There you go again, Ronald Reagan would say when debating with someone whose views he wanted to dismiss as propagandistic. It was one of the Great Communicator’s most effective tools, and the American public needs to start using it on politicians, economists and reporters.

There you go again, we should say whenever some news anchor or reporter says, The American people just aren’t saving enough. There you go again, you corporate tools. Why aren’t you saying American employers just aren’t paying enough? Why aren’t you saying American employers aren’t providing enough benefits? Why aren’t you saying our politicians are helping the corpocracy squeeze the American Dream out of its beleaguered employees? Why aren’t you asking our society to define a decent, moral profit margin?

Whenever you hear that cliché, remember that you are listening to journalism in the service of its corporate masters. Remember that we don’t have a free press, we have a commercially censored press. There is no way on earth that it can be called good or even decent journalism to say we aren’t saving enough without providing the further context that we aren’t being paid enough, that the cost of living is relentlessly rising, and that our benefits are being savaged. Tell the corporate servants to put that in their pipes and smoke it.

—DM

(This is Transcript No. 35 of Del Marbrook’s Hot Copy, a weekly podcast series for The Student Operated Press)

Pack journalism came in for discussion during the Vietnam conflict and later during the Lebanese civil war. The most memorable image used to describe pack journalism was a bunch of foreign correspondents hanging out in a bar and reporting on what each other said. There was probably some truth to this disquieting image. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect was that drunks habitually think the next day that they had wonderful conversations.

There is always a danger of pack journalism. I remember covering an industrial fire in New England when a reporter for another paper came up to me, jovially jabbed me in the arm, and said, Howya doin’ buddy, whatcha got? Like I was going to tell him what information I had already gathered. But a much greater danger than pack journalism is the institutional mind, and that is why the concentration of the press in fewer and fewer hands endangers the republic. (more…)

Captain Nathan Hale may or may not have said, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” Much has been written about what he might have said. But no one questions that on September 22, 1776, the twenty-one-year-old scholar from Connecticut gave his life for the unborn United States with a dignity and composure that impressed and rattled the British who hung him for spying.

Today a bronze plaque  outside a Banana Republic store on Manhattan’s Third Avenue commemorates this deed that resonates down through time. Hale (statue in New York’s City Hall Park, inset) was hung not more than 100 yards from the store on what is now 66th Street and was then rural. This intersection of patriotism and commerce is today posh and stylish. Hale could not have imagined its diversity and wealth. One can hope that we still live in a country that values patriotism over money, but the quaint position of the memorial site  is less than heartening.

—DM 

I once told a dear prep school friend that I liked Tchaikovsky. My friend, the late poet David L. O’Melia, said, “Tchaikovsky is like an ice cream sundae— as you get older you’ll appreciate Bach and Mozart.” David, who was to die in airplane crash while still a student, was reservedly right. I did come to revere Bach and Mozart but not at Tchaikovsky’s expense.

David had a similar response to my first poem. I was 14 and snarky about Edward FitzGerald’s irreligious and misleading translation of Omar Khayyam. “Take the cash and let the credit go,” etc. I loved the poem but disagreed with its sentiments, so I set out to compose a retort in the same quatrain structure.

“Do you have any idea how bad Fitzgerald’s translation is?” David admonished. Of course I didn’t. I loved it, the way the “enlightened” selfish today love Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. It would be many years before I learned that Khayyam was hardly the man the Victorian FitzGerald had given the West. He was in fact a mystic and mathematician much more to my liking. But I had begun my checkered career as a poet.

When David and I were studying at Manhattan’s Dwight School we had a mentor, Assistant Headmaster George B. Donus, who was passionate about the classics and is undoubtedly responsible for my repeated rereadings of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Mr. Donus was of Greek descent, and I have often wished I could discuss my fondness for the poetry of C.P. Cavafy and other matters Greek with him.

My unpromising career as a poet was interrupted not so much by a stint in the Navy or the untoward necessity to earn a living as a newspaperman, but rather by my habit of melting down and calling it by other names. It happened first in the spring of my junior year at Columbia. It was sunny that day on 116th Street when suddenly everything got too big, too loud and too close. They probably would have called it a nervous breakdown in those days. I’m sure I called it good cause for a beer. It happened again, often accompanied by “spotty amnesia.” You wake up one morning and can’t remember how to tie your shoes. It’s as if your hard disk had thrown out files during the night, but you don’t know which ones yet. Sort of a metaphor for life’s surprises.

In retrospect this was very good for a poet. We’re all mad, but we’re mad in different ways, and a poet has to discover and celebrate his particular madness while tossing in its harrowing throes. But in my 30s, burdened by the weight of my own follies, I gave up poetry. Well, I gave up writing it, but I kept on reading and studying it. I had discovered, as I tried to fathom my meltdowns, that I hadn’t wanted to be caught saying what I meant or meaning what I said. It was a horrifying discovery, something like Dorian Gray’s painting in the attic. My poems had been a pretense, or so I concluded.

But when I resumed writing poems in 2001 the problem had vanished. In fact, I couldn’t disguise what I meant for the life of me. Better yet, I knew what I meant. It was such an exhilarating feeling that I found to my surprise that I wasn’t giving much thought to publishing these poems. This was curious, I thought. Then I remembered my years of pondering the work of Ibn al Arabi, and I saw that I regarded the making of a poem as an act of co-imagination. I was, with God, co-imagining an ever-evolving universe. This was my job, my prayer.

I can’t say much more about this, for the moment, the moment being the announcement by Kent State University that they have given me their Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. (more…)

(This is the transcript of Hot Copy No. 34, my weekly podcast for The Student Operated Press to journalism students)

Transparency International is an organization that monitors corruption throughout the world. In its latest report the United States ranks Number 22 in corruption, far from the bottom, but much too far from the top. What does this tell us? Well, first of all, did you know we’re considered that corrupt? You probably didn’t. And whose fault is that? Was it a front page story? Did it get as much time on CNN and Fox as O.J. Simpson’s latest squalid enterprise? Did the press bother to tell us how Transparency International decided upon such a ranking? These are not rhetorical questions. We need to know. We need to know why news of such corruption takes us by surprise. We need to know whether we live in a decent and law-abiding capitalist society or a society that winks at corrupt corporate governance, at Tammany politics. We need to know if we have a press we can trust to tell us what kind of society we’re living in, since, after all, our bread and butter and futures depend on it. (more…)

The job of art galleries is to sell art, not screw artists. It’s to make markets where there were none, push the aesthetic envelope, take risks, not importune the artists who have already taken bigger risks.

But there is a trend among once reputable galleries to exact tribute from artists and exhibitors rather than create a clientele for them. This cheap risk-management tactic, aside from its venality and intellectual bankruptcy, represents the abdication of the traditional taste-making responsibility of galleries.

The reason it isn’t being discussed, as it should be, in print pages devoted to art is that these pages are supported by the advertising of the rascals.

The rascals, of course, would argue that high rents and other escalating costs have driven them to this squalid dead end. But their risks are nothing compared to those of the artists they’re bilking.

Vanity presses and galleries aren’t new, and it can be argued that with so many artists and writers praying for a day in the sun they’re inevitable.

But that doesn’t well conceal the moral failure here, just as letting agents and marketers dictate what is worthy to be published doesn’t conceal the publishers’ greed and contempt for any cultural responsibility to the society they’re cheating.

—DM

“President Huckabee? You got to be kidding me.”

That’s what Dan Bartlett, President Bush’s former counselor, told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce the other day. He was talking about former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (inset), who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination.

If this kind of disquieting small-mindedness is characteristic of the electorate, as Bartlett seems to think it is, are Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton electable? I pray the ill-spoken counselor is wrong, but what concerns me more than whether he accurately gauges public sentiment is the cast of mind his hick remark reveals. Does this reflect the same kind of nativist White House the Nixon Tapes showed us?

Huckabee, of course, is a perfectly respectable name deriving from the British isles. It’s nowhere near as exotic as Obama or Giuliani. But Bartlett seems to feel it’s somehow comical, a notion the many Huckabees in this country may not appreciate. What is disturbing about his remark is its childishness, its adolescent pleasure in poking fun at others. This is not the kind of demeanor a great nation expects from its White House. This is the kind of meanness most of us encountered in the schoolyard from ignorant bullies.

When I joined the Navy I encountered young men from hamlets in Appalachia who were fascinated by the names of some of us Northeasterners, but I don’t remember a single one of them making the kind of snide, infantile remark we have just heard from the president’s man. I don’t think he reflects the country; I think he reflects vestigial nasties of whom we’re frequently ashamed.

If the Republican candidates—and Dan Bartlett’s most recent boss— have any decency they will repudiate his ugly viewpoint.

—DM

A calamity has befallen me as a baseball lover. One expects calamities of old age, of course, but not absurd calamities. I’ve begun to find it too painful to watch the other side lose. It doesn’t matter which other side.

I’m a Yankee fan, and this season has been harrowing. There has been the exhilaration of watching
Alex Rodriguez make history and yet dreading his post-season clutch-ups. There has been the sorrow of watching the noble Joe Torre under obscene pressure from the front office. There has been the exquisite anguish of wondering what keeps going wrong with the Yankees’ chemistry. And finally there has been the recognition that I no longer wish anybody to lose. What I really enjoy is seeing the winners pour out of the dugout in pure joy.

True, I like watching the Yankees win more than I like watching The Tribe win, but the more familiar a team is to me (the Red Sox, say) the more I enjoy their triumphs. If you had told me when I was twenty that the only part of the game some old man liked was watching the winners celebrate I would have put it down to senility. But I can still write a satisfactory poem, so it’s hard to think myself senile. On the other hand, maybe that’s how senility is: you can win a Nobel Prize one day and be a silly fool the next day or maybe even on the podium. (more…)

The guy who walks around behind you when you’re contemplating a painting in a museum is an aristo. The girl who chats amiably in low tones on her cell phone while walking in the street, smiling at strangers, she’s an aristo. The cop who bows with mock gravity at a jaywalking tourist at Fifth Avenue and Central Park South is an aristo.

They make the loudmouth exhibitionists forgettable aberrations on the road to human perfectibility. They heal our daily wounds, particularly in the cities where we gang up on each other. They reassure us that prescribed ways of behavior, like mariners’ rules of the road, still apply and are honored. They make the world more familiar and navigable. The cellphone obliviots, mowing down passersby and calling attention to their inane conversations, are not aristos.

Not long ago I watched a few people listening to guide phones at a museum and crashing around as if the phones were license to rampage. It was a disheartening moment. But then a handsome young man politely walked behind me so as not to break my line of vision with a Joan Miro painting (inset), and moments later I saw an elegant young woman step aside at the foot of an escalator for an elderly woman.

The crass and the refined are always at play, and I believe the world is still sufficiently populated with aristos to inspire the rest of us to persevere in routinely decent behavior. Perhaps they are those angels we are said to entertain unawares.

—DM

What’s with this my-patriotism-is-bigger-than-yours dengue? Is it the usual Freudian thing or does it presage something darker with its underlying accusation that some of us aren’t as patriotic as we should be? I regard myself as a patriot and have always been willing to die for my country, right or wrong. But measuring my patriotism against my fellow citizens’ strikes me as both obscene and sick.

At first I thought it was just another Swift Boat ploy to muster the right and smear moderates and leftists, as if to say you can’t be both American and moderate or leftist. But the more I think about it the more it seems related to me to a need to be right at everybody else’s expense. It’s bad enough that such a mentality polarizes a nation that has always prided itself on pulling together, but an even bleaker aspect is the dogged sense that anybody could actually corner the market on truth. This goes beyond self-righteousness to a kind of close-mindedness that doesn’t bode well for human evolution. The world’s best mariners once held that the world was flat and that it was ridiculous to think you could navigate by the stars. The head of IBM once doubted anyone would ever want a computer in his home. (more…)