Concluding Un-Huxleyan Postscript and the Difference between This Town and Other Town

The voice of my friend on the other side of the phone was clearly exasperated. In a very apologetic tone he tells me that if we were doing this three years ago it would have been completed with no trouble, but events have made something as simple as signing up for health care a ridiculously heroic endeavor.

My friend was a health insurance agent, and we were at the tail end of an eighteen-month journey trying to get me and my family of four a sane health-care insurance policy. When we started, both my friend and I were of the same skeptical mind regarding the prospects of the soon to unfold first phase of the Affordable Care Act. He, because as an insurance agent, he was already seeing the confusion that it was unleashing from within the health-insurance industry; me, because I am a manufacturing and process engineer and my experience has been that actual cost–benefit efficiencies in any process are never improved by micro-managing from the top, but more often are seriously degraded. As it happened, events proved our skepticism right.

So I had opted instead to take a serious hair cut with COBRA and wait it out until things settled down in the industry. Eighteen months later, with COBRA ending, I was forced to enter the post apocalyptic world of our national health insurance industry, an adventure that would have me and my friend spending days on California’s insurance exchange website, days more on private insurance providers websites, and an especially enjoyable two hours I spent on the phone in a death spiral of customer service handoffs. By accident one of those handoffs put me in contact with a department deeper inside the health insurance beast and which sounded like I was calling the IT equivalent of a battleship that was taking in water,

I’m sorry. All of IT is working on the website trying to fix the problem. There’s no one left to support customer service.

What I didn’t realize so many months ago when my friend and I began this process was that as a result of the Twittersphere, I was going to have words with a former member of the regime that ushered in this new healthcare revolution. And by words I mean a three tweet exchange.

In the same week that my friend and I were attempting to conclude our epic endeavor, I had just posted a blog article titled “Politics in the Age of Soma: How We Became the United States of Aldous Huxley.” In what would prove later to be an ironic twist, it was a follow-up to my critical assessment of the Obama administration, “Barack Obama and the Difference Between Attaining Office and Attaining Power.” In that article I discussed how the political environment that allowed Obama to win re-election has become dangerously selective for personalities least disposed to acknowledge and deal with the world as it is. Politics in the Age of Soma was intended to explain why that political environment exists, because our culture has ceased to be influenced by typographic literacy but rather by an appetite for amusement, and our politics has naturally come to reflect that disposition.

When I got off the phone with my insurance agent friend I had a few moments to see how Politics in the Age of Soma was doing on Twitter. To my pleasant surprise Mark Leibovich, the author of the book This Town, which I rely on extensively in the article, re-tweeted the link. This seemed to have sent the article into the D.C. political culture because it was then re-re-tweeted by one Jon Lovett, whose resume includes standup comedian, speech writer for three years for the Obama administration followed by a stint as creator of the TV show 1600 Penn, a sit com about a dysfunctional family in the White House.

No. The irony was not lost on me.

“He did read the article, didn’t he?” I thought to myself.  An article, the subject of which is quite literally about the deleterious effects of TV and amusement on the quality of our public discourse and ends quoting Neil Postman from his book Amusing Ourselves to Death:

Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us. . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter?

What is one to make of a former denizen of Mark Leibovich’s This Town recommending an article that seems to call special jaundiced attention to his own craft? Partly out of curiosity, and partly out of aggravation toward Mr. Lovett’s former boss for making my last few weeks miserable, I tweeted Mr. Lovett directly.

Um, thanks for the retweet, but a Comic/Speech Writer for the Obama admin is sort of exhibit A of the problem.

Mr. Lovett was kind enough to favorite the tweet and respond about ten minutes later.

I assure you that the vast majority of speeches I wrote were not entertaining in the slightest.

If Twitter has become our generation’s salon of the networked world, Mr. Lovett’s tweet had whatever the Twitter equivalent is of a powdered wig and a snuff box: charming, self-deprecating, and artful in its ironic evasion.

It brought to mind a quote cited by Matt Ashby and Brendan Carroll of Salon writing on the culturally corrosive effects of irony. The passage is from  the late author David Foster Wallace.

Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like an hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny. It [uses] the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.

The quote didn’t just come to mind because of Mr. Lovett’s Tweet. But because of the, I think not coincidental, quality it bears to the habits of the town he worked in, including that of his former boss.

Whenever he [Obama] lapsed into shtick, a behavioral category that incorporated much of what politicians do in public, it was with an implicit nod to the game transpiring. He was playacting, in other words, and he wanted you to know that he knew it. [Mark Leibovich, This Town]

This kind of irony, the knowing winking and nodding while engaging in political kitsch, appears to be the coin of the realm in This Town the purpose of which seems to be not just to obscure but also to psychically absolve a culture whose high self opinion must needs take refuge from the taint of the sausage coming out of D.C. Irony, it seems, is the lipstick to the Beltway pig.

In Ashyby and Carroll’s worthwhile article, they explore the unfortunate descent of irony in cultural usage, from a potent tool of sixties dissent, it gradually became co-opted by pop culture and has now become a kind of default of hipster wannabe’s, late night TV kitsch, and a tribal tic intended to communicate sophistication without the sophistication.

Irony was becomin a protective carapace . . . a defense mechanism against the possibility of seeming naïve.

I would add it is also one more endowment given to our culture compliments of the medium which was the subject of my previous post, and has particularly flourished in our political class. But unfortunately, as the last couple weeks of my healthcare adventure has demonstrated, irony doesn’t make for good policy.

My response to Mr. Lovett’s tweet lacked his art. It is bad Twitter etiquette, it seems, to respond to charming self deprecation with full throated sarcasm, at least not without first engaging in some form of mutually diverting foreplay. I made the classic blunder of those who live outside This Town of attempting to cut to the chase.

But in my defense, we in Other Town are in a difficult position. We are the recipients, for better or worse, of the product of This Town. Our lives are directly affected by the horse trading, sausage making, sell-your-mother-to-move-up-the-political-food-chain, culture that has given us the Frankenstein’s Monster of public policies. Whereas whatever means remains that keeps This Town accountable to Other Town has deteriorated before the reality distortion field of media and the culture it has cultivated which has served to protect its own. This is why Mr. Leibovich’s book has provided such a service to those of us in Other Town who have read it and thought about its implications.

I assume Mr. Lovett recommended my article because he recognized something true in it, and this is good. But I also interpret his artful evasion as the sort of self-insulating tic of a culture that resists, and will continue to resist, its logical implication.

This does not mean, however, that the rest of us need to be so constrained.  For those readers who have somehow wandered innocently onto this blog post and yet remain unmoved, please, buy and read Mark Leibovich’s book This Town and then return to this post. If you are still unmoved, reread Mark Leibovich’s book, but this time take very careful notes, because you may have a fabulous future awaiting you as a wannabe denizen of our glittering Versailles on the Potomac.

For the remaining readers, I’ll just leave you with the following words from someone who, it will become clear, was neither a stand-up comedian, speech writer, nor political consultant:

It’s time to put away childish things.

Update: Mr. Lovett kindly responded to me directly regarding my post stating that the tweet I refer to above was posted strictly to avoid an argument on Twitter, and that he will attempt to respond to my comments when he is able. Feel free to keep this in mind as you consider the above. I thanked Mr. Lovett and told him that I look forward to his response.