Periscope: Notes from a submarine

I have a confession to make. I am a blog junkie.

For a news junkie, it was an obvious next step, because with blogs we can go beyond just reading the news. We can join the discussion that decides what the news means.

And where a newspaper is constrained by journalistic objectivity, a blog can be the authentic, warts-and-all voice of a real person.

I don’t mean to denigrate newspapers. Without journalists doing the hard job of reporting, we’d have nothing to blog about. And if more people knew how much work the dedicated reporters and editors put into every issue of the Daily, they would not be so quick to criticize.

But in a blog we are not tied to whatever the one source that returned our calls may have said that afternoon. Our only limitations are the imagination and logic that we can marshal to our cause.

In that spirit, I am excited to be joining Tres, Tiara, Meredith, and Dane as the first bloggers of the Hub. I hope to be part of a lively conversation with the OU community. I want to hear what you think, even if it is that I am wrong about everything. I will do my best to publicly respond to your comments on the blog, in the message boards, and at periscopeblog@gmail.com.

A little about me: I’m a journalism grad student in my last semester (knock on wood) at OU. I got my undergraduate degree here in history, and I’ve lived in Norman since 2001. For the last few months, I’ve been blogging at my own site, http://genelewis.wordpress.com/. At the wordpress blog I have followed the Cherokee Freedmen, national politics, nerd-tastic spelling bee champion Evan O’Dorney, and whatever else catches my interest. I plan to do the same here.

My master’s thesis is on religion journalism, and I am interested in how both religion and science shape our world. I am Jewish, but I admire the vibrancy of the Christian community at OU. When it comes to religion and nonbelief, I think we waste too much breath talking past each other. There is a lot of bluster and not enough understanding on all sides. I hope this blog will play a small part in reducing those misconceptions.

I am active in local environmental groups, and I believe that global warming will be the defining crisis of this generation. Momentum is on the side of change, but we have a long way to go. The Periscope will try to examine the state of our planet and what we can do to save it.

Oh, that name? Well, it sort of resembles my own, and it implies looking at things from around a corner or a different perspective. That is another goal of this blog, to find some of the idiosyncratic, but nonetheless important, stories and angles hidden in the wilds of the Interweb.

That is an ambitious plan, no? Yes. Luckily I have you all to tell me when I am full of it.

moving day

For the rest of the year I will be blogging at The Periscope, my new home on the University of Oklahoma student Hub. I hope all of you who have enjoyed my posts here will follow me to the new site. I’ll return to this blog in 2008.

Vick and veal

This post by Megan McArdle makes a connection that very much deserves exploring. Michael Vick’s conviction of running a dog-fighting ring has inspired a remarkable amount of popular outrage, much of it deserved. But the outcry against dog-fighting exists alongside our unspoken acceptance of an industrial farming system that is, by the sheer number of animals affected, much worse. Megan uses the example of veal, which is just an extreme case of the systemic cruelty done to most of the animals that we eat. Yet animal-rights activists are routinely derided with as much passion as Vick has been, especially when they get in the way of a good hamburger.

I’m not a vegetarian, and I certainly don’t believe that eating animals is inherently wrong. I usually try to only eat animals that I know were treated humanely during their lives, though I admit I could do much better. But those who defend meat-eating on the basis that humans are naturally omnivores rarely take into account the quite unnatural industry that is supplying our meat. Are we only capable of mustering outrage for animals we keep as pets?

Megan is looking for a rational moral principle on which to base our attitudes towards animals, but I think that is only half the story. We don’t give better protection to cattle because we haven’t included them in our empathetic world; whatever reason might say, it takes an emotional response to change the status quo. No matter how “good” we are as people, we will always be people of our time; for example, the otherwise brilliant and forward-looking men who founded the United States, yet could not envision equality for women and people of other races.

It’s a good bet that at least some of today’s common sense beliefs will be deemed by our descendants as monstrous. If society evolves in a way that expands our empathy rather than restricts it (which is by no means certain), then I suspect factory farming will be judged as one of the first sins of our time.

I’m not saying that many hardcore animal rights activists aren’t obnoxious. They are. They judge us by a different standard than we like to judge ourselves, which is irritating and uncomfortable. But that doesn’t mean they won’t be vindicated by history.

Photo by Flickr user Charles Haynes used under a Creative Commons license.

hello neglected blog

Joan Walsh has an excellent review in Salon of a new Matt Bai book about the Democratic Party. It’s worth reading whether or not you’re interested in the book. Walsh’s analysis of recent political history is spot on. Especially welcome is her refutation of the old “Democrats lose because they lack ideas” canard. Leaving aside that progressives have plenty of ideas, Walsh also nails the corollary, that Republicans succeeded merely on the strength of their own positive programs:

But for all its love of big bold ideas, “The Argument” is premised on a big, bold idea that’s simply wrong: that Republicans seized and held power in the Nixon-Reagan-Bush I generation by selling Americans on a positive platform of new programs for national renewal, while Democrats, by contrast, are now winning merely by not losing, bashing Bush for wrecking the country while never explaining to voters what they’d do instead.

I wanted to agree with Bai, at times — I love big, bold ideas, really I do. But I think the role of big, new ideas in political realignments is overrated. Bai’s book is flawed by his failure to grapple with the negativity, lo, the hatred behind the Republican revolution of the ’70s and ’80s, some of which is still politically operative today. Does he really think Reagan rode to power on the Laffer curve, not by bashing Cadillac-driving welfare queens, scruffy war protesters and big bad government? Both Nixon and Reagan (George Bush I was merely Reagan’s long tail) were the political beneficiaries of a resentful, sometimes racist reaction to the perceived excesses of the 1960s and ’70s, associated with the Democrats, far more than they were the avatars of a wildly popular new way of running the country.

That’s just one nugget in a story that is full of them. Read the whole thing.

this day in history

Dick Cheney on why America shouldn’t invade Iraq