Contrary to what Komen’s highly-paid PR crisis hacks and gullible headline writers at newsdesks around the nation would ask you to believe, The Susan G. Komen Foundation does NOT promise to fund Planned Parenthood in the future. They promise to let PP APPLY for grants in the future. Applying and receiving are different things, as anyone who ever applied and got rejected for a job ought to know.

…

The announcement is timed beautifully – just before Super Bowl Weekend – and they’re hoping that the combination of the pretend apology and the big game will insure that, come Monday morning, nobody will remember what they did. They can then find a reason to deny those future Planned Parenthood grant apps when nobody is paying much attention.

The title of that post wonders if the American public will be stupid enough to fall for it. Perhaps the question I should have been asking was this: why are America’s copy editors stupid enough to fall for it? Witness the headlines from some of the nation’s more prominent purveyors of journalism:

• Komen Drops Plans to Cut Planned Parenthood Grants – ABC News
• Komen reverses Planned Parenthood move – angering antiabortion activists – Philadelphia Inquirer
• Komen reverses move to cut Planned Parenthood funding – Reuters
• Komen backs off decision on funding cuts – msnbc.com
• Komen Reverses Stance on Planned Parenthood – Bloomberg
• Web Fury Spurs Komen Reversal, $3 Million for Planned Parenthood – BusinessWeek
• Cancer Group Backs Down on Cutting Off Planned Parenthood – New York Times
• Komen does about-face on cuts to Planned Parenthood – The Seattle Times
• Komen changes course on Planned Parenthood funding – Atlanta Journal Constitution
• Charity Does an About-Face – Wall Street Journal
• Komen Caves Under Pressure, Reinstates PP Funding – Forbes
• Komen Charity Reverses Planned Parenthood Grant Cuts – PBS News Hour

It’s frightening how much journalism has changed in a generation. For instance, there used to be a subtle game of cat-and-mouse between the PR hacks who wanted their clients’ stories told a certain way and the journalists who wanted the story told the right way. The pros would tune up a pitch and present it to a reporter or editor so that it put the organization in the best light. There was something of a negotiational process. And the publisher went to press with a headline (written by the copy desk) that, in their view, best summarized the nuts and bolts of the story. The PR pro/journalist relationship was a professional one, with each side understanding the demands of the other’s job. A good PR exec would work to make the reporter’s job easier by making sure the pitch was tailored to the publication’s audience and the reporter understood that the PR industry could be a helpful source of information – after all, communities have a vested interest in the businesses and private organizations that serve them, right? Reporters often resented the high salaries that PR professionals earned (and any number of reporters eventually migrated over to “the dark side” for this very reason – in fact, most of the best PR people I have known in my career followed precisely that path), but there was a productive symbiosis that worked well so long as everyone did his or her job well.

I remember the frustration on the 50th floor at 1801 California in Denver back in the late ’90s when US West would go to the press with a story and they’d spin it differently than we wanted. This happened often enough, and especially with quarterly earnings reports. The Media Relations and Investor Relations teams would hone the story to a fine edge, release it to the world, and what appeared in the papers the next day often bore very little resemblance to what we had put out. Why? Well, the PR group’s job is like that of a lawyer – represent the client’s interest, period. The reporter, on the other hand, was more like the judge, making sure that due attention was paid to the facts themselves. The audience was the jury.

That was then, and this is now. While the nature of financial reporting is such that you still get some actual journalism when earnings are released (thanks to the laws and regulations around corporate finance), the rest of the newsroom might as well be on the payroll of the PR firm doing the pitching. My colleague, Dr. Denny, spent 20 years on the copy desk and has dedicated significant energy here at S&R to explaining why our papers are increasingly populated by unedited PR copy (and to the corrosive impact this exerts on our democracy). The next time you’re thinking of buying a book on why the republic has gone to hell, save your money. Just click that link above and spend a few hours reflecting on his analysis. It’s more illuminating than just about anything on the virtual shelves at Amazon. And it’s free.

I don’t want to put words in Denny’s mouth, but I suspect had yesterday’s “reversal” story broken on a day when Denny was running the copy desk he’d have taken the time to:

• actually read the release;
• consider the established context of the story and the motivations of the players involved (no, he wouldn’t project his politics into the story, but he would be aware of the politics of the organizations because that’s at the center of the controversy);
• take a moment to think about the importance of the story to the community he served – what was their interest?
• Oh, yeah – he’d consider how much space he had and whether there were other more pressing stories.

Then he’d have edited the story according to these factors and he’d have written a headline that summarized what Komen had actually done. If, in his professional judgment, Komen was legitimately reversing field, that’s what the headline would have said. If, on the other hand, he had read the facts of the case the way I do, he would have ignored the cleverly crafted 48-point bold headline that Komen’s PR folks had put at the top of the page.

But yesterday, all across America, copy editors who are in too many cases inexperienced, poorly trained and swamped with more responsibility than one person can reasonably manage, did what they usually do. They took the headline at face value and ran the press release pretty much as-is.

And what landed in front of the public, flying under the banner of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Seattle Times, and, the gods help us, the PBS News Hour, was unfiltered crisis PR put together by hacks paid not to think about the best interests of the public, but about the financial and political agendas of their client. Put in the terms of my courtroom analogy above, it’s like we’ve made the defense attorney the judge and jury, as well.

The lesson, sadly, is that with this story (and just about all other stories of importance to the citizens of the US), we cannot look to the press for help. They have become nothing more than the publication arm of the American public relations industry. Typists. Transcriptionists. Gofers. Foot soldiers.

So it’s up to us to read closely, to think critically, and to keep each other plugged in, using whatever tools are available, so that we can make informed decisions in the public interest. If we don’t, nobody will.

Today, the Journal published a response by 38 climate scientists to the commentary as a letter to the editor. This continues a pattern at the Journal of refusing to grant equal space and prominence to refutations of factually deficient commentaries. But given the Journal could have simply refused to publish any response, this is something a reasonably significant accomplishment. (Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway document the Journal‘s long and iniquitous history of refusing to publish rebuttals in great detail in their book Merchants of Doubt, reviewed by S&R here)

Here are the opening lines from the rebuttal:

Do you consult your dentist on your heart condition? In science, as in any area, reputations are based on knowledge and expertise in a field, and on published, peer-reviewed work. If you need surgery, you want a highly experienced expert in the field who has done a large number of the proposed operations.

On January 27, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed on climate change by the climate science equivalent of dentists practicing cardiology….

Please click on the link above (or this one, which could move the rebuttal behind the Journal‘s paywall at any time) to read the rest.

On tonight’s episode of Modern Family (perhaps TV’s best sitcom), one of the storylines deals with what happens when a young child starts using curse words. One of America’s more prominent gatekeepers of the public morality, the Parents Television council, immediately lurched into a galloping conniption. That they haven’t actually seen the episode, and hence, have no fudging idea what they’re screeching about, is beside the point.

“It’s not suitable language for a child that young in the real world, and it’s not suitable language for a child that young on television, either.”

Turns out the adorable little child actress is saying “fudge” instead of the more vapors-inducing “fuck.”

It all feels so familiar. Like back in the ’80s when Tipper Gore and her friends got their granny panties in a bunch over things like Ozzy’s “Ultimate Sin” which, despite the hot demonic chick in the video turns out to have been a love song about “how could you leave me?” The album, of course, featured other such Satanic themes as “nuclear war is bad,” so you can understand their pique. Anyhoo, Tippy and the rest of the Concerned Responsible People^® in Washington formed the Parents Music Resource Council, a forebear to the PTC, to by jingies slap some labels on all that objectionable comment.

This was a debacle from one end to the other, but their first really huge mistake was in summoning Frank Zappa and then handing him a microphone. What followed was a first-ballot induction into the Beatdown Hall of Fame.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Then later on, they compounded their error by calling Steven Dallas, who was then the manager of heavy metal band Deathtöngue. Here’s how that went down.

Yes, well. We seem to have no fewer narrow-minded zealots than we did a generation ago, nor does our current crop of zealots seem to feel any more obligation than their predecessors did to actually, you know, understanding what they were talking about.

I’m torn. Part of me wants to encourage the PTC to shut the fudge up. But another part of me enjoys watching the self-righteous idiocracy clown itself while the world watches.

In any case, I look forward to tonight’s episode. But I’ll watch it lying down so that I won’t bump my head if I faint.

_____

Credit: Berke Breathed, Billy and the Boingers Bootleg. Little, Brown, 1987. Highly recommended.

“Editor’s note: Today’s “Non Sequitur” strip was withheld because it was deemed objectionable by Plain Dealer editors. A replacement strip was unavailable by press time.”

I knew I was going to find that message–my husband had already seen it (and written a letter to the PD editor, Debra Adams Simmons). I asked what the problem was and I expected something about religious or political content. He described the cartoon: two men and a rabbit sitting at a table with a police line-up in progress. On the other side of the two-way mirror: a cat, a bear, a wolf, and a snake. The rabbit’s line, “OK, I know how bad it sounds, but they all really do look alike to me.” You can see the original here on the Seattlepi.com website.

The contents of the rest of the PD, including the comic section, make that bit of censorship seem ludicrous.

I’m not sure who made the decision about the comics page. Ms. Simmons is the editor, but the choice could have been that of the features editor or a combination of people. It seems as if someone saw the cartoon as racist, racially offensive, or just patently offensive because of the line “they all really do look alike to me.” We all understand that the phrase in question can be highly charged and insensitive.

But if that were the case, and the issue was really the offensiveness of the rabbit saying, “they all really do look alike to me,” then why did the PD run the Mutts cartoon on the same day? The January 13th Mutts panel featured the cat character continuing his search for two identical snowflakes. The cat gets all excited because he may have found his quarry and his dog friend asks for confirmation. The cat’s response? “I dunno. . . . They ALL look the same to me.” Seattlepi.com also has that strip online here.

Perhaps the paper was being sensitive because Monday will be Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Perhaps Ms. Simmons (who is African-American) or another editor was particularly offended by the line-up image but overlooked the identical line in a reference to snowflakes. But there was obviously no consistency, even in the same section on the same day.

It’s not as if Non Sequitur’s Wiley is a stranger to controversy, either. Within the past six weeks, there was the Klansman with the “Cain for President” sign, a reference to the pepper-spraying cop, and a solid jab at the Tea Party.

But why include the announcement about the offensive content unless the purpose was to draw attention to it? Why not just leave it blank, move the cartoons around and put an ad on the page? I know–layout costs, etc.

So, what else was in the paper on Friday? On the front page there was a gallery of floating heads illustrating the major players in the ongoing county-corruption scandal. One of the faces was greyed out, but she is described as having “provided sexual favors” to the current defendant in exchange for a job. Today’s paper contained a detailed account of the defendant’s Las Vegas trip, complete with prostitutes, a dip in the “Bare Pool” at the hotel, and descriptions of topless women in the pool.

I guess none of that is “objectionable.” A bit nauseating, perhaps, when you know that the defendant in question probably tips the scales at 350 pounds plus and is quoted as saying, “I came in with a proper pristine image and I’m leaving a man whore.” But this kind of objectionable sells papers.

So I’m waiting for an explanation. Maybe the explanation is that I’m just insensitive. I don’t think that’s it–but I’m looking for the official answer.

The number of jobs eliminated in the newspaper industry rose by nearly 30% in 2011 from the prior year, according to the blog that has been tracking the human toll on the industry for the last five years.

Mutter, working with data from Erica Smith, author of the Paper Cuts blog, notes layoffs have been horrific over the past four years.

Since Smith began her running count of publishing layoffs in the middle of 2007, 39,806+ newspaper jobs have been eliminated. This represents 11% of the all the jobs in an industry that, according to the Census Bureau, employed 360,633 individuals in 2007.

Worse, Mutter points out, the number of journalists in America’s print newsroom is at an all-time low. The layoffs, over time, have taken a staggering toll on newsrooms.

Nowhere has the toll been higher than in newsrooms, where staffing has slipped each year since 2005 to successively new modern-day lows.

Nearly 1 in 3 newsroom jobs have been eliminated since the number of journalists peaked at 56,900 in 1989, according to an annual survey by the American Society of News Editors. At the end of 2010, only 41,600 scribes were left on the industry’s payrolls.

If only a fifth of the cuts identified by Smith in 2011 were in newsrooms, then barely 41,000 journalists will be left at America’s newspapers at year’s end.

I’ve written repeatedly about the increasing need for good — even great — journalism and the declining ability of the newspaper industry’s ability to provide it.

The reason’s no secret. A decimated business model that a decade ago arrogantly wrote off the Internet as a credible competitor and a tectonic shift in technology that turned Everyman into a supposed journalist killed the industry’s centuries-old reliance on ad revenues. According to Mutter, 2011 was

a year that many newspaper people had hoped would be a time of relative stability after five years of successive revenue declines. Instead of steadying, advertising sales slid throughout 2011 and likely will come in at less than half of the record $49.4 billion achieved as recently as 2005. [emphasis added]

With the number of journalists half that of the historical high, who will produce the local stories that matter those tens of thousands laid off no longer do? As one of my colleagues at S&R advises me, the citizen journalist and the neighborhood blogger are inadequate replacements to produce quality local news.

Citizen journalists … say they will do for free what journalists used to do for money, e.g., cover school board meetings. Whether they do or not is another matter, but as a general rule, in any industry where people are willing to work for free, you end up with a bimodal distribution of returns — a few who make it very rich, and the many who make almost nothing. Examples include writing, acting, music, fashion, etc. It appears that journalism, or at least column writing, has become one of those industries.

Plenty of opinions on how to fix the news biz exist (see here, here, here, here, and here). Recent attempts to revive industry revenues have met with uneven success — permeable and impermeable paywalls, dalliances with social media, and so on. Foundations and non-profit organizations have taken up the mantle of investigative reporting on regional and national levels. But good local news is a vanishing commodity.

I wish I had answers. I wish more than 41,000 journalists will be holding governments and corporations accountable — that’s the job that needs to be done — in 2012. But the trend suggests the next year will bring more dismal news for those remaining in newsrooms. If you value good local news, you’re likely to be increasingly disappointed.

However, these men are bound together by … wait for it … an unwavering and extremely public faith in God that has grown with each episode. This past week’s show might as well have been a praise rally, as the tribe was gathered for on-your-knees, hand-holding chest-thumping prayer at least three times (and this doesn’t count Coach’s Tai Chi/I’m Not Worthy Father workout routine, which was played with a performative subtlety worthy of a Commedia dell’Arte).

The moral of this story isn’t the annoying PDP, though. It gets better. What they were praying for was that the tribe could find the hidden immunity idol. Which is sacrilegious to start with – you think The Lord Most High gives a fuck about Survivor? Please. He’s got enough on his hands trying to save the Denver Broncos from Tim Tebow’s inability to read a safety blitz.

Hang on – even that isn’t the good part. No, the real payoff is that Coach already has the idol. He’s had it for days and has been keeping it a secret from Brandon because, well, because Brandon’s crazier than a sack of bats on nitrous. Two other members of the tribe know, as well, so there they are, on their knees on national television, using God as a red herring. Which proves there’s no god pretty conclusively, I’d think. If there were, He’d have “voted the whole tribe off the island” on the spot, if you catch my meaning.

The Jesus-and-pony show continued unabated throughout the rest of the season, and not much happened to change my opinion of the whole charade. (Although we have since learned that, while Brandon Hantz is indeed about as stable as a weeble on a fault line, there are reasons for it. In short, had she grown up in that family, Mother Teresa would probably have wound up a crack whore.)

In last night’s season finale and the subsequent reunion show, we continued hearing terms like “faith” and “Christian man” every other sentence or so and nobody came close to poking a stick at the hypocrisy angle. I found myself wishing that I were on the jury, so that when my time came I could stand in front of the three finalists on national TV and say the following:

I’m not a Christian, but I grew up Southern Baptist and was a Christian until my late 20s. So I know a little about the religion. With that in mind I want to reflect back on the day when the five members of your alliance gathered on the beach to hunt for the hidden immunity idol.

If you recall, you all joined hands, bowed your heads and prayed to your savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, to help you find the idol. I don’t even want to worry about the idea that the supreme being, the creator of the world, is interested in the outcome of this season of Survivor. Instead, I want to remind you that all three of you sitting in front of me knew that the idol was, at that moment, in Coach’s pocket.

I think back to my Christian youth and to the values I was taught, and a part of me shudders at the idea of intentionally using God as a prop on a reality show. Had I done something like that everyone would have moved away from me so that they didn’t get hit when I was struck down on the spot.

So here’s the question, and I’d like to hear from each of you. You all believe that on Judgment Day you’ll stand before God to answer for your sins. When he asks you about your prayer, on television, for help in locating an item that you already had, what will you say to him? When asks how you justify clowning your faith in front of millions of people, what will you say? When he says that someone out there saw that shameless display and turned away from him because of the arrogance of his followers, what will you say?

Coach, you go first.

The next time you hear a Christian complaining about the threat that non-believers pose to their faith, do me a favor: hand them a mirror.

Tilikum, a massive 22.5-foot-long orca whale living in captivity at Sea World Orlando, has been involved in three fatal incidents. The most notorious of these, the death of 40-year-old trainer Dawn Brancheau, occurred on Feb. 24, 2010.

Brancheau’s death garnered copious amounts of media attention and sparked numerous debates about the humanity of keeping killer whales captive.

Humans began capturing and putting orcas on display in the 1960s. In 1985 a female named Kalina became the first captive-born orca to survive more than a few days.

Tilikum, captured at the age of 2, off the coast of Iceland, has been living in captivity since November 1983. But since Brancheau’s death, Tilikum has been kept in almost total isolation from the other killer whales captive at Sea World Orlando, according to its representatives.

Killer whales are social animals. In the wild, killer whales move in pods, traveling up to 100 miles a day, sleeping and hunting together.

In captivity, killer whales lack the stimulation and space available in the wild. Tilikum spends most of his time in a pool 100 feet by 50 feet and 35 feet deep, according to Sea World representatives. That’s an unfortunate change from the oceans that cover 70 percent of the planet he once called home.

Many of the whales’ pools, including Tilikum’s, lack the shade and depth needed to protect them from the blaring Orlando sun.

In March 2011 Tilikum returned to performing in Sea World’s killer whale shows. He typically performs four or five times a day in the 35-minute shows. He spends the rest of his time floating listlessly in his pool with no toys and limited human contact.

In captivity, whales forget how to forage for their food and ward off predators. They forget how to be wild animals. Thus, Tilikum, now 30 years old, is doomed to live out the rest of his life in captivity because he will not survive if integrated back into the wild. Although, with the reduced life expectancies of killer whales in captivity, it is likely Tilikum won’t live much longer.

There has never been a recorded killing of a human by killer whales in the wild.

Most of the knowledge scientists have about killer whales comes from studying them in the wild. No useful information can come from studying an animal removed from its habitat, its family and its normal hunting grounds.

The stress of captivity harms the whales’ psyche. No good can come from keeping such large, wild animals pent up in unnatural habitats.

Society needs to stop using these creatures for entertainment and allow them to live freely in the wild without human interference.

Melissa Wood is a junior journalism and mass communication major at St. Bonavenure University.

After the show, as we waited for a chance to congratulate the cast, my companions and I found ourselves discussing a topic that has come to intrigue me a great deal: the curious rehabilitation of Richard Nixon. It’s probably safe to say that Tricky Dick was one of the most reviled figures in American political history and on August 9, 1974 he became the only president in the nation’s history to resign the office.

There was much about Nixon to hate.

• The unforgivable  ”Southern Strategy” established the overtly racist blueprint for every major Republican electoral success of the past 40 years.
• His prosecution of the Vietnam War (and its incursions into Laos and Cambodia) sacrificed thousands of lives for military and political goals that were questionable, at best.
• Then of course, there was that whole Watergate thing.

Hunter Thompson, perhaps the most reliable voice of the American conscience during Nixon’s heyday, painted the man as an epically corrupt political fixer, famously writing that:

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

I can’t help wondering what Hunter, who died in 2005, would make of the increasingly flattering light bathing Nixon’s memory in the last five years. Frost/Nixon, which debuted on the London stage in 2006 (with a successful film version following in 2008), didn’t let the disgraced former president off the hook by any  means, but its portrayal humanized the beast by looking deeply into the tribulations that shaped his soul. As he squared off with out-of-favor talk-show host David Frost, a man also waging a battle for his professional life and legacy, Nixon almost seemed to be inviting the dagger that would end his suffering. He wanted, he needed, Frost to be a worthy adversary and he promised to be relentless in return. Only one of them could survive, he explained in a booze-addled late-night call to Frost on the eve of the final showdown, and if he was consciously fantasizing about a return to the bright lights of Washington, DC, he seemed subconsciously desperate for the absolution that attended final defeat.

The Frost team finally uncovered the discrepancy in the official record that broke Nixon, forcing an admission of guilt and setting the stage for the apology that ultimately was as important to him as it was to the nation he betrayed. Neither the big-screen portrayal by Frank Langella or the small stage reprise by O’Steen argued for vindication, but both insisted on a measure of forgiveness.

The question, then, becomes why? Why the play? Why the movie adaptation? After all, playwright Peter Morgan could have written about anything. Once he did write the play, audiences could have rejected it. Other troupes, such as the Longmont Theatre Company, could have opted to mount a different show instead, something with more perceived social salience or more box office promise.

I’m a culturalist, and as a result I pay attention to the artifacts of the popular culture. If vampires are in vogue all of a sudden, then it’s probably meaningful. The broad social response to a theme, a trope, a meme suggests something about the collective psyche, and if you’re interested in understanding the society in question it’s a good idea to pay attention to its books, its plays, its music, its games and television and movies.

The answer, then, to why Nixon, why now, seems fairly obvious: His presidency, as twisted and corrupt and doomed as it was politically, was actually the last time we had a White House acting more or less in the best interests of the citizens of the United States. And we miss it. We know that power politics has always responded to wealth, but we long for the days when the sell-out wasn’t so comprehensive, so shameless, so arrogant and sneering. We wish those who control the political and economic direction of the nation would drop a crumb or two every now and then. We hate that corporations are citizens and that money is speech.

Three years ago, during the run-up to the 2008 election, I wrote an article recalling some of the high spots in the actual Nixon record and inviting readers to compare what they saw with the records and platforms of the candidates vying for the White House. The conclusion was unmistakeable, and for many perhaps a bit shocking: “If he were a candidate in the 2008 presidential election, Richard M. Nixon would be more progressive than either the Republican or Democratic nominees.” In truth, he’d have been more progressive than any of the even remotely viable Dems we’d heard from that year, with the possible exception of John Edwards (and the question there, of course, was how much of what he said you could actually set stock by).

Earlier this year I revisited the topic because all of a sudden I seemed to have company. From the wide right we had Bruce Bartlett, who used to work for Ron Paul, Jack Kemp and Bush the Elder, articulating Nixon’s liberalism and arguing that he was to the GOP what Obama is to the Democrats. From the other end of the spectrum we had Noam Chomsky, one of the most outspoken, unapologetically liberal voices in the country, telling a packed house at the University of Colorado that “Richard Nixon was America’s last liberal president.” I pointed to Nixon’s record in both of those posts, and it’s worth repeating the finer points here:

• He got us out of Vietnam.
• He was a keen foreign policy type whose diplomatic efforts strengthened our relationships with both established and emerging world powers.
• He implemented the first significant federal affirmative action program.
• He dramatically increased spending on federal employee salaries.
• He oversaw the first large-scale integration of public schools in the South (something the crackers where I grew up were none too happy about).
• He proposed a guaranteed annual wage (aka a “negative income tax”).
• He advocated comprehensive national health insurance (single payer) for all Americans.
• He imposed wage and price controls in times of economic crisis. This wasn’t a terribly good idea, but it was the furthest thing from a conservative idea. Truth is, it was positively socialist.
• Both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities thrived under his administration in ways they have not since.
• He indexed Social Security for inflation and created Supplemental Security Income.
• He created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the Office of Minority Business Enterprise.
• He promoted the Legacy of Parks program.
• Title IX became law on his watch.
• Social spending eclipsed defense spending for the first time in U.S. history.
• He appointed four Supreme Court Justices. Three of them voted with the majority in Roe v. Wade.

If you put Bartlett and Chomsky in a room, this might be the only subject in the world they’d find any degree of agreement on. That someone as intellectually contrary as I can be agrees with both of them, well, that may be the 7th Sign.

So who was right? Hunter Thompson or Noam Chomsky? The answer, of course, is both. In a sane, coherent political climate characterized by service to the well-being of its citizens a crook like Nixon could not be tolerated. We might view the above bulleted list as a minimal set of requirements for the office. There would be nothing special about them and we’d therefore be free to swing away at the character deficiencies of a pol as tricky as Dick. Thompson had a burr under his saddle where Nixon was concerned, no doubt, but his every rant was grounded in truth and his verdict on the amorality of Richard Milhous Nixon was more than justified.

We don’t live in a sane, coherent political climate, though, and from the perspective of the sociopathocracy of our day even a man as vile as Nixon begins to look pretty good. All you really need to consider is that “relativity” thing: we have, in the 37 years since he was chased from Washington with torches and pitchforks, slid so far to the right that the architect of the Southern Strategy, the man who expanded an already-unjust war across a couple more borders, the mastermind behind the highest felony in US political history and the reason why we attach “-gate” to everything that’s even remotely scandalous looks good by comparison. Chomsky certainly couldn’t have felt good about what he told that audience in Boulder, but only a fool walked away thinking the comment was about Nixon.

The odd case of Richard M. Nixon teaches us a valuable lesson about history. As Churchill once observed, history is written by the victors – and those who defeated Nixon wrote a good bit of history. But history books also get revised, don’t they? Unfortunately, we now know, with a vengeful certainty, that a couple generations of contemptible successors can transform a malevolent tyrant into a good and faithful custodian of the common weal.

It’s a lesson we’d be better off without.

The Sing-Off was a bit of a disappointment this year.

Last season was the show’s high water mark to date, with four or five legitimate A-level contenders and two acts – Committed (the winner) and Street Corner Symphony (runner-up) – that stand head and shoulders above everybody else in the show’s three seasons to date. (And please, click those links to see what I’m talking about.) Season 2 just shimmered, from the first note to the last, with depth and resonance and nuance and soul. It was a show that, week in and week out, was a must-see and a joy to listen to (especially if you were DVRing and could ffwd through Nick Lachey and Nicole Scherzinger).

This season, though, something was different, and I didn’t really detect it until we’d gotten the first few bands out of the way. I’ll admit right up front that those who disagree with me will be able to dismiss some of my complaints as issuing from “mere taste.” Maybe so, but I’ll make the argument and let you decide for yourself.

As I see it, there were two problems, with the big one dictating the second one.

First: Season 3 of The Sing-Off wasn’t a musical competition, it was a SONY A&R showcase. The grand prize was a SONY recording contract, so obviously the label has an interest in who wins. But on seasons 1 and 2, the judging hewed to a pretty basic standard: who was the best? In the entire run of the first two seasons I think I only quibbled with a judging decision once. The best act (Nota) won in season 1 and in season 2 you could have made a very strong argument for either of the top two, but I think the Committed was better by a hair. If you look at the final standings, top to bottom, there was almost nothing to complain about.

The first two seasons were dominated by what I guess we’d call pure a capella acts, as well – it was as if talent scouts scoured the country and came up with the best of the tradition as it stood at the moment.

This year, though, something was different. Whereas in seasons past the record deal was the prize, this year it was the sole judging criterion. Not “you’re the best so you win,” but “you win because you’re best suited to SONY’s marketing goals.” As the season wore on, it felt more and more like the label was sitting right behind the judges, “consulting” with them on their decisions.

Off-putting, to say the least. One of the things I used to like about The Sing-Off was how different it seemed to be from American Idol. This year the goal was apparently how can we be more like AI (and The X Factor). In fact, if you’d never seen The Sing-Off and I had to describe season 3, I’d call it “X Factor without musical instruments.”

Looking back, the producers were clearly attempting to “innovate” this season. And the innovations were all driven by one factor: can SONY turn this into something that Top 40 radio listeners will pay for? Had I known at the outset what I know now, I’d have predicted that your final two would be Pentatonix (who won) and Denver’s own Urban Method, who took third. I’d have liked the chances of a couple other acts assuming they could gel quickly. Pentatonix features three 19 year-old singers and everything they do – everything - is about emulating club and hit radio. Urban Method has gone a step further and invented “rap-a-pella.” Here, everything is about hip-hop of the radio-friendly variety. The anomaly in the final three, runner-up The Dartmouth Aires (which looked at a glance like another all-guy university a capella group), stood out for one reason and one reason only: featured singer Michael Odokara-Okigbo, who is going to be a freakin’ superstar. Gods, the young man can sing, and some nights seemed like the best (if not only) reason to tune in. If he hasn’t signed a deal yet I’d bet the farm that he has had conversations with SONY. (Probably nobody else, though, because I’m guess that all the groups signed contracts for the show granting SONY the right of first refusal.)

Other clues, looking back:

• Delilah – all women with a couple potential stars out front
• Kinfolk 9 – sort of an all-star collection of singers from LA new to the a capella game, but with a serious featured singer in Moises Navarro (his performance on “Let It Be” was perhaps the season’s most chillingly amazing moment; it was also the night they got sent home)
• Sonos – like Pentatonix, except that their approach made ample use of effects pedals (which they obviously couldn’t use on the show; still, had to look interesting to SONY)
• The Collective – sort of like a Nashville answer to Kinfolk 9, with a series of solo artists that a label might want to have a look at
• Afro-Blue – I assume SONY has a jazz imprint, and if so I imagine conversations are under way with Christie Dashiell, at the least; smart A&R reps might even bet on A-B being the next Manhattan Transfer

Everybody else was there to provide flavor. I’m not saying that these people aren’t talented – they are very, very talented – I’m just saying that the pool as selected by the producers was obviously geared toward certain outcomes friendly to the agendas of A&R personnel.

Does this make it evil? Not necessarily. But it undercuts what was so essential about the show’s first two seasons and it certainly raises credibility questions.

As for the judging, I expect the absolute highest in standards out of Ben Folds (who hails from my hometown) and all I can do is hope that he was embarrassed at times. Shawn Stockman was what he always is – a savvy guy who knows all about the system. Sara Bareilles was … less annoying than Nicole Scherzinger but generally about as useless. As a group they gave us moments to ponder and scratch our heads.

• The Aires survived to the end for the one reason noted above, even though I thought for sure they were gone at least twice.
• Urban Method – I love that somebody from the 5280 is representing my current city proudly, but they were lucky a couple of times and I think they know it. They could easily have been gone a couple of times, as well.
• Delilah should thank their lucky stars they were born pretty because while they’re good, they last a couple weeks longer than they should have.

And so on.

The second problem, flowing directly from the first, was the song selection. The first two seasons presented us with a broad range of styles and genres. If you didn’t like something, sit tight because something different would be along shortly. This go-round, though, was all about Top 40 and whoever writes Rihanna’s songs can probably retire comfortably on the royalties from this season alone. If you weren’t deeply into hit radio, you had no idea what was going on most of the time and no hope that it would get better.

I’m sure the producers did their research, although I’m not sure how the ratings finally stacked up to expectations. I can guarantee you that a good portion of the audience over 25 is gone for good, though. Abandoning a context driven by great, timeless music and replacing it with prefabricated song-like disposable product that no one is going to remember in ten minutes is a strategy that sheds loyalty building in favor of shameless pandering to the most fickle segments of the entire US music market.

The result, from my couch anyway, was a season that was too often cold and distant, alienating and soulless. In other words, the very antithesis of what a capella tradition has been built on.

I don’t want this critique to be taken as a suggestion that the winners aren’t worthy talents. The fact is that all my bitching aside, Pentatonix did things that I’ve never heard anybody do, period. UM does, in fact, take the genre someplace new. The issue is whether new is good. The Aires featured a superstar in the making and a bunch of other kids who understood their role in the production. Afro-Blue I look forward to seeing live someday, even though I don’t much care for jazz, on the hopes that they’ll reprise Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” (and ‘splain to me how they got eliminated after that performance, by the way).

The lasting impression of season 3, fittingly enough, will be of Pentatonix. Time and time again they gave us brilliant, nuanced performances of songs that … simply were not worthy of their talent. The saying goes that a thing not worth doing well isn’t worth doing, but the reverse is true for this group (and the rest of the contestants): too many of these songs simply weren’t worth singing in the first place.

So that’s my argument, and I’m sure some readers are already yelling to their families to come look at the old guy across the street shaking his cane and yelling at those damned kids to get the hell off his lawn. Maybe that’s a fair take on the song selection argument. But you have to be naïve not to see the powerful hand of SONY’s talent execs behind the selection of contestants and the general slant of the whole production.

If it worked out for them, season 4 will be more of the same. If too many people reacted like I have, though, then season 4 is going to be a lot more like season 2 than 3. If there is a season 4. It all comes down to the dollars. For my part, I hit iTunes and bought probably 25 tracks from season 2, but I’m not likely to plop down for more than one or two tracks this year.

SONY is hoping I’m the exception and not the rule.

[sigh] If only there had been more of this…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Wicker wrote good stories and abhorred the practices that produced bad stories. From The Times‘ obit:

Mr. Wicker’s “On Press” (1978) enlarged on complaints he had made for years: the myth of objectivity, reliance on official and anonymous sources. Far from being robust and uninhibited, he wrote, the press was often a toady to government and business.

In his honor, please permit me to revisit a post I wrote about Wicker some months ago. What makes a good news story? Or a bad one?

Nearly a decade ago, my university’s journalism school gave an award to Wicker, whose “In The Nation” column ran in The Times from 1966 through 1992. His columns were sufficiently critical of Richard Nixon to earn Wicker a place on Nixon’s enemies list.

In accepting our modest award, Wicker said, “Find out what you can and tell the people what you know.”

That’s what good journalists are trained (and love) to do — find out stuff. (Other occupations, such as scientists and explorers, do that too, but journalists do it in a hurry, on deadline, hoping sources aren’t lying, and … make mistakes in doing all that.) Wicker, and journalists everywhere, get that: People need accurate information from credible sources — that’s the traditional content of good news stories. But that’s changing, it seems.

In those same remarks, Wicker explained the mission of journalism: “We stand against privilege and we must question power.” Few understood as well as he the necessity of holding the powerful accountable for their words and deeds.

Now, for Wicker and tens of thousands of journalists who began plying this trade before the arrival of the Age of Internet Experts On Everything, this has been our calling. It’s what journalists must do in exchange for First Amendment protection against government interference. It’s why every day, my news editor, David James, wore a button on his leather vest proclaiming “Question Authority.”

Back then, for us, a good story explained to readers why we were telling them this, and why now, and why readers should care. Good stories provided context. That required a sufficient number of carefully chosen words (not merely 140 characters). Even USA Today these days needs several hundred words per story despite its “write tight, write bright” philosophy.

We needed still more carefully considered words to include who, what, when, where, why, how and so what — all by deadline. And, of course, all these stories were “objective” (wink, wink). I’ll return to that in a moment.

But the days of these “good” stories bred over decades of traditional journalistic practices were numbered. Well-written and researched context is suffering the most. Wicker saw this coming before most folks did. In the preface to the 2002 edition of his book “On The Record: An Insider’s Guide to Journalism,” he wrote:

I once thought of naming this book Lost in Cyberspace, and for good reason. The old-fashioned craft of journalism, after all, seemed out of place in the astounding modern world of digital wizardry, global communications, the World Wide Web, e-mail, chips, bauds, dot-com addresses, electronically contrived backgrounds, million-dollar IPOs for techno-firms yet to earn a dollar, nerds too young to vote and too rich to care. In such a new-fashioned world, journalism itself seemed dated and deservedly so, an ill-reputed relic in an e-attic, on the shelf with the rabbit-ear antennae and eight-track audio.

Wicker saw this eight years ago, before most of us realized that the hundreds-of-years-old business model of corporate-owned newspapers had begun to crumble because arrogance prevented recognition of the Internet as a viable business competitor or a credible provider of content — as defined by old-school diehards (you know, like me).

In those eight years, the ability to transmit information has changed in remarkable ways. It can be done instantaneously. An individual with virtually no technical training can toss a factoid into the Internet ether sans editor instantly and with minimal reflection on meaning or context. The technology permitting this is exceedingly small, relatively inexpensive and easy to transport. The big news van from Channel 7 is obsolete. The staff photographer of a newspaper who doesn’t write or cut video is history. One man, one woman, can absorb all the functions that once required several people in a newsroom a mere five years ago.

But technological change has increased the probability that a story will be bad.

Speed kills. Accuracy dies when hordes of people, each with an electronic device capable of transmitting a story, strive to be first to tell the world what they found out — without necessarily checking its veracity.

Context dies. Because speed is the premium of the Internet era, the patience for explaining what this means is vanishing.

Tweets kill. Successive waves of 140-character messages are unlikely to carefully convey context, meaning and depth and breadth of description. It’s ironic that a generation branded with a short-attention span waits breathlessly for a succession of tweets — about what? And why?

Yet technology can also enhance the probability that a story will be good.

Video reveals. Iranian, Egyptian, and Syrian protests, campus shootings, man-made and natural disasters. A cell phone with an 8-megapixel camera can transmit digital video and audio worldwide. The omnipresence of small devices capable of near-broadcast-quality video has ended the monopoly of broadcast and cable networks on news viewers can see. That’s bred CNN’s world of “iReporters.” (That, and because it costs nothing to put amateur video on the air rather than parachute at great expense a team into the news zone.)

Massive amounts of video reveals more. So much nuance has been brought to millions because so many people in dangerous situations, with little to gain for themselves, pointed a cell phone camera at a riot, a flood, a fire, a protest where police are firing real bullets, a crime scene. With the degraded size of the professional press corps, these many cell phones bring more eyes, minds and hearts to that which is news.

Whether I like it or not, the definition of a good news story is changing because telling news is no longer the exclusive province of professionals produced at journalism schools.

Hundreds of millions of people with blogs are all speaking and shouting and showing video and telling the world that this is what The Truth Really Is. They’re all telling stories. Are those stories good or bad? And by what standards should we assess them?

Again, Tom Wicker:

And since any clever hack can fill the Internet with gossip, propaganda, rumors and lies, what’s the use of trained reporters and editors? In a universe moving inexorably into fakery — the virtual, the simulated, the hyped — who needs an old-world craft devoted, at its infrequent best, to merely reliable information, dispassionately presented?

We all know why the number of good news stories by professional journalists has declined (but not disappeared). In the past few years, tens of thousands of experienced journalists have been turned out on the streets. Mostly the young and less experienced remain. The work load is high: Where a reporter used to be required to seek out four or five sources for nuance, context and cross-checking for source credibility, now he or she may call just one. That produces really bad stories.

There remains the ingrained reflex to be “objective” — the “he said, she said” journalism. That means a reporter will call one representative of millions of people who believe X is True for a comment, and then call one representative of only a hundred people who believe X is False — and treat both reps the same in number of words, column inches, or minutes and (or more likely) seconds of air.

That’s not a good news story. Says ABC’s Christiane Amanpour:

Objectivity means trying to give all sides a hearing. It does not, in my view, mean treating all sides as equal.

Sadly, virtually all sources who provide us information we want and need are subjective, providing information colored by their points of view. Does that mean all news stories whose authors are deliberately subjective are bad?

Not necessarily. If a story’s subjective bias is explained (and I mean fully), then I have a context within which to determine its credibility. After all, the youthful roots of American journalism were deeply infused with the subjective fertilizer of ideology and rampant deceit. Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain!

What’s a good story? Credibility and utility of a story lie in the eye (and wisdom) of the beholder. If you’re Jesse Ventura, former pro wrestler and former governor of Minnesota, here’s your opinion of journalists: “They’ve always been dirtbags, and they still are.”

If you’re William E. Schmidt, assistant managing editor of The Times trying to defend your newspaper’s credibility during the Jayson Blair scandal, here’s what a good story does: “Reporting is going out and getting facts and telling stories truthfully.”

Kathleen Parker, a Pulitzer-winning columnist and a self-described conservative, after receiving a Tribune Company memo announcing the elimination of 200 jobs in the news division, said American journalism just plain sucks:

Let me be blunt. Newspapers bite. The work isn’t much fun anymore, thanks to the soul-snatching corporate culture that has euthanized newspaper personalities. Most papers reflect that numbers-crunching, cubicle-hunkering mentality. We’re boring, predictable, staid, and out of touch with the folks with quarters.

Yet journalists of all stripes — us old newsroom hacks, freshly minted J-school grads, and bloggers with brains — still have a job to do, and that’s to produce damn good stories.

Need reasons? Iraq. Afghanistan. The legacies of the Bush administration. The many unfulfilled promises of the Obama administration. The hypocrisy of Congress. Occupy Wall Street. The apparent rise of Newt. The ghastly poverty rates and sky-high teen unemployment. The decline of public education in America. Climate change. State budgets billions of dollars in the red, affecting the budgets of your city or town or school system. Energy. Nuclear waste. Racism. Gender inequalities in virtually every aspect of life. Health care. Deficits.

Phil Bronstein, editor-at-large for the San Francisco Chronicle, nailed it:

Governments are in the business of manipulating information to achieve their goals. We are in the business of illuminating reality. Those two objectives are often in conflict.

Now just add “and corporations” after “government” and you’ll see the need for good, really well done news stories.

As for me, I’ll stick with the philosophy of Lazarus Long, a fictional character created by sci-fi writer Robert A. Heinlein, in “Time Enough for Love”:

What are the facts? Again and again and again — what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what ‘the stars foretell,’ avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable ‘verdict of history’ … What are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!

So what is a good (meaning well done) news story? My answer revolves around three important concepts: useful information people don’t know, adversarial purpose, and appropriate, meaningful context. That’s the legacy of Tom Wicker.

It’s common practice today for a band to accept a few bucks from someone who wants to appropriate its music for a soundtrack. Back in 1980, not so much. But Queen went far beyond that, aligning themselves so closely with science fiction schlock that they actually wrote the soundtrack.

And I loved every note of it.

In 1986, guitarist Brian May would spearhead the band’s surprisingly thoughtful soundtrack effort for Highlander. That movie’s most notable song, the elegiac “Who Wants to Live Forever,” stands as one of the greatest in the Queen canon.

But the 1980 effort on Flash Gordon was much different. It was heavy on the synth and pounded with a heart-beat bass that could punch out of any ribcage. Only two songs on the album featured lyrics, although dialogue from the movie was sprinkled liberally throughout.

I was eleven the year the movie came out, my veins coursing with all the science fiction I could inject. I lived on a steady diet of comic books. Star Wars, two movies old by then, hung everywhere in the air. I had Star Trek reruns on television, Creature Double-Feature on Saturdays, and Ridley Scott’s Alien lodged in my nightmares (I still can’t believe I was allowed to watch that one). Battlestar Galactica landed in my home every Sunday night, but as much as I wanted them to stick around, Adama and his wandering people, still lost, flew away at the end of an hour.

Buck Rogers had already successfully made his way to a big-screen revival in 1978, so it was only a matter of time before Flash Gordon came along. Whereas Buck Rogers in the 25th Century played as pretty standard B-movie sci-fi fare (which did well enough to spin off into a successful TV series), Flash Gordon played for camp—but then took itself too seriously while trying to do so. Even now when I sit through parts of the film, I can’t convince myself that the movie was self-aware enough to know what it was doing. It just seems so damn earnest.

I wasn’t especially discerning about my sci-fi, though. Quantity was far more important than quality. I wanted as much as I could get. For Flash Gordon, that included the soundtrack, which grabbed me the moment Ming the Merciless started triggering tidal waves and earthquakes in the movie’s opening sequence.

I rode my bike down to the local Music Merchant, a record store whose camel logo tried to evoke exotic Middle Eastern traders. The sales counter was usually populated by bored college students who didn’t have much time for kids. I sometimes went there with my cousin Jerome, though, in his mid-twenties, who would flip through the long bins of records the way you might flip through oversized index cards. He flipped through all of them, it seemed, on the lookout for misfiled albums that he wanted but were out of stock, or perhaps those forgotten gems a person hoped for but never expected to find.

I killed a lot of time in Music Merchant waiting for Jerome, so I knew right where the soundtracks were. I flipped to the F’s: Flash Gordon. Ah-ahhhhh!

Flash Gordon, Queen’s ninth studio album, sported a bright yellow cover with red art deco letters and a red lightning bolt flashing behind a side-tilted Saturn-like planet.

The album rose to #23 on the Billboard charts in the U.S., and poked its head into the top ten in the U.K., although the Germans and Austrians apparently loved it, where it topped out at #2 and #1, respectively. Those Austrians loved themselves some Flash Gordon.

So did I. I burned for that album.

I had coveted only two other albums in my life prior to that: the 1978 Bee Gees/Peter Frampton version of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the 1979 soundtrack to The Muppet Movie. I don’t know what that says for my taste back then.

Flash Gordon represented my first “grown-up” album. True, it had only two songs on it with lyrics, and it was the soundtrack for a cheeseball sci-fi movie—but it was Queen. I didn’t know anything then about Freddie Mercury, about his legendary showmanship or his boundary-pushing sexuality. I knew “Another One Bites the Dust” and “We Are the Champions” and probably “We Will Rock You.”

And I knew “Flash! Ah-ahhhhh!”

Without DVDs or VCRs, the Flash Gordon soundtrack was my only connection to the movie. Most of the album was, let’s face it, unextraordinary, but that opening song begged me to turn myself into an arena rocker every time it played—an arena rocker from a distant galaxy, even. It allowed me to make the movie more magnificent in my head every time I spun the soundtrack on the turntable.

By the time I found the movie years later at a video rental store, I was profoundly disappointed.

Queen, too, failed to catch on for me over the years. Weird Al Yankovic’s “Another One Rides the Bus” entertained me more than the song it parodied. A decade and a half later, it would take Wayne and Garth to help me appreciate “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

By then, Freddie Mercury had been gone for years. At the time of his passing, people in my peer group hardly paid notice. Those who did scoffed at Mercury for being a “butt pirate.” As horrifying as it is, one of the things I remember most clearly about Mercury’s death is a fraternity brother’s slur, laughing as he said it: “He died of anal sex.”

I didn’t respond, not because I agreed but because I didn’t care about Freddie Mercury beyond the same passing-but-sincere “That’s too bad” I’d utter at anyone’s death. I’ve since learned that silence can be mistaken for assent.

The culture wars of political correctness were in full swing by then, but enlightenment came slowly, and northwestern Pennsylvania was still largely populated by the unconverted. Looking back, I’d smack us all upside the head in an effort to speed things up.

I credit Mercury for helping affect the change that did eventually happen, though, slow and uneven as it was. He gave AIDS a celebrity face that pushed HIV-awareness into the pop culture mainstream. That, in turn, helped push gay rights into the pop culture mainstream. We were able to start talking about those things, in part, because we lost Freddie Mercury’s voice from the conversation.

I have to admit, I still don’t like Queen’s music all that much. I’ve tried, but I just can’t get past it as overblown arena rock—which, I’m certain, makes me a Philistine in the eyes of many of my peers.

But I do appreciate what Mercury’s death really meant and what it helped make possible. I respect the impact he had on rock and roll, as a vocalist and as a showman. I still think fondly of that fantastic “Flash!” and the introduction it gave me to Mercury’s music.

The science fiction of my youth has given way to stranger, more troubling times than I could’ve possibly imagined back then. Freddie Mercury, in his way, helped me to better understand them. The man who asked “Who wants to live forever” has proven he was no mere flash at all.

My self-appointed task was to assist with setting up income generation projects. I had a “real” job during the week and would arrive early on Saturday mornings to a queue of toddlers and tiny children waiting to be picked up and swung. Little happy, snotty faces with upstretched arms taking their turns and then running to the back of the line to have another go.

And every one of them HIV-positive.

One day a child, late to be swung, came running too quickly and slipped. She fell hard on the concrete and scraped her arm and leg. Blood flowed and she began to howl. I stooped to pick her up and a nurse grabbed me, pulling me back.

“No,” she said, her face sad, “let her mother pick her up,” indicating the blood and cuts on my hands from where I’d injured myself working on my car.

That was the moment that the death sentence implied by AIDS hit home. None of these children would live more than another few years.

Princes of the Universe

1984 was the year of Big Brother. The rest of the world was grappling with the Cold War. South Africa had Total Onslaught as the Apartheid government of the time sent soldiers into the townships to fight pro-democracy activists. The ANC bombing campaign was under way with almost weekly attacks. The South African army was still fighting independence movements in Angola and Mozambique. Archbishop Desmond Tutu won his Nobel Peace Prize. The Stander Gang, bank robbers led by police officers, were killed in a shootout.

And — at the height of international sanctions — Queen visited Sun City in Bophuthatswana. The splatter of nominally independent states was an Apartheid construct, a vassal state “Bantustan,” created to represent the supposed “separate but equal” politics of the day.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Queen should never have come.

Freddie Mercury — birth name Farrokh Bulsara, a gay Parsi from Gujarat who grew up in Zanzibar and was raised as a Zoroastrian — visiting a country where everything about him is illegal as a celebrated guest? I was 10 years old and most of the hype went straight over my head.

I remember that the band had second thoughts. Mercury came down with a throat infection and the band threatened to pull out. Sol Kerzner, international man of mystery and the owner of Sun City, must have thrown a lot of cash at them to get them to stay. A trick he would use to grand effect every year during the Million Dollar Golf Tournament to get his big name stars to break sanctions.

Queen stayed and played nine sell-out concerts. They arrived back in the UK to universal condemnation, were fined by the British Musicians Union, and ostracised.

Why do it? They didn’t need the money. Maybe because they felt that the band was breaking up anyway?

Mercury had started recording duets with Michael Jackson in 1981 (none yet released), singles released in 1984 and a full solo album, Mr Bad Guy, in 1985. Brian May and Roger Taylor also tried their own efforts. The creative conflicts in the band had led to albums which swung between the epic rock anthems we all love and forgettable bits of dropsy.

Mercury wanted to experiment with more disco and electronic sounds while the rest of the band considered themselves firmly in the rock camp. The dynamic of intensely creative band members pulling in different directions is almost prosaically predictable.

In 1985, when Queen delivered a mind-bending performance at Live Aid, it really did feel like a break-up couldn’t be far away.

Who wants to live forever?

In May this year, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the formation of the band, the BBC aired “Queen: Days of Our Lives.” Roger Taylor and Brian May were extensively interviewed for it and gave a real sense that 1985 was the most troubled year for the group.

Bob Geldof didn’t quite beg them to perform for his Live Aid charity event, but he came pretty close. The concert would have the world’s largest ever television audience of 1.9 billion and he wanted a band who could amp a stadium.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Eventually they agreed. Jim Hutton, Mercury’s last partner, said that Mercury was diagnosed with AIDS in 1987, but May suggested that Mercury may already have known something was wrong at the time of Live Aid.

Live Aid may have done precious little for Ethiopia but it saved Queen from self-destruction. Mercury was always private about himself and it wouldn’t be until very close to his death that there would be any public statement about his illness.

Remember the times, though. Homosexuality was only legalised in the UK in 1967. AIDS was the Gay Disease. In the early 1980s hardly any popular male stars could maintain public support by announcing their sexual preferences for men.

Queen had already lost much chance of success in the US after the music video of “I Want to Break Free.” Written by bassist John Deacon and with the video story proposed by Taylor, this wasn’t intended as some attempt to be drag queens. It was a parody of long-running British soap, Coronation Street and was loved in the UK but banned in the US by MTV. The American antagonism to homosexuality (or even the hint of it) would ruin many careers.

The band closed ranks around Mercury. More importantly, their relationship with each other changed. Up to that time much of the creative antagonism related to the way in which credit was given for each song. Deacon, long considered one of the greatest bass guitarists, wrote few songs; Freddie most of them. From here on they would all share the credit, and the money.

At the end of 1985 they would release “One Vision,” with all band members sharing the credit for the first time. In 1986 they released A Kind of Magic, one of the greatest rock albums of all time. 1986 would see their last live tour, with over 120,000 people pouring in to Knebworth Park to view Mercury’s final performance.

The band then set to producing albums. The Miracle in 1989, Innuendo in 1991 and, with Freddie hanging on, Made in Heaven. He died on 24 November 1991.

The show must go on

What made Queen so fantastic? Mercury had a tremendous voice and personality to carry an entire stadium on his own. He was so powerful that it is easy to imagine he didn’t need the band, but he did. His solo albums weren’t that successful.

When Mercury died we also lost the musical talents of Roger Taylor, John Deacon and Brian May. Deacon in particular, one of the world’s most creative bass guitarists, no longer even performs. Mercury may have written “We Are the Champions”, but “We Will Rock You” is Brian May’s, “Another One Bites the Dust” is John Deacon’s and “Radio Ga Ga” is Roger Taylor’s. Four people in one band each capable of producing songs that can cause entire stadia to sing and clap together?

Click here to view the embedded video.

After Mercury’s death the remaining members of the band arranged what the Guinness Book of Records regards as the largest rock star benefit concert in history. 1.2 billion people tuned in to watch on 20 April 1992.

Live Aid had shownthat such big concerts could attract a lot of attention and support. Ending poverty is too diffuse a problem for concerts to solve. Poverty is remote. Could awareness and financial support for poverty in Ethiopia really have much impact when the toxic mix of civil war and oppression which cause it is of local origin? There have been numerous anti-poverty concerts and none of them have had any impact short of reviving the fortunes of ailing pop stars.

The Freddie Mercury Tribute would be on a different scale. In 1992 AIDS was still a shameful illness. The disease was spreading rapidly everywhere. AZT, the first anti-retroviral drug to make any impact on HIV, was released only in 1987, but people needed to be tested and accept the illness. The stigma needed to be overcome.

Almost as an afterthought, and certainly forgotten by most people, Queen invited Mango Groove — a South African band — to perform via a live satellite uplink. From a frozen and blustery Johannesburg the band performed. They’re a nice bunch and their music was doing well in South Africa at the time, but they weren’t epic, they weren’t awesome. But Queen introduced the world to AIDS Ground Zero.

The concert raised $20 million for AIDS programs. It put the illness on the world agenda. Condoms would be available. Clean needles for drug users. Everywhere but South Africa, AIDS spread crashed.

Mercury’s death was a tragedy but, without it, Queen may not have lasted much longer and AIDS awareness may not have received the boost it needed. Tens of thousands of lives may have been saved.

More importantly, consider the number of gay stars who came out after 1992. Consider the compassion with which most have been received. Do you think we’d be in a position where gay marriage is even up for discussion without the near universal support Freddie Mercury unleashed?

Sadly, my homeland refused the lesson proving again that pop-star-driven charity can only take you so far. Up until very recently the country entertained a procession of AIDS denialists. Even now anti-retroviral treatment is not universally available and 4 million people are HIV positive; 10 percent of the population.

These are the days of our lives

Will there be another Queen? How much has the world changed since 1991?

Individual bands find it difficult to fill stadiums on their own. Oh, sure, your big bands from the 1970s and 1980s can still do it, but they’re still products of the old studio system which is now falling apart. The most successful recent acts are churned out through popularity contests. Journeyman bands can build a local following and then trade that up to perform at the growing number of music festivals but that isn’t quite the same.

Music has become commoditised. Streaming downloads mean that we listen to types of music and individual songs. We wanted a world in which major corporations didn’t dominate the music business and now… different major corporations dominate the music business. We’ve exchanged EMI for Simon Cowell. Sure, it’s easier for some unknown to set up a YouTube distribution of their work. Much harder to make a living out of success. Even harder to maintain momentum with so many new acts charging in.

The age of Queen was an age of limited distribution in which only big agencies could muscle up the cash to get you on every radio station and ensure you were stocked in every store. The winners in that system could become global phenomenon.

Who here thinks Justin Bieber will remain popular once he escapes puberty?

But even today I believe that someone with that much raw talent, confidence, stage dominance and vocal awesomeness would succeed. That Freddie Mercury and Queen would have been a sensation whereever they started. And, if that is the case, then maybe one day we will see his type again.

Until that day, here’s someone to love…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Stuart, longtime friend to S&R, is a veteran stage actor who portrays the former president in the Longmont (Colorado) Theatre Company‘s ambitious take on Frost/Nixon.

I had the great pleasure of recently seeing the production. As a politics junkie and student of American political history, particularly of the Watergate debacle, I couldn’t pass it up. And I anticipated from having seen Stuart’s remarkable performance as Robert Scott in 2009′s Terra Nova that he would surely immerse himself in this unique role as well.

My high expectations were more than exceeded. I was treated to marvelous performances by all involved, particularly Stuart and Robert Mess as his counterpart, David Frost. The clever usage of manned TV cameras on the stage to show a live feed of the principals on a big screen over the seated actors really drove home the feeling that you were witnessing history anew. Actors in supporting roles, particularly Michael Stedman as Jim Reston and Nicholas Lee as Swifty Lazar, were memorable and engaging. All in all an impressive depiction of one of the most compelling and peculiar spectacles in the annals of American popular culture.

The Denver Post would tend to agree, calling the play “fascinating” and “intriguing” and saying of Stuart, “O’Steen plays [Nixon] cool, with an easygoing charm that relies on truth over caricature or mere impersonation.”

If you’re in the Denver area this evening, make the short drive north to Longmont and take in the company’s final performance of the play. Tickets available here.

Further reading…
Longmont Times-Call: Longmont Theatre gives ‘Frost/Nixon’ regional premiere
Boulder Daily Camera: Boulder Theater: Frost, Nixon
Washington Post: The Watergate Story
Wikipedia: Frost/Nixon (Play)

The original vampire, long before people were writing about it, was not a sexy creature. It had ragged teeth; raw, red skin; long nails; and tangled hair — if it had any at all.

After writers like Bram Stoker and Anne Rice began writing about the vampire, it evolved into a charismatic being that seduced pop culture. Enter Stephenie Meyer, and the classical perception of the vampire dissolves.

The vampire once symbolized all macabre ideas, like death and violence. But thanks to the public’s new vision of this nocturnal creature, the vampire has transformed into a mopey adolescent.

The classical vampire could be destroyed by one thing: the sun, a metaphor for life and opposite of death. When exposed to the sun, vampires burst into flame and crumpled into ash. Modern vampires have no need to fear the sun because it makes them glitter like diamonds. Vampires who glitter? Really?

Meyer, the author of the renowned Twilight series, doesn’t even have an explanation for why she makes vampires sparkle. In an interview with Collider, an entertainment-themed website, Meyer says a dream inspired the idea that vampires sparkle. She just made it up without homage to the traditional vampire themes.

“Dracula,” written by Stoker in 1897, set the standard for the classical vampire. Stoker groomed the vampire into a sophisticated being but kept the monstrous undertone and allusions to death and horror.

Rice continued Stoker’s legacy with her Vampire Chronicles series in 1973 with “Interview with the Vampire.” Rice’s vampires followed the guidelines set by Stoker almost a century before. However, Rice’s creations have more alluring personalities than Dracula.

Stephen King portrayed his vampires as ferocious predators in his 1975 novel “Salem’s Lot.” They only thought while they plotted ways to mentally torture their victims. These vampires never considered their condition a curse.

The vampire owes its existence to Stoker and should follow the principles he set.

Meyer’s vampires brood relentlessly over the burden of being a vampire. They refrain from drinking human blood, as they don’t want to hurt humans. Throughout the series they refer to themselves as “vegetarian” vampires because they consume only animal blood.

In each Twilight novel, the main vampire clan avoids violent conflicts when possible, a far cry from the classical persona who craved confrontations.

The new model of vampires no longer commands the senses of fear and terror. Unlike their predecessors, they inspire hope, love and teenage angst. Meyer makes vampires a joke. They’ve become something pretty to look at, losing everything that makes them intimidating.

This regression does not stop with vampires. As pop culture evolves, so does the perception of the classics. Heroes like Captain America become anti-heroes. The “bad boy” archetype has become more attractive than the traditional heroes who once flooded the media.

This means the classics get lost and replaced by newborn replicas. Younger generations will accept these deviations as classical figures, having little to no knowledge of the true classics.

Make vampires terrifying again, not comedic.

Santana Questa is a senior journalism and mass communication major at St. Bonaventure University.

Twitter.com/LeeCamp

by Luke Powers

You know what I hate about death? Dying.

Basically, we human beings are just rotting meat on a skeleton. All seven billion of us.

Even Steve Jobs—he just died you know. The rich die the same as the poor. They just get fancier funerals.

You know, when I was a war correspondent during WWII, I saw a lot of guys die. It was nothing like Hollywood – “Saving Private Ryan.” I saw Private Ryans screaming their lungs out as their bloody guts hung out of their bellies. I once saw a body on fire running around – with no head. Can you imagine that? Just like a chicken with its head cut off.

People use that expression all the time, but how many people have actually seen a chicken running around with its head cut off?

Personally, I use a Smith-Corona Model 102A typewriter. Have since WWII. The “x” sticks so I avoid words that have the letter “x” in them. It’s not as easy as it sounds. But in my day a writer was expected to know a little about the language.

Now we have personal computers to do our typing for us. We expect our computers to do everything for us. Even think for us.

No wonder the kids can’t read. Don’t blame me. Thank Steve Jobs.

I’ve never taken up texting, but I sure see a lot of people doing it. Walking down the sidewalk. Sitting in the park. It’s a beautiful day and they don’t even notice the ducks walking in a line down to the pond. I used to read a book to my children. Make Way for Ducklings. A policeman helped the ducklings cross the street.

You wouldn’t see that nowadays. The police have a union now. And everyone else is too busy texting.

Have you ever smelt a duckling that’s been run over. It doesn’t smell very good. Especially after a couple days. The streetcleaners won’t touch it -that’s the job of Animal Control.

You guessed it – unions.

But once that smell of death gets in your nasal cavities, it’s hard to get rid of. I was a correspondent during WWII. Boy, did I smell it then.

That’s what I like about my Smith-Corona. The smell. Especially after I put on a new ribbon. Actually I don’t put on the ribbon myself. My secretary Gladys does that for me. She finds the ribbons somewhere. Who knows? Chinatown?

Actually, Gladys, god rest her soul, has been dead for thirty years. CBS pays somebody to change the ribbon on my typewriter. I’m sure he’s a member of a union. The Typewriter-Ribbon-Changers Local 5205.

I forget where Gladys is buried. I didn’t go to the funeral. I was pissed off at her for some reason. But I sent a card. I typed it on my Smith-Corona. But I never got anything back. I’m not sure that Gladys had any family.

Gladys was what we used to call a “working woman.” It wasn’t a putdown. She worked and she was a woman. I don’t understand all this feminist fuss.

But she’s dead now and I’m dead too. I can’t get the horrible stench of death out of my nasal cavity. I suppose the decay process takes a while. I probably should have been buried with my Smith-Corona. With a brand new ribbon.

I should have added that to the Will, but I kept putting it off, putting it off. It was just a little thing I was going to get round to but never did.

Did you ever realize how the overwhelming stench of death makes you wish you hadn’t put off those little things? I’m dead now and I sure do.

Andy Rooney is dead.

When Kurt Cobain died in 1994 Rooney launched perhaps his most infamous rant. From the Wikipedia summary:

“I’d love to relieve the pain you’re going through by switching my age for yours.” In addition, he asked “What would all these young people be doing if they had real problems like a Depression, World War II or Vietnam?” and commented that “If [Cobain] applied the same brain to his music that he applied to his drug-infested life, it’s reasonable to think that his music may not have made much sense either.”

I swore then that on the day Rooney died there’d be a party at my house where we’d dance on the grave of the hateful bastard just as he had Cobain’s.

That Rooney apologized the following week doesn’t really matter to me. If he’d gone off about something he didn’t understand just this once, I’d get it. We all have our bad days and I don’t think our legacies should be defined by our worst moment. The problem is that “half-cocked” was Rooney’s brand. It was the rule, not the exception. His whole schtick was babbling about things he didn’t get. As it turns out, there were enough things he didn’t get to sustain a 33-year run on one of America’s most popular shows.

If only his brand had been about finding things he didn’t understand and then, you know, learning about them. Instead, he made a mint as TV’s version of the crotchety old geezer that we probably all know, the pissed off 150 year-old fossil shaking his cane at those damned kids to get off his lawn and venting a closet full of opinions that are as strongly held as they are ill-informed. Shit my granddad says. Times a hundred.

I never forgave Rooney for his spiteful and ignorant assault on Kurt Cobain and I never will. But the party tonight will have nothing to do with his passing. In the end, I can find no reason to make more of his death than I did his life.