Interregnum
First, I grew up on newspapers and magazines, and mostly no longer bother with them. Forget what the publishers say -- I've given up on print because the owners of print media have given up on print. The Los Angeles Times that I read in the 1980s had a weekly"World Report" section full of long, detailed, and frequently quirky reporting from overseas, on topics that went beyond the quotidian news. It had a solid twice-weekly section on local government in the San Gabriel Valley, where I lived. The newspaper had active foreign bureaus, an active city bureau, a healthy representation in Sacramento, a columnist who travelled the Central Valley and wrote about the state's considerable farming community. It was solid, informed and informative, connected. It had a feeling of life.
Today there's a wind howling through the emptiness of the pages. Or I assume there is, since I haven't bothered to look at the thing in two or three years. I don't have the foggiest idea what's happening at city hall, in West Hollywood (where I live now) or in Los Angeles, and I have no faith that the Times is equipped to tell me. They certainly weren't when I stopped reading. Facing declining circulations, newspapers cut back on reporting to save money and prop up the bottom line.
It's like a deli saw a decline in the number of diners, so the owners started serving sandwiches without anything in them in order to save their business. Folks are gonna just love our new corned beef sandwich -- it's two pieces of bread with some mayo on it.
Meanwhile, the thin content that survives is getting thinner. Op-ed pages print the tiredest partisans, who spew the tiredest cliches and talking points, and please do shoot me if another Maureen Dowd column ever ends up in front of my eyes. And can anyone explain the decision at the Washington Post to print Liz Cheney's recent little junior high school essay? Why do I want to pay for that? Why would anyone? What does it contribute? What does it even say?
Meanwhile, I've saved all kinds of money on subscriptions as the magazines I used to love to read -- Esquire, Outside, and others -- have all adopted a kind of uniform empty magazine voice, in the universal empty magazine format that now relies on little bursts of simple text. Like I want to spend an hour reading chirpy captions. The Outside I loved once reported on a man who was so stricken by the coast of northern California, so helplessly heartbroken by the fact of the Pacific Ocean, that he kayaked himself to death -- he just literally to save his own life couldn't stop paddling out into the surf, and drowned in a storm that kicked up towering waves over his head. The magazine's admiration shone through every word of the story. And I shared it.
Much more recently, I knew I was done forever with Outside when I read a little blurb on great places to"sip bubbly" in comfortable wilderness-like settings.
And of course, a replacement is being built, and go ahead and note my use of passive language, there. I love the emerging culture of blogs and YouTube, and I love (as I very recently noted) the cultural commerce of the"long tail." But let's not pretend. How many bloggers cover the federal bureaucracy? How many YouTube posters are systematically examining Pentagon spending? What website uses the public records laws to keep track of what my city government is doing? The replacements for our effectively dead print media are still in very early infancy, and I doubt there's a model that makes hard news about local government a profitable model for online journalists.
There is some reporting on the blogs, and Josh Marshall seems to be the smartest example out there. But Talking Points Memo, and its associated sites, cover national politics. They don't cover the regulatory agencies; they don't have people walking the halls at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and asking where the money is going. That's what newspapers were supposed to do, and sometimes did, and there's nobody lining up to take over the job. I don't see the path by which Eschaton replaces the New York Times. And, judging by the twenty minutes it took me to sigh and slump through last week's Sunday paper, we need a replacement for the New York Times.
Second -- longest post ever, yes -- it's blindingly, radiantly, painfully clear that the American project in the Middle East is a disaster. But the path of that disaster, and the boundaries of that disaster, are far from clear, dear god help us, and will be far from clear for years. (For two years, at least, and probably for more than that.)
And it's also very much unclear how the domestic politics of that failure will shake out. The Republican party has gutshot the republic; the Democratic party helped to hold the gun and pull the trigger, and now hilariously postures as an opposition party. My own representative, Henry Waxman, is marketed as a crusader against the Bush agenda; he voted for the Patriot Act and the authorization to use military force against Iraq. Maybe I'm missing something.
So we can all see that something is ending. Bush is hopelessly lost at the grown-up table, and Cheney appears to have actually suffered a psychotic break with reality. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz are gone, as are the people like Charles Swift and James Comey. The wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia -- and, yes, we're at war to some degree in all three -- are drifting toward the wall; the war in Iraq is irrecoverably lost. (The war in the Philippines, I don't know.) The war with Iran, when and if it comes, will be something pretty close to The End.
But then what? The new Democratic majority in Congress is all fired up to pass some really neat nonbinding resolutions. The punditocracy is the same old gang of awful nonentities, the same Jonah Goldbergs and Michael Ledeens and other empty minds who would, in a healthy society, work at a gas station. And where does that get us? Who leads where?
And so tonight I'm reading Gordon Wood's The Creation of the American Republic, and I read this about the long muddle of the Confederation era, when the war was won but the victory wasn't working as advertised:
Many like John Jay found themselves uneasy,"more so than during the war." Then there had been a"fixed object," and although the means and timing were questionable few had had doubts of the ultimate victory. But with the coming of peace"the case is now altered." Men saw ahead of them"evils and calamities, but without being able to guess at the instrument, nature, or measure of them." The evidence is overwhelming from every source -- newspapers, sermons, and correspondence -- that in the minds of many Americans the course of the Revolution had arrived at a crucial juncture.
And that's precisely where I'm left. I sense evils and calamities somewhere ahead, but without being able to guess at the instrument, nature, or measure of them. The means by which we can discuss and investigate our circumstances are inadequate; print is dead, online media are unformed, and television news is a menace to real information and meaning. And I think the course of the Revolution, the never-secured future of the republic, is nearing a crucial juncture.
If only that juncture would show itself, whatever it is. Because it sure feels like it's overdue.