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.

Bitter pills and magazine journalism

Maybe it's not the most popular thing to say. Heck, I'll say it anyway.
I actually like The Economist.
I emerge bleary from its Brit grayness -- or is it greyness?  -- as though from a Treasury, State Department, White House, Downing Street briefing.
Not every college course entertained me. That doesn't mean I didn't learn.
Oh, it's a slog between witticisms that are British journalism.
But The Economist falls into a class of media with PBS's The News Hour, world's most boring broadcast.
Yeah, I'm hopeless. I watch Jim Lehrer and his gang for the same reason I read The Economist. After the superficial news treatment on the commercial networks, I need some depth to balance the froth.
I don't need any more of the News Hour-Economist's sugarless medicine, however.
So when Newsweek went to a quasi-Economist makeover, I missed the fun, the elan, the immediacy of the old book I had read and enjoyed since before Ben Bradlee left it to run The Washington Post.
The magazine reformulation didn't work for me nor apparently for a lot of others.
And more bad luck: The recent remake of Newsweek hit newsstands along with the economic downturn.
I hate that.
Yet I love a national newspaper that comes out once a week -- one description of Newsweek's former personality.
It's a tough formula. Years ago a weekly, newsprint, full-size National Observer went broke trying the prescription.
See here, though: Features editors at lots of daily newspapers reverse the method successfully all the time -- publishing a magazine-style section on a daily basis.
What I'm describing is originality, a good fit with the audience and balance between news as info and news as fun.
Media sort themselves out according to the right set of ingredients all the time.
The apothecaries at Newsweek simply didn't get the mix right. I think it was too imitative of The Economist. One of those is enough.
So now Newsweek's bitter pill to swallow is named Doomsday. The magazine will be sold or closed.
No publication wants a dose of imitating that.


  

Who stole my holiday?!?

Anyone can be an editor or producer when news breaks.
The trick is to communicate brilliantly when there is no news. As on holidays.
NBC's Today Show broadcast a brief but pretty good report Friday before the long weekend about the impending Independence Day amid a depressing economy.
Matt Lauer, a good interviewer any day, had a really eye-opening conversation with the equally good Maria Bartiromo, the CNBC economic head-turner.
Now, if only we'll see and hear lots of follow-up in depth.
More likely the Marine band and news stale-from-the-can will parade across screen and newspaper page.
Put enough features in City Desk  hold files and the TV video bank, and everyone can have a nice holiday.
Judge by Matt and Maria's interview: Many Americans without work, without a mortgage payment, without good retirement prospects and with BP oil lapping at their security or with health and other bills weighing on their minds are going to have a not-so-nice Fourth of July.
So why wouldn't journalists work longer, harder to report the national misery index doesn't take a holiday.
If terrorists or tornadoes attack, every newsperson will rush in from picnic and park to cover the disaster.
Why don't media work during the slow-motion catastrophe of this holiday in the dumps?
What's with the cancellation of all those municipal fireworks shows?
How come we're actually glad the markets are closed so they can't plummet farther?
Where's the hopefulness without hype out of state and national capitals and city halls?
So many questions. So little time.
Journalism should never take a holiday.
  

Excuse me! I seem to have misplaced my guillotine.

Remember the media panic when this communication revolution began?
The bloggers are coming! The bloggers are coming!
Well, it turned out to be less of a quick-hit rebellion and more of an extended Reign of Terror for conventional publishers.
Eat any cake lately, Marie?
Now the first wave of attack is fading.
Nielsen and others report a significant decline in blog traffic, according to The Economist.
Twitter and Facebook are up substantially, however. So don't harbor any wistful dreams of a return to legacy media.
Thank you BTW for coming to my own blog for this information and commentary. Better than bakery goods, I say, Your Highness!
Look here, the rebels' underlying cause remains the same: People and especially the youth demographic prefer to publish information and exchange comments at little if any expense, at a time of their own choosing and in a manner of their personal convenience such as with a cell phone.
Maybe the iPad will grandly unify the multimedia experience. More likely, we're going to experiment quite a bit more for quite a while longer.
The Economist points out the geopolitical significance of the Internet in real civil unrest such as Iran's.
There's more to going online than sex texting.
So we're not going back. The com-revolt is real. It's here to stay.
And the biggest evidence is the evolution to new forms and their globalization of ideas about freedom.
That's exactly what happens in a revolution

The streetcar that carried the general away

We journalists are Blanche DuBois, forever depending on the kindness of strangers.

People figure no public official will ever follow Gen. Stanley McChrystal's model of allowing a reporter into his candid inner circle. The general ended up fired for his barracks room candor.

Yet I believe journalistic history will repeat itself. Often. Like Blanche's signature line from A Streetcar Named Desire.

Kindness is another way of expressing openness or even naivete.

We haven't seen the end of opening up, even or especially by star-encrusted bravado.

And the public will be the better for it -- as always.

The career mistake of Gen. McChrystal turned into his ultimate service to the nation: Government and public both refocused on the war in Afghanistan, which we are losing or at least not winning.

Miss DuBois will return. We share her perpetual dependency on strangers.

The literary metaphor of Tennessee Williams's character in his 1947 play strikes my mind like a controlled nuclear event.

Blanche's nemesis was another Stanley -- the brutish Kowalski, antithesis of her dowdy, loopy world view and romanticism that drew out the beast in Stanley.

Excuse me, Gen. McChrystal, have you read the play?

The Rolling Stone writer Michael Hastings, who did the live-in interview with McChrystal, might not remind anyone of a DuBois or of the southern playwright who wrote Streetcar.

Yet the reporter and the general acted out the archetypes of clash between brutishness and soft persistence that spin off beneficial journalism like a newly discovered molecule from an atom smasher named Desire.

Oh, yes. Journalism will replicate the explosion, because that's what journalism does.

Not too fond a farewell for Helen and Larry

Am I the only one in America who thinks it's perfectly okay for Larry King to sit at home instead of sitting on his set at CNN?

I have nothing against the gentleman.

But I have nothing especially for him either.

He's not a journalist. He's a habit.

And let's don't confuse the status of endurance with national icon. Larry King is no Cronkite or even a Brokaw.

He simply spent a long time in TV. He talked with a lot of people. Isn't that nice?

Nancy Reagan called him on the air to say she'd miss him. Sweet. They threw on-air kisses to each other.

At least he's going out on his own terms, although with declining popularity.

That's better for him than Helen Thomas's hasty retirement amid catcalls for something she said.

It's hard to imagine Larry King saying anything that could offend in that degree. But I almost wish he would go out in rage rather than smoochiness with any former First Lady.

Oh, I'm not saying a journalist is not a journalist unless he or she is a contrarian. That didn't work for Ms. Thomas, the fixture at the White House.

But I am saying journalism and journalists ought to reinvent themselves several times before we let them get away from us.

Fifty years in a Executive Branch briefing chair with your name on it and 50,000 broadcast interviews are exercises in longevity, not in themselves evidence of journalistic contribution.

Goodbye, Helen! Goodbye, Larry!

It was nice to know you.

Yet not so nice we can't let you slip away so the innovators can take your places.

Writers take note of desperate times when government becomes noble and necessary

The Forgotten Man, A New History of the Great Depression By Amity Shlaes; Harper, New York, 2008, 468 pages, $15.95.

Granddaddy fell off a two-story house and broke both feet in the Depression.
It was the era of The Forgotten Man. Before workmen's comp. Before Social Security. Before government cared about occupational safety or about family or, really, about the common man — grandfather or not.
The natural wisdom of Americans elected a leader in 1932 for the most desperate of times. They chose a government to preserve ordinary, everyday folk.
We're testing the limits of economic endurance again today.
Back then no one held the safety net for my Grandpa Jay. He was a big, loving-in-his-own-way, rough-laughing workingman in the tough prairie town of Lawton, Okla. Frontier rules still prevailed — make your own way.
Buffalo nibbled grass around ruts left by horse caissons out on Fort Sill. If it hadn't been for the artillery garrison, the U.S. government would have had no presence at all in my grandparents' lives.
Military demand for housing gave granddaddy work as a housepainter — until he couldn't climb a ladder. Yet he was the sole support of a wife and three school children of his own and two others taken in from family down on their luck.
Grandma Essie had spooned the last cornmeal into the cast iron skillet. Her children were going hungry.
What happened next was the defining story of my family. Manna fell from heaven. Well, potatoes actually.
My Daddy was tall and skinny but didn't miss a stride as he scooped up the bulging, burlap bag on the railroad siding as though he was paid to unload the boxcar.
You do what you have to do for family, when you literally are "The Forgotten Man."
The original use of the phrase meant the worker who never went on the dole. The person struggled but somehow made it with no more help than a providential sack of spuds the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe never would miss anyway.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt picked the name up like stolen taters for his presidential campaign to use about every common American. God love them, heaven made so many who needed a handout or a hand up.
FDR's brain trust got to work. The president's and wife Eleanor's skillful use of media cranked up. And the specter of a nation going under created a social experiment out of every working class American, forgotten no more.
The Amity Shlaes account is revisionist history — not original, but well-told: The line has it that FDR didn't end the Great Depression with the New Deal; that his anti-business vigor and monetary policy vacillation made things worse; and that only World War II ended the country's worst downturn ever.
The trouble with her view is the nation did sense a rescue mission and regain hope as a result. The government sun did come up again every day. The light around FDR's jaunty visage and sparky effort did counter the dark economy.
The vigor of Roosevelt's government dispelled even fear itself. His fireside chats made the White House a comfortable home for the nation to visit on the air. Lasting institutions such as deposit insurance reformed and protected banking.
Shlaes is right to remind us government can get in the way as FDR's did, creating a depression within the Depression. She is right about politics too easily diverting public works spending from its mission to rebuild the economy. And she is right that government takes steps in a national emergency we don't want from it all the time —— such as the current nationalization of industries.
But heroic measures electrified rural America. Americans went to work building roads and bridges and schools. Government organized writers and artists to make us sensitive to the desperate times, represented by Dorothea Lange's photograph of a migrant mother.
Those were noble and necessary acts of government we should not forget.
To say otherwise is like telling President-elect Barack Obama to stay in Chicago. Yet our once again fearful nation counts on him to avoid another Great Depression in the unforgettable FDR-style.
Sometimes you just have to scoop up the potatoes.