The Dish

Reading through some of the letters blasted my way, I’ve discovered a form of prejudice that I didn’t know existed until just now. The mere fact that I live in Montana has drawn, from some, such wild bile and spittle that I’m shocked. And it’s hard to be shocked these days. One guy, some nut, said he was tired of being lectured on morality by people from the sticks — people who think of New York as “Jew York City.” What would that be called? Knee-jerk anti-anti semitism? This stupid business of classifying one another according to state-of-residence is exactly what I’m complaining about when I say that political conversation nowadays has gotten awfully tiresome in certain aspects. This red-blue thing isn’t real: it’s a grid put down on the landscape by lazy pundits in order to foster a conflict that isn’t there so the poeple who profit from conflict can work their way with us. It reminds me of the 1990s, when Clinton blew the so-called “Militia Movement” into a threat much larger than it was (turn your guns on Osama, dumbass)and used it as a pretext to set his snipers on hermits in Idaho and religious separationists in Texas.

Here’s what Montana’s like, if anyone’s interested. First, it’s one of the most urbanized places in the country, where most of the people cluster up together due to lack of water in the landscape. It’s full of back-the-landers from the 70s, populist out-of-work miners in cities like Butte whose ancesotrs bloodily started the union movement, ranchers and farmers who keep the land open for their hay and wheat and cattle instead of just selling out and cashing in so second-home types can build their gated developments (though there are more and more of those), and refugees from places like LA who’ve taken their equity out of booming housing markets and put it into modest houses so they don’t have to work in cubicles 24/7. We’ve got a vicious drug problem — crystal meth — and a lot of other contemporary ills that keep us from being the lazy wooded paradise full of smug evangelicals that others picture us as. We legalized medical marijuana last year and if there’s a governing political culture it’s live and let live and don’t make too many rules, because people just break rules, which means more police, etcetera, and a cycle of hypocrisy by which everyone condemns the neighbors for doing pretty much the same things they’re doing themselves. And as state constitutions go, ours is as progressive as they come in terms of civil rights, outdoing the federal constitution.

– posted by Walter

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

I saw yesterday that Norman Pearlstine, an editorial honcho at Time Inc., just recently told a New York audience that the guarantee of anonymity granted to Karl Rove in the Valerie Plame kerfuffle wasn’t justified by the value of the info that Rove disclosed, confirmed, or whatever. He’s right, I suppose, but that’s not what interests me about this whole affair, whose very presence in the news – and especially on the front pages and magazine covers and at the top of broadcast after broadcast – wasn’t justified by the underlying info, as evidenced by the cessation of this coverage before most of the main issues have been resolved.

The story got the play it did, I think, because it cast the journalists involved in a coveted, heroic, old-fashioned role — as crusading truth tellers, researchers, and promise keepers. They dig for the facts, and as they dig they stand up to the highest powers that be, meanwhile putting their words of honor on the line as a way of reassuring anxious sources. This is a flattering notion in a period when the reality is just the opposite.

What big-time Washington journalists largely do these days, in my experience, is to get as close as possible to power, socially and in every other way, while maintaining the legal fiction that they aren’t implicated in its workings. They send their kids to school with power’s kids, they marry it, they go to parties with it, they jabber with it on the phone, they watch the game with it from adjoining seats, and, as a natural result, they keep its confidences — until, that is, some secret leaks out anyway and they have to pretend that they didn’t already know it but will get to the bottom of it immediately or that they knew it all along and just weren’t telling their audiences because they were bound by some lofty code of ethics that allows them to do the jobs they rarely do. They’re profound double-dealers, is what I’m saying, who pay for their access, influence, and by going along and getting along until it’s simply too embarrassing not to. They reserve their best stories for one another, publishing them only when they have to and feeling very nervous when they do, because it might screw up the Great Arrangement. And afterwards, once the secrets are on the street, it often comes out that they were common knowledge among the people whose jobs it was to tell them.

Quick story. In the mid 1980s I went to a fancy Fifth Av. party for Senator Ted Kennedy. There were journalists there and lots of other bigwigs. The only time I’d seen Kennedy before was at a campaign stop in 1979 when he’d been seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. He might have won, but I realized at the party that it would have been a terrible thing because he was the drunkest human being I had ever encountered in my life, and chances were that it hadn’t just started that night. Sure, he already had this reputation, but it was a vague reputation, all myth and gossip, while the intoxicated wreck in front of me was as vivid and specific as a car wreck. How many thousands of times, I wondered, had such behavior as I was witnessing been quietly countenanced by journalists, and how much other wild, scary stuff pertaining to other movers and shakers who had a shot at ruling the free world, say, had they deftly slipped into their back pockets in return for the right to attend such parties as this one?

I was a kid then, in my early twenties, and I couldn’t answer that question. Now I’m older, I’ve seen more, and I can. A certain kind of job in journalism can only be kept if its holder, for the most part, refrains from doing it.

– posted by Walter

I’ll start with something that’s been bugging me but that I haven’t had a forum to write about: this idea, almost universally agreed upon, that Americans mustn’t let terrorism change our way of life. I disagree. Our way of life had its problems before Osama appeared, and we probably could have stood to change it then, but now that we have the added impetus of being collectively attacked in ways that we never dreamed about in past years, I think it’s high time that we did a few thing differently that maybe we should have done already
Like, say, spread out a little geographically. I live in Montana, way out in the country, near towns that have been abandoned and depopulated and could use a few resources from the threatened cities that have made themselves sitting ducks for sabotage by building their infrastructures so dense and tall that a pellet gun could knock them over. There’s a price for supersaturating small areas with people, wealth, and technology, and now we’re paying it by trying to secure in thousands of ways targets that are inviting as they come. This folly of rebuilding the World Trade Center proves that we’d rather be proud and stubborn than safe. Here we go piling up the blocks again just to show how bloodied but unbowed we are instead of learning our lesson and reshaping things. It’s not the de-urbanization of the cities that I’m dreaming about here, it’s the re-urbanization of the towns — places where strangers can easily be spotted and people can’t be vaporized by the hundreds merely by stuffing a few bombs into some backpacks.

IDEAS, PLEASE: Maybe I don’t sound serious. I am. At least in this respect I am: responding to terrorism with inflexibility isn’t going to work, I fear, and unless we start entertaining notions as wild and possibly half-baked as situating our treasure and our people in places where they don’t invite assault we’re not only daring the bad guys to bring it on, we’re forgetting that the beauty of our society is that it can mold itself to new realities rather than march in lockstep like the Redcoats toward all-too-predictable catastrophes.
I guess I’m just weary of hearing that beating terrorism means doing what we’ve always done but a whole lot harder, with more firmly gritted teeth. That’s what Iraq’s about, it seems to me: fighting the Gulf War over again, but this time with feeling. It’s like rebuilding the World Trade Center and calling it The Freedom Tower or whatever. Why not call it the Lack-of-Imagination Tower? And while we’re at it, why not call The Energy Bill that does almost nothing to address the fact that our fuel supply is being pumped directly out of our children’s veins and arteries while enriching our enemies’ war chest The Out-of-New-Ideas Bill?
I’m a fiction writer and a book critic, not a professional political journalist, and the behavior of our leaders nowadays reminds me of Captain Ahab or King Lear and doesn’t prompt thoughts about issues and philosophies. I think I know megalomania when I see it, in literature and also in life, and I think I know too when when a plot has swerved toward tragedy. It happens when events reveal a flaw in the basic approach of the protagonist and he reacts to the bad news by clinging to that flaw more strenuously. Aside from the Bill of Rights, which protects our very ability to change, let’s change what we can as quickly as we can and see what works and what doesn’t in this fight instead of going all stiff and stern. That’s our advantage, after all: we can revise our doctrines and they can’t.
Ideas, please, the kookier the better. Mine, as I’ve said, is scatter, reduce our profile, go to work in our homes as much as possible instead of converging every morning on Wall Street and Times Square, and let them try to hit a moving target. And don’t build that foolish Freedom Tower thing. Change doesn’t mean the terrorists have won. Not changing does. Ask the Redcoats. Or better yet, ask the Native Americans. They stood tall too, once, here on the very spot where I’m sitting now.

– posted by Walter