Et tu, Keisling?

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: Phil Keisling

Charles Peters is the editor of The Washington Monthly.

Like everyone else who has worked here, I have my own frustrations with what the Monthly has been unable to do and my own embarrassment with the times the Monthly has been wrong. As to the latter, I obviously agree with Mickey Kaus that we were wrong in the early seventies to support a guaranteed annual income wit >;hout a work requirement because we have since changed our position to support such a requirement. As to the frustrations, my greatest has been our inability to find and write about organizations that work, to complement our ample coverage of those that don't. This frustration has been most acute in the case of our futile search for poverty programs that work. As I look to the future, no mission for the Monthly seems more important to me than helping to end the degradation of the underclass by freeing it >;from the drugs and hopelessness and cynicism that now overwhelm it.

It also seems to me that, in our effort to expose and correct the follies of liberalism, we have given insufficient attention to the subjects on which we are in substantial agreement with our fellow liberals. One of these is the cause of racial justice.

Another is the environment, which is why I find myself sympathetic to the comments made by Phil

Keisling and Arthur Levine. While it is true that we have published at least a dozen p >;ieces expressing environmental concern, beginning with one in our first issue deploring the then complete lack of control of pollution from automobiles, and that last year I urged Michael Dukakis to make the environment the number one issue in his campaign, I agree that we haven't done enough on the environment and the dangers posed to it by uncontrolled economic growth.

I disagree with Levine, however, to the extent that I am convinced that without economic growth, we won't have the tax revenues necessa >;ry to clean up the environmental mess that already exists. But I join him in believing that economic growth must be attained without adding to the mess.

With one of the foregoing essays-by Nicholas Lemann-I'm in complete agreement. In the case of six others-Joseph Nocera, Walter Shapiro, Mickey Kaus, Steven Waldman, Jonathan Alter, and James Fallows-I concur with much of what they say but do, as with Levine's, have some points of dissent.

I agree with Nocera that journalism cannot deal with the dark >; night of the soul, which means we'll always need the Dostoevskys. I once was even ready to concede that modern fiction might be able to illuminate social problems in a way that reporting could not. Twelve years ago the Monthly attempted to create a fiction section and named a talented young novelist, Garrett Epps, as its editor. But that great fiction about social problems that should have been out there quite simply wasn't, and we had to abandon the section. We continue, as Matthew Cooper indicated in >; our

December issue, to hope that a new Dickens will appear. But in the meantime, I think that journalists in the Monthly's tradition, like Nocera with his article on T. Boone Pickens and Taylor Branch with his splendid book on Martin...