Panic in the Newsroom

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Apr 222013
 

    If you’ll Google “Koch Brothers Chicago Tribune,” you’ll get a bushel of interesting returns. I am amused.

A few years back, when a (ed: opinion coming) deservedly obscure but vaultingly ambitious  Illinois State Senator named Obama decided to run for the U. S. Senate, the Chicago news media cleared the way for him, first in the Democratic primary election, disposing of the front runner, a rich lefty named Blair Hull, whose ex-wife had accused him of being violent. Then they disposed of the Republican, another rich guy this time from the right, named Jack Ryan, because his ex wife, a minor actress renowned for, mmm, her architecture,  accused him of taking her to scandalous Paris clubs while they were married. The accusations were made after their divorce, in a custody proceeding. In the Hull and Ryan cases, the litigation was supposedly sealed, and somehow leaked and then released. Which simply means that in Illinois, ain’t nothin’ sealed. The Chicago news media, first the Fun Times and then the Tribunal, got ahold of the scandals and used them to bludgeon Blair Hull and Jack Ryan out of the campaigns. For all I know, both Hull and Ryan are horrible tentacled monsters from the Dungeon Dimensions. Or not. It doesn’t matter. The media used the allegations, not any substance behind them, to create a scandal and smooth their favored candidate’s way. Smoothed it all the way to the White House, they did.

Thing is, of course, that divorcing and divorced people lie about each other. The more that’s at stake, the more they lie.

Now, advocacy is part of journalism. Always has been, always will be. Good reporters and opinionators transcend their advocacy at least a little, but it’s there and should be. The Tribune was founded in part to be an abolitionist platform. It became infamous (at least if you are a progressive) for the crusades of it’s long-time publisher, Robert McCormick, a lavishly opinionated man:

McCormick carried on crusades against gangsters and racketeers, prohibition and prohibitionists, local, state, and national politicians, Wall Street, the East and Easterners, Democrats, the New Deal and the Fair Deal, liberal Republicans, the League of Nations, the World Court, the United Nations, British imperialism, socialism, and communism. Besides Roosevelt, his chief targets included Chicago Mayor William Hale Thompson and Illinois Governor Len Small. Some of McCormick’s personal crusades were seen as quixotic (such as his attempts to reform spelling of the English language) and were parodied in political cartoons in rival Frank Knox’s Chicago Daily News. Knox’s political cartoonists, including Cecil Jensen, derided McCormick as “Colonel McCosmic”, a “pompous, paunchy, didactic individual with a bristling mustache and superlative ego.”

In the current, on-line version of the Tribune, a caricature of the Colonel is used as a semi-humorous avatar of the company. He would not have approved.

So it it happens that the Brothers Koch purchase the eight newspapers of the Tribune Company, it will be an example of Dame Fortuna’s wheel rotating. The current Tribune is a rather sad, drab, and boring place. Whatever will they do with it?

 Posted by Jack at 5:51 am  Tagged with: , , , ,

The Uses of Crises

 Opinionification  1 Response »
Dec 202012
 

Since Friday’s horror at Sandy Hook, I’ve been often enough overcome by tears, as I am sure a lot of us have been. No one who has cared for a small child is not in some way wounded by this howling evil.  Parents and grandparents everywhere share to some small extent in the bottomless grief of the parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, of the Innocents of Sandy Hook.
When these things happen, the heart cries for action.  What is to be done?  Can’t we prevent these massacres?
First of all, far and away first of all, no plan or program that does not account for the brokenness of each and every human being has the least chance of mitigating or ending the danger.  Our culture doesn’t like to deal with this essential, truly essential, fact very much, but there it is, and the evidence for it is everywhere.
The fantasy of the Institutional Radical Progressive (no, not Liberal, they love neither Liberty nor open discussion, but are dictatorial and censorious) is that human brokenness can be solved with legislation and regulation, so they propose greater or lesser increases in the control over firearms.  To which, the smart alec (but entirely on point) reply is, “The War on Drugs is going well, isn’t it?  Can’t get illegal drugs anywhere.  Bravo, well done, what next?”  As long as there is a market for them, any prohibited object will find its way to those who want them, and, quite possibly, in even more lethal forms.  Prohibition only moves problems around.  Sometimes things need to be prohibited, but our historical evidence is that prohibition is rarely successful.
On the other hand, Second Amendment purists have to come to grips with the ‘force-multiplying’ effect of guns.  Without guns, Adam Lanza might still have killed his mother, and that would have been a horrible family tragedy.  Knives, staircases, bricks, swimming pools, frying pans, bottles, household cleaners, and quite a lot of ordinary tools, can be quite lethal if one is of sufficiently murderous intent.  But it would have been a  family tragedy only, not a national one.    It was the combination of his madness and some weapons that has made it a national horror.  I myself wouldn’t mind seeing a massive tariff on large capacity magazines, and restrictions on certain types of ammunition, knowing that those would not eliminate but maybe reduce their availability.  Beyond that, I suspect that only cooperation between knowledgeable and reasonable gun owners and law enforcement and security specialists will come up with effective proposals.  And that I’ll leave to them:  with my vision, I might be able to hit the broad side of a barn.  With a shotgun.  From close range.  Firearms are not my world.
We must be cautious about how folks use tragedy.  Quite near my home is an east-west arterial street, not the most heavily travelled (that one is another half mile north), but busy enough.  It’s a divided street, with shops and homes and a couple of schools.  The speed limit was 30 mph for years, 20 in the school zones.  In my experience, these are reasonable limits, most of the time.  Of course people go faster: that’s what people do.  Of course they text while driving, or drive while furiously angry with their girlfriend, or their boss, or because they just didn’t give themselves enough time to get to work.  That’s what people do.
Earlier this year, there was a tragedy when a 9 year old boy on a bicycle was killed when a driver turning from one of the north-south streets struck a van, then the boy riding the sidewalk.  The agitation for a reduced speed limit on the arterial street began at once, and was successful – the limit is now 25 mph, and there is talk of a stoplight near one of the schools.
However, a different kind of speed killed the boy.  The driver who initiated the sequence was high as a kite on marijuana and amphetamines, and that this was not her first offense for DUI.  She may well have been driving too fast (though on the side street, not the arterial), but she should not have been driving a car in the first place.  The remedy enacted by the town will do precisely nothing to address the cause of the tragedy.  We live in Cook County, after all, where the chairman of the County Board discourages “minor” arrests for marijuana possession.  Law abiding citizens will slow down; folks who ignore speed limits  and “yield right of way” signs, or drive while intoxicated, will continue to do so, and our courts will continue to tolerate such drivers.
The demands of our broken hearts make us easily misled.  Beware those who seize on a tragedy to drive an agenda of their own.

 Posted by Jack at 3:11 pm

Another Election Post Mortem: Losing the 4th Quarter

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Nov 122012
 

When political conservatives lose elections, they get all despondent, think that no one loves them, and they wonder if they have to change their message.  When political radicals lose elections, they start thinking about how to win the next one – or in some rare cases or places, steal it.  They do not change their goals.  In last weeks election, should anyone have bothered to notice, we all saw the influence of the Chicago Method.  Identify your voters well in advance and make sure they get to the poll.  The Chicago Machine has always been very good at knowing who would vote the straight ticket and why, and making sure they would vote.  Sure, they stole votes when they had to.  But what Axe and Obama brought off last week was a matter of identifying their core voters at the precinct level and getting them to the poll.  The Romney folks did a poor job of that where it counted.  Watching his campaign was a lot like watching Northwestern football this year: finding a way to lose it in the fourth quarter.  Sometimes at the last second.  This wasn’t about ideology, nor did a national endorsement of the President’s policies (whatever they are) occur.  Conservatives should be talking the nitty gritty of building up local organizations and finding and persuading voters at the local level.  Because that’s how you win elections.

 Posted by Jack at 2:34 pm  Tagged with: ,

Election Post Mortem #1

 Opinionification  1 Response »
Nov 072012
 

Yesterday’s election was, I think, illuminating in all sorts of ways, and I’ll be muttering (mostly to myself, I fear) about them intermittently.

Briefly, and for starters, the President lost around 10 million of his supporters from 4 years ago.  This is fairly unprecedented; reelected presidents usually gain in the popular total, not lose.  One has to go back to Franklin Roosevelt’s third term to find the same result, and his third term was  controversial even among his supporters.  Mitt Romney managed to lose votes in comparison with John McCain, though not nearly to the same degree.  However, he failed to generate any enthusiasm for Mitt Romney.  At first look, it seems likely that those who lost their enthusiasm for Mr. Obama simply stayed home.

 

 Posted by Jack at 11:12 am  Tagged with:

Shame

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Oct 312012
 

I worked in Federal employment for 29 ½ years, finally taking an early out offer of the sort that the government made then – essentially allowed to retire 6 months early.  Certainly no bonus was involved.   The idea was that I would work at some writing, give my wife more time to do her job teaching engineers and premeds, and maybe do some research – and have a parent at home most of the time as our daughter entered high school.  It didn’t quite work out that way, but that’s besides the point.  Nor, for that matter, did I set out to be a bureaucrat – back in the long ago, doors to other careers slammed shut, sometimes by my folly, sometimes by other folks, sometimes because of the times.  Water, bridge.

Federal employment had drawbacks and advantages, much as do other fields.  It’s a bit amusing these days to read from some self-defined ‘conservatives’ vituperation heaped on public sector workers that is really quite like the vituperation that self-defined ‘progressives’ apply to “capitalists.’  Neither of it is very realistic.  But in those years, I was ashamed of working for Uncle precisely once:

This application of wholly unnecessary police power upon someone who wished only to live in freedom was far decency the boundaries of decency.  One can, I suppose,  debate the Clinton Administration’s policy in re Elian: what appalled me was the application of force.  It still does.

 

 

Now this event revived that sense of indecency:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As time passes, and it becomes ever more clear that the Administration knew from the outset that the attack on the American Consulate was a planned terrorist attack, the effort to scapegoat anyone however much a mope he might be is ever more appalling.  As evidence accumulates, it becomes ever more obvious that something happened that is unprecedented in my experience – Americans were left to die when help was possible and (relatively) immediately available.  But while the growing body of evidence has its own fascination, the sheer, deliberate, deceitful effort to direct attention away from the real causes and toward someone entirely irrelevant, is appalling.  And indecent.

This was, keep in mind, a President who came in to office promising to do things differently.

 Posted by Jack at 11:41 am  Tagged with: , ,

Don’t Take It, It’s a Trap

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Aug 222012
 

(With apologies to Big Al)
The other day, Republican congressman and candidate for the Senate from Missouri Todd Akin swallowed his leg entire.  He made the mistake of answering the “What about pregnancy resulting from rape” trap question with this bit of wackitude:

It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

Poor Missouri.

The rape question when put to pro-life candidates, especially men, is a trap and nothing else.  It’s an opportunity to show yourself to be a knuckledragging  doofus, and Mr. Akin seized the opportunity with splendid vigor.  Pro-life candidates should never answer this question.  The sound bite response is easy: “Well, Talking Head, hard cases make bad law.”  You might elaborate very slightly, but not much.  And responding as a Christian, he might say, “Talking Head, this is what sin does.  It leaves us with problems human beings can’t solve.  A horrible crime has been committed. The woman’s freedom of choice has been violated.  On the other hand, a new life is involved now.”

But, Oh No, he couldn’t recognize the trap, he walked right in, and he gives such opposition thugs as my very own Jan Schakowsky (D, Ogawdnojanistalkingagainpleaseshutup) to accuse every Republican everywhere of being of the same doofus ilk.

Of course, the U. S. Senate has a long tradition of doofusing.  Some of its members, having developed and displayed their doofusness for many years, are elevated to higher office.  Mr. Akin here displays a willingness to avoid admitting that sometimes we get  truly difficult conundrums by escaping in an inky cloud of pseudoscience babble.  Our senators, however, will have nothing but hard cases to deal with in the next decade or so.  The current majority in the Senate have managed to avoid passing a budget, which is sort of a big part of their job, for years.  Avoiding hard decisions is a good deal of how we got into this mess.

 Posted by Jack at 4:59 am  Tagged with: , ,

Yes Sir, Senator

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Jul 192012
 

The President has attracted much comment for his “you didn’t build this” speech.  His display of economic naivete has provoked hilarity, anger, indignation, and, of course, among his supporters, explanation.  It is one of those highly unpackable moments.

Experienced and (relatively) alert long time residents of the Chicago area will recognize the tendency to give to the state – whether the City, Township, County, Region, or State – a real identity, complete with “needs” (usually for money), as if these political entities have an existence apart from the will of the voters.  Chicago and Cook County have not been in any sense a democracy for decades – they are self-perpetuating oligarchies, attached to no real ideology, and the only real crime is to lose the next election.  This oligarchic approach has been spreading to the rest of the state for years, and has nearly consumed it.  For the young politician hereabouts, this oligarchy is the teat upon which he must suck, dispensing favors, the opportunity to run for office, cash, the acquaintance of insiders, assistants, coat holders, flacks, and fixers.  It’s pretty appalling.

The politicians adapted this strange environment exhibit some interesting behaviors.  For example, come election season, judges up for retention often (but no always) discover an Irish heritage.  Lawn signs for these judges often feature the color green, with the Irish name (often a middle name, and sometimes a middle name never heard of between elections) in large characters.  Politician wannabes often portray themselves as reformers and critics of the political establishment.  After serving their apprenticeship as rebels and outsiders, they become adopted by the oligarchy, filling the ranks of county commissioners, water reclamation commissioners, and members of the state house of representatives. The President did the young Turk thing early in his career, as did his Chief Henchman David Axelrod.  It is a larval stage through which they must pass, not uncommon with other parasitic forms.  This parasite dispenses a mildly soporific drug called “services” that convinces the voting public that the parasites are indispensable to survival, in the form of garbage cans, contracts for government services, zoning variances, property tax appeals, and so on.   That government might exist to serve the citizenry is an idea so lost as to be utterly forgotten.

So it is not surprising that a politician nurtured in this political culture would say what he said.  It does, however, resonate with an aspect of contemporary culture, the “giving back” culture that so many younger folks are inculcated into.  This is a phenomenon worthy of much examination, but the grammar itself is intriguing.  “Giving back” makes an assumption about how we have what we have, and it is that the larger society has “given” to us, and that it is correspondingly appropriate to “give back” in various ways.  This giving back may certainly be good and appropriate in many ways, but an assumption it’s easy to see how it fits with the President’s own assumptions.  I imagine that I shall ruminate upon this more in the immediate future.

 Posted by Jack at 12:00 pm

ACA Meanderings

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Jun 282012
 

I view the Affordable Care Act unfavorably, mostly, and on entirely prudential and experiential grounds.  I spent 30 years in a Federal social services bureaucracy, and found that, by and large, with the usual exceptions to validate the rule, utter mediocrity finds its way to the top, where it preserves itself rigorously.  This led to White’s Law of the Intelligence of Large Organizations:

The effective IQ of any large organization is equal to the nth root of the sum of the IQs of the n members of the organization.

In other words, it approaches 1.  Fast.  Do you really want the sort of person who thinks this is a good idea (tug o’ the forelock to MCJ) to be making decisions about your own health care, or your child’s or your parents?  That’s what we’ll get.

Additionally, the Federal Government cannot produce much of anything, much less more health care.  That can be done only by economic forces, which can be guided partially, but not controlled.  What Uncle can do to reasonably good effect is ration, and I really don’t think we want to go there.

With that out of the way, today’s Supreme Court decision seems itself to be prudential.  Faced with a split court, the Chief Justice acted to remove the Court from the election and made the ACA the centerpiece of the summer and fall campaign, as it should be.  A 5-4 decision to overturn the ACA would have made the Supreme Court the center of attention.  Now the center of attention is the ACA itself, and its fate is in the hands of the electorate.  Which is as it should be.  The tax that wasn’t a tax is clearly stated to be a tax, and the Commerce Clause expansionists have been cuffed around a bit.  Now it’s in the hands of the voters.  If the electorate wants the ACA repealed or substantially altered, they can elect Mitt Romney and a Heffalump House and Senate.  Or not.  As for me, no matter what the rest of the country wants, I am still stuck with Jan Schakowsky, who seems to be my Representative-for-life.

 Posted by Jack at 11:09 am  Tagged with: ,

Blood

 Family, Opinionification  No Responses »
Jun 022012
 

When aggravated with my father, my mother would sometimes get on her Mayflower descendent hobby horse and ride it around the house for a while.  Dad’s response would be to bring up his hillbilly/Cherokee connection.  One of my great-great-grandfathers on his side “married (maybe)” a Cherokee woman and lived on a mountain top in Tennessee, where he made a living skinning mules.  I am not making this up, though perhaps at the Elizabeth Warren Famous Genealogist’s School that’s acceptable practice.  This appears to be accurate, and though I don’t consider my cheekbones to be “high” I had jet black hair until my daughter turned 13.  I’m not too sure about Mom’s Mayflower claim – maybe through one of the Colonial Era wives.  The Cherokee great-great grandmother appears to be well proven, though sometimes Dad  would attribute his coloring to a hypothetical Black Irish connection, when he was really out to irritate her.  As best I know, there’s no Irish connection at all, at all, Black, Orange, or Green.  Some Scots, yes, which is genetically about the same as Irish, barring some Pictish admixture . . . but Cherokee, yes, almost certainly, according to those who have done the actual work.  Real amateur genealogists tend to be very meticulous, nearly obsessive, researchers.  So I am at least as Cherokee as Elizabeth Warren claims to be.  It’s not important.  Family roots are interesting and curious (generations of farmers seem to have left me with a tendency to get up early and a need to smell living soil some times), but they don’t determine who you are.  My ancestors have been (occasionally, and not nearly often enough) well-to-do, more often poor, sometimes brave, often foolish, sometimes besotted, sometimes teetotal.  In other words, like most folks.  Having an actual Oppressed Minority in the remoter parts of the gene pool is not very important.  Like most long time American families, I have slave owning distant relatives, and also fierce Abolitionists.  None of that determines who I am.

I suppose that Warren’s fabulizing is in ways about the same as those who take pride in discovering some smidgin of once-royal blood in some remote corner of their ancestry.  In 200 years someone might preen themselves over being a descendent of Steve Jobs.  That would not be very important either.

 Posted by Jack at 6:02 am  Tagged with: ,

Go Boom

 Culture, Opinionification  No Responses »
Mar 242012
 

I’ll be alone in this, I suspect.  Unread, certainly.

As we hurtle along Time’s highway, as the years fall like leaves before the wintry gale, as Baby Boomers get older,  it seems to becoming every slightly more common for the commenting classes to attribute to my generation whatever vice is to be belabored at the moment.  It’s convenient, easy, and sort of appealing.  The most recent example, and provocation for this mild rant, is Michael Walsh’s post in The Corner, which includes such staple imprecations as “Self-centered Baby Boomer liberalism.”

All right.  Let’s go.

The only statements about a large demographic cohort that can test true are quantitative.   Qualitative statements are always false.   “Baby Boomers are numerous,” is true, but “Baby Boomers are selfish” is rebutted by the existence of one unselfish Boomer.  My own, highly unscientific, cohort from high school and college includes engineers (lots), public school teachers, physicians, missionaries, astronomers (quite a few again, by quirk), classical musicians, nurses (again, lots), firemen, soldiers, a few layabouts, and a couple of drunks, and one major corporation CEO.  Maybe two.  Mostly, a bunch of people who just put one foot in front of the other, every day.  They screw up, they get up again.

What is certainly true about Boomers is that the normal human variety of characteristics can appear exaggerated by the size of the group, which, after all, Boomers had little to do with.

Mr. Walsh’s post is mostly about the “consequences of no consequences,” and that is certainly a problem we are all confronting.  It is not a concept that suddenly appeared among the Boomers in, oh, June 1967, without any precursor.  Indeed, the sources of the sort of generational irresponsibility that younger writers like to attribute to Boomers (and which is in fact present, to a degree, in all human generations) is an interesting question that I don’t think anyone has answered.  I am inclined to look at the tweeners, those born between the World Wars but who were too young for service in the Second.  Amongst academics, this cohort was entering middle age in the late 1960s, perhaps becoming a little frustrated with their lives, and looking with a certain amount of envy for the younger, rising, Boomers.  This generation included (and, once again, cannot be said to be universally anything) those who were frustrated with Dead White Male literature, and so began the movement away from them; it included many of the slightly older mentors of the Boomer hippies. The Chicago 7, for example, were none of the Boomers; William Ayers, friend and mentor to our current president, can’t accurately be identified as a Boomer (being born in 1944, just slightly ahead of the bulge).  Neither he nor his wife would have found the haven in academics that they did without the influence of William’s father.

Beyond doubt, the introduction of the Pill and it’s increasingly wide use in the 1960s created a window of time in which Boomers could actions did not have consequences.  People have rarely needed incentive to behave badly, and there were a lot of folks cheering us on.  Not everyone listened.

In other words, the tangle of influences that created those features that are so unpopular today didn’t originate among Boomers.  The more thoughtless forms of American Progressivism are maybe at work; the sort of mild, not terribly cogent Marxism that took refuge in the American academy; a lot of other ingredients that got tossed in the pot.  But not every Boomer ate that soup; it’s convenient to say so, but lazy.

 Posted by Jack at 5:06 am  Tagged with:
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