UniBrow

I can sense it already, a malignancy stirring deep within the coils of this E! Online article: The unprincipled and the inglorious are joining with the unglamorous and the ill-proportioned–urged onward, all of them, by the talentless and the unsmiling–to read the sickest of calumnies into the news of Paula Abdul’s mishap with a household Chihuahua that resulted (for Ms. Abdul) in a broken nose and numerous other injuries (the canine was unhurt). Where does this come from? Surely the post of adjudicator of musical competence for a top-hole American television competition could be won only by persons of exemplary probity, unyielding conviction, and the finest discrimination. And if there is anything in this charming and gifted lady’s past, or in her character, that licenses these disgusting speculations, and could justifiably cause any reasoning mind to suspect that the incident did not occur exactly as Ms. Abdul, no doubt on her word of honor, said it did, then I would goddamn sure like to know what the fuck it is.

Part of me doesn’t like to take issue with the reader comments posted here at UniBrow. This is not from any excess of politeness or an aversion to confrontation; it’s just that commentators are so few and infrequent hereabouts that I have to fight back an impulse to organize a parade in the honor of anyone who bothers. And yet I can’t be expected to let a defense of Jane Smiley, even a qualified one, go unremarked.

Some time back, in response to our post concerning Jane’s determination never to help a homeless person who voted for Bush, a reader wrote:

Well, I think the intended shape of Ms. Smiley’s parable about stepping on the homeless Bush-voter implies that the Bush-voter “became” homeless as an indirect consequence of said vote (and a direct consequence of the Bush junta’s inept, semi-autistic stewardship) and therefore deserves no shekels.

Possibly, my friend, possibly–but I don’t think so. The main lines of opposition to Bush–and certainly Jane’s brief against the Dubya administration–arise from the Iraq War rather than from domestic economic dislocation. Had this been 25 years ago, as the Reagan administration was deploying supply-side economics and visiting economic hardship on those least able to cope with it, a “parable” about the recent voting history of homeless people would at least have been apposite. But to this point at least, Jane’s case against Bush has not been that he’s flooding the streets with destitute souls. If she had instead imagined asking, say, a maimed Iraq War veteran in need of alms which candidate he voted for in 2000 or 2004, and then proudly intoned that any who said he voted for Bush would as a result never see a dime of the proceeds of Moo, her anecdote would have been more coherent, though no less cruel or petty. No, I think Jane is saying that a vote for Bush puts you–whoever you are–beyond the reach of human compassion as she defines it. 

Finally, as a general thing, I think there’s much less chance of my missing a subtlety than of Jane Smiley’s actually having one.  

There are days when the universe manages not to seem like a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. I’m permitting myself a small degree of encouragement from the interest that the general reading public has demonstrated over the past few years in books that are calling religion to account for its crimes and fatuities. Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and now Christopher Hitchens have all moved boatloads of product with texts of this sort. Hitchens’s brand-new God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is No. 3 at The New York Times, and Dawkins’s The God Delusion–which appeared last September–reached the No. 1 slot at the Times and then remained at or near that wintry pinnacle for several weeks. Even now, eight months later, it’s fallen only as far as No. 17. And then what do you know but Jerry Falwell goes tits up, and I’m blown if I don’t notice in the media a somewhat more just appraisal of the reverend’s life and works than I had been bracing for. It’s true we’ve had to rely on Hitchens–both in a Slate column yesterday and also two nights ago on the TV with Gloria Vanderbilt’s boy–to carry the greater part of the load all by himself, but attention to Falwell’s more disgusting public pronouncements, his primitive eschatological lunacy, and general lowbrow hucksterism didn’t seem to be entirely lacking in the mainstream media. I had expected the major organs of American journalism to greet Falwell’s expiration with a wall-to-wall soft-focus affirmation of all that is faith-based–not that there wasn’t plenty of that: see, e.g., yesterday’s New York Times–but I was pleasantly surprised on the whole. Spring is here. The buds are on the trees; the lambs are in the meadow.

And I’m sure I’ll be better tomorrow. Here, meanwhile, is the clip of Hitchens with Anderson Cooper:

And here he is, appearing slightly the worse for drink, having his way with Sean Hannity: