Monday, September 08, 2003
The Widening Gyre
It's become something of a press meme lately to point out the credibility problem most of the leading Democratic contenders have when criticizing Bush over an Iraq policy that they themselves voted for. True enough, and they deserve all the criticism they are getting. But what about the press itself? Where was the press in the run-up to catastrophe? Taking handouts from the White House, that's where, uncritically printing anything and everything uttered by the most brazen liars ever to occupy it. Are we likely to hear a mea culpa from the Fourth Estate? Only if we demand it.
For at least a decade now there has been an ongoing, slow-motion collapse of the system of checks and balances that is supposed to ensure that the ship of state does not go on the rocks. Democrats have been selling out their constituencies for campaign cash, the Left has been trafficking in its own fantasies of "moral clarity" by indulging in infantile tantrums, and even decent conservatives have opted for their short-term political survival by remaining silent as their own movement is hijacked by people who make a mockery of every value that honest conservatives espouse.
But politicians are expected to be venal and self-serving if given the chance. Above and beyond their nonfeasance and misfeasance, aiding and abetting it, has been the press, which with the occasional honorable exception, spent much the last decade watching, with cynical indifference at best, and amusement at worst, the apparatus of democracy being repeatedly attacked, often in broad daylight, until, in November 2000, the last, perhaps fatal blow fell. (Like tens of thousands of others, I was in D.C. on Inauguration Day to bear witness to the crime, but we could have been the proverbial tree falling in the forest for all the coverage the celebrity press gave this unprecedented event.)
When you let thugs stab the beating heart of democracy, you can hardly affect surprise when things later don't go so well.
The culmination of this is the present unfolding catastrophe, which required the moral connivance, in one way or another, of nearly every sector of civil society. There is going to be no easy exit. When the smoke clears and we finally survey the wreckage left by the vandals who visited this on us, there needs to be reckoning, not just for the participants, but for those who stood by and said nothing. This will be, I fear but also hope, our Kitty Genovese moment.
We must not let it happen again.
For at least a decade now there has been an ongoing, slow-motion collapse of the system of checks and balances that is supposed to ensure that the ship of state does not go on the rocks. Democrats have been selling out their constituencies for campaign cash, the Left has been trafficking in its own fantasies of "moral clarity" by indulging in infantile tantrums, and even decent conservatives have opted for their short-term political survival by remaining silent as their own movement is hijacked by people who make a mockery of every value that honest conservatives espouse.
But politicians are expected to be venal and self-serving if given the chance. Above and beyond their nonfeasance and misfeasance, aiding and abetting it, has been the press, which with the occasional honorable exception, spent much the last decade watching, with cynical indifference at best, and amusement at worst, the apparatus of democracy being repeatedly attacked, often in broad daylight, until, in November 2000, the last, perhaps fatal blow fell. (Like tens of thousands of others, I was in D.C. on Inauguration Day to bear witness to the crime, but we could have been the proverbial tree falling in the forest for all the coverage the celebrity press gave this unprecedented event.)
When you let thugs stab the beating heart of democracy, you can hardly affect surprise when things later don't go so well.
The culmination of this is the present unfolding catastrophe, which required the moral connivance, in one way or another, of nearly every sector of civil society. There is going to be no easy exit. When the smoke clears and we finally survey the wreckage left by the vandals who visited this on us, there needs to be reckoning, not just for the participants, but for those who stood by and said nothing. This will be, I fear but also hope, our Kitty Genovese moment.
We must not let it happen again.
