Of all the asinine post-election pieces THE SCRAPBOOK has read (trust us, we've read them all), there's been none worse than Washington Post fashion writer Robin Givhan's 800-world broadside against Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris's cosmetics choices. Entitled "The Eyelashes Have It," Givhan savaged Harris for her "berry-red lipstick," for looking as "if she were wearing a mask," and for appearing to have applied her "makeup with a trowel." Meow.
As an excuse for her column -- which prompted hundreds of complaints and two denunciatory columns from the Post's new ombudsman, Michael Getler -- Givhan lamely argued that by making such poor cosmetics choices, Harris "failed to think for herself. Why should anyone trust her?" Givhan's foray into politics demonstrates why writers who capably explore important topics such as the perils of wearing linen after Labor Day should stay on their side of the newsroom. But just as we were about to award Givhan the Most Asinine trophy (a bronzed jawbone of an ass), along came Geneva Overholser.
Now a syndicated columnist, Overholser herself served as Washington Post ombudsman until 1998. If media critics are too often lazy journalists who wish to be paid to read other people's newspapers, ombudsmen are too often lazy media critics who get paid to read their own paper. The breed is given to composing intellectually soft, self-serving, pompous pronouncements. Overholser does all these things -- sometimes in the space of a single column -- as she did when she came to Givhan's defense last week. Not only does Overholser feebly assert that making fun of Harris's make-up isn't the same as "assessing a woman senator's hips" (wonder which senator she means?), but she then echoes Givhan, asserting that Harris's "cosmetics choices" are "way out of the norm. If you watched her on TV and didn't think so, the women in your life look different from the women in mine."
But wait, there's more. Overholser clumsily appends a feminist manifesto, the likes of which THE SCRAPBOOK hasn't read since a Womyn's Studies teaching assistant teed off in our university newspaper. Givhan's piece, she writes, "made me think about the choices women make, and why, and society's changing views of cosmetics," which leads to "what really burns me . . . the fact that so few women's views are represented on America's major opinion pages." Check, please.
Give this much to Givhan: Unlike Overholser, she can put a great sentence together. Harris's skin, wrote Givhan, "had been plastered and powdered to the texture of pre-war walls in need of a skim coat." Not bad. Imagine what Givhan could do with worthier subject material, like, say, the unemployed-librarian couture of David Boies.