An American Lion

There are Verlyn Klinkenborgs everywhere—

In an “Editorial Observer” column published this week under the remarkable title “Individualism, Identity and Bicycles in Northern California“—is it a 500-word newspaper column or a doctoral thesis?—Klinkenborg finds himself on the campus of Stanford University, contemplating “great clouds of cyclists pulsing between classes along the street called Serra Mall … like so many slowly charged particles in a physics experiment.”

This puffed-up prose is typical of Klinkenborg, who may be the windiest windbag in newspaper history. But surely poetry is called for in the case of this column: Klinkenborg is recounting an astonishing spectacle.

At Stanford, he reports, cyclists pilot bikes of assorted makes and gear configurations. Also, they display varying degrees of cycling aptitude. “Some riders are clearly adepts,” Klinkenborg writes, while others ride “à la 8 years old, prey to the wobbling clutches of gravity, prone to every distorting posture a bicycle can inflict.” The cyclists are clad in a variety of costumes. Some talk on cell phones as they pedal. Many carry bags. It all leaves Klinkenborg in a state of wonder-struck bafflement. “There is a deeply pleasing randomness about the campus cyclists, as though one morning university officials had assigned a bicycle to every member of the Stanford community, come as you are.”

There is, indeed, a randomness “about” the campus cyclists, although it has nothing to do with university officials. The fact is, each of these riders has obtained his or her bicycle individually, often by purchasing them at a store specializing in the sale of bicycles. Similarly, the sartorial variety that Klinkenborg finds mysterious is the result of a process, undertaken by each cyclist at his or her place of residence, whereby a suit of clothes is selected and then donned, beginning with undergarments and proceeding to outerwear. Often as not, these fully clothed individuals then fill a satchel or valise with personal belongings—a corncob pipe, say, or a dog-eared copy of Making Hay. This explains the cyclists’ “distended bags of every description,” which Klinkenborg observes with wide-eyed bewilderment.

In truth, Klinkenborg isn’t bewildered at all. But bewilderment is his shtick. Klinkenborg’s columns are literary minstrel routines, starring the writer as an idiot savant—a bumpkin-seer who perceives the marvelous in the pedestrian and pivots to “epiphanies” that elude those of us who haven’t spent years watching sunlight dapple the snouts of woodchucks.

There is a huge audience for the pastoral and the quasi-profound, and the thing I have to keep in mind when I look at material across the Internet is that, more often than not, I’m NOT the target audience. If you can look at things honestly and realize, well, that’s not meant for me, you can find yourself giving a more honest appraisal of things. Klinkenborg doesn’t write for hipsters, cynical art chicks, emo-rock dudes, media critics, or the pseudo-intellectual elite. Klinkenborg is billed as an “editorial observer” so whatever he observes is what they print (and, perhaps they reject some of his columns or ideas? Who knows?). Someone has made a conscious effort to pick a writer who will broaden the appeal of the newspaper and bring in more readers—imagine that in this day and age.

Miss Jody Rosen misses the point when Klinkenborg ends his essay with:

Truly, we are the only species so discontented with our natural gaits, so ambitious to exceed a foot-pace. It all puts me in mind of Thomas Jefferson, on the subject of walking and horses and their deleterious effect on human exercise.

“I doubt,” he wrote, “whether we have not lost more than we have gained, by the use of this animal.”

I believe the correct phrase is, “when you put it THAT way…” but she reacts thusly:

But does he expect readers to buy that he’s perplexed by the concept of wheeled transport?

No. He expects readers to think about that for a moment, and then move on to something else.