Parasitism isn't a profession, it's an activity: In which A.O. Scott is subjected to the Instapundit one-two

A couple of days back, New York Times film crit­ic A.O. Scott filed one of his typ­ic­ally thought­ful dis­patches from the Cannes Film Festival, this one treat­ing Steven Soderbergh’s epic Che. Like a few oth­er crit­ics, this one included, he noted that the film’s two-part, mirror-image struc­ture, in which the suc­cess­ful Cuban revolu­tion and Che’s botched attempt at launch­ing a whole “Latin American Revolution” are chron­icled, con­veni­ently allows the film­makers to elide the peri­od of Che’s life in which he acted most mon­strously, that is, his early co-governing of Cuba with Castro. This both­ers Scott (it both­ers me, too, but not nearly as much—not because I’m a tyranny-loving Commie, or any­thing, but because I’m, like, a form­al­ist), and he’s not afraid to say so, and he says so with typ­ic­al elo­quence and clarity. 

Over at the National Review Online, John J. Miller, one of the “hip­per” con­ser­vat­ives out there (he com­piled, you may recall, a rather, um, con­ten­tious list of “con­ser­vat­ive” rock songs, and more recently no doubt broke NRO edit­or Kathryn Jean Lopez’s heart by avow­ing a pref­er­ence for a Drive-By Truckers show to a Bill Bennett char­ity ball), takes note of Scott’s objec­tions without hav­ing the cour­tesy to men­tion Scott himself. 

Going bey­ond the stand­ard prac­tice of con­demning a film before actu­ally hav­ing seen it (which you can rail about until the cows come home, and none of these guys will ever pay you the least atten­tion), Miller says “it’s prob­ably impossible for Hollywood to make an hon­est movie about this awful man.” We should by now under­stand that when con­ser­vat­ives say “Hollywood” they are not refer­ring to a spe­cif­ic geo­graph­ic­al place or the indus­tries loc­ated there but a state of mind. Hence, Che, while French and Spanish-financed, and in fact as of this writ­ing lack­ing a United States dis­trib­ut­or, is a “Hollywood” film, while noth­ing pro­duced by Walden Media is. Just so you know. Anyway, lack­ing the com­mon fuck­ing cour­tesy to cite A.O. Scott by name, Miller ups the ante before quot­ing Scott’s rel­ev­ant pas­sage, not­ing, “even the NYT sees the prob­lem clearly.”

“Even the NYT,” is, of course, a vari­ant of the old joke, “even the lib­er­al New Republic…” But it begs the ques­tion of when, exactly, the New York Times has ever been in the tank, as the say­ing goes, for Che Guevara? Scan the Times’ archives and you’ll find the exact oppos­ite to have been the case. Miller’s ana­chron­ist­ic­ally red-baiting implic­a­tion verges on the slan­der­ous, mak­ing it per­fect for…“Instapundit” Glenn Reynolds, who devotes one of his epi­gram­mat­ic posts to Miller’s post, thusly: 

A CHE HAGIOGRAPHY that gives even The New York Times prob­lems. “Guevara was an import­ant play­er in the Castro gov­ern­ment, but his bru­tal role in turn­ing a revolu­tion­ary move­ment into a dic­tat­or­ship goes vir­tu­ally unmentioned.”

Again, Scott is ignored; it’s as if The New York Times only exists as an insti­tu­tion­al voice, or that, more insult­ing still, Scott’s words are mon­itored and approved by some cultural/political pur­ity com­mit­ee therein. I don’t know pre­cisely why this post cheeses me off so much. It’s no more or less Nixonian than any­thing else Reynolds does, pro­pog­at­ing the most nox­ious notions behind the ever-reliable shield of “I did­n’t say it, I’m just link­ing to it.” (Not for noth­ing did alicub­log’s Roy Edroso, rat­ing right-wing blog­gers in the Village Voice, award Reynolds a stupid/evil ratio of 5:95.) My ire could just have some­thing to do with the fact that I, like Scott, was at Cannes, saw Che at Cannes, thought about Che at Cannes, wrote about Che from Cannes. 

When you tell people you’re going to Cannes to cov­er the Film Festival, a lot of them react as if you’re get­ting the best paid vaca­tion ever. Even my ther­ap­ist, for heav­en’s sake, has some­times per­sisted in call­ing my for­ays to Cannes for Première a “perk.” Let’s get this straight: as the Cannes Film Festival takes place in the south of France, it does, indeed, offer an extremely attract­ive, pleas­ant set­ting. But cov­er­ing it does not con­sti­tute a paid vaca­tion. We journ­al­ists are in movie theat­ers by 8:30 a.m. nearly every morn­ing. Getting into screen­ings, even if you’ve got the much-envied white badge, like Scott, or the nothing-to-sneeze-at pink badge, like myself, is often a time-consuming and phys­ic­ally tax­ing chore—mordant jokes about Who con­certs were heard on the line-ups for both Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and the you-would-think-lower-profile Two Lovers. Having to for­mu­late coher­ent opin­ions and argu­ments in the after­math of a giv­en film can be a chal­lenge even in atmo­spheres of zen-like calm; in the non-stop clogged-up crazi­ness of Cannes—the Orange wi-fi lounge in the Palais is a great and wel­come ser­vice, yes, but as a friend noted, it often looked and felt like a Civil War hos­pit­al with laptops—it’s almost impossible. 

Scott was walk­ing the walk as hard as, if not harder than, any oth­er writer at Cannes. So see­ing this clot Reynolds—who enjoys end­lessly reit­er­at­ing his asin­ine man­tra, “journ­al­ism isn’t a pro­fes­sion, it’s an activ­ity;” who more often than not blogs from the com­fort of his den, with one thumb all the way up his ass for all I know—second-handedly mis­ap­pro­pri­ate and twist the fruits of Scott’s toil makes my blood abso­lutely boil. I under­stand that the “real” Reynolds is an affable chap, and I’ve in fact exchanged a couple of guardedly cor­di­al e‑mails with the fel­low. But see­ing this kind of thing, I’ve got to con­clude that he is, finally, as much of a dick as—yes—Sean Penn.