Martin Eisenstadt is a pundit with a credibility problem. This hardly qualifies as a shocking revelation; most pundits have credibility problems. You don't make your bones predicting the future without some errors. As Smooth Jimmy Apollo said on The Simpsons: "Well, folks, when you're right 52% of the time, you're wrong 48% of the time." But Eisenstadt has a bigger problem than most pundits face: even if just days ago he defended himself here on the Barnes & Noble forums, still almost nobody thinks he exists.
That's because he doesn't, but "his" recent political memoir,
I Am Martin Eisenstadt , strenuously asserts otherwise. This makes for a very unusual and fun book: it's not often that you get political satire that spends probably a quarter of its time wandering through slightly silly existential voids seeking validation of the self.
The real story behind the book offers nearly as many riches as the philosophizing and dirt-dishing of the eponymous character. "Martin Eisenstadt" is the creation of filmmakers Eitan Gorlin and Dan Mirvish (the former portrays Eisenstadt; both wrote the book). During 2008's Republican primaries, they created a parking-lot valet character who shared offensively boorish pro-Giuliani videos on Youtube.
Although the two filmmakers didn't realize their initial ambition of developing the character for a TV show, they'd still made a great vehicle for pranking the media and the horse-race attitude of campaign punditry. The character was christened M. Thomas Eisenstadt (in honor of the observation that all neoconservative pundits seem to be Jewish men with Christian first names), and later Martin Eisenstadt, then let loose on the internet.
Martin Eisenstadt claimed to be the Senior Fellow at the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy, named after Warren G. Harding, almost universally considered one of the three worst American presidents. He allegedly appeared on Iraqi TV, discussing plans to put a casino in the Green Zone (complete with a mosque). He leaked the news that McCain campaign staff were being chided by the Hilton family for the famous negative "celebrity" ad that compared Obama to Paris Hilton. He alone disclosed that McCain's new friend Joe the Plumber was related to Charles Keating, the Savings and Loan official whose name inspired the term "The Keating Five" (one of whom, embarrassingly, was John McCain). Finally, it was Martin Eisenstadt who confirmed the story that Sarah Palin said that Africa was a single country.
Mother Jones ran the Baghdad casino story before a quick retraction. Blogs took the Hilton and Keating stories and disseminated the juicy rumors. MSNBC, the LA Times and countless conservative and liberal blogs had a field day with the Africa story. But here's the rub: aside from the Africa comment (which has some bearing in reality), none of those things were true.
It may be difficult to be certain of the differences between fact and fiction in I Am Martin Eisenstadt, but that's the point. It's a fun recount of a series of hoaxes that's told as a clear narrative defense of the hoax's reality. Interestingly, in presenting the book this way, Mirvish and Gorlin use Eistenstadt as a comic castigation of the media's rush to scoop, to constantly turn over new content and examine it only as long as nothing new is coming down the pipeline.
The book can be read without heady interpretations, of course. First and foremost, it's funny. Eisenstadt is an amoral opportunist, an empty main character in a political fable. He's there to throw candidates under the bus when he can upgrade campaigns, to take Elliot Spitzer's prostitute upstairs from the hotel bar, to be a bagman for Dennis Hastert and to abuse his underlings while whoring his own expertise for fat development contracts in Iraq. The book is bawdy (look for many redacted names in the hot tub) and slapstick (Saab trunk, meet Turkish wrestling oil), but it's also very familiar.
Eisenstadt's a jerk, but he's a jerk we've come to know thanks to 24-hour news networks. And it's this familiarity, combined with the hoax's effectiveness, that raises the most interesting questions. As funny as the book is, it forces one to ask whether it even matters that Eisenstadt isn't real. Take the Palin/Africa story. Although exaggerated, it was true. Mirvish and Gorlin didn't make that up: they merely "confirmed" the anonymous source that Fox News' Cam Cameron had used. (For the record, Cameron has never retracted this story.) Meanwhile, real people tell you documented lies every day on 24-hour news. So the question is: what's the essential difference between a fake person confirming a true story and real people telling you fake stories?
The almost insidious fun about the Eisenstadt character's crisis and struggle to prove his existence is that it probably doesn't matter. Although his indiscretions and opportunism are comically outsized, they're only quantitatively different from much of what we already experience. We already see processed two-dimensional people fibbing at us; if they were faked people, it wouldn't be much of a stretch.
I Am Martin Eisenstadt manages to be both thoughtful and funny in two ways. Beyond the slapstick, sports jokes, sexcapades and political maneuvering, it entertains both coming and going. On the surface, it's an absurd media hoax; underneath, it's a valid observation about the credulity of a media whose accountability, impartiality and diligence are already largely hoaxes themselves.
Thus one day "Martin Eisenstadt" can register here, share bullying opinions, fend off anything like a discomforting challenge, sound authentically like a talking-points mouthpiece, and it makes sense. Similarly, Dan Mirvish can show up here next Tuesday and interactively pick apart the fiction of Martin Eisenstadt, and the pieces will still fit. The character works just as well when you deconstruct him as he does when you take him at face value. He's a joke, whether he's "playing" the media or playing as a member of it. He manages to be astutely observant by telling lies. Most importantly, he's fun to read.
