by Michael Dymmoch
Really, really mad? Mad enough that you’re not gonna take it any more?
Really?
What are you going to do about it? Besides complain?
Carol Marin’s column last week in the Sun-Times, “Want to send a message? Elect Claypool. “ offered one suggestion.
Here’s another: Next time somebody bitches about the state of the State of Illinois, ask him if he voted. And for whom. If he says, “Why bother?” ask him how many blank personal checks he’s handed out lately. And why he isn’t demanding that politicians who overdraw taxpayers accounts aren’t having their accounts closed.
Ask him why it takes a Federal indictment to get a blatantly crooked politician off the ballot, a conviction to eject one from office. Ask him why he comparison shops for TV sets and cars, but happily “buys” the first hack his favorite political party offers up. (Or, more recently, the latest nutcase rich enough to run as an “independent.”)
I’m happy to say I helped a lot of other pissed off citizens vote Todd Stroger off next November’s ballot. And I wrote Mickey Mouse in for governor because there wasn’t a candidate I could stomach on the ballot. (Which doesn’t mean I won’t vote for the least awful of the pitiful choices in November.)
Politics in Illinois is crass and Machiavellian. But no more complicated than Monopoly or the office football pool. And in case you need a score card, there are plenty of brilliant reporters covering it (Carol Marin and Mike Flannery to name just two).
Tiny children manage to “get” Monopoly. “Grown-ups“ play it with fake money for fun. Why don’t “adults” bother to notice how elected officials and their cronies are monopolizing taxpayers’ real dollars? If more people paid attention, we might get a better class of elected official. Attentive voters might even find “the game” entertaining.
Showing posts with label Carol Marin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Carol Marin. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Kudos for the Pros
by Michael Dymmoch
I grew up reading the Chicago Daily News because my parents subscribed. Sidney J Harris taught me philosophy—before I knew what the word meant—and that the purpose of a liberal education is to make one’s head a decent place in which to spend one’s leisure. The Daily News also introduced me to Erma Bombeck and Mike Royko
Years later, I followed Royko to The Chicago Sun-Times, then to the Trib. After he died, I drifted back to the Sun-Times because an acquaintance started giving me her copy when she’d finished with it. I still mostly read the Sun-Times because I’m currently addicted to Mark Brown and Richard Roeper, Roger Ebert, Cathleen Falsani, Neil Steinberg and Carol Marin (and because the Trib jettisoned its book section and moved the TV guide to Saturday).
What impresses me almost as much about the pros as their talents is the fact that they wrote/write so much—some of them four or five columns a week, forty-five or fifty weeks a year, many of them for decades. To anyone who’s ever tried to blog regularly (even just once every two weeks) that’s amazing! And most of their stuff is really good, though that may not be obvious because they make it look easy .
Blogging seems to have taken over as the medium for getting ideas across, and those of us with a life or occupation now have too many talented writers to keep up with. But all of them, wherever their work appears, continue to remind us that we belong to a community of people who value ideas and appreciate those ideas skillfully presented.
With so many terrific writers to choose from, how do you decide with whom to spend your time?
I grew up reading the Chicago Daily News because my parents subscribed. Sidney J Harris taught me philosophy—before I knew what the word meant—and that the purpose of a liberal education is to make one’s head a decent place in which to spend one’s leisure. The Daily News also introduced me to Erma Bombeck and Mike Royko
Years later, I followed Royko to The Chicago Sun-Times, then to the Trib. After he died, I drifted back to the Sun-Times because an acquaintance started giving me her copy when she’d finished with it. I still mostly read the Sun-Times because I’m currently addicted to Mark Brown and Richard Roeper, Roger Ebert, Cathleen Falsani, Neil Steinberg and Carol Marin (and because the Trib jettisoned its book section and moved the TV guide to Saturday).
What impresses me almost as much about the pros as their talents is the fact that they wrote/write so much—some of them four or five columns a week, forty-five or fifty weeks a year, many of them for decades. To anyone who’s ever tried to blog regularly (even just once every two weeks) that’s amazing! And most of their stuff is really good, though that may not be obvious because they make it look easy .
Blogging seems to have taken over as the medium for getting ideas across, and those of us with a life or occupation now have too many talented writers to keep up with. But all of them, wherever their work appears, continue to remind us that we belong to a community of people who value ideas and appreciate those ideas skillfully presented.
With so many terrific writers to choose from, how do you decide with whom to spend your time?
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
More on media
by Michael Dymmoch
Yesterday's news about the Sun-Times had me seriously bummed—some of my favorite writers work for the paper. If it goes under, where will I find Roeper and Ebert, Carol Marin, and Mark Brown? And Cathleen Falsani, Neil Steinberg, Laura Washington or Mary Mitchell?
Then I read Sean Chercover's blog and Clay Shirky's thoughtful essay about newspapers and the revolution Gutenberg started. Print writers are scrambling to find a place in a world fundamentally changed by the Internet. Printed books will probably be around a while in spite of Kindle®. But newspapers as we've known them...
Part of the problem I had writing this blog today mirrors what I see as the conundrum of our age—there is too much to occupy our time. Unlike our life and attention spans, information is unlimited. A Google search turns up thousands, sometimes millions of references. Even Wikipedia often yields dozens of pages of information and pages of further references. So many books are published annually that libraries have to discard the old to fit in the new.
Non-fiction books quickly become outdated, so it's just as well for taxpayers and the environment that the information is available electronically. But on the internet how do you sort out the accurate from the innuendo? The alarming-but-true from the paranoid? More choices are available—more radio stations, more TV channels, more books, more cable, but people seem more poorly prepared than ever to judge what is true, accurate, or appropriate. One of the advantages of newspapers is that most have some standards for accuracy and journalistic integrity. And they prominently display the names of their contributors and editorial boards.
And what about all the great fiction that libraries dump because it's not circulating? I gave up trying to keep Another Country in my local library after the second time someone put it on the Discards-For-A-Quarter shelf. The argument was that some library in the Inter-Library Loan System still had a copy, so it was still available. But how is anyone to discover it—as I did—while browsing? Kindle and Project Gutenberg are genius ideas, but old out-of-print books will still have to be recommended to new readers by someone. And living writers will still need to be compensated for their work.
I don't subscribe to cable—can't begin to keep up with the great programs available via rabbit ears—so most of my news comes from the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune, WTTW and the BBC. If Clay Shirky's correct, I'll have to adapt to a world without the daily papers. Which is why I just wrote a check for Channel 11 and made an online contribution to WYCC.
Yesterday's news about the Sun-Times had me seriously bummed—some of my favorite writers work for the paper. If it goes under, where will I find Roeper and Ebert, Carol Marin, and Mark Brown? And Cathleen Falsani, Neil Steinberg, Laura Washington or Mary Mitchell?
Then I read Sean Chercover's blog and Clay Shirky's thoughtful essay about newspapers and the revolution Gutenberg started. Print writers are scrambling to find a place in a world fundamentally changed by the Internet. Printed books will probably be around a while in spite of Kindle®. But newspapers as we've known them...
Part of the problem I had writing this blog today mirrors what I see as the conundrum of our age—there is too much to occupy our time. Unlike our life and attention spans, information is unlimited. A Google search turns up thousands, sometimes millions of references. Even Wikipedia often yields dozens of pages of information and pages of further references. So many books are published annually that libraries have to discard the old to fit in the new.
Non-fiction books quickly become outdated, so it's just as well for taxpayers and the environment that the information is available electronically. But on the internet how do you sort out the accurate from the innuendo? The alarming-but-true from the paranoid? More choices are available—more radio stations, more TV channels, more books, more cable, but people seem more poorly prepared than ever to judge what is true, accurate, or appropriate. One of the advantages of newspapers is that most have some standards for accuracy and journalistic integrity. And they prominently display the names of their contributors and editorial boards.
And what about all the great fiction that libraries dump because it's not circulating? I gave up trying to keep Another Country in my local library after the second time someone put it on the Discards-For-A-Quarter shelf. The argument was that some library in the Inter-Library Loan System still had a copy, so it was still available. But how is anyone to discover it—as I did—while browsing? Kindle and Project Gutenberg are genius ideas, but old out-of-print books will still have to be recommended to new readers by someone. And living writers will still need to be compensated for their work.
I don't subscribe to cable—can't begin to keep up with the great programs available via rabbit ears—so most of my news comes from the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune, WTTW and the BBC. If Clay Shirky's correct, I'll have to adapt to a world without the daily papers. Which is why I just wrote a check for Channel 11 and made an online contribution to WYCC.
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