I flashed on George Trow’s exit from The New Yorker when I scrolled through Roseanne Barr’s tweets for Trump. (“If you support HRC who stayed married to a rapist, funded ISIS, robbed starving Haitian children, you deserve xtreme horrors of her globalism”) Back in the day, when Roseanne was a phenomenon not a has-been, Trow resigned in protest from The New Yorker after celeb-mongering Tina Brown had Barr guest-edit an issue of the magazine. At the time, Trow’s gesture seemed locked into a class-bound, liberal artsy terrarium. And there’s a risk of making too much of his elite dudgeon. (I’m not putting him on a pedestal with Tommie Smith and John Carlos!) Looking back, though, Trow’s protest hints at how he was always alive to sketchy alliances that threatened to pollute the American air. As per John Irving:
More than [Trow’s] words, it is his face I remember from Exeter. As I was a slow and struggling student, I used to feel that there was something arrogant or smug in George’s smile; I occasionally felt that George Trow was smirking at me. Now I realize that he was simply more alert and more aware than I was. What I mistook for smirking was instead something prescient in his smile; it was as if the unfathomable powers of precognition were already alive within him.
The satiric movie scenario posted below provides further confirmation of George Trow’s power of precognition.