"The New Yorker" on Sen. Larry Craig’s predicament
Sep 11th, 2007 by Paul Moor
“The New Yorker”, for me during my first several decades on earth the finest publication in the entire world and in recent years once again for me at least one of the finest, has now weighed in with its customary sylish grace, expertise, and authority on the continuing brouhaha about Sen. Craig’s apparently endless pillorying. (Linguistically I fell head over heels in love with “The New Yorker” during my years as a teenager in El Paso, Texas’ Stephen F. Austin High School, and I do not exaggerate when I say I learned more about writing my mother tongue from devouring “The New Yorker” every week virtually from cover to cover, skipping over almost nothing, than I did from all other high-school and university English classes I enrolled in put together. In 1949, during my first trip to Europe, the cultural stars who punctuated those six permanently addicting months included both Evelyn Waugh, at his country home down in Gloucestershire, and Christopher Fry, just recently moved into a wonderful new house up in Hampstead which he and his charming wife could newly afford thanks to the unexpected success of his delicious verse play The Lady’s Not for Burning, then enjoying an improbably long smash-hit run in London’s West End. They both, independent of each other and unprompted by me, said that in their opinions the finest English writing appearing anywhere at that time regularly appeared every week in “The New Yorker”.)
Hendrik Hertzberg, apparently a member of the magazine’s staff in its present incarnation, has an expectably brilliant upsumming of the Craig case in the latest issue entitled “Offenses” – note the plural – comparing Craig’s ordeal with related instances in the American past. I’ve made the complete article available to you by simply clicking here.
3 Responses to “"The New Yorker" on Sen. Larry Craig’s predicament”
Thanks for the pointer. I enjoyed the article.
I think it’s interesting that so many people are outraged about the Senator’s “conduct,” when his vocation is “politician.” In my estimation, maligning the Senator for his sexual peccadilloes is like taking an armed robber to task for wearing a mask that does not compliment his attire; it is incidental to the critical issue.
I feel sad for us humans–sad that our hormones are capable of overriding our judgment–compelling us to engage in behavior that compromises our dignity. The poor man is acting out because he has painted himself into a moral corner that does not allow him to exercise his preferences without becoming a target for the thought police.
If we would legalize prostitution, men could fulfill their needs safely. But, the radical supernaturalists have ensured against that happening. I am surprised that people find it paradoxical that a gay man would have spoken out so vehemently against gay issues; it is the nature of politics and the requirements of the job–staying in office.
Sometimes life in American seems like a giant party where everything that one’s heart’s desire is on the buffet table, but it is being distributed by conservative Baptists who refuse to allow you to have any of it. And, they don’t allow you to dance or laugh or leave.
What an asylum.
I haven’t gotten my New Yorker copy yet in the mail (apparently, they deliver it almost a week late in Texas, perhaps to vet the contents), but I do take some issue with Hertzberg’s comments. Not about police harrassment of homosexuals, but that he turns Craig into some sort of homosexual martyr. To compare him to Bayard Rustin borders on the ridiculous.
I agree with Michele Morgan (though not for her reasons) that Craig *is* a lying crapweasel. I don’t feel sorry for his family, since he would sell out his own mother for political power and since he had no regard for Clinton’s family in the Lewinsky scandal. If only lying crapweaselness were a misdemeanor so we could put him in the stocks and throw rotten vegetables at him.