Journalism

Posted 2 days ago, under journalism
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When I was growing up in Chicago, there were four daily newspapers—The Chicago Herald-American, the Chicago Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Sun-Times. The first two went under years ago and the other two are bankrupt. Click to see why.

I used to read daily newspapers—you probably did, too—at least one a day. I don’t know when that started to change, but by the time I had a DSL Internet connection at home those days were over. A newspaper is obviously not the place to look for news. Newspapers are too slow.

Newspapers and other print media put me in mind of a story about a company at the beginning of the 20th century that makes the best product of its kind. This company’s product has performed better than any other for many years, but the company is steadily losing money with no end in sight because it makes buggy whips.

Much of what corporate media, print and electronic, offer is guesswork and speculation, useful only for fear mongering. Hard news—that most likely to engender fear or awe—is expensive to produce and has been losing credibility for a while anyway. Mindless reporting on imaginary weapons of mass destruction and corporate financial scams is an example of what corporate media do for public discourse. Even if you somehow still believe what you read in newspapers, dealing with a wad of paper that calls for at least handling and recycling is way more trouble than closing a browser on your computer. Same drivel, less waste.

Having done no research whatsoever, I’m gonna imitate a journalist and speculate that newspapers are dying all over only partly because of the clear superiority of the Internet as a source of current information. I think another reason that newspapers are tanking and journalism generally has lost status is that most journalists went to an accredited school of journalism.

Journalism is a profession because its practioners profess to think the same way and to approach things the J-school way. That way may actually involve a standard that was once thought to be somehow higher; it may not. The only thing certain in any profession is that a lot of people are invested in a particular way of thinking about what they do and believe that what they do is the best thing that can be done, especially if they’ve been at it a long time. The Roman priests who read chicken entrails were the same way. So is the medical industry, where new ideas are dangerous unless they’re patentable. And, of course, education.

On the Web site of a northern California daily four days after Michael Jackson’s death, this was the “TOP HEADLINE”—
“Jackson still had pulse when found.” All the editorial staff could think of to put on the home page was trivia about a dead man. Brought to you by professionals.
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Slow

Posted 2 weeks ago, under forgetfulness, idiocy, old
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Lately I’ve been thinking about how gaga old people, diagnosed or otherwise, so often seem happy, though not all, I know. A lot of them forget about the stuff that used to worry them and find themselves entirely in the moment, where things are pretty good. My maternal grandmother’s personality and disposition were vastly improved by senility.

So losing my brain doesn’t bother me at all, and in some ways I’m looking forward to it. Although I don’t like the thought of being far enough gone to be taken over by a superior force, either the commies or the county, not knowing and most of all not caring about much of anything sounds just fine to me.

I don’t feel like I’m losing my whole mind, though, just a part. I am losing my brain, though, at least that’s what I think it is. I’m as forgetful as most people I know, and now there’s another layer of lacunae that doesn’t feel like the usual short-term memory loss. Skills and facilities I’ve had forever are sliding away.

I’ve learned to appreciate forgetting things inside the house and having to go back two or three times before I actually go anywhere. That’s fine. I’ve been known to circle an intersection two point seven five times on my bike deciding if should go back yet again for something I meant to bring with me. That kind of exertion is at least aerobic and I enjoy it. But now I’m a slow thinker, too, and I’m not used to it. I don’t mind being retarded—I can see how I used to miss a lot—but I used to be fast and I’m having difficulty adjusting.

Physical aging is easier for me to grasp. Even when I was twenty, I could imagine being tired and even creaky, but I couldn’t imagine being stupid. Creeping idiocy is fascinating, let me tell you, except now I might not remember how to tell you, so you see the difficulty. I think that’s irony, but maybe not. I’ll get back to you.

In the movie Memento, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, the main character resorts to having his body tatooed with the only information he’s sure of. Without a quest like his that seems a bit much but I’m not there yet so I’ll just hush.

Some people I’ve met are offended when I don’t know their names or sometimes even recognize them the next time I see them even if it’s only minutes later. I can’t imagine caring that some old fart doesn’t remember meeting me on the other side of the room ten minutes ago. He’s just slow.
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School

Posted 3 weeks ago, under Leave No Child Behind, President Barack Hussein Obama, Wall Street, cheap labor for business, children, education, public education, public schools
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My youngest son hasn’t been doing well in school lately. Last year, honor roll; this year, not even close. He’s never been much enamored of school anyway, and adolescence hasn’t changed his disposition.

I liked school. I was a good student, and school was a way to win approval and avoid unwanted attention, which for me was pretty much any attention at all. My mother had great faith in school—which she thought of as education—and was pleased that I did well. If I stumbled, like when I got that U in arithmetic in fifth grade, she was upset and my life was less pleasant. I didn’t stumble much.

I’ve heard that the single biggest factor in a child’s school performance is the parents’ attitude, which explains a lot. My problem with dealing with my son’s lack of concern is that I’m not concerned either, and he knows it.

Public schools are designed to turn out cheap labor for businesses, and since I can’t imagine any of my sons in a cubicle, I don’t care how they do in school. Their not excelling at something chosen for them by people who neither know nor care about them doesn’t distress them or me. I especially don’t care how your children do.

When President Obama promised extra pay for science and math teachers as a way to end a shortage, he meant that business wants to pay less to people who have those skills, and young people don’t seem to be all that interested in math and science, so let’s make some more of what Wall Street wants and encourage students to do what’s best for the country.

I try to persuade my son to do better because I think doing well will make things easier for him. He has no notion of that, though. He knows I’ll love him forever no matter how he does in school, so there’s at least no reason for him to do well to get my approval.

I was a substitute teacher for a couple of years in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, and a lot of teachers are good people, although that’s not a requirement.

I was the long-term building sub in two schools and got to know people a little. It’s a tough job. A school takes a lot of resources and constant effort because it’s a crime against nature to force children to sit at desks and learn the same damn thing, whether they care about it or not. That’s where the professionalism comes in.

For several months I was the building floater at what I used to refer to as the Jordan Park School of Elongated Learning. One of the teachers there likened public school teachers to sheep, mindlessly following orders to transmit the approved texts. Not just anybody can do it. You have to be certified.

Politicians decide the range of subjects taught and tested in schools that get government money—which is damned near all—and then presumably students can specialize in whatever they want. Here’s a relevant quotation: “If you give me the power to nominate, you can vote for whomever you please.” Benito Mussolini said that. If you know who Mussolini was, I bet you went to public school a long time ago.

I’ve read that when Albert Einstein finally accepted a teaching position he said, “So, now I, too, am an official member of the guild of whores.” You remember Einstein.
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Congress

Posted 4 weeks ago, under politics
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I’m tired of congress, which doesn’t deserve to be capitalized. What a bunch of weasels. Jeebus. I want to cut congress’s budget in half. I don’t care who makes the cuts. One half.

What congress does seldom affects them directly, and sometimes not at all. I want to change that. The discussion about health care will be authentic only when it affects all of us, not just ordinary people, but specifically all public employees, including first and foremost all present and former members of congress and all present and former federal elected officials at all levels. If they get free health care, I want it to be the same as yours. No more sweet deals. They’re no better than anybody else. That’s what I want.

And since congress is obviously incompetent, let’s start over with a fresh batch. Anybody who’s been a member of congress more than two years is fired. Go home. I want to start with people who just might have a new idea, and maybe they haven’t been paid for yet.

So I was riffing on congress when I got a whiff of jasmine calling me out in the sun for a break. Risky move.

Outside, I don’t care about congress. I’m completely local outside, even if I’m online. Online inside, I’m in cyberspace. Online outside, I’m in the backyard. Outside, the sun is real, and congress is a story and not a very good one at that. Being in the sun with birdsong and breeze is much more engaging for me than a story with congress in it.

Years ago I suggested to my boss that we have our next staff meeting outside. He laughed and said, “Oh, no! We’d never get anything done.” Could be, and I’m starting to think that whatever we can’t do outside, maybe we oughtn’t to do anyway. We pretty much evolved outside. All our buildings are fairly recent, and I think we may make better decisions outside. I do. Maybe congress should meet outside.

Even if every registered voter in this great nation of theirs wanted the very same thing, it wouldn’t matter, because the United States is a pretend democracy. There’s a case to be made for its being a republic, a corporatocracy, an oligarchy, a plutocracy, and probably some more things I’ve never heard of, but the one thing it ain’t is a democracy. There’s too much distance between our vote and what actually happens. Our vote is the popular vote, not the meaningful vote. You and I hardly ever vote on issues and some people never do. We vote for a politician or the brand and hope for the best. I want all of us to vote on everything and if we don’t want to support something—say, the military or the state of Israel—we earmark our taxes for something else. That’s what I want, that and sunny weather, mostly sunny weather.
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Judgment

Posted 5 weeks ago, under Abortion, corporate media, judgment
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George Tiller, M.D., was murdered recently in the foyer of the Lutheran church he attended in Wichita, Kansas. He was handing out bulletins and his wife was in the choir when he was shot by a man who got away.

Someone at the church saw the killer get in a pickup registered to Scott Roeder, who in 1996 seems to have posted online about bringing “justice to Tiller and the closing of his death camp.” Roeder was also a member of the Freemen, a group that claimed in the 1990s that they were their own nation more or less and weren’t subject to laws and taxes except their own. I don’t know if they had any. Probably not. Regardless, the cops stopped Roeder on his way home three hours after the shooting and eventually arrested him for murder.

Judy L. Thomas writes in the Kansas City Star that people who know Roeder were not surprised, calling him a “fanatic” and saying saying that “[H]e believed in justifiable homicide, that he “very strongly believed that abortion was murder and that you ought to defend the little ones, both born and unborn.”

That last bit is important because George Tiller, M.D., was one of the few physicians left in the United States who performed late-term abortions—after the fetus looks like a baby and abortion seems wronger to some people—and had been shot in both arms in 1993 because of it.

All of the principals approve of deliberately killing a human being. They just have to hear the right story. Although Bill O’Reilly said, “This man will terminate fetuses at any time for $5,000,” that wasn’t quite true. Tiller performed third-trimester abortions only in cases of “severe fetal abnormalities” when he judged an abortion would be “therapeutic.” Tiller had a “therapeutic” story.

The killer, not satisfied with leading his very own good life, wants everybody to be as good as he thinks they ought to be, and if they’re bad enough, he’ll kill them. The killer, who may or may not be Roeder, has a “righteous” story.

I can understand how killing one elderly man you see as a mass murderer of babies might seem like a good idea, but only if you’re god, better make that God.

The doctor judged the fetuses, and the killer judged the doctor, and now people with much better things to do with their friends and family or even their gardens will judge both of them or you and me and anything else corporate media thinks will help them deliver our eyeballs to advertisers, when none of it’s any of our business. None of it.
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Memory

Posted May 28, 2009, under fathering
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Some years ago, I found myself with no food in the house and no car. That wouldn’t have been a big deal except I also had our seven-year-old son, and Cub Foods was nearly five miles away.

I told my son that we had to ride our bicycles, which understandably alarmed him. He had ridden around the neighborhood with me, and with his friends, and now and again he and his younger brother and I would ride to the beach at Wirth Lake, maybe a mile away. That was it.

At seven, having ridden mostly in the back seat of cars and not paying attention anyway, he had no idea how far much of anything was from home. As far as he was concerned, Cub Foods could’ve been just the other side of Wirth Park or in the next county.

The route to Cub Foods was along an ugly, busy street, and the weather was hot. The ride seemed to take forever, and perhaps would have if we hadn’t had to get back home for our youngest’s delivery from pre-school and before the frozen stuff we bought melted.

So we did it, me slowly and him with remarkable fortitude for a seven-year-old. Finally back home, my son could hardly wait to tell his mother and little brother when they showed up. Having led him for every pedal stroke, I had some idea how much effort it had taken for him to make that trip and decided I was witnessing the genesis of a family story, like the ones my family used to tell on holidays about the time somebody or other did something wonderful or awful, and wasn’t that something?

Eventually my son had told everybody he knew, and the event began to fade from dinner conversation and my mind. Then years later and twenty-five hundred miles away in Chico, my son, now taller and smarter than I, asked me if I remembered our trek.

That ride to Cub Foods had been a significant father-and-son episode for me, and I did indeed remember it. I was tickled pink, which takes quite a bit of tickling for me, that the ordeal was actually turning into a family story, apparently as important to him as to me. Very satisfying.

Then just before I started writing this, I mentioned that ride to my son, and—lest I get the idea that my perceptions have some lasting importance or meaning—he said he had no recollection. I was dumbfounded, probably not all that unusual, but this time I realized it. No recollection! It must be hormones.

I’d been thinking all along that this epic adventure would live on in the annals of the Porter family, and I suppose it will, but only because I want it to and I guess that’s what it was all about anyway.
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Safe

Posted May 21, 2009, under stuff
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A friend of mine gave me a real safe, with a combination and a key. I thought I’d gotten past attracting more stuff, but he really thought I should have it, and so I hauled it home and put it in my conference room. That was five months ago, and it’s still empty. I can’t decide what to put in it.

It has a horizontal surface, so I’ve put several things on it, but it’s empty because I don’t know what to put in it. I don’t have a passport anymore, and I’m bereft of bearer bonds, secret formulas, and diamonds. I could keep my cash in it, but a safe seems like a lot to put up with to guard the occasional sawbuck I could afford to be without for a day or two.

There’s a part of me that’s says I ought to have something so valuable that other people want to steal it, like a fancy car or a sack of diamonds, which by the way was one of my goals when I was 25. That’s only part of the foolishness I have to deal with, most of which I learned in public school. Speaking of which, one thing I’ve considered putting in my safe is evidence of my having been a scholar in 1954. The certificate has been in the same plastic frame since the 1980s, though, and I like it hanging in the hall for the boost it gives me many times a day. I want all boosts.

Counting my mood ring, I’ve got maybe $23 worth of jewelry, not much of a target even for the level of thief who would let my little safe stop them.

What I want to continue to exist in spite of natural disaster or civil uprising are people, none of whom are small enough for my safe. I’ve got a few serigraphs and silver prints, but they wouldn’t fit either.

And when I think of other little things that mean something to me being closed up inside that drab gray box in total darkness, I can’t do it. I can’t lock away the necklace I got from an Ecuadorian shaman like that. It’s been around my neck, and I can’t banish it from life, from me. I like it. I’ll take my chances.

If a thing is all that valuable to me, I want it out in the open, or at least easy to get at. If I had a sack of diamonds I’d want to keep them out on a table so I could see them glint in the light. Why not? Diamonds don’t have much to offer as it is—hardness and glinting is about it.

I like having a safe, though. When the barbarians get to Chapmantown, I’ll figure out what to put in it.
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The Greater Good

Posted May 14, 2009, under Earth's resources, environmental responsibility, politics
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To get $1.5 billion of stimulus money that’s earmarked for greening the electrical grid, the Transmission Agency of Northern California proposes to build 164 miles of humongous towers across northern California. TANC works in the public interest on behalf of its member utilities, so it can exercise eminent domain to use land however it sees fit. Eminent domain is a lot like manifest destiny.

TANC will cut a swath through thousands of acres of forest and hundreds of properties erecting towers as close as 30 feet from the houses of the people who thought they owned the land. Think about that, a crackling, 150-foot transmission tower ceaselessly pulsing out high-energy magnetic fields thirty feet from your remote and formerly peaceful home.

As a child I lived one block from State Street, the dividing line between the east-west dividing line in Chicago that became part of the route for Interstate 94. In the 1950s some government or other bought out the people who had property in the one-block path of what became the Dan Ryan Expressway. Where there’d been neighborhoods was a hole an eighth of a mile wide, for the greater good. The hole is still there.

While the rest of the country is learning to do without, TANC is ramping up, starting with $1.5 billion from us. Remember Enron?

You and I are mostly empty space with the occasional bit of information and energy doing whatever the hell it’s doing at that instant in conjunction with all the other metaphors. These ideas—namely you and I—are sensitive to all sorts of electromagnetic waves, and many sober people seem to think that pulsing, buzzing transmission towers may not be for the greater good, at least not if you live nearby.

Just one United Press International story from 2007 about a university study in Tasmania mentions increased rates of leukemia, lymphoma, and bone marrow cancer from living near high-tension wires. I heard about such cancer zones years ago in studies done in the United States. The woman who’d done the research kept finding more evidence and the utility people kept saying either that she was nuts or they said nothing at all.

TANC mostly says nothing at all. Look at www.tanc.us and see for yourself. Then look at www.stoptanc.com or www.sencal.org. The TANC transmission project will increase toxic air contaminants, remove active agricultural land from production, electrocute birds in a bald eagle breeding area, affect tribal lands and sites on the National Register of Historic Places, increase the likelihood of landslides on Round Mountain, and cause more surface water run-off and more erosion, not to mention what will happen to property values. For the greater good, though. When General Motors persuaded cities across the country to rip up their interurban lines and buy GM’s buses, that was for the greater good, too.

TANC’s project disproportionately affects low-income and minority populations, just like I-94 in Chicago. It’s usually easy to get poor people to roll over for the greater good. Maybe not this time.
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Appreciation

Posted May 7, 2009, under appreciation, gardening
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I appreciate jasmine, and I love the way the new jasmine on our back fence has taken to its assigned spot next to the ailanthus stump—little green shoots everywhere. It’ll cover the trellis and nicely block out a neighbor’s bright-all-night light, and I really appreciate that.

And the hostas came back! Hostas were extensively developed at the University of Minnesota, and having been a Minnesota gardener I have a certain knee-jerk regard for what seems like a home-team plant. I still convinced myself that hostas’ legendary hardiness and willingness to make the best of any condition were just hooey and the two healthy plants I’d thought were well adjusted last fall and set for the winter had died just to disappoint me. Nonsense. I appreciate their coming back. Hostas rule.

Although I’m making progress at appreciating all weather, and my chakras have done well recently with rainy days, I’m still glad winter is over. I like long, bright days. I don’t know how I survived all those midwestern winters, especially the 18 I spent in Minnesnowta where the sky is often darker than the land. In some ways I didn’t survive, thus making way for this wild California rebirth. I appreciate the north valley climate. I love the heat.

The new little oleander in our backyard has begun to bloom, and must have made its peace with all the rocks. It’s at least near the spigot, an advantage in the summer. I appreciate oleander’s extravagance, like that of so much flora—and fauna too, come to think of it, especially people—in California. Things and people go wild, and I appreciate that, even when they go wild on me.

The rosemary and the rose bushes under my conference-room window are testaments to California’s botanical hospitality, which I appreciate. Every rosemary plant I tried to grow in Saint Paul and Minneapolis promptly swooned and died. One seemed to grow despondent on the way home from the nursery. The rosemary we have now is a happy hedge—bigger than all my indoor efforts combined—and I appreciate and eat it.

The previous owner of our house in Minneapolis was known all over the neighborhood for his beautiful roses, of which there were many specimens when I showed up. I think Fred’s beautiful roses starting giving up the ghost as soon as they got wind of who had moved in, and soon there wasn’t a scrap of rose bush on the property. Our current roses are exuberant in spite of living in my backyard, a zone of deep neglect, and I deeply appreciate their ability to go it alone.

And I appreciate my family not killing me in my sleep, although few would blame them, least of all me. I’m grateful, too.
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Obama 1

Posted April 30, 2009, under Negroes, debates
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So we’ve got a Black President. Wow. White people have really come a long way, in spite of their leadership, and I salute them, figuratively speaking.

I ignored political news for years, and now Barack Obama’s election has me monitoring the chatter online. Of course, it’s mostly guesswork, the essence of blah-blah. It’s news when anybody in media thinks of something new to say or, more often, thinks of a way to say the same old thing slightly differently. They fill the space-time with whatever they think will get our attention—movement, bright colors, catchy tunes.

Obama’s popularity in my kitchen slipped when he started picking the Clinton gang and other conventional suits to work for him. It seems a counterintuitive way to achieve change. Those polled are hopeful that he’ll find somebody who actually thinks differently and have adopted a wait-and-see posture.

I don’t think Obama is the messiah, though he and Jesus of Nazareth are similar in that everything we think either of them ever said is chewed on endlessly and savored for meaning and intent and implication. That’s where the similarity ends. Jesus was a radical. Obama is not.

Obama’s election, among any number of other readings, is an indication of his non-threatening acceptability to the power elite. He also seems like a smart guy and a decent, thoughtful human being. He’s cool, too, and he may even be kind. Still, Obama and McCain were in the debates because they could be relied on to stick to the glossary and not make any unfortunate suggestions. They would talk about the usual subjects in conventional terms, based on the patriotic premises that more is better and war is necessary. No problem.

They could talk about tweaking something and even talk about redistributing some of the money, but no-drama Obama and the other guy would not be bringing up no wild-eyed shadow-government conspiracy shit or no “let Wall Street go to hell” or “get out of Iraq by the equinox” or “the drug war is over” or “no government secrecy” or “Israel’s full of it” or any other hint of radical thought. Nothing like that. Progressivism is too far out to be taken seriously, so we’re stuck at liberalism, for which I’m grateful. He gets points for taking a train to the inauguration because that’s cool.

I don’t expect Barack Obama to kill the Federal Reserve system or the CIA or to slash military spending or even revoke any corporate charters, but I think we’ve got a shot at universal health care and maybe sooner or later a Department of Peace or at least an innovative appointment or two. A constitutional convention would clear up a lot of things, but the thought of rethinking everything from the ground up scares some people and my guess is that’s the last thing Obama wants to do. That’s my blah-blah.

I’m glad Obama got over like a big dog. In your face. I like that, and yet I can’t quite get with the way some people get all dreamy-eyed and defensive about somebody they’ve never met. Get a grip. He’s a Chicago politician.
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