Cynicism

During the disastrous bread famine in France, Marie Antoinette was purported to have said, "Let them eat cake. " Similarly in our own era, our President shed tears of staged concern for the elderly poor, unemployed youth and the technologically disenfranchised by telling us, as he slashed social programs, "to reach for the stars. " In this contemporized version of the "pie-in-the-sky," is he telling those who live close to the bone or those whose bones have been stripped bare to get lost into that vast void of eschatological space?

You expect a salesman to emphasize the positive attributes of whatever he's peddling and to downplay the downside. But even by extreme standards of political salesmanship, the rhetoric-reality gap on display in President Bush's State of the Union shows the White House has taken cynicism to impressive new levels. Indeed, it's hard to pick the single area in which the President's shading of reality departs most cynically from the facts - the competition is so fierce! There was the President's single throwaway line about his budget deficits - when in fact Bush has turned record surpluses into record deficits that independent analysts say could add $5 trillion to the national debt in the next decade.

Robert McNamara, the former Defense Secretary and principal architect of the Vietnam War, has just about everyone fuming. But McNamara's new book, a confessional titled In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, could get us talking seriously about our current mess. One of the big questions for our time is how, three decades after the 1960s - a time of idealism, optimism and enormous energy - we wound up with widespread disillusionment and cynicism? McNamara can help us understand this decline if we pay attention to what he now admits he did, rather than what he says about the lessons to be learned or the reasons he wrote the book.

Attorneys for U.S. Rep. Joe McDade contend the longtime Republican congressman from the Scranton area is being "shanghaied to Philadelphia" to be tried on racketeering charges. In a last-ditch effort to get the upcoming June trial transferred to Scranton or Washington, D.C., defense attorneys say prosecutors chose Philadelphia "to tap into the cynicism" of area residents who might sit on the jury. "This cynicism rises to an unconscionable level" when viewing elected officials from other areas, the defense attorneys told U.S. District Judge Robert S. Gawthrop III in a memo filed yesterday.

As a card-carrying member of the unreconstructed Left (relax, folks; it's a library card), I stand indicted for- and if you're reading this aloud, you might want to get the kids out of the room - cynicism. By Bob Dole, no less. Being accused of cynicism by Sen. Robert Dole, R-Kan., is like being called strange by Michael Jackson. The man knows cynicism. What prompted the accusation was our response to Dole's diatribe against the purveyors of popular culture, Time-Warner and the rest of that crowd.

Despite the inherent difficulties, a dialogue is beginning to take place between people in government and people in the press about the deterioration in the tone and quality of public discourse in this country. It is worth pursuing, despite the different agendas politicians and journalists bring to it. The White House and members of Congress have policies to push, elections to win. The press has both a moneymaking motive and a public service obligation. Where the interests of the two overlap is in combating cynicism, and cynicism is epidemic right now. It saps people's confidence in politics and public officials, and it erodes both the standing and the standards of journalism.

A decade ago, at an academic post-mortem on the Ford presidency, a reporter attempted to praise Richard Cheney for his efforts as White House chief of staff. "At least you never lied to me," the reporter said. "That's a pretty minimum standard," Cheney replied. "I'd like to think I did better than that. " I was the reporter and promptly apologized for an intended compliment that came out sounding like an insult. For the truth was that Cheney, as he put it, had done better than simply avoiding lies.

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, lately the subject of conflict-of-interest inquiries, won a fifth term last month by obtaining slightly more than half the vote in an election in which 17 percent of the city's 1.9 million registered voters participated. Bradley received 157,000 votes or about 5 percent of the potential electorate, if unregistered and otherwise eligible adults are taken into account. The election was a depressing sign of the times. Voting has become so unpopular that American presidents now routinely win landslides with the support of one-fourth of the potential electorate.

Pollsters who bring good news to the officeholders who commissioned them have come bearing ominous tidings lately: Take little comfort in incumbency, they warn. A bad moon is rising across this land. It's a conclusion seemingly borne out by a careful auguring of the entrails spilled in Massachusetts where voters chose two gubernatorial candidates with no background in elective politics. You could read it on the winds of change that saw Oklahomans vote 2-to-1 to limit the service of state legislators to 12 years.

Now that was an interesting election night. Suspense; humor; triumph; heartbreak; frequent commercials. Mind you, as I write, all is in limbo. Looks like Bush, but folks are chasing votes all over Florida. (Can't you just see the genius battalions thumbing through the ballots?: 1,457 . . . 1,458 . . . oops . . . 1 . . . 2 . . .) If ever there was an election that proved each vote is crucial, this one was it. If ever an Election Day mocked the notion that there's no use in voting, Nov. 7, 2000, did. In race after race, state and national, you kept hearing 49 percent to 48 percent or the dreaded too close to call.

Courageous. Historic. Inspiring. Misguided. Immoral. Out of touch. Reactions ranged widely in the Philadelphia region to President Obama's unequivocal statement Wednesday in support of gay marriage rights, an issue that has elicited strong feelings across the country about morality, religion, and constitutional rights. "At first, I was dumbfounded," said Oberon Wackwitz, a gay 17-year-old from North Philadelphia. Wackwitz, a junior at a Philadelphia charter school, had been with a group of friends at the Attic Youth Center, a Center City program that supports gay teens, when the television interview on ABC was broadcast.

New Jersey Sen. Jim Beach shared his "yes" vote on marriage equality with one of his harshest critics Monday. "I just thought it was the right thing to do," the Camden County Democrat says, referring to his decision to support the bill - and to invite liberal activist Jay Lassiter to sit beside him as the roll was called in the Senate. The measure was approved, 24-16. Beach and several other key Democrats abstained when marriage equality last came before the Senate two years ago. "It felt personal when he abstained," Lassiter says.

CHARLESTON, S.C. - The biggest political rally of the primary season was hosted Friday by a fake Republican who is running for president even though he's not on the ballot and a real Republican who is not running for president even though he is on the ballot. And that pretty much tells you everything you need to know about how the masses - the cynical masses - view the American political system in the winter of 2012. Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert, a South Carolina native and one of the most influential American satirists of modern times, drew thousands to a 45-minute performance on the College of Charleston campus billed as the Rock Me Like a Herman Cain South Cain-Olina Primary Rally.

What do you do if you can't run on your record - 9 percent unemployment, stagnant growth, and ruinous deficits as far as the eye can see? How to run when you are asked whether Americans are better off than they were four years ago, and you are compelled to answer no? Play the outsider. Declare yourself the underdog. Denounce Washington as if the electorate hasn't noticed that you've been in charge of it for nearly three years. But above all: Find villains. President Obama first tried finding excuses, blaming America's dismal condition on Japanese supply-chain interruptions, the Arab Spring, European debt, and various acts of God. Didn't work.

BACK IN THE DAY, when major league baseball resembled a half-vast plantation and teams owned players forever and a day, the Cardinals traded centerfielder Curt Flood to the Phillies. It was October 1969 and Flood got the news from the publicity guy, so far down the chain of command he rattled when he walked. Flood said, hell no, he won't go. What he actually said was, "In the history of man, there's no other profession except slavery where one man is tied to one owner for the rest of his life.

"I'm going to do my part to lead a constructive and civil debate on these issues. " - President Obama on immigration, El Paso, Texas Constructive, civil debate - like the one Obama initiated just four weeks ago on deficit reduction? The speech in which he accused the Republicans of abandoning families of kids with autism and Down syndrome? The debate in which Obama's secretary of health and human services said the Republican plan would make old folks "die sooner"? In this spirit of comity, Obama's recent invitation to civil discourse on immigration came just 11 minutes after he accused opponents of moving the goalposts on border enforcement.

Poor Natalie Portman - she survives the horrors of "Black Swan," only to find herself in an Ashton Kutcher movie. Oh, say the ladies, but he's so cute. If you say so. I'll allow "cute. " So long as you allow that the phrase "rich interior life" does not suit him. In "No Strings Attached," he applies his negligible force of personality to the role of Adam, TV production assistant who is unlucky in love. He commiserates with casual acquaintance Emma (Portman), who's too busy and ornery for love, so they decide to be friends with benefits.

I owe the architects at EwingCole an apology for trashing their Family Court building, planned for an empty lot across from JFK Plaza, at 15th and Arch Streets. It's not the designers' fault that the bulky, 14-story building, a clone of the original, mediocre Penn Center slab towers, will be a mean and frosty rendition of America's most noble architectural form, the courthouse. Thanks to Friday's Inquirer article on the Pennsylvania courts' casual oversight of the $200 million project, we now know that the real architect of this affront to democracy is Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille, who presided over the project while it was milked for fees by a pair of political insiders, lawyer Jeffrey B. Rotwitt and developer Donald W. Pulver.

The Nashville synth-pop band Paper Route's opening set at the Electric Factory on Sunday was almost over, but singer J.T. Daly still had one more question for the audience: "Do you guys like YouTube?" Even by the "Hello, Cleveland" standards of stage banter, it was a fairly weak attempt to solicit an audience response, but it worked. The audience, a sea of teenage faces dotted by the occasional parent or guardian, wasn't about to let a tired bit of stagecraft get in the way of their desire to yell.

HEALTH CARE is the most personal of any public policy, and it understandably evokes profound emotion, as we have seen throughout the current debate. While I believe the reform the president signed into law last week will strengthen our nation and extend health care to millions of families, the effort of getting to this point has been long and difficult, and at times the process and debate fell short of what we owe the American people. For all its flaws, we cannot overlook the fact that this process has been close to what our Founding Fathers must have envisioned when they gathered in Philadelphia and - on a few sheets of paper - rewrote the structure of our civilization and the rights of humankind.