Local Bias: Benjamin Franklin

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Wasserman Disputes Fundamentalist Propaganda

Published on Saturday, February 13, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
Our Founders were NOT Fundamentalists

by Harvey Wasserman
"God made the idiot for practice, and then He made the school board." --Mark Twain

Tomorrow's New York Times Sunday Magazine highlights yet another mob of extremists using the Texas School Board to baptize our children's textbooks.

This endless, ever-angry escalating assault on our Constitution by crusading theocrats could be obliterated with the effective incantation of two names: Benjamin Franklin, and Deganawidah.

But first, let's do some history:

1. Actual Founder-Presidents #2 through #6---John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe and John Quincy Adams---were all freethinking Deists and Unitarians; what Christian precepts they embraced were moderate, tolerant and open-minded.

2. Actual Founder-President #1, George Washington, became an Anglican as required for original military service under the British, and occasionally quoted scripture. But he vehemently opposed any church-state union. In a 1790 letter to the Jews of Truro, he wrote: The "Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistances, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens." A 1796 treaty he signed says "the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." Washington rarely went to church and by some accounts refused last religious rites.

3. Washington was also the nation's leading brewer, and since most Americans drank much beer (water could be lethal in the cities) they regularly trembled before the keg, not the altar. Like Washington, Jefferson and Madison, virtually all American farmers raised hemp and its variations.

4. Jefferson produced a personal Bible from which he edited out all reference to the "miraculous" from the life of Jesus, whom he considered both an activist and a mortal.

5. Tom Paine's COMMON SENSE sparked the Revolution with nary a mention of Jesus or Christianity. His Deist Creator established the laws of Nature, endowed humans with Free Will, then left.

6. The Constitution never mentions the words "Christian" or "Jesus" or "Christ."

7. Revolutionary America was filled with Christians whose commitment to toleration and diversity was completely adverse to the violent, racist, misogynist, anti-sex theocratic Puritans whose "City on the Hill" meant a totalitarian state. Inspirational preachers like Rhode Island's Roger Williams and religious groups like the Quakers envisioned a nation built on tolerance and love for all.

8. The US was founded less on Judeo-Christian beliefs than on the Greco-Roman love for dialog and reason. There are no contemporary portraits of any Founder wearing a crucifix or church garb. But Washington was famously painted half-naked in the buff toga of the Roman Republic, which continues to inspire much of our official architecture.

9. The great guerilla fighter (and furniture maker) Ethan Allen was an aggressive atheist; his beliefs were common among the farmers, sailors and artisans who were the backbone of Revolutionary America.

10. America's most influential statesman, thinker, writer, agitator, publisher, citizen-scientist and proud liberal libertine was---and remains---Benjamin Franklin. He was at the heart of the Declaration, Constitution and Treaty of Paris ending the Revolution. The ultimate Enlightenment icon, Franklin's Deism embraced a pragmatic love of diversity. As early America's dominant publisher he, Paine and Jefferson printed the intellectual soul of the new nation.

11. Franklin deeply admired the Ho-de-no-sau-nee (Iroquois) Confederacy of what's now upstate New York. Inspired by the legendary peacemaker Deganawidah, this democratic congress of five tribes had worked "better than the British Parliament" for more than two centuries. It gave us the model for our federal structure and the images of freedom and equality that inspired both the French and American Revolutions.

It's no accident today's fundamentalist crusaders and media bloviators (Rev. Limbaugh, St. Beck) seek to purge our children's texts of all native images except as they are being forceably converted or killed.

Today's fundamentalists would have DESPISED the actual Founders. Franklin's joyous, amply reciprocated love of women would evoke their limitless rage. Jefferson's paternities with his slave mistress Sally Hemings, Paine's attacks on the priesthood, Hamilton's bastardly philandering, the grassroots scorn for organized religion---all would draw howls of righteous right-wing rage.

Which may be why theocratic fundamentalists are so desperate to sanitize and fictionalize what's real about our history.

God forbid our children should know of American Christians who embraced the Sermon on the Mount and renounced the Book of Revelations...or natives who established democracy on American soil long before they saw the first European...or actual Founders who got drunk, high and laid on their way to writing the Constitution.

Faith-based tyranny is anti-American. So are dishonest textbooks. It's time to fight them both.

Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030, is at www.solartopia.org. He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and writes regularly for www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared.

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Why many newspaper pay sites may fail

Image via Wikipedia

Reflections of a Newsosaur by Alan Mutter

Musings (and occasional urgent warnings) of a veteran media executive, who fears our news-gathering companies are stumbling to extinction
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
Why many newspaper pay sites may fail
If modern publishers shared the smarts of Benjamin Franklin, one of the shrewdest of their number who ever lived, they might today be selling content successfully on the web.

“Gentlemen,” intoned Franklin, urging fellow patriots to sign the Declaration of Independence in the sweltering summer of 1776. “If we don’t hang together, we most assuredly will all hang separately.”
While Franklin evidently wasn’t the first person to utter the immortal line widely attributed to him, things would have gone better for today’s publishers if they emulated his wisdom when they began trying to sell their valuable content.

Instead, newspapers are embarked on a scattered number of half-baked, one-off pay schemes that for the most part are doomed to fail. It didn’t have to be that way. But the outcome isn’t particularly surprising, given the inability of publishers to successfully collaborate, even though this is the most difficult time in the history of their business.
Newspapers lost their last chance to hang together when it became clear yesterday that the wheels seemingly have come off Journalism Online, the ambitious, global pay-wall initiative launched last year by serial entrepreneur Steven Brill.

After a year of trying to persuade publishers worldwide to join the universal content-vending system that he envisioned, Brill told the New York Times the only committed client he could identify was a Lilliputian daily in Lancaster, PA. Brill said more affiliates are on the way for a service he christened Press+.

While Brill barnstormed unsuccessfully in support of his idea, papers great and small embarked on – or at least started the final boarding process for – a plethora of pay schemes that they each cobbled together for themselves.

The profusion of pay plans has produced a welter of home-grown offerings that will be alien, confusing and generally repugnant to consumers who have been gleefully consuming content for 1½ decades without having to pay for it.

Fortunately for piqued consumers, they can quickly click to any of the thousands of free sites that will be eager to welcome them. Newspapers won’t be so lucky.

The value of Journalism Online – and the similar but different ViewPass project I abandoned last fall when it became clear the industry could not rally around a common pay platform – is that either would have been a widely available, highly visible system that surfers would recognize all over the web.

These trusted, ubiquitous brands would have made it easy for consumers to buy content at any participating site by simply clicking a button to activate a previously authorized credit card.

Instead of coalescing around one or two universal payment systems, the publishers elected to fire off in all directions:

:: The New York Times will wait until next year to introduce a metered system that requires visitors to pay after taking advantage of a still-to-be-determined number of free peeks at the site. The solution may work great for NYTimes.Com, but there appears to be no plan to extend it to other publishers.

:: Newsday already has implemented a protocol that requires visitors to subscribe in order to read anything more than the few paragraphs running in the clear on its site. The scheme, which has resulted in a 41.5% drop in site traffic since it debuted in the fall, has gained a whole 35 subscribers willing to pay $5 a week. This system might work for Newsday, which is giving free online access to anyone who subscribes to its print product or the cable services owned by it parent, CableVision. But the plan doesn’t seem the least bit extensible to other papers.

:: At least three dozen small- and medium-dailies around the country have deployed individual systems to sell some or all of their content for prices ranging from $1 a year to $400 a year. The response? On average, an amount equal to only 2.4% of the print subscriber base of the papers is paying for online content. Inasmuch as there is no common thread among the various solutions, there’s scant chance an industry standard will emerge.

While publishers in certain isolated markets may employ successfully Newsday-like plans to stanch the erosion of their print circulation, none of the schemes to date is helping turn interactive content into the potent new revenue stream it ought to be.

Had publishers agreed to build a unified pay system, they could have created a marketplace to syndicate articles among themselves and to target articles to readers according to their interests. Newspapers could have collected premium prices for ads served alongside the targeted content and might have been able to curb a bit of copyright poaching, too.

But the publishers never got it together. Now, they’ll be hanging separately.