10/31/2008 11:10 pm
Culture
Margo Howard and Roger Ebert Say to Erica Jong: Take a Vow of Silence, You’re no Norman Mailer
Editor’s Note: A longtime journalist, Margo Howard went into the family business (her mother was the fabled Ann Landers) in the 1990s as Dear Prudence. Her broad experience and understanding of human nature provide answers for the troubled — and entertainment for everyone else. Click here to read her column on Yahoo! Howard’s friend famed-film-critic Roger Ebert joined the opining for this column.
Dear, passé, clueless Erica Jong has shot off her mouth in Italy – apparently thinking she was talking only to Italians. She sounded absolutely nuts. Among the things she said to the Italian daily, Corriere della Sera:
1. If Obama loses, it will result in a second American Civil War. (!)
2. Her friends, Ken Follett and Susan Cheever "are extremely worried." As if the discomfiture of these two worthies were not enough, she relates that "Naomi Wolf calls me every day." This would be the same Naomi Wolf who advised Gore to dress in earth tones … which, as we know, didn’t help a whole lot. And the afore-mentioned people are not the only fellow-sufferers. Jane Fonda e-mailed Jong that she cried all night and that the stress of it all was giving her back spasms. Her distress was so acute, Jong relates, that Fonda had no choice but to visit an acupuncturist and get an RX for Valium.
3. And getting back to the second American civil war, Jong opines, "Blood will run in the streets, believe me. And it’s not a coincidence that President Bush recalled soldiers from Iraq for Dick Cheney to lead against American citizens in the streets."
4. And I think the following is the most egocentric remark I have heard since I have been middle-aged. It has to do with her soi-disant fellow writers at the top ranks of American letters who are not doing anything to help Obama. "Tom Wolfe and John Updike are men of the right and Philip Roth is at this point a hermit who leads a monastic life in Connecticut, far from everything and everybody."
But all is not lost. She says she is still trooping the flag, and of course there is also Michael Chabon. The two of them she believes, have "taken the place of Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer respectively," because, she said, they have the same political sensibilities, "but a better sense of humor."
Forgive me, but I knew Norman Mailer … and you know the rest. As for appointing herself Susan Sontag, well, my advice to her would be to borrow some of Ms. Fonda’s Valium and take a nap, not to mention a vow of silence.
by Roger Ebert 
What is the matter with Erica Jong? Has she lost her mind? She’s raving like a right-wing nut about a "second civil war" if Obama loses. Where did she say this? In an interview with an Italian newspaper, possibly because no American newspaper gives a fart in a windstorm what she thinks about the election. So now the Italians have been warned.
A story in the New York Observer makes her sound scripted by the Onion. How will this Jong quote play with the paranoids on the right:
"Yesterday, Jane Fonda sent me an email to tell me that she cried all night and can’t cure her ailing back for all the stress that has reduced her to a bundle of nerves. My back is also suffering from spasms, so much so that I had to see an acupuncturist and get prescriptions for Valium."
Ohmigod! Spasms! Aimed like an arrow into Sarah Palin’s next speech.
But Jong will bravely fight at the barricades, despite her aching back. There are no other writers to do so. She goes on:
"Tom Wolfe and John Updike are men of the right and Philip Roth is at this point a hermit who leads a monastic life in Connecticut, far from everything and everybody."
Dire, although at least the monk is a great novelist, and keeps on writing. But wait, there is hope. The Observer reports: "Luckily, she said, there are her and Michael Chabon, who, she says, have ‘taken the place of Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer respectively’."
Nobody has taken their places. Nobody is ever gonna. Erica Jong is not even high on the "nobody’s gonna" list. If Susan Sontag had read that, she would have hurled. I loved Chabon’s New York Review convention coverage and his fiction. Erica Jong is known mostly for Fear of Flying. Now she should write Fear of Thinking.
Maybe the McCainists are correct, and the coasts are overpopulated with elitist feminist flywheels. We here in Illinois elected Senator Obama in such a landslide (70% - 27%) that the GOP saw it coming and had to hire a guy from out of state to run against him. We voted out of conviction, not as a cure for psychosomatic spasms.
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