Whiff+AP

“Whiff”

Andrea Peters

Whiff is an exceptionally short article, stopping at just about two pages, but the amount of information and under current tones ,as well as variations of styles, packed in there is fairly prominent. The first pattern in this article is McPhee’s seemingly customary habit of starting his pieces “in media res”. Without really having any idea or explanation about which context the word “Whiff” is being used, I began reading about how William Shawn, The New Yorker’s editor ,was very particular in his choice of pieces. More specifically, Mcphee puts a lot of detail into explaining how Mr. Shawn disliked “futuristic” pieces because he thought the present was unpredictable enough to keep writers busy, without them having to start trying to figure the future out.

“Reacting to a proposal of mine (Mcphee’s voice), he once slightly modified his position, informing me that the future was actually the second-worst subject in the world, the worst being the Loch Ness monster.”

So after letting his readers know that “Whiff” stood for “fast dying ideas or concepts” about the future rather than dirty sock’ fumes; McPhee quickly launches in a description of the two articles projecting a more or less near future that he did get published. Using an exceptional sense of rhetoric and eloquence, he carries on to talk about this giant airship that was supposedly “a bulbous delta more than a thousand feet long and a thousand feet wide”, whose goal was to travel all around the world to irradiate world poverty and struggles in underdeveloped countries- by giving out food, bibles, and recruiting new members for the Christian church. Remarkably sarcastic, yet still writing in a “dead pan” sort of tone, McPhee points out that for thirty years, the prototype had been hidden under a large black cloth in a hangar in New Jersey, waiting to pass his flight tests and undergo further “development”.

Still laughing, I read on to notice that McPhee changes his diction again by using technical words to describe this second invention in an attempt to seem credible and naively fascinated, but his sarcasm is so evident that I sped through the lines to see what happened to this thing.

Described as a “floating nuclear power plant that would produce twenty-three hundred megawatts electricity and was meant to float 2.8 miles off the New Jersey coast near Atlantic City,” the device was given the boot after the accident at Three Mile Island in the next year, which apparently “reduced toward zero the appeal of floating fission”. Just before hitting what I thought was the last bit of humour, I had to stop to look up what had happened at Three Mile Island, and realized that by comparing the gravity of the incident that had occurred in 1979 (in sum- the biggest accident in the history of the American commercial nuclear power generating industry!), McPhee was inviting his readers to poke fun at the expense of the Public Service Electric & Gas company, who took _three years_ to decide this massive floating nuclear plant was not a good idea :p

A change of style occurs in the “third chunk” of McPhee’s article, and he brings the reader back to the “present”, which at the time of this article was in 2003, and goes on to make a mention of the Tea Room he had described in an article in November, and explains how the United States Golf Association had bought the tea room thinking they would build a 7th floor to the building to expand their museum, but they were unaware that museums in NY are subject to “the oversight of the New York Board of Regents and are required to have boards of trustees independent of parent organizations, they decided they wanted to call their own shots and did not in fact have the budget to make the renovations needed to make the world-class facility they thought appropriate, so “Tea Room for sale”.

In organizing his article like in these three main parts, the readers are set up to read a very funny conclusion, and McPhee complies to this marvellously, adding a nonchalant and extremely sarcastic social criticism that was just great. Making sort of a “loop”, McPhee goes back to talking about how with three different predictions of the future, and three different whiffs, how he was beginning to see Mr. Shawn’s point about it, and says that it had inspired him to complete as soon as he could, “certainly in this autumn of 2003- a detailed description, in the future definite, of the second Administration of George W. Bush”.....HA!

“Neat” is what comes to mind when I think about this article. It’s as if every little detail was given for a reason, and McPhee knew just what word to use in his descriptions. He's almost as detailed as in the other pieces I have read by him, but this time no loose ends are left untied, and it's really funny!