Now Me Too · 15 September 2002
As stated before, print magazines take their time crossing the Atlantic; only last week the September Harper’s showed up, in which was found a most excellent essay by Lee Siegel deep on p 75: ‘Consuming Culture: When our critics won’t turn off the TV’.
Ostensibly a review of (the addictively readable New York Times columnist) Paul Krugman’s recent pamphlet Fuzzy Math: The Essential Guide to the Bush Tax Plan, the piece strives to catalogue some of the rhetorical noise surrounding Krugman, and in doing so, to survey the ragged, growing media obsessiveness forever on the tip of the tongue of current debate.
Siegel pauses along the way to lay blame on the noisy early-1990s excesses of the academic left for the current sniffy dismissal of all things ‘liberal’ by neoconservatives:
The language of social reform has become so eccentric thanks to conservative caricature and the atmosphere of prosperity that, as with Hemingway’s style, anyone who employs it sounds like a parody. So writers who might have used such an idiom content themselves to write about media.
Which does ring nicely. He then situates Krugman between two contrasts. First, he invokes the much-maligned Susan Sontag’s much-maligned ‘Talk of the Town’ piece in The New Yorker last September, and finds
...the anachronistic assumptions behind what has passed for much ‘left wing’ political criticism in this country for the past thirty years.
Then, later:
Her opacities crystallize into one grand platitude: Power lies. This is not unsettling, and it is not a revelation. It is a consolation to the converted disguised as a provocation to the pious. You don’t accept Sontag’s ideas the way an independent mind gradually comes to accept ideas, along the lines of rational persuasions; you inherit them the way the rich inherent their class.
Which rings like a clarion. There follows a solid portrait of Krugman, his skills, his credentials, and his relatively bipartisan prejudices, before the last and sweetest portion of the essay: a harsh, harsh thumping of Krugman’s most shrill critic, Andrew Sullivan. But only after a bit of obligatory foghorn journo flourish:
Just as the difference between Krugman and Sontag is the difference between a mature and a puerile social criticism, the chasm between Krugman and Sullivan exposes the impoverishment of American journalism over the last ten years.
I’d say that’s a bit generous: it’s something of a reach to call Sullivan – who daily outperforms even that sweaty little fuckpig Mark Steyn in public acts of fellatio upon the greedy and stupid – an exemplary journalist. The thumping is a treat all the same: very deft and beautifully delivered. It would be an injustice to retype selective bits here; if you haven’t seen the ish yet, pick it up.
Okay, one:
[A]lthough he has one of the most tarnished reputations in American journalism, Sullivan, like Pavarotti, refuses to leave the stage.
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