Older & Wiser? The Triumph of Cotton Mather

Today's Photos Courtesy of Jan

GQ, the Great Questioner, has another one: "Are our current politicians disappointing because we are older, wiser (?), and more informed, not necessarily truthfully, or are they truly lacking relative to some past presidents?"

I once had dinner with a US Senator in his home with his wife. I really liked this guy, and urged him and them to run for President. He combined intelligence, political adroitness, decency, and a wonderful sense of humor. While I didn't know him all that well, his flat refusal to consider running seemed odd for an ambitious politician (redundancy alert). Later I found out that he had a long-term girl friend. He assumed this information would find its way into print if he ran outside his home state. That dinner represents a kind of dividing line that I want to talk about here. Let's remember the parts of GQ's question:

Well GQ, all of us are older. And I believe that people often shift their values as life moves along. This could lead towards wisdom. I want to focus on is GQ's third choice - our being better informed. This focus has two parts.

Part One is the changing media. My dinner with the Senator happened just at a time when our country's reporting was shifting from an old boy's network towards the scrum of trivialities that blasts out of my computer and radio each day. The Senator knew that a decade earlier he could have counted on the media to not report his adulterous affair. The longest serving President of the United States served term after term without his physical disabilities being portrayed and rarely mentioned, and his adulterous affairs and those of his wife were not mentioned to the public.

The media seemed to be pivoting its standards of what is fair game just at the time my favorite Senator was deciding to not run, and not that many years later he played an important role in President Clinton's impeachment over his affair. People like to point to extensive changes in the nature of media. TV and the internet do make the dissemination of information instant, and anyone - even me - can be a blogger.

The media's need to "fill the news hole" puts the most astonishingly irrelevant and trivial items on the front page. Our fascination with reality TV creates a bridge between the fictional world and the world of facts. We even have a hideous word for it, infotainment. Increasingly, much of political news purports to be reporting but actually is entertainment - today's event could be called "Real Politicians of New Hampshire."

There's no doubt that had he run for President, my Senator pal's cheating would have been exposed, and in fact it was some years later, before his death.

This leads us to Part Two of my consideration of being "better informed." Let's ask, informed about what? I want to suggest that we have gradually become accustomed to delving into the minutia of politician's private lives past a point that is sensible or necessary. It is highly relevant to me that President Clinton promoted globalization, squashed benefits for poor people, promoted homophobic rules in the military and bungled health care reform. I disagree in those matters of public policy. That he cheated on his wife is pathetic and ridiculous, but not public business.

The media has found a way to attract more eyeballs and ears to sell more expensive ads: appeal to the very strong puritan and moralistic traditions in America. Actually what they do is pretend to be puritan and moralistic; in reality they appeal to our most prurient tendencies, using titillation, innuendo, and gross exposure to dirty details. While ostensibly clucking their little virtual tongues at the misbehavior of certain public figures, they actually are selling a kind of porn.

We're told by these professional panderers that they're giving us the tools to judge a politician's character. Actually, I can gather a lot of data about President Clinton's character from how he handled the policies I mentioned above. The depictions of semen stains on Monica's dress? Not needed. Not wanted. Not helpful to political discourse in a great democracy.

I believe that we've lost our way as users of media. The tabloidization of our information stream is based on a secret delight in learning about sexual escapades and other moral failings. We've decided that a person who stands for public office is being evaluated less on skills and ideas, more on personal characteristics. In  many instances, polls show that the public cares more - and understands more - about those personal issues than they do issues of great civic import.

Some personal behavior is indeed relevant: it's vitally important that our kids learn Thomas Jefferson kept slaves, for example, in addition to other more commendable things he did during his lifetime. Even Jefferson fathering children with his slaves is relevant, since such sexual abuse was part of slave ownership. Sometimes it's difficult to figure out, but in most instances, we can indeed sort out what's pertinent to know about our elected representatives.......from what's none of our damn business.