Category Archives: Alycin Bektesh

02/18/2015
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2015 Bloomington Emerging Leader, Alycin Bektesh, ISIS, Islam, John Steinbeck, Socialism, Women's History Month

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America

From John Steinbeck:

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

Steinbeck

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Bektesh Boffo

My old pal and colleague Alycin Bektesh has been named Bloomington’s 2015 Emerging Leader as part of the city’s Women’s History Month festivities in March.

Hard to believe the old girl is now 30 y.o., considering I recall her years ago sitting next to me for the first time one afternoon in the WFHB newsroom, fresh out of J-school, as well-scrubbed as any neophyte can be.

Hah — neophyte! She showed me. Alycin hit the ground running and didn’t stop until she left her latest post as News Director earlier this year. Believe me, the dame showed the entire news op. how a young, serious, dedicated reporter should act. She served as a role model not only to young women, sure, but to young men like WFIU voice Drew Daudelin and new WFHB News Director Joe Crawford, and — yeah, I’ll admit it — to an old bastard like me.

Bektesh

Alycin Bektesh

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Alycin will grab her award at city hall, Tuesday, March 3rd, at 5pm. The event is free and open to the public. Oh, I’ll be there, just to hear her say, “Hey, Glab,” one last time. Alycin tells me she has no definitive work plans at this time but with nearly a thousand NPR stations and better than 220 community radio stations pumping out news in the US, it’s almost a sure bet someone’s gonna grab her from us. I get the feeling she has the itch to do some creative and important reporting after spending the last few years cracking the whip at ‘FHB.

Of course, she’ll tell you ‘FHB cracked the whip on her — and she’d be right, too. It’s good to see her step away from that grind and breathe again.

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Excuses, Excuses

Scads o’folks are taking to the interwebs these days to lay a big guilt trip on this holy land for making it possible for ISIS to exist.

The idea being, our benighted leaders have so horribly mangled and mauled various precincts of the Middle East that, by golly, what else can you expect but for good, decent young Muslim men to chop people’s heads off?

And burn one or two hostages at the stake.

And videotape the festivities.

Make no mistake, it’s easy as pie to hate empire, any empire, and we — these United States of Murrica — are the empire du siècle.

Many of the same tut-tutters decry outraged criticism of ISIS as so much Islamophobia. These sensitive souls like to say the ISIS guys are not really Muslims at all, not like the peace-loving, vast majority of Muslims on this otherwise mad planet.

All told, a certain number of hand-wringers and pontificators hold that we’ve got ISIS all wrong and, even if we don’t, we — the USA — are jerks anyway so who are we to be outraged?

The truth is the ISIS gang is really more interested than anything else in time-machining the world to the Seventh Century. That would be when Islam’s founder, fella named Muhammad, decided to incorporate his god myth. The way the ISIS boys (and they are exclusively males, natch) look at it, every single thing that’s happened since the good old Six Hundreds has been an utter and brazen violation of god’s want.

Don’t ask me how they know this. I’m perplexed by all god-believers and their cock-suredness of what the putative creator of the Universe is thinking. Hey, Christianist peeps here think god becomes sick to his stomach at the very thought of two men passionately kissing. Then again, the ISIS boys think the same thing so, hell, who knows? Maybe they’re both right — although it seems far-fetched that the super supreme being who created all 118 elements as well as Katy Perry and Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, would be so skittish.

Creation

Creation

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Nevertheless, the ISIS-ers are dead set upon regressing this world some 1400 years. And should they fail in that quest, apparently, they would be more than happy to see this planet roasted. Yep, acc’d’g to Yale U. poli-sci lecturer Graeme Wood, writing in the most recent issue of The Atlantic, ISIS makes no bones about that either-or position. Either we go back to those rollicking pre-A/C, frozen pizza-less, women-are-chattel, no-one’s-ever-heard-of-the-Chicago-Cubs days or they’ll do what they can to make an apocalypse happen.

As in a biblical Apocalypse. Capital A.

And guess what — should they get their hands on some nukes and some matches, it wouldn’t be a jaw-dropping shock to see ISIS torch, say, Cairo, Tel Aviv, or even New York City.

See, the roster of ISIS is not comprised of hail-well-met fellows who’d be Quakers or volunteers for Habitat for Humanity were it not for the USA’s missteps and atrocities. They’re cut-throats. They’re end-times believers. They hate the world. They hate life itself.

And their vision of Islam is the most pure and unadulterated there is. As Graeme Wood writes:

The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.

I know many good people who practice the Islamic faith. But like Christians and Jews, they cherry-pick their scriptural guidelines and commandments. All faiths today are pale imitations of the holy — and monumentally violent — ideals of their denominations’ original charters.

And today, only the ISIS guys are following the rules as originally laid down by Muhammad and his PR men.

Fundamentalists, man. We’re going to be fighting them for a long time to come. As we should.

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01/28/2015
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Alycin Bektesh, Benedict Cumberbatch, Bob Costello, Joe Crawford, Just In, Kari Costello, Mike Pence, Racism, Steve Martin, Village Deli, WFHB

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It Takes A Village

I waylaid Kari Costello this AM, digging for dope on the future of her and hubby Bob’s Village Deli, which came thisclose to being destroyed by fire this past Sunday afternoon.

Village Deli

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The Bloomington institution’s hind end was devastated by flames during the Sunday breakfast/brunch rush. Nobody was injured even as thick black smoke and leaping flames forced the packed house to be evacuated in a hurry.

Anyway, K. Costello says she and Bob have entertained a couple of insurance co. appraisers in the three days since the conflagration. They still don’t know anything about when the restaurant will re-open nor how much actual repair work needs to be done.

Village Deli

The Front’s Cool

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Of equal importance to is the plight of the V.D.’s staff. “A lot of them are college kids,” Kari says. “This was their only source of income. How are they going to pay their rent? We’ve got to do something for them, and quick.”

Some V.D. staffers will work temporarily at the Laughing Planet, also part of the Costello empire along with Soma Coffee. As for further info on the Deli’s re-opening, Kari says, “When we know something, you’ll know something.”

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Moving On

And then who should drop by Table No. 1 at Soma but Alycin Bektesh, newly-emeritus news director at WFHB. She took a powder, unexpectedly and surprisingly, from the community radio station earlier this month. Her second in command, ass’t news director Joe Crawford, has been elevated to her chair and Alycin’s sticking around to help with the transition and finding a lieutenant for him.

Bektesh

Alycin Bektesh, Election Night 2014

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I’ll tell you this: Alycin looks great these days. Her face is free of the stress of working virtually every day of the week, being on call from morning until night, and spending holidays, birthdays, and sunny summer days in the on-air studio.

Alycin doesn’t know precisely what the future holds in store for her but, natch, level-headed kid she is, she won’t be panhandling on Kirkwood Avenue any time soon.

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All The News That Fits

Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.

— Allen Ginsberg

Pence

Gov. Mike Pence: Indiana’s Editor-In-Chief

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Yeah, I’m as harrumphed as anyone in light of the news that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence has started his own state-run news service. It’s called Just IN. Cute, huh? Y’know, taking the old TV newsman’s intro to a bulletin — “This just in…” — and doubling it down to to connote news and info just from the Hoosier State. Just for you. Just, I guess, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth as the Guv sees it.

How, peeps are asking, can a supposed small-gov’t conservative justify using taxpayer dough to run a propaganda operation? What would the Founding Daddy-o’s, whom the Right never fails to cite when trying to win an argument, say about that?

Well, history tells us the likes of Benjamin Franklin, who ran the Colonies’ first non-Crown post office, wanted low-cost and easy delivery of mail in large part so he and his cohorts could spread news about their Revolution. The current USPS (then called the U.S. Post Office Department)) was created in 1792 thanks to legislation sponsored by George Washington and James Madison. Its paramount raison d’être was to facilitate the dissemination of gov’t news.

So it can be said the post office has always been a propaganda machine. And the Founding Fathers wanted the taxpayers to foot most of its bills.

Just as Mike Pence does for his little venture.

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Martin’s Music

Digital DJ extraordinaire Hondo Thompson passes along this news from Steve Martin’s Twitter account:

Starting now to record a new album with Edie Brickell. Peter Asher (CBE!) producing.

Just wondering: Is there a cooler guy in America than Steve Martin?

Martin

Steve Martin

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BTW: While trying to find a nice image of himself, I came upon Martin’s speaker’s appearance agency. Apparently, he gets a cool $200,000 for each speaking engagement. Yow! My speaker’s fee is negotiable, in case you’re interested. I’ll be happy with $20. If that’s too much for your blood, I’ll take a White Castle gift certificate. Or bus fare. Your choice.

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Nuh uh, Sez Michelle

Anything that’s a spit in the eye of a tyrannical theocracy (I apologize for being redundant) is good by me.

WaPo 20150127

Click Image For Full Story

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Word Police

Benedict Cumberbatch, whom millions of females find alluring for some reason or another, consigned himself to the fires of hell by using the term “coloured” to describe black and brown people, ironically in a interview having to do with racism in both Great Britain and this holy land. Cumberbatch expressed dismay that his homeland is seemingly more racist than the US. He also decried the lack of opportunity for dark-skinned folk in theater, movies, and TV.

None of that means anything, though, to people who dig finding insults under every bed.

Just to recap: White man (who, physically, could be mistaken for a mobile home owner from Bedford, Indiana) places himself four-square on the side of the angels in terms of race relations in the Anglo-American world but, unfortunately, chooses to use a forbidden term to describe the oppressed group so he’s immediately cast as a racist on the order of a Grand Dragon .

Cumberbatch

Cumberbatch

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So, I put it to my pal, a reasonably well-known African-American artist. This Cumberbunch dude, I said, used the term “coloured.” What’s your take?

After a few shrugs and a question or two about exactly who Cummerbund is, my pal finally responded, “Who cares?”

Bingo. Here’s the sham that passes for race relations in these United States today: Canary-in-a-coalmine sensitivities are elevated to moral imperatives even as real atrocities are committed day in and day out against America’s dark-skinned brethren and sisteren. It’s a trade-off everybody’s a party to — we whites promise not to drop N-bombs or other slurs and dark-skinned folks promise not to rise up en masse and kick the crap out of us for hundreds of years of slavery, Jim Crow, coded political catch phrases, institutionalized second-clss citizenship, and too many policemen using them for target practice.

Hypocrisy — as American as sweet potato pie.

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11/06/2014
2 Comments
2014 Election, Alycin Bektesh, bloomingOUT, Democratic Party, Elizabeth Warren, Liberals, WFHB

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The Party’s Over

So, the Republicans now are the big boys, running the halls of Congress like they own it. The Democrats, meanwhile, are crying, moaning, copping pleas, and generally behaving like high school sophomores who failed geometry because they didn’t study.

I have no use for either gang at this point in history.

The Republicans give me the jitters because their party has been hijacked by loons. The Dems upset my stomach because they’re all afraid of their own shadows. What choice does a bright, intelligent, caring, charming citizen such as I have?

Ick. Just Ick.

BTW: Those BMOC Republicans who think they own Congress? They don’t. The Koch Boys and several other nefarious, archcriminal, ungodly wealthy sociopaths do. Not that it matters to the Republicans in Q. The money’s gonna flow into their campaign coffers for the foreseeable future and, really, that’s all that matters. The Dems? Money’s still flowing into their war chests, too — just not as obscenely much as that emanating from the checkbooks of Chucky and Davey et al.

Koch Industries

The Nation’s Capital

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For years I’ve been telling people we in the Dem party shouldn’t pin our hopes on peeps like Dennis Kucinich or Elizabeth Warren for possible White House runs. They’re too liberal, I’d say, pretending I’m some wise old political strategist. They need to be on the outside, shouting in, I’d pontificate. Mom and Pop Murrica won’t buy them. Apparently the Dem “brain” trust bought that argument as well, imposing upon us slate upon slate of milquetoasty, innocuous, borderline vacuous stuffed shirts. Oh no, they weren’t too liberal at all. They were, um, uh…, well, they were alive as far as the rest of us could tell. Barack Obama is alive. So is Hillary Clinton. Harry Reid. Alison Lundergan Grimes. Rahm Emanuel. Andrew Cuomo. John Kerry.

Ugh. I’m sick to death of all of them, every single middle-of-the-road, safe, non-threatening, “successful” Dem out there, and that’s a huge lot. (Admittedly, Obama’s brown skin and Hillary’s vagina threaten the bejesus out of tons o’folks in this holy land but no matter; those people are never going to vote Dem anyway.) The “safe” way has been so successful that the Dem party has pissed away control of the White House and both houses of Congress as late as 2010 to the point now where a certain revivified corpse pundit can ask, Is this the end of the Democratic era?

So, yeah, bring Elizabeth Warren on! And bring with her legislators like Judy Chu and Keith Ellison. Al Franken ought to get an invite. Donna Edwards, Sam Farr, Mike Honda, Jan Schakowsky, and Linda Sanchez too. Put out the call for Barbara Mikulski, Brian Schatz, Maria Cantwell, and Tammy Baldwin while you’re at it.

Warren

Bring Her On!

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They’re all too liberal, acc’d’g to conventional wisdom — which makes them just liberal enough for me.

Hell, sticking like glue with true believers worked out fabulously well for the Conservatives, resulting in the beatification of one Ronald Wilson Reagan. Old Dutch never once apologized for his views. He was, at one time, long, long ago, considered a political joke. Saint Ronald now sits in heaven at the right hand of god.

Give me E. Warren for Prez in 2016.

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Out Is Back

Drop what you’re doing and tune in tonight at 6pm. bloomingOUT! is back on the air.

South Central Indiana’s only LGBTQI-oriented radio talk show went silent for a few months after the retirements of producer Carol Fischer and her partner, host Helen Harrell, in August. Now, WFHB is airing the program again, starting immediately after the Daily Local News tonight.

“We have a big crew of volunteers from eclectic backgrounds coming together to produce bloomingOUT,” says WFHB New Dept. chief Alycin Bektesh. “We have a rotating cast of hosts, segment producers and engineers. Many IU students are involved as well as Indiana’s Marriage Equality Poster Boys Jeff Jewel and Jeff Polling.”

Jewel/Polling

Jeff Jewel & Jeff Polling Get Married (Photo: Chris Howell/Herald Times)

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08/26/2014
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4th Street Festival of the Arts & Cra, Alycin Bektesh, Bryan Park, Count Chocula, Frankenberry, Joe Crawford, Krista Detor, Lotus World Music Festival, NPR Morning Edition, Patrick Peterson, Seinfeld, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Uncategorized, WFHB

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Faster, Pussycat

You want further proof this holy land is becoming more deranged by the nanosecond? Okay, you’ve got it.

A report on NPR’s Morning Edition today reveals that sales of breakfast cereals have been off the last few years. In fact, trade in sugar-coated sugar cubes upon which aficionados sprinkle sugar before adding their milk have been dropping since cereal’s high-water mark in 1996. (Which, BTW, was the heyday of the sitcom, Seinfeld. In case you’ve forgotten, Jerry was noted for keeping an enviable stash of breakfast cereals in his kitchen cupboard. Coincidence? I think not.)

From "Seinfeld"

Seinfeld And His Cereals

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Anyway, people apparently are shying away from breakfast cereals — either the aforementioned glucose bombs or the less hyperglycemic varieties — because…, swear to god, I can hardly believe what I’m typing…, it takes to long to make a goddamned bowl of cereal.

What are we all, firemen? Honest to the Big Daddy-o in the Sky, who in this crazy, mixed-up world is in too much of a hurry to pour out a bowl of Count Chocula? A crystal meth addict?

BTW: in researching Count Chocula for this entry, I learned that its sister cereal, Frankenberry, was responsible for a condition known as, well, Frankenberry Stool. That is, certain kids who slurped that slop were physically unable to break down the dye used in it, so their daily deuces (AKA feces) emerged a rich carmine. Chemistry, my friends, can brighten up your world.

Frankenberry

“Red Is The Ultimate Cure For Sadness.” — Bill Blass

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Pluckin’ And A’picnickin’

Whaddya doing Sunday night? Huh? You don’t know?

Silly.

Everybody who’s anybody will be parked out in front of the Bryan Park bandshell to take in the annual outdoor performance of Krista Detor, backed up by her boy band including hubby David Weber, Steve Mascari, and Tim Moore. The yearly Detor outdoor gig is the best excuse on the planet to lay out a blanket and open up the pick-a-nick basket in the South Central Indiana e’en.

Detor

Krista Detor

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The shindig is part of an action-packed end-of-summer month for this world class hamlet. The 6:30pm Detor show serves as the unofficial coda for the 4th Street Festival of the Arts & Crafts, which will have just wrapped up at that time some half a mile north of the bandshell. And just as soon as locals recover from those two bashes, the 2014 Lotus World Music & Arts Festival kicks off less than three weeks later.

Time for a shameless plug: Krista Detor’s book/CD, Flat Earth Diary, is on sale now at the Book Corner. Twenty two bucks, babies — as Alfred E. Neuman used to say, cheap.

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Check, Mate

So, news has emerged that a large fellow who this year will earn more money than you or I will ever see in our lifetimes because of his ability to prevent other large fellows from catching a football received a $15 million bonus check on July 29th — and he hasn’t cashed it yet!

Patrick Peterson, defensive back for the Arizona Cardinals, got the check when he signed his five-year, $70million contract extension with the NFL team that day. And now it’s been nearly a month and it’s still sitting, presumably, on the passenger seat of his SUV.

Peterson

Payee Peterson

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Sheesh. I think of the times I copped $25 checks for stories that’d taken me a week to write and cashing them so fast that I doubt if I left any fingerprints on them. Then again, I have no idea how to prevent a large fellow from catching a football.

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Citizen Journos

Kudos to big boss Alycin Bektesh over at the WFHB News Department. She’s conjured a 21st Century solution to an age-old problem at the volunteer scoop shop. She calls it the Wordy 30 Club.

One of the biggest problems Bektesh faces is a dearth of vols to fully staff the Monday-through-Friday news writing shifts at the Firehouse Broadcasting outlet. She and her ass’t, Joe Crawford, have had to pen Daily Local News scripts too many times to count of late. This is especially so in summer when Indiana University journalism students are off for the summer, thereby whittling down the vol pool. Most days in June and July, Bektesh can practice firing off her cannon in the ‘FHB newsroom and not worry she’ll hit anybody.

WFHB

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The Wordy 30 ought to remedy that. The way it works is Alycin and Joe will curate a list of news leads that will be available to any volunteer at, well, any place on Earth. All the vols need are their computers or other hand-held devices and they can pick and choose, say, three news leads, then proceed to write headlines or what we in the biz like to call “readers.” These are quick, concise news bits that don’t really deserve the full Woodward/Bernstein treatment but may well be of interest or use to listeners.

Each Wordy 30 shift will last — yep — 30 minutes. Perfect for our fast-paced, short-att’n-span world, nay?

I can see the Daily Local News becoming much more snappy and info-packed once this scheme is in full swing. Those, by the way, are two descriptors few employed in regard to the DLN in the past.

Oh, and don’t fret if your taste in news trends toward long-form, in-depth coverage. WFHB will still churn out those stories. A mix of penetrating journalism and bang-bang headlines ought to make the DLN the indispensable news source for Bloomingtonians.

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08/08/2014
1 Comment
Alycin Bektesh, Book Corner, Cassidy Stay, Conspiracy Theory, Drew Daudelin, GMO, Guns, Indiana University, Kat Carlton, Martha Crouch, Monsanto, Racism, SketchFactor, Union of Concerned Scientists, WFHB, WFIU

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Just The Facts, Ma’am

Loyal Pencillistas know I’m a defender of Genetically Modified Organisms, AKA GMOs. That puts me in a distinct minority in this food fetishist town. People here know me as a liberal-bordering-on-radical and so are aghast when they discover I don’t see GMOs as the tools of the devil.

They say: But what about Monsanto? To which I reply: Sure, Monsanto’s about as evil as, say, Halliburton or Academi (the former Blackwater.) Monsanto makes tons of dough on its patented GMO seeds and uses the most bullying tactics possible to make certain every farmer, every gardener, hell, every kid who plays in the dirt buys its product. Plus, Monsanto actively squashes competition, infringes on free speech, impedes investigations, harasses critics, and literally writes laws that legislators on its payroll can then obediently introduce and pass.

Monsanto is, in short, a bad guy.

Newcomb/Reuters

A Monsanto Corn Sprout [photo by Peter Newcomb/Reuters]

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The ways Monsanto is forcing GMOs upon the world may be despicable but that that doesn’t mean their new species per se necessarily spell the end of civilization. That’s my position.

That said, it was my good fortune to meet Dr. Martha Crouch, better known as Marti, at the Book Corner Monday. “Hey,” I nearly shouted as I read the name on her credit card, “you’re you!”

“Indeed I am,” she replied, smartly.

Crouch

Marti Crouch, Surrounded By Green, Naturally

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I explained how I’ve heard about her through countless folks who’ve taken me to task for defending GMOs. I then asked her to educate me. “I’d be more than happy,” I said, “to change my mind if you’d take the trouble to persuade me — and I buy your argument.”

Marti Crouch is the “real thing” — so sez Pencillista Nancy Hiller. She’s earned herself a national rep. Here, for instance, is a description from a short piece about her appearing in Mother Jones magazine back in 2000:

Martha Crouch, a biology professor at Indiana University in Bloomington and once a pioneering biotechnologist, studied her entire life to reach the pinnacle of her profession. She earned a Ph.D. in developmental biology at Yale before landing at Indiana University, where she teaches and once ran a lab dedicated to cutting edge plant research. In 1990, her lab made the cover of The Plant Cell, the leading journal in the field of plant molecular biology. Instead of launching Crouch into professional nirvana, however, the article marked the end of her research career.

Crouch had tenure and was well-known in her field. But she had awakened one day to the realization that her research was being co-opted by corporations which hoped to apply the science for profit. Further, the manner in which those firms used her discoveries was destroying the natural processes that attracted Crouch to the study of biology in the first place.

In the piece, Crouch is quoted as saying, “You are basically treating the agricultural environment as if it was a factory where you are making televisions or VCRs.”

She’s no longer teaching science because she stopped doing research (IU looked askance at her public denigration of the commercial exploitation of her research.) If anyone can sway me, she’ll be the one.

Marti Crouch has sent me the first of what promises to be a long series of info-packed articles and tracts. It’s an excellent introduction to GMOs from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Consider it GMOs 101. Here it is.

UCS

Click Image For Full Article

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Even if you think you know all you need to know about GMOs, you should read these pieces. Hey, you may learn something! I know I’m hoping to.

Let the conversation begin.

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White Fright

h/t to both Chuck Rogers and Jerry Boyle for this one:

From ValleyWag/Gawker

Click Image For Full Story

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Need I even tell you how much this disgusts me?

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Wahoo, Drew & Cool Kat

Congrats to Drew Daudelin, the new news reader/producer over at WFIU.

Teller/Daudelin

Daudelin (r) With Teller of Penn & Teller

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I met Drew at WFHB where he volunteered five days a week to edit each Daily Local News script. The kid was good, I’m telling’ ya. He brought the writing level up dramatically while he was there.

Now, apparently, he’s making real dough. Good for him.

You may also have caught Kat Carlton reading the news during local breaks on Morning Edition the last few months as well. She, too, prepped at WFHB, in fact writing up news stories right next to me on several occasions. Just watching the way she carried herself, I could tell she was going places.

Carlton/IPM

Carlton

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That Alycin Bektesh, WFHB’s redoubtable News Director, she’s got a nose for talent, no? A thought: Maybe WFIU should become a major contributor to WFHB, considering the latter is now the talent pool for the former.

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Criminally Cynical

Remember the teenaged girl in Texas who survived the massacre of her family a few weeks ago? The one who gave a heartfelt speech at her family’s memorial? The latest poster child for gun sanity?

Stay Funeral

Cassidy Stay (center) At Her Family’s Funeral

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Her name was (and is) Cassidy Stay. The shooter, if you don’t recall, was searching for his ex-wife and held her sister’s family hostage until they told him where she was. They refused to and as a result were executed, Nazi-style, with bullets to the backs of their heads. Cassidy survived the carnage.

At the memorial Cassidy (who played dead during the gunman’s rampage) said:

I really like Harry Potter. In “The Prisoner of Azkaban,” Dumbledore says, “Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times.” I know that my mom, dad, Bryan, Emily, Becca and Zach are in a much better place and that I’ll be able to see them again one day. Thank you all for coming and for showing support for me and my family. Stay strong.

Gun control advocates, naturally, lauded Cassidy to the skies and asked, for the zillionth time, why we have to endure yet another firearms atrocity.

Just as naturally, gun nuts on the far end of that particular spectrum didn’t look as kindly upon the teen girl and those who hero-ized her. In fact, a certain number of people believe Cassidy never was shot at all and that her family was killed in that old reliable trick of the jack-booted gov’t, the false flag job. Not only that, the gun control crowd, acc’d’g to this train of “thought,” works hand in hand with purported “victims” of gun crimes merely to make money. Want detail? Check this vid out. It just may be the most cynical thing you’ve ever seen or heard:

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A reminder, kids: There aren’t two sides to every question.

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04/04/2014
1 Comment
Alternative Radio, Alycin Bektesh, Brendan Eich, California Proposition 8, Citizens United, David Barsamian, Firefox, Hampton Sides, John Roberts, Martin Luther King, McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, Mozilla, Same-Sex Marriage, Shaun McCutcheon, US Supreme Court, WFHB

Hot Air

Drive, I Said

Pull out your wallet or your checkbook because the WFHB spring fund drive kicked off this morning. The beg-fest will run for 10 days, until a week from Sunday, and the station hopes to pocket some $40,000.

Kick in a sawbuck or two. Every little bit helps.

Spot Button

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As part of the festivities, WFHB will bring independent radio savant David Barsamian to town on Sunday, April 10th. The founder of the Alternative Radio network will speak about Media, Capitalism, and the Environment. The talk begins at 7:00pm at the Bloomington-Monroe County Convention Center. Tix are $5 for the speech alone and $35 for the speech and a meet-and-greet with Barsamian after.

Barsamian

David Barsamian

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WFHB News Director Alycin Bektesh worked her newshound paws to the bone to pull this special appearance off. Get tickets here. Barsamian, BTW, is forgoing his speaking fee so all proceeds go to the station.

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April 4th, 1968

This day, 46 years ago, a racist drifter whacked Martin Luther King, Jr. Many believe evidence exists that the drifter’s stalking of the civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner was bankrolled by one or more wealthy segregationists.

For public consumption, President Lyndon Johnson shook his head and said it was a terrible thing. So did tons of governors, mayors, and chiefs of police. Their crocodile tears belied their relief that King was erased from the scene because he’d recently begun to talk about the enormous gulf between the haves and the have-nots as well as the evils of unfettered capitalism. That, my friends, was and is a mortal sin.

Abernathy & King

Ralph Abernathy Tends To The Mortally Wounded King — Note King’s Cigarette on Walkway (Photo/Life)

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Meanwhile, acc’d’g to legend, when news of King’s slaying reached the FBI office, agents jumped out of their chairs and cheered.

You want a good, un-hysterical account of the assassination, read Hampton Sides’ Hellhound on His Trail.

All I know is April 4th, 1968, was the day I began to see this holy land in a more clear light.

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Yer Out!

So, the Mozilla CEO up and quit his new job because of all the hollering over his financial support of California’s anti-LGBT Proposition 8 in 2008.

Brendan Eich gave a thousand bucks to the Proposition 8 forces, who fought tooth and nail to get an amendment into the state constitution banning marriage by anyone except Ma and Pa Kettle. The Prop 8-ers were successful at first, but the amendment was ultimately ruled unconstitutional.

Eich

Mozilla-ites Don’t Like Eich

■

Mozilla, and its flagship product Firefox, are positioned as toys of the people — young, hip, open-minded people, specifically. Throwing money at anti-same sex marriage bigots isn’t looked upon kindly by that demographic. So they screamed and Eich is out.

Which is fine by me. Well, sorta. I’m glad the dope is out but I’m made a little itchy by a loud public outcry costing someone his or her job. It all sounds a little tyranny-of-the-majority to me. We were just lucky — this time — that the object of righteous rage was a bigot.

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The Rich Are Something Else

I’m here to guide you through the thickets of the legal and political systems which can be so confounding in this holy land.

For instance, many of us are wondering why the Supreme Court once again ruled against campaign finance regulations, using as its justification the 1st Amendment guarantee of free speech.

Many of us might say, Hey, wait a sec. What does money have to do with free speech?

The answer: Nothing.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission Wednesday, effectively allowing any and every rich guy to donate thousands, millions, or billions, if he so chooses, to candidates, parties, and PACs.The ruling ends whatever caps were left in place after the Citizens United decision in 2010. When the Big Robe writes an opinion, that means the majority thinks the case is mighty important.

They’re right. McCutcheon defines us as a nation.

See, an uber-wealthy political donor named Shaun McCutcheon wanted to plow ever greater piles of his money into the Republican Party and its candidates. The FEC said, Hold on there, pard, we’re trying to level the playing field here. McCutcheon and his lawyers responded by wringing their hands, weeping, gnashing their teeth — and suing, natch. McCutcheon figured, What’s the good of having all the dough in the world if I can’t buy a statehouse or two or even the White House?

Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Kennedy agreed. They had to base their ruling on something that sounded high-minded and less venal than the real reason.

Follow me so far? Okay, let’s not bullshit each other or ourselves anymore. Let’s tell each other and ourselves the way it is.

For years our elementary school teachers, newspapers and television stations, flamboyantly patriotic candidates for elective office, and other purveyors of myth and nonsense have sung paeans to our democracy. One man, one vote. The voice of the people. The power of the ballot box. Hey buddy, my taxes pay your salary, and so on ad infinitum, bordering on ad nauseam.

You don’t buy that bologna (oh, alright, baloney), do you? I assume you don’t, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading these (almost) daily screeds.

Cheap Lunchmeat

Today’s Civics Lesson, Sliced

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Cutting through the cheap lunchmeat that is politico-legal jargon today and, for that matter, has been every day since this great country arose from god’s mighty hand some 238 years ago, is really awfully easy.

Just remember that even though we pride ourselves on having a classless society and every man is a king and the rest of that blather, the dominant train of thought in this holy land holds that the rich are better human beings than the rest of us. That’s the truth.

And by rich, I mean rich. Not the schlub down the street who may have cracked the quarter-million-dollar-a-year salary threshold. He’s not rich. He’s comfortable. When his car breaks down, he can get it fixed without thinking much about it. He can even buy a brand new car if he wants. He won’t agonize over the decision. His car breaking down is not a disaster. For the rest of us, it may very well be.

But should our comfy neighbor lose his job, he and his family will start hurting sometime in the not too distant future. He may have a pile of dough today, but it won’t last him the rest of his life.

There are, though, people who’ll never have to work again until the day they die. Nor will their children or grandchildren. For that matter, every successive generation until these United States break up or are taken over by Mexicans or Russians or extra-terrestrials or whomever you envision in your paranoiac fever dreams will be rich enough to laugh at the very idea of work.

Work that puts bread on the table. For them, bread is always on the table. They are given bread as a birthright.

They are different than the rest of us. They are better.

We really believe that.

Real wealth in America buys and sells power. Real wealth can sway elections, get laws passed, regulations ignored, misdemeanors winked at, felonies fixed.

The rich — the real rich — are something different. They’re…, they’re…, well, they’re closer to god.

There’s your American dream.

The Reagan/Bush/Bush Supreme Court appointees voted in a bloc once again to codify the American belief that the rich not only are superior human beings but they should be allowed to elect presidents and governors and senators and even, if any of them is so inclined, the odd county commissioner or city clerk.

Money, Roberts and the boys have ruled, is everything.

That, kiddies, is America. And it ain’t no dream.

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01/10/2014
1 Comment
Alycin Bektesh, Bloody Sunday, Harry Nilsson, John Lewis, March (Book One), Nate Powell, Peter LoPilato, The Ryder, WFHB

Relatively Balmy Air

Big Talk

Yo ho, the first installment in my new series of interviews, jointly produced with WFHB radio and The Ryder magazine, came off without a hitch yesterday.

Logo Combo

Media Conglomerate

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The series has no name just yet — I’m leaning toward something like The Big Talk. Interview Number 1 aired during the Daily Local News at 5:30pm on 91.3 FM. I’d sat down with Nate Powell, now a Bloomington resident and one of the top graphic novelists/cartoonists in the country. Powell illustrated Congressman John Lewis’s biographical graphic novel, March: Book One. Lewis was one of the pioneers of the civil rights movement and famously got his skull broken by an Alabama state trooper’s nightstick on Bloody Sunday, the day of the first Selma voting rights march.

The series includes both an 8-minute radio interview to be followed by a longer chitchat in the magazine. The Powell interview will run in Feb.’s Ryder, appropriately enough, during Black History Month.

Tons o’thanks to WFHB News Director Alycin Bektesh and The Ryder editor and publisher Peter LoPilato for their support. This is gonna be fun!

Anyway, check out the Nate Powell talk online.

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Making Things Up

My pal, the retired IU prof of Southeast Asia studies (who, BTW, forbids me from disclosing his name in this communications colossus), suggests we need a word for the practice in coffeehouses and restaurants of combining two or more tables to accommodate a big group of people.

You know, something like schadenfreude¹ or zeitgeist² or doppelgänger³. The Germans, natch, are huge on that portmanteau-ish practice and, in fact, are notorious for coining words that go on and on and on. The language and writing blog Verbavores points out the 30-letter word Geschwindigkeitsbeschränkungen, which actually means nothing more complicated than speed limits.

German Speed Limit Signs

Strassenverkehrsordnung-stuff

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A visiting German student working on his thesis here at IU was sitting with us in Soma this AM. We leaned on him to help us come up with such a word. Give us something with table and combine, we said.

He thought for a moment, then commandeered my interwebs machine to type in the following: Tischzusammenschiebungen.

Hmm. Doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, does it? We’ll have to keep working on it.

◆

[1: Harm-joy, finding pleasure in the suffering of others; 2: Ghost-time, the spirit of the age; and 3: Double-goer, a paranormal double of a living person or one who uncannily resembles someone else.]

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[Oh, one more thing: the name of this media powerhouse, in Teutonic portmanteau, is Elektronenbleistift. You’re welcome.]

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Everybody’s Talkin’

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01/03/2014
Leave a comment
Affluenza, Alycin Bektesh, Anaheim Ducks, Beanie Babies, Chris Madsen, Civil Rights, Duck Dynasty, Elaine Irwin, Guns, John Lewis, John Mellencamp, Nate Powell, Peter LoPilato, Rolling Stone, The Ryder, Ty Warner, WFHB

Hot Air

Quick Hits & Snippets

Cold yet? Just wait. In the meantime, here are some news tidbits, opinions, and pontifications straight from The Pencil world headquarters. BTW: Chris Madsen, long-time voice of the NHL’s Anaheim Ducks and noted national media consultant, called my almost-daily word spurts “rants” yesterday. Hmm! Rants, eh? I’ll show you some rants.

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Brrrrrr…., Grrrrrr!

Personal to Old Man Winter: Just go, will you?

Winter Ice

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Music As Biography

Have you read the piece on John Mellencamp in the last Rolling Stone issue of 2013? It’s called “My Life in 15 Songs” and, in it, he describes how he’s grown, how his life has changed through the years as landmarked by certain hits. Pretty cool idea.

Now, I’ve never met Mellencamp, although I like to think we’re neighbors: He and I live on Indiana State Road 446. Of course, his lakefront mansion is some five miles south of my far more modest chez.

Anyway, when I first moved here, I’d hear people talking about M. and their stories generally went something like this:

My cousin’s brother-in-law knew him in high school and, man, was he an asshole. There was this one time….

None of the people who were so certain as to the character of the pop star-turned Americana singer-songwriter had ever seen the man, much less knew him.

I get the feeling that because he’d elected to live in So. Cent. Ind. people expected him to be chummy and warm with everyone he’d run into hereabouts, as if, rather than being a worldwide celebrity, he was everybody’s next door neighbor. So when he’d grunt in response to goggle-eyed fans accosting him at the Starbucks, they’d take it personally.

Mellencamp/Irwin

Jekyll & Bride

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Conversely, his ex-wife, the stunning model Elaine Irwin, seems universally regarded as the nicest human ever to breath air in Indiana. I’ve got a theory about that, too, natch. See, people expect super models to be haughty, aloof, and utterly unapproachable. So whenever anyone might run into her in the Starbucks line, they’d hear her say please and thank you to the barista and come away convinced that she was, in truth, gushingly effusive and open-armed.

Face it, folks, we’re a weird species.

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I’d Like You To Meet Someone….

Hey, as soon as I finish clacking this post out, I’m off to the recording studio to do an interview with big time graphic novelist Nate Powell. His latest tome is a joint production with Congressman John Lewis (D-Georgia) and writer Andrew Aydin entitled March: Book One. It the first of a trilogy recounting the life of the civil rights leader from his days on a little Pike County, Alabama, farm through the 1965 voting rights march in Selma (where he got his skull broken by an Alabama state trooper) and on, triumphantly, to the halls of the US Capitol.

Nate Powell Artwork/John Lewis

Powell & Lewis

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Powell’s well-known for his graphic novels, including Swallow Me Whole and Any Empire. He took a roundabout route to comix fame and we’ll be talking about it all today. My interview with him will be the first in a joint production venture between WFHB and The Ryder magazine. We’re looking to run a monthly piece in the mag featuring compelling folk from here in the Bloomington area as well as a companion audio feature on the Daily Local News. I’m excited as all hell about it.

Kudos and thanks to WFHB News Director Alycin Bektesh and Ryder editor/publisher Peter LoPilato for joining the venture. BTW: I haven’t figured out what to call the thing yet. I’ve tossed around some ideas in my coconut and the best so far seems to be Big Mike’s People. If you’ve got a better idea, by all means pass it on.

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Ready, Aim…, Duck!

Wow, here’s a shocker: Those Duck Dynasty hyenas are now pimping for a gun manufacturer. Imagine that! Bigoted people and guns. No one on Earth has ever made that connection before.

Tea Party & Guns

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Poor Little Rich Boys

And, of course, the “affluenza” defense is becoming real, at least a version of it. Well, “real” in the same sense that, say, an accused rapist might plead he couldn’t help himself because that woman wore a miniskirt.

Ty Warner, the billionaire entrepreneurial genius who gave us Beanie Babies®, has been convicted of income tax evasion for parking countless millions of dollars in off-shore accounts. See, geniuses shouldn’t have to pay taxes like the rest of us slobs.

He has pleaded guilty in federal court to the tax evasion charges and now is trying to convince the judge in his case that he shouldn’t go to jail because he came from the most deprived of childhoods so how could she expect him to do the right thing when he became a bazillionaire?

Warner

The Tears Of A Clown

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Warner faces five years in the federal pen; that’s in addition to the $53 million in penalties and $16 million in back taxes he’s already been ordered to pay. But his reasoning goes that rich geniuses shouldn’t have to go to jail for evading taxes, especially if they’d been forced to endure abominations like taking jobs as busboys and valet parkers when they were in college.

The horror.

Do I need to tell you how I hope the judge rules?

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Room To Write

Resident of the Internet-iverse (although his corporal body can be found in Forest Park, Illinois), Bill Lichtenberg, happened upon some chilling stats. Chilling, that is, when one (me) considers the depth and breadth of the competition to get one’s (mine) novel published.

Dominic Smith, writing in the books, arts and culture online magazine The Millions, has found that there are way, way, way, way too many people trying to catch the eyes of traditional publishers these days. Smith writes:

After studying the data, I’m inclined to think there’s a million people writing novels, a quarter of a million actively publishing them in some form, and about 50,000 publishing them with mainstream and small, traditional presses.

That’s in America alone, babies.

Personal to other writers: Back off; you’re crowding me

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Radio Talk

Finally, the newly-formed WFHB newsletter committee will meet again tonight. I can say that I’m on the committee and maybe — just maybe — tonight I can get the other members to give me permission to identify them. We’ll see.

Anyway, the committee last week decided to aim for March to put out the inaugural issue.

Stay tuned.

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11/22/2013
4 Comments
Alycin Bektesh, Dallas Texas, Dena Hawes, Jack Ruby, Jim Manion, Joe Estevill, Joe Estivill, John F. Kennedy, Kevin Culbertson, Lee Harvey Oswald, Lyndon B. Johnson, Orange Is The New Black, Richard J. Daley, Snowclone, St. Giles Catholic School, WFHB

Hot Camelot Air

Dallas

Fifty years ago today, the nuns at St. Giles school told us we were to go home when class started after lunch. I had no idea why.

I did know Sister Caelin seemed sad.

When I got home, I found my mother obsessively vacuuming the same spot on the living room carpet. Looking closer, I realized she was crying. It was the first time I ever saw her cry.

I wondered if I was in trouble.

The TV was on. Ma never had the TV on during the day. Simpler times, you know. TV watching was for night time, after work and dinner, school and homework, and all the day’s chores had been completed. Ma noticed me standing there, staring at her.

“Mike,” she said, dolorously, “President Kennedy is dead.”

Then I cried.

Dealey Plaza

Dealey Plaza Today

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I knew who President Kennedy was. He was the boss of America, a man bigger even than Chicago’s Mayor Daley, a fact I was just starting to wrap my mind around.

I knew Mayor Daley could tell my Dad what to do. It was very difficult for me to grasp that someone could tell Mayor Daley what to do.

That night, I was sorely disappointed to learn that regular Friday night TV programming would be suspended in favor of wall to wall assassination coverage. I found it very unfair.

As the weekend went by, I came to understand the gravity of the killing of a president. I also came to understand how fragile all our hierarchies, relationships, and systems were. I saw Lee Harvey Oswald get whacked by Jack Ruby. I tried to get used to saying President Johnson.

Johnson

The President?

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I began to get that everything in this weird world — save the world itself — was temporal.

In these more hyper-sensitive, more protective days, a lot of parents might advocate shielding seven-year-olds from jarring news like the murder of a president. Kids have plenty of time to grow up, they might say. Kids aren’t prepared for that kind of reality.

To which I’d reply, no one is prepared for that kind of reality. And, I’d add, the weekend of John F. Kennedy’s assassination was the first and most effective introduction to the real world this little kid could possibly receive.

I have a lot of issues with the things my parents did and didn’t do in raising me. But the fact that they never shied from telling me the unvarnished truth about world affairs or family secrets wasn’t one of them.

For that, I thank them.

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And On And On And On And….

The WFHB soap opera continues. As recently as Sunday, for instance, acting general manager Cleveland Dietz was pondering what he might do with the rest of his life.

Now, he knows where he’ll be spending his days at least through the end of the year. This week Board of Directors president Joe Estivill as well as regular Board member Richard Fish have approached Dietz, asking him to remain on the job through December 31st.

Estevill/Fish

Estivill & Fish

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The Board will vote on the extension at Monday’s meeting.

Meanwhile, insiders are certain the board will start the entire GM search process over again, meaning the community radio station won’t have a permanent boss until April.

Which is ludicrous.

This latest development, following the withdrawal of controversial choice Kevin Culbertson earlier this week, would mean WFHB will have gone almost an entire year without a general manager.

A state the size of California can pick its governor in less time. And, in case the Board doesn’t know it, California is bigger with a far vaster budget, and hundreds — perhaps thousands — of departments, bureaus, and offices. Plus, the job pays a hell of a lot more than WFHB will pay its future leader.

This whole “national search” business is a pretense the station can no longer afford. WFHB is a community radio station; its leadership should come, naturally, from a local pool of people numbering a minimum of 200,000, if the latest census figures are to be believed. If the Board can’t find a GM in that crowd — which, by the way, includes the students and faculty of a major university — they’re not looking hard enough.

In fact, the three finalists for the job from which Culbertson was plucked include a former GM of this very station and a proven fundraiser for non-profit organizations. Even if the anti-Chad Carrothers sentiment is deep enough to preclude him from ever getting the job again (a situation that, too, is ludicrous), why can’t the Board fall back on Dena Hawes?

The argument against her that she has no media experience is a red herring. Hawes can raise dough. That should be of paramount concern. Jim Manion can continue to run the Music Department and Alycin Bektesh can keep News humming. They’re both good at what they do. WFHB needs a top dog now. People with money burning holes in their pockets just might begin to wonder if this rudderless ship is worth investing in.

The Board Monday ought to commit itself to finding a general manager within a month. That’s it; 31 days. It can be done. Big organizations, corporations, and even governmental agencies do it all the time.

The Board would do so if it was smart. My guess is when Tuesday midnight rolls around we’ll still be looking at an April target date.

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Word Trivia

Do you know what a snowclone is? Neither did I until just the other night, when I came across it somewhere, somehow.

It’s something you and I probably have used a dozen times recently. In fact, if you’re a fan of narrowcasting comedy-dramas, you likely have watched Orange Is the New Black. The title of that Netflix production is itself a snowclone.

From "Orange Is the New Black"

OITNB

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Here’s the definition, according to Know Your Meme®:

Snowclones are a type of phrasal templates in which certain words may be replaced with another to produce new variations with altered meanings, similar to the “fill-in-the-blank” game of Mad Libs. Although freeform parody of quotes from popular films, music and TV shows is a fairly common theme in Internet humor, snowclones usually adhere to a particular format or arrangement order which may be reduced down to a grammatical formula with one or more custom variables. They can be understood as the verbal or text-based form of photoshopped exploitables.

In common English, that means you can take a familiar meme or trope and substitute words that make it into a whole new cliche. One of the earliest examples was If Eskimos have a million words for snow, then [some other folks] must have a million words for [something common to them].

BTW: the Eskimo trope is false; they don’t have a million or however many words for snow. Nevertheless, that cliched statement spread like wildfire a few years ago.

Anyway, Orange Is the New Black morphed out of the original fashion world pronouncement, grey is the new black, after many generations of variations.

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04/30/2012
2 Comments
al Qaeda, Alycin Bektesh, Barack Obama, bin Laden Death Hoax Theory, Chad Carrothers, Cindy Sheehan, Conspiracy Theory, Firehouse Broadcasting, George W. Bush, Iraq War, LiveScience.com, Matt Taibbi, Osama bin Laden, Pablo Picasso, Pakistan, Ryan Lee Dawes, Society of Professional Journalists, The Great Derangement, The Onion, US Navy SEAL Team 6, WFHB

The Pencil Today:

✍

THE QUOTE

“You mustn’t always believe what I say. Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer.” — Pablo Picasso

♢

TELL ME SWEET LITTLE LIES

It’ll be a year tomorrow that a posse of Navy SEALs cornered that varmint Osama bin Laden and plugged him in his bedroom.

President Barack Obama had large enough cagliones to order the secret assault on ObL’s hideout in Pakistan and the raid paid off big time — sort of. Had a Republican president been in charge there would have been daily parades in his honor in every big city since the al Qaeda boss’s take-down.

The President Watches The Operation Unfold

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But because Obama is a Muslim mole whose goal is to transform our holy land into a commie/Nazi gulag/stalag, he hasn’t exactly been showered with laurel leaves since his big night.

Funny thing is, almost within minutes of the announcement that ObL had been executed, the conspiracy theorists leaped out of the woodwork. Chief among them, sad to say, was Cindy Sheehan, the California mom whose son was killed in the Iraq War and who channeled her grief into highly publicized anti-war activism.

Literally within hours after the news of bin Laden’s death broke, Sheehan famously wrote on her website, “I am sorry, but if you believe the newest death of OBL (sic), you’re stupid.” She went on to detail some very iffy evidence that the whole operation was a hoax.

Poor Sheehan lost whatever credibility she had left after that.

Cindy Sheehan

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Fringe-y organizations both left and right jumped on the ObL Death Hoax bandwagon for the next several weeks, then fell silent. A brief scan of the internet shows that no one has said much about such hoax claims since about June last year.

Which is odd because conspiracies and hoaxes usually seem to have the staying power of a bad cold in January.

Here’s a list of the ten top conspiracy theories in the US, as compiled by LiveScience.com:

  • 10) 9/11 was an inside job (2001)
  • 9) Princess Diana was murdered (1997)
  • 8) Subliminal advertising (1973)
  • 7) The Apollo moon landings were faked (1978)
  • 6) Paul McCartney died (1966)
  • 5) All the people and organizations who killed JFK (mid-1960s)
  • 4) The Roswell UFO crash (1947)
  • 3) “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (1905)
  • 2) The epidemic of satanic cults (1980s)
  • 1) Big Pharma (1990s-2000s)

Leave It To The Onion

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As you can see, a good conspiracy/hoax theory can last a century or more. But today’s technology and the mass media bombardment of us with deception and myth has turned us into ever-more credulous suckers.

Journalist/polemicist Matt Taibbi has a nice explanation of the phenomenon in his book, “The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion.” On pages 183 to 189 (paperback edition) he lays out the ways advertisers, pols, and charlatans have inundated us with phony claims, distortions, spin, subterfuge, and outright lies. Here, I cherry-pick the key points from his thesis:

“How many lies are too many? How much bullshit is the human organism designed to tolerate before it starts to malfunction? Is there a breaking point?

“Mainstream American society has never been designed to confront difficult or dangerous truths. In fact, our mass media has corrupted the idea of objective truth so badly in the past five or six decades that it is now hard to tell when anyone is being serious about anything — the news, the movies, commercials, anything….

“Somehow ordinary people were supposed to keep track of all this, make their own sense of it. Decades after Watergate, Vietnam, and the Kennedy assassination, Americans were forced to rummage for objective reality in a sea of the most confusing and diabolical web of bullshit ever created by human minds — a false media tableau created mainly a s a medium to sell products, a medium in which even the content of the ‘news’ was affected by commercial considerations….”

“This was too much for the people to handle….”

“America by the early years of this century was a confusing kaleidoscope of transparent, invidious bullshit, a place where politicians hired consultants to teach them to ‘straight talk,’ where debates were decided by inadvertent coughs and smiles and elections were resolved via competing smear campaigns, and where network news programs — subsidized by advertisements for bogus alchemist potions like Enzyte that supposedly made your dick grow by magic — could feature as a lead story newly released photos of the Tom Cruise love child, at a time when young American men and women were dying every day in the deserts of the Middle East.

“The message of all of this was that Americans were now supposed to make their own sense of the world. There was no dependable authority left to turn to, no life raft in an increasingly perilous informational sea. This coincided with an age when Americans now needed to understand more of the world than ever before…. Now… Joe American has to turn on the Internet and tell himself a story that makes sense to him.”

Cindy Sheehan reached the breaking point when Barack Obama held his historic midnight news conference a year ago. Of course, she was pushed toward that snap by the death of her child. But the rest of us are under strain as well, if not so heart-wrenching.

We’re living in an age when fiction and reality are interchangeable. That’s why George W. Bush could lie us into a war and Barack Obama could sell himself as a man who would change government.

✍

So I’m surprised the Osama bin Laden Death Hoax stories didn’t last. It doesn’t mean we’re becoming more rational and sophisticated — probably only that the vast majority liked the the story of the Navy SEAL Team 6 operation a year ago too much.

♢

REAL NEWS

WFHB‘s Alycin Bektesh, Ryan Dawes, and Chad Carrothers lugged home a lot of hardware after Friday night’s Society of Professional Journalists annual awards dinner in Indianapolis. The Firehouse broadcasters won 19 awards for excellence, going up against news departments from around the state.

The WFHB Gang Friday Night In Indy

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Bloomington’s community radio station consistently puts out the best local news and special programming in the region. No commercial station nearby can hold a candle to the news department that current GM Carrothers started about a decade ago.

Carrothers took a chance, donating his time and considerable energies for no pay at first, just to get the operation off the ground. Now WFHB News puts all those for-profit radio news departments to shame.

♢

LIAR, LIAR

The 1965 hit by The Castaways.

✍

♢

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Electron Pencil event listings: Music, art, movies, lectures, parties, receptions, benefits, plays, meetings, fairs, conspiracies, rituals, etc.

Monday, April 30, 2012

◗ IU Mathers Museum of World Cultures — Exhibits, “Blended Harmonies: Music and Religion in Nepal”; through July 1st — “Esse Quam Videri (To Be, Rather than To Be Seen): Muslim Self Portraits; through June 17th — “From the Big Bang to the World Wide Web: The Origins of Everything”; through July 1st, 9am-4:30pm

From “Esse Quam Videri”

✍

◗ IU Grunwald (SOFA) Gallery — MFA & BFA Thesis 3 exhibitions; through May 5th

◗ IU Kinsey Institute Gallery — Exhibit, “Man as Object: Reversing the Gaze”; through June 29th, 1:30-5pm

◗ IU Asian Culture Center — Henna 101; 4pm

◗ Bell Trace Health & Living Center — Session 2 of a 4-part class, “Life in a British Period Drama”; 6:30pm

◗ IU Cinema — Student film, “Mudcity”; 7pm

◗ IU Department of Folklore & Ethnomusicology, Performance & Lecture Hall — Students perform Ghanaian music, drumming, and dance, directed by Bernard Woma, guest artists: Evelyn Yaa Bekyore and Joyce Bekyore; 7pm

Bernard Woma

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◗ The Player’s Pub — Songwriters Showcase; 8pm

◗ The Bluebird — Dave Walters Karaoke; 8pm

◗ The Bishop — DJs, The Vallures; Film, “Brick and Mortar and Love”; both at 8pm

◗ Bear’s Place — Archie Powell & the Exports, Sandman Viper Command, Deadghost, Keeping Cars; 9pm

♢

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