By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, July 07, 2020
There are many dumb genres of American journalism, and it
is difficult to say which is truly and finally the dumbest, unless we consider
Jonathan Chait’s output a genre unto itself. But, short of taking that drastic
step, the “As a One-Armed Paper-Hanger” essay may take the booby prize.
The “As a One-Armed Paper-Hanger” essay is based on a
claim of special standing to speak to a particular issue. That special standing
is based on an experience, usually traumatic or familial, that is in no way
related to actual expertise. “As Someone Who Is Dying of Leukemia, Here
Is What I Think About Health-Care Reform,” “As the Mother of a Child Who Died
in a Horrifying School Shooting, Here Is What I Think About Gun Control,” “I’m
a Very Very Rich Guy Who Supports Higher Taxes on Very Very Rich Guys,” etc.
In fact, having leukemia doesn’t give you any special
knowledge about the economics of health-insurance subsidies or insurance
regulation, losing a child in a terrible crime does not give you any special
insight into crime prevention or Second Amendment jurisprudence, and being a
very very rich guy doesn’t make you an expert on anything, necessarily, though
a very very large share of very very rich guys seems to think otherwise.
The “As a One-Armed Paper-Hanger” essay is almost always
a sympathy play, with politicians and newspaper editors exploiting the victims
of horrible events or awful diseases in the service of the ideological
orientations under which they already are operating. (The other kind of
sympathy play is the authorial-martyr model: “Look at me heroically endorsing
something that is superficially against my own interests!”). It is relatively
rare, for example, to see an essay in a big liberal newspaper headlined “As the
Mother of a Child Who Died in a Horrifying School Shooting, I Support the
Second Amendment,” although you do see an essay like that every now and then.
(People also see Bigfoot every now and then.) “As a Latino, I Support Building
a Dozen New Natural-Gas Pipelines” is every bit as intellectually sensible a
headline as “As a Latino, I Oppose Building a Border Wall,” but it doesn’t have
the same dumb emotional appeal.
Never mind that sick people have as wide an array of
opinions on health care as healthy people do, that people come away from
violent experiences with very different opinions about gun control and much
else, that there are poor people who think taxes on the rich are too high as
well as rich people who think taxes on the rich are too low, that Latino people
have different views on immigration, etc. The range of expression in the
typical American newspaper’s op-ed pages is like paint-by-numbers for people
who can’t count past four.
A particularly stupid variant on the “As a One-Armed
Paper-Hanger” essay is the distant-relation essay, for example Monday’s New
York Times column by some jabroni with a name that sounds like a bad
amateur parody of an old National Review byline: Lucian K. Truscott IV.
Thank goodness he puts both the K and the IV in there so as to distinguish him
from all the other Lucian Truscotts out there.
(And it really is too bad that the guitarist who styles
himself Yngwie J. Malmsteen is not Yngwie J. Malmsteen IV.)
If you have come across the byline of Lucian K. Truscott
IV in the past, then you may know that he is a distant relative of Thomas
Jefferson’s. In fact, almost every article that I can remember having seen from
him (not a huge sample, I admit) mentions that connection. Being a distant
relation of Thomas Jefferson’s is, in part, the profession of Lucian K.
Truscott IV. And that is sufficient to get him into the pages of the New
York Times with an exercise in pointlessness headlined “I’m a Direct
Descendant of Thomas Jefferson. Take Down His Memorial.”
As any direct descendent of Adam could tell you, being a
distant relation of Jefferson’s gives no one any special insight into the
contemporary controversy over Washington’s monuments. Does Lucian K. Truscott
IV have anything interesting to say on the subject of the Jefferson Memorial?
No, Lucian K. Truscott IV does not have anything interesting to say on the
subject of the Jefferson Memorial. The Times knows that he has nothing interesting
to say, but the Times thinks it is interesting that he says it.
The Times is wrong about that. There is not one original thought or interesting
sentence in the essay. But Lucian K. Truscott IV still would very much like you
to join him on his stroll down memory lane, complete with some truly banal
scene-setting that I will be obliged to interrupt at a few points:
When my brother Frank and I were
boys visiting our grandparents at their home in Virginia, just outside of
Washington, we used to heckle [sic; that isn’t what heckle means;
what, did the Times opinion page fire its editor?] our grandmother until
she would drive us into town so we could visit the Smithsonian museum on the
Mall.
As we crossed the Potomac River on
the 14th Street Bridge [speaking of memorials, the 14th Street bridge was
renamed in 1958 for Marshal Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de
Rochambeau, who helped Americans win the Revolution, and then renamed again for
Arland D. Williams Jr., who died in an airplane crash] the Jefferson Memorial
stood off to the left, overlooking the Tidal Basin. [It still does.] I don’t
remember ever visiting the memorial, even though it was just a short walk from
the museums. It was located on the Mall, along Jefferson Drive, naturally. [It
is in West Potomac Park off Basin Drive.]
We were surrounded by the history
of Thomas Jefferson when we made those visits to our grandparents. We would
drive down to Charlottesville with our grandmother to visit our great-aunts and
our great-grandmother — and they would take us up the mountain to Monticello
and drop us off to play in the house and on the grounds. They treated
Monticello like it was the family home, because in a way it was: They were
great-granddaughters of Jefferson. They had been born and grew up only a few
miles away at a family plantation, called Edgehill.
I guess that’s why my brother and
I, the great-grandsons, took the Jefferson Memorial for granted.
It goes on in much the same
elderly-Washington-tour-guide-indiscriminately-verbalizing-his-field-of-vision
mode until Lucian K. Truscott IV musters, if not quite an argument, then a
little bit of rhetoric
It’s a shrine to a man who famously
wrote that “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence that
founded this nation — and yet never did much to make those words come true.
that is rather less fleshed out than Frederick Douglass’s
indictment of Jefferson. And here I do not even mean the real-life Frederick
Douglass but the joke version in Epic Rap Battles of History,
who has a much pithier take on Jefferson’s failures but who is not — poor
fellow! — distantly related to an 18th-century historical figure in the news.
Naturally, it never occurs to Lucian K. Truscott IV or to
the editors at the New York Times that Thomas Jefferson’s “all men are
created equal” was not put forward as a promise that might one day in
the future be made to “come true” like a fairy tale but instead was a statement
of something believed to be true at the time Jefferson wrote it — which is, in
fact, more damning for the Founders than the clumsy interpretation of Lucian K.
Truscott IV. That is another reminder that people who cannot write clearly
cannot think clearly, and that elevating sympathy plays over actual argument
invariably produces mush.
I have spent many years writing about free trade and
tariffs. And I am, if the family Bible is to be believed, distantly related to
William McKinley, who backed a very stupid tariff scheme in 1890 and ended his
career by managing to get himself murdered by an anarchist. But I must resist
the urge to start shopping around my “As a Distant Relative of William
McKinley, I Think Tariffs Are Pretty Dumb” essay.
The times being what they are, I calculate that I am less likely to sell that essay than I am to be murdered by anarchists.
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