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I've been soured on CNN for more than a year now (somebody take those graphics away from Blitzer! And who made these chair-warmers into pundits?)-- but have decided to forgive Anderson Cooper, at least, for moderating this debate.

The Mandate of a Mad Heaven, or the Whim of a Malign Thug

My friends find me almost mute about the earthquake in China, odd considering my interest in Chinese history, and my need to alert the world to the fall of the smallest sparrow. The best coverage has been that of Melissa Block on NPR, a story I'm sure she would rather have lived without seeing. This was a sad case of being the right person in the wrong place at the right time: Block and Robert Siegel were in China for the Olympics, and Block herself was interviewing a Chinese Christian about his flock in the west of China when the towers began to shake. The next day she had to watch mothers and fathers identify the bodies of their dead children, and on into the night with rain falling and candles flickering around small bodies as families burnt offerings for the dead, paper money and incense and firecrackers, and paper toys if they had them, in the old tradition. This was not ambulance chasing; just being there and bearing witness. Siegel himself was covering a makeshift emergency rom where the doctors had gone days without sleep, mentioned his own daughters safe at home, and learned that the doctor he was interviewing, up to his elbows in another patient, had lost his twenty-six-year-old daughter in the quake. Who must do the difficult things? goes the proverb, He who can.

The Lisbon earthquake and tsunami back in 1755 was one of the events that fed the Enlightenment and led people like Voltaire to question the blinkered praise of a merciful God:
Unhappy mortals! Dark and mourning earth!
Affrighted gathering of human kind!
Eternal lingering of useless pain!
"If God's up there," Dr. Lecter tells Clarice Starling about church collapses, in his role as the demon who always puts a little bit of truth in the lies he tells, "He just... loves... it." And Voltaire's Candide watched the tsunami murder the innocent while the wicked bobbed like corks, and forever after considered themselves as blessed by God. If ever you wonder how the Bush administration sleeps at night, there's your answer: their friends and children didn't die, and yours did.

One of the early commentators on the Chengdu tragedy mentioned the "Mandate of Heaven", an ancient homily that says every dynasty in China survives only so long as it has the clear approval of the Powers that Be-- that is, so long as a dynasty keeps winning, then God must approve. The fellow who mentioned the Mandate caught some flack later on, usually along the line that China is a modern country now and doesn't believe in such superstition any more, but I think they missed the point he was making. The influence of natural disaster on the Mandate of Heaven has always been a practical one: regimes that do a good job of coping with natural disasters do well, and those who fail to take care of the people in a crisis soon find the ship of state beset on all sides by a sea of angry humanity. Apparently, the Chinese regime is doing the best anyone could ask for, for its own people at least (although one wishes the political wing would use its influence in Burma to kick the Myanamar generals' ass up around their ears). In Chengdu, the complaints and anger have been directed at lax building codes and local corruption that led to collapses, while the government in Beijing is still very much in charge.

Beijing says it wants to rebuild in two years, and probably means it, which would be rather ironic, considering the clusterfuck that the ideology of laissez-faire capitalism visited on Louisiana and the Gulf Coast after a couple of hurricanes. Here's a prayer for Sichaun Province, and keep a prayerful eye on friends near San Francisco and Saint Louis on the San Andreas and New Madrid fault lines. There's enough old Baptist left in me to wonder if some worse thing, some greater sorrow, was avoided, but Portugal's prime minister probably said it best in 1755, and quieted the philosophers and the preachers: "We will bury the dead and take care of the living."

Bend Your Knees and Relax, Democracy

Wonkette is funny again, which might make its "liveblogging" the only sane choice for Primary updates tonight. CNN becomes more and more unwatchable as the "host" format wears on, and even their last shining glimmer of intelligence, Anderson Cooper, has been buried somewhere beneath panels of second rate pundits and canned segments, when he should be out in the hinterlands doing his investigative thing on these mother@#@Qcock$#@$###sonofa *&%##$#$ voting machines. Apparently his second hour is stunningly coming in behind the O'Reilly hate broadcast, and Fox I mean CNN is cutting back on Cooper's chance to become the peripatetic Murrow of our day. Because you know, our mission statement at CNN has nothing to do with a well-informed democracy, not since we started dressing like the cool kids at Fox. And remember what Paley told Bill Moyers back when he left for PBS? "I'm sorry, Bill. but the minute's just worth too much money now."

I've nothing to say about Fat Tuesday and "Super Tuesday" falling on the same day, other than to complain that wretched excess makes my gorge rise, and I'm not talking about the Mardi Gras. The drunken half of America will be showing their tits, and the sober half showing their asses like parading baboons, and who can say which spectacle will bring happiness to the greater number of people?

10:30 PM EST: The History Channel is showing a Megadisasters episode about the possibility of an alien virus causing a pandemic after riding in on a comet or returning spacecraft. This is way more entertaining than Mitt Romney's pep rally chants on the networks. PBS is an island of sanity with Jim Lehrer the Betazoid anchor (really have you ever seen his pupils?) NBC has reached the absolute low in expert opinion by hiring reknowned Arabist Karen Hughes. You don't just reach for the remote and change the channel when that happens, you scream "Dive! Dive!" and start punching buttons like a submarine crew. Back to the space bug pandemic, where there is at least some hope for a cure.

11:00 PM: Obama has nine states so far, even snatching Connecticut and Delaware out from under Clinton's nose. Clinton has Massacusetts, the only state that went for McGovern over Nixon in 1972, proving once again that they're Democrats that don't mind losing.

Happy Birthday, Daniel Schorr

Just as I've finished my whinging about the good dying young, comes news of Daniel Schorr's 91st birthday. The last of Murrow's Boys still working: the guys who could write well, speak well and had the moxie to "tell the truth and run". (Marvin Kalb was actually the last hired by Murrow, four years after Schorr, but he took the king's shilling years ago to teach at Harvard and become a Gray Eminence, a Lippman instead of a George Seldes or I.F. Stone.)

Murrow hired Schorr two years before I was born, for God's sake, when Schorr was 37-- and very much the "kid" around CBS, compared with colleagues like William Shirer, who'd stuck around Nazi Germany and didn't get out until 1940, or Cronkite, a wire-and-print man at UPI until 1950, who'd landed with troops behind enemy lines in a glider on D-Day. Shirer himself gave Murrow a civics lesson by quitting when CBS was late coming to the table against McCarthy and failed to stand up for Shirer when he was being red-baited as prematurely anti-fascist. (We like to remember Murrow at his best, but at the time, Murrow's eloquent speech against McCarthyism was akin to Stalin declaring war on Japan after the US bombed Hiroshima.)

Kid Schorr got his chance to show what it takes to be a "Murrow Boy" when he got in a pissing match with the Pentagon, the Nixon White House and CBS itself, which fired him over his reporting on CIA villainy and the Pike Committee hearings. It's part of guy lore that a man is defined not just by his friends but by who his enemies are, and there are few more deserving of a great soul in opposition than the secret murderers at CIA, or moments more delicious than Schorr reading Nixon's "enemies list" on-air without realizing that his own name was on the list.

If I seem in a valedictory mood, it's inspired by watching in quick succession Richard Pryor's first concert film (the one with the dead pet monkies and a sympathetic German Shepherd) and a Paul McCartney broadcast, Chaos and Creation at Abbey Road, with McCartney fiddling around with Elvis' bass or explaining how the chords of "Blackbird" were born of a mistake he and George Harrison used to make while trying to play Bach as kids. This inclines me to appreciate our treasures while we have them.

Some of my my favorite moments in the week are Schorr's conversations with Scott Simon on Saturday mornings. Apparently it's a favorite joke at NPR to send the most naive interns around to ask Schorr questions about covering the Spanish American war, but he seems to be enjoying himself. Long may he continue to be a Ring-Tailed Wonder, pissing off the right people and much loved by the best.

Wolf Kills Are Good for Other Living Things; Beaver Population Up 10%

Certain unreported events in the natural world have at least as much effect on my spiritual well-being as the solipsistic concerns of the cannibals in Washington or the public masturbators in Los Angeles. With 22 minutes to describe reality, Katie Couric thinks that I give a shit whether Senator Fred Thompson is still dating Lorrie Morgan. The local "news" broadcast in Kalamazoo includes movie clips and "Survivor" updates. Everyone except Mika Brzezinski insists on telling me the affairs of a drunken heiress I've never met. The networks keep entertaining themselves, their audience share is mysteriously dropping, we have a talking chimp for a president, and children want to be celebrities instead of doctors or firemen.

This might be why Thoreau tells us to read not the times, but the eternities. The BBC, NPR and the Daily Show keep me informed of human affairs, leaving us sadder and afraid but not wiser. CBS' Sunday Morning broadcast is one of the few to acknowledge a larger reality outside our concerns, by broadcasting nature scenes every week without narration. This is a blessing to us all, and might restore the nation if practiced more widely. Dick Cheney grunts and frets his hour upon the stage, and we all pray for a defective microwave-- but meanwhile, in spite of his efforts, grizzlies go on fishing in a river somewhere with the water rushing past them and neither gives a shit about Donald Trump. Honeybee hive collapse is an important story. Tuvalu sinking is an important story. Ask me for local news, and I'll tell you about the feral cat in my backyard, the raccoon family schedule, or the osprey I saw taking a fish in the Allegan forest.

Anderson Cooper continues to score points around here by including regular reports on animals: not just the stars of the moment, like Butterstick the DC panda or Knute the polar bear, but endangered animals in Bangkok markets and stray dogs in New Orleans. The video clip here includes an unexpected side effect (unexpected by me, anyway) from the introduction of wolves into Yellowstone. Wolves keep elk on their toes; with a big predator in the area, elk don't eat up all the young willow and birch. More willow stands, more cover for smaller wildlife of all kinds, and an increase in the number of beaver families that keep the landscape engineered and irrigated-- and I do love the beavers.

I heard about a Sicilian immigrant who thought that the woods around his daughter's house weren't really a forest until the arrival of a black bear in the neighborhood: now the patch of trees had attained wildness, some of the ancient magic. For some people it's wolves or cougars. For me it's the arrival of beavers and all that they represent in a happy landscape. News comes from New York City that an adolescent beaver has started building in the Bronx, the first beaver on John Jacob Astor's island in more than 200 years.