It matters

By W.W. | IOWA CITY

YESTERDAY, the indefatigable Glenn Greenwald tweeted:

Hard to imagine how much different/better our political culture would be if media devoted a fraction of WeinerEnergy to things that matter

This proposition was re-tweeted over 100 times. Lots of people think there's something to it. I'm not so sure. Mr Greenwald assumes the Weiner debacle is not a thing that matters, but isn't the fact that so much energy has been devoted to it pretty compelling evidence that it matters a good deal to a great many people? I don't doubt that the media to some extent shapes America's political culture, but any media outlet that prioritises subjects its high-minded producers believe really matter is sure to lose out to competing outlets that cater to the public's salacious tastes. Moreover, it seems to me that ridiculous scandals, water-skiing squirrels, and the absurd local angle are the spoonsful of sugar that make the medicine of "real" news go down. For all we know, Weinergate has made Americans marginally less ignorant of subjects that ought to matter to them, but don't. Of the millions who tuned in to Mr Weiner's televised mea culpa, surely some of them failed to locate the remote before they accidentally learned something useful.

Would American political culture improve were the public to become more interested in the intricacies of health-care policy and whatnot? Sure, of course. Can the media make Americans care more than we do about the boring stuff that profoundly affects the commonweal? No, not really.

I would also emphasise that the idea of "representation" operative in "representative democracy" is not merely demographic and partisan. It is also moral and cultural, like it or not. Congressional representatives are not mere instruments through which the policy preferences of their constituents are aggregated and submitted to the legislative body. They are living symbols of the people in their districts. High-school kids headed out of town for a basketball game or debate tournament are routinely warned to be on their best behaviour by way of the grave reminder that each of them represents their whole school, their whole community. If it makes any sense to think the trombonist on the high-school pep band can tarnish the reputation of her town, then it's got to make sense to think a member of the House of Representatives can bring dishonour to his district.

Now, I'd rather voters evaluate candidate representatives on the basis of their policy opinions and legislative competence, and I think the desire to minimise the more numinous symbolic aspects of political representation can be a noble one. But we musn't kid ourselves. I was relieved when George W. Bush left office because he made me feel a bit ashamed of my country. There were a number of reasons for this, but one of them was that I thought he sounded a bit dumb. Despite my deracinated cosmopolitan ideals, despite the fact I never voted for him, I nevertheless felt he represented me when he spoke, and I didn't like it. He made us all look a bit dumb. Representative Weiner represents a bunch of New Yorkers in a more direct way than George W. Bush ever represented me, and I imagine most of them now like that fact less than they used to. I'm not going to tell them it doesn't matter.

(Photo credit: AFP)