Light On Dark Water

Mid-Week Miscellany

Just a few quick notes–I had sort of wanted to comment at more length on these but ran short of time:

The Future of Social Democracy: English (Telegraph) columnist wonders why the U.S. is starting down the path that Europe seems to be coming to the end of.

Related sentiments from Germany: "The US has lived on borrowed money for too long." Amen to that. But it isn't going to change, short of a complete crash-and-burn of some kind, without causing us a fair amount of pain, and I don't know that we have what it takes to make sacrifices anymore.

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Some conservatives, emboldened by last week's electoral victories and annoyed by NPR's firing of Juan Williams, have decided that now is the time to press on with a truly terrible idea: de-funding public broadcasting. Ok, in the abstract there is a good case to be made for getting the government out of that business. But apparently government is only a small part of their budget. And despite my disagreement with NPR's politics, they do a huge amount of really excellent work which is not dominated by politics: for instance, Terry Gross's Fresh Air. If I should ever be in a position to be interviewed, I want the operation to be performed by Terry Gross.  Let's cut out some of the actively harmful and/or really expensive things the government does before getting all puritanical about the few tax dollars that go to public broadcasting.

And anyway,  an all-out attack on NPR/PBS would be a huge gift to the Democrats.

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Those crafty racist conservatives are attempting to mislead the public by electing non-white candidates. Perhaps Nancy Pelosi can attempt to put a stop to this while she's still Speaker. It would be a fitting legacy for her–remember her call for the Tea Party to be "investigated."  (By the way, if you click on the word "seriously" at the end of that post, beware: it takes you to an anti-conservative screech by someone amusingly named Tim Wise.)

Speaking of race-obsessed liberals/leftists: "Whiter than a Stewart-Colbert rally." Heh. Turnabout etc. 

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Mist on the delta early last Saturday morning, taken with my phone through the car window, so not very good, but still, sort of nice, I thought:

Pic1106003
 

Maclin Horton

31 responses to “Mid-Week Miscellany”

  1. Francesca

    Janet Daley is an American journalist living in England.

    Reply
  2. Mac

    Do you mean that just as a factual correction, or that what she says in that piece is not representative of British opinion? It certainly doesn’t seem representative of these folks.

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  3. Francesca

    I means that she thinks and writes like an American, not like an English columnist

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  4. Mac

    So you don’t think she’s particularly accurate about the disenchantment with the welfare state?

    Reply
  5. Janet

    I like that picture. I love mist, but, of course, I’ve probably mentioned that several times here.
    AMDG

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  6. Mac

    If it were a higher-res image and those cables weren’t in it, I would crop it down to the really pretty part. But this is all there is.

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  7. Janet Cupo

    It makes me think that I should take my camera to work tomorrow. I won’t be driving, so I won’t have to risk my life to take a picture. I love this time of year because there’s mist almost every morning.
    AMDG

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  8. Janet Cupo

    And the mist hides the fact that the trees don’t look so good this year. Oh, that reminds me.
    Simon Barrington-Ward (never heard of him before) wrote this about a walk he took with CSL. One day I made a mild complaint about the dullness of the Cambridge countryside contrasted with other places that I had known and loved. He turned on me quite gravely. “You should never condemn any genuine countryside in that way,” he said almost severely to me. “In every landscape you should try to feel for its real nature and quality and let it grasp hold of you. The day is coming when, beyond this life, we shall recognize that quality in the eternal fulfillment in which it will have its true place.”
    AMDG

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  9. Rob G

    NPR, despite its often screwy political commentary, is one of the last places left to get classical music on regular radio. We’re fortunate enough to have a 24/7 classical station here, which I support monetarily (I neither want nor expect the State to foot the whole bill). Since from a certain angle classical music is inherently conservative, I see NPR’s support of it as mildly ironic, and quite praiseworthy.
    When I made this argument on the First Things blog, one of the responses I got was “How dare you expect the government to tax me in order to support your musical tastes!”
    Whatever.

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  10. Mac

    I guess that’s pretty much the way I feel about the Greenbrier landscape, where I grew up. It’s pretty drab but I have an attachment to it.

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  11. Mac

    That last comment was a reply to Janet (obviously?).
    Re NPR & “How dare you etc.”: yeah yeah, fine–in the abstract this argument is ok, but the amount of money is so small, and the harm so little, and the benefit so large, that it’s a weird place to insist on drawing a line. Yes, NPR news has a lefty slant, but usually not to the point of total distortion, at least in the actual news, and their reportage is fuller than you get in most places. Granted, I don’t listen to it very much, but there doesn’t seem to be any Olbermann-level scorched-earth political stuff.
    I gave my wife an iPod for…was it Christmas last year?…anyway, not too long ago–and wasn’t sure she would really use it that much, because she’s not a music hound like I am. But she has it stuffed full of NPR podcasts, not because she likes their politics and general secular-liberal p.o.v. but because shows like Fresh Air are just really interesting and well-done. And they’re not totally dominated by politics.

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  12. Janet

    And while they play a lot of classical music, they don’t just cater to one taste. You can hear almost any kind of music on Public Radio at one time or another, and great interviews with musicians, too.
    AMDG

    Reply
  13. Mac

    I caught a few minutes of Terri Gross interviewing Loretta Lynn a night or two ago. Karen was telling me I really ought to download the interview with Dolly Parton. I did hear a really fascinating one with Brian May. He was the guitarist with Queen, not a group I ever liked, but he is an extremely interesting guy.

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  14. Janet

    I know I’ve mentioned this to Maclin, but I can’t remember if I said anything here. I heard an interview with Vic Chesnutt about a month before he killed himself, and while I almost cannot stand to be in the car when his music is playing, I disagree with him about almost everything, it was one of the most compelling interviews I ever heard. It was also extremely sad. He talked about his mother’s death and his struggle with suicide, which at the time he thought he had won. He talked about how his grandmother had always told him, “You are the light of my life and the beat of my heart.” I would not have wanted to miss this interview, and don’t know anyone else who is doing these in depth interviews.

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  15. Mac

    “I would not have wanted to miss this interview, and don’t know anyone else who is doing these in depth interviews.”
    Yes, that’s the bottom line. Would this stuff be as widely available without some government subsidy? Maybe or maybe not, but is that subsidy really something to make a big fuss about? I can think of a number of things higher on the reform list.

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  16. Paul

    It’s a pity that book 5 is so often left out of abridged editions of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. For anybody with a genuine attachment to Smith’s brand of economics, there could hardly be anything more appropriate for the government to sponsor than public radio:
    “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations … generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become … unless government takes some pains to prevent it.”

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  17. Mac

    Some American conservatives insist that Smith was not the hardcore Randian sort of capitalist he’s painted to be. Never read him myself.
    I’m willing to at least entertain the argument that at least in principle it’s right and proper for the government to assist in supporting the arts. That argument requires refusing to flinch in asserting that some art deserves support more than others, which makes most people nowadays howl as if scalded. Unfortunately, in practice, in this country, it means that some tax dollars go toward worthless shock-the-bourgeoisie posturing.

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  18. Rob G

    Fr. Patrick Reardon once told me that too many conservatives read The Wealth of Nations without ever looking at The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He didn’t mean this literally — few conservatives have actually read Smith — but figuratively, in the sense that Smith’s economic philosophy has been wholeheartedly accepted while the moral philosophy underpinning it has been ignored.
    I gather this to mean that just as the Founders were convinced that democracy would work only with a moral populace, Smith in effect taught the same about capitalism.

    Reply
  19. Daniel Nichols

    NPR’s “lefty” slant is needed in a time when the Right dominates the “mainstream media”, in spite of conservative propaganda to the contrary. I mean if Limbaugh and Hannity and Beck, with their massive audiences, do not constitute mainstream, I don’t know what does. And every allegedly lefty newspaper has its conservative pundits. Does Fox or the Washington Times have liberal ones? And you will look in vain for any editorial resistance to our imperial long wars in the NY Times or Washington Post when Bush, Cheney, & Co were building their case for war.
    Nor does NPR only send classical over its airwaves. Local stations around here include the only place to hear jazz, and one public station that carries no news but only new rock during the week and folk, blues, and ethnic music during the weekend.
    And personally, I would much rather have my money going to music I never listen to (like the Slovenian hour) than oh, bombs or poisons.

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  20. Louise

    Well, that’s a different view from what I had generally believed, Daniel. I won’t contradict you, since I have no idea what the US is really like.
    But certainly here in Oz, there is very little conservative voice in the mainstream media. Here, almost everything is somewhere to the left of Chairman Mao. And I don’t think that our “conservatives” (if they exist) are anywhere near the views of Beck and Co.
    None of which has any bearing upon your comment, I only mentioned it b/c I find it interesting.

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  21. Francesca

    In GB it is fairly much like Louise says Australia is. The public media, ie the BBC is generally secularist and left of centre. But I nonetheless agree with Rob G (here and in his debate on Inside Catholic) and with Dan. People get a real musical education from Radio 3. There are plays like Shakespeare and Chekov and Aeschylus. Classical music buffs complain about it, but I also love the late night world music shows. I don’t listen to Radio 4 myself, but many enjoy the political programs and the Archers and so forth. On both Radio 3, Radio 4, and even to an extent Radio 2, there is stuff that simply doesnt appear on radio stations which are not publically paid for (ie, paid for by TV owners with their license fees). I hope BBC Radio survives, and I think it is worth it.
    I am not so sure about BBC TV. Since I started buying box sets of American DVDs, from Band of Brothers to Six Feet Under, through the Sopranos to the Wire and Breaking Bad – I have to say there is nothing of comparable quality on BBC television.

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  22. Paul

    There’s almost nothing worth watching on the BBC these days, but the coverage of the ceremonies in Whitehall this morning was pretty much unmatchable.

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  23. Mac

    I’ve taken to using the term “non-Fox media” in place of “mainstream.” Within the frame of reference of the journalism business, there is indeed a mainstream that Fox is out of, but that world is itself in many respects out of the mainstream in the sense of “where most people are”–that’s a large part of the reason for its success.
    Fox commentary also has more of a liberal presence than is generally recognized (e.g. Juan Williams), but it’s handled the way conservatives traditionally have been by the other guys: one or two to provide “balance” and serve as a foil to the heavily preponderant other views.
    I would describe the journalistic landscape in the U.S. this way (lumping news & opinion together, and with all due allowances for the inadequacy of the left-right categories): Fox News–right-center-right; almost everybody else–center-left; MSNBC & NPR/PBS–left-center-left. Really hardcore types on both right and left can legitimately complain of being left out. People who think NPR is far left must not have looked at the actual far left. Likewise for Fox and the far right. (What would be the pure center? Good question. Ideologically, I’m not sure. From the point of view of the profession of journalism, I guess it would be a position of really scrupulous fairness.)
    The actual news part of Fox News is not nearly as unbalanced as people say. It’s the commentary part that’s sort of crudely right-wing. The problem with the news part is not so much right-wing bias as superficiality and sensationalism. My wife & I went through a couple of years or so of watching TV news during breakfast, generally switching between CNN & Fox. The difference between them was less a matter of ideology than style. CNN was more sober and professional, Fox sort of manic and populist. One day we both decided “I’m sick of these people” and quit watching them altogether.
    Louise & Francesca, it sounds like this is a more diverse picture than in either Australia or the UK.

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  24. Mac

    Rob said: “just as the Founders were convinced that democracy would work only with a moral populace, Smith in effect taught the same about capitalism.”
    I think this is true. My brother just told an interesting bit of history (I’m taking his word for it): that the concept of the price tag in retailing was introduced on explicitly Christian principles by one of the founders of one of the big retailers–Sears or Penney’s or something–as a means of insuring honesty and fairness toward all customers.
    My local paper has a weekly feature in the business section which profiles a small business. It includes a little summary of the business–what it does, how many employees, etc., and one of the items is “advice you would give someone starting a business.” It’s surprising how often the answer is a variation on “treat everybody the way you would like to be treated.” Certainly there are plenty of predatory small-timers, but I think that way of looking at things tends to disappear in a big corporation.

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  25. Mac

    Francesca, where is this Inside Catholic debate you’re referring to? I read it pretty regularly but haven’t seen a discussion involving you & Rob.

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  26. Rob G

    Mac, your breakdown of the American media scene sounds about right to me.
    We get some good UK TV over here on Masterpiece Theatre and such, but a friend of mine who spends a lot of time over there says that we tend to get only the cream of the crop, and most of the rest is pretty bad. I’ve really enjoyed the new ‘Sherlock’ series so far, for instance.

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  27. Francesca

    Rob G was in a debate about public radio somewhere deep in the bowels of Inside Catholic, and I posted something lame like, ‘I agree with Rob G’.

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  28. Francesca

    I make TV broadcasting sound much more monolithic than it is, because I’m in the bronze age, in terms of TV watching. It used to be just BBC and two ITVs, and then about a decade ago the satellite channels came in. You need something called a ‘digi-box’ for them, and I never got it.

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  29. Mac

    Must be an older piece–I sure don’t see anything in their list of recent posts that seems related to NPR. But then discussions are known to wander pretty far afield.

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  30. Mac

    You’ll have a decision to make when you get here. Broadcast tv is almost disappearing, and the “cable” options are unbelievable. I would tell you what my wife & I just bought but I’m too embarrassed. (“cable” in quotes because it may be cable or phone lines or satellite.)

    Reply
  31. Francesca

    Rob, a lot of people said Sherlock was good. I missed it. There are some good things, but even this seems primitive by comparison with The Wire or Breaking Bad.

    Reply

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