Scott Martelle

A friend owns a children's bookstore here in Irvine, California - A Whale of a Tale, a great shop - and Margaret and I helped her out yesterday with crowd control for a signing by "Weird Al" Yankovic. Afterward, a few of us met for dinner at a neighboring brewpub, and the conversation naturally steered to Borders' filing for bankruptcy.

One of our dining companions, an illustrator, had earlier in his career worked at Borders, and had some revealing stories about top-down management and a failure to understand what sets readers apart from general customers - familiar complaints, among many, about the once-great independent chain's plunge into insolvency, which we generally agreed began when it became part of massive corporations (K-Mart).

There wasn't much of it at our table last night, but I was thinking this morning about the general sense of popular condemnation when a company like Borders goes under, even if it is a reorganization plan. We tend to focus on the missteps and critical junctures in which wrong decisions were made, and that maybe the company go what it deserved. Which is fair enough, given that we are, at heart, a puritanical and punitive society (and that is a whole other blog post).

But perusing the list of creditors this morning is pretty sobering (the filing details are available here). Some of the biggest publishers are owed some serious money in a business in which margins are shrinking by the day. Those owed double-digit millions include Penguin ($41 million), Hachette ($37 million), Simon & Schuster ($34 million), Random House ($34 million), HarperCollins ($26 million), Macmillan ($11 million), and Wiley ($11 million).

Who knows how this will turn out. It could be Borders will reorganize and come out leaner and more competitive (it plans to close nearly one-third of its stores, so it's hard to see it re-establishing itself as the premier chain). And it could be that the creditors come out of this with a minimal loss of blood. But as my agent, Jane Dystel, pointed out in a blog post back when Borders first began halting payments to vendors, this is not a good thing for book publishing. And it is not a good thing for authors (um, me).

I can't help but think that given all the structural problems publishers are facing in these days of high unemployment, stagnant (if not reduced) wages, and a depressed retail world, that book publishing is facing a year of critical importance to its survival. And I hope, for all of us, that it survives relatively intact. Read More 

There's an interesting column in the New York Times this morning by media writer David Carr looking at the absurd valuations for companies like Facebook and Twitter on the heels of Huffington Post's agreement to be swallowed up by AOL.

Carr is usually a pretty astute critic, but I think he missed a crucial differentiation here. He argues, correctly, that Huffington Post ratcheted itself to the value of $315 million on the unpaid work of thousands of bloggers, and perhaps to a bigger extent by doing little more than aggregating the paid-for output of professional media organizations.

If that's not outright thievery, it's pretty close. And, to me, highly unethical. HuffPo breaks very little news, and does very little reporting. It's a parasitical relationship with the mainstream media, and Arianna Huffington has been richly rewarded by it.

Facebook and other social media venues are different beasts, though Carr lumps them together with HuffPo. The difference is intent. HuffPo intends to draw readers to its aggregated links and bloggers. Facebook's intent is to give users a forum with which oi interact with each other. Both sell ads on the side, and thus generate significant cash. But Facebook isn't drawing people with content in the way HuffPo is. It's drawing users - and eyeballs for advertisers - by giving them a forum through which to interact with friends, not by publishing their content. It's the difference, I think, between publishing a newspaper with purloined or unpaid content, and operating a coffee shop, where your customers hang around in your space and socialize.

That's a much more legitimate business model. It's not objectionable on ethical grounds. Huffington Post, on the other hand, is. And all the more so because of the political outlook of the site. There's something deeply suspicious about an ostensibly politically liberal organization so devaluing the works of individuals, and of journalism as a profession.

Maybe what HuffPo needs is a strong union. Read More 

The always insightful Garry Wills had an interesting take on The New York Review of Books blog yesterday heading into Super Bowl Weekend, which has become our annual celebration of violence.

Wills' point of departure is the viciousness at the heart of the sport, and the irony that the very equipment meant to protect players becomes, when worn by 300-plus pound behemoths, weapons.

This “protection” is like the boxing gloves mandated by the Marquess of Queensberry Rules in 1867. Some supposed they were meant to protect a fighter’s hands. Their real function was to make it possible to strike at an opponent’s head with maximum force. Back in the days of bare-knuckle fights, the only way to do real damage to another man’s head, without crippling oneself, was to break his nose with the heel of the hand. Otherwise, the long bouts were waged with wallops to the muscle-padded torso. The gloves made it possible to score knockouts to the head—and to do that head permanent damage, registered in the high degree of dementia among fighters.

The same “gain” has been achieved for football with the heavy helmet.

The chilling result is the high number of former pro football players suffering from trauma-induced dementia. And it becomes even more tragic when you consider the number of kids who have been killed or suffered crippling injuries from the sport as they emulate the toughness lauded on television every Sunday.

Between 1982 and 2009 according to the National Center for Catastrophic Injury Research, 295 fatalities directly or indirectly resulted from high-school football. From 1977 to 2009, at all levels, 307 cervical-cord injuries were recorded. And between 1984 and 2009 there were 133 instances of brain damage—not slowly accruing damage, as in the case of C.T.E., but damage upon impact.

All of which has me mulling this national ethos that celebrates violence. Fights make the hockey game. We celebrate boxers who, by definition, earn their livings by committing felonies. The most violent and macabre movies and TV shows become cultural icons, then we react with disgust when life imitates art. John Hinckley's attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan, emulating the character Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver stands as the ultimate crossover.

In the back of my mind lurks the sections of the current book project about the 1970s and 1980s in Detroit, when the gun slinging drug-dealer became a folk hero to a generation of youths who saw - and not in the romanticized nihilistic sense - nothing but prison or death in their futures. The hit movie "Scarface, though set in Miami, captured that sense in all of its gory glory. Which, of course, was a remake of a Depression-era movie about the violent gangster world propelled by Prohibition. So this thing of ours - the glorification of violence - is nothing new. And I'm as guilty as the next. I love hockey, fights and all, and will be watching the Super Bowl on Sunday, though I hope I have the good grace to wince instead of cheer when a player gets knocked senseless.

More broadly, though, I wonder what history will have to say about us, and the choices we've made as a culture, and as a political society. I used to think we have come to treat free-market capitalism, with all of its faults, as a national religion, albeit one without a soul. But I'm beginning to think that at a deeper level we worship, first, Darwinism, from our social policies to our entertainment choices to our sports. It's a faith in which only the tough survive. And that's not a good thing if we are to have any credibility when we say we value human life.

It reminds of that old David Gray song, "Let the Truth Sting," with its lyric, "If we're searching for peace, how come we still believe in hatred as the catalyst?"9K4N5ZN8ZM7X Read More 

The television and I have an agreement: It shows "Law and Order" or "NCIS" reruns with the occasional soccer and football game thrown in, and I agree to watch it. Otherwise we don't spend a whole lot of time together.

But I managed to catch the first two episodes of the new series, "Harry's Law," on NBC, with Kathy Bates, and find it pretty intriguing. The writing is erratic - some scenes stretch credulity to the breaking point - and they have an annoying habit of pushing up cheesy music during emotional peaks, which only serves to lessen the dramatic impact.

But the first episode dove into the problem of drug addiction, from the perspective of the addict and our societal failure to create pro-active programs to help. The second episode touched on the plight of chronically poor elderly people, and our failure to adequately support them.

Not exactly groundbreaking stuff, but a lot better than the cheap moralism of "Law and Order" (even though I watch it), "CSI" and other top-rated TV shows with their typical "catch a perp" approach. "Harry's Law" offers a more nuanced look - at least least in the first two episodes - at some of the key social issues that, for decades now, have influenced the make up and health of our urban and rural communities. Poverty and addiction are isolating things, and in that isolation, desperation grows.

This also has had me ruminating lately on our societal predisposition to treat crime as a problem in our neighborhoods, but as entertainment on our TV screens and in our movie theaters. "Detroit 187" is one of the new ones, and while it;s fun to see Detroit on the screen, I can't help but think there are better ways to get at the city's core than following cops around. What we need is more entertainment holding up teachers, social workers and others who try to build a better society, and fewer programs romanticizing those who break our codes, and those who enforce them. Read More 

Stumbled across an intriguing article in the Detroit Free Press this morning - I'm in Detroit doing book research - about an unusual demographic twist. The birth rate in the state of Michigan has dropped precipitously.

Just 117,309 babies were born in Michigan in 2009, the smallest supply of newborn Michiganders since the end of World War II. That's 11.8 babies per 1,000 Michiganders, the lowest birthrate since the 1870s.

At its peak -- during the national baby boom -- Michigan's high was 27.6 new babies for every 1,000 residents.

This really is remarkable, especially the point writer Robin Erb makes in the piece that part of the cause is the exodus of young, child-bearing couples. This is how ghost towns are made, though Michigan doesn't risk that fate (can we have a ghost state?). But a baby bust is something of a canary in the coal mine - or the auto plant, in this case. When the young give up on a place, it makes it all the harder to keep the economy running and diversifying.

I've long told my newspaper colleagues that all journalists should come spend some time in Detroit, and in Michigan, to get a sense of what post-industrial society really looks like. The forces that led Detroit to this juncture are complex, and they pose massive challenges. So far, there has been little national political will to do something about it.

You know, that would make for an interesting book project .... Read More 

"The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure."
--Thomas Jefferson, 1823

The noise and grandstanding surrounding Wikileaks and its puckish promoter, Julian Assange, hit full voice over the past few days and it’s a chilling thing to watch. You all know the circumstances: Assange and his colleagues have posted hundreds of thousands of leaked documents detailing the U.S. prosecution of wars, and the U.S. diplomatic corps’ perceptions of foreign government figures, both allies and enemies.

None of the material, from what’s been bandied about, has directly imperiled U.S. military actions, though the now-public documents have detailed questionable past practices and policies, and helped us better understand how events have transpired. And the diplomats seem to have been tripped up by a basic reality of the modern communications world: Never put in writing something you wouldn’t want to see published on the front page of the New York Times.

More chilling, though, is the U.S. government’s response, from hindering access by federal workers and contractors to coverage of Wikileaks to warning would-be diplomats (college students) that to discuss the leaked documents in a public venue could kill a future career. The Pentagon earlier filed charges against Bruce Manning, a soldier who provided Wikileaks with documents. Ever since the Pentagon Papers, U.S. courts have held that it is the government’s responsibility to keep its secrets, not the media’s. Though, given the details contained in the leaked documents, one hopes the soldier gets some coverage from whistleblower-protection laws.

And no, this is not espionage, no matter how the braying right wing may seek to define it. This is an established, award-winning new media journalism site. Look at it as the globalization of the media – a rootless collection of people fighting to shed more light, not less, on the workings of government and big business, from the United States to Kenya. That is the basic role of journalism in America, and it’s indefensible that our government treats Wikileaks any differently than it would the New York Times or Washington Post.

Then there’s the shunning of Wikileaks by Amazon, which bounced the site from its servers. That is entirely within Amazon’s rights, but still the kind of act that will send more of my online buys to Powells. Paypal's decision to stop processing donations to Wikileaks is even worse, claiming that Wikileaks violated its polices against handling money to be used for illegal purposes. Paypal (I’ll be closing my account) seems to have appointed itself responsibilities we tend to reserve for the courts. At their heart, Amazon and Paypal’s reasons seem contrived, at best, and one can sense the backroom phone call from Homeland Security warning of the consequences of aiding an “enemy” of the U.S. Government.

Over the past four years, Wikileaks has published a wide range of government and business secrets that, in total, have made the world a better place. Or at least a better-informed one. And over the past few months the Obama administration has shown itself to be as thin-skinned as the Nixon Administration, from its petty response to Wikileaks to the FBI raids on homes of antiwar activists in Minnesota and Illinois under the guise of an anti-terror investigation.

Given the broad usurpation of civil rights under the USA Patriot Act – which allows the government to conduct warrantless searches without judicial overview – you have to figure that the recent public, warrant-backed raids are just the tip of the iceberg. And perhaps a warning against those who would defy government policies. Against that backdrop, pending sex-abuse charges from Sweden against Assange are suspicious in their timing. Still, the work Wikileaks is doing is more than Assange’s public pronouncements and private problems, and to focus attention on his legal bind diverts attention from the real issues – a U.S. government that is increasingly acting against the interests, and rights, of its citizens.

So where will this end? Badly, I fear. Over the past nine years, the U.S. public has shown a frightening lack of interest in the reality of how its government works, and the acts that have been taken in our names. As long as I’m invoking old adages here, let me finish by pointing out that in a democracy, we tend to get the government we deserve. In this case, we’re being represented by arrogance, and ignorance, ever a dangerous combination. Read More 

This story in the New York Times about the first of the Guantanamo Bay detainees to be tried in civilian court caught my eye this morning. What jumps out is the presumption behind the key argument against trying suspected terrorists in civilian courts - and it should be a red flag for defenders of civil liberties.

The underlying political issue is what to do with the men still detained at Gitmo. They don't don't belong there. Guilty or innocent, the plots with which the government believes they are linked amount to criminal acts, not military. And they should be tried in civilian courts.

But the bothersome element of this story is the underlying presumption that the civilian court somehow failed because the jury convicted suspected terrorist Ahmed Ghailani of only one of some 280 counts against him. “This is a tragic wake-up call to the Obama Administration to immediately abandon its ill-advised plan to try Guantanamo terrorists” in federal civilian courts, the Times quotes U.S. Rep. Peter King, a New York Republican. “We must treat them as wartime enemies and try them in military commissions at Guantanamo.”

Why? Because Ghailani was only convicted of one charge? Does King presume a military tribunal would look at the evidence differently than civilians and would have convicted Ghailani on all the counts, guilt or innocence be damned?

These are the freedoms we hold dear, and for which our terroristic enemies supposedly hate us: that the accused are innocent until proven guilty, and that justice will be blind. Summary trials and pre-ordained verdicts are the stuff of totalitarian regimes, not democratic ones. It's possible the U.S. government couldn't make its case. It's been wrong before about the men the swept up, and deprived of freedom, in the name of anti-terrorism. The presumption that a military tribunal would have convicted him Ghailani regardless of the evidence suggests King thinks the military courts are hanging courts, and not concerned with such niceties as the rule of law and the rules of evidence. There, King seems to believe, suspected terrorists would get what's coming to them. Whether guilty or innocent.

We're a better nation that that. I hope. Read More 

For the past couple of days the story of Angelo Mozilo's rise and fall -- and the nation's economy along with it -- has been nagging at the back of my mind (Facebook friends already saw an earlier post about this). Thealign="left"> Sunday New York Times recapped the case against Mozilo, one of the founders and a propelling force in the now-defunct Countrywide Financial, which rode toxic mortgages to massive profits before it fell apart.

The story portrays a CEO who knew his company was pursuing policies that not only put the firm at risk, but also imperiled the financial well-being of the people to whom it was giving mortgages. In internal emails Mozilo expressed his fear about the practices to his top deputies.

Rather than halting the practices, Mozilo set up an auto-sell program for his personal shares of Countrywide, so while he was publicly pushing a rosy view of Countrywide's financial health and future, in private he was cashing in while there was still money to be had.

Where this moves from crass to appalling is the Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil charges against Mozilo accusing him, among other things, of pocketing $140 million in illicit gains from those insider deals. The settlement? He agreed to pay $67.5 million, of which Bank of America, which bought Countrywide as it collapsed, is paying $20 million (and covering Mozilo's legal bills). You'd think the BofA stockholders would be outraged. Even though  Read More 

Like countless others, I've been riveted by the live scenes from Chile as the trapped miners emerge, one by one, after an incomprehensibly long and close brush with death. It's a fascinating story of luck, perserverance, and survival by the miners, and dogged persistence by those above ground scrambling to rescue them.

align="left">But it was also an intriguing example of media, and image control. The usual throngs of reporters and cameras were kept at bay, and the Chilean government handled the video and audio feeds. From thousands of miles and several time zones away, we were able to sit in our living room and watch the rescue unfold, from the camera in the mine itself to the ground-level reunions with families and rescuers, to the wheeling away of the gurneys (and the omnipresent Chilean flag, like a company logo).

But you have to wonder what would have happened had the rescue failed (and I fully recognize it still might; miners continue to be pulled through that long drill hole as I write this)? Would the Chilean government have kept that feed live? Or would a disaster have led them to pull the plug? And this isn't ghoulish speculation: A free press is only as free as its access to news events. The rescuers were well-served keeping the media throng at a distance, but leaving the pool feed in the hands of the government involves too much opportunity for censorship. Better to have let the media set up their own pool feed, with no government overseer's hand on the plug. And one of the telling moments of the age: The miners apparently requested they receive media training before they face journalists.

One final thought: Again in a dramatic moment, we get lots of TV reporters tossing around the word "hero" like a pronoun for "trapped miner." Maybe I'm becoming too curmudgeonly, but surviving to me doesn't equal heroism. Same for the Americans who successfully drilled the rescue shaft (and plaudits for their decision to decamp for Santiago by the time the rescue began, leaving the limelight for the miners). The drillers did a tremendous job under trying circumstances, but does that earn the mantle of hero? The miners were brave, resilient and resourceful, especially as evidenced by their ability to self-organize for mutual benefit. As for the drillers, doing their jobs well should be an expectation, not an act of heroism.

So I'm wondering, what should be the hurdle for declaring heroism? If it's simply surviving under difficult, life-threatening circumstances, I know a lot of everyday people who would qualify. Same for those who do their jobs well in a difficult environment, and under extreme pressure. So it has me thinking about that old Joe Jackson song, "Real Men," but with a different lyric: What's a hero now? What's a hero mean?  Read More