In theory at least, news magazine covers function as a sort of national mirror, reflecting the most interesting or important news and cultural symbols of the moment.
So we're in for a rough year. The 13 January covers of Time and Newsweek are perfect metaphors not only for the kind of country we are, but for the kind of year journalism has planned for us. It isn't pretty.
Parental advisory: This column is rated HW TA 17 - for teenagers and younger only (only kids will be strong enough to stomach it).
On Newsweek's cover is Paula Jones: "Clinton v. Paula Jones Goes to the Supreme Court: Should She Be Heard?"
On Time's cover is Bill Gates: "The Private World of Bill Gates: A surprising visit with the man who is shaping our future."
Being chosen for Time's cover might be honor enough for most moguls, but not for Gates. The piece was too important to be done by an ordinary reporter, who might have asked annoying questions, so was reported by no less a personage than Time's highest-ranking editorial staff member, managing editor Walter Isaacson, who didn't write a discordant word.
The two covers take a literal and figurative approach to the same thing: fellatio of the powerful, a persistent theme in American media these days.
As the old tabloid editors used to say, both covers dress up the hog. Newsweek can claim it isn't interested in sex at all, but instead "what it [the Jones trial] could mean for the president's future."
Newsweek reminds us again that journalism's tendency to be prurient in the name of public service is as transparent as it is destructive - Newsweek's reporters have no idea what happened between Ms. Jones and then-governor Clinton.
Putting her on the cover instead of simply waiting to cover the trial signals that it's morals squad time again for the Washington press corps. Invading people's private sexual lives in the name of public morality is more fun than anything, especially actually covering the government.
So the big political story is that the first few months of Clinton's second term will be crippled by journalistic and political allegations of immoral behavior, just as the start of his first term was. Washington reporters get to inject themselves once again into the private sexual behavior of public people.
Time's cover involves a different kind of blow job. It purports to take us deep into the private history and personal life of Gates, journalism's universal metaphor for everything digital, for the millennium and beyond.
It redefines oral sex in journalism: "[Gates] has become the Edison and Ford of our age. A technologist turned entrepreneur, he embodies the digital era."
You have to hand it to Walter Isaacson. Delving into Bill Gates' intimate life was perhaps a more heroic act than he knew. It was also doomed, however.
Despite many forests felled in the media service of Bill Gates' and Microsoft's glory, the idea that his life is worth a private peek is the problem. The guy is the biggest bore in the history of legends. He doesn't have it in him to utter a stirring word or inspiring thought.
Like many of his fellow media hotshots, Isaacson is not into the skepticism with which journalists have traditionally approached powerful billionaires.
Of Gates at work he writes: "He can be so rigorous as he processes data that one can imagine his mind may indeed be digital: no sloppy emotions or analog fuzziness, just trillions of binary impulses coolly converting input into correct answers."
There's more: "... at the office he sometimes surprises colleagues by joyfully leaping to touch the ceiling, and he finds bouncing on a trampoline as conducive to concentration as rocking."
Here's Gates on his infant daughter: "I used to think I wouldn't be all that interested in the baby talk until she was two or so and could talk. But I'm totally into it now. She's just started to say 'ba-ba' and have a personality."
Gates on his spiritual life: "Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning."
OK, so the man shaping our future isn't exactly Churchill, though it's neat to think of Winnie bouncing on a trampoline in the cabinet war rooms as the slack-jawed general staff gathers to ponder responses to the Nazi threat.
In fact, as many reporters as have flocked in awe to Redmond (oddly enough, the more skeptical ones don't seem to get through), not one has ever come up with a single memorable utterance from "the man who is shaping our future."
If you don't believe this, take the Mythic Figure quiz:
1. Do you remember a single thing Bill Gates ever said?
2. Can you recall a single penetrating observation Bill Gates has ever made about society, politics, media, or culture?
3. Do you want your kid to grow up to be like Bill Gates? Or would you drown him first?
4. Have you ever spent an evening reading inspiring stories about Bill Gates? For that matter, have you ever heard an inspiring story about Bill Gates?
5. Has there ever been an intimate or personal detail about Bill Gates that you were a) glad you learned about, b) can remember, or c) have ever passed on to another human being?
If the answer to any of these questions is yes, you get free software for the millennium. If the answer to all or most of these questions is no, you (and I) are in big trouble.
There is, of course, no justice in Mediaville. Clinton has to face a prosecutor for allegedly asking Paula Jones for a blow job. Gates gets one without asking - by an editor not too abashed to assign himself stories that nobody at Time dares edit.
The interesting thing is that Gates has become a surreal figure in American media, floating so far above us as to be nearly totally incomprehensible.
Unlike Edison or Ford, he has never really invented a thing. He didn't create the Internet or the Web. He didn't invent the modem, nor did he come up with the microchip or microprocessor.
He has made billions by creating efficient, reliable, if dull, software. But he has in no demonstrable way altered life in this century. Unlike Stalin, Roosevelt, even figures like Betty Friedan, Malcolm X, or Ronald Reagan, Gates has neither introduced nor advanced powerful ideas that affect and alter the way we live. In fact, beyond lucrative new software and service media, he has no political ideas. Elvis Presley changed our culture much more than Bill Gates has or will.
Gates is already living on borrowed time, media-wise. One of the fundamental laws of modern media is this: what they build up unthinkingly, they must tear down viciously. Hyping Gates will shortly become too boring even for journalism. The real reputations will come to those who start knocking him down.
This is especially true in Gates' case, since no human can possibly live up to the absurd expectations raised about him by the modern media hype machine. The press has always fallen for techno-talk about the future. We should be floating on People Movers by now, zipping in hover cars. Cancer was supposed to be a thing of the past, and we were supposed to be controlling weather systems years ago.
By the millennium, we were supposed to be going to the Moon as often as we went to the supermarket. You remember the Space Age, don't you?
The one sure bet about technology is that it never does what people expect it to do. Maybe people will be buying Microsoft software to run their kitchen appliances, like the reporters are telling us, or maybe they won't. But take this to the bank: Bill Gates will not be one of the 20th-century figures stuck in the imagination of the future citizens of the world.
Isaacson would have been much better off sending one of his hard-boiled reporters into Bill Gates' office and living room. In his search for the values of the man shaping our future, Isaacson missed the big story, the one right under his nose. Aside from making money, Gates doesn't seem to have any values.
