Dealing with grace: It's not brain surgery

Erstwhile New Orleans church-occupier Poppy Z. Brite at least recognizes grace when she sees it. Apparently, she found some at Our Lady of Good Counsel -- the church whose closure she protested.

Unfortunately, what the goth writer fails to apprehend is kind of crucial to this whole saving grace thing.

ONE, she seems not to understand that graces flow from the Almighty, not a parish community. Two, Ms. Brite -- repeating an omission common to moderns who can't understand why Adam and Eve got in such deep s*** for noshing on that damned apple -- doesn't quite get that grace requires a response. She makes this manifestly plain in her blog:

And to be honest, by Catholic standards, there are some legitimate criticisms in those "mean comments." All I can say is that I have never claimed to be a good Catholic. I find succor in the celebration of the Mass and the sharing of the Eucharist, not in dogma. I am a cafeteria Catholic of the exact kind that drives strict Catholics up the wall. I'm pro-choice, which automatically excludes me from some definitions of Catholicism. I'm unapologetically queer. I think the current Pope is an asshole. Hell, I even love Life of Brian. My pastor and my parish family are Christian enough to accept me anyway. I find it sad that so many so-called "Christians" are not. I'm sorry if my becoming Catholic hurts them in some way. I didn't do it to hurt anybody. We are all flawed people at OLGC. I wish these wonderful anonymous Catholics would send me the names of their churches full of perfect people so I could go and bask in their perfection.

However, while I know I am deeply flawed, I cannot believe that trying to help protect my church and my Church from bad leadership is wrong.

I'm not a good Catholic, but I am a seeking one, and if I hadn't had this particular church to turn to when I did, I might well be dead now. Very likely some of these types would consider that preferable to my filthy self sullying "their" precious Church, but they can put it on their T.S. list and send it to the archbishop.

NEWS FLASH: We're all pretty bad Catholics. Many of us hope someday to be mediocre -- kind of like Louisiana's perpetual quest to reach the elusive "Southern average" in various education benchmarks.

Likewise, many of us are just about as likely to reach that holy grail.

And when we have breathed our last and find our immortal souls standing before the Judgment Seat, we will throw ourselves on the mercy of the divine court -- "Lord Jesus Christ, son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner."

Call that a D-minus response to grace. But at least a D-minus is better than the Big Flunk.

The Big Flunk would be something like . . .

I am a cafeteria Catholic of the exact kind that drives strict Catholics up the wall. I'm pro-choice, which automatically excludes me from some definitions of Catholicism. I'm unapologetically queer. I think the current Pope is an asshole. Hell, I even love Life of Brian. My pastor and my parish family are Christian enough to accept me anyway. I find it sad that so many so-called "Christians" are not.

I USED TO BE a copy editor. I think I can tighten this up some:

"Hey, God! I think you should be Christian enough to endorse my flouting all your retrograde, bigoted and medieval bulls***. I ate that apple . . . and I liked it! I'm manifestly OK the way I am, and you ought to be damned glad to have me in Heaven."

OR . . . HOW ABOUT THIS, to steal a line or two from Groundhog Day?

Phil: I'm a god.
Rita: You're a god?
Phil: I'm a god, not the God . . . I don't think.

AND THAT SUMS UP the whole problem of Poppy Z. Brite, Bad Catholic. Her and all those other "cafeteria Catholics" who seem to think Jesus Christ, the pope and the whole friggin' church need kiss dissenters' asses just because they're too attached to their sins to embark on a spiritual 12-step program.

Come to think of it, Bill Murray as Phil the Weatherman exhibited somewhat more humility. He didn't think he was the God.

Jesus accepted all. That is not the same as affirming everybody's basic OK-ness.

22
You will be hated by all because of my name, but whoever endures to the end will be saved.
23
When they persecute you in one town, flee to another. Amen, I say to you, you will not finish the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes.
24
No disciple is above his teacher, no slave above his master.
25
It is enough for the disciple that he become like his teacher, for the slave that he become like his master. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more those of his household!
26
"Therefore do not be afraid of them. Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, nor secret that will not be known.
27
What I say to you in the darkness, speak in the light; what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops.
28
And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.
29
Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father's knowledge.
30
Even all the hairs of your head are counted.
31
So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.
32
Everyone who acknowledges me before others I will acknowledge before my heavenly Father.
33
But whoever denies me before others, I will deny before my heavenly Father.
34
"Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword.
35
For I have come to set a man 'against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
36
and one's enemies will be those of his household.'
37
"Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;
38
and whoever does not take up his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me.
39
Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
40
"Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.

(Matthew 10:22-40)

GRACE, AND ACCEPTANCE, was when Jesus revealed Himself as the Messiah to the Samaritan woman in John, Chapter 4. It was scandalous enough that Jesus was talking to a woman not related to Him. Worse yet, He was a good Jew hobnobbing with a Samaritan woman.

And even more horrific that all of that, this woman got around. A lot.

But what was more important than some powerful grace was the Samaritan woman's powerful response to that grace. That response was not "So what if I've had five husbands and now I'm shacking up with somebody? Bless my sexuality, Lord."

THE SAMARITAN WOMAN'S response was to become the early church's greatest evangelist after the apostle Paul. In the Orthodox faith and in Eastern Catholic churches, she is known as St. Photini.

You can read about her here. Hint: Photini did not call her bishop "dickless" or Peter an "asshole."

3 Chords & the Truth: Daisy . . . Daiiiisy. . . .

Eight years past the dawn of 2001, we find that radio has morphed into HAL 9000, and its soon-to-be-former audience is doing a pretty credible impression of Dr. Dave Bowman.

Any more understaffed, uninspired, unmanned shenanigans coming from the erstwhile Empire of the Air, and we're going to pull the plug. Hell, we are pulling the plug, because the mad accountants who put HAL 9000 in charge of the airwaves long ago ceased giving us any reason to listen.

A NEW DAY is dawning. We have no more time -- or patience -- for monoliths.

That's one of the things we're meditating over, in a most musical fashion, on this week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth, an audio service of Revolution 21. What comes after radio? Or, perhaps more precisely, what will be the new radio for the post-radio generation?

We're hoping 3 Chords & the Truth will be part of it, whatever It might be.

AS USUAL on the Big Show, we have a wildly diverse lineup of music this week -- from Joni Mitchell to Dr. John, and from Norwegian rockers to late American jazz greats. We even have a long, strange trip thrown in for good measure.

For radio, the dying medium, today's show would be wildly unusual. For us, it's all in an episode's programming. Isn't that a good enough reason to listen right there?

It'll expand your mind. Legally, and without those lingering unpleasant aftereffects.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Radio today

Jerry Del Colliano is a gifted war correspondent who daily sends his dispatches back from the battlefield -- with his gripping accounts of the carnage, the ruin and the walking wounded giving us a horrific vision of a world gone mad.

You won't find Jerry in Baghdad, Kirkuk or Mosul. Neither will you find him in Afghanistan.

On the Gaza border in Israel? Fuggedaboudit.

JERRY IS A PROFESSOR at the University of Southern California, and is a former radio broadcaster. And a former trade publisher who went head-to-head with Cheap Clear Channel. What's left of the American radio business is his beat.

And it's starting to make the Iraq War look like a pretty successful venture:

Yesterday, the hits kept on coming as Clear Channel's rep firm, Katz, decided to lay off 122 people. For starters, these are not layoffs. They are firings. Layoffs is the word used by the radio group to spin what it really is -- firings.

Meanwhile hundreds of Clear Channel managers have returned home to their nervous employees from this week's Dallas corporate meetings -- the proverbial other shoe will no doubt drop shortly -- some think a bloodbath is on the way as early as next week.

More firings.

More good people out of work because their employers have tried everything and it hasn't worked. Everything except running radio as a local business -- the way they found it when they bought into it.

Local radio is now apparently off the table.

That's why increasingly you see so many groups heavy up on syndicated programs or network their own talent to their other stations to save money. Forget that they are also cutting local programming. And to me this is the fatal blow -- not all the other mistakes these CEOs have made.

Look, some managers don't relish the position of chief executioner. One reader who identified him or herself as a Clear Channel manager who has fired 11 people put it like this:

"I'm the grim reaper. I'm the guy who does the firing. Over the last 2 years I've dismissed 11 employees. Their only crime: they drew a paycheck. At the time I was doing it for the good of the company. We needed to downsize, to save money so that we can serve the community better with great radio. The only person I was kidding was myself. I no longer drink the Kool-Aid and realize that this company has no interest in programming except on how to do it for cheap.... And I'm sorry to those 11 who I have ruined their families holidays".

(snip)

Look at the wild goose chase this reader tells us her husband was sent on by Fagreed Suleman and his wife, Judy Ellis, at Citadel. It's not pretty but it's indicative of how radio people are willing to do almost anything for their employers and yet they still get jerked around:

"My husband has been in radio for 25 years. The last 3 years we have moved 4 times. In 2008, we have lived in 3 states. We have fought to feed, pay the bills and keep our kids in college. However, all the markets we were in this year had increased revenue because of my husbands ability to motivate his staff. What did we get for that? Pink Slip, can't afford to pay you this high salary. 'Fagreed' was our last stop. They moved us across the country only to "budget cut" us after 4 months. This is just another example of greed!!!! I bet he has never had to wonder about how to keep his kids in college. Pathetic!!! It makes me sick."

IF YOU LIKE to read good war reportage -- or if you're among the dwindling number who still give a rat's ass about American radio -- check out Jerry's blog. You'll be glad you did.

Peace, mother#*$&@%!

It used to be that the song written by Nick Lowe and popularized by Elvis Costello was a pretty straightforward proposition.

After all, what is so damn funny about peace, love and understanding?

IT TAKES SOMEONE with a name like Poppy Z. Brite to show us how hilariously ironic a proposition it can be when the loudest -- and most self-proclaimedly persecuted -- apostles of "peace, love and understanding" display the capacity for tolerance and understanding you'd might expect of your local imperial wizard. (See post below.)

Then again, this is New Orleans we're talking about, the only place I know of where "F*** you, you f***ing f***s" can be turned into a movement.

Prada Bitch 1, Poppy Z. Brite 0

New Orleans writer and church-closing protester Poppy Z. Brite explained on Christmas Eve why she remains a Catholic, despite her . . . differences with church leadership and doctrine.

But if we all leave, then the assholes will have uncontested ownership of a potentially beautiful and valuable institution, and if we Catholics who don't believe this garbage put up with it, then hate will remain part and parcel of Catholic doctrine.

HER PAEAN to peace, love and understanding was entitled "Bite my fat one, Prada bitch." In case the reader might be unclear about the identity of the "Prada bitch," she included a graphic explaining, in graphic terms, what "Nazi popes" could do.

Furthermore, Ms. Brite -- who has said "I think of myself as male, and that I am attracted to males" -- was quite upset over Pope Benedict XVI's recent statement about gender, which supported what Judeo-Christian tradition has held about such things since, oh . . . forever. This all ties in somehow with why Poppy had been helping to "occupy" an Uptown parish the Archdiocese of New Orleans had seen fit to shutter.

"In case you've ever wondered why I don't just go to some other church," she wrote, "no one at Our Lady of Good Counsel thinks I'm going to destroy the human race."

As one who has written my own archbishop suggesting -- amid the scandals and a petulant tantrum he threw regarding governance of Boys' Town -- that he start acting like a shepherd or please resign, I sympathize on some level with those who are unwilling to scrape and bow before the majesty of the chancery.

On the other hand, who the *&@! does she think she is?

By definition, Catholics "believe this garbage." When she was confirmed as an adult -- as did I when I was confirmed as an adult -- Poppy Z. Brite made this profession:

“I believe and profess all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches,
and proclaims to be revealed by God.”

NOTHING THERE about "Catholics who don't believe this garbage." So forgive me if I don't have much sympathy for Ms. Brite's and her fellow at Our Lady of Good Counsel protesters' bleating about the archdiocese, etcetera and so on, acting in bad faith.

Like this from the Times-Picayune:

Tuesday's action appears to end parishioners' long attempt to save their parishes, an effort that began in April, when [Archbishop Alfred] Hughes announced they would be closed as part of a massive restructuring of post-Hurricane Katrina worship life in the archdiocese.

Parishioners seized their churches after their last scheduled Masses in late October. Since then, they have occupied them in shifts around the clock, holding priestless Sunday prayer services and, they said, steadily building support for their volunteer rosters.

As Comiskey arrived at Good Counsel, one person from the crowd asked loudly about an earlier statement from archdiocesean officials that those participating in the vigil would not be disturbed as long as they remained peaceful. She didn't immediately respond.

As police prepared to remove Baquet, others close to Baquet, including his attorney, Lee Madere, were furious that police would not allow them access to Baquet to make sure he had medicine he needs as part of his treatment for cancer.

"You ain't never eating at Lil' Dizzy's again," Madere, standing at a church door, told a police officer, referring to the Esplanade Avenue restaurant run by relatives of Baquet.

Shortly after police arrived at St. Henry, one distraught parishioner, Cynthia Robidoux, rushed to the locked door tearfully demanding entry.

Robidoux told Assistant City Attorney Nolan Lambert she wanted to swap herself for the three parishioners inside to spare them arrest. Moreover, she told Lambert and police, she said she wanted to be arrested herself.

"I want everyone to see what they're doing. I want them to be ashamed," she said, referring to Hughes and other church officials.

I LOVE IT when folks, on one hand, portray church officials as disciples of "hate" then, on the other, get all snitty when they perceive them as not acting "Christian." Isn't that exactly what they expected of "assholes"?

These eminently rational folk admittedly "don't believe this garbage" themselves, think the Holy Father is "Nazi" who needs to "f*** off" and only remain in the Catholic Church because they don't want the "assholes" to have "uncontested ownership" of it as they, the brave revolutionaries, seek to change unchangeable doctrine.

Translation: We're Fifth Columnists who want to remake the church in our image, but we need to hang on to the petty cash and copy machines to accomplish it.

What's not to love?

MAYBE NOT EVERY protester at Our Lady of Good Counsel is as obnoxiously obnoxious as Poppy Z. Brite. Maybe not all of them want the pope to "f*** off." Maybe not all of them want the church to accommodate the sexual vagueness of a gay man trapped in a woman's body who in 1988 said he/she/???, at one point, "grew depressed because I couldn't go out at night and f*** greased-boy ass in some back room."

If so, whose "Brite" idea was it to let Poppy speak in their names? Get in front of the TV cameras? Be a ringleader of the church occupiers.

At any rate, all charges were dropped Wednesday. The "assholes" were merciful, it would appear. That, or not keen to feed the protesters' need for spectacle.

Damn pity. I would have liked to see how Catholic New Orleans would have reacted to "NAZI POPES F*** OFF."

Your FUBAR government at work

If Joe the Congressman can't screw over poor people, non-profits, small-business people and Grandma when hard times are at hand, why, it's hardly worth the effort of getting elected.

And a screw job, according to the Los Angeles Times, is just what's about to happen in a month, when the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act goes into effect:

Barring a reprieve, regulations set to take effect next month could force thousands of clothing retailers and thrift stores to throw away trunkloads of children's clothing.

The law, aimed at keeping lead-filled merchandise away from children, mandates that all products sold for those age 12 and younger -- including clothing -- be tested for lead and phthalates, which are chemicals used to make plastics more pliable. Those that haven't been tested will be considered hazardous, regardless of whether they actually contain lead.

"They'll all have to go to the landfill," said Adele Meyer, executive director of the National Assn. of Resale and Thrift Shops.

The new regulations take effect Feb. 10 under the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, which was passed by Congress last year in response to widespread recalls of products that posed a threat to children, including toys made with lead or lead-based paint.

Supporters say the measure is sorely needed. One health advocacy group said it found high levels of lead in dozens of products purchased around the country, including children's jewelry, backpacks and ponchos.

Lead can also be found in buttons or charms on clothing and on appliques that have been added to fabric, said Charles Margulis, communications director for the Center for Environmental Health in Oakland. A child in Minnesota died a few years ago after swallowing a lead charm on his sneaker, he said.

But others say the measure was written too broadly. Among the most vocal critics to emerge in recent weeks are U.S.-based makers of handcrafted toys and handmade clothes, as well as thrift and consignment shops that sell children's clothing.

"We will have to lock our doors and file for bankruptcy," said Shauna Sloan, founder of Salt Lake City-based franchise Kid to Kid, which sells used children's clothing in 75 stores across the country and had planned to open a store in Santa Clara, Calif., this year.

There is the possibility of a partial reprieve. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is responsible for enforcing the law, on Monday will consider exempting clothing and toys made of natural materials such as wool or wood. The commission does not have the authority to change the law but can decide how to interpret it.

But exempting natural materials does not go far enough, said Stephen Lamar, executive vice president of the American Apparel and Footwear Assn. Clothes made of cotton but with dyes or non-cotton yarn, for example, might still have to be tested, as would clothes that are cotton-polyester blends, he said.

"The law introduces an extraordinarily large number of testing requirements for products for which everyone knows there's no lead," he said.

Clothing and thrift trade groups say the law is flawed because it went through Congress too quickly. By deeming that any product not tested for lead content by Feb. 10 be considered hazardous waste, they contend, stores will have to tell customers that clothing they were allowed to sell Feb. 9 became banned overnight.

THIS THING is either going to bankrupt or make crooks out of more Americans than anything since Prohibition. And it continues a disturbing trend toward benefiting big business at the expense of the little guy through Congress' efforts to "reform" something or another.

See the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for just a couple of examples.

But the real victim of such idiotic government overreach -- particularly overreach that serves to make earning one's keep (or, now, keeping one's kids clothed) prohibitive for average citizens will be government itself. With every intervention that makes life harder for Joe the (fill in the blank), with every slick new law that lessens competition for the captains of industry, ordinary people believe just a little more that they just can't win.

And they come to think that, indeed, there's just no percentage in obeying the law at all because the law has just become another tool the rich use to screw the hoi polloi. Bottom line: The federal government begins to lose legitimacy.

Great timing, too. Just when the funding for bread and circuses starts to dry up.

No one ever learns that the Bolshevik Revolution happened for a reason.

The next big thing

As we speak, there are Mac enthusiasts flocking to their local Apple stores wanting to buy the new MacBook Wheel. I have a better name for it, but there are ladies present.

Really, if Steve Jobs built it, people would buy it. Probably the same people who really enjoy tagging MiniDiscs.

I think the reason The Onion's satire is so damned funny is because you know there's someone out there. . . .

HAT TIP: Dvorak Uncensored

Revisiting Revolution 21's premise

Every now and again, I like to revisit what Revolution 21 is all about -- if for no other reason than to remind myself.

SO, here we go:

Let's get something straight right now, O huddled masses: Revolution 21 ain't your grandma's media provider. It ain't your typical Catholic radio thing, and it ain't your typical corporate, over-researched, same-boring-playlist rock radio thing, either.

But is it really useful to define Revolution 21 by what it's not? So sorry, my plebes! My bad.

Let's just say -- plainly -- what Revolution 21 is. Revolution 21 is a website and music program that aim to reflect life as it is lived by screwed-up, struggling, inspired-yet-bumbling children of God sorely in need of His grace and forgiveness.

Revolution 21 -- that is, the Blog for the People and 3 Chords & the Truth -- realizes that Catholics like the Mighty Favog (your host and the master of dysfunctionality) live life with one foot in Heaven and the other in the gutter with all the other schmucks called Humanity. We strive for holiness, we occasionally achieve it, and sometimes the best we can muster is Holier Than Thou.

Oh, well. Blame it on Eve and that damned apple.

For his part, the Mighty Favog -- though a great and mighty Favog -- is a Bad Catholic. It is to be hoped, however, that he is capable of decent "radio" . . . and a stellar show.

And he's trying most mightily to become, at the least, a Mediocre Catholic.

So, like us believing schmucks, Revolution 21 -- all of it, text and audio -- is a mixture of the sacred and the secular. The serious and the foolish. Rock . . . and roll. Well, you get the idea.

But Revolution 21 has a problem with our oversecularized, materialist and ultimately shallow culture. We figure schizo is the only thing you get out of putting faith waaaaaaaaaaaaaay over in one corner of your life and "real life" waaaaaaaaaaaaaay over in another corner so the two never touch.

We say put that Faith Thing and that Life Thing in a bag, shake it the hell up and see what happens.

I mean, ain't that a lot more fun than alienation, ennui and life in Schizo City? Or, if not always fun, at least always a lot more interesting and, ultimately, rewarding.

But then again, it's not All About Me -- or All About You -- is it, now?

Enough blather, proclaims the Mighty Favog, your master of New Media!

Let us now proceed with trashing preconceived notions of radio formatting and stale bourgeois convention. Let us now do radio and blogging and . . . whatever . . . like we ought to be living -- faith and life together, recognizing only two kinds of music. That would be Good and Bad.

The bad, we don't mess with.

WELL, THAT'S pretty much the foundational vision of what this enterprise is about -- trying to come up with a new model of being a person of faith, of being a Catholic, in media.

Catholic media shouldn't have to be all about preaching and, frankly, staying in the Catholic ghetto. It should be about more than non-stop apologetics and, sad to say, some really bad "contemporary" music.

Of course, there needs to be a place for all that -- well, except for the bad music -- in Catholic radio, webcasting and podcasting. But there needs to be more. The Catholic media message, especially at this time in history, needs to be multidimensional.

There needs to be a cultural-support system for faith . . . and a space where Catholics can be intelligent, fun, culturally attuned beings while paying mind to the Permanent Things. If you listen to Catholic radio at all, for instance, you know that just isn't happening there.

IF ANYTHING, you start to wonder how such a church ever could have produced a Flannery O'Connor or a Walker Percy. Hang on a sec. Walker Percy was a convert.

You also start to wonder why most of the musicians and authors whose work you consider to be the most "Catholic" have achieved that while walking out the door of the church. You know, the whole "I was raised Catholic" thing.

You wonder whatever happened to whatever in Catholicism produced so much of the Renaissance. Whatever kept so much of Western culture alive during the Dark Ages.

I mean, how in the hell did we get from there to a culturally retarded institution which oftentimes has nothing better to offer the Almighty than the liturgical equivalent of this:


SO, HOW DOES ONE expect to get anywhere with something like, for example, 3 Chords & the Truth in this milieu?

You don't.

As the general manager of a Catholic radio station once told me about an effort far less "out there" (at least from a religious-radio perspective) than 3 Chords & the Truth, "Catholic radio's not ready for that." That, of course, begs the question, "When the hell will it be, then?"

Not now. Not when Catholic culture -- and let's face it, Christian culture in this country -- isn't any smarter than what it's supposed to be transcending.

So, what I think I need to face up to is that what I'm doing has no prospect of success within "the church." I don't know that I'd change a word of the above "mission statement" (for lack of a better term), but I know I can't force proselytizing or overt evangelizing into what is more properly the realm of culture and art.

Music -- art -- is more than just a tool for chalking up souls. It's more than the ol' evangelization bait and switch. And most importantly, it's not being true to the fullness of who I am or what I'm trying to accomplish here . . . whatever that might ultimately be.

WHAT I'M DOING, I guess, is "Catholic media" in the sense that it's media done by a guy trying to be a faithful Catholic. Just don't expect that it's "Catholic media" in the sense of being a shill for the institutional church, or merely a utilitarian "hook" for convincing you to be Catholic or to do as I say God says.

You are welcome here even if you think I'm full of it, and that that goes double for my religion.

If there's anything wrong in my foundational vision, it's that it is too formal -- as informal as it is, relatively speaking. The institutional church, for all I know, probably would be actively hostile to what I'm doing . . . at least if its name had to be on it. And I damn well know most Catholics just don't "get it."

Our church is a timid church.
It fears how some things might look.
There is no room for this.
Our church is a timid church.

SOME OF YOU will know the tune to put to that. Expect 3 Chords & the Truth to change accordingly, starting this week.

Brother, can you spare some bling?

Paul Krugman, the Princeton economics professor and New York Times columnist, says it's beginning to look a lot like the Great Depression out there. I am not going to argue economics with a Nobel laureate.

ELSEWHERE in the Times, Michael Lewis and David Einhorn explain that the sad financial straits we're in isn't a matter of bad breaks or a few bad Wall Street bankers, but instead is a matter of national insanity.

Einhorn and Lewis:

Incredibly, intelligent people the world over remain willing to lend us money and even listen to our advice; they appear not to have realized the full extent of our madness. We have at least a brief chance to cure ourselves. But first we need to ask: of what?

To that end consider the strange story of Harry Markopolos. Mr. Markopolos is the former investment officer with Rampart Investment Management in Boston who, for nine years, tried to explain to the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bernard L. Madoff couldn’t be anything other than a fraud. Mr. Madoff’s investment performance, given his stated strategy, was not merely improbable but mathematically impossible. And so, Mr. Markopolos reasoned, Bernard Madoff must be doing something other than what he said he was doing.

In his devastatingly persuasive 17-page letter to the S.E.C., Mr. Markopolos saw two possible scenarios. In the “Unlikely” scenario: Mr. Madoff, who acted as a broker as well as an investor, was “front-running” his brokerage customers. A customer might submit an order to Madoff Securities to buy shares in I.B.M. at a certain price, for example, and Madoff Securities instantly would buy I.B.M. shares for its own portfolio ahead of the customer order. If I.B.M.’s shares rose, Mr. Madoff kept them; if they fell he fobbed them off onto the poor customer.

In the “Highly Likely” scenario, wrote Mr. Markopolos, “Madoff Securities is the world’s largest Ponzi Scheme.” Which, as we now know, it was.

Harry Markopolos sent his report to the S.E.C. on Nov. 7, 2005 — more than three years before Mr. Madoff was finally exposed — but he had been trying to explain the fraud to them since 1999. He had no direct financial interest in exposing Mr. Madoff — he wasn’t an unhappy investor or a disgruntled employee. There was no way to short shares in Madoff Securities, and so Mr. Markopolos could not have made money directly from Mr. Madoff’s failure. To judge from his letter, Harry Markopolos anticipated mainly downsides for himself: he declined to put his name on it for fear of what might happen to him and his family if anyone found out he had written it. And yet the S.E.C.’s cursory investigation of Mr. Madoff pronounced him free of fraud.

What’s interesting about the Madoff scandal, in retrospect, is how little interest anyone inside the financial system had in exposing it. It wasn’t just Harry Markopolos who smelled a rat. As Mr. Markopolos explained in his letter, Goldman Sachs was refusing to do business with Mr. Madoff; many others doubted Mr. Madoff’s profits or assumed he was front-running his customers and steered clear of him. Between the lines, Mr. Markopolos hinted that even some of Mr. Madoff’s investors may have suspected that they were the beneficiaries of a scam. After all, it wasn’t all that hard to see that the profits were too good to be true. Some of Mr. Madoff’s investors may have reasoned that the worst that could happen to them, if the authorities put a stop to the front-running, was that a good thing would come to an end.

The Madoff scandal echoes a deeper absence inside our financial system, which has been undermined not merely by bad behavior but by the lack of checks and balances to discourage it. “Greed” doesn’t cut it as a satisfying explanation for the current financial crisis. Greed was necessary but insufficient; in any case, we are as likely to eliminate greed from our national character as we are lust and envy. The fixable problem isn’t the greed of the few but the misaligned interests of the many.

(snip)

Our financial catastrophe, like Bernard Madoff’s pyramid scheme, required all sorts of important, plugged-in people to sacrifice our collective long-term interests for short-term gain. The pressure to do this in today’s financial markets is immense. Obviously the greater the market pressure to excel in the short term, the greater the need for pressure from outside the market to consider the longer term. But that’s the problem: there is no longer any serious pressure from outside the market. The tyranny of the short term has extended itself with frightening ease into the entities that were meant to, one way or another, discipline Wall Street, and force it to consider its enlightened self-interest.

THUS DO AMERICANS great and small, and thus have they done ever since Gordon Gekko told us "Greed is good," and the Reagan Administration governed as if it were so. Today is the enemy of tomorrow, and our wants have become the mortal enemy of our needs.

We Americans live as if we can separate faith and life -- or lack of faith and life, for that matter. It doesn't work out. God won't stay in a box, only to be taken out for an hour on Sundays -- if then. There are consequences when we try to do that, both individually and collectively.

Likewise, Satan won't stay in a box either, content to come out only when we want to have a little naughty fun. You don't have to give the devil his due; he'll just take it.

Among other things.

WHAT HAS BEEN playing out on Wall Street, in Detroit . . . and on Main Street, too, resembles nothing so much as it does a cleaned-up version of ghetto nihilism. You know, the kind of life your kids like to hear glorified by the likes of Lil' Wayne, T-Pain and 50-Cent.

Er, Fiddycent.

If you have no hope of long-term reward for right behavior, no faith in a better day to come, see no prospect of something -- Someone -- greater than yourself caring for even the humblest of creatures and someday setting what is wrong aright, why not go for the bling, the blow and the booty? Or, in polite "society", the immediate return writ large, the second home in the Hamptons and "friends with benefits."

Or a high-priced "escort." Whatever.

ONE PATHOLOGY widespread among the "underclass" is an inability -- often so ingrained as to be a cultural trait -- to act in its own long-term interest through self-restraint and delayed gratification. Today, nothing so defines the culture of Wall Street, and of Main Street, so much as this same pathology.

How else do we explain McMansions, investment banks with 30 times more debt than assets, three cars in the garage and subprime mortgages?

Today's headlines tell us of a financial crisis. The systemic and cultural dysfunction behind the financial crisis, however, speaks to a longtime -- and ongoing -- spiritual depression. Our society struggles with a deficit of faith, while deflationary pressures deplete its reservoirs of hope.

WE'VE EATEN. We've drunk. We thought we were merry. Was it all because the only prospect we saw for tomorrow was "die"?

Music and magic in the night

The magic is gone. Radio is dead.

Not so long ago -- OK, long ago -- the moonlight brought magic into the lives of American kids, their rooms illuminated by the dial lights and vacuum tubes of bedside radios and their ears filled with the soundtrack of amazing worlds that lay somewhere behind four-inch loudspeakers.

Where now lives -- if one can use the term so loosely -- syndicated fare like George Noory's all-night freak show and angry AM-radio ranters used to exist a world where DJs spun records through the night, both across town and halfway across a continent.

LATE AT NIGHT, the old tube radio filled your room with the faint smell of ozone and the powerful magic of stepping into worlds not your own -- the kid in a burg like Baton Rouge eavesdropped on the big-time rock 'n' roll sounds of the big city via WLS in Chicago. Or he might have an entirely legal psychedelic experience in Little Rock -- Little Rock??? -- on KAAY's Beaker Street . . . or, closer to home over on the FM band, on "Loose Radio" or maybe aboard the Chad Noga Choo-Choo on "Rampart 102" out of New Orleans.

Up here in Omaha, kids lay in their rooms listening to the late-night "Good Guy" on the "Mighty 1290" KOIL. Or maybe to whomever was pumpin' out the hits on KOMA in Oklahoma City or KIMN in Denver.

Others, to be sure, had rigged up an FM set so they could tune in and turn on as their radio "guru" dropped the needle on some Moby Grape over on "Radio Free Omaha," and all the groovy cats of the upper Midwest dreamed dreams of Max Yasgur's farm.

We are stardust. We are golden.

We are no more.

THE MAGIC IS DEAD. Our radios -- and our alternate universes -- have collapsed upon themselves in a computerized corporate cataclysm, leaving shards of smashed tubes and smashed dreams scattered across the landscape of our culture and our minds.

After the Buy n Large Corp. bought and consolidated an entire medium, there was no room for such inefficiencies as magic. Soon enough, the airwaves no longer could support life at all.

The children of the magic took it for granted, and it vanished beneath mountains of financial, cultural and human debris. And BnL didn't even leave a Wall·E to clean up the mess.

NOW OUR CHILDREN go through life with cell phones and iPods wired to their brains. They'll never know the magic of conjuring up entire worlds out of a box of capacitors and electron tubes.

They'll do a keyword search for "theater of the mind" on YouTube. All the results will reference an album by Ludacris.

Now, if you will excuse me, I'm going to turn on my old radio -- the one with the glowing vacuum tubes -- and see whether I can tease the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. out of the ether from up there in Winnipeg. I'm becoming a fast fan of In the Key of Charles and Tonic with Tim Tamashiro.

Maybe somewhere out there -- somewhere beyond this all-American, all-capitalistic Iron Curtain of our own making -- there be magic.

Merely wires and lights in a box

Click on the 1942 Philco for audio

Following that last post -- about what passes for informational content on cable news channels these days -- I thought it might be appropriate to post a couple of the 7,231.459,295 reasons we all should be profoundly sorry that Edward R. Murrow is dead.

Above is a link to the first of those reasons, the famed CBS newsman's 1945 report from the Nazis' just-liberated Buchenwald concentration camp. What follows is a story from WREG television in Memphis about another of the countless reasons we should mourn that there are no men -- or women -- like Murrow on the American airwaves today.


IN HIS FAMOUS SPEECH to the Radio and Television News Directors Association, Murrow pretty much said it all. He warned, in concluding:

I began by saying that our history will be what we make it. If we go on as we are, then history will take its revenge, and retribution will not limp in catching up with us.

We are to a large extent an imitative society. If one or two or three corporations would undertake to devote just a small traction of their advertising appropriation along the lines that I have suggested, the procedure would grow by contagion; the economic burden would be bearable, and there might ensue a most exciting adventure--exposure to ideas and the bringing of reality into the homes of the nation.

To those who say people wouldn't look; they wouldn't be interested; they're too complacent, indifferent and insulated, I can only reply: There is, in one reporter's opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. But even if they are right, what have they got to lose? Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.

Stonewall Jackson, who knew something about the use of weapons, is reported to have said, "When war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard." The trouble with television is that it is rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival.

"If we go on as we are, then history will take its revenge, and retribution will not limp in catching up with us."

This . . . is #!@%&*$ CNN, mother#!@%&*$!

NOTE: Videos contain off-color language

Reason No. 7,231,459,295 Edward R. Murrow is really glad he's dead now.

THE NEW YORK POST has the, er, blow-by-blow account of New Year's Eve on what used to be the Cable News Network:

Comedienne Kathy Griffin may be doomed to life on CNN's S-list after answering a heckler with a shrieking, vulgar tirade during the network's live New Year's Eve broadcast.

"Screw you," she told the heckler. "Why don't you get a job, buddy? You know what? I don't go to your job and knock the d- - - out of your mouth."

The raunchy exchange, which occurred well after the ball dropped at midnight, was received with guffaws by the camera crew.

Co-host Anderson Cooper, who spent the night playing the role of straight man to Griffin's antics, then managed to break for commercial - although by that point, he could barely keep a straight face.

Cooper seemed to become increasingly uncomfortable with Griffin's off-color remarks, including her request to "get a pap smear from [CNN medical reporter] Dr. Sanjay Gupta," and her description of former CNN host Glenn Beck as a "heroin addict Mormon."

I CAN'T WAIT to see what Katie Couric does -- while broadcasting the CBS Evening News live from Bourbon Street on Mardi Gras -- when some drunk from Ohio demands "Show us your t***!"

SlimeBob GreedPants vs. Big Cable

Hey! Kids!

If your cable company doesn't pony up, we're gonna kill SpongeBob! And then we're gonna take Dora and we're gonna explore her! If you get our drift.

Tell Mom and Dad to call Big Cable and complain. Tell Mom and Dad you'll hold your breath until you turn blue.

SpongeBob's waterlogged life is in your hands, kids! Don't let him down.

OF COURSE, reports the Los Angeles Times, this worked fantastically. Because we're that kind of country.

Facing a backlash from TV viewers furious at the prospect of losing "SpongeBob SquarePants" and "Dora the Explorer," two media giants reached a new programming agreement that keeps those popular cartoon characters on the channels of the country's second-largest cable operator.

Viacom Inc. had threatened to pull 19 of its cable channels, including Nickelodeon, MTV, VH-1 and Comedy Central, from the Time Warner Cable Inc. systems at midnight Wednesday when their previous two-year contract expired.

At midnight in New York, minutes into the new year, Viacom granted an extension that allowed the two sides to keep talking. They then clinched a deal. The New Year's Day accord avoided a blackout of Viacom's programming in 13.3 million homes in the U.S. served by Time Warner Cable Inc., including nearly 2 million in the Los Angeles area.

Details of the new contract were not immediately available.

The resolution came after a long day of squabbling as each side accused the other of greed, and irate customers jammed Time Warner Cable's call centers, saying they wanted their MTV and Nickelodeon. The reaction from viewers was stoked by Viacom's costly media campaign in print and on television, much of it targeted at kids.

"Demanding that our customers pay so much more for these few networks would be unreasonable in any economy, but it is particularly outrageous given the current economic conditions," Time Warner Cable Chief Executive Glenn Britt said early Wednesday. "Huge price increases like what Viacom is demanding threaten the ultimate value of cable TV."

Viacom had purchased newspaper advertisements, featuring a tearful Dora the Explorer, and placed an on-screen crawl on its channels to alert viewers to the impending programming blackout. The ads encouraged viewers to complain to Time Warner Cable.

The tactic worked -- parents reported having to soothe children who were upset over the prospect of not being able to watch their favorite shows on Nickelodeon, including "SpongeBob SquarePants."

"Our family will cancel Time Warner if a suitable agreement is not reached," threatened Debra Cooper, a mother of two who lives in San Diego. "I admit SpongeBob's laugh drives me nuts, but he is part of our family, as is George Lopez, 'Home Improvement,' 'i-Carly,' and all the rest."

Cooper said she called Time Warner Cable twice Wednesday to lobby for the channel. The company was inundated with calls, and executives from both companies put their holiday plans on hold to return to the negotiations.

KILL YOUR TV. It's important.

Who knew?

For the last post of the year, we present The Future . . . or, what we were supposed to have 10 years ago.

Where the hell is my air car?

World-Herald dumps western Nebraska

Well, at least western Nebraska still can get Husker games on the radio. At least until the radio industry finishes imploding, anyway.

But they'll have to wait a day or two for the Omaha World-Herald's wall-to-wall coverage of everybody's all-Americans.

THAT'S BECAUSE the state's largest newspaper has decided them folks up in the Sandhills kin jes' go on ahead and become part of Wyoming, as has been threatened by some from time to time. In a state where folks past Grand Island have felt less and less connected to their more-numerous eastern Nebraska brethren, they are just about to have one less thing in common -- their formerly statewide newspaper:

Effective Feb. 2, The World-Herald is changing the way it delivers the news and provides advertising services across the state of Nebraska.

The newspaper will end its Midlands edition, which is distributed across much of the western half of the state. Instead of providing same-day printed newspaper delivery to that part of the state, The World-Herald will provide subscriptions to a replica electronic edition (e-Edition) for each day's paper. It also will offer delivery of the paper by U.S. mail.

In a significant related move, The World-Herald will expand distribution of its Nebraska edition, pushing delivery of this edition as far west as the Kearney and Holdrege areas. The Nebraska edition goes to press nearly five hours later than the Midlands edition that these areas currently receive, providing more up-to-date news.

The World-Herald News Service, created last year, makes available all World-Herald content to its family of daily and weekly papers across the state. Over the past two decades, The World-Herald has ensured quality news and advertising services throughout Nebraska by acquiring and improving newspapers and their related Web sites in Scottsbluff, North Platte, Kearney, Grand Island and York, as well as 11 weekly newspapers. The Norfolk Daily News also participates in the World-Herald News Service.

Four Iowa daily papers and 12 nondaily papers owned by The World-Herald also are part of the World-Herald News Service.

Omaha.com also provides World-Herald content 24/7 online and by mobile phone.

AHEM. Will the World-Herald Co. be vastly expanding the newshole of the North Platte Telegraph and Scottsbluff Star-Herald so they might somehow shoehorn in all that World-Herald News Service wonderfulness each day?

And what about all the World-Herald's coverage of Husker football on Sundays? Exactly how many of the Telegraph's or Star-Herald's Sunday sports sections could be fit into the World-Herald's college-football section?

Listen, I realize the newspaper industry is in for drastic changes, and that print editions will be less and less of the equation from here on out. What offends me is the newspaper peeing down western Nebraska readers' legs, then telling them it's a beneficial rain.

What we are talking here is a diminution of service to an overwhelmingly rural area of the state. What we also are talking here, in the socio-political sphere, is an unintended but not-so-subtle message to those folks that they do not matter in the grand scheme of Nebraska.

I UNDERSTAND the economic reasoning behind the World-Herald's move. What I don't understand is how the paper is allowing its brand to be diminished by so blatantly throwing in the towel and leaving so much of the state unserved by anything but the smallest of small-town newspapers.

The newspaper crisis has been building since the birth of the World Wide Web, and now the World-Herald reacts? Worse, the long-delayed reaction isn't a proactive one but, instead, comes in the form of a barely organized retreat.

And it's outstate World-Herald subscribers and single-copy buyers who've been left bleeding on the battlefield.

So now the paper's soon-to-be-erstwhile readers are expected to subscribe to the "e-Edition" available on the paper's woeful, truncated website? Good luck with that one, guys. Really, the "e-Edition" should be a joy to read in areas where broadband Internet service isn't nearly so ubiquitous as in the big city.

It seems to me many of the World-Herald's cost-saving objectives could have been met by either having its outstate editions printed in Grand Island, North Platte and Scottsbluff, then distributed from those hubs.

OR, BETTER YET, why not expand the circulation areas of those World-Herald Co. newspapers somewhat, and then offer an outstate edition of the World-Herald as a wrap-around to them, while raising the cover price of the papers, say, a dime? Would it really have been impossible -- and economically unfeasible -- to achieve cost savings while enhancing value to the customer?

Even if you are retrenching somewhat, isn't it always better to do it in a way that plausibly can be spun as a plus for your readership while positioning you as an industry innovator? Wouldn't it be smart journalism to add state- and national-coverage value to three of your western Nebraska publications while freeing up space in -- and the staff of -- those papers for more, and more thorough, regional and local coverage?

What the newspaper industry needs today is imagination and innovation. What it gets is slapdash haphazardry and sheer panic.

NEWSPAPERS LIKE the Omaha World-Herald could be intelligently organizing a graceful retreat from the business of publishing dead-tree newspapers and an entry into the world of multimedia news dissemination. A measured, thoughtful transition would give editors and publishers time to develop a game plan.

It also would give areas like western Nebraska time to more completely integrate into the broadband world so that no reader -- no citizen -- is left behind.

The World-Herald could have done that. Could have.

As in "coulda, woulda . . . shoulda."

The new shortwave

Before during and after World War II, listening to shortwave radio -- dropping in on what was up a world away -- was all the rage.

If what was on the Omaha airwaves was just too boring. well, let's see whether Radio Moscow is worth a few socialistic laughs and giggles. Alternatively, you might find less ironic enjoyment from the BBC World Service or Radio Netherlands International.

AND IF THERE was a crisis somewhere on the globe, maybe you could pull in a broadcast from the thick of the action through the static as the signal came and went.

Shortwave radio was exotic. Shortwave radio was romantic. Shortwave radio helped you escape the ordinariness of your ordinary old American town.

It's a new century now, and what's left of the Omaha airwaves is more boring than anyone ever could have imagined in 1958. I'm serious, here. Radio nut that I am, I'm pining for those comparatively exciting days when KFAB was spinning vinyl like the Mills Brothers' "Cab Driver." Or maybe even some 101 Strings or Jerry Vale.

But there is escape today via Internet radio . . . the new shortwave. And, lo, manufacturers are starting to advertise 'Net radio the same way they sold us shortwave well over half a century ago.

I mean, listen to this from Tivoli Audio:

When Tivoli Audio CEO Tom DeVesto and his team of engineers set out to create the next generation of home audio, they began with a simple question: What would the ideal radio do? The new Tivoli Audio NetWorks radio is the answer to that question. Taking advantage of broadcasting over the Internet, NetWorks delivers crystal-clear reception of any radio station, near or far, with no need for a computer. NetWorks allows listeners to tune in to Italian Opera from Milan, rock music from New York City, or any specialty, niche radio station from any location in the world in its native language, and in real time.

BETTER YET, watch:


THE BIG DIFFERENCE between now and then, though, is that you didn't have to sell your daughters into white slavery to buy that RCA shortwave table radio way back there then. There are, of course, well-heeled folk today who wouldn't think twice about dropping anywhere from $599 to $750 on an Internet table radio.

I, however, am not one of them. Me, I got no frame of reference for that kind of thing. I also got no daughters to sell into white slavery.

Running audio cables from my computer to my stereo will just have to suffice. Either that or firing up the old shortwave set atop the bookcase.