Present Laughter

The title of this post concerns, first of all, the Noel Coward play I saw last evening at the Saint James Theater in Manhattan. Kevin Kline was brilliant. I didn't realize that I wasn't the only person who loves him. The theater was packed. I wish I had enough money to go every night for the rest of the run and sit in the front row. The play was a piece of puff, but there was so much to see that I could not take it all in.

Afterward I went out with my new pals Rena and Andie. While I wasn't paying attention, I saw that the theater district has come to life in recent years: tons of restaurants and hotels. We ended up at a Brazilian place on 46th Street. A glass of white wine and calamari took off the edge after concentration on the theater piece. Rena, whose late husband was in real estate, said that "retail is dead." Malls will soon be rebuilt as office spaces and apartment complexes. All over the Upper West Side, it is true, the stores are closing. Storefronts stand empty, with FOR RENT signs in the windows.

I thought of this situation this morning as I was walking near where the old Coliseum Book Store used to be, just south of Columbus Circle. Checking the internet, I discovered that it closed in 2006, over a decade ago already. A way of life -- bookstores -- was on its way out. Who would have imagined that when I arrived in New York in 1980?

Can one use the term "present laughter" to refer to the ridiculous op-ed in the New York Times by Ulrich Baer, professor in NYU's German department? (The link here is to Jonathan Chait's response in New York magazine to such “illiberal” attacks on free speech. The piece includes a link to the NYT op-ed.)

On the one hand, it is amusing to consider what most readers of the New York Times might have made of the postmodernist jargon of the op-ed. It was as convoluted as the writings of Jean-Francois Lyotard, the French “literary theorist” who is Baer's authority on the issue of free speech. Baer identifies himself as “a college professor and university administrator with over two decades of direct experience of campus politics.” Clearly, he has spent too much time around twenty-year-olds. On the other hand, his defense of recent university protests against conservative speakers disguises the fact that students today are simply acting out the cynical ideals of Baer's academic cohort.

Most of the liberal free speech advocates, such as Chait, are tearing out their hair now, asserting that it is important to listen to all views, even “hateful” ones, “bigoted” ones, and so on. But why would anyone want to listen to hateful or bigoted views? I don’t want to. I don’t listen to the views of Holocaust deniers, for instance.

But are the views of Ann Coulter, Charles Murray, and Condoleezza Rice (another uninvited speaker) “hateful”? Or are they simply offensive to a portion of the population that has its own fixed views?

Besides illustrating what happens to an intelligent person when he spends too much time with young people, Ulrich Baer is exhibit no. 1 of why academics should stick with their area of expertise. (He writes books with titles like Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma.) If someone thinks that I am wading outside of mine, let me remind you that I have actually done work in this area and edited a book on the subject.

Photo credit: Marilyn K. Yee/The New York Times