Poor Anna Wintour. It’s going to be a very good month for her enemies, because the latest issue of Vogue shows the rail-thin cultural icon and style arbiter to be well behind the curve on the biggest international fashion trend of the year. Arab democracy is in, and what’s out are Arab dictators—Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Qaddafi are just so, well, 2010. But in the March 2011 Vogue, Joan Juliet Buck pens a jaw-droppingly unctuous profile of the woman behind the tyrant who runs Syria, Bashar al-Assad’s glam wife Asma.
The famously fabulous Asma seems to pop up every month or so in some desperate newspaper’s style supplement, but with her own Vogue profile, Asma has hit the big time—Qatar’s Sheikha Moza must be crying herself to sleep. Of course the Buck article hits all the key details, like Asma’s do-gooderness and all the NGOs she funds—which is to say, Asma feeds Syrians the crumbs from the loaf that her husband stole from them.
This passage was especially rich, Damascus’s number one power couple dropping names, including the biggest name of all—Brangelina:
When Angelina Jolie came with Brad Pitt for the United Nations in 2009, she was impressed by the first lady’s efforts to encourage empowerment among Iraqi and Palestinian refugees but alarmed by the Assads’ idea of safety. “My husband was driving us all to lunch,” says Asma al-Assad, “and out of the corner of my eye I could see Brad Pitt was fidgeting. I turned around and asked, ‘Is anything wrong?’ ” “Where’s your security?” asked Pitt. “So I started teasing him—‘See that old woman on the street? That’s one of them! And that old guy crossing the road? That’s the other one!’ ” They both laugh. The president joins in the punch line: “Brad Pitt wanted to send his security guards here to come and get some training!”
That is funny—although unless Brad hires bodyguards with Hezbollah pedigrees, they’re going to be pretty freaked out with the training. It’s a classic fish out of water story-line—just imagine the look on the faces of Brad’s security guys when Syrian secret police offer to teach the Hollywood heartthrob’s bodyguards how to torture prisoners, or wire a car with explosives, or help jihadist groups get into Iraq to kill U.S. soldiers and our allies.
Having spent some time at Condé Nast several years ago, The Scrapbook is still mystified at how this sinister dreck passed muster. How exactly, we wonder, was the Assad puff-piece pitched to the editor? . . .
( Anna Wintour’s office, lunchtime)
Anna, nibbling on a DB Bistro Moderne hamburger: I don’t know, Joan. Isn’t Syria a state sponsor of terrorism?
Joan Juliet Buck: Terrorism is the new edgy, Anna.
Anna: I hated Carlos—my nightmare, a five-hour long movie about seventies’ hairstyles with revolutionary politics. Anyway, didn’t they just discover a second nuclear facility in Syria, right in the outskirts of Damascus?
Joan: John Kerry thinks Asma’s great. He’s her biggest fan in Washington.
Anna: Speaking of big hair . . .
Joan: Come on, Anna, he’s going to be the next secretary of state.
Anna: Look, I’m no fan of Miss Traveling Pantsuit, but Kerry’s been carrying water for the Syrians for two years and what do we have to show for trying to engage the regime in Damascus? Lebanon’s a mess, the Syrians are still trying to bring down Maliki in Iraq, and Bashar and that crew have got the Saudis more wired than a 19-year-old Brazilian model on a coffee and cigarette drip. And then where’s that Syria-Israeli track Fred Hof over at State keeps talking about? How’s that whole “peace park” on the Golan Heights working out? I don’t like it, Joan—let’s look for another profile. Doesn’t Clooney have a new girlfriend? Or what about something with Angie and Brad? . . .
Liberal Newsrooms, Cont.
One of the unexpected dividends of the crisis of the American newspaper is that the large metropolitan dailies, as they inexorably shrink in size and staff, no longer bother with any sort of pretense about editorial independence or objectivity. Newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post are now unapologetically partisan.
The Scrapbook spends a fair amount of time—wasted time?—chronicling this all-too-obvious development: newspaper stories that might easily have been drafted in the Office of Communications at the Democratic National Committee, or by MoveOn.org, where the adjectives and modifiers and adverbs and descriptive phrases leave no doubt where a writer’s sentiments lie.
A typical example is a recent story in the Washington Post about the appearance of author Amy ( Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother) Chua at a local bookstore. As might be expected, Chua’s presence stimulated much lively discussion and impassioned argument, some of it political in its overtones, which the reporter (Monica Hesse) described as divisions between “permissive lefty parents” and “frightened righty wing nuts.” Strike One. But what took our breath away was this passage:
If “Tiger Mom” had been written by a woman of a different nationality . . . it might not have raised so many hackles. But this book came on the heels of that weirdly racist Citizens Against Government Waste commercial—the one where the futuristic Chinese professor cackles maniacally over the downfall of America—and at a time of concern about the U.S. economy and American children’s ability to compete.
Weirdly racist? The Scrapbook immediately repaired to YouTube and watched the commercial—twice—and concluded that the only way to understand Hesse’s strange comment is to assume that, for the Post’s “Style” section, any depiction of any particular nationality (Italian, Danish, Australian, Honduran) must be, by definition, “weirdly racist.” In fact, that Citizens Against Government Waste commercial, which was broadcast last fall and effectively played off America’s accelerating indebtedness to the People’s Republic of China, featured a Mandarin-speaking Chinese economist, a futuristic lecture hall, and a roomful of apparent Chinese undergraduates. At no time did the professor’s voice, or behavior, suggest anything approaching a caricature; his words were delivered in markedly sober tones, and he didn’t “cackle maniacally” at the end of his remarks. (“Quietly chuckled” would have been a more accurate description.)
But as we know, from the Post’s point of view, there is no more demonizing assertion than to accuse somebody—anybody—of racism, even if race and racism have nothing whatsoever to do with the topic at hand. Indeed, The Scrapbook might just as easily complain that Monica Hesse’s choice to write about Amy Chua, instead of another visiting author, was “weirdly racist” in its own way. But then we were reminded that, not so long ago, the last newsroom fistfight in the history of the Washington Post broke out over a veteran editor/writer’s complaint that another article by Monica Hesse was “total crap” and the “second worst story I have seen in ‘Style’ in 43 years.”
What, The Scrapbook wonders, was the worst?
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Crazy for Crazy U
Congratulations are in order to Scrapbook colleague Andrew Ferguson, a senior editor of this magazine, on the publication of his new book Crazy U, which tells the (hilarious and poignant) story of his struggles getting his son through the college admissions process.
Regular readers of Ferguson’s work in these pages (as well as of his previous books Fools’ Names, Fools’ Faces and Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America) are unlikely to be surprised by the excellence of his latest book. Still, we were pleased to see the nonfiction editor of the Washington Post’s Book World, Steven Levingston, give Crazy U a rave review:
It may seem strange to say that a book so full of heartache is a pleasure to read, but Ferguson’s storytelling is irresistible. You root for the obsessive, well-meaning dad and his lackadaisical son, and you laugh out loud over their college-app tug of war. There’s the son telling his high school counselor that in college he wants to major in beer and paint his chest in the school colors at football games, prompting Dad to snap later: “It’ll be a big help when he writes your recommendation.” Then there’s Dad handing his procrastinator a book on successful college essays and watching the boy vacantly turn it over in his hands. “I thought of the apes coming upon the obelisk in the opening scene of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ ” Dad writes. “He did everything but sniff it.” And here’s Dad encountering a mother who gloats that she and her daughter worked three solid months on the essays every day after school, plus weekends. “We did three months of work too,” he tells her, “in twelve days.”
It’s almost enough to make us retract the preceding item! Ferguson’s Crazy U comes out March 1. Be sure to buy a copy (or two).