There are times when I think I'm going too far in my belief that the United States of America has basically had it - that we're past the point of even grasping how to deal seriously with existential crises like debt and unfunded entitlement obligations, and that at this point it's really just a matter of how long the political class can maintain the illusion that everything is hunky dory until we wake up one day and we're told, sorry, it's been fun but nothing lasts forever.
Yeah. That sort of pessimism is hard to maintain 24/7, especially for someone like me who is actually pretty optimistic in my own personal life. I figure I'm being melodramatic, and somehow or other we'll get it all sorted out.
Then along comes the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner, and I remember, "Oh, right, this is why we're screwed."
A few of the denziens of the media are starting to catch on to what a stomach-curdling freak show this is, but as you might expect, they don't pick up on the real problem. Tom Brokaw is upset that Lindsay Lohan was invited, and he refused to attend, but his main objection is that the media are hurting their own credibility by throwing this big gala for themselves - as if their performance of their jobs was not enough of a credibility killer. National Journal's Ron Fournier, keeper of the conventional wisdom among Washington media types, frets that the so-called "nerd prom" makes the media look "out of touch" - which is funny because the very use of that media cliche shows just how deep inside the bubble Fournier lives.
Brokaw and Fournier sense that something is horribly wrong here, but the real truth is far too terrifying for them to grasp. The problem with the White House Correspondents' Dinner is not that it makes the movers and shakers of Washington look foolish, self-absorbed, shallow, narcissistic and aloof. The problem is that it is the one night of the year when they throw off pretense and show us that is, in fact, exactly what they really are.
The Washington culture - Democrats, Republicans, media, bureaucrats, consultants, etc. - consists of completely shallow, phony people whose primary concern is their own fame and prominence. The occasional person who somehow slips through the barbed wire with a serious understanding of issues and solutions is treated as a pariah, as a kook, as a buzzkill.
This is so often compared to high school that the very analogy has itself become a cliche, but there's a reason you hear it as often as you do. Insecure teenagers will do anything, no matter how phony and insincere, to be accepted and, with any luck, respected. Most of us grow out of that around the time we hit 19 and we focus on living productive lives. Some never do, so they go into politics and the media. And those who play these games most shrewdly end up in Washington, and ultimately at the annual pinnacle of their lives - this stupid dinner. That's where you can actually walk a red carpet like you're a movie star or something. That's where you can sit there listening to the president of the United States painfully trying to entertain you during the open-mic comedy segment, only to have you actually file news reports about whether he was funny.
You're so lost that you actually think this crap matters. You actually think it says something positive about you that you were there.
And this matters for the following reason: These same shallow people are the ones whose charge it is to inform the rest of us about the business of the nation. That's why you don't know about the Gosnell trial. That's why you don't know entitlements are driving us to bankruptcy. That's why you think Joe Biden is smart and Sarah Palin is dumb. That's why you think the sequester is some sort of severe reduction of government.
You are uninformed because you're relying on narcissistic airheads to tell you what you need to know, and you have no idea that they not only lack the intellectual firepower to do so even if they wanted to, but that they have no intention of doing so because their only priority is to stay on the A-list so they can get an invitation to this stupid dinner once a year, and maybe sit with Lindsay Lohan.
So yeah. I'm back on the country-is-screwed bandwagon. And yeah, it's because a dinner packed with preeners has reminded me that there is scarcely a serious person in our nation's capital - just a bunch of self-styled celebrities who think you want nothing more than to talk about how cool it would be to get invited to the "nerd prom."
A republic, if you can keep it . . . which you can't if you leave it up to slugs like this.
