Glass houses

I finally caught up with Shattered Glass, Billy Ray's treatment of the Stephen Glass scandal at the New Republic. The film is quite good. I was pleasantly surprised by the powerful performance of Hayden Christensen, previously known to me only as a not-very-threatening Darth Vader.

The most stunning part of the film occurs at very beginning, when introductory titles inform us that the average age of staff members at the magazine was 26. Glass himself was all of 24.

Glass wrote his little fictions at a time when I had come to hate that magazine, due to its incessant attacks on Clinton. The New Republic repackaged American Spectator crap in order to foist it on liberals. Some called the periodical The Newly Republican.

It's a little galling to learn that the writers and editors who annoyed me so thoroughly were toddlers. Why was this milk-mustache brigade allowed to impact the national debate?

When I was 24, I was an idiot. I was one of the brightest, most studious 24 year-olds anyone ever met -- I practically lived in libraries -- yet I didn't have any true grasp of history until about 1200 books later. Life experience? Jeez, I hadn't even had my first major break-up yet. On the other hand, I knew what it was like to see a loved one die of cancer, and I had already gone through my first bout of homelessness -- events which taught me important lessons you'll never learn at the Marty Peretz Preschool for the Privileged.

These pseudo-hip infants at TNR assailed the finest president of the post-war era -- yet they knew nothing.

The film hints that Glass achieved his position precisely because those young pseudo-hipsters accepted him as a fellow member of Club Clueless. He was cute and charming and one of them. That sufficed. In fact, the man who hired him was Andrew Sullivan, who may have chosen to surround himself with pretty-boys based on reasons that had nothing to do with writing talent. ("You were loved," Sullivan later told Glass.) Murray Waas and Gene Lyons could not get printed in TNR, but Steve Glass could.

His fabricated stories bored me; I never read more than the first couple of paragraphs. They became interesting only in retrospect. Jesus, why fake that shit? I have more respect for Jack Kelley of USA Today, who offered concoctions on topics of genuine import. (The film does not reference a hoax piece Glass wrote slandering Vernon Jordan. At least that one was diverting.)

The hidden lesson of the Glass story concerns old media versus new media -- for-pay writing versus for-free writing. Today, you'll find much better writing on the blogs, and you won't pay a dime for it. Why? Because a blog writer markets his work directly to readers, not to editors. Nobody cares if a blog author has age spots or sagging tits or a funky smell or outdated clothes. Nothing compels a blogger to wow colleagues with youth and charm. The best writers have no colleagues, no youth and no charm. They have fangs. Life has taken big bites out of their hides, and they want only to bite back.

By the way: Perhaps we can find an additional explanation for the hiring of Glass (whose Mommy and Daddy later funded his adventures in law school) in this 2004 piece on Marty Peretz, who runs TNR. At the time, Peretz did everything he could to scuttle John Kerry.

So what is Peretz really afraid of regarding Mideast policy in a potential Kerry administration? He doesn’t want a president who sees himself as an honest broker in this conflict. He wants a George Bush type who hasn’t a clue how to deal with the conflict and who is content to let Ariel Sharon tramp across the stage in combat boots setting his own terms for everything relevant to this conflict. Peretz wants a president who can’t say ‘no’ to Israel.

In other words, TNR is really a version of the "megaphone" operation -- which also uses naive and pliable kids.