Someone asked what Barack Obama has actually done on his job to justify anyone's admiration. I understand he was instrumental in getting a law passed in Illinois that requires that confessions be videotaped in capital cases. That's good enough for me.

Posted at June 20, 2006 7:20 PM in response to Why Can't Anyone Speak

Do we all have this same fantasy of a news source - print or tv or whatever - that addresses low-income issues, and gets this segment of society to raise its collective head from wherever it's grazing and, you know, take part in civic life to better their conditions, or even vote?

As somebody pointed out, the ones who style themselves as speaking to the regular Joe do so primarily by appealing to Joe's hatred for weirdos and elitists [i.e. vote for who you'd rather have a beer with, assuming for the instant that G.W. still boozes it up], and not to Joe's concerns over what actually might affect his mortgage or whatever.

Is that what we're talking about here?

If so, I'm with you 100% but here's my question: And it involves a very un-p.c. generalization: How would you even get Joe to read or watch this stuff? I married a Joe, so I get to raise my hand on this. He hates PBS and anything that looks like it. Joe didn't do all that well in school, and is not a big reader, and does not like to foray into territory where he feels unsure of his ability. You are really going to need to dumb it down, and you are going to have to slip it in somewhere between the football and the strippers. And use the same angry tone that Bill O'Reilly uses.

The one person I see doing some of this is Oprah Winfrey, but for the chicks. Oprah slides some guy who talks about debt reduction in between the Nicole Kidman and the makeovers. Instead of anger there's empathy. She's really elevating the level of engagement for a lot of people, to the extent that The Daily Worker just never will. And I don't think you can approach the problem of non-engagement without recognizing that a huge part of the underclass reflexively shies away from anything that looks school-y and not fun.

We need some guy to be the Oprah, and make guys care about debt reduction. Howard Stern would be really good, actually, and I remember him - when I lived in NYC years ago - even talking about how the flat tax would be better for low income people. In between the strippers and freaks, of course.

Posted at June 17, 2006 1:29 PM in response to Class and the Press

There's a rough correlation between class [or income if that's what you mean] and literacy, isn't there? People who read books are going to get better jobs, generally, than people who don't. They will certainly do better in school. And their children are more likely to be exposed to books and reading and better schools.

Of course this perpetuates itself. It's not as though lower income/class people have no access to the "serious" journalism. The highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow stuff is usually on the same rack. But my own experience suggests that you need a little introduction to the harder stuff, or it seems forever intimidating. I distinctly remember as a young teen reading only the "newsmakers" section of my mom's Newsweeks, and then later being actually able to understand other parts, and then more other parts, etc. It was a gateway periodical to harder stuff, like the Economist. Lots of people who never get past "People" didn't have Newsweeks sitting around their apartments, is my guess.

Where's the unfair part? One huge glaring obvious perpetuator is public schools getting funded by property tax, so that poor neigborhoods get poor schools. I've never heard a politician mention anything about this, probably because it directly pits the haves against the have-nots for the limited resource of school funding, and the haves tend to vote more.

Posted at June 16, 2006 2:35 PM in response to Class and the Press

The idea that we should all hide any religious motivation when arguing a point is something that makes sense if you're drafting legislation or writing a court opinion; only non-religious justifications allowed.
For the rest of us, however, the argument for leaving religion out of it is necessary only to a certain extent, specifically: you shouldn't ever just say "because the bible says so [the end]" or you will annoy people. Annoying people doesn't get you anywhere.
That said, I do like when people full-disclose about why they personally are so on fire about something, be it their religious beliefs or their personal history, because that makes the discussion more interesting.
MLK was obviously on the interesting, not annoying, side of the line.

Posted at June 15, 2006 6:48 PM in response to Fun With Political Philosophy