Thanks to all for reading and commenting. To follow my work post-T/S, the best thing to do is to follow me on Twitter. There’s also my own website/blog. My blogging will show up there and also at the Huffington Post, the Guardian and other venues.

I refer to the WikiLeaks release of a trove of 92,000 U.S. documents detailing efforts of the U.S. Army and Special Forces in the war in Afghanistan, published simultaneously with interpretive accounts from the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel. As soon as this went up, you could feel the ground shifting under the media and governments: their traditional relationships were suddenly upended by this new architecture of information flows. From anonymous leakers to seemingly invulnerable transnational secret-exposing organization to journalists and to the public.

To those who say “there’s nothing new here,” I suppose that’s right in the general sense. But if you read some of these documents (or their excerpts), I don’t think they are so easily dismissed as old news. They paint a vivid picture of a daily reality that is absurdly complex, baffling and possibly hopeless. The sensation you get from reading through them is different than if you just read the words ”complex, baffling and hopeless.” More different than if you read a policy paper on it. And more different still than if you watch the Pentagon’s daily briefings. There’s no substitute for primary sources, and the volume of information and breadth of topics creates an overwhelming sense of the drift of the war effort.

Does this represent an emergent form of journalism? C.W. Anderson argues that it does:

This captures the essence of the question I was trying to get at in the fifth point of yesterday’s post (“journalism in the era of big data”). I noted the similarities between “War Logs” and last week’s big bombshell, “Top Secret America.” The essence of the similarity, I said, was that they were based on reams of data, which, in sum, might not tell us anything shockingly new but that brought home, in Ryan Sholin’s excellent phrase, “the weight of failure.” And this gets me excited because I think it represents something new in journalism, or something old-enough-to-new: a focus on the aggregation of a million “on the ground reports” that might sometimes get us closer to the truth than three well placed sources over a nice off-the-record dinner.

Going forward, we’re going to get more info-troves like this one. They will sit out there on the web and in our mental landscapes: 92,000 documents here, 1.3 million data points there, saying something important. And some will so overwhelmingly point in one direction that merely posting them will accomplish the basic journalistic goal of conveying something new (or at least something people haven’t seen before). And that should influence the public debate.

However, a lot of data – most of it, really – is not nearly as clear-cut as the Afghanistan reports. It’s often ambiguous and contradictory on the surface, with the alarming pattern one or two levels down. Or an apparently scoop-worthy data point may turn out to mean something entirely different in light of a deeper understanding. To find its true value you need to interpret, provide context. And then what if the interpretation is skewed? As Marc Lynch writes, there was a somewhat similar data dump of Saddam-era Iraqi documents during the Bush administration:

This use of the WikiLeaks documents brings back some old memories, of a long time ago (March 2006) in a galaxy far far away when the Pentagon posted a massive set of captured Iraqi documents on the internet without context. Analysts dived into them, mostly searching for a smoking gun on Iraqi WMD or ties to al-Qaeda. The right-wing blogs and magazines ran with a series of breathless announcements that something had been found proving one case or another. Each finding would dissolve when put into context or subjected to scrutiny, and at the end it only further confirmed the consensus (outside of the fever swamps, at least) that there had been no significant ties between Saddam and al-Qaeda. But the cumulative effect of each “revelation”, even if subsequently discredited, probably fueled the conviction that such ties had existed and did help maintain support for the Iraq war among the faithful.

A huge cache of data, especially documents (each a story in itself), will invariably spawn competing “narratives” about its meaning, especially in an era when old media models of authority are breaking down. Some of these narratives will be lies. And sometimes the truths will simply be glossed over or forgotten.

That’s why this is a great moment for journalism, and also a perilous one. Anderson continues:

“[F]inding something new” (being there, being at dinner, getting the source to say something we didn’t know before) may not always be as important as finding the pattern in what is there already.

This is a variation on a basic idea of investigative journalism that I wrote about recently: “In government, the real scandal is usually not what’s illegal, but legal and routine: the day-to-day status quo that, when examined closely by fresh eyes, turns out to be something monstrous.” (This approach takes a backseat to the “get people indicted” school of investigations – but that may be changing, and it ought to.) Certainly, the Afghan documents are monstrous enough on their own. But often it’s not enough to post the data and let it speak for itself: it must be marshaled in service to a story, an argument. That’s what historians do; journalists now have ever-greater opportunities to do the same.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

I’d like to elaborate on my previous post on the recent spate of wild and/or false racism charges emanating from the Breitbarts and Megyn Kellys of the world. It was glib to ignore the longstanding complaints of conservatives about reverse discrimination.

First, for the sake of argument, some perspective: the United States has a brutal historical legacy of slavery and legalized oppression of African-Americans. It has gradually been mitigated, legally, politically, and socially, a process that continues. This process is one of the things that makes America great. But the legacy hasn’t disappeared, it remains a pernicious force in American society. There is, comparatively speaking, no significant legacy or history of black-on-white discrimination. There are black people who are prejudiced against white people, of course. Statistically speaking, some of them probably work for government agencies. But that’s not evidence of systemic anti-white discrimination.

However. The great liberal project that reached a pinnacle with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in the 1960s produced a wave of changes in the way governments and private entities did business. It also produced policies (racial and ethnic quotas, busing, disparate impact laws and regulations, affirmative action) that, unlike, say, ensuring the right to vote, were debatable – and were debated, in the courts and the political arena. And all this produced massive social stresses that have shaped American politics ever since. (And that’s not even mentioning other issues, such as welfare, that were not race-based but became politically racialized.)

All of this is to say, the anger about alleged anti-white racism that we see on the right – and the reason Breitbart is able to generate the reactions he does – is not the result of paranoia or fantasy. It is an understandable product of the politics of the past 50 years.

But most of the political shocks wrought by the Great Society and liberalism in the 1970s through the 1990s have already worked their way through the system; white flight; the South going Republican, welfare reform. To put it another way: in the past, when white conservatives were outraged about race issues, it was because those issues affected millions of people directly, and resonated for tens of millions more. Busing or affirmative action, for example. Liberal sanctimony and self-righteousness only made things worse.

Today, attempts by Breitbart and Fox News to gin up similar outrage are isolated incidents painted as broad conspiracies that don’t stand up to serious examination. If the New Black Panthers are the best they’ve got, it’s a sign that as a driving force of American politics, as a “wedge issue,” anger over anti-white discrimination is a shadow (a pale one!) of what it once was. They’re shaping news cycles with this stuff, not electoral coalitions. Just as 1990s-era political correctness on the left (and that diversity workshop I attended) was weak, er, tea compared with what had come before, so are today’s racism faux-scandals.

This is not to say that as matters of law and policy, all questions of race have been settled. Far from it. But those questions are not currently driving national politics. (And the focus on culture war outrages is actually undermining the conservative policy agenda on this front.)

Because race is still an inescapable issue in American society, and the legacy of centuries of racism lingers, and the whiff of liberal sanctimony never quite disperses, this remains a raw spot on the national psyche, easily exploited by unscrupulous media hucksters. But the underlying weakness of their efforts is actually kind of encouraging.

classified and sources reluctant to talk), the conceptualizing, writing, and shaping of it all are very difficult. Outside criticism never quite captures the depth of the effort.

The Washington Post has done a great service in putting all this information into the public domain. We’re in an era when secrecy for its own sake, rather than to ensure safety and security, is an endemic problem. The series’s database, maps, and the stories themselves are a portrait of 21st century government-out-of-control, shielded from bureaucratic and political accountability. The implications are staggering. By pushing this out there, the Post can provide the germ of a genuine public debate on this topic. Right now, there isn’t one. That’s the essence of journalism.

Yet in other ways, the series doesn’t quite deliver – at least not what I have come to expect from a big investigative series from the Washington Post. In government, the real scandal is usually not what’s illegal, but legal and routine: the day-to-day status quo that, when examined closely by fresh eyes, turns out to be something monstrous. This is an obvious case of that. When you read something like this, the result of two years of digging, you expect your sensibilities to be shocked and your expectations undermined. But what we got was more of a mildly alarming, broad-brush portrait of the way things are now: the gradual breakdown of bureaucratic order and accountability as the intelligence community expanded post 9/11. It may be making us less safe, though this is disputed. Some people in government view this as a problem and are trying to address it. Others don’t. There are entire suburbs for secretive agencies and corporate contractors, which have a lot of of money and good schools.

A deep dive like this, you want something more than a broad-brush portrait of a system: you want to know how it got out of control, what interest groups and political entities benefit from the status quo and thwart reform, what some of the system’s worst and emblematic excesses are. And what it all means. The series outlines a dangerous breakdown in accountability without an immediate solution, government “bigness” beyond anyone’s control – and mysteriously stops there. But what are the implications for domestic spying, for democracy, for my own life? When you immerse yourself in material like this, you develop deep insights and can draw strong conclusions. The Post never quite gets there. To put it another way, I don’t think they’re quaking in their boots out in those new office suites in Herndon.

There’s also the issue of crediting earlier reporting on this topic, notably that of Tim Shorrock,  P.W. Singer and James Bamford. (Full disclosure: Shorrock is a friend.) The Post should have tipped its hat to them somehow. The journalism etiquette on this type of thing is very nuanced, perhaps ridiculously so. For the purposes of having an impact on public debate and, well, history, a newspaper will try to claim a kind of “ownership” of a topic when it does a huge investigation. There are, to be blunt, Pulitzer Prizes at stake. The problem is, you’re never going to own a story like this one. The topic is too broad and too well-known. And this is the Internet age, the era of links and collaboration and iteration. Nobody has an exclusive claim on anything, really. Even if you push the story to a new level of depth, failing to acknowledge earlier work ends up looking not just high-handed, but strange.

Update: Tim Shorrock on where he believes the series misses the mark.

Sometime in the mid-1990s, I went through a mandatory two-day course of diversity training. The newspaper management required it for all editorial employees after concerted lobbying by African-Americans on the staff who complained of a lot of casual racism in the newsroom. Lord knows, they were right: there was a lot of casual racism. Sexism too.

But the diversity course was bizarre. I hope they don’t still do it this way: The facilitators were true-believing leftists (ironically working to help corporations avoid being sued). They took it as their mission to convince everyone of the deep-seated oppression of American society towards minorities and women, and the role that white males played in victimizing everyone else. This was done through various exercises in which we were asked to talk about our personal lives and encounters with people of different ethnic backgrounds from ourselves. Our anecdotes were then squeezed into this oppression narrative. The idea was to get white people to see it all from the other side – or else. Some participants found the sharing to be alarming and inappropriate – it was painful to watch them fumble through it. I had recently been covering Latin America, and pointed out that systemic oppression was significantly worse in, say, Guatemala, where you could be killed for your opinions, your ethnicity, or both.

I write this not to complain, but to note that this was basically an earlier iteration of the cycle of stupid that has captured the media this summer on the question of America and race.

Just as my diversity workshop tried to simplistically rig things one way (whites are oppressors, blacks are victims) Andrew Brietbart and others on the right are trying to rig things the other way (blacks are oppressors, whites are victims). It’s a mirror image of the left’s “oppression narrative” – only without actual oppression.

Recently, I got into a brief Twitter exchange with a conservative who was outraged over the New Black Panthers case and the notion that the Obama administration might not be going down the middle, prosecuting blacks suppressing the white vote with a fervor equal to that it displays when the races are reversed. It was brief because it was a ridiculous conversation. He seemed unaware that there is, historically and statistically speaking, no black suppression of white voters in the United States. It is simply not a problem. Even the NBP case dealt with a brief incident in a majority black district; no white voter has come forward to complain of being scared away from the polls. Suppressing the black vote, on the other hand, has a long and ugly history and is still not unheard of.

In the same way, the case of Shirley Sherrod, advanced by the irresponsible Breitbart as a case of racism, illustrates the opposite: it is the story of an African-American who overcame her own prejudices and difficult personal history and helped people different from her.

The problem with the diversity workshop was ultimately in its attempt to compel people to change their thinking. The notion that your employer could do that, or attempt to, is repellent. What’s going on now has even less to do with race relations. And, like back then, everything to do with power.

Just as those true-believing facilitators wielded power conferred by a corporation to pound ideas into our heads, the right is using its media echo chamber to settle scores and reinforce its own “oppression narrative” in which black racism is a major national problem, and in which racism is not measured by material facts, but by what’s allegedly in your head. Here’s what Breitbart told TPM even after it came out that his Sherrod video clip, in context, conveyed the opposite of his original claim: “I think the video speaks for itself. The way she’s talking about white people … is conveying a present tense racism in my opinion. But racism is in the eye of the beholder.”

The good news here is that these faux-scandals are so thin on substance and so short-lived that few Americans are going to notice. They have the feel of late-stage culture warfare, in which the original sources of outrage and grievance have dried up. So the warriors must search for, and manufacture, more.

Image via Wikipedia

The Washington Post’s series on the metastasizing U.S. intelligence community is an excellent piece of reporting, and illustrates how the day-to-day flux of American politics and ideological debates are becoming increasingly disengaged from what is actually happening in the world (if they ever were engaged at all).

What’s sad about this series – at least, the first installment – is how unsurprising it is.  Tim Shorrock and others have reported on this trend for years. But even if you were unaware of the details that the Post so expertly catalogues, the broad contours of what’s happening have long been obvious. The United States has a vast and growing secret security apparatus whose structure no one understands, that is in effect accountable to no one.

This is a two-headed beast where each head doesn’t know what the other is doing. It is a recipe for all kinds of abuses and snafus. (My own modest foray into the shadow world of contracting a few years ago showed an impossibly complex bureaucratic web around a tiny, incompetently managed spyplane program.) Precisely because lines of authority are crossed and muddled, it’s easy for those responsible to escape being held accountable. That is, if we even hear about it. In such a system the primary aim of government secrecy often ceases to be the national security and becomes a tool of CYA and turf protection.

This state of affairs is both outrageous and dangerous, and yet there is no particular political impetus right now to rein this in, to make our intelligence apparatus behave in a sensible, effective way, or even to understand it better.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Post-9/11, the United States cannot spend too much, politically speaking, on security. If a politician voices skepticism about where all that money’s going, s/he risks attack for being insufficiently vigilant about America’s security. Terrorism aside, such a system becomes self-perpetuating: money in politics attracts more money, some of which goes to lobbyists whose job it is to protect and expand that money flow. And this is one giant gravity well of federal dollars.

This is a classic problem of runaway big government, compounded by the out-of-control growth of private contracting. Yet we don’t hear Republicans complaining about it. It’s a threat to civil liberties and the reputation of government itself, yet we don’t hear a peep from Democrats either.

One omission of the Post series thus far is an assessment of what the long-term problems of such a system will be (besides straightforward bureaucratic confusion and waste). The story identifies the role of bureaucratic snarls in failing to anticipate terror attacks by individuals, but to be honest, those are always a bit hard to judge.

Glenn Greenwald identifies some of these problems – shadowy, powerful security agencies taking aim at Americans; a breakdown in security priorities; a decline in security itself. What I think is likely to happen in the short run is the inexorable growth of the incompetent security state – the no-fly list times a thousand. At some point abuses and snafus will break out into the open, and Congress will attempt some kind of reform. But it appears this system may already be un-reformable.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

It’s a cruel summer for Democrats, and the media are filled with analyses of what’s gone wrong with the Obama presidency.

The main problem with these pieces is that they soft-pedal the real, and really the only, reason that Obama’s approval rating is low (and it isn’t even that low – Pollster.com’s “poll of polls” puts it 46.1 percent, compared to 48.3 percent who disapprove). Generally speaking, the broad American public barely follows politics, especially in a non-presidential election year. For instance, I’d bet that most people have never heard of the “New Black Panthers.” Americans do, however, respond to objective economic conditions, and those are very bad right now. It’s a wonder Obama’s approval isn’t a lot lower.

The media still assume that when Obama gives a speech, or meets with some foreign leader, or that when the oil well gets capped, the public opinion needle moves. Maybe it does, for a short while, though such movements are hard to separate from noise. The fallacy is the assumption that enough speeches and salesmanship and short-term political victories and gaffes by opponents can move the needle of public opinion almost anywhere, and that political ninja skills can keep it there. That’s just not true, as Brendan Nyhan points out in a post critiquing a piece by Slate’s John Dickerson:

In reality, however, there’s no evidence that Obama has become any less effective as a salesman — as I’ve repeatedly pointed out over the years (e.g. here, here, here, and here), presidents can rarely generate significant shifts in public opinion in support of their domestic policy agenda. Obama’s failure to generate increased support for the stimulus and health care is not the least bit surprising, especially given the political environment in which he’s operating.

The larger problem with this analysis is that Dickerson is constructing a post hoc narrative about Obama’s poll numbers using the epistemology of journalism, which treats tactics as the dominant causal force in politics. Within that worldview, if Obama’s numbers used to be high and they are now low, the only logical conclusion is that “his ability to persuade and change minds is seriously damaged.” The idea that Obama’s numbers have declined across the board in large part due to the state of the economy is only briefly acknowledged (“or [the public] can’t hear [Obama] over the bad economic news”).

But if the president’s day-to-day statements, speeches and photo ops truly have virtually no electoral consequences, what are journalists supposed to cover? What would happen if the media based its assumptions for covering politics on the way politics actually worked?

For political media, it’s all about election results. The goal is to tell us what actions today will shape tomorrow’s elections and longer-term electoral coalitions, and ultimately what that means for people. If they really wanted to do that accurately, reporters would have to change their assumptions and upgrade their technical skills. Here are a few suggestions:

-Put political tactics in perspective. A news cycle full of Gibbs quips, Biden gaffes, gotcha questions, the outrage-of-the-day, anything Sarah Palin says or does, etc. tells us little. In general, political reporters should be more skeptical about the agency of presidential aides and political strategists in influencing public opinion and voting. I’m not saying ignore the tactical stuff – just assign it something less than the world-historical importance it now has. That will be tough, though, because most political reporters fancy themselves political strategists, and envy the real ones. But in fact, the slavish devotion to “savvy” and the conventional wisdom of the moment tends to circumscribe debates and limit political options. It’s all very meta, and one reason why the reason the system is broken.

-Understand public opinion and polling. Reporters should be able to explain how voters really respond to economic changes and political trends. Right now, most can’t, or won’t. Reference: fivethirtyeight.com.

-Focus on what the government actually does. If elections are determined mostly by economic conditions, political reporters should focus more on the levers of economic policy, examining what Obama, Congress and the Fed are, and could be, doing to boost economic growth and employment. This would, however, require a level of literacy in the subject matter that most political journalists do not have, and also a willingness to challenge statements and assumptions by politicians about the economy that they’re not currently in the habit of doing. But if the political press corps were more economically literate, and used that literacy intelligently, the level of BS in our political debates might actually fall.

Instead, one of his offenses was … dancing, maybe a little strangely, at a wedding. This was truly a feeding frenzy worthy of a Seinfeld episode.

Seriously, Weigel is a talented journalist who added a fresh perspective to the Washington Post. He should not have been booted out for what he did. Why was he? The Weigel Incident does illustrate some of the biggest fault lines and flaws of Washington journalism. Here are a few:

1. Fake decorum dominates our political discourse.
This exists solely so that people can score political points by taking offense. Often, though not exclusively, those taking offense these days tend to be Republicans and conservatives who have discovered the advantages of the left’s equally lame 1990s-era political correctness.

The stuff Weigel posted on the private Journolist email list was mostly snark – some of it funny, some nasty. He was injudicious to post it – nothing is truly secret on the Internet, and it’s in his own interest to be, if not neutral, credible. But it should be possible to mock Matt Drudge, apologize, and still write on the conservative movement. No doubt there are some conservatives who do not consider Drudge an unalloyed force for good for America or politics on the right. Because he isn’t.

Once you violate decorum your enemies, and the enemies of whatever power center you represent, will come for your scalp. And the media will pile on and abet this, because nothing generates more traffic than fake umbrage (except, sometimes, genuine umbrage). But maybe it will all blow over, especially if your patrons take the long view, and have your back. Unless, of course, everyone just agrees to go with the whole fake decorum thing.

2. The “print guys won” at the Washington Post.
The exact mechanics of Weigel’s departure are unclear, but it does seem clear that if Post editors wanted to keep him, they could have torn up his resignation letter. Instead, they cut him loose. And some inside the Post are reveling in this as a great victory, according to Jeffrey Goldberg, who published some quotes of Post staffers crowing about the whole thing:

“This is not just sour grapes about the sudden rise of these untrained kids, though I have to think that some people in the building resent them for bypassing the usual way people rise here. This is really about the serial stupidity of allowing these bloggers to trade on the name of the Washington Post.”

“It makes me crazy when I see these guys referred to as reporters. They’re anything but. And they hurt the newspaper when they claim to be reporters.”

The backstory here is the internal struggle between the print and online sides that the “print guys” famously won when the two were consolidated. As a result the paper’s embrace of the web has at times been ambiguous.

The print side is built on traditions like sending reporters to cover the city or suburbs before they’re allowed near national politics. Weigel never paid those dues. As a practical matter, though, the Post ought to be able to assign talented, well-sourced political reporters to cover, well, politics, without first making them cover the Howard County zoning board for eight years.

3. The “view from nowhere” retains its grip on the political press.
But the burning issue here is whether Washington Post reporters can have opinions, and if they do, how should they express them? Weigel came out of the world of blogging and Washington’s independent political journalism community (the libertarian Reason and the left-leaning Washington Independent). The writing is looser, shaped by a personal perspective/politics. I think this is the future, in part because it’s more honest and accessible. The traditional “view from nowhere” that posits the truth lies midway between left and right is an untenable construct, especially in an age of shocking institutional failures. Clinging to it is eroding the credibility of traditional media.

But the world outside the warm embrace of objectivity looks dangerous to those still inside it, especially if there’s any ambiguity about what team you’re on. Politico’s Ben Smith wrote a piece before Weigel’s resignation broke that basically stated: if you are one of these journalists-with-opinions, you have to choose a side. If you don’t, we’ll choose one for you. Weigel, you’re a liberal. This is preposterous for two reasons: first, Weigel says he’s not a liberal. (And indeed, there is little evidence for ideological liberalism in his snark; rather, it’s contempt for individuals and conservative strategy/tactics – blunt, yes, but honest.) Second, a journalist (or, for that matter, anybody) ought to be able to hold opinions without actually joining a political movement. This describes most Americans, after all.

Sadly, it appears that an unholy alliance between culture warriors and journalism traditionalists has won the day here, and Washington journalism is weaker for it. At least until Weigel turns up at the Huffington Post.

Wendell Pierce as Antoine Batiste

If any TV show deserves not just ratings but love, it’s Treme. The HBO show (which concluded its first season Sunday night; a second has been greenlit) has interesting characters, an epic overarching storyline, a fascinating setting and great music. And the themes it treats – the frayed yet unbroken civic bonds of New Orleans society, and America, in the face of disaster – are very important. Not just because south Louisiana now confronts another catastrophe, but because of our crumbling infrastructure, dirty energy economy, institutional rot, and climate change, there are going to be a lot more of them.

And yet, to me anyway, Treme has not lived up to expectations. (I will pause here to ask my New Orleans friends for forgiveness.) It’s had some great moments, but just as often it’s been erratic and self-indulgent. Compared to the awesome mastery of The Wire, Treme still feels like a minor work in the David Simon oeuvre, yet to find its focus.

Maybe it’s an unfair comparison. The Wire focused on an urban community as exploited and distorted by an indifferent, inexorable system of political bureaucracy – its Big Idea was the corruption of American democracy itself. With Treme, there is a similar and even grander backdrop of social and institutional failure, but the focus has shifted to culture and individual expression, where there’s more potential to defeat the system, or at least win some small victories. The Mardi Gras Indian storyline anchored by the great Clarke Peters (a Wire vet) played on these themes compellingly.

But still. I wonder if Simon and his stable of crack writers have fallen victim to the last thing I thought they would: sentimentality. Treme spent an awful lot of time revisiting this basic idea: “New Orleans is a wonderful and unique place. The people there love it. Tourists and visitors initiated into its mysteries love it. Our characters love it too. They never want to leave, and those who do leave are inevitably pulled back into its embrace. Because (did we tell you?) New Orleans is wonderful.”

This is a perfectly fine point as far as it goes. If you present it with some wry charm, great. If you use it as an entry point for a character’s individual drama, fine. But in a 10-hour season, it too often became the predominant point, and when it did the show slipped from drama into self-congratulation.

This is, interestingly, a feature of New Orleans itself – something the show obviously gets. New Orleans’s outsized self-esteem, given its many problems, is charming but dangerous: the city can be self-absorbed, dissolute, corrupt. And determined to stay that way. Treme characters struggle with their own self-destructive tendencies, and sometimes lose.

But here too Treme also stumbled. Its mixture of comedy, character-driven drama, and social commentary never quite found its ideal balance. Many characters weren’t quite complex or interesting enough to deliver the dramatic or comedic punches they were assigned, at least never in a way approaching the patient, devastating dramatic arcs of The Wire or other great HBO shows like Deadwood or The Sopranos. How many uninteresting fights were there between street musicians Annie and her annoying, less talented boyfriend, Sonny? How many grating, quirky things could gadfly Davis McAlary do in a single episode? How many scenes did we need of chef Janette Desautel pouring a swirl of sauce on freshly-grilled fish? And entertaining as they sometimes were, the multiple cameos by New Orleans musicians and other local celebrities at times gave the show the feeling of a huge in-joke.

This tendency reached an apex in the Mardi Gras episode, in which most of the characters – who inhabit various New Orleans social strata – repeatedly encountered each other during carnival parades and parties. You could almost see the bullet points on the writing room white board: Mardi Gras is a great equalizer; New Orleans is fundamentally a small town; Mardi Gras is when New Orleans most becomes New Orleans. But it reminded me of the sideways-universe in the final season of Lost, where all the passengers from Oceanic 815 also kept improbably bumping into one another in Los Angeles. In that case it was a sign that their lives there were not real, something they had to wake up from. Maybe New Orleans is heaven’s anteroom?

Perhaps the biggest, most unexpected dramatic moment of the series came when John Goodman’s character, Tulane professor Creighton Bernette, commits suicide by jumping off a ferry (n.b.: this was also the way monologist Spalding Gray killed himself). This was distressing, but more because it was Goodman than because it was Bernette. So in season 2 we’ll get less John Goodman, more Steve Zahn? Nooooo!

Dramatically, though, this could have been a moment of climactic insight into the plight of New Orleans and its citizens. The ubiquitous post-traumatic stress of living in post-K New Orleans led many people to become depressed (including some of my own friends and colleagues) and some to kill themselves. It could happen to anybody – another, more perverse “great equalizer.” But was that the only point? Because it’s an awfully statistical one for a high-end drama. It was never clear exactly why we were watching Creighton Bernette go through the textbook stages of depression, as opposed to any other character. Stringer Bell’s death, by contrast, was Shakespearean.

I don’t mean to carp, because I share at least some of Simon’s perspective as a journalist-outsider documenting this great city. I worked for The Times-Picayune and spent many years writing about New Orleans. I love the place. It is, indeed, wonderful. New Orleans is fascinating and complex, and does not fit the stereotypes the rest of America assigns it. It is self-destructive, yet worthy of redemption. But if you make it your purpose to explain to America why that is, or simply that it is, it will only take you so far. The challenge is in taking a step back and (while being true to the city’s character) showing why New Orleans really isn’t all that different from the rest of America. That’s the essence of its predicament. That’s why New Orleans is screwed. And why we all are.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

One feature of modern conservatism has been its ability to embrace, in the service of pragmatism and politics, things many of its followers find inimical. And I want to thank Joe Barton for confirming that that thin thread linking conservatives to basic political reality still exists.

“Wha-?” you say. Bear with me.

The conservatism of the past 40 years or so has basically been a critique of the modern liberal welfare state. Sometimes a pertinent critique, but usually just a critique – never an actual alternative. For the most part conservatives say they’re just fine with the achievements wrought by liberals, over their movement’s opposition: big things like Social Security, Medicare, the Voting Rights Act, and smaller things like regulations requiring seatbelts and airbags. That’s because the public overwhelmingly likes and approves of this stuff.

Lately, though, with the emergence of the tea party movement, conservatives are having a hard time covering up the fact that a lot of them aren’t really okay with the stuff they’re supposed to be okay with. And because they don’t really have a viable alternative to the basic outlines of the liberal welfare state, the atmosphere has been getting crazier and the potential policy results dangerous.

From GOP senate candidates, you had Rand Paul’s disagreement with the Voting Rights Act and Sharron Angle’s flirtations with taking up the armed struggle. They’ve been told to shut up, but these are merely the more flamboyant displays of what amounts to a broader Republican nihilism: the notion that the government doesn’t actually do anything that helps individuals, and that (whether for nefarious reasons or due to bureaucracy-run-amok) it’s actually a destructive force that can never do anything right, and as many government resources as possible should devolve to the private sector and individuals.

For instance, a few months back Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning filibustered funds for extending unemployment benefits, upgrading infrastructure, etc. As Bunning railed against government debt (a real problem, but one requiring a strategic, long-term solution), unemployed people and their families were left without money to pay their bills, transportation workers were furloughed and projects suspended. These on-the-ground facts didn’t matter to Bunning, and seemed not to matter much to the GOP leadership.

You had to wonder: does cutting off support for this stuff have no political consequences anymore? If so, then maybe the Great Recession really has changed the whole notion of America as a community.

Thursday, Texas Rep. Joe Barton upped the ante with his fawning apology to BP and his denunciation of the new $20 billion fund to aid people and businesses hit hard by the oil spill as a “shakedown.” I tried to think of ways this could possibly be good politics for Republicans, what constituencies outside of BP and the American Petroleum Institute it might play to. (Conceivably, the $20 billion could be mishandled, or won’t do enough, in which case the GOP could claim it was a bad idea all along – but its political logic now is still inexorable). It soon turned out that even Republicans considered his comments beyond the pale, and he apologized for his earlier apology.

So there are limits to the GOP anti-government rhetoric and its odd identification of corporate interests with the national one – at least in public. As this is mostly about public posturing, that’s not saying much. But it does show there are some bright lines of civility and community remaining in U.S. politics. Everyone officially agrees government still has a role to play. So thanks Joe Barton. The Sarah Palin wing lost one today.