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Are women's magazines a conspiracy to make all women insecure about their bodies, their lives and their futures? Rage against the industry in the Media area of Table Talk
R E C E N T L Y Hush, hush, sweet Monica Torah! Torah! Torah! The st*r report Lashed by Lish Diana: One year later, still dead BROWSE THE
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BY JAMES PONIEWOZIK One of my favorite books as a child was a fat pocket paperback -- embossed with a presidential seal -- that reprinted documents from the Watergate investigation. (No, I was not a popular boy.) I never read the book cover to cover and can't claim to have understood it very well, but I had read enough "Doonesbury," looked at enough Mad magazines, heard enough "[expletive]" jokes to want to blunder through the grippingly tedious transcripts. In the end, I probably got my sense of history more from Garry Trudeau and Norman Lear than from Jaworski and Sirica, but, boy, did it make me feel smart. In that sense I was ahead of my time: Courtesy of the House of Representatives, the American public has been delivered enough legalese, leavened with the occasional "unusual sex game," to raise our collective perceived IQ a good 30 points. The House's decision to post Kenneth Starr's impeachment report on the World Wide Web was, characteristically, hailed as an extraordinary advance in cyberdemocracy and public education -- the New York Times called it "an extraordinary cyberspace look at just what Mr. Starr considers 'substantial and credible' evidence." No more waiting for a thick report to roll off a groaning and antiquated printing press! No more relying on snooty interpreters to leisurely digest the legal document for us! Today, the same great American illiterati who have made the Idiot's Guides and Dummies series into bestselling dynasties can skim the 445-page document -- or at least do text searches for "Gap dress" and "thong underwear" -- offer their considered opinions to John Gibson or their local DJ in time to catch "Access: Hollywood" and be ready to usher in the Gore administration on Monday. No one with an Internet connection in America likely got any work done Friday afternoon, but talk about your savings in productivity! The Web posting of the report has generated the "Internet coming of age" baggage that has accompanied every major news event with a tangential relation to the Web -- the 1996 election, the first Lewinsky explosion, the Louise Woodward verdict. Blah blah blah server crashes; blah blah blah 24-hour news cycle; blah blah blah empowerment of the little guy; blah blah blah village square of the 21st century. But whatever the nation's newest free adult Web site may tell us about the potential of the Internet, the delivery of the Starr Report may actually show that electronic publication is not quite ready to supplant print. Consider, after all, what we saw over and over on television last week after Starr's September Surprise: a truck pulling up to a government office, solemn guards unloading ream after ream, box upon box -- Of paper. Now, anyone who has come near an office in the last decade knows how we produce documents nowadays. Does anyone believe Starr and his deputies were hunt-and-pecking their charges on manual Underwood typewriters, diligently rolling in sheets of bond paper and patiently applying correction tape? No. Presumably analysis, testimony, depositions and supporting evidence were all set down the way most office documents are -- on computer. In the au courant spirit of governmental paper reduction -- and given that electronic formatting was convenient enough for a heavily HTML-formatted report to appear by mid-afternoon -- why couldn't Starr simply have turned over a Zip disk? Better, why not e-mail the report on a secure T1 line? Isn't there some sort of Reinventing Government directive about this? Certainly, there may have been various legitimate reasons for delivering a print report. But a prosecutor like Ken Starr would never want to file electronically, even if it were legal, more efficient and secure. For it would deny him a valuable set-piece of political theater. A prosecutor dreams of a scene like the one we saw on the evening news last week, a monumental perp walk for the ages: the indelible visual message that the special prosecutor and his team have amassed so much evidence, that his target is so mendacious, that it takes a team of strong men just to carry the indictment. Starr conjured a literal mountain of paper that played directly off the Himalayan language of the post-confession media reports: "an avalanche of criticism," "a snowballing effect." And the move demonstrates a feel for imagery worthy of Spielberg; only with the OIC's brimming CARE package could you have had the spectacle of caretakers cracking open those cardboard moving boxes like so many Arks of the Covenant, extracting the sacred tomes therein. You wouldn't get that kind of money shot from a flashing modem light, or some pencil-necked bureaucrat handing Henry Hyde a CD-ROM; you cannot bury a man in a mountain of 0s and 1s. On balance, posting the Starr Report while it's still white-hot probably deserves neither the praise nor the tut-tutting it will eventually engender. Wired or not, most of us will still likely lean on the usual village idiots to pre-form our judgments, but neither would holding the report back have returned us to some age of Platonic reason. Like much of the Web's offerings, it merely affords most citizens the opportunity to ignore a greater wealth of information than any civilization has heretofore ignored. It's still a little early to announce the electronic millennium in law and politics, for even the most cybersavvy prosecutor knows that our image of justice is still decidedly pre-Gutenberg. It is a lady in a gown, with a balance and a sword. It is a wise man bearing heavy, heavy stone tablets, laying down the law.
James Poniewozik writes the Under the Covers column, which runs in Salon's Media Circus every other Wednesday. |
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