Last summer, I found myself dancing as an unpaid extra in a reality show. I’d been a dancing extra in a TV movie, and at least got minimum wage. This time I not only did it for free, but I had to sign a non-disclosure document. This show will have a wider audience than the (bad) movie that I was in before.

Why, you may well ask, do I mention it now? Well, that very show is finally being broadcast. The bit in which St. Louis Contradancers like myself will appear is just a couple of episodes away. It’s the CW’s iteration of “Farmer Wants a Wife” filmed just barely in the next county, near where the Missouri river joins the Mississippi. I say iteration because the show had already been a local reality show hit in 11 other countries before a U.S. company picked it up.

Now, I can’t say who was still standing in our episode. I don’t even remember. I don’t really care.

I am amused by the middle-of-nowhere pretension. Sure, it is in the flood plain, and out of sight of any big city. But it is also less than a half hour drive from major population and commercial support. The St. Charles airport that they flew into is about 15 minutes closer to the farm by bus than is Lambert International Airport. Lambert was the primary hub for TWA, before the industry crashed in 2001.

We were just there for a barn dance. It was fun. Cameras were everywhere, all the primaries wore wireless mikes, and camouflaged lighting kept things warm up in that depression era barn loft. Backstage has always had more appeal to me than the audience point of view.

But now I’m watching my first reality show. Sure, we record it and watch it when convenient. It is fun to see people on TV that we’ve met, in places where we’ve been. But now I have even more awareness of all the setup, production, and post production that goes in to making these 40 minute episodes.

Have you seen Jon Stewart’s interview of Doug Feith?

It is obvious that Feith appeared on the The Daily Show in an attempt to try to:

A) salvage his own sordid reputation, and
B) convince the audience that the Bush Administration didn’t lead the charge to invade Iraq, drumming up false intelligence in the process.

Feith failed miserably on both accounts because Stewart refused to play the role of a nodding bobblehead. In fact, Stewart showed himself to be a better interviewer than most members of the mainstream news media. It was refreshing to see Stewart challenging Feith at every turn.

For an evidence-based version of how this country came to occupy Iraq, watch “Buying the War,” a Bill Moyers video, showing that the Bush Administration consciously and intentionally pulled all the necessary strings and the mainstream media marched in lockstep.

The United States didn’t end up in Iraq because of a series of accidents and mistakes, as Feith tries to argue. The Downing Street memo and Richard Clarke’s accounts, among much other evidence, shows that the Bush Administration planned to march into Baghdad regardless of the evidence. They got their way, and now they, including Feith, are acting like it’s not their fault. Now we’re seeing an extended media campaign of shameless revisionism.

Our President just can’t stop himself. Here are two of his recent bald-faced lies:

1) He can’t use email while he’s President “for security reasons.”

2) He gave up golf after UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello was killed in Iraq.

I know that no one cares anymore. It wouldn’t do any good to impeach him because an equally prolific liar, Dick Cheney, would then officially take over. How many more days until the next President is sworn in?

Back in February, I posted a quote from The Gods Must Be Crazy about the needless complexity of modern life. The quote has made me stew on the topic ever since. We live in a world awash in technologies designed to make life easier, but that often only bog us down. An air conditioning unit may cool your brow and make you happier and more productive in the summer months, but only if you don’t spend seven months attempting to get your evasive landlord to either have the cursed, broken thing fixed or replaced entirely. Not that I would know. A computer makes it easier to write and send documents- unless it freezes, or the printer jams, or the email server has gone down, or you can’t get a decent wireless connection, or the power goes out. I hear, at least, that can prove extremely frustrating.

More technology spells more helplessness when that technology fails. If only I had just suffered through the heat, and adjusted to it; if only I had elected to write a letter by candle light! Instead, I became attached to the convenience of modern goodies. But technology is not the first or only huge complicator in our lives. No, today I’d like to focus on stuff. Things, junk.

We all have too many pieces of stuff lying around our homes, all designed to make life easier. I often suspect these handy doohickeys waste more space and money than their limited “uses” justify. I’ll take some examples from my own apartment:

The banana hook, a simple fruit-bearing tool. Few kitchen objects have such absurd specialization as this, barring the grapefruit spoon. Not even a devout fruitarian could really rationalize the space devoted to dangling a single, specific food product. Imagine if we required a special hook for every kind of produce in the house- my small kitchen couldn’t bear it, and I wager few could. Fortunately, we don’t need hooks for all our fruits. We don’t even need them for bananas. Don’t believe the shrewd marketing- a humble bowl will do. But at least I didn’t invest in the even more absurd banana hammock, right?
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The difference is that Bill O’Reilly really did explode on the set. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

In my most recent post on Dangerous Intersection, as well as others previously, I’ve written about the many ways in which the traditional media has willfully discarded its obligation to inform the public. And so far, as the 2008 presidential election gets into full swing, there are no signs of improvement. If anything, the traditional media has sunk lower than ever before, thrusting legitimate stories aside to pursue trivial distractions and shallow and meaningless issues of “character”.

So, are we as a nation doomed to become more and more ill-informed? Is our standing in the world only going to get worse while the populace is lulled into distraction by the TV screen? Is there no reason for hope?

Well, actually, there is. But it’s not the media is improving. Rather, it’s that Americans are increasingly recognizing its failings and abandoning it in huge numbers (HT, as always, to Glenn Greenwald).

Those trend lines tell an alarming story. The combined average audience for the big-three evening newscasts in 1980 was about 53 million viewers. By the fall of 2006, when Couric was getting ready to make the jump from NBC’s “Today” show, the three national evening newscasts had a combined audience of about 27 million viewers.

How’s that for a trend line? The evening newscasts lost about half of their audience over 26 years. They lost viewers at a rate of 1 million a year, and they’re still losing them. Last week, according to numbers Nielsen released Tuesday, the combined audience was 21.5 million.

The rise of blogs and the Internet has undoubtedly accelerated the decline, but it is not the sole cause. As the article says, this downturn began as long ago as the 1980s. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, people’s declining opinions of the news industry are partly the cause:

As we have noted in other reports,since the early 1980s, the public has come to view the news media as less professional, less accurate, less caring, less moral and more inclined to cover up rather than correct mistakes.

…The number of Americans with a favorable view of the press, for instance, dropped markedly in 2006, from 59% in February, to 48% in July. The metric can be volatile, but that was still one of the lower marks over the course of a decade.

And in one of the most basic yardsticks of public attitudes, the number of Americans who believe most or all of what news organizations tell them, there were continued declines. Virtually every news outlet saw its number fall in 2006.

With continuing stories like the revelation that the news channels hired bought-and-paid for Pentagon agents to spread favorable propaganda about the Iraq war in the guise of an “independent voice” - and those same channels’ ongoing and shocking blackout of this story - it’s not hard to understand why the American public is increasingly abandoning them and turning to other sources, such as the Internet, for news. And the sooner the better, I say.

Granted, on the Internet, it’s easy to find sources of information that are more fiercely partisan and agenda-driven than even Fox News, and whose disinterest in the facts is even worse than the traditional media’s. But the great virtue of the Internet, as former Vice President Al Gore said in The Assault on Reason, is that it’s a medium where the barriers to entry are low. Anyone can participate, and this makes it very easy to find a broad spectrum of differing views. Thus, in a key sense, the news from the Internet is balanced in a way that news from traditional sources can never be. (Of course, I’m preaching to the choir here, aren’t I?)

This productive cacophony of views is a far better analogue to the marketplace of ideas than the traditional media, where a few unaccountable individuals have enormous power to shape the focus, tone and direction of coverage that informs (or fails to inform) millions of people. In the increasingly diverse media landscape of the future, it will be far more difficult for meddling politicians and wealthy corporations to manipulate public opinion to their advantage.

The results are out at Science Debate 2008:

A new poll (charts, pdf, 3.1mb) shows that 85% of U.S. adults agree that the presidential candidates should participate in a debate on how science can be used to tackle America’s major challenges. The poll found no difference between Democrats and Republicans on this question. A majority (84%) also agree that scientific innovations are improving our standard of living.

The poll, commissioned by Research!America and ScienceDebate2008.com and conducted by Harris Interactive®, shows that 56% strongly agree and 29% somewhat agree that the presidential candidates should participate in a debate to discuss key problems facing the United States, such as health care, climate change and energy, and how science can help tackle them.

So here’s my initial thought: How can 15% of Americans oppose any debate by the presidential candidates on the relevance of science to solving key issues such as health care, climate change and energy? Who are these incredibly ignorant people? Americans have been shown to be incredibly ignorant. Maybe the 15% don’t know enough to know that they are ignorant? Don’t they realize that science has much to offer to analyzing these issues and potentially solving some of these problems? How can anyone be against having an open discussion on these issues?

I must admit, however, that in light of the bizarre questions forced on candidates during many previous “debates,” I am reluctant to watch any further “debates” on any topic. I wonder, then, whether the 15% are mainly anti-science or whether they are anti-debate . . .

I was meandering in cyberspace, and stumbled onto this column by Australian Michael Ruse: The struggle between evolution and creation: an American problem. This appeals to me after all the news about Australian Ken Ham and his Creation Museum here in the U.S. The muse of Mr. Ruse is that the U.S. is vocally and publicly debating the science of evolution versus competing Biblical philosophies, and their roles in education and culture

But his main point is that this is just a symptom. Ever since the Scopes trial, the vocal Biblical Literalism Fundamentalist minority has been fighting for its life. Part of their claim is that evolution is not as values-neutral as proponents like to claim. Ruse agrees. Evolution theory was bolstered by Darwin’s books with his additions to the theory. But it might have stayed a quiet and intellectual revelation, had it not been for Darwin’s contemporary, scientific and social activist Thomas Huxley.

Huxley, who was known in the popular press as “Pope” Huxley, preached evolution-as- Christianity-alternative non-stop at working men’s clubs, from the podia in presidential addresses, and in debates with clerics, notably Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford. Huxley, who invented for himself the religious label of “agnostic”, even aided the founding of the new cathedrals of evolution, stuffed as they were with displays of dinosaurs newly discovered in the American west. Except that these halls of worship were better known as museums of natural history.

Ruse follows the history forward to show why he considers this to be An American Problem. The rest of the world’s Christians are content to accept science for what it can provide, and leave to the Bible issues outside of what can be examined. But America was settled in part by religious extremists, exiled from England and other countries for their radical beliefs. This culture is diluted, but still present and very vocal. The founding fathers were well aware of this element, and set the nation up to minimize the damage that they can cause, while allowing them to be themselves.

As the orders of magnitude of scientific understanding kept expanding beyond the narrow scale of the Biblical universe, the Biblical Literalists had to draw a line. It was too late to hold at a geocentric universe, and much too late for a flat Earth. Sin and demonic possession as the causes of disease also gave way to germ theory without much of a fight. But spontaneous divine creation of man is now the sticking point. Any evidence or theory that contradicts direct and intentional divine creation is labeled unholy.

In America the battle between secular government and a theocracy is being fought in the guise of Evolution versus Intelligent Design (or whatever name Scientific Creationism is using). From the vantage of Australia, it is an interesting skirmish. Here in the Bible Belt, it scares me.

Hilary Hahn is a brilliant young violinist. She is incredibly musical (not all musicians are musical), and I return to her music on a regular basis for inspiration and energy. Here is a link to her bio on her website.

I recently found a few YouTube videos of Hilary Hahn performances. Until this point, I had heard her music, though I hadn’t seen her perform. Enjoy!:

And here is a bit of a documentary, including Hilary talking about her music:

Reminder for anyone interested: The National Conference for Media Reform - Minneapolis — will occur June 6 - 8, 2008.  Here’s a short video created by the conference organizers.

Here’s an audio clip promoting the NCMR - 2008: ncmr-2008_30sec

If you’d like to know more about the conference sessions or if you’d like to register, click the icon below: