IT’S NOT ENOUGH THAT JIAN GHOMESHI BE DENOUNCED, BUT THE EDITOR WHO GAVE HIM A FORUM TO TELL HIS SIDE OF THE STORY MUST BE CAST OUT AS WELL. THAT’S WHAT HAPPENED TO IAN BURUMA.
In the words of the late, great Freddie Mercury of Queen, another one bites the dust. This was Ian Buruma, who has departed as editor of The New York Review of Books in the midst of a social media furor over his recent decision to publish an essay by former Canadian radio star Jian Ghomeshi.
The magazine’s publicist, Nicholas During, confirmed it for The New York Times Wednesday. During didn’t return a National Post email asking whether Buruma had been fired, resigned or “voluntold,” as soldiers say, to disappear.
Really, it doesn’t much matter. The accomplished writer and author and long-time Review contributor, whose job as editor was to publish essays, has lost his job for publishing an essay.
It is no longer enough to denounce someone who actually does something the mob finds disagreeable.
That would be Ghomeshi, who was accused but acquitted of sexual assault two years ago but was nonetheless widely believed, as he himself wrote in that essay, to be “almost certainly a world-class prick, probably a sexual bully, and that I needed to be held to account beyond simply losing my career and reputation.”
It isn’t even enough to denounce someone who writes something the mob dislikes.
That would be, yep, Ghomeshi again, whose critics took such morbid pleasure in describing the essay as awful and him as a bad writer, imagining, it seemed, that such would hurt him deeply.
(What about all those women who have been abused by men, went this hue and cry, why can’t they write 6,000 words for the Review? What about their voices? And fair enough. God knows, to judge by the writing on Twitter, lots of those claiming victim status are very bad writers.)
Now, more than halfway through the year and well into #MeToo, what must happen is that the enablers — those who provide the forums for the disagreeable voices or in any way support those who provide the forums — must be offed as well.
That’s how Buruma was caught up in this. And he not only published the Ghomeshi piece, the poor deluded SOB also publicly defended having done so.
Shortly after the essay went online on Friday — it was scheduled to be published in print on Sept. 27, but don’t hold your breath — Buruma was interviewed by a correct-thinking male reporter for Slate magazine, who asked the very questions that people were asking online, such as, “Would he publish O.J. Simpson too?” and the like, the suggestion being that soon the pages of prestigious journals everywhere would be filled with the sage words of killers, scoundrels and rapists.
Buruma’s explanation was this: “I am not going to defend his behaviour, and I don’t know if what all these women (Ghomeshi’s accusers, only four of whom reported to the police and thus had their allegations tested in court) are saying is true,” he said in part.
“Perhaps it is. Perhaps it isn’t. My interest in running this piece, as I said, is the point of view of somebody who has been pilloried in public opinion and what somebody like that feels about it. It was not run as a piece to exonerate him or to somehow mitigate the nature of his behaviour.”
(The reporter was offended. “You say it’s not your ‘concern’ but it is your concern. If you knew the allegations were true, I assume you would not have run the piece.” In the next breath, said reporter described the Toronto Star, in whose pages the allegations against Ghomeshi were first published — and in many cases, which were taken nowhere else and thus never tested anywhere, except by the paper — as “a famed and respected newspaper.” Buruma allowed that the paper is respected. I never met the man, but I like to imagine him smiling as he said this.
Interestingly, the same week Ghomeshi’s piece ran in the Review, Harper’s magazine published an essay by a former public radio host named John Hockenberry.
Hockenberry is in a wheelchair, the result of a spinal cord injury he suffered as a teenager. He was the host for almost a decade of a New York Public Radio show called The Takeaway. He left the job about a year ago, quietly at first until one of the women he allegedly harassed filed a complaint about him, and then wrote about the investigation she conducted to see if she was the only one who had been made to feel uncomfortable.
His essay is long, and like Ghomeshi, in it he admitted to some bad behaviour and denied much. He also discussed his accident-caused impotence and how as a paraplegic man, his “total lack of sensation” has led to “a certain amount of adventurous improvisation in order to have any kind of a sex life.” It’s an uncomfortable read.
Harper’s publisher is Rick MacArthur and this week he appeared on CBC Radio’s The Current, where host Anna Maria Tremonti took him on and he her. His point was that #MeToo has had “an unfortunate tendency to lump together everybody from Harvey Weinstein to the guy who looked at you funny at the lunch room”; Tremonti’s was why would he defend Hockenberry’s essay.
The interview was described as bizarre, with MacArthur nailed for mansplaining, and, really, for not being more deferential to his interviewer.
The worried consensus, among a group of people I know, colleagues and many of them more literate and learned than I ever will be, is that MacArthur may be next for the axe.
“Running that piece was a suicidal act,” one of them said. And I guess it was, but thank God there are a few of the suiciders still around, to do what is in the modern world so very dangerous.