An assistant to a famous conservative opinion-meister once described her boss to me, a little breathlessly and in the kind of value-neutral mode one hears in this milieu, as being one of the funniest, most intelligent, high-energy people she’d ever met. I believed her. To do what he does must take a special and terrifying skill set. Did she agree with his politics? She demurred — she did and she didn’t. It was kind of beside the point. He was kicking much ass. I immediately felt a little gauche for asking about her politics, like a guy who, in the palace, asks how much the footman makes.
The first requirement of greatness is that one stay in the game. To stay in the game, one must prove viable; to prove viable, one has to be watched; to be watched, one has to be watchable, and, in the news business, a convention of Watchability has evolved — a tone, a pace, an unspoken set of acceptable topics and acceptable relations to these topics — that bears, at best, a peripheral relation to truth. What can be said on TV is circumscribed, subtly, by past performance, editing, and social cues, and, not so subtly, by whether one is invited back.
This entity I’m trying to unify under the rubric of The Megaphone is, of course, in reality, a community tens of thousands of people strong, and like all communities, it is diverse, and resistant to easy generality, and its ways are mysterious.
But this community constitutes a kind of de facto ruling class, because what it says we can’t avoid hearing, and what we hear changes the way we think. It has become a kind of branch of our government: when government wants to mislead, it turns to the media; when media gets hot for a certain story (i.e., senses a ratings hot spot), it influences the government. This has always been true, but more and more this relationship is becoming a closed loop, which leaves the citizen extraneous. Like any ruling class, this one looks down on those it rules. The new twist is that this ruling class rules via our eyes and the ears. It fills the air, and thus our heads, with its priorities and thoughts, and its new stunted diction.
This is a ruling class made of strange bedfellows: the Conservative Opinion King has more in common with the Liberal Opinion King than either does with the liberal and conservative slaughterhouse workers toiling side by side in Wichita; the Opinion Kings have friends in common, similar ambitions, a common frame of reference (agents, expected perks, a knowledge of the hierarchy of success indicators, a mastery of insider jargon). What they share most is a desire not to be cast down, down from the realm of the rarefied air, back to where they came from.
There’s a little slot on the side of the Megaphone, and as long as you’re allowed to keep talking into it, money keeps dropping out.
Seasons pass. What once would have evoked an eye-roll evokes a dull blink. New truisms, new baselines, arise. A new foundation, labeled Our Basic Belief System, is laid, and on this foundation appear startling new structures: a sudden quasi acceptance of, say, the water-boarding of prisoners, or of the idea that a trial is a privilege we may choose to withhold if we deem the crime severe enough.
9.
At this point I hear a voice from the back of the room, and it is mine: “Come on, George, hasn’t our mass media always been sensationalistic, dumb, and profit-seeking?”
Of course it has. If you want a tutorial on stupid tonality, watch an old newsreel (“These scrappy Southern Yanks are taking a brisk walk toward some Krauts who’ll soon be whistling Dixie out of the other side of Das Traps!”). We were plenty able to whip ourselves into murderous frenzies even when the Megaphone was a baby, consisting of a handful of newspapers (Hi, Mr. Hearst!), and I suppose if we went back far enough, we’d find six or seven troglodytes madly projecting about a village of opposing troglodytes, then jogging down there, hooting pithy slogans, to eliminate it on the fallacious power of their collective flame-fanning.
But I think we’re in an hour of special danger, if only because our technology has become so loud, slick, and seductive, its powers of self-critique so insufficient and glacial. The era of the jackboot is over: the forces that come for our decency, humor, and freedom will be extolling, in beautiful smooth voices, the virtue of decency, humor, and freedom.
Imagine that the Megaphone has two dials: One controls the Intelligence of its rhetoric and the other its Volume. Ideally, the Intelligence would be set on High, and the Volume on Low — making it possible for multiple, contradictory voices to be broadcast and heard. But to the extent that the Intelligence is set on Stupid, and the Volume on Drown Out All Others, this is verging on propaganda, and we have a problem, one that works directly against the health of our democracy.
Is there an antidote?
Well, there is, but it’s partial, and may not work, and isn’t very exciting. Can we legislate against Stupidity? I don’t think we’d want to. Freedom means we have to be free to be Stupid, and Banal, and Perverse, free to generate both Absalom, Absalom!, and Swapping Pets: The Alligator Edition. Freedom means that if some former radio DJ can wrestle his way to the top of the heap and provoke political upheavals by spouting his lame opinions and bullying his guests, he too has a right to have a breakfast cereal named after him. American creative energy has always teetered on the brink of insanity. “Rhapsody in Blue” and “The Night Chicago Died” have, alas, common DNA, the DNA for “joyfully reckless confidence.” What I propose as an antidote is simply: awareness of the Megaphonic tendency, and discussion of same. Every well-thought-out rebuttal to dogma, every scrap of intelligent logic, every absurdist reduction of some bullying stance is the antidote. Every request for the clarification of the vague, every poke at smug banality, every pen stroke in a document under revision is the antidote.
This battle, like any great moral battle, will be won, if won, not with some easy corrective tidal wave of Total Righteousness, but with small drops of specificity and aplomb and correct logic, delivered titrationally, by many of us all at once.
We have met the enemy and he is us, yes, yes, but the fact that we have recognized ourselves as the enemy indicates we still have the ability to rise up and whip our own ass, so to speak: keep reminding ourselves that representations of the world are never the world itself. Turn that Megaphone down, and insist that what’s said through it be as precise, intelligent, and humane as possible.
THE NEW MECCA
PUT THAT STATELY PLEASURE PALACE THERE BETWEEN THOSE OTHER TWO
If you are like I was before I went to Dubai, you may not know exactly where Dubai is. Near Venezuela? No, sorry, that is incorrect. Somewhere north of Pakistan, an idyllic mountain kingdom ruled by gentle goatherds? Well, no.
Dubai, actually, is in the United Arab Emirates, on the Arabian Peninsula, one hundred miles across the Gulf from Iran, about six hundred miles from Basra, eleven hundred from Kabul.
You might also not know, as I did not know, what Dubai is all about or why someone would want to send you there. You might wonder: Is it dangerous? Will I be beheaded? Will I need a translator? Will my translator be beheaded? Just before we’re beheaded, will my translator try to get out of it by blaming everything on me?
No, no, not to worry. Dubai, turns out, is quite possibly the safest great city in the world. It is also the newest great city in the world. In the 1950s, before oil was discovered there, Dubai was just a cluster of mud huts and Bedouin tents along Dubai Creek: the entire city has basically been built in the last fifty years. And actually, the cool parts — the parts that have won Dubai its reputation as “the Vegas of the Middle East” or “the Venice of the Middle East” or “the Disney World of the Middle East, if Disney World were the size of San Francisco and out in a desert”—have been built in the last ten years. And the supercool parts — the parts that, when someone tells you about them, your attention drifts because these morons have to be lying (no one dreams this big or has that much available capital) — those parts are all going to be built in the next five years.