American Patrol

You know that frank national conversation about race we’ve been meaning to have? We didn’t have it last week, either. Which, among a great many other shames and pities the week brought us, is a shame and a pity. The full story told by Shirley Sharrod in the once infamous NAACP tape, as corroborated by the white Georgia farm couple she encountered and aided twenty four years ago, was a formative experience for all three, and would have made a dandy place to start. No soap, though. Instead, we were treated to an epic display of the cynicism, dishonesty, willful misunderstanding, and moral cowardice that will prevent us from having such a conversation for some time to come.

Politics in America tends to hit the level of metacriticism without stopping very long at either poetry or prose, and the convoluted story of how we heard Sharrod’s story in the first place presents a much brighter and shinier object for the news media than the story itself ever could. By now you’ve heard it over, under, sideways, and down, so I won’t belabor it further, except to note a few of the more poignant lessons this “teaching moment” has produced that might have gotten lost in the din.

*One of the many, many problems with the vaunted “24 hour news cycle” is the fact that it provides far less than 24 hours worth of news. Instead, we get self-serving analysis, far more repetitions than even Goebbels required to make a truth, endless staring matches with plane crashes, car chases, and the like, and the broad dissemination of utter horseshit like the initial Shirley Sharrod stories. Another is that the media seems so transfixed with the supposedly blistering pace of it all that things like corroboration, fact checking, and plain old reportage have become ballast, discarded at the first sign of things slowing down, leading to the broad dissemination of utter horseshit like the initial Shirley Sharrod stories.

*The fact that the initial Shirley Sharrod stories were utter horseshit didn’t slow things down one bit. Fox News, where even points of internal consistency were ballast discarded many miles ago, pulled a quick and nasty 180, going from demanding Sharrod’s resignation to criticizing the Administration for forcing Sharrod to resign “before all the facts were in.” CNN meanwhile tried to parlay some video of Anderson Cooper posing some baldly obvious questions to Andrew Breitbart into a claim that they were the real journalists in the game despite having ridden the manure spreader for most of the previous day.

*The response of the Rahm Emanuel-led White House political operation-- a/k/a “Pavlov’s White House”--was a work of breathtaking and dangerous ineptitude. In trying to short circuit the situation in a single news cycle for fear of how it would play in the right wing media, they managed to create a story that would dominate coverage for the rest of the week and serve to legitimize the worst of the right wing media.

The entire situation boils down to one inevitable conclusion-- that the governance of this country has to a great degree been given over to the attempts of cowards to placate liars. And that is bad news indeed.