cspan

C-SPAN: The World’s Dullest Telescope on America’s Loudest Democracy
By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Geneva

Every civilization eventually builds a monument to its own attention span. The Romans had the Colosseum, India has the Taj Mahal, and the United States—ever the pioneer in low-cost masochism—gave us C-SPAN. Conceived in 1979 as a charitable act of optical fiber evangelism, the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network now beams 24 hours of uninterrupted parliamentary tedium to 100 million homes, a feat that makes Sisyphus look like a go-getter with excellent project-management skills.

An international viewer tuning in for the first time might reasonably assume Congress is an avant-garde sleep clinic. There’s Speaker Pro Tempore Johnson (or is it Smith? they breed like photocopies) reciting vote tallies in the hushed monotone of a funeral director who’s misplaced the corpse. Below, lawmakers mill about like hungover undergraduates hunting for the right lecture hall. Somewhere in the middle, a 78-year-old senator from a state with more livestock than people is reading the entirety of “Green Eggs and Ham” into the record—ostensibly to protest the national debt, but mostly to prove he can still stay awake longer than his constituents.

To the rest of the planet, C-SPAN functions as both mirror and warning label. The French, who once guillotined their aristocrats for less, watch slack-jawed as American legislators spend six hours renaming post offices and zero hours on health care. Beijing’s cadres study the footage with the relish of anthropologists discovering a tribe that voluntarily televises its own filibusters. Meanwhile, in Westminster, MPs stream C-SPAN during late-night sittings, comforted that somewhere across the Atlantic an even stiffer upper lip is being maintained—mainly through sheer catatonia.

Yet for all the narcoleptic aesthetics, C-SPAN is the closest thing modern diplomacy has to an unfiltered webcam. Foreign ministries parse the live quorum calls the way Kremlinologists once counted limousines: How many aisle-hops did the moderate from Nebraska make? Did the chair gavel down the progressive from Queens before or after the lunch prayer? The answers, scrawled into cables marked “Sensitive But Unclassified,” determine whether Seoul buys more grain, whether Ankara gets those F-35 parts, and whether Brussels should bother pretending to care about the next debt-ceiling cliffhanger.

The network’s refusal to add a laugh track is itself a geopolitical statement. In an era when every autocrat employs a state broadcaster to polish his jowls to a high sheen, C-SPAN’s static camera angles and beige carpets are a brag: “Look how little we need to manipulate you; our democracy is so sturdy we can afford to bore you to death.” It’s a flex, the political equivalent of Silicon Valley billionaires wearing the same gray T-shirt every day—except the shirt is 250 years old and smells faintly of gunpowder and student-loan interest.

Of course, the joke only works if everyone keeps watching. Viewership spikes whenever democracy threatens to edge into actual drama—impeachments, insurrections, Supreme Court confirmations that feel like the Met Gala for constitutional originalists. Then the world tunes in, popcorn seasoned with schadenfreude, to see whether the experiment will finally tip into prime-time worthy chaos. So far, the republic has disappointed the ratings gods and staggered on, wheezing but upright, like a marathon runner who refuses to drop dead on camera because it would be poor optics.

And so C-SPAN endures, a monument to the proposition that if you stare long enough at the sausage factory, the sausage starts staring back. It teaches the globe two lessons at once: that transparency can be weaponized as tedium, and that the most subversive act in politics might simply be refusing to edit. Somewhere in a windowless Brussels conference room, a Eurocrat sighs, closes the livestream, and books another trip to Washington—reminded yet again that power doesn’t always roar; sometimes it drones in a monotone, forever.