Preview

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.