subject: Journalist Hacks Are Like Starbucks Without Caffeine [print this page] Journalist Hacks Are Like Starbucks Without Caffeine
The late humorist, journalist and author, Art Buchwald was a Pulitzer Prize winner who, at age 81 still cracked me up with his commentaries on just about everything. You had to admire a heart and mind that made you think as well as laugh.
Despite the kidney failure that eventually killed him, Buchwald defied death by taking himself off dialysis and out of hospice so he could be at home with his family and continue giving us insight with humor.
Renowned for his view from the bleachers, Pulitzer man Jimmy Breslin writes columns that champion the average citizen. His report on the ghastly injuries suffered by American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan is an appalling example of what is not being reported, or reported very lightly, by most of the press. Breslin is an original. "The civil are not organized, and the organized are not civil." I wish I'd said that.
Now civil rings my bell. I probably should have been born a century earlier because I miss civil. Not as in ACLU. As in civility. I miss civil that holds a door open because it does not need to trample me in order to go first. I miss civil that says, "thank you," civil that says "I apologize" and civil that respects parents and teachers. I miss civil that doesn't tailgate me into an accident. I wasn't around in Will Rogers' time, yet I miss his kind of civil that sends the message with humor instead of malice: "On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does."
I miss humorists with vision and visionaries with humor. So what's a civil being to do? All the new age pundits tell us to be in the now. I try to do that. But we are each a composite of our past. The 20th century was the bloodiest yet. Will those of us who have imbibed the best of it be the last civil generation? Today's announcement in the New York Times that Hollywood producers are succumbing to the lure of a Wall Street that seeks to control the film industry is disheartening. Civil and original have left the building with Frasier. They're just so "last century."
"Simplicity-Courage-Humor-Soul"
My website is under reconstruction until 2010. Meanwhile, you can find me at http://newagejournal.com/2007/spirituality/the-eternal-search-for-who-am-i
You can also read two chapters of my novel, The Sword and the Chrysanthemum, Journey of the Heart at http://www.samurai-archives.com/guestart.html
