PrintDecember 9, 2008
The fairy tale school of political analysis
"What really draws me to the notion of Caroline (Kennedy) as senator, though, is the modern-fairy-tale quality of it all. ... Caroline has always been part of my consciousness: The lucky little girl with a pony and an impossibly handsome father. ... In this fairy tale, Caroline is our tragic national princess...."
So gushes Ruth Marcus, the hard-as-nails political scribbler for the Washington Post, even as the circulation of the Washington Post continues to slide. But the WaPo is still the company paper in a one-company town. Ms. Marcus isn't just waltzing on the deck as the ship tilts and the deck furniture begins to slide. She is playing "My Little Pony" on the front page, as a substitute for adult analysis about Caroline Kennedy for Senator from New York, a job for which her previous life as Little Princess of the Kennedy Clan has obviously qualified her.
Nothing could better prove the bottomless triviality of the liberal media as they say goodbye to their monopoly power in American politics, having thrown up in the very act of dying the farthest Left president in American history. The media terminate their monopoly with a final, giant finger to the American Republic. I will not mourn their passing.
P.G. Wodehouse is by common consent the greatest humorist of the 20th century writing in English, and Ruth Marcus sounds exactly like his satirical heroine Madeline Bassett, a parody of a liberal goo-goo gusher of the 1930s. Madeline Bassett would have melted at the very thought of electing Caroline Kennedy as America's Princess, to represent the sentimental State of New York, and to guide all its porky power-plays in the US Senate. Bassett is described as
"...a pretty enough girl in a droopy, blonde, saucer-eyed way, but ... the soppiest, mushiest, sentimentalest young gawd-help-us that ever was... who fondly imagined that the stars are God's daisy chain and that every time a fairy blows its wee nose a baby is born."
Call it the "My Little Pony" school of mediaprop.
There is nothing new about goo-goo liberalism. Wodehouse had his readers giggling at it in the 1920s, and Ruth Marcus gives it to us in great, gloppy handfuls in 2008. It is not even a substitute for thinking. Like so much of the media today, it is gaudy pink lipstick on the snorting pig of media decay.
But it's tailored to the audience. Fifty-two percent of American voters just stumbled into the biggest single gamble on the future of this country, by electing a Chicago pol from the sewer of Illinois politics. That feat was accomplished only through a see-no-evil agreement among our fast-fading "news" hucksters. The goo-goo factor is a big part of that scam; the sentimentalization of American politics and the trivialization of our culture. Tens of millions of men and women and being dumbed down into Madeline Bassett mode.
In an age of nuclear proliferation that is not an adult choice. We will see if Barack Obama can rise above the scummy triviality of his selection process. If he turns out to be a Jimmy Carter, or worse, the voters may find themselves having to grow up fast. Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will not be impressed with My Little Pony.
If there are any adults left at the Washington Post, maybe they can shoo the goo-goo scribblers back to the Style Section? It would help prop up the crumbling reputation of serious journalism in American life.
