Well, I Woke Up to a Nightmare

I stepped into the dark foyer, as I do every morning, though this was one of the last times. In no unfamiliar scene, a swarm of baby strollers blocked my path, as did a heavyset woman struggling to put down her young child as the carriage she held dangled precariously on the stair's edge. A tiny girl with wispy locks of blonde, the child looked up just as I was peering down, closely minding the obstacles in preparation for my ascent. Her eyes locked on mine for what must have been a split second too long because, without refrain or warning, she giggled (a little too sharply for the dreary dawn) and squealed "Daddy!" I looked behind, confused, only to find an empty doorway, and when I turned back the little creature was still staring and smiling, repeating, even after I walked briskly past: "Daddy!"

I ran.

And So Ends a Great American Political Institution

Tomorrow

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My Industry's Self-Righteous Suicide

I impetuously attended one of those Big Swingin' Dick journalism conferences in Baltimore last week. The atmosphere was predictably self-congratulatory, but among the well-groomed broadcasters, ragged newspapermen, seasoned muckrakers and doe-eyed dilettantes lingered a palpable sense of despair. It took an old schooler, who now trades in fiction, to aptly explain why aspiring reporters are (largely) fucked:

"When newspaper chains began cutting personnel and content, their industry was one of the most profitable yet discovered by Wall Street money. We know now--because bankruptcy has opened the books--that the Baltimore Sun was eliminating its afternoon edition and trimming nearly 100 editors and reporters in an era where the paper was achieving 37 percent profits. In the years before the Internet deluge, the men and women who might have made the Sun a more essential vehicle for news and commentary...were being ushered out the door so that Wall Street could command short-term profits in the extreme.

Such shortsighted arrogance rivals that of Detroit in the 1970s, when automakers--confident that American consumers were mere captives--offered up Chevy Vegas and Pacers and Gremlins without the slightest worry that mediocrity would be challenged by better-made cars from Germany or Japan. In short, my industry butchered itself and we did so at the behest of Wall Street and the same unfettered, free-market logic that has proved so disastrous for so many American industries. And the original sin of American newspapering lies, indeed, in going to Wall Street in the first place."

Wall Street and free-market logic, having been a destructive force in journalism over the last few decades, are not now suddenly the answer. Raw, unencumbered capitalism is never the answer when a public trust or public mission is at issue. If the last quarter century has taught us anything--and admittedly, with too many of us, I doubt it has--it's that free-market capitalism, absent social imperatives and responsible regulatory oversight, can produce durable goods and services, glorious profits, and little of lasting social value. Airlines, manufacturing, banking, real estate--is there a sector of the American economy where laissez-faire theories have not burned the poor, the middle class and the consumer, while bloating the rich and mortgaging the very future of the industry, if not the country itself? I'm pressed to think of one" [Simon].

I work in non-profit journalism, which seems to be an expanding model. But I doubt it's any more sustainable than the paradigms of yore.

Mean Ole' World

There is something inherently serendipitous about Washington. On a sticky Monday evening I wandered down from the hill to watch the ragged old men and riotous young punks play chess in Dupont Circle. The competitors tickle the board with movements so fluid they might have been orchestrated, if not for the visible furrow of the loser's brow when he has no other refuge but to turn to the side, palms outstretched in quiet incredulity as I, the unassuming observer, mimic his futile gesture. A more deliberate person speaks emphatically into a microphone and garners a modest ripple of applause, followed by another whose string of succinct verses stagger on until I'm sure he hasn't a single breath left. I suppose the poetry slam, like the chess match, offers encumbered souls solace inside the solace of the taxpayer-funded recession-proof bubble that is the nation's capital.

Word.

Diplomacy

"One man who came in to talk with U.S. Army Captain Samuel Cook was Sarhan Hassan. Sarhan boasted of having planted more than 200 bombs for attacks on U.S. troops, a claim he later happily repeated to Cook. His other specialty was killing locals who cooperated with Americans. The Americans had raided his house six times but never caught him.

As the two men got to know each other, their discussion meandered, as Cook sought to understand his onetime and perhaps future adversary. Cook knew that Iraqis of all stripes loved American movies, particularly the 1997 epic Titanic. Sarhan told him that he didn't watch any American movies, that they were products of the devil. Cook jokingly asked him if he liked Titanic, knowing it was enormously popular in Iraq. Why, yes, the insurgent confessed. He recounted watching it seven times and crying every time at the ending, as Kate Winslet lets the dead Leonardo DiCaprio slip into the freezing North Atlantic" [Ricks].