The glory of Christianity is its gospel of love, charity and compassion, so why do condemnatory histrionics from the pulpit about family values, abortion and homosexuality dominate news of Christendom while the pulpit’s deafening silence about a church-going society that allows insurance adjusters to make a mockery of its dearest tenets is met with complimentary silence in the media? (more…)

With Hillary Clinton having recently made like a schoolyard bully, maybe this isn’t the right moment to bring up the issue of misogyny. Or maybe it is.

Anybody who thinks this is a dead-letter issue should take a look at those e-mailed erectile dysfunction advertisements bubbling up from the cesspools of humanity. Their revolting language is full of references to the male member as a weapon. They talk of overpowering, exploding and nailing women. They assure men “their” women will be delighted by this weaponization of sexuality. (more…)

The only thing keeping us from becoming a federal police state is our
nostalgia for the ideals of our founders and the need to pretend that
we’re still living up to them.

Perhaps I’ve figured out why we clumsily call it a health care system. It’s because it exists to take care of the health care industry. Otherwise we might more felicitously call it patient care. The way it is now, the patient is so named for patience while being screwed. (more…)

Books have been written about why Americans vote against their best interests. I approach the question through the offices of my failing cook top. Leafing through Consumer Reports, it’s apparent to me I must spend at least $700 to replace it decently. That got me to thinking about all the other little marvels in CR and how Americans pay for them. Or not.

Here’s the disconnect, as I see it. If the corporados keep on dismantling the middle class, cutting wages and benefits and pensions, and shipping our jobs overseas, who are they going to sell all these goods to? Nothing wrong with publishing CR in Urdu and Chinese, of course, but this suggests another disconnect. (more…)

The news that General Motors, reporting a record $722-million fourth-quarter loss, is offering buyouts to all 74,000 of its unionized employees suggests to me that we need to talk about what nations are for.

Are they for getting out of the way of global corporations? Except when it’s necessary for the sons and daughters of the poor to defend those corporations? Are they for serving as the foreign office and defense department of global corporations? Are they for breaking the unions that speak for workers?

Or are nations to uphold our collective ideals, give us all a crack at happiness and prosperity, protect us from criminals within and without, and nurture the general good?

The problem is we all pay lip service to that last description, but our policies are calling into question our commitment to it. We seem to be buying the idea that everything will be okay if we just let corporations do whatever they want to do. (more…)

It’s often said Americans’ favorite fast food is the burger. I don’t believe it. I think it’s herring, red herring. I think the electorate these days hardly ever sees a diversionary tactic it doesn’t want to swallow in a single gulp.

You name it, the mythological connection between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and 9/11, single-payer national health care as socialized medicine, Social Security going bankrupt, gay marriage, right to life, family values, support the troops—all tactics to blind us to the simple fact that the gap between the rich and poor is growing every day, the middle class is disappearing, the government has been stolen by corporados, our elections are corrupted, and the republic is being turned into an imperium.

Some of these red herrings are whoppers, pure and simple, such as the Saddam-9/11 connection and national health care as socialized medicine. Other red herrings contain a truth twisted to suit politics. For example, the Social Security System will go bankrupt only if we fail to raise the current $97,000 annual income to which Social Security tax is applied. The slogan, support the troops, has been twisted to mean that you can’t support them if you disagree with President Bush’s war policies.

Other red herrings are legitimate issues in their own right, such as gay marriage, right to life and family values. They’re red herrings because they’re used to whip up a frenzy in certain political bases while blinding the members of those bases to the fact that their economic futures and their civil rights are being abridged. It’s like bumping into a busy man on the street to distract him from the fact you’re picking his pocket.

I think we love red herrings for the same reason we love fast food in general—it’s quick and easy. True, we get fat and sick, but that’s later. Meanwhile, lies and half-truths taste better than truth. Besides, we don’t taste the food, we taste what we put on it, and in the case of politics, the salt and fat is spin.

We can’t keep on wolfing down fast food and stay healthy, and the republic can’t keep on swallowing red herrings and stay healthy.

—DM

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(This is the transcript of Hot Copy No. 35, my regular podcast for The Student Operated Press)

If you imagine any subject as a puzzle with a thousand pieces you can begin to visualize how the press covers the news. It reports this piece and that piece, or this cluster of pieces and that cluster, but the entire picture remains fragmented. You may see a face, but not a crowd. A country but not a continent. An issue but not its context.

Take the recent disastrous California fires, which are becoming an annual event. We get the firefighting. We get the usual photo opportunities—you know, the governor or the president flying to the scene and saying something predictable. We get the evacuations. The dislocation and human misery. And finally, like icing on the cake, we get the insurance story—how State Farm, for example, is abandoning California to nature and its desecrators. All this passes for the big picture. But it isn’t the big picture. It’s merely a handful of pieces, as if they had been chucked into the air in the hope that they would come down intelligibly.

What is missing? What is missing from the California fires story is pretty much what was missing from the run-up to the catastrophic Iraq war. It’s called context. What are the consequences to our society of an unregulated insurance industry making all it can in a region or a state and then picking up its marbles and saying it won’t make nice anymore? What are the consequences of a state failing to conserve enough water or enough land to create firebreaks? Once the fires are out, once the death and destruction is reported, the press moves on, but the underlying problem remains and will come back to haunt us again. Is this responsible journalism or is it news as entertainment? What is the difference between this kind of reporting and televised football? (more…)

I’ve always thought of snobs as narrow of foot and thin of lip, given to cutlery stares and cold shoulders, none of which describes this broad-footed fellow. But now in my old age and especially when walking around Woodstock, New York, that rainbow-hued, pinwheel-kinetic redoubt of the New Age, I repent of ugly snobbery, because I turned up my nose at the New Age, thinking it shallow, exhibitionist and revisionist.

I failed in my middle-aged pretention to appreciate the New Age for the popularizing movement it was and is. The case for it being shallow and showy has been made by my betters, but why revisionist? My feeling then, back in the 60s, was that you would have thought the New Agers had discovered metaphysics by themselves. And you would have thought that only in the East or among the Native Americans could they find spirituality.

What I failed to see, refused to see, is that mediocre poetry and county fair metaphysics would inevitably lead to rediscovery of William Butler Yeats, father of modern poetry and magus, Paracelsus, John Dee, Robert Fludd, Giordano Bruno, Marsilio Ficino, Simon Magus, the Cathars, Arab alchemy, Gnosticism, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, the works of Frances A. Yates and Evelyn Underhill, and much more.

Because the New Age stirred interest in Celtic traditions, it should have been clear to me, for example, that if the New Agers weren’t reciting Yeats in their various energy centers they soon would be. And because they themselves were so threatening to the old order they would soon rediscover Bruno and the Cathars, persecuted for their supposed heresies. And as they were interested in holistic medicine, they would inevitably see that it has had a long line of martyrs.

Indeed the New Agers’ paths might eventually wind up at Albert Camus’ doorstep (inset) where they would share his distrust of ideologues, even if they might not share his equal distrust of faith.

—DM

(Note: I try to keep these weekly podcasts for The Student Operated Press conversational to make them easy listening for journalism students, so you’ll notice the language isn’t sanded and varnished.)

You’re more than students, much more, and I’d like to tell you why. I’ve read a lot of job applications from journalism school graduates. They’re always well written. It would be a deal-breaker if they weren’t, because the professors and instructors have edited them. I never made a single decision to hire anybody on the basis of a handful of stories. I never saw a story that really stood out from the others. Think about that. Here you have a veteran reporter and editor getting applications over the transom almost every day, and the best stories the applicants can come up with aren’t very impressive.

Back before the worldwide web, this miserable fact wasn’t so shocking, but today it ought to shock us. (more…)

I suppose some diehards are carrying on literary correspondences that arrive with postal stamps on them. I suppose a subspecies of diehard might even be handwriting their literary correspondences. I write almost everything longhand and then turn to the computer for refiner’s fire. I don’t deplore the passing of a noble tradition. I suspect Pharoah’s scribes would have loved computers. I’ll ask the little plaster scribe who sits on my library bookshelf.

Just as moveable type influenced the way writers write, so must the computer and Internet. We can now exchange our thoughts so speedily that it has become a little dicey to hit the send button without some forethought, to say nothing of the dangers of sending our thoughts to the wrong person by some address-line misadventure. And all those multiple addresses with their blind copies are bound to lead some fine miscarriages of propriety, to say nothing of law suits.

There is now an excitement and spontaneity in our correspondence that has replaced a more formal and considered manner of communicating. Some would say e-mail carries a plague of semi-literacy. I myself think it simply carries the thought and effort we put into it.

That said, I suspect, while confessing I know little about neuroscience, that our brains are being rewired. In short, it seems to me likely the computer, which so often mimicks the human brain that created it, is changing the way we think. Surgeons, following the example of the pilots who flew in the Gulf War, are performing virtual surgeries before entering the operating theater. By the time they actually enter the brain they have rehearsed the scheduled operation several times.

I remember newsrooms stacked with piles of newspapers, spikes piled high with stories, notes and phone messages, and floors awash with yards and yards of teletype copy. There was a separation between the words that in their birth throes killed so many trees and the brain that created them, but that separation is now being transgressed by computers which so much resemble the brain. There is a new and exciting intimacy between the human mind and the words it employs to express itself. Watching the computer screen begins to resemble the synaptic circuitry of the brain itself, and this is bound to change the nature of writing.

I think e-mail is more disposed to reveal the “tell” in the sender’s demeanor than longhand or typewriter correspondence, to use a poker term. It has its own broad array of tics and micro-expressions. It’s more vulnerable, sometimes even naked. Its own facility can betray it. This is not to say it’s inherently more honest. It is, after all, as honest or dishonest as its sender. But just as handwriting reveals the writer, so e-mail has a way of revealing him, too. It’s a bit like handling quicksilver. What I mean is that I think we’ve all by now had the experience of sending an e-mail and then sitting there muttering, Oh God, did I do that?

—DM