President Obama’s expects blind fanatical devotion from Liberal bloggers that reaches the same level of intensity as did the evening TV newscasts from Berlin during the era of the Third Reich. Many teabagging journalism critics may be surprised to learn that even before CBS radio started to recruit newspaper reporters for the gang that became known as “Murrow’s Boys,” Germany had a nightly newscast on TV. The 1936 Olympic Games were telecast but it used a convoluted technology that got images that were a minute old from freshly developed movie film. The German leader devised the publicity generating ploy of the Olympic flame. The nightly TV newscasts were suspended long before VE Day. The pro-Obama bloggers slogger on.
Conversely, curmudgeonly online columnists are accorded the same broad amount of permissiveness as are the fellows who deliver the opening monologues on the late night marathons of promobabble. Columnists are free to lampoon the President if they stumble across any potential for hilarity such as (hypothetically) if a President from the Democratic Party inadvertently began to help the Republicans achieve their dream goal of dismantling FDR’s “New Deal.”
Imagine for a moment that Johnny Carson were able again to do such a monologue recently and that he laughingly speculated that if the CIA had been permitted to use their famous “enhanced intorogation” methods, the Casey Anthony case would have ended with a confession. He could get away with such an example of a hilarious hypothetical, right?
Any Liberal Blogger who attempted to emulate such impunity would be given a time out and sent to his/her room if not actually dismissed from the roster of daily boosters of the President’s cause.
Cynical columnists would defend their obstreperousness by pointing to page 285 of Donald L. Miller’s book, Masters of the Air, because the author delineated the different qualities that were considered when picking bomber pilots or fighter pilots. If someone showed “rapid hand-eye co-ordination, aggressiveness, boldness, individuality, and a zest for battle,” they were more qualified for fighter pilot training. The ideal candidate for bomber pilot training displayed “physical strength, judgment, emotional stamina, dependability, team play, discipline, and leadership.”
Bert Stiles was both a B-17 pilot and a fighter pilot (P-51 Mustang). After completing his 35 bombing missions and qualifying for reassignment back to the states, he asked to be reassigned as a fighter pilot. We read his book “Serenade to the Big Bird” while in high school.
Newspaper reporters would be more like bomber pilots and the columnists would be more like the fighter pilots.
Bloggers are much better at doing what they are told to do and they will help President Obama get reelected so that he can continue to work his magic for four more years. They will ignore the reliability factor of the electronic voting machine results because if they don’t they will sound like conspiracy theory nuts. Capiche?
A blogger will accept his mission unquestioningly. You will hammer home the point about the possibility that the next President might get to make some important nominations for the Supreme Court.
The permissiveness for columnists often reminds his audience of the passage in the aforementioned Miller book (again on page 285) that goes: “This often encouraged explosive recklessness and dangerous exhibitionism, . . . .” (“Capt. Willard, are my methods unsound?”)
Would a rogue columnist be reluctant to challenge his audience to imagine President Obama saying to Rupert Murdock: “Please, I’ll do anything you ask if you will please, please, please quash this story.”?
Wouldn’t Freddie Francisco (from Berkeley CA), also known as “Mr. San Francisco,” also approve?
Bloggers will not be free to point out that the 2011 Presidential Election is shaping up to be a competition between an extreme Republican and a moderate Republican seeking reelection.
Is the Red Barron’s mantle of invincibility greater than Obama’s reelection chances?
How many unearned electoral votes will the electronic voting machines award to the Republican candidate? Will it be five or six? Was “Dirty Harry” a fighter pilot in WWII?
The chances that the average voter won’t be as effectively represented in the Debt Ceiling crisis debate as will the folks in the “no millionaire left behind” squadron suggest to this columnist that he should make a concerted effort to do the fact finding that would be needed to frame the Debt Ceiling issue in the form of a basic plot paradigm from the film noir genre. (Maybe not today. Mayby not tomorrow, but some day soon.)
Wasn’t it in the film “The Great McGinty,” that Claude Rains said: “Ricky, I’m shocked. I’m shocked to learn that fraud is being suspected in the electronic voting machine elections!”?
George Raft has said: “I must have gone through $10 million during my career. Part of the loot went for gambling, part for horses, and part for women. The rest I spent foolishly.” Would that have been in the form of campaign contributions?
Now the disk jockey will play “Sky Pilot,” “Snoopy and the Red Barron,” and the Pogue song “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda.” We have to go hunting for our copy of “Catch 22.” Have a “bombs away!” type week.
Is there a UCB – von Richthofen link?
Is there a link between the two?
The Chronicle saw a link
There are multiple bits of local lore and history that residents of Berkeley CA might find interesting, but that doesn’t mean that stumbling onto one of these obscure facts from the past will provide a columnist with a topic to use online because folks in other parts of the world might not be concerned with the hundred year old social life of a UC Berkeley graduate who went on to a teaching career in Oakland.
Would there be a world wide audience interested in her if further investigation revealed that after Manfred von Richthofen (AKA the Red Barron) was shot down, on April 21, 1918, during World War I, a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle sought out Miss Margaret P. Hayne and asked her if she had been engaged to him?
After noting that she denied that, a story in the Chronicle went on to report that “her friends believed that there was an understanding between the brilliant German aviator and the Berkeley girl.”
She was quoted as saying “I knew him very well, that is all.” She went on to explain that she knew his mother, brothers and sisters and that “ . . . a close friendship existed between myself and the family.”
The story informed readers that Ms. Hayne had graduated from UC Berkeley in 1903, passed the bar exam, and that she had had a law office in San Francisco before beginning her teaching career in Oakland. Was calling a woman approximately 35 years old “a girl” an early example of “spin”?
On Saturday, January 14, 2012, the World’s Laziest Journalist went on a topic safari to San Francisco. At the once-a-month warehouse sale held by the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, we bought two book to be read with an eye for column topics, but we had also purchased William E. Burrows’ book, “Richthofen: A True History of the Red Baron” just to read for personal pleasure.
That nigh, when we opened up the 1969 book from Harcourt, Brace, and World Inc., while looking for the end-paper map, we noticed that a standard 8 ½ by 11 sheet of paper had been folded in half and tucked behind the back flap of the dust jacket.
We expected to find a review of the book at hand, but when we unfolded the paper it appeared to be a 100% size Xerox copy of the front page of a much older newspaper.
A story about Miss Margaret Hayne was circled in red.
Since a portion of the image identifies the San Francisco Chronicle as the source and sine it makes reference to the fact that Captain Baron von Richthofen had been shot down the week before, it would be relatively simple to track down the exact date of publication.
If we went to the San Francisco Public Library it would probably require just another hour or two of library research to ascertain that information and perhaps provide the basis for sending a feature story query letter to a magazine that appeals to an audience of aviation enthusiasts.
A quick online search revealed that the Red Baron was killed on the 21st of April in 1918, which was just a few days after the United States marked the first full year of participation in the War to end all Wars. Congress had declared war on April 6, 1917 because of a torpedo attack on the passenger liner Lusitania. Conspiracy theory lunatics have challenged the veracity of the official accounts of the incident ever since.
The alternative would be to put the information into the less scholarly form of a loopy column and skip over the need for extensive academic research.
Information that had been previously published several decades ago won’t qualify the column as a “scoop,” but a few Google searches indicated that a column about Ms. Hayne and the Red Baron would provide some information online that hasn’t previously been easily accessible for the curious readers on the Internets.
At the same time and place that we bought the Red Baron book, we had also purchased a mint condition copy of a 2003 Barnes and Noble paperback edition of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” with introduction and notes by Maura Spiegel. It was obvious from the blurbs on the back cover that if the columnist reads that book another column about how the exploitation of workers by the wealthy Chicago meatpacking company owners would write itself. Sinclair called the area Packingtown.
The headline “Occupy the Jungle” would help draw today’s readers into a review with comments about the 100 year old novel.
When “The Jungle” was published it spurred President Theodore Roosevelt into action and another of its effects, according to the Introduction by Maura Spiegel, “was shinning a bright light on the ever-darkening realms of child labor, prisons, insurance companies, and foremost, American enterprise and its role in the creation of a new American class of impoverished industrial wage slaves.” Isn’t the pendulum swinging back towards the sanctioning of child labor once again?
Some Republicans are hinting that such a move could benefit the United States in two ways: it would eliminate the need to spend tax dollars on school improvements and it would provide families with extra income.
Could Mitt Romney use Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” to assert that he will fight to reestablish the sacred American tradition of exploiting poor workers to help him get himself get elected as President?
Earlier in the week, the columnist had bought a copy of “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid,” and learned about the concept of “Strange Loops.” According to the Author, Douglas R. Hofstadter: “The ‘Strange Loop’ phenomenon occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started.”
If the Occupy Movement is fighting the same injustices that caused Upton Sinclair to write his best selling rant more than a hundred years ago, does that mean it is time for Hofstadter to revise his book with more examples of contemporary culture’s modern flashbacks to the past?
Hofstadter maintains that many of M. C. Escher’s most famous drawings are images that embody the Strange Loop concept.
Would it surprise Hofstadter if the Republicans select JEB Bush as their Presidential candidate or would he merely shrug it off saying that it was just another example of the Strange Loop?
About two blocks away from the book sale and about two hours after we bought the books, Occupy San Francisco made the news with some protest activity at a nearby branch of the Wells Fargo Bank. We missed the chance to cover that chapter of the history of the Occupy Movement, but thanks to the material we gathered leading to information about a Berkeley student, the WWI ace, and the muckraking journalist, we would classify our topic safari to San Francisco as a success.
Ms. Hayne provided this column’s closing quote when she gave her assessment of von Richthofen to the Chronicle’s reporter: “He was a fine man.” We concur. Wasn’t respect for a warrior from the other side considered a proper manifestation of the chivalry code of conduct?
Now the disk jockey (can you see it coming a mile away?) will play The Royal Guardsmen’s “Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron,” the Guns and Roses’ song “Welcome to the Jungle,” and as a farewell tribute to a fellow whose formative years were spent in Berkeley, Johnny Otis’ “Willie and the Hand Jive.” We have to go check the show times for the new movie titled “Red Tails.” Have a “I don’t want to send those men up there in machines held together with bailing wire and chewing gum – but I must!” type week.