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Topic: Letters Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 3/4/2005 11:57:30 AM
Title: Andersen misses the "fresh, smart" Wolcott of old
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
From KURT ANDERSEN: I'm not in the habit of replying to public attacks. In fact, I don't think I've ever done so. But there's a first time for everything, so here is a response to James Wolcott's recent posting about the column I wrote in New York magazine.

Confession: I used to find it exhilarating to read James Wolcott when he was writing in his fresh, careful, smart and unpredictable fashion about TV for the Village Voice and the exigencies of the cultural moment for Vanity Fair. But during the last few years, once he discovered his own simple, predictable, self-righteous, driving political convictions and decided to give them endless, repetitive vent, I have found myself wondering what ever happened to the terrific cultural critic he once was. Rage is easy. Preaching to the choir is easy. "Spouting the same old tailpipe exhaust," as he remarked recently about Charles Krauthammer, is easy. What Wolcott used to do is hard.

It's sad that instead of engaging the substance of what I wrote in New York about the shifting ethics of one's position on the war in Iraq, and
partisanship's corrosion of intellectual honesty, he resorts almost entirely to ad hominem attack and accusations of bad faith. (Also, speaking of honesty, why does Wolcott now suggest that he liked Spy, since at the time, as I recall, he only ridiculed the magazine in print? Might this be some "positioning” on his part -- that is, because *back then* Spy was satirizing his Vanity Fair boss, whereas his *current* Vanity Fair boss was a co-founder of Spy? But I digress.)

As for "positions" I've taken, it's bizarre to me that the very piece that prompted Wolcott’s slag was all about taking a difficult position -- a position on Iraq that he finds disagreeable and tries to dismiss, in part, by asserting that I don't take positions. Moreover, when I've felt I had something remotely interesting or useful to add to worthy critiques of the Bush Administration and its allies (color-coded fear alerts, John Ashcroft, gay-baiting of SpongeBob, whatever), I've done so. And surely it counted as "taking a real position" by Wolcott's lights, for instance, when I emceed a fundraiser last fall for the Democratic voter-registration organization America Coming Together.

As for my supposedly invisible "enthusiasms": they drove the coverage
of New York magazine for the years I edited it, they have driven my book reviews and my writing and research about design and architecture, they drive the choice of subjects and the conversations every week on Studio 360. I could go on.

And finally, as for "binary modes": my loathing of political discourse
reduced to crudely partisan A and B ideological choice -- you're either a red-stater or a blue-stater, a believer in Michael Moore or Ann Coulter, a Bush-hater or a Bush-lover, no complexity allowed -- was the whole point of the column in New York. So, what appalls me? Fixed, easy, reactionary, black-and-white thinking of any ideological stripe. And it appalls me even more when it comes from people who don't have the excuse of stupidity.

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