Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Even after the impeachment debacle revealed just how out of touch they are, the Washington media elite are still trying to hustle the American people.
Feb 17, 1999 | To be honest, it was only on further reflection that it occurred to me the new movie "Rushmore" might be called "Young Mr. Clinton," the bizarro-universe corollary of John Ford's 1939 "Young Mr. Lincoln." The biggest fuck-up at Rushmore prep school, the film's protagonist, Max, is half precocious and half stunted, half triumphant smirk and half self-pitying whine, outrageous liar and compulsive con man, an embodiment of the present moment while stuck in a past of old Donovan songs and '60s Playboy centerfolds tacked to the wall. Sound familiar? That he hasn't yet become a complete sexual degenerate is only because he's 15.
The news media hasn't made the connection between the president and "Rushmore," but then the news media is no longer in the business of making connections, assuming it ever was. The very idea of pop culture saying more about the country than the political culture ever did or could doesn't simply confound the media, it terrifies it: If you were to ask Sam Donaldson who was more important to post-World War II America, Gerald Ford or Chuck Berry, do you have any doubt what he would answer? That any president of the United States, even one as inconsequential as Ford, might be less significant in the vast scheme of things than the man who invented the musical vernacular of the last half-century threatens everything Donaldson represents. Because media culture and political culture breathe the same air and exchange the same conceptual viruses, and anything from outside the bubble in which they exist is alien to their common immune system. It's just another example of how -- like the political culture it pimps for -- the Washington opinion-elite that presumes to speak for the country fails so utterly to understand it.
For a year now, the country has been trying to tell the media something about itself. This, it has said again and again, is who we are. Again and again the media has ignored it. Once, 30 or 40 years ago during the McCarthy hearings and civil rights and Vietnam and Watergate, the electronic press in particular was mediator between the political establishment and the rest of us. But somewhere in the unfolding Lewinsky scandal the press finally and completely lost its bearings. Exacerbated by the cable age's hothouse atmosphere of competition, the media's natural inclination to patronize the nation turned into barely veiled contempt mixed with full-blown confusion, its every acknowledgment of the public's "disconnect" from the scandal implicitly suggesting that the great unwashed didn't get it. It was the same argument Henry Hyde made for the last three months: If, like kindergartners, the distracted masses could just be focused long enough and educated about the nuances of the scandal as Hyde's more exalted intelligence understood them, then opinion would shift accordingly.
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