Getting Back on the Horse (Yet Again)
Greetings after long silence. A very belated happy new year to you and yours, and may 2026 improve on 2025.
Last fall I slipped into a severe funk once more, with nothing to say about the Trump regime’s fresh horrors du jour as they piled up. Then, just when my morale improved slightly around the holidays, the software that powers this blog began to glitch in ways that left the site inaccessible to visitors, and frequently to me as well.
Weeks of conferences with tech support at my website hosting providers ensued, including several long phone interactions with a surprisingly competent AI bot. Along with considerable tinkering under the hood on my part, informed by multiple targeted internet searches as I narrowed down the probable causes of these outages.
Without pulling you into the weeds with me, a short version: I constructed this blog and premiered it in the spring of 2009. The template that controls its design, and the WYSIWYG toolbar that manages the backstage interface of the blog’s writing environment, have both entered the “classic” or “legacy” phase. Like any 17-year-old vehicle, it requires regular maintenance and close attention from a devoted mechanic to remain roadworthy.
Which it has now received, leaving me with no technological excuse for malingering. So I’ll go on. Just a matter of putting one word in front of the other.
•
I’m Calling It
Yes, we have now entered the condition of fascism. Early, nascent, proto, just kicking the tires, dipping our toes in the water, sure — use whatever qualifier suits your fancy. When we’ve got armed and masked storm troopers shooting citizens in their cars and dragging them from their homes, a mad despot in the White House, and no one in government with the gumption to depose him, we’ve become a fascist state de facto.
As I’ve said here before, I didn’t expect to spend this phase of my life confronting a radical-right takeover of the country. And I’m not sure how I can make myself useful in this situation. Feeling old and in the way, only marginally relevant under the best of circumstances, what does my nattering on about photography matter while democracy collapses around us?
There’s the dilemma. Anything that smacks of business as usual seems fatuous and pointless, while venting to this blog’s readership feels like preaching to the choir, and both smack of pissing in the wind. What’s an octogenarian wordsmith to do?
During my recent mope, needing relief from poking and prodding my recalcitrant blogware, I binge-watched the entire seven seasons of The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin’s turn-of-the-century White House drama. I’d watched it off and on back in the day, but most of it had slipped down the black hole of memory, leaving only dim recollections of assorted bits and pieces. Seen in toto and in retrospect, it’s a majestic piece of work on the parts of all concerned, a brilliant set of engrossing tutorials on how the system of American democracy works. Correction: On how it used to work, or how we thought it should and could work at its best. Because if it ever did work that way, even aspirationally, it doesn’t anymore, and perhaps never will again. Which lent the whole series a prelapsarian aura that brought me repeatedly to tears.
However, as Canadian prime minister Mark Carney said in his January 21st speech to the World Economic Forum at Davos, “Nostalgia is not a strategy.”
•
In Search of Lost (New York) Time(s)
I grew up in a media-rich environment. If I take as an arbitrary starting point the New York newspaper strike in November-December 1953, when I was about to turn ten, the city had all national and some local radio and TV stations, and a plethora of major newspapers: the New York Times, Herald Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Journal-American, World-Telegram & Sun, Mirror, Post, Daily News. Their fat Sunday editions enjoyed a combined circulation of 7,860,256.
Ours was a media-attentive household. My parents were the first in their crowd to buy a TV set. We had several radios in our apartment, including on in my bedroom. Sunday mornings we spent, ritually, with the New York Times. My folks also read the daily edition of the Times and the Wall Street Journal, and sometimes sent me to the corner newsstand for evening editions of the World-Telegram & Sun. They had subscriptions to several monthly magazines, the weekly magazines Saturday Review of Literature and the New Yorker, and I. F. Stone’s Weekly, an independent left-wing newsletter that covered national politics.
As a youngster coming into an awareness of the adult world around me, I took this bounty for granted. The emerging alternative press augmented it as I rolled into my teens: the Village Voice, Paul Krassner‘s The Realist, to which I added the long-lived progressive monthly The Nation. By the time I started writing regularly for publication, as a budding journalist and op-ed editorialist for the Hunter College Arrow in fall 1960, I’d absorbed osmotically from my exposure to all these sources some basic understandings of what it meant to work as a cultural journalist and public intellectual, and to use platforms like these to make what civil rights activist John Lewis would much later call “good trouble.”
Less than a decade later I found myself working professionally as a columnist for both the mainstream press (New York Times) and the alternative press (Village Voice). I’ve since run a ten-year column in the weekly New York Observer, and even published (once) in the Washington Post. So, as both a reader of and contributor to what we now call mainstream and/or legacy print media, I experience my life entwined with them.
Which makes it excruciating to watch them implode, collapse, and otherwise self-destruct. Perhaps the advent of the internet and social media made the gradual extinction of print media inevitable. Certainly those technologies hastened the demise of the Voice and Observer, and have played major roles in the decline of the NYT, the WP, and other major papers. But their abject surrender to the oligarchy, the sane-washing of Trumpism, the craven kowtowing and risk-aversion, make it clear there’s no hill they’ll die on. They’ll simply expire.
And we have nothing with which to replace them. For all their many faults, over the years they had accumulated a gravitas that, once squandered as they’ve now done, they cannot regain. Whether any new media can acquire comparable resonance only time can tell, but we don’t have much of that and I have my doubts.
As one of Russell Hoban’s characters puts it in Turtle Diary, “I feel as if the life is being torn out of the world.”
•
Thought for the Day
“For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.” — Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1921)
•
•
Special offer: If you want me to either continue pursuing a particular subject or give you a break and (for one post) write on a topic — my choice — other than the current main story, make a donation of $50 via the PayPal widget below, indicating your preference in a note accompanying your donation. I’ll credit you as that new post’s sponsor, and link to a website of your choosing.
And, as a bonus, I’ll send you a signed copy of my new book, poetic license / poetic justice — published under my full name, Allan Douglass Coleman, which I use for my creative writing.
[donateplus]
SPJ Research Award 2014
Cabin Fever: Bits & Pieces 2026
Greetings after long silence. A very belated happy new year to you and yours, and may 2026 improve on 2025.
Last fall I slipped into a severe funk once more, with nothing to say about the Trump regime’s fresh horrors du jour as they piled up. Then, just when my morale improved slightly around the holidays, the software that powers this blog began to glitch in ways that left the site inaccessible to visitors, and frequently to me as well.
Weeks of conferences with tech support at my website hosting providers ensued, including several long phone interactions with a surprisingly competent AI bot. Along with considerable tinkering under the hood on my part, informed by multiple targeted internet searches as I narrowed down the probable causes of these outages.
Without pulling you into the weeds with me, a short version: I constructed this blog and premiered it in the spring of 2009. The template that controls its design, and the WYSIWYG toolbar that manages the backstage interface of the blog’s writing environment, have both entered the “classic” or “legacy” phase. Like any 17-year-old vehicle, it requires regular maintenance and close attention from a devoted mechanic to remain roadworthy.
Which it has now received, leaving me with no technological excuse for malingering. So I’ll go on. Just a matter of putting one word in front of the other.
•
I’m Calling It
Yes, we have now entered the condition of fascism. Early, nascent, proto, just kicking the tires, dipping our toes in the water, sure — use whatever qualifier suits your fancy. When we’ve got armed and masked storm troopers shooting citizens in their cars and dragging them from their homes, a mad despot in the White House, and no one in government with the gumption to depose him, we’ve become a fascist state de facto.
As I’ve said here before, I didn’t expect to spend this phase of my life confronting a radical-right takeover of the country. And I’m not sure how I can make myself useful in this situation. Feeling old and in the way, only marginally relevant under the best of circumstances, what does my nattering on about photography matter while democracy collapses around us?
There’s the dilemma. Anything that smacks of business as usual seems fatuous and pointless, while venting to this blog’s readership feels like preaching to the choir, and both smack of pissing in the wind. What’s an octogenarian wordsmith to do?
During my recent mope, needing relief from poking and prodding my recalcitrant blogware, I binge-watched the entire seven seasons of The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin’s turn-of-the-century White House drama. I’d watched it off and on back in the day, but most of it had slipped down the black hole of memory, leaving only dim recollections of assorted bits and pieces. Seen in toto and in retrospect, it’s a majestic piece of work on the parts of all concerned, a brilliant set of engrossing tutorials on how the system of American democracy works. Correction: On how it used to work, or how we thought it should and could work at its best. Because if it ever did work that way, even aspirationally, it doesn’t anymore, and perhaps never will again. Which lent the whole series a prelapsarian aura that brought me repeatedly to tears.
However, as Canadian prime minister Mark Carney said in his January 21st speech to the World Economic Forum at Davos, “Nostalgia is not a strategy.”
•
In Search of Lost (New York) Time(s)
I grew up in a media-rich environment. If I take as an arbitrary starting point the New York newspaper strike in November-December 1953, when I was about to turn ten, the city had all national and some local radio and TV stations, and a plethora of major newspapers: the New York Times, Herald Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Journal-American, World-Telegram & Sun, Mirror, Post, Daily News. Their fat Sunday editions enjoyed a combined circulation of 7,860,256.
Ours was a media-attentive household. My parents were the first in their crowd to buy a TV set. We had several radios in our apartment, including on in my bedroom. Sunday mornings we spent, ritually, with the New York Times. My folks also read the daily edition of the Times and the Wall Street Journal, and sometimes sent me to the corner newsstand for evening editions of the World-Telegram & Sun. They had subscriptions to several monthly magazines, the weekly magazines Saturday Review of Literature and the New Yorker, and I. F. Stone’s Weekly, an independent left-wing newsletter that covered national politics.
As a youngster coming into an awareness of the adult world around me, I took this bounty for granted. The emerging alternative press augmented it as I rolled into my teens: the Village Voice, Paul Krassner‘s The Realist, to which I added the long-lived progressive monthly The Nation. By the time I started writing regularly for publication, as a budding journalist and op-ed editorialist for the Hunter College Arrow in fall 1960, I’d absorbed osmotically from my exposure to all these sources some basic understandings of what it meant to work as a cultural journalist and public intellectual, and to use platforms like these to make what civil rights activist John Lewis would much later call “good trouble.”
Less than a decade later I found myself working professionally as a columnist for both the mainstream press (New York Times) and the alternative press (Village Voice). I’ve since run a ten-year column in the weekly New York Observer, and even published (once) in the Washington Post. So, as both a reader of and contributor to what we now call mainstream and/or legacy print media, I experience my life entwined with them.
Which makes it excruciating to watch them implode, collapse, and otherwise self-destruct. Perhaps the advent of the internet and social media made the gradual extinction of print media inevitable. Certainly those technologies hastened the demise of the Voice and Observer, and have played major roles in the decline of the NYT, the WP, and other major papers. But their abject surrender to the oligarchy, the sane-washing of Trumpism, the craven kowtowing and risk-aversion, make it clear there’s no hill they’ll die on. They’ll simply expire.
And we have nothing with which to replace them. For all their many faults, over the years they had accumulated a gravitas that, once squandered as they’ve now done, they cannot regain. Whether any new media can acquire comparable resonance only time can tell, but we don’t have much of that and I have my doubts.
As one of Russell Hoban’s characters puts it in Turtle Diary, “I feel as if the life is being torn out of the world.”
•
Thought for the Day
“For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.” — Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1921)
•
•
Special offer: If you want me to either continue pursuing a particular subject or give you a break and (for one post) write on a topic — my choice — other than the current main story, make a donation of $50 via the PayPal widget below, indicating your preference in a note accompanying your donation. I’ll credit you as that new post’s sponsor, and link to a website of your choosing.
And, as a bonus, I’ll send you a signed copy of my new book, poetic license / poetic justice — published under my full name, Allan Douglass Coleman, which I use for my creative writing.
[donateplus]