Kettle-Corn Kevin

Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls, 1966.

London Skinheads, 1980s, photograph curated (I guess) by Sean Reveron.

Haven't noticed National Review's Kevin D. Williamson ("Whose Streets, Indeed?") doing this in a long time, pretending to be Tom Wolfe:

S

o there’s this really whacked-out young lady just absolutely spitting high on rage with one of those weird Chelsea Girl fringe haircuts like skinhead molls used to wear back in the Age of Reagan and she is right at this moment very fixated on — and I am not making this up — kettle corn, that weird repulsive caramel-coated Dutch mutant popcorn varietal sold at state fairs and any place men in laced-up pirate blouses are gathered, and she’s just going on and on about it, screaming at the top of her skinny little lungs: “It’s salty and sweet! It’s salty and sweet! It’s salty and sweet!”

This is some of your High Bad Writing indeed, pounding the reader with cultural signifiers without regard to the laws of physics, in allowing a character to be simultaneously wearing two completely different haircuts and whacked out on rage while fixated on snacks, I mean even if rage really does give you munchies, which is somewhat at odds with my own experience of both, can you be fixated on kettle corn and spitting with rage at the same instant? Or is it the kettle corn that enrages her? Is she high on rage because it's salty and sweet? Does that give her something in common with Kevin D. Williamson? How many places are there where men in laced pirate blouses gather, other than Disney movie sets and maybe a Halloween party gone wrong, and are any of them really state fairs? Do our lungs in fact comport with our body types, do we have fat lungs, skinny lungs, and mesomorphic lungs to match the various torsos that enclose them?

For the Record: Can Korean-Americans be Racists?

Like did somebody say there was anything wrong with being an underground goblin?  Via Monsters Vault.

I feel like I warned everybody about Kevin Williamson, that when the Atlantic hired him and then fired him over his ridiculously ghoulish tweets demanding capital punishment for women who undergo abortions—by hanging if I remember it right—the world would have been better off focusing on what a terrible writer he was, and how thoroughly dishonest, instead of pressing him like a mob of Jake Tappers to confess that he really wanted mass executions, which of course he didn't, he's much too clubbable for that—he just wanted to make people's flesh creep, like the fat boy in Pickwick Papers, only with self-righteousness instead of honest fear, and without any sense that his stupid and careless words were encouraging actual real-world abortion haters to kill, as they have killed before—

But no, everybody wanted to make it about the tweets, and now the world has constructed its equal and opposite reaction in the form of The New York Times hiring a gifted young tech writer, Sarah Jeong, to serve on its editorial board, and a massive rightwing butthurt protest because she once emitted some mean tweets, displaying an alarming lack of compassion for white people, because that's one of the big issues of the day. For example, in response to some especially obnoxious "can we hear both sides?" tweet from Andrew Sullivan in 2014, she'd responded,

Comically enough, this was the one Andrew Sullivan himself would personally call out four years later, as especially hurtful, completely unaware that it had been composed as a direct parody of his own most offensively just-saying "can't we at least consider the possibility that black people are genetically predisposed to sit around gossiping in the low-stress environment of the African savannah?" manner.

Everything's going to be fine for Sarah Jeong, the Times has backed her up appropriately, but I really can't pass over the implication around the intertubes that it's somehow impossible for Asian women to suffer discrimination:

The Silence of Kevin Williamson

Effie Deans, by John Everett Miilais. Lillie Langtry is said to have been the model. Via RubyLane.

Anti-abortion freak Kevin D. Williamson continued today to be silenced (in Lemieux's conception) by the thought hegemony of the international cultural Marxist left. This morning he was silenced in a full-length column in the Washington Post, "The Punishment I Favor for Abortion", in which he suggests that he's finally going to tell us whether or not he thinks women who have abortions should be executed by hanging, as would have happened to poor Effie Deans in the Edinburgh Tolbooth Prison in Walter Scott's The Heart of Midlothian (1818), if her brave sister Jeanie hadn't walked clear from Dumfriesshire to London to beg the queen for her life (though Effie was charged not with abortion, which wasn't covered by criminal law in Scotland in the 1720s or anywhere else, but with killing her newborn, and indeed turned out to be innocent of that as well, somewhat to her own surprise).

Which was a question of some suspense, for Williamson followers (see Roy), because he's been teasing us for a while now, not saying anything about it in the piece Wall Street Journal published when he was being silenced over there last Friday, refusing to tell Ed Kilgore of New York Magazine unless New York agreed to publish his essay on the subject, which he explained to us this week when he was silenced at The Weekly Standard:

Poser

First issue, 1857, via Wikipedia.

OK, so one last moment of engagement with the saga of Kevin D. Williamson, because as it turns out the whole thing really was about one tweet, apparently, or Williamson's inability to give a satisfactory explanation of it to the Atlantic's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg:

Specifically, the subject of one of Kevin’s most controversial tweets was also a centerpiece of a [2014] podcast discussion in which Kevin explained his views on the subject of the death penalty and abortion. The language he used in this podcast—and in my conversations with him in recent days—made it clear that the original tweet did, in fact, represent his carefully considered views. The tweet was not merely an impulsive, decontextualized, heat-of-the-moment post, as Kevin had explained it. Furthermore, the language used in the podcast was callous and violent. This runs contrary to The Atlantic’s tradition of respectful, well-reasoned debate, and to the values of our workplace.

Kevin is a gifted writer, and he has been nothing but professional in all of our interactions. But I have come to the conclusion that The Atlantic is not the best fit for his talents, and so we are parting ways.

Which was the one issue I hadn't really given a lot of attention to, interested as I was in Williamson's general tendency to dehumanize whoever he doesn't like, from African American children in East St. Louis, Illinois to the Trump voters of Hardscrabble, New York and Childwhelp, Kentucky, and the success with which he masquerades (like William F. Buckley, Jr., or Mr. Bret Stephens) as the kind of writer somebody like Jeffrey Goldberg might refer to as "gifted".

Rhetorical Excess

Mr. Bret Stephens writes a letter to his pal Kevin D. Williamson, newly appointed columnist for The Atlantic, commiserating with him over the sad fate of being criticized ("The Outrage Over Kevin Williamson"):

The case against you, as best as I can tell, rests on three charges. You think abortion is murder and tweeted — appallingly in my view — that doctors and women should perhaps be hanged for it. You believe “sex is a biological reality” and that gender should not be a choice. And you once boorishly described an African-American boy in East St. Louis, Ill., “raising his palms to his clavicles, elbows akimbo, in the universal gesture of primate territorial challenge.”

My view is that there are more important charges than these: he is a bad writer and dishonest. For example, he falsely accused Jonathan Chait of using a strawman argument in a piece in which he himself used an idiotic strawman argument, an awful ad hominem argument, and two serious falsehoods, followed by a second post in which he falsely accused Chait of dishonesty, and falsely claimed that the great socialist writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., agreed with him (Williamson) that human inequality is genetically determined (of course the basic criticism there applies to Stephens too). I wrote it up in 2015:

Tough Enough

National Review's Kevin D. Williamson, continuing his discussion of the David Mamet fake toughness of Donald J. Trump, works himself into a funny rhetorical pickle on the subject of the genuinely tough, where he nominates the military heroes, Senator McCain and former president George H.W. Bush:

The fact that McCain has been something of a disappointment as a senator and a presidential candidate invites reflection upon the actual political value of personal toughness. George H. W. Bush finished flying a World War II combat mission while bleeding from a head wound in an airplane that was on fire before parachuting into the Pacific, where he evaded vengeful Japanese soldiers who were just then engaged in torturing and eating their prisoners. He was somehow lampooned as a “wimp” by the same media that had earlier accused him of being a bloodthirsty killer (it was alleged that he had strafed a Japanese lifeboat), and some conservatives joined in that, Pat Buchanan among them. The wimp flew 58 combat missions, whereas tough-guy Trump might play 58 holes of golf in an unusually active fortnight. But George H. W. Bush’s genuine toughness and courage was nearly irrelevant to his performance in office.

Given that Trump has visited a golf course 43 times in the first 14 fortnights/28 weeks of his presidency, or almost exactly 3 times per fortnight, I'd suggest he plays at least 54 holes in a normal fortnight. (Reporters aren't generally allowed to know when he's playing, and he's known to have claimed he was doing a meeting when he was actually on the course; more details and possibly different calculations here.) The 58 holes of an unusually active fortnight would be when he's interrupted on the fifth hole of a fourth round because he's required to do something presidential. That would indeed be unusual. He's so lazy he's been known to drive his cart across a putting green, something even an ignoramus like me can recognize as disgusting. Perhaps that is one reason he is reluctant to play on courses he doesn't own.

National Review gets into The Normalizing

Image via.

At the National Review, Kevin D. Williamson dips a toe into The Normalization:

I do not agree with Donald Trump about much of anything. Early in the primary season, I wrote a little book titled “The Case against Trump.”

An extremely little book (48 200-words-per-page sides, or maybe 30 pages of manuscript, rushed out to cash in on the #NeverTrump flutter in the conservative movement before it fainted and died) in the Encounter Broadsides series beginning with a lively complaint that if it were 160 years ago and Trump were British he would probably oppose the repeal of the Corn Laws, which I think has to be one of the weakest arguments against Trump that has yet been deployed—not that I'd be against Repeal myself, of course, if I were an Englishman in 1846, I just think it's very hard to be sure how Trump would have felt about it, if he were somebody else in a different place and a different time, and equally hard to see why it's important.

And going on to clarify that Trump is actually right about immigration, though illiberal and wrong at the same time, and not a racist, because the racists just happen to be right about immigrants: "The litany of complaints is no less true for being dear to the hearts of bigots", because he has some evidence to suggest that Latino people in the United States are generally poorer than white people, and also a little more criminal, as poorer people often are, though Williamson doesn't of course mention that immigrant Latinos as opposed to US-born ones are on the whole significantly less criminal—

Friday cheap shots: Baseless Rhetoric

Image via the Toms River Patch.

Now we know what the price of Christie's Trump endorsement was: cash (via WNYC).

At a rally of about a thousand people at the armory in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, Thursday, Governor Chris Christie introduced the guest of honor, saying: "Let me bring you the next President of the United States, Donald Trump!"

But this was no ordinary political Trump rally. Tickets cost $200 a person, and the money was used to pay off Christie’s debt left over from his presidential campaign.

WNYC's Matt Katz says that with about 1,000 people attending the rally, that went a long way toward wiping out Christie's $250,000 debt. And that wasn't all. 

"Before the event, Trump did a roundtable fundraiser that cost between $20,000 and $25,000 a person, There were about 18 people there," Katz said. "That money was actually used to pay off Bridgegate lawyers that the state Republican party had hired after they got hit with subpoenas more than two years ago. There’s a half-million dollars owed to those Bridgegate attorneys. And now, thanks to Trump — who six months ago campaigned against Christie by saying he knew about Bridgegate — that debt is mostly paid off."

And what Trump gets out of it is a representative of the "conservative establishment" he can victimize in public, to his (pained) face:

Ochone!

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

Sticking to his guns

Image via Pleated Jeans.

Our old friend Kevin D. Williamson of the National Review (quoted on Monday by Steve M), making fun of the urban myth that mass shootings of the Umpqua Community College type are some kind of problem:

we love stories. We love them more than we love reality: The Republican party is not run by a secret cabal of warmongering billionaires; Barack Obama is a cookie-cutter Ivy League lefty, not a Kenya-born al-Qaeda plant; you’re going to die from emphysema or from being fat rather than from Ebola or a resurgent Islamic caliphate; the people who commit the murders are for the most part going to be ordinary criminals going about ordinary criminal business, and a fair number of the people they kill are the same thing.

I couldn't get over the implication there that murder itself is not a problem in the US, because it's not a problem for Kevin D. Williamson and other upstanding citizens; it's just an occupational hazard of ordinary criminal business, whatever that is—if people don't want to get shot to death, you know, they really need to make better life choices, and the wider society can't help with that.

Meaning, pretty clearly, that it's only a problem for black people, nothing serious, because that's the memetic heritage of this argument, as put out in such respectable sources as the World Nut Daily, or the Arkansas Council of Conservative Citizens, based on the technique of lumping together a large number of bona fide statistical views of a single problem as if they were independently correlated variables:

Rhetorical excess

Blowhard.

Kevin D. Williamson of the National Review, on Thursday, writes about "Inequality Warriors Vs. the Family and the Individual", chides persons of progressive views over

the inequality that you purport to be committed to eradicating.

and invites us to

abandon the inequality crusade

(for comments see Scott Lemieux at LGM) but, on Friday, objects with some agitation to having his rhetoric criticized:

Annals of derp: Ted Cruz is an ignoramus

,

Via Flat Earth Society.

Senator Ted Cruz, as reported by Bloomberg:

"Today the global warming alarmists are the equivalent of the flat-Earthers," Cruz said. "You know it used to be it is accepted scientific wisdom the Earth is flat, and this heretic named Galileo was branded a denier."

Galileo never denied that the Earth was flat, matter of fact, because he never in his life met anybody who thought the Earth was flat. It would have been impossible to even bring it up in conversation. He denied that the Earth was at the center of the universe, and got jailed for it by the Vatican, but the more-or-less sphericality of the Earth was entirely well-known to every educated person including his jailers. Ted Cruz is an ill-educated idiot.

National Review fail of the week: the People's House

Via ScottSeesThings.

My occasional correspondent Kevin D. Williamson has some fun over at The Corner with some unhappy innumeracy from Alternet (now withdrawn from the site, because unlike National Review they do correct errors over there sometimes):

Here is an excerpt from an Alternet article by Kali Holloway republished by Salon. See if anything about the GDP figures jumps out at you.

How conservatives think

Celine painted-toe heels, spring 2013. Via.

Something funny from the short-paragraph factory at Heritage Foundation's Daily Dogwhistle, sorry, make that Daily Signal, their would-be counterpart to Think Progress:

War on women. Minimum wage. Climate change.

You hear liberals talking about these same topics all the time. Why?

Running the rhetorical gamut

From Liar Game 156, via MangaPanda.

Alyssa Rosenberg mocked conservative admirers of the film The Giver, dryly, for the suggestion that normal humanity is some kind of special uniquely conservative quality:

the movie makes absolutely clear that it is grotesque to kill a baby who cries when he is not soothed and that something is missing in families designed by the state. Though it may be in Palin’s and Lopez’s interests to suggest otherwise, these ideas are hardly the sole provenance of conservatives. Suggesting that people who advocate for continued access to abortion do not care about the welfare of young children is an unpleasant rhetorical gamut, but often an effective one.

Kevin D. Williamson of the National Review responds:

Heart of Whiteness

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:

Obama derangement: The acute phase

Circus Elephant. Roger Hilton, 1973. From Animalarium.

Kevin D. Williamson at National Review tries to strike the magazine's old note of magisterial grandeur, or at least General Jack D. Ripper paranoia:

Conservatives have for years attempted to put our finger upon precisely why Barack Obama strikes us as queer in precisely the way he does. There is an alienness about him...