Still, this was not what was so remarkable about him. What was remarkable was his brass. For far from ever conceding error, he would simply begin each new (wholly revised) explanation, ““As I predicted eight months ago when Shalimpski ousted Schmazinski . . .’’ and then go on to rewrite in every detail what he had predicted at the time. In the same article, he would, as well, render yet another ringing forecast of things to come, which would, of course, itself need to be revised after the next Politburo shakeup. He seemed to be unashamed by this. Remind you of anything?
I have given a certain amount of thought to what I see as the unfortunate similarities between the analytic powers and outcomes of my tribe–the media–and those of the lost tribe of Sovietologists. They have pretty well vanished from the face of the earth along with the Soviet Union, which is no longer here to be misinterpreted. There are plenty of people assuming, and even more, I expect, praying that the same fate will overtake us. But before it does, we could do worse than to consider how, at the end of this tumultuous political year, we have run up a record of all but unbroken failure in our predictions and why we nonetheless persist in the humiliating practice.
Well, first, most of us seem to have avoided the soul-searching that would be useful by telling ourselves that it is not we, but other journalists who have made the humiliating errors. The journalist has yet to be born who will not tell you, when confronted on this count, that aloneamong journalists, he or she had the thing right weeks ago. If you insist on evidence, you will be served up an article which, in the 12th paragraph, contains a murky reference that could be construed as foreseeing what was to come, though only under a very strained reading. But that is not so much a distinctive weakness of journalists as a commonplace human response to criticism. What is notable is that, in trying to understand and anticipate American politicians and the American electorate, we have also fallen victim to a variation on the same doomed practice that the sages of Sovietology followed. We draw hard and fast conclusions from a flimsy, irrelevant and perhaps even nonexistent factual base, a fabrication. It is a fictionalized take on real-world political conflict, one in which opinions and certainties change overnight. We shake our heads in disbelief, but we love it. When it becomes really preposterous we respond in the manner of movie critics to the events of the week: "” “Bizarre’–The Washington Post,’’ "” “Surreal’–The New York Times.’’ We begin to think not in sound bites so much as marquee bites.
But the reality of this country could no more be inferred from the continuous lightweight movie that American politics has become than the reality of the Soviet Union could be extracted from those tedious tables documenting a decline in potato production. This, to me, is the central fact of the matter and provides the principal explanation of our prediction-and-analysis debacle, though not of our irrational insistence on continuing fecklessly to predict. Increasingly, our national politics has taken on the character of a not very good film. Increasingly, it becomes less something in which people engage than something they watch. What is appearing on the screen at any given moment–two-dimensional and without either depth or complexity–is all.
Importantly, it has its own requirements if it is to maintain our interest, and we journalists seem no less willing to meet them than commercial filmmakers would be. First, the story has to keep moving and changing at a pretty fast clip that does not comport with the pace at which real life is lived. Second, the characters must be simple and coherent–identifiable at once as good, bad, weak, strong, honest, crooked, etc. It also doesn’t hurt if they are unexpectedly odd or exotic, as so many of the players in the Lewinsky saga are. The Lewinsky saga in fact satisfied many of the movie requirements. Understand: I am not talking about a good movie, but rather one of those things they show on the walls at railroad terminals. The problem is that what makes the film entertaining or fast-paced enough or engaging as a struggle between the forces of good and of evil is precisely what renders it useless as a reflection of reality or a predictor of the way actual people will behave. And we, alas, have moved into the movie. What is on the screen has become the totality of our political world. It is a fatal delusion.
A few weeks ago, when the Democrats were enjoying one of their recurrent remissions, I was with a group of them who were exulting in their good luck and toting up their latest blessings. Against expectation they had done well in the midterm elections. Some of their least favorite opponents (Al D’Amato, Lauch Faircloth) had been retired, and as if all that were not enough, one of them said, ““Iraq went away.’’ That, to me, was the tip-off: Iraq went away. I wondered where they thought it had gone, except temporarily off the screen. We journalists likely won’t improve our dismal record as analysts and political seers until we brush the popcorn off our lap, and go see what’s happening outside the theater.
