Wampum

Reading and Writing (2)

You might think that being 72 hours ahead of the best newspapers in North America would make me feel, well, full of myself. Up to the gills with oh-the-importance-of-blog, etc. It doesn't. There's not a lot of joy in reading the un-American presses and watching the wave of verified reporting work through Reuters and the AP and finally momentarily displace the onanistic self-referential projections that characterize the American presses -- top, middle, and minor, daily, weekly and monthly. Some, like the wild disparity of the Kurds-find-Saddam vs Osama-in-box stories and their trajectories, are in fact, interesting. Reading the Persian election news this winter was not. Reading the Spanish news the past 10 days was not.

What this country needs is not a good 5¢ cigar, it is someone worth reading. Janet Flanner used to fill that niche. If Janet Flanner were writing today for the New Yorker, there is the possibility that she, and not Ari Fleisher or Scott McClellan or some other lackwit would be the fixed point in the rotating sky to which ordinary journalists preparing their copy for their outlets from their upstream sources would measure from and steer by.

The Kerry campaign should find someone who can write, and who "gets it" at least as well as the average reader of Le Monde Diplo (scope) and at least as fast as the average reader of daily edition of Le Monde (timliness), or who is at least interesting to read when wrong, and have her write "Letters from Paris" on a campaign asset blog. There's not a lot of hope breaking through the mindnumbingness of Tom Brokaw et al, before Fall, but if blogging is an effective means to an end, and ending Perle's monopoly on the American vision of the world is on-message, then it should be done. We're going to get another 216 days of the Iraqi Collectors Edition of Trivial Pursuits no matter what we do anyway.

Or we could all go on reading the WaPo and NYT and LAT and ... together, and periodically reading a meta-piece like Eric Alterman's WLM, until the restoration of the Republic takes place, no doubt accomplished by LitCrit means in some J-school.

In case I'm too obscure, I'm soliciting suggestions. Who is worth reading? From Europe? From Asia? From the other 2/3rds of this hemisphere? If we gave a Janet Flanner prize, who would be the nominees?

Posted by at March 17, 2004 10:05 AM | TrackBack