As the Empire declines, public discourse becomes more and more a theater of the absurd. At least, that is obvious to us who live outside the box. It's easy to forget that the vast majority of people in this country still take our politics seriously. Writing in this month's issue of Vanity Fair, James Wolcott tries to deal with the disconnect in That's Political Entertainment! First, Wolcott reminds us that there used to be news in the news, but now it's all showbiz.
In Morning Glory, last year’s most underrated movie comedy, go-getter breakfast-show producer Becky Fuller (Rachel McAdams, divine), in a burst of exasperation, explains the facts of life to journalistic warhorse Mike Pomeroy (Harrison Ford, face furrowed with mental indigestion): “The world has been debating news versus entertainment for years, and guess what? You lost!” Which hasn’t stopped the losing side from singing the chain-gang blues.
Civic-minded souls in journalism, academe, and the mushroom farms of C-span panels can still be heard lamenting the infestation of news and politics by showbiz values, a war between informed debate and pole dancing that they (unlike Ford’s Pomeroy) recognize as a lost cause, hence their elegiac tone, the dead fly in their lemonade. The days when the words “Hollywood actor” framed Ronald Reagan like bunny fingers as an ID tag and an implied insult seem far-off and quaint: nearly everybody in politics—candidate, consultant, pundit, and Tea Party crowd extra alike—is an actor now, a shameless ham in a hoked-up reality series that never stops.
In one corner, we have the Comedy Channel's Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. Facing them across the ring are Fox News Network's Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. Those clinging desperately to their faith in America's corrupt political system seem to have only these two options. Wolcott compares and contrasts Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally on the Washington Mall with the Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear" rally a few months later.
If you feel compelled to have a rally to restore sanity, it should immediately occur to you that sanity is now only a distant memory. It's far too late to do anything about it. Stewart went ahead and held the rally anyway. I guess we have to put him in the category Deluded.
Wolcott did come up with an insight (sort of) regarding those in the category Insane. Actually, a blogger named David Seaton came up with the quasi-insight, and Wolcott ran with it.
A blogger named David Seaton provided the keenest insight into the tactical superiority of Beck’s home-brewed surrealism. “To understand what Beck is doing, to understand him, you must suspend your capacity for rational thought and just let the emotions wash over you and try to take note of them as they assault your endocrine system,” Seaton wrote.
As America enters the downward slope of empire—its debt mounting, the disparity between wealthy and poor continuing to chasm, the environmental ravages becoming irreversible, high unemployment becoming the cruel norm—the Richie Riches have a vested interest in misdirecting people by blaming the powerless for the sins of the powerful.
Incoherence isn’t a bug in Beck’s software program, it’s the primary directive. Seaton: “That is what the Tea Party, Fox, etc is all about: keeping people from thinking straight. The idea is to play on people’s emotions: fear, hate, racism, xenophobia, just to keep them from doing the math. The Teabaggers, Beck, [Gingrich] and Fox [News] are often criticized for not making any sense This is not a failure of communication or an error on their part That is the object of the exercise: to make rational thought difficult or impossible due to emotional overload.” (Wolcott's italics).
To his credit, Wolcott sees that America is no longer a serious enterprise. And I agree that Glenn Beck is merely a tool of the rich. But seriously. Glenn Beck? Together with Rational Thought? I didn't realize this was an issue that intelligent people might hold an earnest discusson about.
The gap between those who grasp this and those clinging to the floating driftwood was dramatized in a Rolling Stone panel discussion in which renegade journalist Matt Taibbi flat out called the Tea Partiers “crazy,” much to the tea-pinkie dismay of David Gergen and pollster Peter Hart. You simply can’t write off such a large slice of the electorate as mental patients, Gergen demurred. (Gergen’s the Perry Como of demurral.) Sure you can, Taibbi replied. “I interview these people. They’re not basing their positions on the facts—they’re completely uninterested in the facts. They’re voting completely on what they see and hear on Fox News and afternoon talk radio, and that’s enough for them.” This disinformation addiction puts the political satirists on the left at a disadvantage—how do you poke fun at nonsense that’s intended to be nonsensical, an ideological crack pipe blowing smoke into millions of brains? Swiftian satire clicks only for those already compos mentis.
Wolcott is framing the argument in Left/Right terms, as though these categories have some relevance to anything at all. They do not. If you think the important debate in the United States is between the Comedy Channel and the Tea Party, you're living in a state of terminal confusion. We can also throw Wolcott in the category Deluded along with Stewart. Wolcott argues that—
The old punditocracy, grounded in facts, credentials, and rational debate, has been overpowered by a new breed of political entertainer, who deals in raw emotion. Sure, there’s some brainy blue-state satire out there, from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. But the likes of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Kelsey Grammer, et al. aren’t trying to change the way people think, the author argues—they don’t want their audiences to think at all.
That's all true at a superficial level, but the central insight which eludes Wolcott is this: the debasement of our political discourse, it's evolution into pure entertainment, the preying upon people's emotions, is a predictable outcome of America's decline. These are not independent phenomena. Here's what Walcott said—
- As America enters the downward slope of empire... the Richie Riches have a vested interest in misdirecting people by blaming the powerless for the sins of the powerful.
Long before Jon Stewart (the Deluded) or Glenn Beck (the Insane) showed up, the "Richie Riches" had a vested interest in stealing the people's money and misdirecting blame for the theft. And it wasn't just those on the so-called Right who did that. To give you just one example, Bill Clinton pushed hard for globalization and free trade. The inevitable result? The decline in American manufacturing, the flight of those jobs, and so on. The Empire was already sliding downhill when Clinton endorsed those policies in the mid-1990s. Clinton was just moving things along. The fix has been in for a long time, folks. As America enters the downward slope of Empire... Enters?
Share of total income going to the top decile (10%) with my annotations, from Emmanuel Saez's Striking It Richer
You basically have two choices. You can live inside the box, as Wolcott does, and arrive at the startling conclusion that Glenn Beck spews emotion-laden nonsense in order to serve his corporate masters. And then you can watch the Comedy Channel instead. Or you can transcend this unhelpful, misleading Left/Right distinction, and then decide what you're going to do with your life.
You have to add Rush Limbaugh to the scary list. He is the leader of the pack. I dread talking to my 80 year old Dad about any relevant issue as his opinion is spoonfed from Rush. It is almost like a cult. I was driving through North Carolina the other day and there is actually a radio station called 'Rush 94.5 FM'. They play Rush and reruns of his show most of the day.
Posted by: John D | 01/21/2011 at 11:29 AM