How many times have we heard this?:

celebrity culture is a cancer, a poltergeist to be exorcised because it makes distraction and trivia overwhelmingly powerful against things we need to think about. During June 2005, CNN, FOXNews, NBC/MSNBC, ABC, and CBS ran 50 times as many stories about Michael Jackson and 12 times as many stories about Tom Cruise as they did about the genocide in Darfur. I long for the day when the last salivating pundit is strangled with the entrails of the last vapid cinematic glamourpuss.

Why do otherwise intelligent people believe that if only we weren’t so distracted by tabloid culture, if only the “national conversation” were more elevated, if only people really knew what’s going on in the world, we’d all be out there fighting the good fight instead of looking for ever cooler gadgets, ever more exotic ways to spend our leisure time (and I do include blogging), or whatever it is that we really like to do.

It’s a nonsensical argument, way past its prime. I don’t mean to pick on the person who said it, so I won’t link it. If I had time, I could find ten other quotes just like it, from every point on the political spectrum. This isn’t a political thing. It’s not a partisan thing. It’s a cultural thing. “Everyone” has agreed on it ever since it was floated: that the crap on TV rots our collective American brain. No one has ever been able to prove that it’s true. It’s an over-ripe idea. Rotten.

Human beings seek distraction. We may even be hard-wired for it.

That’s the central thesis of this blog: that important information–i.e., “news”–gets transmitted to people despite the showbiz packaging.

More about this–a lot more–another time. Meanwhile, here is a related post–something that might also serve as an “about this blog.”

You can’t get more prominent coverage for your story than the Washington Post, and the good professors are taken on in the pages of the paper today by Eli Cohen, a professor at Johns Hopkins. He doesn’t beat around the bush, either:

Inept, even kooky academic work, then, but is it anti-Semitic? If by anti-Semitism one means obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews; if one accuses them of disloyalty, subversion or treachery, of having occult powers and of participating in secret combinations that manipulate institutions and governments; if one systematically selects everything unfair, ugly or wrong about Jews as individuals or a group and equally systematically suppresses any exculpatory information — why, yes, this paper is anti-Semitic. …

If this sounds personal, it is, although I am only a footnote target for Mearsheimer and Walt. I am a public intellectual and a proud Jew; sympathetic to Israel and extensively engaged in our nation’s military affairs; vaguely conservative and occasionally hawkish. In a week my family will celebrate Passover with my oldest son — the third generation to serve as an officer in the United States Army. He will be home on leave from the bomb-strewn streets of Baghdad. The patch on his shoulder is the same flag that flies on my porch.

Other supposed members of “The Lobby” also have children in military service. Impugning their patriotism or mine is not scholarship or policy advocacy. It is merely, and unforgivably, bigotry.

Here’s how the Boston Globe begins its piece:

Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke calls their work “a modern American Declaration of Independence!” It’s not the kind of praise Harvard’s Stephen Walt and the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer have welcomed.

Here’s the Financial Times:

Professors Walt and Mearsheimer ignited a firestorm in academic and political circles last month with the publication of The Israel Lobby, an 83-page paper in which they contend that the US’s “unwavering support” for Israel is a result of an influential and insidious “lobby”.

And Alan Dershowitz’s “working paper” in response to “The Israel Lobby” has been posted at the Kennedy School’s website.

UPDATE: Here’s the link.

This is ugly but unavoidable. Walt and Mearsheimer’s paper must be confronted because it hides behind the figleaf of serious scholarship–and because the professors had the temerity to try to insulate themselves from criticism beforehand by declaring that anyone who disagreed with them would use the anti-Semitism card against them. That kind of argument used to wash once upon a time in America. Those days are gone, though. Victimology is out. (Witness the eye-rolling at the antics of Rep. Cynthia McKinney, a fame whore currently making accusations of racism against the Washington establishment; it’s not going over too well.)

What Professors Walt and Mearsheimer didn’t reckon on is that their impudent tone would come through loud and clear, even to those who are skeptical of American policy toward Israel. Many of the press reports have picked up on–and underscored–the fact that Walt and Mearsheimer claim there’s no moral reason to be on Israel’s side. This goes far beyond their “realist” politics. It is a moral judgment, out of place in an academic paper. That’s why it doesn’t pass the smell test, as Hitchens said. (I wrote about this subject here and here and here and here.)
In the FT piece I note above, Alan Dershowitz asks:

“What would motivate two recognised academics to issue a compilation of previously made assertions that they must know will be used by overt anti-Semites . . .  that will give an academic imprimatur to crass bigotry and . . .  place all Jews in government and the media under suspicion of disloyalty to America?”

Yes. I wonder about that too.