The way I see things, there are three kinds of journalistic
pieces, articles, columns, essays or whatever you want to call them, and that
Ethan Epstein has written a piece of the third kind.
First, there is the piece that is written by an experienced writer. It is usually concise, saying no more than needs to be said. It is also
clear in that you do not guess what the writer is trying to say even if you
appreciate the occasional subtle point whose meaning you may spend some time
deciphering. And it is informative because it is apt to teach a great number of
people a great deal of new things.
Second, there is the piece that is written by a beginner. It
is usually a repetitive rant about points that do not come out clearly. And so,
you find it necessary to go over the piece several times to get a feel of what
the writer is trying to say. When you sense that you are starting to connect
with it, you kind of fill the blanks by guessing what would tie together the
ideas you see scattered all over the page.
Third, there is the piece that is written by a hack writer –
or more like a small group of hack writers. It pretends to be written in a
journalistic format but is, in reality, a fiction posing as a personal story
whose mendacity would be too difficult to verify because the story stands on a
little bit of truth woven with a great deal of imagined situations. It is a
genre that started two or three decades ago when (as far as I can tell) a
Toronto newspaper started a series of columns that were written by
non-journalists about incidents that happened to them, and would be proper to
their respective professions.
Thus, we had doctors, lawyers, engineers and what have you
write what they said were true incidents that happened to them. The trouble is
that you did not have to be a literary critic to detect that each piece could
not have been written by a different writer. They were all written in the same
style ... not necessarily by one and the same writer, but one and the same
group of writers. No matter what the story was about, it featured a Jew whose
character was exemplary, and featured an Arab or mentioned one that was – well,
if not a terrorist – at least a very bad character.
And this brings us to the piece that was written by Ethan
Epstein under the title: “Civil Engineers Support More Spending on Civil
Engineering,” published on May 15, 2015 in the Weekly Standard. The title of
the piece tells you that the civil engineers of the story appear to be engaged
in a self-servicing exercise, which makes it so that the writer is most
probably not telling a straightforward story about them but is criticizing
them.
Knowing already of the bridges that have been collapsing in
America, the street potholes that people have been complaining about, and the
airports that everyone has been saying look worse than those of the Third
World, you are curious to see how Ethan Epstein will try to convince you that
the civil engineers are not talking about a real need but are engaged in a self
serving exercise.
So you read the article and find in it an assault on the
integrity of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) whose “report card”
on the nation's infrastructure is adopted uncritically by the New republic, CBS
News, the Christian Science Monitor, Slate and prominent people in the
government, says Epstein. He disagrees with them all, and agrees with the
Washington Post which criticized ASCE; also agrees with the leftist anti-car
writer Charles Marohn who called the ASCE report card “propaganda”.
What is missing in the Epstein article is a summation of
what the ASCE report says, what those who have adopted it say about it, and
what those who disagree with it say. All that you see in his presentation is a
diatribe against the civil engineers whose report card, as he admits, is not
necessarily wrong. So then, why did he write the article the way that he did?
There is only one answer to that question; the article is of
the third type. While standing on the truth that there is an ASCE issuing
report cards on America's infrastructure, this little bit of truth is woven
with a forceful diatribe that sounds very much removed from the reality of
America's crumbling infrastructure.