Dear Shabby, My Colleague Keeps Sublimating His Second Marriage Into Everything He Writes!
Dear Shabby,
Since this will be the second time I have written you in as many decades, I now feel we now know each other well enough to unburden myself to you about the same damn colleague I wrote to you last time in a letter I entitled "Dear Shabby, My Colleague Keeps Sublimating His Divorce Into Everything He Writes!"
This colleague of mine is still a Very Famous Column Writer for an important newspaper in New York City, and has since somehow secured a second Very Famous Column Writing job at a second important publication, this one in Washington D.C. He used to be contractually obligated to produce a column for the New York City publication twice a week, but now it seems his agreement with them is to delivering something "whenever he feels like it". However, when he drops a column, it is still what his millions of readers take to be either sage insights into the human condition or canny insider information about the political scene, with some stuff about economics or what's going on overseas mixed in to keep it fresh.
His problem? Even all these years later he still doesn't know anything useful about politics. Or economics. Or what's going on overseas. And so his "insights" usually start off being to nothing more than the reconstituted, water-cooler gossip of people who already think just like he does, and end up being horribly, horribly wrong.
About 20 years ago, after my colleague had made a regular featurette out of telling his readers how great everything was going in Iraq, he began to have less and less to say on the subject. As Iraq collapsed he got razzed a lot for what he had written, but he deals with all criticism the same way: he ignores it. Gradually he just stopped writing about Iraq and how terrific everything was there altogether: he never retracted any of his nutty "insights", but instead dealt with Iraq as if it had been sent to a puppy farm upstate where we couldn't see it anymore, but where it was probably playing happily with other countries.
As you might recall, to fill the hole in his lineup, my colleague started cranking out what I can only describe as "advice columns for carbon based life forms as written by a robot from Arcturus." As I said, he refused to walk back any of the truly awful things he had written, or even acknowledge the existence of the people who had been right all along, but suddenly his columns got very scoldy. Everyone everywhere should be a lot more humble because everybody was always equally right and wrong about everything all the time. Humans should be more reticent! Also less judgmental!
Also he took a really weird turn into telling humans who are poor that they should not be having so much sexytime. Because apparently the problems of the poor have nothing to do with the structural problems of a job market geared to wrecking the middle class and relentlessly slashing wages, benefits and pensions. Or from a handful of plutocrats swallowing up the world economy. Or from seeing the price of housing, education, basic medical care and everything else skyrocket out of their reach. Or from the policies driven by a merciless war being waged on the poor because Conservatives equate poverty with moral depravity.
Instead, my colleague went on and on about how the poors are screwed up because of all the wrong sexytime they are having. And their broken families. And their disordered communities. And so forth. My colleague, I should add, lives in a large mansion in a very exclusive neighborhood. He has vast spaces for entertaining. His main job pays him insane amounts of money to dispense "insights" that the decades have shown to be pretty uniformly terrible. His main job has gotten him many other jobs that pay him a lot more money to basically read aloud whatever he wrote last week. His jobs lets him travel the world as he wishes, gives him unlimited access to the most powerful people on Earth, and lets him take extended vacations or "book leave" whenever he pleases. And from this perspective, his advice to the poors is basically that their lives will get better when they start emulating the behavior of high net-worth strivers with their stable families in their well-ordered communities that my colleague interacts with every day.
Then as you will remember from my last letter, very my wealthy, well-ordered colleague got divorced.
Stealthily.
Like his famous "Now that the war is over" columns about Iraq, this subject was
never mentioned (although recently it is rumored that his marriage advice to the Great Unwashed has been seen at an upstate puppy farm where it gambols happily in the sun with Tikrik and Mosul and Baghdad all day long.) Instead, my colleague quickly and quietly shifted his focus from telling his readers that the poors need to get their shit together, to telling his readers that
life is hard and relationships are messy.
Well, since that time, my colleague as gotten re-married to a much younger person who was, while he was stealth-divorcing his first wife, his research assistant. As you know, during the decade between my last letter to you and this one, things have gotten pretty well "effed-up" (as the kids say) in our country. Fascism is on the march here. Science is being attacked on all fronts. Books are being banned. Armed goons in masks snatch people off the street, enforcing Trumpian orthodoxy like the Guidance Patrol of Law Enforcement Command of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
All of this is being done by one political party -- the Republican party, with which is my colleague recently parted company -- and opposed by the Democratic party. And my colleague has reacted to this frightening development in two ways.
And second, now that he has a much-younger second wife in tow, he has lapsed into that privileged, white, clueless, male, senior-citizen thing of making sweeping declarations about Human Nature That Everyone Should Listen To. Today he took it upon himself to lecture the great unwashed that they're Doing Love All Wrong!
These grandiose pronouncements were prompted by the same source that has inspired the deep thoughts of philosophers and public intellectuals for centuries: some random comments on Substack.
The Wrong Definition of Love
...And yet I’d say the Substack answers betray a common misunderstanding of how you become beloved. There was a lot of self in these answers and not much about the other person. There was a lot about being paid attention to, and not much about maybe serving and caring for another person, or even putting that person’s interests above your own.
These answers didn’t come from nowhere; they’re a perfect distillation of the cultural trends...
Yadda yadda yadda.
In such a culture people are naturally going to define love as the...
In other, less self-oriented cultures, and in other times, love was seen as...
Falling in love in this view is not a decision you make for your own benefit, but a submission, a poetic surrender...
In his 1822 book, “On Love,” Stendhal describes the process of “crystallization,” during which we idealize the people we love as if they were coated with shimmering crystals...
I’m not saying people actually lived in this altruistic way back then...
In this conception of love...
So my question once again, Shabby, is how do I get my colleague to once and for all Shut The Fuck Up about that which he clearly knows not? Or, alternatively, where can I get a job that pays a king's ransom for pulling arrant, nonsense out of my ass twice a week?
Yours in Christ,
driftglass
No Half Measures
