War of Words

In today’s New York Observer, our old friend Philip Weiss indulges us in one of our favorite subjects—the history of the New Yorker. Weiss, you may know, began his decorated career in journalism here in the Twin Cities and some of his most memorable stories have been set in the area. (His profile in Harper’s of Stephen Blumberg, the Twin Cities native who took bibliophila to felonious new heights, is a classic.)

Anyway, Weiss reiterates the story of New Yorker writer Jack Kahn, who was one of the magazine’s most prolific authors, and helped establish its national reputation by writing from the ranks of the U.S. Army during World War II. We’ve mentioned before one of the mechanical reasons the New Yorker supersized its national reputation (and circulation) after the war—they’d cultivated a massive readership in the military itself with free Pony editions. When GIs got home from the war, they became subscribers en masse, wherever they lived.

Weiss makes a good case based on aesthetics as well. Before World War II, the magazine was fizzy. It still considered itself primarily a humor magazine set in the Jazz age. War changed the tenor of the times, and would either kill the the magazine or require it to evolve. It was always a good magazine, but a world war was the kind of journalistic material that created an opportunity to make a lasting contribution to American letters. Harold Ross and his staff rose to the occasion, and their achievement has now persisted for three-quarters of a century. (The title of Weiss’s article, “The New Yorker at War,” is also the title of an old anthology of the magazine’s best pieces from World War II. Highly recommended.)

It makes us sad to consider how times have changed. We hate to be defeatist, but it seems like no amount of courage today is enough to do meaningful work in the field of journalism, particularly as it pertains to Iraq. Print as a medium has certainly declined in substance and style, but more crucially, the entire culture is inured to journalism. Reporters and writers are held in low esteem—generally considered either rubes to be manipulated by PR flacks, or partisan snipers to be avoided at any cost. In both cases, the free movement of both mind and body are gone, for the journalist. The borders are closed; we simply do not get the access or the respect that reporters got in the middle of the last century.

To get directly to the point: Why aren’t there any memorable stories coming out of Iraq—the most important story of the new century? It is because good, thoughtful, independent writers are not getting in or out, and the military has a waterproof monopoly on virtually all meaningful information there. If it does not support the campaign, it is not allowed. Please refer to your wallet-card instructions for dealing with the press.

More subtly, the main difference between then and now is this: Today’s volunteer army is far more class-segregated than the drafted armies of the second world war. The New Yorker had a number of established young writers who were subsequently drafted and went to war. Almost to a man, these young fellows wished to continue to write for the New Yorker. Today, nothing is more rare than a trained writer in the ranks. Even if we could find him, he would have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting clearance to write for an independent, objective, for-profit magazine. If the military has learned anything in the past fifty years, it’s how to use information as yet another weapon in the arsenal. Never has the phrase “loose lips sink ships” been more threatening to the simple enterprise of telling a truthful and engaging story about the most important, brutally dangerous moment in our lifetimes.