I feel like the media constantly bombards us with two completely opposite visions of the future:
In future #1 I can talk to my home appliances and have virtual sex with supermodels while my hydrogen-powered biodegradable car drives me to work.
In future #2 I’m learning to make fire and trying to defend my survival garden against roving bands of marauders.
I don’t know which one we’re headed for, but I’m stockpiling canned food.
When future archaeologists unearth the cities of what was once the great empire called America, and they sift through the remains of our civilization looking for the causes of our collapse, this commercial will tell them all they need to know…
We had lots of opportunities to save ourselves, but we preferred to party.
“[The writer] does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.” – J.G. Ballard
I’ve been on a kind of media fast since around Christmas of last year. It started accidentally; I was so busy with holiday madness and projects at work that I didn’t check in to Twitter or Facebook for about a week. Nor did I watch the Daily Show, listen to NPR, peruse my staple of blogs.
I didn’t miss it at all.
In fact, after the holidays passed and I had some free time again, I found I’d completely lost my appetite for commentary on healthcare, tea baggers, Glenn Beck, Copenhagen, the economy, the iPhone, Android, social media, Web 2.0 and pretty much everything else. I found I could only tolerate maybe an hour of TV at most per day.
Instead, I read a couple of books. Fiction. I also spent a lot of time just sitting and… not even thinking really, just sensing. Pretty soon I started to feel a familiar tingle somewhere deep in my consciousness, like an arm waking up after you’ve slept on it wrong. I began to see the hidden layers of life again.
A few times since I started this fast, I’ve tried to dip myself back into the stream of information I once bathed in, but all the things I spent so much time consuming over the last few years feel like junk food all of a sudden. Some of it was obviously junk the whole time, but a lot of it seemed kind of important once.
When you read a novel, a short story, a personal essay, a historical narrative or even a good anecdote, your mind – your imagination – has to create pictures, sounds, smells, textures. This doesn’t happen when Jon Stewart cleverly lampoons Glenn Beck’s latest ravings. Nor does it happen when you read someone’s pithy little insight about Twitter, on Twitter. Nor when you read someone’s passionate indictment of Apple’s iPhone app approval process – or the thread of vitriolic comments below it.
And then there’s television. So much TV these days leaves nothing for your mind to fill in. The dramas that unfold on Reality TV shows – by definition – were never imagined in the true sense of the word. Other shows assault us with useless information. Still others insult us by over-explaining everything and neatly wrapping up crimes, arrests and entire trials in the space of an hour.
We used to be a storytelling species. We took turns talking and listening, and when we listened, our imaginations had to do some real work. Now there is either no work for your imagination to do at all (in pithy tweets or long rants about the iPhone), or the work is done for us by professionals, via scripts (or not), actors (or not), cameras and editors.
I will admit there is also some excellent TV happening these days. Shows that rival the best written stories. I’m thinking of The Wire, Mad Men, Deadwood and even seemingly lightweight shows like 30 Rock and The Office. All of these have unfolded at a pace that has allowed the characters to develop complex inner lives that we as viewers have to piece together in our own minds. Imagination again.
Anyway, none of this is to say there’s not a place in our lives for junk information and Reality TV, and I’m not sure how long this fast of mine will last; already It’s more like a diet than a fast, which will be evident if you discover this post on Twitter of Facebook.
I’m only saying that as a species, we’ve never been so connected to the outside world as we are now. But neither, perhaps, have we been less connected to ourselves.
Americans, it’s well known, aren’t interested in soccer. Americans prefer the other football. We don’t like hockey either, which isn’t surprising, since it’s a lot like soccer played on skates. It’s hard to find definitive rankings of U.S. sports by popularity, but every source I’ve found lists the top three as:
Hockey is always fourth or fifth, or even lower, and soccer barely makes the list. UFC, NASCAR and WWE (which isn’t even a sport) are way more popular.
Soccer, of course, is the world’s most popular sport, so this yet another way the U.S. is an outlier on this earth. But why is it so?
Here’s a theory:
Soccer and hockey go for long stretches where there’s no clear winner. You see lots of players running (or skating) around in a beautiful exhibition of athleticism, but the scoreboard is the only thing that tells you what team is on top.
This is not the case with football, baseball and basketball.
Football is split up into four downs and ten yard spans. The team with the ball gets four chances to go ten yards. The game completely stops between each down. A down lasts for maybe five to ten seconds, and during those few seconds the team with the ball either moves forward or they get pushed back. If they don’t move at least ten yards forward in four tries (really, three), they have to give the ball to the other team.
So for every down – and every set of four downs – there’s a clear winner and loser. That’s a winner every five to ten seconds.
Baseball is even more atomic. Baseball is broken down into pitches, outs and innings. Every pitch results in a ball, strike, foul, hit or out. In other words, every pitch has a winner and a loser. Every inning too.
In basketball, it’s possessions. You get the idea.
Americans like things we can win, and the more opportunities there are to win, the more we like it. If a sporting event is a metaphor for life, then Americans don’t want to wait til the end to know whether they won or not. We want the opportunity to win over and over again; we want another shot after losing a down, or a pitch or a possession.
This is how we do everything in America. Look at our financial industry or our healthcare system. We seem to prefer a healthcare system with clear winners and losers, over one where everyone is protected. We prefer to an arguably corrupt financial system that we can game, over one that would guarantee prosperity for all. Not only do we like to win, we like there to be losers.
The chance to win once every few seconds is more enticing than the idea of running around for 90 minutes having fun.
[image above via juiceanalytics.com]
Yes old friend, I’m talking to you. You with the high-paying office job, the fine house in the suburbs, the lovely wife and the precocious daughter who’s just about to start first grade at a fancy private school – a fancy private school incidentally that has not ceased to exist despite the fact that free public education exists too (some of it very good even). But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I have come into possession of something you might be interested in. It’s a one-way ticket to a place called Alternate America. An America where the federal government is small, minuscule. Where it stays out of the way and doesn’t meddle in the business of business. Where markets and men are free. It has always been this way in Alternate America. Oh, yes, and this ticket is good for your whole family.
Whoa, hold on there friend. I’ll give it to you in a minute. Let me read you some fine print first. There are some warnings and disclaimers here… I know I know, lawyers. Always covering somebody’s ass. But bear with me.
Here’s some stuff about food:
In Alternate America, there are no ingredients on many food labels. There’s no nutrition information either, because the FDA doesn’t exist. Liberals created the FDA in 1906, during what has come to be called the “Progressive Era.” Scary! On the other hand, some food labels have more nutrition information than you could ever want. There are breakfast cereals that guarantee a boost in IQ for example, and potato chips that prevent certain cancers. And there are some magical drugs. Something called “thalidomide” for example is a wonder cure for insomnia, coughs, colds and headaches. At least that’s what the advertisements say. Anyway, if you decide to take this ticket to Alternate America, you should definitely buy some of that IQ-boosting cereal for your little girl, to help her do well in school! I’m sure it’s safe.
You might want to be careful about fruits and vegetables. There’s no EPA to set pesticide residue limits or regulate the chemicals that can be used for food packaging. But all plastics are basically the same, right? I doubt there’s any chance something bad could leech out of the container into your daughter’s apple juice. And the companies that make those pesticides say there’s nothing to worry about.
Oh… says here that some people have been claiming their kids have been getting sick a lot – stomachaches, headaches, fatigue – ever since they bought some toys made in China. Just something to keep in mind. Maybe you could buy some kind of lead-testing kit, just to be safe, since no one else will be testing the toys. Some companies say their toys are 100% lead-free. Just buy those “lead-free” toys. You believe em, right? One more thing… Stay away from the tap water. Definitely.
Hmm… there’s a lot more here about food and drugs, but let me skim ahead…
Oh, liberals were responsible for that whole women’s suffrage thing, so your wife isn’t eligible to vote. But you probably don’t care about that, because you don’t like the government anyway.
Let’s see, what else…?
If you lose your job, you’re kind of screwed. There’s no unemployment insurance. More big government stuff created by liberals. At least you don’t have to pay to help other people who lose their jobs.
Medicare and Social Security don’t exist, so make sure you save your money wisely. Hopefully you’ll always have that high-paying office job, and hopefully you won’t hit any unexpected financial speed bumps in the next 25-30 years. I’ll cross my fingers for you. Some of your friends probably won’t be so lucky, but screw em.
Travel in Alternate America is a little dicey. There are no interstate highways. The roads in general are really bad, but they do the job I guess. No one really owns them, and no one has found a good way to make money by building and maintaining them. Luckily you’ll be able to afford a car with seatbelts. The nicer cars have em. Hopefully you’ll never have an accident, because most drivers don’t have any kind of insurance. Why would you pay for insurance if you don’t have to? There aren’t a lot of really beautiful things to see in Alternate America anyway. There’s no Grand Canyon for example, because the government didn’t want to get in the way of all the companies who wanted to build dams along the Colorado River.
Oh, I should also warn you that airplanes are pretty scary. Regular maintenance costs a lot of money, so the airlines in Alternate America try to milk everything they can out of the parts they have before replacing them.
I’ll skip ahead here… there have got to be some things you’ll really like about Alternate America…
Oh, here’s one… No progressive taxation! Of course, that means Alternate America was not able to wage WWII, build the atomic bomb, put a man on the moon or win the Cold War, since most of the revenue in regular America comes from progressive taxation. And you like all that awesome war stuff, right? Go America!
No progressive taxation also means there’s no Internet in Alternate America, because it cost the Department of Defense (in regular America) a lot of money to build.
Well, those are some of the highlights of the fine print. Still want that ticket?
If Sarah Palin falls in the forest and the media ignores her, does it make a sound?
I shouldn’t have to wish for Sarah Palin to go away. After all, what is Sarah Palin but the losing candidate for vice-president in an election that happened 10 months ago, and the former governor of a state most of us never think about (sorry Alaska)? If the winner of the vice presidency is awarded with “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived” (in the immortal words of John Adams), then what does the loser get?
As far as I can tell, Sarah Palin generated a lot of media buzz last summer because she was a woman that no one had ever heard of, and the GOP picked her to be John McCain’s running mate. Pure shock value basically. In a sensible world, the buzz would have quickly dwindled to the sub-audible hum that most veep candidates garner. Except that it turned out she was kind of a dimwit. OK, so that was a bit newsworthy, and Palin was good for a few ammusing “joe six packs” and “you betchas.”
But then it really should have been over.
When McCain lost the election, and she went back to Alaska, that should have been the last we heard from or about her – barring a sex scandal or some kind of meltdown. Like suddenly quitting her job.
But this is the governor of Alaska we’re talking about, and we only care about her because she ran for vice president. When a former veep candidate resigns from office in the least-populous state, it warrants a few paragraphs of coverage for a day or two.
So who’s still talking about Sarah Palin? I don’t read the conservative press, but the New York Times has run several Op-Ed pieces in the last few days and another front-page story yesterday. The Huffington Post has posted probably 50 Palin stories in the last week. The Daily Dish, which usually has better things to talk about, has been beating the dead horse too.
Can y’all stop now please?
It’s been a while since I posted here, and I’m introducing a new category: Elimination Dance.
Instructions: An elimination dance begins with a crowded dance floor. At a signal, the band stops playing and the announcer reads an elimination, say, “Any lover who has gone into a flower shop on Valentine’s Day and asked for clitoris when he meant clematis.” Any dancer answering this description must sit down, and his partner is also disqualified. The process continues (e.g. “Any person who has burst into tears at the Liquor Control Board”) until a single couple remains.
(from the description of Michael Ondaatje’s book by the same title)
This new category, in other words, is for all the things I wish would go away. My first is small-government fanatics. For some reason I’ve allowed myself to rant in the comments of a couple friends’ blogs this week in response to passionate small-government fanaticism and comments I somewhat unfairly deemed as such.
The rest of this post is a lightly-edited re-post of a comment I left on my friend Jay’s blog…
Small-government fanatics seem to believe we are a prosperous and successful country in spite of our government – rather than because of it, whereas I believe the truth is very much both.
We are beneficiaries of two centuries of government protection and support – much of which we basically seem to take for granted at this point, and much of which few people would really want to go back and undo. Of course there have been missteps too, but the small-government libertarian crowd usually fails to acknowledge the ways in which we have benefited.
One core principle of small-government fanatics is free markets, or as my friend Jay unambiguously put it: “The free market is one of the greatest gifts to mankind in all of our history.”
I think, however, that total market freedom almost inevitably leads to “tragedy of the commons” scenarios. People and businesses will pursue their own desires even to the detriment of everyone’s needs. They pursue immediate individual gains that risk (and often cause) generalized future catastrophe.
If government does not serve to protect the commons from the individual, then what – or who – will?
Before the FDA required drug companies to prove their products were not dangerous prior to putting them on the market, there were numerous incidents of contamination – sometimes maiming or killing thousands (thalidomide, diethylene glycol). What’s the free-market alternative to this? The free-market response might be to put a company out of business because one of their products killed a few thousand people, but um… the company KILLED people. That was the free-market drug industry before the FDA.
What about a more straightforward tragedy of the commons? I have a hard time envisioning a free-market solution to protecting fisheries from individual companies competing against each other to pull in the biggest catches. The companies know when they are pushing fisheries toward collapse, but they also know that if they hold back, then others will just step in and out-fish them. What’s the free-market answer?
This is similar in nature to what happened in our financial markets. Smart people knew they were taking insane risks that were not sustainable, in order to reap huge short-term gains. But they also knew that if they didn’t do it, plenty of other people would out-gain them in the short term, and they would be fired.
For whatever reason, it’s easier for me to stomach this problem with the financial markets (as part of the cost of doing business – even if it hurts a lot of innocent bystanders), than with things like forests and fisheries. Damage done to forests and fisheries is longer-lasting.
I have a hard time believing our country’s major parks and wilderness areas would ever have been created without our government deciding to do so (imagine how many more dams could have been built along the Colorado River and how many more trees harvested in Appalachia if companies were free to do so). I’m personally happier to have the parks and wildernesses.
Scientists have been sounding alarms about atmospheric carbon and climate change for five decades, warning us about a point-of-no-return. We probably needed to start doing things differently 10 years ago to avoid the point-of-no-return, but what free market incentive existed to do so? None, and that’s why we’re in the predicament we’re in.
If you believe there are no situations when the collective good is more important than individual gains, then my argument is lost on you. I don’t believe this. And it’s hard to imagine who would aim us toward the collective good if the government was not trying to do so.
It’s fair to argue that the government does not operate effectively or efficiently enough, but I think the answer is to improve it, not to eviscerate it.
I think it’s good and necessary to debate each threshold of government intervention (currently, healthcare), but I think we need to acknowledge how much existing government protection and support we take for granted and would not want to give up.
I have a somewhat irrational affection for Costco. The selection is good, the prices are low. They have a generous return policy (my friend just returned a printer he bought there four years ago and exchanged it for a new one). The folks who work at the one in San Francisco always seem to be enjoying themselves.
But many of my green-minded friends see Costco as a perfect embodiment of modern-day consumer culture and all that is wrong with America.
When you think about it though, one giant jug of laundry detergent requires significantly less plastic than the same amount of detergent sold in six smaller bottles. And buying a mega-bundle of toilet paper means fewer trips to the store than buying six rolls at a time. Plus, they sell recycled paper products and phosphate-free detergent.
I’m just sayin’
I just finished watching the second season of Mad Men, and I’m left with a familiar bittersweet feeling. The same one you get when you finish a great book. I don’t often get this feeling from a TV show, so I’ve begun to reflect a little on what it is that makes the show so good. One thing, of course, is the place and time.
1960 in America
Setting a show in 1960 was a stroke of pure genius. America, having recovered from World War II hit it’s stride in the 1950s. The country was enjoying an unprecedented era of era of prosperity. The big companies that created the machinery of modern warfare reinvented themselves as purveyors of household magic. Plastic revolutionized packaging and changed the whole concept of disposable goods. Chemicals emerged to ensure everything from green lawns to wrinkle-free clothing. A proliferation of new gadgets promised to erase every inconvenience from our lives. This is when Modern America was born. We were seduced by technology, and we never looked back.
At the same time, there was so much about America in 1960 that seems so quaint and primitive now. Often comically so. There’s a voyeuristic joy in watching kids play spacemen in front of their parents by putting plastic bags over their heads. Seatbelts didn’t even exist yet. Pregnant women smoked and drank. Everyone, for that matter, smoked and drank constantly – even at work. Every executive had “a girl” to take care of all the minutiae of meetings and phone calls (plus coffee, dry-cleaning and sometimes other “perks”). “Homos” were perverts, and “negroes” were only fit for household help and operating elevators.
Looking back on this era is to witness the fascinating disconnect between what Americans in 1960 believed about themselves – and their culture and their country – and what we now understand to be the reality. This makes for many gasp-producing, head-shaking moments. But I believe there’s also something much more personal going on. I suspect that in 2009 there is a similar disconnect at play in America.
1960 as a mirror
The Internet has resurrected our reverence for technology and our faith in technology’s ability to solve our problems (if it ever went away). We constantly crave the next new thing – then we adopt it, adapt to it, become disillusioned by it and discard it. This whole cycle can happen over a few months or even weeks.
Today, for example, everyone seems to be excited about Twitter’s third anniversary. At the same time they’re wondering if Facebook’s home page redesign is a harbinger of impending decline.
Women and minorities have come a long way of course. There are whole categories of things we consider unjust today that were acceptable in 1960, but there is still plenty of injustice in the world. And for the most part we still coast through our lives, blissfully untouched by it.
So partly, we love Mad Men for the same reason we love most great stories – because we recognize ourselves in the characters, and we see our world in the one they inhabit.
There’s no shortage of ideas for how the newspaper industry might save itself – by adopting new business models, distribution strategies, etc. The other day, my friend Ben suggested a new twist on subscriptions that would work something like cable television. Others hint that newspapers should push for mass adoption of the Kindle. Still others believe it might make sense to run newspapers as charitable trusts, and organize periodic pledge drives – like NPR.
In these strange and stressful times, people across the political spectrum seem resigned to the likely demise of some major banks and possibly the whole U.S. auto industry. Even my most liberal friends seem almost eager to see GM and Chrysler bite the big one. Yet they’re unwilling to accept a similar fate for the New York Times.
They may not have a choice of course. Michael Hirschorn suggested in the Atlantic Monthly that the Times could disappear by this summer (prompting this response from the Times).
I more or less share my friends’ sentiment. I’m an avid reader of the New York Times (online edition), and I’d miss it. On the other hand, I’ve never owned an American car, so I feel somewhat indifferent to the possibility of their extinction. In my mind, American car companies have made one bad business decision after another, failing to adequately respond to major shifts in the market. On top of that, their product actually harms the planet.
But is the newspaper industry really so different? Newspapers have made plenty of bad business decisions, and they haven’t adequately responded to major shifts in the market. Plus, ink, paper and all the driving involved in distribution take their own toll on the planet.
But the bigger question is, why do we need newspapers? And I’m not just talking about the physical offline versions. I mean why do we need the New York Times at all? Who needs their classifieds when you have Craigslist, Ebay, Amazon, Facebook, etc.? And there are plenty of other – and better – places to keep up on sports, finance, travel, food and entertainment.
That leaves general news of the nation and the world. Again though, would we really miss what the major newspapers provide? We shouldn’t equate newspapers with journalism.
After all, the major newspapers dropped the ball with respect to the current financial crisis. In hindsight, there are all kinds of questions they should have been asking. The alternative press and bloggers were arguably doing better at what the fourth estate is supposed to do, but the very existence of the newspapers casts a pretty long shadow over these guys.
The major newspapers failed during the Vietnam War to report on things like illegal bombing campaigns and widespread atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers, although there was ample evidence and no shortage of credible sources willing to come forward without anonymity. Again, the alternative press were the only ones willing to write about these things until the war was basically over and the tide of public opinion had completely shifted.
The major newspapers failed during the run-up to the Iraq war to question the motives or tactics of the Bush administration. And they neglected through the first four or five years of his presidency to adequately scrutinize anything his administration did – from suspensions of civil liberties and habeas corpus to rampant corruption and deceit.
The major newspapers failed for many years to lay out the straightforward scoop on climate change, opting instead for a misguided even-handedness. The perception of impartiality was more important to them than the truth.
In so many important cases, the major newspapers put their bottom line ahead of journalistic principles, unwilling to report anything that ran against the public opinion of the moment. This is why nine out of the ten most emailed New York Times articles on any given day are op-ed pieces. This is the most trustworthy section of the Times because it’s the most uncorruptable, the least subject to compromise.
In my view, the only newspapers that don’t have an obvious replacement are the small-town ones. Without small-town papers, where will people find out about the latest zoning ordinances and high-school wrestling results? But the potential demise of local news sources isn’t a tragedy. It’s a business opportunity. The Internet still needs to get a lot more local. And it will.
It’s OK to let the newspapers die.
