A Ring-tailed Tooter

It isn't often I get to combine Molly and book topics all in one sitting. This at least keeps topic of books and reading alive.

Prior MI/book conjunctions for me at least consisted of the last couple of Molly's own works I read - but we're not talking a single sitting in that case, given my reading tempo. This is a special treat, especially as she manages to make what I would have figured for a real snoozer sound entertaining.

Book Exposes the Real ‘New Economy’
Molly Ivins [Published August 8, 2005 by Charleston (W Va) Gazette]

Haven’t had so much fun reading a book since I was 12 and found “The ThreeMusketeers.”

Thomas Frank’s “One Market, Under God” is a populist romp over the most delicious idiocies of the past decade. The obligatory subtitle is “Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism and the End of Economic Democracy,” which doesn’t sound promising, but this is a ring-tailed tooter. The book is a delicious chronicle of the hubris of capitalism in our time, and it contains some of the most savagely funny cultural criticism I have ever come across.

Of course, it’s really not fair — all Frank has to do is quote them: business as God, technology as divinity, the New Economy as the end of history. We live in a culture that produces books like “God Wants You to Be Rich” and “Jesus, CEO.”

What’s startling about this book is the extent to which we’re so surrounded by this nincompoopery but don’t even notice it. How many TV ads for stockbrokerages do you suppose you’ve seen in the past 10 years? Anything about them strike you as funny?

It should have. The specific subtext of the IBM-is-God ad is so outrageous that it could gag a maggot. But I, for one, never even thought about it until I read Frank’s dissection of it.

Much of this book has the charm of the child who pointed out that the emperor was wearing no clothes. It’s been a long time since anyone commented on the obvious with such gleeful disrespect

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While the likes of Rush Limbaugh and George Gilder raged against“elitists,” CEO compensation during the decade went from 85 times more than what average blue-collar employees received in 1990 to 475 times what blue-collar workers received in 1999.

Any old populist can rage against the gross maldistribution of wealth; Frank’s special contribution is his mordant examination of the cultural snow job that accompanied the redistribution of wealth to the rich.

Just one symptom of how deeply this nonstop propaganda has affected us lies in the fact that President Bush and Congress repealed the estate tax. Gee, taxing estates — what an un-’90s notion.

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The Endangered Questioning Journalist

My appetite for television news, never high, has been staying away in droves for a good long time now. As a result, while I could pick Peter J out of a lineup, he is no more of a cultural icon to me than those other heads out there.

However, passages like his, sad as they are, sometimes have beneficial side-effects that may partly offset the mourning. This article suggests that Mr. Jennings may have been responsible for providing some nutritious bits among the swill that seems the most common constituent of most news broadcasts these days. And the caution that we not be too taken in by sudden spasms of self-righteousness among liberal journalists seems very timely.

Peter Jennings on the Iraq War by Lila Rajiva

Media Research Center - "the largest media watch-dog organization in America," it touts itself - is a non-profit conservative outfit founded and run by L. Brent Bozell, a prominent conservative activist. Its website compiles lists of what it considers liberal bias in the media, among which it places Peter Jennings' allegedly anti-American commentary on the Iraq War. Two years after the War, though, that commentary looks more and more like accurate, responsible, and at times prescient reporting. It also undermines the self-exculpatory liberal consensus that Bush "lied us into war" by showing us just how much even broadcast journalists subject to all the particular commercial and government pressures of TV can manage to put on the air if they make the effort.

Obviously Bush did lie, but just as obviously a number of journalists who now affect misused innocence not only did not question those lies but avidly went along with them. More than government propaganda, media self-censorship and opportunism has to be to blamed for the dismal non-coverage of the Iraq War in America. Jennings consistently put the focus where it should have been and not on sideshows served up for public distraction, to the everlasting shame of several leading print outlets, not to mention a tidy number of academic and government experts.

Not bad for a high school drop out.

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