For some reason known perhaps only to Nancy Pelosi(’s speechwriter), at 4:06 in this video, Pelosi uses Carl Sandburg’s famous image of “little cat feet” to describe how the gigantic, once-in-a-century financial crisis came upon us. You figure it out.
The Fog
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
I found this interview on TV this afternoon, and was floored. It’s as if this man, Andrew Bacevich, understands everything I have sensed about the meaning of America, the problems in our politics, the reasons why our pre-emptive war doctrine is wrong at its core, but can elicit it better than I could ever imagine.
I encourage everyone to watch this interview in full; watch the first five minutes at least and see if you like it. The second half can be found on PBS’ website here. I recently reached my credit card’s promised land, earning a $25 gift card for amazon. I’ve been trying to decide what to buy with it, and I was leaning toward buying some Space Ghost Coast to Coast DVDs, but this guy has a book out, and it’s going down for me.
So he does do something more than read viewer email!
In all seriousness, he’s right, though.
I wandered over to the Daily Kos today to see what was being said about the economy, and found this terrific post, comparing the way this bill is being pushed through to the FISA bill over the summer. While the writer and I no doubt disagree about what caused the crisis and what all should be done, he makes a good point. The folks over at Kos, while wrongheaded in my opinion, are at least pretty consistent in their ideology.
Thanks to Greg for bringing to my attention this masterful column that ran in the Wall Street Journal last week.
The writer is David Perel, editor-in-chief of the National Enquirer, the one paper that carried the John Edwards scandal story for a year with no corroboration or even acknowledgment from anywhere else in the media. The fact that the Enquirer did this alone, when it probably cost them money to keep pursuing it, bought them a lot of respect in my book. Don’t look for me to go subscribe yet, or even link to them on the side of this page, but they definitely showed toughness in following the story through, and sticking to it when it was hard.
The main question Perel asks is this: Are “personal” issues fair game for the media to cover in the election?
I realize I wrote a few entries back that Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy should be off-limits. Perel’s answer, according to the title of the column, is that “everything about politicians is fair game.” After reading his full column, I agree more with him.
In his column, Perel welcomes us to “the greatest tabloid presidential election in modern times.” Whether it’s the greatest of all I don’t know; I tend to think that all the elections these days are basically “charades,” as Ron Paul recently said. In O Brother, Where Art Thou? we see the campaign for the governorship of Mississippi carried out through the movie. The style of campaigning that is most visibly employed by the two candidates involves a flatbed truck driving around with a fiddler, a speaker, and a dancing midget on the back. It’s a sideshow. Though campaigns don’t use politically incorrect stunts like that anymore, the substance of the modern-day grassroots campaign is the same. Without going into specific examples here, I hope readers can at least partially allow me this claim.
So why is a politician’s private life—or even their family’s internal drama—fair game?
As I wrote in my last entry to reference the National Enquirer (boy, I never thought I’d be using that tag again), Dan Rather’s definition of “news” is a great starting point. “Anything that someone somewhere doesn’t want you to know; that’s news.” Certainly Republicans would prefer to maintain the image of Sarah Palin as an irrationally religious conservative mom whose existence is in perfect accord with her proclaimed biblical values. A pregnant teenage daughter does that image significant damage. The full extent of what the National Enquirer is reporting is significantly worse (and, true to form, still untouched by the mainstream media, even if just to discredit it). I’ll leave it to Perel to point out all the hypocrisy that had to be performed left and right in response to the knocked-up revelation, and stick to the “what’s fair?” question in this entry.
Perel answers it himself:
In electing [our leaders] we grasp for any clues to their judgment and character, signals as to how they will react, and the verisimilitude of what they will tell the American people. An affair, regardless of political affiliation, is a breach of private trust; lying about it to the American public signals a dangerous willingness to deceive when caught in tough situations.
He’s pretty much right on that. The other big question Perel’s column raises, and leaves more open, is what the difference even is between the “mainstream” media and the “tabloid” media.
I say the biggest difference is simply the immediate reaction that every reader of this blog probably had to those two words. The highbrow mainstream media is where the real political discussion takes place, and where the truly important issues are examined, the worthwhile stories broken. Meanwhile, the tabloid media reports on Oprah’s weight, on Jessica Simpson’s divorce, on Britney Spears’ wackout. The tabloid media reports on things the mainstream media won’t.
But when I look at the “mainstream” outlets, I see nothing like what they are “supposed” to be.
Instead, I see hours of TV time spent guessing who Obama and McCain might pick as running mates, debate that was rendered totally pointless once they were actually announced (not that there was a point to it before the announcements). Inches, square feet even, of newspaper pages talking not about serious issues, but about how convention stages were set up, how events were calculated to appeal to the media, even how the media is reporting it. In what is ultimately a mockery of fairness and intelligent debate, media of all formats trot out voices representing the two opposing sides of “right” and “left” to have seven minute, mostly ad hominem, debates with no resolution ever. It is cotton candy from the fair, and the campaigns are only too happy to make it for the media, giving them plenty of press releases and access to the candidates as long as they don’t ask them anything too tough. The cotton candy is offered in several different flavors—blue, red, and purple—that all taste basically the same, and are all just as bad for you. And the infantile mainstream media devours it.
I still don’t regard the Enquirer as a trusty source, although the mere act of considering whether they are trustworthy assumes they have stories worth reading, which they generally don’t. I would like there to be a real difference between the two; lately there isn’t. Anyone who has read All the President’s Men has a sense of how much a media outlet really risks by doing long, investigative, and potentially explosive stories. If something like the Watergate break-in happened today, who would report it? I simply cannot imagine that any of the 24-hour TV networks would. I like to hope that some leading newspapers would pick it up, or a truly courageous independent website. Sadly, the John Edwards story suggests that it would be none of these, but instead most likely a tabloid paper.
What I mourn is the lack of any reputable media outlet to actually do its job. To not be wholly consumed by coverage of the election all the way from January 2007 to election day, to do fact-finding and investigating behind candidates’ claims instead of just mindlessly repeating the message each is trying to pass on to voters. There was a time, when I was so much younger and things were so much simpler, when I would have taken pride in saying I worked for a magazine like TIME, a paper like the New York Times, or a network like CNN. Now I’m waiting for the day when I meet someone who actually does, to tell them what I think of the job their company’s doing. “How long did it take you to learn how to stand in front of a building on camera and deliver a two-sentence story intro and earn your week’s pay?”
I don’t even really know how to conclude this; it’s pretty late, I’ve been writing a long time, and there’s not really any good conclusion to reach except that the mainstream media acts like the perfect definition of impotence, but I hope all my readers already knew that. I don’t know how I could do anything to actually change the way the media works, or anyone else: total impotence to fight this total impotence. I hope I at least encourage more people to step back and look at the whole mess of this. I find hope still in the internet, where free thought sometimes does happen, and fruitful exchange of ideas can occur.
Nice self-reference:
Hillary: “…and you just glided in on a dog sleigh, wearing your pageant sash and your Tina Fey glasses…”
and for anyone curious, like me, the best answer i could find after searching the internet for a few minutes, FLIRJ stands for “first lady i’d like to—”… well, do your best to fill in the blanks. Naturally, the first place I checked was urbandictionary, but they didn’t have any satisfying definitions. I then found a forum discussing it, and someone hypothesized the definition given here, standing it up against the known MILF. So it seems the SNL people made up this term for a little-pondered concept, and left it to the thinking people in their audience to deduce the meaning.
Actually the column’s from yesterday, but I just read it during some downtime at the R&B. Here’s Mo in full (why not?):
Bering Straight Talk
I’ve been in Alaska only a week, but I’m already feeling ever so much smarter about Russia.
I can’t quite see it from my hotel window, but, hey, I know it’s out there somewhere, beyond all the stuffed bears and cruise ships and glaciers and oil derricks.
The proximity of the country from which William Seward bartered to buy Alaska for $7 million — Seward’s icebox — is so illuminating that I suddenly realize that we would commit a grave error by overestimating Russia’s economic strength. After all, it represents only 2.8 percent of the world’s G.D.P., even though its gross domestic product has ballooned from $200 billion in 1999 to $1.7 trillion this year.
But I overanalyze.
An Arctic blast of action has swept into the 2008 race, making thinking passé. We don’t really need to hurt our brains studying the world; we just need the world to know we’re capable of bringing a world of hurt to the world if the world continues to be hell-bent on misbehaving.
Two weeks after being thrown onto a national ticket, and moments after being speed-briefed by McCain foreign-policy advisers, our new Napoleon in bunny boots (not the Pamela Anderson kind, but the knock-offs of the U.S. Army Extreme Cold Weather Vapor Barrier Boots) is ready to face down the Russkies and start a land war over Georgia, and, holy cow, what business is it of ours if Israel attacks Iran?
The trigger-happy John McCain has indeed found a soul mate. Trigger squared. In Fairbanks on Thursday, at a deployment ceremony for her son who is going to Iraq, Governor Palin followed the lead of McCain and W. in fusing Osama bin Laden’s diabolical work on 9/11 and the mission in Iraq. She told the departing troops, “You’ll be there to defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the deaths of thousands of Americans.”
Asked by Charlie Gibson what insight into Russian actions her Alaskan proximity gave her, Sarah blithely replied: “They’re our next-door neighbors. And you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska.”
Being a next-door neighbor is not quite enough, though. If Sarah had been reading about the world she feels so confident about leading rather than just parroting by rote what Randy Scheunemann and the neocons around McCain drilled into her last week — Drill, baby, drill! — she might have realized that as heinous as Russia’s behavior toward Georgia was, it was not completely unprovoked. The State Department has let it be known that it warned McCain’s friend, Misha, the hotheaded president of Georgia, not to send troops in to crush the rebellion in two breakaway states.
And she might not have had to clench her jaw and play for time when Gibson raised the Bush doctrine, the wacko preemption philosophy that so utterly changed the world.
The really scary part of the Palin interview was how much she seemed like W. in 2000, and not just the way she pronounced nu-cue-lar. She had the same flimsy but tenacious adeptness at saying nothing, the same generalities and platitudes, the same restrained resentment at being pressed to be specific, as though specific is the province of silly eggheads, not people who clear brush at the ranch or shoot moose on the tundra.
Just as W. once could not name the General-General running Pakistan, so Palin took a position on Pakistan that McCain had derided as naïve when Obama took it.
“We must not, Charlie, blink, Charlie, because, Charlie, as I’ve said, Charlie, before, John McCain has said, Charlie, that — and remember here, Charlie, we’re talking about John McCain, Charlie, who, Charlie, is John McCain and I won’t be blinking, Charlie.”
She tried to finesse her previous church comments about Iraq, asking worshipers to pray “that there is a plan, and that plan is God’s plan.” Earnestly repeating after her tutors, she said she had meant to echo Abraham Lincoln, that in war we must pray that we are on God’s side rather than that he is on ours. But her original comments sounded more W. than Abe — taking your policy and ideology and giving it the hallowed mantle of a mission from God.
Sarah has single-handedly ushered out the “Sex and the City” era, and made the sexy new model for America a retro one — the glamorous Pioneer Woman, packing a gun, a baby and a Bible.
Her explosion onto the scene made Obama seem even more like a windy, wispy egghead. Like W., Sarah has the power of positive unthinking. But now we may want to think about where ignorance and pride and no self-doubt has gotten us. Being quick on the trigger might be good in moose hunting, but in dealing with Putin, a little knowledge might come in handy.
Indeed, I can look at Russia on a map, or at pictures of the snow on google; does that also give me a great knowledge of relations with them?
The author of this NY Times “news” “article” is not aware that the word “existential” has a meaning besides referring to the modernist school of thought cognizant of the absence of real meaning in life. Apparently neither were any of the copy editors or desk editors.
His was a tricky course to navigate. If Mr. Gibson were too soft, Democrats would accuse him of being afraid of the Republican news-media-bashing machine, which has been scouring the press and Senator Barack Obama’s speeches for any hint of sexism or elitism. If his questions were too tough, he would be very likely to stir up charges of sexism or elitism. While his questions were trenchant, they were fair game; he was careful in the first day of interviews not to ask anything too frivolous (there were no questions about lipstick, pigs or juggling family and career). But his attitude was at times supercilious: He asked if a nuclear Iran posed an “existential threat” to Israel, as if it were the land of Sartre, not Sabras.
It saddens me more, though, that the media has been reduced to covering itself covering the election. Grow some balls, ok, media?
====
At least the Onion’s still serving up existentialism done right. Waiting for the next Onion article does give my life some hope, much more than waiting for the next depressing sign of a totally impotent news media.
I am in a history class right now called “Introduction to Chinese Civilization.” It’s, as my professor says, a “great books” course, so we pretty much read (translations of) classic Chinese texts going back to the earliest recorded times and talk about what they mean, and what we can know from them. Since we have fifteen weeks to talk about three thousand years of the poetry, philosophy, and history of a tradition completely foreign to us, we basically only get to hit on major authors with one, maybe two, day each. Kind of like trying to summarize Bob Dylan’s career on one CD, like this album tries and fails to do.
Anyhow, it’s still great to go back and study the political history of a civilization that was basically identifiably continuous through all history. Today we read from a scholar named Mencius (or Mengzi), one of the first interpreters of Confucianism, about the fourth century BC. The reading was extremely dense (I honestly only read about 15 pages of the assigned 70, but besides that I’ve actually kept up with the readings so far, which is amazing for me), yet one scene stuck out to me and even made me laugh. The book consists of dialogues between several kings and the philosopher Mencius. In this particular exchange, Mencius asks the king a series of questions, bringing him to an uncomfortable admission:
1B:6 Mencius said to King Xuan of Qi, “Suppose that one of the king’s subjects entrusted his wife and children to his friend and journeyed to Chu. On returning he found that he had allowed his wife and children to be hungry and cold. What should he do?”
The king said, “Renounce him.”
“Suppose the chief criminal judge could not control the officers. What should he do?”
The king said, “Get rid of him.”
“Suppose that within the four borders of the state there is no proper government?”
The king looked left and right and spoke of other things.
Reminds me of the foot massage dialogue in Pulp Fiction, about half way through here:
