Fair Game
I actually bought the latest issue of Vanity Fair, for the first time in something like ten years. After spending two minutes trying to read all the good parts as I stood in WH Smith’s, it struck me that perhaps this issue was actually worth paying for. So I did.
And…wow. There is some serious mental illness making the rounds of the Condé Nasties, if page after page of frothing anti-Republicanism is anything to go by. I mean, I see where it comes from and it’s something I share - to a degree, from a completely different angle than their strident statist one. But there is something more than a bit deranged and grasping about the tone of VF, and while it may not be pretty, it is fascinating for ten minutes or so.
One story that made the magazine worth buying was disgraced former CBS producer Mary Mapes’s half-baked account of what happened when her shoddy journalism was exposed by the blogosphere. Rand Simberg does a brilliant job of fisking Mapes’s VF story. I still find it stunning that this piece made it past the most cursory editorial checks; this shows, perhaps, how little I have learned from Rathergate and the last few years of blogging, because this horseshit - to borrow one of Mapes’s favourite words - happens all the time. Ah, well. It was worth it for the hilarity of reading her describe Little Green Footballs as “far-right”. Yes, obviously. That Mapes can still not be bothered to do basic research on this story is astonishing and sad, but also a little funny. Or maybe she’s just as outrageously dishonest as so many have always contended.
In other news, James Wolcott is still swivel-eyed bonkers. If I were Michelle Malkin, I’d wear it like a badge of pride that he lashes out at her twice in his article about why rich people need the government to foot the bill for their entertainment.
A few pages later, the magazine has come over all royalist with a fawning piece on Charles and Camilla. It’s an interesting piece, and the photos prove that Camilla was foxy when she was a debutante. Santa Sebag-Montefiore must be chuffed to have figured out a way to get her name in a publication other than Waitrose Food Illustrated. Is this Vanity Fair, or Majesty?
Billionaire’s son Ben Goldsmith and multi-millionaire’s daughter Kate Rothschild are really a model hippy couple who think money is evil and eat only organic, free-range food, which does not conflict at all with their ownership of the upper class members’ only club Drones. Honest! They are as irritating as they sound, and probably every bit as stupid. Vanity Fair loves them and takes them as they are, without question. Again, there is something about this mad approach that is strangely absorbing, as if one were reading the media of some universe where these things make a lick of sense.
Maureen Dowd’s answers to the Proust Questionnaire are so awful, so unfunny, and so desperate to be anything but that I came close to feeling a scintilla of sympathy for her. But Luke Ford has her number:
Dowd has no wisdom to share as either a pundit or a woman. Her personal life is in shambles, and it is not because she’s so wonderful. It’s because she’s a clueless harpie.
On the topic of not-so-clueless harpies, my good friend Arianna Huffington (ahem) could not be more transparent if she were made of 100 per cent water. And I couldn’t help but marvel at the fact that the journalist who profiled her for this issue utterly missed the real story behind Arianna’s celebrity-stuffed blog. Did no one point her in the direction of Andrew Breitbart?
I’m still reading the damn thing, so think I have eeked out at least £3.95 worth of value from this issue. If you haven’t yet seen them, the stunning Kate Moss photos are worth a gander, too.
Filed under: Life