A Martian seeking to understand current U.S. intellectual life might pick up
a copy of The New York Review of Books under the illusion that it offers a
wide-ranging survey of the literary scene by talented writers with a good
range of outlooks and opinions.
Well, let’s see. The current (11/4/04) issue of NYRB includes a round-up of
views on the coming election from the magazine’s contributors. You can get
the flavor of the thing from the following quotes. I have included all the
contributors whose views appear in this symposium.
—K. Anthony Appiah: “In this President, then, we have a self-described
’uniter’ who has nominated a succession of right-wing ideologues to the
federal bench; a man who has invoked his commitment to ‘fairness’ as he
continues to transfer the cost of governance to people further down the
income scale…”
—Russell Baker: “Upon entering the White House he [i.e. GWB] immediately
started to govern from the ideological right, and not the smiling Reagan
right of the 1980s, but the hard, hard right which had spent generations
hating everything governmental that could be called ‘progressive,’ including
Theodore Roosevelt, who had afflicted Republicans with that abominable word
for the past hundred years…”
—Ian Buruma: “The question is whether the US will be a better place after
years of fear-mongering, military abuse, erosion of civil liberties, and a
constant stream of political propaganda that distorts America’s proudest
legacies…”
—Mark Danner: “It is no surprise that the fundamentalist George Bush
responded to the cataclysm of September 11 by rallying Americans to a threat
he found in the realm not of politics or strategy but of metaphysics…”
—Ronald Dworkin: “America is very lucky to have survived one Bush
administration without a single new Supreme Court appointment, but a second
term without more than one new appointment seems unlikely…”
—Michael Ignatieff: “Kerry has begun to win some support simply by
insisting on the grimness of the facts [i.e. about Iraq] and by pointing out
that Bush and Cheney’s optimism borders on the delusional…”
—Anthony Lewis: “[S]ince September 11, 2001, President Bush and his
administration have made a mockery of the American commitment to law. Using
the threat of terrorism as a reason, they have overridden constitutional
rights and treaties to take harsh, punitive action against hundreds of
individuals…”
—Norman Mailer: “The sorriest thing to be said about the US, as we sidle
up to fascism (which can become our fate is we plunge into a major
depression, or suffer a set of dirty-bomb catastrophes), is that we expect
disasters. We await them. We have become a guilty nation…”
—Edmund S. Morgan: “We cannot now escape credit for what our government
has so shamefully done. We began as a people with ‘a decent respect for the
opinions of mankind,’ and we won admiration for it. We have now lost the
good opinion of mankind and with it the sefl-respect of decent Americans…”
—Thomas Powers: “I do not think that voters on election day will forget
everything else [i.e. but Iraq] — the failure to restore lost jobs, a
ballooning of the national debt that threatens Social Security, the watering
down or outright repeal of regulations on business and the environment, the
failure to fund the No Child Left Behind Act, the spreading loss of health
benefits for ordinary Americans, above all [sic] the bluder of the
unnecessary war…”
—Alan Ryan: “…the election is first about bringing the Iraq folly to
an end, second about reversing the erosion of civil liberties, and third
about restoring respect for intelligence in the formulation and
implementation of policy. Underpinning all this, it would help to have a
president who could tell the truth — and who could distinguish it from
fantasy…”
—Brian Urquart: “[T]he ideology of the George W. Bush administration is
basically unilateralist, exceptionalist, and anti-internationalist. Its
worldview first manifested itself in the rejection of important
international agreements like the anti-ballistic missile and nuclear test
ban treaties, to Kyoto Protocol on global warming, proposed conventions on
chemical warfare and the limitation of small arms, and the recently
established International Criminal Court…”
—Steven Weinberg: “President Bush’s re-election would be disastrous in
another respect. The present Supreme Court has attacked the constitutional
powers of Congress, striking down legislation that would protect individuals
against unconstitutional state action. The vacancies on the Court that are
likely to open soon create an opportunity to reverse these decisions. Four
more years of a Bush administration will tip the balance of the Court toward
extremist justices like Antonin SAcalia and Clarence Thomas…”
—Garry Wills: “[A] vote for Republicans is a vote for Halliburton and
contractors in the oil world, for a Rumsfeld policy of destroying the
military, for a Cheny vision of unilateral action in a world of nations
dismissed as cowards or fools, for an economy based on tax cuts, deficits,
and resistance to social programs…”
Now, there is nothing wrong with being a magazine of the foam-flecked Left.
There is not even anything much wrong with being a magazine of the
foam-flecked Left under a title that gives no clue about your political
orientation. (“National Review” is, after all, from the point of view of
our Martian visitor, not very informative in this respect.) As a life-long
lover of books and writing, though, I do take mild umbrage at a lefty
political rag traveling under the title “New York Review of Books” — a
title that suggests something wider than a solid block of rants against the
wickedness of the current administration.
May I suggest that NYRB considers re-titling itself to something more
appropriate? How about: “New York Review of the Opinions of Burned-Out Old
Stalinists, Aging Hippies Who Just Can’t Get Over Vietnam, Affirmative
Action Academic Hires, Alcoholic Novelists Who Haven’t Had a Decent Plot
Idea Since 1962, and Retired UN Bureacrats”? Just a suggestion.
