Every summer seems to have its media madness. This summer, we are so obsessed with Gary Condit’s pinched, pale, wan, wax-museum puss plastered across our front pages and TV screens and, yes, it’s a toxic distraction from what’s really wrong with the world or, at least, America.
Aren’t you sick of it yet?
Reporters interview reporters, who have interviewed reporters who have spoken to Gary Condit. Seriously, I saw this again and again on television, the other white meat. Mutual reportorial proctological examinations even more elaborate than rumored alien abductee anal probes. (Hey, once I had a blind date with Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff. Does that count? For anything? Um, don’t call me, I’ll call you.)
Not only does Connie Chung’s vaunted interview with Gary Condit fail to crack through his prefabricated, redundantly regurgitated “I’m a family man, married 34 years and I’ve made some mistakes and some things must remain private out of respect to them and the Levys” facade, but Chung begins building an entire second career on post-morteming her own efforts.
Then we’re treated to further lame, limp-butt apologias for Condit’s broadcast lockjaw and his sleazy lifestyle as a sexual Svengali from his grown son, the California governor’s recently resigned patronage appointee, Chad (yes, I am not making this up, Chad’s his real name, not political satire) who during media interviews does not refer to his father as “Dad,” but “Gary,” instead of the all-purpose honorific “Sir,” – which should be a clue to something, I’m not sure what, other than clearly Gary Condit’s profligate behavior left his son Chad hanging. In my father’s house, where discipline, authority and monogamy reigned supreme, we were never buddies with our parents. Heaven forefend. It would have been unthinkable to call my father by his first name, such as it was.
Too simple to dismiss Gary Condit as merely an emotionally-predatory, terminally-self-centered narcissist who coldly debates the definition of the word “relationship” so subjectively, with such detachment, we want to weep for those doubtlessly wailing women who thought that was what they were having with him. Relationships, no. Sex Posse, si.
Besides that, Gary Condit is a classic Don Juan, or in his case, Don Wan.
My whiz-bang Atomica electronic desktop dictionary says “Don Juan” means “a man who is an obsessive seducer of women. After Don Juan, legendary 14th-century Spanish nobleman and libertine.”
How fun. Perhaps with a dual diagnosis of satyriasis. A convenient credential for the career Lothario.
Well, this should be instructive. Some men are like this. Sex and power redux. And many of them run for public office. Deal with it. As for Gary Condit, he definitely would have benefited from better crisis intervention advice from competent professionals: Meet the charges head on in a timely fashion. Treat the media as your colleagues not your nemeses. Don’t stonewall or shirk the truth. Be pro-active, rather than reactive. Enlist the public as your allies.
The other day, Dr. Lynn Kelly sent me this e-mail:
Subject: Taleban to Mimic Hitler: Please read and respond.
I checked it out on Urban Legends and didn’t see anything.
Have you received this from anyone else? And is it Taleban
or Taliban? Have seen it both ways.L
On May 23rd the Taleban authorities in Afghanistan confirmed that all Hindus will be required to wear a strip of yellow cloth sewn onto a shirt pocket in order to identify themselves.
They claim that the measure is for their “protection.” The world has faced this before: in 1939 the world was required, at great cost, to rid itself of Hitler’s tyranny. It is not hard to spot his child. Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to relive it.
The Taleban’s record on respecting other religions gives great cause for concern that their ultimate aim, upon which they are intent, is “religious cleansing.”
They have already demonstrated their disdain and intolerance for other religions and traditions by the desecration and destruction of the ancient Buddhist statues of Bhamiyan, our collective heritage.
Whatever your religion, or even if you have none, we hope that you will agree that this is fundamentally wrong.
Remember, “All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”
Alas, it’s true, I wrote her back. It began a few weeks ago. But, IMHO, e-mail petitions to the U.N. are not the answer, responsive world leaders are.
Later, still on the case, my doctor friend wrote again:
Just looked it up, and Taleban means bully with a beard and turban, originally adored for going against the establishment and then became the establishment or worse.
Sounds like Castro’s and Mussolini’s beginnings.
Didn’t they say the anti-Christ would be from the East, originally looked up to and also would wear a turban? Blood spilled on the site of the temple is supposed to start the whole shebang.
On a much smaller scale, that modern-day red-beret gang we had … At first they protected people in the subways and on the streets, gaining public confidence and then gradually metamorphosed into bully vigilantes.
I guarantee, five years from now, when Gary Condit is shrivelled and withered and obscenely wealthy from doing TV commercials hawking Viagra, the Taleban will still be up to their nefarious shenanigans.
Where, I ask you, is the outrage?
And so, I encourage you to activate yourself for relevance, looking at events in their larger context and fighting to change what really matters in life. Or else, you will continue to be seduced and titillated and whipped into a useless frenzy and then drugged into eventual passivity and, yes, enslaved by each ultimately irrelevant media-made scandal after scandal after scandal. This echoes what Don Miguel Ruiz calls “the domestication of humans,” in his book of Toltec wisdom, “The Four Agreements.” “We cannot see who we truly are;” Ruiz writes, “we cannot see we are not free.”
The choice, dear readers, is entirely yours.
