B.O.E.

Digby from Hullabaloo has a great post about the torture memo. The last sentence,

"The slippery slope to totalitarianism started in a conference room where coffee and donuts and microsoft power point presentations on torture and pain were on the agenda one morning."

just killed me.

Some of the vitriol in my last post comes from a dark sense that the vapidity and superficiality of the 24/7 TV Reagasm, the vapidity and superficiality of the Bush administration, and the terrible evil that the Bush administration has given animation to are intimately connected. That they are all emanations of the same unthinking and conscienceless miasma.

It wasn't until I read Digby's post that I realized that such a feeling wasn't complete madness. Disconnected and only semi-logical, yes, but not madness. Even this is a cliched sentiment, but we are living in times that demand seriousness and conscience and yet the forces that claim authority, ie. the press and political leaders, are terrified of that which is serious and real. They weave their unrealities until they cover everything, they build impressions over reality until it is all but invisible. In this case it took the ugly reality of these terrible (and, perhaps this is ironic, staged) photographs documenting torture to puncture this veil of pleasant fantasy.

It is deeply painful, then, to see these petty mythmakers conjure fake Reagans to obscure the chaos and bloodshed in Iraq, the by-now-obvious malfeasance of the Bush administration in several different directions, and the responsibility Bush, and, indeed, all of us, has in these. It is more than sad- deeply disturbing, in fact- to me that the great message spread at this moment is that what made Reagan a great leader, and by extension makes all leaders great, is some genial contextless optimism, some brainless American exceptionalism. It's a goddamned lie. If the road to hell is paved with anything, it is this kind sunny enthusiasm.

What a Liberal Media would look like:

A liberal media (Not The American Prospect and Air America; not that component of the media that is liberal. I mean a nationwide mass media that can be accurately described as liberal or even liberalish in aggregate) would not look like the one we have today.

For example, a liberal media would not devote days on end of wall-to-wall coverage of Ronald Reagan's death. There's not really that much to cover. The man had Alzheimers and died. Yes, he was a significant president, but I don't remember a similar reaction to Nixon's death. Not even close.

And it isn't even that the attention given to Reagan's death is wall-to-wall flood-the-zone overwhelming, but it is, by and large fawning. A liberal media wouldn't eulogized Ronald Reagan this way. Ronald Reagan was by far the most "conservative," if you can call it that, president of second half of the 20th century. And yet Reagan is treated as godlike, and his flaws are airbrushed out. His unseriousness, Manicheanism, doddering manner and the cynicism and dishonesty of his administration are praised for those very failings. All sorts of myths about Reagan's bravery and heroism are passed of as unquestionable truth. The press engages in doublethink, portraying Reagan as the great destroyer of taxes rather than the man responsible for the largest modern tax increase. The deficits he created are passed over in silence. He is praised as a small-government conservative, when he is responsible for rapid growth in the size of government.

In general, the memory of Reagan is massaged by an alliance of willing media and a cadre of professional Reagan hagiographers like Grover Norquist. A liberal media certainly would not let it be used so. A liberal media would no more air the opinions of yet another movement conservative talking about how great it would be if Reagan was on the 10 dollar bill than would a conservative media entertain calls for LBJ to be on the 20.

The sheer spectacle of round the clock deification of a president is proof, once and for all, that the conservative whines about the liberal media are deeply at odds with reality. More than that, however, they speak to a media culture in America that is diseased. The bizarre cult of personality that surrounds Reagan is unfit for an egalitarian society that prides itself on individualism. It is yet another example of the rot and decay of media culture. In the midst of a world that is a chaotic and dangerous as any in recent memory, the press passes out bromides about Reagan when it isn't spinning in circles over American Idol or J-Lo's most recent marriage or Paris Hilton. It is fitting that Reagan should be an object of the media's undying affection. After all, before the current president, who was more completely a PR construction? It speaks poorly of the American people that they would elect, on two different occasions, a man whose major asset was that he was every inch the B-Movie actor. But it speaks still worse of a press that it would have embraced him so.

A Liberal Media would have found a way to bestow upon Jimmy Carter a mystique of competence and accomplishment the way they have upon Bush. A Liberal Media would have treated Bill Clinton with the kid gloves it treated Reagan. Let's get over this foolish illusion that the media is liberal and recognize it for what it really is: fickle; personality obsessed; far more intimidated by the right than the left; incompetent to deal with issues of any import without resorting to bromides, nostrums, and received wisdom; Heatherish; and easily taken in by a good myth.