The New New New Republic
I had a sense of dread sitting at the public library yesterday afternoon pursuing the new issue of the New Republic. The new cover design, portrait of the cover feature subject, makes me cringe — particularly as I guage that the magazine is proud of this new departure. Just in case you want a video prolouge of this issue, here it is on youtube. A less rigid presentation I cannot possibly conjure.
Okay. So the magazine came to the sort of emerging unconventional conventional wisdom of Hillary Clinton on Iraq — what be she but a “hawk”? And if you watch the video prolouge, we get to a cringe-inducing comment “Also on the Hillary Clinton subject” on an essay about a book on the “19th Century Hillary Clinton”. Interestingly, if you google that phrase you will get a mention of the woman who ran before the subject of this one — Victoria Woodhull — as opposed to Belva Lockwood — who somehow or other The New Republic spliced meaning to define the latter as “serious” and the former as not. I remember Woodhull’s presidential run from some lesson plans in an English grammar textbook, which combined with some lesson plans that had students conjugate a couple sentences about Carl Barks’s Donald Duck comics was about when I divined that the sausage factory of English textbooks runs us through Graduate students trying to amuse themselves and educate the middle school and high school students on their interests.
So, this article about Woodhull ends with Woodhull murmuring that women will be elected soon enough, and indeed years later — so the article states — Jeanette Rankin was elected to the House of Representatives from Wyoming. I slid out my pen, crossed out Wyoming, and wrote above it “Montana”. I invite everyone to go to their local bookstore and do so to every copy of the New Republic that they can until the manager of the store tells you to stop and leave.
Hey! Dick Gephardt is now a lobbyist for Turkey!
The Ned Lamont article spares me from something I was thinking I would do — which is figure out where the hell he is. It comes to no completion, Ned Lamont not lending himself to much political relevance. Interestingly enough, Lamont endorsed Chris Dodd for president. Which gets Chris Dodd nowhere in particular. Nor does it get Ned Lamont anywhere.
The musing on how neo-conservatives seem to leave radical Left-wing ideologies to arrive at their new conservative haunts with no steps in between and no sense of gradations– (your David Horowitzes) which means at both steps of their ideological journeys they could engage in Liberal-bashing — has never ceased to bemuse me. This article adds little to my thoughts, but maybe it will to someone.
Actually, that’s the problem with the last two issues of the New Republic. It is remarkably toothless. I do not need to read them. Maybe I never needed to read the New Republic, much maligned in the liberal blogosphere, but I have less use for the magazine now.