Too Good to Be True?

6 Responses to “Too Good to Be True?”

1. See-Dubya Says:
   May 31st, 2006 at 4:24 pm

   Except that it’s not entirely apocryphal. From that same Wikipedia entry:

   “The origin of the meme is unclear. Some have claimed that it was a garbled version of quote Kael gave to the Wall Street Journal. Asked to comment on the election, Kael replied that it would be inappropriate for her to comment, as nobody she knew had voted for him. ”

   That’s pretty close, wouldn’t you say? The only real reason not knowing anyone who voted for Nixon might render inappropriate her comments on the election inappropriate is that she just didn’t know how those Nixon voters thought–it was that foreign to her.

   So her insularity is true and the quote is still useful to demonstrate it. The only fake–or unverified–part of the quote is the notion that she thought her circle of friends was sufficiently representative of the voting public to determine the election’s outcome. She wasn’t that dumb.

2. Xrlq Says:
   May 31st, 2006 at 9:20 pm

   Only knowing members of one party is not all that remarkable. Lots of people hang out with their own kind; birds of a feather, etc. It’s only newsworthy when it causes people to become myopic. The usual Kael quote has her mistaking her circle of friends for a microcosm of America. This version is quite the opposite, implying that despite living in a one-party world, she was at least sensible enough to realize that there is a whole ‘nuther world out there.

   More importantly, perhaps, the Wikipedia entry does not necessarily say that this version of the quote is legit, either. It’s only one of several other versions of the quote floating out there, not all of which connote insularity (one has her saying it as an ironic reaction to Nixon’s horrendous polls during Watergate), and not all of which even attribute the quote to Kael. All this begs the question of what Kael actually said about Nixon, if anything.

3. Dean Esmay Says:
   May 31st, 2006 at 9:47 pm

   I don’t know, I’ve never been so exclusive I didn’t know ANYONE who voted different from me. It would seem pretty insular to me.

   Although if it was ironic, then it changes the entire complexion of the statement.

4. nk Says:
   June 1st, 2006 at 10:47 pm

   Actually, I have been ruminating on this since you posted it. It’s not all that slanderous and it gives her a place in political mythology. A very small piece of immortality is better than none at all.

   (Did you know that some historians have concluded that, depite his fearsome reputation, the gunfight at the OK Corral was the first time Doc Holliday had killed anyone?)

5. Bilwick Says:
   June 2nd, 2006 at 2:48 pm

   I’m almost tempted to say that the quote is “fake, but accurate.” The quote accurately reflects that kind of insularity one finds in NYC liberals. (I know; I grew up there; I lived in Manhattan, and moved among them, an artist-intellectual type assumed to be a liberal like the rest of them when in reality–nyah-ha-ha!–I was a libertarian.) Whether Kael herself was actually as insular as the quote suggests, or instead self-aware enough to have said it (or something like it) ironically, I leave to her biographers.

6. Michelle Malkin » Some unintentional truth at the New York Times Says:
   April 7th, 2008 at 2:04 pm

   [...] mainstream America. Rich sounds like another famous New York Times critic, Pauline Kael, who is supposed to have wondered how America elected Nixon in 1972 when she didn’t know a single person who voted for [...]

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