Symposium: Michael Tomasky

Symposium: Michael Tomasky

I’m not qualified to answer question two, so consider this a response to the other three questions.

Internet, film, television, and popular music are rather broad categories, each containing nutritious wheat and faddish chaff. By “television,” do we mean The Wire or Dancing with the Stars? By “Internet,” do we mean amazon.com or pornography? But without wasting space on a virtually endless inventory of such distinctions, I say, Embrace!

On balance, these are overwhelmingly liberating and progressive forces. At this point in history, I can’t imagine that there’s even any argument about this. In fact, I thought it was more or less settled by the 1990s, let’s say, that the antique left-intellectual disdain for popular culture had been rather embarrassing. Go back and read, as I once did, the initial grudging and snobbish assessments of The Beatles in the highbrow journals (“No Soul in Beatlesville,” ran the Nation’s headline in March 1964). How silly does that look today, as do so many indictments issued by the Left in those years of television and other expressions of popular culture. At the time, it was all dismissed as masscult drivel. But through history’s lens that view holds up about as well as 1948 predictions that come Election Day, Henry Wallace just might surprise some people.

Can it be any clearer today that these forces are our friends? The fundamental fact of the Internet is that it releases both information and knowledge to people who haven’t had access to them. Don’t count me against that. I admit I don’t listen to much new music, but from what I gather the singers and rappers are still for the most part counseling their young listeners to question authority and smash convention and engage in kindred healthy activities. Film, or at least American film, seems to me to be in a bit of a moss-gathering period in general—too many projects aimed at fifteen-year-old-male Cowper’s glands, but even some of those can have a certain subversive wit about them.

It is for television, though, that I reserve my clearest enthusiasm. If you still don’t watch even the critically acclaimed shows: do. They’re good. Much television writing is good today. Boundaries are pushed on TV that even movies shy away from. And Jean Baudrillard turns out to have had it wrong: I say television creates real communities. Friday Night Lights is no false simulacrum. It’s practically as real as real life—a show about high-school football that’s also about race and class and physical handicap and angst and sex (fraught sex between teenagers, mature sex between their parents) and why people fear things they don’t know. When I watch it, and know that millions of others are—and when I visit its Web site or read chat rooms devoted to the show—I become a part of something. (On the other hand, Baudrillard is probably right about television news, which people should watch only with deep skepticism.)

It seems to me the responsibility of intellectuals today to be engaged with the world and with our country. I don’t mean intellectually engaged, which is a given, but literally and physically: get out there. Go to a Home Depot, an Applebee’s, a courthouse square, a small town’s theater company production; indeed, a high school football game.

I am mindful here of the quote, which I read too long ago to have down exactly, from Philip Rahv, who left Manhattan to take a drive around America and reported back to William Phillips with horror about the “monsters out there.” That kind of thinking is now a caricature, but I’d venture that many liberal-left intellectuals still have some sympathy with the general idea. That may have been okay then, when New York was the cynosure of virtually all intellectual activity in America and could dictate tastes and mores to the rest of the country. But that is not the case now. It is also not the case any longer that New York is all that singular (there’s a used-book store in Bethesda, Maryland, as good as any I currently know of in Manhattan). Our people are everywhere. Outnumbered, often—but everywhere.

I go into all this because I think it is the first prerequisite for true political participation these days: engage, investigate, see. There’s a bit of tactical politics in my position. The right gets such vast mileage out of its jibes about liberals and the coasts and “flyover” country and our alleged contempt for regular folkways. So we should do what we can to neutralize those arguments.

But that’s just a part of it. The larger part is simply that today’s America is a very interesting place. No, I confess, I’m not moving to Alabama anytime soon. I live in Montgomery County, Maryland, which is as blue as the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and I’m staying put. But the spread of information and education; the impact of immigration, which has delivered people from all over the world even to small towns; and, yes, the liberalizing impact of the popular culture discussed above—these and other factors have transformed the country. The nation represented in the news media—blue versus red, divided, irate—is not really the nation that exists in most places. It’s worth going out there and seeing this.

It follows from the above that of course I am a patriot. America is vast, weird, anomalous, and I love it. I admire the principles to which the nation aspires in its better moments. Yes, we’ve done a lot of harm in the world. A lot. But it’s also the case that we cannot—even Barack Obama cannot, it turns out—settle ancient scores that are not in the first instance about us.

Again, I think the old and stereotypical liberal-left view of patriotism as somehow jingoistic or simple-minded could do with some revisionism. And now is an especially good time for it: the Republican Party and the Tea Party Right, accusing our side of harboring infectious, alien schemes, is paradoxically sounding crazier and crazier (and more un-American) with each passing year, month, and week. When a sitting governor (Rick Perry of Texas) idly muses about secession; when a member of Congress (Michelle Bachmann) says that Americans should refuse to participate in the Census; when other Republican members of Congress refuse to say whether Obama is a rightful citizen,they are themselves taking positions that average folks recognize as alien. There’s an opening there to redefine patriotism and rebrand it, as it were, with our stamp.

I am a world citizen, too, emphatically so. And maybe the time is right to fuse the two concepts a bit more than we have. It may infuriate Glenn Beck and his followers, but again, I believe most Americans (perhaps just barely, but yes, most) understand that so many of our challenges—the environment, poverty, development, disease—are transnational and global. Patriotism, today and in the future, includes recognizing this and acting accordingly. A fight this will be, no doubt of that. It is a fight our side will win eventually.

Michael Tomasky is editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and American editor at large for the Guardian.