More Rhetorical Excess

Via.

More Stephens on Williamson:

Dear Kevin, 

I’m sorry to have to write you, for two reasons. Sorry, first, that you have to endure having your character assailed and assassinated by people who rarely if ever read you and likely never met you. Sorry also that your hiring as a writer for The Atlantic has set off another censorious furor in media circles when surely there are more important subjects on this earth.

(1) "I'm sorry to have to write you" is the form of an apology, when you're going to give somebody pain but your position obliges you do to it, as in "As Tiffany's teacher, I'm sorry to have to inform you that she is a very unpleasant little girl." Since this is not your plan, why are you doing that? (2) You don't have to write Kevin D. Williamson in any way, as a matter of fact. If you did, publishing your letter in The Times isn't the best way to get to him. I'm sure you could just pop him an email. Moreover, it's clear that you're not writing him. You're writing me, as a subscriber to the paper. And I didn't ask you. (3) I don't think anybody is in fact assailing, still less assassinating, Williamson's character. I think they're complaining about the shit he writes for public consumption, which is his job, which, to be sure, makes him look as if he had a pretty bad character (it's unlikely somebody would try to hide his true character by saying he believes women who have abortions deserve the same punishment as criminal homicides). I must say I love the idea that people can't judge your writing unless they've met you. (4) So this column is to quiet the censorious furor in media circles by publishing a column on the subject, in a censorious tone, in The Times? Or is that what you meant in the first place? "I'm sorry my censoriousness obliges me to contribute another 800 words to the furor when I'm sure you and everybody else would prefer me to be writing about something important."

It lacks (damn the word!) empathy

Another Blast From Kevin D. Williamson's Past:  Remember how he took on the white working class Trump supporter in March 2016 as "whelping human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog"? That's the kind of spirit they need at The Atlantic!

Mr. Trump Potato Head, by Hannah Rothstein. Via Time.

Kevin D. Williamson of the National Review, a day or two ago, telling us how he really feels about those white working class Trump voters (rearranging slightly):

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization.... Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America.... nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.

You seem nice, Kevin.

And now he can't believe everybody's so pissed off with him! Well, I guess he remembers it a little differently, because he doesn't wonder if he was wrong to compare people to dysfunctional, negligent, incomprehensibly malicious stray dogs who are 100% to blame for whatever suffering they may endure. What? No, he thinks it's about the advice he gave them; he's

For the Record: How Many Divisions Has the National Review?

Via.

The genial Jeet Heer of what we used to call Even-The-Liberal-New-Republic is flummoxed, and he's not the only one, by the Atlantic's hiring of Kevin D. Williamson not just because he's a colossally bad, pretentious and malapropic writer (in The Atlantic of all magazines, whose founders included Emerson and Longfellow and whose first editor was James Russell Lowell, with a history of immense literary distinction down to Ta-Nehisi Coates), not just because he's unable to refrain from insulting persons of genders or skin colors other than his own—but just because who cares what Kevin D. Williamson thinks, or the brave little coterie of anti-Trump conservatives in general (including Bret Stephens recently posted from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times, and Megan McCardle from that same Atlantic to the Washington Post a movement of less intellectual significance now than it has had for more than 60 years, a bunch of utterly discredited cranks with no ideas at all:

On the Kevin Williamson thing, leaving everything else aside, I'm just puzzled by mainstream editors elevating Never Trump conservatives, who nearly rival tankies for political irrelevance.

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) March 24, 2018

So I believe I actually have a piece of an idea:

Kevin Williamson's Heart of Darkness

In honor of Kevin D. Williamson's accession from the National Review to the hallowed precincts of The Atlantic, I'm reposting what I'm pretty sure is the funniest piece I've written about him and his remarkable literary style (plus bonus Duke Ellington), from August 2014:

Papa K illustrating the "West Side" sign, possibly making a universal gesture of primate territorial challenge as well.

I just found out (via Sick Horses) that National Review has taken to running literary fiction, starting with a charming effort by its "roving correspondent" and Chancellor of the Exchequer Kevin Williamson, entitled "Where the Sidewalk Ends: Danger and Despair in Pat Quinn's Crumbling Illinois".

The story is a journey narrative, a re-imagining of a trip to East St. Louis, Illinois, as an enchanted, surreal landscape seen through a child's eyes, taking its cue, as the title makes clear, from Shel Silverstein's poem: