New Iowa Truth Revealed

                                                                                           

In Iowa?

 

Yes, in Iowa, where the lightly tasked U.S. Census Bureau counts around three million people while the much-busier United States Department of Agriculture counts around seventeen million hogs.

 

In Iowa, where the highest point in the state is in someone’s feedlot and where the term “square mile” finds its deepest meaning.

 

In Iowa, where the state’s Supreme Court yesterday said a 1998 law defining marriage as only possible between persons of the opposite sex was blatantly unconstitutional, violating equal protection provisions. The ruling was unanimous.

 

The Iowa court’s common sense on the explosively divisive gay marriage issue moves the debate from the Coasties in California and Massachusetts to the heartland. And while there’s certain to be chest-thumping and posturing from all sides, the hope is that the heartland’s bone-deep common sense will eventually drop the issue and get back to something productive, like hogs.

 

If  Iowa manages it, the rest of us should give it a try.

 

A great deal of human misery has come from our nasty habit of treating “different” and “evil” as synonyms. It becomes an especially virulent affliction when it springs from some revealed truth of whatever brand. Then the folks who want to make outcasts of those who are different can wrap themselves in the Truth Revealer’s Will.

 

It allows them to scream “pervert!” in front of the home of a committed gay couple and then go back to their own homes to oil up the mink-lined handcuffs, secure in the knowledge that the Truth Revealer approves.

 

So here’s a proposed New Iowa Revealed Truth, revealed to me in front of this computer keyboard, which is less dramatic but lots more comfortable than from a mountaintop burning bush or a visit from an angel:

 

Mind Your Own Business and Mind Your Manners

 

That pretty much covers the ground. I happen to like women, but that’s my business. If you’re a guy who likes men or a gal who likes women or an equal-opportunity type, that’s your business. Minding our own business mandates that each of us doesn’t care what the other does, as long as it doesn’t interfere with what we do.

 

The second part is equally important. Talking in public about what you and anyone else do in private is just bad manners. If you enjoy whatever you do, good for you –but keep it to yourself. Talking in public about what others do is also bad manners, whether it’s to cheer, condemn or offer technical pointers. Keep it to yourself.

Like many revealed truths before it, the New Iowa Revealed Truth will be easier in revelation than in practice, but it’s worth a shot.

 

In Iowa.

 

And beyond.

 

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News-Fish In A Waterless Ocean. . .

 

Pale and growing cold as the lifeblood of readers and advertisers drains from them, newspapers are flopping about trying to find the mistake that laid them low.

 

Dinosaurs millions of year ago probably asked the same question, and in both cases, the answer is that they made no mistake, did nothing terribly wrong. The dinosaurs disappeared when the world around them changed dramatically through no fault of their own, and daily printed newspapers are meeting the same fate.

 

Paleontologists speculate about dinosaurs and climate change, but with newspapers, it’s community change, and the change is that the geography-based news community is disappearing, leaving newspapers like fish in an ocean going back to component hydrogen and oxygen atoms.

 

Look at the roll call of the dead and you’ll notice that they’re all tied to a place. RIP the (Denver) Rocky Mountain News, the Cincinnati Post, the Albuquerque Tribune and whoever follows this week or next. Like all newspapers, they were of, by, for and about a geographic community. As Wikipedia says, “Traditionally a "community" has been defined as a group of interacting people living in a common location.”

 

Folks interacted in a common location because it was a major pain and expense to interact much beyond a circle of 20-25 miles. Newspapers fostered that sense of community and fed upon it, telling readers about their own doings and those of outsiders who might affect them. Those readers in turn were offered to advertisers. Newspapers collected from both.

 

There were flaws. If you were peddling cars, you hoped to reach the couple thousand or so readers in a newspaper’s hundred-thousand circulation who were looking for cars – but to do so, you paid to reach everyone. Or you might subscribe to the newspaper because you liked the sports section, even though you seldom read the other sections but paid for them anyway.

 

It was like a couple whose kids were long grown paying real estate taxes to support local schools – they got no direct benefit, but it supported the community. As the folk saying put it “It goes with the territory.”

 

Now the folk ought to update that saying to “There goes the territory,” and with it the base for the editorial and marketing scheme that supported newspapers so profitably for so long.

 

The internet enables the extremely economical transfer of information without regard to geography and forms “communities” the same way. Politico.com serves the political junkie community whether they are on K Street or Kodiak Island. It has a large audience. Click on the web site button it labels “Community” and you’ll find forums about all flavors and subsets of politics, none of them tied to a particular location except incidentally.

 

But as a reader, you’re not likely to find sports, home and garden or any of the other one-size-fits-all trappings of a community-focused newspaper. Nor, as an advertiser, are you forced to pay to reach those who very likely aren’t interested in your product.

 

And if you’re running the place, you aren’t paying for all that content that might or should interest some segment of your geographic readership. You’re just producing the content that you’re rock-solid, damned-straight sure will interest your readership community. Plus, that’s a certainty easily checked.

 

A business model that dumps barely sorted content on a community defined by geography can’t compete for very long with a business model that matches both editorial and advertising content to interest-defined communities.

 

Maybe some newspapers will adapt and survive, but consider: some scientist think that chicken you’re roasting for dinner is a dinosaur that adapted and survived.  A chicken, of course, is insignificant next to a Tyrannosaurus Rex – except that the chicken survives and Rex doesn’t.

 

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Maybe It’s The New Jersey Water. . .

 

Every state has official moles touting their hills as mountains, but New Jersey is often specially blessed.

 

The latest gift comes from Passaic County, where authorities were able to tear themselves away from prosecuting murder, theft, corruption and other routine stuff to save public morals by arresting a 14-year-old Clifton girl.

 

She posted “explicit” pictures of herself on MySpace.com to impress her boyfriend. You know – “explicit” as in “naked.” It’s not clear whether or not her boyfriend was impressed, or even noticed, but the Associated Press reported that word reached the Passaic County Sheriff’s Office, which arrested the teen and charged her with possession of child pornography and distribution of child pornography.

 

Which makes perfect sense if you realize that she is, after all, a child – and if your IQ and the caliber of your sidearm have the same number. The AP quoted a Bill Maer, identified as a sheriff’s spokesman, as saying “We consider this case a wake-up call to parents.”

 

It is a wake-up call. It should alert parents that dumb as the things their teens do might be, elected officials stand ready to do things even dumber. Those charges are felony charges. They carry the possibility of serious prison time and having to register as a sex offender.

 

The behavior in question is called “sexting,” a variant of “texting.”  Texting is what’s going on when you see kids courting serious thumb injury by conversing via cellphone text with friends three feet away. Sexting’s main focus isn’t the thumbs. Similar cases have popped up in other states.

 

If you subtract the high-tech novelty aspect, you’re left with an example of teen girls and boys discovering that their bodies are mutually interesting and really nifty playgrounds. That usually comes well before the discovery of playground rules and consequences.

 

Which is where parents come in. Or at least they did in the past, when teens deprived of high-tech venues had to get along with spin-the-bottle, skinny-dipping, strip-poker, and other chances to swap hormones, at least until caught by parents who raised the roof and lowered the boom.

 

But letting parents ground kids without internet or cell phone connections is a common-sense response, which means it won’t be considered by the crusaders of the Passaic County Sheriff’s Office.

 

Besides, they’re probably busy organizing a squad to bust toddlers playing doctor.

 

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