Remember how, in the first couple of weeks after September 11, every media outlet that didn't have actual, real news to report (like who the hijackers were or what happened on the planes or whatever) would run these little sidebar editorials about the death of irony? You know, how this horrible thing had happened on American soil and it shocked us all out of our hard shells, exposing the soft underbellies of our latent sincerity? Mostly what I thought when I read those articles was, alternately, "Ha!" (since Sars, who watched the Towers come down, was making with the gallows humour that night), or "Yikes, I hope not!" since if the entire nation decided it'd had enough of talking shit about celebrities and bad TV shows, I'd be out of a job. When The Daily Show came back and started its regular installments of "America Freaks Out," my belief in irony's resiliency was restored.

The December 2001 issue of Esquire has been the first media product I've consumed since September 11 in which I could detect a tone more earnest and sincere than the norm, and consider the result to be an improvement. To put it more succinctly, this issue of Esquire lacks all the glib, balding smuggery that has characterized it for the past several years, and the result is an issue that, practically from cover to cover, is uniformly excellent.

(Regular readers of this space will note that I am not usually a fan of men's magazines, Esquire in particular. So I had to ask myself as I eagerly devoured this issue -- and without any of my usual snorts of contempt or "oh please" notations in the margins -- did the magazine change, or did I? I'm pretty sure it's the magazine.)

The reason this issue is so good -- or that I, as a person presumably outside the publication's target demographic, like it so much -- is that it gives the man/woman thing a rest, for once. A typical men's magazine feature is something like "91 Things A Woman Can't Ask A Man To Give Up" (from the September 2001 issue of GQ), but the December 2001 offers "162 Reasons It's Good to Be an American" instead. David Granger prepares us for it in his editor's letter: "Here's the thing: Expressions of love for the fruits of liberty always risk spilling over into the realm of unthinking, uncritical, saccharine self-congratulation. Still." That "Still" says it all -- like, "It could be sappy and lame, and it's not the kind of thing we would have ever commissioned six months ago, but here it is anyway." "91 Things A Woman Can't Ask A Man To Give Up" made me, as the "they" the story was mocking, feel sorry for the "we" the author understood as his audience -- sad that men could be so scared of women that one would actually make such a defiant, defensive list. But "162 Reasons It's Good to Be an American" -- even though I am not among the "we" for whom the list is presumably written -- made me proud to be among America's neighbours, and a lover of Americans and things American. On the list were several things I would have included if I'd drafted it -- Jon Stewart, TiVo, Tenacious D, Cartman. It reminded me of things I loved when I lived in Los Angeles (like 24-hour supermarkets and drive-thrus and cable channels) and especially of things that I love about New York and that I've been thinking about a lot lately:

156. The carousel in Central Park.
157. The Staten Island Ferry.
158. Times Square and Broadway.
159. A day game at the Stadium, too.
160. Subway exhalations. Sirens two streets over.
161. And skyscrapers, too.
162. Skyscrapers.

I recently made email contact again with a childhood friend of mine from Regina, who asked how I like living in Toronto, and whether I'd ever want to live anywhere else; I told her I did love Toronto, but that if we ever won the lottery or something, Glark and I would probably move to New York. She'd never been there, but she was surprised that, in light of recent events, I would still want to live there; I tried to explain by saying, "New York...okay, I just saw K-PAX, which was a pretty shitty movie, but it was packed with more adoring, reverent shots of New York than I think I've ever seen, and I was struck all over again how beautiful New York is. It's not just the architecture or the skyline or whatever people usually amorphously call the 'energy' or the people or anything you can put your finger on. I just love New York."

But this isn't about me. My point is, it reminded me of that New York feeling that I sometimes get when I'm there. It was a good list.

And, despite David Granger's warning, there are glimmers of irony and criticism that save the issue from being...well, Life or The Saturday Evening Post or some such. Tom Carson's TV column covers the coverage, comparing the networks' news programming from September 11th forward. Amid the usual "Dan Rather freaked out, Peter Jennings made such a production out of appearing in shirtsleeves, Tom Brokaw is a pompous jackhole" are some insightful observations: "What TV can do, though -- and does do, if only by pure reflex -- is give chaotic happenings a semblance of manageability just by capably organizing its own coverage. How cataclysmic can a disaster be if it's got a logo?" That was something I'd seen discussed in various places on the internet, as we wondered how the networks all seemed to go through the stages of grief from "America Under Attack" to "America's New War" and finally on to the more aggressive "America Strikes Back." This also struck a chord with me, and will probably sound familiar to readers of this site as well:

Can you picture any network now greenlighting a series like Fear Factor, with its assumption of an audience so sated with ease that it craved concocted dangers? That we'd called this stuff "reality" TV just seems to lay bare the unreality of our situation before the attack. I don't mean that as a condemnation, though, unlike the moralizers...saying "I told you so" when they hadn't...who took pleasure in berating us for our belatedly exposed frivolity, as if watching Survivor and obsessing on J.Lo was what gave Osama bin Laden his opening. Delighting in froth doesn't prove how silly we were but how safe we felt, and I wouldn't blame anyone who's already feeling nostalgic for it. If our sense of security turned out to be false, well, they all do eventually.

The centerpiece of the issue is the interview with Ocean's 11 stars (and the issue's cover boy and girl) George Clooney and Julia Roberts. And dammit, I couldn't even be the tiniest bit cynical about them, either. I mean, in my rational mind, I know it's quite possible -- probable, even -- that Julia and George aren't really as charming and funny and relaxed and at ease with each other as they seem to be in the story. I know that they are both (a) actors (and thus good at pretending), and (b) movie stars (and thus experienced at manipulating the press). Because they are such huge movie stars, I do feel like I should resist being manipulated right along with the press. But I can't do it. I've been soaking in this issue like it's misanthrope tenderizer, and by the time Clooney gets around to talking about his motorcycle trip through Italy with "the boys," all I can think is, "Me too!"

The format of the story is a bit precious: Mike Sager, the ostensible author talks to both Roberts and Clooney over lunch and then takes off for an hour, leaving them with the tape recorder; the story is primarily made up of the highlights of the transcript of their conversation. But Clooney and Roberts do seem to be friends, or at least friendly (and why shouldn't they be? He's rakish and ribald; she's coltish and coy...they're a perfect match), and freed from the usual cookie-cutter celebrity profile bullshit ("Why did you and Ben break up? What's really going on between you and Mark Wahlberg?"), they do talk a bit more frankly than one usually sees -- about whether Clooney would like to direct Roberts, about people they'd like to work with (and veiled references to people they wouldn't), about being an organ donor, and, naturally, about what it's like to be a famous movie star. Roberts, as she usually does on Letterman and such, doesn't seem to have any problem with the fans, but has no love for the press (she complains, rather unbecomingly, of "the transparent meanness of" the rumours about her), but Clooney, miraculously, still comes across as a basically decent, normal, down-to-earth guy (despite his elevated position in the industry and his, let's face it, criminally good looks that are, damn him, only improving with age), who has an appreciation for how lucky he is. With that in mind, you can just ignore all the fake, reflexive flirting between the two subjects, and boil the entire interview down to this exchange:

G: Today, there are lots of actresses. But you -- you're bigger than the male stars. And that hasn't been around for a while. It's been a male-driven industry for a long time. So it's really interesting to watch. We always talk about you -- you know, you and I have talked about it before -- how there aren't real movie stars anymore, how they don't really exist anymore, how there aren't any Paul Newmans anymore. There are a couple now. There's you and Tom and a few others who are really just bigger than life. People have to take their shots at you because you're sitting on top.

J: Which I understand, and I don't really mind. But I also think this whole movie-star thing -- to be called a movie star in the forties was, like, beautiful and glamorous.

G: It's not a bad thing now.

George Clooney seems too good to be true, so he probably is. But this issue of Esquire has softened me up so much with its sincerity and hopefulness and general...excellent quality -- I mean, even the fiction story was great! I even read the SPORTS column, for crying out loud! -- that I can say it, but I don't really believe it.