By Tim Hartnett
November 14, 2026
"It's better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody." Holly Golightly
My high school English class was assigned "The Catcher in the Rye" on a Friday in April at about 10:30 A.M. Before 11 that night I turned the last page. It was just the kind of stuff to whet a 16-year-old's literary appetite. Alas Holden, so forlorn and misunderstood... he poured 190-proof grain alcohol on the fires of adolescent angst, ego and delusions of rough treatment by a cruel world. The teacher of the literature, Mrs. Burgess, was keen on the tale and also the hottest one in front of a blackboard at Robert E. Lee High. That fact, somehow, made Caulfield's woes feel all the more authentic to a sophomore.
Mrs. Burgess gave me the highest grade in her "Catcher" classes on the essay test covering the book. Over 20 years later my mother found the paper while sorting through old stuff. Re-reading it was a big letdown, that teacher must have had a gift for translating teeny-bopper-babble into fluency better than the actual speaker of the tongue.
Secretly, I knew I could be pretty phony myself. Mr. Haas, the Elkton Hills Headmaster, unsubtly snubbed nerdly parents. While entertaining the notion that the story reached a profound part of me, I don't remember any inclination to become more inclusive. Unpopular schoolmates who dressed and acted awkwardly didn't suddenly get more attention. How many cliquish kids, do you think, actually widened their circles after that assignment?
It's hard to say if the book succeeded making many teenagers more genuine in their human engagements. By the 1970s a counterfeit soft spot for the poor rich victim's values had evolved into the cringiest kind of hipsterism. Did JD Salinger's masterpiece cut surgically into the snobby tumor that starts growing on lots of kids at about the time that pubic hair sprouts ? Or, is it possible that aloof literary pretensions became more deeply ingrained among those both "cool" and on the fast track ? And not excluding the ones fantasizing they are - or were - among that elect?
Of course, missing the privileged kid in the hunting hat's point wasn't universal, but generally sunk in slowly if at all. The story had its impact and as years passed prejudging or alienating people for superficial reasons could play on thoughtful readers' consciences. Wherever that teen-lit stands as a novel today, it can make a reader pause and bring on second thoughts about dismissing people casually. Unfortunately, it could also arouse a destructive figment in a reader's mind, of their own imaginary abuse in the coarse grip of pretentious society.
The book has taken a bit of a beating by some reviewers in recent times. Not necessarily without justification. Most of the writers damning the fiction for glorifying excessive sensitivity lately think there's a lot of phoniness in the people claiming ultra-conscientiousness. And there is. "Caring" is not a competition. If you want to turn people off, make a point of out-caring them.
Callous treatment of fellow humans is most common in the callow, especially where XY chromosomes prevail - I think - without letting XX's off the hook. High-schoolers are commonly hypersensitive - but it's usually to their own hurt feelings rather than those of who they mistreat. Maturing without any rueful recollection of your past human interactions can only mean you're either a saint or somewhere on the psychopathic spectrum.
Being a poseur doesn't necessarily harm other people. There was a lady in my social ambit once that pretended - seriously - to have a British accent. She was a little trying to endure but did no one any actual harm. Meanwhile, some people 100% ingenuous can be cutthroats at the same time. You don't have to be putting on airs to be toxic... although, doing so is helpful cluing the rest of us in on what to expect.
It's one thing to want to name the moon, or the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, after yourself. It's another strange one to claim to be named after a guy no one in the US had heard of, like Sir Edmund Hillary, until over five years after you were born. Being self-centered enough to want to hear and see your own name all the time is obnoxious, and never attractive. What nobody will ever accuse 47 or 42's 1st-lady of is being like Hillary, the mountaineer not the pol. He took a photo of Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay at the Everest summit. When Norgay wanted the camera to include his client, Edmund refused. We could really stand some candidates resembling Hillary's faux namesake. People making big deals of their own names may not have a lot of brain space left for the general welfare.
The world has come a long way from the kind of class consciousness still thriving in the 1950's. Whether that was forwards or backwards is less than settled. The media keeps us awash in supposed "celebrity." Figuring out why many of them are worth any coverage by the press is a tall order. They don't let just anybody past the cordon at big-wheel clambakes even today. But being as dull as white noise no longer appears to be disqualifying. Now, while Trump and Clinton are phony and bombastic in their own distinct ways, what about the rest of society ? Is it possible that Salinger actually helped lead us down the ersatz path?
Between WWII and Truman Capote's A-list only Black and White Ball, social justice and the plight of the downtrodden usually got short shrift at high society functions. People flaunting altruistic idealism were pegged as boors with suspect motives in the smuggest circles. What the poor people were up to wasn't a hot topic of conversation at the height of the season. What's in with the in crowd keeps wannabes on their toes. It wasn't long before natural adult skepticism of human nature became passé. People gushing forth about selfless service to humankind were suddenly ruled believably sincere in abodes with doormen and security gates. The transformation came about as urban environs were crumbling apocalyptically throughout the US.
By January of 1970, the chic had evolved so radically that Tom Wolfe titled his coverage of Leonard Bernstein's Black Panther soiree "Radical Chic." Wolfe devotes over a page to servants at the event. "Felicia," the writer implies Lenny must have insisted, "be sure to find all white ones." The look of things that night outweighed the overwhelming curiosity a black waiter - or any number of other interested people - must have had about witnessing such a spectacle. A devout culture critic might have paid the Bernstein's for the opportunity of serving there; it had to be an unbeatable vantage point. Numerous other names common to the society page, that used "summer" as a verb, hosted similar shindigs. And, they kept on "summering" in places that placed them far from all the riff-raff.
While the Panthers, the SDS, the Weather Underground, the Yippies were still thriving - and the Symbionese Liberation Army wasn't even up and running yet - hippy-hood was already waning. By the 1980 presidential election many of the counter-culturalists had become yuppies. It took a quarter century more for social justice to regain anything close to its previous rolling steam.
Still, the market for saccharine sob stories has become hotter by degrees every year since 1951 when JD's defining book came out. On campus, particularly, it is unclear if it will cool from the boiling point. Did Salinger ever mention a black person or any minority in the high-toned world of his fiction ? That didn't seem to matter much to the mob of sensitive souls that wanted Joyce Maynard out-casted and publicly scourged for describing the recluse up close. Holden's creator was obsessed with the fragile sensibilities of people raised like he was. That element of his work became strangely out of bounds where "woke" came into play. It's no wonder Holden preferred Fitzgerald to Hemingway. His rich were very different from you and me; they had the feelings that counted.
In sane environments, it's the academics sharing Jason Arday's complexion that are righteously livid with Hillary Cremin. She's was the one in charge of the panel that took on Dr. Arday. When she followed that up claiming on TV he was "the best in the world" in this kind of research, the question was "what kind?"
The idea that the English speaking world doesn't teem with blacks more qualified and generally erudite than the late Arday is what's racistly unworldly. Go out and mingle in public places in any town or city. The only way not to find a person of African descent - including the ones born in Africa - making more sense than Arday did on his best day, is by avoiding people of pigment the way Headmaster Haas shunned parents sporting Sears' suits and hoofing it in Thom Mcans. Arday's appeal to the hiring hierarchy was - above any other factor - shallow, bromidal conformity to the reigning academic idealism. A subconscious suspicion - if not outright conviction - of racial inferiority lurks between Cremin's lines.
There's no doubt plenty of paler profs are just as fraudulent as the late Cambridgean, most fly under the radar by - among other things - more careful restraint of flamboyantly fake self-promotion. Adopting "discretion is the better part of valor" is not a bad plan for any fake somebody dragging letters behind his moniker. The righteous reaction to the Arday tragedy is rifling the whole parasitic structure manning Western higher education now, while rays of hope still flash on occasion.
Whatever the condition of the film industry Holden scorned was pre 1951, at least it didn't rely so desperately on the recycling bin. Shakespeare reworked a lot of pre-used material but made it new and all his own while at it. Any preference for the big screen these days gets dulled weekly when the latest attractions at the local cinema get posted. MGM's motto, "Ars gratia artis," is "art for art's sake" in English. Amending it to "Artifice for profit's sake" is too generous to credit them with at this stage; Hollywood brass resists anything as creative as artifice. One reviewer described "Cinema Paradiso," after it reached US shores, as "A big, sloppy wet kiss by the film industry on itself." That didn't go far enough for AMC theaters. They took it up a notch and hired Nicole Kidman to maudlinize audiences to near nausea before each picture.
Any person or entity in awe of itself makes time on Earth less livable for those who must endure them. What's worse is Americans slobbering over and groveling before superiors and clientele like sycophantic Ottoman satraps. The smartasses of classic noir films in service industries have been almost extinguished in real life. Bootlicking has gathered cultural acceptance in the US to third world degrees. Witnessing its prevalence in the 21st century US would have convinced De Tocqueville to send his pages to an outhouse instead of a publishing one.
Isn't it safe to say that the world is far phonier at this point than six years after WWII ended ? Salinger served in the conflict and may have contributed a lot more than he is credited for. That was the way of the day, and most days before VJ-Day. Napoleon said: "Give me enough medals and I'll win you any war." Followed by: "You call these medals and ribbons baubles; well, it is with such baubles that men are led." The Pentagon got through that war without taking him to heart. Then they changed course. They are now imitating the Federal Reserve, minting medals at a rate only slightly behind the creation of currency.
High society has always been a pretentious milieu, but before the dawn of its denizens "woking" up at least it was always fair game for culture critics. In 2020 - a year that may be dubbed peak-woke if sanity ever prevails again - Philadelphia Inquirer executive editor Steve Wischnowski resigned after 20 years there. His sin was allowing the headline "Buildings Matter, Too" on a column by Inga Saffron. The piece dared to Ku Klux Klannically suggest that riotous destruction of the town's ancient edifices was an unnecessarily high price to pay in local contrition for George Floyd's death. When much of the journalistic class sanctimoniously went along with the purge, or laid low and mum as it transpired, the phonyometer's arrow broke.
"Each man's death diminishes me," said John Donne. Why was it that well over 20,000 other homicides in 2020 diminished US media organs so much less than Floyd's ? The corpse count came to nearly 60 a day in that leap year. In 1985 Philadelphia Mayor Wilson Goode had the cops' bomb MOVE headquarters with 6 adults and 6 kids inside. All except one child, Birdie Africa, were consumed in the flames. You can gauge press hostility to Goode at the time by the fact he was reelected in 1988. Does he really have less to answer for than Derek Chauvin ? The withdrawal of New Coke from the market in 1985 is more vivid in the minds of most news consumers today.
"Anything worth doing is worth doing well," said Benjamin Franklin. If you'd like to get real, he is the real father of the United States. He was also the most prominent member of America's 4th estate in the lead up to the revolution. Does any reader familiar with the man's life find him the kind of guy who bent to peer pressure, plastic emotion, fads and trends ? Ridicule of herd mentality was among his most lethal rhetorical weapons. Is there any place we can find a roughly accurate count of media figures who have cowered up against the mob in recent years ? Even the ones forced to resign in the face of press agents and academicians with pitchforks feign contrition for fake sins nowadays - with full cognizance apologies won't save them.
When you try putting the present state of mass media into historic context, it's hard to say if you identify more with Don Quixote or Sancho Panza. If there is a brand name in media, whatever its ideological center, that won't tilt at windmills - its existence would be news to most readers. Thirty years ago, the tone of a news article was seldom surprising; you were holding its source physically in hand. Now, when reading The NYT or The Telegraph and find yourself thinking "I wouldn't expect them to say that," you quickly realize you've switched sites. Rooting out one sentence that fails to fit a modern organ's stereotype, whether it's the NYT or The Telegraph, is like mining for gold.
It was shortly after the music director of the New York Philharmonic hosted the Panthers that the gap between haves and have-nots began spreading to its present chasmic divide. A little over one year later Nixon took us off the gold standard completely. The US debt was $277.3 billion then today it is 40.32 trillion, that's over 145 times higher. Where it all goes is no mystery as the buying power of poor people shrinks. Since that time the chorus of "care" for the downtrodden has amped to 11 from wherever the cloistered classes of privilege convene.
At the Black and White Ball in 1966 you might have still heard a line like: "Oh Thurston, how droll." By the 1970's the beautiful people were gushing stuff like, "Oh Angela, tell me more about the Reverend Jones." After the parson did himself in, taking a congregation of nearly 1000 with him, the Reverend Al took over where Jones left off. Compiling the carnage possibly averted sans Sharpton's sermonizing is a more complex equation to calculate. He ignores crime where it is and finds it where it isn't, getting lots of ink and airtime while at it.
What was behind Hillary Cremin's motives for hiring, possibly, the worst candidate before her to fill the opening at Cambridge ? Could it be she was after someone as vapid and pliant to academic fads as herself ? Listening to the woman won't plunge the audience into deep, meaningful reflection on the state of things. "What the hell is she babbling about?" is the more likely reaction. Keeping the social - so-called - "sciences" in their present superficial condition of maiming perception of reality and glorifying grievance grift seems to be the prevailing scheme in academic redoubts far beyond Cambridge. JD's "the rich kids aren't alright" piss-moaning screed, familiar to anyone plying language intensive arts, probably made things worse.
After reading "The Catcher in the Rye," all those pre-internet years ago, "For Esme with Love and Squalor" was the most readily available Salinger work in the R.E. Lee library. I can't remember if it was in an old New Yorker or an anthology. The protagonist's fascination with a 13-year-old child - and her oblivion to her governess's direction - was striking. JD had no problem with class distinctions, affluent brats counted to him in ways no commoner could. As the story developed, another facet of it arose; its author had a squalid fascination with an idea of "innocence." Esme, the young Sergeant of the tale found, was intriguing for both innocence and worldliness at once. That he was "better" than the lowlife the US army billeted him with comes out in the early paragraphs.
I already knew what pedophilia was by then, but any wariness about its existence was in remote parts of the minds of kids at that time. Halfway into Salinger's second most renowned story, it was impossible to miss. The writer was a guy with little use for classes outside his own and amorous uses for intelligent, still-flowered females inside it. "Innocence," in fact, was the very commodity he hoped to exploit. While it's doubtful Jeffrey Epstein and pals were inspired by Salinger, it's not beyond the realm of possibility. That the man who invented "Esme" was not right, by any rational understanding of adjustment, is now well documented by many of the women who knew him intimately. His fascination with the mellifluous waif "Esme" - who was likely based on a real girl - dripped with pathology
The narcissistic locomotive of youthful self-obsession, finding martyrdom in the hands of previous generations, has gathered enormous momentum since Holden hit presses. And, for the perspective that worked in his fiction, Salinger picked his parents pretty wisely. Greta Thunberg, who was given a UN pulpit to rain fire and brimstone down upon an unworthy world - qualifying to deliver the global homily without any qualification whatsoever - is JD's ideological progeny. Her rapt admirers mostly don't know that she wasn't "born by the river in a little tent." The major organs of media find the detail less than relevant. She comes from the Holden world of privilege and access that average people must toil in for years, quite ably, for any hope of their voices gathering far less reach.
People who have accomplished much more than Greta is ever likely to, don't get opportunities to address the UN and our entire planet. Our caring, conscientious media evinces no inclination to delve into how this child merited a worldwide platform. The present "narrative" makes her ascension appear to be a completely natural development. She did take a sailboat ride, after all; that roughly equals St. Joan at the stake in modern moral mathematics. "Change" has come. It has mostly resulted in a financial grip, by the oligopoly, on power that looks far more secure than in 1951.
Was Holden himself a snob ? Well, on his train ride to New York, the mother of one in his peerage impressed him by the sophisticated way she smoked a cigarette. Once downtown and in a bar his class consciousness erupts again. The older woman he engaged in conversation ordered a gin and tonic... in December ? What could the oblivious plebe be thinking ? Only the most aristocratic adolescent could get snooty over such a trifle.
Teen suicide began its gradual rise about the time "JD Salinger" became a household name. Faulting him for a trend that has generally fluctuated upwards - since "Catcher" caught on - would be an unconscionable smear. But the author certainly didn't help. We have plunged deep into a culture of phony celebrity, mercenary journalism, counterfeit money, insipid arts, superficial education, surreal politics and self-pity glorified to industrial strength. The next step in this trendy trek is grisly to speculate upon.
Many years ago a decal was sold in novelty shops depicting a man in a toilet with his hand on the flusher. The caption read: "Goodbye, cruel world." Young boys were pasting it everywhere followed by mothers and school janitors scraping it off. Today, the sick joke would likely lead to more serious consequences for pranksters. Flushing oneself has become too common to be taken lightly, while magnifying the world's cruelty to ten times actual size has become widespread commercial enterprise.
The American generation that fought WWII was anything but soft. The overwhelming majority of them landing on Norman beaches in June 1944 did not grow up on Park Avenue. Huge numbers of them went through the 1930's too hungry to have gripes about the menu Pencey preppies ungratefully endured. Few of those who trudged South Pacific swamps or North European snow drifts were "classy" enough to have done any downtown Manhattan boozing underage. Most of them came out of wartorn hell-scapes with a mind toward family, peace and prosperity. They paid a price for all of us and didn't emerge with palms outstretched.
What's phony is making fun of people who couldn't properly pronounce the names of cheeses Sol Salinger imported. The crowd that could in the 1950's contained those rare real McCoys JD found worthy. Winston Smith said: "If there is hope, it lies in the proles." Holden didn't see it that way. Holding the right drink, at the right time, wearing the right threads and with all the right people is the scene Holdenites will make tonight.