I’ve been musing about the recent Mantheon wars ("wars" is perhaps an exaggeration; it’s been more of a rhetorical slap fight, and the slaps aren’t even that hard).
They started because Jamie has a MAID-crush on David Sedaris, and so he added him to the Mantheon, but I think Sedaris is kind of a middlebrow sap and so I denounced his admission to the Mantheon and complained that Jamie added him without consultation. Jamie gets upset because in the course of my denunciation I compare Sedaris to Augusten Burroughs (Jamie has a hang-up about memoirists who fabricate some of their memoirs, which Burroughs may or may not have done), and he wonders who the hell I am to complain about non-consultative Mantheon-expanding since I’ve added like five people to the Mantheon without consulting him, and in fact in the very post in which I complained about Sedaris I added late late night host Craig Ferguson to the Mantheon on the basis of one monologue that I liked, so really who am I to be throwing glass houses at black kettles?
And so on and so on, and Jamie got all huffy and pouty and decided on a whim to fly off to London with his mother.
In the spirit of reconciliation, then, I’ve decided to cull the Mantheon. Craig Ferguson is out. Rufus Wainwright — out (for the time being, though I have hopes of reinstatement). John McEnroe is out. George Orwell’s gone. Jimmy Baldwin’s gone. And David Sedaris is gone.
And then there were four. Charles Barkley, the patron saint of MAID, remains. As does John Amaechi, another black basketball player (and a gay one to boot). Rounding out the final four are Jon Stewart and his protege Stephen Colbert.
