A friendly note to James Wolcott

Jeff Goldstein could kill you with his bare hands. And probably should, but I doubt he will. However, it would be unfortunate if I were to log on one day and see this top headline at Memeorandum:

MANHUNT FOR GOLDSTEIN
Police Seek Blogger in Columnist's
Brutal Dismemberment Slaying

Don't hate the player, hate the game. The viciousness of online discourse has been pondered from many perspectives, but it really comes down to the fact that people think they can say anything they want and never get their asses kicked for it.

Remember the Sparkman case? Sully was wetting his pants over "Southern populist terrorism" and Rick Ungar was screaming "Send the Body to Glenn Beck." In that atmosphere of fear-mongering pundit panic, I decided one Saturday night to try to do some actual reporting and, after a couple of calls, managed to get a law-enforcement official in Kentucky on the phone:

"You'd be surprised what some of these morons write on the Internet . . . that they wouldn't say to somebody's face," the official said in a brief telephone interview.

Exactly. I guarantee that under no circumstances would you, James Wolcott, taunt Jeff to his face. But you have no compunction about sitting there at your computer, on Conde Nast's dime, making fun of a guy you've never met and whom most of your readers never heard of.

Pretty, Popular and Vicious
This "Mean Girls" vibe is an unexpected consequence of online discourse. When I was a kid in school, I used to marvel at the way girls were always doing that evil gossip-clique thing: "You can't be her friend because she said such-and-such to so-and-so and I hate her."

Girl culture is so much more vicious than boy culture because boys are naturally prone to settle matters with their fists. The biggest boy in third grade may be an obnoxious jerk, but his superior potential for violence means that other boys are faced with a choice:

• Stay out of his way;
• Try to be his friend; or
• Form an alliance with other pipsqueaks so that if the big kid gets mad at you, he'll have to fight more than one of you.

Because girls don't routinely risk violence in their conflicts, their viciousness toward each other is unrestrained, and the clique mentality reigns in girl culture -- back-biting gossip, secret rivalries and all the rest.

Girl culture can also be described as the "culture of niceness," because popularity among girls is so largely a function of who is superficially "nice," in terms of appearance and comportment. This is why girls are so keen on fashion and grooming, whereas boys don't care about that crap. If you score the winning touchdown, nobody cares about your hairstyle.

Mean Girls in the Intelligentsia
Now, to bring this back to the blogosphere, you see an extreme example of a problem that is ubiquitous in intellectual life and more generally in "civilized" white-collar environments, where physical violence is considered an impossibility.

When a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation gets upset with a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, the one outcome that can be ruled out in advance is that the Heritage guy will jump in his car, drive over to Cato, storm into the office of his antagonist and invite him out to the parking lot to settle their argument like men.

This is all for the good except that, absent the possibility of an occasional ass-kicking, denizens of the think-tank world start behaving like girls on the third-grade playground, constantly backstabbing each other and forming snobby little cliques.

Steiner's Law -- "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" -- expresses the essential bogusness of virtual discourse, where a flame-war between rival bloggers passes for a Titanic Struggle for the Soul of America, even though it's merely a collection of words posted online and read by a few thousand people in a nation of 300 million.

People don't like to be insulted and, in a real-world setting, civilized people refrain from insulting others directly -- especially if the person they're insulting is someone who might kick their ass. In the real world, Jeff Goldstein is not accustomed to being insulted and if you, James Wolcott, had ever met Goldstein, you sure as hell wouldn't be taunting him with lyrics from a Village People song.

It's extremely unlikely that Goldstein will show up on your doorstep, brandishing a blood-spattered arm -- torn from the corpse of a California Jew-hater, prior to driving cross-country to confront you -- and bellowing in murderous rage: "Wolcott, you cowardly bastard, come out here and meet your doom, or I'll kick down your door!"

Extremely unlikely, I say. But crazier things have happened.

UPDATE: Moe Lane's Quote of the Day. Moe is an easygoing, mild-mannered guy. Most people don't realize that Moe's day job is ninja warrior.

Meanwhile, one of the glories of the post-racial Obama Age is that it's once again safe for guys named "Schultz" to suggest violence against guys named "Lieberman":

What is the feeling towards Joe Lieberman? I mean how do you, you know, go into a room without punching the guy out after what he’s done to the progressive movement in this country?

Ed Schultz is speaking on behalf of the progressive movement, so he can't be held responsible if somebody actually does a beatdown on the Jew. I'm sure Joe will be deeply moved when he and Hadassah get a Happy Hannukah card from their progressive friends at MSNBC.

UPDATE II: Little Miss Attila is upset that I haven't linked her. Donald Douglas at American Power links with some vintage punk rock, and Jimmie Bise at Sundries Shack also links (but without punk rock).

Dear James Wolcott: Blow me

Perhaps "blow me" is not the kind of commentary that would make me popular with Vanity Fair readers, who are used to such lofty intellectual matter as Gisele Bundchen nude. But dig the cluelessness of the world's most pretentious dropout from Frostburg (Md.) State University:

Nobody nowhere no way no how is going to buy a "book" by defeated tea bagger Doug Hoffman, who will now recede into the woodwork of irrelevancy to spend more time with his hanging ferns. . . .
If Sarah Palin's emancipation proclamation is being shoveled out to the rabid faithful as a loss leader, a cheap giveaway, how much additional landfill would be needed to accommodate the return copies of the political testament of an obscure guy whose loss handed the Congressional seat to a Democrat for the first time since dinosaurs walked with Jesus? . . .

Wolcott is recycling second-hand memes poached from the liberal blogosphere. He has nothing original to say, and throws less traffic than Sadly No or Crooks and Liars. He is a has-been pop-culture critic whose employment by Graydon Carter seems to be chiefly due to Wolcott's marriage to a Vanity Fair contributing editor.

Wolcott knows as much about politics as such a person might be expected to know. Wolcott seems incapable of doing any actual reporting. There was never any chance of him trundling his obese corpus up to the Adirondacks to cover this election. He will, however, sneer at any journalist who actually works for a living.

So while I've logged thousands of miles and hundreds of hours covering NY23 -- and have spent a few years studying the conservative book market from a perspective of economic self-interest -- I know nothing about nothing, and James Wolcott knows everything.

Excuse me for wasting more than two words on Wolcott. I'm on deadline, and the distraction was annoying.

James Wolcott: Cthulhu of Vanity Fair? (Plus: Gisele Bundchen Nude!)

James Wolcott's Vanity Fair blog throws less traffic than Protein Wisdom, but -- alas! -- Jeff Goldstein, Dan Collins & Co. don't have a high-end Conde Nast magazine to pay them a full-time salary to write unfunny "humor" posts:

For a Master of Disguise such as myself . . . majoring in latex masks and the slurring vowels of obscure dialects, infiltrating the Tea Parties will be a piece of pie. It will require little more than a series of message t-shirts tastefully spattered with barbecue sauce, baggy jeans, sneakers that double as orthopedic shoes, and a protest sign with at least one word defiantly misspelled, as if to say to the media, "Fuck you, MSM, only pussies adhere to that 'i' before 'e' bullshit." Please forgive the obscenities and vulgarities--it's all part of "getting into character" and feeling the role.

As much as some may be tempted to compare him to Cthulhu, Wolcott is not really interesting enough to be evil. He might be more usefully compared to Frank Rich, who became bored with writing theater criticism and decided instead to try his hand at political commentary. This seems to have inspired the imitative Wolcott, who had muddled around for decades as a media/pop-culture critic, to decide that this politics scene was the place to be.

How incestuously convenient that he's married to a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and so the fact that Wolcott's political writing is both ill-informed and unenlightening matters not a whit. As I wrote nearly a year ago:

If James Wolcott is being paid by the word, his 3,700-word screed in the June issue of Vanity Fair is the Crime of the Century.The article is presented as describing the "vicious Clinton-versus-Obama rupture at Daily Kos" and thus an analysis of "a party-wide split" among Democrats, but it's really nothing of the kind. In fact, it's nothing at all. There is no reporting and very little that could be called research. Just massive paragraph after paragraph of florid prose.

Observant readers, contemplating the fact that Wolcott's fictitious "party-wide split" failed to prevent the Democrats from carrying 53% of the popular vote in November, cannot help but conclude that Wolcott doesn't know what he's talking about. And yet he continues to collect a paycheck from Graydon Carter.

True to his belle-lettrist roots, Wolcott apparently can't be bothered to pick up a phone and call an actual source, much less trundle his corpulent ass somewhere and do any on-the-scene reporting. He expects to be admired on the basis of his self-imagined eloquence and wit, which explains why he goes to such lengths with his stereotypical portrayal of conservatives as troglodyte hicks who can't spell.

Like his marriage to Laura Jacobs, Wolcott's liberalism is incestuously convenient. Vanity Fair is basically a fashion/celebrity magazine, and the inclusion of ignorant political commentary is therefore not necessary to the magazine's stock-in-trade. Yet New York being New York, and the magazine business being the magazine business, if Vanity Fair is going to feature ignorant political commentary, you can bet that it will be ignorant liberal political commentary.

So they sell a magazine by putting supermodel Giselle Bundchen naked on the cover -- with a multi-page pictorial display inside -- and use part of the resulting revenue to pay Wolcott to provide uninformative (and largely unread) filler between the ads for jewelry, cosmetics and brand-name clothing.

My search for wealthy investors to fund a magazine combining nude supermodels and conservative commentary has been unssuccessful so far. Oh, there are plenty of guys in the blogosphere who'd be happy to write conservative commentary for 20 cents a word, but nude supermodels? They would require the supervision of a trained professional journalist.

UPDATE: Dan Collins is overjoyed to be named by good ol' Wolly. Just don't try to elbow me out of that gig as Editorial Director for Nude Supermodels at the new magazine, Dan.