Guys, remember when the Syrian government was overthrown? Me neither! There have been so many awful and engrossing news stories since then––the wildfires in Los Angeles, the inauguration and the return of Trump, the global wars still raging––that my puny, addled brain can barely recollect the experience of reading the news the day Syrian rebels swiftly and easily captured Damascus.
But apparently my long-term memory is, unlike my short-term one, in decent shape, because whenever I hear the al-Assad name I think: how’s Joan Juliet Buck doing?
In case you missed it, here’s the background: Joan Juliet Buck was a well-respected if eccentric writer for Vogue who, in 2011, took an assignment from her editor to write a profile of Asma al-Assad, the British-born wife of then-Syrian president (he was president in 2011, when Buck profiled his wife, not when they met). In her retelling of this afterward, she was uneasy from the get-go. “Absolutely not,” she wrote in an essay for Newsweek. “I don’t want to meet the Assads, and they don’t want to meet a Jew.” Nevertheless, she said it was “more interesting” than her usual assignments profiling models and actresses, and she was eager to see the antiquities in Syria, so she went.
You can probably guess what happened next. Shortly after Buck’s article came out, the brutal Syrian Civil War began, during which al-Assad killed many Syrians. Scrambling for a justification for printing a glossy profile of a woman married to a mass murderer, Vogue threw Buck under the bus, even though anyone in or around publishing would––should––have recognized that the buck didn’t stop with her, and Vogue would have had to be complicit in many ways, if not the sole reason for such a misstep.
Regardless, Buck’s article vanished from the Internet, and her contract wasn’t renewed. As of 2017, she was living in a rented apartment in Rhinebeck, New York and working on her memoir from the basement of a local library.
I’ve long been curious about what happens to documents deemed no longer reliable because of social reasons, like this, or because they’ve been found unreliable due to plagiarism or authorial dishonesty. (For a long time, I was obsessed with wondering who would actively choose to read James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces post-Oprah debacle, and what that person’s experience of the book would be.) So naturally I went on Ebay to track down a copy of Vogue’s Power Issue from March 2011. (Don’t worry––it wasn’t that expensive.)
My first thought upon receiving it is how weird it was to hold a bulky magazine like this again, actually. Given how much we’ve moved away from print in recent years, and how most of the publications I now do read IRL are slim or literary journals (so therefore kind of thick but much smaller), I had a shocking jolt of recollection––I wouldn’t call it nostalgia, really, because it wasn’t entirely pleasant––when I flipped through what felt like dozens of pages of ads before I even got to the table of contents. As a person who can fetishize the analog, I was sort of surprised to find I didn’t actually miss this tactile experience.
At the time I purchased it earlier this year, you couldn’t find the article itself anywhere online, although a friend told me she’d heard Gawker had a copy up for a while. You could, however, find recounting of the debacle like this one, which quoted or paraphrased the piece in a few places, including the Guardian (here). Most of those articles about the article focused on the rather gauzy, Vogue-appropriate physical descriptions of the first lady, which play pretty, uh, poorly in retrospect. “[G]lamorous, young, and very chic… [A] thin, long-limbed beauty,” Buck calls the woman currently believed to be holed up in some opulent Moscow apartment.
I agree that a lot of her descriptions read as unsavory in the light of the present, but actually, the article isn’t as glowing as many of Buck’s detractors made it out to be. Right in the second paragraph, she calls out the assumption of Syria’s safety as based upon the fact that its government “conducts intense physical and electronic surveillance” of Syrians and foreigners alike. When the first lady feeds Buck a bunch of bromides about coexistence in Syria, Buck segues into a description of the desolate Jewish quarter in Damascus.
By far the weirdest and saddest thing in the piece is not Buck commenting on Mrs. al-Assa’s quiet luxury or whatever; it’s her description of their visit to one of the Massar centers, youth civic centers where kids are, on that day, learning music and chess on computers. Then:
“Asma al-Assad stands to watch a laborious debate about how–-and whether––to standardize the Arabic spelling of the word Syria. Then she throws out a curveball. ‘I’ve been advised that we have to close down this center so as to open another one somewhere else,’ she says. Kids mouths drop open. Some repress tears. Others are furious. One boy chooses altruism: ‘That’s ok. We know how to do it now; we’ll help them.”
Then the first lady announces, ‘That wasn’t true. I just wanted to see how much you care about Massar.’
As the pilot expertly avoids sheet lightning above the snow-flecked desert on the way back, she explains, ‘There was a little bit of formality in what they were saying to me… Tricks like this help––they became alive, they became passionate.’”
Tricking refugee children into believing a major source of support is about to disappear: this is jaw-droppingly insane! Buck touched upon this in her Newsweek piece, but it doesn’t pop up much elsewhere that I’ve seen, and I mean honestly, just getting that in there I think makes Asma come off really poorly. Am I wrong on this?
Anyway if you want to see the thing in full reach out to me, I’ll just scan this sucker and send it along!
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