With any luck in a matter of days the furor over John Kerry’s botched joke will be over and the political news will be dominated by something really important, like the discovery that a Democratic Congressman somewhere in Michigan is driving a French car, or something Sean Penn says about gay marriage, or the revelation that someone with a subscription to The New York Times once smoked pot, followed by the White House demand that the paper retract every story it has ever published.

The details of the Kerry gaffe and its fall-out hardly call for analysis. In fact, I’m not sure I can do much more than offer for some imaginary historical record –in hopes that some day in the future the planet will get back on its axis— my stunned confusion. Partly I’m amazed that Kerry is such a terrible public speaker, but that’s not really news. What is truly astonishing to me –call me naïve, but this is not false indignation— is the extent to which our mainstream media has played along with the whole thing, reporting as news, as fact, what any sane person has to agree is a willful misinterpretation. (FOX news –always already waiting at that bottom toward which everyone else is racing—reports that Kerry “effectively” said that only an uneducated person would want to serve their country.) If you think I’m overstating the case for sanity, consider that such left-wing radicals as Dick Army, Bill Frist, and Bill O’Reilly all acknowledge that Kerry’s botched joke was just that and that no one could reasonably think that Kerry –a veteran trying to help his party during an unpopular war— intentionally insulted the collective intelligence of “our troops.”

In fact, “misinterpretation” is too generous. The level of cynicism involved here is so abyssal that even “cynicism” seems too generous. The game seems to be that if I can take a grouping of words that have come out of your mouth at any point I can attribute to you any possible meaning that might be attributed to those words, a meaning that then becomes subject to paraphrase, and so on. Question: “Mr. Kerry, have you stopped beating your wife?” Answer: “I refuse to answer such a stupid trick question.” Headline: “KERRY REFUSES TO STOP BEATING HIS WIFE.” After all, he did say “I refuse” when asked the question, no? And now he won’t apologize!

(A sidebar: One of the broad ironies of the last 6 years is the extent which American political discourse has become a brutal embodiment of what was once the right-wing nightmare caricature of Deconstruction.)

Kerry’s political future is not in play at the moment and I doubt this will have much impact on anything except to distract for a few days from the fact that around 100 U.S soldiers were killed in Iraq in October, along with 119 Iraqi police and 1,000 Iraqi citizens (AP) –this last figure, especially, is probably much higher in fact. Oh, and the fact that the Iraqi government is beginning to call the bluff about their autonomy and is actually starting to dictate U.S. military policy. No, what’s important about all this has nothing to do with Kerry or even what happens next week. I’m sure this event is not in fact unprecedented, but I have at least experienced as a new low for American journalism. What the most audacious political strategist would hardly have dared attempt a generation ago has become part of how the White House officially addresses the public, which has become FOX, which has become the norm.

The irony of all this is that even though Kerry –a pretty centrist Democratic all told, and hardly a class warrior—would never, ever have deliberately said what he said, the fact remains that the less educated you are the more likely you are to end up in, say, Iraq. Which does not mean that educated people don’t enlist or that the uneducated who do enlist aren’t intelligent, but simply that ever since the end of the draft the U.S. military has consistently and undeniably presented itself as a career opportunity, a way to get skills or to pay for college for people who don’t yet have employable skills or who can’t otherwise afford college. Obviously the reasons why people join the military have changed dramatically in the last few years, but I think it is fair to say that the majority of the troops who were initially sent to Afghanistan and Iraq –especially those in the National Guard—were not getting what they had signed up for.

In the meantime, the president, Cheney, and an army of talking heads in suits and ties, standing behind podiums and sitting behind desks talk and talk and talk –thanks to the benefits of their educations-- about the nobility of the sacrifice of other peoples’ kids, a sacrifice they themselves have never had to seriously contemplate making because they have, as Cheney said of his staying out of the military during the Vietnam War—“other priorities.”

Kerry’s joke should have been one Yalie taking a shot at another, but if I put on my psychoanalyst’s beard and spectacles I can’t help but think that this story got legs because it touched a nerve. Quite by accident Kerry said something unspeakable, raising the specter of class. Everyone is willing to speak up for the abstract value of “education” but no one dares to mention what happens without it because that would imply that being uneducated is bad. This is one of the great knots of American politics: sacred is the desire to get ahead, to get an education, to make money, to have power, and nothing shall hinder its growth; sacred are the class-bound, the uneducated, the working poor, the broken and resentful, and no one shall impugn the sanctity of their condition. Sometimes out of the mouths of boobs . . .