Murphy's Law

Right now Paddy Chayefsky is:

a. Rolling over in his grave

b. High-fiving Peter Finch in heaven

c. High-fiving Peter Finch in hell (where it’s Happy Hour 24/7)

d. All of the above

There are any number of examples that could be (and probably have been) offered up to illustrate how prescient Chayefsky’s screenplay for Network really was. Think of phony purveyors of moral outrage ranging from Morton Downey Jr. to Jerry Springer, and the whole concept of infotainment to the hastening-of-the-apocalypse proliferation of Reality TV. Stage it and they will come is now the (un)official mantra of media’s M.O. And, in the end, it’s all pretty much a tempest in a teapot. Or, a tempest in a tea party. Which brings us to the unbelievable Glenn Beck. Of course, fabricated indignation has been good business in America since Jonathan Edwards first perfected the formula with Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God back in 1741, shortly before the advent of cable television.

Capitalizing on the nervous consciences of the faithful created steady work well into the 20th Century, and Sinclair Lewis codified the archetypal character in Elmer Gantry (1926). That pernicious tradition was carried on faithfully by Confidence Men like Pat Roberston, Jerry Falwell, Benny Hinn and Rick Warren. But of course this act has always been too tempting for politicians not to embrace with every inauthentic bone in their bodies. The only hucksters that can outhustle the pols are the preening simpletons who rile up the credulous citizens who dial in each day for another dose of bad medicine. At the appointed hour, the idiot box transfigures into a burning bush and these rapt minions who otherwise behold Christ in their breakfast food (or, proving how crafy and omnipotent the Lord can be, at  lunchtime too), get their Godhead on in the form of a third-rate carnival barker.

Of course, the current poseur-du-jour is Fox News fixture Glenn Beck. How can a cretin this transparently full of shit possibly capture a prime time audience? Simple: have the worst presidency in U.S. history leave an unprecedented number of people jobless, scared shitless about losing their jobs, bemoaning their 401-k that flew away, and understandably appalled at Wall Street slumlords who used our credit rating like a plastic fuck doll still wallowing in money the way a dog rolls on a dead rodent. Enter the savior, the man who cries on cue like an actress at the Oscars, and about as convincingly. He cares, you see, he really cares. And he loves this country too much to just watch…a charismatic leader try to come in and clean up the mess the man he worshipped so carelessly created.

As incendiary, and insufferable, as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly are, you tend to appreciate how they sometimes can’t keep a straight face as they shovel the horseshit, whipping simpletons into a righteous lather for a steady paycheck. Yes, they are contemptible and yes, they wield their petty power over the powerless in incredibly irresponsible fashion. But with them you know to expect less than little in terms of originality, integrity or intellectual rigor. Thus, you have to remain content, in a free country, to let them hold sway over a semi-retarded audience who would crawl over molten coals for them. And to be certain, Glenn Beck’s senseless sensibility makes those two blowhards look like oracular paragons. He is an empty suit with an empty mind, offering regurgitated jeremiads and faux populism to a genuinely distressed viewership looking for answers but disinclined to trust the dirty Socialists currently in power. His histrionics, about as genuine as A-Rod’s apologies, are comprised of two primary objectives: to position himself as a voice of reason in these troubling times, and to use a time of crisis as the impetus for his own existence. If Beck was capable of experiencing even an infinitesimal measure of shame, he would combust quicker than a drummer from Spinal Tap.

Thank God for Stephen Colbert. He did, as has been noted elsewhere, what famously “liberal” mainstream outlets like the New York Times couldn’t (wouldn’t) do and took Beck to task, on his own terms, with his own words, and exposed him as the opportunistic nitwit he so obviously is.

Stephen Colbert ripped apart Fox News host (and New York Times cover boy) Glenn Beck Tuesday night, mocking his 9-12 project, meant to conjure the spirit of compassion and camaraderie Americans felt on September 12, 2001. “We weren’t told how to behave that day after 9/11, we just knew,” Beck says to describe the project. “It was right, it was the opposite of what we feel today. Are you ready to be the person you were that day after 9/11, on 9/12?”

“Ready!” Colbert shouted, decked out in a gas mask, holding a gun, and wearing adult diapers. Colbert then…exposed the hypocrisy of Beck’s 9-12 project by highlighting comments he made on September 9, 2005…”The 9-12 project is not for families directly affected by 9/11, just people building their careers on it,” Colbert said.

There is not too much that needs to be said after this well-warranted incineration (the must-see video is here). But we can, and should, bat Beck’s bones around a little bit. At this moment, with all that is confronting our country, it is very necessary to take all available opportunities to mock and expose this charlatan. Here is a man who would suck the blood out of a rotting corpse if it would get his contract renewed; the least we can do is rub his nose in it when he soils himself, nightly on national TV.

While writing about Flannery O’Connor the other day, I made the half-serious, half-sardonic observation that dedication like hers is probably impossible to imitate today because of all the noise, electronic and digital, distracting us. This type of sentiment could, understandably, be interpreted as iredeemably self-indulgent. Borderline delusional even, the sort that seems so pervasive amongst the more sanguine if solipsistic literary types on today’s scene. I’m not hating, but I would hope not to include myself amongst their ilk. Chalk me up as someone not prepared to shed any tears (for anyone else, certainly not for myself) about how difficult all these distractions are for writers. Perhaps it would be nice, in purely aesthetic terms, to contemplate a more austere, less busy world where the lack of outside stimulation forced one to focus on quaint things like books, letter writing and one’s own work, because, simply put, there was nothing else to do. But admittedly skewed and sentimental longing aside, is there even a question about then vs. now? Please.

Allen Ginsburg said: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…looking for an angry fix. If all it took was heroin to lay them that low, imagine what Google would have done to them. Pussies.

Let me put it this way. Do you think, given the choice, Flannery O’Connor (of all people!) wouldn’t have wanted to live in a world with this genius, fully prepared for a negligible but oh so necessary infringement on her (otherwise unfettered) artistic vision? Hell yes, she would have.

And information overload cuts both ways. Sure, it takes bandwidth away from the pursuit of more old-fashioned type activities like sleep, chopping wood, and contracting tuberculosis. You have to take the good with the bad; then, or now. And who says the saturation of stuff available to all of us, eight days a week, via the Internet, is inherently bad? All that’s required of the overstimulated individual is to unplug, look away or take care of the business at hand (the multi-taskers can take care of the business in hand as well; the Internet is the cup that forever overfloweth). If given the choice between being forcibly removed from the possibility of endless diversion and an internal engine enabling me to pick and choose when and how I’ll be amused, it’s a no-brainer. Plus, it’s always preferable to attain the best of both worlds: all of that enticement out there can tempt as much as it can teach, and being able to manage this embarrassment of riches is a simple matter of evolution. Or, as the curmudgeonly but clearheaded Neil Peart famously opined: I will choose a path that’s clear–I will choose free will.

Put another, less pretentiously longwinded way, if I lived in a simpler time without an Internet filled with electronic apples to taste, I could never find things like this:

Pretty cute, huh? Well get a load of this site. The awesomeness of Fuck You, Penguin, from concept to execution is possibly unparalleled. Who could ever have thought of this? They did. And I love them for it (so too do quite a few other folks, Democracy at work!) Personally, I’d rather have the best and brightest creating content for the masses than working in war rooms coming up with advanced ways to incinerate entire populations. As Descartes said, Cogito, ergo sum (Rough translation: I blog therefore I am).

The weird wide web is the face that launched a thousand ships. Also known as websites. It is, taking the long view, a big landfill holding the detritus of our over-educated, over-stimulated and under-engaged minds. But it’s all recylcable; better in these green days to kill minds than trees. Plus, how else could we find things like this?

Shudder to think, there was once a world without that image. The possibility of living in that world terrifies me (Perhaps that is what Kurtz despaired about as he drew his last, tortured breath: The horror, the horror). Been on an airplane lately? In the air less than ten minutes and you see that collective panic attack amongst the people who can’t plug something in. Then, the second tires hit the tarmac it quickly becomes a contest to see who can turn on their phone first. How did people exist in the world before cell phones? Before e-mail for that matter? Before computers? I lived in that world. Recently. And I have no idea. But I do know this: that ship set sail and it’s never coming back to shore. My advice for anyone (the creatively inclined and the ostensibly more productive members of society) who bemoans the bad old days when our minds weren’t turned to mush by radioactive x-rays emanating from the lap-tops scalding our crotches? Go to sleep and dream about them. After all, that’s what you are invariably doing, eyes wide shut, as you spend those awkward hours in between your next Internet fix. As Thoreau said: The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. At least before YouTube.