LOWERING THE BAR

The New Yorker Goes to War (DANIEL LAZARE, June 2, 2003, The Nation)

The New Yorker has not been the only publication to fall into line behind the Bush Administration's war drive, but for a number of reasons its performance seems especially disappointing. One reason has to do with the magazine's track record. One doesn't have to be a William Shawn devotee to agree that the magazine has published some astonishing journalism over the years--Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem," James Baldwin's "Letter from a Region of My Mind," Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," Jonathan Schell's pieces on Vietnam and Pauline Kael's wonderful demolition job on Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, to name just a few. During the Vietnam War, it was one of the few mainstream publications to try to unmask the sordid reality behind the brass's regular 5 o'clock press briefings. And if it published too many long and hyperfactual stories in the 1980s about wheat or geology, at least it preferred being trivial and obscure to the glories of being a team player in Washington, which is a moral stance of a sort.

Though its style may have been genteel, The New Yorker succeeded in challenging middle-class sensibilities more often than any number of scruffier publications. Another reason to mourn the magazine's lack of resistance is that it represents an opportunity lost. Just as the magazine helped middle-class opinion to coalesce against US intervention in Vietnam, it might well have served a similar function today by clarifying what is at stake in the Middle East. Rather than unveil the reality behind a spurious War on Terrorism, though, The New Yorker helped obscure it by painting Bush's crusade as a natural and inevitable response to the World Trade Center/Pentagon attack and, as a consequence, useless to oppose. Instead of encouraging opposition, it helped defuse it. From shocking the bourgeoisie, it has moved on to placating it at a time when it has rarely been more dangerous and bellicose.

Are those really the examples that Mr. Lazare wants to cite? Ms Arendt famously referred to the banality of evil in that piece, but somehow managed not to mention her own relationship with a famous soulless Nazi. Even the NY Review of Books made fun of the Baldwin essay. Ms Kael's pan of Shoah seems to have been intended to provoke readers. Jonathan Schell has followed up being wrong about the Vietnam War with being wrong about the entire Cold War and most recently wrong about the Iraq war. And Silent Spring is widely derided by all but the most doctrinaire liberals.

Doesn't having Sy Hersh write nonsense every week pretty much meet the standards that Mr. Lazare has set? Posted by Orrin Judd at May 19, 2003 8:45 PM