Attention Called
I’m guessing the Wall Street Journal op-ed editor’s goal in publishing a narcissistic piece by depression-plagued Ivy League literary phenom/dingbat Elizabeth Wurtzel admonishing us to ignore a presidential candidate’s disturbing pattern of friendships, was to call more attention to a disturbing pattern of friendships that we should be paying attention to.
The Ayers thing is so two weeks ago, after all, and in another week, the Wright thing will be, too. There’s that Rezko thing, but I don’t want to pile on. The WSJ op-ed is mainly about Wurtzel’s adolescence, anyway, and to the extent it seeks to makes a point about Obama’s pal problems while furthering her career goal of calling attention to herself, it’s a twofer. Karl at Protein Wisdom reads Wurtzel’s self-obsessed and confused ramble through the 1960s/80s so you don’t have to, and also helpfully reminds us someone who has made utterances such as this about 9/11 may have a conflict of interest when it comes to lecturing people to ignore disturbing associations:
“I had not the slightest emotional reaction. I thought: ‘This is a really strange art project.’ It was a most amazing sight in terms of sheer elegance. It fell like water. It just slid, like a turtleneck going over someone’s head…I just felt, like, everyone was overreacting. People were going on about it. That part really annoyed me.”
Actually finding a working link to the article is proving difficult, but here’s the quote as archived in its original Globe and Mail text:
On Sept. 11, Wurtzel, who usually gets up at the crack of noon, was asleep when her mother called to say a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center. “My main thought was: What a pain in the ass.”
Her apartment was at ground zero, on Greenwich Street, south of Chambers. She could see the twin towers from her window. Or she could have, if she had bothered to get out of bed.
Then the second plane hit, and more people called. Wurtzel finally hauled herself up in time to watch one tower collapse. “I had not the slightest emotional reaction,” she recalls. “I thought: ‘This is a really strange art project.’ ”
Wurtzel takes a tiny bite of monkfish and ponders the worst terrorist attack in New York’s history. “It was a most amazing sight in terms of sheer elegance. It fell like water. It just slid, like a turtleneck going over someone’s head.”
She takes another bite of monkfish. “It was just beautiful. You can’t tell people this. I’m talking to you because you’re Canadian.”
Then her windows blew in. Airplane chunks landed on her roof. Wurtzel crawled into the basement and was later removed from the building. To this day, she can’t understand why everyone else was so upset. “I just felt, like, everyone was overreacting. People were going on about it. That part really annoyed me.”
Wurtzel became hysterical only when she realized she wouldn’t be allowed back to fetch her cat. She used her psychiatrist’s husband, who is head of the New York City hospital association, to get her past police lines.
“I cried about all the animals left there in the neighbourhood,” Wurtzel says. But she has remained dry-eyed about all the human victims. “I think I have some kind of emotional block. I think I should join some support group for people who were there.”
Asked if she has written about her eyewitness account of the World Trade Center attack, Wurtzel tosses her blond mane. “You know what was really funny? After the fact, like, all these different writers were writing these things about what it was like, and nobody bothered to call me.”
Wikipedia, citing NPR in October of 2001, indicates someone did in fact bother to call her for some blather at least, and that she was somewhat less dispassionate then:
I remember sitting in my apartment and when the first tower fell and the ground shook and one of my windows blew out and there was all this horrible gray and brown dust blowing into my apartment, and I was on the phone with my college roommate, who was calling from Washington basically to say, “Get out of your apartment. You just have to get out of your apartment.” And I screamed really loud while I was on the phone with her and I just kept saying, “I’m going to die.” And I later spoke to her and she said she’s never heard me sound so afraid. And I think it was because for the first time in my life I felt like, you know, in actual danger… As of right now, all it is one horrible, horrible day in the history of this city and this country. We don’t know yet what else is gonna happen. But I do think people our age are pretty philosophical about this stuff. Maybe it’s just a refusal to believe that anything terrible is going to happen. I mean, maybe that’s my problem. Maybe that’s what I sound like.[2]
Back to the matter at hand, the Gotham angst/ennui diva wants you to ignore Obama’s association with 1960s Weather Underground radicals. Here’s the point she arrvies at, after picking through the clutter of her adolescence and expressing some astonishment at the willingness of law schools and law firms to overlook past criminal associations, even as we are being counseled to do so. Because …
By all accounts, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers are unfathomably charming, brilliant and comely people, absolutely irresistible. Everybody who meets them is taken and forgets what they should know.
Mr. Obama expects us all to understand this, because we understand everything else. He is doing something most unusual: He’s acting as if the American people are thinking with their brains. He’s giving all of us a lot of credit. Could it be that we deserve it?
Well, there’s something. The Harvard-Yale Law grad/moody Soho literata charitably thinks the American lumpenpeasantry, or at least the workaday plodders who read the Wall Street Journal, may actually be sophisticated enough and have sufficient appreciation for radical chic to be charmed by fashionable erstwhile terrorists.
By the way, for those of you shallow enough to enjoy artful, if sassy half-boob shots regardless of their bearers’ self-obsessions and other shortcomings, here’s the cover of Wurtzel’s “Bitch.”
Welcome Instapundit, Stumbleupon, etal. Always so good to see you. Hungry? I kill to eat. It’s a bit of an unPCapalooza today, so here’s the latest legal news on unPC usage. Careful you don’t catch anything, there’s some bad viral insurgencies making the rounds. Hey, I’m no pointy headed elitist, but I’m always game for thumbing through blood-soaked U.S. history. Big shout out to our anti-American Sunni pals in Baghdad for Great American Slaughterers Through the Ages, with great vid graphics. Their idea of the C-word is “infidel Crusader dogs.” That said, I bet those guys aren’t keen on the prospects of this peace partnership.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:36 am on Saturday, May 3, 2008
14 Responses to “Attention Called”
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May 3rd, 2008 at 11:34 am
That girl is disgusting. I’m shocked almost beyond words. Who the heck eats monkfish?! Yuck.
May 3rd, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Wow. It’s like she internalized all of her Gen-X angst and cynicism, and stopped maturing 15 years ago.
I’m not surprised you referred to her as a girl, blogagog. She comes across that way. She’s actually 40, almost 41, though. It’s clear that she drew a mental line in the sand when her first best selling book came out in her 20’s, and has refused to cross it ever since.
May 3rd, 2008 at 12:35 pm
“I think I have some kind of emotional block. I think I should join some support group for people who were there.”
It’s called sociopathy. And counseling will not alleviate it.
May 3rd, 2008 at 1:05 pm
“…After the fact, like, all these different writers were writing these things about what it was like, and nobody bothered to call me.”
I suspect thats probably because she is an irrelevent nobody but I could be wrong……………
May 3rd, 2008 at 3:45 pm
I’ve read about sociopaths who have no conscience or sense of morality or any empathy whatsoever for their fellow human beings. This girl is a sociopath.
Furthermore if she didn’t look like that no one would read her or talk about her. Feh.
May 3rd, 2008 at 4:03 pm
For some reason I’m reminded of the scene near the beginning of the new Iron Man movie where Tony Stark is confronted by an attractive blond Vanity Fair reporter (the result of which was the first indication that the movie was a classic, btw).
Meanwhile, somewhere in America, a guy just read this entry and thought “yeah, I’d hit that.”
May 3rd, 2008 at 4:52 pm
[…] anyone surprised that Miss Wurtzel is a bit of an exhibitionist whose work has been called “tiresomely solipsistic“? So the question is: did the WSJ […]
May 3rd, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Greyhawk, I would definitely hit that. With a crowbar.
May 3rd, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Not sociopathic, depressive. Look it up. Ninny.
Now, guys, try reading what she wrote instead of reading her boobs (although I bow to no one in my admiration of her boobs). She’s not Evil Liberalwoman, she’s saying “maybe it’s not the 60’s we should think about, it’s now.”
This is wrong why?
And maybe she’s right — we don’t get consumed with the vapors, at least the grownups among us don’t, when we hear a story that McCain called his wife a bad name in a moment of anger, or that Obama smoked dope in his teens, or that Hilary is sleeping with her amazingly gorgeous and apparently inseparable female aide.
She’s also saying, at least it looks to me, that when the newspaper people won’t talk about Ayers’ and Dohrn’s histories, that they’re not willing to let us use our brains. Not about Ayers — at least, now everyone who can hear knows that Ayers is an attempted murderer, accessory to murder, and felony murderer — but about Obama.
May 3rd, 2008 at 11:37 pm
…she’s saying “maybe it’s not the 60’s we should think about, it’s now.”
By “we”, Charlie, do you mean the Democrats? The left in general? The Republicans? Because, I assure you, I stopped thinking about the 1960s sometime around January, 1970.
The only groups I know of that are obsessing over that period are the Baby Boomers who want to relive it (i.e., hippies), and the Generation Xers who regret missing it..
Just so you get that point straight, eh?
My bigger problem with Wurtzel is that she simply doesn’t care. Ye gods, the bint watched thousands of people die, nearly died herself, and showed emotion only when her cat was threatened.
This is not “depression” (yes, I did look it up), at least not now. Maybe earlier in her life she was merely depressed, but that hid symptoms of other problems. This is much deeper than “depression”. Clearly narcissistic, probably a sociopath, and certainly not a person whose analysis is to be accepted as rational.
May 4th, 2008 at 1:18 am
Jeff, I don’t know about her but I was depressed when I read the excerpt from her latest. Now all I have to do is figure whether I’m situationally or clinically depressed after reading it.
May 4th, 2008 at 11:16 am
Good point, Mike. Mayhaps you should get a photo taken of yourself flipping off the world? Alas, you lack (I think) the upper body features that many people (mostly male) would be attracted to, so no best selling book for you!
On the other hand, perhaps part of her behavior as a sociopath includes depressing other people. Try reading more of Jules’ stuff as an anti-depressant. Or maybe Theo.
May 4th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
She’s a despicable malignant c*nt, which trumps her upper body features.
May 4th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
[…] and contradictory responses to his voluntary association with his racist, anti-American preacher. Bizarre justifications of The Exalted One’s supporters notwithstanding, the reality is all that’s left is an […]