Letters to the Editor
William Timberman
Published Letters: 3298 Editor's Choice: 7
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A context for letting them eat cake
[Read the article: The Politico: Gossip rag masquerading as news organization?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Versailles is an excellent metaphor, so is Hollywood. I loved the description of Washington as Hollywood for ugly people that I heard long ago; I no longer remember where.
It seems to me that all three places, and the gossip culture which drives (drove) them, owe their character to the fact that in all of them only a few people actually make decisions about anything, yet thousands depend on the crumbs from their table. (Hollywood may be a special case. In Tinseltown, I'm not convinced that any of the hangars-on know who the decision makers actually are, which makes the gossip even more hysterical. Washington under the Republicans may approach this state, but so far hasn't reached it, not as far as I can tell, anyway.)
When you have a real town, the people in it have projects of their own; they could care less, in most cases, what goes on in the house on the hill, or what the local developer is up to, unless he's bribed the city council to let him build a mall or a pig farm next door to them.
The media is just an expression of the gossip culture in its home cities, which is probably why most people instinctively hate it. This hatred has been caricatured as public antipathy to ideologically biased reporting; I think it's more accurately described as antipathy toward blather which seems to have nothing to do with their actual experience. I also think that pundits make a mistake when they act as though what they say is accepted at face value. People may have endured it so far, but far fewer of them embrace it quite as uncritically as we've been led to believe.
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Not a goat
[Read the article: Fred Hiatt and Iraq -- Together Forever]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Paul, I think it more likely that in a moment of weakness, he recalled another picture -- a picture of that helicopter hovering over an embassy roof, ladder dangling, except that this time there was a head shot of his own sweet self somewhere down in the lower right-hand corner.
I imagine that he shook himself all over, and when his vision cleared, went back to the keyboard determined never, ever to let himself be unmanned like that ever again.
I do love to watch them alternately squirm and pontificate. I do. Mea culpa.
Daleyrocks, this is your fate too. Enjoy the fruits of your labor, that's my curse on you and yours. Heh....
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Sadly, we are what we aren't
[Read the article: Fred Hiatt and Iraq -- Together Forever]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I think how many commenters, myself among them, have said here that they've turned off their television sets and found their lives returned to them; a sudden slowing that allows the mind to come to rest in the body again.
I think of the portrait of Mr. Taranto that Glenn included in one of his posts a while back, which had the same wrenching effect. It wasn't so much that Taranto looks the way he looks. He doesn't, in fact, look any worse or any better than many of us white-boy lumps between the age of forty and our first bypass operation. The sudden sense of deceleration comes only when you compare what he looks like with what he writes, and you suddenly realize that he's not the only one who's gone to sleep in that obvious disparity.
The problem is that we all outsmart ourselves. The talking point works because we believe ourselves to be smarter than the talking point, yet the moment we set out to prove how much smarter we are, the talking point replaces a reality which has come to seem too organic, too ambiguous, too sequential, and above all, too damned slow.
I believe in the benefits of thinking, in particular of analytic thinking, but I despise both cynicism and irony, the kind of consciousness which allows us to think that because we can see behind the curtain, even make elaborate jokes about what's back there, that nothing else is required of us. Are we really so different from that widely-quoted administration numbnuts who asserted that, you know, he and his mentally-buffed colleagues make reality while we follow along in their wake dithering about where they're taking us?
The disembodied intellect is much ado about very little, however useful the purveyors of 24/7/365 television find it in the futherance of their own agendas. Weariness, it turns out, is the first step in recovering your self-respect. The final step is to take up clownsense's hoe. Give the braying donkeys of the pundit class a smack with it first, if you must, but for the gods' sake, use it as it was intended afterwards. You -- we -- will be a lot better for it.