Elaine: “Well, he’s smart.”
Kramer: “No, I don’t find him all that bright.”
George Will has the bearing, temperament, and wardrobe of a serious and thoughtful man. But it’s all a mirage. Every column he writes contains some major logical fallacy or some grossly unfair characterization of facts or motives. You could teach a journalism class dedicated to finding the fake crutch Will uses to construct his arguments. Today he takes on what he calls ‘therapism’. He claims, “the “caring professions” have a professional stake in the myth that most people are too fragile to cope with life’s vicissitudes and traumas without professional help.” And he concludes, “national enfeeblement must result when therapism replaces the virtues on which the republic was founded — stoicism, self-reliance and courage.”
To prove his point he leads with this:
:::Read More:::
Now, I’m not an orgy guy. I can’t get with all the oils, and lotions, not to mention the gold jewelry. I have nothing against people that like to invite a third or fourth person into their bed, but it’s just not my thing.
George Will seems have a much more open mind. He equates Jane Fonda’s discomfort with her husband’s practice of insisting on group sex with some kind of symptom of national enfeeblement. Apparently, the proper response to such a request from your husband is a stoic resignation, combined with a touch of courage. In fact, as Jane should have known, bottling up your feelings, and submitting to unwanted group sex is good for your mental health:
George Will sure looks sharp in his custom tailored suits, bow-tie, and designer glasses…but I gotta agree with Kramer…”I don’t find him all that bright.”
As tho Jane Fonda is emblematic of anything that has to do with average Americans — daughter of a movie star who became a movie star in her own right, who married a sexual predator, crossed the line in protesting the Vietnam War, married a politician, promoted herself as an exercise queen, married a friggin’ billionaire and blew that by being “born again.” Yeah, we all have soooo much in common with Jane.
And George Will? Nope, nothin’in common with him either up there in his elitist ivory tower, looking down on the rest of us.
More to the point of his essay: “national enfeeblement” resulting from getting in touch with our feelings thru therapy is hardly a danger to the American psyche. What’s dangerous is all the repressed rage in folks who think therapy is for sissies and end up going postal on their co-workers or the kids at the nearest McDonald’s.
I gotta tell you. I haven’t heard his side of this at all. And frankly I’m suspect. I didn’t read the book but she said that he left her and that she was “devestated.”
I know that when people start a marketing strategy for a memoir, they start drawing up talking points.
“How about threesomes with my husband,” she asked. “How would that come off on Ophra?”
And the publisher cried BooooYa.
###
He fits the stereotypical image people have of what an intellectual should look like (at least a conservative intellectual), he comes across as very assured and confident, and he uses words that many have to scramble for a dictionary to define.
It’s all to easy for people to assume he knows what he’s talking about, especially if its about a subject they themselves are not very conversant. Plus he usually provides the appearance of a reasoned argument in defense the ingrained prejudices of many in his audience.
In other words, he makes public ignorance and bias work to his advantage.
A classic spokesperson in the era of Spin.
Let me see if I get this straight.
Because Jane Fonda let her feelings get the better of her, and because we have lots of therapists, therefore the republic is in danger?
Might take me a while to work that one out.
That’s generous. My take: because Jane Fonda felt badly about the fact the her husband desired more than just her for sexual gratification, she is a whiny, insecure, loser.
And furthermore, her feelings of inadequacy are a symptom of the decline of Western civilization.
She should have supressed her feelings of inadequacy and gotten over her revulsion at being forced to make love to another woman in her husband’s presence, and watching her husband make love to another woman, in her bed, and just shown a little courage.
Revolting.
You know what you have to do next. Write an LTE saying just that. Please oh please.
listen George… you didn’t have to tell us that…
but we know how you feel George… or actually, we don’t… you’ve repressed it.
I know nothing of Jane Fonda’s sex life beyond what is posted above, but the interesting thing here is that her take on her husbands needs would be based upon what she perceives her worth to be. That is very much a cultural thing. Say in central Europe society would view him as a pervert, further South he would be looked upon as a deviant, but here it is looked upon as someone doing damage to a victim – which is a cultural anomaly. I have never met as many victims as I have here, and those that profit are counselors and lawyers and pharmaceuticals (if we can drug the victim as well).
I told this short story on Kos the other day: When I was about 14 I went on a class trip for a week to Florence where one of the boys cornered me into the bathroom and started pawing me. So I swung out as hard as I could and gave him a big fat red mark across his face and walked out after savoring my handiwork for a moment. He stayed clear of me for the rest of the trip, and I went to no trouble to avoid him in future.
I got a response back from someone whose reaction was to feel sorry for me that something like this had happened. I told him/her that no, in fact whenever I think about this I still need to suppress a laugh. The point was that I was raised to face my problems, and I walked away from that encounter the victor.
My biggest gripe is that I need to run daily damage control on my daughter when she comes home from school. When she first went to Kindergarten she’d come home and tell us about how naughty the other kids had been and what trouble so and so got into. She never behaved like this before. We found out that it is school policy for the kids to tell the teacher every little mishap on the playground, when it happens – without trying to sort it out for themselves. She is now in 2nd grade and this is still happening – when her friends come over they are constantly running up to me telling on each other for the most ridiculous things, and I as the adult am expected to step in and solve the problem. In effect when children don’t learn to deal with their problems and confrontations in the here and now, how exactly are they going to be able to do this as adults?
You make a lot of good points.
I have a cultural bias, like everyone. Jane Fonda had a husband that pressured her to have sex (threesomes) with other women.
She went along with it because she wanted to make her husband happy. But she felt low self-esteem that her husband was not satisfied with just her. She also was not attracted to women.
Now, we can all criticize Jane for feeling the way she did, but George Will uses this embarrassing confession to accuse her of being symptomatic of a culture of ‘therapism’.
I think many people do things they are uncomfortable about to make someone else happy, and many people feel low self-esteem, when it is not necessarily appropriate…
It has nothing to do with a culture of ‘therapism’.
It’s a non sequitor. And another example of how George Will is an idiot.
I had to go look up his picture – well, to each his own.
I would have to say that she’s an unhappy person who never learned to stand up for herself, and if her actions don’t impact me I won’t criticize them either. Society as a whole however can be way to critical, which in turn can impact the way people feel about themselves.
Take ‘my’ school for instance: in 15 years who will these youngsters turn to in order to solve the problems they never learned to solve – with many of these kids already being medicated (they learn that their minds are sick – therefore they need drugs to be ‘normal’)? I won’t be so arrogant to speak of this culture as a whole, but just my immediate environment (since the South where I’ve spent time is very different).
Hanni, I’m so sorry this is happening to your daughter. If it’s hard on your daughter — I can’t tell from your description above — you could follow my example and let her become a truant. It’s only through sheer luck that wasn’t tossed in the clink for letting my daughter skip a lot of school because it made her so emotionally miserable. And I think she’s a better adult for it. In fact, I know she is more mentally healthy for having avoided all that crap.
Last year I was a mentor/tutor in a rural elementary school, and I was appalled — shocked — by the over-disciplining of the children who, to a one, felt oppressed and hated school. (Except for a tiny minority who have that particular personality that abides well in a tightly disciplined sphere.) They were disciplined endlessly for nothing! And all the disciplining severely impacted the amount of time left for learning. Also: Certain kids who got tagged as troublemakers were even more constantly punished… there wasn’t one thing those kids could do that was right.
I also noticed that the more severe the teacher or aide were in punishing and expressing themselves angrily, the more they were respected by those in authority. That I found very scary.
LOL – She’s missed 20 days so far this semester. Yes – that’s great advice. I teach her a lot at home.
George could not be more typical of his generation:
“Never mind research indicating that reticence and suppression of feelings can be healthy.”
I’m part of that generation, too. Only I’m female, raised by a man who suppressed feelings, married a man who suppressed feelings. Today, I hear the indicators long before I get involved with a person.
Today, free as a bird, a poet who writes about that suppression of feelings. Happy? Oh my, yes!
But I’m irritated by Will’s approach to what Jane Fonda was saying. Jane was abused as a child, which brought her to the state of not feeling good enough. This was reinforced by her first husband.
There goes Will, pooh-poohing the whole matter. He’s not just “not very bright,” he’s all about victimizing the victims. Maybe he gets some kind of thrill out of that. Maybe he should see a therapist.
Sorry guys. That was too broad a brush stroke about men of my (and George Will’s) generation. Some of you managed to learn. God bless you all.
This is an interesting discussion, but I do have to disagree with the basic premise in your headline. George Will is an overweening, overbarbered, sanctimonious, extremely unattractive little twit who wouldn’t know a genuine emotion or an honest fact if it kicked him in his tight little ass.
And he’s not a very good writer.
I love it! Good on you, Booman.
“national enfeeblement must result when therapism replaces the virtues on which the republic was founded — stoicism, self-reliance and courage.” [Emphasis added] MUST result? (chortles quietly to himself) A classic example of the fallacy of the Slippery Slope!
Also a classic George Will argument: a gross logical error buried in and surrounded by uneschewment of logomachian obfuscation giving the appearance, but not the reality, of intelligence. Mayhap he should loosen that bow tie and get some blood flowing to his brain.
Methinks that the bow tie cut off the blood supply to his brain many years ago, and he entered into a persistent vegetative state. While the musculature continues to respond to stimuli, there’s no real evidence of any brain-wave activity.
But seriously, even this statement of his quoted here is demonstrably incorrect: if the republic was founded on stoicism, wouldn’t the reaction to such issues as “taxation without representation”/lack of self-government have been to silently take our lumps in the 1770s and hope that Parliament eventually tosses a bone the colonies’ way? And if it was founded on self-reliance, wouldn’t they not have solicited aid from France and have told Lafayette (among others), “Thanks, but we prefer to try to defeat the British all by ourselves”?
What useless pabulum. And for Will in any way to imply that Jane Fonda should just have held her chin up high and gone along with her husband’s sexual preferences is in the same league as the immortal Clayton Williams remark during the 1990 Texas race for governor: “Rape is like the weather. If there isn’t anything you can do about it, you may as well sit back and enjoy it.” Just jaw-droppingly offensive.
My personal opinion is people who commit gross logical errors (and are then praised for their “intelligence”) should be publicly flogged on a daily basis. This could provide amusement for the American People as well as be educational for the children.
And don’t get me started on ‘Tush’ Limpblah.
I completely agree with “pabulum.” Thanks for pointing that out.
So we add a gross factual error with a gross logical error throw-in some inchoate verbage and … Zowie! … we obtain George Will, Conservative Intellectual par excellence.
Didn’t Georgie get thrown out by his wife for adultery? I wonder if he isn’t covering his own sexual peccadillos. But, in truth, I could care less about the sexual antics of the Rich and PR’ed. I’m 52. I’ll leave orgies to Supreme Court Justices and you younger studs. And my wife has a marble rolling pin and knows what bed I should be sleeping in!
I can’t help liking Jane Fonda though she’s done some mighty stupid things in her mostly sad life. This “candid” bare-all book is one of the stupidest. She’s always seemed to me to be both needy and deeply sweet-natured. Her roles in “Klute” and “Nine to Five,” probably make me think that. Yet in her interviews with talk show hosts, she appears to be concerned about showing good manners and graciousness.
Though her past actions contradict this, I suspect that she’s not at all tacky and cares very much about others’ feelings.
You all have described so well how I see George. You’ve got him dead to rights. A few years ago, in a column, he let his readers know that his son was retarded. I don’t remember if he used the term “special needs,” but I did have the feeling that this was – in his mind- a most gracious “admission” to his readers. He had offered a personal concession: he, too was human and experienced pain in his life. I was ashamed of my reaction to this gesture: I suspected his motives. The fact was so perfectly incorporated in his column about baseball games, and the information was delivered in such a calculatedly natural way.
Lately he looks even more clenched than ever, but the conviction of his own rightness is beginning to look silly. So often he doesn’t, by any measure, make sense.
Maybe I’m spinning a fantasy around him – that his precise and refined intellect is at war with his true nature. Obviously, I can’t figure him out. But that makes him faintly interesting, and not attractive.He’s one who might just implode.
He brilliantly skewers those he doesn’t approve of, or so he thinks. He can be a very nasty kind of bully in his emotionless way. George can dish it out …
I wish Jane would drop the “gracious lady” pose and respond to him in kind, when the urge for revenge is cold.
George Will, attractive?
He’s such a verbose idiot it’s hard to judge fairly.
But then I suppose if he’d just said, women should shut up and suffer he’d sound too Limbaugh.
And I’m impressed, not one soul asked…Anita Ekberg? With or without eye patch?
Sorry about that dive to the bottom of the gutter,I’m on my first cup of coffee.