When I learn of a high-profile quarrel within the heavily subsidized loss leader we call “the free press,” my response is the same when as when I hear, late at night and half-asleep, one of my eleven cats coughing up vomit somewhere nearby: alarm, then, gritting my teeth, anger, then disappointment. Eventually the awful braying ends, I get out of my U.S.M.C. surplus cot, I mop up the effluvium with a rag, I withdraw.
I once had dreams of homesteading the Fourth Estate, a mangy dingo groomed and retrained to be a watchdog. Now, those aspirations seem like a child’s fantasy, in a world jobbed exclusively by highborn clods like David G. Bradley, publisher of the elaborate money-and-influence laundering front known as “The Atlantic.” This week, freelance writer Nate Thayer published an email exchange with “Atlantic” Global Editor Olga Khazan, revealing that though they’d love to republish one of his articles on their website, they would not be able to pay him for his work – in Khazan’s words, she was “out of freelance money right now.”
The well had run dry. In Loretta Lynn’s words, there was nary a “poor man’s dollar.” Only the essentials could be budgeted, like a pair of ponies for apartheid jailer/“journalist” Jeffrey Goldberg. But what this august publication could not offer Thayer in money, they could in exposure – as Khazan put it, “we do reach 13 million readers a month.” This is an increasingly popular business model, advanced perhaps most successfully by the Bride of Dracula, and heartily defended by titans of journalism like Jonathan “Ernest Goes to Iraq” Chait, and Matt “Human Ziggy” Yglesias.
Such journalistic ethics lead to conclusions rooted in natural law: with a scrum of writers, it’s the company store that dictates the price. And prices aren’t just monetary. It’s all rather unseemly, but as nature abhors a vacuum, nature will fill the vacuum – albeit, usually, with the most low-down, egg-sucking elements. Bill Keller whines about Twitter bullies. The aforementioned Dauphin of Dreck, Jeffy Goldberg, praises guns, and their ability to neutralize anything from home intruders to Connecticut kindergartners. After mocking pro-democracy activist in Iran face-to-face while they were being tortured and killed, Jon Stewart announces he’s directing a paean to pro-democracy activists in Iran, to predictable plaudits.
Thus, the system works – an army of writers are ranged against society, a great winnowing occurs, and we are left with the crème de la merde. And this elite serves the public well, chopping down any poppy that grows too tall. Any freak that emerges from the cloaca too wormy and misshapen will be duly scorned and snubbed by the well-formed droppings. Just ask White House hopeful Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) Paul, a neo-segregationist mutant of genetic proportions, made the mistake of filibustering Obama’s nominee to the post of High Executioner, John Brennan, for the minor crime of being unable to answer whether it was okay to assassinate Americans without due process.
Yes, Sen. Paul was right, for maybe the first time in his life – and he was predictably torn up by a two-party dervish. Who says there’s no such thing as bipartisanship in Washington, where Obama courts John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Paul Ryan like they’re an unattainable pixie girl working at a reaaaaally cool vintage clothing store? Any freak that shows the weird flash of bell-curve decency that only the truly fucked know – they will be destroyed. Just look at the warm obituaries offered in the West to the late Hugo Chavez, sometimes reprehensible, sometimes not – but primarily despised here for what he said about the West, rather than what he did. We are served well by a system, so stocked with antibodies against such virulent strains of discourse.
The deck reshuffles, new cards are dealt, we get drunker. It is a strange paradise where the incipient threat of a nuclear attack by North Korea can be the only thing warming the hearts of Americans these days, but then, the Chicago Bulls are long experienced at heaving such thunderbolts.
I once had a memorable Fourth of July. I was splayed over the railing of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, the dark Potomac below me and the lights of Georgetown beyond me. I was twisted on applejack, fermented for four months in an empty jug of Juicy Juice I’d concealed in grandma’s deep freezer. In colonial times, your Sam Adams or Paul Revere would’ve stashed a couple of growlers of the stuff in the snow, and now here I was, drinking it all in the summertime. And whether it was that potent rotgut, or the plain truth, the moment the fireworks flew (which I couldn’t stand to look at), I saw a column of rats scramble across the girder below me like it was greased.
