I landed in US on June 24th 1998 and by the next week I had subscribed to that great American standard bearer of American journalism, Time. In Time’s pages I first encountered Charles Krauthammer and Lance Morrow, essayists who in the space of page could take an issue, discuss the opposing sides and, without ambiguity, conclude which side they’re on and why and all this wrapped in sharp prose that glittered and informed. Krauthammer and Morrow belonged not to the class of “columnists” but to a vanishing tribe of a hoary literary tradition, “essayists”. As a rule Conservatives of a bygone era were known for lapidary prose unlike the liberals who had a penchant for loopy verbosity.
Barely 3 years after my arrival evil descended in Manhattan on September 11th and Morrow rose to the occasion in a masterful essay giving moral clarity of purpose to a shocked nation. In a now legendary essay, Morrow wrote:
“For once, let’s have no “grief counselors” standing by with banal consolations, as if the purpose, in the midst of all this, were merely to make everyone feel better as quickly as possible. We shouldn’t feel better.
A day cannot live in infamy without the nourishment of rage. Let’s have rage. What’s needed is a unified, unifying, Pearl Harbor sort of purple American fury — ruthless indignation that doesn’t leak away in a week or two, wandering off into Prozac-induced forgetfulness or into the next media sensation.
Anyone who does not loathe the people who did these things, and the people who cheer them on, is too philosophical for decent company.”
It is the kind of article that no magazine, not even Time itself, would print today.
When Trump rose and shook up the American political scene Lance Morrow’s column on the rise of Nixon in 1970 looked prescient. Morrow wrote of the Middle America that launched Nixon, “The American dream that they were living was no longer the dream as advertised. They feared that they were beginning to lose their grip on the country. Others seemed to be taking over —the liberals, the radicals, the defiant young, a communications industry that they often believed was lying to them.” In 2016 he recalled this essay appropriately.
How did Lance Morrow look at the Trumpian era? Here he is after the assassination attempt on Trump was hailed as a moment of divine intervention to save the president for an unfinished mission:
“The spiritual glow acquired in Butler faded quickly. Mr. Trump soon squandered whatever wonder and mystique the brush with death had bestowed on him. In his speech to the Republican convention, he descended to earth. He was the same Mr. Trump as before: preening, insulting his political enemies, riffing like a solo jazzman for more than 90 minutes.”
And then Morrow quoted Emerson’s passage on angels and dogs: “It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum, and here they will break out in their native music and utter at intervals the words they have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns and they mope and wallow like dogs.”
The essay then skewered Trump as, well, Un-Christian.
“Christ embraced losers. They were his people, his favorites. The last shall be first and the first shall be last. In Mr. Trump’s doctrine, the first shall be first and the last are losers and suckers.
If God intervened to save Mr. Trump in Pennsylvania, it wasn’t the God Mr. Trump is accustomed to worshiping.”
Morrow wrote 7 cover stories for Time’s then much anticipated “Man of the Year” issues. Later he mused about the transformation from “Man of the Year” to gender neutral “Person of the Year” and wrote, “In 1976 I did the Women of the Year story about outstanding women in various fields. A man wouldn’t get that assignment today. It would have to be written by a woman.” Ah, yes he had his blinders too.
How did Morrow view the October 7th attack on Israel by Hamas and how does his view compare with his famous essay on Sep 11th? Here he is:
“So it came to pass in recent days that acknowledgment of the patent evil of the Hamas assault on Oct. 7 became shadowed and then, in some minds, reversed by the steps that Israel took—is taking—to defend itself. Is it possible to commit evil in attempting (however brutally) to protect yourself against evil? The question is a sort of Zen koan—with a falsehood at its heart. Call it the solecism of equivalence.
Or are we to adopt a two-tier scale of judgment, in which the primary, initiating act of evil (the assault of Oct. 7, say) is deemed a mortal sin, while secondary acts of self-defense, with whatever collateral damage, are deemed venial?
Perhaps. Meantime, it’s a cardinal rule of war and of history’s theatrics that each side in the struggle (especially in the Middle East) must condemn the other as satanic. Evil is an objective fact in the world, and yet it prospers and nourishes itself on the passionate and even tribal subjectivities of human nature.”
The concluding line was probably born out of what he saw in America squandering its purpose after 9/11 in the “War on Terror”, this line almost repudiates his own essay on 9/11 that was titled “the case for rage and retribution”. Seeing the Israeli offensive he concluded, “Rage often does the work of evil, and produces some of the same effects.”
Farewell Lance Morrow, you enriched my world.
A personal note. Morrow, like my father, died of prostate cancer. It is often said that men dont die “of prostate cancer” but “with prostate cancer”. Then there are men like Morrow and my father who die of it. Men, aged 50 and above, should do prostrate screening.
References:
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/12/03/lance-morrow-time-writer-dies/
2. https://time.com/archive/6664772/the-case-for-rage-and-retribution/
6. https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,943113,00.html
7. https://www.wsj.com/articles/did-god-save-donald-trump-assassination-religion-86138daa
