It’s official. Although I grew up in an era where CNN was the one-stop go-to place to get real news (remember the last days of the USSR?), I’ve been getting more and more fed up with them over the past few years. I went onto their website today to get info on the California wildfires, and am greeted not with any mention of the fires on CNN’s homepage, but instead with this totally important news item.

Reuters, a foreign news source, has a headline on their front page about the fires.

But, CNN, you’ve lost my respect. At this point I just wish you’d be honest and quit calling yourself a “news network.” Better to assume a more befitting title, such as “Items of Medium to Low Interest, as Digestible as Jaffa Cakes.”

Neil Postman was right.

[EDIT: In an attempt not to be such a cranky ol' grandpa, I in fact sent an e-mail to CNN via their feedback form. Heaven knows if anyone reads it, but if they do, this is what they'll see:

I am very concerned about what I have been seeing lately on CNN. I grew up in an era when CNN (as a TV station) was the go-to network for global news, even before the internet was a common-place media format. Remember the last days of the USSR? You guys were amazing during that.

~ Sarah McMenomy

Most of which I already said in the blog post. I guess we'll see if they respond... The thing is, I'm not kidding, I'd love to have an American news network that I felt like I could trust, something that was keeping me informed about the rest of the world. But maybe that's just a pipe dream at this point. The last one I might trust is ABC, although their homepage is structured so as to make it maximally impossible to sort out what the heck is going on on it...]

I don’t understand why pundits criticize “salad bar” conservatism or “salad bar” liberalism. Why should we be carbon copies of one another? It widens the divide more to say, “You have to do this because you are one of Us, and this is what We do,” than it does to ignore the views of the opposition because that is Them and that is just what Someone Like That would do. In either case, though, you wind up pigeonholing someone — but in only one case does that stereotype self-fulfill and limit the actions of what you and your own party can accomplish.

Any teenager who’s been warned off drugs and sex knows the overplayed theme of peer pressure; it’s only natural to trust someone that you identify with more than someone you don’t. Unfortunately, it’s a heuristically obtained ad hominem fallacy: someone can agree with you in nearly every respect but one, and on that they can be right, and you can be wrong. I fear that the prevalence of Jungian archetypes in our collective consciousness has undermined our ability to view people as individuals rather than as just another copy of Personality A, or B, and so on. Speaking only of our two largest political parties, I suspect that if you could boil away the unconsidered dogma and spectrally analyze what’s left, you’d find a wider range of difference within each individual party than you would between them.

One hears this sort of rhetoric in a religious context as well, although my argument with that is different than it is with politics — one of my main concerns there is that this sort of dogmatism discourages religion as a living tradition at all, or as any kind of journey for human souls beyond the individual one which has been set as a precise path, like the labyrinth. I like labyrinths, by the way. It’s very peaceful to walk them. There’s a lot to be gained, and there are times when you need to find that kind of calm. But if you have questions and are not satisfied by the answers, then I am not really sure that you should be calm. Without some sort of spiritual unrest, you will not be driven to learn, explore, change, or grow. Perhaps more importantly, though, if you do not question what you are told, you will likely end up doing something that is simply wrong, but you won’t take proper responsibility for your own actions, because you have taken someone else’s word for it (cf. the Milgram experiment).

Still, inasmuch as any religion has an internal consistency as a system of beliefs, you may or may not be able to pick and choose without contradicting yourself; you can’t believe that Jesus was God but simultaneously disbelieve it because another religion has said that. But you can pick and choose certain practices, devotions, writings, and lines of argument that make the most sense to you, and they can compliment each other, even if they’re in the tradition of a religion that you do not wholly embrace.

In both the political and the religious spheres, there is more sawdust blown around than meat served. Instead of discussion, we have reaction, and then reaction to the reaction, until it all becomes either a ridiculous shouting match or a refusal to even pretend to listen (cf. Judge Sotomayor not even being granted an audience with Senator Inhofe). I find myself hungry, and wish that someone would step up to the plate and indulge our country now and then in a little intelligent discourse. A little goes a long way.

Inasmuch as authors are, by the act of creation, images of God, the idea of making a Buffy movie without Joss Whedon is blasphemy. Buffy was a character that sprang from the brain of Joss (rather like Athena from the side of Zeus) and into boot-kickin’ television glory only after she had been bought from Joss and mostly ruined by Hollywood in the original ‘92 feature film.

Even if you were to leave Joss, Buffy, and the idiot Hollywoodians out of it entirely, I can’t think of a much worse thing you could do to the show’s extremely loyal fans. Buffy has a still-growing fan base, years after its cancellation. A fan base which organizes Meetup groups, holds Buffy-watching marathons, or swamps theaters with hundreds of people descending for a showing of the musical episode, Once More, With Feeling. The fans dress up for cons, dish out for DVDs, and run exhaustive blogs documenting Joss’ every move. Yes, maybe you could draw new fans with a new Joss-less vision — but not without alienating the existing ones, and why on earth would you want to do that?

Imagine if, in a world with no existing Batman comics, Frank Miller had written Batman Begins,* and pitched it to the studios. They bought the idea, but then twisted his script and dumbed it down to campy Adam West Batman. Then they poured the shattered wreckage back into the original author’s hands and said, “Okay, I guess you can do a TV show with this, if you want.” With freedom, Frank had gone on to create his vision of the Dark Knight through seven glorious years of television. (Sure, some years of Buffy were more glorious than others… nonetheless, the show was, overall, great.)

Now it’s like those producers are saying, “Ooh, okay, we’re gonna make another Batman movie — but we don’t want Frank or his vision involved; we want Adam West back.”

We’ve had the Dark Knight for seven years. Adam West was fun, and we laugh at him… but why would we ever, ever want to regress there?

* Yeah, I know Miller didn’t write the movie, but he did write Year One, which is most of where the movie got its meat from the comic books.