Over at The Millions site, Garth Risk Hallberg administers a comprehensive whipping of criticism's most notorious pleasure-killing machine, B.R. Myers, author of A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American LIterary Culture and The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters. Myers may be a skilled interpreter of North Korean political culture, but he’s a one-man North Korea of literary sensibility. His primary bête noire is anything he deems postmodernist, and he beats on it like Camille Paglia humping a Madonna mannequin. You can discern both the style of his wooden invidiousness and the substance of his captious manifesto in a sample sentence like this one: “I would also rather join the reactionaries than those who want to reduce the printed sentence to an elongated Rorschach blot.” The only thing I regret about Hallberg’s counterstrike is his pinning it largely on a defense of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom against the perfidy of Myers’ recent review in the Atlantic; you don’t have to love the Franzen to have the Myers make your skin crawl. It's not really about the targets that Myers chooses (Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLilo, Denis Johnson, Toni Morrison, Jonathan Safran Foer), the narrow shelf of writers he's admired (John le Carré, and no one else I can recall at the moment), or the crabbed virtues he dimly champions. His disapprobation and praise amount to the same thing, a vivid instance of the malady that Samuel Johnson called “the general conspiracy against contemporary merit.”
Photograph of B.R. Myers courtesy of Seoul Rotary Club
[Updated below]
I've written before about the idiocy of generational theorizing and the bankruptcy of generational politics as a diagnostic tool. I’m vaguely dreading Matt Bai’s forthcoming book, The Great Distraction, talking ‘bout “the failed era of boomer politics,” given the poor odds of rising above the built-in sententiousness of such a shopworn enterprise.
Meanwhile, a salute to Andrew Sprung at the Xpostfactoid blog, my comrade in the cause of heaping ridicule on generational finger-wagging. His post today, "Thomas Friedman at his Thomas Friedmanest,” tears into the Flat-Earther’s latest Sunday column, which anticipates Bai’s lament while recycling one of Maureen Dowd’s signature tropes from her days of dissing Bill Clinton:
Leave it to Friedman to decide, as the U.S. struggles out of the steepest recession in 70 years, that our troubles are due to the moral failings of baby boomers, set off by a cartoonish Goofus/Gallant contrast with the Greatest Generation. His column putting this moralizing mush across is so jaw-droppingly sloppy that it seems self indulgent to try to debunk it...
Generational contrasts are the refuge for those who prefer moralizing to analysis. You cannot generalize about the moral composition of hundreds of millions of people born between arbitrarily selected dates. When I read boomer-bashings, I always mentally reply: if those of the WWII generation were such paragons, why did they raise a generation of feckless self-indulgent screwups? Is prosperity itself inherently corrupting? If so, we'd better stop trying to grow our economy. Further, one instance of the get-rich-quick mania that Friedman excoriates—the dotcom boom—was the flip side of an aspect of our economy he suggests we're losing—rapid technological development. The tension between productive economic development and unchecked greed is hardly a recent phenomenon in American history. Another alleged moral failing of U.S. leadership—taxcut goodies leading to budget problems—was promulgated in the first instance by WWII-gen President Ronald Reagan—while quintessential boomer Bill Clinton paid in political blood for rebalancing our tax and budget priorities.
I’m not in accord with every particular of Sprung’s Friedman-foiling ripostes, but it’s a pleasure to see bunkum debunked.
[Update I: Andrew Sprung added an exceptionally gracious and thoughtful addendum to his post in acknowledgment of my comments above.]
[Update II: Now Michael Kinsley has entered the fray with an Atlantic cover story on the "self-absorbed, self-indulged, and self-loathing" baby boomers and the debt they owe society for their crimes. In the end, it's a pretty silly, bad-faith affair, despite the gravitas of the forum; Kinsley is too whip-smart and cynical to play it straight with what is, after all, a hoary old chestnut. Meanwhile, James Bennet, the magazine's editor, tries to insist this all really matters, and Gary Trudeau, following up on his ignominious 1984 Newsweek cover illustration trumpeting "The Year of the Yuppie," offers a recruiting poster for a cause that's dead on arrival.]
