History is the source code of the future

Agatha Christie in a fugue with the candlestick

Guardian Unlimited Books | News | Christie's most famous mystery solved at last:

The solution to the darkest of all Agatha Christie mysteries may be at hand. What lay behind her extraordinary 11-day disappearance in 1926? Several plausible theories have competed for favour over the years, but biographer Andrew Norman believes he is the first to find one that satisfies every element of the case.

In his study of the writer's life published this autumn, Norman uses medical case studies to show that Christie was in the grip of a rare but increasingly acknowledged mental condition known as a 'fugue state', or a period of out-of-body amnesia induced by stress...

I'm more a fan of Dorothy Sayers, especially The Nine Tailors, but this is one of those legends mystery readers all hear about.

Technorati Tags: history, literature

The total transformation of Germany

Richard J. Evans' second book in a three-volume work on the history of Nazi Germany, The Third Reich In Power, is a complex book. Certainly, it was difficult to write, but it is a pleasure and terror to read. Unlike the first volume, The Coming of the Third Reich, this book is focused only by the borders of Germany and the story of its complete destruction and reconstruction under the Nazi leadership principle after the party came to power in 1933.

After taking power, the Nazi party utterly destroyed the German personality. Evans' book, like many social histories, is a fractal work, covering the arts, internal political battles (the Nazis killed their opponents, but there were so many that the tactics varied from slaughter of Brownshirt leaders who threatened Hitler during "The Night of the Long Knives" to its battles with the Catholic and Lutheran churches, which it attempted to replace with a nationalist Christian church that substituted Hitler on Earth for God in Heaven), to the widespread corruption within the corporate backers of Nazism who ultimately were overwhelmed by Nazi power.

Like a thousand rollercoaster cars being assembled into a train that will plunge into hell, the fractal story ultimately explains how a nation could be driven to the brink of madness and tipped into an inferno by a small group of fanatics. In the final section of the book, as Hitler approaches the war, the clear awful picture familiar from the first volume returns. There is no simple reason why Germany went mad. The Nazi attack on the German identity was so overarching that resistance was driven too far underground to matter and the young were lost in a storm of militarist nationalism, willing to ride into Hell for glory and Germany.

Evans books will certainly be the greatest accomplisment in Nazi-era history in our generation. The last book, due in a few years, will likely be a triumph of detail in the war years, as this book is a dissection of the total Nazification of Germany that made the madness of World War II and the Final Solution possible.

Louise Bryant revived

courant.com: A Trunkful Of History:

There he lay, on a couch in the Winter Palace library, his face buried in his arms in complete exhaustion.

It was 1917, and Russian Prime Minister Aleksandr Kerensky was living under heavy guard in anticipation of another turn in the revolution - this one to overthrow him. Radical journalists Louise Bryant and her husband, John Reed, finally had their chance at a long sought-after interview, but they could not bring themselves to disturb the man whose government was about to fall. They both stood in the library for a moment, then left, according to Bryant's notes.

"Socialism is here, whether we like it or not ... and it spreads with the years," she later wrote in her book "Six Red Months in Russia," based on her reporting from the Russian Revolution.

"In Russia the socialist state is an accomplished fact. We can never again call it an idle dream of longhaired philosophers."And if that growth has resembled the sudden upshooting of a mushroom, if it must fall because it is premature, it is nevertheless real and must have a tremendous effect on all that follows."

It was in damp, overcast Russia that the 32-year-old Bryant found a place in the sun after being so frequently overshadowed by Reed, a renowned journalist and a prince of the burgeoning bohemian community back home in New York's Greenwich Village. Although Bryant became an accomplished journalist, one of the first international female correspondents, she did not achieve the acclaim of Reed or even of her third husband, diplomat William C. Bullitt.

Now, thanks to the discovery by Yale University researchers of a trunk of her papers, Bryant has emerged again to claim a place in history. (One of the last spikes of interest in her work followed from the 1981 movie "Reds," in which Diane Keaton played Bryant, and Warren Beatty portrayed Reed.)

"It's a collection we never would have expected in terms of its richness," said William Massa, the head of special collections at Yale's Sterling Memorial Library, which houses the papers. "It goes beyond anything we anticipated.

Read the rest. Very interesting, as Bryant is treated almost as an afterthought of Reds, the film she is most known by, simply fading out after John Reed died, when she had a very full life.

Technorati Tags: history

Team of Rivals is in the White House

'Team of Rivals': Friends of Abe - New York Times:

MORE books about Abraham Lincoln line the shelves of libraries than about any other American. Can there be anything new to say about our 16th president? Surprisingly, the answer is yes. Having previously offered fresh insights into Lyndon Johnson, the Kennedys and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Doris Kearns Goodwin has written an elegant, incisive study of Lincoln and leading members of his cabinet that will appeal to experts as well as to those whose knowledge of Lincoln is an amalgam of high school history and popular mythology.

I've just started Team of Rivals. The New York Times review, which reflects my thoughts about the book after 110 pages, is very positive. So is the review of The Washington Post. Kearns Goodwin is weaving a very complex history of several men who, had they failed to join and work together would have seen the end of the nation.

Technorati Tags: book, democracy, government, history, war

A disappointing Jackson

H.W. Brands' Andrew Jackson—His Life and Times is full of colorful detail, but failed to tie the many episodes into a coherent whole.

There's no doubt that, as Brands argues, Jackson is a keystone of the American experience, responsible for the fulfillment of Jefferson's egalitarian vision for the United States in the 19th century. However, the man's imperial personality, which co-existed with an astonishing commitment to the rights of the Western settler to self-determination, isn't explained in any new detail. Instead, Brands illustrates the fact that Jackson, a swaggering giant who defined his place, the West, and his times, was a walking bundle of contradictions, often at the expense of those contradictions.

For example, Brands consistently minimizes Jackson's slave-holding, arguing he was a humane master, even though he, too, had slaves whipped and sold apart from their families at various times, in contradiction with his instructions to his overseers that they should be kind, but firm, with the slaves in his household. What comes through is that Jackson believed in discipline, as proved by his repeated decisions to execute soldiers under his command who were disobedient, but Brand's insistence that Jackson was different than other slaveholders doesn't hold up.

It seems he wants to excuse his subject from the prejudices of his times, as when he writes about the impossibility of ending slavery in the 1810s and 20s "Even if they had suffered pangs of conscience for their slaves—and few seem to have suffered any more than Jackson did—they couldn't have afforded the remedy."

Likewise, Jackson's brash relationships with the world—he was involved in several duels, killing one man and getting himself shot by Thomas Hart Benton and his brother—are not brought into focus as much as I would like, yet the details of those confrontations are exquisitely retold. I'd like to know more about how these actions were viewed by Jackson, his wife and friends, who, even if Jackson burned his letters, must have been recorded in many places. Benton, for instance, became a political ally later in Jackson's life, but the explanation is that Benton realized he needed Jackson's support, and that's all.

Jackson was a great man, doubtlessly. Yet he twice resigned his Senate seat for, according to Brands, reasons to do with his impatience with the other Senators' inaction and longwindedness. This would suggest to anyone thinking about the choice of a president that he was incapable of succeeding in Washington, a city of overt propriety where the man of action is seldom welcomed. Somehow—it is not explained by Brands—this inconstancy in the Senate is ignored by everyone around Jackson.

The book is full of fascinating details about parts of the Jackson legend. The wars and the duels come to life in detail, but events, such as the "longest, bitterst, ugliest campaign in American political history" which Brands describes as taking from the end of the disputed election of 1824 until the election of 1828, pass in a whorl of passages external to Jackson's time at home at the Hermitage and the death of his wife, which is attributed to the pressures of the election.

The problem is that much of Jackson's life is unknown, because of the times he lived in and the isolation of Tennessee from the rest of the nation. The other well-regarded biography of Jackson, The Life of Andrew Jackson, by Robert Rimini, shares this murky quality. Compared to such a well-documented Western life like Lincoln's, the hazy outlines that allow for the soft focus on Jackson's many weaknesses, is surprising. I'd hoped that more of the contradictions would be analyzed in Brands' book, yet the book is an entertaining read even if, by the time it arrived at the Bank of the United States crisis, the details of the battles obliterated the life and times of the subject.

'Mao': The Real Mao - New York Times

I'd ordered Mao: The Unknown Story based on my continuing interest in China and how it became the incredible menage of opportunity and tyranny it is today. Now Nicholas Kristof, whose excellent reporting, with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, has been a constant source of insight, has given the book a review that, like China, is decidedly positive—in the sense that we need to be engaged with the country and its history—even as we are repelled by it.

I haven't read the book, yet, but this review deserves note.

Kristof calls the book "magisterial," but has a number of important comments to add in his review, 'Mao': The Real Mao - New York Times:

Another problem: Mao comes across as such a villain that he never really becomes three-dimensional. As readers, we recoil from him but don't really understand him. He is presented as such a bumbling psychopath that it's hard to comprehend how he bested all his rivals to lead China and emerge as one of the most worshipped figures of the last century.

Finally, there is Mao's place in history. I agree that Mao was a catastrophic ruler in many, many respects, and this book captures that side better than anything ever written. But Mao's legacy is not all bad. Land reform in China, like the land reform in Japan and Taiwan, helped lay the groundwork for prosperity today. The emancipation of women and end of child marriages moved China from one of the worst places in the world to be a girl to one where women have more equality than in, say, Japan or Korea. Indeed, Mao's entire assault on the old economic and social structure made it easier for China to emerge as the world's new economic dragon.

Perhaps the best comparison is with Qinshihuang, the first Qin emperor, who 2,200 years ago unified China, built much of the Great Wall, standardized weights and measures and created a common currency and legal system - but burned books and buried scholars alive. The Qin emperor was as savage and at times as insane as Mao - but his success in integrating and strengthening China laid the groundwork for the next dynasty, the Han, one of the golden eras of Chinese civilization. In the same way, I think, Mao's ruthlessness was a catastrophe at the time, brilliantly captured in this extraordinary book - and yet there's more to the story: Mao also helped lay the groundwork for the rebirth and rise of China after five centuries of slumber.

Mao bad is not the whole story. Mao good is not the story. But, if the Germans had won the Second World War in Europe and had become our main trading partner, what would we be saying about Hitler now? Authors Jung Chang and Jon Halliday clearly are of the opinion that no terrors are worth the progress made by China and I would generally agree. It is hard to say what, if anything, would be different about China (except its communism) economically and politically today if there had been no Mao. I suspect that, given the rise of other economies in the region, China could have climbed into modernism sooner and without the madness of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.

Technorati Tags: China, history, Mao, kristof

Murrow: A real story

The practice of historiography focuses on how the changing story of the past reflects the times of the storytellers, not the past itself. Today, we're all historians and reporters, because we're all contributing to the debate about current and past events in a public discourse that, ultimately, shapes how future generations will remember their past.

With the release of Good Night and Good Luck, the film about Edward R. Murrow's confrontation with Senator Joe McCarthy through his television show, See It Now (you can see the show, too), the parallels and differences between the rise of television news and blogs are bound to be discussed. In this context, Murrow is both the model for would-be media revolutionaries and the source of the faults in the television news—someone to be discussed, but not embraced. Here, for example, is what blogger Jeff Jarvis had to say about the film, Murrow and the lessons for citizen journalists (Jarvis criticizes "Murrow-worshipers" elsewhere, attributing the mistakes of the grandsons and granddaughters to the father of television and radio journalism):

BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Edward R. Murrow: God or not?:

As courageous and laudable as Murrow’s stand against American tyranny was – and it was – I also wonder whether it helped lead to the downfall of Dan Rather, the downsizing of CBS News, and perhaps even the decline of mainstream journalism itself.

For Murrow’s triumph led to a half-century-long era of haughtiness, self-importance, and separation from the public in the news. That may not be his responsibility – though he is shown at the start and end of the film dismissing the decadence, escapism, distraction, and amusement of television and America’s mass tastes (either out of snobbery or more likely out of shame, since he, too, catered to them on his own celebrity slather show). His disciples came to believe that the wattage of their broadcast towers entitled them to equivalent power in society. They thought they were no longer hacks looking out for the common man – as common men themselves – but instead the saviors of society (and rich ones at that). They were the ones who dubbed themselves the Tiffany Network. They thought they could do no wrong.

And then along came Dan.

Ain’t Edward R. spinning in is grave now?

These founding fathers of TV news could convince themselves of their invincibility because they came into journalism just as television itself destroyed competition in local newspapers and established an age of monopoly news, of one-size-fits-all mass media, of fewer voices and less diversity of views. And so CBS News pulled the rest of TV – and print journalism, too – up on a pedestal, above it all. The age of the oracles began, an age that – thanks to the internet – is just now ending, as declared by no one less than the current president of CBS News, Andrew Heyward.

Isn’t that ironic: The most mass medium in history gave birth to a class of media snobs. And the until-recently-exclusive medium (for the technologically sophisticated at the start) cuts them down to earth and once again empowers the little guy.

I don't think Murrow is now spinning or ever has spun in his grave, because he was plenty worried about the state of television long before his untimely death from cancer. What Jarvis neglects to mention is that Murrow was the creator of both radio and television journalism as we know it—virtually everything we still know as familiar formats, from the daily news program, the live report during wartime and live video feeds, split-screen and celebrity interviews to the international roundtable discussion, were created by Murrow, usually on the fly using tools that were barely up to the task, having been invented only months before. He did not succeed because of technical sophistication. He succeeded because he knew how to tell a story.

I happen to have gone to the same college Murrow did, even working on one of the radio stations in the building named after him. For many years, I've been hearing and reading about the man, who—less than Woodward and Bernstein—was an inspiration for my migration to journalism. After reading Jarvis' comments and former Morning Edition host Bob Edwards' Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism—the audiobook version is here—(it's a chatty introduction to Murrow, the best of the Murrow biographies, I think is A.M. Sperber's Murrow: His Life and Times), I'd like to offer a different interpretation of Murrow, one that attempts to see him in the larger context of the evolution of media instead of the progenitor of the media bloggers would like to replace.

I'll do this by "fisking" Mr. Jarvis's posting.... after all, why not take a new media format as the template for critiquing a misplaced criticism of previous media.

BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Edward R. Murrow: God or not?:

Even in his title, Jeff Jarvis misses one of the keystone elements of Murrow's reality. He never considered himself a god, and welcomed mockery of the idea. During the post-WWII era, when he returned to New York from London to head up CBS's nascent news organization, even his wife was a member of the Murrow-Isn't-God Club, a group of journalists and staffers who knew better than to buy the myth. Among other things, Murrow lied about his age and his education (claiming to have a Master's degree from Stanford) to get his first job with CBS. He was as human as anyone and knew it.

As courageous and laudable as Murrow’s stand against American tyranny was – and it was – I also wonder whether it helped lead to the downfall of Dan Rather, the downsizing of CBS News, and perhaps even the decline of mainstream journalism itself.

Murrow said in his first broadcast about the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, years before his campaign against McCarthy: "The right of dissent—or, if you prefer, the right to be wrong—is surely fundamental to the existence of a democratic society. That's the right that went down first in every nation that stumbled down the trail of totalitarianism." Murrow would not condemn Rather, though he would certainly have reprimanded Rather's misjudgments in the Bush-National Guard story. Being wrong sometimes is the natural condition of humanity and the processes that Murrow put in place, with producers Don Hewitt (who went on to start 60 Minutes) and Fred Friendly (played by George Clooney in the new movie, which will probably now be how Friendly is best remembered), sough to assure as many checks and balances on individual mistakes as possible on a limited budget.

CBS News expanded dramatically after Murrow left, claiming much more of the broadcast schedule than at any time during Murrow's tenure with the company. It's down-sizing had little to do with its insulation from the market (as Jarvis suggests below), because it was down-sized in response to market forces. Advertisers bought into other programs and CBS News was cut back. Those cut-backs contributed to limited resources for checking stories, but they did not betray an essential flaw in the process of fact-checking, they merely demonstrated that you can't be authoritative on a small budget.

Murrow paid repeatedly for the controversies he pursued, losing sponsorships from Campbell's Soup and Alcoa along the way. The important point, however, is that he pursued an agenda he believed served the public's best interests nevertheless. That principle is the one Murrow should be remembered for, for it is the same one that is espoused by all media, even bloggers.

For Murrow’s triumph led to a half-century-long era of haughtiness, self-importance, and separation from the public in the news. That may not be his responsibility – though he is shown at the start and end of the film dismissing the decadence, escapism, distraction, and amusement of television and America’s mass tastes (either out of snobbery or more likely out of shame, since he, too, catered to them on his own celebrity slather show). His disciples came to believe that the wattage of their broadcast towers entitled them to equivalent power in society. They thought they were no longer hacks looking out for the common man – as common men themselves – but instead the saviors of society (and rich ones at that). They were the ones who dubbed themselves the Tiffany Network. They thought they could do no wrong.

Murrow in his famous speech about the television wasteland to the Radio and Television News Directors Association in 1958, that is apparently portrayed in the movie (I have not seen it yet, as it hasn't come to my area) specifically dismisses the idea that newspeople should be haughty or self-important. Murrow was sure the reporter could do wrong, as his own friends and network were attacked mercilessly by other journalists who supported McCarthy. It was this kind of blind subjectivity Murrow campaigned against. He himself was not objective, but believed in the ability of reason to discover and test facts in order to produce an analysis that would be of value to the viewer. Indeed, Murrow believed this so much that when CBS got carried away with offering free airtime to any critic of Murrow's programming, he railed against the airing of propaganda to CBS Chairman William Paley.

Murrow was poor at birth and his last major journalistic effort, Harvest of Shame, returned to the question of poverty. Having read much about the man, I do not think that he ever forgot the common man within himself. However, he did pull himself up by sheer intellectual will power and if that's a sin, so be it. It is not a sin to be smart, only to lord it over someone else.

In the RTNDA speech, Murrow also addressed the obligation of a mass media to dedicate some part of its profit to the public good, not as a matter of noblesse oblige, but as the price of doing business:

I have no technical advice or counsel to offer those of you who labor in this vineyard that produces words and pictures. You will forgive me for not telling you that instruments with which you work are miraculous, that your responsibility is unprecedented or that your aspirations are frequently frustrated. It is not necessary to remind you that the fact that your voice is amplified to the degree where it reaches from one end of the country to the other does not confer upon you greater wisdom or understanding than you possessed when your voice reached only from one end of the bar to the other....

I am entirely persuaded that the American public is more reasonable, restrained and more mature than most of our industry's program planners believe. Their fear of controversy is not warranted by the evidence. I have reason to know, as do many of you, that when the evidence on a controversial subject is fairly and calmly presented, the public recognizes it for what it is--an effort to illuminate rather than to agitate....

Sometimes there is a clash between the public interest and the corporate interest. A telephone call or a letter from the proper quarter in Washington is treated rather more seriously than a communication from an irate but not politically potent viewer. It is tempting enough to give away a little air time for frequently irresponsible and unwarranted utterances in an effort to temper the wind of criticism.

Upon occasion, economics and editorial judgment are in conflict. And there is no law which says that dollars will be defeated by duty. Not so long ago the President of the United States delivered a television address to the nation. He was discoursing on the possibility or probability of war between this nation and the Soviet Union and Communist China--a reasonably compelling subject. Two networks CBS and NBC, delayed that broadcast for an hour and fifteen minutes. If this decision was dictated by anything other than financial reasons, the networks didn't deign to explain those reasons. That hour-and-fifteen-minute delay, by the way, is about twice the time required for an ICBM to travel from the Soviet Union to major targets in the United States. It is difficult to believe that this decision was made by men who love, respect and understand news.

Let us have a little competition. Not only in selling soap, cigarettes and automobiles, but in informing a troubled, apprehensive but receptive public. Why should not each of the 20 or 30 big corporations which dominate radio and television decide that they will give up one or two of their regularly scheduled programs each year, turn the time over to the networks and say in effect: "This is a tiny tithe, just a little bit of our profits. On this particular night we aren't going to try to sell cigarettes or automobiles; this is merely a gesture to indicate our belief in the importance of ideas." The networks should, and I think would, pay for the cost of producing the program. The advertiser, the sponsor, would get name credit but would have nothing to do with the content of the program. Would this blemish the corporate image? Would the stockholders object? I think not. For if the premise upon which our pluralistic society rests, which as I understand it is that if the people are given sufficient undiluted information, they will then somehow, even after long, sober second thoughts, reach the right decision--if that premise is wrong, then not only the corporate image but the corporations are done for.

There used to be an old phrase in this country, employed when someone talked too much. It was: "Go hire a hall." Under this proposal the sponsor would have hired the hall; he has bought the time; the local station operator, no matter how indifferent, is going to carry the program-he has to. Then it's up to the networks to fill the hall. I am not here talking about editorializing but about straightaway exposition as direct, unadorned and impartial as falliable human beings can make it. Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information....

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.

Stonewall Jackson, who knew something about the use of weapons, is reported to have said, "When war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard." The trouble with television is that it is rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival.

And then along came Dan.

Well, to be accurate, after Murrow left CBS, Dan Rather, a rookie reporter in Texas jumped into a flood-swollen river to save a horse during a live report—it landed Rather the CBS gig. It was kind of a Geraldo moment and we should have known he had the grandstander in him. Most of the Murrow Boys, as his reporting hires were called during World War II, had moved on by the time Rather reached the network. Any influence Murrow had on Rather was reflected and, as I say, the mistake that brought Rather low was really rather trivial if you accept that humans are fallible, and defensive, which was the primary source of the compounded errors about the Bush-National Guard story, which was largely correct.

Ain’t Edward R. spinning in is grave now?

Here we come to the issue of the present decrying the past to justify itself, which is an intellectual waste of time when applied to superlative innovators like Murrow.... Bloggers and citizen journalists today should be competing with Murrow's example of courage and conviction—both to the truth and the value of a well-researched and thoroughly reasoned analysis. As we look at the evolving myth of Murrow, we also look at the way media people feel about themselves. This is the work of historiography and, eventually, we'll be analyzing today's Murrow commentators through another lens. Hopefully it will be a better one (not to say Jarvis' view is bad, only that we can hope for improvements in media that allow greater generosity toward the past and, by extension, broader access in the media to views that recognize and celebrate the full story of human fallibility.

These founding fathers of TV news could convince themselves of their invincibility because they came into journalism just as television itself destroyed competition in local newspapers and established an age of monopoly news, of one-size-fits-all mass media, of fewer voices and less diversity of views. And so CBS News pulled the rest of TV – and print journalism, too – up on a pedestal, above it all. The age of the oracles began, an age that – thanks to the internet – is just now ending, as declared by no one less than the current president of CBS News, Andrew Heyward.

The newspapers were not destroyed by television at the time Murrow was working, this is a phenomenon that began in earnest in the early 1960s and gathered real momentum during the next couple decades, until newspaper circulation began to drop precipitously in the 1990s. There were 1,772 daily newspapers in the United States in 1950, only nine fewer a decade later. Circulation of papers rose during the 1950s until the 1990s. Economic decisions about the role of news in the corporate budget had much more to do with the era of "monopoly news," and even that notion is debatable, as the number of print publications, television networks and other media (including the Web) exploded during the same years.

Murrow's confidence had much to do with his mastery of the previous medium, radio, not to mention his own success in networking with the influencers of his time. That did not contribute to a sense of invincibility, but of careful exegesis of the experience of a reporter in the field. Consider how tentatively Murrow described his entering the Buchenwald concentration camp on the day of its liberation (where he gave away all the money he was carrying, violating the notion of a reporter being beyond the events they cover):

"I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words.... If I have offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I'm not in the least bit sorry."

This is not journalism on a pedestal, but a raw account of events. When Murrow confronted McCarthy in 1954, he carefully destroyed the perception of authority created by the Senator, citing the McCarthy's waving of documents that he described as "confidential" during hearings which were, in fact, publicly available for a small fee, and documented how conservative newspapers, not just liberal ones and the television media (already a whipping boy of the conservatives), were expressing serious doubts about McCarthy and his tactics. Only after building this case through the unraveling of McCarthy's tactics, did Murrow provide his analysis (calling for many voices to participate in a debate rather than he and McCarthy alone):

"This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve.... The actions of the junior senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable aid and comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his; he didn't create this situation of fear, he merely exploited it and rather successfully. Cassius was right. 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.' Good night and good luck."

Isn’t that ironic: The most mass medium in history gave birth to a class of media snobs. And the until-recently-exclusive medium (for the technologically sophisticated at the start) cuts them down to earth and once again empowers the little guy.

I've been the little guy who got the power of the press in his hands, both as a reporter in a media conglomerate and as a self-publisher. Both experiences struck me full of awe and Murrow's principles have been invaluable as a firm ground to stand on and a tonic against a swollen ego.

The irony, to me, is that the founders of this new egalitarian medium are much more interested in separating themselves from all tradition and all predecessors, suggesting a kind of quasi-religious ascension from a corrupt past into a pure future. This is a kind of hubris far more likely to undercut the credibility of the new media in short order than any of the real or imagined faults of a small group of reporters and producers around Murrow who had the good fortune to have access to a new technology. If success in this era, when we all have access to a new media, is dependent on a sense that users of one form and format of expression are inherently superior to others, we've only managed to repeat the mistakes we condemn.

Technorati Tags: blogging, Jarvis, Murrow, Media

Lincoln: Honorable by pained nature

There are two new biographies of Abraham Lincoln, one a psychological biography by Joshua Wolf Shenk, Lincoln's Melancholy, which is out now. I read Lincoln's Melancholy over the weekend and came away deeply impressed with the fact that imperfection was an acceptable quality in our leaders during the 1800s, but that today it is not.

The modern American has parsed the experiences of their own lives into such narrow categories based on a mythos of the value of optimism that they no longer accept a candidate who does not pretend to be perfect. Note: I said "pretend," because we know there are no perfect people. Presidential candidates today attempt, by setting and staying on a fixed set of messages, to excise any faults from their record and, more importantly, to portray themselves as representing an ideal of the type of voters in their coalition.

Lincoln also would be aghast at the Republican dedication to strict constructionism in the interpretation of of the U.S. Constitution. An early and dedicated believer in evolution, Lincoln conceived of the founding documents of the republic as a platform for change. As Shenk puts it: "The spirit of the Declaration, Lincoln said, was meant to be realized — to the greatest extent possible — by each succeeding generation. The Founders cast off despotism and created a framework for a free republic, invoking, as they did, not arguments of mere self-interest but the ideal of natural, universal, God-given rights. 'They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society,' Lincoln said, 'which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for... even though never perfectly attained."

Liberty, then, is a work in process, not something accomplished 220 years ago and never to be changed, only conserved.

Lincoln's depression, which is the subject of Shenk's biography, gave him both a pragmatic outlook on the world about him and a reservoir of strenght and resolve, as well as a firm belief in his own potential to change the world for the better.

Based on an article about the upcoming book by Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals, in The Atlantic Monthly, Shenk's explanations about how Lincoln's personality allowed him to achieve such great feats of leadership is an excellent backdrop for reading Goodwin's Lincoln biography. Focusing on the entire cabinet and, particularly, William Seward, Lincoln's rival for the Republican nomination and his Secretary of State, Goodwin's book looks to capture why the group of men who came together in the Lincoln Administration were the right—perhaps only—team to work with Lincoln to preserve the Union.