Katha Pollitt is one ugly woman - this past Halloween the kids at the door gave her candy; in Katha's photo album there's only negatives;beauty is only skin deep but ugly is to the bone (Dangerfield. New York).
Click my post title for the article - it is pretty standard hate stuff but very badly written and certainly worthy of the Chicago Tribune editorial board.
I read Miss Pollitt's op-ed piece with great interest this morning. The Tribune did not provide a photo of Miss Pollitt but I managed to match the face with the message. Miss Pollitt is also not all that bright it seems to me thata demitasse would fit her head like a sombrero. Miss Pollitt is also rather . . .shall we say offensive? I've come across decomposed bodies of two fishermen tossed up on the beach at Holland Michigan that were less offensive than Miss Pollitt.
Miss Pollitt would scare a starving dog off a meat wagon, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder. As Progressive are wont to say 'Who's to judge?' As I am wont to say, 'Me.' That is one ugly broad. Beauty works it's way up from the heart and Miss Pollitt's words of unnecessary invective match her tiny heart.
But shucks, don't take my word for it I am a dedicated and devout sexist.
My favorite Lesbian/literary critic Camille Paglia thinks not much of Miss Pollitt*. as well.
Feminist author Camille Paglia described Pollitt as a "whiny troll, an unscrupulous and unreliable critic and a cultural philistine...She's a good example of the phony prep-school/trust-fund leftism suffusing the incestuously interwined Ivy League cliques who run the corrupt East Coast literary and magazine establishment."[6]
Yet, the Chicago Tribune's editorial board sees fit to use a 'whiny troll' to smear Sarah Palin. Pollitt is a feminist. One of those feminists who can not seem to develop a happy life and Billy-bedamns any woman who is everything that they are not. Pollitt tosses hate on Sarah Palin like Englewood Napalm ( a horrific concoction of boiling water and bacon grease that is infamous for branding domestic disputes.
Sarah Palin will be fine. The Radical Feminists are scared witless - I believe that is the word I wish - of Sarah Palin.
The Chicago Tribune has become as sad a joke in journalism as the soon to closed Chicago Sun Times.
Katha Pollitt is married ( her second and his third) to Marxist critic Steve Lukes.
Sarah Palin is Governor of Alaska and happily married to the man she met in high school.
This is list from Mother Jones by Katha Pollitt Her Ten Must Reads - Yeah, I'll get around to those hits . . .when it snows in the Philippines.
Katha Pollitt is a columnist for The Nation magazine and author of Reasonable Creatures: Feminism & Society in American Culture at the End of the Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage, 1994). In the early 1980s, she reviewed books for Mother Jones. Her choices, listed chronologically:
1976 Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture & Society, by Raymond Williams (London: Oxford University Press). The great Marxist scholar of English literature analyzes the history of 131 crucial words, from "aesthetic," which has always meant the opposite of "social" and "practical," to "work," which did not always mean paid employment.
1978 For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women, by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English (New York: Doubleday). This feminist classic is still the most elegant and spirited dissection of received medical wisdom -- a.k.a. sexism.
1983 Imagined Communities, by Benedict Anderson (London: Verso). A brilliant and erudite investigation of the concept of national identity -- a modern invention whose psychological power lies in denying that it is one.
1984 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, by Pierre Bourdieu (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). With subtlety and sophistication, the great French sociologist analyzes the way social and economic classes are shaped and preserved by myriad tiny but amazingly precise differences -- from preferences in food and art to body language and hairstyles. The data are French, the implications universal.
1984 Not In Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature, by R.C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin (New York: Pantheon). Three prominent scientists debunk genetic determinism and sociobiology so thoroughly it's amazing The Bell Curve got published.
1988 A Small Place, by Jamaica Kincaid (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux). A beautiful, furious essay about the author's native Antigua, tourist mecca and postcolonial slum -- the modern world in a nutshell.
1990 City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, by Mike Davis (London: Verso). I learned something from every page of this bold social history of Los Angeles as the prototype of a new kind of city, the world megalopolis.
1991 Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, by Susan Faludi (New York: Crown). The book that woke American women from their Reagan-era "post-feminist" nap. Faludi shows how the media operates as a kind of Möbius strip, endlessly recycling half-truths and distortions to "prove" that feminism has made women miserable.
1991 Mao II, by Don DeLillo (New York: Penguin). A Pynchon-like writer leaves his study to explore a world of cults, terrorists, dilapidation, and drift. A tragic meditation on post-modernity as alternating currents of isolation and mass hysteria.
Adolph Reed Jr.'s essays are not collected in a book, but he is the smartest person of any race, class, or gender writing on race, class, and gender. (His writing appears in the Progressive and Village Voice.)
Rather have my gums scrapped, Katha!
Cammy, with words such as yours about Katha ('She's a good example of the phony prep-school/trust-fund leftism suffusing the incestuously interwined Ivy League cliques who run the corrupt East Coast literary and magazine establishment.') I am proud to call myself a Lesbian too!
This is one of the most objectionable posts I have ever read. Your criticisms of a perfectly capable journalist seem to centre on her supposed 'ugliness', her left-leaning political views, her feminism and even her personal life. If you disagree with Pollitt, quote her directly and address her articles with more intelligence, instead of discrediting her on such irrelevances as her physical appearance.
ReplyDeleteGee, . . .uh, Anonymous is it? that bothers me no end. Actually it does not.
ReplyDeleteBeauty is only skin deep, but ugly is to the bone.
Thanks for your forthright and heroic advocacy.
I disagree with Ms. Pollitt and object strongly to her as well - now had Ms. Pollitt given her target ( Gov. Palin) a scintilla of respect and avoided scurrilous and cowardly sneers, she would have enjoyed what is due to her.
Stay Anonymous - it works for you.
Is that the kind of language your parents and your priest taught you to use regarding women whose political views you dislike?
ReplyDeleteI don't like Palin -- the whole ignorance thing gets to me; and I don't like national politicians who bash my lovely, prosperous and patriotic home state -- but I've never called her a "stupid broad" (or the equivalent).
I guess I need to go to church more often, right? Maybe then I'd be more comfortable employing these sorts of nasty ad hominem attacks. Evidently there's no reason to feel guilty about being mean when you're sure God's on your team.
I expect that this comment will have zero impact on you, and I anticipate your sarcastic, angry self-justification. You can complain that I've posted anonymously, and then tell yourself that this means you're free to continue being as boorish and crude as you'd like.
Classy.
Ha, or you won't allow my comment to go up at all. I'm curious which it'll be.
ReplyDeleteYou sure?
ReplyDeleteSure you are.