Letters to the Editor

• Why?

  [Read the article: Did David Broder "prop up" the Bush presidency?]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  A major question that frequently arose at Unclaimed Territory in both posts and comments was: Why are so many establishment figures in American journalism so obsequious toward Bush?

  Broder is an old hand, not a TV station. He's got a secure position and shouldn't fear being called a traitor. He's got friends in the administration and access to it that he depends on, but administrations change at least every 8 years---even if they don't change much---and they also depend on him. None of the offered excuses should make him a devout Bushlicker. None of these accounts for the uniformity of Beltway punditry.

  Glenn cites the fact that all of Washington's players are long friends who use one another as foils and echo chambers as they jockey for position at Court. But why did this insular clique develop and then turn virulent? Why did it turn inward, and against what? How did it go from establishment to appendage? I think Beltway punditry became useless long ago and only recent events have left it isolated and adrift. It always protected and maintained itself, but it used to be able to take risks.

  Many have documented the general rise of a culture of cynicism: a distrust in facts and numbers (they can be cooked and manipulated) and a distrust in politics (it's all dishonest gridlocking and popularity contests). Conspiracy theories have become mainstream, even nutty ones, and cops are dirty (thanks, Hollywood). Voting is down.

  And politics are an ugly thing best kept behind a curtain. It doesn't help that the major debates of past decades have been reported as unhealed wounds---Vietnam, abortion, immigration, gridlock, environmentalism---that make most people sick just to think of. Citizens have supposedly already made up their minds and the media fear to confront that.

  Citizens are at best impatient with debate, to the extent that many would be happy to see the plug pulled on Congress. (Many people I knew were so upset by the 2000 near-constitutional crisis that they just wanted it ended, they didn't care how.) Meanwhile, trust in occasionally charismatic figures like the president continues to rise: our only hope as the only functioning branch of the federal government.

  Thus, citizens only trust those institutions they see as functioning well enough to be able to save them from the nonfunctional ones---or at least to distract them. Business culture, financial success, executive power, Walmart, the Internet, you name it---all of these not only play the medieval role of the King as the only hope and earthly salvation of the people who are oppressed by the wicked barons, but also play into the conservative myth. If these fail us, then we are truly on our own, and that is too terrifying to contemplate. Meanwhile, we lose our health care unless we're rich, the Feds can't muster a response to a hurricane, and PennDOT chokes on a little snowstorm. Again, all the factors Glenn has discussed play a role, along with the right wing's encouragement of businessthink/speak and the myth that we are better off without not just corrupt government but any government at all.

  So where does that leave the gray eminences of political journalism? If they keep digging into politics, they become pornographers because, at a certain rarified level, politics are either boring or obscene. Nobody wants to hear about it unless it's both spicy and tastefully packaged to overcome the misgivings of advertisers. (Note---War is not politics. War is "serious." Politics are "frivolous.") True dissent is unpleasant, because the truth is too horrible to contemplate. Since 9/11, it has become increasingly plain that the American empire is not benevolent but a festering sore on our planet and on our species, and there is no cure. How do you report that?

  By 2000, our republic was already moribund and the political functions of the national brain were paralyzed or necrotic. The Constitution was not invoked so as not to frighten the children. When 9/11 came, we responded not with factual historical analysis, introspection, honest democratic debate, and legislative deliberation but with Bibles and crusades and appeals to authoritarianism and even more consumerism. Only the ancient foreign policy consensus that American might makes American right has survived from decades past, now playing the peculiar role of both destroyer and savior. (Paraphrasing Homer Simpson regarding another addiction, oil is the cause of and the solution to all of America's foreign policy problems. Well, that and Israel and the military-industrial complex.)

  Back to Broder. Iraq has slapped us out of the 9/11 revenge-lust and brought all these preexisting conditions into stark relief. If real political debate is too dangerous to report on, its repercussions too awful to contemplate, and its discourse too contaminating to join, what does a "serious" reporter do with an open conspiracy to defraud the country, dismantle the republic, rob it blind, and commit mass racial murder? After all, an even moderately thorough and professional investigation into any one of a number of alleged crimes would force Congress to terminate Bush's presidency with extreme prejudice if all the details became widely known among the public. The media are not equipped to handle it.

  So one denies it or reports it from a disengaged distance. One "learns to love the bomb," or at least get on friendly terms with it. "Some believe" the world will end with fire, and "some believe" it will end with ice. One dares not speculate which.

  Even here in this column, as at Unclaimed Territory, one can no more seriously demand that Bush and Cheney be tried and hanged as traitors than we can propose that the Pope be homosexually gang-raped. Someone will complain that this goes too far, that even impeachment is unthinkable. But American political discourse has already narrowed its scope to the point of See Spot Run. We are paralyzed with fear of the knowledge of extinction and our delicate balancing act on a pile of corpses. One does not rock a sinking boat. One does not dance at the edge of a volcano.

  Permalink Saturday, February 17, 2007 10:24 AM