Some ain't too swift in Rapid City

Two weeks  ago, I huddled in a powerless house in Rapid City during the unseasonal blizzard.  We went there to meet my daughter and husband and grandson from Denver and  gathered at the house of my son-in-law's mother.   Also in attendance were my daughter's newly adopted greyhound from Florida and my spouse's Boston Terrier puppy.  We arrived on Thursday evening when rain was shrouding the town and making it very difficult to figure out the detours  around the many street closures because of construction.  During our attempt to find our way through the construction maze,  the empty light came on in the gasoline gauge.  But  everyone made it to the appointed house and spent a normal evening doing what families do when they get together.


By Friday morning, the snow was slamming down on a high wind.  A branch on a huge crab apple tree in the back yard crashed on the deck, bringing a cable  with it.  About noon we heard an electrical transformer explode and the power went out.  I thought it time to fill up my empty gas tank and get some food, so we plowed through the drifting snow to a Safeway store not too far away. The 4-wheel drive was useful.   At that point the snow was drifting but was so watery that the car tires could cut through it  to grip the pavement, but the temperature was dropping and the snow was beginning to pack down into a slushy ice.  By evening no power was restored, so we cooked supper on a charcoal grill in the car port.  We huddled in blankets and afghans as the house cooled down, and tended to dogs and a toddler by candlelight.  We tried to get some reports on what to expect on a battery powered radio, but no radio stations were reporting news other than to observe we were in an unusual winter storm (Duh!) and the authorities were advising against travel.  By this time, the snow was piled high enough that we saw that we could not go anywhere even if we could back our 4-wheel drives out of the driveway into the street.  And big tree limbs were dropping into the streets to further block any traffic.  The radio stations continued their country music and evangelical rants against that devil Obama and his  liberal minions.  But nothing about what to expect from the storm or the official response to it. 

 Eventually, to stay warm and conserve the candles and dwindling power in our phone batteries, we went to bed wondering whether some of the food in the warming refrigerator should be moved to the colder carport. 

On Saturday morning, one radio station had a lengthy interview with  an emergency manager.  Rapid City had banned all travel, but not in time to keep a bunch of people from getting stranded in the snow.  Particularly vexing was that people were getting into their cars and following emergency vehicles and snow plows and getting stuck in the process to further impede the workers' efforts to deal with the storm.  The manager cited one case in which fire trucks were seriously delayed in responding to a fire by the foolish motorists getting in their way.  And the manager put out a call for people with snowmobiles to volunteer their help in rescuing stranded motorists.  The report that morning assured people that roads were being cleared and power restored.

The blizzard was a disaster in many respects.  It was no bigger a disaster than the performance of the radio stations.  At a time when there is no power for television and computer and wifi connections, battery-powered radio assumes an essential role. But radio stations are no longer equipped to serve that role.  Aside from that one interview, there was no news other than national feeds, which reported that the Black Hills were experiencing a blizzard.  Duh.  The twang-billy stations still played music of lament about scraping that there stinky stuff off ma boots, and the evangelicals still preached their message of hatred and rancor from the first epistle to the anti-Obamaites.  There were no reports even faintly resembling an attempt to provide news relevant to dealing with the blizzard.  The public radio towers must have been taken down by the blizzard, because I could not find their signal.

The lack of any useful information in Rapid City during the blizzard is a symptom of the overall deterioration that besets America's news media.  Up until the late 1990s, for example, Aberdeen had three radio stations that had news staffs.  My spouse was one of the reporters.  During any kind of community emergency, those news people would be at work relaying pertinent information over the air.  Reports on the state of roads and power would be updated continuously. 








Greyhound coping with blizzard.

But the MBA syndrome hit the radio business.  Rather than try to make the radio stations make money by building an audience through providing it with locally produced programming and reporting, the stations were bought up be "media" companies that made money by eliminating as much overhead as possible.  Staffs were eliminated, except for announcers and advertising sales people.  The programs are satellite feeds coordinated by computers.  Most news is from a national network feed. 
 Some stations will have an announcer read state news from a wire service and read the local weather forecast.  Often the weather forecast is recorded on tape and replayed throughout the day and night.  There are no reporters or news editors reporting on local events,  although some stations do have part-timers covering high school athletics and recording reports on the events.  




Boston Terrier puppy coping with blizzard.

 

Toddler grandson coping with blizzard.

The ruling criteria for radio programming is how cheaply it can be done and still to have an audience for the selling of ads.  Radio station licenses are periodically reviewed and a point of such reviews is how the stations are serving the public to justify a broadcast frequency on the public airways.  It is a  game of seeing how little will suffice to justify a license and how cheaply it can be done.  Media companies do not buy radio stations to improve programming and service to the public.  They totally operate on the principle of seeing how much they can earn by doing as little as possible as cheaply as possible. 

In situations such as the early October blizzard, the lack of media attention and effort has its effect on the sources for information.  When reporters call into government agencies and power companies, the organizations grudgingly respond by getting requested information.  Or in the case of Rapid City, the police department volunteered the information that the city was banning all travel to keep citizens out of the way and to keep them from getting stranded in the snow.  The experience with the power company was quite different.

By Saturday afternoon with no power and no news about when to expect it, we started calling Black Hills Power.  Their call center is in North Dakota.  The calls produced the information that lines and power were being rapidly restored and we could expect power at any time.  On Sunday morning, there still was no power.  A call produced the information that power had been restored to our location at 4:53 that morning.  We checked the circuit breakers to make sure they did not go off when power was restored.  They were still connected, so we called back.  This call produced the information that the company was unable to restore power to 14 homes in our area.

So, with no heat and no way to prepare warm food, we called motels and found one--with power--and went there for the night.  The news we received on a television station was that 14,000 customers were still without power. 

As we drove out on I-90 Monday morning, we saw the carcasses of cattle in the ditches, in the median, and in the pastures.  What had  been a weather adventure became a tragedy for ranchers and their stock. 

The radio news media was simply not up to dealing with the storm.  It has eliminated the ability to gather and provide useful information in such situations.  It has disqualified itself as a news source, and now can only flood the airways with twang music and the sanctified hate speech of the evangelicals. 

It is just one facet of the journalistic inadequacies into which our legacy news media have fallen.  It just is not capable of covering the world most of us live in.  

Non compos mentis is all the rage

You would think those icons of Texas intellect Louie Gohmert and Ted Cruz came out of the same school.  Actually, their incoherent, schizophrenic representations of the world make one wonder if they went to school.  But both have gone to law school.  Gohmert went to Texas A. & M. and Baylor.  Cruz went to Princeton and Harvard.  They have both held high positions in jurisprudence, Gohmert as a judge and Cruz as a solicitor general and a specialist before the Supreme Court.  Cruz was called brilliant by one of his most left-leaning professors at Harvard.  But from the recent things these men have said and done, one wonders if they are strays from the farm (or in the case of Texas, the ranch) for the mentally unsound. 

The loony alarm bells are not set off by their political leanings, but by the anti-social and destructive things they say and do to define their political beliefs.  One wonders further if they are  beliefs or mental aberrations.  The fact is that people of brilliance in some areas of mental workings can be idiots.  Idiot savants, who cannot function in society, are known to be able to do mathematical computations at the speed of computers or be able to play music at the level of virtuosos, but they cannot otherwise function without intervention and supervision.  In such cases, one must look beyond the areas of brilliance for symptoms of mental dysfunction.  They can be dangerous. 

Professors do not have to be teaching for very long before they are confronted with a student who shows promise and brilliance but proves dysfunctional and incompetent outside of  isolated areas of talent.   The task of professors is to encourage and help such students build lives on and around their talents, to help them construct a sound foundation and framework to complement and integrate their talents so that they may utilize them.  That is the  ingenuity of the general, liberal arts education.  For the most part, it works.  But there are those who are defeated by the task of dealing with all the aspects of human society or who  cannot or do not want to surmount some sociopathologies that threaten to take possession of them.  Sociopaths have problems with the principle of cause-and-effect   In the fog of narcissism that gathers around them, they cannot consider who will be affected by their actions and how they will be affected.

Ted Cruz is example of a person whose personality is possessed by a sociopathic streak.  It was something that became apparent when he was in law school.  An article in CQ quotes his former roommate that Cruz had a snobbish streak and would study only with classmates from other elite Ivy League schools.  He would not even consort academically with those from Brown or the University of Pennsylvania.  Such extreme selectiveness reveals a social ambition that reverts to a medieval notion of class and refutes the premise of equality, the first self-evident truth cited when we announced our separation from the feudal world of class rankings and the system of oppression.  And, as experienced professors know, extreme snobbishness in students generally expresses itself in racism and other forms of class discrimination.  It is a prime characteristic of the fascist mentality.

When Cruz was elected senator, he saw that the power and status of his ambition was within reach, and the discriminations that drove him were fully unleashed.  The trappings of power most often produce a full revelation of personality of those in the process of attaining it,  and the sociopathic elements of Cruz's character threw off all restraints as he mounted his opposition against Barack Obama and the Affordable Healthcare Act.  For one who could dismiss even the graduates of Brown and the U. of Pennsylvania as unequals who were of no consequence to him, the 46 million Americans who do not have healthcare insurance were not given a thought.  Cruz's ambition was to unleash a legislative insurgency that could bring down the country, if necessary, and give him the power he so craved.  And he gave no thought as to the consequences his ploy for power would produce in other people.  He and his cohorts shut down the government and cost the struggling economy $24 billion under the premise of saving the country from the effects of the Affordable Care Act.  But true to the sociopath's mentality, they cannot acknowledge the irreparable damage they have inflicted on the country.  And they cannot be called into account for what they will not acknowledge.  Rather, they congratulate themselves on their show of strength.

Cruz's defect is shown in his oblivion to the effects on the country of what he has done.  His House crony finds a way to place the blame for something he does on others: "The President and Harry Reid should not have shut this government down," he said.  The workings of his mind are incomprehensible, but he seems to think he is being crafty and clever. 

The 1012 presidential election campaign, particularly the Republican primary, was filled with words of mental derangement from Michelle Bachman, Herman Cain, and the like. Ignorance combined with the irrational may be entertaining, but when minds such as this are directing and affecting the affairs of the nation, grim disaster is in the making. 

Despite Cruz's display of unsound mind, he has a solid backing from his constituents in Texas, and he earned $800,000 for his campaign fund from avid donors.  This is what is the most portentous about the Cruz and cronies actions.  There is a very large constituency that finds that the unhinged and incoherent words and deeds emanating from disordered minds represents their interests.  Like their representatives in Congress, they have absolutely no concern for the damage they have inflicted on the nation.  They are quite willing to take destructive action against their fellow citizens.

When irrational. unconscionable, malicious action becomes a standard of a large segment of the citizenry, the processes of government cannot deal with it.  Mental chaos precedes physical chaos.  The government shutdown has made the cultural divide in the country more pronounced, more menacing, and chaos more certain. 

 

 

 

Predictions of America's failure coming true.

Since America's inception as a nation,  there have been many learned people from the Old World who thought it could not succeed.  Their  basic premise is that "ordinary" people can't govern themselves because they are dedicated only to self interest and can only bicker, backbite, bitch, and prosecute their contempt and hatred of other people.  British writer Thomas Carlyle commented often on the inability of ordinary people to form a workable government.  He thought democracy was self-defeating:

Democracy will prevail when men believe the vote of Judas as good as that of Jesus Christ.

He thought that our form of government would eventually fall into the dysfunction we are currently experiencing:

Only perhaps in the United States, which alone of countries can do without

governing, every man being at least able to live, and move off into the wilderness, let Congress jargon as it will, can such a form of so-called Government continue for any length of time to torment men with the semblance, when the indispensable substance is not there.

 The government people get is the government they want and deserve:

In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government.

It has taken us taken us 238 years, but we have finally fulfilled the predictions of those who didn't think we were capable of making democracy work. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A black hole for Democrats

A call went out for volunteers to help with a mass mailing and telephone calling during the 2010 campaign.  A couple who reliably showed up to help on such occasions came in and asked where they could help.  I was busy sorting the letters and filling out the bulk mail paperwork when I noticed the couple rather quickly slip out the back door.  The next day I saw the man in the grocery store, said I didn't get a chance to talk to him, and asked him if something was wrong.  He said if he wanted to be treated the way he was the previous night, he'd go hang out at the Republican headquarters.  He said there are days when he wasn't sure the Democratic Party wanted him or that he could support the Party.  He brought up the idea of changing his registration to independent:  that way he could vote in the primaries and avoid the unpleasantries and insulting rudeness that active participation in a political party seemed to so frequently offer.  He mentioned that other people had expressed the idea to him.

This man's complaint was not the only one I heard during that campaign, and I have heard many since then.  A few weeks ago I  heard a conversation among some Democrats in which one person expressed some dismay about party matters.  Another person made the comment in effect that the person had no grounds to complain after all that the party had done for the person.  The comment was a puzzler. I could not think of any instances in which the party had done anything for anybody but its candidates.  But I could think of a multitude of instances in which people did many, many things for the party.  The person who expressed the dismay is one who had come through for the party on many occasions when someone else did not and has noted that an acknowledgement or a word of thanks was never offered.  In recent years I have heard many complaints about how cliquishness was diminishing interest and participation in party business. 

An old colleague of mine offers some insight into the significance of the behavior of political parties.  Like me, he is retired, but is still active in a research organization that studies and conducts polls.  His position title was professor of political theory and practice. He refuses to be called a political scientist.  He says the people who call themselves political scientists have given science a bad name.  While staying in my old home area recently, I heard him on a public radio station discussion show on the splintering and fractiousness within the political parties.  Later, I exchanged emails with him, as he had information about the organizational matters that affect political parties and other organizations.


Anyone who has participated in volunteer organizations has experienced the people who have commonplace and unremarkable lives, but claim great authority in their volunteer work as they strive for power and dominance.  My colleague makes the point that the concern about bullying in schools and the kind of teenage society portrayed in the film "Mean Girls" is actually a reflection of  the way adult society operates.  His explanation is that social stratification took a mean turn in the late 1970s and 1980s when the U.S. job market began to eliminate manufacturing jobs and consign them to workers in foreign lands who worked for subsistence in what was often prison camp positions.  Workers in the minds of many were just another form of expendable, cheap energy, he says.  As people strove to distinguish themselves from expendables, their society reverted to the juvenile nastiness of schoolhouse cliques.   Many wanted to be identified with the elite 1 or 10 percent.  This reversion to rather primitive and crude class distinctions has defined politics for the last quarter century or so.

Volunteer organizations have become the theater of war in the struggle to identify with a controlling class.  My colleague points to the diminishment of fraternal organizations as a symptom of the battles for classes.  He said at one time they were the refuge of brotherhood from the discriminatory and exclusionary practices of  a status seeking society.  When those organizations became venues for the struggles for dominance, control, and status, they failed.  My colleague points to the effect this kind of internal competition for control has had on churches, colleges and universities, as well as the fraternal organizations that are dying off.  He cites this very struggle as the basis for the political turmoil in state and national legislatures and within the political parties.

He said the Republican Party very stridently makes class division a defining principle.  It became bluntly stated with Mitt Romney's 47 percent remark and Paul Ryan's winners and losers division of the citizenry. It is evident in the emigration policy struggle, and in the resurgence of racial denigrations generally.   It is the Mean Girls syndrome at its most intense. 

My colleague stresses that no sentient person can surf the Internet, listen to talk radio, or watch cable news and not recognize that much of the nation's verbal efforts are being directed at inciting hatreds and their consequent exclusions of classes of people.  But what is taking place within organizations is not so overtly obvious, and this poses a problem that Democrats have not faced.

My colleague has looked at the voter registrations of South Dakota, among other states,  for evidence of the internal turmoil that is affecting politics.  He points out that South Dakota runs on federal money but has a state legislature and a general political attitude that shuns and vilifies the very federal programs that sustain the state.  The people like to believe in their independence and self-sufficiency, and they are particularly vehement against those people who openly seek government help--except for the agricultural sector.  Farm aid does not have the stigma of other welfare programs.  But, he says, the attitudes of class status have a more insidious aspect when it comes to the Democratic Party, which professes equality of human status and opportunity.  When people experience dismissal and insulting rudeness in their political relationships, they recognize that the people identified with the party are not practicing the principles of the party.  And as in the fraternal organizations, they lose their reason for belonging.  The growing independent registrations are symptoms of dissatisfaction with the party at the personal level.  My colleague said that switching from a party registration to an independent registration is a personal declaration of independence from the established political rule.  America is undergoing a deconstruction of its political system.

My colleague says the Occupy Wall Street movement and its barely noticeable status is a largely misinterpreted event in American politics.  The movement was a largely nonviolent demonstration, but was met with reactions as if it were a violent protest.  The movement retreated, but my colleague said it did not produce a change of minds.  It produced a change in attitudes about what it takes to make a successful protest.  The participants found that peaceful demonstrations tend to be ignored.  And they also know that movements such as the Arab Spring can be co-opted by those forces that seek power and dominance.  The colleague and his fellows have studied and are in contact with people in the Occupy movement and he says that the movement was criticized because it did not seem to have  established leaders or a stated agenda.  That, he said, was the whole point.  Vying for leadership and asserting positions are a part of the politics that Occupy members see as the failures of our democracy.  There is a difference between arguments to reach a clarity of position and purpose and arguments which are about who rises to the status of power.  The Occupy Movement sees those who covet the trappings of power as contrary to the purpose of the movement.  And so, many people who are involved in the movement are registered to vote as independents, and expanding that registration has become a goal of the movement. 

Democrats in South Dakota probably  have more sympathizers with the party's stated cause than registrations indicate.  But there is a very significant group in the party who think that some leaders have compromised their principles away in the name of winning elections.  They feel betrayed and demeaned by some party candidates and leaders, and are pulling back from active participation in party functions.  Such a retreat was what my friend who walked out of the campaign office was considering.  I don't know if, when he moved, he changed his party registration, but I do know a number of people who have.

My colleague said that there are many people who do not have the social skills to contribute to an organization.  But he says, that does not seem to be the case in the Democratic Party, as he and his fellows have interviewed people and collected data.  He says some would be leaders in the party are just very selective about whom they will bother with courtesies and respectful acknowledgment.  And that attitude projects itself strongly and is lethal to the life of any organization.   Democrats who are imperiously dismissive of some members are like people who profess Christian charity but practice devilish exclusion.  They are mean girls who appear to be just what they are. 

Ultimately, my colleague says, what is troubling American politics is not partisanship.  It is the same old primitive attitudes about class and superiority and inferiority that we once hoped the human race would be lifted out of by the ideas of democracy.  The struggle in both parties is for power and dominance fueled by disregard for large portions of the human race.  Portions, which my friend says, will inevitably rise up and create new organizations that can accommodate them. 


 

Guns rule over intelligence

Voters in Colorado recalled two of their state senators, one the Senate president, for advocating and passing strict gun laws.  Colorado is the scene of two of the mass shootings that have defined what has become part of American culture, Columbine and the Aurora movie theater.  

The Second Amendment, which in the time it was framed was intended to establish a means of maintaining an armed militia that could be called up in defense of the nation, has been given an interpretation that rules over all other parts of the Constitution which provide individual rights and public safety. Voters in Colorado Springs and Pueblo have decided that the right of mentally deranged killers to have any type of weapon they want and use it any way they want takes precedent over rights of kids to be safe in schools and of people to enjoy a film without being threatened by nuts with guns. 

I am a gun owner and user who has enjoyed shooting sports.  My advocacy of reasonable gun laws has and will result in gun addicts saying I am anti-gun and anti-Second Amendment.  However, I am also convinced that some kinds of weapons should be regulated.  Those with violent criminal histories and the mentally ill should not have unrestrained access to firearms, and some types of weapons should be restricted as to where, when, and by whom they can be used.

The argument advanced by the NRA and other gun nut organizations is that Obama and others are plotting to take away all guns to set up  a totalitarian state.  They can cite no proposals that do more than try to keep guns out of the hands of those likely to use them to kill other people.  Still the hysteria that someone is out to take away all their toys spreads and becomes a basis for the law of the  land.  

The last time I went pheasant hunting with my son, we were stopped by conservation officers who checked my son's shotgun to see if it contained the plug that limits it to three shells, and they checked the ammunition to see if it was lead or steel shot, as we were hunting in a state preserve area.    And, of course, they checked his hunting license.  We had complied with all the rules.  But I wonder, if given the interpretation that any rules and regulations restricting guns is considered an infringement on the Second Amendment, if the rules restricting the amount of shells in a shotgun and the kind of ammunition used can hold up under the current interpretation. 

Furthermore, if one chooses an automobile as a weapon of choice, need one abide by the licensing and insurance requirements and the traffic laws.  Many people use their automobiles to run down animals in the night and to defend what they regard as their rights on the highways.  Are all the vehicular laws infringements on their right to bear automobiles as arms?

Do we even need a constitution when we can solve our problems with guns and other devices we can use as arms? (And I wonder why any of these Second-Amendment-over-all advocates should give a shit if Obama wants to use weapons on Syria.)

Ridiculous, you say?  Not any more so than what the NRA is promoting.  If people are against laws restricting the violent aspects of human behavior,  it may be time to go all out and let our violent tendencies and the devices we express them with supplant the rule of law.  The only constitution we need is the Second Amendment.  And without any constitution, we don't need that. 

For accounts of the Colorado recall elections, you can consult the following links:

The Denver Post

The New York Times

Huffington Post Denver

Talking Points Memo

Top Dem: Colorado losses due to 'voter suppression, pure and simple'

Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/other-races/321567-top-dem-blames-colorado-defeats-on-voter-suppression-pure-and-simple#ixzz2ebsU7qGi

 

Of lickspittles and playground bullies

Politics is all about competition.  Competition to claim the stupid vote by seeing how stupid we can become.  Equal opportunity in politics means dummying down the electorate so that it creates a constituency of idiots who can be governed by imbeciles.   Morons are considered elitists.  

What is currently tolerated in political discussions is preposterous.  South Dakota has assumed more than its share of the burden in making people stupid.  The plan seems to be establishing villages of idiots in which a person of some education and intelligence is the one who will be regarded as having special needs. 

The epitome of this movement  is the blog South Dakota War College, which claims to be "South Dakota's #1 Political Website."   That rather spurious claim comes from the fact that The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza takes a poll on the most popular blogs in the states and has indicated that Madville Times and South Dakota War College are the most popular in South Dakota.  But the two blogs are hugely different in ways much more significant than political orientation.  Madville Times is liberal, but it is also a thoughtful blog that assembles facts in support of its positions and shows the basis for its opinions.   War College is the most abject kind of political hackery, and it has accrued a long list of credentials in that regard.   Truth and accuracy are not in the blog's vocabulary.  Perhaps it knows the words but hasn't the vaguest idea of what they mean. 

There are other blogs that represent some factions within the GOP, but readily fall into the category of batshit crazy and are quickly dismissed.   SDWC, however, has the endorsement of the party.   In fact, it has been used for some time as its official internet communication outlet.  

When War College first started up, it appeared to be a blog

O, the humanity!

for the discussion of political strategies.  However, it soon developed into a highly partisan blog that was virulent in its denunciation of anything Democratic.  It abandoned discussion about political strategies and took up personal, libelous  attacks against Democrats as its main function.  The South Dakota GOP uses SDWC as its official Internet outlet.    That fact became apparent during the campaign preceding the 2010 election when the War College published GOP press releases before any of the legacy news media got them.  

During that period there was a flurry of posts which stated things that were quickly changed or deleted altogether, as the blog engaged in a frenzy of maligning and libeling Democrats.  Suddenly, as the blog's author took a job in the secretary of state's office, the blog was totally eliminated from the Internet,  although it was revived in an enfeebled form by some pseudonymous individuals somewhere.  When Pat Powers was caught  in a conflict of  interest by trying to peddle his malign campaign wares while being an employee of that office,  he resigned and returned to his blogging activities.

Most of the posts on South Dakota War College are profoundly unintelligent.  They either dutifully reproduce the partisan cant of the Republican Party or they take on the guffawing  belligerence of the perennial fifth-grade bully, who stands in the playground shouting insults and abuse to those he chooses to demean, while his buddies lurk about chortling and snickering at the witless, petty malevolence.  If South Dakota War College is a leading place for political news in the state, that is a devastating statement about the intellectual level on which the state operates.  

The social media technology has given the ignorant, the illiterate, and the ill-willed a voice that is often loud enough to shout down the educated and considered. The fact that SDWC gets the attention that it does is an indicator of the intellectual climate of the state.  As is true with global warming, human activity influences the public mentality.  There is much celebration of technology and its use as a medium for communication.  Popular culture is overwhelmed by technology and fixates on the gimmickry of the technology, not the content of what the technology transmits. For many, the medium is the message.  And the message is to play the gimmick games if you want to be with it.  Content and mastery of the language which it transmits have been eclipsed into oblivion by the obsessions with the virtual.

Those who preside over the legacy media which claim stewardship of  carefully chosen and deftly used language as their function share a responsibility in the loss of language.  When newspapers lost advertisers because they were losing their readership to the new media, they attempted to gain a foot in the media door by emulating what is called its "interactive" feature by allowing unmoderated and unedited comments on its news stories.  Instead of attracting readers, the practice drove away the literate who were looking for considered presentations of facts.  Even those publications which once prided themselves on the highest level of writing, such as The New Yorker, permitted the crude and trite responses from the knee-jerks in the name of free expression and robust dialogue.  Little intelligible or worthy of consideration comes out of the ensuing sound and fury.  

It has become a convention that Twitter is a means to reaching a massive audience.  It, like Facebook and other social media, does reach millions and millions of people.  But it also demonstrates how actual communication is sacrificed to mere noise.  A Twitter-user is limited to responses of 140 characters or less.  It poses the same problem that headline writers have in fitting a coherent and accurate summary into a limited number of characters,  Or the problem faced by the writer of haiku  who is limited to 17 syllables.  How many people have the verbal command and the desire to write a credible, intelligible, and engaging haiku?  How many people have the verbal command and desire to put an intelligible, coherent, and engaging statement into 140 characters?


Most of the tweets registered on Twitter are sentence fragments or unpredicated attempts at a sentence.  They are signals like cat hisses and dog growls, which express some emotive force at work on the tweeter, but cannot penetrate into those areas of human understanding that communication is supposed to reach.

The great failure of the legacy press is that it has never critically examined the limitations of the new media, but instead allowed itself to be cowed into accepting it as an irresistible force that it must reshape itself to accommodate.  Journalism is essentially literary.  It depends upon writing talent, broadly educated practitioners, and a firm grasp of how language and story are the tools we human use to record and transmit our experience and accumulated knowledge.  Journalism incorporates the narrative and expository aspects of literature.  It tries to leave the argumentative--the rhetorical---for specialized editorial sections.  Most of what is posted on the Internet has an argumentative intent.  There is little interest in finding, examining, verifying facts and presenting them in a narrative context with the confluence of human history.  

That is why nearly all of what is posted on line cannot be regarded as journalism.  And that gets to an issue regarding the South Dakota War College.  Its author was   recently called up in a court case to reveal some anonymous source who he said told him information that he posted on his blog.  He claimed that he should not need to testify because he is a journalist who has the right to protect his sources.  Circuit Judge Vince Foley pronounced,  “I am of the opinion that ... bloggers in their vein are journalists in the modern sense of the word,” Foley said.  However, he also said that he would not exempt Powers from testifying.  

It is a sad blow to journalism when a judge decides who is a journalist and what journalism actually is.  But it is evidence of what journalism has come to mean "in the modern sense of the word."  Not all bloggers, as explained by Scott Ehrisman out of Sioux Falls, have such an inflated notion of what blogging is. 

The issue is not whether the public should be denied any avenue of expression and free speech.  It is whether there are any professions that stand for the integrity and power of language and are willing to serve those people who hunger for carefully explained facts and the intellectual and aesthetic experience of vigorous thought and fine writing. 

South Dakota War College stands in refutation of what once comprised the important function and purpose of journalism.  It is the work of lickspittles and playground bullies. 

  The South Dakota
       Wart Collage

South Dakota's #1 blog for everything ugly and stupid

by Pissant Power 

Fool me once, shame on you. You ain't going to get another chance.

When the U.S. government geared up to invade Iraq,  there was some resistance.  There were some people who asked questions about the evidence of weapons of mass destruction,  the report of the U.N. team that looked for them but found none, and what the actual intelligence agencies of our country and our allies had for information.  The lack of evidence was compelling, but the nation had been whipped into the mood for war, and the voices that asked for the evidence were shouted down.  And so, we sent soldiers to their deaths, maimed and crippled many others, and spent billions and billions on a war that was contrived.

We are facing a very similar situation.  News reports and intelligence assessments indicate that people in Syria were killed and made ill from the use of gas, sarin.  It is known and has been for some time that Syria possesses chemical and biological weapons, and has purchased the means of delivery from Russia and Iran.  President Obama has taken up the vow of the western world to never let a holocaust, the killing of civilians, particularly with chemical and biological means, to happen again without holding the perpetrators to account.  

But this time those folks who were so rabid about invading Iraq and plastered decals on their cars in support of that war are inveighing against Obama for wanting to take action against Syria.  For many of the opponents, it is not a matter of responding to an atrocity that is clearly a holocaust-style war crime but a matter of venting hatred against Obama.  The Obama derangement syndrome overrules any concern about the mass killing of the innocent.  

However, for some the reluctance to strike Syria is the result of the lesson learned from Iraq.  People have been made wary about the claims made in support of war by their government.   The 6,000 dead and tens of thousand troops maimed in Iraq are evidence of what deadly foolery a war based upon false information can be.  And so, many of those in opposition to Obama's plan are so because of Iraq.

People do deserve to have any information calling them to war detailed and verified.  One of the leaders against the mounting of war in Iraq was former Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who  was among those pointing to the falseness of information and the assessments of Iraq by people who actually were acquainted with the situation on the ground in Iraq at the time.  But when a populace is whipped into a war-mongering frenzy, truthful information is sacrificed to the lust for blood.  

Dennis Kucinich now offers a list of  things that have not been verified about the justifications for a war strike against Syria.  They are worth your attention in making any decision about supporting a planned strike.