This was not quite an exhaustive description of my duties. From her vantage point as a toddler, she could not distinguish between the physical space and the job usually performed in it. She might just as easily have gotten the impression that I am a professional viewer of Skip and Shannon Undisputed.
How do I make my living, though? If I were asked to give a succinct description of my work (for that, believe it or not, is what writing four or five days a week is) I would say that I am an entertainer and that journalism is simply a form of mass entertainment, like Hollywood or Major League Baseball, albeit one with somewhat lower average earnings potential. My job is to write things that please readers, to amuse, to clarify an inchoate feeling, to elucidate a vexed question, and at least occasionally, I hope, to inspire laughter with 800 or so words. Broadway it ain't. But odder things have been called fun.
Which of these is closer to the truth? My instinct is that to say that while there is something to both definitions, the conditions under which the latter obtain are rare even for the most talented writers. (Did H.L. Mencken change the public's mind about a single question?) But even if they were combined, in full knowledge that aiming high is no guarantee of even hitting the rim, they would form only a partial interpretation at best — an attempt to prescribe what, under something like ideal conditions, a columnist's job might involve. If I were asked instead to give a descriptive rather than a prescriptive account of the opinion-having business, to say what it looks like in practice as opposed to what it ought to be, my response would be that I am here to elicit your outrage.
This admittedly rather sordid activity can take two basic forms. The first involves writing things that call attention to real or perceived injustices, which gives rise to what readers will fondly suppose is righteous anger. The second requires me to write more or less the same piece and wait for it to reach a very different set of readers, who become indignant because they are as convinced of my fecklessness and ignorance as the others are of my sagacity. Because I write on the internet, both kinds of readers share what I have said with others on social media, who either agree or disagree with their implicit assessment of my mental (and no doubt spiritual) capabilities, which in turn gives rise to another round of recriminations. Rinse and repeat.
I am happy to admit that the first two accounts of opinion writing are somewhat pollyannish. But I think that the third one, which best describes the actual opinion journalism that exists in this country right now and the means by which we are conditioned to respond to it, is actively dangerous, so dangerous that it is ultimately incompatible with the ends presupposed by either of the former accounts and, in the long run, with democratic self-government itself, and the various accounts of "the good life" apparently guaranteed by such a system.
This is true for two related reasons. The first is that a society that has made outrage its primary mode of communication is incapable of being entertained, moved, or, perhaps worst of all, teased. (This reality is not immediately obvious, least of all to the outraged themselves, who mistake the dopamine hit of a fave for all of the aforementioned feelings.) The second is that those questions — about taxation, infrastructure, the provision of medical care, the environment, foreign policy — that a free press is meant to help adjudicate have a tendency to disappear from view, unmissed, while I issue my fourth superlative in as many hundred words about a politician's unimportant speech and you and your former coworker argue about whose basic fitness for the human race is called into question by his attitude toward what I have written (and will forget about tomorrow).
by Matthew Walther, The Week | Read more:
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