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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

An Anti-Semite Who's Anything But
Yet another fiction in the right wing's echo chamber

Donald Trump's presidency has worsened American journalism in myriad
ways. One obvious one is the manner in which so many lies and slanders
are trumpeted (ouch!), uncorrected, as quotes from liars and lunatics.
Take for example, this Times article on Mike Pompeo's presidential
prospects
.
It's meant to be critical, but it contains sentences like "Mr.
Pompeo has also condemned Mr. Biden's 'backward' 'open border'
policies," without mentioning that there are no such "open border"
policies. It reports that "Mr. Pompeo tweeted that the Biden
administration's plans to restart aid to the Palestinians canceled
under Mr. Trump were 'immoral' and would support terrorist
activity," without challenging Pompeo's equation of Palestinians
with "terrorists."

The authors do quote former Obama aide Ben Rhodes pooh-poohing
Pompeo's silliness. Interestingly, they do so without mentioning that
last month, Pompeo slandered Rhodes so sloppily that he misidentified
the source he was lying about. On February 10, Peter Beinart interviewed
Rhodes for his Occupied Thoughts podcast. Pompeo then tweeted
that Rhodes
had told the website Jewish Insider-which had merely reported on
Beinart's podcast
-that
"all Jews" were "corrupt and cruel
." This was
picked up by an article in The Federalist that reported that Rhodes used
"antisemitic tropes directed toward Israel, its Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu, and Jews
"
and spurred a demand from Len Khodorkovsky, a former deputy assistant
secretary of state under Trump, that Rhodes be kicked off the board of
the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum for "his anti-Semitic views
." Of
course, Rhodes said no such thing
.
My larger point though is that the two Times reporters who combined to
write about Pompeo knew very well that they were writing about a liar, a
racist, and a McCarthyite. And yet they ran his quotes as if what he was
saying was not in any way objectionable, much less in need of immediate
correction before it should be reprinted in our alleged Paper of Record.

There are people who know this stuff better than I do, but I have long
lamented the implicit conspiracy of media silence regarding the unholy
alliance between (certain) members of the Congressional Black Caucus and
right-wing Republicans to screw Black people in particular and
liberalism in general-to say nothing of the Democratic Party-by
making sure that a few Black representatives can be ensured of enormous
majorities in their districts. Such supermajority-clinging ends up
wasting significant numbers of votes that could-and should-be spread
out by more rational redistricting. More liberals would be elected that
way-and likely, more minority representatives-and their
constituencies would be the beneficiaries of better legislation.

But the CBC likes things the way they are, with the assurance of
enormous margins and little to worry about come election time. This
typical "Dems in Disarray" article

hints at some of this, but you will rarely see it stated outright
because there is no percentage in getting the wrong people mad at you if
nothing is going to change. This is a far worse crime today than it has
been in the past owing, alas, to the apparently irreversible
Trumpification of the Republican Party. Pew tells us that today "about
three-quarters of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (77%)
say Trump made progress in addressing the nation's major problems."
Trump remains extremely unpopular with the majority of the country
.
But we have a political system, especially at the local level, that does
not care what the majority of people think or feel.

A few things inspired by the reception (so far) to Blake Bailey's
Philip Roth biography :

* I can't defend Roth's treatment of women and won't try. But
regarding the extensive hassling of his publishers and editors, well,
one can only dream. Look, Roth was, undeniably, a great writer. Great
writers should be pissy with their editors and publishers. It's their
work, not their character, that matters to the rest of the world. I was
close friends with E.L. Doctorow. He was always giving me advice about
what to demand from my publisher, which, as a mid-list author, would
have made them laugh if I tried to act on it. You had to be Doctorow (or
Roth or Bellow or Updike) to do so, and our literature is better for it.

* Another irony of the critics' complaints of Bailey's focus on
Roth's affairs is that similar complaints about James Atlas's
biography of Saul Bellow were what led Roth to breaking off his
friendship with Atlas, whom he had originally helped recruit to write
the book in the first place. (I believe the cut on Atlas's Bellow book
was that he was portrayed as "a penis that also wrote books.")

* If the reviews are correct-and I think they must be-then
Bailey's biography is the mirror image of Timothy Brennan's
biography of Edward Said .
Bailey is interested in Roth's life, rather than his work, and
apparently does not attempt to place him in the context of the historic
American Jewish takeover of American culture that Roth, together with
Bellow, Trilling, Woody Allen, et al., manifested in their respective
glory days. Those will have to wait for Steve Zipperstein's follow-up
biography in Yale's "Jewish Lives" series. (As for Ira Nadel's
extensive biography of Roth

published in March, I read it, but cannot recommend that you do so.) I
have also read Brennan's Said biography, and these two

reviews

strike me as accurate; this one
,
less so. The author, a former student of Said's-who died in 2003 of
cancer and was a friend of mine as well as my professor for one
semester-does well with Said's literary criticism. However, he is
not at all interested in Said's personal psychology or the myriad
conflicts that the various roles in his rich life called on him to
negotiate.

* I also have a particular bone to pick with Brennan. On page 255, he
asserts that Said was relegated to "the back of the book" of The
Nation (for just book reviews and music criticism) owing to pressure on
Victor Navasky from "pro-Israel liberals" with a bizarre connection
to Jesse Jackson's candidacy (which, Brennan does not seem to know,
was actually quite popular at The Nation then). He presents no evidence
for this at all, and anyone who knows Navasky and is familiar with the
way he ran The Nation knows this to be so far from true as to be
laughable. It is conspiratorial thinking and makes me wonder about the
things in the book I am not competent to judge. (Too bad it did not come
up here
,
huh?)

Speaking of Said-and inspired by The New Republic's choosing our
friend and former Prospect editor Michael Tomasky to be its head
honcho-I recently watched the infamous MESA debate
that pitted Bernard Lewis and Leon
Wieseltier against Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens. It's a
fascinating time capsule of the state of the academic Middle East
debate-so different from that of the MSM-in the mid-to-late '80s.
Its most entertaining moment comes when Hitchens turns to Wieseltier and
says:

Where did the following appear? The description of a play at the
American Repertory Theater in this town: "The universalist prejudice
of our culture prepared us for this play's Arab, a crazed Arab to be
sure, but crazed in the distinctive ways of his culture. He is
intoxicated by language, cannot discern between fantasy and reality,
abhors compromise, always blames others for his predicament and, in the
end, lances the painful boil of his frustrations in a pointless, though
momentarily gratifying, act of bloodlust." That is a signed comment by
the owner and editor of the New Republic. [He means Marty Peretz
.] I disagree
with you, Leon; I'm sorry, I don't believe that could appear about
an Indian or an African in any other magazine in this country. As to
whether it should be said at all of any ethnic or racial group in a
magazine that, once, boasted Walter Lippman and Edmund Wilson, is a
question for those who toil in that vineyard.

ODDS AND ENDS

In my extended experience as a fan of Tom Jones's later work,
especially, for instance, his version of Leonard Cohen's "Tower of
Song," I find that while people may be
aware that he's been kind of great lately, they still think he was
kind of a joke in his heyday. This is wrong. He was kind of a joke then,
but he was also great whenever he chose to be. This is unarguably
demonstrated by these terrific performances with Janis Joplin

and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
. You're
welcome.

* The Film Forum's virtual theater is showing all four of Eric
Rohmer's wonderful seasonal dramas beginning with A Tale of Springtime
.
If you are unfamiliar with his films, read The New Yorker's Richard
Brody

and watch this video essay .

* Finally, this is, I think, the best issue of The New York Review in
many years for some reason.
I don't know why. But take a look. (Also, read this incredibly
depressing (and incredibly long) piece

by Nathan Thrall on Israel/Palestine, which is only online.)

* And hey, look what just popped up: Larry McMurtry on Ken Kesey and On
the Road .

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Donate to The American Prospect

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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