By David Walley

Yep, it's about that time again when a new President is about to be elected. How do I know? It's simple: the media-ocracy who ought to know better is talking about youthful drug use by boomer age politicians. It's not like this is particularly a hot issue out in the hinterlands where the voters live, not on your life. You would think that this would be old news for everyone including boomers, and probably, all things being equal, think it would be strange to find a politician who never tried drugs in their youth. I mean what else are you supposed to do when you're a teenager or in college? These days, smoking a joint is like drinking a beer (unfortunate but true, but that's a subject for another column at another time depending on where this Bush issue goes in the coming months.) It's a fairer comment to make that what happens inside the Beltway in Washington DC, or within the confines of the major network board rooms has little to do with what happens in Anytown USA where most of us live. Maybe its during election years that it becomes apparent that the concerns of the electronic networks exist in a separate universe which is run by its own set of rules and usually involve sponsors who must be satisfied.

And so for the time being we long-suffering residents of the outer perimeters are being treated to the spectacle of Republican front-runner George W. Bush taking its first public hit in the electoral media process. It's not like he's in any danger of losing the nomination for even now his candidacy has that scent of inevitability (it's scandalous how much 'soft' money he's amassed already form the Republican faithful---any president but Gore.) It's not as if there's much choice between parties these days. Republicans had virtual control of the Congress for eight years and all they gave the American people was a case of gridlock or an extended peep show for the pruriently-minded attorneys. No matter, Bush is the Un-Clinton save for this picky little issue which seems to pester all politicians of a peculiar age bracket.

[I guess here I should admit it that I bridle at being a mere on-line columnist/pundit and long to get back into the fray. But how does a mere "music" zine rise to the occasion? I mean writing a monthly on-line column for the mysterious Web is one thing, but the problem really is that it's a constituency which rarely bites back. Oh if I was writing a stock tout column for an Internet chat room which specialized in IPO scams and get-quick-rich schemes, I'd get much more feedback I suppose. It's the very neutral flatten affect of cyber journalism which is maddening, but which at times (though not now) alienates me as well as encourages me to rant and rave in hopes that some kind of dialogue will be stirred. And I'm enough of a Sixties person still to want to see Hip Hop nation rise up as a voting bloc---I keep hearing about it in the NY Times--but somehow I don't think it's going to happen within my lifetime unless something really drastic happens. Maybe this is the issue---]

But all this brouhaha about Candidate Bush's implied dalliance with Peruvian marching powder is getting a little old, I'm thinking. Perhaps the grownup media (TV/print/official cyber scribe networks) are losing their reader and listener-ship because this invariant cycle of scandal, bust and re-scandal has lost its novelty, that the "OJ-ification" (!!) of media in the Nineties has finally caught up with them; the public's appetite for outrage has been satiated, and the inevitable indigestion has set in. Though it may be too early to predict, nevertheless, it seems to be inevitable that this latest go-round will produce more voter boredom and apathy for election 2000 when less than 25% of the registered electorate will elect a President for the next millennium. I hate to be a conspiracy monger, especially since I give most people the benefit of the doubt (Y2K madness notwithstanding), but if I didn't know any better I'd think this was some kind of unconscious gigantic plot. Notice I said "unconscious" because, apparently, the official media don't appear to be in the habit of thinking about what they've been doing to the public mind save in as far as it translates to advertising revenues which seem to be holding steady, or so is claimed. To paraphrase an old advertising saw, "It's enough to make you sick, is it enough to make you quit?"

But Watergate's over and done with, Woodward and Bernstein notwithstanding, and Zippergate, much to the chagrin of the Republican faithful, never produced that necessary pop, the Clinton exit. No, instead nothing happened except that for a year and change very little was accomplished in the Congress, but we've all grown to know that Congress is never supposed to do anything, and that there's no such thing as bi-partisanship in government, only what's mine is mine and what's thine is mine, especially if it comes to legislations which are popular in the hinterlands. More to the point, there are a newer bunch of reporters out there, net-literate, web-hopping sons-of-guns for whom the OJ-ification of news is a not-to-worry problem, but chasing the scandal du jour is. And if none presents itself, it's easy to manufacture one with un-sourced rumors. Which is what's been done this August while the shrinks are on vacation in the Hamptons and the dog days of summer are drawing to a close. Anyone who bothered to watch the top end of the cable box and MS-NBC will bear witness to that particular phenomenon.

If we were a more sophisticated people---check that, if the media gave us all credit for being sophisticated, the "issue," such as it is, would have faded. Would it be any more of a revelation if the Candidates du jour were aspirin junkies or took a few hits of speed to get them through finals in law school? Drugs are like sexual mores: so long as one's performance as a public official isn't compromised, whose business it is what someone does or did?

And if the same litmus test was going to be applied to candidates as members of the news media, who among them would pass the piss test I'd like to know? It's like that perennial argument which rages in baseball and each year the Hall of Fame ballet comes out about which reporters would survive the scrutiny they themselves have put on Pete Rose, for instance, and who among them doesn't gamble on occasion. Hell, politicians ain't saints, and we wouldn't like 'em if they were.

Which leads us back to George W. Bush and his coy answers to the insistent queries about his alleged use of controlled substances way back when. This little dance is a boomer variation on that deathless old question, "When did you stop beating your wife?" to which no answer can be given, or better neither answer is the right one. The issue of course is that as Governor George Bush has supported Draconian laws dealing with drugs, especially cocaine, and more to the point, that the Federal government has been hypocritical in the same way (for in truth, how many of them could pass the same scrutiny, or conversely if those who experimented with drugs were discounted as public servants, who would be left to serve the people?). We're talking about a national drug policy, not individual drug use or preference in the disco age ferchrissakes!! Even the lamest politician knows that drug use is as American as apple pie, just ask all of those Prozac junkies out there.

But as was proved by the recent Clinton foolishness, despite the dire predictions otherwise by the electronic and print media, the American public appears to be far more sophisticated than their elected officials; they overwhelmingly gave Clinton a vote confidence despite the fact that they disapproved of his personal quirks, a fair enough take on the situation. The American public appear to be almost as sophisticated as their European counterparts who care more about whether the trains run on time than what the conductors are wearing while they're doing so.

Who deemed that our politicians should be better than the people they're sworn to represent? What system but this one would tolerate such a grand deception? It would appear for the moment that George W. Bush, the Republican front-runner for President (the one with the most obscene amount of soft money) has a credibility gap, but the closer one looks the more obvious that it's the media who has a frozen nose problem of its own. We've all grownup out here in the hinterlands. Wouldn't it be delightful if the media in all its colors, shades and hues, reflected that fact?

God, there's a concept to conjure with. Stay tuned.


(C) 1999 - David G. Walley