Privacy in Wonderland: We all wonder where it went

Shirley Sherrod could bring a libel suit against her tormentor.
She suffered loss of reputation. She suffered job loss. She suffered.
The African-American civil servant in the Georgia office of the U.S. Agriculture Department started a perfectly ordinary week in wonderful anonymity.
But she tumbled into the blogosphere as innocently as Alice assailed by a Mad Hatter and the madding crowd of the right wing wonderland.
Then she emerged with an apology from President Obama, a better job offer from Ag Secretary Vilsack and vilification as racist turned on its head into stoic civil-sainthood. She was never the person portrayed by a blogger.
No wonder there's talk of libel.
The whole case presents itself as a study in the politics of vilification abetted by the digital speed of the modern communication mode measured more by moments than calm reason.
Too many tick-tock white rabbits running down too many media holes.
No wonder lawyer talk is out and about.
A defamation court, however, would have to deal with the fact Ms. Sherrod fell into a Georgia privy but emerged sweet-smelling and clutching the reward of a better job offer and notoriety transformed into celebrity. Where is the damage now? A judge must ask.
How much better for her and for us if she were to bring a privacy suit for being dragged unwilling into false light.
The invasion of her right to keep to herself, do her job and control her own destiny suffered permanent harm. She forever will endure indignity as victim-symbol of quick-trigger misinformation.
Tremble, all you who enter the new world of communication. (That's all of us, if you wonder.)
FOX news and its imitators -- collectively a causative factor in the media climate raining rabid cats and mad dogs all over Shirley Sherrod -- long ago cost us any expectation of fairness and accuracy in public affairs reporting.
Truth is no longer an expectation.
The one comfort any of us might retreat into had been the expectation of privacy: If we were not a public person, "they" couldn't get to us.
The experience of a no-longer-private person in government service shows any of us could suffer the same loss of a basic right.   
"They" can get to a nameless, faceless bureaucrat. "They" can get to any of us.
And who is "they?" Anyone with an Internet connection and a story to bait media attention.
A judicial ruling to counter privacy invasion would do our New Media society far more good than libel damages, if any.
We are all Alice, tip-toeing through the  media mind-field of sinkholes leading to anguish, not tea parties. 

The untold story of this GD economy

The first rough-draft of history can't read the picture of our times.
You didn't have to live through the Great Depression to write a chronicle of repetition.
First there was the financial crisis as President Obama entered office. And by "crisis" I don't mean a market downturn. The system failed. Completely.
As in 1929 we were so-o-o-o close to losing the nation.
The Hoover-like Bush-Cheney administration set us up: Regulation went big bye-bye, tax policy transformed surplus into deficit with the rich getting richer and the rest getting poorer and the oil industry, the most subsidized business in America, received corporate freedom to slash and burn for profit -- greed in the name of capitalism.
Hoover lives!
The new administration strives mightily in the Spirit of FDR. But the White House is up against the same throwback forces that made the GD (Great Depression) economy worse than it had to be.
Republican Party and Libertarian ideology prevail to prevent stimulus spending.
The one time a government should spend money it doesn't have is during an economy as slow to move as a politician in an election year.
But the conservatives who want Obama and Democrats out for partisan reasons are saving our way into deeper financial disaster.
It all happened before. We never learn.
No wonder this emotional nation feels a world class downer of frustration trending to grief -- the blues, a second, essential, psychological part of an economic depression.
Element three is the reflection in nature.
The 1930s had the Dust Bowl.
We have the BP Oil Spill.
Don't you dare dismiss the Gulf crisis as a regional problem. The biblical plague of our times trashes lives, finances and well-being directly or indirectly in a threat to life as we know it from sea to shining.
The impact may be less obvious in circles farther from the epicenter. But energy policy, environmental policy, economic policy, public policy, political palaver will all reflect the humanitarian catastrophe.
Americans who don't have out-of-pocket losses nevertheless will experience a looser grip on nationhood.
Black humor, itself an oil pun, may chortle about high-test seafood but is really a cry from the heart.
That's Great Depression material.
How amazing journalism hasn't pieced the picture together.
Too busy covering press conferences, placing anchors on oily beaches and covering the trivia of a BP executive's yacht race and other PR gaffes.
Charter boat captains, coastal politicians and washaterias for pelicans get some coverage.
Yet no one covering the Fed in Washington, the markets in New York or the boom shortage in Biloxi has taken the holistic view of economic life from shore to board room to living room.
Maybe when the out-migration of Gulfies matches the Grapes of Wrath era of Okies we'll see the Dorothea Lange images and the John Steinbeck narratives and the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.  reminders of the cycles of history in endless repetition.
Artists and historians again will have to compensate for journalism's failure. Another missed opportunity.
And that's too GD bad.