Op-Eds&CO.

[Richard Fiero]

Terrance wrote:
>My belief is that if an op-ed or column does not greatly upset a
>substantial number of people, the author has wasted the space. This is
>particularly true in economics, where many people have strong views and
>rather fewer have taken the trouble to think those views through - so
>that simply insisting on being clear-headed about an issue is usually
>enough to enrage many if not most of your readers.
>
>         --Paul Krugman--
>
>Paul Krugman has an op-ed in Friday's  NYT. It sucks. It's not
>upsetting.

Terrance's posts are traps that I'll happily wallow into.
Very funny. Krugman is no comic. Mr. Krugman is doing public 
policy from outside of government rather than from inside and 
is doing a great job. Mr. Krugman is far too wooden to be funny 
and so never tries. The above statement may have been Mr. 
Krugman's initial mission statement but this has been altered 
by his horror of current government machinations. His statement 
serves as good cover.
Mr. Krugman correctly called the '98 Asian financial crises 
some years before but takes no credit for it stating that it 
was a lucky guess. He's doing it again.

Fact: The biographical sketch for the Secretary of the Army reads in part:
"From 1990 to 2001, Mr. White was employed by Enron Corporation 
and held various senior executive positions."
Prior to Enron's collapse, the sketch read a bit differently:
"Secretary White also served as a member of Enron's Executive 
Committee and was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer for 
Enron Operations Corporation. He was also responsible for the 
Enron Engineering and Construction Company, which managed an 
extensive construction portfolio with domestic and international projects."
www.army.mil/leaders/Secarmy/Secarmy.htm
There is more:
"As Secretary of the Army, Secretary White has statutory 
responsibility for all matters relating to Army manpower, 
personnel, reserve affairs, installations, environmental 
issues, weapons systems and equipment acquisition, 
communications, and financial management. Secretary White is 
responsible for the department's annual budget of nearly $82 
billion. The Secretary leads a team of just over one million 
active duty, National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers and 
220,000 civilian employees, and has stewardship over 15 million acres of land."

>It's not humorous. Paul is wasting space. Why? Paul is a serious
>economist and he would never write such nonsense in one of his books or
>in a serious article on economics. It's an op-ed. Most of us read these
>things. They take little thought and they can be amusing. But we can't
>read too many of them just as we can't read comics all day long. Unless
>of course it's our job to read them or deliver them or whatever.
>
>I wonder about all this op-eding and on-line journalism and the internet
>and I think that the Drudging of stories is not good for us. Everyone
>has sources unknown and secret and people seem to be cutting and pasting
>speculations and rumors and calling it journalism. It's troublesome. I
>wonder too about how the online journalist, relying on on-line or
>cyberspace or Baedekered realities is the worst kind of tourist. Tom
>Friedman (like him or not) writes Op-Eds and books. He writes about the
>Middle East for the most part. He lived and worked there for a long
>time. You can read Friedman and know that he's lived there. But if
>you've never been to Brazil how can you write about it. Well, as readers
>of Pynchon we all know you can write wonderful fiction about places
>you've never been, but journalism is supposed to be more real. And there
>is something incestuous about the press and the way they talk about
>themselves. This one reported this many people and that one reported
>that his one reported and so on. Can't anyone give us the facts? Facts
>are not newsworthy I guess, but neither is naked pamphleteering and
>cyber googled on-line journalism.

 From the Prefatory Note to Warlock by Oakley Hall:
"The pursuit of truth, not of facts, is the business of fiction."