Diddling While America Burns

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This must have been how the peasants felt, watching Nero fiddle a merry tune while Rome burned.

Gasoline approaches $5 a gallon, runs on our banks are just barely averted, the war on terror drags on and on and what are we obsessed with? A magazine cover, now that the New Yorker‘s suddenly embraced satiric ones, and Bernie Mac’s barely funny jokes at an Obama fundraiser. Imagine…a comedian making luke warm fun of the probable next Prez’s marital woes. Heavens!

Do our problems seem so insoluble that we don’t know what else to tackle but inanities like this? The only good that can come of this puerility is the fodder it provides for those of us who teach journalism (students, see: what not to do). It’s twaddle like this that makes good journalism so much more precious. Wanna feed your brain instead of swaddle it in crap, wanna encourage journalists to produce more of it? Here are three items not to miss.

First, check out this bloggingheads.tv discussion between Michelle Goldberg and Rebecca Traister, two of my favorite young, outside-the-box feminist journalists. They expand my thinking and piss me off in all the best ways.

Then read this article in this week’s New Yorker, instead of just about its cover. It’s an utterly fascinating, very detailed history and analysis of a young Obama making the journey from idealistic neophyte to squinty-eyed professional politician.

I’m somewhat afraid of him now, even as I realize that only after such a process could anyone, let alone someone like Obama, be a stone’s throw from the Oval. If you want to really understand the man who may well be our next president, a president in some of the most perilous times we’ve ever faced, don’t miss articles like this one.

You can’t read, or listen to, these while you’re driving, and you might just have to miss that TMZ video of some stupid celeb buying cheez doodles, but it’s well worth it.

If you really want to do your job as a thinking adult and voter, read this Nation piece by Kai Wright. She, too, did something that I just love to hate: She’s forcing me to admit that maybe, just maybe, I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about when I wrote this about the mortgage debacle.

The subprime crisis isn’t simple. It isn’t about wanna be Donald Trumps buying McMansions. Rather, it wasn’t just about that. I had plenty of working class relatives, as early as the 80s, making fools of themselves and losing their homes refinancing at terms they refused to understand and spending the money on trips to Bermuda, shoes and big screen TVs. But now it’s clear that there was a clear pattern of deception, hard sell, and outright fraud in these loans. And that they were specifically targeted at poor, elderly blacks, and black neighborhoods.

You have to read all the way to the end for the proof I found most staggering, but the fact remains that blacks depend, to a far greater extent than others on their home equity as the basis of what scant wealth we hold as a community, and there was a concerted, ruthless effort made to defraud us; check out the parts, near the end, about how the Yellow Page-sized mortgage documents were forged to show retirees who were actually pulling in $2000 a month as fixed income being shown to have monthly incomes of nearly $5000.

Grandma and Grandpa Washington didn’t prepare those documents, IndyMac did—then sent ruthless MBAs to their ghetto homes to pressure them into signing. Entire black communities have been decimated, our future generations bereft of any low-dollar amount inheritance ever in the offing (1 in 4 whites receive a bequest while only 1 in 10 blacks do. Even then, blacks get only half as much).

I have more reading to do on all these issues, but wading through the mega pixels of brain-killing nonsense we readers seem to prefer has me more determined than ever to do so.

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

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