JONAH OWEN LAMB

So, I have made it this far. My car is still in working order and it’s not even that hot. My little civic kicks but. It gets something like 40 miles per gallon on the freeway and with current gas prices as they are this is a good thing. But when I am not thinking about how good my car is doing, I am listening to one of my two long books on CD.

Scranton was small and set in the low tree-covered hills of Appalachia. Above the down town rose the huge sign of the town’s paper, The Scranton Times. I spent a couple days there and met some of the paper’s reporters. It was a pretty sleepy town. That said, a triple homicide happened the day before I arrived. Some guy took out three people with a hammer.

Crossing PA was a long monotonous drive. I was surprised at how few towns filled in the rocky forest land that is most of the state. It really felt untouched in a way. But once I crossed into Ohio, farms and fields filled much of the flat lands. Here only patches of wood sat alongside the farmland. Indiana kept on in pretty much the same way as Ohio.

I made it in a day from Scranton to Chicago. By the time the skyline of down town Chicago was looming over some rusty bridge, the sun was all in my face. I maneuvered my way through town as my friend Alex tried to direct me to his house in Lincoln Park. I passed a ball park and down town and then came into a neighborhood along the lake.

One more day and then I am heading west.

WEST

It only took three more days to cross Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah and then Nevada. But first Iowa. Iowa was all hills and bucolic farmland, in an English-countryside kind of way. But then came the razor edged flatness that is Nebraska. So flat it hurt. It wasn’t until the eastern parts of the state that the high plains of our imaginations emerged. But then came the crisp blue skies above Wyoming and the yellowing grass lands. Utah was a couple mountains that soon dropped into the seemingly unstoppable desert of Nevada. And then the Sierra Nevada of teh Golden State.

I was recently sitting in the Rochester Airport, waiting for my flight, and the drone of CNN bore down on me like a cascading bucket of bile. Besides its menu of political ads – mostly thinly veiled oil lobby PR about what Shell and Chevron are doing for a “green” future – the talking heads were at their usual best.

(Let’s define “best” as narrow, superficial and glib.)

While it’s no surprise that 24-hour news networks need to fill up the day with something (let’s call it, um, dog shit) their repetitive regurgitation of other people’s “news” is hard to swallow.

It’s as if they intentionally sit down at their daily meetings and think about how to annoy the American public. Mostly, their programs consist of what appears to be well-groomed talking heads repeating the headlines, again and again, and then trying to squeeze something of value from them. “Well, Joe Bob commentator,” they might ask, “What does it mean when Obama uses his left hand instead of his right to itch his ear?” Deep probing and insightful questions such as this abound. Watching this malarkey is like trying to go to sleep on acid; the horribly narcotic concerns of your brain take over and nibble away at nothing until all you want is a gun to quiet your scattered brain.

Having watched CNN, MSNBC and their sister shows during the Democratic primary perform their less than stellar programs, I have come to the realization that they are not just doing more harm than good in their horse race coverage of politics, they are degrading journalism in general.

For instance, on CNN, with their self-described “best political team on TV” there is more comment than actually reportage. One wonders how many actual reporters they have working in the field, actually reporting. From this viewer’s humble spot on the couch, it seems to be about two, and all they ever do is yell into the microphone at campaign rallies.

Come on now guys, with all that “talent” at you finger tips, you might actually produce some news some of the time instead of continually playing with electoral maps of Indiana and commenting on the slow vote count, while a million other things far more important are going on in the world, unreported.