Altercation: Goodbye and Thanks

So, this is my last Altercation newsletter. I’m not being fired or anything. It’s just that the foundation that was paying for it, the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, made a two-year commitment to the Prospect right before it spent down all its funds. This month also marks, almost exactly, the 30-year anniversary of the moment I first began my now-ended streak of having my own column. It began with Mother Jones in 1993 and then Rolling Stone a year later and eventually resulted in long stints with The Nation (25 years), MSNBC.com (12 years; no archives), the Center for American Progress (14 years), and much shorter stints at—as I count them—seven other publications and/or websites during the same period.

I was thinking of trying to write something deep and meaningful, but then, first thing Tuesday morning, I received a call that Victor Navasky had died. Victor published my first-ever piece in a national magazine back in March 1983 before hiring me and giving me a column 12 years later. Since then, he’s been a dear friend, a mentor, and a role model; not merely as a journalist and a scholar, but also—and I know this is weird given what different personality types we are—a person. I could go on about this for pages and pages, but I’ll just say this: The fundamental genius of Victor that I have always tried (and most often failed) to emulate was his ability to care about little things as much as he cared about big things; he cared about individual people as much as he cared about millions of people; he had an incredible gift for being interested in almost everyone and finding something worthwhile in spending time listening to their thoughts and doing what he could to help with their problems. If he could not help you with something, he reached into his unimaginably enormous network of friends and professional acquaintances to find someone who maybe could. This was true whether you were his friend or just someone who needed help. His generosity was matched only by his wiles and parsimony. Victor’s memory is already a blessing, not only to me and the thousands of lives he touched personally, but also to the millions of people who live on a nicer, fairer planet thanks to his (literally) undying efforts.

Here is the best profile of Victor I’ve so far come across, and the photo above of the two of us was taken at my 60th birthday party, just over three years ago.

As for me, my career in journalism (as opposed to my contiguous career in academia) has had, as I understand it, three phases. In its earliest one, I began believing that the truth would set us free. By that I mean that better information provided to citizens via good journalism would lead them to pursue politics in a more sensible, and possibly humane, fashion and that my job would be to be such a provider. That’s nonsense, of course. I should have listened harder to Paul Simon when he instructed us that “a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest” back in 1970. (I’ve now used that quote as an epigraph for two of my books, spaced exactly 30 years apart—so you’d think I would have understood it better.)

In my second phase, I had hopes that by focusing attention on the lies, dissimulations, ideological assumptions, and cowardice of the mainstream media—particularly given its members’ desire to kowtow to their conservative critics who evinced no respect or even interest in either the craft of journalism or truth itself—I might be able to embarrass these same journalists into doing a better job. I was willing to make enemies in the service of this cause, even, when necessary, with the folks who buy ink by the barrel. But eventually, it became clear to me that MSM journalists are ultimately unembarrassable. The weaknesses of the MSM are more pronounced than ever. Every week for the past two years, when I have looked for a lead item for Altercation, I’ve been overwhelmed by potential examples. For instance, were I doing a detailed disquisition this week, I could have picked:

This ridiculous piece in Politico, which compares Republican and Democratic (though actually bipartisan, since we’re talking about the January 6th Committee) investigative techniques without taking note that one of them was investigating a violent attempt to overthrow the duly elected government of the United States while the other one wants to focus on dick pics—among other no less relevant issues as they relate to the actual governance of the United States—in the laptop computer of the president’s son, a son who played no role whatsoever in the government. (This is in contrast to Jared Kushner, who did and received payments in the billions of dollars from foreign autocracies in apparent gratitude for his willingness to help mitigate the reaction to their murder and dismemberment of journalists and dissidents.

Or

This almost unbelievably stupid story about a Tucker Carlson–inspired—I can’t believe I’m writing these words—“scandal” about female names given to M&M flavors, which the Times poses as a problem for the manufacturer because it “found itself in the culture wars.” A better headline would have been “Nothing is too ridiculous for Tucker Carlson to pretend to care about or for The New York Times to write about, as we continue to do everything to kowtow to right-wing lunatics who hate journalism and don’t care about truth, but somehow intimidate us into making jerks of ourselves with headlines like this one above stupid stories like this one” (or something like that).

Or

What about this Times story? My alternative headline: “Biden and Trump’s documents cases are completely different, but we intend to cover them as if they are exactly the same, because, as with Hillary Clinton’s emails, we like to blow up phony Democratic ‘scandals,’ to the point where they appear at least as egregious as, say, the treasonous crimes.”

Additionally, does the fact that the Times Twitter feed had to post this explanation tell you anything about the assumption that underlies its (and to be fair, most mainstream) journalism? “Correction: An earlier tweet misstated the nature of recent debt ceiling showdowns. Both parties are responsible for the debt, but only Republicans are using it as a political tool. We deleted the incorrect tweet.”

I could go on, almost endlessly, but my point here is that in my third phase, I realized the primary value of what I wrote was in (a) keeping myself (relatively) sane, and (b) helping my readers to feel that they were also sane despite what they were reading and seeing elsewhere, and perhaps even a little less alone in the world as a result.

The key question I want to leave people with is this: Given the lack of guardrails, how far are these people willing to go? Trump is as popular as he was before January 6th and has been invited back on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. His only credible alternative for the Republican nomination at this point, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is in many significant respects even worse than Trump. Kevin McCarthy is elevating lunatic insurrectionists who fear Jewish space lasers and children’s books about loving gay parents to positions with real power and rejecting people merely because they are competent and committed to the Constitution. Tucker Carlson, a paranoid, racist co-conspirator of the morally disgusting Alex Jones, has the highest ratings in cable news. Thanks in part to a great lineup at the New York Jewish Film Festival this month, I’ve just recently seen a whole bunch of films about the fate of fascism in Germany, Austria, France, Ukraine, and Poland—I’m considering Stalinism to be a form of fascism here—and another about Eichmann’s trial and death in Israel, and elsewhere in theaters about town, about fascism in Argentina, in Italy (which I wrote about here), and another one about Austria. They speak to this question, which has long been on my mind: How far are these people willing to go and what is to stop them?

My answer is that I really don’t know. I just know I never imagined, when I began writing about the overall awfulness of the American right and the wimpiness of its left, that my country would ever face a question like this one.

In We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel news, here’s a nice long interview Andrew Silow-Carroll did with me for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. If you want to see me talk about it, there will be a Zoom event with David Kraemer of the Jewish Theological Seminary on February 7 (register here) and another on February 15 with Kai Bird, sponsored by the CUNY Center for Jewish Studies (register here). If you want to keep up with my future talks or writing, I will be listing them on my open Facebook page and Twitter feed. I have also registered an Altercation Substack page, and so can you. It’s free, but I have not yet decided how or if I will use it, as I have always been a fan of Samuel Johnson and I would not wish him to think me a blockhead should he, Navasky, and I ever share a martini in the great hereafter …

The Music Part

I caught Scott Robinson this week leading the Octet in a celebration of the tenor sax and flute man Frank Wess, who most people know from his many years with the iconic Count Basie Orchestra. Wess was one of its longest-living members and he formed a partnership with the reedist Robinson, who put together this standout band that sends one back into the past in the best possible way. They’ll be playing two sets through Saturday night at Birdland to celebrate Wess’s 101st birthday and you can say hello to Wess’s widow, Sara Tsutsumi, after the show. Bonus: Here is a video of then 87-year-old Wess and Robinson burning up the joint back in 2009.

Well, that’s about it. But because tramps like me were this, I must finally say to all my readers this, and finally, offer a heartfelt this.