Will Vogue Magazine Ever Learn?
You might suppose that Vogue magazine would have learned to be a lot more careful about its cover stories, after the landmark outrage of its February, 2011 cover spread lauding Syria’s Asma al-Assad, wife of the dictator.
Not quite.
Who can forget that cover story? Profiling Asma as “A Rose in the Desert,” writer Joan Juliet Buck gushed on and on about Asma, first lady of Syria: “glamorous, young and very chic — the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies.” Vogue treated its readers to a tour of Asma’s “wildly democratic” life with her husband, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, and described Asma as leading a down-home life of style and good works, answering the door of the presidential residence herself, “in jeans and old suede stilleto boots,” and rushing around, “breezy, conspiratorial and fun,” accessorized with little more than her Chanel agates and a Syrian-silk Louboutin handbag.
It was all about rebranding Syria’s regime as open, modern, classy. Asma, according to Vogue, was on a campaign to promote what she called Syria’s “brand essence.”
The month after Vogue ran that cover story, Syria’s people rose in open protest against the Assad regime — protest that has now gone on for 14 months, to which the regime has responded with hideous violence, shelling, shooting, jailing, and torturing, with a death toll now topping 10,000. During these horrors, as we now know from leaked emails, Asma whiled away some of her time with high-end online shopping.
Vogue initially defended its Asma cover story; then — as the carnage in Syria kept making headlines — scrubbed the piece from its web site.
Now, in a more subtle manner, comes another Vogue exercise in branding — this one featuring United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon on the May cover of Italian Vogue. In this case, unlike that of Syria’s regime, there is at least some reasonable justification for the advertised aim — which is “rebranding Africa.” Reportedly, L’Uomo Vogue is trying to create a better image for Africa’s more successful ventures, calling attention in an accompanying press release to “a positive side to the continent.”
Fair enough. But in that case, why on earth is Ban Ki-Moon the cover celebrity for this issue focused on the better side of Africa? In an article on this latest bout of Vogue creativity, the Guardian suggests that Ban is such a big draw — interviewed by Italian Vogue editor Franca Sozzani — that his starring appearance suggests Vogue is serious about giving Africa a boost.
Vogue should give up on politics. They’re clueless.
The real issue is that success promotes itself by being noticed – reality sees to this. Africa is not an obscure pop/rock band that needs promotion so we can understand they would make cool songs and be popular if given a chance. Success on that plane is far more complex and all the promotion in the world won’t make Africa better than it is or the West worst.
Despite that fact, the Leftist meme is to do exactly that – promote racially and geographically. The Left is wrapped up in success and failure in a political and racial sense, and so have a stake in exaggerating success and mitigating failure in those terms. That’s why the Left’s social programs are such failures and which by their mere existence themselves are an admission of where failure in fact resides. The Left always posits failure as being someone else’s fault, and so their cures never work. The Left always posits success in a certain area of the world such as the West as due to exploitation. But if success happens with a minority or in the Third World, it is said to be due to innate racial brilliance and patronizingly held up like a father showing it’s baby video of first steps, or saying “dada.”
No surprise that an air of unreality suffuses the Left and their mad political correctness – they are always out of step with reality, which doesn’t give them pause, but only fuels their conviction that racism is at work, and so they dig out whites or help blacks even more, ironically taking up the view and task of the white man’s burden while simultaneously asserting the exact opposite. The political Left is sick in their minds and heart due to their obsession with race and will never come to grips or terms with the simple nature of reality, which is success is where you find it, not where you want it to be.
Promoting Asma ElAssad as a rose in the desert, brings us back to the ” good old times ” of totalitarian nazi & communist regimes.Eva Braun wan’t she a pretty lady always eaget to releieve her boyfriend his big burden ? Mao’s widow wasn’t she a poet or something like that ? Ms Elena Ceaucescu, wasn’t she a multi-doctorate Ph.D holder ? May be Vogue is short of inspiration ? Maybe Vogue is for rent ? Why not a hamas style glamour report , under the burqua, Vogue discovered an enchanted world of lingerie …Vogue makes me puke.
Promoting Asma ElAssad as a rose in the desert, brings us back to the ” good old times ” of totalitarian nazi & communist regimes.Eva Braun wan’t she a pretty lady always eaget to releieve her boyfriend his big burden ? Mao’s widow wasn’t she a poet or something like that ? Ms Elena Ceaucescu, wasn’t she a multi-doctorate Ph.D holder ?
For the record, Eva Braun was virtually unknown to the German public until AFTER the war. She was not Hitler’s very public girlfriend as we might see today. Hitler was portrayed as far too preoccupied with leading his nation to have time for women.
Mao’s wife was an actor, not a poet. Mao was considered a poet. Actually, the wife that had been an actor in her youth was actually Mao’s fourth wife. His first wife died of disease in 1920. The second was captured by an anti-communist warlord and executed in 1930. I can’t find anything on how his third marriage ended; the third wife didn’t die until after Mao but the marriage ended in 1937. I seem to remember reading that she was simply abandoned by Mao in favour of his fourth wife….
Elena Ceaucescu was widely touted as a great chemist who was looked up to by chemists the world over during her husband’s time in power. The reality was that she never even attended high school and only got decent grades in one subject, needlework. There are allegations that her Ph.D. in chemistry was arranged by the Communist Party in Rumania and that she had done little if any of the work needed to earn the degree herself. After she and her husband were toppled from power, various real scientists alleged that they had been coerced to write scientific papers for her.
I’m sure that some wives of top leaders had important contributions that they made on their own merit but I’m not sure that many of the ones you’ve cited are in that category.
Publications like Vogue seem to need to keep pressing their stuffy, hothouse vision of the universe, as in pumping up Asma, painting false portraits of Africa.
It has something to do with the magazine’s perception of itself, its own sense of self-importance.
As for the UN, first effete Kofi for 7 years and now the mentally challenged Ban Ki-Moon.
Being relatively dull and self-serving must be a requirement for the Sec’y Generalship.
…largest surges in GDP per capita development (notably Botswana and Mauritius in Africa, as well as the East Asian tigers elsewhere, and more recently India and China) have been largely homegrown rather than the result of ambitious outside aid and intervention
I recall the words of an African newspaper guy 5 or 6 years ago when asked how the world might help Africa.
“Leave us alone”.
Bono and countless effete celebrities, attempting to assuage their own guilt and personal wealth by “helping” the Dark Continent, obviously didn’t get the memo.
I have great respect for Claudia Rosett, but if she thinks the Syrian “Uprising” is some spontaneous demand for freedom and democracy she is delusional. What it is, is a Saudi sponsored guerilla attack on a sovereign state because of that State’s alliance with Iran. The Assad regime may be unsatisfactory when compared to the western model but Bashar Assad is a shining example of humanitarian goodness when compared to the repulsive Gulf state monarchies who are the rebellions sponsors.
A young niece of mine travelled to Syria a few months before the uprising started. She made friends there. At least one of those friends is now dead, killed by a sniper’s bullet, not for taking Saudi gold, but for the sin of straying on to his home street.
Call me pedantic, but a regime which posts marksmen randomly to gun down the citizenry has gone a fair distance beyond “unsatisfactory”.
You mean like a regime whose FBI/ATF murdered dozens at Waco and whose FBI assassinated Vicky Weaver at Ruby Ridge (after killing Randy’s son Sammy).
You are so right! I wish more could see Saudi Arabia for what it really is.
“During these horrors, as we now know from leaked emails, Asma whiled away some of her time with high-end online shopping.”
Yes, I hope she’s wearing her favorite Chanel outfit when the Syrian people put her up against a wall and execute her. I’ll bet you Gaddafi never thought in a million years that he would end up the way he did. I guess the Assads see it the same way. Only they WILL eventually lose, because the Syrian people have come too far now to go back. The rebels know that if they give up they will all be exterminated, so they may as well go down fighting. And with grudges in that part of the world lasting for generations, this civil war will only be resolved when one side totally obliterates the other. And the UN is doing nothing, absolutely nothing, about it. Just another reason to get rid of this horrific organization that has probably cost more lives than saved.
Well, they could do one on a really classy lady – Ann Romney!
Welcome to the culmination of 40 years of crap education in America. We now find ourselves surrounded by a vast, endless ocean of abject idiots and liars.
She was born in the UK and educated there with a degree in computer science-she worked in the US as an executive with Morgan Stanley
We understand that she now lives in NYC and London with her children
“During these horrors, as we now know from leaked emails, Asma whiled away some of her time with high-end online shopping.”
Does Fedex deliver to Syria?