Mr. Noah:

I've never noticed anything so obtuse by you to add your name to my mental list of the many jacka**es populating the media landscape. In fact, if I went back and reviewed your articles over the years, I'd probably like most of them.

But you sir, have gone beyond the pale with this one. Lewis Lapham is one of the only voices of erudition and historical literacy in the barren intellectual landscape of American journalism. He deserves praise, not ridicule, for including learned historical parallels in his delicious diatribes about our current march of folly.

I have not scanned the other responses here more than cursorily, but I'm willing to bet most are with me on this.

There is enough hostility to those with an intelligent grasp of history in our media. I can get that sort of Know-Nothing attitude from Fox News, not to mention more mainstream journalism. Someone at Slate needs to wake up and let Mr. Noah know it's not welcome to this readership.

I agree Gumshoe. Although I'm decently knowledgeable on history I wish I knew 1/10th what Lapham does about it. He should be praised, not ridiculed by lesser minds. Granted I do find some of his pieces hard to follow but that is more my lack than his.

-Doughdee222

"I am a realist, not a pessimist. The real world is pessimistic by nature."

Eridute, maybe, but is he on target? Lapham seems utterly fixated on the idea of America as a decadent, corrupt, decaying Empire, but is that really the case? See my earlier post on the subject.

Lapham seems to view everything through a highly specific moral lens: that money is the root of all evil. Or maybe more accurately, that GRUBBING for money is the root of all evil. This is a classic upper class elitist position and I for one find it rather annoying--not being anywhere near the upper class myself, naturally.

America, he thinks, pursues money at the cost of everything else, and he often implies that the worst thing is really how vulgar we are at it. However Lapham himself is one of the prime beneficiaries of the American pursuit of money. Wasn't he born to inherited wealth? How clean was that money? Didn't somebody grub for that? And isn't he the editor of a magazine that no doubt pays him a good salary?

So he's criticizing the pursuit of money from a very comfortable vantage point. It opens him to the same charge that Norm Chomsky or Gore Vidal are vulnerable to; they are all huge and often vicious critics of a system of which they are prime beneficiaries and thus one wonders how serious they really are. Are they posing? Working out Daddy issues? Are they in some way back handed apologists for the system? IOW, by being so insistent that the system is utterly corrupt, are they not really teaching people that this is the way the system HAS to be? And then they end up benefiting from the corruption they so loudly and publically decry.

So I think Noah did go after a worthy target, but maybe not as well as it could have been done.

Doughdee, don't be so hard on yourself. You can be just like Lapham! In the opening essay of the first issue, he even spells out for us what kind of habits will get us on the right track. "Every morning at ten o’clock, I sat down to a desk occupied by five newspapers and seven periodicals (four of them embroiled in politics, the others concerned with socio-economic theory or scientific discovery), three volumes of ancient or modern history (the War of 1812, the death of Christopher Marlowe, the life of Suleiman the Magnificent), a public opinion poll sifting America’s attitude toward family values and assault weapons, and at least fifteen manuscripts, solicited and unsolicited, whose authors assured me in their cover letters that they had unearthed, among other items of interest, the true reason for the Kennedy assassinations and the secret of the universe." I guess first you just need to buy a really large desk.

Long ago, I had a subscription to Harpers, and tried a few times to read Lapham's commentary. The phrase that kept popping into my head was the one famously coined by Spiro Agnew -- effete snob. Pompous bla bla signifying nothing (more or less what Noah said). Perhaps in the afterlife (call it hell or irony or whatever you please), Lapham and Agnew would be excellent bunk mates.

Now I would sooner eat lima beans than read anything by Lapham.

At the same time, I wonder as you do why Noah thought it necessary to put the knife in at this moment, in such a snide way. His column is more like something to write after the man's death, in a more obscure literary journal, just to warn aspiring would-be writers not to go that way. That would have been a useful and more discreet alternative.

Lapham writes for those who have the traditional English education, heavy on the Roman Empire and the wars involving European states. So far, so good. If you share that frame of reference, you'll enjoy Lapham's writing. The problem is Lapham tries very (so veddy) hard to include as much flowery language and obscure references as he possibly can. He's writing for a select audience, those who admire his style and see it as erudite and scholarly. These would be mostly Anglophiles, I'm guessing, many of whom tilt toward snobbishness. Most ordinary Americans (even most ordinary Brits) would find all this too pretentious. Lapham appears pretty full of himself, and that takes away from the fact he happens to be correct in his analysis of "our current march of folly."

No, I'm not being specific enough. It takes away for most people, not for those who share Lapham's frame of reference. I suppose that's where Mr. Noah's article falls short, in recommending that nobody should address that audience in the style of Mr. Lapham. Everyone deserves to read informed analysis they can enjoy, and Lapham provides just that for a select audience. Still, for most of us, Lapham seems a comic figure. Most of his admiring readership is probably laughing at us as we are laughing at them. Well, "laughing" might be the wrong verb choice. Perhaps they're adjusting their monocles so they might better look down their noses at us.

I think Noah is just having some fun with Lapham. I notice he didn't call for a boycott until Lapham desists with references to beribboned Roman emperors.