Justin Bieberlake or Justin Timberbieb? The Plight of the Journalist In Me
Why my penchant for criticism? I need to examine this penchant! My criticism always puts me in the position of judgment, as if I’m sitting on a throne.
(I’m old enough now to remember Henry Miller writing when I was old enough to read Henry Miller. “The Earth is a paradise, the only one we will ever know. We will realize it the moment we open our eyes. We don’t have to make it a paradise—it is one. We have only to make ourselves fit to inhabit it.”)
Most journalism is dog food. I don’t say this with any penchant toward disparagement, only with a fondness for both journalism and dogs. There are some very good journalists practicing journalism today; Roger Cohen and George Packer come to mind and we’re lucky to have them and others like them, the kind of journalist’s who get-beneath-the-surface of a reader’s skin. A good journalist is perforce a philosopher, a good journalist must make himself or herself overcast enough to emulate a philosopher pursuing the truth rather than pandering to propaganda.
Reading as much journalism as I invariably do, so much of it feels as if I’m traveling with a small child who’s 6-years old—it doesn’t matter if it’s a little boy or a little girl, one holding their doll and the other holding their stuffed dog. (It's curious about children, how they can be both so open to experience and so closed as to be impenetrable).
I confess: I sometimes catch myself reading catchy, pop journalism to the degree where I can no longer actually distinguish whether I’m reading about Justin Bieberlake or Justin Timberbieb or listening to their lousy music: they’re both the same person to me, drained of their vital juices, pickled in popular culture so they can perform on the pages of People Magazine or Facebook etc. get arrested, sell-out giant arenas, gain more even more and more followers on social media…
Reading too much undistinguished, junk journalism, I’m trying to take the cure by switching to philosophy. It’s here at the intersection of Ontology and Epistemology where I receive the liveliest reports. Epistemology is most interesting to me, ‘the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion’. Philosophy is subterranean, earthbound, interstellar. A good philosopher is also a journalist other journalists could actually hope to emulate.
The work of Hannah Arendt whose book, one of many, is titled, “Men in Dark Times”, is always worth reading. One of Arendt’s essays therein—the essay on Herman Broch—remains a favorite of mine, far beyond the precinct of criticism. Arendt’s a philosopher who never turned her back on journalism.