"In today’s therapy-saturated culture, you hear countless messages about what therapy is and what it is for...."

"Back in 1979, the historian and critic Christopher Lasch wrote that the New Left had retreated from politics and turned inward, focusing on personal psychological well-being instead of external collective struggles. These days that is funnily reversed: Psychology is often used, especially online, as a way to collectively press others. In some corners therapy has become a kind of social imperative, something anyone can urge strangers to engage in — not so they can explore their own experiences, but so their psychic toxicity can be contained before it spills onto others. Social media is filled with memes and jokes in which people 'beg' men to get therapy, or deploy variations of the formula that 'men will literally do anything but go to therapy.'..."

From "Is It Toxic to Tell Everyone to Get Therapy?/It has become a social credential to be in therapy. It’s also incredibly difficult to access" by Zachary Siegel (NYT). 

The link on Lasch goes to a 2010 essay — by Lee Siegel — about Lasch's 1979 book, "The Culture of Narcissism":

"As what one might call a celebrity emotion, empathy is often simplified and caricatured. It’s hardly an entirely positive attribute."

"Being able to feel what another person is feeling can also allow someone to manipulate or injure another person. Sadists can be as empathetic as therapists. Iago is the most empathetic figure in literature—he feels every nuance and degree of Othello’s insecurity and plays on them to destroy him. Yet in a democratic society, where individual freedom abounds at historically unique levels, empathy is indispensable. In a dictatorship, it doesn’t matter if you’re aware of another person’s inner state; the regime regulates relations between people. In a democracy, however, the people themselves regulate the relations between them.... In a democracy, [Toqueville] writes, 'each [man] may judge in a moment of the sensations of all the others; he casts a rapid glance upon himself, and that is enough....' If it is true that the essence of a functioning democracy is the ability of its people to feel empathy for one another, then the widespread reliance on antidepressants.... is like some cruel joke. Add to the pharmacological cultivation of emotional blunting the emotionally blunting effect of lives lived increasingly online, and you have a democracy resting on a fundamentally anti-democratic way of life."

 
Writes Lee Siegel in "Antidepressants, Empathy, and Democracy/Is the American way of life threatened by the growing proportion of citizens taking psychiatric medications?" (City Journal).

"If, in a spirit of free intellectual and imaginative inquiry, you dared to suggest that a man who masturbated in front of a woman he barely knew without her consent..."

"... might have been acting out, in an attitude of aggressive contempt, his own shame and emasculation — if you tried to understand his actions, without justifying them — you would be shouted down and vilified. Imagine the outcry if you went further and speculated about why Harvey Weinstein allegedly manipulated some actresses dependent on his power into watching him while he was naked. Could it be that Mr. Weinstein, who reportedly had often been mocked for his appearance, wanted to dehumanize these women as well, while at the same time turning himself into a person who is watched and admired, like a person of beauty?... [I]n the realm of the free operation of intellect and imagination that is culture, let there bloom the suspension of moral judgment for the sake of a better understanding of our moral natures. It’s not because we owe anything to the likes of Harvey Weinstein; it’s because of what we owe ourselves."

Writes Lee Siegel in the NYT in "Whatever Happened to Moral Rigor?" — remembering the old days when James Baldwin, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer engaged in the "imaginative inhabiting" of evildoers.

ADDED: Siegel writes:

Closer to our own time and place, Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas accidentally kills a white woman in the novel “Native Son,” and then rapes and murders a black woman; Gore Vidal wrote with sympathy about Timothy McVeigh; and David Mamet composed “Oleanna,” a prescient play about sexual harassment, accusation, guilt and innocence that, famously, had no clear resolution.

But he seems to have missed the news (last February) that David Mamet says he's written a play about Harvey Weinstein.

"Lee Siegel courageously speaks up on behalf of everyone who lacks a sense of humor."

Top rated comment at an NPR interview with Lee Siegel, who has written a biography of Groucho Marx, about whom he says:

The conventional image of Groucho was that he was on the side of the little guy, and he spoke defiantly and insolently to powerful people and wealthy people... But my feeling is that Groucho was out to deflate everybody — that he was a thoroughgoing misanthrope.... His misogyny is relentless and thoroughgoing, and it's very hard to tolerate. His attacks on Margaret Dumont almost always take the form of attacking her status as a woman. And it's very odd that he keeps attacking her, because of course she might be wealthy and she might be somewhat clueless and she might be puffed up with her own virtue — but she's actually fairly kind, and a harmless person who just wants to help out these impostors Groucho is inhabiting. But he keeps insulting her for being a woman. And you don't find the same thing in Chaplin or Laurel and Hardy or W.C. Fields, but with the Marx Brothers, yeah, they took woman hatred to a whole new level. It's difficult to watch.

Is it? Margaret Dumont thought of herself as a great straightwoman. Check out the evidence... if it's not too difficult to watch:



ADDED: Having given this post the "Lee Siegel" tag, I clicked on it, and found 2 old posts that caught my fancy. First was a September 2013 post about a Siegel op-ed "When City Elections Were Fun," remembering the time Norman Mailer ran for office.

Back then, the race for mayor was fueled by the outsize talent that powered New York itself. In contrast, in the current campaign season we have the spectacle of figures whose substance consists of embarrassing character defects, fiery (yawn) rhetoric and patient waiting for a rival’s implosion.... But imagine if the present-day city... were to produce even one candidate with his brio and originality."

Ha ha. What are the chances Siegel is enjoying Donald Trump, who's an outsize New York talent? I like that old post because it gave me an opportunity to show you a photo of me in 1970 sitting under a Mailer-for-Mayor poster. (The first comment says, justifiably, "Althouse looks like a member of the Manson Family in that 1970 photo.")

The second old post is "Adventures in sock puppetry," from 2007. Lee Siegel had gotten into trouble writing under a pseudonym in his own comments section at TNR. I had written about it, and when somebody showed up as "Lee Siegel" in my comments, I assumed it was somebody else appropriating his name and deleted him. "Lee Siegel" emailed asking to be restored and I needed him to prove it really was him.

He's all:

Prove it to you? Are you kidding? You want me to Fedex you my passport? What childishness. Then I guess you can't prove that anyone is who he says he is who writes in to your "blog." Hey, it's me. You just don't want to restore my post. So don't. One more tale from the brave new blogosphere.

I retort:

You've given me the proof that you are not Lee Siegel. Thanks.

Am I wrong?

"Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they’ve stolen."

An old Mort Sahl joke, quoted in a NYT piece by Lee Siegel titled "Welcome to the Age of the Unfunny Joke."

Siegel, who's about to publish a biography of Groucho Marx, has observations like: "The laughter, if it comes, is a new kind of laughter: a satisfying release, but also distracted by an undercurrent of hard fact. In that sense, humor today is a continuing assault, or insurrection."

How far into the past do we need to go to find humor that wasn't interwoven with real-life things thing disturb us? Freud had that figured out in 1905.

Siegel ought to have to give us evidence that there was an earlier era when jokes had no "undercurrent of hard fact," when people giggled over jokes that did not relate to the troubles of real life. To the extent that Siegel is saying that many of today's real-life-related jokes aren't funny, there have always been unfunny jokes.

Maybe his point is: These days, we feel social pressure to accept and act appreciative of unfunny comedy that makes reference to subject matter that we believe we're supposed to take seriously. In the older era, the jokes about disturbing subjects gave us release, and that's why we laughed. In the new era, there's no release from anxiety. The laughter is the manifestation of anxiety about being seen as good people who care about the serious things we understand we're supposed to care about.

"Or maybe our attempts to get at the truth of an imbroglio, like that involving Farrow and Allen, reflect a frustrated aspiration to retrieve some kind of shared, collective truth, period."

That's one sentence in a belabored essay by Lee Siegel titled "Is the News Replacing Literature?" Subheading that appears at the top of my browser but not on the page: "Woody Allen and Dylan Farrow v. Proust and Kafka."

Of course, Woody Allen has written innumerable screenplays in the 20 years that have gone by since we first heard the accusations about what he might have done to Dylan. We still consume those things. We (some of us) endeavor to fathom "Blue Jasmine" or whatever his movie of the year is.

But Siegel insists: "Instantaneous news of what happened, or might have happened, has become our art, and, like the chorus in ancient Greek tragedy, we are all part of the swelling roar." If so, is this bad? In novels, the characters are fictional, so our inferences from the evidence don't pass judgment on anyone real. If we can't see all the facts, it's because the author created ambiguity or didn't foresee all the various ideas we'd have, reading, and the additional things we might think we need to know.

It's a mental exercise, reading fiction, and the author may be a despicable person, like Woody Allen, if Woody Allen really did the things he's accused of, so maybe it is better to stretch our minds over the framework of some news story, like the story of Woody and Dylan. There, the facts are incomplete for a different reason, but the incompleteness is reality-based: Reporters can't get any deeper into the truth of the past. If we judge, we judge real people, and that isn't merely a mental exercise. We risk our own morality.

Siegel observes "a backlash of fanatical certainty and malevolent personal projection" in much of the "swelling roar" about Woody and Dylan, but people say foolish things about art too. High art is a filter. Who has opinions about Proust and Kafka? Maybe what's really eating Siegel is that those who used to consume high art and exchange their fanatical certainties and malevolent personal projections amongst themselves have joined the mob blabbering about news stories, and where can you find the truly excellent people anymore?

"Quite simply, the book review is dead, and the long review essay centered on a specific book or books is staggering toward extinction."

"The future lies in a synthetic approach. Instead of books, art, theatre, and music being consigned to specialized niches, we might have a criticism that better reflects the eclecticism of our time, a criticism that takes in various arts all at once. You might have, say, a review of a novel by Rachel Kushner that is also a reflection on 'Girls,' the art of Marina Abramović, the acting style of Jessica Chastain, and the commercial, theatrical, existential provocations of Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus. Or not. In any case, it’s worth a try."

Writes Lee Siegel in The New Yorker, longingly. Why in that example did he name 5 women and allude (via "Girls") to at least 4 more? Have women overrun culture in some anarchic way, making the single-mindedness of the stereotypical male seem old-fashioned? The future is all wildly free-associative, like the fever-swamp brain of some lady blogger.

***

"Yes, but what does sprezzatura think of it?"

"It would be obscene to pine for the urban agony that fomented [Norman] Mailer’s run [for Mayor of NYC]."

"But imagine if the present-day city, so bright and neatly quantified on the surface, so excluding and unequal just underneath, were to produce even one candidate with his brio and originality."

Writes Lee Siegel, in a NYT op-ed titled "When City Elections Were Fun."

I'm blogging this in part so I can show you (once again) one of my favorite old pictures:



That's the 4th time I've put that picture on the blog. (Previously: "The 51st State," "Norman Mailer died," and "Althouse in 1970.")

IN THE COMMENTS: EDH says: "Althouse looks like a member of the Manson Family in that 1970 photo." And I say "That’s exactly what I thought when I was putting the picture up!" Also, discussion of where I am, what color was may hair, and what was I holding in my hands 43 years ago. 

PHOTO CREDIT: Stephen Cohen.

Why is Chelsea Clinton leading a big new religion program at NYU?

"The former first daughter has tackled what the school calls a 'multifaith' role as co-founder and co-chair of its brand-new Of Many Institute. The program is described by the university as aiming to 'develop multifaith dialogue and train multifaith leaders.'"

Back in September, Clinton — who’s married to banker Marc Mezvinsky — told Time of her desire to study faith and education: “With all candor, because my husband is Jewish and I’m Christian, and we’re both practicing, it’s something that’s quite close to home,” she said.

A rep for NYU told us that the Of Many program is not academic, but is a part of the university’s Center for Spiritual Life. NYU’s Web site says the institute has developed a “minor degree in multifaith and spiritual leadership” shared with the Silver School of Social Work and the Wagner School.

I have never associated Chelsea Clinton with religion. She has a Master of Public Health degree from Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health and she's been teaching graduate level classes there.

But maybe the NYU "Of Many" concept of religion really is about "public health." Let's think about the interwoven nature of public health and religion — especially as the Clintons might understand it. When Hillary Clinton first emerged on the national scene, she was associated with religion. I remember a magazine cover — was it Tikkun? — depicting her as "St. Hillary" and lots of talk about "the politics of meaning," which was some politics-and-religion theme back in the 90s. And Hillary segued into public health in a way that we were supposed to understand, but didn't.

So here comes Hillary II, Chelsea Clinton merging health and religion. What does it all mean? How well will this lay the groundwork for a career in politics? I strongly prefer the separation of government and religion, and I don't want government to wield the powers of religion or powers over the human mind that are too much like the power of religion. And though government is going to have some role in public health, its growing and over-intrusive activity is disturbing. A politician who builds a career in health and religion should scare us. This is wedging very deeply into the realm of the individual — mind and body.

Here's some background reading: "All Politics is Cosmic," a 1996 article in The Atlantic by Lee Siegel, reviewing Michael Lerner's book "The Politics of Meaning." Excerpt:

"I have never seen a wildly successful adult who got there because his mother made him cry over his grades."

Says Ben Stein:

Men and women succeed because they find a field of endeavor that matches their interests and abilities. It's that simple. They then motivate themselves and achieve.... I don't believe the most successful people are the ones who got the best grades, got into the best schools, or made the most money. The most successful ones are those who find peace of mind. If they can do it with mothers who manufacture self-loathing the way Ms. Chua or Ms. Waldman do, it's despite those Moms and not because of them. This whole idea that there is something noble about browbeating your own children is just plain sick.

And then there's Lee Siegel:

Ms. Chua's book is a case study in how lack of self-knowledge, absence of empathy, and poor writing skills can be a blessing if you possess enough robotic ambition, callousness toward other people and lack of honesty about yourself and your subject. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is an inspiration to aggressive mediocrities everywhere. The book wasn't written; it was assembled. 

"What is government if words have no meaning?" — Jared Loughner's question to Gabrielle Giffords is " the stuff, not just of right-wing suspicion of government, or of radical left-wing suspicion of same, but of scores of Hollywood movies."

Writes Lee Siegel:

... from Taxi Driver and Three Days of the Condor, to Guilty by Suspicion and Mercury Rising, to The Sentinel and Syriana, and, well, I can't keep up. For at least half a century, our movies, from simple to complex, have been driven by the idea that official words have no meaning and that government is either criminal or a sham.

If you haven't seen the movies:

...you have probably read the standard texts of advanced American attitudes. Thus you have absorbed throughout college, like any number of Hollywood screenwriters and American tastemakers, the idea — from Nietzsche to Wittgenstein to Foucault to Derrida to Chomsky to Stanley Fish — that the words used by any type of official, political entity, like a government, are nonsense. "What is government if words have no meaning?" That could be the motto of The Daily Show.

If we're soaking in a culture of nihilism, why are most of us holding up so well?

Adventures in sock puppetry.

Help me figure something out. I wrote a post this morning about sock puppetry that included a quote from Lee Siegel, the New Republic critic who got suspended for writing under a pseudonym in the magazine's comments section. In the comments to that post, someone wrote under the name "Lee Siegel." To some extent this long comment made sense and seemed to be an interesting explanation of Siegel's predicament, but it also misread what I'd written so badly that I didn't think it could be the real Lee Siegel, whom I would be honored to have participate in the comments.

I deleted the comment and wrote:

I don't accept people posting under someone else's name here. I deleted the post that purported to be Lee Siegel because it's inconceivable to me that Lee Siegel could be dumb enough to write: "Ann Althouse astonishingly writes that she 'condemns' me because 'the truth is I never liked Lee Siegel,' so I guess nothing I say will penetrate her bias."

Obviously, the post and another comment defends Lee Siegel and I only said I was "tempted" to condemn "the practice" of sock puppetry -- not Siegel himself because I don't like him. (I don't like his writing. Find my old posts criticizing his writing if you like.) I'm defending him in spite of the fact that I don't like his writing. Get it? The opposite of bias. Jeez.

If that actually was Lee Siegel, he can email me and convince me it was him, and then I'll restore the post, which I still have.

I received an email:

Yes, that was dumb old me. Please restore my post.

I responded:

I have a strong policy against imitations, so you need to prove it to me. I myself am imitated on a site and I don't like it.

He's all:

Prove it to you? Are you kidding? You want me to Fedex you my passport? What childishness. Then I guess you can't prove that anyone is who he says he is who writes in to your "blog." Hey, it's me. You just don't want to restore my post. So don't. One more tale from the brave new blogosphere.

I retort:

You've given me the proof that you are not Lee Siegel. Thanks.

Am I wrong?

Anyway, with all this explanation, it is not confusing to anyone to reprint the original comment by the person who may or may not be Lee Siegel, so here it is, interspersed with my commentary:

Ann Althouse astonishingly writes that she "condemns" me because "the truth is I never liked Lee Siegel," so I guess nothing I say will penetrate her bias. But let me try.

I just didn't like Siegel's writing -- see this old post -- quite aside from his problem with sock puppetry. I think he got a bum rap on that, so accusing me of bias is backwards. My point is that I'm supporting him even though I didn't like his criticism.

Althouse writes: "Siegel should respect the policies his employer lays down." I'm surprised that an evidence-conscious lawyer like Althouse hasn't bothered to find out what those policies were. This is what they were.

I didn't say one way or the other whether he violated his employer's policy. I was speaking to what I was in a position to talk about: whether it was inherently bad to participate in the comments under a pseudonym. Spare me the "evidence-conscious lawyer" crap. All I did was concede that the policies -- whatever they were -- would bind him. Meanwhile, I was supporting him!

The New Republic's "Rules of Use" for its Talkback section--where I responded to my detractors--are these: They prohibited "posts that are defamatory, libelous, unnecessarily antagonistic... posts that are obscene, abusive, harassing, threatening, off-topic, unintelligible,
or inappropriate."

The problem is that the New Republic never enforced those rules. Anonymous commenters called me a liar, a fraud, and a pedophile. "Siegel wanted to fuck a child" went one post. These are all libelous things to say.

But the New Republic allowed anyone to post whatever they wanted, no matter how "defamatory, libelous or unnecessarily antagonistic." There was no screening, editing, or filtering of comments. And people were allowed to say whatever they wanted to say anonymously.

When I protested, I was told that I had to live with it. Exasperated, I decided to give my anonymous attackers a taste of their own medicine. I did not take on a pseudonym because I was taking advantage of the Web's convention of anonmymity [sic]. I took on a pseudonyn [sic] TO PROTEST THE WEB'S CONVENTION OF ANONYMITY. I had protested malicious anomymity [sic] several times on my blog and in other venues. It was, you see, a matter of principle, and of journalistic ethics. I could not believe that a serious and distinguished magazine was allowing these things to be published, and anonymously. In fact, no other magazine or respectable blog has ever allowed such comments to be made anonymously. Ann Althouse certainly doesn't.

And lo and behold, since my little scandal, articles have appeared denouncing malicious anonymity on the Internet, a convention that was taken for granted until I began to speak out against it.

I realize that I am making myself vulnerable to Ms. Althouse's derision -- after all, she "never liked" me. But maybe some readers will want now to see my side of the story.

Well, maybe you -- if you are Lee Siegel -- will cool down and perceive that I was taking your side! And maybe this whole incident will give you some insight into why I didn't like you as a critic: Your perceptions are off.

IN THE COMMENTS: Verso said:

What a Kafkaesque dilemma Siegel faces:

Condemned for sockpuppetry, he now is banned from posting under his real name.

The only way Lee Siegel could get a post past Althouse would be by post it anonymously or pseudonymously.

Irony is not dead.

Sock puppetry.

It's embarrassing and humiliating when the sock comes off, but it could be worse:

[T]he Securities and Exchange Commission had begun a formal inquiry into whether [Whole Foods chief executive John] Mackey violated security laws with the posts.

Whole Foods maintains that Mr. Mackey did not break the law because he did not disclose any confidential company information.

But the consequences could be damaging to the company, if not to Mr. Mackey. Securities lawyers say the Federal Trade Commission might use the comments to scuttle Whole Foods’ proposed acquisition of a competitor, Wild Oats, a company Mr. Mackey derided in his posts. Wild Oats may also use the comments as the basis of a lawsuit against Whole Foods.

Let's consult sock puppetry expert Lee Siegel:

In November, New Republic magazine suspended its culture critic Lee Siegel after it determined that he had been energetically defending himself in the discussion forums of his New Republic blog, under the name “sprezzatura” (Italian for “making the difficult look easy”).

In an interview, Mr. Siegel said that it is only human to engage with critics, particularly in a medium like the Web that encourages self-expression. He still defends his actions, saying that he was having fun, playfully praising himself while combating some critics whom he saw as fierce and puerile. He thinks that much of the inflection of his online writing got lost on the computer screen.

Yeah, who knew the free-wheeling world of the web was going to get all straight-laced about fooling around like this?

“As for Mackey boosting his company and putting down his rivals, entrepreneurs will be entrepreneurs, and technology is an amplification of human nature, not a cure for it,” Mr. Siegel said.

It may also be human nature to vent online, especially for people who, like chief executives, face formidable legal and public relations pressures to stay on script. That pressure, repressing people who may be otherwise inclined to speak and fight candidly, may be what forces executives like Mr. Mackey to invent fake identities.

You know, I'm sympathetic to both Siegel and Mackey. Why can't we play on line? Mackey should have to follow the legal rules about disclosing insider information and so forth, and Siegel should respect the policies his employer lays down, but why are we being so repressive about the use of pseudonyms? Using a pseudonym on line is like walking around in public incognito. People don't always have to know who you are. If the new rule is going to be that you must always be identifiable, what a horrible loss of freedom!

UPDATE: Someone purporting to be Lee Siegel participates in the comments, leading to deletion and controversy, which is all explained here.

"Seriously, the blogosphere strips argument of logic and rhetoric down to the naked emotion behind it."

So says Lee Siegel, the media critic axed for sock-puppetry on his TNR blog, when the ace NYT interviewer Deborah Solomon comes up with "What are you talking about?" as the follow-up question after he says "putting a polemicist like myself in the blogosphere is like putting someone with an obesity problem in a chocolate factory."

The real answer to Solomon's question was that he was trying to set up one of those addiction theories. It's a disease, you know. But he backed off from his own bullshit. Fortunately. But there are probably self-help books and treatment programs for blogoholism already, right?

"Best not to pick a fight with people who have gigabytes of text at their disposal unless you are interested in a duel on equal footing."

Well, it's not as catchy as don't pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel, but that's what the NYT is saying ought to replace the old saying. The point is that MSM needs to catch on that blogs even out the fight:

Professional reputations and affiliations with mainstream institutions don’t offer any cover — not The New Republic, not CBS and not The New York Times. [Lee] Siegel was obviously driven slightly batty by the new medium, even calling it “blogofascism,” a term that brought much ridicule down on his head.

He has since calmed down and has his regrets.

“People of course have a right to question a critic’s judgment, but there’s a difference between doing that and merely insulting someone you disagree with,” he said in a phone call. “So I wildly created an over-the-top persona and adopted the tone of my attackers, when I should have just gone to the gym instead.”

"The very idea of an institutional blog is a contradiction in terms."

Writes Terry Teachout. (This comes up in the context of talking about the trouble Lee Siegel got into blogging at The New Republic.)

The best blogs are idiosyncratic, unmediated expressions of an individual sensibility, a notion which tends to make old-media executives squirm, so much so that many print-media publications refuse to let their employees blog.

I think that’s a mistake. In fact, I think editors and reporters should be encouraged to blog independently of the publications for which they work.

I said something similar to that first paragraph in that Yale Law Journal Pocket Part essay I mentioned this morning. The essay is mainly about whether law journals should change in response to the internet, but at one point I talk about institutional blogs, specifically law school faculty blogs:

[You law journal editors don't] need to host a blog to talk about your articles. In fact, it is better if you don’t. Institutionalized blogs tend to be flat and safe.

I have put some effort into starting a faculty blog at my law school, perhaps something like The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog. But I have little hope that this project will go well, and I note that the Chicago project has never gained much traction. Since the original spike of attention that greeted the announcement of its existence, the traffic to the site has waned. And there is no bloggish energy to the site, with a post – usually a long one – going up only every few days. I don’t think this is a special Chicago Law School problem, but a predictable consequence of worrying about preserving the dignity of the institution they so conspicuously represent.

To continue to Teachout's train of thought... of course, I'm in favor of lawprofs blogging independently from the law school's website. Law schools shouldn't fret too much about their lawprofs expressing themselves idiosyncratically in our own separate blog spaces. There's a temptation for the law school and the lawprof blogger to try to improve things by making a bigger, better law school website replete with blogs, but it will suck the energy out of the blogging.

Postscript: Speaking of Lee Siegel, I enjoyed watching Bob Wright and Mickey Kaus argue about it on BloggingHeads.

Sprezzatura.

Well, I see that The New Republic 's Lee Siegel has gone and gotten himself into trouble by participating in the production of blog comments in support of his own writing. The pseudonymous Sprezzatura went about slamming Siegel's critics, like Ezra Klein, who serves up the details and declines to gloat. And now TNR has killed Siegel's blog and suspended him from writing for the magazine.

The person I know with the best memory reminds me that in the past I've made fun of Lee Siegel's writing -- including once in a post with an update saying that the person I know with the best memory reminds me that in the past I've made fun of Lee Siegel's writing. So, I should be enjoying the poor critic's plight more than I'd realized.

Let's look at the old posts.

April 12, 2004:

"The marriage of comedy and politics is even more unhealthy than the marriage of church and state." So says Lee Siegel, TNR's TV critic. Too many metaphors: marriage and health. And unhealthy comedy is not going to kill anyone, whereas the diseases of the religion-state alliance have produced monumental evils throughout history.

But I agree with Siegel that right now politics is ruining comedy, especially The Daily Show (as I said here). Jon Stewart gets so much good press--the NYT never misses an opportunity to praise him--so it's really almost shocking to read strong criticism like this:

Stewart weighs down his jokes with a kind of Government 101 knowingness. He's not just funny about politics, you see, he's savvy about the way the system works, and he's going to help us through the maze. In Washington, "you have to cut through the partisan gridlock just to get to the bureaucratic logjam." Stop, you're killing me. But when it came to Richard Clarke and his controversial book, Stewart gave up even the pretense of being funny. ... Here was a slick, malleable, professional political advisor/operator, who had the choice of resigning in protest against an invasion of Iraq months before it took place, when such a protest might have had consequences, but chose instead to wait until his slighted ego burst at the seams--this Clarke, a true embodiment of human foible and folly, deserved to be manhandled by the spirit of laughter every bit as much as his accusations deserved to be defended by the spirit of truth. But like everybody else in public life, from politicians and pundits to performers and poets, Stewart wants to seem edifying and instructive. He wants to seem good.

Wanting to seem good is really bad for comedy. And, of course, picking a political side to be what is good is just bad for so many reasons. Siegel thinks Stewart is pandering to his audience, but I would think he's losing half of his audience. He's lost me. And (unlike Siegel) I was completely in love with him.

I'VE JUST GOT TO ADD: If I didn't independently agree with Siegel's opinion of The Daily Show, I would have been quite reluctant to trust him, because I think his instincts about comedy are a bit off, since he seems to have meant the following sentence to be taken seriously:

Politics hates the naked unbridled ego that laughter sets free; it hates it with the intensity with which laughter heaps its furies on the naked unbridled ego that hides behind the highflown sentiments of politics.

As Jon Stewart would say: Whaaaa?

From February 7, 2005:

Baby, you can't do my media criticism.

Here's the free link to get to Lee Siegel's TNR essay about why football provides the perfect showcase for ads. Assuming you want to get to it. It reads like this:

Last night, the brunt of the commercials during the first quarter were for cars, mostly SUVs and minivans. Even a very unexcited-looking Paul McCartney ("Thank you Super Bowl!" he kept shouting) sang, as the first of four songs in his halftime show, "Baby You Can Drive My Car." The interesting thing about a car is that it's a piece of property that you can inhabit while traversing, or entering, other people's property. That's what Brady's team was doing as it moved down the field. So what was happening in the stadium and what was occurring on the tube were mutual reinforcements of this illusion of sovereign motion.

Well, first, that really is not the interesting thing about a car. But second, what laughably tedious writing! The weird thing is that it reminded me a lot of the great old George Carlin routine comparing football and baseball.

Funnily enough, over at Klein's post, you can see that Sprezzatura said things like this:

There's this awful suck-up named Ezra Klein--his "writing" is sweaty with panting obsequious ambition--who keeps distorting everything Siegel writes--the only way this no-talent can get him. And I ask myself: why is it the young guys who go after Siegel? Must be because he writes the way young guys should be writing: angry, independent, not afraid of offending powerful people. They on the other hand write like aging careerists: timid, ingratiating, careful not to offend people who are powerful. They hate him because they want to write like him but can't. Maybe if they'd let themselves go and write truthfully, they'd get Leon Wieseltier to notice them too.

Ha! Lee Siegel is a ridiculously bad writer.

"I hope they enjoy their lily white, golly gee, clean, fun plaza."

Says Lee Siegel, who brought a lawsuit challenging a deal in which the city gave the LDS church control over a public square in Salt Lake City. Yesterday, the 10th Circuit approved the deal, saying it does "nothing to advance religion, but merely enables the LDS church to advance itself."

"The marriage of comedy and politics is even more unhealthy than the marriage of church and state." So says Lee Siegel, TNR's TV critic. Too many metaphors: marriage and health. And unhealthy comedy is not going to kill anyone, whereas the diseases of the religion-state alliance have produced monumental evils throughout history.

But I agree with Siegel that right now politics is ruining comedy, especially The Daily Show (as I said here). Jon Stewart gets so much good press--the NYT never misses an opportunity to praise him--so it's really almost shocking to read strong criticism like this:

Stewart weighs down his jokes with a kind of Government 101 knowingness. He's not just funny about politics, you see, he's savvy about the way the system works, and he's going to help us through the maze. In Washington, "you have to cut through the partisan gridlock just to get to the bureaucratic logjam." Stop, you're killing me. But when it came to Richard Clarke and his controversial book, Stewart gave up even the pretense of being funny. ... Here was a slick, malleable, professional political advisor/operator, who had the choice of resigning in protest against an invasion of Iraq months before it took place, when such a protest might have had consequences, but chose instead to wait until his slighted ego burst at the seams--this Clarke, a true embodiment of human foible and folly, deserved to be manhandled by the spirit of laughter every bit as much as his accusations deserved to be defended by the spirit of truth. But like everybody else in public life, from politicians and pundits to performers and poets, Stewart wants to seem edifying and instructive. He wants to seem good.

Wanting to seem good is really bad for comedy. And, of course, picking a political side to be what is good is just bad for so many reasons. Siegel thinks Stewart is pandering to his audience, but I would think he's losing half of his audience. He's lost me. And (unlike Siegel) I was completely in love with him.

I'VE JUST GOT TO ADD: If I didn't independently agree with Siegel's opinion of The Daily Show, I would have been quite reluctant to trust him, because I think his instincts about comedy are a bit off, since he seems to have meant the following sentence to be taken seriously:

Politics hates the naked unbridled ego that laughter sets free; it hates it with the intensity with which laughter heaps its furies on the naked unbridled ego that hides behind the highflown sentiments of politics.

As Jon Stewart would say: Whaaaa?