Posted on 03/11/2005 7:06:20 PM PST by CHARLITE
Living in New York, I have no choice but to read the New York Times every day. I try to leaven it with the Daily News and the New York Post, but it's a witch's brew.
The News has somehow cast itself as the newspaper of the underclass, so it feels obliged to report every bit of mayhem coming out of New York's poor neighborhoods. Somebody killed somebody over a jacket. Somebody got shot over a parking space. A grandmother in a housing project was killed in the crossfire by drug dealers. News about democracy demonstrations in Lebanon usually appears on page 23. Then you get to the editorial pages and E.R. Shipp is saying we've got to get rid of the "barbarity" of the death penalty. Is it really worth the trip?
Being conservative, the Post usually gives more play to world affairs. The editorial page is excellent, if occasionally a little turgid and one-sided. Following the Murdoch formula of celebrity journalism, however, the paper seems compelled to fill every other page with pictures of movie stars shopping in Santa Monica. It's only a matter of dumb luck that the Post hasn't yet reverted to the British formula of bare-breasted women on every other page. If it ever happens, the paper's conservatism will become an embarrassment.
And so I have to read the New York Times. It's an art. Begin by accepting that the front page is filled with editorials and the editorial page is wrong about everything. Still, there are little gems here and there. I once found a story that the nuclear industry was making a big comeback under private ownership. The safety record was better than ever and reactors were running at their highest capacity in history. The interesting thing was the story ran in the Sunday edition on page B-12, behind the obituaries--about as deep as you can bury a story in the Times. The editors had obviously held it for weeks, hoping it would go away.
The Sunday "Week in Review" is my favorite place for building Times immunity. Here reporters cut loose from the shackles of being objective and write about anything they please. Last week, for example, the lead story, "What's in It for America?" argued that the rise of democracy in the Middle East means little. "It is precisely in democratic Europe that Mohammed Atta, a mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, lived for about a decade, and it is from Britain, scarcely a stranger to liberty, that Richard Reid, the would-be shoe bomber, hailed." I'll allow you to deconstruct that one.
Then there was the predictable tearjerker about how, even though senior citizens are now the richest segment of the population, the "golden years" have turned out to be an illusion. On the editorial page, President Bush was criticized for choosing judges from "the far right of the ideological spectrum" and developing "bunker-busting nuclear weapons"--the usual stuff. Letters criticizing various Times articles for being too conservative. (I've found the only thing worse than the people who write the New York Times is the people who read it.)
None of this, however--none--prepares you for Maureen Dowd.
To call Dowd's columns "incomprehensible rants" is to do them a favor. Entering her world, you to take your bearings at every moment. The basic question is, what the hell is she talking about?
Last Sunday's rant, "Taming of the Shrews," began as follows:
Arabs put their women in veils. We put ours in the stocks.
Every culture has its own way of tamping down female power, be it sexual, political, or financial. Americans like to see women who wear their pants be beaten up and humiliated. Afterward, in a gratifying redemption ritual, people like to see the battered women be rewarded.
That's how Hilary Swank won two Oscars. That's how Hillary Clinton won a Senate seat and a presidential front-runner spot. And that's how Martha Steward won her own reality TV show and became a half-billion dollars richer while she was in prison.
Can you figure this out? Dowd's premise is that somehow Swank, Clinton, and Stewart are part of the same phenomenon--uppity women being put down--but then raised up again. All this is done by--we must assume--"male culture." Get it?
Shoehorning these three examples into the same mold takes a little torturing of the facts. Swank (or her character) is, to begin with, not a "battered woman." She is a rags-to-riches heroine taking on what was formerly a man's role--a boxer. Swank accomplishes what every great actress must do: She takes a character that is forlorn and homely and makes her beautiful. For this she won an Academy Award. Does this have anything to do with putting women in veils?
As for Hillary Clinton and Martha Stewart, it would be hard to find two women whose public paths have been more divergent. Hillary became famous for saying she wasn't going to "bake cookies" but would tackle the nation's health policy instead. She got her "comeuppance" when the country decided it didn't want the government running health care. She has never lost her popularity among liberals and is now winning praise from conservatives for her moves toward the center. Does this constitute, as Dowd charges, "playing a victim card all the way to the Senate?"
Stewart was the opposite--a diva of domesticity who did nothing but bake cookies. Her problem was that she became rich and famous as a businesswoman. Anyone who succeeds in business is vulnerable. Her real analogy is Michael Milkin, the most successful entrepreneur of the 1980s who ended up sentenced to ten years in prison for what the judge admitted were minor infractions.
So how does this prove Dowd's sturm und drang? Well, it turns out there is an explanation. Both Stewart and Clinton are blond. "They are brass-knuckled survivors who elicit both admiration and an enmity that Alessandra Stanley memorably dubbed 'blondenfreude.'"
To wrap things up, Dowd corrals still another famous female into the equation.
One Democratic image maker admiringly predicts that, having survived their virago and victim phases, our two most relentless blonds will outlast everyone: "When the world ends, there will be only a few cockroaches, Cher, Hillary and Martha."
I'm not going to belabor this, but Cher, Hillary, and Martha make three people, not two. And however many personalities Cher has assumed, she ain't blond.
Contributing writer William Tucker is the author of "Right Idea," a weekly column for TAEmag.com.
LOL
Why would one even bother?
I need to check with my wife before I let you know what my opinion is
This guy must like to torture himself.
Wake up! It's not necessary to read the Times any longer. Go on the internet and you can find all the news you want.
Maureen Dowd continues to wrongly misinterpret the dusty cobwebs in her vagina as a grand conspiracy to oppress women.
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