Jeff Gannon

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Thursday, March 03, 2005
What Jeff Gannon Means to You, and What Gannongate Means to the Future of America

An ADVOCATE EDITORIAL

If a man is imbued with even a modicum of inquisitiveness, there will come a point in his workaday march of weeks and years in which he demands answers to all the minute yet terrifically important questions: How does a faucet work? Why does an engine start when it turns over? What is an annuity? When is it financially beneficial to me and my family to cancel the collision insurance on the car?

Nor is this inclination to question, and this expectation of answer, merely a phenomenon of the aged or middle-aged. Children, too, as writers across the generations have famously written, wonder about for answers to their most pressing questions at least as much if not more than their elders: Why the tides? Why the sunrise in the east? Why frogs? Why fireflies?

Liberalism calls out to our inquisitive nature, both the agile brand of curiosity we develop in childhood, and the heavy-set elephant of doubt we seem to garage in our later years: the will to know, the drive to discover, the imperative to get it right. It is no less central a tenet of our humanity than is our tendency to be fallible, to be incredulous, to be base, to be something less than sincere about who we are and what we want from those we love.

Conservatism, at one time, may have done much the same for our baser, yet no less deeply-held and deeply-felt instincts: the urge against unbridled advance; the sweetness of sentiment; the nostalgia for never-was or never-again.

There is, indeed, something to be said for the human race not getting ahead of itself, for ensuring our grasp keeps pace with our reach--every bit as much as there is something to be said for advancing the causes of justice and knowledge with no more trepidation or delay than the human spirit must, by its own intemperate nature, from time to time allow.

Modern conservatism--which would largely, to the ear of true conservatives like Theodore Roosevelt, sound a lot like that shrieking bastard-child, "neo-conservatism"--has in the last forty years come to root itself in two opposing yet oddly harmonious principles: the death of reason and the death of religion. Only where science fails, and the dynamic, almost cellular movement of God in the hearts of men flags, can the Golden Age of Men encroach.

Strip malls.

Social security privatization. Fast food. Denuding the wilderness.

Industrialization without accountability.

Dog eat dog eat dog eat its own tail.

Time was when we knew the earth's atmosphere was damaged. We knew global temperatures were rising at an alarming pace, several degrees warmer on average, this year, than seventy years ago. We knew not because someone simply told us it was so, but because someone had proven it was so, and the personal courage that demonstrative process revealed to us--someone believing in something so much that getting it right through proofs and science could actually matter--emboldened and deepened our sense of knowledge.

That is, we knew what we knew not merely because we knew it, but because we knew it demonstrably and palpably true.

True not simply because we had some small faith in the idea of it being true, or just a child's elusive desire for that, but because we had the fortitude and wherewithal to bring an idea to bear--to light, to truth, to understanding--through both the laws of physics and the laws of men.

The scientific method. Peer review. Publication. Dissemination.

Lecture halls. Question and answer sessions. Conventions.

Conferences. Credentialing of scientists and analysts.

The Academy. Graduate students. Dissertations.

Dilemma, query, thesis, diagnosis, resolution, prognosis, logic, rationality, conclusion.

The Bush Administration, in practiced and professional form, took this bright splay of human ingenuity, this interplay between the scientific community and the lay community--man's supposition, made in faith, coupled with man's integrity, in seeking proof--and snuffed it out right quick.

Suddenly we were told that science was at odds with itself, it did not know what it had purported to know, it could no longer tell what it had purportedly already told in lectures, in studies, in publications, in presentations, in charts, in data, in volumes and volumes of accumulated wisdom.

The horse was put back in the barn.

The waters reversed course and flowed back under the bridge.

The ship retreated to its dock.

Team Bush had found a scientist or two, the renegades and rogues and used car salesmen of their profession, to say those things neo-conservative Team Bush wanted or needed so desperately to hear: we (said the renegades and rogues) the gathered purveyors of formerly indisputable, as-you-say scientific fact, don't really don't know anything at all.

Science presents no threat to your beliefs (or policies) such that you must amend them or vacate them entirely.

And what a racecourse of anti-intellectualism that set this country upon.

Like dominoes on a prepared track, the things we thought we knew were suddenly once more just unevolved masses in the Great Unknown: abstinence education might still work; a strategic missile-defense system might still work; Social Darwinists might yet be deserving of our thanks (were any of them still alive to receive it) in postulating that the poor are poor because the poor are lazy; global warming might be no more than the myth we secretly had hoped it to be; the roulette-wheel of the stock market might yet be the most sound frame upon which to weave our nation's civic safety net; the saturation of legally-sold guns into suburbia might yet make these bedroom communities safer, rather than more treacherous through random acts of passion, confusion, accident, unchecked impulse; holy wars between the great religions might yet be more holy than all other wars combined, less fraught with evil deeds and evil consequences; juveniles might yet defy a generation of psychiatrists and prove themselves as morally developed as men and women thirty years their senior; corporations might yet be such superlative stewards of the public trust that they, and not the humans who populate them, will ever remain most deserving of generous tax treatment; journalism might be merely an art, not a profession, and nothing one could quantify, anyway, with standards, or credentials, or bona fides, or curricula vitae, or degrees, or experience, or concentric circles of objectivity mapped upon a foundational, bedrock belief in integrity.

All in all, life in America became Something It Had Not Been.

A Death to Excellence.

A Death to Experience.

But more than that, too:

The Death of Knowledge.

The Death of Wisdom.

The Death of Fact.

The Death of Proof.

The Death of Distinctions.

The Death of Science.

The Death of Reason.

On the radio and on cable news, non-lawyers instructed lawyers in the law; non-scientists questioned the credentials and conclusions of scientists; disc jockeys declaimed on elementary school education; privately-schooled, well-heeled politicians expressed their accumulated wisdom on the subjects of drug addiction, homelessness, alcoholism, urban education, child abuse, clinical depression, carpal-tunnel syndrome, sleep apnea, insomnia, and gang violence.

The Great Wheel turned, and Today was (and is) manifestly Not Yesterday.

What matters, Today, is not so much being right--is not, in fact, getting it right--but getting it into the public consciousness with the most volume, the earliest, the most-often, with the most vitriol, a biting wit, an acerbic tongue, a knowing glance, a honeyed voice, a terrorizing bit of "oppo," a smear, a grimace, a smirk, an act.

The prize for Drama and the prize for Accuracy are one and the same.

Say it well and you may as well have said it right.

Or, failing that, you could simply say it so often--have such a constant and unflappable stock of faith in your own rectitude--it could wear the advance of grim reality to a nub.

Oh, faith!

Faith: nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to fear, nothing to merely abide or tolerate, nothing to chastise or belittle. Faith, that is, which is coupled with a catholic (small "c") commitment to the eternal steadfastness of principle.

Did we hear, during the last presidential election, that one candidate, a Catholic, should not receive the communion because he favored the right of a woman to choose (or not choose) to have an abortion? Because he allowed that civil unions for homosexuals might not be so destructive, after all, to any reasonable measure of the nation's overall health?

Yet did we hear, simultaneously, an across-the-board damning of those who deny, or ignore, or flaunt, or chide, or denigrate the Pope's proscription on governments putting humans to death?

Were all those who called for the excommunication of U.S. Senator John F. Kerry categorical opponents (in both word and deed) of pre-martial sex, extra-martial sex, birth control, condoms, twice-a-year confessions, infrequent church attendance, sparse charitable giving, castigating of the poor and the suffering, and the use of the Lord's name in vain?

What kind of religion, a self-delineated, connect-the-dots religion? What real demand, on the rest of us, that we respect or cherish that religion in public or in private, when it has not the decency or the strength of will to respect and cherish its own immutable prescriptions?

If a man should claim he is right with God, but is at the same time more right with the Corporation than his Brother, what Man of God is he?

If a man should claim he believes in salvation, but seeks it neither through good works for others nor even good thoughts about the frailty of himself and of others, what sort of half-pipe into Heaven has he made for himself?

How does Team Bush, led by George W. Bush, the reification of fifteen years of a right honorable "Christian" politics, justify more time and money spent on keeping the Ten Commandments in our courthouses than keeping handguns out of the hands of our children? More time and money spent policing a television documentary on Ronald Reagan than policing corporate crime? More time and money spent bringing faith into drug treatment than bringing clinically-confirmed drug addicts to treatment rather than prison in the first instance? More time and money spent on keeping one adult male penis from one adult male anus, when the two are willingly and lovingly joined, than keeping children safe from cigarettes, or women safe from harassment at work, or minorities safe from discrimination in hiring, or workers safe from preventable workplace injury and death, or homeowners safe from asbestos, or American Muslims safe from violations of their civil liberties, or civilians under the thumb of tyrannies safe from being no more than the collateral damage of our militaristic attentions, or the generations of mankind which have not yet been born safe from the poisoned water, decimated atmosphere, chronic flooding, and Hell-formed weather patterns of a nearly-here hyper-industrial future?

The Death of Religion is the Death of Metaphor.

It is the beginning of an Era in which the Bible is read like a menu, not a morality play.

Where the psalms wash over the faithful like the instruction manual for a washer and dryer, not as a universal tale in which the privileging of one value over another--charity over greed, peace over hatred, empathy over seclusion--is more than merely academic, more than something the Israelites sanctimoniously rammed up the asses of the Moabites all those thousands and thousands of years ago.

Neo-conservatism does not intend, nor hope for, nor work toward God moving in the hearts of men.

It intends, rather, to appropriate, for its own ends, the profound electricity of millions of hearts moving toward God.

It favors not those who are religious, but those who are seeking a Religion. And why not neo-conservatism for an idol? Why not Republicanism? Why not the Grand Old Party? Why not the elephant over the donkey? Why not dance around the golden pachyderm and spurn the threadbare burro?

Isn't it enough to simply believe?

Isn't that what we all want, to believe in something so hopelessly our hopelessness almost smells and walks and moves within us like hope?

But what is that, anyway?

The Death of Hope.

The Death of Spirit Coupled With Reason.

The Death of the Spirit Which Seeks to Know More Than That Which It Fears.

The Death of Wisdom.

Does it matter what a single man, call him a reporter, call him an activist, call him a whore, call him a plant, call him a scoundrel, does in the privacy of his apartment or hotel or motel or crawlspace or outhouse or townhouse or cubby-hole or watering hole?

No.

What matters is that a man who was not who he said he was, who did not believe in the standards he claimed to meet, who did not earn what he had, who did not aspire to anything more than what he felt as-he-was, who did not deserve the trust of his government or the public or the institutions he fraudulently laid claim to respect, who did not face any reckoning with the truth so much as an insistent handshake with the darkness--who, that is, worked not to enlighten, but to deceive the world and the cities and the spaces and the rooms he moved in--was somehow someone we could not distinguish from his betters.

Perhaps, said the White House, this man was every bit as deserving as anyone else to come here. Or perhaps he wasn't. Look, there--Helen Thomas. And there--Les Kinsolving. What we do we mean by that? Oh, nothing. Or something.

Perhaps, said the White House Press Office, we did everything we could to screen Gannon before we let him in. Or perhaps we didn't. Or perhaps we won't say.

Perhaps, said the White House press corps, we ought not say whether he was a journalist or not. Or perhaps we just can't tell anymore. Or perhaps we can but won't. Or perhaps we won't, for no reason other than that we haven't. Or perhaps someday we will. Or perhaps we never will.

Perhaps, said the Old Media, this is a story. We don't know, we'll have to wait to find out. What are we waiting for? To find out. We'll find out, we think, if we wait. This just might be a story. This might be nothing.

Perhaps, said the New Media, this is a story about a prostitute. Or hypocrisy. Or Karl Rove. Or oil interests in Iran. Or Karl Rove. Or something big, we mean big. What precisely? We don't know. We haven't had time to catch our breath. We haven't had time to decide. But it must be big.

Perhaps, said America, moral relativism means something. Perhaps we hate it. Perhaps we don't. Perhaps we hate it here but despise it abroad. Or vice versa. Perhaps this is a slippery slope. Perhaps we'll ride it out and see what happens. Perhaps it's nothing. Maybe it's a sign of the times. Or maybe it's a sign of the future. It's not my meat and potatoes. It's not in my best interest. It could hurt my Party. It could hurt my country. It hurts. I know what I believe. I believe what I believe.

And I believe this is a sign.

This is a sign.

This is something big.

I'm not going to wait anymore.

I need to know.

This is something big.

posted by News Editor at 3/3/2005 08:13:00 AM