Press Gives Head -- Curmudgette Has Head Cold

The latter is really apropos of nothing. But I appear to have a fife and drum corps living in my sinuses and I feel like complaining.

Remember Media Whores Online? Gone but not forgotten, it still ranks as one of my favorite political sites of all time. I think Katrina VandenHeuvel was giving them a little high five on the "Colbert Report," when she said, and I quote, "We [The Nation] never lost our head, while too much of the media gave head."



For a view from within the red light district, read Gary Kamiya's "Iraq: Why the media failed" in Salon. Writes Kamiya:

It's no secret that the period of time between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq represents one of the greatest collapses in the history of the American media. Every branch of the media failed, from daily newspapers, magazines and Web sites to television networks, cable channels and radio. I'm not going to go into chapter and verse about the media's specific failures, its credulousness about aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds and failure to make clear that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 -- they're too well known to repeat. In any case, the real failing was not in any one area; it was across the board. Bush administration lies and distortions went unchallenged, or were actively promoted. Fundamental and problematic assumptions about terrorism and the "war on terror" were rarely debated or even discussed. Vital historical context was almost never provided. And it wasn't just a failure of analysis. With some honorable exceptions, good old-fashioned reporting was also absent.

Like most of the apologia to issue from members of the fourth estate, it puts a lot of the blame for the media's credulity and lack of vigilance on 9/11. In short, it does not wholly satisfy. Worthwhile reading, none the less.

I wish I could get homemade chicken soup delivered.

Wag The Children Tour Stumbles

Alberto Gonzales's Wag the Children tour is getting off to a rocky start. The press seems to be having a little trouble getting into the spirit of things. They just keep prodding and pestering him over this trifling federal prosecutor scandal. Today the fearless protector of our little ones was actually driven from the podium with the carping of Chicago reporters. Can't they read? "Protect Safe Childhood!!!" Can't miss it. It's on a great big, Orwellian backdrop that was paid for with our tax dollars. Doesn't say "Prosecutorgate" over and over in big block letters, now does it? These reporters seem to have forgotten how these things work. Let's review:

Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell check and go home.
-- Stephen Colbert

Yeesh!

Good Morning Richard Cohen

Originally published: Friday, May 05, 2006

Lt. Steven Hauk: Sir, in my heart, I know I'm funny.
-- Good Morning Vietnam

"First, let me state my credentials," writes the Washington Post's Richard Cohen. "I am a funny guy." Such arrogance does not really invite further indulgence, but somehow I made it through the rest of his column. It only gets worse. Stephen Colbert, veteran of the legendary Second City and star of Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," whose list of credits includes, "The Daily Show," "Strangers with Candy," "Exit 57," and Robert Smigel's "The Ambiguously Gay Duo"... not funny. And Cohen knows funny.

Not only wasn't the accomplished, comic actor, writer, and producer funny, he was "rude," and "a bully." Writes Cohen:

Rudeness means taking advantage of the other person's sense of decorum or tradition or civility that keeps that other person from striking back or, worse, rising in a huff and leaving. The other night, that person was George W. Bush.

Riiiiight... A President who has exempted himself from over 750 laws, including a ban on torture; who has authorized wiretapping of private citizens without warrants; who lied this nation into a war that has now cost the lives of over 2400 service people and countless thousands of Iraqis; who entertained at this same event two years ago with his own comedic bit about looking under chairs, tables, and behind drapes for the non-existent WMD that were the pretext for that war... that President was held captive by rules of etiquette. Apparently we've been going about this thing all wrong. It's not Congress or due process of law we should be appealing to to rein this White House in. It's Miss Manners.

Lt. Steven Hauk: Sir, the man has got an irreverent tendency.
He did a very off-color parody of former VP Nixon.
General: I thought it was hilarious.
Lt. Steven Hauk: Respectfully, sir, the former VP
is a good man and a decent man.
General: Bullshit! I know Nixon personally.
He lugs a trainload of shit behind him that could
fertilize the Sinai. Why, I wouldn't buy an apple
from the son of a bitch and I consider him a
good, close, personal friend.

Cohen would have us know that there was nothing courageous about Stephen Colbert's performance.

His defenders -- and they are all over the blogosphere -- will tell you he spoke truth to power. This is a tired phrase, as we all know, but when it was fresh and meaningful it suggested repercussions, consequences -- maybe even death in some countries. When you spoke truth to power you took the distinct chance that power would smite you, toss you into a dungeon or -- if you're at work -- take away your office.

What then, I wonder, is Cohen's excuse for reciting White House spin without question or scrutiny for the past five years? Cohen may consider himself the superior wit, but I for one think his drooling sycophant shtick is getting old.

Colbert took a swipe at Bush's Iraq policy, at domestic eavesdropping, and he took a shot at the news corps for purportedly being nothing more than stenographers recording what the Bush White House said. He referred to the recent staff changes at the White House, chiding the media for supposedly repeating the cliche "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" when he would have put it differently: "This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg." A mixed metaphor, and lame as can be.

I have a BA in English. That's my credential. Mr. Cohen, that's not a mixed metaphor.

Lt. Steven Hauk: "Good morning, Vietnam."
What the heck is that supposed to mean?
Private Abersold: I don't know, Lieutenant,
I guess it means good morning, Vietnam.

Caitlin's Hellish Crusade

Originally published: Thursday, April 20, 2006

So many times I have opined like Morticia in "Adams Family Values":

I'm just like every modern woman trying to have it all. A loving husband, a family. I only wish I had more time to seek out the dark forces and join their hellish crusade.

In other words I want to be Caitlin Flanagan. I want to be the kind of stay-at-home mom who has a full staff, so that I have more time for idle pursuits like being published in prestigious magazines and locking down book deals. If I don't get a nanny soon to take my daughter to the park and bandage her scraped knees, I'm not sure I can even give this little blog my all.

For example I've been trying to write this entry for three days but the laundry was piling up, the kitchen counters needed a good bleaching, and don't even get me started on the Sisyphean effort of loading and unloading the dishwasher. All that and my child actually requires meals on occasion. No really. She does. The demands of motherhood are manifold.

I was going to chuck the idea and gaffe off the furor surrounding Flanagan's newest collection of essays, "To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife." But then I saw her on the "Colbert Report" last night. What can I say except, OH MY GOD! I LOVED HER SHOES!! A delicious little pair of fuck-me pumps that reminded me, once again, of the important things in life. Things like nurturing children, supervising the baking of cookies, and giving my loving breadwinner a proper schtupping.

My husband makes a decent living and I don't have to consider a "real" job. Being a woman of letters isn't real work, of course, but it is a little time consuming. To properly undertake such leisurely pursuits does require a support system of some kind.

Caitlin Flanagan has renewed my hope and inspiration. There's just no reason any relatively attractive woman can't have it all: a wealthy husband, a lovely home, a maid, a nanny, a little writing hobby, a contributing editorship, and the opportunity to flirt shamelessly with Stephen Colbert on national television. The rewards of traditional values are more than worth the sacrifices.

There are those, like Joan Walsh of Salon, who claim Flanagan is a tad hypocritical and manipulative.

Everyone knows Caitlin Flanagan isn't a stay-at-home mother, she's an accomplished writer who plays a stay-at-home mom in magazines and on TV. Right? Part of why I've never gotten upset about Flanagan's pro-hearth and home shtick is that I've seen it as just that, shtick. I'd read enough to know she had a full-time nanny when her twin sons were infants and she was trying to be a novelist; then she wrote about modern womanhood and family life for the Atlantic Monthly after they hit preschool; now, with her boys in grade school, she's got a great gig at the New Yorker. So how is she not a career woman who's also a mom?

I've been too busy to figure it out, since I am a career woman who's also a mom. I haven't always found time to read Flanagan's glossy essays, although I know I should, since she drives some feminist writers I admire to fits. Not me, I always said, with (dare I confess?) a semi-secret, Flanagan-like flash of self-satisfaction: I would never judge those women who are driven nuts by Flanagan, but maybe I'm just a little wiser, a little more secure in my choices, just a bit harder to rattle than they are, the poor dears.

Then I picked up Flanagan's new book, "To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife," and I lost my equanimity. It's mostly a lightly reworked compilation of her New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly essays from the last few years, but dressed up with a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger introduction blaming feminism for causing women "heartache," and a truly below-the-belt conclusion, on how surviving breast cancer confirmed Flanagan's conviction that traditional marriage and motherhood is best. I put the book aside for almost two months because even though I'm tough, I'm not tough enough to kick someone with cancer, and Flanagan deserves a kick for the dishonest and divisive gloss these new essays give the book, and her whole career. But I guess I learned something new about myself in this process: Apparently I am tough enough to kick someone with cancer, but only after feeling bad about it for a while.

One bitter feminazi even went so far as to insist that the lovely Flanagan is pulling off an even more massive deception:

Sorry to be a spoiler - and, really, that woman they hired for the author photo is gorgeous - but I finally get it: Caitlin Flanagan is actually a man! She had me going there for a while with the whole "woe is men" thing: Surely they should suffer less nagging about lunch and laundry and enjoy more conjugal hokey-pokey, right?

A profile in Elle makes her look vicious:

Driving to meet Flanagan, I call home to Brooklyn and learn that our gerbil has just died. My elder girl is a little sad, my babysitter tells me, but doing okay. My younger, barely two, doesn't know the difference. I feel a twinge of guilt for not being there, and it's the first thing I mention once Flanagan and I settle in to talk in the sunroom of her large, gracious home in L.A.'s affluent Hancock Park. What will she say, this woman who insists that children suffer if their mother works at all, who loved teaching high school English but wouldn't think of returning until her twin boys, eight years old, are in college "because I would never be away from my kids"?

"She'll grow from it," Flanagan says winningly. "Your daughter will grow from her gerbil dying while you're not there." There isn't a hint of disingenuousness in her voice; indeed, she's so earnest I worry that I've exaggerated "Gerby's" place in our hearts. Maybe she's different in person than on paper….

Midway through the interview in her home, I say that I noticed she removed the most searing line from her revised "Serfdom" essay: "When a mother works, something is lost." So, I ask her, do you stand by that line? "Yeah," Flanagan says, her voice now soft, serious. "The gerbil's dead, and you're here."

It's not surprising that Flanagan pushes buttons. Even I winced just a little at her enthusiastic agreement with Colbert's nostalgic reference to the good old days when women who declined sex with their husbands were labeled crazy and lobotomized. But I'm sure she was just being her playful, kittenish self. And I did love her shoes.