Jenny Hare, a wonderful artist from England with a beautiful blog, wrote me this morning to talk about photo I put up the other day, it zeroed in on the words “hope” and Jenny assumed I painted it, I did not. The artist is named LV Hull, a prolific folk artist who works and lives in Mississippi.
The words “hope” are actually part of a larger work.
Maria bought it during a trip through the South some years ago.
The point of her painting, in the form of a cross, is that wherever there is despair, there is also hope.
Above is the entire artwork, it sits out on our back porch, I am thinking of moving it into my study.
I’m reading a wonderful book about the Underground Railroad – titled The Underground Railroad – by Colson Whithead, it is a novel, it won the National Book Award and deservedly so, it is riveting and challenging and disturbing.
I was struck by the hope so many slaves clung to in the midst of unimaginable degradation and suffering, so much worse than the whiners in our political campaign on both sides have experienced. On her blog, Jenny, a former journalist and an author, wrote about the challenging of hope as an artist or creative person.
She panicked when she started work as a reporter, but a friend came over and told her to “Just write…anything, doesn’t matter what, just type something and you’ll be fine.”
It was good advice, and Jenny took it, it got her going. It still does. My photo of LV’s cross touched Jenny the other.
“When I began to paint just now,” Jenny wrote on her blog,”I realized that I was itching first to write. I asked the question, what do you want to write, Jenny? The answer was just that. Hope.”
Jenny wrote eloquently about the struggle of the artist and the creative to keep hope alive while also living securely in the world. I know this feeling. When you work alone, there is really no one to prop you up but you. I often write a book chapter and ask myself why anyone will care what I say, or sometimes dread rejection and irrelevance.
It is up to me to find hope. I feel the same way about the politics of the country now. I am hopeful, good things come in all sorts of unexpected and unpredictable ways. I read about a teacher who has started a blog to spot fake and hateful news and alert advertisers to the fact that their ads are supporting bigotry and hatred. Often, he found, the advertisers, who give money to online marketers, don’t know, and he has already been responsible for having 400 ads pulled from racist and anti-semitic websites.
He was shocked by his own success, one teacher sitting at his computer.
I think of one of the characters in Whitehead’s novel, she has seen her husband and family sold off, a friend have his hand chopped off for stealing, and lost many friends to starvation and overwork. She has been degraded and abused in every imaginable way, but she is grateful to be alive, and clings every day to her belief in a better life, a better future, a just world.
If she could do it (she is based on a real person), I can certainly do it in America in 2017. My own people were murdered and enslaved for many years, and here I am living a free and better life. I am grateful for that every day, no politician is going to take that from me.
Hope powers my writing, my blog, my photography, my love for Maria. I never dreamed that I would find love, I found it when I was 68. I never gave up on hoping for it. One day I might even have a raging international best-selling book. One can hope.
Jenny thanked me for writing about hope. “Now I will paint for the sheer, joyous, love of it and my heart is already there on the canvas waiting for me to begin.
I loved Jenny’s paintings, they are beautiful and she has sold many of them. I love her discovery and re-discovery of hope. I commit myself to hope every single day, hope and creativity are two of the most important things in the world. They can life me up and they can lift others up.
How nice my photographs can lift up spirits so far away. They are angels, every one of them heading out into the world to do good. That’s why they are free.
There is good work to be done. My refugee family is arriving soon, and I am eager to mentor and support them, and hopefully show them as the vulnerable and good human beings they are, not as the demons some cast them as being. They have suffered enough.
Hope And Creativity: W.C. Fields Mold. One Of My Muses
I stayed up to watch the Golden Gloves last night, I am happy to say I’ve seen Moonlight, La-La-Land (twice) and Manchester-By-The-Sea and was rooting for all three of them. They all did well.
I was touched by Emma Stone’s comment that La-La-Land was that hope and creativity are two of the most important things in the world, and that was what the movie was all about. I thought so too, which is why I cried several times during the movie. That is what my life is about.
Here’s to those who dream, I have been a dreamer all of my life, and what a mess Ive made sometimes.
The movie stirred up the hope in me, I think the most hopeful thing about these times is all of the feeling and emotions – many of them compassionate and very human – that are being stirred up all around. We are very much alive these days, and that is a great gift. I see that so many of us were asleep, or at least, in a daze.
I was also touched by Meryl Streep’s defense of journalists and the importance of a free and independent press. I was a reporter and editor for much of my life, blessed to work at some of the best media organizations in the county – the Boston Globe, The Washington Post, the New York Times, CBS News, the Dallas Times-Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Rolling Stone, Wired – and with some of the best journalists in the country, so many of whom inspired and taught me.
I am a book writer and blogger now, but I guess it’s like being a cop or a soldier, or firefighter, once a journalist, always a journalist, and my love of journalism has shaped me and never left me.
No one defends the press much these days, the ideologues on the left think they are tame and acquiescent, the ideologues on the right have been successful at portraying reporters as dishonest, biased, unfailingly liberal and untrustworthy.
It is common to hear phrases like the “dishonest” or “mainstream” media. The wealthiest and most successful media organizations today – Fox News, Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh and many others – are quite mainstream and in recent years, more powerful and wealthy than the much demonized “conventional” press. The dread New York Times is struggling to break even, Fox News will make more than $1 billion dollars this year.
Good for them, they earned it. But I don’t really see Sean Hannity or Limbaugh as being on the fringe, as vulnerable victims. We are becoming a nation of victims and whiners. The most vulnerable reporters I know where the ones being threatened and insulted and followed and jeered at political rallies last year.
I think when you make a billion dollars and lead the cable news ratings several years in a row, you are pretty mainstream. The New York Times would be delighted to be that mainstream, or that powerful.
The most effective way to keep people distracted, passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion – only the “left” and the “right” are allowed in our media, and to allow vigorous debate within that narrow range. We are fooled into thinking we are free, when the truth is we are simply being manipulated and anesthetized.
To be mainstream means: “the ideas, attitudes, or activities that are regarded as normal or conventional, the dominant, trend in opinion, fashion, or the arts.” If you want to consider a marginalized or fringe journalist, out of the mainstream, consider the very brilliant Noam Chomsky, one of our most loved and respected political observers. You will never see him on CNN or Fox News, that is what it means to be “mainstream.”
I worked with hundreds of journalists, and know many journalists today.I am a journalist, through and through, as well as an author.
I do not know of one that is dishonest, and very few who are especially political. If we have learned nothing else this year, it is that we ought not to ignore or ridicule the beliefs of others simply because they carry a different “label” than we do. I am open to ideas from people who call themselves conservatives and people who call themselves progressive.
We ought not be looking for heroes or Kings or Gods, or ideas from the “left” or the”right,” we should instead be looking for good ideas.
Journalism does not draw ideologues. Journalism tends to draw middle-class outsiders like me who don’t want to go to law or medical school or work in Silicon Valley. We are often people who would like to make a difference, and who are happy to watch, rather than participate. We never talked politics much in the newsrooms where I worked, I would guess most reporters leaned towards the Democratic Party, we were often the children of depression survivors or immigrants, and they tended to love FDR.
We are often kind of ghoulish, but rarely fanatics.
We were taught that it was a journalistic crime to falsify information, we were taught to revere facts, not opinion.
When opinion crept into stories, as it sometimes did, there was usually an outcry or a reprimand. Reporters who did that invariably ended up in politics, not journalism.Reporters who were ideologically biased were rarely successful, to work as a journalist you had to have access to everyone, that was how you were judged.
Detachment is not that hard, really, I covered many politicians – certainly many Republicans and conservatives – and I never had one complain to me that I was dishonest, or too “liberal” to be believed, or told that the “mainstream” media, whatever that is, was never to be trusted. I was threatened many times, and punched more than once.
Streep was correct, think, in saying we need a free and fractious press. I uncovered a lot of serious wrong doing and abuse in my time as a reporter, I sent some people to jail and exposed corrupt and fraudulent and wasteful practices in government, I am very proud of that. I helped people who were abused by the police or cheated by government agencies.
The country’s founders had a free press very much in mind when they wrote the First Amendment, journalism was seen as a critical check and balance in a process designed to keep people remain free. In Washington, there is much hypocritical talk about the Constitution from people who seem not to have read it, just as so many so called religious leaders invoke Jesus while seeming to know nothing about him.
The Constitution is very clear about free speech and journalism: we need it, and it must be protected.
When the New York Carriage Horse trade was being persecuted and wronged by an arrogant mayor and dishonest animal rights activists, it was the press that finally exposed the lies and distortions and saved the lives of hundreds of horses and the jobs of hundreds of people. Without a free press, the carriage trade would have been destroyed.
I was taught to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted.
In a nation where so much power now lies in the hands of one political party and one ideology, the role of the media has never been more critical. It isn’t that the government is evil and needs to be overturned, it is that the government is very powerful and it needs to be watched and challenged and questioned.
When people call reporters scum, and ridicule them as dishonest, or make fun of their looks, and encourage others to insult or attack them, they are not just challenging a few newspapers or TV networks, they are challenging the very idea of a democratic system. The press is just as important as the judiciary or the branches of Congress, if it is muted or crippled or undermined, there will be no one to make sure that people are protected from power – that was the whole point of the American Experience.
“If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise,” wrote Chomsky, “we don’t believe in it all.”
People have the right to cheer for Donald Trump at his rallies, Meryl Streep has the right to challenge him at the Golden Globes. What’s the big deal? Why is one dishonest and treasonous, the other simple free speech?
I write this in honor of the many admirable, ethical and conscientious people I worked with, it is hard to see them libeled in so reckless a way. And to celebrate the very honorable and important tradition of a free and outspoken press. Journalists have saved many lives, curbed the arrogance of power, exposed much corruption, called many people to account for wrongdoing. I will never be ashamed of that.
I don’t know what kind of President Donald Trump will be, I do know he has no grasp or understanding of the role of a free press in American political life.That is a very serious failing.
Questioning him or challenging him or correcting him is not blasphemy, it is not treasonous or biased or dishonest. He does not need to whine and strike out every time he is criticized, that is what nine-year-olds do, not Presidents.
Presidents are criticized a lot, by all kinds of people. For his sake and ours, I hope Donald Trump grows a thicker skin and calmer head.
Challenge is the very purpose of journalism. I am questioned every day about what I write on my blog, I most often don’t like it, but I do respect it and permit it. It often challenges me to think more deeply about what I do, and to change my behavior or take responsibility for my mistakes.
I have sometimes abused my position as a writer, I have been called on it and checked.
I know I need this, even if I’d rather be praised. And I am not a person in any real kind of power.
So thanks to Streep for speaking up for journalists. I wish more people would do the same. Most of them are just like you people reading this, hard-working and conscientious family people, people who love their work and their country. They are not, as a rule, dishonest at all, it is a poor choice of careers for people looking to get rich.
I was a media critic, I see the grave shortcomings in the press, just as I see the shortcomings in many of the people who seek elective office, often for the most selfish and greedy of reasons. Journalism is not a perfect profession, any more than politics.
For more than 200 years, journalists have worked to keep power in check, to give the people some venue for redress against mighty corporations, lobbyists, moguls and demagogues. I think we are beginning to understand what is lost when journalism fails.
Take a look at the Committee To Protect Journalists. When you protect journalism, you protect democracy, your own freedom and that of your children and neighbors and friends.
I belong to the CPJ, see if you might want to help out as well. I think Streep is correct, it will be needed.
