Salon.com > Steve Erickson http://www.salon.com Fri, 04 Jan 2013 12:45:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Give Obama a break on the “fiscal cliff” http://www.salon.com/2013/01/03/give_obama_a_break_on_the_fiscal_cliff/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/03/give_obama_a_break_on_the_fiscal_cliff/#comments Thu, 03 Jan 2013 16:58:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13160828 The American Prospect When President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in 1862 (a couple of times, actually), he conceded the possible unconstitutionality of what he had done but concluded that since the move was necessary in a time when half the country was at war with the other half, he would take his chances with Congress, the courts, and history. The country’s current chief executive finds Lincoln comparisons disconcerting, but this is a case where he might pay attention, because his legal grounds for unilaterally raising the ceiling on the national debt in a time of congressionally inflicted crisis are no weaker than Lincoln’s and probably stronger.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/03/give_obama_a_break_on_the_fiscal_cliff/feed/ 16 When noir blew up! http://www.salon.com/2012/12/12/when_noir_blew_up/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/12/when_noir_blew_up/#comments Wed, 12 Dec 2012 18:03:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13122744 Los
Angeles Review of Books WITH ITS ARTLESSLY PERFECT FIRST SENTENCE — "They threw me off the hay truck about noon" — James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice drew a line in the sand as defiant as any in literature since The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Not unlike that novel, Postman forced an untamed populist voice onto more exalted cultural sensibilities; of course, nothing could be more American. Cain is a major figure of American fiction’s shadow pantheon, the one that includes not Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Steinbeck but Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, and Philip K. Dick, with Faulkner, Miller, and Pynchon wandering the demilitarized zone between. The most commercially successful of them, Cain was also the most spiritually bleak, finding his calling late and fast in the Depression’s depths after a fitful career as a journalist. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) was a sensation and scandal, at the other end of the bookshelf from The Grapes of Wrath (1939): Tom Joad may have been riding that hay truck too, but Frank Chambers is the one who got thrown off.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/12/when_noir_blew_up/feed/ 1 I was a teenage conservative http://www.salon.com/2012/12/06/i_was_a_teenage_conservative/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/06/i_was_a_teenage_conservative/#comments Thu, 06 Dec 2012 16:38:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13116973 The American Prospect Barry Goldwater was my first political hero. The most antiauthoritarian figure in mainstream American politics, who said what he thought without giving a damn, he looked and sounded as Western as Arizona, the state he represented in the Senate. Goldwater and John Kennedy hatched plans in the White House—for what they assumed would be their upcoming presidential campaign against each other in 1964—to travel the country in the Arizonan’s small plane that he flew himself, stopping off at airports in the middle of nowhere to debate one issue or another before taking off again. This two-fisted, free-flying persona made Goldwater the kind of politician that film director Howard Hawks might have come up with; by comparison, government couldn’t help appearing soullessly oppressive. Great Society liberalism had become the norm by the mid-1960s, and this reinforced Goldwater’s iconoclasm, striking a politically attuned, insistently nonconformist teenager as utopian, in the same way that Kennedy embodied idealism for so many others of my generation.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/06/i_was_a_teenage_conservative/feed/ 14 Mitt Romney, human cipher http://www.salon.com/2012/08/23/mitt_romney_human_cipher/ http://www.salon.com/2012/08/23/mitt_romney_human_cipher/#comments Thu, 23 Aug 2012 14:25:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12990240 One of the things we’ll learn this presidential election is whether the Republican Party can survive itself. As we’ve seen in the ten days since Governor Mitt Romney picked Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate, and most acutely in the last 72 hours since the fiasco involving Missouri Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin broke, the party is reaching what may be the most critical moment of its quarter-century-long identity crisis. In the way that Franklin Roosevelt did for Democrats during the 1930s, by sheer force of personality and eloquence Ronald Reagan in the 1980s resolved tensions that had riven the party for years. He could incarnate the party so fully as to invite and absolve fellow travelers who might be suspiciously less than true believers. After Reagan, no one else could do this; even as what now constitutes the conservative wing of the party invokes Reagan’s name with a sobriety that borders on the biblical, that wing has moved considerably to the right of him.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/08/23/mitt_romney_human_cipher/feed/ 9 Can a film’s website be more than promotional? http://www.salon.com/2011/11/23/can_a_films_website_be_more_than_promotional/ http://www.salon.com/2011/11/23/can_a_films_website_be_more_than_promotional/#comments Wed, 23 Nov 2011 19:07:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10252270 Online movie marketing can be a craft, if not an art, all its own. Many people found the website of "The Blair Witch Project," which elaborated on the film’s story and mythology, more entertaining than the film itself. However, in recent years, most film websites have settled for mere promotion. The site for Ira Sachs’ "Keep the Lights On," which is now in postproduction, does something different. Drawing on the themes of Sachs’ film, which include autobiography, addiction and gay New York, it opens itself up to readers’ contributions. The blog is unpredictable. One day, you’re likely to find a memoir of adolescent desire, an advice column, a short documentary or Sachs’ production diary. While its nature is ultimately promotional, it has more substantial content than the vast majority of personal, noncommercial blogs.

Sachs, whose films include the Sundance-winning "Forty Shades of Blue," created the blog in collaboration with editor Adam Baran, with whom he also curates the Queer/Art/Film series, held at New York’s IFC Center. Queer/Art/Film presents films selected by LGBT artists, who speak about their choices in front of the audience and then do a question-and-answer session afterward. One can recognize something of the social nature of Queer/Art/Film screenings, which often sell out, in the film's blog, although it appears in a much different form.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/11/23/can_a_films_website_be_more_than_promotional/feed/ 0 Hollywood’s summer of revolution http://www.salon.com/2011/09/14/blockbuster_summer_underclass/ http://www.salon.com/2011/09/14/blockbuster_summer_underclass/#comments Wed, 14 Sep 2011 18:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/2011/09/14/blockbuster_summer_underclass Our oppressed underclass rises up and rebels against inhuman treatment -- well, at least in some of Hollywood's biggest current blockbusters.

While Tim Burton’s 2001 "Planet of the Apes" remake didn’t seem to have much on its mind, "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" is far more engaged with the culture of the moment -- as was the original, widely seen as a response to the civil rights movement. It's the only recent American film with even metaphorical relevance to the Arab Spring movement. And it shares some interesting resonance with Tate Taylor’s "The Help" and British director Joe Cornish’s "Attack the Block."

"The Help" falls into a long line of "problem pictures" running from Elia Kazan’s "Gentleman's Agreement" and "Pinky" to Paul Haggis’ "Crash." They’ve proven popular with Oscar voters, but while they purport to expose racism and other prejudices, they often subtly reinforce stereotypes in the guise of dismantling them. Whatever their virtues (usually as showcases for actors), such films tend to suffocate on their own earnestness. That can’t be said for "Rise of the Planet of the Apes," which falls into another tradition. It’s no B-movie, but it moves along like one. Its depiction of the fine line between humanity and the animal kingdom owes a lot to George Romero’s "Living Dead" trilogy and David Cronenberg’s films. Genre films benefit from being irresponsible, which I mean in the most positive sense. By talking about animals and monsters rather than speaking more directly about race and class, they have the freedom to escape from received wisdom about the latter subjects.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/09/14/blockbuster_summer_underclass/feed/ 17 The New Sanctimony http://www.salon.com/2000/08/18/erickson_sanctimony/ http://www.salon.com/2000/08/18/erickson_sanctimony/#comments Fri, 18 Aug 2000 19:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/sex/feature/2000/08/18/erickson_sanctimony Unless we take it all with the appropriate pillar of salt, as we turn to gaze at the Sodom some have come to call America, the most important revelation of the last two weeks is that the men who presume to lead us measure our national morality in the currency of blow jobs. The opening of the coming fall campaign has been about not guns or abortion or education or Social Security or the environment but eight years of lost righteousness. After a 20th century of New Deals, New Frontiers, New Covenants, the politics of the 21st century is the New Sanctimony, most remarkable for how it's been so entirely embraced by both political parties and their candidates that you can barely tell one strategically timed cri de coeur from another.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/08/18/erickson_sanctimony/feed/ 0 L.A. stories http://www.salon.com/1999/04/19/erickson/ http://www.salon.com/1999/04/19/erickson/#comments Mon, 19 Apr 1999 19:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/bag/1999/04/19/erickson "The Death of Speedy" by Jaime Hernandez (1989)

Life among las locas, east of a Los Angeles River where no water flows: Amid the urban punk rubble she never quite fits into, running with grrrls tough enough to get by with one r, Maggie is distinguished as much by her enduring spirit as by her endless remorse at not somehow being better than she is, even as she's better than everyone around her. Funny, violent, sexy, tender and devastating, rejecting sensationalism as forcefully as sociological cant, disdaining cheap emotion as determinedly as glib resolutions, like a classic 19th century novel, this barrio masterpiece even has pictures. Quite a few of them.

"Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said" by Philip K. Dick (1974)
Possessed by a vision his erratic voice could barely keep up with, Dick confronted the meaning of reality before moving on to the bigger question: the meaning of humanity. In the L.A. of the future -- 1988 -- Police General Felix Buckman flies over a city that awaits his judgment, where he lives in a depraved marriage with a woman whose appetite for sex and drugs is limitless; she also happens to be his sister. Her life disgusts him only slightly less than her death shatters him, and as night chases him across town, he slowly comes apart -- the inherent meaningless of reality overtaking whatever meaning humanity still holds.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/04/19/erickson/feed/ 0 Swing Nation RIP http://www.salon.com/1999/03/31/eric/ http://www.salon.com/1999/03/31/eric/#comments Wed, 31 Mar 1999 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/circus/1999/03/31/eric Last week I listened to "The Summit in Concert," the new CD memorial to Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack days, with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. The "comedy" isn't amusing but puerile, and musically it's inferior to a second-rate Dino CD, not to mention a third-rate Sinatra -- but none of this really accounts for why I hate it, which is more complicated. In and of itself, "The Summit in Concert"
doesn't really warrant any sort of emotional response other than sour irony. But in a culture of sour irony the Rat Pack is hot right now, from an HBO movie to "Ocean's Eleven" on cable, complete with all the boys' booze-and-broads wit
plus a few darkie jokes here and there just so Sammy doesn't feel left out.

The current Rat Pack rage coincides with the new swing phenomenon, and both
remind you how little is personal about our culture anymore, how little
personally the culture demands of us. A year or so back, at the
beginning of what was to be a particularly misbegotten assignment for a
national magazine, my editor complained that an early draft of a piece "didn't
swing," and at first I thought he must have said "sing," or maybe "ring," as
in "ring true." He couldn't have really said "swing," unless he was in his
60s, or maybe his teens or early 20s like Alicia Silverstone's gay heartthrob
in "Clueless." But in fact this editor wasn't 20 or 60, he was my age, in his
40s, for whom over the years things have variously rocked or grooved or gotten
down, but never, absolutely positively never, swung.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/03/31/eric/feed/ 0 Why Elia Kazan should not receive an Oscar http://www.salon.com/1999/03/17/eric_2/ http://www.salon.com/1999/03/17/eric_2/#comments Wed, 17 Mar 1999 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/eric/1999/03/17/eric Watched John Ford's 1956 "The Searchers" on video the other night. My wife had never seen it. At the end, of course, she was drop-jawed stunned, and talked about it for days, not because it's an impeccable masterpiece; at best it's a flawed masterpiece. Leaving aside Jane Darwell in "The Grapes of Wrath," Ford could never direct women to save his life, and every time "The Searchers" switches to the Vera Miles-Jeffrey Hunter romantic subplot, it heads south. Which is to say, every time either Monument Valley or John Wayne isn't on-screen.

It was Wayne who blew my wife away, and if you've ever seen "The Searchers" -- or, for that matter, "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" or "Red River" -- and your mind is at least cracked ajar if not wide open, you already know he's the most underrated actor in the history of American film. If his range was narrow, his control of every nuance within that range was untouchable. That he is so underrated is partly his own fault; as time went by, he was seduced more and more by his own iconography, and in the 20 years between "The Searchers" and his elegiac final film, "The Shootist," in 1976, the movies where he was willing to turn that iconography inside out or on its head, such as "Rio Bravo" or "True Grit" or "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," became more and more exceptional.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/03/17/eric_2/feed/ 0 The Teen Millennium http://www.salon.com/1999/03/03/eric_3/ http://www.salon.com/1999/03/03/eric_3/#comments Wed, 03 Mar 1999 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/eric/1999/03/03/eric Buffy had a moral crisis a few weeks ago. As she was offing vampires with Faith -- a Rose McGowan-like compatriot on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" -- Faith accidentally offed the wrong vampire, which is to say someone who turned out to be not a vampire at all. Never especially enthusiastic about her work, and feeling complicit in the mistake, Buffy was tormented; Faith, liking her work too well, shrugged and moved on.

I wish I could claim I was hip enough to have caught on to "Buffy" from the beginning, but I wasn't, though I remember liking the original movie some years back. I can't even claim to be a true convert, since converts are by nature obsessive and I'm not obsessive about "Buffy" like I've become about "The Practice" or used to be about "Larry Sanders" and the brilliant British cop series "Cracker" (by all means not to be confused with its dreary and short-lived American counterpart). But "Buffy" is probably as witty as prime-time TV gets these days, and sly enough in its postmodernism to almost redeem postmodernism, in part because it sustains a narrow concept through its characters in a way that, for instance, "The X-Files" now routinely fails to do. Where Scully and Mulder, defying even the best efforts of their able actors, have been straitjacketed into types -- more functionaries of the show's tedious "conspiracy" than real people -- the dynamics of the "Buffy" ensemble constantly evolve, led by Sarah Michelle Gellar in the title role. At first glance every inch the usual vacuous three-named TV blond, Gellar gains both personality and credibility with every episode; I have no problem believing she's kicking the asses of vampires twice her size.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/03/03/eric_3/feed/ 0 Pimps without portfolio http://www.salon.com/1999/02/17/eric_4/ http://www.salon.com/1999/02/17/eric_4/#comments Wed, 17 Feb 1999 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/eric/1999/02/17/eric To be honest, it was only on further reflection that it occurred to me the new movie "Rushmore" might be called "Young Mr. Clinton," the bizarro-universe corollary of John Ford's 1939 "Young Mr. Lincoln." The biggest fuck-up at Rushmore prep school, the film's protagonist, Max, is half precocious and half stunted, half triumphant smirk and half self-pitying whine, outrageous liar and compulsive con man, an embodiment of the present moment while stuck in a past of old Donovan songs and '60s Playboy centerfolds tacked to the wall. Sound familiar? That he hasn't yet become a complete sexual degenerate is only because he's 15.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/02/17/eric_4/feed/ 0 Mammary dreams http://www.salon.com/1999/02/03/eric_5/ http://www.salon.com/1999/02/03/eric_5/#comments Wed, 03 Feb 1999 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/eric/1999/02/03/eric I have been informed by the national media that breasts are back. I assume my sources on this are reliable. Esquire says it's so, and even more
impressively, Newsweek says that Esquire says it. In investigating this
phenomenon I thought it sufficient to simply scope out the covers of Esquire,
GQ, Details, Maxim, Bikini and Gear at the local newsstand, with Pamela Anderson,
Heidi Klum, Elizabeth Hurley and Bridget Fonda among others making the case. But
the Newsweek writer reporting this development was apparently conscientious
enough to actually buy these magazines and read them. There you go. From
Newsweek you get such thoughtful analysis and from Salon you get me.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/02/03/eric_5/feed/ 0 A battle for the soul of America http://www.salon.com/1999/01/20/eric_6/ http://www.salon.com/1999/01/20/eric_6/#comments Wed, 20 Jan 1999 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/eric/1999/01/20/eric In Steve Darnall and Alex Ross' new graphic novel "Uncle Sam" (Vertigo/DC), the title character wanders the country homeless and ragged, red-white-and-blue wardrobe in tatters, hat missing and white hair and beard caked in the drool and dirt of sleeping in the streets. His memory is a mass of whispers, from "Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" to "I have a dream" to "I'm not a crook" to "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" to "You can't say Dallas doesn't love you, Mr. President" to "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country." From these whispers he's trying to piece together an identity, trying to figure which of his various incarnations is real, until of course he must accept that they're all real.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/01/20/eric_6/feed/ 0 Let the culture war rage http://www.salon.com/1999/01/06/eric_7/ http://www.salon.com/1999/01/06/eric_7/#comments Wed, 06 Jan 1999 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/eric/1999/01/06/eric If you're still paying attention -- and no one would blame you if you weren't -- you know that in the last week a plan has begun to take shape in the
United States Senate that would dispose of the impeachment charges against
President Clinton in as few as four days. You also know that dismayed
conservative politicians and commentators, who see the president they loathe
once again slipping from their grasp, have responded vehemently that instead
there should be a full-blown Senate trial involving testimony by witnesses and
presumably lasting weeks if not months. They're right.

That they're right for the wrong reasons, having to do not with any reverence for the Constitution but bad faith, is neither here nor
there. They're right because, first of all, the Constitution calls for it:
When it says the Senate "shall" conduct a trial, "shall" does not mean "may"
but, in the parlance of the 18th century, "will," and by implication this
suggests not an "expeditious" hearing that sweeps matters under the rug, but
an exhaustive one. The second reason there should be a trial is that this is
no longer simply about Clinton. A trial will also be about the House of
Representatives and the Republican Party, and what they did last month and
why, and in a much larger sense about the presidency and impeachment itself.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/01/06/eric_7/feed/ 0 Mementos from the pre-millennium http://www.salon.com/1998/12/23/eric_8/ http://www.salon.com/1998/12/23/eric_8/#comments Wed, 23 Dec 1998 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/eric/1998/12/23/eric Hurtling faster and faster toward the event horizon of a year from now, here
is the Unspun Top 10 of 1998 -- artifacts to take with you down the wormhole:

1) "Memory Gospel" by Moby: When time so outraces memory that all we can do is try to remember the future, when psychic rootlessness and cultural entropy
constitute the only aesthetic anyone can believe in anymore, this soaring B-side clandestinely hidden on the latest single by the most willfully alienated
artist of the decade provided a subliminal soundtrack for everything else. A pop response to Henryk Gorecki's "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs," it short-circuited spiritual foreplay and cut straight to the ecstasy, the blur of orgasm merged
with the careen of history.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/12/23/eric_8/feed/ 0 Secret America http://www.salon.com/1998/12/09/eric_12/ http://www.salon.com/1998/12/09/eric_12/#comments Wed, 09 Dec 1998 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/eric/1998/12/09/eric Near the end of the new film "Enemy of the State," Jon Voight says, "Someday the only privacy left will be the one inside your head," and then adds, "Maybe that will be enough." "Enemy of the State" really doesn't have as much on its mind as this sounds; while the blitzkrieg of Tony Scott's direction is well-suited to the obsessive, technological vertigo of his subject, and while the film resolves itself more cleverly and with more wit than most comparable thrillers, it's interesting how -- given that Will Smith is one of our most likable actors and Gene Hackman one of our most reliable -- the two have absolutely no chemistry at all. But for all its hyped-up electronic paranoia, there's a visceral ring-of-truth about the movie's portrayal of the assault on secret America presently waged on any number of fronts, President Clinton's sex life being only the most tiresome.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/12/09/eric_12/feed/ 0 Democracy on life support http://www.salon.com/1998/11/25/eric_11/ http://www.salon.com/1998/11/25/eric_11/#comments Wed, 25 Nov 1998 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/eric/1998/11/25/eric This past week, 13 and a half months early, the millennium came to TV, in case you weren't paying attention -- and if you weren't, it's to your credit. This assumes you believe the millennium will be not the Rapture, accompanied by celestial chimes, but an abysmal journey down the drain of time, accompanied by a Whitney Houston-Mariah Carey duet. Millennial-TV began as Kangaroo Court-TV last Thursday and ended as Snuff-TV Sunday night, all the imagination and integrity and courage sucked out of our age like oxygen, leaving only a vacuum occupied by an electronic nation of the undead or, thanks to "60 Minutes," the dead, population of one.

I spent half of Sunday in dread of the "60 Minutes" program, having gotten
it into my head that, for the purpose of writing this column, journalistic responsibility obligated me to watch Jack Kevorkian kill someone too pain-wracked and doomed to think clearly. Since "60 Minutes" happens to follow "Siskel and Ebert" in the TV market where I live, I figured this would surely put me in the appropriate thumbs-up/thumbs-down mood. But truth be told, by Sunday evening the idea of watching another minute of any sort of TV was almost unbearable, though to say I spent last Thursday watching the House Judiciary Committee perform a Kevorkian on my country would only be more cheap melodrama at a time when we hardly need another moment of it.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/11/25/eric_11/feed/ 0 Starr dust, pundit bust http://www.salon.com/1998/11/18/eric_10/ http://www.salon.com/1998/11/18/eric_10/#comments Wed, 18 Nov 1998 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/eric/1998/11/18/eric To even the most literal-minded, it has to be obvious now that a shift in the American political Zeitgeist is taking place -- though what its final result will be remains to be seen. The soundtrack for this new Zeitgeist might be Mercury Rev's weird and haunting new "Deserter's Songs," a CD I intend to play during Kenneth Starr's testimony to Congress tomorrow; if Lincoln's "mystic chords of memory" were pop music, it would sound like this. Though this shift became clear with the election a couple of weeks ago, in fact it began, in metaphorically appropriate fashion, on the last day of summer.

That was the Tuesday, Sept. 22, following Congress' release of the
videotape of Clinton's testimony to the grand jury in the Monica Lewinsky investigation. On that day, after wide anticipation by both the media and the political establishment that the tape would doom Clinton's presidency for good, new polls showed that overnight the president's ratings had risen six points and those of Congress had plummeted 12. Of course it's easy in hindsight to say so, but in typical fashion both the politicians and the media had missed what was important about the tape: They assumed the public would be focusing on the president's answers. Instead, what people heard were the questions.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/11/18/eric_10/feed/ 0 The amazing disappearing Newt http://www.salon.com/1998/11/11/eric_9/ http://www.salon.com/1998/11/11/eric_9/#comments Wed, 11 Nov 1998 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/eric/1998/11/11/eric Twenty years from now, Newt Gingrich will be a mere blip on the radar screen
of history. That he is presently seen as a major historical figure, "the
most important speaker in a generation," as the Los Angeles Times put
it when he announced his departure from Congress and the speakership Friday, speaks to the way our sense of history has been warped by more than just
technology's acceleration of time. It's been warped by a self-interested
pundit culture for whom someone or something is important simply because the
pundit culture bore witness to it.

Mesmerized as pundits and commentators are
by electronic grandstanding, the media has been seduced into making Gingrich important because that in turn makes the media important. I was
there when Newt was speaker, the pundits imagine intoning to their
journalistic grandchildren, like Edward R. Murrow's reporting from the London
ruins of World War II.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/11/11/eric_9/feed/ 0