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The mess that is America in 2011.  We have an absolutely polarized American electorate.  We have a void of leadership that same electorate sent to Washington, D.C.  The federal credit rating is diminished.  So, how did we get here?  How did we move from widespread visions of hope and change in 2008 to equally widespread fear and discontent in 2011?  How did "We, the People" become "We, the angry masses"?  How did this happen, America?  

According to an essay written by Val E. Limburg for the Museum of Broadcast Communications, it's a long, long story, one that begins with President Ronald Reagan and a former policy of the Federal Communications Commission called the "Fairness Doctrine".  According to the Museum of Broadcast Communications, the Fairness Doctrine was a policy begun in 1949 meant to ensure that all coverage of controversial issues by broadcasters was fair and balanced since broadcasters were viewed as "public trustees" given the limited number of broadcast frequencies available at the time and the massive number of people who could be reached (and influenced) despite the scarcity of those frequencies. The doctrine wasn't a law, however, although the Supreme Court sanctioned it in 1969 when it ruled in favor of the FCC in the case of Red Lion Broadcasting Co., Inc. v. FCC.  Despite its intent, the doctrine upset many who considered it a violation of First Amendment rights of free speech and free press through which the freedom to make stories as balanced or unbalanced as reporters saw fit should be granted to the media.  Lacking that freedom to slant coverage, some reporters avoided certain controversial issues simply to avoid the FCC's requirement to find alternate points of view.

The doctrine remained in effect until the 1980s, according to Limburg, at which point two things changed: Ronald Reagan became President and cable television began to spread across the nation.  Reagan, a champion of smaller government and federal deregulation, noted that the consideration of broadcasters as "public trustees" due to the scarcity of broadcast resources was rendered moot since the proliferation of cable systems meant that diverse opinions on controversial topics would be readily available to viewers, and Mark Fowler, the new Chairman of the FCC as appointed by President Reagan, publicly vowed to end the doctrine.  In 1985, the FCC, still under the control of the Reagan administration, issued its Fairness Report in which it validated earlier concerns about the doctrine's constitutionality and its effect on reducing the press coverage given to controversial topics. In 1987, the case of Meredith Corp. v. FCC saw the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit verify that the Fairness Doctrine was not law, but policy, and as such the FCC did not have to continue to enforce it. The FCC dissolved the doctrine in August of that year.
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Note: Updated on 7/21/2011.
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Paul Ryan "Hulks Out" on the elderly.
Republican Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the House Budget Chairman, this year announced with the GOP calls the "Path to Prosperity", a plan replete with significant cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.  Ryan has projected $750 billion in cost savings should the initiative be adopted, but critics charge that the plan will only succeed in endangering the lives of America's elderly by reducing their healthcare coverage.  Ryan's plan would change Medicare from a Federal system that pays the beneficiary directly to a system of state-level block grants controlled by state governors that pays private insurance providers directly.  Given that each state will receive a grant under the plan, there exists the possibility that the seniors could face a lower quality of coverage due to several factors that include a lack of funds allocated to their state.  Conversely, the reverse is true in that some states could be granted more money for Medicaid expenditures than could reasonably be expended.  No matter what the future may or may not hold, the one sure thing is that Ryan failed to mention that any funding issues plaguing Medicare were themselves exacerbated by the actions of the very Republican party he is part of, the same Republican party that caved in to special interests in an orgy of greed and pandering on the morning of November 22, 2003.
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Broadcast Life 07/07/2011
 
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Norman Rockwell / "Portrait of Norman Rockwell Painting the Soda Jerk" / 1953
Television was once the conveyor of virginal imagery, the bringer of the Norman Rockwell version of America as beamed to homes from coast-to-coast by the gods of television on a daily basis.  During those days long past there was a security in television that’s all but extinct today.  Censors and sponsors combined to make TV a sterile landscape devoid of most forms of offensive behavior, sexual innuendoes and expressions of thought contrary to the perceived norms of American society.  Those were the days when “men were men and women were women”, when homosexuality was ignored and heterosexuality was limited to platonic hugs and closed-mouth kisses.  War was a bloodless display of valor and manliness according to shows such as “The Rat Patrol” and “Combat”, while the American West was a place of brave, noble men who tamed fierce savages and felled outlaws with equally bloodless gunshots as evidenced by shows such as “Bonanza” and “Gunsmoke”.  Women were seen as aspirants to domestic perfection and personified by such fictional pre-Martha Stewart domestic divas as June Cleaver in “Leave it to Beaver” and Margaret Anderson in “Father Knows Best”.   As to displays or the mere mentioning of the sex act, it was avoided at all costs even if it meant depicting a bedroom as surreal as the one containing the separate beds of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo on “I Love Lucy” or as unseen as Ralph and Alice Kramden’s bedroom on “The Honeymooners”.  Such is how it was prior to January 29th, 1968 – the date of the Viet Cong’s bloody Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War – as television was, to that date, used as the great sanitizer of American life.  Afterwards, it was a whole new ballgame.

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Sen. Joseph McCarthy. (Altered photo.)
When I decided to address the subject of the media, I suddenly understood just what it was like to be a shark at sea with the smell of fresh blood in the water.  In the eyes of this humble and loyal American, the media in general and the Fourth Estate in particular have done great harm to the nation through slanted presentations and socio-politically skewed reporting that have time and again altered the national fabric.  Focusing exclusively on the media's impact from the popularization of television in the late 1940s to today, I unequivocally state my firm belief that the media's coverage and comments regarding certain major events coupled with its polymorphic allegations of societal norms consistently transgress into the forbidden, dangerous realm of shaping both national opinion and national policy.

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Artwork depicting the Framers of the Constitution.
Underpinning our American society is a document that is now over 220 years old, one that was fashioned by some of the finest minds of the 18th century. What those Colonial intellects created was the United States Constitution, the supreme law of the land since its adoption at the Philadelphia Convention on September 17, 1787. On that day, a combination of merchants, land and financial speculators, slave owners, farmers, public officials, retirees, scientists, physicians, and persons engaged in other pursuits successfully completed a wide-ranging legal document in culmination of an effort that began with altogether different aims. The assemblage originally gathered with the intent of amending the Articles of Confederation, the document that defined the American system of government in de facto manner since the Second Continental Congress adopted it on November 15, 1777, and which defined American law since its ratification on March 1, 1781. However, in the 10 years since the Articles of Confederation were created, serious flaws were seen in its design, and those flaws, highlighted by the collection of fliers now collectively known as the Federalist Papers, could only be surmounted by scrapping the Articles of Confederation entirely in favor of a different national document. 21st century America remains guided by that document, one forged by men and men alone in a far distant era that not only preceded the crucial turning point in American history that was the Civil War by eight decades, but the Industrial Revolution, women's liberation, the civil rights movement, gay rights, electric lights, space travel, automobiles, and telecommunications as well. Given this, I seriously question the continued viability of such a document.

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African-Americans Marching (1995)
Let’s talk about the past, present, and future of Africans in America. Africans came to America either in chains or of their own volition. They came from both scattered tribes and unified kingdoms. They spoke or clicked different languages, they were of wildly different cultures, tribes, and nations, and they wrote using various scripts such as Coptic, Ge’ez, and Vai, but in America they are currently referred to by the one-size-fits-all term of “African-Americans”. Pardon me, but that’s about as accurate as calling Americans of Italian, Irish, and German descent “European-Americans”. Oh, sure, they’re all descended from Europeans, but aren’t the Irish different from the Germans? And aren’t they both different from the Italians? If they’re so different, then how accurate would it be to omit their nationality when referring to their ancestries and heritage? Not very, in my opinion. And that's what this essay is about: accuracy as applied to African-Americans and our future in America.

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Driven by Madison Avenue and fashion runways around the world, the concept of beauty is an ever-evolving thing possessed of neither a steady form nor a truly constant definition.  To me, the only constants about it are nebulous ones in that beauty is said to be pleasing to the eye or in the eye of the beholder.  However, facets of beauty change frequently and often differ per ethnic group, and the concept blurs even further when social dynamics inevitably come into play.
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Mae West (1933)
To the left is a picture of legendary actress/writer Mae West.  Born in 1893 as Mary Jane West in Brooklyn, New York, she was one of American cinema's earliest sex symbols, a blonde tigress who exuded a raw sexual presence as had never been seen before on the silver screen.  She gained fame--and notoriety--not only for her looks, but from what she wore, what she said, what she wrote, and the unforgettable way in which she spoke her most memorable lines with an almost feline purr.  She was bold.  She was sensuous.  She was dynamic.  Yet despite her fame, despite her flirtatious screen persona, despite all that Mae West brought to Hollywood and all that she was, would the great Mae West be seen as the most physically beautiful living woman today?
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tuchodi / "Instant Messaging/Chat Acronyms" / 2009
In this age of the Internet and all things Twitter-ish, acronyms such as BFN, FTF, ROFL, OMG, TYT, and their ilk have pervaded the American lexicon as aided by every slow, lazy, or shamelessly trendy typist on the Web, and I believe enough is enough. Sure, acronyms have been is wide use for years, with NBC, WMD, BLT, SONAR, AM, FM, EPA, ATF, RADAR, FBI, CIA, NSA, IRS, SCUBA, SNAFU, NASA, RAF, SSN, DSRV, and the names of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "alphabet agencies" being prime examples. However, today’s overdependence on acronyms hints at something negative within modern America, and I find that extremely troubling.
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Some call it the Florida-Haiti Interstate Tunnel.  Some call it the Caribbean International Highway.  Some simply refer to it as I95U.  No matter what it’s called, it is said to be an enormous undertaking, one of the largest construction projects in existence.  It is purportedly a 600 mile-long system of overland highways and floating tunnels moored to the floor of the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea meant to link Florida, Cuba, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico in a single roadway system.[1]  Those who believe in it call it a wonder of modern engineering.  Those who know better call it a magnificent hoax, one that partly depends on confusing it with the nearby and very real Port of Miami Tunnel project.[2]
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First Post! 05/20/2011
 
Hello!  Today marks the start of my new online presence.  During my years of IT- and non-IT work, I've functioned as everything from mailroom clerk to I.T. department manager, with almost every possible position worked in as I rose through the ranks.  With the knowledge I've gained through navigating the minefield that life is sometimes, I've gained what some call "a slightly different perspective on the world" from both my professional and personal experiences that I want to share. I hope you'll come along for the ride.
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