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BlogosmearGregg Easterbrook and the perils of writing before you think.

By Jack ShaferPosted Monday, Oct. 20, 2003, at 7:23 PM ET

Gregg Easterbrook's hyper-logical journalism has a way of seeing around corners. For instance, as the first space shuttle queued up for its maiden launch, he depicted it as a death ship in the Washington Monthly; later, Easterbrook's detailed exposé of the Pentagon's DIVAD anti-missile system in the Atlantic led to the weapon's cancellation; and in 1996, his book A Moment on the Earth made the persuasive case for environmental optimism.

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But Easterbrook isn't all Spock and no play. As "Tuesday Morning Quarterback" readers know, he can write using just his funny bone. Sometimes Hyper-Logical Gregg agrees to collaborate with Funny Bone Gregg, as they did in "Bush Unveils Faith-Based Missile Defense" for Slate, and the results are smashing.

Related in Slate

For Mickey Kaus' take on the Easterbrook controversy, click here.

But the Easterbrook I'm not familiar with is Easterbrook the Scold. In the 20 years he's been my friend, I've never known him to froth. The Easterbrook I know slays his foes (and some of his friends!) with the flick of an X-Acto or tickles them to death. So when I read his New Republic blog item last week, I was flummoxed by the vehemence of Easterbrook's attack on Quentin Tarantino for the ultraviolence of Kill Bill, and then stupefied by his denunciations of Michael Eisner and Harvey Weinstein for backing the movie. Easterbrook wrote:

Disney's CEO, Michael Eisner, is Jewish; the chief of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, is Jewish. Yes, there are plenty of Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence. Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence? Recent European history alone ought to cause Jewish executives to experience second thoughts about glorifying the killing of the helpless as a fun lifestyle choice.

The moral posturing and witless embrace of loathsome cultural stereotypes found in these 84 words seemed so un-Easterbrook that I hoped that someone would e-mail me the news that somebody had hacked Gregg's blog and inserted this bogus copy. Alas, it's not the case, as readers know from accounts in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. After apologizing for the blog item, Easterbrook still finds himself accused of anti-Semitism by the ADL's Abraham H. Foxman and sacked from his "Tuesday Morning Quarterback" gig at the Disney's ESPN.com. (Disclosure: "Tuesday Morning Quarterback" started at Slate in the fall of 2000.)

I refuse to accept that my friend is an anti-Semite based on one paragraph in one ass-backward column and his less-than-abject apology. In defending the man and not the piece, I follow New Republic Literary Editor Leon Wieseltier, who exonerates Easterbrook of anti-Semitism but calls his blog comments "objectively anti-Semitic … insofar as [they] impute Jewish motives for everything that Jews do, insofar as they suggest that everything any Jew does is intrinsically a Jewish thing."

How could such a thoughtful, deliberate, and precise journalist have gone so stupendously wrong? Having edited Easterbrook numerous times over the years, I know him to be a polymath and a quick study, as well as a good critic of his own work. But this is the first Easterbrook piece that appears to be written from a position of ignorance. His career has been about rigor, originality, and sincerity. That said, perhaps he's not the guy who should write without the safety net of an editor.

My first inkling that Easterbrook didn't know much about the subject of movie violence came in the opening sentences as I realized that he was sermonizing against it rather than documenting its dangers. My second inkling came when I realized his argument was mostly emotional, something that I'd never encountered in his nonfiction work that I can remember. Relying on his limbic system instead of his cerebral cortex, Easterbrook dismisses movie violence as unimaginative, hackneyed, and trite with an argument that is as unimaginative, hackneyed, and trite as you'll ever read. I have no doubt that the Rev. Donald Wildmon could write better on the same subject.

By the time Easterbrook gets to the item's last paragraph, in which he slags Eisner and Weinstein, he's embraced so many clichés and stereotypes about movies, violence, and the people who make them that it's only a small wonder that he stoops also to pick up a few about Hollywood executives and money worship. But Easterbrook's appreciation of Eisner and Weinstein's careers is no more savvy than his treatment of movie violence.

Do Disney, Eisner, and Weinstein really purvey the sort of immoral bloody cinema that so outrages Easterbrook? A brief review of Weinstein's credits proves otherwise. If Weinstein worships anything, he worships uplifting and somewhat arty movies. His genius has been finding ways to make money on them. Joe Bob Briggs would have a hard time curating an Ultraviolent Film Festival from the Weinstein filmography if you factored out the Tarantino films and a few Scream-type pics. The real Harvey Weinstein resides in this selective list of films in which he served as executive producer: The Human Stain; The Lord of the Rings Trilogy; Kate & Leopold; The Shipping News; The Others; Chocolat; Love's Labour's Lost; The Cider House Rules; Mansfield Park; She's All That; Shakespeare in Love; Good Will Hunting; The Wings of the Dove; Air Bud; The English Patient; Emma; Flirting with Disaster; Jane Eyre; etc.

Composer and bandleader Charles Mingus was known to dismiss his musicians from the stage whenever their performance displeased him, accusing them of "mental tardiness." By blogging so recklessly, Easterbrook deserves a day's damnation for mental tardiness, but anybody who wants to convict him of anti-Semitism will have to cross pens with me.

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Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large. Follow him on Twitter.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

I have to admit that I love Easterbrook's work. He is the best football writer that I have ever read, and also writes well on a breathtaking range of topics. I don't want him to be an anti-Semite.

The article in question, it seems to me, is an attempt to use Eisner's and Weinstein's Jewishness to shame them; this could only be the result of a a fundamental respect for the Judaic ethical system, and, it seems to me, not the result of some underlying anti-Semitism.

Isn't Easterbrook really saying that he expects better from Jewish businessmen than to make money from violence? I may be stretching a bit here, but it seems to me that it is more a case of ill-considered wording than it is a case of pulling the mask off of a closet Nazi.

--Schadenfreude

(To reply, click here)

…Gregg Easterbrook is smart enough to know that what he said is not just an accidentally offensive intersection of language and stereotype he couldn't have foreseen (he said it was merely a bad choice of words). If I were to make the argument in the previous paragraph and say "Gregg Easterbrook is stupid and lazy," I might have some point, but I would be mostly wrong, and that would be that. But if I were to say that a black author were "stupid lazy," it would mean something entirely different, and you would expect me to be smart enough to know not to make my point in that way. This is the difference between saying "Jewish filmmakers violate their own religious teachings to pollute our minds with garbage in pursuit of the almighty dollar" and saying the same of Christian filmmakers. Both may be valid points, but only one is stereotypical and offensive.

Finally, even if lacked the intellectual self-censoring mechanisms long enough to allow such a point to slip through, you would still expect me to make a sincere apology. Gregg Easterbrook, surely a smarter man than me, does not lack the faculties to do the former, and has also not bothered to do the latter. How on Earth is this excusable?

--CaptainRonVoyage

(To reply, click here)

It would be pleasant if Easterbrook's colleagues stopped making excuses for him at this point. I'm not saying they should pile on and stone him in a public square, but their increasingly contorted arguments are getting ridiculous. The fact is, their friend has a little iggie where Jews are concerned, and it got out. This doesn't make him a crazed Jew-hater, and it doesn't warrant his resignation from anything. It's just not a nice thing to know about him, and it's too bad. (It's also too bad that Easterbrook couldn't apologize more thoroughly, but I guess that's hard when you're not really sorry for what you said.)

--AReader-2

(To reply, click here)

The guy didn't lose his job for attacking Jews, but for attacking Eisner. Eisner has repeatedly gotten journalists and commentators fired shortly after attacking him, this goes back to 1995 (when he first acquired ABC) when he got Jim Hightower canned.

That's not to defend Easterbrook, who apparently lost his marbles recently and who has made a whole series of idiotic statements (like it's not rape no matter how many times the woman says "no", she must say "this is rape"). But Eisner has publicly declared that journalists working for ABC/Disney must not attack him. He's even gotten allied news organizations to fire journalists for attacking Disney (e.g. Nikki Finke of the NY Post).

--JoeUser

(To reply, click here)

… Gregg Easterbrook got tripped up in the unique status of Jewishness as both a religion and an ethnicity. He's written frequently in the past on religious obligations, and has taken a number of religious people - mostly or entirely Christian - to task for their failings as Christians, per se.

Fair enough. But using this already risky approach with Jews - and ignorantly conflating Jewishness, the ethnicity, with Judaism, the religion - has gotten him into a whole heap of trouble that he should have been smart enough to avoid like the plague.

Harvey Weinstein and Michael Eisner are Jews - ethnically. Easterbrook's argument, with regard to their Judaic beliefs, was baseless because he never bothers to establish them as observant practitioners of Judaism. He simply assigns them those obligations on account of their race.

Anyway, that's my take. Big mistake, yes. Intellectually foolish and careless, yes. Insensitive, yes. Anti-Semitic? Not quite.

--SlipperyPete

(To reply, click here)

…I walked out of Reservoir Dogs in a righteous fury during the torture scene, and righteous fury isn't one of my usual keys. I was appalled that a civil society could produce this and accept it and pretend it was an innocent entertainment. I felt that society had somehow failed me, failed to put the proper fences around this outpouring of extreme nihilism, failed to be sufficiently outraged or to warn me that I would be outraged. And this is directly relevant to the Easterbrook case. If he felt about Kill Bill the way I did about Reservoir Dogs, I can see how he would be grasping at elements of that civil society which failed him. Disney, that's supposed to be civil. By drawing attention to Michael Eisner's Jewishness, he meant Jewish not as a term of abuse, but as in one of us, someone who maybe shows up at the church/synagogue occasionally, part of the society with more or less common values which ought to be protecting people from Quentin Tarantino's movies, not selling them. It makes me sad and angry to think that the general situation between Jews and Christians in this country is so untrusting that these comments are enough to brand him as an anti-Semite, and is so unforgiving that they are enough to lose him his job. Quentin Tarantino is the one we should be outraged at. He is the one who should be shamed and shouted out of public life.

--Adaline

(To reply, click here)

(10/20)

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