Sunday Morning Comin’ Down – Part 2 of 3

Down These Mean Blogs Edition

Because first and foremost, a blog is, duh, a “web log”, I used the occasion of the eve of the 3rd Blogiversary of my little pie wagon here to take a stroll down memory lane.

Down into the deep weeds of spam-choked early-posts to see what my first few Sunday Morning Coming Downses looked like to me is 2005.

There I found The Usual Suspects:

Friedman and BoBo both off the leash in a Sunday Morning, and not a Krugman or an Ivens or even a Dowd to be seen on any of the Major Networks. Just the lazy, Bizarro Norm Peterson and Cliffy Claven of the New York Times.

I found the “Everybody is Wrong” meme in full flower here:

“Bob Schieffer: “Is there some kind of compromise that is being worked on...”

Bob don’t get it, and I'll get to that in a longer piece on what I’ll call the “Tyranny of Artificial Bisection” at a future date.”

And here:

On ABC: George Allen versus “Kapo” Joe Lieberman. Nothing like a Fair-n-Balanced debate between Republican Senator Imbecile and and Republican Senator Palpatine.

Lieberman: “The problem is extremists on both sides...”

“The moderates in both parties...” can re-form a middle and blah blah blah.

Allen: “I was listening to Joe, who I normally agree with most of the time...”

And here:

Juan Williams on Fox: “Extremists on both sides...”

There was John McCain (Republican Senator from Teeveeland) flip-flopping madly over matters of personal rectitude:

And as regards Dear Old Tom DeLay and his reeking-so-bad-it-makes-Baby-Jesus-cry scandals, McCain opines further, "I'll take him at his word" and "I'm not is a position to comment on DeLay."

So...Big John, how exactly did you vote on the Clinton Impeachment again? I believe part of what you said went something like...this,

”Although I may admit to failures in my private life, I have at all times, and to the best of my ability, kept faith with every oath I have ever sworn to this country. I have known some men who kept that faith at the cost of their lives. I cannot--not in deference to public opinion, or for political considerations, or for the sake of comity and friendship--I cannot agree to expect less from the President.”

(From Bill Shakespeare who was, most definitely, not making the rounds this Sunday Morning:

He was my friend, faithful and just to me;
But Brutus says he was ambitious,
And Brutus is an honorable man.)

To my absolute lack of surprise, three years ago the transformation of McCain from Bush Roadkill into George Walker Bush’s long-lost political goodwife was well underway as well;

And then McCain has a hearty laugh about how effectively Bush ass-raped him in 2000.

Hehehe! Lookit the funny draft dodgy creep who ran a fixed-bayonet attack right at genuine war heroes. Impugning their service at war and in POW camps, slandering their good names, during the period when Der Bush was apparently too knee-walking drunk to bother to show up for the cushy job his rich daddy poached for him. Letting some poorer, smarter, low-born thrall go off to the jungles and suck up bullets.

There was the discovering that, man, after three-years, I can haz repeated myself sometimes :-)

Man! Bush-dick must taste like Belgian Chocolate! So yummy, that you just can't get it out of your mouth!

Oh the shame.

There were Conservatives lying about why they refused to do oversight:

Roberts explains that, well, we're very busy, y'know. Very, very busy. Got confirmations. Judges. Social Security. Doing our taxes. Cleaning out the gutters. Buncha stuff. But don’t you worry, America: we'll get ‘round to it eventually, one of these fine days.

And, yes, these are the same people that all but shut the government down to impeach Bill Clinton over some consensual fellation.

Iraq was waiting dfor me back there, dressed up in Bobo Brooks' retina-frying pink tie:

On to BoBo who sez (conflating Afghanistan, Iraq, the eternal War on All Evil Everywhere, America's bold new experiment in Evangelical Empire building and torture in that sassy, intellectually dishonest way he does) we’re in danger of getting paralyzed by the stupid things we do. He pooh-poohs atrocities as par for the course. As silly things that happen in every war. Comparing to WWII, and that was a “Good War”, and bad things happened there too, and we should all STFU about these so-called “atrocities”.

When BoBo decides to be spit Bush’s dick out of his mouth and be anything but a dishonest stooge for the Right, somebody give me a call.

You fucking vonce. When we went to war with Germany, our actions didn't scream that we were REALLY making war on the entire Christian World.

When we went to war with the Axis, we didn’t decide that invading Russia was the Number One Priority, and that Berlin and Rome and Tokyo could be jobbed out to locals before the job was half-done.

When we went to war with Hitler, our leaders didn’t shrug off actually defeating Hiter as irrelevant, and that letting Der Fuhrer prance around the Alps unmolested was OK.

Oh, and your 1,346 day time limit on getting to pretend that Operation Eternal Clusterfuck in any way remotely resembles WWII just ran out last Thursday...but thanks for playing our game!

And as I read through those older posts made by a younger me and wondered what this post today would say, I realized that I’d been thinking and writing about something like today's piece for a very long, sad time.

Thinking about how broken it all is.

Shattered, really. Not clean fractures that can be splinted up and healed. Not a dinged chassis or cracked cylinders, but everything. Everything having to do with the way our media delivers information to us is irreparably contaminated. This is a fact to be faced because we have to get past the idea that we can “fix” our media, because its cannot be fixed in any conventional sense.

Looking back across the last three years I was struck by the profound…airlessness and bloodlessness of the entire Mouse Circus enterprise. The sense that there are great, costly engines of commerce and telecommunications being brought online every week to execute in minute detail a complex ritual that has no bearing on the good of the nation or the lives of its citizens whatsoever.

And in a democracy, if the Machineries of Media are not serving the commonweal in any meaningful way, then what in the fuck are they doing?

Because while it is perfectly true that we are literally dying for want of a place to talk about the vital issues of the day, what we see in the media are not "Issue" programs and they never will be.

The mistake was ours, I suppose; thinking that the Mainstream Media exists (theoretically, at the very least) to serve some public interest, but that it has fallen from a state of grace.

Hence we carp and bitch about it. Hell, I know I do. We try from narrow perch on the outermost edge of the mediaverse to salvage, critique and perfect it because we know that our civilization and our future depends on it, and we believe that what is shoveled out to us on cable, or in print, or on Sunday Morning is the misfiring of a malformed version of our Better Media Selves.

But it is not.

What we are watching instead is a form of episodic teevee fiction. What I’ll call, for lack of a better term, Political Procedurals; little Beltway dramas purring along perfectly, performing their function.

Like police procedural -- the crime in act one; the reveal in act four -- the cast never changes.

The beats and cadences of the action never changes.

Occasionally there is a Special Guest Star to liven up the metronomic predictability of it, or someone with genuine talent -- a David Mamet or a Harlan Ellison -- is brought in to write a really muscular episode, but at the end of the hour the franchise rolls on and nothing has changed.

And because it is a franchised form of genre fiction where predictability is the product, the rules of the Star Trek Universe apply:

1. Poor Ensign Whothefuck will always perish in Act One.
2. Technobabble and sneering super villains ensue.
3. And at the denouement, the Core Ensemble emerge -- unmussed and untouched – to joke and jape as the final credits roll.

Except of course in the real world, it is not some random redshirt that is doing the dying, but real human beings.

Human beings betrayed and sacrificed by monsters who are not attacking our government, but are our government.

Monsters who – off camera -- have cocktails and exchange pleasantries and carpool with leaders of the Mouse Circus.

Which is why the Broders and Bobos and Tweeties and Russerts will never change; because they will never see themselves as villains. In their eyes they are, at worst, just actors, performing their parts in a wholly artificial piece of fiction.

They have not failed the news media, because we have no news media.

What we have is the journalistic equivalent of the automated house in Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains”.

From Wikipedia:

This story is about a house in an apocalyptic world, and the technology that resides there, unfazed by the damages of nuclear war. The house is fully automated and sensitive to its owners and their requests and needs. Unaware of the absence of its owners, though aware of other external and internal disruptions, such as the weather and birds attempting to land on it, it continues to serve the dead family.

Throughout the story, the house makes breakfast, disposes of it uneaten, and performs various domestic tasks. Only one living thing makes an appearance in the story: the family dog, which had been slowly dying from the radiation of the nuclear war. It makes its way back to the house only to die; its corpse is then swiftly removed by the house's automated cleaning robots.

The author at one point mentions the shapes of the family's silhouettes which are permanently burned onto the side of the house (as was exemplified at Hiroshima) when they were vaporized by the nuclear explosion which wiped out all the surrounding civilization, leaving radioactive glowing debris that can be seen for miles away at night.

The Mouse Circus and its animatronic brethren on cable and in print are not news or journalism: they are players in weekly episodes of a very specific of subgenre of fiction; actors who continue continued to perform their function perfectly long after their function has become pointless and grotesque.

Now in the realm of lit’rary pilferage, if there is anything lower than a thief who steals from the weak and helpless, it the thief who filches from the dead.

Which exactly what I will do in Part Three of the behemoth, without apology or excuse, because over 60 years ago Raymond Chandler sat down at his typewriter with something to say about writing and damn if it isn't as urgent today as it was then.

End Part 2 of 3