One trouble of blogging is the silly things one thinks are placed out there for everyone to read. In the past, one opined to one’s friends and they all thankfully (or charitably) forgot that you thought the Packers would lay waste to the Giants.
No more. Bad ideas are forever.
I believed the Republicans would keep control of Congress in January of 2006. I thought John McCain finished last fall. The aftermath of the Iraq War went far worse than I thought it would.
The list is depressingly long, but I have one consolation.
At least I was wrong here and not on the pages of the Wall Street Journal.
My wife tries to guard against the nasty and reactionary post which should induce repentance and not just shame. You can disagree with Barack Obama, but merely calling him names, especially false names is thoughtless. Hillary Clinton is probably past her political expiration date, but she is a capable pol and just calling her names is tiresome.
There is, perhaps, a place for witty insult, but it is a difficult task for all but the greatest writer. The style requires the skill of a Trollope or a Browning. Of course, insult is easy to write, but is hard to write well so most of us set out to write Browning and end up writing witless slanders.
Sadly, Mark Helprin puts together a column today for the Wall Street Journal that is witless and uncharitable . . . a fatal combination. He might have been charitable and witless and his love of his fellow man would have covered his literary sins or witty and uncharitable as our love for his cleverness would have covered his crimes against polite society, but not both.
See this paragraph as an example of Helprin today lowering himself to little effect:
What a kerfuffle! Half a dozen talk-radio hosts whose major talent is that, like hairdressers, they can talk all day long to one client after another as they snip, have decided that the presumptive Republican nominee does not hew sufficiently close to their gospel.
As anyone who has listened to them knows, the depth of their thought is truly Oprah-like. And if a great institution of the left can weigh-in as it does in the choice of a nominee, why not its fraternal twins on the right? It doesn’t matter that Mitt Romney, suddenly their Reagan, became a conservative in a flash of light sometime last year, or that their other champion, a populist theocrat, is in many ways as conservative as Vladimir Lenin. The task is to stop the devil McCain.
As a mere print person whose words are not electrified and shot through walls, automobiles, pine trees, and brains, I realize that what I write in the bloody ink of a dying industry may be irrelevant. But from my antiquated perspective, something is very wrong.
There are good reasons to go after some in talk radio, but Helprin manages to stumble on to none of them. He begins in an unpromising direction by comparing the role of a radio pundit to that of a hairdresser or barber. Why this particular analogy is useful is left to our imagination as it is dropped. Mr. Helprin is described as a novelist so perhaps he is used to having the space to explain bizarre analogies and his explanation of the relevance of hair care to talk radio was left on the cutting room floor like clippings from a bald man in a middle class barbershop . . .
Or perhaps he just got a hair cut and overwhelmed by the experience padded the column with it. Who knows?
We do know that Mark Helprin’s witless column explains nothing and is devoid of fact . . . getting the few facts contains wrong. It associates the rise of talk radio with the Clinton administration, for example. Those of us who heard Rush long before we had heard of Bill and Hillar will be shocked to discover that other “talkers” were not rushing to imitate his success, as the father of the modern talk radio genre, but instead were created because of the awesome power of the Clinton administration. By this reasoning, the spate of religious films produced after Gibson’s Passion made big coin for the actor were less about that film’s financial success and more about the second Bush term.
Apparently Mark Helprin has never listened to talk radio where national figures like Hewitt and Ingraham educate their audiences on a daily basis. Today Hewitt will dedicate his show to an extensive discussion of a serious book . . . and I have heard Rush work hard to explain complex economic terms to lay people. Nobody will confuse the EIB with a Bill Buckley column, of course, but it at least matches the depth of a Wall Street Journal editorial by Mark Helprin.
Helprin does not like Oprah or the depth of her thought, which opinion must shake her to her ample foundations.
My guess is that she has done more to get people to read and think about serious books (to give just one example) than most of us, but Helprin is generalizing while insulting and so this fact cannot get in the way. One wonders if he has ever watched her show enough to know what it does. It is entertainment, but it also has a blend of informative guests that attempts to educate while it entertains.
None of that matters of course as Helprin can rely on snobbish ignorance of the actual content of Oprah and so criticize an edutainer for doing exactly what she sets out to do and doing it well. No need to engage any ideas when one can merely posture and sneer.
If one does so, and there is placed for a Wilde like rejoinder, then one should do so in a manner at least comprehensible. Talk radio sadly is not much like cutting hair and theocracy in not much like Lenin. Helprin slanders Huckabee in a way that only makes sense if one relies on the anti-religious prejudices of a certain class of people.
Mike Huckabee evidently is a theocrat as conservative as Lenin. I suppose that comparing the amiable governor of Arkansas to a mass murder might be considered in bad taste, but one wonders why Helprin stopped with Lenin. If one wants to slander with witless comparisons to killers of thousands, why not go the whole way and compare Huck to Hitler?
One guesses that Helprin merely meant to compare economic policies of Huck and Lenin, but surely he could have been more sensitive than to pick a man who martyred thousands of Huckabee’s co-religionists. But perhaps I have merely missed the humor in telling a Baptist that he is, in an important way, like a man who began the process that would kill thousands of Baptists in horrific camps stretched across Siberia!
What larks for Mr. Helprin!
In a world with real theocrats, see Iran Mr. Helprin, there is something bizarre about calling a successful governor of an American state a theocrat. As far as I know the nation of Israel was not under threat during the dark night of Mr. Huckabee’s governance. Atheists were not made second class citizens or sent to retraining camps in Little Rock.
Unless Mr. Helprin thinks the America of John F. Kennedy was a theocracy, when students prayed in school, marriage was traditional, and abortion a state matter, then Mr. Huckabee’s goals seem pretty tame.
But wait! Mr. Huckabee quotes the Bible a great deal like such noted theocrats as Abraham Lincoln (who ran appealing to the religious right), Teddy Roosevelt (who stood at Armageddon and battled for the Lord), and Ronald Reagan (whose public and private musings on eschatology in the 1980’s must have terrified Mr. Heprin ).
Of course, Mr. Huckabee cut personal income taxes in Arkansas just as Lenin did in Russia. He also, the horror, raised fees in Arkansas which as every student of history knows is just one step from nationalizing the means of production. A concern about public smoking is just one small step from setting up the Gulag Archipelago.
Evidently worrying about the poor out loud makes one a communist . . . which, I think, might be giving the Bolshies a bit too much credit.
But Helprin, thank God, will also save us from people who change their mind to agree with us such as Mr. Romney.
Evidently, Mr. Romney did not gestate the appropriate length of time (which Mr. Helprin gets wrong anyway) for Mr. Helprin to trust him. Having changed his mind (several years ago) on the culture of life, should Mr. Romney have lied about it?
It is not enough, evidently, to change ones mind to avoid the Helprin sneer. One must also change ones mind for a sufficient length of time to please Mr. Helprin. Of course he does not tell us what this time span is, but evidently no Road to Damascus experience (a theocratic reference on my part!) will satisfy him. He would have been there in Damascus urging caution about this Paul fellow and later would have discounted Romans due to earlier statements made about Christians.
Romney was not, of course Reagan, but his case was that his views when running were the most like Reagan’s.
He was not saying his views were most like Reagan ten years ago, but then it is difficult to vote now for the Romney of ten years ago.
Evidently any opposition to McCain is “stopping a devil.” I have certainly been critical of this attitude, but Helprin goes overboard in the opposite direction. In fact, he uses the very same slanders of Huckabee that those going overboard attacking the “devil McCain” made of Huckabee. Evidently going overboard attacking Huckabee is good, but when they went overboard attacking McCain they were bad.
Mark Helprin knows better than this column which insults voters for Mr. Romney and Mr. Huckabee that McCain will need to win in a difficult year.
His further natter about his “old fashioned” column next to that new technology radio made me laugh out loud. The wonders of Mr. Marconi’s toy seem about as cutting edge and daring as bobbed hair. To bring it all back, as he never does, to his own hopeless hair cutting analogy, Mr. Helprin’s column forgets that this sort of opinion writing is like Brylcreem . . . a little dab will do you . . . a commercial as fresh as his column and as cutting edge as the technology behind radio.