Herb Caen, John Ensign and Disappearing Voices Of Our Cities

Interesting article about Ensign.
_
I myself wonder if Coburn (R) has been subpoenaed, since that Doug Hampton guy claimed that Coburn was the one who advised Ensign to bribe him (or have Ensign’s parents bribe him to be more specific).
_
It would be awful fun if the whole C-Street crew had to go talk to a grand jury, and it might even shut up Bart Stupad for a few minutes.

Yes, yes, Ensign cheated on his wife and then broke laws to cover it up. By all means, run him out of office. no complaints there.

But why is the press largely incapable of covering scandals that don’t involve (a) sex or (b) cheap, personal benefits?

Right now the governor of New York is being relentlessly attacked for not paying for Yankee tickets. Meanwhile, the Treasury Secretary and former head of the NY Fed has been revealed to have been complicit in the corporate accounting frauds to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars and the media barely notices. Does anyone have any perspective?

When a Congressman is caught with $90,000 in bribe money in his freezer — not an insignificant sum — he is justifiably condemned. But when political officials retire and receive compensation often several magnitudes greater by investment banks, hedge firms, lobbying firms, and the like, the media treats it as business as usual.

Senator Dodd — along with the entire GOP minority of the Finance Committee — just drowned financial reform in a bathtub. Dodd will retire and rake in the vastly more money for his efforts than Rep. Jefferson ever stuck in his freezer. Who is the biggest criminal?

“when political officials retire and receive compensation often several magnitudes greater by investment banks, hedge firms, lobbying firms, and the like, the media treats it as business as usual.”
.
It IS business as usual.
.
The foregoing “IS” in all caps is not intended to indicate any affiliation with or sympathy for the views of the right-wing participants in this blog’s Comments section.

Understood. Although a teabagger would probably type:
.
HA! It is BUSINESS AS USUAL for the DEMOCRAT PARTY.
.
To be on the safe side, I usually go with italics for emphasis.

Michael Scherer:
.
We don’t need newspapers, we need journalism.
.
We need journalism however it can be made, and wherever it can be found. We will do it ourselves, if necessary, since we’re fortunate enough now not to be dependent on the capital of Hearsts to patronize and publish. We will do it ourselves, now that gangs of publishers’ thugs can’t stop us from distributing a product by beating our paper-boys, or driving our trucks off of the road. We will do it ourselves, because we can, and because it’s worth doing.
.
This is America, where we put up our own “low churches,” instead of bemoaning a lack of cathedrals.

Frontier American journalism preserved a vestige of the low-church impulse toward universal literacy whereby the new country imagined it could read and write itself into existence.

, writes Rodriguez with typical, parlor-bound myopia.
.
If Richard Rodriguez would deign to descend from the ivory tower of his pampered theories into the intellectually teeming world online, he might notice a new American frontier, and its continued impulse toward universal –global, actually– literacy. Incredibly, for all of his education and worldliness, Richard Rodriguez can’t seem to see what’s right there in front of his face every time he looks into the monitor: this new country still imagines that it can read and write itself into existence. Not only that, but it’s actually doing so whilst Rodriguez tritely laments.
.
We don’t need “the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus,” by which Rodriguez means an artificial scarcity of content imposed by the state on the market at the behest of current industry leaders, we just need the widest possible access to the content that we –pros and non-pros– make.
.
Contra Rodriguez, we don’t need the editorial staff of local classified section monopolies to create our culture for us town by town, because we’re perfectly capable of creating these things for ourselves –including Donald J. Bingle with his opinions on literature.
.
“We will all live in Washington, D.C“?
.
Until the internet came along, we were all living the opinions and mouthing the words of the Beltway elites who presumed to speak for us. We experience our world through the words of the smug Broders, who deigned to catch up on politics with the locals while windshields were washed, the vain Sally Quinns with their touching columns on “faith in the family,” and the geniuses David Brooks or Richard Cohen who would explain to us all what we really wanted from government and our country, and what it all meant.
.
Where has Richard Rodriguez been living all these years?
.
On PBS?
.
We don’t need Rodriguez’s Mayberry-metropolis fantasies, or his professional ideology (that coincidentally posits himself and his colleagues at the apex of human culture), or his dishonest nostalgia for a provincialism from which he was privileged to escape. We don’t need him to point out to us dullards the superiority of the opera-going class in our local towns, nor to enforce the proper opinion of Melville’s work on us proles.
.
“who will tell us what it means to live as citizens of Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor?,” he plaintively asks, somehow forgetting to add “That’s my job, not yours!”
.
We don’t need Rodriguez to tell us “what it means to live as citizens,” or what journalism should mean to us, the people who actually use it.
.
We don’t need Richard Rodriguez or the people who write his paychecks one iota at all.
.
And we certainly don’t need newspapers or magazines, Michael Scherer, we need journalism.

I for one would like to hear Scherer’s response to this…

Michael, thank you for posting this. Sometimes we need just good writing Stuart. I never lived in any of their cities but loved reading Caen, Royko, and Breslin. They gave me a feeling for their cities and the people who lived there.
I don’t NEED Melville to tell me about whale hunting but boy is Moby Dick a good story.

Of course we need good writing, apr2563, just like we need good journalism.
.
We just don’t need newspapers and magazines as they are currently structured economically –and economics is the real point here– to have these things in our lives.
.
To see journalism solely as the product of newspapers whose existence depends on Craig’s list going away, or advertising rates staying high is to assume its death. Journalism is not publishing. Writing is not publishing. Reporters, editors’ and food and theater critics’ jobs are not writing.
.
Richard Rodriguez is bemoaning the interstate highway system for making small towns less provincial, instead of looking at what the interstate highway system did for Americans’ ability to see the whole country.

Not sure what prompted this, Stuart. Richard Rodriguez is a favorite writer of mine, and I wouldn’t characterize him as living in any ivory towers. In fact, he refused offers to teach in ivory towers because he’d gotten his education through affirmative action, and it didn’t seem fair to him.

Is there something beyond this quote that you bring to your opinion about him?

Reading the top paragraph Michael quoted I was thinking how this is in some sense true of me, because I’ve long since cancelled my subscription to the local paper, and count on friends to let me know if someone I know has died. That’s rather pathetic. (I don’t do facebook, where I’d probably find out otherwise. I don’t suppose you think it’s necessary to be on facebook?)

There are of course a lot of people engaged in the “intellectually teeming world online,” but there are a lot more who never bother to visit any sites that challenge either their own worldview or their intellect.

I tend to lean in your direction Kathy. SZ is, of course, right about the limitations of the old, dying template. What I fail to find evidence of is that the new, evolving world of so-called democratic/horizontal journalism is resulting in anything better. These micro, compartmentalized communities that we cling to seem to preclude larger movements. And the larger movements that do evolve tend to be coopted by the same powers that be (Organizing for America = Hearst Corp?) Perhaps I’m just feeling bleak given what Move.on etc. have exhibited for us in recent weeks.
.
Not to mention the without-question epic cratering of literacy in America. That a brilliant bloke like RR might lament the dumbing down of our discourse might leave him open to cries of elitism, but it does not shake his contention that tech. is advancing ignorance, not empowerment. SZ, like so many of us, still read, still strive to seek out the enlightened corners of the net, but to imagine that our own ivory towers, affluent, educated urban enclaves stand in for anything more than acute segments of the pop. is ludicrous.
.
I think the old sucked, but I think the technology that has exploded that template affords us nothing to be optimistic about.

I’m sorry to have insulted one of your favorite writers, kathy, no offense.

given what Move.on etc. have exhibited for us in recent weeks
.
There’s worse coming, JC.
.
Much worse.
.
The decline of Rodriguez’ favored local monopolies are the least of our problems to come.

We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels. We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are without professional book reviewers and art critics and essays about what it might mean that our local newspaper has died. We are a nation of Amazon reader responses (Moby Dick is “not a really good piece of fiction”—Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald J. Bingle, Saint Charles, Ill.—two stars out of five).

I’m pretty much a cultural conservative: don’t get much out of postmodernist art and criticism, very skeptical about Internet triumphalism, etc. But really…. You know when else we had to struggle through a dark age without intellectual property and professional book reviewers? When Melville was writing Moby Dick. And of course even more so when Shakespeare was writing his plays.