Over at Slate, Ron Rosenbaum asks if the cover-profile of Angelina Jolie in the latest issue of Esquire is the worst celebrity profile ever. And to judge by some of the shudderingly bad extracts he posts, which combine vacuousness and pretentiousness to peerless degree ("in post 9/11 America, Angelina Jolie is the best woman in the world because she is the most famous woman in the world—because she is not like you or me"), it's got to be a contender. But in passing, he notes an example of a fallacy not yet covered by our in-house speciousness expert, Tom Chatfield:
He begins with the question"Does 9/11 still have meaning for most Americans? Does it have more meaning than celebrity? Does it have more meaning than the very specific message of meaninglessness contained in the weekly parable of Angelina Jolie's twisted double life? Or have we reached the point where its meaning is somehow inextricable from the meaning of celebrity, as 9/11 recedes into the past and celebrity gives birth to the future?"I'm not making this up. I'm copying it right out of the pages of a well-known magazine, which (full disclosure) I've written for in the past. But I will be deeply indebted to any Slate reader who can make the slightest bit of sense of this paragraph about meaninglessness. Is it an example of what they used to call at Yale "the fallacy of imitative form," in which in order to write about meaninglessness you have to be meaningless?
