New York Intellectuals Battle It Out

"What did you think would happen when you sent 100,000 soldiers into Iraq?"

Jeffrey Goldberg, a staff writer for The New Yorker, asked this question of Douglas J. Feith, former Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, at The New Yorker Festival's opening Town Hall Meeting on Iraq last Friday night.

"Our government was not concerned with internal considerations regarding Iraq," Feith said, choosing his words carefully. "We were concerned with the dangers of Saddam to the region and to America."

The New Yorker Festival, an annual celebration of politics and culture now in its sixth year, has never hesitated to put equal and opposite forces on a stage and enjoy the show. But the glee with which the audience watched Feith fumble through his cliche Rolodex and produce nothing but platitudes redefined schadenfreude altogether.

At one point, George Packer, a staff writer for The New Yorker who was also on the panel, called the Defense Department under Feith "the FEMA of the Iraq war."

"I thought the derogatory names would come from the audience, not the panelists," said Rhonda Sherman, the festival's director. "I didn't think these grown-ups would be doing that to each other."

But when New York's most cutting wits meet on stages around the city for three days, an hour without barbs is like a Christmas (or Chanukah, as the case may be) without toys.

Sherman assembled the panels in coordination with the magazine's writers and editors, drawing ideas largely from articles published in the past year. Events ranged from a conversation with Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly about the city's security provisions to a master class on the graphic novel with cartoonist Chris Ware to a performance and discussion with Steve Martin and banjo maestros Tony Ellis, Earl Scruggs, Pete Wernick, and Charles Wood.

Some pairings resulted from coincidence as much as shared interests. Malcolm Gladwell and The Roots, who talked grassroots hip-hop on Saturday evening, are linked by The Tipping Point-the name of Gladwell's 2002 book on the science behind social changes-after which The Roots later named an album. "That one was obvious," Sherman said.

A consistent organizational theme has been the pairing of the high-brow and the low-brow, the mainstream and the marginal.

Stephen King strolled onstage Saturday morning wearing a T-shirt bearing the words "I make stuff up" as part of a panel entitled "When Reality Fails," alongside authors Martin Amis, Judy Budnitz, George Saunders, and A. M. Homes. Moderated by fiction editor Deborah Treisman, the panel discussed the limits of realism and the autonomy of imagination in fiction.

"I've always been fascinated by how people cope with the incredible," King said. He shared a recent idea that occurred to him while watching a woman on the street talking into her cell phone. "What if she got this message through her cell phone to attack everyone she saw, starting with the doorman?" he wondered aloud.

Amis suggested that even as realism has its limits, so does fantasy. "My rule is keep it short," he said. "Once you get beyond thirty pages, there must be some degree of realism."

Later that day, some of America's most successful fantasists gathered for "Anarchy and Animation," a panel examining the destructive tendency of cartoons.

"The barriers [between live action and animation] are breaking down," said Brad Bird, long-time animator for The Simpsons and director of The Incredibles. "But animation should do things in a different way from live action."

Bird shared the stage with South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, as well as the creators of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Matt Maiellaro and Dave Willis.

The moderator, Tad Friend, prodded the panelists about their respective creations' predilection for chaos.

Parker, whose show depicts violent death, military invasions, and chronic illness on a regular basis, said ease of destruction is a major factor. "You can blow things up real cheap," said Parker. "The Chinese army costs the same as an ice cream store."

The panelists celebrated the relative autonomy given to animation as compared to film. Stone said being the voice of his characters gives him ultimate creative control over his art. In their most recent film, Team America: World Police, Stone and Parker substituted puppets for actors. "Acting really doesn't matter that much," Parker said.

Among the legions of creators who populated the festival's panels, King, who possesses one of the most lucrative imaginations of his generation, may have best described the power of creation. "It's a crazy thing to do, make shit up," he said.