As the rest of us hurtle into this painful, terrifying new reality — if COVID-19 doesn’t get you, the economy surely will — the New York Times is doing what it does best: untethering further from reality, issuing dispatches for and by the one percent, perseverating over problems of privilege, name-dropping along the way.
As the old saw goes: Never let a good crisis go to waste.
And so we have op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd, who has built a far-too-long career out of relying almost exclusively on “King Lear” and the original “Star Wars” trilogy as political metaphor, profiling Larry David at the pandemic’s outset.
Indeed, who among us was not wondering how an A-list Hollywood star would be faring in his mansion, situated on a golf course, in LA’s Pacific Palisades?
And it’s not like Dowd doesn’t have COVID-related problems of her own, you know. In the middle of this profile, she tells the reader she was so nervous about how she’d look on FaceTime that “I asked my lighting sensei, Tom Ford, for some tips and he kindly sent these instructions, which you are all welcome to use …”
Wow. We really are all in this together.
The Times, self-appointed institutional rectifier of racial and economic equality, has dubbed its coverage of this crisis “The America We Need.” The inaugural op-ed, credited to the entire editorial board, made note of our two Americas: one in which celebrities can get fast and easy testing, another in which the poor and middle-class will suffer devastations now and long after.
Yet the Times is resoundingly clear, in everything from content to design to headlines, whom they’re writing for — and it’s not both Americas.
“My 4-Year-Old Thinks She’s a Sous-Chef. I’m Trying to Remain Calm.”
There are plenty of Americans, by the way, who don’t know what a sous-chef is. Now is not the time.
Yet this was a column from Tuesday. Surely Times op-ed writer Elizabeth Bruenig thought this would be a welcome distraction, but when food banks across the country are about to ration food — when newly unemployed parents are stressed about how to feed their children — maybe don’t write this:
“I train my face in a vague Renaissance smile as she takes an egg in hand … Earlier this week, we hovered together over a sheet of rolled cookie dough, cutters in hand. I was almost sweating just at the thought of it.”
The Times has a greater fixation on food than normal; artisanal has never been so chic in these pages, and that’s saying something. The insufferable Jennifer Finney Boylan has been filing columns — excuse me, her journal entries “from Our Plague Year” — from the comfort of her cozy second home in bucolic Maine, with a special focus on what she’s been eating.
“I do a lot of baking,” Boylan writes, as well as a lot of sitting around roaring fires with her loved ones, everyone safe and healthy. But Boylan — she is a wreck.
“One day I sit down to darn a sock,” Boylan writes. “But I can’t thread the needle.”
In case the preciousness of that heavy-handed metaphor eludes you: Boylan, a Kardashian-adjacent, highly successful professor at Barnard, a published author, reality TV star and Times contributor, does not know if she can see her way through this.
“Protecting the Ones I Love, with Flour, Sausage and Cheese,” headlines Boylan’s latest journal entry for her “Plague Year: Week 7” — and watch out, Maureen Dowd. You’re not the only name-dropper on the masthead.
In writing about her Proustian search for an Italian dish called scacciata, Boylan indulges in some classic Timesian class snobbery, oh-so-casually mentioning that she got her bachelor’s at Wesleyan — not enough to name her prestigious East Coast liberal arts college, which she does twice here, but she must let us know she also has her master’s.
Boylan then updates us as to those cozy nights by the fire, cocktails in hand — craft, no doubt — and tells us that this years-long search for scacciata, made more acute by the pandemic, was brought to a close by her great friend Richard Russo, who, she informs us, “is not only a gifted novelist but a great chef as well.”
At some point in these columns — randomly, inappropriately — Boylan will interject the number of infected and dead Americans, as if to lend gravitas to her privileged musings-slash-humblebrags.
The Times has given those of us who hate-read it an unintentional gift: Its utter humorlessness, wrapped in reflexive self-regard and condescension, has never been so funny. Of course, we all want to read lighter takes on life amid coronavirus. Problem is, there is almost zero acknowledgment here that some pandemic-related problems are more important than others — as in their recent coverage of rich New Yorkers who have had their expensive home renovations suddenly halted, the equivalent of having elective cosmetic surgery postponed. There is zero self-awareness among writers and editors, who regard the Times as their religion and themselves as its apostles.
So here’s middle-aged white guy David Brooks, self-styled Aristotle of the op-ed pages, going to Watts to investigate income inequality! Here’s The Ethicist — as low as the Times will stoop to running a tawdry advice columnist — weighing in on whether readers should go to the grocery store themselves or opt for delivery.
Selfish readers: You should be growing your own food!
“Shopping Your Garden” is a recent, ostensibly helpful column for Manhattanites, who know painfully well how little personal outdoor space abounds. Yet here is our author Margaret Roach — name ’em and shame ’em — telling us she began “with one little plant of Hylomecon japonicum … from a rare-plants sale” and now she has “rivers of gold in many of my large garden beds at this time of year.”
I could go on. It seems the Times surely will, having no issue with chronicling the existential suffering of their contributors, even as they file from bespoke gardens lit with help from Tom Ford while a delicious meal sourced by a bestselling author warms in the oven.
This is the America the Times thinks we need.