Just a few more days to go before I get my degree in buggy whip manufacturing, oops, I mean photojournalism, and I read this. Perhaps I should have invested the last two years in learning the finer points of flat earth theory instead.

One of the big problems with newspapers is that they mistake the power of monopoly for the attraction of quality. "People read us," they say, "because of our high standards of journalistic integrity." Uh, yeah. And people bought CDs from the big record labels because of the fine, ground-breaking music produced by Milli Vanilli. No, actually, people read newspapers because they were the only mass outlets for information in most areas of the country. "Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns it," says the bumper sticker. Thanks to the internet, one no longer needs to own a printing press to reach large numbers of people, and the man who owns the press now finds he has a very expensive and cumbersome paperweight.

Oh, I'm sure there'll still be newspapers in the future. After all, luddites like me still use tube amps and listen to vinyl. Printed newspapers will become a niche market for retro-oriented hipsters, the same ones who ride single gear bikes and decorate their apartments in a 1950s "Tiki" theme. You'll walk into a coffee shop and find a bohemian-looking guy pouring over the sports section because it's so much "cooler" than looking up NFL results online. And I'll still read 'em, because my mother does, and my grandmother did, and despite what some of you may think I'm still somewhat of a traditionalist. But the days when a single newspaper could dominate the flow of media in even a medium-size city are long gone, and with them the reason many people have for reading it.

It's not surprising that I'm as messed up as I am, what with a childhood full of Heino, Barney's Army and Commander USA, but I also lived in the Tri-State area (New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania) for a while in the late 1970s. Fort Dix, New Jersey, to be exact. In the days before cable all we had was the big three networks and a bunch of rinky-dink local UHF stations, most showing reruns of "Get Smart" or "I Love Lucy." They also aired some of the greatest TV commercials ever produced by the human mind:

Crazy Eddie's was a chain of electronic stores in the Tri-State area, and their over-the-top commercials developed something of a cult following over the years, being lampooned on "Seinfeld" and appearing in the movie "Splash." The man in the commercial, contrary to popular belief, is not owner "Crazy Eddie" Antar, but radio DJ Jerry Carroll:

"Crazy Eddie" himself was crazy like a fox. After driving the chain into bankruptcy in the late 80s through Enron-like financial chicanery, he fled the country ahead of federal investigators and lived abroad before being extradited back to the states to serve several years in prison (and no, Crazy Eddie's never had a "jailbreak" sale, unfortunately).

Another popular chain up north was Carvel ice cream, famous for their ice cream cakes (I can still remember the one my parents got me for my tenth birthday), as well as ameteurish commercial voice-overs courtesy of owner Tom Carvel:

Carvel's "Cookie Puss" cake inspired a punk rock band called the Beastie Boys to make a prank call to their local Carvel franchise, resulting in a Jerky Boys-esque song entitled "Cooky Puss" that took the group's music in an entirely different direction:

Imagine the culture shock when I moved to North Carolina and discovered that no one down here knew what I was talking about when I walked into a store and exclaimed, "These prices are INSANE!" Ah, the good old days when pop-culture references were a regional phenomenon...

Extra special bonus commercial: Anyone remember Burger Chef? I do. Their burgers were OK, but I mostly remember their frozen "Icee"-style treats:

He was a stalwart defender of free speech, a social gadfly and a damn funny guy to boot. The world is a much darker place without his trenchant wit:

(Warning: the clip below contains strong language. But I really didn't have to tell you that, did I?)

Every time a new form of communication is invented, those in power practically fall over themselves in a rush to control it. The British government once required a license to own a printing press; in the United States the Federal Communications Commission was created to monitor and regulate the new industries of radio and television; and Hollywood was forced to adopt the restrictive Hays Code to avoid government censorship. In each case, the reasons given were distressingly the same; protection of "public morality" or "national security," or the "need" to prevent false information from being spread (as usual, the government doesn't like the competition).

The internet presented a new challenge to those who would tell us what we can see and hear for our own good. It's decentralized, with no bulky presses, projectors or transmitters that can be monitored or licensed. There's literally millions of websites, and even totalitarian regimes like China's have faced challenges in censoring them. Rest assured, though, that those in power aren't going to give up easily. In the U.S., the government has attempted to regulate the internet in the name of fighting child pornography. Congress's first attempt, the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996, was struck down by the Supreme Court as being unconstitutionally restrictive. Thwarted in their efforts at direct control, the government adopted a more subversive approach: pressuring internet service providers (ISPs) to censor their own customers, a method lifted directly from the People's Republic of China playbook. The Constitution protects us from government censorship; it doesn't protect us from corporate censorship. Clever, huh?

Now I'm not in favor of child porn. Who is? But child porn is just an excuse to get the camel's nose under the tent. Verizon Communications has just announced that it's eliminating thousands of discussion groups from its servers, the vast majority of which have nothing to do with child porn, as a result of pressure from New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. Coumo is quite proud of his end run around the Constitution:

"We are attacking this problem by working with Internet service providers...I commend the companies that have stepped up today to embrace a new standard of responsibility, which should serve as a model for the entire industry."

There's a quote that's been erroniously attributed to Mussolini, but it perfectly sums up this new joint government/corporate effort to dictate what gets discussed in our society:

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."

As the Verizon case indicates, nothing could be worse for the preservation our civil liberties than a coalition of power-seeking politicians and profit-seeking corporations. What's a freedom-seeking American to do?

Oh, those economists! They still can't understand why Americans aren't running out to the malls to buy more useless crap they can't afford. According to this article in the Washington Post, we're just a bunch of Chicken Littles afraid of nothing. There's plenty of money! Didn't you just get a big stimulus check? Oh wait, I had to use that to fill up my tank just to get to work this morning. Never mind...

As usual, you have to look outside the mainstream media to get a dose of reality. This essay explains why Americans don't have any more money to spend. Regardless of how the government spins it, your person in the street knows when they're tapped out. After years of running up the credit cards and refinancing the house, the average consumer has simply run out of money. The only way for them to get more would be to earn more, and that's not likely in the short term.

Some government efforts at economic propaganda are downright laughable. An inflation index that DOESN'T count food and energy, the two things EVERYBODY needs? You can always mend your own trousers or keep watching VHS tapes on the old black and white TV, but it's kind of hard to get by without eating. Earth to Washington: You're not fooling anyone. I know how much I spend every week on food and gas, and believe me, it's way more then I was spending a year ago. Just how stupid do you think I am?

All this talk of the "New Economy" aside, the keys to national financial and political stability are the same as they've always been: Wages that allow people to live beyond a mere subsistance level; consumers spending money wisely on products that last, and saving the rest; and the creation of government infrastructure - cheap education, affordable health care - that reinforces people's access to a "middle class" way of life. In the last 30 years, we've gone backward in all three of those categories, and no amount of economists' voodoo is going to put lipstick on that pig. It's going to be a long ride, folks. Hope you brought a book.

For those who believe the government has no business determining what is or isn't obscene, here's exhibit A: A federal obscenity case has been suspended after it turned out that the judge was posting pornographic pictures to his own web site! Irony aside, this just shows how ridiculous the whole concept of "community standards" is when it comes to obscenity cases. There probably isn't a single human being out there, myself included, who hasn't looked at or read something for the purpose of sexual arousal, and it was probably something that someone else would find "obscene." One person's "obscenity," after all, is another person's erotica.

Why do prosecutors waste time and money pursuing these cases? When I was in high school an adult bookstore opened in my hometown, to much consternation from local bluenoses. The county DA launched several investigations of the establishment, arresting mostly clerks, but was never able to close it down. Even at the time the "community standards" rule for obscenity struck me as absurd. I mean, who else was going there except people in the community? Folks certainly weren't driving all the way from out of state to buy dirty magazines and dildos in little ol' Sanford, North Carolina.

Well, if the federal government insists on continuing this charade, I've got the perfect judge for them, the Honorable Pigmeat Markham. They won't have to worry about him posting any embarrassing photos, because, well, he's dead, but he's an expert in "nudist" cases:

A new poll confirms what most working people already know: trying to get by in this country will literally make you sick. Apparently Ben Franklin was on to something when he said "Neither a borrower nor a lender be," but it's hard to do that in a predatory capitalist culture that's constantly manipulating you through mass advertising.

And it's not just owing money to the legal equivalent of "Big Tony" that can make you ill, both physically and emotionally. The very job that you rely on to pay your debts can increase your stress, too. And the more menial your job, the worse it is.

Why do we subject ourselves to such toxic conditions? I believe it's because we allow the wrong kind of people to rise to the top in our society, namely type-A personality, hyper-competitive types who then expect the rest of us to run as fast as they do. You know the ones: the "crisis every minute" office manager who treats the loss of a pencil like it was the bombing of Hiroshima; the glory-mad politician who drags his nation into unwinnable wars to "save the world"; the workaholic boss who's in the office 70 hours a week and expects you to be too. We could have a society based on friendly, collaborative relationships instead of vicious, heads-I-win, tails-you-lose ones, but not with this bunch in charge. Of course, the fact that the pharmaceutical industry makes huge profits off of medications to treat the symptoms of this sick society is unlikely to lead to change either. There's money to be made in misery.

So we go off to our soul-crushing jobs, medicate ourselves with substances legal or otherwise, and rush off to the mall to buy worthless crap with money we don't have at prices we can't afford, just to justify having the shitty job in the first place. Then again, maybe some people are happy with this state of affairs. But what about the ones of us who aren't? Don't we get any say in the matter? And how do you find the will to continue everyday when you feel completely out of place in this scenario, when the society you live in is like a foreign country with no exit visa? Do you resign yourself to going along with it, or do you seek alternatives? Do you try to change the system from within, or try to burn it down from without?

What do you call a newspaper without any news in it? The LA Times, apparently. The paper's parent company, Tribune, is cutting costs by eliminating newsroom staff and, ultimately, the news coverage they create. It's a sign of the desperation in the traditional media industry that a newspaper conglomerate would consider cutting the very information that gives its product its identity, as well as giving consumers a reason to actually purchase it. If this strategy is successful, expect to see it spread to other industries:

1. SUVs with only three wheels;

2. Frying pans without handles;

3. Guitars with only five strings;

...and so on. Reduce the amount of news enough, and pretty soon newspapers will be nothing but ads. You know, those things people try to avoid by getting their news online. And given the state of the economy, do they really think people will pay to see ads for the things they can't afford? I don't think there's enough masochists in this country to make that a winner.

The War on Drugs has always been a bit of a joke (anyone ever have any trouble getting drugs?), but the federal government - always looking for another excuse to keep an eye on Americans - takes it very seriously, as this article in the LA times demonstrates. They'll be no marijauna-related punnery in THIS country, no sirree Bob. The term "weed" better be strictly limited to usage by the proper authorities and little old ladies in their gardens. Maybe they're onto something here. What did we learn from Orwell's "1984?" If you can control the way people speak, you can ultimately control the way they think . . .

While not addressing journalism per se, this opinion piece by Gregory Rodriguez in the L.A. Times highlights one of the major challenges to the traditional idea of the one-size-fits-all community newspaper: extreme political partisanship and the erosion of national and local consensus on matters ranging from personal morality to foreign policy. In short, people want to read and see things that reinforce the values of their particular subculture, while avoiding anything that disagrees with its worldview.

I'm not sure what this development means in the long run. Countries whose citizens divide themselves into squabbling factions - for example, Yugoslavia - usually don't remain countries for very long. From a print jounalism perspective, it will result in the growth of more niche publications aimed at specific "lifestyle" groups, and the decline of large newspapers aimed at the ever-fragmenting "middle America". You can see this in Greensboro with the rising influence of the Rhino Times and YesWeekly, our city's "conservative" and "alternative" publications, respectively, not to mention the various blogs, each cultivating their own audience based on common hobbies, musical tastes, politics, etc. Ironically, the technological revolution that has put the tools of mass communication into an ever-increasing number of hands may be undermining democracy in the old-fashioned town meeting sense of the word. Why debate policy with your fellow citizens when you can coccoon yourself amongst your own kind at Freerepublic.com or Commondreams.org?