HOME / the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Katha Pollitt and Andrew Sullivan

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News and Letters, Truth and Consequences

By Katha Pollitt
Posted Thursday, May 14, 1998, at 2:52 PM ET

Andrew,

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That newspaper stealer is an evil troll--my sympathies. If you find out who it is, maybe Pakistan can conduct its retaliatory nuclear tests in his (or her) apartment. Sometimes I sneak a peek at my neighbors on my way out (I don't get home delivery because if I did I would never leave the house). But I always fold it neatly just the way it was. I'm sure they don't suspect.

But you know, I also wonder why I bother keeping up with the press. Especially since, as I'm sure you have also observed, if you've ever been involved in an event that was reported in the papers, they get everything wrong! Not necessarily the big things (although often that as well), but the tenor of events, their meaning, their flavor. I'm sure future generations will regard our media as being just as nakedly ideological and biased and false as the papers a hundred years ago, when Citizen Kane was building his yellow-press empire. So we are definitely wasting our lives. And yet, even when Sophie was a tiny baby and I was too sleepy and frazzled to read books, or some days even get dressed, I slogged through the New York Times every single day. I used to joke they would put that on my tombstone: She Read the Times Every Day Of Her Adult Life.

What do I think of Indonesia? I meant to post you about it back when we were discussing Russia, but there are only so many hours in the day! Here's a capitalist government which has many of the qualities you object to in communist (or "communist") ones. It seized power with the massacre of maybe a million people back in the Sixties; it is not democratic; it practices torture of political opponents of the regime; it is immensely corrupt; and it is currently involved in occupying East Timor and has so far murdered something like a third of the Timorese population--with US blessing, I might add.

Now, because of the financial crisis, the bills are coming due. Good.

I finally visited Slate this morning--I thought I should see if they are actually posting what we write--which, perhaps unfortunately, they are. Then once I was there, I read the Diary of Eric Alterman, since he also writes for The Nation. What an amazing document! It solidly confirms the idea we were discussing the other day, about the trap set for the unwary personality by the illusory privacy of e-mail. Andrew, it's true: every line one writes reveals one's character as clearly as those magnifying makeup mirrors reveal all the pores and squiggles in your skin. He boasts of how little child care he does for his newborn daughter--oh yes, men have it so easy, isn't that awful? Gloat, gloat. He makes vulgar jokes about her future sex life. He drops names. He pushes his Nation column. His partner, mother of baby, is a cipher--just a name and a set of musical preferences. He goes on and on about the marriage tax penalty (which a letter-writer says he vastly overrates)--as if we are really to believe that this is what keeps these two extremely prosperous professionals unmarried. It is all so self-satisfied and vain and vainglorious. And all out of his own mouth.

So if Mike asks you to do the Diary, be careful! I knew there was a reason I keep saying not just now when they ask me to take a turn.

I have to lie down now...

Katha

p.s. The above is not gossip, or slander, or libel. It is literary criticism. Ask your friend Michael Oakeshott. I'm sure he'll agree.

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