The Mainstream Media needs wingmen. I volunteer.
Katie Couric and news operations at the radio and television networks, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and other national newspapers, are members of the Mainstream Media, or MSM, as it has come to be called. These are the people responsible for encountering, finding, and objectively reporting the news, and they are the ones that really count, in terms of the safety of the democracy. In fact let’s give them an identifier of their own. They are the Mainstream Mainstream Media, or MMSM.
Besides the MMSM, all MSM organizations also have an opinion operation housing analysis and commentary, but those opinion operations don't need wingmen. Some of them should BE wingmen for their MMSM colleagues.
A wingman is a commentator, no doubt about it. I am about to attack those people who have taken the MMSM under attack, and my mission is to keep them under attack for as long as necessary. I am flying a pretty good airplane. I have 35 years of experience at the controls of the media profession, and I know the news side as well as I know the opinion side.
The mission needs wingmen because the MMSM can’t defend itself without appearing to lose balance and objectivity, particularly in a political season such as this. I can take on the McCain and Obama camps with impunity, however, because I am a declared commentator flying partisan colors, but they are not politically partisan. I am partisan free press. I am pro-MMSM, and anyone who is not is walking on the fighting side of me. The role of the MMSM in American democracy dates to the 1734 Zenger verdict and predates presidents, politics, and the Constitution. A free press is as basic to American democracy as oxygen atoms are to air. Nothing about this republic is more worthy of our regard and our respect.
I decided to become an MMSM wingman last night when I heard John McCain say to Katie Couric, “This is not the first time I have seen a governor being questioned by some quote, ‘expert’.” Katie Couric couldn’t bite his head off, but I sure can. I can wonder why a man who would aspire to the presidency of the United States would place his partisan needs before the principle of democratic oxygen. The nation is gripped by fear of financial failure, but no one is asking about the effect on the republic of an MMSM failure, which is far scarier. Rather, it has become open season on the free press. I could hear millions of Americans last night, joining McCain’s attack, cheering his words in the dark. Does he not see the risk?
In today’s MMSM, speaking of Gov. Sarah Palin’s candidacy, Ron Carey, chairman of the Minnesota Republican Party, said, “Thanks to the mainstream media, quite a low expectation has been created for her performance.” Katon Dawson, the GOP chair in South Carolina, again referring to Palin, spoke of “a pile-on by the media elite. You don’t have this kind of negative media attack without a question mark being put up.”
If the MMSM’s reporting – and yes, they are the elites in their business – does not meet the Zenger verdict’s standard of truth, there will be retractions and corrections. In the meantime, the people are free to react to the information with high or low expectations, and with exclamation points or question marks. This wingman mission is all about the people. Taped to my instrument panel are these words:
“The guarantee of a free press was not in the Constitution, which established the government, but right at the top, No. 1 in the Bill of Rights, which protected the governed. The press belongs not to the Constitution, but to the people, who created it. Thus the source of the power of the press must be the power of the people, who can access their power through only one source, the power of the press.”
Thus an attack such as McCain’s on the MMSM must in fact be an attack on the people. It is time it, and they, were defended.
September 30, 2008
September 24, 2008
National guitar champion
When Tyler Grant was youth soccer age (an age I thought would never end), I used to harp on him about moving his feet. He had very slow feet.
It would be years before I realized I was watching the wrong parts. If I wanted fast, I should have been watching his hands. Those were the hands that last Saturday picked up a guitar at the National Flatpicking Guitar Championships, and when they set the guitar down again, Tyler had won first prize. There were 32 contestants. He was awarded $2,000 and a guitar of his choice. He chose a Collings, hand-made by a company in Austin.
I figured he chose the Collings because he had a space in the Collings Room for it. He must have rooms for all the guitars he has won – the Martin Room, the Gibson Room, etc. Me? I am making room in the Pride and Envy corners of my head to allow for the kind of swelling created by the news that your kid is the National Flatpicking Guitar Champion of the United States of America.
Many fathers can take credit for guiding or coaching or inspiring their kids to this sort of success, and I feel highly motivated to try. We do have a guitar connection, but it is a flimsy one. I have been crashing through three-chord progressions since I was 12 or 13 and wanted to copy the rock and roll that overnight had started pouring out of the radio. I learned a few Elvis songs and a few Johnny Cash songs, establishing a repertoire that has changed hardly at all to this day. I tried to play the guitar licks between verses, but my hands were as fast as Tyler’s feet would someday be, and I gave that up and just stuck to the chords.
So Tyler heard his dad play guitar from the time he was born, and he may have been inspired by the sound, or by staring through the bars of his crib, thinking somebody really needed to teach me how to play that thing, and it might as well be him, someday. I do know that on Tyler’s MySpace page, he lists me fourth among the people who have inspired him, behind Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, Jerry Garcia, and David Grier.
That is pride enough for me. I think the inspiration that brought Tyler to becoming a guitar champion started the same place that mine did, listening to music he liked. When he heard bluegrass, he knew what he wanted to do. Then he did the work.
It has been a lot of work. Tyler started when he was 16 or 17. Now he is 32. He has degrees from Grossmont College and California University of the Arts. He knows music theory. He plays classical guitar. He practices three or four hours a day. One day years ago he was playing and I asked him what the tune was. “Just notes,” he said. He was practicing what he called a pentatonic scale. Sounded like music to me.
I have watched Tyler’s hands through these years. They weren’t nearly as fast in the beginning. About a year ago, I heard him reach a fluidity that gives the impression that playing the guitar isn’t work at all. The reward for all the work is that playing starts to sound easy. When I hear Tyler playing on a CD, I see his fingers on the strings, and that connection is a gift for a lifetime. There is a very good photo of him at his sister’s Website at oliveme.wordpress.com. You will also find there a very good summation of the winning ways that Tyler brought to the stage with him last Saturday.
It would be years before I realized I was watching the wrong parts. If I wanted fast, I should have been watching his hands. Those were the hands that last Saturday picked up a guitar at the National Flatpicking Guitar Championships, and when they set the guitar down again, Tyler had won first prize. There were 32 contestants. He was awarded $2,000 and a guitar of his choice. He chose a Collings, hand-made by a company in Austin.
I figured he chose the Collings because he had a space in the Collings Room for it. He must have rooms for all the guitars he has won – the Martin Room, the Gibson Room, etc. Me? I am making room in the Pride and Envy corners of my head to allow for the kind of swelling created by the news that your kid is the National Flatpicking Guitar Champion of the United States of America.
Many fathers can take credit for guiding or coaching or inspiring their kids to this sort of success, and I feel highly motivated to try. We do have a guitar connection, but it is a flimsy one. I have been crashing through three-chord progressions since I was 12 or 13 and wanted to copy the rock and roll that overnight had started pouring out of the radio. I learned a few Elvis songs and a few Johnny Cash songs, establishing a repertoire that has changed hardly at all to this day. I tried to play the guitar licks between verses, but my hands were as fast as Tyler’s feet would someday be, and I gave that up and just stuck to the chords.
So Tyler heard his dad play guitar from the time he was born, and he may have been inspired by the sound, or by staring through the bars of his crib, thinking somebody really needed to teach me how to play that thing, and it might as well be him, someday. I do know that on Tyler’s MySpace page, he lists me fourth among the people who have inspired him, behind Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, Jerry Garcia, and David Grier.
That is pride enough for me. I think the inspiration that brought Tyler to becoming a guitar champion started the same place that mine did, listening to music he liked. When he heard bluegrass, he knew what he wanted to do. Then he did the work.
It has been a lot of work. Tyler started when he was 16 or 17. Now he is 32. He has degrees from Grossmont College and California University of the Arts. He knows music theory. He plays classical guitar. He practices three or four hours a day. One day years ago he was playing and I asked him what the tune was. “Just notes,” he said. He was practicing what he called a pentatonic scale. Sounded like music to me.
I have watched Tyler’s hands through these years. They weren’t nearly as fast in the beginning. About a year ago, I heard him reach a fluidity that gives the impression that playing the guitar isn’t work at all. The reward for all the work is that playing starts to sound easy. When I hear Tyler playing on a CD, I see his fingers on the strings, and that connection is a gift for a lifetime. There is a very good photo of him at his sister’s Website at oliveme.wordpress.com. You will also find there a very good summation of the winning ways that Tyler brought to the stage with him last Saturday.
September 18, 2008
Approaching HDTV, over
Lots of circles closing around here. One last week, and now another one. I like circles closing, but when they start coming fast like this, there is the dark breath of a suggestion of an end being nigh. When the One Great Circle starts to close . . . well, never mind. Is it too late to get some new circles started?
This circle started in 1952, when word came that Abilene, Texas, my hometown, was going to have its own television station going on the air in 1953. This was hysterically good news to a nine-year-old who had already successfully badgered his elders into placing a 21-inch Zenith, complete with ChannelMaster antenna, in a corner of the living room even though the nearest stations were in Dallas, 160 miles away. It was truly miraculous. I could bring in ghostly images from KRLD and WFAA and faint snatches of voice escaping the static. Otherwise the TV was a good vase holder, and of course an easy way to shut me up for hours at a time.
In 1952, television was novel technology. The radio, you turned it on, you turned it off. The television, you had to know how to operate it, requiring a melding of the mind with strange new forces inside the TV that were swayed by an array of controls. I can honestly say, in 2008, that television in 1952-53 was a television from another planet.
Here’s how you changed the channel. First you had to physically know where the station transmitter was from your house. For me, Channel 9 was south, Channel 12 was west. Say I’m watching 9 and want to watch 12. I have two options. I can rotate the ChannelMaster dial from S to W and run madly outside and watch the antenna swing around. Or I can click the TV dial from 9 to 12, then rotate the ChannelMaster and shriek with delight as the 12 picture slowly emerges out of the driving snow. My grandmother would take this in with the clearest expression I have ever seen of someone in a world coming to something that was totally devoid of a lick of sense.
Then you had to adjust the Vertical Hold, the Horizontal Hold, and the Fine Tune Knob, and quite possibly the ChannelMaster some more until the 12 picture yielded to these demands and centered itself quietly more or less in the center of the screen. Half an hour later – or maybe just 15 minutes – a lot of shows in 1953 were only 15 minutes long – to flip back to Channel 9, you repeated the process.
Television eventually became as simple as a radio to use, and all through the 1980s and ‘90s I would brag to young remote-wielding couch potatoes how making a television picture come in took one part boy, one part God and one part Charles Lindbergh. Yesterday the circle closed. Karen wondered if we shouldn’t investigate HDTVs. It was an offer a 65-year-old boy couldn’t refuse.
Quickly I found that television has entered a new world. The last TV we bought, we went to the store, decided which was the best picture, took it home, plugged it in, turned it on. It has been that way for 35 years. Now it is 1953 again. I am reading about HDTV online and it is all if, and, and but. Compared to this, the 1952 Zenith really was black and white.
This circle started in 1952, when word came that Abilene, Texas, my hometown, was going to have its own television station going on the air in 1953. This was hysterically good news to a nine-year-old who had already successfully badgered his elders into placing a 21-inch Zenith, complete with ChannelMaster antenna, in a corner of the living room even though the nearest stations were in Dallas, 160 miles away. It was truly miraculous. I could bring in ghostly images from KRLD and WFAA and faint snatches of voice escaping the static. Otherwise the TV was a good vase holder, and of course an easy way to shut me up for hours at a time.
In 1952, television was novel technology. The radio, you turned it on, you turned it off. The television, you had to know how to operate it, requiring a melding of the mind with strange new forces inside the TV that were swayed by an array of controls. I can honestly say, in 2008, that television in 1952-53 was a television from another planet.
Here’s how you changed the channel. First you had to physically know where the station transmitter was from your house. For me, Channel 9 was south, Channel 12 was west. Say I’m watching 9 and want to watch 12. I have two options. I can rotate the ChannelMaster dial from S to W and run madly outside and watch the antenna swing around. Or I can click the TV dial from 9 to 12, then rotate the ChannelMaster and shriek with delight as the 12 picture slowly emerges out of the driving snow. My grandmother would take this in with the clearest expression I have ever seen of someone in a world coming to something that was totally devoid of a lick of sense.
Then you had to adjust the Vertical Hold, the Horizontal Hold, and the Fine Tune Knob, and quite possibly the ChannelMaster some more until the 12 picture yielded to these demands and centered itself quietly more or less in the center of the screen. Half an hour later – or maybe just 15 minutes – a lot of shows in 1953 were only 15 minutes long – to flip back to Channel 9, you repeated the process.
Television eventually became as simple as a radio to use, and all through the 1980s and ‘90s I would brag to young remote-wielding couch potatoes how making a television picture come in took one part boy, one part God and one part Charles Lindbergh. Yesterday the circle closed. Karen wondered if we shouldn’t investigate HDTVs. It was an offer a 65-year-old boy couldn’t refuse.
Quickly I found that television has entered a new world. The last TV we bought, we went to the store, decided which was the best picture, took it home, plugged it in, turned it on. It has been that way for 35 years. Now it is 1953 again. I am reading about HDTV online and it is all if, and, and but. Compared to this, the 1952 Zenith really was black and white.
September 12, 2008
Acorn Fever strikes Southern California
It is 2:30 in the afternoon in San Diego, California, and I just pulled on a sweatshirt. I've felt it coming on for several days and now, just like that, it has hit. Acorn Fever.
Acorn Fever strikes thousands of Southern California residents every September. Some suggestion of fall weather breaks out and infects us with strong urges to pull on sweaters, build fires, rake leaves, and drink apple cider. The problem is, there are no leaves to rake. This afternoon and tomorrow, I can expect to go out for a drive and see numerous Pendleton-clad Acorn Fever victims with leaf brooms, purposefully raking green, leaf-free lawns. I can drive to the freeway and notice thick eastbound traffic, headed for our local mountains 30 miles away to buy jugs of cider. From chimneys I can expect the scent of wood smoke. Threats to life are in the air.
We are fortunate this season that the Fever appears to have struck on a Friday. Most people don't have to go to work tomorrow. In years when the attacks come on a Monday or Tuesday, the next day you will witness our downtown streets populated with workers in plaids and woolens and pashminas. Weather that started cool and gray at sunrise will have evolved by noon into a blue glare of sky and beach temperatures. By 2 p.m. the downtown temperature may be in the 80s. September is typically our hottest month in Southern California, which is why Acorn Fever is so insidious. By 3 p.m., police and other emergency agencies will be cruising the streets, watching for dark clumps of woolens where a citizen has collapsed and is dissolving into a puddle of sweat on the sidewalk.
Acorn Fever hardly ever strikes twice the same way, but the result is always the same. There is the viral suggestion of fall, enough to make people find sweaters and pull out stewpots, but the suggestion is short-lived, quickly followed by typical September temperatures in the 90s or over 100, which catch the afflicted in their tracks, or in their cars with the heaters on.
Sometimes Acorn Fever arrives with a snap, or what we call a snap in this part of the world. Snaps usually arrive at the end of a particularly hot July and August. A couple of years ago, we hit 118 one afternoon in July. People forget that Southern California essentially is a desert, all the way to the ocean. If we didn't import water over long interstate distances, very few people would live here at all. So after a summer like that, one morning in September the temperature will actually briefly slip below 60. That is what we call a snap.
But this summer has been atypically cool, very few afternoons even into the 90s, even inland, away from the ocean. Among Acorn Fever observers, interest was heightened as September arrived. How might it hit this year, if at all? A September without Acorn Fever would make history. Last Monday, I noticed – or more than noticed – I felt – the morning light arrive later, and the evening dusk arrive sooner. A circadian gear shifted in my head. Then on Wednesday, driving home in the early evening, objects beyond the windshield lost their edges, reminding me of the scene in "Dark Victory" when Bette Davis wonders where the clouds came from so suddenly. I'm at an age where I have lost both hips and my prostate, so it wasn't difficult for me to imagine instant glaucoma. I rubbed my eyes.
But then I looked at the windshield and saw the film of fog spreading upward from the dashboard. I couldn't feel it, but the glass was sensitive enough to feel some differential in the air. It was the Fever out there, incubating. Then today the morning clouds didn't burn off. It even drizzled. At 2:30, the clouds are still there and the house feels cool. Too cool. It is so cozy in this sweater. I should probably build a fire, but I think I'll settle for a couple of chili dogs and see if the thing blows over.
Acorn Fever strikes thousands of Southern California residents every September. Some suggestion of fall weather breaks out and infects us with strong urges to pull on sweaters, build fires, rake leaves, and drink apple cider. The problem is, there are no leaves to rake. This afternoon and tomorrow, I can expect to go out for a drive and see numerous Pendleton-clad Acorn Fever victims with leaf brooms, purposefully raking green, leaf-free lawns. I can drive to the freeway and notice thick eastbound traffic, headed for our local mountains 30 miles away to buy jugs of cider. From chimneys I can expect the scent of wood smoke. Threats to life are in the air.
We are fortunate this season that the Fever appears to have struck on a Friday. Most people don't have to go to work tomorrow. In years when the attacks come on a Monday or Tuesday, the next day you will witness our downtown streets populated with workers in plaids and woolens and pashminas. Weather that started cool and gray at sunrise will have evolved by noon into a blue glare of sky and beach temperatures. By 2 p.m. the downtown temperature may be in the 80s. September is typically our hottest month in Southern California, which is why Acorn Fever is so insidious. By 3 p.m., police and other emergency agencies will be cruising the streets, watching for dark clumps of woolens where a citizen has collapsed and is dissolving into a puddle of sweat on the sidewalk.
Acorn Fever hardly ever strikes twice the same way, but the result is always the same. There is the viral suggestion of fall, enough to make people find sweaters and pull out stewpots, but the suggestion is short-lived, quickly followed by typical September temperatures in the 90s or over 100, which catch the afflicted in their tracks, or in their cars with the heaters on.
Sometimes Acorn Fever arrives with a snap, or what we call a snap in this part of the world. Snaps usually arrive at the end of a particularly hot July and August. A couple of years ago, we hit 118 one afternoon in July. People forget that Southern California essentially is a desert, all the way to the ocean. If we didn't import water over long interstate distances, very few people would live here at all. So after a summer like that, one morning in September the temperature will actually briefly slip below 60. That is what we call a snap.
But this summer has been atypically cool, very few afternoons even into the 90s, even inland, away from the ocean. Among Acorn Fever observers, interest was heightened as September arrived. How might it hit this year, if at all? A September without Acorn Fever would make history. Last Monday, I noticed – or more than noticed – I felt – the morning light arrive later, and the evening dusk arrive sooner. A circadian gear shifted in my head. Then on Wednesday, driving home in the early evening, objects beyond the windshield lost their edges, reminding me of the scene in "Dark Victory" when Bette Davis wonders where the clouds came from so suddenly. I'm at an age where I have lost both hips and my prostate, so it wasn't difficult for me to imagine instant glaucoma. I rubbed my eyes.
But then I looked at the windshield and saw the film of fog spreading upward from the dashboard. I couldn't feel it, but the glass was sensitive enough to feel some differential in the air. It was the Fever out there, incubating. Then today the morning clouds didn't burn off. It even drizzled. At 2:30, the clouds are still there and the house feels cool. Too cool. It is so cozy in this sweater. I should probably build a fire, but I think I'll settle for a couple of chili dogs and see if the thing blows over.
September 11, 2008
"Hockey Mom" fading, "Lipstick Season" awaits
“Hockey Mom” is still pulling great ratings, but I saw my first “I’m sick of” comment in the media pages today. Tomorrow, “HM” episodes will have been on the air 24/7 for two weeks, with almost no change in the dialogue. Sarah Palin says the same lines, over and over again. It’s worse than being forced to watch nothing but “Survivor” 24/7 for two weeks. Pretty soon, nothing helps. You could put lipstick on “Survivor” and it would still be “Survivor.”
That’s where we are. You could put lipstick on “Hockey Mom,” and it would still be “Hockey Mom.” The novelty is wearing off, as the novelty always does. If the show’s producers expect Sarah Palin to get John McCain elected, look for some re-invention soon. God help them if the audience starts calling for guest appearances from Joe Lieberman.
Wherever that goes, “Hockey Mom” has been responsible for a great spinoff, “Lipstick Season,” which may be topping the Nielsens long after the election. At last, the media has a reality show that means something. Millions of American women are coming onstage to talk about what it means to be a woman in a society where “Hockey Mom,” which portrays a woman as a marketing tool, can become a hit.
Millions of American men should be drawn to “Lipstick Season” too, but I’m only interested in one of them. Me. Karen has poured thousands of rounds of cannon fire into the television since “Hockey Mom” came on, and I find myself mystified. It is as if she is speaking a second language that I never heard before. I have fancied myself a hard worker where understanding women’s issues is concerned, but now I have to borrow a line from Olympia Dukakis: what I don’t know about women is a lot.
I think it is a matter of women finally having a double standard placed so everyone can see it, and placed there by a woman in the employ, of all agencies, the Republican Party, which women think wouldn’t know a double standard if one came up and bit it on the leg. It’s very convoluted, very hard to follow, totally new in my experience. Someone on morning television speaks of Palin’s right to privacy, and Karen fires back, the kitchen shaking with the thunder of the barrage. She is visibly incensed and combative, that same intensity I have sensed in the national air since Palin came on the scene.
I ask Karen to explain it to me, and she growls that the right to privacy is the bedrock principle of a woman’s right to choose what she does with her body. I try to put it together, but I have always been weak with any thinking that involves inverted or over-under-around-through logic: if this is right, then that is wrong, which makes this other thing right. It takes the form of, well, how can Palin do this, when that is so, or not so?
It may be that Palin has pulled the pin on a gender grenade starting a war that women have been itching to fight, but couldn’t, because before, it was always a man pulling the pin. Is this a war that can only be fought with lipstick? Am I making any sense? I wish I knew, but I do know that I am feeling decidedly grateful in an over-under-around-through way to the GOP producers for “Hockey Mom” and the way it is setting the stage for “Lipstick Season.” I think it is going to be an epochal production.
That’s where we are. You could put lipstick on “Hockey Mom,” and it would still be “Hockey Mom.” The novelty is wearing off, as the novelty always does. If the show’s producers expect Sarah Palin to get John McCain elected, look for some re-invention soon. God help them if the audience starts calling for guest appearances from Joe Lieberman.
Wherever that goes, “Hockey Mom” has been responsible for a great spinoff, “Lipstick Season,” which may be topping the Nielsens long after the election. At last, the media has a reality show that means something. Millions of American women are coming onstage to talk about what it means to be a woman in a society where “Hockey Mom,” which portrays a woman as a marketing tool, can become a hit.
Millions of American men should be drawn to “Lipstick Season” too, but I’m only interested in one of them. Me. Karen has poured thousands of rounds of cannon fire into the television since “Hockey Mom” came on, and I find myself mystified. It is as if she is speaking a second language that I never heard before. I have fancied myself a hard worker where understanding women’s issues is concerned, but now I have to borrow a line from Olympia Dukakis: what I don’t know about women is a lot.
I think it is a matter of women finally having a double standard placed so everyone can see it, and placed there by a woman in the employ, of all agencies, the Republican Party, which women think wouldn’t know a double standard if one came up and bit it on the leg. It’s very convoluted, very hard to follow, totally new in my experience. Someone on morning television speaks of Palin’s right to privacy, and Karen fires back, the kitchen shaking with the thunder of the barrage. She is visibly incensed and combative, that same intensity I have sensed in the national air since Palin came on the scene.
I ask Karen to explain it to me, and she growls that the right to privacy is the bedrock principle of a woman’s right to choose what she does with her body. I try to put it together, but I have always been weak with any thinking that involves inverted or over-under-around-through logic: if this is right, then that is wrong, which makes this other thing right. It takes the form of, well, how can Palin do this, when that is so, or not so?
It may be that Palin has pulled the pin on a gender grenade starting a war that women have been itching to fight, but couldn’t, because before, it was always a man pulling the pin. Is this a war that can only be fought with lipstick? Am I making any sense? I wish I knew, but I do know that I am feeling decidedly grateful in an over-under-around-through way to the GOP producers for “Hockey Mom” and the way it is setting the stage for “Lipstick Season.” I think it is going to be an epochal production.
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