Somebody tell Charlie Rose to get his ass to Hot Topic: Maureen Dowd wants to make sexytime with a vampire. Imagine, for a moment, that you are M. Dowd. Your journaliturgical home, the New York Times, reaches millions of humans around the world via print and the Internets. Now let us also imagine that it is Sunday, July 4th, 2010. Many folks who don’t usually take the time to catch up on their reading are skimming the big fat Sunday edition. It’s a vacation! Verily they kick back, enjoy some savory Jewish “breakfast donuts” with “creamed cheese” and read about America, maybe something poignant and brave and thoughtful on this, the birthday of General Christ Washington.
What are you going to write for them, Maureen, you Pulitzer-prize winning Titian-haired mistress of the whimsical and the smart? How will you talk to the readership that has, at least in part, lauded you for your combination of biting wit, incisive political commentary, and preternaturally youthful appearance? What will be your latest addition to several senators’ secret-shame spank bank? Oh! Here it is!
“It wasn’t until I was in high school that fangs started to seem alluring.”
Happy birthday, America! Maureen Brigid Dowd would like Dracula to throw it inside her. See, The Twilight Eclipsed opened this weekend! BOOM! The NY Times Op-ed page is relevant again, to the Youth!
Let’s begin at the beginning, as is traditional in many (but probably not all, you fascists!) cultures. Moe D starts out strong: “Sometimes the thing that’s weird about you is the thing that’s cool about you.” This is unarguably true! For example, Picasso was an artist, like our own Lauri Apple. This is weird, because art is not sports. But it is also cool! Maureen Dowd has written a good lede.
And here again is something smart and good and fuck it, even inspiring:
What needs to be nurtured is the stuff that’s different, that sets you apart from the pack, rather than the stuff that helps you blend in.
A call to arms for the weirdos, the nerds, the geeks and the oddballs. Let us make this personal, so that it stirs the heart: When I was seven years old, you know who my favorite writer was? Art Buchwald. I read my grandparents’ collections of his columns and lost my shit laughing at his Spiro Agnew jokes. I had no idea who the fuck Spiro Agnew was. But my family nurtured their strange little imp’s fondness for political humor, and now here I am today, contributing daily (surprise!) to the world’s only website. MoDo knows what up.
Then, later, she encourages us/you to “let your freak flag fly.” Okay! Still with her!
And then Our Gal starts to do the thing she sometimes does, which is to say, she starts to lose it.
Al Gore would probably have gotten to be president if he hadn’t let his campaign mercenaries talk him out of a full-throated zeal on … the environment.
Or, ha ha, if the election he actually did win hadn’t been stolen from him through a series of unfortunate yet highly convenient events involving lies, the Supreme Court of the United States, more lies, and the state led by the fucking brother of the guy running against him. Or, you know, if folks like Maureen Dowd hadn’t dedicated their bully pulpits to helping crush his chances at a very clear margin of victory by painting him as womanish.
And here is where the S.S. Maureentania goes truly apeshit:
From the time I was small, I had a passion that many others found strange … a royal heartthrob who appealed to no one but me. He had a funny accent, odd eating habits and bizarre sleep patterns … like me, he didn’t like the beach or baking in the sun.
What? Hey? Whoa? Being different? Al Gore should’ve talked about the environment? Where the flying fuck is this headed? More importantly, who is this pale homosexual who had Our Lady’s pristine white cotton panties in a moist Catholic twist?
Ohhhhh … it’s Dracula! Or, um, all vampires?
I tried to get the gloomy goth out of my bloodstream and move on to more mainstream sex symbols like Steve McQueen.
Tragically, even Bullitt could not stem the flow of unholy vamp-lust bursting forth from Mo Diggity’s undercarriage. And now, on this USA Birthday Weekend, her teen obsession is at last validated!
What I kept on the down-low is now dominating American pop culture.
Ignore for a moment, that a 58-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner has co-opted the language of the streets to describe her childhood sex fetish. Ask yourself why Maureen Dowd got her adolescent rocks off pining for an undead cannibal of the Carpathians. Now ask yourself why so many American Women (TM) are into this quasi-semi-sorta-non-consensual-sex fantasy. Now wonder what the hell all this has to do with being independent and different.
Now read MoDo quoting Tim Stack of EW on how vamps who get staked on “True Blood” turn into “‘a puddle of red, sticky, slimy … goo.’”
And now, if you are still alive, in the traditional sense, take a deep breath and experience the last line of America’s Greatest Column:
The moral of my story is simple: to thine own goo be true.
A thousand more Pulitzers for Maureen Dowd, right now, with honorable mentions to Robert Pattinson and Dakota Fanning. [NYT]
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Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
Sara Benincasa actually wrote this — and sent it to Wonkette’s newsroom — on her Verizon “Wireless” Blackberry.
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This vamp is more her speed.
http://deardickwolf.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/ghvamp.jpg
Al Gore would have been president if the votes were counted, bitch.
Vampires suck.
I’ve seen Moe Do in the sunlight. She sparkles.
Has Anne Rice committed suicide yet?
To type all that on a Blackberry keyboard shows pure journalistic grit or an obsessive/compulsive disorder. IAE, thanks, I resisted reading MoDo’s article this Sunday as my monitor screen was melting.
Kool Moe D is embarrassment to us oldies.
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Sent by from my Amiga 500, 1200 Baud, Workbench 1.3
Sara Benincasa actually wrote this — and sent it to Wonkette’s newsroom — on her Verizon “Wireless” Blackberry.
Ginger-on-ginger hate is what keeps me going.
I would much prefer being sexually molested by a busload of syphilis-infested oompa-loompas rather than reading/watching Twilight and especially anything written by Dowd’s syndrome.
Now, Dowd’s appearance isn’t preternaturally youthful; face lifts and botox are perfectly common among our nation’s rich old women.
So now she’s trying to claim she was basically a goth before goths and vampire sex were cool. Nice try, Maureen, but unless you can pull out a column written in at most the 1980s fantasizing about Dracula I’m not buying it. Moreover, your constant attempts to appear young and relevant are not working; you are still in late middle age and surrounded by fellow rich white Manhattanites who are rather disconnected from the real world.
Mo diddlin’ sounds like to me..
[re=612070]AnnieGetYourFun[/re]: Worse; she went full-on batshit fundamentalist Catholic, and only writes about Jesus now.
Heads up, the link to the crazy lady’s column is bad, on my desktop it wants to link to the mobile column, which for some reason won’t work. Maybe it’s me, but I don’t think so.
Oh, funny old Art Buchwald, my constant childhood companion as well, when I wasn’t exploring other avenues via NatLam: http://tinyurl.com/235qbpk
[re=612077]AnnieGetYourFun[/re]: Yeah, they need to get a toddler pool full of mud or jell-o and just hash this out…on video and youtube , of course.
[re=612096]El Pinche[/re]: You haven’t heard? Prince has declared that the internet is over! So, no more YouTube.
[re=612077]AnnieGetYourFun[/re]: Does someone who dyes naturally gray hair red really count a ginger anymore; assuming they were ever one naturally in the first place?
what a coincidence. maureen dowd was on npr this morning laughing about things that are only ironically comical if you’re an idiot.
Dowd finally jumped the shark or whatever other creature with sharp teeth you care to name. Time to retire, Mo.
[re=612101]fictional character[/re]: Were they ironically comical or coincidentally comical?
[re=612080]JMP[/re]: “So now she’s trying to claim she was basically a goth before goths and vampire sex were cool. Nice try, Maureen, but unless you can pull out a column written in at most the 1980s fantasizing about Dracula I’m not buying it.”
I graduated from high school in 1969, and I recall that there were a few goths in those days. I remember one girl in particular who seemed to have a fetish about it. So maybe it wasn’t “cool,” but it’s certainly reasonable to think that Mo might have had an interest in the whole goth/vampire thing.
But yeah, a column about that on the Fourth of July? Tacky.
I don’t think Ms. MoDo understands the “down-low.” At all…
Leave Maureen alone!!!!11 those eyes haunt me and the fake red hair is the stuff of dreams. I’m headed out right now to get me some wax teeth and a creepy accent so I can more effectively stalk her.
This truly is the golden age of “Wireless”.
shorter every modo column: hey, i look at the periodicals and the weekly television broadcasts just like you, former liberal arts degree major! hey, can we rap about politics and keepin’ it status quo for a few paragraphs?
Tune in Wednesday, when David Brooks will reveal what began to stir his adolescent passions: dressing up in powdered wigs like Edmund Burke.
Oh no, how will Richard Cohen top this? He also likes to write about what’s up with the wacky kids these days, you know, Walkmen, baggy shorts, long hair, loud music that doesn’t even sound like music….
Why does no one ever mention that MoDo is, as you might say, HEFTY?
I wouldn’t give two sh*ts about this, except that, for some reason comprehensible to only managing editors (and great Cthulhu) MoDo’s columns, somehow, count towards the ‘liberal’ total. And then the go out and hire goofballs like Krystal and Sad Eyes (my pet name for Ross Douthat) to somehow restore the balance of nature. As if Nature were ever balanced. As if there’s a conservative in the country that would be caught dead with the NYTimes under his arm.
Hey NYTimes, I’d gladly let you retire MoDo early, if you just let her drag Ross or David Brooks back to her lair when she goes -
So basically Maureen Dowd regrets not being more of what she would’ve liked to have been, had a crush on Dracula and wants to encourage this Mormon vampire fantasy schlock as a way of making amends. Ugh — she knows, doesn’t she, that teabaggers are motivated by the same miserable attempt to recapture the simple world of their youth? It wasn’t the world that was simple back then, Mo — it was you. The world seems simpler when you’re young, period, but it’s not the world, it’s your tiny perception of it. When that expands, the previous myopia can’t be recaptured. Get the f*ck over it.
I think MoDo’s sex fetish for the undead was a Catholic thing, Jeebus/Dracula same diff.
It’s nice to know there is someone available to take Queen Nooningshire’s throne when she finally shuffles off this mortal coil.
Mo diggity belongs in a newseum.
[re=612076]El Pinche[/re]: Cool J? Is that you? Welcome to the world of CYBERPUNK!
-Billy Idol
[re=612098]AnnieGetYourFun[/re]: I think Prince is getting his career and the internets confused.
Now ask yourself why so many American Women (TM) are into this quasi-semi-sorta-non-consensual-sex fantasy…
I’m teaching a writing class this summer to high school kids, and we JUST talked about this a few days ago. The guy from “The Oatmeal” puts it best, I think, when he describes Bella as a character “[who] is an empty shell” and who is presented in the Twilight novels as “less of a person and more of something a female reader can put on and wear.”
Yes, we talked about Twilight in class. I teach at a private school. We’re totally allowed to do shit like that.
Benincasa, I know your future, it is with me, you just don’t know it yet. You can smirk in words, is there any limit to your talents?
Maureen is suffering from “Loss of Problems,” where everything seems flat and uninteresting. Wittgenstein said that Bertrand Russell also suffered from this malady. Of course, it was a lot classier when Russell suffered from it.
Of course, she was different!
Not by being smart, articulate, or well read. No, that would be shameful to admit, or perhaps cliche. She was different because she loved the trappings of nobility and manners that the Browning “Dracula” introduced to Americans and the idea of being the sole love of a man’s life, with a suicide pact involved. See, that’s not common at all, and it’s not shameful, either.
She doesn’t have to confess to being different in any way that is visible, that counts, that she’s responsible for, and she can encourage her readers to do the same. Way to go, Mo.
The vampire lust is not. It’s another dead boyfriend, where you get the love and sex on terms without emotional complexity, where all the issues are magnified so that they Really Count. When “women’s lib” happened, there was a spate of dead girlfriend movies, too (“Love Story,” “Brian’s Song”).
No a thousand more pulitzers to you Sara. Where have they been hiding your brilliance until now?
[re=612070]AnnieGetYourFun[/re]: Unfortunately, not.
Keep your mitts off Mo ya’ mugs. She’s hot.
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