One of the then-surprising findings from the bloom of empirical communications research (much done at the U of I) in the 1950s was that most people who read newspapers didn’t really read them. They used them more to scan the world (as presented in the press) to make sure there was nothing particularly important occurring that they had to attend to. I suppose that effect is still more or less true, although anyone who believes a newspaper, particularly an American newspaper, and most particularly our local rag, presents anything approaching an accurate representation of the world is a sucker ripe for the plucking.
Even so, your modern common man or woman, lacking time, is rarely able to even scan the newspaper, and may experience a vague gnawing feeling of just not knowing what’s going on of importance; being out of the loop as it were.
If this is you, let me put your mind at ease. There is almost never anything you need to read in the local newspaper. It will not help you make a more informed decision in case you are amongst the minority who votes. It is not a vigorous debate, or a marketplace of ideas. Nor is it much of a watchdog despite its pretensions to present itself as one; more often it appears as a lapdog petted by the rich and powerful in these climes.
All of which is to say I’m a little sick of reading the Gazette, let alone trying to convey its idiocy (and idiocy is the exact meaning of the bubble its owners and executors live in), so this is the last go around of this project for at least a little while. I need a little idiocy of rural life of my own.
You may have noticed a little to-do in The SPlog about an article on some condos for sale that read like an advertisement. Well, that happens. This sort of stuff is almost all partially advertising anyway, but this piece was a little careless. My guess is that the reporter’s brain was fried from trying to untangle the tangled web of deception surrounding the UI research park (the editors get no such dispensation).
It seems that a bunch of presumptuous pinheads, i.e. the faculty, want an audit of the research park before the big U invests in Phase 2. How dare they question the harnessing of the university to the business model? The U of I is a going concern. It has a venture capital fund, it’s a real estate developer, it markets itself as an economic development engine and jobs jobs jobs! The article’s conclusion seems to be that no one really knows what the gains and losses are, who’s getting the sugar, who’s getting fleeced, or even how the whole thing got set up — old timers might remember the Chancellor’s shredder. It will be interesting to see how the big players game this, although I expect little of substance, probably a prolonged Chief-type defense. Thirty years from now we might get the old passive-voice “mistakes were made,” but the perps will be expiring in their luxurious digs in Florida.
A typical bleeding-heart sob story on the front page starts with some local middle class woman whose entire income is about to be wiped out by health insurance premiums. Well she should of thought of that earlier and invested properly. Does she think the rest of us owe her a living? Does she want to put our free market health insurance companies out of business? Are there no prisons? No poorhouses? Yes you’ve read this all before. Move along, there’s nothing to see here, unless you like looking at train wrecks.
Rob Kanter has an article on a net zero energy house built in Urbana. (You can read about it here).
It’s cutting edge. Except that it appears that most of the technology and know-how has been available since the 1980s. No cost data is provided, unfortunately, but my guess is energy savings over initial costs is a big net gain in money terms alone, but maybe not in the short term, individually advantageous but socially damaging terms of The Market (blessed be its name). A couple years ago I lived across Philo road from one of the new Build Urbana subdivisions getting thrown up. I had a heating contractor out to do some work. We got to talking about energy efficiency, and he said you would not believe the low-end inefficient crap that was going into those houses. Of course that shaves several thousand dollars off the cost, maybe even tens of dollars in monthly payments, so The Market (blessed be its name) says: buy cheap, use more gas, drill baby drill, invade the middle east. So I don’t know what these guys building zero energy houses are trying to prove. It’s probably a socialist plot. The next thing you know your freedom will be taken away by “the nanny state” and their energy efficient building codes.
A feature on our man Hogan, the perhaps unsound new UI President, focuses on his continuing work as a scholar of the cold war. He has a couple intriguing observations about the period, such as that the Soviet Union destroyed its economy by excessive military spending. That’s interesting given last week’s column by neocon militarist Max Boot on the American military empire, Tom Englehardt’s recent column “Call the Politburo, We’re in Trouble,” and the quickly heating debate about the Afghanistan debacle.
That segues into this week’s George Will column. As I noted last week, Will is often a good barometer of what the not-totally-crazy right is thinking and pushing. He details a couple of war front incidents, and appears to be heading toward saying our boys are hamstrung by those bleeding heart liberals back in Washington and that we should unleash the current incarnation of Chiang Kai-Shek or Curtis LeMay (you can Google him along with the words “war criminal”). To my surprise, Will then takes the position that this war is beyond foolish and it’s time to leave. Well, I guess it is Obama’s war now.
On the totally crazy right, Cal Thomas continues his jihad against Islam. It’s puerile garbage of course, but it’s raw meat to the reactionaries that brought this piece of work to C-U this spring. It’s dismaying that some of our “local leaders” actually give this guy credence and continue to foist his disease on us. Then again, one of the Gazoo righties recently reviewed a biography of LeMay and presented him in a favorable light. Send in the drones and bomb ’em back to the Stone Age.
Another piece of rightist drivel appears in a point-counterpoint bit about blame for the BP disaster in the Gulf. It’s not really worth mentioning, and certainly not worth reading — either side of it, except to note that the author of the right side is a law professor at the U of I. It’s not the same guy who wrote about Hollywood causing the financial crash, but he’s in the same silly gang practicing the same religion (blessed be its name). This one is a similarly ludicrous and shallow piece of propaganda, but what’s of note is that the Gazette does not identify him as a “player” working for oil industry front groups. It’s not a big point, but it is one more in favor of simply ignoring your local newspaper, because it’s not yours at all. It is a blight on the community and has to go.