Leon Wieseltier and His Gemeinschaft

Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic (which has recently reinvented itself as a fortnightly), has written a backpager for the magazine on the final episode of the HBO series The Sopranos.

Here is a (brief) excerpt from that article:

The hobbled and true language of Chase's people is an essential element of his devastating portrait of the dictatorship of ordinary life, of the alternately quickening and deadening influences of the commonplace. (So, too, is his exegetical use of popular music, whose salving effect has never been made clearer. I speak as one who is also inwardly fortified by "Denise" and "Oh Girl," and lifted up by "The Dolphins." And I can almost not forgive the show for leaving me so absurdly affected by "Con Te Partirò.") The Sopranos is a searching study of the problem of small horizons. The problem is that they are beautiful and they are crushing. Who does not come from a place that mistakes itself for the universe? All metaphysics is local. If it is possible to have a vision of the Virgin Mary, then it possible to have a vision of the Virgin Mary at the Bada Bing. The Sopranos locates the human lot in north Jersey, but the human lot is available everywhere or it is available nowhere. And the gangland Gemeinschaft provides the same satisfactions as any Gemeinschaft. (And the same hilarity. Meadow: "The state can crush the individual." Tony: "New Jersey?") Yet it provides also the same airlessness: the authenticity of these made communitarians does not exactly leave an impression of radiance. The bitter joke of the show is that these people are repulsive not only for their baseness but also for their provincialism. There is no Archimedean point outside the new Avellino. These are peasants with latte machines. Their insularity, their superstition, their immutability, their self-love: these, too, are human failures, like evil.

When I read this, I had the following reaction: you know, it's probably a good thing that Wieseltier is the literary editor of the magazine, because if such a pretentious piece of utter bullshit had come in over the transom, it probably would have been laughed out of the office.

Doesn't it read like a parody of head-up-their-ass intellectuals such as you might find in the pages of a Saul Bellow novel? It reminds me of when I worked at Newsweek, years ago, and Meg Greenfield used to write essays for the magazine. Or at least she called them essays -- in reality they were rambling, chaotic screeds whose sentences went on and on like Proust, only pointlessly. The problem was that all the editors at the magazine, knowing how close Greenfield was to Mrs. Graham (the owner of The Washington Post Company, which owns Newsweek), were afraid to edit her.

Let me repeat that -- they were afraid to edit her. So her windbaggy blatherings went on, unedited, to the end of her life.

So it's good to know the boss -- or, in Wieseltier's case, to be the editor. How else are you going to make an utter ass of yourself with impunity? But for me, I would just say: Leon, why don't you take your pompous article and stuff it right up your gemeinschaft. Bada bing!

Tom Moran