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Who’s To Blame?

Fred Russel

    In an age of punditry where almost all political and social criticism in the media is in the hands of journalists who are unequipped to understand how societies become what they are, and lack the courage to call into question the foundations of American life, it is not surprising that almost all such criticism is directed against politicians and other public figures. What the journalistic profession is clearly incapable of understanding and certainly does not wish to understand is that America’s problems – the crime and poverty, the violence and bigotry, the ignorance and apathy, the greed and selfishness, the resentment and frustration, the anxiety and depression – are not the product or fault of incompetent or wrongheaded government but a direct result of the values and character of the American people. The fiction that the People are never at fault, that the People are great, that the country is great, and that it is their leaders who let them down may be necessary to enable Americans to maintain a good opinion of themselves but in and of itself is one of the greatest obstacles to the healing of America. When people locate the ills of society in government rather than in themselves, they are in effect dooming that society to perpetuate everything that is rotten in it.
    It is of course true that America is poorly governed and it is also true to a large extent that politics attract an inferior type of individual, whether in terms of morality or ability, as do entrepreneurship and journalism itself for that matter, so that, ironically, it may be said that the three most important functions of society – its overall management, the provision of its material needs and the control and flow of information – are in the hands of people who are the least suited to carry them out. But at the same time, the problems of America run so deep, are so deeply ingrained in the character of the American people, that the country is virtually ungovernable. This, however, does not mean that it is not as tightly controlled as the harshest dictatorship, not by brute force of course but by the rigid proceduralization of daily life. All Americans live by other people’s rules – rules that are established primarily for the convenience of these other people – and therefore Americans are led around by the nose whenever they come into contact with the bureaucracies that administer and control public or any other kinds of services. The man in the street thus enters a world where rules of behavior have been laid out for him by those who control given segments or sectors of the society. Paradoxically, too, it is Western societies that have the most rules, for they are far more sophisticated in organizing society than less developed countries. Computerization of course augments all this significantly. Everything comes with instructions which we blindly obey. It is in fact virtually impossible to interact with the outside world without acting in a prescribed way.
    As for journalism, it is true that the demands of the media, the need to fill time or space and their engagement in meaningless competition with one another, encourage the sloppiness and superficiality that are the chief characteristics of the journalistic profession, and it may well be that in the absence of such constraints, a small number of journalists might emerge as real writers or even historians, just as a small number of bloggers could conceivably emerge as real writers if the absence of standards on the Internet did not encourage even greater sloppiness and superficiality. Of free enterprise and the market economy, the meat and potatoes of the American way of life, the less said the better, for they thrive largely by seducing or manipulating consumers into buying what they don’t need or can’t afford.
    It is truly discouraging to run one’s eye over the headlines in the press and on the web or to listen to the sages on the talk shows without ever encountering the suggestion that something is wrong with America other than Washington or Wall Street. This is the great failure of American journalism, a failure of nerve and a failure of perception. Needless to say, novelists and social scientists have done a much better job of representing the realities of American life, but relatively few people read them, and even those who do fall into the habit of viewing America through the eyes of its journalists after being exposed to their “stories” and “opinion pieces” day in and day out for years on end. The blissful ignorance of Americans is thus assured from one generation to the next as they wait to be informed each day about what other people are doing wrong.

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