George Carlin’s brutally patriotic criticism

The First Amendment isn’t worth a damn unless it is actually being used. If it is not being used, then politicians and their rich and powerful keepers will continue to utter long and loud streams of nonsense to financially screw the ordinary working people of America in dozens of ways. They will continue to feed us unending misinformation in order to justify their urges to wage unnecessary wars to help them retain their power. They will continue invading our houses and and minds thanks to their many stenographers in the commercial media. Those of us who have resisted drinking much of this country’s spiked elixir of Judeo-Christian-consumerist-warmongering-bigotry know that most of what we hear our authority figures uttering, even those authority figures who we want to believe to be on our side, is flawed. Much of it substantially untrue and quite a bit of it is absolute bullshit.  I hate to be writing these words, but I've lost a lot of faith in the United States in the past ten years.  Misinformation pours into the living rooms and cars of Americans every day, where it too often takes root, perhaps because it is uttered by people wearing fancy suits and flag pins. Americans need an antidote to this unending poison. They need the kinds of people who can effectively challenge these messages and messengers--someone who not only can challenge this propaganda but can do it with sharp fast pinpricks that deflate this bloviation on the spot.  They need much more than "news" reporters who don't have the tools, courage or motivation to challenge all the BS. They need someone who is old enough and thick-skinned enough that he/she doesn’t give a shit about being criticized for being unpatriotic. In fact, this type of person, of whom we actually need many, feeds on the criticism aimed at them by the powers-that-be and even gets even better under attack; he/she feels compelled to speak truth to power because it is the right thing to do, it's in the blood and it's the patriotic thing. The types of patriotic people we need to deliver this blitzkrieg criticism also need to be excellent entertainers in order to maintain the attention of large numbers of Americans. As comedians, they can hone their messages into comical memes that their audience members will pass around in viral fashion long after the original message was delivered. To the extent that these funny social critics portray themselves as jesters, they will have more access to the mass media, enabling them more effectively put their verbal swords in and out of those who own and run this country. Many conservatives consider this iconoclastic feedback to be unpatriotic. [More . . . ]

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Apparently We Need More Accidental Criminals

I was reading my usual science blogs, and came across Weekend Diversion: And now, they're coming for me. Yeah, me. Because I write for you. at Starts With a Bang. Apparently Congress is creating new classes of felons that would have no idea they were doing anything even technically wrong. In brief,  U.S. Senate Bill 978 (that just cleared committee) makes it a Federal Offense (felony) if you happen to embed someone's video on your post that someday someone may claim infringed on a copyright. If I, for example, embed a video of some stranger's birthday party on this blog, that pans briefly across a television set that happened to be playing a commercial for shoes, that has background music by the Beatles, and in five years Michael Jackson's heirs decide that this infringed on their copyright on the music of McCartney and yank the video, I could technically be sentenced to up to 5 years in prison. Even if the creator of the video, the owners of the network, and the shoe company and its marketing agent all had approved my use. Ethan Siegel has more details about this silliness and suggestions on his post.

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Ira Glass and the taste-ability gap.

Creation is daunting. Partly because the drive to create is always rooted in admiration for others' creations. What writer hasn't struggled against inadvertently ghost-writing their favorite author? What aspiring auteur, poet, or painter doesn't begin with work that is heartrendingly derivative of others' better attempts? Or worse-- what creative person hasn't struggled to make something 'great', something 'great' as the art they adore, only to find they can't quite compete? And who doesn't infer from these failings that maybe they weren't cut out to be a creative type after all? Ira Glass, creator and longtime host of This American Life, says there's a very simple reason for the head-bashing frustrations of early creative production. Simply put: if you are interested in creating something, it's probably because you have immaculate taste. Taste that outpaces your own ability. At least, at first. Glass says:

“What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me . . . is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
I found this snippet in a video interview with Glass (below) a year or two ago, and I find it incredibly inspiring. Glass' view of creativity suggests that even if you lack innate, immediate creative ability, you are not a lost cause-- and that, in fact, a little creative self-loathing may be a sign of good aesthetic instincts. It also suggests there is a solution to the problem of making unsatisfying dreck: just keep making more. And more. And more. This wisdom is especially powerful in context. As a radio producer, Glass was a very late bloomer. He worked in public radio for twenty years before conceiving of This American Life; he readily admits (in another portion of his interview, and on his program) that the first seven years of his radio work was deeply underwhelming and often poorly-paced.  He'll readily admit that his early stories were bad, and that even he knew they were bad, and that this tormented him. Only through tireless efforts and the cultivation of exceptional taste was he able to develop and bloom. And he bloomed big:  This American Life is one of the most widely-heard public radio programs ever, with 1.7 million weekly listeners, and has topped the Itunes podcast chart continuously for years. If Ira had given up after a few years of shoddy radio stories, we'd all have missed out on TAL's  hundreds of hours of thoughtful, poignant, high-quality public radio. I found this interview snippet a little over a year ago, and Glass' words of experience have galvanized me ever since. Whenever I write something that strikes me as uninspiring or derivative dreck, I reassure myself it's a matter of taste, and time. And more time.

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Celebrity Republicans

I'll assume that most of DI's readers, like me, hate the celebrity phenomenon of the "famous for being famous". This rising class of psuedo-celebs, the "famesque", are a newish phenomenon who owe their livelihoods to media over-saturation. In a world of thousands of channels and millions of websites, in an economy where celebrity gossip magazines and gossip sites flourish as newspapers decline, there is a consistent demand for fluffy content. The outrageous and fame-hungry, who are willing (it seems) to do anything to garner attention, bloom and profit in such an environment. If you have no standards and no shame, it is relatively easy to make a celebrity career of puff piece interviews and reality TV appearances. Far easier than launching a career based on hard-work, creative production, and talent, anyway. But there is a new subclass of the 'famesque', one far more insidious than the droves of Paris Hiltons and Snookies and Osbornes and Kardashians we all despise and ignore. They are Celebrity Republicans- wannabe politicos who are pundits just for the sake of being pundits. And they are tearing the Republican party and political discourse apart.

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