House of Eratosthenes

Last December, I got into a rather silly and spicy exchange with some other blogger who inflicted his glorious assault against this blog, which calls itself the blog that nobody reads, with his condescending pronouncement that nobody will ever read this blog. Well, surprise, surprise. I fired the opening salvo in that exchange, charging that opinions were being formed based on alleged facts that, according to the opinion-formers themselves, fell short of commanding overwhelming merit or even lukewarm merit. This, I charged, was ill-advised for a resource calling itself the “Hammer of Truth.” Interestingly, his pattern was to swivel the subject around from a dialog about verity, to a dialog about brevity. Never mind what’s right, or wrong, or verifiable, or falsifiable, or what remains an enigma: MY SHIT WAS TOO LONG.

Well, I’m not going to sit here and type in some nonsense to the effect that I fancy myself innocent of the charge. I write short stuff when I feel like it, and I write long stuff when I feel like it. I do what I want. People read it, or they don’t; which is why it’s called the blog that nobody reads. But it’s interesting: Mr. VanDyke is not the first to point out, upon perusing my products, that Hey Themz A Lot Of Big Wurdz Up There and try to launch literary criticism based on this discovery. And there’s merit to this literary criticism. Some. I see something written for the intent of being read, and I have these feelings of tedium and exhaustion that compels me to avoid reading it, it’s natural to suppose the author would benefit from that information — and it’s very human to suppose many other potential readers are weighed down by the same sense of exhaustion, before I’ve verified this is the case.

“Human,” however, isn’t always right. That’s an important thing to realize in a dialog where one party wants to debate what is quick-and-snappy, and the other party wants to debate what is right. I think I’ve picked on VanDyke enough, but there are many other people running around with the same issues: I see something I don’t like, something which is based on fact or legitimate question, but runs on a little bit long. I pronounce the facts delusive or the questions baseless, because I don’t like the result — but I’ll pretend it has something to do with the length. Yes, that’s it. Your stuff is really long, so it must not be right.

To these critics, I present Peggy Noonan, speechwriter for arguably the greatest public-speaking United States President in modern times. Noonan is compelling. Convincing. Soothing. Is she quick? Snappy? Witty? Do I suddenly realize a Noonan speech is over, and am I left wondering where all the time went because I had such a great time listening to it? Is her product what you would call a “page-turner”?

No, no, no, no and no.

In terms of presenting the product in a bite-sized package easily digested by an audience with a limited attention-span, Noonan isn’t even competent. Nor does she even try to be. No, Peggy Noonan strives for accuracy. And comprehensive coverage. She is like the grandfather or uncle who receives for Christmas, because of someone’s poor judgment, an eight-megapixel digital camera and now floods your e-mail multiple times a week with casual snapshots of the family cat, 24-bit True Color, several megabytes in size, compressed. The difference is that Noonan knows what she’s doing: She has a list of things she wants to cover, she’s already whittled that list down from something else thank you very much, and damn it, she’s going to cover all of what’s left. And she has her reasons for hitting it all.

Her essays are like a chapter in The Godfather. If you can’t remember what the point was in any particular passage, or you understand the point but fail to see how it melded in with the rest of the work, you just go over it again. And it’s always a pleasure to go over it again.

Of course, maybe if you disagree with the point she’s trying to make, or you agree with it but only grudgingly, perhaps that’s not pleasurable. But that’s true of anything.

But the point is, Noonan’s product, in its own way, works. Reagan kicked ass. Both times. And it’s generally agreed, even among people who despised Reagan, that his victories were due to his speeches — his ability to connect with his audience.

Now, discounting that tidbit about “we begin bombing in five minutes” what was the shortest Reagan speech ever? They weren’t short. Nobody cared. Through Reagan’s presidency, Noonan was able to convey not only the text, but the culture in which the text was wrapped: I am the writer, you are the listener. We both have jobs to do. The speech is as long as it needs to be, but it makes sense. It’s up to you to put it together.

That’s a good thing. Not that brevity is a bad thing; sometimes brevity can be a good thing too. But being apathetic about it, and being more passionate about the truth than about length, is always a good thing. Because when you subordinate your respect for the truth to other considerations, it calls into question everything you have to say, and everything you’ve absorbed in order to form the things you have to say.

And at that point, even a single word is way too long.

Noonan is a heroine. She is one of my heroes. This is not to say when you read a Morgan Freeberg essay, you’re seeing something trying to be a Peggy Noonan essay — I have other heroes too, who write differently. But she breaks rules. Time-honored, time-tested rules that “everybody knows” represent the “right way” to do things. She breaks them, and yet, her success is beyond question. Like it or not, her success is a demonstrated fact.

Take a look at this careful, plodding mission of identifying everything she has seen, good-and-bad, and stating the obvious in such a way that the reader may be inspired to think of a thing or two that aren’t quite so obvious:

Which gets us to George Clooney, and his work. George Clooney is Hollywood now. He is charming and beautiful and cool, but he is not Orson Welles. I know that’s like saying of an artist that he’s no Rembrandt, but bear with me because I have a point that I think is worth making.

Orson Welles was an artist. George Clooney is a fellow who read an article and now wants to tell us the truth, if we can handle it.

More important, Orson Welles had a canny respect for the audience while maintaining a difficult relationship with studio executives, whom he approached as if they were his intellectual and artistic inferiors. George Clooney has a canny respect for the Hollywood establishment, for its executives and agents, and treats his audience as if it were composed of his intellectual and artistic inferiors. (He is not alone in this. He is only this year’s example.)

And because they are his inferiors, he must teach them. He must teach them about racial tolerance and speaking truth to power, etc. He must teach them to be brave. And so in his acceptance speech for best supporting actor the other night he instructed the audience about Hollywood’s courage in making movies about AIDS, and recognizing the work of Hattie McDaniel with an Oscar.

Was his speech wholly without merit? No. It was a response and not an attack, and it appears to have been impromptu. Mr. Clooney presumably didn’t know Jon Stewart would tease the audience for being out of touch, and he wanted to argue that out of touch isn’t all bad. Fair enough. It is hard to think on your feet in front of 38 million people, and most of his critics will never try it or have to. (This is a problem with modern media: Only the doer understands the degree of difficulty.)

But Mr. Clooney’s remarks were also part of the tinniness of the age, and of modern Hollywood. I don’t think he was being disingenuous in suggesting he was himself somewhat heroic. He doesn’t even know he’s not heroic. He thinks making a movie in 2005 that said McCarthyism was bad is heroic.

How could he think this? Maybe part of the answer is in this: The Clooney generation in Hollywood is not writing and directing movies about life as if they’ve experienced it, with all its mysteries and complexity and variety. In an odd way they haven’t experienced life; they’ve experienced media. Their films seem more an elaboration and meditation on media than an elaboration and meditation on life. This is how he could take such an unnuanced, unsophisticated, unknowing gloss on the 1950s and the McCarthy era. He just absorbed media about it. And that media itself came from certain assumptions and understandings, and myths.

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NoonanThursday, March 9th, 2006

Noonan
Thursday, March 9th, 2006