alias Bruce.

Jon Stewart's breakup with President Obama over Libya

 

The Daily Show
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Thanks to Laurie.

 

5-second promo I overheard for Sunday night's Baltimore TV news:

A young man is murdered while his pregnant girlfriend is with him in the car; there is a police shooting; a local soldier dies abroad.

Local TV news is approaching the point of utter uselessness: Violent crime; car crashes; scandalous political accusations; brainlessly mandatory stories (e.g., local election coverage); tales of personal drama; "Action News on your side" consumer anecdotes; and sports and weather. All brought to you by local car dealerships, grocery and department stores, and ambulance-chaser law firms.

I'm not saying that violent deaths and accidents and scandals and personal dramas do not matter. They matter deeply and forever to the people to whom they happen. And they occasionally have public significance -- for highway safety, for police practices, for political standards, for the public interest. But for the most part, they do not. They are splashily emotional events that happen every day to someone, but that are not "news" in the sense of being events about which the broad mass of citizens needs to know. People get drunk or make bad driving decisions and crash their cars. People shoot their lovers. People get suckered for living room sets or cars. These are bad and sad things. But they are rarely news. News is information that has public significance.

When was the last time, for instance, that your local on-air Talking Hairdos did an investigative story about real-estate developer campaign contributions fueling suburban sprawl policy? Or a story about the actual effect of massive imprisonment of nonviolent drug users on ongoing rates of addiction and drug crime? I'll wager it wasn't recent. And I'll bet, further, that such TV news stories are rare where you live.

That is why I rarely bother to watch local TV news any more.

As I write this, I am sitting in a local eatery -- one of the places where I frequently sit and write -- and the TV on the wall is alternating football and commercials and teasers for the late news broadcast. It's as close as I will get this week to watching anything that the local "news" teams have to offer.

It hurts just to think about it: All of this technology, all of these skilled and highly-paid info-gatherers racing around town with digital cameras and helicopters and staffs of TV producers and technicians. In pursuit of virtually nothing.

Honey, turn on the TV!

This faked Dancing with the Stars duo is making the email rounds. Nice Photoshop job. And thanks to Steph for the tip-off.

If you loved Felix the Cat, don't miss an essay about cartoons and racist archetypes that will

both piss you off and intrigue you. On the one hand, one feels, Is there anything safe from racism? (The answer is no.) On the other hand, it is great to see a piece that dives head-first into what the styles of cartooning to which we become accustomed as kids actually mean.

I'm talking about an essay I stumbled across on the Sans Everything blog, by journalist and cartoon aficionado Jeet Heer, titled Felix the Cat & Blackface. Heer looks, fascinatingly, at the striking visual similarities between early cartoon characters -- such as Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse -- and the blackface style of racist stage portrayal of black people that was all the rage for decades. Heer argues convincingly, too, that the personalities of animated characters such as Mickey and Felix were almost the exact cartoon analog of the popular white image of black Americans: randy, fun-loving tricksters who were haplessly reckless but blessed with the good fortune of their ignorance. Heer also quotes, at length, a brilliant John Updike riff on the brazenly race-colored jivey, elastic jazziness imparted to such characters as Mickey and Felix by white cartoon studios. And Heer quotes, as well, a riveting explanation by cartoonist Art Spiegelman about the stark racial message he saw in the cat-and-mouse cartoons and why he ultimately chose that metaphor to portray the Nazis and Jews in Maus, his devastating book-length comic-style story of the Holocaust.

You owe it to Felix to read Heer.

David Simon on Drugs.

Here's an irony: For the kind of ruthlessly frank discourse on drug crime and drug policy that most of our journalists won't touch, watch the in-depth interview with screenwriter -- that's right, screenwriter -- David Simon on the April 17 edition of Bill Moyers' Journal.

Simon, a former police reporter for the Baltimore Sun, was creator of the HBO series The Wire and The Corner (both set here in Baltimore), among others. As I recently wrote while devouring episodes of The Wire on DVD, Simon is the consummate example of how incisive social-drama fiction can be more truthful than the offerings of journalists whose outlooks (and job prospects) are wedded to officially-accepted assumptions about how the world works. Sure, artists have always served as truth-tellers via the decidedly mixed blessing of their disenfranchisement. But Simon is a rare animal: a social reformer who found a commercially successful dramatic vehicle for his political message. Again, the irony is that Simon left journalism because of how insistently the profession closed its eyes and ears to the stories he found needed telling.

In the interview with Moyers, Simon talks with brutal clarity and conviction about what drove him to leave the corporate newsroom; how and why the War on Drugs is a long-dead-and-buried policy failure that today's police embrace solely for the cynical sake of arrest statistics and coveted federal funding; how the narrative of real-life drug addiction and drug crime blatantly contradicts the Page One and Evening News stories; and what it will take to actually get a firm and effective handle on America's criminal and medical drug addiction problem.

If you wonder how a purveyor of TV drama can wade in such deep water and keep his footing, watch the interview. You will not be disappointed.

There is also, by the way, an interesting March 30 profile of Simon -- and his indictment of corporate journalists for their not holding bad policy and corrupt leadership accountable to the public -- on the British news and commentary site The First Post.

True Fiction.

As I like to do with TV from time to time, since I have never had cable, I have recently been mainlining DVD episodes of The Wire, HBO's late great series about the Baltimore street drug trade. It strikes me with this show, as it often does with wickedly well-done social issue drama, how much better a job alleged fiction does at conveying reality than does alleged journalism. This is not a unique irony; it is true of fiction, poetry and music pretty much wherever you'd care to look, from Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead to Percival Everett's novel Erasure to the poems of Yusef Komunyakaa and Lucille Clifton to Grandmaster Flash's proto-hip-hop classic The Message and the millinenial global thread of myths and folk songs. Official news reciters with lapel microphones may do better with the names and dates, but storytellers and troubadours do better at telling the underlying truths.

As does The Wire (pictured above, from season one). In a town like Baltimore, where drug addiction and drug trade rivalries account for most of the city's 300 yearly homicides, coverage by the Baltimore Sun and the what-bleeds-leads local TV news affiliates gives us a blinding stream of seemingly meaningless atrocities, with each news account duly supplying dates, locations, details of death, and the requisite quotes from shell-shocked neighbors and agonized loved ones. The Wire, however, gives us the story: Who ends up on junk and why; Who sells it and why; How the marketing operations (two-for-one days, name-brand reputations, wildfire rumors of potent product on X block on X day) entice strung-out customers to literally line up for sales; How and why certain addicts decide to try to kick and how they succeed or fail or both; How the local drug CEOs handle their mega-million-dollar empires and their tiers of managers and employees with various psych-ops, incentives and intimidations; How the sellers think and the codes they observe; How addicts feel and how they address real life; How cops work in a culture that can include slaving at trying to do an impossible job, showing care or abusive contempt toward citizens, lying about evidence, kicking the crap out of suspects in interrogation rooms, or sabotaging other cops' cases for personal position or perceived self-preservation; How teenaged kids take care of households full of young children, feeding and supervising them and sending them off to school, before leaving for their own day's work at the neighborhood drug operation. Yes, this is television drama. But at its core it is truer than most of what you'll see in the news media about street drugs and the people who use, sell, and police them.

So this is a story that today's frightened commuters and urban professionals, sadly, hardly ever get from journalists. Yes, the Baltimore Sun has, every once in a great while, run a story or a series that gets at some of the actual lives and real human decisions behind the proffered daily circus of the Page One narrative on drugs. But what does it say about corporate news media that they literally make it their business to chronicle the carnage and occasionally profile a dealer while telling us little or nothing about how and why the drug life persists? Meanwhile, David Simon, a former Sun police reporter, decided that someone needed to tell the real drug story. So he took it to HBO – an entertainment network.

Don't get me wrong. I am not deifying the routine parade of TV melodramas and sneering laff fests. But it so happens that in this case the one getting it right on the drug problem is, if you like, the troubadour.

At least somebody is telling the story.