Dear Susan,
Hooray! Huzzah! Vente Frappaccinos all around! Microsoft has won a round in its battle with the Justice Department. Until recently I haven’t been able to choose sides in this dispute–both have good arguments–but as long as I’m in Slate, I’m happy to be a Gates buttboy. Call me old fashioned, but when I’m bought I stay bought (and I come extraordinarily cheap).
If anything drives me into the Microsoft camp besides loyalty, it is the irrational hatred of Bill in Silicon Quarters. Some of it, I suspect, has to do with the fact that all these self-styled rebels now find themselves kissing up for VC money in corporate boardrooms, so to preserve their bohemian bona fides they have to attack the closest thing they have to an establishment, which is Gates. If you read the transcripts of the software conferences that Esther Dyson and Saul Wurman host (has there ever been an industry that spent so much time talking about itself amidst evenly spaced bottles of mineral water?) you notice that most speakers hew to the same morality tale: Some new thing has just been invented. The big old companies don’t see it. They are doomed. History will sweep them away. The last will be first. The young rebels will conquer the world. But somehow the big evil Microsofts never do get swept away. Now as always, it is the people who talk about inexorable Historical forces that get swept onto the historical ash heaps. But the software visionaries, who represent the epicenter of hubris in the modern world, keep rolling across the nation on their silly lecture tours.
Speaking of arrogance, have you ever seen a group of people more full of themselves than novelists? Ariel Dorfman, who now teaches at Duke, has an op-ed in today’s New York Times on bilingual education. You’d think if you were going to send in an op-ed to the Times, you would study the issue, read up on the arguments on both sides. But of course not. Sidestepping the actual facts in the debate, Dorfman talks about the “subconscious choice” that he claims, despite any evidence, to be the real crux of the issue: whether Americans should be monolingual or multilingual. The implication is that opponents of bilingualism are against multilingual Americans. In fact they would argue they are the true multilingualists: that bilingual education’s problem is that it has become a patronage system that never teaches kids English, so preventing them from becoming bilingual. But it’s rarely worth burdening a big name novelist with the actual substance of a policy dispute. Almost always they will pick the side in any public issue that, first, yields them the most status among their literary peers, and second, allows them to talk most about themselves.
Speaking of things you should never do, you should never write a letter to the editor in anger. That, I’m afraid is what Stuart Taylor has done. Your account of running into him at the Jefferson Hotel was nice and whimsical. He needed to respond because Starr aide Jackie Bennett could get into trouble with the judge who is supervising the investigation. But he didn’t need to respond in such a tightly wound manner. This dispute has many of the key figures locked in such furious combat that they are losing perspective–though to be fair to Taylor the Clintonistas have sunk to such viciousness that he has a right to be touchy.
In a way, the one impressive thing about Clinton is that in public he has never let his true passions about the case bubble over. He is disciplined about some things. He seems to recognize that when you are in a media controversy, manners are more importance than substance. In letters to the editor battles, the writer who adopts the friendlier tone almost always comes out ahead. I’m reminded of an apocryphal letter that a writer allegedly send to the TLS after a particularly nasty review appeared. It began: “Dear Sirs, Surely of all the people you could have chosen to review my book on Shakespeare, you could have found one who was not formerly my wife.”
I’m running long and I haven’t even gotten to the Susan Molinari story, the McCauley Culken story, the Maureen O’Sullivan story or any of the many others that stud today’s papers. Abundance, abundance. This is how Bill Gates must feel.
Sincerely,
David
