CONSENSUS: What if the guardians walk off their posts?

FRIDAY, JUNE 14, 2024

What if they never existed? As we watched Sunday's Washington Journal, a type of consensus took form.

Amazing! Callers from our own Blue America agreed with callers from the Red America of our neighbors and friends! They agreed on this proposition about November's election:

Our nation's survival is at stake—but only if The Other Guy wins!

If President Biden wins re-election, we'll be losing our republic. If Candidate Trump returns to the White House, our democracy will cease to exist.

We aren't saying that any particular claim is wrong. We're simply noting the unhelpful consensus which now prevails across the fruited plain.

 "Both [sides] read the same Bible and pray to the same God..."

That's what President Lincoln said in his second inaugural address. Six weeks later, he was murdered by a nutcase from one of those sides.

Both sides "pray to the same God, and each invokes his aid against the other?" In a nation which is less religious and more diverse, it's a bit like that today.

If you're watching American "cable news," each side now has its favorite "convicted felon."

(A word of warning: In the political sense, the more dangerous trial of Hunter Biden is the one which is scheduled to start in September. You hear that said on the Fox News Channel, perhaps not on MSNBC.)

Each side has its favorite convicted felon. Also:

As of this morning, their side has President Biden wandering off at the G-7 conference, with Giorgia Miloni rushing to shepherd him back to the fold. Our side has Candidate Trump calling Milwaukee a [BLEEP]hole city and talking about those sharks.

(We're told that the Milwaukee remark may finish him off. Our tribe's thought leaders have been making such predictions ever since Trump made that early remark about the POW status of the late John McCain.)

Plus, we have the surreptitiously taped, carefully curated remarks by Alito. Not just by Justice Alito; but also by his wife. 

(Carefully curated, then helpfully paraphrased. This is the level to which our own failing tribe has now stooped. More on this topic next week.)

On Washington Journal, another type of consensus quickly emerged. Neither side had the slightest idea what the other side could be thinking! 

The first two callers said this:

MODERATOR (6/9/24): So what do you think? Is 2024 the most important election in our history, or in our lifetimes? 

Jim in Washington State, Democrat. What do you think?

JIM FROM WASHINGTON STATE: It definitely is. Why do so many Republicans support a convicted rapist, a convicted fraud, a convicted felon with no shame? I mean, what's wrong with the Republican Party? And that's terrible. Yeah. What—yeah.

MODERATOR: Danny is in Louisville, Kentucky, Republican.  Danny, is this the most important election in history?

DANNY FROM KENTUCKY: Yes. I tell you, I don't know how anybody can't see this has got to be the most important, because if things keep going the way they're going, we ain't gonna have a republic.

You know, just like the other guy said, you know, he's wondering what's wrong with the Republicans. I'm wondering what's wrong with Democrats.

It was "just like the other guy said!" We'd call it a type of consensus! 

(Similar statements of incomprehension punctuated the hour.)

Out of the growing consensus, one dissenter emerged. He didn't want to discuss which candidate is a pedophile, as opposed to which of the candidates can't satisfy his many wives.

The fourth caller was in California, where it was just after 4 a.m. It's as we showed you yesterday. Weirdly, the caller said this:

MODERATOR: This is Gregory, Sherman Oaks, California, Democrat.  Gregory, good morning to you.

GREGORY IN CALIFORNIA: And good morning to you. And this is the most important election, at least in six elections. 

I've heard a bunch of Republicans talk about how we're going to lose our republic, or our Second Amendment rights, or jobs or some other stuff. 

What we're going to lose is our planet. If we don't get behind doing something serious about climate destruction and global heating, all the other issues are going to be dying out, on a planet that is dying out.

It's up to us, in this generation—and this part of this generation now running the show, has the choice whether or not we're going to save the planet from the worst possible effects of climate change and climate destruction and whether we're going to save it by finally cutting back on such things as  fossil fuels subsidies and turning that money to energy efficiency, green energy, climate mitigation and resilience and other environmental and climate remediation. 

We are the generation that gets to save the planet. I would say that one other election really was, like this one, the most important election, and that was the election of the millennial year 2000.

We could have started the third millennium with a president who was going to at least put a foundation on saving the planet by attacking climate change. Of course, that was Al Gore—Albert Gore Jr., the vice president. And instead, we wasted the first decade of this new century and new millennium on a president who gave us climate betrayal, two stupid wars and a financial meltdown, among many other failures.

MODERATOR: That's Gregory in Sherman Oaks, California.  Thank you.

This caller authored a bit of a throwback discussion. He talked about a serious topic, and he recalled an earlier time.

What would a President Gore have done with respect to climate? No one will ever find out.

(In our estimation, his presidency would have been an ongoing nightmare. He would have spent the next four years dealing with claims that he had said that he invented the Internet, and with poisonous claims about the way he hired a woman to teach him how to be a man.)

No one will ever find out. That said, we were struck by this caller's reference to that earlier "most important" campaign. Our reason would go like this:

The caller made no reference to way that earlier "most important election" was covered in the mainstream press. That said, the disintegration of our national discourse was already well underway at that point--not that the thought leaders of Blue America are ever going to say that.

(We refer to Blue America's academics as well as to our journalists.)

In fact, the disintegration of the discourse was driven by the mainstream press corps during that fateful campaign. In the main, it was driven by the MSM—not by the RNC!

(It was an extension of the mainstream press corps' peculiar war against Bill Clinton--a war which began with the New York Times' bungled Whitewater reporting. That initial story was told by Gene Lyons in Fools for Scandal—How the Media Invented Whitewater. The book was published by Harper's magazine and was quickly disappeared.)

Back to Campaign 2000. They had their fun with Al Gore's clothes. They kept inventing crazy statements they would pretend he had made.

Working from within their lack of a sexual politics, they kept insulting Gore as a girly-man—as "today's man/woman." (We're quoting Chris Matthews, who was very influential within the mainstream press at the time.)

On the Sunday before the nation voted, Maureen Dowd published her seventh column focused on Gore's bald spot. She pictured him singing "I Feel Pretty" he stood before a mirror.

This is the way these stars behaved as "our democracy's" most sacred day approached during that fateful year.

In a single report, there is no way to capture the way these idiots behaved in the twenty months leading up to that fateful election. Simply put, the children were angry at President Clinton, who had just escaped removal from office in his impeachment trial 

The vice president hadn't denounced the president to a degree which met their guild's approval. And so they fell to work, for the next twenty months, transferring their enmity over to him.

Everyone knows that this is what happened, but no careerist is ever going to tell you! When we heard that California caller focus on the climate, we thought of one of the craziest manifestations of this twenty-month mainstream press corps war:

We thought of the front-page report in the New York Times in which Michiko Kakutani took a trip to the funny farm as she summarized Candidate Gore's widely praised 1992 book, Earth in the Balance.

The Crazy leaped from the clown car and ran wild that particular day. Of all the crazy moments in the mainstream press corps' "war against Gore," that report by Kakutani—Maureen Dowd's friend—was arguably the weirdest of them all.

Eight years later, Gore would receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate. (The honor was so great that it even caused the gruesome Frank Rich to reverse his ceaseless trashing of Gore and of Gore's devious motives.)

In 2007, Gore was awarded the Nobel Prize. In November of 1999, the New York Times, on its front page, was way off in the crazy zone in its treatment of the original book.

None of the careerists our tribe is told to trust—none of "our favorite reporters and friends"—are ever going to tell you what happened in that earlier "most important" campaign. 

Our journalists aren't going to tell you. Neither will our tribe's vaunted academics.

(Nor will they tell you the fuller story. The war to which we refer was later extended through the 2016 campaign, helping send Donald J. Trump to the White House. All in all, Maureen Dowd plainly seemed to favor Candidate Trump in that important campaign.)

The Wallaces, the Maddows and the O'Donnells will never tell you such things. That said, we thought of Kakutani's bizarre report as Gregory from Sherman Oaks recalled the possibilities which were lost in the course of that earlier campaign.

Today, stars like Wallace lead you to think that you can trust her "favorites." Her favorites are pictured as our guardians, to steal a term from "a very old book."

Today, Wallace's favorites are Blue America's guardians—or so we're urged to believe. 

That said, who will guard us against the guardians? The question has lingered for thousands of years. We thought of that ancient question as watched Washington Journal this Sunday morning.

In fairness to Plato, successful societies really do need their guardians! We direct you to two scenes from the Best Picture winner, The Godfather:

In one scene, Sonny is killed at a Jersey toll booth when the collectors have all agreed to walk off their posts. 

In another scene, Michael has to scramble to save his father's life in a hospital where he lies unconscious. Once again, the guardians—in this case, the police officer assigned to protect this unconscious patient—have been paid to abandon their posts.

Why did that narrative structure appear two times in that award-winning film? We can't tell you that.

But the people we're told to trust today were never capable players. Beyond that, they were never acting as guardians in the first place.

Today, their general cluelessness remains—and a smiling figure tells you, each day, that these people should be regarded as our tribe's "favorite reporters and friends."

What if our guardians walk off their posts? That is a very good question.

Then too, what if they never existed at all? That's more like the situation we modern Americans face.

The caller from sunny California was pretty much off in the clouds. He was discussing a serious topic in some detail—and our modern journalistic "imitation of life" doesn't function like that. 

(Nor is it clear that our journalists could perform some such task, even if they decided to try.)

We humans are good at building tall buildings. As the later Wittgenstein incoherently noted, we're skilled at little else. 

The people our tribe is told to trust worked to send Candidate Bush (and then Candidate Trump) to the White House. Gregory from Sherman Oaks didn't mention that aspect of that earlier campaign. 

That said, Pepperidge Farm remembers what actually happened.

What if the guardians walk off their posts? Fellow blue tribe citizens, please!

What if the guardians "walk off their posts?" Why can't we turn to the serious question:

 What if they never existed?