How to explain the day John Kennedy died

It is still shocking how badly the Kennedy assassination traumatized us, how it launched millions of rounds of conspiracy theorizing, historical taxonomy, and sorrowful speculation about missing futures. And on this key anniversary, it feels as if all we can do is helplessly circle around the sadness at the heart of it all, about the event itself.

It is a thing that still lives and thrives in a fog of words, feelings, and memories. If we aren't careful, it can be a crutch of self-pity and misplaces frustration. And I think we need help thinking about what is important about it and what questions and challenges it raises that we still have to face. So if I can add my little bit, I'd point readers to something Daniel Schorr wrote in the New York Review of Books in October 1977 that shines through the event's aftermath like a light.

Schorr's essay, which is alas behind a archive paywall, is a patient and methodical effort to connect the investigations done by the Warren Commission in the aftermath of the tragedy to the work done in the mid-1970s as America sorted through the violence, horror, and shame of the 60s. Specifically, he dug through the findings of the Church Committee, which had hauled before the American people all the mischief and skullduggery its secret security services had carried themselves into. It was the kind of shocking and painful public reckoning that only a healthy democracy can live through, and people like me who remember it were in no way surprised by the recent NSA revelations, but have been horrified by our shrugging indifference to them.

Many of the things that Schorr explains in detail were new then but in the past decades have been well-digested and, sadly, forgotten. In particular, he looks at the CIA and the Mafia's efforts to turn back the Cuban revolution. It was both horrifying and plainly ridiculous:

"My favorite plot — nonlethal — was what someone in the CIA called “elimination by illumination.” It was dreamed up by General Edward Lansdale, Robert Kennedy’s coordinator for the hidden war against Castro. Never put into execution, the plan was to spread the word in Cuba of the imminent Second Coming of Christ, with the corollary message that Castro, the Antichrist, would have to go. At the appointed time, American submarines would surface off the coast, sending up star shells, which would presumably inspire the Cubans to rise up against Castro."

And Schorr also casually hints at scandals that continue today. For example, that Bill Moyers, who makes a living as a self-righteous media scold and sanctimonious old fart, almost certainly knows way, way more than he's telling about some important things. Specifically, Schorr notes that Moyer, as a top LBJ aide, was part of the conversation about the effort in the days after the assassination to cut off speculation about motivations and any possibility of Communist involvement (that's in the Church Committee report). And so, until that man speaks — and real reporter Robert Caro has spent decades politely inviting him to do so — he's a fraud and anything else he has to say is bullshit.

See, what I'm really talking about is journalism, and how they can help fix a problem. So much of what a reporter can do is really just putting things in context, of explaining the history and the mechanics of a complicated thing in a simple way. And by doing so, he probably comes closest to finding a motivation than anyone else:

"Had the [Warren] commission not been so completely sidetracked from every Cuban lead, it might have found what this reporter was able to find—buried in the commission’s own files or later dug up in congressional investigations and from other sources.

Where the 'Castro revenge' theory had run aground was on the lack of evidence that Oswald had any contact with anyone who knew about the CIA’s secret plotting against the Cuban leader. But Oswald did not need to have such contact to reach the conclusion that Castro, his hero, was being threatened and that he, in turn, could become a hero in Cuba by responding to the threat."

All the evidence is lying in plain sight; you don't need grassy knolls or magic bullets. Just the moral awareness of the irony of what had come back to haunt us:

"The possibility that Oswald acted on his own, inspired by Castro’s statement, cannot today be proved, but it has the elements of the fortuitous and the lunatic that sometimes govern history. The “conspiracy,” then, would have been a conspiracy of interlocking events—the incessant CIA plots to kill Castro, touching off a Castro warning, touching off something in the fevered mind of Lee Harvey Oswald. 

It would be comforting to know that Oswald acted on his own—not as part of some dark left-wing or right-wing plot to strike down a president. It is less comforting to realize that the chain of events may have started with the reckless plotting of the CIA against Castro, perhaps in pursuit of what it thought to be Kennedy’s aim. An arrow launched into the air to kill a foreign leader may well have fallen back to kill our own."

As you can see, Schorr is a hero to me, and I'm amazed at the variety of ways his courage took shape. When he wrote that piece for the NYRB, it was just about a year after being effectively fired by his long-time employer, CBS News, who wouldn't support him in an effort to protect the name of a source who had leaked a suppressed Congressional report about CIA overreach.

The more things are the same… CBS wouldn't stick up for Schorr then, but look at what they stand up for today: television personality like Lara Logan, who interprets her job as "Chief Foreign Correspondent" as being like a press officer to make members of the military-industrial complex look heroic and cool, cheerfully do their dirty work of slandering opponents, and have pictures of herself looking cute taken in tanks and helicopters. That's what corporate journalism is worth. And that's why so little makes sense any more.

The broad, broad view of the Washington Post sale

When I worked at Newsweek, when it was a part of the Washington Post family, Donald Graham used to appear in the office every few weeks. Everything you hear about the guy seemed to be true. He had to be pointed out to me — a gangly, awkward, fellow in a terrible suit. He seemed shy, and smiled the same way to everyone he passed in the halls, from our big cheese world-beating editor in chief to me, a nobody on the absolute bottom of the corporate ladder.

Part of my job was to sit in on the editorial meetings and report on them for our far-flung foreign affiliates. This meant standing in the back of the room, and quietly taking notes. Sometimes I'd perch on the window sill, overlooking Eighth Avenue and Columbus Circle. A few times, Mr. Graham ended up perched next to me, just watching, deflecting whatever remarks or questions were aimed at him.

And I remember looking at the guy, amazed that he ran a global, powerful media empire, and was the steward of one of the most important institutions in American journalism. There was so much resting on his metaphorical shoulders, I thought, as I wondered if that was dandruff I spotted resting on his actual shoulders. It was amazing that so many vital human endeavors ultimately came down to one actual person. And thank goodness that at that time and place the guy who signed my checks was decent and dedicated to the same mission that I was.

And now he sold it. Instead of that one man, who was really part of a family, he sold the thing to another man, Jeff Bezos. It wasn't to a private equity firm, or any of the many bottom-feeder newspaper chains still sulking about, which is good (they've long since sold off Newsweek, whose sordid afterlife as an increasingly unloved old nag was shaping up to be the big media story this month before the sale).

The Post sale, along with the Globe being snatched up by John Henry, raises a ton of questions that high-flying media folk like to publicly mull over. The emerging consensus, I think, is that these are pretty awesome developments. At last, fabulously wealthy, smart business leaders realize the value of "old media." Don't dwell too long on the depressing fact that they were able to buy major metropolitan and national institutions with as much thought and sacrifice as most of us buy new iPods, and what that says about what we value. These guys are new, and they "get it." The can negotiate change, and aren't used to failing. And becoming beholden to a person, a personality, is way way better than the fate most newspapers face, in which some market buys the papers on leverage and cuts them to death. The nagging voices chime up that these men represent such vast bundles of conflicts of interest, that the basic mission of fair and honest reporting is doomed. There's the essential plot development of uncertainty.

But I would like to take the long view. The media-land conversation is fascinating in New York, Washington, Silicon Valley, and among the dwindling corners of the industry where people still make a decent living. In other words, this is the one percent talking to itself. In the broader view, this is a snapshot of life in our present plutocracy, in which most of us can only look on and shrug.

I'm going to wander around a moment, but bear with me. In college I had a close friend who was full of ridiculous ideas that were pretty funny at the time, but I keep thinking about. Both of us were English majors, and very interested in topics like the future of poetry and the role of the arts in society. Sometimes this friend was eerily prescient: he said it would be a good idea to write about vampires, which were an enduring human theme and destined for a comeback (at that moment Stephenie Meyer was still only a receptionist who had never written a word). He thought hip-hop and opera were destined to meet someday (and perhaps it did, if you think R. Kelly counts. We can argue about whether that's a good thing). But one of his sillier idea was that the less profitable arts, like poetry, would have to revert to a model you saw in Renaissance Italy, of finding patronage from powerful families or institutions. The bizarre example he gave was that Bill Gates and Microsoft could be talked into needing a court poet. This spawned a million jokes about Pindaric odes to celebrate the arrival of Windows 95.

What my friend grasped far earlier than I did, was the cynical reality of how we live. I was too busy being earnest and judgmental to see that things don't really change much. I was alive to the idea that the story changes, but didn't realize that it usually happened in ways that I was able to anticipate. I remember in one of my poetry classes talking to a senior who had just accepted a job at a company in Seattle that sold books over the internet. I was sure that was the stupidest idea on earth — who'd deal with that when there was a Borders or a Barnes & Noble on every block? I was just about to start a summer internship at my hometown newspaper — a family run, essential service for my community that was as permanent as the mountains. That was how I'd build a stable and reasonable future. Joke's on me (that college friend I mentioned, by the way, is a investment banker now. He's doing alright).

For all the talk of change, things aren't changing, and to take a much, much broader view, there is great peril lining our future. Consider Venice, which for hundreds of years was a true merchant republic, governed by an evolving and surprisingly fluid class of wealthy businessmen, with the occasional nudge or shove from an angry mob. Unlike the rest of Europe, where wealth and power and social order was determined by land and conquest, Venice was about commercial skill, political dexterity, and luck.

It worked for a long time, until the 13th century when the ruling class decided to pull the ladder up behind them. They restricted access to the circles of power to families that already had it, who over time became a formal self-perpetuating, autocratic nobility. That came with all the nonsense that entails — inbreeding, the creation of surplus offspring that loiter about at parties and in convents and waste resources, and an ossified, entitled, unimaginative ruling class that props itself up until something new and vibrant knocks it over.

Venice slammed shut the door just over 500 years into its existence. Our American republican experiment just hit year 237.

A new new media

Being cynical about professional media and the State of Journalism means I'm almost never impressed by the things that I love. I realized how bad it was a few weeks ago when I tried to put into words why I was so grumpy that my wife and begun a subscription to The New York Times. I realized that it was because I subconsciously want newspapers to die so the deadwood and barnacles stuck in the field would drift away to sell cars or whatever, while the people really interested in reporting and writing would have to start anew and get on with it. 

These days I still read a lot, and almost exclusively online. There are old media outlets I follow now on computer screens, like the New Yorker, the Economist, the New York Review of Books, which I've kept an eye on since college. There are a few new media outlets I check everyday — The Awl is a favorite, and Grantland is an experiment I'm curious about. But I realize that all of them are alike in that they don't fundamentally challenge the same categories we've always had. They are all, basically, conservative. Text is text, images are images, videos are videos, audio is audio, and the idea of hyperlinking has been around long enough to have become perfectly conventional. But everywhere, the same tried and true cubbyholes are respected, kept a safe, respectable distance apart.

But does it need to be that way, and should it remain that way? I sort of had my mind blown a little the other day when I clicked on a link at Pitchfork to a feature about the new London-based poseur-core indie band Savages ("No Heroes," by Laura Snapes). At this point I have no opinion on the band at all, I'm not in awe of the quality of the writing, and the overall vibe of brooding intensity reeking off the band is perhaps a bit overmuch. In the details, it feels more like marketing or promotion material… but why? The piece is visually interesting, the different elements are seamlessly connected, it is clear that writers, editors, photographers, and designers all worked together on it. And I realized that on the web you can do things like this, so after all this, why doesn't anybody?

I've been endlessly amused at the way old media tries to adopt bits of new media. It never worked out the details in a creative way. I don't see much value in forcing already overworked reporters to tweet photos and create slideshows for the website of images they have to take themselves. I don't mean the big boys, who give a little space and funding for videographers to present different kinds of stories. And I don't mean the occasional fancy infographic with clickable data points to graft next to an enterprise story. I mean, why doesn't anybody try to put it all together? Reading this profile of Savages, at some point I stopped paying attention to the band, and began thinking how awesome it would be if someone gave this treatment to municipal water rates.

Each January I teach a course at Williams on long-form magazine reporting and writing. One of the recurring themes that comes up is that it is very hard to do this kind of stuff anymore, certainly not in the great age of the postwar magazines, larded with ads for cigarettes and booze and read by upwardly mobile folks. I got to thinking that I wanted to try to think about something else, and last winter hatched the idea of bugging a good friend who is an outstanding computer scientist into co-teaching a course about marrying old and new media. I figured we could create one big project about something related to the college — about the breakdown of admissions applications, or the college's investment portfolio. Something that would blend old fashioned reporting and writing with all the graphic wonders out there that no one thinks are relevant. I wanted to do this for myself as much as anything else.

Maybe someday.

Anthony Lewis

One of the things you have to do as a journalist is field questions and complaints from your non-journalist friends about the common misbehavior, laziness, and ignorance of reporters. You hear stories about being misquoted, about some terrible moment in the coverage of a crime or a lawsuit or a tragedy that affected them, or questions about why one thing is covered and another thing isn't. They'll want to know why something can't be done about this. I try my best to patiently explain that restricting or regulating freedom of expression — even when it seems to be plain "common sense" — hurts all of us in ways we can't anticipate.

At those moments the voice in the back of my mind is Anthony Lewis, the long-time New York Times columnist who for years taught the Columbia Journalism School's required law class. Every Friday morning I would sit as he gently and eloquently explained to us the bracing, ennobling logic behind cases like Near vs. Minnesota and Times vs. Sullivan, about the peril of the Pentagon Papers and the foundational value of forbidding "prior restraint." He explained why the apparatus of First Amendment law and its protections is the delicate, beautiful, conscious construction of some of our nation's best and best intentioned minds. That it reflects and serves our civilization's highest values, and is perennially in danger of being taken for granted and picked apart by cheap, narrow-minded interests.

This class was one of the most important and lasting elements of my journalism education. I was sad to hear about his death last weekend, and am glad I had the chance to get that voice in my head.

The Watergate Mystique

My generation has been left a whole herd of sacred cows to sort through by the baby boomers, and none smells quite like Watergate. It is, we are ritually reminded, a singularity — the very worst of Presidential mischief, and the very best of American journalism. As it celebrates its 40th anniversary this month has enough time passed to think about it clearly?

Like any very durable collective delusion, it serves the purposes of the powerful. It reshaped our political landscape in a way that the far-right, which was pounding on the doors of the GOP already in the Nixon years, could effectively bury the center-right. For the left, it did the opposite job: handing the center and the right of the party a convenient Republican bogeyman to remind the faithful what happens if the party strays too left. But perhaps the worst of the hangover is with the media. Watergate, and in particular the roles of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, is a very comforting narrative American journalists have told themselves at times of great stress and strain.

I'll admit that my thoughts on the subject are perhaps a bit shaggy — I write this blog for fun in my spare time, don't forget. But I remember the way that when I was in high school the clock of history stopped right at Watergate. I was aware even then the real electric thrill that comes with writing history, which is something you can never forget.

So here are a few ideas, that I hope are food for thought.

WOODSTEIN

Unfortunately for Woodward and Bernstein, their party was spoiled last spring when Jeff Himmelman's account of some lingering doubts about the story appeared in New York magazine. The specific nuances of the controversy are the stuff of J-school panel discussions. Basically, it seems that they actually did get information from a grand juror, which they had previously lied about (because, reasonably, they'd have gone to jail). It's just enough to poke some ugly shadows on the awesome 70s detective story, and the event that sparked a revival of the already moribund newspaper industry.

The legend of Woodward and Bernstein, like any self-flattering fantasy, says a lot about American journalism. In particular, its incredible self-righteousness and obsession with the details of the digging over the big picture. All this is for another post. But what about the results, did they "bring down a president"? Probably not: the wheels of history were grinding along fine on their own.

Here's the blunt truth about how things were going, according to Max Holland:

"Federal prosecutors and agents never truly learned anything germane from the Washington Post’s stories—although they were certainly mortified to see the fruits of their investigation appear in print. The FBI’s documents on Watergate, released as early as 1992, bear this out. The government was always ahead of the press in its investigation of Watergate; it just wasn’t publishing its findings."

And for the record, they were helped greatly by "Deep Throat," just another career bureaucrat with an ax to grind. Don't look too closely at how the sausage is made.

John Cook at Gawker provides a more thorough brief about their work. "It represents the Platonic ideal of what journalism-with-a-capital-J ought to be, at least according to its high priesthood — sober, careful young men doggedly following the story wherever it leads and holding power to account, without fear or favor," Cook writes. "It was also a sloppy, ethically dubious project the details of which would mortify any of the smug high priests of journalism that flourished in its wake. The actual Watergate investigation could never have survived the legacy it helped create."

But isn't it convenient there are so many photographs of them while they worked?

NIXON IN CONTEXT

Now let's take a look at Richard M. Nixon, a man who became a cartoon villain in the eyes of baby boomers. This month, Woodward and Bernstein teamed up again (for the first time in decades! what an event!) to rehash what he meant. They argue that saying "the coverup was worse than the crime" — a bit of lazy thinking that's become common — disregards what a bastard he was. That makes them look, again, like crusading superheroes.

Watergate ensures that we are unable to see Nixon clearly, which is a shame. His domestic policy was ruthlessly pragmatic, which meant a certain degree of pandering to the South, but also a lot of things worth cheering about. OSHA and the EPA were created under his watch.

On foreign policy, he and that miserable, fatuous toad Kissinger came up with some real Hague-worthy evils. No doubt about that. He was desperate to finish on his terms a war which, let it never be forgotten, was started by his Democratic predecessors. But on other fronts, the easing of the Cold War is going to remembered centuries from now. Much is made of his China moment, but less acclaimed is the spirit of detente with the Soviet Union, which brought us a full decade of peace and enabled the wretched old system to collapse under its own inefficiency and nastiness. Look at this campaign ad from 1972 — a Republican, a man who made his name hounding FDR loyalists for being Reds, made that! It's almost, please excuse me, human.

Which brings us to the other fact: Nixon was dark and bitter and twisted, and anyone who has read a novel or glanced through Shakespeare can understand that there was something very complicated and very familiar about him.

THE SCARECROW

The great tragedy of Watergate was the opportunity it presented to seal for another generation the victories of moderate liberalism of Roosevelt and Johnson.

No matter what anyone tells you, George McGovern is the man the Founding Fathers dreamed about. Modest, dedicated to public service, intelligent. His like simply don't exist in American politics today. But in the wretched aftermath of the loss, Democrats managed to ask all the wrong questions. They were so worked up with the evil of the other guys, that didn't bother to think about themselves. In 1976, a free pass if ever there was one, they were still freaked out about appearing too far to the left.

That left the door open for an unctuous, self-righteous con man who couldn't stop talking about how much he loved Jesus and how bloody fucking honest he was and how don't you dare call him a "liberal" (I've gone at length into the truth about the Carter "legacy" here).

Everything Nixon and his gang of clowns couldn't accomplish with their college pranks, Jimmy Carter did for them.

THE BOTTOM LINE

In terms of scandals, Watergate is a lark compared to Iran-Contra, which we will never conclusively get to the bottom of. In terms of politics, Nixon was was responsible for nothing as bad as the pollution that has streamed into our civic life since 1994. The Plumbers were ridiculous, evil, and shitty (Colson, in his afterlife, proved he was a bigger fuck than we could have imagined, Magruder deserves a heavy dose of honest respect and forgiveness), but they were mere pranksters compared to what Dick Cheney or Alberto Gonzalez could accomplish.

And in terms of the real structural damage Nixon accomplished to the United States and the constitution, again, nothing compared to what George W. Bush pulled off. A wholesale redistribution of the nation's wealth to the rich, wars launched on false pretences, half-wits installed all over the federal branch that will take a generation to shit out. And with the Roberts Court, its a gift that could keep on giving for decades more.

There is a lot to talk about on the occasion of this anniversary. But at some point, we have to start asking the right questions about this third-rate burglary.

'One or two secret policemen along the way'

There is a line in Anne Applebaum's review of Masha Gessen's new book about Putin that that is so inaccurate and mendacious I can't believe it appeared in print, let alone in the New York Review of Books. Describing Yuri Andropov's response to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, when he was the Soviet ambassador to Budapest, she writes,

He had been shocked when young Hungarians first called for democracy, then protested against the Communist establishment, and then took up arms against the regime, even lynching one or two secret policemen along the way. 

First a factual note about those "one or two secret policemen along the way." On Oct. 30, 1956, a mob lynched at least 24 AVH conscripts at Köztársaság Square. A photographer for Life magazine was at the scene, and it's tough viewing if you agree with me that murder is murder, no matter who does what to whom. 

But just as bad is her glib effort to make 1956 fit her world view. The uprising was remarkable for the breadth of its support -- young and old -- led first and foremost by left-wing, Marxist intellectuals and students who wanted a better form of socialism. They were joined a huge outpouring of support, including from many veterans of the extreme right. One eyewitness recalled that the uprising included the first reappearance of open anti-Semitism in Budapest since the Holocaust. 

By clumsily tromping outside her area of "expertise," she's let her stereotypes and assumptions show, and provide an insight into the Russophobic recesses of the neoconservative soul. This mix of provincial arrogance and willful ignorance is tragedy when we stumble into avoidable wars and prop up dictators, comedy when George W. Bush gets shoes instead of flowers thrown at him, and irrelevant when authentic people-led movements for social change -- in Serbia in 2000, across the Arab world last year, and in Russia right now. 

There's something pathetic about this unending desire to keep fighting the Cold War. Applebaum has plenty of places that will pay her for these thoughts, which she has honed as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and which have been feted by the most dishonest intellectual engineering project in Europe. So how she became NYRB's designated Russia expert is a mystery.

One more thing about 'Hitch'

I've been sufficiently creeped out by the fulsome celebration of all things "Hitch" that I'm compelled to write a little more. The turning point was reading Katie Roiphe, the hackiest of Slate's considerable stable of knee-jerk "contrarians" -- who regularly pulls off a trifecta of being wrong, thin-skinned, and boring -- describing how Hitchens offered personal encouragement in her career as a "provocateur."

Well, the man frequently suffered from terrible judgment, and I'm glad that my favorite writer younger than me, Alex Pareene at Salon, was there to settle the record. In particular, his refusal to excuse his hypocritical support for the war in Iraq:

"And so we had the world's self-appointed defender of Orwell's legacy happily joining an extended misinformation campaign designed to sell an incompetent right-wing government's war of choice. The man who carefully laid out the case for arresting Henry Kissinger for war crimes was now palling around with Paul fucking Wolfowitz."

The sting of this behavior is just how convincing his writing about Kissinger and that ilk is. I was shaken by his powerful reporting on the immorality of Agent Orange -- a toxin whose evil reaches across generations -- that I cannot understand how that writer and the Iraq War cheerleader are related (it's a little infuriating to say it now, but seriously, go read 'The Vietnam Syndrome' in VF). Strange, but I think that to be so right about one thing while at the same time being so wrong about another is a chronic condition of the 20th century.

There was a quote kicking around twitter in which Hitchens described how he always wrote to be read posthumously. That's an ambitious idea, and truly cuts both ways. Without the shambolic, chain-smoking, lovable curmudgeon we remember from the chat-show circuit, we only have his words. Many should be cherished for a good long time (see above), but I hope I don't live to see the day that his cheap, blood-thirsty, war-mongering is accepted as truth by reasonable people. 

If there is a fate worse than an eternity in hell, perhaps it has having your biggest mistakes laying in the sun without the opportunity to charm yourself into a state of grace where a mere man does not belong.

Hitchens

I'd long made it a habit to automatically read anything by Christopher Hitchens that came across my vision, and it has been an unpleasant feeling this past year of so to realize each time that this may be the last thing we'll have. It feels terrible that this long anticipated absence has finally arrived.

Others will say more precisely and more eloquently what they'll miss about his work. I'll miss the routine of engagement, the curiosity that comes trying to figure what he'd have about this or that. I can't think of any other writers who could make you applaud or hiss with such regularity. I'll never come around to his opinion about the Iraq War -- which I guess "ended" the same day he did (and don't read too many fawning eulogies without also reading John Cook's blisteringly honest breakdown of his biggest mistake). Also, I'll probably never think much more of Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie than I do now, but those times when you agreed with him... boy, you felt there were legions with you.

Bless him for never letting an idea alone, for proving that "received wisdom" is a wholly bad idea. His insistence on looking hard and critically at Mother Theresa, Henry Kissinger, the Clintons, Jimmy Carter (to name just my favorites) were great blows for truth and justice. I wish more people would be persuaded.

I think that his last great crusade, the "New Atheism" as it has been dubbed, is an important legacy. I was never wholly sold on it, mostly because I think protesting quite so much crosses the line into just being a jerk, but I'm incredibly glad he didn't shrink from the fight. This is a world in which born-again Christians continue to obnoxiously insist they are a persecuted minority, and I'm very grateful that he had the vision and courage to speak out on behalf of the real victims of oppression: the godless, and by extension those who wish to be free to explore their doubts.

If I was often impressed by the reasoning in his writing, I was often less fond of his style. They say he could churn out columns in 30 minutes, and it often showed. They often felt like hectoring emails. But great "writers" are a dime a dozen these days. His achievement was to keep the spirit of George Orwell alive for another generation. He proved that all wasn't lost to self-absorbed craftsmen and panicky careerists.

From his formative years in London in the 1970s right up to today, he wrote when the the sureties and pieties of the "short" 20th century were coming to a messy, confusing end. We have no idea what is being forged at the moment, but no doubt we'll need to be as curious, argumentative, and unintimidated as he was.

Life after napalm

It was with profound, profound interest that I read Jack Shafer's story in Slate about great moments from journalists on the way out of newsrooms (such a rich topic, it managed a part two). A few years ago, I had my big bridge-burning moment, with a letter that I still think about a lot, and which might be some of my best work -- I didn't even have to resort to profanity. What's surprised me most, is how long after the fires have died and been forgotten by everyone else, I still can't make peace with it all.

I should say from the start that I have never, not for a moment, regretted what I did. I wrote the truth, to the correct person, with the precise amount of force the situation warranted. It got me out of a very crumby situation, and perhaps for a few moments forces another human mind to think with a little more depth about a situation and the choices they made. It also forced me not to settle for easy decisions, and though it is the most transient and base aspect of all this, it made me feel better after months of feeling helpless.

But eventually, the very brutal reality set in: it didn't accomplish anything. This effort, this sacrifice, didn't change anything for anyone except me (and my family, for better and for worse). It's a terrible irritant: the story here that resonates the most with real life, alas, is Ron Rosenbaum's famous departure from the Voice ("Who was that?").

While Shafer pokes fun at the idea of the journalist that "works through his anger by killing chipmunks and other small game," I'm not sure there is a lot to laugh at. Journalism, or "Journalism" if you must, is suffering because of those "paper-pushers" and "quacking mallards," though maybe that's easy to forget when you have a steady paycheck from the Washington Post Company. And of course, if you look at the state of late-model, corporate capitalism, it is pretty clear that every line of work is being debased by this new feudalism of a handful of wealthy bosses and a vast army of peons. Only difference, perhaps, is that journalists are usually better writers.

There is a pattern to the lives of journalists. The thing that has dismayed me the most about the business, the point at which the high-minded rhetoric of J-school is in too stark contrast with the reality of the newsroom, is how... well, meek working journalists can be. Oddly, people who have no trouble asking the grieving mother how she "feels," who can shout embarassing questions at a press conference about a congressman's privates, who can shrug off any number of nasty arrows and cheap-shots from Internet trolls, seem unable to constructively engage with the reality of how little control they have over their own careers. And the methods for dealing with it are pathological. In the day to day, it looks like this: Bitch bitch moan complain bitch complain and bitch some more. Some decide to carry on and get by, others quietly slip away (hopefully to something more lucrative), but for whatever reason, I didn't care for either option. And when that happens, things catch fire.

Obviously, I could write about this all day, even though I realized long ago, consciously at least, that madness lies in that direction. Whenever it comes up in conversation, I tend to shrug and make a small joke and try to signal that I've moved on. But really, I haven't as much as I would have liked. And the fact that I'm still mad this made me mad makes me mad.

There is wisdom out there though. I'll refer to Joseph Brodsky's Michigan speech, which I wrote about last month, and which had an interesting take on the angle of forgiving and forgetting:

"Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those -- in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed. Suffer them if you can't escape them, but once you have steered clear of them, give them the shortest shrift possible. Above all, try to avoid telling stories about the unjust treatment you received at their hands; avoid it no matter how receptive your audience may be. Tales of this sort extend the existence of your antagonists... By himself, no individual is worth an exercise in injustice (or for that matter, in justice). The ratio of one-to-one doesn't justify the effort: it's the echo that counts. That's the main principle of any oppressor, whether state-sponsored or autodidact. Therefore, steal, or still, the echo, so that you don't allow an event, however unpleasant or momentous, to claim any more time that it took for it to occur." 

Great advice. Very hard to live by.

The agonies of Cleveland

One of the surest ways to my heart remains to bring me back newspapers whenever you go somewhere. Even though I'm over them, as it were, I think they remain the best way to take a core sample of a place and a time. Over the weekend, my wife's trip home from a conference took her through Cleveland, and she brought me the Sunday Plain Dealer. What I learned is that, boy, I'm glad I don't live in Cleveland.

The front page featured three stories. Two-thirds of that was one big story -- a detailed look at LeBron James' possible future by sports writer Brian Windhorst. It was a detailed accounting of what his options are, who the likely suitors will be, and what the timeline looks like from now until free agency begins in July.

The undercurrent of the story is so thick and heavy it needn't be spelled out. One of the fascinating things about this moment in time is the amount of anger and unease the nation is feeling, and the ways it is coming out all cock-eyed. We saw this with the Conan O'Brien debacle earlier this year. Somehow, a celebrity who -- let's face it -- kinda sucked at his particular job and got a multimillion dollar kiss-off became a parable for how ordinary, loyal, hard-working employees felt pushed around by inept, greedy, and selfish companies. The human urge to create narrative and sense out of high-profile situations often overwhelms the details. And the LeBron situation appears to be part of all that. The story is really about a small-market town, down on its luck, with a homegrown superstar who they can't keep away from the brighter lights. It is about the decline of an entire region, and seems to present all the swirling forces that are shaping American life today in an easy to understand story.

What is interesting abotu Sunday's Plain Dealer is how the rest of the front page communicates this malaise as well. Another story is what appears to be a long column by Steven Litt about the Cleveland Museum of Art's search for a new director (its third in ten years) as it precedes with an important building and redesign program. That's what the story is actually about, but it is instead framed by looking at how a much smaller, more nimble Sun Belt museum is building a bright future for itself (the headline: "N.C. art museum gains from strong leadership"). "Seeing it is enough to shake assumptions about whether Sun Belt cities outside California and Texas will always remain in the cultureal shadow of northern cities such as Cleveland," Litt writes. The article explains how museums like Cleveland's benefit from deep stores of cultural heritage and large endowments. About their museum has size and a breadth of collection that smaller, newer museums can't match. But in terms of their mission going forward, in contemporary art, in cultivating new donors and shaping their mission, these newer museums are doing much better.

One of the things that struck me is that the Cleveland Museum, which appears to have such a headstart, was only founded in 1913. It makes you wonder to what extent all that cultural capital is a brief, fleeting thing. If that old alignment that made what we now call "the Rust Belt" such a powerhouse of the American experience was just a blip of the Industrial Revolution, which is now over and done. And if that in turn means that the clock is running out, for good.

The third story on the front is more mundane, but just a part of the drumbeat of soul-sapping news. It is about the federal corruption investigation into a county commissioner, which sounds like it has been painfully dragging on for years toward some eventual, inexorable conclusion. "Even the public is growing weary of the demoralizing drip, drip of the corruption investigation, which flares up in the media each time somebody new is hauled into courty," the story reads.

Sales of Tums must be way up across northeast Ohio. And for the record, I don't think there is anyway LeBron is anywhere other than New York next season.

What I learned from Newsweek

The news last week about Newsweek -- that the Washington Post Co. plans to put it up for sale because it can't see a profit in carrying on with it -- is sudden, grim and wholly unsurprising. As Slate's Jack Shafer put it, "The category has finally gone to mold and will, in another 30 months or 30 years, advance to putrefaction."

I worked for Newsweek for awhile right after school, and it is an experience I am very grateful for. I specifically worked in the New York office for the magazine overseas editions and partners, reporting on the details of editorial planning through the news cycle, and representing their interests and needs where necessary. I was a full-time fly-on-the-wall, and learned more about big-time media and how the whole sausage factory works than I could have anywhere else.

Back then, it still had a definite swerve, as did most mainstream media outlets. Circulation was stable, the dot-com boom was in full swing so money wasn't a problem. I didn't make a lot of money -- compared to all my friends who were making actual money at various Silicon Alley outfits. And since everyone still had dial-up connections, there was a definite sense around our office that the Internet was a problem within our power to master. Newsweek's web presence at the time was a semi-autonomous add-on, with content provided by eager young shlubs like me for a little extra money. There was a lot to be excited about.

But basically, I was at the bottom on the ladder, and you learn a lot down there. You see how people do their jobs, how they understand what they do, and most immediately, how they treat people who are at the bottom of the ladder. I saw first-hand just how howlingly pompous, glib, and shallow many high-flying media pros are. In many ways they are the ones who did irreparable damage to the news industry -- and yet oddly are rarely mentioned in any of the myriad panels, symposia, lectures, radio chat shows, or CJR features dedicated to understanding just what had happened to journalism and how it can move forward. These were the sort of people who would flatly dismiss a national desk story about a major Midwestern drought because "no one cared about that," but treated negotiations to get an exclusive feature with the five finalists of the first season of "Survivor" like it was the Pentagon Papers. (I've got plenty more stories, by the way, but I'll save them until we have a drink sometime).

On the other hand, I met a lot of people who I came to respect and admire. Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham was in that second category. He was considered a bit of a boy wonder back then, when he was the managing editor. He was smart, and quick with intelligent and apropos historical anecdotes during meetings that were met with nervous titters. He's taken a fair share of lumps in the past few days, which says a lot more about media-land than about him. If there was any sense or justice in the world, Meacham would be leading some smart American version of The Economist (and I, since we're in fantasy-land here, would be one of his loyal foot soldiers, happily toiling away knowing I'm doing important work and being fairly compensated for it. But whatever.).

Meacham's understanding of the industry always made sense to me -- and Shafer admits he "understands publishing's upheaval better than his fading magazine would indicate." I thought their redesign last year could have been a step in the right direction, but in reality turned out to be little more than a half-assed gesture in the most likely cardinal point. The problem was that they chose to rely on brand names instead of content, which is a dangerous proposition if practically-speaking that means giving a free reign to gushing founts of conventional wisdom like Howard Fineman and Fareed Zakeria.

The short leash the Post have to the experiment cuts to the quick very fast. It is hard to believe that the idea of a newsweekly is really dead, but as Dan Kennedy put it in all its plain, simple truth, it really isn't. Newsweek just failed, while Time, The Economist, and The Week didn't. "Newsweek and U.S. News were not done in by cable TV and blogs," he wrote. "They were done in by leaner, smarter competitors who had a better idea of what a weekly news magazine should be."

The slow demise of this institution has been a steady topic of conversation among the media chattering classes, and the observations of one very small, temporary cog in it usually don't matter beyond that single cog. Although, many have had formative professional experiences in the trenches of these behemoths. Hunter S. Thompson, in his youth, was a copy boy at Time for a year or so when he was young. It was enough to frighten him into thinking about new and better ways to tell stories than the early industrial grind of the newsmagazine of record. (Update, 5/11: Alex Beam of the Boston Globe, another former Newsweek cog, has a much more candid assessment of his time there than I can muster at the moment.)

What lesson did I learn? The most immediate was I came to recognize that as much as I liked that second category of serious journalists, I was so creeped out by the first batch of media creatures that I got a powerful fugue-like sense that I had to leave New York -- at least for a little while -- or lose an important part of my soul. I could see that climbing that particular ladder came at the price of a certain emptiness -- the drudge of moving from assistant editor to associate editor, the sense that your professional life is a big high school cafeteria, and the stubborn insistence that Manhattan is the universe, and not just an island. So I decided to see the world on my own careful and cautious terms. So I made a parallel leap into another self-absorbed fish-pond (Washington, which is a whole other story).

But I never realized that those first few doubts would never go away. I'm grateful to Shafer for trying to put a positive spin on it, when he exhorts readers to cheer up: "There isn't a minute that something new and wonderful isn't being born." Yeah?

Keeping busy

A few housekeeping notes for the new year... As you can see, things have been pretty quiet around here for a few months, and I'm hoping that, in a number of ways, we'll get things moving again. First and foremost, I've agreed to write a blog for the Albany Times Union about goings on in the Berkshires. And if you look to the right, you'll notice my brand new Twitter account. I'm pretty excited about this multi-platform future, though I predict it may take a little while to find the right balance between everything. I hope you'll stay tuned.

Trendy newspaper design

Newspaper design sometimes feels like a "rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic" kind of endeavor. It's a thankless job, and having done it for awhile, I appreciate it when it is done well. A big part of the challenge of the work is dealing with the work cut out for you by the wizards who run the business. It is where the admonition to "do more with less" is most apparent.

They have fewer actually designers to do the work, there are fewer reporters and editors producing the content, and they even have to endure the injustice of having less paper -- less space -- to work with. Those incredible shrinking newspapers are a nightmare to make anything meaningful on.

Of course, newspaper designers haven't always helped themselves out much. The whole field is prone to fads and foolishness that occasionally sweeps through. First and foremost is the recent failure to remember that this is a print medium, and however important visual imagery is, it is second banana to the words around it. These aren't picture books, for crying out loud. And many charts, graphs, boxes, and briefs exist simply to eliminate "gray space" -- the design world's unfortunate and obnoxious term for what we old-fashioned folks call "text." Another particularly silly meme was that newspapers should somehow "look like websites." This came from a fundamental misunderstanding of what a newspaper is, and a the kind of ham-handed cross-marketing effort dreamed up in a B-school seminar.

The Hartford Courant bit hard on this kind of stuff, and the newspaper I picked up on recent Sunday on a trip to Torrington bore almost no resemblance to any other newspaper I've seen, and I don't mean that in a good way. The flag was off to the side, the Courant's delightfully weird logo (with a bright red heart, crown, and pigeon holding a telegram) was placed too prominently up top, and you had a hard time finding out where basic bits of info like the price and date. But scrolling down, you noticed that they appeared to have their own second thoughts about the subject...

All this is a great shame, because newspaper design doesn't need to suffer this much. On a recent trip to the UK, Olga brought me back a stack of newspaper, including several of the Sunday broadsheets. In the UK, broadsheet still means "broad sheet." During the week, most of the respectable British papers have switched to a tabloid size, which despite being a major taboo in the U.S., makes a ton of sense. It saves paper, it puts an emphasis on the text, and it gives advertising much more impact (businesses that pay for tiny ads at the bottom of a broadsheet page are wasting their money). But for their Sunday editions, they blow it all out. And suddenly, you realize the value of it -- huge photo spreads, properly constructed in-depth packages including break-out material -- in other words, something worth paying money for and spending some time with.

That kind of year...

The day the Pulitzers are announced is usually a chance for the staffs of the handful of newspapers still in a position to win such things to pat themselves on the back. But there's always at least one out of nowhere, feel-good surprise. This year, it's editorial page editor Mark Mahoney of the Post-Star in Glens Falls, NY. "This is for all the small newspapers out there that never got to play in the game," said Post-Star editor Ken Tingley. But being 2009, of course one of the winners had already been laid-off from his job late last year. But Paul Giblen and his editor and a few other laid-off staffers from the East Valley Tribune have started their own online news outlet. I hope it works out.

Only a personal post...

It sounds ridiculous, but I try not to write too much about myself here. That is to say, I don’t like to get into anything about my personal life that is not perfectly obvious from a distance. But I feel it is time for one of those exceptions right now, mostly because I think it will explain a lot about why I’ve been so quiet these past few months, and will hopefully explain to my friends out there where I’ve been all these months.


Last June, my family and I came back from Moscow. It was a weird time, I remember sitting on that plane -- or more properly, running around in circles on that KLM Boeing-747 as Mila did laps for several hours -- full of all kinds of nervousness and anticipation. I didn’t have anything I was going back to, but something about being abroad and living in the big city made me appreciate our quiet country lives. Things would work out. But something came up. In the middle of adjusting to the culture shock, and moving to a new house, I got a job offer. In general, it is not a great idea to make major life decisions guided solely by fear.


But when I was offered a night editing job at the Eagle, my old haunt, I was terrified of refusing a regular paycheck when the economy was beginning to circle the drain. So I took the job, and I remember driving down to Pittsfield my first day, and then there is nothing but this whooshing sound. And here I am, months later, unsure about where the time went. Lots happened, of course -- Mila started daycare, we went to Poland -- but honestly, those details feel like detached dreams. My schedule at work was only nights, and most weekends. There was no set schedule, so the weeks all blurred into one mush of work. Because the job hours happened precisely and solely when we did not have access to childcare, my wife had to take care of Mila, significantly impacting her work as well. Our family life suffered because we were together rarely. I spent my time in Russia looking forward to being able to cook again, but now I had a job in which I couldn’t cook anymore. And the work itself was difficult. Years and years of budget cuts at American newspapers have whittled it down to a few incredibly busy jobs it is almost impossible to do well. Basically, you show up for work, grind away on a computer, look up and realize its time to go home and fall asleep. The closest analogy, I’m afraid to admit, was that summer in college I spent 12-hour shifts putting labels on shampoo bottles at a plastic molding factory.


So for the past few weeks, I’ve been in agony thinking about the future. It came about because this spring we have a lot of things on our schedule, and my work, in which I was parceled out a random batch of days two weeks ahead of time, made it frustrating to plan. I realized I was on a path that was wrong for my career, wrong for my wife’s career, wrong for my daughter’s childhood, and I stuck with it because I liked my co-workers, I liked the idea of having a career in newspaper journalism, and I liked the paycheck (though note: I did not like the amount of money it brought me. Newspapers work is appallingly badly paid). I went back and forth over and over again. I made up my mind and still agonized over whether it was the right thing to do. I ate badly, I lost sleep, I snapped at friends and strangers. And in the background, the steady, miserable backdrop of economic apocalypse. As the ship goes down, to step off it makes you feel perfectly insane. I’ve been pretty responsible though – no ill-advised mortgage, just ill-advised student loans. And there is the general malaise and agita of the future of newspapers (this year’s Internet meme must surely be “The Death of Newspapers” … but that’s another post!).


But what tipped me over the edge was the most mundane thing: a really, really bad boss that made none of it worthwhile. Maybe I’ll get into all that later; I haven’t decided yet. And then you had winter. Readjusting to a New England winter, especially a particularly nasty one like this, has been hard. In Moscow, you get central heating, crews of central Asian immigrants that keep the snow cleared. Here, where you are responsible for everything yourself, it feels like each little thing takes a greater toll on you. Every time you have to shovel the walkway, or pay a jaw-dropping bill for a heating oil delivery, seems to make things a little worse. But I try to remember all those things about how I felt on that plane slouching toward JFK International Airport. And after this months-long detour, I can look forward once again to the fear, uncertainty, and… spring!

Two ways of looking at a cruise ship

Most of the work I've read by David Foster Wallace, who killed himself last week, has been his journalism and nonfiction. I never read his fiction, but of course was quite aware of his singular place in American arts and letters, especially in the 1990s. I've had friends whose opinions I respect both slam and praise him, and I think that in itself is a sort of accomplishment. But there is one thing about him that has never set well with me. In one of my magazine writing classes at Columbia, we were assigned to read Wallace's impressive January 1996 folio "Shipping Out," a long essay about the cruise ship industry and the nature of vacation, relaxation and modern American life. It was a big hit in class, as it should be because it is really very insightful and well-written. At the same time, in another class, we read some James Agee, and I was impressed enough to check out of Butler Library a volume of his collected journalism pieces. Included was a feature for Fortune magazine from September 1937 entitled "Havana Cruise," a long essay about the then-fledgling cruise industry. In subject matter and approach, these two articles are very very similar. I've never been able to square how a writer as well-read and knowledgeable -- not to mention as obsessively enamored with footnotes of all shapes and sizes -- failed to include at least a passing mention of Agee's work. I'm not suggesting there is any wrongdoing of any sort, I just can't figure it out. That said, the two articles are really very interesting in presenting what I would call the modernist and postmodernist approach to narrative journalism. With a caveat that I haven't really sat down and read through them in nearly ten years, I remember Agee's story is earnest, serious, obsessed with "breaking news" and the idea of the new. Wallace's is a bit more fun, full of jokes and asides, and seems more interested in hashing out ideas and experiences in an effort to connect seemingly random and inconsequential themes into some kind of bigger coherence. What they both share is a bit of self-indulgence (Agee's sometimes pretentious verbiage [too much Joyce]; Wallace's distractions into pop culture ephemera and jumping into rabbit-holes of his own whim) and an overwhelming sense of dread (especially well done in Agee's piece. He had a much better sense of drama). Both are excellent reads.

Ordinary weird

Slowly, we’re getting into the swing of things. The great thing about living abroad is the way that it makes the weird ordinary and the ordinary weird. For more than I year, the backdrop of my life featured onion-domed churches, billboards and posters in another alphabet, people chattering in another language all around me. Several times a day it would strike me that this was the strangest situation I’d ever been in, stranger than I would have dared to imagine when I was young. That all of Europe and the Atlantic Ocean were between me and where I was born, that there was a vast country all around that I was slowly beginning to actually understand.

Then I come back, and the scenes around me are familiar but all the details are sticking out. The first thing that came as a shock was how quiet it is up here – real quiet, as in, you don’t hear anything and when you try to actively listen you realize there is just stone cold nothing out there. It is almost unsettling. Also, I’m still at the stage at which nearly anything I do is the first time I’ve done it in ages. I had a burrito for lunch today – first burrito I’ve had in more than 15 months!

But it is all starting to sink in. Reading the Russian papers online, I feel like I’m reading about a very far away place. I don’t seem to cherish the ability to communicate freely and effortlessly with people in my native language the way I did in the first few days. And today, the Eagle ran my last “Letter from Moscow” column. It was the hardest one to write, as I tried to wrap it all up and get on paper all these stray thoughts I’d accumulated over the past year. The result is as incoherent as you’d expect from someone still going through jet lag, culture shock, life with a very busy toddler, and near constant worrying about what he’s going to do next.

My talking head debut

Just like my favorite blogging media personalities, I now have the chance to make a cross-platform promotional post: I'm slated to appear on the Russia Today channel this evening to discuss tonight's Russia-Netherlands quarterfinal at Euro 2008. Watch me try to pronounce "Diniyar Bilyaletdinov" and "Demy De Zeeuw" on live teevee.

In the footsteps of Grantland Rice...

With the new year comes a new gig: I've been talked into writing a sports column for The Moscow News.

Professional notes

A few stray odds and ends about journalism that have come across my view lately…

In an interview with the Sacramento Bee, the most senior working reporter in America, 91-year old Daniel Schorr, seems to suggest he’s glad he isn’t making a career today. “Of course, the changes are partly technological,” he says. “You no longer have to rely on a great newspaper like the Sacramento Bee or on a television network to get the news. You can go on the web and get anything you need.” He adds: “I’m glad I’m not 20 years younger, because I’d be very discouraged.” I’m only 32, but I’m pretty discouraged, but it isn’t because people have more options for getting their news.

And it brings me to another point: I stumbled upon the obit for Walter Bowart, the founding publisher of 60s alternative newspaper the East Village Other, who died last week at 68. In addition to admiring his unusual career (in the 80s he edited Palm Springs Life magazine, which wrote about celebrities and golf etc), I admire the dedication and brass behind the alternative press of the 60s, even if most of the writing was wretched and the reporting was shoddy in the extreme. But I’ve been curious about why this kind of spirit hasn’t adapted itself well to the new Web frontier, where sure, many individuals run off on their own, but their seem too few good collective efforts to move journalism forward. It feels as if to do something, anything, these days with a goal other than making tons of money is deeply and unacceptably radical. This is why I am keeping one eye on Politico.com, founded by journalists, and wish it succeeds.

Of course, morale all over is terrible. A recent study by a professor at Ball State University found what every working journalist already knows. Deadline driven work, low pay, long hours, demanding bosses, technological uncertainty… all these make working journalists an impressively miserable lot. How long can this go on? Forever, I say. One by one, individuals who’ve gotten themselves into journalism make up their minds to get themselves out of it. J-schools churn out an abundance of replacements to come along. You can exploit youthful idealism, enthusiasm, and naivete ad infinitum.

Finally, you can always say that things are worse in Russia. The other day there was an interview in Novye Izvestia with Mariana Maximovskaya, a television presenter for REN-TV who is probably the only figure on Russian television today who I recognize as a television journalist. Her very presence testifies to the misery of the state of television news here: it is amazing that the most respected t.v. reporter left working in this vast land, the only one you could say carries any sort of professional integrity and personal gravitas, is only 37 years old.

Maximovskaya talks about how exciting it was when she got started in the 1990s, and how the job has changed. She describes how today, the final year students she teaches at Moscow State University are already lined up with jobs, and ethics are hardly the first thing on their mind. “These young people understand that they are coming to an existing structure, and have to make some compromises," she says. "Including, perhaps, to compromise their conscience.” UPDATE (Jan. 25): Simon Owens has a good overview and much more about the Ball State study here.