When Kafka met Kaufman

Of the many uncertainties facing this country in these tumultuous times, among the least pressing is, have we reached peak meta yet?

With a 3,000-word, Charlie Kaufman-esque account* of an awkward blackface moment at a staffer's Halloween party from two years ago, the Washington Post seems to be saying from within its own collective rectum that the answer is SHIDD, NUH.

Here are the key points:

• White liberal Nobody attended the Post's political cartoonist's personal Halloween bash in 2018 as "Megyn Kelly but in blackface," only to leave in tears after some unsophisticated people failed to appreciate the irony.
• Incident went unreported and was mostly forgotten for nearly two years. Until...
• Two people who, as of last week, still felt "harassed" by Nobody complained to the host, Post political cartoonist Tom Toles.
• Toles lied to them both about knowing that the incident happened and about knowing Nobody. He nonetheless apologized for the incident.
• Complainant 1 deemed the apology insufficient, deriding Toles's failure to offer up Nobody's identity for further public humiliation as "a deliberate act of white privilege and cowardice."
•  Nobody, seeking to get ahead of the story, discloses the imminent publication of the Post article to her employer, who summarily fires her.
• The Post publishes a 3,000-word Kaufman-esque account to serve as both didactic tale of the evils of white privilege and cynical CYA for one of its own.

The whole thing is a glorious trainwreck of media virtue-signalling, self-indulgence, and unintentional humor.

The actual news value is nil. I probably should have mentioned that at the top.

(It's worth noting for those unfamiliar that Toles is no stranger to self-referential humor: He carries on the proud hack-political-cartoonist tradition of drawing into the corner of each offering a tiny version of himself reacting to his own joke or providing an obvious punchline where none is otherwise available.)

Update: New York magazine dug into this mess and came up with some interesting inside details that, while not entirely responsive to the important questions raised by the debacle, shed light on how one of the pillars of the influence media views its role in today's environment. Among them:

• The Post story engendered the same confusion among its staff as it did its readership -- namely, why was this a matter of public interest? The Post's designated p.r. muppet claims the presence of newsroom employees at the incident "impelled" the paper to publish the piece: "The story is a microcosm of what the country is going through right now." Sure, it is. I mean, who among us doesn't work for one of the most influential media institutions in the country and hasn't thrown a Halloween party where people wear obnoxious Beltway-themed costumes like Brett Kavanaugh-with-a-beer-helmet and haven't had that blow up in our face when someone showed up in "ironic" blackface?
• The fact that even the two bylined reporters -- both 20-year Post veterans -- seem more than a little embarrassed by their own story suggests they were under direct or indirect orders by editors who are no more than one or two rungs under top editor Marty Baron. The New York follow-up doesn't name who it might have been, which doesn't speak well for them.
• Along those lines, it's clear the Post absolutely will NOT hold anyone accountable for this mess. If they weren't going to return the Pulitzer they got for their role in promoting the now-discredited Russiagate conspiracy theory, they sure as s___ aren't going to walk back this one.
• As the reporting for the Post story was unfolding, senior management were being subjected to intense pressure from within about the Post's own "racism and discrimination" problems. One former reporter quoted in the New York piece infers that "someone complained to the Post about this stupid incident[,] and rather than handling it as an HR matter, they decided the best thing for public relations would be to project transparency by reporting on it themselves." [Emphasis added.]
•  Finally -- and most deliciously -- New York interviewed Complainant 1 after the Post crapped the bed. She expressed "shock" that the reaction to the story she harangued the Post into reporting led to people wanting to cancel her. Where before she claimed the failure to publicly shame a private person to be "an act of white privilege and cowardice," she now preaches the gospel of can't-we-all-just-get-along:

  But truth is — we’re ALL racist, that’s the problem. And we all deserve the grace to learn and change. Let’s use these moments to change hearts and minds, not publicly shame. 

*For those paywalled or too lazy to read the whole goddamn thing, Reason's writeup provides more than sufficient excerpts and analysis.