Bookends

The flag out in front of the station is at half-staff, in memory of President Gerald Ford, who died this week at the age of 93. But it could be lowered as well to commemorate the passing of a very different cultural icon, James Brown, who ascended to a higher stage this week at the age of 73 (or 146 in normal-tempo years). The two men--as wildly different as two can be--could be bookends for that peculiar blip in the American arc, the 1970s.

Ford is best remembered for his calm, stolid and avuncular style at a time when the country, on the one hand, was coping with the disastrous denouement of the Vietnam War, and on the other, with the executive overreaching that brought down the Nixon administration. Ford’s time in office also marked the end of the era when cultural and political moderates dominated the GOP. Republican leaders for the next thirty years would be conservatives empowered by the Reagan “Revolution.”

James Brown embodied everything that the cultural warriors who came after Ford decried. He gloried in the outrageous--celebrating sexuality and appetite. His freaky-deaky costume and makeup, the in-your-face steaminess of his performances, his celebration of racial identity, his chaotic personal and public life—all make him a poster-child for the exuberant iconoclasm that also marked the time.

Two Americans, two Americas—and so it remains.

Makeover

It’s the hinge of the year, when the old passes away to make room for the new. The day has shrunk as far as it will go, and has started to expand toward summer again—no matter what your bones tell you come January. New toys, new clothes and gizmos, books and baubles—they’re just waiting to be unwrapped. Food and festival, company and cacophony, we all cut loose a little before the long wintering-in.

In the spirit of the season, NCPR has renewed the look and content of all our email publications. The shiny new makeover of our daily headlines email began on Monday, including more information on each news story, and adding in all the day’s events from the Community Calendar. There's a new (and improved, I hope) Listening Post. Tomorrow, the new design of our weekly topical news briefs will debut, and come the new year, we will begin a new work in our Books by Email serial. Please drop me a line at dale@ncpr.org with your reaction on unwrapping the new goodies, and any suggestions for improvement. All my best for the season, and for the new and improved year ahead.

Loss of tone

It is common custom in the North Country, when meeting folks from other northern climes, to have a--shall we say--writing-your-name-in-the-snow contest about who has it the worst. But this run of warm Decembers is eroding our credibility. What happened to those regular autumn blizzards that contributed so much to our imagined moral fiber? Why are the geese still hanging around? Winter is supposed to be endless and unendurable, brutal to the point of weeping. That's why we feel so deserving of our practice sessions in heaven, packing up head colds and rheumatism to flaunt cadaverous winter paunches on the beaches of the southlands. If winter is merely miserable, then this snowbirding is merely self-indulgent. If we could just have a few weeks where the temperature never rises above zero, and you need a purple tennis ball on the aerial to find your car, that would be all it would take to get us back into smug shape. "Ha--you call that winter? Let me tell you about winter..."

You can look it up

Everybody is talking about the Hamilton-Baker Commission's Iraq Study Group Report—what it means and doesn't mean, who is for it and against it, whether each of its recommendations will work or not work, and on and on. One of the truly useful things to come with the internet age is the instant availability of documents that just ten or so years ago would have meant a month's wait and a visit to a major reference library. President Bush received his copy yesterday at 11 am, and by 11:02 am NCPR had a link to the complete text on its home page, and by 11:15 am I had my own copy downloaded to my desktop. I may read all of it, or part of it, but now I no longer have to rely on someone else's interpretation of what it says. This may seem like a small matter, but in the long run, I think it could be analogous to the publication of inexpensive vernacular editions of the Bible. The church was never the same afterward. Not this one report per se--but the breaking of the monopoly hold that the modern priesthood of politicians, pundits and experts of all stripes has on the basic source material of the public conversation.

The NCPR news crew has been diligent about linking to original source material related to their individual stories, but there has never been one location where someone could go to find the public records, the original plans and studies, the text of legislation and agreements and proposals that drive public policy in the region. NCPR Online is now in the process of building a Public Records section to collect primary source documents that relate to all aspects of life in the region. This is a job that everyone can get in on—please. Recommend an archive site, a single document, historical materials, search tools, whatever you have run across that helps you get to the root of public matters in the North Country. Email radio@ncpr.org.