Author: Hans Eisenbeis

We hate being the center of the national news when it means yet another school shooting. And we hate having to write this: What possible service can this news be to the Plain People of America? It most certainly is news, even though we detect a certain low-level anomie—even a perverse detachment developing, as each new shooting story trickles into the living rooms of an increasingly jaded public. Normally, these sorts of stories are justified in newsrooms under the “protect the children” code that all professional journalists learn today—there is much danger in the world, even (especially?) in its most isolated corners. We report on these sorts of tragedies in the hopes of averting future tragedies. Right?

But that would require some pragmatic answers to complex problems. (More security? Trigger locks? Outlaw video games and trench coats? Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ? Uh, no, we were thinking a bit more serious than that.) Instead, what we see is something of a circus of gory detail, the voyeuristic stenography (block that ironic headline, please) of reconstructing a crime scene, without a lot of analysis or thoughtful consideration. Most efforts to process such an incident are feeble, moralistic, empty, soft-headed. What is a reader or viewer left with? What is the take-away?

We can’t bear to read through the reams of sensational coverage (the silver lining of heinous news: Nice work, Bemidji Pioneer, drinks for everyone in the newsroom—after a tasteful moment of silence, of course), so we don’t really know what we’re talking about, frankly.

But one thing we did notice this morning was a humble little press release from the National Mental Health Association that linked to an important resource page: Bullying and What To Do About It. Here is a salient extract:

“Although its always been around, bullying should never be accepted as normal behavior. The feelings experienced by victims of bullying are painful and lasting. Bullies, if not stopped, can progress to more serious, antisocial behavior. Recent incidents of school violence show that bullying can have tragic consequences for individuals, families, schools, and entire communities.”

See, gaining a little insight into the news is a lot easier than anyone could hope.

We would never be so simple-minded as to suggest that certain geo-political situations bear any relationship at all to the insular, microcosmic, uniquely troubled world of the Red Lake reservation. But it makes a guy think.

If reporting terrible news actually made the world a better place, well, we should be on the threshold of an honest-to-God golden age. But all signs point in the other direction. Still, there are a few heroes of the dawning Post-American Sino-European world. (Pre-emptive rhetorical device: Forced to live? Or allowed to die? It’s how you frame the question, innit.)

We are pleased to report yet another first here at the magazine: Last night, we finally took a nap on that old seat-sprung couch over there. (Photographic evidence to the contrary was carefully staged.) This morning, there are lots of reasons why we might want to just close our eyes and make the world go away—but last night’s little episode of shut-eye was actually the direct consequence of the subscription model for online content.

Let’s explain. Many readers have commented on the simpatico they see between the magazine and radio—specifically the more playful versions of public radio—and we frequently work directly with MPR. The relationship extends from a basic story-telling ethic. Great radio, like a great magazine, does not waste words. It rewards you for listening by creating vivid mental pictures (in print, we have the luxury of giving you pictures, true, but we do not have the passive immediacy that a voice in your car has).

Anyway, our obsession with radio’s story-telling possibilities goes way back, predating even a short run of writing for Garrison Keillor. (He didn’t like us very much.) It goes back to the 80s, specifically to Sunday nights in Eugene, Oregon, lying on our back on the carpet, staring at the ceiling, and listening to “Joe Frank: Work in Progress” on KLCC. And occasionally we drifted off, in a sort of narrative-induced trance. If you know Joe Frank’s work, you need no explanation—indeed, you realize any explanation is invariably feeble. Frank is typically described as “the master of noir radio,” but that implies that there really is something called “noir radio” and that there are other people producing it. (They aren’t. Well, they ARE, but they are not really being broadcast anywhere. The whole thing with radio is that it is a “push” technology—it comes to you. You get to be passive about it. Any radio-style production that uses a pull model—you go and get it because you know you want it—is probably doomed to fail.) Anyway, noir radio, if there is such a thing, is this: creative monologues, dialogues, fictional sketches, audio experimentation, typically produced with or without sound effects, soundtracks, sound loops, and so on. Ira Glass occasionally tinkers with the form, but less so in recent years. Keillor’s “Guy Noir” has nothing to do with it.

Since we ended up working in a parallel industry, we actually got friendly with Joe Frank a few years back, and we commissioned a story on KCRW, the legendary Santa Monica radio station that used to employ Joe. (A long aside, for extra credit: KCRW is frequently cited as one of the prototypes for our shiny new radio station, the Current. Which reminds us of a conversation we had over the weekend—a smart friend indeed was pointing out that public radio’s original insight was that commercial radio couldn’t or wouldn’t do news in a way that fully took advantage of the medium. Commercial news at the time was pretty much what commercial news is today—top-of-the-hour soundbites and summaries, barely going beyond what in print would be a headline and subheadline. NPR’s genius, born at St. John’s abbey lo these many years ago, was seeing that the listening public could short-circuit the traditional ad-based model and pay directly for more substantive news and thoughtful round-the-clock broadcast journalis. Now, the genius of MPR, and visionaries like Bill Kling and Sara Lutman, is that ~music~ is the next frontier of public broadcasting. We’ve been meaning to say this for a while: it is very gratifying indeed to see that there are still some new tricks left in this old dog!)

So we heard a while ago that there was supposedly some strange falling out with KCRW (and its legendary director, Ruth Seymour); but in hind sight, it might be that Joe Frank had a falling out with public radio in general—although we note that he recently participated in the pledge drive of New York’s WMFU, where they still broadcast back issues of his many, many radio shows. Joe seems to have little or no interest in producing new shows for radio. Instead, he has cast his lot with the Web, appealing directly to his fans to subsidize his work.

Last night we popped for a one-month subscription—feeling magnanimous, we guess, after becoming founding members of the Current—but then realizing we deserve no such pat on the back, having been public broadcasting free-loaders whenever the personal well had run dry. It is an interesting model; Joe is now producing a three or four new audio pieces per month, usually one long piece, several shorter pieces, sometimes posting short films based on his work, and so on.

We intend to make good use of our month-long subscription, and if it means naps every Sunday night on our couch, then so be it. We encourage you to do the same.

UPDATE: Readers have pointed out that there is an advertisement for The Current that pops up right over there, to the right of your screen. We–meaning me, the writer of this particular blog—have no control over which advertisements appear over there. Frankly, I don’t have a lot of control over what I end up writing about each day, either!

Every industry has its peer-reviewed awards competition, especially industries that are fueled mainly by ego and vanity the way the media industry is. There are serious awards and then there are somewhat ridiculous awards,but basically there are enough awards to make sure just about everyone can win something sometime. This has become such a cliche that one can really distinguish oneself these days by at least claiming never to have won an award for anything. This would be an asset for a couple of reasons, not the least of which would be evidence of strength of character, comfort in your own skin, a sort of clarity of vision to recognize that you do not want to belong to the club that would have you for a member.

Still, we cannot bear not to mention that the ASME finalists have been announced. As usual, the New Yorker dominates the field, and this is as it should be. We were especially gratified to see Louis Menand nominated in the commentary and criticism category, less so for Adam Gopnik. We love Adam, but mostly for technical reasons. Menand is just as smart and gifted, but he also happens to be genuinely funny and selfless; those are virtues of age that Gopnik may grow into, if he’s lucky. Other notable nominations: James Woolcott gets a much-deserved nod in the same category, and Ted Genoways—formerly of the Minnesota Historical Society Press—gets TWO count them TWO nominations for his Virginia Quarterly Review! Well done, fella! Notable ecxlusions: The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl, an unfailingly, jaw-droppingly great art critic, somehow slipped through the cracks, and neither the scrappy, sincere Salon nor the self-evidentally great Slate made the finals in the online category. (To be clear, without inside information, there is no way of knowing whether they even entered, which they’d have to do in order to be nominated as finalists. It is probably better not to ask. Eyes are red and skins are chafed right now.)

Now it is important to note that the “Ellies” (as they are known to us editor-types; they are also known as the national magazine awards) are an essentially credible merit badge worth bragging about, especially among other editor-types. We’re not sure the public cares a whole lot, and if they do, they are not going to be especially surprised that the New Yorker received ten nominations, nor that Vanity Fair received seven, and they certainly aren’t going to think that Vanity Fair must have turned a dramatic corner in the last year, since they were shut out of the nominations last year. (By the way, here is our national magazine award-winning writer—though, of course, she won years ago for her work in the New Yorker, not her work in The Rake, which we have not entered into the competition.)

But here some salient facts that may interest regular folks—and by regular folks, we mean people who are insanely and irrationally obsessed with glossy magazines. Unlike some idiotic magazine awards that are run like college alumni clubs, anyone can enter the national magazine awards. The Awards are juried by members of ASME—that is, the American Society of Magazine Editors. That is, the editors-in-chief whose magazines are competing against one another. Naturally, there are all kinds of personal issues, high levels of favoritism, a certain predisposition to celebrate that which has already been celebrated frequently, a compulsion to look more seriously at the magazines of editors who eat lunch at the Four Seasons, and so on. But there are just enough surprises to keep the whole thing generally on the up-and-up, and these are all basically good people with unimpeachable ethics. Plus, the awards are administered by the Columbia School of Journalism, which puts a very high premium indeed on credibility.

What is the price of vanity? To enter the ASME awards, applicants must submit $400 per entry (that’s for the general excellence category; $200 if you are a member of ASME; membership dues are generally in the range of $200-300 per year). Needless to say, smaller independent publishers find it difficult even to enter the competition—magazines that spend disproportionately on quality editorial content ) are the most disadvantaged of all, because they would benefit the most from national notice, while being the least able to afford the steep entry fee (we’d spend $400 on a page and a half in our magazine, and our writers need the money more than ASME does, probably). If you think about it, it would really be shameful if huge, powerful, intensely profitable companies like Conde Nast DIDN’T monopolize these sorts of awards, even if their editors weren’t favorably judging each other’s titles-—oh, but wait. They surely aren’t allowed to do that, and knowing what we do about the insanely cut-throat culture inside Conde Nast, there is no guarantee that the dogs wouldn’t kill each other if they were caged together.)

The ASMEs are the Oscars for magazines, and that is not saying much, to be sure, but it is what we have. We have wondered for years now why magazines are conspicuously excluded from the Pulitzers—a cut far above the Ellies in terms of public prestige—when that award is spread from the daily fish wraps, to hardcover books, to freakin stageplays. What’s up with THAT?

Anyway, if if the Ellies have their limitations, they still give us hope each year that there ARE a number of magazine editors (and publishers and writers) out there who DO use their powers for good, even when the whole world is pushing them to be evil.

UPDATE: Because of bad wording that we are too lazy to edit right now, we implied the opposite of what we meant to say out loud somewhere in this little taradiddle: We did, in fact, enter in one category, GE. Alas, we did not escape relegation. If we had, we would not be here talking to you right now, we’d be drinking martinis across the street.

Yesterday, we had the pleasure of speaking to the Minnesota Book Publisher’s Roundtable. Even though we were running late and trying to duck the falling ceiling timbers, we managed to make it to our appointment, where we met old friends and made some new ones.

One friend mentioned to us that the Pioneer Press had last weekend published an item on polar explorer Will Steger, a man who is near and dear to our hearts after his very generous gifts to The Rake. We’d actually been thinking about Steger on the way over to St. Paul, as we heard reports from Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, who are presently trekking across the Arctic again.

On top of all that, we had a terrible desire to get an early start on St. Patrick’s Day tippling—our generally high spirits had been deflated by the unbelievably depressing news that our elected officials in the UNited States Senate had voted narrowly to allow oil drilling in the Arcitic National Wildlife Refuge. (Steger and Senator Mark Dayton have travelled together to ANWR; few people understand better than these gents that fragile polar environments are the best barometers we have for the health of the entire globe. What we are already doing to these wildernesses, at a great distance, is itself criminal, and now we’re going to simply rejoin chickens and eggs.) So let’s be clear about this: Effectively the vote of ONE PERSON, in the entire United States, has resulted in a razor-thin majority to allow a complete reversal of a longstanding trust—resulting in the permanent desecration of national property for the short-term profiteering of the oil industry and a handful of belligerent Alaskans. (The vote was 51 to 49.) President Bush, ever the master of simple and moving, if reductionist , slogans had this to say about the momentous decision:”This will help us get some more oil reserves on the books.”

We are still almost too angry to see straight, but we need to vent on a few issues here. First, thank you very much to Senator Norm Coleman who “kept a campaign promise” and was one of seven Republicans to vote against opening ANWR. Second, shame on Hawaii Democrats Ionouye and Akaka. We’d very much like to know how these fine gentlemen—normally a real credit to their state, their country, their people, and their party—justify their vote. Is there some special caucus for states that are not a part of the contiguous “lower forty-eight” that would compell them to side with the money-grabbing, self-serving, screw-you-me-first, nevermind-the- grandchildren-I-want-mine, God-gave-us-oil-to-make-us-rich Republicans of Alaska?

We note that Senator Akaka, in particular, sits on the Senate’s Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. His website describes his seat there in the following way:

“This post serves the Senator’s longstanding commitments to safeguard our precious natural resources.”

Perhaps he could tell the Plain People of America how voting to open ANWR to oil drilling comports with this statement.

And we can’t help wondering what would happen to Hawaii’s lei industry if the Big Island were surrounded by oil rigs, and its volcanoes porcupined with geo-thermal taps.

UPDATE: We poked around in the Hawaii newspapers, and learned that the good senators from Hawaii chose to frame this issue as one of native (indigenous peoples’) rights. Apparently, there are a number or local inuit tribes that strongly favor oil drilling. (Well, duh. “Think of the money! We’ll be rich, rich, RICH!—cough, cough.”) So we have the very bizarre phenomenon of a tyranny of the (razor thin) majority passing a law that certain Democrats justify in their minds by framing as an issue of minority rights– in other words, all Americans must now agree to allow their property–their legacy–to be turned over to the profit of a very few, whether they be Inuit or Exxon.

We have been flooded with letters from readers who want to know, apropos of yesterday’s edition, whether there have been any writers banished from the pages of The Rake for various misdemeanors, infractions, transgressions, or naughty behavior.

Yes, there have been many. The most celebrated example of a writer banishment at The Rake is, of course, the legendary St. Paul writer Larry Wyler. In his 2002 critical review of The Rake for The Newer York, Wyler viciously attacked our magazine. It was not necessary, really, to read beyond the headline—”Never Mind The Rake, Grab the Gun and the Shovel.”

We really shouldn’t say more than that, because the wound was deep, and the tears still spring to our eyes with alarming ease. Needless to say, Wyler and his agent and his publisher and his kith and his ken are not welcome here. We might reconsider, under very specific circumstances. Like, for example, if he submitted a story for us to publish.

Another celebrated case is Dorian Hayes, a fine writer, whom we approached on bended knee years ago to write for us. Reading his published work elsewhere, we felt like we were kindred spirits, lost together on the cruel seas of post-industrial anomie. Hayes produced some of our most memorable early features, including a seven-part series on Bassett Creek that won a cordon bleu in the Hormel Awards for Meat and Meat-Related Journalism. Hayes, it is true, was socially intolerable—never introduced us to his friends, rarely paid his tab, drank to excess, stuck chewing gum to the bottom of our desk. Worst of all, he refused to use the serial comma, despite frequent warnings. Ultimately, it was Dorian Hayes or us, and we decided on us. He has not appeared in the magazine since his 1989 interviews with Steven Soderbergh (“Sex, Lies, and Videotape”) and Peter Greenaway (“The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover.”)

Finally, we put Mr. Jem Casey on a long boat to China for a number of infractions. First, Casey found it impossible to write critical reviews of films, books, or CDs without referring, at length, to Nick Drake. This was compounded by his energetic hatred of children. Then there was the arrest for wearing spurs and carrying a Colt forty-five on the Light Rail (also a charge of public urination, later dropped). The great whoopie-cushion fiasco was the final straw.

We never got around to mentioning Roger Angell’s nice little remembrance of his step father, E.B. White, of a few weeks ago. It didn’t add a lot to the canon, as far as the personal and professional lives of Andy and Katherine Angell White, other than the lovely image of them working across the hallway from each other—the writer and the editor at their antipodes, which Roger Angell describes in a memorable turn-of-phrase that is certainly worthy of his stepdad:

“Soon the noises of her typing out another letter to Harold Ross or Gus Lobrano are joined by the slower clatter of his Underwood: a New England light industry is again in full gear, pouring out its high-market daily product, and the labor force, for the moment, seems content. Soon it will be lunchtime.”

The other interesting aspect of the piece was Roger’s thoughtful meditation on the Whites’ complimentary cases of hypochondria. One of the things we mourned about the only biography that has ever been written about Mrs. White, an above-average personal history by an amateur biographer, was that it dwelled heavily on her later years, and gave the impression that she was constantly afflicted with one dread disease or another—to the exclusion of what a singular role she had in shaping and maintaining the voice of the New Yorker throughout her life. (This topic has been given short shrift in every book ever written about the New Yorker, including Ben Yagoda’s excellent “About Town” and Thomas Kunkel’s “Genius in Disguise.” There are plenty of bread crumbs for the serious historian, though, sprinkled through the published “Letters From the Editor” in which Harold Ross cannot hide the fact that Katherine was his right-hand-woman from almost the beginning.) Roger toys with the idea that the White’s hypochondria was actually an important expression of their dependence and love for one another, and a meaningful development in their identities in later life, not an artifice or an affectation.

The other thing we noticed: In discussing Andy’s main gift to writing, which was a sacred committment to clarity, Roger slipped a sly inside-joke into his piece:

“Clarity is the message of “The Elements of Style,” the handbook he based on an early model written by Will Strunk, a professor of his at Cornell, which has helped more than ten million writers—the senior honors candidate, the rewriting lover, the overburdened historian—through the whichy thicket.”

This was, of course, a gentle slap at Tom Wolfe, the most high-profile case of a well-known writer who has been excommunicated by the New Yorker. The cause? Wolfe’s most famous early magazine story was a 1966 takedown of William Shawn written for Clay Felker at New York magazine. The title of that piece was “Tiny Mummies,” and it poked a great deal of fun—at the apparent exepnse of the truth—at the New Yorker’s intense, well-oiled machine of old-fashioned prose. He lampooned the style as being full of “whichy thickets.”

Ever since, professional writers have held Wolfe in a kind of state of horror-envy. There is no higher aspiration in the business than being published in the great ship of state once helmed by Ross and Shawn; the converse is that there is no greater transgression than disrespecting it. There is no consolation for permanent exile—such are the contingencies of an icon—and we think we can detect the bitterness in almost everything the dapper southern gentleman writes.

There is fire falling from the sky, the timbered ceilings are barely holding, the low-pile carpet is soggy with rising bile, the white boards are weeping away the month’s strategy, the troops are rebelling, the dogs are snarling, the elevator alarms are bawling.

No, but the new issue of the magazine is due to the printer this week, which means we begin to slough off on this here blog. No time to muck around with the internal politics of the New York Times, no time to argue the finer points of punctuation, no time to gripe about writers and poets who childishly refuse to capitalize their initials—nor to celebrate the brave editors who refuse to comply.

But we do note with a small fizzy kick of pleasure that CJ, our friend over at the Star Tribune Newspaper of the Twin Cities, seems to believe that she has a copyright on the facts. It would seem that someone over at Page Six clipped a tragi-comic item she penned back in February regarding some charity event or another, about some quaint risposte between vulgar comedian, schoolmarmish grandmother, and the princely sum of $25 thousand.

We’ve been over this before—one man’s poaching is another man’s public information. We feel your pain, CJ, and wish to take this opportunity merely to suggest that no one is immune from the old Reach Around.

Now, we know that CJ would never pick up an item from any other gossip columnist, at least without a little credit. She is, after all, the hardest working woman in local print journalism, writing as often as three times per week, in a news-generating community that is an open-pit mine of rich gossip concerning professional athletes and the news readers who dig through their garbage. Also, occasionally, a movie star has a layover out at our International airport.

So when CJ asks, “Is there no honor among gossip columnists?” we think the answer is pretty obvious, but we’ll have to check first with our sources.

UPDATE: We have been asked by “Bewildered” to explain how we find time to read CJ during production week. Easy. Our rigorously adhered-to schedule and patented Deluxe Peerless Editorial System allows us to raise our nose from the grindstone at least once a day for a period of up to thirty seconds–precisely the amount of time it takes to read and digest CJ, when necessary.

We’ve never been huge fans of Steve Sack’s work, but that’s probably more to do with his medium than himself. Editorial cartooning is one of those dusty old traditions of publishing that we’re glad to see persist, without feeling terribly interested. Come to think of it, that’s true of newspapers as a whole—glad they’re around, but don’t feel we’re missing much when the subscription lapses. Still, editorial cartooning is one of the few bright spots in a trade that is otherwise in steep decline.

That explains why we were especially galled by the Pioneer-Press’s decision a couple years ago to drop Kirk Anderson. It seemed to many people to be yet another sign of end times at the dilapidated Knight-Ridder operation across town. Anderson resurfaced at the alt weekly— good for him, and good for them.

The thing about editorial cartoonists is that they seem to work harder than anyone else at the newspaper. While editors sit in business strategy meetings trying to conform the news to the interests of rich suburban readers, while the columnists sit on their thumbs two days out of every three, Sack publishes a new cartoon virtually each morning. There is no one else we can readily identify at the Strib who churns out this much work—of any quality. You might argue that there is nothing easier than expressing your opinion and getting paid to do it, but you would be wrong. The daily opinion part is itself a challenge, but attempting to be funny at the same time is about the hardest thing you can do in a seated position. Naturally, there are ups and there are downs, and the trick with succeeding in the media business is to get the average quality to the highest possible level and sustain it there for as long as you can.

For his sustained level of quality, and for his raw output alone, Sack certainly deserves the Scripps Howard National Journalism Award he just received as best editorial cartoonist in the nation—that’s a well-earned ten thousand dollar bonus, in our humble view.

The main virtue of the editorial cartoon is that it makes optimum use of its medium—in the best cases, it combines opinion, news, humor, and art in an instant visual snapshot that would not work as well in any other context, certainly not in broadcast journalism. At the same time, the editorial cartoon is the archetype for the one bright spot and growth area in the “news” business these days—the Daily Show, the Onion, the blogosphere, and all other iterations of hard news as soft entertainment turned up to eleven. This compares unfavorably with the general drift of newspapering these days, which is trying to make soft news (lifestyle magazine-type content) look and act like hard news, and also have it compete in the attention economy as entertainment—certainly a lost cause. In other words, most newspapers today (indeed, most magazines too) are trying to look and act like TV—while the true heroes such as Sack soldier on in the unglamorous backpages of a hollowed-out advertising vehicle.

Too busy to say anything of any substance today, so sounding a little like a broken record, but look here:

As I’ve mentioned before, there seems to be some panic abroad that the disinformation spread by hardcore partisan bloggers is somehow shaping reality for the nonpartisan centrists who seem to be in hiding. I have always had my doubts—and if I have to cast my lot with anyone, it will be with the optimists and the anthropologists, who tend to see the big picture and the broad view. In other words, it should be reassuring that we live in intensely polarized times where the tyranny of the majority rests on the thinnest margin, and the minority isn’t shy about saying so. (I do worry though about the violence that can be done to the country and its constitution in such a brief burst of pressing a slight advantage.) It should be possible for a slight majority of voters within the next two years to lose the scales from their eyes, and see raw power-grabbing for what it is, and begin the slow process of fixing what’s been done to us. (Didn’t this guy just win a seat and now he’s already looking for a promotion?)

As for certain silly attempts to continue to “frame” the conversation, I’m with editor Anders Gyllenhaal—bring ’em on. The neo-con blogosphere has already run up against the glass ceiling of credibility. When the choir is already full, and you just keep preaching the same gospel, the only room for movement is back out of the choir, where the rest of us have plenty of doctrinal elbow room.

Take, for example, this litany of supposed lefty bias exhibited by Dan Rather. It only appears to be evidence of lefty bias if you yourself are biased in the other direction. There are times when the facts militate against a particular political paradigm—but then the right has never shown much respect for or interest in the facts. If you need a measure of hubris, it is when they believe their gotcha moments are self-evident, when they are merely self-defeating, risible indications of the troglodyte’s myopia.

I have, for several weeks now, been saying that it is immoral to give certain highly intelligent, totally unaccountable liars any more exposure than they already get, but this morring I suddenly had two countervening epiphanies. First, I am no better nor more important than they are (considerably less so, actually), so for the moment I will suspend my own arrogance and obsequiousness, and I will climb into the jello-tub with them.

Second, I realized that I am making certain prejudicial assumptions about them. I have intuited that they are the worst sort of writers—pundits who never manage to escape a cycle of conforming the facts to an uncritical idolatry of current neo-con gospel. The reason they never surprise you is that they have no other job than to idolize that gospel, and doing something interesting—along the lines of a thoughtful critique of their own inherited party-line positions—is not within the realm of the possible for them. (Update: We expected a gradual deteriorization of consensus in the ranks, and here it comes—from the aging agnostics. Unchallenged arrogance and groupthink has its inherent downside. Power corrupts, you know.) So I decided, right here and now, that I would give these fellows the benefit of the doubt. When I go to their blog, which I will do momentarily, I will check on their position with regard to the shameless bankruptcy bill (so ably considered by the Big Boss over here). If their position is what I expect it to be, I pledge that I will never again sully these pages with the merest mention of them. On the other hand, if they surprise me, the lines will stay open.

Just to be clear, I am not a powerful, widely read pundit (the closest I ever got to Time magazine was once interviewing to be an editor there), and I have no reasonable hope of influencing anyone anywhere. This is merely a proposed personal and permanent embargo. In other words, this will hurt me more than it hurts you. Ah, but there I go making my assumptions again!

So, here I go… be right back… (start the clock)…

I’m back. It took me three minutes to scroll the homepage. Wading through a majority of posts that mostly celebrate (what else) the importance of Power Line, or idolize the President, I was astonished to see that the boys have not weighed in on the Bankruptcy Bill… I need to dive back in here. Is it possible that there is no reasonable defense that a couple of bankers can credibly pose? Hmmm.. be right back…

I cannot readily find the boys’ views—they have apparently never mumbled the word “bankruptcy” as a term pertaining to banking rather than morality—but I have had, in just a few minutes, a nose full of their self-promotion, self-righteousness, and… well, just their selves. I think it would be wrong not to go ahead with that embargo just the same.