For the Record: Time for Another Blogger Ethics Panel

Press critic and hero of rectificationism Eric Boehlert of Media Matters and more recently his own bloggy Press Run, who died incomprehensibly on Monday in a bike collision with a train on the Montclair-Boonton line near his home in Montclair, New Jersey, at the age of 56. I'm feeling so bad about this. Photo from Salon.

 

"Why ethics matters", please not "why ethics matter". Construing "ethics" as a plural (as in "how many ethics do you have?") is an automatic disqualifier https://t.co/97efItHcTg

— Woker Cupcake Bible (@Yastreblyansky) April 7, 2022

Imagine seriously talking about "Why physics matter". What is a physic? (In old-fashioned medical practice, it's a medicine—"You must take some physic for that, my lord.") There's a suitable use for a singular "ethic" in modern English, as there is for "aesthetic", but "ethic" is isn't its plural; "an ethic" is ethics focused on a particularly narrow subject matter with a singular set of principles, where ethics is the broad discussion of all the different princples you might adopt.

The real problem with thinking like that of Balderas is the myth of "objectivity" in description of social phenomena, the idea that a journalist can adopt what Rosen calls a "view from nowhere". In fact there isn't a place "outside" of society from which you could observe it.

— Woker Cupcake Bible (@Yastreblyansky) April 7, 2022

(like NYTimes Peter Baker, proud that he doesn't vote), you're effectively against it, presenting yourself as superior to the masses, AND dishonest. In this way, far from freeing itself from bias, "ethical" journalism of the kind espoused by these guys is dishonest, HIDING bias.

— Woker Cupcake Bible (@Yastreblyansky) April 7, 2022

A truly ethical journalistic practice is one that acknowledges its bias so the reader can correct for it. (It should also be accurate, scrupulously sourced, and fair to everybody.) RIP Eric Boehlert, who exemplified this so well.

— Woker Cupcake Bible (@Yastreblyansky) April 7, 2022

RIP

Dear blogfriend Peter Hochstein, known to you all as The New York Crank and in the comments as Etaoin Shrdlu, died April 9 this year, apparently of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, at what must have been around 80 or 81  (he graduated from Antioch in 1961). I just Googled him this morning, wondering why he hadn't posted anything at his own blog or anywhere else since March, and found his brief obituary at the Antioch website.

Another blogfriend, MBouffant, sent us a link to a very fine blog obituary (bloggobit?) by Jill of Brilliant at Breakfast, which I hope everybody will read. He was a superb writer, with a droll fantasy under an old ad man's discipline (he could never write anything without a clear-cut shape), and a kind though cranky person, and we'll miss him forever. His last post, from just three weeks or so before he died, was a particularly good one, dark and funny, which somehow helps me hope with Jill that his passing was quick and peaceful.

Nil Nisi Bonum Department

 

Gerald Ford's chief of staff Don Rumsfeld, right, and his deputy Dick Cheney, 1975. Photo by Harvey Georges/AP, via The New York Times.

In defense of that vile reprobate Donald Rumsfeld, now on his final journey to whichever circle of Hell it is that houses those who believe their own parochial interests outweigh the suffering of millions, it is not at all true that he spoke incomprehensible gobbledygook in the way Sarah Jones suggests in her otherwise excellent farewell note in New York:

Iraq will be Rumsfeld’s legacy, with all of the lies, all of the torture, all of the killing. While many hands bear responsibility for such loss, two belonged to Rumsfeld, who had Saddam Hussein in his sights for years before 9/11 gave him the excuse he’d wanted to attack Iraq. Rumsfeld lived out the rest of his days with his impunity. His victims weren’t so lucky.

Lance

 The blogoverse is a little messed up today, I don't mind saying, by an internal event, the unexpected death (quietly, in his sleep, of causes as yet unknown) of the blogger known as Lance Mannion, among the finest writers of us all, a blogger's blogger if you like, who saw the potential of the form as a literary form and made it work as hardly anybody has done, working with a range of subjects that included, obviously, the rage against the machine that we all express, but also constantly coming back to writing itself, and movies, offering some of the best (and most generous) criticism on the Toobz, and professional lit-prof instruction too—his last post was just one supremely writerly quote from a master, Scott Fitzgerald, in The Last Tycoon—

It was my first inkling Wylie was a writer. And while I like writers---because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer---still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren't people exactly, or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors, who lean backward trying---only to see their faces in reflecting chandeliers.

—and a plug for a 2009 New Yorker article in which it was cited, as if he was worried, selflessly as usual, that Arthur Krystal's 12-year-old piece might not have been appreciated as much as it deserved.

But he had another shtik as well that was unique, I think, covering his and his family's lives in upstate New York in a normal routine of crisis and adjustment, reminiscent of James Thurber in his "The Night the Bed Fell" vein (that was Roy's reference), often hilarious, and then, latterly when Mrs. M. or his father, "Pop",  or both of them might be in a medical emergency, hilarious and unbearably poignant at the same time, of which I'll point you toward a piece he chose himself for the 2018 Jon Swift Roundup, "Of Pop Mannion, Mrs M, spinach pasta, and the persistence of memory";

A moment like this has happened just about every day since Pop died. Mrs M and Pop were very close. I’ve only had to lose my father once. She’s lost her beloved father-in-law five or six times and will likely lose him a few more until the memories finally make it to their proper place in the attic.

I debated with myself over what order to tell this, whether I should put the sad part or the funny part first. Yep. There’s a funny part. Obviously, that was the sad part. So here’s the funny part.

So read it and RIP to a really good writer.

Update from Lance/David's son Oliver/Jack and link to a gofundme:

So many people have said so many great things, and my apologies if I miss reacting to a few. Below is a go fund me generously set up by @SusieMadrak. Thank you once again for all the kind words.https://t.co/IdVmVtSXcy

— Lance Mannion (@LanceMannion) April 23, 2021

For the Record: Ginsburg

Photo by AP.

Some reaction to the inevitable, but almost unbearably sad, loss of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, degenerating mostly into politics:

Oh my. I'm so sorry for our loss. https://t.co/dUrTIzAae7

— Amazing Life (@Yastreblyansky) September 19, 2020

But I know you want to talk about the other thing. First, hypocrite McConnell: If you feel bad about suddenly seeing the logic of his 2016 position, don't. It actually applies this time. In 2016 there seemed to be no possibility of change in Democratic control of White House...

— Amazing Life (@Yastreblyansky) September 19, 2020

Jessye Norman RIP

The great soprano, maybe the greatest musician I've seen, who died yesterday. I never saw enough of her, and I think this is the performance that I regret missing most, in the 1988 Ariadne auf Naxos with Tatiana Troyanos (who died really young) and Kathleen Battle and James King. I saw her in the part in 1993 but in a hateful, silly, too-busy production where she got a bit buried.

Necrology

On the death of David Koch, I'm generally a nil nisi bonum kind of guy, but I think I might as well repost something from five years ago, which touches on some of the issues that have been coming up in the apologetics—that he wasn't really a moronic reactionary but a person compelled to his opinions by his special and enlightened philosophical bent, and that far from clinging selfishly and stingily to his fortune he spent it freely, but choosing his own causes rather than bowing to the will of the taxman—I was dubious then, and I haven't changed my mind:

Straw Dog photo from China News Service. Typical People's Republic, no credit to the photographer or even the author of the piece it illustrates, but there's an editor name, because hierarchy.

Via Steve M ("Libertarian Talk is Cheap"), I'm looking at a weird article by the editor in chief of Reason, one Nick Gillespie, who's been living by his own account off Koch brothers philanthropy for 21 years and wants us to know that old Charles and David are not hypocritical moralist Republican authoritarians but literally—wait for it—too liberal for the John Birch Society:

RIP GHWB

Also, as he receded in very old age into inoffensiveness, whether jumping out of airplanes in his 80s or wearing Bill Clinton socks in his 90s, he became truly cute in spite of everything. Photo via Associated Press.

I don't usually stop to commemorate the deaths of old people about whom I don't have a lot of positive things to say, but the contemplation of George H.W. Bush could lead somewhere interesting:

Anyway, he was conservative in the real sense, which is something I think people are just now realizing they miss. He fought bravely and knew a great deal about baseball. Played it well too, they say.

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) December 1, 2018

Dick's getting his Hemingway on here, isn't he? It's that, though, the "real sense" of being a conservative, which I think for the real Nixon might be what this anonymous Redditor suggested a couple of years ago:

I've always thought of Nixon as a Gaullist or Disraeli type of conservative with a small-town American strain in him rather than a Reaganite conservative or a "closet liberal". He was conservative in the real sense of the word--his major domestic and foreign goals revolved around order and structure, not ideals or justice--but a different kind of conservative. Makes a lot more sense, and that's what Nixon himself thought.

I don't know if he thought it or not, but I think he might have been pleased by having the description applied to him alongside the patrician George Herbert Walker Bush, emphasizing the calm "realism" of his views once he achieved the presidency, and papering over the noise and squalor of the dirty fighting and deceit that got him there up from early poverty and rage.

RIP Roy Hargrove

This great young trumpet player, 49 years old, died Friday of cardiac arrest in New York City after going to the hospital with kidney issues.

In this remarkable cut Hargrove and his band members systematically, though not directly, establish their place in the entire heritage of jazz from the 12-bar blues through the harmonic explorations of John Coltrane, through the mediation of the name of Charlie Parker:

R.I..P. Charles Aznavour

For the Record: V for Vindictive

Love the quotation marks, and that exclamation point! Via Jezebel.

I really should have put a bet on this, which I predicted by some significant number of hours ahead of the Washington Post scooping it:

Trump allowed Scavino to compose a sympathy tweet addressed but not @-ed to the McCain family, complete with a full-length portrait of himself, because what would be better calculated to soothe their grief, but he's evidently refusing to sign off on a formal statement. https://t.co/PnZUqV8vhH

— Yasphalt Jungle (@Yastreblyansky) August 26, 2018

RIP, I guess

By Freakshow, via Freaking News.

Reporters in the era when McCain flourished saw themselves as sitting between parties, creatures of neither, equal opportunity cynics, un-ideological, in possession of the most awesome crap-detectors in politics. They also loved him because he reflected this image back to them. 3

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) August 26, 2018

Jay Rosen's Proustian theory of McCain ("Proustian" doesn't mean it's a joke; it's pretty good) https://t.co/33bmjzkrR9

— Yasphalt Jungle (@Yastreblyansky) August 26, 2018

I had in mind one of a number of passages like this one, from À l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs, as cited in this quotes compendium:

Aretha

I just thought I'd post this, my own best Aretha moment of recent years, at the 2015 Kennedy Center honors, when she was introduced by some chick pretending to be Carole King, and the real Carole King, who was getting one of the awards, was in the audience and going nuts at the way this great artist was taking her own work and transmuting it—if you were listening, you were listening through King's ears and King's gratitude, which we should all share, because we're very fortunate to have had her among us all these years.

(And here's what Fox did, if you haven't heard about it.) Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

R.I.P. Anthony Bourdain

For every smart kid who ever found himself in in a restaurant kitchen doing too many drugs instead of being in college, all our love and esteem to a wonderful writer and good man https://t.co/ZeN9owLi5R

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) June 8, 2018

Bourdain left a woman because she was rude to wait staff. Balls, then. Integrity and remembering where you come from.

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) June 8, 2018

RIP Johnny Hallyday

The great French rocker has died, at 74. Obituary here.



From 1976.

RIP Dmitry Hvorostovsky

The great Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky died, of brain cancer. He was 55 years old. I think I only saw him once, at the Met, as one of his trademark Verdi villains, the Count di Luna in Il Trovatore; wish I'd seen the Don Giovanni.

Roll over, Beethoven

You've got company.

Just let me hear some of that rock 'n' roll music any old way you use it I am playing I'm talking about you. God bless Chuck Berry Chuck 😎 pic.twitter.com/XmwmaGzGpL

— #RingoStarr (@ringostarrmusic) March 18, 2017

These are so raw and happy and unproduced you might find them disturbing. RIP Chuck.

RIP Nicolai Gedda

The great Swedish tenor, who rose from a childhood as the son of an unmarried teenage waitress to become an incomparable master of languages and styles, died January 8 at the age of 91.

RIP Gwen Ifill

Image via Raw Story, though not from the page where Google Images thinks I'll find it.

David Brooks is eulogizing the wonderful late Gwen Ifill today and I'm really not interested in criticizing him on this. In fact partial praise for one confessional sentence:

She worked doggedly on her programs, and whenever I did anything that diminished the “NewsHour” she let me know directly.

Sounds like it happened fairly often, and makes me respect and miss Ifill even more.

RIP Leon

Sorry about this, it was the shortest thing I could find to communicate my feelings about the sublime pianist and singer and extraordinary composer and guitarist and wonderful human Leon Russell, who died today at the age of 74.



No wait, there's this if you've only got ten minutes.


11 "Medley: Jumpin' Jack Flash/Young Blood... by yoshiyuki-harada