Great Journalism Leavened with Humor

I had the privilege to commit journalism in the tents of two of America's greatest newspaper publishers -- John S. Knight and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger.

When "Punch" Sulzberger died last week at 86, the obituary writers unanimously declared his greatest moment as publisher of the New York Times to have been the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which he personally approved. The documentation of lies and deceit at the highest levels of government and the military during the Vietnam War took place while I was an editor at the Washington Bureau of The Times.

Parenthetically, when publication was temporarily enjoined while the case was argued before the Supreme Court, journalists at the bureau conducted a wagering pool; entrants had to predict the decision, the vote, the justices on each side and, as a tie-breaker, the day and time the decision would be announced.  I won the pool with a nearly perfect score, missing only by about four minutes on the exact time of the announcement that The Times had won the historic case.

On Punch's next visit to the Bureau, he sought out the editor who had "called the shot" on the Pentagon Papers court battle.  Given this rare opportunity to impress the Boss of Bosses, I began to pontificate about Potter Stewart's historic role on the court and blah, blah, blah.  When I paused for breath, Punch smiled indulgently and said, "In other words, blind luck."

Clyde Haberman's excellent obituary in last Sunday's Times rightly made much of Sulzberger's sense of humor, a trait he shared with Knight, whose chain of fine papers was a magnet for great editors and reporters

Both men were not averse to making themselves the butt of their jokes.  "Jack" Knight attended a meeting with his Detroit Free Press editors not long after he had been the subject of a flattering cover story in Time magazine.   When this was mentioned, Knight said, with just the right hint of a wry smile, "The piece called me 'crusty,' which I think means hard on the outside -- and empty on the inside."

Both men filled their newsrooms with outstanding editors and reporters, then let them do what they did best unfettered by concerns about what the publisher did or did not want.  Both men believed that the news columns belonged, not to the man who owned the presses, but to the readers.

Under their leadership, The Times, The Chicago Daily News, the Detroit Free Press, the Miami Herald, the Akron Beacon Journal and other fine papers practiced a kind of journalism that has all but vanished from these United States, leaving democracy the poorer.

I think probably it helped that the editors of those newspapers knew the top boss had a sense of humor.

How to Characterize Wednesday's Show

Millions of Americans will commit a political act Wednesday night by turning on their TV sets.  They'll watch something called a "debate"  between the presidential candidates.  In fact it's just another TV show, a piece of political theater, and if there's a "winner," he should receive an Emmy, not four years' occupancy of the Oval Office.

Oh well, it will probably provide a wee bit more intellectual stimulus than the entertainments whose screen time it pre-empts. There are good scripts and bad scripts and this is likely to fall somewhere in between.

Roughly four in five of the Americans expected to watch Wednesday's performances had not even been born when these things we call debates began.  The Democrat was John F. Kennedy, a young senator best known outside of Washington for being a son of one of America's richest men.  The Republican was the incumbent vice president, a tough veteran of the political wars, Richard M. Nixon.  Nixon, it was thought, would make mincemeat of the inexperienced Kennedy.

Those "debates" undoubtedly had an important effect on the outcome of the election.  Even then there wasn't a lot of substance to them.  Image -- Nixon's "five o'clock shadow," Kennedy's "youthful vigor" -- swayed more voters than anything that was said. But it was a lesson for political handlers. These pieces of theater could be powerful tools in the right hands. And so the curtain rose on Camelot while, backstage, the era of spinmeisters, damage control and sound bytes emerged from behind the drums of pancake make-up.

The debates have evolved into showcases for the theater arts of so-called journalists as well as candidates.  Jim Lehrer of PBS, the moderator for Wednesday's show, is a widely-imitated master of The Serious Look, the mandatory mien for asking banal questions that the candidates know are coming.  Performers for ABC, CNN and CBS will moderate subsequent debate shows.

All of this stuff is orchestrated by a Commission on Presidential Debates, created in 1987 "to ensure that debates, as a permanent part of every general election, provide the best possible information to viewers and listeners." The commission members are a typical cross section of the white Christian male plutocracy that runs the country, with a token woman (Dorothy Ridings, a former newspaper publisher) and a token Hispanic (Antonia Hernandez, who is also a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation and a director of the American Constitution Society and the American Automobile Association0.

The commission sets the dates for the theatricals, names the moderators and generally assures that the voting public will get an entertaining show.  The commission even has its own set designer, f'gawdsakes, who makes sure that the lighting us up to snuff.  That assures that nobody will be done in again by "five o'clock shadow" although, truth to tell, there's nothing to be done about the Republican ticket's pronounced "good hair" advantage this time around.

It's all good fun and a cheap way to fill hours and hours of broadcast time without forcing anyone to actually think.  You might say it's just another one of those "reality shows" that TV executives love to death these days.  Occasionally in the past these things have given us flashes of soap opera drama, as well.  The Talking Heads will assure us that the shows make news.

They are some kind of made-for-TV animal.  But they aren't debates.

They Will Not Let the Sun Shine In

The sorry thing about the State Department v. Anderson Cooper fooferaw is that it's just one more symptom of the Obama Administration's obsession with operating in utter secrecy.

One of the many reasons not to vote for Obama is that, after promising transparency, his administration surpassed its predecessor as the most secretive in the nation's history.

Citizens are entitled to know what their government is doing and why.  Quit playing coy about your damned drones; this isn't a game.  You're killing civilian men, women and children by remote control.  The American people are entitled to know that and, if they choose, as they should, to demand that you tell them why you're doing it.

Quit playing coy about your spying on American citizens, poking into our telephone calls, e-mails, bank accounts and travels.  It's our law, our Constitution, you're trampling on.

Quit your pious warnings to other countries about violations of human rights and tend to the atrocities in your own back yard: torture, rendition, endless incarceration without charges.

Cooper dared to peel back a tiny piece of the black shroud behind which our government operates when CNN got hold of a personal journal written by the U.S. ambassador slain in a consulate in Libya. Of course CNN did what any news organization worth its salt would do before returning it to the victim's family: looked inside to see if there was anything newsworthy in there.

There was.  CNN again did what any news organization worth its salt would do: sent reporters to independently verify the news tips in the journal.  Then it reported truthfully on what its reporters learned.

Foggy Bottom went berserk. How dare a news organization actually report news about us!  What good Washington reporters are supposed to do is regurgitate the pabulum and propaganda we shovel out to them, no questions asked. Everybody inside the beltway knows that.

It's a sad state of affairs when a television performer like Cooper has to remind the mainstream media what real journalists are supposed to do.  Sadder still that it happens so seldom. 

When a government is as committed to secrecy and presidential power as this one is, and the free press reneges on its responsibilities, as today's media have, the people have two choices: accept  their slide toward virtual slavery, or rebel.

By militarizing the domestic branches of security and public safety, mostly in secret, the government has assured itself, according to a (secret, of course)  government study, that it is in a position to suppress by armed force any attempt at revolution by the people of the United States.

And if you think that's bad, wait till next year. The corporatocracy marches on.

I Am Not Going to Lose My Lunch Again

Against my better judgment, I clicked on an online clip of an encounter between Ted Koppel and Bill O'Reilly.  I had recently eaten lunch.

O'Reilly was challenging Koppel's characterization of what's broadcast by MSNBC (on the left) and Fox (on the right) as "bad for the Republic."

O'Reilly said Fox broadcasts eight hours of "hard news" a day.

O'Reilly said that he considers that what he, himself, does on Fox is "something noble."

I threw up.  Fortunately the carpet wasn't badly stained.

How can anyone take this guy seriously?  Before I finally lost my lunch there was some kind of banter about O'Reilly's viewership and the "free market place," with O'Reilly alleging that Fox's viewership numbers couldn't happen if the network were biased.

Something like that.

I believe it was O'Reilly's employer that pioneered a broadcasting concept called "reality shows," which in fact are obscene distortions of reality, but which also attract huge audiences, and which also should not be taken seriously.

The number of viewers attracted by television productions such as O'Reilly's, and the so-called "reality shows," suggests the answer to the question famously posed by a page one headline in a British tabloid the day after the 2004 U.S. presidential election: How can 50 million people be so stupid?

At least 50 million -- far more, probably -- go through life without ever dealing with anything real.  Those who are fortunate enough to still have jobs drive to work listening to O'Reilly's soul-mates like Rush Limbaugh; on breaks and lunch hours they talk about the previous night's "reality shows" or the fictions they heard from Limbaugh or O'Reilly; after work they go home to watch/listen to more of the same. They are encapsulated in a nonsense world where America is great and good, its wars are fought by heroes to keep the world safe for democracy, dark-skinned people with rags on their heads hate us because we're free and a bunch of white guys in wigs wrote the Constitution so that we would always be a Christian nation.

In about 40 days millions of these people will cast ballots in another presidential election whose outcome will revalidate the British tab's question about mass stupidity.

I will not be among them.  I'm going to cast an early ballot, voting for either Jill Stein or Rocky Anderson (probably Stein) for president.  There are two other candidates on my ballot who are actually worthy of the offices they are seeking (a U.S. Senate seat and a local judgeship).  I'll vote for them, too.

Perhaps none of my candidates will be elected.

But I'll damn well keep my lunch down the day I vote for them.

Eleven Years Later, This Is What We Are

"A Nation Changed" was the headline in the local rag on one of the Eleventh Anniversary stories, loaded with the usual platitudes, patriotic chest-thumping and banal braggadocio.

Then came word of the tragic slaying of Americans in a consulate in Libya.

Willard Romney's sick, slimy, error-pocked statement about events in Egypt and Libya was simply one more manifestation of the utter lack of ethical leadership under which this country has operated since the September attacks more than a decade ago. 

We have become a nation fueled by hate and greed, a nation whose gross national product is war, a nation whose wealthiest few are giddily driving ever more Americans out work and into poverty with the connivance of an abjectly corrupt governmental and political system.

Throughout the Muslim world, rage continues to rise, ignited by an artistically starved amateur hate movie made in the U.S.A. that profanes the Muslim religious and cultural heritage. Even though the U.S. government rightly denounces it, the rest of the world sees it as another piece in the hegemonic American mosaic of dominion and hubris. More violence seems inevitable.

The American ruling class and the Israeli government continue hell-bent on open and unprovoked war against Iran, even as our CIA and assorted covert, private armies conduct stealth wars in a dozen other places around the globe.  They regard Iran as a nuclear threat even though it has yet to take one serious step toward developing nuclear weaponry, whereas Israel's big nuclear arsenal is the world's most poorly kept military secret but somehow is not construed as a threat to its neighbors in the Middle East. 

American drones continue to kill civilian men, women and children.  Only this week another innocent victim of our national policies of illegal detention and torture died in our black hole in Cuba.  Our president retains the dictatorial authority to declare any American citizen, here or abroad, a terrorist enemy and have that person jailed indefinitely or killed on the spot.

We have 46 million American citizens living in poverty while the richest few among us enjoy spiraling and largely untaxed wealth unprecedented in the history of the republic. At a recent post-golf beer session in a club for the merely very rich, the good ol' boys took turns boasting about the number of recent years in which they paid no taxes.  A retired physician among them, himself comfortably well off despite paying taxes every year, gave up golf rather than having to listen to this bilge several times a week.

We have nearly one in four Americans of working age out of work, and a national economy that  adds jobs at a rate that does not equal the number of new citizens entering the work force.  Virtually all the "new jobs" are minimum or low-wage service jobs.

American corporations have shipped all of their living wage jobs overseas where pay scales are much lower.  Corporate profits soar, corporate money is parked offshore and untaxed. They have plenty of cash to buy politicians who, when elected, do their bidding.

 Median income in the United States is eight percent less than it was before the Bush-Obama recession. A typical member of the wealthiest American one percent now is 288 times richer than the median U.S. wage earner.

Our "free" press has become part of a massive propaganda machine.  Our sources of "news" are mere shills for government and its corporate masters.  We have fewer and fewer places to go to find truth.

Yes, we are indeed "a nation changed."

Musings While the Green Chiles Roast

There are other, often better, ways to measure time than clocks and calendars.

One of my favorites is the green chile harvest. When you see those bushels of green heading for the roasting sites you know that the autumnal equinox is just around the corner. With the harvest comes one of the most pleasurable food aromas in the world, that of flame-roasting green chiles.  Advocates of fresh-baked bread aroma have a point, but their favorite lacks the subtle pungency of the roasting chile.

At this time of year I like to take the back roads and linger near the chile roasters, savoring the scent and dreaming up new ideas for using green chile in cooking.

The aroma sharpens other senses as well. Yesterday I spotted half a dozen "new" sandbars in the Rio Grande.  I think the water-release guys at the upriver dams ration the flow a bit more cautiously at this time of year.  When winter arrives, of course, they turn it off completely.  This year it was mid-May before they turned it on again.  Everyone dependent on that river hopes and prays for more snowfall on the southern San Juan Mountains in Colorado in the coming winter. 

Hoping and praying for water is a year-round sport in the parched southwest, one that so far hasn't affected the record drought. Hope and prayer are impotent weapons against the ignorance of man, who manages the precious resources of his home planet with reckless abandon.

But our Mesilla Valley is fortunate.  It still has enough water to get by.  On yesterday's meander I passed a field where it seems that only yesterday fresh rows of pecan seedlings had been planted.  They're trees now, soon to mature into crop-yielders. One more season, perhaps. That field is an important landmark. 

Across the road, when one generation passed the land on to a younger one, the heirs sold out to developers.  Times were good when they sold but the Bush depression came and Obama did nothing to end it, so nobody's building these days.  Two or three nondescript homes sit rather desolately in the far reaches of the plot, but the ground closer to the road is just another place for the late-night drink-and-drive cowboys to pitch their empties, used condoms and dirty sweat socks.

The heirs to the land where the pecans are growing decided to plant trees that provide an annual yield, rather than rotating three or four crops a year as their forebears did. Probably not as sustainable, long-term, but better than selling out to a developer who would plant little boxes made of ticky-tacky that all look just the same.

My back-road meander doesn't take me all the way home.  I have to travel a mile or so on a main thoroughfare.  It's littered these days with political signs.  "Keep Judge Hoozit."  "Elect Sam Friendly!"  The World's Worst Congressman, who represents our district, has more signs than anyone.  He's a drilling multimillionaire and his even richer pals in the awl and gez bidness keep him rolling in campaign funds.

A neighbor whom I know well, a good lawyer who will be a fine judge if she's elected, has a lot of signs, too. Hers somehow seem less offensive than the congressman's.  Well, she's prettier for one thing. Smarter, for another.  And a lot more honest, I believe.

On the last lap homeward I noticed that the sun is taking on its autumnal angle, creating beautiful late-afternoon light.

Where the heck did I put the camera gear?

Our National Pastime: The Lying Game

This is how low we have sunk.

•  A candidate for vice-president tells the nation so many lies that even Fox "News" acknowledges some of them.
• Truth doesn't matter, says the head of Mitt Romney's campaign for the presidency.  "We're not going to let fact-checkers run our campaign."
• Never mind the peccadillos, writes a so-called journalist for a once-reputable newspaper, Paul Ryan's speech last night was about "big ideas."

Right.  His big ideas include the notion that rape is just one more "form of conception."  That if we let children go without education, sick people go without treatment, hungry people starve to death and aged people die quickly, and continue to spend trillions  on imperial wars that violate international law and our own Constitution, we will, in 28 years, have a balanced budget. That we must not collect taxes from the very wealthy or from the richest corporations in the history of the world because then they will only cut  a few hundred thousand jobs a year rather than, say, millions.  That we must put up with millions of cases of disease and death from pollution of our air, water and soil because restrictions on what corporations can or cannot do are, well, a nuisance and a burden to the free market economy.  That guns are every citizen's right, even children, and  the occasional mass slaying in schools, synagogues, churches and mosques are the price of being free. That planetary climate change is a myth dreamed up by overpaid scientists whose jobs ought to be outsourced, maybe to Mars.  And that's just a sampler.

Tonight, as I recall, is the night that Mr. Ryan's running mate, Mitt Romney, will address the nation with still more lies.

Ah, but this is an equal opportunity country!  Next week the Democrats seeking to retain the offices to which Messrs. Romney and Ryan aspire will have their turn to lie to the nation on national TV.  Being wont to temper their untruths with soupcons of veracity, they will admit that everything isn't entirely hunky-dory in the U.S. of A., but insist that we're making progress because Barack and Joe are in office and not those nasty Republicans.  They will say they have tried and tried to compromise and will try and try again but, you know, Republicans just don't play fair.

Mainstream media performers will continue to treat everything that's said as worthy of serious consideration by  voters.

But in fact, the game metaphor implicit in "play fair" is apt.  All of this is a game, a giant charade permitted for our amusement by the  rich and powerful few who actually run things. 

The better the show the more likely it is to perpetuate the myth that we are a free people, exceptional in our national virtue and blessed with the quadrennial opportunity to choose our own leadership.  Love it or leave it!

As long as we're playing fast and loose with truth, I'll let you in on a little secret:  I never did commit journalism for a living.  I really did play the piano in a whorehouse.  I and Harry Truman.

You could look it up.

Three Voices Voters Should Hear, But Won't

Most Americans will go the polls about nine weeks from now without having read or heard a word from the only three presidential candidates who are truthfully addressing all or many of the most important issues in the republic today.

Our great quadrennial Silly Season, during which candidates for high office and their giddy advocates perform childish hijinks and applaud saccharine entertainments, is, the Associated Press soberly tells me, "in full swing" in Tampa.

More of the same will ensue in Charlotte, NC.

And then we will endure the so-called "presidential debates."

At no point in all of this will we be exposed to the positions of Jill Stein, the Green candidate for the presidency; Ross Carl (everyone calls him "Rocky") Anderson, the Justice Party candidate; or Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate.

That's because they aren't "serious" candidates.  Before the 2008 primaries had run their course, a television performer masquerading as a journalist dismissed Dennis Kucinich, the Ohio congressman, for wasting time in the Democratic presidential nominating debates because he wasn't a "serious" candidate.  The TV clown said Kucinich's lack of "seriousness" was evident because he wanted to talk about the illegal wars that were killing hundreds of young Americans and thousands of Iraqi and Pakistani civilians rather than answering questions about whether he and Shirley MacLaine had actually seen a flying saucer.

Despite fierce opposition from the Romney campaign, Johnson will be on the ballot in all 50 states and, on that ground, still hopes to take part in the so-called presidential debates.  He would hold both main party candidates' feet to the fire:

Democrats: "The notion of ending the wars, the notion of ending the drug war, repealing the Patriot Act, marriage equality [all of which Johnson favors] -- wow! These are traditionally Democrat issues that they're not doing so well on."

Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan: "This guy's supported the wars, this guy's proposed a balanced budget in 28 years, assuming growth, this guy voted for the Patriot Act, this guy voted for the National Defense Authorization Act, this guy proposed legislation in line with Virginia's ultrasound legislation regarding women .   . .and the irony to me is that (he's) supposed to be the boldest Republican on the budget, but if he's the boldest the Republicans have then the Republicans are really a third party, they've abandoned what's historically supposed to be Republican."

Romney's position on immigration: "I'm speaking as a  former border state [New Mexico] governor.  There's a total disconnect between his rhetoric regarding immigration and the reality.  (The language in the GOP) platform is anti-immigration; it borders on racist."

Put this guy on the stage with Romney, Ryan, Obama and Biden and we'd have the beginnings of a genuine debate. Add Anderson and Stein there might even be a smidgen of hope of restoring our democratic republic some day.

Anderson, the former mayor of Salt Lake City, wants to talk about why a Democratic administration wants to crush dissent (the Occupy movement, for example) and why government hasn't investigated what really happened on Sept,. 11, 2001.  He, too, opposes NDAA and wants to debate why it should be repealed.

He told an interviewer: "The rule of law has been utterly eviscerated during the Bush and Obama administrations. We've engaged in wars of aggression, wars for which there has been no coherent explanation. Our debt is completely out of control. We have a military-industrial complex with a stranglehold on our government. And at the core of almost every public policy failure, all we have to do to find an explanation is follow the money, because our Congress and the White House have been purchased lock, stock and barrel by wealthy corporate interests. The Republican and Democratic Parties have colluded in creating the corrupt, perverse system that has led our nation to this point today. And there is now no question in my mind that we need a major new alternative.

"This isn't only about the American people. This is about the future of our world. Climate change poses, by far, the greatest risk to humanity. And the failure of essential US leadership in the international community will end up having devastating consequences.

"If we allow the fear-driven argument that the lesser of two evils may be defeated by the greater of two evils, then we're simply conceding to the status quo. Then we'll never see a change. In fact, we'll see things continue to get worse, with the ratcheting up of an imperial presidency, with the undermining of the rule of law and our constitutional values, and a continued destruction of our democracy, as well as a worsening economic disparity - which is already worse than at any time since the 1920s and during the Great Depression.

"We can either choose to simply move the players - Republicans and Democrats - around and sustain the corrupt system in which those with the money call all the shots, or we can finally organize and take action together to choose a very different way."

Stein likes to jump into the economic issues by saying government must "make the banks do what they're supposed to do, which is negotiate to keep homeowners in their homes." She says, "The playing field is tilted against everyday people trying to get jobs, trying to have decent wages, trying to get affordable health care, trying to have affordable higher education for their kids."

She speaks out bluntly against "this president negotiating a new Free Trade agreement that is like NAFTA on steroids." She wants to talk about "the attack on our civil liberties in which President Obama codified all the violations of George W. Bush and then took it further to where he can throw anybody in jail for whatever his pleasure is."

She has lots more to say, about the real problems that have dragged this country down, and about the bogus "lesser of two evils" argument.

Gary Johnson and Rocky Anderson have lots more to say, as well. But most Americans, when they vote for president in November, will not have heard them.  Many will not even know their names.
And so they'll cast their ballots in ignorance, like sheep fattened on the sophistry of the Great Quadrennial American Silly Season.

No wonder the country is such a mess.

Don't Let 'Livestrong' Become a Victim

Today I feel like the mythical little boy who waited outside the baseball commissioner's office in some long-ago sportswriter's fable, then confronted Shoeless Joe Jackson when he emerged from the hearing that banned him for life because he deliberately lost games in cahoots with gamblers.

"Say it ain't so," the tearful boy said in the fable.  "Say it ain't so, Joe."

Lance Armstrong said it ain't so over and over and over again as he won an unprecedented seven Tours de France and countless other major bicycling competitions while being constantly accused of using banned substances or other performance-enhancing devices.

How, after all, could a man who had recovered from not one but two killer cancers perform so remarkably in this brutally challenging competition and still be clean?  With all the accusations he became the most tested athlete in sports, yet throughout his racing career no testing agency ever purported to have found evidence that he cheated.

Now, saying he is sick and tired of all the accusations, he has chosen not to fight the latest and most serious ones, which emerged from a grand jury investigation of evidence collected by the U.S. sports anti-doping people.  For most people, this amounts to a tacit admission of guilt.  Armstrong has been stripped of his seven Tour titles and banned from cycling for life.

I don't feel sorry for Lance.  He has a lot of money, his health, and a lot of memories.  He really did overcome first testicular and then brain cancer, fierce maladies that almost always kill.  And as he did so he put himself through a training  regimen the likes of which few athletes, even world class athletes, have but considered, let alone taken on.  And, regardless of what he did or ingested between races or stages of races, he really did climb all those mountains in the Alps and Pyrenees, he really did ride all those torturesome time trails, he really did outride everyone else in the field.  Given how rife his sport is with cheating, given how many of his rivals have been tested and found to have used banned substances, it is reasonable to wonder just how much of an unfair  advantage Armstrong might have gained from his alleged transgressions.

Unlike Shoeless Joe, Floyd Landis, Roger Clemens or the legion of other sports cheaters, caught or uncaught, Armstrong did one particularly admirable thing:  He founded. funded and promoted the Livestrong foundation.

As a cancer survivor myself, I admire the fact that he put a considerable portion of his wealth and all of his prestige and influence into this agency for research in quest of a cancer cure, education of the public about healthy lifestyles than can reduce cancer risk, and aid and comfort to the victims of the disease and their families.  In an age when our government can find trillions for wars that kill and maim  innocent men, women and children, but not even pittances for life-saving research and science, Livestrong is a critically important force in the effort to improve the human condition around the world.

I hope Armstrong's decision yesterday and the ensuing widespread assumption that he is guilty  do not result in the death or diminution of Livestrong.  Armstrong once asked why anyone could think he would risk everything he had put into his foundation just to cheat in bicycle racing. Now, he says, ``I will commit myself to the work I began before ever winning a single Tour de France title: serving people and families affected by cancer, especially those in underserved communities.''

I will continue to support Livestrong because the question of its founder's guilt or innocence is immaterial in the context  of the good the organization does, having raised more than $500 million for cancer causes since its foundation.

On the great gray scale of human merit, I still think that makes Lance Armstrong a far better man than his accusers.

No Point? Listen Again to the Music of Revolution

I forgive the brashness of youth but that doesn't mean I allow its impertinences to stand unchallenged.

Michael Barthel has written about popular music for a number of print outlets and his work appears widely online.  It was on the website Salon that I read his essay triggered by the conviction of the three Pussy Riot  women on hooliganism charges in Russia.

The headline -- "Protest Songs Are Pointless" -- only sort of captures what Barthel has to say.  He takes issue -- sort of -- with those who recall the music of the1960s and wonder "what happened to protest songs."  Their yearning, he writes, "feeds listeners' fantasies of music as a revolutionary tool, even though its actual pleasures are far more complex than that."  Huh?

Oh, well, toward the end of his essay Barthel does recognize, sort of,  something about the "spirit" of music as a motivating force, but he quotes another, unnamed critic when he does so: "One critic got it right when he said that Pussy Riot  shows 'the punk rock spirit . . . can be a force that incites fear.' Indeed, the spirit can, but the actual music still mostly incites pogoing." Huh?

Oh, well, Barthel also makes the point, sort of, that it's OK for Paul Ryan to like the music of Rage Against the Machine even though Rage's  leader, Tom Morello, publicly scolded Ryan for being part of the very machine he rages against: "Perhaps Paul Ryan was moshing when he should have been listening."  Never mind, writes Barthel: "The politically important stuff about music isn't the 'content' of the lyrics; it's the symbolic gestures made by the people performing them." Huh?

Oh, well, if Barthel really is saying that protest music is pointless so quit longing for the good old '60s when you fantasized that it actually motivated people to, well, protest, and besides, Paul Ryan can listen to Rage Against the Machine  if he wants to because it's a free country, isn't it? -- if that's what he's saying, he's right, sort of, about Ryan.

As for the rest of it, though, he needs to bone up on history.  He probably wasn't even alive when  people, white and black, suffered and died to advance the Civil Rights Movement.  He needs to see the grainy film footage of some of those people marching down the dusty road to Selma, singing the simple melody and simple lyrics of We Shall Overcome as they risked mistreatment in prison or even death for their actions.  He needs to learn about how the wives of battered warriors for workers' rights sang Song of the Union Maid as they marched to support their men in the bloody struggle against thugs and corrupt lawmen in the battles of the coal fields, the auto plants and the rail yards.  The underdog has always marched to the music of the troubadours of protest in the unending struggle to right the wrongs of history.

Even before Beethoven tore up the title page of his third symphony to protest  Napoleon and renamed it Eroica, the music of protest stirred a great peoples' revolution in France.  Marchers from Marseille paraded into Paris in July of 1792 singing DeLisle's Chant de Guerre pour l'Armee du Rhine and the gathering insurrectionists were so bestirred that they dubbed it La Marseillaise and made it the rallying cry of their revolution.  It remains the country's national anthem and was adapted by the leaders of three Latin American uprisings as the anthems of their own revolutions.

How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man ?
How many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand ?
Yes, how many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they're forever banned ?

And how many young Americans were moved to defy their own country's government by  Bob Dylan's anthem?

It's probably too late to do much about the deplorable state of this country, but a new generation of Dylans, Guthries, Seegers and their ilk might at least stir up some action.

It Was Published. It Was Not Fact-Checked.

Never mind whose side you're on in the fuss between Paul Krugman and a host of other reputable economists on one side, and Nial Ferguson, a cockamamie Harvard professor of history on the other, about Ferguson's maniacal cover story in Newsweek.

Well, on second thought, do  mind.  If you side with Ferguson, move to Missouri and vote for Todd Akin.

Otherwise, consider this little item buried in the exchange of broadsides:  Newsweek did not repeat not fact-check the article!  According to Dylan Byers of Politico, a  Newsweek spokesman said the magazine does not have a fact-checking department, and that "we, like other news organizations today, rely on our writers to submit factually accurate material."

Mein Gott!!!!!

I hope the magazine's mouthpiece is wrong that "other news organizations today" don't check the facts before publishing.  I hope the New York Times, where I once worked, not only holds editors accountable for the veracity of every word in every story they vet, but also still  backs them up with the superb research department we were able to consult back then.  I hope the Philadelphia Inquirer, where I once worked, hasn't lost the lesson it learned when it was zapped with the biggest libel judgement in history for failing adequately to check the work of a writer who was a known drunk and had a widely known jihad against one of the subjects of his article. I hope the Detroit Free Press, where I once worked, despite its economic troubles, has not ceased to hold editors accountable for the accuracy of the stories they edit.  (I once got hauled up to the office of Lee Hills, then the Free Press publisher, to explain why I allowed a a sentence with a subtle double-meaning -- not an error, mind you, but something that readers might misconstrue -- slip into a complex story.)

The very first thing we learned in journalism class, the very first thing we drummed into the skulls of rookie reporters, was, "Get it right!"  And we -- the editors -- were, by God, there to make damned sure they learned that lesson.

Because, truth to tell, that's all we had: getting it right.  The scandalously low pay, the ridiculously long hours, the shabby newsrooms -- badges of honor, because day after day, when the presses rolled we could pick up the first-offs and read our stories -- the ones we had reported, edited, checked, and checked again -- and know that we got it right.  We owed that to our readers because they trusted us to get it right.

If we could get it right in fine language -- "Literature in a hurry," as one great editor used to say -- all the better.  If we could get it first and get it right, better still.  If we could get it right and get it exclusively, best of all.

But always, always, first and foremost, get it right.

Nial Ferguson reported demonstrable economic fallacies, not facts, on several matters of key importance in his Newsweek screed.  That is to his discredit.

That it got into print is to the magazine's everlasting shame.  No fact-checkers?

Get the hell out of business.

? !

Just when you think  right wing ignorance has reached unplumbed depths and can't go any deeper, along comes someone like Rep. Todd Akin (R-Missouri) to prove that  American fascist depravity has no limits.

Aikin has long been one of the most outspoken opponents of women's reproductive health, always seeking to enslave them in draconian laws against complete ob-gyn care.

He was asked Sunday by an interviewer if he thought abortion should be legal for victims of rape.

"From what I understand from doctors, that (pregnancy) is really rare,"  he said. "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

Legitimate rape? Legitimate rape?  Legitimate rape? Legitimate rape?  LEGITIMATE RAPE?

This guy gets to vote on the laws that govern us.  No wonder we have constitutional abominations like the so-called Patriot Act!

Somewhere in the female anatomy, somewhere in the uterus, according to Akin, lies the power to distinguish among, say, a "legitimate" rapist's sperm, an illegitimate rapist's sperm, and spousal or other "friendly" sperm!

And this guy is running for the United States Senate.