Today I Weep for Journalism

Last night I watched "Scarborough Country." I don't expect anything like unbiased reporting from the former Congressman turned "news man." Sad enough that he is featured prominently on a "news" network. Sadder still to hear him lament the sad demise of esteemed broadcast journalist Barbara Walters's reputation. Saddest of all to acknowledge that he is right.

SCARBOROUGH: Matthew, explain to people, if you will, that only know her through “The View” and through those interviews that she does on ABC—I guess “20/20” she‘s been doing for years—explain to people what a trailblazer Barbara Walters was and how hard she worked for her reputation, that Rosie O‘Donnell tatters every time she does something like this.

FELLING: Absolutely. It has been a shock to me that she‘s been putting up with this for this long. She is the patron saint. She is the woman that all female journalists since the ‘70s looked up to and said, “You know what? She can do it; I‘m going to do, too.”

She was perfection. She was the gold standard with regards to female journalists through the ‘80s, into the ‘90s. And now she‘s doing this Faustian bargain, where she‘s willing to put up with it, but only so far. And I do really think that Rosie‘s days are numbered.

I hate "The View." I've never understood what the seasoned news woman thought she was doing when she launched this show. For the trail-blazer who broke through the glass ceiling and proved that a woman could deliver news with the same sense of gravitas and dignity of her male counterparts, to be associated with a format that sounds more like a coffee-clatch than a news show, has always struck me as the ultimate come-down. "The View" seems almost designed to prove that women are biologically determined to be gossipy, shallow, and unserious. And now the show has reached a new low. Rosie O'Donnell's public feud with Donald Trump is playing out with all the dignity of professional wrestling.

Sadly this makes Rosie only slightly more ridiculous than the crop of talking heads scattered across the cable dial. Anchors no longer deliver news. They bloviate. From Bill O'Reilly's projection about everyone else's bias, to Tim Russert's pandering/badgering intensity, to Chris Matthews bullying and obsequious "I agree with you" brown-nosing. And while the left has its intellectually satisfying Keith Olbermann diatribes, one could hardly confuse his pontificating with objectivity. Wisdom and surprising literacy, but not objectivity.

The whole of broadcast news, which once held promise as a medium for disseminating information, has devolved into self-parody. It's a cheap carney side show which I half expect to start featuring geeks biting the heads off live chickens.

Fox News has gone through the looking glass with grammatically challenged spokesmodels, spouting McCarthyesque agitprop:

GRETCHEN CARLSON: You talk about the hostile enemy, obviously being Iraq, but hostile enemies right here on the home front. Yesterday Senator Ted Kennedy, proposing that any kind of a troop surge should mean there should be congressional approval of that. A lot of democrats not coming to his side on this. But obviously this is not going to be an easy sell on Capitol Hill, even if it’s not an easy sell to the American Public.

But tragically the rest of the industry has followed it through to the Red Queen's court.

None of this is news to blogosphere, I'm sure; which functions as one of the few watchdog venues for an industry which seems to have no adequate check or balance. But lately I find myself thinking back to the early days when a much missed Media Whores Online began its crusade to remind the Fourth Estate of its proud heritage. Watching Scarborough last night I came to the sad realization that the wreckage of Benjamin Franklin's legacy has declined still further and shows little hope of regaining the high ground.

Americans across the political spectrum confuse what can only be described as self-righteous indignation with refreshing honesty. Who wants the dry, impartial reporting of a Walter Cronkite or a young Barbara Walters, when they can get their factoids from carnival barkers and blond chippies in push-up bras? I'm left waxing nostalgic for a time when the empty-headed Bill Boggs and the crass Morton Downey Jr. represented the lunatic fringe of a profession yearning to be taken seriously. Today their antics seem tame by comparison.

What accounts for broadcast journalism doesn't belong on a "news" channel. It should be fought out in the Roman Coliseum, awaiting the thumbs up or thumbs down from Emperor Bush. Entertainment for the hoi poloi to distract them from our crumbling empire.

Once Again, It's the Oil Stupid

A tip of the hat to Chris Floyd for making my point and providing the proof. Anyone who thinks we are in Iraq for reasons other than oil isn't paying attention. While pundits scratch their heads; baffled by a President unconcerned with public opinion, rebellious generals, and defections in his own party, Bush and puppet-master Cheney just keep marching forward with their agenda. It's a kind of anti-politics, which must sound to seasoned politicos like a whistle only dogs can hear.

It looks like political suicide but it's simply the Bush Administration fulfilling the purpose for which it was installed, no matter what the peasantry thinks. Bush will have his "surge." Tony Snow has made very clear that no political process can prevent him.

Snow held out hope that the Democrats would come to their senses about opposing this but admitted it could even be a battle royal. But what about calls for the Democrats to halt the build up by denying funding? Snow admitted congress had funding control but also pointed out that the president could ultimately do what he wants. "You know, Congress has the power of the purse," Snow said, then added: "The President has the ability to exercise his own authority if he thinks Congress has voted the wrong way."

The reason is not mysterious. It's not just political tone-deafness, delusional thinking, or unbridled arrogance. It's that America's will is not invested in the ambitions of the oil barons at the helm. Floyd puts it into perspective.

The reason that George W. Bush insists that "victory" is achievable in Iraq is not because he is deluded or isolated or ignorant or detached from reality or ill-advised. No, it's that his definition of "victory" is different from those bruited about in his own rhetoric and in the ever-earnest disquisitions of the chattering classes in print and on-line. For Bush, victory is indeed at hand. It could come at any moment now, could already have been achieved by the time you read this. And the driving force behind his planned "surge" of American troops is the need to preserve those fruits of victory that are now ripening in his hand.

At any time within the next few days, the Iraqi Council of Ministers is expected to approve a new "hydrocarbon law" essentially drawn up by the Bush Administration and its UK lackey, the Independent on Sunday reports.

As per the Independent, big oil, whose front men are still squatting in the White House, is about to achieve the objective for which this war was launched.

Iraq's massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.

The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.

The Independent takes pains to point out that the warmongers have claimed from the beginning that this war was not being fought over oil.

Proposing the parliamentary motion for war in 2003, Tony Blair denied the "false claim" that "we want to seize" Iraq's oil revenues. He said the money should be put into a trust fund, run by the UN, for the Iraqis, but the idea came to nothing. The same year Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, said: "It cost a great deal of money to prosecute this war. But the oil of the Iraqi people belongs to the Iraqi people; it is their wealth, it will be used for their benefit. So we did not do it for oil."

Supporters say the provision allowing oil companies to take up to 75 per cent of the profits will last until they have recouped initial drilling costs. After that, they would collect about 20 per cent of all profits, according to industry sources in Iraq. But that is twice the industry average for such deals. [emphases added]

So now that the country lies prostrate -- war-torn, factionalized, economically crippled, with shattered infrastructure -- it's big oil to the rescue. They will help the fragile Iraqi government to harvest their oil, and for the favor they will take 3 quarters of the profit until they say they have recouped their costs. Such a deal!

I'm reminded of Tony Soprano explaining to his childhood friend why he's gutted his business in order to extract payment for gambling debts. Like the scorpion who's convinced the frog to take him across the river, he's stung him to death before ever reaching the shore. "It's my nature," he explains. The fictive version of the Ramsey Outdoor Store is lost and so it appears is the real-world Iraq. But not without providing enrichment for a criminal enterprise.

A Tale of Two Epidemics

The irony of two recent New York Times stories, running two days apart, was not lost on me. Today I learned that chunky, and even not so chunky, children are being tormented by weight report cards from their schools. Only Saturday I read that the fashion industry is struggling over the concept of weight requirements for their increasingly cadaverous models. Two sides of the same coin really; these twin epidemics of obesity and anorexia. And lost in the divide between them, any real concept of health.

You can never be too rich...

We have for too long equated "thin" with "healthy." I know far too many ideally thin girls who start their day with coffee and a cigarette, to buy into that notion. I've also known many heavy women who are far more healthy and energetic than their skinny counterparts. Such simplistic shorthand is based far more in lookism than in any real indicators of health and wellness. It does not address the prevalence of say, fitness freaks I've known who stopped menstruating in their twenties because of their lack of body fat. Some of them looked great, though.

This is certainly not to say that obesity is healthy; only that the issue is far more complex and subjective than can be addressed in standardized "report card." Such an approach can only exacerbate the self esteem issues that most girls and an increasing number of boys experience over body image. Just ask the mother of six-year-old Karlind Dunbar, profiled in the New York Times story.

The problem was the letter Karlind discovered, tucked inside her report card, saying that she had a body mass index in the 80th percentile. The first grader did not know what “index” or “percentile” meant, or that children scoring in the 5th through 85th percentiles are considered normal, while those scoring higher are at risk of being or already overweight.

Yet she became convinced that her teachers were chastising her for overeating.

Since the letter arrived, “my 2-year-old eats more than she does,” said Georgeanna Dunbar, Karlind’s mother, who complained to the school and is trying to help her confused child. “She’s afraid she’s going to get in trouble,” Ms. Dunbar said.

Mrs. Dunbar should be concerned as more and more girls succumb to a life-threatening body dysmorphia. The obsession with "thin" has spawned a generation of acolytes of "Ana."

They call her “Ana.” She is a role model to some, a goddess to others — the subject of drawings, prayers and even a creed.

She tells them what to eat and mocks them when they don’t lose weight. And yet, while she is a very real presence in the lives of many of her followers, she exists only in their minds.

Ana is short for anorexia, and — to the alarm of experts — many who suffer from the potentially fatal eating disorder are part of an underground movement that promotes self-starvation and, in some cases, has an almost cult-like appeal.

Followers include young women and teens who wear red Ana bracelets and offer one another encouraging words of “thinspiration” on Web pages and blogs.

Or too thin.

Then, as if conjured by the hallucinations of a thousand starving girls, a real-life Ana died of complications of anorexia. Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston, died of self-imposed starvation, sending a chill through a fashion industry already under scrutiny for parading skeletons down runways from New York to Milan.

The response from the fashion industry has been unsurprisingly superficial.

According to participants at the meeting, the recommendations are likely to include scheduling fashion-show fittings with younger models during daylight hours, rather than late at night, to help them get more sleep; urging designers to identify models with eating disorders; and introducing more nutritious backstage catering, where a diet of Champagne and cigarettes is the norm.

There are no plans to require models to achieve an objective measure of health like a height-to-weight ratio, which was imposed by Madrid in September, a move that brought much public attention to the issue.

I can't help but wonder if models were packing on the pounds like those at-risk school children around the country, if the response would be as blase. Methinks that in a an industry by whose contemporary standards modeling greats of time of yore -- such as Cindy Crawford -- would be considered real chunkos, the response would be far more draconian than the report cards embraced by public schools.

But here is the real tragedy. At both extremes of this weight dichotomy is the same problem: malnutrition.

Here, in the rural Southern Tioga School District, the schools distribute the state-mandated reports even as they continue to serve funnel cakes and pizza for breakfast. Some students have physical education for only half the school year, even though 34 percent of kindergartners were overweight or at risk for it, according to 2003-4 reports.

Even health authorities who support distributing students’ scores worry about these inconsistent messages, saying they could result in eating disorders and social stigma, misinterpretation of numbers that experts say are confusing, and a sense of helplessness about high scores.

“It would be the height of irony if we successfully identified overweight kids through B.M.I. screening and notification while continuing to feed them atrocious quality meals and snacks, with limited if any opportunities for phys ed in school,” said Dr. David Ludwig, director of the Optimal Weight for Life program at Children’s Hospital Boston.

So let me see if I understand the formula. Evaluate kids and be sure to tell them when they fail to meet the bar, then provide no real means for support or improvement. That sounds about right for the public school system.

None of this even addresses the problems of depleted soil and pesticide laden food that is poisoning overfed Americans and tearing apart our immune systems. We are a nation literally growing fat on deprivation; starving to death in the land of plenty.

It's the Oil Stupid

Robert Scheer writes that Ike was right and the Iraq war is not about oil, but about the military-industrial complex. Ike was right but Scheer's logic is flawed. His premise explains the plan for endless war and would be more appropriately applied the deceptively named "war on terror." But why Iraq? We could be fighting anywhere on trumped up reasons just to keep lining the pockets of war profiteers. Afghanistan is perfect terrain for bankrupting a national treasury. Just ask the former Soviet Union. It makes a very decent sink hole for our tax dollars and could be far more easily justified to the American people. Yet Bushco moved heaven and earth to convince us that we needed to leave Afghanistan on the back burner and open yet another theater in Iraq. It has been argued by many that our efforts in Afghanistan are collapsing, largely unnoticed by television cameras, because we shifted our focus and our dollars to Iraq. I don't know that the fight in Afghanistan was winnable. Again, the former Soviet Union might be a good place to start looking for that answer.

Make no mistake. We are in Iraq for oil. Not that there aren't numerous, intertwining agendas at work, including the interests of those military contractors and the many Congresspeople who live in their pockets. But "Occam's razor" dictates that it comes down to oil. Put the money aside for a moment and follow the logic. Iraq is sitting on the second largest proven oil reserve in the world and it's sweet crude. Both President and Vice are oil whores. They and most of their cronies -- including the much abused James Baker who helped place the dauphin on the throne -- owe the bulk of their fortunes to the oil industry. Yet pundit after pundit acts as if it's somehow too obvious to be true that oil is the key motivator for an administration that has been hell bent on getting into Iraq on any dubious rationale it could sell, since before it was even elected. Scheer's is just the latest attempt at pretzel logic to dissuade the reader from the most simple and obvious deduction.

Defining Deviancy Down

The MADD mothers have dumped Miss Teen USA. Thank goodness someone in this whole, ridiculous melee is capable of acting like a grown-up. Certainly no one can argue with the reasoning.

"In the past, MADD has teamed with Miss Teen USA to raise awareness about the serious and often deadly consequences of underage drinking. However, we do not feel, at this time, that Ms. Blair can be an effective spokesperson on underage drinking and will not ask her to represent MADD in future initiatives," Heidi Castle, a spokeswoman for MADD, said in a statement.

Full disclosure: I have no love for beauty pageants. I have this crazy, radically feminist notion that women should be judged by the content of their character. I know that pageant organizations have long emphasized the crucial role of talent and an abiding concern for world peace in their contests. Yes, the ideal woman can sing an aria, is congenial, and just happens to look great in a bathing suit. Pageants have to work very hard to elevate the idea of parading women around and judging them by their appearance above the obvious objectifying sexism. They do it by insisting on broader criteria that includes things like morals clauses. When Donald Trump gave Tara Conner a "second chance" he gave the lie to the whole business and reminded the world what beauty pageants are all about. Pretty matters. Character, not so much.

Madman in the Marketplace did an excellent job of putting this charade into a broader cultural perspective. There are different standards for pretty white girls from prominent families.

We like to say that we’re a land that believes in second chances, that if someone is sincere about changing their life we Americans will support and welcome them when they’ve picked themselves up, and we’ll do everything we can to help them. This is, of course, utter bullshit. You get second chances if you’re of the right class, the right race, the right connections. Otherwise the full weight of our government and rapacious tabloid media will be brought down on your head....if a darker pretty girl in it had been tested positive for drugs, she’d be far more likely to be facing charges than a stay at a celebrity rehab center. Our enormous prison system is bulging with people who did the same things that Miss Perfect American is reported to have done. Unlike her, many who get caught doing drugs or acting out in public are put into the system, and once in the odds of them getting a second chance disappear...

It would surely be grand if our culture genuinely supported the idea of treatment for addicts, rather than punishment. But there is a difference between the draconian nature of our criminal justice system and simple consequences. Tara Conner faces neither. I doubt Miss Conner is an addict. She's more likely a kid acting out. But lets say for the sake of argument that she really is an addict in need of treatment. If so, Trump has done the worst possible thing he could have done if his intent was to help her. He's enabled her addiction by depriving her of the opportunity to experience the consequences of her behavior. She violated an agreement. She should have been fired. Period.

Perhaps that's what Rosie O'Donnell was on about in her latest bout of verbal diarrhea. I suppose she means well when she tries to remind viewers of "The View" about simple decency. It's unfortunate that she can't seem to do it without equally indecent ad hominem attacks that will likely land her in a slander suit.

I seem to remember a time when public figures acted with a certain level of decorum. I was very young then, I think. It all seems like a memory in my dreams now; an America that strove for a certain cultural standard, even it never quite achieved it. News was presented with a sense of gravitas by men like Walter Cronkite, rather than the screaming hysteria of a Rosie O'Donnell or Bill O'Reilly. And beauty pageants were shiny, child-friendly spectacles, whose winners usually slipped into a kind of quiet, wholesome obscurity. I don't know. Maybe it was Utah.

Slow News Day

Oh my God! I agree with Tony Snow. Saying that out loud makes me want to wash my mouth out with soap. But when he quipped that the DC press whores must be having a "slow news day," for all their fascination with Laura Bush's skin cancer lesion, I have to agree. Isn't there anything else going on in the world? Here's a little of the exchange, as reported in the New York Times Blog:

Q: Tony, can you tell us about Mrs. Bush’s skin cancer? How is she doing? And how was the decision reached not to disclose this publicly until questions were asked?

Mr. Snow: Yes, I talked to her a couple of minutes ago. She’s doing fine. And she said, “It’s no big deal, and we knew it was no big deal at the time.” Frankly I don’t think anybody thought it was the sort of thing that occasioned a need for a public disclosure. Furthermore, she’s got the same right to medical privacy that you do. She’s a private citizen; she’s not an elected official. So for that reason she didn’t disclose it. But she’s doing fine, and thank you for your concern.

Pressed as to whether Mrs. Bush would begin advocating for screening for skin cancers, Mr. Snow said:

“She’s also had colds, she’s had the flu, she’s had stomach aches –”

Q: But she could still — it could be a platform.

Mr. Snow: You guys are really stretching it. I mean, it is now officially a really slow news day.

Laura Bush's health concerns, either serious, or, as in this case, un-serious, are not my business. I don't want to know. I'm simply not afflicted with such voyeuristic tendencies.

One of my old college roommates used to quip that, "Every time the cat farts in the White House, it's 'news'." This fascination with the daily comings and goings in the halls of power comes at the expense of coverage of things the public actually does need to know. There are two overlapping and interrelated problems that have led to the perception of the nation's capital as the navel of the world. One is the very structure of news gathering. Gaye Tuchman used the term "news net" in her book "Making News: The Construction of Reality." She explains that news gathering relies heavily on a system of beats and bureaus. You can only catch fish where you throw your net, and the nets are thrown at public institutions which are deemed newsworthy and credible. If a public figure says it, it's a "fact" by virtue of conferred status. If a public figure does it, it's news, even if it's painfully boring and irrelevant to the lives of ordinary Americans.

The second half of the problem is the disappearance of those very beats and bureaus from all over the country. Thanks to the consolidation of mass media, local newspapers from across the nation have slipped quietly down the memory hole. Many have been bought out by competing papers and shut down. Others have been replaced by conglomerates which package tasty, little McNews bites and publish them under the mastheads of small "local" papers. The "Media Monopoly" as Ben Bagdikian calls it, now consists of 5 corporations which own the vast majority of newspapers, television outlets, radio, book publishing, and film. Five corporations own the entire info-tainment business. And their focus on the bottom-line has meant, among other things, that the beats covered by reporters have dwindled to a few major focal points. The result is a well-fed beltway press corps and metaphorical tumbleweeds blowing across the rest of the newsworthy world.

There is still another problem, exemplified by this type of reportage that I'm at pains to explain. That of the DC press corps itself, which elevates the trivial and minimizes the deadly serious, even in its given purview. Where was this aggressive questioning during the build-up to the Iraq war? Anyone with an ounce of sense could have driven a truck the gaps in logic provided by DC officials, in their ever-shifting rationales for bombing the hell out of a crippled nation. Where was it when a male prostitute was sitting among them, gaining unprecedented access to the aforementioned halls of power? Where was it when it fell to David Corn at the ever-vigilant Nation to point out that Bob Novack had no business knowing that Valarie Plame Wilson was in the CIA? Why does the press corps have to be clubbed over the head by the blogosphere to notice crimes and misdemeanors in their midst, but positively obsess over an in-office procedure, performed under local anesthetic. It would be funny if the net result for the public at large weren't so serious.

Editors Note: Both Ben Bagdikian's "New Media Monopoly" and Gaye Tuchman's "Making News" are available in Curmudgette's Reading Room, although the latter is currently out of print and available only from resellers. Still, highly recommended.

Who's Uncivil?

George Will has joined the beltway circle jerk over Jim Webb's testy exchange with Bush. The consensus view of the chattering class seems to be that it was Jim Webb who was rude. I guess when you're the President you can't ever be in the wrong. It's good to be the King. But George Will was also disingenuous in his reportage of the exchange. He left out his majesty's classically Bushy rejoinder. As reported in The Hill:

At a private reception held at the White House with newly elected lawmakers shortly after the election, Bush asked Webb how his son, a Marine lance corporal serving in Iraq, was doing.

Webb responded that he really wanted to see his son brought back home, said a person who heard about the exchange from Webb.

“I didn’t ask you that, I asked how he’s doing,” Bush retorted, according to the source.

Webb confessed that he was so angered by this that he was tempted to slug the commander-in-chief, reported the source, but of course didn’t. It’s safe to say, however, that Bush and Webb won’t be taking any overseas trips together anytime soon.

Of course Will left out Bush's statement. Reporting the things Bush says makes him look bad. The media has been largely complicit in covering for his personality quirks. If he's reported as he is, he looks downright un-Presidential. It is not Jim Webb who has shown "patent disrespect for the Presidency." It's the child-man currently occupying the post. A civil person would have accepted the answer he got to an unwelcome question and moved on. Bush's response was that of a boorish control freak. Once again he put his morally stunted personality on full display and the punditry is too frightfully clever to notice his obvious defects.

George W. Bush has done more to degrade the office of the Presidency than any leader in memory; certainly more than Bill Clinton's or Jack Kennedy's sexcapades could have. At least they knew how to behave in public. Only Bush could get himself snubbed by third world leader. Beyond the echo chamber of the beltway, there's an entire world well aware that the leader of the free world is no longer deserving of respect.

Joe Lieberman: Extortionist

It didn't take long did it?

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut said yesterday that he will caucus with Senate Democrats in the new Congress, but he would not rule out switching to the Republican caucus if he starts to feel uncomfortable among Democrats.

As I pointed out during the CT primary season, Joe Lieberman is not a "nice guy." He's an unbridled egotist who will stop at nothing to get his own way; a passive-aggressive whiner whose non-threatening, girl-haired, appearance, obscures a damaging visciousness.

In the primary he openly tried to extort Democratic voters. Now it's Senate Democrats whose narrow victory could be overturned with a flip of his bony wrist. He'll hold anyone hostage to his ambitions, whether its CT voters, Senate Democrats, or the entire, massive-change-wanting country.

Judith Miller Worries About Blogger Integrity

Judith Miller has stopped drinking the Neocon Kool-Aid and is now clear headed enough to worry about the damage bloggers can do.

The blurring of entertainment and news and the relaxing of journalistic standards can be seen in online bloggers who are critical of people without giving them an opportunity to respond or who don't post corrections when they learn that what they have posted is wrong, she said.

"I'm worried about bloggers," she said. "(A post) starts as a rumor and within 24 hours it's repeated as fact."

Gosh. I don't know if we can parrot the talking points of shady political insiders and land the nation in an illegal war, but then we don't have the New York Times as a platform for our unverified rumors do we?

I think it's a little late in the game for the credulous Miss Miller to talk about journalistic vigilance.

The Dumbening

Just when you thought it was safe to be an American again... You know I almost didn't write this entry; being as it is a rumination on the decline of American civilization. I've been so heady since the election. We have turned a corner as a nation and perhaps put the brakes on our steady slide towards cultural entropy. Tuesday night I felt relief... even optimism. Then I read this:

As gas prices have plunged since topping $3 a gallon this summer, a startling shift is taking place in the car market. Hybrid sales are slowing and SUV sales are speeding up.

Come again?

That’s right: the megawatt popularity of hybrids is dimming and Americans are rediscovering their favorite automotive guilty pleasure, gas-guzzling SUVs.

Yes. Like a coop of chickens slipping into blissful slumber when their heads have been forced under their wings, Americans giddy on an artificial, transparently political, dip in gas prices, jump behind the wheels of those hideous, resource gobbling, behemoths. SUVs exemplify everything that is wrong and stupid in this country; the gluttony, the ignorance of history, the lack of foresight, the love of style over substance, the persistent belief that perception is reality... For instance, ask the average SUV driver "why?!" and he will usually say "safety." But SUVs are not safer. They are more likely to roll over, they lack a number of the safety features of smaller vehicles, and they are far more dangerous to everyone else on the road. Could there be a more perfect symbol of the mentality that has pushed this country to the precipice? As long as I feel safe who cares if I actually am safe or if I pose a mortal threat to everyone else; how many little cars I crush or how many tiny nations are turned to rubble in my pursuit of an illusive sense of security.

I've been pondering "the dumbening" of America for some time, but particularly over the last couple of months. Throughout our search for a new home and a difficult move, it was glaringly apparent to me that we are a nation in decline. As the housing boom goes bust, the country is littered with prefab catastrophes waiting to be bought. We saw listing after listing of cosmetically adorable lemons. Not only are they made of particle board and spit, almost to house they are designed with air conditioning/forced air, gas heat units. Cheap for the builder, expensive and inefficient for the home owner. Heat Rises. Cold falls. Does anyone not know this? Having experienced the wonders of forced air in a couple of rentals -- that delicious combination of dry, baked air, and the total lack of actual warmth -- and paid the attendant energy bills, I turned my nose up at 99.9 percent of the listings. I explained to our baffled realtor that to buy a house with a forced air system, just as energy prices are going through the roof, is a little like saying, "Hey gas is $3 a gallon. Time to buy an SUV." The joke fell flat and after reading Newsweek, it's pretty clear why. People keep buying their cardboard dream houses with the heating vents in the ceiling, and they keep buying SUVs.

We found our smart, efficient little bi-level. We love the house, but the move was horrifying. Why? The dumbening. Before moving we hit all the wickets, including setting up our new phone service. But even after two emails confirming that our phone would be turned on the day we moved in, it was not to be. So I called Verizon (on my cell, obviously) and was told that they had been unable to process our order. It took over half an hour and 3 different customer service people to arrive at the reason. They didn't have our old phone number. Why they didn't have it I still don't know. Why they didn't contact us to get the necessary information I still don't know. I do know that even after providing it so they could process the order, they still could not turn on our phone for another 3 weeks. I received a number of mutually contradictory reasons for this, but my favorite was "the weather." I guess it's never rained in the North East before and they were just flummoxed by it.

When I rented my first solo apartment over 15 years ago, a single phone call had my account set up and my phone turned on the day I moved in. During those three weeks while I parceled out my anytime minutes like canteen water in a desert, I had plenty of time to contemplate how it could possibly be that in the "age of communication" getting phone service has gone from nearly effortless to an herculean feat. I had no phone, no internet... and no television. My Sony lies in pieces in our new garage. Why? The dumbening. How else to explain professional movers so idiotic that they piled my husband's weights on top of it. More remarkable, they apparently delivered it into storage as a crushed pile of rubble and left it there without comment, signing off on the shipment like everything was cool. The loss and damage of this move was the worst I've experienced, and thanks to the wonders of bureaucracy it will be years before I see even partial recompense, but that I guess is not a terribly new phenomenon.

What is new, and I why I think America is dumbening is that no one seems to notice or care anymore that everything works like crap. What amazed me more than anything about my laborious conversations with Verizon was the seeming astonishment of the customer service reps that I was, how say, dissatisfied, at being forced to wait for 3 weeks for phone service through no fault of my own. Gone are the days when the customer was always right and sales people cared about your business. Today's service industries are typified by a prevailing sense that they are entitled to your money and a customer's unhappiness with either product or service is his problem.

It almost doesn't surprise me that Verizon reps seemed shocked by my lack of complacency. Complacency has become the hallmark of American culture. Now, I'm as thrilled as anyone that Dems have taken back both houses of Congress and it truly gives me hope, but look at just how bad things had to get for the tide to turn. Torture scandals, the loss of habeas corpus, unauthorized wiretaps, open cronyism, an illegal war; this litany of criminal offenses goes on. But what finally turned public opinion en masse? The lesson for today is that if you want to create massive political shift in this country, a President publicly shredding the Constitution is not enough. What you really need are some good sex scandals. Not just any sex scandals either. They have to be GAY sex scandals.

We have pulled ourselves back from the precipice and I have hope again. Hope that the self-loathing-gay-Republican-led zeitgeist will translate into a broader reawakening of an American populace grown far too comfortable in an environment of utter wrongness. For against this backdrop of unprecedented government excess and criminality, what I see ambling about town is a people whose biggest concern is which $2,500, flat panel television to dig themselves deeper into debt with. Because as credit card interest surpasses usury rates, you surely cannot have enough debt. (I'm not kidding. Since that beacon of Democratic ethics Joe Biden green-lighted bankruptcy reform, I'm waiting for the revised customer agreement notice that tells me that they can break my legs if I'm a day late on payment.) It's worth it because every American home should have a Fahrenheit 451-style "wall." And if cable rates are rising several times the rate of inflation, so be it. What's important is that we all know what's happening on American Idol.

So, yes, I'm optimistic. But with a Democratic Party that seems hell bent on snatching defeat from the jaws of an historic victory, I still have... concerns. I worry that we are a nation grown fat and happy on a literal and metaphorical diet of empty calories. Couch potatoes staring dumbly at ever larger, more crisply defined, images of pundits telling us what we think and feel, until our critical thinking muscles have gone utterly flaccid. Last Tuesday was a reminder of what can happen when the public flexes. We have a choice now between continued vigilance and a consumer culture more intoxicating than the waters of Lethe.