What else can we conclude from the ill-argued propaganda tracts that Reason magazine’s Matt Welch reports are being handed out by United Food and Commercial Workers activists boycotting Whole Foods?
John Mackey is a right wing libertarian. . . .
He has just launched a campaign to defeat a single payer national health insurance system. . . .
And the problem with Mackey’s campaign is that it results in the deaths of 60 Americans every day due to lack of health insurance. [Emphasis added]
Describing Mackey as a “right wing libertarian” seems rather tepid considering UFCW subsequently accuses him of mass murder! If opposition to ObamaCare is tantamount to willing complicity in the annual deaths of 21,900 Americans (60 x 365, as if union propagandists could do basic math), why not lead off with that?
This Mackey-the-killer rhetoric from UFCW invites us to imagine the Whole Foods CEO in the role of the psychotic gunman in Steve Martin’s absurdist 1979 comedy The Jerk, picking Navin Johnson out of a phonebook and aiming his rifle:
“Die, you random uninsured bastards!”
Despite their incompetence as propagandists, the UFCW pamphleteers nevertheless succeed in confusing and obscuring the health-care debate.
To borrow an observation about “affordable housing” from right-wing libertarian P.J. O”Rourke, the problem with socialized medicine is that whenever the government offers to give you something for nothing, the inevitable result will be a shortage of something and a surplus of nothing.
Whereas the market economy routinely brings into existence goods and services previously unavailable—like the surprisingly affordable laptop computer on which I”m writing this right-wing libertarian screed—government can only reallocate goods and services that already exist. The coercive and uneconomic methods employed in this reallocation always leads to shortages of things that might otherwise be produced in plenitude under a free-market system.
The great progressive myth to which the Whole Foods boycotters have fallen prey is the erroneous belief that nothing exists until government guarantees its provision to everyone, at taxpayer expense if necessary.
Call this the National Endowment Theory of Government. In the 1980s and “90s, social conservatives howled about the National Endowment for Arts funding decadent art such as Robert Mapplethorpe‘s infamous photo of a man with a bullwhip protruding from his rectum. The question of what kind of art the NEA should or should not fund, however, entirely missed the fundamental point: Why were federal taxpayers being billed for art in the first place?
To hear NEA’s defenders tell it, there was no such thing as art in the United States until the creation of the National Endowment in 1965. To oppose taxpayer funding for the “arts community” (as NEA defenders styled themselves) was to stand accused of being anti-art.
Social conservatives would have been on much firmer political ground, and might have done more good for their cause, if instead of indicting Mapplethorpe for decadence, they had indicted the NEA as a fraud against the American taxpayer.
Regardless of my opinion of Mapplethorpe’s photography, and the uses to which he put his model’s rectum, I sincerely object to the “arts community” sticking it to the taxpayer in that manner. Let consenting adults do what they will in the privacy of their own photography studios; just don”t demand that the taxpayers foot the bill—and don”t demonize the objecting taxpayer as a philistine who “hates art.”
Now we see the advocates of Obama’s health-care plan repeating the same basic argument made by the “arts community”: If you oppose the president’s plan, you are anti-healthcare. To criticize the specifics of the legislation currently being considered in Congress, as Mackey has done, is to oppose medical treatment per se. Mackey’s “campaign” against Obama is thereby rhetorically transposed into responsibility for the deaths of 60 people every day.
These rhetorical escalations of the Left inspire similar escalations by the Right—the Marxist/Nazi tropes which Tea Party protesters routinely invoke in their hand-lettered posters. These populist Obama-the-Dictator themes elicit tut-tutting from respectable Republican types who decry such “irresponsible” rhetoric, but who can deny that there is a whiff of totalitarianism in the all-or-nothing language employed by ObamaCare advocates?
If Mackey’s opposition to the president’s plan makes him personally responsible for the deaths of more than 20,000 Americans each year, as the UFCW handout insists, isn”t Mackey being cast as Emmanuel Goldstein in this particular remake of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four?
Mackey would certainly be a convenient scapegoat. What red-blooded American can resist the temptation to hate a man who made his fortune marketing stuff like organic vegetables, free-range chicken and all manner of whole-grain products appealing to the colonic-health obsessions of aging Baby Boomers?
Ever since Katie Couric televised her own colonoscopy on the “Today” show, hypochondriac survivors of the Woodstock generation have flocked to Whole Foods like pilgrims in search of the Fountain of Intestinal Youth, paying premium prices for products presumed to be carcinogen-free. Indeed, Rod Dreher would have his “crunchy” acolytes believe that Mackey is selling them the means to spiritual perfection.
While I stand ready to hate Mackey as a peddler of holistic hokum, I side with him in his stand against the boycotters manning the UFCW picket lines.
Eat red meat and die, union bastards!
]]>The latest young starlet to roll off the Disney assembly line is 16-year-old Selena Gomez. After a stint on the insipid Barney the Dinosaur show and other parts, Gomez was discovered by the mouse kingdom. She appeared in such Disney TV cable series as Zack and Cody’s Suite Life and Hannah Montana (celebrity gossips portray Gomez and “Hannah” star Miley Cyrus as bitter rivals).
Gomez’s career came to my attention in an unexpected way when I walked through my living room where some of my younger children were watching Disney TV’s showing of Another Cinderella Story, the starlet’s 2008 direct-to-DVD feature film debut.
Call me old-fashioned. Call me a puritanical spoilsport. Or call the FBI and have the producers of Another Cinderella Story investigated on suspicion of pedophilia. Whatever you do, don’t call this age-appropriate entertainment for children.
While I’m hardly a prude, I was stunned by a scene in which Gomez and co-star Drew Seeley danced a decidedly adult-oriented tango. Imagine a father’s reaction (remember, my children were watching this) when Gomez leaped upward and flung herself against Seeley, wrapping her legs around his waist.
Perhaps not since Jennifer Grey shimmied her way into the Dirty Dancing arms of Patrick Swayze”“What Baby wants, Baby gets””has a film so blatantly blended the sexual symbolism of dance with the jailbait frisson of adolescence. Lest anyone accuse me of exaggeration, I managed to find a YouTube video clip of this scene:
<object height=“344” width=“425”><param name=“movie” value=“http://www.youtube.com/v/-UH3mmVKma0&hl=en&fs=1&”>
<embed src=“http://www.youtube.com/v/-UH3mmVKma0&hl=en&fs=1&” type=“application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=“always” allowfullscreen=“true” width=“425” height=“344”></embed></object>This was on Disney TV! On Sunday morning!
I said nothing to my children, who I hope are too young to be permanently warped by incidental exposure to such stuff. It would only draw attention to the inappropriate subject matter if Dad threw a fit and commanded them to change to channel.
The difference between Disney’s original 1950 Cinderella and Another Cinderella Story is dramatic. The original version is a cartoon about a young woman whose big dance with the prince is an elegant waltz”romantic and erotic but not “sexy””in the fairy-tale setting of castles and enchantment. The live-action remake with Selena Gomez casts the story in a high-school context, where the characters wear jeans and T-shirts rather than crowns and gowns.
Disney’s enduring brand image as a purveyor of wholesome entertainment probably lulls many parents into ignoring the significance of such shifts in content: “How bad could it be? It’s Disney!”
The sorry fate of Britney Spears (wed and annulled, wed and divorced, repeatedly rehabbed, all before age 25) and Lindsay Lohan (rehabbed and “out” as a lesbian by age 22) suggests what the future might hold for Selena Gomez, as also perhaps for her more-famous teen rival Miley Cyrus. The effect of a cultural shift in Disney’s productions aimed at children may also be projected into the future, a prospect that could inspire more parents to get in touch with their inner puritan.
]]>When he was 16, Bill McCain told his mother, “You won”t ever have to worry about me again.” He left the family farm in rural Randolph County, Alabama, and moved 40 miles away to West Point, Georgia, where he went to work on the night shift in a cotton mill.
You”ve heard of people who worked their way through college? My father worked his way through high school. Most of his cotton-mill pay went for room and board and books—in those days, public-school students in Georgia had to buy their own textbooks—at the school where he became a football star.
Football was the cause of my father’s decision to relocate to Georgia. His gridiron ability already had gained him notice in Randolph County, but he was sufficiently shrewd to recognize that West Point had a better coach and that he would stand a better chance of attracting the notice of college scouts if he played on a championship squad.
Five-foot-eight and lean, Bill McCain was not a big man, but he was smart, fast and tough. In 1940, the era of football behemoths—pumped up by weightlifting regimens, protein supplements and steroids—was still at least three decades in the future. Back in the day, plenty of college football teams had “watch-pocket guards,” wiry linemen under six feet tall who made up in quick, hard-hitting tenacity what they lacked in sheer bulk.
Dad played end, on both offense and defense. Naturally, his boyhood hero was Don Hutson, the All-America end who led the University of Alabama to a national championship still recalled in the Crimson Tide fight song with the lyrics, “remember the Rose Bowl we”ll win.” Bill McCain had listened to the 1935 New Year’s Day radio broadcast as Hutson—destined to become a Hall of Famer for the Green Bay Packers—caught six passes for 165 yards and two touchdowns in Pasadena to lead the Tide to a 29-13 victory over Stanford. Yet it was the fellow who described himself as “the other end” on that championship squad—a tough farm boy from Fordyce, Arkansas, named Paul “Bear” Bryant—who ultimately became synonymous with Alabama football legend.
The Gridiron Gospel
Fundamentalist Christianity is widely considered the dominant religion of the South, but certainly football ranks at least a close second. On autumn Saturdays in the Bible Belt, true believers gather at temples like Tuscaloosa’s Bryant-Denny Stadium in numbers that far exceed the congregation of even the largest mega-church.
It was during the Great Depression that the gridiron gospel gained its hold on Southern souls. Once I asked my Aunt Lera Mae—Dad’s older sister—about the impact of the Depression. “Well, we never really noticed,” she replied. “Times was always hard on the farm.” Lera Mae hastened to add that they”d never gone hungry, as more than 100 acres of red clay upland provided plenty of vegetables and feed for their livestock. Yet the Southern economy had never fully recovered from the devastation of the Civil War, and cash was always hard to come by. My grandfather made some money trading mules and horses, but when the bottom fell out of the cotton market after World War I, my ancestors could not escape the financial ruin that became nearly universal in the rural South.
Widespread poverty in the Cotton States preceded the Great Depression by a decade and had a profound impact on my father’s generation. The culture in which Dad grew up was chronicled in a 1989 book by University of Alabama historian Wayne Flynt, Poor but Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites
.
Of course, “poor white” has always had pejorative connotations. My folks were not as poor as some others, but in the ubiquitous poverty of early 20th-century Alabama, there was a sort of democracy of hardship in which no sin was as egregious as “putting on airs” of superiority. Arrogance and ostentation were scorned, a cordial down-to-earth style of courtesy was esteemed, and yet a stubborn, stoic pride was the unshakeable rock upon which this culture was founded.
“Boy, hold your head up high,” my parents and grandparents repeatedly told me. “There ain”t nobody better than you.” For decades, every Southern boy was drilled in that catechism. We were raised on such incitements to determined persistence as “You can do anything if you set your mind to it,” and “Can”t never could.”
Shadows of the Past
We needed no Horatio Alger novels, for our own parents personified the ethos of hard work and persistence they preached. After moving to Georgia at age 16, my Dad not only earned his own keep and made the football team at West Point High, he was named to the “All-Valley” team, accumulating a fine academic record as well, and was recruited by several colleges.
History intervened, however. In 1942, Uncle Sam decided Bill McCain’s abilities could be best put to use in the Army, where he served in a forward reconnaissance unit in France. He was wounded by German shrapnel in 1944—”A million-dollar wound, Mac,” the medic at the field hospital told him—and finished the war as the personal driver for a colonel in occupied France. Discharged with the rank of staff sergeant, the G.I. Bill put him through the University of Alabama, where he married my mother, another Randolph County girl.
After Dad graduated, they moved to Atlanta. Mom worked as a secretary and bookkeeper, first for Merganthaler Linotype and later for RCA Records, while Dad worked a year on the railroad before hiring on at the Lockheed Aircraft plant in Marietta, where he stayed for the next 37 years. The hard-working spirit of their Alabama youth kept both my parents busy in various small entrepreneurial ventures over the years. They sold Watkins Products door-to-door—poor folks in Austell, Georgia, always knew me as the son of “The Watkins Man”—and dabbled in real estate development and other enterprises. The summer I was 12, I recall going door to door in Cobb County, handing out fliers for a garbage-hauling business my father had started, having purchased a big truck and hired two fellows to run the route.
My two brothers and I grew up in a handsome brick home on a large tree-shaded lot in Lithia Springs—now a booming Atlanta suburb, but then still a relatively sleepy small town—where our middle-class status was always haunted by the shadow of our parents” childhood poverty. We were constantly reminded of how fortunate we were, a message reinforced by frequent visits “down home” to Randolph County, where my father’s mother still lived in a four-room farmhouse, hoed her own garden, and drew her water from a well. By the early 1970s, with her health beginning to decline, Maw McCain consented to let her children pay to install plumbing at the home place. For most of my childhood, however, there was not even an outhouse at Maw McCain’s, where one attended to calls of nature at a designated area behind the dilapidated old barn.
Catechism in Cleats
Nearly all the teachers, ministers, Scout leaders, and other adults who influenced my youth came from similar backgrounds, if not indeed from poverty so dire as to make Maw McCain seem an aristocrat by comparison. The catechism of our parents’ rural roots was constantly reinforced in school and church. So while we grew up in the radical Sixties and the swinging Seventies, we could not escape a full-immersion baptism in the folkways of Depression-era rural life.
Nowhere, however, were the lessons of that poor-but-proud culture taught more rigorously than on the football field. I never played football in high school—as a trombonist of some skill, I proudly performed in the Douglas County High Marching Tiger Band—but from ages nine to 14, I was a first-team lineman for the Sweetwater Valley Red Raiders, competing in the Cobb County youth league.
Go ahead and laugh at “midget” football, but 40 years ago, it was taken quite seriously by our coaches. Most of these coaches were veterans of World War II or the Korean War who saw nothing wrong with drilling youth football players as if they were Marine recruits at Parris Island en route to combat assignments in Vietnam.
That attitude was shared by our parents. My father offered me some advice from his own career. The key to winning as a lineman, Dad said, was the first play from scrimmage. Come to the line with the determination to fire off as soon as the ball was snapped and hit the other guy as hard as you can. “Line up and look him in the eye and say, “I”m going to beat you today,” and then knock him on his butt. Hit him as hard as you can, then come back on the next play and do it again. Just keep at it until you”ve got him beat.”
My most memorable season was in 1970, when Sweetwater Valley’s 75-pound team was coached by a guy named Chuck Starnes. We placed second in our league that year and the Red Raiders were invited to compete in a post-season tournament in Panama City, Florida. It was during that late-November trip, at age 11, that I first kissed a girl, a cheerleader named Darlene Goza with the most adorably dimpled chin you ever saw.
We won our first tournament game in Florida with ease, advancing to the championship game against a team from Bessemer, Alabama. Those Bessemer boys were huge and, though I managed to hold my own at right guard, our opponents fielded an aggressive 5-4-2 defensive formation that stymied our offense, while our defense could not contain their running backs.
Tears in the Huddle
Our quarterback was Tim Crunk, who eventually went on to be starting quarterback for South Cobb High. He played college ball and eventually became a coach and school administrator in Cobb County. Tim had a blond crew-cut and a foghorn voice, and anything he lacked in native athleticism was more than compensated by his devotion to winning.
Tim Crunk could not stand to lose and I will never forget the November day in 1970 when Bessemer was beating us in the championship game in that Panama City tournament. We fell behind by two touchdowns early, then got a stern chewing-out by our coaches at halftime, and returned for the second half determined to make up the deficit. Alas, victory was not to be ours that day and, as the clock ticked down in the fourth quarter, the inevitability of defeat was apparent.
After another Bessemer touchdown and the ensuing kickoff, the Red Raiders huddled up, waiting for Crunk to come in and call the first play of what looked to be our final series on offense. Tim ran in from the sidelines and when I looked up, tears were streaming down his face from eyes reddened by shame and rage. He managed to choke out the call, and we went to the line rattled by what we had seen.
Tim Crunk was a tough kid and no crybaby, but the experience of being beaten in this game—the pinnacle of his football career to date “ had stirred in him emotions too powerful for an 11-year-old to restrain. When we returned to the huddle for the second play of the series, Tim’s tears were still flowing and now others were crying, too, including halfback Mike Stone.
Our center, Royce McAllister, was probably the toughest player I ever knew. McAllister tried to console Tim and Mike but, as he did so, I noticed that Royce’s eyes were also beginning to brim with tears. And so it went, as we played out the clock that day in Florida.
Did I cry? I honestly don”t remember if I did, but I will never forget the mortification I felt at seeing Tim Crunk reduced to tears by the shame of defeat.
The Same Game
Nearly four decades later, that scene is etched in my mind, emblematic of the fierce desire for victory that is the spirit of champions. What distinguishes the champion—not merely in football or other athletic endeavors, but in every walk of life—is the reckless commitment to expend every possible effort to attain victory.
My own twin sons are now 16, and work various jobs to earn their own tuition at the small private school they attend. On Father’s Day, I found myself thinking of my late father, who left the family farm and worked his way through at West Point High.
Whatever the future may hold for my sons, I hope they never forget what I learned from the old man, No. 27. Success in any endeavor starts with the resolute determination to succeed. No matter how formidable the competition, hold your head up high. They”re no better than you, and victory begins with the decision to rule out the possibility of defeat. “Can”t never could.”
That attitude took my father from a farm in Alabama to a brick home in the suburbs of Atlanta. It took me from Georgia to Washington, where now I find myself in daily competition no less formidable than those big boys from Bessemer, even if the sport is a bit more refined. Really, though, it’s still the same game, and the formula for winning has never changed.
I”m going to beat you today.
Count on it, buddy. I didn”t come this far to start losing now.
]]>Of course, it was Frum whose “Unpatriotic Conservatives” was the most vicious blow yet struck in this long feud. (In my hobby of dreaming up titles for books no one will ever pay me to write, my history of the intra-conservative Peloponnesian War would be called First, They Came for Mel Bradford.) Daniel McCarthy has reminded us that much of what Frum wrote for his National Review cover story in 2003, he had previewed 12 years earlier in a 1991 American Spectator cover story. Some may wish, as conspiracy-minded left-wing bloggers were wont to say during the previous administration, to question the timing.
No conspiracy theory is necessary to say that Frum accuses Patrick Buchanan and others of Jew-hating, which accusation intimidates me not at all, as my philo-Semitism is well known to all who know me, whether foe, friend or family. (My Jewish cousins are “Second Amendment Democrats” who live in Montgomery, Alabama.) Some of my neoconservative friends have questioned why I write for Taki, a man they accuse of atrocious sentiments. Well, if I have been misunderstood by my enemies, perhaps the same is true of Mr. Theodoracopulos and, as I remarked in reviewing Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons, I write for money.
My opinions of U.S. foreign policy, especially in the most recent Iraq war, are nuanced. It is my staunch belief that no nation ever benefitted from military defeat and that the unquestioned invincibility of American arms ought to be the greatest security of our peace. Yet it is also my belief that Falkland’s great conservative dictum”“When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change””might also be applied to Arab despotisms. If we wish to overthrow vicious dictatorships, why not begin 90 miles from Key West? Cuba is an island, our Navy is up to the task, the Marines are ready, and such of the occupation troops as were not content drinking rum and Coca-Cola with the local jiniteras could take their weekend R&R passes in Miami.
Free the Cohibas! (What are you, some kind of un-American?)
The reader apprehends at once that it has never been my aspiration to be a “senior policy adviser” to any candidate, nor do I aspire to a Cabinet post or a think-tank fellowship. Je suis un journaliste, if I may be permitted what Dreher calls “faggy French.” Others, alas, are not content merely to write for a living, but fancy themselves called to much higher avocations. It is this factor of ambition, not ideology, which accounts for the attacks of Dreher and Frum against Levin, and also against Rush Limbaugh.
OK, maybe you hate both Levin and Limbaugh. Fine. That’s irrelevant. The point is that they are successful in the very difficult business of talk radio and, before either Dreher or Frum went after Levin, they first attacked Limbaugh. (Dreher here, Frum here.) Again, you might be tempted to question the timing. Republicans lose an election, after nominating John McCain as their candidate over the objections of both Levin and Limbaugh, and yet the blame falls not on the failed candidate, but on the successful radio stars.
What is going on here? Look, I’ve been a professional journalist since 1986. I didn’t get into journalism because I cared about politics. Hell, I didn’t even care about journalism. But my career plan to become a zillionaire rock star required me to have a day job to pay the bills, and I got sick of wearing a hard hat and driving a forklift. So I started at a tiny weekly paper in Austell, Georgia, for $4.50 an hour and worked my way up. By the time I got to Washington in 1997, I’d already won a national award as a columnist, but the Washington Times wasn’t interested in hiring Georgia columnists, so I became a news editor, figuring to work my way up to being a columnist again. But that didn’t work out any better than the rock-star career and . . .
Yet I know what everybody in the journalism business today knows: The market for the printed word is evaporating, and Republican opinion-mongers are a dime a dozen nowadays. We may someday look back on the era 1994-2006 as the Golden Age of Conservative Punditry, when every moderately well knowk cable-news commentator or halfway clever staffer for The Weekly Standard either had a book deal or was shopping a proposal.
As with deluxe condos in California, however, the bottom has fallen out of that market. In 2006, a division of Random House published Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush by Fred Barnes, a wretchedly sycophantic book destined to be remembered in much the same way we now recall Belshazzar’s feast on the night that Babylon fell. (There we go, back to Mesopotamia again.)
What all of this means, then, is that a Republican political journalist hustling a book has got to find an angle, and both Dreher and Frum have figured that trashing the only famous Republicans who still have any meaningful influence”guys like Limbaugh and Levin”is the way to go. They want to join the ranks of The Republicans Who Really Matter.
Meanwhile, Levin had quite a different idea. He figured that the Obama administration would be a miserable disaster, and that what was needed was a reiteration of basic GOP principles. Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto
has been at or near the top of the New York Times bestsellers list for weeks.
Ergo, to guys like Dreher and Frum who have staked their careers and reputations on the bet that standard-issue Republican conservatism has become obsolete, the success of Levin’s book is not merely a goad of envy, but an indication that their knack for political prophecy is no better now than it was circa 2003. In his “crunchy” sectarianism, Dreher has established himself as the king of a cul-de-sac, whereas Frum is trying to sell a “new majority” that no one’s buying.
If Judge Sotomayor is going to be Borked, it won’t be because of anything Rod Dreher wrote. And if the GOP stages a comeback, it won’t be because of the advice they’re getting from the New Majority. Despite Richard Spencer’s grisly hopes for the Party of Zarathustra, my simple hunch is that if the “Alternative Right” is going to do something politically meaningful in the near future, it will not be either as part of a Frumian centrism or a Dreheresque monasticism. For better or worse, what Dreher disdains as “the habits of the horde” will prevail.
Expect the peasants with pitchforks to be as scornful as ever of pointy-headed intellectuals who can’t even park their bicycles straight. That Levin has cast his lot with the rabble is significant. As a student of Burnham might say, the “managerial elite” of the GOP has become decadent,
Has anyone heard from any students of Burnham lately? Because just last night, I’m told, residents of Chattanooga reported hearing eerie laughter coming from the direction of Forest Hills Cemetery.
Question the timing.
]]>
“Always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy, if possible. . . Such tactics will win every time.”
~Lt. Gen. Thomas Jackson
My habit of citing such authorities explains a bit about why the diligent Googler can find me denounced as a “white supremacist,” a “segregationist,” et cetera. How often have I wished to cite some appropriate bit of wisdom from John C. Calhoun’s Disquisition on Government or from the writings of Robert Lewis Dabney and decided against it, lest I provide more evidence for the “ransom note” banditti: “A-ha! See? We told you so!”
The key to my notoriety, as I’ve explained to friends, has been my own relative silence on all this. When I was first labeled a “neo-Confederate” by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2001, my employers decided that it was best to ignore this, as a response would only lend publicity to the charge. So I was compelled to bite my tongue.
In the Internet age, a sort of online “phone game” inevitably ensued. The tale was elaborated with error and falsehood and guilt-by-association until many fools had convinced themselves that I was the intellectual heir of Theodore Bilbo (whose grandson I happened to meet, by pure coincidence, at a cocktail reception in Washington last fall).
See? There I go again. Never mind. My experience taught me a few valuable lessons. For one thing, I gained insight into what it is that outfits like the SPLC seek to accomplish, and how they go about it. The accusation of thought-crime is intended not merely to vilify and marginalize the target, but also force him to deny the charge, to denounce his friends, and to repudiate whatever species of deviation from acceptable liberal belief is involved in the accusation. No such defense ever prevails, of course: Who can believe a word those vile right-wingers say?
The fortunate circumstance of my enforced silence rendered the defensive option inoperable in my case, while affording me occasion to contemplate many things, including the potential advantages of a bad reputation. “There is no such thing as bad publicity,” they say, and my Google-enhanced notoriety has put me in a situation somewhat similar to Rhett Butler at the Twelve Oaks barbecue, where Cathleen Calvert shares this delicious gossip with Scarlett O’Hara:
“Darling, don’t you know anything? Caro told me all about it last summer and her mama would die if she thought Caro even knew about it. Well, this Mr. Butler took a Charleston girl out buggy riding. I never did know who she was, but I’ve got my suspicions. She couldn’t have been very nice or she wouldn”t have gone out with him in the late afternoon without a chaperone. And, my dear, they stayed out nearly all night and walked home finally, saying the horse had run away and smashed the buggy and they had gotten lost in the woods. And guess what””
“I can’t guess. Tell me,” said Scarlett enthusiastically, hoping for the worst.
“He refused to marry her the next day!”
“Oh,” said Scarlett, her hopes dashed.
“He said he hadn’t “er”done anything to her and he didn’t see why he should marry her. And, of course, her brother called him out, and Mr. Butler said he”d rather be shot than marry a stupid fool. And so they fought a duel and Mr. Butler shot the girl’s brother, and he died, and Mr. Butler had to leave Charleston and now nobody receives him,” finished Cathleen triumphantly. …
“Did she have a baby?” whispered Scarlett in Cathleen’s ear.
Cathleen shook her head violently. “But she was ruined just the same,” she hissed back.
Again, I suppose I’m not helping myself, quoting neo-Confederate propaganda like that, but you get the point. “With enough courage, you can do without a reputation,” as Rhett told Scarlett, and the “black-hearted varmint” was right. Once you’ve become a living scandal, there is a tremendous liberation to be had by ceasing to care what people say about you. This surely explains Kathy Shaidle’s fiddle-de-dee attitude toward Canada’s “human rights” commissars.
The publicity value of unrefuted rumor was a gold-mine discovery for a communications professional in the Internet age, and I’ve exploited my hard-won knowledge rather ruthlessly. I’m both a blogger and a consultant/mentor to others, and what is nowadays called “viral marketing” can sometimes resemble the gossipy habits of Cathleen Calvert.
How to become the object of “buzz” is a much-coveted secret in the online world, and part of the secret involves what might be termed opacity“a refusal to fully explain everything, so as to acquire an enticing aura of mystery. An ironic sense of humor is helpful to this method, and perhaps the reader will appreciate my satisfied smile when I got an email Monday with the delicious subject line:
Is Suzanna Logan a lesbian?
If so, we can blame Richard Spencer, but there’s no need to tell that whole gruesome story here, is there? I’m a latter-day Bilbo, Richard turned Suzanna gay, and everybody knows that this is all part of a right-wing conspiracy funded by a wealthy Greek playboy.
Whatever you do, don’t anyone deny a word of it. Especially not the part about our good friend Terry McAuliffe.
]]>Bob Barr was eating a chocolate-dipped soft-serve ice cream cone from Dairy Queen. I was driving him to Raleigh-Durham International Airport after his appearance at the North Carolina Libertarian Party state conference in Burlington.
It was April 2008, and Barr’s entry into the LP presidential contest had made the former Republican congressman from Georgia the odds-on favorite for the nomination”at least as far as major news organizations seemed to know. The mainstream press had its storyline clear: The disillusioned conservative who had once spearheaded the impeachment of President Clinton would get the Libertarian nomination and, by peeling away votes from Republican candidate John McCain in key “swing” states, would make a decisive difference to help elect a Democrat in November.
From McCain |
“Come November, Barr conceivably could be to John McCain what Ralph Nader was to Al Gore in 2000 “ ruinous.”
~George F. Will, Newsweek, April 21, 2008
That scenario ultimately didn”t work out, for several reasons that would take too long to explain here, but it does have something to do with why I was driving across North Carolina that Saturday afternoon last April while a former member of the House Judiciary Committee ate a Dairy Queen ice cream cone in the passenger seat of my KIA Optima. What I knew”and what most mainstream reporters seemed not to grasp in April 2008″was that the biggest obstacle to their “Bob Barr the Right-Wing Spoiler” scenario was the Libertarian Party.
Barr had only joined the party two years earlier. He was viewed skeptically by many long-time Libertarian activists, and his belated entry into the LP presidential contest angered his several rivals for the nomination, some of whom had been campaigning for two years. Barr strategist Stephen Gordon had done a phone survey of delegates to the party’s national convention in Denver and, while the numbers were encouraging, it was certainly no lead-pipe cinch. So Barr had come to woo the North Carolina LP gathered at a La Quinta Inn near the Interstate 40 off-ramp in Burlington.
Get close to your sources. If there is one piece of advice I would give to any reporter trying to get ahead in the news business, that’s it. Stop worrying about that objective “ethical” bullshit, where the job of the reporter is to be an aloof adversary playing “gotcha” with the people whose words and actions constitute news. Instead, try to penetrate their comfort zone, gain their trust, and show them you”re smart enough not to report everything you hear. You”ll get more good stuff that way.
So when, as the North Carolina LP gathering was winding down, I overheard Gordon discussing with other Barr supporters how they were going to get the former congressman to the airport, I didn”t hesitate: “I”ll give him a ride.” It was a 40-minute drive out of my way, but there was no way I was going to pass up the chance to spend that much time alone with the candidate who might just play a pivotal role in the election. Plus, when he’s truly off the record”as he was with me on our ride to the airport last spring”Barr is a helluva funny guy. And he bought me an ice cream, too.
There was a time, about ten years ago, when I could write like Grantland Rice. Not necessarily because I believed all that sporty bullshit, but because sportswriting was the only thing I could do that anybody was willing to pay for.”
~Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail “72
She is a slender honey blonde with brown eyes full of . . . it is “innocence”? “Vulnerability”? There must be a word that captures exactly the quality of Anita Thompson’s eyes, but I”m on deadline and don”t have time to look for it right now. Whatever the word, Anita is altogether beautiful, and meeting the widow of the legendary gonzo journalist was one of the highlights of my career in the news business.
Olsson’s Books in D.C.’s Chinatown neighborhood has gone out of business since that day in September 2007 when Anita came to do a book-signing event for The Gonzo Way: A Celebration of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Seeing her mission as saving her late husband’s legacy from academics and other intellectual elitists, Anita told the audience, “He was not writing for professors, he was writing for his people.”
He was also writing for money. Anyone who has read The Proud Highway, a collection of his letters from 1955-67 published in 1997, knows that Thompson spent the early years of his career bouncing from job to job, eking out a meager living as a freelancer. His original ambition was to be a novelist like his heroes F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, but that didn”t work out, and so Thompson was always trying to hustle up another assignment, writing outraged letters to editors who rejected his submissions or who failed to pay up on time.
The professors and literary critics who try to understand Thompson fail to grasp the extent to which his most famous works were, at some level, a vengeful discourse on the fate of the freelance journalist. He never forgot those years of impoverished obscurity, when the rejection notices were frequent and the occasional check for $100 or $200 was like manna from heaven. He blamed his misery on the editors who ran the publications that rejected him. He denounced them as “Rotarian bastards” who preferred cautiously mediocre writers to those with genuine talent. And he never forgave them. Ever.
The story that became Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, for example, began with Thompson landing a surprise assignment from Sports Illustrated to cover the Mint 500 motorcycle race in Las Vegas. Apparently, some SI editor had the idea that it would be a clever thing to hire the author of Hell’s Angels to cover this event. (One can imagine that weekly assignment meeting at HQ in New York: “It’s motorcycles, see? Hell’s Angels, get it?”) All Thompson had to do, in return for this expense-paid trip to Vegas and a handsome fee, was to file several hundred words that would accompany the photographic coverage of the race.
For a few months in 1958, however, Thompson had earned $50 a week as a copy boy for Time, and he had apparently spent more than a decade nursing a grudge against the Time-Life publishing empire, of which Sports Illustrated was part. So he talked Time into giving him a cash advance for expenses, bought a bunch of dope, rented a Chevy convertible and drove to Vegas with his radical Chicano buddy Oscar Acosta. Whatever he wrote about the Mint 400 was lunatic gibberish that the editors refused to publish. Yet the magazine was on the hook for his expenses, and Thompson did a double-burn on them. Not only did he run up a massive tab for hotel room service and other expenses, but he used the Vegas trip as the substance for a two-part feature in Rolling Stone, which at that time was a radical counterculture journal 180 degrees out of phase with the Rotarian sensibilities at Time-Life.
Thompson’s sense of journalism as a form of adventurous combat, a blood sport where ripping off a publisher for whom he had no respect and flipping a finger in the face of the Establishment was part of the game”this is what is missed by most of the imitative Gonzo wannabes who aspire to write what they are afraid to live. They crave the acclaim of a great writer, but they live the Rotarian life.
The superficiality of faux-Gonzo annoys the great man’s widow. “A lot of young people are under the assumption that if you do a lot of cocaine and drink a lot of Wild Turkey, you, too, can write like Hunter S. Thompson,” as Anita told the crowd at Olsson’s in September 2007.
It was an opportunity for a healthy retreat from politics for serious and thoughtful conservatives, a chance to sort out who they were and what they wanted to accomplish outside of the glare of party politics. Providing the online meeting place in which they could do it seemed like a great idea to Culture11’s founders, maybe even one that could succeed as a for-profit enterprise. One of those things turned out to be true.”
~Charles Homans, Washington Monthly, March/April 2009“How would we be different, [Culture11 CEO] David [Kuo] asked, if we had the same writers as everyone else? That was all the permission we needed to become, as David would often say, “Rolling Stone in the “70s.” We wanted to be the place that found the next Cameron Crowes and Hunter Thompsons.”
~Culture11 managing editor Joe Carter, Jan. 30, 2009
In less than six months of publication, Culture 11 burned through a stack of start-up capital rumored to be north of $1 million. Kuo hired a staff of young writers and ensconced them in a waterfront office in Alexandria, Virginia. And with a few exceptions”like some “conservative case for gay marriage“ thumbsuckers that drew approving linkage from Andrew Sullivan “ they were ignored by the online world.
“I never even heard of this Culture11 site until I read that it was gone,” said veteran conservative blogger Dan Riehl. “If someone wants to know why it failed, extrapolate that out to other bloggers and web surfers, that was it. Having never seen it, all I can conclude is that it really must have sucked.”
Charles Homan of the liberal Washington Monthly naturally pursues the theme that there is some ideological flaw in conservatism that accounts for the failure of Culture11. “How does a movement that yearns for the values of the past confront a culture that prizes novelty? This was a problem that had bedeviled modern American conservatism since Buckley first inveighed against the Beatles in his syndicated column,” Homan writes, attempting to expand on an idea expressed by former Culture11 political editor James Poulos.
Homan has got it all wrong. The problem at Culture11 was that personnel is policy. Poulos and arts editor Peter Suderman were the two writers of indisputable merit at Culture11, but Poulos was probably misplaced on the politics beat. Launching their project in the middle of a presidential election year, why didn”t Culture11 have had an honest-to-goodness political reporter on their staff? The guy they needed to hire was David Weigel, who now writes mainly for The Washington Independent and who, for my money, is the best young political reporter in D.C. (At a conference last Tuesday in Washington where Grover Norquist announced that Sen. Arlen Specter would vote against cloture on the Big Labor-backed “card check” legislation, Weigel actually broke the news on his Twitter feed. His tweet got picked up by other journalists, so that The Huffington Post got the big traffic on what was actually Weigel’s story. The guy is tough to beat.)
Yet it wasn”t so much the staffing of Culture11 that was the problem, as it was the fateful decision to entrust the project to David Kuo. Nothing in his biography suggested he was qualified for the job, and Carter’s reference to Kuo’s invocation of “Rolling Stone in the”70s” caused me to remark: “Ponder the yawning chasm between David Kuo and “the next Cameron Crowes and Hunter Thompsons.” It’s as if one day Kenny G announced he was looking for “the next Ramones.” “
Before Culture11 launched, I was solicited for a contribution by one of their staffers, who said in an e-mail their intent was to offer “irresistibly interesting perspectives on life in America from pop culture to politics, from faith to family.” This sounded interesting, but three days later, I saw in The New Republic that Kuo was in charge of the project, and replied to the staffer that under no circumstance would I have anything to do with any project involving Kuo.
It was the principle of the thing, as Hunter S. Thompson would have instantly recognized. I”d read Kuo’s book, Tempting Faith, in which he intended to expose the Bush administration as faithless to its religious conservative allies. In the process, however, Kuo exposed himself as a second-rate mediocrity, the kind of worthless small-timer who couldn”t make a profit on the snow-cone concession in Hell.
Kuo’s decision to hire a staff to report to a brick-and-mortar office was a foolish blunder. In case any Taki’s Magazine readers don”t realize it, the office from which Richard Spencer works is wherever he happens to log onto the Internet and access the software. He’s the only “staff,” and the rest of the contributors are paid a piece-rate. Whether or not the total output could be called “irresistibly interesting perspectives,” the total traffic exceeds anything Culture11 ever mustered, and for a fraction of the price.
Mainstream publications give our insights insufficient due, hence the rise of right-of-center outlets. But those publications rarely influence the apolitical, centrists, or liberals, for they are funded by, produced for, and read by those already sympathetic to the right—and mostly ignored by everyone else. Escaping this ghetto requires understanding why the media slants left. Contra the least-thoughtful conservative critics, there isn”t any elite liberal conspiracy at work. Bias creeps in largely because the narrative conventions of journalism are poor at capturing basic conservative and libertarian truths.”
~Conor Friedersdorf, 2008“Don”t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining.”
~The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
Spare me your “insufficients,” your “hences,” and your “narrative conventions,” Mr. Friedersdorf. The problem with conservative journalism is that it is not as ruthless as the free-market economy that conservatives are supposed to favor. There are too many easy 501(c)3 sinecures that attract lazy poseurs who think that subscribing to a certain set of ideological principles entitles them to full-time employment and praise from all their second-rate buddies sucking on the teats of The Movement. Hustling to meet a deadline, trying to score a scoop”that’s for the lowly proles, says the arrogant young intellectual, who covets praise from “serious and thoughtful conservatives.”
To Hell with that. I”ve got ties older than you, kid.
Most of my experience has been in sportswriting, but I can write everything from warmongering propaganda to learned book reviews. I can work twenty-five hours a day if necessary, live on any reasonable salary, and don”t give a black damn for job security, office politics, or adverse public relations. I would rather be on the dole than work for a paper I was ashamed of.
~Hunter S. Thompson, Oct. 1, 1958, letter seeking employment at the Vancouver Sun
“Hey, Richard, I need to talk to you about getting paid, man.”
“Well, I”m in Montana now, Stacy, but how much do you need?”
So I explained that I was at the county office to deal with the shut-off notice on our water bill. The question of how much I was due was discussed, and I confessed that I wasn”t exactly sure whether it was a lower or a higher amount.
“Just cut the check for [the higher amount], and if it turns out it’s more than I”m due, you know I”m good for it.” Paid my water bill and headed down to D.C., where I eventually found myself hanging out with “ of all people “ former Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe. (Get close to your sources, right?)
From McCain |
These young wannabes can”t write gonzo because they”re too cowardly to live gonzo. They want to do their internships and their fellowships and sit on seminar panels while they suck the milk from the non-profit teat. God forbid they should ever actually have to work.
Shortly after the Hindenburg-at-Lakehurst implosion of Culture11, at a cocktail reception, I was talking to another Washington writer, explaining how I didn”t get involved because I saw the project as doomed from the start. My friend said, “Dude, you should have taken the money. They paid me [impressive sum in Internet journalism] for 700 words.”
Hmmm. Yeah, but if I die tomorrow, at least my friends can say, “He never worked for David Kuo.”
]]>Someone who is informed and rational, which I realize is kind of an oxymoron for women. . . . Ideally you find someone with a manageable degree of irrationality.
From this, Fireweed concludes that Ziegler is a “predictable misogynist,” who is out of step with the 21st century. I think she is wrong about the misogyny. Ziegler strikes me more like Henry Higgins on a blind date with Eliza Doolittle: “Why can”t a woman be more like a man?”
Fireweed is even more wrong to assert Ziegler needs to “fast forward . . . to the 21st century.” His message could not be more timely. One might say the man and the hour have met, and that Ziegler has unwittingly struck the spark of revolution.
What Ziegler is telling the woman in so many words is something that ought to be plainly obvious from the video: He is not a man who deals well with emotion. He understands that most women act on emotion in their personal relationships, and he expresses an aversion to entering a relationship established on such a basis, where he is so obviously at a disadvantage.
All men”all smart men, anyway”recognize this intrinsic problem in male-female relationships. We are compelled to deal with women on their terms, or else do without their companionship.
How a woman feels is, to her, an objective reality. If she feels unloved or disrespected, no protestation to the contrary will satisfy her. The man is just going forward, living his life, doing what seems to him ordinary and logical and then “ without thinking about how it makes her feel”he says or does something that hurts her. Whereupon he finds himself required to expend time and energy soothing a hurt he never intended to inflict.
This happens even in male-female relationships where romance is not involved, nor even remotely contemplated. Women pay close attention to the emotional content of their dealings with others, whether it is with family members, friends or co-workers. My wife can develop an instant dislike toward a waitress or retail clerk over the most superficial perception: “She’s snooty,” or “He’s creepy.” Women reify their perceptions: If my wife believes you are “creepy,” then your creepiness is to her a tangible fact, a thing as real as the nose on your face.
Words like “thoughtful” and “sensitive” describe the qualities necessary to cooperate effectively with women. One must carefully monitor one’s interactions with them, gauge their reactions and adjust accordingly. For most men, and especially for hyper-rationalizing men like Ziegler, this is a terrifying tightrope walk across an abyss.
Most men are not naturally thoughtful and sensitive in that way, and they resent having to devote effort to “relationship management””a task at which they suck” when it would be a far more productive use of their time to concentrate on doing the things they do best.
The feminization of our culture has the effect of stigmatizing the rough, insensitive, hierarchical, let’s-get-down-to-business male way of doing things, while making womanly subjectivity the standard by which male-female relations are judged. If she feels mistreated, the man stands accused in a court where only the woman’s testimony is admitted as evidence. What he intended, or whether his actions toward her were objectively unjust, is irrelevant. She feels hurt, therefore he is to blame.
John Ziegler had the effrontery to attempt, however awkwardly, to express a protest against this. My jocular reaction to Ziegler’s romantic face-plant, and much of the busting on Ziegler by smart-alecks in the blog comments, were directed at the folly of his attempting to do this on a blind date, when men should be on their best behavior. Yet his remarks about female irrationality are a fair complaint.
Women are permitted to complain endlessly about the brutish ways of men. This License To Bitch is so automatic, so taken for granted, that no one even notices it, much less questions it. But let a man attempt to give voice to what all men understand”that is, the harmfulness of female subjectivity”and he’s a sexist, a misogynist, a swine.
What is the origin of the Bitch Culture, wherein men must constantly be on guard against the accusation of “insensitivity,” against which no defense is permitted? Look no further than the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Rep. Howard W. Smith, a Virginia Democrat and ardent segregationist, sought to prevent passage of the bill by adding “sex” to the categories of prohibited discrimination. Smith believed that a federally enforced regime of sexual equality was so ludicrous, so self-evidently wrong, that even lawmaker who wished to end Jim Crow would vote against the bill. Smith reckoned wrongly and we behold the consequences.
Over ensuing decades, a series of federal court decisions established a body of law governing “sexual harassment,” a civil offense that has no explicit basis in law, but rather is an interpretive outgrowth of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. One of the most pernicious of these interpretations is the “hostile environment” variety of sexual harassment, which permits plaintiffs to adduce as evidence of discriminatory intent almost anything and everything said or done by any man in the workplace.
To describe this regime as an expression of militant egalitarianism is a mistake. Its de facto effect is to enforce female supremacy. Legalized discrimination against men has naturally fostered a cultural attitude that deprives a man of the assumption of innocence if ever a woman accuses him of wrong.
Given the legal and political origins of all this, it was deeply ironic that the incident that brought to public attention the hideousness of le regime nouveau was the 1991 confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Even if every allegation made by Anita Hill were true, it was by no means evident that Thomas had ever discriminated against her in the sense that most people conceive of discrimination “ that is, unjustly depriving someone of career opportunities in hiring, pay or promotion. To the contrary, evidence indicated that Thomas had assisted Hill in her career. Had she presented her case as a plaintiff in a harassment suit, she would have been unable to “show harm,” as the lawyers say.
The “show harm” requirement is the kind of demand for rationality by which Ziegler invited the accusation of misogyny.
American women today, as a class, are the most privileged women in the entire history of humanity. No women anywhere have ever enjoyed more wealth, more leisure, or more opportunity. And yet they are not grateful, nor do they give American men any credit for their good fortune.
All we ever hear from them is bitch, bitch, bitch”especially when a man dares call attention to their faults. Gentlemen, you are guilty of cowardice for not speaking out more strongly in your own defense, and in defense of your fellow men.
John Ziegler face-planted for your sins.
]]>I remember sitting at VodkaPundit‘s home near Denver, the day after the Democratic convention, blogging Palin’s announcement, and going straight at the Hottie Factor:
What better way to counter the MSM stereotype of conservatives as uptight, boring, sexless prudes than to celebrate the fact that the GOP running mate is totally hot?
Like Sarah Palin, my wife is 44, a pro-life Christian mother (six kids), and very attractive. My beloved wife is at the age when catcalls and whistles are more flattering than offensive, an affirmation that she’s still got it.
So I’m thinking that Mrs. Palin won’t really mind being acknowledged as a hottie, and her husband will probably find it flattering, too.
If there’s anything I know about public relations, it’s that nothing is so disarming as self-deprecating humor. People who can tell a joke at their own expense”and Ronald Reagan was a master of this”thereby make a twofold statement:
“¢ I am aware of my own faults, i.e., I am smart enough to get the joke.
“¢ I am a big enough person to laugh along with those who see in me something of the ridiculousness of humanity.
Self-deprecating humor can be a kind of ju-jitsu, turning a perceived weakness into a strength, as when Reagan, running for re-election in 1984 as the oldest man ever to be president, joked that he would not make an issue of his opponent’s youth and inexperience. And if Sarah Palin would learn to make a clever self-deprecating joke or two about her looks, it would remove that elephant-in-the-room factor in a way so as to enhance her credibility.
Because beauty is associated with sexuality, it tends to make people uncomfortable and awkward, especially in our politically-correct society where fear of a sexual-harassment charge hovers silently in every workplace. It is my contention that beauty is an objective reality, a simple fact of life, and that the attempt to suppress acknowledgement of beauty”to forbid a man to compliment a good-looking woman”forces us into a stifling artificiality.
Nature suppressed creates a tension that distorts our perceptions and responses. I would argue that the unnatural influence of political correctness, suppressing our natural appreciation of beauty, leads to the kind of situations where sexual-harassment is actually more likely than it would be if the objective reality of beauty were more frankly acknowledged.
Perhaps my sensibilities on this matter are shaped by the fact that I’m a Southerner, and Southern women are such irrepressible flirts. I’d say Texas women take the cake on this score.
At last year’s Media Research Center gala, I went outside the hotel for a smoke break and encountered two 50-something blondes from Texas whose husbands are MRC donors. After being stuck in the uptight world of Washington for so long, it was a delight to be endlessly honeyed and sugared by these two erstwhile belles from the Lone Star State. They flirted with a facile facetiousness that immediately infused a friendly familiarity to our conversation.
Their flirtatious ways, you see, are a form of courtesy. Too many people think of “courtesy” as cold formality. But the jest that dissolves social awkwardness”and this is what flirting is”is a gesture of generosity, and generosity is the bedrock principle of courtesy.
When I met my wife more than 20 years ago, I loved the way she smiled when I flirted with her. “Ah, look at that smile”she’s crazy about you, McCain,” I thought to myself, and pursued her with all the romantic ardor of Pepe Le Peu chasing that white-striped cat.
After we were wed, it happened that one morning I stopped by the Hardee’s restaurant where she was then working the breakfast shift. And I watched as she took the food orders of two old guys from the nearby National Guard armory”all the while smiling at their flirtations just as she had smiled at mine!
Painful as it was to discover that I wasn’t quite as special as I’d thought, there was wisdom to be gained by this discovery. Beauty is an objective reality, and all men notice it. There’s a country song by Sammy Kershaw, “She Don’t Know She’s Beautiful,” but don’t kid yourself, guys”there is no beautiful woman who is unaware of her beauty. The kind of girl commemorated by the country song is merely gracious about her beauty, blessed with the kind of generous soul that does not begrudge men’s admiration, nor so superficial as to believe beauty alone is sufficient merit in a woman.
Is Sarah Palin such a woman? I think so. Although her aptitude for high office remains much debated, this research that claims her beauty is a disadvantage is just another example of the idiocy of academic “experts.”
* * * * *
Speaking of experts, Taki’s Magazine editor Richard Spencer is becoming an expert in romantic missed chances. I told you on Valentine’s Day about how young Richard whiffed his turn at bat with Michelle Lee Muccio, and promised then that I knew of “a certain blue-eyed stunner” who would be in Washington for the Conservative Political Action Convention. Let the discerning eye judge whether I delivered as promised:
Alas, another swing and a miss for young Richard. I could relate the details, but it’s just too brutal to bear telling. Richard assures me he doesn’t lack for female companionship, and obviously such a fine-looking young fellow must have many prospects. However, given his 0-for-2 record in the encounters I’ve personally witnessed, I’d say he needs all the help he can get, if we’re going to save those fine Spencer genes from a sad Darwinian fate.
From McCain |
So if any of you young ladies out there think you’d be interested in that handsome lad, just drop me an e-mail, and we’ll see if we can arrange an opportunity for Richard to strike out with you, too. If he keeps up with this losing streak, we might have to bring in Taki himself to give the boy some instruction on the art of flirtation. (And by the way, ladies, don”t try e-mailing me with requests for an introduction to Taki. He can fend for himself.)
]]>Washington, it has been said, is Hollywood for the ugly, and, indeed, great beauties are a rarity in the nation’s capital. So I was doing Richard Spencer a huge favor in December 2007 by introducing him to Michelle Lee Muccio.
An associate at the free-market Acton Institute, Miss Muccio became an Internet celebrity this past week with a YouTube video advocating a payroll-tax holiday instead of the $789 billion “stimulus,” which the 111th Congress (may it live in infamy) just passed. Her video sparked more than the usual quota of hubba-hubba comments when it was posted at HotAir.com, and I immediately seized on the occasion to chide Richard for having missed his shot. That was one of those “Glengarry leads,” pal.
The chivalrous Spencer has challenged me to a duel for having “slandered Michelle Lee Muccio’s good name” by allegedly implying that she were attached to someone as morally suspect as himself.
No such implication was made, of course. I merely introduced a handsome young conservative editor to a pretty free-market activist and continued circulating around the holiday cocktail reception. When I circulated back around 15 minutes later and found these two fine-looking youngsters still engaged in friendly conversation”well, excuse an old romantic for supposing that Richard’s interest in Miss Muccio was not strictly professional.
“Alas””and let the record show that word as directly quoted from Spencer himself”he lacked the Always Be Closing instinct, and so they went their separate ways. Spencer has since relocated to New York where, he hastens to assure me, he does not suffer a shortage of female companionship.
Right. And those grapes were probably sour anyway.
“All seductions begin by flirting. Flirting is the key which turns the engine on. It is as simple as that. Without flirting you cannot seduce, and without seduction the race becomes extinct.”
“Taki Theodoracopulos
She was sitting at my desk when I returned from covering a softball game late one afternoon in October 1987. I”d been sports editor of the Calhoun (Ga.) Times for about six weeks and was surprised to find my desk occupied by a pretty brunette, but happy to have a ready-made excuse to talk to her. The newspaper was having its annual subscription drive, and the brunette was one of several temporary sales people brought in to work the phones that evening. She apologized and moved to a nearby desk, and I spent the next hour or so flirting with her while I filed my report of the softball game.
Love at first sight? I don”t know if I believe in that, but she was definitely one of those “Glengarry leads.” In less than two years, we were married and had a newborn baby (in that order!). And I”ve spent the past 20 years being congratulated on my good fortune by friends who, upon being introduced to my wife, invariably wonder in amazement how such a classy beauty ended up with a guy like me.
What can I say? Some guys get the El Dorado. Some guys get the steak knives.
As Valentine’s Day 2009 arrives, the desperate real-estate salesmen of Glengarry Glen Ross are an apt metaphor for the romantic plight of our age. Plenty of prospects out there”there are some 24 million women ages 18-29 in the United States”but guys can”t seem to close the deal: 65 percent of those women have never married. The median age at first marriage for women, which was 20 in 1960, is now at an all-time high of 25.3, and spinsterhood is an increasingly common fate. Thirteen percent of women 40-44 have never married, reflecting about a one-third rise since 1980 in the likelihood of being an old maid, a percentage that can be expected to increase given the current low marriage rates for young women.
Of course, a rare beauty like Miss Muccio will almost certainly land a husband sooner or later, and for all I know, she may already have found the lucky fellow she”ll lead to the altar. Yet the fact that she could reach age 27 and still be single is a sad testimony to the lack of romantic ardor among our nation’s young bachelors.
Spencer blew his big chance with Miss Muccio, but he’s a lad of great promise and not too shabby-looking himself, so perhaps other opportunities will come along. As a matter of fact, I have in mind a certain blue-eyed stunner who”ll be in Washington for the Conservative Political Action Conference in two weeks. She’s a writer, he’s an editor”strictly an introduction of two young professionals, you understand.
She’s another “Glengarry lead,” Richard. Remember: Coffee is for closers. And second prize is the steak knives.
]]>That kind of stuff is surefire Nielsen magic, and it doesn”t matter that in reality a teen victim is far more likely to be molested by a teacher or a coach than by some creepy stranger they encounter in an online chat room. The formula “teen + sex + crime” is luridly irresistible. Once Hansen did the first show, he was inevitably required to do dozens more, so that no matter what other big stories he reports, viewers will forever picture him surprising the chat-room cockroaches that crawl into his hidden-camera trap seeking the (fictional) 13-year-old bait.
More cleverly exploiting the same genre is Greta Van Susteren of FOX News, who has turned the May 2005 disappearance of high-school senior Natalie Holloway into a permanent excuse for “investigative” excursions to Aruba. Every other week, it seems, we see Greta standing beneath the swaying palms, earnestly describing her latest “update” on the case. If Natalie had been run over by a bus in Aruba, the story wouldn”t have merited a single national headline, but the disappearance of an attractive 18-year-old blonde trips the “teen + sex + crime” trigger in such a way that Greta can keep going back to Aruba over and over again.
With the exception of the New York Post“I’D BE YOUR ‘LOLLIPOP’: SLEAZY E-MAILS FROM MARRIED ASSEMBLYMAN TO TEEN INTERN“most newspapers don”t go in for that kind of stuff.
You”d certainly never find an esteemed publication like the New York Times blatantly working the “teen + sex + crime” angle with leering headlines and suggestive prose. No, whenever the gang at 620 Eighth Avenue wants to do teen sex, they generally do it from the social-science perspective, and so the headline Sunday was, “The Myth of Rampant Teenage Promiscuity“ with health writer Tara Parker-Pope assuring Times readers that “in many ways, today’s teenagers are more conservative about sex than previous generations.”
The Times story was in reaction to a Jan. 7 report from the National Center for Health Statistics. “The birth rate for teenagers 15″19 years increased 3 percent in 2006, interrupting the 14-year period of continuous decline from 1991 through 2005,” the NCHS reported.
The NCHS report had sparked a predictable round of media hand-wringing when it was released. USA Today reported: “Some blame a more sexualized culture and greater acceptance of births to unmarried women. Others say abstinence-only sex education and a possible de-emphasis on birth control may play a part.” Sarah Brown of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy perceived a cultural shift: “In the last couple of years, we had Jamie Lynn Spears. We had Juno and we had Bristol Palin. Those three were in 2007 and 2008 and not in 2005 to 2006, but they point to that phenomenon.”
Given the sort of spin that most media put on the 102-page report, Parker-Pope of the Times obviously felt a need to debunk the alarmist fear-mongering. She cited previous reports showing that the percentage of girls ages 15-17 who reported having had sexual intercourse actually declined from 38 percent in 1995 to 30 percent in 2002. And she enlisted the sort of “expert” opinion that is indispensible to respectable social-science reporting, with University of LaSalle sociologist Kathleen Bogle providing the pooh-pooh quote: “There’s no doubt that the public perception is that things are getting worse, and that kids are having sex younger and are much wilder than they ever were. … But when you look at the data, that’s not the case.”
Well, that settles it, eh? Despite the blip in teen pregnancy, teenagers actually aren”t screwing around so much. Another “myth” busted by the New York Times!
The skeptical reader raises an eyebrow. Less teen sex, more teen mothers? Skepticism is arguably justified. Social science cannot provide a perfect measurement of how much sex teenagers are actually having. The fundamental problem is the reliability of self-reported survey data about sex. “Sex being an extremely private matter, it is nearly impossible to verify self-reported data about sexual behavior, and some self-reports are certainly false,” as one noted authority recently wrote.
In contrast to the necessary ambiguity of self-reported survey results, birth statistics are solid data, and that data confirms that some teenager are, we might say, living la vida loca.
The big news in NCHS report was that Mississippi had reclaimed its accustomed No. 1 status as America’s teen pregnancy capital, supplanting Texas, which had led the nation in 2004. According to the NCHS data, in 2006, the three states with the highest teen birth rates were Mississippi (68.4 births per 1,000 females ages 15-19), New Mexico (64.1 per 1,000) and Texas (63.1).
“Hmmm,” says the skeptical reader. “Perhaps demographics may be a factor?”
Again, the skeptic is on the right track. Plow through the NCHS report and you discover find is that the birth rate per 1,000 females 15-19 breaks down like this:
White………26.6
Black……….63.7
Hispanic….83.0
Teen motherhood occurs more than three times as often among Hispanics, and more than twice as often among blacks, than among whites. And according to the Census bureau, the population of Mississippi is 37.1 percent black and 1.8 percent Hispanic, whereas Texas is 11.9 percent black and 35.7 percent Hispanic, and New Mexico is 2.5 percent black and 44.0 percent Hispanic. By comparison, the state with the lowest teen birth rate, New Hampshire, is 95.8 percent white.
So while some liberals spun the NCHS report as reflecting the failure of the abstinence-only approach to sex education, demographic influence seems much more explanatory. (Perhaps the abstinence-only curricula would be more effective en Espanol?)
According to the NCHS, there were 441,822 babies born to females under age 20 in 2006. Of these, 148,125 were born to Hispanic mothers, 106,187 were born to black mothers, and 170,996 were born to non-Hispanic white mothers. So whereas non-Hispanic whites are 66 percent of the U.S. population, they contributed only 38 percent of babies born to teen mothers. The differential is even more dramatic among the youngest teens. Of the 6,396 babies born in 2006 to girls 14 and younger, 2,456 (38 percent) were born to Hispanics, 2,462 (38 percent) were born to blacks, and 1,647 (20 percent) were born to non-Hispanic whites.
None of that data appeared in the New York Times‘s story, which in nearly 900 words didn”t even acknowledge the demographic factor in teen pregnancy statistics. Chris Hansen keeps trapping Internet pervs, Greta Van Susteren keeps flying down to Aruba to explore the Mystery of the Missing Blonde, and the New York Post (we assume) eagerly awaits the next teen-sex scandal of “Long Island Lolita“ proportions, but the much larger “scandal“ remains remarkably underreported.
]]>It was one of those headlines that automatically gets a Drudge link: “Wealthy men give women more orgasms,” the Times of London declared Sunday.
Before we launch our “Win a Dream Date With Taki” promotion, however, let’s pause to ponder the gap between what the headline said and what the researchers found.
The article reported research by Newcastle University evolutionary psychologist Thomas Pollet, based on a lifestyle survey of some 1,500 Chinese women. “Increasing partner income had a highly positive effect on women’s self-reported frequency of orgasm. More desirable mates cause women to experience more orgasms.”
Surely, there are sophomore sociology majors who could spot the weaknesses in this conclusion. To begin with, the study relied on self-reported data. The Chinese survey respondents were asked whether they had orgasms during sex, with 121 answering “always,” 408 saying “often,” 762 replying “sometimes,” and the remaining 243 “rarely” or “never” having orgasms”or so they said.
The dubious reliability of self-reported data was one of the basic structural flaws of the Alfred Kinsey’s 1948 and 1952 reports on sexual behavior. Sex being an extremely private matter, it is nearly impossible to verify self-reported data about sexual behavior, and some self-reports are certainly false.
For example, a recent federal study (see Figure 6) found that U.S. men over age 25 typically reported more than six opposite-sex partners in their lifetimes, compared to a median four lifetime partners reported by women. Similarly, while 22.6 percent of U.S. men reported 15 or more lifetime female sex partners, only 9.6 percent of U.S. women reported 15 or more partners. From the inherent mismatch in this data, one can only conclude that when responding to such surveys, men tend to exaggerate, and/or women tend to minimize, their number of partners.
If survey respondents cannot be trusted to accurately report such a basic fact as their number of sex partners, how much confidence can be placed in women’s survey responses as to whether they climax “often” or “sometimes” during sex? And even if we stipulate that there is some validity to self-reported sex data, we can”t overlook the potential for cultural variability in results. Chinese women may be more orgasmic with wealthier partners, but is the same effect equally observable among Finns, Argentines and Somalis? (Let’s leave the “Pakis“ out of this, shall we?)
Stipulating even that this research from the People’s Republic is both valid and universally applicable, however, the sophomore sociology major would still ask: Does correlation prove causation? That is to say, is the man’s wealth a determining independent factor in his partner’s satisfaction? Or is it possible that wealth correlates closely with some other factor or factors that are more likely to be the true cause of the reported effect?
We know, for example, that good health is correlated with high intelligence, which is in turn correlated with higher income. And we also know that taller men are more likely to have high incomes. So, rather than wealth being an independent factor in the orgasmic equation, perhaps the research merely indicates that women get off more with tall, smart, healthy partners than with short, dumb, sickly guys.
Furthermore, we could turn the equation around and ponder selection effects among the women. Assuming that wealthy men have a greater choice among their partners, perhaps rich guys (in China, at least) are demonstrating an understandable preference for more passionate women, rejecting the bedroom duds who are in turn paired with low-income males.
All of which is to say that Professor Pollet has certainly not proven what the newspaper headline implied. Sorry, guys. If you win the Powerball lottery tomorrow, your winnings won”t automatically transform you into a romantic dynamo who drives women into spasmodic convulsions of ecstasy.
Which is not to say that Melissa Beech hasn”t made a shrewd bargain with her “sugar daddy,” nor that Natalie Dylan won”t get more than monetary satisfaction from auctioning her virginity. Rather, the inherent shortcomings of Professor Pollet’s research merely demonstrate that science is a feeble instrument for understanding sex.
When researchers actually do manage to “discover” some great truth about sex, it usually has a dog-bites-man obviousness, science proving what ordinary people already know through common sense. Women have always preferred high-income partners, as Professor Pollet might have discovered by surveying guys who ride mopeds and work as convenience store clerks.
Anecdotal evidence is abundant. Single guys in D.C., for example, constantly complain about the status-conscious romantic preferences of that city’s women who, upon first being introduced at a social function, will ask, “What do you do?” Smart guys (who may someday parlay their brains into wealth) manage to answer that question in ways that disguise their relative poverty. I recently advised a bachelor buddy”a researcher for a non-profit organization who also does occasional freelance journalism”to answer The Question by describing himself as an “investigative reporter.” It just sounds so much sexier, doesn”t it?
The possibility that a man might fool a woman about his income points toward some interesting research questions:
“¢ If a guy who makes $40,000 a year rents a Mercedes and puts a $600 suit on his credit card, goes to a nightclub and spends like a high roller, picks up a hottie and sweeps her off to a hotel luxury suite, will her orgasmic response be the same as if he actually were as rich as he pretends to be?
“¢ Should a woman demand to examine a potential partner’s 1040 forms before deciding whether she has sex with him? (“Sorry, I can”t get off on $65,000 a year. If you can get a raise to $80,000, call me.”)
“¢ Has the recent financial meltdown spawned a trend of frigidity?
There is no reason that university professors should have a monopoly on exploring these important scientific issues. In fact, given our new president’s promise to “spread the wealth around,” perhaps I can get a federal research grant to determine once and for all if a man’s increased income has an independent effect on a woman’s sexual satisfaction.
Give me a million dollars”call it a “stimulus””and I”ll let you know if it has any effect on my wife. My hypothesis is that her answer will be yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes! Yes! Yes!
]]>Laura Gallier, who runs a Texas-based abstinence education program, was dumbfounded by the news that bidding in the online auction of a California woman’s virginity had reached $3.7 million.
“When I communicate to young people that their virginity is valuable, that’s not exactly what I have in mind,” said Gallier, author of Choosing to Wait.
Yet if 22-year-old Natalie Dylan has proven nothing else, she has demonstrated that virginity” though not exactly innocence”has market value.
The San Diego college student says the purpose of her enterprise is to raise money for graduate school. She is seeking a master’s degree in women’s studies, but she’s stumbled onto a Ph.D.-worthy discovery in economics. She has also vindicated an ancient common-sense understanding of human nature: When it comes to sex, women represent the supply side of the equation and men are the demand.
This was what your rustic great-grandmother meant when she warned your grandmother, “He ain”t gonna buy the cow, if he’s gettin” the milk for free.”
The modern young woman inevitably reacts to repetition of this old saying with loud objections at being metaphorically likened to livestock. Being modern, she also rejects the underlying wisdom of the adage: That her companionship can be understood as a commodity and that its value is not fixed, but rather subject to market fluctuation.
What great-grandma meant, of course, was that women who engage in pre-marital sex thereby lessen the incentives for men to seek marriage. And one reason her modern great-granddaughter is so infuriated by that adage is that the price-signals have become so confused in a market now flooded with free milk.
The best available research indicates that nowadays the average American girl first engages in sexual intercourse a few months before her 17th birthday. According to the Census Bureau, the median age at first marriage for women is 25.3 years.
Simple arithmetic, then, suggests that the typical American woman now is sexually active for more than eight years before her wedding. Research also indicates, however, that this typical woman is not particularly promiscuous during those eight years, since the median reported number of lifetime sexual partners for women was less than four. (Although more than 30 percent reported having at least seven sex partners, of which about 11 percent reported at least 15 partners.)
How rare is a 22-year-old virgin nowadays? The CDC found that less than 9 percent of women 20-24 reported zero lifetime sexual partners, and less than 3 percent of women over 25 are still virgins. Do the math, then, and the inescapable conclusion is that the symbolic innocence of a white wedding is now nearly always a cynical expression of hypocrisy.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned…
“William Butler Yeats,
“The Second Coming,” 1920
Ceremonies of innocence were more honestly symbolic a half-century ago. In 1959, the median female age at first marriage was 20.2 years, which means that nearly half were wed while still teenagers. The girl who was “saving herself for marriage” usually didn”t have to save herself too long.
If we may return to the rustic adage that so offends the modern woman, guys were faced with a shortage of free milk in 1959, since most cows were off the market before they were 21. And the question of how and why this situation changed may require another old metaphor: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? That is to say, did a declining interest in marriage lead to the increased availability of premarital sex, or vice-versa?
The evidence clearly points toward vice-versa. Long after the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s, most American women continued to marry at relatively young ages. When the median female age at first marriage reached 22.1 years in 1979, it was the highest age ever recorded by the Census Bureau.
Despite all those “Swinging Sixties” tales about “free love” and hippies, the reality is that most young people continued to connect love, sex, and marriage in rather traditional ways even after “The Age of Aquarius” gave way to “Saturday Night Fever.”
Pop music of the era shows that the “one and only” ideal of lifelong romantic exclusivity persisted well past the Woodstock epoch and into the disco age. In 1971, when the protagonist of the Temptations” “Just My Imagination” gazes on the object of his desire, he dreams that “soon we”ll be married and raise a family.” It was in 1976 that Heatwave recorded “Always and Forever,” still a standard at wedding receptions, as is Lionel Richie’s 1981 ballad, “Endless Love.”
If even in the “Get Down Tonight” atmosphere of the Seventies, the typical bride wed her one and only when she was still a mere 22″the median age at first marriage didn”t reach 23 until 1984″it is very difficult to argue that a decline of the marital objective caused the rise of premarital sex.
Prior to the mid-“80s, then, “premarital sex” generally retained its original meaning”young lovers who intended to marry one another but who simply couldn”t wait for the wedding night. This original sense of premarital sex can be perceived in the 1968 study that found that 20 percent of brides were already pregnant when they walked down the aisle.
Even if the bride of the Sixties and Seventies was less likely than her mother to literally “save herself for marriage,” she typically saved herself for a pledge of love and at least the implied promise of wedding bells. One is reminded of the now-famous 1938 mug shot of 23-year-old Frank Sinatra when he was arrested in Lodi, N.J., on the charge of “seduction,” defined as the crime of enticing a woman to have intercourse with a false promise of marriage. That New Jersey law has long since been repealed, the law having reflected a cultural sensibility now nearly faded from memory.
Wouldn”t it be nice if we were older,
Then we wouldn”t have to wait so long . . .
We could be married
And then we”d be happy.
“”Wouldn”t It Be Nice,”
The Beach Boys, 1966
What flourishes today is not pre-marital sex, but rather non-marital sex or, if we wish to be bluntly accurate, anti-marital sex, since the widespread availability of the commodity with no strings attached tends to obviate the rationale of marriage. When so many women are willing even to become mothers without benefit of clergy”37 percent of U.S. births are to unmarried women”why on earth would any man marry?
No promise of marriage is sought by Miss Dylan in the online auction of her virginity. Indeed, she is quite explicit that she is offering only a one-night stand with a virgin (volunteering to undergo a gynecological exam to certify truth in advertising) and has no interest in any relationship, certainly not marriage. That stipulation seems unnecessary, as it is difficult to imagine the man who would wish to marry such a woman, and she has expressed surprise that the bidding has gone so high.
Miss Dylan’s ultimate customer will be very rich, and very much a cynic as Oscar Wilde defined the term: “A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
Cynics have become quite numerous of late. The cynic can well imagine the envy Miss Dylan’s auction must inspire in so many of her peers, who as teenagers parted with the same surprisingly valuable commodity for no more than the price of a few wine coolers.
]]>Oh, also Dolce & Gabbana, Levis, Wrangler, Jimmy Choo, BMW, Corona beer, and Captain Morgan rum.
This is the message of a remarkable video produced by the Gabriela Network as part of “the international feminist movement’s 16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence campaign.” The 16 days expired in December, but the video was posted Tuesday at a feminist blog, The Confluence, where it generated more than 200 comments in the span of a few hours.
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“This is what the victory of Barack Obama means for women: We are all fair game,” said the woman who posted the video.
Entitled “Burn It Down,” the video features images of magazine advertisements, mostly for high-end fashion brands, in which women are depicted in sexualized ways”for instance, there’s a Levis ad in which the outline of a jeans pocket is shown on a woman’s bare buttocks”or, in some instances, shown on the receiving end of stylized sado-masochism. Interposed with these images are notes for a sort of mini-lecture about violence against women.
“Violence and objectification are a normal part of women’s lives,” the viewer is told. “In the US, the media bombards us on a daily basis with images that regulate how we think: about our bodies, our sexuality, our ethnicity, our relationships, and our very existence.”
Wait a minute. Notice how glibly this script puts violence and “objectification” on the same moral plane, as if the models in the fashion ads, in being hired for display as sex symbols, were victimized in the same way as if they had been assaulted. To equate violence with “objectification” serves the propaganda purpose of expanding the universe of victimhood so as to include every pretty girl who’s ever been made uncomfortable by a stranger’s lingering glance.
The claim that advertising can “regulate how we think,” turning us into robots or zombies incapable of independent thought or action, is certainly not novel or unique to feminist cant. More than a half-century has passed since John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society depicted the consumer as “subject to the forces of advertising and emulation by which production creates its own demand.” Whereas Galbraith’s wrath was directed at the marketers of Chevrolets with tailfins, however, the producers of “Burn It Down” aim their indignation at advertisers who (the feminists would have us believe) are more interested in maintaining patriarchal oppression than selling blue jeans or beer.
“Advertisements like these contribute to a culture where all women are for sale,” the video tells us, before showing us a jeweler’s ad in which, once a kneeling man opens the box holding the engagement ring, a seated woman uncrosses her legs. The next image is of a Tom Ford perfume ad, with the perfume bottle situated in front of a naked woman’s depilated crotch.
A few images later, the video lecture connects cause and effect: “These advertisements contribute to the fact that in the US, a woman is battered, usually by her partner, every 9 seconds.”
Full stop. However degrading the imagery in these ads, they appear mainly in upscale magazines like Vanity Fair, GQ, Vogue and Esquire. Most of these ads are directed at women readers and, while one doesn”t wish to stereotype the readership of men’s fashion journals, it’s difficult to imagine the average GQ subscriber as a wife-beating brute.
The video continues: “In the US, a woman is raped every 90 seconds. . . . 4 women are murdered in the US every day. . . . 1 in 3 women, globally, is sexually abused in her lifetime. . . . Over 1 million women and children are trafficked into sexual and labor exploitation every year.”
Even if you accept all these statistical claims at face value, the question cannot be avoided: What does this have to do with Dolce & Gabbana? How many international sex traffickers, for instance, have ever picked up a copy of Vanity Fair? Until someone can get a federal research grant to investigate the reading habits of murderers, I refuse to believe that serial killers are being inspired to their crimes by reading Vogue.
“All violence against women””back to the video script again””is the result of a system that values power and money over human rights. This system is responsible for these advertisements and for the TRAFFICKING, RAPE, MURDER of women all over the world, including right here in the US. It’s called PATRIARCHY. Burn it Down, Start Over.”
The revolutionary moment has arrived, sisters! Women of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your Jimmy Choos. Cancel your magazine subscriptions and then . . . and then what, exactly? The video doesn”t say.
There are no instructions for just how the sisterhood will fight the systemic oppression wrought by advertisers in the pages of Conde Nast publications. Ah, but surely they”re too clever to divulge their secret plans for overthrowing the fashionista regime. However, let us assume they have such plans and furthermore assume that these plans are destined to succeed.
Once the destructive maelstrom of the revolution has spent its fury, once the patriarchy has been overthrown, what new civilization do the feminists propose to erect on the shattered ruins of the sexist empire? Where is the blueprint for this New Girl Order?
Is there a manifesto, a 10-point platform providing some basic guidelines to govern the post-patriarchal world? We get the point that, in this promised utopia, there will be no half-naked models posing provocatively in magazines, but beyond that, what will we be left with, once the feminists “burn it down”? We are not told.
Questions multiply endlessly”isn”t it true that these fashion ads are chiefly conceived by gay men?”but perhaps the most relevant mystery is what any of this has to do with Barack Obama.
Feminist logic is an oxymoron, but the apparent connecting point between the “Burn It Down” video and the femblogger’s rage against Obama is the incident in which the president-elect’s top speechwriter, Jonathan Favreau, was photographed while groping a cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton. Having denounced this “feign[ed] date rape,” the outraged blogger proceeds to identify herself as a PUMA, one of the Hillary supporters whose response to demands that Democrats unite behind Obama was summarized by the phrase, “Party Unity My Ass.” She then vents her anger at women’s groups that endorsed Obama, “asserting that they will then be able to “change” him after he wins.”
Next, she devotes most of a paragraph to the case of a New Jersey man, George Hartwig, who shot his estranged wife’s sister. After that detour, she’s ready for her peroration: “I am sick and tired of being treated like a third-class citizen by people who aren”t even fit to tie my shoes. The plutocracy uses the built-in misogyny of American society to keep the power and the money in their hands. And NOW and WomenCount and NARAL simper and giggle and scrap for all the crumbs they can scrounge from Barack’s table. MoDo [i.e., New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd] and Gail Collins and their ilk spend their time sniping at other women to earn the big bucks from their condescending corporate masters.”
Plutocracy, misogyny, “corporate masters””she’s mastered the radical vocabulary and yet, oddly enough, this mastery has not been accompanied by empowerment.
What can we learn from this online outburst? First, it becomes obvious that whatever the political merits of adding Sarah Palin to the Republican ticket, diehard Hillary devotees were never a constituency that the GOP could seduce easily. Their frustration at seeing their idol go from inevitable nominee to also-ran only intensified their commitment to militant gynocentrism, and even Hillary’s appointment as Secretary of State has not abated their feminist fury.
Second, we witness the rage of the politically self-marginalized. The blogger responsible for this screed, “madamab,” identifies herself as “an opera singer residing in New York City.” Through her refusal to reconcile herself to Obama’s presidency, she purposefully relegates herself to a futile fringe of her own party, so that she forsakes whatever joy she might otherwise have derived from the Democratic triumph.
Third and finally, we are reminded that kooks constitute the natural base of the Democratic Party. As bizarre as the “Burn It Down” video may be, its ideology is really no more extreme than the Women’s Caucus at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, where one speaker”actress Rosario Dawson”earnestly assured her fellow delegates: “One-in-three women in this country will be affected by rape, abuse or be killed.”
There it is again””one-in-three women,” the statistical assurance that any woman who hasn”t yet been victimized still has a chance to claim her prize in the victimhood lottery. You”re “fair game,” Obama is to blame, and don”t let anyone tell you different, sister.
]]>Her story may be as phony as her pseudonym, but when Miss Beech told it via Tina Brown’s new outfit, The Daily Beast, the outrage she provoked was real. Her confessional elicited more than 100 comments”many calling her a prostitute”and prompted responses at Slate and Salon. Such was the outpouring of judgmentalism that Miss Beech produced a follow-up, interviewing her “benefactor” (as she calls him) who defended the legitimacy of their arrangement.
In an age where literary fraud is commonplace, I”m highly dubious of Miss Beech’s story, which sounds just a bit too much like the plot of a successful “chick lit” project. Her patron is unmarried, in his early 30s, and earns a seven-figure income, yet he can”t have the usual sort of girlfriend “because of the stress and pressure they placed on his already hectic lifestyle.” Hmmmm.
Such suspicions aside, the indignant reaction is truly fascinating. In a society that long ago discarded the ideal of premarital chastity, youthful fornication has lost its shock power. If Miss Beech were merely sleeping with a college classmate, her behavior would be no different than that of millions of other young women in 21st-century America, and nowadays only the strictest of religious conservatives would condemn it. None of those passing judgment on her, however, speaks the language of sin. Her stone-throwing Pharisees are strictly secular.
Much of the opprobrium heaped on Miss Beech took her to task for failing to live up to the careerist ideals of feminism. She met her benefactor via a job interview. She didn”t get the job, but he recommended her for employment elsewhere, so that he was free to offer her an “arrangement” without exposing himself to the charge of workplace harassment. The cleverness with which he thus eluded the snares of Title VII probably accounts for a large share of the outrage misplaced on Miss Beech. The transcendental purpose of “sexual harassment” law is to prevent successful men from leveraging their workplace authority to obtain romantic opportunities, so as to create a “level playing field” without favoritism to the boss’s girlfriend.
In the gender-neutral meritocracy of feminist imagination, no woman should benefit from youth and beauty, as this would be unfair to the old and ungainly. If a woman adds to youth and beauty a willingness to accommodate the sexual interests of powerful men, she is colluding with the enemy in perpetuating patriarchal oppression. Sexual harassment law, however, has not yet found a way to punish influential men who give their girlfriends favorable recommendations at other firms, and so Melissa Beech and her lover are thumbing their noses at feminism, proving once again Rush Limbaugh’s Undeniable Truth No. 24:
Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society.
Feminists have waged a four-decade war against traditional morality, and so can ill afford to invoke old-fashioned moral language and condemn Miss Beech as a selfish, shallow tramp. Instead, she is scorned for failing to demonstrate self-sufficiency, as with the commenter who scolded: “Learn to work like most of us had to in college, even if that means wearing Payless shoes instead of Jimmy Choos. At least you’ll have your dignity and some REAL job skills at the end!”
Yet Miss Beech evidently lacks neither intelligence nor diligence. Her boyfriend says in the follow-up interview that she is “probably one of the hardest working young women I have ever met. The jobs you”ve received were in your own merit. I did nothing except refer your name to friends of mine.” She is having her feminist cake and eating it, too “ pursuing a professional career in the usual manner while also benefitting from Mr. Big’s patronage to the tune of $5,000 a month.
Resentment of her good fortune in securing such a font of generosity appears a major motivator of the sanctimony directed at Miss Beech. Rather than spend her youth engaged in “relationships” with equally impecunious 20-somethings, she instead has found an affluent older lover willing and able to provide her with material advantages. Her critics are cloaking class envy in moralistic drag. If he were not wealthy, there would be no relationship and no cause for condemnation, as he discerns: “I”m lucky enough to be able to financially give you anything you could want, and if people resent that then that’s too bad for them.”
The source of outrage that Miss Beech’s critics seem unable to express directly is that her “mutually beneficial arrangement” offends the egalitarian sensibilities of the modern age. When the Pandora’s Box of liberation was opened in the 1960s, the prevailing assumption was that sexual freedom would result in sexual equality. However, as every perceptive mind since Edmund Burke has discerned, freedom and equality are conflicting values. The more we are free, the less we will be equal, and this is true as much in sex as in economics.
A regime of sexual liberation benefits the attractive, the affluent and the extroverted far more than it benefits the ugly, the poor, and the awkward, who find themselves alone on the outside, peering as through an impenetrable window into the carnival of pleasure enjoyed by the rich and beautiful. Attempts by the unfortunate to emulate this sexual circus only reinforce the pre-existent inequality. Hollywood starlets and Wall Street moguls seem to glide undamaged through their botched marriages and child-custody disputes, while similar behavior by the poor only aggravates their poverty.
The egalitarian mind does not object to Miss Beech having a boyfriend, or to her benefactor having a girlfriend. Rather the shock is that they have transcended the barrier that their inequalities of age, wealth and career status are expected to impose. A successful man is nowadays expected to choose as his romantic companion an equally accomplished partner. This expectation, more than the alleged pressures of his “hectic lifestyle” or any objection by Miss Beech, likely explains why her beau doesn”t consider marriage a potential end-point of their relationship.
As the carefully-matched pairings of Ivy League careerists celebrated by New York Times wedding announcements suggest, our egalitarian elites reserve an especial odium for high-achieving men who marry women too far below them on the status ladder. Such an unequal match would imply that professional achievement yields for women less romantic benefit than it does for men. If a man in his 30s earning a million dollars should announce his engagement to a 22-year-old college senior, this would be viewed as an uncouth abandonment of those 30-something career women from among whom such a man is expected to select his mate.
Having forsaken the Judeo-Christian strictures that would denounce the sexual adventures of Miss Beech as sinful, our culture yet retains its instinct for condemnation, directing it toward behavior that mocks the social standards that have replaced the stern “Thou shalt not” commandments of yore. Egalitarian idolators are ashamed to admit that theirs is also a jealous god.
Probably no one would be surprised if the saga of Melissa Beech were revealed to be a hoax, or at least artfully embroidered to present her “arrangement” in the most flattering light. Her story would be less reader-friendly if her boyfriend were a married or divorced man in his 50s, rather than a bachelor in his 30s. And even if the essentials of her story are true, one suspects that the Philadelphia locale is a deception”a million-dollar media salary is far more likely in New York or Washington.
Whatever deceptions Miss Beech has practiced, her story nonetheless functions as a morality play, and her critics were eager to prophesy a tragic ending, predicting that her boyfriend would eventually dump her in favor of some other young pretty thing. They are likely to be disappointed in that expectation, however, as the authoress has foreshadowed a different denouement.
Miss Beech introduces herself as coming from a family of “traditional Irish Catholic Republicans” and, in her follow-up article, her boyfriend makes a telling revelation: “We have met each other’s families, your dad and I go golfing together, and my mom thinks you”re the sweetest.” Ah, with such chains is the poor beast led to the sacrificial altar!
Whether fiction or fact, this fairy tale promises to end with wedding bells. And when that final chapter is written, Miss Beech will have accomplished a betrayal of modernity for which her critics can never forgive her.
Robert Stacy McCain is co-author (with Lynn Vincent) of Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party. He is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator and blogs at The Other McCain.
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