After reading David Sirota's powerful populist piece, I realized that he must have transferred some of that righteous anger to me. As I kept thinking about insider journalists defiantly clinging to their turf I was reminded of the following incident in my past which I hope is interesting enough for a diary:
Barely old enough to hold a real job, a job not involving babies and sitting, I worked for a huge corporation after school and weekends. The supervisor, a young guy, and the only guy in the office, who was supervisor by virtue of being slightly older than us high schoolers, and then of course because he was a guy, loved to flirt with the cute girls - and there were only girls - who took the stacks of files from him and spread out in the massive room to put them away.
He really has nothing to do with the story. The story is not about anti-feminism but other cultural attitudes of the late 60s, in the midst of the civil rights struggle. At some point during my two-year tenure, a girl who had just moved to the community got a job in my office. She was from Florida, and while I have long forgotten her first name, her last name was Goodman, a name which could have, might have, maybe was, sounded, but she assured us wasn't, Jewish.
In fact, when someone in this largely Jewish community asked her whether she was Jewish, she laughed lightly, not quite managing to conceal her disdain. "Oh no," she cooed, "but that happened a lot to my family in Florida. People would assume we were Jewish, and we'd get all sorts of letters and phone calls asking us to contribute to causes and such."
I stared at her and said nothing. Shortly following this exchange, and in a context I can't recall, someone asked her about Blacks in Florida. How they were treated, how they behaved. Language which during that transformational era incited no scorn or alarm at least among an exclusively white, half Jewish and half Catholic work force. "Oh," she shrugged in the same dismissive tone, " they know their place down there."
There was some follow-up discussion about how "down there" differed from "up here" in the north which I don't remember. I don't want to remember, and haven't for many years. But it seems to me this conversation is an apt analogy to a current societal movement - outsiders "crashing the gates.''
David Sirota noted it in his diary describing "Dean" David Broder's column dismissing "angry, profane lefties" as the moral equivalent to the truly obscene rightwingers war-mongering, fighting mightily for a Christian nation, threatening liberal Supreme Court justices, and otherwise scheming to maintain power with no tactics too immoral to be off limits. Broder is a hopeless case, and when he asserts his "Midwestern" credentials not only as a defense against accusations of elitism but as an excuse to be suspicious of "aloof eggheads" like Gore and Kerry, he only reveals that he actually feels protected by his insider status. Broder is so impervious to what's occurring just beyond his beltway reach that for all the information about blogs and bloggers that must puncture his balloon of insulation he simply doesn't know enough to feel threatened by the burgeoning reconfiguration of politics and journalism. And, as David Sirota has characterized it, though Broder is in the midst of a mental breakdown, he has no idea that he is, that sooner rather than later the old rules will no longer apply.
The movement is passing him by. To this day Broder can describe the Gores and the Kerrys as aristocratic candidates unappealing to common-sense-oriented Midwesterners and others while disconnecting himself from the fact that as a member of the traditional press corps, it is he who is the aristocrat. It is Broder who presumes exemption from the impact of the current administration, who chuckles among his peers on Meet the Press as if the issue under consideration were of no consequence, who assumes that by swatting at the lefties and righties attempting to intrude on his hard-earned exclusive rights to shape debates he can practically will them away. And it is Broder who will be caught off guard and howl in dismay when the truth of the matter can no longer be denied as those gates to the castles and palaces crash open.
It was so much easier when kings were allowed to be kings, when Broder was Your Majesty, and the unwashed masses knew their place.