Joshuah Bearman

Red + Blue = Me + You

The Tank is the converted theater where the un-credentialed left-wing bloggers are setting up shop during convention week. It’s on the far west end on 42nd Street, between 9th and 10th, and getting there requires dodging the hawkers in front of the Lion King as well as those guys who importune passersby with “a business opportunity” while handing out slips of paper that say to meet later at some hotel in New Jersey.

Last night, the Tank was the site of a party called Sleeping With The Enemy: A Bi-Partisan Affair. The idea was to get young liberals and young republicans together, get them drunk, and let the carnal magic unfold a velvet path across the aisle. Party identification at the bar determined who got a red cup or a blue cup. It was perhaps a testament to size and gender makeup of the co-sponsoring New York Young Republican Club that there seemed to be far fewer red cups than blue ones, and I saw only one girl holding red, which I think might have been an accident. Not that the color coding was needed, since other than the aforementioned instance, all the red ups were all in the hands of dudes whose button-downs and pleated chinos gave their affiliation away from fifty yards.

It was a nice time, a welcome improvement over the media party, despite that it looked like there was little bi-partisan love brewing in the Tank’s courtyard.

“I haven’t seen much yet,” said David Alpert, one of the organizers. “We though that the couches might get used. But no luck so far.”

I was disappointed by the lack of ladies with red cups, because I’ve been secretly hoping to see some Republican romance — either a) intra-Republican mating, for anthropological purposes, or b) inter-faith “dialogue” between Republicans and Democrats, or c) a special sub-variety thereof involving one young Republican lass and me.

The only way to understand them, I’ve decided, is to love them. So for the sake of coming to terms with this convention and what it means for humankind, I think I have to go on a Republican date. But I haven’t really seen any opportunities. The Republicans for Choice are not in my age bracket. The Log Cabin Republicans don’t do it for me. And then it was slim pickings from the red cups at the Sleeping With the Enemy party.

Still, I’m convinced I must press forward. Mostly because of this weird dream I had the other night where I seduced this earnest young southern belle-type Republican delegate who was being harassed by nasty protesters. They were hosing her down, not in the she’s-my-cherry-pie-by-Warrant way but more in the eyes-on-the-prize-Bull-Connor-way, and in the morphean morality my mind generated, this was an acceptable punishment at first for being a Republican delegate, but at a certain point she became a victim. I intervened. She looked up at me in gratitude. The strangest part was how my voice fell to sotto voce and I drew her near while also saying "you know that the President has the worst job approval ratings in history — you know that don't you? Don’t you?" She began to accept this, to believe me as she came closer, to part her lips as she changed her mind about Bush, and that's the last thing I remember before the phone rang.

Even The Media Hates The Media

It took no more than thirty seconds inside the Time Warner Official Media Welcome party Saturday night to be reminded why our country’s voters are the worst-informed and least participatory in the industrialized world.

Out on the streets around Madison Square Garden you can pick the press from the delegates without seeing their credentials just by the way they walk. The press always try to look important. They hurry. Or manage to look hurried even while standing still. The print people are mostly schleps, and the television world loves to get all dressed up for no good reason.* Everyone wants to feel like they’re going somewhere, spatially and professionally. And when they get where they think they ought to be going, they want to know everyone in the room. Which is why the multiple levels and bridges of the shopping complex where the party was held were brimming with people dropping their salmon tartar cones and wiping flan-covered fingers on their pants to shake Larry King’s hand and you couldn’t take one sip from the Margaritas that looked like they were poured the day before without hearing someone say, “Ohhhh . . . Mr. Blitzer . . . I’m [insert name here] from [insert network here].”

This doesn’t mean there aren’t many journalists I admire and whose abilities I can never hope to match; but as a whole, the media seem far more interested in careers than truth. And for a group that’s supposed to be relating a whole lot of complex ideas about the world, they sure do seem parochial.

I know, I know — the poor journalists are easy targets. Don’t they suffer enough humiliation at the hands of a ruthless right-wing libel machine that’s pushed them on a slow defensive slide towards irrelevance? Yes, they have in fact suffered at the hands of a ruthless right-wing libel machine — only adding to my annoyance. Because they don’t fight back. They get beaten up for supposed bias, but the real problem is the worn shield of false objectivity they feebly raise as their sole resistance. Wandering with the crowds past the strategically scattered hors d’oeuvres tables and the strange display of a woman in what seemed to be an immobile dress conically shaped out of magazines, I kept wanting to run into Michael Dobbs and demand to know why the nut graf in his Washington Post investigation into Kerry’s military record would include the line “both sides have withheld information from the public record and provided an incomplete, and sometimes inaccurate, picture of what took place.”

Such a statement may be technically accurate, but that statement alone fails to represent the accompanying context and scale and intent. One set of claims, on the Swift Boat side, are vicious fabrications made by people with a vendetta and are being exploited by the cruelest knee cappers to rule politics since the days of hand-bills and the pamphleteering assassins of the nineteenth century.

Whatever paperwork discrepancies exist between Kerry’s paperwork and diaries and so on are not commensurate with the Swift Vets’ flat-out intentional and politically motivated falsehoods. Contrary to the dogma of J-schools across the country, there are not always two sides to a story. Balance is often necessary and indispensable, but there are times when the media might have to, um, mediate a bunch of information and make a judgment. And in those instances, presenting contrasting information as if it’s equally important is, in fact, the false representation — more false than saying, “I’ve gathered a lot of material and vetted it all, and here’s my assessment.”**

Just because you can always find a counter quote, or an “expert” who will say that evolution is a disputed science, or some guy who will tell you that Kerry didn’t go to Cambodia doesn’t mean you should repeat it. Here’s a new principle they might add to the J-School dogma: don’t quote people who are lying just to have “both sides” represented. And here’s a tip: don’t source with fringe nuts. That’s not objectivity; it’s retarded. If you want to saunter around the Time Warner Center looking so satisfied with yourselves as the guardians of information, then the least you could do is live up to your role. Don’t be afraid of judgment. It’s all you have left.

All this torment over the state of our news is probably why the scene wasn’t fun. It certainly wasn't as much fun as the DNC media party, and that was a pretty lame party, even with the chocolate fountain and the ferris wheel. I did run into some Air America folks, and had a nice conversation with an editor at the foreign desk of NBC, who shared my grievances about the people swirling past us. But in general, the feeling in the place was weird, so I left for the Sleeping With The Enemy Party at the Tank. That's where young progressives and Republicans were purposely invited to the same place and asked to co-mingle to see if any of them could find some common ground, if you catch my meaning.

On the way out I missed a surprise photo op with Bloomberg, and, sadly, never got to see Don King, leaving me wondering, as I always have: Is that guy even real?

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* Is it unfair to make fun of the way our media friends dress? After all, you might say, it's not their job to be sartorially current. Except that they’re the ones who tried to sink Wesley Clark because the guy decided that as a civilian, he might want to don a few sweaters. And they got on Gore for his tweeds. Don’t defend them; they’ll turn on your duds in a second.

** For a good example of how the “both sides” compare and contrast seems to give validity to claims that have none, see the Christmas in Cambodia section of the little insert box accompanying the Swift Boat Accounts Incomplete article in the Washington Post. It’s called “A Record Questioned,” and is a disaster of unintended graphical misrepresentation.