DOWD: Truth obligations are bigger than Bambi

I started speaking truth to power early.

And my older brothers didn’t like it.

They told me that archness in a 10-year-old was not welcome.

I concocted a plan to prove how boring life would be if you were just nice all the time, how much more bracing it is to have sweetness laced with tartness.

I told them I would be very, very nice until they asked me to stop, certain that they’d get sick of saccharine and syrupy in short order.

Except they didn’t. They liked it.

After a week, I’d overdosed on sugar myself and gave up, going back to my old ways of being angelic or devilish, depending on the provocation.

Later, when I fell in love with Jonathan Swift, I felt gratified that I’d kept sardonic, that excellent arrow against oppressors, in the quiver.

So naturally, I’m intrigued with the literary donnybrook over niceness raging on the Internet, a place better known for nastiness.

It flared in November when Isaac Fitzgerald, the first book editor of BuzzFeed, gave an interview to Poynter. Looking for clicks, BuzzFeed, Upworthy and various new websites try to capitalize on the “awesome” rather than the awful.

Fitzgerald, a former biker-bar employee, co-owner of the online site The Rumpus and director of publicity at David Eggers’ San Francisco-based literary journal and publishing house, McSweeney’s, said he was negative on negative reviews.

“Why waste breath talking smack about something?” he said. “You see it in so many old media-type places, the scathing takedown rip.”

Old media? Has this guy ever browsed with his browser?

Fitzgerald said he would follow the “Bambi Rule” espoused by Thumper: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.”

In a wonderful essay on Gawker last month, Tom Scocca excoriated the pompous and often vapid niceness brigade. Snark can be overdone, he wrote, but it is better than smarm, which “is never a force for good. A civilization that speaks in smarm is a civilization that has lost its ability to talk about purposes at all. It is a civilization that says, ‘Don’t Be Evil,’ rather than making sure it does not do evil.”

The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell tried to riposte in a post called “Being Nice Isn’t Really So Awful,” but wandered into a silly argument about satire propping up, rather than subverting, the privileged and the status quo.

Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, notes that we label food if we believe it has deleterious consequences and critics are perfectly within their rights to label books in the same way.

“If one feels that a value or a belief or a form that one cherishes has been traduced, one should rise to its defense,” he told me. “In intellectual and literary life, where the stakes may be quite high, manners must never be the primary consideration. People who advance controversial notions should be prepared for controversy. Questions of truth, meaning, goodness, justice and beauty are bigger than Bambi. I never thought I’d utter a sentence like this, but I stand with Gawker against BuzzFeed.”

Pretending that false and ugly things don’t exist is a bit delusional. Yet such prettifying is consistent with a culture dominated by an Internet concerned mainly with marketing techniques.

Not to review books negatively is in essence to subsume book reviewing into advertising, public relations and promotion.

All quarrels are not petty. Sometimes quarrels are about big things, and it’s an actual privilege to take a side in them.•

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Dowd is a New York Times columnist. Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.