Years of Poems and Spirits

Saw plenty of Limbaugh coverage recently. But two images stuck in my mind. I definitely like the New Yorker one better. In fact, I left this cover on the kitchen counter, just to enlighten my mood every morning.

The Newsweek one is good. But is a little too serious, and trying too hard to make a point. As Eisenhower once said about Joe McCarthy, “you don’t want to get into a pissing contest with a skunk”.

I was just arguing for Diane yesterday and said, given my age and knowledge of American political system (and how easily it is to find about anything I like to know), “rarely has any one brought more significant marginal increase to what I know than Diane does.” And here is an good example today.

The topic of discussion is “Earmark Reform“. This was a contentious topic during the Presidential Campaign and a rather arcane one too. I knew what it is but didn’t know enough to make up my own mind about the need to reform.

Listening to today’s show changed all that. Diane has the uncanny ability to find the right guests for the right topic: not only are they knowledgeable, but also very articulate. The reform advocate (Melanie Sloan) has a very coherent argument for her cause, but the moderate guy and the status-quo guy are very engaging too. Nobody dismisses the other’s ideas out of hand so that the discussion degenerates into a shouting match. Even though Norman Ornstein appeared exacerbated at the notion of a whole-scale reform, he did a good enough job to make his point across.

After the program, a rather confusing topic now becomes pretty clear to me. I think the most effective and achievable reform at this stage is the continuation of making the process more transparent. I wouldn’t even go as far as publicly tying campaign contributions from earmark recipients (if you remodel your house, would you ask your contractors how much he made from every transactions involved in the project?)

Compared to most other talking heads, particularly those on cable TV, Diane’s program is a fine example of how journalists can keep Democracy the best political system in the world.

Too busy today, may add on to the following thoughts:

The problem of New York Times: the castrated ms media leader who would rather go after individual politicians than to challenge interest groups–whether it is Israel Lobby or Labor Unions; the unachieveable goal of “fair and balanced” reporting by any commercial enterprise; the critique of mainstream media in digital age in the New Yorker by A. Huffington; the power-hungry beasts like Politico and cable news and their impact to political discourse; and again, hallelujah to Diane!!

Just read the outrageous news, “Leading Russian Rights Lawyer Is Shot to Death in Moscow”. The title says it all. What is striking is the nonchalant tone in the piece, as if being murdered in broad daylight is part of daily life for Russian liberals.

True or not, just got me thinking. A new term coined in China last year was “beggar-gang journalist” (新闻丐帮). It refers to journalists flocking to industrial accident sites, waiting to be bought off.  For example, there have been reports that some coalmine accidents were left out of news after reporters were seen getting paid off.

Each of the two above story may not be so interesting until they are placed side by side. It reveals something about each society, particularly what happens when ”civilized” disagreements cannot be reconciled.

If I read Norbert Elias right, historically, conflict resolution used to be violent. A side project of the modernization/state formation/social transformation is the “civilization” process after which physical violence is replaced with “war of words and symbols” (my phrase). Well, the journalists are perhaps the ultimate word warriors in this regard.

But sooner or later, the words will run afoul of the real world somewhere. How the societal dissonance is reconciled really tells something about the society. Both China and Russia are top-down, patriarchal societies, yet how they hold themselves together seems to be different: one resorts more to man self-interest, the other to man’s fear.

Needless to say, this is not about who is more right/better than the other. Just interesting to note.