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.
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.
There are a lot of people lining up for stimulus dollars, a lot of ambitious and long-dormant projects being dusted off by governors and mayors across the country.
But there’s another group of opportunists taking advantage of the debate. I’m talking about the G.O.P. who are stonewalling and stalling in the name of prudent spending. At least that’s what they’d like us to think. They’re going through the proposed bill line by line and collectively decrying as wasteful almost everything in it.
I suspect something else is behind the political theater.
It’s possible the Republicans think they have nothing to lose by delaying or even derailing the President’s plan. It’s reasonable for them to believe they won’t be blamed if the final plan they approve ultimately fails to fix the economy. If it fails, the Republicans can be pretty sure that the president and not congress will bear the blame. Likewise if it succeeds, he will get most of the credit. Congress will share very little of either.
I’m not sure I’m so cynical as to suspect the Republicans of trying to engineer a failure, but looking at it as a purely political opportunity, they have much more to gain from failure than they do from success.
Don’t ask me why, but I was looking at Sean Hannity’s website today. OK, I was looking for a video clip of his recent interview with Shelby Steele that I learned about via Digg or reddit or something. Anyway, once I was there, I found myself clicking around out of sheer amazement.
Right away, I was assaulted by an orgy of red, white and blue that makes Stephen Colbert’s set look sedate. This is the obligatory patriotic pose. When you stand in front of the American flag, you must look proudly into the distance and display the underside of your chin. It also helps to have a second shot of yourself behind you, representing that “over-reaching” quality we want from our government.
Anyway, after I absorbed the full weight of Hannity’s patriotism, I tried searching for “Shelby Steele” and came up with nothing…
I was delighted to see, however, that I can share this page of zero search results with a friend. And I can search for Shelby Steele in the Yellow Pages. Do people still use the Yellow Pages?
Undeterred, I tried searching for Obama…
Nothing. Hmm… An example of “fair and balanced” reporting? How about a search for Clinton…
OK, could be the same thing. How about a couple of searches more in line with Hannity’s views…
Wow! How about another…
So, clearly pure incompetence. Maybe it has something to do with the way every word you search for is transformed into a “Sean Hannity Keyword.”
I want to keep clicking! By far the best thing I found on Sean Hannity’s website was this…
This has to be a joke. It needs to be a joke. But there’s no way Hannity is that funny, so I can only conclude that it’s real. I’m completely hooked at this point, especially when I see…
I love this. Watch out ladies, he’s “ready for it.” He’s actually armed and ready for it, if you look at the picture. Don’t take your eyes off your drink if you’re around this guy, because he’s bound to slip you a rohypnol. I can’t stop myself from clicking into his profile…
Who would have guessed motor racing and wrestling? I mean, the guy has a high school education. But wait, there’s more…
Wait, twenty-seven? Didn’t your personal information say you were 31?
This dude can’t be real. I’m almost sure he’s fake… but he is the “featured” profile, which either says something about Hannity’s audience (if he’s real) or his ability to run a website (if he’s fake).
I wish I had time to see more, and say more, but it’s midnight, and I’m procrastinating. I have a couple more hours of work left before I can go to bed, so I’ll just leave it here.
The fantasy known as Dubai, home of the world’s only 7-star hotel, is planning to burn another billion or so on what will be the world’s largest and tallest spanning arch bridge, The 6th Crossing:
(rendering by FXFOWLE)
Obscene displays of money are nothing new to Dubai, and why not? They might as well spend everything they can as fast as they can, because in 100 years I’m guessing Dubai will look something like…
(photo by daarkfire)
President Bush is touring the Middle East right now, and he has made sure to bluster about Iran’s fictional nuclear ambitions at every stop, but oil has been the main topic on his agenda. Yesterday he met with Saudi leader, King Abdullah and tried to persuade him to up his country’s production, in order to stabilize prices.
Bush argued that high oil prices will cause the US to import less oil, and therefore less money will flow from American wallets into royal Saudi Arabian wallets. The problem with this argument (other than the notion of protecting the exchange of our cash for Saudi palaces and ponies) is that the increasing demand for oil in China, India and the rest of the developing world will more than offset any decrease in US imports.
Saudi Arabia shrugs.
In the 1970s, before the Ayatollah overthrew the Shah, Iran was one of our main sources of imported oil. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 triggered an energy crisis when in November of that year, President Carter cut off oil imports from Iran. This marked the beginning of the end for Carter, who famously proposed to the American people that the solution to the crisis was to conserve. “Wear sweaters,” he told us.
The thing is, we’re addicted to oil, and to conserve is… well… un-American. The Reagan administration saw the light, and Saudi Arabia became our new best friend in the Middle East.
Fast-forward to 2008. Iran is still chock full of oil, so it should come as no surprise that our current president has steadfastly ignored the U.S. Intelligence Estimate finding that Iran stopped pursuing its nuclear ambitions in 2003. Iran has oil. We want it. We need it. Therefore we need Iran to be a threat, just like we needed Iraq to be a threat, because President Bush needs to guarantee access to oil.
Consider the following:
Bush’s commitment to keeping oil lines open is not sinister in itself. The reality is, our economy would cease to function without foreign oil, and that would hurt every single one of us, probably more than we can imagine. If Bush had simply told the truth – we need a steady supply of oil from Iraq in order for our economy to function, therefore we need a more stable and sympathetic regime there – he would not have gotten the necessary support from Congress or the American people. So he used terrorism as a pretense.
Now Bush is trying to do it again, with Iran.
The war in Iraq is about oil. Few people would dispute that. Some would say it was waged simply to take the oil, while others argue that it is being waged in order to create a stable regional ally who will reliably sell us oil. It’s probably the latter, but it doesn’t really matter. The war is about oil.
To ensure access to Iraq’s oil, we are paying $275 million per day. How much would it cost to expand the war to Iran?
So, to summarize, we consume an enormous amount of oil. We have dangerously little oil of our own, so we need everything we can get from the Middle East. To maintain this dynamic of dependence, we are willing to invest $275 million per day and hundreds of thousands of American lives (because it’s not just the lives lost that we are investing, but the hard work of all the soldiers) in a war.
This is the true cost of oil, which is not represented at the pump. The $3-plus that you pay per gallon does not include the costs of tax subsidies to the oil industry, the subsidies for the extraction, production, and use of petroleum, the military costs of protecting access to oil supplies – not to mention health care costs for treating respiratory illnesses ranging from asthma to emphysema, or finally, the costs of climate change. If we factored all this into the price of gasoline, it would cost about $15 per gallon, according to a study (pdf) by the International Center for Technology Assessment.
Are we getting a good return on this investment? Does it have a future? What else could we do with $275 million per day and the hard work of hundreds of thousands of people we’re spending just on the Iraq war?
$275 million per day works out to about $100 billion per year which, according to one study, could pay for…
Before you get into a tizzy, the figures above reflect additional money that would need to be spent on the various initiatives, rather than the total figures. These are all things, like the military, that only cost us money. They don’t generate any, which is why I didn’t compare the military spending on the Iraq war to money we could invest in, say, developing alternative energy sources. We’d actually make money if we did that.
It’s good to know we have our priorities straight.
Today, I took my car to the nearest Shell station to get it smog checked – a bi-yearly(?) ritual for drivers in California. The friendly folks at the Shell station took one look at my registration renewal paperwork from the California DMV, however, and said, “oh, you’re test only.”
Me: “What does that mean?”
Shell guy: “It means they’re picking on you.”
[beat]
Shell guy: “Seriously, it means we can’t do your smog check. We’re not allowed to do ‘test only’ checks. I’ll call the guys across the street.”
Long story short, the banner on the Shell station said “Smog Check Center,” while the one across the street said, “Smog Check Center: Test Only.” The difference, apparently, is that the test-only center can’t fix your car if it doesn’t pass the test. Now follow along kids, because here’s where it gets stupid…
Based on data collected by the California DMV, cars most likely to fail the smog check are flagged for test-only checking. That’s right, cars most likely to NEED FIXING to pass the smog check must get their smog checks done at the places that CAN’T FIX THEM.
Sweet infant Jesus.
Anyway, mine passed (yay), so next I visited the California DMV website where I was greeted by this monstrosity (direct link in case it goes away from the DMV home page).
Rock on DMV!
A group calling themselves gravity monkey has gone mobile with FundRace’s geo-coded FEC data. They’ve created a Java app called red | blue (pronounced “red or blue”) that can tell you whether or not you’re standing in enemy territory.
