We may as well finish up the weekend with something which is either incredibly stupid or amazingly self-serving. Salon author Scott Timberg has published a mind numbing, lengthy interview with an author who is promoting a book about music, but which pauses to veer off into realms beyond the rainbow which should be embarrassing even to that publication. (No… I’m not going to name either the author or the book and lend them any additional traffic or Google hits. But I did do an online search and he’s at least as famous as Elliott Lang, author of the indispensable Pigeon Passion. The Complete Pigeon and Racing Pigeon Guide. I have no doubt, however, that the pigeon book is better.)

The interviewer goes through a list of mundane questions about the book and music history in general, then abruptly takes a sharp left turn, prompting the following from the author.

I’m not a psychiatrist, I haven’t sat down and interviewed George Zimmerman or the cop who shot Michael Brown, I don’t know what their motives are, I don’t know what kind of people they are, what kind of childhood traumas they have experienced. But I don’t think it’s nuts that in a certain way, when that cop killed Michael Brown, and when George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, they were killing Barack Obama.

It’s tempting to think that this was just an unfiltered moment of extemporaneous blather from an out of touch hippie, but reading the entire, eight paragraph answer to the question makes it look far too staged and strained for that. Far more likely is the theory that Timberg wanted to help out the author by drawing some outrage and attention in an attempt to drive traffic to the interview, hoping somebody might actually order the book. Given the subject matter, the question seems to hint at this being a staged stunt as the explanation.

Anyone who studied music history or American history knows that this country has a complicated and, at times, tragic, relationship to race, but it seems that even with that background, the last few years has been particularly fraught. It seems at times like the nation has sort of flipped out. I wonder if you noticed this, and if you have any sense of what’s happening. It strikes me that the Civil War has never really been settled.

I’ll admit, when I first saw this tripe pop up in my Twitter timeline I assumed that it was from the fake Salon account which drew so much controversy after its banning earlier this year. I even asked if that might be the source, but it was not. However, our own Noah Rothman came up with an alternate suggestion which seems to be on the mark.

@JazzShaw parody Salon has really forced actual Salon to up its game. — Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) October 12, 2014

But how much would you like to bet that this guy actually sells a few more books to Left side blog readers who think there will be more of the same inside? It might turn out to be a clever bit of marketing on Salon’s part.