My wife said a few nights ago that she thought the Iraq war
would finally result in a near-complete split between the media and
most of the American people. She’s probably right. I had thought
that split would come in the Clinton years, during the Lewinsky
rave-up. Sally pointed out that most people really weren’t very
interested in that. Virtually everybody in America, by contrast,
cares very much about the Iraq war.
The polls indicate that split, with Americans expressing support
for the war and for President Bush at percentages in the
mid-seventies. But the split takes place on a more fundamental
level. Let’s count the ways.
Media people are social climbers. In their very appearances on
television, they declare their allegiance to the clawing, grab-ass
game of status. That game requires, of course, an obsessive concern
with thinking and saying the right thing. And how is “the right
thing” determined? By obsessively watching what all the other
climbers say and do. Most of us outgrew that set of attitudes
somewhere around tenth grade.
Oh, we’re plenty ambitious and competitive. An old childhood
friend of mine just got elected to the South Dakota Sports Hall of
Fame, in recognition of the 24 letters he won in his college sports
career. (Way to go, Rich!) But most of us look around about the
time our second child is born and realize that we are pretty much
where we are, and we make the best of that.
We might have thought it charming at one point to renovate a
Victorian house in a historic inner city neighborhood. But children
change that, unless you’re rich. We got tired of dealing with
150-year-old dirt, and worrying every time the kids wanted to go
outside. So we make as much money as we can, and we move into the
best suburban neighborhoods we can afford, always keeping a weather
eye on the quality of the local school district, and we cope with
stuff. With phone calls in the middle of the day saying our oldest
is running a fever and just threw up and could we please come and
get him? With the tiny daily despair of trying to figure out what
kind of decent supper we can cook so everybody in the family
(including the three-year-old) will eat — including fruits and
vegetables. With painting the dining room. With wondering why the
oldest got toilet training so easily and the youngest doesn’t have
a clue.
And we strongly, and probably correctly, suspect that Paula Zahn
does not concern herself with such things. For the media, their
lives and their jobs are one obsession. For us, our jobs and our
lives are different things. Our jobs support our lives. They do not
define them.
More and more as the years go by, we value the company of
regular guys doing regular things. (That’s why we like George W.
Bush, by the way. He’s a regular guy doing the regular thing in a
very important job, and what he says makes a lot of sense to us.)
In our neighborhood, the border between northern Massachusetts and
New Hampshire, you’d never know that liberals hold sway politically
in Boston. The most popular restaurant is called The Texas
Roadhouse. A sign on the door warns, “Peanuts and peanut dust
everywhere!” and that’s enough to keep the self-conscious yuppie
types out. Inside, we listen to rompin’ stompin’ country music and
eat great big slabs of bloody beef.
Yes, we occasionally do a flickering channel surf across the
cable news outlets to see what’s happening in Iraq, and what we see
mostly looks pretty good. But you want to know what astounds us?
Hearing the questions reporters ask the President and the Secretary
of State and the Secretary of Defense and the military spokesmen at
CENTCOM.
Do you know what we think — what most of the country thinks —
when it hears questions like that? We think, “What the f*** are you
talking about?”
And we change the channel.
Sure, the polls support us. But the media conducts the polls. So
nothing ever really surprises them as much as it might — as much
as it might if, for example, the pollsters asked some questions
they never ask.
Like, “What should the United States do about the U.N.?” Or,
“How should the United States deal with France, Germany, and Russia
in the reconstruction of post-war Iraq?”
With appropriate multiple-choice answers.
If the media ever circulated a poll like that, maybe they’d get
the message, too.
