The New York Times goes on in its schizoid way. It
gives us John Burns’s brilliant
reporting out of Iraq — Burns makes Nicholas Kristof, the
other Timesman who’s been there, look like a college
sophomore — and it also gives us great quantities of schlock.
Maureen Dowd’s column last Sunday bordered on the obscene. On the
other hand, it’s unlikely many people pay attention to Dowd
anymore, so maybe that doesn’t matter. Meanwhile on Sunday the
Times also gave us Paul Krugman, ostensibly an economist,
but actually a polemicist, although not a particularly good one. He
writes in a puffed-up way about things he knows very little about,
and he is a leading contender for lightweight columnist of the
year.
Krugman’s contribution on Sunday was the cover
story in the Times magazine. It was entitled “The End
of Middle-Class America,” and, as he does in so many of his pieces,
Krugman began it by talking about himself. It seems the
middle-class America he knew while growing up on Long Island in the
1950s and 1960s is gone; the America of his “youth was another
country.” Social norms have “unraveled, replaced by an ethos of
‘anything goes.’” This has apparently led to exorbitant salaries
for unprincipled CEOs and an America in which the rich get richer,
and inequality in income distribution grows. Consequently the
middle class is supposed to be fading away.
But the idea that there is a growing inequality in income
distribution is not new. It has been argued about and debated for
years. Krugman’s contribution to the debate, however, is to claim
that the inequality and all its baneful effects have been brought
about solely by political conservatives. The unraveled social norms
and anything goes ethos, for example, have nothing to do with, say,
coarseness in the popular culture, or banishing God from the public
square, and certainly not with kinky sex and lies in the White
House; greedy conservatives are responsible, and that’s all there
is to it.
Krugman, in fact, reminds you of one of those dreary people you
sometimes meet at social gatherings: They may not know much about
politics, but when they make political pronouncements it makes them
feel important. Indeed Krugman has suggested in some of his
Times op-ed page columns that because he is so significant
a figure the right wing is out to get him. He seems to have bought
into the idea that there really is a vast right-wing conspiracy,
although whether this is more self-aggrandizement, or whether he
actually believes it, is hard to say. But Krugman is also a
Princeton professor, so maybe he actually believes it.
Anyway in the magazine piece Krugman breaks new ground. “It may
sound simplistic to describe the Democrats as the party that wants
to tax the rich and help the poor, and the Republicans as the party
that wants to keep taxes and social spending as low as possible,”
he writes, but then he goes to say that’s exactly what they are. He
also makes the extraordinary claim that the “growing divisiveness
of our politics” has nothing to do with ideological or
philosophical differences. Instead it’s because the Republicans
have all been bought off by the rich. Krugman is too delicate to
speak of cash bribes, but that seems to be what he means.
And that, of course, is a nasty charge, and whether Krugman
believes this, too, or is only trying again to draw attention to
himself is also hard to say. On the other hand, it may be that, as
it is with Dowd, it may be with Krugman. Hardly anyone is paying
attention anymore, so perhaps it doesn’t matter.
* * * * *
As was noted in this space recently, Robert Mugabe, the despotic
Zimbabwe president, had a reception in his honor at New York’s City
Hall. The reception was organized by Councilman Charles Barron, an
up and coming race hustler, and attended by a dozen or so members
of the New York City Council. Barron said at the time that he
intended to lead a Council delegation on a fact-finding mission to
Zimbabwe.
And, in fact, he has, although it turns out to be not much of a
delegation. The pro-government Express in Zimbabwe
reported last week that Barron had arrived leading a group of
twenty, but the more reliable Daily News said the
delegation consisted of only Barron and one other Councilman, along
with seven or eight junketing staffers. “We’re not disappointed,”
Barron’s top aide told a reporter. “There were a lot of scheduling
issues.”
