Time Out of Joint
Other preoccupations and distractions have kept me off the blog for a few days; the Phils keeping losing three, then winning three, and I don't have much enthusiasm, or particularly well-informed opinions, on John Bolton and the newly elevated Pope Benedict XVI. I'm fairly sure the former is an ass-hat, and I'm hoping the latter surprises me by proving himself otherwise.

I do have an opinion, a pretty strong one, about Time magazine's decision to put Ann Coulter on its cover this week. (What, they didn't have any more Jesus cover stories in the can?) You have to love the timing, however: this week marks the 10-year anniversary of the Oklahoma City terror attack, carried out by far right-wing extremists who hated the federal guv'mit. One of Coulter's more memorable "witticisms"--the Time story offers fawning praise for her sense of humor--was that she only wished Timothy McVeigh had driven his explosives-laden truck into the New York Times building.

Why do I have the feeling that if, say, Arundhati Roy had said, "I only wish McVeigh had driven his truck into the American Enterprise Institute's building," our media betters wouldn't see the humor in her statement?

Coulter's myriad falsehoods and smears are exhaustively documented; today's Daily Howler offers a very quick primer, for one. But her more serious transgressions, I think, are that you can look long and hard through her writings and you'll find not a word about love of country, the value of democracy and self-government, or connection of whatever policy issue she's demagoguing about to some core value of America. No, it's all about the monstrous evil of liberals, the hideous character of Ted Kennedy or Hillary Clinton or whoever she's demonizing, and occasionally you'll discern a piteous whine about how Christians are so horribly persecuted in this country. (Maybe Time had been leading up to making her its cover girl with all those shout-outs to the Jesusmeister.)

Worst of all, as I've written here before, is her tactic of demonizing those with whom she disagrees. From her statement at this winter's Conservative Political Action Conference that it's time to give those liberals a taste of "the McCarthyism they're always whining about," to her calls to racially profile "swarthy men" at airports, to her suggestion that America should treat with the Arab world by "invad[ing] their countries, kill[ing] their leaders, and convert[ing] them to Christianity," the recommended solutions always involve division and scapegoating, and usually at least strongly imply violence. The First Amendment protects this sort of hate speech, but it's hard to see how it contains enough value to be propagated.

Here's the best thing I've read about the larger picture and the politics of Time. After a review of how the magazine served as the Fox News of the late '40s and through the 1950s, author Billmon dismisses the argument that Time is simply coming full circle:

...the differences between the old Time and the new Time not only show how much the magazine has changed, they also highlight how much the news media as a whole have been changed by the rise of the mega-monster entertainment conglomerates – such as Time Warner AOL CNN HBO Elektra etc. etc.

Time isn’t returning to its roots – if anything, it’s moving even further away from them. The old Time was conservative, right down to its DNA; the new Time is pandering to the conservatives, right down to its bottom line.

The old Time mirrored the obsessions of its founder, which were only partially, and not even primarily, commercial. The new Time is only part – and probably not even the largest part – of a line item on a quarterly profit and loss statement. The Time drones are giving head to Ann Coulter for the same reason the NBC clones are putting Left Behind knock offs in the fall line up: They’re both terrified they’ve lost touch with the mass audience, which they believe (based on what evidence I don’t know) to be drifting deeper and deeper into wacko land.

But there’s absolutely no conviction behind it, no Lucian desire to smite the wicked and elect the virtuous. Heck, according to BuyBlue.org, Time-Warner is the bluest of the blue corporations, with its executives giving a cool 77% of their $1.7 million in political contributions to the Democrats in the 2003-04 cycle.

Which is exactly why the magazine's fawning treatment of the conservative Mafia is being repaid with such contempt. Time is offering the journalistic equivalent of protection money, but the crew has something bigger in mind – like busting up the joint and taking it over.

In less abstract matters, let's also take a moment for melancholy over the pending retirement of Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords. The Republican-turned-Independent whose rejection of his erstwhile party's hard right turn gave the Democrats control of the Senate in 2001 was among the last of a dying breed: responsible fiscal conservatives and social moderates within the Party of Lincoln.

Jeffords put country over party. I'm nearing the end of David McCullough's biography of another man who made that choice, albeit in a time when party allegiences weren't nearly so fixed: John Adams. It's probably too much to hope that, as Jeffords nears the end of his career in public service, many of his former partisan colleagues will contemplate casting votes on similar grounds.