Hotel shuttle: terminal 1. Charon the ferryman: terminal 2.

Taken while waiting for Alex to pick me up last Friday at BUF.

Over at Mother Jones, there’s a highly informative article revisiting 18 of the more egregious inconsistencies and blunders the mainstream media in the U.S. have been responsible for, since the start of this whole “war on terror” thing¹.

I freely admit that my views of the U.S. political machinery and the war itself have changed, as things have gone along. But the Mother Jones article was a wake-up call, nevertheless. How quickly we forget the weasely words of the people in the magic box.

Second favorite:

The day before the invasion, Bill O’Reilly said, “If the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it’s clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation; I will not trust the Bush administration again, all right?”

As if we needed more evidence that Bill O’Reilly was an especially heinous, right-wing-ratings puppet. And, though it’s more of a mockery of the media, rather than a media blunder, per se, here’s my favorite:

Stephen Colbert’s routine at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in April 2006 is remembered for the in-his-face mockery of President Bush—but he also spanked the press, perhaps one reason his mainstream reviews were mixed at best. Addressing the correspondents directly, Colbert said, “Let’s review the rules. The president makes decisions; he’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell-check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know—fiction.”

Yeah.

The democratic machinery of the nation, by its very nature, is always “broken” to some extent, but there are functional measures of how much it’s broken. Currently, I think a strong case can be made that it’s more broken than it’s been in ages. Mainstream media organizations have often been the Bush Administration’s willing minions in this process.

It will take a long time to fix what we’ve broken in the past couple of decades (especially the last 7 years). Assuming we ever get around to fixing things.

1. It just occurred to me… is a “War on Terror” pretty much the same as “Attacking the Darkness?” Surely someone else has seen this parallel of meaningless abstraction in nomenclature before now [↩]

Would you shop here?

Roof puppies in Oaxaca also like the sun

It was sunny outside! For only a few hours, true, and now it’s back to an overcast thingy, but at least it’s a bright overcast thingy. I got up late (7:45), fooled around with stuff, then finally left the apartment at 9:00, got to work at 9:30 (I took the extremely long way; my commute is actually about 7 minutes if traffic cooperates), and didn’t even mind all the mud on my bike. And on me. It’s been lead-dark and cloudy for 2 weeks, now. And ridiculously cold for this part of the world. maybe we’re starting to have a normal winter again (i.e., sunny and warm).

In other amazing and excellent news, I went into the locker room in the gym, where I have a locker in the non-faculty area (menos cool). I shower, however, in the faculty lockers, because it’s a much better shower experience. So, I browsed around the locker area (as is my wont, from time to time) and saw what I was looking for: a free locker! I’ve waited for a year and a half. So, I snatched it. With the requisite paperwork, of course. I now have a faculty locker. No more wandering the length and breadth of the undergrad locker room in nothing but the way-too-small university towel, on my way to and from the shower. Yay! Plus, if your gym shorts are really stinky, you can hang them on the outside of your locker without worrying that the staff or the other students will trash them.