This Just In

Professor  J,

How very superlative! With masculine endings even! ;) I should probably have opened with Professorius Supremus.

Yes, of course you are correct in pointing out that availability of healthy food is often a problem in certain areas, particularly in the inner city. And we see nutrition, exercise, and an interest in healthy living move more and more to the forefront as education and incomes rise. HBO recently aired a great documentary on the subject. The Weight of the Nation is worth watching in its entirety but part 4: Challenges is closely related to the point you were making in your last post. Other forces are at play as well. A recent study showed a connection between babies born by C-section and obesity.  While lots of things are pulling at us (and the HBO doc does an excellent job of exploring them) I still can't let parents off the personal responsibility hook when we see so much of the problem in areas where families are not stranded amid bad choices.

Did you see that Mayor Bloomberg is tackling the sugar addiction in New York? His proposal would ban extra large versions of sugary drinks. We'll see how that goes.

Hedges explains further what has happened to the press on p. 170 after quoting an exchange between John Stewart and Jim Cramer (host of Mad Money on CNBC):

" Cramer, like most television and many print reporters, gives an uncritical forum to the powerful. At the same time they pretend they have vetted and investigated the claims made by those in power. They play the role of television journalists. It is a dirty quid pro quo. The media get access to the elite as long as the media faithfully report what the elite wants reported. The moment that quid pro quo breaks down, reporters--real reporters--are cast into the wilderness and denied access."

In Dan Rather's book which I quoted last time, he lays out the close connection between the corporatization of the news, the need to secure licenses and permissions from the government, and the move away from digging for the truth.  He spends a good deal of time reiterating the fact that uncovering the truth is the point  of journalism no matter how unpleasant the results may be. And he relates some stories he's covered where the results were unpleasant not only for the country but for him personally. At one point he refers to real journalism as a "public service."

"What mattered was getting to the truth, or as close to the truth as humanly possible. The public's right to know--our right to know--what was being done in our name, in our country's name, was paramount."

More paramount than getting invited to scintillating cocktail parties and gaining access to power players and celebrities? Not anymore according to one of Rather's cohorts.  Last month on Meet the Press we saw Tom Brokaw take issue with the White House Correspondents Dinner:

“Look, I think George Clooney is a great guy. I’d like to meet Charlize Theron,” he said. “But I don’t think the big press event in Washington should be that kind of glittering event where the whole talk is about Cristal champagne, taking over the Italian Embassy, who had the best party, who got to meet the most people. That’s another separation between what we’re supposed to be doing and what the people expect us to be doing, and I think that the Washington press corps has to look at that.”

The event “separates the press from the people that they’re supposed to serve, symbolically,” he said. “It is time to rethink it.”

Back to Hedges:

"The most egregious lie is the pretense that  these people function as reporters, that they actually report on our behalf. It is not one or two reporters or television hosts who are corrupt. The media institutions are corrupt. Many media workers, especially those  based in Washington, work shamelessly for our elites. In the weeks before the occupation of Iraq, media workers were too busy posturing as red-blooded American patriots to report. They rarely challenged the steady assault by the Bush White House against our civil liberties and the trashing of our Constitution. The role of courtiers is to parrot official propaganda." (175)

Oh, I have to go first in the thread unraveling? Okay. I'll make a tiny start anyway...Answers, real answers are not going to come from the top down. They are going to come from the bottom up. Hedges makes this point for me in the book. But we aren't going to get any real solutions in any kind of collective way until we own responsibility for ourselves. Self education, awareness, and tenacity are going to be necessary to free us from our mental slavery and old thinking. We cannot expect someone else to rescue us from our individual prisons of old thought, mindless action...paralyzing inaction. Change must start with us being the people we'd hope to be.

A community is  a collection of individuals, so is a nation. If the old adage that "all politics are local" holds true then it may also hold true that all change is personal. We have a unique national mentality that is well suited for blazing trails in the wilderness and imagining and inventing. It is, however, a bit of  a liability when it comes to get people to see that they are connected in both large and small ways.  The impact of individual decisions and actions on our communities, local and national, are rarely thought of. Education about that might be a first step.

Oh, I had no doubt you still had much to say! ;)