The American Press sometimes wakes up.I have been more than slightly contemptuous of most of the American press on this blog. I think that they generally form a sort of preening and pressurised media class that doesn't hold their leaders to account. It is possible, however, in the infotainment world, to see some examples of people asking serious questions and persisting.
Beneath this post, for instance, is such an example. I've attached the ferocious (by American standards) grilling that Campbell Brown subjected some numpty from the McCain campaign to when he tried to run an 'experience' argument about Sarah Palin. At least the republic is going down fighting.
I'd also draw your attention to this blog, by a former professor of constitutional law at Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald, which has been an antidote to the mainstream press for some time. Greenwald has been asking deliberately provocative, fact-based questions about serious issues, such as why China gets condemned for suppressing Olympics protest whilst the FBI can coordinate massive, sloppy and illegal crackdowns on the homes of potential protestors at the Republican Convention.
In recent months, Greewald has also asked what the evidence actually is for assumed guilt of the 'anthrax' scientist who committed suicide a few weeks ago. One of his themes is an attempt to find out what the surveillance courts actually do.
The McCain camp has responded to Brown's questions the other day by banning CNN from an interview with McCain. I think that she should carry on, and ask hard questions of both camps, until people start behaving like the decent, professional American journalist I had dinner with amongst friends in Oxford last night.
I should make a confession. I actually like reading or watching Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly shows. They're the pantomime, id-driven narcissism which allows you to think a world actually exists in which you can just 'hit' people, win arguments by shouting, ignore facts that you don't like, or smear opponents and call it righteousness. However, as Robert Kennedy is reported to have said by David Talbot in 1968, 'the most important thing to find out is that your world is not real'.
They have a certain sort of vital force and dark appeal, those right-wing propagandists, like cheap wine with a Jimi Hendrix picture on the label. They are, frankly, more fun than their counterparts on the self-styled 'left', partly because of the cheerful hypocrisy of their self-indulgence. And if we have too much of that, our brains will choke. For the avoidance of doubt, I'd also like Coulter and O'Reilly to be covered in honey and dropped in the Congo from space, so that they could live out one of his mad sociopathic novels, but that is just a whim. Really, they need help but it would be more fun to laugh with them and their crazy murderous japes.
I'd rather go to a Bill O'Reilly circus than a Keith Olbermann one, just as I'd rather hang around Thames Magistrates or Southwark Crown Court, or even go in search of a guaranteed murder at the Bailey, than watch people behaving themselves. Criminals are oddly life-affirming. I would not want to live in their world, however.
It's funny; I always thought that in any Irish person who liked America, there would be an outward strain, even unconsciously, to be like John or Robert Kennedy, or to convey that impression. In all such people, in the ocean behind the eyes, there is probably always a Pat Buchanan, a potato Mussolini, trying to claw its way out of the box at the bottom of the deep.
Ultimately, a world run by self-indulgent silliness would be vicious, cynical, and would lose any sort of capacity to ask people into a civic space. Where every liberal is a caricature trolling from a mental ghetto, and where every person of media importance has no more substance than Homer Simpson, what sort of pointless, arrested adolescence would we be living in?
Perhaps the Fourth Crusade was the typical Western enterprise. Misconceived in false nobility, violent, righteous, easily diverted, and a wreck which we somehow survived. That was over eight hundred years ago. Now, with rich and growing cultures that have their own imperatives, their own vast arsenals, and no real need to uphold law and balance if our states abandon it, it is dangerous to indulge ourselves.
An American Suez that left the world to others, who inevitably would look after their own, might cure our self indulgent, decadent society. Some decent people seem to hope for something of the sort. But at what cost?
The capacity to save the free world starts with the citizens of the free world recognising the fix that politicians, the media, and our own personality disorders and consumerism have put us in.
We need clear, long-term and strategic policy, and much smarter politicians. We could start by recognising some journalists as circus entertainers and encouraging others who bothered to do a professional job.
The image at the top of this blog is of a painting by Pierre Denys de Montfort, which has often been used to illustrate the story of deep sea Kraken.
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