This was the third year I attended the National Conference for Media Reform sponsored by Free Press. This year’s conference was held in Minneapolis. As in previous media reform conferences, I was reminded about many of the hurdles faced by those American citizens who are attempting to get serious and coherent coverage of the news. By “news,” I mean the type of information that is critically important in order to prepare us to make good decisions as citizens (i.e., voting). One of the most distressing things one learns from attending the conference is that very little news is available to those watch local TV “news” and read their local “news”papers.

One of the fundamental principles of Free Press is that there cannot be a healthy democracy without a vigorous news media. The problem is that our news media is sickly, poisoned by rampant commercialism. The modern corporate media is over-consolidated to such an extent that it reflexively kowtows to political power and repeatedly refuses to challenge abuses of that power.

McChesney/Nichols - Part I

Topics covered in Part I:

• Is the media reform movement paying too much attention to Bill O’Reilly and FOX?
• The basic aims of the media reform movement.
• More on Free Press and the reason for the media reform movement.
• The problem with over-consolidation of the media.
  

Free Press stands for the proposition that there is no stark divide between journalists and citizens. Rather, there are also citizen-journalists, those of us who take media issues seriously and want to contribute important information as well as being consumers of information. This outlook dovetails nicely with the basic premise of Web 2.0. Free Press offers bloggers like me the opportunity to register at the convention as “Press.” I took advantage of that option this year (as I did last year). This allowed me several opportunities to attend sessions specifically geared to “The Press.”

This year, one of those special sessions consisted of a presentation of many of the concerns and principles of the media reform movement by two of the primary founders of the movement, Robert McChesney and John Nichols of Free Press.  Robert McChesney, a professor of Communications at the University of Illinois-Champaign-Urbana, is widely regarded as one of the foremost media historians in the United States. Author John Nichols is a founding board member of Free Press.

I brought a cheap camcorder and a tripod to that session and I recorded the entire interview. I have now finished editing the session by summarizing the questions with title screens and breaking the session into four 10-minute segments (YouTube limits video submissions to 10 minutes or fewer).

McChesney/Nichols - Part II

Topics covered in Part II:

• Citizens versus consumers.
• Concerns regarding pharmaceutical advertising.
• Media reform and campaign finance reform.
• The kind of political candidates Big Media takes seriously.

The first half of this presentation by McChesney and Nichols occurred in a conference room; the session then spilled out into the convention center hallway for more questions. I needed to set up in a hurry for this impromptu session on the hallway. You can see that the video is not always of the highest quality (I struggled to get a clear straight line position to McChesney and Nichols), although the audio is fine and Nichols and McChesney were happy to take numerous additional questions out in the hall.

McChesney/Nichols - Part III

• Who attends media reform conferences?
• The anticipated role of big media according to the media reform movement
• The closing of foreign news bureaus.
• Candidates and media reform.
• Media and wars

This informal presentation of important media issues will be especially accessible to anyone who is new to the media reform movement. As you can see from these videos, McChesney and Nichols speak in plain yet thoughtful language (they are also terrific writers, co-authoring several recent books on the media reform movement, such as The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas.

If you’d like to get a good intuitive grasp of the media reform movement, I would recommend that you watch all four of the these segments (this will take approximately 40 minutes). For those who wish to zero in on particular issues, I have indicated the topics addressed by each of the four segments.

McChesney/Nichols - Part IV

• The lack of media coverage regarding the National Conference for Media Reform.
• The lack of media coverage regarding media reform in general.
• The need for public broadcasting networks.
• The desperate need for noncommercial programming for children.

If you find that these issues ignite your interest in the media reform movement, you can learn much more about each of these issues by visiting Free Press or visiting any of the other media reform websites listed on the homepage of Dangerous Intersection. You’ll also find numerous posts about media reform a dangerous intersection under the category “media.”

Many of the videotaped presentations from the 2008 conference are available at Free Press. Insightful articles have resulted from the 2008 conference.

I have already posted on several of the other sessions from the 2008 conference. One of those sessions concerns Phil Donahue’s new movie, “Body of War.” Another post concerns another superb documentary regarding media and the war, “War Made Easy” (this post includes an extended interview with the co-director of “war made easy,” Loretta Alper. Last but not least, the topic of the rampant commercialization of children’s programming is addressed in this post, which includes a two-part interview with Josh Golin of Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood.

The topics addressed at the 2007 conference also remain relevant. I’ve filed about a dozen posts on the 2007 conference. Each of these DI posts is listed and described in this single DI post.

If, after watching these four videos by Bob McChesney and John Nichols, you feel distressed by what has been going on regarding Big Media, this is your opportunity to know that you are not alone and that we can truly change the entire media industry, acting together. The problem with Big Media has gotten so out of control that interest in media reform has become bi-partisan, as John Nichols comments in Part I.

Reforming the media is not a pipe dream. It is becoming more of a reality with every passing month because of the concern and oftentimes modest contributions of people like you. In fact, the theme for the 2008 conference was “Media Reform Begins with Me.” That applies to you and me and everyone else we know.

Barack Obama has, for all intents and purposes, clinched the Democratic nomination for the presidency. Hillary will jocky for position in before the upcoming convention. Much speculation has been thrown about as to whether or not she’ll be a vice presidential nominee. I am dubious of that. Dubious that Obama will risk bringing her perceived “baggage” on board, dubious that she would accept. I think it would be a hell of a slate, though, one that has only a single precedent (yes, there is a precedent) but with the roles reversed.

In 1872, Victoria Woodhull—a feminist, a suffragist, a newspaper publisher, a Wall Street player, a spiritualist, and free lover—declared her candidacy for president of the United States. It was a serious bid, make no mistake, and one which virtually split the Women’s Suffrage movement in two. Those who ought to have been her natural allies—Susan B. Anthony chief among them—couldn’t stand her. They attempted to bar her from conventions, they denounced her in their own press, they threw obstructions in her path. Why? She was…immodest.

But the Women’s Suffrage movement was torn. They needed Woodhull because she understood how to work the system. She was popular, with men and women. She understood how money worked. She brought a lot with her, so they were forced to include her in their January 1872 convention as a principle speaker and as one of the “leaders” of the Equal Rights Movement. As Anthony told the convention “Now bless your soulds she was not dragged to the front. She came to Washington from Wall Street with powerful argument and with lots of cash behind her, and I bet you cash is a big thing with Congress.”

Woodhull was one of six women who appeared before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on January 12. Their purpose was to push forward a Declaratory Act which would grant Woman Suffrage by vote of congress. They had twenty thousand signatures. That evening, suffragist and spiritualist Ada Ballou put Woodhull’s name forward as a candidate for president, leading the Equal Rights Party. In May, the Party was officially chartered and Woodhull named as its candidate at Apollo Hall in New York City.

It was a progressive party by any stretch of the imagination. Twenty-three planks formed the Party platform—covering education, suffrage, social and industrial reforms, several of which resonate down to the present: graduated direct taxation, regulation of monopolies, labor laws, and a merit-based civil service to replace cronyism.

Because the Suffrage Movement has always been joined at the hip to Abolition (among other movements), Victoria Woodhull chose Frederick Douglass to be her running mate.

However, it was a publicity choice, one unfortunately not backed by the candidate in question. Douglass did not accept. He was committed to U.S. Grant and the Republicans and had been present at none of the Equal Rights Party events. Woodhull chose to ignore this little problem and ran with Douglass the presumed vice presidential candidate.

By June the Party was deep in debt with donors bailing out. By September it was over.

The Declaratory Act to grant suffrage failed. Anthony and Stanton blamed Woodhull and her “precipitate” bid for the presidency. Not to mention that Woodhull’s “free love” and spiritualist philosophies were unwelcome by the serious-minded and abstemious main line suffragists, who saw sex and booze as the twin shackles binding women to a second-class status (the Temperance Movement, founded the following year, joined suffrage and temperance and led ultimately not only to the 19th Amendment granting women the vote in 1921 but also to the 18th Amendment—Prohibition—which is the only amendment to the Constitution ever to be repealed).

Short-lived as it was, the Woodhull-Douglass ticket has become part of our national folklore, more for what it represented than for anything that it actually accomplished. But a closer look shows that the ideas fueling this ill-fated bid were as progressive as anything one might imagine today. It was, after all, the Equal Rights Party—and Victoria Woodhull was deadly earnest about that. She sought to unchain everyone from the bonds of the past—materially and spiritually.

I have noted in the last several months the word “Progressive” coming to the fore, replacing Liberal. McCain uses Liberal—expectedly, as a cudgel—but Obama, when he says anything like that at all, says Progressive. For a long time, the Right has held a rhetorical high ground and dominated the discourse by controlling the language. It has taken the Left all this time to realize that people react in often Pavlovian thoughtlessness to language and labels and to start using some of those strategies. Most people on the Left tend to believe people are not so simplistic, but time and again we are shown that our expectations of other peoples’ intellectual capactiy are in error. That and the fact that neuro-linguistics tells us this response is anything but simple.

Bush has damaged the country. Badly. To some extent, this is because he has blindly followed his Party line—something conservatives are supposed to be above. Mostly, this is due to his shortcomings as a leader. He doesn’t Get It.

And of course he was handed a raw deal with 9/11. Make no mistake, any president would have had problems dealing with that. We were unfortunate enough to have a mediocre intellect in the White House at the time, but the fall out from that was daunting.

McCain is not a Bush clone—not on any kind of one-to-one basis. But he is bound to a Party that has evolved into what it is under the influence of ideological positions which are untenable. To become the Republican Party of, say, Eisenhower, they must divest themselves of a cumbersome element of what they perceive as their power base. They cannot do this if they win.

In order for the Democrats to become a new kind of Party, one capable of dealing with the coming 90 years, they must have a focus. Progressivism may be it. Different from doctrinaire Liberalism, Progressivism is potentially a causal-based, reality-centered mind-set that could be flexible enough to utilize liberalism and conservatism as need be, something doctrinaire Liberalism could never do.

Obama has rhetorically held himself to be above the usual fray. The minefield of race was a proving ground for him. It is possible that he may be the locus for a resurgent progressivism which could free us from the left-overs of both the Cold War and the Fundamentalist crusades and catalyze the creation of a new American ethos.

But he’d better be damned careful who he picks as his running mate and how he manages his cabinet. Because that’s where the difference will be made.

Would Hillary Clinton be a good choice? She understands the nature of national politics in a way that maybe Obama, in his youth, does not. She could be a powerful resource—Obama’s version of LBJ. But she could also be a weight, binding him to 20th Century Politics As Usual.

Stay tuned.

The disturbing part of this story is the reactions of so-called medical professionals to this couple’s situation and decision.

Now there are two ways to look at this. The one that might make more sense (though certainly no more palatable) is that these physicians et al are concerned with Insurance issues. What’s covered here? How does malpractice potentially enter into it? And while these folks are relatively well off and can carry their own expenses, what kind of precedent might be set here that will spread to the uninsured or Medicaid?

Unpleasant, but it would give a dimension to it that we could wrap our disgust around.

The other way to see it is as an example that, much as we might as a society wish to see ourselves as maturing, getting beyond such primordial reactions (namely—”Ugh! You different! You die!”), it turns out not to be true. That what we have is a facade and as long as no one really tests it, we can be what we think we are, at least to ourselves.

My reaction to what this couple is doing was initially (and continues to be) “Wow, cool!”

But I may well be in the minority.

With the possible spoiler of Mike Huckabee, it’s clear that John McCain is set to be the candidate the Democrats need to beat in November. The irony of the ongoing battle between Hillary and Obama is that, policy-wise, they just aren’t that different. There were some real differences between the Republicans, but those differences are not what McCain seems to be gearing up to run on. He is all about Iraq.

McCain has to convince hardline conservatives that he’s their guy. Why? Because he has occasionally backed some responsible legislation, like McCain-Feingold. He refused to sugarcoat our waning industrial possibilities while campaigning in Michigan. He has spoken positively about amnesty programs for illegal immigrants. He has not always been a friend to Big Business. True Red Republicans of the Bush League see the potential for fiscal treason in McCain—that he might raise taxes, control campaign spending, or propose, back, and sign Democratic-sounding legislation that would take the country toward *gasp* Socialism.

I have a hard time squaring complaints from anyone that McCain is somehow not a fiscal conservative when Bush just put forward a three-point-one TRILLION dollar budget (with the largest slice for defense spending since WWII). It just goes to show, all the rhetoric about Democratic profligacy is really just a complaint that the Dems spend the money on things the Republicans don’t like. It’s not the money, it’s the programs.

Setting that aside, though, McCain obviously doesn’t think he can sway them all. So he’s about to start campaigning hard on the pitfalls of an Iraq withdrawal. I will wait for the P-word to rear its ugly torso—Patriotism. The suggestion will be made that anyone wishing to pull out is somehow not patriotic. We saw this under Bush, aspersions cast on some of the most loyal, patriotic, and demonstrably courageous people who suggested that maybe this war was a bad idea and that, furthermore, we more or less screwed it up by going in blind, deaf, and predetermined.

I hear echoes of the Sixties all over again, and of all the people who should know better, it is John McCain. (”Pull out…doesn’t sound manly to me, Bub. I say leave it in there till the job is done and they’re thoroughly messed up.”)

The problem is, this may well play for the American voter. When we have serious doubts, we tend to stick with what we’re doing rather than risk change. We have to have our faces rubbed in the muck of bad decision-making before we finally say—in sufficient numbers to matter—enough is enough. I am not sanguine about the political maturity of the American people.

And the thing is, we aren’t getting our faces rubbed in it. We’re adapting. Gasoline is high, the American industrial base is shrinking, we have infrastructure problems galore, but we’re making accommodations and doing fine, thank you. People complain, but by and large we haven’t actually lost anything that matters. So much of this debate is still in the realm of hypotheticals, theories, ideas, and potentials.

So we look to the Democratic candidates and what do we see? One old school politician who would probably do a fine enough job and maybe make a few worthwhile changes, mainly around the edges, and one young firebrand who is promising Big Changes. And a serious look at their policies shows that, really, they differ by degrees, not ideas. It’s going to devolve into a popularity and demographics battle. Which barrier do we want to break first? Gender or race? And underlying that, is the question no one wants to ask: does it really matter anymore?

In my misbegotten youth, I used to be what they call a Single Issue Voter. Was a time I voted against anyone who wanted to erode the Second Amendment. Yes, I was one of those Right to Bear Arms purists. I had bought into the argument that an armed populace kept the government in line and the first step towards tyranny is to disarm the population at large. There’s truth to that in history, but today, here, in this country, it’s a rather weak argument. Power doesn’t work that way. Not to say it couldn’t, but for now it simply doesn’t.

I could also argue that anyone wishing to tamper with the Constitution was de facto untrustworthy. Which may also be true. People doing good for me whether I want it or not is loathesome. Make the subject anything but guns and you see this immediately.

But the truth is, single issue voting only means you’re not informed, interested, or intellectually capable of understanding multiple issues. Or it means you don’t care about anything else, which is just as bad. It is stupid.

As it has transpired, most of the Second Amendment purists voted into office in the last forty years have also brought with them a whole suite of ideologies I cannot abide. They are, many of them, the natural constituency of the George W. Bush League. That single issue—preserving an unquestioned right to own, carry, and by implication use something which I, in fact, do not own or carry—comes packaged with people whose other policy positions I find absurd or dangerous.

The word Balance comes to mind. Tricky at the best of times.

McCain will campaign on a single issue. Oh, there will be other policy positions he’ll talk about and want to deal with, but at present it looks like he’s going to threaten America with the awful prospect of “pulling out” if we vote for the Democrats. He will polarize people over a Single Issue that will push all the rest to the side in an emotional gambit to convince us to—wait for it, he may yet use the phrase—Stay The Course.

In such an environment, the first casualty is reason. You can’t even get close to truth without that.

I would really like to see the two Democratic front-runners make a deal, put together a ticket that can roll over this irrationalism. The Republicans are once again demonstrating their major strength—they’re forming ranks and closing up behind a candidate and they will see it through as a group. For a bunch of people who profess to believe in American Individuality, they sure can cast it aside quickly enough for their Cause. Democrats traditionally devour each other.

The one factor we have left to see whether McCain has a reasonable shot or not is who he picks as a running mate. Because that will indicate who he thinks his successor will be, ought to be. As it appears right now, if Hilary and Obama made a deal and ran together, it would be the best of all possible worlds. Either one of them is acceptable to me.

I suppose I should say whether I think we should get out of Iraq. Saying— believing—that we should never have gone in to begin with is not the same thing. Now it would be like making a mess of a paraplegic’s kitchen, then leaving without cleaning up the mess. So I guess I’m forced into the opinion that we would be ill-advised to simply pull out until Iraq really does have a security base that works well enough. Otherwise, they will be divvied up by the various factions outside their borders. Iran has, in fact, an old score to settle, and they are more dangerous to future peace in the region than Iraq ever was. Saddam ultimately was just greedy. The Iranian hierarchy are Inspired.

But that doesn’t mean I’d vote for John McCain—all the other things he’s bringing to the table are things I do not really support.

Single Issue Voting is for morons.

Missouri’s first State Poet Laureate.  Walter Bargen.

I can’t tell you how pleased I am by this.  Walter is a first-rate poet and, just if not more importantly, a decent human being.

He will be formally introduced on February 13th at the state capitol.  After that, he will serve a two-year-term, administered by the Missouri Center for the Book .  We are enormously proud of this and look forward to a fruitful affiliation.

The shameless promotional part:  if anyone feels generous and wishes to support an institution whose goal to the elevation and promotion of the literary arts, go to our website, find the P.O. Box address, and…you know…

We will appreciate it.

Meanwhile, congratulations to Walter Bargen and a thank you to all who support the arts.

Bhutto is dead.

One tries to be understanding, patient, tries to embrace the tolerance so thoroughly rejected by those who condemn out of hand, with no chance for counterargument, the possibility of dialogue.  Comes a point where one has to simply acknowledge that some people, in some places, just don’t share anything in common with us.

We have tried to explain the Jihadists by looking at history, pointing out where they have just cause to be angry with the West, outraged at what has been done to their people, and that the response can be understood from some exterior position that refrains from taking sides.  Suicide bombing as a cultural aberration can nonetheless be comprehended from the perspective of the political outsider who sees that the only weapon available to those with no voice is sometimes the loudest, most irrational shout imaginable.  We see the situation in the Middle East and shake our heads at the repeated injustices committed over and over again in the name of oil or power or faith, which may in the end all be one and the same.

But the simple truth now seems to be that any political or moral validity these movements may at one time have possessed has been squandered in a mindless lemming-like inability to allow for anything other than the preprocessed, spoonfed insanity of their religious convictions.  The act of destroying those who are not One Of Them has become a self-perpetuating series of negations, a denial that anyone can have any authority to negotiate, to make policy, to attempt reconciliation, to render the situation rational.  Only Allah may be “in charge” and anyone else who attempts to command a plebiscite to accomplish anything that in the least way deviates from the perceived path of the righteous must simply die.

Which in the end will be everyone.  Under such a program, no one may be in charge.

And since Allah chooses to be silent in the present day, the natural condition of such a polity will be subsistence and terror.  All progress must cease by this program.  Everything must be rendered down into a basic mortal pabulum that has no definable shape, no direction, no possibility of Becoming.

These people are insane.  Perhaps not clinically–there may be no organic component to their madness–which makes it all the more terrifying.  They value nothing by which common ground can be found or common cause be made.  Even their leaders probably cannot control them, once the zeal and the arrogance that has no Self at its center takes hold and they believe they are acting according to divine will.

There is no political future in that path and it is abhorrent to all we hold dear.  One may deride the West for many failures to live up to its own promises, criticize us for our lapses in conscience, but in the face of such utter nihilistic perversity one has to admire the things we cling to as noble and true and precious, at the base of which is the assumed freedom to simply have a different opinion.

The genius of the United States and modern Europe lies in the fact that when we have an election, regardless the outcome, we Go Home.  We do not riot.  We do not overturn the Constitution.  We do not have coups.  (One can argue these points, but in the end they are largely true.)  How does one teach that to a nation that seems incapable of accepting differences of opinion?  We see it time and again, when elections here or there or some other place are declared, by someone, to be not the will of the people, the cities burn, the leaders are shot, the military is called out, and democracy is kicked in the balls again.

Bhutto may not have been able to save Pakistan from itself.  But now we’ll never know. A plebiscite of one decided for the whole country.

And people wonder why religion in politics is such a Big Deal.

While doing the research for my previous post, A Slaughterhouse of One’s Own: A community confronts Santeria, I came across several explanations of exactly how animal sacrifice works in this religion, physically and metaphorically speaking.

The animal is bound and its throat is cut. The carotid artery is sliced with a ceremonial knife and the blood of the animal is drained from its body in the belief that,

…the energy contained in blood of an animal sacrifice opens a channel of direct communication with the Orishas.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/santeri1.htm

(Orishas are the multitude of gods that represent various aspects of life, much as in the Hindu pantheon or the Christian saints.)

The question that first occurred to me when I read this was “Who figured this out?”

I mean, there is no Santeria “bible”, it’s an oral tradition. Someone somewhere in Africa got it in her head that the blood of animals somehow “speaks” to her God and she was persuasive enough to convince others that it was true. So persuasive in fact, that people are still doing it to this day just because a teacher tells them to, even though there is no “written word of God” to back her up.

The original priestess of Santeria must have been wishing really hard for something big and when she killed a goat her wish came true. She deduced that it was the killing that caused the good thing to happen and I can only assume she followed that up with more killing and more good luck.

The second thought that occurred to me was, “How do they know it still works?”

For that matter, how does anyone who prays know that their message is reaching God and that God will act on their request? In a recent scientific study it was proven that prayer is usless from a medical standpoint.

Distant prayer and the bedside use of music, imagery and touch (MIT therapy) did not have a significant effect upon the primary clinical outcome observed in patients undergoing certain heart procedures, researchers at Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI), Duke University Medical Center, the Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VAMC) and seven other leading academic medical institutions across the U.S. have found.

“Prayers for the sick and healing-touch are among the most widely practiced healing traditions around the world,” said Mitchell Krucoff, MD, interventional cardiologist at Duke and lead author of the study. “As widespread as these practices are, few rigorous studies exist to explain any mechanism of action or reliable measures of safety or effectiveness. While many of us are fascinated culturally or philosophically with the mystery of healing and prayer, for the practice of medicine we need to understand these phenomena with data-driven insight.”

I’m sure this is old news for regular readers of DI, but I decided to conduct a personal (i.e. anecdotal, unscientific) experiment of my own. So that I couldn’t be accused of persecuting anyone’s religion, I decided to put my own family’s faith in the spotlight. (I was raised Roman Catholic.)

I thought back over the years to the many times that members of my family were in major medical distress and we prayed for help. Did it work? Let’s see…

Great Aunt Mary: Cancer.

Her sisters, my grandmother included, were avid churchgoers all their lives. They prayed for Mary for many months as she suffered with her disease.

Result: Aunt Mary died.

Cousin Jeremy: Because he was born with a heart defect Josh needed periodic surgeries to expand his chest cavity to accommodate the growing organ. At 12 years of age during one such operation his body became wracked with infection. Our family prayed for him.

Result: Jeremy died.

Baby Jake: My sister’s son became feverish and was diagnosed with meningitis. We were all asked to pray for him.

Result: Jake got better.

Lynne: My cousin’s wife was 37 years old with three small children when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. We prayed like we’d never prayed before.

Result: Lynne died.

Rose: The 38 year old sister of a close friend discovered a tumor on her spine. She was a single mother of a small daughter. His family and my family both prayed for her.

Result: Rose died.

That’s 1 out of 5. Pretty lousy track record if you ask me.

What did we do wrong? Are we a bad family whose members deserve to die painful tragic deaths? As far as I can tell we are no better or worse than anyone else.

I wonder if the practitioners of Santeria fare better statistically than Catholics. Even the proverbial flip of the coin, 50/50, would be a big improvement! I’d like to know because if draining the blood from a screaming animal can increase my odds of getting what I want and save my family from untimely death…I’m joining!

Listening to a talk show at work yesterday, I heard some fall-out from the recent suicide of the young girl who had been “duped” on MySpace.  When I first learned of this tragedy, I ran through a series of thoughts about the dangers posed by the interfaces we use these days, which put us often too early and unprepared into contact with things in another era we would simply have had no opportunity to encounter.  This girl was a casualty of the wavefront of experience that comes now in new forms and through media that never before existed.  

I never once thought it was her fault.

How could you?  She’d been deceived.  Inexperienced, unwitting, she invested a bit too much, and it put her over the edge to discover that what she thought was “real” was in fact a deception.

History is full of examples of people committing suicide over things with only marginal reality.  Especially among adolescents.  We’ve learned in the last decade a great deal more about brain development than ever before, and one of those things is that adolescence is the time of some of the most intricate and fragile growth–physically–within the brain.  The hormone storm that is unleashed at the onset of puberty, the growth spurts visible in every other part of the body, the physiological changes of emergent sexuality and secondary sexual characteristics, all have their equivalent in cognitive development.  It makes perfect sense after the fact, but for a long, long time we blithely assumed that adolescents were more or less just like adults.  Instead we find that, because of the rapid and complex changes they are going through, teen-agers who appear out-of-control, impulsive, overly-sensitive, clueless, clumsy–in short, borderline insane–really are all those things and it is the responsibility of the adults around them to set guidelines and provide aid to get them through this period to the other side and (hopefully) “normality” and sanity.  (When this fails, we have all manner of screwed up adult.)

Which is why holding a teenager responsible for not behaving like an adult is absurd on its face.

And consequences of this journey can run the gamut from perpetual clumsiness to neuroses to schizophrenia to manic-depression to suicide.

It is one of the challenges of our new awareness of these things to take actions to mitigate the worst effects and to do what we can to ensure a healthy mind in the emergent adult.

Something like this tragic suicide occurs, though, and when we listen to what comes after we discover how unlikely that is for some people.  Many people emailed this talk show to express their opinion that the dead girl “got what was coming to her.”  It was somehow her fault.

When we tease through this senseless reaction, we come to the bottom line opinion that what she was doing on MySpace was something she shouldn’t have been doing, something that is to some people Bad.  In fact immoral.  Evil.  That she reaped the rewards of an inappropriate indulgence.

This is pathetic.  But rather than condemn it outright, maybe we ought to take a look at this and see where it comes from.  This echoes similar responses to other events, like rape.  “She shouldn’t have been out that late, she shouldn’t have been with Those People, she shouldn’t have been dressed Like That.”  We’ve heard all this.  After enough of it, you’d think the poor rapist had absolutely no choice but to attack That Female.  It was all her fault, she brought it on herself.

Blaming the victim.

This happens to men, too, but in less obvious ways.  (more…)

Writer John Scalzi recently visited the Creation Museum.    He  has written his report, assessed his impressions, and concluded…well, you should read his conclusions for yourself, here.

I do  not have Mr. Scalzi’s flare for describing expensive nonsense in such finely satirical, subversive, and somewhat detached a manner.  There is also a FlickR show attached worth a look—go through the images separately, though, rather than as a slide show, as he has added comments also worth a look.

The capacity of human beings to deceive themselves and ignore evidence that things really aren’t the way they wish them to be might in itself be proof of god’s existence.  How else does one explain it?  The fact that money was spent to put this elaborate Rube-Goldberg explanation on exhibit, that people who are otherwise perfectly reasonable and intelligent seem totally unwilling to use that intelligence and reason when it comes to a pet obsession, is proof of something.

Surely it is.  But what?

I am not at all sure.

But they are.

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.

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.

One of the things that sends me straight up a wall to paw helplessly and violently at ceilings comprised of crushed glass, old nails, and asbestos fibers is when I hear a young woman blithely claim that she isn’t a Feminist and, in fact, “wouldn’t want to be one.” They make this claim with all the insouciant self confidence they might apply to choosing a new dress or deciding which shoes to wear or whether this or that club is trendy enough. Inside, I rage, and want to scream at them “WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU? DON’T YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT YOU’RE SAYING?”

Of course they don’t. They’ve grown up in a world that has been substantially changed by feminism, a world in which it would no more occur to them that they couldn’t do a particular job if they wanted to than it would occur to them that they might be forbidden to vote, drink or smoke in public, or get a divorce from a man and expect to leave with actual belongings. They don’t understand that the very fact that they can choose not to be a feminist is because of feminism and the struggles of those they now see, probably, as dreary, frumpy, unromantic, possibly man-hating, poorly groomed sexless harridans.

And who wants to be bothered with all that politics and political correctness anyway?

I want to shake them, open their well-coifed heads and pour history into their brains. On the one hand, I’m thrilled they can make that choice, that it is a matter of choice, that they can go on about whatever lives they choose and not be concerned about the fact that some Male might decide—because they have no penis—that they should be barred from certain career choices, or prohibited from opting out of a marriage, or committed to an asylum because of a hysterical dissatisfaction with limitations they shouldn’t question anyway because, after all, women who work out of the home are “unnatural” and “neurotic” and women who want things beyond that which society deems appropriate for them to have are suffering delusions of self-ownership. I am happy about that.

But like any freedom, the utter ignorance of how it came to be infuriates me. As if the freedom now enjoyed is somehow permanent and will never go away.

I’d like to recommend a new book. James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice Sheldon. For those who may know a little something about science fiction, James Tiptree jr. was one of the finest writers of the Seventies. To my mind, it would not have mattered which genre the work came out in, Tiptree was a first class thinker. As suggested by the title, he was also a woman, one Alice Bradley Sheldon.

Myth surrounded Tiptree almost from the moment the stories began to appear in 1969. He was reclusive to the point of insanity, there were hints that he worked for the CIA, no one knew anything about him, not even the editors soliciting stories. Sheldon allowed and later fed the myths through voluminous letter-writing. It was finally revealed that Tiptree was a woman, after several major figures in the field had made pronouncements about her gender (Robert Silverberg’s is the most famous, made in print, that there was something “ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing.”), and it turned a world-full of preconceptions on end.

The Seventies was the decade of rising Women’s Consciousness. It came after a century of preparatory work and followed hard upon the Civil Rights movement. What women enjoy today in terms of freedom of self and action was established in that decade. So you can imagine that the dialogue was heady and a lot of bad ideas were being touted and shot to pieces and we were all learning a new language. Tiptree, in the small pond of science fiction, had a huge impact simply by virtue of writing work that transcended gender.

But the story is infinitely more complex. Alice Sheldon came from a famous family and had the kind of life we imagine for writers like Hemingway or Genet or Joyce. It took decades for her to come out from beneath the shadow of a very famous mother and find her own voice—and when she found it, perversely, she had to write it in the guise of a man.

Julie Phillips, a freelance journalist, became intrigued, wrote a couple of articles about Sheldon, then produced this superb literary biography which is also a textbook on the struggles of women in the 20th Century. She never makes the mistake of coopting Alice Sheldon’s story for larger purposes of politics, because she recognized how her life and the politics around it were essentially inseparable.It is a book I would like to thrust into the hands and down the cranium of any young female who disses feminism while clearly understanding nothing about it. One passage alone should suffice to suggest that things are Really Different Now—Alice Sheldon was one of the first to join the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps in the early days of World War II (The WAAC preceded the WAC). Her company was part of a WAAC parade for the benefit of Eleanor Roosevelt in Des Moines. And—

“As the women marched in formation through the city streets to receive the first lady, they drew a large crowd of men who kicked slush at them and bombarded them with garbage.” Pg. 113

I suggest it as invaluable reading also for its psychological insight into the problem–the challenge–of any Out Group struggling to be heard by the majority culture. It is brilliant, well-written, and timely. A great antidote for the mindless acceptance of rights and liberties that, for no better reason than simple biology, a world of men are struggling today to remove.

According to this article, Barry Goldwater’s book, The Conscience of a Conservative, is being reissued. Timely reading? Depends on what audience at which this is aimed.

I seriously doubt conservatives of the Rove/Norquist stripe will have much sympathy with Goldwater, who now seems admirable and even iconic compared to the dunces dancing to the tune of the Far Right today.

It might be well to remember that traditional conservatism bears little substantive resemblance to what passes as popular conservatism today. Since Reagan, the Right has taken up the gauntlet of attack as its primary ethic, and this is now costing them.

It has been asked in recent decades just what Liberals stand for, but I think the question is better applied to Conservatives. A quick glanc