The Anchoress

The quicker goes the journalist the slower go his thoughts. The result is the newspaper of our time, which every day can be delivered earlier and earlier, and which every day is less worth delivering at all.
- G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils

I think it’s sad that pols and the public must endure two years of campaigning and the glaring media eye…seems to me things are moving too fast, anymore, for real thoughtfulness. Everyone is scrambling for either the next sound bite or the next “gotcha” moment, but there is no depth, no substance, no “there,” there to any of it.

I feel a little like I’m watching children play “garden” in the backyard. There’s very little rowing, seeding or weeding and then - without rain or patience - the children stamp the foot and say “grow! Grow!” And a garden is supposed to spring forth. Somehow, all of the meaningless that has become media and public discourse is supposed to produce something sustaining? I don’t see how.

Everything is supposed to be real and meaningful, but also be given short shrift - wherever possible - and distortion is still the order of the day.

A few days ago I wrote:

keep thinking of that old phrase, “diabolical disorientation,” and that’s what the news, the politics and the blogosphere feels like to me, right now. When you’re a kid, you spin and spin, because the disorientation is thrilling and new. Over the past 15 years we’ve watched whole governments spin and spin and now the press does it incessantly…and we’re all disoriented.

I don’t see how - with everything both shallowed-out and speeded-up, we’re actually going to know any of the candidates better by election date while the spin cycle is still set on “disorientation.”

I’m glad Mayor Rudy Giuliani has declared for ‘08 - he immediately brings a grown-up mind into the mix - but bang out the gate we’re seeing some of his words being twisted (by the left and some on the far-right) to “frighten” others into believing that, were he president, Rudy would appoint a million little Ruth Bader Ginsbergs onto the SCOTUS.

Asked about the SCOTUS, Giuliani, who as a prosecutor tried to uphold existing law, not create new law, said he liked and knew Sam Alito, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and that those sorts of strict constitutionalists are the sort of judges he’d look for. He mentioned “the Ginsburg Standard” - and that was the button that immediately started the “spin” cycle. “Ohhhh, the Ginsberg standard, eh? Well, that must mean he’d appoint Ginsbergs!”

Um. No. The “Ginsberg Standard” was the standard by which the Republicans in congress during Bill Clinton’s tenure declared (with courtesy that is unimaginable of today’s Democrats) that “the president is entitled to his nominee…” and that a nominee can be excused from answering questions that do not cite a particular case. I don’t know if there was ever a judicial nominee who answered fewer questions than Ruth Bader Ginsberg, but the Democrats seemed to like that standard just fine, back then.

There are a hundred magazines, but only about five stories.
- G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News 1926

Giuliani is not the only one being treated to the extreme spin cycle. The press is also busy spinning the notion of cloture, for the American public - and this is an easy one to confuse them on. Q&O has the excellent rundown. Bottom line: Dems are trying to end a debate, Republicans are trying to keep it open, but in the twisted world of the press, the GOP is trying to “shut down” a debate by…apparently…making the Democrats talk about things they don’t want to talk about. Egad. Ed Morrissey explains it all and Second Hand Conjecture and Instapundit also lay it out.

I keep thinking of Hamlet, after his play has struck the conscience of the king, Claudius. Through a whirlwind of confusion Hamlet turns to Ophelia and says - with seeming clarity of mind - “believe none of this.”

Sigh. Welcome to American politics 2007.

Obedience. The most thrilling word in the world; a very thunderclap of a word. Why do these fools fancy that the soul is only free when it disagrees with the common command? Even the mobs who rise to burn and destroy owe all their granduer and terror, and a sort of authority, not to their anger, but to their agreement. Why should mere disagreement make us feel free?
- G.K. Chesterton, The Surprise

Meanwhile, Kathryn Jean Lopez takes a look at the rather virulent Anti-Catholicism of John Edwards’ new blogmaster who - because her imagination is either running rampant or dulled in the extreme - rings the “Catholics hate sex and wimmin” bell rather sharply. Michelle Malkin did a public dramatic reading of some of this blogger’s other writings. She reports that the thing is not being well-recieved by the “humorless” left. I don’t know that I’d call the left humorless…Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert can be pretty clever. The left is simply incapable of self-deprecation, or laughing at themselves. That’s not humorlessness, that’s insecurity and overworked “self-esteem.”

Pride is a weakness in the character; it dries up laughter, it dries up wonder, it dries up chivalry and energy.
- G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

I disagree with those suggesting that Edwards should fire his blogmistress - master, whatever - though. Let her stay. She’ll either grow into the job and manage to release herself from her narrow and constricted former voice or she’ll crash and burn. She certainly shouldn’t be silenced.

And anyway, silencing is - increasingly - the province of the left. So is, ummm, suggesting ironic laws.

Democracy Project believes it has found more revisionism which is another word for distortion.

I have a notion that the real advice I could give to a young journalist is simply this: to write an article for the Sporting Times and one for the Church Times and put them in the wrong envelopes…what is really the matter with almost every paper is that it is much too full of things suitable to the paper.
- G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography.

Finally, an male emailer wrote a moving missive about this piece which I’d written as an afterthought to one of Maxed Out Mama’s well-done posts. In his email, this writer expressed frustration with the way in which men are being portrayed in society, via Madison Avenue, sitcoms, etc. This is an important issue.

A decade or so ago we were hearing about the “crisis” in female self-esteem and part of the answer to that problem was to make sure that women were always portrayed as smart and capable - at least around men. Men thus became the staggering baboons of society and there they have remained.

Our fathers did not talk about psychology; they talked about a knowledge of Human Nature. But they had it, and we have not. They knew by instinct all that we have ignored by the help of information. For it is exactly the first facts about human nature that are now being ignored by humanity.
- G.K. Chesterton, Sidelights

If the commercials at Super Bowl (those that weren’t sending us secret encoded messages about the Iraq war) are any indication, the problem is getting worse and no one is talking about it. It needs talking and thinking about. Here is Dick Meyer, on the subject barely a year ago and Deborah Roffman in the WaPo, who wrote almost exactly one year ago:

I said I thought the “boys will be bad” message of the show was a terribly disrespectful one, and I wouldn’t use my classroom in any way to reinforce it. It was a good moment: Recognizing for the first time the irony that maybe it was they who were really being demeaned, some of the boys got mad, even indignant.

Click! A channel is switched. Push! A new spin cycle is begun. We’re not keeping up with things. Truth is becoming expedient. Important matters are being shoved aside for a look at Paris Hilton’s crotch.

And we forget about what’s really going on. And what heroes and grown-ups are.

The new school of art and thought does indeed wear an air of audacity, and breaks out everywhere into blasphemies, as if it required any courage to say a blasphemy. There is only one thing that requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.
-G.K. Chesterton, G.F. Watts

Everyone needs to grow up, and fast, or we’re all in one hell of a lot of trouble.

When you choose anything, you reject everything else.
- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy