In so far as my forays outside of Flatland are more frustrating than rewarding and can not possibly have a salutary effect on my high blood pressure, I am going to spend the final days of this blog having fun.
I love living on a planet teeming with big-brained bipedal predators who don't know what they're doing or why they're doing it. Can't get enough of that! Ya' can't trust 'em as far as you can throw 'em. Love it, love it, love it!
Did you know there's a global coalition against corruption called Transparency International? I didn't.
I mean, c'mon! — these are human beings we're talking about here. You might as well have a global coalition against high-tech toys or stupid bullshit.
Come to think of it, why not put together a global coalition against stupid bullshit? I'm sure we could get 26 people to sign up for that.
Wait, hang on a second — George Carlin is dead. Make that 25 people
Anyway, the transparency folks found that 75% of Americans believe that Democrats and Republicans are corrupt, which only leaves us wondering about the remaining 25%. And when I saw that, I was reminded of a recent article called The Roiling Swamp of Washington (Wall Street Journal, July 12, 1013). Such articles express contempt for the contemptible, and I pride myself on the fact that when it comes to the corrupt elites running this sorry country, nobody has more contempt for them than I do.
The writer Andrew Ferguson (of The Weekly Standard) is sarcastic throughout, which is only appropriate to the subject.
Last week, the Washington Post's gossip columnists called Mark Leibovich's "This Town" a "takedown of insider Washington," and insider Washington—also known to the author as The Club, The Political Class, Suck-Up City and more—has been doing its best to be scandalized.
It's harder than it sounds.
Yes, it is. And I quote — Leibovich's new book "This Town" describes Washington as a city that is "hopelessly interconnected," with "beautifully busy people constantly writing the story of their own lives."
Mr. Leibovich, said the Post, takes "sharp-eyed digs at the rich and famous" as well as the rich and not-famous. (Every member of Washington's political class is, by any common standard, at least rich.)
We get social-climbing hostesses throwing sumptuous, pointless parties; Reagan-era mastodons making millions as political consultants doing God knows what; and journalists, such as NBC's Andrea Mitchell, who can scarcely turn around without head-butting a conflict of interest.
[sucking up, image above — President Obama with Ed Henry (then of CNN), press secretary Robert Gibbs and NBC's Brian Williams, 2009]
It turns out, moreover, that all those idealistic dreamers who followed Barack Obama to Washington have abandoned government work after a few years and landed nice, cushy jobs with non-idealistic corporations. They're just sick about it.
One White House press officer produced a 33-point memo about Valerie Jarrett titled 'The Magic of Valerie.'
So the evidence is in. Washington is a roiling swamp of narcissism, hypocrisy, insincerity and money-grubbing.
We can thank Mr. Leibovich, a New York Times reporter, for making the case in such vivid ways, even some he may not be aware of.
Let's skip the bulk of the review and get right to the meat. How does Mr. Leibovich make his case in ways which he may not be aware of?
I'm sure some of you have already come up with the answer — he's sucking up too!
Mr. Leibovich is a fine writer and a wide-awake reporter. He's also a great big pussycat.
[Magical Valerie, image left]
He comes off less an observer of Suck-Up City than someone the suckees have pressed into service. He takes care to identify powerful hostesses as "lovely"; one even "looks fabulous in a bikini." A logrolling pair of sleazy party hacks turned lobbyists appear as lovable "good-time guys," and in-the-tank reporters are described boldly as "fierce, smart, and tenacious."
No one but a fully immersed insider could write a sentence as follows: "It's always a thrill to score the invite to Ben and Sally's." These bits of bogus flattery are presumably intended to keep the author just this side of his friendly sources' good nature—if they have one. The invites will keep coming.
If, as the Post claimed, some of Mr. Leibovich's "digs" are "sharp-eyed"—well, he kids because he loves. Washington has always enjoyed the brave speaker of truth to power, the satirist confronting the powers that be, who, in turn, think he's just the cutest little thing. The tradition of naughty, naughty boys runs from the piano-pounding Mark Russell to the late Art Buchwald up to the still-breathing Post columnist Dana Milbank. The mere presence of such declawed mascots serves chiefly to reassure the political class. How insular and corrupt could we really be, they may ask themselves, when we employ our own Shakespearean Fools to berate us for our insularity and corruption?
Mr. Leibovich settles comfortably in this line...
For whatever reason, he has chosen to be just a naughty boy, bravely brandishing his peashooter and aiming two clicks off target so that no one important gets stung.
Sucking up, status-seeking, sycophancy, ass-kissing, toadying — call it what you will, you know they're all doing it. They just can't help themselves!
Yesterday I included this type of behavior in the "social instincts." But that's such a dry term, dontcha think?
But then, Ferguson spoils our fun. He notes that the Real Problem is that the Roiling Swamp is merely a glorified extortion racket, which it is.
But the real problem with "This Town" isn't its triviality or phony-baloney fearlessness. It's the flattened view of politics that Mr. Leibovich shares with other members of The Club, their near-total lack of interest in the ideas that are supposed to shape the political arrangements of a contentious but self-governing country...
A near-total lack of interest in the ideas which are supposed to shape... Right, they're too busy partying, sucking-up and jostling for position.
No, Washington is unique because its human pageant is played out entirely on someone else's dime.
Mr. Leibovich isn't the first professional observer to notice that Washington's economy is from top to bottom parasitic, but he is one of the first not to be especially bothered by it.
The money that Suck-Up City sucks up is wealth created by the productive labor of faraway citizens who send it to the capital under penalty of law, according to whatever pretenses the political class can get away with, and that is then passed around as transaction fees.
Moneymaking Washington-style is a many-layered version of the ditch digger who shovels across your front yard and then demands you pay him to fill up the hole...
That's the extortion racket.
Though always a derivative enterprise, journalism might be expected to stand as at least a partial check on the unappetizing spectacle. Instead, in Washington, journalism is the most dubious trade of all—leeches fastened upon leeches.
Leeches upon leeches — meet the Washington press corps!
Why write about "social instincts" when you can see the real thing in action?
Here's some more magic. It's all about transparency.
And media figures at the head of the line. After all, they cannot do their jobs unless they have access to the powerful. What are their jobs anyway? It's not "truth telling."
Posted by: Ken Barrows | 07/18/2013 at 09:38 AM