Tomorrow President Obama will visit the Cape Coast Castle in Ghana. The castle was a major departure point for Africans sold into slavery. This was where the horrors of the middle passage began.
My son, who was in the Peace Corps in West Africa at the time, took me to the Cape Coast castle in 2005.
The castle, as you can see in my picture, is actually a very peaceful and beautiful place. I remember visitors approaching the entrance quietly. But the quiet was temporary. Because as the guide described the atrocities that took place in each tunnel, each crevice, it was impossible not to imagine the terrified voices and the anguished moaning.
Yes, moaning. I thought I heard moaning. Then, we descended into the bowels of the underground prison, and heard stories of parents and children being violently separated.
Finally we reached the exit that led directly to the gangplanks of thousands of slave ships, the exit where millions faced either actual death on the ocean journey or survival in slavery that became what sociologists like Orlando Paterson call “social death.”
Today there are still boats at this exit, hundreds in fact. But they are the small and colorful ships of Ghanaian fishermen, and I will never forget the expanse of humanity that I saw as I walked out into the sunshine. Expecting more sadness, I saw only vitality, and I devoured the extraordinary sights and sounds of the life that now occupied what had been a place of such pain.
They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the LORD, and his wonders in the deep. For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof. They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble. Psalm 107.
Harve was one of the great leading men in musical theatre and musical films. But thanks to Ethan and Joel Coen, late in his career he was cast as William H. Macy’s father-in-law, Wade Gustafson, in the film Fargo.
His performance was as remarkable as the film. And the scenes he did with Macy were classics.
JERRY
Well, you know Stan'll say no
dice. That's why you pay him.
I'm asking you here, Wade. This
could work out real good for me
and Jean and Scotty -
WADE
Jean and Scott never have to worry
But Jack Shafer’s piece in Slate is a superb and deserving takedown of all the journalists who seem obligated to recount their 30 seconds with Jackson.
Have you ever thought about how media and culture represent the concepts of “past” and “present?”
The past is always better. It is when things were less complicated, when people were more civil, and when music wasn’t as loud.
The present is when things are going to “hell in a handbasket.” It is when we have lost track of fundamental values and when we have become more crude and more thoughtless.
Most of all, the present is precisely when we have to return to the values that we honored until, well, until the present. They were the core of our goodness, the essence of our humanity, until today.
Why do we do this?
I don’t know, but as I look around at this turbulent and unforgiving world, I can only remember the peace and decency that was pervasive just moments ago when I started to write this.
By his own admission, he betrayed the trust of almost anyone who meant anything to him.
His acts crossed the line from private behavior to public performance in office, rendering him unsuitable to be Governor of South Carolina.
But I simply can’t revel in this misfortune. I recognize that some people — good journalists — do have to be immersed in all the sleaze to serve the public’s need to know. I don’t.
But one of my friends (I’m telling you, she is such a witty smart a__ that she has probably already thought of a good line satirizing my having called her a friend in this sentence! ) sent me the following reaction to my piece on the sleazy Governor of South Carolina.
I will treasure it:
“Agree with you wholeheartedly – save this, I may never say it again.”
Believe me, I will save it. And I am already plotting my response.
“Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive”
Sir Walter Scott
In the years I have been teaching, my students and I have closely monitored the evolution of the distinction between public and private. Slowly, and not always clearly, we have watched society change from a place where a private life could be conducted away from media scrutiny to a society in which virtually no private space seems to exist.
We have also watched as the public gradually came to accept that their national leaders would come with all manner of personal flaws that would not necessarily disqualify them from public office. It is almost hard to remember a time when some marijuana use could potentially derail a campaign for national office. I remember.
Infidelity, though, still seems to occupy a somewhat ambiguous place in political culture. To be sure, we have in the last two decades knowingly elected a president who had committed adultery. There might have been many who argued that adultery revealed something important about character. But those people were outnumbered by a majority who listened to the the taped conversation between Bill Clinton and Jennifer Flowers before the election and decided that it would not affect their vote.
Today, though, in South Carolina, we witnessed a bizarre episode that will almost certain reopen the discussion of when it might be entirely appropriate for the public to consider private behavior when evaluating public performance.
Governor Mark Sanford, after close to a week in which virtually no one knew his whereabouts, admitted — in what the New York Times called a “rambling” press conference — that contrary to previous reports placing him on the Appalachian Trail for some R&R, he had actually been in Argentina conducting an extra-marital affair.
Public or private?
I see this as an easy example of an episode in which private behavior clearly affected public performance; a case in which that behavior might rise to level of negligence and dereliction of duty. And I am not thinking primarily about the sex.
Governor Sanford disappeared. His wife told reporters during his absence that she didn’t know where he was. At some point, she announced that he was hiking on the Appalachian Trail. While she actually may have known more, the fact remains that the people of South Carolina didn’t. Their Governor was hiding.
Bad. Very bad.
And even if he had simply been ballroom dancing, he was would not have been available to his constituents if there had been some “God forbid” moment. The fact that he had disappeared into an ongoing extramarital affair simply reveals a little more of what went into his cost/benefit analysis when he contemplated flying the coop.
I will always have a weakness for human frailty. I won’t even bother to say that I don’t expect perfect leaders because no one is perfect, especially those who claim to be. Just because Sanford is an outsized character in a news saga does not mean he is not also a human being who hurts and hopes and struggles.
But this crosses a line. You can be a Governor. And you can disappear. But you can’t be a Governor and disappear.
Easy call. He has to go. Private acts, in this case, lead directly to professional neglect.
Later Comment: Just yesterday in my class Journalism and Society, we were discussing how honesty, even about difficult topics, usually trumps deception. Read the statement that Governor Sanford’s staff released in the midst of his disappearance.
“Gov. Sanford is taking some time away from the office this week to recharge after the stimulus battle and the legislative session, and to work on a couple of projects that have fallen by the wayside. We are not going to discuss the specifics of his travel arrangements or his security arrangements.”
I don’t know about you, but I find this kind of weasily lie drafted by a junior flack to be a greater sin than adultery.
Projects that have “fallen by the wayside?” Right. And even their decision to lie and put him on the Appalachian trail was calculated political claptrap. The Appalachian Trail comes close but does not run through South Carolina. So the lie put him in the glory of nature, kept him “fictionally” very close to South Carolina, but allowed them to “honestly” say he was ”out of state.”
Andrew has reminded his readers again and again that much of the video and twitter-traffic cannot be fully verified and sourced. But even taken with that major grain of salt, the images and words spilling out of Iran in digital form are simply mesmerizing (and terrifying).
I can’t recommend Daily Dish strongly enough for a taste of journalism in the era of “links.” Is it fully authoritative? No. But Andrew himself has been absolutely clear about these limitations. No one can be absolutely certain of the origin of much of the horrifying video, he continually reminds us, but it is a major source of raw material that will eventually be part of a larger, more coherent story.
Please check out the Daily Dish and look at some of the video. Even if one discounts half of these images as fraudulent (unlikely), the remaining half tell a story of fearless resistance to authoritarian power. And, sadly, of an astoundingly brutal response by that power.
The flood of video and text from Iran – as well as the brilliant way that Sullivan is collating and editing and commenting on it — is an extraordinary example of digital age journalism reaching maturity.
After looking at much of the video, I had a surprizing reaction: I really hope a few specific videosare fraudulent. If they are genuine, the brutality is almost unbearable.
Something extremely important is happening at this very moment and it is worth taking a look.
Despite all the past debate about the blogosphere — sometimes heated — among conventional journalists, bloggers, and plain old twitterers , the New York Times is putting together some extraordinary breaking coverage of the events in Iran using just these types of “questionable” sources.
I have always listened when Bill Keller, Times Managing Editor, and other journalists have offered their sometimes biting critique of the blogosphere: Who are these bloggers? What are their sources? How can they be trusted? These are fair questions.
But forget those arguments for a second and look at the Times itself. The fact is that, when events like those in Iran occurred, experienced journalists immediately looked to all these fragmented sources and knew just what to do with them. They collated them, questioned them, linked to them, accepted some, rejected others, and tried to fit them into a larger puzzle. It worked.
One big kvetch of conventional journalists has been that the blogosphere has no fact-checkers and editors. But the complaint has essentially fizzled. The Times proved a basic point:
They are still the editors!
No one forced them to quote from the blogs and the tweets of students caught in the midst of demonstrations. They did it carefully, and with the clear belief that “the amateurs” helped fill-in the details of the complex story they were covering.
And what do you know? The amateurs didn’t overrun quality journalism. They didn’t replace it. They became an indispensable part of the mix.
In the end, all these new-fangled news sources from the street turned out to be not all that different from the old stodgy, official sources: You look at them, judge their validity, decide when they can be embedded in a larger story, and either use them or not use them. Of course, you have to be cautious, very cautious, but – in the end — you are still the editor.
You can only watch a cash register so many times on the evening news before you realize how difficult it is to cover a complex, systemic issue like economics. Economic upheaval – and the resulting unemployment, hunger, and human suffering – is first visible (or invisible) in very “unsexy” computer bytes and programming code that record everything from credit default swaps to out-and-out Madoff-style thievery.
The other day someone in one of my classes remarked that, at least in the depression, there were countless visuals of suffering and a group of extraordinary photographers to record them. Those early 20th century images remain eloquent testimony of the suffering wrought by speculators and other assorted financial crooks.
Today, though, white-collar crime is more complex and more quiet. It is a stealth enterprise in which one corrupt accountant can press the send button on his or her computer, and send hundreds of phony profit statements reporting non-existent earnings to victims of the latest Ponzi scheme.
Well today it was all a little less baffling.
The PBS documentary series “Frontline” has produced an extraordinary 90 minute documentary that clearly explains how so many smart people lost so much money in Bernard Madoff’s scheme. The mechanics of the theft are fascinating.
But even more fascinating is the depiction of how people, happy with more and more profits, created a distorted picture of the world for themselves in which it was impossible to see even Madoff’s most ludicrous and bizarre behavior as anything unusual. Bernie was making them money , and it was oh so easy to imagine a world in which it all made sense. The documentary tells the stories of one shrewd person after another who, though capable of due diligence in every aspect of their lives, made room for Bernie’s peculiar practices simply because the money was good.
If Bernie the multibillion-dollar money manager happened to use one only one anonymous accountant whose office was in a strip mall, there had to be a reason. And who knew the reason? Bernie. Because Bernie was, after all, Bernie.
What an incredibly important lesson: At just the right moment, not two weeks or two months later when with hindsight everything becomes clear, we are capable of convincing ourselves of ridiculously implausible realities simply because the money is good.
I can’t recommend this documentary strongly enough. By the way, much of it is the reporting work of Frontline correspondent Martin Smith.
I am going to sound like a broken record soon, but there are sometimes when I simply can’t stop myself .
I thought my Chicago Tribune piece about maniacal cable news would make me feel better, calm me down a little, but it didn’t work.
Now it’s the shouters who often speak for me — my “loudmouths,” if you will — who are about to push me off the deep end.
Is there any chance, any chance at all, that hot air machines like Ed Schultz, Chrtis Matthews or Keith Olberman have any idea how deranged even their most persusave and courageous views can sound when they are shouted in a hyperventilating, salivating frenzy.
I wish I could think of a more nuanced way to put it, guys, but you have to switch to decaf. Your indignation, however justified, will emerge in the clarity and elegance of your argument and not with the accelerartion of your heart rate.
You look ridiculous. Bulging neck veins don’t make you more authoritative, they bring on heart attacks.
Here’s how sick of the nuttiness I am, how much I want the “debate by dynamite” to stop. I am going to quote from Richard Nixon’s first innaugural address. That’s right. Richard Nixon. Paragon of quiet, honest, reasoned argument.
I won’t suggest that Nixon followed his own advice, nor that he even wrote the following passage. But he did say it, and it keeps coming to mind as I watch the shoutocracy of cable news act as if they are mainlining Red Bull.
“To lower our voices would be a simple thing ….. We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another–until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.”
This summer I am looking forward to teaching two classes.
At Hunter College, one summer session compresses a semester’s worth of work into eight weeks. One of those classes is Introduction to Media Studies, which I rarely teach. Every time I do, though, it is an opportunity to move out of the trees of specialization and get a good look at the whole forest.
To tell you the truth, I feel a little bit like the cowardly lion in the Wizard of Oz. Contemporary media and culture can be a scary forest. Social and technological change is taking place at breakneck speed. Media are pervasive and omnipresent. New technologies and social networks have so effectively penetrated social life that it is hard to find any remaining truly private spaces. Our TVs are computers and our computers are TVs.
And news is so instantaneous that, if some “god-forbid” catastrophic event happens to occur while I am teaching, it is possible that all of us in class with our various vibrating, digital gizmos will get a glimpse of the event on some tiny screen even before the first responders arrive on the scene of the actual event. We live in “real-time.”
(It’s actually quite a sight when, in one of my classes, a major news event takes place. Purses and pockets all across the room start to vibrate like a mini-earthquake!)
But one thing in particular worries me about this hyperventilating world: How — in the midst of all this noise, content, yelling, shouting, and reality programming – does someone who cares about an issue or an injustice make that issue heard and understood amidst the cacophony?
Some social problems, for a whole host of reasons, are not easily explained in this media environment. They may be complex, they may require nuanced thinking, or they may not have the kind of compelling visuals that get people’s pulse to quicken. Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes, for example, are serious health problems. But if you are someone who wants to raise awareness or if you want to promote increased government funding, how do you get people all hot and bothered about something that might not affect them?
And so I wanted to share a passage from a wonderful New Yorker (May 18, 2009) article by Nick Paumgarten entitled “The Death of Kings: Notes from a Meltdown.” (Hunter students can access the article on Lexis-Nexis at the library database page.)
How, he asks, did such a massive financial collapse escape the attention of so many people? Why were people taken by surprise? His answer is one of the best comments on the role of media and the visual image that I have seen in a long time:
We are a visual species. In an economic crisis, in the early stages, at least (and we are likely still in the early stages, in spite of all the recent happy talk), the visible effects are subtle, if they are present at all. Maybe there are empty seats at the game. It is a mathematical predicament, an abstraction that expresses itself in dreary reports that don’t affect you, until they do. Deferred dreams aren’t news. Even the worst consequences-homelessness, hunger, untreated illness, everything short of civil unrest or outright revolution-aren’t spectacles. The history-making developments-the collapses of great or at least large institutions, the government’s deployments of sums beyond imagining, the exchange of gigantic liabilities for even more gigantic ones in the future, the effects these things have on geopolitics-are difficult to picture. People grasp at anecdotal observation: store closures, idle spouses, a rash of attacks by a mugger (a mugger!) with a pipe. The immigrants are going home.
How often do you wait for the compelling visual to get concerned?
So now Judge Sotomayor’s “testy side” will be a talking point in the effort to derail her nomination.
Testy, huh?
What a pathetic strategy! Justice Scalia acts with astounding immaturity in public , at one point making an obscene gesture at a reporter, and it is largely laughed off.
Yet now, when a woman is reported to be possibly testy, all the big boys are running home to mommy because she might be mean to them.
If you have a problems with one of Judge Sotomayor’s opinions, speak up. Put her feet to the fire.
But to bring up issues like testiness and demeanor, after decades in which the “boys will be boys” rule basically excused any nonsense a man wanted to pull, beytrays the deep insecurity of men who still are terrified by the thought of an angry woman.
Yesterday, two students asked about two old columns of mine, one for the Washington Post and one for the International Herald Tribune. What’s strange about these being the ones they discovered is that there actually is one way they do belong together:
One was was as fun to write as anything I have ever done and the other was gut wrenching.
Psychologist Daniel Gilbert has a brilliant short piece in today’s Times about the fear that is engendered by uncertainty. He cites some fascinating studies in which subjects, to avoid or escape uncertainty, are willing to choose undesirable, yet clear and immediate, outcomes. The horror you know seems to trump an unknown future in which things might actually turn out to not be so bad.
How true! Our inability (and I do mean our ) to deal with uncertainty leads us into hole after hole. I was thinking of one of those holes in particular:
How many self-promoting, pseudo-experts – especially those who fill the bottomless news hole of 24 hour cable news – get airtime solely because, in times of uncertainty and ambiguity, they promise clarity? Of course, they never really deliver it. But how often do we seize their cockamamie “clarity” solely because we can’t live without immediate answers?
So many social problems defy easy explanations. Yet we still seem to go bonkers when, in a hyper-ventilating, instantaneous information environment, reporters and public officials fail to deliver quick answers that will sufficiently reduce our anxiety.
Do we know with any certainty the ultimate severity and trajectory of the H1N1 virus? Do we know why individuals erupt in senseless acts of mass violence? Do we really know why relationships fall apart? Or why hunger persists in a supposedly “developed” country?
In fact, we know a little bit about each of these vexing questions. In some cases we know a lot.
But certainty? Not a chance. Serious inquiry can reduce uncertainty and help us approach explanations for complex social phenomena. But it doesn’t provide certainty.
In fact, only one thing seems completely certain to me: There will never be a social crisis or problem that doesn’t spawn a crowd of “snake-oil ” hucksters who are all too happy to fill an uncertain void with pet theories, easy remedies, and ads for the products that will bring us the clarity we seek.
It’s a paradox, but it just might be that one of the most admirable qualities of an informed citizen in a complex world will be the ability to admit ignorance. Isn’t self-aware ignorance infinitely more honest than the bluster of phony certainty?
One of the most brilliant and hilarious comedians on the planet, Wanda Sykes, will be hosting tonight’s White House Correspondent’s Association dinner. Watch it at 8 PM EDT live on C-Span.
I still can’t believe that the selection committee watched any of her videos. Or, if they did, I can’t believe that Wanda will somehow be able to resist, well, being Wanda.
Wanda Sykes. Face to face with President Barack Obama.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go make sure that my defibrilator has fresh batteries.
Have you ever been mesmerized by a film, haunted for days and even months, and been astonished at the length of time it takes for the emotional hangover to wear off?
Well get this:
For over 25 years I have been haunted by a film and, through all those years, I have never lost the uneasiness, the melancholy that came over me the day I first saw it.
But I have been laid up with a cold and – strangely enough – have found myself deliriously musing about all sorts of completely strange and random topics.
Of course, I have been thinking a lot about the pandemic, but before I say anything about H1N1, I have been trying to watch it unfold and think of some things to say that might actually be useful. This is a time when we can hear from too many voices, many well-intentioned, which speak with scandalously inadequate information. Some of you know I was very peripherally involved in pandemic planning, but I’ll get to that in a day or two.
For good or bad, these are some of the places my twisted mind has been visiting over the last couple days as I almost certainly try to subconsciously think about things other than a potential pandemic.
Why and how did one of the great actresses of the American stage, and later television, Sada Thompson, simply disappear almost 2 decades ago? It’s not that any artist has an obligation to keep working, but I wonder what the story might be here. Ms. Thompson is enormously respected in the theater world, and in the early 70s was the linchpin of the ABC television show “Family.” While it had all the trappings of a soap opera, it transcended the genre and was actually very good. Sada? Here she is with the comparably brilliant Sylvia Sidney.
I don’t talk about the Beach Boys much, but I am a big fan – always have been – and still feel sad that their great lead guitarist Carl Wilson died much too young (lung cancer, 1998). Carl was also, along with Brian, one of the soaring falsetto voices in so many of their classics. I am thrilled that I was able to see the Beach Boys live on a number of occasions, including a memorable night on the Sunset Strip (Whiskey a Go Go) in 1971, the 80s, and even once in the 90s. He doesn’t sing in this 1964 TV clip, but the classic lead guitar intro to Fun, Fun, Fun is all Carl and starts at the 50 second mark. Carl was an interesting case in that he grew so much as a guitar player that he continued to play in later recording sessions that relied primarily on skilled studio musicians. Carl was also the lead vocalist on Darlin’, God Only Knows, I Can Hear Music.
If you subscribe to Netflix, you have to check out their new system for recommending films based on your tastes. They now use almost an infinite number of categories, and today I actually received recommendations under some of the following categories — 1) critically acclaimed cerebral dramas, 2) mind bending foreign movies from the 70s, 3) dark political movies, 4) critically acclaimed movies based on real life, and 5) something close to “road films about courageous women.” As if it’s the subject rather than the quality that makes the difference. It was sort of amusing, but I can’t say I was that happy to see that one of the most riveting documentaries of the last several years Taxi to the Dark Side, was classified as a dark political thriller and placed in the midst of all sorts such espionage films and World War II Gestapo thrillers. Weird.
Categorize this under “careers that have gone up in smoke because of inadequate awareness of the capacities of digital technology. “ Several weeks ago, Britain’s most senior counterterrorism officer, Bob Quick, was forced to resign because he was photographed walking into #10 Downing Street with a memo the wrong side up. All those megapixels and telephotos we joke about allowed the document to be enlarged. It revealed an extremely sensitive investigation, revealed the names of suspects who may or may not be guilty, and forced the premature end of an ongoing operation. Here is the photo.
Finally, if any of you receive strange, scary or implausible emails related to the H1N1 epidemic, I would love you to forward them. They will be put to serious use in my research. The more bizarre, the better. I am confident that real medical expertise is making its voice heard, but my interest has always leaned toward monitoring the unhelpful voices of fear, misinformation, and panic that are inevitable when we are scared about something in which the outcome is unpredictable.
Now it is back to a movie so trashy, so juvenile, and so relentlessly idiotic that no one will ever, ever get me to reveal the title. Not even waterboarding would get me to admit it. Just thinking about the fact that I am watching is embarrassing.
But yesterday I was mortified to find myself actually responding to a text message in the middle of class. And while I normally feel no great compulsion to give public confessions, this is different. Because just a week before, I had gently admonished a student who did the same thing.
I was showing a brief video excerpt to the class. The room was dark. Suddenly, I felt the vibrations from my new Blackberry storm in my shirt pocket. When I looked down, I saw the name of the sender who — whatever they were sending — could not have conceivably been the source of an emergency message. In other words, I could’ve waited. Easily.
Except that it wasn’t easy.
I couldn’t wait, and I actually hid the Blackberry from the class’es view and checked the message. Not only could it have waited, but I easily could have deleted it without opening it.
Aside from the fact that my Blackberry will now be turned off during class, it is probably a media professor’s occupational hazard that I can’t stop thinking about it. Why in the world did I feel a temporary, almost irresistible, compulsion to open that message? What information or psychic benefit did I imagine I would be missing if I waited twenty minutes until the end of class? Why was I unable to even think twice before I lost the kind of digital patience that I expect from students during class?
The answer isn’t that profound. We live in a society, and are immersed in a culture, in which the definition of connectedness keeps changing. We are sold devices that promise permanent connectedness. Our digital commercial culture regularly reminds us that even one moment out of the loop might be the precise moment in which we miss that once-in-a-lifetime message. We come to imagine that the costs of disconnectedness are too great to even imagine.
My brief moment of surreptitious texting also reminded me that, only a year or two ago, even a compulsive guy like me could wait several hours to read my e-mail. Yet yesterday I found myself easily slipping into a series of imagined, implausible scenarios in which failing to open one stupid e-mail could have all sorts of catastrophic consequences.
Is this crazy or what? Of course it is. And I can’t avoid thinking that there may even be some embarrassing amount of grandiosity in imagining that there was some urgent reason that I in particular had to open that particular message. Who do I think I am?
Of course I don’t want to do it again. But I am too aware of my own fears and insecurities to say that it won’t be a struggle. Even as I write this, I feel a small twinge of anxiety just contemplating an hour or two of disconnectedness.
Because this blog does not often deal with the economics of news, some of you reading this will not immediately get why this is very big news. Others can explain that better, and few better than Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine.
This is probably APs last all-out attempt to protect their proprietary news content from unauthorized use on other web sites.
The problem is that this is an era when it is virtually impossible to protect anything. AP could easily win and stop others from showing AP content. But they could lose in the long run when other producers of news product step in.
If content users find other sources of less expensive news, the value of APs product could decline and even evaporate.
This is not the first time I have wondered whether someone gave Jack Shafer, Slate’s media critic, a hard time on the playground when he was a kid. For whatever reason, Shafer seems unable to resist occasionally punctuating his thoughtful criticism with the most bizarre, mean-spirited personal vitriole. Whenever he loses control, I feel like calling him and assuring him that he no longer has to worry about the kid who kicked him in the shins in 1962.
Jack: Question the management decisions made by Times publishers. Question whether their views are adequately nuanced and informed. Question whether they have adapted to the challenge of new media or remained stuck in a defunct economic model. And feel free to characterize any statement or action of any past or present New York Times publisher as flat-out and astoundingly stupid.
But for you to write a piece about whether someone was ”born stupid” only begs the obvious question:
Were you born cruel?
By the way, I would still read any column Shafer writes about who has made what mistakes at the New York Times, about who has said or done stupid things.
But Tuesday’s column was beyond cruel. It was peculiar. It was crazed.
How many of you have taken that widely circulated quiz to determine your “real” age? You know, the one that gives you a “health” age as opposed to your chronological age?
It turns that the “quiz” is a veiled attempt to extract health-related information from you that all sorts of marketers can use.
I am naturally skeptical of anything billed as “new” or “improved.” Chalk that up to a childhood when a “new” and “improved” Tide detergent came out every month or so.
Someday, if I can get past the emotions and bittersweet memories, I am going to tell you why this man — my 6th grade teacher in West Covina, California – probably taught me as much about patience, compassion, and decency as anyone I have known in my life. I have even thought about writing a book about him. And I may.
I have always tried to be realistic when it comes to the weird topics that attract large audiences. Some topics that are easy to dismiss as disgusting and sensational really do speak to some of our most basic fears and anxieties. In all their sleaziness, they can connect to basic aspects of what it means to be a human being.
Stories of violence, infidelity, and disaster have grabbed our attention since antiquity, and I have always thought it futile to deny these fascinations or to suggest that we pay less attention. We are going to pay attention.
Having said that, this morning I read about an upcoming broadcast that will almost certainly set some unofficial record for pathetic pandering and shameless sensationalism. We are talking about nonsense of the highest order.
Will anyone watch this? Of course. And that fact alone gives me a feeling someplace between the discomfort of indigestion and a minor traffic accident.
If this essay is a tongue-in-cheek humor piece, I send it along with sincere compliments to the author for so deliciously and humorously impersonating idiocy at its most astounding.
If the guy is serious, then I send it along as idiocy at its most astounding.
What do you think?
I honestly can’t tell.
P.S. I just re-read it, and — if I had to bet the college fund ( or what’s left of it) — I’d say the author could not be serious and that this is a humor piece.
Posted by Steve Gorelick 
Posted by Steve Gorelick 
Posted by Steve Gorelick 
Steve Gorelick
