Even seen from 30,000 feet…

…I can’t pass as a journalist


The brief journey West ends, and I get back to the land of the wired only to discover this pie-faced critter still has a j-o-b that pays better than the guy who cleans up scuff marks in the Phoenix Sky Harbor men's room using a tennis ball on a broomstick.

And I find that…irritating

Life Lessons From Watergate

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: June 5, 2005

The most interesting part of this Deep Throat business is Bob Woodward's description, in Thursday's Washington Post, of the state he was in when he met Mark Felt. He had graduated from Yale and was finishing a tour in the Navy, but he had no idea of what he wanted to do with his life. He was plagued by "angst and a sense of drift," and stricken by "considerable anxiety."

...

Places like Washington and New York attract large numbers of ambitious young people who have spent their short lives engaged in highly structured striving: getting good grades, getting into college.
...

Their elders tell them to take their time and explore, advice that is of absolutely no comfort. Failure seems but a step away. Loneliness hovers. They often feel stunted and restless (I haven't moved up in six months!), so they adopt a conversational mode - ironic, self-deprecatory, postpubescent fatalism - that masks their anxiety about falling behind.
...

They are learning important lessons - for example, that the more successful a person is, the higher dose of daily flattery he or she needs to maintain psychic equilibrium - but they still don't see their own route to the top.

They find that the people who used to be just friends are now competitors in the frantic scramble, and the standard by which they measure their own climb. That loser who watched TV in dark rooms through college is now making a fortune writing screenplays.

Entering the world of the Higher Shamelessness, they begin networking like mad, cultivating the fine art of false modesty and calculated friendships. The most nakedly ambitious - the blogging Junior Lippmanns - rarely win in the long run, but that doesn't mean you can't mass e-mail your essays for obscure online sites with little "Thought you might be interested" notes.

...

For that is the purpose of Watergate in today's culture. It isn't about Nixon and the cover-up anymore. It's about Woodward and Bernstein. Watergate has become a modern Horatio Alger story, a real-life fairy tale, an inspiring ode for mediacentric college types…

First, I worry about BoBo writing to the young ‘uns and how (he seems to infer) talent perhaps takes a back-seat or at least rides in the side-car well abaft of “Entering the world of the Higher Shamelessness, they begin networking like mad, cultivating the fine art of false modesty and calculated friendships.”

Or as the grave and gravel-voiced announcer of every wannabe blockbuster movie puts it, “In a world...”

In a world where you stand atop the highest peak that journalism has to offer and shout to the world with every word, every inflection, “I am Mediocrity Incarnate”, is this perhaps BoBo’s veiled and piteous cry for help? A plea for some sort of journalistic intervention, to help this poor artless, craftless stooge for the Right Wing break free of the Golden Diaper that writing for the NYT has so obviously become so that he might move on with a more fitting and appropriate pursuit such as, say, grooming Bill Kristol and Bill Buckley like a theta male gibbon?

Is this just more embarrassing projection?

More terror the likes of which haunts talentless second-rater and approbation-junkie Peter Keating in “The Fountainhead?” given give hackneyed voice yet again?

Does it, finally, make him “Tell Tale Heart” nervous ---

(Aside...“ but why will you say that I am mad? My complete lack of even a basic aptitude for journalism had sharpened my may value to the NYT — not destroyed — not dulled it. Above all was the sense of ass-kissing acute. I kissed the brown-eye of all things in the heaven and in the earth. I bung-smooched many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Harken! and observe how gassily — how literarily club-footedly I can completely fuck up and deliberately miss the central point of the whole story.”)

--- knowing that the stubble Paul Krugman taps out of his razor after pruning the chin topiary for prime time appearances has more literary gift and honest craft than he.

And second, well lookey, lookey and see what the King of Killdeer media is trying to do. Badly.

“The most interesting part of this Deep Throat business is Bob Woodward's description, in Thursday's Washington Post, of the state he was in when he met Mark Felt.”

And

“For that is the purpose of Watergate in today's culture. It isn't about Nixon and the cover-up anymore.”

No, you fierce little decoy: It is about Nixon.

It is about the cover-up and all President’s Horses and all The President’s Men are desperately trying to make it otherwise.

Like leftover Cold War doomsday weapons, the gallery of Nixon-era ex-con thugs and liars and hacks are still ticking away. Still leaching their toxins into the watershed. Still spinning Nixon’s rotting corpse as they spun his morally rotting Administration while the Monster President shambled across the face of the Earth.

Nixon was a criminal of epic, Shakespearian proportion; the very lowest, most grotesquely mutant form of that uniquely American brand of Star Spangled Fascist impulse that is the engine that drives the Right Wing. That iron-flavored and jackboot-shod love of political Authoritarianism which, in this case, brought this country closer to tanks in the streets and martial law than any Presidency in history.

He was in every way the anti-American, and his power-crapulent henchmen and whores still bay and bark that No! NO! MacBeth was the fucking Victim and Hero here and MacDuff and the rest of the men who brought him down were the Villians.

Scumbags. Always were; always gonna be.

BoBo, I suspect, has another motive.

After all, what would become of hollow piñata “journalists” like him if the public ever got the scent of real NEWS back in its nose again? I mean Nixon was at least a criminal genius who took pains to hide his crimes. But this “Flowers For Algernon” Bush Administration relies heavily on pandering, prophylactic sponges like Brooks to safely soak up the scrutiny by passing as reporters, and relentlessly steer the countries eyes away from its many scandals and treasons.

And where would Bush and his orcs and Brooks and his fellow maundering drivel-jockeys be if the people ever woke up and remembered that it wasn’t always this way?