John Ziegler, you’ll remember, considers tragic suicide the perfect occasion for self-promotion, so his recent antics should come as no surprise. Here’s what happened:
He announced that he would demonstrate the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Journalism. On the day of the event, he was treated like a demonstrator.
That should be all you need to know, but Ziegler is a savvy self-promoter. At some point after he’d made his intentions to demonstrate clear enough to USC that they hired extra security and set up a barricade, he decided that he would not be demonstrating the event after all: he would be reporting on it. Here he is informing a very polite USC employee of that decision (3:48):
USC Employee: You indicated that you were here to demonstrate.
Ziegler: Actually no, I called off the demonstration. I’m just here to find out what’s going on.
USC Employee: But, so you’re not the media in a sense—
Ziegler: I’ve got a microphone and a camera and website. [quick edit] So now you’re acknowledging that because of my political position on this, that has something to do with the access to this event.
Some on the right believe that because Ziegler claimed to be a journalist while holding an implement of the trade, irony’s the order of the day:
The Annenberg School of Journalism . . . teaching journalists how to stonewall and intimidate . . . journalists.
Let me fix that for Mr. Morrissey:
Employees of the Davidson Conference Center and USC Department of Public Safety . . . teaching uncooperative demonstrators what happens to uncooperative demonstrators . . . when they refuse to comply when ordered to leave the premises.
Ziegler may, as he told Greta Van Susteren, have “decided against [protesting],” but if he never communicated that decision to anyone outside his own head, his belief that he would be greeted upon arrival as the journalist he had decided to be instead of the demonstrator he’d repeatedly declared he was going to be is delusional in the strong clinical sense. He believes other people can read his mind. That’s not all.
When the USC Employee fails to pluck the changed gameplan from Ziegler’s thoughts, he replies nonsensically: “I’ve got a microphone and a camera and a website,” he says, the implication being that the simultaneous possession of those items transforms a person into a journalist. If I walk up to Dodger Stadium carrying a cap and a glove and a bat tomorrow, am I a professional baseball player? If I walk into the Gordon Ramsay London with an apron and a hat and a sack of Henckels, am I a professional chef?
The only possible way telepathy and fallacy could have failed, Ziegler reasons, is if They are out to get him—if They are persecuting him. The fact that uninvited demonstrators are rarely allowed unfettered access to the invitation only event they are demonstrating never occurs to him, and why would it? Only he knows how special he is, and now that nobody can read his mind anymore, he has no means of telling the world how special he is.
Or he’s not clinically anything, merely too stupid to realize that if you announce your intent to demonstrate an event, everyone will consider you a demonstrator no matter what you call yourself because once you air that announcement any action you take will be interpreted as a protestation. The “I’m not protesting, Officer, I’m just standing here minding my business” routine never works because one you are a protester, standing there minding your business becomes an act of civil disobedience.
All of which is only to say, I think I need another Virgil. The one I have is wonderful—I love my cats, don’t get me wrong—but when I find myself in the eighth circle of Hell staring into an evil pocket at a hypocrite like Ziegler, it would be nice to have a Virgil who could rebuke me so soundly this would happen:
Like one asleep who dreams himself in trouble
and in his dream he wishes he were dreaming,
longing for that which is, as if it were not,just so I found myself: unable to speak,
longing to beg for pardon and already
begging for pardon, not knowing that I did.“Less shame than yours would wash away a fault
greater than yours has been,” my master said.
“and so forget about it, do not be sad.”If ever again you should meet up with men
engaging in this kind of futile wrangling,
remember I am always at your side;to have a taste for talk like this is vulgar!”
Preach on, Virgil, preach on.
The Edge of the American West 
11 comments
April 18, 2009 at 8:42 pm
grackle
If the Virgil you have says,and you emphasize, “…to have a taste for talk like this is vulgar!” and you post anyway, I guess I don’t understand your point, and like KB, I fall outside your targeted audience. As one can grant that there are an abundance of jerks in the world, one must also grant , that in most situations, one can, and should, ignore them. It makes life so much more pleasant
April 18, 2009 at 9:17 pm
Rich Puchalsky
“delusional in the strong clinical sense”
Um — what? He staged an event by saying that he’d be demonstrating, and then when he got there by saying that he was there to be a journalist. So that when they treat him like a demonstrator anyways, he can fire up his audience. That sounds perfectly reasonable to me. A good tactic, actually. I don’t like Ziegler at all, or his cause, but his technique seems pretty good in this case.
April 18, 2009 at 10:29 pm
Colin
http://www.mwscomp.com/movies/grail/grail-03.htm
ARTHUR:
Shut up, will you? Shut up!
DENNIS:
Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system.
ARTHUR:
Shut up!
DENNIS:
Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I’m being repressed!
ARTHUR:
Bloody peasant!
DENNIS:
Oh, what a give-away. Did you hear that? Did you hear that, eh? That’s what I’m on about. Did you see him repressing me? You saw it, didn’t you?
April 19, 2009 at 9:01 am
SEK
If the Virgil you have says
I don’t know where the link disappeared off to, but the only thing the Virgil I have says is “meow.” I want a Virgil like the one Dante had, so I can stop being engrossed in the protestations of an idiot.
He staged an event by saying that he’d be demonstrating, and then when he got there by saying that he was there to be a journalist. So that when they treat him like a demonstrator anyways, he can fire up his audience. That sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
I agree, but I don’t think he’s smart enough to have thought that through in advance. If you watch the video—especially the second part, where he’s being cuffed—and read what he said afterward, he’s genuinely surprised that they’re treating him like a demonstrator. I believe he genuinely surprised. So I don’t think he’s really clinically delusional, just dumb as a brick.
April 19, 2009 at 10:02 am
Rich Puchalsky
You believe he’s genuinely surprised? All right, so now I wasted ten minutes watching the stupid video. I don’t see any signs of genuine surprise. He baits them until they arrest him, then he plays to the camera the entire time. Of course he has to pretend to be surprised, for rhetorical purposes, but he’s not very good at it.
I think that you got punked, perhaps even more than his audience did. After all, most of his audience is also only pretending to be shocked.
April 19, 2009 at 10:44 am
SEK
You believe he’s genuinely surprised?
I think he’s genuinely surprised that it worked, because he has no idea why it did. He believes he was detained because he wanted to be a journalist, which is why his script—extemporaneous, sure, but well-practiced—is all about how he’s being silenced for his politics.
But he’s genuinely confused as to why he, a journalist, has to stand behind the barricades USC erected for the protesters. He genuinely doesn’t understand why Channel 7 is allowed in the feed room and he isn’t, whereas it’s clear to everyone else that it’s because demonstrators aren’t allowed in the feed room.
In other words, he bumbled into an effective means of staging the stunt, and even now probably isn’t aware of why it worked.
April 19, 2009 at 10:52 am
Rich Puchalsky
I really don’t see how you’re judging genuineness here. How can you possibly tell that he’s genuinely confused when his whole shtick depends on pretending to be confused? The minute he says “OK, I understand why you want demonstrators back here” the whole thing collapses. You think that a media person can’t act as well as he does in this video?
April 19, 2009 at 1:00 pm
SEK
The minute he says “OK, I understand why you want demonstrators back here” the whole thing collapses.
What I’m saying is, I don’t think understood the situation well enough to make that an issue. I think he believed that by uttering the magic word (“journalist”) while being filmed holding a mike meant he wasn’t a demonstrator anymore. You’re right, though, that it’s impossible to tell whether he was feigning rank stupidity or actually is that dumb, but I think it’s the latter. I mean, he thinks this is witty enough to feature on his homepage as a “Zieglerism”:
I’m sure I could make that make sense somehow, but if that’s the height of wit for someone, well…
April 19, 2009 at 1:12 pm
ekogan
The worst thing you could do to John Ziegler is ignore him – and you’re not doing it!!!
April 23, 2009 at 9:46 pm
fromlaurelstreet
i don’t know, i watched the video and my impression was that he was drunk.
April 24, 2009 at 4:40 am
Michael Turner
The worst thing you could do to John Ziegler is ignore him
Maybe so, ekogan, but there’s a lot to be gained by paying close attention to David Foster Wallace paying close attention to Ziegler.
What Wallace wrote in that Atlantic piece about the origins of conservative talk radio sent me off into an hour or more of reading, out of which I got a much better grasp of how it started and the role it has played. I now think conservative talk radio owes much to Reagan’s supreme confidence in political communication as entertainment, not just information, and in the broad appeal of his own brand of entertaining (if not too informative) populist conservatism.
Ironically, this confidence was not shared by many of Reagan’s own White House staffers; they argued against his support for ending the Fairness Doctrine. They feared its repeal would mean the end of any meaningful conservative representation on the major TV networks. But Reagan probably realized: if TV was really conservatism’s Achilles Heel, he wouldn’t have gotten a second term.
I also think Reagan knew from radio, both as a former New Deal Democrat, and later as a Republican who was no stranger to the airwaves himself. I think he knew that when the rise of FM left AM to talkers, some of them scathingly witty hosts, others merely phoning in with their two cents but at least feeling gotten heard, it could only help further solidify–maybe even expand–the GOP base that his presidency had galvanized. The Fairness Doctrine, as it stood, could only be a wet blanket on the infotainment experience of talk radio. When it was gone, AM stations relegated to talk could finally control — albeit only in a very improvisational style — not just the content but the tone and tenor of what was said about the events of the day, its menu could be as consistent as at Macdonalds. And with that, talk radio could crystallize Angry White Middle-Aged Male Identity Politics, and the votes and campaign contributions that come with it. Political scientists might someday rank The AM Radio Strategy along with The Southern Strategy, in stiffening the ribs of conservatism in America.