T. Rex

Even though he's become something of a fuddy-duddy, and even though the New Yorker for which he writes has turned contemporary fiction and poetry into a quiet beach on which Ian McEwan's characters prattle on lyrically about their penises without ever using them properly, I will admit to a certain fondness for Hendrik Hertzberg. But this is nuts, and I'll tell you why:

No one naked around here. No chaos at YearlyKos. No “sweet smell of marijuana,” as the straight papers used to refer to it. No demands for revolution. No denunciations of bourgeois democracy. The Democratic National Committee Chairman is listened to respectfully and cheered enthusiastically.

I think the difference between today’s left and yesterday’s is partly explained by the difference between the wars that have energized them. Vietnam was, as Bob Dole might say, a “Democrat war.” You couldn’t protest it just by putting your energies into electing Democrats, and of course you couldn’t do it by trying to elect Republicans, who liked the war even more. You had to go to the left of the Dems, and if you hadn’t happened to have already acquired a moral/political compass, you might keep going till you ended up at the feet of Chairman Mao. This war is an all-Republican affair. And this generation, thank God, is perfectly content to stick with Chairman Howard.

In other words, YearlyKos is another boring industry confab, one more tacky convention in a nation replete with tacky conventions, in which the high points are the free danish and the low points are the uncomfortable convention-center D-chairs, where a moment of excitement might be a middle-aged divorcee with a few extra pounds picking up a middle-aged widow with a few extra kids at the hotel bar for a round of mildly regrettable, enthusiastic, unathletic sex. One therefore wonders: Why does it merit coverage by the nation's preeminent weekly publication? Perhaps because politicians show up, but there isn't a diner in New Hampshire of which that isn't also true, and most of them get by with an occasional remote from some CBS affiliate in Hartford. Unlike revolutionists of yore, I'm generally untroubled by the bourgeoisie and their cute democracy--no more than I'm troubled by cows grazing in pastures along the interstate. But I'm hardly going to slow down for it, either. If no one is naked, no one is denouncing anyone else, no one is rioting, no one is shooting tear gas, no one, in other words, is doing anything other than listening politely to speeches before once again hitting up the coffee bar, what, pray tell, is the point? An amusement park without roller coasters is just a parking lot with fried food. Etc.

The second paragraph is more objectionable on its merits. The idea that this is a "Republican War" is the hoariest bit of self-flattery that I've heard in quite a while, and Hertzberg is usually a more adept and observant journalist than the sort you'd expect to regurgitate so patent a falsehood. Whatever feelings the folks at YearlyKos may personally hold about war, this war, any war, the national politicians who disgrace the convention with their presence almost to a man have voted again and again to fund and authorize it and its excesses. The cheerleaders may be mostly Republican, but there are plenty of Democrats at the bake sale. Go Team! "Chairman Dean" spoke passionately about ending the war four years ago! Et puis ? This isn't merely sang-froid on my part; here you have thousands of people, Hertzberg among them, who are for all intents and purposes consenting to spend a week being lied to. I read their blogs and their posts and their diaries, and so I know that on some deep, ever-repressed level they understand they're being sold a bill of goods. They cry out in writing at each betrayal of the promise of their legislative majority; they observe keenly each instance of capitulation; they mock each outbreak of Congressional cowardice; they parse the pablum of their Presidential candidates to determine who is most likely to bring this particularly sorry episde of American imperial overreach to a close. Then they get together to "applaud politely."

What you have, then, is every indication of a deep sickness of the soul. It is one thing to be lied to, but to know that you're being lied to and still sit around as if stuck at a staff meeting, accepting all the hortatory blather of motivational speech, strategizing, comparing tactics, expounding points of procedure . . . why, it's a farce. It's pornographic. It's sad. It's bathetic. And it is the face of ruin and defeat.