I am, I fear, too small a fry in the publishing world to lure Roger Kimball, the co-editor and co-publisher of the highbrow conservative journal The New Criterion, into a catfight, but just in case he’s listening, I want him to know that I find his writing voice pretentious and his thinking stale (oh, snap!).
I’m struggling to find the right word to describe his particular brand of assholery—he’s not quite a toff, or a prig, or a popinjay—but he’s definitely in that family of men whose personae are premised on the aggressive display of erudition, on a vast collection of bowties, on scorn for all forms of literary theory that arrived after T.S. Eliot laid his thing down, and on an apparently absolute certainty that anyone who disagrees with them must be the captive of a corrupt ideology or the victim of a second-class education.
Usually, this is the point in my post when I point out that under all those bowties, and neat-o references to Aristotle, there must be the hurting soul of a little boy who wasn’t loved well enough by his parents, and surely there is—the arrogance that oozes out of every sentence that Kimball writes has to be a defense for some kind of deep pain—but I’m just not finding the sympathy that I usually manage to find, for some reason, when writing about men who always seem like they’re just one traffic ticket away from beating their wives with a tire iron.
Maybe it’s the residue of my own experience as a kid of feeling like my smarts weren’t recognized because they weren’t wrapped in the right package, but sometimes you just don’t like a guy, and I really don’t like Kimball.
Typical of Kimball is a recent post to his blog, in which he riffs on a Hilary Clinton speech in which she "threatened legislation to regulate the mortgage lending industry closely if money managers do not come up with their own scheme to defray the effects of the subprime mortgage collapse. She also served notice on wealthy Americans that they should be prepared for tax increases."
Kimball launches his argument like this:
“Those who cannot remember the past,” Santayana famously wrote, “are condemned to repeat it.” What he didn’t say, but what often seems to be the case, is that we can remember the past just fine and then go on to repeat it anyway. A variation, perhaps, of Ovid’s observation that “video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor”—“I see and approve the better path, but follow the worse.”
He goes on to reference, or quote, Mussolini, Lenin, Adam Smith, Orwell, W.S. Gilbert (of the & Sullivans Gilberts), Hilaire Belloc, Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes, and Friedrich Hayek (whose Road to Serfdom apparently convinced Kimball that he never has to think another thought about economics ever again).
He commends a mediocre joke by a fellow conservative blogger as a “a sterling deployment of rhetorical irony.”
He uses the words “lest,” “datum,” “legerdemain,” “contretemps,” and “redolent” without even the least sterling deployment of rhetorical irony.
And all this hullabaloo to make what reduces to a simplistic argument that government intervention in the “beneficient alchemy of capitalism” is a bad thing. There isn’t one surprising thought in all of it, or one concession to the possibility that his political nemeses might be thoughtful, reasonable people.
We talk a lot, at this blog, about the standard American macho poses and themes, but it’s worth pointing out that Kimball’s pose—the old-fashioned highbrow intellectual who’s fighting a rearguard action on behalf of civilization, tradition and virtue—projects a kind of machisimo as well. His writerly style—the many allusions, the hyper-precise diction, the vibe that the author believes he comes from better stock than you do—doesn’t have to be deployed against feminism and gay rights, against those of us who aren’t so sure that things in the old days were better, against pleasure and pop culture, against the poor. But it almost always is.
