Thursday, September 20, 2012

Suu Kyi, Pussy Riot, and the corridors of power

Two WaPo reporters recount an event at the Newseum in which Aung San Suu Kyi, fresh from receiving her delayed Congressional Gold Medal, rubbed shoulders with supporters and relatives of Pussy Riot, the Russian punk rocker feminists three of whom are now serving time in a Moscow prison for, in effect, insulting Vladimir Putin.

The WaPo reporters are taken with the notion of strange-seeming allies and with how, sooner or later, "everyone" (their word) comes to Washington, D.C. to make his or her "case."

I admire Suu Kyi (who doesn't?). I'm fine with Pussy Riot. But as someone who was born in Washington, D.C. and has lived much of his life in the city or its environs, I find the smug, self-congratulatory tone of the reporters' article, with its comfy assumption that "everyone" comes to Washington, D.C., to be false and somewhat repellent.

It reminds me of a D.C.-based bank (perhaps no longer in existence) which used to run advertisements, some years ago, referring to itself as "the most important bank in the most important city in the world." Pardon me while I reach for the barf bag.

Washington, D.C. is not the center of the universe. New York City is not the center of the universe. These are delusions held by people who have spent too much time in or around what the WaPo article calls, without really even a hint of irony, the "corridors of power."

The WaPo article quotes a Univ. of California professor who blogs about social movements on how cool it is for Suu Kyi and Pussy Riot to be sharing a stage and a spotlight. But the article is more interested in a faux anthropological-sociological analysis of the difference between being on Washington's A-list, which Suu Kyi is, and the contrasting status of the Pussy Riot people, who have to be driven by someone from Amnesty rather than getting a Secret Service escort.

Does anyone really care about this kind of gossipy trivia? The answer is apparently yes: readers of the WaPo Style section. Year after year, decade after decade, the Style section has specialized in this sort of thing, always guided by the comforting and false assumption that its readers unfolding the paper at breakfast were privileged participants in, or at least privileged onlookers to, the most important happenings in the most important place in the world.

That assumption was never true, but at least in the days when most readers unfolded a hard-copy Washington Post at breakfast it had a certain surface claim to wink-iness. As in: we the people writing and you the people reading this newspaper are (wink) important, we are (wink) in the know, we are (wink) where it's at, we are mere steps from the corridors of power. Now that many people read the paper online and can do it anywhere from Wheeling to Waukesha to Nairobi to Oslo, this kind of insular appeal no longer has even much surface plausibility.

But that hasn't stopped the Style section from continuing to use the same old figures of speech, the same old conceits, patting its (local, if not other) readers on the back for their enormous luck in happening to live where they do.

The reporters who churn out this stuff probably don't even know that the phrase "the corridors of power" was not coined by someone in D.C., not even by an American. It comes from the title of a novel by the British scientist and writer C.P. Snow.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Please also note the inherent hypocrisy in the fact that while these two fine human beings are "fashionable," Americans holding the credentials as "dissenters" will never receive the same treatment from WaPo's distinguished stenographers. Indeed, Kyi's American sistren are only treated with derision, for some reason.

It seems that being foreign really helps in getting sympathy in the matter of one's dissent. Indeed, it's a prerequisite, is it not?

It's too bad then, that the Chicago Teachers Union wasn't a Polish union named Solidarity, eh? WaPo would have turned out in force for them, no doubt!

LFC said...

Anon:
Yes, I think you have a point, certainly as far as the attitude of the Wash. Post is concerned.

Of course American dissenters come in different varieties and are differently positioned than Suu Kyi in various ways. But I take your basic point.

I don't do as much -- how shall I put this? -- active publicizing and supporting of dissenters as some other bloggers do. You might be interested in, e.g., the Democratic Individuality blog if you don't already know it, which does more of that. (And there are others as well.)

Anyway, thanks for commenting. Virtually every blogger appreciates getting comments and I am no exception!