Nick Griffin, the leader of the tiny British National Party, has a very low profile outside the UK. Their best political showing has been to pick up two seats in the European Parliament, when they polled 6% of the UK vote in that election in June 2009.

They are a minority party and are unlikely to ever lead political thought in the UK, let alone Europe.

Griffin has never appeared on public television to either promote or defend his party. The BBC, acknowledging that he now represents a small, but distinct, subset of the British population, invited him onto their long-running political panel discussion show, Question Time.

Outside, angry demonstrators gathered to protest Griffin’s arrival. Hundreds of police battled hundreds of protestors. 25 broke through a barrier and managed to make it inside the BBC buildings before being dragged back outside. By the end of the evening, three policemen had been injured and six protestors arrested.

What gives?

The reason for this excitement is the platform espoused by the BNP. They demand that all “foreigners” be deported and that the borders be closed to immigrants. They’re a single-issue, racist party. That’s it.

There has been more than enough written about the BBC’s decision to invite the man that many Brits find personally offensive onto the public broadcaster. I’m a foreign-born Brit, and Jewish, so hardly someone that the BNP would allow as a member, but I believe that the BBC did the right thing.

Watching Griffin bumble about, claiming not to be a Nazi or a racist is amusing stuff. It allows his poison to be drawn and his opinions to be challenged, debated and held to account.

Unfortunately, that process is somewhat drained knowing that he had to fight his way through a lynch-mob just to get into the studio. Griffin may be a Nazi, but he’s a brave Nazi.

Breeding Headlines Breeding Extremists

There are a lot of people, both politicians and pundits, who make their living by catering to the fears and phobias of marginal groups. Until the coming of the telecommunications age, if these nutters wanted a mainstream platform, they’d have to pay for it themselves. It would cost a lot.

The Internet changed all that. Now even the most isolated loony can get a message out to other isolated members of the faithful. They can organise, communicate and incite each other to further levels of apoplexy.

But even this wouldn’t have much penetration into the lives of ordinary people.

Except for bloggers looking for something to write about.

Newspapers have long known the importance of a good headline. The film The Shipping News has the following exchange between Quoyle (Kevin Spacey), who is learning how to write for a local newspaper, and a colleague, Billy Pretty, played by Gordon Pinsent:

Pretty: It’s finding the centre of your story, the beating heart of it, that’s what makes a reporter. You have to start by making up some headlines. You know: short, punchy, dramatic headlines. Now, have a look, [pointing at dark clouds gathering in the sky over the ocean] what do you see? Tell me the headline.

Quoyle: HORIZON FILLS WITH DARK CLOUDS?

Pretty: IMMINENT STORM THREATENS VILLAGE.

Quoyle: But what if no storm comes?

Pretty: VILLAGE SPARED FROM DEADLY STORM.

The problem with this approach is that it leads to a selective understanding of events. When compounded by the rapid accretion of millions of “me-too” copies of the same story, it amounts to a “conversation” and swiftly becomes accepted wisdom.

It also becomes the benchmark for future headlines to rise above. This breeds ever-more hyperbolic headlines and hypes up the emotions of ever more people.

It is also an easy and cheap way to manipulate the mass media (which is what bloggers are these days) into giving away free advertising for a very small and indifferent bunch of nut-jobs.

All that a fledgling fascist has to do is make some inflammatory remark and watch the inevitable response from the blogosphere drive up awareness of his message. He can feed back into that opprobrium by simply selecting from some of the more extreme opposition comments and feed those back to his own support base.

What this does is remove the capacity for debate and push both opponents to the absolute extremes.

Coping with extremism in the blogosphere

Clearly progressive bloggers don’t set out to provide a platform for fascists and wing-nuts anymore than the BBC set out to promote the agenda of Nick Griffin.

The BBC’s approach is the best, and probably most difficult. It is to invite Griffin to present his own ideas and let him defend himself in a reasoned and reasonable debate. That debate couldn’t happen because it had become a moral crusade before he even arrived.

The violent protests show people that Griffin and those most opposed to him are equally thuggish and unpleasant. The true outrage and horror of the last 24 hours has not been Griffin, but the lack of respect for the institutions of the state, the press and the law exhibited by those claiming to defend it.

Now, it’s a tough job asking everyone with a loudhailer to speak softly, but that is precisely what is necessary.

Never before has the capacity for organisation and response to civil disagreements been so all-encompassing and speedy. Yet democracy and free speech is exactly all about giving the most unpleasant fringes of society a good airing.

Sunlight is a fantastic disinfectant. But baying for the blood of those at the edge just drives them and their supporters further away. They may express their fears badly, but not allowing them to express their fears at all will mean that they are never acknowledged, discussed and recognised.

Fighting extremism with extremism simply makes everyone a nut-case.

On the same day that The New York Times said (buried in its Media Decoder blog) that it would cut 100 newsroom jobs (again), Columbia University said it would not accept applications next year for its dual-degree graduate program in environmental journalism. The former is no surprise; the latter is a sad sign of the impact of newsroom job cuts on what news gets reported — or not.

In a letter to faculty, the directors of the program wrote:

As you know, media organizations across the county are in dire financial straits and thousands of journalists’ jobs have been eliminated. Science and environment beats have been particularly vulnerable. Although our graduates have done well in their careers, even those still employed are finding few opportunities to do the kind of substantive reporting for which the dual degree program has trained them, as they scramble to do their own work plus that of laid-off colleagues. [emphasis added]

Obviously, it’s a very discouraging time to be working in journalism with so many layoffs, buyouts, and closings. There are fewer staff jobs for specialized environmental reporters and fewer resources available to those who do have jobs. Tragically, this is happening at a time when environmental issues are finally getting more attention from the political and business realms. … the fate of newspapers will be the fate of science and environmental journalism at newspapers. They’re hemorrhaging jobs like mad, as so many of this journal’s readers are painfully aware, and I certainly have no idea what will staunch the bleeding. However, I can say that it’s been phenomenally impressive to watch how well print reporters have transitioned to the Web over the last few years. I really have no idea how practical it is — because there’s still no reliable business model for any kind of (web) journalism … [emphasis added]

One of those training grounds has been at Columbia. The directors of its suspended program, however, can read the tea leaves: Their graduates cannot reliably find reporting jobs at the nation’s daily newspapers. Yes, various online environmental journalism operations have sprouted. But their readership still can’t match the nearly 50 million newspapers printed daily. Though declining, that amount of paid circulation still has some muscle. But the decline in numbers of environmental journalists hurts, says the Observatory’s Brainard:

But who is watching all the municipal waste departments out there, looking over the environmental impact statements of local energy projects, or paying attention to water quality? Who will be keeping track of all environment- and energy-related stimulus money as it filters down to the lowest levels of government and out to businesses and contractors? Regional news outlets are the only ones who can reliably monitor such things. That’s exactly where we’ve lost so many of our very best journalists.

[Disclosure: I am a member of the SEJournal editorial board and its former chair.]

Part of my job as a journalism professor is to recruit students. Because I was a journalist, I’m interested in finding bright, hard-working young men and women who’d like to follow the calling of the public service mission of journalism. (I remain optimistic, perhaps foolishly.)

Parents of prospective students, of course, routinely ask: “What’s your record on job placement?” That I can tell them, based on surveys of our grads six months after matriculation. (And it’s an excellent record, too.)

But here’s the question I dread:

My daughter says she wants to be a journalist. Even if her financial aid package is half your $35,000 per year cost — and rising at 5 percent a year — and despite what parents can pay, she may end up with more than $30,000 or $40,000 in student loans. How long will it take for her on an entry-level journalist’s salary to recover her investment?

Surveys of journalism school grads from recent years say salaries in the mid-20s are customary. Entry-level print journalists earn a little less (in some cases, a lot less, as my graduates tell me); PR, advertising and some broadcast jobs earn more. That parent envisions an ROI on the family’s investment in the daughter’s education at three to five years or more. That’s at a private school; presumably, a public school grad would fare better.

If that young woman is bright, she’ll do her homework. She’ll ask me before sending in her enrollent deposit for the names of recent grads who landed daily print jobs after graduation. After getting their permission, I’ll give them to her. They’ll tell her this:

They love being journalists. They love telling a good story. But they detest working 60 or 70 hours, nights and weekends, for 40 hours’ pay. They detest the unpaid furloughs imposed by corporate managers looking to cut costs. Their raises, if profferred, lag significantly behind inflation. Because of numerous rounds of buyouts and layoffs, fewer older, experienced reporters and editors are available (and willing) to serve as mentors. Young journos are tired of seeing assignments that serve more as fluff than substance. They thought, as journalists, that they could make a difference. They are discovering that the current structure of the industry prevents that, frustrating them. Their health-care plans suck. And they’re tired of providing their own reporter’s notebooks.

That prospective student may still attend my journalism program — but if she’s keenly aware of her ROI, she may apply her time, treasure and talent to mastering the skills of a journalist only to apply them to other avenues of communication that pay more. She’ll learn to observe, record, analyze, organize and present. But she’ll do that concocting advertising and PR campaigns instead of digging up the dirt at city hall that unpaid “volunteer” amateurs and bloggers don’t do well or at all. That’s because those stories — the mundane but necessary stuff of holding government accountable — don’t drive traffic to blogs.

Yes, I paint a bleak picture. Yes, it’s overdrawn. But scratch journalists in their mid-20s, either at print jobs or small-market broadcast stations, and you’ll hear all these threads. And yes, there are a number of emerging avenues for distribution of journalists’ work operated by laid-off journos, foundations, non-profits and for-profit, online-only startups. There are places she can work as a journalist. But then there’s that ROI calculation: Making a difference vs. paying the bills and student loans.

I wonder where the journalists will come from who will be around 10 to 20 years from now to cover the financial funeral of Social Security, the continuing debate over health-care reform, the attempt by President Hillary Clinton to amend the constitution to allow her a third term and the still unfolding drama of Brett Favre’s 15th “retirement” from the Toronto Argonauts.

Thousands of journalists at daily papers have lost their jobs in just the past few years. Generally, they’ve been the older, more experienced journalists. Bean counters figure they can hire two, maybe three cub reporters for the dough they pay an experienced journo making Guild scale and excellent benefits after 25 years. And that’s if they hire at all.

Studies show that the nation’s journalism schools are cranking out about 12,000 graduates every year. But is the trend line of those who wish a journalism career with a public-service aura ascending or descending?

Where will the next generation of skilled, committed journalists come from if the perceived ROI of a journalism education is so dismal?

There was a time when abuse was performed with style, wit and elegance; and it came from a clear moral stance. The ancient Greeks raised it to an art form: it had a formal structure and it took risks by offending the powerful. Jonathan Swift’s savagely ironic A Modest Proposal, which urged that the Irish poor should sell their children to the rich as food, was a masterpiece of outrage and black humour.

But “snark” – the term is borrowed from Lewis Carroll – is something different. Denby refers to a tone of voice, which has spread far and wide thanks to new media technologies, that is content to spread casual calumnies without regard to whether they possess any sense of.

Snark is “free-floating contempt in a void”: it is the unchecked innuendo that can end a career, or the clumsy and overblown destruction of easy targets. Its purveyor-in-chief is the anonymous internet blogger, who has nothing positive to contribute to civic discourse other than “low, ragging insult with a little curlicue of knowingess”.

Denby, a film critic for The New Yorker, makes his case with wit – vital to avoid the obvious charge of humourlessness. He is at pains to rebut the accusation. To take a stand against snark is not to submit to self-importance and excessive earnestness; it is merely to call for greater care in the choosing of victims and the crafting of jokes.

There’s more, and it’s generally favourable. That’s the only review I’ve seen in the UK. I’ve also seen some reviews in the US, which seem to suggest that Aspeden’s enthusiasm is a bit misplaced. In New York Magazine, Adam Sternbergh had this to say:

You have to give David Denby credit for bravery: Writing a book titled Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation is like writing a book titled Keying My Car: It’s the Wrong Thing to Do or Why Flaming Bags of Dog Poop on My Doorstep Just Aren’t Funny. You invite the transgression even as you decry it; you loose the hounds on yourself. Given Denby’s age (65) and position in the firmament (film reviewer for The New Yorker), he could have written the most concise, insightful, artfully balanced, and expertly argued book about snark and still come off like an Internet-age Andy Rooney, wagging his finger from his rocking chair at the boisterous kids on the lawn. And he has not written the most concise, insightful, artfully balanced, and expertly argued book about snark.

I’m sorry, did that sound snarky? I apologize. Denby’s book invites—even begs masochistically to receive—a snarky response, but he won’t get one here. I enjoy snark. I practice snark. And I hope herein to defend snark. But it’s too easy to stamp this book with some snarky dismissal (EPIC FAIL) and continue on one’s self-satisfied way. Denby’s book is serious, and wrong, and it deserves an appropriate response. Moreover, the book is premised on a popular meme: that so-called snark, what he calls “a nasty, knowing strain of abuse spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation,” is both increasingly unavoidable and intrinsically corrosive. I disagree on both counts. Snark can be misused and misdirected. It can be mean, and it can be personal. It’s also not only useful as a form of public conversation but necessary, for reasons that Denby either ignores or fails to comprehend.

I thought this was a sensible, balanced and highly informed review, and it encouraged me to not read Denby’s book, unlike the sensible, balanced and highly informed Aspeden review, which made me think this book might be worth reading. Let’s see, can we get a third opinion? How about Walter Kirn in The New York Times?

In “Snark,” an earnest book-length essay of neo-Victorian public-mindedness that deplores the “nasty, knowing abuse” that the author would have us fear contaminates too much American humour lately, David Denby, a movie critic for The New Yorker, sets for himself what has to be one of the most quixotic projects that a moral reformer can undertake. He wants to correct and restrain, using scholarship and logic, perhaps the keenest, most reflexive, prehistoric and anarchic of simple human pleasures, short of eating or achieving orgasm. The act of laughter, this would be. Or, for Denby, the act of low, illicit laughter — laughter enjoyed for the wrong reasons and provoked by the wrong lines. Whether laughter for the right reasons is even possible, given humour’s subversive, corrosive history, is a difficult philosophical question, of course, but Denby feels that it is. This follows from his belief that the impulses to giggle, grin and cackle (and the various means for stimulating these impulses) can be, and ought to be, consciously aligned with civic virtues and literary standards, lest our society laugh for no just cause, at jokes that aren’t witty enough to laugh at and that may even be plain stupid and malicious.

The humour that stirs this wrongful laughter is “snark,” named for a fictional creature from the poem “The Hunting of the Snark,” by Lewis Carroll. As a species of vicious contemporary humour, it is defined by Denby in many ways — so many, in fact, that the creature never materializes as anything more than a shadow on a wall that Denby keeps shooting at yet never hits. In his opening pages he defines snark negatively — as a practice that certain famed comics are often charged with, but undeservedly and inaccurately because they actually trade in “irony” and also, one can’t help but gather from Denby’s remarks, because they’re politically virtuous in their japery, even when their words seem cruel and harsh. Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart are two of these unfairly maligned non-snarkers. Sarah Silverman escapes unscathed, while Penn Jillette, an avowed libertarian who entertains mostly in Las Vegas nowadays, and Sarah Palin, an avowed big-game hunter who’s safely tucked away up north somewhere, are portrayed as snarkers par excellence. So is John McCain, coincidentally, and pretty much everyone who ever tweaked Barack Obama for any reason — especially if they did so on the Internet and indulged in prejudice.

But “hate speech” isn’t snark either, Denby writes, because it aims to “incite,” not get chuckles, and because it’s “directed at groups,” not individuals. Denby finds such discourse loathsome, presumably, but he states early on that it’s no concern of his, first because it’s a constitutional right, and second, because he feels sorry for nuts who use it: “the legions of anguished, lost people on Web sites and the social networking site Facebook” who are “looking for a way to release fear.” In other words, vengeful morons can’t be snarky, only parties to bigoted violence now and then, which may be horrific and tragic but isn’t annoying. No, what really bugs Denby’s mandarin side is a much subtler species of expression: humour that celebrates “the power to ridicule” and is indulged in by semi-sophisticates who seek to sound clued-in and hip so as to soothe their feelings of “dispossession” and elevate their wounded self-esteem by sneering at folks like — get ready to be outraged! — the convicted insider trader Ivan Boesky, whose notorious taste in gaudy baubles was once satirized in the late Spy magazine.

And that, sir, is snark, society’s archenemy — making light fun of vulgar criminal robber barons who steal more in a month than Capone stole in a decade. This manner, this “snark,” and the motives he imputes to it, are treated by Denby as more ominous for our future prospects as a people than the invective of K.K.K. grand wizards. What he views as outbreaks of unacknowledged envy for the extremely wealthy and conspicuous by the comparatively poor and plain (masquerading as people of taste and virtue when, in fact, they’re merely climbers) is positively intolerable to him. And just as complicit in this grave offense (grave to Denby, but natural to the masses; see The National Enquirer and its routine photos of stars without their makeup) are the readers who laugh at such upstart snottiness. They should be bigger than that, somehow. Less petty.

Well, this is not at all helpful. It’s getting harder and harder to come up with a reason to read this book. Is there anyone in the US who liked the book? What about someone who represents everything Denby dislikes these days—Gawker, and intentionally snarky website? Well, I’m going to hazard a guess that they won’t like it. Bingo! In a review entitled Please Buy David Denby’s Book, So He Will Stop Talking, I learn that:

David Denby, the New Yorker movie critic (not the good one), continues to bait us in interview after interview so we’ll write something about his book Snark, so it will sell. Okay fine, here:

David Denby, can you present a short, clear, and meaningful definition of “snark,” that clearly delineates it from every other form of humour or criticism? Let’s see:

• “It’s not hate speech, it’s not trolling, it’s not simple insult. What I’m getting at is contempt, and a signal sent to a member of a club (which can be enormous or tiny) in which a certain kind of reference is understood, and stands in for an attitude that one wants to put down”…
• “’Snark is like a schoolyard taunt without the schoolyard,’ he writes. ‘Snark is hazing on the page.’” …
• “Denby, in a phone interview, defines snark as ‘the knowing nasty tone, the cheap shot.’” …
• “Snark is not original. It is essentially parasitic and lazy…Most people who are trying to be true use sarcasm or wit to speak the truth, but not snark”…
• “It is an adolescent tone. I think a lot of it is powerless…There are some heavy hitters of snark like Maureen Dowd, who I go after at some length, but most of it is sort of a confession of impotence and it does seem adolescent and it does seem like kids in a high school cafeteria or sitting around watching TV a lot of the time. But when older people do it, I think it’s because of the panic that’s setting in that we don’t know where journalism is going and we want to sound hip and we want young demographics and panic is not a good mood in which to write anything. You release that and it’s kind of juvenile sarcasm. It signals to readers that you’re up to date.”

No, you cannot. That’s because “snark” is not an actual, scientific term; it is a made-up word that means whatever the writer wants it to mean. Therefore your book, while perhaps eloquent (haven’t read), is, in the end, just a preposterously meaningless rant. A sort of “snark,” if you will.

Of course, Gawker is a blog, and blogs are the lowest of the low—even lower than Fox News, apparently—so there’s no point in looking at any other blogs either. They’re all going to hate it. Actually, as far as I can tell from a Google search, a lot more blogs have reviewed Snark than magazines or newspapers. I’m not sure what to make of this, and I guess I’m not sure what Denby will make of it either.

But wait—maybe I don’t have to read it. The Guardian had a whole post—no, I mean piece– by Denby, or a précis, or something, last Saturday. Denby is certainly doing his bit for book sales. So here’s the first bit.

What is snark? Abuse in a public forum of a particular kind – personal, low, teasing, rug-pulling, finger-pointing, snide, obvious, and knowing.

How does snark work? Snark is hazing on the page. It prides itself on wit, but it’s closer to a leg stuck out in a school corridor that sends some kid flying. It pretends to be all in fun, and anyone who’s annoyed by it will be greeted with the retort, “How can you take this seriously? What’s wrong with you?” – which has the doubly aggressive effect of putting the victim on the defensive. No one wants to argue with a joke, so this is shrewd as far as it goes. But some of these funsters are mean little toughs. Snark seizes on any vulnerability or weakness it can find – a slip of the tongue, a sentence not quite up to date, a bit of flab, an exposed boob, a blotch, a blemish, a wrinkle, an open fly, an open mouth, a closed mouth. It exploits – slyly, teasingly – race and gender prejudice. When there are no vulnerabilities, it makes them up. Snark razzes pomp, but it razzes certain kinds of strength, too – people who are unaffectedly serious. Snarky writers can’t bear being outclassed by anyone, and snark becomes the vehicle of their resentment and contempt.

Hmm. This does sound serious. But it also sounds really, really confused, hardly the sort of thing someone who read Great Books (twice, apparently)would write. Maybe he didn’t really read them–how else to explain the miasma above that’s supposed to pass for a paragraph? I mean, I’m as concerned with the debasement of modern discourse as the next guy. But that includes the debasement of language, and using sentences that make sense. Denby has lots of tips in the article on how snark operates—in fact, he counts the ways. But I’m not going to go into this any more–you can go read them if you want, but they read much like the quoted section.

In actuality, Denby has a point, but it’s the wrong one. It’s not that it’s easy to be snarky these days. There is, in fact, entirely too much snark around. It is all over the internet. But it’s also everywhere in the MSM, as Denby notes. It’s everywhere. But there’s a simple reason for that, and it’s not because people have become more, well, snarky. It’s because there are too many easy targets. At one time, there was a limited number of “celebrities” one could get snarky about. Now they are legion, and the success of Gawker and similar sites simply shows that they have multiplied beyond control. Ditto politics. The level of political discourse in the US has never been particularly high—snarky slurs against Washington and Jefferson were popular, and common, back then. But the political landscape now is so littered with easy targets that no one in their right mind could possibly resist being snarky, unless you’re totally devoid of any sense of humour whatsoever. Who could possibly make up the modern Republican party? People like Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay would at one time simply have been interesting characters in Pogo—now you can’t turn on the television without them shouting at you. The cultural landscape? Good lord, has anyone taken a look at The New York Times best seller list? Or what people watch on television? Or go to the movies to see? Really, the amount of effort being made on someone’s behalf to place all this dreck in front of us deserves nothing but snark.

So here’s my solution. Instead of trying to elevate the level of discourse about the culture around us, as Denby seems to want (although I haven’t read the book, so I can’t be certain), how about taking seriously the notion that a culture that gets as much snark as modern American culture does actually deserves it? And if we actually made some effort to improve the culture, that would be a big step in the right direction of making snark a bit less prevalent. Make better movies. Produce better (and fewer) musicals. Write better books. Engage in more reasoned political discourse. See? That’s not so hard.

You will want to know what happened. You may not immediately want to know what someone else thinks or feels about what happened. That may come later. You first want someone to tell you clearly and with minimal subjectivity what happened with no opinion or impression attached.

You live in a second-hand world. You need someone to observe the world first-hand when you cannot. Who will you trust to faithfully do that for you?

Sociologist C. Wright Mills described this half a century ago in the book The Politics of Truth:

The first rule for understanding the human condition is that men live in second-hand worlds. They are aware of much more than they have personally experienced, and their own experience is always indirect.

The quality of their lives is determined by meanings they have received from others. Everyone lives in a world of such meanings. No man stands alone directly confronting a world of solid facts. …

[I]n their everyday life they do not experience a world of solid fact; their experience itself is selected by stereotyped meanings and shaped by readymade interpretations. Their images of the world, and of themselves, are given to them by crowds of witnesses they have never met and never shall meet.

Yet for every man these images — provided by strangers and dead men — are the very basis of his life as a human being.

Your information needs may be summed up by three questions: How does the world work? Why does it work that way? What will be the impact on me?

The answers reflect the raw data of empirical observation and a neutral explanation of phenomena eventually followed by analyses laced with points of view. Those “crowds of witnesses” offer that information in many forms — books, movies, art, advertising, television, music, and the various means by which journalism and pseudo-journalism are distributed.

You first need to know what happened. But doesn’t it increasingly seem that your principal sources are also those who didn’t witness the event first-hand either? Doesn’t it seem as if your first notice of what happened comes from a second-hand source who is not a witness at all? Is that source someone using the pretense of a witness, someone who imbues that initial report with analysis laced with a point of view, pre-coloring and presaging your first impression? Which do you need first — a subjective point of view or one as objective as possible?

Reflect on your information needs. (Not your wants — that’s a different post.) What do you need to know? Why do you need to know it? Who will credibly tell you?

Mills’ analysis of understanding the human condition anticipates the digital world you live in. Your second-hand world consists of, in Mills’ words, “stereotyped meanings and shaped by readymade interpretations.” From what source do you not receive pre-digested reports?

If you want information without a point of view shaping it, perhaps you need Anne. She is a Fair Witness in Robert A. Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land.” Her employer, Jubal Harshaw, is asked to demonstrate her capabilities. Harshaw points to a building and asks Anne its color. Her reply: “White on this side.” In Heinlein’s fictional world, a Fair Witness has total recall, is fully impartial, and makes no intuitive or analytical leaps beyond what she can witness (such as assuming the color on the side of the building she cannot see).

A Fair Witness is the antithesis of a Spin Doctor. Anne, the Fair Witness, is a source of unfiltered fact. You are left to divine the meaning of that fact in a context uniquely yours.

In the midst of this high-noise, low-signal digital information age one S&R writer called “Shoutworld,” no Fair Witness appears to exist. Traditionally “objective” sources of information increasingly have colorized what happened through an ideological, self-centered, or selfish lens. The numbers of those sources who minimize the predigestion of what happened declines daily.

You eventually may find that subjective witness reports are necessary to help you ascertain context, importance, and meaning. On what basis, however, do you trust their authors?

If all your information sources tell you what it means before telling you what happened, how certain are you of what, indeed, did happen?

These are skilled people with diverse interests and even more diverse points of view. Three are college professors. Also writing for S&R have been or are an Hispanic activist from Texas; a foreign affairs writer who specializes in nuclear deproliferation issues and civilian casualties resulting from armed conflict; a gay staff cartoonist; a management consultant specializing in organizational behavior whose clients include 20 percent of the Fortune 500; an ex-pat South African economist; three experts in popular culture; a former director of the Berkeley Stage Company and statistical demographer for the U.S. Census Bureau; a professional stage actor; two stay-at-moms; a photographer; and occasional guest columnists.

However, we all share one trait: We are volunteers. We don’t get paid. We have other lives, other responsibilities, other people dependent on us to make a living. As business models go, ours sucks. Modest ad income and passing the hat means S&R remains a labor of love. But can love be a sustaining force for the online medium in the absence of profit?

In the Beginning of Blogging, it was all so exciting. Thrilling, even. Putting up a post, watching the stats, seeing who read your work, where they were — and how many read your stuff. Generate those hits. Yeah. That was heady stuff.

Is it still?

Most individual and group blogs are dependent on volunteers. It’s rare that a Huffington Post can raise $37 million to sustain the enterprise. (Of course, HuffPo has “volunteers” too, doesn’t it?)

The print newspaper industry continues to collapse in terms of revenue, profitability, and numbers of paid, professional journalists. So the dominant use of volunteers to inaugurate and maintain sites featuring commentary and/or advocacy journalism becomes an increasingly important public-interest issue.

Most S&R writers are ideologically progressive but rarely hew to party lines. As the S&R mission statement says:

Scholars & Rogues is a diverse band of thinkers, social analysts, activists, grousers, jesters, and troublemakers. We’re different in many ways, but we share a general belief in progress, a conviction that smarter is better, and a passionate distaste for convention.

That statement mirrors the intent of many capable bloggers. Many (but perhaps not most) bloggers seek to simply make things better. We have particular issues or problems that occupy our blogging attention. We are exceedingly dependent, though, on the research of others (those paid professional journalists whose stories we link to) to support points made in our posts.

But those posts, which leaven “objective” journalism with (usually lucid) commentary, add substance to debates of public interest. Yet the majority of bloggers are not paid for their work. What will become of community blogs such as S&R as the corps of volunteers 1) lose interest, 2) lose access to reliable, verifiable information produced by journalists, 3) lose equal access to the Web as politicians favor corporate control of the Internet or 4) just need to spend more time at the day job in a bad economy to make ends meet?

Note that newspapers, in the early days of online news Web sites, had links where volunteers could post community news. Now, that didn’t work out so well, did it? Let’s hope community blogs fare better.

Volunteerism is the principle means of support for community blogs such as S&R. Many such blogs, blogs populated by smart, capable people (see our blogroll), no doubt face the same pressure the volunteers at S&R do: Keep pumpin’ out the posts. Keep the conversation going. Keep the debate fresh and focused. But it’s difficult, as a volunteer, to pump out as many posts as I’d like. (I do like to get eight hours’ sleep each night.)

At some point, as B.B. King would sing, “The thrill is gone.” I hope most of us aren’t there yet, but it’s increasingly a problem faced by those bloggers who believe in candid, civil, and common-sense conversations in the public sphere — yet have family and job responsibilities elsewhere.

My colleague told The News that his class had scheduled a media critic from Scholars and Rogues as a guest. He invited The News to send a representative to join in as a co-guest. It would have been a wonderful opportunity for The News — and me — to talk about western New York’s largest newspaper in the context of the larger turmoil surrounding the industry. But The News yanked the microphone, er, the keyboard, out of my hands.

The News was offered a guest and a topic in its own online platform that it could use to talk about its own efforts to meet the challenges of the current industry climate. It could respond directly to readers online — which is precisely what the newspaper industry has to do to survive. The appearance of a well-spoken representative (and me) in its own venue would have been its public relations folks’ wet dream.

But The News declined the offer. And nixed the topic —and me. I don’t know why; I didn’t ask my colleague. The program belongs to The News; it can do what it damn well pleases.

But it missed an opportunity to speak directly to the online audience and answer this question: “How is the newspaper going to ensure that it can continue to meet the needs of its readers?”

That The News not only refused to talk about this but also waved the students away from the entire topic depicts the newspaper as fearing circumstances in which it might face criticism. Why wouldn’t it want to let its readers know how it was coping with the industry crisis? Why would it want to pretend like nothing’s amiss? Why doesn’t it want the lens of public scrutiny turned on itself?

It seems the paper is behaving in exactly the way that, if it was a public official, the paper itself would crucify him or her for. If a newspaper’s representative was shut out of a public forum by someone else, it would scream “foul” in a too-long editorial about freedom of the press, etc.

Perhaps The News was concerned about what I might say to its online audience.

Too bad. I would have said this:

I’m proud of how The News has reacted to declining circulation and revenue. Its Internet operation is done well. It has resisted pulling reporter Jerry Zremski from his Washington, D.C., post, allowing News readers unique insights into politics with a western New York context. I like how The News continues to support exceptional, veteran reporters like Bob McCarthy, Dan Herbeck and Lou Michel. I like how it has freed Steve Watson to report more on communications and the Internet.

The News has been a better newspaper in the past. But it remains, still, a good one. I’m willing to pay 75 cents for a newsstand copy before heading off for a diner breakfast.

And today, The News’ online audience will not read that in an online chat. They’ll have to come here, to Scholars and Rogues, to read it.

To your left on our home page is our somewhat, uh, quirky blog roll. We’ll now endeavor to attribute the listings to specific Scholars & Rogues staff members and add their other personal favorites. Some are just listed; others, annotated, as well. Remember: Blogs only — no websites, as such, allowed.

Ann Ivins:
Go Fug Yourself: Pure unadulterated (and funny) bitchiness on one of my favorite topics: fashion.
PhotoShop Disasters: Where reality meets Photoshop meets insanity.

Dawn Farmer:
Opening the door, walking outside: A 365-day blogging promise to spend time each day in the great outdoors. This blog belongs to a woman in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. On Solstice night, December 21, 2008 she made a commitment to spend some time outside every day for a year. True to her word she has shared with her readers her daily adventures. We have through words and images experienced the beauty of snow, the promise of the thaw and the wonders of the natural environment surrounding her home. Kathy is a storyteller as well. Woven into her encounters are personal moments and experiences that bring to life the objects she finds on her excursions. Kathy’s blog is soul satisfying and her love of the natural world is infectious.
Baseball Nerd
Extra Bases

Sam Smith:
Ian Welsh
Square State

Lex Koltowicz:
The eXile: Does it count? [As a blog? By the skin of its teeth. -- RW] I’ve got a solid decade of reading history with [founder/editor Mark] Ames at this point.
Newshoggers: I check it out on a regular basis after “getting to know” [founder/editor] Steve Hynd.
Electric Politics: Of late i’ve been reading and really like it.
The Agonist: I’m a pretty hardcore Agonista.

Mike Sheehan:
48 Feasts
Abandoned Places
BAGnewsNotes
Crooks and Liars
Destination: Out
FiveThirtyEight
GoodShit (NSFW!)
Industrial Decay
La Bloga
Mr. Cargo
Somewhere in Africa
Think Progress
This is your paradise.
Undercover Black Man

Russ Wellen:
From my Google Reader. . .
American Footprints and Progressive Realist: Two top foreign-policy blogs both edited by Eric Martin. The second is more of an aggregator.
Newshoggers: Nobody is as on top of foreign affairs as Steve Hynd and crew. They really do hog all the news!
War in Context: Possibly, without intending to be or realizing it is, the best foreign-policy aggregator going. Founded and edited by Paul Woodward.
Ultimate Giant: Forget the New York media — this is the most in-depth coverage of the New York football Giants.

I read and enjoy many more blogs, as well as websites.

We invite readers to submit their own favorite blogs (including their own) — of any stripe — in the comments section.

In truth, the problem runs deeper than just “our side’s” billionaires, or so it appears. It started the other day when some prominent Left Blogistanis decided they weren’t going to keep their mouths shut anymore. The first shot was fired in a Greg Sargent piece at Who Runs Gov:

Some of the leading liberal bloggers are privately furious with the major progressive groups — and in some cases, the Democratic Party committees — for failing to spend money advertising on their sites, even as these groups constantly ask the bloggers for free assistance in driving their message.

It’s a development that’s creating tensions on the left and raises questions about the future role of the blogosphere at a time when a Dem is in the White House and liberalism could be headed for a period of sustained ascendancy….

“They come to us, expecting us to give them free publicity, and we do, but it’s not a two way street,” Jane Hamsher, the founder of FiredogLake, said in an interview. “They won’t do anything in return. They’re not advertising with us. They’re not offering fellowships. They’re not doing anything to help financially, and people are growing increasingly resentful.”

Hamsher singled out Americans United for Change, which raises and spends big money on TV ad campaigns driving Obama’s agenda, as well as the constellation of groups associated with it, and the American Association of Retired Persons, also a big TV advertiser.

“Most want the easy way — having a big blogger promote their agenda,” adds Markos Moulitsas, the founder of DailyKos. “Then they turn around and spend $50K for a one-page ad in the New York Times or whatever.” Moulitsas adds that officials at such groups often do nothing to engage the sites’s audiences by, say, writing posts, instead wanting the bloggers to do everything for them.

John Aravosis was quick to chime in:

At some point, Democrats – progressives – need to start investing in the future. And by “the future,” I don’t mean large organizations that have been around for years but haven’t accomplished anything in the past two decades. I mean investing in progressives who can kick ass, and have a proven ability to do so.

There is the perception on the right that all of the top liberal blogs are funded by George Soros. I wish. We, for example, are funded by advertising and by your individual donations. Both are dropping in a terrible economy. No one subsidizes my blog. I wish they did. But they don’t.

For our blog to survive – for the liberal blogosphere to survive – we need support. Unlike many of the top bloggers on the right, many of the top liberal bloggers blog for a living (many of the folks on the right have “real” jobs, a lot of them work as lawyers, and blog on the side). This is our job. It’s our career. It’s our passion, to be sure. But it’s also how we pay the mortgage, invest in our retirement, and put food on the table. It makes no sense that Democrats have not found a way to invest in the blogosphere, and help us not just survive, but grow and become even more powerful. It’s almost as if we don’t want to win.

These comments touched off some lively conversations – much of it behind the scenes – and I don’t think I’d be out of line to suggest that while there are nuances aplenty, the consensus is that yes, it sure would be nice if our brightest and best didn’t have to fight the war for America’s future in their spare time, what little of it there is.

The problem here isn’t quite the same as with my hypothetical legion of prog billionaires, though. To put it simply, I’m not sure the large organizations being railed at by Hamsher, Moulitsas, Aravosis and others see much practical value in advertising to the choir. If these groups were to take those bloggers and their readers for granted – where, after all, are they going to go? – it might be hard to argue with them. Maybe. Sure, those bloggers might not campaign for the individual causes in question, but their work on behalf of others who shared the same general mission would lift all the boats together, right? Whether this is accurate or not, it’s certainly a plausible hypothesis.

Would they go so far as to say that the enduring victories we’re after require us to win the hearts and minds of those not already firmly on our side? This is ShoutWorld, after all. If we were persuaded that supporting the faithful would pay off through their redoubled energy – a very solid proposition – that would change the equation. Still, we might find ourselves wondering about diminishing returns or the incremental value of spending on new markets instead of further saturating established ones.

Regardless, the behavior of those with money suggests that not all of them are worried about their intellectuals or their footsoldiers. And those being taken for granted are in a tough spot. You can make your point by withholding your time and effort next time around, but think about the price. Eight more years of whatever neo-Bushevik wins the 2012 GOP nomination isn’t just cutting off your nose to spite your face.

No, folks, that’s more like taking an assault rifle to your nards.

It’s not yet known who was behind the attack.

Paul Preston, who runs the network, was understandably at the point of despair early today, posting a note saying that the operation was dead. Fortunately his latest missive notes that things are stabilized and moving ahead, and for this we’re grateful.

With luck today’s events will result in the development of a more reliable infrastructure. Paul has done heroic work building and maintaining SoapBlox, but like a lot of us out here, he’s been doing so with precious little support or resources. Perhaps today’s hack was inevitable, and I hope that it won’t be long before we can all look back and say things like “that was the best thing that ever happened to the progressive blog network.”

UPDATE: New statement from SoapBlox provides additional details.

Meanwhile, I don’t know if anyone has yet had time to call the FBI. If not, it needs to happen soon. Never mind the nature of the views being expressed on these sites – this attack was a naked broadside aimed at the very infrastructure of public speech and discourse in America, just as surely as if vandals had destroyed the presses used by the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine back in the 1700s. As long as the United States professes to be in the free speech business, actions like these cannot be allowed to stand.

Those responsible need to be found and brought to justice, and we at Scholars & Rogues hope that the incoming Attorney General feels as strongly on this point as we do.

It’s true. Scholars & Rogues has been nominated (again) for a 2008 Weblog Award in the Midsize Blog category. We’re not sure who nominated us or why, but we’re gratified and honored, to be sure. But what we’d really like is to win. Especially given the quality of the competition.

If you think we’re deserving,  click here to vote. Or click on the image to the right. Or click on the image in the left sidebar. Just click somewhere, then exercise your god-given American right to … ummm, well, you know.

Seriously, we do take the nomination as very high praise for what we try and do here, and since I think I may have mentioned before that we’re not making any money at it (in a good month we earn enough to cover our hosting bill), we probably take it a little more to heart than do the big sites.

We appreciate that you take the time to stop by and read, and that’s all the award we need.

Still, winning would be nice…

S&R, on the other hand, writes about music. About literature and poetry. About art. Education. Sports. Culture and popular culture. The Ramsey case and what it tells us about the state of media. And now that the election is over, S&R is writing about politics less than ever.

So really, what is S&R?

One response might argue that tout est politique. I’ve never been terribly comfortable with totalizing positions like this, though, because they tend to trivialize – if everything is politics, then nothing is. However, there’s no denying the fundamental truth that many things we don’t commonly associate with politics are powerfully political in their implications.

Take popular music, for instance. It’s impossible to consider the sweeping cultural and political upheavals of the 1960s without the soundtrack – Dylan, The Beatles, Woodstock…the list goes on and on. Some of those artists were quite explicitly agitating for political reform while others wove themselves into the social tapestry in less obvious ways, but the sum total of the music of that decade was inherently political.

Contrast that with the music of the Bush administration. Where was the protest, the outcry? Who was the Dylan of the 2000s? What record will we be comparing, come 2024, with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band?

The absence of such a voice was not an accident. Part of the grand conservative plan, the blitzkrieg that was launched upon Reagan’s inauguration, was the neutering of music’s political possibility. When Ronnie’s FCC hacks, Fowler and Brenner, decreed that “the public interest is what the public is interested in,” it did so in order to subvert, once and for all, the power of the creative social mind to the will of corporate logic. It dismantled radio ownership limits that assured a massive diversity of options for artists and audiences alike, and found its ultimate expression in Clear Channel’s pro-war, pro-Bush rallies and the banishment of those who chose to give voice to their dissent (the most notable case being the attempted silencing of The Dixie Chicks).

So when our generation needed to be marching in the streets and demanding an end to the outrage in Iraq, where was the soundtrack? Who ultimately benefited from those policies way back in the early ’80s? We’re fighting an unjust invasion and occupation and the rallies in the streets are for the war?! Corporate-sponsored pro-war rallies?!

When I’m writing a TunesDay piece on some band or another, providing a video link or encouraging you to check it out at eMusic, part of what’s going on is purely and simply about the music as art. But it’s also about the bigger picture, about the need for our culture to build a strong platform whereby artists can be heard. If they use this platform to sing silly love songs, that’s fine, so long as the platform is there when they need to sing about injustice. I recently did a piece promoting The Well Wishers, Maximo Park and The Dandy Warhols, and none of these bands may ever contribute a note to the cause of world peace. On the other hand, if I flash back to 1997 and Green Day’s Nimrod, I’m not sure I could have predicted American Idiot, a manifesto so powerful that not even the soul-deadening corporate might of Clear Channel could contain it.

What political blogs do is important, especially in a society where the legacy press has largely abdicated its responsibility to watchdog our institutions of power. Who Obama selects to run the State Department matters. His choices for Treasury and Defense and our various intelligence and military leadership posts matter tremendously.

But empires rarely rise and fall as a result of a couple close-in political knife fights. In my view, a great deal of what even the best poliblogs do is tactical, street-level and near-term. This isn’t true across the board, of course. There are outstanding thinkers and writers who are looking at the big picture and the long term. And this is where I think S&R has done and will continue to do its best work. Not in the political battle, but the culture war.

We may debate some of the nuances and specifics amongst ourselves, but in general it’s safe to say that those of us here at Scholars & Rogues have a shared vision of a more progressive society. I don’t use that word in any sort of conventional, partisan sense. By “progressive” I mean more enlightened; better educated; more appreciative of the cultural arts; better informed about the forces shaping our world; more productively spiritual (and less dogmatically sectarian) in our approach to life; more generous and charitable; more tolerant and more willing to understand the value of diversity; more committed to community and the common good; more literate; more intellectually curious and prone to critical thought; more responsive to the well-reasoned than to the passionately felt; and above all, more insistent that those we choose to represent us, to lead us and to govern us be the best America has to offer, not the worst.

Some of the solutions that get us to our destination may be “liberal” by our current reckoning, some “conservative.” The best ideas may be “idealistic” or they may be “pragmatic.” But in the end, I think most of us believe that a society that reads – in an environment uncluttered by censorship, either active or passive, governmental or cultural or corporate – is in better shape than one that doesn’t read or won’t. A society whose citizens not only have knowledge in their heads, but who have been trained to use it in innovative ways is more likely to solve more problems faster and more effectively. A country that thinks and thinks relentlessly is nearly immune to the machinations of despotism. A nation whose mythologies make clear that war is the last resort, not the first, is more likely to achieve greatness both at home and abroad. A nation whose media structures are designed to foster the best that is thought and created is one whose streets are less likely to flow with the blood of aggrieved citizens. A culture where competition aims to help people up the ladder instead of keeping them in their place is one that maximizes its collective genius. A political economy where genuine opportunity arises from a level playing field is certainly more likely to produce spectacular successes than one where the reality is that of a rigged game played beneath a banner of cynical egalitarian rhetoric.

And the most actualized of all possible societies is one where happiness and satisfaction have nothing at all to do with purchasing power.

This is what I think Scholars & Rogues is. We’ve covered a lot of ground since we launched less than two years ago, and at that point I deliberately chose not to compose a mission statement. Our philosophy was simple: invite the smartest people we could find to share their thoughts and trust the power of that intellect to start great conversations, attract more great minds and build the foundation of a thriving community. With that in place, I wanted to learn what we were rather than dictating what we would be.

Some of what we write may look trivial at first, and the occasional item may even prove trivial in the final analysis. But I think we now have a good sense of what we are and why our readers keep stopping by. We hope our political writings are worthy in the coming months and (if we’re lucky) years, and we expect that our audience will grasp the deeper political mission embedded in our far-flung musings.

Meanwhile, we’ll continue to work toward a better culture, and in doing so will trust that if you enlighten the people and establish social structures that exalt the best they have to offer, the merely political will take care of itself.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I begin with this because in the last month or two some of my progressive allies have been getting on my nerves. Case in point: the just-won’t-die AIG fake scandal. Many of the Dem types I read and occasionally interact with are fine people with noble intentions and a relentless commitment to working for a better and more equitable society, but not all of them have much in the way of actual experience and knowledge where the conduct of real business is concerned. Sometimes I find myself reading opinions and “analysis” that make me wonder what kinds of jobs the writer has actually had. Beltway progressive advocacy org: check. Low-level Congressional staffer: check. Job with for-profit business: not so check.

The unfortunate upshot is that some of these folks wind up talking out of their asses.

When the story of AIG’s $400K retreat broke, my colleague JS O’Brien, whose impeccable, unimpeachable progressive credentials are augmented by tremendous amounts of business experience and particular expertise as a compensation specialist for large corporations, penned an informed, reasoned, insightful explanation for why this wasn’t a scandal at all. I injected this piece into a raging debate on one of my lists, and followed it up with some comments of my own – because I, too, have spent a good portion of the past couple decades working in and with corporate enterprises of one sort or another. Here’s what I said:

It’s not about whether the thing COULD be done so much as it’s about whether doing it one way gets better results than another. What JS O’Brien explains in the post is dead-on – a big part of my job over the past few years has been sales training and I’ve worked one president’s club for a big company that was my client. Salespeople respond to money, sure, but you won’t believe the lengths they’ll go to in order to earn their way into the PC.

At the core, this is a math question. Spending $X might seem extravagant (and the one I worked was in fact quite extravagant), and it’s easy to point to it and say hey, that’s ridiculous (or even obscene, if you like). But if spending $X results in behavior that returns $5X, it’s not a bad deal at all. This is especially true when that $5X allows the company to expand, hire more people, enter new markets, and so on.

Additionally, that outlay goes to people who work for a living. Bartenders, grounds crews, all kinds of service types at the hotel and resort, and then you factor in the money these people spend shopping (often at local places) and on activities. For instance, the company I did the project for spent a small fortune with local tour businesses, like the mud-bogging tour I got to do. The kids running that tour were the furthest thing from fat cats, and the simple fact is that this one lavish corporate outing put a lot of money in the pockets of those that people like us are working on behalf of – if I might stereotype a second, the honest American worker.

By the way, the company I worked for at the time was a small consultancy made up of good people trying to survive some hard times (this was back in early 2004, I think, and the company was not in great shape). The money we earned was important to the firm and it was extremely important to a couple of people who worked there – myself included.

This is not as simple a case as the MSM has made it. I can’t say specifically in the AIG case whether the money they spent turned out to be a good investment, but in general it’s a common practice that produces results that are good for the people we care about.

Those in the forum who bothered to acknowledge me at all were dismissive, and one prominent member responded with something along the lines of: “Screw this. AIG should be hung.” I may not have his words exactly right, but this is the extent of his analysis. No evidence. No reasoning. No engagement with a single word that either JS or I had written. Just “fuck it – hang ‘em all.” It was like trying to debate a pre-schooler.

And of course, you can’t debate a pre-schooler, any more than you can an ideologue.

(I should make clear here – because I don’t want to be guilty of knocking down straw men – that not everybody on the left [and not everybody on the forum in question, either] is as simplistic and, well, silly as the person I call out above. In fact, a couple people who’ve had business experience wrote to make roughly the same point that JS and I were making. So all isn’t lost – I’m just hoping to hear more from the latter than the former over the next four-eight years.)

Tim Reason, writing at CFO.com, points out how genuinely non-outrageous AIG’s latest sins against common decency really are:

Financial planners, of course, recommend insurance products to their clients, so this is a marketing event for AIG. Moreover, AIG managed to get 93 percent of the tab paid for by sponsors, and the financial planners paid a registration fee and their own travel. AIG paid the remaining cost — about $23,000 — out of pocket. That works out to about $153 per financial planner — an extraordinarily low cost.

$153 per potential channel partner? Damn, where can my company find that kind of efficiency?

Not only that, but “the company has canceled more than 160 meetings or conferences in the past month.” Reason asks, quite rightly: what are companies supposed to do? Quit marketing?

If they did suspend business operations and refrain from profitable activity – which is pretty much what we’re talking about here – what possible way would it benefit … well, anybody?

Nobody has to tell me about out-of-control corporateering. Part of working in this world as long as I have involves seeing stupidity, excess, wastefulness, stupidity, greed and stupidity. A lot of America’s convicted corporate leaders deserve what they’ve gotten, and unfortunately too many others have been allowed to profit from incompetence and bad faith actions that wrought severe damage in the lives of good, hard-working citizens. I wish the very worst for these and will support, as strongly as I am able, business and regulatory reforms aimed at ending the looting once and for all.

But I won’t sit quietly while allegedly smart people pretend that all business leaders are criminals and that every expenditure is treason.

In a follow-up piece, Reason acknowledges past instances of bad behavior by AIG but sensibly explains that punishing good behavior is counter-productive. He then puts the onus on the press, the politicians and public, explaining that

The inability of the media, the government, and the public to distinguish between corporate excess and ordinary business is the result of the very same financial illiteracy that got us into this mess in the first place.

Exactly.

Now that the Busheviks have been deposed us progressives find ourselves in a new role, and this is going to be a particular challenge for those of us whose brands have been defined by outsider bitching. We have to find ways of harnessing our intellects and energies to the task of governance, of driving policy and reform, of finding a balance between supercharging that which is good about capitalism while disabling that which is bad.

I hope I’m able to do my part without getting drummed out of the Enlightened Brotherhood, but if that’s how it has to be, well, I’ve never been much of a joiner, anyhow…

Part 1 arrived today, and it provides a perspective on the process that most people probably haven’t encountered before.

Where are you Online” is a docuwebisode project exploring the shift from entertainment to ‘intertainment’.

We have a unique opportunity to document a shift in technology, entertainment, and our whole society’s view on “Who can be an artist?”

People making art spend most of their lives trying to find loopholes and secret entry ways into an industry that prides itself on being closed. We are enthralled with the idea that the gates have opened, and we are here to see what happens during and after the flood.

I recommend this very highly (and not just because of the particularly cool bits that start at the 2:46 and 5:19 marks).

Click here to view the embedded video.

We’ll let you know when subsequent segments are released.

NOTE: Some people seem to be having problems accessing the video link above. If you’re having issues, click here or here.

“I’m interested in what motivates you, and how you understand the world.” He glanced sideways at her. “Rausch tells me you’ve written about music.”

“Sixties garage bands. I started writing about them when I was still in the Curfew.”"Were they an inspiration?”

She was watching a fourteen-inch display on the Maybach’s dash, the red cursor that was the car proceeding along the green line that was Sunset. She looked up at him. “Not in any linear way, musically. They were my favorite bands. Are,” she corrected herself.

He nodded.

- William Gibson, Spook Country

I’ve always been intrigued by the curious dynamic of influence. This passage from Gibson’s latest finds the protagonist, a journalist who was formerly part of a short-lived band (of precisely the sort you’d expect to fascinate Gibson – not a huge commercial success, but possessing an intellectual depth that would assure riveted cult status for a generation or more) talking with her new employer (again, a typically Gibsonian character, intrigued by the potential to bridge the critically obscure with the commercially popular). In the exchange, we understand that Hollis (the protag) was influenced, but not in a linear (read, discernable) fashion, by music of a completely different genre than what she was producing.

I was thinking about this as I listened to Midnight Matinee, the new release from The Lost Patrol, a band that made my Best of list last year for their outstanding Launch and Landing CD. When you visit their MySpace page and scroll down to “Influences,” you get the damnedest list: Ennio Morricone, John Barry, Johnny Cash, The Cramps, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Ventures, The Stranglers, Phil Spector, Julee Cruise, Cocteau Twins, Jesus and Mary Chain, Gary Numan, The Church, The Damned, The Chameleons, Dusty Springfield, The Cure, V.A.S.T., The Nightblooms, The Cult, The Beach Boys, Jerry Murad’s Harmonicats, A Flock of Seagulls, Dead Can Dance, Smashing Pumpkins, Sisters of Mercy, The Shadows, Al Caiola, Jack Nitzsche, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, The Verve, Jean Michel Jarre, Duane Eddy, Andy Williams, Angelo Badalamenti, Allison Krause & Union Station, Mazzy Star, Tarnation, The Catherine Wheel, The Sundays, Sigur Rós, Echo and The Bunnymen, Medieval Baebes, Aimee Mann, Miranda Sex Garden, The Shaggs, Joanna Newsom, Goldfrapp, X, Kate Bush, Lovespirals, Abby Travis and Curve.

Now, a lot of this makes sense when you listen to them. But then you get some more influences: films by David Lynch, Hal Hartley, Jim Jarmusch, Wes Andersen, Sergio Leone and John Waters.

Again, a lot of this makes sense when you consider the way in which The Lost Patrol’s music connotes landscape – wide, empty, frontier spaces at dusk, burnt oranges fading to blackest, solitary blue.

Once upon a time I thought of influence in that linear form that Hollis references – poets inspired by poets in ways that were evident upon reading. Musicians whose lineage could be tracked in quirks of phrasing. Painters whose technique never quite escaped the gravitational well of the masters they copied in their adolescence. And so on. As I learned and developed in my own right, though, I came to understand the non-linearity of influence: how one musical style could inform something new and apparently different; how certain types of influence can hide in the woodwork, only revealing themselves to those who study the hardest; and how influence can work across genres – music on poetry, painting on film, dance on sculpture, etc.

Those who have read my poetry have noted the straight-line artistic heritage: Eliot, Yeats, Thomas, Charles Wright. (Not that I’m worthy of those comparisons at all – it’s just that whatever I have done has aspired in the direction of these epic artists.) But I also like to note how important my early exposure to ancient masters like John Donne shaped my perspective – I doubt that’s as evident to most readers.

Earlier in my “career” I played with rock music influences, as well, sometimes going so far as to riff on Springsteen and Mellencamp and U2, and today my poems are frequently indebted to all kinds of musical insurgencies.

But there’s more. My writing has always been pretty impressionist. I’ve never worried about the hard narrative edges of the “stories” being told, but have instead focused on the imagistic, on the colors and vague shapes and details that were deliberately misremembered. There’s a lot of Monet and Degas in my poetry, in other words.

I was once called a “Jungian pagan” by a friend (who’s probably reading this and can identify himself if he wants to), and while I’m not 100% sure I’ve figured out what that means, there’s no denying that my writing trades heavily in the iconic, the totemic, the deeply symbolic. Jung? Sure, but also Yeats doubles back in here, and I can’t disregard the importance of Tarot in helping me think about what lies at the core of certain people, events, relationships, etc.

And what about the guy quoted at the top, William Gibson? The world I write about is frequently technological and urban, concerning itself with how my culture and my generation are being, have been, colonized by autonomous technology – that is, technology that appears to operate with its own agenda. Gibson is a core part of that, as is Bruce Sterling, and in depicting these moments I also draw on visual imagery from films like Blade Runner and the oeuvre-wide vision of directors like Tim Burton.

There’s nothing terribly profound in all this. Essentially it boils down to “influence is a highly asymmetrical, nonlinear process.” But since a novel and CD got me to thinking about my poetry, it seemed a worthy subject for a Sunday blog.

Well, I don’t need a lot of prodding, so here you go. I’ve mentioned a couple of these before, I know, but great music is the sort of thing it’s okay to harp on…

• The Gaslight Anthem: The ‘59 Sound – Here are some Jersey boys who have listened to Springsteen. And, I’m guessing maybe Marah. And The Killers, and possibly even a touch of Tommy Conwell?
• Lucky Soul: The Great Unwanted – Up the same neo-R&B/60s girl group alley as Duffy, Sharon Jones/Dap Kings and Amy Winehouse, but more purely on the Dusty Springfield side. Really great – I like it better than Duffy, I think.
• Rob Dickinson: Fresh Wine for the Horses – Former Catherine Wheel front man’s fantabulous solo effort. An early candidate for CD of the Year – this is a generally great record with two or three epic moments.
• Don DIxon & the Jump Rabbits: The Nu-Look – Don has been playing live with Jamie Hoover and Jim Brock for years, but this is the first time they’ve gone into the studio as a recording power trio. Really, really good stuff.
• The Del-Bombers: Rescue Records Volume 2 – Manages to recall some of those great ’80s bands with “Del” in their names, but without sounding self-consciously retro. Honest, straight-on rock from people who know how to write a tune.

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Well, well, well….

There’s been a spurt of 527 activity on behalf of Sen. John McCain, but Barack Obama campaign has suddenly gone silent on the subject.That’s because, after of year of telling donors not to contribute to 527 groups, of encouraging strategists not to form them and of suggesting that outside messaging efforts would not be welcome in Obama’s Democratic Party, Obama’s strategists have changed their approach.

An Obama adviser privy to the campaign’s internal thinking on the matter says that,with less than two months before the election and with the realization that Republicans have achieved financial parity with Democrats, they hope that Democratic allies — what another campaign aide termed “the cavalry” — with come to Obama’s aid.

Obama has made no attempt to hide that he’s a control freak. He’s ordered donors to stay away from 527s and called all the money to his campaign directly. He’s cold-shouldered the grassroots and Netroots. And he’s ignored the blogs like a high school quarterback ignores his 14 year-old sister when his friends are watching.

He’s played to the center – which isn’t a bad strategy in and of itself – but in the process has made a show of distancing himself from all the fringe freakbat liberals out there to the left of Ken Salazar. He and Biden have been so complimentary of John McCain that I half expect them to haul out the kneepads and chapstick at any moment.*

Of course, you can see the reason for all the civility. McCain has himself run a civil, honest and fair campaign so far. Errr, no, wait. That’s not right. He’s lied about Obama so badly that FOX freakin’ News called him on it!

Well, still. It’s not like the real power brokers in the GOP won’t rein him in if he gets too out of hand, right? (By the way, can anybody here explain how an obscure noun like “swiftboat” got to be a verb?)

A week and a half ago, at the end of a gloriously staged spectacle in Mile High Stadium, Barack Obama was King of the World. Since then his opponents have put on an epic display of ballistic podiatry by focusing the world’s undivided attention on the worst VP nominee since Dan Quayle (and frankly, I think I prefer Quayle; truth be told, Palin scares me worse than Marilyn Quayle). Life’s great, right?

Except, if we’re to place any stock in the most recent round of polls (which I don’t, completely – but there’s no excuse for him having placed himself behind the 8 ball this badly), he’s now running from behind in a world where his opponent has made significant gains on the money front.

So now Barack has come around to the idea that his campaign needs the sort of opponent-tenderizing capability that only a snarling 527 can provide. Or maybe he was led around to the conclusion by his advisers. Not sure that matters. All that matters is that it’s late in the day. Maybe too late – I’m not an expert on campaign law and procedures, but I’m seeing some folks questioning whether it’s technically doable at this point, and if so, is it too late to really raise the cash needed to do it right? (Whatever may be happening on the 527 front, there’s no outreach to the blogosphere yet. Maybe he just assumes they’ll fight to the death for him because, well, what the hell choice do they have. And he may well be right. Still, you want people fighting out of love and passion instead of dread and spite if at all possible.)

Of course, the serious racist stuff hasn’t started to fly yet, although it certainly will. It won’t come from McCain, but it will come from his surrogates. You know, kind that Obama has made clear he doesn’t need.

I respect that Obama wants to run a high-road campaign, that he wants to win the right way. But I’m starting to suspect a bit of arrogance on his part – it’s one thing to want to win the right way and another entirely to assume that it can be done, despite all evidence pointing the other way.

Maybe his new “No Maverick” ad is a sign that he’s getting it, finally. Time will tell, and I guess we’ll know soon enough if he adapted in time.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting here thinking: lack of experience, indeed….

* Thanks to Nick Langewis for this disturbing turn of phrase.