While I admire Bill Safire's integrity and intelligence, as well as his post as one of the scarce rightists writing for the New York Times, his columns over the past couple of months have been unenlightening and, worse, tinged with the disconnected loftiness of a permanently tenured professor. He recently expressed the maximum amount of fear communicable in a newspaper column for a sustained and heavy Republican majority - as if the 20th Century Congresses hadn't been dominated by the other party, sans societal collapse. A silly piece, really, and the mark of a man in an ivory tower, otherwise lacking reliable perspective. Andrew Sullivan has gone a wide step further, taking Safire to task on his yearly predictions. The verdict? Bloggers - amateurs, even - can do better.
My verdict? Safire, as he is now, may have reached an impasse; at least a shortcoming of prescience. How so? Times, culture, politics and the metrics thereof have changed drastically since the writer came of age. True wisdom is, of course, timeless. But he does not seem to have modified the application of that wisdom; not like Wall Street Journal editor and contemporary Robert Bartley, who changed enormously between his journalistic start in the early 1970s and his death last month. As a consequence, Safire's evaluation of the past, observation of the present and outlook for the future are each out of focus. You can occasionally see the same miscalculation in the otherwise brilliant Bill Buckley.
Sullivan made a similar point this morning about a leftist, poor old Arthur Miller stewing in his Castrophiliac crucible. It was a little raw. Essentially, until Miller's generation commits to the grave, much of its reality - especially as circulated by intellectuals - walks on like the living dead; and we're still left to contend with it as serious argument. So the only end to the antiquity is the death of its valuers.
Strong stuff, and difficult to wield in conversation without sounding unfit for rational conversation. Here's a better frame for it. Some people will be able to see wisdom as a thing not circumstantially bound: not dictated by events but instead defining events itself, and so those people can more easily adapt to realities that develop far after the stubbornness of old age begins to set in. Others will be inflexible with the disappearance of the world they knew in their formative, energetic years, insistent on reasoning from within the rules of time past - becoming shrill, broken records. The intuitive versus the experiential, in another sense. The latter fosters the mindset that kept ill people with thick skulls from seeing doctors who could have saved their lives earlier last century; and the mindset that prevents old men from removing themselves from the bleak, mystifying shroud of the Cold War. (As an aside, we prevent our coming to terms with that frightening time by failing to count it as one of the world wars.)
So, if a little flip, Andrew Sullivan's right: either a man such as Safire readjusts or his commentary for today and tomorrow is only of qualified value.