Crapitulation, Culture, and the Wall Street Journal
After a break of about a year, I started reading the Wall Street Journal again just this week, and promptly encountered the following rather disturbing passage, in a page one feature article about the 300th and final bout of a British boxer, Peter Buckley, who’d lost 256 out of his 299 previous matches:
“With five seconds left Friday night, Mr. Buckley unleashed a wild swing for the last punch of his professional career. It missed.
“The bell rang. The crowd rose. Peter Buckley’s name filled the air of a boxing arena for the first, and last, time.
“The judge’s decision came quickly. The score was 40 to 38 points. A tattooed arm was held up. The perennial loser had won.”
I’ll explain why this particular passage bothered me so much in a moment, but first a word about a word: “Crapitulation.”
Crapitulation is a collective shrug in the face of incipient failure, an apathetic acknowledgment that there’s no reason to care any more because no one else cares either. It is the process by which seemingly minuscule defects are allowed to creep into heretofore unassailably excellent cultural institutions; then, when no one notices or objects to these minor faults, the institution, in effect, capitulates and ceases to do the incessant hard work necessary to uphold its high standards. The tiny cracks then spread throughout the institution and, even as everyone continues to pretend that it’s still standing, the entire edifice collapses into a sad pile of sorry crap.
Now, back to the Wall Street Journal article. The potential crapitulation I’m referring to is not Peter Buckley’s: On the evidence of this article, Buckley is a relatively skilled fighter who most of the time simply wasn’t good enough, and who certainly never capitulated — he was swinging up until the final bell of his final fight which, after all, he won. As a huge boxing fan myself, I have at least an inkling of how superbly skilled even supposedly “bad” boxers must be to survive in the ring.
No, I’m referring to the Wall Street Journal itself. Read that passage again and ask yourself where you’ve encountered this kind of prose before:
“The bell rang. The crowd rose… The score was 40 to 38 points. A tattooed arm was held up. The perennial loser had won.”
The Weekly Reader? A third-grade textbook? Highlights for Kids (you know, that children’s magazine that can be found in pediatricians’ offices everywhere?)
The Wall Street Journal has (had?) always been one of the best-written publications in America for a general readership, rivaled only by the Atlantic Monthly in its consistent excellence, and the front-page features were particularly fine. The split between the Journal’s liberal reporters and its steadfastly conservative editorial team was a continuing source of fascination to regular readers, of course, but the paper had always been united in its commitment to the crafting of first-rate prose. And, of course, its coverage of business, finance, and the markets remains essential.
But it’s hard not to worry about those flat, ultra-short, declarative sentences that have all the impact of a lazy jab, the lame attempt at generating suspense, and the puzzling reference to Buckley’s name “(filling) the air of a boxing arena for the first…time.” Wasn’t his name announced before all of his 299 previous fights, and after the 40-plus fights he’d either won or drawn? Or perhaps what the writer means is that, for the first time, the fighter’s name was chanted in unison by an admiring crowd, though to make this point crystal clear would have required an additional clause, and perhaps six or seven more words, fancy footwork indeed for a story that otherwise would appear to be aimed at plodders and palookas.
I don’t think the problem is with the writer, either. I Googled some of his other stories, and he clearly can write. More likely, the new Murdoch regime is beginning to enforce a “dumbing down” regimen, and the limitations of this article are the result of some sort of explicit or implicit executive mandate. Maybe Murdoch’s minions convened a focus group in which some random attendee, lured by the promise of $50 incentive and feeling obligated to say something in recompense for this payment, complained that the Journal contains too many compound sentences and “big words.”
Or this article could be nothing more than a minor aberration.
But I’ve seen other such “minor aberrations” in the past spread faster and more destructively than an airborne virus in an elevator. I remember, for example, a ghastly afternoon back in 1981, when I first heard Lionel Richie and Diana Ross ululate their way through a song called “Endless Love” and wondered how such a tuneless and in every other respect utterly worthless song could possibly have made it onto the radio. At the same time, however, I had a terrible foreboding that this was to be the future of commercial music.
And I was, regrettably, right: Not only did the song infest the Number One position in the Top 40 for 9 endless weeks, it ushered in a joyless era of manufactured music that remains to this day. From adult contemporary pop to hip-hop to punk to electronica to metal to country to contemporary R&B, once the music industry realized that melody no longer mattered, and that a song that sounded as if the singers were making it up as they went along could be an enormous hit, there was no point any more in crafting indelible melodies.
That’s crapitulation.
For former fans of poetry like myself, the dominance of free verse is a kind of slow-motion slide into crapulescence, a sort of Gresham’s Law in which bad verse invariably drives out the good. There probably was a time when a person who couldn’t employ meter and rhyme would have been ashamed to call himself or herself a poet at all. Now the only qualification is to be a ragged obscurantist; hardly anyone bothers any more to craft memorable poems because hardly anyone cares.
For the record, I continue to have faith in the Wall Street Journal. If it truly is dumbing itself down, print and online journalists everywhere might as well all pack it in and leave the arena. But I’m holding out the hope that this particular article was, as boxing announcers are wont to say, an accidental slip rather than a knockdown, and that it’ll be back on its feet in no time.
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One other thing (and I came upon your link through Books, Inq.): I suspect that MacDonald’s ineptitude — and his sentences here truly are atrocious — may have something to do with the fact that he is writing outside of his economic beat. How else do you explain “on his recent streak of 88 fights without a win” instead of “losing streak”? Or, for that matter, this abysmal sentence: “Born into a family of nine children in a working-class neighborhood in Birmingham, Mr. Buckley was caught robbing a shop and sent for four months to a youth detention center when he was 15 after his father died.” It isn’t just the rudimentary declarative sentences you point out, but a firm determination to mangle the English language. His economics articles are, as you point out, not as atrocious. But sometimes a reporter faces severe problems when writing outside of his accustomed mode.
No, no, no. The WSJ was not the best-written publication in the country. It was the best-EDITED publication in the country. Ask any reporter in New York City. She or he will tell you that the WSJ was always an editor-driven paper, as opposed to the Times, where the reporters were and remain more powerful.
About ten years of newsroom cutbacks have resulted the problems you cite. You can see the deleterious effects of fewer, and overworked, copy editors at The New Yorker as well.
Excuse me. Have resulted IN the problems you cite.
See? We all need good editors.
When I see typos in the New Yorker, it’s a little startling — because I’ve come to expect the New Yorker to be impeccable. But “dumbed down” prose is, in my mind, even worse, because it seems to stem from a conscious decision to lower standards, rather than merely inattention to those standards, as bad as the latter may be.
BTW, I do agree with your point that the Journal was editor-driven; they used to (maybe still do) hire journalists right out of college and mold them. But the effect, from the reader’s perspective, was the same: The writing sparkled.
The New York Times, on the other hand, has always suffered, in my opinion, from the imbalance you note between writer and editor. I find a lot of weak, equivocal, tendentious, and self-indulgent writing in the Times, and to this day the paper still doesn’t know the difference between “insure” and “ensure.”