Three cords and a (broad) band : PUNK journalism

Once upon a time, long ago and far away, there was an orphan feller from way out in the country ; a yokel with a Gibson J-200, a boom box dreadnought with only three frets ,way up at the cowboy end of the stick.

Real dumb I know (!!!!!!) , but this musically-challenged rustic claimed that was all he needed to be a real big songwriter.

 Just three chords and the truth.

I'd be right some glad to challenge his fantastic claim, but unfortunately I haven't written any hit songs ---- unlike him.

In fact, the truth be know, friend , the famous Harlan Howard has probably written more big hits than you've had bowel movements.

Even in hermetically-sealed North Korea, the kids and their mommies & daddies all perk up whenever his tunes come on the one-channel radio, even if set to somewhat different words than Harlan originally dreamed up.

You may better know his boast as adapted by the U-2's Bono or the Rolling Stones' Keith Richard, but you definitely know of his sentiments : call it  DIY / Punk / or Postmodernity, it defines our age from that of our parents.

I couldn't get three chords together, though God knows I tried many times , but now in 2012,  its "three cords and a (broad) band"  and that is something that I am definitely up for !

With just two fingers , I can't type as fast as as I talk, let alone as fast as I think ---- but then no John Henry in tandem with a steam shovel ever could   (-;

The Blog-o-sphere is just made for people like me.

What it isn't made for, is the Global Cities' elite press corps : they are now irrelevant . Gone, Done. Dead. Buried. Stiff. As a parrot.

Once upon a time, back about the time of the 1933 election and FDR , peoples' daily lives stopped being impacted hardest by stuff down at their local City Hall : the New Deal was truly a whole new thing.

In response, big media's best explainers (shout out to Walter Lippmann) moved right along with the biggest impactors into the big national capitals.

 And then, from 1940 onwards, they moved onto the world's big global cities like London, Washington and Tokyo.

They and they alone had the exclusives on all the earthquakes and the firestorms happening in political Washington and political Moscow - the stuff we all needed to know in a nuclear age.

But now they're totally irrelevant. No, not  real earthquakes and firestorms - those natural events are more relevant than ever.

But, fundamentally, that's also the crux of the problem for the Washington Press Corps and all their kinfolk worldwide.

When our biggest news stories are literally 'global' such as climate change or hemisphere-wide in impact (East Coast rising sea levels) who needs a press card or a permanent invite to the White House to 'do' the story ?

Just stick a wet finger up in the air and then blog away : as Stewart Alsop (or someone a lot like him) said a long, long time ago "you don't have to be a weatherman, to know which way the wind blows."

So my beat is the world and my audience is the world.

Everyone in the world is simultaneously both a reporter upon rising temperatures AND a consumer of those rising temperatures.

We renewers and denial-fighters , in every one of our globe's 24 time zones,  have frontline seats for the News Story of the Century.

 It is happening out here in the real world, in the real atmosphere, the real power plant, the real ocean and it being won or lost "out here" in the virtual world of the blog-o-sphere.

Sorry Facebook, LinkedIn ,Twitter : while you do an excellent distribution job, it is the bloggers (from Pros with Pimps to the greenest freelance amateur) that provide the content you distribute.

Yes the deniers (unlike us) are mostly (very well) paid to blog full time and yes Denial, like Greed itself, "Never Sleeps".

But be forewarned, neither do we.....

why me and not some academic writing up Henry Dawson's discoveries ?

Good question : one I get asked many times.

One answer is that if an academic is ever going to do a thesis on Henry Dawson, I want it done before I am dead,  so I can read it too.

I mean the man made the significant breakthrough in DNA almost 85 years ago, the significant breakthrough in penicillin almost 75 years ago - so why aren't thesis supervisors beating at his family's door, looking for personal and professional papers ?

I think I know why.

I am a longtime DIYer and I instantly recognized a kindred "go it alone" spirit in Dawson's tiny little makeshift penicillin project, something I was sure that "Big Academia's collegiality won't be able to fathom.

Modern day academics seem uncomfortable proceeding on a offbeat project without some sort of successful grant-offering process to support it and to validate it in their colleagues' eyes.

Dawson had the spirit of Punk and DIY and low postmodernity burned into his DNA and they, largely, do not.

They believe that the God of Academia is on the side of the big battalions like Florey and the OSRD , not hole-in-the-wall science efforts that never sought a grant - "not seeking a grant - why that is practically treason - does that man Dawson actually want us to go back to the bad old days ?"

Actually there has been one thesis cum book * on Dawson's "go it alone" effort - it is by an academic (David Parrish Adams) and in it,  Adams predictably pans Dawson mercilessly and sticks up for Vannevar Bush's OSRD .

I suspect his thesis supervisor said something like "there is at least 50 linear feet on the penicillin efforts of the NAS and OSRD in the National Archives - easily enough for an in-and-out thesis" and as usual, the PhD history candidate quickly got 'captured' by his sources.

When only the rich and powerful can afford fulsome archives, a study based only on archival sources only tells the story from the viewpoint of the rich and powerful.....

* Truth be told, I am largely writing up Dawson's life as a long , spirited, rebuttal to Adams' book "The Greatest Good to the Greatest Number" --- which I nevertheless fully enjoyed, because it gave me some insights into what Dawson's opponents - then and now - were saying about him.

the fragments of a dialectic enlightenment :Adorno & Horkheimer as PUNK DIYers ...

If one of your dear, dear friends gave you as a christmas present, late in December, over 300 pages of turgid prose, written in fragmentary style, and mimeographed to ensure ultra low quality readability and then stuck it all between two dull brown covers, you might be forgiven if you waited until January before you began a token,polite, skim through it.

That would be January....... 1945.

1945 ! : post-hegemony's annus mirabilis.

And what a way to usher in the postmodern era but with a punk-DIY un-book, as principle author Adorno reminded his co-conspiractor, Horkheimer on the latter's 50th birthday.

Adorno felt that hardcover,professionally printed books brought in the Modernist era - so why not a humble mimeograph to do the honors for the new age ?

So 500 years of Modernity laid low in an instance by a ZINE, for crikes sake !

Well, that and a little help from Modernity itself, during that most modernist of wars : WWII ....