Byte the Broccoli

It's been a funny week. Call it the vegetating of our polity. On the one hand, President Bush has reaffirmed that great American principle: Every boy can grow up to turn down the veggies his mother forced him to eat. Meanwhile out in the Wilder West pro-choice forces threatened to eat no more potatoes if Idaho governor Cecil Andrus signed the bill severely limited abortions.

Is this puerile politics, or what? Make that infantile, and try to guess how low our political discourse can slide once you get on the slippery slope of letting TV sound bytes determine the intellectual level.

I remember well the first time I noticed how leaving it to George was going to amBush our politics. It was during the 1984 election that I ran into humungous crowds as I was getting my passport out of my safe deposit box at the Chinatown branch of the San Francisco Federal Savings and Loan. "What's up?" I asked as the crowd thickened.

"Vice-President Bush is after the Oriental vote," was the explanation. So I decided to do my own little sound byte, without benefit of television. The night before he had lost the TV debate to Geraldine Ferraro but had tried to compensate with his contemptible "We kicked a little ass" comment.

He had been forced to admit in the media that he was less than chivalrous in this ploy to depreppie his image. I wondered if he had been only media contrite so I hollered out as he passed me, "Going to kick a little more ass in San Francisco today, Mr. Vice President?" With that maddeningly crooked Alfred E. Newman smile flickering across his suddenly enlivened face, he concurred, "RIGHT ON!"

Right off, Mr. Sound Byter. Right off the high road of Lincolnian debate. And right down the slippery slope that made the 1988 election campaign such a disgusting disgrace. Bush then threw the Willie Horton racial innuendo into the campaign and to show how serious a man he was about patriotism got himself video-ed visiting flag factories in New Jersey. And to show what a macho Marlboro man he was he chomped pork rinds, his junk food of choice.

That is not the most pathetic aspect of this media malarkey. That the media immediately succumbed to a broccoli feeding frenzy shows how little we can depend on them to maintain a reasonably literate politics. "If it moves, they'll byte it" seems to be the extent of their intelligence as they deepen our despond in the dismal swamp of media imagery.

We are the laughing stock of the civilized world. We cheer Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel for their high seriousness at joint sessions of the national legislature then happily return to the playpen of our own politics. I think William Pfaff of the International Herald Tribune has the right idea: the only way out of this morass is not more political cheesecake but a total ban on bought for TV advertising.

We're the only Western country that doesn't provide free TV in support of the political process, and look where our greediness has got us--shorter and shorter attention spans in the electorate, and cruder and cruder appeals to what we laughingly call their mentality.

Presidential puerility is not the only problem. Single issue politics predisposes every sliver of the electorate to push their only simpleminded agendas in the same fatuous way. "Ban potatoes" shout the pro-choice forces in Idaho. "Tear off that fur coat" clamor the animal rightists in Atlantic City. "Get your rosaries off my ovaries" is the Christmas message of ACT UP lowerers of the level of political discourse at St. Patrick's Cathedral. How low can we all go?

The answer seems clear: there is no depths to which televidiot byte seekers will not stoop. We're in the Playpen Era of American politics. The tough question is how do we get out? Not easily, and not quickly. The infantilization of the electorate has been going on apace since Consumerism shifted into high gear after World War II. Our media system has only one obsession.

MOVE MORE GOODS TO MORE PEOPLE. This was not a conspiracy to make Disney level infants of the median American. It just turned out that way. We didn't expect fast food franchising to destroy the American family dinner either. It just has. And feminists and their friends didn't expect that day care crisis that looms over us either. In the bad old days, grandma and grandpa helped care for a family's children. Now they're either stacked in a Miami condo or strung out on crack in a ghetto.

The potentially tragic outcome of sound byte politics is that it offers no alternatives to our many impasses in community life in contemporary America. It's a politics of incumbency. Don't rock my boat; I've got to get reelected; I'll do anything on the medium of mediocrity to ensure survival. If the cost becomes astronomical, just pay of the PAC's and move on to the next sound byte.

No serious polity would ever get suckered into covering a Presidential aversion to a veggie. That Bush lives from byte to byte is truly sad and a sorry portent for the future of our politics. But that our media go along with his every tick and shtick is truly contemptible. For if the media loose their moxie, who will blow the whistle on the next and worst fatuity?

The infantilization of American politics, alas, accelerates. What media Popeye will finally make us eat our spinach? Ted Turner? (Heh, Fonda, be a plain Jane and don't rattle our last best hope for sanity in media coverage of politics.) Let's hope that CNN spells FINIS to the politics of vegetables.