THE PSUEDOSPHERE: It should go without saying that John Edwards is hardly the only politician to adopt a collection of generic uplifting words as a motto, or find those words also in use by others. Mark Warner‘s Forward Together PAC, for example, last summer shared its name with the failed military push into Baghdad, Operation Forward Together, which just goes to show that neither of the two efforts were named with any degree of specificity.
Indeed, such lack of specificity is a tell-tale sign that you’ve descended into what Eric Alterman, in Sound and Fury: The Rise of the Punditocracy, describes as “the pseduo-sphere,” the place where manufactured events meet psuedo-news stories, and everything gets so divorced from reality that words start to lose their meaning. Readers and viewers are alienated by the psuedosphere, as well, because the reporting on fake events so often focuses on the quality of the theatrics, as there is no actual news involved, just forms of stage-management.
The coverage of Edward’s announcement yesterday was unusually and refreshingly blunt in making the psuedo-quality of the whole event thing clear. “There was no secret about Edwards’s presidential campaign intentions. The 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee has been running hard for two years, and campaign officials have been at work for more than a week on final arrangements for the official launching,” wrote Dan Balz, for example. “[C]andidates now seek to draw attention to presidential campaign announcements, attempting to maximize their audience through the various media platforms for what are well-scripted events.” Reported The New York Times: “The �formal� announcement of his candidacy today was, by design, anything but formal. Mr. Edwards wore work boots, blue jeans and a thick blue shirt against the chill.” A stage-managed event got the usual theatrical evaluation, but also some meta commentary.
Pseudosphere trappings aside, the issues Edwards highlighted were important ones, and he’s been a welcome addition to the ranks of those who advocate for the poor since 2004. And yet. There is something in his new approach that rankles. An accusation of guilt, with the finger pointed at the people, not the powerful. Edwards said that he was in New Orleans, volunteering, �to show what�s possible when we as Americans, instead of staying home and complaining, actually take action and take responsibility.�
That’s all very well and good — A Thousand Points of Light by way of Eli Segal. But Edwards is running for president, not director of AmeriCorps, and what happened in New Orleans was a failure of goverment, not private charity. Americans poured their hearts and wallets out for New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, just as they did for New York after 9/11. The issue then as now is not the failure of the American people to be generous, but what role we expect government to play in our lives and in solving those problems that are too big for us to solve alone. The problems that led to the disaster of Katrina — nepotism, cronyism, and disrespect for scientific authority among those who control our tax dollars — won’t be solved by a bunch of well-meaning teenagers weilding shovels. Nor will low literacy and illiteracy — two of the biggest contributors to poverty in New Orleans and around the country — be solved by once-a-month community action days, or holiday food drives.
“We need to ask Americans to be patriotic about something other that war,” Edwards said in New Orleans.”We can’t wait for someone else to do this for us. There is just too much at stake.” And also, in an e-mail to supporters: “And we can’t wait for the next President to take office to begin fundamentally changing our country.”
–Garance Franke-Ruta
