I’ve wanted to have a weekly column since I was in my late teens. Now, of course, anyone can have one.
Your own free blog through, ahem, WordPress. A self-written Substack of your own fact-based or fictional stuff with a minimum paywall. Or an ongoing spot on an existing website which you contribute to for nothing or for which you are very, very, VERY seriously underpaid.
I’m not sure if a continuing stream of your own TikTok videos or Instagram posts counts as your own column but in the world of 21st century “journalism” I suppose it has to. I don’t say this as begrudgingly as it sounds because I occasionally watch them and find some of them amusing. But, yikes, there is sooooooooooo much stream of consciousness stuff by nitwits or morons or fringe characters looking to insight anger, an argument or a riot by any rational human being.
Much like our current POTUS.
Except he does it live from the White House and it gets picked up by not only every social media platform, but all the major networks and newspaper outlets. It might not cost us money to watch them, but rest assured we pay.
As his exorbitant tariff plan for pretty much every country went into effect last week (Note: 25-125% for foreign goods, which is pretty much most of everything the way manufacturing works in the modern era), he caused the stock market to crash by almost 20% (Note: Dropping our worth by $6 trillion), only to then bounce back to three-quarters its worth, and then go back down again – only to partially recover once more – but not before it shook up the bond market.
No, I didn’t know what that meant either. Though after some basic reading (Note: Imagine that!) I learned it meant that big world investors, who often dump their excess money in things like the sure thing treasury bonds of the United States for safe keeping, were spooked. Meaning the international financial world no longer sees the U.S. as stable – aka a sure bet for almost a century – which in turn means any real faith the rest of the world economy has in us as a reliable “safe place” in the future is cratering. Fast.
The Great Orange One vamped that this was all his plan all along to the TV cameras and in front of preening White House aides and hand-picked members of the press, and that he only modified because a few naysayers began to get “yippy.”
Yippy? #CallingDrMarty
Even though when he announced the deal he said he’d never modify it.
Of course, we have all of this on tape from a few days ago but that was forgotten as quickly as yesterday’s Truth Social post and replaced with talk about being “nimble.” And, in the next few days, by messaging from his minions, who kept repeating “the art of the deal, the art of the deal,” “the art of the deal.”
The messaging was supposed to bolster his expertise on dealmaking by using the 1980s bestseller he supposedly authored. But everyone except his voters seem to know journalist Tony Schwartz famously wrote The Art of the Deal AND coined the phrase, figuring out a way to package the Orange One’s tangents into something vaguely coherent. Not only did Trump never pen a word of it but Schwartz has publicly stated numerous times that he isn’t to this day convinced that he’s ever read it.
Speaking of reliving the past, the Oval Office talk continued for what seemed like forever with a series of softball questions and rambling word salad answers where he went on to wax nostalgic on his first presidency, claiming the stock market was at an all-time high when he left in 2020 and the country was in the best shape it’s ever been.
Except, well, I was there and so were you.
And I don’t know about you, but my 401K was way, way, waaaay down, and the country was still reeling and masked (Note: Okay, we in the blue states were) from Covid.
Again, I know because I was there and so were you….
Thousands of people were dead in its wake, many more businesses were bankrupted and Trump himself came close to death, likely due to his refusal to wear a mask. And then the uniquely-rare treatment he was given of monoclonal antibodies. (Note: The treatment was approved for him by Dr. Peter Stein, the director of New Drugs at the FDA, who the DOGE bros just fired).
Yes, Covid happened. This isn’t a senior citizen golf tournament where you ask for and receive a gimme because you own the course.
And yes, I’m a partisan, but facts, real facts, don’t lie.
The only time facts lie are when they are alternative facts.
In other words, lies.
Lies go unchallenged in the zeitgeist these days because there is little real journalism that is read by a majority of voters in the country. Sure, there is lots to be read, and watched, and listened to. But it’s become niche. Networks for niche political points of view. Some real newspapers but they were years ago branded as “fake news” by the Orange One and, in turn, by MAGA voters.
So mostly it’s HIS word. And, if rating numbers and polls of MAGA voters are to believed, it’s far, far right (Note: Formerly fringe) podcasts and blogs and social media posts. Many non-factual and often written by conspiracy theorists like Laura Loomer, a 9/11 truther who now advises and travels with the president and recently recommended the firing of several key and accomplished members of his National Security Council because of disloyalties she imagines in her mind.
Let’s not even get started with the guy who runs the Health and Human Services Department that finds vaccines suspect. After two young children died of measles in Texas, he went on Fox News and touted medically unproven alternate treatments by two doctors he called “extraordinary healers” , one of whom was seen on a news report in his own Texas clinic treating a child when he himself was recovering from full blown measles, acknowledging the remaining measles spots on his head to an offscreen reporter, and confessing he was “achy” yesterday but today was just a bit tired.
Now I take vitamins and believe in free speech as much as the next American – and these days likely more so. But with our niche media landscape, when anyone can be widely read or widely seen, we are in the midst of a real catastrophe. See, here’s the real problem for me:
I grew up reading people like Jimmy Breslin, Nora Ephron and Fran Lebowitz in publications like the Daily News, New York Magazine and Andy Warhol’s Interview and there was a personal nature to their writing that hooked me. Breslin covered politics and related human interest stories. Ephron talked about social issues, entertainment, food and behind-the-scenes power struggles. Fran Lebowitz would mostly give humorously snide opinions on pretty much anything and anyone.
They were all columnists but they all also wrote best-selling books that were considered a type of new journalism that was opinion-based but, at its root, relied on F.A.C.T.S.
Love them or hate them these were learned people. I don’t even mean they were all college graduates. I mean they were smart and savvy and thoughtful. Meaning they did research, spoke to people, observed all kinds of things, gathered facts from all corners and then filtered it all through their own point of view. It might have been opinion but it was informed opinion. Not made up sh-t looking for a result.
I loved the 1970s – the writing, the singer-songwriters (Note: Long live Carole King, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, Cat Stevens and all the people I’m leaving out), even the fashion (Note: I soo miss my platforms shoes!).
But it wasn’t all great. Far from it.
In the first half we had Richard Nixon and his group of corrupt clowns lying and cheating their way through the White House. When he was running for the presidency, Nixon went behind the scenes and derailed a pending peace deal in Vietnam brokered by a Democratic president, promising them they’d soon get something better from him if they backed off since he was likely to soon get elected to the presidency (Note: The latter especially if they backed off and didn’t give the Democrats a deal. Which they did.)
This cost the lives of thousands of young American men, not to mention national and international respect once the facts of the Watergate break-in and the various lies told to protect him, and by him, finally surfaced.
And they only surfaced because the independently owned Washington Post – and two reporters they employed named Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein – doggedly reported on the corruption for years, with the stoic solid backing of the place that published the vetted, fact-based stories – at the time deemed treasonous by the far right – they were writing.
Amazon’s billionaire Jeff Bezos now owns The Washington Post. He might still be reporting news but after meeting with Trump and publicly contributing $1,000,000 to his inauguration fund, he’s not looking for the next Woodward and Bernstein. Meaning what? He soft caters to him, already changing his plaything’s, I mean paper’s, editorial page to reflect a “healthy diversity of opinion and argument” that precipitated the loss of many of its most prestigious lead editors and columnists who value the latter more than anything. Mark Zuckerberg, owner of Instagram and Facebook, made a similar contribution and analogous pronouncements – e.g. ending “fact-checking” – that reflects the same point of view. We won’t even discuss the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk, it’s conversion to “X” and his conversion to a chain-saw wielding, Nazi saluting cheesehead.
I could go on.
But suffice it to say, none of them have any interest in Breslin, Ephron, Lebowitz or anyone else of their ilk or pedigree.
What they seem preoccupied with is personal power and prosperity through any means necessary. The freedom to do what they want, when they want and to whomever they want. Unchecked and untethered.
Much like everyone else who continues to turn away from the obvious facts that are unfolding in our nation’s Capital right before our eyes.
Not to mention the man behind the MAGA curtain who’s supposedly running the whole show.
But please, pay no real attention to him.
Bob Dylan – “Blowin’ in the Wind”
notes from a chair 