Scott Martelle

The other day a neighborhood realtor walked our street planting little plastic American flags in the lawns, something she does every year in advance of the Fourth of July. And the other day I pulled out the one she left at our house, as I do every year. There's just something off-putting about such a blatant merger of PR and patriotism, And as my son Michael joked at the time, nothing says "Independence Day" like a forced display of patriotism.

I'm deep into the writing of The Fear Within, which regular readers of this blog know is my narrative retelling of the 1949 trial of the leaders of the American Communist Party, a trial that helped usher in the McCarthy Era. So I've been thinking a lot lately about the promise of America, and the reality of America. And no, this is not some anti-patriotic rant. This is a great country, but that greatness does not mean it can't -- and shouldn't -- be improved. But to do so, we need to step beyond our societal predisposition to embrace myth and engage honestly with our history.

The Los Angeles Times has an interesting, albeit short, op-ed piece today by Peter de Bolla, author of The Fourth of July and the Founding of America, which delves into the popular and cultural misperceptions surrounding the Declaration of Independence, including how July 4 came to be the celebrated day.

Of course, our little "experiment in democracy" is built on the U.S. Constitution, which didn't come into being until more than a decade after the Declaration, and five years after the Treaty of Paris that ceded the colonies to the colonists (we'll leave the whole Native American issue for another time). Within that arc, the Declaration was the act of treason (from the British perspective) that cemented the rebellion. It established nothing -- other than a spirit and a sense of promise, and a defining sense of national identity. It can still stir, centuries later:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Powerful stuff, that.

Countless others have pointed out that the Constitution didn't quite deliver on the ambitions of the Declaration, Most notably, women and blacks were not included in the "men created equal" concept. Those have since been redressed, legally if not culturally, but other civil rights remain bound up. Gay marriage, for instance. In the 1967 Loving case striking down anti-miscegenation laws, marriage was held to be "one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival."

"To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State."

Yet here we are, infringing away (on the basis of gender rather than race), state after state.

And we still, in times of stress, tend to flout the basic civil rights that lie at the heart of the nation's founding. The post 9/11 USA Patriot Act, which gives the government indefensible access to our homes and personal records, is only the most recent, and joins a long line of repressive governmental acts, from the Palmer Raids and the first Red Scare to the Japanese-American internments to the second Red Scare to the FBI and local police infiltrations of various civil rights, peace and anti-nuclear organizations.

So I guess today is a good time to sit back and think about what we are as a nation, how we can become better as a society, and what we can do here in our national adulthood to fulfill a little more of that promise from our youth.

Happy birthday, everyone.

 Read More 

As we head into the three-day orgy of grilled meat, light explosives and, at least here in Southern California, beautiful summer sunshine, there's a nice little bit in Wired on the steps that have been taken to preserve the parchment on which the Declaration of Independence was written.

Argon, apparently, is the solution to aging. Read More 

I love these little slices of history when they crop up -- in this case in the form of an obituary from the Toronto Star (thanks to Mark Sarvas' The Elegant Variation for the initial link). It seems Lloyd Lockhart, a Canadian reporter with the claim of being the last to interview Ernest Hemingway, has died.

It wasn't much of an interview -- more like tea and chat. And that only after Hemingway spotted Lockhart's wife waiting behind him at the door before he kicked the reporter off his property. This was near Havana during the last days of the Fulgencio Batista regime (Fidel Castro was still leading his band of rebels in the hills).

Hemingway worked for the Toronto Star in the 1920s, and Lockhart, then a Star reporter, had thought that might give him an in with the reclusive Nobel Prize-winning writer. It didn't -- Hemingway had a rather low opinion of his former bosses.

"He complained that the paper blew hot and cold on its newsroom people, that you were a king one day and a dog the next. He told me he had made friends there, had some interesting times but it still rankled him how the Star ebbed and flowed around (long-time editor) Harry Hindmarsh Sr."

Sounds like every newsroom I ever worked in... Read More 

A Facebook friend posted this U2 video embedded below, built around the start of their world tour earlier this week in Barcelona. It's an interesting ten minutes, watching the gig come together and getting a sense of the sheer size of the Nou Camp arena, where FC Barcelona plays soccer. The stadium holds 98,000 people, which makes it a little smaller than the football stadium at the University of Michigan, where I used to do occasional stories on the UM-MSU and UM-Notre Dame rivalries. But it's still pretty damn big. For the concert, some 90,000 seats were available. And it took less than an hour to sell out.

What strikes me about this video, though, is the shrewd way U2 uses it for marketing. The video generates some excitement, gives fans a taste of the stage design, offers some close-up, high-resolution video -- but only snippets of songs, presumably to thwart piracy.

So far, only 7,000 views on YouTube, but expect that to grow quickly.

 Read More 

A little later this morning folks will gather at the Ludlow Massacre site in Southern Colorado for a program marking its addition to the roster of National Historic Landmarks. For obvious reasons, I wish I was there, but events conspired against it. I am, though, there in spirit.

As most of you know, the massacre and the surrounding 1913-14 coal field war were the subject of my first book, Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West, so on a personal level I'm glad to see the site get formal recognition. More than 75 people died during that strike, which was effectively a guerrilla war between the coal mine operators and their striking workers. It took the intervention of the U.S. Army to end the fighting after the union side had seized control of some 275 miles of the Front Range. The biggest convulsion of violence came as the strikers routed the Colorado National Guard after the April 20, 1914, Ludlow Massacre in which 11 children and two mothers suffocated as National Guard-spread fire whipped through their tent colony.

It's long been a source of frustration to me that this kind of violence could erupt on American soil and not be entered into the public history. In school we get taught about the Shays Rebellion and other flare ups, such as the anti-slavery activities of John Brown. But we don't teach about this brutal struggle between labor and management, in which the Colorado events were part of a long and vicious arc.

Interestingly, when the Ludlow Massacre does get mentioned, often the details are wrong, reflecting the success the union side enjoyed at the time in using the deaths of the women and children to draw attention to their struggle. Tellingly, the Ludlow Massacre is what we focus on, not the broader guerrilla war in which they died. And the massacre technically wasn't one, since there's no indication from the historic record that the women and children were intentionally killed.

That does not exonerate the National Guard of brutal acts, but it's important to put such events in as accurate a context as possible. The accepted history is that the abusive companies brutalized their workers, forced them to work in appalling conditions, and then killed their families when the workers stood up for themselves.

The reality is much more nuanced. The owners were brutal and the conditions appalling (mules were valued more than miners because a mule had to be bought, and a miner's time was rented). In my book I argue that the coal miners were in effect freedom fighters rebelling against a corrupt local political and economic system. They were hardly passive victims. Of the dead, most were National Guardsmen (under the control of the coal operators), scabs and mine guards. The strikers won this war, even if they lost the strike. All in all, it reminds of this key passage from the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

To my mind, the strikers -- most of them immigrants -- were acting in the grand American tradition of throwing off the bonds of tyranny, even if it was of the local and corporate variety. We do a disservice to our understanding of what we are as a country by ignoring this part of our history.  Read More 

A couple of weeks ago the nation's TV stations went completely digital, dropping the longtime analog system for a digital system that ostensibly frees up airwaves for public safety uses. In general, a good plan. In execution not so much.

I do most of the cooking in our house (when I'm not on the road), and have a small TV on which I watch sports, the news, and the occasional Sunday morning talking-heads show while I work. The TV is older, I think, than our sons, one of those clunky, remote-less 13-inch models that takes up way more space than it needs to.

But it's worked perfectly fine, except for some snow on Channel 2 and a few of the UHF stations, which is understandable -- we live 45 or 50 miles from where most of the Los Angeles TV stations have their antennas.

So now we've been forced into digital land -- and can't get diddly on the set, even with a new antenna and the federally subsidized converter box. I've moved the antenna, re-scanned, moved it again, re-scanned again, but still get hardly any of the major stations, and even those are so weak we get that impromptu stop-action as the screen pixilates and freezes for a few seconds.

There are other sets in the house hooked up to cable so we're not cut off from the world but it has me wondering -- how has this affected low-income, cable-less families in sprawling metro areas like this, or in rural areas?

I have to think this has been a boon for the cable and satellite providers -- I'm contemplating adding a line to the kitchen -- and the phone companies (from whom the government chose not to take bandwidth). But I also have to think a few more ounces of flesh have been taken from the poor. Read More 

By now you all know Michael Jackson died yesterday, seemingly of a heart attack. There's a ton of coverage out there, some very solid (check out my friend Ann Powers' lovely tribute at the LA Times) and some pretty bizarre, such as the fan who told KABC-7 here in Los Angeles that the death was "life-changing." Well, yeah, in a binary, lights on/lights off kind of way.

A few things jump out at me. Jackson was a powerfully talented singer, songwriter and entertainer, with a shrewd sense of media manipulation and an admirable ability to break down barriers. He was also a tragic figure with a suspicious devotion to children that eventually overwhelmed his standing as a pop music icon (to most of the public, at least).

But I quibble with the hyperbole about his influence on pop music. Pop culture, definitely. Pop music, not as much. Most of Jackson's influence was in a specific cul de sac in pop music, the hit-hunting R&B neighborhood. He built on the creativity of predecessors like James Brown and wisely put himself in Quincy Jones' hands, but while he was toe-dancing and twirling and bringing old R&B showmanship on tour and to MTV, punk visionaries and the hip-hop generation emerged and radically transformed popular music. Against that backdrop, Jackson was less revolutionary than evolutionary.

Part of any major breaking news story is the media covering the media, including this bit from Robert Niles at the Online Journalism Review. Okay, so here goes an assessment of the assessment. Niles points out that people who use Twitter were tweeting away about the death long before it had been confirmed anywhere outside TMZ, which apparently got the scoop (and a hearty congrats to them). Ignoring the point that the tweets were, in effect, lightning-fast gossip, Niles argues media outlets should drop their use of email alerts about major news events because they make the outlets seem "clueless and slow."

Maybe, but only to the folks who rely on tweets for their news. And this strikes at one of the flawed undercurrents of a lot of media analysis right now -- it focuses on the technology more than the message. Twitter is still a new and growing social network with some intriguing potential for use (and abuse). But it is hardly pervasive. I have an account but don't receive tweets because I don't use text-messaging. The vast majority of people in this country don't use Twitter. In this eternal rush to the new we tend to forget about the established. Even with the startling decline of newspapers, outlets like my former employer, the LA Times, still sell hundreds of thousands of printed copies a day.

We can't forsake the old just because there's new. What's emerging aren't full replacements for newspapers but added avenues of information distribution (with some serious economic consequences, to be sure). Radio didn't kill newspapers, TV didn't kill radio and the Internet and Twitter aren't going to be murderous entities either. Like Jackson, they're more evolutionary than revolutionary. With all due respect to Marshall McLuhan, the message is the message. Read More 

With the confession from South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford that well, no, he wasn't really hiking the Appalachian Trail, you have to wonder who's left on the Republican presidential bench.

Nevada Sen. John Ensign?

Alaksa Gov. and former veep candidate Sarah Palin?

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal? Read More 

A blogger at Virginia Quarterly Review (one of the best periodicals out there) dug into Chris Anderson, of Wired fame, and his book Free: The Future of a Radical Idea, and found Anderson had lifted portions of it from Wikipedia. (Ironically, I lifted this book jacket from Anderson's blog page).

Anderson copped to the problems in an email with VQR (the magazine was preparing a review of the book), blaming it on a last-minute decision to not use footnotes. Beyond the fact that nonfiction books without footnotes always make me suspicious, for the life of me I can't figure out why deciding late in the process to drop the footnotes makes a difference. Lifting passages verbatim and then footnoting is just as lazy -- and dishonest -- as cribbing them in the first place, as Ed Champion also notes on his blog.

But Wikipedia? I mean, if you're going to steal ...
 Read More 

Since I have some, ahem, time on my hands, and with the school year over, we decided to paint the master bedroom. This kind of project always seems like a good idea when you're standing before racks of paint strips and picking out colors, ignoring that nagging memory in the back of the brain.

Then comes the prep work. Moving everything out of the room. Scrubbing things down. Repairing holes from where pictures once hung. And you begin to remember why you don't like to paint.

Then comes the not-fully-imagined challenge of painting a ceiling covered with that godawful popcorn texturing -- the thick layer of what must have been sprayed on compound that gives the ceiling a shaggy look, like it's molting.

In truth, this stuff is a sponge. One gallon of paint should have covered a room this size. It will likely take four gallons. And as you work with the roller overhead bits of the texturing break loose, raining little sticky cheese curds down on you. They coat your glasses, stick to hair, skin and clothes, and strike the plastic drop cloth with little click/pop sounds, like indoor rain. Which you then step on.

And then you remember why you swore off this kind of project ever again, that you'd hire someone next time. But then, well, you wind up with some time on your hands and figure why not, how hard can it be ....

Back at it later this morning, day two of my own personal paint-flecked hell.  Read More