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Michael Chabon and Frank Rich

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from: Michael Chabon

Will the Real Puff Daddy Please Stand Up?

Posted Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2001, at 4:14 PM ET

Dear Frank,

This is such a big country. There's ample room for Eminem and all his millions of fans and me to peacefully coexist in blissful ignorance of one another. The song is amusing. But I guess I don't quite get the Eminem thing. I don't mean that I don't get his success, or his popularity, because such things never really need to be explained, or rather, all the explanations ultimately fall short. It's more that there seems to be some additional element to the story, some strange media effulgence shed by the Eminem apparatus, a weird byproduct of gossip and PR and statements made to the press that I never heard or read, that just passed me by. I used to be attuned to the pulse of popular music, but somewhere back around Mariah Carey it all started to fade easily from my consciousness. It took me years to figure out that Puff Daddy was the same person as Sean "Puffy" Combs.

Having decided to resume my state of determined denial, I skipped lightly past the Bush pages in the paper today and found myself drawn into two stories. First, the two tiny Cincinnati of Burma have decided to hang up their AK-47s and go home. They have renounced their magical powers of invulnerability (but not chain-smoking cigarettes) and, looking in the wire photo as if they have not aged during the long months of their campaign but actually grown younger, have decided to return to their parents and the life of normal ethnic-Caren-minority boys, whatever that may be. Now here was a mediagenetic youth phenomenon that neither passed me by nor left me puzzled. Two self-appointed magical boys with names like Johnny and Luther Htoo, one of them sporting a totemistic Samson ponytail, leading a ragtag army into battle against the evil forces of Myanmar? It was a millennium's end story--this is the Age of Imperiled Children--that also tapped directly into the deepest fantasies of former boys everywhere--mingling horror and undeniable attraction, like Fagin's band or Huck and Jim on their raft.

The other story that grabbed me was more purely--but still, dare I confess it, not merely--horrifying. This, of course, is the account of Nathaniel Bar-Jonah, the accused Montana boy-eater who may also have served his victims' flesh to his friends and neighbors. My first thought, of course, on hearing about him was, "Bad for the Jews," but thank God his pseudo-Aramaic name turns out to be an assumed one. His crimes, if he committed them, are appalling and disgusting and abominable. But, damn Stephen Sondheim, just as you couldn't rid your mind of "The Real Slim Shady" when you read that headline, I can't, since reading the story about Bar-Jonah, get that song "A Little Priest" out of my head. God help me. There seemed to be the same kind of horribly quaint Victorian air in the notes that the guy apparently made in his journal: "Little boy stew," "Little boy potpie," and "Lunch is served on the patio with roasted child." And did you catch this line: "Several of his neighbors commented that the meat in dishes he made for them tasted strange." You just can't make this stuff up.

See you later.

Michael

the breakfast table
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from: Michael Chabon

Will the Real Puff Daddy Please Stand Up?

Posted Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2001, at 4:14 PM ET
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Michael Chabon's latest novel is The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Frank Rich is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times and author, most recently, of Ghost Light.
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Reader Comments From The Fray:




Thank you Mr Rich for bringing up the no tanks in the streets comment repeated by all the talking heads on TV. I too was shocked by it. We should be celebrating because there are no tanks in the streets? We settle for so little. They had an election in Canada recently, with very high turnout(by American standards) modern voting machines, and yes no tank in the streets. The winner was declared within hours. Unlike the US they can be certain that the man in charge was elected fair and square.

Why do the talking heads repeat empty pieties? Healing, closure, no tanks, peaceful transfer? Is it to create a false sense that the system works even when there are signs that the system failed?

--James Lynch

(To reply, click here.)


The news coverage of the inauguration seemed so rote. It reminded me of my local cable access channel, which replays the same prom footage over and over and at odd times. It's odd to channel surf and come across high-schoolers decked out in tuxes and gowns, standing awkwardly on lawns, getting into limos, walking into a dance hall over and again. I'm sure the kids in the video might like the event, and must love seeing it.

So too this inauguration. The hard core Bushies and the hard core Clinton-haters were likely cheered and moved by the whole coronation process. But really. It was so forlorn.

And even Bush's well-crafted--it's a pleasure to read--acceptance speech sounded tin coming from him. Every time he speaks, even when the rhetoric's lofty, I can't help but hear the C- student he usually is, the one who describes or explains things by restating the obvious (I'm a uniter, not divider, and that means I try to bring people together, not push them apart.). I'm so used to circular logic from Bush that I'm edge whenever he speaks.

And too, Clinton's 7.5 minute farewell, it seemed to me, had more oomph and staying power than W.'s 14 minute at bat. So as Rich suggests, W. pales not only because I usually find him dim, but also, in this case, by comparison to Clinton's superior oratory style.

--Nick Carbone

(To reply, click here.)

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