State of the Union, 2/26/07: Storm clouds brewing
A few fun headlines (with links) from today and the past few weeks, regarding the present social, financial, and cultural situation in the United States:
“Greenspan Warns of Likely U.S. Recession“
“Demand for Ethanol May Hike Food Prices“
“U.S. mortgage crisis goes into meltdown“
“Children’s TV ‘is linked to cancer, autism, dementia’“
“Get the message: it’s the medium” (scientific evidence that television rots the brain, ruins the body)
“Media obsession with trivial hurts our nation“
Okay, so maybe the last one’s kind of a cheat if I’m trying to provide a survey of negative-sounding items from the media recently, since it’s a shortened version of my blog post from last week titled “Anna Nicole Smith is the Fourth Horseman.” I contacted Tony Messenger, the editorial page editor of my local area daily paper who’s mentioned in the post, and asked him if he’d be interested in running the piece in the newspaper. He said yes and asked me to chop it down to around 450 words. So I did, and it appeared in yesterday’s paper as a guest editorial. Yesterday morning a number of friends mentioned it when I saw them. I guess I’m a minor local celebrity now.
Since I talk about my teaching job and my students’ general cultural ignorance in the piece, I had wondered whether I might catch some flak when I arrived at work today, but in fact not a single person has asked me about it. So I brought it up to some colleagues at lunch and found that none of them had read yesterday’s editorial page. Go figure.
