Vincent Carroll of the Rocky Mountain News has figured out what’s so unsettling about Pinch Sulzberger’s commencement address at SUNY New Paltz, covered here earlier. From Carroll’s column:
"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
- Mark Twain
But of course it is not easy to keep your mouth closed when you are publisher of The New York Times . . .
The breathtaking arrogance of [his] litany lies not in its politics, which are what you'd expect, but in its sheer childishness.
What serious adult could possibly anticipate a world in which environmentalists—or any other interest group—are given free rein to define national policy, and in which U.S. leaders are indifferent to safeguarding a commodity crucial to their economy?
What serious adult would expect consensus over efforts to redefine marriage or how to treat millions of people who entered this country without permission? It seems Sulzberger graduated from college anticipating a world in which no one ever disagreed with The New York Times. How revealing to make such a confession.
The crowning touch of these passages, however, is their false contrition - the apology for a state of affairs that he and his audience both know Sulzberger had nothing to do with creating. He is sorry that the world has not lived up to his standards for Utopia. It's a 12-year-old's lament delivered by the publisher of the most powerful newspaper in the land to an audience that in some cases sounds, based on the cheering, almost as immature as he is.
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