Books

Laugh-out-loud funny
DEALING WITH CELEBRITY WORSHIP

I basically forgot to fire Toby every day for five years.
Graydon Carter
Editor-in-Chief, Vanity Fair

Toby Young's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People is laugh-out-loud funny and also looks great on the coffee table. For anyone who has experienced the angst of not being famous in a world where celebrity seems to be ubiquitous, this is a must read. For those who think the New YorkHollywood media hub is an alien planet, the book is even more fun.

This true story begins in Los Angeles with the author crashing the A-list Vanity Fair Oscar party by assuming the identity of a friend who actually has an invitation. Young thrills at the sight of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, offends a few lesser lights with his less than snappy patter, but manages to break the ice with figure skater Nancy Kerrigan. Unfortunately, while he is mentally whisking her back to his hotel room, his ruse is discovered. As Young is hustled away by Security Apes, a terrified Kerrigan glares at him as if I might at any moment whip out a retractable baton and start pounding away at her knee.

Thus the stage is set and our hero spends much of the rest of the book struggling to get past clipboard nazis, intransigent PR people and thuggish bouncers who would keep him from reaching nirvana on the other side of the velvet rope.

Is celebrity worship sick? Absolutely. Is rubbing elbows with Jim Carrey and Ralph Fiennes intoxicating? Only a fool would deny it. And that's the charm of Toby Young. He doesn't turn his nose up at the spectacle; he jumps right in with a big, obnoxious splash.

Young first made a name for himself in London where he was co-founder of The Modern Review, a magazine that featured intellectuals writing about low culture. In the mid-90s he left England for New York to become a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.

His dreams of Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and the wits of the Algonquin round table are quickly dashed as he realizes that glossy magazines are big businesses run by egomaniacal personalities who take as divine right the perks that come their wayeverything from beauty treatments and designer clothing to theater tickets that arrive at their offices like offerings to the gods.

Young never quite fits into the Cond Nast culture. On his first day, after failing to realize casual dress does not mean jeans and a funky T-shirt, he is directed to the post room via the service lift. Some months later, and tone deaf to sexual impropriety, he hires a strippagram, on what turns out to be Bring-Your-Daughter-to-Work Day.

The author is just warming up, and his genius for self-sabotage knows no bounds. During the next five years he distinguishes himself as a career failure, an alcoholic, a social Neanderthal and a pathetically inept suitor.

The reader is by turns embarrassed and repulsed by this post-modern Sammy Glick but, if it all sounds depressing, it is not. We root for Young because his heart is mostly in the right place. He is not a snob, and he does have at least a shred of journalistic integrity in a milieu where honesty is hardly ever the best policy.

We also never feel sorry for him. A graduate of Cambridge and Oxford, Young is a very smart cookie. His late parents, Sasha and Sir Michael Young (founder of the Open University in England) were the personification of what the English refer to as the Great and the Good. Perhaps this helps explain why their sons rebellion against the educated bourgeoisie took the shape of embracing American popular culture.

Youngs candor is often refreshing, and some of his observations are spot-on. As a Fulbright scholar at Harvard, Young was appalled at the cult of political correctness, and his rant against this idiocy is one of the highlights of the book. He quotes knowingly from Alex De Touqueville, Jane Austen and Allan Bloom and also gives sage advice about how to make it as a man in New York. That is, dress British, think Yiddish and be just gay enough.

While Young is deadly accurate as a satirist, he is wise enough to see the complexity of most of the people he is covering. He can be tart, but he never comes across as bitter as he paints intriguing sketches on Sex and the City creator Candice Bushnell, eccentric Vogue editor Anna Wintour, power couple Tina Brown and Harold Evans and his boss at Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter.

Bottom line, Young proves the maxim that experience in itself is neutral; it is what one does with it that counts. Youngs book is a success story disguised as a failure, a feel-good romp in the guise of a tragedy. Had he behaved better, he might not have done so well. As things stand now, Young has a six-figure film deal; the book is No. 20 on the New York Times bestseller list (No. 1 on the New York Post list); his old enemies want to take him out to lunch; and by writing scathingly about the magazine business, he has insured himself endless press. Oh, and did I mention he found true love? Yep, he even got married and for all the right non-cynical reasons.

Toby Young is a work in progress and ultimatelyit is more interesting where he is going than where he has been. One senses he is eager to hang up the clown suit and become, as they say in the biz, a mensch.

Q & A with Toby Young

The Toby Young of the book and the Toby Young who wrote the book are different people. Tell a little about your parents and how they've influenced your worldview.

My father was a social entrepreneur who created a number of successful, not-for-profit organizations and my mother was a writer and a journalist. They were both liberals, and I rebelled against that, becoming a fairly staunch conservative at an early age. I was a bit like the Michael J. Fox character in Family Ties. However, now that I've gotten older and both my parents are dead, I'm beginning to come round to their way of thinking. I wouldn't describe myself as a liberal, but I've definitely mellowed. Free market capitalism doesn't seem like the universal panacea it once did. I think were going to see more and more conservatives coming out as liberals. Its the 21st-century equivalent of liberals becoming conservatives.

Youre expensively educatedwhat was your attraction to low culture?

My interest in low culture stems from being educated at the British equivalent of public schools until I was 18. My parents encouraged me to take up a musical instrument and learn French, but I ignored them. Low culture was cool. I used to pick my friends according to how much TV they watchedthe more, the better. After Oxford, I tried to rationalize my passion for low culture by arguing that some of it could withstand comparison to high culture, particularly Hollywood screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s. That led to The Modern Review, a magazine I started in 1991 with some friends in which we got journalists and academics to write long, scholarly pieces about people like Madonna and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Its motto was Low Culture for Highbrows. Needless to say, my interest in low culture is beginning to fade, and its being replaced by a passion for the classics. I'm now the theatre critic for The Spectator (of London) so I get to see a lot of Shakespeare. I've also started working my way through the classics of English literature. I read a lot of Dickens last year, and I'm currently reading Thackerys Vanity Fair. I've got a lot of catching up to do.

In the prologue you state, I want to be SOMEBODY! You said you would do just about anything to become famous, but you werent willing to sell your soul to hang out with famous people. Do you think that distinction helped you survive?

I used to exaggerate my interest in famous people, as well as my own desire to be famous, as a way of pissing off my parents and their friends. I embraced the shallowness and vulgarity of American show business because it seemed so appealing next to their earnest high-mindedness. But after living in America for five years, and being exposed to people who really do worship fame, I've concluded that my parents were probably right. I started out thinking celebrity culture was an antidote. Now I think its a disease.

Many of your coworkers at Vanity Fair adopted an attitude that they are more important than the people they write about. What is that special arrogance?

One of the corrosive effects of celebrity culture is that non-celebrities start mimicking celebrity behavior. Celebrities are the equivalent of aristocrats in 18th-century Europethey set the standards that everyone else follows. I saw this among my colleagues at Vanity Fair. They'd have personal assistants, personal trainers, dog groomers, leg waxersall the trappings of fame. Yet they were just journalists. It was disheartening. I think that in order to be a good journalist, you need to have certain hostility to the world you're covering.

Graydon Carter probably won't be flattered by your portrait of him, but he should be. The seven-rooms speechwhat did you take it to mean?

The seven-rooms speech encapsulates Graydons whole philosophy. For him, life is a game in which the object is to get to the seventh roomthe ultimate inner-sanctum. I think a lot of people in New York think that way, but they feel obliged to pretend otherwise. For one thing, unless they do, they'll never make it to the seventh room. So in many ways Graydons candor is refreshing. But its still a pretty shallow outlook.

Ben Hecht and his ilk would not be writers today; they'd be producers and have 20 writers working for them. Given that you were nave to think any semblance of that golden age was still alive, what journalists currently on the scene do you admire?

Was it nave of me to think I'd find the contemporary equivalents of Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woolcott in New York? Maybe. I would have liked to have met Tom Wolfe. He's at the top of the tree, as far as I'm concerned. The journalists I admire most are the ones who are completely independent-minded, who are beholden to no one. I'd put James Wolcott and Christopher Hitchens in that category, along with Michael Wolff and Mark Steyn. I read pretty much everything they write. Among people my age, I like Dave Eggers, Walter Kirn, Laura Miller.

What is next for you?

Im currently adapting my book for film. After I've done that, I want to try my hand at a novel. I'm going to try and write a big beast of a book in the tradition of Dickens and Thackeraya satire of contemporary society that's based on a lot of careful reporting. Itll probably be a miserable failure, but I feel I have to try.

M.D. Baer is a novelist and screenwriter. He has recently moved to Raleigh from Los Angeles. 

IS AMERICA WORTH FIGHTING FOR?

Yes, emphasize Bill Bennett and Dinesh DSouza, American is worth fighting for. In Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism, Bennett refutes the moral relativists and explains our moral right to defend ourselves against terrorism. In Whats So Great About America, DSouza refutes the multiculturalists and explains Americas unique greatness.

The books were a joint feature selection of the Conservative Book Club, and conservative commentators have praised them. They have received less attention in left-liberal review media.

Although both books deal with the post-September 11th War on Terrorism, they include historical, timeless wisdoms. In explaining Americas defense against the Islamic militants, DSouza begins with the 430 B.C. funeral oration of Pericles to the people of Athens about their defense against the Spartans. For a summary of the just-war theory, Bennett draws on Saint Augustine of the 4th century and Saint Thomas Aquinas of the 13th century in explaining our right to defend ourselves against terrorism.

Both Bennett and DSouza are qualified critics of Islamic militancy against Western modernity and qualified defenders of the West. Bennett, the well-known former Secretary of Education in the Reagan administration, earned a doctorate in philosophy and a law degree, and once headed the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park. (His wife is a Tar Heel native, and they have a second home on the North Carolina coast.) The less-known DSouza (who lacks North Carolina ties but debated academic superstar Stanley Fish about multiculturalism when Fish was at Duke University) was a public policy analyst in the Reagan White House and is now a research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Both Bennett and DSouza have previously defended Western civilization against attacks from academic relativists and multiculturalists such as Fish. In these books Bennett criticizes Fish for his relativism and DSouza for his multiculturalism. Undeterred by any criticisms, Fish continues his postmodernist interpretations of the events of September 11 and the War on Terrorism, most recently in a political journal symposium, Can Postmodernists Condemn Terrorism? and in a magazine article, Postmodern Warfare: The Ignorance of our Warrior Intellectuals. Fish defends his fellow academics who have condemned America as the greatest terrorist state, a rogue nation, or an international outlaw. Fortunately, other critics of Fish have picked up where Bennett and DSouza left off in these books.

Bennett and DSouza continue to defend America against academic anti-Americanism in these books. Among the academic expressions criticized are the teach-in at UNC-Chapel Hill after September 11, equating the American victims of that day with alleged victims of American imperialism and a charge, on another campus, that the cause of September 11 was the fascism of U.S. foreign policy.

Because of his earlier criticisms of the academic Lefts relativistic and multicultural curricula changes and his defenses of traditional scholarship, Bennett, over a decade ago, became a bte noire to the academic Left. For similar reasons, DSouza also became an anathema to the academic Left. Bennett, a white Roman Catholic, is an easy target for the academic Left. DSouza, now an American citizen who came here from a Christian family in India with Brahmin ancestry, is a person of color in the Lefts politically correct vocabulary and is a tougher target for them to attack.

Bennett and DSouza provide articulate, indeed eloquent, arguments for Western civilization and American values. Bennetts arguments are more conservative; DSouzas more libertarian. Thus, while each questions whether we Americans always exercise our liberty wisely, they have some differences, especially over what to do about the libertinism of some parts of our culture. While neither overlooks faults and failures in our history, each is committed to the defense of American liberty.

While both discuss the threat to American liberty of Islamic militancy, their books have different scopes. For example, Bennett explains the importance of Israel and defends Americas support of it. Keeping faith with the people of Israel in their still unfinished confrontation with evil is, for Bennett, a species of keeping faith with ourselves; breaking faith, a species of self-negation.

DSouza defends America against various charges, including contemporary condemnation for past slavery. He notes that slavery had been widespread throughout most cultures until objections arose in the West, originally from English and American evangelical Christians. The characteristic of slavery unique to the West was abolition. In rejecting current claims for reparations for slavery, DSouza points out the little-known fact that African chiefs, who profited from the slave trade, sent delegations to the West to protest the abolition of slaveryThe descendants of African slaves owe their freedom to the exertions of white strangers, not to the people of Africa who betrayed them and sold them. Indeed, an irony in the appeal of Islam to some American blacks is the Muslim participation, past and present, in the slave trade of Africans.

Bennett regrets that many of us have forgotten the truth we once knew about the heritage of our Western civilization. He admonishes that the time has come to begin remembering. DSouza also laments our lapse of historical memory. He reminds us that America is the greatest, freest, and most decent society in existence History will view America as a great gift to the world, a gift that Americans today must preserve and cherish.

Everyone exposed to the relativistic and multiculturalist ideologies now dominant in our schools, colleges and universities should read these brief books. Either book would have been a good substitute for the controversial selection for required summer reading by new students at UNC at Chapel Hill, Michael Sells Approaching the Quran: The Early Revelations (1999). Academia defended the required reading of that translation of some of Islams sacred scriptures as expanding the perspectives of new students, while some critics of the choice saw it as an extension of politically correct multiculturalism.

Ironically, over a decade ago DSouza, in Illiberal Education (1991), argued that if academia were serious about multicultural studies, as opposed to multiculturalist ideology, a prime subject of study should be Islamic fundamentalism. Academia ignored DSouzas advice and criticized his book. Academia took the ideological path instead, leading to little academic credibility on the crisis now confronting us, as explained by Martin Kramer in Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (2002).

That ideological path led also to an ambivalent student population. According to a recent poll of American college students by Empower America, an organization of which Bennett is co-director, 84 percent do not think that Western culture is superior to Arab culture and 60 percent think that promoting multiculturalism is the preferred method of preventing terrorism. The poll shows, as explained by a commentator, that academia has taken multiculturalism to such extreme ideological levels that students, rather than gaining perspective on their own culture by learning about other cultures, now embrace and praise all societies but their own. Among the other poll results, 70 percent of American college students responded that they would not serve in the Armed Forces if they were to be sent abroad. Such students need to read these books.

Then they will know that, yes, America is worth fighting for.