Doppelgängers Doubling, Budding Journalists Cut Up

Psychological Analysis of Progressive Covid True Believers

Talk about burying the lede. Naomi Klein is wrapping up her 300 page book Doppelganger, a cultural critique of Naomi Wolf whom she is mistakenly conflated with, before she finally coughs up her original obsession with differentiation. Loyal readers will have followed Klein’s laborious peeling away her shadow Naomi, impatient Peter Pans skipped to the last chapter.

Winter of 1991, twenty year old Klein is a student journalist at her community college, assigned to cover 28 yo Wolf’s book tour for recently released The Beauty Myth. It was already a “big splash in the UK”, where Wolf had been a Rhodes Scholar selection at Oxford. She’d been personally invited by a professor at Klein’s Canadian college months before BM went supernova in North America. It wasn’t even called Third Wave feminism yet.

Wolf’s thesis that unattainable beauty ideals were derailing young, professional women from crashing through corporate glass ceilings resonated with Klein’s liberati generation, especially if they were not sufficiently slender, attractive or submissive to the patriarchy. As the “baby feminist on campus”, Klein was assigned to interview Wolf for The Varsity student paper.

Klein recalls there was nothing in Myth “new or revelatory”, being “raised by a second wave feminist mother who made a documentary about pornography” when she was nine. Not with her in it. Naomi the Younger was “already organizing screenings of Killing Us Softly” on campus, which “deconstructed female representation” where “beauty and docility were prized.” Her feminist friend challenged Wolf on BM’s overlooking Asian/Black beauty myths causing color bleaching, hair straightening, eyelid lifts. These girls were already way ahead of Wolf ideologically.

Still, this older Naomi “was magnetic”, bearing an aroma of the “freewheeling 70’s” to a room full of young women “come of age in the 80’s” with “glossy and suffocating” images of girls on MTV and legacy media. (I really came of age in the “freewheeling 70’s”, both as student reporter and adolescent to young adult). Older Naomi was a toddler/ pubescent Wolf watching Sesame Street and prancing around to Abba in the living room. She “came of age” in the 80’s, too. Just broke free of the pack. Females were gender gazing and gazed like doppelganger guards/prisoners in Black Mirror Panopticons.

Naomi the Younger’s cultural cohort was “starving themselves”, bevies of binging bulimics, fitness junkies exhausted from working out, girls “gagged” by gender roles, “hating our bodies.” Professional women pursuing plastic surgery to match unattainable ideals that were “robbing us of our rightful power and place in the world.”

Klein identified herself after the talk as the student assigned to interview Wolf. She was gobsmacked when glamorous Naomi said, “I knew it was you, you look like you’ve just been raped.” Did she mean the universal terrorized posture and expression, shoulders hunched, chin up, mouth open, sanpaku eyes? Neither Naomi describes this visual definition of recently traumatized.

Young Naomi knew it was “wildly inappropriate”, but it “jolted my body.” Did she assume the position then? Left unscrivened. Klein now attributes Wolf’s lifelong habit of “jumping to conclusions without facts”, with an absolute “certainty of words spoken” in blazing ignorance of rudeness. Possibly just cultural, polite Canadian clashes with brassy New Joysey.

Wolf’s “compulsion to be the expert in every interaction”, a trait of “charismatic leaders”, was a “textbook power move” tapping into a “special vein of knowledge to gain my trust.” Then, the “instant intimacy stunt worked. I spilled my guts” to Naomi the Elder.

This must be the prime fulcrum for her antipathy to anything Wolf espouses now. Like my abiding anger for the British journalism classmate who couldn’t write, so became Editor Scissorhands in our community college student newspaper,The Phoenix. Scraping by on Pell grants and work/study in the English Dept., meant bicycling to campus, riding west three miles on State Road 84, a 55 mph divided highway, truck route with no shoulder. White Line, Head down.

After reporting campus news for a year and a half, I’d earned an opinion column my final semester of an AA in Journalism, (still recovering). The Health Habit was decades ahead of medical consensus in 1977, but advanced information was in the aire. Covered the bases. White Sugar= Poison, Tobacco Kills, Heart Attacks are Self Defense. Natural Foods, Daily Exercise.

After Smart, the Brit idjit, deliberately “cut up” one column without literary merit, our chainsmoking Journalism professor edited my copy. The Health Habit’s semester series finale was a double center page, straight news article on bicycle safety. It won a state journalism award for college papers.  Tied into my successful campaign lobbying Broward County to pave two separated bike paths to its community college. Not memorial paths, fortunately.

An entry into decades of Bicycle Safety political acts. Nevertheless, my brief but spectacular career as student reporter ended there. Went up to Gainesville to finish out the freewheelin’ 70’s. Took one class in the University of Florida Journalism School and switched majors for my B.A. The Future of Journalism convinced me there was none.

Gainesville had a nationally renowned independent student newspaper, published five days a week when students were in class. Somehow Smart slimed his way into chief editor of The Alligator, where he could do the most damage.

I cornered him behind his big desk for turning my “letter to the editor” protesting cuts to the Creative Writing program into uncreative cut-up again. In the good old days, vengeance on editors was a legal loophole. In the freewheelin’ 70’s, rage was the only permissable weapon. Now, in Florida I could shoot him in the parking lot, Standing My Ground.

Klein “flunked out of junior college” when her “mom got sick.” Wolf had connected her with her cousin in the business. Nothing came of that, but she still got steered towards prestigious reporting assignments in national magazines, as a college dropout.

Some say Journalism Schools killed real reporters, when their degrees became hiring barriers in the post Watergate 70’s. Klein slid in without one, through the back door. This led to her first book, No Logos.

She credits Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, for showing her that a “Big Book about Big Ideas” was possible, when she “had no goals- no mapped out future.” Wolf proved that “a book of ideas, could command an international audience by calling bullshit on patriarchy.” Klein rode the third wave into publishing nirvana with Logos.