Here's an issue on which The American Prospect, The National Review, Mother Jones, The American Spectator and The Nation all agree: a 20-percent postal rate increase for small magazines would be a devastating blow to freedom of the press and to the diversity of our national conversation.
Avedon Carol provides several links of importance to anyone concerned about this issue and the future of small magazines:
Here is the letter to the Postal Board of Governors signed by the editors of more than a dozen independent journals.
"SAVE SMALL MAGAZINES … LIKE THIS ONE" say the editors of Tapped and The American Prospect.
Free Press has an online petition to "Save Small and Independent Publishers."
I used to work for, and briefly ran, a small magazine. (Actually, we weren't big enough to be considered a "small" magazine. Seriously. They have circulation figures for these categories and ours was sub-small.) The desperate use of the word "save" above is not hyperbole. The rate hikes the USPS is considering will, with inevitable, mathematical certainty, mean the death of many small and independent publications.
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The Opinion Mill offers a dandy excerpt from the recently departed Kurt Vonnegut:
For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.
“Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break!
I've also been thinking a bit about the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1-12) lately. Familiarity has inured us to the upside-down idealism of this passage, but try to hear it with fresh ears and you realize how backwards it is from, well, everything else we've been taught. Just look at the list of people it says are "blessed": the poor, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, those who are persecuted. That's quite the lucky bunch.
But the bit that's had me thinking lately is the final blessed: "Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me."
Somehow, the meaning of this passage has been twisted into the idea that fat, complacent and otherwise-indistinct-from-everyone-else blowhards should invent trumped up, bogus claims of persecution so that they can reap the blessings of direct-mail fundraising. (Yes, Bill Donohue, I'm talking to you.)
What was that term St. John used for people who teach the opposite (or "anti-") of what Jesus (or "Christ") taught?
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Glenn Greenwald has a nice rundown of the journalism fiasco that was the Jessica Lynch saga.
He identifies the media's failure to ask any critical questions of the military's official account of their original story — and that was a woeful, massive example of journalistic malpractice. But he omits one other point here: The original story didn't make any sense.
Here's my mea culpa for my part in this malpractice. I tried to kill this story at the paper. I didn't try very hard. I got talked out of it.
I told my boss we had a "rosebud" problem. In Citizen Kane, the tycoon dies alone and there's no one else around to hear him say his final word, "rosebud." The original account of Lynch's firefight, likewise, offered details that no one was present to report: everyone who might have witnessed any of this was either dead, unconscious or the enemy.
"It's a great story, though," my boss said.
"Yeah, but who the hell is telling it?"
Bottom line: It was a wire story from The Washington Post, and who were we to question The Washington Post's editors and fact-checkers? I inserted the word "reportedly" several times into the Post's account — the ultimate elastic-clause weasel word — and we ran it otherwise unaltered and unquestioned.
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A close parallel to Matthew 5:11-12, above, is John 15:20: "Remember what I told you, they hated me they will hate you."
That's a paraphrase, borrowed from the chorus of Sinead O'Connor's "Black Boys on Mopeds." You remember O'Connor — she was the lady who ripped up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live because she claimed the Catholic Church was doing nothing in response to allegations of the sexual abuse of children by clergy. Bill Donohue's career took off thanks to his claiming "persecution" for this victimless gesture.
As for the substance of O'Connor's claims, well, funny story there …
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"Bob Marley used to live in Delaware," Wonkette reminds us. Strange but true. More to the point, Bob Marley used to work the overnight shift in Delaware, at GM's Boxwood Road plant, which is just across I-95 from where I work the overnight shift in Delaware.
The title of this post comes from the lyrics to Bob Marley's "Night Shift," the song that answers the seldom-asked question "What does the slacktivist have in common with a legendary reggae prophet?"
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