I was complaining that the mainstream media’s peculiar notion of “fair and balanced” news was on display last week in some Washington Post stories about newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson.
I asked my neighbor Swamp Rabbit if he knew that the House had taken the speaker’s job away from Kevin McCarthy and then rejected a bid for the job by Jim Jordan, the ex-wrestling coach who legislates with all the wisdom and charm of a rabid dog. Republicans, who hold a slim majority in the House, settled on Johnson, an obscure Louisiana Bible beater.
Johnson is opposed to abortion rights, same-sex marriage, gun control and clean energy. He’s an unrepentant election denier who was close to planners of the Jan. 6 insurrection. He has yet to answer reporters’ questions about his involvement in efforts to block certification of the 2020 election results.
You might say Johnson is Jim Jordan without the rabies. Ruth Marcus in Washington Post put it more politely: Johnson “is Jordon in a more palatable package.”
But here’s where the coverage gets weird. A few days after Marcus’s opinion piece appeared, the Post ran a profile of Johnson by a staffer who cited Johnson’s “heavy reliance” on “family and faith.” The staffer included testimonials from Johnson’s hometown friends and Republican colleagues, and quoted his mother on what a swell guy he is.
The staffer should have addressed why Johnson was allowed to remain in office after trying to bring down the government. Maybe Johnson would have answered like Chuck Berry: Must have been some other body/It wasn’t me.
“I thought the article was fair and balanced,” Swamp Rabbit said, just to piss me off. “The reporter was nice to Johnson’s mom and didn’t mention that he don’t believe in honest elections. What you got against fair and balanced?”
I was telling my neighbor Swamp Rabbit that scientists just sounded a new alarm about ice shelves in the Antarctic. “They’re melting a lot faster than the experts used to think, but nobody seems to care,” I said.
“Ice shelves ain’t news,” he replied. “Not until all the ice melts and the seacoasts go underwater.”
I couldn’t argue with his logic. The world is a hot mess and wars are everywhere. It should surprise no one that news about the environment takes a back seat to stories about warmongers who’d rather foul up the planet further than save it from climate change. People like Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu and whatever sicko who happens to be the boss of Hamas this week.
“All them world leaders are bullshit,” Swamp Rabbit declared. “Pope Francis is the only one tells it like it is. The Catholic Church ain’t cool, but the pope is.”
I did some reading to find out what the pope is saying these days. Eight years ago he issued an encyclical — an official papal letter — calling for “a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet. We need a conversation which includes everyone, since the environmental challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all.”
This time around, in another communique, he shared some of the same thoughts but with more urgency and pointed criticism of the climate deniers who are inching the world closer to disaster:
They bring up allegedly solid scientific data, like the fact that the planet has always had, and will have, periods of cooling and warming. They forget to mention another relevant datum: that what we are presently experiencing is an unusual acceleration of warming, at such a speed that it will take only one generation – not centuries or millennia – in order to verify it. The rise in the sea level and the melting of glaciers can be easily perceived by an individual in his or her lifetime, and probably in a few years many populations will have to move their homes because of these facts.
Francis also had harsh words for the ineffective UN climate change conferences (COP28 is the next one, in December); for oil and gas companies; and for lifestyle choices in the United States, where individuals, on the average, generate about seven times more carbon emissions that people in the poorest countries.
Swamp Rabbit criticized the pope for singling out the United States. “Them poor countries would pollute just as much as us if they had more money.”
“You’re probably right,” I said, “but that’s no reason to ignore climate change and spend all our time and energy on bread and circuses.”
Swamp Rabbit’s eyes lit up. “Speaking of which, how about them Phillies? A bunch of million-dollar bums. Worst collapse I ever seen. Think I’ll find a new team to root for next year.”
Swamp Rabbit and I were re-reading a New York Times story posted shortly after the October 17 Gaza hospital explosion that killed scores, or perhaps hundreds, of civilians. The question of who’s responsible for the explosion is still up in the air, but that didn’t stop NYT from using this presumptuous headline: “Israeli strike kills hundreds in hospital, Palestinians say.”
“This story reminds a lot of people of that quote attributed to Mark Twain,” I said in regard to the headline. “‘A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth gets a chance to get its pants on.'”
“So the media ain’t to be trusted, everything they report is lies,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Is that what you’re saying?”
Most reporters don’t set out to lie, I told him, but the idea that their stories will be processed and published without being altered to fit someone’s agenda is naive, to say the least. Editors at a powerful entity like NYT don’t make final content decisions in a vacuum, free from the influences of competing interest groups fighting for coverage that will cast their views in a favorable light.
I told him that the big media outlets often tweak news stories to fit what they think is the prevailing public mood regarding important issues. For instance, the prevailing public mood after 9/11 was overwhelmingly hawkish, so the mainstream media more or less ignored war foes and fell into lockstep with government liars who said Iraq had WMDs and must therefore be vanquished.
In the case of the hospital explosion, NYT editors surely realized that much of the world was appalled by video showing high casualties in Gaza caused by Israeli forces reacting to the October 7 massacre of 1,300 Israelis by Hamas. Responding to what seemed to be the prevailing public mood, the editors apparently jumped to the conclusion that the Israelis were responsible for the hospital bombing. In order not to be accused of bias, they added the weasel words, “Palestinians say.”
“They assumed an ‘Israeli strike’ caused the explosion,” I said. “They assumed hundreds were killed in the explosion, even though the death count hadn’t been independently verified. They ignored the possibility that Hamas may have been responsible for the explosion. They unwittingly turned the hospital story into a big victory for anti-Israel propagandists.”
“You’re saying the NYT screwed up but they didn’t lie?” Swamp Rabbit asked.
“I’m saying the Times and a lot of other big media outlets obscured the truth in response to a strong public outcry by supporters of the Palestinians,” I replied. “That’s not the same as lying but it might be just as bad.”
Footnote: The Times ran an updated version of the hospital explosion story that includes some unacknowledged corrections. The headline is “Hundreds reported killed in blast at a Gaza hospital.”
From an op-ed in Washington Post, a few days after Hamas fighters massacred more than 1,300 people in a surprise attack on Israel by land, sea and air:
For many years, Israel has been governed by a populist strongman, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is a public-relations genius but an incompetent prime minister. He has repeatedly preferred his personal interests over the national interest and has built his career on dividing the nation against itself. He has appointed people to key positions based on loyalty more than qualifications, took credit for every success while never taking responsibility for failures, and seemed to give little importance to either telling or hearing the truth.
“Substitute ‘president’ for ‘prime minister’ and who we talkin’ about?” said my neighbor Swamp Rabbit, who was reading over my shoulder.
“The orange hog monster,” I replied, noting that Netanyahu — “Bibi” to his admirers — and Donald Trump were good buddies when Trump was president. Both men are cruel blowhards who spend most of their time trying to undermine those who might threaten their power. Both depend on the support of religious fanatics and other rightwing kooks, and both use fear and loathing to divide and conquer.
Netanyahu seemed to become more pompous and arrogant as he aged. He was indicted on bribery and fraud charges in 2019, while serving as prime minister. He was turned out of office in 2021, but last year weaseled his way into another term, heading what is widely considered the most rightwing government in Israel’s history. He spent most of 2023 trying to weaken the Israeli judiciary, a move that threw the country into turmoil and arguably helped spark the attack last week by Hamas militants.
“I don’t get it,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Netanyahu graduated from Cheltenham High School, a good school just outside Philly, when his family lived in America. Didn’t he learn civics? Didn’t they teach him that dictators are bad news?”
I stared at him. “You’re putting me on, right? Trump went to the U. of P. and look how he turned out.”
Footnote: Now Netanyahu is back in his element, calling for an all-out attack on Gaza to distract constituents from his woeful failings as a leader. And apologists for Hamas are refusing to condemn the massacre of Israelis. I can’t help but think of a question posed this week by the writer Fintan O’Toole: What lessons do people actually learn from the cruelties they applaud and the ones they suffer in return? Forget it, the answer is too depressing.
My neighbor Swamp Rabbit has a plan. “If I gotta go back to work, I want to be one of them social media influencers,” he said. “That’s where the money is these days.”
“Not really,” I replied. ” But it’s where the media’s attention is. Just look at all the publicity that influencer in Philly got last week.”
In case you were living in an ashram and just got back, a social media influencer is someone with a strong internet presence who directs his or her online followers to a product or activity about which he or she has special knowledge or expertise. Tech-savvy influencers are now delving into fields as diverse as fashion and cosmetics, food and restaurants, and real estate.
In Philadelphia, a 21-year-old influencer known as Meatball was arrested last week after she live-streamed the looting of retail stores in various parts of the city by gangs of young people, most of them Black. The looting took place shortly after charges were dismissed in the case of a white cop who, without provocation, shot and killed a young Black man in Philly in August.
Meatball, who is Black, was charged with six felonies, including criminal mischief and conspiracy. But was she conspiring with looters or merely documenting the looting incidents for her 185,000 Instagram followers? That’s for the courts to decide, but the recordings she made certainly don’t help her case.
Swamp Rabbit was impressed by Meatball’s social media skills, and now he wants to make his mark in the influencer racket. He has heard of people who work influencer-type jobs — marketing, public relations and sales positions that involve convincing consumers to buy things they don’t need and do things they’d be better off not doing. Bullshit jobs is what David Graeber called them.
“I can influence with the best of them,” Swamp Rabbit said. “And I can do it without working for some higher-ups who would take credit for what I done on my own.”
“Just don’t become a looting influencer,” I replied. “I’m not bailing you out if you do.”
Footnote: According to Morning Consult, 86 percent of young people would like to use their social media platforms to try to become influencers, even though most existing influencers make little or no money at it. The ones who make big money — “mega-influencers” — usually have already made a name for themselves in their chosen fields by the time they enter the racket.
My neighbor Swamp Rabbit and I saw a news report about Elon Musk, who wants to direct the course of wars and launch billionaires to Mars. He owns a big chunk of social media and is in the electric car business, but he seems to have nothing but contempt for his fellow humans.
I asked Swamp Rabbit if he agrees that it’s hard to have faith in a future that’s being molded by psychos who control all the capital. We’ll be lucky if we make it through the winter, I told him.
“I don’t want to hear it,” he said. “We made it through the summer, we’ll make it through the winter.”
“The hottest summer ever recorded,” I said. “The world was on fire.”
He got out his phone and showed me a news story in which the world’s foremost energy economist states that “the rapid uptake of solar panels and electric vehicles” has renewed his hope that the nations of the world will achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and thus avoid the worst effects of the climate crisis. This despite the fact that the climate continues to change “at frightening speed.”
“Glad to hear about someone who looks on the bright side,” I said, making an effort to suppress my doubts.
For one thing, reaching net zero would require a consistently high level of cooperation among the nations that spew the largest amounts of greenhouse gas — China, the US, India, the European Union and Russia. How likely is long-term cooperation given the current levels of enmity and mistrust among world powers?
Another reason for pessimism is Musk and the other obscenely wealthy jackasses who dominate the news cycle. Musk’s Teslas run clean but he has made it clear that he’s a bigoted kook who’s more committed to establishing a “multiplanetary” civilization than to averting climate disaster on Earth. He wants to use Twitter — X, as he calls it — and his other holdings to fight the “the woke-mind virus,” as he told Walter Isaacson, his biographer and most well-regarded cheerleader.
“You’re just mad because you can’t afford one of them electric cars,” Swamp Rabbit said as I continued to badmouth Musk.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said, but if I could afford an EV, I wouldn’t buy one of his.”
Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner’s book of interviews he conducted with famous rock ‘n’ roll artists will be published next week. It’s called The Masters, and its subjects are Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Jerry Garcia, Pete Townshend, Bono and Bruce Springsteen. Here’s Wenner responding to a reporter who asked why the book doesn’t include any interviews with Black or female artists:
Insofar as the women, just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level.
It’s not that they’re not creative geniuses. It’s not that they’re inarticulate, although, go have a deep conversation with Grace Slick or Janis Joplin. Please, be my guest. You know, Joni was not a philosopher of rock ‘n’ roll. She didn’t, in my mind, meet that test. Not by her work, not by other interviews she did.
The people I interviewed were the kind of philosophers of rock. Of Black artists, you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right? I suppose when you use a word as broad as masters, the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level.
My neighbor Swamp Rabbit was taken aback, not so much because Wenner’s comments are so controversial but rather because they’re so … inarticulate. For example, “…None of them [women rockers] were as articulate enough on this intellectual level.”
“Ain’t this the same guy who ran the rock ‘n’ roll Bible?” Swamp Rabbit said. “The hippest magazine that ever was? Your main source of info about the sounds that shaped your boomer generation? How could he say such stupid shit?”
I told him Rolling Stone was once a great magazine. That Wenner hired some of the most insightful music writers and investigative reporters in the business and kept the magazine operating at a high level throughout the years when rock ‘n’ roll was a dominant force in the culture.
“But don’t put words in my mouth,” I said. “I liked Rolling Stone because of the writing, not because it spoke for my generation, so-called. I don’t even know what that means. And Wenner, great editor that he was, always struck me as a starstruck, self-important jerk.”
Before going any further, I should note that Swamp Rabbit is considerably younger than me, even though he looks like an old bum and sometimes talks like a reactionary. He’s only dimly aware that the era of the rock ‘n’ roll star is over. That the era of great rock ‘n’ roll songs has passed. That the rock ‘n’ roll he grew up with in the 1990s and beyond was, with few exceptions, far less innovative and memorable than the rock ‘n’ roll made in previous decades. No wonder he’s so jaded.
“Do some research,” I said. “It’s no accident that Rolling Stone began declining around the same time that rock ‘n’ roll began losing its cultural relevance.”
“You sound as snooty as Wenner,” Swamp Rabbit replied. “You probably wouldn’t include any Blacks and women on your list of great rockers.”
“Looking back, I’d put Aretha Franklin on my list,” I said. “Chrissie Hynde, Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye, Grace Slick, Chuck Berry, Jimi effin’ Hendrix, to name a few. It’s partly a question of whether you think soul and funk and other music genres can fit under the rock ‘n’ roll umbrella. Wenner clearly doesn’t.”
Footnote: Wenner could have spared himself a ton of trouble if he’d simply told the NY Times that his interview subjects were chosen because they were his favorite rockers and buddies of his. But he went out of his way to put down Blacks and women because… he’s a jerk.
One more: It seems Wenner forgot what one of the masters wrote: Come gather ’round people wherever you roam/And admit that the waters around you have grown/And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone…
The heat goes on, breaking records. Time has become a slow-motion blur that flattens everything I say and do. Incidents that should matter are like river flotsam, here one minute, gone the next. But the river, visible from the dirt path next to the Tinicum swamp, just keeps on rolling. Its progress would soothe me if I wasn’t so maladaptive.
“What’s maladaptive?” says my neighbor Swamp Rabbit. “Where’d you get that word?”
I tell him it’s a buzzword from one of those self-help books that well-off Americans are drawn to. Eat Doze Rinse Repeat, et al.
Such books are all well and good, and the media love them, but what if existential catastrophe is imminent? What will happen to us if the levees break?
I’ve been researching these questions, but online popup stories keep impeding my progress. What were Nazi German soldiers like in person? Why didn’t Don Knotts return to the Andy Griffith Show? When I start lingering over dispatches like these, I realize how badly I’m procrastinating. Maybe I really don’t want to know what’s up.
Swamp Rabbit says I’m too pessimistic: “You gotta kick this end-of-days obsession. It ain’t healthy.”
All is not lost, he tells me. Russian scientists are growing watermelons in Antarctica. The American government is spending $1 billion on a giant carbon-extraction machine. Philosopher Toby Ord, author of The Precipice, has crunched the numbers and thinks there’s only a 1-in-6 chance of an existential catastrophe occurring within the next hundred years. (Only the gods know how he arrived at that figure.)
Thoughts and Prayers, my housecats, seem unimpressed when I relay the good news as I watch the skies for wildfire smoke. “I don’t trust Ord’s estimate either,” I tell them. “Then again, I’m not a numbers guy… and I’m maladaptive.”
We were discussing the weather, a popular topic these days. My neighbor Swamp Rabbit told me what the UN secretary-general had said: “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.”
“Great quote, but what about global flooding?” I asked. Swamp Rabbit laughed, so I informed him that hotter weather means more droughts but also heavier downpours when the rains come. That means more floods like the one that left two million people homeless in Pakistan last year. And sea levels are rising as ice melts at the poles.
We were on our way to sell renewable energy at a gay pride event on a brutally hot day. I was in a good mood because the crowds at pride events are generally more receptive to wind and solar options than, for instance, crowds at Celtic festivals, where the focus is on beer-drinking and bagpipes.
We stepped into the crowd. Famous divas lip-synced disco hits. Swamp Rabbit waved a tiny rainbow flag. Little Bo-Peep raised her shepherd’s cane to greet the Gimp from Pulp Fiction and the bearded ballerina at the other end of his leash. A sudden rain shower chased us through the sculpture garden to the gallery. I looked around for coffee, but none of the food vendors had any.
Swamp Rabbit was miffed. He wanted me to walk across the grassy field to meet Varinia, his artist/shopkeeper friend, but I never meet anyone until I’ve had my coffee. We were in a wealthy suburb of Philadelphia – Abington, I think. I drove to the nearest convenience store, more than a mile away.
When I got back, the shower had become a steady downpour. The show was over. Swamp Rabbit jumped into my car and scolded me for drinking coffee while driving. I took an alternate route back to South Philly with the idea of avoiding the sort of flash floods that had skirted New York City a few weeks earlier.
“The ocean will have us all,” I said, quoting an old John Cale song.
Swamp Rabbit told me I was crazy. A heat dome was still hanging over much of the country. Wildfires were burning all the boreal forests in Canada and were devastating Maui.
“The fires will have us, not the floods,” he said.
Lightning flashed as we argued. The rain stopped, but a pickup truck at Broad and Erie almost demolished us when I blew through a stop sign.
“Way to go,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Keep driving like that and you won’t have to worry about the weather no more.”
Swamp Rabbit and I were talking about the death at age 80 of Robbie Robertson, lead guitarist and main songwriter in the Band, one of the most artful and influential acts in rock ‘n’ roll history.
I’m tempted to use the word “legendary.” Robertson’s most enduring work with the Band — the studio albums Music from Big Pink, The Band and Stage Fright — were released way back in 1968, 1969 and 1970, respectively.
“Don’t forget that live album, Rock of Ages,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Is that the perfect title, or what?”
Life on the road took its toll, and Robertson had a gradual falling-out with his bandmates in the 1970s. Their final concert together was captured in Martin Scorsese’s classic film The Last Waltz (1978). After the breakup, Robertson was happy to engage in a decades-long goodbye, recounting for numerous interviewers and in his memoir Testimony (2016) how he and the other Band members — drummer Levon Helm, piano man Richard Manuel, bassist Rick Danko and organist Garth Hudson — drew on American roots music to forge their eclectic, inimitable sound.
Many music fans who are the same age now as Robertson was at his songwriting peak are probably unfamiliar with most of his recordings with the Band and unaware of the long, strange trip he made from Toronto, near the Indian reservation where his mother was born, to commercial success and critical acclaim in America. The obits are informative, but the Band’s history and legacy are complex. How do you explain the miracle of great art?
“I don’t know, Odd Man,” Swamp Rabbit said, rolling his eyes. “How do you do that?”
You don’t even try, I told him. You direct listeners to the Band’s recordings to hear for themselves how Robertson and his fellow misfits — three of them also from Canada, one from Arkansas — evolved into a tight unit that sounded both old-timey and strikingly original. “It’s like you’d never heard them before and like they’d always been there,” Bruce Springsteen said in the documentary Once Were Brothers (2020).
You tell them that the Band spent years mastering their craft by backing up the wild journeyman rocker Ronnie Hawkins and then Bob Dylan before succeeding on their own. And how it’s no accident that Robertson, the son of a Native American mother and a Jewish gangster father, populated his songs with colorful outsiders who brought to life his “mythic but authentic” vision of America.
You point to the interviews with Robertson in The Last Waltz. Has there ever been a cooler or more articulate self-appointed champion of rock ‘n’ roll music? Will there be another in our time?
“Your second question is so ridiculous, it don’t even deserve an answer,” Swamp Rabbit said.
Footnote: Robertson didn’t dry up after the Band’s demise. He made solo albums and wrote soundtracks for Scorsese and other filmmakers. His last score with Scorsese was for Killers of the Flower Moon, set for theatrical release in October.
