She’s a jerk. On the smallest, most immediate level, the sort I can appreciate, she’s a fake and a bully. At Harper’s, Scott Horton posts about her torture-heavy Q&A session with students at a Stamford doom. Horton addresses the mismatch between her remarks and publicly known facts. But what gets me is the cheap way she tried to muscle one of the kids asking her questions. It’s not enough that she cherrypicked an isolated finding in a report about Guantanamo (where it called the prison’s physical facilities “a model medium security prison”) and ignored the damning stuff in the same report (treatment of prisoners was “mental torture.” She had to pretend the kid hadn’t done his/her homework.  After trotting out the “model medium” finding: “if you didn’t know that, maybe before you make allegations about Guantanamo you should read.” When she, in effect, blames the Supreme Court for keeping Guantanamo’s inmate indefinitely detained — because the court wouldn’t allow Bush’s people to put the inmates before kangaroo tribunals — she tries to make the student into a stooge by quizzing him:

RICE: Those trials were stayed by whom? Who kept us from holding the trials?

STUDENT: I can’t answer that question.

RICE: Do your homework first.

… a conscious effort to inscribe this “Trek” in the storytelling traditions popularized by Joseph Campbell, in which heroes must suffer loss and abandonment before they rise to the occasion. The filmmakers admit that this is a deliberate homage to their favorite films, like “Superman,” “Star Wars” and “The Godfather Part II.”

I live in the section of Montreal near McGill University. There are lots of college kids around. Right now it’s finals and the 2nd Cup is jammed full of kids studying. I’m parked at my little table in a row of other little tables, all of them full except for the one to my left. It has a textbook placed on its far edge and a slim sheaf of papers placed atop the textbook. During the past hour four different people have tried to park themselves at the table. Each time the girl sitting one table over has told them no, “somebody’s sitting there.” But there isn’t. Her friend, who had been there, took off to print something at home and so far has not returned. As mentioned, the coffee shop is jammed and, like the missing girl, the people who want to sit down are students frantic to get ready for big tests.

In a much talked-about essay, Peggy Orenstein has speculated that Facebook denies to young people “an opportunity for insight, for growth through loneliness”; it makes it harder for them “to establish distance from their former selves, to clear space for introspection and transformation.” Maybe it also eases — or hides from us — our displacements, and creates, etc., etc., etc.,

Nobody can stand the guy. And it’s not like he’s mean and slashing; he’s just a drag. You can imagine him in conversation with his pompous beard wagging from side to side and the long uhhhhhh‘s between sentences as he dredges up his points.

When I say “nobody,” I mean this: 20 years ago a coworker read Denby’s review of Gorillas in the Mist and said, “He’s always so overblown,” and she hadn’t even seen the movie — it was just his voice, the way he wrote. Eight years ago, trying to define “douchebag” for another coworker, I said, “Like David Denby” and he said, “Oh God, yeah.” Three days ago my mother said, “That David Denby is such a jerk.” And whenever I look at The New Yorker and see his name I think, “Too bad,” whereas when I see Anthony Lane’s byline I think, “Well, there might be some good jokes.” Of course there might not, but the sight of Lane’s name doesn’t in itself make me turn the page.

Via Andrew Sullivan, Reason Online reviews Denby’s new book, Snark. Apparently Denby is trying to shame “douchebag” out of the national discourse. I would too, if I were him. The review says Denby downgrades Tom Wolfe — disturbing if true — and that he doesn’t have much use for Maureen Dowd. The second point is also disturbing, because it means Denby can’t be entirely bad. Of course, Reason may disagree: “the reader comes close to simply telling him to lighten up, rather than explaining that Dowd is a satirist, not a sexist political scientist.” Hah, no. Maureen Dowd is a twit.

The big problem with snark isn’t that it’s mean or shallow, it’s that the people who want to be snarky are inferior. The word sprang up when trying to be snotty and clever became a national passtime. Everyone swarmed in and only a very few had any sort of gift for the assignment.