Currying Disfavor

Good afternoon. Since I started The Gene Pool late last year, many readers have asked me to address the events leading to — basically — my cancellation from The Washington Post. It’s taken me a while to put this together so it is readable and honest, but here it is. Alert: You will be shocked, but only to the extent of some poor schmuck in an electric chair. It’s kinda long. I am not going to take questions today because I am drained. We meet again, full force, on Thursday.

Starting in 2001, I ran an online, real-time reader-participation chat in The Post called “Chatological Humor,” a joke on “scatological humor” that many people didn’t get.  I wasn’t paid to do it; I just did it because I felt it made me more familiar and accessible to readers, which was a plus for both the newspaper and me.   There were other chats by other journalists, but my gimmick, if you could call it that, was vulgarity.  Not dirty words, but a willingness to enter arenas that The Post never did.  Over the years, this chat achieved several milestones. 

At one point I conducted a poll in which readers – male and female – disclosed if and how they trimmed their pubic hair.  After consulting with a famed proctologist (yes, there are famed proctologists) I was able to medically explain, I believe for the first time anywhere, why we experience the “almost home” effect, in which you can not need to poop for hours, but then, as soon as you find yourself approaching home, your urgency becomes overpowering.  I once created and presented a persuasive mathematical argument  – with an elaborate accompanying graph – proving that there is no God.  Once, in real time, in the chat, I helped talk a man out of suicide. 

I basically had been given a one-off license to do all this by virtue of my Awesome Status at the paper.  There appeared to be unspoken rules, just for me. 

Status can be a bitch, as I would discover.  

I always jokingly speculated, in the chat, on how I would eventually lose my job.  I contended it was inevitable, eventually. My first guess was a cut-and-paste disaster, such as the one that befell a law professor at Drexel University a few years ago.  Along with a memo to all of her students about tips for writing legal briefs, she inadvertently linked to an egregiously graphic video titled “She loves her anal beads.”   My second guess was that my sometimes pugnacious temperament would come into conflict with an evolving era of propriety and gentility and decorum in the newsroom.  My third guess was that I would eventually push the envelope too hard in trying for a laugh.   Those last two were closer.  But I never heard footsteps.

One day a few years ago the Post rolled out new chat-publishing software called Pubble that had been in production for months and arrived with great fanfare and promises of bodacious new features.  Day One was a catastrophic failure.  A failure of Chernobylic proportions.  Readers didn’t know where to look to find their questions or see my answers.  They groused and grumbled and many left the chat in frustration.  I was frustrated, too, and inasmuch as I knew I was allowed to criticize the Post  – I was inoculated, by virtue of my Awesome Status – I groused, too.  In the chat, I identified the rollout as a cataclysm wrought by incompetent planning.  And I said, “Heads must roll!”   That is a term I had used before, as hyperbole, a joke – the impotent, self-important douchebag pounding on a desk that “heads must roll.”  This time, I got a call from HR.  It turns out the person I was criticizing most heavily, though not by name  – I actually had no idea who had been in charge of the rollout – was a young, highly regarded online editor and she had been offended.  HR accused me of “bullying.”  My chat was over.   

That’s when I first began to hear footsteps.  My inoculation appeared to have lost some potency.  I had no booster shots available.

After the end of my chat, though, I still had my weekly humor column in the Post’s Sunday magazine. Then the Earth made many revolutions around the sun. The Post got new management.  I kept getting statistically older in comparison to the rest of the Washington Post staff, as others my age retired or died or became senile and incontinent and the newsroom was wisely hiring very talented children who were not incontinent.  

Still, my column was always testing boundaries. 

At one point, in 2019, I wrote a column about a recent spate of popular books with asterisked titles that used barely disguised dirty words.  There were dozens of them: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck,   Calm the F*ck Down,  The Day Miriam Lost Her Sh*t,  You Can’t Make This Sh*t Up. I thought this was juvenile, but didn’t say it in the column.  I claimed to like the idea, and then out-juveniled them all by suggesting new titles for old classics.   Example:  “Imagine how many more sales these famous books would have made with re-engineered titles:  The Complete Works of Arthur Conan Doyle becomes The Adventures of No-Sh*t Sherlock!    Moby-Dick becomes F*ck That Whale!  Ulysses becomes F*ck Yes!  The Sun Also Rises becomes F*ck No!   Poisoned: The True Story of the Deadly E. Coli Outbreak That Changed the Way Americans Eat, by Jeff Benedict, becomes Eat Sh*t and Die.” Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles, becomes “ Get That Motherf*cker. Portney’s Complaint, by Philip Roth, becomes “ Liver? F*ck It!”

You are one of the few people on Earth who have ever read these examples, because the Post never published the column.   In 17 years, to my recollection, the Post had never before killed a column of mine for reasons of taste.  This sort of book titles were in every bookstore in America, right out there on the same shelves as the Holy Bible and Great Expectations.   But at the Post, editors had changed.  New protocols were in place; new rules that would rein me in because I was evidently out of control.  All of which was fine, except that  I’d been out of control for 17 years without complaint.

I acceded, because I had no choice other than to quit, and I did not want to quit.  But I seethed. 

Then something else happened, something bigger.  I wrote a column making fun of James O’Keefe, the chief executive slimeball of Project Veritas, which does disreputable “gotcha” quasi-journalism by trying to trap liberals into saying objectionable things in secretly recorded, then dishonestly edited, videos.  O’Keefe had recently gotten a network political reporter suspended and demoted because his organization had secretly taped him saying Donald Trump was a “dick.” (Which he is.)

The conceit of my column was that I would preemptively make myself immune to to such attacks by O’Keefe by printing all my objectionable opinions right there, out in the open, in print.  And I did, though nothing I said was actually noxious.  But the column was very cruel and dismissive of O’Keefe. I called his organization “fecal” and told him that I did not want to take him on “the way one would not want to challenge a really stupid and vindictive scorpion to a tongue-related duel.” 

You have not read this before, either.  The Post killed this column, too.   The reason they gave me was that the newspaper was engaged in some sort of legal battle with O’Keefe, (I had not known this) and they did not want to give him any ammunition to contend we were biased against him, particularly not in a mere humor column. 

Now, on the one hand, I understood their position. My column might have seemed deliberate, corporate-ordered, even punitive.  Theirs was a prudent position taken by prudent managers, balancing their responsibilities prudently, with prudence.  On the other hand – well, at the moment, the other hand was busy giving them the finger.  I resigned.  Then, almost  immediately, I rescinded my resignation because I hadn’t gotten the reaction I had hoped for – a reaction I had gotten once before in similar circumstances, years before: “No!  Wait!  Let’s talk this out!”  This time the response was a terse, “Sorry to hear that. Thanks for your service,” issued with all the sincerity of “thoughts and prayers.”

Clearly, something was going on with them, and me. 

–

There is some dispute over whether a “Cancel Culture” exists at all.  Like many cranky geezers,   I think it does.  Unlike many cranky geezers, I’m not entirely opposed to it. 

]In one sense, it is a venomous form of mob rule – a posse is fueled by self-righteousness, infected by ignorance, disproportionately influenced by influencers and enabled by the cowardice of anonymity. At times, it becomes  character assassination for sport.   In another sense, it is a long-overdue, democratizing adjustment in the balance of social power, diminishing the influence of the snobby elites and redistributing it to "ordinary" people. It is utilizing the hive mind that the Internet has turned into an occasionally valuable asset.    I think of Cancel Culture as being like the early Industrial Revolution – altogether a good thing, and a step forward, but still needing some serious tweaks.  

I am an unreconstructed New Deal liberal.  My column had always been unreservedly, joyfully, and unapologetically  progressive.  I have written that I am so liberal I should be tried for treason and executed.  This is an important backdrop to what follows.  

One day in late 2021 my idea for the week’s column fell through, and I needed to come up with another, tout suite.  I settled on an easy one, a timeless one I considered anodyne.  I would write about foods I refuse to eat.  The butt of the column would be me – I presented myself as a baby with infantile tastes and weird, over-the-top, immature prejudices.  The accompanying cartoon showed me in  a bib on a highchair, turning away from food being offered to me on a spoon. 

In the column, I said about Old Bay, a wildly popular mid-Atlantic seafood seasoning, that it tasted like the dandruff harvested off a corpse and combined with moldy rust scraped from toilet fixtures.  I said that balsamic vinegar broke up the Beatles, and that sweet pickles made as much gustatorial sense as chicken-flavored jelly beans.  I said drowning a hot dog in a dozen toppings was like drowning puppies in a toilet.  I said hazelnuts were fake nuts, engineered to make other nuts feel better about themselves. In short, I intended none of this to be taken literally, or seriously.   And then I mentioned Indian food. 

You hear the “Jaws” theme music, don’t you?  It’s faint but slowly swelling.  The technical term is “crescendoing.”

I was somewhat savvy enough to realize that this subject might be a little touchy, so here is how I wrote it:  

The Indian subcontinent has vastly enriched the world, giving us chess, buttons, the mathematical concept of zero, shampoo, modern-day nonviolent political resistance, Chutes and Ladders, the Fibonacci sequence, rock candy, cataract surgery, cashmere, USB ports ... and curry. 

Indian foods are the only ethnic cuisine insanely based on one spice.  If you like Indian curries, yay, you like one of India’s most popular class of dishes!  If you think Indian curries taste like something that could knock a vulture off a meat wagon, you do not like a lot of Indian food. I don’t get it, as a culinary principle. It is as though the French passed a law requiring a wide swath of their dishes to be slathered in smashed, pureed snails. (I’d personally have no problem with that, but you might, and I would sympathize.) 

That was it. The initial reaction was mostly positive, with online commenters sharing the foods they hate.  A few people said they found it culturally insensitive.  In response, I went to Rasika, the finest Indian restaurant in D.C., had a meal there, and reported back to Twitter that the restaurant was beautiful, the food was elegantly prepared, and I still didn’t like it. I was unrepentant. 

On Twitter, Padma Lakshmi saw this.  She is the Indian-born American TV personality, former host of “Top Chef.”   She wrote a very brief tweet in response to mine: “On behalf of 1.3 billion people, kindly  f–k off.”  When I read it, I spat my coffee, and laughed.  It was, I thought, the perfect, succinct comment.  One I might have written. 

Padma Lakshmi has a million Twitter followers. 

This began a three-week Twitter bloodbath.  I had apparently offended an entire subcontinent, and was hearing from that subcontinent halfway around the world, as well as my own, meaning the tweets were 24-7.  The prevailing sentiment was that I was a “colonialist.”  At least two Twitterers with sizable followings wrote: “Let’s get him!”   I could barely access my Twitter feed, so choked was it with bile. The Post food section editors were angry with me.

Most of the tweeters had not seen the entire column and did not know the context: They saw only the section on Indian food, which had been cut and pasted alone. I know this for many reasons, one of which was that a huge percentage of responders seemed not to know I wrote humor but thought I was the Post’s food critic, a woman named Jean. Two of the people who hated on me online were Indian-Americans I deeply admired: the British-American novelist Salman Rushdie, Lakshmi’s ex-husband, and Preet Bharara, the fearless former New York prosecutor. 

The Post was not amused.  They saw this as an open, suppurating sore, bringing disrepute to the paper. 

I found myself thinking of Ben Bradlee, the legendary Washington Post executive editor during the Watergate era.  Ben was a swaggering, fusty. old-time editor.  One day, during the height of Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein wrote a huge Page One story that was immediately and forcefully denied by one of the subjects. 

TV cameras descended on Bradlee.   What was his reaction? 

Bradlee knew that the man who issued the denial was ethical. You could take him at his word, without reservation.  There was no doubt that Woodstein had made a  grievous error – and other news outlets were confirming that. What was unclear was exactly what they’d gotten wrong, and how it had happened.  Whatever, it was an open, suppurating sore, bringing disrepute to the newspaper.  A qualified apology and retraction might have been prudent. Bradlee took in the cameras, sucked in his belly, stuck out that annoyingly porcelain, patrician chin, and said: 

“We stand by our story.” 

In reacting to the furor over my column, the Washington Post editors might have been right or they might have been wrong, or possibly they were somewhere in between. I take no sides on that, because I am in no position to be objective.   What I can say for sure is that they did not emulate Ben Bradlee.  

The first thing they did was to issue a “correction,” which is more than a little unusual for a humor column.  The correction said that India has “vastly diverse cuisines.”

Then they invited Padma Lakshmi to write a piece savaging me.  She did.  It was well written.  She said my joke was “racist” and “not funny” and – in the pages of my own newspaper – urged that I be fired and replaced by a person of color.  I was not asked for comment. 

Then they had someone write a story in the Post about how wonderful Indian food is.    

Then a genteel man named Ashok Bajaj, who owned Rasika, took me to lunch.  He was being remarkably gracious.  He was trying to help. When I told the Post editors that I wanted to thank him on Twitter and compliment the food, the managing editor ordered me not to.  The newspaper didn’t want to hear from me again on this subject. 

Then they took away my column.  I wasn’t fired – I would still write big feature stories for the paper, as I always had  – but my column was gone.  

The Post did replace me with a person of color.  He’ was quite good, but then got fired when The Post killed the magazine.

How did I feel at this point?  Officially, okay.  Officially, I was professional, terse, tense, unsmiling, businesslike, assured, like Sully Sullenberger instructing air traffic control that he was going into the Hudson.   Inside, I was a sputtering maniac.  Who the hell were these soft-handed, flabby-souled, cringing careerist pantywaist middle-management failed-writer editors who had never written anything of consequence themselves, never taken a risk, never created anything lasting, never tested any rules, never faced a gun, harumph harumph  kaf kaf kaf kaf hack spit. 

One interesting thing that happened during this ordeal is that I got some online support from well known people.  One was from “Cockburn,” the high-profile pseudonymous columnist at the British news magazine The Spectator.  He or she or them said food is funny and worthy of ridicule, and there should have been no apology.  But most of my support – this was personally worrisome – came from people whose views I despise, fulminating right wingers across the spectrum railing about “wokeness” in journalism.  If there is anything about this episode of which I am proud, and there isn’t much, it’s that I didn’t retweet, or cite in any way, these laudatory, tainted posts.     

Meanwhile, if you Google my name and “colonialist,” even today, you  get 23,000 hits.  I would appear to be a modern day Cecil Rhodes, the white dictator of colonial Rhodesia. When it came time for the Post to renew my contract, they made an offer so paltry that I said “No, thank you,” which is also what I said to a nice woman when I was 14, who offered me a blow job. But that’s a different story for a different day.

People have asked me if I’m sorry I wrote the Indian section of the column.  Yes, of course I am.  But not just because of the impact it had on me. And not because it supposedly exposed me as a colonialist racist scumbag dirtball subhuman.   

The fact is there was only one ethnic cuisine I had broad-brush criticized in the column, which was an error in judgment that left the door open to uncharitable assessments. But  I regret it mostly because of two letters I got from young Indian-American  women.  They were quite polite and respectful. They explained to me, in almost identical terms,  that it was hurtful to them because they grew up with friends telling them that their family’s food was “stinky.”

Naively, this surprised me, because I am the only person in my ambit of friends and colleagues who doesn’t love Indian food.  Had I known of the ubiquity of this cultural prejudice, and how early it attaches, I never would have written it.  It was a trivial column and I could have found another food to criticize.  Say, Mexican food.  

Just kidding!  I think I would have gone with “kale.”