Bummer

So many wonderful people died in the final days of that horrible year 2021: Desmond Tutu, E.O. Wilson, Stephen Sondheim, Joan Didion, Sarah Weddington, Wayne Thiebaud, Jonathan Spence, John Madden, Betty White.

It’s natural (I think) for us to praise our fellow humans over their graves, though it would have done more good (I’m sure) to praise them alive, when it might have eased their passage through this world.

I’ve held off on these comments until a new year was upon us, out of respect for the dead. But journalism is a cruel profession — not willfully cruel, but cruel by its nature.

In “straight news reporting” the reporter and her editors are not supposed to “take a side.” That’s why, for instance, in news stories about the genocide being carried out today by the governments of Myanmar, China, India and Israel, reporters and editors at responsible newspapers include statements from the governments of Myanmar, China, India, Israel and the United States that no such thing is happening — though it is.

Let’s not get into the question of whether reporting like this is actually “straight news.”

In a slower, more honest age, editors might have been allowed to give reporters a bit of time to examine the genocidal governments’ statements. But not today. Now we throw in the bullshit to show that we’re trying to “report both sides.”

As if anything that happens on Planet Earth has only two sides.

I believe it was Alan Barth, an editorial writer for The Washington Post from 1943 to 1972, who called journalism “the first rough draft of history.” In that sense, it’s good that “straight news reporters” include the bullshit statements from lying governments about what just happened. It belongs in the historical record, bullshit though it is.

Now I must, uncomfortably, delve into today’s subject: the obituaries of two of our recently departed dear ones. I don’t want to do it — really, I do not — but I’m a writer of a first draft of history, and I know something about this. So here goes. 

Stephen Sondheim never wrote a memorable tune in his life.

A genius? Sure. A great lyricist and songwriter? Of course. Lenny loved the guy. But name one tune he ever wrote that you sing or whistle on a walk in the park — or even remember.

Not the words — the tune.

I’m not dissing Stephen Sondheim — I’m evaluating his work. 

During my brief career as a pit musician, many of the gigs I got were Sondheim musicals. In that sense, I lived off his genius. But could he write a good tune? A lovely melody you could sing without the words? He could not. Name one.

And now, I’m afraid, Joan Didion. Again, a master of her craft — something between journalism and art — helping to make journalism into a different sort of art than Stephen Crane and Ida Tarbell and Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway had helped to make it — but neither a great journalist nor a great artist.

Way overrated as a writer at her death, yet still a great, inspiring human being.

She never did groundbreaking journalism about anything. She tried to capture an aura — whatever that is. Her failings are most evident in her 1983 book “Salvador,” based on two weeks in that country in 1982. I appreciate her courage in going there during the height of the slaughter. But her book was mist. Nothing nailed down. Nothing solid. Her goal, apparently, was to capture on the page the temperature of the air. That’s not quite journalism, though it is literature.

Except for “Salvador,” I enjoyed reading her works. Her last years surely were sad, and “The Year of Magical Thinking” is a heartbreaker. But 50 years from now, when most of us are dead, I don’t think Didion’s or Sondheim’s works will last, except, perhaps, as examples of how desperate we are today to call something — anything, in our own time and place — great art.

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