I have formed a very clear conception of patriotism.
I have generally found it thrust into the foreground by some fellow
who has something to hide in the background.
I have seen a great deal of patriotism;
and I have generally found it the last refuge of the scoundrel.
GK Chesterton

Back in the day when textbooks were carved in stone and we did "sums" on slates with slate "pencils," there lived a presidential candidate named Michael Dukakis.¹ Now, according to some—this was before they put the pun in pundit—the two main reasons for his inelectability² were that America was not ready for such an ethnic president and that Americans did not want a "liberal" in the White House. Well, as for the first reason, perhaps it was best that Mr. Dukakis was not elected. In the late 1950’s, the pundits said that America was not yet ready for a Catholic president, but poor Mr. Kennedy was elected, and look what happened to him. As for the stigma of being a "liberal," the situation was both more pathetic and more poignant—not to mention ironic, if only because the White House exists because many Americans in the late 1770’s wanted to be ruled by a liberal president.

It was pathetic, because the shame of Dukakis’s liberality was based on his apparent leniency toward murders and a prison furlough program gone wrong in the case of one Willie Horton.³ These actions may have been acts of liberality in the Christian sense, or they may have been bad judgments in the human sense, but they were not necessarily acts of liberality in the political sense. I say this only because, at that time, the term "liberal" was presented in the media as a kind of curse word, found somewhere between bastard and bitch.

It would seem that to be a liberal was also to be a danger to society. What is actually true, however, is that liberals are only dangerous to some societies. For instance, certain "liberals" turned out to be very dangerous to apartheid-era South African society. They also turned out to be morally—and politically—right. In fact, theirs was the moral victory when apartheid was overturned. "Liberals" were also perceived as a threat to National Socialism in Germany. Although we now view anti-Nazi liberals as having been morally correct, they lost the moral battle. Most of them were dead before the threat that was National Socialism—which, in turn, proved to be an even bigger threat than the Bolshevism it was propped up to combat⁴—could be defeated.

So, perhaps the problem was not in the liberals but in the Reaganite society they were challenging. Perhaps, also, it was to be found in the people who were deemed at that time to be "the liberals" of the 1980’s: gushing actresses and strutting actors.⁵ Today, in the new millennium, we see quite a few more rock stars. So, these horrible liberals were artsy-fartsy folks like Bono, an anti-capitalist social deviant, if there ever was one. Bono, of U2, anti-capitalist? Can you imagine how much money that man has made? Look at the people he associates with: Bill and Melinda Gates! The last thing that successful performers are is anti-capitalist. Then, again, along with the Gates Foundation, Bono and other social luminaries are working to combat HIV/AIDS in Africa. Ah, Bill Gates, you’re an anti-capitalist indeed!

Of course, we are cautioned that we shouldn’t get our social and political opinions from media celebrities. But if we don’t get them from media celebrities like Ted Koppel and Jon Stewart and Tom Brokaw and Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, from whom should we get them? From CEOs? Our religious leaders? Our grandparents? Aunt Mary? Uncle Joe?

We have no idea. And so, just as we get our weather report from a media source in lieu of actually walking out the door or even looking out the window to see what the weather is like, we get our political opinions from the media. Strangely enough, this is where the prejudice that we shouldn’t get our politics from the likes of Tim Robbins or Bruce Springsteen enters the picture; these are the people who are media. Some of them have an access to the hearts and minds of America and the rest of the world that any CEO, even Rupert Murdoch, envies. And, just as any leader in the oil industry might use his or her petrodollars to swing an election, so, too, a leader in the media industry uses his or her celebridollars to swing an election.

But the threat from the celebrity is subtler yet. A celebrity makes money for (drum roll, please) no one less than Rupert Murdoch himself! A company releases Michael Moore’s Farenheit 9/11 because the folks in marketing know it will make money, politics be damned. Moreover, we’ll pay to see Bono or Bruce Springsteen swagger across the stage; people would have to be paid to watch Rupert Murdoch stagger across a room.

So, celebrity is power, and it is the ultimate power in a media age. It is not for nothing that the Dukakis who will be retained in memory is Olympia and not her brother, because she’s an actress; Michael was merely a Presidential candidate. Then, again, isn’t it said that the real reason that Kennedy beat out Nixon in 1960 was because Nixon committed, as Dennis Miller notes, "the unpardonable sin"—he looked bad on television. And, television, like other media outlets—newspapers, magazines, non-advertisements on XM radio—is where the political action is.