Lady Gabba Gabba Hey

Why the New York Times no longer maketh me lie down in gray pastures

Gregory Peck as the former Habby in John Huston’s miscalculated interpretation of a boy and his whale.

Melville fans minus eyes sharp enough to read between the lines tend to forget Ahab’s Classics Illustrated boyhood search for Moby Dumbo, the white elephant who obsessed him in his cash-pinched youth after biting one of the only two crayons the poor lad owned in half. No slouch at seafaring improv even then, he kept the black one.

This gave him something handy to brandish at annoying fellow kindergarteners whenever he felt like yelling “From heck’s heart I stab at thee.” ‘Tis said that Habby (the future Pequod captain’s pre-K nickname at Mapple School for Tots) felt that way often.

Now it’s my turn. My own One Shade of Gray crayon, peddled in Sgt. Fury And His Howling Commandos to four-eyed 1960s nerds under the slogan All The News That’s Fit To Color Childishly, has busted in twain like a Bazooka-pink cigarette. I don’t feel bad because I did it myself.

That’s to say I’ve just performed what I call my Patrick McGoohan Bar Mitzvah No. 6. After over 50 years as a generally devoted if often exasperated New York Times reader, I’ve Canceled My Subscription. Today I am not a number; I am a free man.

Patrick McGoohan with daily paper (Sunday edition).

There was no particular tipping point. The paper’s coverage of this week’s National Spelling Bee, for instance, is as always top-shelf stuff and most likely unexcelled in its genre. Something about the institutional throw weight implicitly ballasting the report makes it uniquely authoritative.

It’s just that the NYT’s stubbornly institutional outlook and vanity about its own quasi-official probity, ever its crossword puzzle to bear, have made the paper hopelessly inadequate and indeed worse than useless in conveying the intransigently junked-up gestalt and feature-not-a-bug dementia of the second Trump administration. Everything boiled down to how, grazing cud-style amid the gray pastures of Friday’s online edition – perhaps this was a tipping point – my eye lit upon the headline “A Draft U.S.-Iran Plan Is Said To Be On The Table.”

Because you can’t help wanting the newspaper of record to buttress your perceptions of what’s going on, I naturally read this as “A Daft Plan.” Talk about wishful thinking! Talk about rear projection! Holy Pavlov, Batman.

The Times, as is well known, UFC’ed all over the joint before grimly resorting to “lies” to describe the extent of Trump’s command of English. But the word that ought to be in anyone-for-tennis contention among the paper’s editorial wrestlers, and isn’t, is crazy.

Also nuts, cuckoo, gaga, deluded, babbling, loco, and incongruous. Among trusty old-weird-American turns of phrase, Non Compos, If A Frog Had Wings, Gabba Gabba Hey, You’ve Got To Be Fucking Kidding Me and Tell It To The Marines.

Come to think of it, that last one might come in really handy in coverage of the Strait of Hormuz. Not to mention the Gay of Hormuz, the Trance of Hormuz, the Biennale of Hormuz and the Clusterfuck-Curious of Hormuz, all of which have left Trump exasperated with the refusal of parts to pretend they speak for the whole. (“Why not? I do it all the time,” he’s wont to say. But let’s not speak of giving ‘em enough rope in the house of the, etc., etc.)

Within the limits imposed by their employer’s fondness for dog collars, leashes, ball gags and gimp masks, the Times’ reporters are still awesomely proficient. Yet this is like saying that the White Star Line sailors’ skill sets might have been even more valuable if the Titanic had had enough lifeboats. The ship’s landlocked print epigone could end up playing bottom to The Atlantic if it gets itself sideswiped by a rogue, pissed-off Sulzberg. People always said Cy was a cold man anyway.

Maureen Dowd caught looking for her 401 (k).

The Times doesn’t have the WashPost’s (canceled two months ago) I Murdered My Parents And Now I’m An Orphan alibi. Can’t you just hear Michael Keaton saying “Bezos Bezos Bezos” three times fast in fright makeup?

Still linked to the Ochs and Sulzberger clans via one of those indistinct corporate arrangements whose coyness non-initiates can’t fathom, The New York Times Company hasn’t caved in to Trump and Trumpism as openly as Bezos Bezos Bezos did. Out of combined cravenness and complicity, he pulled the Post’s Kamala Harris endorsement just in time to greet Halloween 2024 wearing knee pads. Any hope the new look was only a scary costume went gang a-gley on January 20, 2025.

However, the NYT doesn’t need to kowtow to Trump to be a bat boy in umpire’s clothing. All it has to do is behave as if the world as the New York Times sees it is still a going concern. “But I have to go back for my jewelry,” first-class passengers cried as unwitting future James Cameron bit players tried herding them into the looming shortage of lifeboats.

‘Twas ever thus, just in a less madcap Navelverse. When the paper was too bland, its feistier Op-Ed columnists could be counted on to heave a brickbat into the mix just for novelty’s sake. That included its 1970s token Old Nixon Hand “conservative,” and brother, do I miss William Safire. He’d be spitting bullets today like an idiom-crazed Gatling gun.

And now? Krugman’s occupation’s gone. He’d been sounding for a while like he wouldn’t mind throwing in the towel as soon as the price of monogrammed His and Dow towels went down. Dowd herself sounds increasingly resentful – she calls ageism, duh – that the plum part of Fourth Weird Sister got cut from Macbeth in New Haven. And here she’d already gone and snapped up the NYT and WYT towels that cheeky bastard Frank Bruni proposed a bit too damned puckishly for his own good as MoDo’s parting gift “if ever.”

Paul Krugman decides he’s had it with fulminating full-time.

Interesting younger writers pop up far too irregularly. My own pick for a choice full-time hire would be Jennifer Finley Boylan, but I guess trans, transient, and transom still get clumped together in the NYT style guide for a reason. Hey, what about Max Boot? His take on Netanyahu’s butchery-zonked Gaza, West Bank (and counting) policies makes me wonder if Boot mistook Sweeney Todd for a hymn to pomade, but a recovering Iraqholic is always good for terse candor about the state of the U.S. military.

Too bad the Times editorial page now defines its core mission as convincing me I’ve maligned George F. Will all these years. Plenty of other news flashes in the sea, though! Friends speak admiringly of ProPublica, among others. The Guardian is not only reliable but – cough, cough – interesting.

I’m overdue anyhow to put away childish crayons. So release me, don’t tease me, Lady NYT. Sent my subscription to perdition and I’m finally free. Your old fans switched years ago to MSNBC, singing this’ll be the day we say twee. This’ll be the day we say shee.

It.