Michiko Kakutani used to be an important person in the world of people who cared about book reviews in the New York Times. This was not a world at all, so much as a small village whose borders could be seen from any tall building in Manhattan. Still, her opinion was considered important. Kakutani was notorious for actually reading the books she reviewed, and for not thinking of the reviewer’s desk as an outpost of the publisher’s press office. So, though book reviews are generally not worth reading, hers sometimes were.
When Kakutani left the Times in 2017, it was rumored that she had jumped before being pushed by the downward-dumbing of the Times’ arts’ content. Demonstrating a previously untapped talent for comedy, she announced that she was leaving in order to write about the status of truth in the age of Trump. That sounded like a pitch for the kind of book that gets a lot of reviews and then gets remaindered and pulped in gratifyingly short order. And here comes Kakutani’s highly palpable and eminently remainderable The Death of Truth.
No need to buy the book. The Guardian, that fearless defender of truth, free speech and equity whose website is sustained by an offshore trust in a Caribbean island, published what were purported to be the interesting bits last weekend. These bits are not at all interesting in themselves. Most of them read like literary Rohypnol, as if our brains are being softened so we’ll renew that online subscription to the Times.
Kakutani drones on and on in a tone reminiscent of an unsigned editorial from the Times or the Guardian, but without the benefit of compression. All of her big ideas are familiar but, as you’d expect from someone who spent half a lifetime at the Times, sour and empty like flatulence. She even quotes Hannah Arendt—always the mark of an impostor. Some of the analysis is risible, as when Kakutani cites that expert banaliser of the truth and all-round intellectual faker Christiane Amanpour, who tells us, but not, of course, her editors at CNN, to ‘stop banalising the truth’. A lot of it is patronising, as when Kakutani reminds us, the little people, that Donald Trump is ‘the 45th president of the US’, in case we are too pig-ignorant to count that high on our stubby little trotters. And a lot more of it is the self-soothing gibberish of the affluent:
‘Around the world, waves of populism and fundamentalism are elevating appeals to fear and anger over reasoned debate, eroding democratic institutions, and replacing expertise with the wisdom of the crowd.’