Hitchens Meets Vidal

Christopher Hitchens, always percolating with sharply wrought, coldly incisive ideas, does a gentleman's job in reviewing Gore Vidal's recent memoir. Hitchens feels no doubt skeptical to downright estranged in his assessment of many of Vidal's judgments (as am I) but Hitchens clearly respects the skill and intelligence in Vidal's work, and allows Vidal the honor of the old warrior.

Vidal is the narcissist who needed to disparage everything that wasn't him. He would take commonly admired individuals and go out of his way to explain how they were not worthy, not worthy at all; in interviews, Vidal exuded an obvious pleasure in acidic diminishment, both for the effect on its target and for the disillusionment he hoped to evoke in the audience. In another review of Vidal's book the reviewer noted that every story did not just include him but put Vidal at the very center of history. Vidal for example, according to this reviewer, makes claim that his suggestion to JFK that we go to the moon was crucial to the US space program. Not Sputnik.

Both Hitchens, and several other reviewers, have noted how beautifully written and deeply felt were Vidal's words about the death of his longtime companion Howard Auster. Vidal, talented and bright, was capable of, and created much that was admirable. Had his insecurity allowed it, Vidal could have done even more.

Questions of the Age

Not long ago there was a discussion @ Lehrer about North Korea. An articulate woman from the American Enterprise Institute was adamant that sanctions were necessary. A fellow named Harrison from another think tank thought that we should apply a talk cure with North Korea; he said that he had had personal contact with members of the North Korean government and that “they are very open to negotiation.” Harrison appeared to me more focused on his personal validation via contact with the dictatorship than critically engaging the credibility to be applied to the North Korean assertions — from bureaucrats in a dictatorship no less.

This seems to be the dispute of the age. What do you do about bad characters? Do you punish them, do you try to understand them — talk to them? Is talking to them, after atrocious acts, simply “bringing them to the table”, or validating them? Or are you just enabling their behavior, giving them cover, and thereby complicit in their depravity, no matter what your motives? Do you “create them” if you reject them?

NYT Does Kramer

I've been thinking of canceling my subscription to the NY Times and I'm not sure if I want to do it because the Times has become watery and irrelevant (too late, too predictable), or I just don't like the news — it's been unrelentingly depressing, and I can blame it on the Times — the way newscasters blame the weatherman for bad weather.

I know for sure there is a conventional mentality that oozes out of the Times, especially in the weekend editions — it goes from weekday fairly smart to weekend smugly careerist. I know I've felt skeptical of NY Times slants, particularly about Israel and NYT political advocacy — especially the often clueless editorial page writers. When Howell Raines was Executive Editor the bias was less under the radar than now under Bill Keller, but it is still there.

Whatever the reason, the NYT coverage of the Michael Richards' meltdown made me appreciate the ungainly Times beast again. The Times is so large, has such a wide scope, so many bright reporters, that it can pull you back in.

First, in an AP article carried by the Times there is a surprise — Richards' “crisis expert” said that his client had uttered anti-Semitic comments on another occasion — he wasn't offering this as an excuse (equal opportunity offender), he was responding to earlier criticism of his client:

As for reports that Richards shouted out anti-Semitic remarks during another standup comedy routine in April, Rubenstein confirmed his client did, but that he was only role-playing.

''He's Jewish. He's not anti-Semitic at all. He was role-playing, he was playing a part. He did use inappropriate language, but he doesn't have any anti-Semitic feelings whatsoever,'' Rubenstein said.

The role playing comment is interesting because in the Times, Viriginia Heffernan wrote:

“You know,” Mr. Richards said at one point, seeming to address Mr. Letterman directly, “I’m a performer. I push the envelope. I work in a very uncontrolled manner onstage. I do a lot of free-association” — he slurred the word a bit — “and spontaneous. I go into character.”

That fairly simple point seemed, in the delivery, important. In the Laugh Factory clip, which was cut, framed and semiliterately subtitled by AOL’s entertainment site, TMZ.com, Mr. Richards begins by saying, “Shut up! Fifty years ago …” and then the material becomes unpublishable. But viewed with the possibility in mind that he’s creating characters, it’s easy to see a trace of parody in the way he hams up his racist word, shaking his fist like the leader of a lynch mob.

As I had written after hearing Richards' commentary on the Seinfeld DVDs, Michael Richards is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. His instinctual approach to performance might plausibly have had some confused motive — the creation of a racist “character” — meant to be mocked. But really, “confused” is the operative word — if that was the driving force, he needed to be more articulate after his meltdown than he apparently can be, and no matter what explanation he offered for his over-the-top performance, it was simply unacceptable under any circumstance.

Richards is a confused guy — a talented physical comedian, but severely limited in that very special way performers make evident nearly everyday in the media. Yet another supporting example of Charles Barkley's remark, “I'm not a role model.” The bottom line though is that the references in Richards' rant, not only the incendiary epithets, but the ideas themselves — references to lynching — are so repellent that the only group that can truly forgive him is the very African-American community that he so grievously attacked.

To finish off about the Times' coverage, here is a link to an article by the reliable Bill Carter, in an unusually clear and accurate report on Richards' appearance on Letterman — which I watched with horrified fascination — it was raw TV. The article clarified, at least partly, why the Letterman audience was intermittently laughing — they had not heard about the incident yet and thought Richards' appearance was a bit.

Indeed, during the first part of Mr. Richards’s comments, even though he was clearly distraught and expressing abject regret, some of the audience reacted with laughter, until Mr. Seinfeld gently mentioned that the interview was not meant to be funny.

FWIW, it appeared to me that Richards was sincere — presenting as a bewildered child, shocked he had brought down the wrath of the adults. Seinfeld was impressive, doing all he could to help his friend.

Neanderthals and Modern Woes

This is such a fascinating article about genetic findings related to our Neanderthal cousins. Nick Wade is just a terrific science reporter. The genetic divergence of Neanderthals and humans discussed in Wade's article, which appears to have occurred 500,000 years ago, might lead to a better understanding of the specific genetic markers that makes us human.

Ghosts

John Kerry's recent gaff once again makes the Dems look like the gang that can't shoot straight. The Democrats are finally about to make some gains, not because of anything they said or did, but because Republican ineptness on multiple levels has led to a potential mother-lode of disaffected voters looking for something else; so Kerry not only misspeaks, providing a gift of deflection for the Republicans, he complicates the issue by not apologizing quickly. This refusal to quickly assert his regret at a mistake is familiar territory, a Democratic syndrome involving post election rage — Al Gore had a similar dysfunction, if not in the same way — but I think out of the same logic. Gore gave an over the top speech that made him sound unbalanced after his own run — trying to make up for all the missed opportunities to reply to the misdirections of the Republican campaign, but Gore was swinging at ghosts.

Kerry didn't get angry enough when he ran for president; as he said today, “I'm sick and tired…” of unfair attacks, thinking more about the past than the present. You can't get angry now John about past failures and ignore current ones.