Say what you will about those libertarians, they sometimes do decent work. In a discussion of the extrajudicial killings of Americans deemed by somebody or other to be terrorists, Nick Gillespie dissects the angsty journalism-school intellectualism of Michael Tomasky and briefly describes the pathetic toadyism of Touré.
But, further to my readings of online self-help literature, I find I must diverge from the libertarians in one key area, namely, I have gradually come to the conclusion that mindless, self-serving sycophancy is more disease than moral failure. So…I’ve been thinking that maybe I should quit complaining and instead lend a helping hand to the Tomaskys and Tourés of the world. In furtherance of that typically noble goal, I’ve begun to put together a new 12 Step program for American journalists and political TV personalities:
The 12 Steps of Ball-Lickers Anonymous
1. We admitted we were powerless over our need to lick the balls of powerful men—that our tongues had become fuzzy and mildewy.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could remove this unseemly compulsion.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of something other than the hairy, pendulous sacks we worship.
…
It’s true that I envision something of an empire—treatment facilities, halfway houses, a dedicated publishing house—but my heart is in the right place (of course it is), and I think this new approach is just what America needs…for its safety and security.
Bim,
If I agree with some pundit, is he my leader or my co-conspirator? Tomasky and Touré can’t lead me, since I haven’t read MT since he left Cif and I have no idea who Touré might be. So they can’t be responsible for my opinions, even though these may be very much like theirs (how would I know?) But say I picked them up today, read them and liked what I read: would they be leading me then? Quite possibly, in some senses.
To the extent that we actually live in a network of feedback loops, anybody we listen to a lot will be both an originator and a reflector of information. But while we do at least partly live in such a network, almost none of us live in exactly the same one, and the information that any of us amplifies and repeats to the rest is anything but consistent from listener to listener (and not very much under the control of the amplifier).
For instance, yours of 5:50PM on Feb the 8th: there is original information there, a story none of the rest of us is likely to have heard. But that’s unlikely to be all we get from it, and most of the rest of what we get from it is nothing you put in. Let enough people read it and some will hear, “Bim don’t like cops: yea!” And some will hear, “Bim don’t like cops, which is what I’d expect from a disgraceful site like this one.” And some (this part I’m sure of) may only think, “So that’s what Bim has been doing, instead of bringing RPOS-enabled wit to the ‘ready, fire, aim’ thread as we expected (and deserve).”
So I’m pretty sure that what we call punditry is maybe 9,642 parts feedback to one part original information – and as for how much of that original information is what the author intended to put there…
I would have thought that the drone memo would have produced almost no reaction at all. My reasoning (if anyone had made me spell it out) would have been:
–Everybody who is inclined to care about the drone war already knows that it’s going on; anybody who is just hearing about it would be an outlier among outliers.
–And since it is going on, and nobody denies that it is going on, it is obviously the national policy that it be going on. Therefore the fact that it is national policy cannot be news to any non-outlying reader of punditry, and therefore a memo stating that what is obviously the national policy is in fact the national policy can’t be a surprise (much less a revelation) to just about anybody at all.
–And since policies are always written down for the instruction of those who are expected to pursue them, the existence of something very much like the very memo that has emerged is simply de rigueur. (Of course, not everybody knows that. Some people have never worked for very large organizations, much less for governments, and may not know that when lots and lots of people are expected to do something, somebody always writes the policy down. But even so, why would learning about the ancient and universal practice of writing down what we expect people to do be a shock, much less a source of outrage, to anybody?)
So that’s what I would have thought, and I would have been wrong. Because, against all reason, the thing is news. News that, if one believes what one is told, is actually changing opinions, exactly as though people had not been told there was a drone war going on until a few days ago. Bizarre. Amazing, in fact. But there you have it.
So what do we make of it? There’s only one thing I know for sure that has changed recently. I wouldn’t have expected it to make that much difference, but something has made a whole lot of difference, and this is all I can come up with – so here it is.
The electoral element has momentarily disappeared. Or if not disappeared, receded, and with it, the impulse to impose an electoral context on one’s thoughts about national policies – at least on those national policies that aren’t still matters of large-scale political contention.
If that is what’s happened, it’s a very good thing. Because the drone war isn’t going on because conservatives like it (much as they mostly do). It’s going on because about 80% of self-identified liberals approve it. 80%. That’s a lot. That’s way more than like the Affordable Care Act. That’s way more than would endorse anything approaching meaningful gun control. Now, I think I know why 80% of self-identified liberals are – or have been – okay with the drone war (I’ve even rattled on about it, right here, for pages and pages at a time). Given that they did, no power on earth could stop it. It is enormously encouraging that something appears to have changed that renders thinking about whether we ought to be doing it possible on a large-ish scale. Even if it’s not so easy to identify what that something could be. What remains unthinkable to me is the notion that any pundit, anywhere, could ever have had much of anything to do with making anybody like the drone war once, or turn against it now, or stop anyone from turning against it if that’s what people are suddenly inclined to do.
I haven’t read that thing (I’m not sure I can cope any more with journalism school navel-gazing: I never went to one, never did any kind of course in it) and I don’t know who Toure is either.
But I think there’s a fundamental difference between punditry and commentary (although in the US media particularly, there’s a great deal of the former and bugger all of the latter).
Punditry, it seems to me is simply stating (with appropriate degrees of amazement and self-congratulation, and as though it’s ‘new[s]‘) something that, if the readers had a) kept up, b) been paying attention and c) actually thought for themselves for a minute or two, they would already know and, as Nat says, wouldn’t therefore surprise them or astonish them in the least.
Greenwald is (I really have come to thoroughly dislike that guy!) a perfect example these days in the Grauniad.
Commentary, on the other hand, is (or should be?) writing about something so that a reader gains some new perspective on something that perhaps had no reason to impinge on their senses until then; or broadens a discussion.
The other essential difference I think too ought to be that commentary should start from a base of information, knowledge or experience; whereas people punditise (punditate?) from a starting point of none of those.
A pundit, thus, can write for weeks and weeks about whether people think black is really blue; whether science has found blue light particles that are indistinguishable from black light particles; the ‘controversy’ as to whether light is a wave or a particle; whether black light really exists, or is it actually ultra-violet; whether the US Department of Offense is developing blue-light lasers or black light lasers to shoot down Korean red light laser-bearing satellites, and so on and on and on.
Only because, someone, somewhere, casually wrote once that they couldn’t distinguish a black sock from a dark blue one by candlelight. Commentary would merely point out that’s not uncommon, and the answer is either electric light, a visit to an opthalmologist, or buying brighter coloured socks.
Am I thinking on the right lines here?
Natasha,
Thank you. As usual, I agree. And especially with this:
Deep down, it’s not as if I expect everyone to be angry, contrarian and anti-authority. Nor would I like it if they were. A little more independence and idiosyncrasy…sure. A little less sycophancy and hypocrisy…yes, of course.
Sometimes I just can’t write much anymore, and I tell myself I’d like to focus on the more personal stuff anyway. But the rage and indignation are compelling; sometimes they seem more alive than nearly anything or anyone else…
Squirrel,
The pundifferentiation of sock color is worrisome, and it’s not too soon to propose an at least conditional blue-black duality of sub-shoe footwear if that would put an end to it. But it may already have gone too far. Thanks to you, it’s probably already a meme (and did ever a word deteriorate as fast as that one?)
There’s still enough decent commentary on the sports pages of US papers that it isn’t a complete surprise to find it. Unfortunately, one has to care a little about sports to enjoy most of it. But sometimes a sportswriter crosses over into other realms and keeps to the higher standard for a little while (Tom Scocca being a good example, and before him, Hemingway).
I have been asked (through an obscure back channel) to justify my assertion that 80% of self-described liberals have supported the drone war. I can’t find the summary of polling which, months ago, left me with that impression — but I do see that yesterday, the Washington Post put the portion of liberal Democrats supporting it at 77%. Yesterday. So I ain’t taking it back. And I’m willing to concede that as many as a dozen of these people hold that opinion because some pundit told them they ought to – maybe two dozen, but only because I’m tired of arguing the unprovable.
That doesn’t mean that I deny a connection between those 77% of self-described liberal Democrats and the rarefied world of pundimonium: not at all. It’s just that the flow of conversion moves in the opposite direction of what is usually (and carelessly) proposed. If a consultant is someone you hire to borrow your watch so he can tell you what time it is, then a pundit is someone hired to convince readers that they’re geniuses: by feeding them back their own opinions. A mostly harmless breed, for a while: just as kudzu was, for a while. But the cure isn’t reform, which would imply the possibility of useful pundoliferation. The cure is exile, but only because it’s so much more humane than extermination.
To be fair to Tomasky, his long pieces in the NYRB count mostly as reasoned, and reasonable, commentary. The blog is much more from the hip, much more like a guy in a bar shooting the shit. But then that’s sort of what pundit type blogs mostly are, aren’t they? A guy in a bar shooting the shit, just without the bar. I’m pretty sure the alcohol content, at least of most of the commentators, is at least as high as it would be in a bar. Or else drunk merely on solitude and anonymity.
And who is to say that democracy does not, in the main, consist of a lot of tipsy people in a lot bars talking out of their arses at the tops of their lungs, who are either shouted down, or shouted up, or ignored or lionized or ridiculed or given free drinks or spat upon or given taller stools, and then- every now and then an election. A pause (ten or twelve minutes or so) then the shit shooting starts all over again.
i guess what makes Tomasky ‘angsty’ and ‘intellectual’ in Nick Gillespie’s view is that he actually makes and effort not to baldly make stuff up. Which effort alone probably puts him on the long list for a pulitzer when you compare him to plenty of other ‘pundits’ with far larger readership. What I don’t get is whose balls in particular Bim supposes he is licking on so these days. Hillary’s? Aren’t his politics more defined by who he doesn’t approve of or is disappointed by? Which seems to be just about everyone at least some of the time and Southern Republicans all of the time. Of course there is always the notion of ball licking as proved by not addressing stuff that ought to be addressed. But that could also just be disinterest or plain blindness. Which seems to me the much likelier impetus.
Unless I missed something crucial here? I do read his blog, but not all the time.
Bluth,
As I said, I’m not au courant with MT’s blogging. But I have no doubt that he saw his job at Cif as, “Hey, people, let’s kick this one around for a while. Here, I’ll start…” Which often led him to deliberate, somewhat impish provocation. (“I know you and you and you will disagree with this, but can you really argue your position?”) That’s what made it fun. For me, anyway.
But there’s no doubt at all that he takes his NYRB gig far more seriously, and really does try to rise to the level of commentary.
Okay, okay, I was being unfair. So I’ve decided to quit hoping to encounter comment/analysis from some American version of Constance Garnett or Sir Kenneth Dover or whoever. There is surely a place in the world for your average American journalism-school graduate…
I know exactly what I’m doing, of course, and while I don’t see it as particularly pretty, we all like to whip up a nice pork-product sandwich from time to time.
Bim,
Why on earth would you want to meet Constance Garnett anywhere this side of the Pearly Gates? (And there only if you were assured a better seat at the table…) The woman who singlehandedly turned all of 19th century Russian literature into the homogenized work of one minor Edwardian hack? The so-called translator who, when she didn’t understand enough Russian to get the literal sense of what she was “translating,” simply left the hard passage out?
All glory to Pevear and Volokhonsky! Death to the memory of that precious old pretender, the Preventer of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and, especially, Gogol for generation upon generation of innocent English-speaking readers…
Oh, come on, Natasha, Constance was wonderful. (Nobody’s perfect.)
τί ἐστιν ἀλήθεια?
Whatever. Copleston maybe?
Bim I’m enjoying trying to imagine a Daily Beast Blog from Copleston. Something with a headline along the lines of, say,
τί ἐστιν ἀλήθεια? Truth, Bim, ain’t got nothing to do it — even bad taste and lazy scholarship can hit bits of it by accident. As Constance proved over and over again. But Copleston don’t raise too many hackles chez moi; at least, not too many for a Jesuit…
Bluth (and Natasha, now that I see yours),
Yes, definitely!
It’s all just an epistemic thing, I realize, and there’s no fighting progress. Tina B., Tomasky and Touré no doubt deserve their time in the sun too. And the same can be said for Rush and O’Reilly. So be it. Evagrius and Nietzsche were madmen and their afflictions will be described in the DSM V, which will in turn lead to ICD-9 codes to be used by healthcare providers when they submit their bills. Sooner or later Paul Krugman and Ann Coulter will weigh in…
I think we’re on the right track.
Evagrius, yet! All I remember about him is he left town real fast for fear of his mistress’s husband. And discovered that horniness impedes placid contemplation. Neither of which sound all that crazy to me. And Nietzsche wasn’t the least bit nuts till he flat out collapsed, which he did suddenly and completely, after his last book came out — which means nobody’s ever read a word he wrote while impaired. And equating Krugman with Coulter and Tomasky with Tina B is uneasy-making: maybe just for me, but there it is.
Something is vaguely reminding me of a Monty Python sketch, where Karl Marx, Mao Tse Tung and Che Guevara on guests on a quiz show — and the answer to every question is something like “Wolverhampton Wanderers.” Which is a good thing, I hasten to add. If I don’t remember more of it, it’s because I was laughing so hard.
Scowl
For Elizabeth Gilbert
More later. I am a sick man…. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe I have a sore throat and a mild fever…