Buckeyes! What do I know from Dartmouth? Thinking we’ll win anyway. Boss says so. He cuts the grass. It’ll be good.
Remember I talked about old friends who really aren’t?
He’s an executive editor of the Providence Journal in Rhode Island. I have no doubt that he’s a good man as he conceives it. He was a good friend to me when I needed one, way back in my teens. I was at his wedding. A fine Episcopalian event on the Main Line. He’s one of the elect.
Smart. Privileged. Graduate of Taft School, Dartmouth, and the Columbia School of Journalism. Best friend of his fellow Taft grad Arthur Waldron, who was the valedictorian of his class at Harvard and is today one of the leading experts on China in the United States.
How dare I diss him? Because. Because he’s an idiot.
He accomplished the exact opposite of Winston Churchill’s definition of intelligence. If you’re not liberal when you’re young, you have no heart. If you’re not conservative when you’re old, you have no brain. When I knew him in college, he was a conservative. Now he’s a Rhode Island liberal, once challenged, ready to brand me a coward, a fool, and a reactionary.
Sadly, not even the privileged are immune from personal pain. Robert has a daughter in pain. Which makes him believe that the government should pay for all our health care. We clashed over ObamaCare. His highly intelligent argument was, why shouldn’t we try it? Really? Because it will bankrupt us and destroy the lives of millions of real people?
Oh wait. Robert knows nothing whatever about real people. He’s never met any. In the U.S., he’s lived his life in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Rhode Island. Ring any bells? He’s also affiliated with the Aga Khan. Supposed to make us feel respectful.
I feel bad for him. I feel sorry for him. I won’t go into the personal matters that cause him so much pain. I understand pain. BUT…
He’s a journalist. An influential one. And he’s done absolutely nothing to cover the Obama administration in any way that’s different from what the New York Times also doesn’t do.
Hence my contempt. If you have all the advantages, you have an overwhelming duty to be better than the usual suspects. What has he done? Nothing. Absolutely, completely, utterly, nothing.
He’s become a septuagenarian Ivy clubbie. Could he write if he wanted to? Yeah. You know. Not great. But correct, workmanlike if not lyrical, and convincing if he’d ever had a mind to.
What I said about the trajectories of life. He’s a success in career terms. He’s the biggest failure I know.
Look him up. I miss him. And I also don’t much care anymore.
PS. Here’s the front page of today’s Providence Journal. Unless you’d prefer their website.
I never fully understood your anger toward him (as an outsider to your relationship) until I read this post. Beyond any personal falling out or difference of opinion, it’s clear to me now that Robert and those in positions like his have a responsibility to not simply dial it in and coast through life. He wouldn’t see it that way, I’m sure, but those of us that get elevated to important positions and come from privileged backgrounds (eg. almost all of my students) truly do owe it to the country to do the right thing. And now that not even the MSM can ignore Obama’s failures, it’s past time to step up and, you know, *report*.
And he’s not. And that’s infuriating, even for me who has only heard about it.
The Present Testament of TBB predicts it all. Those Ultra Harriers who found their ways to the top jobs are simply cashing it in and getting their consolation.
They are all a disgrace to their profession and their country.
I just finished rereading Witness. It’s astonishing how relevant it is to our time. I believe humanity gets better, however slowly and stumbling, but it’s very easy to get to the end of Witness and think that no one has learned a single goddamn thing in the sixty years since it was published.
That said, I can’t help wondering whether something big and beneficial is being set up, by some vast, slow intelligence. Something we may not even live to see, but might at least live to get a hint of. Call me a fool if you like.
Note to Guy: Nordlinger essay linked at other site’s new post has good Chesterton material. And other fine stuff…
Checked out the NR links. Thanks for the tip. I used to visit the site all the time but haven’t been there for a while–don’t know why.
Also checked out the Providence Journal front page. Not a word about the Benghazi hearings. And the website–you can’t find anything recent about Benghazi even if you take the trouble to use their search function. I guess those wire service articles must be expensive.
Shame on you, you appear to have a brain in your head but you reduce yourself to just another ego driven blog master venting misinformation in hopes of drawing attention to yourself. You were never this man’s friend, you know nothing of his life, nothing at all.
As it happens I do know this man. I’ve known him for 40 years. I attended his wedding. I met his father. I know something of his personal travails.
Here’s what I know which causes me to set all that aside. He got a professional degree in journalism, and he has betrayed the principles of that profession utterly. He is an influential member of the cheerleader press which shamelessly promoted and materially helped elect the most calamitously unqualified and incompetent president in the nation’s history. It doesn’t matter in this context if he’s kind to his neighbors, loves his children and is faithful to his wife. He has failed at what he accepted as his life’s principal public responsibility.
If he were an attorney he would deserve disbarment. If he were a doctor he would deserve being stripped of his medical license. If he were a priest he would deserve excommunication. Journalists don’t bear such risks. Why they should be even more beholden to the standards they trumpet. Do I know this man? Yes. Well enough to be profoundly hurt and disappointed by his default of his responsibilities.
All he receives by way of censure is the anger and condemnation of a solitary blogger. Apart from this, I am sure he is receiving awards and lavish praise from other members of his profession and you.
I call that getting off scot free. You can call it whatever you want. I’m too old to pretend that things which matter deeply don’t matter because it’s more important to be nice.
You are paper thin surfaces and self promotion, you present yourself in some shared human experiences but you were never this man’s friend. I know exactly who you are.
Fine. And you are anonymous. Which in this medium amounts to a sniper slot.
You’re entitled to your own perspective. You are obviously his champion. Again, fine.
If I were as paper thin as you claim, neither of your comments would have been published here. I have to approve every comment at this site.
I think it ends here. I’m not the one that brought it up again. I had my say. Now you’ve had yours.
btw, a contradiction I feel compelled to share with you. If I’m not qualified to comment on RW’s life, then it’s illogical for you to assume that you “know exactly” who I am. You don’t. If you’ve never met me, you know what you’ve been told. If you have met me, I’m sure it was only for a brief time, or you wouldn’t think I’m paper thin with an obsession for self promotion. But in my case it’s actually possible to learn something about who I am. I’m not a journalist. I’m a writer. Which I have been doing for 40 years now. Here’s a place you could start:
Instapunk Archives, from 2003 to 2013.
If that.s not enough for you, search for any term that means something to you. Instapunk will have something on it. Probably many somethings on it.
Don’t presume to tell me you know exactly who I am until you’ve read a million words or so. Much of it is meant to entertain, but much is also meant to spell out a spiritual and political philosophy that speaks to our times and our duties as people. I don’t subscribe, for example, to the nostrum that all our principles can be junked in favor of family needs as convenient. Some principles are more sacred than sons and daughters and wives and friends. You don’t have to agree. But you don’t get to tell me I’ve not thinking about these things longer, more perseverantly, and more thoroughly than most.
I appreciate your loyalty to the man. I suspect you’re a personal protege or family member. I’m sorry if I’ve brought you grief. But you’ll find there’s nothing thin in my writings about what a man’s public responsibilities are.
If the Archives aren’t enough for you, there’s more. A lot more. But my best guess is you’re all Roman Candle fire and no thought to speak of. Dudgeon without a core beyond personal relationship. Good luck with that. In some part of my heart — and yes, I have one — I still love Robert. He just got small as life got bigger on him. It happens. My disappointment? At heart, he’s still living in the 1930s. Or the Cheever 1940s and 1950s. Gatsby’s light at the end of the dock, the smell of woodsmoke in a Connecticut suburb, it all comes spilling out when people who knew him before you did plug back in. Life is still New Yorker cartoons and wryly superior observations about the 90 percent of the country he doesn’t bother with. the Steig graphic of the U.S. as seen from New York. You know it?
He wrote a book about wind farms off the coast of Nantucket. Is that the realm where you live too?
So. Okay. I don’t know him. You do, apparently. Congratulations. Ever get him talking about Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Benchley, Gershwin songs on the piano? Ask him who Harold Ross was. He’ll know and he’ll be interesting. But it’s all a fantasy, one he prefers to the sordid business of dealing with what needs dealing with.
Don’t worry. Hardly anyone will ever read this. It, like your complaint, is a late comment in an old old post. I’m having a conversation. That’s all. I owe you that.
You mistake my intentions. I’m the rarest of bloggers. I court no favor. I’m not writing to get op-ed assignments (hell, I didn’t even bill RW for the first PJ pieces I wrote until he insisted, and the latter ones I didn’t bill him for.) Money hasn’t been my objective. I’m not trying to get gigs on cable TV news outlets, which is wide open to people who write like I do from the right hand side. I can spell, I can punctuate, I can write a coherent paragraph. Ever seen Breitbart? Hotair? I should be famous. I’m a conservative who can actually write.
I’ve made good money as a management consultant working for Fortune 100 companies, including GM, Whirlpool, Mead Data Central (Lexis/Nexis)’ and others. Executive speechwriter, developer of training materials for JIT manufacturing and other “Continuous Improvement” disciplines. I’ve worked in Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Hong Kong. And then I couldn’t do it anymore. I was done with pretending that half educated corporate bureaucrats could ever learn how to think.
Since then, I’ve made virtually no money from writing. I’ve produced one huge work of fiction, one multimedia experiment containing 3000 hand drawn graphics and 350,000 words of text, two websites still available thru the Wayback Machine, and the ten year effort called Instapunk.com. That’s the one whose Archives I have shown you above.
Any of this confirm your claim you know “exactly who” I am?
It’s okay that you don’t care. What you’ve probably heard is that I was always a prodigal. I was. RW bailed me out of a fix of my own making at least once. I am eternally grateful for that.
But here’s something he probably won’t ever tell you. He had every reason to think that I needed someone to take me in hand, but he chose not to intercede until I had to ask him for help. This is not a personal grudge I’m hunting down; it’s the signature of what late in life I find wanting in him.
[Note that in telling you this I’m also making it available to all the people I’m supposedly promoting myself to.]
I had just turned 17 when I entered Harvard. How just? I was 19 when when I graduated, thanks to sophomore standing I got upon admission. I was 18 when I became president of the Phoenix SK Club, now famous as the breeding ground of Facebook. Arbus, as we knew him, was older, maybe 24 when he made his drop-in visits to the PSK. He was particular friends with PG, who wrote the Hasty Pudding Show the year before I joined and who was the best piano player any fin de siècle club ever had. Which is what we were. We had lobster luncheons in our brick-walled garden on Fridays, and we had an endlessly open bar that enabled us to enjoy everything from beer to Moët Chandon Champagne by signing chits. Meaning little pieces of paper saying we would pay eventually.
At the time, RW was a student at the Columbia School of Journalism. I was out of control, but to him I was just collateral damage, the byproduct of Harvard Club Society. And I was amusing. Yes. I was. Amusing. Another friend who did nothing at the time and subsequently became an Episcopal priest wrote me some years later and blamed me for my behavior as a teen. “We could all see your clear brilliance but…then you were maudlin and embarrassing” so we did nothing and blamed you instead. I think he’s a bishop now. He has a book of his own.
I am NOT saying I was RW’s responsibility. What I’m saying is that that there’s a detachment people of class have. You know, Taft School and New England roots and all. I’m not even saying he wasn’t tempted to intervene. Why did he introduce me to his dad? He was definitely trying in his own way. Probably because he didn’t realize I had a dad of my own who would have leaped to Cambridge in a single jump if he’d only known. Yeah, RW talked to my dad when I got arrested en route to an interview at Cornell Business School. He appeared with me in court, which my dad couldn’t find time to do. All us Protestant aristocrats are the same, aren’t we? (I don’t know this man…?)
Live and let die. It was politesse. And snobbery. And a certain fatalism. Which is the point.
Fond of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. “What’s the difference between ordinary people and the rich?” “The rich have more money.” What’s the other stamp? “They retreat into their vast carelessness…” Like everyone I ever knew at Harvard did.
So let the snicker of time do its laughing routine.
RW might have saved me and might have saved me not. But he was in a unique position to seize me by the throat and say “stop!” I looked at him differently from the others. I trusted him. He was older. If he’d taken me aside and been a Dutch Uncle, I might have ignored him. But you know what? He didn’t do that. Now I get, well, stuff, about how unfair I’m being to him. He’s, you know, a great character.
And it’s all based on who I was 40 years ago. Gasp. Truth is, I grew in that interim and he didn’t. What I hold against him is what he did as a grownup professional. Namely, nothing but belong to the same old club.
interesting take on my life.
right in a few spots, wrong in others
Noted.
Interesting take on my rather complicated life.