Here’s a thing to know: I only have two or three genuinely good ideas per year. Maybe one or two more, if I’m really fortunate.
I imagine that you already know this, that you have felt the manic energy of a dispatch like the one about semantic drain dissipate into desperation the next week. And maybe even a whole bunch of weeks after, as I frantically attempt to come up with something interesting to say that I have not already said before.
So anyway a professor made a somewhat amusing joke on Twitter about Bret Stephens and the bedbugs that are apparently infesting the New York Times offices and Bret Stephens really needed to Speak to His Manager and then wrote an entire column* about how his situation—in which, again, a professor made a topical joke about Bret Stephens being a metaphorical bedbug— and it made me think about why we even have editorial columnists at newspapers like the Times, and why we ask people to constantly churn out writing when they cannot possibly have more than one (1) interesting thing to say every couple months or so. And even then, the people hired to do this kind of writing have a very different idea of what “interesting” means than most sentient beings.
But so why? Why do we—or, really, newspapers—do this? The short answer of course is “late-stage capitalism,” the Big Bad behind most of our current fears and problems.
The longer answer is that a large chunk of editorial columns are not intended to inform. The vast majority are merely Hot Takes written by people who think having an Ivy League education matters, manufactured to be clicked on by as many people as possible, and possibly of enough interest to keep as customers the feckless dregs of Middle Class Urbanites who subscribe to newspapers to read erudite versions of 4chan shitposts or endless variations on “Why doesn’t everyone want to listen at all times to what I and my similarly minded friends have to say?”
And wow, do we sure get a lot of the latter! Usually it’s mixed in with some screed against students on Ivy League campuses, who are treated as synecdoche for two entire generations. Antifascist groups—by definition decentralized and comprised simply of individuals engaging in antifascism action—also make plenty of appearances as part of a phantom operation to strip these men and women (ugh, Wari Beiss) of their divine right to shove opinions into the eyeballs of every literate American.
The current Stephens imbroglio—again, seriously, I remind you that Bret Stephens went on MSNBC and wrote an entire (bad) column about how a professor saying something funny and mean about him on Twitter heralds another Holocaust—is bizarre for reasons that plenty of other people have already pointed out, not least of which is that, for someone so concerned with how language associated with the Holocaust—ahem, “concentration camps”—is used, he certainly has no qualms using it as a shield against laughably mild criticism.
I get it, truly. It’s hard to come up with something interesting to say even a couple times a month, much less something new and interesting. And yet even at my worst, at my most desperate—like, say, the Saturday of Labor Day weekend—I have never plugged an old piece into Thesaurus dot com and filed it to an editor, or turned what was at best a one-sided Twitter beef about a topical joke into an entire column in a national newspaper.
Sometimes you just don’t have anything interesting to say, and you should avail yourself of the right to simply shut the fuck up. Bret Stephens isn’t a bedbug, he’s a fucking hack.
*I will not be linking to this column because honestly fuck him and fuck the entire New York Times editorial board.