Pastimes

by digby

I have to agree with Frank Rich that the Time Magazine person of the year was a little bit absurd — but then so is his column about it:

This editorial pratfall struck me, once a proud Time staff member, as a sign that my journalistic alma mater might go the way of the old Life… Let’s hope publishing history doesn’t repeat itself. So in Time’s defense, let me say that the more I reflected on its 2006 Person of the Year — or perhaps the more that Mylar cover reflected back at me — the more I realized that the magazine wasn’t as out of touch as it first seemed. Time made the right choice, albeit for the wrong reasons.

As our country sinks deeper into a quagmire — and even a conclusive Election Day repudiation of the war proves powerless to stop it — we the people, and that includes, yes, you, will seek out any escape hatch we can find. In the Iraq era, the dropout nostrums of choice are not the drugs and drug culture of Vietnam but the equally masturbatory and narcissistic (if less psychedelic) pastimes of the Internet. Why not spend hour upon hour passionately venting in the blogosphere, as Time suggests, about our “state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street”? Or an afternoon surfing from video to video on YouTube, where short-attention-span fluff is infinite? It’s more fun than the nightly news, which, as Laura Bush reminded us this month, has been criminally lax in unearthing all those “good things that are happening” in Baghdad.

So, just like George Will, Rich sees the blogosphere as masturbatory and narcissistic fluff —- why, it’s more fun than the nightly news! Apparently Rich and Will want us to believe that they spend their days and nights reading policy papers and holding seminars on the important issues of the day while the rest of us passionately vent about “our state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street” — which sounds suspiciously like a cocktail party in Manhattan or Georgetown.

I won’t go into why the political blogosphere is both entertaining and influential because if you read blogs you already know why. If it is escapism, it’s a form that creates community and makes people better informed and more actively involved in citizenship — so I’m hard pressed to see why this should be considered masturbatory and narcissistic.

Whatever. The blogosphere is something new and like most new things, much of the staid establishment fails to accept it until it’s already out of fashion. I’ve watched this phenonmenon my whole life. (I remember when the politicians started growing their sideburns in the 70’s. Oy.)

But as much as I’ve liked Rich over the years, I have to agree with Big Tent Democrat that when he gets a little too superior toward hoi polloi he needs to be reminded of this, by Bob Sommerby:

Why has a “liberal” like Rich been so tough on Gore through the years? Why did he invent Love Story in 1997? Throughout the course of Campaign 2000, why did he keep pretending that Bush and Gore were a perfectly-matched pair of bumblers? When Gore spoke out on Iraq in 2002, why did Rich attack him again (inventing his facts as he went)? And in his new column, just two weeks ago, why did he nit-pick those ludicrous complaints about Gore? For example, why did he pretend—in that pathetic example—that Gore “waffled” on creationism in 1999? For the most part, readers have no way to evaluate such claims. Why does Rich just keep making them up?

Rich was one of the pathologically unserious who treated the 2000 election as if it were a seventh grade girls slumber party. Considering the consequences, a little humility is in order.

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