At the New York Times, Jennifer Senior has written a forced smile of a book review, and who can blame her? The volume at hand: Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik, released on Friday.
Notorious RBG is a Tumblr page that the authors have converted into a book — a genre whose notable contributions include Hot Chicks with Douchebags and I Can Has Cheezburger? A LOLcat Collekshun. This latest addition is, apparently, not much smarter. Senior writes:
As Ms. Carmon explains in a prefatory author’s note, she and Ms. Knizhnik are both “#millennials,” which some readers may take as an early typographical cue to close the book and slowly back away.
This book is not for them. “Notorious RBG” may be a playful project, but it asks to be read seriously. It’s an artisanal hagiography, a frank and admiring piece of fan nonfiction. One chapter is devoted almost entirely to Justice Ginsburg’s workout (impressive) and lace collars (she owns at least a dozen). Early on, we learn that Justice Ginsburg was a fan of Nancy Drew as a child, and “Notorious RBG,” with its earnest superhero framing, reads like a Nancy Drew novel itself: “After years of toil, often in the shadows, she is poised to explain to the country just what is going wrong.” It’s an Honest Abe tale for the 20-something set.
Which part of that is a compliment? Later:
This book is also a direct descendant of contemporary feminist websites (Ms. Carmon spent two years as a staff writer at Jezebel) and as such, has not just their strengths — wit, sharp consciousness-raising — but also, on occasion, their weaknesses (a Manichaean worldview, a lack of tonal maturity).
I am not sure this book’s target audience will much care.
Translation: This book is childish, but its readers are too, so . . .
I feel for Senior. The Cult of Ginsburg demands much, which is why I announced my dissent this summer:
For Ginsburg, the law is an instrument toward political ends. When she declared in her 1993 confirmation hearing that her reading of the Constitution relied on “the climate of the age,” she was offering not an interpretive rule, but a political one. The jurist who thinks there are “populations that we don’t want to have too many of” (three cheers for Roe for helping out with that!) is really just waiting for the climate of the age to catch up with her fevered pursuit of justice. Someday we yokels will see that a good eugenics program is just what we need.
The acclaim for Ginsburg’s distinguished legal career is, then, really acclaim for her unorthodox political career. Go back to those dissents. If you read reports from left-wing media, Ginsburg is the Jon Stewart of Supreme Court opinions: her dissents are “ferocious,” “withering,” “blistering,” “barbequing,” and (my personal favorite) “disemboweling.” Justice Scalia, eat your heart out!
But Ginsburg gets her dissents made into songs not because they actually eviscerate opponents’ arguments, but because she is already an icon. The whole arrangement is backwards, to wit: She is not a feminist hero because she is (in the words of Rebecca Traister, writing at The New Republic) “bone-crushingly robust yet simultaneously appealing”; she is “bone-crushingly robust yet simultaneously appealing” because she is a feminist hero.
Ironically, to argument Ginsburg’s legions of fans have proven largely unresponsive.