There’s an old joke in the newspaper business, now immortal on the Internet:
“The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country..."Yeah, we've all heard that one, it's pretty good. Now what --
"...USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don’t really understand the New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie-chart format. . . . The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country, and they did a far superior job of it, thank you very much..."My guess: Goldberg, after years of telling his own terrible jokes or overexplaining them, has moved on to ruining the classics.
But the joke is on us. You see, no one is running the country.
I don’t mean that as a knock on President Obama. No president “runs” America because the government doesn’t run America — and the president barely runs the government. He can scarcely tell his own employees what to do. Civil-service laws and union rules make it darn near impossible to fire even grossly incompetent employees for anything short of pederasty or murder.
I don’t have the space to rehash the Federalist Papers, but at the federal level there are three branches of government and each one monkey-wrenches the other, all the time. Meanwhile, do you know how many local governments there are in the United States?Despite this chaos, some people think we're being run by Liberal Fascism. How'd that happen?
Cutting to the chase: People think the country is run by rich people but Goldberg says it isn't -- he knows because they told him:
In recent years, I’ve had the good fortune to get to know some famous .001-percenters. Guess what? Not only do they not run the country, but they’re often desperate to find out who does."Yes, very interesting question, Mr. Goldberg. When you find out, tell me! Now if you'll excuse me, my harem of Guatemalan toddlers awaits; Rolf will see you out."
But this thinking is ancient, says Goldberg:
The notion that there’s a class or group of people secretly running things is ancient. It was old when the Roman consul Lucius Cassius famously asked, “Cui bono?” (“To whose benefit?”)I suppose if you pointed out that this conflates conspiracy thinking with simple causality, Goldberg's grammar intern would explain that "old when" doesn't have to mean the two things have something to do with one another. Saved by sloppy writing once more!
Naturally, though conspiracy thinking is universal, it's worser with the Left because they believe in nonsense like "systemic racism or sexism or white privilege" -- As if! -- whereas conservatives only believe in sensible things like media bias.
Toward the end Goldberg grows philosophical, by which I mean less coherent:
I think some people are scared of the idea that nobody is in charge, in part because they want someone to blame for their problems. Others don’t like this notion because they have an outsize faith in the power of human will. If villains aren’t to blame for our ills, then some problems cease to be problems and simply become facts of life.Just when you're puzzling out how an outsize faith in the power of human will makes a person less inclined to fix problems, Goldberg pops his button:
Me? I like knowing no one is running things because, for starters, it means I’m free.He could have just started with that and skipped the column. But then how would people know he's an intellectual?
