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Monday, July 3, 2006
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 Monday, July 3, 2006
started 7/3/2006; 3:03:43 PM - last post 7/6/2006; 3:24:00 PM
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Doc Searls - Monday, July 3, 2006 
7/3/2006; 7:03:43 PM (reads: 7404, responses: 2)
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Wanna get depressed? 
| | Read this. It's a long speech by Tom Stites that makes many points and takes its time building its biggest ones. So it's not easy (nor should it be) to find the encapsulating paragraph to excerpt. |
| | Closest I could find is this: |
| | Citizens who have no access to serious journalism about the issues that are relevant to their lives end up awash in the propagandistic opinion media and in the sound bite vapidity of standard broadcast news. Without serious journalism that they can read to equip them with facts and engage their reason, some respond to this sorry state by disenfranchising themselves in hopelessness; others vote the opinions drilled into them by the manipulative cable news diatribes. |
| | Yes, blogs and other online voicings are routes around the failures — willful and otherwise — of daily newspapers. And yes, we'll build something (or things) here in the 'sphere that will be Good in many ways. |
| | But we also need to save newspapers. |
| | I'm trying (not too hard, but still, trying) at the local level, here in Santa Barbara, and getting exactly nowhere. |
| | The News-Press has a terrific editorial staff, and routinely wins awards. It even does a lot of the stuff Tom Stites would like a paper to do, in appealing to the full spectrum of actual and potential readers. But it's run by a rich lady and her boyfriend, who seem to care most deeply about saving feral pigs from the U.S. Park Service on the Channel Islands. (Meanwhile, Santa Barbarians probably eat more pig in a week than the Park feds will shoot in the fullness of time.) Worse, the paper and its (otherwise charming) radio station are Net-unsavvy in the extreme. |
| | Nick Welch, who writes the reliably snarky Angry Poodle Barbecue for the local weekly, gives a depressing rundown on the situation. Even if you have zero interest in Santa Barbara, it makes good reading. |
| | I'd help them for free if they'll have it; but I fear they won't, so... whatever. |
| | We'll just keep doing what we can, where we can. |
Late Pet du Jour, #5: Poco
| | Here are two good reasons to be glad you weren't a kid in the Fifties, or earlier. |
| | One: Dentistry. Although Novocaine (the familiar brandname for procaine) had come into use in the 1950s, it didn't become widespread in the dentistry profession until the 1960s. For reasons of convenience and cost, my parents sent me Dr. Phillips, whose office was upstairs over the candy store at the corner of Pleasant and Maywood Avenues, in downtown Maywood, New Jersey. And Dr. Phillips didn't believe in Novocaine. In fact, he didn't even use a high-speed drill until after 1960. His torture instrument of choice was a pulley-powered mother that dated from the 1930s. Since I required a lot of dentistry, I spent many very long hours gripping the arms of Dr. Phillips dental chair while he repeatedly said "Open..." |
| | Many years later, when I had a defective turbinate ripped from my head by an otorhinolaryngologist — without anesthesia, because the work was too close to my brain for that — he noted how little I responded to the obvious pain. "I have a feeling you had a lot of dentistry without anesthesia as a kid", he said. "How can you tell?" I asked. "Because you have a very high tolerance of pain in the head. I see that a lot in patients who didn't have dental anesthesia when they were children." |
| | Two: Surgery on the privates. I was born with Cryptorchidism, better known as an undescended testicle. Not that my parents called it either. They said I had to go to the hospital for "hernia" surgery. This was performed at Holy Name Hospital in Teaneck. (I believe the hospital was named after the curses screamed by patients there.) The surgeon was a Dr. Kissinger. (Holy Name, he's still there! Must be a son or a coincidence.) Anyway, I walked around for a week with my kneecaps pointing at the walls, to avoid yanking the surgical string that ran through both my balls plus a large piece of hard gauze soaked, along with the whole affected area, in bright orange mercurochrome. My privates looked like a fucking (well, not yet) road hazard. |
| | Anyway, when I got home from the hospital, the family had a new pet: Poco, a green parakeet. |
| | Poco was cool. He'd sit on your finger, nuzzle your knuckles and make cute little sounds. We tried to get him (or her... who knew?) to make like a parrot and repeat what we said, but that never worked. |
| | The important thing with parakeets is to keep them from flying out a window or a door. We did that pretty well, or so we thought. |
| | One summer day we let Poco out of his cage to fly around the house, and he disappeared. We always assumed that he'd flown out a window or a door. He was nowhere to be found in the house, which was a pretty small place. We hoped that he survived in the woods, and sometimes thought we saw him in the trees. But he was clearly gone for good. |
| | Several years later we re-arranged our bedroom at the summer house. The place was minimally constructed, with open roof joists overhead and open studs on the walls. For some reason Pop had nailed a door to one of those walls. Nobody remembered why, including Pop, so we pried it off the studs. There, on the floor, behind the door and between two studs, lay the corpse of Poco. My sister Jan picked it up, and we examined it closely. I felt it too. Poco looked like he'd just gone to sleep, though he'd been dead several years by this time. (I'm guessing this would be 1960 or so.) |
| | Jan carried Poco into the kitchen (our main living area), where Pop was napping on the couch. She woke him up, shoved the dead bird under his nose, and said "We found Poco!" |
| | A couple days ago on the phone she said "I don't remember whether he sneezed or threw up." |
| | In any case, we made a coffin out of a cereal box and planted Poco between Kim and Sparky in our pet cemetary behind Grandma's place. |
| | Poco was the last pet to be buried there. Our next pet was the first and only to survive more than a few years, and outlived the whole family compound. |
| | That compound consisted of three contiguous properties: Grandma's place, her sister Florence's place, and ours — all spreads of pine barrens bought in the 1940s and early 1950s for a few hundred dollars, total. |
| | All due respect to our late pets, those were God's little acres for us. The land, and the good times we had with family and friends there, was what I remember best, and what matters most. |
| | On Google Maps, the Wanigan site is here. I believe the structure there now is a bank. Grandma's property is now filled with a shopping center: the U-shaped structure surrounding a parking lot just south of the bank. Aunt Florence's place was at the north end of that mall, facing the main road, which has since widened to four lanes. |
| | Our pet cemetary is now paved over, and lies under that parking lot, right about here. |
| | The picture at the top was taken in the summer of 1952, and the link goes to a post I wrote on August 20, 2003, a few days before Mom died. That post recalled what a paradise that place was. And those times. And those people. Most of whom, I'm glad to say, are still around. |
A new campaign platform
Rolling freight
And they have the Midlings surrounded.
Political incorrection
| | Even it the Maids are not your cup of metier, compare and contrast the indiecasting choices (of which FMTV is one) with the expensive produced-for-the-tube stuff coming from the mainstream. |
Watching
Good
Coincidence?
| | "Really? What's his name?" |
| | "That's familiar. Is he in the U.K.?" |
| | "No, he's in Texas. He's an authority on the Big Bend area." |
| | "Did he write a book about it?" |
| | "I have that book. I bought it a few weeks ago." |
| | What's extra weird is that I don't own that many geology books. In fact, I don't own more than a few hundred books, period. Most of my old books have long since been given to libraries or sold at yard sales, because I thought it was better to expose them to other people than to store them in boxes. See, we've been moving an average of once a year since 1997, and only one house in my whole life has had enough shelf space to hold all the books I owned at the time, and we didn't live in that one very long anyway. |
| | So it's an extreme coincidental bull's eye that I actually own Hugh's dad's book. |
| | I'm trying to remember why I bought it. I think the answer is that Amazon suggested it. I rarely follow those suggestions, but that I followed this one is a coincidence that borders on the psychic. |
discuss
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Tom Guarriello - Re: Saturday, July 1, 2006
7/4/2006; 12:11:16 AM (reads: 1180, responses: 0)
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Now, if you could only get Hugh to buy psychedelic t-shirt blanks for his cartoons from you, you'd be all set!
;-]
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adamsj - Depressed? I wanna be sedated--turn on NPR, okay?
7/6/2006; 7:24:00 PM (reads: 1228, responses: 0)
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Doc, I think you've missed the heart of what Stites is saying. Check the two paragraphs right before the one you quoted:
What really makes me twitch is that the amount and distribution of serious reporting that people can read are both dwindling, and they’re dwindling in a way that all but cuts off citizens who are less than affluent – the hourly wage earners, the marginally self-employed, the Wal-Mart shoppers, the regular folks of America. This is to say most folks. Shortly I’m going to provide you with some fresh and surprising statistics that show how negative this trend is. But let me start by saying that cutting these citizens off from serious reporting is profoundly antidemocratic in and of itself. It distorts the political process by ensuring that a lot of people don’t have the solid information they need to make sound life and citizenship judgments.
Keep in mind that we’re talking about a huge population of people quite unlike the information elite who populate this room – people whose average wages have been declining for years after inflation is taken into account, who may be dealing with predatory lenders and have a negative net worth, whose job security tends to be eroding, who may be working more than one job, who include almost all the 45 million Americans without health insurance. Journalism doesn’t serve this huge population if it is written and presented only in ways that appeal to people with disposable income to spend on nice furnishings for their suburban houses and who worry about how best to get a second opinion on a medical diagnosis. In fact, to people whose challenge is how best to see just one doctor without ending up in the poorhouse, that kind of reporting is an affront. So is all the lavish coverage of personal finance. And this is the state of our daily newspapers today.
When you take that one paragraph you quoted out of this context, you're miscontruing his point. People like you and I get the news we need. We aren't the people he's talking about, and we aren't going to be. Even if we suffered financial misfortune that put us on the bottom of the ladder, our pre-developed habits of information seeking would keep us in the loop (possibly to the detriment of getting off the bottom, but that's another story). We expect to be able to find things out. It's a skill we learned over time and (at least in my case) through the luxury of having sufficient financial resources to take the time to learn it. Take an axe to my internet connection, and I'd still get what I needed to know.
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