Covid rant

 

Yes, I wrote that I would limit myself to photographs and the contrarities they reveal about our current way of life. I've been housebound for days now, and one of my kind neighbors has been delivering food to the top of my steps, including yesterday a delicious fruit salad with the most creamy, silky yogurt, along with a copy of the recent New York Times Book Review. So, here I sit this morning with my tea, hoping that this may be the day that I trust myself to walk down the steps and outside for some fresh air. I look at the front page of the Book Review on the table before me, and as always with this publication, I take umbrage. Which is my way of saying that I am offended by almost everything I read in it, starting with the headlines. Indeed, the headlines in the NYT are a signal for you to assume the opinion stated therein.

What offends me? Its assumptions, which are those that the loyal New York Times reader is to assume as their own. Let me start with the headline on the front page of this May 15, 2022, issue, which pictures a group of stewardesses -- oh, oh: make that flight attendants.:

TWO NEW BOOKS SHOW HOW FED-UP FLIGHT ATTENDANTS SPARKED A MASS LABOR MOVEMENT

There are two books under review concerning flight attendants. One is a nostalgic memoir of a woman who became a stewardess in the late 1970s when in her twenties. For the reviewer, Fly Girl: A Memoir "leaves out a lot" and reads "like watching a vintage Doris Day movie in which the clueless heroine mistakenly wanders out of the 1950s and into the sex, drugs, and rock and roll that followed ..." The other (The Great Stewardess Rebellion) is a takedown of such nostalgia. The reviewer stakes out her position in the opening sentences: stewardesses served as "sexual bait to lure the nation's burgeoning corps of male business travelers." The writer of The Great Stewardess Rebellion), Neil Wulfhart, is not identified in the review as having been a stewardess, but is, according to her website, a "decision coach." (Go see for yourself.) So, this expert in life coaching has done the investigation and can tell you "the real story": the stewardesses who get fired from gaining weight, the amp dependencies, "the vicious misogyny of all the sexist men ..." who countered the attempts to improve working conditions.

I'm not saying that the Doris Day account is the one to live by, but my objection is to the  assumption that "sparking a mass labor movement" was a good thing. That may or may not be the case, but destroying illusions is a given in the world of the New York Times. Is there some reason why the reviewer could not have given a more measured picture? Being a stewardess in the 1970s was not like chattel slavery. A lot of people, men and women, were trapped in jobs that were oppressive. But there is something very evil about the way that the NYT focuses on people's discontent, and clearly the reviewer here (Leslie Bennetts, author of articles on, among others, Jennifer Anniston) is committed to the arena of femal discontent. Almost every novel reviewed in the NYTBR concerns a topic like "toxic mother-daughter relationships." A headline to such a review reads: "The author suggests that the body is sickened by secrets; everything must come out." Oh, really? Why?

Thus, my disgust with this newspaper. The NYT obviously has an outsized influence on the kinds of books that are published, tales of blame and hurt and self-pity. And one wonders where the great writers have gone.  I feel for my kind neighbor, who reads this NYT trash every day and whose view of society is contaminated by it.