Big Talk
Tune in this afternoon at 5:30 to WFHB’s Daily Local News for a sampling of my Big Talk conversation with Charlotte Zietlow.
The eight-minute feature is a snippet of a lengthy conversation I had with the old pro of Bloomington politics. Charlotte’s history in the public arena reaches back to the great transformation of Bloomington and Monroe County from a frumpy Republican stronghold to a crunchy Democratic kingdom.
Charlotte Zietlow (Photo/Jill Jolliff)
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I’ll post the link to the feature just as soon as News Director Alycin Bektesh and DLN editor Drew Daudelin post it on the station’s website. Many thanks to them and studio producer Sarah Hetrick for their help and support on the radio side. Peter LoPilato of The Ryder comes in for a pat on the back, as always. And, of course, kudos and laurel leaves to The Loved One for her support on the interwebs operation.
Make sure to catch the entire interview in this month’s Ryder magazine. The Ryder hard copy will hit the streets Friday and articles will be posted online a week later.
Big Talk with Big Mike is a joint production of WFHB, The Ryder, and The Electron Pencil.
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Ignorance Is Bliss
This holy land came in for a smackdown in last week’s edition of Maclean’s magazine, Canada’s venerable news magazine.
Entitled “America Dumbs Down,” the article, penned by Jonathon Gatehouse, takes the population of the Earth’s current empire to task for being, well, blissfully and voluntarily stupid. Gatehouse offers several eye-popping stat showing how uninformed and unread we happily are.
He concludes, “If ignorance is contagious, it’s high time to put the United States in quarantine.”
American Idiot
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Yikes. You, of course, knew that already, being a loyal reader of this communications colossus and, for that matter, a sentient human being in a land of glassy-eyed cementheads.
An underlying theme in the piece is the author’s suggestion that it’s democratization that’s responsible for America’s dopiness. We fetishize the unwashed common folk at the expense of a demonized expert elite. Gatehouse writes:
The term “elitist” has become one of the most used, and feared, insults in American life. Even in the country’s halls of higher learning, there is now an ingrained bias that favours the accessible over the exacting.
For my part, I dig being accessible. My writing style time and again has been characterized as “folksy.” That’s cool. But I’d like to think my thought processes are more complicated, even sophisticated. I may not be there yet, but I’m trying.
Other than that little quibble, I but Gatehouse’s thesis hook, line and sinker. Lack of knowledge in a person doesn’t bother me one bit; intentional stupidity bugs me a great deal.
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Ad Nauseam
I just got finished scrolling through a scary site called Stop Islamisation of Australia.
The group’s stance, apparently is that Muslims are all wild-eyed, murderous, cut-throat, suicide-bombing, West-hating psychopaths. And that they’re a hair’s-breadth away from taking over all the Christianist nations on Earth.
The only positive I can possibly glean from exposing myself to such sewage is that at least it’s not an American group, although I have little doubt one or more such bunds exist. Realist though I am, I’d hate to think all the hateful, paranoid, ignorant gangs of people come from this holy land.
Then again, one member of this Australian batch of loons points out some ads that festoon Washington DC buses these days. Here’s an example:
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Yeesh! Aljazeera America offers some info on the people responsible for the ads. Calling themselves the American Freedom Defense Initiative, the group says the ads are a response to a pro-Palestinian lobbying group that has painting Israelis in a similarly outlandish light.
I’d say god help us but the creator of the Universe is prob. too busy trying to decide whom he loves more, the Jews or the Muslims.
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