Psychoanalysis is outdated. If you really want to learn about yourself, take over a popular blog for a few days, scribble away about the odd ideas that no conventional publication would ever let you air, and wait about twenty minutes for the flood of e-mailed corrections, ass-kickings, character judgments, and other miscellaneous reactions that you’ve so roundly earned in certain cases and in other cases don’t deserve.
My half-fanciful conversation-starter notion that it’s high time we let terrorism change our way of life has gotten the most mail so far. So as to make ourselves a trickier target and perhaps recivilize our blasted rural landscape I called for (among other things) a decentralization of social power and infrastructure and the repopulation of our small towns and cities. Many of you responded by calling me an idiot, which is accurate enough in general, and some of you sensed an anti-urban bias in what I wrote. Well, I don’t have such a bias. Living in Montana hasn’t caused me to hate New York but to appreciate it in ways that those who live there day-in and day-out may not be able to. Dwelling in the country sucks sometimes. It gets lonesome and boring and when you make a wave it sloshes around forever in the small tidepool until you can hardly walk downtown without getting glares or snickers. It’s also very peaceful, relatively inexpensive, and markedly hassle-free, liberating much personal time and energy. It doesn’t take half an hour to mail a letter here or to obtain a driver’s license renewal. I like Montana in some ways and don’t in others, but we land where we land in life and we make the best of it.
Would spreading out consume more energy, though? A lot of you say that it would, but I’m not sure. The kind of shift I’m talking about is not towards more suburban sprawl but towards a revitalization of real towns that used to have sidewalks and drugstores and movie theaters and were, in fact, dense miniature urban clusters. Until Wal-Mart came along, that is. Living in such places and working in them would be no more wasteful of energy, I’d wager, than our current practice of staging massive two-way daily commutes into major cites.
The next largest stir I’ve caused so far resulted from my saying that politics bores me. I meant a certain kind of politics, based on media-driven “wedge issues” such as the Ten Commandment business and so on. Such controversies are calculated, I feel, to whip people up into frenzies of contribution-making, petition-signing, and opinion poll-answering that steal away energy from our actual lives to power the professional political establishment. I like to talk about politics myself some, which is why I’m doing this blog, but the politics that interests me arises out of people’s real situations and on-the ground-concerns. It doesn’t issue from the fax machines of lobbyists and party hacks. We’re playing their game when we jump each time they bark at us and maybe it’s time to act deaf next time they do and, as I stated, talk about ourselves instead of about what they’d prefer we talked about. Like whether John Bolton is an easy boss.
Finally, a few journalists have written me to say how dare you “impugn” our profession by saying that we sometimes hold back the juiciest stories in order to maintain our close relationships with the people we’re reporting on. Well, tough. I’ve seen it happen. Journalists should be outsiders, period. Let the insiders come to us or be ignored and forgotten. But let’s not cater to them, embroiling ourselves in their careers and doing favors in return for other favors. It’s not the politician who ought to be covered by term limits, it’s the reporters, especially if they can’t resist the temptation to be accepted by the folks they ought to be offending consistently.
– posted by Walter
The Dish 