Gladwell asks

What is the blog's role in the news media? An excerpt of his take:

"when it comes to politics—and to some extent high culture and business and economics—it is quite right to argue that traditional print media like the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal continue to set the conversational agenda.

I’m not sure why this statement should be controversial. Has the level of self-regard in the blogosphere really reached such dizzying heights that it can’t acknowledge the work that traditional media does on behalf of the rest of us? Yes, the newspaper business isn’t as lucrative as it once was (although it’s still pretty lucrative). And it doesn’t seem as exciting and relevant as it once was. But newspapers continue to perform an incredibly important function as informational gatekeepers—a function, as far as I can tell, that grows more important with time, not less. Between them, for instance, the Times and the Post have literally hundreds of trained professionals whose only job it is to sift through the mountains of information that come out of the various levels of government and find what is of value and of importance to the rest of us. Where would we be without them? We’d be lost.

Nor am I making any kind of controversial claim when I say that that is not a function that bloggers can or will, anytime soon, replace. Blogs—like this one, incidentally—are necessarily and properly derivative. Anderson called his post “the Derivative Myth” and uses “derivative” like it’s a dirty word. But it isn’t. Any form that consists, chiefly, of commentary and criticism is derivative. We need derivative media sources to help us make sense of what we learn from primary sources. But you can’t have one without the other, and although it maybe possible for some bloggers to think of their thoughts as rising, fully formed, from the blogosphere, it just ain’t so. Even people who do not think of themselves as being influenced by the agenda of traditional media actually are: they are simply influenced by someone who is influenced by someone who is influenced by old media—or something like that."

I agree with Gladwell's assessment of traditional news's importance, but he doesn't account for blogs' influence on old media. Blogs are an immense commentariat and serve as secondary distributors to narrower audience segments, and reporters and editors are very aware of how their work plays on the larger blogs. Last month I talked to a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who has been bombarded by hate email because conservative bloggers falsely called her a liar. The trolls who did that never would have heard of her if not for conservative bloggers because they don't touch the MSM articles unless it's served to them by right wing blogs. Bloggers aren't just passive critics. Some of them are playing full contact against traditional media.

I'm not saying Malcolm is unaware of this; I'm quite sure he is. But he could have mentioned it.

About an hour and a half ago, I drove my faltering Ford Escort to Arby's for some roast beef sandwiches. On my way up a long, curved hill I felt the car sway horizontally a little bit. I grew wary, but not enough to turn around.

I checked my voicemail while my car drifted in its lane. I missed a few calls last night, so getting through the messages took a minute. One said simply, "Hi Daniel, this is Officer Ryan with the police department. Call me as soon as you get this message."

I reflexively deleted it. I haven't lately done or seen anything that would concern the police, but the message rattled me. I couldn't imagine why this cop would want to talk to me, unless he suspected I'd done or seen something I hadn't. Having no idea what to expect, I feared the callback I felt I had to make.

I had trouble finishing my two roast beef sandwiches. They were a bit rare for my taste.

Heading north on Providence Road after lunch, my car began to shake, drift and drag. I know that feeling. Flat tire. I pulled onto the shadeless shoulder, got out of the car and said a cuss word before pulling my spare tire, jack and tire iron out of the hatch. I spiked the iron onto the cracked pavement before bending down and getting to work. It was 82 degrees. Very pleasant when you're not on the side of a four lane highway.

The first bolt came loose pretty easily. The second required a heavy push. Jerks, pulls, grunts and tugs wouldn't budge the third one. So I called my friends at Tiger Towing; they know me well.

About five minutes after they dispatched their truck, a 40-something guy in a white Cadillac station wagon pulled over behind me, got out and asked if I needed help. I told him I had a tow on the way, but he saw my flat and knew he could fix it.

"Don't you have a spare?" he asked.

"Yeah, but I couldn't get the nuts off." Why not let him try.

"Can't get the nuts off? Sounds like you need a new girlfriend." I laughed. He reminded me of a salty uncle.

I got the tools back out of the hatch for him. After commenting on the shittiness of my tire iron, he put it on the stubborn bolt and stomped on it. One kick was all it took.

"I own a junkyard, so I'm pretty good at stuff like this," he said. "Call that truck back and tell him to turn around. You'll be out of here in a minute."

By the time I got off the phone, my spare was on. All I did was lower the jack. He made conversation, asking where in Virginia I was from. He was from St. Charles and had just arrived in Columbia for the Show Me State Games. He doesn't like it here.

"The niggers here are awful. You just look at them and they act like they're gonna kill you. I thought the niggers in St. Charles were bad, but these niggers are terrible."

I had no idea how to respond to this hateful good neighbor. Could I go off on a stranger who stopped on the edge of a 55 mph highway to change my tire, saving me a $40 tow? Could I let it slide? Could I think of anything to say at all?

"Hmm. Interesting." I don't know what my tone was like. I thanked him for his help. It was no problem, he assured me.

When he pulled onto the highway, the squeal and rumble of his tires sounded like nigger. Part of me wishes he had left me to my tow truck. Hearing a word like nigger and not doing anything to correct the sensibilities behind it is a failure. I'd rather not have taken that test today.

When I got home I called the main desk at the police station and asked to speak to officer Ryan. The cop at the desk said there was no officer Ryan. Nor was there an officer Bryan or Bryant. Someone had had a little fun with me, the desk sergeant suggested. Judging from her voice, she was black. I wanted to go turn myself in.

Screw the Azzurri

Italy ranks among the nations I'd most like to visit before I die, but their soccer team places high among the teams I'd least like to see win the World Cup. They have elevated taking a dive to new heights (Michelangelo:painting::Team Italy:faking injuries after phantom fouls). But win they did, and I have chosen to live.

Zidane's implosion was truly shocking. In the last game of his great career, on sport's biggest stage, in a tight game, he head butts an Italian defender, sending him to the ground like Michael Spinks. I'm not saying the victim didn't crumple with typically Italian flair, but come on. A violent cheap shot away from the play in bonus time of the World Cup final? Is there any precedent for this? This would be like John Elway getting ejected for spearing late in the 4th quarter of the Super Bowl. Unbelievable, but awesome. I much prefer American sports, but I can't imagine an ending like this in any of them.

The Obama fallout

Last week, Barack Obama ruffled some feathers with a speech about his faith. A friend of progressive Christian friend of mine who saw it was impressed, and by comparison I couldn't care less about the Kos-osphere's reaction. Amy Sullivan, a Washington Monthly editor and doctoral candidate in divinity at Princeton, on the other hand, brings a more informed perspective. She wrote about Obama's speech in Slate a few days ago. The key paragraphs:

Obama's first prolonged exposure to the church came when he moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer. Working with African-American churches, he said, "I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world."

But—and he is firm about this—conversion wasn't for him the end point. "Faith doesn't mean that you don't have doubts. You need to come to church in the first place precisely because you are first of this world, not apart from it," he said last week.

Millions and millions of faithful, including many evangelicals, have this sort of complicated relationship with their God. One of the enduring mysteries of faith is that it's not easy to determine divine will. Most of us who consider ourselves religious are engaged in a constant struggle to discern God's will for us, and we're always aware of just how far we fall short of meeting that standard. Obama received one of his loudest ovations when he admitted: "The questions I had didn't magically disappear."

This humbler version of faith has been in the shadows for the past few years, derided as moral relativism or even a lack of true belief. Obama stepped up not to defend this approach to religion, but to insist on the rightness of it. That should be comforting to anyone who has been deeply discomfited by Bush's version of Christianity. A questioning faith is a much better fit for a society like ours than one that allows for no challenge or reflection. It also acts as a check against liberals who would appropriate God for their own purposes, declaring Jesus to be the original Democrat and trotting out New Testament verses to justify their own policy programs. Liberals don't have the answer key to divining God's will any more than conservatives do.

Obama's speech, delivered to an audience of the frustrated religious left, was not a tactical plan for electoral success in November or in 2008. It wasn't a "We are too religious!" rebuttal to Republicans. It was, for the first time in modern memory, an affirmative statement from a Democrat about "how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy," as Obama put it. John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Mario Cuomo in 1984 each gave seminal speeches on faith and Democratic politics, but they were primarily concerned with defining their own faith—Catholicism—in terms of what it was not.

Obama's goal was different and larger. The speech worked partly because the senator speaks with easy-going confidence about his faith, weaving spiritual phrases into his speech without needing to announce them to his audience as so many of his colleagues do ("This debate about tax cuts reminds me of that verse from the Book of Hebrews …"). But more important, he doesn't recount the story of his conversion in order to establish his religious bona fides; he does it in the service of a broader argument. And he doesn't defend progressives' claim to religion; he asserts the responsibilities that fall to them as religious people. Americans are looking, Obama said, for a "deeper, fuller conversation about religion in this country." He started that conversation. A few others are joining in. It's time for everyone else to catch up.

I like her clear explanation of the mutually beneficial relationship between faith and reflectiveness. The notion is lost on too many Christians whose dogmatism unfortunately leads them to reflexive support of the expertly packaged piety of the Bush administration.

Wrapping up the week

I must confess that my increasing interest in the World Cup has come at the expense of my normal focus on the news. My awareness of the week's events is thus unusually limited, which is a shame because some pretty major events went down. The biggies that I should have written about, in no particular order:

• Hamas abducts an Israeli soldier in a cross-border raid. Israel sends tanks and troops into Gaza and lights up the Palestinian Prime Minister's office with a rocket (disproportionate force has worked so well in the past, right?). Hamas warns of retaliation in Israel. Groundhog Day. UPDATE: Interesting point-counterpoint on the battle.
• Warren Buffett gives 85 percent of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Buffett's generosity is truly commendable, and because the Gates Foundation is so good at what they do, his gifts will literally save thousands of lives. It's a shame that Buffett's example is so unique. According to an article in today's NY Times, the very richest Americans have become discernibly stingier over the past ten years, even as their incomes have skyrocketed and they've spent hundreds of millions lobbying to kill the estate tax. I've written before that such unbridled greed is beyond my comprehension; the very notion that one can actually deserve such wild abundance is, frankly, sickening. That Buffett could amass so many billions and then give them away is a testament to the liveliness of his soul, and it should be viewed as a benchmark by which other barons' legacies are measured.
• The Supremes rebuke Bush's military tribunal policy. We will now lose the Global War On Terror. Gonzalez apparently thinks Bin Laden would fare well in a court martial or civilian court. Since we're not hunting him any more, that point is as moot as it is stupid.
• Republicans work themselves into a frothy little passion over The New York Times' treasonous! story about the administration's financial intelligence collaboration with Swift. Yet we continue to notice that they don't govern so well. It's impossible to say for sure, but the Republicans have to be being cynical here, right? Do actual members of Congress truly, in their heart of hearts, believe that the Swift story undermines national security and is a crime punishable by imprisonment or death? "That's scary" is a throwaway line, but such ignorant authoritarianism really does bode ill for our democracy, especially when the ruling party has shown consistent disdain for oversight and the rule of law as we previously knew it.
• Car bomb kills 60+ in Iraq.

America do not advance? No, it's America DOES not advance

I hate how people conjugate soccer teams' actions in the plural. England score a goal. Brazil play with flair. Nonsense. It's a team. One team. One unit. Singular. We're not talking about 11 guys who happen to be on the same field at the same time, each doing his own thing. Those eleven guys cooperate toward a common goal, forming a SINGLE organic entity. If you're going to conjugate them in the plural, name them in the plural. Either "America does not advance" or "The Americans do not advance." We don't say "the gang rob people" or "the administration lie," do we? What makes soccer teams different?

Anyway, the U.S. team did not advance. After a stirring battle against Italy, they played flat, dispirited ball against an aggressive, lively Ghanaian squad. It wasn't simply a matter of being outplayed and catching a bad break. America was sloppy, passive, unimaginative and scared.

Landon Donovan, in particular, got exposed. Anyone with eyes and/or ears knows that he has been the preening face of U.S. soccer ever since the last Cup. He's been on magazine covers, sports shows and late night shows, but he was almost invisible out on the field. Most notably, he passed up an unobstructed shot in the waning minutes of the Ghana match. I think the only thing you need to know about this guy is that he rode the pine in the German Bundesliga, and rather than tough it out and actually try to improve against top competition, he chose to come home to play Minor League Soccer for the Los Angeles Galaxy, where he is completely unchallenged. There's a word for that, and it begins with a "ch" and ends with an "icken." That's no way to become a winner.

Zarqawi is dead, and people are talking about it

The biggest story of the week is obviously Zarqawi's death. Papers have features and analysis about the man, the death, the implications for the insurgency, etc. If you're looking for a thorough article about his beginnings, influences, travels, beliefs, career turns, mistakes and significance, take a look at Mary Anne Weaver's in The Atlantic. No need for a subscription for this one. If you don't have all day, just read pages three and four.

Weaver depicts Zarqawi as a fanatical, semi-literate, charismatic, bloodthirsty, arrogant, grandiose bastard. It's well-written, thoroughly sourced and informative. Take a look.