A Pair of Petty Outrages in the Penny Press!

The Penny Press has been mostly behaving itself lately, which is an oddly mixed blessing. When I’m happily reading along, encountering one great piece after another while ensconced in my hole-in-the-wall lunch-time getaway, of course I’m intellectually satisfied (and once again mystified as to how other thinking readers somehow get along without such a steady diet of periodical literature, reading little or none of it at all when I can’t get enough of it). But also wary – because outrages are sure to come; they’re built into the nature of the thing, after all.

I got a pair of such outrages just recently, in two of the dozens of such periodicals I eagerly consume every week. The first was a book review in The National Review, a brisk and generally competent thing by Florence King looking at Stephen Puleo’s book The Caning, about the scandalous episode in May of 1856 when deep-fried South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks walked up to where Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner was seated in the Senate and beat him senseless with his heavy walking stick. The incident took about fifteen minutes, so Puleo’s book is mostly padding of one kind or another – including some interesting thoughts about how the savagery of Brooks’ attack was an accurate shorthand for the scorched-earth obduracy of the South that would soon break out in civil war.

The annoyance came from King’s echoing of some of the worst parts of Puleo’s padding, unfortunately – mainly along the lines of Sumner having it coming. The rationale is, as always, pop psychology: “Unable to please his impossibly demanding father, he overcompensated with a pose of superiority and never let his mask crack.” And so we’re told that Sumner’s fierce oratory on the Senate floor came not from his deeply-held abolitionist views but because he was “consumed by a driving need to hurl invective to assuage his buried resentments.” Yeesh.

A slightly bigger annoyance came in The New Republic, and it at least was predictable: the ongoing canonization of Aaron Swartz. This piece, called “So Open It Hurts,” is by the talented Noam Scheiber – and the fact that it spends half its time discussing not Swartz but the hacker “culture” of which he was a part doesn’t exactly mitigate the irritation, especially since Scheiber makes that “culture” sound like something out of the heroic bits of Les Miserables: “Underlying it all was the hacker belief that the world could be perfected if enough of us tapped society’s vast reserves of knowledge and put it to proper use,” he writes, apparently without irony, about a crowd of smugly misanthropic criminals. When at one point he clarifies, “For this crowd, ‘hacker’ is a complimentary term connoting ingenuity; only in pop culture has it become associated with criminal activity,” I told myself, “he won’t go two lines without mentioning something that is, in fact, a criminal activity.” And sure enough, the very next line is “It is the hacker’s job to take an existing pile of code or equipment and mold it into something new, say a touch-tone phone refashioned as a messaging device” – for all the world as though the idealistic hackers in question built the signal towers and launched the comm satellites and so have more right to ‘refashion’ than the companies that did (and of course no obligation to pay those companies anything).

“The lawyers said an action was wrong if it was against the law,” Scheiber summarizes, “The hacker says it was only wrong if you failed to accomplish it. It was the most fundamental statement of the hacker ethos, and it teemed with idealism.” If you can spot anything idealistic in that ‘ethos,’ you’re obviously Scheiber’s intended audience.

He also takes the by now requisite stab at making Swartz a medical hero, although at least Scheiber has the innate honesty to make it a half-hearted stab:

Part of the problem may have been clinical. Swartz would later write about his eating binges and mood swings, the days when he was too paralyzed by sadness to even venture outside. These stretches may have been flare-ups of depression or bipolar disorder, though it’s impossible to know: Swartz’s father has said Aaron was never diagnosed with depression or on antidepressants.

There’ll be no stopping this particular angle, I’m sure (I’ve already had dire warnings about the long piece on Swartz in the New Yorker – I’m a subscriber, so I won’t see the current issue for several weeks, but I’m bracing myself), but it’s flat-out nonsense. There was nothing clinically wrong with Aaron Swartz – he was just a really smart kid whose parents refused to raise him: he entered nominal adulthood every bit as feckless, impulsive, and self-absorbed as any eight-year-old. His suicide wasn’t an under-medicated cry for help; it was a petulant refusal to play. There aren’t words to describe how it would have shocked him to know that death is permanent. Sainthood should be made of entirely different material, but it’s nevertheless easy to feel the draperies of sainthood gathering about him. I’m sure next year we’ll be talking about a slew of books instead of a slew of hagiographic articles.

For right now, though, it’s just the smaller version of these annoyances: Charles Sumner sold short, Aaron Swartz sold long – and the Penny Press rolls on.