Conservative Author Cancels Subscription to the Garish 'Gray Lady'
Conservative author Joseph Epstein disowned the New York Times on Monday. "Adios, Gray Lady,"
he proclaimed at the Weekly Standard's website. "For years now she has been going heavy on the rouge, lipstick, and eyeliner, using a push-up bra, and gadding about in stiletto heels. She's become a bit -
perhaps more than a bit - of a slut, whoring after
youth through pretending to be with-it."
The front page no longer seemed to be a place for hard news, just gassy features: "Chief Justice Warren Sees No Trend in Burger Court," with its stunning irrelevance, is an old Times headline atop the kind of story I have in mind and see more and more of."
Epstein is bone-tired of the Times opinion pages. Although he briefly hailed David Brooks as not being "locked into a Pavlovian political
response," he declared that "I find no need to read any of the
Times's regular columnists." Then he really took out a cudgel:
Every so often I check to remind myself that Maureen Dowd isn't amusing, though she is an improvement, I suppose, over the termagantial Anna Quindlen, whom I used to read with the trepidation of a drunken husband mounting the stairs knowing his wife awaits with a rolling pin. I'd sooner read the fine print in my insurance policies than the paper's perfectly predictable editorials. Laughter, an elegant phrase, a surprising sentiment-the New York Times op-ed and editorial pages are the last place to look for any of these things....
I could go on about the artificial rage of Frank Rich - the liberals' Glenn Beck - or the forced gaiety of "Sunday Styles," but the main feeling I have as I rise from having wasted an hour or so with the Sunday New York Times is of what wretched shape the country is in if it is engaged in such boringly trivial pursuits, elevating to eminence such dim cultural and political figures, writing so muddledly about ostensibly significant subjects.
Epstein's distaste for the tastemakers in the Arts section has a certain elderly man's dismay that rock and rap music and "graphic novels" are defined as "the arts."
I sometimes glimpse the Arts section to see which wrong people are being praised or have been awarded large cash prizes or recognized for years of mediocre achievement by election to the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Arts, of course, are no longer quite The Arts, at least in the New York Times, which features hard rock and rap music and video games and graphic novels under the rubric The Arts. Only the photographs of dancers lend an aesthetic dimension to the shabby section.
I lift the Sunday New York Times from the hallway outside our apartment with a heart twice the weight of the hefty paper itself. From it I extract the Book Review, the magazine, "Sunday Styles," the "Week in Review." For decades now the New York Times Book Review has been devoted to reinforcing received (and mostly wrong) literary opinions and doing so in impressively undistinguished prose. The New York Times Magazine has always been dull, but earlier it erred on the side of seriousness. Now it is dull on the side of ersatz hipness. The other Sunday I put myself through a long article on the dangers of leaving a record of one's minor misdeeds on the Internet. The article's last sentence instructed that "we need to learn new forms of empathy, new ways of defining ourselves without reference to what others say about us and new ways of forgiving one another for the digital trails that will follow us forever." Yes, I thought, and wet birds never fly at night.
Epstein concluded:
Perhaps one picks up all newspapers in anticipation and puts them down in disappointment. But the New York Times, at no extra charge, also leaves one feeling one lives in immitigably dreary times, and it does so daily. I don't need it.
Cancel my subscription, please.
