Category: Poseur Alert

Can Bill Frist honestly have signed off on a book like this? How pompous and self-congratulatory can you get? My favorite reader review:

“This ghost written, ego-inflating snoozer of a book will be a sure cure for anyone suffering from insomnia. The mendacious Frist expounds in mind-numbing detail on his ‘roots’ and is sure to please readers who enjoy reading the fatuous, self-serving meanderings of wealthy, privileged, right-wing ideologues who are fond of ‘good breeding,’ the land of cotton and Dixie.”

There’s more feedback here.

UPDATE: Some readers have said this is for family consumption only. So why is it on Amazon and available to anyone in the country? It just strikes me as politically obtuse and morally troubling when someone from the South trumpets their good breeding as something morally admirable. What’s the betting on the Frist family’s old views on miscegenation?

DIVERSITY AT DUKE: It’s beginning to dawn on the faculty at Duke that they may have an issue.

THE EMPOWERMENT OF MARRIAGE: Something is happening out there. Instead of begging for the basic right to marry, gay couples are now demanding it. In San Francisco, they are simply getting married as an act of civil disobedience. And that is also happening across the country. This will alter the debate – as will the actual existence of marriages in Massachusetts in May. The debate will become how to tear gay couples apart, how to demean and marginalize them, rather than an abstract debate about theories of marriage. And as these couples begin to feel what marriage is like, as they experience what civil equality actually is, they will become emboldened. Just as those who refused to leave segregated lunch-counters began to deepen their sense of moral outrage and conviction, so the act of getting married – something heterosexuals simply assume they have – is empowering. When Massachusetts becomes the first free state for gay citizens, the movement will explode. I predict thousands of couples from all over the country and the world will arrive to claim their dignity and rights – and this experience will help transform the argument. I’ve always believed that if we could get every gay man and lesbian to fully internalize their own equality, to get past the brutalization that society has wrought upon their souls, nothing could stop us from achieving our dream. Now the process is accelerating. Already consciousness has been changed. Already the very idea of equal marriage rights is in the minds and souls of a new generation. And when the religious right try to strip us of those marriages, and force us back into second-class status, then we will see something else: resistance. We are on the verge of the next phase of this civil rights movement: when we become the change we want to see in the world.

“Yesterday I posted an announcement of my new piece on gay marriage. This piece, I believe, will shift the gay marriage debate from speculation about the future to a discussion of present realities. For that reason, I see it as the most important piece on gay marriage I’ve ever published.” – Stanley Kurtz, plugging yet another Very Important Article on marriage rights. (Don’t worry: I’m planning a substantive response soon.)

“This barefoot guy in a parking lot talking to me about Santeria and Norwegian mental institutions inhabits a realm far, far outside the one most people think of when they think of Hollywood actors, yet he is fast approaching a celestial syzygy of fame.” – Alex Kuczynski on Viggo Mortensen, the former star of “Young Guns II” and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III,” in January’s Vanity Fair. Another priceless snippet:

“[W]e’re sitting in front of the pounding ocean in my rented LeSabre listening to Mortensen’s new CD … The music is dark, spooky stuff. Most of it comes from a jam session with Buckethead [a Japanese guitarist who has toured with Guns ‘N Roses and has a cult following, but is otherwise known chiefly for wearing a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket over his head during performances. (‘He’s very shy, and he doesn’t want people to see him,’ Mortensen explains)]. We smoke American Spirit cigarettes, as Mortensen, on the CD, recites over ominous guitar tracks a poem in Danish about a warrior who must leave home to avenge his country.”

I promise I didn’t make that up. By the way, Mortensen is anti-war. Imagine.

“They lashed out at Dr. King, they lashed out at Nelson Mandela, they lashed out at Jesus, so all of those who fight for change become the object of frustration,” – Jesse Jackson, explaining why some people object to his brand of gesture-politics.

POSEUR ALERT II: “His conversation is quick, emphatic, torrential – it comes in complete paragraphs, which themselves come complete with footnotes, jokes and marginalia. The word “dialectic” puts in frequent appearances, and questions about God are liable to be answered with references to 18th-century astronomers.” – from the latest New York Times puff-piece on Tony Kushner. There’s also a lovely Freudian slip in the text, as a friend pointed out to me in an email: “The writer quotes Kushner: ‘Brecht was like a light bulb going off.’ Leaving the fledgling dramatist in complete darkness, it seems.”

MEME WATCH: A useful debunking of the latest anti-Bush canard: that he doesn’t go to soldiers’ funerals.

“The Kennedys are like that, too: loved for their love of attention, which they gather by dispensing an altruistic other kind of love. Sometimes the love backfires and they behave badly, are seen to be grabbing too much. So, too, did Arnold grope. When speaking of his California, he is sometimes verklempt and inarticulate, the way people get when they talk about their folks getting old. Other times he is grabby.” – Hank Stuever, dowding it up, Washington Post, today.

“One you’ve never heard of. ‘Jaspora’ by Wyclef Jean.” – Howard Dean, when asked what his favorite song was. Here are the lyrics, from the lead singer/rapper for the Fugees. Is this some sort of Jamaican slang? Can someone translate for me? It could be really interesting. I’m sure Joe Lieberman would love to find out what “Yo pa respekte Izrayèl” might mean.

BBC VERSUS THE JEWS: They never let up, do they? This report is even more biased than the Arab Times.

“You have presumably made a study of how important it is for the people — the people and not the oil plutocrats, the people and not the fantasists in right wing think tanks, the people and not the virulent lockstep gasbags of Sunday morning talk shows and editorial pages and all-Nazi all-the-time radio ranting marathons, the thinking people and not the crazy people, the rich and multivarious multicultural people and not the pale pale greyish-white cranky grim greedy people, the secular pluralist people and not the theocrats, the metaphorical imaginative expansive generous sensual rational people and not the sexual hysterics, the misogynists, Muslim and Christian and Jewish fundamentalists, the hard-working people and not the people whose only real exertion ever in their whole parasite lives has been the effort if takes to slash a trillion plus dollars in tax revenue and then stuff it in their already overfull pockets – whatever your degree, you have presumably read history and thought about justice and freedom and the relationship between ideas and action and you know how important it is for the sizable community of decent sane just egalitarian people, comprising many minority communities constituting if not a majority then a plurality, a substantial smart let’s- say-40%- plurality community (more than large enough in a pluralist democracy) (which for the time being the United States still is) if it uses its brains and works together, to wield decisive power, power for enfranchisement and economic as well as racial justice and gender justice and sexual political justice and environmental sanity and in the name of a real globalism, a real internationalism, a real solidarity with all the peoples of the world, to wield power infused with the knowledge that democracy is created not by military machines, not by MOAB bombs and smart bombs but by smart peaceable people, fed people, educated people — democracy is created by making an aggressive determined and longterm effort at eradicating the real axis of evil: poverty, homelessness, no health care.” – Tony Kushner, in one sentence, explaining his political philosophy.

ACADEMIC DIVERSITY: A professor gets denied tenure at Smith College after publishing an anti-p.c. piece in National Review Online. Two members of the tenure committee cited writing that could be construed as conservative in their defense of their no-votes. Some students feel otherwise:

“It’s hard to point to a single professor besides Jim Miller that is an active conservative voice in the economics department,” said Borell. Politics aside, “We think he stands on his own merits,” Kringen said. “He’s just a really excellent teacher. He requires students to think critically.”

But he’s a Republican. And there are some aspects of diversity that simply cannot be countenanced at some universities.

“Lee Siegel, Lee Siegel, Lee Siegel, Lee Siegel, Lee Siegel, Lee Siegel… Oh! There you are. This “Diary” creeps up on you in the most unguarded moments. I recently improved my condition from self-intoxication to self-obsession, and I was just doing some lunchtime exercises – I ate lunch around 1:30 today; my cat Maya poached some salmon from Citarella – meant to bring me to the next stage, which is self-absorption. Dr. von Hoffenshtoffen, whom I mentioned yesterday, devised these “identity calisthenics,” as he calls them. I think they’re helping, but this Diary, with its emphasis on “I,” gave me a “soul hernia” (another Hoffenshtoffenian phrase)… So who is this person staring back at me from the mirror in my bathroom? My lips are small and thin; Maya likes the way the upper lip protrudes slightly over the lower one. Carmencita likes the lower lip – but she also wants me to wear cologne. A certain roundness and softness to my face always bothered me. I wanted to look hard and lean and chiseled, just as I wanted to have that invincible steel will of Central European intellectuals like Arthur Koestler, and not all that moist, tremulous high (and low) feeling I’ve inherited from my Russian-Jewish forebears. Everyone in my family is vibrato; there is not a note blanche to be found in our entire genetic pool. Weeping was a form of communication. One sob meant hello, two sobs meant good-bye, three sobs meant “There’s a call for you,” and so forth. Hoffenshtoffen, who gets bored by lachrymosity, says that I was born with a silver violin in my mouth.” – Lee Siegel, still unaccountably being published, in Slate.

“The truth about my name is that… I believe that people choose their names and that our names say a lot about what our destiny in life is. So I discovered that my birthday was October 3rd and Mahatma Gandhi was October 2nd. But when I discovered it I knew there was something to it. Once I started making music I started to understand that the political statements I make in my music and doing it in an honest but non-offensive way said a lot about his character and the peaceful protests. And my brother’s also born on Martin Luther King’s birthday. So I think it says a lot about my mother and my father’s children and who we are. I got my name because I chose it in Heaven.” – India Arie, on the BBC’s “Woman’s Hour,” radio show, noted by Private Eye (whose “Pseuds’ Corner” concept this blog shamelessly ripped off).

BAY AREA SECESSION? Independence for “weirdoes and misfits”? Nah. We need them. We love them. They’re part of the mix. And without the rest of us, they wouldn’t be misfits, would they?

AFTER ENABLING SADDAM: Some peaceniks even side with Mugabe, if it means swiping at Bush. Way to go, guys!

“Like the demigods of mythological yore, like Achilles with his divinely wrought shield, cops on television – they also have shields – occupy a hybrid, liminal realm.” – Lee Siegel, The New Republic.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “What Kennedy said of communism, in the same 60s address, could be transposed, with uncanny accuracy, to Americanism today. “The communist drive to impose their political and economic system on others,” he contended, “is the primary cause of world tension today. For there can be no doubt that, if all nations could refrain from interfering in the self-determination of others, the peace would be much more assured.” The role reversal may not be exact. World terrorism has to be factored into the equation. But as a verdict on Bush’s America, this picture of political and economic imperialism rampant helps explain why a peaceful new world order seems out of reach.” – Hugo Young, the Guardian, equating today’s United States with the Soviet Union.