Dorothy Parker Wins Pulitzer Prize?

Hey, how could that not be awesome!

The literary lioness and chief snark gunnery officer of the Algonquin Round Table?

…
In 1919, her career took off (1921) while she was writing theatre criticism for Vanity Fair, which she began to do in 1918 as a stand-in for the vacationing P. G. Wodehouse.[15] At the magazine she met Robert Benchley, who became a close friend, and Robert E. Sherwood.[16] The trio began lunching at the Algonquin Hotel on a near-daily basis and became founding members of the Algonquin Round Table. The Round Table numbered among its members the newspaper columnists Franklin Pierce Adams and Alexander Woollcott. Through their re-printing of her lunchtime remarks and short verses, particularly in Adams' column "The Conning Tower," Dorothy began developing a national reputation as a wit.

Parker's caustic wit as a critic initially proved popular, but she was eventually terminated by Vanity Fair in 1920 after her criticisms began to offend powerful producers too often. In solidarity, both Benchley and Sherwood resigned in protest.[17]
…

Her greatest period of productivity and success came in the next 15 years. In the 1920s alone she published some 300 poems and free verses in outlets including the aforementioned Vanity Fair, Vogue, "The Conning Tower" and The New Yorker along with Life, McCall's and The New Republic.[19]

The blacklisted Academy Award nominee whose diamond-cutter wit regularly turned out gems like this?

“A little bad taste is like a nice dash of paprika.”

And this:

“If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.”

And this:

“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”

And a thousand more?


The catapult out which the career of a young Harlan Ellison was launched?

...
One of these reviews had a huge impact on the career of the young Harlan Ellison. Reviewing his paperback short story collection Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation (Regency, 1961), she described Ellison as "a good, clean, honest writer, putting down what he has seen and known and no sensationalism about it" and lavished praise on his story "Daniel White for the Greater Good," commenting, "It is without exception the best presentation I have ever seen of present racial conditions in the South and of those who try to alleviate them. I cannot recommend it too vehemently.... Incidentally, the other stories in Mr. Ellison's book are not so dusty, either."

Her favorable nod gave Ellison a foothold with both mainstream publishers and film producers, and shortly afterwards he headed for Hollywood.

Well what can one say but “Here! Here!”

Richly deserved, I’d say, and considering that she died 43 years ago, long overd…

What’s that?

Not “Dorothy”?

“Kathleen”?

Kathleen Parker?

Kathleen Parker?

Really?

Oh.

Well, that’s very different.

Whet Moser has more at "The Chicago Reader" (a snip of which here):

The 2010 Pulitzer for Not Being a Monster Anymore

I think Michael Miner has it about right when he says that Kathleen Parker won a Pulitzer for commentary by going against type, and it's worth remembering that she made some notable waves when she argued that Sarah Palin is a doofus. By that standard Tina Fey should have a MacArthur and I should have been a finalist for tying my shoes every morning, but it made Parker an apostate.

Roy Edroso describes her as an "anodyne, conservative-MoDo," and anodyne is about right, at least as far as her Pulitzer-winning efforts go. I browsed through her 2009 columns yesterday and was surprised how, well, house-trained she seemed, especially compared to a 2008 piece that will live in infamy (h/t @wmharnett for the reminder):

"A full-blooded American."

That's how 24-year-old Josh Fry of West Virginia described his preference for John McCain over Barack Obama. His feelings aren't racist, he explained. He would just be more comfortable with "someone who is a full-blooded American as president."

Whether Fry was referring to McCain's military service or Obama's Kenyan father isn't clear, but he may have hit upon something essential in this presidential race.

Remember: it's not racist.

Who "gets" America? And who doesn't?

...

But Kathleen Parker, defender of whiteitude and penises, has since embraced the middle of the road, along with dead armadillos and most editorial pages, and has been handsomely rewarded for it.

I'd bet the house that David Brooks will win next year. Just be prepared.

The only thing about this story that was ever really interesting of was the context within which what happened to Not Dorothy Parker took place: the sudden, public disruption of the normally-smooth-running Wingnut Propaganda Machine and the brief glimpse into the naked inner workings of that machine it vouchsafed to the rest of us, validating everything we had long known about the Right.

Kathleen Parker's epiphany came a year and a half ago when she stepped one inch off of the Conservative Reservation to suggested that Sarah Palin might not be 100% ready to run the most powerful country in the history of the world.

And – as if a switch had been thrown -- her dog-loyal audience fell on her like a pack of "28 Days Later" rage zombies.

Which is, of course, precisely what 20 years of relentless brainwashing by the Wingnut Propaganda Machine had programmed them to do.

What happened to Parker is the classic case of what happens to anyone who has been too long at the fair: she had forgotten that the Right hasn’t been a Movement, or even a coherent governing philosophy, for decades. It is a cult; one which is held together by a rage, paranoia and rigid and ever-loonier orthodoxy, and from which people like her have made handsome livings for a long, long time feeding gobbets of red meat to the cultists.

She somehow forgot that she was not a lion of American journalism, but just another Princess of the Pig People: another honored member of the ruling elite of Goofball Island, deriving her status and popularity from the same polluted source as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.

And when for a brief moment she brushed up against the Real World and was shocked -- shocked! -- to discover what any Liberal could have told her 20 years ago.

And let me tell you, over at the Sekrit Liberal Headquarters (high atop Mt. Soros), all us SEIU traitors and ACORN thugs took a little time off (at taxpayer expense, of course!) from our tireless efforts to destroy America and seize everyone’s guns (weird how we manage to be both lazy and relentless) to have a hearty laugh watching Parker struggle to invent a vocabulary for writing about her horrifying discovery without admitting that the Dirty Hippies had been right about the Right all along.

And that she had been wrong.

We assumed that, after much spluttering, she would do what most other "respectable" Conservative sock-puppets have done when some brief, accidental bout of integrity left them stunned and sobered by an intimate encounter with the snarling Wingnut Wahabi Guardians of the Faith: namely, scrounge around in the magic word bag for some way to blame the last couple of decades of Republican mass psychosis on Bill Clinton’s penis, and then run as fast as possible to beg Rush Limbaugh's forgiveness.

Apparently Kathleen Parker’s has decided on Plan B: becoming a Centrist.

Which means that while Bill Clinton’s penis can now only be blamed for half of all Conservative perfidy, at least Kathleen Parker’s real core values were allowed to remain unscathed.

Or, in the words of that other Parker;

"The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'cheque enclosed.'"