Nice appreciation of GWS Trow in Slate

Stephen Metcalfe sums up writer George W.S. Trow and his major work, Within the Context of No Context. It's a reasonably good read for people interested in such things.

The scion of a prosperous New York printing family, Trow was a prime mover in the revivication that turned the Harvard Lampoon from a snotty finals-club tipsheet into something quite splendid. In addition to helping National Lampoon get off the ground, Trow wrote for The New Yorker back when that was more akin to an Oxbridge donship than to magazine work: lifetime employment among a collection of overbright individuals simultaneously more influential than they probably should've been, and yet much less influential than they thought they were.

Reading that back, it sounds harsh; I don't mean it that way. Trow and his ilk were extremely good at whatever it was that they did--you cannot question their seriousness or devotion, and the chasing of the dons from The New Yorker hasn't been an unalloyed good thing. The current magazine's closer connection to timeliness and pop culture, which replaced an unwavering adherence to a completely internal, idiosyncratic, persnickety sense of quality, has given The New Yorker many of the flaws of the current culture...while keeping its Olympian self-satisfaction intact. It's Baby Boomer magic: all of the arrogance and exclusivity, but none of the redeeming seriousness of purpose. The old magazine disdained the mass taste, and this squareness allowed it to champion worthy things that didn't fit into the marketing machines. Now, The New Yorker is as likely to profile Tim Allen as a Nobel Prize winner, and in a world glutted with entertainment, that's not really progress. It's to Trow's credit that he excused himself after Tina Brown arrived. Coming from money allows one to stand on principle; it's one of the things we look to them for, to remind the rest of us that it is possible.

If the decline of the Eastern Establishment interests you, Trow's Context is worth a read; also good is Nelson Aldritch's Old Money. Though the particulars change from book to book, the central thesis is simply this: the Eastern Establishment withered away when it could no longer project a set of values strong enough to compete against the commercial/celebrity culture--what Metcalfe calls "hustler culture."

Coming as I do from more-or-less broke Midwesterners, I have a soft spot for the Eastern Establishment, which was nice enough to let me bed down with them for four years at Yale. But the solidity and memory that it represents to me--a sense of the individual in history that I have such affection for--doesn't really exist anymore. I'll quote Metcalf:

The hustler-elite, meanwhile, converted the old WASP hegemony into a pair of useful minstrels: the preppy and the yuppie. The preppy is the old country club nonstriver who never got the memo and so recluses stupidly within a set of dead social conventions. For her part, the yuppie is all too happy to play by the new rules. After mastering semiotics at Brown, she puts to use her new knowledge by creating content … well, by, for, and about the exciting world of content!

This shift, like most things in life, is a mix of good and bad. On the good side, there's more mobility than ever before--the circumstances of one's birth matter less and less. On the bad side, though, success has shrunken to a single skill: manipulating the media, the masses, or the market. Learning how to work in the world of commerce and celebrity--hardly ennobling pursuits, not really worth the sweat of a lifetime (just ask anybody who's "made it")--has become the only field for ambition.

Here's a bit of proof: at least according to one Princetonian, "starting a revolution" is the same as launching a cross between Rolling Stone and GQ." The youthful hyperbole can be excused--we're all there at some point in our lives, though most of us manage to keep it off the internet. But the dream of celebrity, of stardom through entertainment, is as paltry as it is common. When our best-educated, most able young people cannot think of a finer future than the well-compensated manufacture of shiny objects, something's deeply wrong. Person by person, generation by generation, I fear we'll become unequipped to do the serious work of society. And the worst thing is, we won't know it's happened, until a test comes and we find ourselves wanting, quoting "Seinfeld" lines to the onrushing tsunami. I suspect the homeless and the hungry suspect it's happened already.

Oh well, back to writing comic novels!