THIS MODERN WORLD

Okay, I think I’ve figured it out: Ana Marie Cox is the female David Brooks. Actually, that’s not quite fair to David Brooks, who’s positively insightful by comparison. Reading Ana Marie’s review of Katha Pollitt’s new book is more like reading Britney Spears’ thoughts on Noam Chomsky. “Like, whut is he so uptight about?”

She lays her cards down on the table in her opening paragraph:

Strident feminism can seem out of place — even tacky — in a world where women have come so demonstrably far. With Katie Couric at the anchor desk, Condoleezza Rice leading the State Department and Hillary Clinton aiming for the top of the ticket, many of the young, educated and otherwise liberal women who might, in another era, have found themselves burning bras and raising their consciousness would rather be fitted for the right bra (like on “Oprah”) and raising their credit limit.

Strident feminists — they’re just so tacky! Today’s modern woman rolls her eyes at those ridiculous bra burners from the sixties (apparently unaware that they are almost certainly an urban legend, albeit a convenient one for lazy writers).

It gets better, by which I mean worse. Much, much worse:

Katha Pollitt is the skunk at this “Desperate Housewives” watching party. Her new collection of essays, “Virginity or Death!,” culled from her columns for The Nation over the past five years, shows her to be stubbornly unapologetic in championing access to abortion and fixated on the depressingly slow evolution of women’s rights in the Middle East. In the midst of our celebration of Katie’s last day, Pollitt is the one who would drown out the clinking of cosmo glasses with a loud condemnation of the surgery available to those women who would sacrifice their little toes the better to fit their Jimmy Choos.

I’ve called myself a feminist for years. I’ve elbowed my way into more boys’ clubs than I care to remember and I once participated in a piece of street theater in support of Anita Hill — something else I’d just as well forget, actually. But the first thing I thought when I read Pollitt deride the false consciousness of pink-ectomy patients (O.K., maybe not the first) was “Does it really work?” While I hesitate to consider myself representative (and no, I would never actually do it), the ability to hold a predilection for stilettos and support for abortion rights in one’s head simultaneously seems suggestive of today’s compromised, complicated feminist mind-set.

This isn’t very clear writing, so just in case you glossed over her point: silly strident Katha is the sort of feminist shrew who gets upset about women voluntarily amputating their little toes in order to more comfortably wear ill-fitting designer shoes. Fun-loving Ana Marie, by contrast, is intrigued by the possibility of self-mutilation in pursuit of a fashion ideal!

What a chucklehead.

I think I’ve finally gotten thank you notes out to everyone who sent something off the Wish List over the past few months. If I missed you, though, please don’t mistake my personal disorganization for ingratitutde — I’ve said it before, but those unexpected little gifts showing up in the middle of a long day are one of the best perks of this job.

“Despite the cool weather, they’re blaming the rains and floods on, what? Global warming.” –Sean Hannity, derisively, a few seconds ago.

A couple weeks back, I mentioned the satirical NSA posters that I designed for a company called RSA Data Security back in 1995 (and which are, for obvious reasons, suddenly timely again). As I said then, these have apparently become quite the collector’s items in certain circles — I get email from people trying to find copies of them on a pretty regular basis. I didn’t think I had copies of them myself — but … I was going through a closet and found a mailing tube that didn’t appear to have been opened since I left the Bay Area, eleven years and (I think) six moves ago — and inside it, I found a small stash of those very posters in near-mint condition. Which made me very happy, because I like to have copies of these things for my archives. And since I’ve got a couple to spare, I’m putting one each of the two designs up on eBay, here and here. (Note: the images on the actual posters are much crisper than these low-res scans make them appear.) Since we’re on the verge of a long holiday weekend, I’m making it a ten day auction.

Now seems like a good time to remember this section from Hard News by Seth Mnookin:

[A]ccording to half a dozen sources within the Times, Raines wanted to prove once and for all that he wasn’t editing the paper in a way that betrayed his liberal beliefs… “My sense was that Howell Raines was eager to have articles that supported the warmongering out of Washington,” former investigative editor Doug Frantz wrote in an email…Frantz, who personally edited some of [Judith] Miller’s stories, went on to write, “He discouraged pieces that were at odds with the administration’s position on Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction and alleged links of Al Qaeda.”

Let’s see. How’s that working out for them?

The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee…said he will write Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, urging that the nation’s chief law enforcer “begin an investigation and prosecution of the New York Times — the reporters, the editors and the publisher.”

“We’re at war, and for the Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous,” King said.

I think the lesson here is clear: the NY Times still hasn’t proven, ONCE AND FOR ALL, that they’re not dirty liberals. But once they do, America’s right will surely leave them alone. That’s because America’s right is all about honest, fair-minded criticism.