Marty Kaplan holds the Norman Lear Chair at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. His Jewish Journal columns have won First Place in the Southern California Journalism Awards six times in the past six years. Reach him at martyk@jewishjournal.com
If you’re reading this, your vote for president won’t count. Don’t get me wrong. Everyone should vote; I think it should be compulsory, as it is in Australia, with fines for no-shows. Too much patriots’ blood has been spilled to protect our right to vote for America to be soft on civic deadbeats. Voting is the minimum price of admission to democracy.
Until Marine Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach and her unborn child were murdered by Marine Cpl. Cesar Laurean and buried in his backyard, her congressman, Mike Turner, had a record like any other garden-variety Republican warrior on women. With his 100 percent perfect opposition to women’s freedom of choice over their reproductive systems, Turner’s Dayton, Ohio-area constituents had been represented by just the kind of disciplined hard-core conservative that John Boehner and Eric Cantor rely on.
The trouble with kids these days is that they think luck counts more than they should. That’s the diagnosis of America’s young people offered by a New York Times opinion piece this past weekend. Generation Y has moved back home and given up on gung-ho because in these recessionary times, they’re putting too little weight on the importance of effort and too much weight on the riskiness of risk.
This coming weekend, Harvard’s Kennedy School will host a One State Conference” where some 20 speakers will be talking about “Israel/Palestine and the one-state solution.” Between the idea of a one-state solution, and the reaction to Harvard’s providing a venue for entertaining it, and the ongoing Republican assault on elites and universities, I don’t know whether to cry or to cry.
Will Hillary be Obama’s running mate, with Biden going to State if they win? Will Romney wrap things up on Super Tuesday, or will there be a brokered Republican convention, with Ron Paul as kingmaker? Will Democrats take back the House but lose the Senate?
“Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?” That was the headline last week on a blog posted by New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane.
What did I miss? For seven days I didn’t have salt, meat or CNN. My mornings began without “Morning Joe” or “Morning Edition”; I saw sunrise on a mountain hike, not with a clicker in my hand.
Did you see how Newt Gingrich kept winking during the Dec. 10 Republican debate? I’ll bet you $10,000 I’m the one he was winking at.
This is the disclaimer that Britain’s Public Interest Research Centre recently proposed for inclusion on billboards:
\”Are you not entertained?\” That was Jon Stewart’s response to Rick Perry’s brain freeze. He said it twice, maniacally. “Are you not entertained?” Stewart’s right about what’s happening. America is on track for the most amusing apocalypse ever. Things may be going to hell, but the campaign narrative unfolding in real time couldn’t be any more fun. It’s all entertainment, just grist for the media mill, and apparently there’s no bummer bad enough to shock us back to our senses.
