Washington Monthly - September/October 2012 - 15

be very active in a crucial political contest. But instead of using their humor to make clear to their audience that the coming election would be crucial, they devoted almost the entire event to showing how clever and above partisanship they were and how awesome their guests were. Only the eightyfour-year-old Tony Bennett urged the crowd to vote. And he just got out that one word, “vote,” over his shoulder as he was being hustled offstage to make room for the next act.

How was the sense of responsibility lost? Last year in these pages, I traced the explosion of greed and selfishness since the 1980s to the self-indulgence that developed out of the gradual morphing of the 1950s and early-1960s movement for group rights into an assertion of personal rights. Kurt Andersen, in a July op-ed in the New York Times, seems to join in this analysis: “Do your own thing” is not so different than “every man for himself.” If it feels good, do it, whether that means smoking weed and watching porn and never wearing a necktie, retiring at 50 with a six-figure public pension and refusing modest gun regulation, or moving your factories overseas and letting commercial banks become financial speculators. The self-absorbed “Me” Decade, having expanded during the ’80s and ’90s from personal life to encompass the political economy, will soon be the “Me” Half-Century.

billies go get shot.” The result was the separation between blue-collar workers and liberal Democrats that Republicans have since exploited. Remember how Spiro Agnew said, “A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals”?

Pill payola
Television’s Dr. Drew—his last name is Pinsky—has been caught taking payoffs from the drug company GlaxoSmithKline for endorsing its antidepression drug Wellbutrin. Of course, Dr. Pinsky is just the tip of a giant iceberg of medical malpractice. If you have missed the movie Love and Other Drugs, be sure to see it. Part of the film is a totally delicious satire of the corrupt relationship between pharmaceutical salesmen and physicians.

Where’s the beef?
One of the main problems of Obama’s health care bill has been the lack of public understanding of its provisions. Why doesn’t the public know? One answer comes from the Pew Research Center, which studied media coverage of the bill and found that only 23 percent was of substance, while 49 percent was about “politics and strategy.” Of course, the same is true every day on every issue as the media continues to focus on politics, not substance.

The Me-First Era
Both the very conservative Charles Murray and the moderate conservative David Brooks agree about what Murray calls the “segregation of capitalism from virtue.” I can remember that in the 1950s Wall Streeters like Chase Manhattan Bank’s David Rockefeller and businessmen like Scott Paper’s Thomas McCabe still liked to be called responsible, meaning that they made their money with at least some regard for the morality and the effect on the rest of us of how they made it. Murray traces this sense of responsibility to the McGuffey Readers, explaining that the books on which generations of American children were raised have plenty of stories treating initiative, hard work and entrepreneurialism as virtues, but just as many stories praising the virtues of self-restraint, personal integrity and concern for those who depend on you. The freedom to act and a stern moral obligation to act in certain ways were seen as two sides of the same American coin. Little of that has survived.

W hat is re Kantor’s book The Obamas, for markable about instance, calls the president’s legislative this almost identical thought is accomplishments “extraordinary,” but that I’m sure Andevotes less than one page—it’s 192, if dersen’s thoughts are his own. I you want to check—to listing them. doubt that he even reads this column, a result that we pretty much as- Feed the beast sured by publishing an article making fun of the snobbish tendencies of Spy, a magazine One reason why I fear we will never get real he cofounded. campaign finance reform is that the media So I hope mine and Andersen’s is industry is reaping such vast profits from like the agreement between Murray the sale of time for all those commercials and Brooks in suggesting that we that are deluging the airwaves. Both the are at last beginning to come togeth- broadcast and the cable networks feast on er to figure out what’s gone wrong with this income, which also enriches local stathis country. tions, especially those in swing states. According to the Wall Street Journal’s “Heard on the Street,” political advertisers will Split by snobbery spend $42 per U.S. adult this year. The snobbery for which we criticized Spy was another development we did Two scandals that weren’t not like about the late 1960s. It was expressed most notably by the largely college- Two recent articles in the New York Times educated antiwar protestors who called have made me wonder which Times ediblue-collar policemen pigs and justified tors were asleep the day they were pubtheir avoidance of the draft with words like lished. One, by Motoko Rich, ran as the the title of a Monthly article, “let those hill- lead article on the front page with the
Washington Monthly 15

Washington Monthly - September/October 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Washington Monthly - September/October 2012