After Trump

               Journalism has been overtaken  by a Biblical plague of dickheads.
                                                                                       Richard Ben Cramer
               We have met the enemy, and he is us.     
                                                   Pogo Possum
   

     As an alumnus of the Fourth Estate, I like the story of a lad who dreamed of being a railroad man.  When he came of age, he went straight to the railroad office and applied for work.
     A manager administered an aptitude test, then sat the lad down for mixed news.
     "I'm sorry," the manager said. "The test indicates you have no aptitude for railroad work."
     The boy was crestfallen.
     "But there's good news," the manager said.  "The test says you are perfectly suited to be a journalist."
     "A journalist?" the boy said.
     "Yes. A journalist."
     "How so?"
     "It was in your answer to question 37."
     "I don't remember the numbers," the boy said. "Which question was that?"
     "Question 37 asked, 'If you were at the master controls of a railroad switch yard and you saw two trains speeding toward each other on the same track at 100 miles an hour, what would you do?'  You answered, 'I'd run and get my brother, because he's never seen a train wreck.' "
     The post-Trump era (it's coming sooner or later) will surely include new consideration of the way we speak to each other as a nation, and the way our town criers speak to us. In a phrase from another writer, saying that a certain quality has gone missing from our national conversation is like using imagery of burnt toast to discuss the Chicago fire.
      Discussion would logically begin with the sewer of propaganda issuing daily from the White House. I think my former colleagues in the press stumbled, at first, in reacting to this manifestation of the President's bone-deep corruption and his retainers' glad complicity.  Perhaps raising a train-wreck alarm early on would have seemed the kind of side-taking that journalists are not supposed to do.   But as venality has settled into the bloodstream of our government, we've seen once again that neutrality in the face of outrage is not neutrality at all.
     Meanwhile, the rise of electronic media has tilted news reporting toward stories that can be told in pictures, charts and graphs. In bites of screen time. This new day has raised the profile of journalists whose employability is conditioned by their capacity to perform well in these media -- and especially on camera. Some of them also have other pertinent talents, but some are merely actors or technocrats.
     In this era of bite-sized news, discourse of public affairs has absorbed changed standards -- I would say diminished standards -- of utility for an English sentence. Diminished standards become norms. Even major news outlets may now feature commentators whose grasp of language is so loose that they mistake invective for appraisal and ridicule for wit.
     It would be wrong to say that today's journalism includes no distinguished figures. But extra searching is needed to find one who can approach, say, the eloquence of Walter Lippman:

      When all men think alike, no one thinks very much. 

     A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable or dangerous to do so.

     Or Theodore H. White's combination of reportage and portraiture:
   
     It was invisible, as always.
     They had begun to vote in the villages of New Hampshire at midnight, as they always do, seven and a half hours before the candidate rose. ...
     By the time the candidate left his Boston hotel at 8:30, several million had already voted across the country -- in schools, libraries, churches, stores, post offices. These, too, were invisible ...
     What results from the fitting together of these secrets is, of course, the most awesome transfer of power in the world -- the power to marshal and mobilize, the power to send men to kill or be killed, the power to tax and destroy, the power to create and the responsibility to do so, the power to guide and the responsibility to heal -- all committed into the hands of one man.
                                                                                                 The Making Of The President 1960    

     The air these days is heavy with the language of distemper. Political figures urge us to fight with each other. Sectarian voices urge us to condemn each other. Even we who don't want to listen  can't help hearing, being affected and perhaps being infected.
     Should the shallowing of public vocabulary be laid to cause or to effect? Future historians will probably have to answer that one. Either way, they will surely note that,  in the early part of the 21st Century, the constructive expression of disagreement became a neglected art.
     The country will eventually be rid of a president who is, surely, a lifelong white-collar criminal. He can be gone soon if voters will only bother to make it so.
     Cleanup will be an arduous, top-to-bottom chore. Perhaps we could imagine it this way:
     The next president provides a fresh beginning simply by not being a daily disgrace; by returning common decency to behavior and public language.
      Legislators, not only in Congress,  embrace deep reform. They wake to the difference between leading people and herding them. Republicans in particular resolve that party loyalty does not supersede their oath of office, and that systematically frightening and deceiving the electorate is a poisonous kind of corruption.
     We the people -- to borrow another phrase -- resolve to improve our focus on several realities. They are: We get what we demand -- or worse, what we tolerate. Citizenship is work, and politics is not a parlor game. The purpose of a vote is to belly up to a real-life choice of governance, not to make a gesture. A vote not cast is license given to nameless strangers.
      In particular, we resolve to deny demagogues their staple food: The attitude that whoever disagrees with me is immoral or stupid by virtue of that fact.
      The institutional press, which has always been an evolving creature, becomes a little quicker to name fools and scoundrels for what they are. Evolution continues in its influence on the quality of public language, inescapably and not entirely for the better. Yesterday's journalism provided a variety of cultural nourishment. Today's version can be thin soup.
     But those voices of cultural nourishment do not disappear. They explore new outlets, new venues, new methods. And better days come because they can, if we the people -- that telling phrase again -- buckle down to the workaday chores of bringing them on.