After years of being trained to suspect underlying interests behind any genre or institution that claims a position of disinterest or service to the pure public good, and watching the corporatization and partisan-ization of the press, including that of the so-called public media, at least here in the U.S., of which I think Bill Moyers is the best and most hardhitting analyst (hence my soft spot for movies like Network and The Insider), I think I still harbored the naive belief that, if not the New York Times at least the New York Times Book Review could be a safe harbor, an a-topia immune to the obvious and crass antics of media manipulation – because after all the New York Times Book Review readership is if nothing else hyper-literate. Despite the inevitable and increasingly common topical capitulations to the topical, I never felt that any book review actually had a secret agenda other than to review a book and maybe to advance the reviewer’s standing in the eyes of the public as someone with better adjectives or better restraint in the use of adjectives, or someone better versed in the art of rhetorical inversions, or someone with an unfathomably richer vocabulary than that of any other reviewer who ever wrote for the US intelligentsia’s Good Book. There are countless Sundays when I have read the NYTBR like a kind of scripture, pen in hand, marking my agreements and disagreements with the reviewers, and notes to self and marginalia of resonances with my own obsessions.
But last Sunday’s April 13, 2008 book review featured a review, Niall Ferguson’s review of Terror and Consent by Philip Bobbitt that made me feel that not only had politics encroached upon my sacred space but the same political antics that were driving campaign pundits to smear and camoflauge strategy as opinion and disinform the gullible glue-eyed American “public” 25 hours a day, 8 days a week were intruding into the very structure and message of the review. There are better critiques than mine of the troubling substance of the review. (e.g. Kalkaina’s on the Daily Kos, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/4/13/133931/051). But my surprise — surprise is the wrong word, as if Scarlet O’Hara was “surprised” to find Tara demolished in the midst of a civil war that turned the world into an upside down hell, or dot dot dot name your literary figure here for sacred domestic spaces being turned into vivid scenes of destruction and lost innocence) — was that the entire editorial apparatus was being brought in to camouflage a campaign ad for John McCain as if it were a very positive review of a very scholarly book.
First, never before in the New York Times Book Review have I noticed so much focus on the credentials of the author of the book in a review. The authors whose works have been reviewed in the review include the world’s greatest writers, the most prize winning prize winners, some of the most honored degree holders, and a slew of really smart people whose lack of an ivy league degree in no way compromises their achievements as scholars, writers, or achievers on the world stage. New York Times Book Review readers, I imagine, are a smart group who collectively represent higher education around the world, and are likely not to be wowed by emphases on the educational credentials of the authors reviewed. But the editors of this issue — rather than commenting on the substance of the review — state that Phillip Bobbitt “is a busy man” as Senior Fellow of the University of Texas research institute, teaches law at Columbia and runs the Columbia Center for National Security. But, we are told that “his reviewer goes one better” holding four positions, including Lawrence A. Tisch professor of history at Harvard, the William Ziegler professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford.
Doth the lady protest too much?
We only get a hint at an idea in the last line of the editor’s “Up Front” Preface to this week’s review.
What are all these credentials for? We now read the review not as one review among others but as a reviewer’s review – where the conspicuous display of unsurpassed credentials should suspend any disbelief we have toward the content of the review. I skip now over the review’s assertions rather than display of the brilliance of this text and the superlatives that Niall Ferguson lays upon the Bobbitt book (it is “quite simply the most prfound book to have been written on the subject of American foreign policy since the attacks of 9/11 - indeed since the end of the cold war,” my emphasis), I skip over these measured and objective remarks to the review’s conclusion, “Yet it is striking that despite being a democrat, Philip Bobbitt so often echoes the arguments made by McCain on foreign policy.
Are we meant to go away from the lead book review in the New York Times with the impression that even the most well educated democrats will be forced to concede after reading this book, or even without reading this book?, that John McCain is the candidate for anyone who cares about foreign policy? perhaps that McCain is the most profound candidate for advancing US foreign policy since the cold war? Or are we supposed to go away thinking that either of these eggheads would make a mighty fine Secretary of State under President McCain? Or are we supposed to come away thinking, hmmm… I’m a democrat and if I (like the New York Times) really want to endorse Hillary Clinton, I better vote for McCain (and find really convoluted ways of defending my choice to my fellow democrats) so Hillary has a chance in 2012?
Posted by thinandlight 