Sean Patrick Cooper

I’m enjoying this line immensely. 

“The process today gives everyone a chance to participate,” Tom Hayden, by way of explaining “the difference” between 1968 and 1988, said to Bryant Gumbel on NBC at 7:50 AM on the day after Jesse Jackson spoke at the Democratic convention in Atlanta. This statement was, at a convention which had as its controlling principle the notably non-participatory idea of “unity,” demonstrably not true, but people inside the process, constituting as they do a self-created and self-referring class, a new kind of managerial elite, tend to speak of the world not necessarily as it is but as they want people out there to believe it is. They tend to prefer the theoretical to the observable, and to dismiss that which might be learned empirically as “anecdotal.” 

This is from a 68’ NYRB piece, “Insider Baseball.”

I’m most drawn to her characterization of this managerial elite—not because of who it represented when she wrote it, but because of how it might describe factions of our media and even business entities today. The media’s managerial elite is more noticeable, higher profile than their strictly business counterparts, but both operate themselves with the same aloofness and disregard for the way the world intersects the people who live in that world.