23rd
The Dowd Zone
The Twitter dudes are pretty hilarious in this piece, but what I can’t get over is this: how genuine were Maureen Dowd’s questions? Even though I’m never positive she’s entirely earnest, I generally assume she’s not being ironic — just dumb.
Take her last column, a true Dowd gem. Look, I love talking about Star Wars at least as much as the next guy, and I’m glad Dowd’s confirming my long-held belief that Star Wars can be used to explain ANYTHING IN THE WORLD. But seriously, what do those first five paragraphs have to do with, you know, the actual subject of her column? She tries, though — you gotta love this painful transition: “Sated, I went over to talk to the other celestial celebrity in San Francisco who inspires cultlike devotion for what she does with green cooking rather than blue screens.” I’d say this was a self-parody or something, but again, I don’t think Dowd does irony — just stupidity. (There’s much more to say about Dowd in the context of an anti-snark rant — it’s effective when used well but when the default form, as it too often is right now, it just leads to lazy, intellectually vapid writing — but that’s for another time when I’m not being a wee bit snarky myself.)
It’s like Dowd’s editors have given up trying to get her to write well thought-out or coherent or readable columns. Her writing has reached some version of The Tyson Zone: I accept all her columns as genuine no matter how outrageously bad or stupid they may be. She’s in The Dowd Zone now. God help us all.
