Yakkin’ About the Bad Writers
by Jonathan M. Katz and Maria Bustillos
Katz and Bustillos spoke over the phone on Tuesday. Here's a lightly edited version of their conversation.
Maria Bustillos: I think the chickens of “American exceptionalism” have finally come home to roost now. We’re seeing all these human beings in what was supposed to be a superior form of government just like, crashing the train into every wall.
Jonathan M. Katz: Yep.
MB: You’ve long viewed politics in the United States in a larger context, which is why I’d been hoping we could talk. What are your views on the revelations of the last two weeks? Between these Epstein documents and the President losing his mind on the regular and every other fucking thing.
JK: He’s had a hard couple of weeks, to put it mildly, and I don’t think it’s going to get any better. He keeps looking for a way out. Unfortunately, one of his ways out might be starting a war in Venezuela. Maybe Mexico, maybe Colombia. Somewhere in the Western Hemisphere.
MB: Wag the Dog, again.
JK: Yeah. I keep seeing analyses in the Times that are just sort of, “You know, there is a little bit of a history of the U.S. doing things in the Western Hemisphere!” They had a piece a couple days ago that had a link... It was like, “The U.S. has carried out coups,” or something like that. It was even more mildly worded than that. [It was “The United States has long tried to tip the scales around Latin America, where it has supported military coups, conducted covert operations and invaded Panama.” – Ed.] And then the link was not even to a blog about the sweep of the history; it was just some university website about this one ancillary episode. Out of all the things they could have linked to in the entire history of U.S. imperialism in the world and specifically in the Hemisphere.
There was another piece from the Times about Trump and China that talked about how the government of Xi Jinping uses China’s history of national humiliation—the “hundred years of humiliation,” as it’s officially called—as a way to understand the world and China’s place in it, and the way they react to aggression, including aggression from the United States. But they left out the fact that the United States played a signal role in that, from direct participation by American citizens in the Second Opium War to straight-up participation in the invasion of China in 1900 and then in the 1920s, and then fighting the Japanese in China before the U.S. even entered World War II. All these other things that they just kind of left out.
As always, the discourse is fighting with both arms behind its back because there’s all this history and there’s all this context to understand how we got here that mainstream platforms simply cannot touch.
MB: This is legacy media making not even the remotest attempt to educate. Exactly. Media not as information but as entertainment only… in fact, this conversation started because we were talking about the ridiculous Olivia Nuzzi scandal.
JK: Oh my god.
MB: We were talking on Bluesky about how amazing it is that this person can land on her feet professionally, as a journalist [after having been busted having an affair with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whose presidential campaign she was covering], write a book and go blithely along to a top job at Vanity Fair. But then I remembered the history of Vanity Fair over the last like 40 years, and realized that serving power, and protecting those who serve power, is absolutely on brand for them. And it doesn’t matter that they have no talent. It only matters that they’ll obey; this is media.
JK: At the risk of stretching these connections until they break, because obviously it’s a long way to travel to get from U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean to Olivia Nuzzi landing at Vanity Fair. But I just have to say this out loud: That excerpt [of Nuzzi’s book] that ran in Vanity Fair is one of the single worst pieces of writing I’ve ever seen published in a major English-language publication. I don’t understand how that got into print. I don’t understand how she doesn’t have people in her life who could have sat her down and been like, “This is not good.” It’s unreadable.
MB: What, you don’t inhabit the sphere of meme? Is that what you’re telling me?
JK: What was it, “vaulting from the sphere of meme to the sphere of screwy legend”?
MB: Whoa, good memory. “I loved his brain.” I don’t know, dude, it’s really sad and weird. I mean, this lady evidently lived with Keith Olbermann for four years starting like when she was still a teenager?
JK: And apparently maybe also had an affair with Mark Sanford.
MB: I don’t know. The piece is so bad and she put herself in such a distressing position, and on the other hand she has this whole *new* plum job?
JK: Right. The thing that I think made it so bad, but also why it got published, is that it was so egregiously self-regarding. Like, the only way that the story makes any sense—because as she writes it, she’s in Los Angeles watching an American city literally be consumed by flame—and all she can think of is, “Wow, this is what I’m going through in my career! Because I’m so great, and I’m so special, and I know all these really powerful people, and they all love me, literally, and yet I have been thrown out of my job, one of the most prominent, high-flying jobs in what is left of American journalism. This fire is about me.”
That kind of overweening regard for herself as a profile writer she then applies to the people who are great just because they’re next to her, and she’s great, because she’s next to them. And for them it makes sense, like of course you would then also sometimes sleep together, because you’re God’s most special children, and you’re all really powerful. You all hang out in the same spaces, and some of you are writing glossy magazine profiles and some of you are taking away people’s healthcare, but you’re all part of the same thing, and you’re all beautiful, and you’re all geniuses.
MB: That’s right, we’re all in the same Jackie Collins novel together.
And that is where the connective tissue is, between U.S. geopolitics and the Nuzzi scandal, as evidenced by the trove of Jeffrey Epstein documents that was released by the House Oversight Committee on November 12.
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