From Waits’ 1983 album, Swordfishtrombones:
…and so I slopped at the corner on cold chow mein
and shot billards with a midget
until the rain stopped
and I bought a long sleeved shirt
with horses on the front
and some gum and a lighter and a knife
and a new deck of cards (with girls on the back)
and I sat down and wrote a letter to my wife…
From a 1982 book review in which Garry Wills noted that Martin Luther King, Jr. knew he “would have to accept his own death” if he were to play a leading role in the civil rights movement:
…He did not do it all at once; he hoped to slip away from the appointment he had made. But it was soon clear to him, as to others around him, that one could not challenge the entire moral basis of a society’s racial arrangements without being jailed, beaten, and (finally) killed. Going to jail meant risking death from inmates as well as guards, and he went to jail nineteen times…
…By 1962 a northern editor was instructing his reporter, “Go where the Mahatma goes, he might get killed.” By 1968 the Federal Bureau of Investigation had followed up on fifty death threats. He was stabbed; his home was bombed; his church was bombed. His time was running out…
Wills concluded that “[King’s] insistence on a moral assessment of our country’s use of its power and wealth becomes more important, not less, as time passes.”
Thirty years later, who would dispute Wills’ statement? Unfortunately, many people would, but the persistence of human folly does nothing to diminish King’s courage and vision.
Here’s Paul Krugman on those who have no interest in understanding the scope of King’s efforts:
…Mitt Romney says that we should discuss income inequality, if at all, only in “quiet rooms.” There was a time when people said the same thing about racial inequality. Luckily, however, there were people like Martin Luther King who refused to stay quiet. And we should follow their example today. For the fact is that rising inequality threatens to make America a different and worse place — and we need to reverse that trend to preserve both our values and our dreams.
A recent Vanity Fair piece spoofs the shockingly stupid editor’s column in the NYT that asked readers to decide whether newspapers should report facts. Many VF readers apparently didn’t get VF‘s joke. Read the VF piece below and then the reader responses to it to see what I mean:
Just as New York Times public editor Arthur S. Brisbane is concerned whether his newspaper is printing lies or the truth, we here at V.F. are looking for reader input on whether and when Vanity Fair should spell “words” correctly in the stories we publish.
One example: the word “maintenance” seems like it should only have one “a” in it. It should be “maintenence,” right? But it’s not. So is it our job as reporters and editors to spell it correctly?
Another example: who decides “Michele Bachmann” should be spelled with one “l” in “Michele” and two “n”s in “Bachmann”? I’ve never seen it spelled like that in any other circumstance, so should we print it just because that’s how she spells it? I don’t know.
As one reader recently wrote in a message to the spelling editor:
“My question is what role the magazine’s news coverage should play with regard to stupidly spelled words. In general, Vanity Fair spells stuff correctly, but sometimes words just look wrong. ‘Broccoli,’ for instance, looks dumb. If a magazine’s overarching goal is to be correct, but something makes you do a double-take because it just looks so bad, should Vanity Fair just let these oddities stand?”
Is that the prevailing view? And if so, how can Vanity Fair do this in a way that is objective and fair? Whose job is it to decide what words look strange and what words just look fancy? And at what point does an exotic extra consonant become distracting?
One respondent to the VF piece wrote: “Small changes, like the spelling of broccoli, shouldn’t be decided by one or two editors. But an interesting thought nonetheless!”
It’s amazing how many people are irony-deficient. Too bad you can’t buy the stuff in supplement form at the GNC.
This one’s almost as good as “Five Guys Named Moe.”
Albert Murray, from his book Stomping the Blues:
The element of frolicsome mockery in [Jordan’s] verbal delivery is as obvious as the downhome earthiness represented by the instrumental accompaniment. Incidentally, as should surprise no one, Jordan is completely at home with [Louis] Armstrong both as a vocalist and as a first-rate instrumentalist [alto sax] on “You Rascal, You” and “Life Is So Peculiar,” recorded for Decca in 1950.
Sebastian Junger in the Washington Post, via Reader Supported News:
The video that emerged in recent days appearing to show four U.S. Marines urinating on several dead Taliban fighters has outraged many people in this country. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta have condemned the act, the military has promised an inquiry, and some experts are even suggesting that the act could qualify as a war crime…
It would take a Jonathan Swift to fully convey the contempt we should feel for obscene hypocrites such as Clinton and Panetta, but Junger comes damn close without even seeming to try:
…As a society, we may be disgusted by seeing U.S. Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters, but we remain oddly unfazed by the fact that, presumably, those same Marines just put bullets through the fighters’ chests. American troops are not blind to this irony. They are very clear about the fact that society trains them to kill, orders them to kill and then balks at anything that suggests they have dehumanized the enemy they have killed…
I wonder if those outraged by the photo know the extent of the atrocities committed by Japanese and American forces on Iwo Jima and other island battles in World War II. Or that Russian soldiers raped more than two million German women at the end of that war, to avenge atrocities committed by Germans. Or that well over 100,000 noncombatants were killed during the Iraq war.
Maybe not. Such realities aren’t dramatized in TV mini-series about war, and are rarely reported by the mainstream news media.
Daily newspapers subscribe to the notion of objective reporting, and newspaper editors are always eager to defend this foggy notion. Which makes it all the more curious that New York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane recently asked readers whether “news reporters should challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.”
WTF! Brisbane was calling attention to the facade constructed long ago by the mainstream media to guard against the charge that their main function is to defend the status quo. In doing so, he chose a good example to illustrate what’s wrong with the mainstream mindset:
…On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches “apologizing for America,” a phrase to which Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the “post-truth” stage.
As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news reporters do the same..?
Note that Brisbane quickly jumps back behind the facade, ignoring the question of whether Romney’s accusation against Obama is based on fact. He says reporters have been trained to not ask such questions, even if evidence exists that could answer them. However, it’s long been OK for columnists to ask and even answer such questions, because columnists merely state opinions. As if opinions and facts necessarily dwell in different realms.
But the key question really can’t be ignored. Has Obama been apologizing for America in speeches, or is the accusation a lie? Is Krugman pointing out that Romney is a liar or merely pointing to “what he thinks is a lie”?
I don’t think it was an accident that Brisbane singled out Krugman, who is, as I stated in a previous post, the only columnist in a major daily who dares to criticize the MSM’s bogus “he said/she said” style of journalism. Maybe Brisbane raised the issue on his own, or maybe the higher-ups at the Times are tired of being embarrassed by Krugman’s criticism and called on Brisbane to address it.
But honestly, can you imagine anything more pathetic than an editor asking readers whether journalists should be obligated to report whether “newsmakers” are lying?
By stepping from behind the facade of objectivity, just for a second, Brisbane exposes its flimsiness and his own uncertainty about it. He is defending what Glenn Greenwald contemptuously referred to as the “stenographer’s model” of reporting and then asking readers to tell him whether this model makes sense. He may as well ask them what facts are.
Brisbane surely knows it’s a fairly easy matter for a reporter, and certainly for an editor, to determine whether or not Romney was lying. You don’t have to answer the question in a sidebar. All you have to do to check the record of what Obama said then answer the question in the story. Instead, Brisbane asks readers whether fact-checking and subsequent evaluation should be part of reporters’ and editors’ jobs.
The latter question is worse than fatuous. It’s an admission that the Times isn’t providing the public service that justifies its existence.
I’m joking, Newt Gingrich is a long way from siding with OWS. However, in his speeches and attack ads against Mitt Romney, Newt sounds a lot like the thousands of Occupiers who actively protested the vulture capitalism that Mitt personifies.
From the New York Times:
Mr. Gingrich sought to frame the issue as reflective of Mr. Romney’s “judgment” and “decisions,” in particular deals in which workers lost jobs and pensions while Bain [Capital] investors profited. “I’ve raised the question, which I think is a totally legitimate question – what about some companies that Bain took over that went bankrupt?’’ Mr. Gingrich asked Greta Van Susteren of Fox on Wednesday night.
Mr. Gingrich is hoping that his anti-Wall Street theme will connect with a deep vein of economic populism in the South, including South Carolina, with its high unemployment and depressed housing market. Speaking here at a convention of senior citizens, he portrayed the pressure on him to reverse course as coming from the establishment, both on Wall Street and elsewhere.
“I’m not going to back down or be afraid to say we the American people have the right to know, and any candidate for president has an obligation to tell us,’’ he said.
“No one tells the American people they aren’t allowed to learn what is going on in their very own country,’’ he said.
How beautifully ironic that a creep such as Gingrich is helping fuel phase two of the movement to wake Americans to the fact that the financial industry has wrecked the real economy and lowered the living standards of most people who have, or had, real jobs. Even funnier is the fact that Mittens left himself open to Newt’s attacks by lying about what he did as head of Bain.
Take it to the streets, Newt!
This I’m posting in connection with the scary news item from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. The nuclear weapons situation last year looked so grim — everybody has them! — that the scientists reset the Doomsday Clock a minute closer to midnight. We’re within minutes of Armageddon, which might work out to five years in Bowie-time.
Which is good in a way. I’ve got a lot of writing to do and deadlines help me get down to business, and the fact that there won’t be any readers left is beside the point.
Then again, Bowie wrote the song around 1972, when he was doing his Ziggy Stardust thing. He turned 65 on Jan. 8. It’s safe to not take the song literally.
But keep your eye on that Doomsday Clock.
Footnote: In the Guardian, Alexis Petridis explains why it’s fitting that Bowie keeps such a low profile these days:
Bowie was an early adopter of the internet, but he didn’t really fit with the notion of a star in the 21st century, an era when the manufacturing of pop music has been laid bare on the TV and where stars are perpetually available on Twitter and Tumblr. Rock music currently exists in a world of 360 degree connectivity that’s supposed to bring the artist and the fan closer and reveal the real person behind the myth. But as the best of his umpteen biographers David Buckley pointed out, with Bowie, revealing the real person behind the myth is missing the point: “the myth has far greater resonance and is far more intriguing than stolid attempts to identify a ‘true’ essence … his appeal has lain in the generation of myths.” Those myths look likely to remain intact forever, which seems perfectly fitting.
Mitt Romney actually managed to out-slime Newt Gingrich in campaign ads leading up to the Iowa primary, but Newt is hitting back with a 27-minute film, “When Romney Comes to Town,” that convincingly portrays Mittens as the cold-blooded jobs-killer he was as CEO at Bain Capital:
From Raw Story:
Produced by a former top Romney strategist, the film focuses on people turned out of their jobs at four of the many companies Bain essentially looted, tapping into the popular discontentment with Wall Street to label Romney a “corporate raider.”
The companies — laundry equipment maker UniMac, electronics maker DDI, toy store chain KayBee Toys and office supplier AmPad — were all purchased by Bain [Capital] and liquidated, “killing jobs for big financial rewards,” the film explains.
“They could care less about us, the way I see it,” one of the film’s subjects explains. “Who am I? Mitt Romney and them guys, they don’t care about who I am.”
The pro-Gingrich PAC Winning Our Future placed a top-dollar bid on the 27-minute film after pro-Romney PACs essentially destroyed Gingrich’s chances in Iowa with a flood of negative advertising that blanketed the airwaves.
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