Johnny Never Knew How

Almost any discussion of what to do about the United States (or any number of similarly placed countries) ultimately devolves into education, with almost every national candidate claiming to want to become the "education president." Let's stop spinning our wheels.

Behind all that lies the notion that the good ol' U.S. of A. was once a nation of inventive tinkerers from whose "know how" came the horn of plenty we came to know after World War II, from about 1945 to 1973. Hear that buzzer? Wrong answer. False history.

Average Americans were never great geniuses, never particularly well educated. Ask any European who came to these shores in the 1930s, 40s, or 50s. The fabled "greatest generation" did not know encyclopedias from footwear, their forks from one another, or Brazil from Peru.

Sophistication, or its approximate appearance, came in the 1960s, with a handsome young couple in the White House.

Before that, the United States imported genius: Einstein, Fermi and Bohr had more to do with the supposed "American know how" that gave the USA a nuclear monopoly in 1945 than any educational system.

The steam engine was a Scotsman's idea, James Watt. Electricity was invented by the Italians Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta. The internal combustion engine came from Alphonse Beau de Rochas. All of them were Europeans.

What did Americans excel at? Swindling (aka "investment banking"), selling used cars (to other Americans) and faking their way to apparent success ("fake 'till you make it").

That Johnny can't read, compute or write is nothing new. The wealthy get the necessary tutoring, the poor get pushed into jail or war, the rest muddle through. That's been true for a very long time.

Want a more educated American?

Pay his or her parents a family-sustaining wage, a college-affording salary, a house-buying income. Almost all alleged "failures" of education are traceable to socioeconomics. The level of general knowledge broadened somewhat after the children of GI Bill university graduates went to college on their parents' income.

Caring for each individual child as a person is more effective a tool to raise confidence in the ability to learn and a thirst for knowledge than anything else. Testing, teaching to tests, and attempting to quantify knowledge as if it came in conveniently measurable units won't and hasn't worked.

Let's stop having undereducated and incurious automatons dispensing widgets of knowledge in classrooms in which you can hear a pin drop. Show some imagination!

In the end, even that may not change things. Because Americans did not succeed at becoming a wealthy nation: our country was the sole industrial nation left standing after two World Wars. We filled an unrepeatable historical vacuum.

The American Revolution Wasn't

A number of House lawmakers and misguided ordinary American citizens argue that their "Tea Party" represents a contemporary effort to re-awaken the spirit of the so-called American Revolution. It is, but not the way they think.

As during the American Revolution, ordinary people are being led by their noses to stage a false revolt for the benefit of the very few and the continued and even increased burdens of the many — especially the majority of the well-intended folks who have fallen for the public relations snow job.

Back then, the few were a handful of slave owners such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, bankers such as Alexander Hamilton and wealthy businessmen such as Benjamin Franklin. Today, most people don't even know the names of the wealthiest people, save for celebrities such as monopolist marketer Bill Gates, but there is a 1 percent getting richer as the rest of the country gets poorer and there are giant corporations that pay nothing in taxes.

Back then, the revolution did not change anything in American society. Slavery remained intact, as did indentured servitude for whites. In 1794, ordinary farmer took up arms to protest taxes being levied on their backs to pay off Hamilton and his friends who held the government hostage to loans they had made during the war of independence.

But here comes the lesson of this post: Hamilton had them put down harshly and there was never another rebellion like it ever again. Scour the history of the United States of America and you will not find any widespread challenge of the social order.

Americans have never revolted and they are way too busy watching television to be bothered to be awakened by anything any Tea, Coffee, or Pretty Please Sugar Party may bring about.

Americans went through more than twice today's level of unemployment during the Great Depression without a whimper. Wages have been dropping — and I do mean actually dropping — since 1973 without the slightest public awareness.

Indeed, Americans have repeatedly elected those who are most obviously at the service of those few who profit off their progressively more poorly paid work — Reagan, the two Bushes (admittedly these two came from among the rich few).

And, I hate to say this, those of us who voted for Barack Obama were misled to believe that his campaign could be banked by Wall Street without selling out the candidates' principles. Obama serves the rich and the few, let's not fool ourselves.

Let us remember today — the 150th anniversary of the first shots fired in the Civil War — that Americans were led like lambs to the slaughter to defend slaveholders against industrialists. Did anything change for the common man after the Civil War?

Even emancipation was quicky turned into a merely symbolic legal fiction as the descendants of slaves were blocked from every path to enjoying "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Almost 50 years from the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., prisons and jails are filled to the brim with the flower of African American youth.

What was King doing the day he was murdered? He was linking the struggle for civil rights to the struggle for economic democracy, supporting sanitation workers on strike.

The wealthy elite didn't care who sat at the Woolworth lunch counters they would never visit — except maybe to slum around in as college students. They cared about and feared the activism of civil rights spreading to the bread and butter issues. That's why King was killed.

The American Revolution was not revolutionary in that it didn't change anything but the names of the masters. Americans have never revolted in any significant way against their masters and I don't see any evidence they ever will.

Indeed, last week the rank and file supporters of the Tea Party begged their leaders to demolish anything that might one day save them from poverty. That day that is not too distant for most of us, as economic inequality widens in America.

The nation as a dysfunctional family

Last week the Republican House pouted, stamped its feet and held its breath until the Democratic Senate and White House agreed to serve a federal meal made mostly of ice cream. Who is to blame? The citizens are: we are in one of those moments in which the government comes close to representing a vectorial sum of the political forces in play.

Allow me to explain.

One of the first things I learned in physics was the idea of forces and how they interact. Say we're pushing a big, human-size ball: you're pushing east and I'm pushing west; the ball will either stay put from equally opposing forces or it will veer  northwest or southwest if my force is stronger or northeast or southeast if yours is. This is the sum of our vectors.

Right now the U.S. government comes close to representing the variety of political forces at play. Most people, who were sick of George W. Bush's misrule, elected Barack Obama and the Democratic majorities. The few people who are rich and have corporate power (who, not being stupid, recognized Bush was a colossal failure) made sure Obama and his pals were bought men incapable of doing them any harm. The elderly voted to protect their Social Security and Medicare. The white lower middle class threw away their votes on a former fly boy who really didn't want to win, then got mesmerized by an invention of millionaires and K Street consultants called the "Tea Party." The poor, as always, didn't vote.

Voilà! The politics of 2010. The nation is a dysfunctional family and the government reflects it in miniature. Misbehaving and unruly children in the House. A neurotic, narcissistic wife on the verge of a breakdown in the Senate. A pusillanimous peace-at-any-price husband in the White House.

That's the "royal family" that governs us.

It reflects our own national childishness, our unrestrained and irrational greed, the sheer illogic of wanting the mansion and the swimming pool but not the work, our thinking we are somehow entitled and have earned our privileges. It reflects our collective inability to lose weight, to make things that work, to be as young as we once were without huge infusions of foreigners, coupled with our pathological depressive, fearful and phobic state about our situation. Finally, it reflects the willingness to play whatever theatrical roles are required to keep the farce going that this is a reasonable, can-do, high-minded national family whose house is a beacon to the world.

The first step in any kind of redirection in thinking is to face facts. Awareness. We need to come to grips with the following facts:

1. The "American Revolution" was not a revolution in any sense of the word and Americans are not now, nor have ever been, a revolutionary people.

2. American prosperity did not come about by dint of effort or "know-how" and no amount of wheel spinning and education reform will solve the problems that appear to afflict us.

3. American power did not come as a result of brilliant military strategy or the most effective soldiers, but because of an outmoded military doctrine that will likely never work again.

4. Americans were never primarily English, male and Christian but always an uneasy demographic mix uncomfortable with religious beliefs.

5. The United States is for the moment wealthy, among the largest countries, in diminishing measure a remarkably open and flexible society, an awesome nation of superlatives, yet one whose myth of greatness is often glaringly blinding to those who most believe in it.

Think about and comment on these themes, please. In coming posts, I will try to expand on each of them, perhaps pointing to some of the national therapy we need.

News about jobs unveils America´s real religion

Every month at about this time, just a day before the Bureau of Labor Statistics unveils what it calls "The Employment Situation," we have a friendly office pool (we each bet 25 cents) on the unemployment rate and the net employment gain or loss figure. As a glass-half-empty kind of guy, I won a few of these bets when we were in what Paul Krugman calls the "oh-God-we’re-all-gonna-die period" of the recession, but I've been losing steadily as things get better.

I thought we'd hear 9.3 percent unemployment last Friday (March 4). It was 8.9 percent.

I didn't reveal any of this in my professional reporting (my job is to write "just the facts, ma'am"), but I did note how folks were cheering a 0.1 percentage point decline from 9.0 percent -- which most people don't know is not statistically significant.

A whoop also went up for the net 192,000 jobs added to the economy in February 2011 (I'd bet 50,000) -- even though one group calculated that even at that lofty rate the labor force won't get back to pre-recession levels until 2019 .

Never mind the details. The net job gain was announced with the words "job creation" in the press. These words go to the heart of this post.

If you believe the economic mythology of most major newspapers -- even the Wall Street Journal, which knows better, indulges in it -- new jobs are "created" every time this sort of things happens.

Way back when John F. Kennedy was a senator running for president, Sister Catherine Agnes had something to say about this -- and it still resonates with me today, even as an agnostic: the only being who makes something out of nothing (e.g., creates) is the one we humans call God, Allah, etc., whose existence I, of course, seriously question. Yet here are the major newspapers telling us that someone -- "employers" -- creates jobs, not in heaven, but right here in our own back yard.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph and all the saints and angels! (Sister's curse.)

This lauded economic Creator is also called an entrepreneur, a venture capitalist, an investor ... whatever. He (it's usually still a he) inhabits the pantheon of the real religion of the United States, which is not Christianity (sorry, Religious Right), but ... drum roll ... the worship of Money, Wealth, and all the Power and Sex it can get you.

Just a thought to ponder as you rush to encourage the Creator by spending your cash as fast as you get it to fuel the economy.

People march (or revolt) on their stomachs, too!

The Muslim world's dictators, kings, sheiks and other potentates are falling like dominoes not because of some CIA plot by Western infidels (as Libya's unspellable tyrant alleges), but because food prices have risen dramatically. In countries in which food is a large part of the consumer basket of goods, such as in the Arab world, this spells hunger.

We all know that “Let them eat cakes!” is a recipe for a bad end. The last person reputed to have said such a thing of her starving subjects, French Queen Marie Antoinette, wife of King Louis XVI, was executed in 1793.

The reality today is that people in poorer countries today are facing acute hunger and starvation. According to the World Bank, global food prices have risen an average 29 percent between January 2010 and January 2011. Before that, prices were just 3 percent down from a historical peak in 2008.

“Based on a very rough analysis, we estimate that a doubling of food prices over the last three years could potentially push 100 million people in low-income countries deeper into poverty,” World Bank President Robert Zoellick declared recently. “This is not just a question of short-term needs, as important as those are; this is ensuring that future generations don’t pay a price too.”

Food prices leading to inability to satisfy hunger is the phantom at the barricades in Tunis, Cairo, Tripoli, Teheran and Amman — not Thomas Jefferson, not Osama bin Laden and certainly not CIA Director Leon Panetta.

Why History Is Not About Lara Logan

The fluid developments in Libya remind one that political history runs on wheels bigger than the latest gossip about one telegenic American. History — and Machiavelli — teaches us that every ruler, democratic or otherwise, has a relationship with the ruled and faces a critical decision when discontent sets in and an angry mob arises: kill them all and rule from fear or quell discontent subtly without changing the order of things.

The problem usually comes when the ruler changes horses in the middle of the river — which sometimes can't be avoided.

In my view of the French Revolution, for example, Louis XVI's appointment of Necker and the end of repression, marked the king fit for his eventual decapitation. Every subsequent show of force was only a demonstration of a lack of real power.

That's because every people form a compact with every ruler, whether it is written or implicit.

Stalin could kill millions, but he had to put offer secure jobs and stable wages and prices (e.g., Russian rents in the 1920s were the same as they were in the 1980s). The demise of stability under Gorbachev and later is what gave the post-Communism Stalinists the gumption to attempt a coup and even to praise the "good old days" of Uncle Joe.

Of course, sometimes the compact is itself finite: lead us to a defined "Promise Land" (the development of a modern technocratic class, for example). When such an intelligentsya finally takes consciousness of itself, the compact ends and the ruler must step down.

For Egypt, for example, simplifying much, one could argue that Nasser promised national pride, Sadat offered peace and Mubarak offered continuity amid turmoil — until society Egyptian stabilized, didn't need a hallway monitor any more and people were willing to forge some new balance of power based (we think) on elections.

As to the ballot box, let's not delude ourselves into thinking that democracy abroad — we in the United States really have a republic in which the elected officials are representatives primarily of the already powerful — is either a panacea or the only way in which people and ruler can communicate and make the necessary deals.

There are a variety of imperfections that can invalidate electoral results.

In the United States, most major party candidates of the last century easily represented 40 percent of the electorate, at a minimum. What does that mean, though? Ronald Reagan's "landslides" were predicated on the votes of no more than a third of those eligible to vote.

By and large, a rather broad majority goes unrepresented in Congress, or much less the White House. Indeed, the disunity, anger and frustration of Americans with all politicians is rooted in this fact — which the chattering class of Washington (which I mostly observe for a living) refuses to acknowledge, for good reason.

Real democratic revolutions yield results that none of us who are riding the applecart want to see.

In Iran, it was the Ayahtollah Khomeini. In Afghanistan, the mujaheddin CIA-armed rebels became the Taliban, riding on the shoulder of enthusiastic crowds; let'snot forget that the Taliban was (is?) very popular.

There is no guarantee that modern revolutions will automatically lead to Western liberal "democracy." Should there be? History renders the question moot.

Living at 33 rpm

Lazybones that I always was, I cursed my luck when the city bus on which I was on was suddenly diverted from its familiar route barely two blocks before my stop. Then, as the bus actually made its 90-degree turn, I caught sight of a long line of tanks heading downtown. That night the government was overthrown.

This is a true experience of mine in Buenos Aires many years ago when, as a teenager coming home from school, I first came face to face to with the everyday details of a government overthrow. The events of Egypt and its region bring it to mind.

Back then, some people joked that Argentina's politics were like a long-play record because it had 33 revolutions per minute.*

They weren't real revolutions; no systemic change was ever brought about by these events. They didn't occur quite as frequently in Argentina as elsewhere (at the time Bolivia held the frequency record, with more revoluciones than years of independence). They were not spontaneous, popular overthrow, as in Egypt.

Yet they bore a number of similarities. There were war vehicles in the streets and soldiers in fatigues. People liked them or didn't like them, but life temporarily stopped.

Schools closed. Many places of work closed. Groceries were available but in short supply because deliveries halted. For an average person, it was a time of uncertainty.

In the Latin American pronunciamiento (pronouncement) ballet, some generals sided with the president, some with the rebels. Both sides seized radios and began to broadcast communiques.

Who was really winning? Were the two sides going to shoot at one another? Was it safe to be on the streets at night? Would they -- the "they" who were at the moment in charge, whoever they were -- turn off electricity or shut off the water supply? Who knew!

When students and workers took to the streets against the army a few years later, there were sharpshooters. From both sides. Anyone could get hit by a stray bullet.

This is what I imagine life was recently like in Tunisia and Egypt and is still much that way elsewhere in the Arabic World.

More to the point of the moment, in countries where revolt has succeeded in toppling a ruler, there's still that terrible, terrible uncertainty of not knowing what comes next. As the Hungarians joked in the 1990s: What's worse than Communism? Post-Communism.

Toppling is always the easy part. Putting something better in its place ... that's tough. Many average people in those countries are now wondering what comes next.

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* The joke made more sense in the 20th century, before cassettes or CDs, when the LP -- a vinyl record roughly comparable to the contemporary commercial music CD today -- replaced the single, which usually spun at a speed of 45 rpms on the turntable (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LP_record for details).

The Cecilieauxist Manifesto

Events have overtaken a variety of comments and posts. In lieu of outdated piecemeal commentary, I hereby offer a grand positive vision of what ought to be ...

A specter is haunting the globe and it is the model of economic growth driven by consumption demand at prices, levels of production and wages dictated by a market that is falsely said to operate unfettered in its allocation of goods, services and capital.

This system has unrivaled global reach. Having destroyed its prime challenger in the past century, Soviet Communism, the system is now devouring secondary challengers, such as the western European welfare state and islets of experimentation elsewhere. The system has swallowed post-Communist Russia whole and is in the process of digesting China. It has also laid waste to American power and influence and used the government of the United States has its gendarme and its enabling institution.

The system is a hydra-headed combination of multinational corporations and plutocratic elites that, because they are locked in dynamic competition with one another, is invisible and omnipresent at once. No political party, government or group has shown itself capable of fending off its insidious and seductive power. No individual escapes the pathology of greed that it spreads. Unless it is stopped, the planet will be despoiled by its byproducts and civilization as we have known it will disappear from the face of the Earth.

We Cecilieauxists believe, however, that the current trend is not yet irreversible, that the overall mass of human beings will ultimately arise to change the course of history, if it awakens from the systems somniferous distractions.

We conceive of a political economy in which the art of decisionmaking lends itself to the apportionment of the world's resources in such a way as to extend the well-being of the many balanced by careful regard for the healthful development of every individual.

We believe that, for the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge to equitably distribute all the essentials needed for survival to all human beings and that disparities are only the result of willful maldistribution that needs to be remedied. Given this situation, we believe it is possible that many assumptions heretofore held by the vast majority of economists and policymakers can and should be transcended. The human economics of the future must be a non-zero-sum game in which all actors aggregate and multiply the resources for all.

In the process of developing a new human economy, we believe that economic power and economic results trump all other powers and factors. A hungry army will fail. An arbitrary project will collapse of its own. It is in such a pragmatic approach that Cecilieuxism has nothing to say beyond the material goal of a globally equitable society.

The cause will not succeed until success is global. Equitable need not mean a perfect, mathematical material equality, so long as everyone's essential needs are satisfied and differentials do not enshrine an unbridgeable gap. The social aim is inextricably linked to the social necessities of human beings to survive and does not mean a disregard for differences between people and their individuality, the common good and the well-being of the individual.

As initial steps toward such a world, we propose:

1. The permanent and worldwide abolition of hereditary classes through a 100% tax that devolves all assets of a deceased to government, in trust for society -- with the understanding that society undertakes to safeguard the well-being of the family left behind, especially children and adults unable to care for themselves.

2. The gradual abolition, through attrition and education reform, of involuntary work. Individuals working only out of economic need should be replaced by individuals who choose occupations and terms of work that give them the greatest joy. The change is to be brought about by a student-centered education system directed to help individuals discover the talents, abilities and capacities they most enjoy giving to society. Work in the future should be a privilege in which those who toil fulfill their potential and their desires through an activity of their choosing.

3. A gradual reform of the labor market to reduce the workforce to the minimum necessary to satisfy all the human needs of society. This would be achieved by automating the least desirable occupations, eliminating jobs that serve no useful purpose or tasks within jobs that serve no useful purpose and the establishment of a universal conscription of all men and women at age 18 to a Social Service Corps for a period of three years to perform tasks of service to society.


4. A gradual de-linking of income from work or occupation and individuals and a gradual elimination of individual earnings differentials, focusing instead on household income necessary to fulfill the human needs of its members.

5. A redefinition of human needs to include minimal material survival, but also, to the extent that equitably allocated resources allow, cultural and intellectual needs. However, no human need beyond immediate survival should be served before all human beings are satisfied in this regard.

6. Along with guarantees toward household incomes necessary to fulfill human needs, a revolutionized global society should set maximum standards of income and creature comforts, devolving any excesses to society for common use.

7. All weaponry and means of inflicting pain, wounding or death should be destroyed and the industries that produce them redirected to peaceful technological innovation.

8. Government should be limited to regulating and policing the equitable allocation of resources, fostering private initiative to fulfill public needs, the resolution of disputes and the maintenance of public order necessary to assure public safety and survival of all. All punitive measures shall aim to repair the damage of wrongdoing to the extent reasonably possible as well as to rehabilitate the wrongdoer to just behavior. Government policy should be decided through legislation and plebiscites, with elections and campaigning at public expense.

9. Private enterprises should be transformed into nonprofit social enterprises, with excess revenues directed only to expansion, innovation and, in lieu of these, the capitalization of society through government. Existing nonprofit organizations, churches and other similar organizations should be incorporated into a similar regime.

10. The right to property of fixed assets or machinery should be limited to socially beneficial uses (i.e., to provide housing, produce goods needed, etc.), but not as a source of income from rents or sale. Owners unable to use such property for socially beneficial purposes should relinquish their property to other proposing the best possible use.

In sum, we envision a peaceful world in which the fulfillment of human potential is a reasonable expectation and economic crime is eliminated through guaranteed survival and equitable access to human requirements. We believe that the path to the necessary changes must be persuasion and participatory democratic decisionmaking, as the veritable revolution needed will not take place without the enthusiastic support of all sectors of society.

Bring Back Partisanship!

Just because Nancy Pelosi can't count votes and Harry Reid lacks the stomach to put the nutwing in its place and a part of the electorate thinks Glenn Beck is the new Aristotle, it doesn't mean that it's wrong to be partisan as an adherent to a cause.

Granted, the Republicrats in Congress don't much cotton to causes, beliefs or allegiances of any substance. Their goal in life is to get re-elected and protect the gravy train for wealthy people like themselves.

Conservatives say they are for principles. But let's look at the record. Being red-meat macho about war didn't prevent George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from running away from Vietnam like pansies. Nor did the much vaunted family values keep Newt Gingrich from adultery with a choirsinger while his wife was dying of cancer. Larry (men's room staller) Craig became the poster child for closeted homosexuality, against homophobic speech he's ever delivered.

And all Republicans claim they're all against abortion, but they never passed a ban while they were in the majority in both houses of Congress.

The liberals are not much better. They're for the common man, except when they're making zillions off tort litigation at his expense (John Edwards) or being unable to find a health insurance lobby they didn't like (Max Baucus). They promise change, except when they don't (Barack Obama).

Most, like famous drunken driver Ted Kennedy, were born with a silver spoon and if all their posturing doesn't help anybody, well that's no skin off their noses.

So let's stop pretending to make nice by avoiding the word "kill" in figurative senses, such as the poorly named Repealing the Job-Killing Health-Care Law Act, which they knew damn well would not repeal a damn thing.

Americans disagree profoundly about important things. We have a constitutional right to disagree and to express that disagreement, even in tasteless or hyperbolic terms.

We also have a right to be represented. I don't want the people's representatives pretending we all love each other, when we really don't. There's an good fight to be fought. They're wrong and we're right. Bring it on!

Good ol' Kafka University tells me I never graduated

Imagine that you're an established professional of many years. You get nostalgic for the days of yore and go to your alma mater's Web site, find that unlike every other school, they don't sell bumperstickers and other alum stuff. Then you see an offer of a free alum card ...

I can't resist a freebie. With this card I can go use the gym for free. Of course, the trip there would cost a bit, what with the two-hour flight (or was it three?) from my present lair to the haunts where I wrote faux-beat poetry.

But then, a kindly soul in the alumni office tells me that there doesn't seem to be a record of my graduation. I knew there was a reason they wouldn't admit me to MIT's PhD program in rocket science!

All these years I thought I was at least a university graduate. Do note: in Canada, my spiritual homeland, we go to "university," not merely "college." And in Montreal they have (had?) something called Collège d'Enseignement Général Et Professionnel, that everyone calls merely CEGEP (say-JEHP), so that a B.A. or B.S. takes five years, not four.

That's one way to keep youth unemployment down, eh?

Anyway, by now we've exchanged the requisite correspondence and thanks to VG and AR (you know who you are) I have just had my Dustin Hoffman moment: I'm a graduate!

OK, so it's 35 years later, but who's counting when you're having fun.

Kafka University prepared me well for life. I've had my identity stolen years before anyone knew of such a thing (try to imagine a Social Security Administration staffer showing you your record, then asking, "Are you sure that's not your mother?").

I am a walking, talking opposite profile of The Unknown Citizen, of whom W.H. Auden wrote

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint

Yet my record keepers at Kafka University, along with the denizens of various bureaucracies through which I have traversed, unwillingly likely share the view Auden's citizen-keepers

Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

A headline's echo of 1963

For years grizzled old journalists bored cub reporters with the tale of the wire correspondent who became nearly incoherent one November Friday afternoon in Dallas. Yesterday, the French paper Le Monde offered an echo of what happens when the media megaphone tries to react to unexpected tragedy.

You could find it in the feed*  hours later.

As news flashed around the world of the shooting of Rep Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz), some editor in Paris stuck with the Saturday morning shift assumed the worst and dashed off this headline for the Web:

Une parlementaire américaine tuée dans une fusillade

Translation — An American legislator killed amid gunfire.

Indeed, the first graf of the initial story said: Une parlementaire américaine et six autres personnes ont été tuées samedi dans l'Arizona par un tireur qui a ouvert le feu au cours d'un meeting. (U.S. congresswoman and six others were killed Saturday in Arizona by a gunman who opened fire during a rally.)

It's an easy mistake to make. Indeed, that was initial assumption. Who survives a gunshot to the head?

Anyone who has ever been stuck in the middle of breaking news knows the initial cacophony right after a startling, shocking and unexpected event. I witnessed the oh-so-macho George W. Bush White House employees skitter out in what was an obvious panic attack in the first hour of the Sept. 11, 2001, events. Even chicken hawk Georgie Porgie himself scrambled to a bunker in Nebraska.

Of course, some people simply act in disregard of their own well-being. Such as the now-dubbed "hero intern" Daniel Hernandez whose quick moves essentially saved Gifford's life.

In journalism, such adrenalin-pumped responses are not uncommon among war correspondents. One reporter whose family I knew got himself blown up as he tinkered in fascination with an improvised Viet Cong grenade.

Then there's the surviving film by a Swedish-Argentine video journalist Leonardo Henrichsen in Santiago, Chile, during the Pinochet 1973 coup. He was manning the camera.

You see the images keeps rolling as soldiers approach to shut his filming (for Swedish television), it tumbles and shows the lens-eye's last skaky views, then it goes black. Henrichsen was killed on the spot.

Now if you click on LeMonde's feed on the Gifford shooting you still get the dramatic, but more accurate

Etats-Unis : une députée entre la vie et la mort après une fusillade

Translation — United States: a congresswoman between life and death after a fusillade.

By the Orwellian magic of the Web, the newspaper goof never happened. Except it did.

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* http://www.lemonde.fr/ameriques/article/2011/01/08/une-parlementaire-americaine-tuee-dans-une-fusillade_1463036_3222.html#xtor=RSS-3208

Pound foolish about welfare fraud

A new year's clean slate and little happening forces the journalist to end up burrowing through piles of audits to find news. Here's my perennial beef about almost all of the investigating: it's all focused on penny-ante small-time pilfering by individuals, not the big money corporate ripoffs.

An appointee steers contracts to favored consulting firms? The fine tooth comb is used to qualify everything until the misdeed is found either negligible or not subject to proof.

But let someone, usually someone none too smart, chisel a dime here or there to feed his or her family and the Marines get called in. There was even a Republican president who lied and slandered and racially stereotyped people with a claim about an alleged "welfare queen" that turned out to be false.

We could give away public assistance to everyone who said they needed it (frankly, it's not much to begin with), without verifying their papers and we'd save tons on paperwork and bureaucracy, to which a substantial portion of the money goes.

All told the real and significant corruption is corporate, not individual.They get contracts for millions for services they perform poorly, at very low cost or not at all. In contrast, the average individual gets, at most, a below-poverty income. Time to refocus accountability on the private sector's use of the public dime.

Consumer Rights in a Corporate Internet

Now that the Internet is about to be swallowed up by governments and giant multinational corporations, let's assert some basic rights as consumers. After all, if it's just going to be a service we pay for, let's get our money's worth, at a minimum.

If the United States of MicroVeriGoo will be in charge, on our dime, let's demand:

• no more tweeting and status-updating involving the trivia of everyday life (we don't care what you're cooking for dinner);
• no more endless comments by people who obviously have never read the words they're attempting to write (we do so need edyucashun);
• no more scams, by Nigerians or European software companies alike; and
• no more spam.

If the USM can't do that, let's just take our business elsewhere. (Fidonet, here we return ...)

2011: the year without heroes

Call me naïve, but for most of my life I have had heroes, seemingly immutable principles, beliefs and hopes and even faith. Each has peeled off me like the skins of an onion until coming to believe in nothing much, eschew hope, deem most principles self-serving and finding malleable clay at the feet of all my heroic statuary.

My first heroes were, of course, the simple projections of a child. John F. Kennedy, John XXIII. Later I reveled in the contemporary literary figures such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Heinrich Böll, Nikos Kazantzakis. As a journalist, my patron saints were H.L. Mencken and I.F. Stone and Seymour Hersch.

Indeed, the latter's Dark Side of Camelot, which I lacked the stomach to finish, slayed the moral standing of my beloved Bobbie Kennedy as surely a St. George skewered the dragon. Robert F. Kennedy remains at best an outstanding stylist, as evidenced in the exquisitely prose in Thirteen Days -- assuming it was not the work of a ghostwriter, as his golden speeches were.

There were many other admirable figures, Alexander Dubcek, Pierre Trudeau, Hannah Arendt, over the years but none set in bronze or stone as notably as the first ones. None all that larger in life than the professors or most brilliant fellow students or colleagues.

By the time Barack Obama came along in 2008, with oratory that exuded an inspiring whiff of Camelot, the hero was a relatively pedestrian figure, no longer riding a grand white horse. Obama promised -- he did promise, whatever the White House hacks now want to say -- to set in motion at last many of the much needed changes in our society and, indeed, the world.

To say he has disappointed is an understatement.

We are entering this year an age of mental midgets and grand demagogues and no religion, ideology, or idea has been left standing to hold up as a yardstick, a goal or an aspiration. 2011 is the year without heroes, without hope, the year of muddling through.