Sunday 2/18/24
This is part of my response to a different letter someone sent me about David Remnick, touching on their own experience.
Hello there,
I'm up early for work, and just seeing this now. I appreciate you sending it to me, and I hope what sounds like a form of a nightmare is now part of your past and not negatively impacting your present.
I am not surprised when I see these kinds of words, and that's not even strictly a David Remnick thing. All of these people tend to be this way. It's one reason they are so pathologically loyal to each other, even in instances where they've hardly exchanged a word. It is a code of their system: Say none of the truth about anyone else, lest ye have someone say the truth about you.
They know what they know about the people next to them, or people wherever, because they talk, and gossip, and someone's agent says this, and they know that those people know about them. This is where a lot of their energies go. It doesn't go into work, the quality of what is put forward. It doesn't go into becoming a better a writer, or an editor striving to present that which is best. It goes into nonsense, and ego-feeding and empty gratification. But the old truism has a special kind of traction here: Power corrupts, and these are the last people on earth who are going to resist that and be principled. Even petty power corrupts, and, paradoxically, can do so in worse ways, given the delusion aspect, with this forced, desperate attempt to have something--and a life--be bigger than what it is, which is really what we're talking here.
When people have nothing else, and they are nothing else, and they know, in truth, that they are nothing, they're not special, they don't have some remarkable talent, or any, they take all they can and insulate themselves in order to keep that going and feed the lies with lies, and they detest anyone who is legitimate and good things that they are not and never will be. The more, the more. And when it comes to sexual matters, they act as if it's all but their supernally-declared right to take and have what they want. There are no principles; there's only want, and want, typically, sans censure, or a single person to say, "Hey, that's not right, don't do that." They exist in darkness, where no light is shone. Again, that's part of the code. Keep the light out. Keep the eyes away. One way that is done is by putting forward bad work about which no one cares or could have any interest. It is readerly apathy and disinterest that allows their system to be what it is, where people get away with what they do. And that's all these people are looking to do.
To find one of these people, too, without a mountain of sexual misdeeds would take some doing. Remnick had no problem with Jeffrey Toobin, a married man with kids, following women home from parties (it seems almost superfluous to add, "women he did not know") and asking if he could anally fist them. This was even reported and documented.
It was only when Toobin was caught jerking off on a New Yorker Zoom meeting that Remnick fired him, and that was because of the level of "embarrassment" this caused The New Yorker--and thus, worried David Remnick, David Remnick--in the popular culture with Twitter and the like. Jokes about #metoobin and what not. If all of that wasn't creating this kind of flak for him and a brand that instead should clean house, Remnick wouldn't have cared.
He didn't care up until then. That was obvious and on record. He knew. I knew. The public was free to know. Remnick wasn't going to kick a fellow Princeton alum off the gravy train just because he terrified women on the darkened streets of Manhattan by popping out of a cab and asking if he could insert his fist in their anus. We're not talking a perspicacious knight at the round table here in David Remnick. We're talking a bad, connected person of no real ability and no character or morals.
I know that he is worse than I've described, as you mention before touching on your specific experience.
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