FASCISM (AND SELF-PROMOTION) FOR TOTEBAGGERS

Every totebag-wielding Manhattanite knows what it means to appear "in conversation with" David Remnick at the New Yorker Festival or with some other cultural luminary at the 92nd Street Y: It means your work is admired and you're going to approached with something close to reverence. That's one reason why the now-rescinded invitation from Remnick to Steve Bannon seemed so inappropriate: The festival is not a forum at which featured guests are typically grilled. It's not even The View, where things occasionally get ugly. It's usually a lovefest.

I know, I know -- before uninviting Bannon, Remnick swore he'd pull no punches during the discussion:

“I have every intention of asking him difficult questions and engaging in a serious and even combative conversation,” he said.

Which brings me to my favorite tweets on this subject:

every journalist dreams of being the one hero to truly unpack steve bannon... to pull back the mask. they do this with interviews where they let him rant about china for 40 minutes

— j.r. hennessy (@jrhennessy) September 3, 2018

bannon: i think we should bring back feudalism
journalist: wow
bannon: i think europe should be 900 small ethnic enclaves and we should nuke china
journalist: this is dizzy stuff

— j.r. hennessy (@jrhennessy) September 3, 2018

That's Bannon -- he bamboozles listeners, including supposedly intelligent interviewers, with a firehose spew of words that sound reasonably intelligent but mostly serve as a delivery system for (a) white nationalism and (b) self-promotion. The former is reason enough not to invite him, but so is the latter. Here's a guy who lost his powerful government job, who lost his Mercer family financing, and who is now going from interviewer to interviewer looking for a way to shoehorn himself back into the public consciousness. If his racism isn't enough reason to give him a wide berth, then his current irrelevance ought to be the deciding factor. He was a noxious presence in our political life, but now he's out of the picture -- except that he's desperate to be a noxious presence again. Why help him?

He has a financial need for a new grift. He has a psychological need to be taken seriously. I don't want to help him fulfill either of these needs. I don't know why the hell David Remnick wanted to.