To the interesting question posed last week-is Bobby Ray Inman wacky or is Washington really that bad? Here is the answer:
Yes.
Or, life being too complex to be summed up in one word: Yes but. . .
– But maybe Inman wasn’t being wacky; maybe he was diverting attention from something worse.
– But “modern McCarthyism” is the wrong term. It’s even a disservice to Sen. Joe, who isn’t easy to disserve but who at least violated individual rights and human decency with honest vulgarity.
– But it isn’t just Washington.
Assuming that Inman was not engaged in disingenuous disinformation, his wackiness was unmistakable. Wacky, it should be understood, is not the same thing as crazy. Inman does not lack sanity, just perspective.
Wackiness is characterized by self-absorption, self-righteousness and self-pity. It is insufficient to say that Inman displayed all three in his press conference because he displayed little else. Only a man blinded by his vision of himself could claim to be a victim of “modern McCarthyism” while making unsubstantiated charges against others.
Those others need no defense. Less tenacious and less dishonest than McCarthy, Inman withdrew most of his allegations the minute he was challenged about them. In fairness to Inman, though, his surrender does not eradicate his point.
In Washington, both political debate by participants and commentary by observers has become increasingly personal, bitter and mindless. These qualities were never in short supply and, in some periods (McCarthy’s, for one), they have been worse. But in the last two decades standards of decency, fairness and restraint have gradually eroded.
The result bears some resemblance to McCarthyism. Partisans feel free to allege without regard to evidence. Reporters build stories around what “investigators say they are trying to learn,” which means what a cop said over a beer. Columnists go on television panels where they speculate in public about the private lives of public people.
But there are huge differences between the present situation and McCarthyism, which had a political agenda. McCarthy himself may have been mostly an ambitious boob, but some of his allies used him to try to discredit the New Deal as a Communist plot.
Today’s political outrages are bipartisan. Republicans commit more of them, but that’s only because they’re the outsiders. And the bias of most commentators is neither liberal nor conservative. It is anti-political. We in the news business will destroy any public official for the crime of being one, for fun and ego-gratification.
All of this is more obvious in Washington than anywhere else, but it is a delusion to suppose that it is confined to Washington. The delusion is widespread, perhaps because it is so comforting. Just as Americans have used the Mafia to fool themselves into thinking that sin is foreign, the notion of Washington as separate, bizarre and inferior provides a convenient “other” to blame for what goes wrong.
Yet it was not Washington but Middle America which became fascinated by, and read signficiance into, the violent domestic troubles of two stupid, crude young people in Virginia. It is America’s heartland, not Washington, where the fatuous pop sociology of Oprah, Geraldo and Sally Jessy are taken seriously. Washington is not home to the campuses which pay attention to Deconstruction or the Post-Modern, which employ Michael Milken to instruct the young or listen to feminist “scholarship” which compares science with rape.
It is not along Constitution Avenue, but along Main Street, where people believe the ignorant loudmouths of talk radio. It it is not in Washington but in down-to-Earth Denver where one of those loudmouths has not only his radio show but also a newspaper column, even while he records commercials for local businesses. Where there are standards of honesty, those who comment on public affairs do not shill for stores.
Washington is not the headquarters of corporations whose leaders are held in high regard only because their crimes are described on the business pages which most people don’t read. Those are southern entrepreneurs, not Washington insiders, accused of defrauding investors on behalf of Prudential Securities, Inc.
Beating up on Washington is fun, and not without some justification. But ours is, from sea to shining sea, among the plain folk and the fancy, a decadent society, as demonstrated last week by Bobby Ray Inman, a corporate executive from Austin, Texas, well beyond the Beltway.
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