Gerald Russello, RIP
An obituary for the devoted editor of the University Bookman at the Russell Kirk Center & a sample of my work with him
I met Gerald a few years back, just South of Central Park, for lunch. It was a beautiful autumn day, warm, but not without a breeze, more or less what a reasonable man wants out of life; my mind was on my observations of Manhattan, as I suppose his was on the day’s work, lawyering. But then we saw each other & that all went away—I think you could say without insult that we’re funny-looking people; Gerald had a broad smile he flashed without warning & its warmth was disconcerting—he neither acted like the lawyer whose suit he was wearing, careless but not disheveled, nor like a man nearing 50, but like a young man animated by an idea or a story which occasionally ran ahead of his speech or was simply too broad to coax into an image, & I had to look to his very expressive face for suggestions as to what else was happening inside of him. You could say I looked like an amateur Civil War reenactor, or, if you prefer, the busboy at a snobbish restaurant, but Gerald was nevertheless pleased to see me & asked eagerly about my adventures, as though unwarned by appearances that he was letting himself in for something startling.
That’s my image of him, a young man, even a college kid—he knew he was smarter than most, but did not make anything of it; always reading, eager to be part of a public conversation that needed his decency & his talents more than it could know; critical of political goings on & pleased to share his sharp observations of the vanities & failures of prestigious institutions in a measured way, devoid of malice. He admired Russell Kirk & wrote a defense of Kirk’s rhetorical & poetic pedagogy which I recommend warmly, was happy to bear that banner at the University Bookman, he was always looking to publish in the most respectable liberal reviews to make the case for Christian humanism, & he spent a lot of time on Twitter trying to encourage writers & readers to come to the University Bookman, but also to go anywhere they could to speak up for this belief—he believed that human dignity requires that we speak up for human dignity. Gerald was modest; it’s easiest to praise him by saying what he was not—he was not an intellectual, he was not a wonk, to say nothing o even uglier pretenses typical of our times; he was accordingly no exasperated by Twitter & what it reveals about, or encourages in, American writers.
Gerald was not blind to how funny his position was, lawyer by day & editor by night, aspiring apologist for a kind of conservatism that doesn’t sell very well in America, gentle, in love with learning, but unable to flatter celebrities or TV audiences. Penniless, in short. There is something noble in being unpopular in America; he made nothing of it, he seemed to have no self-importance. He believed that storytelling was largely moral pedagogy & admired artistic endeavors; he also believed that conservative abandonment of everything that can be called entertainment was a terrible mistake which he wanted to help fix, both because he knew decent people recognized themselves in pop culture often enough & because he knew the desire to tell stories about what we hope & fear, above what we admire most, is irrepressibly human. He wanted very much to make his book review a success, which he deserved, but he was content to always encourage conservative to be more humanistic—he believed America would always be a country where culture is moonlighting, & he was ok with that.
Gerald wanted me to write for the University Bookman & I was pleased to do so; our lunch involved little food & no drink, instead we compared notes on America, as anonymous outsiders looking to break in; we agreed that the future of postmodern conservatism is conspiratorial & it was a wonderful, promising thing to know we had seen the same problems, seen them as opportunities, & would not be alone in trying to ennoble conservatism. A few people here, a few there, we thought, will form friendships & recruit the kind of talent that speaks to their spiritual needs, & eventually success will come. He thought I was a young writer of promise, that it would be good for me to get an audience & eventually put my thoughts in a book. I am grateful for his generosity & so I feel a duty to talk about the work we did together. I don’t spend much time in Manhattan, of course, we could not be friends, but for the last couple of years, I wrote for him essays or reviews that I knew I couldn’t expect to publish almost anywhere else. We were political friends. Gerald used his judgment & it told him that much that conservative publications reject is in fact good writing, often better than what they prefer. He took hope from the foolishness of others. The University Bookman lacks the money & celebrity other publications have, but it can be judged by the worth of its writers. I am in a modest way proud I was part of the endeavor to restore poetic judgment & style; I look back on what I wrote for Gerald & I believe we were right to think as we did & act as we did. I cannot speak about his family, & it would anyway be improper, & we didn’t talk about Catholic things, since I am not Catholic, so I leave to others to speak about these things, for which he lived & by which he died. I can only speak to the comparatively unimportant problem of coming to grips with America: Below, you can find the essays I wrote & he published, some of which he commissioned, others I pitched; sometimes I came to him with things no one else wanted to publish, sometimes he had ideas no one else suggested to me. Since he never rejected my unpopular essays, I believe they can bear witness to his interests & his unusual perspective.
A Tocquevillian view of computer games. As readers of PoMoCon know, I specialize in pointing out the obvious, the massive social facts our elites, especially intellectuals, ignore &, if they ever see them, misunderstand them in a vulgar way. Virtual manliness as the phantom image of Progress is a good theme for art, not just journalism, & more so now than three years back when I wrote this.
The Truman Show & digital democracy. The 90s were the high point of TV influence on democracy & gave us also the most popular criticism of that corruption of American morality we call globalization. This is an overview of the self-destruction of cinema, the collapse of stars & the parallel collapse of the distinction between fantasy & reality.
Blade Runner, the Californian tragedy. I compared the fictional California, 2019 of Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie with the one we inhabit to bring out the fear that we already live like machines, repetitive, replaceable, interchangeable, & might be looking for revenge to prove that we are human.
The Coen Bros Western. Here I compared The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs with the old John Ford Westerns—we cannot have both these visions of the American past & therefore of the meaning of violence in American politics. That said, the Coen Bros have a lot of secrets to share about how screwed up America is now, starting with a man who is hanged twice as a vision of cheating death; it’s not resurrection, it’s not immortality, but it is how people experience learning how screwed up America is now.
Terrence Malick’s cinema of failure. This was the first essay I wrote for Gerald, an introduction for conservatives to their only artistic champion & for fans of Malick to his unusual Christian art. Sin & confession have not previously been considered as a style of moviemaking; it’s worth considering whether this can help people realize there is something innocent left in them that makes them fall in love.
Hayao Miyazaki on authenticity. This is a review of an academic study of the most important Japanese artist since Kurosawa. I have some criticism of academics here & I reveal how a student of modern philosophy should look at Miyazaki, or the problem of the education of children.
Toy Story, or American parents. Boomer America has been depicted in this series of movies going from parenthood to old age & facing mortality, since 1995. Wonder has given way to resignation, because neither bringing up Millennials nor living out America’s post-war triumph & tribulations leads to any great good. Family is now “family.”
Stranger things, love at the mall. Gen-X America is in turn reinterpreted in this series set in the 80s, which then turns into a heartwarming story about girls who take over a boys’ story & train them to be obedient, even unto death.
Game of Thrones to Mandalorian, Disney moralism. This was the last thing I wrote for Gerald, fittingly, an overview of the transformation of the type of entertainment that serves to unite liberal elites to the popular audience. Democratic brutality-to-sentimentality is the emotional shift for Millennials & younger Americans—“Silicon Valley” takes over from “Hollywood” in corporate entertainment.
Tom Wolfe against cowardly elites. This is the only essay that had nothing to do with entertainment—it’s a review of Wolfe’s last essay, The Kingdom Of Man. Wolfe was the most successful conservative writer for decades. He deserves to be taken seriously enough that we learn from him & are inspired by him.
If you read these essays, you’ll understand what PoMoCon is supposed to show you about America & what we’re trying to teach conservatism about what we still mistakenly call culture. The education of popular sentiment & the justification of elite opinion is still the outstanding task for anything called euphemistically conservatism. I remember Gerald with gratitude & I always hoped to impress him when I sent him an essay—I’m a writer out of conviction, I stand by the things I have written, & so my name will be tied up with his, if in a small way, as long as I write. I hope others will continue to do the work of editor he did in the spirit in which he did it—intelligent generosity, encouragement of talent without flattery, help, even when small, rather than rejection or indifference.