Column: Tolerating the Intolerable: 101

The commentariat, membership in which I take dubious pride, is too commonly fond of unleashing a removed, oh-so urbane attitude about skies falling all around us. We have seen this before; things have been worse; the clouds have been darker and weightier ere now; the wise remain calm -- just like us pros.

Ours is an insouciance that impresses, I suppose. But, for those who don't already know this -- and the knowers tend to be the rightly outraged over climatic conditions -- it is also a deliberate gambit: a pompous display of unmatched worldliness intended to awe the great unwashed with our keenness of insight and to confirm our advertised status as power-structure insiders. We've been around, we hobnob with the powers that come and go, and we're in the know. You haven't, you don't, and you aren't. In short, our insouciance contains, to use the colloquial, some sizable b.s.

Sometimes the calculus of a darkening society is simple and obvious enough to even a wet-nosed prepubescent, and that society's exponential decline is equally stark. Sometimes the proverbial sky is indeed falling, yet tuned-in intuitive knowledge gets smothered by the rationalizing and cosmopolitan commentariat. Rather than enlightening, the latter becomes part of the problem -- an active, problematic player -- because it has become a self-satisfied part of the degenerating system.

Take, for example, a few items of interest from the past week. You want exponentiation in your societal decline? One week and you have it in spades. We -- the commentariat -- now tolerate the intolerable at lightening speed. Each of these stories will be dead copy by the time this is printed, just 4 days away; yet each, just 4 years ago, would have been the subject of endless journalistic agonizing.

One. No one who has read so much as the Thrifty Nickel could be, any longer, in the dark about the Bush administration's exceedingly shady relationship with the Saudi Arabian autocracy. Recent exposes leave a reader slackjawed. No longer is there any question that the ever-so-diplomatic and subtle regime has funded, one way or another, more anti-American terrorists than Saddam's regime ever contemplated.

Bill J. got impeached for full-Montying the bimbo-babes Paula and Monica. And today? George W. gets a pass for being in some serious bed with terrorist financiers -- after -- after, mind you -- 9/11.

Two. It was learned that the media gargoyle and federally contracted MCI has been routing government calls through foreign territory to evade domestic tariffs.

Bill J. had only to look at a Chinese and ask for a few bucks and our national security was blown all to hell. The story lasted years. Today? George W. has a friendly corporate hustler zapping sensitive State Department communications through potentially hostile lands, but all is well since his General Services Administration says the matter is under review.

Three. The Pentagon -- right under the putative adults' noses and courtesy Iran-Contra schemer Admiral John Poindexter -- had been hatching a Doomsday Futures Market and Casino. What can one say.

Had Bill J. hired a once-convicted felon with a decided penchant for Strangelovian angles that even Peter Sellers could not have deadpanned, the commentariat would have stormed the White House after first asking General Jack D. Ripper to lead the charge. It would have declared the end of a civilized presidency as an institution. What hit did George W. take? Not even a slap. These days, the commentariat understands that boys will be boys. Nothing to fret about. Only the silly minded, unsophisticated and inexperienced would get worked up.

We, the collective beacons of print and electronic imagery, are the ones permitting the death of outrage. We're invulnerable to the outrageous. We're just too damned suave -- and part of the whole stinking charade.

© Copyright 2003 P. M. Carpenter

Mr. Carpenter's column is published weekly by History News Network and buzzflash.com.