Neal Lynch, the brother of a high school girlfriend contacted me via Facebook inquiring if I had been a member of the River City Singers from Grand Rapids, Michigan during the 1960s. Facebook is the source of reconnections so plenty these days that this one would simply blend in with the others were it not for the fact that I’m able to pass it along to you. Neal lives in California, and the circumstances under which he contacted me are remarkable all by themselves, but The Great Horizontal — the connected culture we’re just beginning to know — is what made this possible.

I wrote back that I was indeed a member of that band, whereupon he sent me two photographs of myself and my two brothers playing our music in his basement. He was 12-years old at the time and shortly thereafter picked up guitar and has been playing ever since. The photos were made from old Kodak slides and are the only high-resolution, digital color pictures of the three of us playing together. The ONLY ones, and I’d never seen them before. These pictures blew my mind, because I was able to zoom in and closely examine facial expressions. The experience really took me back to when I was 18-years old. All that I am, I was back then. The experiences I’ve had in the last 47 years have shaped only what I do, but all that is really me — the gifts, the spirit, the emotions, the soul — can be seen in these pictures.

I sent copies to my two brothers and heard back from older brother Jim (the guitar picker). He told me that he was so blown away that all he could do was go sit in his back yard alone and think about our lives as a bluegrass band. I knew exactly what he was talking about.

Words cannot express my appreciation for the way Life has engineered this and especially to Neal for contacting me. In the picture to the left, you can see me, as my daughter told me via Facebook, “lost in the music.” This is true, but “lost in the music” can also be a form of “hiding from everybody,” which took a big emotional toll on me over the decades that followed.

My two brothers and I are not close. The Vietnam War broke up our band, and we all went our separate ways. It has been one of the biggest regrets of my life, because I really did and do love my brothers. That fact is inescapable when examining these pictures. We were really good, and to quote Marlon Brando, “I coulda been a contender.” Bluegrass is a music meant to be played, not just listened to. I haven’t had a banjo in many years, but this may inspire me to find something at a pawn shop. I’m playing an old Gibson Mastertone in the pictures. That instrument is worth a lot of money today.

This event in my life has reinforced everything I believe deeply about the enormity of this “second Gutenberg moment” in the history of Western Civilization. We may spit and snarl and fight it all the way, but this “Great Horizontal” is transforming everything about our culture. The more open we become, the harder it is for anybody to live a double life and to present bullshit as a cover story for one’s life. We have to rethink everything, and I envy those who are just entering adulthood, for life will be very different for them when they reach my age. The naysayers shout down change, usually because they have something to lose in terms of their position vis-a-vis everybody else.

I’m incredibly hopeful for tomorrow, because truth weighs far less than falsehood, and we’re all ridiculously overweight. That’s what my view of postmodernism is all about. These pictures have helped me in the ongoing journey to find my truth, and I am forever grateful.

Terry Heaton is (a) doomsayer. And he’s been at it for YEARS and YEARS. Good God, man—enough already.

I don’t wish necessarily to refute that, but I do want to talk about it, because if anybody honestly feels that way, then what we have here is a failure to communicate.

I’ve learned in my life to actually welcome criticism. It used to really get to me, but my beliefs about Life have convinced me that we’re all just trying to do the best we can with what we know. That means I can’t assume a personal attack when considering criticism. Instead, I have to back away and ask myself honestly if there’s any truth in what’s being said. If I have a teachable spirit, I might actually learn something.

So the issue here is have I been functioning as a doomsayer for “years and years?” Along the way, I think it’s fair to ask if such forecasting is validated by the circumstances, or whether it’s merely ranting to get attention or for some other motive.

There are several variations of the definition of a doomsayer, but they all say essentially the same thing.

• One who predicts calamity at every opportunity.
• A person disposed to predicting catastrophe, disaster, etc.
• A person who predicts disaster, esp. in politics or economics.
• One given to forebodings and predictions of impending calamity.

There are two essential problems that I have with the image of a doomsayer.

One, my overall body of work consistently expresses the admonition not to view anything I write as “all-or-nothing.” I’m a pragmatist who deals in abstracts, not absolutes, and readers will miss important nuances if assuming I speak of black-white, win-lose, sink-swim, right-wrong, and all-or-nothing. I may predict calamity, but it’s always with certain caveats that can be understood. For example, I’m careful to write that it is the pursuit of “only” a certain path that will produce a certain result. This is far different than stating that the die is cast and that we’re all going to die.

Two, I offer solutions, and while this may qualify me for other pejorative terms, it disqualifies me as a doomsayer. Local media consulting has changed forever, and many would say that’s a good thing. At AR&D, we are absolutely convinced that reinvention is the mandate, but to what end? We wrote a book about that and are about to embark on taking that vision to another level. Meanwhile, I’ve been making intelligent and workable suggestions for “years and years,” because my views aren’t fully tainted by trying to defend the indefensible. I understand the resistance, but I will continue to make the recommendations.

The vast majority of observers, writers and consultants who work with new media view it as a way to make media better, to improve on its essential mandate, and find new ways of distributing media’s work. There are lot of these people, and they provide a necessary service. Every TV station, for example, should be using Twitter and Facebook and Skype and iPhones, and so on and so forth. These things, to me, however are a part of the Media 1.0 mission and architecture, the extending of the existing brand in the marketplace. While that’s important, it doesn’t do much for the bottom line, because it’s simply moving declining money around.

For example, we need to be TV stations online, but AR&D research reveals that when we do that, we’re still dealing with the same people who watch our stations. Even a station with a very high preference rating is leaving at least two-thirds of the market alone, and online, that means we’re not competing for anything other than 9 percent of the potential revenue pie, according to Borrell’s latest market share data. Simply put, our brands limit what we can do online, for we bring with us all the baggage that accompanies those brands (e.g. we’re not everybody’s favorite) in addition to all the good.

To a certain extent — and for newspapers especially — moving money around is vital, for these companies need that digital, brand-extension revenue to take the place of that which is being lost via its legacy property. So you’ll never hear an argument from me about this, and where I can help, I will.

However, my mission on behalf of media companies is the growth and development of Media 2.0, the disruption itself. It’s here where I think media companies miss the boat, and wherever I see the practice of protecting the brand taking precedence over disruptive innovations, I have to call “foul.” I had a very smart media exec tell me recently that he has to play both defense and offense at the same time. This is a problem, for defense is reserved for the Media 1.0 side of things. Media 2.0 is a separate entity that is only on the attack. It has to be separate, because it conflicts with the defense being played by the Media 1.0 purveyors.

That’s pretty straightforward, it seems to me.

The catastrophe for media is for an old way of life, when double-digit annual revenue growth and over 50% margins were the norm. Rules changed when we became corporate profit centers and then again when the disruptions started hitting. The last blow was the economy, and that’s showing signs of becoming a permanent fixture.

So yeah, in that sense, I’m a doomsayer, and I feel sorry for my many colleagues and friends who continue to suffer the consequences. There is a bright future, however, although the path from here to there seems obscured by overgrowth and boulders. Finding that path, unfortunately, means letting go of our grip on the old, and that’s extremely difficult for those with mandated quarterly goals to meet.

I need to preface this with a little history of my own. Most of you already know this, but I was the Producer and Executive Producer of The 700 Club in the early and mid-80s. I’m terribly proud of the work I did there, but you would be mistaken to judge my personal views as associated in any way with that program. It was a job. I was certainly involved in the life on campus, but I was also able to maintain a certain distance, and I think it made me a better producer. I may write a book about it some day.

That said, I’m keenly aware of how the Christian right thinks and behaves, and my observations of life include that knowledge. The biggest complaint that Christians — and I’m talking on a broader scale than just the right, but of them especially — have today is that “the culture” is denying Christ, something they honestly feel will land people in hell. I’m not here to discuss the truth of such a belief, only to insist that it’s sincere. The evangelical spirit of Christianity — just as it is with Islam, for example — is a sincere belief that unless one behaves a certain way, they risk eternal damnation. It doesn’t matter if you believe that; they believe that, and so this idea of “denying Christ” is extremely critical.

So last week, in a boring evening of television, I flipped to the program Memphis Beat on TNT. It’s not bad, and it really tries to imitate life in the South, including occasional references to religion. This particular episode was called “Flesh and Blood” and dealt with finding the parents of a baby that had apparently been abandoned in a car.

In the scene that got my attention, Memphis Police Lt. Tanya Rice, played by Alfre Woodard, was trying to talk a young woman into helping police get everybody out alive in a hostage situation. The hostage-taker was the woman’s father; his hostage was her sister.

“I can’t do that,” the woman says, suggesting she isn’t strong enough. Lt. Rice responds warmly, “I can do all things through God who strengthens me.”

It’s the key scene in the whole episode, for it turns the whole case. Ultimately, the girl helps and talks her father down. Happy ending.

The problem, of course, that Lt. Rice’s wise quote is incorrect. It’s “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” Semantic hair splitting? No, because it’s evidence of something much deeper that’s taking place in our culture. The writers of this show had to come to a stop here and make a decision about which word to use. Is it God or Christ? Hollywood both leads and follows the flows of American thought, and they decided to go with the much safer, more politically correct route of the term “God.” Nice try.

The truth is that you’d be hard pressed to find ANYBODY in Memphis, Tennessee who would substitute the word “God” for “Christ” in that Bible quote, so while the writers are trying to duplicate life in the South, they can only allow themselves to go so far.

When well-intentioned, decent Christian people start talking about how their faith is being persecuted in public these days, listeners often close their ears. That’s the talk of the lunatic fringe, the fundamentalist right. Cultural observers and pundits ridicule the notion as nonsense and go on to mock those who make such statements. Apparently, every group on earth is off-limits for ridicule except certain Christians, and that has permanently, I think, cast aspersions on the entire faith itself.

It is not politically correct nor expedient to speak the name Jesus or use the term Christ in public anymore. This has had a dramatic chilling effect on people of the Christian faith, to the point where only the radicals seem to speak anymore. They are the ones quoted by others, because it fits the common public mold of Christianity and further drives believers into silence, ‘lest they, too, become a mockery in the public sphere.

So to the Hollywood community and people in general, let me say this. You are entitled to your own opinion about religion — and you certainly are free to worship as you please — but you are not entitled to your own quotes from the Book. It’s false, a lie. It’s not just that it’s sinister or intellectual dishonesty. It’s not just that it’s offensive, and I’m sure it is to many. It’s mostly that you’re altering culture and our history in the process, and that is unacceptable, because that carries with it unintended consequences.

A word here. A word there. Soon, nobody will truly understand the many roles of Christianity in our history, because we will have watered down its cultural influence and, in so doing, altered our own history. Do we really want that to happen? People may not like the way certain Christians behave, but throwing the baby out with the bath water has consequences for everything we hold dear in America, especially our freedoms. Our Republic makes little sense without the role of religion in its establishment, and I know there are people who’ve dedicated their lives to trying to prove otherwise. Webster’s 1828 dictionary, however, contains all the evidence anyone needs, for the words used by the founders of the country had different meanings than they do today, especially the word “religion.”

It’s unconscious, what we’re doing, but it’s sloppy thinking just the same, and we should know better. To me, it isn’t about saving souls, whatever that means. It’s about disrespecting the truth of our own history, and it has happened during my lifetime.

I shudder to think where it’s all going.

My family is out of town celebrating the birth of our grandson, Caden, so I’d planned to spend a relaxing day at home Saturday writing. I know it’s technically “work,” but it’s also my passion, so it sounded like a good idea. We had planned a Skype session from the hospital later on, and I was looking forward to that.

I fired up my HP dv6t (Karen works for HP), and Microsoft informed me that it was downloading and installing Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1), which is a bunch of little things put together in one package. Fine. It happens all the time. My day began its torture after the restart. I could not access the Internet. I could send and receive email, but I couldn’t access the Web to save my life.

I called Time Warner first and spent some quality time with a fine man from Manila who spoke perfect English. We tried everything. He tried everything. I got out my HP netbook and tried that. Bingo, it worked. “It must be a problem with HP,” was the conclusion. He gave me their number. Alan, another nice guy from the Philippines took my call. Before I could speak with him, though, he had to check my warranty and told me it had already expired. I would have to buy a service contract before he could even talk to me. I explained that the computer was purchased by my employer with the stipulation that I bought an extended warranty, and that I had certainly done that. Nope. No record. “If you can give me the order number, I can verify it,” Alan said.

I’m now starting to get angry, because Karen is the only person who could find such a document, and she’s in Vir-fucking-ginia. I’d have to find the receipt later and ask for a refund.

After some unkind comments, I spent $100, and Alan began walking me through things. He asked if I had a back up of my important stuff, which didn’t sound good. Our efforts took forever and accomplished nothing. At one point, however, after some background Windows program had run, Microsoft informed me that it needed to reload SP1. Fine. Maybe they screwed something up the first time, so I thanked Alan and got down to business.

The reinstall went smoothly and the two error messages I’d received after the original restart disappeared. I was joyful and suddenly able to get online. Victory!

But it was slow as molasses! I mean dail-up slow. I did Speakeasy tests and determined I was getting about 4 megs down and a half a meg up. It seemed much slower, however. Everything on the computer seemed slow. I grew impatient, so I went back to the netbook and repeated the Speakeasy tests. Same results, so I called Time Warner back.

This time, it was Rose in Manila. It took forever. I had to put my phone on the charger. She did some tests and finally found something. Then, she told me she’d have somebody out to fix it on Wednesday. That’s right, Wednesday, as in 5 days away.

I got a little more angry. How a company like Time Warner — whose very lifeblood is its customers — can treat people like this is all the evidence you need in order to accept that something is terribly wrong with our culture and its economy. I yelled at her and demanded to speak to a supervisor.

She said I should speak with the “local” office, which made my eyes light up. Then, she transferred me. I was now speaking with Mae in El Paso (hardly local). May felt compelled to have me start at the beginning, which really infuriated me. She was a sweet thing, but she kept wanting me to try things I’d already been through, including hardwiring to the modem. That bloody well didn’t work. She insisted that Time Warner was sending a signal to me, something I already knew.

She apologized but said Wednesday was the soonest. I hung up and yelled at the dogs.

My wife called. I yelled at her.

Then I called my friend Richard Andrews, a computer repair guy who has helped me out in the past. He could sense my anxiety and said he’d be over as soon as he could. The guy lives in Keller. I live in Frisco. It’s about an hour’s drive.

Richard arrived about 7:30 p.m. and said he’d never seen such a thing. His first thought was to uninstall SP1, which took about 30 minutes. Bingo, everything went back to normal. He then hid the update, so that I would never install it again, and went his way. It cost me a few bills, but I was happy to pay. Richard went above and beyond with me, and I couldn’t help think that this is the way all those who service the industry need to behave. I guess that’s why his business is booming. If you live in the DFW area, you simply won’t find anybody better.

Geek friends reading this will say, “I’d have uninstalled SP1 right away.” Good for you. I was simply unable to put 2 and 2 together and come up with that solution. After I got back online, I researched the problem, and, lo and behold, I’m not alone.

Windows 7 is a great improvement beyond its predecessors, but Microsoft is still Microsoft. Damn them!

So I’m 65 now, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget this particular birthday. Maybe that’s what this was all about anyway: Life tapping me on the shoulder to remind me of my own powerlessness in the overall scheme of things. The most important thing about my birthday, after all, was that the circle of life twitched, and new life came into mine just one day earlier. I missed my Skype session, but that’s tiny in comparison.

Kinda puts things in perspective, eh?

The scrapbook, I must admit, is a tribute of love to a man I used to despise. It wasn’t until much later in life that my mind was able to understand him, and I was able to let go of all that anger. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say he didn’t believe in “sparing the rod.” When we finally made amends, he told me that growing up on a farm in rural Western Michigan, he had worked a full time job since the age of seven. Imagine the toll that could take on a boy. He had no advanced education but a strong, Calvinist faith that required much of him. He served in World War II, and moved my mother around the country much as I did as a news director a generation later. He was doing the best he knew how to do, and I could no longer hold it against him. I remember that day well. We were together alone overlooking the channel at Holland Harbor on Lake Michigan. It was June of 1981.

It’s taken me a long time, but I’ve come to a place where I believe that we’re all — every one of us — just trying to do the best we can with what we know and have. Yeah, we all tend towards self-centeredness, but that’s because we’re human. The more human we become, however, the better we see the faults of ourselves more than the faults of others, and that becomes its own great freedom. We have a saying in AA: “If you spot it, you got it,” which means that the defects we see in others are really our own, for how else would we recognize them as defects?

My scrapbook walks me through my life up until his death, but it’s all smiles and happy memories. Playing on the beach. Holidays. Trips. Sports. Friends. Music. Vietnam. Brothers. Weddings. And other times, too. In truth, though, I was a lonely, lonely boy. I felt unwanted and unloved — even unlovable — although I know in my head that wasn’t true.

My best friend and my greatest enemy as a child was my imagination. “Stop being so sensitive” would’ve made me rich, if I had a nickel for every time I heard it growing up. The problem was I was also very intelligent. School was easy, but my creative mind took me into illusionary worlds when things around me didn’t make sense. Some of the worst things in my life, the old saying goes, never happened, because they were all in my imagination. Father beats a 10-year old boy’s backside with a thick stick? He must hate the kid. And so it goes…

Freedom from that misery, however, begins with letting it go, and as I learned with my dad that day at Holland Harbor, that’s because only we have the ability to change our past. Actually, it’s not the events that matter; those can’t be changed. It’s our reaction to those events that we control, and that’s something we can change. After all, I’d still been living with the negativity of those wounds all those many years later. Whose fault was that?

So I can say with confidence this Father’s Day that I remember the many sides of my dad. He told me that day at the beach that the most exciting thing that ever happened to him as a youngster was when they built the new gymnasium at his little country High School in Ravenna, Michigan. That puts much in perspective for me, and I celebrate his life by carrying his blood and saying a small inner cheer every time a new gym is built anywhere.

And let me join my voice to others this day who send out a simple note to those with fathers still living: it’s only too late to tell him you love him after he’s gone. I’d give anything to be in your shoes for just a few minutes, to tell my dad what I’ve been up to, show him a little of my work and share my family with him. You still have that opportunity. Please take the time to do it.

Happy Father’s Day to all the dads everywhere.

We’ve come such a long way in our technology that we can sit in the comfort of our homes and watch incredible videos like the ones we saw last week. When I was a boy, however, that was unthinkable. What we have are memories.

So I did a little searching and found a treasure trove of memories and pictures via the National Weather Service office in Grand Rapids, my old home town. I told Karen that the most amazing thing to me about looking back is how vivid the memories are. This was 55 years ago, and I can remember it like it was last week (Old farts don’t remember anything “like it was yesterday,” not even yesterday).

The date was April 3, 1956. I was in the fourth grade at Oakdale Elementary School in the city’s southeastern section. We lived on a very short street called Alto Avenue. Despite the size of our block, over 40 kids lived there, and we were a very active neighborhood. Much of the activity took place in a large field in back of our house. That field was a buffer between our neighborhood and the C&O Railroad tracks that ran north and south at the far side of the field. In our backyard, the view was due west, and on the other side of the tracks a few hundred yards away was another neighborhood.

My two brothers and I went to school that day like every other morning, although it was exceptionally hot for early April. Everything was normal until the school office announced that the Weather Bureau had issued a tornado watch and that we were going home early. I remember walking home about lunchtime in the sun and heat. We were all pointing at the sky laughing and saying, “There’s a tornado. No, there’s one.” To us, it was a free afternoon off.

My father came home from work a little after four, and he was talking about the coming storms. We used to have a coal furnace, so we had a small room in the basement in the southwest corner that used to be where we stored coal. It had been transformed into our air raid/storm shelter (a must for the 50s), and that’s where he wanted us to go when the storm came.

We went to the backyard, and I had my first sense of awe and wonderment. The sky was an eerie green color and the clouds looked like they were upside down. It was so quiet, and I was both frightened by it yet drawn to it. Then, the air raid sirens went off. These sirens usually only went off during drills. On top of every school, the howls of their warnings reverberated through neighborhood after neighborhood, as they went round and round and crossed each other’s sound paths in a terrifying signal that all was not well. Green sky. Stillness. Upside down clouds. Sirens.

My mother shuddered. “Get in the basement,” my father ordered.

We all scrambled downstairs and turned on the radio. The tornado was west of us, moving to the northeast. My mother was scared, but I was drawn to the danger. I snuck out of the room and headed back upstairs. I looked out the kitchen window into the backyard, and there was my father, staring to the west. The sky was a very dark green, but bright sunlight was beginning to peer through the very horizon. I pushed the back door open and headed into the back yard.

What I saw is forever etched in my mind. The sky to the west was completely black. We were east-northeast of the storm, so it had the appearance of the whole sky lifting and revealing sunlight as it grew closer. The funnel appeared to be miles across when the sky first began “lifting,” but as it got closer, the wedge was clearly visible, and it moved across the horizon from left to right. We were miles away, but the thing was enormous. I was scared but mesmerized by the thing. Its magnetism froze me in place. Visions of The Wizard of Oz flashed through my mind, as I stood there paralyzed. It was pitch black and revolving with the sunlight beaming in from behind it, as if the curtain of dark clouds had sprung a leak, spilling its contents through this funnel. At that point, I learned later, it was destroying Standale, Michigan, and killing people along the way.

My father turned and saw me and yelled for me to get back to the basement. He was right behind me.

We huddled in the storm cellar, listened to reports on WOOD radio, and waited for the all-clear sirens. When it finally went back into the sky, the tornado had traveled 52 miles on the ground, killing 17 people.

I didn’t sleep very well that night, and a couple of days later, we drove through what used to be Standale. I don’t think much about that trip, for the destruction was too real, but that tornado — that Svengali-like monster — called to me every night for a very long time. The feelings of that day remain with me today. It created the door through which I passed en route to a lifetime in the news business — television news, where I spent many days and nights helping warn people about the very thing that haunted me.

And last week, while watching live video of powerful twisters as they destroyed everything in their paths, there were flashes of being 9-years old again and in the backyard with my father, participating in something I hope never to do again. Today’s curious 9-year olders can search YouTube. They can also find the real deal on shows about storm chasers and the like. But I’m not sure video can ever really capture what it’s like to go through one of those things, and I’m grateful for that.

(More great pictures of the April 3, 1956 Michigan tornado via Flickr)

It got systematically worse as the months passed. My white blood cell count went up and gradually the pain shifted to my groin. Turns out — we think — that my body is rejecting the implant, because of the shedding of metal ions from the metal-on-metal socket. So I’ve been undergoing tests and am now on the schedule to have the implant replaced with one that is ceramic and plastic.

The company that makes the socket recalled a bunch of a different model, mostly due to similar problems with other people. I’m not a law suit guy, especially not the kind that the ambulance chasers love, but I’d like not to have any out-of-pocket costs here either. Tough decision.

Meanwhile, it’s influencing my quality of life. I’m always tired and have little energy for walks or other exercise. It’s impacted my writing and my ability to think, because I can only get comfortable for little bursts at a time. In plain English, it sucks.

More later.

I began today with a YouTube video of an old Kurt Vonnegut speech to college graduates in Albion, Michigan. This came via Mediagazer, via kottke.org.

Vonnegut’s statements about how the arts grow your soul is what got me going. His view was that trying to make a living through the arts is the wrong way to view creativity — that it, instead, was the path to growing your soul, something about which he was extremely passionate. I profoundly believe this, and it’s a big part of what shapes my views of copyright and how badly we’ve mucked things up in that arena. The “copyright industry” sticks its bony fingers through the soul of creativity by turning it into a business. Shame on us.

As a writer, I believe that creative endeavors such as the arts should reward those who bring things to life from nothing, but I am strongly opposed to treating copyright as property law. Nobody owns creativity. It all comes from one source, and that belongs to everybody. I’ve written about this many times (here).

The soul. If you believe numerology, mine is an old one. Sometimes I think so; other times, I think it’s a child. I’m not sure when I first became aware of my soul, but I think it happened when I was very young. Soul awareness produces a kind of give-a-shit attitude about the usual trappings of life, and that’s always been my curse. The soul taps into the Lifestream of all things, because, as C.S. Lewis was fond of saying, “humans are like amphibians — living in two worlds at the same time.” The soul is where those two worlds meet and play in a never-ending here and now.

I call these two worlds life (small L) and Life (capital L). The only place they meet is in the here and now, and that reminds me of Blaise Pascal’s wonderful thought from The Penses:

Let each one examine his thoughts, and he will find them all occupied with the past and the future. We scarcely ever think of the present, and when we think of it, it is only to take light from it to arrange the future…So we never live, but we hope to live, and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so.

Trust me: if you can find the here and now, you’ll never want to leave. Finding it, however, isn’t easy. Regret, shame and resentments bond us to yesterday, while fear and anxiety keep us in tomorrow.

My mind then took me to Woodstock, more specifically Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s song (video below) about the event and the particularly haunting line that “we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

That is our quest, humankind’s ultimate quest, and it separates those more interested in Life than life. The baby boom generation seemed to grasp the capital L, which was a major threat to those who made a good living with small L life. I mean, who needs to get back to the garden, when this life produces a gardenesque living anyway?

But it’s an illusion. Small L life isn’t “real,” or perhaps I should say it doesn’t matter. What is the end of small L life anyway? As Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young sang, “Mother Earth will swallow you.” If you believe small L is all there is, then I feel sorry for you. On this issue, I side, again, with Blaise Pascal.

Ah, the soul? Nobody knows for sure, but I think the soul lives on somehow, some way, and perhaps that’s why Vonnegut’s words are so meaningful this morning. He advised everyone in that audience to go out, write a poem, show it to no one, and then tear it into pieces and scatter it. That simple act, he noted, would grow your soul, and, oh my, what that would do.

I think nations have souls in a way, too, and that ours is currently very sick. We’ve spent far too much energy at the feeding trough of mammon and not nearly enough time of late growing that soul. As Dylan wrote, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody,” and a day of reckoning awaits all of us. You want to know the solution for everything that ails America? Our soul is sick and needs attention. We need to create again and again and again.

So thanks for coming along on my journey this morning. Do yourself a favor and create something today. Perhaps if we all do that together, we’ll somehow find our way back to the garden.

And that would be pretty cool.

Among my earliest memories as a child is an album of my father’s containing various marches from World War II. His generation was exceptional, having conquered evil oceans away. You don’t find the courage to do that in your mind, but you do in your soul, and that’s what Battle Hymn touches. If you read the lyrics, you understand that. People who sang in back then were fighting on behalf of what they believed in, their God and their country.

In the second-to-last verse, one highlighted by the choir’s interpretation at the show, this is especially evident:

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.

Remember, this is a “battle” hymn, one sung in war, and given that the 4th of July celebrates our independence — a holiday soaked in the blood of our forefathers — you’d think we’d be faithful to that. The third line was changed, however:

As He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free…

War is not nice. It’s ugly, and when our young men and women die, we acknowledge their sacrifice. But sacrifice for what? They’ve died, at least in part, “to make men free.”

Call me anything you want, but we do a gross disservice to people like my dad and to our own history altogether when we do things like this to mollify the masses. It is especially egregious, because we’re fighting a war right now.

And here’s the thing: do they think people don’t notice?

We’re got some serious soul-searching to do in this country, because we’re heading down a dangerous path when we tamper with stuff like this.

UPDATE: Wikipedia (among others) notes the following:

In later years, when this song was sung in a non-military environment, the clause “let us die to make men free” was sometimes changed to “let us live to make men free”. This change can be seen in most modern hymnals.

Okay, fair enough. But who decides such things? I certainly didn’t get a vote.

Last week, I ran into (and subsequently made friends with) a Finnish sports photographer named Kari Kuukka (also here and here). He’d just returned from the Vancouver Olympics and wrote a blog entry referencing a quote of mine that he uses on his Facebook page (see image). My Google search picked it up. I went to take a look. And now we’re Facebook friends.

This kind of thing happens more often than you might think, and it kind of freaks me out. Kari is a reader of this blog and also of my essays, which are published by The Digital Journalist. I showed the Facebook quote to Karen, and she said, “You’re famous.”

A few days later, my friend (and genius) David Weinberger posted a blog entry referring to a podcast he’d done on the subject of fame. In it, David speaks of a new form of fame that is here, thanks to the World Wide Web. In days past, “the media” determined who rose to the ranks of the famous. There was a neat, orderly process that one had to go through in order to “become” famous, but even if one followed all the right steps, the decision wasn’t based on anything other than the grace of media. He’s including Hollywood, the music industry, etc.

Today, it’s very different. The mainstream media still plays a role, but fame today is generally within smaller groups, peer groups or whatever. I think this is going to take awhile for people to accept that “fame” within smaller circles is actually fame, but I think David’s right. And not only is it more like “big fish/small pond,” the method of determining fame is very different, for the mechanisms of the Web allow for the audience – everyday people – to make the decisions on who gets to bask in the light of fame.

In Lexington this week, WLEX-TV General Manager Pat Dalbey took me to the Monday night taping of Woodsongs, a popular old-time music show that’s recorded in an old theater in downtown Lexington. One of the performers was Andy McKee, a remarkable guitar player that, well, you have to see to believe. Under the old world system, it’s unlikely Andy would be touring the country and selling CDs of his original compositions. His claim to fame? The guitar channel of YouTube, where Andy McKee’s music has been heard and seen over 72 million times. The members of YouTube vaulted McKee to fame, although it’s very unlikely his name will ever be a household word (neither will mine).

There are other stories popping up all the time. Colbie Caillat presented at the Grammies this year. Nobody ever heard of her before she put her music on MySpace. David Lehre’s work on YouTube got him a spot with MTVU, and he’s now a film producer.

So fame works in different ways today.

I first wrote about this in September of 2007 in our AR&D Media 2.0 Intel newsletter:

This is a generation unbound by the roadblocks used by the status quo to maintain their status, and I’m especially taken by the astute views of Ms. Caillat.

In an age when marketing has been elevated above content and so many songs are written and produced to a pre-ordained formula…Records these days…tend to contain one or two good tracks which you download to your computer so that you never have to listen to the rest of the album again.

The clue to the real power of J.D. Lasica‘s “personal media revolution” is found in this statement, and it assigns blame for current media chaos where it belongs — with the people who used to control everything. It’s not about technology or copyright or distribution or any of the other things you read and hear about these days that are cutting into music sales; it’s about the institution producing crap.

(Ask your employees how many watch your news, and then ask them why they don’t. Be prepared for the next response.)

So what do people do when confronted with crap? They usually find another path, and that’s at the core of what’s happening around us. This is why I so strongly recommend that local media companies search their own neighborhoods for tomorrow’s employees in addition to following the more traditional paths.

We’re being disrupted by the prosumer movement, and so far, we’ve taken the wrong path in trying to defend ourselves. Steve Jobs was asked last week why Apple came out with what could be considered an iPhone killer, an iPod with everything the iPhone has except the phone. His response is telling: “If anybody is going to cannibalize us, I want it to be us. I don’t want it to be a competitor.”

So rather than wait for somebody else to embrace the prosumer movement, we need to be doing this ourselves. This is essential Media 2.0.

So to Karen’s statement about Kari putting a quote of mine on his Facebook page, yes, I may be “famous.” But my tribe is a far cry from that which produces old world “fame,” and I’m very happy for it to be that way. You see, I write to challenge my own assumptions, not necessarily to be read, so anything that comes of that is really just an ancillary benefit. Oh it makes me “feel” good to know that people notice, but that’s not my goal.

And maybe that’s what real fame is all about anyway.

(You might be interested in a Google search on “1,000 true fans” and what that means for media professionals today as they work to grow their personal brands.)