Oak Parkers Furious: Chicago Magazine Spurious?
“It’s a fourteen-hundred-word article,” says Dan Santow. “And a lot of the criticism, I think, implies that we shortchanged the issue. Well, it was meant to be a 1,400-word article and not a 5,000-word article.”
Averbach is undoubtedly right about what the story not written demands. Alas, the 1,400-word report (a genre Hot Type knows intimately) makes demands of its own. Get it done fast, is one demand. Make it punchy, is the other.
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Paradoxically, if Santow’s exercise had been a 5,000-word article, carefully considered and diligently edited, there would be no room for this incoherent sentence. Is “uncomplicated looking” a feckless way of saying “simple”? Is observing that this fellow’s sobriety saves him from goofiness similar to reflecting that the tree we see outside our window might be an oak if it wasn’t a catalpa?
“One would hope,” says Gevinson, “that Santow was unaware that for many readers the phrase [“uncomplicated looking’] would have insidious racial overtones, recalling old, apparently undying stereotypes. The sad irony, of course, is that a reporter with such putatively egalitarian purposes would betray such vile instincts.”
“If Chicago would act on my suggestion that Santow be fired, he need not fret. There is an alternative for a reporter who seems never to have glanced at a code of journalistic ethics. I understand that they’re still looking for contributors for the next issue of SPEW.”
