Pierce on Obama

Did you also attend glorious Mizzou?

 

This is really a bravura performance on Mr. Pierce's part. And if he ever surfs past, I'd say to him what I said to Jones on the occasion of his latest: I'm proud and happy and flattered to be writing in the same age.

At once insightful and inciting, lyrical and polemical, hard-boiled and melancholy, this is a virtuoso piece in the long, noble line of political/cultural literature from the pages of Esquire. It's a direct descendant of Mailer's "Superman Comes to the Supermarket." While it rings a little of Dr. Thompson I suppose, it rejects his excesses and gymnastics, and has a great deal more in common with the beautifully observed work of someone like Michael Herr.

To think of a piece like this as only partisan misses the point of the work almost entirely. Like Herr in 'Dispatches,' the moral authority of the piece derives from the writer's own pilgrimage, his own quest for answers. The quality and precision of the observations made on that pilgrimage are what earn the author a right to judge and criticize the landscape across which that journey occurs. By being scrupulously honest about himself, the 'cynic' here earns the right to be scrupulously honest (by his lights) about others. If you don't see the battered optimism and love of country at the core of the 'cynic,' you're not reading this piece closely enough.

'Objectivity' doesn't simply mean 'neutrality.' Sometimes in work like this it means revealing yourself - your own moral core, your own hopes or hopelessness - and then assessing as fairly as you can what you see around you on exactly the same terms.

This isn't 'advocacy journalism' in the sense most of us seem to have of that term. This is journalism that advocates nothing but a further search for greater truths. Whatever they are and wherever they might be found.

And if I'm being completely honest, I find some of the hair-trigger wrongheadedness in our readings of the piece deeply dispiriting. As if we - mostly working journalists, after all - were no longer up to the task of interpreting work that challenges the current conventions of 10-second soundbites and 6th-grade reading levels.

 

Much like Mr. jgmacg is proud and happy to be writing in the same age of Mr. Pierce and Mr. Jones, I feel pretty damn good about posting on the same message board as jgmacg.

Mercy lord, that was a good summary of this story.

 

Six graphs and a Chester Arthur reference before we get a quote (via the radio) from Obama. It's an interesting piece of writing, but it seemed to be more about Pierce than Obama. Dude should start a blog.

 

The elipses...are going to give me...epilepsy...

 

And here I thought that writing, even great writing, is often open to different interpretations. Depending, of course, on the individual reader.

The piece is long, four Internet pages long. There are many things that could be taken from it, and to call someone else's view of it "wrongheaded" and akin to "6th-grade reading levels" is unfair.

And yes, "dispiriting" on a message board where we dissect great writing, from many different angles, daily.

 

Wasn't referring to you, PR, for whatever that's worth.

Add:

And the "6th-grade reading levels" refer to what our publishers ask us to keep in mind when we write - not the reading level of those gathered here.

 

Haven't read it yet, but on the occassions that I have read him in the past (not too many, mostly sports - the Manny one comes first to mind), I have yet to see why everyone here fawns over him.

 

I'm as big a Pierce fan as there is, but that was a self-indulgent, solipsistic piece of garbage.

 

That's fair, and thanks.

I just feel there are many ways such a piece could be interpreted. Including my own view that "the cynic" could be a character representing those who still don't believe in Obama.

 

I honor interpretation, PR. I just think you have to read a piece in its entirety as closely as you can, and then digest it, before offering one.

 

I was not a big fan of this one. Probably because I do think that Pierce's version of the America that once existed is just as sepia-toned as Obama's version of our future (which Pierce alludes to in the final paragraphs)