A conservative friend of mine once praised me as a fine writer. Then added, “I mean, your ideas are all fucked up, but that’s another story.” I told that to another conservative friend the other day, and he nodded, and said, “That’s about right.”
Well I’d rather be a good writer with some ideas that rub you backwards than a bad one who you agree with all the time. (Cuz those motherfuckers grow on trees.)
Ran across a couple of real good paragraphs in my online reading yesterday—(that sounded more fun when we called it “surfing the Internet” than it does now when we call it, “Tuesday”)—and thought I’d share, cuz they’re pretty darn yummy, whether you agree with them or not.
The first one was also flagged by my speechwriter pal Joel Hood; all my daily professional correspondents are writers, can you imagine? It’s by the writer’s writer George Saunders, who wrote a tight New York Times column about the Trump administration’s idiotic firing of the librarian of Congress for totally unnamed “concerning things” that she allegedly did in the name of “DEI.” What is that, Saunders asked?
What it seems to mean, to [the Trump administration], is: The accused is a person who is aware that certain groups have had a different experience of American life and who feels that it is part of our intellectual responsibility (and joy) to engage with that history, so as to improve our democracy (that whole “more perfect union” thing). This the administration sees not as healthy intellectual curiosity but as dangerous indoctrination. Indoctrination into what? Truth, history, a realistic engagement with the past, I guess.
And really, any American who feels that way about concepts like “diversity, equity and inclusion” might as well move out. If you’re not interested in groping for truth and fairness and social progress, what are you here for, the July 4th fireworks? Those were invented in China.
But more exquisitely brutal was the first paragraph of Dwight Garner’s book review of Ron Chernow’s new Mark Twain biography, also in The New York Times:
Ron Chernow’s new biography of Mark Twain is enormous, bland and remote—it squats over Twain’s career like a McMansion. Chernow, who has previously written lives of financial titans, war heroes and founding fathers, misses the man William Faulkner called “the father of American literature” almost entirely. He demonstrates little feeling for the deeper and least domesticated regions of Twain’s art, or for the literary context of his era. His book is an endurance test, one that skimps on the things that formed Twain and made him the most lucid, profound, unpredictable and irascibly witty American of his time. Hardy will be the souls who tour this air-conditioned edifice all the way through and glimpse the exit sign.
Now, is Garner actually right to pan this new Twain tome? Hell if I know. I did try to get through Chernow’s biography of John Rockefeller, but after 200 pages, could ascertain nothing of what drove or lured Rockefeller to his business feats, and concluded that life was too short. (Mine, not his.)
But it would take a hell of a lot of fine paragraphs in Chernow’s book’s favor to get me to pick up a brickful of papers that managed to make one of the most interesting people in the history of America, dull to even one smart guy.
