Marty Kaplan has described how the media covers political campaigns.  The media:

work for a big business, whose oxygen is attention. They live or die on grabbing and holding audiences. To stay in business, they need combat, conflict, heat, meat, flip-flops, gotchas, losers, boozers, hairpin turns, heroes with feet of clay, Rockys, Quixotes, cliffhangers, firewalkers, comebacks, kickbacks, zingers, ‘wingers.

And yet at the same time the media root for and egg on mudwrestling and foodfighting, what they say they want is a cathedral — bipartisanship, consensus, a Serious Debate on The Issues, Bringing America Together.

Boy, is that a sucker punch. The truth is, they think that stuff is really b-o-r-i-n-g. No combat = no attention.

The state of Missouri has never had an official poet laureate.  Like many people, I didn’t know that, although unlike many of those many people, I should have.  One of the hats I wear (besides the one in the cool profile photo above) is the president of the Missouri Center for the Book.

What, you may ask, is the Missouri Center for the Book and what, furthermore, does it have to do with state poets laureate?

I’m so glad you asked.  The Missouri Center for the Book (hereafter known as MCB) is the state affiliate to the Library of Congress Center for the Book.  All 50 states have such an institution now, and we are all as different in our structure and specific goals as those states.  The common thread is that we are all dedicated to promoting what we call the Culture of the Book.  This includes authors, certainly, but also publishers, editors, reviewers, literature teachers, schools.  We see all these things as inextricably part and parcel of that culture, though obviously authors are the most visible part.

We do not do remedial reading work.  There are other agencies that do that and do it far better than we could.  That’s not our mandate.

In our heyday, the first several years after our founding in 1993, we did all sorts of things to promote the idea of books and reading, mostly through the mechanism of conferences which addressed certain themes.  We had notable guests, lots of writers and publishers, an open forum.

And then, as happens in such things, funding slipped away and we did smaller and smaller programs.

Among the things we do is administer the state Letters About Literature contest, which is a very cool program for three levels of students, primary to secondary, in which a student writes a letter to the author of a book that has had a significant impact on that student.  We select the best, the winners go on to a national contest.  Some of these letters, even from very young students, are tremendous.  They give me hope for the future.  Quiet hope, a confidence that we have a chance, that the young are not dumber than their parents or grandparents, but are generally smarter.

As president for the past three years, I’ve been reorganizing and rebuilding the MCB.  We have plans to relaunch the conferences.  We intend to rebuild our website, which contains an author database which was, when it was instituted, the first of its kind in the nation.  We intend that it be made interactive.  That’s going to be a bit pricey, but once done it will be a great tool.

There are other programs we’d like to do.

But one thing we’ve been working at for the last eight years, doggedly and consistently, is the creation of a state poet laureate.  I won’t go into the details of that effort, they would bore you.  Mostly the work consisted of letter writing, long conversations with “influential” people, planning the structure of the post, often just being a pest.  MCB itself could not do this—for it to be “official” it must come from either the governor or the legislature.  Most states, it is an appointment of the governor.  It boils down to convincing the governor to do it.

Governor Blunt has decided to do it.  Last month we received word that the position would be created and the first poet laureate will be named in mid-December.  MCB has been named the agency which will administer the post and work on selection.

Warning:  what follows is an unapologetic promotional request for financial support.

I canvassed a number of states about their poet laureate programs.  There are about 8 or 9 states that do not have the position.  Among the others, the post is largely honorary, with no funding.  From the beginning, we thought the post should have some money behind.  It is incredibly difficult to make a living as a writer, triply so as a writer of poetry.  Besides, we intend for our laureates to travel the state, speaking on the matter of the literary arts.  That shouldn’t come out of the laureate’s own pocket.  But we’ve already learned that Missouri’s laureate post will also, as far as the state government is concerned, be honorary.

So I am asking for donations.  MCB’s future programming efforts will be built around the poet laureate–not specifically so much as thematically.  Missouri is stepping up to the plate, symbolically, to declare that literature, that reading, that authors are actually important.  In order to move forward and take advantage of the very public opportunity this is giving the Culture of the Book, we want to put some teeth behind it.

You can go to our website– books.missouri.org –and read a bit more about us.  Mind you, the site as it stands is going to be changed in a year or so, but there’s still worthwhile content.  If given the chance and the support, we intend doing a job of elevating the stature of the written word in Missouri.  So if you are so inclined, please send your tax deductible donations to:

Missouri Center for the Book
600 West Main,
P.O. Box 2075
Jefferson City, MO 65102-2075,

or call 573-751-1821

Before you ask, I cleared this with Erich.  MCB is a 501c3 nonprofit organization (which receives no money from state or federal sources).

As I said, I am unapologetically, unabashedly, unashamedly asking for money.  We want to pay our poets laureate a reasonable honorarium and we want to fund programs that will do for books what PBS does for documentary film or NPR does for radio broadcasting.  Granted, on a more modest scale, but still.

The governor has decided to announce this before Christmas.  Seems like a good time to give a present to the state and to make a stab at doing better for one of the things we all love and need so much—good books.

Thank you for your time and attention.

Here’s a heartwarming story  about some of the insanity that followed in the wake of 9/11.  We see this kind of thing all the time, in the news, on tv shows, in movies.  A mistake compounded into tragedy by the utter fear and panic induced under extreme conditions.  One could almost forgive the FBI for this given the circumstances, but the follow-up beggars understanding.

It’s not like this is rare.  In Myanmar, comedians get jailed for cracking wise about the government (I believe stand-up comedy is illegal there period).  In Cuba, it is fine to criticize the United States all you want, but if you point out that your own government (Castro’s) doesn’t exactly deliver what anyone might call freedom, you end up in jail or dead.  Threats to national security the world over are never treated as anything less than the active presence of the devil or Darth Vader.  (Of course, in most cases Darth Vader is the one in charge, so…)

We, however, have no excuse.  Now, the courts did let this man go.  But then they sought to eradicate the public statements of what really happened.  The coercion was seen as something we must not admit happened.

So what’s worse?  Embarrassment or a violation of individual rights?  Because that is what all this has in common.  Governments seeking at all costs to avoid being embarrassed.

You might think that this should be a no-brainer.  If you want not to be embarrassed, don’t do anything embarrassing–i.e. don’t do anything stupid.  But governing is a large, complex, messy endeavor, and those who govern, after all, are humans (usually) who are prone to all the failures of our organism.  Things that look like a “good idea at the time” can turn out very much badly.

And the truth is, we still depend on Face in international relations.  This is silly as well, but unfortunately very true.  The appearance of a dignified, competent national government carries weight in negotiations.  It also carries weight with the people being represented.  After all, who wants to grant power to a buffoon?

I think, however, this part of the Emperor’s wardrobe.  Nations tacitly accept that they must avoid embarrassment on the home front in order to be credible to the rest of the world, but is there any validity to the presumption?  Between individuals, the ability to admit mistakes and laugh at oneself is seen—usually—as a virtue.  Somehow, once we go up the ladder into the realms of government, that virtue becomes intolerable.

So the FBI gets the wrong address, busts in on a family in its bed, makes a mess of the home, and finds out later that this really wasn’t a safe house for drug dealers/terrorists/counterfeiters/kidnappers/what have you.  Would it destroy them to say “We’re sorry” and perhaps offer some compensation for the inconvenience?  Instead they adamantly behave as it a trick had been played on them and that the FBI is the victim.

This is supposed to be a democracy.  This is supposed to be where the government works for Us.  When someone I hire screws up a job, I do not apologize to them or tolerate the suggestion that it was my fault they did it wrong.  In fact, while I might be inclined to overlook the mistake in the first instance, such arrogance would get them summarily fired.

It might do for all of us–right or left, it doesn’t matter–to bear in mind one simple fact about our leaders.

They are employees.

The president of the United States is indeed the most powerful single national leader on the planet.  He (perhaps soon she) wields power and authority unlike no king in history.  The burden and complexity of the office are crushing and we have seen men go in fairly vigorous and come out white-haired and, sometimes, broken (Johnson comes to mind; the job arguably killed Roosevelt and both Wilson and Eisenhower were damaged in office); those who gain the office deserve respect and perhaps a little admiration.  But at the end of the day, they are not My Country—they are an employee.

And if that’s the case for the president, it is even more so for everyone else down the chain.

So if a government official does something stupid, well, let’s see about making sure that doesn’t happen again.  If, however, they then proceed to act as if I have no right to bring them up short for their mistakes, then it’s time to fire them.

Because all too often the consequences of trying to squelch the public exposure of an embarrassment are far worse than the initial mistake.  After all, this isn’t Myanmar.

Is it?

The Onion News Network always gives us top notch humor.  Often, though, ONN uses its wit to effectively make a serious point.

But what’s puzzlin’ you is the nature of my game…

That’s about the only song I can stand to listen to the Rolling Stones do.  Musically, thematically, it all comes together for them.  It’s perfect.  Beyond that, while I certaiinly like a lot of their songs, I cannot abide listening to the Stones.  Particularly, I can’t tolerate Mick Jagger’s sorry excuse for a singing voice.  Call me old fashioned, but a hoarse tenor croak is not pleasant to listen to.

(To be fair, I can’t stand Tony Bennet, AC/DC, Rod Stewart. Or Bruce Springsteen, largely for the same reasons.)

I start this piece with that bit of personal revelation for a reason.  Voice, to me, is very important.  Getting it right, using it properly, saying something meaningful…they all work together.  One may argue over style vs. substance—and there is validity to the argument, for certainly some people have nothing but style (Celine Dion comes to mind) and it would be nice if they had something to say—but ultimately, to get across what you mean, the two must work hand-in-glove.

When Erich invited me to contribute to Dangerous Intersection, I agreed under the proviso that I use a pseudonym.  My reasons were many, but mainly I wasn’t sure how good I’d be at it, and I wanted to practice.  But practicing in public can be…dicey.  So while I learned better how to do this, I elected to do it behind the cloak of an alter ego.

Jason Rayl is my creation.  In many ways, he is me.  He is a character in an unpublished novel I wrote in my late teens and early twenties, the first novel I ever completed.  It’s a big sucker and may never see the light of day, but the main character is very much me.  Or, at least, a very idealized version of who I thought I was and who I thought I’d like to be.  I grew out of him, but from time to time he’s been useful.

My name is Mark W. Tiedemann and I write science fiction.  You can find my books on Amazon.  I’ve posted a link to my own website, which I’ve just finished revamping.  It’s not all done yet, but done enough.  There, you’ll find a page called The Distal Muse, which is where I post news and assorted ramblings, and may now be posting much of what I’ve been posting here.  If Erich permits, I may cross post.

It’s not so much that I think I’ve mastered this form of writing—I wonder how many ever master their words—but I think the experiment has paid off and frankly I’m not in the least ashamed of anything I’ve put on Dangerous Intersection.  I would not be ashamed of the content in any event, but the voice….ah, the voice.  From time to time in my life I’ve committed actual songwriting.  Whatever other merits my attempts may possess, I do not sing them myself.  I don’t have the voice.

When Stephen King did away with Richard Bachman, he declared that Bachman had died “from cancer of the pseudonym.”  In Jason’s case, it was bad cold.

I said I write science fiction.  I’ve published ten novels, fifty plus short stories.  Writing fiction of any kind forces one to grow perspective.  Writing science fiction requires an appreciation if not a full understanding of how systems work and why things come together the way they do.  Historical writing shares this.  What it has done for—or to—me is cause me to see as many sides of an issue as I can grasp.  Consequently, I cannot abide doctrinaire positions, ideologues, Us Or Them thinking.  This has also caused many friends to view me with frustration and consternation, because they can’t pin my sympathies down.  Am I a liberal?  A conservative?  Reactionary, radical, libertarian?  Relativist?

See all of the above.  More often than not I take a “curse on both your houses” approach, because more often than not the primary issues are overlooked, run down, trampled, or twisted in the name of political expediency.
This has caused me to draw back from posting on some topic on which I have strong feelings, but can’t quite find the center of, and don’t wish to shortchange the complexities of what may really be going on in the interest of presenting a solid front for one position or another.

For instance, this whole mad, trendy, fashionable rush for bio-fuels.  I have friends who two years ago would never have admitted to any sympathy with Green anything and are now on the bandwagon for ethanol.  Why?  “We need to become independent of foreign oil.”  And when I say, “oh, so we should become dependent then on foreign sugar?”  they look at me as if I’d just farted at the birthday party.  See, they now support this for political reasons, not environmental reasons, and I find that just as objectionable as unthinking support for Big Oil.  It will solve nothing, just shift the focus of the problem.  The issues are far more complex than party politics allow.  Even though the bedrock issue is as simple as first-year algebra, and no one really wants to talk meaningfully about it.

Which means I stand outside both groups and lob stink bombs.  Not a comfortable place to be.

But it’s where I am and where I live.

So I thought it would be a good time to introduce myself.  So now you know who and what I am and can accept or reject what I say with full knowledge that you’ve been addressed by a Science Fiction writer.

Excuse me?  The bedrock problem?  Oh, sorry.  Population.  Very simply, there are just too damn many people on the planet, with no obvious possibility of curtailing the growth rate.  People don’t want to talk about that.  In order to live, to survive, to be what we may potentially be, we have to burn energy.  We have to burn something.  What that something is, frankly, is less important in the long run than the fact that we have to burn it.  Solar is passive, sure, but make solar panels we have to use petroleum, heat, the kind of high tech that has emerged as a legacy of a burning economy.  Hydropower is also pasisve, but building dams has other environmental drawbacks and is not transportable everywhere.  Geothermal?  Well, sure, but we may be releasing heat.

No simple answer.  The one factor, which if addressed could begin to solve some of these problems is population, but people insist, in aggregate, that they are separate from “nature” in this instance.  We take for ourselves the unhampered right to reproduce at will, without restraint, and that means that all the solutions we come up with for this overcharged fossil fuel existence are band-aids.  What could be sustainable and manageable at a billion people is a horrific problem at seven billion.  The planet isn’t getting any bigger.

There have been science fiction writers talking about this for decades.

Anyway, if you’ve a mind, come over to my website occasionally.  Or, if the whole pseudonym thing has put you off, stop reading me altogether.  I’m done with the experiment and feel that I have gotten from it what I needed.  So from now on, it’s me you’ll be dealing with.  Not Jason.  Oh, he’s not gone.  He always was part of me and always will be.  But he’s on my advisory board now.  Retired from public life for the time being.

Pleased to meet you…hope you get my name.

Project Censored has just released its list of top censored stories for 2008.  Civil rights violations of U.S. citizens and economic abuses invited by the U.S. government are prominent thoughout this list.   Sobering and depressing.

How many Blackwater incidents like this are unreported?  I am just amazed when I hear repeated  Republican claims that things are going well in Iraq.  Until I know that reporters can wander out of the Green Zone un-escorted, I’ll continue to assume that no news is bad news. 

Where do you turn if you really want to know what’s going on in Burma?

Harry Shearer compares the Al Jazeera English coverage to domestic news services and finds that Al Jazeera wins hands down.  CNN’s domestic feed is pathetic, while CNN has been working hard to make its international feed unavailable to those in the U.S.

How bad is domestic coverage of international news:

Once you watch BBC, CNNI, AJE–any of services we’ve been talking about today–and then venture back to the domestic swill, you realize the difference: the international channels are, despite their faults and differences, talking to grownups, the domestic channels are talking either to somewhat bright or somewhat dim children.

The comments fleshed out Shearer’s short post:

Whenever something significant happens in the world - I either go to CBC or to a lesser extent the BBC for a real news account. The American counterpart is 1% news and 99% hot gas telling us how we should feel about it.

Somewhere along the line - people like Rupert Murdoch, Michael Eisner, and Sumner Rothstein decided that news was supposed to make money and pacify a nation of imbeciles - not inform the citizens of a self-governed nation. . . . And with names like those above - is it any wonder that the American public has been fed 35 years of anti-arab bias? I think back to my childhood watching cartoons - and even in the Bugs Bunny cartoons, the arab is always portrayed as an irate sword weilding psycho. (more…)

The new media are increasingly learning the lessons of the corporate media. According to this post on the Harper’s site, the bloggers who get personal access to the President are those who write about the President sympathetically.

Here’s an example of the sort of bloggers the President seeks:

Matthew Burden, who blogs under the name Blackfive (who subsequently wrote that Bush called him “brutha,” [who] described Bush as “intelligent, razor sharp, warm, focused, emotional (especially about his dad), and genuine. Even more so than this cynical Chicago Boy expected. I was overwhelmed by the sincerity–it wasn’t staged.”)

In case Bush is considering inviting me, I hereby suggest that Bush is faster than a speeding bullet; more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound . . .

Most rational people wouldn’t consider running for a prominent political office for fear of what would happen to their reputations.  Their worries are well-founded.  That is why so many people would never run for office, which serves to filter out the best and brightest potential candidates.  This filtering process endangers our democracy.

Exhibit A this concern for one’s reputation is the Swift Boating of John Kerry.  Whatever you think of Kerry’s politics, it was clear that Kerry was a young man who earnestly and bravely served his time in the military.  It is equally clear that the service record of George W. Bush is riddled with question marks.   There’s nothing like millions of dollars to turn Kerry into a questionable character and Bush into a war hero.  

But it could happen to anyone, anywhere.  Here some simple ideas for soiling the reputation of anyone running for office.  This list is by no means exhaustive.   What is important to note is that even great leaders would be vulnerable to such attacks:

Find the candidate’s youthful indiscretions and start questioning their adult judgment in light of them.

If they were in politics all their life, criticize them for being career politicians.   If they are relatively new to politics, question their lack of experience.

No matter what their religious beliefs (or lack of religious beliefs), question their sincerity.

If they are well-to-do, call them elitists.  If they are not well-to-do, call them financially unimpressive. 

If they are women or African Americans, raise questions about whether America is “ready” for them.

Pick on their physical imperfections. 

Criticize members of their family.

If they have worked too hard on the career, accuse them of failing to spend time with their families.  If they’ve spent lots of time with their families, accuse them of not being serious about their careers.

If they haven’t served in the military, argue that they are not qualified to have opinions regarding military issues.   If they have served in the military, dig up someone who served with them who didn’t get along with them.

If they are willing to act on new evidence and new consideration, call them flip-floppers.

According to this article in Media Matters, Editor and Publisher have painstakingly gathered data to determine what types of columnists are being published in what markets. The results demonstrate a strong conservative bias in most newspapers.  Here are some of the results from the Executive Summary of the study:

• Sixty percent of the nation’s daily newspapers print more conservative syndicated columnists every week than progressive syndicated columnists. Only 20 percent run more progressives than conservatives, while the remaining 20 percent are evenly balanced.
• In a given week, nationally syndicated progressive columnists are published in newspapers with a combined total circulation of 125 million. Conservative columnists, on the other hand, are published in newspapers with a combined total circulation of more than 152 million.2
• The top 10 columnists as ranked by the number of papers in which they are carried include five conservatives, two centrists, and only three progressives.
• The top 10 columnists as ranked by the total circulation of the papers in which they are published also include five conservatives, two centrists, and only three progressives.
• In 38 states, the conservative voice is greater than the progressive voice — in other words, conservative columns reach more readers in total than progressive columns. In only 12 states is the progressive voice greater than the conservative voice.

If you don’t think that FOX news is absolutely corrupt, and that FOX has drunk lots of concentrated neocon Koolaid, take a look at the furious spin job FOX did during the first Republican debate.

This video has been doctored by Ron Paul’s people, sometimes in an entertaining way. The video does a good job of demonstrating that FOX thinks that FOX gets to choose the next president, not the U.S. voters. I just love the text message voting stats throughout.

What does “No Child Left Behind” mean in real-life classrooms? I’ve discussed this topic with several grade school teachers. They are uniformly distressed that NCLB narrows the focus of classroom instruction to the point where children are too often “taught” factoids, ephemeral bits of information that will allow them to pass a test without significantly advancing their ability to understand the world around them.

Jonathan Kozol writes passionately about this point at this Huffpo post:

The poisonous essence of this law lies in the mania of obsessive testing it has forced upon our nation’s schools and, in the case of underfunded, overcrowded inner-city schools, the miserable drill-and-kill curriculum of robotic “teaching to the test” it has imposed on teachers, the best of whom are fleeing from these schools because they know that this debased curriculum would never have been tolerated in the good suburban schools that they, themselves, attended.

When I ask them why they’ve grown demoralized, they routinely tell me it’s the feeling of continual anxiety, the sense of being in a kind of “state of siege,” as well as the pressure to conform to teaching methods that drain every bit of joy out of the hours that their children spend with them in school.

“I didn’t study all these years,” a highly principled and effective first-grade teacher told me — she had studied literature and anthropology in college while also having been immersed in education courses — “in order to turn black babies into mindless little robots, denied the normal breadth of learning, all the arts and sciences, all the joy in reading literary classics, all the spontaneity and power to ask interesting questions, that kids are getting in the middle-class white systems.”

Kozol raises the issue of what to do about the many dysfunctional inner-city schools. It is, after all, a tragedy that we have so many buildings that look like schools but don’t function like schools. I happen to live near several dysfunctional inner-city schools. No thoughtful parent with options to do otherwise would willingly send their kids to such “schools.” I wrote about one teacher’s experience in one such school. I invite you to read the words of this conscientious teacher, who I called “Geri Anderson.” The epilogue to that troubling story is that “Geri’s” contract was not renewed. I have heard it over and over (from teachers and ex-teachers) that inner-city school teachers who show heartfelt enthusiam and creativity can expect to burn out or get fired in short order. In fact, one of my neighbors volunteered to tutor at that same school for several years. She spoke up last year when she noticed that a 2nd grader was getting none of the special education he required (and that school documents indicated he was getting). Epilogue II: My neighbor, the volunteer, was consequently “fired” (told that her services were no longer needed).

How do we fix these problem schools? I hate to sound like a broken record, but media reform is a big part of this problem (and most other big problems too). Stories of what it’s really like to go to these types of schools should be on the front page of local newspapers every day until we address the situation with real changes. We do have lots of available space on the newspaper front page–it’s often filled with advertising disguised as articles and other feel-good stories such as how to purchase a special Halloween-theme leash for your dog. Advertisers don’t like stories about failing schools, though. It makes people feel that they should tax themselves enough to fix the problem. It makes them feel guilty about buying those diamond bracelets, sporty new cars and the other non-essentials advertised in the paper.

Depriving children, our next generation of adults, of real education is a bill we will pay, within our lifetimes, with the high costs of prisons and social services. That’s the message that should be front and center every day.

Kozol is correct, in my opinion, that one important way to help the schools is to quit foisting NCLB onto teachers. Great teachers and good teachers don’t teach in ways that obsess with the narrow-minded tests required by NCLB. After all, when they grow up, these kids aren’t going to find jobs that require them to take trivial quizzes. They will need to know how to think so that they can continually tool up to meet the needs of jobs that don’t even exist today.

Kozol goes further, advocating a new round of inter-district busing, a system not based on race. I’m wary of such an approach for many reasons, however. Mainly, it’s an approach that doesn’t force bad schools to become better. Why not spend limited money on more teachers and better teachers rather than bus drivers? Politicians advocating another round of busing have no chance of getting elected in most of the U.S.

Instead, why not publish a constant steam of media stories about what it’s really like to attend class in a dysfunctional school. Cut the classroom photo ops and show the citizens that too many of the kids in the classroom are not getting a meaningful education. Do it until people can’t stand to see these articles anymore. If people stop reading the papers because they don’t want to do anything about this massive problem, then we have a much bigger problem, indeed. Especially in light of the fact that it makes economic sense to address this problem. Fixing this problem should appeal the self-interest of everyone.

In the meantime, Kozol is right that the status quo is intolerable. We need to put an end to fake education; no more bandaids. No more big government programs that actually make education worse. NCLB is a fraud being perpetrated on the public. It defrauds parents who send their kids to the horrible schools and it defrauds a public that assumes that other people’s kids are being educated when they are actually being turned into resentful robots. Those kids are being taught to be turned off by anything that goes by the name of “education.” That’s the state of education in all too many of our public schools.

It’s called the American Dream because “you have to be asleep to believe it.”

I’ve rarely agreed so many times in four short minutes.

Here’s what Edwards had to say on August 23 in New Hampshire: 

Real change starts with being honest — the system in Washington is rigged and our government is broken. It’s rigged by greedy corporate powers to protect corporate profits. It’s rigged by the very wealthy to ensure they become even wealthier. At the end of the day, it’s rigged by all those who benefit from the established order of things. For them, more of the same means more money and more power. They’ll do anything they can to keep things just the way they are — not for the country, but for themselves.

[The system is] controlled by big corporations, the lobbyists they hire to protect their bottom line and the politicians who curry their favor and carry their water. And it’s perpetuated by a media that too often fawns over the establishment, but fails to seriously cover the challenges we face or the solutions being proposed. This is the game of American politics and in this game, the interests of regular Americans don’t stand a chance.

This is spot on.  But Edwards wasn’t finished, as reported by Alternet:

“Let me tell you one thing I have learned from my experience,” Edwards said last week. “You cannot deal with them on their terms. You cannot play by their rules, sit at their table, or give them a seat at yours. They will not give up their power — you have to take it from them.”

Now we need a dozen other candidates telling it like it is, plus hundreds of elected officials willing to do something about it.  All of that is a long way off.   Edwards’ speech was important, though.  All important journeys begin with a single step. 

Here’s the headline: “Gas prices drop nearly 3 cents in last 2 weeks Survey: U.S. avarage now at $2.75 a gallon.”  

And here’s the lead paragraph:

The national average price for gasoline dropped about 2.9 cents over the last two weeks, according to a survey released Sunday.

These sorts of headlines (they are common) are symptoms of a society horribly addicted to a fragile supply of a dwindling resource.  Ours is a society that could be brought to its knees by the shutdown of one refinery, or the intentional sinking of one oil tanker.

We should be quickly moving to a new economy where a 1% change in the cost of an energy source causes nothing but a yawn.  Unfortunately, there is no indication that any American politician “gets it” that we should be implementing any such changes.

Yes, we have a reckless energy policy.  A reckless, feckless, energy policy.

If you somehow haven’t yet figured out how the incessant lies of FOX led us to begin the senseless bloody occupation of Iraq, you can catch it all again. Except it’s about Iran now. This video comparing the FOX campaigns against Iraq and Iran is almost unbelievable. Is there anyone really willing to believe such disinformation a second time around? But we’re in full swing and there’s no powerful media voice blowing the whistle.

Here is a Yahoo.com story on this video comparison.

Amy Goodman had this to say about the run-up to the invasion of Iraq:

FAIR did a a study. In the week leading up to General Colin Powell going to the security council to make his case for the invasion and the week afterwards, this was the period where more than half of the people in this country were opposed to an invasion. They did a study of CBS evening news, NBC nightly news, ABC evening news and the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. The four major newscasts. Two weeks. 393 interviews on war. 3 were anti-war voices. 3 of almost 400 and that included PBS. This has to be changed. It has to be challenged.

The question is whether enough people running mainstream media care enough to vigorously contest the current round of lies regarding Iran.

In a recent poll, reading in America is revealed to be, well, less than appreciated by large swaths of the population. This ought come as no surprise. We live in a time of stupendous ignorance, which allows for the expression of epic stupidity. The Founding Fathers were suspicious of democracy (I learned this by reading several books on the subject of the early republic), believing that the vast majority of people were incapable of the kind of intellectual comprehension necessary for an informed plebiscite. In short, they knew people were ill-educated and believed this meant they could not parse abstraction. By the mid-19th century, though, reading was probably the most common form of home entertainment.

America has championed the idea of public education. Our publishing companies have been at the forefront of issuing special editions of “Great Books”, and we have turned our economy into a college degree-driven dynamo. Yet the most basic reasons to read seem ignored by most, along with the habit of reading after leaving school.

A few quotes:

“Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.” Mortimer Adler

“By reading, we enjoy the dead; by conversation, the living; and by contemplation, ourselves. Reading enriches the memory; conversation polishes wit; and contemplation improves the judgment. Of these, reading is the most important, as it furnishes both the others.” Charels Caleb Colton

“The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.” Oliver Goldsmith

“Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year.” Horace Mann

And finally, a lengthier quote from someone who knows a thing or two about the subject.

“There is no single way to read well, though these is a prime reason why we should read. Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found? If you are fortunate, you encounter a particular teacher who can help, yet finally you are alone, going on without further mediation. Reading well is one of the great pleasures solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.” Harold Bloom

I have been an avid reader virtually all my life. I caught what is known as the Reading Bug around age 10, and ever since there has rarely been a year when I did not read at least thirty books cover to cover, averaging sixty to seventy a year. My senior year of high school I cut most days and spent them in the local public library, where I achieved an enviable (and now inconceivable) rate of a book a day, and tore through most of the so-called Classics that year.

“Why do you always have your face in a book?”

This question was never asked by my parents. My parents, when early on they realized I was reading so much, increased my allowance so I could buy more books (a paperback then was sixty cents). No, this came from “friends” who rarely read, who equated reading with school, which they disliked, and for whom reading had unfortunately become a chore.

I blame the educational system for that. English, as taught in the schools then, had the unfortunate effect of beating a love of reading out of most kids. They could never just have fun with a book, they had to analyze it and “find meaning.” The fact is, meaning is such a individualized thing, it must be discovered individually. Telling someone that what they thought was important about a book is wrong because they do not pick up on the “deeper meanings” of the text is a sure way to turn them off unless they are already dedicated readers. And ridiculing the literature of choice of a student will put the nail in the coffin.

“Why should I learn how to jump through those hoops? This reading stuff is a pain.”

Add to that the simple fact that reading is Not Social, and you have the makings of a functionality illiterate society.

Not illiterate in the sense that they cannot read a sentence, but in the sense that so many people do not know how to access literature.

It takes practice. Learning how to decode the words on the page and make the images in your mind the author hopes you do takes learning. It’s an acquired skill that improves over time and repeated exposure, and those who figure it out become those people who are content to sit alone somewhere with a book.

Is this really important?

Reading enlarges the capacity of the imagination. No other medium does that, with the possible exception of music (but only in certain limited respects). How else does one get to a point where empathy becomes so developed that we can literally understand a person from another culture without having gone through their experiences?

I do not mean understand them as if we had lived their life, but understand the differences and the depth of similarities that hang on those differences.

Movies do the work of the imagination for us. Video games as well.

When asked whether I believe violent movies and television feed violence in society, I have to admit that, yes, I do. But only because there’s nothing between the raw, unformed pysche of the young and the insistent imagery, nothing to mediate, to give context, to offer viable alternatives, and nothing that has aided the development of skeptical buffers. Reading does that. It does it by forcing the mind to do the work of contextualizing, of comprehending meaning. When you read, you are an active participant, engaged in the process of judging, of analyzing, of making sense of the text—and the text itself offers context that is often missing from a visual experience.

I hasten to add here that this is true of all reading, but more true of broad reading. People who basically read the same book over and over again may begin the process of enlarging their imaginations, but then it falters, ill-fed and poorly exercised.

People who read a lot are often more interesting—mainly because they start off by being more interested, by virtue of the worlds they’ve encountered on the page.

Lastly, though, books are the connective tissue of our civilization, past to future. You cannot talk to Ben Franklin in the flesh, but he’s there, in print. Likewise Aristotle, Plato, Cyrano de Bergerac, Twain, Tolkein, all worthy minds who left their vision behind to talk to us. Books are the avatars of their creators, and once opened are fully interactive.

I have no idea how to turn this trend around. Many things conspire to rob us of a literate culture, not least of which is a sheer lack of time. We work longer hours, necessities cost more, there are people around us demanding attention. But it’s a mistake not to see reading as a necessary thing.

Those who are parents might consider easing up on the team sports and the implicit ridicule of always forcing the child to go play with friends. Books are friends. Spending all the time with a book is no better, though, than spending no time with one at all.

I grew up in a house in which it was ordinary to see everyone quietly reading. I’ve been in houses where there wasn’t a single book to be found.

But most importantly, we need to stop asking that reading be defended. “What’ good is it? What use is it?” The use and good of it is self-evident over time, but just reading, at any given moment, should be no more odd than having a conversation with someone—which no one really questions.

Given the recent stupidity expressed in much of our public life these past several years, I think it’s time to advocate reading a bit more. And not just “prescribed” reading. I have a poster on my wall, a picture of Mary Harris “Mother” Jones—yes, the one the magazine was named for—and the quote says “Sit down and read. Prepare yourself for the coming conflict.”

In an article from the Washington Post we learn that the United States has slipped in the ranking for life expectancy in the world to number 42. Douglas Adams aside, this is not a good thing.

The article lists a good many factors contributing to this fact, which seems paradoxical since, as stated, we spend more on health care than any other nation. I’m not surprised. Americas in general live as though built like Abrams tanks. We work hard, we party hard, and we loaf hard. We eat badly, pay no attention to our personal health, assuming that if anything really goes wrong “the doctor can fix it.” We believe, innately, that we’re indestructible and can do anything. This leads to careless habits. One factor cited is that 45 million of us lack health insurance. Which brings me to the peeve of this post.

There is a talk show mouth named Mark Christopher.  His show is out of Nashville, but you can hear him (in St. Louis) on KTRS 550. This guy is a Rush Limbaugh wannabe. And one of his horses to ride hobbyistically is an ongoing rant against national health care. He’s phobic about this. Every other day he has some little tidbit about how bad health care is in other countries that have a state health care system. He commented yesterday on this report in the Washington Post. Now, aside from the fact that he cherry picked the article, which cited factors he then went on to name as if the Washington Post had not, he displayed a profound case of Innumeracy.

He said (I paraphrase) that in a country of 300 million, 45 million people is a “drop in the bucket.” Meaning that we ought not overturn our wonderful private health care system (which is going to bankrupt us eventually) for so few who just fall out of the system. 45 million out of 300 million is 15%. That is hardly a drop in the bucket. To put that in perspective, that would be one and half out of ten, or three out of twenty. Fifteen of every hundred people. Which means that on an average city block (which I determined by standing on my street and counting) of roughly 35 houses with an average of four people per house, there are around 21 people with no reliable health care. On one block.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that among those 21 we have 2 or 3 cases of tuberculosis (which is a rising problem in this country). Tuberculosis is highly infectious. How fast might that spread among the various blocks around us? Another way to look at it. The worst battlefield casualties the United States ever experienced were in the Civil War, which sometimes reached 30%. They averaged between 12 and 18%. A modern army–-ours—regards 5% heavy and anything approaching 10% unacceptable. And fighting a war is by far more expensive than average health care costs. The unbelievable inability—or, more likely, carelessness—of someone with a national talk show to understand the most basic arithmetic in this way verges on criminal.

If 15% of our population dropped dead tomorrow, I assure you we would notice. It would not be “a drop in the bucket.” We are nationally anxious about 6 coal miners in Utah who may be dead and if they are, we will demand an investigation. We can’t 6 people dying in a mining accident. But in the sphere of health care, 45 million people become a drop in the bucket. The phobia that has taken root over this issue has become one of those insurmountable arguments that has run headlong into panic.

We Americans—I think all of us, it just depends on what aspect of our lives is under discussion—our suspicious of government. If it’s not national health care, then it’s Big Brother. Liberals, conservatives, and combination thereof, Americans can find something we don’t want the government to run. We have always been like this, it’s nothing new. And we are often stupid about it. But the world is shrinking and in so doing making it less and less possible for us to escape the consequences of ill-considered, knee-jerk prejudice. I don’t care how this issue gets resolved. Even if we do end up with some kind of federalized health care system, we will abuse it, it will cost too much, and it will still be bent to the service of a nation of people who act like they can do anything they want—play, eat, party, work, or loaf—too much and think nothing bad will come of it.

Which means that the most cost-effective health care system—prophylaxis—will not be the one that gets the priority. Insurance companies must be made to offer things like well baby care and prenatal coverage now. Taking care of a problem before it becomes something that lands us in the emergency room costs far less, but we don’t, for the most part, do that now. And we have a absurd and irrational devotion to extending Life far past any possibility of meaningful living, which is still where the bulk of our expense here falls (though obesity related health issues are rapidly catching up).

Whatever we do, the basic tenets of good health care will probably still be ignored by a people who think they don’t have to pay attention personally to their own health care. Which is reflected in the Washington Post article as well. But I am profoundly tired of the misinformation spread by both sides of the debate, and the incredible lack of grasp people who ought to know better have on the most basic aspects of problem-solving.

End of rant. You may now return to your regularly scheduled panic.

E.g., Don’t hold your breath that the Democrats will save us.  Or that anyone will.  It might take something far more dramatic.  Perhaps something revolutionary.  But it’s going to require far more than sitting around watching our TV’s to make it happen.

Marty Kaplan is a really smart media-reform and political-reform guy who tells it like it is.  In this recent piece in Huffpo, titled “Our Years of Magical Thinking,” Kaplan worries that too many of us have the attitude that good things will simply happen.  It is a pervasive and dangerous attitude.  I agree with him.  For the most part, good things take planning, sacrifice and hard work.  Bad things often just happen.   It takes a lot of effort to build something.  On the other hand, mere decay and neglect can bring it down.

Politically, we now face many huge struggles but there is no indication that the key players (all of us are key players some of the time) are willing to do what it takes to effect real change for the better:

Today, magical thinking is the belief that a Democratic White House and a filibuster-proof Congress is all that stands between the country and meaningful political reform. Is it really credible that elected officials who got to Washington without making campaign finance reform and media reform their signature issues will risk their incumbencies to force the only kind of change that can rescue democracy from the dangers the Founders warned us about, no matter who’s in charge?

Why is “magical thinking” dangerous?   It’s because people who believe in magic are lazy and naïve.  They are all too willing to trust the next seller of political snake oil.  As Kaplan writes:  “What haunts me is the possibility that Americans will one day decide that there is something so inherently dysfunctional about our political system that rolling the dice on non-democratic change is the only hope to rescue it.”

I also agree with Kaplan that media reform and campaign reform are huge issues that urgently need help.  In fact, without first addressing these two festering problems, it will be one hundred times harder to have the necessary national conversation to fix any other complex national issue (there are dozens–take you pick).  Sorry to end this on this depressing note.  Perhaps I’ve just been reading too much about what the candidates aren’t discussing . . .

Salon’s Michael Grieve reports on Michael Copp’s address to the YearlyKos Convention. Copps, an FCC commissioner, addressed the YearlyKos Convention in Chicago:

a three-day gathering of about 1,500 bloggers and liberal activists. But his address was less a lecture than a call to action. “The country needs you, it needs a free press, it needs the Netroots community, it needs everyone you can bring along and fight like your future depends on it,” he said.

Copps focused on the biggest two issues facing media reformers: consolidation of media ownership and attempts by the telecoms to violate net neutrality

Neither issue gets much attention, but Copps, a balding former assistant secretary of commerce, has a way of turning incredibly complex bureaucratic rule makings into morality plays. “The way you win, the only way you win, is to take this story not just to Capitol Hill but all across America,” he said. “Talk about it, write about it, blog about it. If you can sing, sing about it.” The ballroom crowd of roughly 200 offered its applause.

That’s what the broadcast license-renewal process has become:  a rubber stamp procedure.  The following are the words of FCC Commissioner Michael Copps:

[U]nder pressure from media conglomerates, previous commissions have eviscerated the renewal process. Now we have what big broadcasters lovingly call “postcard renewal” — the agency typically rubber-stamps an application without any substantive review. Denials on public interest grounds are extraordinarily rare.

It wasn’t always like this. Before the deregulatory mania in the 1980s — when an F.C.C. chairman described television as a “toaster with pictures” — the commission gave license renewals a hard look every three years, with specific criteria for making a public interest finding. Indeed, broadcasters’ respect for the renewal process encouraged them to pay for hard-hitting news operations. That was then.

Here are just some of the criteria for renewal the F.C.C. considered in the 1990s but never put into place:

• Did the station show programs on local civic affairs (apart from the nightly news), or set aside airtime for local community groups?

• Did it broadcast political conventions, and local as well as national candidate debates? Did it devote at least five minutes each night to covering politics in the month before an election?

• In an era when owners may live thousands of miles from their stations, have they met with local community leaders and the public to receive feedback?

• Is the station’s so-called children’s programming actually, in the view of experts, educational?

Truthdig.com has produced a video displaying the coordinated smear campaign FOX is running against left wing bloggers.

Fox News is out to smear the blogosphere with a slew of unsavory tactics, such as comparing liberal bloggers to the Klan and Nazi Germany. It has already met with some success, prompting JetBlue to pull its sponsorship from the YearlyKos convention.

Truthdig is also proposing a method of putting a stop to the lies and defamation:  write to the advertisers of local FOX programming to express your outrage that they support such programming.  

This is a must see for those concerned about the state of the Media:  Bill Moyers’ interview with “The Yes Men,”  These two innovative men, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, use “satirical humor laced with lunacy to call the media’s attention to serious issues.”

Here’s an excerpt:

BILL MOYERS: Are you concerned about the ethical implications of what you are doing, of fooling people or making fools of people?

MIKE BONANNO: We’re much more concerned with the ethical implications of not doing it.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?

MIKE BONANNO: What I mean is that it seems like it’s incumbent upon us to try to do something about the really grave ethics issues in the world, the real problems, companies that will go and exploit resources that we know are going to, in the long run, kill us or many people around the world. These kinds of wrongdoings are at such a scale, they’re so vast compared to our white lies, let’s say, that we think it’s ethical. Our path is actually ethical one.

BILL MOYERS: I mean, you would not get away with this in Putin’s Russia or in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe or in China today.

MIKE BONANNO: Or maybe even in France. I’m not entirely kidding. I mean, we do have really good free speech laws here. Unfortunately, there– you know, they’re kind of circumvented by other kind of loopholes. You know, we can speak at the volume of however much money you have. But, you know, we are lucky to actually be able to do these sorts of things here, although we’ve also done it in Europe. Because we do engage in this as a form of protected speech. It is satire. It is parody. It’s a way for us to speak sort of beyond the volume that we normally would be able to.