Katherine Maher Is a Drone

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, April 17, 2024

 

Of Katherine Maher, the new CEO of NPR, Jeff writes:

 

You see, it turns out that Katherine Maher is no ordinary ascendant progressive media executive. No, this woman’s social-media history reveals her to be the Kwisatz Haderach of white wokeness, presumably bred through generations of careful genetic selection to be the supernaturally perfect embodiment of Affluent White Female Liberalism. (As many have noted, she not only acts but looks like Titania McGrath.) It’s vaguely unreal: If there was a trendy progressive take floating around on Twitter and popular within media circles, then you can reliably bet she was there to voice it in the most preeningly insulting way possible.

 

He concludes:

 

Maher is so cringe-inducingly woke that she almost reads like an intentionally cruel parody of wokeness from beyond the uncanny valley — as if she were tweeting in the progressive equivalent of blackface, her endless ultra-orthodoxy an act of desperate, sweaty-palmed minstrelsy. I prefer an empathetic take myself: Don’t hate the player, hate the game. As a rich white heterosexual woman from Connecticut in a world of brutally cutthroat media identity politics, she needs to give a truly committed performance at all times simply in order to survive.

 

I disagree. I read through Maher’s tweets this morning, and what jumped out at me above all else was that she seems completely and utterly un-self-aware. That, not her willingness to “give a performance,” is why her affect is so creepy. She believes it — and, worse yet, she’s never considered the alternative.

 

Almost everyone I’ve ever met in this world has at least some ability to look at themselves from the outside and to comprehend how they come across. I’m not convinced Maher can. There is hilarious moment in the movie Young Frankenstein in which Igor (played by Marty Feldman) is asked by Dr. Frederick Frankenstein (played by Gene Wilder) if Igor would like Frankenstein to use his “brilliant” surgical skills to remove the large and unsightly hump on Igor’s back, and Igor replies, simply, “What hump?” In the film, it’s a great joke. Here on earth, it’s a problem.

 

Why? Well, because a lack of self-awareness typically indicates a lack of empathy. Given how often she uses the word, I’m sure that Katherine Maher would hate that diagnosis. But so be it. She lacks empathy. The best thing that can happen to any of us is to learn that other good, nice, decent people differ from us in important ways. I know who I am — for better and for worse — because I was raised to understand that the world is a big, rambunctious place; that a lot of the people in it see things differently than I will; and that that’s absolutely fine. Better still, I have spent a lot of my life surrounded by well-meaning people who have been happy to make fun of me whenever they got half a chance. If you want to appreciate your role in things, make friends who’ll roast you for your qualities — both good and bad. I know of no better mirror, and no better teacher.

 

Does Katherine Maher come across to you as the sort of person who understands other people’s experiences — or, heaven forfend, who is willing to laugh at herself for her ridiculous traits? I don’t think she does. Whether she’s opining formally or responding casually to something she happened to see on TV, her approach is that of the cloistered zealot. Look through years of her output, and you’ll find no humility, no self-deprecation, no sense of humor, no understanding of context, no joy. You won’t even find a grudging acknowledgment that her worldview is unusual relative to the other people who live in the place she calls home. She’s a robot, an AI with skin, a drone equipped with an Oberlin textbook. She is her ideology, and her ideology is her, and outside it there can be nothing more. Some believe that this makes her ill-suited to head up NPR. Personally, I think her only option is to get married to it.