<i>The New Yorker</i> Nukes Thoreau

magazine just tried to destroy Henry David Thoreau in an article by recently hired Kathryn Schulz. Her only book isand this article adds to her authority on that subject considerably.
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NEW YORK, NY - OCTOBER 03: The New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz speaks onstage at 9 On The Richer Scale during The New Yorker Festival 2015 at SVA Theater on October 3, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Craig Barritt/Getty Images for The New Yorker)
NEW YORK, NY - OCTOBER 03: The New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz speaks onstage at 9 On The Richer Scale during The New Yorker Festival 2015 at SVA Theater on October 3, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Craig Barritt/Getty Images for The New Yorker)

The New Yorker magazine just tried to destroy Henry David Thoreau in an article by recently hired Kathryn Schulz. Her only book is Being Wrong and this article adds to her authority on that subject considerably. The article is a bizarre hate-filled screed, and as such, an aberration in the The New Yorker archive, and also as such, it brings into question yet again the judgment of editor David Remnick.

"Pond Scum" is the perfect title for Schulz's article. Though she doesn't use it in the body of the article, the latter word perfectly expresses Schulz's assessment of Thoreau. She doesn't simply deny him all morality but all humanity. Unfortunately for her cause, there is another evaluation of Thoreau, by one of his closest friends and one of America's greatest writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson. To get the true measure of "Pond Scum," it should be read along side "Emerson's Eulogy of May 9th, 1862." There are few, if any, criticisms that Schulz makes that are not also in Emerson's Eulogy. She just has to hit all the high notes of moral outrage.

Schulz does score some hits. She says of Thoreau's lifelong project of subsistence living that it is "a condition attractive chiefly to those not obliged to endure it." Thoreau always had a troubling appeal to right-wingers and Schulz is right to mention Ayn Rand. There was a pathological edge to Thoreau's emotional isolation, especially at middle age, and to his puritanical sex attitudes. But there is also a pathological edge to "Pond Scum."

Schulz praises Thoreau for being "an outspoken abolitionist," for opposing the institution that, according the Schulz, "was and remains the central moral and political crisis of American history." Then in the very next paragraph she says, "The deepest of all the troubles disturbing the waters of Walden - is that it assumes that Thoreau had some better way of discerning the truth than other people did." Like the rest of the abolitionists, who were a very small percentage of the population, Thoreau indisputably had a better way of discerning the truth about that central moral and political crisis.

Schulz takes back that meager praise, and of course, she leaves out entirely Thoreau's greatest accomplishments, which made him indispensable to America and the world. Emerson complained, "Instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party." But when Thoreau invented civil disobedience (by refusing to pay taxes and deliberately going to jail to protest the unjust war against Mexico of 1846-48) he was "engineering for" America, and the world for that matter, by his philosophy and example, through Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Cesar Chavez, among others.

Also unfortunately for her cause, Schulz is up against the highly educated New Yorker readership, the majority of whom are familiar with and have their own opinions about Henry David Thoreau. Plus, she is up against those who have voted in favor of Thoreau in the most profound way possible, by using him as a life-model. For instance, today there are thousands of members of the simple living movement voluntarily "subsistence living" throughout the U.S. but especially in the West. Thoreau was also an icon and model for the 60s Counter Culture, that second coming of the 1850s American Renaissance. I have been a life-long Thoreauvian, participating in both the Civil Rights Movement and the back-to-the-land movement, the final phase of the Counter Culture.

Aside from what "Pond Scum" says about Thoreau, the piece is a diffuse tantrum, and that David Remnick published it (and unedited judging by its tedious length), says something about him. But he hasn't just published "Pond Scum," he hired Schulz, she's on staff now, so we New Yorker readers can benefit from the insight she demonstrates here for some time to come.

Remnick's tenure already includes similar glaring lapses in judgment, most prominently (and with infinitely more at stake of course) when he threw the moral weight of the magazine behind George W. Bush's Iraq War, diminishing that moral weight considerably in the process. Remnick should have used Thoreau as a model.

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