How scary is he?

Fear.

It's what political campaigns thrive on — that raw, unvarnished, inescapable terror we all feel when we've been surprised by information we can't process. The more complex the facts, the better for the fear factor. Those who play the fear card are banking on the tendency we all have to run and hide when we're afraid.

But there are a few of us who are the Dorothys in the Wizard of Oz story. She pulled back the curtain. And there he was, the Wizard — not so scary after all.

The Los Angeles Times, much like its East Coast rival (NYT), has made it clear that it supports the democratic candidate. And the coverage shows it — from headlines to ledes to choices of who to quote to photos. Read it carefully and you'll see there's a methodical attention to showing how stupid (and dangerous) the Republicans are, and how virtuous and downtrodden the Democrats are.

Both sides of this debate are using fear as a tool, though.

I just hope that voters will do their due diligence between now and November and figure out the difference between scary fluff and reality.

Somebody was Wrong

Poynter Institute for Media Studies bloggers have good eyes.

They're watching what's coming over the hill, and what they're noticing is that newspaper journalism — thought to be not only over the hill but nearly dead — is showing signs of life. Cyber-life. Whoodathunkit?

Poynter points out that the LA Times, a paper I read nearly every day on my train ride into Los Angeles County, is blogging in ways that show this is a newspaper that gets it.

They get that younger readers in today's market, the ones we thought were staying away from newspapers (and news in general) are reading LA Times blogs and blogging back. In other words, journalists are talking to people. And people like it.

I like that. I'd say I'm not surprised but nobody'd believe me. I'm a historian of journalism. People like me can tell you about how journalists know how to talk to people. They have to. Used to be we called this letters to the editor. Or just phone calls. Or people walking in the newsroom, right past the secretary, and right up to the desk. Face to face with the sports editor. Or the editorial writer.

In William Allen White's daddy's day, editors would get called out in the muddy street to draw pistols over what they'd written. Interactivity, we might say.

So blogs are the latest thing, but they're not.

I'm just glad somebody noticed.

Manhattan

I just taught a course for three days in the basement of the Empire State Building.

The basement. Down a long hallway from the elevator that made Sleepless in Seattle such a throwback to an earlier movie.

I toted my computer into an airless room fitted with track lighting, acoustic engineering, and the feel of a trendy, upscale educational wing.

In that room, morning and afternoon, at the bidding of the World Journalism Institute, I invested in the minds, hearts, and souls of a roomful of students from across the country. Smart ones. Some well-versed in journalism. All of them eager to make a mark far beyond themselves. They paid attention. A few even took pictures of me in my academic gymnastics.

I exhausted myself nurturing in these unblinking eyes the passion I have — passion to make a difference, passion to write with such attention to detail and to the ironies and amazing nuances of life that audiences put down their coffee, read with full attention, and even turn a page if necessary.

Richard John Neuhaus came one day as a luncheon speaker.

Neuhaus told the students that they were wrong to think their journalism can change the world. He said journalism with that mindset is what fueled the worst oligarchies in history.

He described journalism as much less significant than that — a kind of hit-or-miss thing that has limited potential for good.

Ah, the reflections of ideological warriors who speak in cryptic vagueness. There's so much more to the story he was trying to tell. Did the students get it? I couldn't tell from their chewing, swigging of water, and overall lack of fervor for serious questions when he was done.

What Neuhaus didn't mention is how his own magazine, First Things, is part of an ongoing dialogue within the media marketplace that is, in its own way, seeking very intentionally to change the world. He's been a prolific writer for that magazine, and I'm sure holds it to high standards of journalistic excellence.

Can journalism be part of the solutions of our time? Certainly. Will it get credit for the significant pieces it places in the jigsaw puzzle? Mostly, no. But that's not what we as believers in Christ are about.

We're called to be faithful.

And Proverbs 22:29 would suggest that a journalist skilled in his work — really skilled, intensely mindful of the target — will not see that work languish in basements of buildings.

The world awaits — upstairs, on the streets, and up higher.

And journalism educators have no less daunting a task in this 21st century as audiences sit down with their coffee looking for that article that reaches into their soul.

Thick skin comes with a price.

Uncool

Journalism faculty who try too hard to be the coolest, trendiest dudes on the campus are bound to run into problems.

The best, most honorable deeds, after all, don't go unpunished.

And there is a point of diminishing return on investment when it comes to some students.

I've been at this teaching thing now for 18 years. And I still haven't quite learned this lesson.

But I'm getting there.

Writing

Journalists know how to write well and do it — fast, and all the time.

That's the theory, anyway.

But when they don't, they give the whole profession a bad name — or I should say, a worse name. A quick stroll through the front pages of most dailies and around the blogosphere will tell you there are a lot of people working for publications and media organizations who aren't very good writers. Or they aren't trying very hard.

Maybe we can blame it on the layoffs of copyeditors and the piling of work onto the backs of those whose seniority kept them in the newsroom.

That's discouraging for someone trying to teach students to write like the professionals — people being paid to write but who are producing stuff that's too often lazy, under-reported drivel, derivative stuff.

A student asked me today to what to do if the job description says the publication or media organization wants years of experience before they'll look at a candidate.

I told her what the media organization wants is somebody good — really good. And someone at that organization figured a few years' full-time experience would bring good work — good reporting, good writing.

But if they're smart, they'll get past the numbers on the resume and look at what's in the portfolio. If it's great writing, and they want their media organization to grow, they'll invite that just-out-of-college person in for a chat.

Writing is a function of hard work. And in some media organizations there's an inverse proportion between years of service and willingness to dig in and put words together that are stunning in their insight, never-seen-before facts, and did-you-hear-this novelty.

Maybe youth is wasted on the young. But editors waste their opportunities if they neglect looking at the power of what's coming to them from the schools they've not yet hired from.

He never did like funeral music

Larry Norman’s not gone. His music, so we’re seeing in the media response to his death, is too tightly woven into the generations he influenced. Funny how death brings life.

If anything, Larry Norman has been rediscovered in ways that remind us of the hard questions he raised — ones that won’t go away.

Norman’s web site said he died Sunday at 2:45 a.m. with his younger brother Charles and Charles’ wife holding his hands, waiting for his heart to slowly stop beating. He was 60. He had been struggling since the 1970s from a steadily weakening heart and the effects of head injuries from an airplane cabin accident. Media reports said debris that fell on him affected his brain. And then there had been diabetes.

“I feel like a prize in a box of cracker jacks with God’s hand reaching down to pick me up,” Norman said in the last moments of his life. Allen Fleming, a friend of Norman’s typed the words into Norman’s laptop as he lay dying.

The message ends with a kind of poem — or another lyric.

Goodbye, farewell, we’ll meet again
Somewhere beyond the sky.
I pray that you will stay with God
Goodbye, my friends, goodbye.

________


The enormity of Norman’s musical and cultural influence cannot be traced in gold or platinum as might be the case with other rock pioneers. Part of what kept Norman from selling more recordings was his discomfort with labels — the kind recording companies make and the kind media tend to create.

Larry Norman burst on the music scene in the 1960s with nearly white blonde hair — grown down past his chest — a furrowed brow, and a perpetual pout. His tight, thin lips protruded when he sang in a nasal growl. His sound was a mix between Elton, Guthrie, Mick, and Dylan. Norman’s was bluesy folk and sometime-rock at a time when these were tools of cultural vernacular used by youth banging the bars of cages set up by adults around them.

Norman’s first two solo albums, “Upon This Rock,” released on Capitol in 1969, and “Only Visiting This Planet,” released on Verve in 1972 have been called the first significant Christian rock albums in the United States. Their energy was the quiet, simmering fury of chords and lyrics calling young people to take their faith to the streets. Know the Bible, prove it; do something about it, his music said.

Larry Norman’s war was against sin and hypocrisy — rigid complacency — in the rapidly growing evangelical church in the post-World War II era. He made an appeal to non-Christians, too. Bloggers and a reported outpouring of emails to his web site indicate many came to know Christ from listening to Larry’s music. Frank Black, of the Pixies, was working on an album with Norman at the time of his death. “Larry was my door into the music business, and he was the most Christlike person I ever met,” Black said in a statement Monday. But what set Larry Norman apart was his challenge to a regimented culture of Protestant evangelism, worship music, and the “pleasant valley Sunday” that the Monkees had sneered about in his time.

Larry Norman’s reputation came as much from his singing and songwriting as from his spoken words. He had a reputation from the beginning for talk during concerts. Rather than banging out songs seamlessly,one to the next, Norman interjected comments. They could take a while. Concert-goers would be challenged to leave a changed people: more humble, more sensitive God’s voice, more mindful of the pain in those around them.

“Why should the Devil have all the good music?” went the refrain of one Norman song. It was a piece filled with a smirk and a growl at those who failed to see past external appearances in the hippie era.

They say to cut my hair/ they’re driving me insane/
I grew it out long to make room for my brain/
They say rock-and-roll is wrong/
we’ll give you one more chance/
I say I feel so good I want to get up and dance

______

As in all of life, those who were closest to Norman were the first to find out he’d gone. Mark Joseph, who wrote a book about the fading of Christian rock, was among the
first to note Norman’s passing on Bullypulpitnewst.com, a blog run from Southern California. Joseph’s obituary for Norman ran on huffingtonpost.com on Tuesday of the week Norman died.

National Public Radio, that Thursday, posted an unsmiling photo of Norman from what looks like the 1970s, along with an interview with Charles Norman. In that interview, Norman’s brother recalled growing up with a big brother bold enough to rock with gusto, grow his hair long and write about sin in ways that transcended metaphor.

In one song, Norman wrote,

Gonorrhea on Valentine’s Day/
And you’re still looking for the perfect lay/
Why don’t you look into Jesus/
He’s got the answers

“Stuff like that that shocked uptight Christians,” said Charles Norman in the NPR interview. And he was right. Many Christian bookstores — primary outlets for Christian music in the era when Norman was exploding on the music scene — refused to carry his albums. Not that this bothered him, outwardly anyway. Rejection became a kind of ongoing theme of Norman’s life. His style, it seemed, almost invited it.

Randy Stonehill, a friend of Norman’s who came to faith through Norman’s life and music ministry turned down a Christianity Today interview, but used his own web site to tell the world that one tragedy of Norman’s life was his inability to maintain relationships. Norman was married twice, the second time to Stonehill’s former wife. Larry Norman’s trajectory through ministry, like that of many artists, was one that put passion before people. His was a great heart — but one that took a beating and did some beating of its own.

The odd thing about Norman's death was the utter silence of those who were so integral to his early career. Where was Tom Howard? Steve Camp? All those who had mixed and mingled with him at Jesus festivals through the 60s and 70s?

No comment. Too hard, maybe. No need.

Media reports by the Associated Press, the (Portland) Oregonian, the (San Jose) Mercury News, Entertainment Weekly and Christianity Today played down the broken heart angle. But it was there nonetheless. In the end, Larry Norman’s heart couldn’t take any more — a kind of metaphor of the songwriter’s life. He’d been about putting heart and soul before people in auditoriums, stadiums, rock festivals, and sound-stage coffee shops around the world.

Maybe the deafening silence from most evangelicals at his passing came from Norman's penchant for leaving places. His emergence on the music scene as a Christian rocker came after leaving the San Jose psychedelic band People! From there, he came and left a lot. It made him a loner — though one who had real musical talent, perhaps genius. But genius in isolation can look like dementia, an aberration.

Some media reports caught the nuance that Norman was a man without an ideological country. Rock-and-roll writers and pop culture critics generally ignored him. So did the Christian media. His music would have had as much appeal — maybe more — than such noted pioneers as Roger Daltrey, Robert Plant and Jimi Hendrix. Norman toured with some of them in the 1970s. “He really could’ve been a star if he were singing about something other than Jesus,” said Willman. And Willman’s writing sounds an almost mournful tone about such a decision.

Rebels have a tough life. They thrive on an anger that works best at low simmer. But if they live with that anger, it tears them up — maybe kills them. At best, it drives them from others. So it was with Larry Norman. He toured a lot — right up to the end, even in his weak condition. He released records on his own label or small ones run by others. But it was work in the back side of the desert, a work apart.

At the end, like many of his musical generation, Norman spent more time watching and listening than speaking. Like a good prophet, he sat back and watched as events came together as he’d predicted.

Within days of his death, a report by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life suggested a large number of Americans were reporting that their pursuit of God was something they didn’t want crammed into a box — boxes Norman had spent his younger years decrying. One of the fastest areas of growth in American religious experience was one that defied survey description. Norman would have liked that trend.

Norman’s web site said a funeral would be held the Saturday after his death at The Church on the Hill in Turner, Oregon. “My plan is to be buried in a simple pine box with flowers in it,” Norman had said just before he died.

In a kind of foreshadowing of what his end might be like, Norman wrote, in “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music”

I’m not knocking the hymns/
Just give me something that moves my feet/
I don’t like those funeral marches/
I’m not dead yet

Later in the song, Norman wrote,

They nailed him to the cross/
And they laid him in the ground/
But they should’ve known you can’t keep a good man down.

As Norman’s own funeral took place — squarely in the season of Lent — the notion of resurrection seemed a fitting descriptor for a life that made spiritual redemption a cornerstone of musical journey.

Has the world figured out all that Larry Norman was trying to be and do? Probably not.

Nor does it need to. The next generation of fury and counterculture has raised enough questions of its own.

And this is as it should be.

Not during the prayer. I SAID, not during...

Photojournalists get such a bad rap.

They're not paparazzi. They're not vampires. They do have souls.

No, not all of them behave scrupulously at all times.

But do they deserve to be kicked?

Javier Manzano of the Rocky Mountain News was doing his job in the Colorado capitol building last week, shooting routine images of a swearing-in ceremony. He was unceremoniously stopped in the process.

News media across the nation — including the New York Times — have put the spotlight on Manzano and his decision to ignore warnings to cease shooting and be reverent.

My experience in journalism, and with journalists, convinces me that most really do care about the civic life they cover and the reality (even the sanctity) of the moment. Their job is to tell the story — official and unofficial — whenever it comes in front of their lens. If they're good, they're ready when the real story emerges from layers of spin and hype that glosses so much of what poses as news today.

It shouldn't surprise working journalists that Manzano got down on the floor in front of Rep. Douglas Bruce and House Speaker Andrew Romanoff and shot a frame or two of Bruce in prayer (maybe especially after Bruce said to go away.)

Bruce's decision to kick Manzano in the knee when he heard the camera shutter was one that might symbolize all the pent-up frustration that politicians feel toward journalists who won't color within the lines. Journalists are so darn ubiquitous.

Manzano declined comment after the photo session.

News coverage of this event has centered on both Manzano and Bruce — presumably because there's a sympathetic audience for both. My sympathies are with both, but for different reasons.

One reason Manzano wouldn't back off, I think, is that Manzano got the fact that prayer — for all its shallowness in socio-political life — is still part of the civic process. Actually, a lot of us believe it ought to be even more part of the process (albeit in private, in an earnest seeking of God for wisdom.)

Bruce was part of a political process that deserves public scrutiny. But he'd made it all the more compelling by jerking the state legislature around to do this swearing-in thing just when he wanted it — even if it was inconvenient for the whole.

What Manzano did, though, by shooting images of a praying man when that man said not to (maybe he asked nicely, the reports don't make that clear) is to promote a stereotype of photojournalists as blood-sucking creatures who disdain the life of the Spirit (at least that's what those who took a glance without really reading about it would conclude. And we live in a nation of cynical media glancers.)

I don't think Manzano should have backed off. But there are ways to do one's job so everybody wins. Maybe impossible here, but I suggest it's worth pursuing.

My sympathies are with Bruce because he's now made a name for himself as a guy who not only doesn't understand journalism within the democratic experience and socio-political life, he's also shown how much he doesn't grasp the place of prayer in that mix.

All of us lose it — occasionally in front of a bunch of people.

What's sad is that this guy exploded not only during prayer, but in front of cameras.

Jesus got angry at people who made His Father's house (the temple in Jerusalem), a place He called a house of prayer, into a circus of greed and commodification. But He didn't attack during prayer. When Jesus prayed, he prayed. When He took people to task, He waited until he could look them in the eye and make the lesson clear — sometimes so profoundly that they'd think about it for years afterward.

Douglas Bruce has labeled himself in a way that will make him a caricature of public servants for quite a while. And he's hurt the reputation of those who really do make prayer part of their calling to serve a constituency.

Of the two, I think Manzano will weather all this with less damage — even if he might have a sore knee for a while.

Maybe Douglas Bruce will think about knees more carefully now, even to the point of getting down on his own, experiencing what real prayer is all about.

If he does, politics in Colorado will be the better for it — as will the life of the media marketplace around him, that won't be going away anytime soon.

What it is and what it isn't

Journalism is as necessary as the pavement over which we drive, the rails over which we run, and the satellite transmissions that connect us to each other around this planet.

It's not the connection it was in centuries (or even decades) past.

Perhaps it never will be.

But like the democracy over which it guards, it is a collective entity that we ignore at our peril.

May journalism educators never lose sight of that bigger picture as we grind out our teaching, mentoring, correcting and inspiring.

History is a moment away. We can change it.

But pity the educator who believes that the process can be made more than institutional routine without the guidance of the Creator of all Truth.

She cried — sort of.

The ABC News video clip of Hillary Clinton, seated at a table, brandishing the microphone with the flick of a wrist — like the rock star some have made her out to be — is making waves across the country. Probably around the world.

Why?

Is it the pause, with that half-grin, half-sob, and a wisp of moisture in her eye?

Is it centuries of sexism rising from the depths of the American female psyche to burst onto the presidential campaign in quiet fury?

Is it because we're surprised that someone's talking candidly in a horse race that's been, well, exhausting?

I think it's because we suddenly caught a glimpse of reality — from a woman who, right there in front of us, has been figuring out who she is. It ain't about Bill anymore (if it ever really was), and it can't be about New York because, well, she's not really from there.

In that moment, at that table in New Hampshire, we saw something. And it was real — not pre-packaged, not scripted, not calculated (though if you look this clip up on YouTube a few times, you'll see how smoothly she moves from almost-lost-it to gotta-get-back-on-message. She's no dummy.

Don't expect to see the campaign pivot on that moment. It takes more than momentary candor in front of adoring crowds to make one fit for leadership on the national and international stage. We've got some hard watching and listening to do as this campaign season surges forward.

But we were seeing in the massive reaction (albeit brief, it's a long way to November) the symptoms of a nation yearning to put its heart and soul back into democracy. Young voters are showing up in droves at caucuses that used to be collections of oldsters. And like visionary young people tend to do, they're making their elders sit up and pay attention.

If predictions are correct, it's young voters that are going to swing this election. And it's about time. We live in a nation that has youthful vigor and brilliant outside-the-box brains driving its economy and best steps toward sanity and recovery at many levels. (And please get this: the young people I'm talking about aren't all white suburban kids. Some of the smartest have bilingual and bi-cultural abilities, in some cases learned overseas.)

Journalists, for all the flak they get, are pretty good at being watchdogs. And they were smart enough to have their cameras on and audio running when truth peeked out at them from Hillary Clinton.

Let's hope it happens again — in more places, with more people.

Commuting

The act of travel by train in California is a physical agility drill. It requires navigation skills, money to cover parking and fares, and a healthy sense of the inevitability of delay.



To reach one's destination, one must be willing to fight car and truck traffic to and from the station, there will likely be six flights of stairs to do (three and three down) before reaching the direction you need to go.

But the result is a hardy Californian. Or realtor signs in yards as people give up on commuting and just move closer to where they need to be.

Or they just move away -- to where the trains actually work or the driving is cake.