Magical Thinking: Sometimes You Just Gotta Believe

This past weekend, I chilled out on the couch with my kids. We watched a program re-telling "Jack and the Beanstalk." In this version, Jack receives the magic beans from a roadside vendor. The vendor advises that the beans only work if you believe in magic. The tale's hero, of course, believes in magic.

The "you gotta believe" idea--what I call the magical thinking trope--appears a lot in kids' movies and shows. When a story uses magical thinking, the character who doesn't believe or who is skeptical always gets shown up by the power of belief. For instance, the heroine who knows in her heart there is a "diamond castle" that can be called into existence by singing a song--she will prevail. In another program, the skeptical character will eventually be forced to admit that there are powers beyond rational and scientific explanation.

I don't see the point of putting magical thinking out on TV like this. Maybe it has something to do with an ideal of childhood--a time when magic seemed real and wonder abounded. But I think the producers have it wrong. Look at most any Bugs Bunny cartoon, universally smarter and funnier than today's kiddie pablum. In these animated shorts, humor comes from the fun of being able to violate reality. In the classic Bugs joke, he defies the law of gravity, but then notes he never studied law.

Bugs cartoons play with magical thinking; they never take it seriously, and never promote it as a life value.

The magical thinking of today's kiddie media comes with an ugly downside, too. When you tell the little darlings that magic is real you also tell them monsters are real. They have to accept both. The world of fairies and demigods by necessity includes sorcery and demons. The world of Jesus is the world of Satan. The world of the faithful is the world of infidels. You open their hearts to both wonder and terror; you cannot shut out the scary.

In contrast, a world without magic is a world where power comes from the mind, the will, the body, the community, the resources, and the technology. Who manages these is best positioned to influence the world. There are no magic spells in this world, only knowledge and power. There are no hidden helpers, only one's friends and one's network. There are no gods to please, only a society to contribute to. There are no devils to resist, only bullies.

There is both wonder and terror in this world, too. There is scary. The difference is that we are part of it all. In the magical world, the dram of good an evil happens on some other plane, hidden from us except for the magic that brings it out.

There's no need for magical thinking. We can have fantasy movies without bolstering general superstition. We can dramatize positivity without advocating miracle-dependence. We can promote imagination and creativity without endorsing irrationality.

Reality may be scarier than fictional monsters, at least at times and for some people. But reality is certainly far better than magic.

DOMA Unconstitutional

If you know and respect the US Constitution, then of course DOMA is unconstitutional.

Saw this news item earlier today:

An appeals court ruled Thursday that the heart of a law that denies a host of federal benefits to gay married couples is unconstitutional.

The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston said the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, discriminates against married same-sex couples by denying them federal benefits.

The law was passed in 1996 at a time when it appeared Hawaii would legalize gay marriage. Since then, many states have instituted their own bans on gay marriage, while eight states have approved it, led by Massachusetts in 2004.

The appeals court agreed with a lower court judge who ruled in 2010 that the law is unconstitutional because it interferes with the right of a state to define marriage and denies married gay couples federal benefits given to heterosexual married couples, including the ability to file joint tax returns.

Yes, arbitrarily denying federal benefits to some married couples and not others is unconstitutional and immoral.

Eventually, all US states will either come to recognize "gay marriage" (and it will just be "marriage") or they will be forced to. I hope for the former but I'm comfortable with the latter.

I May Have to Go to a Movie Theater (Wednesday Comedy)

I have not been in a movie theater since 2001, but The Three Stooges might bring me back. Seriously. I love the Stooges. Here's the trailer:



I do hope the movie includes a pie fight.

In the Humanities, We Too Want to Find Things Out

Tauriq Moosa at 3 Quarks Daily is unconvinced by my defense of pop-culture humanities, including conferences such as the Jersey Shore conference held recently at the University of Chicago. Moosa says I fail "to offer good reasons for us to take the conference even a little seriously." He then proceeds to assess the conference program against my assertions of value for the topics (based only on the titled of topics and papers--I was not there).

Here is Moosa on the identity studies topic:

I’ve never understood what identity studies are about and what it means. I say this and I live in South Africa. Having engaged with it for many years, I’ve found identity studies to be nothing but nonsense posturing as deep, complex, psychological questions. In the end, who the hell cares? I’m an ex-Muslim who studies bioethics, to change public policy on matters on euthanasia and organ donation, and I read too many comics – I’ve never considered what my identity is or means in the context of a society that is largely unemployed and uneducated. What I have considered is what those factors of unemployment and no education will do when I attempt to engage in political change on matters of medicine (since the majority of the very population I want to benefit might not at first understand my reasons for wanting medical practioners to kill their patients, legally).

But will engaging with what it means to, say, be a man in today’s world really be an important topic? I’m always hesitant about such topics since sometimes people want to take what should be a discussion as a platform to advocate how men (or women) should be; which I think is unfounded, since gender roles don’t make sense anymore with, for example, increasing acceptance of homosexual relationships and artificial insemination. Who cares “how” a man should be in today’s world? I don’t think it’s a relevant topic, but then that’s just me.

Moosa is completely correct about a danger in identity studies to produce "nonsense posturing as deep, complex, psychological questions." One is well served to have a BS-meter handy when reading any paper that purports to focus on identity issues.

Yet, questions of identity do have importance, as does engaging with such questions. Moosa asks why one should care about the topic, and why it matters to have students engage with questions of masculinity or femininity or race or income level or legal status or...so on and so on.

Here's why: because we want to know how things work, including societies and cultures. Some people want to know how light behaves under certain conditions. Others want to know how an organism survived millions of years ago in a hostile environment. Some people want to know what happens when two different molecules interact with each other. Some people want to know how people make sense of the sounds and gestures produced by other people. And some people want to know how different ideas get expressed, used, shared, and altered in a culture.

I am one of the people in this last group. I think we can look at identity categories, for one thing, as a way of studying the historical character of cultures. I believe further that knowing more about such categories and their uses in cultures helps to advance the cause of civil/legal equality and to lessen bigotry.

Moosa asks "Who cares 'how' a man should be in today’s world?" The answer is that I do. I care how masculinity gets defined, and I think it has broad social implications and historical connections. There's a light beer commercial series that focuses on unmanly behavior. Usually, one guy in the commercial won't drink the right kind of light beer and it ties into some earlier behavior that was either too child-like or too feminine. These humorous constructions of masculinity have interesting tie backs to other beer commercials and to other literature where men better behave like men. And we all know of real-life groups and situations where it was a matter of harm or death to act unmanly.

So, yeah, it's relevant how people construct manliness or Italian-American-ness or most any other identity. It's important. Moosa repeatedly he uses the words "important" (10 times) and "pointless" (6 times) to dismiss both the subject of the conference--Jersey Shore--and the approach to the subject--too shallow and posturing.

But I see the humanities as able to play an important role in (1) developing the cultural knowledge mentioned above, and (2) teaching the critical thinking skills required for such knowledge. As I remark in another post:

My point is not about the relative quality of the products, Jersey Shore vs. The Brothers Karamazov; it's about their value (also not equal) in allowing students to learn, discuss, and hone critical thinking skills. In my ideal world, the best teaching would lead people to be offended that Jersey Shore was ever offered as an option for entertainment. And then the show would fold along with others of its ilk.

Moosa rightly points out the dangers of people getting on platforms to tell us how men or women should be. In my conception, the humanities is descriptive, not prescriptive. Moosa also asks why people like me want to know how people of the past saw their world, why people like me want to understand the fictional worlds created in our literature, and why people like me want to study reality shows and comic books. The answer is (again) because we, like you, want to know how the world works. For us, the pleasure of finding things out concerns things that are made and valued by people. 

And that's why even a conference on Jersey Shore has a point and has importance. Moosa is quite right that the Jersey Shore conference could have been on anything: from the Darwin biopic to Lost, and everywhere in between. The point is, however, that we have companies and people who make something like Jersey Shore, we have companies and people who make money from the show, and we have people who watch it and have their various reactions to it. This point is important because it requires us to make up hypotheses, as Moosa does, for why the show is a hit. He says:

Most people are comfortably bored with their lives and, lacking creative stimulus enjoy seeing "better" versions of themselves through the tanned, ripped abs of Italian-American people from New Jersey; the show is so unbelievably stupid, you watch it the same way you do a car-crash in slow motion, except the things breaking are people’s lives and what’s dissolving is time better spent elsewhere; and so on.

These are excellent hypotheses and worth investigating. In my mind, in my conception of the humanities, these are precisely the kinds of questions to explore. I suspect that the papers of the Jersey Shore conference actually make just these explorations, except perhaps in a tapioca of puffed out prose, but the hypotheses are the point. We do humanities to make hypotheses, to make arguments, and to weigh and consider their merits and flaws.

From what I gather, a show like Jersey Shore screams for an explanation. Who would produce such a thing? Why would it resonate? If we start, dispassionately, at this show, what can we learn about the workings of a culture in which Snooki is a star?

These are questions of interpretation and argumentation, and they are also questions of information and data. Many of the cultural studies questions raised in the conference do or could lead to data. After all, most historical scholarship requires data on the period in question, even if the period is very recent. Indeed,  data appears to be quite "hot" in the humanities right now.

Should the Jersey Shore conference be taken seriously? I say "yes" because it offers views of a cultural phenomenon, a phenomenon that can give us information on how our world actually works. I know folks in the sciences who get up in arms when the government or the public views their projects as frivolous, unimportant, a waste, or without benefit.

May I humbly suggest, then, that the scholars in Jersey Shore conference might have their own takes on why the conference was not a waste of funding and was a legitimate way to serve education? And may I humbly suggest that these scholars offer their takes publicly?

The Last Prejudice?

We are petty and tribal, we people.

A relative of mine posted a link on Facebook to a story out of Michigan:

Michigan Woman Faces Civil Rights Complaint for Seeking a Christian Roommate
A civil rights complaint has been filed against a woman in Grand Rapids, Mich., who posted an advertisement at her church last July seeking a Christian roommate.

The ad "expresses an illegal preference for a Christian roommate, thus excluding people of other faiths,” according to the complaint filed by the Fair Housing Center of West Michigan.

"It's a violation to make, print or publish a discriminatory statement," Executive Director Nancy Haynes told Fox News. "There are no exemptions to that."

Haynes said the unnamed 31-year-old woman’s case was turned over to the Michigan Department of Civil Rights. Depending on the outcome of the case, she said, the woman could face several hundreds of dollars in fines and “fair housing training so it doesn’t happen again.”

Harold Core, director of public affairs with the Michigan Department of Civil Rights, told the Grand Rapids Press that the Fair Housing Act prevents people from publishing an advertisement stating their preference of religion, race or handicap with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling.

"It's really difficult to say at this point what could potentially happen," he told the newspaper, noting that there are exemptions in the law for gender when there is a shared living space.

But Joel Oster, an attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund, which is representing the woman free of charge, describes the case as "outrageous."

"Clearly this woman has a right to pick and choose who she wants to live with," he said.

"Christians shouldn't live in fear of being punished by the government for being Christians. It is completely absurd to try to penalize a single Christian woman for privately seeking a Christian roommate at church -- an obviously legal and constitutionally protected activity."

Haynes said the person who filed the initial complaint saw the ad on the church bulletin board and contacted the local fair housing organization.

The ad included the words, "Christian roommate wanted," along with the woman's contact information. Had the ad not included the word "Christian," Haynes said, it would not have been illegal.

"If you read it and you were not Christian, would you not feel welcome to rent there?" Haynes asked.

Oster said he hopes the case will eventually be dropped and that he's sent a letter to the state asking the authorities to dismiss the case as groundless.

"The First Amendment guarantees us Freedom of Religion," he said. "And we have the right to live with someone of the same faith. The Michigan Department of Civil Rights is denying her rights by pursuing this complaint."

But Haynes said officials plan on pursuing the matter.

"We want to make sure it doesn't happen again," she said.

My relative's comment on the story was "Are you kidding me?????????," meaning he felt the complaint was patently ridiculous, unjust, or out of order. Others agreed with his viewpoint:

Comment 1: "WOW! That's unbelievable...."

Comment 2: "the last prejudice....."

Comment 3: "Sadly believable. PC run amuck."

Let me say from the outset that I probably side with the woman who posted the advertisement to some extent. I certainly don't think she ought to be fined or subjected to sensitivity training.

However, in specifying a certain type of roommate from the outset, the woman expressed her own prejudice. I think, therefore, there are grounds for this complaint. Although we might sympathize with the woman who made the ad, the complaint is not trivial and not prejudicial against Christians. I'm not a lawyer, but to me the complaint raises a very interesting and important question about where we draw the line between the rights of the private individual seeking a roommate and the many potential roommates seeking a place to live.

After some internal deliberation, I decided to post my own comment:

Similar situation: person faces civil rights complaint for seeking a white roommate.

From the website of the complaining organization, the Fair Housing Center of West Michigan: "What is Fair Housing? Fair Housing is the right of individuals ...to obtain the housing of their choice (ie: rent an apartment, buy a home, obtain a mortgage, purchase homeowners insurance etc.), free from discrimination based on race, color, religion, gender, national origin, mental or physical disability, familial status, marital status, age, sexual preference, and legal and verifiable source of income. These rights are assured by Federal, State and local fair housing laws."

My comment goes back to the idea that the complaint is at least valid. In the white/non-white context, the validity is more clear.

One commenter makes what I think is a reasonable response, but the second commenter is hysterical. This is the same one who had earlier bought in the comment on "the last prejudice."

Comment 5: "from the article 'The ad included the words, "Christian roommate wanted,"' she didn't say 'no - non-christians' - she just gave what she was looking for, like 'non-smoker' Plus, she advertised at her CHURCH - who was at her church that would report this!?!?! I understand the laws are in place for a reason - but this really pushes the limits!!!"

Comment 6: "it does push the limits. The article says she's looking for a roomate. Does that mean she has to be forced to live with anyone; a serial killer, a rapist, an atheist or a man? This law was meant for landlords and the artcile doesn't say whether she's the landlord or not. This is a frivolous lawsuit and a waste of taxpayer dollars...shameful. A person could ask for a gay roomate or an atheist roomate and no-one would complain due to political correcteness. Like I said, the last acceptable predjudice is against Christians."

Comment 6 reveals a troubled mind, someone who sees soldiers forcing people to act against their choices. The person also claims that a double standard exists: "A person could ask for a gay roomate or an atheist roommate and no-one would complain." I don't know if this claim is (f)actually true, but neither does the person making the claim--that subjunctive "would" tells us the person is speculating.

However, the really intriguing item is that prejudice against Christians is "the last acceptable" prejudice.

Really?

Is anyone asking Christians to live in ghettos or internment camps? Is anyone telling Christians that they can't eat in particular restaurants, attend particular schools, or sit in designated areas of buses? Are Christians being bullied to the point of suicide? Are Christians likely to encounter career ceilings and lower pay than their non-Christian colleagues? Are Christians being forced to wear badges or to adhere to special curfews? Are Christians prey to mobs willing to commit unrestrained violence against them? Are they being fed to lions? Are they being nailed to pieces of wood?

I find this persecution complex unfounded and abhorrent. I find designating this prejudice as "the last" completely egocentric.

Krugman on the Health Insurance Reform Vote

Fear Strikes Out, by Paul Krugman
22 March 2010

The day before Sunday’s health care vote, President Obama gave an unscripted talk to House Democrats. Near the end, he spoke about why his party should pass reform: “Every once in a while a moment comes where you have a chance to vindicate all those best hopes that you had about yourself, about this country, where you have a chance to make good on those promises that you made ... And this is the time to make true on that promise. We are not bound to win, but we are bound to be true. We are not bound to succeed, but we are bound to let whatever light we have shine.”

And on the other side, here’s what Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the House — a man celebrated by many in his party as an intellectual leader — had to say: If Democrats pass health reform, “They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years” by passing civil rights legislation.

I’d argue that Mr. Gingrich is wrong about that: proposals to guarantee health insurance are often controversial before they go into effect — Ronald Reagan famously argued that Medicare would mean the end of American freedom — but always popular once enacted.

But that’s not the point I want to make today. Instead, I want you to consider the contrast: on one side, the closing argument was an appeal to our better angels, urging politicians to do what is right, even if it hurts their careers; on the other side, callous cynicism. Think about what it means to condemn health reform by comparing it to the Civil Rights Act. Who in modern America would say that L.B.J. did the wrong thing by pushing for racial equality? (Actually, we know who: the people at the Tea Party protest who hurled racial epithets at Democratic members of Congress on the eve of the vote.)

And that cynicism has been the hallmark of the whole campaign against reform.

Yes, a few conservative policy intellectuals, after making a show of thinking hard about the issues, claimed to be disturbed by reform’s fiscal implications (but were strangely unmoved by the clean bill of fiscal health from the Congressional Budget Office) or to want stronger action on costs (even though this reform does more to tackle health care costs than any previous legislation). For the most part, however, opponents of reform didn’t even pretend to engage with the reality either of the existing health care system or of the moderate, centrist plan — very close in outline to the reform Mitt Romney introduced in Massachusetts — that Democrats were proposing.

Instead, the emotional core of opposition to reform was blatant fear-mongering, unconstrained either by the facts or by any sense of decency.

It wasn’t just the death panel smear. It was racial hate-mongering, like a piece in Investor’s Business Daily declaring that health reform is “affirmative action on steroids, deciding everything from who becomes a doctor to who gets treatment on the basis of skin color.” It was wild claims about abortion funding. It was the insistence that there is something tyrannical about giving young working Americans the assurance that health care will be available when they need it, an assurance that older Americans have enjoyed ever since Lyndon Johnson — whom Mr. Gingrich considers a failed president — pushed Medicare through over the howls of conservatives.

And let’s be clear: the campaign of fear hasn’t been carried out by a radical fringe, unconnected to the Republican establishment. On the contrary, that establishment has been involved and approving all the way. Politicians like Sarah Palin — who was, let us remember, the G.O.P.’s vice-presidential candidate — eagerly spread the death panel lie, and supposedly reasonable, moderate politicians like Senator Chuck Grassley refused to say that it was untrue. On the eve of the big vote, Republican members of Congress warned that “freedom dies a little bit today” and accused Democrats of “totalitarian tactics,” which I believe means the process known as “voting.”

Without question, the campaign of fear was effective: health reform went from being highly popular to wide disapproval, although the numbers have been improving lately. But the question was, would it actually be enough to block reform?

And the answer is no. The Democrats have done it. The House has passed the Senate version of health reform, and an improved version will be achieved through reconciliation.

This is, of course, a political victory for President Obama, and a triumph for Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker. But it is also a victory for America’s soul. In the end, a vicious, unprincipled fear offensive failed to block reform. This time, fear struck out.

Pat the Dick

Richard Dawkins has weighed in on the silly and malicious comments that American evangelist Pat Robertson made about the recent earthquake that has devastated Haiti. As ridiculous as Robertson's views are - that long-standing Haitian misery and poverty originate with a supposed "pact with the devil" made by Haitian revolutionaries - Dawkins's comments have attracted a fair amount of attention themselves.

I'd like to highlight a few passages from Dawkins's article in the UK.

Loathsome as Robertson’s views undoubtedly are, he is the Christian who stands squarely in the Christian tradition. The agonised theodiceans who see suffering as an intractable “mystery”, or who see God in the help, money and goodwill that is now flooding into Haiti, or (most nauseating of all) who claim to see God “suffering on the cross” in the ruins of Port-au-Prince, those faux-anguished hypocrites are denying the centrepiece of their own theology. It is the obnoxious Pat Robertson who is the true Christian here.

Here, the important point is that Robertson articulates the unadulterated Christian message quite well. Sin and suffering, despite the murkiness of their definitions, centrally ground Christian belief and teaching. Bad things happen because someone sinned. And the suffering of Jesus is the main spectacle that Christians witness every Sunday. His getting the shit kicked out of him and his agony are the point, regardless of whether this aspect of the faith gets admitted in mixed company.

Dawkins continues:

Your entire religion is founded on an obsession with “sin”, with punishment and with atonement. Where do you find the effrontery to condemn Pat Robertson, you who have signed up to the odious doctrine that the central purpose of Jesus’s incarnation was to have himself tortured as a scapegoat for the “sins” of all mankind, past, present and future, beginning with the “sin” of Adam, who (as any modern theologian well knows) never even existed?

Yes, I know you hate the word “scapegoat” (with good reason, because it is a barbaric idea) but what other word would you use? The only respect in which “scapegoat” falls short as a perfect epitome of Christian theology is that the Christian atonement is even more unpleasant. The goat of Jewish tradition was merely driven into the wilderness with its cargo of symbolic sin. Jesus was supposedly tortured and executed to atone for sins that, any rational person might protest, he had it in his power simply to forgive, without the agony. Among all the ideas ever to occur to a nasty human mind (Paul’s of course), the Christian “atonement” would win a prize for pointless futility as well as moral depravity.

I completely agree with Dawkins here. Nothing about the alleged "passion" of Jesus is beautiful or noble outside of a literary-mythical context. A person who knowingly allows himself to be scourged and tortured unnecessarily is hardly worthy of worship.

Dawkins sums up his article with a direct admonishment of the aloof believer who sleeps safe and warm in suburban comfort:

Educated apologist, how dare you weep Christian tears, when your entire theology is one long celebration of suffering: suffering as payback for “sin” — or suffering as “atonement” for it? You may weep for Haiti where Pat Robertson does not, but at least, in his hick, sub-Palinesque ignorance, he holds up an honest mirror to the ugliness of Christian theology. You are nothing but a whited sepulchre.

Christianity is the prolonged celebration at a distance of the suffering of others. Supposedly, a Jewish preacher was tortured and killed by Roman authorities over 2,000 years ago. But that was way back when and "we" of course are saved.

Certainly, Haiti was laid waste by natural forces of the Earth. But that was way over there and "we" of course are insulated.

It's a miracle, hallelujah.

Why the Press Isn't Taken Seriously

This is an excellent assessment of the sort of media hypocrisy and shenanigans I've railed against for years.

Just Good Enough to Deconstruct

John McIntyre has one of my favorite blogs on writing. Today's post looks at public apathy toward quality - in consumer products and in writing. While I agree with most of his points, I want to take issue with what he does at the end, which is take a cheap shot at deconstruction. In my view he mis-characterizes deconstruction by making it a philosophy of meaninglessness. It's rather an unfortunate cheap shot that glosses over the real insights that a deconstructive approach can yield.

Let's go through the post in sequence. He begins:

Here’s a start for a profoundly depressing day.

The estimable David Sullivan, my colleague at The Philadelphia Inquirer, has a sobering post at That’s the Press, Baby on copy editing and quality. Reacting to a section of a long analysis of American newspapering by Vin Crosbie, he explores the idea that for most readers, good enough is the only standard that matters.

Much of the video quality on Youtube is poor, he points out, but it’s good enough to amuse people; cell phones are less reliable than land lines, but they are good enough to satisfy the customers; a great deal of the writing on the Internet is less than optimal, but it is good enough for all but the most demanding readers. And it’s all free. You could pay money for a newspaper that is better edited, but why would you, if you can get basically the same information, for free and good enough.

Then he says -

It’s not hard to see where this is going. Where this has already been going, as newspapers cut back on all that expensive and time-consuming editing and give the reader the “unmediated” work of reporters, God save the mark. For the past 28 years, I have closed the day in some confidence that the next morning’s paper was better in some respects for my having been on the desk. But the number of people willing to pay for a product with some assured level of quality* — and worse, the number of advertisers confident that such a quality product is the right vehicle for their sales pitches — dwindles.

He closes out with this -

Mr. Sullivan is probably right in speculating that the novelty will begin to fade from many of the currently popular Web sites. I suspect that the great and painful sorting-out under way among American newspapers will result in products — electronic certainly, and perhaps even in print — that have readers and the revenue to support the enterprise. And somewhere in these emerging enterprises there will be a desire for accuracy, precision and clarity. That will require editing. So maybe it’s not the best idea to cut loose all the copy editors just yet.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go into the office and put out a newspaper. If I do my job properly, it will be some better than good enough.

In an interesting move, he gives not one but two footnotes, and the real action of the post - for me, anyway - happens here. The first note undercuts possible objectors:

* Before you write about all the ignorant errors you have spotted in The Baltimore Sun and whom do I think I am fooling, let me save time by giving you the answers in advance: (1) You have not seen the ignorant errors that the copy desk caught, and (2) you have not taken into account the quality of most other American newspapers.

The second note, however, goes after deconstruction. McIntyre says:

** If I can digress — and who will stop me? — I suspect that the slow seepage of deconstructionist ideas from the academy into mainstream culture over the past 30 years has contributed to the difficulties in mainstream journalism. If it is the case that any text is merely a reflection of certain interests and power relationships, and if there is no external reality to which a text corresponds, then all of us will think what we prefer to think (or what those power relationships have programmed us to think), and the mainstream media’s preoccupation with fictitious concepts such as “objectivity” is merely another sham. That this is the case may be seen plainly in political journalism, in which people read and tenaciously hold on to assertions that are demonstrably false.

Is it the case "that any text is merely a reflection of certain interests and power relationships"? Well, yes, any text reflects interests and relationships, but a text has more to it than this - so it is NOT merely a reflection. A text actively constructs such relationships. It defines them and gives them a concrete grounding visible to all in and as writing. The reflection is not derivative and it is not identical; rather it is innovative and differential, and this is the whole problem of language. Language is not backwards referential but forwards.

But then I should come back a bit because there's a fundamental quality of text that I think needs to be recognized. Text is not a thing. Just like knowledge is information put to use, text is inscription/writing put to interpretation. In other words, text consists of both the thing being read and the process of reading together. The idea that text makes the scene of (social/political/personal) interests and relationships is not deconstructionist per se. But deconstruction's proponents suggest that these interests and relationships can be inferred and that they matter - at the point(s) of writing and reading.

Removing Any Doubts ...

... that the Boston Globe is part of the established order and no longer the people's check on it:

Taxachusetts no more

August 11, 2008

EFFORTS TO tamp down antitax sentiment in Massachusetts got an unexpected boost last week: the small-government advocates at the National Tax Foundation in Washington, D.C., issued a report showing that the state's tax burden has dropped a few notches this year. The epithet "Taxachusetts" has been difficult to shake, but the foundation report ranks the state 23d out of 50 for the bite state and local taxes take out of a resident's paycheck. That's just about the middle by anyone's calculation.

As incomes rise and taxes remain fairly stable, Massachusetts' standing improves. The report shows the tax burden here declining steadily since 2005, when Massachusetts ranked 18th among the states. Back in 1980, the year a property tax revolt fueled passage of Proposition 2 1/2, the state ranked second, just behind New York.

States with higher tax burdens include many considered competitors for jobs and skilled workers: California, North Carolina, and Virginia, for example. New Jersey has the highest tax burden of all.

To avoid statistical distortions, it is important to calculate taxes as a proportion of personal income, instead of just per person. States with lower incomes than Massachusetts may have somewhat lower tax rates, but the tax bill hurts more for poorer residents of Arkansas (which ranks 14th for tax burden) or Georgia (16th). It is somewhat akin to the wind-chill factor: the temperature (raw data) may say one thing, but what matters is how much the cold hurts.

In November, voters will be faced with a ballot question to eliminate the state income tax. The tax foundation's report shows Massachusetts moving in the right direction. It should help inform a debate based on facts, not slogans.

Of course, I fully support efforts to eliminate the state income tax. Clearly this piece wants me to reconsider, as if I should be wowed by our number 23 ranking. Or as if I should feel uneasy that "competitor" states such as California rank higher.

This is unabashed propaganda. Denounce it, all.

More Media Fraud and Puppetry

Injustice and unfairness take many forms, but at an intellectual level they are particularly (ob)noxious when given the form of journalistic essay. David Gelertner, Yale professor and senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, commits several acts of intellectual injustice in his commentary on reported statements by Woody Allen.

Gelertner’s “Woody Allen's History Goes Nowhere ... And It Doesn't Explain Natan Sharansky” begins the assault by labeling Allen along political-ideological lines:

Woody Allen (liberal) and Natan Sharansky (conservative) are celebrity Jewish intellectuals who offer radically different worldviews for your contemplation. Allen’s is more popular with intellectuals worldwide. Sharansky's whole life says that Allen is wrong. Allen recently explained his view of history to the German magazine Der Spiegel. And Sharansky was interviewed by Jay Nordlinger of the National Review. If you understand their disagreement, you will grasp the main spiritual question facing Americans today.

Don’t be fooled: this is not about the real Natan Sharansky. The “Natan Sharansky” here is a rhetorical puppet used to represent correctness, propriety, and value. This is not even about Woody Allen or his worldview. It is, really, about Gelertner and a spiritual answer he needs to have, an answer he must know to be right.

Through the Allen-Sharansky puppet show, Gelertner first seeks to minimize Allen and glorify the ideological position represented by Sharansky:

Allen, 69, is a filmmaker from Brooklyn. Sharansky, 57, was a political prisoner in the Soviet gulag; today he is an Israeli politician.

Notice how provincial Allen looks next to Sharansky, a man of two nations. Notice how mercantile Allen seems beside the stately Sharansky. Gelertner deftly sets up Allen as a clown whose time has passed, as a relic and a Jewish Uncle Tom to the Europeans. Indeed, Allen’s popularity in Europe must surely make any statement of his wrong, Anti-American, Anti-Israel, and Anti-Judaism.

Allen got famous as the anti-hero of his own movies, the schnook who invites the world to laugh at him while he gets the girl anyway. He has become the master comedian of the age, so funny he hasn't found it necessary to make a joke in 30 years. During this time his movies have dispensed with mere humor in favor of gentle, carefully-crafted tedium. He is especially popular in Europe, where people enjoy well-written films, prefer literate irony to childish comedy, and never object to a Jew making a fool of himself.

Here, then, is the conclusion: Allen is a fool, liberals are fools, liberalism is foolish. Now that this has been firmly established, Gelertner gives us Allen’s statements from a recent interview in Der Spiegel. More importantly, we get Gelertner’s take on the statements:

"The history of the world," he told Der Spiegel, "is like: He kills me, I kill him." (Of course he was speaking casually, off the cuff.)" Only with different cosmetics and different castings: So in 2001, some fanatics killed some Americans, and now some Americans are killing some Iraqis. And in my childhood, some Nazis killed Jews. And now, some Jewish people and some Palestinians are killing each other. Political questions, if you go back thousands of years, are ephemeral, not important. History is the same thing over and over again."

If history is merely a bad movie endlessly repeating itself, then history is meaningless. If all killing amounts to the same thing, you can't possibly save the world by fighting wars. Allen doesn't say these things but plainly implies them.

These ideas are important: Americans must decide whether they are fools to fight for other people's freedom. The Iraq war was partly inspired by none other than Natan Sharansky — who passionately preaches that free people must battle tyranny militarily. Referring to Sharansky's "The Case for Democracy," President Bush said: "If you want a glimpse of how I think about foreign policy, read Natan Sharansky's book."

Notice that Gelertner first challenges (what he takes to be) Allen’s view of history by caricaturing some of the view’s implications, which Gelertner says are “plainly” made. This is an interesting tactic because it keeps intact the core premise of Allen’s statements on history. If Gelertner can establish that the implications are logically or morally wrong, then he can more easily discredit Allen’s statements, which are of course already suspect because Allen has been made a questionable character.

But even if Allen “plainly implies” them, the critical ideas – the ones that get bashed – are in fact those that must actually be attributed to Gelertner: “If history is merely a bad movie endlessly repeating itself, then history is meaningless. If all killing amounts to the same thing, you can't possibly save the world by fighting wars.” The only thing that’s plain to me is that these statements make no logical sense. What is the connection supposed to be between the historical fact of repeated human warfare – and history is as much the history of wars as anything else, is it not? – and the meaning that this or that Herbert ascribes to it? In other words, why would the repetition evacuate the meaning from history? Nietzsche suggested that endless repetition actually made life meaningful.

The second statement is pure theatre -- rhetorical thunder, but too ridiculous for comment. Clearly, Gelertner needs history to have meaning. He needs to believe that the world can be saved, and that wars are one way to do it. I cannot answer why he has these needs, but I think I understand them. Nevertheless, emotion and ideology seem to have overwhelmed Gelertner’s logic and intellectual rigor; otherwise, sweeping terms such as “meaningless” and “save the world,” which are utterly vacuous in context, would never have made it to print.

Gelertner certainly displays keen insight in connecting the “endless repetition of killing and retaliation killing” to the current conflict between Americans and terrorist insurgents in Iraq. Unfortunately, Gelertner apparently forgets that we went to Iraq under the pretense of an imminent threat to America: Saddam Hussein had, or was taking clear steps to obtain, nuclear warfare capabilities. Fighting “for other people's freedom” may be the official agenda now, in addition to preventing all of America’s new and old enemies from taking power in Iraq, but I don’t see how this contradicts Allen’s statements at all. Gelertner, of course, disagrees:

Allen's theory implies that we are crazy to fight in Iraq. True, Saddam Hussein and his rape rooms and torture shops and killing grounds have been washed away like gore off a butcher-shop floor; all the same, history is going nowhere. Whether you kill a man while liberating his country or because you are Saddam Hussein just fooling around, he is equally dead. America had no better excuse than Hussein to kill Iraqis.

Argumentatively, this is the essay’s heart. The monumental question is whether America’s military presence in Iraq has a unique, differentiating validity – in other words, if it’s justified. Gelertner is obviously trying to steer us in the direction of “we are logically and morally correct to be in Iraq.” And he attempts to get us there through some philosophical bullying: do you prefer to see yourself living in a world where history is going "nowhere" or "somewhere"?

This, however, is where Gelertner commits an important injustice against Allen. Forget that history is not, in fact, "going" anywhere and that Gelertner has let a metaphor overtake him. Forget also that if "Allen's theory" describes a cyclical, repetitive history, then it too depicts history as going somewhere. Based on the one quote of Allen’s that is provided, “Allen’s theory” does not evaluate the political questions behind individual wars against each other, it states that relative to many thousands of years of human history, these questions are unimportant. “Allen’s theory” comments on what appears to be an endlessly recurring human theme of military attack-retaliate-attack-retaliate, but it doesn’t suggest that some attacks and some retaliations are not more justified, more necessary, or more moral than others. In other words, “Allen’s theory” does not match with Allen’s quoted statement, and this is unfair.

The shame of it is that Gelertner’s support for American involvement in Iraq could have been articulated within the actual parameters of “Allen’s theory.” But this would have required acknowledging that Iraq is both a retaliatory and an initiatory military engagement. This would have required accepting that we are killing Iraqis, some of whom are very bad people.

Unfortunately, Gelertner chooses instead to construct, using Sharansky, a more palatable view of history:

But Sharansky knows that as language expresses human thoughts, history expresses deeds — which (like thoughts) are sometimes nonsense and sometimes meaningful. The collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, meant that innumerable freedom lovers had struggled and suffered and won.

Sharansky himself spent more than 10 years in Soviet prisons — because he was a dissident, had worked with other dissidents and yearned to go to Israel. Nordlinger writes about Sharansky's imprisonment: "More than 400 of those days were spent in punishment cells; more than 200 were spent on hunger strikes. His refusal to concede anything to the Soviets was almost superhuman."

Sharansky was prepared to die for freedom. He saw fellow dissidents die. Don't tell him that all killing is the same, that history is going nowhere. He rode history's bucking bronco from a Soviet cell to a Jewish state that is strong enough (physically, spiritually) to fight off insatiable enemies in war after war and never surrender.

Notice that by this point, Gelertner has not given us one word of “Sharansky’s theory,” only testimonial from President Bush and some anecdote. It’s the lowest point of the article, Gelertner as snake-oil salesman. Then, of course, Gelertner completes the character assassination of Woody Allen, with a Sharansky quote brought in for good measure:

I don't know Allen's view of religion. But the idea that history repeats itself endlessly, that no utopian "end of days" will ever come, that existence is a grim, meaningless merry-go-round nicely compliments atheism. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called this view (which he also held) "the eternal recurrence." Nietzsche was the wisest atheist of all. But again, Sharansky disagrees. As a Soviet prisoner he invented a prayer: "Grant me the strength, the power, the intelligence and the patience to leave this jail and reach the land of Israel in an honest and worthy way." The prayer was granted. For Sharansky, his personal history means nothing less than that G-d is listening.

Is that meaning enough for Woody Allen?

There is an interesting theological question in here: if everything we believe about G-d and Judaism and the world/universe is true, but there is no afterlife, is history meaningless? In other words, do our lives require an afterlife for meaning? Is the fact of living not meaning enough? Dayenu?

This article is a glaring example of journalistic irresponsibility. Gelertner had a topic of merit and substance, and chose a rhetorical path of manipulation and obfuscation. In America, we trust that those giving commentary on current events will provide fact-based insight and perspectives that transcend political trends. For whatever reasons, David Gelertner chose a less distinguished approach for this essay. It’s the kind of writing we can only hope does not get repeated endlessly.

Common Sense Nonsense, Part 2

One of the more disturbing elements of the media-government partnership discussed in Part 1 is that media commentators and/or political pundits are working together to attack intellectuals.

What's most objectionable is that the attacks are made as these zero-sum arguments that champion the attacking speaker rather than the ideas/position. Many of these attacks seem based on nothing more than 1) a dislike of the intellectual posture/image and, more fundamentally, 2) an unwillingness to acknowledge ideas that cannot easily be translated into sound bites, buzz words or catch phrases.

As a case in point, read below how Jonathan Gurwitz just gets Derrida and so-called “Deconstruction” wrong:

Jacques Derrida is dead — maybe
By Jonathan Gurwitz
‘Deconstruction’ and the death of common sense

http://www.jewishworldreview.com The protagonist of Friedrich Nietzsche's seminal work "Thus Spake Zarathustra" declares, "G-d is dead." But it was G-d, or at least nature, that had the final say in the matter.

A clever epigram puts the issue in stark relief.

Nietzsche: "G-d is dead."
G-d: "Nietzsche is dead."

Nietzsche predicted that the decline in traditional beliefs, such as the belief in G-d, would undermine the cultural foundations of morality and set mankind on an inevitable journey toward relativism and nihilism.

After Nietzsche's death, one of the great captains of that journey was Jacques Derrida, an Algerian-born French philosopher whose signal contribution to the relativistic effort was deconstruction, the theory that no ultimate truth or meaning can be found in a text or work of art.

Jacques Derrida is dead. Maybe.

The object here is not to make light of Derrida's death from a painful disease. Rather, it is to demonstrate how such transcendent events can be rendered meaningless by his own theory.

News reports suggest that Derrida succumbed to cancer this month in Paris. Yet those reports may have multiple meanings. Our traditional way of understanding an obituary may be based on false assumptions. The fact that reporters have declared Derrida to be dead may not mean that Derrida is, in fact, dead.

All this may sound like a nonsensical game of semantics to the average person. Which only demonstrates that the average person has more common sense than the great minds of academia seized by the whimsical notion that, for instance, when Thomas Jefferson wrote, "all men are created equal," he quite probably meant precisely the opposite.

Deconstruction has led to some fanciful efforts, stripping meaning from the likes of Plato and Shakespeare and adding it to indolent streams of free verse consciousness.

The prospect that one's own words could be meaningless was of particular interest to Paul de Man, a Yale University professor who was deconstruction's most ardent advocate in the United States. In 1987, four years after de Man's death, the rediscovery of pro-Nazi, pro-collaborationist and anti-Semitic articles de Man had written as a young man in Nazi-occupied Belgium created a deconstructive scandal.

That's the attraction, and the artifice, of deconstruction. On the one hand, it turns literature — and literary criticism — into an intellectual free-for-all where any notion, no matter how outlandish, has merit. In fact, the more outlandish, and the more peppered with sexual references and progressive political causes, the better.

On the other hand, it means — as Derrida demonstrated in his defense of de Man — that what you write or say ultimately has no meaning.

In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal set out to demonstrate the intellectual vacuousness of deconstruction by submitting an article intentionally devoid of any meaning to the journal Social Text. In writing "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," he sought to test whether a serious academic journal would "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."

Sokal's opus sparkled with deconstructive-sounding gems: "These criteria, admirable as they are, are insufficient for a liberatory postmodern science: they liberate human beings from the tyranny of 'absolute truth' and 'objective reality,' but not necessarily from the tyranny of other human beings."

The editors of Social Text couldn't help themselves. "Transgressing the Boundaries" went to print in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue. Course descriptions in the humanities, literature and sociology — to say nothing of gender and race studies — at almost any university reveal the extent to which such deconstructive language is ascendant in academia.

Few intellectual movements have done more to unhinge words from meaning, ideas from philosophical foundations and art from artistry than Derrida's ghastly creation. In 1992, Cambridge University proposed giving Derrida an honorary degree. Twenty professors of philosophy objected that "semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university." In a vote of the full faculty, Derrida's supporters prevailed, 336-204.

Even Sigmund Freud, another contributor to the relativistic cause, is attributed with saying, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

Jacques Derrida is dead. Deconstruction, however, lives on, carrying forward the insidious tendency toward relativism and nihilism that Nietzsche presaged more than a century ago.

Make no mistake, Gurwitz has a political agenda, and his commentary springs from it. You'll recognize the agenda, it's couched as quasi-moral indignation.

Now, I am no expert in post-structuralism or in Derrida, but I have read enough Derrida to believe strongly that so-called “Deconstruction" is certainly not “the theory that no ultimate truth or meaning can be found in a text or work of art.” This is a conclusion that many try to support using so-called “Deconstruction,” but Derrida's theories really do not lead to such a conclusion, especially as it is formulated by Gurwitz.

Derrida’s theories, as I remember, assert that a text allows many meanings, sometimes conflicting meanings, to be generated. But a text is also self-enclosed. For example, a novel contains the characters “Ronald Reagan” and “Bill Clinton.” The Derridean point is that there is no necessary tie to the real 40th and 42nd U.S. presidents. In other words, the novel's Reagan and Clinton are not the real Reagan and Clinton; what's more, the novel's "Reagan" and "Clinton" do not necessarily refer to the real Reagan and Clinton. The novel's characters are not obligated to be anything like what we may call their "real-world counterparts."

A text allows one great liberty in constructing the identity tied to a name. In the novel, there’s a lot I can do with the identities of “Ronald Reagan” and “Bill Clinton”: manipulate, re-create, re-invent, distort, and so on. Gurwitz' twisting of so-called "Deconstruction" is precisely the kind of textual appropriation that Derrida theorized. But Derrida's ideas go further in suggesting that from the standpoint of my novel’s world, there are no real “Ronald Reagan” and “Bill Clinton” in another world outside. The world of the text is the world, and there is no outside-text. Gurwitz' "Deconstruction" is, within the confines of his article, so-called "Deconstruction." The use of the name is self-serving, ideological and masturbatory.

Gurwitz, I suppose, believes that we find ultimate truths and meanings in works of literature and art. At least, the Gurwitz that emerges in his article seems to have these beliefs. Personally, I think it would be more than great if we could read a book, or view a painting, or inspect a sculpture, and determine from that a final, unchanging truth or meaning that was the same for everyone in every time. But I also think that whenever we look closely at what someone calls an ultimate truth, we invariably find that this truth is a constructed thing – a manipulation, re-creation, re-invention, distortion, of something else. In other words, the ultimate truth may just be that the truth is a fiction borne of another fiction, a manufactured product of an inherited product (that was itself manufactured).

So-called “Deconstruction” did not “unhinge words from meaning.” The nature of language is to hinge words to meaning. It’s why languages are organic. So-called “Deconstruction” is not “the death of common sense.” Indeed, a little understanding of so-called “Deconstruction” helps one to see the manipulation in hinging Hannity to a U.S. flag backdrop and in hinging the secular humanist to a background of the scholar’s bookshelf. We can see the media-driven fabrication of identities, and we can see how the actual topics/issues being discussed are made to be irrelevant next to the conflict-mongering. We are being incited to pick sides, to argue only ad hominem, and to refrain from ever considering the substance of issues. There’s the death of common sense.

Common Sense Nonsense, Part 1

I caught a brief glimpse on the television of Sean Hannity conducting an interview with someone identified as a secular humanist. It was a remote interview, so a split screen was used: Hannity on the left side, the interviewee on the right.

One look at the screen told a viewer all that needed to be known about the interview: Hannity’s full background was an image of an American flag, possibly a waving flag. Behind the secular humanist was a dark wood bookcase filled with impressive-looking books.

This was no interview. It was a conflict of agendas and ideologies made to look like an interview. It was a wrestling match. On one contender's uniform, in glittering gold sequins, we saw the phrase "Common Sense." The costume of the other contender announced the name, "Intellectual." Or maybe "Secularist." Or maybe "Liberal." They're all the same, right?

In most wrestling matches, it's easy to pick the winner before the match even starts: the name-brand wrestler will prevail. Same thing with the Hannity-Secular Humanist match. Hannity was scripted to win. No need to see or hear the interview. The interviewer always wins, partly because the person asking the questions always has an advantage in knowing both the questions and answers beforehand.

The cartoonish nature of this interview just reminded me again what a strange state our country is in right now. Something is definitely rotten, and if the rot can't be spotted directly in the government, it can in the popular media. The news programs -- TV and newspaper -- give us more circus than soleil: just a bunch of vivid images, icons and postures being used to forward vague agendas.

For example, from today’s Boston Globe, here's a story involving media, government, and the trendy collusion of the two:

State employs a Herald columnist
By Raphael Lewis, Globe Staff April 8, 2005

Governor Mitt Romney's administration has awarded a $10,000 contract to a Boston Herald op-ed columnist to promote the governor's environmental policies.

The columnist, Charles D. Chieppo, started working yesterday with the Executive Office of Environmental Affairs.

His job calls for writing op-ed pieces and internal documents ''to support the efforts of senior management to promote education, awareness, and acceptance of major policy initiatives" on the environment.

Chieppo will work two days a week until at least June 30. He also plans to continue writing op-ed columns for the Herald, where he is paid for each article.

Chieppo, who signed his pact on April 2, declined to comment yesterday. In January, he left a six-figure job in the Executive Office of Administration and Finance to start a private consulting business and to write the weekly Herald column.

Joe O'Keefe, Romney's assistant environmental secretary for public affairs, said in an interview yesterday that Chieppo has ''fully vetted" the consultancy with the state Ethics Commission and that ''he can't have any contact with Herald reporters or columnists or write anything that would be published in the Herald on our behalf."

Chieppo was awarded the contract over another bidder when his Herald columns were highly supportive of Romney's policies. His March 21 column, which appeared three days after Chieppo submitted his bid for the state contract, praised the Romney mass-transit plan that was largely authored by Douglas Foy, the secretary of Commonwealth development and the person who oversees the Environmental Affairs office that now employs Chieppo.

Bob Zelnick, who chairs Boston University's journalism department, said in an interview yesterday that the Chieppo contract raised ethical questions.

''I think it is inappropriate, bordering on improper, for a person to be writing a column one day and consulting actively in a paid position for the administration the same day or even the next day," Zelnick said. ''I think that blurs the lines between legitimate journalism and politics [in a way] that serves neither the administration nor the public and certainly not the newspaper."

The White House has recently been under fire for paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to columnists and journalists to tout Bush administration policies across a wide array of topics. The most prominent example was nationally syndicated columnist Armstrong Williams, whom the administration paid $240,000. He touted the No Child Left Behind law.

Late last month, The Sarasota Herald-Tribune wrote that Governor Jeb Bush of Florida and several of his subordinate offices have paid more than $100,000 to a Tallahassee production company owned by a veteran television reporter who regularly reports on the administration.

Bob Steele -- a senior faculty member in ethics at The Poynter Institute in Florida, a think tank and journalism school -- said the Chieppo contract is a cousin of those other controversial examples.

''Are his observations and is his writing on the issues and events in any way influenced in reality or perception by those government contract connections?" Steele asked. ''It is a matter of credibility that could be reasonably challenged. And he could argue from sunset to sunrise and back that he is uninfluenced by the contract, but you can't prove that. This intersection [where] he's driven his journalistic vehicle is dangerous at best."

The Boston Globe has four regular contributors who are paid by the piece, said Renee Loth, editor of the Globe's editorial page. Loth said the Globe would not have a regular contributor who was under contract to promote a point of view. ''We want our regular contributors to be offering their own independent opinions," she said.

Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney's communications director, said yesterday that neither he nor the governor was aware that Chieppo was brought on by the Environmental Affairs Office. He referred questions to the Environmental Affairs Office.

Gwen Gage, a spokeswoman for the Boston Herald, said that Chieppo has disclosed his new state contract to the paper's editorial page editor, Rachelle Cohen, who decided to allow him to continue writing his weekly column as long as he refrains from writing about ''those topics he's consulting on."

''We have an agreement that he'll stay clear of that stuff," Gage said.

It's not unusual for reporters to move to government jobs and sometimes back into journalism. In the past month, Herald political reporter David Guarino left the paper to become communications director for Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly.

But Zelnick said that situation is different from being paid by the government while remaining a paid op-ed writer.

''I think we've become accepting of the existence of a revolving door between the political and journalistic communities, so when an individual goes from a position in the administration to writing a column of opinion, most people take it for what it's worth," Zelnick said. ''They can discount the opinion if they wish. There's a difference between a revolving door and a newsman who wears two hats simultaneously."

Chieppo's contract calls on him to work with staff of the Environmental Affairs Office ''to develop and coordinate strategy and messaging," as well as ''engage external stakeholders" and ''provide writing and editing support" to staff members writing op-ed pieces on pending legislation and other policy areas.

O'Keefe said that op-ed pieces will not take up the majority of Chieppo's commitment to the administration, two days per week.

''We have a significant amount of technical writing that needs to get done internally, so we expect most of his work to be focused on internal reports and documentation," O'Keefe said. ''There will be a component that will be op-ed pieces on behalf of certain pieces of legislation of interest to us, but it would not be allowed to be run in the Herald. He would assist in the writing."

It's just remarkable to me how cozy together media, government and business are. Is this not the relativism and nihilism that the so-called pundits lament?

More on this in Part 2.