The prospect of defending Virtuous Reality in the nation's capital never seemed bleaker than it did after a week in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
For one thing, even I was getting tired of hearing myself talk about media, culture, and morality. I'd been doing it nonstop day and night for three weeks. I was repeating myself endlessly, and spacing out in the middle of interviews. I missed my family, my playwriting workshop, my dogs, and my dank basement. I had heartburn from eating bad food quickly and at odd times. I dreaded the nightly fax that told me where I was going the next morning. I was having nightmares about the tiny chickens served on airplanes. My laptop mysteriously triggered the suspicions of every security guard at every airport X-ray machine I went through.
I had a cold and blisters on my feet and had sustained my first bona fide writing injury - I cracked my finger on my Powerbook while reaching for a hotel telephone (I may have broken it). Days of little sleep, pre-dawn wake-up calls, scrambling to interviews, checking email, filing rants, and racing from place to place had left me with permanent double vision. I was out of clean clothes, books to read, and pocket money.
And if one more person informed me that the Net was overflowing with pornography, I thought I would take a cue from Diane, the Mormon mother, who advised me on a radio show from Utah to shriek: "Turn it off!" It occurred to me mid-tour that we needed to start rating parents, not TV shows. I was drifting more and more in this mean-spirited vein, a dangerous mood on a book tour where snarling or going berserk isn't considered an effective way to push your work.
I'd read and heard about this state.
It was book-tour crash, the point when you aren't sure where you are, or what you're talking about, the point when you've been asked the same questions so many times that the question and your answer both sound so familiar and banal you can barely stand either.
So a return to Washington was an especially unwelcome prospect. In most of the country, I was introduced as the author of an "interesting" or "provocative" book that challenged the way old media and older politics distort culture, new media, and morality. I had spirited conversations with earnest public-radio interviewers (none famous for gentleness) in New York City, with Mormons in Utah, evangelics in Ohio, computer execs in Silicon Valley.
There are lots of reasons people might disagree with me or take issue with my book, I learned. I was joyously disagreed with by somebody - or sometimes everybody - everywhere I went, on every talk show, at every signing, during every TV or newspaper interview. But the conversations were invariably good-hearted, healthy, and usually fun. You can tell in a flash when you're connecting and when you're not. People talked and listened. They care about this stuff, and want to find a rational way to get comfortable with it. When all is said and done, it's a stunning compliment when even a handful of people bother to listen to what you think or read what you've written. It moved me every single time.
But in Washington, the hostility toward my book transcended the standard raucous controversy of media debates. I was the ambassador from Hell, official spokesperson and apologist for the dark side. A Washington newspaper librarian begged people in a review to ignore my "harsh" book and read Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital instead. A conservative Washington weekly magazine suggested I was celebrating and elevating the most vulgar elements in our culture. A Washington transplant at the Web site "Slate" had compared me to the Unabomber and portrayed me as St. Jon, the leader of a degenerate digital nation of self-indulgent porn-peddlers and illiterates. The Washington Post called my criticism of Bennett and the boomers "truly offensive" and said every single thing in my book was wrong and its arguments ultimately undermined culture and democracy itself. A Washington think-tank fellow writing for The LA Times called the book not only completely wrong but trite.
NPR's Washington-based Talk of the Nation recruited a right-wing attack panelist to battle me on the air and counter my "radical" views. FOX News in Washington brought in a conservative newsweekly columnist to surprise me on the air and make sure my shocking opinions didn't go unchallenged - or uninterrupted.
Away from Washington, it was almost as if Virtuous Reality was a different book, published in a different country about a different topic. There were fulsome reviews as well as quarrelsome ones. The book was excerpted in the The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and The New York Times, which also reviewed Virtuous Reality this week and said of it: "Grounding himself in the past, with a clear-eyed look at the present and ideas to spare for the future, Mr. Katz presents a very compelling argument - along with producing a book that ponders both "Beavis and Butt-head" and John Locke.
Lots of people disagreed with lots of things in Virtuous Reality, but outside of Washington, few found it offensive or even all that controversial. Much of it made some sense to almost everybody. The farther I got from Washington and the strange prism of people who live and work there, the more striking were the reactions, style, attitude, and language of ordinary people. As I began to get substantial email from readers of the book (my email address is in the jacket), I was struck even more by the difference in response between Washington and the rest of the country.
That this was so was not a complete shock. That it was so wide a chasm was. Washington is the world capital of the few-to-many model of information. It is a place where people proclaim, not listen.
In Washington, Virtuous Reality was almost heresy, an attack on the understandings and sacred conventional wisdoms that rule culture, politics, and media. Bennett was a member of the political-journalistic tribe, and I had brazenly singled him out in my sub-title: How American surrendered moral values to opportunists, nitwits and blockheads like William Bennett.
I didn't just have the feeling that people there didn't like the book, which is perfectly okay, but that they wanted to drive a stake through its heart. To ward it off as if it were some dread virus. I had stepped across an invisible boundary, committed a betrayal. I had poked the bear, and now the bear was chasing me up a tree. In other times and places, I couldn't help feeling, he would have got me, too. This made me feel fortunate. The history of heretics doesn't make for pleasant reading. In my time, martyrs get on talk shows and file lawsuits, and controversy is supposed to sell.
In Washington, pornography dogged me as if it were my last name. I was defending every imaginable kind of political and sexual filth. I was further accused of representing a new culture that glorified illiteracy and poor language, promoted social dislocation. I was asked repeatedly about Walter Cronkite's alarms that the Net spread false, misleading, and unfiltered information. What about militias? What about bombmaking instructions downloaded by teenagers? What about cyber-seduction of innocent children? What about Pierre Salinger pulling loopy theories off the Net? What about people zoned out and brain fried in front of their screens, losing the instinct for travel and human contact? What about the civic chaos that results in all these millions of geeks shrieking irresponsible gibberish while good people in Washington struggle to run the country?
Okay, I was weakening. "Do I have to go back there? It wasn't in the schedule," I whined to my publicist. "I'm tired. I'm sick. My finger is broken. I miss my wife and kid. My dogs need me."
She didn't hesitate, her cold, publishing heart untouched. "You don't have to go, of course" she said. "I'm sorry to send you all the way back there. But you got on Derek McGinty's NPR show. 50 stations." She paused. She'd heard this before, it was clear. "He sells books."
I was on a plane hours later.
When I arrived, a geek HotWired reader and her friend, a tech, were waiting for me outside the control room. She shook hands, looking furtively around. "Derek is online all the time," she confided in a low voice. "He's cool." Unlike most of his colleagues, McGinty had been on the Web.
My voice was going, and my circuits were crossing. I wasn't sure I could handle another attack interviewer, or even a nice one. I dreaded the first calls about kids looking at pictures of people doing it. McGinty shook my hand and introduced himself. "Interesting book," he said. "I'm not sure I agree with all of it." I nodded. You and the most distinguished thinkers in America, I thought. I only had to make it through an hour. I started coughing again. Everybody has their own method of dealing with trying times. Mine is that I invoke different heroes - I have six or seven - and try to imagine what they'd do if they were in my shoes. If one doesn't inspire me, I go to the next. I went to Mencken.
Steady, I thought.
What fun Mencken would have had with William Bennett. He would have called him much worse than "blockhead." He would have feasted on Bennett and the moralizing windbags who pass for pundits and leaders in America, and who know best and with absolute certainty what the right moral choice is for everybody, while they stuff their pockets and advance their political careers off the fears of vulnerable people. I felt better.
I took a deep breath, charged into the studio, and put my earphones on forcefully and with authority. Come and get me.
The geek was right. McGinty, as it turned out, was a hoot - skeptical, sharp, open, and funny. Maybe, being young and black and wired, he was somehow outside the circle of media wise guys, political posturers, think-tank policy wonks who demand the right to define civilization for the rest of us. He seemed to take life less seriously than his peers. Five calls were about pornography, three from boomers twitchy about their kids and the nasty things they saw on TV. I did my now blah-blah "pornography isn't the only thing on the Net" thing.
McGinty and I got into a great back-and-forth about objectivity. Papers need to be objective, he said. The Washington Post was running a great series on how public education in DC was falling apart. Didn't that show how fairness and objectivity worked? No, I said. The series (which I had blessedly read on the way over from the airport) didn't balance one side, then the other. It clearly made the point that the DC schools sucked.
But I needed a pit stop. And I had five more radio and online interviews to do when I got home. And the plane back to beautiful New Jersey (it reminds me of San Francisco in subtle ways) bounced up and down like a kite in a windstorm. And I was to go off on tour again the next morning, to New York City (a CNN producer had already left a message on my answering machine advising me I would be on with a parents-for-decency "guest" who would "debate me.") If it wasn't in Washington, it didn't matter. I could hack it.
That morning, I dreaded my new job as ambassador From Hell. By midnight, walking my dogs, getting ready to hit the road again, it hit me like a thunderbolt. Finally, I'd found the right job for me, the only one I was truly qualified to hold.
