This may be of interest to some on FW.
An article from today's Wall Street Journal dealing with a media culture and
goverance.
See especially the paragraphs below dealing with leadership and why there
seem to be no leaders today.
arthur
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Feb. 16, 1999
Diminished Returns: The Stature Debate: Monicagate Left Few Reputations
Enhanced --- Is It a Sign of These Times, Or of the Saga Itself, That No
Heroes Emerge? --- `A Substitute for Soap Operas'
By Dennis Farney and Gerald F. Seib Staff Reporters of The Wall Street
Journal
Great times make great men. These are not great times, nor a time of great
men.
There were no transcendent figures in the tortuous impeachment saga of
President Clinton, no statesmen such as those who emerged from the Watergate
struggle. The reason goes well beyond the substantive differences between
the two cases to a much broader cultural change that was gathering force
even during Watergate a quarter-century ago. American political and media
culture now destroys heroes even in the act of celebrating them.
This is an era that inexorably hollows out the hero into the celebrity
(which is another, opposite, thing); which devalues news into entertainment;
which can transform even an impeachment drama into just another televised
spectacle.
Twenty-five years from now, who will be remembered as a transcendent figurea
Sam Ervin, a Howard Baker or a Barbara Jordan -- from the Clinton
impeachment imbroglio? Most likely, no one.
"There were no victors -- nobody won," says Herbert Stein, the economist and
social commentator. "If anybody is the hero in this," he adds, "it's
probably Clinton. He withstood all the challenges against him. But he's not
a real hero either. He just eluded capture."
Nearly four decades ago, in 1962, scholar Daniel J. Boorstin wrote a book,
"The Image," in which he drew the distinction between the hero, who
transcends ordinary life to achieve mythic status, and the celebrity, who is
famous simply for being famous. He argued that this distinction was being
blurred -- and along with it, the distinction between "pseudo events" and
genuine events. As he saw it, both trends threatened to corrupt the civic
dialogue upon which a democracy depends to reach decisions and establish a
sense of proportion.
Mr. Boorstin, a former Librarian of Congress, has seen his prophecy become
reality. "The fact that Congress made a president's [survival] turn on a
relationship with an intern is quite remarkable -- astonishing, disturbing,"
he says in an interview. "These are not the kinds of great issues which have
engaged us in the past."
Democracy is dialogue. But there are two distinctly different ways that the
dialogue can die. In his book "Nineteen Eighty-Four," George Orwell posited
one: a boot-in-the-face dictatorship that represses its citizens and denies
them the truth. This dark vision hasn't come to pass. In most of the world,
in fact, the movement is toward more and more openness.
But nearly seven decades ago, Aldous Huxley wrote another book, "Brave New
World," that posited a different threat: a society so flooded with trivia
that its citizens can no longer distinguish between fact and factoid. This
is happening.
Neil Postman, today chairman of the department of culture and communication
at New York University, wrote in 1985 that the Huxley thesis had prevailed:
"Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the
truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would
become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture."
Mr. Postman titled his book "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse
in the Age of Show Business." He, too, has seen possibility become reality.
Politics have merged with entertainment, he says in an interview. "This
reduces any sense of the sacred. Instead, politics become a kind of sitcom
that people watch as a substitute for the soap operas."
Indeed, the congressional debate over Monicagate, televised as it was on
weekday afternoons, sometimes actually looked and sounded like a soap opera.
As such, it offered few opportunities for statesmanship.
There was no dramatic search for the truth in Congress's deliberations --
for the basic truth of the whole episode was known months before impeachment
deliberations began. There weren't even any real moments of drama to capture
the public fancy -- just a sordid tale repeated over and over again.
The advent of 24-hour news cycles has produced a new level of familiarity
with our leaders, which is apt to breed a bit of contempt. And if that
process cast the president himself as a kind of soap-opera character, there
now is broad concern about whether the presidency itself has been so
diminished that Americans will cease looking there to find heroic figures.
There is little doubt that the presidency has suffered institutional damage.
America's courts -- in some cases the Supreme Court -- have decided that a
sitting president can be sued in civil court; that his top confidants can't
claim executive privilege when called to testify against him; that his own
bodyguards can be hauled before a grand jury to talk about what they have
seen and heard in the White House. The first lady herself now has gone
before a grand jury.
But the deeper damage may be psychological. Not only has the Lewinsky
episode made this president a smaller figure, but the prospect that every
potential successor will have his or her private life examined and explored
on a dozen cable channels and a thousand Internet pages reduces the chances
that the next president can seem much more heroic.
Rather than look to the White House, Americans "look now to Mark McGwire and
Michael Jordan and other places," says recently retired Rep. Lee Hamilton of
Indiana, who led the inquiry into the Iran-Contra affair. "The day of
politicians as heroes has passed, for a while. But it will come back."
Optimists think that perhaps one grand figure is all that is needed to
restore some of the mystique of the Oval Office. "It reminds me that at the
time of Jimmy Carter, pundits and political scientists were saying maybe the
presidency had become too big for any person," says Kenneth Duberstein, a
former White House chief of staff. "When it was Ronald Reagan, they stopped
saying that. I think it will take the next president to begin the
restoration process."
Oddly, though, the sense of limited scope is hardly limited to U.S.
politics. Span the globe today, and you will look in vain for a
larger-than-life leader who is inspiring the masses or capturing the
imagination of the nations. Even the leaders who successfully ushered out
the Cold War have been dismissed from office, their places taken by leaders
of less experience, and widely considered to be of lesser stature.
Gone are Germany's Helmut Kohl, bumped from office after 16 years. Britain
has lost its Margaret Thatcher, France its Francois Mitterrand. Mikhail
Gorbachev changed the world; his place has been taken by Boris Yeltsin, who
seems to have lost his ability to change even Russia. King Hussein, in many
ways the most heroic figure of his time in the Middle East, has just died,
replaced by a son who was virtually anonymous three weeks ago. Japan is led
by a seemingly endless string of faceless bureaucrats -- four in the past
five years alone -- who shuttle in and out of the prime minister's office in
a style more befitting a Third World nation.
But perhaps there is a lack of heroic world leaders because these aren't
times that demand heroism from those leaders. The World War II generation is
leaving the scene, the Cold War is over, no Great Depression looms on the
horizon. Sometimes leaders come with greatness, but more often they have
greatness thrust upon them. Few would have envisioned Harry Truman as an
engineer capable of world reconstruction.
Thus, not everyone agrees with the notion that the rise of the celebrity
culture explains the dearth of heroes in the Clinton impeachment process.
"That's too facile an explanation," argues historian Arthur M. Schlesinger
Jr. "If anyone had tried to make the kind of impression that Sam Ervin made
during Watergate, it would have commanded great respect." A better
explanation, he thinks, is that the gravity of the charges against President
Clinton simply paled in comparison to the gravity of the charges against
President Nixon. "This was a case of low crimes and misdemeanors."
Mr. Schlesinger does note that it is difficult for any president to rise to
heroic status in the absence of an external crisis such as war or economic
depression. "Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt were two forceful
personalities who did succeed in imposing their own perceptions upon the
country" in relatively placid times, he says. But he doubts that President
Clinton will be able to do the same: "He's an accommodator," Mr. Schlesinger
says, "not a fighter."
The paradox of today's media culture is that the more a public figure is
discussed and celebrated, the less that figure becomes a hero. About the
only heroes left, by definition, are unsung -- the ordinary citizens who do
their duty without fanfare.
And it is Mr. Clinton's link to ordinary citizens that is the strength of
his presidency; this is also the one factor his foes have never quite
grasped. How could his approval ratings have soared even as he has grappled
with this crisis? Perhaps because, in an unheroic period, he hasn't tried to
be a hero. What he has done, through his policies, is to reach out to the
soccer moms and the ordinary workers in ways that make a difference in their
daily lives. More police on the street, more teachers in the classroom, a
prosperous economy generating budget surplusesheroes aren't made from such
material.
But popular presidents are.
In a celebrity culture, it scarcely matters whether the celebrity is
celebrated for his virtue -- or his notoriety. And as the celebrity culture
seeps into politics, what the celebrity-as-politician stands for may count
for less than the fact that he or she is famous and, at least initially, a
refreshing change from politics as usual.
Thus last November Minnesota voters elected Jesse Ventura, best known as a
professional wrestler, as their governor over two solid but conventional
career politicians.
But the celebrity culture exacts its price. "The nonstop chatter that
surrounds all [political] events" saps them of their potential to create
heroes, argues Jay Rosen, media critic and journalism professor at New York
University. "Heroes are made through action, but also through mystery and
reticence." Commenting on the Clinton impeachment process, he concludes:
"There were partisan fighters. But we think of a hero as having a certain
transcendence, and there was no transcendence in this whole squalid mess."
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