January 2011

Overrated:
Ralph Nader, Green party, 2000. Hold on, now! Didn’t he cost Al Gore the presidency? Didn’t he change the course of modern political history by, in essence, splitting the Democratic vote and delivering the White House to George W. Bush? How can such an influential candidate be overrated? Well, because he did nothing of the sort. What’s more, his 2.74 percent of the vote was pretty abysmal, compared with some other third-party candidacies, such as Ross Perot’s in 1992 and George Wallace’s in 1968. By their standard, Nader’s campaign in 2000 is less than a footnote in political history.

Overrated Johnny Carson was “the king,” a “living legend,” the man who put “The Tonight Show” on the top of the TV talk-show world when he took it over from Jack Paar (after some interregnum hosts) in 1962. Johnny doubled Paar’s viewership and defended his dominant position on network television for nearly 30 years on the air, well into the age of cable.

But his late-night juggernaut was born in hype (the show was heralded by every trumpet in the NBC publicity machine) and died in hype (it seemed as if there was not a newspaper in the land that didn’t run a headline on the king’s stepping down), and when Bette Midler was singing him his swan song, there didn’t seem to be a dry eye in the house.

Overrated The International Space Station is a technical marvel, the largest human-built object ever to circle the Earth. But it’s also an overpriced albatross that has hung around the neck of America’s human space-flight program for two decades and counting. It has been a roadblock to human missions beyond Earth, not a catalyst for them. Most damaging, it has sapped NASA’s ever-dwindling resources by taking longer to complete and costing far more than anyone expected. When announced to great fanfare by President Reagan in 1984, the station was to cost eight billion dollars and be completed by 1992. Twelve years, three Presidents, and many cost factors later, the station is still not finished.

Overrated The most popular hero of American silent movies was Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., athletic and gallant rescuer of helpless virgins, escape artist, swashbuckling do-gooder. He also wrote self-improvement books ( Profiting by Experience, Assuming Responsibilities ) and believed in “going through life with a smile.” In fact he hardly ever stopped smiling. Whether dueling, jumping from a balcony to a tree, or leaping from his horse through an open window, he bared those gleaming teeth with a self-reliance that seemed inspirational at the time, but today the effect is monotonous, and the movies completely lack tension. Whatever his predicament, the perpetually Laughing Cavalier never seems in real danger.

Overrated The financier Daniel Drew (1797-1879) is remembered today as the devout founder of several Methodist churches and as the underwriter of the Drew Theological Seminary. In his own time, however, Drew was notorious on Wall Street as an outright liar and cheat, the most sinister, cynical, and self-serving of operators, a man who took savage delight in the opportunities caused by the Civil War. (He commented to friends, “It’s good fishing in troubled waters.”)

The onetime drover, who’d always salted and watered his cattle just as surely as he later watered stocks, claimed that “anybody who plays the stock market not as an insider is like a man buying cows in the moonlight.” Nevertheless, he himself came a cropper during the panic of 1873 and spent his last years living off the charity of one of his sons.

Overrated The most overrated American regional food comes from my beloved Northeast. Each April or May chefs throughout New York and beyond (those in my own restaurants included) celebrate the arrival of fiddlehead ferns and ramps with an overblown enthusiasm that belies their own culinary good sense. It is true that the long, endless winters of our region stoke a deep-seated craving for spring. By mid-February we are already sick and tired of cooking with apples, squash, and root vegetables, so we project our need to reawaken on the first green anything that emerges from the defrosted earth. Let’s be honest. A fiddlehead fern is not delicious, no matter how you prepare it. Blanched, sautéed, batter-fried, or raw, it is nothing more than a bland, oddly textured plant whose only redeeming virtue is that it doesn’t poison you. (And I’m told it’s even capable of doing that.)

Overrated Susan B. Anthony, whose profile appears on the dollar coin. Anthony, who originally believed that the subjugation of women in society was rooted in reactionary religious and economic as well as political institutions, compromised her convictions by allying the nineteenth-century suffragist movement with socially and religiously conservative female prohibitionists and pro-censorship activists, who wanted the vote for women in order to promote their ideas of morality. She was tactically right in her belief that her movement would be strengthened by an alliance with cultural conservatives, but time proved that the vote alone, achieved with ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, did not change the fundamentally inferior status of women. Basic change would come only with the second wave of feminism in the 1970s, which (in a throwback to the first wave of feminism, beginning in 1848) mounted a radical attack on the economic, religious, and educational as well as political underpinnings of discrimination against women.

Overrated As often happens with our Presidents, the recent outpouring of grief over the death of Ronald Reagan has tended to distort the historical record. This is certainly understandable, especially considering Reagan’s tragic final illness, which by all accounts he faced with typical personal courage for as long as he could.

Yet the primary claim for Reagan’s greatness—that he “won” the Cold War—seems exaggerated on the face of it. The Cold War was won by every President from Truman through Reagan, not to mention the countless brave men and women, in our armed forces and without, and in all the free countries of the world, who did the long, hard job of grinding down the Soviet Union after 1945. An Evil Empire does not fall in a day.

Overrated Eugene O’Neill has been credited by critics and scholars with introducing modernist themes into American drama and rescuing our theater from the claptrap that dominated the commercial stage since before the turn of the twentieth century. When he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1936, his reputation rested on six plays: The Emperor Jones (1920), The Hairy Ape (1922), Desire Under the Elms (1924), The Great God Brown (1926), and, most particularly, Strange Interlude (1928) and Mourning Becomes Electra (1931).

Overrated “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was written about a single episode from a war about which Americans now know little and that most historians agree should not have been fought. While the song goes into great detail chronicling the failure of the British assault and the success of those fighting for the United States, it really does not touch upon the wonder and beauty of the country. In that sense, our national anthem is very one-dimensional.

The old English drinking tune “To Anacreon in Heaven,” which supplies the melody for “The Star-Spangled Banner” is hardly inspiring in itself. By the time it was set to Francis Scott Key’s poem “The Defence of Fort McHenry,” it had been coupled to at least 84 other sets of lyrics in the U.S. alone, including another written by Key. Hence, with its one-note story and antiquated tune, “The Star-Spangled Banner” is a strange and narrow choice for the musical symbol of the United States.