As we enter a period of unmitigated crassness in public life, I find myself guiltily dreaming of frivolity and luxury.

Plus Trump and the End of Expertise, and Martha Stewart’s Redemption

As a Brit, I have no particular fondness for Thanksgiving, which has always felt to me like it steals the thunder of Christmas. Turkey with all the trimmings twice in four weeks? Get me outta here. Plus, I have never been a fan of that frenzied interregnum when every professional decision is deferred till “after the holidays” and one lives out the end of the year in the hectic oxymoron of a packed limbo. This year I plan to flee altogether and spend four days with the family in the Dominican Republic.

Early December does make me feel a certain nostalgia for my years at Condé Nast, when the chairman, Si Newhouse, used to host a holiday luncheon for all the magazine editors in chief and publishers in a private room at The Four Seasons Restaurant. In those dinosaur days when print media mattered, the power signals of where you were placed in relation to the Sun King Si were followed keenly by the New York Post media columnist Keith Kelly, who usually reproduced the seating chart. Right afterwards, Si took off for his annual two-week art and opera sojourn in Vienna with his bluestocking wife Victoria and their beloved pug dogs. By January 2, he was itching to fire the people he had held off from ejecting all  through the holiday season. My first call of the new year was usually from Kelly trying to find out which of the Glossy Posse would be loaded into the Condé Nast tumbril on January 10.

As we enter a period  of unmitigated crassness in public life, I find myself guiltily dreaming of frivolity and luxury. I want to roam around the Diptyque store on Madison Avenue and self-medicate with scented candles. I want to swathe myself in white cashmere and laugh tinklingly at a 40s musical. Headlines about the grim swirl of World War III vibes in Europe sound preposterous as I pack my Dorothy Parker in Hollywood book and ruminate about a 274-night cruise aboard the Royal Caribbean on which my butler might mysteriously go overboard. 

This Thanksgiving will be the first in eight years when I suspect the morning shows won’t do their usual segments about partisan fisticuffs blowing up between family members over the pumpkin pie. With malice toward all and charity toward none, the  civil war is in abeyance, and the tired tribes of America have retreated to their corners. For a few days, all will be peacefully sullen.

No Experience Needed

Do many of Trump's hopelessly unqualified new appointments represent the final death knell of expertise in public life? It’s remarkable how government positions of stature and power can shrink in perception when you install Fox News hacks and presidential toadies into them. Have positions like Secretary of Defense and Attorney General been permanently pygmified by Trump’s low-brow onslaught? Any resume of A-list accomplishments now means you are one of the dreaded “elite” or, as Kellyanne Conway memorably put it at the Washington Post Global Women's Summit last week (where she performed with lethal intelligence), the “elites and the effetes,” two words that are now becoming inseparable. That’s the Democrats’ own fault sadly, thanks to people like outgoing Attorney General Merrick Garland  — I always think of him as Whistler’s mother — who seemed placed under perpetual house arrest by his own conscience. Biden’s people crafted disaster through expertise of the wrong kind — knowing that you ought to look at all sides of a problem (cf. Israel and the Palestinians) without realizing that being seen to consider all sides of a problem is worse than not seeing any at all. In the 2024 election, Americans showed they prefer wrong and strong every time if that’s the choice at the ballot box.

Loudmouths and Know-It-Alls

Some of the new disregard of expertise is an outcrop of the arrogance of the new oligarch class. With a big enough fortune, you can claim mastery of things you know nothing about —   climate change, education, foreign affairs, media — topics that require their own rigorous study but now are drowned in the opinions of Wall Street loudmouths and tech savant idiots. Why, for instance, do billionaires like Jeff Bezos buy big sophisticated news organizations, appoint all the wrong people to manage them (something they would never do in their core businesses), then blame the journalists for the downturn and “loss of trust?” Actually it’s he who has lost the audience’s trust by showing such baffling professional incompetence.

 Mighty Martha 

I finally caught up with R.J. Cutler’s riveting Martha Stewart documentary this weekend and saw how, in the 2003 ImClone insider trading case that knocked her from her pedestal, she was hammered by resentment from every side. The case was brought by the perpetually self-righteous prosecutor James Comey, stewing in moral vanity, who was determined to bag a trophy as glittering as the all-perfect Martha. The precipitous fall of America’s first self-made female billionaire unleashed the fury of the misogynist tabloid press, who now punished her for her determined insistence on standards of beauty and aesthetic excellence. Watching the doc, I was unexpectedly mesmerized by Martha’s melodious, velvet voice, her don’t-give-a-shit poise, her refusal to compromise her vision of elevating the Kmart class with affordable high-thread-count luxury, and her steely sangfroid serving five months in a federal prison. The catastrophic detonation of her media and retail empire now feels as heartbreaking to striving women as it was unjust.  

Hooray that Martha resurrected herself. The self-made dynamo from Nutley, New Jersey dug herself out of what she called “a fucking hole” and ultimately sold her company for a third of its former value. What did she have to do to win back relevance and regain cultural cachet? After smiling through a pile-on of humiliating jokes at her expense by Kevin Hart and Pete Davidson at the 2015 roast of Justin Bieber, she took the stage and won the audience with a salvo of racy prison-life zingers (“all the hood rats on my cell block wanted to break off a piece of Martha Stewart’s ass”). She showed she could wrestle in the mud like everyone else and the documentary’s viewers are supposed to see her brave self-abasement as critical to her redemption. Then it was on to being coronated in 2023 as the oldest woman ever to appear on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and her triumph at the 2024 Summer Olympics with her unlikely bestie Snoop Dogg, goofing around in Paris — an icon once again.

But as the last shots in the film show 83-year-old Martha in her leather pants striding through her exquisite Turkey Hill garden dictating notes into her iPhone about the rogue weeds and invasive plants her gardeners must banish, it feels like a forlorn denouement. Martha will never give up on her quest for perfection, even as, day by day, we say good-bye to all that.

Pinned up behind my computer is a passage by the brilliant, roistering Australian art critic Robert Hughes (godfather of my daughter), whose pugnacious defense of excellence is so desperately needed today. In a 2015 anthology of essays, The Spectacle of Skill, published posthumously, Hughes vented:  

“I am completely an elitist in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it's an expert gardener at work or a good carpenter chopping dovetails. I don't think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be with as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player than a mediocre one, unless the latter is a friend or a relative. Consequently, most of the human race doesn't matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights. I see no reason to squirm around apologizing for this. I am, after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate, pretentious, sentimental, and boring stuff that saturates culture today, more (perhaps) than it ever has. I hate populist [shit], no matter how much the demos love it.”

Let’s expand the concept of “elite”in the way that Hughes meant it, not as the condescension of class but as the elevation of the mind and the preservation of standards. 

Happy Thanksgiving.