Why do you write these stupid little essays for those stupid little local newspapers that no one reads?
Whoa! That’s a lot of putdowns in one short sentence. Let’s take them one at a time.
1. That the essays are little is undeniable. Generally a few hundred words, given the amount of space allocated by the editors who publish them. It’s true that they need words to separate the advertisements on which their existence depends, and they are sometimes grateful to get free ones, but at the same time they have to avoid alienating readers who may not agree with all the words, and they can’t afford to use too much paid advertising space. A careful balance is required, even with the popular rubric of “Op Ed” to absolve them of responsibility before the temperature rises too much. Occasional expansive explorations of a particularly complicated subject may occasionally be tolerated, but not on a steady weekly or bi-monthly basis. I have occasionally had permission for a two-part dissertation, but those were definite exceptions. (I recall that when Newt Gingrich published his Contract With America in 1994, in the form of 15 proposed Acts of Congress that the insurgents promised to introduce, it took me a lengthy two-installment 6,000-word effort to point out one by one their inconsistencies and impossibilities — as well as the horrendous grammar in which they offered them. My editor at the time at the New Fairfield Citizen News, Ellen Burnett, blessed be her name, shepherded it through, and defended it in the fuss that followed. We never tried it again, though.)
There is also the matter of reader attention. A quick in and out is generally the best way not to be overlooked, especially if your opening words are challenging. And that’s usually the reason for an essay anyway. What’s the point of adding another string of clichés to a subject that everyone has already beaten into submission? Especially if the topic happens to be in the daily new broadcasts, to which the TV addicts (that’s most of us, by a wide margin) have already been subjected to endless analysis. You need a new “hook”. Put it out there in the first sentence, before opposition (or indifference) sets in. And keep it short.
2. “Stupid” is of course a judgment call. Every reader is entitled to his own judgment calls. Brevity in itself doesn’t make an essay stupid. In fact, quite the contrary. If an idea cannot be boiled down to 2,000 words it is probably either too specialized (occupied with nitpicking, for the cognoscenti only) or too vague to be worth reading. “I didn’t have time to make it shorter” is itself a cliché among writing workshop leaders, but clichés don’t last unless they are accurate and useful.
That judgment, applied to either the essay or the newspaper (or book, or blog) where it is given a public airing, is probably intended was a condemnation, but based on what?
There is an implication that a small circulation vehicle must not be a serious one. Luther’s 95 theses though were originally nailed up in an edition of one. They gained wider currency later of course, thanks to Gutenberg. Many a samizdat started as the three or four legible copies that carbon paper could produce on a typewriter, passed from hand to hand before they finally found a typesetter and a press. The Gospels began as handwritten one-of-a-kind scrolls. I don’t mean to suggest that my scribblings have anything in common with any of those, but the Sherman Sentinel perhaps had a circulation at its maximum of around a thousand; the Citizen News in Ellen’s day had a print run of only about 8,300 (the population of New Fairfield at the time was just under 14,000). That’s not quite chopped liver, although since I am sure many recipients were quite uninterested in anything I had to say it’s not necessarily a measure of readership either. I admi that the section that always interested me most as a reader of both publications was the Letters to the Editor, which dealt almost exclusively with local issues, hardly ever with the more wide-ranging topics I chose to write about.
3. Which brings us to the that stupid little local newspapers that no one reads part. There are 320 million Americans. One out of 320 sees The doctor and I New Yorker. One out of 3,200 sees The New York Review of Books. According to WordPress my blog gets seen by about 5 people on average, if you don’t count the Chinese guy who checks in once a month, presumably on behalf of Xi’s Censorship Bureau. The disparity in those numbers does not strike me as significant, considering that we are all three pretty much tilting at windmills. There are real differences of course in remuneration and reputation, but I don’t feel particularly disadvantaged. I seriously doubt that anything said by any of us has any serious effect on the movers and shakers of the world : the politicians, the corporate moguls, or the corrupt autocrats. They have their own methods of communication and their own world of their own made-up statistics. It works. They are not likely to listen to any suggestions from me, or The New Yorker, or The NYRB.
4. So why then bother to write essays in the first place? That’s trickier. “Because I have something to say” is in the end an egotistical claim like Trump’s — that my God-given brain is so exceptional that I am obligated to pass its benefits along to the less favored. OK. Guilty as charged. Anyone who opens his mouth or takes up his pen or approaches his computer keyboard with a public comment on other people’s behavior is admitting to a degree of pride he might well be embarrassed to admit to in other contexts. He may be truly concerned with the fate of the world, or of democracy, or of his favorite religion, but it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to try to tell everyone else what to do.
But one thing in favor of writing an essay rather than lettering a placard and picking up a bullhorn and screaming on the street corner is that the essayist has to be prepared to defend his thesis. He had better do his homework, check his numbers and names, and be ready to back up his recommendations with facts, because once he has made them public they are art of the written record and he is obligated to be able to defend them. This has a salutary effect on the essayist, unless he is into pure polemics (or Trumpian conmanship). The work of expanding a casual observation into a considered thesis, and then the reverse work of boiling it down into newspaper column length is enough to spare the world many a foolish notion. It has spared me more than one embarrassing faux pas. I have a large wastebasket, generally filled with wadded up false starts.
But why not race open wheel cars or raise chickens or build chairs? Why write essays in the first place?
There is only one answer to that : Why not?
We each ultimately have to find a meaning for our own lives. There is no agreed-on Master Book to which we all can turn to find out what the “right” life is all about (although a fortunate few like Joseph Smith and L. J hiju inRon Hubbard and a pious parade of popes and rabbis and imams believe that there is, and that they have found it). For the rest of us it is a matter of creating our own path and then being as faithful to our aspirations as possible. If you choose to build chairs, build the best damn chairs you are capable of building. Raise the fattest, most contented chickens. Win all the races you can. There is no standard that says one is more important to the future of mankind than another.
There is a case to be made that individual choice is too hard an assignment for many people — that lessons drawn from the past require too much effort and investment of time to discover what the past in fact was about. Joining a group that already “has it figured out” and codified (ten commandments for the Popes; 613 laws of correct behavior for the rabbis, 114 surahs and at least 4,000 hadiths for the imams) and letting their officially approved tenets serve to relieve one of the burden of individual exploration is a tempting alternative. It is also in many ways a more practical one, since groupthink is more powerful in politics than individual protest and politics is in its most basic form the art of survival.
Such debates are the reasons I choose to write essays. I will never equal Michel de Montaigne, who originated this literary form more than four centuries ago, but I will come as close as my talent allows. You may choose to read them or not, but if you do I hope to open your eyes to something you may not have considered before. It may have to do with politics, or war, or my reaction to stray puppies or whatever interests me at the moment. I will try to make it interesting to you too. I will even try to say something about it that may never before have been said, or thought of. I will try to back it up with facts, real ones, not made-up ones. I will be prepared to debate it with you, without shouting. On the occasions when I feel I have succeeded I will be proud. When I have failed I will be embarrassed, and resolve to do better next time.
So far there have been 600 next times. I have no intention of quitting yet.
Vance Weaver 