Upcoming appearances:

Sunday, August 17th, 3:00 p.m.: Barnes & Noble, Cary, NC, with Cynthia Fox from Chapel Hill's Wild Bird Center

Friday, August 29th, 7:00 p.m.: Barnes & Noble, Christiansburg, VA

Tuesday, September 2nd, 3:30 p.m.: Bull's Head Bookshop, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC

Ahem.

FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED!

Thanks for your attention. Why, you may ask, is PC going all fair and balanced on us?

I'm glad you asked. As you may know, author/actor Al Franken is currently being sued by Fox News for titling his upcoming book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. The issue involves Fox's trademark on the phrase "Fair and Balanced," and its claim that consumers may see the phrase on Franken's book and mistakenly purchase it in the belief that it is in some way approved by Fox, thus robbing it of its hard-earned dollars.

We'll ignore the question of whether Fox News is fair and balanced; I've never watched it, though I hear tell that their ideal ("We report. You decide.") goes consistently unachieved. We'll also ignore the rather telling fact that Fox is claiming that its usual product might be confused with something called Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, which says a little something about their usual product, to my way of thinking.

Let's simply consider two things: first, the trademark applies only to the product Fox News makes--television news. They do not publish books, so far as I know. This makes the claim of potential confusion a bit disingenuous. Coca-Cola may have trademarked "The Real Thing" as it applies to beverages, but Tom Stoppard was still able to title a play The Real Thing because there was little danger that the public might assume that the soft drink giant was branching out into intellectual comedies about popular music and modern marriage--it might be a logical step, but it wasn't their strategy for creating a brand at the time.

Second, and more important, Franken is a satirist. His chosen field of satire is politics, and he has written several other books on the subject, most notably Why Not Me? and the best-selling Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations. (If nothing else, the title of this last should indicate that Franken knows some pretty successful lawyers.) His point in using "fair and balanced" in the subtitle of his book is, presumably, satirical. I expect that he's using it to poke fun both at himself and at the notion that Fox News is fair and balanced; because the rest of the title suggests that he's planning to espouse (I'm going out on a limb here, I admit) a left-wing viewpoint, "fair and balanced" takes on a somewhat ironic tone; and because Fox News is generally recognized as a right-wing organization, that irony also indicates a certain contradiction between its political stance and its chosen slogan. It's good irony--trust me, I'm an English teacher. I know these things.

The point is, however, that political criticism, satire, or even discussion involves using political language. "Compassionate conservative." "Just say no." "Weapons of mass destruction." In a democracy, we must be able to discuss these terms, even if someone has trademarked them in order to sell a product. (And somehow I feel sure they have.) Private property rights are secondary to the public good (see Amendment Five), but even if they weren't, no property rights are being denied here. Franken isn't pretending to be a Fox News operative, nor is he trying to profit from using Fox's ideas. Instead, he's a Fox News opponent, trying to profit from rejecting Fox's ideas. He's not stealing from Fox's cash register--he's a competitor, standing in front of Fox's store complaining loudly about the lousy service and the high prices. In America, that's not theft--that's just aggressive advertising.

So in support of Al, today I and many other bloggers on the web are taking this opportunity to use three little words, three little words that provide us no profit and do nothing to deny the legal rights of Fox News. And if Fox really wants to live up to its slogan, it'll drop this lawsuit before you can say FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED!
9:51 PM

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Upcoming appearances:

Sunday, August 17th, 3:00 p.m.: Barnes & Noble, Cary, NC, with Cynthia Fox from Chapel Hill's Wild Bird Center

Friday, August 29th, 7:00 p.m.: Barnes & Noble, Christiansburg, VA

Tuesday, September 2nd, 3:30 p.m. Bull's Head Bookshop, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC

Weight check: alas, it was inevitable... I put two pounds back on. Not entirely a shock, given the fact that the last two weeks involved a lot of travel and little exercise. We'll see how the next trip goes...

I'm actually starting to look forward to school starting. I desperately needed the break, and my appreciation for Woodberry's sabbatical program is now immense, but I'm starting to feel as though I'm spinning my wheels a bit. I've spent five and a half months away from the classroom--the longest such stretch I've had since 1986--and I'm beginning to feel the need for a bit more structure in my day.

Somewhat to my surprise, it hasn't been easy to get a lot of writing done during this break (except, of course, in my journal.) The fact that there's no deadline pressure means that my laziness has every opportunity to make itself felt. When I was working on The Verb 'To Bird', by contrast, I was very aware that I had only a limited number of hours in which to work--the morning hours of summer break, when Kelly was on child-rearing duty and I was free to pound out whatever I could. In the afternoon, I'd go on duty and she could write or do whatever else she wanted.

This summer, however, the kids are old enough to operate with minimal supervision, and Kelly's at work most days from nine to one. During that time, what am I doing? Piddling around on the Internet, as often as not, because I don't feel the clock ticking.

And of course it hasn't helped that I've got four projects going right now, and I can't quite get fixated on any one of them yet. I've finally gotten everything I've written of The Amazing Q, my children's book, onto the computer, but the story is still incomplete--probably only about halfway there. Kel and I did a lot of research for Mother Wit, our alternate history novel, while we were in Italy, and we've gotten the plot pretty fully outlined, but we haven't actually written that much since we returned; I'd say the first draft is still only about 30% completed. I've been thinking about my solo novel, Moving Day, but with so many other things I feel I ought to be doing, I haven't written anything in it for several months; hey, I've been toying with the idea incessantly since 1990, why should I rush things now? And I will be working on the new nonfiction book, A Microscopic Dot on a Mighty Long Line, over Labor Day, when I visit Chapel Hill and spend some time with my friends from the music scene there, but it'll still be very raw information, and I won't have much time to rework it before school starts.

So maybe what I need to get myself going is a sense of urgency, a sense that I'll need to write really, really hard for a few hours because after that, I've got to get ready for class.

How gracious of fall to provide that for me.
11:15 AM

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