WARNING TRACK POWER

 “Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”

I read an article yesterday by Pat Jordan’s in Slate which seemed to apply to the environment of all journalists today:  Whether it was the athlete, the Hollywood star, the corporation with spin doctors, the people covering them were afraid to ask real questions.  It was like listening to radio broadcasts of the Minnesotan Twins, when fly balls hit to the fence on the radio did not quite reach the warning track on television.  Honesty was sacrificed today to create a false sense of excitement. 

 

Television journalists seem afraid to open Pandora’s box. It might affect the ratings.  And that fear was spreading to other areas of the American media. Would the financial cost of the war, out of the tax payer’s pocket, be discussed this election year?  It never has been since troops were sent over.  I had read that elected representatives in Congress did not ever have the cost in the budget.  Why not?  Why are Democrats collaborating with Republicans on this issue?  Why was it considered to be patriotic to have troops in Iraq? 

 

And by the way, have you noticed the different emphasis given in the foreign press to the 35 articles of impeachment introduced by Dennis Kucinich, compared to the American press?  Even though he is a gadfly.  But then I came acros the following:     

 

by Douglas Thompson

Dec 5, 2005, 07:53

 

Last month, Republican Congressional leaders filed into the Oval Office to meet with President George Bush and talk about renewing the controversial USA Patriot Act.Several provisions of the act, passed in the shell shocked period immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, caused enough anger that liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union had joined forces with prominent conservatives like Bob Barr and Phyllis Schlafly to oppose renewal.GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to nominate White House counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.

 

 

“I don’t give a goddamn,” Bush retorted. “I’m the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way.””Mr. President,” one aide in the meeting said. “There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.”

“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”

This information comes from three West Wing sources who say a fourth White House employee in the meeting told them the President called the Constitution “a goddamned piece of paper.” That employee refused to return my phone calls. 

Star Tribune Now in Default

 

Views from a city with a newspaper that is failing.  There was a price we pay for inattention.  Waking up and realizing the morning bird call was gone.  I was in a place where there was too much insouciance.  Not caring about the loss of a species, not caring about the losses, not caring about the suffering of other men.  Not thinking about the source of food, the resources, the water, the work of creation.  We were numb.  Living pre-recorded lives, listening to pre-recorded music day after day.  The birds’ flyway connects us as the mortar to South America.  To markets.  To families here among us.  To animals.  To the land. 

While humankind in the north was changing the land, sub-diving it, breaking it apart,the birds kept going south each winter.  When the river began in your backyard and went for more than one thousand miles, when it went into the sea, you thought differently.  You sensed an impact you had on everyone downstream.  It was not just arrogance.  But now we were breaking apart, like the land, like our bridges.  In Minneapolis.

July 1, 2008

NEW YORK The owners of the Star Tribune in Minneapolis have opted not to pay interest on the paper’s second-tier debt.

Neal St. Anthony reported. in the Star Tribune that Avista Capital Partners declined to make a quarterly interest payment on $96 million in debt, which is now in default. Instead the company wants to work out a restructuring plan with The Blackstone Group. Avista retained the financial advisors in May.

Chris Harte, CEO of the Star Tribune, told St. Anthony, “If we can restructure this debt, we still have a very viable [business].”

Avista paid the interest payment on its senior debt of $400 million.

Harte said that EBITDA is “down dramatically” and that the newspaper has not be able to cut operating costs fast enough. The plan is restructure the debt with senior creditors.

St. Anthony reported that Avista’s senior debt has traded among banks for as little as 56 cents on the dollar and the second-tier debt has traded for as little as a 10 cents on the dollar.

 

 

Global Positioning Systems & Vanishing Ireland

Except for the high holidays, my brother-in-law did not attend church.  You know.  The one when there was food and drink afterwards.  We were all Irish Catholics.  And he was my weather vane to the modern world.  No one thought they were better than he was, based on matters strictly of worship.  It was just the way the world was becoming. 

 

This same brother-in-law has retinitis pigmentosa.  After a process over at least the ten years, he is for all practical purposes blind.  We gave him a global position system for his birthday this weekend so he did not get lost.  Apparently family members worried that he would get lost at the age of 59.  I wondered if he really wanted it.  I wondered if this was like a book someone bought me, something I never would read.  Like the book his wife gave me for a birthday.  1000 Places to see Before You Die.  Dan Neil’s article within the past week in the LA Times was featured on National Public Radio today concerning “endangered places.”  The clock is ticking on the fabled snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro, and the white water of Patagonia’s Futaleufu River is threatened.  The World Wildlife Fund is collecting money to save the Bering Sea.  And Condé Nast Traveler’s Concierge.com is worried about the future of the Swiss glaciers before global climate change causes them to vanish.  Rich people are afraid that they will be limited in the future in their vacations? 

 

The irony of the concern over lost places for tourism is a recent book I purchased called Vanishing Ireland.  The Celtic Tiger had eroded a way of life.  Or something had.  It was just the way the world was becoming. 

 

What was really vanishing? I had been to Ireland twice.  I was of the generation whose social formation was guided by television.  And for the generation after me social formation was guided even more by the media.  I am not sure if it was as much the economy’s impact on the towns and counties of geographic Ireland as it was what had changed with people here over the same period of time. 

In 1993, I had stayed at a bed & breakfast in Kilkenny sixteen years after my first trip.  The place was operated by a woman in her seventies.  Mrs. Hefferan was long-time divorced.  And Ireland at the time was in the midst of an election campaign whether divorce should be legally recognized in her country.  In the course of a breakfast on a Sunday morning, Mrs. Hefferan revealed what was special about Kilkenny.  It was her stories about the man she married.  It had not been an unhappy experience for her.  She just explained what happened on an island, to an American and a French woman over tea, whether to men or to dogs.  After years of breeding, she felt they inevitably just got high strung.  But still Irish men and Irish setters were appreciated the world over for their companionship.  Much as I had appreciated this rather unique Lady Hefferan.

 

 

Vanishing Ireland was not so much a degeneration of the vision of Ireland that tourists and natives always had.  Rather, in the world where the media had such an impact now on social formation, the challenge was in finding original characters.  Like Mrs. Hefferan.  Or like Captain Jack who I once met on my very first family vacation in 1967 with my dad.  I had thought about my dad and the people not that he met on vacation but folks that he knew.  Did media erode the chance to meet real characters that had surrounded my dad’s life, people that he had found without a global position system?

Minnesota Mortar

Connecting the stories of the week.  Thoms Lynch said that really poetry was connecting items that seemed in no way connected. 

 

 

Bob had had a coming out party.  At the age of 44.  Saturday night.  The party was an announcement to friends that had always meant the most to him.  The party represented his desire to say something intimate about himself.  His past, his future.  It was interesting to note who was and who was not present, and who might not be there for him from now on. 

 

 

He had addressed intimacy, when there always was a fear of it for everyone, of saying what is deepest inside.  I was not crazy to hear in this case what it was that was deepest inside.  The fear was about not knowing how to handle it.  “It” being loss or change. 

 

 

On Sunday of this weekend the story was about the potential bankruptcy of the Minneapolis StarTribune.  It was a decade where the future of all newspapers, an enterprise of communications, was being threatened.  Not many Americans had wakened to what it meant to be in the throes of this loss. 

 

 

I had a dream last night that my mother was going in for a CT scan to address issues of dizziness.  At least to my knowledge this was a physical problem restricted to my dream.  But it too did call the question of the meaning of love and of being loved.  The dream also called the question of identity, my family identity, expression of who were and are.  In my dream, I wanted to work at communications, communicating the importance one life had been to mine.    And like most guys, I was not very good at expressing it. 

 

Intimacy:  Sex. Communication.  In a world where there was so much threatening human existence, in illness that needed to be diagnosed, most people had something wrong with them.  And it was in facing challenges to good health, physical, econonomic, in relationships, each of us was challenged to how express things of significance.   

 

 

I had seen a rat in the garage on Saturday.  I had not seen many rats in my life.  Never before had I seen one in my neighborhood.  The rat still existed as some kind of terror.  And these were the days of the ongoing, never ending War on Terror which did show the ultimate threat to life was death.  Whether it was a worry from the dream of what was wrong physically, fears of what were spiritually wrong, whatever the answer, it was the threat of, a fear of the unknown. 

 

 

When so many people have no spiritual identity, then there is a threat to spiritual existence, to ideals.  A good number of people amongst us had no idea who they were.  The threat was to the meaning and purpose of any individual.  The trouble was living in relationships, in community, with people different than I was.  And institutions were a mortar that held us all together. 

 

 

With death, an individual comes to grips with a side of intimacy and the desire to pass on what is, what was most important about life.  Intimacy afterall determines identity.  

 

 

With sickness, it was a time to wake up to reflect on what I could pass on.  What was most important here, in the area of ideals?  For the friend now gay, the newspaper, the rat, a mother near the date of Mother’s Day?  Was Darwin right?  Was ultimately life, the sex life, about the survival of the fittest? 

 

I had started to think of all this last night on a walk.  I had wondered this spring what was the shape of the foundation of who I was, who I am, who we were, we are.  I had noticed the bricks around the base of a wall near a Summit Avenue mansion, close to the governor’s mansion, when I wondered about the mortar of American identity this year, that certain mortar that had always held people together.  On Summit Aveneue, the mortar was coming apart but only at the base.  It dawned on me that the legislature was due to adjourn this week. 

 

 

Actually when I got home there was a live debate still on public television at 10:30 pm when PBS programming should have been on. 

 

 

Newspapers, government, there had always been a certain mortar—keeping people together.  We took the connectiveness all for granted.  Now we need this real life poetry more than ever.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Search of Scapegoats

I live in a town where since last August 1, 2008 there has been a heightened awareness about crossing a bridge.  One day last November, the oldest business in the state of Minnesota had lost its identity, with little note made.  There is more awareness this week over the loss of the headquarters of a major airline.  And there was awareness over the national convention of one of the major political parties which would be here in less than 5 months. 

 

 

Most residents of the two cities seemed asleep as to whether the Minneapolis StarTribune or the St. Paul Pioneer Press would be around to cover the national convention.  A pending bankruptcy of the StarTribune Company was written about on May 4^th in the New York Post.  It has currently been denied.

 

 

The threat of collapse of either enterprise was not just the loss of a local source of news.  The news could be read elsewhere, without a local taste.  Small towns in Minnesota had been going through similiar change, with consolidated school districts for most of the last twenty-five years.  And that will be the direction of the churches in the archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis, as throughout the country, for the next decade.

 

 

What exactly did they teach in MBA programs where consolidations were supposed to be workable when smaller companies could not survive?

 

 

I had worked in downtown Chicago 18 years ago when I heard a contemporary, a suburbanite, bemoan the loss of identity of the suburb where he had grown up.  He felt that Arlington Heights was suddenly just like any other suburb in Chicago, in America. Without any flavor.  Tasteless.   Or had it been Elk Grove?

 

 

How soon would Minneapolis–St. Paul be just tasteless, without a flavor?  The loss of ethnic identity was having an effect on this generation of Americans.  As people I saw lost a sense of belonging, a sense of anger seemed to be a substitute, to those of the other party who might be responsible for the current state of affairs.  The community already seemed fractured.  But the stress fracture seemed to be getting worse.  A lot like what had happened to those gusset plates in that bridge structure that led to the collapse.