It’s said, not without creedence, that anything’s possible today.
This is a wish-upon-a-star thought, but it’s possible The New York Times is transitioning (not in a Minneapolis sense, at least I don’t think so) to a newspaper/website that’s almost entirely satire, and not in The Onion or Babylon Bee broken mold—always thought The Onion was weak sauce in its print rendition in the 1990s, and the “Bee” is just stupid—but more like the early days of National Lampoon in the 1970s and the late-1980s Spy when it upended a complacent media and pop culture with such force that its influence was immediate, from its clever typography, hilarious covers and mean-but-accurate stories and lists. (The flipside to Spy was the pernicious—but brilliantly marketed—USA Today, which foretold, starting with its inception in 1982, the media disaster of the 21st Century. The daily, annoyingly on the bedside table of every hotel in the world, was print social media long before anyone knew a Tik from a Tok.)
An August 30th Times article by Jacob Bernstein (47-year-old son of Nora Ephron and Carl Bernstein, a NYT hire that had nothing to do with connections) was, I’m positive, because anything’s possible today, the first intentional foray into satire. Bernstein’s tag at the end of the story notes that he “reports on power and privilege for the Style section,” a simple confirmation for readers who didn’t get the joke. The headline, “How Are the Very Rich Feeling About New York’s Next Mayor,” was a low-key needle-puncture for what followed.
Bernstein doesn’t waste any bullets once he gets going. It begins: “August in the Hamptons: Ocean breezes. Oversubscribed Tracy Anderson [I had to look up who Anderson was, but it was a breezy explanation!] classes. Parking woes. And this year, with a New York City mayoral election looming in the fall, a freakout that the most sumptuous of summer staples hasn’t soothed. ‘Even overpriced lobster salad can’t seem to make people out here feel better,’ said Robert Zimmerman, a veteran political fund-raiser who has yet to back anyone in the race… The agita is on full blast out east, where the price for one home last year ran as high as $88.5 million and so many 0.1 percenters congregate in August. (Presuming they don’t have a yacht.)… In other words, the plutocrats are panicking.”
That’s some good shit! (Digression: in 1994, when Pulp Fiction came out, family friend Michael Gentile—and New York Press art director—said to my wife Melissa, “Pulp Fiction! Go immediately, it’s the good shit.” Melissa replied, “When did 'shit' become ‘good’?”)
The joke, for those with low reading comprehension, is that Zohran Mamdani’s likely election (although if the 33-year-old loses on Nov. 4th, maybe to Eric Adams, wouldn’t shock me, because, clap your hands and Sing Along With Russ, anything’s possible) will hardly “panic” plutocrats, since with their multiple residences and tax attorneys they’ll feel just the sting of a yellowjacket on a pinky finger—sheathed with a ring or bare. Also, as Bernstein knows, “0.1 percenters” don’t merely congregate in the Hamptons for lobster salad in August; they open their residences on Memorial Day. Some say, if you believe anonymous sources, that Mamdani, once in office, will nudge toward the Democratic center, and might not institute government-run supermarkets and free bus rides (for the “unsheltered”) on Day One, punting to a Blue-Ribbon Commission to “study” the proposal.
More Times satire, this time from Bruce Handy (a well-traveled journalist/author who began writing for Spy in 1987) on the very dumb showdown between “Sandwich Guy” Sean Dunn and malicious United States D.C. attorney Jeanine Pirro. Handy: “Note that Mr. Dunn didn’t fling a pita sandwich or a torta, which might have been too cringe and on the nose as a token of resistance, though not as cringe as pussy hats, at least in retrospect.” That’s Handy, a mid-60s fella, poking fun at all the idiots on social media—especially reporters—who still use the word “cringe.”
Left behind by the likes of Bernstein and Handy, to no one’s surprise, was Frank Bruni, a Times contributor and Duke professor, who still, like the writers at The Atlantic, thrive on repetition. Bruni, writing about “King Donald” (wasn’t that jibe outlawed, a la Keir Starmer, in 2018?), huffs: “He’s the monster the founders dreaded, rehomed from their nightmares to the Resolute Desk, where he’s teaching us a lesson I didn’t get in school: Some of the most important checks and balances reside not in the architecture of our government but in the stirring of our consciences, the murmurings of our souls.”
I believe that once The Times’ transition is complete, fools like Bruni will be tossed away as fast as a Hampton plutocrat drains a Campari & soda minutes after finishing a grueling set of tennis and—multi-tasking—wiring $40 million to a bank for a Caribbean bungalow.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023