"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler
James Wolcott praises “the porn that can be the only source of solace on those lonely nights away from the aggravations of home.”
Obviously, this is why Vanity Fair pays him the big bucks: To tell us what he does in his spare time. But you probably suspected this, didn’t you?
Apologies to readers disturbed by the mental image of a sweaty Wolcott in his undershorts getting his jollies watching pay-per-view cable.
Pamela Geller’s commentary about Sandra Fluke has caused a conniption on the part of — you guessed, didn’t you? — Charles Johnson. Mr. Jazzy McBikeshorts then got into a Twitter colloquy with the infamously boring James Wolcott, who decided to bring my name into it. A commenter informed me about this, prompting my Twitter reply:
News Flash: James Wolcott, who for years has had a Vanity Fair column nobody reads, now has a Twitter account nobody follows.
Because you have probably never heard of James Wolcott, it is necessary to explain that he is a cadaverous-looking college dropout who spent years as an unpopular media critic at the Village Voice before becoming an unpopular columnist at Vanity Fair. His knowledge of politics is extremely limited, as I noted in April 2008:
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.
So far as anyone can tell, Wolcott never ventures outside Manhattan and can’t be bothered to do any actual reporting. He has attempted to remain “relevant” by adding a blog that nobody reads to his duties at Vanity Fair, whose publisher apparently hired him as a favor to Wolcott’s wife, an editor for the magazine.
Wolcott’s most memorable contribution to the online world was a 2004 post in which he cheered for killer hurricanes — “Mother Nature’s fist of fury, Gaia’s stern rebuke” — to hit America, and thereby inadvertantly helped re-elect President Bush.
Last year, Wolcott somehow inveigled Doubleday into publishing his memoir. Nobody read that either, mainly because the author is so notoriously dull, but perhaps also because readers had been warned via a New York Times review that Wolcott “devotes 50 genuflecting pages” of his 258-page memoir to film critic Pauline Kael.
No, I’m not kidding. Really.
To the extent that most blog readers nowadays have any inkling who James Wolcott is, it’s because he has occasionally attempted to generate traffic by taking cheap shots at Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom. Is anyone therefore surprised that a pompous nobody like Wolcott seems to have found a kindred spirit in Charles Johnson?
Readers may be wondering why I would devote an entire 500-word blog post to a couple of windbags like Johnson and Wolcott, but I mainly wanted to use this as an opportunity to point out that Pamela Geller is always interesting, which is why those irrelevant losers hate her so much.
Anyway, the two latest polls — one by Marist and another by Reuters — both show the Ohio Republican primary a dead heat, and I’m thinking about heading to Columbus for the big showdown, which should be a lot more fun than sitting around blogging about James Wolcott.
UPDATE: The Man Who Named the Blogosphere observes that the list of Things Which Are More Fun Than Sitting Around Blogging About James Wolcott is quite long, and welcome, Instapundit readers!
As to the absurd “controversy” that briefly permitted Wolcott to indulge his delusions of relevance, Rush Limbaugh explained his apology to Sandra Fluke today on the World’s Biggest Radio Show.
It’s been a while — too long, really — since we’ve made fun of James Wolcott. I stumbled across the picturesque phrasing of Dan Collins at Piece of Work in Progress (quoted in the title), describing the author of this infamous expression of environmentalist misanthropy:
“I root for hurricanes. When, courtesy of the Weather Channel, I see one forming in the ocean off the coast of Africa, I find myself longing for it to become big and strong — Mother Nature’s fist of fury, Gaia’s stern rebuke.”
— James Wolcott, “An Ignoble Confession,” Sept. 2004
A year later, after Katrina hit New Orleans, Wolcott defended that post as the product of “a frivolous vacation mood,” but has subsequently deleted it. Yet with vast swaths of the country now devastated by tornados, Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom decided to remind him of it.
Liberalism: Because People Who
Vote Republican Deserve to Die!
Someone wrote a brief Onion-style satire in which residents of New Orleans expressed dismay that “Japanese were missing a golden opportunity” for looting in the wake of the tsunami there.
Little Miss Attila linked that without comment.
This compelled James Wolcott to cite Attila as an example of conservatives “transmitting in their usual racial code.”
Really.
You have to marvel at the extraordinary effort it took for a Vanity Fair columnist to reach such a farfetched conclusion about a blogger he’s never met, on the basis of her having linked a humorous item that ends with a reference to Charlie Sheen and the Wisconsin teachers union.
Wolcott does such things all the time. Evidently too busy to trundle his decrepit ass anywhere to do any actual reporting, he sits there, carping and sneering at, inter alia, Sarah Palin and her admirers.
It’s a newsworthy event when Wolcott manages to make it so far as a Manhattan bar, where all he can think about is “the psychopathology of certain rightwing blogs, especially those whose hosts have turned bitter and bristling with recriminations.” He’s obsessed with us, yet it is we who are diagnosed as suffering from psychopathology.
Project much?
In fact, nowadays Wolcott is America’s most eminent former TV critic moonlighting as a foreign-policy expert, approvingly quoting (with emphasis) Financial Times columnist Max Hastings: “The most powerful single strand in opinion throughout the Muslim world is bitterness about America’s continuing support for Israeli oppression of the Palestinians.”
The Jews! They’re oppressing Palestinians! And perhaps also secretly plotting to get James Wolcott bounced from his sinecure as a Vanity Fair contributing editor! Reckon that’s why Wolcott threw in an extra jab at “neocons” like Max Boot?
Note to Graydon Carter: Play him or trade him. Either put Wolcott on the next plane to Benghazi — send him where the action is, to do some honest-to-God journalism — or else cut him loose. To keep him there in Manhattan, festering like an infected boil, is ruining the man.
When you turn over a rock, you expect to find creepy-crawly things, but still sometimes …
“I don’t think Felker had any way of knowing what was going to happen. Christgau, Goldstein … it was those sort of people who really formed the core of politicizing the Voice and really pushing its cultural coverage to the hard left.”
— James Wolcott, interviewed by Russ Smith and John Strausbaugh, New York Press, April 24, 2001
Music critics Robert Christau and Richard Goldstein are rather curious targets for Wolcott, now a washed-up TV critic moonlighting as … well, what, exactly?
Never mind. I’m genuinely perplexed by that Wolcott interview and his out-of-sync reference to legendary magazine editor Clay Felker. While Christgau was re-hired as music editor by Felker in 1974 — after Christgau’s two-year stint at Newsday — Goldstein had been writing continuously for the Voice since 1966. Wolcott joined the Voice in 1972, the same year Christgau left for Newsday, and when Goldstein had already been writing there for more than five years.
Yet, name-out-of-the-hat, Goldstein gets lumped in with Christgau in the “those sort of people” category, responsible for “politicizing” the Voice toward the hard Left.
A couple of music critics had such tremendous influence?
People more familiar with the era may be able to explain that. At any rate, Wolcott left the Voice in 1982 — ousted by the weekly’s “politburo,” we are told — and, if this Smith/Strausbaugh interview is any indication, he was in early 2001 somewhat pro-Bush, or at least not anti-Bush.
What happened to Wolcott? I only ask this because yesterday afternoon he lashed out at Little Miss Attila and invoked my name in the process. This didn’t even make a blip on my SiteMeter, however, and it wasn’t until Attila e-mailed me her reply to Wolcott that I even knew Wolcott had mentioned me. (Attila and I had been playing blogsopheric badminton with “feminism” for a shuttlecock.) And the really strange thing is that the seeming trigger of Wolcott’s lashing-out was a post in which Attila promoted Dan Collins’ fundraiser.
Whisky Tango Foxtrot? Continue reading James Wolcott: ‘Those Sort of People’ →