Capital Contempt
Corry, John
John Corry Capital Contempt MEG GREENFIELD'S WASHINGTON anything you did not already know, or at least suspect, but it was written by the late Meg Greenfield, and so you should pay...
...Washington journalists should all be term-limited, and then rotated "out there...
...It dehumanizes its principal players, Greenfield writes...
...Washington, gracefully written, judicious and often witty, is, in fact, a plea for better manners and more considerate behavior toward one another on the part of politicians and the journalists who cover them...
...Greenfield, though, seems indifferent to this...
...the fat salaries, fees, and commissions sustain a way of life...
...They would be more in touch with "out there"-the world of ordinary people outside of official Washington...
...In 1961, when the old Reporter magazine dispatched her to Washington, she found "a strange society, overly hierarchic and frequently sophomoric," but with "relatively healthy social constraints...
...John Corry Capital Contempt MEG GREENFIELD'S WASHINGTON anything you did not already know, or at least suspect, but it was written by the late Meg Greenfield, and so you should pay attention...
...As a pre-eminent insider she had to either accept things as they are or lose her insider status...
...Reporters have become insensitive and cold-blooded...
...Greenfield's stern judgments, made more in sorrow than in anger, are rooted in professional experience...
...moderates oppose them...
...They also inflate egos, confirm identities, and separate the public people even further from "out there...
...Politicians may find "such abnormal absorption in career as to rule out the possibility of practically every grace, courtesy and consideration for others that people regard as the minimal requirements of family and communal life...
...Washington is money-conscious in a way that NewYork, say, or Chicago is not...
...But otherwise official Washington comes off badly...
...In fact, though, they see it through an ideological prism...
...And, alas, the press has made things worse...
...Only conservatives support the Bush tax cuts, for instance...
...And its politics would remain intact, too, of course...
...She may have despised virtual life, but other than a call for better manners she had no prescription for changing it...
...In news stories, there are no liberals or left-wingers in sight...
...As editorial-page editor of the Washington Post from 1979 until her death in 1999, she influenced political life in the capital while also being one of its pre-eminent insiders.Apparently, though, she never really liked the place...
...Nonetheless Washington, the memoir she left behind her, eschews gossip and scandalous stories...
...Money, however, is more than just the mother's milk of politics in Washington...
...They enjoy amenities not available to the people "out there...
...Public Affairs, 241 pages, $26 126 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR N Summer Reading Issue 2001...
...Much of this is fueled by money, although Washington never mentions it...
...It seems the atmosphere there was poisonous, and Greenfield found most politicians and the people around them to be either vacuous, hypocritical, or boring...
...Washington life is virtual life, and the politicians and journalists who practice it are divorced from "out there...
...But much has changed since then, and little of the change has been for the better...
...The terminology ordinary people use is more apt...
...Some Washington journalists may be biased, Greenfield says, but overwhelmingly they report the news only as they see it...
...Virtual or not, Washington life is also an agreeable life, and the politicians and journalists-the "public people," Greenfield calls them-live in very comfortable circumstances...
...She does not propose, for example, to move Agriculture to Des Moines, or Energy to Denver, while scrapping Education entirely...
...For it is preponderantly virtual life-simulated life, fabricated life," Greenfield wrote, "that is coming to the fore...
...Life in Washington, according to Greenfield, has become "more unmoored from reality and more remote from the way business is ordinarily conducted among human beings...
...But Greenfield also ignores much of what separates Washington from "out there...
...Public Affairs, 241 pages, $26 126 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR N Summer Reading Issue 2001 erminology ordinary people use is more apt...
...Meanwhile the "basic linguistic unit of speech in politics...is a statement that is already somewhere between one-eighth and one-fourth of the way to being a lie...
...This would make the capital a more civilized place, and, Greenfield thought, also make the politicians and journalists less insular...
...Man to man has given way to every man for himself, and the old give and take has been replaced by the polldriven pursuit of cosmeticized public images...
...It names few names, and for the most part the people who are named are the people Greenfield admired...
...Human frailties were tolerated (and often taken advantage of) but the modus operandi was give and take, and sometimes useful work got done...
...Official Washington would remain intact...
...Clearly Greenfield was on to something...
...The old bulls who ran Congress had their faults, although they operated man to man...
...They have in so many cases ceased thinking of the people they write about as people at all," Greenfield wrote, and included her own newspaper in the criticism: "A paper like the Post is a two-ton truck, and we run over a lot of people without knowing it, and then we just roll on without even the most casual glance in the rearview mirror...
Vol. 34 • July 2001 • No. 6
