Rose Defends Dowd

David Denby went on to The Charlie Rose Show to flog his rather thin and poorly researched treatise on snark, cleverly called Snark. See my earlier post about that flaming pile. About half the segment dealt, either directly or indirectly, with Denby’s perplexingly misguided focus on Maureen Dowd on what he sees as the faults of snark. As second movie string critic for the New Yorker (a magazine I am assured by some DailyKos diarists is still read and loved) Denby is a frequent guest on Rose's show critquing movies and other pop cultural flotsam. This time Denby is the one on the hot seat.



The full segment (link here) is nearly twenty minutes long, so I have painstakingly transcribed the portions that pertain most directly to Dowd. It is not an official transcript and I have done minor editing for clarity. For example, there is a lot of cross-talk that I have consolidated. That said, all errors is spelling, grammar, and punctuation that are not evident from the taped archive are mine alone.

I’m also dispensing with my usual color-coded blockquote format for just this post. My parenthetical asides are in italics.

Denby: Some people ask me “How you can attack Maureen Dowd of the New York Times for being snarky…

Rose: Exactly.

Denby: …and praise John Stewart?”

Rose: Yes!

Denby: “Isn’t he snarky? Or Keith Olbermann?”

Rose: It’s seems to me those are very different people because they’re in very different mediums, but go ahead.

Denby: My point was that Stewart and Colbert and Olbermann have a political passion. They think the government should not lie to the people. They think our civil liberties should not be invaded. Maureen Dowd makes fun of people’s appearance and affect and manner and so on. I don’t see any political idea at all of what government should be doing or what the point of government is or what the point of politics is. It’s all about ambition and sham.

So I’m to assume that by inference Denby is accusing Dowd of thinking the government should lie and invade our civil liberties. That is a shameful slur.

Rose: I’ll rise to defend Maureen because I differ with you about this. Plus, I like her and she’s a friend and all of that.

Denby: There is nothing personal here.

Really? Sure could have fooled me. The discussion veers off into what is and isn't snark, with the emphasis on what may or may not cover Maureen Dowd but not, say, John Stewart.

Denby: Look, Maureen Dowd, to come back to her, is brilliant. Look, We’re not talking talent here.

Rose: A Pulitzer Prize winner, I think.

Denby: Look, more than that. She’s brilliant with what she can do with language, but what I don’t see is any value there being defended. No matter what you’ve got, she’s against it. If you expose your throat, she’s going to leap with fangs. I mean she went after both Al Gore and George Bush in 2000. She reduced Gore, who is after all a serious guy who presents himself awkwardly to the public, she reduced him to a caricature.

Rose: Let me just say this...

Denby: She was widely imitated and it hurt.

Rose: If Al Gore can’t survive this, and he can. Look what happened to him, he’s done quite well. If Al Gore can’t survive whatever Maureen Dowd said…

Denby: What if he had been president instead of the disaster we had?

Rose: Wait, wait a minute…

Denby: She played a small role. She played a role. She played a role in that mess.

And here we are back to the camel's back theory of “It’s all Maureen’s fault because she said anything bad at all. If she had only be more of a team player..” hindsight. It doesn’t make sense to shoot the messenger no matter how accurate her aim was.

Rose: She played? I don’t want to make this about her because the theme is more important than one particular person, She said very, very difficult things about President Clinton at the height of his problems.

Denby: (nodding) President Bush.

Rose: …President Bush. And I suspect that at some point she will say very difficult things about President Obama.

Denby: She’s got trouble at the moment because he’s serious. He’s accountable. She can’t get a handle on him.

Rose: That criticism has been raised about everybody with respect to him.

Denby then goes on a long diatribe about how brilliant a satirist Colbert is because he is skewering right wing blowhards like O'Reilly while explaining Supreme Court decisions.

Denby: It’s not just making fun of someone who is physically vulnerable or has a strange manner or something. That’s the difference to me.

I had no idea Gore was such an drooling invalid, but Denby seems to think attacking him is on par with making fun of oddly dressed retards.

Rose: I think you are putting too much emphasis on that. You may have picked one or two columns. I mean, day in and day out, I know columnists, and I would include Maureen in this, are people who view the world of Washington with a sharp eye and sharp language. And it’s not just as you would suggest a long riff on people’s appearance.

Denby: Yes, I have no problem with that. I’m talking about a particular kind of malicious, nasty undermining humor which is value free.

Rose: Alright, let me roll tape. Here is Maureen Dowd on our show. Roll tape:

The clip is dated 8/27/04.

Dowd: The first couple of years of my column I just spent rolled up on the floor just crying. I mean, I found it so hard. And not the genre. The genre of column writing is hard, but they psychological pressure of being really tough. And with a woman they do tend to use different words. It’s like, you’re mean or you’re vituperative or you’re venomous which you don’t hear so much about Tom.

It’s like she is predicting Denby word for word.

Rose: Nobody is calling Tom Friedman “The Cobra.”

Dowd: Yeah, well you want to be liked. They don’t want everybody kind of hating.

Rose: Is there part of you that wants to be liked?

Dowd: All of me wants to be liked. What do you mean part of me? Yeah.

Rose: You like Bill Clinton?

She deftly avoids that minefield.

Dowd: Tom Friedman said once you get a column, you never make another friend.

Rose: That’s not true.

No, because Charlie has clearly become smitten.
The clip ends.

Denby: Tom Friedman is trying to save the world. He’s full of ideas.

Rose: So, wait, wait. The test of who’s snarky and who’s not snarky is what they want to do, what's their ambition in what they’re writing? That’s the test?

Denby: Yes. Seriousness in purpose. No matter how funny and nasty you are, if there is something serious behind it. And satire does that brilliantly from Jonathon Swift on down. Makes fun, but there’s some reforming instinct there. If you are just jumping at somebody’s weakness that is snark.

Rose: Alright, let’s move beyond that because if that is your test you have no basis to criticize Maureen Dowd if your test is seriousness of purpose.

Game, set and match goes to Rose. Denby’s accusations of Dowd are based on a false premise.

Denby: What is her values except that we should all be honest?

Rose: Her value is that she writes brilliantly and gives us an insight into sort of the behavioral aspects of people who aspire to lead.

Denby: She attacks everyone, Charlie. What would she have done with Abe Lincoln. I mean Honest Abe, really? Or FDR?

This is the sacred cows theory of criticism. Denby thinks some people should be above ridicule.

Rose: Hello? No worse than five or six other writers did with Abe Lincoln by the way.

Denby: Okay! But my point is that she’s often wrong.

And here is the crux of Denby’s attacks. He hates Dowd because she disagrees with him.

Rose: Moving beyond her only because it sounds like I’m trying to defend her because she’s a friend and I’m not. I think on the merit it looks that way.

No, Charlie, you’re dealing with a pompous ass with no internal logic to his arguments. Thank you for revealing that Denby’s grudge is against Dowd because he disagrees with her, not because of anything in particular about her style.

Me again. Nobody can say Maureen Dowd isn’t snarky. It’s her signature feature. What is in dispute is why Denby singles her out as the archetype of what he feels is wrong with snark. He accuses her of shallowness and a lack of perspective. He feels that some people are above criticism and he is the arbiter of what is and isn’t serious and high minded. Rose really skewers him on this point, but Denby wriggles away.

Denby postures as being high-minded and noble, but he is really just as mean and vicious as what he accuses Dowd of being. And he is far more deceptive about it and much less witty. And that is a far greater sin than being merely snarky.

Cheap Shots At The Queen of Snots

David Denby, an obscure film critic from a magazine nobody reads anymore, decided to make a name for himself by trashing Maureen Dowd in a book called Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal and It's Ruining Our Conversation. While the nominal reason is to advocate a return to civility, the real reason is to go on a character assassination tirade against Maureen Dowd. He rails on and on about how snarky writing is coarsening society, but the quasi-academic foundation-setting is really all build-up to the penultimate chapter (or 'Fit' as he more than appropriately calls them) devoted exclusively to Maureen Dowd, the only figure in the book to get such singular treatment.

A large portion of that chapter was excerpted in the New York Post, the trashy tabloidy competitor to the Times. For someone wanting to raise the level of discourse, Denby sure picked a weird place to do it. The Post, full of trashy stories and home to the ultra-snarky Page Six celebrity gossip column is most famous for its “Headless Body Found In Topless Bar” style of reporting, which may explain the "Queen of Snots" article title. Way to stay classy there.

Rather than just jump in on her, he butters her up with some faint praise.

Maureen Dowd has rhythm, pace, timing, an extraordinary ear, an amazing memory for odd bits of cultural flotsam. She's a brilliant aphorist who, in a few words, can say something it would take another writer paragraphs to spell out. She uses all the traditional tools of comedy - exaggeration, lampoon, insult, outrageous puns, fantasia - and gives them her own twist. She seems to have read everything, and she's shrewd about popular culture, particularly about the way movies colonize the country's unconscious.

Maybe it's her frequent movie allusions that bug Denby because he thinks that she is stepping on his turf. But what seems to annoy Denby most is her cynicism:

She assumes that everyone in politics is out for himself; that principles or beliefs in a politician are a set of self-flattering delusions; that the powerful are moved by jealousy, rivalry, narcissism, and fear of every sort - fear of being thought weak, most of all. She knows everything about poseurs and posing. But does she know anything else about politics?

No Denby, she knows nothing about politics. She was born in raised in Washington, DC. She worked for the Washington Star, Time magazine, and the New York Times without ever learning anything about politics. She must have won that Pulitzer Prize for fashion reporting. [/sarcasm]. To call her credentials as a journalist into question is just appalling and ridiculous. Denby must have another motive. Then he tips his hand:

Utterly repelled by piety and righteousness, she also seems bored by genuine advocacy. Disgusted by unbounded ambition, she never seems to wonder what an ambitious leader might do besides gratify himself. Her appetite for ridicule equals any politician's appetite for power, and maybe the two hungers aren't all that different.

Her problem, as he sees it, is that she is not partisan enough. She doesn’t overlook the peccadilloes of politicians when it would serve a greater good. And he is most upset at her picking on Al Gore and the Clintons. He has bought into the myth that Maureen Dowd single-handedly brought down Gore’s disastrous 2000 campaign. Of course, she needed a little help from 92,000 Nader supporters, hundreds of senile Palm Beach County voters, and five Supreme Court justices, but in Denby's mind, Maureen Dowd making fun of Al Gore’s suits was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Not only has Denby nursed this grudge for nearly a decade, he also finds it unforgivable that she dare to criticize Hillary Clinton. He makes the very vicious accusation that Maureen’s motives were merely to tear down the chances of a female candidate just because she was a woman.

At times, Dowd seemed eager to punish Hillary for her ambitions, as if deep down she were alarmed by the idea of a woman making so great a claim for herself, and snark filled the space where sympathy - or perhaps rueful appreciation-should have been. And, of course, what Clinton actually wanted to do as president - which, after all, might have validated her presumption - was of no interest to Dowd. Policy is for drips.

Again, here is the thesis that Dowd should have overlooked the failings of a candidate in order to support a greater good. Denby doesn’t want a critic, he wants a cheerleader. While accusing Dowd of being as sexist, catty, jealous woman, he is exposing his own prejudices. He dismisses Dowd’s attacks on George W. Bush as being too coddling and ineffective. So when Maureen attacks a Democrat she is being destructive, but she isn’t vicious enough when criticizing conservatives? You can’t have it both ways, Denby.

Denby has managed to bottle his rage and spill it onto a rather slender ranting polemic that he has the nerve to charge nearly twenty bucks for just to settle some scores with a columnist that he blames for the defeat of his candidates.

That’s just sad and desperate. The subtitle of the book is "It's Mean, It's Personal and It's Ruining Our Conversation", but it is Denby's book that is mean and personal. It is a vicious personal attack on a professional rival disguised as a noble treatise. The sole point of a hundred and fifty pages of rather widely margined and generously spaced build-up is so that he can take cheap shots at the writer he blames for his party's mistakes.

If I were snarky, I’d bring up the flagrant errors that riddle his book, but that would be unkind. Instead let’s have some sympathy for a bitter man who does a year of shoddy research and Google surfing just to hit a woman.