The Back Page

  As a quick thinking senatorial aide switched on the Senate's public-address system and cued up the infamous "Seven Minutes of Funk" break, Mr. Leahy and Mr. Cheny went head-to-head in what can only be described as a "take no prisoners" freestyle rap battle.

   -The New Yorker

 

It's not even my own writing, but I knew when I read this earlier today that I had to share it with my listeners.  But if I may rant, I must say I was disappointed with the rest of the New Yorker that I encountered.  The "Talk of the Town" section really had nothing but cloying rhetoric: the same left-wing arguments I've heard my whole life only written with more style.  To draw a parallel, let's think of the left-wing as all minor keys in music.  Minor keys lead straitway to interesting melodies brimming with style.  Very few major melodies share in this popularity.  Of course, good music must use both major and minor feels, just as good politics must have competition.

 

To give you a sense of what I mean, let me fish through the magazine for an example....  Adam Gopnik writes about the nascent ubiquity of the bicycletaxi in midtown.  Yes, the "modern" rickshaw.  In the spirit of today's periodicals, he first drops a few names then makes a moral judgement, (then drops another reference):

 

What Robert Reich has talked about for years, and John Edwards has talked about for the past several months--that the gaps has widened between the wealthy few and everybody else--is, in the bicycle taxi, suddenly given a local habitation and a loud bell.  The feeling is not even so much capitalist as feudal.  You are the lord of the manor, being pulled through the streets on a sedan chair; he is Piers Plowman, in spandex shorts.

 

See: it's good writing.  Let me criticize it, rather than the underlying politics.  First, the last word: shorts.  "Spandex" would suffice perfectly in this context, but saying "spandex shorts" makes him sound like an old fart.  I conclude either he is an old fart (that is, he lacks the ability of young people to adapt to new things), or he's trying to be one for his audience, which is more offensive.  But this brings me to my second point: that it is precisely young people who do this job.  Could you fathom anyone over the age of twenty-four pedaling the bike?  I never imagined feudalism as the old money-holders protecting the young able-bodied workers.

 

Do readers of the New Yorker really exist in a bubble that somehow this writer is without?  He's saying: look, midtowners, now you have to own up to young people's lack of wealth.  I'm certain that businessmen and women were also young once and quite aware of how much work and sacrifice they had to put in to attain their current position (as the people who can afford to ride in the bicycle taxi).

 

So to criticize the name of the section "The Talk of the Town," my question is this: is this what people discuss (I mean literally, not just something that might come up under espresso-charged ruminations), or is this fuel for discussion?  And if someone brings one of these topics up, he's sure to use the same style as those authors.  So that's what the New Yorker now strikes me as: style in a can.