I know, I know. I shouldn’t be wasting bandwidth here telling you all to read The Nation. It seems like one step away from a lot of craziness, but, well, they had a good article about the New Yorker and about how it became pro-war since Susan Sontag penned her infamous (but still generally damned good) response to the attacks of September 11. I mostly mention this since the burgeoning readership of this webpage also enjoy the ramblings in the New Yorker, as do I, in fact. But there is something telling in one of the final paragraphs of Daniel Lazare’s critique, involving the recent fluff profile of Slavoj Žižek, which I actually rather liked.
Here it is:
When The New Yorker runs a clever and amusing profile of a colorful character like the Slovenian social theorist Slavoj Zizek, as it recently did, the main purpose is to give an appearance of openness while assuring readers that such radical critics remain safely marginalized. Meanwhile, it seems highly unlikely that the magazine would publish articles by the likes of Hannah Arendt or Pauline Kael, hard-hitting intellectual warriors whose goal was to challenge conventional wisdom head-on.
And dammit, if Lazare isn’t correct. Hendrik Hertzberg seems to be slowly coming undone regarding Mr. Bush, but his voice is often tempered by the likes of Remnik. Seymour Hersh is always interesting and pretty well-connected, but his work isn’t really making me excited. I mean, come on, this is a magazine that a few months ago had a fawning profile of the Saudi ambassador to the US. The New Yorker will throw us a bone–like the profile of my man from Ljubljana–but then not give much else. Even the recent profiles of Karl Rove and Roger Ailes only strove to show that, yes, evil men are running this nation to the ground. They didn’t quite strike a whole lot of fear. In comparison, I notice personally that I sort of had to stop reading The Nation, as it was just pulling me down. The New Yorker? No way.
This all said, Harper”s is veering towards being really no longer amused by the Bush administration. And this is the same Harper’s that I sort of didn’t renew my subscription for because of the verbal diarrhea aimed at academics by Tom Wolfe on the occasion of Harper’s 150th birthday. Then after that fiasco, the first Harper’s I picked up was the (I believe) November 2002 issue, with a giant folio essay on how racial identity is destroying individuality. What’s next? David Foster Wallace to write something racist and reductive about current debates in linguistics and English usage?
Ahem. I’ve been meaning to get that out of my system. Back to Harper’s‘s being unamused. Lewis Lapham: you are pissed. It’s ok. Show it. Tom Frank: you rock my world and continue to be one of the most angry men I’ve had the pleasure of reading over the past half-decade. Your buckets of hate aimed at the Bush budget was just the sort of thing that the New Yorker should be publishing.
In the meantime, anyone up for a game of cards?
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