Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
This is a repost from BlackOutBlog, but as nobody reads BlackOutBlog, I'm posting it on Hongpong.
On to my thoughts:
Safire: He's leaving, and I am despondent over it. Safire is a gargantuan asshole, with a Mailer-like obsession, if not a Carlyle-like obsession, with the halls of power. His life has been lived with an ear undelicately to the ground, pumping biased sources for information often false. However, his commentary is excellent. There is no denying this guy is one smart mofo, and I will miss him.
Compounding my despondency is the now-obvious placement of David Brooks, who has been placed in the role of sucessor to token conservative on the NYT staff. Brooks is colorless, odorless, tasteless and uninsightful, choosing to review Tom Wolfe's (another non-dumb ragin asshole) new book the other day rather than do his job. He belittles those book critics who line up to trash his latest book every time, and lauds Wolfe's "moral intent" while dismissing his underdevloped characters.
To you, David, I say this: shut the fuck up. You aren't a critic, and your love of Wolfe has to do with some notion of him as a pitchman for your own retrograde notion of morality. First off, I don't think Wolfe is pushing any value system upon his readers. I would suspect, though I don't know, that Wolfe would agree with Oscar Wilde's prologue to The Picture of Dorian Gray when he says:
"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written."
It's not as simple as that, however?there are beautifully-written books with no content or vision published every year. However, a writer and an artist are two different things, and morality has a complicated relationship with the artist and an untroubled relationship to the writer. Brooks would be a writer in this construction, lacking the chops for artistry:
"The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved."
In fact, Wilde would posit that Brooks is not even a legitimate critic:
"The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things."
Brooks is not translating, he is drawing conclusions on something for which conclusions can not be drawn, only interpretations forwarded. For him to discursively rant, stapling his ideology upon a great man of letters, demonstrates what a pea-brained little sycophant he is, a little nitpicking turd without the breadth of vision of Friedman (who I nonetheless dislike), the humanity of Kristof or Krugman (though Krugman can be a sanctimonious whinger at times) or the wit of Dowd (my hero). While the alternatives are no great shakes, either?we could have seen some George F. Will-esque replacement?I really think the world's most august daily could do a little better than Brooks.
Back to Safire; the man used "Weltanschauung" in his column today. These days, we are running out of competent writers in the newspaper industry. There is no craftsmanship, just a dry retelling of facts or a spoken word-like delivery of opinions. Safire is a godsend here?he, like Dowd, can write?they have lively writing voices, their prose represents a sub-character of themselves, not merely their world view as they would present it on a pundit's show. Dowd is a wry and raunchy cocktail-circuit party girl grown up, Safire is a deeply skeptical observer, peering through the fog of cigarette smoke and the haze of scotch towards the raw and unedited truths of the game as played in Washington.
Both voices are certainly self-caricatures; Safire is an accomplished historian of the English language, with other interests and an awareness of his crotchety bias. Dowd is simply too old and too smart to think her barbs even scratch her targets. They still do it, though, bring a literary twist into their writing, and I willmiss Safire's counterpoint. In retrospect, they should have been scheduled to write on the same day, it would have allowed for more competitiveness. By the way, Weltanschauung means "world view" in German.
As for world views and the relative lack thereof of certain individuals in government, Condi Rice was named Secretary of State by Piehole yesterday, meaning a continuation of her shameless sycophancy and her utter distaste for world politics. A former Kremlinologist, Rice is still bent by the "Us vs. Them" mentality that was the hallmark of the Manichaean ideological divide of 1946-1991.
Dan adds: Oh and she ducked questions under oath and stonewalled the 9/11 Commission.
Safire had argued that Powell would stay on a few months to see if Arafat's death could help clear the peace process, but it looks as if he wanted out and wanted out NOW. Obviously, peace is on the backburner now, and it's up with war:
Be afraid of the war mammie, be very afraid.
Posted by Mordred at November 17, 2004 09:10 AM