an american dream

I feel a bizarre and exhilarating mix of embarrassment, sympathy, and excitement when my favorite public figures go off the deep end. From today's NY Post [I think you have to register to read it online, so I just reprinted the whole thing here]:

NORMAN Mailer is catching static over "Asiatic." The literary lion offended the politically-correct crowd by denouncing New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani as a "kamikaze" and an "Asiatic, feminist . . . two-fer . . . token." In a letter to Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner, who published Mailer's remarks, Esther Wu, president of the Asian American Journalists Assn., calls Mailer a racist who "essentially diminishes the accomplishments of all women and journalists of color. It insinuates that media companies keep people like Ms. Kakutani on staff simply because they are women and minorities -- a dangerous, dismissive and, certainly, misguided notion. On a side note, with Mr. Mailer's firm grasp of the English language, we're sure he knows that 'Asiatic' -- like 'Oriental' -- has long been considered an offensive word to describe Asians or in the case of Ms. Kakutani, a Connecticut native, Asian-Americans . . . we'd like to thank Rolling Stone for exposing the bigotry of one of America's prized authors. To Mr. Mailer, we'd simply like to say: Shame on you." We await Mailer's response.

This made me think of one of the funnier things I've ever read at McSweeney's:

What started as a bascially innocent college prank has gotten seriously out of hand, and, at the urging of the small group of people who know the truth, I have decided to come forward and admit it.

I am Michiko Kakutani.

Many people will have a hard time accepting the idea that a basically undistinguished middle-aged white man living in Hartford, Connecticut, is actually the brilliant, acerbic, reclusive, rarely photographed lynx-like New York Times book critic and Pulitzer winner.

But I am.

[...]

I have not dressed up as her more than 50 times in my life, and, to be brutally frank, one reason I've come forward now is that I'm 44 and my body is thickening, my metabolism slowing, and getting ready to be Michiko Kakutani now requires three weeks of obsessive exercise, diuretics and amphetamines.

[...]

There were mornings when I lay exhausted in my bed, and Alice Shaughnessy, the Sligo-bred housekeeper I inexplicably have, would tiptoe in with coddled eggs and toast points.

"Sure and you've been at it again, sir," she'd gasp. "Herself came out again last night?"

"She reviewed Norman Mailer's silly, self-important, inadvertently comical Jesus novel," I'd groan. "Somebody had to knock that fat bastard down, Alice. Michiko Kakutani was the only one with the spine for the job."

"Sir, it's not my place to say," Alice would falter, "but I worry, sir. I fear you're consorting with dark forces beyond your control, sir."

"Alice, it's a 'zacked-out feel-good literary culture of mutually masturbatory blurb-writers. Nobody wants to be the turd in the punchbowl. Only Michiko tells the tough truth."