When Charlie Sheen recently made headlines by shouting “lying faggot assholes” at the opening of his new bar in Cabo, the joke was that it was “homophobic” nature of his words that constituted something truly scandalous. Charlie’s whore-mongering and cocaine habit are not controversial — “Hey, who are we to judge?” — but it’s an impermissible ThoughtCrime for him to speak the word “faggot.”
This reveals the totalitarian impulse behind identity politics and what is dismissively called “political correctness”: Attempting to control thought by setting boundaries on language, supposedly to protect those who are victimized and oppressed by society. It is not necessary to present evidence that Charlie Sheen has ever harmed homosexuals — or that his words were motivated by hostility to homosexuals — in order for the Thought Police to make a political example of him with the casual accusation of “homophobia.”
The moral of the story is clear: Whore-mongers and drug addicts are OK with the Thought Police, but woe be unto ye homophobes!
Anyway, Kathy Griffin made a spectacle of herself on New Year’s Eve by sexually harassing her CNN co-host Anderson Cooper who — in case you missed the news — is gay.
Griffin is what is known, in gay jargon, as a “fag hag”: A woman who tries to be “one of the boys” by hanging around gay bars.
The psychology of the fag hag is probably worth an essay of several thousand words that I don’t feel an urge to write today, except to say that these are usually rather unattractive women who seem to derive a secondhand frisson from socializing with ostentatiously gorgeous men in a hypersexualized environment. This satisfies an immature impulse — a desire for superficial “popularity” — and provides the fag hag with a low-risk source of male companionship, along with an obvious excuse to protect herself from feelings of sexual rejection.
Which, if you’re Kathy Griffin, you’ve had to deal with a lot.
Griffin has parlayed her fag-hag act into a career, having discovered that gay men will buy tickets to hear ugly women tell raunchy jokes, in much the way that its always the old fat drag queens who serve as wisecracking emcees for transvestite beauty pageants. Ace of Spades remarks on Griffin’s act:
Kathy Griffin, who is to comedy what Cher is to music, that is to say, irrelevant and old and weird-looking from plastic surgery, continues scrabbling at her last possible handhold of cultural relevance. . . .
Almost all of the media continues chasing the same minority cohort — liberal, urban, sexually loose.
Two words, Ace: Disposable income.
Unlike the respectable bourgeois suburban Republicans working to pay their mortgages and send their kids to college, the hip urbanites have money to throw away on name-brand fashion products and other gaudy expensive baubles that the Wal-Mart shoppers don’t buy. Also, the urban market in New York, L.A. and D.C. includes people who are cultural trend-setters in ways that pudgy accountants in New Jersey, Bakersfield and Fauqier County can never hope to be. But I digress . . .
Speaking of people Ace despises, Andrew Sullivan has treated us to a hilariously pompous display of hand-wringing as he announces he will take his “Daily Dish” blog — which in 2011 switched to Tina Brown’s Daily Beast after years under James Fallows’s Atlantic umbrella — back to a stand-alone site with a $19.99 subscription model:
In return for purchasing a subscription, Sullivan promises his readers, “No corporate ownership, no advertising demands, no pressure for pageviews … just a concept designed to make your reading experience as good as possible, and to lead us not into temptation.”
For now, Sullivan is offering readers a chance to sign up for $19.99 a year, which he notes, “translates to $1.67 a month.”
Translation: “I think I can make more money this way, but let me drape this crude financial calculus in a lot of altruistic anti-commercial argle-bargle, just to maintain my credibility as an intellectual idealist — which is, of course, my stock in trade.”
Me? I’m just a Shameless Capitalist Blogger, reminding you once more of The Five Most Important Words in the English Language:
HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!
At least I spare you the phony “progressive” idealism, eh?
UPDATE: Bill Quick at Daily Pundit:
What all this glosses over, I think, is that The Daily Beast didn’t want to keep Sullivan on.
I wonder why?
That’s an interesting question, isn’t it? I mean, it was regarded as something of a coup for Tina Brown to sign Sullivan in April 2011. Now, barely a year and a half later, she decides he’s not worth the cost of keeping? Hmmmm.
UPDATE II: Christine Haughney of the New York Times:
Mr. Sullivan said in an e-mail message that he could have remained at the Daily Beast under a new contract. But he said that as he and his two partners started negotiating, they “began to see the overpowering logic of real independence.”
He added that the Dish is going to stay in New York City, where he and his two business partners are based, “for the foreseeable future.” He added, “We need to be together as a group.”
It’s important to understand that Sully had “real independence” at his blog for many years, from 2000 until he transferred it under Time magazine’s editorial umbrella. He subsequently switched it from Time to the Atlantic and then to Tina’s Daily Beast, so that he’s been sort of a blogging free agent all along.
So it’s difficult to see why, amid contract negotiations with Tina, “the overpowering logic of real independence” should suddenly occur to Sully and his business partners. Something about this narrative doesn’t exactly add up, does it?
