From The Atlantic:
One afternoon in the mid-1980s, while on scholarship at the University of Oxford, Walter Kirn came upon a bulletin announcing that Jorge Luis Borges was visiting the campus and wished to meet students informally. Kirn, the future writer and critic, then in his early 20s and a recent Princeton graduate, glanced at his watch and realized that the event started in 10 minutes.
He hurried down to one of those little rooms where Oxford students drank sherry with their dons. Borges, bent over an old-fashioned cane, leaning on a nurse’s arm, with wraparound sunglasses to shield his blind eyes, walked in. To Kirn, Borges had until then existed wholly outside space and time, less a human being than a synonym for capital-L Literature, like Kafka or Cervantes. Now the famous writer offered the cowed students an icebreaker. “I have a game I like to play,” he said. “I like to edit, or revise, Shakespeare.” On long flights or when he was bored, he would take Shakespeare’s speeches and try to improve them. He gave an example of a line he’d adjusted from King Lear. “Isn’t it plainly much better?” Borges asked.
Kirn went on to write for a long list of newspapers and magazines (including this one). He married and divorced the daughter of a famous actress. He wrote the novel Up in the Air, which was turned into a movie starring George Clooney (who, Kirn says, tried to swoop in on his own girlfriend—the writer Amanda Fortini—when she visited the set; Fortini is now his wife). In his hilarious 2009 memoir, Lost in the Meritocracy (which began as an Atlantic cover story), he described how he came to be a member of “the class that runs things,” the one that “writes the headlines, and the stories under them.” It was the account of a middle-class kid from Minnesota trying desperately to fit into the elite world—and then realizing that he didn’t want to fit in at all. Now 61, Kirn has a newsletter on Substack, co-hosts a lively podcast devoted in large part to critiquing establishment liberalism, writes the kind of provocative tweets that not everyone understands are jokes (in part because some aren’t), and appears on Fox’s late-night comedy show. Depending on one’s perspective, he is either a spokesperson for a forgotten America, a truth teller in a grim and timid time, or a recklessly contrarian apologist for Donald Trump and the more conspiratorially minded of his supporters.
In March, I spent two days with him in Livingston, Montana, where he moved from New York City more than 30 years ago. Bronze-skinned even in winter, Kirn has thick white hair and a prankster’s smile. When he speaks, he’ll glance around the room and drop his voice before reestablishing eye contact, so you feel as though he’s letting you in on a secret. Then he tells you a story: the one about how he flipped his car into a creek while not wearing a seat belt; or how he ended up euthanizing his mother, who was comatose and dying of a brain infection; or when he drove his truck over his baby, who had crawled into the driveway and emerged from between the wheels miraculously unscathed.
Even many of his sharpest political arguments take the shape of a yarn. Kirn’s father died in May 2020, but Kirn still maintains his house in Livingston; on a visit there he showed me, hanging in the garage, an American flag with a superimposed black-and-white photograph of a rifle-toting Geronimo. Kirn calls Geronimo an American hero for asserting his own inherent dignity and refusing to make peace with the United States. Geronimo was eventually imprisoned at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, until he died and was buried there. Then, in 1918, Kirn says, “f******g Prescott Bush comes in and f******g steals his skull. You know where his skull is? Skull and Bones. It’s their f******g little totem for their Yale secret society! They took his f******g skull, and it sits there.”
The story might be apocryphal (there’s no hard evidence that Geronimo’s grave was looted, though some historians consider it plausible). But it captures something essential about Kirn, who can seem, like Trump himself, less concerned with the strict facticity of the claims he makes than with the sins of the people he’s attacking.
Kirn would never describe himself as a Trump supporter, but he cares less about Trump’s rampage through American democracy, or even the lunacy and violence of January 6, than he does about the selfish and self-satisfied elites—all noblesse, no oblige—who sparked that anger and sustained it. Call him a counter-elite. As he said about Skull and Bones: “That’s our elite. Who wouldn’t want to be counter to it?”
Kirn described the dominant politics of his Minnesota youth as “rural progressivism.” He spoke reverently of his grandfather, also named Walter Kirn, a local politician in Akron, Ohio, who, in the 1950s, ruined his career by defending the right of the Black thespian and suspected communist Paul Robeson to come to town. Family legend has it that he opened up a high-school auditorium for Robeson’s performance “purely on the basis of his right to express himself. It wasn’t out of empathy for his views.” Kirn sees that “as the right kind of politics.”
Today he regards Trump’s supporters not as the proverbial basket of deplorables but as more or less reasonable citizens with valid concerns. The movement around Trump, Kirn told me, is “an expression of American frustration on the part of people who feel like they got a really raw deal.” He described himself as “anti-anti-Trump, in the sense that I don’t think that this is the unique challenge in American history for which we should throw away all sorts of liberties and prerogatives that we are going to want back.” One reason he doesn’t see the coming election as a state of emergency is he does not believe that previous American leaders, such as the Bushes, were particularly virtuous, even in comparison with Trump—a figure Kirn and his colleagues at that bastion of 1990s East Coast snobbism, Spy magazine, used to relentlessly mock. Here, Kirn’s personal evolution is telling: He is perhaps the most salient example of a mainstream writer rejecting his past to throw in with the populists.
Kirn is right that, as the internet and social media have allowed us to peer inside our national institutions, there is no denying their stewards have suffered profoundly from the exposure. And yet, I kept asking myself a question and phrasing it to Kirn in different ways: Why can’t we do two things simultaneously? Why can’t we revise our estimation of a decadent and often deceitful ruling class and refuse to downplay the sui generis outrage that is Donald Trump? It is not an acquittal of George W. Bush’s grandfather to insist that a second Trump term would be a mistake.
Whenever I tried this tack with Kirn, he didn’t dispute it. It just wasn’t an argument that excited him.
and Triumphant, an eschatological cult of about 2,000 members that built bomb shelters in preparation for Armageddon. “People were charging up their credit cards because they thought the bills would never come due,” he later wrote in a story about the movement for Slate. “They were buying ammunition by the crate load.” Kirn had flown out west to witness the end of the world and liked it so much that he stayed.
Kirn’s own ex-father-in-law, the writer Thomas McGuane, coined the term flyover country. Kirn was drawn to the freedom and openness of the land, and on the drive from the airport, the jagged Rockies brushed orange by the sunset, I could easily see why. Livingston had once been a thriving railroad town, as well as the gateway to Yellowstone, America’s first national park. But by the time Kirn showed up, the Northern Pacific Railroad had shuttered its Italianate depot, and he could purchase an entire building with the money he made writing book reviews. The area was majestic; Tom Brokaw owned (and still owns) a sprawling ranch nearby. There weren’t even speed limits on the highways. And so, as he once put it, he became “a resident of Montana’s center (both geographically and politically).”
Not everyone would describe Kirn as a centrist now, certainly not since the election of 2016.
Reporting for Harper’s on the Republican convention, Kirn was immediately attuned to Trump’s appeal. He also saw an opportunity to showcase his own growing estrangement from mainstream liberal journalism:
The media loungers with their gift for telepathic quasi plagiarism have reached their verdict, and many of them pronounce it in the same words. Dark. Dystopian. Negative. A turnoff. My pal in California, the conspiratorial libertarian who’ll probably write in Frank Zappa on his ballot, would likely say, “I guess they got the memo.” But I didn’t see the memo. I’ve never seen the memo, maybe because I don’t work for the large outfits. I’m not a joiner.
Today, Kirn believes that the coverage of Trump’s presidency—followed by the public-health messaging and regulations during the pandemic—poses a much more significant threat than Trump to American democracy. He’s just “not that astonishing an American character,” Kirn told me. “America tries all kinds of types. It tries the pseudo-aristocrat”—John F. Kennedy. It tries “the smoothie”—Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. It tries “the adultish son, like George Bush.” Trump is “the rough salesman” archetype.
Link to the rest at The Atlantic
PG notes that he doesn’t necessarily agree with items he posts on TPV. He also reassures one and all that TPV is not going to become a destination for the discussion of contemporary politics.
He was interested in the OP for its story – former radical getting old and slow, physically and mentally. The last time he had dinner with one of his college friends, formerly a campus radical, PG’s primary emotion was to feel sorry for him, still living in a long-gone past. (PG notes this particular friend is not able to read PG’s comments any longer.)
