Letters to the Editor
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Yup
And Tim, what you may notice is that, while the people you meet in DC will be exceedingly well-informed and as apt as you are to be examining the twigs and leaves on a daily basis, travel just 30 minutes out of the city and you'll find mostly people who will dedicate, at most, 30 minutes between now and the 2008 election figuring out who they'll vote for. Drive south on I-95 to Fredericksburg, VA, and you'll be in a completely different world, a world where, if anyone's ever even heard of John Edwards, they're likely to say, "Oh, yeah, isn't that the guy who gets expensive haircuts?" because that's what they were saying on the Today show that was playing in the background while they were making breakfast this morning.
On another subject, Tim, would you click on my previous posting? I'm serious about the barbecue and am wondering if other DC-based Salon readers are also interested.
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Welcome back, Tim.
You were covered by a very good colleague. I have given-up on "main stream" TV reporting as it is anything but. A vast majority know more about the drinking habits and breast size of Paris Hilton than about the daily shellings of the green zone. Sigh...Don't think all of that isn't missed by Rush and Co. It almost, but quite not, places a full smile (grimace) onto the face of President Cheney.
One ,I guess, has to get away from the Web to see why one needs to go there...
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The foundation of a democracy is an informed public
I'm no conspiracy theorist, so I'm made really uncomfortable by this feeling I have, that A. letting the public school system go to hell while B. fostering this festering pop culture celebrity worship news-as-entertainment-cum-lies thing is part of some horrible strategy to allow the kinds of "unitary executive" crap and subversion of democracy that's going on as we speak to happen. It was kind of funny in Gilliam's Brazil; in real life, however, it's terrifying.
Which is why we need people like you, Tim. Welcome back, and welcome home!
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You never miss your water til your well runs dry
At the risk of some anonymous turd calling me a sycophant:
Man, I missed you bad.
There's nothing like a coast to coast drive across the The Great Craton to fix in your head just how blissfully brain-dead the masses of America are. This is especially true if your final destination is Washington D.C. where there are a select number of their representatives elevated by the simple folk to positions of awesome power.
From the time you left Rock Springs, Wyo., to perhaps 150 miles west of Chicago, if you turned on your AM radio, you would get nothing but Jesus and Rush Limbaugh until your ears start to bleed.
Now you have experienced what it is like to live out here. Please don't forget it.
You went from the progressive bubble of "The Sac" all the way to the bubble of insanity that is Washington D.C. with a trip through the land of the perpetual ignorati. I hope you keep that middle portion of your trip firmly in mind on those times when you are perplexed by our "leaders" in Washington and why they do the things they do.
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Grieving no more!
Welcome back, Mr. Grieve! Yes, it's scary when you realize that in the bid to be informed, one has to work at it. If you want to really drive yourself crazy, try to watch the nightly network news, and see how inadequate it is as a means of covering world events, compared with the huge amount of information available by way of the Internet. You find stories "breaking" on network news that you've known about for years, by way of the Net.
And what's more, it's frightening to think that for a big chunk of the populace, that 22-minute nightly news is where they get their information. It's wholly inadequate to the task of covering our complicated world -- it amazes me that, pre-Internet, it was where nearly everybody got their news, along with the papers.
Even the 24-hour cable TV news (and certainly not the print newspapers) can't hope to keep up with it. Only fanatic newshounds and partisan diehards can really keep up with what's going on, and even then, only by following areas of interest. I guess that's why the Bush League has pursued their own variation of "don't ask, don't tell" with regard to news dissemination.
Tuning in definitely takes work. Glad you'll be tuned in again, though; we missed you!
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Bin laden vs. bin lyin'
Welcome back,Tim! But I was sorry to realize, as I read your description, that you were traveling in the wrong direction.
DC! Cripes!
On the other hand, we're very lucky to have you there. Now, did you really mean Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11? Why, that must mean Bush has bin lyin' to us. No. Impossible!
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St.Louis
you were out driving around and missed St.Louis? we're right here in the middle. if you travel thru here sometime, put the radio on FM88.1, KDHX(or try it via the internet). this is real public radio, not NPR, just a local listener supported anarchy on the radio waves. various music and various programming, only thing they buy is DemocracyNow and that's the news programming. glad your back. Digby was great.
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I hate to say this, but....
...your 'discovery' that the general populace is uninformed simply underscores, and strengthens, the right's boilerplate image of liberals/progressives as elitist and alien. Most people don't read Salon, or Slate, or Tompaine.com, or the Atlantic, of the New Yorker, or anything else, for that matter. They read the sports, the comics, the metro/local section, and then MAYBE skim the front page of their daily paper. They watch the local news at 6 and 10, and the rest of their 'information' comes from talk radio or People magazine. That's it. They've never heard of Seymour Hersh, or Sidney Blumenthal, or Joe Conason, or Hugh Hewitt, or Jonah Goldberg, or Andrew Sullivan. The Democrat/progressive/liberal braintrust needs desperately to get out of New York/Boston/San Francisco (a stereotype, and yet also a truth) and start living in Plano, Omaha, Jacksonville, and Billings, and perhaps THEN we can truly combat the small minority of wingnuts that has sent this country careening downhill in a rudderless Radio Flyer wagon... The inability of the progressives to comprehend the way 'regular folks' see the world is akin to Glenn Greenwald's indictment of the Beltway press corps : "The way we see it is OBVIOUSLY the correct view; why can't THEY understand that?"