The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — If you could catch a ride in a time machine what time and place would you pick?

Time and place weigh heavy on my mind this weekend as I make my 64th annual ride around the sun on this beautiful blue planet, as mixed up and in trouble as things seem.

If I could go back in time and change a few things, I would go back to near the end of the 20th century.

In the early days of the personal computer revolution and the internet age, we know now it was the end of the era of the mass circulation daily newspaper when reading and literacy rates were about to take a big dive downward. This was before Facebook and social media came along and damaged our information and communications system seemingly beyond repair.

Related: Part III: How to Create a Functioning Communications System to Save Democracy and the Planet

Even 24-hour cable news seemed to have its benefits back in the 1990s, when Ted Turner’s CNN brought certain standards from broadcast television news into the growing number of wired homes. Hopes for the democratizing influence of the internet was at its height.

We are living in a fractured society now, in so many ways, so there are serious doubts about whether any of our most pressing problems can be addressed in any meaningful way. Droughts, wildfires, floods and large storms as a result of climate change due to global warming from the burning of fossil fuels seem out of control. Political attempts to address these problems are bogged down in selfish fights, along with all the economic problems following the Covid pandemic. We can’t even seem to be able to figure how to ship the cheap, plastic goods from China the people are willing to order on Amazon and get them here in time for Christmas.

Meanwhile the competitive corporate media empires chase ever more sensational stories to try to hold the publics’ attention and keep the advertising and subscription dollars coming. If I have to see more headlines about UFOs and Big Foot dominating the news feed for much longer, I may just decide this place is beyond salvation and decide I no longer want to play this game.

People do not know who or what to trust, and with good reason. They have been let down and lied to and disappointed over and over again.

So is it any wonder that half the people would turn to an authoritarian dictator type leader who makes false promises of salvation from hope shattering poverty and corrupt criminality?

Rich, chain newspaper managers could have done more to prevent all this confusion if they had listened to those of us pushing the internet publishing technology forward back when. But you know the age old story. They were arrogant in their wealth and power, and did not embrace the coming changes fast enough.

In my life and times, I had a chance to play a pioneering role in experimenting with the new technology while teaching journalism in Tennessee and working on a Ph.D. My doctoral committee and the journalism department indulged a group of students who wanted to experiment with publishing journalism and literature on the web.

We had a series of meetings and came up with the idea to bring back an out of business magazine online. That resulted in the creation of The Southerner, at a time when journalism in the South and Southern American literature still commanded some respect.

That’s long gone now. The intellectual community in New York, Washington, D.C. the West Coast and Europe can only see the South as a collection of confederate red states politically, where the vast majority of people still support the corrupt, racist Donald Trump for president, and will vote for him again in 2024. They believe his lies about the election being stolen from him, to the point where they are willing to die rather than submit themselves to a Covid vaccine shot or wear a mask in public. They are the laughing stock of the world, and I want nothing more to do with them.

Where is the writer from Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee or Arkansas who will stand up to this so-called conservative crowd and tell them to wake the fuck up? I’ve tried, and tried, but still people won’t pay attention.

As I turned 64, I could not help but think of the Mississippi writer Willie Morris. After a career as a writer in England and New York, including a stint as the youngest editor in Harper‘s magazine history, he had moved back to his home state to teach. He died of a heart attack at the age of 64. Upon learning of his death, we produced a special issue about him.

I know it seems like a long time ago in a place far, far away. But if you have time and the inclination, you can still read it online here: A Tribute to Willie Morris.

I took the time to read back through it this weekend, because in looking back, it was one of the highlights of my life. I got to interview and edit some of the greatest writers of the 20th century, some of them the greatest writers and journalists ever from the South.

At that time we were still arguing about whether there even was a South anymore as a definable region as McDonald’s and the shopping mall developers had homogenized everything, including big chain newspapers which they funded with their advertising.

It was a fun rhetorical, literary game back then that didn’t seem to have life and death consequences.

One of the most profound stories came from my interview with Gay Talese, who I had remained in touch with until recently. He must have serous health problems now, maybe dementia, because that last time I called his number in Manhattan, his wife Nan Talese answered the phone and would not let me talk to him. I tried sending him an email, but there came no reply. She is an editor in her own right at Doubleday, but she indicated her last client would be Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood.

Talese had attended the University of Alabama and wrote about sports for The Crimson White student newspaper, and I was in a group picture with him in the mid-1990s that has now been lost to history.

But I interviewed him about how Willie Morris saved his writing career back in the 1960s, and helped fund the book about The New York Times, The Kingdom and the Power. The audio file is still online.

Gay Talese on Willie Morris

I found out that the author of Forest Gump, Winston Groom, had been a friend of Willie’s, so I appealed to him to write something. His agent faxed me a short piece that was full of misspellings and typographical errors, but I was able to fix it up and run it anyway.

Willie Had His Quirks

There’s more. Check it out.

Now as I’m wrapping up this Sunday column, I see a professional football game has wiped the Sunday news shows “CBS Sunday Morning” and “Face the Nation” from the broadcast television lineup, as if football could somehow save our democracy and the planet more than talking about our intractable political problems.

Maybe I’m just old, and tired, and have reached that place in life when this world doesn’t seem recognizable anymore. Is it still worth trying to save?

You tell me. I’m all out of solutions.

If a Facebook billionaire is now in charge of who gets to be seen as reporting the factual news, how do you think this story is going to turn out? It can’t turn out well.

You would think by now some of those who have money and some power left would know better and be willing to take a chance on something different.

But no one would fund The Southerner back in the day when the dot com bubble burst.

And most people now just seem content to rely on the garbage on Facebook and the Tube.

Hey, if that’s the way it’s going to be, I’ll spend my remaining days in a comfortable camp chair somewhere in the mountains near the nation’s capital and watch the world come to a fiery end from here.

I can’t help but think things could have turned out differently, using Mac, if only the right people had listened.

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