Special 'Listening Reports' from The Center of Advanced Excellence in Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of Watergate

1. The USA’s become really good at hearings—Watergate and before Watergate McCarthy and before McCarthy HUAC. We now specialize in hearing, first creating the need, then supplying the actual content, then vetting, commenting, critiquing, handwringing, the subsequent post-content writing of books, the making of documentaries and feature films etc. We do hearings expertly, our elected officials are organized, disciplined, and exhaustive in their pursuit of the truth, having the advantage now of such great technological prowess—PowerPoint, video, streaming, Tweets, and archived Presidential records (44 U.S.C Chapter 22)— that our forefathers, the framers of our beloved if much misread Constitution did not have.

2. Everything wrong with us is always out in the open. It seems it’s always been this way from the beginning. We seem to lack the capacity to go as deeply inside ourselves as we need to go for there to be any kind of real healing, much less any sort of social or political agreement about what the best course of our organized lives together might take moving forward.

3. I watch those who testify and those to whom they are testifying—the lawyers and politicians, the advisors, the loyal and disloyal synchophants, the family members—and feel sorry for them, all of them, from the bottom up, especially for the most powerful, especially the king. But I wonder? Feeling sorry for them am I not also feeling sorry for myself?

4. Our hearings, our investigations, are a kind of officially sanctioned, governmentally approved performance art piece.

5. While writing this I stop to take a quick look at the TV. The hearing’s taken a break: the network needs to make some money. On screen, there’s an advertisement for a cheeseburger. It looks so good to me, the cheese having melted on my hi-def screen over the meat, the leaf of lettuce now atop the meat, the pickle in place, the bun magically descending from above to enclose the whole beautiful work…I want a cheeseburger! It’s almost lunchtime. I deserve a cheeseburger, this particular cheeseburger.