Shirley, It's Not As Bad As All That
A brief description of your host's history, and a bitter joke
I began blogging in the before times, around 2002, at the late and occasionally lamented BTC News. The blog, powered by rage and … well, more rage, was modestly popular and at one point boasted its own White House correspondent: the inimitable and indominable Eric Brewer (not the baseball player).
Eric was the first blogger to pose a question to a White House press secretary. He asked pointed questions of the perpetually aggrieved Ari Fleischer, professional wall of stone Scott McClellan, and former Fox News personality —with all that that implies — Tony Snow, who had to publicly apologize to Eric for answering a question both wrongly and with a surplus of snark.
At our height, the blog and Eric and I even got a couple of mentions in the Washington Post courtesy of press gadfly Dan Froomkin, who was later let go from The Post for being sensible. Froomkin now runs the excellent Press Watch site, which he styles “an intervention for political journalism.“
That was then. Eric, who remarkably had no prior journalism experience, left the blog to focus exclusively on his real job as a soil scientist after Obama got elected; the other very talented writers returned to their own varied interests; and I glided gradually and ungracefully into a state of homelessness (again) and less than robust mental health (again).
That was also then, if later. Today — housed, medicated and still absolutely fucking enraged — I’m back to provide original insights into the mirthful side of our impending doom.
In that vein, I will point out that on July 18th of this year, the White House floated the notion that Biden might declare a climate emergency in response to our climate emergency. Ten days later, during which time no emergency was declared, Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer triumphantly announced a climate deal as part of the zombified and greatly diminished corpse (weasels ripped its flesh) of the original $3.5 trillion Build Back Better legislation.
The new bill includes measures opening up tens of millions of acres, land and sea, for federal oil and gas drilling leases as a condition of implementing everything in it that doesn’t exacerbate our climate emergency. One suspects that passing a bill so frankly contributing to the emergency would have been impossible had Biden declared one, and that that is why he did not.
That’s funny, right?
(Contributors to this post include Zap Mama’s Ancestry in Progress, Sampa the Great’s Birds and the Bee9, and The Standells’ Bump.)
It's great to see you back. Also, thanks for directing me to Froomkin. I've been thinking a lot lately (like, the past five years or so) about Hannah Arendt who helpfully, albeit depressingly, explains how the goal of propaganda isn't really to convince anyone of anything, but to get you to distrust everything. I've wondered if there's a complementary process that's evolved as a function of market-driven news; if all the news is bad, then "bad" begins to lose its meaning or significance.
What the country needs is hope, encouragement and a viable plan. We're not really getting any of those things. Now that we've lost Walter Cronkite et al, we don't have "daddy" explaining to us how everything to us, and how things can be all right. Probably a good thing, but without the reassurance, folks seem to be more comfortable with their head in the sand.
Anything hopeful going on? If the public doesn't find a way to both acknowledge our current status and find a viable path to save our collective face, the incentives to avoid reality will be too seductive, I'm afraid. Of course there's always art, and insightful social commentary at least helps me feel sane.
And don't call me Shirley.
https://youtu.be/INNmLQnmTa8
Welcome back to the show, such as it is, Weldon. I wasn't sure if I was getting your emails until today, when I did a search in my Gmail and presto, there they all were. Don't remember getting them in real time. Maybe they were being held in purgatory until they cleaned up their act.