It’s interesting how eager both the left and the right wings are to pull the trigger on Scott McClellan, the former White House spokesman, who has written a book confirming many of our worst suspicions about the Bush Administration.

If he knew his bosses were lying about Iraq and Valerie Plame, the CIA undercover agent whom they treacherously outed, why didn’t he speak up, save thousands of lives, dollars and damages? That’s what many of his critics of the left and right are yowling. (more…)

Do you remember The Gates (inset) in Central Park in 2005, that hydrology of orange banners installed by Christos and Jeanne-Claude? I don’t think anybody mentioned it at the time but it had a precedent among the Arabs. They used to hold great poetry competitions in which the poems were painted on vast banners. The banners were then carried onto fields, turning them into seas of calligraphy. (more…)

Noah Eli Gordon in an end paper in the Spring issue of Rain Taxi says he recently began to read page twenty-six of every book he owns. The more I thought about this quixotic adventure the more it enchanted me. As I compared it to the evening news, it seemed to me infinitely more intellectually adventurous.

News organizations are like fastball hitters; they fear curve balls and knuckle balls, exactly the kind of pitches Noah Gordon is likely finding on all those twenty-sixth pages. For the average news anchor there’s ping and then there’s pong. There’s ho and then there’s hum. But lord knows what glories, temptations and recognitions are in those books. (more…)

We talk from time to time in our society about racial profiling, but where is Frank Gorshin now that we need him so much? Impersonators tell us more about our leaders and wannabes than all the pundits and reporters together.

Watch John McCain walking arthritically with his fists held rigidly in front of him like bumpers. Consider Hillary Clinton pointing angrily from the stump at Saudi Arabia. Notice Barack Obama tapping someone on the arm as he passes. (more…)

I live in a house surrounded by its weed yards. Each spring I look forward to the happy dandelions so despised by the many. I even like the myriad puff balls they turn into. Periodically the farmer who cuts our grass rakes the thatch and spreads lime, but I use no chemicals or fertilizer.

Something is wrong with this picture. At this point it would be expensive to correct it, but the predicament heightens my awareness that a great many aspects of our culture are missing from the discourse we are reluctantly beginning about energy. (more…)

Greg Palast, the outré investigative reporter, claims the Iraq war and the subsequent surge are a global swindle— read about it here— a conspiracy of government and industry to pick our pockets and to hell with the future.

How much truth there is in this, if any, remains to be seen. But considering the sheer amount of inconsequential BS fed to us by the media—Barack Obama’s elitism, Hillary Clinton’s abrasiveness, etc—isn’t it a wee bit strange that nobody in the mainstream media even pretends to examine Palast’s contention? Reminds you of how they sat on their hands while the White House lied us into a catastrophic war, doesn’t it?

After all, media gasbags are perfectly willing to waste their time and ours entertaining stupid notions like the McCain-Clinton gas tax holiday or some ditzy celeb’s boringly bad behavior, so what’s their problem giving Palast’s theory a toss? Oh, that would be irresponsible journalism, right? Like yakking about John Edwards’ hair?

And why hasn’t Congress asked him to testify. After all, he was once a congressional investigator.

I don’t always know what to make of Palast. His hopped-up language worries his most serious reports. But we know Enron manipulated California’s power supply, so why is Palast’s notion so unworthy of inquiry? Is it unimaginable that Big Oil would con us? Or is it because the Big Media yakkers, while telling us what a great job they are doing, are doing a job on us? —DM

Now that our planet, a betrayed beloved, is strongly suggesting to us
that unremitting consumerism may just dig us a hole to hell, we might learn a new way of living from the resourcefulness of children.

Have you noticed how children build whole worlds with stick and stones, how they improvise, making magic circles, giving strange animals decent burials? Have you noticed how much they see that adults don’t even think worthy of seeing, just as adults haven’t seen the rape of the planet worthy of their hifalutin attention? (more…)

Speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing.

—Henry David Thoreau

One of the many blessings of growing old is a certain integrity of smile. There is an instant of delay between cause and effect in which we’re invited to wonder if an elderly person is going to smile at all. I admire this inordinately. The sheer amount of electrical energy required of the young to smile all too often and laugh all too loudly is appalling.

I suppose it’s rooted in desire to please, a disease which handles the elderly more gently than it does the rest of us. (more…)

If you’d like to look at the changing face of news, consider your own Google home page. Savor its interactivity. You can organize your news, weather maps, solar systems, art exegesis, you name it, and the list of “gadgets” grows almost daily. You can design your own newspaper.

But it’s no longer a paper, it’s news from the ether, and it’s being updated and reedited around the clock. More than all the words about the demise of the newspaper, your home page can tell the story. You can do with your cursor what it costs a paper-and-ink newsroom big bucks to do. (more…)

(This is the latest transcript of Hot Copy my regular podcast for The Student Operated Press)

One of the reasons I cherish The New York Times is its institutional eye for the easy-to-overlook and profound. The March 27th front page features a story by Brian Stelter called Finding Political News Online, Young Viewers Pass It Along. It may prove to be the most significant story of the first fifty years of the century, and to its credit The Times put it on the front page.

The story is about the socialization of news and imagery, not in the political sense, but in the sense that sharing news and imagery has become part of the way we socialize with each other. We like a blog post, a news story, an essay, an image, a poem, a quotation, and next thing you know it’s whizzing around the world to friends and family. What we’re accustomed to calling news is becoming as personal and intimate as a jewel box or a pack of baseball cards. (more…)