Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow – Monobrow!
So Clem comes walkin’ back up the dusty road to the family shack, all alone.
“How come you ain’t with your bride, Clem? I thought you were still honeymoonin’.”
“I shot her, pa.”
“Shot her??What in hell you did that fer?”
“She were a virgin, pa.”
“Oh. You did right, then, son. She ain’t good enough for her own folks, she ain’t good enough for ours.”
Which came to mind when I learned that Norman Podhoretz will hand the editorship of Commentary over to his son John. Other people have written about how famously nepotistic upper-crust neoconservatism is today. But this is especially egregious. I haven’t read Commentary in years – not since the mid-1990s – but Geezer Podhoretz was, despite everything, a man of letters. And his turn to conservatism in the 1960s represented a certain amount of work – it involved actively bucking his milieu, at a certain personal and emotional cost. Junior Podhoretz is neither learned nor stylish in his writing, and his conservatism takes all the heroism of floating in amniotic fluid. He’s as suited to run a literary magazine as I am to conduct the BSO.
Comment by James Joyner —
October 17, 2007 @ 7:56 am
According to his Wikipedia entry, he “received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago in 1982. In 1986, he became a five-time champion on the game show Jeopardy!.”
Papa Pods probably never did that!
Comment by norbizness —
October 17, 2007 @ 7:57 am
That’s only because he ate the other contestants.
Comment by jlw —
October 17, 2007 @ 8:26 am
A quibble, I know, but I thought the term was “monobrow.”
Comment by Jim Henley —
October 17, 2007 @ 8:31 am
Fixed! };)
Comment by Eric the .5b —
October 17, 2007 @ 10:17 am
Monobrow? Is that like a unibrow?
I’m confused – I didn’t see the original headline.
Comment by SDM —
October 17, 2007 @ 12:00 pm
He’s also an asshole. I have occasional pleasant interactions via email with righty bloggers; not so J-Pod. He’s just straight-up a jerk.
Comment by Gary Farber —
October 17, 2007 @ 4:24 pm
“He’s as suited to run a literary magazine as I am to conduct the BSO.”
But he did ride the elevator as a child with Madeleine L’Engle.
I bet he’s pretty good at riding the elevator at every publication he’s ever worked for that has one. Early training will pay off. Credit where due.
Anyway, I just hope this doesn’t mean that Commentary will start publishing crackpots. Or that the editor will be a war-mongering lunatic.
The shock might kill me.