I’VE DONE IT; HOW ABOUT YOU?

The good professor Steven Taylor has posted a list of ten things he’s done which most people haven’t. Here’s mine; I have:

1. Lived in both Dakotas, as well as all the other states generally thought of as comprising the upper Midwest (Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Wisconsin).
2. Had a cemetary in my back yard. (Occupational hazard.)
3. Had dinner with a cabinet secretary (Mike Johanns, the Secretary of Agriculture, though when I dined with him, he was merely the governor of Nebraska).
4. Been quoted in an AP report about premarital cohabitation (again, occupational hazard).
5. Made the longest possible drive across North Dakota, from the far southeastern corner to the far northwestern one. (It took ten hours and trust me, eat in Minot, even if you’re not hungry.)
6. Sold more Christmas trees in a four-hour shift than any other member of the Jaycees chapter I belonged to in Nebraska.
7. Had a chance encounter with Graham Nash on a street corner in Nashville.
8. Experienced 39 flat tires in a 36-month period.
9. Studied drama in the same class as a two-time Golden Gloves national champion.
10. Completed this list of ten things I’ve done which you probably haven’t.

Your turn . . .

VOTE EARLY, BUT ONLY ONCE

It has come to my attention that this blog is up for MKE Online’s “Blog of the Week” award. I’d like to welcome those of you who have come here from MKE’s website. If this is your first visit to The Bemusement Park (and let’s face it, it is), I invite you to start off by reading “The Best of TBP” to get a feel for some of the content posted here. You can also check out the author bio to learn more about me.

Obviously, the only reason I’m doing this is to butter you up so you will go and vote for me. But simple pandering just won’t do; after all, what’s a Milwaukee election without some sort of cringe-inducing weirdness? So here’s the deal: I can’t promise you, the individual voter, anything. After all, I don’t know who some of you are, but based on my search engine hits, I’m fairly certain that most of you are more than slightly unbalanced, the sort of people around whom one should not make sudden moves. So I ain’t offerin’ any of you squat. But I will make you this promise: if I win, I’ll double my stepdaughter’s allowance for a week. Thus, if you vote for TBP, one little girl will have twice as much money to spend on ice cream bars. How can you tell her no? Huh?

Anyway, thanks for visiting, and please come back often, because otherwise, what’s the point of spending $10 a month to do this?

EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW, I LEARNED FROM SCOOBY-DOO

• Like Shaggy and Scooby, we are all perpetually trapped by fears of our own creation. These fears are so overpowering that they can blind us to the ease with which we can escape. If Shaggy and Scooby had simply quit trying to solve mysteries, they might never see another monster ever again. Of course, that just raises the question of whether they secretly longed to be scared out of their wits; perhaps, without the fear, they didn’t truly feel alive. Thus man is caught on the horns of an existential dilemma: it is possible to live without fear, but to do so makes one less than truly human.
• Beauty without purpose, as personified by Daphne, accomplishes little and eventually fades into the background, leaving one as a less-than-fully developed character.
• The world is not actually haunted by spirits, ghosts, monsters, and the like; rather, the love of money (or at least the inability to be satisfied with one’s own wealth) is the true root of all evil.
• Real estate is the only thing worth fighting for.
• Contra Ecclesiastes, not everything in the universe is cyclical: it will never again be acceptable for men to wear bright red kerchiefs around their necks. On the other hand, every man wishes he could dress like Shaggy, forever.
• A hungry man will eat the dog’s dinner. Thus, the key to keeping people controllable is to always keep them hungry and to control what and when they eat. If Shaggy had carried the Scooby Snacks, he would have had no need to associate himself with the others. Machiavelli understood this, but failed to put it in an animatable form.
• Knowledge without perspective is blind, viz. Velma without her glasses. One must have a lens of some sort with which to frame and focus reality; otherwise, the universe is merely a collection of meaningless, amorphous blobs, the contemplation of which leaves one pathetically vulnerable.
• Driving the van and pointing out the obvious is enough to justify one’s existence.
• Some people will watch anything if it has a talking dog in it.

ANOTHER QUICK QUESTION

Is Morrissey’s self-parody intentional or not?

CLEAN LANGUAGE

Just a quick question for the Tuesday noon hour: When you have moved just-laundered clothes from the washing machine to the dryer, is it still appropriate to refer to those clothes as “the wash” even though they’ve already been washed? If not, what should you call them?

PRESS AND PRESSURE

By now, enough has been written about Newsweek and its retraction of the story regarding alleged abuse of the Quran by US interrogators at Guantanamo Bay. I admit that the worst, most cynical parts of me want to believe that Newsweek published this story with the full knowledge that it was a humbug which they would have to retract, much as a lawyer might ask a blatantly foul question while cross-examining a witness, knowing that the other lawyer will object, the judge will sustain the objection, and the jurors won’t be able to put the whole incident out of their minds. I really don’t want to believe that Newsweek would be so stupid as to publish such an inflammatory article simply to embarrass the administration, but CBS bought the bogus “Bush is AWOL” memos, so who knows?

I am not a journalist, nor am I one who regards bloggers as “citizen journalists,” so I don’t feel overly qualified to address the question of whether Newsweek had enough evidence to justify publishing the story. I think we’d all have felt more comfortable if Newsweek could point to a second corroborating source, but I am not an expert on these matters.

What I am an expert on is the marketplace of ideas, since I represent a faith which has survived in it for two thousand years. And what intrigues me at present is the degree to which post-Watergate American journalism is now being tested in that marketplace.

All Americans owe a debt of gratitude to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. They exposed Nixon’s low hustles and helped usher in a new era of semi-accountability in American politics. So I’m not willing to make them solely responsible for the new era of “gotcha” journalism. It is well for journalists to want to reveal what others want to keep hidden, particularly when those things are being done in the name of a people or a government. But there’s a right way to do that, and a wrong way.

We all saw, in the CBS Air Guard memo story (or, if you prefer, in Fox News’ perpetual “WMDs found in Iraq!”claim from the early days of the current war), the willingness of a news organization to report a particular point of view. (Most thinking persons have been aware of this sort of partisan journalism for a long time, but let’s face it; without media bias, there wouldn’t even be a blogosphere.) CBS’s shameful episode produced the mother of all unintended consequences: Now, when derogatory information about the administration comes to light, it’s reasonable to assume that the information is either (a) spun like a Pedro Martinez fastball, or (b) completely made up. To many people, the large media now serve a function like Baghdad Bob did in Hussein’s Iraq: They’re who you turn to find out what’s not actually happening in the world.

In recent days, there have been polls showing that Americans are beginning to support the idea that maybe freedom of the press goes too far. When we see the rage that these reports of Quran desecration have caused among those who already don’t like us anyway, it’s natural to wish that it had never happened. It’s even more natural to wish that after finding out that the report was quite flimsy in the first place. But I reject the idea that the solution to situations such as these is to implement some form of prior restraint on the press. Anybody with enough experience in the marketplace of ideas can tell you that it’s the most ruthlessly capitalist market on Earth–and it’s a buyer’s market, because there are far more people seeking your urgent attention than you can ever hope to pay any attention to. In this marketplace, there are no second-place trophies; the rewards go only to the person who can get their idea to market first. So it was somewhat natural for Newsweek to try to get its idea to market as fast as possible, without fully considering the implications of being wrong–or even the possibility that they might, in fact, be wrong. What if Time got the story right and beat them to it? Who, then, would read Newsweek?

The danger, of course, is the same as the danger of bringing an untested, unsafe product to market: the product’s failure might result in harm to the consumer, or even to innocent bystanders. There’s a plethora of such products in the physical marketplace; names like “Pinto” spring to mind. And that’s what happened here. Whether Newsweek failed to verify this story adequately, or whether they poisoned the well on purpose, the point is, they willingly put a sketchy product out there in the marketplace of ideas. And anybody who knows the basics about free markets knows that consumers can punish the sellers of bad products much more harshly and efficiently than the government ever can dream of.

So the solution to Toiletgate is not found in weakening the Constitutional protection of the press. The solution is found in all of us remembering that the right to publish doesn’t include the right to an audience, and we all do well to shun the purveyors of gooshy journalism such as that practiced by those who would be Woodward and/or Bernstein. You’ll recall that they investigated what Deep Throat told them; they didn’t just publish his information without checking it first.

ON SECOND THOUGHT . . .

This was originally going to be the post in which I told you to grab what you wanted to keep from the TBP archives, because this site was going to go away.

I had a good reason, you know. We just learned last week that we’re going to have another child, and as little time as I have to blog with one small child in the house (and one big one as well), I figured there would be even less with two. Particularly, with two who are only about 15 months apart.

But I relented. I tend to keep forgetting that I blog for myself, not for you (though, if you enjoy what’s written here, that’s great), so I really can’t give this up. There’s enough backwash in my brain from the day-to-day activities of a parish pastor; if I don’t let it out once in a while, negative consequences inevitably follow.

Still, the initial pressures of feeling like I had to post something every single day if I wanted to consider myself a “real” blogger led me to make an editorial decision back in September to focus on longer pieces posted less often, and I think that decision was wise. I’d rather have two months’ worth of posts on the main page and be proud of every one of them instead of continuing to follow the “shotgun” approach to blogging I worked with at first. That’s worked well for others, but I have noticed that the best blogs (and please note I did not say “the most successful blogs”) have a unanimity of purpose. They don’t try to be all things to all people, or try to encompass every event happening anywhere in the world. Instead, they offer focus, a chance to see the world through one particular lens that is perhaps quite unlike your own. At their best, blogs are personal without being private; at their worst, they’re just forums for recreational character assassination. (Blogs–and bloggers–in the latter category annoy me to no end. If you’re wondering why there are certain Big Name Blogs I don’t link to, that’s why.)

Since I am a man of paradox–an irreverent reverend, a reckless egalitarian who believes that not enough Americans aspire to greatness, an intellectual who aspires to be the thinking man’s Dave Barry–I’ve decided to embrace yet another paradox as my guideline for TBP. It shall become more like it was: an impersonally personal blog. I am going to dispense with the notion of what you, the reader, may or may not want to hear, and focus instead on what I want to write. Again, if you like what you read, that’s great; if not, remember that I still felt better for having written it. I still value every person who stops by, with the notable exception of the teeming hordes looking for inappropriate iconography of the semipuerile. (If doing Search Engine Answer Guy has taught me anything, it’s that you have to be very careful of your words, lest by sowing the seeds of sight gags, you reap the whirlwind of degeneracy.)

So I hope you enjoy the new TBP, which will not be tremendously different from the old TBP. Except that I won’t be doing SEAG any more, since (a) I haven’t for three months now, (b) nobody’s asked for it, and (c) I really got sick of writing it. Pickin’ on the Big Ten shall remain, however, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I write more about sports, once people start playing them again.

TEN (OKAY, EIGHT) RANDOM THOUGHTS #10

1. I’m a little surprised that the police had to resort to tranquilizer darts to catch the bear in Wauwatosa the other day. Couldn’t they have just put up goalposts? That usually sends Bears running in the other direction.
2. If you consistently pronounce Applebee’s as “uh-PLEB-ess,” you can almost pass it off as some exotic ethnic restaurant.
3. Pretty soon, every athlete who’s ever been any good at all will be accused of having been on steroids. Well, except for Wayne Gretzky, It’s obvious he wasn’t doing anything excessively biochemical.
4. There are, at most, two other bloggers
   who may be able to relate to this thought: I am convinced that, when I die, I’ll be waiting in line at the pearly gates, stuck behind a Kreilkamp truck.
5. But that’s beside the point anyway, since the road to heaven is currently detoured . . . and even the detour is under construction.
6. How many more months will it be until that song from Kill Bill Vol. 1 (”Battle Without Honor or Humanity” by Tomoyasu Hotel; listen to a sample of it here; it’s track #9) is used as the background for every single radio and TV commercial, as well as being used for bumper music by every program on the radio? Not only is Jaguar using it in their commercials, it’s the bumper for at least three radio programs I listen to. In fact, I wonder how long it’ll be until that’s the only piece of music left on Earth.
7. I’m really upset that the North Carolina pastor who excommunicated all the Kerry supporters resigned the other day. Not because I agreed with him, of course, but, well . . . I already had a great sermon worked up for Sunday in which I was going to excommunicate my entire congregation for a variety of offenses both great and small, and now I can’t use it.
8. By the way, I disagree with the oft-repeated assertion that religion and politics must neccesarily intertwine. If Christians did a better job properly caring for the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, the government would be so much smaller, the president could hold cabinet meetings in a diner booth. Until that day, I think I’ve got bigger things to worry about than school-board elections.

A POCKETFUL OF CHANGE

Yep, it’s almost time for my semi-monthly announcement of changes that may or may not be made to this here blog. Look for an announcement on Sunday.

NONE DARE CALL IT IRONY

I have come to one unshakeable conclusion: the current spate of nanny shows is the worst thing to happen to Monday night television since Dennis Miller on Monday Night Football.