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The opposite of integrity

Nice piece by Neal Gabler in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle Magazine. The mouthful title is Who Wants to Be a President? Election 2000: The Miniseries. Why the real winner of the Gore-Bush "campaign" may be the media. The gist:

With cable and the Internet, there is now more politics to watch than ever before, but Americans know it is for show, not substance — a tale told by a whole crew of idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Like Maureen Dowd, voters recognize the absurdity of the process and feel bemused by it, which doesn't mean that they will stop watching it so long as it remains entertaining. So if Gore lost, well, that is just the way it goes in the political show. No big whup.

The same recognition of the election as a media-managed entertainment may also help reconcile two clashing interpretations of the returns. By one analysis, the vote suggests a country deeply divided. By another analysis, it suggests a country basically united and finding little to choose between Bush and Gore. Both may be right.

The country seems by and large to be united on a centrist agenda, but it is divided on aesthetics — on whether, as the media presented it, a liar or a fool, a prevaricating smarty pants or a moronic frat boy, would make the better president.

Context: Neal Gabler is a senior fellow at the University of Southern California's Norman Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and the author of Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality and other books.

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Doc, it's the media, not politics that is "for show, not substance — a tale told by a whole crew of idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Gabler misses the point. The penetration of reality by the media is an old story, since Walter Benjamin, but it doesn't turn reality into a movie, it just confuses people's sense of reality -- pretty different.

So America isn't divided or united, it's confused. If pervasive media turns the Presidential election into a popularity contest, gee, that ain't exactly a division about 'aesthetics.'

Maybe nothing hangs on who's elected homecoming king, but right now we're about to get a Secretary of Defense who is on record favoring an immense anti-missile barrier in space, an Attorney General put in place at great effort by the Christian right, and maybe three new Supreme Court justices appointed by this crew -- not to mention the anti-environmental head of the Department of the Interior, the anti-Labor head of the Department of Labor, etc. What do you think will happen to the policies of these departments? To the courts? Nothing?

Believe it or not, I'm not just expressing my personal politics (but I'm not hiding them either). If America voted for what we're getting then fine, it's what we deserve. But I don't think that's what happened. Like Neal Gabler, I think it was a rejection of smartypants in favor of frat boy. But, aestheticizing politics only hides the real results, it doesn't prevent them from happening. Hold on for a wild ride.

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I think Neal Gabler is a little close to Hollywood. He does, after all, work, however indirectly, for the entertainment industry himself (installed at the Annenberg School and all that).

I think we're at a liminal time in history. The Industrial Age isn't quite over (it lives in hour heads, where it urges us to think new stuff with the same old metaphors). Whatever we call the age that succeeds it will be characterized, it seems, by a great deal more personal autonomy, I fantasize of the sort Whitman expressed 1.5 centuries ago, when he blew grit in our chops and urged us to feel the truths in ourselves. I get far more useful news from other folks's weblogs than from the old industrial "channels."

Speaking of smartypants and the fratboy, Willie Brown put it best when he called it a choice between "the insufferable and the incompetent."

And yeah, the cabinet choices are mighty creepy.

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I think Neal Gabler is a little close to Hollywood. He does, after all, work, however indirectly, for the entertainment industry himself (installed at the Annenberg School and all that).

I think we're at a liminal time in history. The Industrial Age isn't quite over (it lives in our heads, where it urges us to think new stuff with the same old metaphors). Whatever we call the age that succeeds it will be characterized, it seems, by a great deal more personal autonomy, I fantasize of the sort Whitman expressed 1.5 centuries ago, when he blew grit in our chops and urged us to feel the truths in ourselves. I get far more useful news from other folks's weblogs than from the old industrial "channels."

Speaking of smartypants and the fratboy, Willie Brown put it best when he called it a choice between "the insufferable and the incompetent."

And yeah, the cabinet choices are mighty creepy.

discuss

You'll hear more from me, Doc, and soon -- I'm finally doing a website and will do a weblog. I didn't go to Camden in October, and I really regretted the ommission when I heard you'd been there.

(Btw, re: my forthcoming weblog - no matter how easy something is, when you don't know how to do it you gotta learn. I haven't a clue how to design one of these logs, and I'd love some help from a knowledgeable human - suggestions?)

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