> Max Sawicky wrote:
>
> > I used to watch Letterman all the time but stopped. The show went down a
> > lot in the past five years. He was more liberal back then too.
>
> This concern about the *change* Letterman represents seems odd
> to me -- like a close comparison of the odors of differing varieties
> of excrement. This leads to a gross overestimation of the TV and
> radio of the past. Doug went into this sort of thing in detail in
> his fight on PEN-L on that press critic (from the Nation I believe)
> who was so concerned about centralization of media power and how
> it was destroying something that never existed in the first place.
>
> Was not Fred Allen the last (and also the first?) radio/tv personality
> who in any serious way critiqued the medium. At the time I did him
> an injustice by assuming that his fights with network VPs were more
> or less staged. My wife has been reading a history of radio that makes
> it clear the fight was very real.
>
> Nostalgia usually is as misleading as utopianism. The shit used to
> be blacker and richer.
Carrol makes two good points here, and one not-so-good one.
Since I found Letterman literally unwatchable 10 years ago (I tuned in once because some band I really liked was on, but I turned it off in disgust), I agree with Carrols point re Letterman.
And I agree with his general point about nostalgia being misleading.
But does this mean that media concentration over the past 10-20 years hasn't made things worse?
Or to put it a bit more abstractly, does rejecting the most sweeping of generalizations (the nostalgia trap) immediately impell us to embrace an only seemingly less sweeping generalization (the nothing-has-changed-and-I'm-so-much-wiser-than-you-to-realize-it trap).
Note how dramatically this kind of schematic thinking contrasts with Chuck Grimes comments about cell biology.
Yes, folks, IMHO science really does have a lot to teach about how to think, inseparbly intertwined with the rich complexity of the world it reveals.
In fact, Chuck's final statement:
> In other words, the biology of the cell is richer in
> relationships than any assembly of ideologies or
> theoretical designs. That's the problem.
invites a quick, appreciative rejoinder:
That's the solution.
All our ideologies, theories, etc. are hueristics at best, flexible guides to help us explore the richness of reality that always excedes their grasp. Enjoy your theories while ye may. But let the real world be your guide.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"