Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

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Friday, July 15, 2005
18:10 - I know politics bore you, but I feel like a hypocrite talking to you	(top)
Dean Barnett and Lileks both call attention, each with an essay well worth reading, to a fact that we in blogland tend to forget: most people don't care. About the big issues, yes, they do. But not about the details. Now that the Rove/Plame thing seems to be over, and good riddance to it, I have to wonder how many people in America even know who Karl Rove is�let alone Valerie Plame or Joe Wilson. Probably fewer than we would imagine even in our hedging estimates. And I think this phenomenon isn't poised to change anytime soon, if this quote from the linked Slate article is any indication: Plucky liberal Joshua Micah Marshall offers what he hopes will be the Democratic line on the scandal. "The entire Wilson/Plame story and the Rove/White House criminal probe sub-story are just so many threads thrown off a much larger and more consquential ball of yarn: the administration's use of fraudulent evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program to seal the deal for war on Iraq with the American people," he writes at TPMCafe. You know what? To the American public, for whom the news is a story that unfolds over the course of years rather than hours, Iraq isn't this writhing chimaera of moral equivalence that it's been dolled up as by Michael Moore and the MTV scene; it's not about IEDs and speeding Italian reporters and plastic turkeys and tote boards listing how many WMDs have been found and of what type and whether any of them have Osama bin Laden's autograph on them. It's about Gulf War 1. It's about Kuwait. It's about SCUDs versus Patriots. It's about no-fly zones. It's about Clinton firing in cruise missiles. It's about the comedians of the 90s who urged us to worry more about Saddam Hussein than about stained blue dresses. And it's about mass graves. Lots and lots of mass graves. We knew, in our collective souls, by the evening of 9/11 that the face of the Middle East would have to change, and that we'd be the ones who would have to do it. We sat down to somber dinner imagining the grim job ahead of our military, the one we knew we'd ask them to undertake. We knew that routing some medieval theocrats from a comically faraway country in the mountainous outskirts of the old Soviet world wasn't going to be the end of the story begun with those planes and those fireballs and those falling monoliths. We knew a lot more countries than just Afghanistan were going to have to learn to fear the living crap out of us. And Iraq, we knew, was a damned good place to start. Just as the WMD question is irrelevant and silly to the Iraqi man on the street who remembers life under Saddam, and just as aging rockers are irrelevant to peasants in African countries kept too poor and sheltered from the outside world by their respective despots to know that Live8 had even taken place, the details of Saddam's alleged nuclear ambitions aren't even on the table for most Americans. We already know him: he's Saddam Hussein. We remember him from last time. We knew him when he was clean-shaven and grinning in a beret, not just as a sad and decrepit bearded prisoner in BVDs. The daily tide of news that springs forth upon the blogosphere fully formed and devoid of long-term context largely passes by the general public, to whom 9/11 is still far too real and present to turn into a schoolyard joke, like the ones we learned by rote as kids about Nazis keeping their armies up their sleevies, without even knowing what Nazis were. It's not that people are disinterested; it's that they've got different priorities. Most people know full well that Saddam never posed a direct threat to them, specifically; but then, most people understood that although they'd had no plans to travel to New York and visit the World Trade Center on a Tuesday morning a few years ago, that doesn't mean 9/11 has no relevance to them. Despite what Moore might say, it's not all about whether New York made a good target based on the political makeup of the city and who voted for whom in 2000. Most people are less fine-grained in their alliances, less fickle, less provincial. Most people see the bigger picture. To most people, getting rid of Saddam was a clear benefit that needed to be achieved�hell, we'd been arguing in favor of it for years, and now the people wailing that it was a mistake look like guys who stumbled drunk into the movie theater halfway through and loudly demanded to know what that guy on the screen was doing and why he just said that to her. We're too busy to dispense plot summaries for those whose attention spans don't extend past last night's rave. We know there's more to come, too. The London bombing, most people understand, isn't about "retaliation" for slights in Iraq recognized in the past six months, any more than 9/11 was a response to the policies of Israeli prime ministers enacted after it happened. These things take time to plan. They also require secrecy, and sometimes we fail to stop them. Sometimes the bad guys get away. People watch enough CSI to understand that. And whereas the blogosphere and the news infrastructure often fail equally badly to apply Occam's Razor to any given situation in the news, to call terrorists "terrorists" and to take them at their word when they declare war on us, to presume that it's not a conspiracy about oil and Halliburton and stolen elections and racism, to give our elected leaders the benefit of the doubt when they tell us they're doing the best they can, the public at large is expert at it�and we could stand to take a lesson from them. The mainstream news media's hemorrhaging of viewership has to be attributable to such things as, well, that people are sick of hearing bad news�bad news might sell, but not when we're still feeling like we're in the mood for some of the good stuff. And relentless coverage of Michael Jackson trials and runaway brides doesn't help. What we want is to see some righteous ass-kicking. We know we're entitled to dispense some, and we're in no mood to be told to sit down and shut up and listen to boring details of yellowcake and out-of-context memos and he-said-she-said rumormongering. We saw those towers fall. We saw those tube bombs go off. We heard what that asshole in Amsterdam said, and we're listening now to what London's dry-brush-in-summertime contingent has to say. This is no time for self-reflection. This is no time to wonder whether this is what it must have felt like in Germany in 1938, with all that implies. The endless news-chewers of the blogosphere think they've got a great handle on what's going on in the world, but perhaps it's the core Jacksonians who are our last best hope for seeing this thing through�and we have to remind ourselves that there are enough of them out there that perhaps we don't have to worry so much.