Taking Down a Snob

I love this book review from Michael C. Moynihan in Reason magazine. He makes a fool of elitist New Yorker film critic David Denby, who has a new book out on the culture of the "snark." (read)

The byproduct of this conversation is a pungent and angry little book called Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation. In just over 100 pages, alongside the first-name references to his famous friends and descriptions of his high-class meals, Denby attacks the online boobeoise who, he argues, have altered the tone of debate by supplanting thoughtful conversation with snide and indiscriminant denunciations of the “douchebags” with whom they disagree. “In a media society,” he writes, “snark is an easy way of seeming smart.” If the bloggers at Gawker and Wonkette, two websites dedicated to all things snarky, delight in puncturing the pretentions of the old-guard bourgeois intelligentsia, Denby has provided them a slow-moving target.

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Denby wants things as they once were, when American culture was effectively a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie; when the Ivy League guardians of “our conversation” ruthlessly protected it from contamination by the jealous and uncouth. “Whatever its miseries, the country in the thirties and forties was at peace with itself spiritually: We were all in the same boat,” he argues. Today we have “income inequalities and Rovian tactics that exacerbate ethnic and class differences”; then we merely had Nazism and the Depression.

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Denby identifies Wolfe’s “Radical Chic” as a progenitor of today’s snarky style, but it fails, he says, because the writer’s teasing of haute-liberal infatuation with the Black Panthers “now seems more fatuous than the assembled partygoers.” How so? Because according to Denby, “In the end, [Wolfe’s trademark] white suit may have been less an ironic joke than the heraldic uniform of a man born in Richmond, Virginia, who entertained fancies of a distinguished Old South in which blacks kept their mouths shut, a conservative who had never accustomed himself to the new money in the Northeast.” While denouncing bloggers for rumor-mongering and for besmirching reputations with nothing but conjecture, Denby nevertheless finds it appropriate to imply that Wolfe’s writing is steeped in white supremacy.