Ready for his Close-Up.

“But political success on television is not, unfortunately, limited only to those who deserve it. It is a medium which lends itself to manipulation, exploitation and gimmicks. It can be abused by demagogs, by appeals to emotion and prejudice and ignorance. Political campaigns can be actually taken over by the ‘public relations’ experts, who tell the candidate not only how to use TV but what to say, what to stand for and what ‘kind of person’ to be. Political shows, like quiz shows, can be fixed-and sometimes are.”

By way of Ted at The Late Adopter, Senator John F. Kennedy ruminates on how television has changed politics in 1959, and much of it reads as presciently as Eisenhower’s farewell address fourteen months later. “The other great problem TV presents for politics is the item of financial cost. It is no small item…If all candidates and parties are to have equal access to this essential and decisive campaign medium, without becoming deeply obligated to the big financial contributors from the worlds of business, labor or other major lobbies, then the time has come when a solution must be found to this problem of TV costs.” Yeah, I’d like to say we were working on that.

The Atlantic Sesquicentennial.

“In The Atlantic’s very first issue, in 1857, the magazine’s founders — an illustrious group that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell — declared that they would dedicate their new publication to monitoring the development, and advancing the cause, of what they called ‘the American idea.’ And for the last century and a half, the magazine has been preoccupied with the fundamental subjects of the American experience: war and peace, science and religion, the conundrum of race, the role of women, the plight of the cities, the struggle to preserve the environment, the strengths and failings of our politics, and especially, America’s proper place in the world.” To commemorate the magazine’s 150th anniversary, The Atlantic Monthly publishes The American Idea, an anthology of articles which includes republished writings by TR, W.E.B. DuBois, Albert Einstein, John Muir, Helen Keller, and Vannevar Bush. (Alas, only ten of the included articles are online.)

“The postmodern institutions…those are the indifferent gods.”

“This final season of the show, Simon told me, will be about ‘perception versus reality’ — in particular, what kind of reality newspapers can capture and what they can’t. Newspapers across the country are shrinking, laying off beat reporters who understood their turf. More important, Simon believes, newspapers are fundamentally not equipped to convey certain kinds of complex truths. Instead, they focus on scandals — stories that have a clean moral. ‘It’s like, Find the eight-hundred-dollar toilet seat, find the contractor who’s double-billing,’ Simon said at one point. ‘That’s their bread and butter. Systemic societal failure that has multiple problems — newspapers are not designed to understand it.“

A huge find by way of Chris at Do You Feel Loved?: Margaret Talbot offers a long-form New Yorker profile on David Simon and The Wire. (If you haven’t yet seen Season 4, I recommend bookmarking this for now — it gives away many of S4’s major beats.) There’s also a good deal of spoilerish information on what to expect from Season 5, what David Simon wants to do next, and who’s singing this season’s version of “Way Down in the Hole.” (I’ll give that one away…Bubbles’ sponsor, Steve Earle — listen here.) “Simon makes it clear that the show’s ambitions were grand. ‘”The Wire” is dissent,’ he says. ‘It is perhaps the only storytelling on television that overtly suggests that our political and economic and social constructs are no longer viable, that our leadership has failed us relentlessly, and that no, we are not going to be all right.’”

Vicious Mood Swings.

Right around the midpoint of Steve Buscemi’s uneven, ultimately disappointing Interview, the first of three American remakes of films by the slain Dutch director Theo Van Gogh (the other two will be directed by Stanley Tucci and John Turturro), Buscemi’s beleaguered, world-weary, and increasingly drunk journalist bemoans the state of his notes for his article on Sienna Miller’s catty, self-entitled celebrity-of-the-moment: “This tape is just ten minutes of us bickering at each other!” Uh, Steve, it’s more like 85 minutes. A very brief scene at the opening notwithstanding, the entire movie consists of this eponymous interview, meaning that Buscemi and Miller are bickering, cajoling, pleading, seducing, and threatening each other for the entire film’s run. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing — I came in to the movie expecting a theaterish two-person character study (with possible archetypal overtones about the overlapping worlds of media and entertainment): Add one pompous reporter, one self-infatuated actress, and simmer. But, while the beginning is engaging, the ending is decent, and the film is well-made and well-acted throughout, Interview lost me in the middle going. These two characters turn on a dime too quickly too often: They go from at each other’s throats to in each other’s arms and back over and over again, and it just doesn’t feel plausible. This is mainly a fault of the writing, which — while clever — also feels stilted and unnatural. Buscemi the actor and director comes up aces here, but Buscemi the writer (along with David Schecter) frankly could’ve used a later deadline.

The plot, in a nutshell, has already been described: Pierre (Steve Buscemi) is a hard-drinking, pill-popping political journalist who, as the result of being on the outs with his editor, has been assigned a celebrity puff piece in New York on the same day Very Important Indictments are being handed down in DC. (As we discover in the film’s opening moments, he also has a shell of a brother wasting away at a mental hospital. Based on later revelations, this inclusion may be important, or it may just be a red herring — I chalked it up to a need to humanize Pierre before we watch him rant and rave his way through the rest of the evening.) The celebrity in question is Katya (Sienna Miller), the It Girl of the hour for her sexual escapades and breast reduction surgery as much as for her horror film and soapy TV drama (neither of which Pierre took the trouble to screen beforehand. He considers the subject matter — and the subject — beneath him.) The official interview, at a trendy downtown restaurant, starts and ends badly. But, on the way home, an accidental bump on the head, perhaps precipitated by Katya’s winning smile, gets our two antagonists bottled up in her spacious Tribeca loft, where the “real” interview begins to unfurl…

The remainder of this epic interview consists of seventy or so minutes of intensive, convulsive, verbal wrestling within this deluxe apartment in the sky: Buscemi’s snake to Miller’s mongoose (or is it Buscemi’s mongoose to Miller’s snake? Either way it’s bad — I don’t know animals.) Their sparring is intermittently entertaining, to be sure, but it zigs and zags too often to feel anything close to real. And, while Buscemi and Miller both do excellent work in the roles as written, other parts of the story just don’t hold up. At one point, Buscemi becomes fascinated with some morbid paragraphs he finds (surreptitiously) in Katya’s diary. But, frankly, it’s the type of gloomy woe-is-me fluff everybody had written at some point in a journal, and it doesn’t really make sense that it’d pique his interest so. And to help explain away the reason why neither Pierre or Katya disengage from this disastrous conversation much earlier, they’re given an unwieldy, simplistic Freudian connection — he looks like her wayward dad (her dad is John Waters?), she reminds him of his deceased daughter — that comes off as groan-inducing more than anything else. The last few beats of the movie help bring the story into focus, but by then the damage is done — I’d stop thinking of either character as real people, or as anything other than writerly conceits. For all intent and purposes by then, the Interview was over.

Debate and Digression.

Well, it may seem like they’ve been going at it for awhile now…nevertheless, the first official Democratic primary debate was held last night, co-sponsored by the good folks at CNN and YouTube. [Transcript.] (As you likely heard, this gimmick this time was that the questions were submitted by Youtube users the nation over. All in all, they turned out to be a mixed bag, but no more or less cutting than the ones usually conjured up by George Stephanopoulos, Anderson Cooper, or some other venerable talking head of the moment. Still, not a single query on campaign finance reform managed to sneak through the vetters…so now, I kinda wish I had at least tried to submit one.)

And the verdict this time? Well, no one broke out of the pack as a result of their performance last night, which — the talking heads tell me (hey, David Gergen’s gotta eat) — means a win for Clinton. But, as with the past few debates, I still find my position further solidifying in favor of Obama and Edwards, and against the Senator from New York. (My reasons have been put forth previously here and here.) In fact, the most irritating moment of the debate for me, and I’ll admit that this’ll be considered well beyond stupid and pedantic to most people, was Senator Clinton’s butchering of the distinction between “liberal” and “progressive” to contort her way out of having to name herself the former. For what it’s worth, the key element of a turn-of-the-century progressive was never “someone who believes strongly in individual rights and freedoms” — that would be a liberal. Indeed, arguably the major flaw in the progressive movement — until after WWI — was its inattentiveness to individual rights and freedoms…hence, Prohibition, or, to take an even more sordid example, the proliferation of Jim Crow in the South.

But, more importantly, and this is what really irked me, Hillary Clinton has proven herself to be the least progressive of the Democratic candidates, in that she’s been the most willing to get into bed with corporate interests time and time again. (And, for you historians reading this, yes, I’m calling shenanigans on Kolko.)

Ok, I’ll concede, Clinton can’t honestly be expected to deliver a comprehensive historical disquisition about liberalism v. progressivism in a 45-second debate answer. But, please don’t chalk up my concern simply to being an aggrieved aspiring egghead just yet. (And, hey, speaking of parochial, Obama mentioned my hometown, Florence, SC, tonight, albeit not in a positive light. But I digress again.) The fact is, the differences between liberalism and progressivism do matter, particularly when you consider [a] how often politicians in our party seem confused, or even ignorant, about the Left’s guiding political philosophies these days, and [b] how different a truly progressive presidential candidate would seem from what Hillary Clinton has yet offered us.

Most importantly, a true “modern progressive” would push campaign finance reform, ethics in government, and voting reform though the heavens fall. These are hardly central tenets of the Clinton campaign, to say the least. And, along with the obvious necessities of a sane, competent, foreign policy, accessible, affordable health care, and comprehensively reworked environmental and energy plans, a real “modern progressive” would also extol education, civics reform, universal (if not mandatory) service, community-building, a vast increase in arts and science funding, an end to child poverty…all ways to help renew the bonds of citizenship, to help encourage an active, engaged, self-governing electorate, and to help foster a new generation of Americans more attuned and responsive to the concerns of their fellow men and women — here and around the globe — than they are to the self-absorbed and increasingly inescapable dictates of rapacious consumerism and the corporate bottom line.

It’s late, and I’ve clearly started soapboxing. Still, what I wrote back in 2000 here, before I came to Columbia, still holds: “I know it all sounds a bit academic and removed from reality, but, what can I say? This is where my idealism (or what vestiges of it that survive this election cycle) lies.” Well, it’s been a few election cycles since then, and in many other ways the years since have not been kind, in terms of progressivism or otherwise. I’d very much like to continue indulging in “the audacity of hope” when it comes to such matters — I know it’s way early in the game, and that we’re probably still at least a good 3 or 4 “Macaca moments” out before this all gets decided. But increasingly, and particularly after listening to these debates thus far and the virtual Clinton coronation by the talking heads thereafter, other quotes often come to mind as well. For example: “Look for your friends, but do not trust to hope. It has forsaken these lands.”

I’m not saying Clinton would make a terrible president — Obviously, she’d be much better than the current fiasco of an administration. (But, as always, who wouldn’t be?) But I do increasingly fear her tenure — if it’s marked by the same confused, wishy-washy and corporate-friendly Republican-lite “centrism” her campaign and the DLC have pushed in the past — will make for yet another missed opportunity in terms of fostering real progressive change in this country. (And Senator Clinton, to get to the point: I know progressives. I’ve spent the past six years and change studying progressives. And, you, Madam, have been no progressive.)

What Rough Beast?

“I am going to say something that few people in public life will say, but most know is absolutely true: a vast aspect of our jobs today – outside of the really major decisions, as big as anything else – is coping with the media, its sheer scale, weight and constant hyperactivity. At points, it literally overwhelms.” In his final weeks as prime minister, Tony Blair addresses the problem of the media, calling it “like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits.” (Full text of remarks.) “The result is a media that increasingly and to a dangerous degree is driven by ‘impact’. Impact is what matters. It is all that can distinguish, can rise above the clamour, can get noticed. Impact gives competitive edge. Of course the accuracy of a story counts. But it is secondary to impact. It is this necessary devotion to impact that is unravelling standards, driving them down, making the diversity of the media not the strength it should be but an impulsion towards sensation above all else.“

I wouldn’t say the feral beast metaphor gets right at it — until last year, most of the major news media, in this country at least, was rather well domesticated: It let Dubya lie his way through just about anything, including building a case for war in Iraq on false pretenses, with impunity. But, clearly something is broken with “this relationship between public life and media,” as Blair put it. In the midst of a conflict that’s been dragging on longer than World War II, you’re still likely to hear more about Paris Hilton’s jail travails (Prison sucks? Our criminal justice system tends to favor the wealthy? Who knew?), Don Imus’s racist bromides (A bile-spewing racist on talk radio? Wherever did they find him?), or the winner of American Idol, to take only three recent examples, than anything of use about the status of the conflict, or our actions, there. And even coverage of the horrifying tragedy at Virginia Tech, obviously a legitimate news story, descended into exploitation almost immediately (and provoked very little understanding that this level of tragedy has become virtually a daily occurrence in Iraq.) They’re just giving us what they want, I suspect the comeback is, and that’s almost assuredly true. But, still, it’d be nice to see a little more daily recognition from our major journalistic outlets that the mass media in our society performs a crucial — if not the crucial — function in informing the electorate on current events and providing the information indispensable to maintaining an active, responsive citizenry, and that other factors should come into play in their coverage than just the corporate bottom line. Update: From the press box, Slate‘s Jack Shafer cries foul.

The Best and the Brightest.

“If you get information that is going to jar the Government of the United States and jar the people of the United States, that’s what you get paid for. Don’t expect to be popular. The better you do the job, the more likely you are to go against conventional wisdom, and people don’t like to hear bad news. So you are not going to be popular.” David Halberstam, 1934-2007.

Assassin Nation.

I’ll grant I have as much morbid curiosity as the next man, probably more, and I’ll admit to have found it interesting that — judging from his ubiquitous Youtube-suicide dump (I’m sure y’all can find it) — the Virginia Tech killer, Cho Seung Hui, also seems to have recently seen Oldboy (and The Killer.) That being said, I’m with the families of the deceased: It was ridiculously offensive on the part of the press scorps to give this murderous chump his much-desired fifteen minutes, even after death, and to plaster his visage all over every media outlet for 18 hours like a two-bit Travis Bickel. CNN’s clearly been trying to rectify by putting the victims on their front page at the moment, but too little, too late. I’m reminded of Sirhan Sirhan’s famous quote: “They can gas me, but I am famous. I have achieved in one day what it took Robert Kennedy all his life to do.” Please, let’s not play into these sick bastards’ games anymore. I’m sorry Cho’s life turned out to be a sad and pathetic one, but let him just be consigned to the ignominious dustbin of psycho killer history, where he belongs. He was a lonely, depressed, raging, and homicidal young man, who lost any claim to sympathy when he started randomly firing at people — We’re not going to understand him any better by throwing up his obscene posthumous vanity portraits in every nook and cranny of the national culture.

That being said, using Cho less as a poster-child for his own sick revenge fantasies and more as one for sensible gun control laws makes a little more sense to me. Now I understand that real gun control is sadly something of a non-starter in this country, and that mandatory gun safety training, for example, is the type of thing that might pay more dividends over time so long as the second amendment remains interpreted as it is. And naturally, the NRA is already ready to push back on any attempt to tie this awful incident to easy access to weaponry. But it seems abundantly clear: Whether we need a new law or just need to enforce the old ones, people who’ve already been declared certifiable by a federal judge should have a little harder time procuring two firearms than did Cho. Can we at least agree on that?

Roads, Towers, Beats, and Beechers.

The 2007 Pulitzers are announced: Cormac McCarthy wins the fiction prize for The Road; Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 takes non-fiction; Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff win the history prize for The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, and Debby Applegate’s biography The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher wins in that category. Congrats to all.

The Alan Colmes Project.

“It sounds harsh, but think of most of the Fox Democrats, at least those who appear on the opinion shows, which take up half the network’s airtime, as one of three types. They are either scary liberals, losers or enablers. Representatives of each type may score some points for Democrats when they appear on-air, but ultimately they help further Fox’s larger narrative about Democrats and liberals and what they stand for.” Also in Salon, Alex Koppelman takes a gander at FOX News’s usual go-to stable of kept Dems.