Satire

Friday

Cockburn

Who REALLY blew up the Nord Stream pipelines?

Four days have passed since the Nord Stream pipelines mysteriously ruptured in the Baltic Sea, just outside of NATO territory. Sabotage is suspected. Many in the West blame Vladimir Putin; others, such as Tucker Carlson, Radek Sikorski and, er, Vladimir Putin, blame America. But to truly solve this mystery, Cockburn thinks circumstances require us to cast the net a little wider. Here are some potential saboteurs deserving of further scrutiny. Greta Thunberg How dare we! The gray Swedish doom-gremlin has dedicated much of the last years to warning us of the looming Armageddon, traipsing from the UN to Davos to COP26. Is it farfetched to suggest that Thunberg might take dramatic steps to ensure her cause is the only option on the table?

nord stream

Friday

Neal Pollack

The Greatest Living American Writer on Salman Rushdie

In the late 1990s, author Neal Pollack developed an alter-ego character, "The Greatest Living American Writer," for the McSweeneys website, to satirize a generation of pretentious authors, particularly Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, as well as macho literary journalists. That character formed the basis of Pollack's first book, the cult classic The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature. The GLAW has since appeared in numerous other publications,  left- and right-wing and completely apolitical, surfacing and de-surfacing as the times demand. Now he's back in The Spectator World, until we get tired of him.  I have been the Greatest Living American Writer across eight decades of world literature and have seen many shocking acts of violence.

greatest living american writer salman rushdie

Thursday

Ben Sixsmith

My day as a real man

Today, I woke up and felt hungry. In the past I would have eaten breakfast. Cereal perhaps. Some toast. A boiled egg. Not today. What am I? A pussy? My stomach rumbles and I have to feed it right away like I’m some sort of woman? “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” Oh, yeah? Says who? I’ll be the judge of that. Besides, I’m not going to make my own sandwiches. I’ve been watching a lot of videos on YouTube. I’ve been watching a lot of videos featuring Andrew Tate. Andrew Tate is a British-American kickboxer (odd mid-Atlantic accent included) who made a lot of money managing a Romanian studio for camgirls and now teaches people how to be real men.

Thursday

Matt Purple

Undercover in DeSantis’s Disney World

Recently The Spectator sent me undercover inside Ron DeSantis’s Disney World. Allow me to explain. Back in April, Florida lawmakers voted to dissolve the so-called Reedy Creek Improvement District. Reedy Creek, for those unfamiliar with the seamy world of crony capitalism, was a self-governing enclave within Orlando, Florida, run by the Disney corporation. It had been set up to allow Disney World to effectively function as its own nation-state, setting its own rules, levying its own taxes, even administering its own public services. Reedy Creek was established in 1967. It was part of Walt Disney’s original vision for his parks, which was exceedingly ambitious, seeing, for example, EPCOT Center as growing into its own autonomous futuristic city.

disney

Thursday

Ivo Dawnay

P.J. O’Rourke’s death marks the end of a great satirical era

From our UK edition

There was something old school about P.J. O’Rourke, who died on Tuesday, something that felt like a leftover echo of the American Revolution. Visiting him in his ancient, low-ceilinged, clapboard farm-house in Sharon, New Hampshire, one half-expected Paul Revere to burst breathlessly into the kitchen warning that the British were coming. Though he was by birth an Ohio boy, New England felt like the tweedy satirist’s natural environment — a pioneer sensibility that combined American impatience with the Old World with a nostalgic yearning for the oak-panelled values and certainties of yesteryear.

Wednesday

William Murchison

P.J. O’Rourke, a conservative of enjoyment

The politics of the moment are pompous, bilious, unforgiving, over-stuffed, hypocritical beyond the normal standards for political hypocrisy: in other words, designed — as if by divine ordinance — for the gifts of P.J. O’Rourke. I must add, I’m afraid, the late P.J. Rourke. He died the day after Valentine’s Day due to complications from cancer, at age seventy-four. RIP. The world hadn’t heard a great deal about him in a while, likely because he was ailing. This was rotten timing. The current Washington DC sideshow reflects and confirms what Patrick Jake O’Rourke had been saying about politics for some long while. Such as: “I believe in original sin, and politics may be its name.

p.j. o’rourke
p.j. o’rourke
Teresa Mull

P.J. O’Rourke mastered the art of teasing

I first encountered P.J. O’Rourke’s writings as a teenager in a copy of Modern Manners my father encouraged me to buy while we were browsing the secondhand offerings of an offbeat little bookstore (looking back, I can’t imagine who in their right mind would part with such a book). “You should get that, he’s funny,” dad said. That evening, I read some G-rated excerpts to my traditionalist parents, who laughed out loud. For me, it was love at first quip. I finished the rest of Modern Manners in one sitting, completely taken by a style of writing I found blended the best qualities of a person. It was smart, perceptive, clever, sensitive and, of course, good-humored. Reading P.J. O’Rourke inspired me to want to write in a way that informs and entertains.

Thursday

Michael Delgado

Scholars and spectres: The Runes Have Been Cast, by Robert Irwin, reviewed

From our UK edition

It could be said that the power of a horror story depends on the possibility, however minute, of it being true. This is partly why so many masters of the genre, from Bram Stoker to Robert Louis Stevenson, have given their narratives the semblance of believability by including epistolary passages, ‘found’ documents and the commentaries of ‘editors’ in their books. In The Runes Have Been Cast, Robert Irwin takes the opposite approach, writing in a prologue: Should any of my readers incline to a serious study of the subject of this book, it is only right to urge them most strongly to refrain from being drawn into the practice of the Secret Art... My own observations have led me to an absolute conviction that to do so would be a complete waste of time.

Thursday

D.J. Taylor

A book trade romp: Sour Grapes, by Dan Rhodes, reviewed

From our UK edition

Dan Rhodes’s career might be regarded as an object lesson in How Not to Get Ahead in Publishing. Our man was chosen as one of the Best of Young British Novelists in 2003, but his recent exploits include a spectacular falling out with his one-time sponsors, Messrs Canongate, and the writing of a lampoon about Richard Dawkins which so alarmed the lawyers that it had to be issued privately. Significantly, Sour Grapes — his first novel for seven years — comes courtesy of a small, independent press of which I confess that I had not previously heard. In most hands, these serial misfortunes could be guaranteed to produce a full-frontal assault on the people and institutions thought to have let the proud author down. Oddly enough, though billed as ‘a hilarious satire...

Tuesday

Charles Lipson

Supply chain for dummies: a fairy tale

Joe Biden cheerfully told Americans that most of them are too thick to understand what a “supply chain” is. Naturally, he understands it thoroughly. You can see with your very own eyes how well he has handled it. Since, as Joe said, you must be wondering why so many shelves are empty, I’m here to explain. Following the president’s wise advice, I will use small words and a simple story. Let’s begin in the good ol’ days, not too long ago, when the shelves were magically full. The story begins in a land ever so far away, where happy people worked and worked to make Christmas toys for children in Kansas. When they finished making the toys, they placed each one in a little box and then placed lots of them in a great big box.

supply chain

Thursday

James Delingpole

Up there with Succession and Chernobyl: The White Lotus, Sky Atlantic, reviewed

From our UK edition

Every now and then, you see a new series — Succession, say, or Chernobyl or To the Lake — which reminds you why you watch TV. The latest such joy is The White Lotus (Sky Atlantic), a darkly comic satirical drama created, written and directed by Mike White. White seems to be a curious and engaging character with lots of hinterland. His father used to be a speechwriter for ‘religious right’ preachers Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (and later came out as gay). He wrote the charming comedy School of Rock because, though not himself a rock fan, his friend Jack Black wanted an excuse to perform all his favourite songs. He was runner-up in the competitive reality TV show Survivor: David vs. Goliath.

Friday

Stephen L. Miller

The racist Cleveland Guardians baseball team must be renamed

This country is experiencing a long overdue racial reckoning — and the city of Cleveland and Major League Baseball have failed another major test. The new name for the professional baseball franchise in Cleveland — Guardians — must go. As several states work to remove imperialistic statues of cis white men, the city of Cleveland has reached into its racist past to honor them. This is not the progress that Nikole Hannah-Jones has been dreaming of. The new mascot, for the team that will henceforth only be referenced as the ‘Cleveland Baseball Team’, is supposedly a reference to four giant stone statues that ‘guard’ the Hope Memorial Bridge just outside the city’s stadium.

cleveland guardians

Friday

Charles Lipson

Getting UN help on American civil rights is a great idea

The small-minded people who believe in freedom and democratic self-government have their shorts in a bunch over the Biden administration’s invitation to the United Nations to review our country’s civil-rights record. What a superb idea. Long overdue. The countries filling the human rights bodies at the UN have the kind of expertise you can’t get by reading books or following the rule of law. You have to get that kind of experience in the streets. Police brutality? All you have to do is ask the leading members of the UN Human Rights Council like Cuba, Libya, Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia, Somalia, Sudan and Venezuela. They know a thing or two about protecting civil rights. But why stop there?

un

Saturday

Ben Sixsmith

My day at Sun Valley

‘What would you like for dinner sir?’ ‘What do you recommend?’ ‘The grilled cicadas are very fine, sir. Or the fried cockroaches.’ ‘Sounds delicious.’ Smiling, I look around the table of the Sun Valley restaurant where billionaires from Jeff Bezos to Tim Cook have convened to talk shop in a safe environment. It is a kind of tech-based relative of Bilderberg — the annual conference at which presidents, prime ministers and assorted other elite figures quietly come together. No journalists allowed, I was told. ‘I’m not a journalist!’ ‘What are you then?’ ‘I’m a thought leader.’ ‘A what?’ ‘A public intellectual.’ ‘Eh?’ ‘I have a column in the New York Times.’ It wasn’t true but it got me in.

sun valley

Friday

Jarvis Dupont

It’s rude to stare at a woman’s penis

After months of lockdown stress, I decided to treat myself to an afternoon of pampering at a health spa. I felt sure my anxiety-ridden bones would benefit from a nice long soak in some warm, soothing, vitamin-infused waters. I convinced myself that a deep massage, followed by a detoxifying celery juice smoothie would exorcise my inner demons and factory reset my mind’s iOS to pre-COVID levels of tranquility. Oh, dear reader, how wrong I was. For I had omitted to include the torrent of anti-trans bigotry I would encounter at the spa. As traumatic as it is, I shall relive my experience for you here so that it may never be repeated. As a trans woman, I am no stranger to uneducated TERFs and their ‘gender critical’ ignorance.

penis

Monday

Jarvis Dupont

Trans Koreans are Koreans

(If this were a documentary, I would open with the track ‘Turning Japanese’ by The Vapors which, yes, I know that’s the wrong ones, but I still think it would work so please have that song in mind as you read the opening paragraph.) Today something beautiful happened. A tortured soul was finally able to present themselves to the world as their authentic self. YouTube star, songstress and social media guru Oli London came out as Korean. Oh, and also nonbinary too, but to be honest all that gender stuff is getting a little old these days. When almost every social media influencer is either nonbinary or genderqueer, the market becomes somewhat oversaturated. Like what happened with Beyblades.

trans koreans korean

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

A mighty contest from trivial things — the quarrel between Alexander Pope and Edmund Curll

From our UK edition

Rapid technological advance, a dark underworld of uncensored publishing, a threatened rupture with Scotland, even fears of a new outbreak of plague. Close scrutiny of the first few decades of the 18th century reveals some startling (and oddly reassuring) parallels with our own trying times. In his new book, Pat Rogers, an expert on the writings of Alexander Pope and much else, resurrects what you might think was an obscure battle over copyright between Pope and the Grub Street bookseller and printer Edmund Curll. Their quarrel, though, becomes a prism through which Rogers captures the upheavals, hubbub and stench but, above all, the wit of that period, when words could have the explosive impact of hand grenades.

Thursday

Jarvis Dupont

An open letter to Demi Lovato, whoever they is

Dear Demi (whoever you are), I hope this letter finds you well and that you are able to mentally center yourself in a positive and mindful way by doing whatever it is that you do, (I’m sorry but I just don’t have time to Google you what with dealing with my own groundbreakingly courageous gender non-conforming shenanigans). I cannot express just how important it is that you’ve come out as a plural. Your bravery to invite the world to dip their jaded fingers into the open wound of your vulnerability strikes such a chord with me. I watched your video (at one point I thought I recognized you from somewhere...maybe a commercial for a cereal or something?

demi lovato

Thursday

Jarvis Dupont

It’s not ME, it’s YOU

I wake up each morning and take a good long look in the mirror. ‘Wow! You are AMAZING!’ I say to my reflection. And I mean it. I truly mean it. I am literally gobsmacked at how incredible I am — and in so many ways. As a trans woman I am FIERCE. As an activist I am FEARLESS. As a human being I am empathy personified. Yet the moment I step out of my boudoir and into the virtual world of online social media, I am bombarded by negativity. Why is this? I know it’s not me. It’s YOU. Yes. I am sorry dear reader, but the fact that you are unable to handle me and all my perfections is a YOU problem. As an online influencer I am no stranger to violence. My viral videos often bring with them a torrent of abuse.

narcissist online

Wednesday

Godfrey Elfwick

Are vaccine passports enough?

As someone who is able to process information at a higher level than the average person, these past few weeks I have been investing a lot of my energies into the situation we find ourselves in regards to the COVID vaccine rollout. I have some concerns. Firstly, are any of the vaccines suitable for vegans? Have the ingredients been ethically sourced from independent suppliers who only employ Black and ethnic minority workers at a 25 percent above-average wage? Did the vaccine trials include a significant subset of genderqueer and nonbinary individuals and, (more importantly) if so, were their needs met when it came to respecting their unique identities and their right to exist?

vaccine passports