Originally Posted by albatross '82

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

Katrina is just part of it. September 11th was enough of a shock to allow a major policy shift. Bush 43 implemented the War on Terror, featuring Afghanistan and Iraq. I have been trying to label this a 'false regeneracy.' Bush 43 responded to September 11th, but not strongly or acutely enough for the public to perceive a light at the end of the tunnel. Katrina is but one of a bunch of things that is marking Bush's efforts as the wrong approach. Persistent problems in Iraq and Afghanistan, deficits, Rovegate, and ugly echoes of the Culture Wars parallel Katrina's sense of something being wrong. This leaves the door open for another attempt at regeneracy.

Last time around, there was a gap between the Crash of 29 and the election of FDR. Hoover was not perceived of as doing enough. We might be going through a similar period.

That's interesting, so you're under the impression that it's basically Bush's fault that we aren't in full 4T mode. You think that even if Bush had acted strongly enough, America would have been ready for it? Because that's what I keep hearing about 9/11 being the false regeneracy--"We weren't ready." It did come a bit early after all, according to S&H's prediction. But maybe we were ready, and Bush screwed it up and left us in this weird limbo? That's interesting.

I think people deep down want a regeneracy, as can be seen by our short-lived unity following 9/11. We've probably been ready since the 2000 election. I think that's when people really started to get sick of the culture wars. I think that our regeneracy may very well be an election, Lincoln style. 8)

That's about right. I'm dithering on saying it is Bush's "fault." It is natural for a conservative to propose small solutions to big problems. Even Lincoln dithered for years before the Emancipation Proclamation, and he was no conservative. Going into the crisis, neither the People or the politicians are going to throw away the status quo lightly. I've called it the "On to Richmond" effect. One tries to use brute force to push things back to the way things have always been. In the days immediately after September 11th, Bush firmly took a stance against addressing the underlying causes of terrorism. There was, he claimed, no excuse for what the terrorists did. Since then, he has begun to address underlying causes, with nation building, spreading democracy, and aid packages. Still, I don't get the feeling he is doing enough, and I doubt I'm alone in this perception.

But there is a difference between faulting Bush 43 for not proposing large enough solutions and faulting him for incompetence and cronyism. I doubt any conservative would propose the final set of answers when a crisis first starts. Conservatives, by nature, cling to old values. Heck, today's Democrats are barely ahead of the Republicans. It is mighty early on to see the need for draconian measures. I can't fault conservatives for being conservatives this early on.

I can fault the incompetence and cronyism. If they had tried to secure the peace rather than securing the oil, if they had allowed the French and Russian oil companies a sizable chunk of the rebuilding contracts, if they hadn't disbanded the Iraqi army... Possibly their regeneracy might have turned true. I'm doubtful. Possibly. But faulting lack of vision and faulting honesty and competence are two different things.

It would have been a lot to expect them to have gotten it right first time out. We have lessons learned, which might be more valuable than early success, if we manage to learn the lessons. The key at this point is recognizing failure. Next time, don't repeat the same mistakes. Make new ones. It is still early. The next regeneracy won't be perfect either. We keep regenerating until we find a leader who recognizes his mistakes faster than the general public, and puts new solutions in front of us before we want to tear him down for the failures of his old ones.

The coming generational storm

The solution? Cut Pentagon spending in half.

Originally Posted by albatross '82

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

Katrina is just part of it. September 11th was enough of a shock to allow a major policy shift. Bush 43 implemented the War on Terror, featuring Afghanistan and Iraq. I have been trying to label this a 'false regeneracy.' Bush 43 responded to September 11th, but not strongly or acutely enough for the public to perceive a light at the end of the tunnel. Katrina is but one of a bunch of things that is marking Bush's efforts as the wrong approach. Persistent problems in Iraq and Afghanistan, deficits, Rovegate, and ugly echoes of the Culture Wars parallel Katrina's sense of something being wrong. This leaves the door open for another attempt at regeneracy.

Last time around, there was a gap between the Crash of 29 and the election of FDR. Hoover was not perceived of as doing enough. We might be going through a similar period.

That's interesting, so you're under the impression that it's basically Bush's fault that we aren't in full 4T mode. You think that even if Bush had acted strongly enough, America would have been ready for it? Because that's what I keep hearing about 9/11 being the false regeneracy--"We weren't ready." It did come a bit early after all, according to S&H's prediction. But maybe we were ready, and Bush screwed it up and left us in this weird limbo? That's interesting.

I think people deep down want a regeneracy, as can be seen by our short-lived unity following 9/11. We've probably been ready since the 2000 election. I think that's when people really started to get sick of the culture wars. I think that our regeneracy may very well be an election, Lincoln style. 8)

Lincoln style? Do you mean Lincoln's reelection in 1864 (which was not so much of a shakeup at all) or his election in 1860 (which S&H actually consider to be a 4T Catalyst, not a regeneracy)?

We may very well see a Lincoln-style election in 2008... but would that be regeneracy or just the end of 3T?

Originally Posted by Seminomad

We may very well see a Lincoln-style election in 2008... but would that be regeneracy or just the end of 3T?

I'd say end of the 3T but, push that back to 2006. The regeneracy won't come until 2012. Whoever gets to be president in 2008 will catch all hell for what problems are going to happen then. You think Bush is already in deep water for what's going on, wait till you how badly the person after him will handle the stuff left behind. It doesn't matter whether he or she is a Republican or Democrat. Republican hopes for a competent candidate will be lost, Democrat hopes for a cure-all candidate will also be sorely disappointed.

Whatever it is going to be, no one should be rooting for anyone to win either in 2006 or 2008. Avoid those elections at all costs. If all else, at least choose the youngest candidate, most preferrably an Xer.

Excuse me --- wasn't Germany's cure-all Chancellor a Lost?

We might as well re-elect Jimmy Carter, who at least will do no harm.

Originally Posted by Idiot Girl

Excuse me --- wasn't Germany's cure-all Chancellor a Lost?

We might as well re-elect Jimmy Carter, who at least will do no harm.

Verloren, nicht Lost. Jimmy could be our Paul von; what with all that gas. Ka-boom! Oh, the humanity. :arrow: :arrow: :arrow:

Originally Posted by Idiot Girl

Excuse me --- wasn't Germany's cure-all Chancellor a Lost?

We might as well re-elect Jimmy Carter, who at least will do no harm.

I was speaking in terms of Congress for the Xers. For the president, again, young will do fine. We had FDR the last time who was quite late into the Missionary Generation (although I suspect the boundary was tailored to accomodate him). Expect a shining candidate to come through who was born in the mid to late 1950s.

The issue of the 3T and 4T boundary is tied up in the mechanism of the saeculum, specifically, why does one turning end and another begin? The first thing to realize is that Strauss and Howe turnings (as opposed to Xenakis turnings or Horner turnings) are determined based on the associated generation, not the other way around as all other workers proceed.

Strauss and Howe don't claim that you can see the saeculum by examining historical events. Rather, they claim that the saeculum can be seen by examining historical cohort biographies.

Consider, if it were possible to see the saeculum by examining events (e.g. 911, Katrina, Rovegate etc.) historians would have discovered the saeculum long ago because the evidence (historical events) is readily available and known to historians. No way the American saeculum would have remained undiscovered until the late 1980's.

But since cohort biographies are not readily available, it is easy to believe that nobody even looked into them until Strauss and Howe did and so they were the first to discover the saeculum.

What I am getting at here is if we restrict ourselves to the methods and principles given by Strauss and Howe, we must first determine the divider between the Millennials and the Homelanders. Strauss and Howe identified the 1981/82 divider between Xers and Millennials in Generations, which was published in 1991. They must have made this determination by 1990 at the latest and that means that generational boundaries should be detectable eight years after the fact.

Detecting the turning change after the fact is not very useful. Better would be a way to project when the turning change is likely. Strauss and Howe provide such a method, which I discuss on the Cause of the Saeculum thread. This method is the aligned generational constellation. When generations line up with phases of life, a new generation starts being born. For example consider 2004, the year Strauss and Howe project for the start of the Homelanders in Generations.

On New Years Day in 2004, the youth phase of life (age 0-21) contained those born in 1982-2003. Youth was 100% occupied by Millennials. The Rising Adult phase of life (age 22-43) contained those born in 1960-1981 and was 95% occupied by Gen X. Since Gen X is only 21 years long, a 95% occupation is effectively 100% (optimal alignment). Maturity (age 44-65) contained those born in 1938-1959 and was 77% occupied by Boomers. Since Boomers are only 18 years long their maximum occupation is only 82% so their alignment here is effectively 94%. Finally, elderhood was occupied by those born in 1916-1937, reflecting a 59% occupation by Silent. As the Silent are also only 18 years long their effective alignment is 72%.

This effective alignment of 100-100-95-72 is pretty good. Can we do better? Yep, if we set 2005 as the start of the Homelander gen we get 100-100-100-78. Any later will simply subtract from Gen X and Boomer alignment and add to Silent alignment, making overall alignment worse. This makes 2005 the optimally aligned generational constellation and 2005 the constellation model prediction of the start of the Homelander generation. Here are the predictions and actuals for recent generations:

Predict Actual

1904 . 1901 - 3 years late
1926 . 1925 - 1 years late
1947 . 1943 - 4 years late
1965 . 1961 - 4 years late
1986 . 1982 - 4 years late
2005 . 2001? - 4 years late?

Based on this track record, it appears that the generational constellation routinely predicts late in recent generations. In the remote past it routinely predicted early. Based on the recent track record 2001 looks like the best forecast for the start of the Homelander generation. Direct evidence for this idea might be studies looking at infant and toddler nurture before and after 911.

If 2001 is the first Homelander year this makes 2001 like 1982, 1961, 1943 and 1925, implying a turning change 2-4 years after 2001 or in 2003-2005.

If you go to the Cause of the Saeculum thread you will see that I characterize the constellation model as a bad causative model. It is. It is unlikely that generational constellations by themselves cause the saeculum. What makes it a bad model is that the residuals show a trend rather than random distribution, meaning that the constellation model is missing something important to generation timing. If one takes advantage of the highly significant trend in residuals and uses it to correct the model prediction for the unknown missing factor (as I did above by subtracting 4 from the 2005 model prediction) one obtains a very good correlation between corrected generational constellation and generation starts.

Although correlation does not imply causation, it is perfectly satisfactory for making predictions.

Originally Posted by Prisoner 81591518

Originally Posted by Idiot Girl

Maybe we haven't reached the Solstice yet, but we sure as shooting are past Samhain!

Blessed be.

More like past the halfway point between Samhain and Yule, I'd say. (Which in Xtian terms translates to just past Thanksgiving, IIRC.)

Yep. Complete with turkey.

Originally Posted by The Dude

The coming generational storm

The solution? Cut Pentagon spending in half.

Do that, and we'll get to see the spin-up of another sort of 'perfect storm', which would render all domestic issues into moot points by the time it's over.

I was reading through the day's news, as usual keeping half an eye out for articles that might have a cyclic or generational element. I found a few minor possible 3T / 4T boundary possibilities...

Riots in greater Paris. African / Muslim young males damaging property, complaining about lack of job opportunities, lack of respect, low pay...

Turmoil in Philadelphia. Terrill Owens suspended from job for damaging team, complaining about lack of respect, low pay...

These might be less about the 3T / 4T boundary than the sublime / ridiculous.

Originally Posted by eekelsey

The PATRIOT Act is another story, but even that has been used far more judiciously than I initially thought it would be.

Or not

Heated bra supports good cause

For discussion only. Do not touch or feel.

Originally Posted by YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/Getty Images

A model standing by a mannequin displays Triumph International's new "Warmbiz Bra" at the lingerie maker's Tokyo headquarters on Nov. 9, 2005. The bra has special pads filled with an eco-friendly gel that can be easily heated in a microwave or with a hot water bottle. It's named for Japan's "WarmBiz" campaign, which encourages office workers to conserve energy by wearing warm clothes to avoid the use of heaters.

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

Heated bra supports good cause

For discussion only. Do not touch or feel.

Originally Posted by YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/Getty Images

A model standing by a mannequin displays Triumph International's new "Warmbiz Bra" at the lingerie maker's Tokyo headquarters on Nov. 9, 2005. The bra has special pads filled with an eco-friendly gel that can be easily heated in a microwave or with a hot water bottle. It's named for Japan's "WarmBiz" campaign, which encourages office workers to conserve energy by wearing warm clothes to avoid the use of heaters.

Talk about an important invention. During those NFL games in December, cheerleaders now won't have to wear heavy clothes.

Originally Posted by cumulonimbus

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

Heated bra supports good cause

For discussion only. Do not touch or feel.

Originally Posted by YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/Getty Images

A model standing by a mannequin displays Triumph International's new "Warmbiz Bra" at the lingerie maker's Tokyo headquarters on Nov. 9, 2005. The bra has special pads filled with an eco-friendly gel that can be easily heated in a microwave or with a hot water bottle. It's named for Japan's "WarmBiz" campaign, which encourages office workers to conserve energy by wearing warm clothes to avoid the use of heaters.

Talk about an important invention. During those NFL games in December, cheerleaders now won't have to wear heavy clothes.

But, but things will never get to the point, so to speak.

Here we have one of Thoreau's heirs, longing for the good ole days by Walden Pond. I'm throwing it up here as it reflects some aspects of Future Shock and the Third Wave of Civilization. As the Industrial Age goes to its logical conclusion and beyond, machine efficiency can create the necessities with fewer workers. Thus, to keep people fully employed, we have an endless quest for non necessities.

The following addresses the poetic and values aspects of a possible Third Wave Post Millennial Crisis value shift rather than the economics.

Eat, Sleep, Work, Consume, Die

For discussion purposes only...

Originally Posted by Tony Long

Civilization took a definite nose dive when the merchant princes grew ascendant at the expense of the artists and thinkers; when the notion of liberté, égalité, fraternité gave way to "I've got mine; screw you" (an attitude that existed in Voltaire's day, too, you might recall, with unfortunate results for the blue bloods). In the Big Picture, the dead white guys -- Rousseau, Thoreau, Mill -- cared a lot more about your well-being than the live ones like Gates or Jobs or Ellison ever will.

But stock-market capitalism is today's coin of the realm, consumerism its handmaiden, and technology is the great enabler. You think technology benefits you because it gives you an easier row to hoe? Bollocks. The ease it provides is illusory. It has trapped you, made you a slave to things you don't even need but suddenly can't live without. So you rot in a cubicle trying to get the money to get the stuff, when you should be out walking in a meadow or wooing a lover or writing a song.

Utopian claptrap, you sneer. So you put nose to grindstone, your life ebbing as you accumulate ... what?

Originally Posted by Virgil K. Saari

Originally Posted by cumulonimbus

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

Heated bra supports good cause

For discussion only. Do not touch or feel.

Originally Posted by YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/Getty Images

A model standing by a mannequin displays Triumph International's new "Warmbiz Bra" at the lingerie maker's Tokyo headquarters on Nov. 9, 2005. The bra has special pads filled with an eco-friendly gel that can be easily heated in a microwave or with a hot water bottle. It's named for Japan's "WarmBiz" campaign, which encourages office workers to conserve energy by wearing warm clothes to avoid the use of heaters.

Talk about an important invention. During those NFL games in December, cheerleaders now won't have to wear heavy clothes.

But, but things will never get to the point, so to speak.

There are upsides. At the office, when one sees Mary Sue heading for the microwave to warm up her bra, would it not be time to go get a fresh cup of coffee?

Originally Posted by Tony Long

Romanticist drivel . . . my kind of people are better beings . . . blah blah blah . . .

The guy has no concept of the future and can only do things in comparison with a biased view of the past. Yes, it would be wonderful if we could all strum our lyres and tap into our inner muses, get away from the hustle and technicalities and just "be". Yeah, well, this is the current reality, and despite what one may think that ancient Greece, the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment were full of artists and thinkers and the such hoping to make the world a better place, there are the multitudes of people just doing their thing to make sure it is running (oh, geez, now I sound Communist) and making those hopes come true.

Not to diminish the purpose of artists and thinkers, but theses too are also careers and not simply something you can pick up and run with. The world doesn't simply run on expression and thoughts . . .

I seem to have a huge problem with the notion of how important artists and thinkers are because anytime one of those sorts of people start self-referencing, they boost the significance of their existence to such large proportions, even moreso than say Donald Trump. They're valuable of course, but I don't think they are THAT important. Let me appreciate it for myself, don't shove it in my face telling me I SHOULD value it without thought.

Originally Posted by Andy '85

Originally Posted by Tony Long

Romanticist drivel . . . my kind of people are better beings . . . blah blah blah . . .

The guy has no concept of the future and can only do things in comparison with a biased view of the past. Yes, it would be wonderful if we could all strum our lyres and tap into our inner muses, get away from the hustle and technicalities and just "be". Yeah, well, this is the current reality, and despite what one may think that ancient Greece, the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment were full of artists and thinkers and the such hoping to make the world a better place, there are the multitudes of people just doing their thing to make sure it is running (oh, geez, now I sound Communist) and making those hopes come true.

Not to diminish the purpose of artists and thinkers, but theses too are also careers and not simply something you can pick up and run with. The world doesn't simply run on expression and thoughts . . .

I seem to have a huge problem with the notion of how important artists and thinkers are because anytime one of those sorts of people start self-referencing, they boost the significance of their existence to such large proportions, even moreso than say Donald Trump. They're valuable of course, but I don't think they are THAT important. Let me appreciate it for myself, don't shove it in my face telling me I SHOULD value it without thought.

I can see where you're coming from. As a musician, it's the abstract thinking, music and art and make life halfway decent to me, but in the end their USEFULNESS isn't any more than scientists and engineers.

You think artists are full of themselves, you should see the people in the recording industry! I used to intern in a recording studio, and the guys who worked there were really cool and practical and knew their place in the scheme of things (yep, first wave Xers). However, they told stories of some of the older guys in the industry who wax spiritual about the death of analog and all that crap. They, of course, think they should get most of the credit for all the great music out there. They try to make recording out to be a high art, while the guys I worked with were more concerned with "getting the job done." It wasn't a glorious job to them.

But then these Xers would in turn get all old-fogey on me about how all these young kids can do basically what they're doing because all these digital applications are so cheap and easily available, and I had to laugh. They were basically describing Millies!

I don't know if anyone has posted this article here yet. It is an interesting take on how what is happening in the media reflects the breakdown of the last wave of institutions and the coming of a new wave where access to information, habits and power are shifting and creating major disruptions. "The centralized institutions of press and broadcasting are being challenged and steadily eroded by widening circles of unlicensed "news" agents--from talk-radio hosts to Internet bloggers and others--who compete with the official press to be believed. These interlopers speak in a different language and from many different angles of vision. Less authoritative, but more democratic. "

The media are only one area where we see the break down of last wave institutions... it's everywhere... government, academia, business, the military... cracks spreading and deepening. When you have the executive branch being investigated for espionage, the Congress entangled in...what?...racketeering through the Abramoff scandal, the enron trials due next year...not to mention the war and the "oil problem"... Can 4T be really that far away?

All the King's Media
by WILLIAM GREIDER

Amid the smoke and stench of burning careers, Washington feels a bit like the last days of the ancien régime. As the world's finest democracy, we do not do guillotines. But there are other less bloody rituals of humiliation, designed to reassure the populace that order is restored, the Republic cleansed. Let the perp walks begin. Whether the public feels reassured is another matter.

George W. Bush's plight leads me to thoughts of Louis XV and his royal court in the eighteenth century. Politics may not have changed as much as modern pretensions assume. Like Bush, the French king was quite popular until he was scorned, stubbornly self-certain in his exercise of power yet strangely submissive to manipulation by his courtiers. Like Louis Quinze, our American magistrate (whose own position was secured through court intrigues, not elections) has lost the "royal touch."

Certain influential cliques openly jeer the leader they not so long ago extolled; others gossip about royal tantrums and other symptoms of lost direction. The accusations stalking his important counselors and assembly leaders might even send some of them to jail. These political upsets might matter less if the government were not so inept at fulfilling its routine obligations, like storm relief. The king's sorry war drags on without resolution, with people still arguing over why exactly he started it. The staff of life--oil, not bread--has become punishingly expensive. The government is broke, borrowing formidable sums from rival nations. The king pretends nothing has changed.

The burnt odor in Washington is from the disintegrating authority of the governing classes. The public's darkest suspicions seem confirmed. Flagrant money corruption, deceitful communication of public plans and purposes, shocking incompetence--take your pick, all are involved. None are new to American politics, but they are potently fused in the present circumstances. A recent survey in Wisconsin found that only 6 percent of citizens believe their elected representatives serve the public interest. If they think that of state and local officials, what must they think of Washington?

We are witnessing, I suspect, something more momentous than the disgrace of another American President. Watergate was red hot, but always about Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon. This convergence of scandal and failure seems more systemic, less personal. The new political force for change is not the squeamish opposition party called the Democrats but a common disgust and anger at the sordidness embedded in our dysfunctional democracy. The wake from that disgust may prove broader than Watergate's (when democracy was supposedly restored by Nixon's exit), because the anger is also splashing over once-trusted elements of the establishment.

Heroic truth-tellers in the Watergate saga, the established media are now in disrepute, scandalized by unreliable "news" and over-intimate attachments to powerful court insiders. The major media stood too close to the throne, deferred too eagerly to the king's twisted version of reality and his lust for war. The institutions of "news" failed democracy on monumental matters. In fact, the contemporary system looks a lot more like the ancien régime than its practitioners realize. Control is top-down and centralized. Information is shaped (and tainted) by the proximity of leading news-gatherers to the royal court and by their great distance from people and ordinary experience.

People do find ways to inform themselves, as best they can, when the regular "news" is not reliable. In prerevolutionary France, independent newspapers were illegal--forbidden by the king--and books and pamphlets, rigorously censored by the government. Yet people developed a complex shadow system by which they learned what was really going on--the news that did not appear in official court pronouncements and privileged publications. Cultural historian Robert Darnton, in brilliantly original works like The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, has mapped the informal but politically potent news system by which Parisians of high and low status circulated court secrets or consumed the scandalous books known as libelles, along with subversive songs, poems and gossip, often leaked from within the king's own circle. News traveled in widening circles. Parisians gathered in favored cafes, designated park benches or exclusive salons, where the forbidden information was read aloud and copied by others to pass along. Parisians could choose for themselves which reality they believed. The power of the French throne was effectively finished, one might say, once the king lost control of the news. (It was his successor, Louis XVI, who lost his head.)

Something similar, as Darnton noted, is occurring now in American society. The centralized institutions of press and broadcasting are being challenged and steadily eroded by widening circles of unlicensed "news" agents--from talk-radio hosts to Internet bloggers and others--who compete with the official press to be believed. These interlopers speak in a different language and from many different angles of vision. Less authoritative, but more democratic. The upheaval has only just begun, but already even the best newspapers are hemorrhaging circulation. Dan Gillmor, an influential pioneer and author of We the Media, thinks tomorrow's news, the reporting and production, will be "more of a conversation, or a seminar"--less top-down, and closer to how people really speak about their lives.

Which brings us to the sappy operetta of the reporter and her influential source: Scooter Libby, the Vice President's now-indicted war wonk, and Judith Miller, the New York Times's intrepid reporter and First Amendment martyr. What seems most shocking about their relationship is the intimacy. "Come back to work--and life," Scooter pleaded in a letter to Judy, doing her eighty-five days in jail. "Out west, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them." Miller responded in her bizarre first-person Times account by telling a cherished memory of Scooter. Out West, she said, a man in sunglasses, dressed like a cowboy, approached and spoke to her: "Judy, it's Scooter Libby."

Are Washington reporters really that close to their sources? For her part, Miller has a "tropism toward powerful men," as Times columnist Maureen Dowd delicately put it. This is well-known gossip in court circles, but let's not go there. Boy reporters also suck up to powerful men with shameful deference, wanting to be loved by the insiders so they can be inside too (shades of the French courtiers). The price of intimacy is collected in various coins, but older hands in the news business understand what is being sold. The media, Christopher Dickey of Newsweek observed in a web essay, "long ago concluded having access to power is more important than speaking truth to it."

The elite press, like any narcissistic politician, tells a heart-warming myth about itself. Reporters, it is said, dig out the hard facts to share with the people by locating anonymous truth-tellers inside government. They then protect these sources from retaliation by refusing to name them, even at the cost of going to prison. That story line was utterly smashed by this scandal. Reporters were prepared to go to jail to protect sources who were not exactly whistleblowers cowering in anonymity. They were Libby and Karl Rove--the king's own counselors at the pinnacle of government. They were the same guys who collaborated on the bloodiest political deception of the Bush presidency: the lies that took the country into war. So, in a sense, the press was also protecting itself from further embarrassment. The major media, including the best newspapers, all got the war wrong, and for roughly the same reason--their compliant proximity to power. With a few honorable exceptions, they bought into the lies and led cheers for war. They ignored or downplayed the dissent from some military leaders and declined to explore tough questions posed by anyone outside the charmed circle. The nation may not soon forget this abuse of privileged status, nor should it.

Leaks and whispers are a daily routine of news-gathering in Washington. The sweet irony of President Bush's predicament is that it was partly self-induced. His White House deputies enforced discipline on reporters and insiders, essentially shutting down the stream of nonofficial communications and closing the informal portals for dissent and dispute within government. This was new in the Bush era, and it's ultimately been debilitating. It has made reporters still more dependent on the official spin, as the Administration wanted, but it has also sealed off the king from the flow of high-level leaks and informative background noises that help vet developing policies and steer reporters to the deeper news.

The paradox of our predicament is that, unlike the ancien régime, US citizens do enjoy free speech, free press and other rights to disturb the powerful. In this country you can say aloud or publish just about anything you like. But will anyone hear you? The audible range of diverse and rebellious voices has been visibly shrunk in the last generation. The corporate concentration of media ownership has put a deadening blanket over the usual cacophony of democracy, with dissenting voices screened for acceptability by young and often witless TV producers. Corporate owners have a strong stake in what gets said on their stations. Why piss off the President when you will need his good regard for so many things? Viewers have a zillion things to watch, but if you jump around the dial, with luck you will always be watching a General Electric channel.

How did it happen that the multiplication of outlets made possible by technology led to a concentration of views and opinions--ones usually anchored by the conventional wisdom of center-right sensibilities? Where did the "freedom" go? Where are the people's ideas and observations? Al Gore, who found his voice after he lost the presidency, recently expressed his sense of alarm: "I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse." The bread-and-circuses format that monopolizes the public's airwaves is driven by a condescending commercial calculation that Americans are too stupid to want anything more. But that assumption becomes fragile as other voices find other venues for expression. This is an industry crisis that will be very healthy for the society, a political opening to rearrange access and licensing for democratic purposes.

For the faltering press, the bloggers will keep sharpening their swords, slicing away at the established order. This is good, but the pressure will lead to meaningful change only if the Internet artisans innovate further, organizing new formats and techniques for networking among more diverse people and interests. The daily feed of facts and bile from bloggers has been wondrously effective in unmasking the pretensions of the big boys, but the broader society needs more--something closer to the democratic "conversations and seminars" that Gillmor envisions, and less dependent on partisan fury and accusation.

As an ex-Luddite, I came to the web with the skepticism of an old print guy. Against expectations, I am experiencing sustained exchanges with many far-flung people I've never met--dialogues that inform both of us and are utterly voluntary experiences. This is a promising new form of consent. Democracy, I once wrote, begins not at election time but in human conversation.

Establishment newspapers like the New York Times face a special dilemma, one they may not easily resolve. Under assault, do editors and reporters align still more closely with the establishment interests to maintain an air of "authority," or do they get down with folks and dish it out to the powerful? Scandal and crisis compelled the Times to lower its veil of authority a bit and acknowledge error (a shocking development itself). But while the Times is in my view the best, most interesting newspaper, it always will be establishment. For instance, it could be more honest about its longstanding newsroom tensions between "liberals" and "neocons." What the editors might re-examine is their own defensive concept of what's authoritative. It is not just Bush's war that blinded sober judgment and led to narrow coverage. In many other important areas--political decay and global economics, among others--the Times (like other elite papers) seems afraid to acknowledge that wider, more fundamental debate exists. It chooses to report only one side--the side of received elite opinion.

Readers do understand--surprise!--that the Times is not infallible. A newspaper comes out every day and gets something wrong. Tomorrow, it comes out again and can try to get it right. In essence, that is what people and critics already know. They are more likely to be forgiving if the newspaper loosens up a bit and makes room for more divergent understandings of what's happening. But as more irreverent voices elbow their way into the "news" system, the big media are likely to lose still more audience if they cannot get more distance from throne and power.

What will come of all this? Possibly, not much. The cluster of scandals and breakdown may simply feed the people's alienation and resignation. The governing elites, including major media, are in denial, unwilling to speak honestly about the perilous economic circumstances ahead, the burgeoning debt from global trade, the sinking of the working class and other threatening conditions. When those realities surface, many American lives will be upended with no available recourse and no one in authority they can trust, since the denial and evasion are bipartisan. That's a very dangerous situation for a society--an invitation to irrational angers and scapegoating. It will require a new, more encompassing politics to avert an ugly political contagion. We need more reliable "news" to recover democracy.

Next wavers vs. last wavers:

MIASMA
Don't you dare call me a journalist
By John Steinberg | RAW STORY COLUMNIST

We who blog have generally been seen by the mainstream press as having a chip on our collective shoulders. We think the work we do qualifies us as bona fide journalists, and we are not happy when we are not acknowledged as such. Much effort has been expended, by bloggers across the political spectrum, to equate our work with what the big boys and girls do. If the Fourth Estate is a club, bloggers want in.
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Well, screw that. I am proud of what I do, and want my work to be read and taken seriously. But include me out of the journalism club.

There is a great line in Zach Braff’s 2004 film “Garden State.” He says that a family is “a group of people who miss the same imaginary place.” When bloggers say they want to be journalists, they are doing the same thing.

The Platonic form of journalism – Edward R. Murrow taking on Joseph McCarthy, Walter Cronkite taking on Lyndon Johnson after the Tet Offensive, Woodward and Bernstein taking on Nixon – is today a fantasy unrecognizable in the flickering phosphors on the walls of our contemporary caves. Perhaps journalists once took risks in order to share dangerous truths with readers and viewers, but that time seems to have passed into history. What passes for journalism in Washington and New York today is in large measure as corrupt and despicable as the subjects it glosses.

The most egregious, and at long last acknowledged, example of journalism as epithet is of course Judith Miller, (formerly?) of the New York Times. Her steadfast refusal to come clean about her involvement in the Traitorgate affair marks her with at least one of two fatal flaws: she could be a dupe; she could be a conspirator. Or she could be both. But the way her colleagues continue to circle the wagons around her proves that she is not “outside the mainstream,” but an exemplar of contemporary journalism.

The Society of Professional Journalists gave Judith Miller its “First Amendment Award,” and a standing ovation – both of which occurred after the belated denouement in the Times. For these cheerleaders of her self-promotion, journalism is clearly no longer about following the truth where it leads or afflicting the comfortable. When journalists cheer a woman who refused to cooperate with or turn over her notes to reporters from her own newspaper, it is clear that the residents of the Fourth Estate are concerned primarily with preserving their co-dependency with the other three.

Judith Miller has likely worked herself out of the club: as more of her profound ethical breaches become public, I assume she will eventually become radioactive even to the credulous First Amendment hawks who bought her pig-in-a-poke First Amendment fantasy. But the Washington beat remains a miasma of hypocrisy and putrefaction. And perhaps the most toxic of the ethical Superfund sites is General Electric-owned NBC.

General Electric is a huge conglomerate. I’m sure the folks in the news room will insist that they are free to follow their stories wherever they lead. But do you really believe that anyone who works for a company that expects more than $3 billion in revenue from rebuilding Iraq is going to be fearless about biting the hand that feeds it? Flash Occam’s Razor in a confrontation with Tim Russert and Chris Matthews and Andrea Mitchell and Pete Williams and tell me what explanation best fits the data. There is room to speculate about the motives behind their dereliction: simple cowardice could also explain some of their actions. Maybe laziness explains most of the rest. But consider this: Russert defends the exchange with Libby detailed in Libby’s indictment as a call in which Libby complained about how the network had covered Libby – a complaint Russert says he passed directly to the president of NBC News. What Russert did may be an appropriate response at People Magazine, but here betrays dangerous levels of dysfunctional symbiosis.

And Russert’s weekly kabuki theater, in which he failed for two years to so much as acknowledge his own role in the underlying scandal he discussed? Russert defends by saying that Fitzgerald asked him to remain silent. But Fitzgerald’s white hat does not change the fact that Russert yet again considered himself more beholden to his subjects than to his audience. So pick your poison: pretend to report a story without disclosing your own role in it, or pretend to report on government while doing billions of dollars in business with it. You will find both sins almost everywhere you look at NBC.

(I consider outlier Keith Olbermann to be a blogger who happens to have a TV show. And please note that his show seems to be barely tolerated by his corporate masters who, lest we forget, already pulled the plug on Donahue.)

NBC is not alone, of course, in its malfeasance. The folks at Time magazine who sat on the explosive story it had about White House lies concerning Rove’s leaking to Matt Cooper – precisely because the story could have turned the election – surely they call themselves journalists. The shot-callers at CBS who repeatedly yanked the still-unseen 60 Minutes story about the forged Niger yellow cake documents during the same time frame – I’m sure they are journalists, too. And Bob Woodward – elevated into the pantheon by his Watergate work, now utterly addicted to the quo(tes) that his sycophantic books transform into quid, shamelessly shilling for his source – a journalist through and through.

What we do is different. When it comes down to it, the raison d’etre of blogging is the dissemination of information. Most of us make little or nothing from our efforts; we just want our truths to be heard. That used to be first principle of journalism, but today it is not. The pathetic, conflicted coverage of the Plame case proves it. Journalism is now more about gilt than guilt; it is an object lesson in the ease with which the powerful can co-opt the ambitious.

Perhaps the most repugnant thing to come out of Fitzgerald’s investigation, and the most damning indictment of today’s journalism is this: we now know that smart and experienced senior White House officials banked their entire criminal enterprise on their certainty that journalists would protect them by strenuously resisting the efforts of the special prosecutor to pull their toothless gums from the teat of easy access. That is what journalism has become.

If what Judith Miller and the New York Times and CBS and Time and NBC did is journalism, if what Tim Russert and Chris Matthews and Andrea Mitchell and Robert Novak continue to do is journalism, then I want no part of it. I find far more honor in the term “blogger” than in the charred, empty husk of the word “journalist.”

So call me a blogger, please. Journalists turn my stomach.

Originally Posted by John Steinberg

So call me a blogger, please. Journalists turn my stomach.

Until recently, I wasn't heavily into the conspiracy theory perspectives that the mainstream media (MSM) is heavily promoting a collective agenda. The Rovegate mess has made me more of a convert. The gap between domestic and Arab coverage of Iraq contributes as well. Whether it is corporate interests, brown nosing government sources to get inside access, improving ratings by telling people what they want to hear, or all of the above, we have post modern reality being presented by the MSM.

Problem is, the bloggers have their own agendas. Anyone with enough energy to put out a blog worth reading has an agenda. Thus, as we move past the First Wave bards and town criers, to Second Wave newspapers and broadcasts to Third Wave networked information, it won't be the Establishment that determines which worldview is presented.

The reader can select bloggers that will tell him whatever he wants to hear.

My news draw-bar has CNN, Google News and BBC web page URLs. I've got the Times, Post and Wired RSS feeds. So what. That gives me the mainstream perspective of what I'm supposed to hear. I've also got Al Jazeera, Al Ahram and Pravda URLs up there for good luck. I've also been doing Firedoglake, for an anti Bush / Rove / Cheeny spin.

But I don't trust any of it. Anyone who visits these pages knows how many sets of blinders with various tinted colored lenses are available.

Yes. So, perhaps being a blogger is more honorable these days than being a journalist. Leaks from inside government are such a large part of gathering the news these days that one has to mouthpiece the party line or one looses the necessary leak sources required to be a 'journalist'.

But this does not entirely solve the problem of spin. Those who are net savvy enough to chase the web for alternate perspectives often enough choose information sources more spun than the main stream. As we get more and more sources of truth, will we each select the truth we most want to hear?

Signs of a neverending third turning...

"I've joined with the veterans groups to call on Congress to protect the flag of the United States in the Constitution of the United States. (Applause.) In June, the House of Representatives voted for a constitutional amendment to ban flag desecration. I urge the United States Senate to pass this important amendment. (Applause.)At this hour, a new generation of Americans is defending our flag and our freedom in the first war of the 21st century."

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

Until recently, I wasn't heavily into the conspiracy theory perspectives that the mainstream media (MSM) is heavily promoting a collective agenda. The Rovegate mess has made me more of a convert.

9/11 made me a convert:

Brigham Young physics professor thinks bombs, not planes, toppled World Trade Center

also of interest:

FREUDIAN SLIP: Silverstein talks about the Demolition of WTC7 on PBS documentary (video)

Generation x: the answer to everything. Too bad we're drunk, lazy morons who don't run for office.

Originally Posted by Gregory Rodriguez

"Thirteen years ago, Neil Howe, co-author of "Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069," predicted that "after midlife, boomers will take on a darker tone. They stigmatize what they don't approve of…. They scream down those they don't agree with." He was right. We're now halfway into the roughly 30 years that boomers are likely to hold power, and there is no indication that the politics of polarization is easing.

It would be difficult to find two more polarizing figures than the two presidents who came of age in the 1960s, Clinton and Bush. Now that boomers hold a majority of seats in the House of Representatives and a plurality in the Senate, Congress is more divided than at any time since the end of World War II, and political parties have become more ideologically pure.

The good news is that the generations waiting in the wings tend to be less partisan and ideologically devout than the boomers. Surveys indicate that younger adults are less likely to identify with either major political party or vote a straight party ticket. A disproportionately large percentage of Generation Xers, born roughly between 1961 and 1981, identify as political independents.

The bad news, however, is that Xers have been so turned off by boomer-era politics that they are the slowest generation in American history to acquire political power. As of 2004, Generation X held only 5% of national leadership posts. By contrast, the year the first wave of boomers turned 42, they already controlled 13%.

It is ironic that the political emergence of the Xers, a generation that is routinely maligned for not exhibiting boomer-like passion, might be the antidote to the politics of polarization. But what this nation needs now more than ever is to have the so-called slackers of Generation X run for office. Only when they dominate the ranks of political leaders will we be able to finally declare the 1960s officially over."