Daniel Henninger thinks the American public may have acquired a collective festive new set of togs: Protective coats of cynicism:
With fakery everywhere–some of it amusing, some of it not funny–people’s ability to know where things fall on the spectrum between fact and falsity becomes so compromised that they retreat into a shell of cynicism about everything. And there is a lot to process: 9/11 deniers, Iranian Holocaust deniers, Obama birthers. Lily Tomlin provided the epigraph for our age: “I try to be cynical, but it’s hard to keep up.”
The antidote of choice for many of us in a suspect world is irony and satire. The Onion, Jon Stewart or “Saturday Night Live” end up closer to the truth than the original material. CNN’s “fact-check” of a SNL comedy skit may have been goofy, but it’s hard to blame CNN for losing its way in the electronic forest.
One can argue that all this reality bending remains harmless. Much of it’s just entertainment and the rest is reversible. People adjust. Living deep inside this new electronic forest, the human animal has learned to adapt. But the one presumably important area of life that seems to be having a hard time adapting to the reality of pandemic doubt is politics.
American politics long ago came up with its own word for shaping reality–spin. Being professionals, the politicians got away with a lot of it.
Now, with more people decked out in protective coats of cynicism, it’s gotten harder for the pols to sell their grand schemes. Ask President Obama.
Mr. Obama’s health-care initiative has been a hard sell with the public. He pitched it before a joint session of Congress. Its difficulties during the August recess became the famous “tea parties” for members of Congress.
The tea parties were ridiculed as right-wing activism. Up to a point, perhaps, but that’s too simple. Those people had been trained by the culture to be reflexively skeptical. They were struggling to understand a complex piece of major legislation that their own representatives couldn’t explain.
He may be on to something. Even with a subservient media duly reporting every Obama talking point, even with that cheering section doing everything they could to minimize, marginalize and demonize Obama opponents, all hell broke loose this past summer.
The spin was not working then – and it is not working now. Is it a suit of plate cynicism? Chain mail skepticism?
Are people not buying the politician’s spin and the media cheerleading any more?
One can hope.
I’m not buying Henniger’s insulting analysis. His snide comments reek of elitism and condescension, and his thinly veiled cheap shots at “tea party people” are wrongheaded and reveal his prejudice.
He says the tea party people, “… had been trained by the culture to be reflexively skeptical.”
Well, do say? Trained by the culture? Really, trained by the culture, or inadequately informed, deceived by mass media, spun, twisted, and propagandized by journalists so often and so relentlessly “those people” finally refuse to take newspapers at face value any longer?
Next, he labels us, “…reflexively skeptical.” More likely, since we actually pay good money for news, we expect professional journalists to level with us, and since they don’t, and haven’t for years, we’re just not convinced they’re up to the task. If this be skepticism, someone at the Wall Street Journal should tell Hinniger it’s a learned response.
He goes on to say the tea party people, “…were struggling to understand a complex piece of major legislation that their own representatives couldn’t’t explain.”
Wow, What a pity. Those poor struggling tea party people (culturally trained by journalists and yet stubbornly reflexively skeptical) just couldn’t seem to understand complex legislation.
How could this be? Why couldn’t the representatives selected for us by politicians in cooperation with professional journalists, explain the steaming pile of garbage designed to gut Medicare was just what the doctor ordered? Perhaps the culture failed to train us properly. Or maybe we figured it out for ourselves, just didn’t like what we saw, and declined to let Mr Hinniger and his ilk tell us what to think.
As to my TV, I punched it’s ticket to the promised land a year ago yesterday.
I’ll be getting my news and universal truths from the musicians at the blues bar.
“They were struggling to understand a complex piece of major legislation that their own representatives couldn’t explain.” Not only couldn’t, but wouldn’t.
I think ropelight read into Henniger’s comments an attitude Henniger may not have had. At least, that’s not the way I read it. YMMV.