So, someone asked me what I thought of the weird demise of The New Republic. Which I have to say wasn't much different from someone asking me what I thought of Miley Cyrus doing whatever that desperate attention seeker has done to get attention - does anyone else feel like the pop industry and the internet has put us all into an early John Waters movie we saw after someone slipped us some acid? I'll tell you, but I'll go farther than that.
I don't much care about The New Republic having the plug pulled -if you'll indulge an inverted metaphor made ironically - by some doofus internet billionaire. a power broker made so by the merit of having known Mark Zuckerberg in college. I hadn't looked at much of it in decades, since it was taken over by another doofus who married into money, Marty Peretz. While there are those on the scribbling left who seem to be having some regrets over its death, I don't much care about them or their scribbler buddies or their careers in the scribbling trade. My youthful faith in the power of a crusading liberal media is deader than TNR has been for the past several decades. I pretty much despised it before the editorship of the late war criminal Michael Kelly and such guys (and they were all guys) as Andrew Sullivan were brought in to make it relevant to a new generation of soon to be middle age fogies.
The best and the brightest of the writing class got what they wanted in my youth when they fought against any restrictions on such violent, misogynistic crap as The Last Exit To Brooklyn, the stupid stand up of Lenny Bruce and the right of speech in the form of strippers to expose their genitals without g-strings (a great cause celebre of the "liberals" which, I saw the other day, is still being crusaded for) and look at the state of our politics. I MEAN JUST LOOK AT THE STATE OF OUR POLITICS AND OUR MORAL LIVES! I would just like for some of them to admit the role the economic self-interest of their profession has played in that disaster.
Every single bit of progress made on economic justice, equality, etc. has been thrown under the bus as a direct result of "liberals" who made money out of the media getting exactly what they really wanted. I see them all as having a bit of David Horowitz in their souls. At least potentially. At this point there are few of the organs of that kind of lit'ry "liberalism" that could fall and I'd be bothered to notice it.
The only thing I looked at with any regularity in the most recent spewage of The New Republic are the oddly corseted ravings of Jerry Coyne. I'd love to know how hard the editor had to work to reign in his typical raving lunatic blog style. I suppose someone at The New Republic wanted to get on the neo-atheist bandwagon in the '00s another thing I'm hoping to see break down as this decade progresses.
I am a lot less impressed with journalism than I used to be. It has always oversold its importance. Online, the tiny little part of it which I had once hoped would bloom with thousands of I. F. Stones seems to be turning out more Hedda Hoppers and Walter Winchells, Amanda Marcottes and Jerry Coynes. Or, perhaps, the weird ability to see into the unedited tappings of people on the left merely gives us a mirror into the thinking behind the failure of liberalism* and that is what informs my skepticism of the value of "liberalism" as edited by the former organs of official liberalism, such as The New Republic used to be in the lost past. It is as it always was, first and foremost, the libertarianism of those who made money from the media who didn't really care all that much about much of anything else.
There will be no liberal resurrection that is led by them, it will come from The People and I suspect it will have the disdain of the scribbling class. Including the online one, the one that will trend on twitter and get posted on Talking Points Memo or Alternet, to cover that spectrum.
* Update: There are those who attribute his self-exposure as a racist crank online for the fall of Marty Peretz.
No comments:
Post a Comment