Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote of Political Writers:
"He that shall peruse the political pamphlets of any past reign will wonder why they were so eagerly read, or so loudly praised. Many of the performances which had power to inflame factions, and fill a kingdom with confusion, have now very little effect upon a frigid critic; and the time is coming when the compositions of later hirelings shall lie equally despised. In proportion as those who write on temporary subjects are exalted above their merit at first, they are afterwards depressed below it; nor can the brightest elegance of diction, or most artful subtilty of reasoning, hope for much esteem from those whose regard is no longer quickened by curiosity or pride."
Johnson: Rambler #106 (March 23, 1751)
When we look back at the commentary on the current local, national, international political landscape during this first six months of the current administration, we shall all exclaim--"My GOd! What kool-aid were those keepers of the public's need to know drinking?" How could they squander opportunity after opportunity to pin down the "teleprompter" president? How did they lose track of their responsibility to report the truth which they so richly congratulated themselves for doing during the previous administration? Where is the Klieg light of investigative journalism shining here? On the president's tobacco habit? On the first lady's organic garden patch?
Give us back our voice! This inexplicable dumb-show of sewn-mouth marionettes must end. Report! Account for yourselves! You are the true guardians of civilization--the press corps of the free world--report! Be journalists! Report!
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
The Post-Intelligence-er era
This week the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ceased regular publication and became a completely online, all-digital publication. Another daily newspaper stopped the presses.
Their press release yelped, “The Hearst Corp. announced Monday that it would stop publishing the 146-year old newspaper, Seattle's oldest business, and cease delivery to more than 117,600 weekday readers.” All those “weekday readers” can now go online for their news. In Seattle the daily newspaper has gone the way of that other staple of the fish business, the ice house.
The story went on, “The new operation will be more than a newspaper online, Steven Swartz, president of Hearst Newspapers, said. The so-called ‘community platform’ will feature breaking news, columns from prominent Seattle residents, community databases, photo galleries, 150 citizen bloggers and links to other journalistic outlets.” So, news, sports, weather and opinion—150 “citizen bloggers” worth of opinion. Oh, goodie, more “_____ sucks” journalism from “citizen bloggers.” Deep dishes from “prominent” citizens. Oooo! I’m getting chills.
Another AOL warmed up with “local content.” How visionary.
“Links to other journalistic outlets” means AP, Reuters, BBC, CNN, Fox—the same stories written by the same people working from the same second-hand facts.
Welcome to the post-intelligence-er era.
Their press release yelped, “The Hearst Corp. announced Monday that it would stop publishing the 146-year old newspaper, Seattle's oldest business, and cease delivery to more than 117,600 weekday readers.” All those “weekday readers” can now go online for their news. In Seattle the daily newspaper has gone the way of that other staple of the fish business, the ice house.
The story went on, “The new operation will be more than a newspaper online, Steven Swartz, president of Hearst Newspapers, said. The so-called ‘community platform’ will feature breaking news, columns from prominent Seattle residents, community databases, photo galleries, 150 citizen bloggers and links to other journalistic outlets.” So, news, sports, weather and opinion—150 “citizen bloggers” worth of opinion. Oh, goodie, more “_____ sucks” journalism from “citizen bloggers.” Deep dishes from “prominent” citizens. Oooo! I’m getting chills.
Another AOL warmed up with “local content.” How visionary.
“Links to other journalistic outlets” means AP, Reuters, BBC, CNN, Fox—the same stories written by the same people working from the same second-hand facts.
Welcome to the post-intelligence-er era.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Ordinary Citizens
I’ve encountered the term “ordinary citizens” in my daily reading of news reports with disturbing frequency lately. I make no apology for this bit of pedantry, but the uniquely American idea is that all of us citizens are “ordinary citizens.” That is what is meant by “equality.” So, why the insistence on this differentiation?
I grew up white and fatherless in Montgomery, Alabama in the fifties and sixties. Chaos, destruction, anger, violence, fear, suspicion and outright hatred permeated the cultural atmosphere. It was a time between worlds, as Matthew Arnold put it, “the one dead; the other, powerless to be born.”
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., James Meredith, Floyd McKissick, Bull Connor, John Patterson, George Wallace, Bobby Kennedy, H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, strode across our lives playing out the end-games of official institutional racism—the, let it be said here, ubiquitous Jim Crow civil and social system. This was not just a southern thing, it was an American thing. Churches, schools, community centers, hospitals, YMCAs and YWCAs—every single aspect of the separate-but-(un)equal culture was shattered. Old ways came to an end. Nobody knew what the new ways would be.
In more ways than we ordinary citizens yet know, it’s like that now.
To make matters even more complicated, there was also a war on, and it brought the forced conscription of young men around Montgomery county. The young men taken were mostly the black and the un-well-connected white. Jim Crow working unimpeded at the Federal level.
We lived our day-to-day lives inside a tornado roaring through a bone-yard.
Fifty years on, the civil system in the US—the core institution of the old institutional racism, holding its power as it always has by structural process and political appointment—remains. No longer the exclusive provenance of white people, the civil system is multi-racial and multi-cultural. It retains its steely grip on the real levers of power—the ability to operate “the system,” the sure but mostly unseen hands administering the rules that direct, control and influence the daily behavior of ordinary people. Barak Obama’s triumph is as much a signal of the change in this system as anything else. Surely, and all to the good, Mr. Attorney General Holder notwithstanding, it is not about race anymore.
In the modern civil system, we have exchanged the Jim Crow positioning of African Americans at the bottom rung of society for a far less-obvious, more sophisticated but similarly insidious system devoted to the civil positioning of ordinary Americans without regard to race, creed or national origin. The modern system is based, as it really has always been, on economics and influence. The working and the non-working poor, the old, the sick, the un-or-poorly-educated, the fringe-religious, the drug addicted, the foster-system-ed, the illegally or dubiously resident, the un-credentialed, and the newly scandalized and always manipulable—the un-creditworthy—have replaced the ham-handed color-profiling civil system extant under Jim Crow.
These new “untouchables” of the civil caste system are the modern grist for the institutional grinding wheel—not so readily identifiable as by the color of our skins, but just as easily targetable by the new-breed manipulators who own unfettered access to our information, our systemic fingerprint, our social and cultural identity.
The N-words and the J-words, and the S-words, and the C-words, and the W-words of 20th century America have been replaced by a 21st century profile generated from answers to a series of questions which feed the new –ism Gnostic code. What is your credit score? Do you have insurance? What is your social security number, your driver’s license number, or your government-issued ID number? Who has custody of your children? Are both biological parents present in the home? What was your taxable income the last three years? Do you own or rent? Do you receive or are you required to pay child support? Do you have a chronic illness? Heart disease? Diabetes? Do you have a disability or some other personal situation which causes you to be unable to work? Are you obese? Do you use or have you ever used tobacco? Have you now or have you ever had a sexually transmitted disease? Are you HIV positive? Do you have a compromised immune system? Do you take prescription drugs? Brand name or generic? Have you ever been convicted of a crime? Have you ever been arrested? Would you take a drug test?
From the answers comes your “ordinary citizen” profile, your consequently assigned place in the civil hierarchy.
People insist on continuing to ask, is racism alive in America? Oh, yes, the same old sorry racism that across the USA exploited the labor and defenselessness of women like Rosa Parks, that stoked the angst of W.E.B. Dubois, Malcolm X, Bobby Seale, and John Carlos, that prompted The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King to re-invent non-violent civil disobedience for America.
Pause to ponder that—Civil disobedience.
Everyone knows that on many levels, racism still lurks among us. We don’t need a Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Or an Eric Holder to remind us of our old and current racial sins. We are culturally, like the oft caricatured repentant drunk “taking the cure,” forever trying to do better. But our credibility is shot, our past overshadows our present, and nobody really wants to let us forget it. That’s just how it is right now. How it is.
But the racism debate is a red herring.
What’s lost in all our learned and emotional discussions of racism, of institutionalized racism, is that the civil system, populated with an overwhelming majority of white people during Jim Crow, but today a modern marvel of diversity, exerts ever more complete control over our ordinary citizen lives, our opportunities, our access to capital, education, healthcare, utilities, transportation, technology, child care, elder care, and on and on. And while the old methodology of institutional racism against black people has fallen away, the new methods, casting their much wider net of civil-control, achieve the old ends far more efficiently. Here, the “beyond-ordinary citizens” achieve their inflated status.
We need look no further than the immediate past presidential election. The winner of the election is clearly a fortuitous anomaly. Thank God that barrier is breached forever. But the practical. on-the-ground mechanics of Barak Obama’s electoral victory lead us to one inevitable conclusion. Our national and local political apparatus clearly wants us to continue to stay racially and culturally divided, to get us to continue to vote in blocs, to remain, for their purposes, predictable—“working-class white” vs African Americans vs Hispanics vs Indian-Americans vs Asian Americans. Picking at the scabs over the old wounds of racism keeps us comfortably divided and eminently predictable.
How is that system any different than the Jim Crow system?
Our best thinking and our best exhortations would lead us to say, would that our race would rise up, that it would set aside its differences as to color and gender and creed and national origin. Would that our race would confront today’s injustices not as the scion of Jim Crow’s racial system, but as the scion of Jim Crow’s civil system. Would that our race, our human race, might stand together and proclaim that the least able of America are as worthy as the most able, should have the same access to the national bounty in clean water, air, power, fuel, technology, education, healthcare, opportunity, and that every person in the US merits the respect and deference given to kings from birth right through to the natural ends of our lives. Would that as a race of enlightened humans, we might see past our own petty and narrow prejudices, and view a far greater vista for ourselves. That we would all see one another as “ordinary citizens.”
That was and is the uniquely American idea. That is the idea of “all men are created equal.” Race-baiting from whatever perspective serves one and only one purpose—to keep us diverted from that idea, from that core principle. Racial and social injustices are real. The horrors perpetrated in the name of the superiority of one race over another, one gender over another, one religion over another, one national origin over another, one tribe over another have happened and continue to happen around the globe. Just ask a Bosnian, or a Serb, or a Hutu, or a Tutsi, or a Sunni or a Shiite, or a Christian. Asking people to forget those horrors, or to just get over them, is like asking an amputee to forget the lost limb. Not happening.
Remember, then, the chaos and the horror of what has happened as the overt result of racism, and unite in the vow to never give it place anywhere in our culture again. But with that same passion and unity, remember that racism is a vicious, despicable, intolerable tactic, but it is a tactic, employed to advance a greater strategy—the superiority of one person or one group over another.
With that distinction in mind, we must coldly look to the other –isms in America, economic-ism, age-ism, sex-ism, health-ism, greed-ism, child exploitation-ism, self-aggrandizement-ism, and any other –ism (the glorification of the trivial-ism, for example) which seeks to vault one person’s fundamental civil status above another and confront them for what they have always been, the most sinister -ism of all, the tyranny of civil institutions-ism, the tyranny of the institutional state over its ordinary citizenry. Americans are all “ordinary citizens”: nothing more; nothing less.
Forget that, move beyond that, and all hope for the uniquely American idea lies slain.
I grew up white and fatherless in Montgomery, Alabama in the fifties and sixties. Chaos, destruction, anger, violence, fear, suspicion and outright hatred permeated the cultural atmosphere. It was a time between worlds, as Matthew Arnold put it, “the one dead; the other, powerless to be born.”
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., James Meredith, Floyd McKissick, Bull Connor, John Patterson, George Wallace, Bobby Kennedy, H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, strode across our lives playing out the end-games of official institutional racism—the, let it be said here, ubiquitous Jim Crow civil and social system. This was not just a southern thing, it was an American thing. Churches, schools, community centers, hospitals, YMCAs and YWCAs—every single aspect of the separate-but-(un)equal culture was shattered. Old ways came to an end. Nobody knew what the new ways would be.
In more ways than we ordinary citizens yet know, it’s like that now.
To make matters even more complicated, there was also a war on, and it brought the forced conscription of young men around Montgomery county. The young men taken were mostly the black and the un-well-connected white. Jim Crow working unimpeded at the Federal level.
We lived our day-to-day lives inside a tornado roaring through a bone-yard.
Fifty years on, the civil system in the US—the core institution of the old institutional racism, holding its power as it always has by structural process and political appointment—remains. No longer the exclusive provenance of white people, the civil system is multi-racial and multi-cultural. It retains its steely grip on the real levers of power—the ability to operate “the system,” the sure but mostly unseen hands administering the rules that direct, control and influence the daily behavior of ordinary people. Barak Obama’s triumph is as much a signal of the change in this system as anything else. Surely, and all to the good, Mr. Attorney General Holder notwithstanding, it is not about race anymore.
In the modern civil system, we have exchanged the Jim Crow positioning of African Americans at the bottom rung of society for a far less-obvious, more sophisticated but similarly insidious system devoted to the civil positioning of ordinary Americans without regard to race, creed or national origin. The modern system is based, as it really has always been, on economics and influence. The working and the non-working poor, the old, the sick, the un-or-poorly-educated, the fringe-religious, the drug addicted, the foster-system-ed, the illegally or dubiously resident, the un-credentialed, and the newly scandalized and always manipulable—the un-creditworthy—have replaced the ham-handed color-profiling civil system extant under Jim Crow.
These new “untouchables” of the civil caste system are the modern grist for the institutional grinding wheel—not so readily identifiable as by the color of our skins, but just as easily targetable by the new-breed manipulators who own unfettered access to our information, our systemic fingerprint, our social and cultural identity.
The N-words and the J-words, and the S-words, and the C-words, and the W-words of 20th century America have been replaced by a 21st century profile generated from answers to a series of questions which feed the new –ism Gnostic code. What is your credit score? Do you have insurance? What is your social security number, your driver’s license number, or your government-issued ID number? Who has custody of your children? Are both biological parents present in the home? What was your taxable income the last three years? Do you own or rent? Do you receive or are you required to pay child support? Do you have a chronic illness? Heart disease? Diabetes? Do you have a disability or some other personal situation which causes you to be unable to work? Are you obese? Do you use or have you ever used tobacco? Have you now or have you ever had a sexually transmitted disease? Are you HIV positive? Do you have a compromised immune system? Do you take prescription drugs? Brand name or generic? Have you ever been convicted of a crime? Have you ever been arrested? Would you take a drug test?
From the answers comes your “ordinary citizen” profile, your consequently assigned place in the civil hierarchy.
People insist on continuing to ask, is racism alive in America? Oh, yes, the same old sorry racism that across the USA exploited the labor and defenselessness of women like Rosa Parks, that stoked the angst of W.E.B. Dubois, Malcolm X, Bobby Seale, and John Carlos, that prompted The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King to re-invent non-violent civil disobedience for America.
Pause to ponder that—Civil disobedience.
Everyone knows that on many levels, racism still lurks among us. We don’t need a Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Or an Eric Holder to remind us of our old and current racial sins. We are culturally, like the oft caricatured repentant drunk “taking the cure,” forever trying to do better. But our credibility is shot, our past overshadows our present, and nobody really wants to let us forget it. That’s just how it is right now. How it is.
But the racism debate is a red herring.
What’s lost in all our learned and emotional discussions of racism, of institutionalized racism, is that the civil system, populated with an overwhelming majority of white people during Jim Crow, but today a modern marvel of diversity, exerts ever more complete control over our ordinary citizen lives, our opportunities, our access to capital, education, healthcare, utilities, transportation, technology, child care, elder care, and on and on. And while the old methodology of institutional racism against black people has fallen away, the new methods, casting their much wider net of civil-control, achieve the old ends far more efficiently. Here, the “beyond-ordinary citizens” achieve their inflated status.
We need look no further than the immediate past presidential election. The winner of the election is clearly a fortuitous anomaly. Thank God that barrier is breached forever. But the practical. on-the-ground mechanics of Barak Obama’s electoral victory lead us to one inevitable conclusion. Our national and local political apparatus clearly wants us to continue to stay racially and culturally divided, to get us to continue to vote in blocs, to remain, for their purposes, predictable—“working-class white” vs African Americans vs Hispanics vs Indian-Americans vs Asian Americans. Picking at the scabs over the old wounds of racism keeps us comfortably divided and eminently predictable.
How is that system any different than the Jim Crow system?
Our best thinking and our best exhortations would lead us to say, would that our race would rise up, that it would set aside its differences as to color and gender and creed and national origin. Would that our race would confront today’s injustices not as the scion of Jim Crow’s racial system, but as the scion of Jim Crow’s civil system. Would that our race, our human race, might stand together and proclaim that the least able of America are as worthy as the most able, should have the same access to the national bounty in clean water, air, power, fuel, technology, education, healthcare, opportunity, and that every person in the US merits the respect and deference given to kings from birth right through to the natural ends of our lives. Would that as a race of enlightened humans, we might see past our own petty and narrow prejudices, and view a far greater vista for ourselves. That we would all see one another as “ordinary citizens.”
That was and is the uniquely American idea. That is the idea of “all men are created equal.” Race-baiting from whatever perspective serves one and only one purpose—to keep us diverted from that idea, from that core principle. Racial and social injustices are real. The horrors perpetrated in the name of the superiority of one race over another, one gender over another, one religion over another, one national origin over another, one tribe over another have happened and continue to happen around the globe. Just ask a Bosnian, or a Serb, or a Hutu, or a Tutsi, or a Sunni or a Shiite, or a Christian. Asking people to forget those horrors, or to just get over them, is like asking an amputee to forget the lost limb. Not happening.
Remember, then, the chaos and the horror of what has happened as the overt result of racism, and unite in the vow to never give it place anywhere in our culture again. But with that same passion and unity, remember that racism is a vicious, despicable, intolerable tactic, but it is a tactic, employed to advance a greater strategy—the superiority of one person or one group over another.
With that distinction in mind, we must coldly look to the other –isms in America, economic-ism, age-ism, sex-ism, health-ism, greed-ism, child exploitation-ism, self-aggrandizement-ism, and any other –ism (the glorification of the trivial-ism, for example) which seeks to vault one person’s fundamental civil status above another and confront them for what they have always been, the most sinister -ism of all, the tyranny of civil institutions-ism, the tyranny of the institutional state over its ordinary citizenry. Americans are all “ordinary citizens”: nothing more; nothing less.
Forget that, move beyond that, and all hope for the uniquely American idea lies slain.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
NOT GOING GENTLE . . .
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. . . .”
From: Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” 1952
Several of my 60-ish and 70-ish friends have confided to me recently they are giving up, going on unemployment until they can draw Social Security, or going for “early retirement” which means drawing a slightly diminished SS check and opting into Medicare at the earliest possible moment. It’s just too hard to find a decent job or to start a business in “these economic times.”
Eight months ago most people never used the words, “the economy” in a sentence even once in a week. They were too busy using the words that are making a comeback now, “gas prices.” Now they say, ”the economy” or “this economy” every couple of hours. We’re scared and demoralized. The president scared us even more so he could get his precious stimulus bill passed. It passed. $13 more a week (if you’re working) starting around June. Oo-rah!
Then what?
Part of the problem is the age-discrimination thing. It’s hard to get people excited about it. What with so many single moms needing in-vitro fertilization and all. The forty-somethings at the bureaus which are supposed to enforce the laws against ageism have no vested interest in vigorously doing that. They think, “what if I need that job? Why should it go to or stay with that old person?” We’re used to that thinking because we subscribed to it back in the me-decades, the seventies, eighties and nineties. What goes around . . .
What my 60ish and 70ish fellows really mean is, “I’m dropping off the grid.” We’ll draw our puny government assistance all right—we deserve it; we paid into it all these years. But we’ll do things for which we can get paid in cash, and like Daschle or Geithner, we’ll forget to report it. Hey, we’re old, our memories are going.
This is how we’ll get our revenge against the marginalization of our kind—us old folks. We’ll babysit, carpenter, yardwork, powerwash, appliance-fix, car-fix, odd-job, flyer-handout, business-consult and any number of other invisible economy jobs, and the government won’t get the benefit of our taxes any more, or of our individual and collective wisdom (which it clearly doesn’t want, representing as it does, according to that limp-viper, Harry Reid, the “failed thinking of the past.”
Fail this!
Oh no, we’ll NOT go gentle into the good night of desperation and compliant despair, walking lockstep into the faceless maw of government-run warehouses for the old; we’ll coldly, quietly, invisibly, with all the beauty, cunning and calculation of that most elegant villanelle, “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. . . .”
From: Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” 1952
Several of my 60-ish and 70-ish friends have confided to me recently they are giving up, going on unemployment until they can draw Social Security, or going for “early retirement” which means drawing a slightly diminished SS check and opting into Medicare at the earliest possible moment. It’s just too hard to find a decent job or to start a business in “these economic times.”
Eight months ago most people never used the words, “the economy” in a sentence even once in a week. They were too busy using the words that are making a comeback now, “gas prices.” Now they say, ”the economy” or “this economy” every couple of hours. We’re scared and demoralized. The president scared us even more so he could get his precious stimulus bill passed. It passed. $13 more a week (if you’re working) starting around June. Oo-rah!
Then what?
Part of the problem is the age-discrimination thing. It’s hard to get people excited about it. What with so many single moms needing in-vitro fertilization and all. The forty-somethings at the bureaus which are supposed to enforce the laws against ageism have no vested interest in vigorously doing that. They think, “what if I need that job? Why should it go to or stay with that old person?” We’re used to that thinking because we subscribed to it back in the me-decades, the seventies, eighties and nineties. What goes around . . .
What my 60ish and 70ish fellows really mean is, “I’m dropping off the grid.” We’ll draw our puny government assistance all right—we deserve it; we paid into it all these years. But we’ll do things for which we can get paid in cash, and like Daschle or Geithner, we’ll forget to report it. Hey, we’re old, our memories are going.
This is how we’ll get our revenge against the marginalization of our kind—us old folks. We’ll babysit, carpenter, yardwork, powerwash, appliance-fix, car-fix, odd-job, flyer-handout, business-consult and any number of other invisible economy jobs, and the government won’t get the benefit of our taxes any more, or of our individual and collective wisdom (which it clearly doesn’t want, representing as it does, according to that limp-viper, Harry Reid, the “failed thinking of the past.”
Fail this!
Oh no, we’ll NOT go gentle into the good night of desperation and compliant despair, walking lockstep into the faceless maw of government-run warehouses for the old; we’ll coldly, quietly, invisibly, with all the beauty, cunning and calculation of that most elegant villanelle, “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Friday, January 16, 2009
Moving on . . .
In praise of letting go
My son, Josh, told me Eric Clapton won’t perform his “Tears in Heaven” anymore. Fortunately, we have plenty of high quality versions of Clapton singing that timeless paean to loss and guilt, so we are none the poorer. He’s moved on. Authentic grief has a duration; there comes a time for the letting go.
Disbelief and outrage at the loss of people's life savings in the market debacle have given way to a kind of empty-socket dull ache. Kubler-Ross called it acceptance, but I do not think people have actually accepted their losses so much as they have only become inured to them. So many people have lost so much. Now, it’s hard to get even mildly exercised about another story of a fund emptied, another scumbag “financial advisor” absconding with his ill-gotten gains. I'm bone weary of brokerage commercials beating their Lipper averages at us. They must think people are over the horror too. It’s been like watching a blowout bowl game narrated by a commentator with a three metaphor vocabulary. “Market Hit Again”; “Stocks Rebound Briefly Then Fade” ; “Carnage Continues In Financial Sector.” Can we let go of the great 2008 disaster—the grieving for everyone, everywhere’s defenestrated financials? Let’s move on.
How about those bailouts? I’m not even going there. The fatigue is crushing.
Up next, the "Green” tsunami. Everywhere I look declarations of Green-ness wail their declarations that they are not boiling the planet. It’s not us, we’re GREEN! Everything from concrete trucks to plastic grocery sacks claim to be “Green.” A lithe barista wished me a “Green” day. “Have a green day!”
Oy.
Will the immense mounds of refuse the crowds at the inauguration leave behind be “Green?” I have the distinct impression that it will be a long, long time before we can move on from green . . .
My son, Josh, told me Eric Clapton won’t perform his “Tears in Heaven” anymore. Fortunately, we have plenty of high quality versions of Clapton singing that timeless paean to loss and guilt, so we are none the poorer. He’s moved on. Authentic grief has a duration; there comes a time for the letting go.
Disbelief and outrage at the loss of people's life savings in the market debacle have given way to a kind of empty-socket dull ache. Kubler-Ross called it acceptance, but I do not think people have actually accepted their losses so much as they have only become inured to them. So many people have lost so much. Now, it’s hard to get even mildly exercised about another story of a fund emptied, another scumbag “financial advisor” absconding with his ill-gotten gains. I'm bone weary of brokerage commercials beating their Lipper averages at us. They must think people are over the horror too. It’s been like watching a blowout bowl game narrated by a commentator with a three metaphor vocabulary. “Market Hit Again”; “Stocks Rebound Briefly Then Fade” ; “Carnage Continues In Financial Sector.” Can we let go of the great 2008 disaster—the grieving for everyone, everywhere’s defenestrated financials? Let’s move on.
How about those bailouts? I’m not even going there. The fatigue is crushing.
Up next, the "Green” tsunami. Everywhere I look declarations of Green-ness wail their declarations that they are not boiling the planet. It’s not us, we’re GREEN! Everything from concrete trucks to plastic grocery sacks claim to be “Green.” A lithe barista wished me a “Green” day. “Have a green day!”
Oy.
Will the immense mounds of refuse the crowds at the inauguration leave behind be “Green?” I have the distinct impression that it will be a long, long time before we can move on from green . . .
Monday, January 12, 2009
Civility-Snarkility
WSJ writer David Ulin wrote today about “Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation” by David Denby. Ulin quotes Denby, “I think it's reasonable to ask: What are we doing to ourselves? What kind of journalistic culture do we want? . . . What kind of national conversation?" And then Ulin goes on to say, “what we need is a revolution in sensibility, a return to civil discourse, a way of opening, rather than closing down, debate."
Civility is a choice. Snarkility is a choice. The snarkist’s shtick is, “we give you pukes out there just what you deserve.” The civilist’s shtick is, “we tell you what you need to know with respect."
I’m not really bothered by either attitude. I remember them from jr. high. In both camps, if you’re in, you’re cool. If not, you’re worse than excrement. The one says it overtly; the other obliquely. It’s a convenient way to ascertain the world.
“In the context of no context,” author George W. S. Trow warned us this was coming. He wrote of the changes in how we do “History” and of the decline of adulthood:
HISTORY
History had been the record of growth, conflict, and destruction.
THE NEW HISTORY
The New History was the record of the expression of demographically significant preferences: the lunge of demography here as opposed to there. . . In the New History, the ideal became agreement rather than well-judged action, so men learned to be competent only in those modes which embraced the possibility of agreement. The world of power changed. What was powerful grew more powerful in ways that could be easily measured, grew less powerful in every way that could not be measured.
What is now counted as powerful in modern discourse is how many “views” can you “document,” not how compelling or convincing is your argument. What may be off-putting about the snarkists is they are offensive. They are, however, in the parlance of the new history, aligned with the current demographic lunge; thence, successful. Civilists are out. Dead meat.
If one is being ingenuous when engaging in discourse, one wants the other party to at least comprehend one’s point. One hopes to, if not convince outright, at least move the other person one's way. Civility for its own sake won’t accomplish that, but it may potentiate that. Snarkility doesn’t give a flying ____ whether it’s comprehended; it just wants to be seen to look good.
What kind of journalistic culture do we want? One that tells us things we would not otherwise know. Whether the tone of the telling is civil or snarky, let stories be told, let facts come out, let pictures be painted, let revealing words flow, let things that could not be measured be told anyway. Let more than what is cool to say be said. Let the free press discover its voice and let that voice yawp out something worth its hearing.
Civility is a choice. Snarkility is a choice. The snarkist’s shtick is, “we give you pukes out there just what you deserve.” The civilist’s shtick is, “we tell you what you need to know with respect."
I’m not really bothered by either attitude. I remember them from jr. high. In both camps, if you’re in, you’re cool. If not, you’re worse than excrement. The one says it overtly; the other obliquely. It’s a convenient way to ascertain the world.
“In the context of no context,” author George W. S. Trow warned us this was coming. He wrote of the changes in how we do “History” and of the decline of adulthood:
HISTORY
History had been the record of growth, conflict, and destruction.
THE NEW HISTORY
The New History was the record of the expression of demographically significant preferences: the lunge of demography here as opposed to there. . . In the New History, the ideal became agreement rather than well-judged action, so men learned to be competent only in those modes which embraced the possibility of agreement. The world of power changed. What was powerful grew more powerful in ways that could be easily measured, grew less powerful in every way that could not be measured.
What is now counted as powerful in modern discourse is how many “views” can you “document,” not how compelling or convincing is your argument. What may be off-putting about the snarkists is they are offensive. They are, however, in the parlance of the new history, aligned with the current demographic lunge; thence, successful. Civilists are out. Dead meat.
If one is being ingenuous when engaging in discourse, one wants the other party to at least comprehend one’s point. One hopes to, if not convince outright, at least move the other person one's way. Civility for its own sake won’t accomplish that, but it may potentiate that. Snarkility doesn’t give a flying ____ whether it’s comprehended; it just wants to be seen to look good.
What kind of journalistic culture do we want? One that tells us things we would not otherwise know. Whether the tone of the telling is civil or snarky, let stories be told, let facts come out, let pictures be painted, let revealing words flow, let things that could not be measured be told anyway. Let more than what is cool to say be said. Let the free press discover its voice and let that voice yawp out something worth its hearing.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
In Defense of Peggy Noonan
"In the afternoon they came unto a land,
In which it seemed always afternoon."
It's afternoon in America, when soap operas reign and old movies run. When kids come home from school hungry for a snack and ready for a nap. When old folks actually do nap. When the crews go out and open or change the direction of the HOV lanes. When shifts change. When chefs put the evening's roasts in their ovens. When the lines grow longer at Starbucks, and people think about their plans for the night. Did I set my TiVo for the new shows? What am I wearing to the club? Do I need to pick up something for dinner?
We have a new president this afternoon. He'll either be an effective communicator and an effective congressional arm-twister or he won't. He'll either influence the oil sheiks or he won't. He'll stoke the fires of trade or he won't. He'll create new programs that'll get passed and even funded or they won't.
The same hustlers will make a boodle of money off his stimuli that made a boodle of money off the mortgage giveaways. Businesses will go in and out of business. The wars will wind down and up depending on how much vigor the radical islamists have and how much will we’ll have to push back. People will pay more or less taxes, but they’ll pay taxes. The “system” will grow and grow and grow.
But, President Obama cannot supernaturally fix the ills of America's generational entitlement programs. He will not make "every man (or woman) a king." He won't put a chicken in every pot and a car in every covered parking space. He will not provide free healthcare or free post-secondary education for our kids, and grandkids. He won't make public transit free. He won't do these and many more of the things a large percentage of the people who voted for him believe he will do because those things are not do-able by anyone. They are not do-able.
In her column in the Wall Street Journal this week, Peggy Noonan (among other things) is saying these things and more are actually believed by a large number of Americans--that a president can actually cause these things to come to pass. If we can blame a president for the destruction caused by a hurricane, then we can expect a president to fix social security--how hard could that be compared to stopping a hurricane? We can expect a president to provide universal, high quality healthcare. We can expect a president to keep oil prices low and make wind and solar power cost-effective, and find real life on Mars.
But Peggy said something else--there are large numbers of people in the 24/7 news cycle business, who actually believe a president can do these things, and they want to believe Barak Obama is the president who will do them. That is what she meant by “awe.” It's as if they believe the movie stars they salivate about all the time are actually the people they play in the movies. They seem to think being glib, handsome, slender and buff make you politically efficacious. They do not.
Presidents don't have the power to do the things a great and growing number of people believe they have the power to do. They can't prevent suffering. They can't prevent natural disasters, or even man-made economic disasters. They can't, with the stroke of a pen, change the economic climate, or actually put your out of work uncle back to work, or heal your Aunt Edith's lung cancer, or ease the pain of loss when your child dies in battle. They are just humans. They do not possess these powers.
If it seems as though I am selling our new president short, that is not my intention. I'm just saying what Peggy Noonan is saying--running for office isn't the same as being in office. Presidents are just humans. So, let's just get real.
In which it seemed always afternoon."
It's afternoon in America, when soap operas reign and old movies run. When kids come home from school hungry for a snack and ready for a nap. When old folks actually do nap. When the crews go out and open or change the direction of the HOV lanes. When shifts change. When chefs put the evening's roasts in their ovens. When the lines grow longer at Starbucks, and people think about their plans for the night. Did I set my TiVo for the new shows? What am I wearing to the club? Do I need to pick up something for dinner?
We have a new president this afternoon. He'll either be an effective communicator and an effective congressional arm-twister or he won't. He'll either influence the oil sheiks or he won't. He'll stoke the fires of trade or he won't. He'll create new programs that'll get passed and even funded or they won't.
The same hustlers will make a boodle of money off his stimuli that made a boodle of money off the mortgage giveaways. Businesses will go in and out of business. The wars will wind down and up depending on how much vigor the radical islamists have and how much will we’ll have to push back. People will pay more or less taxes, but they’ll pay taxes. The “system” will grow and grow and grow.
But, President Obama cannot supernaturally fix the ills of America's generational entitlement programs. He will not make "every man (or woman) a king." He won't put a chicken in every pot and a car in every covered parking space. He will not provide free healthcare or free post-secondary education for our kids, and grandkids. He won't make public transit free. He won't do these and many more of the things a large percentage of the people who voted for him believe he will do because those things are not do-able by anyone. They are not do-able.
In her column in the Wall Street Journal this week, Peggy Noonan (among other things) is saying these things and more are actually believed by a large number of Americans--that a president can actually cause these things to come to pass. If we can blame a president for the destruction caused by a hurricane, then we can expect a president to fix social security--how hard could that be compared to stopping a hurricane? We can expect a president to provide universal, high quality healthcare. We can expect a president to keep oil prices low and make wind and solar power cost-effective, and find real life on Mars.
But Peggy said something else--there are large numbers of people in the 24/7 news cycle business, who actually believe a president can do these things, and they want to believe Barak Obama is the president who will do them. That is what she meant by “awe.” It's as if they believe the movie stars they salivate about all the time are actually the people they play in the movies. They seem to think being glib, handsome, slender and buff make you politically efficacious. They do not.
Presidents don't have the power to do the things a great and growing number of people believe they have the power to do. They can't prevent suffering. They can't prevent natural disasters, or even man-made economic disasters. They can't, with the stroke of a pen, change the economic climate, or actually put your out of work uncle back to work, or heal your Aunt Edith's lung cancer, or ease the pain of loss when your child dies in battle. They are just humans. They do not possess these powers.
If it seems as though I am selling our new president short, that is not my intention. I'm just saying what Peggy Noonan is saying--running for office isn't the same as being in office. Presidents are just humans. So, let's just get real.
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