The BEAST: Buffalo's Best Fiend

The Meaning of Tripe by Matt Taibbi
WELL, IT'S OVER. Last week we Americans celebrated one of our grandest traditions, the victory of Tweedledum over Tweedledee. The occasion was marked by awe and splendor on all sides, as befits a contest in which the leader of the free world is chosen in race to see which Ivy League graduate is quicker to reach for a duck call at the sight of a Reuters photographer.

What did it all mean?

The major media in typical lock step fashion says that the Bush win along the same red-blue patterns from 2000 mean that the electorate is "hopelessly divided" and that the election threw "two Americas" into relief. The BEAST cheerfully guarantees that nothing that could not have been written by a well-trained chimpanzee will appear in print anywhere in America in the next month. For things to be otherwise would violate the entire spirit of the affair. Newspapers waited until the results were in to tell us what it all meant to avoid having to confess to what they've all known from the start: that the American presidential election was a gigantic exercise in conventional thinking, in which the real result is always a sea of slaves cheering the walloping defeat of originality at the hands of craven mediocrity.

It might be that some of us in the media-criticism business have read too much Marx. Or maybe too much Lincoln. Ralph Nader certainly has. Like most of the Earnest Young Idealists who marched against the war in the past year or so (I was one of them), Nader insists, as an article of faith, that the chief reason America's politics are so bankrupt of meaning is that the people are misinformed. Ralph is fond of quoting Lincoln, who said that if people are brought the "real facts" then they "can be depended upon to meet any national crisis." In this world view, the true villains of our national politics are the representatives of the commercial media, who bring us not facts but reams of horseshit about which guy has a better haircut, is smoother at ordering a Philly cheese steak, has a more genuine-looking tan.

That might be giving the people too much credit. Certainly there is plenty of evidence that Americans, when it comes to politics anyway, have always been a group of spineless goons motivated primarily by a hatred of ideas and the fear that a superior person might end up as their leader. It can't be only the media's fault that we are the only people on Earth who demand that our leaders be as dumb as we are.
If Albert Einstein ran for president, we'd make him do photo ops at bowling alleys, eat baskets of french fries, visit Redskins training camp. And once he gave in to that, we'd have another list of demands: no more talk about physics, a round of target practice at Camp Lejeune, a stint juggling lemons with Jimmy Fallon on Saturday Night Live.

And if Einstein were still standing on election day the only thing ingenious left about him would be his name. Otherwise, he'd be exactly what we had left for candidates: an idiot, compromised and humiliated in a thousand different ways, his only virtue being that he'd proven his acceptance of our orthodoxy by throwing his brains and his personality in a bonfire.

That is what our national elections are all about. It's a gladiatorial spectacle in which individual dignity is ritualistically destroyed over the course of more than a year of constant battering and television exposure. Whether this is a trick of the elite to deliver a frightening object lesson to the population, or whether it represents the actual emotional desire of an impressively mean and stupid citizenry, that's hard to say. Either way, it sucks. And either way, we're going to spend the next few weeks hearing just about every shameless hack in print and on television celebrating this gruesome process as a triumph of democracy and idealism.

The Bush-Kerry fiasco turned out to be one of the greatest and most prolonged insults to human dignity the world has ever seen.

It is hard to imagine anything more meaningless, underhanded, vapid, shameless, pointlessly vicious, embarrassing, uninspiring, degrading and even unentertaining than this billion-dollar daily exchange of sneering teenage accusations between the Bush and Kerry camps. And it is hard to imagine anything more galling than the unspoken media subtext of the election-the idea that this slime-fest somehow represents an important moment, a landmark memory, in our own lives. The implication that we're such losers that we would actually want to watch this crap 24 hours a day for 15 or 16 months is almost more appalling than the behavior of the candidates themselves.

Though we're tempted to blame the politicians, it's time to dig deeper. It's time to blame the press corps that daily brings us this unrelenting symphony of horseshit and never comes within 1000 miles of an apology for any of it. And it's time to blame the press not only as a class of people, but as individuals. We must brand anyone who puts his name or his face on credulous campaign coverage an eternal Enemy of the State. Hopefully, over time, if we're not all tending mutant sheep in a post-nuclear desert by then, this will have a deterrent effect.

It is not enough to say that the enemy is out there. We must name names, and in the next issue of The Beast that is exactly what we plan to do. We will review the campaign coverage of the worst major media hacks, and compile a list of the worst of the worst, in fact The Ten Worst Presidential Election Campaign Hacks of 2004. The winner will be awarded a very, very special prize. Stay tuned.