Cotton Kills
Requiem for an Informed Electorate
A new book by a University of Texas journalism professor argues that the current generation--the so-called Millienials--don't give a hoot for news. According to the release for the book, young folks today describe what the mainstream media produces as follows: "garbage, lies, one-sided, propaganda, repetitive and boring." Furthermore, the majority "don't feel that being informed is important."
In the press release for the book, the author laments: “In the future we may not have anybody consuming news. We can’t continue to ignore the problem. The older generation is dying out. Who will be the role model encouraging future generations to be informed?”
An item about the book has kicked off a fairly heated discussion today at the popular media blog JimRomenesko.com. A similar discussion ensued in our own offices when CALIFORNIA contributor, and former newsman, Frank Viviano submitted the Free Speech (that is, opinion) piece that runs in the latest issue. Entitled "The Empty Town Hall," Franks essay begins:
Somewhere, deep in my jaded heart, the America I want to believe in still lives, and it has a very specific image: Freedom of Speech, a Norman Rockwell oil painting commissioned in 1943 by The Saturday Evening Post. My father hung a print of it in our home when I was growing up in the 1950s. Its central figure, a prototype everyman dressed in humble work clothes, has risen to speak at a town hall meeting.
All heads in the packed room are turned toward him, all attention riveted on his words. For me, Rockwell’s idealized town hall scene came to represent essential, inarguable values: the freedom to speak, of course, but even more, the collective engagement implied in its crowded seats and turned heads, the palpable sense of community that made informed opinion and debate meaningful.
Of the countless monuments toppled in the Internet Age, few are more iconic than Rockwell’s version of democracy, which was so tangible that a child could grasp its suggestive power. In less than two decades, the communications revolution has emptied the town hall as Rockwell envisioned it—and upended Tip O’Neill’s celebrated axiom that “all politics is local.”
Viviano goes on to argue that the body politic is not only less well-informed today, but that the lack of civic engagement can be traced to the demise of newspapers--especially regional newspapers, like the ones Viviano himself worked for. But okay, setting aside the self-interested aspect of Frank's argument, we still wondered (and argued) amongst ourselves about its validity. Are people today really less well-informed than generations past? Was the Town Hall in 1943 really filled with impassioned and informed citizens, or was it just what the opening of the story unwittingly suggests--less a toppled monument than a bullshit version of the past?
Your turn. Discuss.
Music Theory
From "The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century," by The New Yorker's music critic, Alex Ross:
Charles Seeger was father to folk legend Pete Seeger. CALIFORNIA wrote about the Berkeley Department of Music here.The story begins, oddly and aptly, with Charles Seeger, the future dogmatician of American Popular Front music, who came out to the University of California at Berkeley in 1912 to start a music department. The idea of teaching music in a university was novel enough that Seeger’s work fell under the purview of the Department of Agriculture. He held classes in a YMCA, in the Hearst Mining Building, and in a “smelly old house” on Bancroft Way. With no curriculum in place, Seeger felt free to introduce unorthodox ideas. He presented his theory of “dissonant counterpoint,” with its anticipations of twelve-tone practice, and also exposed students to early music, folk music, popular music, and non-Western traditions.
We Are Mostly Not Us
Currently, one of the most emailed stories at The New York Times is Carl Zimmer's fascinating piece on what's being call the human microbiome, "Tending the Body's Microbial Garden." It's a subject we examined in our own pages last Fall when contributor Brendan Buhler wrote "The Teeming Metropolis of You." Buhler's article begins:
You are mostly not you.That is to say that 90 percent of the cells residing in your body are not human cells, they are microbes. Viewed from the perspective of most of its inhabitants, your body is not so much the temple and vessel of the human soul as it is a complex and ambulatory feeding mechanism for a methane reactor in your small intestine.
This is the kind of information microbiologists like to share at dinner parties, and you should too, especially if you can punctuate it with a belch.
We're happy to let you know that Brendan's story has been selected for inclusion in the 2012 Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology -- the second time CALIFORNIA has been selected for that particular series. Pretty impressive, no? Belch.
Excuse us.
Tough Bitch
With Earth Day approaching it's a good time to remember the late evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, who earned her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1963. Margulis, who was once married to the astronomer Carl Sagan, was famous for advancing the theory of endosymbiosis to explain the origin of eukaryotic cells; in short, the complex cells arose from interactions between various bacteria. Now widely viewed as a major scientific breakthrough, the theory was attacked for many years, and Margolis never backed down in her defense of it.
Once, when asked whether she enjoyed being controversial, she answered that she didn't think of her ideas as controversial. She thought of them as right.
Nevertheless, contoversy followed her and she later attracted criticism for her embrace of the Gaia Hypothesis which she advanced alongside the atmospheric scientist James Lovelock in the early 70s. According to the hypothesis, Earth acts as a giant, self-regulating organism. Unlike Lovelock, she eschewed some of the more spiritual language attached to the hypothesis, which took its name from the Earth goddess in Greek mythology, but she also recognized the need to speak in metaphors and to accommodate the cultural milieu if scientific ideas were to enjoy any influence.
"Gaia is a tough bitch," she once wrote. The living Earth, she continued, is "a system that has worked for over three billion years without people. This planet's surface and its atmosphere and environment will continue to evolve long after people and prejudice are gone."
Lynn Margulis is now gone. She died last November at age 73.
Berkeley in Books: Evacuation Order #19
Julie Otsuka has been awarded the 2012 PEN/Faulkner Award for her second novel, The Buddha in the Attic. Otsuka, a California native who studied art at Yale and later took her MFA at Columbia, opened her first novel, When the Emperor was Divine, in Berkeley, a few months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when, by Executive Order, all Japanese and Japanese-Americans were being removed to internment camps. Here's how it opens:
The sign had appeared overnight. On billboards and trees and the backs of bus-stop benches. It hung in the window of Woolworth's. It hung by the entrance to the YMCA. It was stapled to the door of the municipal court and nailed, at eye level, to every telephone pole along University Avenue. The woman was returning a book to the library when she saw the sign in a post office window. It was a sunny day in Berkeley in the spring of 1942 and she was wearing new glasses and she could see everything clearly for the first time in weeks. She no longer had to squint but she squinted out of habit anyway. She read the sign from top to bottom, then still squinting, she took out a pen and read the sign from top to bottom again. The print was small and dark. Some of it was tiny. She wrote down a few words on the back of a bank receipt, then turned around and when home and began to pack.
The Piracy Issue
Somali pirates, patent trolls, phishing scams. It's a wild world out there. The Spring 2012 issue of CALIFORNIA seizes some of these troublesome trends by the throat. Go here to the see the online version.
