Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

“Prior to Paddy Chayefsky, most of us were considered to be two-headed hacks who worked around the clock... Paddy gave us stature.”

-- Rod Serling talking about writing for early teevee.

Early teevee started off remarkably similar to early blogging in lots of ways. Teevee was seen as the disreputable bastard child of other, older forms of mass media. Teevee couldn’t compete with the lavishness of cinema, the popularity of radio or the prestige of The Stage. Early on, it crawled around as a technology in search of a purpose, and a soapbox in search of a street corner and a crowd.

But it did find its voice. It did crack open doors through which a Chayefsky, Serling, Reginald Rose, Tad Mosel, and a handful of others could roar.

This is the crucial ingredient that social/political/media blogging either lacked from the beginning, or lost along the way: a collective sense of its own identity as an artistic enterprise that was strong enough to persist and sustain its best and brightest.

But before it had a chance achieve a critical artistic mass, grow three heads, wings and purple horns and become something altogether different, blogging streaked from Bohemian to rebellion to “show me your ROI” in the wink of an eye. There is plenty of policy-wonkery in bloggerdom. Plenty of number crunching and poll taking. Scads of political activism and fundraising. More than enough blast emails every damned day exhorting us to “Tell Joe Lieberman To Stop Being A Prick/Sign My Thingie Now!” Enough pick-up-and-push aggregators flinging headlines at us to last several lifetimes.

But for all of that, political/media blogging grows “stale, flat and unprofitable”, because while it groans under the weight of oceans of angry data, it still does not know how to Tell. A. Story.

Because it is too much “Survivor” and “Meet the Press”, and not enough "Twilight Zone".

Because while it has all the smarts in the world and a good, strong back, it lacks a soul.

A poet’s soul.

And lacking the poet’s soul, it does not understand that the greatest of all the unforgivable failures of the Mouse Circus is that it is bad fucking theater. Every week, the same troupe of aging, lackluster players mouthing the same, hackneyed, meaningless lines. Every week a Pro Wrestling puppet show where no side ever actually wins, no actors are considered to have been too fucking disgraced to lose their place at the trough, and any possibility of genuine emotion or real, passionate debate has been scripted out of existence.

The Mouse Circus is not about keeping you informed or engaged; the Mouse Circus is a meticulously crafted weekly mortality play designed to hammer home the futility of fighting the Beltway’s collective wisdom. Again and again and again it turns its cameras over to a clammy little clubhouse of serial liars, war criminals, the ghoulish offspring of and apologists for war criminals, and various other political and cultural misfits and miscreants to rub our face in the fact that normal rules don’t apply to the denizens of that world.

And it is their sophisticated comprehension of this reality at the level of theater – their artistic sensibility -- that marks the rare genius of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report”.

And so when human Ipecac like Joe Lieberman show up for the 387th time on “Meet the Press” to wax pious about health care, David Gregory conspicuously avoids asking Holy Joe about he and his wife’s financially incestuous relationship with the insurance industry.

Because it would be rude to embarrass one’s fellow performer in that way.

And it would break the fourth wall.

Or something.

So instead we get…


Lieberman: We should cut the debt at any cost. Even of it destroys the country, let it be written in the Book of Judgment that we went broke spending money propping up banks and disastrous wars, and giving tax cuts to rich people, and not wasting on the smelly working classes to aren’t smart enough to figure out how to take legal bribes from insurance companies.

Gregory: Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, should Timmy Geithner lose his job?

Hutchison: I’m sorry, but I don’t understand your question, so I’ll assume you just asked me about tax cuts. Yes, we should be cutting taxes!

Gregory: OK…but should Timmy Geithner lose his job?

Hutchison: This stimulus package is making Jebus mad! And just before his Birthday!

Gregory: Look, it’s a simple question. Timmy Geithner? Loses his job?

Hutchison: This stimulus package is wrong. This health care bill is wrong. Also we need to cut some more motherfucking taxes, bitches!

Lieberman: May I just add that we need to replicate everything we did in Iraq over in Afghanistan.

driftglass: You mean bribing people to stop killing us? Well, it worked on Wall Street…

Hutchison: Yadda yadda yadda…bringing enemy combatants to Murrica…giving terrorists the rights of Americans…every freedom loving country… yadda yadda export terrorism…making us less safe…. yadda yadda..something about the giant flag pole up my ass.

Over on “Fox News Sunday” Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn) was saddened by the arrogance of trying to fix the whole system instead of doing little, tiny, itsy-bitsy edge-nibbling which is all the suckweeds in the GOP are capable of doing. So long as the edge-nibbling is confined bashing trial lawyers. And cutting taxes. And screwing working people. So show Lamar a bill that figures out a way to use working people to kill trial lawyers and convert their remains into tax cuts…and he’s all for it.

Shorter Alexander: If your boat has five gaping holes in it, you should only plug one of them. Preferably with a trial lawyer.

Kit “Foghorn Leghorn” Bond (R-CSA) was wild about the dangers of excessive gummint control. And evil gummint takeovers. He warned that the “2,000 page bill is full of “Must” and “Shall”…”

Bad, scary words indeed. Word you certainly wouldn’t want the Evil Gummint throwing around.

Even though that Gummint was elected by the people, giving that Gummint something called “the consent of the governed”.

Still, “Must” and “Shall” are words that real patriots would never use to lard up Important Gummint Legal Thingies. like, say, the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…

Ok, well, what’s one little “Shall” between friends? It's moral Mulligan; like having a gay fling while you were in college and drunk. And isn't the First Amendment sort of a practice amendment anyway? Not like the Almighty Second Amendment

A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Well, OK, but at there are Guns in there, and Guns trump bad, scary words every time. Like when we used to play Rock, Paper, Scissors, Shotgun in school.

Moving on.

The Third Amendment

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be…

Hol it right there. Everyone knows this troop-hating amendment was a bone that we Southron boys had to throw to the Liberal Yankees to get Negroes counted as 3/5th of a person.

The Fourth:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue,

Uh…I’m pretty sure the Patriot Act finally fixed this one.

The Fifth

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case...

WTF?

The Sixth

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law...

(Bond flips hurriedly through the Bill of Rights, then though the Constitution.)

Jesus, Mary and Reagan!

(Squirts a quart of Purell onto his puerile little paws)

It’s all over this thing like a diaper rash on Vitter’s sweet little ass!


Over on “This Week” two Name Brand Republicans -- Tom Coburn and and Marsha Blackburn – and one Off Brand Republican-lite -- Ben Nelson -- took turns drowning out the only real Democrat and Health Care reform proponent on the show -- Debbie Wasserman Schultz – by yelling “Big Gummint Is Comin’ To Get You!” in their Outside Voices.

Nelson: I don’t want a big, Gummint-run public option that would threaten the profits of the insurance companies that own my balls.

Coburn: Everything run by the Gummint is a failure. Everything the Gummint does sucks. All Gummint health programs are disasters.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz: Medicare.

Coburn: No! Medicare sucks! Everything the Gummint has ever done or will ever do sucks!

Lastly, Stephanopoulos drop in a mention that Tom “Hordes of Teenage Lesbians are Gaying Up Oklahoma’s Proudly Hetero High School Bathrooms” Coburn has been accused of acted as consigliore/bag-man for has pal and “C Street” Alpha-and-Omega House bunk-mate Senator John Ensign in the scheme to pay hush money to Ensign’s staffer and friend – Doug Hampton -- whose wife Ensign was fucking.

Needless to say, everyone involved in this Republican glue-sniffer summer stock version of “Double Indemnity” is a Family Values Christian Conservative Republican

American Conservatives: Putting the “MONY in “Sanctimony” for the last 40 years.

Later, the daughter of War Criminal and Profiteer Dick Cheney smugly lectured everyone about how we should be conducting ourselves in Afghanistan. But not to worry; no one was rude enough to mention – even tangentially -- her grotesque, blood-soaked hypocrisy on-camera.

On ”The Chris Matthews Show”, Tweety wanted to know how Obama gets “independents” back? As usual, all quotes are not as they literally were, but as they should have been...

Joe Klein: The problem is, “independents” are friggin morons. They think a “public option” means a gummint bureaucrat shooting grandma and using her body to block access to their doctor.

Matthews: “Gummint”. Mmmm. Independents sure don’t like that word.

Klein: “Independents” are like the Taliban. There are 3,4,5 different groups in there. One of them are the “Ron Paul” independents, who want to see every form of gummint larger than rural high school student councils burned to the ground.

Matthews: Jobs? Independent voters blame Obama for everything and give him credit for nothing.

Anne Kornblut (who will be seen 60 minutes later on FoxNews Sunday, because there are only 11 pundits in the whole wide world): “Job summit” is one step up from “task force”.

And a hearty laugh was had by all.

Klein: There is a really strong populist tide against “bigness”.

"Bigness" apparently being defined here as any number that you need to take your socks off to count to.

David Ignatius: Voters want results. The want performance

Then…Optics!

Noron: Presidents never get anything done on foreign trips. The only thing that matters are the pretty, pretty pictures.

Matthews: Pictures are remembered more than words.

Shorter Matthews: "Whales, Mr. Melville? No one is interested in whales."

Sadly, Tweety and the rest of them may be right. Pretty pictures matter more than words. Slogans beat ideas, bumper stickers beat slogans, and stupid is just better for business because a nation of yahoos are easier to con into electing demagogues and cutting their own economic throats than a nation of critical thinkers.

This is fatal to freedom and ruin for the middle class, but the rich and the powerful always hated those institutions anyway.

Maybe the important battles were lost long ago. Maybe we’re fooling ourselves, wagging our little quills and pixels in the face of Titans, fighting at the margins over scraps.

But never doubt that there was a moment in time when an infant medium at least pretended to be as interested in art-as-social-commentary as it was in attracting traffic and ad revenue.

When serious writers made a living doing their work.

When serious subjects were treated seriously,

When "writing something you really believe in" and defending it on that basis was not treated as naive, and being openly smart on teevee was not treated like public masturbation.

When artists like Rod Serling were willing to use the very last episode of Playhouse 90 that was ever committed to film ("In The Presence of Mine Enemies” starring a young Robert Redford playing “Sergeant Lott” with Aryan master-race perfection) to tell America in the starkest terms possible about how evil men find a "morality in hatred":

Captain Richter: Nations can feed on it. They can find their strength in it. They’re nurtured by it, Lott. ... But there must be an object of hatred. Suddenly, in front of us, out steps a Jew. He can be all things to all men: money-lender, Communist, world banker, revolutionist, an unassimilated foreigner in our midst. And so we hate him. And in the process, we're unified. ... The Jews dies so that we can live. That is morality.

When people smoked on-camera, and a member of the Wallace family committed acts of journalism on the air every week in a way that didn't shame his family.

Imagine if you will…


(h/t Phil Rosenthal)