The Fall of The New Yorker
Chasing It, Part 1
By Micah E. Weiss
Note: I was going to submit this essay to The New Yorker, mostly for the fun of it, and to post the rejection email. However, it turns out they no longer accept unsolicited essays, which, brave reader, if you make it through this, you may see as a substantiating little denouement to my central thesis.
Disclaimer: This is one of my longest essays to date. Those of you who read the New Yorker may recall the meandering essay style popular there, but any similarities between my essay and that style were unintentional, though to me a happy accident I realized in editing. I do appreciate you readers, however few of you there are, so if this is trying on anyone’s patience and time, I apologize and will return to form next month.
When I gave up my The New Yorker subscription, it felt an awful lot like turning my back on my family. Being a teacher with three kids on a teacher’s salary, I told myself, my wife, and others, that giving it up was to save money–a statement in the category “marginal truth.” I am likely the first in three generations to overtly cancel my subscription, or more truthfully, deliberately and consciously let it lapse. I grew up in a culture in the 1980s where copies of The New Yorker shared space with the intellectual books of the day on many coffee tables across America. Titles like The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstien, A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman, Cosmos by Carl Sagan, or any title with the Phaidon imprint marked our living room, house, home, and family as members of a certain class of American bourgeois intellectual. The New Yorkers strewn about near those volumes were further were proof of the connection. I grew up next to New York City, but be it LA, Chicago, or DC, I learned that having issues of The New Yorker in a home was a symbol, an iconography of a cultural class. For my “class,” when entering a home, be it a house in the country, the suburbs, or an apartment in Manhattan, issues of The New Yorker signified a commonality every bit as much as a framed picture of the Pope next to a crucifix would have signaled devout Catholicism.
I learned, like many children in a New Yorker home, to read The New Yorker backwards. My youngest child still does it. The first 20 pages of local Goings On About Town—a summary of relevant cultural events in NYC that week— are mostly irrelevant to a child, no matter how close to the events and venues he or she might live. However, the real draw of the back of the magazine was that in bypassing the many pages of fashionable art galllery shows, off-broadway opennings, and new restaurants, etc., the back page gave easy access to the cartoons, probably only a small percentage of which I likely understood. Ed Koren’s funny-nosed folk are deeply embedded in my memory, as is the feeling of confusion after reading another Blast from the Chast, as my childhood little resembled the world of anxious bemusement her characters seemed to inhabit. There was a great moment in my adolescence when Bruce Eric Kaplan joined the crew and gave voice to precocious children that I flattered myself I resembled. One BEK cartoon in particular sticks in my memory: two little girls walk along a city sidewalk with that leaning gait so many of his figures have, their hollow eyes staring over their school books that they clutch to their chests as so many school girls do, one saying, “Have you read the new Sendak?” I remember this cartoon with the vividity and surety of my morning breakfast, though I can’t find it in the 2006 edition DVD-ROM archive The Complete New Yorker I received for my 30th birthday, likely from my aristocratic New York Jewish grandmother, who I like to imagine was proud to buy it for me. Did I imagine that BEK cartoon? Am I just bad at using the arcane search feature on the 20 year old software?
By the time Bruce Eric Kaplan was publishing his droll observations of our “class”–we of the cosmopolitan New Yorkers–I was already skimming the Shouts and Murmurs (then at the back of the magazine), heading thence to the film reviews, and starting to imbibe The Talk of the Town political summaries. John Updike, a kind of holdover for the modernists, was still publishing short fiction, and I like many aspired to print there, being a near worshiper of J. D. Salinger and his mythos. As a teen I read articles on the follies of politics, the forefront of the arts, feuding academics, and other thought provoking musings from a literati I was determined to join. The New Yorker was where I knew New Yorkers went to think, to be challenged, to read poetry and fiction, as well as a more refined, pre-digested, thoughtful version of the news from different perspectives than the increasingly blitzkrieg-like Newsprint and TV iterations. It was, for sure, for liberals. But liberals were, well, liberal then, so hearing from conservatives wasn’t out of the question in those days, and self-criticism from the left itself could be as thoughtful as it was sometimes brutal.
Today, in our house in rural New Hampshire, we inherit the old The New Yorkers of my in-laws who live nearby. It’s Trump country up here (See that? “Up.” Even my go-to geographic prepositions make NYC the center of gravity), far outside of the sphere of New York City, one might think. My mother-in-law is a retired English teacher, however, a profession that can act as a tether to the New Yorker culture I left behind with my lapsed subscription several years ago. Or tried to leave behind: they are the ties that bind. I am an English teacher, too. There is a tight little bit of binding. My English teacher in the 10th grade had papered an entire wall of his classroom with The New Yorker covers and gave writing assignments based on pithy cartoons of dating adults like “Tell the story of this couple’s evening.”
My mother-in-law hails from rural Vermont, and my wife from rural Maine, though there are roots of erudition and education in both sides of the family into which I married. Though the financial situations of my wife’s families were modest, there was old New England Yankee education on one branch, and on another, rumors of old positions, lost wealth, opera boxes, and midtown hotel ownership. We inherited a Currier and Ives lithograph of old New York from my father-in-law’s father; he knew my love and longing for The City, a moniker that never could mean Boston under his roof despite that little town's close proximity. The tendrils of the New Yorker culture creep out into America and transcend geography; they twist and wind and pass through barriers of poverty and regionalism, grasping at the ambitions and interests of people selected almost at random from the population. These are people who believe that culture starts with books rather than television or the internet, and they think reading is a daily practice rather than a hassle or a strictly beach-towel activity. A fellow aspiring writer friend from my freshman year of college, whose name I’ve forgotten, whose origins were blue-collar and rural and of northern New England, is a fine example. On the wall of his dorm room, bless his courageous heart, was a poster of an old monochrome Barnes and Noble illustration of Kurt Vonnegut nearly choked with pinned-on rejection letters. This friend, for whom the only details I can recall were that he smoked constantly, smelled like wet-stale cigarette butts, and wore a jean jacket and a pony-tail–both that looked strangely greasy all the time–had brought a file-cabinet to college and kept copies of all his stories in alphabetical order with a full complement of stamps and manila envelopes for sending out more submissions. And there, pinned just under the right side of Vonnegut's chin was a rejection letter (though more of a rejection card) from The New Yorker. It was moving.
So, in our house, we inherit the cast-off issues, still, from my in-laws. My children read them, and my eleven year old cuts out the funny cartoons she understands, and the refrigerator is covered in them. We use the term “A blast from the Chast” as part of our family argot, the kids remember the time I went to Woodstock Vermont with a group of my students to meet Koren at a book signing, and I still reach for cast-off old copies when astride the paternal throne–for eventually, before they clutter our trash can, all copies of The New Yorker end up on the shelf in the bathroom.
Thus it was that I came across Emily Witt’s Personal History, The Last Rave from last month’s issue. What is there to say about this piece that drove me to my computer? It is mediocre prose, and I expect there is nothing wrong with that. Not every article in every issue of the New Yorker can be a banger, right? Though one might think an editor of the leading publication of the leading intellectual culture for the entirety of the most powerful country in the world would demand an author dig a little deeper into Moria for a metaphor than “the waves of Acid broke over me.” “Really?” a competent editor’s note might simply read. What a profound observation: LSD takes the form of waves. You don’t say? I’m sure my 17-year-old self would agree, though he was a judgmental little bitch and might wonder as much as I do how such banality could slip by an editor responsible for the publication that once printed everyone from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Pauline Kael. As I read, however, the prose itself acted as a defense, as I’m sure Witt might argue: banality was the point (and excuse). The simple, almost but not quite, punchy style was journalistic, and lent its banalities the air of truth. She and “Andrew,” a pseudonym for an ex lover, take ketamine, cocaine, drink, have sex (a mechanical activity devoid of eroticism), hit rave after club, and name-drop clubs and raves and DJs of such from the New York scene, the future forgettables that only the Brooklyn millennials–and Witt–will remember in their old-folks homes surrounded by the maybe-phantoms of the families they never got around to having. And she writes it all with the matter of fact tone that bespeaks the notion that this piece is NOT a confessional! This is simply who we are, she seems to say; what we do, she might protest, can you not see? We feel as little shame as we do joy in our Bushwick and Bed-Stuy haunts, feeding the drug war from the left, feeling the pangs of aging (she feels like a chaperone at some clubs–so she avoids them), and essentially living the life of the flapper in 21st century terms without all that World War and Spanish Flu pathos and regret. In the piece, Witt is writing of the dawn of our own epoch’s pandemic, the Rave in question taking place the week before the shutdowns began. Like many for whom History is nothing but a blurry racist and misogynistic blob, she doesn’t really understand that the mortality rate for a truly apocalyptic pandemic, like the Spanish Flu, was well over 200 times more deadly than COVID and killed the young and fit along with the old and obese. Witt presents events in nearly, but not quite, dramatic tones, not knowing that we got off quite easy in 2020. She goes on to imbue her hackneyed observations with as much gravitas as she will let herself–keeping to the windy side of existential meaning on the road to no revelation at all. As I read, I sensed the coming of a “racial reckoning” from this white-as-the-driven-snow bourgeois who so impresses us with her non-confessional hedonism, and I braced for the clichés. It is as it ever was going to be, sadly predictable–the riots and protests are the backdrop, the pandemic a MacGuffin, for the sundering of her relationship with “Andrew,” a man-child with a trust-fund, a drug problem, and a serious case of affluenza that leads him to real mental illness, and their relationship to ruin. The tale is sordid rather than tragic; the characters pathetic rather than sympathetic; the writing devoid of all the emotive qualities necessary to compel a reader to keep reading. Were I not trashing it in this essay, I would have put it down after a single page; only my sense of duty compelled me to complete the interminable, meandering, sterile promontory of a fable of aging hipsters.
My great-grandmother had Spanish Flu, likely while living near the “events” of Witt's essay, in a Lower-East-Side tenement. Grandma Josie, as I’ve always called her, held me in her tree-branch-beautiful gnarled arthritic hands when I was an infant. Her life was filled with hope, meaning, and relevance, unlike Witt’s bleak existence described in the essay. Josie Weiss (née Beck) lived through immigration through Ellis Island at 14 from eastern European poverty, labored in sweatshops for over a decade, participated in countless, often fruitless strikes, witnessed The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, fought for labor rights and women’s suffrage, and then survived a real plague, all before she bore my grandfather.
Witt appears able to bear a hangover well with an elegant slothfulness.
She is, of course, a miracle of the modern age; a new class of New Yorker. She lives, like many do, in the Global Urban Monoculture of affluence and nihilism. I don’t mean to be personal, IRL (as the kids say); she may well be a very kind and charitable, loving and giving person, for all I know. As a literary character, however, the one she clearly created for herself and us in this Personal History, she is ripe for scorn and pity in equal parts–though it is her age and the publication that chose to publish this tale that truly concern me.
Witt isn’t a millennial, or almost isn’t–as of the writing of these words she is 43. She straddles the Gen X world too well. She likely remembers a time when Kurt Cobain was alive, watched Sex and City as a contemporary rather than as an aspirant, and it's a wonder to me that she “raved” at all in her upper 30s. Good on her, I suppose. I have not the endurance for such activities and haven’t in many years, though I am not that much older than she. Witt’s career is an exemplar of sorts of a type of woman from a culture at war with its own prosperity. A graduate of Brown–a phrase fast turning from brag to liability–she danced, briefly, with greatness as a Fulbright recipient. After that work, however, she appears to have settled on dating and sexuality as her career topic, taking and speaking from “women’s” perspectives, claiming to speak for women as a demographic, though in a way that would mean nothing to most women in most other times and places. The one quote from her wikipedia page, edited by a publicist who I think needs to be replaced reads, “Like most people I had started internet dating out of loneliness. I soon discovered, as most do, that it can only speed up the rate and increase the number of encounters with other single people, where each encounter is still a chance encounter.” Again, I wonder, is the banality by design? Or is it escaping our notice that she is saying almost nothing in that sentence as it slides by in Ivy League syntax? I am unsure. Somehow, this is a rewarded style of observation put in the blandest prose, and the go-to quote for her life’s work.
Witt will win an award someday, and fade into obscurity, and there will be very little to mark her passing but a New Yorker byline during the time wherein which that great periodical hit its precipitous decline, mimicking Witt’s fall-of-Rome behavior; chasing it to the next party, the next rave, the next scene. Chasing it. The New Yorker has been chasing it for over ten years, or more.
As the old guard continues to die and get replaced, The New Yorker will continue to “diversify” itself while its readership will remain as suspiciously monochromatic as an old Barnes and Noble author illustration. The cover art alone is almost inspiring in its lack of white people, except for the continued adventures of the lounging transwoman in the striped shirt. There are more quite beautiful depictions of black people on the covers by artists such as Grace Lynne Haynes and Kadir Nelson than there are likely black readers of the magazine. This is the making-up-for-lost-racism period in American history, and denotes a bit of obvious chasing it desperation on the part of the editors, like when the nerd in high school figures out what brand of clothing is cool, and decks himself out in its logos head to toe. Though given the obvious genius of Nelson in particular, we are richer for it, though the irony is stark, and we all still know you’re a nerd! The problem, as with so many old institutions from Ivy League colleges to the Boy Scouts, is that chasing relevance in a time of decadence will yield sad results. And the view from the present, if one is able to get some elevation, is as ugly as the judgments of posterity are likely to become once the age turns, and decadence transforms, as it must, either to decline or resurgence. If decline, it will be for non-New Yorker anthropologists to see what The New Yorker became as it stopped leading and started chasing, and the age in which we live will assume an instructive shape in the eyes of the next great civilization looking to avoid Rome’s fate. If resurgence is our fate, then the title of New Yorker may yet gain its prominence with hard-won lessons from our time, and take the lead at the head of a new cultural renaissance as it did at the magazine's inception at the height of Modernism.
My first inkling of The New Yorker’s embrace of what is received, becoming the followers of taste, rather than the makers of it, was an article, almost a hit-piece, by Kathryn Schulz on Henry David Thoreau, and in particular his writing of Walden. The essay is called “The Moral Judgements of Henry David Thoreau.” To crib judiciously from Mark Twain, it should be a requirement that if one comments on a work, one should have read and understood it first. Apparently, this was a responsibility vacated by Schulz; perhaps she considered it unnecessary? It is clear rereading the essay that at the least Schulz lacks the sophistication to understand Thoreau. She is just another in a series of comfortable bourgeois who learn that in the two years HDT’s spent at Walden Pond, his mother would visit him on occasion and that he had dinner with Emerson a few times a week. Walden is then summerily declared a lie, a story of, from the subtitle to her piece “fabrications, inconsistencies, and myopia.” Schulz then briefly poo-poos On Resistance to Civil Government as simplistic and moves on without more comment. I don’t require anyone to agree with Thoreau; he’s tough at the best of times. Since she is also about my age, I assume she was bludgeoned by some aging hippie boomer’s adulation of Thoreau, and from that, perhaps, thought that she would change the world with her observations. However, the sad truth of this article is that Thoreau will outlive Schulz. His work Walden isn’t about getting back to the land, it is about stripping life down to its bare nothing to see what resides inside one’s soul when ones life is not dominated by the distractions of the industrialized world, an intrusive reality that was already beginning to define American life. I doubt very much that Schulz believes in a soul, but HDT did, and an oversoul capital-G God that we are all a part of. Thoreau is working within a distinctly American tradition, through both Great Awakenings I wonder if she ever learned about. Thoreau, working within an established tradition, takes that American spiritual challenge to another level, reinventing for himself a neo-monasticism that should be difficult for us and our full stomachs and cushy chairs. And she cheats, too. Schulz’s essay begins with an out-of-context reading of HDTs supposed cold-heartedness in his more obscure essay The Shipwreck. She quotes him thusly: “On the whole, it was not so impressive a scene as I might have expected. If I had found one body cast upon the beach in some lonely place, it would have affected me more. I sympathized rather with the winds and waves, as if to toss and mangle these poor human bodies was the order of the day. If this was the law of Nature, why waste any time in awe or pity?” Schulz, not above moral judgements herself, apparently, opines: “Who was this cold-eyed man who saw in loss of life only aesthetic gain, who identified not with the drowned or the bereaved but with the storm?” As with much of the rest of her essay this is either a misreading or an out and out lie. In that paragraph, if one bothers to read the entire thing, Thoreau mused about the impact of mass death versus the individual, prefiguring Stalin’s “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” A tough thought to be sure, but not an aesthetic one, especially as HDT himself was no stranger to grief and premature death. He lost a beloved brother John to tetanus, of all blessed things; Thoreau held him in his arms to the end, unable to comfort John, lock-jaw being a painful, seizing, thrashing death in the 19th century. Perhaps Thoreau’s perspective on the dead and death was more complex than Schulz let on? In the very next and concluding paragraph of The Shipwreck Thoreau writes: “No doubt, we have reason to thank God that [the dead] have not been ‘shipwrecked into life again.’ The mariner who makes the safest port in Heaven, perchance, seems to his friends on earth to be shipwrecked.” And so Schulz has caught Thoreau red-handed at being a Christian, from that sentence a rather open-hearted one who assumes salvation for all the dead.
As for what Schulz leaves out of HDTs biography, the fact that he worked for the Underground Railroad in the leisure time Schulz derides him seeking, makes me wonder what she does with her spare time. I bet she makes bread! When it comes to influence, civil disobedience, often the alternative title to the essay “On Resistence to Civil Government,” is now one of our great American political traditions. Furthermore, HDT’s essay was read by Ghandi and MLKj, both citing it as influential in their thinking and activism. I wonder what great political leader will read Schulz’s “Why I despise the Great Gatsby,” change their thinking, and then change the world. I honestly don’t know if Schulz is being thoughtless or dishonest, though she, too, attended Brown, and I’m not sure what this sad consistency makes of that institution's reputation. Ultimately, it really doesn’t matter; what is truly important, and what really struck me when I read it at the time, was how inexcusably unoriginal Schulz’s ideas were. There is nothing provocative in Schulz’s article at all, despite a pretense to subversion in her tone. In the 90s it was common knowledge, and a common attack, that Thoreau had dinner with Emerson and got cookies from his mom. I first heard these brilliant insights of Thoreau’s supposed hypocrisy or inconsistency from a fellow teen at a bookstore where we worked together in 1995–Ms. Schulz, like Ms. Witt, harnessed her Ivy League education and high IQ, reached out to the heights of observation, and managed only to catch the insights of a weed-smoking undergraduate of the mid-1990s–one wonders what Schulz was doing when at Brown at that time. . . The implications of Thoreau’s challenge to comfortable effete bourgeois, myself included, is to question the necessity of conspicuous consumption and to consider the value of embracing the beating heart of every day of our barely understood lives, to endure pain and discomfort to fight for what is right in the world. And they are challenges, he minces no words, and that will continue to grind at our comforts, regardless of whether we agree with him or not. We live on the surface of life in many ways, and should reflect on his challenges, rather than dismiss them. But to Schulz I would say, even if we reject Thoreau, we should at least try to be original about it, instead of plagiarizing from the contrarian wannabe edgelord at the freshman seminar on nature writing.
Schulz was just the beginning. Hilton Als took on Bruce Springsteen in 2017 when The Boss did a Broadway narrative-into-song-into-narrative one man show to great critical acclaim. In just over 1300 words, Als praises Springsteen On Broadway for the performance and his songwriting ability: but not right away! He spends the first ~600 words, nearly half the article, explaining to us his own long history of complicated feelings towards “Whiteness.” “I dragged my heels when it came to appreciating Springsteen’s gifts.” Als, in case it wasn’t obvious, a black American, then questions Springsteen's authenticity passive-aggressively “By cultivating that intonation, was he expressing nostalgia for the kind of broken-cowboy-turned-mechanic blue-collar whiteness that he celebrated in his butch persona, his arms raised in triumph from a workingman’s sleeveless denim jacket?” Then questions his collaborations and friendships: “Why was a fantastic black musician (Springsteen’s long-time sax player Clarence Clemons) supporting a white star when there were black artists who could have benefited from his talent? Had Clemons sold out in order to be part of the Boss’s enormous commercial success? Was Springsteen using him to give himself some kind of legitimacy, as Elvis Presley did with Big Mama Thornton?” Als muses, with just a little drive-by side-slander there for Elvis and his motives. And then Als just plants his flag on a racist mound and dares someone to challenge him: “My Springsteen problem, ultimately, was my problem with white masculinity in general: was it possible for straight white men to empathize with anything other than themselves[?]” A problem Als admits he didn't get over until 1993, when Springsteen’s titular song from the movie Philidelphia, where its “Gays in the Aids Crisis” context got Als to finally allow for the possibility that at least one straight white man could relate to someone other than themselves. Thank you for giving us one. Then Als finally comments on the performance he was sent to critique, but not before! Once again, I ask the question, where was the editor? Who gave the assignment? Or perhaps there is a greater question in our era of the Trump working class: Why is it so pathetically, transparently obvious that a largely college educated white affluent audience of New Yorkers need permission from a black man to like Bruce Springsteen? And once again with the boring received wisdom. To the New Yorker class, the white working-class male is the lowest of the low, the punch line to a joke, the source of all of America’s problems, and the last barriers to it’s progress. Such clichés have become the oxygen and nitrogen of The New Yorker.
In 2019 there was a review of a revisionist history book on Thanksgiving, one of those of the tired genre, cue movie trailer voice: “Everything you thought you knew. . .is wrong” books. As if anything one learns in grade school with the aid of paste and construction paper should be considered true. But my issue isn’t with the genre, or even with the tone of the review, where the author, Phillip Deloria, with all the critical courage of a Louis the XIV courtier, rides along with the book for some myth busting with statements like “We falsely remember a Thanksgiving of intercultural harmony.” Do we? Maybe, though probably because “we” are in 2nd grade making a turkey with the cutout of our hand. The author of the book talks about the complexities of the alliance the Pilgrims formed with the Wampanoag, an important story any adult might be interested in—but it would only further that adult’s understanding of how fraught and tentative the relationship really was. However, Deloria is more interested in flogging the modern orthodoxies of American guilt narratives, so we get another in a series of platitudes about genocide and stolen land, none of which is helping a single American Indian alive today–not that your average reader of The New Yorker ever even met one in this day and age. Though his ancestry is mostly European, Deloria himself is a member of the Sioux Nation (where he was not born nor raised) through his maternal something or other, though he lives in Cambridge where he has spent the majority of his adult life teaching at “that school in Boston.” Again, however, as with the first two examples, my central problem isn’t with the meddanger or message itself. In this case, if anything, there is more authentic meat on Deloria’s bone to digest than there is on Als’ troubled relationship with being a racist. As it happens, the message Deloria and the book he is reviewing proposes as novel, is exactly like the one I’ve been teaching as an American History teacher in a high school for almost two decades. Which is exactly my point! I have been teaching this supposed revisionism all along, and was taught it in turn as far back as seventh grade where a man named Mr. Sergenion loved blowing our young minds by blowing up our myths from grade school. If anything, the book being reviewed seems late to the party, let alone the bathetic review. Deloria’s attitude is almost absurd. If he had ever bothered to read a US History textbook printed since 1980, it might disappoint him. “How does one take on a myth?” he writes with perhaps faux sincerity. To which I’d say: start by finding one, you cloistered pedant. But it's all too easy to stroke the blunt major chords of the American guilt song on the guitar that lives in the closet of the modern New Yorker. Why? Because it isn’t really guilt at all, but smug self-satisfaction. To flatter the reader’s sense that they are keepers of the secret knowledge the great unwashed of America (those white, working class males, again) aren’t clever enough to realize. It’s a grotesque pandering; a validation of all the base-line priors of a self-important affluent class who fondly remembers raves, and being cool and detached, likes their consumer goods, iPhones, and comfy lifestyle, hates white, working class men, and feels just enough guilt about what happened to the Indians to feel fashionably bad about it, and ruin Thanksgiving for what few children they have.
This is hard for me. The singer songwriter Joanna Newsome wrote a line that I’ve been thinking about since I started this essay: “The ties that bind, they are barbed and spined, and they hold us close forever.” Or, another way of saying it, “I just can’t quit you, The New Yorker.” Just last month, I threw my hands up at Richard Brody’s review of Kevin Costner’s new epic film Horizon, in the same The New Yorker issue as Witt’s piece. After just a few lines of text, Brody proved another in a series of panderers: “Westerns are an inherently political genre, for the obvious reason that they depict (or distort or interrogate) American history,” (emphasis mine, parentheses his). Yes, that is what they are, political, like everything else these days, The New Yorker, keeper of the trite and tired. Isn’t this the kiss of death to anyone at the dinner party? To say nothing new or clever or even true, and yet continue to speak? Any honest analysis would acknowledge that the American Western is one of the most complicated genres of storytelling there is, and that can include the political, but to say it is the genre’s inherint quality? It has myriad manifestations, character studies, explorations of masculinity and femininity in desperate circumstances, savagery and civilisation, interrogations to be sure, but then re-interrogations, warring philosophical propositions, constructions and deconstructions, but in no way is it ever simply a political exploration. Like every genre, it isn’t “inherently” anything until the artist approaches it–which I shouldn’t have to explain to Brody. But today everything is inherently political. And nothing is more or less. All art is a chance for a The New Yorker contributor to say something received from elsewhere in the culture. Brody continues with his boring pseudo-virtuous analysis: “[T]he American West was already inhabited, and the Indigenous peoples living there had well-developed social orders, so Westerns are, unavoidably, tales of conquest and subjection.” Amazing! Profound! He should take internet dating tips from Witt. (Though this may be an AP style guidelines choice, Brody used the new term “indigenous,” which as far as my researches are concerned, is a term Indians in America still don’t use outside academic contexts. Please see my disclaimer from a previous essay here). That The New Yorker audience would need any of that pointed out to them, and then to cram the entire multi-faceted genre, only a small portion of which contains both Cowboys and Indians, into such a narrowly defining round-hole, is indicative of the problem with not just the magazine, not just the pandering editos, but perhaps the entire class of people for whom the editors continue to believe require such pandering. The defining film of the American Indian in the western genre from the last half century, pretty much my entire lifetime, is clearly Dances With Wolves, as Brody should well know, or else why ask him to write this review? That film, given passing comment by Brody, is flawed, but any “interrogation” of the genre with regard to the conquest of disputed lands was long over by the time that film swept the Oscars. Indians have been the good guys my entire life, from the ridiculous to the sublime: 1981’s godawful The Lone Ranger, to the cartoonish Young Guns, to the tragic and beautiful Last of the Mohicans, to the critically acclaimed (if historically one-sided) film version of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, to all three iterations of the new popular television phenomena Yellowstone. And before my lifetime, if Brody were nearly as well educated in the genre as he should have been, he might know that Indians were already complex and sympathetic antagonists of the genre going back to the 1950s. But here we are again, a The New Yorker contributor with all the creative energy of a sun-dried sponge, chasing the trends and shibboleths in thought and language of the New Yorker audience instead of saying something worth saying, or at least something new.
I’m not sure what would happen if the editors of and contributors to The New Yorker found their courage and said something that went against the presuppositions of the average New Yorker. Right now they are chasing a hyper-political left-wing rabbit down a worn out, dry, unimaginative little rabbit hole that leads not to wonderland, but to wherever they’ve been hiding Claudine Gay and Joe Biden. But The New Yorker is still a magazine of mystique and grandeur. An editor of bravery and vision could well make a name for him or herself by merely reminding the readership of that fact. After nearly a hundred years, a periodical that can remain in print in this digital age would do well to stake a claim to originality and courage rather than platitudes and banalities–else what is the difference between The New Yorker and The Atlantic and New York and Rolling Stone and Vanity Faire and, and, and. . . Condé Nast might well consider consolidating them into a single publication soon for efficiency's sake, The Newatsonityorker, if they are all going to take the same positions (and if you don’t believe me, peruse thier Kamala Harris coverage). They all seem to be rushing towards drab “blah” together at the speed of Twitter (I refuse to call it “X”), like a confirmation bias convergent evolution, each pandering to, and afraid of offending, the same New Yorker readership.
The last of the literati of a once literate culture are held together by The New Yorker. 1.2 million subscribers of the print edition, and nearly half a million more in digital. One must say admire that accomplishment in this day and age where all bends towards quick and dirty, and all may soon be replaced by AI. Might The New Yorker remind these mostly lefty, mostly educated folk that they started reading The New Yorker because they like to think? Thinking is a stimulant, a narcotic of great power, but it is provocation, not conformity, that is the most potent delivery system of that narcotic. The first periodical of the old guard that remembers this could well win the competition for readership, not by joining in on the race to the nearest Democratic voter bromide, but by escaping that race altogether. The film Horizon was poorly reviewed by Brody, an expert not in Westerns, but in French nouvelle vague films. On the surface that sounds like the right move. Who would have deep insight to come at a Western from a different perspective but a French Art-Film critic? Yet in cleaving to received orthodoxies and political simplicities, that admirer of Truffaut and Godard (for heaven’s sake, two masters of breaking orthodoxies!) misses the significance of the title itself to that film: Horizon. We Americans still, even progressives, look to the horizon for what is unknown and possible; what is new about tomorrow. There is something sadly fitting that Brody failed to see that aspect of the film, failing in his review to even comment on it, in the soon to be irrelevant pages of a The New Yorker incapable of seeing that far. Pauline Kael would smirk, and sharpen her pen. If the New Yorker doesn’t look up to the horizon soon, it will appear as Witt does in her own non-confessional confessional: a lonely, empty, middle-aged woman, pushing 40 and still chasing it long past the point where she should just be a chaperone.