SOS: My moral dilemma

I’m on deadline. But can I write for an oligarchist newspaper?

I have a moral dilemma. A lot of journalists now do. Others, too. Those applying for federal grants and censoring words like “inclusion”; hospitals making decisions about gender-affirming care; teachers asking students to read normal books that are fast being turned into samizdat.

We’re officially in a regime.

So: I have a book review due to the Washington Post. The Post’s opinion page has been turned by its steroid-swole owner into an ad for his self-pleasuring views of personal freedoms.

This brazen bullshit is, obviously, unheard of at this scale. It used to be even the appearance of this kind of editorial impropriety—say, a gesture toward a possibility of a breach of the so-called Chinese Wall that once separated editorial from business—brought shame on a newspaper.

Now a clownish modern-day Genghis Khan has breached the Wall so thoroughly that it’s hard to imagine order and trust will ever be restored at the Post.

But I have a deadline. It’s not for an opinion piece. It’s not a news or politics story. The commitment is to an editor I hugely admire. Also, I need the money.

In misery, I think of Paul de Man, the literary critic. As a young man in Belgium, de Man, who died in 1983, wrote for two newspapers controlled by the Nazis.

As an admirer of de Man in the early 1990s, I used to tell myself—when the news of his early perfidy surfaced—that he’d been a very young man during the war, and book reviews paid the rent. In fact, as the revelations compounded, I found that de Man had toed the collaborist line so dutifully he seems to have invented the line. In his reviews, he called Jewish writers degenerates, slagged the French as effeminate, and praised pro-Nazi intellectuals.

So it’s possible a writer can’t stay aloof from the politics of an outlet. Write for a paper owned by “private equity” and you end up disproportionately praising the private sector. Write for a centrist joint and you sand the edges off your politics. Write for a collaborationist newspaper and you, slowly and surely, turn fascist.

Certain freshly minted oligarchic papers—the Post, the LA Times, USA Today—are boiling water. Since I’m not a slow-boiled frog on staff, I’m not caught unaware. To jump into the pot now, maybe, would be to be instantly cooked—and perhaps even to intend to be cooked. To want to be cooked.

Nonetheless. In James Joyce’s long short story The Dead, we get another view, at least a view from inside the anguish over a bunch of live questions. What is literature? What is a newspaper? What is collaborationism?

A version of this anguish haunts many of us these days.

Back to The Dead. In a crucial scene, Gabriel Conroy, the writer protagonist, is interrogated by Molly Ivors, a Irish nationalist and intellectual, as they dance at a party.

Molly dislikes that Gabriel writes for a paper known for its “unionist” politics—that is, its loyalty, on its opinion and news pages, to the British crown. (In this vein, the Washington Post now might be known as an “oligarchist” paper.)

Joyce’s rendering of the exchange and conflict between Molly and Gabriel—and the dynamics of shame and shaming—is a masterpiece within a masterpiece. Here goes:

“I have found out that you write for The Daily Express. Now, aren't you ashamed of yourself?" [Molly asked.]

"Why should I be ashamed of myself?" asked Gabriel, blinking his eyes and trying to smile.

“Well, I'm ashamed of you," said Miss Ivors frankly. "To say you'd write for a paper like that. I didn't think you were a West Briton.”

[A West Briton: meaning hardly Irish at all.]

A look of perplexity appeared on Gabriel's face. It was true that he wrote a literary column every Wednesday in The Daily Express, for which he was paid fifteen shillings. But that did not make him a West Briton surely. The books he received for review were almost more welcome than the paltry cheque. He loved to feel the covers and turn over the pages of newly printed books…He did not know how to meet her charge. He wanted to say that literature was above politics. But they were friends of many years' standing and their careers had been parallel, first at the University and then as teachers: he could not risk a grandiose phrase with her. He continued blinking his eyes and trying to smile and murmured lamely that he saw nothing political in writing reviews of books.

“He wanted to say that literature was above politics.” Oh, Gabriel. I want this too. I also want my fifteen shillings, my paltry cheque!

Reader, what should I do?