PUNDIT WATCH
Douglas, Susan
PUNDIT WATCH Susan Douglas You, Too, Can Be a Pundit While watching TV on Sunday morning, with cream cheese on your bathrobe and your hair looking like a squirrel's nest, do you ever think,...
...Take George Will and the topic of defense spending...
...If you can come up with nonsensical comments like this one, you could even host your own show...
...Now, no one ever has to back up stuff like this, and since there were no female panelists, there were no pesky women around to challenge Bennett on his paean to patriarchy...
...Barry Schweid on Washington Week in Review cast it as "giving blacks a little bit of a break...
...Just like at your local bar...
...Let's see how it works...
...But almost nowhere is gender mentioned in the recent controversy...
...No mention is made of any specific programs or weapons, but there are quotes from Henry Kissinger...
...The recent affirmative-action debates offer an excellent case study...
...Like lemmings, most pundits have followed Pete Wilson's race-baiting references to "tribalism...
...PUNDIT WATCH Susan Douglas You, Too, Can Be a Pundit While watching TV on Sunday morning, with cream cheese on your bathrobe and your hair looking like a squirrel's nest, do you ever think, "Hey, I could be a pundit...
...Tres simple...
...See...
...Susan Douglas teaches at Hampshire College...
...It's almost essential that you be male and pale, and equally essential that you ignore, ridicule, or eradicate female concerns and politics...
...The number of women accepted to medical school has more than doubled since 1973...
...And they have been allowed to set the terms of the debate...
...This is because Republicans don't want to alienate working women...
...You don't have to know anything about anything...
...If you are innocent of logic, ignorant about how much of the country lives and works, inarticulate, a closet racist, a male chauvinist, and a sucker for conservative sophistry, punditry may be for you...
...Still don't really grasp the politics or possible solutions...
...You would need to hold your own against Representative J.C...
...But scrape the cream cheese off your front before circulating the old resume...
...You need to focus on the imagery of events, not their substance...
...When white people wouldn't let black people into movie theaters, public schools, white colleges, law firms, businesses, or hospitals, were white people counting by race or not...
...The number of women directors on Fortune 1000 boards went from forty-six in 1969 to 426 in 1988...
...Her column appears in this space every month...
...How would you respond to John McLaughlin when he asks whether Janet Reno will have to leave office as a result of the Waco hearings which, of course, have only just begun...
...Moderator Tim Russert stopped this insight dead in its tracks by shooting back, "But lack of a job is no substitute for lack of values...
...Since I'm not a pundit, I'll give you a few facts...
...It helps tremendously if you couple this with race-baiting...
...Not to worry—here's how old pro Morton Kondracke handles this one on The McLaughlin Group...
...Now, on to the Waco hearings...
...See, as long as you don't know much about history and have memorized a few Hallmark cards, you're golden...
...You get the idea...
...See, if you're a pundit of Will's stature, it's beneath you to mess with grimy details...
...Andrew Sullivan, editor of The New Republic, wrote in an op-ed piece for The New York Times that affirmative action was designed for one group alone—African Americans—and they don't need it anymore...
...But your real role model here should be Michael Barone, occasional pundit on The McLaughlin Group...
...Once in a while, a spoilsport like Kweisi Mfume, Democrat of Maryland, or Bill Bradley, Democrat of New Jersey, gets on a show like this and suggests that economic facts, especially about discrimination, might alter the debate...
...Women, whom you may recall used to not get into graduate schools, corporate board rooms, or police uniforms, have had their opportunities, and thus their lives, transformed by affirmative action...
...Two days after the General Accounting Office revealed that the B-2 bomber (estimated cost: $44.4 billion for twenty of them) has radar that can't tell the difference between a rain cloud and the Matterhorn and is plagued by other design flaws as well, Will published his impassioned column, "The Case for Defense Spending...
...You must sound emphatic and exude total certitude...
...Ignoring history, the law, current public-opinion polls, and, of course, women, Barone asserted that "the whole essence of affirmative action is quotas—you either count by race or you don't...
...The other important thing to know about being a pundit is that you can and should ignore all facts that don't fit in with your point of view...
...Confused and dispirited about Bosnia...
...You just go on about human nature and the inevitability of war...
...Watts Jr., Republican of Oklahoma, who opined that "Martin Luther King never talked about race," and asserted that "we've lost our ability to get along, to love each other...
...You have to be real good at vague, content-free assessments and far-fetched, irrelevant predictions...
...Even Fred Barnes can't walk out looking like that...
...But there are a few rules...
...If you can ignore the fact that this is a totally stupid question and are prepared to say, "Not a snowball's chance in hell," you are definitely pundit material...
...And, whenever possible, you should buy into the conservative framing of topics and events...
...Well, after the required stops in make-up and wardrobe, you could...
...Now, here's something I haven't mentioned yet about being a pundit...
...Watts was nicely complemented by talk-show regular, intellectual heavyweight, and Iron John graduate Bill Bennett, who gave some more heft to the discussion by adding, "Values can't come from government . . . they have to come from fathers and churches," and "I think what happens on TV, in the movies, and on radio . . . has more to do with the future of this country than the public policies we are discussing here...
...Have you ever heard anything dumber...
...After fifty-five minutes of the usual "we-must-strengthen-the-family" drivel (time for national distribution of barbells), Bradley, looking like he'd been sucking on a persimmon way too long, suggested that the real problem in America was "inadequate economic growth, unfairly shared" and that there was "no way to separate someone's earning power from their prospects for life...
...The number of women in the armed services has quadrupled since 1973...
...Over on Meet the Press, where a recent topic was race relations and affirmative action, you would be expected to hold forth about the decline of values in America (a perennial favorite with the pundits...
...Just like at your dinner table after too much cheap Chardonnay...
...Just for once I'd like to see all-out bombing and see what it does...
Vol. 59 • September 1995 • No. 9
