Using my rarely-tapped powers of quiet diplomacy and sweet reason, I manage to convince a prominent not-left-wing blogger that the old canard about Pauline Kael and Nixon is just that. On the other hand, the guy’s still never gonna link to me. But I don’t do this for traffic. I do it for the truth.
A small victory
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Good job, Glenn.
I’ve always maintained that there are more than enough reasons to dislike Kael without making stuff up; I’m glad you managed to set the record straight.
THANK YOU, thank you thank you!! I am not even a true Paulette and that smelly old rubbish still makes me spit tacks. (There’s even another version, where she says it about Reagan.) Come on, she simply wasn’t that dumb.
It was rude not to link to you. But then again, perhaps he doesn’t realize you blog, because after all, none of his friends read you. ;D
Plus, who the fuck cares what Pauline Kael thought about Nixon? How does she become a representative of how all liberals think of “flyover country”?
To follow up to Dan – indeed, Kael had plenty of unpleasant things to say about liberals as well (especially in her early writings), so I don’t understand the misrepresentation of her statement at all. She may have been somewhat left of center, but using her as a representative of the left is false, cynical, and silly. Oh, wait! That’s the stock-in-trade of Pajamas Media.
I agree with papa zita, though I’m inclined to be more miffed at the slight of Kael than of liberalism…
In the same vein as Dan and papa z. – even if she did say it, why would it be construed as being anything other than sardonic?
Such a misinterpretation of Kael’s probable attitude would seem to bolster the old canard about conservatives being brain-dead when it comes to humor.
Bravo sir, bravo. Pauline Kael was a liberal, not a leftist, and she was never in doubt about the difference. Oddly enough, John Simon was usually far to her left when he was writing for the conservative National Review. She rarely allowed her politics to get in the way of her appreciating an entertaining movie, though she always made it clear if she scorned a film’s philosophy. She gave positive reviews to “Uncommon Valor,” “Hamburger Hill,” “The Dogs of War” and other action movies unpopular with the left. She was Michael Moore’s worst enemy, and she condemned “Salt of the Earth” as “communist propaganda,” her words, not mine. She condemned the politics of “Dirty Harry” while praising it as a “wizardly piece of vicious, brutal filmmaking.” You know from that exactly what the movie is; so many other liberal critics simply condemned the movie, untruthfully, as unskillful filmmaking. And though you know the politics of “Coming Home” were close to her heart, she still eviscerated the movie. The last paragraph is absolutely brilliant, just let me quote the last sentence: “Are liberals really such great lovers?”