YOU KNOW it's going to be a difficult day when you wake up with "Guantanamera, Guajira Guantanamera, Guantanamera, Guajira Guantanamera" going around and around in your head and it won't stop. You know that probably you should not tackle healthcare reform today, though brainlessness has not stopped other people from weighing in, writes GARRISON KEILLOR
Here are mobs of flannel-mouthed robots denouncing Socialist Gummint Takeover as the private health schemes resemble railroads of the early 19th century, when each line decided its own gauge and each stationmaster decided what time it is. But don’t mind me, I’m a man with a viral song in my head and I should go soak it.
The goons who go to town hall meetings and shout down the congressmen can shout until the bats fall off the rafters, but if you really want to know about health insurance, you just look around on the internet. The president gave a good tutorial on the subject back in June, and you can still find it at YouTube. When you come to choose between him and the goons, you don’t have to think too hard.
This is the beauty of new media: It isn’t so transitory as newspapers and TV. Good stuff sticks around and people e-mail it and slowly it floods the country.
What the new media age also means is that there won’t be newspapers to send reporters to cover the next war, but there will be six million teenage girls blogging about their plans for the weekend. There will be no TV networks to put on dramas in which actors in costume strut and orate and gesticulate, but you can see home video of dogs and anybody’s high school graduation anywhere in America. We will be a nation of unpaid freelance journalists and memoirists. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
It comes too late for Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton. In the new media age, there would not be a Watergate or a Monica Lewinsky. The president could conspire to break the law or canoodle with anybody within arm’s reach and likely there would be nobody in the forest to hear that particular tree fall. And that would be just fine. All we got from those enormous Old Media events, frankly, was entertainment.
I’m an old media guy and I love newspapers, but they were brought down by a long period of gluttonous profits when they were run as monopolies by large, phlegmatic, semi-literate men who endowed schools of journalism that laboured mightily to stamp out any style or originality and to create a cadre of reliable transcribers. That was their role, crushing writers and rolling them into cookie dough. Nobody who compares newspaper writing to the swashbuckling world of blogging can have any doubt where the future lies. Bloggers are writers who’ve been liberated from editors, and some of them take you back to the thrilling days of frontier journalism, before the colleges squashed the profession.
The internet is a powerful tide that is washing away some enormous castles and releasing a lovely sense of independence and playfulness in the American people. Millions of people have discovered the joys of seeing yourself in print – your own words! the unique essence of yourself, your stories, your jokes, your own peculiar take on the world – out there where anybody can see it! Wowser.
Unfortunately, nobody is earning a dime from this. So much work, so little pay. It’s tragic. But one door closes and a window opens. The healthcare industry is wide open and there’s a need for writers. Old people are lonely, old people want to be listened to and their stories written down, old people need entertainment. That’s why I am opposed to the current healthcare reform bill – there is nothing in there for creative therapy and the artistic fulfilment of the sick and elderly. A humorist in every hospital ward. Laughter is the best medicine. Sick people need distraction. When you wake up in the morning with Guantanamera going around in your head, you forget about your troubles except for that one.
– (Tribune media services)