Pure insultainment. Sweet.

Modern writers live in terror of saying something unequivocal. Generally, if you challenge their assertion, they will respond with a question. This is because they can't defend their position, but would like to attack yours.

For your delectation, Soren Kierkegaard on journalists. The following (hat tip to the editors of Touchstone magazine) is an extract from Joakim Garff's biography of Kierkegaard (pp. 471-72):

"The collision with The Corsair [Copenhagen newspaper] left Kierkegaard with a terrific loathing for the daily press and its practitioners, 'those who rent out opinions,' as he called them, using an expression he found in Schopenhauer and became infatuated with. Schopenhauer had noted quite correctly that although most people avoid walking around in a borrowed hat or coat, they are only too happy to go around with borrowed opinions, which have been served up to them by journalists: 'The great mass of people naturally have no opinion but—here it comes!—this deficiency is remedied by the journalists who make their living by renting out opinions.' This bizarre situation also has a logic of its own: 'Gradually, as more and more people are wrenched free of the condition of innocence in which they were by no means obliged to have an opinion and are forced into the "condition of guilt" . . . in which they must have an opinion, what can the unfortunate people do? An opinion becomes a necessary item for every member of the enormous public, so the journalist offers his assistance by renting out opinions.' In doing so journalists make people laughable in two respects: first by convincing them of the necessity to have an opinion, then by renting out an 'opinion which despite its insubstantial quality is nonetheless put on and worn as—a necessary item.'

Thus Kierkegaard came surprisingly early to the realization that the press lives by creating its own stories—'it acts as if it were reporting on an actual situation, and it intends to produce that situation'—with the result that reality itself becomes pale and imaginary. 'There is something the journalist wishes to publicize, and perhaps absolutely no one thinks or cares about it. So what does the journalist do? He writes an article in the most exalted manner in which he states that this is a need profoundly felt by everyone, et cetera. Perhaps his journal has a large circulation, and now we have set things in motion. The article is in fact read, it is talked about. . . . There ensues a polemical controversy that causes a sensation.'

. . . . The journalists also incur a moral responsibility because they are capable of completely altering a person’s fate overnight: 'Take a young girl. Someone names her, using her full name, and then relates that she had got a new dress last Sunday. This of course is not the most unsavory sort of evil—and nonetheless she is made ridiculous. Everything private, the condition of privacy itself, is entirely incompatible with being mentioned all over the country in a newspaper.' The vignette itself is so shy and retiring that the reader can scarcely get a glimpse of the problem, but it is there. Even though an announcement such as this is ethically neutral in itself, the mere fact of its publication becomes a violation of privacy. Kierkegaard saw more and more clearly that the media’s transformation of the population into 'the public' was accompanied by increasing infantilization, by the deprivation of the individual’s rightful authority, a condition that was all the more catastrophic because it was said to be identical to the public’s self-determination and its supposed possession of influence."

A challenge: Rewrite Johnson's last quote into today's vernacular so that those in the MSM will clearly understand their wayward ways.

I am still working on my rewrite and I have grave doubts it will be worthwhile.

But I do understand your point -- there is nothing new in human experience and responses to any and all circumstances. Then why do we not get utterly board?
M5

Bravo. As I read this part:

"For it is not enough that many professional "news writers" today are compelled to slant most stories to the left, and ignore others in the right, in their quest for 'a higher truth than mere facts can supply.' "

I was reminded of Jeff Jarvis giving the game away when he wrote: "Anybody can get facts. Facts are the commodity. The truth is harder to find. Justice is harder to fight for. Lessons are what we’re after."

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2005/09/26/correcting-the-facts-and-missing-the-truth/

Lessons. The lessons must be taught

The more shallow we think,
the easier we'll drink
the banal brew
from others' slop-sink.

You are entirely correct that modern scribblers would find a place in the Caliphate. Since Islam is a religion of deeds, of outward appearances that need not reveal or touch the heart, men without chests can easily give pro forma service to a hollow religion in order to flourish.

When you have no principles, it is easy to adopt superfluous ones.

It's funny how everything's connected. Today is November Fifth, Guy Fawkes' Day, so I reposted something I'd written about it almost two years ago.

Within that old post is a reference to one of Gerard's essays on Sam Pepys' diaries. So, I click on the link and find myself reading another Van Der Leun special, this time a rumination on the other great London diarist named Sam.

Proving nothing, really, other than there's always something interesting going on here.

Dear Gerard:

You are a good writer, but not a careful writer.

It’s consommé, not consumé.

And I was mystified by this sequence: “In any case, the now treason of taking the side of a nation's enemy in time of war was not only unheard of but frankly unthinkable. Not so in Johnson's era:..”

It seems to me the second sentence should have been left out, because it contradicts your point. Or you could have written: “As Johnson confirms …”

I am constantly titillated by irritation at the profligation of malaprops, viz.:
"Then why do we not get utterly board?
M5".
So I am rarely BORED. And absolutely never BOARD. It wooden be write.

Remind me to investigate the possibility of being titillated through irritation. Whole fields of sensation loom!

Uh, Gerard, you seriously count Johnson as a "giant"?! This is the same person who called patriotism "the last refuge of the scoundrel", in sync with liberals all over the country!

Well,to begin with he was indeed a very tall man for his time.

And then he wished to have all the American rebels hung.

As Wikipedia notes: "On the evening of 7 April 1775, he made the famous statement, "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel."[168][169] This line was not, as widely believed, about patriotism in general, but the false use of the term "patriotism" by John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute (the patriot-minister) and his supporters.[170] Johnson opposed "self-professed Patriots" in general, but valued what he considered "true" patriotism.[170]"

Hurrah! All of the times that line,"Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.", gets used, I haven't noticed one person point out that the line was being taken out of context.
How ironic that it is the scoundrels that are using that quote against patriots today.

Johnson is of course a giant, and a sublime indefatigable one. The thing I like best about him is his presumptive Tourette's Syndrome, indicated by tics, bugged eyes, and other grotesqueries that made dons and headmasters reluctant to hire him as a teacher. In his later years he used this to his advantage to hold his listeners captive, if not repulsed. Although it seems not to have bothered Boswell.

Gerard,

If you enjoy Montaigne and Johnson, you might like Sir Francis Bacon's Essays. Some are knock offs of Montaigne's, but many are original. There are three editions. He edits some of the earlier versions, and adds new material each time. It's interesting to watch the change in style--in the first edition his style is very compact and dense--lot's of interesting implied interpolations after each sentence. He grows more prolix and fluid in the second and third. I prefer the first, but see what you think.

You might also like his Novum Organum. Bacon was one of the first great popularizers of science. If you want to get really freaky, look at Thomas Browne's Urn Burial. And don't forget Milton's Areopagitica--but now I've become ridiculous.

And in desperation:

http://thephoenix.com/Boston/News/84402-Right-wing-terror/

Have you read the detective novels by Gaboriau that preceded Sherlock Holmes? But then were drowned out by the popularity of the Holmes stories..

"One of my odd hobbies is to read authors so ancient that they are only seldom taught and even less read in our post-post-modern world. Currently these authors are Montaigne and Dr. Johnson."

One of the interesting things about the internet, is finding out you're not as odd as you'd thought. In fact, the unique ground you'd thought you had staked out for yourself, we find we are in fact but one of many claim jumpers upon. Sort of takes some of the wind out of what you'd thought were your eccentricities... but that's probably a good thing after all.

Montaigne and Johnson are two of my favorites which I dip back into again and again. I thought I'd read, skimmed or at least browsed through most of what Johnson had written, but was surprised by one of Theodore Dalrymples essays What Makes Doctor Johnson Great?, to discover that he'd written a small book that I hadn't heard of, called "The History of Rasselas Prince of Abissinia", which I tracked down online, and thoroughly enjoyed.

Interesting to note, it's very much the same story as Voltaire's Candide, even published in the same year, 1759, but as told by someone of much more skill and "moral seriousness". Dalrymple has this to say about the two,

"Voltaire’s Candide, which has always had more renown than Johnson’s Rasselas, is nevertheless far the more superficial work, its irony crude and shallow compared with that of Rasselas. The surface similarities of the stories only underline their difference in depth. The one, Candide, attacks a philosophical doctrine; the other, Rasselas, addresses a human condition that is with us still. Portraits of the two authors reveal the difference in their character: Voltaire looks like an unregenerate cynic who wants to shock the world by sneering at it, while Johnson looks like a man determined to penetrate to the heart of human existence. The more serious man is also far the funnier."

, which I think sums the comparison up well.

About our media and their "Contempt of shame and indifference to truth....", I wonder if they realize that this time might be the end of the line for them? Like Bernie Madoff, they seem to think the swindle can go on for ever... but I think someday soon the jig will be up, and it may well be after a period of much.... unpleasantness, and those they swindled could come looking for payback, or at least a scapegoat.

Somehow I don't think "I was just following orders" is gonna work this time either.

Great comments. Thanks for that Dalrymple pointer.

Does Evelyn Waugh count as an ancient?

Because "Scoop" says what Johnson says, about the press, only with dark and bitter humor.

Thanks for the Samuel Johnson quotes. He's one of my favorites, and, as you noted, rarely taught anymore, probably because his standards were impossibly high. Remember standards? I miss them...

My all time favorite quote of his:

Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?

Actually Gerard, when it comes to war, Vietnam from the period of Ia Drang in late 1965 to Tet is all the MSM knows; because this was the time when the High Command in the US military probably was obfuscating to the general public just how difficult the situation really was; just how deeply dug in to the social fabric the Viet Cong really were.

But once they got their gotcha in the Tet offensive, the story became "How the noble media awakened the slumbering American public to what was REALLY happening in Viet Nam and how the aroused public and youth forced an end to the war."

What the media missed was how the Tet offensive was a tremendous strategic victory that effectively finished off the very problematic Viet Cong. They missed how the NVA bled itself white in 1969 by recklessly attacking US firebases for the sole reason of creating American casualties in order to fuel the antiwar campaign. They missed the fact that after Nixon "expanded" the war by invading Cambodia (actually a salient of Cambodia caused by a double bend in the Mekong River) casualties plummeted to near zero -- which is generally not the case in an expanded war. Just ask any surviving member of the Wehrmacht if German casualties plummeted to near zero when Hitler attacked Russia

They also missed how in 1972, the NVA mounted a full scale invasion of South Vietnam which was stopped by the South Vietnamese with the help of American airpower. They also missed how the South Vietnamese Army retook the fortified stronghold of Quang Tri with the help of American air power. That's a very significant fact because you need a far superior force to retake a position than you do to hold a position

And they also missed the fact that the US Congress withdrew US air support in late 1974, and how just a few months later the NVA mounted another offensive which routed the South. They also missed the story that 450,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians were killed as a result. And they also missed the obvious conclusion that withdrawal of air support is the sole reason that the same army that retook Quang Tri in 1972 was routed in 1975.

And years later, they also whiffed on the admission by North Vietnam that they had sacrificed 920,000 men during that war. Which means those much maligned body counts really were inaccurate -- in that they grossly UNDERESTIMATED the number of enemy dead

And that's why I can't agree fully with your statement that ALL the MSM knows is Vietnam, because they don't even know the half of it

It is perhaps inappropriate to say that deaths in Vietnam dropped to "near zero" after the Cambodian incursion as 5800 soldiers died in the 31 months following the Cambodian incursion until the treaty in 1973. But if you compare this figure to the 41,000 dead in the 40 months before the incursion, you can see that not only was Cambodia necessary but any talk of this being an expansion of the war is laughable in the extreme.

By way of comparison, Nazi Germany had suffered about 65,000 war dead before expanding the war by invading Russia. Whereupon they lossed about 2.8 million more. And when Japan expanded their war aims by bombing Pearl, their death toll rose from
about 200,000 to 1.5 million. And when the Korean War expanded due t the Chinese intervention in November 1950, American deaths rose from about 7000 to 37000. So this is what expanding a war really means.

Sorry, I got to My Lai and couldn't get past it. My boyfriend has a sister that was married to a man, let's call him W, that took part in it. It's not really something that W talks about. W's wife decided to adopt a black child with fetal alcohol syndrome, then got a divorce shortly after. The child also turned out to be schizophrenic. W has done a fine job of raising the boy and we all feel that somehow it's his way of doing penance for My Lai. I guess we'll really never know. I just can't imagine anyone else that would take on the task of dealing with a child like that.