| Washington's
Glass Houses |
I
was going to take the high road on poor Gary Condit, I really was.
It's hard to
say that, you know. "Poor Gary Condit." Heaven knows, much of his problems
are of his own making. I do feel sorry for him, because I don't think he
had anything to do with Chandra Levy's disappearing act. But even the most
staunch supporter has to admit the man got himself into this particular
pickle.
Requisite question:
Where is Chandra Levy?
Perhaps she needed
a vacation and has simply gone off somewhere where they don't have phones,
televisions, radios, newspapers or the Internet, or people who have any
of the above. Like the moon.
Perhaps she killed
herself and won't wash up on anyone's shores for months.
Perhaps Condit
did have some sort of violent interlude with her and has packed her off
somewhere until she swears on a stack of Bibles never to tell.
Perhaps she bumped
into one of the dozen-or-so active serial killers wandering around America
and is currently in someone's basement well.
Perhaps she was
kidnapped by aliens. Call Mulder and Scully.
It may seem that
I am a tad too flip for a family's very real tragedy. Believe me, I feel
for them, especially since I doubt we will ever get the chance to ask Ms.
Levy herself what happened. She has one of the world's most recognizable
faces at the moment, and yet no one has actually seen her. I don't think
she is still among us.
But it's hard
to listen to the current feeding frenzy of speculation and accusation going
on at the moment, from both sides of the camp, with a straight face. No
one can go crazy like America's television journalists (and to be fair,
we print folks have been known to go nuts, too.)
A recent cartoon
showed Condit studying a booklet that read, "Clinton Play Book." This gets
a quick, cheap laugh, and expounding on how our beloved ex-president lowered
standards for all personal behavior.
This is, of course,
nonsense. Compared to many of his predecessors, Clinton was an angel. Clinton
didn't father children with slaves, didn't hold wild tobacco-and-whiskey
parties in the White House, and (more importantly) didn't send hundreds
of thousands of Native Americans to their deaths on the Trail of Tears,
didn't send the U.S. into Vietnam, and didn't intern thousands of Japanese-Americans
to nonlethal concentration camps because of their ethnic heritage.
Did you know
that as recently as thirty years ago, the press actively avoided examinations
of politicans' personal lives? The press photographers deliberately did
not shoot film of Pat Nixon or Betty Ford with a drink, or of Jackie Kennedy
or Mamie Eisenhower with a cigarette. The press knew Franklin Roosevelt
used a wheelchair and that Kennedy and many others had had affairs.
Many believe Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer's long before he was out
of office, and the so-called "liberal media" did not investigate. They
intentionally did not cover these matters.
When did we suddenly
decide that the personal life of a politician was fair game? Was it as
late as Gary Hart, daring the press to follow him to a boat on which he
lounged with Donna Rice? Was it as early as Watergate, which proved that
two reporters and a lot of hard work could bring down a felonious president?
I personally
believe we hire these people to do a job, and certainly a criminal record
and/or a record of incompetance affects our decision. But just as I would
hire someone who cheats on his wife, I'm not going to hold adultery against
a politician.
This is not the
majority opinion. It's much easier to interest the American viewing public
in a sex-and-maybe-murder scandal than an in-depth examination of the fallacy
of using property taxes to fund public education, or the massive overburdening
of the child care industry since welfare-to-work sent families off the
rolls and into the work force without provisions for child care. It's even
more difficult to impress upon the public that soon, roughly half the population
of Africa will be dying of AIDS, or that children in East Timor are learning
to feed themselves with the stumps of their arms after last year's spree
of rebels visiting villages and chopping off the children's hands.
It's much more
fun to do the Daily Condit, plus a neat piece on the state of Missouri
suing Miss Cleo. Actually, I'm rather in favor of that, but only if they
can get that schmuck on the Sci-Fi Channel who pretends to reach the dead
for weeping relatives.
Scott Adams,
the man who created "Dilbert," said that reporters are faced with the daily
choice of painstakingly researching stories or writing whatever people
tell them, and both approaches pay the same. This is true. Editors, however,
face the daily choice of printing whatever the reporters scrape up, or
committing the reporter to real public service, which takes money and risk.
Guess which they choose. Never mind that your average reporter's personal
life could never hold up to the intense scrutiny of your average low-level
politician, much less a congressman or president.
So I will continue
to say, "poor Gary Condit." If those without sin were the only ones to
throw stones, there would be a lot of glass houses in Washington. |
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