Gossipmongers: Enemies of the Governing Class : Gossography: The book on Nancy Reagan is a prime example of how a healthy democracy brings the social elite down to eye level.

NEW YORK —  “Remember,” gossip columnist Liz Smith cautioned a few years ago during the last orgy of scandal, “they don’t have gossip in Russia.” Whether or not civics classes should be scrambling now to adopt gossip as one of the basic tenets of democracy, Smith has a point.

Russians do, of course, gossip; it is a primary form of transmitting information there. But the Soviet Union does not have the massive gossip apparatus we have here in America--no putative Kitty Kelleys waiting to link Raisa Gorbachev to a Russian crooner, largely because Russia does not have the sort of fluid social dynamics out of which a gossip industry springs and by which it is nourished. Does this mean that Kelley, Julia Phillips and the journalistic pack hounds staking out the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach are really democrats wielding their cudgels for the public weal? In a sense, it does.

Gossip as an industry--as distinguished from chatting over the back-yard fence--originated under Walter Winchell in the ‘20s, when a host of forces had conspired to change America’s social landscape. Before urbanization, immigration, industrialization and mass communication, the vast American populace had little sense of itself as a group, much less as a power that might challenge the old elites who had always set the cultural agenda in America: the Wall Street bankers, the industrialists, the genteel aristocrats, the salon set, the rich, the educated, the intellectual and the privileged.

Winchell’s perverse genius--and it couldn’t have been exercised unless the times were right--was to realize gossip could be a weapon in the tussle between the social elites and the much larger mass.

Gossip was a great leveler, a verbal equalizer. By prying into the private lives of the important, by revealing who was courting whom, who was boffing whom, who was cavorting with gangsters, who was homosexual, which spouses were having affairs and which couples were about to divorce and a dozen other secrets, indiscretions and peccadilloes, Winchell transformed his illustrious subjects from silver to clay and, in the process, helped loosen their grip on the social order.

They had the prominence, but we had the “goods.” Our knowledge was our empowerment and our revenge.

Of course no one thinks of gossip as a democratic tool for redress--primarily because the social elites who get gossiped about still define our cultural standards even if they no longer set the terms for how their own lives are regarded.

The governing metaphor of elites toward gossip nowadays is garbage. Over the last few weeks, we have been told repeatedly that gossip is “trash,” “litter,” “junk”--which means that we are vicariously rummaging through the trash barrel and messing ourselves. It also means that the critics of gossip would have us believe the issue is essentially a moral one. By reveling in gossip, we somehow transgress the bounds of decency.

Putting aside the possibility that it is from just such detritus that we may come to know these public figures and demolish the official versions of them that their spin doctors have created, the Reagans and their champions wouldn’t be bellyaching so if they didn’t perceive the implied threat in gossip not to the moral order but their social order.

In a sense, gossip is like Walt Whitman’s howl against hierarchies; and even as a literary form, it is as democratic as Whitman’s lists were. Whether it is Winchell’s epigrammatic items racing down the page in a cascade of ellipses or Kelley’s string of seeming trivialities in her “gossography,” gossip literally reduces everything to the same level of importance. The high affairs of state or the low affairs of the boudoir stand shoulder to shoulder. Facts march in democratic ranks.

That is precisely the point, say gossip’s detractors. There is no scale of values in the tabloids or in Kelley’s gossographies--meaning that gossip doesn’t accept their scale of values. But by establishing a potpourri of facts, gossip is really reordering the priorities of information and changing its use. One might say that gossip is the public’s chance to reclaim history from the celebrities by destroying the accepted priorities.

If we read nothing but gossip, we would comprehend the universe as a place of moral turpitude, chaos, pettiness, suspicion and, above all, uncertainty--uncertainty because gossip always suggests other possibilities beyond the official version of events. What were Frank and Nancy doing during their luncheons?

Most accepted journalistic and biographical practices, in fact, try to foreclose uncertainty. They deal in the coin of established fact. Gossip, on the other hand, invites us to speculate. A form of participatory reality programming, it lets us complete the narrative, so to speak, by letting us fill in the blanks, and in so doing, lets us conform reality to the shape we want. We know what Frank and Nancy were doing . . . .

And so, through gossip, the Reagans and the Kennedys and whoever else is grist for the mill at any given time become protagonists in a democratic drama in which they self-destruct for us to reassure us--their lives reduced to rubble, to use the old gossip metaphor. It couldn’t happen to Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. It could only happen in America where the fires of democracy burn bright, the social elites are damned and gossip is an inalienable right.