WARNING: Mild Political Content!
I don't often get political here, except as the media artifact under scrutiny demands, but I thought the first paragraph of Mark Danner's review (in the New York Times) of the recent book The Way of the World, by Ron Suskind, about our post-9/11 situation, really said in a nutshell what's wrong with our political system here today:
"Scandal is our growth industry. In our era, revelation of wrongdoing leads not to definitive investigation, punishment and expiation but to ... more scandal. Permanent scandal. Frozen scandal. The weapons of mass destruction that turn out not to exist. The torture of detainees who remain forever detained. The firing of prosecutors, which is forever investigated. These and other frozen scandals metastasize, ramify, self-replicate, clogging the cable news shows and the blogosphere and the bookstores. Unpurged and perpetually unresolved, scandal transcends political reality to become commercial fact."
Corruption and wrongdoing in the highest places are not exclusive to the 21st century, nor to any one political party. But in the past, there was genuine outrage about such matters, among the people and the press and the politicians that led to action. Now, we don't even get the appearance of action. Just "frozen scandal ... unpurged and perpetually unresolved." How goddamned depressing.
5 comments:
But there are elections coming soon. Fingers crossed; checkbook open.
Mike, you've always been my hero, but now that you've succumbed to seductive lure of political bloggery, I have to say I'm a little disillusioned, ironic "blah blah blah" title notwithstanding.
Jim, I swear that will be my only politico-shenanigans for the rest of the calendar year, unless I actually read the book that the Times guy was reviewing, which would then make a blog comment on topic. Would it help if I retroactively added some non-relevant sexual comments, like, "If only we had a good Congressional page blow job scandal to wallow in"?
I don't know enough of the history, but one wonders if we have such mater-of-fact scandal-news exactly because the scandalous events and practices have come to be seen as longer shocking. In other times and places, maybe corruption was the norm, and scandals actually had more power to outrage people, because people thought "Wow--I didn't know it was that bad." Now people just think, "Yeah, that's exactly how bad I thought it was" and there's no reason for outrage. What's shocking (to me) about the WMD, prosecutor firings, and Abu Ghraib events, it seems to me, is just how clearly the people engaged in the key decisions have not felt that they'd really done anything wrong: I'd be happier if they took despicable actions out of corruption, rather than because they think what they're doing is business as usual. When it's business as usual, we get news, but not enough outrage to lead to action. Let's bring more honest to goodness corruption back into the process. Out of sight and behind the scenes, of course, so we can be righteously outraged when it's exposed.
Actually, Tom, I blame (seriously) cable news, whose infinite grinding jaws need to be filled with something, ideally something that never has a resolution.
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