A Message From Maureen Dowd

July 13, 2003

It appears that Miss Dowd’s last column offended far more people than I.  Your humble narrator received countless emails and it seems that she managed to garner reactions from most of the blogosphere.  One of our readers (and part-time commando), Jerry Boggs, sent me a couple of Miss Dowd’s email addresses that are not listed on the NYT website.  I decided that the time had come to pull some chain and amuse myself.  I thought the old “welcome neighbor” approach would work best so I sent her a warm letter of thanks:

Dear Maureen, I wanted to say thank you for your columns as a great many people have been reading my responses to them. I really appreciate it. Here’s my latest:

Yours sincerely,

Bernard Chapin

Certainly not poetry but unquestionably from the heart. I heard nothing for about 12 hours but then, after my girlfriend and I finished watching “Gangs of New York,” I checked my mail.  And there, among the mortgage and sexual service spam, was correspondence from Miss Dowd. I expected profanity, but instead, was offered criticism in her world famous, billowy Duvet comforter style. The email read:

i don't mind you answering the column, but you should try to do it in the same spirit. my column is light hearted and tongue in cheek. yours isn't

Now, before any of the New York Times lawyers decide to make me play the Chris Elliot character in their own production of “Cabin Boy,” let me acknowledge that I cannot definitively verify that it was Dowd herself who was the person responding.  The address from which her email was received was the one I sent email to, but I cannot prove that it was not some NYT intern, or even the Dell kids for that matter, who were the persons responding.  However, as the words seems strangely in keeping with Miss Dowd’s personality, I choose to assume that it really was her.

My girlfriend stared at the script and said, “She’s a psycho.  Anybody I’ve ever met who uses lowercase ‘i’s has always been completely insane.” I nodded my head. I told her that based on the countless tissue paper pieces I’d read by the “Liberties” columnist, there may be great truth in her theory.

Her critique of our “Two Minute Mock” made me think of the students at my school.  Whenever they do something truly atrocious they answer, “I was just playin’.”  Kick someone’s feet out from under them so they fall flat on their face?  “I was just playin’.”  Get caught chasing somebody into the bathroom and punching them in the back of the head?  “I was just playin’.” 

Was Dowd simply “playin’” when she misrepresented the words of President Bush two months ago?  James Taranto in his Opinion Journal column documented the scandal.

Dowd wrote: Busy chasing off Saddam, the president and vice president had told us that Al Qaeda was spent. ‘Al Qaeda is on the run,’ President Bush said last week. ‘That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated....They're not a problem anymore.’

However, Taranto noted that her use of ellipses completely distorted the meaning of the quotation.  He continues:

The official White House transcript, with the portion Dowd omitted in bold: 'Al Qaeda is on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly, but surely being decimated. Right now, about half of all the top al Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. In either case, they're not a problem anymore.'

Hey, Mr. President, she was just playin’!  Come on, it’s tongue in cheek.  As for those of us living in the matriarchy, her column last Wednesday was playin’ along the same proportions as her deceptions about Bush.

It was an assault on our essence and future as she stated that the “Y chromosome” was degrading over time and that one day men would become extinct.  Extinction is not play to anyone. 

More importantly, rather than take issue with anything that I specifically said, she simply whined that I wasn’t doing it right because my tone didn’t match hers.  That’s not an argument.  Her attacks are vicious and reminiscent of the words of Henry Hill in “Goodfellas” who warned of executioners approaching with smiles on their faces. 

If you happen to be a far leftist or a radical feminist then certainly her columns are all in good fun. As for the rest of humanity, there is never joy in Mudville. The last time her target was men and we heard such light hearted rubies as “Self-love as a survival mechanism: the unflinching narcissism of men may send women into despair at times, but it has saved their sex for the next 5 million or 10 million years.” See my past column for a complete refutation of this slander of men in general. 

There’s nothing playful about asking males to become a dandyish group of “metrosexuals” who spend more time at salons than producing the goods and services that feed and fuel an entire planet.   

It would seem now that my frequently levied “narcissism” charge is as accurate as originally thought.  You see we’re supposed to be doing the same things that she does because she is the icon to which 6 billion should direct their prayers. In the insular trendy world of the anti-liberal elite, we should look to them for guidance for everything we do. Even when writing. They sit high above and “non-judgmentally” coordinate those below. Thus, it makes sense that she would imagine someone like myself reading her analysis and suddenly responding: “I’m doing it wrong. She is right! I will change.”  Miss Dowd seems to think that everyone and every act is a part of her world and that we are all her pawns in an elaborate game of “Duck, duck, goose.” 

It would seem that not just the political, not just the personal, but the solar system as well, is Maureen Dowd.

Bernard Chapin