High life
Trouble with wimmin
Taki
This is supposed to be the silly season, which is why I guess my friend Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, decided to run a silly piece by the Irish-American feminist Gail Sheehy about Newt Gingrich's love life. The article is filled with salacious tittle-tattle of the most revolting sort. Indeed, it is as scurrilous a piece of writing as has ever appeared in a mainstream publication.
Mind you, I'm as interested in sexual gossip as the next man, but what public interest is served by these so called revela- tions about Newt's past affairs is beyond me. I don't believe a word of it. Newt is as sexually attractive as the Draft Dodger, which means only poor white trash will throw a bone his way. Poor white trash and Gstaad Barbra Streisand, that is. Where Sheehy is being particularly wicked is that the Draft Dodger put his mistresses on the State pay- roll and used State troopers as procurers, whereas Newt, if he did anything, kept it a private matter.
No, it is the old story of American liberals in the media trying to wreck the chances of someone whose politics they abhor. Gingrich never betrayed the public trust, and Sheehy does not demonstrate that he did. She only shovels dirt and unsubstantiated gossip.
I know Gail Sheehy well. She has stayed in my house in London and has been on my boat. She's married to my old mentor Clay Felker, but that is where we part ways. She's a roaring liberal-feminist, I believe all her kind should be shot at dawn if we are to improve this imperfect world. The dif- ference, I admit, is my political leanings. She lies and pretends to be an objective journalist. She is a propagandist, c'est tout.
Which brings me to the point I wish to make in this silliest of weeks of this silly season. The decline of masculinity in gen- eral and in American life in particular. Look around in any social gathering, even here in Gstaad, and you will see women driving the conversation. Men who, once, would have got together and talked about politics or something of the sort are now only too eager to join the gels and natter on about children, or about getting in touch with their emotions.
The film industry, always in the forefront of political correctness, employs only androgynous types. Brad Pitt, Jim Carrey and Johnny Depp are no — to put it mildly — John Waynes or Robert Mitchums. But the most appalling manifestation of all this has been the emergence of journalistic psy- chobabble masquerading as political analy- 'The hubble telescope is providing us with incredibly distant images of a vet), early universe.' sis. The leading practitioner of this genre of writing is Gail Sheehy.
Sheehy hates Newt's politics but what she loathes even more is that Newt refuses to be one of the girls. According to her perverse standards, he is a stunted individ- ual, ambitious, career-oriented, and more interested in politics than in getting in touch with his inner self. Worst of all, he does not hug everyone in sight like that other overweight slob in the White House, is not into emotional intimacy, and when he reads, he reads history and not the kind of books Sheehy writes about finding one- self. (Passages, New Passages, Passages I've passed through, Passages I will pass through, and so on.) Gingrich's alleged sexual misdemeanours are only the outward symptoms of a much graver wrongdoing: Newt is a man. In American PC, this is the worst condition possible. Here is a man who not only writes his own speeches, but actually knows history, not soundbites. He managed to earn himself a Ph.D., to lead his party to an undreamed of victory, and as Speaker of the House at 52 to mastermind and pass a massive legislative programme. All he gets from the Irish version of Oprah Win- frey is scorn.
This is the bad news. The good news is that during my birthday party this week not a single one of my guests bothered with the inner self. We were all too busy having fun. Oh yes, I almost forgot. There were no PC or American types present.
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