HOD #7
Note: Im cheating and using this as a convenient place to take notes. so to my 3 or 4 occasional readers, this is unlikely to make any sense.
Jackson wrote about the self appointed guardians of the American landscape and their disdain for the vulgarity of American life…. because they did not ‘love’ it they could solve problems of the built environment. “In order to change something, you have to love it,” Jackson would often say. This is the same in journalism…. professional journalists feel set apart from the rabble, whose behavior, desires and motivations make little sense to them…if they make sense at all, they are likely to freak them out… witness the NYT series on the Tea Party…. it had a the feeling of a mission to Mars…. as if these people could not possibly be the same species as we ….
No one would admit this disdain (well make Chris Hedges) but it is there….journalists are just as repelled by the audience as the audience is repelled by the reporters!
this was famously observed in the “Whats the Matter with Kansas” book…. the write could not understand why a persons values might cause to vote against their ‘self-interest’ even though liberals do it all the time
its the ordinariness of American life that so bores too many journalists…. the culture is living on a day to day vernacular basis…. urban kids are watching basketball mix tapes —- people still clip coupons for savings —— but journalists revere the global perspective — and bit by bit find ordinary life so pathetic they cant see the stories living there…
100 ideas from 100 unlikely sources….
