(This is the transcript of Hot Copy No. 36 of my regular podcast series for The Student Operated Press

Let us now praise famous men, James Agee (inset) said famously. Journalism certainly does that. Probably too much, especially in a public relations age when you can become famous for being famous. I’d like to celebrate the journalists who devote themselves all over the world to simply telling their neighbors what’s going on. Their tradition is much older than Greek democracy. It’s tribal. I’d like to tell you about a particular man, a mentor and a friend who exemplifies this tradition. Like me, he never became famous, but the influence he had on people’s lives was special. Every small town, every hamlet, every county has such people. They may work in storefront offices or even their basements. They may not work for metropolitan dailies or high-powered radio and television stations, but their jobs and their lives are important to us.

News is news, no matter how it comes to us.

If you listen to North African rai music it becomes apparent sooner or later that this popular style derives from people going from one Bedouin campfire to another singing the news, finding interesting ways to tell people what is going on, to hand down tribal history, to keep the culture intact. They’re journalists. They may sing well, as journalists may write well, but they are transmitting information. (more…)

I’m one of those (rare?) bibliophiles who loves the Internet. I don’t see why the paper and ink book cannot live peaceably with the e-book, serving different purposes. But I admit I’m sometimes unsettled by the amount of trivia people spend their precious time sending each other. My positive take on the phenomenon is that anything in the name of communication is good. But I’m not a cockeyed optimist, just a bit cockeyed in the best of circumstances.

It may be my paranoid imagination as a man of the middle who tends to veer leftward more than rightward but has been known to vote for conservatives that the torrent of right-wing buzz I see on the web shares a common loathing of pesky facts. The left-wing material I see is often far too cavalier and dismissive of conservative ideas. Propagandists of the left often strike me as self-righteous and contemptuous of reality. Propagandists of the right strike me as fearful of discourse and inclined to a Machiavellian use of rumor. (more…)

I’ve been wondering what an extraterrestrial spy would make of our Christmas shopping season, which one writer has described as a national commercial emergency, so I’ve been drifting in the human torrents of Manhattan—SoHo, Nolita, LoHo, Greenwich Village, Madison Avenue, 57th Street, all the places sucking in oodles of money and complaining it’s not enough.

I try to cancel out decades of consumerist pursuit. I try to imagine what an astral traveler would make of this annual high-wire act, this lemming run, this emptying of pockets in the name of what, who? Can we really say it’s in the name of Jesus Christ who drove the money lenders out of the temple? How much of our compulsive sentimentality is commercially driven? And what does it do to our psyches to know this and yet feel helpless to change it?

Some writers have argued that Western capitalism is dependent on Christianity and therefore the commercialization of Christmas should reassure us of the Christian message. I find that charmingly Jesuitical. I’d like to hear its advocates talk more about the poor and turning the other cheek, you know, the hard part of Christianity, the sacrificial part. I find this argument in favor of Christmas’s monetization suspiciously like Ayn Rand’s distinctly anti-Christian message. (more…)

A stone memorial at Madison Square in Manhattan cautions us that Indifference to Injustice is the Gate to Hell. Incised into a 27-foot white marble column (inset) is the site plan to Auschwitz, one of Nazi Germany’s most infamous legacies. The site plan for the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp should be there, too, but on smaller scale, rather like a footnote. Not because we are torturing and slaughtering people on the Satanic scale for which Auschwitz is remembered, but because humanity needs reminding that evil arises as a perfectly reasonable response to a perceived threat.

The Nazis convinced the German masses that worldwide Jewry was a threat to the German state, just as Islamophobes today would have us believe that Muslims, rather than a minority of extremists, are a threat to us. The Holocaust began with curtailments of the civil liberties of Jewish citizens. It progressed to Kristallnacht, the 1938 rampage against Jewish businesses, and from there to mass roundups of Jews and their eventual torture and extermination. Every time an American with a Muslim-sounding name is singled out because of that name we should remember the seemingly innocuous injustices that paved the way to Kristallnacht.

There is no comparison between the wrongs we are committing at the Navy base in Cuba and the Holocaust, but sculptor Harriet Feigenbaum’s compelling 1990 warning at the New York State Court of Appeals should remind us that injustice always seems plausible in the context in which it arises. It seems justified by the exigencies of its moment. The German people, for the most part, were persuaded that some sort of Jewish conspiracy threatened them, just as we let ourselves be persuaded that a secular state in Iraq that actually opposed Al Qaeda and was hated by Al Qaeda had something to do with Al Qaeda’s attacks on us.

We were fooled, as were the Germans. Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering remarked at his Nuremberg trial that it was a piece of cake to trick a population into war, just as the Germans had been tricked into surrendering their civil liberties in response to phony threats. No doubt the German people had enemies. No doubt they needed to be vigilant. And no doubt we have enemies and need to be vigilant. But as Auschwitz was not the answer, neither is Guantanamo. We either stand for human decency and the rights of all or we stand for abridging rights whenever we feel like it. There is no middle ground in spite of what waffling politicians say on the campaign trail.

That, I think, is the immediacy of the message on that courthouse in Manhattan, and we should not lose sight of the fact that it is a memorandum to ourselves.

—DM

Shame has gotten a bad name in psycho-therapeutic circles where it’s reviled as a debilitator. I think it imbues life with tang and zest. We wouldn’t enjoy pheromones so much were they not spiced with shame (Adam and Eve, Albrecht Durer, inset). I confess I don’t much care for its tabloid aspects, but I think it’s often the ghost in the machine, and high art and literature would suffer greatly without it.

A shameless society, which I think our general hypocrisy is working hard to create, would be a crazy-maker in its barrenness. A society without shame would be like living with no olfactory sense, no taste buds, no sense of touch. Shame has been given the same black eye as sobriety. We should reconsider their virtues. It makes our hair stand on end, it heightens experiences, makes human encounter exhilarating and scary.

Psycho-therapy is a wonderful thing—I’d be much crazier than I am without it—but it shares a tendency with isms to be doctrinaire and authoritarian. If I weren’t ashamed of some of my fancies I wouldn’t bother to pursue them. When it comes to art, that would be a disaster.

Rehabilitating shame would be at least as salubrious as admitting, finally, that Prohibition dramatically improved public health.

—DM

See-en-en says the Moniga-heela’s flooding,
the weather is threatening us everywhere,
but the talking heads have matters in hand
and Big Pharma’s curing us of common sense.

I prefer the Monong-ga-heela behave itself
and CNN improve its literacy, but I’ll settle
for a little less weather and uncommon sense,
or is that too much for a buyer-bot to ask?

I don’t know what ta tell ya, the clerk says.
There’s a man I’d like to elect to something—
he honest-to-god doesn’t know what to say.
Quick, get that man on the Sunday talk shows.

                                                                          —DM

What about the guy or gal plowing down the street with an ear phone acting as if a large-mouthed conversation is license to mow everyone else down? Is it obliviousness or exhibitionism? Can it be both? It’s certainly obnoxiousness. Can such a person possibly be successful at what he or she does? Who would reward such anti-social behavior?

I don’t find the ubiquitous use of cell phones, cell phone cameras, text messagers and laptops disquieting. I enjoy this super-communicative environment. But why is it so often an appurtenance of over-the-top self-involvement?

We used to worry about boom boxes deafening the next generation. Now we fret about cell phones and brain tumors. But the behavioral aspects of cell phone use get little attention.

Every day I watch cell phone egomaniacs refusing so much as to give an inch on crowded streets, acting as if no one else had right of passage, not even the elderly using walkers. Is this outer blindness symptomatic of an inner psychic blindness, an inability or unwillingness to walk in anybody else’s shoes even for a moment?

And who is on the other end of these passive-aggressive conversations? Fellow obliviots?

Starbucks and similar cafes are an interesting study. There are usually the people sitting quietly in a corner behind a laptop and then there are the cell phone look-at-me’s, calling attention to themselves, trying hard to turn everybody else into wallpaper, taking up too much room and acting far too entitled.

I’ve taken to refusing to step aside. I love and admire the way New Yorkers have traditionally made room for each other, and I refuse to indulge feckless bullies.

—DM

“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.”

—Reichsmarshal Hermann Wilhelm Goering, at the Nuremberg Trials

The North American Catholic League in calling for a boycott of the film The Golden Compass hands critics of the church carte blanche to paint the church as irretrievably repressive.

Author Philip Pullman’s Magisterium, claiming to be trying to protect humans from an inter-dimensional dust that exposes them to potential evils, acts very much like the Bush Administration and its fundamentalist allies, and I suspect this is what has really stirred up the furor about the film, based on Pullman’s 1995 book.

My guess is that the film’s critics correctly see the film as, wittingly or not, challenging our current security-state mentality, our apathy about government attempts to shut down dissent and inquiry. After all, what match is Pat Robertson and the neocon dissemblers against an army of witches led by Eva Green (inset)? And who wouldn’t prefer a talking polar bear to Dick Cheney?

Yes, The Golden Compass is definitely a threat to national security if the latter is construed as tolerating every blatant lie greedy mind-benders can cook up. Anyone listening to the current Administration trying to lie its way out of destroying CIA video tapes is very likely to come out of the movie house shouting, Bring on the dust!

—DM

Priority check time. We watched a Congress which seemingly had nothing better to do spend more than $70 million investigating Bill Clinton’s sexual hanky-panky and then impeaching him for lying about it. It was hard to tell whose behavior was tawdrier, the President’s, the hounds and hyenas on The Hill or the jaw-dropping apathy of the public.

Now we have the disclosure that the Central Intelligence Agency deliberately destroyed videographic evidence of its harsh interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives, And it did this in the midst of an official inquiry into its controversial conduct. This was no alley-catting and lying; it may well be obstruction of justice involving issues far graver than a foolish leader’s indiscretion.

Will we witness the posturing in high dudgeon that theatricalized the impeachment? Will we see the same righteous indignation? Will Congress have the backbone to investigate or will it concede that the CIA is above the law and therefore our precious laws and ideals have become irrelevant and that indeed we now live in a police state?

What is it going to be? Don’t say, We’ll have to see what they’re going to do, because they aren’t going to do anything unless they sense public outrage.

—DM

(This is the transcript of Hot Copy No. 36, my regular conversational podcast to journalism students around the world))

Driven by pressure to perform for profit-takers, the print and electronic press seem to be moving away from the very direction they should be going towards. Throughout the 20th Century you could rely on newspapers, radio and then television to give you the latest news. That has changed. The Internet can now get the news to you faster. In fact, private citizens can send the news photographically and textually around the world in seconds.

But in general newspapers and electronic media have responded to this revolution by ramping up the amount of coverage, if you can dignify it with such a term, of bad celebrity behavior, so that O.J. Simpson’s latest tribulations receive more attention than a roller-coaster stock market, which most of the press corps doesn’t really understand anyway, or any number of other truly important stories. (more…)