Diary of a Mad Editor

Archive for the ‘Rants’ Category

The Writing on the Wall Pt. 2

You remember that movie, Office Space? Remember that character, Milton and how the boss kept moving him around until he was working in a basement storage room? Well, the great downsizing of American print journalism continues. According to Editor & Publisher, in addition to a buyout of 151 of its reporting and non-reporting support staff, Newark’s Star-Ledger has moved two of its journalists into the mailroom. Can you fucking believe that? The mailroom?!

Here’s my thoughts on this bullshit: Don’t blame New media for killing Old media. This is a death by suicide. Like the auto industry and every other failing industry in the United States, print media is suffering from a supreme lack of imagination, innovation and entrepeneurial spirit. All these buyouts will do nothing to save this industry in the long term — it just drags out the death of the industry. Either make a serious, long term investment in fixing this broken industry — I mean reinvent the fucker or shut it down outright and spare us all the death rattle.

The Politics of Fear, Loathing and Division

One of the more absurd moments of this campaign season, for me, was during the second Presidential debate, when John McCain attempted to recast himself as a modern-day Teddy Roosevelt. What made it so absurd is that the Republican Party has, over the last 40 years, gradually lost its mind, its heart and its soul. I’m sure if T.R. were alive today to see what has become of his Grand Old Party, he’d be furious and sick at the sight of it. Ever since Nixon gave voice to the “Silent Majority” and lobbed the first bombs in what has come to be known as the “Culture Wars,” we’ve seen this country divided more dangerously and saliently than at any time since the Civil War. Even during the Reagan Era, the country wasn’t as divided as it is today.

Then along comes a smart, relatively young, capable, multi-racial candidate in the guise of Barack Obama who has made a career out of the idea of political and cultural reconciliation and has, in fact, staked his whole candidacy on the notion that the American people are ready for that to happen.

And he was doing swimmingly until John McCain decided to whip out the old Republican book of down and dirty campaign strategy when it became clear he couldn’t win this election on the merits of his own policy positions and ideas. Over the past several weeks, John McCain, his VP selection Sarah Palin, his surrogates and an army of ultra-conservative right wing pundits have unleashed an almost unprecedented litany of attacks on Obama characterized by words, images and tactics that seek to demonize and de-Americanize him.

It’s sad, really. Sad for this country and by extention, for the world. Even though the Republican playbook has a track record of winning elections for conservative candidates, it has an abysmal record for accomplishing anything good for the country. The last eight years are the surest proof of this. The politics of fear, loathing and division hasn’t solved one major problem or made a single person’s life better. It has produced a more cynical, apathetic electorate and a generation of politicians who talk to the citizens they serve as if they were a bunch of children instead of speaking to them like adults. This isn’t the democracy we were promised in our youth. This isn’t the democracy true patriots have fought and bled and died for throughout our short, but tortured history. It is, instead, a betrayal of that promise of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” An act of the most scurrilous form of treason.

He Was Just a Bellhop on the Elevator to Hell

I received an email recently from a guy who I hadn’t heard from in awhile, asking me why I didn’t mention David Foster Wallace’s recent suicide on my blog. “I know you weren’t exactly a fan,” he wrote, “I thought you’d have something to say about it.” Well . . . no, I hadn’t planned on it precisely because I’m not a fan of DFW’s writing. But since you mentioned it, guy, I’ll put my two cents in.

Probably, the major reason I’ve never been a fan of Wallace’s work has less to do with him than with postmodernism in general. Postmodernism is one of those things that makes for great chatter in the confines of a graduate school classroom, but has little appeal to me outside in the real world. I’ve always thought of David Foster Wallace as a terribly clever stylist but an ultimately empty storyteller too easily lost in the minutia of “words, words, words ….” And really, as far as DFW was concerned you were either in my camp or otherwise a fanboy. He wasn’t a writer who inspired indifference — which is, I suppose, the closest thing to a compliment I can express. I kind of feel the same way about DFW’s writing that I feel about coffee. Everyone I know drinks coffee, but I’ve never acquired a taste for it. I mean, I’ve tried to like coffee — I’ve tried it about four times since I was four years-old (which rounds out to about once a decade) and I’ve never enjoyed it. By the same token, I’ve tried to read and enjoy Wallace’s writing over the years and couldn’t manage it. I’ve often thought that his so-called masterpiece, Infinite Jest was actually a joke played on the reader. I only actually know one person who’s read the thing cover-to-cover and claims to have enjoyed it and even he said that he didn’t get into it until about “page 700.” I’d say that after 700 pages of a 1000-plus page opus, you’re already pretty well into it, so if it takes you that long to feel as if you’re into it . . . well, I rest my case.

As for David Foster Wallace, I don’t think I could write a glowing obituary of the man. I didn’t know him. I didn’t enjoy reading his work. And it’s not like this guy came to some heroic or otherwise brave end. The fucker hanged himself! Don’t get me wrong, I can embrace the notion that suicide is sometimes a noble thing — like when a unmarried soldier throws himself on a grenade to spare the life of a buddy who’s married with six kids so that guy can go home safe to his family. Or, when a terminally ill woman is face with a choice between dying after much suffering or dying in peace wit some dignity. David Foster Wallace’s death wasn’t such an occasion. I can’t feel sorry for him. I feel sorry for his poor wife who discovered his body. I feel sorry for his parents. I feel sorry for those fans who will miss his presence in the literary world. But sorrow for him? Since David Foster Wallace was a self-proclaimed truth-seeker, here’s a little truth: His life and death don’t amount to spit in the grand scheme of the universe. And I think that’s ultimately what drove him to suicide. In his 2005, commencement address at Kenyon College, he said, “Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. ” I think he was talking about himself. Just my humble opinion. I think the truth of his own existence ate away at him. I think it made him unhappy. I think he couldn’t carry his own luggage spiritually, emotionally or intellectually and it did him in. But it’s politically incorrect these days to call a suicide a coward. We’re supposed to blame society or something. Treat the suicide with deference rather than with shame. Pity that I’m not a politically correct individual.

What I know is this: though a star in his short life, David Foster Wallace will be forgotten. His books, will sell well for a time because of his death, but will eventually fall out of fashion. His writing and his death will just be more chatter for the graduate writing programs. He has become a cliche and not a proper example for the next generation of writers to follow.