Letter To Howie

GREAT ARTICLE in the April Atlantic, Howie. But, hey, couldn’t you have used an editor? I’d say that 15,000 word magazine article is approaching New Yorker levels of self-indulgence. Surely you want to hold something back for the book?

As a conservative, you can imagine that it was delicious for me to read of the dysfunctional “culture of complaint” at the Times. It is a bit shocking, I admit, to read that the newsroom is not a rollicking battlefield of overachievers but a sour pasture polluted by Newspaper Guild time-servers. It’s easy to forget that every story in the Times should probably have a conflict of interest disclosure on it: “This story was reported, written, and edited by members of the Newspaper Guild, so forget about ever reading any criticism of unions, pal.”

It was encouraging to read of your valiant efforts to turn the Times around, to get in there and make the tough decisions immediately before the opposition had time to organize. But what struck me most of all was the failure to tie the problems at the Times to the rest of the world. Here you were, leading an old and venerable institution, owned by a man you characterize as a weak and vacillating leader, trying to break out of the slow exponential decay from former vigor to present complacency to future crisis. Isn’t this a metaphor for the city around you? Yet I can’t say I’ve ever gotten the feeling that you have a clue that your own institutional situation was just a microcosm of the whole welfare state that the Times supports so robustly.

Wasn’t Rudy Giuliani trying to do the same thing to the city as you were to the Times? Wasn’t he trying to inject a tiny dose of your “culture of performance” in the vast “culture of complaint” that we know and love as New York City? And what about New York State? How much support did you give over the years to Governor Pataki in his occasional and indecisive attempts to rein in the vast patronage machine managed by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver? Then there’s George W. Bush. By all accounts, President Bush sems to be bringing a culture of performance to the nation’ government, shaking up the nation’s global strategy in response to 9/11, responding to the collapse of the 1990’s bubble by radically cutting income tax rates in investment income, and actually proposing to “do something” about Social Security and Medicare. But you know, Howie, I can’t say that I’d ever noticed the least acknowledgement of this from the editorial page that you ran for so many years. Indeed, I’d say that, outside your crusade in the Times newsroom, you side 100 percent with the national culture of complaint. There certainly was ample opportunity in your 15,000 words to establish your reforming bona fides if you had wanted to.

I also felt that you didn’t articulate any long-term vision for the newspaper beyond a few platitudes about the digital age. I couldn’t help noticing last week that the Boeing Company announced that it was putting its big Wichita plant up for sale. It wants to outsource the subassembly of its commercial jets, and “position itself as an intellectual company” rather than a tin-bender, according to The Wall Street Journal. Coincidentally, Boeing will distance itself from its own culture of complaint, and dissolve somewhat the monopoly powers of the rather militant Aeromechanics union. Your plans for the Times did not seem to include anything in similar vein. Is this because you knew that Arthur was too timid to do anything, or because you never thought about it? It’s an exciting idea though isn’t it? How do you think an outsourced news operation would look like at The New York Times? How would it be if you kept the brand and the “names,” but outsourced all the support? What would the average Times reader think about it?

I’d say that The New York Times reader would find it hard to make sense of it, because the Times rarely strays from the Democratic party line in reporting on political and economic issues. Yet, as you write, you believe its responsibility is to provide “the smartest and most affluent people in the United States” a sophisticated menu balanced between things they need to know and things they’d like to know. Out here in conservative land we have a ton of exciting writers busily trying to make sense of this new world aborning. But they write the kind of book that would never see the light of day in The New York Times Book Review, or if it did, would be set up for a put-down. So the Times reader never gets to know about a lot of things that they “need to know.” Why would that be, do you think?

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

TAGS

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Home

American Manifesto

Chapters

Chappies

roadtothemiddleclass

presented by Christopher Chantrill

Follow @chrischantrill • Contact