Steve Gillard died five years ago today and the medium he mastered has changed so much in the last five years that it really isn't the same animal anymore.
The aggregators arrived in force and on horseback. Eyeball-bundling entrepreneurs moved in. And every news outlet that wasn't picked clean and sold off by vultures sprouted whole mushroom-farms of in-house J-school bloggers and social networkians with minors in SEO and upcool, or repurposed legacy product (now allowed to grow their hair a tad beatnikier) or they just bought their Google-street-cred off-the-shelf.
Poke through Gilliard's old archives -- past the vanished videos and broken graphics -- and you will find Bill Kristol's firebreathing demands for more Americans-other-than-Bill-Kristol-or-anyone-Bill-Kristol-knows to be fed into his Neocon meatgrinder war (and Juan Williams sitting right next to him fawning and pleading with his buddy Bill to be nice) but you won't find the word "Facebook".
You'll find snapshots of the pasty, nocturnally-feeding Frank Luntz slithering between commas and semicolons trying to find just the right word to make you vote to slit your own economic throat, but there is no "Twitter".
Five years ago I was living a very different life; one with a good job doing important work that provided me with extravagant baubles like "health insurance" and enough of an income to pay my bills, sock a little away and still hit Steve's tip jar hard on a regular basis. All of that is gone now, but I am not particularly nostalgic for those days -- not for the "things" of those days anyhow.
I do, however, very much miss some of the esprit of those times: the sinewy vitality, the urgent presence of shared peril and a sense of intelligent, passionate, focused purpose of those days. Which is why I am nostalgic for the muscular writing of Steve Gilliard: it was the crisp, clear fife and drum of our battles.
His archives sit silent as a digital crypt, vast and unmoving, undisturbed now by any except the few of us who still stop by to read and ruminate, and a few data-gathering algorithms trying to figure out what the Hell a "Fitzmas" was. Some people made a great show of doing a book -- maybe many books -- but that did not materialized because those things never do. There was a grand multimedia site launched with a flotilla of writers that fizzed along for awhile, then died, then relaunched sort of, then died again.
In the busy marketplace, very little writing lasts beyond an author's (or executor's) ability to publicly and persistently beat a drum on its behalf.
This is the way of things, but it still grinds my gears that the world's libraries contain so many shitty books by Tom Friedman and not a single, slim volume containing a selection of the collected works of Mr. Steve Gilliard.
The United States is a single nation with a common history, a common currency and a strong identity. Yet the country has become more polarized, not less. The country has become more difficult to govern, not less.
By golly, we really have become more polarized not less!
Unless, of course, you factor in that bit about slavery.
And 600,000 Americans killing each other in bloody civil war.
And Jim Crow.
And Vietnam.
And the Civil Rights movement.
And in case you hadn't noticed it, our contemporary upsurge in ungovernability comes as a direct result of the unconquered racism, prideful ignorance and bile from each of these acts of near-fatal disunion oozing into our cultural catch-basin and spawning monsters.
Monsters whose explicit goal is destroy the American government by making America ungovernable. Who (as I have written before) now stand on the Overpass of History heaving cinderblocks into traffic.
I guess that spanking new $4M mansion came as mirror-optional.
* (Apropos of nothing except that I stumbled upon an example of it moments ago, it is still strange and inspiring to come across some verbal construction of mine showing up as a part of a civic dialogue far, far away from my front door :-)
Those eager, Republican "Men of Business" sure seem to have a lot of super, MBA-sounding ideas about how to spend down all that extra money which the outgoing, Democratic administration is leaving behind*
And you can bet, if elected, those Republican Men of Business will be extra careful with all that dough!
After all, those surpluses were the result of painful and politically costly reforms -- reforms to which to the
outgoing, Clinton administration sacrificed several, key programs and campaign promises made to its Liberal constituents -- which they put in place to help pull the nation back from the brink of the financial abyss which 12 straight years of Republican fiscal mismanagement had left in its wake. And the Clinton administration did all of this while the Limbaugh Party busied itself trying to destroy their ability to conduct the nation's business with a dizzying combination of witch hunts, wild abuses of prosecution power and crackpot billionaire-funded slander-media.
And so as chastened as they must be by their own failures (and by having to watch Socialist America-hating Democrats put the nation's financial house they destroyed back in order) I can only assume that this time around they would be much more careful. Especially after being handed this helpful warning by Clinton Administration Labor Secretary, Alexis Herman:
"Labor Secretary Alexis Herman, appointed by President Bill Clinton on May 1, 1997, told CNNfn.com that Bush's proposed plan to cut taxes would harm the fiscal discipline that has allowed the current U.S. administration to turn the record deficit into a record surplus, fueling economic growth and creating more new jobs than ever before."
After all, its not like the American electorate would ever be stupid enough to forgive the same gang of criminals and demagogues for nearly destroying the country the same way twice.
Right?
* For those with Conservative friends or colleagues who have spent much of the last ten years manufacturing all kinds of hilarious, ass-covering fairy tales, I include this end-note about the tall tale that this was all just another Evil Liberal Lie cuz there ain't wuzzint never no god damn "surplus" anyway! (Or, if your local Conservative doubters are slightly less clod-of-dirt ignorant) how Dubya (who was famous for his nuanced language) had carefully qualified everything he said about this alleged "surplus" with a busload of caution if-statement.)
Like Donny and Marie, [Romney is] counter-cultural. He doesn’t seem to have experienced the cultural shift of the last few decades. No Lenny Bruce, no Richard Pryor, no Letterman, Seinfeld, Jay-Z or “The View.”
...
My question is: Is this good or bad? People turn back the clock all the time. Look at the Renaissance.
If Mr. Brooks continues to lie about the past to make his daily bread, one of these fine days the University of Chicago campus police are going to come a'knockin' at his $4M front door with a court order stating that he must:
Immediately return the degree in History that he somehow scammed them out of, and,
Stay at least 50 yards away from History and cease and desist from all false, misleading and slanderous public comments about History until such time as he agrees to take and pass a court-approved course in "History Abuse Management."
Until then, don't you think this bit of Mr. Brooks' reflexively fraudulent, hit-and-run Conservatism:
People turn back the clock all the time. Look at the Renaissance.
Reads so much clearer dressed like this?
People turn back the clock all the time. Look at the Taliban.
Or this?
People turn back the clock all the time. Look at the trial of Galileo.
Are those three causes Reaganomics, illegal trillion-dollar wars and the Bush tax cuts?
No they are not.
Slavery, Jim Crow and Vietnam?
Nope.
Neocons, Nicholas Cage movies and 30 years of union-busting?
Still cold.
Prohibition, reality teevee and our alarming lack of moon bases?
Getting warmer, but no.
Forrest Gump beating out Pulp Fiction and Shawshank Redemption for Best Picture, the death of Mike Royko and Richard M. Nixon?
Nope.
Tony Scalia, Robert Bork and every "Dune" sequel after "Children of Dune"?
No.
David Brooks, David Gregory and Tom Friedman?
Again, no.
The Progressive Era, the New Deal and the Great Society?
Bingo!
You must be shitting me!
I shit you not.
You see, America (as constructed single-handedly by Imaginary Alexander Hamilton) "prospered" until successive phases of Dirty Fucking Paleohippies came along and fucked everything up.
Despite being handicapped by the fact that none of this is, y'know, true (from Armando at Daily Kos) --
...
To invoke Hamilton in support of limited government, knowing his critical role as a Founding Father, is to write dishonestly. Brooks is dishonest here because his clear implication is that the Constitution itself reflects Brooks' Lochnerian constitutional views. It does not and Hamilton would no doubt be the person most surprised to see himself used as "a champion" of a limited national government. Consider Sandy Levinson's piece, also in today's New York Times. Levinson writes:
Advocating the adoption of the new Constitution drafted in Philadelphia, the authors of “The Federalist Papers” mocked the “imbecility” of the weak central government created by the Articles of Confederation.
Instead of being an advocate a "limited" national government, as Brooks claims, Hamilton was THE champion of a strong national government. Brooks dishonest invocation of Hamilton for support of his vision of a Lochnerian relationship of government to the People is belied by two of the most famous passages in the judicial history of our country.
...
-- Our Mr. Brooks bravely soldiers on to unmask the really destroyers of America.
First came the Progressive Era with its...
"...excessive faith in the power of government planners to rationalize national life."
Those damn, meddlin' Progressives! Don't they know that America cannot possibly survive without child labor, firetrap sweatshops, breathing polluted air, drinking industrial waste and workers losing the odd arm or leg or eye
in a sloppy steel pour or stamping accident or assembly-line mishap?
Second came (insert sinister incidental music here) The New Deal. And while FDR was "...right to energetically respond to the Depression" the idea that the economy should work for everyone" the results were "eventually corrosive" causing a groups of people called "Americans" to become...
"...corrupted by the allure of debt, sacrificing future development for the sake of present spending and tax cuts."
This will no doubted come as a terrific shock the generations that followed whose prosperity rested on the solid caissons of massive government investments in roads, bridges, education, dams, national parks, highways, etc. from whence all of this terrible corruption came, but onward!
And then comes Bad Thingie #3: The Great Society.
Again we begin with a sop being thrown to the good intentions of those wooly-headed Liberals:
"Lyndon Johnson was right to use government to do more to protect Americans from the vicissitudes of capitalism."
After which comes the "but"...
"But he made a series of open-ended promises, especially on health care. He tried to bind voters to the Democratic Party with a web of middle-class subsidies."
Poor, dumb Liberals. Always trying to help out but always fucking everything up worse than before.
Mr. Brooks begins to wind down is latest work of revisionist flapdoodle by telling us that he has:
"...taken this tour through history because we are having a big debate about what government’s role should be, so, of course, we are having a debate about what government’s role has been."
Except Mr. Brooks hasn't taken a real tour of the real history of America at all.
Instead he has taken a lazy and fraudulent 800 word amble through a Reaganized, Disneyfied alternate universe version of American History, checking each, obligatory, wingnut talking point along the way.
In Mr. Brooks' alternate America, distrust of government did not stem from discovering that it's mostly Republican leaders were engaged in massive criminal enterprises (Nixon -- Watergate) or outright treason and war crimes (Reagan/Bush I-- Iran/Contra...Bush II -- Iraq), or city-killing criminal incompetence (Bush II -- 9-11/Katrina/Iraq/Afghanistan/Osama bin Laden, et al) or fiscal malfeasance on a scale Americans had never seen before (the crippling deficits of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush respectively.)
In Mr. Brooks' alternate America the absolutely relentless, sustaining 30-year verbal bombing campaign from the Right designed to persuade the public that "Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem." also has nothing to do with why Americans distrust government.
In Mr. Brooks' alternate America, the "Tea Party" was not the ginned up product of the native rage and racism of the GOP base fueled by Koch brother's cash, Dick Armey's perfidy and Fox News' business model.
Instead, our...
"...balanced governing philosophy was destroyed gradually over the 20th century, before the Tea Party was even in utero. As government excessively overreached, Republicans became excessively antigovernment."
So the beautiful constitutional design that prevailed when women and southern African-Americans couldn’t vote (or for that matter, much earn a living) and working people were quasi-serfs was ruined, and it’s taking an overreaction to re-achieve the kind of balance that a proper Hamiltonianism—you know, the Hamiltonianism of David Brooks, or perhaps Mitt Romney—would achieve. Maybe women and minorities can’t be disenfranchised, but at least we can “reform entitlements” and get rid of labor unions, right?
David Brooks has always been a master at redefining “the center” to coincide with his own views, and at identifying the immediate needs of the country with the tactical positions of the Republican Party. But this takes the cake: Republicans—the sane, non-Tea Party Republicans—are today’s true Hamiltonians! Those wanting a vigorous, proud politics of common good should be pushing the Ryan Budget, lest the excesses of 20th century liberalism unleash the Jeffersonian Tea Party furies. If there existed an ideological Olympics with a gymnastics competition, Brooks would be the gold medal winner time and time again.
...
And in this remarkable tour through American history, I haven't seen a single actual American worker. The Erie Canal was carved by magic glaciers. The transcontinental railroad was laid by elves, not underpaid Chinese laborers from the West and immigrant laborers in the East. The steel that was laid was made by woodsprites and gnomes, and dwarves and happy goblins dug out the coal to power the trains. The goods in the freight cars were made by sprinking golden Founders dust on the cotton plants, which magically turned into clothing, and was not picked by slaves nor made into shirts by Irish girls squinting themselves into blindness in the mills in Lowell. There were no workers to join unions, to insist on luxuries like the five-day week and the eight-hour day. There were no breaker kids picking through the coal bins. There was no middle class. There were just Contending Theories Of Government, which do not eat much.
...
And leave poor [E.J.] Dionne alone. He's got enough trouble with the bishops these days without your using him to chicken out on the fact that the primary forces that "destroyed the balanced government philosophy" gradually over the 20th century did most of their work in the last quarter of it, when the Republican party guzzled snake-oil economics and got drunk and wrecked the place, to the polite applause of, among other people, David Brooks...
[Republicans] created a debt crisis with their policies and now they want to dismantle a century of progressive government to pay for their folly. They gave the ultra-rich twelve years of absurdly low taxes that directly ruined our balance sheets, and now they refuse to allow any of those people to pay into the system. No wonder people are getting angry with the rich. You're going to make me work two more years before I can collect Social Security just so a billionaire can keep a few more million bucks?
David Brooks continues to concoct new ways to excuse this behavior, and he's probably going to burn in hell for it.
-- each deliver what would be career terminating kill-shots if holding journalists accountable for purveying horseshit as history was something we still did in this country.
But those days are long gone.
Instead, Mr. Brooks will go right on making a living spooning this weak, watery poo into the pages of "The New York Times".
He will continue doing it twice a week, 800 words at a time.
And for this minimal effort Mr. Brooks will continue to reap truly regal rewards.
It's a bomb which will detonate if you ever admit -- even for a moment, even to yourself -- that the Evil Libruls have ever been right about anything.
If detonated, this bomb will not only annihilate your identity, your ideals and your faith...not only destroy your standing in the community, the esteem of your friends, the respect of your spouse and children and, potentially, your livelihood...but it will also utterly humiliate you.
Should that bomb ever go off you would be forced to admit that have gotten really, really important things terribly wrong for the last 10...20...30...40 years.
That you trusted liars and hucksters with lives of your country and family -- liars and hucksters whose bullshit was painfully obvious to others but to which you were happily, willfully oblivious. That you gave these liars and hucksters your votes, your money, your irreplaceable time, your country and your heart even as they were pissing in your cow-dumb face and laughing at you behind your back.
Should that bomb ever go off you would be forced to admit that you not only loudly cheered on the destroyers of your country -- that you actually paid for the privilege --
but actively worked to cripple the efforts of those who first tried to warn you and then tried to save you.
Forced to eat all of your bile-soaked tirades.
Forced to admit before the whole world that you have a chump and a moron of the First Water
It does not matter how many charts Erza Klein generates or how loud the pleas for compromise from the imbecile Center, there is no possibility that our political system will get healthy anytime soon as long as 1/3 of our political ecosystem -- the American Conservative portion -- is stocked from floor to ceiling with people with this bomb in their heads.
I would be delighted if the GOP were to transubstantiate itself into something humane, pragmatic, data-drive and debate-worthy, because God knows we need all hands on deck these days.
But they won't -- they can't -- and so you now have the spectacle of a party/movement/cult that, on the one hand, clearly has no fucking idea what its core values even are anymore, but on the other hand is sprinting from camera to camera reassuring themselves that all they need do rebrand their atrocious ideology instead of rethinking it.
Reformers. But… but, they just can’t help themselves. Like well-dressed junkies, they go back to get their fix; like spoiled children, they break down and cry and demand attention; like washed up athletes and Little Misses, they can’t stop talking about their Glory Days, when what they did mattered, at least to them.
And they expect America to sit quietly, smile politely and listen, once again, to how they could throw that football over that mountain. How, if things were different, they would have won. But always, always, revisiting whatever scene makes the best excuse and gets the most sympathy. And for Republicans, it’s always 9/11/2001. Always.
…
Ignoring both the slowly suffocating voices of their own consciences as well as the advice of party stalwarts like Barry “Every good Christian should line up and kick Jerry Falwell's ass" Goldwater, the GOP spent the last 30 years wallowing luxuriously in the electoral mudhole that Richard Nixon clawed into the soft, red clay of Lester Maddox’s Georgia and George Wallace’s Alabama.
Why?
Simple.
Because it fucking worked.
Because coaxing every miscreant, homophobe, gun nut, blood-and-soil Aryan nationalist, garden variety bigot and Christopath out from under every rock and rotting log in the Confederacy, down a rose-petal-strewn red carpet and into the Party of Lincoln won elections.
To be an American Conservative means that every day terrifying reality impinges a little more; every day history conspires a little harder to flick sparks at the detonation cord which will obliterate you. And since all compromise is surrender, and surrender sets off the bomb, rather than sue Reality for peace, they have left themselves no choice but to scrape together anything that might ignite the fuse -- all of their bigotries, all of their paranoid delusions, all of their crackpot notions of good and God and government -- into one, big pile, defend it all collectively as a Holy Cause.
And never look back.
Being bigoted, atavistic assholes is the hill they have decided to die on
In which I am interviewed by Gregg Bush of KOPN radio (Columbia, Missouri's Liberal news leader!) for about an hour and manage to make every point without imperiling Gregg's FCC licence even once.
I missed seeing racist, bomb-throwing grifter Newt Gingrich
and establishmentarian testicle cozy David Gregory
fellate each on "Meet the Press", after which failed HP CEO and McCain economics whisperer Carly Fiorina and Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times talk in hushed tones about an alternate Universe where the GOP is not packed to the gunwales, bigoted crazy (all while the elfin, corduroy-voiced E.J. Dionne scurries politely along behind trying - quietly and politely -- to point out that they are lying without ever, y'know saying it.)
But I need not have worried: later in the day, the "Liberal" MSNBC reran the entire thing on the teevee machine and WCPT -- virtually the only "Liberal" radio station in Illinois -- reran the entire thing again on the radio machine.
Thus I learned that Carly Fiorina has a deep, blue sad over,
Barack Obama being the most negative politician in the entire history of American politics, and
Vladimir Putin being the "untrustworthy" head of an "unsettled" government despite having George W. Bush's ratifying eye-prints all over his Cossack soul
and that David Brooks,
Worries over "both sides" becoming "bounty hunters" in order to slake the roiling "juices" of their bases and,
Thinks that Scott Walker is a "reformer" whose methods of "reforming the welfare state" might have been a little rough "but at least he did it!"
I have nothing to add to what I have already written about predicting almost to the day when (not "if" but "when") Dancin' David Gregory would once again loan the "Meet the Press" spotlight to his racist, bomb-throwing grifter pal Newt Gingrich so that Gingrich can once again re-vulcanize his bon fides enough to get back to the important work of hustling octogenarian Birchers out of their pudding money:
The Evil That Men Do
...
I bet that Gingrich would be back doing the Sunday shows one of before June 1st, while my better half predicted it would take until at least July for the Mouse Circus douche wranglers to squeegee off enough of Gingrich's accreted awfulness to make him camera-ready again.
Honestly, what gets me -- what ruined an evening I had planned to devote to looking for gas money in the sofa cushions -- is Gregory's sheer, "Fuck you" nakedness. His absolute contempt for his audience and his profession: a contempt that is fully justified by the fact that -- like David Brooks, Marc Halperin and Tom Friedman -- David Gregory knows that none of his colleagues in the media will ever call him out by name for doing what he does.
And so Mr. Gregory drops trou and waves Newt in our faces and smiles because he knows perfectly well that no one is going to say a damn word about it.
Except, of course, a few dirty fucking hippies, screaming uselessly into the hurricane.
...
UPDATE --
And no, this is not a coincidence. Newt Gingrich -- one of the most spectacularly reckless, mendacious, grifty and gleefully destructive people in modern American political history -- appears on the most-watched political talk show in the United States more often that virtually any other human being because David Gregory wants it that way.
...
Keep in mind, "Meet the Press" didn't have the actual Speaker of the House on at all this year. It also featured zero appearances from all of the other living former House Speakers (Hastert, Wright, Foley) combined.
There's just no reasonable explanation for this. Gingrich was forced from office in disgrace -- by his own caucus -- 11 years ago. What's more, he's kind of a nut -- we're talking about a former office holder who speculated, just last week, about hidden messages from God in snowstorms.
And yet, no other political figure was on "Meet the Press" more this year than crazy ol' Newt Gingrich. If someone can explain why, I'm all ears.
Hey, now that Mr. Benen actually works for NBC (well, MSNBC), maybe he can finally lay his hands on some answers to this question which so vexed him just three short years ago and then share them with the rest of us?
Then again, maybe not.
One of the built-in fail-safes of Beltway media power is that those of us who want people like Mr. Gregory to answer for their complicity -- who know that we will perish if we do not find a way to have the kind of honest national dialogues that Mr. Gregory is employed to strangle in the crib -- will never amass the media firepower to get that job done...
...and those that do have the horses know their power would be instantly taken away from them the minute they put someone like Greggers on the spot.
And so Imperial Rome rots because everyone in power hangs onto power by going along with the corrupt bargain.
So that we might never forget that before they put on tri-corner hats and pretended they had never heard of George W. Bush, the members of the 101st Republican Chairborne division were the most loyal members of Commander Cuckoobananas' Amen chorus.
Tomorrow, David Gregory once again invites America's "Definer of civilization, Teacher of the rules of civilization, Arouser of those who form civilization, Organizer of the pro-civilization activists and Leader (possibly) of the civilizing forces" back onto "Meet the Press" to once again shart all over any notion of responsible, political journalism.
As a public service to all of you shrill, vituperation America-haters out there who may wish to express your dissatisfaction with Mr. Gregory's choice of media snuggle-sack buddies, here is a portion of my stockpile of Gingrich Graphics.
If they can be of use to you, have at 'em: all I ask is attribution if you use them.
In addition to mortaring together more award-winning words per page than just about any other writer I can think of, Harlan has also been a tireless, fearless ninja on behalf of just about any, dirty Liberal cause you can think of.
Especially free speech and respect for the rights
of the creative creator.
And the thing is, having bent those oars with Herculean strength and RCMP persistence for more than half a century, he's still at it; still working, still schticking, still a consumate practitioner of the very long con, still squiring the lovely Susan to various interesting places on planet Earth, still living the life you wished you lived and still raising welts and extracting tears using naught but that most ancient human craft of storytelling.
(And don't worry yourself into a hording panic, because there is plenty of New!Ellisonia! to go around.)
When I write about those who have been sounding the alarum bells in the night for decades, I put Harlan is near the top of that list. You cannot read "From Alabamy, With Hate" (1965) --
...
The redhead came over to me.
“We aren’t all as bad as they tell you we are down here,” she said, and seemed infinitely, genuinely sad about it.
“As bad as what, ma’am?” I asked, playing boyish and cute.
“Well, just like, you know, them others, like they tell you.”
“Who tells me, ma’am?”
“You know. We just aren’t all that bad, honest.”
“Yes ma’am.” I smiled at her. “But some of you are, and if you sit back and let them ruin your lovely state, then you’re as guilty as they are. I came all the way from Hollywood, ma’ am, just to see if I could help.”
She stared at me. I’d used a magic word. Hollywood. Then I wasn’t a Communist. A black-loving Jew, probably, but not a Communist. And I had such nice manners, and I obviously wasn’t a beatnik.
The fat one came out with the water. I took a long, deep pull from the kitchen glass, and returned it.
“Thank you, very very much, ma’ am.” I smiled, allowing the left-cheek dimple to show itself.
“You just tell ‘em we gave you a glass of water,” the redhead said, smiling, thinking she was sewing it up.
And if I’d been black? I thought. I didn’t say it, because the idea was to show them there were other ways to do it, not to antagonize them.
I loped back to the line of marchers and fell in, the line moved out again, and I repeated what had been said. They weren’t all that bad down here.
The Negro student turned a look of venom and truth on me.
“Don’t you fall for that okey-dokey,” he warned me.
Hoop-de-hoop. Uh. Uh. Uh. Uh.
We turned down onto the main drag. Dexter Street. Past the Jeff Davis Hotel. The whites standing at every curb, and the rednecks, the denim—clad, white-shirted men, giving us the finger.
“Where you want freedom from, boy?” a redneck murmured at me from the sidelines. “New York? Philadelphia? Chicago?”
I smiled at him...frig you, Jack.
Past the Paramount Theatre. Elvis Presley in Girl Happy.
“That isn’t one of ours,” the Negro high school girl said.
My heart went cold in me. It’s so easy to forget. Past the J.J. Newberry five and dime. The second floor housed the Montgomery Citizens Council offices.
They had a gigantic poster hanging out the window. It showed Martin Luther King with some other people, and it said MARTIN LUTHER KING / COMMUNIST!
Hoop-de-hoop. Hoop-de-hoop.
...
-- or "A Love Song to Jerry Falwell" (1984) or "Revealed at Last! What Killed the Dinosaurs! And You Don't Look so Terrific Yourself." (1978ish) or "Norman Mayer" (1982) and not see the broad, medieval nightmare shadow of what was bearing down on us; not see the Reagan and Nixon years for what they really were -- Guernica-like dress rehearsals for the long-range plans of America's plutocrats and Christopaths.
Oh, and one last thing.
When I was a wee driftglass, the idea of meeting and talking to writers I greatly admired was like the idea of splitting a $20,000 hooker...with Santa Claus...in space: several layers of impossible.
I now know that meeting and talking to writers I greatly admire is both possible and often genuinely delightful.
AOL to Launch Huffington Post Streaming Network in Second Quarter
10:38 AM PST 2/2/2012 by Georg Szalai
NEW YORK - AOL's Huffington Post Media Group will later this year launch the Huffington Post Streaming Network, which will offer live video featuring discussions about HuffPo stories and comments about them, company executives unveiled here on Thursday.
Speaking to reporters at AOL's headquarters here a year after the Internet company acquired the Huffington Post, Roy Sekoff, founding editor of the Huffington Post Media Group who will head up the network, said it will feature live streaming video for 12 hours a day five days a week produced in AOL's New York and LA studios by a dedicated staff of at least 100 plus video on demand clips. Next year, programming will be expanded to 16 hours.
Importantly, viewers will be "a central part of the show" as "people don't want to be told the news anymore," the executive highlighted. "Our community and engagement are unparalleled.
That is why we use the [tagline] 'conversations start here'. We are taking what the Huffington Post does and taking it to another medium." He said the goal is to reach viewers on their computers at work, as well as on their tablets and smartphones.
Expected to launch in the second quarter, the network could be programmed 9am-9pm ET, but the company hasn't made a final decision on the exact streaming times yet, he told THR.
Executives described the streaming network as a never-ending talk show. A demo video that Sekoff showed featured discussions between hosts and Huffington Post reporters, with bloggers or viewers patched in via Skype and Facebook comments read by a host. Segments that were part of the reel included "Defend Your Comment," which showed a Huffington Post blogger and her critic face off via video link, "Write The Headline," which asks readers/viewers to tweet in the headline for a Huffington Post story whose writer is outlining its content, and a look at headlines from around the Huffington Post, including its celebrity and politics sections.
