Some things are so perfect that in the midst of our most grotesque behavior they instill calm, proportion and decency. In Washington, DC, where grotesqueries are a pestilence, two such triumphs of human striving are the Jefferson Memorial (inset) and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s painting, Ville d’Avray, in the National Gallery of Art.

No matter how mad or despicable the behavior at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, John Russell Pope’s neoclassical memorial in which a nineteen-foot Thomas Jefferson broods amid his writings, reassures us of the glory of our republican ideals.

When the weight of the day’s news feels like lead in our shoes, Ville d’Avray, which is only one of Corot’s depictions of that town, fills our lungs with its shimmering silvern air and our minds with the conviction that a world in which such a painting could be painted is redeemable. I owe a large measure of my sanity, such as it is, to that painting.

Most monstrosities and mediocrities are committed by committees, and while that’s an admittedly elitist view, the evidence can hardly be ignored. Take for example the FBI’s headquarters at the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. A fascist society seeking to intimidate its people could hardly have settled on a more brutal pile.

Pope also designed the west building of the National Gallery of Art, where Corot’s exquisite work is most often shown near one of two beatific fountain courtyards. My guess is that among Pope’s more enduring legacies is the occasional sanity that settles upon Washington unexpectedly, like an Easter snow. I have no doubt that architecture and art affect the decisions we make, as well as the ones we ought to have made. For that reason I shudder to think what is being hatched in the Hooverbunker, nor do I think Henry Bacon’s Lincoln Memorial, a stale wedding cake of a building, has done much for the cause of moderation. And as for architect Edward Durrell Stone’s Kennedy Center, it certainly proves Washington has no equal when it comes to piling it on.

Certain Italian princes used to paint the heavens into the vaults of their private chambers to remind them of man’s place in the cosmos. Considering the compulsive grandiosity of most government architecture, we would do well to explore the relationship between the decisions we make and where we spend our time. There may still be time. Even our worst architecture does not yet approach our towering grandiosity.

Most of us don’t go to a restaurant just because the cuisine is good. We go because we like the help. We look forward to seeing them. We like to think they look forward to seeing us. But this has never been the case
in journalism. Until now.

News has always been a bought and paid-for product. There has never been any interaction between the reader and the writer. Even when we watch familiar faces on television we know they’re putting on a show. But the intimacy of the blogosphere is not unlike your favorite cafe. Young journalists serve internships and job probations. If they’re lucky, seasoned veterans will take them in hand. If they’re smart, they’ll listen. But now you can get a sense of journalists at work in the blogosphere. Take Dan Baum’s running web log from New Orleans for The New Yorker magazine. If you read it carefully you’ll get a sense of what it’s like to be a reporter at work. I record a weekly podcast for The Student Operated Press. It’s called Hot Copy, and this week’s subject, Looking Over the Shoulder of a World-Class Reporter, is about Dan’s work.

I always wondered if I’d be the kind of retired journalist whose daily brushes with reality soured him, but it turns out I’m as idealistic as I was when The Providence Journal hired me in my twenties. Wiser, yes, I hope so, but far from cynical. I express some of this experience and perseverant idealism in weekly podcasts for The Student Operated Press, conversational advice for young journalists. You can hear and read Number 16 here at Newsblaze.

In this podcast I make the case that the Internet is creating a kind of collaborative journalism that may well prove to be a Magna Charta, weakening the grip of feudal media barons on our affairs.

—DM

In the 19th Century we had a destiny, to clear and hold everything we could by any stretch call the US of A. There were beneficiaries and casualties. But what is our destiny now? The care and feeding of fat cats?

If we’re going to have a respectable destiny we need a fearsome dedication to the truth, no matter how ugly it is. We need to stop cottoning to seductive lies. It’s all very well to blame the liars for invading Iraq, but we know we smelled their lies.

It’s up to us, but the obstacles are formidable:

—a Fourth Estate disguising its greed by entertaining us to death instead of informing us to thrive;
—a culture obsessed with winning, races, ratings, polls, sales, it doesn’t matter as long as there’s a winner;
—transference of our respect for ourselves and each other to worship of feckless celebrity;
—simpleminded fundamentalism that reduces civil discourse to fiercely held stupidities;
—the absurdity that we can have a just and compassionate society without equitable and progressive taxation;
—the subversion of the republic by corporate imperialists willing to sacrifice our sons and daughters for profits but unwilling to pay their fair share of taxes;
—an election system that discourages our best people from seeking office and confuses fund-raising with competence and integrity;
—the smarmy argument, promoted by the Clintons and Bushes, among others, that what’s good for our mega-corporations is good for the nation; and, last but not least,
—refusal to see that Israel’s safety may well depend on our impaired ability to distinguish our national interests from Israel’s.

Truth oftens hurts like hell, but we have never been a cowardly people. Our bitterest enemies would concede that. We have to dump politicians and poobahs who tell us what we want to hear. We have to register the impulses of our shit detectors. We have to live with what we know and not dope ourselves with lies.

(Note: Ordinarily I would offer all sorts of web links to enhance such a complex subject, but when you search the web for these issues you are swamped by ideological distortions, and so I have chosen to let my bare thoughts stand alone).

Fundamentalism, the idea that things are reassuringly simpler than they look, is the kerosene that turns the altar lamps of religion into conflagrations.

Throughout the histories of the three great Western religions, Judaism,
Christianity and Islam, hard-liners have brought the work of rational men to grief.

In the 12th Century Salah-ed-Din, the Kurd who united Syria and Egypt, and Richard the Lionheart, King of England, strove to conclude the Third Crusade on peaceful terms and were thwarted by fanatics in their own camps.

In 19th Century India Bahadur Shah Zafar (inset), last of the Mughals, who had ruled a brilliant empire, tried to accommodate imperial Britain only to watch his court brought down by intransigent Muslim fanatics.

In 1031 the great Umayyad caliphate at Cordoba fell not to resurgent
Christians but to Berber fundamentalists from North Africa.

Today the efforts of moderates to reach an accord in Iraq are confounded by a young Shiite cleric, Muktadr al Sadr, while at the same time efforts by moderate Americans to comprehend the debacle in Iraq are bullied by Christian and Jewish hard-liners.

In all three religions civilization has advanced under reasonable leaders and foundered at the hands of intransigents.

People who claim to have the answers are seductive. We wish against the odds that their claims are true, relieving us of the onerous burden of arriving at our own world views. The task of sorting through conflicting ideas lies at the heart of democracy. If we give it up and hand it over to cock-sure fundamentalists of any stripe we lose the country whose founding ideas we profess to revere. Selling oneself by confiding that God is whispering in one’s ear is ultimately cheap and devious.

American fundamentalists are willing to decry fundamentalism in Islam while giving themselves and Israel a free pass. They’re willing to enact almost any law to keep Muslim religionists out of our country while refusing to concede our own religionists have messed (and messed up) in Iraq.

In the Middle East the conflict between Israelis and Arabs would have been resolved long ago if it were not for pigheads on both sides. Thirty-nine percent of the land Israel occupies on the West Bank is privately owned by Arabs who have received only grief for it.

The refusal of successive American administrations to see the Middle East in terms of American self-interest has infuriated the Muslim world, deafening it to its own moderates, radicalizing it and handing it over to the schemes of fanatics like Osama bin Laden.

None of this is new. This is not a new or even unusual way of looking at things. It has been available to us all along. So when we hear our politicians talking about mobilizing the base we should remember that what they’re talking about is kowtowing to the kind of irrationality that has again and again toppled the best societies man is capable of building.

It doesn’t matter whether the base is on the right or the left. Unless hard lines give way to compromise, people are slaughtered and mankind goes down looking, as they say of strikeouts in baseball.