The Great American Sport of Witch Hunting
For American expats suffering bouts of insomnia, the 10:00 PM EST live feed of CNN's "AC360" (3:00 AM CET) is sometimes a way of checking the pulse in the "old country" (well, MY old country, in the sense of land of my birth). Years ago, French "Canal +" TV used to rebroadcast the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather early the following morning, nicely shorn of commercials to a compact 20 minutes. Like the Anderson Cooper show, it was a way of seeing what Americans were watching.
These days, that would be THE AIG BONUS SCANDAL. For those who have been away from their news sources, you'd probably have to have been in the outer reaches of the Gobi Desert not to have heard of the millions distributed to the employees of the company that has received billions in bailout money for problem derivative debt in the trillions.
In "School For Scandal: The Larger Meaning of the Sordid Little Tale" in this month's Harper's, Laura Kipnis marvels at our capacity to continue to be shocked - shocked! - at the foibles of the high, the mighty, the fast, and the loose. Kipnis, who is preparing publication of her own book "How To Become A Scandal," reviews two new books on the subject, the more interesting of which is entitled "The Art of the Public Grovel: Sexual Sin and Public Confession In America" by Susan Wise Bauer.
Unless I'm missing something, I'm unaware of a sexual angle in the AIG BONUS SCANDAL or for that matter in the BERNARD MADOFF SCANDAL. No matter. Laura Kipnis wants to tell us that we're down in the weeds (or is it the gutter?), and need to look up:
We're looking for the life raft that would save us, the crucial missing piece of knowledge - something that would change the outcome. Clearly we're looking in the wrong place: the truths we need are hidden in plain sight; the depredations of power are no secret. How much anger toward leaders and elites gets played out around their minor personal missteps, how much sense of social injury; yet how little of it is directed at the moral failures and inequities that actually matter.
What actually matters is apparently what was on President Obama's mind yesterday, at the town hall meeting in Costa Mesa California that AC360 juxtaposed with its own "town hall" in a Detroit area bar.
The President:
But these bonuses, outrageous as they are, are a symptom of a much larger problem. And that is the system and culture that made them possible – a culture where people made enormous sums for taking irresponsible risks that have now put the whole economy at risk. So we are going to do everything we can to deal with these specific bonuses. But what’s just as important is that we make sure we don’t find ourselves in this situation again, where taxpayers are on the hook for losses in bad times and all the wealth generated in good times goes to those at the very top.
"The system and culture that made them possible," as the President said, is still very much present, despite all the sputtering in Congress.
Gail Collins in today's New York Times ("The Grievance Committee"), who can be counted on to get to the sardonic root of things, is "totally angry at everybody in Congress for trying to pretend that they’re angrier than I am." She thinks she's figured out where the President is on this:
Sure he keeps saying he’s mad. But you can tell that he secretly thinks it’s crazy to obsess about $165 million in bonuses in a company that’s still got $1.6 trillion in toxic assets to unravel.
I think Collins/Obama are right. And I think CNN got it way wrong, yesterday, trying to out-populist and out-town meeting the Prez, and trying to link his White House and his party to some sort of responsibility for allowing the (fat) cats to escape the bag. He's The Solution, not The Problem - let's keep that straight. He's Roosevelt, and we just said goodbye to Herbert Dubya Hoover.
But TV news, whether CNN or Fox, likes to rub its hands in glee over scandals of its own devising. Human nature never changes. Read this, from my current bedtime reading:
To think about events realistically, in terms of multiple causations, is hard and emotionally unrewarding. How much easier, how much more agreeable to trace each effect to a single and, if possible, a personal cause! To the illusion of understanding will be joined, in this case, the pleasure of hero worship, if the circumstances are favorable, and the equal, or even greater pleasure, if they should be unfavorable, of persecuting a scapegoat.
The excerpt is from Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun, which is as old as I am but makes for great
reading (maybe that's what caused my insomnia: director Ken Russell did justice to this horribly true tale in his extravagant 1971 epic The Devils).
Hero to... scapegoat. Such was the fate of Father Grandier, popular "virtuoso orator" in Huxley's words, who threatened vested interests but eventually fell afoul of public opinion. He was burned at the stake.
CNN, which should know better, should be wary of any tendency to want to contribute to the Rush Limbaugh "I want him to fail" movement opposing Barack Obama's attempts to steer the ship of state away from its current very dangerous waters. Supertankers, we are told, take a long time to change course. Inauguration Day was all of 58 days ago.