• Who is Callista Bisek Gingrich, and why does she appear to be a strangely convincing Mad Men-era historical reenactor?  Ariel Levy offers some insights:  “She does not seem like a forty-five-year-old, or at least not like a forty-five-year-old of this era. She has the style and smile of an astronaut’s wife, even in her downtime. Once, in Cedar Rapids, I happened to run into her in the women’s bathroom at the airport. In her suit and pearls, with her stiff coiffure, she looked as if she had just exited a beauty parlor in 1962.”  (My theory:  it’s all in the coiff.  She may have been a wash-n-wear kind of gal back in the day, but once you’re spending that kind of time and money on an oddly unfashionable hairdo, you’re all in.)
• From the right Alana Goodman argues that the Stepford Wife persona doesn’t actually make voters forget she’s Newt’s third wife.  Rather, it makes the Gingrich marriage appear even stranger and more off-putting.  I think the public should leave the spouses of the candidates alone, since after all they’re not running for anything, and if their wives or husbands win they won’t not be offered a paid position in the government.  But Goodman is probably right that the deadeye Pat Nixon impersonation is only going to invite unwanted speculation.  And those of you on the left may well think it only fair play given the ugliness that Michelle Obama has had to deal with, which has been clearly and persistently racialized. 
• Who would have thought that Mommie would turn out to be one of the more interesting and powerful First Ladies on the Republican side?  Give me Nancy Reagan any day, in her off-the-shoulder Galanos gown over Nixon or Barbara or Laura Bush.  Cue the Dynasty soundtrack!
• In “Who in God’s Name is Mitt Romney?” Frank Rich argues that the mystery in the riddle wrapped in the enigma that is Willard Mitt Romney is in fact his religion, which although agressively evangelical is also famous for keeping its secrets and sacred rites to members only.  Romney has devoted a great deal of his time and treasure to the Latter-Day Saints in his lifetime.  Until he finds a way to talk about his faith more specifically and openly, Rich argues that Americans on the left, right, and center will continue to see him not as a man, but rather as as a disturbingly lifelike hologram of a presidental candidate.
• I don’t know if that’s true, but it has worked in the recent past when candidates have explained to the voters what their beliefs are and how those beliefs jibe with their politics.  (See for example:  John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.)
• With Romney on an anemic rise and no plausible challengers to his right , it’s no wonder that many on the right are praying for a “Sweet Meteor of Death” to rescue them from a Romney run in the fall.  Too funny!  I’ll say this about the 2008 Dem primary:  as nasty as that got, I don’t think any but the most die-hard Obamabots or Hillary Clinton fan boys and girls were praying for planetary devastation so as to save them from having to support the other candidate’s nomination.  Keep your eyes on the prize, my Republican friends!  There’s always the chance that the Eurozone will pull the U.S. economy off a cliff again, and/or that Sweet Meteor of Death will strike.  Remember, think like Ronald Reagan:  sunny optimism, sunny optimism!

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Some bosses offer dating tips. Diane Sawyer counsels her colleagues on freezing their eggs.

The anchor of ABC’s World News has long been a sounding board for her famously hard-working staff on a host of personal issues, from dating to the more complex realities of a demanding career. A recurring theme with women: finding time away from the office to meet a partner and have kids before they hit 40. It doesn’t always happen, as Sawyer, who first married at age 42, well knows. When it doesn’t, Sawyer sends her workers to New York University’s Fertility Clinic.

.       .       .       .       .       .      

Three quarters come in because they aren’t ready to have children yet. Some are sent by their parents: I know you want to work, but I want grandkids someday. Many are furious their doctors didn’t tell them about egg freezing sooner. “I want to send Diane a basket of flowers for what she’s doing,” says one childless 40-something in the media.

The idea that one could be a woman in her 40s in the media and not be aware of fertility issues is just completely laughable.  This is the same news media that for at least thirty years has been bullying women to get pregnant before they’re 25 or else!!!  That “childless 40-something in the media” probably spent her college internships back in the 1980s writing scripts that scolded women who didn’t get pregnant by 25, then worked as a producer for TV segments in the 1990s discussing the heartbreak of infertility and the joy of international adoption/IVF babies/donor eggs/babies via surrogacy, and then was promoted to create shows in the 2000s recycling these scripts and story lines on daytime TV, the nightly news, and evening news magazines.

Never mind that women in their 30s or 40s who don’t have children might not have them because they don’t want them.  I wonder how many of Diane Sawyer’s employees submit to this expensive procedure because they’re afraid to tell their bosses or co-workers, “no, thank you, I don’t want children.”  I wonder how many women in their 50s and 60s feel pressure to cast their decisions not to have children as some kind of bad luck or physiological failure, because of the opprobrium they might face if they say, “I’m really not into children, so I didn’t have them?”

But, really:  the notion that these stories offer some kind of secret wisdom that women have never heard of before is just too stupid to believe.

We had one suggestion–and only one–from a student who suggested that next time we might consider offering the course with one man and one woman professor, instead of two women.  Right–because our male colleagues are just lining up to teach this course, and it will be soothing and more objective if a male professor is in the room.  (I occasionally get comments like this about the sex of book authors on my evaluation forms that went something like this:  “I thought that this course was biased because we read mostly female-authored books, but then we read some books by men that seem to agree with the women, so I guess the books in this class aren’t biased.”  I really must ask my male colleagues if they ever are informed that including women-authored books on their syllabi is reassuring because it means that the information presented by a male professor and male authors isn’t biased after all.)

A few students suggested that next time we don’t talk about rape so much, but then they didn’t like the one book we assigned that focused on married heterosexuality either.  But the truth is that none of the books in the history of sexuality are super-sexy, because the historiography of sexuality is very Foucaultian and is therefore about the distribution of and challenges to power, challenges that frequently hurt the challengers more than the reigning system of power distribution.  I think the students were surprised that studying sex could be so depressing, although I warned them from the beginning that I think I teach the most depressing courses in the Baa Ram U. history curriculum.

I think the problem is that most modern college students experience sex as liberating, and they don’t want to think about the constraints on sexuality or even the sexual abuse that was a much more widespread experience of most people transhistorically, even in the present.  (I know that’s how I would have thought about these issues as a 20-year old, so I’m sympathetic to this view.)  I get it that the class turned out to be kind of a bummer for them, even if the reading assignments hadn’t been so heavy.  (But quite frankly, the last thing I’d ever want to be accused of is a lack of rigor when teaching anything, let alone a pilot class on the history of sexuality.)

Thou Shalt Not Rape

No, I haven’t renounced my longstanding ressentiment and mistrust of football at any level of play, from Pop Warner through the NFL.  It’s an appalling waste of money that pretty much sums up nearly everything that’s wrong with our culture, in universities and in the nation at large:  profligacy, the wage gap, male supremacy, obsession with inconsequential trivia, anti-intellectualism, and the abuse of women.  But, I’ve go no problem whatsoever with Tim Tebow.  I don’t care about his public religiosity (although it’s not really my style).  I’m impressed that a nice-looking, successful, and wealthy young man has taken a vow of chastity before marriage, not because I value chastity in particular, but because this is also effectively a vow not to abuse women sexually and not to rape them.

Even by comparison to most other professional or college athletes, football players have particularly poor records of abusing women, raping them, or even as we learned last year about Tebow’s teammate Perrish Cox, raping an unconscious woman, and denying it even after a DNA test of her fetus indicated that he was its father.  Seriously–this happened!  Last weekend, I was just fine with the fact Tebow and his team defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers, whose quarterback Ben Roethlisberger has been three times charged with rape.

Conservative columnist Michael Medved–whose work usually makes me throw up a little in my mouth–wrote a perceptive column recently about the mysterious hatred that Tebow inspires.  In it, he suggested that Tebow’s squeaky-clean gee-whiz perfection is what rankles other men:  “In the same sense, most males look at Mr. Tebow and see a virtuous rebuke to our own limitations and imperfections. If we were 24, single, supremely athletic, enormously wealthy and adored by millions of young women, how many could still wear Tim Tebow’s ‘purity ring?’”  It occured to me after reading Medved that Tebow offers a radically different yet clearly authentic masculinity that’s not built around “scoring” with women and treating women like consumer goods.  This is a very different notion of masculinity than most American men inhabit, including Tebow’s opponent this afternoon, Tom Brady of the New England Patriots.  (Brady isn’t a rapist, but he seems to be a serial impregnator.  Eeeww.)

So long as Tebow’s religious and moral commitments prevent him from raping or otherwise abusing women, it’s all good from my perspective.  I might even change my mind about football if substantial numbers of other players followed his example and “tebowing” also became a synonym for treating women like human beings.  Maybe Tim Tebow could make that cool.

Fort Number Four, Charlestown, NH

Nick Kowalczk offers us a detailed look at historical re-enacting in “Embedded with the Reenactors,”  in which he ponders the fascination that some Americans have with reliving the bloody, imperialistic wars of the past.  I thought this article was noteworthy too because 1) they’re not Civil War reenactors, they’re  reenactors of the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), and 2) the Seven Years’ War guys (and yes, they’re mostly middle-aged guys, according to Kowalczk’s reporting and my own observations of all kinds of reenactors over the years) have been enjoying their 250th anniversary moment in the spotlight for the past few years. 

I found Kowalczk’s article fascinating, although it’s written in a more “new journalism” style that includes him as both participant and observer, and I kept wishing he would go deeper into some of the questions he raises about reenactors based on his participation in a battle of the Siege of Fort Niagara:

It’s not every 4^th of July you get to be around nearly 3,000 people inhabiting an amalgam of time, and especially in a place as lovely as Fort Niagara State Park. The water in Lake Ontario actually was blue. And the fortification, now known as Old Fort Niagara, has been well-preserved even though it was built by the French in 1726 and took a 19-day pummeling in July 1759, when a few thousand British and Indians out-maneuvered 600 Frenchman sitting pretty in a big castle protected by cannons and stone walls.

But being on the battlefield exactly 250 years later, I couldn’t help but imagine the 348 people who died and the many others who were injured or suffered. When they trembled for their lives could they ever have imagined that a bloodless, G-rated recreation of their deaths eventually would become someone’s hobby?  

Why bother with reenacting a 250-year old war, when Americans in 2009 can just go to Iraq or Afghanistan to see a bloody war for the empire up close?  Kowalczk doesn’t explore these questions, although for me as a seventeenth and eighteenth-century historian, they’re paramount.  It makes me wonder about the future of reenacting North American wars, when we have so many young vets with real-life experience in a war zone, many of whom are still coping with war-related injuries, disabilities, and trauma.

As it is in Kowalczk’s narrative, the reenactors seem a little strange, even almost “queer” for their love of reliving the past and their feelings of always being out of time in the present.  Sometimes his language makes the connection of reenacting as queer explicit, like when he writes about the importance of dress in reenactor events:  “Like drag shows, re-enactments hinge on sartorial panache.”  At other times, he emphasizes the man-out-of-time aspect of a reenactor’s life.  Here, he describes his main connection to the world of reenactors, a Kansas City man he calls “Old Hickory” because of his career as an Andrey Jackson reenactor and model:

He’s never been married or had children or pets. “I don’t think I’ve ever truly been in love either,” he said on the way to Niagara. These days he’s looking for an attractive, independent, middle-aged, single woman interested in history, who reenacts the 18^th century and sews. One imagines he may be looking for a while.

.       .       .       .       .

“In real life I’m just a wallflower,” he once confessed to me, before adding, on a brighter note, “but when I found reenacting everything changed.”

In 1992, at age 44, he took up black powder shooting and visited a War of 1812 site in Kansas called Fort Osage. There he met some F&I reenactors (anachronistic, yes, but who really cares), and he barraged them with questions. He bought clothes, a musket, and slept in his car at events. Some considered him “a suit” and “a mooch,” given his white-collar job and healthy diet, his constant requests for help and lack of handyman skills, but he paid those criticisms little mind. At events he was approached by the public, asked questions, even photographed. For the first time in his life he felt appreciated, like he had something to offer the world.

“Now when I’m in my street clothes I don’t feel like that’s my identity,” he said when I once asked him, Who are you outside of this?

In that conversation I drew a circle in my notebook and asked him to fill in the elements of his life — family, hobbies, friends, the job he’d quit, whatever — and to shade in the categories that involved reenacting. The exercise perplexed Old Hickory; he pushed my notebook away. “I don’t need to do that,” he said. “Reenacting is the circle. That’s it. There isn’t anything else anymore.”

Fort Number Four, Charlestown, NH

In Kowalczk’s telling, reenactors really are different from you and me, but does that explain the popularity of reenacting?  Some enthusiasts might make it their whole lives, but it strikes me that the desire to live in the past (if only on weekends and special occasions) is a wish more widespread among white men in particular than among others.  Something that I and others have observed before is that only some Americans romanticize the past, because the rest of us recognize how much more awful our lives would have been (holding race and gender constant).  For example:  Chauncy DeVega  at We Are Respectable Negroes wrote recently about a story in which a white woman expressed a wish to live in the time period in which Gone with the Wind was set, saying to her African American friend, “Wouldn’t you have loved to be there?”  Only after a few startled moments did the African American woman point out the obvious:  “Cindy, I would have been a slave.”  Romaticizing the past, like reenacting, is a White thing. 

Perhaps this is what makes me uncomfortable about reenactors–their interest in reenacting violent events (warfare, principally) which from the first Anglo-Indian wars of the seventeenth century through our modern wars, were either explicitly racialized wars (most Anglo-Indian wars, the Mexican War, and the wars waged by the Frontier Army against Native Americans) or wars that mobilized ethnic difference and white racism in the war effort (as in World War II and the war with Japan, the Vietnam War, and Iraq and Afghanistan). 

It’s not that reenactors have an uncomplicated view of the past–I’ve gone to several historical reenactments over the past 15 years, in every place I’ve lived, and for the most part I’ve been impressed with their research and knowledge about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  I’ve been to a reenactment of the Boston Massacre at the old Customs House in Boston; a reenactor camp in Eaton (near Greenville) Ohio, with a focus on the frontier wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (including reenactors for both the U.S. troops and Shawnee families); King George’s imperial troops and their Indian allies and enemies at a reenactor camp in Brooklyn, Michigan; black powder gun enthusiast-reenactors of the fur trade days here in Colorado; and I photographed some Seven Years’ War reenactors at Fort Number Four in New Hampshire when I was there to take some pictures for my book.  But while complex, their vision of history remains blinkered and segregated, not because they exclude reenactors of color now (they don’t) or because they themselves have explicitly racist motivations, but because of the stories they choose to tell, and the stories they’re leaving out.

Re-enactments of slavery times and of slave auctions have come in for both criticism and praise from all quarters–praise for their attempts to depict the history of slavery honestly, and criticism for being extremely (and some would say gratuitously) explicit.  But there are plenty of heroic moments in women’s history, African American history, Latin@/Chican@ history, and Native American history that aren’t being reenacted.  Might we see a future in which African Americans re-enact the major struggles and violent confrontations of the Civil Rights era?  Are there women’s groups who regularly dress up in hundred-year old clothing styles and re-enact the violent climax of the suffrage movement?  Personally, I would turn out as a spectator for these events–and I might even be persuaded to get into costume and participate myself–but who will play the thugs with the torches, guns, clubs,  firehoses, chains, and gavage equipment?  Will middle-aged white men be persuaded to cede the heroic roles to other reenactors?

If you have any interest in historical reenactors, go read Kowalczk’s article.  For all of my quibbles, it’s a really thorough overview of historical reenacting, and a rare view of reenactors doing something other than the U.S. Civil War.  He captures in many respects the regional flavors of reenacting that go beyond the Civl War-era.  Furthermore, his interest in masculinity and gender evident in this article aren’t accidental–Kowalczk has written elsewhere on these themes as in this essay, “Manhood, Lorain-style,”  about growing up in the Rust Belt and picking a fistfight to prove he wasn’t “gay.”  This essay might also be of interest to readers of this blog, so print up a copy or zap it onto your e-reader. 

Kowalczk concludes “Embedded with the Reenactors” with an explicit point about the gendered and even childish nature of the fantasies at work in reenacting.  He writes:

Among them was an attractive young mother with two little boys. One of them sat in a stroller and the other ran around pretending to be a soldier. Despite being in uniform, so to speak, I explained to her what I was doing and asked why she brought her family to a battle reenactment given the kind of message it imparts. She answered, “It’s just something to do. And this is what boys do anyway. They’re conquerors — they think they’re born to be conquerors. I used to get tired of them playing war games, but then I got tired of trying to redirect their imagination.” And together we watched her son pretend to kill an imaginary enemy as we walked off the battlefield.

The Aftermath

Later, and mildly depressed, I went to an ice cream shop inside the fort. As luck would have it, I sat beside two other mothers and their four little boys who were arguing. Naturally I eavesdropped.

They were civilians, and I assumed the mothers also had brought their children to foster an all-American, male fascination with fighting and war. But these boys didn’t care at all about the battles, the reenactors or the fort. Like the reenactors, but also unlike them, these children were somewhere outside of real life and real time.

“I’m Mario,” one of the boys yelled.

“No, I’m Mario,” another said.

“OK, can I be Luigi,” the third asked.

The whole thing went on for five minutes, until one of the exasperated mothers put down her fudge sundae and snapped. “Half a day! Just half a day,” she pleaded. “Can you guys please go one day without arguing who’s who in the video game world.”

Fat, drunk, and stupid is apparently no barrier to a career in philosophy!

Via Inside Higher Ed, I learned today of the tradition of the “smoker” at the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division meeting:

Over the years, the reception at the APA eastern conference has functioned as a job fair of sorts, where, over free-flowing booze, candidates talk to potential employers.

For weeks, philosophy blogs had been alive with discussions about how women job candidates feel vulnerable at the reception, how some of them had been hit on as they talked to recruiters, and the sheer awkwardness of trying to navigate job interviews with a beer bottle in hand. While many disciplinary meetings feature departmental receptions, they tend to be for alumni gatherings and outreach as much as anything; the philosophy reception is one event where candidates say they are urged to schmooze simultaneously with hiring committees, random others, and competitors for the jobs they want.

Ugh–for all of the reasons that the women philosophers note in the linked blog posts above, of course.  But this is also clearly the bright idea of a profession in which the job market is almost entirely a buyers’ market rather than a sellers’ market.  As a tenured professor, I must admit that it would be a lot more fun for me to conduct quasi-interviews over cocktails instead of meeting in the pit in a drafty hotel basement with a sad water cooler the only refreshment.  It would also be a lot of fun for me to ask job candidates to wear silly hats, sing show tunes, and pass trays of hot appetizers of their own devise.  But then, the job interview process isn’t about me, is it? 

Ideally, the job search process in any profession should prioritize professionalism and fairness as well as the preservation of the dignity of all participants.  There are a lot of people who might well feel uncomfortable with this unseemly mixture of interviews and socializing over alcohol–Mormons, observant Muslims, and recovering alcoholics, just to name a few.  Most campus academic job interviews are fraught with enough fake-socializing events like lunches, dinners, and coffees, but most everyone knows that there’s no such thing as a purely social event on a job interview.  Furthermore, there’s more than just alcohol on the menu at those events.  (That is to say, not drinking alcohol is more typical than usual for job candidates, and asking for a soda or a hot cocoa in a cafe instead of coffee isn’t regarded as an oddity.)

Tell me your stories of job interview hell, with bonus points for tales of alcohol-fueled bad behavior, in the comments below.

Hope your 2012 is Dy-No-Mite!

Well, friends, Happy New Year and all that crap.  We’re back home on the High Plains Desert, and it’s sunny and reaching into the 50s and 60s this week.  Fun!  I will miss feeling like Jaime Sommers running at sea level for the past two weeks, but it’s time to get back into running at 4,713 feet elevation-shape again.  While I’m out, here are a few linky-dinkies to keep you amused, if not informed. 

• Kyle Smith of the New York Post asks, “Why do feminists reject their ultimate icon, Margaret Thatcher?”  Maybe the better question is why isn’t Margaret Thatcher a feminist?  “‘I owe nothing to women’s lib,’ Thatcher said, and at another point she remarked, ‘The feminists hate me, don’t they? And I don’t blame them. For I hate feminism. It is poison.’”  Duh.  I forgot:  feminists never do anything right, and everything is always our fault.  Women’s careers are never enabled by the work of previous generations of feminists–no, in fact women only profit by heaping scorn on feminism and feminists.
• From the annals of it’s all mom’s fault:  this problem has a name, and it’s mom.  Yes, 1950s middle-class mothers, in addition to being blamed over the years for causing autism, “smothering” their children, and sending a generation of upper-middle class Easterners into a lifetime of psychotherapy, are now being blamed for Public Health Menace #1:  OBESITY!  Awesome!!!  It’s like there’s nothing that can’t be blamed on a generation of women who were just following orders–doctors’ orders, as the article makes perfectly clear, but I guess “1950s physicians may have triggered obesity epidemic” wouldn’t generate as much interest.  Heaping blame on a generation of women who survived the Great Depression in childhood, answered Uncle Sam’s call to labor for the war effort in the 1940s, and then obediently gave up their factory and office jobs to returning servicemen to go home and make babies and participate in consumer society in order to combat the Communist Menace, is not just historically dubious, but it’s also just nasty and aggressive.  Someone has a mommy issue, I guess.  (Don’t miss the advice she gives about breastfeeding, which of course is the solution to all ills:  “Women should breast-feed for at least six months after childbirth or — better yet — take one year off from work and breast-feed.”  Talk about re-creating the 1950s all over again!  I need a Mother’s Little Helper after just reading this bullcrap.) 
• Tenured Radical offers a thoughtful post on “What I learned at my first job,” as she prepares to move to another institution.  Congratulations and good luck!
• Here’s a question for all of you historians and grammarians out there:  do you say or write  “a historian,” or “an historian?”  I’ve always thought an historian to be a rather affected (as well as outdated) construction, but I learned recently that a colleague of mine is telling our graduate students that an historian is correct.  (Here’s my personal beef:  no one ever considers how dumb and distracting this sounds to people named Ann or Anne, for some reason, and there are an awful lot of us who are in the historical profession.)  So I say “an historian” no, Historiann yes!  (After all–as Eddie Izzard might say, “because there’s a f^(king AITCH in it!”)

But though he played one on TV, Hitchens was not an intellectual, if the word has any meaning anymore. Those known by the somewhat awkward term “public intellectuals” can be based in the professoriate, the nonprofit sector, or journalism. They can even be politicians, like the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan. But genuine intellectuals, as distinct from mere commentators or TV talking heads, need to meet two tests.

First, intellectuals need to produce some substantial works of scholarship, literature or rigorous reporting, distinct from the public affairs commentary for which they may be best known to a broad public. If you do nothing but review other people’s work or write brief columns or blog posts, it is easy to appear to be much smarter and erudite than you really are.

Second, genuine intellectuals base their interventions in public debate on the basis of some coherent view of the world. A dedication to rigorous and systematic reasoning, wherever it may lead, is what distinguishes intellectuals from lobbyists or partisan spin doctors who change their views according to the demands of a special interest or a party. It also distinguishes them from mere “contrarians” — the term Hitchens used to describe himself — who attract publicity by taking controversial stands according to their whims.

Hitchens left behind no substantial scholarly or literary work, and if he had any core principles or values they are hard to discern. He denounced the Gulf War and backed the Iraq War; he supported Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz while continuing to insist that Henry Kissinger was a war criminal.

If he was not really an intellectual, then what was Christopher Hitchens? A decade ago, a British diplomat told me that he was astonished at the reputation Hitchens had attained in the U.S.: “In Britain we think of him as a gossip columnist.”

It’s funny:  I’ve been reading various memorials to the man published over the past few weeks, and even those from his admirers also reveal the slapdash, drunken, and very unserious manner by which he  pursued the “life of the mind.”  (For example, see this very odd and I think unflattering remembrance by David Corn.)  Most feminists have never had any use for Hitchens, whose one “coherent view of the world” was simply male supremacy in all things, but in arts, letters, and comedy in particular.  Me, I dispensed with him years ago on this blog when I reviewed his utterly comical psychologizing of Michelle Obama on the basis of her senior college thesis. 

I’ve been dismayed (but unsurprised) to see lefty-types embrace Hitchens for his aggressive atheism, forgetting his stupendous lack of judgment (or perhaps his tremendous cynicism) in going all in for the nonexistent WMDs and the war in Iraq a decade ago.  But, as many people besides Lind have noted before, none of those numb-nuts pseudomacho armchair warriors has paid a price–in fact, they were most of them richly rewarded.  But, whatever.  I’m sorry Hitchens died a painful death, but I am glad that Lind has pointed out the obvious: 

[Hitchens] had more in common with Walter Winchell than with Walter Lippmann. A gossip columnist of genius, Hitchens escaped from the ghetto of little-known leftist writers when he discovered that he could become a celebrity by denouncing bigger celebrities. That strategy for self-promotion, in my opinion, explains his over-the-top attacks on Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa, Princess Diana and Bill Clinton (Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga were spared the Hitchens treatment). When Princess Di and Mother Teresa died within a week of each other in 1997, I remarked to a friend, “I wonder what celebrity Hitchens will make a career out of denouncing now?” We soon found out: Bill Clinton and the biggest celebrity of all, God.

(I have another theory which might help explain Hitchens’ success in the U.S.:  Americans are still suckers for plummy English accents, and we don’t care if they were acquired at university.  People with those accents get taken seriously in the U.S. for saying things which, if said in a rather flat Kansan dialect or a Texas twang, wouldn’t seem all that smart or insightful.  I’m kind of amazed that this is true of American academics, who like to think of themselves as cosmopolitans, but I’ve seen American academics give something said in an English accent credit for being at least 30% more intelligent than something said in an ordinary American accent.) 

Michael Lind’s column is much funnier and more condemnatory of Hitchens than these brief excerpts suggest, so go read the whole thing.

[Ruth] Marcus states that “I may sound alarmingly crotchety here, but something is upside down in the modern world, which has transformed [Kansas teenager Emma] Sullivan into an unlikely Internet celebrity and heroine of the liberal blogosphere[.]” You don’t sound crotchety Marcus, you sound insane. Sullivan was too mean in her tweet about a politician? And you claim to cover these people?

Something is upside down in this world when a so called journalist can get this up in arms over a tweet that is disrespectful to a pol while being just fine with the past decade in Washington, DC.

Ruth Marcus, a supremely silly woman, is nevertheless only reflecting the reality of the world for people under age 30 or so.  Teenagers and young people aren’t permitted to talk back to nasty pols, even passively through Twitter.  Only nasty pols are allowed to talk smack about American youth, lecturing them about taking baths, getting jobs, and remaining quiescent while their lockers are randomly searched for drugs (or whatever might offer a pretext for turning them over to local police.)  Never mind that nasty pols are particularly nasty about the sex lives of teenaged girls.  For the record, I don’t think Sullivan is a “hero.”  She sounds like a typical teenager, bragging about a confrontation that never happened.  Although foolish, her tweets are her own business.

But even nasty pol Sam Brownback knows that his staff was overzealous, and he apologized to Sullivan for the overreach.  (He’s nasty, but he’s not an idiot.)