Read Who Let the Dogs In? Online
Authors: Molly Ivins
Who Let the Dogs In? (3 page)
M
ANY
CITIZENS
of progressive political persuasion are finding that, soulwise, these are trying times. To be a liberal in the Reagan Era—not to mention being a lefty, pinko, comsymp—strikes most of us as damned hard cheese. Duty requires the earnest liberal to spend most of his time on the qui vive for jackbooted fascism, in a state of profound depression over the advance of the military-industrial complex, and down in the dumps over the incurable nincompoopery of a people addicted to
The Newlywed Game.
Beloveds, fear not, neither let yourselves despair. Rejoice. I bring you good news. As a lifelong Texas liberal, I have spent the whole of my existence in a political climate well to the right of that being created by Ronald Reagan and his merry zealots. Brethren and sistren, this can not only be endured, it can be laughed at. Actually, you have two other choices. You could cry or you could throw up. But crying and throwing up are bad for you, so you might as well laugh. All you need in order to laugh about Reagan is a strong stomach. A tungsten tummy.
Mike Zunk is a fellow we used to know who tried to get into the
Guinness Book of World Records
by eating a car—ground up, you understand, a small bit at a time. He just took it in as a little roughage every day. We always thought of Zunk as a Texas-liberal-in-training. The rest of us toughen our stomachs by taking in the Legislature a day at a time. And now, lo, after all these years of nobody even knowing we were down here, it turns out Texas liberals are among the few folks who know how to survive Reagan. We feel just like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
It may be true, as Tom Lehrer believes, that satire died the day they gave Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize. But then, as Gore Vidal recently observed in another context, one must never underestimate the Scandinavian sense of humor. You have to ignore a lot of stuff in order to laugh about Reagan—dead babies and such—but years of practice with the Texas Lege is just what a body needs to get in shape for the concept of Edwin Meese as attorney general. Beer also helps.
Here are six perfectly good reasons to keep laughing during the Reagan administration:
• Things are not getting worse: Things have always been this bad. Nothing is more consoling than the long perspective of history. It will perk you up no end to go back and read the works of progressives past. You will learn therein that things back then were also terrible, and what’s more, they were always getting worse. This is most inspiriting.
• Things could get worse. The fact that they probably will should not be used as an excuse for tossing away this golden opportunity to rejoice in the relative delightfulness of our current situation. Is there anything to cheer us in the realization that Ed Meese is attorney general? Yes. It could have been Jesse Helms. And may yet be. Let us give thanks for Ed Meese while we yet have time.
• There is always the off chance that adversity will improve our character. Since we are all the spiritual children of the Puritans, we secretly believe suffering is good for us. I am putting this spell in the wilderness to good use myself: That awful tendency we liberals have to bleed from the heart over victims of cruelty and injustice is so off-putting. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to not feel sorry for Texaco, Inc., victim of manifest injustice though it is. I hardly ever heard of anything so awfully unfair as Texaco having an $11 billion judgment put against them when it wasn’t even Texaco that screwed over Pennzoil in the first place. And then they have to pay a $13 billion bond to appeal the case. Gosh, it’s a good thing I have a will of iron or I’d be hard put to suppress those little twinges of sympathy.
• We’re not responsible for any of this stuff. No matter how bad it gets, no matter how much they foul things up, it’s not our fault. We’ve got a guilt-free eight years here, team, and given the amount of guilt we have to carry around with us when we have any say in how things get done, this should be our shining hour.
• A redundant reason to keep right on chortling through the Ronaldan Age is on account of lefties are more fun than righties by definition. Ever been to a YAF convention? By comparison, SDS was a Marx Brothers movie. What’s the point of doing good if you can’t have fun doing it? You want to wind up looking like Jeane Kirkpatrick? So smile.
• The Reagan administration is genuinely funny, honest it is. From the time we whipped Grenada in a fair fight to the day the old boy dropped off the wreath at Bitburg, this administration has been nothing but laughs. James Watt! Killer trees! Ketchup as a vegetable! Reagan cures the deficit! This is great stuff. You can’t make up stuff this good.
In fact, there’s another perfectly good reason to be grateful to Ronald Reagan: He’s so amazing that zillions of future writers are daily being discouraged from ever trying their hands at fiction.
March 1986
A
FEW YEARS AGO,
Jules Feiffer drew an Everyman who offered, in serial panels, these observations about the state of the nation:
1. Truth hurts.
2. Before truth, this was a happy country.
3. But look what truth did to us in Vietnam.
4. Look how the truth fouled us up in the 1960s and the 1970s.
5. Truth has changed us from a nation of optimists to a nation of pessimists.
6. So when the president makes it a crime for government workers to go public with the truth, I say, “Hoorah!”
7. And when he bars the press from reporting our wars, I say, “About time!”
8. America doesn’t need any more truth.
9. It needs to feel better.
Ronald Reagan, Feiffer observed elsewhere, represented “a return to innocence; a new moral, ethical, and political Victorianism. Reagan’s Victorianism transcends truth. It circumvents politics. It gives America what it demands in a time of insoluble crisis: fairy tales.”
Lately, through no initiative of its own, the American press has been debunking fairy tales and once more telling depressing, pessimistic, hurtful, unhappy truth. With predictable results. “The nation’s news organizations have lost substantial public esteem and credibility as a result of the Iran-Nicaraguan affair . . . according to a new Gallup Poll for the Times Mirror Company,” said a front-page story in
The New York Times
on January 4.
What we have really lost is popularity. People don’t like being roused from the rosy Reagan dream that it’s morning in America, so they turn on the messenger who brings the bad news.
Here is a sample—a letter to the editor of my local paper, the
Austin American-Statesman:
“Like sharks circling, the news media are in a feeding frenzy. They would love to bring down a very popular president. From the beginning, President Reagan’s foreign policy has been under attack. First it was Grenada, but that turned out to be a triumph; next it was the bombing of Libya. During that attack, we were deluged with quotes from
Pravda
and
Tass,
but, alas, that too was triumphant for Reagan.”
The letter writer, Jean Whitman, continued: “The media are delighted that irresponsible and traitorous congressmen are leaking top-secret information to them. . . . Consider the media score: They love Castro, hated the shah; they champion the leaders in Zimbabwe and Angola, where tribal murder is now common; they champion the African National Congress, a communistic party, in South Africa. They ignore the plight of Afghanistan. They so divided the country, making heroes out of the SDS and Jane Fonda, that the real heroes came home to hostility after fighting a horrible war in Vietnam.”
Whitman is as serious as a stroke, and while there may not be many citizens who hold her detailed agenda of grudges, the 17 percent drop in confidence in the television news and the 23 percent drop in confidence in the credibility of newspapers uncovered by the Times Mirror poll do represent a kill-the-messenger response.
The reaction is predictable, of course, but that isn’t helping the press deal with it. Like the Supreme Court, the press follows the election returns. And the press, like politicians, wants to be popular. The trouble with waking up America so rudely, after six years of letting it slumber happily in dreamland, is that we’re now being greeted with all the enthusiasm reserved for a loud alarm clock that goes off much too soon. “Ah, shaddap!” “Turn it off!” “Throw it at the cat!”
And when the going gets tough for the press in America, the press fudges, the press jellies. That’s what we’re doing now. We are retreating to a fine old American press cop-out we like to call objectivity. Russell Baker once described it: “In the classic example, a refugee from Nazi Germany who appears on television saying monstrous things are happening in his homeland must be followed by a Nazi spokesman saying Adolf Hitler is the greatest boon to humanity since pasteurized milk. Real objectivity would require not only hard work by news people to determine which report was accurate, but also a willingness to put up with the abuse certain to follow publication of an objectively formed judgment. To escape the hard work or the abuse, if one man says Hitler is an ogre, we instantly give you another to say Hitler is a prince. A man says the rockets won’t work? We give you another who says they will.
“The public may not learn much about these fairly sensitive matters, but neither does it get another excuse to denounce the media for unfairness and lack of objectivity. In brief, society is teeming with people who become furious if told what the score is.”
The American press has always had a tendency to assume that the truth must lie exactly halfway between any two opposing points of view. Thus, if the press presents the man who says Hitler is an ogre and the man who says Hitler is a prince, it believes it has done the full measure of its journalistic duty.
This tendency has been aggravated in recent years by a noticeable trend to substitute people who speak from a right-wing ideological perspective for those who know something about a given subject. Thus we see, night after night, on
MacNeil/Lehrer
or
Nightline,
people who don’t know jack about Iran or Nicaragua or arms control, but who are ready to tear up the pea patch in defense of the proposition that Ronald Reagan is a Great Leader beset by comsymps. They have nothing to offer in the way of facts or insight; they are presented as a way of keeping the networks from being charged with bias by people who are replete with bias and resistant to fact. The justification for putting them on the air is that “they represent a point of view.”
