![]() NEW FOCUS! So dumb! As we prepare for a painful new focus, we retell a sorry old tale: // link // print // previous // next //
TUESDAY, JANUARY 4, 2011 Lets take a look at the record: Facts play almost no role in our culture. For one minor seasonal example, ask yourselves this, sports fans: How has the Southeastern Conference actually fared, in the past decade, against the other major conferences? If youre a college football fan, youve constantly heard familiar claims about the circuits superior status. But how have SEC teams actually fared, on the field, in actual games against Big Ten teams? Against teams from the mighty Pac-10? Since facts play almost no role in our culture, well guess that youve never seen such data. Next Monday, as we prep for this years title game, well hand out some actual facts.
Computer ratings arent magic, of course: This year, before the bowl games began, Jeff Sagarins USA Today computer ranked the SEC second-best. Click here to see his ratings, as of December 12. Note how far down the Big Ten was. Such ratings arent magic, of courseand no, they arent quite objective.
PART 1SAME OLD STORY (permalink): As a people, are we Americans smart enough to run a modern democracy? In one major sector, the answer is nohas been no for a very long time. For many years, mainstream press culture has run on The Dumb. Just consider one way the New York Times chose to kick off the new year. Dan Barrys piece ran above the fold on the famous papers front pagein the January 1 edition. The sheer inanity of the piece was presaged in the headline:
Say what? Its truethat headline makes no obvious sense, except for the way it conveys a tired, inane old stereotype. But as Barrys report began, any doubt about its dumbness was quickly swept away:
Intriguing! According to Barry, 79 million baby boomers are nursing some disappointment about how their lives have turned out. Only the dumbest of the very dumb bunnies write news reports of this typenews reports which turn on silly clichés about tens of millions of people. And this piece did appear as a news report; there was nothing to indicate that it was meant as commentary or (good God!) as some sort of analysis. Lets be fair! Before long, Barry was offering disclaimers about his own foolish method. He noted that no one person can represent all 79 million members of a generation; he quoted an expert who warns against generalizing about baby boomers, especially when it concerns politics. Barry even noted, in passing, that members of this generation held different views, right from the start, about a wide range of affairs, including the civil rights movement and the cultural changes associated with the 1960s. (Barry has heard that the hippie contingent of boomers was somewhat unlike the Young Americans for Freedom contingent.) But Barrys entire news report was built on tired old generalizations. Heres what happened when his expert, book-writer Stephen M. Gillon, cleared his throat and spoke:
In a nation of 300 million souls, theres always some expert out there somewhere tossing off various fatuous comments. Unfortunately, these comments often appear on the front page of our most famous paper, advanced by the unimpressive crowd comprising our mainstream press corps. Good God, this piece is foolish! Barry ends up profiling Buffalos Aloysius Nachreiner on the day he turned 65; allegedly, Nachreiner was the very first of the 79 million boomers. How foolish was Barrys piece, which turned on the notion of massive self-involvement? Nachreiner, a blue collar worker who is still working, seems like the least self-involved person on Earth. By way of contrast, Barry published Pull Me Up: A Memoir, in 2004, when he was just 46. If you want to bore yourself to tears with excerpts from this compilation of self-involved pap, just look it up at Amazon, where you can search inside. Groan! According to Publishers Weekly, heres part of what youll find:
Six years ago, you had to seek out Barrys self-involved piffle at a bookstore. On January 1, the Times put the thoughts of this fatuous fellow above the fold on its front page. Can we talk? Barrys New Years Day news report was really just stunningly dumb. But by whatever turn of the screw, the mainstream press has long since become, on balance, a fatuous pseudo-elitea small, pampered, very dumb mafia. Overpaid, underwhelming and inter-married, they routinely clutter the national discourse with the type of silly piffle which drove Barrys report. Just check the clownish compendia littering the Times as the old year folded: Check this fatuous piece from December 30: The 110 Things New Yorkers Talked About in 2010. (Number 2 thing they supposedly talked about: Peewee Hermans comeback.) Check Gail Collins fatuous End-of-the-Year Quiz, with which she killed her December 31 column. (Inevitably, topics included Bristol Palin, Sarah Palin and Barbara Boxers hair.) An equally silly end-of-year piece appeared on December 29. Mercifully, we cant find it on-line. Alas! Your upper-end press corps has floundered this way for a good long while now. Modern nations really cant function this way. Modern nations cant run on The Dumb. Weve detailed this problem since 98. This year, lets adopt a new focus.
Tomorrowpart 2: Iris DeMent to Digby
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