Written by fools?

"Picking at the scraps"

Today's post is about possible things that can happen in a democracy - picking at the scraps of today's stories that are of interest to me. I have chosen both negative and positive items. All of the stories today were gathered from Newsgator.

Possible? It begins with Joseph Rago's negative opinion about blogs. Found in the Opinion Journal - WSJ.com/ of (12/20/06), its very erudite author wrote a stinging piece about blogs entitled,

INFORMATION AGE-The Blog Mob 'Written by fools to be read by imbeciles.'" I begin with a quote of his opinion about my part of the political spectrum: "Leftward fatuities* too are easily found: The fatuity* matters more than the politics. If the blogs have enthusiastically endorsed Joseph Conrad's judgment of newspapering--"written by fools to be read by imbeciles"--they have also demonstrated a remarkable ecumenicalism in filling out that same role themselves.

He makes several other interesting and perhaps valid points about the very democratic blogosphere. His words caused me to think critically about my own writing. Quoting further,

. . . The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps.
More success is met in purveying opinion and comment. Some critics reproach the blogs for the coarsening and increasing volatility of political life. Blogs, they say, tend to disinhibit. Maybe so. But politics weren't much rarefied when Andrew Jackson was president, either. The larger problem with blogs, it seems to me, is quality. Most of them are pretty awful. Many, even some with large followings, are downright appalling.
Every conceivable belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion . . .
. . . Of course, once a technosocial force like the blog is loosed on the world, it does not go away because some find it undesirable. So grieving over the lost establishment is pointless, and kind of sad. But democracy does not work well, so to speak, without checks and balances. And in acceding so easily to the imperatives of the Internet, we've allowed decay to pass for progress.

*Labeling blogs with prejoritive terms such as "fatuity" seems to me to represent an elitist's lazy overgeneralization. I thought I knew what the word meant but, as usual, I looked it up just to make sure. Here is what I found at Dictionary.com: "fatuous" means "devoid of intelligence," "stupid," "unreal or illusory." Perhaps my posts are all of those things. I think not. However, I will admit I can come across as smug and self-satisfied at times. It is a tendency I should avoid. Quoting further,

American Heritage Dictionary . . fat·u·ous (fāch'ōō-əs) Pronunciation Key. adj.
Foolish or silly, especially in a smug or self-satisfied way: "'Don't you like the poor lonely bachelor?' he yammered in a fatuous way" (Sinclair Lewis). See Synonyms at foolish.

Today presents the possibility of the international community's celebrating NASA's progress in constructing the International Space Station. It is the story that I will be watching most closely. Realistically, there is the possibility of either a terribly negative outcome, or a very positive one. I join the world with hopes for happy landings of the shuttle Discovery. Reuters has the story of NASA's plans for making sure the STS-116 crew is home for Christmas. To quote,

NASA sent equipment and ground crews from Florida to a little-used landing strip in New Mexico which, based on weather forecasts, appeared the most likely landing site for the shuttle Discovery on Friday.
. . . The White Sands Space Harbor site in New Mexico has been used for a landing only once -- and that was 24 years ago -- when the shuttle program was just two years old.
. . . A landing at White Sands means a longer and more costly turnaround for NASA, which is under pressure to finish construction on the International Space Station before 2010, when the shuttle fleet is retired.

It is, unfortunately, also possible to be homeless on the holidays. As a retired clinical social worker, I am always keenly aware of the issues of poverty and the growing inequality between the very rich and the economically disadvantaged citizens of the USA. USA Today carried a sad and ironic story about a family who is living in a shelter near Washington, D.C. Quoting from the article,

Christine Fuller finds holiday kindness at unexpected moments, such as before sunrise at a bus stop 7 miles from the White House.
A bus driver sees her switching buses each weekday morning at 6:15 with four neatly dressed children, ages 6 to 10, as she escorts them to a before-school program. The driver lauds their behavior and says he wants to give each child a Christmas present.
Fuller doesn't know his name. He doesn't know hers. She says presents would be fine.
The bus driver also doesn't know that Fuller and her children are homeless. They've been living at a shelter since September. Fuller has a full-time job that pays her $23,000 a year but says she can't afford an apartment in this affluent suburb of Washington, D.C., where a typical two-bedroom apartment rents for $1,225 a month.
. . . A report released last week by the U.S. Conference of Mayors that analyzed homelessness in 23 cities said that in most of the cities, some homeless families have to split up in order to find shelter.
"This is just unacceptable," says Trenton, N.J., Mayor Douglas Palmer, the conference's president.
The Conference of Mayors report says requests for shelter rose 9% last year in the 23 cities surveyed. Housing affordability is the top problem, says Dennis Culhane, a University of Pennsylvania professor of social welfare policy. He says the government needs to use tax credits to push more investors and developers to build affordable apartments. He says it's much cheaper to give a housing subsidy to a homeless family than to put the family in a shelter, which can cost $50,000 for a 14-month stay.

Possible causes of poverty are documented by Anup Shah, who maintains a very rich and varied website called Global Issues.

Another negative and very real possibility is that poverty-stricken Palestine could descend into a full scale civil war. Democracy has been at work in Palestine for many months now, but the area is still very fragile. And the U.S. has missed many possibilities to again assist a democracy, with its stubborn and short-sighted refusal to deal with Hamas. The story was carried in the Washington Post, from which I quote:

GAZA CITY, Dec. 22 -- A fierce gun battle broke out between rival Palestinian factions in Gaza City early Friday, underscoring the fragility of a two-day-old truce that had largely halted violence here.
The street fighting erupted when Hamas militiamen tried to free two kidnapped gunmen, including a senior member of the governing Islamic group. It died down after 20 minutes as Muslim clerics and other mediators worked to restore the cease-fire. Nobody was hurt despite the battle's intensity, health officials said.
Hamas said its fighters exchanged fire with Fatah-affiliated gunmen responsible for the abductions. The battle spread quickly, drawing in guards outside the residence of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah and militiamen guarding the home of Foreign Minister Mahmoud Zahar of Hamas. Abbas was not in Gaza at the time.

It is still possible for democracy to work in Iran. Despite the current U.S. administration's short-sighted and stubborn unwillingness to deal with this democracy, their people continue to go to the polls and vote. Iran's population is very young, very mixed and very willing to change political horses along the way. The Financial Times has the story:

Final results of municipal elections in the Iranian capital, Tehran, on Thursday have provided evidence that Iran’s reformist politicians - heavily defeated in parliamentary elections in 2004 and presidential elections in 2005 - are making a tentative comeback.
. . . Some conservatives have criticised Mr Ahmadi-Nejad for spending too much time confronting the United States and its allies and failing to deal with Iran’s struggling economy.
The mixed nature of the next council may lead to a coalition between reformists and Mr Qalibaf, who is likely to remain mayor and use the position as a platform from which to launch a bid for the presidency in 2009. Iran’s reformists are hoping to use their victory as a platform for the next parliamentary elections in 2008.

The possibility of establishing a working democracy in Iraq remains an open question. The armed forces, brave fighting men and women, have written magnificent chapters in the war story as they have made the very best they could of the increasingly impossible situation. However, the current administration's original justification and planning for going to war in Iraq was, it seems to me, the story "written by fools." It has some extremely negative chapters, among the most awful for the military, is the one reporting that Marines have been charged with a number of murders in Haditha. The New York Times article begins,

Four marines were charged yesterday with murder in the killings of two dozen Iraqi civilians, including at least 10 women and children, in the village of Haditha last year, military officials said at Camp Pendleton, Calif.
Military prosecutors also charged four officers, including a lieutenant colonel in charge of the First Marine Regiment’s Third Battalion, with dereliction of duty and failure to ensure that accurate information about the killings was delivered up the Marine Corps’ chain of command. A military investigation has found evidence that Marine officers may have obscured certain facts in the case.
The Marines could punish other ranking officers administratively in weeks to come. But the criminal charges filed yesterday against Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, 42, and three other officers reflect an unusually aggressive judicial reaction by military prosecutors to a massacre that has damaged the military’s credibility with Iraqi officials and civilians, military justice experts said.

For those of us who celebrate the holidays at the end of each year, we naturally gravitate towards positive stories. We wish for "peace and good will towards all men." But it is not to be so. Violence happens with frightening frequency. Not everyone's life is peaceful. The best we can do is look for ways to balance the negatives with positives, sugar-coating neither.

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My "creative post" at Southwest Blogger is currently about the space program.