Today, McCain’s campaign manager was found to have pocketed a half million from lobbying for Freddie Mac, Laura Bush said Palin wasn’t ready for the White House, Karl Rove agreed, McCain panicked and tried to cancel the debates, Obama asserts presidentially that Americans need to hear the candidates debate real issues and especially during crises, Americans resoundingly concur, then Bush slammed the big red “panic!” button a few dozen times, Letterman bugged, Couric stumped Palin, Fox News admitted reality, and Bush’s cabinet personally approved breaking the Geneva Conventions.
And it’s only Wednesday.
Over the last week McCain’s lying imbroglio has helped me straighten out one thing. My beef with television news’s coverage of politics boils down to this: balance has become the ideal instead of accuracy. Instead of wise anchors, well-versed in the issues interviewing one person and taking them to task over deceptions, we have blowhards fanning the flames between a “balance” of agenda-laden dolts. CNN, MSNBC, Faux, all guilty.
Zeldman puts it thusly,
“If you’re selling toothpaste, your claims must be vetted by legal and medical professionals. But not if you’re selling a candidate.
If you’re selling a candidate, not only can you lie about his record, but more to the point, you can lie about his opponent.”
Today has been a watershed of understanding in why I have such a damn hard time writing online these days. From my ever-inspiring friend Diana Kimball knocking out the fully crystalized prose versions of the amorphous ideas sloshing around in my noggin’, to my other good friend nickd running an ax straight down the issue in his inaugural hand-spun post just like in the good ol’ days. I’m too caught up in software! I spend all this time in templating languages that prevent me from ever getting around to creating! Horse shit!
In the immediately memorable words of my other dear friend Swifty, “fuck the long tail, I want the mouth to bite me.”
I caught word of this printed essay by Bringhurst over at I Love Typography the other day and pretty much instantly bought the crap out of it. It’s a short essay, only 69 pages, but it’s a cohesive look at the nature of language, writing and the ways in which they convey and suggest meaning. The printing is out of this world, the cover itself is a soft texture with letterforms pressed in that invite you to trace them with your finger and feel the palpable characteristics of their parent languages. The coyly curved Q, the classical firmness of the Б, the geometry of the ᐄ, the eloquent statesmanship of the Υ.
Your daily Wikipedia-found “huh!” moment:
Class dismissed!