Maggie's Farm

Free advice for the NYT and the Boston Globe, if they wish to survive, from Jeff Jarvis. Darn interesting ideas. One quote:

As for the New York Times itself, I’d cut bait and turn it into a national newspaper — international in their dreams. The Times is not now and has not been for sometime a New York paper. So I’d either spin off or kill metro coverage. It could become a new local online collaborative journalistic network in the mold of the new Globe. Or it could die and I firmly believe a new and more nimble local network can emerge and take up the slack left. With that spinoff goes the Times production and distribution arms, in the Morgan model.

If these large newspapers can think outside the proverbial box, as Jeff suggests, they might have a fine future despite their Leftist views. Gee whiz, they're just newspapers - not God's gift to mankind. There is no shortage of interesting stuff to read - like Maggie's Farm, for one modest example.

At the NYT, some integrity and some balance wouldn't hurt, but is not their solution. Just don't dumb it down: the world does not need another USA Today targeted towards curious 3rd grade drop-outs. They need prosperous middlebrow readers like me, who look forward to the Book Review.

(NYC, by the way, has tons of newspapers, from countless neighborhood papers like Chelsea Now, The Staten Island Advance, and The Village Voice, to city-wide papers like The Daily News, The NY Post, The NY Sun, The New York Observer, and Newsday - and more. It's the ultimate newspaper town, and every suburb has at least one local rag. The complication is that the whole country is interested in what goes on in NYC and, nowadays, in our imperial state, Washington too. Alas, because I wish that what those bozos did in DC had no importance to me.)

I love newspapers, and worked on one during summers as a lad (The Hartford Courant, in the typewriter and linotype era), but now I only read online stuff (not including magazines and the local rag, which covers purely local matters and which is required for fire-starting, and for gun- and game-cleaning - and to find out which of your bonehead neighbors has been arrested for burglarizing a hardware store in Torrington).

Confession: I enjoy most of the Sunday NYT, and, between the wife and I, we pretty much give at least a glance at every page of the darn thing. It's their political spin and bias that give us migraines: "Can you believe they said this, honey?" (We cancelled the daily years ago, in a fit of disgust.)

VDH asks "Who is the forgotten American?" Read the piece. Here is his conclusion about the hard-working, responsible, tax-paying backbone of America:

The forgotten American listens to Hillary and Barack and thinks all these promises are nice and well and good, but figures that they expect someone like herself to pay for all those programs for all those who chose to live life differently than she did—for whom in most cases there was as much or more chances than she had. She wants to pay taxes and help, but shrugs that those who receive think it’s never enough—resentment, not gratitude is their more appropriate response for government help. And she assumes that Hillary and Barak, given what they make, don’t much care whether they pay a few thousand dollars more in their own taxes, and that they, like a John Edwards or John Kerry or Al Gore or Ted Kennedy, are rich enough to feel everyone else’s pain but her own.

I don’t know how many forgotten Americans there are out there, but I have a feeling the answer may well determine the next election.

Ahoy there, John McCain.

What happened to the Graf Spee after being scuttled in the River Plate? Ask Mr. Free Market.

Reposted from May, 2005 because it seems to fit somewhat with our post on Messiah Complexes this week.

Mark Lilla of the University of Chicago discusses, in the NYT, the collapse of liberal theology and his fear of the consequences in our culture, if not in our politics:

Over the past 30 years we have seen the steady decline of mainline faiths and the upsurge of evangelical, Pentecostal, charismatic and ''neo-orthodox'' movements -- not only among Protestants but among Catholics and Jews as well.

I agree that there has been a decline of the mainline practices, but true believers never disappeared. The RC Church, Conservative Jews, Protestants both black and white in the south and west and in uban areas have all kept the flames of faith burning. As far as I can tell, the meaningful change has been that intelligent folks have begun speaking out about their faith without regard to fashion; there are unembarassed true believers in the halls of power; and true belief has come to add vitality to the white-bread middle-class suburbia that the elite have always scorned.

Lilla terms this the "dumbing down of American religion":

The leading thinkers of the British and American Enlightenments hoped that life in a modern democratic order would shift the focus of Christianity from a faith-based reality to a reality-based faith. American religion is moving in the opposite direction today, back toward the ecstatic, literalist and credulous spirit of the Great Awakenings.

I do not know what Lilla means by "reality-based faith," but I suspect he refers not to faith but to the vague, tradition-based, civics and morality-focused Main Line Protestant church-going habits of the 1950s and 60s. That kind of thing could never survive long, if it ever really existed, because while it provides community and a nice coffee hour, it provides little spiritual food. As he points out occurred in Germany with the disenchantment with their diluted Protestantism:

They sought an authentic experience with the divine, genuine spiritual solace and a clear understanding of the one path to salvation. And what did liberal Protestantism teach? In the words of H. Richard Niebuhr, that ''a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.'' And if that was the case, why be a Christian at all?

Excellent point. He seems to see the natural human desire for transcendent experience, for an experience of reality containing higher truths than those of pleasure-seeking, comfort, self-worship, humanitarian ethics, and civic-mindedness - in other words, the desire for a "faith-based reality."

That doesn't frighten me at all, but it seems to frighten Lilla, who views liberal (in the Locke sense) government and liberal theology as partners, and he makes the historical case for that view. As I see it, "ya gotta serve somebody," and I find nothing in the Gospels or in Paul's letters to fear. I see everything in them to welcome as a still-revolutionary message of hope of redemption for a sinful world.

But I suspect there is something else going on between the lines. If the recent "Great Awakening" were about liberation theology, or other leftist political causes, I doubt there would be all of this "concern" from Lilla and others - not that Lilla is a leftist. Martin Luther King Jr., a humanly flawed and Godly man, was never criticized for his deep faith which drove his political activism from civil rights to attempting to unionize the South to anti-war activity. Is there a racist condescension in the idea that passionate Christianity is OK for blacks, but not for middle-class white folks? Or is it all mere politics?

However, spiritual awakening is not about politics and it's not about economics - it's about an individual's relationship with the divine.