The Vengeful Vagina Party

(Sports Illustrated and Boston Phoenix scribe Charles Pierce recently reviewed Bill Simmons’ “The Book of Basketball” for Deadspin. My thoughts on Pierce’s thoughts was going to be this blog post, until it turned into something else. That original post may come somewhere down the line, but for now, here’s that “something else.”)

I hate Deadspin, the supposed “irreverent” sports blog, and its ilk. I hate Bill Simmons, who I used to like until I learned to write, and I hate what my profession is turning into on the web. With that in mind, I turned a kind eye to Charles Pierce’s review of Bill Simmons’ The Book of Basketball, recently flooded to the press with much whoring from ESPN and its various syndicates.

How shocked was I to see Pierce, of all people, the Sports Illustrated god, writing for a blog whose lineup includes someone named “Balls Deep.” Pierce is a fine sports writer. He can turn a phrase well, he’s worked for the giants in the industry and he’s as vindictive as they come.

Pierce – whose main criticisms of Simmons center around his tendency to credit himself for being first to inject his prose with nauseous pop culture references, as well as to rely on his many self-created cliches – strikes with a cliche of his own in the beginning of his review – the backhanded compliment.

After all, The Book Of Basketball is at the top of The New York Times bestseller list, and it already has done the world the great service of dumping from that spot Mitch Albom’s latest exercise in Flintstones Chewable Eschatology. And it may just be big and heavy and lumpy enough to keep Sarah Palin’s upcoming tome, My Vengeful Screaming Vagina, out of the top spot. This volume already has done much good for American letters in general.

I can’t imagine Pierce’s reaction to calling Gloria Steinem a “vengeful screaming vagina,” or any of the myriad of liberal women whose main pursuit in life is to be angry about something, usually men. But as far as vengeful vaginas go, Pierce would recognize one, he has to see one in the mirror every morning when he gets up.

In regard to Sarah Palin, the whole media establishment has becoming a baying chorus of vengeful vaginas. This is an attractive woman, living the lifestyle they dread, an ideology they detest, and doing so to more and more success. No wonder Pierce and The Atlantic’s resident homosexual gynecology expert can’t help but be fascinated at her innermost workings.

And they know fascination is as far as it would ever get. There’s no question Palin’s taste in men – it’s not hard to figure which side of the alpha/beta male divide her snowmobile-racing, professional-fishing beau rests. There’s something about that which eats the vengeful vagina party up, that after 40 years of emasculating men from the culture and the leadership (and to much success) here comes this vamp from Alaska who finds success while breathing the scent of testosterone in her midst.

Vengeful is one word, another word is hateful, and that describes Pierce in the lead up to his recent book Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, where Pierce laments how stupid our country is becoming. Case in point, the Creation Museum in Kentucky, which Pierce apparently believes shouldn’t be allowed to exist. Damn those dangerous Creationists and their apostasy. Though I’ve never picked up the book, I doubt if there is much criticism, of say, those living in Africa or the Middle East where Creation is downright contemporary compared to some of the beliefs being bandied about. Notice he keeps his targets centered to America, venturing outward may be politically incorrect and we know how vengeful vaginas get when they are politically incorrect.

But, Creationists don’t strap C4 to themselves or charge the mess hall locked and loaded, so brave and independent thinkers like Pierce are free to attack. It works for Roland Emmerich, who is willing to blow up anything he can animate in a movie, as long as it’s Christian or Western.

Pierce’s article is titled “You Are Not The Cosmos,” a take on the late Molly Ivins and a column she wrote on Camille Paglia. Ivins could match Pierce in cruelty per syllable, and she was more than willing to sell out her own feminist belief system if it meant goodies for her guys, especially Clinton. Paglia, on the other hand, is an unapologetic lefty but she’s intellectually honest, something Pierce or Ivins would never consider because they deal in cruelty.

Pierce and his like are cruel because they think it’s funny. The crueler, the more outlandish, the better, as long as its the right target. This meme has been carried throughout the entire culture. Weeks after Palin appeared on the national scene, porno directors were already casting look-a-likes for various capers, all the while the media establishment poked and prodded her with glee. The press is willing to let Levi Johnston libel her continuously with no basis in fact, but two kids with videotape from an ACORN office are scandalous. That’s all well and good, but to dare utter “socialist” or some other screed toward our black president, and your unleashing a sea of racism. The vaginas don’t like that.

Why the double standard? Why is cruelty OK?  Are the screaming vaginas just a bunch of effete, wimpy, ball-less, gutless wallowing in their own mess? Pretty much.

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