“As former New York Times columnist Frank Rich’s average word count has increased, his writing has steadily become more predictable. From breathless diatribes on the Tea Party (over the course of two years, nearly 40 of his weekly columns touched on the unsavory patriots) to his fascination with the president’s placid demeanor, Rich writes cultural and political criticism with yesterday’s CNN headlines as his starting point. Rich, now a writer for New York magazine, has never been a brilliant political thinker; he is, in fact, an utterly conventional pundit of the old salon liberal variety. In his radical stance, he reminds us of Paul Krugman, except that Krugman is a scholar whose authority about his subject (economics, not politics) is unimpeachable, whereas Rich only knows what he’s learned from the media this past week. He is a clicker-intellectual.”—“Over-Rated Thinkers,” in “The List Issue,” The New Republic, November 3, 2011No, this isn’t the kind of sharp, pointed takedown of Frank Rich that Jim Sleeper, for instance, has done so well, but it’ll do nicely for now. It might have seemed like a good idea in 1992 when The New York Times paired then-theater critic Rich with Maureen Dowd in offering a kind of cultural take on the Democratic Convention. But at least Dowd had been a reporter and was familiar with the personalities and issues involved. Rich’s background was as the “Butcher of Broadway” whose snide reviews left few sorry when he moved onto his own larger, national stage.
Rich stopped having any original insight a long, long time ago. His stay as a Times political pundit was so enduring because his default position—everything traces back to the Culture Wars!—appealed to this by-no-means-inconsiderable reading niche at the Gray Lady. When he left that comfortable perch, the Times’ gain instantly became New York’s loss. The magazine that had once published the young, original Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin and Nora Ephron had now settled for the worst kind of gasbag.
No comments:
Post a Comment