HOUSTON — How lovely it is to be hated, for it grants the license to engage in America`s favorite pastime-whining.
This was the gift bestowed last week by the Republican National Convention upon the agents of American journalism. Who loved it. For every delegate wearing a button proclaiming not to believe ``the liberal media,``
there was a representative of said media-liberal or otherwise-wearing one saying, ``It`s all my fault-I`m with the media.``
Though the practice starts at the very top-the president of the United States alibied his acceptance speech-someone ought to resist this temptation to grovel in one`s outcast status. Let`s start here. If Republicans want to hate the folks in the news business, it`s not just their constitutional right. It comes with the territory.
Nor is it entirely unjustified. Whoever writes a column or a front-page news analysis, or does the interpretation on the network news, is either telling people how to think, telling them what to think, or-worse yet-telling them what they think.
To which there is only one red-blooded American response: Oh, yeah? And just what makes you so all-fired smart, big shot?
Not a bad question, especially to members of a ``profession`` that isn`t one. You don`t have to pass an exam to get into this racket, or even have a college diploma. The guy typing away at the next computer doesn`t have one, the result of a background that gives him insights some of us lack.
So it`s no wonder that many people who work for a living, raise their families, follow their own pursuits and do no harm, sometimes resent these well-dressed, often finely coifed, affluent and perhaps famous folks who three times a week presume to tell them how their world works. It`s reasonable to ask them how they know, and even to wonder whether their job renders them incapable of doing their job.
Most people spend relatively little time pondering public affairs. In a democracy, ``most people`` is the society, a society then analyzed by a small group of people who do spend their time pondering public affairs, putting them out of touch with the society they presume to explain.
Then there is what a Republican strategist called the ``sort of cultural divide in the country,`` which includes ``a lot of unease about the values that our culture and our public figures tend to support.``
There is some truth to the old cliche about every reporter having an unfinished (and probably very bad) novel in his desk drawer. If they are not themselves failed or aspiring artistes, journalists at least sympathize with the writers and scholars who comprise what a critic once called ``the adversary culture.``
This culture, in turn, is interested in those who are offbeat, outcast or somehow different. It has to be. Those are the folks who make for good plots. ``Happy families are all alike,`` wrote Tolstoy, at the start of his great novel about an unhappy family. He knew how difficult it would be to write a good book about a happy one.
Besides, writers are supposed to tell us what`s wrong, just as journalism should focus on problems. When the union and the company agree without rancor on a new contract, it`s a small story in the business section. A strike gets the Page 1 headline.
The conservative commentators who, despite all the gripes from the right wing, dominate the American media these days, object to this. Why don`t you write about the good things, they ask. How come there are not more movies and books about normal people instead of all these weirdos?
A reasonable question. Take a look at the books, movies, plays and art exhibitions that are all the rage. From them alone, one would conclude that this is a country made up entirely of angry blacks, drug addicts, corrupt cops, divorced hedonists and homosexuals dying of AIDS. One reason the ``gay bashing`` so evident here has political resonance is not that people hate homosexuals but that they may be wondering why so much attention is paid to this relatively small group of people, so little to their own problems.
This is not unprecedented. Probably back in 1605, a late Renaissance counterpart of Michael Medved, the conservative critic who attacks Hollywood for being out of touch with the mainstream, wondered why Shakespeare couldn`t write a play about a normal king instead of some loon who gets so upset at his daughter that he wanders around shouting into the wind.
It`s a healthy dispute. At any rate, it`s inevitable. The Republicans here, not representative of their own rank-and-file, went too far, especially when members of the Republican Youth Coalition, who do not understand what democracy is, ran through the working-press area shouting slogans and being mildly disruptive.
They stopped just short of interfering. Interfering would have been totalitarian and intolerable. Complaining is just fine.