MEGO Ledes: 'I Want To Be a Happy JAP'

[purejuice]

Much as we might rag on it, the awful truth must be looked at head-on: Reality TV, that fiction of verisimilitude, is, even for people who read W. G. Sebald and enjoy grim Scottish films with subtitles, supernally addictive.

-- Daphne Merkin, Dream Girl, The New York Times Magazine Women's Fashion Supplement

Daphne Merkin is the least talented most often published writer I know. She's like the Heidi Montag of journalism.

This lede is just so wrong in so many ways -- so assholic New Yorker, so deeply unfunny and witless in a way only the Times lets middle-aged women be (Joyce Wadler! Alex Kucynski!), a true discredit to her race -- I can't even begin to unpack this for you. Like network TV and the deeply boring W.G. Sebald and Trainspotting are not fictions of verisimilitude?

Because all the hip people in the universe are, like me, watching RuPaul's Drag Race and nothing else. Rag on Ru? Are you shitting me? You want fictions of verisimilitude? Baby, Ru -- who places himself, as a drag mama, at "just under 300 years old" -- has been dishing fictions of verisimilitude since -- We're born naked and after that, it's aaaaaaaaaaaall drag. Tatiana gave the best discourse on gender I've heard in 20 years the other night on the reunion show.* Addicted to season 453 of the Housewives of Orange County, as Merkin thinks she's being hip to claim? Dude, you'd have to be in a medically induced coma.

Well, there you go. There's a certain class of girls, let's just leave it at that, I went to college with them, for whom Valium is a way of life.

Oh my God Oh my God Oh my God, she says it! I actually read the rest of the piece, which is deeply, deeply loathsome, almost reptilian, as is Merkin's wont. And she says it! I want to be a happy JAP!!!!!

It's almost as good as being a deeply repellent stoned one.

My. eyes. glaze. over.

___________________________
* She felt she had been disrespected as a queen by the others carping on how she was only just a pretty face. As long as I've got a dick between my legs and a wig on my head, I'm a drag queen. (Authenticity as drag queens -- not transsexuals, or God forbid, women -- being one of the electrifying subthemes of the show.)

Comments

[lindeseig.livejournal.com]

Good to know I'm not the only person on the planet who's been obsessed with RuPaul's Drag Race, and that it's apparently the hip thing to do (like it actually mattered - drag queens+music+dancing+RuPaul= high camp at its' finest.

And I agree about Raven - when she wasn't being a total catty bitch, she had depth and complexity - plus she made me laugh, which always counts for something. Tyra was pretty and that was about it.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

hey hipster! i liked raven a lot, but thought tyra (see comment above) seemed both sweeter and more like a round the way girl.

[lindeseig.livejournal.com]

She was sweeter toward the end, and when she talked about her son, but she needed a serious dose of charm school in the beginning. As for Raven, he had me when he was talking about how he watched his mother get her heart broken when his parents divorced, and he's been in that same position in every relationship he's been in...I was right there with him.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

oooo, i missed that ep -- he softened up!