Wolcott: Signs of the Cross (Wonderful rant!)

[kskiska]

Wish I could post the whole thing. Check it out.

(snip)

The Capital Gang went full metal Catholic in this week's edition, using the Pope's death as an altar to celebrate Novak's Catholic conversion as the fellow panelists reminisced about the great day he received his first communion. The centerpiece of the show was a segment devoted to Novak's embrace of the cross, tracing his spiritual development through a visual montage that showed a young Jewish boy from the Midwest evolving into a political reporter aging into a smug man in a banker's vest staring thoughtfully at church statuary and appearing on Crossfire with ashes smudged on his angry brow. He was even interviewed by Judy Woodruff (Hunt's wife) about his newfound faith! It was bad enough when pundits started fancying themselves as political players, now we're supposed to take them seriously as religious pilgrims too. (The only portion of the show that rang metaphorically true were the glimpses of Novak walking down the aisle between rows of empty pews, because the arid, conservative, high-horse Catholicism that he and O'Beirne espouse is doomed to play to empty houses.) The footage and the testimonials afterwards from Hunt and company treated Novak's conversion and Holy Communion as if it were a major event in the journalistic-political life of Washington, one of those inspirational moments that brought together people of different faiths and political persuasions who put aside their differences and agree on one incontrovertible thing: Bob Novak is one swelluva guy.

Although Hunt joked about Bob not signing on to the "Blessed are the poor" part of the Bible and Dionne facetiously said he now was hoping for a political conversion as well, the truth as any CNN viewer knows is that Novak's Catholic conversion has made him no more compassionate to the poor, weak, and infirm, no less smarmy and reputation-slurring than he was as a young punk sneering at Commie-symps and rummaging Martin Luther King. Catholicism has just provided him with a church organ for his natural pomposity.

I wonder how much airtime CNN or any other cable outfit would give to one of its correspondents who converted to Islam or Buddhism, or, sacre bleu, renounced religion and declared him or herself an atheist. I have a feeling that in the latter case they wouldn't dispatch a camera crew to the New York Historical Society to film the correspondent studying reverently the texts of the Thomas Paine: Patriot and Provocateur exhibit currently on view.* No, the personalization of on-air talent only goes so far.

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[Fenris]

1. Yeah, that's a great piece.