The Weekly Screed (#717)

Weak in Review
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — My conservative friends think that liberals worship the New York Times — oops. It’s The New York Times, right? (Talk about pretentious!). But reading the Gray Lady is more like meeting an old friend every morning at the local diner, where you end up arguing so much that it wakes up the homeless guys.

Typically, liberals trust the Times’ good intentions. We wouldn’t give it up, but we don’t exactly believe in it either. This is the Achilles-heel of liberalism. We adhere completely to no ideology and we bicker among ourselves over our comparative degrees of skepticism about beliefs that are supposed to be our deepest and dearest… if we actually believed in them… which we don’t. Not entirely.

In the liberal spirit of equivocal solidarity — which kills us at election time — we read the Times every day and then bellyache about all the stuff it does wrong. For example, my biggest beef lately is how the editors have turned the Sunday Week in Review opinion pages into a morbid exercise in public navel-gazing. Rarely has a major newspaper engaged so vapidly in the clash of ideas.

The whole shebang started to slide downhill when the Times lost Frank Rich to New York magazine. Rich, an old-school provocateur who is curious, eloquent and fierce, now writes a monthly one-page thinkpiece that nobody reads outside of Manhattan. What a waste of talent.

Perhaps the new-age Week in Review’s most egregious offense is that it has succumbed entirely to the credentialed-blowhard school of op-ed (this term, for you non-inkstained wretches, is short for “opposite the editorial page”). The Week in Review is now thick and sticky with deep thoughts from academics who are foremost in their fields and whose awe-inspiring curriculum vitae suggest erudition of unassailable certitude.

Trouble is, these expert analysts tend to be, well, nerds. Predictably, their presentations are numbingly dull. The only surprise is that their grasp of the obvious is so unsurprisingly obvious.

For example, this week, the Times printed a piece by one Zeynep Tufekci (try saying that three times real fast!), who resides in the School of Information and Library Sciences at the University of North Carolina. This Chapel Hill librarian used up 1,200 words explaining to the breathless reader that robots and machines will eventually supplant not just low-wage, industrial laborers but will also usurp many of the brain-intensive jobs now held by high-wage techworkers.

Well, thanks, Sherlock, but most of us found that out from going to the movies. Arnold Schwarzenegger running amok in the Terminator flicks. Blade Runner on the late late show. HAL 9000 taking over from Dave in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Us sci-fi movie buffs’ve been looking out warily for the robotic takeover of flesh-and-blood humanity ever since The Day the Earth Stood Still. We look at “artificial persons” the way Ripley looked at Bishop.

Even before Hollywood took up the cause, there were books about this stuff. Karel Capek, in the classic 1920 story, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), had it covered. Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov and dozens more expanded on Capek, dramatizing the rise of the machines far more grippingly — and credibly — than Prof. Tufekci’s turgid rehash in the Times.

Same Sunday: T.M. Luhrmann, an anthropology prof from Stanford, occupied a half-page with the stunning revelation that people think differently about faith, God and Jesus than they do about, say, earth science and hydraulics. Really? I guess it’s nice to know that the brain trust at Stanford has assembled empirical proof of something I figured out at 8 o’clock Mass in St. Mary’s Church when I was in third grade. Good to know, but why so dull?

I mean, Frank Rich could have said the same thing, made me laugh, and pissed off a million hardcore Christians. And we all would’ve had fun.

I grew up reading newspapers in an era when fun-to-read was the unwritten motto of every self-respecting op-ed page. Most editors didn’t care if a writer was an expert in any field, as long as there was poetry in his prose and plenty of tongue in his cheek. My op-ed heroes were journalists who’d worked their way up from death notices and police logs. Mike Royko and Russell Baker, Murray Kempton and William Safire wrote with irrepressible humor and startling insight. They had grown up reading forbears like Alexander Woolcott, S.J. Perelman, Thurber and White, H.L. Mencken and don marquis.

There was a time in the Times when the most important word in the title, “op-ed writer” was “writer.” For my money, the only Times essayist who comfortably fits that description now is Gail Collins, who has powers to skewer the pompous without leaving a mark and who remembers the old newspaper dictum about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.

But the Sunday paper doesn’t have Gail. It has Maureen Dowd, who’s getting dangerously close to being called “venerable.” She writes with fluid grace and she’s sometimes funny— but not lately, because Bill and Hillary are back.

Now that Hillary’s in the race, Maureen’s love-hate passion will chew up 20 inches of op-ed turf in the Sunday Times for the next 81 weeks — whether we like it or not. There will be little novelty and scant humor in all this output. Maureen’s feelings about the Clintons are too raw and tortuous for laughs, even though the relationship is ironically symbiotic. Without the Clintons, Maureen wouldn’t be famous. She’s been psychoanalyzing Hillary so long that by now the whole process is reversed. You read Maureen on Hillary to psychoanalyze Maureen.

But why bother? The Times can hire a professor — from Vienna — to examine Maureen’s head for us, on page 4 in the Week in Review. Boringly.