CONCEIT ON DISPLAY -- THE CHARLIE ROSE SHOW

CONCEIT ON DISPLAY – THE CHARLIE ROSE SHOW

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 11, 2011

I wrote a missive on my blog (July 4, 2011):  RETREAT FROM ADULTHOOD – Part Three – What Happened to Civility?  I cringed today when I watched the Charlie Rose Show, as I saw civility dashed to emotional shards by the flippant remarks of one of the celebrated intellectuals of our times.

Guest on the Charlie Rose Show were Fareed Zakaria of Time magazine in his $1,000 suit, Jonathan Chait of the New Republic with his permanent pout against the backdrop of a Bloomberg logo, a sponsor of the Rose show, and a smiling Drew Westen of Emory University with a head so big it filled the entire screen with his Cheshire cat grin 

The subject, of course, was once again the economy, the stimulus package, President Obama’s leadership, jobs, and most remarkably of all, the hagiographic profiling of Obama first two years by Zakaria and Chait.  They claimed Obama’s first two years as president were extraordinarily successful.

Westen differed quite distinctly with them on this.  Worse yet, he detailed how President George Bush was more effective and decisive in the same period of his administration with a divided Congress.

At that point, it got elitist ugly. 

Zakaria and Chait purred in harmony, while Rose smiled in obsequious abeyance to their every expression, especially to silver tongue Zakaria, wallowing in the honey of his words.  Rose smiled with delight at Zakaria’s brilliance, noting he studied law at Duke under one of the pontificator’s references.   

Waxing cheerful with the self-conscious mask of good fellowship, Westen disdained that it was two against one in the discussion, not unlike Obama and the Congress.  Actually, it was three against one. 

Every time Westen spoke the camera would turn to Rose showing the host pointing a nervous finger as if it would dial down the Emory professor’s chilling remarks, remarks chilling to the other three on the topic.

Zakaria was composed, Chait dismissive, as Westen detailed how a larger stimulus package could have passed Congress.  He argued that Majority Senate Leader Reid could have succeeded with the $1.3 trillion stimulus package if “he had kept calling for a call vote in the Senate until he reached the 60 votes required.”   He added, “Reid made a call vote three times.  He should not have stopped.”

It was then that Zakaria dropped his cool and let his frustrations show.  He sounded like the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, who had just had an underling openly question his infallibility. 

Very demurely, yet cruelly scathing, Zakaria said in reply to Westen’s hypothesis, “We have a professor (here) who has never run for dog catcher advising one of the most skillful politicians in the country on how he should have handle it (the stimulus).”

Westen, to his credit, took the psychic blow with much more grace than I thought possible. 

Dr. Westen, professor in the psychology and psychiatric department of Emory University in Atlanta, deserved at the very least a modicum of adult behavior and the civility of colleagues in a public forum, especially one rumored so unflappable as Zakaria.

I sat in front of the television for some time with the pause button freeze framing the end of the program, and thought, Professor Westen was talking like the man-on-the-street, the guy who has a lot of pent up anxiety, the fellow who hasn’t found work for two years with a degreed education, a person who is too angry to find words to express his angst, but hopes to find intellectual civility among talking heads when he hears problems that concern him discussed on such shows as the Charlie Rose Show.   

There is a crack in our society, and it is not at the bottom, but at the top.  God help us if we can endure this fault line and still survive. 

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