An Unserious Nation
Even in decline, our juiciest scandals are the least consequential.
If you want to understand why it is that the American media is so up in arms over a Signal conversation, you first need to grasp just how insufferably nosy Americans are as a species. Many readers may yet be puzzled by the sudden laser focus of the US media and political classes on this of all instances given the context. The United States, after all, is cannibalizing itself. That the Vice President and a few bumbling cabinet members spoke of classified war plans over an insecure channel should be the least of our worries in the grand scheme.
It’s less worrying than the ongoing crusade to deport every Black or brown person with a crown tattoo or a Palestinian flag in their home. Less worrying than Elon Musk’s efforts to strip the US government for parts and gut what’s left of our threadbare social safety net. And certainly less worrying than the impunity with which the US bombs rain down on countries like Yemen, a truth that goes back well before the presidency was in Donald Trump’s syphilitic sights.
No, the real problem here is that the officials bombing Yemen were sloppy enough to talk about it over an app any drooling prole can download at the Apple Store. How common. How unpresidential. How unserious.
This, rather than any of the above, is what finally prompts the Democrats to pull the lead out, to stop helplessly flailing in front of reporters when asked why they aren’t doing anything. This is what it takes for Michael Bennet to start shouting in committee hearings, for the mummified Chuck Schumer to call for investigations. Never underestimate the jolts of motivation provided by a declining empire. It can still provide a few morsels of prestige and clout.
It would be an oversimplification to say that this empire was built by our nosiness, but by that same token it would be simply wrong to say it didn’t play a role. Go back to those longed-for days of the 1950s, when, so we are told, everyone had a comfortable house and two cars and enough scratch to buy a shiny new microwave for each of their 2.5 children and vacations to Disneyland every year. To this day it is only intermittently acknowledged that this was only possible because half the planet had been reduced to rubble, that the atomic future required the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That the goods flowed partly because the west would kill to keep the Suez Canal open. Likewise, it wasn’t simply that the idyllic suburbs happened to exist at the same time as Jim Crow and immiserated ghettoes. Each persisted because of the other.
Still, it was the best of all possible systems. In theory at least. All of it was, naturally, highly individualistic. You, the individual, deserved this comfort. You deserved these manufactured goods almost as you deserved the manufactured desire for them. And so long as you played by the rules, you would receive them. If you didn’t receive, or didn’t receive enough, it was either because you didn’t play well enough or, more likely, someone less deserving got them instead. Someone who didn’t play by the rules as well as you did. The problem wasn’t that a few people had so much more, but that someone else with less might have what should be yours. Be on the lookout for them. They deserve retribution.
A whole cultural praxis sprung up around this in the 1950s. And with it, the paranoia and mistrust, the spirit of late capitalism, blossomed. The busybody neighbor – beamed into your living room every night as part of Leave It to Beaver or The Dick Van Dyke Show – was harmless enough at first blush. But then, these shows always focused on the well-behaved and deserving neighbors. It was those other neighbors, the ones who rumor has it voted for Henry Wallace in ‘48, who once signed a petition against the H-Bomb, who had to really be scrutinized, reported if necessary.
If there was anything as bad as those who didn’t deserve but got anyway, it was those who shared the abundance but didn’t want the system that created it. When the college kids hopped on a bus to register Black voters in the south, when Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland went around singing “Fuck the Army,” they were, by their very nature, ungrateful. No worse sin.
The tabloids and gossip rags and entertainment news shows that flourished in the wake of the 1970s were full of people who dared to have opinions and troubles outside the parameters of power and glamor. Politics was bound to adapt. Watergate might have been the last seriously reported political scandal in US history. After that, it was all downhill. News of arms traded to Iran to back anti-communist death squads in Nicaragua jockeyed alongside revelations that Gary Hart – one of the many mediocrities vying to beat George H.W. Bush to the White House – might have fucked someone who wasn’t his wife.
It is by now trite to point out that this has all come full circle. Kamala Harris thought calling Trump “an unserious man” was a real mic drop. What she missed, what the Democrats still cannot grasp, is that the unseriousness is partly the point. Yes, the nation that gave the world reality TV – a genre that allowed us all to sit in voyeuristic judgment of each other – finally has a reality TV star as its president. The role of social media in organizing the seething American ressentiment that put him there is, by now, well known. Given this, none of us can be surprised that Trump’s ilk have slipped up using the same apps that helped boost them into power. You can say it was on accident, that it was a “screw-up,” but the fact is that he’s made sullying the sacred with the profane (in such a way that it leaves the former intact) second nature for those around him.
The counterattack from other Republicans is similarly predictable. The intrigue titillates even more than it did 70 years ago. The longer it can keep going, the more chatter there is to drown out anything of consequence. White House communications director Stephen Cheung says the Democrats are “weaponizing innocuous actions.” In a certain sense, he’s right. From what we can tell so far, the only issues discussed were the dispositions and capabilities of the military units that carried out the strikes. You could argue that the discussion put troops at risk, but in a world where America is so understandably hated, so does their very existence.
Also half-right is Ted Cruz, who has again said the quiet part out loud. “[I]f you look at the underlying substance of what they were discussing, I think we actually should be very encouraged,” he said. “Now the consequence is Americans, Texans, when you go to the grocery store, you're paying more… When you go to the department store, you're paying more because [of] this terrorism. What the entire text thread is about is President Trump directed his national security team take out the terrorists and open up the shipping lanes. That's terrific.”
About high prices solely coming from terrorism in the Suez Canal, Cruz is wrong. Insofar as the security of 70 years ago ever existed, it certainly doesn’t now, even if our own nosiness can now be used against us. That America will kill for low prices, he is most certainly correct. That it’s terrific? Cruz certainly thinks so. But then, everyone looks equally undeserving of the Good Life through the camera lens of a Predator drone. The window into everyone else’s business has its consequences.
Header shot is from BBC News.