JONAH GOLDBERG: Morality as a Foreign Language.
The New York Times has a big, mostly predictable story on the fall of Jeffrey Toobin. The first thing of note (or the fourth if you count the above) is the headline:
The Undoing of Jeffrey Toobin
How a leading man of legal journalism lost his sweetest gig.
The piece sets this up as some kind of mystery, even though just about everyone who has heard of this story knows how he lost the gig. (Again, I don’t want to offend anybody, so I’ll avoid clinical descriptions. During an online Zoom meeting, he let his mouse out of the house and proceeded to give it a hand.)
In other words, the big reveal of this journalistic whodunnit was his big reveal to his colleagues. (I mean “big reveal” in the literary, and not necessarily the anatomical sense.) The resolution of “How a leading man of legal journalism lost his sweetest gig” was known to the reader from the outset.
Let me explain this in a weird way: Sometimes certain things are explanations in and of themselves, without need of further commentary. For instance, one of my best friends in college was known around campus as one of the nicest people you’d ever meet. One day, a mutual friend who went to high school with him, said “Yeah, Andy’s a very decent guy, but you know his brother’s even nicer.”
I said, “Come on. How could anyone be nicer than Andy?” The guy paused for a second and then said, “His brother was a hugger at the Special Olympics.” He literally waited at the finish line and hugged every kid after they finished.
“Oh. Got it.” I replied.
Or here’s another story. On a business trip in India, my Dad had dinner with a major mogul in Bollywood. The multimillionaire said to my Dad, “Sid, I love your country. America is wonderful. But you can’t really be rich there.”
My Dad said something like, “What are you talking about? We have the richest people in the world in America.”
The mogul paused for a moment, and then said, “Let me put it this way: I have never tied my own shoes.”
“Ah, I see,” my Dad replied.
Now, imagine I was out of the loop and asked someone why Jeffrey Toobin lost his gig at The New Yorker and the answer was, “He pleasured himself on a Zoom call in front of his colleagues and boss.” I might have a lot of questions, but “Why was he fired?” really wouldn’t be one.
Apparently, that just shows I’m ensconced in a bourgeois, Judeo-Christian mindset.
Which for a very long time, is not something one could accuse most Timesmen of. Read the whole thing.