The Breakfast Table

Toxic Politics

Good morning, Cynthia–

I’ll dispense the castor oil as quickly as Big Media dispensed with the shootings at the National Zoo. Here we are, on Day Two, and already the New York Times has this urban horror story below the front-page fold. The Washington Post, naturally, led with two big stories on the shootings, but as the hometown paper it doesn’t count. Not much on the cable shows last night, either. Larry King had movie stars, for chrissakes. This after weeks of Elián Fever. The Post’s Paul Richard today explains the disparity with depressing insight. In an essay on what the next big O.J./Monica/JonBenet/Elián-type story will be, he writes, look for four qualities: beauty, familiarity, irrelevance, and “the monomyth,” i.e., how deeply a story is rooted in basic human myths. The National Zoo shootings have none of those things; just plain old boring tragedy.

Now, on to the completely frivolous: national politics. Salon’s Jake Tapper, whom I once peremptorily dismissed as a “wiseass wanna-be,” has a terrific story today on a toxic incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio, that Al Gore promised to clean up during the 1992 campaign and that he’s pretty much ignored ever since. The East Liverpool story isn’t new–Tapper credits a 1993 Mother Jones investigation for breaking it–but the details are grotesque. Elevated cancer rates. Two little boys who had to have their eyes removed because of retinal tumors. And, of course, sleazy money and official indifference. It’s all reminiscent of the years I spent covering the toxic-waste tragedy in Woburn, Mass.

What really struck me, though, was the familiar theme of activists’ being co-opted by their unfaithful allies. Tapper quotes the pro-Gore Sierra Club’s Carl Pope as saying, “Al Gore is not John Muir, I mean, let’s be honest. But he’s running against George W. Bush, after all.” Well, yes. And I don’t mean to suggest that the Sierra Club should flush its influence down the toilet by endorsing, say, Ralph Nader, or Jello Biafra. But it’s no wonder that most people are completely turned off by advocacy groups, and rightly see them as part of the money-and-politics “iron triangle” that John McCain railed against (and has often been a part of) during his presidential campaign.

I suppose I should clarify and amend the record with regard to my remarks about Jim Cramer. When I wrote about his “raving … incoherently,” I was referring mainly to his seat-of-the-pants commentaries in TheStreet.com. Here’s a line from April 14, the day of the big Nasdaq crash: “We have to buy because it hurts like a red hot rusty poker through our underbellies.” Yum! I would describe his magazine pieces, on the other hand, as coherent raving. (By the way, I see that the Fox News Channel is now upset with Cramer for using its airwaves–cablewaves?–to flog TheStreet.com’s flagging stock.) My problem with Cramer is that he encourages the kind of short-term, panicky thinking that hurts the ordinary folks who’ve been lured into the market in the past few years. I never understood Cramer until I got the secret decoder ring. When he says “long-term investing,” he means “hold until two o’clock this afternoon.” Once you get that, everything else falls into place.

Later,
Dan