Where there’s a (George) Will there’s a way (to be a preening, pompous ass)

Once upon a time, when I was young and callow, I attempted to meet an assignment for my college comp class by taking apart a column by George Will. 

Twenty pages later I gave it up and started writing about what I did on my summer vacation.

I figured I had to be on the wrong track if I needed all those words of mine to refute a mere fifteen hundred of his.  (Newspapers gave more space to everything in those faraway days.)  I don’t remember what the column was about but it was probably the same column he’s been phoning in every third day since somebody decided that his stealing Jimmy Carter’s briefing book for the 1980 Presidential debates showed that Will had the right stuff to be a nationally syndicated pundit, the thesis of which has never varied.  To wit:

It is right and proper that the nation be ruled by rich white men for their benefit, however they see fit to rule it, without any interference or criticism, and the rest of us should be grateful that these rich white men deign to do that otherwise we might have to govern ourselves, and then where would we be?

This is of course the central idea motivating the corporatist-Big Business-Robber Baron wing of the Republican Party.

I shouldn’t call it an idea.  It’s appetite and ego rationalized.  It’s vanity, greed, gluttony, avarice put into words.  It’s the naked will to power dressed up in a top hat, morning coat, striped pants, and spats.  As a loyal partisan and propagandist, Will’s job for over a generation has been to give an intellectual and cultural veneer to the particle board soul of the party.

Will’s daily task has been the opposite of writing well, if the goal of good writing is to make ideas clear.  He writes to distract and obscure.  His hope is that readers will mix up their responses to his classical allusions, cultural references, and topical quotes from the Great Books with their responses to his “argument,” that they will mistake Dickens’ or Socrates’ or Talleyrand’s wisdom for Will’s.

Will throws in a passage from, say, John Donne, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls,” for example, and readers, reminded of the respectful feelings their college English professor taught them to have for Donne’s poetry, nod in solemn agreement and say, Boy that John George Donne Will can turn a phrase, can’t he?

Or he plays cute with a baseball reference or an anecdote about Willie Mays and readers who are baseball fans grow nostalgic and wistful, feeling drawn to the good old days of their youth, and for the moment they think they are conservative and that it’s Will’s persuasive writing that has made them so.

In short, Will is a dab hand at decking out a pseudo-argument with layers of not completely irrelevant irrelevancies that hijack readers’ thoughts and feelings and carry them along to the point where Will’s actual point ought to be, leaving them with the sense that they’ve been following a real argument.

I understood what Will’s real and single theme was, but I didn’t understand how he was going about making it sound more highbrow and thoughtful and persuasive than it was.  I didn’t get it until Garry Trudeau sent the bubbleheaded prepster, Trip Trippler, to work for Will as a “Quote Boy” in Doonsebury.  That came a few years later.  When I was trying to write my paper, I thought I had to take Will on point by point and all I came to realize was that he could pack an awful lot of bullshit into a relatively small number of paragraphs.

It was daunting.

Or as Will himself might put it, it was a mythologically impossible task that combined the enormity of Hercules’ Augean labor with Sisyphus’ expectation of imminent accomplishment as he neared the top of his hill.

So I gave up.

But over the years and years since I’ve been haunted by the conviction that I ought to have been able to pull it off.  I’ve always believed that I should have found a way to thoroughly trash that column in five hundred words or less.  And for years and years after I never read a column by Will without trying in my head to do to it what I’d tried to do to the column that had defeated me back in college.  Ultimately the frustration grew unbearable and I gave up reading Will’s stuff entirely.  Which is why since I’ve been writing this blog I’ve never devoted a post to any of his columns.  Not counting this one.  I’ve been afraid that it would turn the blog into the anti-George Will Blog and I’d be turning out five or six posts for every one paragraph of his that made me mad.

So I leave the job to others, like Tom Levenson, who I take some cheer in noting, takes a good long time picking apart a recent Will column.

If you want to impress the gullibles, and you want to assert an authority you have not earned, make sure you scatter into your writing/speech — preferably near the top — two or three droplets from the handbook of safe bits of smart-people stuff.  Here we have a famous painter, a nicely canonical poet, and the one quote everyone has heard from someone you can be pretty sure most of your readers have not read well (or recently) enough to expose you for the superficial pseud you are.

Will does this all the time — he is glib, he affects a broad and deep knowledge, he has plenty of access to research assistants.  And particularly in a town like DC, which dotes on culture in the service of power, this kind of stuff goes down a treat.

But Tom isn’t really concerned with all the ways Will’s a puffed-up fake and his columns a waste of newsprint and pixels, depending on the medium you use to subject yourself to his bull.  Tom wants to put Will in a larger context and use him to make a point, which is why he titled his post Why Newspapers Are Dying.

The electorate and a growing (though not yet dominant) faction of the ruling party understands that Will has gotten most of the important calls wrong for a very long time now.  They and we realize that he has nothing much left to say, given how thoroughly his earlier arguments have been shown to be wrong — not through debate, nor the easy abstractions of armchair argument, nor by raising his Constable with any of a number of Turners, but in the hard school of the real world in which he has lined up on the side of grotesque political and policy failure.

Which leaves Will with this:  a column that says nothing, as little-boy-nastily as possible.

And that, my friends (channeling my inner McCain, there folks — sorry) leads back to the beginning at which we will end.  If the Post doesn’t start breaking some real journalism soon; if all it has to offer is “such people” kvetching by tired old Gloria Swanson impersonators, then what reason for being will they have?  Why would anyone lay down a buck or whatever they charge these days for wrap any self-respecting fish would reject?

Go read the whole thing.

Comments

[actor212]

Will is like a five year old boy trying to pitch like Roger Clemens, in that he is desperately trying to be the new William F Buckley, who while thuddingly incomprehensible, was at least poetic in his obtusity.

George Will sounds like Norm Crosby to Buckley's Bing.

[chachabowl]

Tom Levinson's observation,"...make sure you scatter into your writing/speech — preferably near the top — two or three droplets from the handbook of safe bits of smart-people stuff," reminds me of the device that Star Trek's writers would use back in the day, where they'd cite say, two real-life examples from earth history then throw in a futuristic name (e.g. Genghis Khan, Stalin, Kodos The Executioner).

By the way, I prefer David Frye's rendition of William F. Buckley to Will's.

[sfmike]

You've made me happy. George Will is putrefying in front of our eyes, and he's helping take down the entire rotten ship that prints him.

[Dutch]

It is right and proper that the nation be ruled by rich white men for their benefit..."

Today, of all days, when "real" print journos across this land are smelling the sickening sweet pyre of burning flesh, not even realizing it's their own - not Limbaugh's - for repeating made up Wikipedia quotes as gospel in their MSM columns... Really, Lance. You're going to put a sock puppet on your hand and have Will's avatar say all the things you WISH he would say? Is that how you honor the journalists who mentored you? Did you really turn in your journalistic ethics card when you clicked the domain purchase button?

This is of course the central idea motivating the corporatist-Big Business-Robber Baron wing of the Republican Party.

Dude. Duuuuuude. Did you actually just use "Robber baron" as an adjective for a man who was born 20 years after that term went moldy??? Or did were you just parroting Jimmy "Kingfish" Carvell? Hahahahahaha! You are killing me!

Well, at least you are wading in to the realm of opposing values. Props for that. You're wearing a set of industrial tarmac-quality ear protectors as you approach the opposition's soapbox, but unlike Actor212 and Derringer, you have the intellectual courage for a tethered expedition from the safety of HuffPo and KOS.

[actor212]

Dutch,

I've met William F Buckley. I've worked with William F Buckley. William F Buckley was not a friend of mine but we were acquainted.

Don't even go there. You have no clue who you are dealing with.

[Chris The Cop]

I have no idea what Dutch and actor 212 are talking about (not that they write for me) but I always kinda liked George Will - he is a little wordy, no question. But when he puts down that goddam thesaurus, he does make the occasional pithy point about the more outlandish foibles of the modern left.

[actor212]

Chris,

Will was the first conservative I've ever heard speak a simple truth: American economics is clearly not free market, since companies are allowed to privatize profits, but also to socialize their losses (e.g. deduct them from taxable income, thus making the American people subsidize them).

[KLG]

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
John Kenneth Galbraith

[Dutch]

And we're doing quite well, KLG.

The moral justification for the theft of someone else's work isn't doing so hot.

[Belvoir]

Even as a teenager, I found Will a smug, prissy little twit.

[KevinHayden]

to give an intellectual and cultural veneer to the particle board soul of the party.

Boy, that Lance Mannion can sure turn a phrase and roast someone so well they know they're completely Donne.