Self-Loathing for Beginners

Courtney Love
may want
to be the girl
with the most cake,
but when it comes to
cocktail-style self-loathing
(see Self-Loathing
for Beginners, p. 22)
Amy Winehouse is
the one on a roll
(bad puns go
down well with Brits).
She handled her
recent arrest
(for impersonating
a crack ho)
with crocodile sobs,
then went
scampering about
for the cameras,
celebrating her
flagrant and adorable self-loathing,
as these astounding
photos from the Daily Mail attest.
Thanks to Gawker for
shipping us across the pond
for this treat.

Arianna Huffington: The Self-Loathing “Liberal” Media

Newsweek hires Karl Rove. The New York Times hires Bill Kristol. CNN hires Tony Snow. What is it with these media outlets? Have they been so cowed by the Right’s relentless branding of them as “liberal” that they feel compelled to show that they are not by sleeping with the enemy? . . . By embracing these unabashed propagandists, the mainstream media have revealed a self-loathing streak a mile wide.

She ends, speaking on behalf of the radical right, with this paraphrase of Lenin:

“Self-loathing liberals will hand us the microphone with which we will bludgeon them.”

I hope they buy my book.

The Spitzers appeared to be in an advanced state of self-loathing when Eliot abandoned the gubernatorial ship yesterday. But loathing over what? Was his shame as durable as he claimed in his resignation speech? He looks like he has swallowed a big gulp of crow, but is “The remorse I feel will always be with me” an accurate statement on his part? We detect a note of relief in his departing words:

I go forward with the belief. . .that as human beings, our greatest glory consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

In other words, he will not stay limp for long. He goes on…

As I leave public life, I will first do what I need to do to help and heal myself and my family. Then I will try once again, outside of politics, to serve the common good. . .

Serious students of self-loathing will detect in this trajectory the mark of the pseudo self-loather. Like Al Gore, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton before him, Eliot Spitzer’s dive may be a self-preserving stratagem designed to escape the harsher sort of public scrutiny and land someplace more cushioned where a person can be more effective, less embattled, better paid and — should he so desire — better laid than a public official.

As for Silda, her self-loathing seems at least temporarily authentic. “How could I?” reads her thought bubble. “How could I have gotten so entangled with this worm it no longer pays to leave? I should have run for Governor myself — like Hillary! And that hooker is so lame! ‘Ashley!!!’ When I think that he stuck his dick into a mouth from which came the words, ‘I am all about my music, and my music is all about me,’ I want to puke my guts out. And now I’m the icon for doormat wives. Thanks, girls.”