Saturday, August 10, 2024

Comes A Time

The press didn’t talk about Biden’s age or his mental acuity. They don’t work that way. 

They talked about what George Clooney was talking about, which was Biden’s age and mental acuity. And polls about Biden’s age and mental acuity. And “Democratic insiders,” worried about Biden’s…well, you get the idea.

Any Republicans doing that? Except, I mean, “Never Trumpers”?

Now, are these things bad, or good?  I was against all those people and what they were saying about Biden, until he stepped aside and Kamala Harris proved me wrong. So we got here by Dems being in disarray and not an organized political party. God works in mysterious ways, huh?
And we’re still better off than the GOP. Which is saddled with Grandpa Shouty, who can’t speak coherently to save his life, and desperately needs to believe 73% of the country is fanatically devoted to him.

Despite the fact they obviously aren’t.

And please stop thinking the press, especially the political press, deals in anything but gossip. They aren’t interested in politicians who discuss policy (MEGO). They are only interested in access (gossip) and the horse race (easier to report on than economics). The most prominent ones are so far away from the Hollywood stereotypes of the 40’s to the 60’s (“Lawrence of Arabia,” hem hem) they may as well be on another planet. They’re more concerned with their tax bracket than with the “man in the street.” Rather than mock the bread and circuses, they want to distribute it.
This is where I start saying Chomsky is a symp, so I’ll stop and calm down.

Gossip always follows the blood in the water. Trump is a wounded animal hiding in his retreat.  We aren’t quite at the stage where the political press is reporting on his ludicrous statements and obvious prattling nonsense, but we’re closer than we were.
The focus there is on Trump’s actions, because “objective journalism” will not allow: “The candidate’s words make no fucking sense.” Rather than address that elephant in the room 🐘, they address the safer subject of the horse race.🏇 No risk of appearing “non-objective” there. Still, this is a sign that Trump hunting season is open, and the safe course, of course, and where the SCOOPS are, is in what “some people say.”

Gossip, plain and simple. Except now all the kewl kids can talk about how Trump is in trouble, if only because, as a candidate (not a speaker on the stump. Heaven forbid! Never that!), he’s running his campaign erratically.

Which may well be why we are returning to the journalistic days that “objectivity” supposedly lifted us from. We certainly don’t need the yellow journalism of Murdoch, our 21st century Hearst and Pulitzer (history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme). But the anodyne assurance of “Uncle Walter” and “That’s the way it is,” his sign off line for decades telling us what TV news covered was all you needed to know. Those bland, establishment assurances, failed in the ‘60’s as the media assured us Vietnam was an extension of the “good fight” of the Korean War, itself a “police action” spinoff of the great “Good War,” as “objective journalist” Tom Brokaw would later label it. It was all of a piece with the voice of the establishment on three channels and in moi newspapers that all was well and this was the best if all possible nations. Dr. King and Malcolm X and the Black Panthers were all on a continuum of trouble makers, even if the police did turn water hoses and vicious dogs on peaceful marchers. It was many years before “Bloody Selma” became Bloody Selma., and not just another protest march by “outside agitators.”

History moves incrementally slowly, if at all, and then lurches forward, only to stop moving, again.

Cronkite was the avatar of the WWII generation. His counterpart, for at least one brief, shining moment, was Hunter S. Thompson on the floor of the GOP convention in ‘72, shrieking obscenities and shaking his fist in defiance of Cronkite in his aerie far above the floor, where he could look down upon the many-headed and tell an anxious nation what it all meant. (Cronkite actually heard Thompson, and casually brushed it off.) Thompson was calling bullshit on that bland and unctuous narrative, one Vietnam and civil rights had already shattered. But just as Rome didn’t fall in a day, neither did the anodyne narrative. And while Woodstein were already writing the narrative that would bring down Nixon, that fall ultimately had less to do with the virtues of journalism, and much more to do with the venality of Nixon. To this day revisionists still argue Nixon was railroaded; and, in a sense, they aren’t wrong. Oh, Nixon was a crook, but Ford cut off any chance for a coherent narrative on that topic to be presented in a court of law. So in the end, what brought Nixon down was the gossip.

And for the generations of journalists in the last 50 years, that is the lesson learned.

And so it continues. Did Tim Walz, who retired after 20 years service, and returned to service after 9/11, cut and run by retiring again four years later, so he could serve in Congress and evade going overseas with his company 2 years later?

Tuttle-tattle.

Did Willie Brown spill his guts to Donald Trump 35 years ago in a failing helicopter ride?

More tittle-tattle.

Why does Donald Trump talk about sharks and sinking boats and Hannibal Lecter in every speech? Who cares? What he said to Miriam Adelson in a text message is much more important.

Idle gossip.

It’s a wonder tall trees ain’t layin’ down. Or that anything, ever, gets done.
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