Zak Smith
"...Jessica at the roadside struggling prettily with a busted bicycle..." (page 39 of Gravity's Rainbow
(1) First things first. There's something off with the numbering of the "morning updates." I believe that this is correctly numbered XXXIII, and I've adjusted the others to follow suit. Here's the thing: Including this one, only 29 are tagged, which means I'm missing two. It's a puzzler. If any enterprising reader wants a free Ich Bin Ein Oberliner mug, then go through the archive and see if you can't figure out what's going on. First (correct) one wins.
The last word? Unless someone gets back to me with the correct answer and documentation on the number of "morning update" posts, then I will never ever speak of this again. How's that for a tie in!?
(2) Second things second. I didn't really want to write or deal with the controversy over the proposed Islamic cultural center in New York. I really didn't. But, like a moth to a flame, I am drawn to teh stupid.
I know that most--if not all--who regularly read this blog probably think the conservative hubbub over the "Ground Zero Mosque" is not only stupid but bigoted and crazy to boot. I feel the same way. What more is there to say?
Well, a few things, I guess. Here we go, and may I never write about this again.
(3) Ezra Klein on the evolution of the controversy:
You get a lot of these mini-manias in the 24-hour news cycle, and it's always hard to say which you should take seriously and which you should ignore. After all, if you jump on everything that cable news makes into a big deal, you've become part of the problem, because you're helping the story along. But you don't want to just dismiss everything, either. The test I try to use is this: Could I imagine a world in which this thing was happening but no one ever thought to comment on it?
Well, yes. I can't imagine that world for unemployment, or financial-regulation reform, or the Afghanistan Wikileaks. But it absolutely could've been the case that Imam Feisel Abdul Rauf decided to build an Islamic community center and no one really noticed, or cared, and maybe a few local politicians from both parties showed up to help cut the ribbon. As it happened, a few opportunists went after it, which brought it to the attention of a few sensationalistic media outlets, and then some opportunistic politicians jumped on board, and then their colleagues felt compelled to comment, and then more legitimate media outlets had something to cover, and on and on. The story is a story because of the incentives of the people making it a story, not because there's something about an Islamic community center a few blocks from Ground Zero that just screams out for national attention.
(4) It's fair to say that few of the actors involved in this mess have any self-awareness at all. Glenn Beck never did, and that's no surprise; the media often doesn't, which somehow still surprises me; and the Democrats can't seem to understand why no one takes them seriously when they go around to the base and claim to have anything resembling a back bone.
Klein is close to something, but a little too dismissive. He's correct, of course, that:
You get a lot of these mini-manias in the 24-hour news cycle, and it's always hard to say which you should take seriously and which you should ignore. After all, if you jump on everything that cable news makes into a big deal, you've become part of the problem, because you're helping the story along. But you don't want to just dismiss everything, either.
But his test isn't doesn't catch 'em all. There's something about this story and the way in which it arrived that's important. It's important, not only because it encapsulates what's wrong with both parties (one's crazy, and one's spineless), but also because it's emblematic of an ailing media (and I don't just mean that it's susceptible to right-wing pollutants).
Consider the headline in today's Minneapolis Star Tribune:
POLITICS OF THE MOSQUE DEBATE
First, while it is a debate over a "mosque," it really should be a debate over a community center that includes prayer space. But I guess that really isn't the point now is it.
The truth is that the "politics" of this debate are shaped by the media coverage of this debate, which seems to be lost (or at least only tacitly recognized) by the media actors involved. One of the upshots of the entwining of commentary and journalism is that you end up with journalism that can masquerade as commentary and commentary that can masquerade as journalism.
That, all too often, is happening here. And of course, Fox News practically invented the modern incarnation of this effect, but that normative wolf in positive clothing is not limited to Fox. When Newt Gingrich says that we wouldn't allow the Nazis to have signs in front of the Holocaust museum, and the "journalist" merely nods and asks some Democrat to respond, that journalist is (1) creating false equivalence and (2) ignoring the facts--Nazis are perfectly within their rights to have signs in front of the Holocaust museum.
By acting as though this is just another two-sided debate--like always--the media is endorsing the idea that both sides have equal standing. But they don't, and the media shouldn't act like they do. After all, it's not the "Ground Zero Mosque," despite what it has been dubbed; you can't see Ground Zero from the damn community center. The hubbub over the "radical" imam is ginned up; President Bush and he worked together. I could go on.
And so, with the media's blessing, the story floats along in this strange context-less bubble, and instead of popping the damn thing, they report on it, and it grows ever-larger and swallows up ever-more of the already small space American's have that isn't devoted to watching people lose weight and sing shitty pop songs.
I'm reminded of what Roger Hodge wrote in Harper's:
The disease manifested itself almost everywhere at once, but the superficial effects were most spectacular in our national mirror: the Media, which absorbed and digested the once proud opposition of the Press and made of it a mere legitimizer of horrors. The self-refuting absurdity of the Bush presidency, with its pretensions to manufacture an imperial reality, parallels the rise of the aggressively oxymoronic genre of “Reality Television,” with all its unintentional ironies. Among so-called news programming, Fox’s “Fair and Balanced: We Report, You Decide” is of a piece with Anderson Cooper’s “Keeping Them Honest” and, to give an extreme and perhaps gratuitous example, CBS Evening News with Katie Couric. More perniciously, the self-importance with which the quality newspapers fawned on George W. Bush and his retainers in the decisive years after September 11, 2001, particularly in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, bears comparison with the bitter satires of G. K. Chesterton and Evelyn Waugh.
The disorder from which we suffer—known among its close observers as Self-Satirizing Syndrome, or SSS—is a cruel one. Not only have we been made to witness the betrayal of almost every promise made by our Founding Fathers, and seen their direst prophesies confirmed, we must also suffer the indignity of seeing our constitutional ideal turned into a shabby mockery of itself. Somehow, by a trick of dialectical cunning, the United States of America has vaulted over the tragic phase of history in favor of a relentless pursuit of historical farce.
It's endlessly fascinating--though perhaps not all that surprising--that The Daily Show's takedown of both the controversy itself and the media's reaction to it remains one of the best I've seen.
Fascinating because The Daily Show is in a sense utterly ajournalistic and yet on occasion it gets at the truth--an ever more elusive specter in these times--better than journalists. Not surprising because what the media lacks, self-awareness, The Daily Show has in spades--albeit in the form of a healthy dose of ironic distance.
I'll let Hodge play me out:
The medicinal literature I have in mind is not fiction, though fiction can serve in this role as well, but the literature of fact, a variety of narrative journalism (of a provenance far too ancient to be called “new”) that has long sought to place a strong bulwark of wit between the reader and history’s perpetual invitation to despair. Today that protective coating has become a medical necessity. In times such as these, healthy citizenship requires the insertion of a human proxy into the stream of historical happenstance. What we need is an experimental subject, an “I” sufficiently armed with narrative powers both literary and historical, gifts of irony and indirection, and the soothing balms of description and implication, to go forth and find stories that might counteract the unhappy effects of our disorder. What distinguishes such dispatches is what might be called the radical first person: the individual consciousness of the writer becomes paramount. The reader is thereby privy to the writer’s experience and receives direct confirmation of its truth value. What results is not mere consumable opinion, the mystical commodity of mediated capitalism, but the raw material of a considered judgment, whether aesthetic, political, or ethical. In that judgment lies the cure for our affliction.
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