In a stunning media error, the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart referred to “California Republican Congressman Jack Kimble” in a post last night. Problem is, there is no Congressman Jack Kimble:
The fictional Kimble claims to be from California's 54th district -- California only has 53 districts -- and his twitter page is adorned with corporate logos including Cargill, Fidelity Investments and Toys R' Us. At first glance, Kimble's posts appear to be in line with conservative ideology, but they are in fact subtle digs at the conservative movement.
I almost feel sorry for Capehart except that this embarrassing incident was completely self-inflicted. How many times have we DFH’s bemoaned of our national press, “can’t you people Google?”
The typical rejoinder one gets is that news is now a 24/7 business and deadlines are awful and no one pays for fact checking or copy editing blabbedy blah blah. Yeah I hear you, it sucks, we’ve all made mistakes, I’ve made some bad ones but the thing is no one is fucking paying me for my blog, this is something I do on my spare time for free and if I fuck up it’s my own fuckup, not another scar on fast-eroding 130 year old tradition. I mean seriously, if you can’t take the time to Google the Congressman and his district and realize it’s a parody then what the hell are you doing writing for the nation’s oldest newspaper?
This story is stupid, and trivial; Keith Olbermann and Jon Stewart will have a moment of fun at Capehart’s expense and we'll all move on. But I wanted to talk about it because the problem is bigger than Jonathan Capehart. This incident points to a larger issue. All around us our institutions are proving themselves completely inadequate to the task at hand, be it educating our kids or fixing our economy or fixing our levees and roads or fixing our politics. And if anyone ever wonders how the nation got dragged into a war of choice in Iraq, it's because we’re a nation of incompetents and low standards.
I’ve often thought that 9/11’s biggest impact on America was that it struck a major blow to an already wounded national morale, and we keep taking hits. Sept. 11 came at the completely wrong time (if a “right” time could be said to exist), since the national psyche was still reeling from the Clenis fallout: all of that angst over a presidential blow job that should never have been international news yet somehow was.
This was followed by the botched 2000 election which cast a pall of doubt over our entire electoral system. It was the kind of thing you read about happening in third world countries and places like Iran, not here. And then some guys armed only with boxcutters hijacked three airplanes and launched an attack on the U.S.? And then the crash of the Columbia space shuttle, followed by invasion of Iraq which, it would soon become clear, was based on misinformation and lies -- I mean, even if you believed it was the right thing to do, that it was totally worth it, where are the WMD’s? Still? To this day? And then the Northeast power grid failure, the levees failing in New Orleans and the major Hurricane Katrina failure and then a bridge collapses over the Mississippi River in Minnesota? And then the financial collapse and the real estate bubble bursts? And an oil well spewing filth into the Gulf of Mexico for months on end?
(And what am I forgetting? Anything else sucky about the past 10 years I’ve overlooked? Doping by sports heroes? Political philandering?) America sure has had that merde touch for the past decade, n’est ce pas?
Against this entire backdrop we’ve got people like Glenn Beck selling crazy juice to the nation. I mean no wonder the nation feels like crap. This kind of stuff used to happen to other countries, not us. America the mighty and strong, America the first to walk on the moon, America whose interstate system and military might and radical yet peaceful regime change every few years were the envy of the world!
It all hit the shitter at once, didn’t it? We the people are completely demoralized; now we have reporters who can’t even hit the Google and Vice Presidential Candidates pwned by Canadian comedians. What in God’s name happened? (And no, I ain’t blaming this on teaching evolution, gay marriage and abortion. Be real.)
I’d like to say Mercury has been retrograde over America for the past 15 years, but I suspect this national lowering of standards happened long ago and we're just now reaping that harvest. Our education system has been crumbling for years yet we ignored the warning signs of falling test scores and Why Johnny Can’t Read reports and our national cluelessness about geography. This is an empire in tailspin, and I suspect it’s been happening a lot longer than any of us realized.
How we get out of this mess is anyone’s guess. I suppose we could all try a little harder to be our best (fill in the blank...). Maybe some great national project, a manned mission to Mars or something. I dunno. Electing our first black president sure got everyone feeling hopey-changey, until the Republicans decided to stick their feet in the mud and answer “no you can’t” to every “yes we can” cheer. Honestly I have the feeling that one group of Americans just wants to wallow in feeling really really crappy right now while another group is wanting to think happy thoughts, which is really hard to do when you’re given bad news at every turn.
So I don’t have any answers. I know the nation is turning its hopeful eyes to a lot of someones and somewheres, but everywhere we look we see just a spectacular fail.
ReplyDeleteI’d like to say Mercury has been retrograde over America for the past 15 years, but I suspect this national lowering of standards happened long ago and we're just now reaping that harvest.
I see a steady path downwards from Ronald Wilson Reagan's (666) election.
~
The Great Buffoonicator certainly marked a steeper decline that previously, but I think it was the Vietnam debacle that began it.
ReplyDeleteWe were there only to prove we could win a war just like we did in the 1940's and because Korea made it clear our winning days were over.
It proved that the country will support any war, will in fact love any war the way they love a ball game and even if three quarters of the country turn against it, the remaining minority can perpetuate it indefinitely by appealing to patriotism and by that vicious attack against reason and reasonable people that began in the 1960's.
We paid for that war with huge inflation and the nation has been divided along the same lines ever since. In many respects it's been divided over the same lines we had in the Civil war too, but yes there's Ronnie, whose bullshit economic maxims have been millstones around our necks all these years. Without him and his idiot successor W we might at least be a prosperous, if divided nation.
What's a DFH?
ReplyDeleteAll super power type nations (Roman, USSR, etc)seem to have one common vein; their rise to greatness, spectacular corruption and misuse of power and their fall to third world nation status.
ReplyDeleteWelcome to the third world.
Is Great Britain Third World?
ReplyDeleteThese are troubling times no doubt about it but I don't think we are quite down the tubes yet.I kind of resist the very suggestion as it reminds me far too the of the fright stories conservatives tell sitting round the campfire.
We've muddled through the Great Depression, WWII, Korea, the 1950's red scares, Vietnam, the Cold War etc. etc. and while we have a whole heck of a lot of woes I'd certainly not describe our situation as this:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/General/ThirdWorld_def.html
But perhaps it's only a matter of time.
BREAKING NEWS: The existence of mankind is under threat, and life on this planet will never be the same. The octopus is pissed. Beware the invasion of the killer cephalopod.
ReplyDeleteSwimming pools, toilet bowls, the kitchen sink, even drinking glasses will be unsafe, because wherever there is water, the stealthy octopus is close at hand. The malicious eight-armed marauder of the night has been taking over minds and tormenting people in their dreams. Dream no more! Now they will be coming for YOU! More here.
... did I mention showers and bathtubs!
ReplyDeleteArtie,
ReplyDeleteDFH - Dirty Fucking Hippie
(Wait a minute - didn't somebody just ask the eternal question? "Can’t you people Google?”)
Thanks Cynic.
ReplyDeleteOf course I could have Googled DFH but I think a piece taking the Washington Post to task for shoddy journalistic standards should set a better example its ownself by using terms a general audience would understand. Among the endless list of acronyms adopted by bloggers DFH is one I'm not familiar with despite having burned hundreds of hours wading through these internets.
Which begs another eternal question. Is this stuff all an attempt to inform or merely a means to score points in competition?
Yes. A simple googling would have saved Capehart a lot of embarrassment. I try to follow that advice when I get emails from friends and family about warnings of such and such. Got one yesterday about http and https. I went to Snopes.com and found that it was true.
ReplyDeleteAnd speaking of prank nation, I want to alert bloggers to THIS.
IMHO, stealing someone's photo online and spreading it around with false information attached to it is cowardly, and just what we'd expect fron the fringe rightwing bloggers.
"merely a means to score points in competition? "
ReplyDeleteBINGO -- you win! You've figured out what the web is all about!
"IMHO, stealing someone's photo online and spreading it around with false information attached to it is cowardly, and just what we'd expect fron the fringe rightwing bloggers."
ReplyDeleteSomeone did that to me a year ago, almost to the day -- set up a parody blog and began posting all over the place using something barely distinguishable from my name.
Fortunately I pulled some strings, found out who he was and politely suggested that he might find out who I was when I laid my fingers upon him. He apologized in writing.
These people bring out the Samuel L Jackson in me but it's not usually possible to do this.
And if anyone ever wonders how the nation got dragged into a war of choice in Iraq, it's because we’re a nation of incompetents and low standards.
ReplyDeleteSoBe,I hear your lament. I relish the Internet but it frustrates me how even basic standards for verifying information are often ignored by those who should know better. People pass around suspect information without taking the few minutes necessary to Google it or utilize my favorite source for debunking Internet hoaxes, snopes.com. The Internet is an information junkie's dream but far too many people use it for the sole purpose of posting inane comments grounded in misinformation and basic stupidity.
We are definitely a nation that values incompetence. The popularity of Sarah Palin attests to that, people love her because she's as incompetent as they are. Heaven forbid that a candidate for office actually speaks with intelligence; clearly, he or she is a socialist, out to destroy America. Beware of people who use big words!
I was still in the classroom when the self-esteem blitz hit public education. Instead of accomplishing something and having healthy self-esteem based on your accomplishments, the focus turned to fostering self-esteem for simply breathing. We're reaping the harvest of that ideology with the current generation.
Combine gratuitous self esteem and a love for incompetence, what do we get?
ReplyDeleteThat's right.
I think a piece taking the Washington Post to task for shoddy journalistic standards should set a better example its ownself by using terms a general audience would understand.
ReplyDeleteYou are not aware of all internet traditions?
Sheria & group:
ReplyDeleteI'm reading Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom" right now ... excellent novel, I didn't care for "The Corrections" all that much but this one talks a lot about culturally relevant themes, things we're sort of grappling with as a nation right now. I just read a section where one of the characters says: "The world doesn't reward ideas or emotions, it rewards integrity and coolness."
I might edit that to say, the culture doesn't reward ideas or emotions. I think the world certainly does, in terms of the marketplace and capitalism and all that. But in terms of what is culturally resonant, and that is where our political discourse happens, it's what is "cool" and has integrity. So George W Bush had integrity even though he was a lying sack of shit because he made a decision and stuck with it, regardless of how WRONG it was. And Sarah Palin has intergrity even though she's a craven greedy-grabber because she preaches abstinence but her daughter gets pregnant anyway and that's something everyone can relate to thanks to the movie "Juno."
I mean it's really that dumb, I think.
I mean it's really that dumb, I think.
ReplyDeleteI think that you're correct.
Thanks for the book recommendation. Picking up a copy of Freedom via my book club.