Weighing In

I usually stay out of the fray of popular opinion, but I've had lots of thoughts recently and little time to flesh them out into essays as I prefer to do.
If the lingering NON-story of Henry Louis Gates Jr. (who everyone was suddenly coached about Day 2 to call "Skip" as if they were chums with him and as if he would prefer this name) being arrested in his home teaches us anything, it is that this country is far from being past race. When news announcers can say with a straight face that a man with a black father and white mother is "racist," there is meaning in neither the word racist nor journalist.
Speaking of which, one of the things that nakedjen and I talked about was "Journalism 2.0" as she informed me it is being called. When someone with a blackberry at an event can inform people about it faster than the press, then what is reportage? I can foresee an Orson Welles moment where someone tweets a false event, setting off a tsunami of unfounded panic. Part of why I don’t normally jump in to current events and publish brief sound bites is that I don’t want to contribute to that culture that panics and responds from fight-or-flight. Perhaps our lives have so little that truly threatens us anymore that our inner lizard brain craves that fight or flight instinct, and we apply it to inappropriate events like the Gates story.
I have been reading Christopher Hitchens's Letters to a Young Contrarian. Get a copy. Hitchens can be strident, but here he is at his best, both witty and incisive and calling on everyone to follow their highest instincts.
Having just "self-published" my book, a phrase that jumped out at me was when Hitchens quoted George Konrad "… be a self-publisher even in conversation…." It's related to what I wrote above. Be truthful. Be original. Edit. Even your speech.
I recently vacationed in northern Minnesota's Mesabi Iron Range, and read a book about the logging industry. We visited "The Lost Forty," a 40-acre stand of white pines spared the loggers' ax due to a surveying mistake. It's amazing to think what the country looked like before plundered. One big problem with capitalism is the faith that money is in and of itself worth something. During this delusional capitalistic time of human development, they turned all of the trees into money. They used the money to buy things, but what comes when people need trees and trees aren't around but money is?
Speaking of money: I saw a post on ESPN about how Billy Beane's Oakland A's are bad and that maybe "moneyball" isn’t working. Hmmm… a huge media conglomerate with a vested interest in generating money from sports thinks that frugality and making choices based on facts rather than the ol' boy network needs to be reprimanded. Remember the old journalism phrase about not believing only one side of a story. "If your mother says she loves you … check it out."