Sigh. Yay. Sigh.

So, um, the blog is on life support. If it weren't for a few conservative right-to-lifers keeping the hospital from pulling the plug, it might be dead.

But since it's still here, let me urge anybody still left reading to Google "Daily Show" and "Jim Cramer Unedited Interview." Jon Stewart does more for the integrity of financial reporting in America in fifteen minutes than CNBC did for a decade.

Also, he says, "Doucheboro." Nice.

Katie Couric = Matt Taibbi

At least when the economy doesn't seem to be collapsing around our ears, right-wing politicos and think-tankers in this country generally brand any concern with economic justice "class warfare." It is, you see, un-American and divisive to worry that 1% of the country controls 40% of its wealth and that the income of that top 1% grew 180% from 1979-2004, whereas the income of the bottom 20% grew about 10% over the same period (see p. 5 of "Is the American Dream...").

But those same politicos and tankers seem to have no objection to cultural warfare. It's totally cool to act as though a tiny percentage of Americans control 95% of the nation's--nay the world's--virtue. See, whereas it's divisive to tell poor people that they're getting the short end of the stick, it's just not a big deal to tell liberals that they're unpatriotic and/or tipped for everlasting torment.

For some obscure reason, I've been thinking about The Titanic lately. And gosh darn if a little old Alaska common sense doesn't tell me that we seem finally to have reached the iceberg-intensive portion of the journey at which the folks in first-class are sending stewards down to steerage to tell us, "Hey, hey, why so reproachful? I mean, we're all in the same boat here, folks."

Then they add, "So all you peons should stay here while the boat sinks because there aren't enough lifeboats for everybody."

Anyway, that's all a long-winded and indirect intro to a relatively brief point.

To wit: political life in this country is increasingly a weird game in which a tiny majority holds power over a large majority while insisting that the people in that ruling minority are coextensive with some vague populist majority. And that creates all kinds of conceptual weirdness.

In particular, I'm struck lately by how the McCain-Palin campaign--especially Palin--simultaneously insists that its candidates know what mainstream Americans really want at the same time that it claims that the "mainstream media" are out of touch with mainstream America.

But if the media really are "mainstream," then wouldn't that mean they're in touch with mainstream America? And if McCain and Palin mean "left-wing" media rather than "mainstream," why don't they say that? Surely they don't want to imply that mainstream America is left-wing?

Is it because if McCain and Palin were actually to say "left-wing" rather than just hint it, they'd have to explicitly accuse Katie Couric of being the hatchet-woman of the liberal media elite and they know that would sound more than a little loopy?

Or (and) is it because they're trying really hard to appeal to groups--especially fundamentalist Christians--whose very identity since at least the 1970s has come in large part from positioning themselves as an embattled, even oppressed, minority in the current, decaying America, although they see themselves the dominant majority of real Americans?


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In memoriam Might Magazine: "Katie Couric = Matt Taibbi = GAY!"

And THIS Should Be a Scandal

So, in addition to apparently being more about loyalty than competence or legality (sound familiar?), Mayor Sarah Palin was an aspiring censor.

From CNN/Time:

Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving "full support" to the mayor.

Yeah, I'm guilty too (see below), but doesn't the fact that someone potentially second in line for the Presidency wants to ban books for naughty language and Unchristian sentiment sound more important than a pregnant teenager? Not to mention that her MO seems to be trying to fire everybody who doesn't support her crackpot authoritarianism?

My guess about some of the inappropriate language? I think it involves words like "tolerance, intellectual inquiry, dissent, skepticism, freethinking, investigative reporting, moderation, atheism, Islam, New York, and polyglot."

How the media will cover the general election...

Want to get on record with this prediction:

If Hillary wins the nomination, the media will spend the entire general election wondering if young and black Democrats feel disenfranchised and how that will help McCain, Romney or a third party candidate.

If Obama wins, the media will fret over whether or not Boomer aged women feel disenfranchised and how that will help the Republicans or a third party.

These arguments will be made most enthusiastically if the Republicans nominate McCain or if Bloomberg runs.

The media is setting up a "group x was left out" narrative that will benefit the Republicans and it will work to make the general election a lot closer than you think it's going to be. If the media insists on this story it is likely to become self-fulfilling.

Camel Toes and Dog Parts, A Requiem

For-profit, mass-market broadcast television is slowly disappearing, and that's mostly for the best.

There's not a lot about broadcast TV that I'll miss. Cable, the internet, and Netflix provide both a wider selection of audiovisual entertainment and less mutilated versions of films and TV programs. And cable shows are just generally better than network shows.

However, when network TV finishes migrating to other media platforms, I will miss the unparalleled opportunities it affords to relish the hilarity of the networks' efforts to provide the salacious, violent, and foolish programming that the vast majority of Americans want while at the same time trying to defend against FCC watchdogs routinely goaded into action by a big-mouthed minority of self-styled decency crusaders who buy their panties pre-bunched.

There is nothing so contorted and peculiar as the position of Standards and Practices departments, i.e. the network censors. In large part, that's because network censors have to spend much of their professional lives telling writers and directors that the things that Americans fantasize about constantly or experience daily would somehow destroy the American psyche if they were to--gasp!--appear on a television screen.

Equally bad, network censors are supposed to make sure that there's no "offensive" content in shows the sole purpose of which is to offer precisely such content--Law and Order: Drunken Child Molester, The Search for the Next Pussycat Doll's Gag Reflex, CSI: Death-Porn San Diego.

Anyway, network censors have a silly, thankless, and soon-to-be eradicated job, so I'd like to pull them off the court before the end of the game so that the home crowd can give them a big cheer. Yay, censors!

Also, if we're looking for an epitaph for the tomb of the network censor, I'd like to suggest two, both of them pull quotes from this week's Entertainment Weekly interview with four anonymous network censors:

I didn't know what a camel toe was. My staff looked at me and said, "I cannot believe you do this job and don't know what it is."

And my favorite:

A viewer called the other day about a new show and said the dog in it had an erection. I called our folks in Washington and said, "Talk to me about obscenity with respect to dog parts."

Indeed, talk to me, baby. But keep it TV-13.

Understanding the Corpses

Every blogger runs the risk of being a pontificating twit, a prattling narcissist, or some affiliated variety of prat. My hunch is that I'm particularly liable to lapse into insensitive dickery. And so I'm having a very hard time writing this post because I'm almost positive it'll come out wrong. But I still feel like what I have to say today is worth saying if I can say it right.

And I want to say that I think we're paying too much attention to the Virginia Tech shootings. Now, I'm not saying that it isn't a big story or that we shouldn't pay attention to it. Thirty-two people murdered is overwhelming. That sort of death, its pointless brutality, should impress itself on our thoughts. On the day all this was happening, I happened to be talking to a current Virginia Tech visiting Chicago. Maybe she would have been killed if she'd still been in Blacksburg. Maybe friends of hers died. Surely friends of her friends were gunned down for no reason worth the name. So that puts me at one or two degrees of separation from the slaughter--immune from the worst suffering but sensitized to the reality of it, aware that something awful happened to real people.

So, yes, I do think we should be paying attention and trying to think it through. Mike, for example, has posted thoughtfully on the shootings. In fact, it's hard for me to figure out how one can pay too much thoughtful attention to the stupid, heartbreaking murder of so many people. (It's not hard to figure out how one can pay too much exploitative, sleazy attention to it; for that, one has only to turn on half of TV news about the story.) So I don't think my objection is about the absolute amount of attention; I think it's about the relative amount of the attention.

Look, if you will, at the pic at the top of this post. The New York Times has three stories dedicated to the Tech killings. That's down from yesterday, I think. It has only one dedicated to the bombing deaths of 115 Iraqis today. Now, of course US reporters will cover US deaths more closely. Their readers and viewers care more and not necessarily for racist or xenophobic reasons but simply because we are taught to think of ourselves as Americans, and so when Americans die, we feel more personally involved. There's something disturbing about that, I think, but reporters aren't and can't be entirely detached from their own cultures. So American reporters cover American deaths more closely. (Plus, of course, it's easier, cheaper, and safer to send reporters to Virginia than to Anbar, so there will be more reporters on the ground anyway.)

Still, there is something wrong here. I've written before that our media often seem to treat some murder victims as way more important that others, and some of that seems to be happening with the Tech slayings. Thirty-three dead (counting the killer) is overwhelming at Tech because there have never been that many people killed there in a single day, not for decades at least, and there's nothing even approaching 33 homicides per year on the Tech campus. So the story is that something shocking has happened. But there there are neighborhoods in the US where 33 people die each year pretty regularly, most of them about the same age as the kids at Tech. That to me is at least as shocking, when you stop to think about it. Which we don't, by and large, unless we live in those neighborhoods. And we don't, by and large. So it keeps happening.

But even our radically uneven sensitivity to death isn't all that bothers me about it. I also think it's because--through a combination of mutually reinforcing practicalities and prejudices--the reporting encourages us think of the dead in Blacksburg as people and the dead in Iraq (and Detroit and Afghanistan...) as numbers. The New York Times, for example, has an interactive feature that gives pictures and details about each of the victims. Even the two currently unidentified victims count as individuals.

Of the Baghdad bombing, the Times can tell us only that the victims were in a "predominately Shiite district." Even the Iraqi reporters who contributed to the story remain anonymous (no doubt to protect them from insurgent attacks). And there's something deeply wrong about that. Without discounting the serious practical obstacles to identifying the Baghdad victims at all much less learning enough about them to provide photos and biographical snapshots, I think it hurts us that we won't ever see get those details.

In fact, simply because I happened to have some small connection to somebody from Virginia Tech at about the time of the shootings, I realize viscerally how angry and mystified and terrified people in Blacksburg must feel right now. I realize the genuine importance of the story, which, ironically makes me think what we're paying too much attention to it or, better, that we're paying too little attention to the ongoing slaughter in Iraq in comparison with the Tech deaths.

I don't say this because almost four times as many died in the recent attacks; it's not about numbers. I say it because it finally sunk in for me how hard and how long everybody touched directly by the Tech killings will have to struggle to come to terms with what happened there. How many nightmare-plagued nights, how many involuntary flinches at popping sounds, how many happy memories of friends that turn sour when the reality of their deaths reasserts itself. The events of a single day will affect the survivors for years, probably for the rest of their lives. I'm obtuse, so it took me a while to really deal with the enormity and the intensity of that. And then an even more overwhelming realization hit me: in Baghdad, for virtually everyone there, it's not the events of a single day. It's the events of days like that every month, if not every week, piled on top of one another, year after year after year.

And that's the story that's missing, I think. The unremitting trauma of being alive in Baghdad these days. Despite all the numbers and video footage, I don't think we as a country have really thought through what it means to live in a place where you can count on ten, twenty, fifty times a year hearing the same news that panicked parents and friends heard about the Tech shootings--there has been a senseless mass killing where your daughter goes to school, where your son works, where your wife studies. Only the families of soldiers on the ground have to deal with that. But that's what living though war actually means. And until we understand that on a gut level, we'll never understand what the war has meant for Iraqis.

Of course, maybe this has been obvious to all of you from the start. Maybe I'm just empathy deficient. If so, today I'm wishing I were a little more deficient. I'd feel better, anyway. But this war was started by people on all sides with that particular defect, people who think in abstractions like money and power or glory and honor and national will. But people who have the power to start violence should think in terms of distant pops and ominously ringing telephones, of terror, loss, and the rage that grows out of them.

Reality Check

So, most mornings I start the day by listening to NPR while I make breakfast. Then, to avoid doing my work, I'll often surf for news. First, real news (NYT, BBC, etc.). Then, fake news at The Onion. In recent months, The Onion has started running ads that are basically headline links for various real or realish news outlets. The headlines almost inevitably strike me as hilarious.

Does this happen to other people? Is it just because being at The Onion site predisposes me to finding real news funny? Or is it that all news coverage (if not the news) is pretty ridiculous and only morning grogginess and long years of being oh-so serious have prevented me from noticing?

An Idiot

If you want to know whom this post is about, you'll have to Google recent news stories for "John Edwards," "CPAC," and "faggot (as in, An Idiot called John Edwards a faggot at a gathering held by the Conservative Political Action Committee).

Most of you know who An Idiot is. She's a famous idiot. But An Idiot is above all else a self-promoter, so as a small gesture of protest I'm refusing to name her in this post.

So, yeah, what An Idiot said was offensive. Offensive, petty, and lame. But I've lost track of why I'm supposed to care. If you sit on a bus or go to a country club luncheon, you'll hear people say equally stupid things a dozen times an hour. But those don't generate controversy in the media. Why not? Because nobody who says them is famous. Fair enough, but why is An Idiot famous? Well, for saying stupid things. You see the problem.

An Idiot doesn't write policy. She doesn't advise people who write policy. She doesn't conduct legitimate research or journalism (i.e., fact-finding that comes from an effort to be fair and thorough). She doesn't even have some other skill--like a crossover dribble or an eight-octave range--that makes her interesting in some other way. An Idiot is a machine for the generation of hateful slurs and distortions ultimately intended not to help any cause (her remarks embarrassed CPAC and all the Republican candidates) but rather to get attention for herself. It's not a surprise, then, when she offers up a hateful slur or distortion. That's what she does. If she had any other skills, she might get a real job. As it is, calling Edwards names is her job. Running stories on "Idiot Calls Edwards 'Faggot'" is like running stories under the headline "Cashier Rings Up Purchase" or "Monkey Flings Poo."

At this point, I'm less annoyed by An Idiot than I am with the members of the media who act as if her stupidity mattered and by the rest of us who validate that behavior by continuing to consume the media coverage. I say we forget it. She just doesn't matter.