We Are Not Amused

The Olivia Nuzzi Return is a Disgrace

The privilege, if not the function, of being a curmudgeon is not to have fun when it’s being mandated. The world declares a subject of universal amusement; the curmudgeon sulks and provides a sour remark. If he does his job well, he can manage to ruin other people’s enjoyment. Nothing provokes a curmudgeon like being told he must join in the mirth of the moment. With all this in mind, I have to say I don’t really find the entire Olivia Nuzzi thing to be funny. Perhaps in this I’m being a prig more than a curmudgeon, but I don’t care. Here I sulk, I can do no other.

If you’re lucky not to be in the media or to consume it relentlessly, you may be blessedly not know what or who I’m talking about. Olivia Nuzzi is a sort of journalist. I say “sort of” because she is known for a constant connection to scandal rather than any work of reporting or writing. She always seems to be the story herself. Her affairs and breakups are the continual fodder for gossip. I know much more about them than any scoop of hers. You may remember the biggest of her indiscretions: she had an affair—of a sort—with RFK Jr., whom she was supposed to be covering for New York magazine. This led to the dissolution of her previous liaison scandaleuse, her engagement to former New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza, who was dismissed from that august publication for sexual misconduct charges, and around the same time, left his wife and children for the younger Nuzzi. The RFK imbroglio also resulted in her brief “banishment” from New York media to the West Coast. Now she’s back: hired by the new regime at Vanity Fair, the subject of an excessive New York Times Styles section replete with glamor shots, and coming out with a book entitled American Canto, whose prose—on display in her mother publication—is perhaps the only actually funny thing about the whole sorry affair. Now the spurned Lizza has revealed even more juicy details about his disloyal former lover in a parody of her overblown style. Lizza of all people should’ve known Olivia è mobile. And mobile ever upwards, apparently.

But is it an ascent or a descent? The pretentious title presumably comes from Dante’s Divine Comedy, which Nuzzi claimed to have been reading while writing her memoir. (They’re both Italian, you see.) It’s unclear to me what Nuzzi could’ve gotten from the Poet’s journey through hell, pulled by his chaste spiritual love for Beatrice. The Beatrice propelling our bard onward in this case seems to be the brass ring. There is, like in the Inferno, plenty of lust, greed, wrath, fraud, and, of course, that bottommost sin: treachery. But it’s hard to believe Nuzzi has overcome them all and embarked on her new life. She’s working for Vanity Fair, not the Little Sisters of the Poor. And count me as skeptical that this book will amount to a modern Dante: it’s not that type of comedy.

Another set of Cantos comes to mind, those of Ezra Pound. His modern vision of hell is peopled with journalists and hacks. It certainly feels like we’re in the domain he describes:

And those who had lied for hire;

the perverts, the perverters of language,

the perverts, who have set money-lust

Before the pleasures of the senses

howling, as of a hen-yard in a printing-house, the clatter of presses,the blowing of dry dust and stray paper,

One look at Nuzzi’s writing, and you’d have to count her among the “perverters of language.” This from the next Canto might do just as well:

a stench, stuck in the nostrils;

beneath one

nothing that might not move,

mobile earth, a dung hatching obscenities,

inchoate error,

boredom born out of boredom,

“A dung hatching obscenities” is a pretty good description of the media environment that occasions all this éclat for Nuzzi’s return.

Another detail links Pound and Nuzzi: they both palled around with fascists. A friendly rapport with Milo Yiannopoulos raised eyebrows, but she claimed any chumminess was before the alt-right when Milo was just “a silly troll.” It’s hard to tell when this innocuous period would’ve been since Milo came to public prominence as one of the lead agitators in the Gamergate harassment campaign. Nor does she seem to have disclaimed her fangirling of Ann Coulter, who perhaps provides a model for the malevolent sort of camp Nuzzi now revels in. None of this is to suggest any ideological sympathy with the alt-rightniks—Nuzzi’s ideology is Nuzzism, not Nazism—rather, it just attests to her amorality and superficiality.

Nuzzi’s latest grotesquerie with RFK Jr. and the overwrought memoirization is a travesty of American politics and journalism, a kind of drag show burlesque of Camelot’s legendary love affairs. In this lies its sole public service: finally ending the myth of the Kennedys. Under the harsh cafeteria fluorescents of the social media era, it doesn’t look so glamorous, but it always has been sordid. Don’t for a second think Jack and Bobby and Teddy were not every bit as lecherous and their lovers every bit as tacky.

Now we get to the part about how I just don’t get it. This is the point! It’s just a bit of fun. What characters! What a lark! Lighten up, John! I’m hardly a Puritan, but here I must stay stern and pharisaical. It’s exactly this type of spectacle and permissiveness that allowed the Trump thing to fester for so many years. Then the same liberal elites are shocked, shocked that there was a monster in their midst. Or perhaps even more to the point: Jeffrey Epstein. When are we gonna stop indulging this? Without undue sanctimony, I think one can say it’s wrecking the country. It’s a goddamn disgrace. Especially when so many worthy journalists, who’ve dedicated their lives to their profession with ethics and seriousness, are being cast onto the ash heap.

I can do very little to hurt Nuzzi’s prospects. She will make an absolute fortune on this. You may think you’re laughing at her, but you’re laughing with her. But I’m not smiling. The other book Nuzzi said she read during her exile was the King James Bible. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.