Media in the Home of the Free and the Brave

By Garret Keizer

“Is the Pope Catholic?” we ask, meaning, “Are you kidding?” But when a pope dies, one is tempted to ask, “Is the media Catholic?” and one is not kidding. For a few days at least, our journalists seem caught up in a contest to see who can achieve the most sublime level of reverence. The anchors turn toward the camera, and in the split second before their voices go “live,” their faces achieve baroque expressions of dolor. Even The New York Times headlines mark John-Paul’s passing with the word “awe,” albeit with discretion enough to attribute said “awe” to the faithful of Poland. When I was a boy and Pope Paul came to address the U.N., my parents told me I could identify the ambassadors from predominately Catholic countries as those who knelt to kiss the pontiff’s ring. The distinction is not so easy to draw in the case of post-mortem journalistic prose.

Perhaps this stands out more if one is not a Roman Catholic, which I am not, though I count such devout Catholics as Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Oscar Romero among my heroes, with honorable mention going to liberation theologians like Ernesto Cardenal, at whom the last pontiff so memorably wagged a scolding finger. Cardenal had knelt to kiss his ring.

But making full allowance for any sectarian or secularist bias, I think that journalistic reverence stands out mostly by way of contrast with the media’s own affectation of “attitude,” its surly insinuation that everything and everyone is fair game for its all-seeing eye. “Is nothing sacred?” we ask, and lo and behold, as incredible as a new star rising over Bethlehem, the media proclaims that something is.

We saw this in the aftermath of September 11. We saw it in the indiscriminate use of the word “hero.” We were told that everyone who perished in the twin towers was a hero. All of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are “heroes.” The six-year-old dying of leukemia is “a little hero.” Does one dare to raise his hand and ask what a hero is? Obviously not someone who rescues another person at great peril to herself or makes some other laudable decision in a moment of crisis. Perhaps it is anyone who suffers, but that doesn’t seem to cover it either. Were the three quarters of a million who died in the Tsunami heroes? I don’t recall that anyone in the media said so. But the connotation is clear even if the denotation is not. A hero is someone elected by the media to stand beyond all reproach and even, to a lesser extent, beyond the media’s encroachment on personal privacy. A hero is someone whose dirty laundry or feet of clay are protected in the reliquary of sentiment.

It is not required, but it certainly helps, if the hero is an American. Several years ago in its photographic summary of the preceding year, Newsweek ran a close-up of a Russian woman who’d been gassed when troops stormed a theatre that had been seized by Chechen rebels. Young and attractive, she sat propped against a bus window, her face suggestive of coital ecstasy, her clothes torn open (whether the result of emergency first aid, sexual assault, or her own delirium, we were not told), and one of her breasts exposed. Though arguably a casualty of the “war on terror,” the woman was obviously not “a hero.” Just as obviously she was not a pope or the wife of a Newsweek executive. Basically she was an easy mark with a nice tit.

So what am I saying, that our media is too reverent or too rude? Are journalists a bunch of callous cynics or a bunch of pandering sentimentalists? It is not unlike asking if the Pope is Catholic, by which I mean, it is a rather stupid question.

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No one should be surprised to find reverence and scurrility so flagrantly juxtaposed. As Oscar Wilde said, “sentimentality is the bank holiday of cynicism.” Accordingly, the death of a pope amounts to a Fleet Street version of a bank holiday. And perhaps the media evinces nothing more remarkable than a basic human trait: a need to revere and debase as old as the Myth of the Dismembered God. It has always made psychological sense to me that Palm Sunday and Good Friday occur in the same week, and it’s not hard to imagine our mainstream media getting into the spirit of each day, especially if you can imagine Jesus as the first century equivalent of a celebrity. What is harder to imagine is our mainstream media doing an in-depth analysis of how a coalition of Romans and Roman stooges was robbing Judea blind. Best to stick with the sensational trial and the spectacle thereafter. The cry from the Cross replayed as mercilessly as the yell of Howard Dean. “Messiah Lacks the Right Stuff.” “‘King of the Jews’ Nailed.” “Mother Says Delusions Began at Age Twelve.” Or, with enough public sentiment to pander to, “He Is Risen!”

If there is something innately human about our need to mix the reverent and the rude, it is a trait especially pronounced in that species of humankind known in the industrialized world as adolescents. I write as one who taught them, not without mutual regard, for a number of years. On the one hand, you have that sharp edge, typified by the proverbial teenage “smart mouth.” On the other hand, you have a sense of the sacrosanct that can reach medieval proportions. It becomes especially powerful at the death of a peer. As a general rule, the more pointless the death, the more fervent the reverence. Die getting your family out of a burning house and you might rank a memorial shrub beside the soccer field, but die by falling drunk out of a fourth-floor window and you’re in line for canonization. There is probably a moral logic to this, a wholesome resistance to the idea that some deaths are less “deserving” of grief than others, that some people are more dispensable, and this may also be the reason for according heroic status to everyone who perished on September 11th. Of course this moral logic is contradicted by the basic facts of adolescent life, where to be human is to be graded, both academically and socially, in everything you do short of dropping dead.

The juxtaposition of the reverent and the rude is very much in evidence, and very much pandered to, in the typical teen flick. The humor is scatological, the interactions between characters are depressingly squalid, but we know that some time before the credits roll, or at least when they roll, some insufferable rock balladeer will attempt to work his magic on our tear ducts by way of sentiments so laughable they would have left Queen Victoria snorting sherry out her nose.

The point here is not how gullible and creepy adolescents are. The point is the kind of sensibility that develops when people are forced to postpone their social or political adulthood. The typical attitudes of adolescents are an attempt to mitigate subservience with disguise. The “smart mouth” is essentially talking to herself. Think of it as giving yourself a pep talk. Thus, you make liberal and inappropriate use of the word “shit” to compensate for the fact that you have to ask your teacher’s permission to take one. Or, in the case of a puerile media, you make a few slighting references to O.J. and his glove, or to Jerry Brown and his Buddhism, knowing that a similar tone would not pass muster if applied to Time-Warner and its principal investors.

Sentimentality, too, can be seen as a defense mechanism in the face of power. In essence, it’s an attempt to put a few cherished objects beyond criticism or at least beyond the perceived indifference of those who hold the reins. I put my precious souvenirs in my yearbook or in my keepsake box where your dirty hands can’t touch them. Sentimentality can also be an attempt at conciliation with power. At odds for so much of the time, we can at least be one in our grief. Me and my mom — whose guts I say I hate, but here we are weeping at the grave of poor Jeremy, whom we shall see no more. United we stand.

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My contention here is that the schizophrenic character of the media is a reflection of the culture it serves, and that this culture typifies an adolescent stage of political development. In other words, I am contending that reverence and rudeness are signs of, and compensation for, a lack of real power and intellectual freedom.

Of course, any attempt to characterize a culture as diverse and dynamic as our own is bound to be reductive. That doesn’t mean that the characterization is bound to be useless. The American cultural project of the last forty years—years marked by the unchecked growth of global capitalism, by vicious and virtually invited assaults on privacy, and by imperial designs that no longer carry any need to blush at the word “imperial” — can be profitably characterized as an attempt to manufacture (and from the consumer’s point of view, to purchase) the illusion that you can be a lab rat and a free spirit too. That a gelding is just a stallion in disguise. The project can be made to account for a wide array of phenomena from tenured professors hot on deconstruction theory to investment bankers high on Harley Davidsons, from hoppin-mad right-wing radio to hiphop “badness,” from monster SUVs and screw-you bumper-stickers to gun culture and New Age spirituality. We are free and we are wild and we have to be home by ten o’clock or our old man will make us mow the lawn. The hallmarks of such a culture, and of the media that reflects it, consist of in-your-face iconoclasm punctuated by a tendency to genuflect before any icon with a high approval rating.

Contrast what I’ve just described with the biographies of people engaged in active opposition to power. One searches in vain through the testimonies of resistance fighters for hints of “attitude” or preciousness. More often than not, genuine defiance turns out to be a close cousin of decorum. At a time when our pundits had first begun to define “attitude,” Nelson Mandela stepped out of prison and into our midst like an ambassador from a courtlier age, a variation on Mark Twain’s fictional anachronism, King Arthur in the Connecticut Yankees’ court. Compare Malcolm X in dress and diction to the latest gangsta rapper and you will instantly see what I’m getting at. Malcolm didn’t have to pretend he was dangerous. He was dangerous. He was dedicated to change of slightly greater moment than the spelling of an –er noun.

A free media fit to serve a free people will have little need of either reverence or scurrility. It will know how to remove its hat in a basilica and how to keep its head at the death of a pope. It will not provide a breast to every voyeur who drools for one; neither will it be overly sidetracked by the alleged “obscenity” of Janet Jackson’s breast. It will not disport itself like the schoolyard apestrut who bruises an arm whenever he can get away with it and then displays a few tears for the sake of the girls who find sensitivity appealing in a thug.

In short, such a media will see its primary mission as identifying the lines of power and the fault lines of power to a citizenry that is losing power at about the same rate as the earth is losing topsoil, and for much the same reasons. The goal of that media will be to ask the question “Is America a democracy?” in such a way and with such dogged persistence that it might eventually become like asking if the Pope is Catholic.

Garret Keizer’s most recent book is Help: The Original Human Dilemma (HarperSanFrancisco). His recent articles have appeared in Mother Jones and Harper’s Magazine.