bustardblog

Hertzberg is Very good

Writing political opinion for The New Yorker magazine cannot be easy. That journalistic cliche "Hot Off the Press" just doesn't apply at The New Yorker. The longer lead time that the magazine requires between the writing of an article and its arrival on the newsstand means that the opinion will never be the most current nor fresh. But when Hendrik Hertzberg is the author, it will often be the best.
Writing of the looming Senate vote on the bill outlawing Desecration of the Flag, Hertzberg explains why its passage would be "almost utterly dispiriting." He ends his piece brilliantly:

"Providence," Lord Bryce,... "has under its special care children, idiots, and the United States of America." The kids are still all right, but unless thirty-four senators hold firm Providence may no longer be able to indulge the second without harming the third."

Hertzberg would never be so inelegant as to call U.S. Senators idiots. Everytime you read one of his pieces, your conclusion the childish spittle spewed by a David Brooks is just a waste of paper and ink, can onlky be reinforced.

 

wrong again.

Not wanting to claim that I'm particularly prescient these days, but please look at yesterday's post regarding the fury of Dubai, and then check out today's New Yorker magazine.

In the New Yorker's Talk of the Town section a  piece described the recent visit by 20 students of the Dubai Women's College to New York University's Tisch school.  At a job fair in Dubai, one of the students approached the Crown Prince of the Emirate, suggesting that he personally pick up the tab for the trip. He agreed to do so on the spot!

In spite of Bush's flip-flop of a decision not to veto any bill that prevented the Dubai Ports World deal going through; it seems that the fury of the Emir we so offended has calmed down enought for him to send 20 young women to New York.

Is Bush ever right?

Scary News

I thought the link in the previous post hilarious.

This, (H/T Ataturk- link at right) is terrifying. I can only hope that Seymour Hersh has started to use drugs. I have no reason to believe that he has - but his article for Monday's New Yorker is scary.

Mar 27,2006: The New Yorker

Sorry, but this week you should really buy three copies of the New Yorker. It's that good. In reality, I can link you to two of the reasons, but I can't link you to the third - so you really will have to buy one.

Since he starts the magazine, I'll start with Hendrik Hertzberg. His brilliant "Disarray This" points out that the Democratic Part is in fact in an array. He also makes the argument that calling Democrats spineless and weak in the face of Feingold's  publicity stunt last week, can only help the Republicans. (I tried, clearly unsuccessfully, to make this point with Glenn Greenwald last week. To see proof of my failure read the venom here.) He makes it clear that the problem is not that Bush doesn't deserve censure, for a wide variety of his actions, but that attacking other Democrats does not help the cause.

Nicholas Lemann, poor guy, actually understands Bill O'Reilly.  "O'Reilly has been playing O'Reilly so successfully for so long, and has developed such a substantial libray of hooks, tics, and subplots, that he seems to be parodying himself, or parodying Colbert's parody of him." My pity for Mr Lemann is particularly intense as he is forced to delve into O'Reilly's fiction. After his career at CBS stalled over an incident in The Falkland Islands War, O'Reilly wrote a novel about a reporter who is fired after an incident in The Falkland Islands War. One by one, the fictional O'Reilly viciously, gruesomely, murders those he blames for his ill treatment. Lemann mentions that "Once, when Howard Stern was asked to explain his success, he said that he owed it to lesbians. O'Reilly owes his to child molesters." You have to read the whole article.

The reason that you have to go out and buy a copy is a piece that I cannot link to: Calvin Trillin writes of his late wife Alice, and it's a honest-to-god love story. Amazing