I can only speak for myself, but for
myself, politics is draining. I don't mean
doing it, I mean even
watching it. Politics is a profession that is, by its very definition, transparently phony. It is a requirement of the very profession. There may be politicians out there that do what they do out of an earnest love of their country, and in fact I know it to be true... but it is impossible for a true patriot to
convey that love without coming off almost exactly the same as any caricature of a phony politician.
That is the fundamental problem with politicians. They need to be liked, and to be liked, you need to say the right things, and the right things really don't vary much at all, from city to city or year to year. I Love America, and therefore we should do what I say is the basic gist of it. You can substitute the flag or our Constitution or children or puppies for America, it'll have the same basic impact. The most rancid sack of opportunistic, festering crap can manage the basic format, and do it with a greasy smile convincing enough to satisfy anyone looking to be convinced.
Anything more than that, and you start getting into the tasks of government. I don't mean just among politicians -- I mean among citizens, too. It is an act of self-governance, and therefore democracy, to look behind the smile at the honest actions of the man or woman flashing it at you.
And it is damn hard to do. It is almost impossible to do, without collaborators willing to do it too. At one time, and still existing in narrow, dark places off the brightly lit and televised main streets, we called those collaborators the press. Knowledge -- truth, more accurately -- is the central requirement of a democracy. Without that, nothing else can follow. Control the truth, perceived, and you control the strings of government just as surely as by force.
We are in an era, currently, where control of the
truth is the battle. We are indeed in an era in which ideas -- little or big "i", makes no difference -- are politically irrelevant, and the direction of democracy is being steered by fouler winds. Story after story reminds us that
reporting the truth is considered a central act of unpatriotic sabotage, these days. In the government, scientists operate under governmentally censored conclusions. In the war, we are told that the news is much, much better than is being reported -- while the reporters are telling us they would
report the good news, if it was only safe enough to leave their hotels. In the Congress, we are told what criticisms we may level, and which ones we may not.
That is the battle. Conservative versus Liberal, I don't give a flying porcine fuck. But cut the strings of democracy, and you are, indeed, something worse than a politician, and something worse than wrong. Cut the strings of democracy, by cutting off access to the truth, and you are -- let's simply say it -- a traitor to the nation. It is time to reclaim the word. I am sick of the New Dictionary of words that mean the opposite of what they mean -- freedom, and compassionate, and Christian and patriot and traitor and more others than I can count. For myself, I intend to take back those words, to shape and polish each of them to a sharp and steely point, and to see if those flinging them at us for the past ten years still bleed.
Of course, that is contingent on whether or not I am permitted to have a voice at all. But for the moment I do, and for the moment I will use it.
A democracy requires a trinity of voices; the politicians, the press, and the people. You may brand them as law, truth, and spirit, if you like. None has ever had a Golden Age.
Politics itself may be unfixable. I say that with the weight of several thousand years of politics behind us, a history in which crooks and cronies have played every bit as important a part as idealists bleeding themselves on the battlements of nobler goals.
The criminals of government have always been as prevalent as the patriots, so forgive me if I do not think of our current crop of con men and hucksters as historically remarkable except by the narrowest of definitions. It may be quite true that a sizable chunk of the Republican Party leadership may be inching towards felon status under one ongoing case or another -- hell, take your pick, at this point -- but it is also true that politics and corruption go together like politics and money. In that politics was, is, and always will be a magnet for those that seek personal power, politics and corruption may well be simply inseparable.
So we continually remove the infected cells, and the rest remains. As long as we remove the infected cells, the body will survive. And those cells are being removed, even now -- too slowly, and with far too much sniffling and bitching by their supposedly patriotic(!) accomplices, but they are being removed. Throughout our own democracy, the press has largely played a doctor's role, in diagnosing and treating our nation's ills even when the corruption lies in the very law itself. It still functions, though slowly.
In these cases, however, it is not currently the press playing the major part of the role. The law itself still functions, too -- and we can thank the miracle of sheer, unabashed lust for power and cash for the politicians' penchant to run afoul of even that, and with aplomb. Apparently, there are indeed still things that are, in fact, illegal, even when a very rich or powerful man does them. Apparently, in some narrow subset of things, some animals are not more equal than others -- at least, not yet.
But we can certainly marvel at it, can't we? It did not take long for the conservatives to take over the farm, to rise up on two hind legs and parade around the yard, and to begin scrawling each two-word addendum to the party rules, each a blanket reversion, on the barn wall. It didn't take long at all.
The press. The media is, at this point, our enemy, more than conservatives, or Republicans, or criminals. It is worth teasing out what, exactly, has gone wrong, because it is apparent that they simply do not understand. Or, perhaps more accurately, they know full well, are enjoying themselves, are quite happy with the merging of politics and press, and do not care.
Individual reporters continue to do hero's work. Individual organizations, like the lost Knight Ridder. Reporting is not what we are talking about here. But there is a corruption at the top that emanates from those locales where politics and media are intertwined, irretrievably, sometimes in the same house, the same bed, or even the same brain. There is a corruption that emanates from the simple chafe between what is true, and what it is in a politician's interest to say, and where that corruption bubbles into a politician cum pundit, or a think tank fellow cum reporter, or a strategist cum analyst, it taints the very landscape of the press, in all directions, far from the actual comingled spill of lost ethics and hair gel.
I think it was punditry that killed the beast. The modern version, specifically, with Good Hair and soundbites and graphics more expensive than the contents of the pundit's head. Theme music commissioned to introduce each slapstick pie fight to be wedged into cage match interviews sandwiched between advertisements for life insurance policies and big box electronics stores and GOD HELP US ALL if there is a truth that cannot be uncovered in less time than it takes to browse the menu of a Chinese restaurant, or if The Sacred Box, holy and infallible, is lost to a moment of reflection.
Punditry is not "the press", it is an appendage. Reporting is "the press". Reporting is God's work; reporting is every bit as much a cornerstone of democracy as the trappings of government. Democracy cannot exist in a vacuum devoid of facts. There's nothing even in the slightest bit adventurous about that notion: it is a stone cold fact. It was known long before the founding of this particular democracy. You cannot have a government of the governed if the governed do not even know the array of issues before them, much less have any access to the true debate -- the legitimate factual debates -- behind those issues. They cannot vote -- it is a futile effort to make a distinction between two lies. It is nothing more than tossing a coin.
Where punditry is hopelessly corrupt -- where it cannot function, and must be, quite frankly, burned down en masse -- is the utter loss of the investigative reporter's core distinction; finding the truth. The two types of media figures, one ascendent and the other in decline, are diametrically opposed. They are anti-matter and matter, and where they collide, the stupidity of the Political Talking Head Movement is exposed as tragic farce.
You cannot have a press undevoted to the truth. And yet, in the new transcendence of pundits, especially the Beltway pundits that glide between politics and press like greased pigs, we have exactly that. Exactly that.
Related to the pundit rash and yet a distinct phenomenon unto itself, one of the other aspects of the current focus on "news as entertainment" by those that manage the big network and cable outlets is that news programming is looked at with the same eyes that imagined up Skating With Celebrities or Temptation Island or any of the various eat-a-live-rat-for-money reality spinoffs of other reality spinoffs. Dirt cheap, unscripted, and utterly devoid of any necessary talent on the part of the people not eating rats, humping the other guests, or trying not to get their arteries cut by a third-tier star contorting themselves into proper leg position. Reality itself is now an overbranded, win or lose sporting event, the rules designed to humiliate the participants as much as possible. Sounds like any of the "big name" cable punditry shows, doesn't it? Maybe even more than a little like the continuing columns of some of the more insipid setters of the discourse, in the New York Times or Washington Post?
In any event, I believe the Rita Cosby show to be the perfect demonstration of where our discourse is heading, as led by its self-pronounced prophets. Nearly every evening, we start with a potential clue or sighting in the case of a current Missing White Woman. If no actual clues are found, the most tenuous possible connections will be drawn, possibly with the help of a Dr. Phil or other celebrity hack. If even that is not available, we will call upon various people to opine on why no such clues are forthcoming.
The eventual day no such guests are bookable, we shall see Rita swallow a live rat.
Ratings may indeed skyrocket.
There it is, and here we are. We have politicians who are corrupt; pundits who have fundamental (monetary) conflicts of interest with the truth; media management figures who are required by market dynamics to deliver to target audiences of the stupid and gullible and terrified, ages whatever to whatever. All of them are unanimous that the problem, here, is me.
Hmm. So bully for me, I guess.
Garance's perhaps ill-thought-out ultimatum to the pseudonymous struck me, certainly, as a poor lesson to learn, of all the possible lessons of the last week, of all the lessons just begging to be learned, but it definitely made me think.
Who the hell am I? And who the hell are you?
And is there a place in politics, or even in the ancient and decidedly non-hermetic art of Having an Informed Opinion, for an occasional Who The Hell Is That? Or have we reached the point where even that art is every bit as stuffy, fossilized and archaic as politics itself? Where you don't get to have a voice except as dictated under the rules of the Already Franchised?
I cannot answer that question, but I think it is worth asking it. For myself, I think we are in a tiny revolution every single day, and I think it is a healthy thing. For myself, I think there is, in the world, conservation of outrage and conservation of truth, and truth blocked via one path will find its way out another. Outrage blocked by the dismissive indifference of the large voices will still seep out, in smaller, quieter voices. It cannot be blocked; it cannot be permanently oppressed.
Who gets to speak, in progressivism or conservatism or anything else? I suppose anyone with a voice worth listening to. To me, that is fairly definitively what populism is. I reject the notion that even our daily discourse must be tiered and managed by the enfranchised, especially since they have proven to have no particular interest in such things.
I realize, it may be branded a terribly shocking thing to think -- that the quality of an idea is independent of the voice proposing it. Monarchies have crumbled on such statements, however, while democracies thrive on them. It is not a notion with any implications that wake me, at night.
Something is going on here -- that much is undeniable, at this point.
A recent ruling has decided, much to the apparent chagrin of many, that citizens do have the right to assemble online as well as off, and even -- shock of shocks -- discuss and opine on politics there. A series of quite put out people are opining that, in the discovery of a conservative star whose career climb was accomplished by stealing the works of others, the real problem here is the qualifications, or not, of the people doing the discovering. As I write this, there is currently another mini-brouhaha developing over the notion that "real" press figures do not have to credit bloggers at all for stories bloggers first report, under a one of those caveats to journalistic ethics that just recently appeared, scrawled, on the side of the barn while the other animals were sleeping.
All three are, of course, different aspects of the same thing -- the perhaps momentary emergence of a populist voice not terribly interested in being preached to any longer, and the alarm of the preachers at the muttering in the pews.
Neither the politicians nor the press are functioning, and it is hardly surprising that the people are looking to fill the required voids themselves, after waiting too long, and being dismissed too often.
We are currently in an era where control of the truth is the battle, and where language itself is under attack. Story after story reminds us that reporting the truth is considered a central act of unpatriotic sabotage, these days, but the implications of that have yet to echo.
We are, as a country, obsessed with notions of leadership, and the stratification of even our discourse into the Enfranchised and the Not. That is unhealthy, but I am not entirely sure I am interested in fighting the notion. There is something to be said for separating the voices out, and attaching motive to each. I am not sure I would draw the lines where I am supposed to draw them, though. I am not sure that those figures, especially, that flit from media to government at parties and in think tanks have the value that they themselves assure us they have.
I don't know. I am healthily unimpressed with politics, and the media that guides these conversations seems to be quite interested in maintaining their status as guides, but without actually doing the work of leading anywhere. Taking criticism from either is, at best, uninteresting. To be honest, I think there is value, in the current environment, in being our own guides.
I think, in fact, that it is about time.