"Lexington" is mostly mush
Peter: weren’t we supposed to bang on the Economist’s “Lexington” column today? Probably best we don’t; it’s like punching a sponge. I’ve been away from the mag for a while, so I can’t speak to the quality of the previous Lex, but the new one is a Sominex in ink form. You get the sense of someone who likes America but cannot help but look down on it, as if he’s forced to dictate his column with his head taped to an airplane window.
Worst sin: it’s mush. Second worse: It’s conventional mush that manages to discuss current events without mentioning salient elements that shape the debate and define the arguments for us in Yankland. At Kagan’s hearing, for example, an interrogator noted “at Harvard she had treated military recruiters in a ‘second-class way.’” The uninformed might think she had, oh, made them serve cocktails and canapes at an official function, or something.
The “Exceptionalism” column you mentioned was tiresome as well; Lexington doesn’t like the term, and oh-so-modestly proposes its abolition. Not because we’re not exceptional - we are! Thanks, Lex - but the term, along with “American greatness,” has been emptied of serious meaning by people like Glenn Beck. People who use the term “may” be secretly worried about American greatness, and this leads to ennui, and as Yoda said, ennui leads to war. Really. He drags in Peter Beinart to amplify the point with his new book, which is typical - the books he cites are usually the ones everyone reviews, the smart set discusses for a week, few read, and end up in tottering piles on the remainder desk in a year.
If not war, then the Moon! But President Obama, Lex notes, made a “sensible decision” not to go back to the moon and on to Mars. “Would returning to the moon and heading for Mars reconnect Americans with their greatness? Many might think the idea batty in present circumstances.”
Many might. Does Lexington? “Many might” is often a coy way of saying “I think so, and I’m not alone, but heaven forfend I issue an opinion.” Killing a return to the Moon and a leap to Mars seemed utterly typical of President Obama, since there’s nothing in it for him (it was Bush’s plan), it does nothing to bind the people into a tighter relationship with the Federal government, and would not be one of those multi-national exercises to which we must all turn our efforts. Mars? Well, we wouldn’t be planting any flags, would we? China does have a greater claim, Mars being red and all.
I don’t read the front of the book when they’re discussing America, either. But the rest of the mag is generally terrific. Whoever ends up with Newsweek might heed its example.
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Re: "Lexington" is mostly mush
Indeed we were, James. "Lexington" pooh-poohs the notion of American exceptionalism:
I myself refute "Lexington" with the words of former Ambassador Charles Hill. Amb. Hill, now the diplomat-in-residence at Yale and the author of Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order, has never been accused of knuckle-dragging knee-jerk jingoism. "America," Amb. Hill said when I interviewed him about world history just last week,
At this point in our interview, I read Amb. Hill the same quotation from President Obama that "Lexington" quotes--the President's remark, that is, that he considered America exceptional just as the citizens of other countries probably considered their own countries exceptional. Amb. Hill's reply?
May '10
Re: "Lexington" is mostly mush
Another Ricochet member (?) mentioned this bit from our own Mark Steyn earlier. It addresses Obama's answer perfectly.
Jul '10
Re: "Lexington" is mostly mush
It's been a while since I was a regular reader, but my impression was that the Lexington column got it right about one-out-of-ten times. It's true, there is just something that doesn't connect. Perhaps all Lexington columnists should be required to read de Toqueville. That would be a start.
May '10
Re: "Lexington" is mostly mush
I loved discovering the Economist in my high school library in the late 1970's; in college it seemed much smarter and serious than anything American; and while in Paris, it seemed like an antidote to the EU socialism that was building. And now, at least its cover stories sicklen me. Was the Economist ever conservative-ish, or have I moved that far to the right that it seems to have moved left?
Jul '10
Re: "Lexington" is mostly mush
I subscribed for over a decade, but finally dropped when the mod Euro Bush/America bashing became a reliable chunk of every issue back in the first W administration. Lexington used to be interesting as a kind of modern Brit de Tocqueville wandering the baffling American political landscape. When I started, that mad London elitist provincialism was detectable but muted. By the time I dropped the magazine it was as if the Onion was somehow substituting a satire for the magazine at the shipping point.