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GP21May03: Good News for a Change
Dire Straits. Dire Straits has long been one of our
favorite pop musical groups. Its name captures perfectly the present mood in
our land. Bad news about war, pestilence, floods, and economic hardship have
shell-shocked Americans and brought insecurity into every home. The New York
Times Book Review of May 18 flags for us
Our Final Hour, a book by British scientist Martin Rees that says,
according to the Times, that “the world has a 50-50 chance of surviving
the 21st century.” Denise Rich, who had an inglorious moment in the
sun during the Clinton administration, reportedly feels compelled these days to
take her yoga guru along on vacation in order to ward off the ills of the
world. And Andrew Weill, the healing doctor, prescribes newsless days to help
you screen out negative thoughts. During a vacation at one of the old
Adirondack camps of yesteryear, we ourselves noticed that everyone in our party
put aside TV and newspapers to shut out the pain of the world.
But this is only to say that good news has been elbowed aside by media that
tends to thrive on negatives. There are plenty of changes afoot that are quite
promising.
Let The Good Times Roll. The New York Times has been taking a lot
of hits lately. First off, a troubled junior reporter has proven to be
excessively creative, dreaming up bits and pieces for his national news stories
that were purely figments of his imagination or were purloined from other
newspapers. Second, the Times appears to have tilted its front page
coverage of the Iraq war to jibe with the prejudices of some of its editors
against our intervention. When U.S. troops were bogged down in a short battle,
the stories hinted we might be losing the war. And finally, circulation has
been eroding lately, a hint that not all was well on the business side.
This and other problems have led, according to the rumor mill, to an
across-the-board pay cut plus a freeze on bonuses.
The irony here is that under Howell Raines, passionate fisherman and the current
executive editor, the paper has perked up considerably. The old gray Times
had become dull and listless. He has been forcibly reworking it, and it is now
less of a newspaper of record and more of a daily news magazine, often filled
with features you will find nowhere else. Probably it is getting better,
even though it has always been an uneven operation, both editorially and
particularly business-wise, where it needs both strategic and operational help.
Raines is much under attack inside and outside the paper, but we suspect he
should be congratulated with a caveat or two. His top-down style has been much
criticized; yet the paper would have just plodded along in the same old way
without a strong hand at the wheel.
The best day of the week for this wordy paper is Saturday, when the writing can
be accused of being almost succinct. (For more on this, see our Global Province
newsletter for
16 October 2002). All the good things slip into the paper Friday night,
when nobody is looking. One feature that has become a regular, The Saturday
Profile, is a smashing success. It recently featured a Russian intellectual who
has taken to writing interesting crime novels. The column dwells on truly
multifaceted people in several societies around the world, people creating a lot
of buzz in their communities. We would never hear about them if the Times
weren't looking for them.
Wind at our Backs. Despite America’s passionate love affair with oil, we
are beginning to do something about our national energy situation. To wit, we
are starting to breed hybrid cars, such as Toyota’s Prius, that use both
rechargeable electricity cells and gas, resulting in much less oil consumption.
Iceland, of all places, is just beginning to put hydrogen pumps in place at
service stations, and fairly soon buses will give up gas guzzling and become
hydrogen-powered. This is just another wonder from a country that
generates so much geothermal power.
Even more dramatic is the great progress the world is making in using
other alternate sources of energy. We would particularly cite wind power. For
the longest while the equipment has been too expensive and too unreliable. But
the Europeans, as we have said in
Big Ideas 58, have built more durable and economic equipment. The Danes, in
particular, reap meaningful amounts of energy from their windpower farms. Now,
as we will report further on the Global Province, America is making progress in
wind generation and in the development of better equipment.
An Unlikely Education. Educational television is something that never
really quite happened, even with early experiments such as Omnibus and the
plethora of content generated by the Public Broadcasting Network. We
do acknowledge that there is a host of TV and videoconferencing instruction
around the nation, but this is not the kind of stuff that takes our citizenry to
a new level of enlightenment or that can reckon with the puzzles presented by
the 21st century. The need for new forms of education has never been
so great, as our formal educational institutions get more deeply mired in
bureaucracy, runaway costs, and political correctness. We need educational
alternatives that work. Surely it was the search for something different that
led scholar Harold Bloom to leave his 25,000-volume book collection to an
unknown college in Vermont, where classical teaching still is the ideal, rather
than to vaunted large institutions that seem to have lost their way. (See
Wit and Wisdom 249).
And education is springing up in unlikely places. C-Span, funded by the cable
industry, features
Booknotes on its C-Span 2 channel on weekends. In fact, this is by far the
most interesting thing that occurs on C-Span. Brian Lamb and his colleagues
interview significant authors in an objective manner and also go to literary
presentations at bookshops, book fairs, etc. In toto, a listener can learn all
sorts of things about this world by tuning in. The only flaw is that it handles
only non-fiction, somewhat limiting its scope. (See
Best of Class 21 for more on Booknotes.) Other kinds of book
programs are creeping onto the airwaves inside and outside the United States.
We hope Booknotes gets piped into more and more of our schools so that
students see what is revealed from a close reading of books that count.
Away from the Madding Crowd. If you can get away from the crowd, no
matter what you do, you may discover some nice things are happening that are
obscured by the calamities in the mainstream media: a new national energy mix
is on the way and real education is taking place in strange places.
Above the Fray. It's always been a truism that the best investors never
get too close to Wall Street, where their thinking would get polluted by the day
traders' fumes. They're out in Omaha or a thousand other places where the hot
news of the moment does not obscure longer term trends. Sir Isaac Newton did
all his best work before he ever came to London; there he became more of a fop
and less of a genius, contaminated by the luxuriant currents swirling in the
capital. It's no wonder that Andrew Weill would have us get away from the
newscasters to guard our health: that also may be good medicine for our
pocketbooks. It may be hard to be a practical streetfighter if you are not
caught up in the thick of things. But it's just as hard to get to the essence
and fathom the important when you are too close to the bright lights or too
hemmed in by the Beltway. To be on top of the world, you simply have to get
above it.
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