Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Jonathan Chait dislikes America

Suzanne Somers?  I've met her, I've spoken with her several times.  I don't consider us friends -- our relationship isn't that deep.  Not because there's anything wrong with her, just because, while always polite and fun, there's never been a connection.

She's a strong light comedian.  She's a strong woman for which I admire her.  ABC repeatedly tried to destroy Suzanne early in her career.  They tried the same tactics with Farrah Fawcett (who was a good friend of mine).  This meant that even after each woman was no longer working for the network, ABC was still attempting to destroy them through back channels by blackballing them.  Farrah wanted out of the show and had never signed her contract with ABC to begin with.  This should have been the only focus of the lawsuit.  Her attorneys knew 'best' and insisted on bringing in other issues which only confused the real issue.  With Suzanne, she was on ABC's number one comedy.  She looked around at male stars on other comedies, comedies getting lower ratings than Three's Company, and saw them raking in a fortune.  She wanted for herself and her co-stars (Joyce DeWitt and John Ritter) to be paid similarly.

Her request wasn't unreasonable and, had she been a man, she would have been heard and gotten some sort of raise.  I'm not interested in all the crackpots with their crappy theories about what went down.  Some of us know what went down because we were paying attention in real time and didn't have our faces against glass but were actually inside as it all went down.

What Suzanne didn't know then and may not know now was that the Big Three Networks (and the failed fourth) got together and all agreed they'd pay no actors a great deal of money.  This was not, the thrifty emerging business of TV, going to be like film where actors had 'runaway' salaries.  They would toe the line.

And for a few years they stuck to that.  Then they broke the rule for one man.  Anyone who can tell me who that is, can correct my facts.  But chances no one outside of the industry can.  It's not a 'name' you'd think it was.  And this man led to another man, led to another, . . .  The only woman with any clout with Lucille Ball.  She had clout because of I Love Lucy, yes, but mainly because she was partners with Desi.  That meant CBS had to take her seriously.  Later, she'd own RKO and CBS would have to take her more seriously.

But women were paid peanuts over and over.  The battles that Farrah and Suzanne fought exposed the rank sexism in the industry.

There was no Three's Company without Suzanne.  It's why the show does poorly in syndication today.  The pattern was established while the show was still in production.  Stations got great ratings for the Chrissy episodes and then the viewers thinned out.  No offense to the two women who replaced her or her two co-stars but they just didn't have the magic she had as Chrissy.

Suzanne survived because she's strong.  ABC did some soul searching (not enough) and got tired of the social shaming that took place throughout the 80s (life outside the offices was not kind for them) and ended up reteaming with Suzanne (first for the successful mini-series of Jackie Collins' Hollywood Wives -- disclosure, I've known Jackie for years -- she's hilarious and a great person).

Like Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland before her, Suzanne is among a small group of women who fought industry sexism and wasn't destroyed.  There's a long list of women who were destroyed.

Suzanne's a survivor and that's why, even though I don't consider us friends, any time we do bump into each other, I'm always thrilled to see her.

She's also a business woman, a very successful one.


Here's how failure Jonathan Chait describes Suzanne:

Somers may lack the “qualifications” to analyze public policy of an Alicia Munnell, but she has written no fewer than 24 books on beauty, aging, weight loss, and other issues relevant to health care generally, and whatever she lacks in traditional analytic skills, she more than makes up for with a strong love of freedom. If your newspaper is going to publish a weekly column by Karl Rove, you have already crossed whatever conceptual boundary might stop you from publishing Suzanne Somers.


Jonathan Chait's a disgusting little man.

Suzanne done and been many things in her life.  She hasn't, however, cheered on illegal wars.  That's really all can't-get-up Jonathan has to his name.


To Chait, she's just a woman to be ridiculed because she wrote "on beauty, aging, weight loss" --
I'm sorry, what beauty tips are in Suzanne's Wednesday's Children: Adult Survivors of Abuse Speak Out?  Or in Keeping Secrets?

And, for the record, she hasn't written any beauty books.  She's written of weight-loss.  The Beauty Principal, by Victoria Principal, is a beauty book.  There's nothing wrong with that but don't claim Suzanne's a beauty writer when she's not.

I'm sure it almost let Chait get a semi-stiffy but it didn't help the rest of us.

Why is Chait mocking her?

Suzanne wrote a column for the Wall St. Journal against ObamaCare.


There are three errors in the column, none of them major.

Chait has sport with Suzanne because she misremembered a magazine cover -- she thought a horse had been on the cover, it was a dog.

A minor error.

She also quotes Lenin and Churchill.

I don't do that.

I'm lucky in that I don't give a damn about the male created gods of the 20th century.  Due to a childhood experience, I had basic history (personal and studied) stripped from my mind.  It never came back in terms of schooling.  In terms of personal history, even now, isolated memories, fractions of them, sometimes float to the surface all these (many, many) years later.

This meant I went into college knowing very little history. To this day, I always enter any room under the assumption that most people in it know far more than I do.  But in college and grad school, what happened, the memory loss, was a gift.  I didn't buy into all the sexism that made up so much of US education.  If women weren't included in the overview of a class, I'd ask why.  And if the answer was for example that there were no women political theorists, I'd go do the research and prove that wrong.

For general subject matter knowledge that I had lost, I had no problem in college going to libraries and checking out children's book to play catch up on subjects I couldn't remember.  I'd read the basic children's books on whatever topic and then move up the chain.  In doing so, I encountered sexism and racism that might have taken hold if I were an impressionable child.  But as an adult, reading these children and young adult books and texts, I was able to see it for the discrimination it was and not take it as gospel or fact.

Because of my own personal experience, I've never felt the need to cite some 'holy' 20th century man to justify my own beliefs or arguments.

Suzanne apparently did feel the need.

Why?

Look at the way she's being attacked (and it's not just Chait -- another funny boy better have enjoyed his yucks, I got off the phone earlier this morning -- before we came into the Congressional hearing I'm sitting in right now -- with his publisher and though funny boy won't be laughing, I'm laughing right now at what awaits him).

These are three small errors in Suzanne's column.

The misquotes?

Suzanne didn't make them up.  She wanted to dress up her column with something 'scholarly' or 'professional' (those never concern me) and wanted to do so because she knew the scorn that awaits anything she writes from some men and from some women who feel that they have a phantom penis.

So she either asked an assistant to find her a series of quotes about health care or she looked herself.  These quotes -- which are false -- exist all over the internet.

Suzanne's not the first person to get something wrong due to the internet.  I can think of a New York Times article from a few years back that the paper ran no correction on but hastily changed online because the facts were wrong, the facts came from Wikipedia and they were copied and pasted into the article with no acknowledgment that this was Wikipedia's work and not that of the reporter.

If I bumped into Suzanne tomorrow, not likely I'm in DC for the bulk of this week, I would advise her to write a light, humorous column about the internet and how we can all get tricked by it.  (The internet is, of course, not just misquotes.)


What she did isn't the end of the world.

In the early 80s, I got into a loud exchange at a party with an ABC suit gloating over the network's destruction of Suzanne.  Though known for being political, I'm not known for arguments at parties.  But this man was taking glee in Suzanne's downfall, he was being a sexist pig and he also had bad breath and I kept stepping back but he kept advancing.  In other words, he should never expect an apology for the fact that I humiliated him and reduced him to tears at the party.

But I feel that same rage building right now as I see one man after another mocking Suzanne.

Those are three minor errors.  The quotes stem directly from the fact that Suzanne didn't feel comfortable about expressing her opinion without some 'gravitas' to back her up.

Why would she feel that way?

Social conditioning, the very personal attacks that have been launched on her repeatedly over the years and much more.  She remembered a magazine cover having a horse on it and it was a dog.  A mistake. Not the end of the world. But the quotes?  Those were included out of fear.  Fear of what?  Fear of this:

Somers may lack the “qualifications” to analyze public policy of an Alicia Munnell, but she has written no fewer than 24 books on beauty, aging, weight loss, and other issues relevant to health care generally, and whatever she lacks in traditional analytic skills, she more than makes up for with a strong love of freedom. If your newspaper is going to publish a weekly column by Karl Rove, you have already crossed whatever conceptual boundary might stop you from publishing Suzanne Somers.


It must feel nice for Jonathan. I mean, he's ugly.  He clearly had no social life (by his writing and his looks) and now he gets to attack 'the pretty girl.'

It must be enough for him to almost get a stiffy.

But no one should be laughing with Jonathan.

In fact they should be outraged by him.

As he mocks Suzanne, he mocks America.

His entire premise is that Suzanne's stupid.  She's not an 'official.'  She's not smart like Alicia Munnell.

No offense to Munnell but she's an administration flunky ("former assistant secretary of the Treasury, member of the Council of Economic Advisers, and member of the Boston Federal Reserve ").  And I understand the significance of officials to Chait -- he madly humps the mattress each night listing them in his head, no doubt, while almost reaching orgasm.

ObamaCare is being implemented.  It's a law that effects every American.

How dare he pretend that Suzanne isn't smart enough to write about it.

We don't need more officials lying.  (Hasn't Dianne Feinstein lied enough for everyone this week?  And it's only Tuesday.)

He doesn't like her opinion.

That's fine.

I'm honestly surprised by her opinion.  It's not one I would have expected from her.

For those who don't read the column, she sees ObamaCare as a form of Socialism.  That's not something I would have expected from her based on our limited conversations over the years but she's entitled to that opinion.  Coming at it from the left, I don't see it as Socialism.  (I see it as a reward to the insurance industry that backed Barack.)  That doesn't make her wrong.

Suzanne is a writer.  She's got every right professionally to write a column.  And, most important, any American has a right to express their opinion.

Chait feels it should just be 'officials.'  But this is a democracy, not an official-acy.

He's such a dumb idiot.

It's like Bob Somerby's obsession with 'the crazy.'  He too often confuses what 'the crazy' was and writes of a desire for the days of Chet Huntley and others.

Bob Somerby can be a real idiot -- and of course a sexist.

Those days weren't better.

Walter Cronkite deciding what was news didn't make for a better world.  It did mean East Timor was covered up.  It did mean many more massacres were.  It also meant that men of color, gay men and women of all color and sexual orientation were shut out of the debates and shut out of the news process.  Those days Bob Somerby waxes over so fondly would have been far less fond for him had he not been an Anglo White male during them.


"The crazy" exists but it's amazing to watch Bob attack people, average Americans, for their beliefs.  "The crazy" exists among officials and pundits.

If I disagree with someone on what happened when, for example, Kennedy was shot, that doesn't make them crazy or wrong.  Bob thinks there's this script we all need to read from.  How sad for the children he taught.

Again, a personal misfortune was actually liberating for me.  It freed me of the need for boxes to pack everyone into or the notion that someone citing 'history' was telling the truth.  A lot of those professors in college and grad school quickly learned to think of new explanations for the absence of women from the syllabus other than 'they didn't exist.'  They learned that I wouldn't just nod and say, "Okay."  I'd go to the library and research, document what really existed prior and spend the rest of the semester working that into the class discussions.

This isn't the only planned morning entry but I am in a hearing taking notes so I have no idea when the next one goes up.


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jonathan chait