I ask you to imagine being a fellow
with a nicely developed capability
to pass as conventional, who wanted
as much to be admired as something
of the model for that virtue. You'd
leap at the chance to have been
named Tom Cotton, would you not? Ah:
a burnished ordinariness, with the
sobriquet to make Huck Finn wilt with
envy! One could go far, even within
the enchanted salons of condescension.
Even if ordinariness where you come
from is racist, even if convention
where you come from is the chivalry
of the anguished lost cause, even if
the way to be its model is to linger
for the retirement of the drooling-
est old dog, Tom Cotton plucks you
from the vestibule of pretenders.
What say you, Robert Penn Warren?
Thus at last, the mise-en-scène
had been laid for our own Tom Cotton,
the scrupulously exact impersonator
of such knighthood, to pass an op-
Ed diatribe through that most con-
tested gate in journalism, the guest
room of The New York Times.
A lifelong dissident friend of mine
found it reprehensible, that the
inn-keeper hadn't even read the
text, but what would he read it for?
Accuracy of aim, when its aim would
perforce be so corrupted, the gauge
does not exist to measure it? Impec-
cability of grammar, when the death
of that value is one of the merriest
bear-baiting rites of modern media?
Virtue of advice, when its virtue
swims up through such a provenance
of the cuspidor as to cite mucosity
as its sponsor? Probably not. An edit-
or who vouches for a guest will only
contradict himself with the next one.
That much being obvious, we need turn
to the intoxicated momentum of de-
manding heresy in defense of prin-
ciples too ascendant to be trusted.
Do we need a more handsome depiction
of crowd-sourcing our shunnings, a
loftier torch of our convictions,
than a festival for their frailty?
Anti-racism is having such a vogue,
just now, that it seemingly can't be
trusted to remain a default condition
of human literacy. Enter the keepers
of the flame, to be sure their as-
sociations are unviolated; hoist the
petard of endangerment. Exile the
editor, by that brightest of all hy-
pocrisies, the exhibition of chastity.
Another friend, whose long leniency
to rmbl has shown no audible limit,
has gently inquired into the cause of
its present mode of meagreness. That
question claims priority for its own
occasion, but a silence in the face
of an epistolary auto-da-fé such as
this, is not within one's capability.
One can hardly feel let down, by the
publisher's concession to his flock,
in re-assigning a person who misjudged
the terms of a private employment. One
can claim no necessity to publish an
Tom Cotton submitted to the Times. Yet
again and again and again and again,
excuses have to be made for benign
distrust of the mind, or this must be
recognized as its universal menace.
No huzzahs for any nitwit's repression
can possibly advance the cause of jus-
tice better, than the exhibition of
the awesomely distinguished Tom Cotton.
It's possible to see a particular dan-
ger, in any impression of thinking as
a correspondent to Americans. It is
that their impression of themselves is
so variable that it is too often at
its least stable, when it is certain.
I don't fear Tom Cotton. I can resist
his repulsive gambit, but he's not our
dog in this hunt. It is one thing to be
ineducable. Yet another, to demand to be.
Tom Cotton
The New York Times
June 3, 2020
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