Rat-Patootie

Near the end of the sublime Ratatouille, bitter, jaded reviewer Anton Ego pens a column in which he explains that he was wrong about pretty much everything. After discovering that the most sublime meal he’s ever eaten was cooked by a rat, Ego says, in voiceover:

In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau’s famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.

Citizen journalism, whether it comes from blogs or podcasts or streaming video or mimeographed pamphlet, is a testament to this idea. There are plenty of well-known and well-respected writers and journalists who didn’t come up through J-school, didn’t start life covering the Maplewood city council, didn’t go through any particular training, but found that they had a voice and an ability to cut through to the truth. Nowhere is this more true than in the world of punditry, in which people had been fêted for coming up with opinions and theories that may or may not bear any connection to reality.

But while an artist can come from anywhere, that does not — as Ego notes — mean that anyone can be good at a job. As anyone who’s read a big chunk of the blogosphere knows, there are a few brilliant bloggers, a bunch of good bloggers, a ton of passable bloggers, and a nearly infinite supply of terrible bloggers. Not everyone is cut out for the business of transmitting the news to people.

And that brings us to “Joe” the “Plumber,” Samuel Wurzelbacher, who has for reasons unknown to any humans been hired by Edsel Media to cover the Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip.

Now, I have experience in journalism. And I’ve been writing on the internets since 2002. I’ve appeared on national television and national radio. And while I’m far from an expert on Israeli-Palestinian relations, I at least have been following the issues for a while. And I can tell you flatly that nobody should send me to cover this conflict; I’m not qualified to do it. There are better people for the job. And yet if someone lost their mind and sent me to cover events there, I feel certain that I would be a combination of Stephen Crane, Sydney Schanberg, Joe Rosenthal, Lady Florence Dixie, and Morley Safer compared to Joe the Sideshow Freak:

There’s a lot there, but here’s the money graf:

I’ll be honest with you. I don’t think journalists should be anywhere allowed war. I mean, you guys report where our troops are at. You report what’s happening day to day. You make a big deal out of it. I think it’s asinine. You know, I liked back in World War I and World War II when you’d go to the theater and you’d see your troops on, you know, the screen and everyone would be real excited and happy for ’em. Now everyone’s got an opinion and wants to downer, ah, down soldiers. You know, American soldiers or Israeli soldiers.

I think media should be abolished from, uh, you know, reporting. You know, war is hell. And if you’re gonna sit there and say, “Well look at this atrocity,” well you don’t know the whole story behind it half the time, so I think the media should have no business in it.

So basically, Joe doesn’t know diddly, except that really, when dealing with war, America and other nations are served best by receiving only propaganda and spoon-fed happy talk from the government.

I’d trash Joe, but really, it’s not his fault; he’s just expressing the certain strain of wingnut thought that dissent is bad, debate is negative, and that when our country goes to war it is our duty to simply shut up and go along with it, whether it’s a terrible idea or not.

Of course, he’s not expressing it particularly intelligently, but that’s what you get for sending a faux plumber to be a faux journalist.