CSotD: Winners and Losers
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Of all the Trump/Nobel cartoons that have appeared in the past 24 hours or so, this is the only one that really cracked me up. Cohen skips all the reasons it didn’t and shouldn’t have and couldn’t have happened, and capitalizes instead on Trump’s preening ego and childlike gullibility, which are at the center of so much these days.
Random insults don’t make good political commentary, but insightful insults do.
Davies wonders why on Earth Dear Leader would expect the prize. He oversteps a bit by listing some metaphorical wars, but he’s right that one claim among that dismal track record makes expecting the prize laughable.
Looking through the list of winners, some have won less for opposing war itself than for offering hope. Obama’s win was a particular surprise, since he got it before doing anything, in response to the hope he ran on, which seemed premature at best. Still, it’s not necessary to face down the guns.
However, it helps to face down those guns with more certainty than we’ve seen so far. As Granlund suggests, rumors of peace are hardly enough.
And Bunday reminds us of another premature declaration of victory that turned out to be not just inaccurate but tragically so. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” extravaganza was not just premature but became a symbol of ambition and overreaching. It’s a reasonable comparison.
The rest of the world, including those involved in the conflict, can take all the credit for the settlement they wish, Rowson suggests, but that poor battered dove has been through a lot, and expecting it to fly is expecting far too much.
That may seem harsh, but his doubts are shared by a good many people close to the conflict, or at least those not employed by an Eternal Optimist hoping for applause and a medal.
It’s good manners and mature behavior to show a little class despite disappointment, but, beyond that, it is necessary to follow the rules, and the cutoff date was January.
Trump could have melted down every gun in the world in March, but a literate grown-up would realize he had missed this year’s deadline and would have to enter next year’s competition.
Timing matters in awards, in part because judges follow trends as well as honoring quality. I wrote a full-page Sunday feature on sexual harassment in the workplace that got lots of local compliments but didn’t win a thing. Had it been published a few months later, it would have been nominated in the Year of Anita Hill and they’d have carried me around the room on their shoulders. So it goes.
And who cares? I won an award every year I was in the newsroom and several times later and it was almost never for my best work. In fact, one of the few that was worthwhile — it had resulted in federal legislation — came with a certificate my editor promised to have framed for me but then lost. And yet somehow I survived.
I once saw a memo from the New Jersey press association instructing award winners on how to get on stage, get their group photo, and get off promptly so the next group could get up there in a timely manner.
If you’re handing out that many awards, it’s like not handing out any.
I’ll grant you a Nobel is more meaningful than that, but mostly because there’s only one and it comes with a million bucks.
Anyway, if Dear Leader had won it, it would have just gotten lost amid his Oval Office glitz.
This is the last day of National Newspaper Week, and thus a good time to address the death of local papers.
There was a time, O Best Beloved, when the local newspaper was part of the community. Not every publisher was John Clum, who founded the Tombstone Epitaph between making peace with the Apache and living amid the gold rush in Alaska with Wyatt Earp.
But the publisher was the owner, and also the editor and the advertising salesman and frequently the typesetter and printer. Even in the 20th century, when the jobs had separated, the hands-on approach persisted, and the newspaper publisher was as esteemed a local figure as the mayor or the mill owner. He not only had prestige in the community but influence and — grudging or grateful — respect.
This meant that he was an officer in the Rotary or Odd Fellows or whatever group held the top position, as well as on the board of the local Chamber. He’d hand out free ad space to promote the annual boat show, the Fourth of July fireworks display, the hospital fundraiser and suchlike.
But then when his wife held her annual flower show, the newspaper would run a special section and all those good people who had received free promotion for their things would step up and buy ads in the flower show program. And what he had cast upon the water was returned as cold, hard cash to keep the paper running.
That was before the chains, but most of the chains had the sense to let the local publisher continue his role (and it was nearly always, but not invariably, “his” role.)
Thus local journalism continued to matter.
Then came the Vulture Capitalists, and they made cuts and buyouts and sold the building and sold the presses, but the worst thing they did was to cram the local paper into the corporate cookie cutter, such that you’d have to search the banner to know what town it was from.
As for the publisher, he or she is no longer part of the community and has no influence anymore. Giving away promotional space is forbidden, and, besides, a good publisher gets promoted to a bigger paper and a bad publisher gets kicked to the curb and no publisher is around for more than four or five years.
Which means no publisher ever has time to climb the ladder to leadership of anything in town, much less time for a spouse to establish an annual flower show.
This death of localism at the paper can be the death of the local community. As Steve Waldman wrote in this excellent piece in the Salt Lake City Tribune
The decline of local news even appears to discourage residents from breaking out of their isolation and participating in face-to-face activities. After newspapers in Seattle and Denver shut, there was a significant drop in the likelihood that people would volunteer in the PTA, the American Legion, a neighborhood watch or other civic organizations.
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