As an aging townie, a handful of figures have been fixtures in Boston journalism since I was a teenager. Howie Carr, who is a good deal older than me, is one of them. An early example of the “angry white guy” type of conservative commentator, he’s unusual among adepts of that genre in that he’s a talented journalist. Like the guy can definitely write. And he can certainly be very funny, no denying that.
But he also is a right-winger and he casts himself in the role of the mean street-smart barfly that everyone from a working family who grew up in the Boston area has known at least a couple of. Which makes him quite effective as a thought leader … since he resonates with a lot of locals, even though he’s not a local.
That he’s infamous for colorful, sharp, and vicious stereotyping among his political opponents goes without saying, however, yesterday he outdid himself in his column “Menacing machete hardly an edged knife: What Massachusetts needs is some commonsense machete control laws.”
That piece had so many generalizations that if they were logs, readers could use them to bridge the Charles River.
So, I thought I would just list them here to make a fast point aimed squarely at people in my profession (which requires me to quote no less than 520 of the article’s 884 words):
“They’re illegal aliens, or maybe TPS, probably expired. Not Americans, in any case.”
“And way back when there was certainly no one running multi-million-dollar food stamp scams out of ruined ‘Gateway Cities,’ crimes almost solely involving the freeloading foreign grifters Gov. Maura Healey calls ‘residents’ or ‘neighbors.’”
“Don’t we need a seven-day waiting period before a cholo can buy a machete?”
“Machetes – they’re not just for chopping up plantains anymore. Now you can use them against the gringos.”
“The machete crime spree started a few years back in all the usual places, perpetrated by all the usual suspects – a Lawrence man here, a Chelsea man there.”
“Now, though, it’s spreading into the Beautiful People districts. It always does. In the long run, the trust-funders in their multi-million-dollar mansions will be just like the rest of us – they can run, but they can’t hide.”
“In Harvard Square, the chinless fops in their ascots said it can’t happen here. But guess what, it did. Just last week, in a coffee shop – on Mount Auburn Street.”
“Mount Auburn Street! You can watch all the transitioning beta males and the no-nonsense gals clucking to themselves – ‘Lovey, lovey, isn’t Harvard Square definitively zoned as a no-machete district.’”
“After the hobo went crazy, there was even a brief shelter-in-place order at Harvard University. Initial reports said ‘machete’ but then the Cambridge Ministry of Truth took over the narrative, and it was, ahem, clarified to downgraded to maybe an ‘edged knife.’”
“Again, not machetes, but ‘machete-type knives.’ How Cambridge is that?”
“In late August, there was a more typical machete incident, in a more typical place – Brockton.”
“The dispute involved an auto repo. How Brockton is that?”
“Even in Brockton, the usual omerta soon descended on the machete mayhem – ‘No further details were immediately available.’”
“There was a false alarm in Fall River on July 26. Did you ever notice how seldom you have a machete ‘false alarm’ in Dover or Chatham. But it somehow seems appropriate in Lizzie Borden’s hometown.”
“Arrested by the police was Mussa M Rafat Mohamed, also known as Amusa Raft Muhammed, age 51. You’re shocked, I know.”
“Did you know that Johnny Appleseed was born in Leominster, back in 1774. He wouldn’t recognize the cuidad today, would he? His nickname now in Leominster would be Juan Machete.”
“But like Third World cuisine, machetes are slowly assimilating into American culture – crime culture anyway. Last spring, three Americans were sentenced to prison for a machete attack in, of all places, Millers Falls, back in 2023.”
“Their last names were Chapin, Chadwell and Collette. It’s a clear indication that, at least in Massachusetts, the machete is becoming as American as apple pie.”
“This savage was released by a judge named Jinsook Ohta, as Breitbart reported, ‘after he allegedly attacked a homeless man by swinging a machete at the victim.’”
“Have they finalized a new state seal of Massachusetts yet? Wasn’t one of the problems with the old one the fact that the Indian, er native American, had a bow?”
“And if the woke reps from Cambridge object, we’ll just call it a large machete-type knife.”
Why bother with this exercise? Just to remind myself and any fellow reporters who happen to be reading this that good journalism is not always good journalism, if you catch my drift.
Apparent Horizon—an award-winning political column—is syndicated by the MassWire news service of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. If you want to see more reporting like this, sign up for BINJ’s free weekly newsletter at binj.news/signup.
