Eat the peas

You know your state's in trouble when the antics of its politicians start turning up on The Daily Show and in late night monologs. While New York has been briefly displaced by South Carolina as the butt of jokes, due to their governor's (once) mysterious walkabout, don't count Albany out yet. It's a slow-motion train wreck that keeps on giving. Dueling simultaneous sessions?--you can't make this stuff up. Lockouts and walkouts, shouting matches, the governor threatening armed intervention--oh joy.

Formulating fixes for our dysfunctional state legislature has become a cottage industry. Popular suggestions: fire the leaders (assuming you can tell who they are); dock everyone's pay; make them all sit at the table until they eat their peas. Rick Lazio (former GOP candidate for the US Senate) suggests: "Senate? We don' need no steenking Senate," proposing a single-house legislature like Nebraska's.

This is the Empire State; maybe we just need an emperor. Caligula had no trouble with Rome's legislature; he could get his horse appointed to the Senate. The whole horse--he was probably thinking, "Why leave the job half done?"

Caption: Caligula parades his horse Incitatus before the Roman Senate.

History in company

When I was a child in the 1950s, you would sometimes still see a newsreel in the theater, wedged between the previews and the cartoon. Television was still a baby, and video news was something consumed in company. Today, it is only the truly dire, or the truly monumental, that brings unrelated people together around a TV. I can count the occasions on my fingers: 1963, at school, as the events in Dallas unfolded; 1969, in the lounge of a South Dakota dude ranch, to watch the moon landing; 1974, at the commune, watching Nixon resign; 1986, at work, as the Challenger exploded; 2001, in the Satellite Room of the NCPR studio, as the World Trade Center fell; and Tuesday, back in the Sat Room, to watch an African American take the oath of office as president.

It is the last two that keep coming back to mind--maybe because I was in the same place with the same people. The occasions seem to be bookends, bracketing an era. After each, I found it necessary to walk by myself--after 9-11, to walk off the evil, and after the Inauguration, to savor relief and gratitude. As political happenings, they also bookend the spectrum--suicidal and murderous intimidation contrasted with peaceful transformation, one appealing to the tribal divide, and one to the common impulse toward mutual progress.

While each of the occasions listed above mark history for good or ill, I have to believe the most momentous is the most recent. An America that can embrace its diversity, rather than merely tolerate it, is a nation not only new to itself, but something new in the history of nations. And such a rebuke to the politics of fear.

A Fresh Start on Metaphors

In his Meet the Press interview last week, President Elect Obama expressed the desire that the various reform, financial rescue and economic stimulus plans would result in a "leaner, meaner and more competitive" America. It has long been popular to apply sports and war metaphors to describe the workings of the world of business, and in the last thirty years, to apply them also to the sphere of government. In an extension of the principle "what's good for General Motors is good for America," citizens have become stakeholders who invest via taxation; agencies make war on poverty or drugs. Party campaigns have partisan playbooks; we endeavor to level the playing field, and so forth.

Later on in the same interview, Obama says that "we are all in this together," and that "we will rise or fall as one nation." This is the rhetoric of cooperation, of communal effort and shared destiny. It is, one could say, at "war" with the tone of the preceding paragraph.

If forced to choose sides, I'd have to opt for the tone of the latter. If I was making a poem, I'd prefer to be on my own, duking it out with other poets for pocket change and bragging rights. But in making or remaking a nation--well--it takes a world to make a nation. Our interdependency has never been more clear than during the current financial crisis. This being the case, it might be a winning gambit for the new administration to lose the playbook of Social Darwinism. When times are tough, we are less a nation of players looking to triumph, and more a bunch of people just looking to get by. That calls for a fairer, kinder and more cooperative America, instead.

Reliable sources report

As forecast by the Institute for Quantum Bogodynamics at MIT, the recent election was accompanied by a massive uptick in the ambient bogon flux, resulting in an unusual incidence of blather, disinformation and hoaxes throughout infospace. Of note today is the revelation that the source of reports that VP candidate Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent and could not name the nations that comprise North America was a McCain advisor named Martin Eisenstadt (bogus), Sr. Fellow of the Harding Institute (nonexistent). MSNBC ate it up with a spoon.

And they're not alone. Eitan Gorlin and Dan Mirvish, the hands within the Eisenstadt sock-puppet, have been taking in bloggers and journalists for over a year. Their creation posted pro-Giuliani campaign rants on YouTube, advocated for a casino in Baghdad's Green Zone, and outed Joe the Plumber as a relative of Charles Keating. Among the egg-faced were the Los Angeles Times, New Republic and Mother Jones.

People are hungry to believe, and never more so than when new "information" reinforces what they already believe. Some people will carry to the grave their belief that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim, others that Bush operatives planned 9-11.

We might expect a more skeptical treatment from the press, and to their credit they have quashed some of the most egregious disinformation to blight the political season. But BS receptors seem to be wired into even the brightest of brains. Believe me--I'm a blogger, too.

The change election

However you feel about Barack Obama's election to the presidency on Tuesday, it has answered one question that has been in the back of voter's minds, both supporters and opponents, ever since Obama's emergence onto the national scene 21 months ago--can a majority of Americans really be persuaded to pull the lever to elect an African American to the highest office in the land. Our dismal history of race relations has led many--left, right and middle, as well as black, brown and white--to doubt it. Many thought that we might first see a black president only if a black vice-president came to office through the death of a white president. Many more thought even that scenario unlikely.

This has been (famously) an election about change, change in the future direction of the country. But the results, in my opinion, speak to the change that has already occurred, so gradually over the last decades as to pass unremarked, and so subtly as to defy definition. We have not, of course, been beamed into some kind of post-racial utopia since Tuesday. But we can now point to some evidence for the hopes we harbor--that we can put a pernicious national shame behind us--that a more perfect union is a practical possibility, not just a line in the patriotic catechism. That's what I call change.

Next rest stop

What a difference a week makes. From sun on leaves to snow-flattened lilacs and bent and broken trees. And before another week is out we will have gone through both Halloween and the end of an endless election. Even the time will change (for those who are looking for change) one hour back. The snow will probably go, and maybe come back, too. And the markets might go way down one day, and way up the next. Frankly, I could use a little Dramamine.

When I used to get carsick as a kid, my Mom told me not to look out the side window or down at the road speeding by, but to focus instead on the horizon, to rest my eyes on the long view. Good advice for the nervous tummy. And good advice for the nervous voter, the nervous investor, and the just plain nervous. Just keep it together for the next few miles. Surely there'll be a rest stop soon.

Today we learn a new word in German

English has more words than just about any other language, but when we find a needful one missing, we cheerfully borrow from our neighbors. An example is schadenfreude, borrowed from German, and defined by dictionary.com as "pleasure felt at someone else's misfortune." Aside from rage, this seems to be the dominant emotion experienced by voters in this election cycle. Commentator Jack Cafferty said that he would crawl naked through barbed wire in order to get to a television set to watch tonight's VP debate. A truly disturbing mental image, and you can bet he wasn't talking about his overwhelming intellectual curiosity. The aficionados (another good word on loan) of schadenfreude line up on each side, one hoping Gov. Palin mistakes "ayatollah" for a town on Florida's Gulf Coast, and the other hoping to hear Sen. Biden reminisce at length about listening to FDR on his iPod.

Shadenfreude was busily at work in the financial meltdown, too, as Masters of the Universe got their comeuppance (a tasty bit of slang, too.) While the loss of untold billions provoked a schadenfreudic chuckle, one imagines that arbitrageurs in handcuffs and day traders dining on pet food would provide a belly laugh. It's just plain mean out there. I'm not immune myself, but I'm trying to take the cure. Here's hoping that tonight's debate is a civil conversation where both candidates are able to present their positions with honesty and clarity. And here's hoping that we can actually get our financial house in order while we still have houses. But maybe it's all just some kind of uberschadenfreude on my part, hoping to take pleasure in the misfortune of those who are anticipating disaster with glee.

No Comments

Given the overall popularity of sites like FaceBook and MySpace, and the tools of online social networking in general--blogs, comment threads, social bookmarking, video, music and photo sharing platforms, citizen journalism, and on and on--it surprises me how little direct interaction there is between ncpr.org and its visitors. The two bright spots are our Photo of the Day feature, which has attracted since its inception more quality submissions than we can ever use, and the Community Calendar, where a substantial number of each day's events are contributed by visitors online.

Our general listener comment page has, on the other hand, attracted three comments in June, and one each in the months of July, August, and September. Brian Mann, in his new blog Ballot Box, has posted thoughtful and timely essays on North Country politics and the rural divide 19 times in the last ten days. He has received three comments total from the hundreds who have read the posts. Actually he has received five, including two abusive comments from the same writer trying to look like one person responding to another. Those didn't get posted. If the rude and nasty tenor of many political sites is keeping you away, we moderate comments--each is read before posting and will be rejected if it transgresses the bounds of civil public conversation.

We plan to go ahead with such features as the ability to comment on individual NCPR news stories, and to participate on NPR's soon-to-be-released social media platform. But it may be that our audience still does its networking the old-fashioned way: talking in the supermarket aisle and the ice cream stand queue and the at the pancake breakfast. Or perhaps it's just our laconic nature as rural folk. If you have anything to say about that, you can post a comment here.

And checking it twice

I'm not an avid mass forwarder of email. I receive and send too much in my day job to enjoy doing more than the necessary off duty. But as a public library trustee I was interested to read a forwarded list of titles that Sarah Palin, while mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, was supposed to have recommended for removal from the town library. The list purported to originate from the minutes of the library board. I was on the verge of forwarding it to my library director and fellow trustees, when I thought to check into its veracity. Good thing--it was bogus.

There are claims in the press that Palin had a conversation about policy regarding library books she considered inappropriate with the library director, and a claim that she subsequently tried to have the director removed, but no list has ever been unearthed, nor evidence that any particular titles were ever proposed. It is now unlikely that there ever will be a credible list, or that the other claims will ever be substantiated or disproven.

Because the entire conversation has now been overtaken by the question of who floated the bogus list and why. And why so many people were ready to accept it at face value, and whether it could be additional evidence for this or that conspiracy theory. Bad info not only drives out good, it poisons the well of further discussion and investigation. It reduces all claims to equal veracity and converts what could have been a dialog into twin streams of disconnected invective.

This is one of the great dangers of the new media landscape. We get too much of our news from sources of untraceable provenance, from "redmeat14@yahoo.com." If there is a bright side to this tawdry episode, it is that it highlights the continuing value of professional and accountable media sources--despite what you might be reading about them in mass emails.

Politics and whiskey

The sign above the bar used to read "Check your guns with the barkeep. No discussion of religion or the president." Small wonder--politics is intoxicating enough all by itself. Under the influence of a hot campaign, otherwise sensible people will say and do almost anything. Examples abound from both Denver and St. Paul, and the rhetorical binge will last until November. Speeches, ads, debates, press conferences, town meetings, photo ops, talking points, rallies, interviews, analysis, commentary, spin control, message management, opposition research, triangulation and segmentation. Yikes!

While I have had to forgo the consolations of whiskey in my life, I am unable to wean myself from politics. It sort of sneaks up on you, just like whiskey, and the sane person at the back of the brain looks on in horror as the tirade pours forth. I slip away from work to sample strong drink in the dim back booths of the blogosphere. I bolt my dinner, washed down with shots of cable news. Mornings lost in anger hangover, evenings lost in partisan email. The disease is progressive, and prone to quadrennial relapse. I would pray for recovery, but don't get me started on religion.

In their own words

A couple of weeks ago I was bemoaning the effects of the Hollywood writers' strike on the one-eyed monster in my living room. But as the labor action continues to drag on, and the world has not come to an end, I have had time to consider the possible benefits of being bereft of words. In particular, bereft of words put into the mouth by others. Consider the possibilities of a political speechwriters' strike. Would candidates just do reruns of previous speeches, or would they take the gamble and communicate with constituents in their own words? And what if talking heads had no one to write their talking points? What if the slick hired guns of Madison Ave. walked off the job, leaving products stripped of all pizzazz? Would we just buy last year's model? Would we forget to go shopping altogether? Silence speaks, as any poet could tell you (as long as the poets aren't out on strike.)

You can look it up

Everybody is talking about the Hamilton-Baker Commission's Iraq Study Group Report—what it means and doesn't mean, who is for it and against it, whether each of its recommendations will work or not work, and on and on. One of the truly useful things to come with the internet age is the instant availability of documents that just ten or so years ago would have meant a month's wait and a visit to a major reference library. President Bush received his copy yesterday at 11 am, and by 11:02 am NCPR had a link to the complete text on its home page, and by 11:15 am I had my own copy downloaded to my desktop. I may read all of it, or part of it, but now I no longer have to rely on someone else's interpretation of what it says. This may seem like a small matter, but in the long run, I think it could be analogous to the publication of inexpensive vernacular editions of the Bible. The church was never the same afterward. Not this one report per se--but the breaking of the monopoly hold that the modern priesthood of politicians, pundits and experts of all stripes has on the basic source material of the public conversation.

The NCPR news crew has been diligent about linking to original source material related to their individual stories, but there has never been one location where someone could go to find the public records, the original plans and studies, the text of legislation and agreements and proposals that drive public policy in the region. NCPR Online is now in the process of building a Public Records section to collect primary source documents that relate to all aspects of life in the region. This is a job that everyone can get in on—please. Recommend an archive site, a single document, historical materials, search tools, whatever you have run across that helps you get to the root of public matters in the North Country. Email radio@ncpr.org.

Small Change

I am privileged to work with some pretty bright people at NCPR, and none brighter than Adirondack Bureau Chief Brian Mann, whose op-ed, "Winning Small," in today's New York Times highlights the critical role voters in rural areas such as ours will play in next Tuesday's election. Control of Congress and the near-term course of US politics at home and abroad will be determined in large degree by whether a relative handful of Americans in small towns and rural counties turns out to support or to challenge the status quo. While winds of change are certainly in evidence, it remains to be seen if the trend can be translated into a redrawing of the political map after Election Day. As in many areas, the politics of the North Country are running hot, and often ugly. In part, this speaks to the even division and polarization of the electorate, and in part to the size of the pot at stake. In any case, this is one hand that nobody should be inclined to sit out.