Spy anxiety; the smart magazine that makes smart people nervous about their status.

Jason DeParle is an editor of The Washington Monthly.

Not long ago The New York Times Sunday real estate section ran an article about a gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn. The Times quoted one "Julian Frank, a freelance art director unhappily sharing a crowded flat in Manhattan," on the proper weighing of the factors, pro and con, of moving to a decent place in Prospect Heights: "Once you've lived in New York awhile, you know there are a lot of cheap places to live, but there aren't a lot of cheap acceptable places, in the sense that you can't live there-you can't tell people you live there, see? It's not acceptable. A while ago this area was not acceptable, but now it is, It's crazy, but it's New York."

What would happen to Julian Frank if he moved to an area that was not acceptable? It's not too hard to conjure up his worries-not too hard, because you've probably had similar worries yourself. There's a party, let's say in a loft with a view of the river, the kind of party that makes you feel like a winner for being in attendance, full of interesting, successful, attractive people making bright talk. Let's say in Julian's case that a lot of art directors, illustrators, and photographers are there, so that there's a kind of automatic career-building charge in the air, At one point somebody says, "Hey, whatever happened to old Julian? I haven't seen him around lately." There's a moment of silence. Then someone else says, "I heard he moved to Rego Park-that's in Queens. I thought about calling him the other day, but he's in a different area code." The group laughs appreciatively and gaily moves onto another subject.

It's a chilling prospect. The fear of making some gaffe that will cause consignation to a dreary outer circle of society is one that grips not just Manhattan but a vast portion of middle-class America, particularly from mid-middle class on up, and it seems to be gening worse. Is my child in the right kindergarten? Am I drinking the right scotch? Have I seen the right art exhibits? To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, do you feel less nervous about your place in the world than you did ten years ago? Probably not.

This pervasive status anxiety is what social scientists like to call an unintended consequence-a consequence of the great democratization of American society since the Depression. The engine of class leveling was the combination of economic prosperity and a more equitable distribution of income. And with the passage of the GI Bill, a college education, once the exclusive coin of the well-to-do, became common currency. The post-war boom that brought good-jobs at good wages, home ownership, and college educations to the masses made snobbery, even in the conformist 1950s, seem doomed. Pick at random any book from the shelf of the liberal-consensus school of the 1940s and 1950s, and you'll find the confident belief that snobbery was a peculiarity of the Gilded Age WASP economic plutocracy, a custom fast being crowded out of modern life.

Here in 1952 is Frederick Lewis Allen in The Big Change:

"What was striking about the social pattern of 1900, as we look back upon it today, was that in most communities it was much cleaner and simpler, the stratifications more generally recognized, and especially that they were generally taken much more seriously than they are today. . . .The rich man smokes the same sort of cigarettes as the poor man, shaves with the same sort of razor, uses the same sort of telephone, vacuum cleaner, radio, and TV set, has the same sort of lighting and heating equipment in his house, and so on indefinitely. . . .Nor should we overlook the immense influence of mass circulation magazines, the movies, the radio, and television in imposing upon Americans of all income levels the same patterns of emulation: in other words, making them want to be the same sort of people . . . .In short, the social distance between the extremes of American society is shrinking. . . .The pattern is kaleidoscopic, to the confusion of organized snobbery."

Mrs. Astor's tenure

As anyone can attest who, say, has scanned the ads in an upscale magazine recently, America has shown great ingenuity in resisting the classlessness that Allen saw as its fate. In retrospect, the harbinger of today's social jitters was the emergence of what New York gossip columnists of the forties dubbed "Cafe Society"-a free-floating group composed of legatees of Old Society, minor members of the European nobility, actors, writers, artists, entertainers, publicists, fashion designers, sports stars, and publishers who spent their evenings in New York nightclubs such as the Stork Club and El Morocco. What was new about Cafe Society was that, since it wasn't based on lavish private entertaining, it didn't require wealth or power as a precondition to membership. Instead, it was necessary merely to be attractive, amusing, sophisticated, glamorous, or well known, and it included, oddly enough, those who were known simply for being known. The thirst for publicity was so strong that debutantes such as Corbina Wright Jr. and Brenda Frazier were reputed to have press agents. Old Society lingered on, of course, and being born into its numbers was still a great advantage; the publication of the Celebrity, Register didn't replace the Social Register as much as signal that other paths to status were possible. But since birth meant less than it had previously, membership in Cafe Society was both more open and more insecure-through some misfortune in your career, you could be drummed out.

Cafe Society, though amply chronicled in the press, was tiny, a curiosity item in the broad context of a more democratic American society. But its ethos spread steadily, with glittering mixes of people from different fields uniting much more by wit, style, taste, and renown than by commonality of financial and ethnic credentials. This social principle later got a huge boost during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, who had put in his time at the Stork Club in the years following World War II and brought Cafe Society style to Washington.

Meanwhile, back in thc fifties, the trends that Frederick Lewis Allen wrote about were creating an ever-larger class of people who were educated, ambitious, prosperous but not spectacularly rich, and, compared to past generations, unusually mobile across the old boundaries of geography and social position. They were people who wanted some kind of elite status but for whom the role of robber baron was unattainable and that of the Babbitt-like local burgher was unappealing. The dream of this group was to join a relatively large national class that can best be described, oxymoronically, as a democratic aristocracy: a distinc"better class of people," in which membership was open to anyone regardless of the circumstances of his or her birth.

Once you got above a certain upper-middle-class floor, money was not the crucial factor for determining membership in this new meritocratic elite (though it's more important). Nor was the possession of a college degree, since ever more people had them. The kind of college degree became more important (was it, in today's parlance, "a hot college"?), as did other credentials, job titles, and the criteria of taste, style, and celebrity. Since membership among the new elite was a less secure commodity, taste badges took on new importance as a means of maintaining status-Mrs. Astor had tenure, Sally Quinn doesn't. The relative rise in equality that Frederick Lewis Allen thought would eliminate the differences in choice of razor, cigarette, and home lighting instead made those choices all the more crucial for those eager to make the grade. How else to set oneself apart? Institutions that could help people qualify for the democratic aristocracy thrived. (This is why Stanley H. Kaplan, the Monarch of Meritocracy, is a rich man today.) At the style-tastefame end of the credentials spectrum, no institution has been more influential than the magazine publishing industry.

Wally Cleaver's dad

Frederick Lewis Allen wrote about an explosion in mass-circulation magazines (there were more magazines with circulations over a million in 1952 than there are today) and assumed that they would promote snobbery-free mass tastes. But television drew the bulk of national mass-market advertising away from magazines, and most of the big slicks (Look, Colliers, The Saturday Evening Post, and Life) died or faded . The magazine industry learned that to survive it had to deliver a targeted audience of the affluent who couldn't be reached efficiently through television. Its economic base became advertising not from Proctor & Gamble but from expensive liquor, fancy cars, and high fashion-all status symbols that were available to many more people than earlier class badges, such as mansions and polo ponies, had been. This served the interests not only of the producers but of the consumers too: these were precisely the kinds of taste flags that the members of the new democratic aristocracy were eager to wave.

Virtually the only magazines that have thrived since the fifties have been the ones that reach specialized audiences. One category of these, socalled "buff books" for hobbyists interested in fishing or golf or computers, are fairly snobberyneutral. Most of the rest have been snobberyenhancing. In the 1950s, the pioneer and unrivaled giant in this field was The New Yorker, whose high seriousness had inherent snob appeal, whose cartoons and "newsbreaks" displayed the suave manner of those in the know, and whose ads for everything from shirts to soda water have long instructed readers on the nuances of sophistication. The magazine's pronouncements on art, literature, theater, and even politics then defined respectable opinion virtually by fiat. Of course The New Yorker was far too genteel to be explicit in its lessons of cultivation. As status hunger soared, the market for more direct instruction in the ways of taste expanded, and other publications arose to fill it.

There came the city magazines, which, under the influence of Clay Felker at New York, focused on chronicling trends in dining and shopping and the fortunes of the local celebrity classes. Newspapers expanded their society pages into sections with names like "Style" and devoted them to following what's hot and what's not. (The conversion in nomenclature from "society" to "style" revealed much about the emergence of the new, sophisticated elite.) Other publications followed suit. There are the "shelter" magazines, which, beginning with the great economic success in the seventies of Architectural Digest, have increasingly moved away from their former Hints-from-Heloise style and toward depicting the homes of the rich. There are the proliferating fashion magazines, which have followed the transition in the high-end clothing business from custom tailoring for the rich to the manufacture of expensive ready-to wear fashions for the upper middle class. In the fifties and sixties, even a magazine like Playboy, now in decline, always had a generous element of teaching the reader how to dress and behave like a "gentleman" in order to nail down his place in the open society of postwar America. Television was slow to understand the need for taste instruction but began playing catch-up in the seventies with the appearance of upper-crust British accents on public TV. Today, even the characters on network programs such as "thirtysomething" make casual reference to The New Republic (and Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie house) to show they're in the know. Imagine Wally Cleaver's dad reading The New Republic and you'll see how far the market for displays of sophistication has advanced.

Back in the Cafe Society days a familiar minor figure was the arbiter of fashion who would issue best-dressed and worst-dressed lists and pronouncements on what was in and out of style. This exercise has spread fantastically over the past decade. Conde Nast's Vanity Fair, which is considered one of the great magazine success stories of the late 1980s, has brought the snob appeal and taste dictation of the company's other magazines to traditional general-interest subject matter. The list of what's In and what's Out has become a staple not just of magazines but of the newspaper lifestyle sections as well, and perhaps reached a pinnacle of sons on New Year's Day when an In and Out list hit the Sunday op-ed page of The New York Times. (The op-ed page.) You know the lists-the Times says that Mel Gibson, large muffins, and Sante Fe are In; Michael Jackson, croissants, and the Hamptons are Out. They can make irresistible reading material and are sometimes intended and received in a tonguein-cheek fashion. But they also induce an undercurrent of unease, connoting as they do the idea that fashion changes so fast that anyone's grip on it is necessarily tenuous.

The In side of the In-and-Out list occupies a higher moral ground than the Out side, In is trendy, but Out is both trendy and a put-down, meant to encourage the reader to feel disdain and also a measure of fear. What if something about me is declared Out? Insults prey on the mind far more than praise does. (As a technique, In-and-Out needn't be confined to a list but can be sprinkled liberally throughout a magazine with parenthetical asides and between-thelines intent.) If you were to attach electrodes to readers to measure their nervousness levels, magazines that concentrate on In, such as Vogue and New York, would register much lower readings than magazines like New York Woman or M, which mix praise with withering scorn for the tasteless. One put-down repository is New York Woman's Loose Lips column, which includes sections with titles like "Man at His Worst" and "Dress to Regress," turning simple In boosters like Esquire ("Man at His Best") and John Malloy (Dress for Success) on their heads. Loose Lips tackles such questions as whether a New York woman should seek a Filofax as a Christmas gift and warns that the operative concept is, "Can you stand to be so late in the game that veterans may mock your binder for its pristine leather?"

The essence of Queens

The magazine that New York is most obsessed with right now is Spy. On a percentage-of-content basis, Spy is more fully devoted to the put-down than any other American periodical. It's a giant In-andOut list with the In side left out. The fact that its put-downs are usually clever and often deserved makes them all the more intimidating. Then again, its editors have been practicing. In 1980 Spy cofounder-to-be Kurt Andersen published The Real Thing, a book-length In-and-Out list that showed that by the age of 26 he had given such things much thought. Budweiser, Dr. J., and the French film Jules and Jim were in; Miller, Kareem, and A Man and a Woman were out. Oak wa"Red cedar is a faddish California upstart. . . .Teak and ebony are just too precious. Redwoods are freaks. Balsa is retarded. Rosewood is too womanish, and maple-sugar maple, anyway-too manly. Pine is prosaic. . . ." Doc Watson was In; Joni Mitchell was Out, "but that doesn't discourage sensitive college-educated young women with two or more cats from buying and worshipping Joni's deadpan Zeitgeist. And these fans-frizzy-haired, herb-tea-swilling children's book illustrators all-know every word of every song. And as if the record-jacket transcriptions weren't enough, they play the records." And so forth.

Spy is much smarter, funnier, and vastly more original than its competitors. It acts as a social Geiger counter of sorts, engineered to detect the sham within levels of (mostly New York) society that range roughly from Tama Janowitz to Donald Trump. Spy can find the worm in most anyone's apple and is particularly adept at documenting backscratching, feuding, social climbing, and other aspects of career maintenance. It runs a Liz Smith Tote Board that lists the number of gossip column appearances per celebrity. It watches authors swap gushes over each other's books. ("Brilliantly clearsighted," says Paul Theroux of Graham Greene. "Compulsive reading," says Graham Greene of Paul Theroux.) Spy prides itself on its rigorous reporting and is full of odd facts that are meant to embarrass and do. Noting the number of people who claimed credit for the popular I [HEART] NY slogan, the magazine sought the real phrase-coiner and found a vicious battle of self-promotion, with one alleged author calling another "a lying piece of shit," to Spy's and its readers' glee.

The delight of much of Spy exists in its sheer nastiness, unburdened by higher social purpose. Still, it's possible to imagine such a purpose lurking behind some of the attacks. The reports on who at The New York Times is sleeping with whom (sometimes literally), compelling as mere gossip, might be defended as an extension of the journalistic principle that powerful institutions deserve examination. The magazine's attack on Eric Breindel, the editorial page editor of The New York Post, was widely criticized for being excessively nasty, and it was. Still, there was more than just nastiness at work. The article showed how, with the right Rolodex, a bright guy from Harvard could overcome most everything-ineluding, in Breindel's case, a bust for possession of heroin. "We champion the underdog and bite the ankle of the overdog," one Spy editor has said.

That's not to say that one finishes an issue of Spy with the glow of democracy upon the skin. The hives of status anxiety are the likelier result. The magazine's rose is owered chiefly by the master of put-downs, and the put-downs are based on the mastery (or alleged mastery) of taste. Emily Post isn't nearly as fastidious. However worthy Spy's attacks on the "overdog," the magazine's final effect is to provide its readers (average household income: $87,500) with plenty of occasion to worry about their own place in the extremely status-fluid, taste-based world.

The first issue's treatment of George Steinbrenner sets the tone: "The hair-a sort of molded Rotarian Prince Valiant cut-is almost enough by itself, but then you have his blue American-made clothes, stretched across his steakhouse belly. . . ." There, in one phrase alone, are the makings of quite an Out list. Skipping momentarily past the hair (since with my $87,500 job I am sophisticated enough to avoid Rotary clubs), I nonetheless begin to itch when I reach the Steinbrenner clothes rack. American-made clothes? Are they Out? Blue-has that been banned too? I return from my nervous mental tour of my closet to Steinbrenner's steakhouse belly and wonder if it's the steak or simply the paunch that's the problem. Perhaps I'd fare better with redfish tonight (though the problems there will later emerge). I haven't finished a single Spy sentence, but I begin to fear that there's much about me, too, that is vulnerable to ridicule.

It's no accident that one of Spy's standard advertisements for itself doesn't so much tout the magazine as mock a dorky, essence-of-Queens guy with sideburns and a too-wide polyester collar, or that its first cover featured a smarmy guy in a disco pose, headlined "Jerks '" These are Spy's straw men, with whom it lures its sophisticated readers for a laugh. But when Spy publishes its annual list of the 100 most "annoying, alarming, and appalling people, places, and things"-and includes among them such former icons of chic as The New Yorker and (oh, no!) blackened redfish-it's not clear who will laugh last. Spy invites its readers in for a good snicker at someone else and leaves them wondering whether someone isn't snickering at them. In this nervous meritocratic world in which we Julian Franks live, that fear can be debilitating. It also boosts circulation.

Omaha toes

To watch how this works, it's useful to divide Spy put-downs into three categories. The magazine's renown, of course, comes from its put-downs of the Trumpclass, the overly rich or powerful and obnoxious, in which Spy typically includes Leona Helmsley, Ivan Boesky, Ed Koch, Abe Rosenthal, Cardinal O'Connor, AI Neuharth, Rupert Murdoch, and Mort Zuckerman. But Spy has also opened a second line of attack against what might be thought of as the lumpenmiddleclass, a group of allegedly crude unsophisticates that the magazine has defined as including people who drive Camaros, wear Florsheim shoes, go to dinner theater, listen to music by Grand Funk Railroad or Cher, live in Winnipeg, central New Jersey, or Queens, and work as tooland-die salesmen. (You know the type.) While the typical Spy attack on, say, Donald Trump is a frontal assault, the magazine's put-downs of the middle class more frequently take the form of gratuitous asides, dismissive nonsequiturs meant to establish good taste. When, for example, a reader wrote in with a question about the musical, "Carrie," Spy replied, apropos of nothing "We missed Carrie-we were seeing a Bucks County dinner-theater production of Moose Murders that night." In other words, "We pause in this broadcast to assure our readers of our sophistication." Theater, of course, is not the issue here, whether on-Broadway, offBroadway, or in the Bucks County high-school auditorium. While many dinner theaters offer overpriced and bad shows, others are perfectly harmless, a few are pretty good, and together they give outof-work but talented actors a place to perform. So, why go to extra effort to piss on them all-other than to flaunt one's credentials of taste? Spy isn't concerned with bad theater but rather with advertising that it knows what people of taste are supposed to consider bad theater.

Similarly, shoes aren't the issue when, speculating on the demise of Times Square, Spy pauses to observe that at least it might "make Florsheim shoes harder to come by'" Wondering what evil was accruing by way of Florsheim shoes, I went down to a nearby outlet and tried a few pairs on. They looked good. Sliding around on that thick shoe-store carpet, they felt pretty good, too. Hand-stitched and leatherlined, they probably would have worn good-just as good as, say, a pair of Peel's. If I'd had the cash-$205 for the top-line loafer-I might have bought them. Why, then, the Spy disdain? Spy's problem with Florsheim is that there are too many guys in Omaha sticking their toes into a pair and thinking that with $200 loafers they've arrived. Anything onan Omaha In list is an immediate Spy target.

Spy's fussy lesson plans in the ways of taste, of course, hold great appeal for the magazine's advertisers, who stand to profit by the great upper-middleclass angst over what to eat, wear, drive, drink, read, say, and do. In the taste game's early days, statusconscious advertisers could content themselves simply by trumpeting the In side of the list, which is to say their products. What young New Yorker reader, eager to establish himself as a person of some sophistication, would have been caught without Schweppes in the cabinet or Hathaway in the drawer? Ogilvy, Benson, & Mather, pioneers on the advertising end of the taste game (with clients like Rolls Royce and the British Travel & Holidays Association), enriched themselves, The New Yorker, and Schweppes by figuring out how to get enough people to pay a premium for the same bottle of tonic water that Canada Dry sold much cheaper. One can imagine the plotters' delight when they stumbled across Commander Whitehead, the Schweppes executive with just the right aristocratic look. "Jesus, Whitehead, we could use you," they must have exclaimed, before pressing him into duty as a symbol of suave carbonation.

These days, with the efforts at class definition a bit more rigorous, even advertisers go in for Out. "DEFINITELY NOT US," proclaims a series of ads in Spy for, of all things, US magazine that display members of the lumpenmiddleclass in the most unflattering poses. They sit around the RV park in one not-US ad wearing T-shirts and housecoats, looking dumb and vaguely menacing; a box of Ritz crackers is open on the table. This apparently is US magazine's way of saying that it, too, caters to people of good taste (all consumers of Carr's table water crackers here), and it's no wonder it chose Spy as one place to make the pitch. Spy is a bullhorn through which its editors keep screaming that all sorts of tasteless people are "definitely not us."

Angie angst

The third and most important category of Spy putdown focuses neither on Donald Trump nor on the Ritz-eaters in the RV park but on rivals for power and prestige within the great American meritocracy, Informally speaking, any society in which people make it on their own is a meritocracy, and on that level Donald Trump would qualify. But the group that most concerns Spy is the meritocracy in a much more specific sense-a professional class that grew from the opportunities of postwar America, and is governed by a series of elaborate if unofficial institutions meant to parcel out success fair" way, along the lines of an unspoken code. For the American meritocrat, life, until age 40 or so anyway, is an intense race through such institutions, which might include SATs, admissions offices, law school, law review, clerkship, the associates program, and, finally, partnership. Playing by these rules, many (though of course not all) meritocrats also adhere to unofficial and rather arbitrary rules of taste-the right clothes, car, wine, and so forth-which they rarely see as arbitrary or snobbish but consider part of the just system by which the right people display sophistication and reap life's rewards. Since a violation of the taste code can threaten one's place in the meritocracy, a rapt, nervous attention frequently is accorded to matters of In and Out.

Spy represents a distillation of meritocratic values, and, to its credit, the magazine has even mocked itself over the incumbent angst. Poking fun at yourself is a good thing to do, and, in that regard at least, more publications could stand to follow Spy's lead "Fear brings us here [to New York] and keeps us here, doesn't it?" the magazine First the fear that we might have to spend a life in Decatur or Schenectady or Wahoo. . .if you didn't go to private school in Manhattan you came from a farm or its moral equivalent. . . .We have certain kinds of fears that we may be able to admit to ourselves-having an uncool job, not getting a place on the Vineyard, being rejected by the Century Association and the Milkbar. . . .It's all part of the price New York forces us to ante up to gain access to the trough.'" While giving Spy credit for the ability to tease itself, the reader might be forgiven the suspicion that these may be the most earnest words the magazine has spoken. Not long ago, a lobbying campaign by Kurt Anderson paid off with an invitation to join-guess where?-the Century Association, an exclusive Manhattan club. And there, last month, was his co-editor, Graydon Carter, not at the Vineyard or the Milkbar but posing for Vogue-"chic in Tom Wolfe's clothing," the caption informed. No trip back to Wahoo (or in Carter's case, Ottawa) for him. When the clothier Barney's went looking for symbols of its chic appeal, guess which founders of a monthly satirical magazine wound up in the ad pages of The New York Times Magazine? Bumping into the editors of Spy at the Century club, one begins to wonder whether the intent is to bite the ankle of the "overdog" as much as it is to join his table.

Spy's big gripe, finally, isn't that the underdog gets shafted but that some people out there are cheating. They're getting ahead without playing by the meritocracy's rules. Not so much Donald Trump-his wealth may rankle, but his crudity is a great consolation; meritocrats don't really want to be Donald Trump. But there are any number of lesser lights who have garnered more wealth, power, privilege, and fame than they've deserved-pushing ahead to the front of the Milkbar line: Jay McInerney, Paloma Picasso, Bianca Jagger, third-generation Kennedys, Julian Schnabel, Nancy Kissinger, and other targets of Spy scorn. "What we cannot accept," Spy says, and only partially in jest, "what causes us to wake up in the middle of the night sweating, is this: 'Why do good things happen to bad people?'"

At times, Spy's pursuit of that question has led to good results. No publication is better at ferreting out undeserved fortune or fame. But Spy's enforcement of the meritocratic code dissolves, finally, into an elaborate put-down game meant to signal superior taste to everyone-and most particularly to other members of the meritocracy, who worry greatly that they, too, will be exposed as lacking. (Even Spy's name is a subtle flash of sophistication, referring to the magazine where the reporter in The Philadelphia Story worked.) The Spy men's relentless and snide exhibitions of taste leave the magazine with the feel that its ultimate purpose isn't to expose the sham but to elevate itself to the Masters of the Taste Universe, gatekeepers of the meritocracy, spreading angst among its earnest aspirants.

Spy's favorite way of fueling meritocratic anxiety is through attacks on a commodity that reached its chic peak, say, last Tuesday-or, even better, next Tuesday, to be ahead of the curve. Spy watches these parabolas of prestige closely, in order to be the first to detect a dip in velocity; any month's Out list might look astoundingly like the In list from a very recent issue of New York. Typically, the put-downs aren't criticisms accompanied by explanation; that would make them judgments. The offensiveness of the object of the put-down is meant to be self-evident, though it often is not.

Any reasonably competent meritocrat will know that Bess Myerson, Gary Hart, and Donald Trump belong on the Out list, but he or she has to follow the chic curve more closely to detect the sagging fortunes of Allan Bloom, the Beatles, Andrew Wyeth, Gloria Steinem, Liza Minnelli, people who talk about Speed the Plow, and people who sa "Bonfire" when they mean Bonfire of the Vanities-all of them on Spy lists of things that appall. And what happens to those who don't follow closely? It might be that just last night I was telling a date (over blackened redfish) how much I enjoyed The Closing of the American Mind or the portraits of Helga and I now discover that I've said something terribly wrong. My command of the topography of chic is lost. Reading Spy, mind you, doesn't tell me why I want to avoid mentioning Speed the Plow, only that I do.

What makes this game particularly tricky is that usually Spy is on to something-an element of hypocrisy or pretension worthy of exposure. Spy's way of dealing with it, though, typically exacerbates one's nervousness, rather than dispels it. Noting that Mets's broadcaster Ralph Kiner uses a pretentious, book-lined set for his postgame show, Spy decided to take a peek and found the titles on the shelves ranged from I Never Met a House Plant I Didn't Like by Jerry Baker to Renata Adler's Toward a Radical Middle. Clearly, a put-down of the "literary lion" and "malapropian Hall of Famer" was in play, but the punch line left me guessing. Is the joke here simply the fake nature of the set? Is it the incongruity in the titles? Or is Spy implying that there's something wrong with all the volumes-that deep down, Renata Adler is just another House-Plant-I-Didn't-Like writer? Unsure, the reader is left with the seeds of worry that his own copy of Toward a Radical Middle may leave him similarly vulnerable. Spy's guide to Regular Guy Manhattan was another puzzler. Okay, I see that Spy will give the yuppie no quarter, following him even to the rough-andtumble side of town where he's posing as a regular. Hey, those Spyguys don't miss a trick, I think. But wait, what's this in their definition of Regular Guys-"Korean War vets...inveterate sharpies. . .misogynists"? I follow that misogynists and inveterate sharpies are bad, but I thought Korean War vets were good guys, M*A*S*H* and all that. Here's Spy to plant the thought that my grasp of such matters is tenuous indeed.

In some cases, the nawre of the magazine's putdown is so arbitrary that a reader attempting to break the taste code can't because there simply is none. (Blue American-made clothes?) Spy groups together the following songs as examples of self-evidently crude recordings that topped the charts: Cher's "Half-Breed" (okay, I'm with you), Grand Funk Railroad's "We're an American Band" (mmmm, still following), and the Rolling Stones's 'Angie" (you lost me). Until now I thought that the Rolling Stones were a great band (some might say the best rock band ever), and I've never seen anything objectionable to the son "Angie." In fact, untill read Spy it was among my favorite Stones songs. But now the impetus is nervously to remove it from my record rack before my error in good judgment becomes public.

It is here, finally, in the narrow borders of the meritocratic class, that the Spy put-down game has its most insidious effects. The snide, unexplained put-downs of New York bigshots (Spy ran a recent sidebar on Rudolph Guiliani's hair) confuse sneering with intelligence. The put-downs of the people at the Bucks County dinner theater reinforce the antidemocratic inclinations of the upper middle class, a group that needs no encouragement. But the kind of game that Spy plays with (mostly young) meritocratic minds is worst of all because of the roadblocks it erects to thought and action. When Spy holds up for ridicule the possession of a Renata Adler book, no reader can fail to see that there is surely something about him or her that could be made fun of in a similarly devastating way, and this kind of fear of embarrassment can become obsessive. Reading Spy has an inhibiting effect, and not just about wearing polyester shirts in loud patterns. The real message is that you can be laughed at for any position you take in life, so you'd better not take one at all.

The proliferation of the put-down, and Spy's honing it to new levels of precision, gives the New York magazine world a new hierarchy. Gael Greene uses a restaurant review in New York magazine for an aside about how some people are sufficiently distasteful to put plaster-of-Paris pelicans in their yards; Spy then comes behind and finds that other people are sufficiently distasteful to read New York magazine. Joel L. Fleishman offers Vanity Fair readers advice on who's "well connected" in the foreign vineyard tour business, since planning trips is "tricky, even if you start with contacts." Then along comes Spy to putdown Fleishman as "not a writer at all but a geeky academic. . .." So imagine how miserable you'd feel if you were Sharon C. Larkins (who thanked Vanity, Fair for Fleishman's advice, since "becoming an expert on wine is on my ever-lengthening list of things to do") and after planning this really well-connected tour of French chateaux you found out you'd been betrayed by a geeky, academic!

Moo Cows and Wangdoodles

Or what if you've been taking literary cues from James Wolcott, a Vanity Fair reviewer who is no stranger himself to the put-down. (He recently wrote that neoliberals ,were misogynists who feared "having their weenies fed to the pencil sharpener. It's a collective case of castration anxiety.") Last spring, Wolcott wrote an intelligent, though typically abrasive, essay in Vanity Fair in which he criticized contemporary humor writing and gave Spy jokes a mixed review. Spy spat back by calling him "James 'Moo cow, Wolcott", whatever that means, "literary America's number-one couch potato," whatever that means, and "a hyperventilating, overpaid contract writer," whatever that means, too. To top it off, Spy sneered that the average Vanity Fair reader was nothing but a "spoiled Barnard freshman who has a crush on Claus von Bulow." Spy didn't bother to explain why it disagreed with Wolcott, and, if "Moo Cow" refers to his weight, it's a particularly unenlightening way to disagree with someone.

Spy's put-downs are on perhaps their most prominent pedestal in the magazine's Review of Reviewers column, which is rarely anything more than an extended, disjointed, name-calling session. As usual, Spy had sound instincts on where to look for influence being used in questionable ways. But virwally every New York critic whom a young Manhattan professional aspiring to sophistication might have found occasion to admire-or quote at cocktail parties-(and many he has not) has been targeted as self-evidently crude, stupid, or perverted: John "Stupid" Rockwell; John "You Can Say that Again" Corry; David "the Dork" Denby; David "Wangdoodle" Edelstein; Clive "Wake me up when it's over" Barnes; Stephen "Short" Schiff; Roger Ebert, "the fattest film critic in America"; Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "the Times's sporting egghead." The Spy reviewer courageously forwards these opinions beneath pseudonymous cover. And following the "Moo Cow" format, he/she/it/they rarely pauses to explain why Spy finds these critics lacking, with the implication for that nervous reader wanting to show his sophistication being, you mean you don't know?

Say for instance that it's a Saturday afternoon and I'm flipping through the November issue of Spy, and I learn, thanks to reviewer of reviewers, Ignatz Ratzwizkiwxki (or "Chickenshit Pseudonymous Writer" in Spyspeak-the name, another taste flag, refers to a character in a Preston Sturges film), that"there are plenty of dumb people outside television. There is, for example, Anna Kisselgorf, the most credulous of the Times's seemingly endless supply of dance reviewers. You could skate around Grand Central station in your socks and Kisselgorf would watch you, taking notes. . . .Just about nothing, it would appear, is dumber than a dancer-or a dance critic." The main evidence presented against Kisselgorf is one of her recent leads, which reads, "Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, but humans don't have to dangle from ropes, trapezes, and gymnasts' bars." There must be something wrong with me, I begin to think, because I don't see what's so terrible. In fact, as leads go, I'd rank it above average, and I'd go on to read the next sentence, except that Spy doesn't provide it, since the stupidity of the first is supposed to be self-evident. I guess that makes me dumb as a dancer or a dance critic. I read on to find that "people who go out for dance in adulthood sound a lot like people who went out for dance in high school," and though I don't know what that means either, I breathe a sigh of relief that I'm not one of those.

If rather straightforward lines like Kisselgorf s get lambasted, you can imagine what the reviewer of reviewers does to people who decide to take a risk. "For some of us terribly juvenile men," wrote Craig Unger in New York Woman of Kathleen Turner, "it's her portrayal of the femme fatale that remains painfully embedded in our American groin." A dangerous line, but not a bad one-self-mocking, vivid, and descriptive of the actress's success in having her intended effect. "Medic! Medic!," squeals Spy's reviewer of reviewers, who lacks the courage to admit to his own name, never mind a risky opinion. "He's juvenile; he's prurient; he's dumb." Spys reviewer here sounds not so much the urban savvy as that guy in junior high school around whom you never said anything because you knew he was simply looking for something to mock.

Spy's irreverence is welcome. Its ability to tease itself is welcome. Lots of its jokes are welcome. But its championing of the put-down prose not only promotes wasteful fretting in its own readers but sets an example that is bound to be copied widely. That can only lead to more braincelis filling up with styrofoam thoughts on style and fewer left to think about things that matter.

From one alternative voice to another, The Washington Times salutes your many contributions to the nation's dominant media culture. Charlie's Angels, now stationed in key positions throughout the country, have given the lie to Oscar Wilde, who said that the difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. The Washington Monthly is the English equivalent of sushi-bait. Many more happy birthdays.

Arnaud de Borchgrave Editor-in-Chief

The Washington Times

New think tank sponsors research on the growth of freedom and democracy; offers position as reporter-researcher-assistant, available now, Hard, interesting work, and a chance for an aspiring journalist or scholar to get published and cited in places like The Washington Monthly. Base salary $21,000 with performance bonuses and opportunity for rapid advancement. Energy, commitment, and imagination preferred over long lists of credentials. Apply to the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, 317 Poplar Avenue Number 1, Redwood City, California 94061 or phone [phone].