Letters to the Editor
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The Fool's Kabuki Dance
What else is amazing about our lame courtier media is the fact that they have been totally outclassed by the comedians -- when it comes to substance!.
I agree that it is amazing, but that's because only serious dramas are allowed to win Academy Awards, comedies (almost?) never. The high art of Comedy does not get its due respect.
And it is sooo ironic if you consider that early on (after Old Comedy, if I'm correct) the purpose of Comedy, especially satire, was to prick the bubble (ego) of those in power or to bring them down a peg or two. Isn't that dealing with real substance?
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Too funny
Being a vacuous airhead doesn't necessarily preclude one from being a cunning sleazeball who exploits our insane torte system to his advantage via blackmail and extortion. It falls far short of the intellect and character we expect from our Commander in Chief.
Hilarious! John Edwards doesn't meet the lofty intellect and character standards of George W. Alcoholic-Cokehead-"The Hungry Caterpillar" reading-AWOLing- Bush. Maybe if one of Edwards's kids was arrested for underage drinking, or if he launched a war in Iraq without knowing the difference between Sunnis and Shi'ites. . .
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Trolling For A Tart Remark
L.W.M.:
What's this about "torte systems"?
I haven't had my supper yet. Is it already time for dessert?
Discretion is the better part of leaving some errors to ripen in their own thyme.
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Postman
William Timberman:
More generally, one of the most overlooked contributory factors in the decline of political conversation in this country is the fact that television and radio abhor a vacuum. Even the most dedicated blog commenter/junkie would have a difficult time scripting 24/7/365 television broadcasts. How could CNN or Fox News exist without descending into gossip and trivia, even without a propaganda agenda to pursue?
You sound like Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death!
Postman posits that television is the primary means of communication for our culture and it has the property of converting conversations into entertainment so much so that public discourse on important issues has disappeared. Since the treatment of serious issues as entertainment inherently prevents them from being treated as serious issues and indeed since serious issues have been treated as entertainment for so many decades now, the public is no longer aware of these issues in their original sense, but only as entertainment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
I wonder what he would have thought of how the blogosphere is making serious discourse possible again? I don't think he saw much promise in the World Wide Web, but Dave Pollard wrote that he thought there was a chance Postman would have recognized some benefits:
The book also provides extensive and compelling evidence that pre-broadcast media Americans, throughout the entire nineteenth century, were the most informed people, and, not coincidentally, the most practiced at exchange of ideas and public discourse in the history of civilization (due in part to the enormous number, variety and popularity of newspapers, broadsheets, pamphlets and public lecture halls), and that, under the influence of the new, context-free, incoherent, unactionable and fragmented modern media, they are now among the least informed, and the least practiced at public discourse.
That was in 1984, when the Internet was in its infancy. Is the proliferation of blogs and other new written media in the past decade a reaction against this incoherence and absence of context? Was Postman unduly pessimistic in seeing the computer as just another 'entertainment screen' masquerading as a literate medium?
http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2005/01/10.html
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As I wrote last year...
Stephen Colbert is Hot!!!
I've never really seen a man act with such intellectual (and yet witty!) courage, while sustaining an almost impossible persona. And in front of a roomful of his comedic targets.
It was truly awesome. Unbelievable. Crush-inspiring, even.
The bar is set incredibly high for anyone else who ever follows him. Rich Little never stood a chance this year.
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And on Tortes and Torts... (stretching the metaphoric envelope)
please consider offering some support to those who oppose the War on Chocolate:
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/04/22/the-war-on-chocolate/
Yes, this is serious business. Chocolate is (so far) a still legal mood-enhancing aid, unregulated (for consumers), that also benefits the cardiovascular system.
Truly the food of the gods, its properties should be sacrosanct, and protected from the vagaries of the IndustrialFoodComplex. Let us not have it spoiled by those who have graced us with HFCS, trans fats, and GMOs, while permitting us to be invaded by E coli, Mad Cow, and the abusive use of hormones and antibiotics.
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An interesting question, SusanMc
Is the Web a return of Chautauqua, or of the 18th century pamphleteers? Is it our own American samizdat? My Russian friends laugh; there has to be a hunger to know, they say, and Americans are sated. Ignorant, but sated nevertheless.
My Russian friends may be right, but they're also intellectuals who thrived for years in deprivation and repression, and are now, like Solzhenitsyn, forced to cope with a culture which is deracinated, smug, and rich to the point of bewilderment. One of them described finding herself one evening, shortly after finally getting her exit visa, on the sidewalk outside a BMW showroom in Berlin. Suddenly, she said, she realized that there were tears running down her cheeks. Now that she has a BMW of her own, she's no longer sad, but she is nostalgic, and she thinks that Americans are ultimately silly.
What do I think? Well, I suppose my commenting here says all that needs to be said, but that aside, I think that the jury's still out. For every Glenn, bebop-o, or Paul Rosenberg, there's a Patterico, or a shooter to add to the blender. We're at the beginning. Who really knows for certain what will come of it in the end, or even, for that matter, in the middle?
I'm here because for years until I turned the television set off for good, I never heard a single talking head who ever mentioned anything -- political or otherwise -- which could be related to my own experience, or to the conversations and arguments I had daily with my friends and acquaintances. I might just as well have been tuning in to broadcastss from Alpha Centauri.
That has changed, and I'm grateful for the others here who've helped add perspective to my alienation. I'd like to say that all is well with our new forum, but grateful as I am, I'm still haunted by those Russian tears.