As readers know, I hate my generation, well, let's be specific. I hate my fellow whites in my generation--again, as a generality, not too specific. But, as a generation, we were influenced by those born in the early 1940s, just before our generation began to be bred. Peter Schjeldahl, a noted art critic for the Village Voice and the New York Times, which alone should be laughable as a bullshit job, considering the subjectivity in the art world since the end of World War II, has written an extended essay in this week's New Yorker, surveying his life as he slowly passes away from lung cancer, which he recognized is tied to his habit of smoking cigarettes.
I read the essay, and, by the end, found myself thinking, God, I hope this guy dies soon. He is a ridiculous, callous, narcissist of a type that typifies people born into relative wealth who are unable to see how their relative wealth followed and protected them throughout their entire lives. One may think of an even more banal George Minafer, from Booth Tarkington's classic novel, The Magnificent Ambersons. Such people are blind to their lives as social constructs based upon happenstance and circumstance. It is an astonishing read because Schjeldahl feigns at self awareness, but he doesn't know the half of it.
Schjeldahl is like the male narrator in Roth's "Goodbye Columbus", where Roth himself never knew what assholes Roth and his "narrator," which was certainly a character in the novella, both were. They formed an important literary part of why the 1960s women's liberation movement became necessary (see: Barbara Ehrenreich's paradigm shifting analysis of the rise of the women's movement as a reaction to men like Roth, though she does not mention, let alone dwell on, Roth).
Oh well. This lifelong jerk to especially women, but also men he knew, will soon be dead. And let's say it loud and clear: Good riddance, Peter Schjeldahl. Your life is a waste, your education and experience taught you nothing about empathy, and you merely lived a series of selfish experiential events where you hurt other, more vulnerable people more often than not. You are worthless, and a horribly banal human being. The sooner the world is rid of you, the better others may feel.
Merry Christmas. :)
