Hunter has a beautiful lamentation currently on the front page, which draws tighter the lines between the current Paris Hilton spectacle and that of Fred Thompson, whom members of the other party in their desperation seem ready to nominate, in earnest, to contend for them for the highest office in the land. Go and read it.
There is a more direct path towards presidential mediocrity than a mere Fred Thompson, and one that will finally arrive at the goal we have been striving for since long before the days of Mencken. The perfect nexus of reality TV, of entirely fictionalized earnestness, of slavish, spittle-flecked reporting and vapidity practiced as deadly art. The simpleness is staggering in its simple simplicity.
We should, in deference to the enforced vapidity of the press, simply abandon all hope of anything better, and elect Paris Hilton as our president.
Indeed, why not? And I'm not saying that this or some similar malice couldn't happen and smash the Republic into glittering shards; simply consider the current affliction of the office. I would point out, however, that our people are far better than we may occasionally give ourselves credit for, and that the howling vapidity of the media is a distorted mirror, at best, of who we are.
Make no mistake, we live in dark times. A simple enumeration fails to do justice to the sheer extent and depth of crises inflicted on us, with a smile and soundbite, by our current government. There is that war that we now call simply the war; the war we were told would be waged, fittingly enough, on television, with all the sacrifice of feeding a quarter into a videogame arcade in long-vanished shopping malls.
And to everlasting shame and dishonor, many Americans bought the glossy package whole and entire. We bought far more than that, even; a hideously misnamed law, the Patriot Act, that shredded our freedoms, the ones that predate the Republic itself; we bought Justices on our highest Court dedicated to pouring lighter fluid on the fabric of our laws; we bought further laws, further appointments, a new outrage every day, people tortured in our name, and so on and so forth in one long parade of national shame. We're still marching, a third of us on a bad day, in that parade.
And it's entirely plausible to think that we're so caught up in, asphyxiated by, Panem et Circenses that we're already treading down the same dismal, hard road trod by Rome. The great Roman buildings that house our government, grand and white and marble on their slave-carved foundations, may yet, no, will witness much further squalor.
But here's the thing: we know about that squalor. We decry it, every day, millions of us. For a very long time, we've been blissfully secure in the belief, mistaken as it turned out, that our government didn't need our attentions, working along well enough as it seemingly did. Many still do; but many, critically many, do not. That's the only reason why, despite this:
...I still have hope for this country. It's not the easiest thing, on occasion, to distinguish that hope from anger, anger over how low this great and flawed country has fallen, has allowed itself to fall, to where we are today. There are days when I read my local newspaper, The New York Times, and fling the blasted thing into a corner. There are days when I'm down here:
...and yes, that hole in the sky is exactly where you think it is, that I want to scream my rage from the rooftops. How could all of this have happened in my country? To my country?
How could so many of us have let it happen?
And then I turn on my teevee and learn more about the sobbing Paris Hilton, sent, ye merciful Gods, to prison, like any number of drunk drivers, every day, from sea to shining sea. It is assumed by members of the fourth estate, clothed as they are in special protections and privileges for my benefit and yours, that this trifling matter is of interest to me and to you. This as the war goes on unabated and unchecked, as our government commits crime after crime with a smiling face and nary a second thought. It's enough to give a reasonable person fits.
And yet. Millions of us are angry, angry at the State of the Nation. Millions more have gotten off our couches and into the streets, and it hasn't stopped there. We've elected ourselves a new Congress, and been sadly disappointed, sometimes, and exhilarated, occasionally. We've created for ourselves an entirely new media infrastructure - you're reading it right now, in fact. Every day, I suppose, somewhere in this vast nation, another person decides, many people decide, to do something about our national shame. We've seen it happen, and I'm lucky enough, privileged enough, to know some of the people willing to go out there and change things. And in that, there is hope, hope for all of us. We can still feel shame. That's our redemption.
Let the old media babble about Paris Hilton. Let Fred Thompson present himself as an anchor to a republican party cast adrift on the storms of its own vast and monumental failure; anchors hold, sometimes, they sink. We're at the beginning, I think, of something new in America, and this country, vast and glorious and scarred and flawed, has in itself the power to heal even the bleeding wounds recently inflicted on it.
We are so much better than this. Fuck Paris Hilton. And fuck Fred Thompson.