John Lennon, Peacenik Idiotarians, and Really Bad English

Onetime NYPress owner and currently a columnist with that odd rag—which vaguely competes with the NYPost and the Village Voice—Russ Smith, who once opined under the "Mugger" moniker, has a moderately interesting piece in the current issue. Although the column doesn't really go very far in offering explanations, it riffs on the topics of John Lennon's vapid song "Give Peace a Chance," the nature of the anti-war efforts then and now, and the current cliché-ridden nature of what today passes for journalism.

Smith, vaguely right-wing except when he's not, has lost his touch since selling his rag and moving back to his native Baltimore. Somehow, it's as if his edgy NYC acidity was surgically removed from him during his move, much like the tracker device was removed from Neo's bellybutton in the original Matrix installation.

In his current column, Smith waxes wroth on all the credit that libs and lefties like to heap on rock oracle John Lennon for ending the Vietnam War. He cites a recent example in the blog version of The Nation, a dead-tree magazine which is to informed writing as Madeline Murray O'Hare was to Christianity. [Direct link to this particular blog was unfound.] Uncharacteristically, however, the writer Smith cites, takes a refreshingly acidic view on this. Smith writes:

...last week I found the reaction to The Nation’s Jon Wiener’s web-only ruminations on the anniversary of John Lennon’s murder fairly fascinating.

Wiener’s Dec. 7 blog entry, “John Lennon’s Legacy,” was a silly (although undoubtedly sincere) nugget arguing that the man who imagined “no possessions,” even as he lived in luxury, played a part in ending the Vietnam War by penning the anthem “Give Peace a Chance.” The longtime Nation contributor, in considering the flawed film The U.S. vs. John Lennon,” in which “the married Beatle” (going back to the ’64 “Ed Sullivan” appearances) has a 1969 set-to with New York Times war correspondent Gloria Emerson, who had no time for protest ditties or rallies populated by young men who were terrified by the still-existent draft.

He writes: “The film presents the exchange as an example of the mainstream media’s relentless hostility to Lennon’s peace activism, and celebrates his put-down of Emerson. But 37 years later, it’s worth reconsidering Emerson’s question: did ‘Give Peace a Chance’ save a single life? Did the anti-war protest of 1969, or any other year, save any lives?” Wiener concedes that the war continued for several more years but concludes, “It was hard to see it in 1969, but eventually the U.S. did end its war in Vietnam. And today the people who were singing ‘Give Peace a Chance’ in 1969 can be glad they sang it.”

I don’t buy Wiener’s contention that the mainstream media was overtly hostile to Lennon (save perhaps The Wall Street Journal or National Review); more likely foreign reporters didn’t give him or his various public spectacles much thought. As it happens, like millions of people worldwide, I did take Lennon’s music, if not his Amsterdam bed-in or Yoko-influenced art projects, seriously and there are few pop musicians from that era who produced an equally significant body of work.

But was Lennon even a small actor in this country’s eventual pullout from Vietnam? Of course not. That’s sort of like saying, years from now, that George Clooney or Barbra Streisand (not to mention the impotent Iraq Study Group document from James Baker, Lee Hamilton and other Beltway worthies) were instrumental in ending the current Mideast conflict.

A good point. Actually, several good points. But the important point that both Smith and Wiener miss is that that's not the point. From the heyday of John Lennon to our present vacuous decade, an increasingly lazy and very leftist media (which was not nearly that leftist in the 1960s) simply parrots the idiotically uninformed political opinions of the entertainment industry's leisure class and trumpets these observations as the received dogma of a sage or a god.

From Lennon onward, however, the vast majority of individuals working in the entertainment industry as well as the MSM have increasingly become the willing mouthpieces of the nihilist left. Egged on by all the free publicity they get (witness the apparently witless Bush-bashing of the Dixie Chicks, whose real objective is to jettison their hick country fans and establish themselves as mainstream "artists"), entertainers simply encourage MSM hacks to characterize their vapid, simplistic philosophical and political mouthings as oracular proclamations and ample evidence that the populace supports such idiotarian views.

Meanwhile, these "artists," who obviously need an increasing amount of buzz to sell concert tickets and CDs in the Age of the iPod, bask in all the free PR as well as the kudos from their fellow travelers in the industry who also appreciate the frequent boosts. Furthermore, to be seen as being "out front" (i.e., embracing the hard left) on any political issue is to attract instant and lavish praise from the media, the kind of approving hug-hug, kiss-kiss that keeps them in the public eye and robs serious intellectual commentary of the oxygen it needs in order to get established.

This is our long-winded way of saying that Weiner and Smith at least have it right in this instance, although neither really delves into the cultural implications of sexually promiscuous and drug addled celebrities forcing public policy to the far left in perilous times such as these. Both writers themselves are thus sucked into the black hole of celebrity. Fighting this whole idiotarian-MSM-entertainment monolith is becoming a lot like taking on an army of orcs with a squirt gun. It's taken on a life of its own. Smith makes some moves in this direction and we try constantly here, but things continue to go downhill. And Lennon's successors seem incapable of learning, since every cheap-shot political song they pen wins wild applause in the media, as has Bruce Springsteen's recent attraction to the Little Red Schoolhouse Conservatory of Agitprop Music.

Since Smith is riffing on the topic of cultural clichés, he finds it easy to segue into the timeworn topic of pure journalistic clichés by referencing the increasing rise of these constructs in the world of journalism:

It’s a rare writer who doesn’t fall victim to employing clichés—[Joseph] Epstein [in the Wall Street Journal] indicts himself for using the shorthand “24/7”—and I remember one upbraiding delivered to yours truly by a friend in New York Press’ art department over a decade ago. This fellow spent an hour or so reading the latest edition of the paper and found five instances of the words “So sue me” (including once in my column), circling each one in red pencil. John Strausbaugh and I got the message and were properly embarrassed.

Some of the phrases I find particularly irritating—and a few are really ancient—are “Back in the day,” “tipping point,” “incurious” (specific to George Bush), “measuring the drapes,” “shout-out,” “give it up for … ,” “no brainer,” “outside the box” and one that sportswriters use to denigrate a ballplayer, such as “the immortal Bubba Crosby.”

Recently, nothing tops the concluding paragraph a Times editorialist committed to print in a Dec. 6 short about Robert Gates headlined “The Un-Rumsfeld.” Providing more evidence that The Times opinion writers are closer to colleagues at The Nation than The Washington Post, this person says, in stingy praise for Gates’ dire assessment of Iraq, “In any other time that would all be considered pretty bland stuff. But for an aspiring member of this administration, that came close to speaking truth to power.”

Nothing new here. "In point of fact," editors actually love the use of popular clichés as a way of dumbing down a piece and, not coincidentally, shaving off column inches at a time, all the more important in an age where tired print MSM behemoths are rapidly losing ad revenue to the web—revenue that used to support longer and more thoughtful piece. Much easier, after all, to dismiss the "beleagured and highly unpopular Bush" out of hand than actually describing the nonstop efforts of the left and their MSM confreres to make him so. A couple of quick clichés will do the job, enabling the journo to hit afternoon happy hour that much more quickly then he would if he had to think or fill more column inches.

One wishes, somehow, that the aging media lefties, whose writing today just doesn't cut the mustard anymore would either make like a tree and leave or simply oblige by kicking the bucket and taking a slow train to the Pearly Gates. But they don't believe in them apples either, so maybe it's best to move on and let sleeping dogs lie.