Pamela Paul, The Gray Lady’s In-House Transphobe

As I write these words, there are a series of bills under consideration in West Virginia that would “protect” minors from any “obscene performance and materials” — which would, of course, include a transgender mother picking up their kid from school. These paleoconservative bigots have reframed such a common act as an apparent act of flamboyant exhibitionism, if not a new form of edgy performance art that will somehow turn every schoolkid into a gender-bending sex kitten. It is estimated that 1.6 million Americans identify as transgender. 19% are parents. In 2020, the murder rate of transgender people took just seven months to surpass that of cis counterparts. In other words, we have a moral duty to stick up for trans people, to respect their pronouns, and to ensure that they are able to live safely and without hate or targeted violence in our society. They are human beings. Just like the rest of us.

In such a dangerous and dehumanizing climate, it would seem quite logical to a surly and aging punk rock humanist like me to devote your newspaper pages to showing the impact that such harmful legislation will have on people. But that’s not what The New York Times is doing. Instead, it has permitted Pamela Paul — a smug and privileged dunce who was once married to an equally hateful and reactionary bedbug — to spew forth all manner of hateful columns against the dignity of trans people. Much like a 1960s white supremacist defending George Wallace, Pamela Paul wrote a repugnant and clueless column detailing how liberals could “learn” from Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor apparently “knows what he’s doing” in targeting trans healthcare, invading the privacy of trans university students, and otherwise declaring a war on trans people. Despite all these clearly horrific moves to dehumanize trans people which have been denounced by nearly every LGBTQ organization, Paul claims that DeSantis “may not be” transphobic and that any protest against this evil is merely “adopting a stance of moral superiority” that will “do us no good.” In other words, Paul’s hopeless head nods like a FOX News-watching bobblehead, approving of these cruel and discriminatory practices against people who have rich lives, promising careers, and big dreams.

But today Pamela Paul doubled down on her casual hatred for the “other” by writing a risible column defending J.K. Rowling, the Harry Potter writer who has ignobly morphed into one of the most prominent transphobes in Western culture. And in case the phony persecution complex wasn’t telegraphed strongly enough, Paul even compared the justifiable pushback against Rowling’s hate to the stabbing of Salman Rushdie, perpetuating the shitty stereotypical trope of trans person as murderer that was played for cheap titilation in Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill more than forty years ago.

In other words, Pamela Paul is an intolerant dinosaur cynically disguising her enmity with false parallels who simply cannot understand what is so fucking easy for the rest of us to understand. She actually has the temerity to write, “Nothing Rowling has said qualifies as transphobic.” Really? Beyond Rowling’s recent novel, which was a lengthy transphobic diatribe disguised as fiction, what about Rowling’s odious remarks about “people who menstruate”? Her pathetic Twitter performance last year on International Women’s Day? I’m a cis hetero man and I’m also angry about this. Rowling’s thoughtless and hateful remarks have been enough to warrant vociferous pushback from many. Is Paul trying to gaslight this response? It’s fairly effortless to imagine Paul stumping for George Orwell’s fascist nation in 1984, claiming that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

Two hundred staffers and contributors have signed a letter condemning The New York Times‘s commitment to transphobia. What many of them have outright refused to do is call out the names of hateful demagogues who are spreading this noxious and completely unacceptable bile.

Pamela Paul collects a regular paycheck for spewing obfuscatory hate in a newspaper that reaches 8.6 million paid digital subscribers. Given that reach, I don’t think it’s a stretch to call Pamela Paul the transphobic answer to Charles Coughlin, who famously used his radio broadcasts to preach anti-Semitism in the 1930s.

The time has come for Pamela Paul to be fired from The New York Times. Let her join her fellow fascist Bari Weiss outside the Gray Lady’s walls and be truly free to reveal the hateful and intolerant conservative she truly is.

A Dark Day for America

The siege on the Capitol didn’t just represent Trump pushing his already dangerous envelope further into the realm of lunacy. It further exposed America as a nation that is hell-bent on abandoning facts, democracy, science, and basic decency. We have two weeks left with the Madman-in-Chief and there can be little doubt now that anyone who continues to support this monster is malleable clay for his cheap authoritarian tyranny. This would include the 11 Senators who opposed the Electoral College as well as the mindless sycophants who bend to his every word.

“We love you,” said Trump. “You’re very special.”

He knows exactly what he’s doing. When sedition becomes aligned with Leo Buscalgia, you know you’re dealing with a particularly sinister strain of outreach.

But let’s not just pin this on the pinhead. Jack Dorsey, who is now inexplicably being heralded as a saint for suspending Trump’s Twitter account for twelve hours, is also responsible for what happening. As is Dean Baquet of The New York Times for legitimizing right-wing extremism under the false “all the news that’s fit to print” covenant. It was Baquet who allowed a Tom Cotton op-ed arguing for brutality against peaceful protesters. Yet the brutality ultimately emerged from Cotton’s own political party and has been increasingly normalized. It was Dorsey who issued an apology to alt-right provocateur Candace Owensgetting on his profiteering hands and knees to apologize for calling her “far right.”

Dorsey and Baquet — in making right-wing extremism and white supremacy as commonplace as a leisurely walk in the park — used their power and media influence to hone the cornerstones of “both-siderism,” where we are now supposed to entertain the alarming notion that Nazis and antidemocratic terrorism should be afforded the same intellectual weight as any sane political position.

If we don’t remove Trump and his enablers soon — and there has been talk of a second impeachment — then the next two weeks could very well be the end of America. If we don’t immediately arrest and try every single thug who stormed the Capitol, then this will send a message that domestic terrorism is as casual as asking a hot dog vendor for extra mustard and sauerkraut. The question of how many Republicans will continue to align themselves with treason and treachery remains an open and likely preordained one. They’ve marched this far in the swamp without a whit of self-reflection and they know very well what butters their bread. But the additional enemies of America are those who continue to pretend that the daily dose of fascism and violent spectacle is something that should be as normal as thousands of Americans dropping dead every day from COVID. The people in power want us to be conditioned to accept all of this as business-as-usual, to capitulate our shock and outrage and to be divested of what remains of our virtues.

If you have rats in your home, you call an exterminator. But Dorsey and Baquet are more interested in growing their fortunes than standing for decency. They have cynically opted for the bottom line of profitability and dishonesty. And if we hope to heal America and secure a peaceful presidential transition, then we need to be very vocal and condemn every known influence that has allowed this repugnant state of affairs. The pestilence that is eating away at the American promise needs to twitch in glue traps.

A Special Message from James Bennet

Hello there! James Bennet here. You may know me as that fun-loving xenophobic paycheck man who, despite never taking a meaningful moral position in my entire life, fell upward thanks to my vanilla background to oversee the op-ed pages of the New York Times! I’m living proof that, if you’re a sycophantic 54-year-old Yalie who bobs his mouth up and down on the throbbing member of the Establishment on a daily basis, you too will never be fired or rebuked by top brass! Because here at the Times, we’re not just about celebrating the Stuff White People Like or ensuring that David Brooks can fulminate right-wing drivel under the false cover of inclusive intellectualism. We’re not just about refusing to modulate or adjust our voice from our hopelessly dowdy upper middle class roots. We’re also firmly committed to being inexorably puzzled by strange cultural figures like Lizzo, Childish Gambino, Big Sean, Boots Riley, Rungano Nyoni, and Mariama Diallo! And we will continue to deny column-inches to anyone who enjoys these strange dark-skinned people!

Thanks to my cowardly sensibilities, I ensure that the New York Times continues to publish all the affluent Cacuasian opinions fit to print! Aside from a few token individuals who are trending heavily on social media (we do, after all, need your subscription dollars to keep the lights on!), you won’t find many brown people or black people among our guest columnists here! Nor will you find any of those sketchy pinko socialists. No, sir! Not on my watch. I’m so committed to reinforcing fascism and putting our African-American staffers at risk that I’m even willing to publish a racist and authoritarian article by a Senator named Tom Cotton! (Get it? Cotton! Ha ha! Yeah, I chuckled over that little joke too.)

They say that opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one and most of them stink. Well, if you’re the overlord of opinions, as I am, then you can only imagine the kind of asshole you’d have to be to swim in a sea of fuming anuses and earn a living at it! Instead of being a writer’s writer or a journalist’s journalist, I’m an asshole’s asshole! My spineless timidity and willful capitulation of my soul have been the secrets to my success!

Here at the Times, we publish the kind of family-friendly white supremacy that gives the Amy Coopers and the Svitlana Floms of our world all the inspiration they need to use their privilege to sic the police on innocent black people with false accusations! I’m very proud of my work. I wake up every day, smile in the mirror, and, just before I splash a few drops of Clive Christian No. 1 upon my neck and prepare to scarf down $60 strips of Norwegian salmon for breakfast, I say to myself, “Goddammit, James! Look at you, you magnificent white bastard!” Not a streak of melanin in my skin, my friends. I take pride in my work. I take pride in my skin color. Not white power, but white pride. There’s a distinction! Still, I have to say. Ain’t being white grand?

However, I do want to explain why we published the piece today by convicted murderer Harold Bailey, former grand wizard of the KKK and, for many years, a prominent dot on the hate map published by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Yes, it’s true that he filed his column from a maximum facility cell at the Red Onion State Prison, where he is serving time for raping forty-five black people. Nevertheless, Times Opinion owes it to our readers to show them counter-arguments. And it remains my firm belief that a dangerous criminal screaming obscenities and making deranged sculptures from his own fecal matter in a padded cell is capable of thinking along the same lines as a policy expert. After all, that’s democracy!

When Mr. Bailey wrote at length about why he wanted to shove a pineapple into my wife Sarah Jessup’s mouth and tie her down with rope in a chair so that she could watch helplessly as he sodomized my two children, I didn’t flinch one bit! Obviously, most people in our society are opposed to this assault and trauma. And that is fine. But we are in the business of recklessly publishing any diseased opinion we can find. It fits right in with the tacit acceptance of white values that we hold dear to our hearts. And sometimes it’s vital to understand the careful nuances of why someone would be driven to such a violent act of abuse. “But what nuances exist in publishing such an explicit essay?” you may ask? Well, it’s not my job to suss these out. Use your noodle! Think about it!

We understand that many readers find Harold Bailey’s argument painful and even dangerous. We believe that this is one reason why it requires public scrutiny and debate. However, if you look deep enough into anything, such as an unblemished wall that has been freshly painted white or a graphic description of my two children being violated, you will find great shining beauty that you can turn into exciting cocktail party banter!

What’s most important about publishing opinions is to realize that they are just that: merely opinions. It’s my job to deaden your soul and to rob you of your moral compass so that you can look upon the world with a clinically detached eye, remaining flip and casual about the unfolding horrors and staying on the sidelines as these uppity revolutionary bastards lose hope and are pecked off one by one by an authoritarian police force. I mean, if I don’t bat an eye when Mr. Bailey writes in adoring detail about the fantasy of committing vicious crimes against my family, then there’s no reason why you should either! If you don’t raise a stink about Tom Cotton’s column, then his views will become more normalized. And when that happens, it creates a stable world in which you too can worship at the altar of unwavering normalcy. And isn’t that a lofty goal for our society? To walk out into the world, knowing that nobody feels anything, and proudly slam down two dollars and fifty cents for the morning edition, only to read opinions that you once considered horrifying and that are now absolutely the norm. That’s why the Times keeps me, James Bennet, here at the top!

I’ll admit. We did push the envelope a bit with the Cotton and Bailey essays. But the only way to unite this nation is by inoculating the population from horrors and systemic abuse, ensuring that they never feel outrage, and creating a population in which nobody has hope. And with protests and a pandemic happening now, and a Second Great Depression just on the horizon, we’re nearly there! All of these exciting developments make me prouder than ever to be white, status quo, and dead inside.

Scoop (Modern Library #75)

(This is the twenty-sixth entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.)

When I last dived into Evelyn Waugh’s exquisite comic fiction for this crazy project nearly six years ago, I wrote a sour essay in which I permitted my hostility towards Waugh’s pugnacious life and his reactionary politics to overshadow my appreciation for his art. Perhaps the way I read fiction has changed or the idea of completely discounting a writer’s achievements with the histrionic tone of an upbraiding Pollyanna who doesn’t possess a scintilla of self-awareness fills me with a dread I usually associate with wincing at a tax bill or standing in a needlessly long line for a pizza slice. Whatever the case, I allowed myself to zero in on Brideshead Revisited‘s weaker elements (namely, the deplorable gay stereotype Anthony Blanche) without possessing the decency to praise that novel’s excellent prose in any way. This was decidedly uncharitable of me. For Waugh was, for all of his faults, a master stylist. That I was also bold enough to rank Wodehouse over Waugh was likewise problematic (although I would still rather read Pip and I have never been able to get into the Sword of Honour trilogy and I still feel that Waugh was more or less finished as an author after The Loved One; incidentally, Waugh himself called Wodehouse “the Master”). At the time, the eminently reasonable Cynthia Haven offered what I now deem to be appropriate pushback, observing that I brought a lot of “post-modern baggage” into my reading. My “take” on that novel’s Catholic dialogue was, I now realize after diving into Waugh again, driven by a cocky yahooism that is perhaps better deployed while knocking back pints in a sports bar and claiming that you’re a big fan of the team everybody else is cheering for. Never mind that the names of the players are only lodged in your memory by the blinding Chryon reminders and the bellowing cries of histrionic announcers that work together to perfect a sense-deadening television experience.

Anyway, I’ll leave cloud cuckoos like Dave Eggers to remain dishonest and pretend they never despised great novels. I’d rather be candid about where I may have strayed in my literary judgement and how I have tried to reckon with it. In a literary climate of “No haters” (and thus no chances), we are apparently no longer allowed to (a) voice dissenting opinions or (b) take the time to reassess our youthful follies and better appreciate a novel that rubbed us the wrong way on the first read. Wrestling with fiction should involve expressing our hesitations and confessing our evolving sensibilities and perceiving what a problematic author did right. And so here we are. It has taken many months to get here, but it does take time to articulate a personal contradiction.

So here goes: As much as I appreciate Scoop‘s considerable merits (particularly the fine and often hilarious satire when the book takes place on Waugh’s home turf), I cannot find it within me to endorse this novel’s abysmally tone-deaf observations on a fictitious Abyssinia — here, Ishmaelia. There are unsophisticated thoughts cloaked beneath the light fluidity of Waugh’s exacting pen that many of his acolytes — including The Observer‘s Robert McCrum and NPR’s Alexander Nazaryan — refuse to acknowledge. There’s no other way to say this, but Waugh is more nimble with his gifts when he bakes his pies with an anglophonic upper crust. And that ugly truth should give any reader or admirer great pause. (Even Selina Hastings, one of his biographers, was forced to concede this. And McCrum, to his credit, does at least write that “Scoop derives less inspiration from Ethiopia,” although this is a bit like stating that Paul Manafort merely muttered a little white lie.) Waugh’s limitations in Scoop are not as scabrous as Black Mischief — a novel so packed with racism that it’s almost the literary equivalent to Louis C.K.’s recent attempts at a comeback. But his “insights” into Africa are still very bad, despite all the other rich wit contained within the book. Waugh cannot see anyone who does not share his lily-white complexion as human. His creatively bankrupt view of Africans as bloodthirsty cannibals or “crapulous black servants” or “a natty young Negro smoking from a long cigarette holder” carries over from Black Mischief. “A pious old darky named Mr. Samuel Smiles Jackson” is installed President. I was rankled by the constant cries of “Boy!” from the assorted journos, late risers who complain about not getting swift servitude with a smile. (“Six bloody black servants and no breakfast,” sneers the entitled Corker at one point.) Even the potentially interesting politics behind Ishmaelia’s upheaval are coarse and general, with the arrival of Dr. Benito at a press conference described in one paragraph with a contrast of “blacks” and “whites” that show the force and timing of a man determined to be vituperative, but without substantive subtlety. One of the book’s jokes involves a nonexistent city on the nation’s map identified as “Laku,” which is Ishmaelite for “I don’t know.” And while it does allow for a decent setup in which numerous journalists expend lavish resources to find Laku for their stories, I suspect that this is really Waugh confessing he doesn’t know and can’t know because he doesn’t want to.

Still, in approaching Scoop, I was determined to give this book more care than what I doled out to Brideshead. Not only did I spend a few months rereading all of Waugh’s novels up through Brideshead, finding them considerably richer than I did on my first two canon reads, but I also dived into the Selina Hastings and Martin Stannard biographies, along with numerous other texts pertaining to Scoop. And one cannot completely invalidate Waugh’s talent:

“Why, once Jakes went out to cover a revolution in one of the Balkan capitals. He overslept in a carriage, woke up at the wrong station, didn’t know any different, got out, went straight to a hotel, and cabled off a thousand-word story about barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote, a dead child, like a broken doll, spreadeagled in the deserted roadway below his window — you know. Well, they were pretty surprised at his office, getting a story like that from the wrong country, but they trusted Jakes and splashed it in six national newspapers. That day every special in Europe got orders to rush to the new revolution.”

This is pitch-perfect Waugh. Sadly, the wanton laziness of journalists and willful opportunism of newspaper publishers remain very applicable eighty-one years after Scoop‘s publication. In 2015, a Hardin County newspaper misreported that the local sheriff had said that “those who go into the law enforcement profession typically do it because they have a desire to shoot minorities.” And this was before The New York Times became an apologist outlet for Nazis (the original title of that linked article was “In America’s Heartland, the Nazi Sympathizer Next Door”) and didn’t even bother to fact-check an infamous climate change denial article from Bret Stephens published on April 28, 2017.

So Scoop does deserve our attention in an age devoted to “alternative facts” and a vulgar leader who routinely squeezes savage whoppers through his soulless teeth. Waugh uses a familiar but extremely effective series of misunderstandings to kickstart his often razor-sharp sendup, whereby a hot writer by the name of John Courtney Boot is considered to be the ideal candidate to cover a war in Ishamelia for The Daily Beast (not to be confused with the present Daily Beast founded by Tina Brown, who took the name from Waugh — and, while we’re on the subject of contemporary parallels, Scoop also features a character by the name of Nannie Bloggs, quite fitting in an epoch populated with dozens of nanny blogs). John Boot is confused with William Boot, a bucolic man who writes a nature column known as Lush Places and believes himself to be in trouble with the top brass for substituting “beaver” with “great crested grebe” in a recent installment. He is sent to cover a war that nobody understands.

The novel is funny and thrilling in its first one hundred pages, with Waugh deftly balancing his keen eye for decor (he did study architecture) with these goofy mixups. Rather tellingly, however, Waugh does spend a lot of time with William Boot in transit to Ishamelia, almost as if Waugh is reluctant to get to the country and write about the adventure. And it is within the regions of East Africa that Waugh is on less firm footing, especially when he strays from the journalists. Stannard has helpfully observed that, of all Waugh’s pre-war novels, Scoop was the most heavily edited and that it was the “political” sections with which Waugh had “structural problems.” But Scoop‘s problems really amount to tonal ones. Where Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road (ML #91) brilliantly holds up a mirror to expose the audience’s assumptions about people (with the novel’s Broadway adaptation inspiring a tremendously interesting Ralph Ellison essay called “An Extravagance of Laughter,” which many of today’s self-righteous vigilantes should read), Scoop seems more content to revel in its atavistic prejudices.

In 2003, Christopher Hitchens gently bemoaned the “rank crudity” of Waugh’s childish names for side characters. And I think he was right to pinpoint Waugh’s declining powers of invention. For all of Scoop‘s blazing panoramas and descriptive sheen (the prose committed to the Megalopilitan offices is brilliant), the ultimate weakness of the book is that Waugh seems incapable of imbuing Ishamelia with the same inventive life with which he devotes to England. When one looks at the travel writing that came before this, even the high points of Waugh in Abyssinia are the sections where he bitches about his boredom.

Waugh’s writing was often fueled by a vicious need for revenge and an inability to let things go. Take the case of Charles Crutwell, the Hertford dean who praised Waugh on his writing and awarded him an Oxford scholarship as a young man. Waugh proceeded to be incredibly lazy about his studies, deciding that he had earned this financial reward, that he no longer needed to exert himself in any way, and that he would spend his time boozing it up and getting tight with his mates. Crutwell told Waugh that he needed to take his research more seriously. He could have had Waugh expelled, but he didn’t. And for this, Crutwell became the target of Waugh’s savage barbs throughout much of his early writing and many of his novels. In Decline and Fall, you’ll find Toby Crutwell as an insane burglar turned MP. In Vile Bodies, a “Captain Crutwell” is the snobby member of the Committee of the Ladies’ Conservative Association at Chesham Bois. There’s a Crutwell in Black Mischief and A Handful of Dust. Waugh’s story “Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing” was originally titled “Mr. Crutwell’s Little Outing.” And in one of Scoop‘s supererogatory chapters, William Boot meets a General Crutwell who has had numerous landmarks named after him. Keep in mind that this is sixteen years after the events in Hertford. You want to take Waugh aside, buy him a beer, and say, “Bro, walk away.”

Now I have to confess that this type of brutal targeted satire was catnip for me at a certain impressionable age that lingered embarrassingly long into my late thirties. The very kind George Saunders tried to get me to understand this twelve years ago during an episode of my old literary podcast, The Bat Segundo Show, in which we were discussing the way Sacha Baron Cohen singled out people with total malice. Cohen’s recent television series Who is America certainly upheld Saunders’s point. Of course, I stubbornly pushed back. Because ridicule is a hell of a drug. Just ask anyone with a Twitter account. But I now understand, especially after contending with Waugh again, that effective satire needs to be more concerned with exposing and virulently denouncing those in actual power, railing against the tyrannical institutions that diminish individual lives, and, of course, exposing the follies of human behavior. Waugh does this to a large extent in Scoop and his observations about newspapermen running up large tabs on their expense accounts and manipulating the competition are both funny and beautiful, but he also appears to have been operating from an inferiority complex, an intense need for victory against his perceived oppressors and something that, truth be told, represents a minor but nevertheless troubling trait I recognize in myself and that has caused much of my own writing and communications with people to be vehemently misunderstood, if not outright distorted into libelous and untrue allegations. When your motivation to write involves the expression of childish snubs and pedantic rage without a corresponding set of virtues, it is, from my standpoint, failed satire. And I don’t know about you, but my feeling is that, if you’re still holding a grudge against someone after five or six years, then the issue is no longer about the person who wronged you, but about a petty and enduring narcissism on behalf of the grudgeholder. What precisely do these many Crutwells add to Waugh’s writing? Not much, to tell you the truth.

We do know that, when Waugh covered Abyssinia, he wrote in a letter to Penelope Betjeman, “I am a very bad journalist, well only a shit could be good on this particular job.” So perhaps there was a part of Waugh that needed to construct a biting novel from his own toxic combination of arrogance and self-loathing.

But Waugh’s biggest flaw as a writer, however great his talent, was his inability to summon empathy or a humanistic vision throughout his work, even if it is there in spurts in Brideshead and perhaps best realized in his finest novel, A Handful of Dust. When William Boot foot falls in love with Kätchen, a poorly realized character at best, Waugh has no interest in portraying Boot’s feelings as anything more than that of a dopey cipher who deserves our contempt: “For twenty-three years he had remained celibate and and heart-whole; landbound. Now for the first time he was far from sure, submerged among deep waters, below wind and tide, where huge trees raised their spongy flowers and monstrous things without fur or feather, wing or foot, passed silently in submarine twilight. A lush place.” It is one thing to present Boot clumsily setting up an unnecessary canoe or showing the way he gets hoodwinked over a heavy package of stones or not understanding basic journalism jargon and to let Boot’s bumbling behavior (or, for that matter, the apposite metaphor of a three-legged dog barking in a barrel just outside Kätchen’s home) speak for itself. It is quite another thing to stack the deck against your protagonist with a passage like this, however eloquently condemned. What Waugh had not learned from Wodehouse was that there was a way of both recognizing the ineptitude of a dunderhead while also humanizing his feelings. You can lay down as many barbs as you like in art, but, at a certain point, if you’re any good, the artistic expression itself has to evolve beyond mere virtuosic style. This, in my view, is the main reason why Waugh crumbled and why I think his standing should be reassessed. The vindictiveness in Black Mischief, however crucially transgressive at the time, still represented a failure of creative powers. All Waugh had left at the end was a bitter nostalgia for a lost Britannia and a fear of modernity, which amounted to little more than an old man pining for the good old days by the time Waugh got to his wildly overrated Sword of Honour trilogy (and by the time Louis C.K. returned on stage with his first full set littered with racism, transphobia, and scorn for the young generation). If Waugh had learned to see the marvel of a changing world and if he had embraced human progress rather than fleeing from it, he might have produced more substantive work. But, hey, here I am talking about the guy nearly a century later, largely because he’s on a list. Still, even today, young conservative men have adopted the tweedy analog look of a “better time.” So maybe the joke’s on me. Thankfully the next Waugh novel book I have to write about, A Handful of Dust (ML #34), is a legitimate masterpiece. So I will try to give Waugh a more generous hearing when we get there in a few years. For now, I’m trying to shake off his seductive spite as well as the few remaining dregs of my own.

Next Up: Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms!

Ben Dolnick, Accidental Fascist

Ben Dolnick is the contemporary master of a little-used freelancing device: the willingness to sell your soul for a pittance to draw attention for a forthcoming novel. Dolnick knew that nobody would read his latest book outside of his mother, his ex-girlfriend, the barista who humored his vaguely charming but obnoxious narcissism whenever he ordered a chai latte, and maybe a few former roommates who would buy his latest volume, The Ghost Notebooks, out of pity (and to prevent Dolnick, a resolute promoter-cum-novelist, from barraging them with endless texts urging them to attend every Dolnick reading within easy access of the L line).

Dolnick had written four previous books, which not many people had read outside of fatigued bookstore clerks who were obliged to read everything written by anyone who wrote and lived in the Brooklyn area. They rightly resented yet another ho-hum 300 page offering from another goddam white dude. “Haven’t these white men had their time?” they asked themselves. And some of them were white. And some of them were men. But it was not self-hatred that motivated their ennui, but rather the sense that something was severely missing within the publishing ecosystem. All who read in New York had become quite exhausted by the limitless and often superficial chronicles of white men so abundantly championed and repugnantly propped up as True Literature for many decades, even when the goods rarely matched the hype. Even though the VIDA warriors had exposed the bankrupt patriarchal bias that had fueled the publishing industry for far too many years, white males were still being published. But none of these bookstore clerks had ever encountered the likes of Ben Dolnick! Ben Dolnick would show them all that he was a white male novelist who mattered! Even though he had nothing much to say at all. Ben Dolnick would show them all that flip and superficial views on humankind still demanded a vast readership!

Faced with declining sales on his previous books, Dolnick considered changing his name to Jonathan, but was advised by his agent that this was not a good idea, as the literary world was quite fatigued with Jonathans in general. The Jonathans had stopped winning awards in recent years, although there were certain older men who believed that it was still 1962 who still wrote highly of them in the papers of record, even when the books in question still portrayed women as little more than one-dimensional doormats. With this intelligence, Dolnick adopted a winning strategy! He sought a blurb from Jonathan Safran Foer, believing that a hastily written sentence from this insufferable draw could win him the mass readership for which he had rightly toiled! Did not the fruits of his pen count for something? Surely, it must! For he had nothing else. He was a bespectacled white man in his mid-thirties who looked pretty much like any other bespectacled white male writer in Brooklyn and he possessed a Weltanschauung that was virtually indistinguishable from any other bespectacled white male writer in Brooklyn. It was tough, really tough, being a bespectacled white male writer in Brooklyn. Dolnick, possessing little more than a generic look and a generic oeuvre, was in need of a new way to get his generic ideas and his generic fiction –most important fiction of our age! – into the hands of new readers.

Dolnick had a contact at The New York Times. They had just published an offensively superficial article on a Nazi written by a white male. Superficial articles about fascist white males written by white males were now the Gray Lady’s bread and butter. It aggravated people on Twitter and was a cheap tactic to keep the New York Times in the headlines. But Dolnick saw an opportunity! He cast aside his half-hearted liberalism (Who had he voted for in the last election? Dolnick could not recall.) and summoned his shaky understanding of Buddhism and pitched the valiant editors at The New York Times‘s Opinion page. Donald Trump! That would be the way in. Being a novelist, he did not have an especially deep or nuanced view about the political situation. He had never attended a rally. At times, it was difficult for him to identify the political party of a particular Senator, even when the television flashed those little Rs and Ds. Could they stand for something else? He knew many businesses that had R&D budgets and he did not know what this meant. Still, blindly stumbling into a situation had never stopped Dolnick before! He was a novelist! And novelists were supposed to imagine!

Dolnick knew little about Trump other than that the President was fond of red baseball caps, allcaps tweets, and was fond of referring to himself in the third person. Perhaps he could empathize with Trump by spending his time referring to himself in the third person. He did not have time to reread Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, but he dimly recalled a chapter on the banality of tense. Trusting his infallible white male memory, and not bothering to vet his ideas with his friends, Dolnick progressed anew with the trajectory of his article. He thought of innocuous metaphorical parallels. Baby pandas! Buddhism! Yes, this would win the doubters over! He began to write his article with relish. The words flowed fast. After 400 words, he took a break to rub one out and, after he had relieved himself, he came up with the phrase “Uniqlo-clad lump of meat.” Brilliant! That would show the world that he was more than just a superficial bespectacled white male writer from Brooklyn!

Dolnick had never seen Donald Trump as an enlightened figure before. But as he wrote the final paragraphs of his article, his pants saddled around his pale white legs like an old worn blanket waiting to be donated to Goodwill, Dolnick realized just how easy it was to sell his soul and how malleable his perspective could be. He could treat a man that most of the nation had perceived as a pathological liar and a dangerous madman and an illiterate speaker as a trusted friend, the trusted friend who would help move a few units of The Ghost Notebooks. For hawking books was the novelist’s new Faustian bargain these days. And who would actually care? The editors at the Times, much to Dolnick’s delight, signed on enthusiastically for Dolnick’s hot take – and Dolnick had certainly been quite hot and warm with himself during the act of writing. They slapped Dolnick on the back and said to themselves, “Dolnick, my man! You are a genius! This is the stuff of journalism!” And as more Muslims were banned from entering the United States, and as the middle-class was further eroded with another hastily passed act of legislation, Dolnick smiled, looked into the mirror, and took in the moment of blissfully ignorant Zen. If you were white, male, bespectacled, and living in Brooklyn, you could pretty much publish anything you wanted, even if you knew nothing whatsoever about the topic you were writing about.