I don't care that Caroline Kennedy may indeed be eligible, competent and critical minded enough to be a Senator. There are surely hundreds of thousands of exactly equally eligible, competent, and critical minded citizens who lack her name and cocktail party connections who aren't under consideration for Senatorial appointment for just those reasons, and the fact that everybody knows this is deeply injurious to American democracy.
Indeed, the only people who benefit from this aristocratic nonsense are the vapid commentariat who are thus provided another celebrity feedbag to substitute for the hard work of doing the journalism and providing the considered judgments for which they like to pretend they are paid so much money and attention in the first place (which, it should go without saying, is likewise deeply injurious to American democracy).
If you want to be Senator, go through the same goddamn process as anybody else would, even with the Kennedy aura and Kennedy millions to grease your path at least the campaign trail would provide some minimal vetting and real-time problem-solving and occasion to actually delineate to your fellow citizens your working philosophy and so minimally prepare you to assume a frankly flabbergastingly powerful position of authority as a Senator of one of the richest and most populous States in America.
This is more than a shudder of revolt against the celebration of such blatant aristocratic privilege in a self-declared democracy (which is certainly bad enough), by the way, but another registration of worry about the special dangers of broadcast-mediated celebrity-culture in a Republic far too vulnerable to "executive" overreaching and also of "branding" as a corrosive substitute for critical deliberation.
No comments:
Post a Comment