The YouTube Moment came at the end, when Jon Stewart devoted about 10 or 15 minutes to a serious speech. He spoke about how, unlike what you see on cable TV news and in Washington politics, Americans are mostly people who work together to solve problems.

On a windblown stage on a sunny afternoon, Stewart tried to make himself the voice of reason in American media. I think he succeeded, but in doing so I’m worried he ignored the role that passion—irrational, rude, confrontational passion—plays in making American work.

During his speech, Stewart played some footage of cars lining up for the Holland Lincoln Tunnel and used it as a symbol for America: People of all different backgrounds lining up and taking their turns to get through the darkness. Stewart noted there is the occasional driver who comes up on the shoulder and cuts people off, but that person is rare and scorned—not hired as an analyst. Stewart identified two problems that cause people to mistrust their fellow “drivers”: Cable television and Washington politics. (Of course, Stewart owes his success to both. His show airs on cable, and a large part of his material comes from ribbing politicians.)

I get Stewart’s point about how we all need to respect one another’s differences. But is the Lincoln Tunnel the America we want? A nation sitting in traffic, waiting patiently in the face of problems? Or do we want a place where people get fired up? This country is not just about solving things. It’s about inventing things. Our greatest writers, architects, engineers and businesspeople did not just set out to make improvements, they set out to create something awesome, to get famous, to make money. Some of the most beloved Americans left behind a trail of hurt feelings and enemies. Thomas Edison did not wait patiently in line for cars at the tunnel. (OK, literally he took the train and the ferry over from Jersey, since the tunnel wasn’t built yet.) He behaved totally unreasonably and irrationally, screwing his investors, taking credit where it wasn’t earned, flattening his competitors, and in doing so managed to bring electric lights to the masses. If he had been a rational man, a large part of the American story would have unfolded more slowly.

Stewart’s call for reason is right on if we’re limiting the conversation to politics. Our political leaders have strayed into dangerous territory lately with statements that slander Muslims and immigrants. Cable news is bad for rational discourse (but probably no worse than the pamphlets, newspapers, rallies and party machines in the last century).

Outside of politics, though, there’s a need for irrational actors. If Stewart himself had followed his own advice—shown restraint, respected everyone—his career probably wouldn’t be anywhere near where it is now, and the millions of people who enjoy his entertainment would have missed out. Sometimes you have to piss people off to get stuff done. And when someone is a jerk to you in America, you sometimes have to be a jerk back.

Not that The Daily Show is any less funny or pointed when Jon Stewart acts righteous. The fact that Stewart can inspire this kind of rally, with this kind of high-quality conversation, is a testament to his skill as a thinker, orator and entertainer.

Update: Here’s a video of the speech:

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

I love it because it goes in for the kill with just five brutal words: “John Raese’s ideas are crazy!”

Craziness. That’s why the midterm election this year is so different from campaigns in the past. Thanks to the Tea Party and Palin-inspired D.I.Y. politics, there are candidates for national office who should never have made it that far. The Tea Party national candidates are inexperienced, lost, cartwheeling, and spouting ideas that are, yes, crazy. Consider:

• Stephen Borden, a Republican running for Congress in Texas, refused to rule out a violent overthrow of the government if the election doesn’t go his way.
• The Republican candidate for governor of Colorado, Dan Maes, opposed a local program to encourage bicycling because it “could threaten our personal freedoms” and it’s “part of a greater strategy to rein in American cities under a United Nations treaty.”
• Christine O’Donnell, the Delaware Republican candidate for Senate, recently sounded unsure if our Constitution guarantees separation of church and state.
• In Colorado, Republican candidate for Congress Ken Buck actually opposes separation of church and state.
• In Nevada, Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for Senate, expressed concern that Dearborn, Michigan was under “Sharia” law.
• Kentucky Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul supports abolishing the U.S. Department of Education because, “I don’t like the idea of somebody in Washington deciding that Susie has two mommies is an appropriate family situation and should be taught to my kindergardener at school.”
• In Utah, Republican candidate for Senate Mike Lee opposes birthright citizenship.
• In Alaska, Republican Senate candidate Joe Miller cited East Germany as a good example of border security, saying, “We have the capacity to, as a great nation, secure the border. If East Germany could, we could.”

There’s not much else to say, really, other than these ideas are crazy. I keep thinking of Barney Frank’s famous line: ”Trying to argue with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it.”

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Also: Pled quilty?

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

The It Gets Better Project is so good, so spot-on, that it ought to be celebrated as a triumph of Internet video, social media and even the English language. I can’t find one damn reason to be cynical about it.

You’ve probably seen at least a piece of this campaign. It’s an online media project started last month in response to a series of suicides by gay youth who were bullied in school. Writer Dan Savage started a website and YouTube channel seeking videos of adults counseling kids to hang in there, it’s going to get better. Savage recorded the first video with his husband, and promoted it in Savage Love, his nationally published sex column.

The site describes the mission in three succinct sentences:

“Many LGBT youth can’t picture what their lives might be like as openly gay adults. They can’t imagine a future for themselves. So let’s show them what our lives are like, let’s show them what the future may hold in store for them.”

Some earnest LGBT supporters have criticized it as just another act of “raising awareness”—a publicity campaign that spreads a message but doesn’t solve anything. I disagree. The problem of kids being bullied into suicide is one of those rare problems that can actually be improved directly and immediately through words.

Middle and high school is a terrible time. I got teased for being a nerd. But I had good parents, teachers, church members, and Boy Scout leaders who consistently told me people who get picked on in school end up doing well as adults. I got the support I needed. Gay kids are systemically denied that support.

The It Gets Better Project has led to an outpouring of videos from adults of all sexual orientations assuring those kids struggling with bad times that they’ll make it through. President Obama recorded one. Governor Patterson recorded one. Tim Gunn recorded one. So have a lot of other celebrities. But the best ones are by people you’ve never heard of. In the last 11 days, the video of Joel Burns delivering his It Gets Better speech at a Fort Worth city council meeting has been played over 2 million times.

The campaign has also, impressively, caught on among clergy. (I chose to embed a video of Bishop Gene Robinson at the top of this post.) Some of the It Gets Better videos are nothing more or less than small-town pastors and rabbis sitting in their studies, speaking into webcams, telling gay kids that God loves them as they are. Who would have guessed it would take Dan Savage to finally give these good people a national platform!

The genius of the It Gets Better Project is that it carries a near-universal message between generations. It’s a precise, three-word incantation that almost every adult understands, and that almost every child still needs to learn. It’s like the time machine we all wish we could use to give advice to the younger version of ourselves. Saying “It gets better” demonstrates compassion and understanding. How many lives has this phrase already saved?

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

• Mike Huckabee: “NPR has discredited itself as a forum for free speech and a protection of the First Amendment rights of all and has solidified itself as the purveyor of politically correct pabulum and protector of views that lean left…. It is time for the taxpayers to start making cuts to federal spending, and I encourage the new Congress to start with NPR.”
• Sarah Palin: “If NPR is unable to tolerate an honest debate about an issue as important as Islamic terrorism, then it’s time for ‘National Public Radio’ to become ‘National Private Radio.’”
• Some dude on Huffington: “It’s clear that NPR would rather play consistently to the left than reach a balanced audience. And for that, they deserve to be pushed away from the public trough.”

I’ve never been a big fan of using tax money to support media programming; its too close to the state-run media in countries with less freedom of speech. But the truth is, in the U.S., public radio hardly gets any tax money. NPR gets no tax money directly. Most of NPR’s revenue comes from private donations. Federal money is funneled through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which doles out grants to local stations, which can use it to pay their NPR dues. How much did the CPB budget for radio this year? $90.5 million. That’s nothing.

I’ve become interested in data visualization, so just for fun, here’s a quick and dirty chart illustrating the amount of tax money spent on public radio compared to a few other choice areas. I threw News Corp’s annual revenues in for good measure. All numbers (except the TARP spending) are from FY 2010.

Sources: 2010 Federal Budget, ProPublica, News Corp. financials, 2010 Federal HHS Budget, Taxpayers for Common Sense, CPB.

Another thought: Fox News has been advancing the narrative that Congress should investigate and defund NPR, with Bill O’Reilly and other commentators framing the federal funding of NPR as tilting the playing field against private broadcasters. So here’s another piece of math if you want it: Federal spending on public radio is less than 0.28% of News Corp’s annual revenue.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

The project that Christie killed yesterday is a second rail tunnel under the Hudson River. It would add capacity to the badly overcrowded and economically vital Northeast Corridor. I ride this route often and I’m surely not the only one tired of sitting in Secaucus going nowhere while we wait for a train ahead to clear the only existing tunnel—built in 1910. Construction began on the new tunnel earlier this year, with funding by the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Port Authority, and the state of New Jersey. Yet Christie determined he had the power to shut it down. “The ARC project will be terminated and staff will immediately begin an expeditious and orderly shutdown of the project,” the governor declared.

What else has the governor been up to?

Here’s Gov. Christie earlier this week at a campaign event in Wisconsin. (This picture is from a video.) On the right is Scott Walker, Republican candidate for governor of Wisconsin. Walker’s campaign runs a web site at www.notrain.com, in which he protests an $810 million federal project to fund a passenger rail project in his state. Walker wants none of it. His campaign commercial calls the unbuilt rail project a “boondoggle.” “We’ll stop this train,” Walker says.

Next, here’s Christie campaigning last month with John Kasich, the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio. In August, Kasich was asked his opinion about a rail system in Ohio that’s being funded with $400 million in federal money. He said, “It’s not going to happen when I become governor, OK?… If you want that train, I hope you can get over that and vote for me anyway, but you’re not going to get that train.”

And here’s a picture of Christie with Meg Whitman, candidate for governor of California, on September 22, from Whitman’s web site. Whitman also opposes a major passenger rail project in her state that’s been decades in the making. Her campaign position was highlighted in a New York Times article this week about state-level politicians opposing federal rail projects.

What the hell is going on? Opposition to trains is not some kind of Tea Party platform. You aren’t hearing anybody talk about it on Fox News or AM radio. There’s little if any populist rage against trains. Rail improvements have bipartisan support at the federal level. Trains make sense and have a proven record of helping boost local economies; they’re pork projects in the best sense of the word. Christie, especially, serves a constituency in New Jersey that depends on trains to get around every day. Additionally, in my experience, state politicians are deeply reluctant to kill projects that divert federal funds to local construction companies. And even if trains aren’t your favorite thing, and even if you think they require too much taxpayer money, they’re certainly cheaper than highways.

Could it be these candidates oppose trains simply because the Obama administration likes them? Could it be to make Democrats look like uncool weenies by forcing them to talk about how great trains are? That seems like a risky strategy. It’s rare to reject cash out of simple political spite.

I wonder if, instead, we’re seeing a replay of the Great American Streetcar Scandal scenario, in which automotive interests conspired to kill our streetcar systems. This time it might not be Detroit, exactly, since the big U.S. auto companies are in too politically sensitive of a situation right now (especially with G.M. basically controlled by the government). But oil companies wield political influence. So do car dealerships and their associations. Are there people who actually think trains could be so successful they reduce the number of cars on the road and the amount of gasoline consumed?

Whatever the case, Christie is the thread that connects the anti-train candidates, and he’s spreading his franchise nationwide.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Today I’m thinking about a few hours I spent on a military base on September 11, 2001. I was into my second week on the job as a news reporter for The Carlisle Sentinel newspaper in Pennsylvania.

We watched the footage on CNN in the newsroom for a few minutes, then I was sent to gather reporting from one of our local military bases for the September 12 paper. Ultimately I contributed quotes and facts to three stories as part of the paper’s reporting team. One story was about the military, another about churches, the third about schools. Nine years later, the parts of those stories that stand out most to me are the quotes from the military professors I interviewed at the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania. Keep in mind these quotes all came within a few hours of the attacks:

“As soon as we saw the film this morning of the second aircraft hitting the tower, it was clear almost immediately what was going on,” said Lt. Col. Thomas T. Smith, garrison commander [of the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle].

Smith said the barracks is following a standard plan for heightened security and also received special instructions from Washington. …

At the War College, where military officers learn about situations such as terrorist attacks, television sets were tuned to the news in most classrooms. In an office Tuesday morning, professors Bill Lord and Greg Baxter stood watching TV pictures of plumes of smoke over the New York skyline.

“It’s apparently a well-coordinated attack,” Lord said.

“Which reveals something about who may have done it,” Baxter added. “This was not amateur hour.”

When the report came through of the plane crash at the Pentagon, Lord recalled when he worked there six years ago. Based on the TV footage, he could identify which offices were hit.

Col. Mike Colpo, director of the department of military assistance to civilian authorities, said this will likely become an example of how military personnel help with disaster response tasks such as clearing rubble and providing drinking water….

Speaking to reporters outside the barracks, Professor Robin Dorff noted the trends in American terrorism and the difficulty in reacting to them.

“Anger is probably going to be the dominant emotion,” said Dorff, chairman of the college’s department of national security and strategy.

“A deliberate and analytical approach to this is what’s warranted,” he said.

Dorff said the attacks will likely cause further debate about which anti-terrorism steps are acceptable and which infringe on people’s liberties.

Technology, such as the Internet, has made it easier for terrorist groups to organize large-scale attacks, Dorff said.

“The benefits we get from the information age,” he said, “are also beneficial to those who want to do us harm.”

Wow. While everybody else was freaking out, these calm military experts accurately identified the next 9 year’s worth of 9/11 story arcs—the war on terror, disaster response, civil liberties, information control. We don’t do enough to celebrate people who make accurate predictions and who spot important ideas first. If we measured people by what they actually knew, and how good they were in the past at figuring things out, we’d pay more attention to military history wonks—like these professors in my story. And maybe we’d pay less attention to hosts of cable TV talk shows, Alaskan politicians, and crazy pastors in Florida.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

(Updated 8:19 p.m. ET) A producer from the BBC interviewed me Friday for a segment on the Islamic Center near Ground Zero. You can watch the video above or see it on the BBC News web site.

This was the latest response to my surprisingly popular “Hallowed Ground” photo essay. The BBC producer who filmed and edited this segment, Ramón J. Goni, wrote to me last week and asked if I would participate in an interview. I was impressed by his clips and his professionalism. I took Friday morning off from work to do the interview. The segment is what’s called, in BBC jargon, a “self authored” piece, in which the subject (me) talks for a few minutes without interruption. This was the best of all possible scenarios for me. I also means that where I sound unsure of myself or trip over a word, that’s exactly how it went down—it’s a very accurate edit of the interview. Ramón asked incisive questions but didn’t pressure me to say anything I didn’t mean. He asked me to walk past some of the places I photographed on the blog and say my thoughts about each one. I only declined one of his suggestions, which was to walk past an existing mosque in the neighborhood on Warren Street, which I didn’t photograph for my original post. I told him I didn’t have anything to say about it. (It’s not really my business.)

If you’re following the news, you know the New York City Muslim community center is still the story of the moment and shows no signs of simmering down. For much of today my interview has been the most-watched video on the BBC News web site. My original post has been viewed about 380,000 times. I’ve received about 250 e-mails in response to it. The overwhelming majority have been in support of my position that to disallow this Muslim center would be an unfair act of religious discrimination. I’m pretty sure my photos inspired a political cartoon. The Newsbusters blog ran one of my photos and essentially accused me of starting a talking point. Wow.

Plenty of other commentators have done a fine job of articulating a defense for religious freedom in New York City. I’m proud of everything I’ve written on this subject, and I’m ready to move on to other topics.

Previous posts:

• July 14: We’re better than this, really
• August 16: “Hallowed Ground”
• August 17: The uplifting response to my Ground Zero post

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

In America, we are all free agents. We can move from city to city, and if one city offers more appeal than another, we should go there. It’s how many of my friends and I ended up in New York. It’s good economics; theoretically a mobile workforce should mean higher employment and better pay for workers, since people are empowered to seek out jobs anywhere.

But what about the small city that gets abandoned by its best people, who are lured away like moths to bright lights? How is that fair? Doesn’t a hero owe his hometown some loyalty?

Fortunately, there’s an app for that. It’s called the local-boy-makes-good narrative. It’s one of the all-time classic stories. Nobody has done a better job of exploiting that narrative in recent years than “American Idol,” the most successful TV show of the decade. Your shining star grows up and leaves town, and the whole town follows her career’s every move.

Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert doesn’t see it that way. In a bizarre and bitter open letter posted last night (and set in Comic Sans on NBA.com!), Gilbert slams the player who helped make him rich.

You can tell the letter’s going to be a strange one simply by its salutation, complete with semicolon: “Dear Cleveland, All Of Northeast Ohio and Cleveland Cavaliers Supporters Wherever You May Be Tonight;”

Gilbert gets an A+ for showmanship and boosterism, but I think he falls down with a couple of paragraphs attacking LeBron:

“If you thought we were motivated before tonight to bring the hardware to Cleveland, I can tell you that this shameful display of selfishness and betrayal by one of our very own has shifted our ‘motivation’ to previously unknown and previously never experienced levels.
…
“This shocking act of disloyalty from our home grown ‘chosen one’ sends the exact opposite lesson of what we would want our children to learn. And ‘who’ we would want them to grow-up to become.”

No. Actually, LeBron sends a good message to children: Train hard. Be good. Make yourself wanted. And then call your own shots.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.