Maureen Dowd On Parade

During this morning's Imus in the Morning show, simulcast on radio and MSNBC America-wide, Mr. Imus and his guest, Newsweek editor Howard Fineman, celebrated columnist Maureen Dowd and her illustrious work at the New York Times. Both men gushed about Ms. Dowd's prowess at titillating her audience, though Mr. Imus did suggest that she was–to put it in Imus' delicate way–"a crazy woman". And both men marveled at Ms. Dowd's ability to so quickly get to the point of a matter, even if in reaching that point she is deliciously blunt.

Imus particularly commended Ms. Dowd's success at being the first to point out that President George W. Bush was "haunting New Orleans" in search of another "bullhorn moment." That Ms. Dowd's remarks surely trivialize President Bush's bullhorn moment atop the rubble at Ground Zero is conspicuous, though any reference to her offense is conspicuously absent from either Imus' or Fineman's adulations. Also conspicuous is Ms. Dowd's equating a natural disaster with a decidedly unnatural one: 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina are somehow related in the incredible mind of Maureen Dowd.

But what is important in that mind of Ms. Dowd's is important in our minds as well, though for entirely different reasons. For Ms. Dowd's perceptions are largely shared as a sort of prostitute's offering, giving her readers exactly what they seek and pay for. She is to literacy what phone sex is to oratory. She is a phone sex fantasy spelled out in lurid letters inked by New York presses. That Ms. Dowd earns her wages dispensing gratuitous favors, working her deft hands so effectively as she massages one giant fallacy after another, is perfectly in keeping with the times. But our minds must be vigilantly occupied with her professions, if for no other reason than to avoid the mentally-transmitted disease her intellectual promiscuity breeds. Ms. Dowd's columns are after all among the most emailed columns published at the New York Times, which even further illustrates the salaciousness of her material. Such material is best read, I am afraid, while wearing latex gloves.

HER CRIPPLING POWER

Please recall that the other night President Bush spoke to the nation from New Orleans during TV's prime time. Those of us who watched any of his speech remember that the President spoke with two distinct objects serving as backdrop: the great St. Louis Cathedral and a statue of Andrew Jackson.

What none of us might have suspected was that Mr. Bush's speech was not merely critiqued on substance or style. It was criticized, particularly by Maureen Dowd, for its backdrop. Hear Ms. Dowd at her Martha Stewart-best:

"[The President's] gladiatorial walk across the darkened greensward, past a St. Louis Cathedral bathed in moon glow from White House klieg lights, just seemed to intensify the sense of an isolated, out-of-touch president clinging to hollow symbols as his disastrous disaster agency continues to flail.

In a ruined city - still largely without power, stinking with piles of garbage and still 40 percent submerged; where people are foraging in the miasma and muck for food, corpses and the sentimental detritus of their lives; and where unbearably sad stories continue to spill out about hordes of evacuees who lost their homes and patients who died in hospitals without either electricity or rescuers - isn't it rather tasteless, not to mention a waste of energy, to haul in White House generators just to give the president a burnished skin tone and a prettified background?

The slick White House TV production team was trying to salvage W.'s "High Noon" snap with some snazzy Hollywood-style lighting ..."

Ah, yes, how terribly gauche.

Let me state the obvious: Ms. Dowd has not spent five percent of her time, or one percent of her literary energy, writing or writhing in pained concern for people who have indeed died, or been severely depressed, in the wake of Katrina. Her energy is directed at aesthetics; about fastidious attention to details that matter to her own urban sensibilities. She's hot not about the dead and dying. She's hot about where the President stands; about how he walks gladiatorally. It's all a big fashion show to her, as she sits and jots down notes to help her winnow winners from losers.

Of course, Dowd and her likeminded colleagues point out the President's floundering attempts at symbolism, decrying his efforts with ease, since their facility at denigration comes as a result of misunderstanding the symbols in the first place. Bush's critics are ignorant of the fact that he stood against a symbolic backdrop of religious might through charitable service; and secular service through military might.

In the words of one historian celebrating the august St. Louis Cathedral, a Catholic beacon to the bone-weary and sin-laden in the heart of the French Quarter, the symbolic church resonates with grace:

"Every quarter-hour, the thin peal of bells at St. Louis Cathedral calls saints and sinners, mostly the latter. They clang out a slightly off-key sound, as if they well know the offbeat rhythms of the neighborhood below them. The pulse of a circus atmosphere around the church pounds from hour to hour, as if to compete with the timbre of the sounds from the tower. The church stands sentinel, neither judging nor joining." [emphasis added]

Neither judging nor joining. How apt. How lovely. And what a symbol. A propos.

The historian continues:

"Today the church contains the remains of eight New Orleans bishops. Their lives reflect the story of the Church and the city. Renovated, decorated and restored over and again, repainted inside and out, waterproofed, strengthened with steel, buttresses added, foundations fixed, the church stands. Today the St. Louis Cathedral is a symbol of New Orleans and a tribute to the people and clergy who have struggled to preserve it. Most of all it is a haven of serenity from the soul-splitting life of the world outside." [emphasis added with alacrity]

Thus the symbol of the Cathedral transcends the very presidency (or kingship) not only of America, but of any country, in any age. For the faithful, for those who seek greatness and goodness beyond themselves, the role of faith and the fury of God's love pushes man and woman to achieve more than any Pulitzer Prize can contain.

Couple that with the devotion of a man and his ideals, ideals inherent in his country's dreams, and the union of Andrew Jackson with St. Louis–the fusion of secular and sacred–reduces the prating of Ms. Dowd and others of her ilk to so much nothing. Their very pride blinds them to the humility that is rightly theirs. They are chatterers; gossips. They cannot see the symbols from the sleaze.

For the symbols of Bush's New Orleans moment point to one thing: the need is greater than what any president can meet. Where lies the fault in that? Does not the fault lie with those who choose to be blind to the symbols that speak so elegantly?

But they are not blind to the symbols. They ignore them in disdain. They despise them.

What would the blind have preferred? Bush standing in front of dying men? Bush stepping over rotting corpses, or standing before destruction and defeat? How about him slitting his throat at the altar of their gods? Or would all of these have been dismissed as gratuitous, empty, self-aggrandizing, or mere distractions?

President Bush is a plain man, immoral, mortal, broken. He is like every person I've ever met. One wonders then what people expect from a president, particularly one they've never supported. What do they expect from a man they revile as dense, out-of-touch, stupid and traitorous?

Moreover, what are they looking for? Do they want someone before whom they may bow in worship and adoration? Do they want a savior, a god, to spare them the difficulties of living? Are they so many braying sheep lost without a shepherd? Is that what they are looking for in a president? Are they hoping for a Nelson Mandela who, in the words of U2's Bono, is the "world's president"?

This is the danger of Maureen Dowd. She implies that there is something greater, some one beyond Bush, some one that will quell her vicious prose, overwhelming her with great force of word and deed. She KNOWS what a bad president looks like because she knows what a great one should look like.

But Dowd's greatest danger is that she has succeeded in elevating her own mediocrity to great heights (perhaps she sees herself in Mr. Bush). To her, the symbols of St. Louis and Andrew Jackson are "hollow", which proves my point. That she has managed to draft a successful career on identifying her perceptions of reality as reality itself is more magic than anything Karl Rove could manage for George W. Bush. I believe Ms. Dowd has misunderstood everything she has ever written about, sort of like the way a prostitute misunderstands her body, irrespective of how deftly used.

Ms. Dowd is pretending. Her clients need her to do that.

Contratimes

©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

Technorati tags: Maureen Dowd, Bush, Katrina, New Orleans, St. Louis Cathedral

Ms. Dowd's comments are culled from her essay, Disney on Parade, September 17, 2005, New York Times. A related Contratimes essay can be read here.