Two weeks ago I wrote about Al Gore's new movie on global warming. I liked the film. In response, I instantly got more than 1,000 e-mails, most of them praising Gore, some calling him the usual names and some concluding there was no such thing as global warming, if only because Gore said there was. I put the messages aside for a slow day, when I would answer them. Then I wrote about Stephen Colbert and his unfunny performance at the White House correspondents' dinner.
Kapow! Within a day, I got more than 2,000 e-mails. A day later, I got 1,000 more. By the fourth day, the number had reached 3,499 -- a figure that does not include the usual offers of nubile Russian women or loot from African dictators. The Colbert messages began with Patrick Manley ("You wouldn't know funny if it slapped you in the face") and ended with Ron ("Colbert ROCKS, you MURDER") who was so proud of his thought that he copied countless others. Ron, you're a genius.
It goes on like that. Jesus, and you thought he was all butt-hurt about the dinner itself just a week or so ago. Now, I'm sure the Diceman gets his share of obnoxious e-mail; fortunately, he is comfortably recompensed, unlike the millions of unwashed bloggers and chat-room denizens who deal with other peoples' shit for free.
I particularly love Digby's take on all this, that Cohen, being neither truly liberal nor conservative but merely another fawning courtier in the Sun King's palace in Crawford East, really doesn't get what this is all about. He doesn't understand that, beneath the hyperbolic virtual drive-bys and e-lynchings (quel dangereuse!), there is a real undercurrent of irritation at Cohen's smarmy condescension.
And because Cohen is an unabashed -- one assumes proud, even -- member of the old school of commentary, he also doesn't realize that his œuvre is that of the journalistic buggy-whip. This is call-and-response in real time, baby; there are tens of millions of us, and we have read books and know shit too. It's just that the dynamics are exponentially exaggerated out here in the wild virtual west.
And people like Cohen have no clue how to keep up with such a dynamic, especially since they're careerist douchebags to begin with. They don't grok that 99% of us don't and can't do this for a living, and even the ones who can would generally (and did) do it for free. So fools like Cohen and Marshall Wittman and the like seize on the most obvious feature of that dynamic, which is the profanity, the strident tone, the verbal pimp-slapping and trash-talking.
They are wounded and mortified by it all, and they needn't be. It's not a barroom brawl; it's a barroom conversation, with all the speed and passion and attention-grabbing histrionics that entails. Sorry if it rankles your sense of decorum, old chum, but this really is how we rabble conduct ourselves at a block party or barbecue or what-have-you. Sorta takes the hokey charm out of it, don't it?
The thing is that Cohen, like Father Tim, like Paula Zahn, like the rest of the overpaid pseudo-journamalists who do precious little actual investimagating of anything but embossed party invites, are already sliding precipitously down the slope of irrelevance and ultimately obsolescence. Don't get me wrong; there will always be a need for actual news gathering, even of the sensationalistic tabloid type. But these people aren't news-gatherers, they're merely news-readers. They're performers, and if the miserable dynamic of American Idol and its ilk have proven anything, it's that pretty much anyone can be a performer. All you have to be is entertaining, and let's face it, the Diceman ain't that, especially when he's got a load of sand in his vagina about something this stupid.
And the more Cohen complains, the more he reminds people that he's said a lot of stupid shit in the past, lent an unpopular administration a lot of unwarranted cover, made a lot of huge bumbles in political judgement, and also floated a lot of fluffy nonsense that inadvertently betrays his thought process. Remember the infamous "Math is hard, let's go shopping" column from a few months back?
I confess to be one of those people who hate math. I can do my basic arithmetic all right (although not percentages) but I flunked algebra (once), barely passed it the second time -- the only proof I've ever seen of divine intervention -- somehow passed geometry and resolved, with a grateful exhale of breath, that I would never go near math again. I let others go on to intermediate algebra and trigonometry while I busied myself learning how to type. In due course, this came to be the way I made my living. Typing: Best class I ever took.
Here's the thing, Gabriela: You will never need to know algebra. I have never once used it and never once even rued that I could not use it. You will never need to know -- never mind want to know -- how many boys it will take to mow a lawn if one of them quits halfway and two more show up later -- or something like that. Most of math can now be done by a computer or a calculator. On the other hand, no computer can write a column or even a thank-you note -- or reason even a little bit. If, say, the school asked you for another year of English or, God forbid, history, so that you actually had to know something about your world, I would be on its side. But algebra? Please.
And that's after Cohen acknowledges (with his usual sniff) that math requirements are "the sort of vaunted education reform that is supposed to close the science and math gap and make the U.S. more competitive." How many typing or English whizzes does he think were involved in designing these calculators and computers he relies on? Plus his ignorant math/English dichotomy bugs the shit out of me; there are plenty of people who are good at both. They are not mutually exclusive, it's just that people like Cohen aren't disciplined enough to work a little harder and gain knowledge of something that certainly does have value, even if one happens not to be intuitively good at it initially. At a time when China and India are kicking our asses at science and math -- which will most certainly set the stage for the power dynamic of this century -- it is flat-out irresponsible to to tell someone it's okay to flunk something (any subject) six fucking times and then just walk away from it. It's just ignorant beyond belief.
Hell, I took typing in high school too. And trig and calculus. History and English as well. Even took a weightlifting class so's I could bulk up and meet chicks. Whoopdee-fuckin'-doo. You can be good at more than one or two things in life. It's this puffy nonsense that leads me to believe that Cohen is just another Bobo, a bland, fatuous milquetoast whose non-threatening, fake-heterodox demeanor lulls the reader into thinking momentarily that he's anything more than a willow in the cultural breeze.
In this column, Cohen actually took the administration to task for its dishonesty and mendacity in several areas, from NSA wiretapping to selling and waging its war:
This is why the war itself needed to be waged for specious reasons -- weapons of mass destruction. There were good reasons -- or, if you will, just plain reasons -- to go to war in Iraq. The president could have built his case around the inhumanity of Saddam Hussein's regime or its refusal to abide by numerous U.N. resolutions or even that the Middle East needed to be thrown up into the air to see if democracy came down -- something like that. But this, as Bush must have known and his associates have sometimes admitted (See Vanity Fair's 2003 interview with Paul Wolfowitz), would not suffice. He needed more: a threat. He needed the nonexistent al Qaeda link and the nonexistent WMD. The two threatened imminence. They justified doing something quickly -- too quickly, as it turned out. Conjecture was embraced as fact.
In order to take a nation to war, you have to believe mightily in the threat you are facing and the virtue of your cause. You have to gin yourself up, pull out all the patriotic stops, inflict the slippery-mouthed Cheney on the pitifully gullible viewers of Fox News. This is why all the rules were thrown out. Restrictions against torture were branded as quaint -- and amended to the point of revolting nonsense: the pain had to be virtually death-like. These prisoners, after all, were not serving nations, as in the good old days, but flagless terrorist organizations. In other words, evil. Bush was merely giving permission to fight fire with fire.
Leaving aside the fact that Cohen supported going to war in the first place, how does the tone of this column square against, say, Stephen Colbert's arch satirical monologue at The Dinner? Cohen's implicitly referring to Bush, Cheney, and Wolfowitz as the liars and fabulists that they are; he inveighs against the "pitifully gullible viewers of Fox News"; he's pissed about our use of torture. So it must simply be that Cohen's problem with Colbert is that Colbert inflicted his gauche yuks upon an unsuspecting audience that was innocently expecting the usual borscht-belt lookin-under-muh-desk-for-them-pesky-WMD, George-milked-a-male-horse family-style humor. Yeah, jerking off a horse=teh funny, but it's bad form to roast a deeply unpopular preznit who has been an unmitigated disaster for this nation. Bad form Steve, you bully, you.
Whatever. It does little good to divine the true Diceman by riffling the archive; like the old one-panel corner cartoons, when flipped quickly in succession, you just see a guy dancing in place, juggling lemons and such for the amusement of passersby.
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