A jaundiced look at the world we live in.
A little humor for the weekend (h/t Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars):
From Butch Hancock of the band Flatlanders:
“Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you’re going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love.”
Every couple of years, I team up with the Dean of the Journalism school at IUPUI to teach a course in Mass Media and Public Affairs. To suggest that it is challenging to describe the relationship between sound information and public policy would be a definite understatement! It was challenging even before newspapers began failing, and right now, it is anyone’s guess what the media landscape will look like ten years hence.
A recent article in the Atlantic addresses journalism’s profound transition from newspapers and broadcast evening news to…what, exactly? We can’t yet know, but Mark Bowden, the author, describes today’s landscape pretty accurately:
With journalists being laid off in droves, ideologues have stepped forward to provide the “reporting” that feeds the 24-hour news cycle. The collapse of journalism means that the quest for information has been superseded by the quest for ammunition . . .
I had, of course, heard of Alan Turing. I knew he was brilliant, and had cracked Nazi codes during WWII, allowing the allies to access information that was critical to winning the war. But I was unaware of the tragic “back story,” until I read that there was a movement in England to issue a posthumous apology to him.
As Ed Brayton over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/09/an_apology_to_alan_turing.php has reported:
Turing’s story is both remarkable and appalling. His work laid the foundation for the development of computers, a development as significant as the harnessing of fire or the invention of the telephone. But during WW2, he was also the man largely responsible for breaking the Nazi codes and allowing the good guys to win that war and prevent Hitler from taking over.
His reward for that? He was prosecuted for being a homosexual, stripped of his security clearance, and subjected to chemical castration. He killed himself two years later. One of the backers of this campaign said, “With Turing’s death, Britain and the world lost one of its finest intellectual minds. A government apology and posthumous pardon are long overdue.”
How sad. Another example of unreasoning hatred depriving mankind of a great resource. It reminds me of the Arabic-speaking gay soldiers discharged under “don’t ask, don’t tell,” even as the U.S. was desperate for recruits who could speak Arabic.
I will never understand people who hate or fear other people so much–people they don’t even know!–that they are willing to harm themselves in order to hurt “them.”
If the people insisting that Obama is a fascist/socialist (as if the terms were synonymous–maybe they’ve heard of “national socialism” and are too ignorant of history to know the difference) had legitimate grievances about the various healthcare proposals on the table, wouldn’t they talk about those, rather than making shit up?
I mean, why invent “provisions” that clearly don’t exist, provisions that have been debunked by multiple credible sources and can easily be seen as fictitious by anyone genuinely interested in determining what is true–unless truth is irrelevant and your only goal is to defeat anything this President proposes?
Which leads me to another observation. A number of “tea baggers” have defended the vitriol coming from the right by pointing to accusations made about George W. Bush by the Left. (I believe this criticism falls into the category of “But Mom, he started it!”) In one sense, that’s fair enough–there were certainly some on the left who were excessive in their language and accusations–although as a friend of mine observed, unlike the rightwingers, they were generally not armed. But there is one telling difference between those who were appalled by GWB and those hurling obscenities at Obama–the criticisms of Bush began AFTER HE’D BEEN IN OFFICE FOR TWO/THREE YEARS. They were based upon actions he took. Many of us who came to believe that he was a disaster for the country (and count me among them) came to that conclusion based upon his actual conduct.
In striking contrast, the hysteria over Obama began even before he took office, and almost none of it has been based upon what he has actually said or done. The justifications have been inventions out of whole cloth. These are not people reacting to measures they disagree with; they are looking for reasons to justify their pre-existing hatred. And the only possible explanation for that is racism.
What we are seeing is what happens when a racist wakes up one morning to find a world in which there is not only a black man (Tiger Woods) who is the best golfer in the world, and a black woman (Oprah) who dominates the entertainment industry, (not to mention women of all colors doing all those jobs that used to be reserved for men) but now, a black man in the White House. What else explains the refrain of people at “town halls” who keep saying “I want my country back”?
Raw bigotry has crawled out from under its usual rocks so we can see it in full display, and it isn’t pretty. Alka-Selzer, anyone?
Commentsfrom Daily Kos:
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