Obama Orange Juice Watch... Day Whatever
by Hunter
Mon Apr 14, 2008 at 07:42:00 AM PDT
It is easy to make fun of the media's obsession with petty trivialities. Really easy. As in, it writes itself. But I suppose at a deeper level we should take it seriously; the most pervasive characteristic of our political discourse, after all, is that it is pervasively stupid. Tthat, certainly, is something to get angry over.
The problem is that it is difficult to truly get angry over, anymore, because it is too predictable; the joke has been played too many times, and increasingly badly with each telling. I can understand why a presidential candidate doing badly at bowling would be a fun, two-minute diversion from weightier matters. And I can understand why a presidential candidate speaking imprecisely about a difficult political issue would become political news. The orange juice thing, where we're trying to pin an "elitist" label on someone because they asked for orange juice instead of coffee?
No. That was the point where the wires crossed, and shorted. There is a point in which a triviality becomes less than trivial, less than banal, and becomes, to use the most technical term for it, deeply and abrasively stupid. There is no spin possible that turns "asking for orange juice" into an issue of elitism or snobbery: there is, in an infinite sea of alternate realities, not one in which asking for orange juice demonstrates an important negative aspect of character. It is stupid. It is aggressively stupid; it is soul-burrowingly stupid; it is mind-fuckingly stupid. It is the kind of stupid that seeps into the rug so that the entire building stinks of stupid for the next ten years whenever the air conditioning comes on. It is the kind of stupid that wounds all those who come into contact with it. It is a stupid that has been rendered physical: it leaves a scar.
Jon Stewart, in his now famous Crossfire appearance, told the hosts of the then already long-since-decayed show that they were hurting America. It was not brilliant, or inspired; it was simply the truth, plainly spoken, which is the job our designated jesters have been tasked with for hundreds of years. For American political coverage, politics has become meta-sport: the actual results of governance matter not a goddamn ounce, only the arguments matter. Crossfire was not a politically serious show; it was reality television for the soulless walking dead of politics, those paid creatures that exist solely to promote Their Spin on Their Issue. There is no plot; there is no character development. There is never any evidence that, when later presented, results in one side or the other admitting error. It is a high school debate club gone tired and sour and aged. And the destruction of Crossfire did nothing to solve the problem, because every droning guest found ready refuge on a dozen other identical programs. America has been reduced to two disembodied heads, shouting at each other, while a steady stream of graphics drifts across the screen on all sides, the electronic equivalent of jingling keys for a toddler.
There is a profound lesson to be taken from Orangejuicegate, or Bowlinggate, or Bittergate, and that lesson is that the guardians of our discourse are, at heart, idiots. There is no other explanation or redemption. Anyone attempting to draw out character definition from a glass of orange juice is, at heart, someone who has entirely run out of insightful things to say. Anyone attempting to make the case that a bowling score represents the measure of a man deserves to be basted, roasted, and served to whatever imbecile of a president does manage to rise to the top of their addled internal scoresheet.
At the same time, I think the appropriate response to this is not to get too angry and pretend to seriously rebut any of this, but to simply recognize it as a function of a deeply embarrassing and inept media environment, and, well... make fun of them. Repeatedly. That is what passes for analysis, as the world decays around us?
Because it should be nothing short of hilarious that, just as usual, orange juice and bowling are stories that titillate our "experts", but torture approved at the highest levels of government is not. If only the government response to Katrina demonstrated half as much as the clothing a candidate wears to an event; now that would be something. If only the measure of our current president was taken a tenth as carefully as that of our current candidates; but no, that would be unpatriotic.
All of this demonstrates, though, exactly how the "political experts" of cable television are going to play the Obama vs. McCain fight, and it's going to be Bush-Gore, Bush-Kerry all over again. The underlying lesson: they can't help it. They're goddamn insane, or perhaps just compulsive to the point of delusion, and that is as plain as it can be put.
So perhaps we should give up, and simply start "Orange Juice Watch", a daily feature dedicated to finding out whether Obama has yet been doomed by his desire, on one fine campaign day, for juice instead of coffee. We could highlight the most absurd media statements about the scandalous Bittergate, and attempt to delve into the psyche of all those that consider the parsing of those words to be of far greater importance than, say, parsing the words of a candidate who can't seem to get the warring parties in Iraq straight in his own mind, yet is convinced the war is going swimmingly anyway.
It is difficult, after all, to do anything but just plain laugh at the political "experts" shoved in front of us, experts so incompetent and up their own esteemed asses, at this point, that they really can't report on anything more substantial than orange juice stories. They can't do it -- it is not a matter of secret bias, they are just not capable. The top "pundits" of cable television weren't hired for their smarts on the hard issues, they were hired to make ridiculous, off-the-cuff pronouncements on the petty trivialities of the day. They know no more about the concerns of small town Americans than they know about roping cattle or performing a colonoscopy, and yet they will sit on television, in suits costing more than some of the used cars the rest of us drive, and claim expertise on all three.
I have often thought that the way to discredit a truly abominable pundit is to steal their undeserved gravitas from them -- make them laughingstocks. But honestly, it is something they can only do to themselves, and each network seems utterly insistent on carving away their own significance one ridiculous pseudo-story at a time.
Someday, I earnestly hope our Democratic strategists to come to terms with the notion that these elections are no longer just battles against Republicans. They are battles against the several dozen ridiculous nuts of the media world who run our democratic discourse like it was their own personal model train set. I see absolutely no strategists that seem to get that -- if Democrats manage to attack their opponents with more gusto, this time around, I still don't see them managing to fight the media folks.
And that is a shame, because truly -- the coverage of the race is rapidly threatening to discredit itself. There is biased, then there is stupid. And then there is orange juice.
- ::