Taken slightly out of context, Marianne Faithfull’s refrain in 1979’s “Broken English”—“What are we fighting for?”—is applicable to today’s incoherent political back-and-forth. Throw out one haymaker after another and watch it pop or fizzle for a brief “news cycle,” whether it’s Trump’s continuing tariff yo-yos (is it too much to ask for clarity after all these months; not that the financial markets pay attention anymore), the FCC’s stupid Jimmy Kimmel fiasco (I’ve still never heard the comic’s voice), Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen’s desperate attempt to have at least two Democratic Party leaders take him seriously as a presidential candidate (I doubt his anti-Israel stance will result in many endorsements) and the ongoing ear-wiggles over the death of literature and contrasting “studies” about either the increase or decrease in church-going among the youth.
The ICE raids and push-back remains ripe: once again, I think the Trump/Stephen Miller xenophobic policies are dangerous, and creepy, but humor often emerges from the smoke of guns, bombs, fake guns and fake bombs and competing recriminations and videos. I’m referring here to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, an older white man (66, Harvard and Oxford) who shoulders the world’s burdens. About Trump’s plan to send federal troops into Portland, OR, Kristof tweeted: “President Trump has dispatched federal troops to what he calls ‘war-ravaged Portland.’ Portland has its problems but it is not the ‘hell’ Trump claims; it remains a food-and-wine heaven. ‘Hell’ does not serve Pinot Noir this good. I suspect Trump is sending troops mainly to see if he can provoke violence to distract from his messes (Epstein files, corruption, tariffs, economic softening) and justify his authoritarian rule.”
I’ve amused myself (and maybe a dozen readers who say “just gimme some truth”) in recent weeks wondering whether the Times is evolving into a parody newspaper/digital company, but Kristof isn’t known for rib-ticklers; in fact it appears he takes himself more seriously (including a failed run for Oregon’s governorship; small details like flunking the residency requirement) than even Thomas Friedman—the impossible becomes possible—David Brooks or Michelle From Brooklyn. He could be serious, even the “Pinot Noir” part, since evoking the Epstein Files again smells of desperation. At this point, anyone implicated in the Epstein Files—Democrat, Republican or Chameleon (Bill Gates)—has covered his tracks sufficiently that any juice that emerges will yield less than from a rock-hard lime.
Whenever the topic is incoherence (a staple since 2018 or so), I find it instructive to take a gander at the latest nonsense from The Atlantic. And so I did on Sunday, just before taking in the outlandishly incoherent film One Battle After Another, a crushing disappointment from director Paul Thomas Anderson. The film’s temporarily in a limited conversation cycle, undoubtedly because there are so few cinema offerings worth more than a grunt. The New Yorker’s exuberant Justin Chang’s review encapsulated the left’s desperation for anything to cheer: “’One Battle After Another,’ as great an American movie as I’ve seen this year, doesn’t simply meet the moment; with extraordinary tenderness, fury, and imagination, it forges a moment all its own, and insists that better ones could still lie ahead.”
You see what you want to see. Except for the funny, if ridiculous, Christmas Adventurers Club—white supremacists—the film was such a meandering mess that I struggled to stay awake. I wasn’t crazy about Ari Aster’s Eddington, but unlike Battle, it was “of the moment.”
Anyway, Jonathan Chait, a 53-year-old of moderate intelligence who has the gumption, or lack of self-awareness, to write stupid articles remains employed: from The New Republic to New York and now The Atlantic. His Sept. 26th clearing-his-throat short essay before a text marathon with like-minded men and women of moderate intelligence was headlined “The Emptiness of Attacking Critics for Their Hypocrisy” and I swear it took me a quintuple read to decipher his prose. I still haven’t.
For example, he writes: “The notion that cancel culture was primarily something liberals did to conservatives is also untrue. The phenomenon of the left-wing outrage mob occurred almost entirely within progressive institutions, such as universities, publishing, media, and the arts, and involved skewering, silencing, and often firing anyone deemed insufficiently progressive.” Let’s see: universities, publishing, media, the arts. That touches millions of Americans—and not just those confined to the MSM East Coast “elite” playhouse—and the “cancellations” were meted out indiscriminately, depending on the month or year.
But Rabbi Chait’s conclusion is pure incoherence: “It’s important to avoid hypocrisy about free speech. It’s important to avoid hypocrisy on anything, for that matter. But if your only way of engaging the issue is to accuse opponents of lacking any principled beliefs, then you probably don’t have any principles of your own.”
That’s indigestible “word salad.” But not surprising! Last year, on Oct. 8, Chait wrote this about Kamala Harris: “Harris ought to be losing. That she isn’t owes a great deal to the buffoonery of her opponent. But it can also be attributed to the cleverness and unsentimental courtship of the center her campaign has followed.”
As I noted above, for this brilliance, Chait soon latched onto The Atlantic, and given the largesse of that Laurene Jobs-owned company, probably earns more than he did at New York. I’ve no opinion one way or the other about Chait’s bank account—that’s a free market and who doesn’t like the equivalent of a Willy Sutton caper?—but his reward for incompetence is… incoherent.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023