Presswatch/Booby Prize
Eastland, Terry
Booby Prize by Terry Eastland Now that Anna Quindlen of the New York Times has won herself a Pulitzer Prize for commentary, there's one more reason to grant her lifetime membership in the Current...
...She called on the judge to address the issue "with humanity," although it was obviously not the humanity of the unborn she had in mind...
...Quindlen's work is a function not of reason but of the company she keeps...
...In another of her Pulitzer-winners, Quindlen parenthetically remarked, self-referentially as usual, about how "a bunch, of us left-liberal types are gathered around some take-out Chinese and a nicely decanted MacNeil-Lehrer News-hour...
...uindlen thus finds it easy to exempt herself from thinking hard about complex issues...
...Asked by Commonweal how long she would write "Public & Private," Quindlen said that her sort of issues—child care, family planning and abortion, and homelessness—are "at the forefront of American consciousness" and that she thought she could "go on writing about them forever...
...apparently, she has never been "told" that a quota might limit the opportunities of women as well as men, or of minorities, depending upon its design...
...So much for the public world normally treated on op-ed pages...
...Quindlen is comfortable writing "Private & Public" because, in her solipsistic world, the two terms are interchangeable...
...As Lehrman writes, "Her journalistic career has been based on the belief that the woman's voice—the voice of compassion, humanity, softness—is missing from newspapers in general...
...The Gulf crisis is not a "black-and-white, good-and-bad, winand-lose" issue, she wrote, because this is "not that kind of World...
...As to why Anita Hill had not come forward ten years earlier, why she had stayed on the job, why she was reluctant to confide in the Judiciary Committee, Quindlen wrote: "The women I know have had no difficulty imagining possible answers...
...But an event that is good for The American Spectator is not necessarily good for the country or the press—or for women, whom I bring up because it is on their behalf that Quindlen claims to speak...
...Quindlen is much more than just another Ellen Goodman, who writes about many of the same things—the homeless, child care, domesticity, and abortion...
...It apparently has never occurred to Quindlen that one may defend abortion rights, as she does, but also regard Roe as untenable, on the grounds that the Constitution does not provide for a right of privacy encompassing abortion...
...Her concluding sentiment is pure cant: she hoped we all "learn to deal with our national tragedy with as much dignity and determination as this good man [Johnson] brings to his personal one...
...No, make that only when Quindlen-like women are at the keyboard, for no male (with the possible exception of the Washington Post's Quindlen clone Andrew Ward, weirdly identified as a "former NPR commentator who lives in the West") could write her gender-based column...
...She sometimes even does a little reporting, as when—to cite one of the columns included in her Pulitzer submission—she visited a homeless shelter established in the basement of a Queens church by a Dean Witter vice president...
...Quindlen is incapable of wrestling with serious moral and legal questions...
...Similarly, in a prize-winning column on Magic Johnson and AIDS, Quindlen did not grapple with what is true about a disease that for the most part is behaviorally induced and behaviorally preventable...
...sions—on, among other things, abortion (for, although she's Roman Catholic), the Gulf War (against), Clarence Thomas (against), and Anita Hill (for)—as "compelling...
...From time to time I am told of the oppression of the white male," Quindlen wrote, "of how the movements to free minorities from prejudice have resulted in bias against the majority...
...Quindlen's prize not only confirms the New York Times in its decision two years ago to relocate her from the "Living" section, where she wrote "Life in the 30s," a weekly column about herself, to the op-ed page as a commentator on things "Public & Private...
...At the risk of being told that I "just don't understand," I must say that that is one adjective that emphatically does not apply to her work...
...For that matter, imagine the Pulitzer board recognizing—and the New York Times offering a regular column to—a Catholic who agreed with her church's teachings on issues such as abortion...
...It also sends a message to newspapers everywhere about what passes for excellence in opinion writing, especially when women are at the keyboard...
...Her op-ed presence is the Times's way of saying that this voice must be heard, particularly on political issues...
...I don't want to hear any more about the impropriety of clean-needle exchanges or the immorality of AIDS education in the schools...
...Her public policy suggestions amounted to bashing those who rely "solely on chastity...
...Got it...
...Or this, from her AIDS column: "I don't want to hear any more about how condoms shouldn't be advertised on television and in the newspapers...
...The following paragraph from the Hill column further illustrates her self-referential smugness...
...uindlen can write well, and not all of her columns are unsuitable for an op-ed page...
...Her women, of course, all sided with Hill...
...The Pulitzer board hailed Quindlen's winning submisTerry Eastland is resident fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C...
...Criticism of Quindlen, as of any writer, however, should not turn upon gender, and in her case, not incidentally, it has not...
...Consider her column linking abortion and Clarence Thomas...
...The women who write political commentary should be read not because they have some gender-based talent for empathy," wrote Lehrman, "but because they have something to say...
...For, unlike Quindlen, Goodman, a Pulitzer winner some years ago, does not pretend to speak for all women...
...Great news for Current Wisdom...
...At her best, Goodman gives reasons for her views, and never suggests that the merits of her arguments turn upon gender...
...Given that she claims to speak for all women, Quindlen felt no need to advise which women it is she knows...
...Quindlen's approach is radiAirp' tr' 311 it gik41111111 ti • up Ito, AN 42 The American Spectator June 1992 cally different, as in the Pulitzer entry written three days after Anita Hill's charges against Clarence Thomas were made public...
...Watching Judge Thomas's confirmation hearings, I wondered how any sane person could give this credence...
...When she resists the urge to sermonize (which, alas, she did not do in the case of the man from Dean Witter), her style brings freshness to an often stale op-ed page...
...I have always been governed by my gut...
...I don't want" . . . "Listen to us...
...She is capable, however, of some peculiar paroxysms, such as this from the abortion column: "To watch as one of the most important issues of our times, an issue that affects the lives of millions of women intimately, is reduced to a political fandango in some cynical means-ends construct and a peevish annoyance for a Senator [Orrin Hatch] who will never have to think twice about who holds jurisdiction over the territory beneath his skin is worse than dispiriting...
...Indeed, Quindlen is awfully proud that her woman's way of treating political issues shuns reason...
...Imagine the Pulitzer board giving an award to a right-wing columnist who talks this way...
...How knowing...
...But even well-written, non-preachy columns on a homeless shelter or a day-care center or a project for disadvantaged kids are not enough to sustain a twice-a-week offering on the op-ed page of a leading newspaper...
...You will notice there is no please in that sentence," she added for emphasis, before observing that "white men of the United States Senate" were sitting as the jury in this case...
...Whenever my response to an important subject is rational and completely cerebral, I know there is something wrong with it," she wrote in a column Lehrman quotes...
...As she said in a Commonweal interview this past February, having "51 percent of the readers is pretty good...
...In her prize-winning column on the Gulf War, shortly before Saddam Hussein was evicted from Kuwait, the truth of the matter was in fact provided her by her peculiar sensibility...
...This is a childish voice, petulant and insistent, and the Pulitzer-winning pride of the New York Times, 1992...
...The Pulitzer board has solemnly agreed...
...Booby Prize by Terry Eastland Now that Anna Quindlen of the New York Times has won herself a Pulitzer Prize for commentary, there's one more reason to grant her lifetime membership in the Current Wisdom section of this magazine...
...Again, she used the first person, but this time to trivialize such a major issue as racial quotas...
...And Anna Quindlen has very little to say...
...Nor did she come to grips, as anyone writing about abortion in connection with the law must, with the constitutionality of Roe v. Wade...
...The point is that Quindlen's politics are about as liberal as they come...
...The Pulitzer Prize is the one award journalists truly esteem among the many they bestow upon themselves...
...Of course, this ignores why she was really brought to the page...
...CI The American Spectator June 1992 43...
...Listen to us," she began, the verb in the imperative mood, the "us" being women...
...Last June, in a review of Quindlen's first novel, Object Lessons, Karen Lehrman of the New Republic also examined her op-ed work in a critique evidently ignored by the Pulitzer board at Columbia University...
...After calling abortion "the issue of our lives" (there she goes again, speaking for all women), she worried that Thomas wouldn't show much empathy with "a group of desperate women in a clinic waiting room...
Vol. 25 • June 1992 • No. 6
