A knave and his index: Lewis Lapham continues to wound our culture.(CULTURE WATCH)

WHAT was Karl Marx's best line? My candidate is his mot, from the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), about history repeating itself first as tragedy, then farce. Consider: It was a minor cultural tragedy when Lewis Lapham trivialized Harper's magazine beyond all recognition. Once upon a time, Harper's was home to such eminences as Henry James, Winston Churchill, and Mark Twain. Under Lapham's long stewardship, the magazine became a poster child for the dumbed-down limousine leftism that Lapham himself so effulgently personified. The infamous Harper's Index, which Lapham introduced in an effort to pander to his readers' diminishing attention spans and confusion of Trivial Pursuit with useful knowledge, epitomized the spirit of the enterprise. Disconnected observations, many of dubious authority, were jumbled together in a pathetic cocktail-game collage:

 
   Number of pointless "facts" jostled 
   together in the pages of a once-great magazine: 
   5 billion. 
 
   Number of Harper's Index items that 
   actually illuminated anyone's experience 
   of the world: Zero. 

I did not look into Harper's often. I felt about it the way C. K. Dexter Haven, in The Philadelphia Story, felt about George Kittredge, Man of the People: that "to hardly know him is to know him well." But I vividly remember "Tentacles of Rage," the 8,000-word fulmination Lapham wrote for the September 2004 issue. Most documents denominated "screeds" do not really live up to the word. "Tentacles of Rage" did so, in spades. Ostensibly an expose of "The Republican Propaganda Mill," the piece was really a mildly paranoid and disjointed compendium of leftish cliches about conservatives.

What chiefly distinguished it, however, was not its tone--an amalgam of hysteria and smugness--but its inaccuracy. As I pointed out at the time, "Tentacles of Rage" was littered with falsehoods, including falsehoods about the founding of The New Criterion. What made the piece notorious--and confirmed the widespread opinion that Lapham was a knave as well as a fool--was its "report" on the Republican National Convention. Lapham included an eyewitness description of the event, replete with withering comments on the crappy, ideologically motivated speeches given by Republicans. Unfortunately, no sooner had that issue of Harper's hit readers' mailboxes than some public-spirited citizen pointed out that Lapham had been reporting on an event that took place after that issue of Harper's had been mailed. In other words, he just made it up.

"Oh, but I just reported the kinds of things that Republicans always say": That, in essence, was Lapham's uncomprehending response. He just didn't get it. Why all the fuss? Who cares if a journalist deliberately scrambles facts, invents unflattering scenarios, and puts words in the mouths of politicians he doesn't like? Didn't people realize that these were conservatives he was talking about--that is, people who do not deserve elementary respect and presumption of good will?

Recollecting this affair leads me from the tragedy of Harper's to the farce of Lapham's Quarterly, volume one, number one of which rolled off the press in November. The great irony, given Lapham's cavalier disregard of historical facts, is that he should embark in his twilight years on a new magazine ostensibly dedicated to history.

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