I can understand why so many people hate Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair Magazine. To say he is a pompous ass doesn’t do his pomposity justice and could possibly be insulting to asses. I remember canceling my subscription to his adstravaganza some years ago, after Tina Brown moved on, as the magazine had taken on a decidedly sour-breath demeanour to anything not cutting edge avant-garde or extremely leftist.
In the March issue (The Hollywood Issue!) that I happened to run across at the dentist’s, his letter to the readers talked about how George W. Bush’s Washington had entered its ‘post-factual’ period. Quoting Mark Danner of The New York Times, Carter talks about how facts have become passé in Bush’s Washington, an outmoded convention that only squids care about.
It’s ironic that Carter should quote someone from the Times when writing about facts or the lack thereof, given that the vaunted Gray Lady has herself been living in a post-factual state for many decades. Since the 1920s The Times has missed hugely important facts throughout history and actually fabricated facts in its efforts to further the agenda of its reporters, editors and publishers.
among the facts missed by the Times was Stalin’s starvation of nearly 10,000,000 Ukrainians, for which Walter Duranty, the Times’ Moscow correspondent and friend of Stalin, collected a Pulitzer Prize. another fact the Times ignored was the systematic slaughter of Europe’s Jews during WW II, when the word "Jew" just didn’t appear in the Times.
Then of course, there’s the Jayson Blair affair. Blair was the New York Times reporter who famously lived in a world devoid of ‘facts’ and felt it necessary to create them. He managed to do this for several years, even when the Times’ own editors warned senior management that Blair was making it all up.
So it’s obvious that Carter must have harvested his ‘facts’ from someplace like The Times or Newsweek when he wrote his screed about the Bushies. His claim that "the Social Security program … not only works but works well" may be somewhat factual today, but that isn’t what the administration is talking about when it talks about "fixing Social Security" and Carter knows it. But the ‘facts’ are probably inconvenient to his sentiments, so why bother with them?
The funniest phrase in his letter and one that speaks volumes about Carter’s state of mind is "…the war avoider gets to strut the world stage like a bemedaled bantam rooster, and the war hero was made to crab-walk to the wings of the Senate like a wimp."
Now that’s what I call imagery! The way he makes it sound is as if Bush somehow did this through subterfuge; fooling over 53% of american voters into believing they were actually voting for the "crab-walking war hero" instead of the "war avoider". and of course wrapped in this tidbit is a nice chunk of doublethink: Carter chides Bush for his "calamitous war" while at the same time excoriating him for being a "war avoider". But then it’s very likely that only an intellect as nuanced and evolved as Graydon Carter’s is capable of making this kind of factual distinction.
There is something obsessively pitiful about a supposedly well-read, well-educated metrosexual, like Carter, who as the Larry Flint of soft porn, pretends to know facts from chopped liver.