Daily Blague

The other night, I was reading The Origins of Totalitarianism and coping with the tangents that shoot forth from Hannah Arendt's pages like guided missiles. I wonder if the New School offers a course in this book. I'd love to be guided through it by a seasoned professor. Quite aside from the main thrust of Arendt's thesis, there is much historical interest in this book that is about as old as I am. Arendt's contempt for the bourgeoisie, for example, strikes a quaint note. It's quaint precisely because I can remember the prevalence of such an attitude among "thinking" people, among whom bourgeois values and, more vehemently, bourgeois hypocrisy were invoked to explain everything that was wrong with the world.

I can no longer recall just what it was in Origins that triggered a sudden recognition: to wit, that, because the implicit template for journalism in American life is the sportswriter or -caster, reporters will always struggle to reduce current events to some sort of contest between two teams. They will also root for whichever team performs better (not necessarily the winning team). And for the simple reason that sports are value-free - teams have no 'content,' no non-game agenda - media rooting will always tend toward the amoral. Hence today's "liberal" media falls over itself presenting right wing elements in a positive light. Regardless of the programs that Republicans and Democrats stand for, the Republicans are obviously performing better in the "game of politics."

Whoa, you say. Just where did I get that bit about sportswriting as the template for American journalism? Hell knows. M le Neveu would call this another one of my "Egyptian beer" brainwaves. (I was right about that one, though.) But it is difficult to read political journalism without encountering the language of games.

Following a link from Joe-of-Joe.My.God's friend Aaron, I discovered a magnificent term of abuse at Steve Gilliard's The News Blog: "Vichy Dems." (Scroll to the bottom of the entry.) It's brilliant! In an ashen sort of way, of course, given that this is a mid-term election year.