The world if full of heroes. Firemen. Neonatal ICU nurses. Teachers. My Mom. Lots of heroes.
But who are the biggest goddamn damn heroes of all?
Why the media of course!
Because after months and months and months of letting Donald J. Trump literally phone-it-in and say whatever and passively pointing their cameras at Donald J. Trump (or at an empty stage and Trump banner at which Donald J. Trump may appear in the near future) the media has begun to nip furiously at the ankles of the monster they helped unleash. From The Daily Beast:
Has the Media Worm Finally Turned on Donald Trump?
Donald Trump has had his roughest media week in the campaign, with journalists finally asking tough questions of the Republican candidate.
Is this the moment when the news media—at long last—has begun to hold Donald Trump to account?
And will the Republican frontrunner finally succumb to the accepted rules of politics he had previously flouted—an outcome the Washington establishment frequently predicts and desperately desires?
If so, the media will claim a fair share of the credit...
Big.
Damn.
Heroes.
And for the record, there actually is a group of people who really have been onto Trump from the beginning and, more importantly, have been raising the alarm for decades about the toxic confluence of ignorance, rage and racism within the Republican Party that makes it such easy picking for fascists like Trump and theocrats like Raphael "Ted" Cruz.
This group is completely ignored by the Beltway Media, and known in the Conservative media as America-hating, God-trashing, terrorist-loving, cut-and-running, baby-killing, dirty Commie surrender-monkeys.
As the economy shudders to a full stop again, world markets freak out again, and we wait expectantly for the President of the United States to politely invite the ambassadors from Jesusland to join hands with him in the spirit of comity and civic obligation to save the nation...
...politely receive their counteroffer to instead, say, cut his nads off with a band-saw...
...politely counter-counteroffer to instead let Eric Cantor throw seven million poor or sick Americans into the active volcano of his choice...
...politely watch as the GOP storms off in a brand new 2011 GM Huff, swearing to "terminate this democracy with extreme prejudice" to the cheers of their Teabagger Base...
...and then politely withdraw to a safe distance with his advisors to ponder the question "Why is "The Professional Left" (We're famous!) such shrill assholes?"...
...I shall relax and enjoy my memories of another (fictional) Presidential Address on the subject of another, all-out effort to save the day initiative, as it was penned by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. in 1972.
...
In 1989, America staged the Big Space Fuck, which was a serious effort to make sure that human life would continue to exist somewhere in the Universe, since it certainly couldn’t continue much longer on Earth. Everything had turned to shit and beer cans and old automobiles and Clorox bottles. An interesting thing happened in the Hawaiian Islands, where they had been throwing trash down extinct volcanoes for years: a couple of the volcanoes all of a sudden spit it all back up. And so on.
This was a period of great permissiveness in matters of language, so even the President was saying shit and fuck and so on, without anybody’s feeling threatened or taking offense. It was perfectly OK. He called the Space Fuck a Space Fuck and so did everybody else. It was a rocket ship with eight-hundred pounds of freeze dried jizzum in its nose. It was going to fired at the Andromeda Galazy, two-million light years away. The ship was named the Arthur C. Clarke, in honor of a famous space pioneer.
It was to be fired at midnight on the Fourth of July. At ten o’clock that night, Dwayne Hooblere and his wife Grace were watching the countdown on television in the living room of their modest home in Elk Harbor, Ohio, on the shore of what used to be Lake Erie. Lake Erie was almost solid sewage now. there were man-eating lampreys in there thirty-eight feet long. Dwayne was a guard in the Ohio Adult Correctional Institution, which was two miles away. His hobby was making birdhouses out of Clorox bottles. He went on making them and hanging them around his yard, even though there weren’t any birds any more.
Dwayne and Grace marveled at a film demonstration of how jizzum had been freeze-dried for the trip. A small beaker of the stuff, which had been contributed by the head of the Mathematics Department at the University of Chicago, was flash-frozen. Then it was placed under a bell jar and the air was exhausted from the jar. The air evanesced, leaving a fine white powder. The powder certainly didn’t look like much, and Dwayne Hoobler said so– but there were several hundred million sperm cells in there, in suspended animation. The original contribution, an average contribution, had been two cubic centimeters. There was enough powder, Dwayne estimated out loud, to clog the eye of a needle. And eight hundred pounds of the stuff would soon be on its way to Andromeda.
“Fuck you, Andromeda,” said Dwayne, and he wasn’t being coarse. He was echoing billboards and stickers all over town. Other signs said, “Andromeda, We Love You,” and “Earth has the Hots for Andromeda,” and so on.
There was a knock on the door, and an old friend of the family, the County Sheriff, simultaneously let himself in. “How are you, you old motherfucker?” said Dwayne.
“Can’t complain, shitface,” said the Sheriff, and they joshed back and forth like that for a while. Grace chuckled, enjoying their wit. She wouldn’t have chuckled so richly, however, if she had been a little more observant. She might have noticed that the sheriff’s jocularity was very much on the surface. Underneath, he had something troubling on his mind. She might have noticed, too, that he had legal papers in his hand.
“Sit down, you silly old fart,” said Dwayne, ” and watch Andromeda get the surprise of her life.”
“The way I understand it,” the sheriff replied, “I’d have to sit there for more than two-million years. My old lady might wonder what’s become of me.” He was a lot smarter than Dwayne. He had jizzum on the Arthur C. Clarke, and Dwayne didn’t. You had to have an I.Q. of over 115 to have your jizzum accepted. there were certain exceptions to this: if you were a good athlete or could play a musical instrument or paint pictures, but Dwayne didn’t qualify in any of those ways, either. He had hoped that birdhouse-makers might be entitled to special consideration, but this turned out not to be the case. The Director of the New York Philharmonic, on the other hand, was entitled to contribute a whole quart, if he wanted to. he was sixty-eight years old. Dwayne was forty-two.
There was an old astronaut on the television now. He was saying that he sure wished he could go where his jizzum was going. But he would sit at home instead, with his memories and a glass of Tang. Tang used to be the official drink of the astronauts. It was a freeze-dried orangeade.
“Maybe you haven’t got two million years,” said Dwayne, ” but you’ve got at least five minutes. Sit thee doon.”
... And he couldn’t look his wretched old friends in the eye, so he looked at the television instead. A scientist there was explaining why Andromeda had been selected as a target. There were at least eighty-seven chrono-synclastic infundibulae, time warps, between Earth and the Andromeda Galaxy. If the Arthur C. Clarke passed through any one of them, the ship and its load would be multiplied a trillion times, and would appear everywhere throughout space and time.
“If there’s any fecundity anywhere in the Universe, ” the scientist promised, “our seed will find it and bloom.” One of the most depressing things about the space program so far, of course, was that it had demonstrated that fecundity was one hell of a long way off, if anywhere.
Dumb people like Dwayne and Grace, and even fairly smart people like the sheriff, had been encouraged to believe that there was hospitality out there, and that Earth was just a piece of shit to use as a launching platform.
Now Earth really was a piece of shit, and it was beginning to dawn on even dumb people that it might be the only inhabitable planet human beings would ever find.
...
Meanwhile, Senator Flem Snopes of Mississippi, Chair-man of the Senate Space Committee, had appeared on the television screen. He was very happy about the Big Space Fuck, and he said it had been what the American space program had been aiming toward all along. He was proud, he said, that the United States had seen fit to locate the biggest jizzum-freezing plant in his “l’il ol’ home town,” which was Mayhew.
The word “jizzum” had an interesting history, by the way. It was as old as “fuck” and “shit” and so on, but it continued to be excluded from dictionaries, long after the others were let in. This was because so many people wanted it to remain a truly magic word—the only one left.
And when the United States announced that it was going to do a truly magical thing, was going to fire sperm at the Andromeda Galaxy, the populace corrected its government. Their collective unconscious announced that it was time for the last magic word to come into the open. They insisted that sperm was nothing to fire at another galaxy. Only jizzum would do. So the Government began using that word, and it did something that had never been done before, either: it standardized the way the word was spelled.
The man who was interviewing Senator Snopes asked him to stand up so everybody could get a good look at his cod-piece, which the Senator did. Codpieces were very much in fashion, and many men were wearing codpieces in the shape of rocket ships, in honor of the Big Space Fuck. These cus-tomarily had the letters “ U.S.A.” embroidered on the shaft. Senator Snopes’ shaft, however, bore the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy.
This led the conversation into the area of heraldry in general, and the interviewer reminded the Senator of his campaign to eliminate the bald eagle as the national bird. The Senator explained that he didn’t like to have his country represented by a creature that obviously hadn’t been able to cut the mustard in modern times.
Asked to name a creature that had been able to cut the mustard, the Senator did better than that: he named two—the lamprey and the bloodworm. And, unbeknownst to him or to anybody, lampreys were finding the Great Lakes too vile and noxious even for them. While all the human beings were in their houses, watching the Big Space Fuck, lam-preys were squirming out of the ooze and onto land. Some of them were nearly as long and thick as the Arthur C. Clarke.
...
I would, of course, very much like it if the President of the United States would break into the Strategic Motherfucking Pejorative Reserve to call these motherfucking jackals on the Right out.
Why do I think that is unlikely?
Because of "some in Washington" ...
We pause now for a brief history lesson from the Year of Our Lord 2004, which we shrill assholes of "The Professional Left" had spent screaming for candidate John Kerry to stand up and for fuck's sake fight the Hell back.
He didn't and he lost, and we thought just maybe, in the rubble of his failed Presidential bid, the Democratic Party leadership might have finally learned down to its bones the following Very Valuable Political: unless you are a saint or a famous non-violent civil rights leader, you absolutely cannot afford to stand there with a grin on your face and talk about bipartisanship and brotherhood while your enemies empty entire outhouses full of lies and slander on your head.
From Al Franken's "The Truth with Jokes" (excerpted here with eye-catching emphasis added by me):
The point is, every good candidate should have a positive agenda. But you also have to fight back.... And that's where Kerry came up short. In politics, you can never turn the other cheek. Especially when you're fighting the Christian right.
Nothing demonstrates the "viciousness gap" between the Bush and the Kerry campaigns better than their respective national conventions.
In Boston, the Democrats made the horrible mistake of responding to a very ironic attack from the Bush team, the claim that Democrats had nothing to offer but "partisan anger." Instead of hitting back with the obvious countercharge that, no, it's Republicans who were the party of partisan anger, the Democrats decided to internalize the message of their abuser and try to be nicer.
The Republicans, on the other hand, ran a convention so partisan and angry that its fundamental dishonesty passed nearly unremarked.
Even though Democrats almost to a man believed that President Bush was an unrivaled horror show who was driving the nation off a cliff, it was easy to watch the Democratic Convention and conclude that the Democrats thought everything was hunky-dory in America, and that their only motivation was the sunny belief that their nominee could do an even better job than the incumbent.
This was no accident. In fact, it was the result of uncharacteristic message discipline on the part of the Democrats. Below the stage at Boston's Fleet Center, an elite team of wordsmiths had the thankless job of "cleansing" the speeches before they reached the teleprompter. Here's how someone who worked in the speechwriting office described it to me, on the condition that I not reveal his or her name:
One of our primary responsibilities was to take out negative comments. We were very concerned about casting the party in a positive light. If there was a line like "Bush has overseen a cataclysmic downturn in the economy and is running the country into the ground," we would have to change it to something like "Kerry will strengthen our economy and put the country on the right track." We'd flip all of the attacks into positive messages. Specifically, we didn't mention George Bush by name. I'd be surprised if there were a single speech that went into the teleprompter that had the President's name in it. Some speakers said it, but they were going off-message. We weren't even allowed to say "White House." I remember somebody asking about that, and being told to write "some in Washington."
I asked him or her (okay, it's a "him") how he felt when he saw the unflaggingly venomous Republican Convention.
Boy, I hope we didn't fuck up. That was my reaction.
But fuck up they had. After the Democratic Convention, Kerry's standing in the polls went up by 4 percent, the smallest post-convention bounce in the history of the Newsweek poll. Compare that to Bush's bounce of 13 percent.
Over in the Better Universe, that would be filed under "Got it. Lesson learned".
But seven years later, over in this Universe...
Remarks of President Barack Obama Weekly Address Saturday, April 30, 2011
Washington, DC
Now, I know that in this tough fiscal environment, it’s tempting for some in Washington to want to cut our investments in clean energy.
WEEKLY ADDRESS: Putting the American People First
Remarks of President Barack Obama
As Prepared for Delivery
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Washington, DC
That’s what’s holding us back – the fact that some in Congress would rather see their opponents lose than see America win.
No, Mr. President. not "some in Washington" or "Some in Congress". The words you are looking for are "those fucking Republicans who are trying to fuck me by fucking you the fuck up".
Bottom line, if Obama's approach to governing was proving popular, then there'd be little fault. If triangulating against liberals bolstered his numbers with independents, then that'd be cool! Heck, if slapping my first-born in the face bumped his numbers up with independents, I'd tolerate it. But it's not. His current approach isn't working. Capitulating to the GOP on matters big (and small) only reinforce the notion that he's weak. No one cares that he's the "grownup" in the room. No one cares that he's "reasonable" or "compromising" or "serious."
Because of the gutless unwillingness of anyone but shrill assholes of "The Professional Left" to name the true name of the monsters who are killing this country, we see once again how very much language speaks louder than words.
Jimmy Wales, the iconoclastic founder of Wikipedia, made a troubling announcement at the seventh annual Wikipedia conference: Nobody wants to edit Wikipedia anymore. Is Wikipedia going to shrivel up and fade away?
Wales told the AP that the number of Wikipedia editors is slowly dwindling. "We are not replenishing our ranks," he said, "it is not a crisis, but I consider it to be important." According to Wales a lot of the core Wikipedians have simply aged out, got married and found that they have better things to do with their time. Previous rumors of Wikipedias demise have focused on a lack of any new stuff to add; but this seems like a real existential threat.
...
And Twitter and Facebook have sucked up all the cognitive surplus younger internet users might have once devoted to building up Wikipedia and shattered it into a million fleeting hashtags.
...
We have a cherished saying in my family: "Let's you and him fight."
Which, translated, is our way of recognizing-with-an-Ozark-laugh that the world is full of people who have lots of good ideas about how other people should spend their abundant "spare time".
What's happening with Wikipedia is not a web phenomenon: it's just the latest manifestation of same something-for-nothing shell game played by every two-bit Alexander the Great I (and probably you) have ever worked for.
It is the fantasy on which turned just about every executive staff session I was ever dragooned into attending into a meeting of all-quarterbacks and no wide-receivers where every wild, dumb idea was flung blindly down-field to no one at all -- in the passive "someone really should move the building two feet to the left!" voice -- by organizational deadwood who later tell their loved ones what heroes they had been that day.
It is the fantasy that allows elected goofs get away with promising that if gummint were just "run like a business" everything would be fine. (Which is bullshit. Most gummint -- most lousy gummint -- is run exactly like a lousy business: idiots on top who got there because or their last names or their college roommates, making far too much money than they are worth by loading up the men and women who actually till the soil and tread the grain [so to speak] with more work than they can possible accomplish [the goof on top didn't get there by telling the public "No"]...and then bitching about their general laziness and clockwatchery, or outsourcing the whole deal to some third party for a quick buck.)
It is the fantasy that has turned unpaid interns into unwitting scabs, and WalMart into an American success story instead of something foul and feudal about which we should be heartily ashamed.
It is the ancient Faustian bargain of the slaveholder – an army of uncomplaining servants created by, oh, let’s say “Providence” to provide the privileged with an endless stream of luxuries at bargain basement prices, and around which mankind has historically erected all manner of depraved theologies explaining why those who do the work should not enjoy the fruits of their labor, but should content themselves sitting on the porch, singin' spirituals.
[Tom Friedman] also treads as lightly as a chubby mouse in a catnip bomber-jacket navigating the main floor of the Lion House just around sup-sup-sup-suppertime, because far too much of his personal well-being is staked to his main gig -- delivering ten-year-old platitudes about globalization to twenty-years-out-of-date, Conservative CEOs. Rich, white men with Republican rock-ribs, who adore George Bush and have voted straight GOP-ticket since they were old enough to golf in ugly pants.
Men who live in First Class – sometimes, to be clear and fair, through dint of long hours and hard work, which are traits to be admired – and have deluded themselves into believing that they can outsource the rivets and steel that hold the plane together, the engines that make it go and the flight crew that navigates it safely though the storm…and yet somehow they will be able to fly on in comfort forever, fueled by consultants and canny financial valuation trickery.
Friedman catches such men as the last of their employees plummet wholesale Earthward, as they sit in the skeletal airframe of their once-proud ships and the deathly cold wind of 30,000 feet is whistling though their ass-cracks and he advises that, perhaps, Steps Of Some Kind Should Be Taken.
...
We may or may not be able to educate our way out of the corner we’re in, but to even attempt to do so, we first have to come squarely to terms with who we are, what we are, and how we really got here.
To do that, consider this, which is one of my favorite quotes from Charlie Chaplin.
“The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.”
That is the dirty truth and true root of our problem; We have become the saddest thing Charlie Chaplin could imagine.
“We have become used to luxury.”
Those $.99 chicken fingers? The $12 bumper-to-bumper, inside-and-out car-wash? The three-oranges-for-a-buck sale down at the Jewel?
These are, all of them, luxury items, created not by a band of rugged Libertarians hewing agricultural and technological miracles out of the living rock, but made possible by an ocean of cheap labor, federal subsidies and a continent rich beyond the dreams of Avarice in natural resources.
What we’re all about (and always have been) is manufacturing what, for most of human history, has been luxury goods, selling them cheap and living fat off the margins. There is nothing at all wrong with making a living doing this, except that in the long run, every race will go to the cleverest, and right now our problem is that we don’t believe that.
We are drowning in our own mythos of Sunshine, Freedom and Manifest Destiny.
We have take a fatal dose of our own Exceptionalism propaganda and have internalized down to our tubby little toesies the belief that God Almighty wants us to live in opulence.
That God wants gas prices to be low.
...
In 1861 the South was prosperous specifically because of the forced labor of four million brown people who were reviled, exploited, abused and utterly necessary.
In 2006, America is prosperous specifically because of the peonage-cheap, illegal labor of twelve million brown people who are reviled, exploited, abused and utterly necessary.
We tolerate with a wink-and-a-nudge a system that simultataneously criminalizes a labor force of twelve million to keep them underground and terrified, and then carefully extracts their labor for pennies.
Any social policy which doesn’t confront immigration on those terms will fail and fail badly because, in the end, we really only have two choices: Either a renegotiation of the social contract to pay working people a living wage, or an open recognition that we will forever rely more and more on cheaper and cheaper labor to remain spoiled and Holy.
So far we have chosen neither. We have chosen to burn through our collective inheritance of wealth and prestige to make foolish choices, set foolish policies, wage foolish wars, without having to feel any pain. Like crack-heads, we have stolen from our parents and mooched from our children enough fast, high-interest cash to allow us to trundle along in a state of oblivious Eloi-ness where we don’t have to make any hard decisions and our God-Given Right to Comfort and Ease keeps us from asking too many tough questions about where all this Free Lunch is actually coming from.
But Physics and Economics are brutal loan-sharks and we can’t all live forever on borrowed money, no matter how successful certain individuals like Dubya have been at doing just that.
...
I use Wikipedia for the occasional fast quote or summary here and there. I appreciate its convenience, just as I appreciate the convenience of free-of-charge services like YouTube and Blogger and gmail.
But I do not own them, and if they went away tomorrow I would find other tools with which to do my thing.
"Crowdsourcing", "cognitive surplus" and suchlike have never been anything but webslang for Homer J. Simpson's famous campaign slogan: "Can't someone else do it?"
When did Sean Hannity get elected to anything and become the cryptkeeper of the Reagan legacy?
Good question, Mr. Wolcott, and many thanks for the link.
So Mr. Wolcott continues using his Vorpal sword to great effect, and Mr. O'Donnell has stepped up. And, as readers know, Dr. Paul Krugman is already doing yeoman's work for the cause (like this from today's NYT):
Very Serious Suckers
Jonathan Chait has an excellent piece documenting the way in which what he calls the establishment, and I call Very Serious People, misjudged the way the debt ceiling thing would play out:
The failure to understand the crisis we were entering was widely shared among centrist types. When Republicans first proposed tying a debt ceiling hike to a measure to reduce the deficit, President Obama instead proposed a traditional, clean debt ceiling hike. He found this position politically untenable for many reasons, one of them being that deficit scolds insisted that using the debt ceiling to force a fiscal adjustment was a terrific idea, and that connecting the deficit debate to a potentially cataclysmic financial event was the mark of seriousness.
...
I can’t help but notice that Chait’s list of chumps is basically the same as the list of people who puffed up Paul Ryan and gave him an award for fiscal responsibility. Enough said.
...
Rather than muting the partisanship and hammering out a compromise so the wealthiest country on earth can keep paying its bills, the two sides seem farther apart than a week ago.
...
Each legislative body has now demonstrated that it can blow up the other’s preferred alternative. What neither has shown is the ability to craft a bill that could actually gain enough support from both parties to break the gridlock.
The day someone finally slap's Tom Friedman's dick out of this sock puppet's mouth, I will dance an Irish jig on Michigan Avenue.
I mean, how am I -- a mere scribbler of transient words in the Wet Sand of Time -- a mere pisser of ephemera on the Urinal Cake of Eternity -- supposed to bear up under this disaster having already been shattered by the death of conversation, the death of the novel, the death of the short story, the death of radio, the death of live theater, the death of the rock and roll, the death of a salesman, the death of irony, the death of Ivan Ilyich, the death of stand-up, the death of the Republican Party, the death of retail,the death of portraiture, the death of Superman, the death of disco, the death of the Democratic Party, the death of the LP, the death of the newspaper, the death of the Western, the death of cities, my death of cold, the death of the essay, the death of Pets.com, the death of the cool, the death of science fiction, the death of the Hired Man, the death of the symphony, the death of traditional marriage, the death of Marat, the death of the metric system, the death of the bar scene, the death of the Ball Turret Gunner, the death of abstract expressionism, the death of outrage,
and of course sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence: throw away respect,
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?
My doughty, authoritative criticisms (here and here) seem to have just about brought the blogosphere to its knees. Looking over some of the responses, I'd have to say that a lot of people either help make my point or miss it altogether. You can look here, here, here, and here for some of the smarter responses. They fall into a few categories.
"You're Comparing Apples and Oranges." The blogosphere is intended to be ephemeral, so accept it on its own terms.
Good advice, if only bloggers would follow it. As I keep saying, I'd have a better attitude about the blogosphere if it presented itself as a flea market instead of a revolution in human affairs. The MSM, imho, is way less self-congratulatory than the blogosphere.
"So's Your Mother." There's lots of bad stuff in old media, so nyah-nyah.
Right. My claim is not that old media are perfect, it's that blogging is a format that makes producing good stuff difficult, which is why there's much less good stuff in the blogosphere.
...
The app supports the fundamental human desire to engage in a sustained way with narrative and argument, which is why it will displace blogging as a medium of cultural importance. Blogging is a cultural dead end, trapped by its own idiosyncracies...
I watch with growing concern as young journalists get channeled into content mills where they post three, seven, who knows how many blog snippets a day. I spoke with one young guy who told me he puts up seven posts a day and would like to break into longer form by doing only three. One of the most promising young journalists I know couldn't take it and quit for medical school. Another young writer tells me he longs to "get off the hamster wheel."
...
And, yes, I admire David Broder.
You know, I'm gonna wear the seat of my Sunday pants all shiny if I have to keep sitting through this same damn wake over and over again.
Or hey, maybe blogging isn't dead?
Maybe this isn't about blogging at all?
Maybe this is about the main thing that monster sites like the Daily Beast really, really care about: traffic.
Maybe this is about larding up their biggest traffic driver with lots of new staff and interns and guest writers and djinns and curatoculturalists and grommet-oglers who conjure a transparently artificial, eyeball-attracting "controversy" out of thin air by whipping a handful of contrarian eggs around inside a very large glass house
Blogging & the Failure of the Legacy Media: College Football Edition
by Alex Massie
Like an over-matched Jack Russell terrier, plucky Jonathan Rauch will neither let go nor go away. I salute the scamp and his rascally determination to snap at any passing ankle!
And, actually, I take his point that new technology such as Kindle singles, apps and whatever comes next will offer writers and readers new and interesting ways to engage with one another. But it's hardly Blogs vs Apps since why can't you have both?
...
in order to induce people to believe that there is some there there.
Maybe I don't give a rat's ass what Mr. Rauch has to say on the subject or, for that matter, anyone else who has read the Last Rites over the blogosphere's from high atop Mt. Insider over the last several years.
Maybe it's just a game they play for their own reasons.
Maybe it's just..."One Ordinary Day With Peanuts".
/Spoiler Alert/ If you haven't read Shirley Jackson's brilliant little monster of a short story originally published in "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction" in January of 1955, first, shame, shame on you (PDF copy here) and second, go no further if you don't want to know how it ends./
The story is 90% about a man named Mr. John Phillip Jonhson, who walks out of his front door on a beautiful day with his pockets stuffed with candy and peanuts and proceeds to be extraordinarily generous and genial and all-around terrific to just about everyone he meets. From a single mother trying supervise the moving of her meager possessions into a truck while also watching her tiny son, to a young man and women that Mr. Johnson plucks out of their individual, harried mornings and sends off to enjoy the beautiful day all expenses paid, to a lost kitten...Mr. Johnson's sincerity and kindness are almost miraculous.
But then, when he gets home, every one of our expectations are upended...
...
Mrs. Johnson came out of the kitchen and kissed him; she was a comfortable woman, and smiling as Mr. Johnson smiled. "Hard day?" she asked.
"Not very," said Mr. Johnson, hanging his coat in the closet. "How about you?"
"So-so," she said. She stood in the kitchen doorway while he settled into his easy chair and took off his good shoes and took out the paper he had bought that morning.
"Here and there," she said.
"I didn't do so badly," Mr. Johnson said. "Couple young people."
"Fine," she said. "I had a little nap this afternoon, took it easy most of the day. Went into a department store this morning and accused the woman next to me of shoplifting, and had the store detective pick her up. Sent three dogs to the
pound—you know, the usual thing. Oh, and listen," she added, remembering.
"What?" asked Mr. Johnson.
"Well," she said, "I got onto a bus and asked the driver for a transfer, and when he helped someone else first I said that he was impertinent, and quarreled with him.
And then I said why wasn't he in the army, and I said it loud enough for everyone to hear, and I took his number and I turned in a complaint. Probably got him fired."
"Fine," said Mr. Johnson. "But you do look tired. Want to change over tomorrow?"
"I would like to," she said. "I could do with a change."
"Right," said Mr. Johnson. "What's for dinner?"
"Veal cutlet."
"Had it for lunch," said Mr. Johnson.
Excuse me now while I outfit my laptop with black crepe and turn all of my pictures of Mark Twain to the wall.
Of course, if pressed at, perhaps, a Davos media mogul bukkake roundtable on, oh, let's say, the Future of Post-industrial Media Ecosystems and Integrated Wisdom Vector Visioneering they'll make a little moue and explain how they rilly, rilly regret it, but times are tough and sacrifices have to be made and it's whole new world now and where the fuck is that intern with my latte and a big sack of free content I can used to pad out my cash cow bold, new direction in journalism?
WaPo Staffers Pissed at Publisher’s Paycheck By Alec Jacobs on March 25, 2011 4:54 PM
WaPo‘s 2010 SEC filings were released this week. In a year when the newspaper saw tough cuts in staff, publisher Katharine Weymouth (granddaughter of famed Post publisher Katharine Graham) earned $537,000 and a bonus of $483,750, plus an additional $1,053,441 based on a pre-established long-term pay plan. She’s also getting a 16.5% raise in her 2011 salary. Not too shabby. Except that now, staffers at WaPo are…displeased. ...
And from "Broadcast News"...24 long years ago.
Because everything old and filthy is new and even filthier again.
Step 1: Give a high-profile aggregator of other people's stuff that nice Davos Lady an assload of dough. She's the one in the middle with her arm around Newt Gingrich.
The "Disgusting" Way AOL Supposedly Fired People Yesterday
Nicholas Carlson
An ex-AOLer reached us this morning to say he thought it was "disgusting" the way AOL handled layoffs yesterday.
According to this guy, people got fired in groups of 20 to 30.
Source:
Managers had no clue if anyone on their teams were getting laid off. They were called into a separate meeting as a diversion, and then those being laid off were called into another and axed in a big group setting.
They pulled 20-30 people into a conference room and told them they "Don't have roles at aol anymore." [Severance is] 1 week for every year worked.
It's really quite appalling.
Step 3: Issue a a memo apparently written by robots programmed with nothing but Buzzspeak Bingo vocabulary that speaks inspiringly about branding and hyperlocality but fails to mention the massive fucking layoffs that are happening at that exact moment and are (I'm just guessing here) going to be the complete front-and-center focus of every actual living human at AOL, except by noting obliquely and fleetingly that management sorta regrets having to feed so many people to the rats (all emphasis added by me.)
From: Armstrong, Tim Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2011 5:46 PM To: Armstrong, Tim Subject: AOL's Next Step
AOLers -
Today is the next critical step on the comeback trail for AOL. We are creating a next generation hyper-local, national and global media company, and every action we've taken since AOL became an independent company has taken us further down that path. Our strategy remains clear: create high quality content experiences for consumers, at scale. As the digital landscape quickly evolves, so must our business, and we must continue to transform our organizational structure to one that works for today’s Internet.
Today, we are announcing an organizational structure that will significantly improve AOL’s ability to focus on growth. The structure will also impact areas of our team -- making the decision to reduce staff levels is a necessary part of rebalancing our workforce...
... AOL is a global brand and a global opportunity and we are doing the hard work that will once again make the company an industry leader. ...
There are three important aspects to the structural changes we are making today. ... The third is our shift from India being a business process center to India being a consumer products group focused on the APAC market.
New Structure: Investing in our Brand Portfolio
AOL’s brand portfolio...
...an AOL brand architecture...
...build best-in-class brands...
AOL’s brands are measured with a consistent set of criteria...
...will continue the brand refinement process over time...
AOL will have four areas of significant brands...
We have a clear path to brand success...
...turbo-charged with the addition of the Huffington Post to our brand portfolio...
(driftglass aside/ In my head, this was the precise point where that thing happen when you have repeated a common word over and over to the point where it momentarily becomes complete meaninglessness and I started to ask myself, "Wait a minute, is 'brand' even a word?" Because by now it has started to sound so weird -- "Brand"..."Brand"..."Brand" -- that I worry that it is really some sort of trance-inducing, semi-subliminal, thought-clouding incantation and I have been cleverly ensorcelled into thinking that "Brand" was once-upon-a-time, in fact, a word with a definition and an origin and everything when is instead obviously just a dead, empty syllable banging against the window in the wind. Corporate glossolalia. "Brand"..."Brand"..."Brand". See what I mean? Just fucking gibberish. Which, I suspect, was sort of the point./ End driftglass aside.)
We have an AOL brand that enjoys 99% brand awareness...
...our commitment to reinvigorating the AOL Brand...
...begin to shift brand perception of AOL...
...named as one of the top 50 brands...
...continue to invest in the AOL Brand...
...support best-in-class brands...
It goes on...and on, but I haven't the heart. Step 4 (Still top-secret and TBA): Reset the every clock in the world to 1994.
Step 5: Sit back and watch the underpants gnomes poop out one million ingots of solid WIN!
...I learned to loathe Harold and Erica, the two upscale avatars of upper-middle-class values that Brooks marches through life in the story. And then I began to resent the omniscient narrator who narrates this exercise in unthinking consumption and privilege that is, supposedly, the ideal of happiness; it's like watching a creepy middle-aged man fuss over his Barbie and Ken dolls, posing them in their expensive accessories and cars and houses and occasionally wiggling them in simulated carnal relations (have no worries, though: Like Barbie and Ken, no genitals appear anywhere in the book), while periodically pausing to tell his audience how cool it all is, and what is going on inside his dolls' soft plastic heads.
-- David Brooks almost tripped over his own dick by accidentally reminding everyone that he is almost always horribly wrong about everything.
Especially things that involve sending other people's children off to die for one of his pet Neocon foreign adventures.
Fortunately for his future book sales, his genuinely jaw-dropping gaffe happened on an obscure foreign program from an exotic and distant land called "PBS" where 10 of the 11 people watching were doing so because the tepid drone of Jim Lehrer's voice puts their newborns to sleep better than the vibrations from either their washing machine or their idling car.
In my case, however, it was enough to halt me mid-stride -- flamingo-like -- bowl of pasta in one hand and say "Did David Fucking Brooks really just say what I think he said?" aloud to an empty room:
MARK SHIELDS: I think [Libya is] going to play out, Jim, absent a visible, factual evidence of a tragedy of great human dimensions there, I think there will be no entry on the part of the United States militarily.
I mean, Secretary Gates again delivered the sobering news for the administration and to the administration critics, which was a no-fly zone is an act of war. You know, you don't simply say -- it's not like a no-passing zone. We don't put up orange cones. I mean, you have to go in and take out the anti-aircraft capability of the other country.
So, I think that's -- that course, which was being trumpeted and heard rather loudly, became muted. But -- and there's no way we're going to act unilaterally. I think the experiences the United States has had in Iraq and Afghanistan in this first decade of the 21st century have given great cause -- caution and hesitation to the idea of a surgical strike anywhere.
JIM LEHRER: How do you see it?
DAVID BROOKS: Well, the experience has given us great caution.
On the other hand, you have got the following logistics sort of playing out. We have imposed sanctions on Gadhafi. We have more or less isolated him and his regime. There is really no escape hatch for them. And the protesters are marching.
And so we have put them in a situation where we -- they say there is no escape. We're not going to be forgiven. We have to fight to the end and just stick this out.
So, we have given them a strong incentive to do everything possible to crush the activists. And, so, if we...
JIM LEHRER: You mean to Gadhafi?
DAVID BROOKS: To Gadhafi.
JIM LEHRER: An incentive to Gadhafi...
DAVID BROOKS: Right.
And, so, I understand why the sanctions -- I supported the sanctions. But if you are going to give the dictator an incentive to kill a lot of people, well, maybe you shouldn't stop there.
And so are we really going to stand by? If his only choice is, I'm going to do whatever it takes, are we really going to do nothing, the whole world? That is a tough thing to do.
JIM LEHRER: But that's the question, isn't it?
DAVID BROOKS: Right. And so I'm -- I understand Mark's cautions, but I don't think we can just -- to the extent that this has happened, and to what we know about Gadhafi, I don't think we can stand there while he massacres people. We should expect the violence is going to get worse, because he has no incentive to not do that.
MARK SHIELDS: The invasion and occupation of Libya, which is what we are talking about...
DAVID BROOKS: Well...
MARK SHIELDS: No, it is.
DAVID BROOKS: ... invading and occupying.
MARK SHIELDS: You don't go in, you don't go in -- you don't send a platoon in. I mean, this is a war, what we're talking about. It's a civil war in the making. And it is real.
We have as little leverage in Libya as we have any place in the world. It's unlike Egypt, where there was an army, an institution that could provide the option of leadership and the reality of leadership. There's no other countries that have any influence over them.
I mean, absent a collective act by many, many countries, you know, I just don't see the United States acting.
JIM LEHRER: What about General Deptula's idea, or not -- it wasn't an idea; it was an option that he said, well, there's that one area in Tripoli that is fortified; that's where Gadhafi and his folks are; take them out?
MARK SHIELDS: I mean, it always sounds great. I mean, it really does.
JIM LEHRER: That's the surgical...
MARK SHIELDS: That's the surgical -- I mean, let's just go in and take him out, and then we're gone.
And we don't have -- I mean, if there is evidence of a massacre, then there will be collective action. You know that. And I am tried -- I'm sorry that people are being hurt. It strikes me that the tide is going in the direction of the anti-Gadhafi forces right now, from all the reports I have had and am privy to.
So, I hope that that happens. But I do not see the United States -- one more land war in the Middle East?
DAVID BROOKS: But, I mean, nobody is talking about sending troops on land. I mean, the activists don't even want them arming us. They don't want them doing a surgical strike. I don't particularly think that is a particularly good idea.
They're asking for a little way to shift the balance of power. And we have had no-fly zones in Iraq and elsewhere around the world. It hasn't meant we have had to take over the country. In Saddam's reign, after the first Desert Storm, we had a no-fly zone. And, so, I'm not sure it is a good idea, but I'm not sure we can walk up this far and then suddenly stand back and say, OK, sorry.
MARK SHIELDS: After we wiped out Saddam's military capacity in the Persian Gulf War.
It was -- the war was stopped after 96 hours because they had been totally decimated and devastated. There was no resistance. He did...
DAVID BROOKS: Saddam had -- was using gunships on Shiites. We don't need to -- on the south, but...
This is what stopped me cold in my living room: the stark revelation that America's Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual had obviously forgotten the entire first Gulf War.
Had just slipped the whole thing down the memory hole.
Had forgotten that Iraq had been carved up by treaty like a roast after the first Gulf War.
Had forgotten that even after his army had been destroyed and his country had been cauterized by no-fly zones, Saddam Hussein had managed to hang onto power.
Had forgotten that it was precisely this fact -- that Saddam Hussein had been contained but not overthrown by the massive and sustained application of American military power -- that provided the impetus for PNAC thugs in media, in think tanks and in the White House
to lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie us into the disaster that is George Bush's Iraqi Debacle.
So you'd think that unless David Fucking Brooks is planning on spending the rest of his life going from town to town individually apologizing to the Americans whose lives he ruined and futures he bankrupted by being one of the Dear Leader's eager, blood-soaked, smirking Neocon boosters for his Excellent Iraqi Adventure, simple common decency would suggest that Bobo once-and-for-all shut the fuck up about Iraq already.
But of course he can't.
He can't because it squats out there, bestriding his resume and dwarfing his many, many other journalistic failures. He can't because it is the ragged hole where a massive professional tooth used to be that he just cannot keep his tongue away from.
And what's more, he doesn't have to.
He doesn't have to because we now live in a country where there is no penalty whatsoever for Conservatives who are grotesquely and serially wrong about matters of life and death. And so well-paid buffoons like Brooks have no incentive to learn the lessons of Iraq that other, less-privileged citizens have paid for with their lives. Instead, he and his ilk are left with their lives, fortunes and positions of power in American politics and media blissfully untouched, free to whitewash their failures over and over again, unmolested by the inconvenient realities of the pain and ruin they left in their wake.
Whitewashing the failure in Iraq
Posted By Stephen M. Walt
On the eve of President Obama's speech to the nation on Iraq, some of the people who dreamed up this foolish war or helped persuade the nation that it was a good idea are getting out their paintbrushes and whitewash. I refer, of course, to the twin op-eds in today's New York Times by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and neoconservative columnist David Brooks.
Wolfowitz, you will recall, was one of the main architects of the war, having pushed the invasion during the 1990s and as soon as he became Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Bush adminstration. He was the guy who recommended invading Iraq four days after 9/11, even though Osama bin Laden was nowhere near Iraq and there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with it. For his part, Brooks was an enthusiastic cheerleader for the war in the months prior to the invasion, and he continued to defend it long after the original rationale had been exposed as a sham.
As for Brooks, his column is a transparent attempt to retroactively justify an unnecessary war. He marshals an array of statistics showing how much things have improved in Iraq, but all his various numbers show is that after you've flattened a country and dismantled its entire political order, you can generate some positive growth rates if you pour billions of dollars back in. He claims this "nation-building" effort cost only $53 billion (hardly a trivial sum), but that figure omits all the other costs of the war (which economist Joseph Stiglitz and budget expert Linda Bilmes estimate to be in excess of $3 trillion). And like Wolfowitz, Brooks is mostly silent about the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis and thousands of dead and wounded Americans who paid the price for their naïve experiment in social engineering.
...
Of course, what Wolfowitz and Brooks are up to is not hard to discern. They want Americans to keep pouring resources into Iraq for as long as it takes to make their ill-fated scheme look like a success. Equally important, they want to portray Iraq in a somewhat positive light now, so that Obama and the Democrats get blamed when things go south.
...
Sadly, there is, of course, nothing new here. This is all part of a "specific, mutagenic strain of "Wingnut Doublethink"" that I referred to here as Strategic Forgettery --
...the training of an entire generation of Conservatives to mindlessly attack!attack!attack! the "Left" while holding themselves willfully and belligerently ignorant of what their Movement is really doing and who is really running it -- is, in the end, Ronald Reagan's most potent and vile political legacy: Strategic Forgettery.
-- one part of a set of radical blueprints upon which the entire Modern Conservative Movement has been constructed, and which as turned the Right into what is it today: a mob of willfully amnesiac killbots who stay angry, crazy and electorally-compliant only by completely forgetting their origins, founders, history, pedigree and basically everything else that happened before whatever Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity upchucked into their skulls yesterday.
And finally, in the most hilariously, multi-dimensional, letter-perfect, public example of "Irony" I have unearthed in many a year, consider that this succinct and damning description of exactly the sort of brutalizing mental and moral devolution upon which the entire Conservative Brain Caste depends --
"Anti-ideology consists of the attempts to shrink men's minds down to the range of the immediate moment, without regard to past or future, without context or memory -- above all, without memory. so that contradictions cannot be detected, and errors or disasters can be blamed on the victim.
"In anti-ideological practice, principles are used implicitly and used to disarm the opposition, but are never acknowledged and are switched at will when it suits the purpose of the moment. Whose purpose? The gang's. This men's moral criterion becomes not "my view of the good -- or of the right -- or of the truth", but "my gang, right or wrong."
"This is what makes today's public issues and discussions so sickeningly false and futile. Most issues rest on so many wrong premises and carry so many contradictions that instead of the question: "Who is right?" one is constantly and tacitly confronted with the question: "Which gang do you support?""
-- was penned by Ayn Rand -- the materfamilias of the whole fucking unholy Movement -- in 1967.
They have become the very monsters they used to write crappy fiction about.
Proving once again that there is never a topic so unrelated to hippies that he cannot stretch it into an occasion for hippie-punching, David Brooks uses the announcement that "The Daily Beast" is gobbling up "Newsweek" to explain how hipsters destroyed American culture.
And no, I am not kidding.
According to the David Brooks time-line of Recent American History, there was once a Golden Age of magazining, when every Floyd-the-Barber knew who was singing "il Pagliacci" at the Met that night and every Arnold Ziffle lived and died over the two-fisted exploits of Norman Mailer.
Rather conspicuous by its absence from Mr. Brook's gauzy, expurgated version of Recent American History is any mention of any equally rustic Negro Persons who also spent the 1950s and 60s waiting anxiously by their suburban tract-house mailboxes for the latest news about what Andy Warhol was up to, which starlet Frank Sinatra was banging, and who was holding court at Elaine's. This is because Conservative dogma holds that, except for Rochester and Amos & Andy and some early, pioneering work done by Abraham Lincoln on American Negro 1.0, black people disappeared completely from American history for nearly a century until Reagan discovered the American Negro 2.0 dressed in furs and whizzing through the streets of the Emerald City in a Cadillac all thanks to their wily abuse of the Welfare System that White People had so graciously provided.
(Later, a 3.0 version would go on to open a string of dry cleaners, move uptown and campaign for George H. W. Bush, while a smaller, 3.1 release would figuratively sit on Nancy Reagan's lap
as she explained to the intricacies of United States drug policy. As a note to future historians you must understand that, in the Small Gummint obsessed Conservativeland of today, the terrifying nanny-state implications of the First Lady of the United States coming personally to your home with her Secret Service detail to lecture you on the evils of drug use are no cause for alarm as long as the First Lady is a Republican named "Reagan" and the lecturee is a tiny black person.)
At its gauzy, expurgated, Brooksian apex, American Civilization was run by happy, conformist White Men, spruced up with perky women who vacuumed in pearls and heels, and enlivened by the occasional splash of color here and there: the humble Asians who cooked for the Cartwrights and raised Eddie's Father's son; the noble Mexicans who were all Guy Williams or Ricardo Montalban and just wanted to get along with White People; the scary Red Injuns who were all Guy Williams or Ricardo Montalban and just wanted to kill White People until their Wise Chief found out how awesome White People could be; and a couple of festively encrypted gay people named Paul Lind Lynde (thanks, Tengrain) and Charles Nelson Reilly.
Then some time passed.
Then, out of nowhere, hippies rode into town!
Hippies, with their smelly hair, clitorises, jungle music and marijuana cigarettes! No one knows who they were or where they came from, but for no reason whatsoever they started wrecking the place!
About a generation ago, this earnest self-improvement ethic came under attack. People no longer believed that there was such a thing as a common culture that all educated Americans should study and know. The new ethos valued hipness, not class.
Moreover, the self-esteem hurricanes blew across the landscape. You don’t have to read or listen to boring stuff to possess character. You are wonderful just the way you are.
Bad hippies! Bad!
Also rather conspicuous by their absence are things like the Civil Rights Movement, because Bobo's idiotic Reader's Digest Decline and Fall of White Conformist Suburban Nirvana fantasy could never survive its sharp and terrible rebuke. But that is the advantage of being a Conservative; when facts and history don't in any way square with your stupid ideology, you can just scrap facts and history.
I mean, its not like there are
any consequences to lying on the Right anymore.
And so, down the memory hole goes the Civil Right Movement, followed by the Women's Right Movement, the Vietnam War, the American Indian Movement, the Gay Rights Movement, Watergate and all the other seismic shifts in American culture caused by non-White, non-Suburban, non-Straight and/or non-Male persons taking American democracy seriously enough to stand up and insist that their rights were just as valid and their opinions just as worthy of inclusion in the marketplace of American Ideas as Ward Cleaver or The Lone Ranger.
Also down the memory hole goes any acknowledgment of the fact that the more confident and leisurely pace of an earlier time was made possible by a middle class who were enjoying record prosperity thanks to political and economic trends against which David Brooks' Conservative Movement has waged a relentless, ideological jihad; things like an export economy based on a healthy manufacturing base, a powerful labor movement, massive government spending on public works programs and top-marginal tax rates for millionaires of between 70% (Kennedy) and 90%(Eisenhower).
Also down the hole goes any recognition that the business model under-girding the general-interest magazine world -- like the business models which kept everything from genre-magazines to academia to book publishing to Mom-and-Pop stores prosperous -- has been wiped out. Liquidated by the WalMart mentality and replaced by a two-tier feudal model where The Few at the top prosper and The Many at the bottom barely eke out a subsistence living.
Like David Brooks, I too would love to see a resurgence of all kinds of magazines, including the "general interest". But first, we would have to see a resurgence of the economic environment that was congenial to a...
...magazine that offers an aspirational ideal to the middle manager in the suburban office park, that offers a respite from the deluge of vapid social network chatter, that transmits the country’s cultural inheritance and its shared way of life, that separates for busy people the things that are enduring from the things that aren’t.
Because until the middle class gets a little of its leisure time back, and writers can make something approximating a living plying their trade, the situation is only going to get worse.
(There is, of course, at least one notable exception to the overall bleak outlook for writers: as long as he has an ample supply of Imaginary Hippies to blame for his every itch and ache, and the myth of White Suburban Camelot to wax nostalgic over for 800-words once every three weeks, a certain moon-faced, overpaid New York Times Conservative tripe-slinger will obviously never miss a meal.)
