Leftist leftovers for censorship

Gracelessly aging, forever jowly Vanity Fair commentator, James Wolcott, celebrates my banishment from Twitter.

A bit of housecleaning on my end.

When ocelot-stroking culture writer James Wolcott Tweeted at me the other day — entirely out of the blue — my response was to say, “Hey, James! Great to hear from you! I thought you were dead!” (Paraphrased. I’d show the actual Tweet had not my account been nuked.)

We’d had many spirited exchanges during peak blog years, James and I, but none that I could recall on Twitter. This temporal void, coupled with his previously permanent state of aggressive slovenlines, the indifferent passage of time, and the painfully obvious observation from pictures I’d seen of the poor dear that he’d never once lifted anything heavier than a pitcher of vodka Gibsons, may have led to my erroneous assumption. Hey. Shit happens.

To James, such a response is “mouthing off”; and, as his haughty follow-up Tweet makes clear, one simply does not respond to Vanity Fair’s resident hoary fixture in such a way!

In fairness to James, I did feel like I was addressing an old Art Deco bathroom spigot somewhere in Vanity Fair’s past that a gin-filled Zelda Fitzgerald once tried to pleasure herself with. And that’s because there’s something very old and very moist about James — something very Gertrude Stein or Gloria Graham in his painfully mannered online persona — and this is of course in addition to the age of his body, which has long been the approximate equal to a plastic garbage bag filled with cottage cheese and a spleen (though, if you are picturing that image, make sure you imagine a white bag. A very, very, very white bag — one no doubt torn in places and that, these days, has a lot of trouble peeing).

I must say, I never did harbor any ill-will toward the flowery sadsack, and I still don’t. However I do find it sad that in the waning light of his years as a public voice, Wolcott has determined that silencing opposition voices for perceived bellicosity is a noble way to improve the marketplace of ideas.

One imagines his ornate, ostentatious tombstone will read, “Here lies James Wolcott (and his ocelot), devoted bachelor and maestro of a language he spent his time on earth using to try to shut down speech that he didn’t much care for. Inelegant speech. The kind of gauche speech one mostly hears in the interior of the country where the poors live and eat Kraft dinners.

“James will always be remembered as the most courageous writer in any room — provided the room had been cleared of all other writers.”

At least, that’s how I like to envision it

Celebrating censorship is the sad end to a writing career that will always be stained in our memories by a fear of being challenged.

I thought you were dead, James. Honest. Turns out, in a very important way, I was correct.