The Nation on The New Yorker on The War on Terror

Those of you irritated by my constant carping about The New Yorker magazine, might take a look at this essay by Daniel Lazare in The Nation. For those pressed for time, I'll simply reprint the last two paragraphs of the essay below:



"...The New Yorker may be just one example of a magazine that has lost its bearings, but, given its journalistic track record, its massive circulation (nearly a million) and the remarkable hold it still has on a major chunk of the reading public, it's an unusually important one. Where once it used its institutional heft to help broaden American politics, now it is helping to narrow them. When The New Yorker runs a clever and amusing profile of a colorful character like the Slovenian social theorist Slavoj Zizek, as it recently did, the main purpose is to give an appearance of openness while assuring readers that such radical critics remain safely marginalized. Meanwhile, it seems highly unlikely that the magazine would publish articles by the likes of Hannah Arendt or Pauline Kael, hard-hitting intellectual warriors whose goal was to challenge conventional wisdom head-on. People like that couldn't have cared less about respectability. The idea that we should put aside all doubts and take people like Rumsfeld or Woolsey at their word would have left them incredulous.



"But, then, irreverence, independence, intellectual daring--such things have been suspended for the foreseeable future. We must swallow our skepticism and fall into line. Criticism must be constructive, which is to say it must not call into question the premises of the War on Terrorism, or the good intentions of those conducting it. One is reminded of the old Dwight Macdonald line about The New Yorker existing to make us "laugh and lie down," except for two things. Rather than passivity and enervation, the goal now is loyalty and mobilization. And as for making us laugh--well, maybe it's the sour mood we find ourselves in nowadays, but The New Yorker no longer seems quite as funny."



Now, me. It's the matter of a moment to dismiss the current timidity of The New Yorker as a temporary thing--perhaps it is, I hope it is. But given the tremendous institutional pressures that any big magazine faces--how much advertising did they lose after Susan Sontag's infamous post-9/11 editorial?--I expect that freedom, once given up, evaporates for good.



And while we're cruising The Nation, here's an amusing discussion of The Daily Show. The last paragraph, however, insists that I bring up (and paraphrase) Peter Cook's comment regarding the effectiveness of political satire: "...and we all know what a splendid job those German cabarets did in preventing Herr Hitler."