James Wolcott: Manure Spreaders

James Wolcott: Manure SpreadersManure Spreaders
Posted by James Wolcott
Kids dreaming of breaking into the journalism business often ask how I'm able to maintain my healthy cynicism year after year.

Honestly, kids, it's easy. There's no great secret to it.

Simply observe how human beings actually behave without any gauzy preconceptions, ignoring their reputations and judging them by their actions, measuring the invisible distance between they profess to be and what they actually say and do.

It also doesn't hurt to get burned now and then as a reminder of what happens when you let other considerations override your perceptions.

Take Chris Wallace. I actually coughed up some nice words about him at the end of my chapter on Fox News in Attack Poodles. I would quote the passage, but I'm too ashamed. Mind, there were mitigating circumstances. He had just taken over hosting Fox News Sunday from Tony Snow and seemed less political than his predecessor, and, I am ashamed to admit this, I wanted to end my Fox chapter on a slightly up note so that it wouldn't read unremittingly negative. By dabbing on a little praise at the end, I thought it would make my criticisms more credible than an all-out attack would. That's what happens when you let formal considerations smother your intuitions, because I suspected that it was only a matter of time before Wallace rottened to the core like every other egotistical toady on Fox News.

By tacking on that bit of praise for Wallace, I betrayed the very cynicism I hold dear. And when you betray your cynicism, giving credit where no credit is due, it nearly always comes back to mock you.

I look at Chris Wallace now and, apart from wishing I had never written his name except in execration, wonder how Mike Wallace feels about having produced such a blot of a son to carry on the family name in broadcasting. He must wonder where he went wrong, even perhaps in the dark night of the soul wish he had worn a rubber rather than spawn this disgrace to a once-proud profession.

It was bad enough when he was badgering and interrupting the American spokesman of Amnesty International like a road-company Joe McCarthy for comparing Guantanamo to a Soviet gulag, conducting the interview as if it were an inquisition, but via Atrios from the Clever Pleasantry blog, we learn of Wallace's most recent gift to reasoned discourse. A guest on Hugh Hewitt's ham radio show for halfwits, Wallace mused that compared to the inmates of Auschwitiz or Belsen, Gitmo's prisoners would probably be happy to defecate on themselves, if that's as bad as it gets.

This is the new meme among our shit-for-brains neoauthoritarian friends, that the residents of Gitmo should be grateful for their captivity and degradation. The other day on MSNBC, Republican strategist Jack Burkman blithely echoed the idiocy spouted by angry caucasian Congressman Duncan Hunter and proposed that the regular meals the Gitmo guests were getting were probably better than what they had back in their native lands, where "they have to hunt their own animals for food." This rightly the normally Buddhist-calm Ron Reagan, who immediately protested Burkman making such a silly, stupid statement.

But of course in the Fox universe such trash talk is the lingua franca. There's no Ron Reagan or Keith Olbermann around to blow a referee's whistle. This morning on Cashin' In, part of Fox's Saturday morning business/investment block, the first topic was (I kid thee not) "The Prison at Guantanamo Bay: Good for the Stock Market?"

Opening up the mental-midget debate for the panel, host Terry Keenan asked, "If we 'cut and run' from there, isn't it all bets off for the market?"

Yeah, if we close Gitmo, everyone's going to sell Google and into the black hole goes the stock market: real smart thinking there, Terry.

Terry Keenan, to refresh some memories, joined Fox from CNN, where she maintained outward appearance of being a real journalist, a pretense she (like Wallace) can dispense with now that they're in the propaganda business, where the cynicism required to draw the first breath in the morning and show up to work without hating yourself is beyond any cynicism even I can muster