My first thought was that it was all a Tom Sawyer-esque hoax. I could imagine Breitbart gleefully watching the media’s reaction to his own death, a glass of pinot noir in hand, relishing yet another chance to humiliate the establishment he despised. But at this point, I’m not holding my breath.
Andrew Breitbart is dead.
I think there are two senses in which someone can be considered great. One is a complete, moral sense. There are great men and women who are admired for what they fought for, and how they fought for it. But there’s another, lesser sense. Some men and women have a greatness that isn't always the same as goodness. They’re great in an earthly sense, because of the shadow they manage to cast during their short time in the sun. They make a dent in the fabric of society, for good or ill.
In that sense, Andrew Breitbart was a great man.
If William F. Buckley Jr. was emblematic of the last generation of conservatives, Andrew Breitbart was the heart and soul of the current one. Buckley was an erudite Ivy League elitist, always ready to disarm opponents with a verbal flourish. He was part of an intellectual conservative establishment that at the very least seemed to value high culture and the search for meaning. Breitbart was an unabashed bomb-thrower to his core. Every action he took was animated by anger against a vast liberal elite, and those he felt had been brainwashed by them. Buckley may have scoffed at liberal protesters in witty columns; Breitbart would march right out to them and yell until he lost his voice. He didn’t just want to fight his enemies. He wanted to destroy them, in hand-to-hand combat if necessary.
And often, he succeeded. Anthony Weiner resigned in disgrace. Shirley Sherrod lost her job. ACORN was cut off from federal funding. Breitbart harnessed his anger to the anger of thousands, and used it to relentlessly push stories online until mainstream news sources could no longer ignore them. He mastered the new media to beat the old media at its own game.
By any account, Breitbart was not a particularly religious person. But the enemy of his enemy was always his friend. His Big Hollywood blog often featured voices ranging from culture-warrior evangelicals to gay libertarians. As long as you wanted to take a wrecking ball to the ivory tower, you were welcome on Team Breitbart. The battle was an all-consuming obsession for him. In Breitbart’s mind, Hollywood elites, liberal newscasters, and hippy protestors weren't just wrong -- they were at war with the country. Somewhat ironically, Breitbart’s tactics were self-consciously modeled after the left-wing radical groups of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Now that they had taken over, he felt that it was his turn to give them a taste of their own medicine.
In style and substance, I never had a whole lot in common with Breitbart. But out of all the conservative political figures in the country, I always felt he would be the most fascinating to have a conversation with. He was a colorful political oddity in a country that manufactures characters by the dozens. He may not have been Limbaugh, but he loved to talk, rambling combatively about the communist plot to take over the country, while making obscure pop culture references and praising the goodness of middle-Americans. The persona he projected was a strange combination of poise and sloppiness, something like a disgruntled think-tank fellow who had just crawled out of bed after a night of heavy drinking. Breitbart was a political conservative who didn’t care for maintaining a clean-cut image. You always got the feeling that he was the guy you’d want to have a beer -- or several beers -- with. But my own chances of grabbing a pint with Breitbart have dropped from .001% to 0.
The man is gone. The media landscape he helped transform remains.
No comments:
Post a Comment