Apparently, I am just another member of the liberal elite.

On Friday night my wife and I had one of our good friends over for dinner in our new apartment. We wanted to serve a meal that was casual, yet delicious, so we settled on turkey burgers from Trader Joe’s, cooked to order on our Le Creuset grill pan. We topped the burgers with provolone cheese, guacamole, sautéed mushrooms and onions, and tomatoes from the farmer’s market, and served them on whole-wheat buns.

We rounded the meal out with a spinach and arugula side salad, topped with fresh orange slices, walnuts and Parmesan shavings. Dessert was simple—home-made oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.

Sounds delicious, right? And yet, it’s a good thing I didn’t have Barack Obama over for dinner, because he’s run into enough trouble with arugula as it is. In July 2007, the candidate mentioned to a group of Iowa farmers that the price of the lettuce was high at Whole Foods. “Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?” Obama said. “I mean, they’re charging a lot of money for this stuff.”

Obama attempted to connect with farmers who were growing and selling arugula and thus earning more money from their crops. Instead, conservative commentators ridiculed him, claiming he was out of touch with small-town America.

Class battles have jumped to the forefront of the 2008 election in coded ways. Sarah Palin spoke at length about her roots in small-town America. “[Small-town citizens] are the ones who do some of the hardest work in America who grow our food, run our factories and fight our wars,” she said. “They love their country, in good times and bad, and they’re always proud of America. I had the privilege of living most of my life in a small town.”

If Republicans have managed to stigmatize “elite,” they have also canonized “small-town,” and especially “small-town values,” even though no one is exactly sure what small-town values are.

Conservatives have identified “elite” as one of this election cycle’s slur words. Michelle Malkin has helped make arugula a synonym. After John McCain had trouble answering in August how many houses he owned, one of his spokespeople claimed Obama was a true elitist. “In terms of who’s an elitist, I think people have made a judgment that John McCain is not an arugula-eating, pointy headed professor-type based on his life story,” Brian Rogers said.

After my hoity-toity dinner on Friday, I attended a former co-worker’s barbecue on Saturday. My wife and I headed to Mission Hills in the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles’ equivalent of middle America. And this was different food, indeed. Hamburgers, hot dogs and barbecued chicken. Potato salad, onion dip and Lays chips. RC Cola and pies from Ralph’s. My host was a middle-age father of three, working to feed his family during challenging economic times.

This is where Obama needs to visit the next time he swings through California, because he can’t dodge the elite label. But aren’t conservatives being just as elite by assuming “their” voters don’t know what Whole Foods is, a publicly traded company with 276 locations and more than 41,000 employees?

Would the world explode if a small-town family cooked the same meal I served last Friday? And do I suddenly become less of an elite snob if I try to replicate my co-worker’s hamburger recipe? (It was delicious and he wouldn’t tell me the ingredients to the spice rub.)

Forget turkey burgers and forget hamburgers. If Republicans continue to succeed in convincing people that Barack Obama is out of touch with small-town voters by virtue of his choice in foliage, and this indicates an inability to be a good president, then we’ll all be clamoring for our new vice-president’s favorite moose burger recipe come November 5.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the strange curse suffered by so many great writers should strike so close to home— at least, as close as my coffee table, where Infinite Jest resides, or my desk, stacked with books of David Foster Wallace’s short stories. Even my memo board is filled with words given to me by D.F.W, scribbled on post-it notes: “You‘ve got to discipline yourself to talk out of the part of you that loves the thing, loves what you‘re working on. Maybe that just plain loves.”

News of his suicide came as a shock. He hanged himself on Friday night at his home in Claremont, California. He was 46, a professor of creative writing at Pomona College, and a literary revolutionist.

I had hoped one day to meet this man and glean some of his genius through even the briefest of conversations. I watched in awe of as even Charlie Rose couldn’t keep up. Now he is to become what all my other mentors are: words on pages, tinted by the knowledge of a tragic end. Ernest Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Sylvia Plath… David Foster Wallace, or “D.F.W.” as he is affectionately referred to by his cult following. Lives weighed down by words in an endless struggle to articulate meaning and find release.

My fascination with David Foster Wallace began in 2006 when I bought his short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men on a literary whim. I opened the book at random in Borders and began reading a story written in second person about a boy assessing the progression of puberty on his thirteenth birthday (”You have seven hairs in your left armpit now. Twelve in your right. Hard dangerous spirals of brittle black hair. Crunchy, animal hair.”) I was confused by the content and astonished by the writing. It made no sense. It was offensive. It was perfect. Foster Wallace could mesh Hemingway-esque terseness with aggressive, arrogant verbosity like no other.

“Death is Not the End,” another story in the collection, is a three-page sentence. Many of the other stories are structured as Q&As, the questions not really questions at all, but independent statements that are as equally confusing as the “answers” accompanying them. “A Radically condensed History of Post-Industrial Life” is just a short paragraph and yet an entire story, heavy with silent sadness and irony.

Foster Wallace was as obsessively unconventional in all his writing as James Joyce was with “Ulysses,” but what Joyce spent years trying to achieve through thorough planning and execution, Foster-Wallace did with an ease that only those with a supernatural level of intelligence can access. The only author able to surpass David Foster Wallace was David Foster Wallace.

To everyone else in the literary world, this was very annoying. Zadie Smith captured a universal sentiment after reading Foster-Wallace’s 1989 collection Girl with Curious Hair, saying: “He’s in a different time-space continuum from the rest of us… Goddamn him.”

He didn’t write the kind of books that people take on vacation, read by the fire on a cold winter’s night or discuss in book groups. His fiction was purposefully difficult. He wanted to make people squirm. He wanted to make his readers work really, really hard for it. But if they did, it would all be worthwhile. If they made the effort to engage, analyze and sweat their way through the pages, they would level-up onto a new plane and be somewhere nearer (although, still very far away from) where Foster-Wallace himself was standing and peering down at the world with a calculator in hand. He was passionate about mathematics, and complicated numeric digressions often pervade his writing. Sometimes it progresses into incomprehensible equations that look more like algebra than narrative. His writing is, above all, an open-ended calculation.

Or else, it is one never-ending footnote that spirals into a story different from the one it squeezes off the page. Or a collection of dictionary definitions, backward chronology, free-association, fragmentation; everything that makes meaning difficult to grasp. Any object he can find to throw in the reader’s way, he does, turning each event into an obstacle course.

This is “serious art”, and as D.F.W. once said: “Serious art is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort.”

But why put his reader through all this effort, when the author could so easily hand them the plot and meaning in a neatly wrapped bundle? One possible clue is revealed in his essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1993), in which Foster-Wallace explains that television has replaced fiction as the medium for access to an unknown world. “Television’s greatest minute-by-minute appeal is that it engages without demanding,” wrote Foster-Wallace. In a land of television-watchers, art becomes passive and the world over-familiarized. So D.F.W took it upon himself to switch the balance, re-claim “uncomfortable” art and de-familiarize the world.

He was hated. He made people furious. He ignited a hardcore set of “anti-fans” who accused him of pointlessness, impenetrable arrogance and wasting paper. Nowhere in my long chain of literature-lovers is there someone who has completed the one thousand-plus pages of Infinite Jest, nor have I met anyone who knows of anyone who has. There is, however, someone who was so offended by its presence that they used it as toilet paper (and it lasted six months).

To the critics: say what you will about David Foster Wallace, but the man dedicated his life to the “high art” of fiction. He poured his genius into words, sculpted meaning into a form of literary electricity, and wrote long and hard without intellectual restraint. For a short life, his works span infinity. All we can do is try to catch up.

In his own words—a sampling of D.F.W.:

“People read fiction the way relatives of the kidnapped listen to the captive’s voice on the captor-held phone: paying attention, natch, to what the victim says, but absolutely hanging on the pitch, quaver, and hue of what’s said, reading a code born of intimacy for interlinear clues about condition, location, and the likelihood of safe return…”—“Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way” (“Girl with Curious Hair”, 1989)

“Fiction-writing is lonely in a way most people misunderstand. It’s yourself you have to be estranged from, really, to work.”

“Fiction is about what it is to be a human being.”

“I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”

“I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering… We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with characters’ pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might be just that simple.”—(An Interview with David Foster Wallace, Larry McCaffery, the Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1993)

“Serious art… is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort.”

“You‘ve got to discipline yourself to talk out of the part of you that loves the thing, loves what you‘re working on. Maybe that just plain loves.”

“Sometimes things do happen. Even in reality. In real realism. It’s a myth that truth is stranger than fiction. Actually they’re about equally strange.” —(“Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way”, from the Girl with Curious Hair collection)

“The preceding generation of cripplingly self-conscious writers, obsessed with their own interpretation, would mention at this point, just as we’re possibly getting somewhere, that the story is getting anywhere.”—(“Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way”, from the Girl with Curious Hair collection)

“Hell hath no fury like a coolly received postmodernist.”—(“Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way”, from the Girl with Curious Hair collection)

“Kissing someone is actually sucking on a long tube the other end of which is full of excrement.”—(“Here and There”, from the Girl with Curious Hair collection)

“I became in myself axiom, language, and formation rule, and seemed to glow filament-white with a righteous fire.”—(“Here and There”, from the Girl with Curious Hair collection)

“Things become bad. I now have a haircut the shadow of which scares me.”—(“Here and There”, from the Girl with Curious Hair collection)

“I’m afraid of absolutely everything there is.”

“Then welcome.”—(The end of “Here and There”.)

“And here’s what I did.”—(The last sentence of “Girl with Curious Hair”.)

Where does former Prisoner of War John McCain really stand on the issue of torture? Is the Republican presidential candidate in favor of the use of torture or against it?

When he was recently asked by Marie Claire magazine which celebrity he identifies with most, McCain said:

“Kiefer Sutherland. [laughs, imitates a voice from the show 24] ‘It’s Jack Bauer.’ We have a lot in common because he escapes all the time.”

However, when reminded of Jack Bauer’s use of torture in the show, McCain does a Hollywood Retake. He says:

“Yeah, that’s right. That’s where Jack and I disagree. He believes in torture, but I don’t. He says, “Tell me where the weapons are.” The person says, “I won’t.” Bam! “OK, I’ll tell.”

I’m not sure which is more disconcerting. McCain’s choice of Jack Bauer from 24 as the character he most identifies with. The fact that policymakers like McCain are actually influenced by fictional television characters. (Who said TV doesn’t affect the viewers?) Or maybe McCain’s choice of Bauer was a Freudian slip?

Yet…McCain’s record on torture belies another story. According to his voting record, McCain voted against a bill banning the use of waterboarding by the CIA. And after the bill passed, he asked Bush to veto it.

So, let’s ask the question again. Is McCain for or against torture? Here is a little refresher of McCain’s stance on torture back in February 2008, courtesy of MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann.

"They call Los Angeles the City of Angels.  I didn't find it
to be that exactly, but I'll allow as there are some nice
folks there.'Course, I can't say I seen London, and I never
been to France, and I ain't never seen no queen in her damn
undies as the fella says. But I'll tell you what, after seeing
 Los Angeles and thisahere story I'm about to unfold--wal,
I guess I seen somethin' ever' bit as stupefyin' as ya'd see
in any a those other places, and in English too, so I can die
with a smile on my face without feelin'
like the good Lord gy**ed me."
               ---The Big Lebowski

Looking Out. Photo by Deborah Stokol (2005)

Nominally, summer is drawing to a close. Were folks to use department stores, fashion magazines, and schools as guides, they’d be under the impression that the leaves were on the cusp of turning a brilliant New England russet, that shadows were already lengthening on the sidewalks, and that spending nights and weekends away from mulled cider and the rigor of book-hitting and paper writing would be totally remiss.

But here in Los Angeles (which turned 217 years old last week!), it’s sunny, hot and dry (can’t you just see the tumbleweeds?)‚ and likely to stay that way for quite some time. (That means, for us, the beaches are a destination long after “summer” has ended).

As an Angeleno who has spent most of my 25 years in this idiosyncratic concrete oasis, I’ve got native knowledge on parts of the city that newly arrived denizens may not. In this series, Secrets of the City, I’ll share insights to Los Angeles and unveil hidden alcoves I’ve chanced upon. Most of these places are not actually secret, and may even be old favorites, so this will be a pleasant consolidation of disparate bookmarked tidbits.

About 15 minutes North of Zuma’s beautiful but often overpopulated sands lies a trinity of small cubbyhole beaches so delightful as to be the perfect antidote to most bouts of ennui and dejection (then again, so is a simple drive up PCH—Pacific Coast Highway—while listening to Stevie Wonder or Sly and the Family Stone. But that’s subjective).

As the driver inches ever closer to Ventura’s (805) and further from the last bastions of LA (proper), he or she will encounter El Matador, La Piedra and El Pescador state beaches.

All lie at the bottom of either steep mounts or craggy altitudes, but the climb down is as invigorating as it is worth it (though the second two are more accessible for those restricted from making the descent).

Once there, El Matador reveals a cave-filled haven that forms a nice mouth to the encroaching sea.

La Piedra is small, clean and, like the others, virtually private. Even when fellow beach-goers lay their towels down, there seems to be a common code against obtrusive behavior. But make no mistake, these beaches don’t attract the haughty; they’re simply relatively unknown and wonderful alternatives to the larger, more crowded, ‘tapped’ spots.

El Pescador, the third and last, but no less least, beach could more aptly be called “la piedra” for the many rocks riddling its grounds, and it sparkles just as much—if not more—as the other two.

Of the three, El Matador seems to get the most visitors–perhaps because it’s the one closest to Zuma. Its beaches are also, if memory serves, slightly softer and finer than those of the other two. But I truly couldn’t choose a favorite; they all feel like refuges.

There are neither public bathrooms nor concession stands of any sorts on these three sites, though porta potties line the parking areas.

The three make lovely picnic spots, and those who frequent these beaches tend to come armed with sumptuous feasts of their own.

Parking is available for $2 in a small lot above these beaches, or for free on the edges of the highway, and the hours are listed ambiguously as 8 a.m. to…Sunset or “dawn to dusk.”

Be careful not to reach your car after closing hours, as you will be stranded. I know…I have a tale concerning a night in 1999 that involves a bonfire, a car and a very large, locked El Matador gate. But that’s another story.

El Matador

32100 PCH

Malibu, CA

818.880.0350

La Piedra

32628 PCH

Malibu, CA

310.457.1324

El Pescador

32900 PCH

Malibu, CA

310.457.8140

General Jeff with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (Tyrone D. Washington/LA Mayor's Office)

On a corner deep in the heart of Skid Row during a hot, sunny afternoon, there are a couple dozen people milling around the entrance to the Midnight Mission, one of the homeless shelters and recovery facilities in the neighborhood. One man is selling cigarettes. Another man, in a dingy white Panama hat and white loafers sits in a lawn chair, listening to his boom box. Just down the street sits the Central Division Police Station. It looks like a fortress.

Beyond law enforcement, this is not a neighborhood that gets a lot of attention. The man I am meeting, who asked to be identified as General Jeff, is a community organizer, a job that was recently vilified and mocked by Gov. Sarah Palin and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani last week at the Republican National Convention.

Jeff is a c.o. for what is perhaps the least organized community in the country. And it’s quite large. According to the 2000 Census, there are approximately 17,000 residents in Central City East. (For the record, that is approximately three times as big as Wasilla when Palin was elected). There are 3.7 million people in the City of Los Angeles—and only one mayor.

On this afternoon, Jeff is late. He has been passing out fliers for the new DASH (Downtown Area Short Hop) route starting in Central City East (Skid Row’s official name). It’s Jeff’s responsibility to “give out all this information to [his] constituents”. He talks about their short attention spans, how some of them can’t read, how he would go through the flier “line by line” if someone needs it.

Palin and Giuliani’s mockery indicated that they didn’t think a community organizer had any real worth or power: the race for the presidency is a race for the most constituents, and maybe the Republicans don’t believe community organizers have any. Or perhaps the Republicans and Palin think community organizers don’t do anything. According to Palin, being “a small-town mayor is sort of like a “community organizer,” except that you have actual responsibilities.”

Well, it certainly looks like Jeff has responsibilities, but what exactly is a community organizer, who are his constituents and what does he do for them?

General Jeff is the first to admit that it’s hard to stick a definition on the title of “Community Organizer.” He thinks that’s why it’s so easy to laugh at the idea— “even if you could stick a definition on it, that would be limiting,” he says.

“There isn’t enough paper in the world to list everything I do.”

In the past year, General Jeff has taken part in starting a basketball league, a street-cleaning program, and a program to put murals on some of the grey, depressing walls that line Skid Row’s streets. This doesn’t include any number of other, quotidian measures he has accomplished—like handing out the DASH public information fliers)to better the lives of Skid Row’s residents.

To him, a community organizer is someone who is “active in the community, doing good things, fighting the good fight, if you will.”

That’s fairly vague, but he’s also at City Hall everyday.  Every week, he reviews the Council’s agenda, highlighting any item dealing with Skid Row. He attends those hearings, filling out a speaker’s card and testifying on behalf of residents.  Jeff says that there are three shifts on Skid Row: the day shift, the night shift, and the graveyard shift, and he hits the streets during all three, checking in with the residents and passing along information.

That morning, he had also met with a representative from one of the developers who is converting lofts along Main Street to discuss some of the issues related to the new development. “I go heavy on the emails,” he laughs. Jeff is also on the board of directors for the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council, a city-chartered organization whose mission is: “To unite the diverse communities of Downtown Los Angeles and to provide an innovative forum for all community stakeholders to contribute to a healthy, vibrant, and inclusive Downtown.” Bridging the gap between community residents and the civic authorities is one of Jeff’s main goals.

But the real question, he says, is: “How do we re-instill hope into the community?” Despite the catchword, Jeff hasn’t been coached by the Obama team. Later, when he talks about the importance of looking to the future, which is one theme he returns to again and again, he says, “Obama was saying that if he got in office, in sixteen months, troops will come home…. Well, a lot of those guys are going to end up on Skid Row.” Everything for him is about who needs to be taken care of, how it can be done with extremely limited resources, and how he can “plant the seeds” for a healthier community.

“We’ve seen a lot of results with zero funding,” he says. Benefits, he says, have been multi-faceted: a local sponsor of the basketball league has seen his business improve, which Jeff credits to closer ties to the community.

Jeff believes that there needs to be someone working at ground level, analyzing and prioritizing the needs of the community. “A lot of these people behind desks don’t have any solutions,” he says. “The decision-makers… haven’t done the legwork. They don’t know how to prioritize [Skid Row's problems].”

Skid Row needs someone like him—someone on the ground, around the clock, who can speak up on its behalf, and can encourage the people there to help themselves. He talks about street-cleaning, about how dirty it was. When they first started sweeping the streets, it was just him and a couple other people, everyday, cleaning up other people’s trash.

At first, people laughed at them and said that Skid Row was a lost cause. “We’re going to make a difference,” Jeff would say. “You’ll see.”

You already can.

The Youth Vote, the Hip Hop Vote, and Reclaiming Politics
Book Excerpts You Can Use, Post, Print and Remix

We’re on fire. Covering election 2008 gives those of us at Pop + Politics a chance to reach people in new ways with the news we need right now.

Since we launched PopandPolitics.com in 1995 (and yes, that is about a billion years go in internet time), the game has changed. There are literally millions of blogs now. And information wants to be free. We blogs cross-link to each other and quote each other. How about sharing even more information?

Well, we’re ready. As a special project of our Election 2008 coverage, Pop and Politics is offering an entire book download free of charge. It’s called “Trust: Reaching the 100 Million Missing Voters,” and it was written in 2004 by Pop and Politics founder Farai Chideya. The information is, if anything, more timely today, as we see the fruition of movements to get more young voters, non-voters, and first-time voters into the political mix.

What does “Trust” cover? Well, do you want to know how the two-party system evolved? Why independent parties are at a disadvantage in that system? Why millions of people don’t vote? How hip hop politics evolved? How young Americans can revolutionize the system? It’s all in there.

AND IT’S YOURS.

This book is yours now. As long as you are a non-profit or a non-commercial blog, you can print any part (or all of) “Trust,” or: distribute it, post it on your site, excerpt it, or put parts of into other works like voter-registration packets. If you’re a commercial publisher or blog, you can do the same thing… but you have send us an email and ask permission first.

How can we give the book away for free online? The publishers, Soft Skull Press, gave us permission to release the book under a Creative Commons License. Creative Commons is an amazing project that allows books, art, and information to be free, with the permission of the people who created it.

That’s it. THIS IS YOURS.

We are posting the six main chapters of “Trust” over the course of the Democratic and Republican Conventions, and the material will remain online for your use indefinitely.

Re-Mix, Re-Use, Re-Define the Game.

CHAPTER ONE:
RIGHT-CLICK HERE to download the PDF
or
CLICK HERE to view jpegs

CHAPTER TWO:
RIGHT-CLICK HERE to download the PDF
or
CLICK HERE to view jpegs

CHAPTER THREE:
RIGHT-CLICK HERE to download the PDF
or
CLICK HERE to view jpegs

CHAPTER FOUR:
RIGHT-CLICK HERE to download the PDF

CHAPTER FIVE:
RIGHT-CLICK HERE to download the PDF

CHAPTER SIX:
RIGHT-CLICK HERE to download the PDF

“Trust: Reaching the 100 Million Missing Voters” by Farai Chideya is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License

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CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT POP + POLITICS NOW

A museum that has to proclaim its mission statement from a 74-foot-tall slab of marble may have a bit of an inferiority complex. Approach the Newseum, the new museum in Washington, D.C. that’s dedicated to the news, and it’s impossible to miss the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution written in block letters on the museum’s façade.

The Newseum is huge, and it is immensely proud of its scope and scale. The “By the Numbers” page on its Web site proclaims the total number of words in the museum’s displays (100,000) and the weight of the artifacts in the exhibits (81,000 pounds). That same page compares the size of the Newseum’s atrium to the Sistine Chapel’s. It figures the Newseum’s would be taller by 22 feet.

I visited the Newseum last weekend on a trip to our nation’s capital. Fresh from my first week at USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism, I hoped to learn more about the profession I was joining and how its proponents were portraying it to the outside world.

The Newseum is a study in contrasts - it is both patently ridiculous and powerfully moving. There are quotes from people like Thurgood Marshall and Philip Graham (past publisher of the Washington Post), inscribed in stone on each level of the museum. Apparently stone = gravitas. It often feels like the museum is forcing things, and nothing gives this impression more than the museum’s “4-D” movie, complete with shaking seats and blasting air. The short film tells the story of three enterprising journalists throughout history who fought to tell their stories. The acting is bad and the 3-D effects are predictably cheesy.

The best parts of the museum are when the curators allow the stories journalists have covered to speak for themselves. A wall in the exhibit dedicated to Sept. 11 is covered floor-to-ceiling with the front pages of papers from around the world covering the day’s horrible events. The headline writers’ interpretations of the terrorist attacks form a powerful collage. (The San Francisco Chronicle’s extra edition proclaiming “Bastards!” was a crowd favorite.)

An exhibit on Pulitzer Prize-winning photography (predictably called “the most comprehensive collection of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs ever assembled”) features some of the most iconic images of the 20th century, accompanied by interviews and videos of the photographers explaining the shots they took. This is journalism coming alive. It’s moving to see fear, compassion, sadness and joy perfectly captured, and the effect is to demonstrate that this kind of high-quality journalism does matter. Most of the prize-winning photographs were taken during wars or natural disasters, often-times telling stories the public otherwise wouldn’t have known about. The message of the Newseum is that journalists report the truth and change the world; the photography exhibit conveys that message without hitting viewers over the head.

Slate’s Jack Shafer soundly criticized the Newseum prior to its opening in February, mocking its enormous cost ($450 million) and exhibits sponsored by media conglomerates like News Corp., Cox Enterprises, Comcast and Time Warner. He wrote, “You don’t think News Corp. and the Sulzbergers would lend their names and money to an enterprise that would sink a shiv into the press, do you?”

Ironically, the interactive exhibit on ethics wasn’t operational for our visit.

Yet, there was more self-criticism than I expected. A panel in one exhibit asked, “Who controls the news?” and called attention to media companies like Disney and GE that have news divisions. Walls on new media and the transition to reporting in the 21st century acknowledged that online revenue streams haven’t made up for the decline in print advertising.

Granted, the Newseum asked more questions than it provided answers. There were no predictions about what reading the news would be like in 25 years. I assume its because the curators of the museum (and the industry as a whole) haven’t got a clue.

The Newseum is like a giant sign that screams, “We are still relevant!” Does it suggest a bit of desperation? Absolutely. Quotes in marble aren’t going to convince anyone that the press is still serving the public. The museum was full of visitors, however, despite the $20 entrance fee. In a town where most other museums are free, this is notable. Were tourists learning about a dynamic and changing industry, or visiting the relics of a bygone era, much like the natural history museum down the street? A little of both, no doubt.

After touring the Newseum, I walked around the Washington Mall, stopping at some of the many war memorials. This is when the power of the press hit home for me. The news is a living, breathing monument that doesn’t need the the passage of time for validation. The Vietnam War Memorial conveys the nation’s shame and sorrow for a war it needlessly fought, and honor for the soldiers who died in that war. But photographs of a napalm attack and reporting on the My Lai massacre trigger similar emotions upon reflection.

Moving, well-reported journalism will do more to sustain the profession than a museum ever will. And at its best, the Newseum shows us this when it lets the stories speak for themselves, without the aid of lofty words carved in stone.

What a difference 72 hours can make. After The McCain campaign released a statement on Monday saying Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol was five months pregnant, the press jumped, providing details on a story the public was hungry to read about. Even Labor Day couldn’t keep a story this big away. But now McCain staffers, conservative media outlets and other Republicans are turning against the press, claiming the “liberal media” are out to destroy Palin’s candidacy.

Democrats may have been more united behind their candidate than Republicans, despite the Clinton/Obama in-fighting, but Republicans can join together and start striking the media punching bag.

In tonight’s speeches, former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee thanked the “liberal media” for going after Palin and uniting the Republican base. Giuliani and Romney took their shots as well, stirring up the antiquated Conservative Napoleonic complex that the media is utterly dominated by people out to bring ruin to the Republican Party.

Yesterday, the McCain camp canceled a scheduled interview their candidate had on CNN’s Larry King Live after Campbell Brown pushed McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds to elaborate on some of Gov. Palin’s executive experience in an interview earlier in the day.

Former senator and presidential candidate Fred Thompson hammered home the notion during his speech in the Xcel Center. He said, “Some Washington pundits and media big shots are in a frenzy over the selection of a woman who has actually governed rather than just talked a good game on the Sunday talk shows and hit the Washington cocktail circuit.”

Conservative talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh followed. On his Wednesday-morning show, he accused the media - and the entire “Washington government machine” - of attacking Palin. “I sense a shift here, ladies and gentlemen, in the Drive-By Media and the way they’re going after Sarah Palin,” Limbaugh said. “I think they’re going to drop this business that she’s not experienced enough. I think they’re going to go after the fact she’s trailer trash.”

Senior McCain strategist Steve Schmidt released statements and gave interviews all day Wednesday, arguing that the press’s treatment of Sarah Palin needed to change. In an interview with the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz, he claimed news outlets were “on a mission to destroy” Palin, and said the McCain camp was “under siege” from reporters.

Stories that shouldn’t be part of the national discourse, like Us Weekly’s admittedly unfair cover story, just provide more ammo for critics. The headline blares ”Babies, Lies and Scandal,” and when compared with the glowing cover story on Barack and Michelle Obama, the differences are notably stark. Any critique of Us Weekly is likely to be true, but the only reason to speak of tabloids along with the Washington Post and the New York Times is to subtly slime these different publications that have different publishing goals.

How thin a line can the press possibly walk? Declining to push the McCain campaign on its vetting process of Palin opens the press up to criticism if more Palin indiscretions come to light later. If discussing Bristol’s pregnancy is off limits, then surely Sarah Palin’s support of abstinence-only sex education in schools is not.

The press should be held to high standards, and you’ll get no protest from me that media outlets have made (and continue to make) election coverage mistakes. But one can imagine how the Palin story will play out. A reasoned debate about whether Bristol Palin’s pregnancy should be covered, and in what context,  will get overshadowed by a categorical blame-a-thon.

If campaign coverage happens in a vacuum, then sometimes the vacuum implodes. Before the week is up, conservative commentators will have reframed the Sarah Palin story as a classic liberal media shark attack. Conservatives will have their new rallying cry, and the press will once again play the role of fall guy.  It’s all too easy to predict.

Scott Tucker, actual gay Republican

I am at the Republican National Convention, and though I am a staunch Democrat who’s possibly even further to the left of Dennis Kucinich, I decided that I must immerse myself in real GOP Culture and not just hang out with unwashed lefty anarchists. Of course, the most painless way to do this for a Democrat such as myself is to spend some time getting used to the Other Side with a contingent I’m very familiar and comfortable with: The Gays, or in this case, the Log Cabin Republicans. Yes, Dorothy, there are Gay Republicans. And no, we’re not in Kansas, anymore.

I told Log Cabin Communications Director Scott Tucker that my friends were perplexed by Log Cabin Republicans’ very existence, as was I. He didn’t miss a beat. “Did they look at you like you had three heads?”

Yes they did. And if you were wondering, Tucker and his fellow Republicans don’t have three heads, either. I spoke with him after their “Big Tent” classy lunch, where all the attendees sat at white tableclothed tables eating fine fare while us journos stood in the back looking like disheveled cattle. He explained that they were endorsing Senator John McCain because they believe he will be an “inclusive” president. They declined, after George W. Bush started a stampede on gay rights with the Federal Marriage Amendment, to endorse W. He said of McCain, “We have a relationship going back with McCain to the early 1990s. Sen McCain stood with us on the Fed Marriage Amendment twice and he stood on the floor with us in 2006 and gave a very impassioned speech about that amendment, calling it antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans.”

The core philosophy is what might make even certain Dems wistful for the days of Alex P. Keaton. Remember when Republicans were mostly about spending money responsibly, smaller, less intrusive government, and strong national defense—and not about Bible thumping yahoos? After W., it’s hard to remember, but you have to reach back before the Reagan years. It was during those years that the Republican party rounded up the right-wing religious fanatics, the James Dobsons and Jerry Falwells of the world, cherry picking certain social issues that had previously belonged to the Dems—like abortion, and now gay rights—to drive a wedge right through the center. ( A good primer on this is the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Haynes Johnson’s book, Sleepwalking Through HIstory: America in the Reagan Years.)

“I would argue the Ronald Reagan never used these issues himself,” said Tucker. That’s the party Tucker and the Log Cabin Republicans hope to bring back: “The way I look at it is those people are going to leave this party before I do,” he said of the extremist factions.

Yes, but what of Sarah Palin, the would-be VP? She’s vocally against gay marriage (as are all the other politicians on both tickets,) and supported a bill banning gay marriage way back in 1998.

In 2006, she struck down a bill that would have denied benefits to gay state employees, but only on the grounds that it was unconstitutional. Still, the eminently quotable Tucker couldn’t really suss out Palin, and left the unflappable flack a little tongue-tied. “Gov. Palin’s positions on gay and lesbian issues is largely unclear,” (nope, they are not, see above), he said and didn’t directly address her support of the ban in 1998.

Even with all their strides, it’s not easy being gay in the GOP. He beamed with pride talking about how 49% of the GOP delegates support civil unions and/or gay marriage, according to a CBS News/New York Times poll, (”That’s half of Republican delegates! These are party faithful, party activists!” he said, hopefully) and noted that during their open booth at the Civic Fest in the hours they were there, and out of the hundreds of people they talked to, only two people said, “Read your Bible,” before walking away. On the battleground front, there’s more work to be done: “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell looks to be on its last legs, and with Cali Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vocally against the Prop 8 ballot initiative, which would overturn the state’s Supreme Court decision recognizing gay marriages, the gays have come a long way, baby.

Tucker allowed that they have “some disagreements with Sen McCain related to gay rights. The employment non-discrimination act, McCain doesn’t support.” And he admits, “Senator Obama has promised a lot of wonderful things. If you’re looking at the very narrow prism of the very specific gay and lesbian rights issues, we’re not going to argue that Republicans are better than Democrats—we never have. Democrats have come farther than Republicans on gay rights issues, if you’re looking at that — quote, unquote — scorecard of issues.”

Still, Tucker points out that Dems are no great shakes, either, especially Donkey rock star, Bill Clinton, who signed both “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” and the “Defense of Marriage Act,” into law. “He was a great disappointment for the LGBT community,” said Tucker. “A Democratic president signed two pieces of legislation that the gay and lesbian community spends most of their money and time fighting and trying to overturn.”

If you’re wondering why they insist on working for a party that largely hates them, Tucker explains their Sysyphean battle thus: “We want to get our party more inclusive on these issues. And we have to come further on these issues otherwise we’ll be on the wrong side of history if we don’t.”

Missed our coverage of last week’s Democratic National Convention? Check out our 30+ posts by clicking HERE.  Or just click the tag “P+P@The DNC” on any related post, or in the Tag Cloud in the sidebar.

Also check out the photo galleries from last Monday’s Wyclef performance, downtown Denver & the protest gallery, and Invesco Field for Obama’s acceptance speech.

And lastly, posts with original P+P video can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Managing Editor Tricia Romano is on the ground as of Monday in St. Paul for the Republican convention, so be sure to look for her observations on the event throughout the course of the next several days.

I distinctly remember the morning that Michael Bloomberg was elected mayor of New York. Two months after 9/11, I woke up in my microscopic studio apartment in the far East Village, once known as Alphabet City, and walked to work and glanced at the New York Post as I walked by the local deli. The headline declared the billionaire businessman, who had been smeared as a “dilettante” and largely written off, as the winner of the election. He beat Mark Green, a far more experienced local politician, and the favorite by all accounts, by a mere two percent.

It was a stunning upset.

I was shocked. Everyone I knew had voted for Mark Green. Most editorials had supported him, including the New York Times, which stated the case, thus: “This an easy call, Mark Green gets our endorsement for mayor….Mr. Bloomberg has run hard, but the fundamental argument behind his candidacy is flawed. He claims that as a successful entrepreneur, he is better qualified to be mayor than Mr. Green, a career politician. …” The Times editorial noted, “Mr. Green has not been the most lovable candidate in New York City history, but he has demonstrated a deep understanding of the issues, a sensible approach to public policy, and the soul of a fighter. That may be the quality he will find most useful if he becomes the city’s next mayor.”

The culture watchers at Paper magazine ran a letter from the editor written by David Hershkovits introducing a profile on Green that had gone to press before the election. The piece celebrated our new nightlife-friendly mayor, Mark Green. It read: ‘‘Mayor Mark Green. Get used to the sound of it because, by the time you read this, the former public advocate will have been elected.”

It was not to be. And in a way, it was OK. Bloomberg turned out to be a far better politician and mayor than the Times had predicted. The take-away for us, and for Barack Obama, is that almost no one saw it coming.

I find the Green upset to be particularly instructive to the Obama-McCain duel. There were a few differences. Bloomberg, unlike McCain, was no one’s media darling. When it was revealed that Bloomberg had preemptively  quit exclusive clubs, the Daily News called Bloomie’s handling of questions,  “lame and defensive.”

But like McCain, he was regularly depicted as curmudgeonly and an ineloquent speaker. By contrast, Mark Green—now the president of Air America—was often portrayed as being too smooth or slick.

Though the polls have been consistently tight, and though many handwringing pieces have tried to examine why Obama is behind, the recent polls were the first indication of serious trouble in Obama-land.

The 2001 mayoral election, postponed because of September 11, was still less than two months after the attack. The  bitter smell of burned bodies and jet fuel still lingered in the air. The city was in shock.

Throughout the summer, when Green was still fending off his Democratic challengers, the polls showed Green up two-to-one against Bloomberg. In fact, in all hypothetical matchups against all the Dem candidates, Bloomberg got his ass kicked.

In the week before the election, Rudy Giuliani gave Bloomberg an endorsement. Before the World Trade Center attacks, Guiliani was mostly vilified by the public and the media. He had broken up with his wife in a press conference, he seemed mean and bitter, he had made a mess of the budget, and had a string racially charged police crimes on his record.  But September 11 transformed Giuliani into America’s Mayor. While our president was mostly absent in the immediate hours after the attacks (and when he was present, it was worse, as he was a bumbling, doddering cowboy), Guiliani was solid and steady, assured, confident, calm, and exuded compassion. He was almost like a human. His backing of Bloomberg did much to boost the billionaire, more than most could have imagined at the time.

But Bloomie also spent $69 million of his own money at a rate of $92 a vote, according to the Times. Still, in November, the margin was wide enough—42 for Green, 37 for Bloomberg—that many talked about how Green was already “measuring the drapes in Gracie Mansion.”  The Times article also notes the number of undecideds, 20%,  who likely threw the election at the last minute to Bloomberg.  As of earlier this month, 13 percent of those polled were undecided in the Obama-McCain matchup. That’s too many people.

Back in November 2001, the Times reported that people were critical of Mark Green’s campaign, because he wasn’t going negative. It is the same criticism being levied at Obama and the Democratic regime. Pundit James Carville opined that the Dems “wasted their first night” by producing feel-good convention fare, instead of fist-pounding McCain the GOP.

The Times wrote in 2001: “Nonetheless, news that Mr. Bloomberg was appearing to close in on Mr. Green in a city with such an edge in registered Democrats, and after Mr. Green had been acting as if victory were at hand, caught supporters of both candidates by surprise….  they said, Mr. Green ran a safe campaign, avoiding attacks on his opponents or offering a compelling case for his own candidacy.”

Obama has another, unfortunate, parallel to Green; while he is most likely going to benefit from Republicans who’ve soured on John McCain, he is also at risk of losing Democrats, particularly the Clintonites.

According to MSNBC, “Green was hurt by a defection of Democrats, with a third of them voting for Bloomberg, according to an exit poll conducted by Edison Media Research for various television and newspaper outlets.”
While most Democrats are unwilling to believe that there is even the possibility of losing, there’s at least one person who doesn’t think Barack will be cruising past McCain in November. Tom Hayden, sixties political activist and former California state legislator, told the Denver Press Club that Obama will lose the election.

He ticked off a few reasons, reported by the Huffington Post:

“An African-American candidate talking about economics and a white war hero—it’s clear to me who is going to win.”

He nitpicked Obama’s choice to vacation in an “exotic” locale like Hawaii instead of some place on the mainland like Myrtle Beach.

But it was another warning bell he sounded that rang the truest to me.

“‘There’s the pursuit of the last white man standing in Pennsylvania,’” he said, rather than a fierce pursuit of the Latino vote, which is what Hayden would like to see.”

Bloomberg knew that, too. On election day, walking through my Dominican and Puerto Rican hood, I was bombarded, as usual, by people flyering on the sidewalks. But when I took the flyer, I was a little perplexed. It was a sticker for Bloomberg in Spanish. I thought, “That’s odd,” and the next morning he was the Mayor.

**Update: John McCain is lustily going after the Latin vote and secured the approval of Puerto Rican , Reggaeton performer, Daddy Yankee. Any which way you can.

The Los Angeles City Council ban on new fast food restaurants in South L.A. might be a step in the right direction (depending on who you talk to), but it’s going to take a lot more work and a good deal of political wrestling to solve the obesity epidemic in America, let alone Los Angeles.

South L.A. faces some of the most serious economic challenges in the county, and “poverty is the strongest socio-demographic determinant of obesity,” says Dr. Antronette Yancey, an associate professor at UCLA’s School of Public Health and co-director of the Center to Eliminate Health Disparities.

Yancey writes in an e-mail interview that she agrees with the moratorium because it “brings widespread attention to the obesity and chronic disease disparities in southern L.A.”

If the city council succeeds in its long-term goal of rezoning South L.A. to attract new businesses, residents there may get access to healthier shopping and dining choices on par with the west side, and though many franchisees and restaurant associations don’t agree with the council’s method, it’s hard to see how better city planning in poor neighborhoods is a bad thing.

However, a report in 2007 by the Los Angeles County Department of Health (the same one cited by city council members) suggests that children in South L.A. experience only a slightly higher rate of obesity than the city average. A quarter of Angeleno children are overweight with or without healthy food options, so leveling the playing field won’t do much to solve the broader problem.

Americans overeat, favor unhealthy foods, and don’t get enough exercise. That much seems clear. But changing these habits at the societal level could require a fundamental overhaul across a variety of sectors both public and private, from farming to infrastructure.

“We are surrounded by a smorgasbord of highly palatable, pervasively marketed, inexpensive, readily accessible, nutrient-poor but energy-dense foods,” Yancey wrote in the April 2007 issue of the journal Obesity Management. “Coupled with seductive sedentary entertainment and transportation options and re-engineering of the built environment to favor automobile transportation over pedestrian or mass transit, our genetic ‘hard-wiring’ [to avoid exercise and eat salty, sweet and fatty foods] easily explains the occurrence of the small caloric excesses and energy expenditure deficits necessary to produce the epidemic.”

Even culture plays a part in overeating. According to Yancey we’re just as likely to stop eating when our favorite show ends or our date finishes her meal as we are when our bellies are full.

So turn off the television at dinner time, sit around the table with your family, and dish up smaller portions. Simple enough. But how do you unravel something as politically tangled as, say, farm policy?

Michael Pollan, director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism at UC-Berkeley and author most recently of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” boils the epidemic down to a stupidly simple equation: overproduction of food equals overeating.

Government subsidies backed by powerful food industry lobbyists allow farmers to get paid whether or not there’s a market for their crop, Pollan argues. So they overproduce. Overproduction devalues the crop, so restaurants and food suppliers maintain their revenues by adding value to the end product (more highly processed foods) or by beefing up the portions (supersize it).

Pollan:

“Cheap corn, transformed into high-fructose corn syrup, is what allowed Coca-Cola to move from the svelte 8-ounce bottle of soda ubiquitous in the 70’s to the chubby 20-ounce bottle of today. Cheap corn, transformed into cheap beef, is what allowed McDonald’s to supersize its burgers and still sell many of them for no more than a dollar. Cheap corn gave us a whole raft of new highly processed foods, including the world-beating chicken nugget, which, if you study its ingredients, you discover is really a most ingenious transubstantiation of corn, from the cornfed chicken it contains to the bulking and binding agents that hold it together.”

Pollan argues in the same article in 2003 that attacking the food suppliers directly won’t work because they’re only playing by the government’s rules. His proposed solution is that we rewrite agricultural policy so it doesn’t subsidize overproduction and in turn overeating.

“Until we somehow deal with this surfeit of calories coming off the farm, it is unlikely that even the most well-intentioned food companies or public-health campaigns will have much success changing the way we eat,” he writes.

That’s bad news for city council members and activists alike. Even worse news—Congress had its chance in late May to tackle the problem at the national level when it passed a new farm bill, but it appears they opted for the status quo instead. It was a show of force for the Big Food lobby, which, according to The Economist, may be more influential than the oil industry (Big Food includes tobacco).

It’s hard to tell whether Pollan’s solution would work, and we may not get to find out anyway, with such political muscle swaying our elected officials.

So what can an ordinary citizen do to influence the outcome of this epidemic when we’re up against the titans of lobbying?

“Citizens can become involved with grassroots advocacy groups to chip away at the food industry’s hold on our politicians and locales, much as they ‘pecked Big Tobacco to death’ initially with smoking bans and restrictions, gradually changing social norms and building political will,” says Yancey.

She says reframing the issue “as addressing the paucity of options rather than controlling people” can help. If you want to get involved, she suggests, protest the pervasiveness of junk food advertising in your community, attend city council and board of supervisor meetings to demand funding for community gardens, and find out what foods schools are offering and advocate for new restrictions or better options.

In the meantime, your own health might best be served by heeding Pollan’s advice, summed up as a simple slogan for his latest book: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

I remember learning of Barack Obama’s Iowa win via text message. A bunch of my old school friends were in town, and the news made an already tasty night even sweeter. Learning of the win �