The Priestess of Fluff

I'm late to the flap over John Edwards, Maureen Dowd and Edwards' $400 haircuts (see Garance for a good round-up of many of the salient points). Nontheless, a few observations:

1. The price includes the cost of the hairdresser visiting Edwards. In Beverley Hills. Suddenly it's rather less shocking, no?

2. It's rotten staff work on the part of the Edwards campaign for failing to anticipate that this would come out and play badly for the candidate - badly because it reinforces a pre-existing theme that Edwards is a little too smooth, a little too polished and a little too concerned with his own appearance. That this theme is a Republican creation - the Breck Girl stuff - is beside the point. It's out now and won't be going anywhere.

3. That's why Ann Coulter was able to call Edwards a "faggot" at CPAC earlier this year. Coulter went further than is generally considered acceptable, of course, but she was only taking the Breck Girl thing to its logical conclusion. At least she has a certain shameless honesty about her - or rather her dishonesty is at least delivered honestly.

4. Which is more than can be said about Maureen Dowd. Dowd's column channels Coulter without daring to be quite so brazen and open. Still, it's all there: the knowing nudges and winks and the suggestion that whatever else can be said of the United States "it is not ready for a metrosexual in chief". A few paragraphs later Dowd makes the point all the more clearly: Bill Clinton might have flirted with metrosexuality (yes, I know, but bear with me) "but the heterosexual beat out the metrosexual". La Dowd might as well come out and say it: John Edwards, he's a poof ain't he?

5. But - conveniently! - there's an escape clause. Dowd isn't telling us what she thinks: she's just writing a column about "appearances" and how they can change the campaign dynamic. Of course, if her column has any impact upon appearances, or helps frame or mould opinions well, that's too bad. It wasn't her what done it. If someone wants to draw conclusions from her column, well, she cant help that.

6. Apart from that, this column confirms, once and for all, that Maureen Dowd really, really can't write. I used to think that she'd make a splendid television critic. Now I'm not so sure. Perhaps she just had an off day. Still, consider these lines:

A) "In presidential politics, it's all but impossible to put the man into manicure. Be sensitive, but not soft. Effete is never effective." Observe the reliance upon alliteration. Generally, this is the mark of the lazy scribbler, unable or unwilling to find more productive ways to enliven their prose. A little of this goes a long way.  It's cheap and it's easy.

B) "We haven't reached the point where we can handle a green-tea-soy-latte-drinking, self-tanning-sea-salt-mango-body-wrapping, Norah-Jones-listening, yoga-toning chief executive." Could we have some more cliches please? Repetition for emphasis loses something when it's this hackneyed.

C) "When you spend more on a couple of haircuts than Burundi's per capita G.D.P. , it looks so vain it makes Paul Wolfowitz's ablutions spitting on his comb look like rugged individualism." No, I hadn't heard a variation on th e"small african country" line of jokes in some time either. The inclusion of Wolfowitz in this paragraph makes no sense either. It adds nothing to the subject being discussed and can only be there because Dowd fancied having a pop at Wolfowitz too.

D) "So it's hard for me to understand how a guy could spend $400 without getting Bergdorf Blonde highlights. (The tabloids claim that Brad and Jen used to get matching streaks.) And don't campaign donors get snippy about sponsoring tonsorial treats?" Note the padding here. Note the irrelevant intorduction of Mr Pitt and Miss Aniston. Note the resort to yet more alliteration. One could go on...

And that's the problem. If you have a reputation as a great stylist it's important that you write with, well, great style. And Dowd doesn't. True comic writing is an extraordinarily difficult trick to pull off. Wodehouse said his books, at their best, were akin to musical comedy without the music. Now, it might seem as though it's unfair to compare Dowd with Wodehouse. Nonetheless, she could learn from him. Wodehouse built his comedy upon a mastery of technique . He was ruthless with himself, insisting that the jokes had to move the narrative forward. If they didn't then, no matter how amusing or well-observed they were, there was no place for them in the particular novel or story he was refining at that moment (they could of course be hoarded for later use).

Wodehouse knew that his comedy had to be at the service of the narrative, not the other way round. Folk are often startled by the polish of Wodehouse's writing to the extent that they fail to see that it's the cut of his novels that is remarkable. Nothing is wasted and once read it's hard to even imagine how else you might have quarried this plot.

Maureen Dowd does not write like that and her prose suffers for it. Too often Dowd's columns are little more than a dummy upon which she can hang as many quips and would-be one-liners as come to mind. There's no compelling narrative or argument, to say nothing of anything so ambitious as intellectual rigour. Take away the snark and the would-be humour and there's nothing there. Equally, one often feels the facts are less important than the jokes. In other words, Dowd takes the opposite approach to Wodehouse: the jokes drive her narrative. They do not adorn or illuminate her argument, they subsittute for it.

In this recent column, for instance, there's this: "Americans have revered such homely leaders as Abe Lincoln. They seem open to balding pates like Rudy's and flattops like Jon Tester's. They don't want self-confidence to look like self-love." We'll pass over the awkward truths that Lincoln's death was celebrated in much of America and that most of the country has never heard of John Tester. Does anyone seriously believe Maureen Dowd would not write a column arguing that Giuliani's baldness alone disqualifies him from the Presidency. Such a column might have a solemn, more-in-sorrow tinge to it: Poor Rudy. If Hizzoner were hirsute he'd be a shoe-in. But his feckless follicles etc etc... God, I can hear it in my head now...

And what is her conclusion in this column anyway? Edwards is a phoney. But so are all the others. Well, thanks for that.

(Mini-disclosure: I've only met Dowd once and found her charming and gracious company. I tagged along to a reception she hosted for Robert McCrum celebrating the publication of his all-but definitive biography of PG Wodehouse which you can buy here. All-but-definitive? Yes, I think McCrum misses one trick by under-estimating the significance of the golf stories which, contra much of the rest of the work, show Wodehouse to be a rather sterner moralist than is sometimes appreciated.)

Comments

[Diablevert]

What do you expect of her, as an op-ed columnist? Dowd was Gawker before there was Gawker. Always was. I remember hearing of her as a young'un, when I was just starting to read the paper on my own, as a smart, hip, breath-of-fresh- air type. When I finally started to read the Times, I found her zingers zingless. There has never been a there there: inasmuch as she's inspired the op-ed page, it's been with a foetid stench of snark. Before her, stern outrage was the order of the day, now glib cynicism is. That change she helped make. But she's never really had an ideology. If she did she'd be an even worse hack, in the manner of Brooks---his smarmy sohpsitries are in the service of a set of ideas. He'd make a good speechwriter; she'd make a good dinner party neighbor, in the Alice Roosevelt Longworth mold. Out of neither could you wring a tuppence worth of wonkery, or a note of the vox populi

[TheDoctor]

My cousin Tony Kornheiser, who is the member of the family who actually gets paid for being a wiseguy, once said of Ms Dowd "I like her; she's willing to pick up her skirts and pee on anyone." True. Unfortunately, this willingness to pee for it's own sake--an attractive characteristic at many parties--helps trivialize politics. Hell, she contradicts herself. Consider that she has said in print that she now regrets the attention paid to Al Gore’s clothing in the 2000 election, and yet she still continues to focus on such issues. If attention had instead been paid in that election to the Bush economic policies, which by suggesting that the same money could be spent twice showed the man to be either a liar or a fool, the results would have been different