The sun makes a rare appearance in the barn

January 8, 2009 – A lot of people seem to feel many of us were not living in reality, especially in terms of energy, the rising value of personal holdings, the worth of real estate, notions about work and retirement. We did – I did – think it would last forever, and I was disturbed and surprised to learn otherwise. I am scrambling to get to reality.
  There seems to be truth in this idea that we got lazy, wasteful and irresponsible, and it also seems many people, adaptable and determined, are starting to figure things out. This is what so many people mean when they say things will get better. They don’t just mean the market will eventually rise, which it will (believe me,the people running markets know how to get them to rise). They mean we will be living differently, and perhaps, in healthier ways.
  Before I bought the farm, as my daughter likes to say, and wrote about dogs and rural life, I worked for some years as a media critic, for Rolling Stone, Wired and other magazines. I’ve seen media change radically in my lifetime, from an imperfect but sometimes serious information source into a dysfunctional collection of institutions that more closely resemble a social disorder.
  Media are transmitters of confrontation, controversy and hysteria more than anything else and they have distorted and transformed our social environment to the point that most of the people I know make a conscious effort to limit the news they absorb or eliminate it completely.
  Media are porous and invasive. They have become a disturbing element.
  There is no escaping them, and you can watch and listen to them all day and not understand one thing more clearly. People squawk all the time that the media are politically biased, and I always laugh at this. That is the least of their problems.
  They are addicted to divisiveness, confrontation and drama – bad news, put another way, and that is much more destructive than political bias. You could easily believe that nothing was happening in the country beyond the immediate collapse of all of our financial institutions, and that there was nothing of meaning, hope or promise to consider.
  I don’t know of any serious financial expert who doesn’t believe media has made serious economic problems demonstrably worse by the panic and confusion they sow.
  This was not what Jefferson had in mind when he helped conceived of an institution that would help citizens understand social problems and have rational discussions about them. There is little that is informative about media, and nothing rational that I can find in the “experts” screaming at us and each other.
  What does this have to do with a writer and photographer living on a farm, considering his life?
  For a long time, it was possible for me to hide from all of this, and avoid it. I stopped watching news, reading papers. I’m sorry I did that, embarrassed. I love Lincoln, Jefferson, Churchill, and they would all be contemptuous of me, and my hiding from reality.
  I’m a citizen too, and I have responsibilities, something my daughter taught me this year. I don’t consider my responsibility to rail about one candidate or the other, or jerk my knee as is epidemic, or drift to the self-righteousness that seems to characterize many political discussions. But if I want the farm to survive, and I do, and I want it to reflect reality, which I do, then I need to understand what is happening. That is a struggle. I’ll try and share.
  I feel sorry for all of the people who have to suffer for the arrogance and agreed of the institutions that were supposed to serve and protect them, but I am equally determined to figure out how to live responsibly, intelligently and to survive, and then some. I will not get much help from the institutions of information we call media. So in a sense, we are on our own. I see from my e-mail that I am not alone.