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THE DUMBEST GUYS IN THE ROOM
THE DUMBEST GUYS IN THE ROOM I have a confession to make. Despite my weekly musings and fulminations on matters some might consider fluffy, you know, television, movies, sports, I do have a more consequential bent. In fact, it could be said that I am something of a political junkie. Spend enough time in my company and you’ll quickly notice how tiresome I can get about the subject. Or so I’ve been told. Given the course of events over the last, say, 8 years or so (to pick any old number out of a hat), it’s hard to imagine how anyone wouldn’t be obsessed with politics to the point of tiresomeness. In less than a decade, we have gone from obsessing over oral sex in the Oval Office to a period of constant and genuine crisis. Economic turbulence draws parallels to the 1930s, which is an indirect way of saying ‘The Great Depression’ out loud. Wars and conflicts drag on or spring up daily with some of our leaders appearing to like it that way. Climate change churns, largely unchecked, poised to dwarf all other concerns. For those reasons and many more, the election race that the self-proclaimed greatest, most powerful nation that has ever graced God’s once green earth is in the midst of resonates far beyond its borders. The next President of the United States will show the rest of the world in what direction the country is preparing to move. We all have a vested interest in how this thing plays out and the November result will have a very serious impact on the shape of global affairs, both immediately and long term. To say that this is the most important American presidential election in at least a generation may not be too much of an overstatement. And yet, as usual, these electoral proceedings are being conducted under the auspices of the dumbest guys in the room. No, not the politicians but the honourable members of the U.S. press corps. In excess of four thousand soldiers dead in Iraq, fighting a war for the most dubious, possibly treasonous of reasons, and patriotism is being couched in terms of wearing flag lapel pins. What about the severely wounded manufacturing sector, battered to a pulp by free trade and globalization? Clearly a candidate who can’t bowl is unqualified to tackle such a problem. Treating this campaign as seriously as one for a student council, the mainstream media seems almost hostile to intelligence, knowledge, capability and diligence, preferring to side with the candidate they’d like to have a beer with. Like all hucksters and con men, the press claims only to be giving the public it so cutely dubs Nascar Dads, Soccer Moms and Joe Lunchbucket, what it wants. This, of course, is a classic case of denial. The public gets what it is given. Raised to believe that information relayed by the media is objective, impartial and, by its very presence in newspapers and on television and radios, important, John Q. Public tends to think they should be concerned about these issues. For those of us who came of age in the 1970s and watched the press chase a corrupt President from office, the bias toward a righteous and crusading fourth estate is strong. We want to believe that they are on our side, protecting our interests by keeping the machinations of the powerful in check. This is one of the defining points between a totalitarian state and us. Some 30 years later, it’s hard not to conclude that the whole Watergate experience was simply an anomaly, an accident of personalities and circumstances that proved atypical for the media. Reading The Brass Check by Upton Sinclair (whose novel, Oil!, was adapted by P.T. Anderson into There Will Be Blood -- a movie reference just so you don’t think I’m taking myself too seriously here) would suggest that we keep stock in the integrity of the press at our peril. Self-published in 1919, The Brass Check is a laundry list of nefariousness and anti-social behaviour by the newspapers and the barons who owned them. Whether drumming up support for a war of aggression (sound familiar?) or shilling for their advertisers and misrepresenting the grievances and conduct of striking workers, it seems that the narrow interests of a highly concentrated group of newspaper owners rarely intersected with those of their readership. Watching the commercial-laden Pennsylvanian Democratic Presidential debate last month did little to dispel that notion. Moderated by George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson, it was quickly and painfully evident that the dumbest guys in the room were, once more, in charge. Grilling Barak Obama about his relationship with his controversial pastor who’d had the temerity to criticise American society, Stephanopoulos apparently couldn’t draw a distinction between dissent and unpatriotic behaviour. The ABC World News anchorman, Gibson, who is paid $8 million a year, got most passionate about capital gains tax rates, mouthing a very conservative and highly suspect notion that lower taxes equal higher government revenue, a concern he shares with about 1% of his viewers. In the end I found myself more partial toward Obama because he barely disguised his contempt for the petty and trivial service the moderators rendered and he seemed far less inclined to stoop to the moderators’ level than his opponent, Hillary Clinton. It has been suggested that a true and functioning democracy is only possible where there is a free and independent press. Thomas Jefferson, an advocate of both democracy and a free press, said: “… were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Now, I don’t know about the quality of newspapers during Jefferson’s time but I’m assuming they must’ve been much more incisive, engaging, public spirited and trustworthy than their modern descendants. These days, it would be difficult to find a less anti-democratic, pro-authoritarian and elitist institution than the mainstream media. Whether they label themselves right-wing populists or the newspaper of record, they all assume their audience is too dumb or distracted to really know what’s going on in an attempt to mask their own laziness, indifference and/or highly partisan motives.Such arrogance in the face of a precipitous downward spiral in the numbers of their readers and viewers suggests that some people, regardless of their economic status or level of education or erudition, aren’t nearly as smart as they think.
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