March 24

In a widely quoted column on the implications of health care passage, David Frum made a very interesting point:

I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination. When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted President Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say – but what is equally true – is that he also wants Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished.

http://www.frumforum.com/waterloo

Frum is right, of course, and part of the reason is what I like to call the "yammer factor": These guys need something to talk about for hours on end. Has there ever been a culture that rewarded so handsomely the ability to yammer endlessly to no particular purpose? It is a gift, of a kind; certainly not everyone could do it. And it is by no means restricted to right-wing talk radio: Howard Stern does it, Keith Olbermann does it, every ESPN announcer and wannabe had better be able to do it. (Would Doug Gottlieb just shut the fuck up already?) The rewards come partly because in a 24/7 media culture, there is so much time to fill. Dead air is, well, deadly (unless you can turn it to comic purpose, as Jim Rome effectively does). And the non-stop yapping serves a subsidiary purpose in that it creates minor media scandals which are then the pretext of much more talk, in a sort of Moebius strip of meaninglessness. A good example is the recent flap over Glenn Beck urging his listeners to back away from churches that promote "social justice" (which, with the exception of the Church of Glenn Beck, is effectively all of them). I'm not excusing Beck from making stupid, but I will acknowledge that if I had to talk for three or four hours a day on both radio and television, as Beck and Jim Rome both do, I would say an awful lot of idiotic and embarrassing things. Because no one can be smart in public for that long, day in and day out. Yammer yammer yammer.

By the way, have I ever said that I like the way Glenn Beck dresses? I do. The French cuffs and spread collars and bright ties are exactly my kind of thing. I figure that if I ever met the guy, we could talk about matters sartorial, and the risk of my doing him harm would be much reduced.

I love this feature on creepy unsolved crimes (hat tip to Bill Crider):

http://www.cracked.com/article_18459_the-5-creepiest-unsolved-crimes-nobody-can-explain.html

(If the subject had been creepy unsolved mysteries rather than crimes, there would need to have been a spot for the mystery of the still-unidentified "Little Miss 1565" from the Hartford Circus Fire in 1944. Stewart O'Nan's The Circus Fire is a great book on this disaster.)

Another good unsolved creepy crime is the 1948 Teikoku Bank massacre in Tokyo, the subject of David Peace's new novel Occupied City:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/books/review/Cartwright-t.html

If you're in the mood for still more creepy reading, check out these books on the Spanish Inquisition. There is even one that is a minor mystery in itself -- list-maker (and novelist) Theresa Breslin can't remember the author or title and is asking for help!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/24/theresa-breslin-top-10-spanish-inquisition

Deaths of woulds-be immigrants along the Arizona/Mexico border are not so much creepy as depressing (although the current wave of drug-related murders in border cities and elsewhere in Mexico is both):

http://atravelerslibrary.com/2010/03/19/new-book-travel-of-a-desperate-sort/

OK, enough doom and gloom, it's time for cheerful bears:

http://theanimalarium.blogspot.com/2010/03/bear-has-awoken.html

Or for a service station that doesn't dampen the spirits (in Grisons, Switzerland):

http://www.archdaily.com/52848/viamala-raststatte-service-station-iseppi-kurath/

Among notables born on this date are cultural critics Dwight Macdonald and Malcolm Muggeridge, explorer John Wesley Powell, novelists William Morris, Olive Schreiner (South Africa), Martin Walser (Germany), and Peter Bichsel (Switzerland), crime novelist Donald Hamilton, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, playwright/performer Dario Fo, Spanish essayist Mariano Jose de Larra, animators Ub Iwerks and Joseph Barbera, photographer Edward Weston, psychologist Wilhelm Reich, magician Harry Houdini, baseball great George Sisler, businessman Andrew Mellon, pop singer Nick Lowe, film director Curtis Hanson, comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, and actors Sir Lancelot, Annabella Sciorra, Richard Conte, and Steve McQueen. Curtis Hanson has had a curious career as a director, to put it mildly. He was slow getting started (quite understandable in Hollywood), and didn't make an "impact film" till he was almost 50, with The Hand that Rocks the Cradle  in 1992. He made everyone sit up and take notice with the very impressive L.A. Confidential in 1997 (for which he won a shelf-ful of best director and screenplay awards), and matched it with the equally confident but very different Wonder Boys in 2000. Since then? Three features starring Eminem, Cameron Diaz, and Eric Bana, none of which did much critically or commercially (but which spawn a reasonable trivia question: what could those three performers have in common?). I can't make any sense of this trajectory at all, but the film industry is a tough world.