SOME TRENCHANT WORDS FROM THE LATE PHILIP ROTH
One enquiring reader of my last Baboon Gabble Derby blog asked me where I came up with the number 77 as my count of Donald Trump’s complete vocabulary. You can’t imagine how delighted I am to respond. Well, I didn’t actually “come up with it”—I borrowed it—from Philip Roth, to whom I will now take the opportunity to pay my tardy respects. The late novelist, who died on May 22, 2018, was quoted in the January 30, 2017 issue of The New Yorker:
I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.
Well put, as usual. As for Trump’s war on journalists who dare to criticize him, Roth had this to say:
Unlike writers in Eastern Europe in the nineteen-seventies, American writers haven’t had their driver’s licenses confiscated and their children forbidden to matriculate in academic schools. Writers here don’t live enslaved in a totalitarian police state, and it would be unwise to act as if we did, unless—or until—there is a genuine assault on our rights and the country is drowning in Trump’s river of lies. In the meantime, I imagine writers will continue robustly to exploit the enormous American freedom that exists to write what they please, to speak out about the political situation, or to organize as they see fit.
Amen! Amen!
I’m sure many of you have read Roth, or seen films or television series based on his writings. Indeed, the television mini-series now appearing on HBO, The Plot Against America, is but one of several TV adaptations of his fiction. Other major works of his include Goodbye, Columbus, Portnoy’s Complaint, The Human Stain, American Pastoral (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998), Indignation, Nemesis. A much-honored author of his time, he won two National Book Awards and three PEN/Faulkner Awards for his fiction.
While saluting Roth I should also praise The New Yorker, the best magazine that is or ever was…in my informed opinion. I’ve loved magazines since I was kid reading Boy’s Life; I got my Master’s degree in magazine journalism from UCLA; I was a magazine editor for 13 years; I taught magazine journalism for 15 years at CSULB; through it all I always looked to The New Yorker as the mark of excellence to shoot for.
Now I grieve to see so many of my favorite magazines emaciated or vanished in this hurried digital age. I feel rather like those pooper-scooper guys must have felt with the passing of the horse-and-buggy age. Sad. Obsolete. Without a job.
Can’t we all slow down? Go back to reading?