(2005-12-20) Andersen Lapham Retirement

Kurt Andersen on Lewis Lapham passing on the torch at Harper's. In fact, most of Harper's is not fusty and Euro-lefty, Lapham's "Notebook" column notwithstanding. But because his 2,500-word essays lead each issue, they tend to color one's sense of the whole magazine. And they all amount to pretty much the same contemptuous, Olympian jeremiad: The powers-that-be are craven and monstrous, American Culture is vulgar and depraved, the U.S. is like imperial Rome, our democracy is dying or dead. All of which is arguably true. But, jeez, sometime tell me something I didn't know, show a shred of uncertainty and maybe some struggle to suss out fresh truth. "Everything I've written," he says, "is a chronicle of the twilight of the American idea." He seems so committed to the decline-and-fall critique, and so supremely uninterested in the novelties and nuances of everyday life and culture, it's hard to take his gloom altogether seriously... As much as he decries oligarchies, Lapham seems nostalgic for the old media Oligarchy. Back when liberals were definitely in charge of the press, Lapham could abide publishing conservatives because they were safely powerless - and because they were horrified by the twilight of the American idea.