Larry Rogers
Decades after first assessment, television still “vast wasteland”
If you type the phrase “vast wasteland” as a search engine prompt, then you will receive around 90 hits that all orbit around a speech given more than 40 years ago. Its author, Newton Minnow, was John F. Kennedy’s appointment as chair of the Federal Communications Commission, the body that (along with the market) regulates the quality of television.
Gov’t has problem with promises
Since I teach social studies methods, I kid myself that anything that I read about that pops up in the news is somehow job-related. In this spirit, I read last week that Idi Amin had died. He wasn’t a loss, having caused significant harm to large numbers of people during his misrule of Uganda, but his death made me think how geography and history intersect to make the world worse than it has to be.
Should we occupy giddy minds with foreign quarrels?
Shakespeare, in one of his history plays, had King Henry IV give advice to his heir, Henry V. When the people complain about the quality of your rule, he argued, arrange to have their “giddy minds” be occupied with foreign quarrels. Then they will be distracted and you can do what you please.
Finding compulsive readers
John Miller wrote a column a couple of weeks ago emphasizing the importance of reading. It triggered a response in me, but then I’m a compulsive reader. Days that I don’t get to read are wasted days. Days filled with meetings often feel wasted in that way, though smuggling reading material into a meeting is almost as useful a skill as escaping from the meeting in the first place.
Americans should find out more about other cultures
It was my luck in the 1960s to be stationed in an Army unit in Korea that was located midway between a decent library and a movie theater. I got to read a lot of miscellaneous stuff in that library on the Yongsan Compound. I discovered Raymond Chandler and began what became my dissertation.
How will the history books handle Sept. 11?
One of the more interesting meetings after the Sept. 11 attack involved Karl Rove, George Bush’s senior adviser and most of the major Hollywood studio chiefs and producers. In it, Rove suggested that Hollywood needed to sign up for the duration of the war against terror.
Patriotism: it’s not as black and white as we think
Today it has been three months since the attack on the United States by the Al Quaida network. What have been the effects of that attack on the behavior of Americans? After all, the impact of the day was compared to that Dec. 7, 1941 as a watershed in our history.
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