If you are on the McCrea list, you get a daily aggregation of Catholic, religion, and politic news from various sites with commentary from people on the list. Yesterday 9/13, McCrea posted a piece by Andrew Sullivan from New York Magazine. Here are Sullivan's opening lines:
"'Our democracy’s ideals were false when they were written.'
"I’ve been struggling with that sentence — the opening statement of the introductory essay to the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project on the legacy of slavery in America — for a few weeks now."
I too have been struggling with that sentence. So I am happy to say that Sullivan has said what I wish I might have said, if my daily annoyance at the NYTimes could have calmed and my brain become more tranquil.
The NYTimes appears at our back door every morning (seven days a week) because the Steinfelses love the smell of ink along with their morning coffee (can't get that on-line). It would be a joint decision to cancel and send the growing sum of money to a worthy cause, but the other half is not there yet. This is to say that increasingly the Times coverage of an array of subjects, art, culture, local news, immigration, race, gender, both political parties, etc., is from a "woke" perspective. It has become predictable and too many cases 'not news'.
Anyway....Sullivan does a good job of writing about the issues...I presume he too reads the paper of record every day, and he too is distressed at the direction the Times is going. I congratulate him on staying calm enough to write about the 1690 project...or at least its opening sentence.
I guess I didn't struggle as long as you and Sullivan did. It didn't seem to me to meet the Carr Van Anda standard, but nothing much, even in the NYTimes, ever did.
ReplyDeleteWould you preferred: "From the time this country was founded, its founders spoke with forked tongue"? I sort of like that. It brings in the original Americans, too. And it's closer to what the offensive opening sentence was trying to say. But if would have offended most of the same people.
Sullivan huffs:
"Hence the insistence that everything about America today is related to that same slavocracy — biased medicine, brutal economics, confounding traffic, destructive financial crises, the 2016 election, and even our expanding waistlines! Am I exaggerating? The NYT editorializes: “No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed..."
I huff right back: Well, the black inventor of the blood banks bled to death before he could get to an unsegregated hospital for treatment. The brutality in our economics comes from the job creators' existential need for an underclass. Traffic is screwed up frequently because of the need to keep ghettos entrapped and the people in them out of other places; ask any urban planner. The 2016 election came about because not enough black people voted, and one party was going out of its way to discourage them from voting. Yeah, maybe my waistline is all my fault, but there is a heavy load of racism in the rest of Sullivan's list.
We have maybe six news organization that are even trying to do more than attract eyeballs. Sullivan bombed one of them for failing to live up to his exalted standards. Well, Trump bombs it, too, for failing to live up to HIS exalted standards'
I'm not giving the NYTimes a pass. In more normal times I'd complain it is picking up too many of the WAPosts vices and not enough of its virtues. But that would be cutting our choices to four. Where do you think Stephen Colbert gets his material?
Okay! The "Carr Van Anda standard" Let's go with that first.
ReplyDeleteYou may not be giving the NYTimes a pass (though you're close),but the NYTimes is giving itself a pass.
It's not the whole paper; only those with reporters under 34. Just for contrast, look at the reporting from the foreign desk today...two stories about the British political crisis, straightforward and informative (a bit more so than the Guardian; its' written in American).
Stephen Colbert get his material from a gang of 13-17 year olds who watch C-Span, you-tube, Fox News and assorted streaming political ads from PACS to the right of the Cheneys. Didn't know that did you?
Oh, so that's where Colbert gets it.
DeleteWell, that doesn't answer my main point, which is that in this era when a man who tweets occasionally "Trump 2024" as well as "Trump 2020," this is hardly the time for the Left to buy into the whole "fake news" dodge. (At least it should force Trump to have his friends buy the papers, like Orban did, and turn them into rags for the monarch.)Trump is trying to destroy them, and you only want to noisily stop reading them over the kinds of vices that pop up periodically even in the best journalistic families.
And I am not saying, "Not in front of the goys." Oh, well, maybe I am. But we have to save what little the Hero of 9/11, who celebrates his Ascension on 7/4 (the date George Washington captured the Teterboro Airport), hasn't already polluted.
Just because it is the nation's greatest newspaper doesn't give the NYTimes leave to rewrite history...I'm tempted to say that at times, "fake history," but I will forebear.
DeleteTry Jill Lepore's "These Truths," if you want to rethink your historical knowledge about race in America...not pretty either, but far more complicated, and has the air of a bit more research. Alas, 789 pages is a bit longer than the Timeses 1690.
Margaret, You forget that I recommended Lepore to you?
DeleteThe NYTimes didn't rewrite history; it repurposed parts of history. Now, if you want rewritten history, study the multiple sources claiming the Founding Fathers were looking for (Christian) religious freedom. THAT is rewriting history. And it is a heck of a lot more prevalent these days than the NYTimes's drop in the bucket. It is also the version the leader of the free world occasionally tweets.
Lepore, p.116: "[In 1781] the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court formally ruled that slavery was inconsistent with the state's constitution, adding, "Is not a law of nature that all men are equal and free? Is not the laws of nature the laws of God? Is not the law of God then against slavery?" The next year, Pennsylvania's 1775 Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage renamed itself the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and a judge in Vermont ruled in favor of a runaway slave whose master had produced a bill of sale proving his ownership: the judge said in order to retain his property in the form of another man he'd have to provide a bil of sale from "God Almighty."
DeleteI had to look up "Car van Anda" and found out that Carr has 2 "r"s.
DeleteI get the time Monday thru Friday (LA version, hence woefully out date by the time the late NYC version hits the stands) and enjoy it. Is it perfect? Doe the pope wear funny shoes? Suffering through the SF Chronicle makes me appreciate the NY Times more each time I read it.
Well, I'm only an occasional reader of the NYT, both because their stuff is usually behind a paywall, and also because living out here on flyover country I'm not their target readership. They lost me with their 1619 project. I think it's reductionist in the extreme, and not helpful to the work that needs to be done in the present. Ask any older Catholic, how effective is guilt actually, as a motivation for virtue?
ReplyDeleteThis comment was by Katherine. I'm at my dad's place, and he doesn't have wifi. So I'm commenting on my phone, which apparently has me tagged as "unknown".
DeleteI think there are things to be learned as long as it doesn't become a theory of everything as Tom seemed to say at the beginning of this whole thing. Perhaps it's counterpunching in this age of Trump. I'm a counterpuncher so I empathize to some degree.
DeleteTrump’s approach to America is to divide and conquer. The 1619 project is in the same vein--it inflames our differences and drives a wedge between groups that need to work together.
ReplyDeleteBob, I am beginning to think there was something in the 1619 project I am missing. But several times a week, I have to decide whether to get into it or bite my tongue. The house painter finished his work, plopped down and, a propos nothing, let fly some of the hoariest crap I have heard since 1960. Fight or ignore it? That goes on all the time in the Age of Trump. I guess I found the 1619 Project agreeable because I didn't have to think: "If I point out what a jerk this guy is, am I going to have to find a new place to get the car repaired?" Maybe I just happen to bump into every racist in the country. But I doubt it.
DeleteObama's election stimulated all the latent or quiet racism in the country. Before his second election, I remember a bumper sticker saying "Dump the Bro'". That this mildly black pro-corporate, pro-Wall Street president could trigger such hate made me reevaluate the trajectory if this country. This reactivated racism was no doubt an important element in Trump's victory.
Delete"Obama's election stimulated the latent or quiet racism in the country." Yes. It makes me think of the re-emergence of diseases that we thought we had conquered. Except I don't know how you vaccinate against racism. The people who are at least somewhat willing to consider the message of the 1619 Project aren't the ones who have apparently hardened their hearts in a racist direction.
DeleteIronically I became a digital subscriber to the NYT in August, for the main reason that I was a print subscriber to the Wall Street Journal about a decade ago. I got a cheap subscription for one year, and decided to see what it would be like to be among their disciples for a year.
ReplyDeleteSo far I have been having the same problem I had with the WSJ. I really don't have time for it. But it is interesting that I seemed to have joined the NYT crowd at this time of upheaval. I think I joined the WSJ crowd right about a year before it was bought out. Maybe one can only read these papers faithfully if one personally knows other people who subscribe and share their world view.
Yes, the "our American ideals were false when they were written" is problematic from a grammatical standpoint. As Sullivan clearly points out, ideals are not false. Ideals are aspirational. So Question 1 in the 1619 Project should have been: Were our aspirations good or evil?
ReplyDeleteThe answer is easy: The aspirations in our founding documents were just fine. In fact, they provide the very framework on which persecuted groups base their complaints and appeals to their fellow Americans: "If you are so dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal, white male Protestant English-speaking persons, why can't I vote, own property, eat in your restaurant, go to school with your kids? Why are people who look like me disproportionately represented in poverty and criminal justice statistics?" Etc.
Sullivan notes at the end: "To present a truth as the truth is, in fact, a deception." I think that's a good point.
But here's the flip side: Why are white intellectuals freaking out about the 1619 Project with what, in my opinion, is disproportionate anger and resentment? I would ask people to consider whether the harsh reactions might, in part, be privileged liberals sick and tired of other groups constantly belly-aching about mistreatment and not being grateful for what has been bestowed on said groups. I think this is a problem among liberal Democrats who want to throw money at problems (though sometimes money is needed) without considering whether the problems are systemic and working against the aspirations and ideals of what our founding documents set forth.
Jean: "Why are white intellectuals freaking out about the 1619 Project with what, in my opinion, is disproportionate anger and resentment? I would ask people to consider whether the harsh reactions might, in part, be privileged liberals sick and tired of other groups constantly belly-aching about mistreatment and not being grateful for what has been bestowed on said groups."
ReplyDeleteI'll put that in the examination of conscience.
But I also find Bob Ginsburg's comment apropos of the issue: "Trump’s approach to America is to divide and conquer. The 1619 project is in the same vein--it inflames our differences and drives a wedge between groups that need to work together."
New York City is not Palm Springs, FLA...so maybe I am not accosted as Tom is by racist comments every time I talk to my fellow citizens. I don't hear a lot of belly-aching from African-Americans, in fact none except from time to time Al Sharpton speaking from some place else in the country.
In NYC, the race issue looks more like a class issue and at the moment it is focused on the schools, which can legitimately be said to be segregated. The main contributor is housing segregation (meaning rent and maintenance money) for local primary schools. For middle schools and high schools it is housing and testing. The current fight (more than you want to know) is over specialized high schools and the single city-wide test for admission to them.
In the eighties and nineties African-American were making gains. Since then their percentages have fallen as have Hispanics as have "whites." Chinese and South Asians, often children of immigrants, have moved ahead in large numbers (percentage-wise). The effort to remedy this has left the mayor, the school chancellor, and the state government at sixes and sevens about a remedy. So the percentages are in "racial" and "ethnic" terms, but the bottom line is better schools across the board, meaning more money for teacher salaries, smaller classrooms, etc., and every other reforming idea floating around in newspaper editorials.
Yes, divide and conquer, Bob made a good point about this happening on both the right and left. It seems to be in the water supply, so to speak, at this juncture in our history.
DeleteAnd while Trump is out there beating the drum on Fake News and journalistic bias, there are some elements in the news media that appear to be living down to his claims.
I just see the reaction to the 1619 Project from the left as a bit surprising and out of proportion.
If I am not mistaken (always a distinct possibity), this thread started as a lament for what has become of the Gray Lady, with the 1619 Project as a howling example of it. Am I correct, Margaret, in deducing that you are tired of being told what to feel about the news instead of simply being given all the news that's fit to print, without the tenderizer?
ReplyDeleteI gather that many here do not see the NYTimes daily,either in print or pixels. So yes, this post was a lament for what is becoming of the NYTimes. The 1690 project helpfully reminded us that that was the first year Africans were brought to be sold as slaves. Of course, there was no U.S. then, no Constitution, not even the preceding articles of confederation that didn't come into effect until 1781!! So whatever the opening headline suggested about liberty was an anachronism. Symbolic of much that has gone wrong.
DeleteThe Times has offered many buy-outs to veteran journalists over the last several years. I think that has removed critical pieces of institutional memory about how to report, how to research, how to write,how to be a reporter. Add to that the niche sections on women-victims (not the recipes!), on the multi-gender phenom, on Trump and his works and pomps, and you get the sense that these are crowding out the quality and quantity of news reporting and topics that were once part of the pleasure in reading a morning paper. Needless to say their local news has been reduced to hating the mayor and trying to get the subways to run on time. What will they do when Trump is gone???
I should add that encouraging reporters and editors to tweet has been a colossal mistake.
DeleteEditorial writers and columnists may Tweet. Reporters must be like monks -- know everybody and everything but confine themselves to the black letters and lay off the red.
DeleteAnd if the curren Kavanaugh imbroglio is any example, they shouldn't have their books excerpted in the newspaper they report for.
Deletehttps://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-new-york-timess-travesty-of-journalistic-ethics/2019/09/17/c731db76-d99f-11e9-a688-303693fb4b0b_story.html
I think the fundamental problem in this discussion is that Americans as a group seem to be either indifferent to history or to (I use the word) hate it. That must lie behind the constant need to update works of the past or represent them as actually taking place in the present. If we can only see the past as a corrupt (or boring) version of the present, then we are (as always) talking only to ourselves, with a mind closed to any new ideas. The past was different! That’s what makes it interesting.
ReplyDeleteI haven't read the 1619 Project articles so I'm not going to opine about their content. Inasmuch as it appeared in a newspaper rather than an academic journal, I suspect its purpose is more politics than history. But it's difficult to read the NY Times these days (at least the parts of the electronic edition that I look at) without suspecting that news, and now history, are being bent for political ends.
ReplyDeleteYes, the 2 JMs are one and the same.
ReplyDeleteYing and Yang!
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