Those were the days, my friend. I doubt they will ever come round again, the way we were, back when newspaper columnists bled on the page.
They wrote in the first person, and so created the New Journalism…vibrant writing for a vibrant town.
Jimmy Breslin would leave it to Krock at The New York Times to write presidential, while he wrote about ordinary New Yorkers.
His style rocked and rolled…and in every column you felt his sweat.
You smelled the aroma of those cigars.
These columnists…Breslin, Talese, Mailer et al, they pounded, they hammered their prose.
As if to plead, CAN YOU HEAR ME?
There were no migrants. There were no Muslims. Everybody was the same and everybody was different.
No one was special. Everyone was special.
All were New Yorkers struggling for a chance.
The columnists wrote about those who fell through the cracks and could not make it after all.
This was the age of Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement, and you lined up left or right.
That was the big picture.
Fury. Everlasting grudges from both sides.
Personal feuds raged across the pages from nearly a dozen daily newspapers, and then moved on to television for face to face disputations.
It got heated.
Because you had to back up your every point of view.
To the right, William F. Buckley. To the left, nearly everybody else. Or so it seemed.
For sure, however, Mailer and Gore Vidal, who were at odds about everything.
Their dispute reverberates to this day.
Dick Cavett had to separate them from a fist fight.
The topic? Forgotten. Only this. They hated each other.
So it was on the streets and in the newsrooms, between the peaceniks and the hard hats.
As we have it covered in The Days of the Bitter End, Revised.
Mailer posed himself as the heir to Hemingway.
It took him years to concede that he was good, but that Hemingway was a reach too far.
Journalism was the diary that leads to history. Hemingway was instant literature.
What’s gone is the writing that gave us the rhythm of the town.
What’s gone is the peaceful coexistence.
How did New Yorkers become so passive?
Mamdani, our angry new mayor, asserts that “Muslims have been in the shadows for too long."
That sounds like a threat.
He would be putty if Breslin and that good crowd were still around, hammering at the music from their typewriters.
Now available, a collection of Jack Engelhard’s op-eds, “Writings."
Jack Engelhard writes a regular column for Arutz Sheva. Engelhard wrote the int’l bestseller Indecent Proposal that was translated into more than 22 languages and turned into a Paramount motion picture starring Robert Redford and Demi Moore. New from the novelist, the anti-BDS thriller Compulsive. Website: www.jackengelhard.com
From the esteemed John w. Cassell: “Jack Engelhard is a writer without peer, and the. conscience of us all."