The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
For a healthy society, we can’t all wear same hat
I spent 16 years as the “house liberal” at WTIC, nesting amid Rush Limbaugh and his inspirees. There were days when the operations manager spent more time talking to people who wanted me fired than doing anything else.
One day, a guy in a trench coat comes walking down the hall with a rolling suitcase. The operations manager is behind him bouncing in the air like a terrier on Adderall.
“He’s from” [bounce] “Arbitron!” [bounce] “And he wants to” [bounce] “talk to you.”
This was highly unorthodox. Arbitron was the big ratings company. Contact between them and on-air talent was proscribed, so there could be no accusations that one of us slipped them a twenty to get an extra 0.4 in share. Or something.
I should add that this was back in the day when ratings came from diaries, filled out by randomly selected Americans, who often wrote down comments, along with the record of their listening.
“I had to meet you,” the guy said. “I travel all over reading these diaries. I’ve never seen anything like this. People hate you. They really hate you. But they keep listening. They’ll listen for 30 or 40 minutes, hating you.”
That was one of the proudest days of my life. Maybe that’s weird. It felt refreshingly American and small “d” democratic. This country wasn’t founded at a wellness retreat. It was Jefferson and Adams, Burr and Hamilton, people at each other’s throats, sometimes literally, but also sharing an exceptional human experience.
On the other hand, WTIC eventually canned me, so ...
I bring this up because of “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” recently published on the Harper’s site and signed by 153 people.
Let me mention some of the signatories. Gloria Steinem. Margaret Atwood. Noam Chomsky. Salman Rushdie. Malcolm Gladwell.
Dig a little deeper, and you find Orlando Patterson, Harvard-based, Jamaicanborn sociologist and one of America’s foremost thinkers on race and racism. Zephyr Teachout, lawyer, activist and metaphorical Bride of Bernie. Bill T. Jones, the legendary black, gay choreographer, famed and defamed for injecting politics into dance.
As you can imagine, these people were denounced as “garbage” and worse by the radical right.
Just kidding. These people were denounced as “garbage” and worse by the left.
The whole point of the letter was that, when it comes to strangling dissenting views in their cribs, the hard left has gotten (almost as) vicious as the far right. The letter described “a climate of intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.”
Many of the other signers were center-right people such as David Brooks of The New York Times
Dozens of artists, writers and academics, including “Harry Potter” author writer J.K. Rowling, have signed an open letter decrying the weakening of public debate, warning the free exchange of information and ideas is in jeopardy. The letter comes amid a debate over so-called cancel culture — where prominent people face attack for sharing controversial opinions.
When it popped up last week, the world — by which I actually mean a couple of thousand people on Twitter — went nuts. The signers of the letter were attacked on every possible basis, including the shocking disclosure by a former barista that one of the 153 had been a customer who only wanted foam in his cup and would send his wife over to complain if there was too much liquid.
This, offered as proof of moral shallowness, did not appear to be a joke.
A popular response was to find the five people on the letter who — in the respondent’s eyes — were the most disgusting and offer them up as proof that the letter was ethically and intellectually corrupt.
A popular unpopular name was J.K. Rowling who, I have to admit, has disturbed me with the unnecessary animus she regularly
directs at the transgender movement. On the other hand, people seem shocked that a person who wrote seven enormous books in which owls deliver the mail does not have a solid grasp on contemporary issues.
What struck me most was what an interesting group they were. I looked up all the Connecticut names, including legal scholar Anthony Kronman who, a few years ago, published an 1,100 page, 4pound mythopoetic book in which he explained the meaning of life. You’d think that would have gotten more publicity.
Maybe the most impressive Connecticut name was critically acclaimed poet and memoirist Reginald Dwayne Betts who, after eight years in prison, went to Yale Law School and then joined the Connecticut Bar. (Talk about getting the cart before the horse.)
A writer named Scott Stern spoke for many with this tweet “What’s weird about the Harper’s list is that most of the people on it are known garbage, but wtf are some of the others doing there?? (e.g. Nell Painter, Noam Chomsky, David Blight, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Matt Karp, Dahlia Lithwick).”
That, of course, was the whole point of the letter. A healthy society is not like Fred Flintstone’s Water Buffalo Lodge where everybody wears the same stupid hat. It’s more like a big fat wedding where all sorts of people converge to eat and drink and argue and laugh and dance.
Antonin Scalia’s best friend on the Supreme Court was Ruth Bader Ginsburg. They and their spouses spent New Year’s Eves together, attended the opera and even vacationed.
Since coming to Hearst, I have heard from many conservative objectors whose idea of wit is to call me a “butt-hurt libtard.” I actually don’t mind them so much. Mostly, I appreciate the effort they put into reading a column they disagree with, especially with all the extra physical effort of moving their lips.
No, the people who fog my glasses are the newly self-crowned inventors of liberalism, the ones who, having read certain blogs and listened to the right podcasts, are now training their eyes on the rest of us, looking for the wobble in somebody’s orbit so they can shoot them out of the sky. To them, the small mistake you make today eclipses anything you’ve done in the last 40 years.
You know who got it? Barack Obama, last October: “This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff: You should get over that quickly ... The world is messy; there are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids and share certain things with you.”
Like the wild turkey who has been standing warily in my yard while I’ve been writing this. Her wattle is backlit bright red by the afternoon sun, and she has one chick she’s trying to lead through this harsh summer.
I hope we can all agree about her. That’s the meaning of life.