100 Years of Turpitude
TERZIAN, PHILIP
Media 100 Years of Turpitude By Philip Terzian Whoever it was who said that journalism is the first rough draft of history was, presumably, a journalist. For no historian would ever suppose such...
...Nazi Klaus Barbie taunts the French...
...For the 1970s, there is J. Anthony Lukas on the Watergate scandal to tell us all we need to know of Richard M. Nixon...
...But the answer is simple...
...No classical music, of course, or jazz, or opera, but a tribute to Woodstock ("It only made the world a little less uptight") and a plastered Janis Joplin ("Such a strange, unsettled mix of defiance and hesitancy, vulnerability and strengths...
...Oral Roberts...
...But there are Bosnia and Beirut and Frances FitzGerald and David Halberstam and "Ho Chi Minh on the Move" against the French...
...and from William Serrin on Jesse Jackson ("How he can preach...
...The 1980s are slightly more varied, but not by much: There is greed, Donald Trump, the Gary Hart affair, a guffaw or two at Dan Quayle's expense, and poor Andy Warhol on the threshold of death...
...There is a somber exploration of the soul of Jimmy Carter, and Merle Miller's declaration of homosexuality...
...Mere oversights, no doubt...
...Arthur M. Dodge makes the case against votes for women (1915...
...In a hundred years of history, what matters is the world since the Baby Boom began...
...from Mel Gussow on Meryl Streep, and Joanne Stang on Woody Allen ("What Allen projects…is wistful futility...
...Chinese dissidents are shot...
...Comes now the New York Times Magazine, which observed its centennial on April 14 by publishing a lush, slightly thicker than usual edition gleaning (in editor Jack Rosenthal's words) "bursts of passion and energy" now bequeathed to posterity...
...From the 1950s, we are once again acquainted with Sen...
...Gloria Steinem is enamored of herself...
...what endures is the product of the past quarter century...
...but, he goes on, "we were struck as we kept reading to see how much powerful writing was provoked by enduring subjects like women, civil rights, Vietnam, and South Africa...
...Billy Graham...
...Right-wing survivalists retreat into the woods, and Howell Raines stages a strategic withdrawal: flyfishing for a while, then riding poor Grady, his family's old servant, to a Pulitzer prize, refreshing himself for the challenge of conservatism...
...You would learn, however, about the courtier spirit, which the Times seems to nurture...
...Meanwhile, Leo Tolstoy, who once wrote an essay for the New York Times Magazine, is banished to make room for monologist Spalding Gray ("So everyone takes their clothes off and lines up like this huddling mob of naked refugees") and articles editor Gerald Marzorati, trailing Salman Rushdie around London...
...Bosnia is drenched in blood...
...And in this century of medical science's greatest triumphs, the cynical reader may guess in advance which topics are included: toxic shock syndrome, breast cancer, and AIDS...
...No mention of Ronald Reagan...
...This note of adoration is frequently struck: From Robert Lipsyte on Muhammad Ali ("Youth and light and magic, a Technicolor genie in a bottle-green world...
...And what better proof is needed than the periodic spectacle of journalists attempting to behave as historians...
...Mencken, Boris Pasternak, Ezra Pound, Edith Wharton, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Luigi Pirandello, Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Paul Val?ry, Willa Cather, William Butler Yeats, or Rainer Maria Rilke...
...Space is found, however, for Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Norman Mailer ("The emotional meat of the heart might be free of the common bile"), Joyce Carol Oates, Joyce Maynard ("My generation is special because of what we missed rather than what we got"), and Delmore Schwartz on Marilyn Monroe...
...Most striking, in all its pages, is what cannot be found...
...To recapture those "moments of memorable writing," Rosenthal explains, excerpts were presented in chronological order...
...What, no essay on the homeless...
...The specter of AIDS stalks the land...
...as good as, perhaps better than, Malcolm or Martin...
...The world before 1960 or so can scarcely be discerned...
...He is perhaps the finest preacher in the country...
...They are run-of-the-mill honkies compared to Jesse...
...So here, then, we know we are in the realm of the journalist-even worse, the Baby Boom journalist...
...Here is Herbert L. Matthews on Fidel Castro: "Apparently it is hard for some to understand how otherwise he can work so feverishly for 20 or 21 hours a day, every day without a break...
...Where contemporary feminism is concerned, no dissenting voices may be heard on any page: It's all Vivian Gornick, Bella Abzug, Susan Brownmiller, Kate Millett, even Susan B. Anthony II and a locker roomful of sweating high-school athletes...
...For no historian would ever suppose such a thing...
...Forster, Vladimir Nabokov, H.L...
...Of science, there is nothing about the theory of relativity, DNA, antibiotics, the fight against cancer, or splitting the atom-not even about the Bomb, a startling omission that would not have occurred in the nuclear-minded 1980s...
...One woman named Mrs...
...For the New York Times Magazine, all those four-color graphics and self-congratulations cannot hide a painful truth: The Sixties are over, and it's all downhill from here...
...The battles of the culture war are starting to be lost, or so James Atlas seems to think...
...from Anne Taylor Fleming on Truman Capote ("He sees everything and can make stories out of everyone...
...The Communist collapse seems to agitate the world...
...More like incessant...
...he has the build of a professional football player and the strength of a bull...
...Auden, T.S...
...Enduring...
...the world before 1940 is practically invisible...
...The Argentine writer Jacobo Timerman is tortured...
...Indeed, once the distant past is thankfully behind them, the editors descend upon familiar ground, retooling the recent past to present-day perspective...
...And yet, toward the end, a pattern seems to form...
...There is one brief, quirky piece set in World War I; there are eight dispatches from Vietnam...
...From the founding of the magazine in 1896 until the eve of World War II-the "Early Years," as the editors call them-nearly half the 20th century is artfully dismissed with an airy visit to the Hamptons, four paragraphs about state senator Franklin Roosevelt, two bird's-eye views of Adolf Hitler, vignettes of Joe Louis and Henry Ford, and nothing whatsoever about the Bolshevik revolution, psychoanalysis, the modernist schools in any of the arts, the Progressive movement, Prohibition, the crash, the Depression, Charlie Chaplin, the talkies, the Armory show, the Armistice, or Aimee Semple McPherson...
...Salman Rushdie faces death...
...but otherwise, it's forever 1972 and the Equal Rights Amendment is marching toward passage...
...you would never have known that Dwight D. Eisenhower had lived, or Bishop Sheen, Adlai Stevenson, Helen Keller, Dean Acheson, Norman Rockwell, Charles de Gaulle, David Riesman, or Robert Taft...
...Joe McCarthy, Jack Kerouac, and John F Kennedy...
...Katha Pollitt is enamored of abortion on demand...
...By the 1980s and the first half of the 90s, as the century is waning, there's a mournful, disturbing, almost elegiac tone to the picture Jack Rosenthal is piecing together...
...Of literature, no mention is made of F Scott Fitzgerald, WH...
...Of war, there is nothing about Manchuria, or Korea, or the Marne, or the Somme, or the Bulge, or the Chinese or Spanish civil wars...
...Eliot, Sherwood Anderson, Evelyn Waugh, William Faulkner, Jean Cocteau, Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Alberto Moravia, E.M...
...Maybe history, for these journalists, is coming to an end: The Baby Boom editors are starting to slow down, and the last half of the century is slipping away...
...Philip Terzian writes a column from Washington for the Providence Journal...
Vol. 1 • April 1996 • No. 32
