(This is the latest segment of Hot Copy, my podcast series for The Student Operated Press.)

The majority of Americans are wage earners. They neither have their own businesses nor help run businesses. Their wages have been more or less stagnant for two decades while the cost of living has risen relentlessly. Now their jobs are being exported and their unions broken, and yet the business section of their newspaper doesn’t interest them as much as, say, sports or obituaries.

Something is wrong with this picture, something verging on hoax. We need to reexamine the history and function of business news, whether it’s the business section of a newspaper or the business segment of a telecast or even publications given over wholly to business.

As newspapers grew from muckraking and often scurrilous weeklies to staid metropolitan and regional dailies in the 19th Century it was thought that their readers would be primarily affluent and literate upper-class citizens, decision-makers. But as the country expanded westward a middle class was created, and this newly affluent and educated middle class was interested in money matters. But it was assumed, wrongly, that money matters would never rate high on reader interest indices. As we discussed in the last segment of this series, that’s not true. Disasters and money rank Number One and Number Two among reader preferences. (more…)

How much of our seeming natures, do you think, are conflations of what’s inherent with screen characters?

I started asking myself this question when I realized that our president strikes me as a surreal amalgam of B movie western characters, something between Hopalong Cassidy and Lee Van Cleef, depending on whether he’s charming or badgering us.

Once this untoward thought entered my loony head I began asking myself what kind of amalgam I am. After all, I know which movie and television characters endeared themselves to me. (more…)

(Hot Copy is my periodical podcast for journalism students worldwide. This is the latest transcript).

We’re in a strange place in American journalism. The great print behemoths seem to be slouching slowly and arthritically towards some secret burial ground. The worldwide web sizzles with experiments in participatory journalism. The television networks are more about Viagra, ratings and entertainment than news. And yet we keep hearing the executives of the media giants saying news is shallow and fatheaded because that’s what people want.

The trouble is the media panjandrums seem to be lying. We’re not getting what we want, we’re getting what they’ve decided to give us, which is basically a raw deal. Radio and television have been granted precious rights of access to the people’s airwaves to give us such a trans fat diet of entertainment idiocy, celebrity worship and sound-bite news that a democracy will inevitably die of heart congestion. (more…)

Signor Dante, would you consider expanding hell
to survivors going through our things, judging
our minutest habits? May I presume your answer
would be a special circle for judges of such matters?
When I consider the great authority of deceit
I wonder how many new circles you would draw
or would you say nothing’s changed except
the illusion of change, which grows deadlier?
Would you make a circle for the talking heads,
for the ideologues top-heavy with their poison isms?
Or is your work done and we have only to go back
and do what we’re most loathe to do: read?

—DM

The other day my wife and I wandered into a magical antiquarian book shop in Hudson, New York, and found a 1935 copy of the first trade edition of T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I bought it for twenty-five dollars and a few days later told the owner of the shop, Neil Montone, how once in Providence, Rhode Island, I’d stumbled on a signed copy of the work. Oh yes, Mr. Montone said, such a copy is probably worth a hundred thousand to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars now. I paid two dollars and fifty cents back in 1959.

So much happened—and didn’t happen—since then, and somehow over the years I was separated from my precious find. And yet my reunion with Seven Pillars is sweet and at the same time bittersweet. The sweet part first: the book is a monument to the state of English rhetoric at the time. Lawrence’s use of language is at once elegant and bold. To boot, Lawrence (inset), an archaeologist by trade, was a considerable grammarian. These matters alone are enough to warrant revisiting the book and savoring its place in the canon. (more…)

The Democrats don’t want to and the Republicans are unfit to govern. That is, I think, the predicament American voters face.

If the Democrats were prepared to govern would their front-runners be two candidates whose electability is questionable at best? If the Republicans were fit to govern would their front-runners be hauling around so much malodorous baggage?

These are parties unwilling and perhaps incapable of purifying themselves. They’re hostage to unsavory money. Neither one represents the people as the people express themselves in poll after poll. And neither one is interested in unifying the nation.

Does anyone really think Rudy Giuliani, Hillary Clinton, Fred Thompson, Barack Obama or Mitt Romney would bring us together to end a spell of paralyzing polarization? Are these people our best hope for remaining one nation rather than two nations, red and blue?

These two parties demonstrate by their front-runners that they would rather be right than govern the United States of America. Right about what? Selling us out to corporations intent on exporting the common weal via a declining dollar?

What can we be thinking to contemplate such candidates? Do the media accurately portray what we’re thinking? They certainly portray what they’re thinking by the miserable coverage they’ve given John Edwards, Ron Paul, Mike Gravel and Bill Richardson—they’re thinking the corporations the media serve don’t like these men.

We don’t need candidates who doll up our already divisive self-righteousness. We need candidates to convince us we can pull together for a better common destiny. Candidates who preach to the choir don’t deserve the attention they’re getting. I may live in New York, but I care what happens to people in Idaho and my closely held presumption is that they care about me. That’s what nationhood is, so let’s have candidates who speak to our compassion for each other, not our prejudices. Let’s have candidates who know that in a democracy you must govern from the middle, not by chicanery but by consensus.

—DM

Writers are like gardeners. There are the profusionists and the minimalists. T.S. Eliot famously enjoined poetry to purify the language of the tribe. He in poetry and Ernest Hemingway in fiction certainly took up the challenge. The popularization of haiku, like the introduction of Japanese gardening, advanced their cause.

Poets have another, not antithetical task: to refine the subtlety of language and thought so that the life of the mind expands. Subtlety and ambiguity are refiner’s fire. Without them language coarsens. It becomes rude and incompetent in exactly the way our politics have become polarized and hostile.

In journalism ambiguity is deemed an enemy; in literature it may be a device for widening the field of discourse. In journalism subtlety is often squeezed out, but in literature it is a tool of discovery. In politics the stupid and mendacious often win votes; in literature they’re just stupid and mendacious. The impulse to simplify leads to spin; spin leads to moral and even financial bankruptcy. (more…)

I lead a walking around life, one reason I don’t need to travel much. Hudson, New York, my county’s seat, is one of those towns fraught with chance encounter. It could be with someone, something, or an idea.

One day recently, when our Canadian friends had whooshed a cool breeze our way, I was walking along Warren Street, Hudson’s main thoroughfare, the usual notebook stuffed in my pocket and a poem’s unborn heart pulsing in my head. It was one of those poems where you have a vision, but that’s all. Not a line, not a bon mot, not even a meter, but a vision. Do you have to explain it or just paint it?

I happened by the gallery Nicole Fiacco. I hadn’t noticed it before. I liked what I saw on the walls. It wasn’t the usual Hudsoniana people seem to think their country homes demand. I struck up a conversation with Ms. Fiacco and she turned her computer so that I could see work from a show she is about to launch.

The first image that caught my eye was a white house on a black hill. The luminous house had no detail, just this ghostly architectural shape on a hill. I was about to ask her about it when I saw a galleon that had clearly lost her helm and was about to fall over an apocalyptic waterfall, just as medieval mariners always feared would happen in accordance with their flat earth ideas. (more…)

“Unforgivable,” says Kentucky’s Sen. Mitchell McConnell, the Republican Senate leader. He’s talking about hapless Sen. Larry E. Craig’s humiliation by the disclosure he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge resulting from an arrest by an undercover policeman in Minneapolis who said the senator made an unwanted sexual advance. Does the Christian Right hear Senator McConnell? Unforgivable? Can Christians hold that the Idaho senator’s behavior is unforgivable? Forgiveness is the foundation of Christianity. I wouldn’t even raise the issue had not a certain segment of the Republican party, pandering to Christian goody-goodies, made holier-than-thou religiosity a discount fixture of our political culture. Having lost their voices about greed, perhaps Christian moderates and liberals might now raise them in behalf of forgiveness, or would that be too confrontational?

—DM