Casual
Casual Protect the Paper People Travelgate I can forgive. Likewise the futures trading profits and the attempt to nationalize health care. But now Hillary Clinton is insisting that she wrote her...
...Only Paper People have the time and inclination to do research, weigh policy initiatives, and read essays...
...Such sweet moments are all the reward ever granted to the Paper Person for his long hours of toil...
...To put it bluntly, Tube People are too busy speaking to have actual knowledge of anything...
...That quiet pleasure was reserved for the Paper People, who work downstairs formulating policies, drafting speeches, ironing out talking points, and otherwise acting like policy footmen ("Will you be requiring an argument against Medicaid block-granting with dinner, Senator...
...The Tube People should be content with that and not try to horn in on those at the other end of the information economy...
...Tube People are Gladys Knight...
...They get to take credit for everything...
...This should be of concern to the whole nation...
...Even the Paper People themselves talk about each other as nonentities: "I hear that Panetta's people really liked the memo that Cisneros's people put together...
...Do you think we could leak it to Koppel's people...
...She showed reporters stacks of handwritten papers that she claimed were the manuscript version of her book...
...This outrage violates the social contract...
...I pray she is lying...
...This isn't only a parochial problem for those in the Paper world, who fear that they might be displaced if the likes of Hillary Clinton begin writing their own stuff...
...Eventually, the grubby world of books, magazines, and even unsummarized newspaper articles drops from the Tube Person's schedule, and he or she enters the rarefied world of television self-sufficiency...
...of course they don't have time to spend a few hours drafting an essay that might be read by a million...
...Paper People are the Pips...
...Calamity...
...Tube People get to sponsor reports they haven't read, they get to blurb books they haven't cracked, they get to vote on bills they haven't looked at (if they are congressmen...
...But if we as a nation let Tubes loose on matters of substance, we will be stuck with government based on information culled at dinner parties...
...Then my friend went to work for a politician running for office...
...But now Hillary Clinton is insisting that she wrote her book It Takes a Village herself...
...If she did write it, she should vow never to do it again...
...Traditionally, a Tube Person is too busy to read, too busy to write...
...Last year a friend of mine ghostwrote an op-ed piece for a business executive on a bill before Congress, which was published in a magazine...
...She even suggested that she had something to do with the information contained in the book...
...Consider the meager pleasures of the Paper Person...
...It takes a village of aides to write a book...
...David Brooks...
...Why should a Tube Person want to interfere with such paltry joys...
...What is going to be left for the nation's ghostwriters, talking-points drafters, and quote-providers if the famous people of the world start doing their own work...
...For the past several years the world of Washington politics has been divided into two classes: the Paper People, who read and write things, and the Tube People, who appear on TV...
...So my friend got to write a letter in the politician's name that praised the op-ed piece he had written under the business executive's name...
...They have to fly days on end so they can appear at a lunch and speak before 200...
...You see the Paper People hovering in a crowd of consultation as their Tube strides down the hallway...
...But up until now they haven't been allowed to control the substance of what they say...
...The snippets of information the Tube Person hears on CNN while dressing in the morning become fodder for his or her judgments during an appearance on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer that evening...
...Tube People have to attend meetings, they have to attend fundraisers, they have to dash off to TV studios...
...Hillary Clinton must publicly swear that she in fact had nothing to do with the writing of her book...
...The business executive sent the op-ed to my friend's candidate...
...But suppose she isn't...
...But now Hillary Clinton, with intolerable greed, wants to be the front person and the substance person...
...With their similar gestures and similar suits, the Paper People do come to look like a Motown group, so you might say, "Oh, look, here come Phil Gramm and the Dickey Flatts...
...The nation must be protected from the political world's famous faces...
...That's a glamorous way to live...
...The Tube People, like Hillary Clinton and other bigwigs, get to do interview programs and appear on the covers of national magazines...
...She loudly complained about how difficult it is to face that blank page every morning...
Vol. 1 • January 1996 • No. 19
