Tag Archives: News

Daily Prompt: Ripped Into the Headline — I have misplaced my outrage …

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Not everyone gets my sense of humor. Despite that, I persist in being myself. I realize irony is wasted on a lot of folks and allusions to movies, books, and history merely annoy them. I just can’t help it. I gotta be me, even if it confuses and aggravates a big slice of the population. I’m just not everybody’s cuppa tea.

Right now, I’m walking around laughing, sometimes hysterically, at the gigantic fuss, furor, and scandal over NSA listening to our phone calls.

So last night, when we were nicely tucked into the most comfortable bed in the world, I said to Garry:

“Can you think of any government anywhere, or any time in the history of humankind, during which governments have not spied on their citizens or subjects?”

He honored me with a thoughtful few seconds before answering … or maybe he was just twiddling with the remote control.

“Nope.”

“I think the way it works is this. First, we invent heads of state. Kings, presidents, emperors, whatever. Next, they invent a secret police so they can keep on being the head of state. The only thing that seems to change is the technology. And the quality of the dungeons.”

“Yup.”

“I think it’s a mistake to try and monitor all those telephone calls. I mean, they are just going to be buried under more data than they handle, so instead of getting more information about real problems, they are just going to get lots of jabbering kids yakking with their friends, people arguing with customer support, and boring conversations by people like us. We never say anything interesting on the phone. We hardly talk on the phone at all.

“Yup.”

Our conversation has continued into today as Garry has pointed out that he is positively shocked to hear that the NSA is listening to our phone calls. SHOCKED!

I said I would have to compose a strongly worded letter and send it to someone, although I’m not sure who.

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Americans seem to have a national need to be outraged about something or other. We apparently require a level of constant civic hysteria, maybe to keep the news from being boring. Scandal keeps ratings up and gives talk show hosts something to rant about. It gives both liberals and conservatives something to accuse each other of doing, even though every administration has done pretty much the same stuff and always will. They did it in ancient Rome and Greece. Egypt, too. Governments spy on their citizens. The more prominent you are, the more dangerous you are perceived to be, so the more attention is likely to be paid to you.

I’m wondering how long this is going to stay on top of the news. Because nothing is going to change. Ever. Governments will spy on their citizens. Citizens will be outraged. The outrage will be ignored. Eventually, everyone will move on to the next big thing.

I actually think our security moguls are shooting themselves in the foot trying to monitor so many people. At a certain point, everything and nothing are identical. If you try to collect every conversation, you wind up knowing less than you did when you targeted actual likely evil-doers. But hey, what do I know, right?

I’m having trouble getting myself worked up over this.

You see, I remember Richard Nixon. I even remember the end of the J. Edgar Hoover era. I’ve read history. Unlike some people, who apparently actually believe that all those traffic cameras have been installed to monitor traffic, I know they are there to keep track of us. You. Me. All of us. Is someone monitoring them all the time? Hardly likely. But if anyone is looking for me — or you — well, I’m sure they will have no trouble finding us.

Did I know the NSA was monitoring phone conversations? Not specifically, but it’s hardly a revelation. Do I believe that if we form protest groups, write letters to congress, they will stop watching and listening? Are you kidding? They aren’t going to stop and making a fuss about it is likely to make them take a long hard look at me. I would prefer to skip that.

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My government spies on me. And you. And everyone else. They were spying on us during the 1960s. They were spying on my parents and their friends in the 1950s and 1940s. What’s your point? Obama didn’t start this. Bush didn’t start it. FDR didn’t start it. Abraham Lincoln didn’t start it. It’s been going on as long as there have been governments and it will never end. Nobody asked my permission and my objections will accomplish nothing. Privacy is an illusion and if we ever had any, we lost it a long time ago.

I know I should be appalled, angry, enraged at the intrusion into my private space, but instead I keep laughing. I am incapable of being appalled. I have completely run out of outrage. Our dogs remain undisturbed and my husband amused. This particular crisis will have to go on without us.

Someone else will have to be outraged on our behalf. Please, whoever you are, don’t forget to send that strongly worded letter. Send me a copy. For my records.

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They got one alive!

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News !!

Watching the manhunt for the last couple of hours. Surreal. How often do you get a message like this from your electric company?

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And finally, it’s over.

The second of the two alleged Boston Marathon bombers has been captured. Alive. How alive? I don’t know but he left by ambulance. Maybe we’ll find out what on God’s green earth motivated these two young men.

What happened to Boston?

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Our president was in Boston today, giving a pep talk. He was here for the remembering. Something happened here and it wasn’t a small thing.

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“Massachusetts invented America,” Governor Deval Patrick said at Thursday morning’s interfaith service honoring the victims of the Marathon bombing. President Obama in the speech that followed, noted that all Americans were thinking about the city. “Every one of us has been touched by this attack on your beloved city,” he said. “Every one of us stands with you.” The marathon attacks were personal, he said.

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There are voices to which we should listen. We need to pay attention to positive voices so the psychopaths and sociopaths, terrorists and bad guys with guns, bombs and a determination to reduce us to shivering in our locked houses don’t get to do a victory lap.

We really must not allow that.

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From Stephen Colbert watch, smile and ponder (video).

What happened to Boston could (and has) happened in other places here and overseas. Open societies are inherently vulnerable. To terror, to deluded groups and individuals who murder people to make a point. No matter how news-weary we are, pep talks are important.

They remind us to not let the bad guys win. We all need to remember bad stuff can happen anywhere and sometimes it happens to us or those we love. There’s nowhere far enough off the grid that those people can’t find us.

Read “To Boston With Love,” a particularly apt and touching op-ed piece from the Washington Post by former local writer E.J. Dionne. It’s especially meaningful if you’ve ever lived in or near Boston.

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A couple of hours ago, it was all over the news. The FBI has pictures of two out of who-knows-how-many people involved in the bombings at the Marathon on Patriot’s Day. I’m waiting to hear what the point of the bombing was supposed to be. Did the voices in someone’s head tell them to do it? Or what? Why?

What if there was no reason at all? What if this horror was perpetrated by a bunch of local sociopaths having their version of a good time? That would be the weirdest, creepiest answer of all.

One way or the other, I would like to know what happened, if there is a semblance of a reason. I hope answers are coming.

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Sensible Violence

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We were up in Worcester, the capital of our middle-of-nowhere part of the world. Taking pictures, happily unaware that something awful was happening 60 miles away in Boston. When we got home and the phone and email lit up, we knew something was up,

Garry and I lived in Boston for a long time. Garry was a reporter. If he were still working, as many of his friends are, he would have been exactly where the bombs went off. I would have been one of the terrified wives waiting to hear if my husband was alive and/or in multiple pieces. Maybe I would have been one of the unlucky ones. I’m glad to have missed the experience.

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A lot of people needed reassurance, wanted to be sure Garry wasn’t working (retired since 2001, but not everyone believes it) and we hadn’t gone to see the Marathon. We had merely taken a drive up to Worcester, looping back via the grocery store and the pond where the swans live. A normal pleasant spring day. For us, anyhow.

I had been laughing earlier in the day about how seriously New Englanders take their holidays. I had tried to get in touch with my doctor only to discover the office was closed for Patriot’s Day. If you live in Boston, there’s also Evacuation Day, another Revolutionary War remembrance, but affecting only the city. I can’t imagine New York closing down to celebrate a battle that took place more than 200 years ago. New York’s all about getting on with business, but Boston is into remembering and celebrating traditions.

Boston State House - Night

Boston State House – Night

Patriot’s Day and the Boston Marathon are part of what makes the Commonwealth and the city special. Unique. Boston is a big city, but it’s accessible. Even with awful parking, potholes and traffic, you can drive in Boston. You may not enjoy the experience but the city is not in constant gridlock. It’s a great walking city too. There are lots of street festivals, free concerts, and events that are open to everyone and their families. Is that going to change?

Are people going to be too afraid to enjoy the city? Lock themselves up behind steel doors? If terrorists can’t kill us all, they sure can take the joy out of life … if we let them.

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I can’t in good conscience tell anyone not to be afraid. But I lived in Jerusalem. I did lose friends to terrorists. It was black humor indeed to call Thursday at the marketplace “Bomb day.” Yet we went on living because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate and because if you close down your world, the bastards have won.

Yesterday, as we watched and listened to the news, we worried about people we knew until we finally heard they were safe.

I don’t “get” the terrorist gestalt, murdering civilians to make a political statement. What statement can you make based on murder? That you are willing to slaughter people because your cause is more important than life itself? Nothing is more important than life.

I have a feeling we aren’t dealing with an international conspiracy. No one has claimed responsibility for this atrocity. The bombs were built to inflict maximum harm, ugly bombs intended to tear flesh, rip and rend. Any bomb can kill you, but these were explicitly created to maim as well as murder.

If it’s discovered this is the work of a homegrown psychopath, will this make us feel better? I don’t find the idea comforting. Quite the opposite. The perpetrator could be a neighbor … or anyone. That’s creepy, not comforting.

Old South Church from Boston Commons

Garry always laughs at the expression “senseless violence.” As if there’s some other kind. The sensible kind.

There may be times when killing is unavoidable to prevent a greater evil but it’s never a good thing, only sometimes justifiable to protect yourself or others. Killing is never good. Sane people know this. Civilian, military and law enforcement personnel don’t casually take lives. That so many people seem comfortable with murder is deeply disturbing. What is wrong with them … and with us that we glorify killers and turn them into heroes?

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Yesterday in Boston, someone showed his/her/their inhumanity and cowardice. Religious fanatics? Non-denominational crazies? Foreign sociopaths? Homegrown psychopaths? Some other previously unknown lunatic fringe group … or a deranged individual?

Does it matter?

Whoever or whatever … I hope we catch them and make sure they never do it again to anyone anywhere.

From Garry:

I covered the Boston Marathon and other Patriot’s Day events for 31 years until my retirement. They are some of the most wonderful memories in my entire TV/radio news career covering more than 40 years. Patriot’s Day is special in New England, in Massachusetts, in greater Boston. The Revolutionary War re-enactments at dawn in Lexington and Concord were among my favorite assignments.

You could see children getting their first real look at history. Normally stoic or cynical adults looked on with pride and awe. I still see their faces in my sense memory. The Marathon weekend was always a period when the bad things going on in the world were put on hold for a brief time.

You met people from all around the world. Instant friendships were formed. Politics were set aside. Laughter and smiles were the common language. It is hard not to see this attack — even in this post 9/11 world — as anything but a horrible loss of innocence. It is so very sad.

Passover, On the News Now!

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If the media were covering the Exodus today, this is what we might expect to see:

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Where’s the story? Why some things are news but other stuff isn’t

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In case you’ve failed to notice, the importance of something going on in the world has an inverse relationship to the amount of attention it gets in the press. By “press,” I’m not referring only to newspapers, radio, television, or newer sources like social networks, websites and blogs. I mean all of it plus the other stuff — newsletters, email — the collective dissemination of information from a wide variety of perspectives. If you care about truth and facts, you have a lot of ways to find it.

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The current definition of “news” is what news organization say it is. Whether or not this actually is the news is an entirely different subject. The control of news content is not, as many people seem to think, in the hands of reporters or even editors and publishers. Control lives in corporate boardrooms run by the likes of Rupert Murdoch, people who have no interest in keeping us informed. It’s all about power, politics and money. Mostly money. It’s business, not public service.

I’m not sure when the news stopped having to do with “what’s new (subtext: important)” and became “what corporate suits think people will watch and make them buy our sponsors’ products.” To a degree, that has always been a part of the news business. For a brief shining period from the mid 1940s through the early 196os and perhaps a bit beyond, the “Ed Murrow” effect was a powerful influence in American news. Reporters were invigorated by getting some respect for their work and tried to be “journalists” rather than muckrakers.

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People my age grew up at the end of that era. Walter Cronkite was The Man. He carried such an aura of honesty and authority, I thought he should be president not merely of the U.S., but of the world. Who would have the temerity to argue with Walter Cronkite? He sat next to God in the newsroom and some of us had a sneaking suspicion God personally told him what was important. If Walter said it was True, we believed. Thus when Walter Cronkite became the person to get Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat to sit down and talk … the beginning of the Camp David Accords … it seemed natural and right. Highly appropriate. Who was more trustworthy than Uncle Walter? Who carried more authority? He walked in the glow of righteousness.

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He always made my mother giggle. It was not Walter, the reporter or man who made her laugh. It was his name. “Cronkite” in Yiddish means ailment, so every time his name was announced, my mother who had a wild and zany sense of humor, was reduced to incoherent choking laughter. It was a nightly event. Eventually she got herself under control sufficiently to watch the news, but the sound of her barely contained merriment did nothing to improve the gravity I felt should surround the news. To this day, the first thing I think of when I hear Walter Cronkite’s name — something that happens with less and less frequency as the younger generations forget everything that happened before Facebook — is the sound of my mother’s laughter. That’s not entirely bad, come to think of it.

What brings this to mind while awaiting what, according to Harvey Leonard, will be the biggest snow storm in 30 or more years, is that Google is stealing our freedom, or at least a good chunk of it, and it’s not on the news at all. No one is  interested.1978

The silence from the press is deafening. Yet this is important and it will affect a lot of people, almost everyone eventually. It’s not another celebrity divorce or trip to rehab. If left unchecked, this is the beginning of the end of the free Internet.

Virtual space is the last truly free thing we have. Everything else is regulated and costs money. Once upon a time, television was free. It wasn’t very good and our TV reception looked like a snowstorm, but the TV was all we needed to access anything on the air. After we bought the television, we had no more TV-related expenses.

Cable brought us nice clear pictures, giant monopolies, and ever-increasing monthly bills to watch television. Cable companies already charge us a hefty monthly fee to hook up to the Internet, so it isn’t really free any more than television is, but it is about to get much worse.

For the past 20 years, communications conglomerates have been looking for a way to capture the Internet and make it pay. More precisely, to make you and me pay for it. It’s the communications mother lode, the last un-mined nature resource for communications moguls. The amount of money to be made by whomever is able to get a lock on the Internet, to charge us for what we currently get free, will make some corporations so rich it makes my head spin thinking about it. All those zeroes!

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There’s a gigantic amount at stake here. Not just money, but civil rights, personal freedom, constitutional issues, broad social implications. You name it, this story touches on it. Moreover, a lot of people’s livelihoods are on the line. Many of us make earn our living via the Internet, directly or indirectly. We’ve become so accustomed to shopping online, having friends online, communicating online — living online — we think nothing of it.

What will you do if they take it away? Suddenly you will have to pay your “internet bill” above and beyond whatever you already pay for high-speed connectivity.

Once they get their hooks into you, it’s going to be your cable company all over again. How much do you love your cable company? That much? Hmm. Well, you’re going to love your Internet gatekeepers even more.

Who is involved? Not just Google!

It’s not just Google, though they are the ones currently in play. AT&T and Verizon, Amazon, Microsoft and others are all eyeing the Internet as the next place to make some really big bucks now that the sale of computers is slowing. Hardware is not delivering the kind of profits it once did … time to find a new source. The Internet — cyberspace — could be the mother lode, the biggest financial jackpot in a century. Think of this as Clash of the Titans. The prize is the Internet … and we are in the way. Ouch.

Back to why no one is covering the story

This is a complicated issue. For it to make sense, you need to be familiar with the technology of the Internet, with search engines and their ever-increasing role in information dissemination. There’s a big segment of the population who won’t get it anyhow, no matter how well you explain it because they can’t understand it or don’t want to. Another bunch of people don’t care about anything that isn’t about guns, sports, or in some way related to beer.These folks will be affected, even though they don’t know it, but they don’t want to hear about it. They want to hear about the latest sports or Hollywood scandals and of course, the weather.

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A story likes this requires time, research and patience. Patience to collect information, make it coherent and comprehensible, time to explain it. A newspaper would need to give it considerable space and have someone actually put more than a few seconds into writing it. Add it all together and it spells “just ignore it and maybe it will go away.”

That so much of what we value will probably go with it? Oh well.

People are lazy. I look around and see a lot of lazy, stupid people who have turned themselves to the “off” position. Folks who were once thinking entities have slid into “duh.” Maybe it’s sensory overload, too much stress and non-stop bombardment by crises so when something really important is happening, everyone is tapped out. Too pooped to pop.

Anyway, the story isn’t sexy. It isn’t going to sell beer in the coveted 18 to 45 demographic, so why bother?

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Radio Days – When We Were Young

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Memories, always worth another look.

Garry Armstrong, my charming husband, wanted to be in the movies. His original aim was stardom on the silver screen. Somewhere along the line, he and I and a whole bunch of people we all knew, found our way to the studios of WVHC, the radio station of Hofstra College, now Hofstra University. It was just 10 watts when Garry and I met in the studios. I was 17, Garry was 22. He was a little older than most of the undergrads because at 17, he’d enlisted in the Marines and by the time he got out, a few years had passed.

Gary, me, and President Clinton on Martha’s Vineyard.

He was the Program Director. I was dating the Station Manager, who was, coincidentally, Garry’s best friend, which is where our personal history gets pretty complicated. I was also the Chief Announcer.  I knew that I wanted print, not electronic media, but the radio station was a great place for those of us who had never found a place where we fit in.

Hofstra University logo flag, used in Hofstra ...

Hofstra University logo flag,

We were all oddballs, variously talented, and pretty much all of us went on to have careers in media and the arts. We turned out a couple of authors, quite a few audio engineers, a variety of talk show hosts, DJs, TV and radio producers, several news directors, a bunch of commercial writers (in which group I fall), a  college professor (maybe two, I’m not sure) … and Garry, the only one of us who became a successful TV reporter. Garry’s career spanned 45 years, 31 of them at Channel 7 in Boston.

Surprisingly little footage of Garry’s on the air career has survived and until today, we had nothing at all from his years at ABC Network. Today, a friend of Garry’s found this footage from 1969, the last year Garry was at ABC before he made the jump to television and working in front of the camera. It’s a promotional piece for ABC News and it features a lot of faces and voices from the past … and one young up and coming fellow, Garry Armstrong.

Let us return to those days of yesteryear, when television cameras used film and there was a war in Vietnam. It was 1969, the year my son was born, the year of Woodstock, the end of an era, the beginning of everything else.

This is how it was, back then. Tape recorders that used tape. I used to know how to edit tape. I bet if you gave me an editing block, tape and a razor blade,  I could still do it.

Look at the state-of-the-art equipment circa 1969. The equipment may be antiquated by today’s standards, but the standards by which the news was gathered and reported were incomparably superior to what passes for news reportage today.