Letters to the Editor
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Mo' Dough?
Amid all the praise Dowd gets for hitting the right targets, and the dissing she's getting for the NYT Magazine excerpts, one thing has been forgotten: Dowd faked a quote about John Kerry, or passed it on as truth. She made a big deal about "Who among us does not love NASCAR?"--which Kerry never said.
The assistant to the previous Public Editor at the NYT told me that the NYT had received inquiries about Dowd's use of this spurious quote and then subsequent riffs on it in other NYT articles, but I never heard more from him and it certainly seems as if Dowd was not taken to task by her bosses. I guess they were too busy letting Judy Miller lead us into battle.
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Dowd's profile in NY Rag
The only thing that's "amazing" about Ariel Levy's breathless portrayal of Dowd is the complete absence of distance of writer from subject. It's one big saucer-eyed love letter to Dowd from an adoring fan. It's pathetic as a piece of journalism.
Dowd is a pathologically self-obsessed narcissist who never has anything penetrating or original to say, and whose thinking is half-baked, simplistic, and wrapped in personal animus. She's an old bore. Ariel Levy comes across as a high school paper editor interviewing a visiting formerly-famous rock star. Ninnies, the both of them.
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I actually enjoyed
the article and realized they were oddly thrown together excerpts, which I couldn't resist commenting on.
I find her humorous, with a consistently nice turn of phrase. And quite a bit more accurate and not as negligently inflammatory than either Coulter or Malkin.
That was a nice love note from Mr. Levy.
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I liked it
While I agree that the piece was choppily edited, I did like it. That it appears so soon after the front page story -- roundly and appropriately criticized -- on Ivy League women planning to stay at home with kids seems a bit ironic. I too wonder if these women who plan to make of their lives one of dependency on men for income and support won't be looking to Betty Friedan or her successor in a few years. To me these women sound eerily like some who were in college with me in the mid-60's. On the one hand, the Times seems to be cheerleading this very small trend and trying to make something bigger of it, while Dowd issues the cautions.
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context?
I also liked the piece, despite it making me want to cry and throw up a little bit (really? the number of women taking their husbands' names is on the rise?); I got the impression from the choppy editing that it removed a little bit of the context - perhaps that's why people are interpreting it as Dowd buying into all this crap? I think she offers a fairly realistic perspective - a woman who took the feminist movement's progression for granted, and who is finding herself startled by many of the questions coming up (questions a lot of people should have expected, but hindsight is 20/20 and all). I think she may reflect the fact that, for many women, it's difficult not to buy into some of the husband-hunting crap that's being thrown around (not me, thank god for the one neurosis that passed me by), but that's not the same as wholeheartedly condoning it.
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Maureen Dowd: Fire starter
I wonder if the editor was a man?????