January 2011

Overrated How can there be any overrated feminist in the twenty-first century? Today we need all the feminists we can get, especially since the conservative right has managed to turn a word that simply means equality for women into a stigmatized category of bra-burning viragoes and male-hating lesbians.

Overrated The fame of Route 66 may have begun in the Dust Bowl but it ended up in the Hollywood Bowl. It’s a cinematic assemblage of clichés from film and fiction and song, the received wisdom of American history riding the back of the great myth: Go West, young man, and prosper. Route 66 is now lined with caricature, corny as the tepee motels and rattlesnake ranches of its legend. It’s a myth compounded of The Grapes of Wrath and Bobby Troup’s song performed by Nat King Cole and even the Rolling Stones. And aside from the happy rhythmics of its name, why shouldn’t 66 be famous? It had a merchant’s association flogging its virtues since before the first Okies headed west. The travel writer Michael Stern shrewdly observed that no one ever describes driving west to east on Route 66. We think of the pilgrimage to California and success, not the return of the failed and frustrated.

Overrated Fusion cooking may currently be the food fad everyone most loves to hate, but there’s reason for this. One fusion chef described himself as being “a master of French, Mediterranean, Japanese, Chinese, Laotian, Vietnamese, Portuguese, and Californian cuisines,” which statement would surely have astounded the likes of Ferdinand Point or Auguste Escoffier, who labored for decades to master French cooking and at the end of their long careers were still learning. But according to the Web site for one fusion restaurant in Oregon, “American culinary arts have broken down the stagnant barriers of traditional cheffing and gastronomic definitions, while creating a new standard we have come to know and love as fusion cuisine.”

Overrated Given that we have until recently paid insufficient attention to most of the explorers of our national topography (other than Lewis and Clark, whom we are now close to running into the ground), it’s difficult to name anyone who is overrated. But on the other side, the underrated ones—that is, explorers scarcely known to most educated Americans—are legion: Clarence King, Ferdinand Hayden, Joseph Ives, G. K. Warren, Howard Stansbury, to name a few, and then the early scientists like Thomas Nuttall, George Engelmann, Asa Gray.

Underrated One of my favorites is Lt. William Emory, whose government report on his 1846-47 reconnaissance of the Southwest is thick with descriptions of landforms, flora, and fauna, much of it new to European Americans, and his accounts of meetings with native peoples are rich with priceless details and anecdotes. The illustrations and maps in the big report are lovely adjuncts to a long trip of scientific inquiry made by a military man.

Overrated People—and by people here I mean veterinarians and poodle owners—keep telling me, Get a poodle. Not the little toy ones named Bijou or Etienne, but the large standard ones, who all seem to be named something like Robert. These poodles, I am told, are smart, cordial, healthy, and brave. I believe it. When I meet these poodles, I like them. But I have been unable, so far, to find a very gratifying petting surface on a poodle. Where a poodle is fluffy I can’t get any traction, and where it’s close-cropped it’s like petting a nubby carpet. I prefer a dog that is somewhere between a chicken and a baseball to the touch.

Overrated I’ve always had a soft spot for Robert B. Parker if only because of an essay he once wrote demolishing the glib academic theory that the hard-boiled detective is a Marxist hero. The sleuth as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler depicted him belongs “not to the Marxist but to the chivalric tradition,” Parker observed. “He is not of the people; he is alone. His adventures are solitary statements.” It seems unchivalrous to have to say that ™ this astute observer talks a better game than he plays. He names his detective after a Renaissance poet (Spenser), just as Chandler did (Marlowe), and the homage is sincere but gives a taste of the derivative nature of Parker’s effort. Reading his lackluster prose, one feels sadly that the old hard-boiled genre has lost something of its verve and inspiration.

Overrated Perhaps they didn’t have enough Tonkas in their childhoods. Perhaps they had too many. But the craze among current car buyers for fourwheel drive in general and SUVs in particular must be compensating them for something very deep and dark. If someone had told Henry Leland, the perfectionist engineer who founded Cadillac, that his successors would line a truck in leather and then call it a Cadillac (the Escalade), he’d have spit nickels. P. T. Barnum would have winked.

Apparently, a whole generation in America longs for a vehicle with less space than a minivan (but more sex appeal), worse handling than a Yugo (but more status), and gas mileage that puts a twinkle in the eyes of oil sheiks. All of that might be chalked up to some kind of personal preference, but four-wheel-drive vehicles, including SUVs, are overrated in terms of safety. In winter, for example, a front-wheel-drive car like a Taurus, equipped with snow tires, is a better choice. However, it doesn’t touch the lumberjack within.

Overrated The German immigrant engineering genius John Augustus Roebling has been widely celebrated for inventing the modern suspension bridge. When Roebling spanned the East River with the Brooklyn Bridge (actual construction was completed by his son, Washington), he created a global icon that has been memorialized in poetry, painting, and photography. In the process, more or less on the basis of this one feat, the Roebling name became synonymous with bridge building.

Underrated While Roebling’s achievement was superb, the true giant among the masters of modern bridge building is another immigrant, the Swiss-German engineer Othmar Ammann. Beginning with the George Washington Bridge in 1931, a towering steel structure at once massive and graceful, Ammann undertook a series of projects that knitted together the New York metropolitan area with some of the world’s most beautiful bridges. These include the Triborough (actually a complex of three bridges), Whitestone, Throgs Neck, and Verrazano-Narrows.

Overrated The architectural historian Fiske Kimball and the critic Lewis Mumford, starting in the 1910s and 1920s, helped inflate the reputation of our only architect-President, but Thomas Jefferson is perhaps the most overrated American practitioner of the building art. Although Jefferson’s beloved Monticello is a fascinating case history of the house as autobiography, it is both formally and spatially awkward, its many “ingenious” contraptions are ultimately tedious, it took him forever to complete, and it cost so much that he died nearly destitute. His inappropriate practice of adapting the forms of ancient Roman temples for the functions of modern American public buildings—the Maison Carrée for the Virginia State Capitol and the Pantheon for the University of Virginia—burdened those institutions with imposing but inflexible structures that resisted expansion. And his anonymous entry in the 1792 competition for the President’s House in Washington, an ill-proportioned version of Palladio’s Villa Rotonda, makes one feel lucky that James Hoban’s graceful and modest scheme was chosen instead.