After I posted a a link to a  photography feature from The New York Times Tuesday, five other South Dakota blogs picked up the feature and linked it from their sites.   Some acknowledged our original posting; some did not.  That is a matter of who knows and understands the procedures for properly establishing attributions and the provenance of information in journalism and writing in general, and it is connected to what "use" blogs make of a powerful and significant piece of journalistic work. 



The photo-essay covers the conditions of poverty on the Pine Ridge Reservation.  The responses to it reveal a deeper source of the poverty that holds South Dakota in its grip.    The differences in the quality of comments posted on the feature at The New York Times site and on the South Dakota citations is indicative of the difference between people who try to grapple with the moral and intellectual issues in our Indian reservation system and people who can only recite uninformed cant--and in the process reveal those less-than-admirable traits of human mind and character,  racism, mindless hatred, dishonesty. 



The New York Times blog entitled "Lens" was initiated in May to provide photographers and other graphic media specialists a venue for their work.  As a former photographer-editor for newspapers, I found one of the hardest parts of the job was to select one or two photographs from  50 to 75 shots to illusrate a story.  The better the photography, the harder the job.  The photographers and editors often complained about how much good photography went to waste because we did not have the space to display some vital pictures that came from assignments.  The huge advantage of the  Internet is that galleries and extended photography sequences can be published and create presentations based upon what can be included, not what must be excluded.  Still photography has resumed its important place in graphic communication.

The New York Times feature, "Behind the Scenes:  Still Wounded," is  exceptionally  powerful, as attested to by it being referenced by six South Dakota bloggers.  But photographer  Aaron Huey is steadfastly careful to use his skills and art to portray what he finds and sees, and is as steadfastly careful in the interview portion of his photo-feature not to make any glib, superficial explanations of what causes the scenes that he captures.  That his photographs are chosen to move people is without question.  That they move many people to displays of cultural dementia is probably inevitable.  And they provide tacit evidence of what is the essential cause of the degradation in which some people live at Pine Ridge, Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, all of South Dakota's reservations.  


In looking at some of the comments,  one is confronted with the systemic malice and stupidity that is the foundation of the reservation system:

• A good lesson as to why the federal government expanding it’s role in anything should scare the pants off of most Americans.

• This is what happens when the Federal Government provides everything for a society. Free health care, subsidized housing, free food, energy assistance for winter heating, etc. Law enforcement is a whole other chapter and the mess that has been created, along with the tribal court system that is in shambles.

• If this situation is to be improved, it needs to be changed. Do away with reservations and the gov't dependency it fosters. Bring the Native Americans into complete citizenship with the rest of the US; no more separate laws that hamper business growth, no more handouts that destroy self-esteem. They should be able to keep their culture, but that doesn't mean a sovereign nation within the US with Uncle Sam providing everything free. That never works, and is proven here.

The comments in The New York Times blog are, admittedly, moderated to be commensurate with the level of presentation established by the feature.  And the South Dakota comments probably represent fewer people than seems apparent.  Some bloggers who permit anonymous comments  (and ban certain IP addresses) write such anonymous comments to reinforce their own posts.  They are unaware that their thoughts and writing styles are as distinguishable as fingerprints, and readers of any literary sensibility at all can identify them.  

Cory Heidelberger of Madville Times moderates the comments on his blog and requires commenters to identify themselves. Comments on his blog often reflect some informed intelligence:
  

• South Dakota needs a vibrant and strong Sioux Nation. We can achieve that by returning land to the Sioux that is held by the federal government.

• After decimating their culture we are frustrated they haven't assimilated. Who would?

• Even now the conversation tends to be how can we get them to change, be like us and have our values.

In addition to being heavily populated with reservations,  South Dakota has produced a prodigious amount of literature by and about American Indians.  When The New York TImes feature is viewed in that literate context, it projects a vision of hope by positing the cause of hopelessness.  An encouraging aspect of the comment about a "vibrant and strong Sioux Nation" is that it is made by a Republican candidate for the U.S. Congress,  Thad Wassom.  One commenter tells Thad that his comment eliminates him from any serious consideration as a candidate, but Thad has done something that has become rare in South Dakota politics.  He raises an idea that send candidates of both parties into fearful sweats.  He suggests that the treaties under which the Sioux were given reservations be carried out.  {He sounds like the Republican Party I once belonged to.)



If the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, the violation of which is the basis for the award of millions of dollars held by courts in compensation, were to be fully observed,   all of West River would be returned to the Sioux.  It is not merely a matter of territorial occupation; it is a matter of a profound cultural and spiritual identity with the land, an identity that is deeply rooted in the nature of the land.  This identity is taken up in this year's Book One, selected for study by the South Dakota Humanities Council:  Buffalo for the Broken Heart by Dan O'Brien.  The book chronicles the reasons and actions of O'Brien to convert from cattle ranching to bison ranching as an enterprise more consistent with the resources and natural features of the West River land.  


While blog commenters may rail about reservation subsidy and dependency on the government, they do not acknowledge that all of West River exists on that dependency because  agriculture and ranching is largely a failure.  It is a false myth, not an operative reality.  O'Brien summarizes the reality:

The mythic American character is made up of the virtues of fairness, self-reliance, toughness, and honesty....It's [the West River land of independence and self-reliance] also a place that does not exist and never has...

The truth is there has  never been much fairness out here.  The homestead acts were mostly ways to get serfs onto the fees of eastern and European industrialists.    When the land, the economy, and the climate revolted,  these people had to suffer or be supported by the government.  Self-reliance went out the window.  As for toughness,  the vast majority of homesteaders failed and either gave their land back to the government or sold out to a neighbor at pennies on the dollar.  There wasn't all that much honesty out here, either.  From  cheating the Indians out of their birthright and culture to pervasive homestead fraud in the form of filing for people who did not exist, pioneers proved to be just as human as the next man, maybe more so. 

   

As Thad Wassom suggests,  a first step in dealing with the reservation problems is to restore as much of the Sioux birthright as possible.  The reservations are part of the Great American Holocaust of slavery and genocide against the Indians.  They are concentration camps onto which the Indians were confined.  They were supposed to subsist on a kind of agriculture for which the land is totally unsuited.  (One of the reasons that Sitting Bull was considered dangerous is because he tried farming and found it an ecological absurdity and said so.)  The religion, the language, and culture of the Sioux was suppressed and banned.  They were lied to, betrayed, degraded, and killed at every opportunity.  And the stupid and illiterate wonder why they choose alcoholic destruction over the culture we  offer them.


The worst thing that could happen to the Sioux would be for them to accept the money awarded by the courts for the swindling and armed violation of their treaty rights.  The elders prefer that the federally-held portions of the Black Hills be returned to them.  Few politicians in South Dakota dare propose such a measure.  


The proposal first raised by the Bradley Bill would turn national forest and grazing lands held by the U.S. government back to Sioux control.  That could mean that some people occupying and using reservation lands might have to leave.  Heaven forbid that any honkeys experience the dislocations and deprivations forced on the Sioux.  Well, politics forbids it, any way.  


It is more politically expedient to let the genocide rage on.  And we can look at Aaron Huey's pictures, and cluck our tongues, and post stupid comments.


The land of the free and home of the brave, you know. 

The New York Times features a stunning series of photographs from the Pine Ridge Reservation.  

Here is the account by NY Times blogger James Estrin.

Aaron Huey arrived on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota at the start of a self-assigned photographic road trip to document poverty in America.

The poverty he found on the reservation stopped him cold.

“Pine Ridge is the scariest place I’ve ever been — more so than in a Taliban ambush,” Mr. Huey said. “It was emotionally devastating. I‘d call my wife late at night crying.”

 Overwhelmed by the poverty — and at the same time by scenes of people trying to maintain the Lakota way of life — Mr. Huey abandoned the rest of his nationwide project to focus on Pine Ridge. Five years later, he’s still photographing on the reservation, which includes the Wounded Knee battlefield.

This is something that most South Dakotans will not and don't want to see.  See the gallery of photographs here.

In thirty years of teaching writing and literature and 55 years of editing writing, I have been asked what I think are the most significant works I have encountered.    It is hard for me to list "favorite" authors because I appreciate the accomplishments of so many writers, including some whose works I don't particularly like but who have command of their art in ways that require that attention be paid to them.  But some of the most affecting and significant works that come to mind were written by non-professional writers and student writers.

One such example was in the take-home part of a final examination for the early American literature course, which covers little fiction and poetry and much in the way of letters exchanged between people like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and critical essays such as The Federalist Papers, speeches, and many personal journals and accounts.  In recent decades, "literature" has come to mean fiction, poetry, and drama. Those other genres are not considered literature.  But they are, and they are essential to any understanding of what comprises good literature and how it operates within a culture.  The question on the examination asked students to choose a work covered in the course and explain how it illuminated their understanding of the history and circumstances in which the work was produced. 

The essay that still has a hold on my mind came from a young woman from a South Dakota reservation.  She wrote about Mary Rowlandson's account of her captivity by American Indians during which her five-year-old daughter died in her arms from injuries the child received from the attack on the household.     The student noted the racial attitudes and bigotry expressed in the account but she also could feel the desolation and hopelessness that Rowlandson experienced, and she admired Rowlandson's strength in faith.  And she noted that readers tended to express great sympathy for Rowlandson but could muster little understanding of why the Indians attacked the settlement where Rowlandson lived and why they took her captive.  The part that the young woman found most moving and informing was the account of Rowlandson carrying the wounded child from place to place as the Indians moved  to avoid pursuers.  The Rowlandson child dies and is buried in the wilderness, and the student found a point of conciliation in the death of the child.  This young South Dakota woman recalled sitting in a desolate shack on the reservation holding her baby sister while the infant died from a severe respiratory infection.  She noted that what she and Rowlandson shared was a lack of sympathy or comfort in their great distress and grief.  The captivity narrative did not provide any consolation or comfort for the student, but it did demonstrate to her that she needed to look for such things in her own culture.  And to do so with greater appreciation and discernment was why she was attending college.

What the young woman did that she had in common with great writers was to take the reader on her quest for understanding and finding the resources of spirit that can sustain one.  She was drawn out of herself by Rowlandson's account and found that she could look at the situation surrounding the death of her infant sister as a hard reality to be confronted, not as an occasion for sympathy.  Her conclusion was that there are people who do not wish others well and one has to build life around those who do.

The image of that young woman in a reservation cabin holding a dying infant is one that is always present with me.  It was a literary gift.

When people write of great, anguishing human tragedies with honesty and perception and tell of their own quests to reach points of understanding,  we have the stuff of true literature, whether fiction, poetry, drama, or prose accounts.  The shootings at Columbine ten years have produced such attempts.  The most comprehensive and literarily rendered is Dave Cullen's Columbine which was published last spring.  Cullen blew away myths about the Columbine incident and the two shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.  Cullen covered the Columbine incident from the day it occurred and searched out and analyzed information relentlessly.  In checking and verifying the facts, he performed a great journalistic service for those who care about knowing the true facts and realities and think they are the basis for any progress humanity makes.

During the past week, another dimension was added to the literature about Columbine that complements Dave Cullen's.  Susan Klebold, the mother of one of the Columbine shooters, has written an essay providing a response to what it is to be the parent of a troubled child who is driven to such violence.  Her essay appears in the November issue of Oprah Winfrey's magazine. In a time, when a large part of the nation is consumed by carping against other  people and fabricating blame to place on them for the nation's ills, Susan Klebold has written an account of the Klebold family that offers a truthful and unsettling account of Klebold family life.  I am sure that it will be maligned by the malice-minded, but for those who earnestly want to solve problems, the essay provides a basis for new understanding.

What is unsettling about the account is that Susan Klebold had no inkling of Dylan's mental state.  It took her ten years, but she came to recognize the fact that when Dylan left the house that April morning, he did not intend to ever return.  He intended to take lives and commit suicide.

The conventional notion promoted by people singularly unqualified to offer advice is that when young people are troubled, they telegraph their troubled state.  Good parents, the notion contends, will spot the signals and intervene.

As a parent and professor,  I know that is not true.  Young people are very good at masking and hiding their troubled states from those they are close to.  They do not want to burden those they love and regard with problems.  A highly respected high school counselor told me some years ago that the most unpleasant part of his job was to inform parents of problems with their children that the parents did not know about.

While the media like to take up the issue of peer pressure,  it is banalized and reduced to simple-minded and absurd axioms.  The impulse in young people as they enter their high school years is to reject parental influence.  It has always been so.  But during the latter decades of the 20th century, adolescents became recognized as a market.  All-pervasive marketing messages are directed toward them.  This occurred simultaneously with the conferring of autonomy on adolescents that severely limited parental influence and discipline.  They were given the power and the means to reform society on their terms.  My high school counselor friend called it "The Lord of the Flies" syndrome.  The most pronounced symptom of this syndrome is juvenile gangs.

The counselor says that kids cannot think past lunch, but they are empowered to make and enforce value decisions.  Those decisions often evolve around cliques and factions, and kids see these cliques and factions as the controlling factors in their destiny, not their families.  In fact, families are rendered powerless to counteract the social predations in teenage society. 

All the high school and college shooters have a sense of alienation and oppression in common.  The psychic disturbances that most adolescents experience drive some into depressive trauma.   It is built into the culture and the time. 

Susan Klebold, like my student writer from the reservation, had to come to terms with something she had not suspected:

"From the writings Dylan left behind, criminal psychologists have concluded that he was depressed and suicidal. When I first saw copied pages of these writings, they broke my heart. I'd had no inkling of the battle Dylan was waging in his mind."

And:

"For the rest of my life, I will be haunted by the horror and anguish Dylan caused. I cannot look at a child in a grocery store or on the street without thinking about how my son's schoolmates spent the last moments of their lives. Dylan changed everything I believed about myself, about God, about family, and about love."

Progress is made only from the confrontation with harsh and unpleasant facts.  Thank you, Susan Klebold, for guiding us to such a confrontation.  You have given people of good will and good purpose and intelligence something to work with. It will be noted and not forgotten.  
It



Susan Klebold and Dylan on his fifth birthday. 

The Nobel Peace Prize committee obviously did not consider how awarding President Obama the prize would fan the sparks of political and racial hatred into flames in his own country.

People from both parties are puzzling over how and why he was nominated only two weeks into his administration.  The complaint is that he has not accomplished all that he has set out to do.  Preventing him from any accomplishments is the controlling goal of the GOP at this point,    The GOP and the Taliban condemn awarding the prize to him. 

The Nobel Committee made clear its reason for the prize.  What Obama accomplished was simply not to get drawn down by the undertow of malice. character assassination, and oppression that is the mission of the American right wing.  Instead, his very candidacy brought a new expression of good will and constructive approaches to a world that was under a blanket of belligerence, ethnic and religious hatred, and an obsession with violence as the dominant form of self-expression.  His accomplishment was to shine a benevolent light in the dark age of malevolence.

Some have said that the Nobel award was a direct slap in the face of President Bush.  Bush did not throw the world into the corrosive mire of hopelessness  and despair by himself.  He had the support of politicians and citizens who wanted only to match hatred, belligerence, and violence directed at America in kind.  Obama's election suggested to the world that Americans wanted to focus on reason, good will, and peace, and even while being embroiled in terrorist attacks and wars which were only exacerbating hatred and violence upon innocents, they wanted to try negotiation instead of arms.  Simply put,  the world was given a glimmer of hope.

The Nobel Peace Prize demonstrates the depth to which the world and America had sunk.  America is about evenly divided between those who want to try Obama's way and those who want to revert to oppression and violence as abiding values.


The prize is also an admission that American politics is no longer leading the world in establishing equality, justice, and peace.  The prize seems to express the vague hope that those values can be revived and made operative. 

Talk is going around again (actually it always is) about closing a South Dakota university.  In South Dakota, such talk will probably always go around.  A predominant part of the electorate values low taxes more than it does smart people.

In fact, in looking at the public comments in newspapers, discussion boards, and blogs,  one finds that smart people are considered the bane of existence on the plains.   During my first year of teaching at Northern State, I attended a conference of state humanities faculty and went to a  reception sponsored by the regents of the state higher education system.  A few of us faculty were chatting with a staff member who was indulging liberally in  the white wine  that was otherwise being politely dispensed and sipped,  At one point he said, "Just remember that the regents have one major objective to carry out:  to make sure no brain cells or good ideas get out of the state alive."  To those of us listening, we had no idea what inspired his warning, but just weeks later news came that he got out of the state alive.  He took a job working for the higher education system in another state.

Those words haunted me throughout the 20 years I was a professor at Northern, because so many of the policies and decisions seemed to be based upon the premise that brain cells are dangerous and smart people are a threat to the values and way of life.  Although higher education officials and politicians constantly whined and moaned about the brain drain from the state, that most bright kids went to college out-of-state and never returned and those that did attend South Dakota institutions tended to skedaddle as soon as they had a diploma in hand,  they enacted policies and practices that discouraged ambitious students and faculty from staying.   And, of course, there are few opportunities for the bright and talented. 

Northern State University has undergone one of its periodic frenzies of self-justification. It has had an economist assess how much money Northern students inject into the Aberdeen economy.  I don't know how many such studies I have witnessed.  And the local newspaper always runs a big editorial on how important NSU is to the local economy.  Of course, if NSU were closed,  Aberdeen would experience  a pronounced decline.   But the prospects raised by these periodic assessments of NSU's value to the community are always put in terms of the money the university brings to the community.
I have still to see an assessment that outlines the intellectual, cultural, and, yes, educational benefits it supplies.

When I came to Northern, I experienced genuine culture shock.  Having studied and taught on campuses in Illinois and Iowa,  I was not prepared  to encounter the anti-intellectual, anti-educational attitudes that were part of the academic environment at Northern.  Many on the faculty resented the Ph.D. and the teaching experience brought from a college that celebrated the humanities, the arts, and sciences, its faculty, and its students.  That is not to say that there were not people at Northern who  valued the academic disciplines and practiced and taught them, but they did so with constant reminders from administrators and politicians and regents that they were merely employees, and nothing more. 

Over time, as I traveled the state in various programs that are part of the faculty work,  I learned of the role that NSU--and the other institutions--play in South Dakota.  In an account of a woman who homesteaded near Pierre, became a country school teacher, and attended Northern to get her teaching credentials, she recalls how her experiences with professors and studies inspired and sustained her.  Her most thrilling memory and lasting inspiration was when she heard a nationally known opera singer perform at Northern.  ;She saw that event as transforming in that she experienced Northern as a place that sent forth beacons of possibilities and modes of life that raised people above drudgery and struggle for survival.

Northern opened pathways to knowledge and more satisfying lives to  many South Dakotans during its century-and-a decade history.  One college president, who was obsessed with image and slogans, recognized the intellectual and artistic aspects of Northern as important reasons students came there.  He saw that Northern had acted as a gateway to better lives and he made up a slogan that termed Northern "the gateway institution."  This slogan quickly drew the ire of the regents office because it suggested that Northern was a way to get the hell out of South Dakota, and many citizens took offense to the suggestion that anyone would obtain an education in order to leave the state.  The slogan was withdrawn and suppressed.

During my time at Northern, it underwent considerable retrenchment.  The curriculum experienced cutbacks.  Foreign language majors were eliminated, even though the college boasts a major in international business, for which one would assume that the study of languages and cultures is important.  Faculty and course offerings in English--my department--were cut and largely limited to the service courses in composition with a smattering of literature, the basic essentials for maintaining accreditation for the baccalaureate degree.  Throughout the 1980s, Northern supplied more teachers to South Dakota schools than any other state university, but retrenchment, faculty infighting, and some horrendous leadership diminished the education program.  My department supplied many fine and effective teachers of English.  They were heavily recruited by systems from other states, who paid considerably more than South Dakota.  Many academic programs at Northern lapsed into mediocrity and below.

The number of lectures, performing artists, conferences, and academic-related events also diminished over the years.   Northern was the headquarters for the Dakota Writing Project, a program that greatly improved the teaching and quality of writing from the grades through graduate schools.  We literally ran the project from the trunks of our cars, and we raised the funds for it through grants.  It left the campus when the college president appropriated its funds for other extension purposes.  During the time I was at Northern, we sponsored some conferences and institutes that gained national recognition, but they were conducted through the efforts of a few faculty with little administrative support or promotion, and many people on campus dismissed them because they involved the humanities and the arts and not the hard core issues of making money.

It is absurdly ironic that people in and around Northern get severe knicker knots when the possibility of closing a state campus is brought up and they have been preparing for years by reducing the curricular offerings and diminishing the programs in the humanities and arts to the point that high school counselors refer their bright and promising students to other institutions.


The outmigration of people with talent and ambition intensifies.  And organizations whose operations require people of talent and ambition take their businesses to communities that supply a vital and vibrant community for such people.

Closing a campus will save little money.  But it will satisfy the cultural need for many people who see much of academics as merely something to disparage.  It will accelerate a population shift that has been going on for a century, and parents will follow their children to more conducive places.

 Pres. Obama inherited two botched wars, an economic crisis with programs put in place by the Bush administration, and crises in North Korea and the Middle East that developed under the policies of the Bush administration.  As his administration attempts to work through the problems, he is accused of violating the Constitution and leading the nation into Marxism, even though none of the actions they cite began with his administration, and none of the things that are happening violate any express provisions of the Constitution or fit any of those policies that define Marxism.  


Like Jimmy Carter, we see the accusations against Obama as hate-accusations manufactured as expressions of what is essentially racial hatred.  There is no other explanation for the stupid pretenses of the lies.


The article below appeared on Newsmax, but was quickly taken down.  But not before a number of people noticed that it was an article of outright sedition. 

 


Obama Risks a Domestic Military Intervention
By: John L. Perry
There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America's military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the "Obama problem." Don't dismiss it as unrealistic.

America isn't the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn't mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it. So, view the following through military eyes:

# Officers swear to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Unlike enlisted personnel, they do not swear to "obey the orders of the president of the United States."

# Top military officers can see the Constitution they are sworn to defend being trampled as American institutions and enterprises are nationalized.

# They can see that Americans are increasingly alarmed that this nation, under President Barack Obama, may not even be recognizable as America by the 2012 election, in which he will surely seek continuation in office.

# They can see that the economy -- ravaged by deficits, taxes, unemployment, and impending inflation -- is financially reliant on foreign lender governments.

# They can see this president waging undeclared war on the intelligence community, without whose rigorous and independent functions the armed services are rendered blind in an ever-more hostile world overseas and at home.

# They can see the dismantling of defenses against missiles targeted at this nation by avowed enemies, even as America's troop strength is allowed to sag.

# They can see the horror of major warfare erupting simultaneously in two, and possibly three, far-flung theaters before America can react in time.

# They can see the nation's safety and their own military establishments and honor placed in jeopardy as never before.

So, if you are one of those observant military professionals, what do you do?
Wait until this president bungles into losing the war in Afghanistan, and Pakistan's arsenal of nuclear bombs falls into the hands of militant Islam?

Wait until Israel is forced to launch air strikes on Iran's nuclear-bomb plants, and the Middle East explodes, destabilizing or subjugating the Free World?

What happens if the generals Obama sent to win the Afghan war are told by this president (who now says, "I'm not interested in victory") that they will be denied troops they must have to win? Do they follow orders they cannot carry out, consistent with their oath of duty? Do they resign en masse?
Or do they soldier on, hoping the 2010 congressional elections will reverse the situation? Do they dare gamble the national survival on such political whims?

Anyone who imagines that those thoughts are not weighing heavily on the intellect and conscience of America's military leadership is lost in a fool's fog.

Will the day come when patriotic general and flag officers sit down with the president, or with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a "family intervention," with some form of limited, shared responsibility?

Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.

Military intervention is what Obama's exponentially accelerating agenda for "fundamental change" toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama's radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.

Unthinkable? Then think up an alternative, non-violent solution to the Obama problem. Just don't shrug and say, "We can always worry about that later."

In the 2008 election, that was the wistful, self-indulgent, indifferent reliance on abnegation of personal responsibility that has sunk the nation into this morass.

A new movie about global pollution is titled "The Age of Stupid," but climate change is not the only topic that seems to overstimulate those who regard stupidity as a virtue.  Journalism also provokes an outpouring of ignorance, illiteracy, and the fence-post brand of cognition.

The demise of journalism and its failings  are  favorite themes on blogs.  There is no doubt that the news media performs miserably at times. It deserves a constant stream of criticism.  That is why journalism reviews were instituted, and why many newspapers have daily editorial conferences to review performance and plan future coverage and assignments.  However, the criticism coming from blogs is mixed.  Many national blogs feature commentary by established, competent journalists.  A few South Dakota blogs also feature the perspectives of journalists.  But the most vociferous anti-journalists in the South Dakota blogosphere have never read a real book on journalism. negotiated the first chapter of a journalism text, or, apparently, been exposed to even a high school course in expository writing.  The anti-journalists know one thing for certain:  they don't like journalism, whatever it is.  They sure as hell don't practice it or any of the fundamentals of writing that make communication possible and even productive at times.

The fact is that politics has shifted from being a representative forum for identifying and resolving issues to a game of malignant character assassination.  There are people possessed of witless malevolence throughout the political spectrum, but those who call themselves conservatives have adopted the presence of malice as the essential definition of their political belief system.  As is demonstrated on the South Dakota political blogs, character assassination, gross misrepresentations, insult and abuse are the only kind of grammar that the conservative faction can command.

What is ridiculous is that bloggers, on the basis of publishing a few bits of gossip and hearsay that turn out to have some truth, claim they are making the mainstream press irrelevant.  They take up the case of young Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe who dressed up as ho and pimp, like middle-schoolers going out to trick-or-treat, and went into ACORN offices to set up a sting by saying they were asking advice on setting up a whorehouse staffed with juveniles.  They videotaped the proceedings.  The conservative movement thinks the young pair set a standard of journalism that the mainstream should either emulate or get out of the news business.  Legislators and government officials have ended any federal funding that ACORN gets.  A few of us old hands in the news business are puzzled and disturbed that the press has taken this story seriously at all.  The Columbia Journalism Review has two articles covering the matter.  (Number 1; Number 2.)

First of all, most credible news agencies have policies against investigative reporters misrepresenting themselves.  Investigative reporters do on occasion get positions at organizations to learn their inside operations.  An example is a series of stories about abuses in mental institutions  by a reporter who got a job as an orderly in one.  Editors questioned whether the reporter could use information obtained by deception, but the stories were not based upon setting up phony identities and deceiving people, but were based solely on careful gathering of documentary evidence.  The ACORN stings were based totally upon a deceptive scam and no documentary evidence was gathered.

The Better Government Association in Chicago often video-tapes reporters who confront government agencies about their finances and practices, but their videos deal with documents and the gathering of  evidence that can be brought into  court.  They do not record reporters misrepresenting themselves.

The New York Times public editor explains why that newspaper treated the story as one of political dirty tricks, not as one that qualifies as valid news in terms of what it claims to have revealed.

A new movie to be released in October, titled Yes Men, features the same kind of scam when two men represent themselves as business entrepreneurs and scam executives in major corporations with outlandish schemes.  In a Washington Post op-ed piece, its makers wonder when the government will take the same reponse to big business that it did with ACORN.


As I have suggested in a previous post, there are obvious aspects of the ACORN scam that raise questions  that have not been addressed.  The impersonations of pimp and ho are so childishly outlandish that it seems ridiculous that any hip community organizers would fall for it.  As was the case with at least one of the people interviewed, it seems more likely that the ACORN people were putting on a pair of presumptuous and foolish kids.   That some politicians, officials, and journalists did not examine the actual circumstances of the videos says  more about their fearful gullibility than it does about the activities of ACORN.  And if ACORN personnel were taken in by the pair of impostors and seriously gave the advice they did, then ACORN needs to be exposed as a refuge for the terminally stupid.  But these matters need thorough investigation and fact-checking,

The O'Keefe-Giles videos are part of the "new media"  hate-based campaigns that include blogs, talk radio, and openly propagandic cable news.  Michael Gerson in a Washington Post essay puts the real significance of the new media in the perspective of journalistic purpose.

...the challenge of this technology is not merely an isolated subculture of hatred. It is a disorienting atmosphere in which information is difficult to verify or critically evaluate, the rules of discourse are unclear, and emotion -- often expressed in CAPITAL LETTERS -- is primary. User-driven content on the Internet often consists of bullying, conspiracy theories and racial prejudice. The absolute freedom of the medium paradoxically encourages authoritarian impulses to intimidate and silence others. The least responsible contributors see their darkest tendencies legitimated and reinforced, while serious voices are driven away by the general ugliness.

Whatever the method, no reputable institution should allow its publishing capacity, in print or online, to be used as the equivalent of the wall of a public bathroom stall.

The exploitation of technology by hatred will never be eliminated. But hatred must be confined to the fringes of our culture -- as the hatred of other times should have been.

No doubt, the media, particularly print journalism, is undergoing some drastic changes. American democracy may well be changing in ways that its critics have warned about since its inception.  It may sink from popular rule to mob rule and the political structure of government may no longer be able to moderate the factions of hate and violent passions.

Or maybe the general populace may awaken from its media-drowse and become hip enough again where it cannot be taken in by juveniles carrying out a parody of a honkey pimp and his ho.  The big question is if the nation can survive The Age of Stupid.

We are the only leading democracy that does not support health-care for all citizens.  The cost of our health-care systems has squeezed a significant portion of our citizens out of the system, is squeezing more out daily, and is a major contributor to family bankruptcies.  The private sector, as in finance and banking and the auto industry, is putting on conclusive demonstrations that it has neither the interest nor ability to provide essential services to the nation.  So, people turn to government as the last, best hope. 

Just who is it that supports the inadequacies in health-care and resists any federal mandate for reform.

An Aberdeen hospital executive for one.  Here is what he said, as reported in the Argus Leader, at a health-care forum:

"Truthfully, I wish it would go away. I don't think politicians understand our needs in small-town South Dakota," said Kellie Ecker, marketing and public relations director for Avera St. Luke's Hospital in Aberdeen.