Last night I went to a New York party and got drunk and said a few unmannerly things. My wife wasn't there, who is often my governor in these situations, or who gives me the grim assessment afterward. This morning I told her about a few things I said, in an effort to undo them. My wife has long found fault with what she calls my prosecutorial, hectoring manner. She says it makes people dislike me; and I've come to agree. I thought I was getting over it. But to the videotape:
There were a lot of media people there; and right now there is only one conversation among media people: the destruction of the old media. They bewail it and wring their hands. I come in with a very different attitude, that I have been doing this blog for three years basically for no money, having been spat out by the old media for transgressive ideas, and guys, this is the way the world is going. Media is social; alot of people are prepared to perform the vital informative function for very little money. The assertion that The New York Times is a better gatekeeper than the blogosphere is damaged by the fact that The New York Times served up the Iraq war on a silver platter, the greatest error in foreign policy in the last generation.
My problem is I make this argument too noisily, with verbal flourishes, and the two people I was talking to sort of shrunk a little. When I said, as I always do, that more people know how to write now than ever, and that's a great thing, and the internet is feeding off that energy, an old friend said, "But everyone on the internet has an agenda."
I said, "Both New York Times reporters in Israel are Jewish and married to Israelis. Isabel Kershner's husband Hirsch Goodman was involved in negotiations around Obama's Middle East plan. These reporters know that the Jewish state is in crisis now. Do you think they don't have an agenda?"
As I said these words, I could feel that I was being too aggressive. Another dear old friend said, "OK maybe that's true, Phil, but don't you recognize that the foreign reporters for the Times are professionals who have been trained for many years, and educated, and who do great work? You say you love Haaretz; that's another professional shop. Where are you going to get your information?"
I then agreed with my friend and conceded, Something is lost in any industrial transition.
But he soon went to another table. Later I saw him laughing merrily.There were many other writers at that table and there was no room for me; and I sensed with some grief my own isolation from a culture in which I was once steeped.
I know that my anger and impatience with the whole New York Jewish establishment over Zionism is embedded in the argument over the media industry. I believe that the establishment's unconscious investment in Jewish nationalism with its religious/racialist freight (even as they always denounce the Christian fundamentalists) is the main event of all our lives, intellectually and professionally–or of that part of our lives that is not concerned with the economic meltdown–and as my views have long been marginalized, and my income endangered, I have trouble not bringing all my insecurity and familial disempowerment to the table when the topic comes up. It's not pretty.
Yes, the internet has been empowering; and maybe 6 months from now I will feel even more power than I do now, and I will relax in these social situations, even having drunk too much red wine.
Still it must be said that the blogosphere is for now the province of refusees and the alienated (as neoconservatism was once that place, inside Jewish intellectual sociology); and this is not the kind of energy that anyone wants in their intellectual pilot. No, they want the equivalent of Chelsea Sullenberger at the controls. Steve Walt is probably the best role model here. He was told by many colleagues 3 years ago that he had sabotaged his own future by writing about the Israel lobby but he chose to ignore these grim pronouncements and go on in his calm straightforward goodnatured manner; and now his career is doing better than ever. Walt has a very solid ego structure, though. So does my partner Adam Horowitz. Myself, I'm spotty.
I did have a couple of satisfying conversations last night. A writer I have argued with online, once taking his head off, as my wife would say, over the Israel lobby, I was civil to. I had warned myself ahead of time not to say one intemperate word to him, no matter what the reason. I didn't. He said, "You look a little like a whaler," and I smiled and agreed: "I know. I've rusticated completely. I was going to wear a dress shirt, but I realized it would look ridiculous." Also I learned that one Jewish girl I've seen at parties from across the room over the years is a secret sharer. I generally avoid The Palestine Issue with Jews I don't know at parties because it can blow up, but she kept saying something about a Nation article I'd written and finally I said, "This is all I care about now." And she looked at me in that everything in an instant way, and said, "It's all I care about too." There was that thrill of recognition. We are going to be in touch.
(Phil Weiss)
