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Sunday, August 9, 2009
Pariah Parade
There is something oddly attractive about making a completely outrageous statement. No doubt most of you know someone who lives to get a rise out of people, a person who loves to shock. Radio careers have been made from this skill set alone. In person, it gets old. Once you get past the shock value of the statement’s presentation, an examination of the conclusion implied will be revealed as disconnected from known cause and effect relationships--or simply be the absolute reverse of the truth. On a base level, it’s a cry for attention, often disguising a lack of true substance. Intellectually, it’s a form of left-handed relativism: after the blinding flash we are expected to buy into the idea that fact one is somehow relevant to fact two, thus leading us to package a supercilious assumption as a supported point. Usually the supported point isn’t stated because it’s an illogical premise to start with. Sadly, this noisy gibberish constitutes a large portion of what passes for public discourse in the media.
Let us take as a case in point a statement made by conservative spokesmodel Ann Coulter in reaction to the attention given to a certain group of 9/11 widows.
“These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much.”
This statement is so mean spirited that it completely deodorizes the fact that it’s nonsensical. Here the premise is actually stated twice, but otherwise the construction is typical. To boil down the argument, it reads ‘people who are getting a lot of attention must enjoy it’, attention being universally enjoyable in Ann Coulter World. In the real world, having one’s spouse blown to smithereens, even if it makes you rich and famous, is the exact opposite of enjoyable.
But let’s get back to the construction of the statement, since it is so typical. ‘These broads are millionaires’ and ‘stalked by greif-arazzis’ are irrelevant points, couching. In a broad but unstated sense, ‘these broads are millionaires’ may have a relationship to their husbands being dead, however the point dead ends. Banged directly together as if they are related is point one ‘lionized’ and point two ‘reveling’. Point one, ‘lionized’, is well supported. Point two, ‘reveling’, is tangential to ‘stalking’ and ‘millionaires’, which even on their best days aren’t close cousins. All of this is, of course, forgotten amidst the mesmerizing thunder of ‘I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much,’ which is just a restatement of point two.
This is a constructed bit of wind baggery. It’s the modern tense. For a more oblique version we can use as an example General MacArthur’s famous phrase
“Old soldiers never die. They just fade away.”
As President Truman dryly observed “What does that mean?” It means he’s goddamn immortal and his immortality is not open to your stinking plebiscite. As far as immortality conveyed upon mortals is concerned, the exact opposite is the truth. A man will die. His measure, his accomplishments, may not fade away. And the old general knows this better than anyone. He’s artistically transposing his point: I will die, but you will not forget my measure.
Both Coulter and MacArthur have identical motivations behind resort to such statements. They have both horribly overplayed their hands. In MacArthur’s case, his last official act as an Old Soldier was to be fired for failing to follow the orders of his President. That’s a heck of a smudge mark. He needs to go oblique in hopes that folks will forget that little incident. In the case of Coulter, who has systematically blown all opportunities to be taken seriously as a pundit, her premise, ‘all attention is good’ seems to be her primary motivator.
Being a talking head on television is one of the great phony baloney jobs available to modern man. The qualifications are fairly nebulous. (Coulter’s appears to be the ability to fill out a dress.) Most of these heads are rather specialized, which limits their exposure. In order to actually make a living at it, the single qualification seems to be to say interesting things, or sometimes, just loud things. The field is incredibly competitive and completely consumptive of one’s material. I think even Shakespeare would have wound up flat footed if his medium was producing on demand glib for the 24 hour news cycle. The occasional resort to nonsense is understandable, however an entire phylum of these speakers earns their daily bread doing nothing but. Like the wrestling bad guys of old, they appear solely for the purpose of lobbing bombs and arousing sentiment against their position. In effect, their position is simply to be contrary in a bombastic way.
No one has this act down better than Pat Robertson. It should be said that Cult Leader Robertson is self employed, so he has to be good. Robertson pays for his air time and production entirely out of his own pocket. Under normal circumstances, Robertson’s show is one unending telethon, which varies between the PBS variety and the Muscular Dystrophy type.
Pat is the absolute master of the oblique. His outrageous statements about the world coming to an end or immediate terrorist attacks or there being active nuclear missiles in Cuba, can actually be timed or charted. He spices them in. Since he has to be loud to draw attention, the pronouncements have to be of a certain magnitude on the ridiculous meter. Once tossed out, these pearls of Pat’s wisdom are seldom developed further. Unlike the average pundit, Pat is out to directly monetize his audience. He’s not out to attract the average person. He’s trolling for suckers. Those drawn in by Pat’s occasional Pariah Act are going to have to sit through a lot of non-stop begging for money in hopes that he will drop another gem, much like slot machine players awaiting a big pay out.
Most of our talking heads, thankfully, aren’t quite this mercenary. A few of them, such as Patrick Buchanan, are something akin to Rip Taylor: a comedian known for throwing confetti and then shouting at the audience “I don't dance, folks! This is it!" Others, such as Lou Dobbs and Coulter are much like the old wrestlers who turn bad guy after their skills have faded: throwing chairs and collecting hisses is all they have left. The prevalence of these bad actors is indicative of an industry shakeout. As time has progressed, even the news has sub divided into Court News and Entertainment News and even Weather News, so the days of the Swiss Pocket Knife Pundit may indeed be numbered. After a few of the General News carriers go under, the bomb throwers should head back to the sidelines where they belong.
On the other hand, if I turn on E! one day only to find Patrick Buchanan commenting on Spanish Novellas, then western culture has indeed fallen. I’m betting on the market and an inevitable swing towards staid in public discourse. History shows the people’s taste for bombast does fade and that the Pariah Parade does have a last clown car.
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