To the Graduates

by William H. Benson

May 18, 2017

     On August 10, 1979, there appeared in the New York Times, Woody Allen’s article, “My Speech to the Graduates.” He began, “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” Here we see on full display Woody Allen’s sense of humor.

     The comedian’s article is a parody of the standard commencement speech. He refuses to repeat the oft-repeated platitudes: “Don’t be afraid to fail.” “Remember that you are the future.” “Always appreciate your parents.” “Enjoy this time in your life.” “Follow your dreams.” “Never stop learning.”

     Instead, he adopts a tongue-in-cheek approach. He says, “We realize that science has failed us.” “Religion too has unfortunately let us down.” “The trouble is, our leaders have not adequately prepared us for a mechanized society,” and, “Instead of facing these challenges, we turn instead to distractions.” Although his words sound serious, his mood is light and funny, as he turns each cliché on its head.

     Today, the most overused word in the English language is “perfect.” We hear the words often, “That is perfect!” Yet, except for perhaps calculus, most things in life are not perfect.

     Raising kids, teaching kids, passing laws, winning the Super Bowl, taking our case to court, winning a Presidential election, declaring and conducting a war, and forging an independent life are all messy affairs. Nothing about any of them is perfect. It is haphazard, slipshod, go-along in order to get-along. Life is more messy than perfect.

     To the graduate, I say, surrender “perfect,” and instead adopt a “try to achieve” approach.”

     You may have heard it said, “Strengthen your emotional intelligence: your resilience, initiative, optimism, and adaptability.” Those are big words, but how do you do that? One way is to try a really hard thing, just for a short time.

     Try cold-call selling at the door or on the telephone. Work in a slaughter house. Ask to give a speech. Study a hard foreign language, like Japanese. Take an evening class in trigonometry. Write a thousand-word essay.  No doubt you will stumble and fail, but you will discover inside of you untapped and unknown reservoirs of strength, energy, and will power that will astonish you and your friends.

     Also, try to find smart people at work, at play, at home, and talk with them. But how can you know if someone is smart? Smart people welcome others, they make people around them feel great, and they accomplish the impossible.

     The fictional Forrest Gump said, “Stupid is as stupid does.” He meant that if a person does a series of stupid things, he or she is stupid, no matter his or her intelligence quotient. Consider Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. In his early twenties, he achieved a PhD in mathematics, but then he decided to mail bombs to unsuspecting people. Not very smart.

     Ignorant people are so self-absorbed that they do not know the effect they have upon other people. They play cruel tricks, manipulate, dominate, and stun others by their merciless actions. Avoid those who make you feel awful inside. A quote I read, “On occasion, we have to see the good in ‘good-bye.’”

     Last week in the New York Times, the British novelist Penelope Lively said, “I have six grandchildren, in their early twenties, and I look at them now and think they’re making the sort of decisions that are going to determine the rest of their lives. It’s quite alarming.”

     She is correct, but people also can take control of their life at any age and redirect it to where they want it to go, in order to try and achieve something grand, whether in their forties, sixties, or eighties. If, in your twenties, you made a decision that you now regret, I say, try to achieve something else. 

     Also, limit your choices. Too many, and we feel overwhelmed. Too few, and we feel slighted.

     One psychologist said, “We are biologically unprepared for the number of choices we face in the modern world. People worry that once they make a choice, they should have chosen a different one. Repeated tests have shown that people are more satisfied when they have less choices, even when the quality is not as good.”    

     Life is less than perfect. Often it is messy. But it is our life, and it is a work-in-progress.

     Woody Allen concluded his speech to the graduates. “Summing it up, it is clear the future holds great opportunities. It also holds pitfalls. The trick will be to avoid the pitfalls, seize the opportunities, and get home by six o’clock.”

     To the graduates of 2017, congratulations. Well done. You are now free to try to achieve something else.

Germany Reunited

by William H. Benson

May 4, 2017

      The Iron Curtain split Europe into two parts: the free countries to the west, and the Soviet-controlled bloc to the east. On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill stated in blunt words the case that, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent.” Two Germany’s, Western and Eastern; and two Berlin’s, West and East.

     Because West Berlin was situated inside East Germany, and accessible by train from West Germany, it was a free island, inside Communist, Soviet-dominated East Germany. Between the end of World War II, in 1945, until 1961, 3.5 million young and well-educated East Germans poured into West Berlin, and from there, they boarded the train that carried them to a free West Germany.

     That escape route ended in August 1961, when East German and Soviet workers constructed an imposing concrete wall that encircled West Berlin. It stood 3.5 meters high, ran for 156 kilometers, and guard patrolled the wall from 300 watchtowers and 50 bunkers. Guards shot at all those who attempted  to cross the wall. For forty-four years the Berlin Wall, that symbol of oppression, stood tall and mighty.

     The first fissure in the Iron Curtain appeared on May 2, 1989, when Hungary’s officials began to dismantle the barbed-wire fence that separated Communist Hungary from free Austria. On August 19, 1989, Hungary’s officials began to allow the few East Germans who resided in Hungary to pass also into Austria. Over the next few months, 13,000 East Germans escaped to the west via the Hungary / Austria border. “Then the tide was unstoppable.”

    Chancellor Helmut Kohl said, that it was in Hungary where “the first stone was removed from the Berlin Wall.” It is now called “Der Erste Riss in der Mauer,” or “The First Crack in the Wall.”

     On November 9, 1989, guards opened the Berlin Wall’s Brandenburg Gate and allowed East Berlin’s citizens to cross into West Berlin. On June 13, 1990, officials began to dismantle the wall, and on October 3, 1990, East and West Germany reunited. The days of Soviet control over Germany ended.

     The exodus out of East Germany alarmed its officials. A writer for the Economist stated the situation, “Nearly 30 years after unification the region still suffers the aftershock from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when millions—mostly young, mostly women—fled for the west.” Those young women chose freedom and opportunity in the west, rather than babies and motherhood at home.

     Some 1.7 million former East German citizens, or 12% of the East’s population, chose to flee to the West in those first months, and demographers predict that eastern Germany’s population will continue to slide throughout this century. “Those women who remained in the former East Germany had record-low birth rates.” By 1994, the east’s total fertility rate fell to .772, “far below the natural replacement rate of 2.1.”

    The forecasts appear grim. Social scientists predict that, “The east’s population will shrink from 12.5 million in 2016 to 8.7 million by 2060.” Frank Swiaczny from the Federal Institute for Population Research in Wiesbaden said, “Kids not born in the 90’s, also didn’t have kids in the 2010’s. It’s the echo of the echo.” The schools suffer. “Two-thirds of kindergartens and over half the schools in the east have closed since 1990.”

     Mayors, town councils, and school boards across eastern Germany face a difficulty: a lack of children in the schools, and yet an overabundance of senior citizens. As a result, care for the elderly has boomed in Germany’s eastern section. Nursing homes are “desperate for more geriatricians, nurses, and trainees.” It is a dilemma: “when does a community turn its school into a care home?”

     Care unit officials refuse though to rely upon recent immigrants from Syria or Afghanistan, due to “educational, religious, and ethical barriers for care jobs.” Germany struggles with the second highest number of migrants worldwide, second only to the United States. At least sixteen million immigrants reside in Germany, but 96.1% of those reside in Germany’s western sections. If a recent immigrant arrives first in Germany’s eastern region, “those who do have the right papers leave quickly.”

     Each year on the eve of April 30, Germans in both east and west celebrate Walpurgisnacht. Local folklore believes that on that night witches meet on Brocken Peak in Germany’s Harz Mountains. Children dress up in witch and devil costumes, and at midnight, a fireworks display drives away the witches and welcomes in May Day.

     The German-speaking people define resilience. Of all peoples, they have suffered the very worst: defeat in two World Wars, the terrors of a Nazi Germany, a Holocaust, a Cold War, an Iron Curtain, and a concrete Berlin Wall. Their current difficulties—a massive influx of Syrian immigrants and a declining population in the east—appear less than significant. Whether split or unified, Germans come together each year on the eve of April 30 to remember Walpurgisnacht.

It Happened in April

by William H. Benson

April 20, 2017

     Tragic events happen in April. For example, Confederate cannons fired on Union soldiers at Fort Sumter in April 1861, and the American Civil war began. Four years later, also in April, an assassin’s bullet killed President Abraham Lincoln.

     In April 1906, an earthquake struck San Francisco and ignited a fire that burnt 28,000 buildings in a 520-block area, and nearly 3,000 residents lost their lives.

     In April 1912, the Titanic struck an iceberg and more than 1,500 passengers drowned.

     Seventy-five years ago, in April 1942, some 5,200 Americans and far more Filipinos lost their lives in the Japanese soldiers’ death march across Bataan.

     The Warsaw ghetto uprising began in April 1943, and when it ended weeks later, German Nazi forces had killed some 13,000 Jewish men, women, and children, who had resisted deportation.

    At Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, in April 1961, a fiasco unravelled, and another assassin’s bullet killed Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968.

     The North Vietnamese Communists ran over Saigon in April 1975, and forced the last Americans to flee the country, via a helicopter atop the American Embassy. That same month Pol Pot’s vicious Khmer Rouge party seized the reins of Cambodia’s government and instituted mass murder as a state policy. The Khmer Rouge killed somewhere between one and three million Cambodian people.

     The nuclear reactor at Chernobyl imploded in April 1986.

     Because the jury at a trial in April 1992 had failed to convict the four police officers who had beaten Rodney King, rioters ran wild on Los Angeles streets, where they looted and set ablaze countless numbers of businesses.          

     On April 19, 1993, Federal government authorities fired tear gas canisters into Mt. Carmel, the Branch Davidian’s compound near Waco, Texas. A fire broke out, and seventy-six men, women, and children died that day. “The nine people who survived the fire cannot say with any certainty how the fatal blaze started. None of them saw it begin.”

     Two years later to the day, Timothy McVeigh parked a Ryder rental truck filled with explosives next to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and detonated the truck. The blast blew away the face of the building, hundreds received injuries, and 168 people died.

     In April 1999, two Columbine High School students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, unleashed a reign of terror, bloodshed, and murder inside their high school before they shot themselves.

     Then, four years ago, in April 2013, Dzhokhar and Tamerian Tsamaev set off two pressure cookers near Boston Marathon’s finish line on Boylston Street, and three people died.

     In all fairness, some wonderful events have also occurred in April. In 1789, George Washington was inaugurated as our country’s first president, a good thing. Congress established the Library of Congress in 1800. Thomas Jefferson bargained with the French and received the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

     In addition, President Truman signed the Marshall Plan in April 1948, twelve nations ratified the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in April 1949, and American astronauts released the Hubble Space Telescope into its orbit in April 1990.

     That is the nature of human history: a long series of wars, deaths, miscalculations, massacres, and poor judgment, interspersed with a few wise decisions by a fewer number of grand thinkers.

     Walter Benjamin, a twentieth-century philosopher, said, “Cultural treasures have a ghastly origin; they only exist because of the ‘toil of the great geniuses, who created them, but also to the nameless drudgery of their contemporaries.’” The geniuses perceive of a better way than the mass of men.

     Benjamin tells of a painting, It is of “the angel of history, who faces backwards at the chain of historical events, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage. The angel would like to awaken the dead and make whole all that has been smashed, but a storm is blowing from Paradise and the angel cannot close his wings. The storm is progress, and it propels the angel into the future, while the pile of debris behind him grows skyward.”

     An appropriate analogy for history: “the pile of debris.”

     We are almost through April. The battles in Syria continue, as they have for millennium. North Korea threatens war, as well as nuclear annihilation. Thousands of people are sitting in prisons all over the world, accused of crimes that they never committed. Injustice is rampant, but this is not new news.  

     Tragic events happen every month of the year, but April has more than its fair share. 

Willie Lincoln

by William H. Benson

April 6, 2017

     Eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln died of typhoid fever, on Thursday, February 20 1862. The most likely cause was from drinking contaminated water drawn from the Potomac River. His mother, Mary Todd Lincoln, was hysterical with grief, and the President suffered his own private agony.

     He said, “My poor boy He was too good for this earth. God has called him home. I know that he is much better off in heaven, but then we loved him so much. It is hard, hard to have him die.”

     Four days later, the Lincoln family laid Willie to rest in a vault at the Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, a Washington D.C. district. In the days ahead, the grief-stricken President returned again and again to the crypt to lift Willie’s body out of his vault and hold him, a strange and unusual action.

     The modern-day author, George Saunders, writes short stories, mainly of the supernatural. He took the historical facts associated with Willie’s passing and then wrote a novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, now a best-seller that he first published on February 14. To the historical characters, Saunders adds a full cast of fictional characters, spirits of those buried at the Oak Hill Cemetery.

     “Bardo” is a Tibetan word from Buddhism that refers to a state of existence between death and rebirth, that varies in length according to a person’s conduct in life. It is the son Willie who is in the bardo, and not the father Abraham.

     In each chapter, Saunders offers a series of quotes—most are a line or two, but some a page—that he lifts from countless historical documents and then provides attribution, as to where he found each.

     For example, “’Willie was burning with fever on the night of the fifth, as his mother dressed for the party. He drew every breath with difficulty. She could see that his lungs were congested and she was frightened.’ In ‘Twenty Days,’ by Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt.”   

     The dead gaze at the lad, and talk amongst themselves. For example, one of the dead, Reverend Everly Thomas, says, “’The newcomer was a boy of some ten or eleven years. A handsome little fellow, blinking and gazing cautiously about him.” Then, after Lincoln visited the crypt, the spirit Hans Vollman said, “And yet no one had ever come here to hold one of us, while speaking so tenderly.”

     Rather than build a plot or a storyline, Saunders paints a collage, a verbal work of art. He intersperses the words of the those who witnessed Willie’s death and burial, with those of the walking, and talking, dead. One book reviewer said, “Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, a theatrical panorama of voices.”

     In a “Letter to the Editor,” dated Sunday, March 12, 2017, Jay H. Lefkowitch of New York points out how similar Saunders’s novel Lincoln in the Bardo is to an episode of The Twilight Zone, called “The Passerby.” (Season 3, episode 4.) Rod Serling wrote the story, and it first aired October 6, 1961.

     Serling begins, “It began at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and ended at a place called Appomattox. It’s littered with the residue of broken battles and shattered dreams. In just a moment, you will enter a strange province that knows neither North nor South, a place we call The Twilight Zone.”

     A woman named Lavinia rocks back and forth on a chair on the front porch of a burned out house somewhere in the South. A stream of wounded and crippled soldiers pass by her house, each anxious to get to the end of the road, obscured by fog. She soon realizes that they are dead, Civil War casualties.

     Lavinia sees her husband Jud, and he tells her that he too is dead, killed in a battle, and that she also died of a fever. He wants to walk on, into the fog, but she hesitates, falls to her knees, looks up, and sees Abraham Lincoln standing over her, his stove-pipe hat atop his head.

     Lincoln helps Lavinia up to her feet, and then he quotes Shakespeare’s words from his play Julius Caesar. “Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me most strange that men should fear, Seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.” Lincoln tells her that he is the final passerby, “the final casualty of the war.” She races ahead to join Jud, in the fog, at the end of the road.

     Rod Serling concludes the episode. “Incident on a dirt road during the month of April, the year 1865. As we’ve already pointed out, its a road that won’t be found on a map, but it’s one of many that lead in and out of The Twilight Zone.”

     George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, and Rod Serling’s “The Passerby.”

     The actor James Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater in Washington D. C. on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, and he died on Saturday, just hours away from Sunday morning, Easter. A funeral train carried the President’s body, and that of his son Willie, back to their home in Springfield, Illinois, where they were buried side by side in the family plot on May 4, 1865.

Comedy

by William H. Benson

March 23, 2017

     We now stand midway between the Ides of March, and April Fool’s Day. The first marks the day when Cassius and Brutus stabbed and assassinated Julius Caesar, March 15, 44 B.C., and the second is a day reserved for harmless jokes that people play on each, but without cruel motives. On occasion tragedy yields to comedy, but then comedy can and will defer to tragedy.

     Tragedy is heavy, somber, intended to shock and horrify; comedy is light-hearted and playful fun. Although at opposite poles, both literary forms William Shakespeare mastered. His tragedies, such as Julius Caesar, and his comedies, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, rank among the world’s best.

     Read the newspapers and discover the world’s tragedies. Somewhere in the world everyday, there is a tragedy unfolding. But somewhere in the world there is a comic ready to stand up, break into a monologue, and incite laughter. Look for them, and you will find them. I prefer the happy comic to the bearer of grim news. The jester’s jibes, I have found, are more satisfying than the king’s dull talk.

     A theory of humor, called the “detection of mistaken reasoning,” argues that humor evolved in our species, because “it strengthens the ability of the brain to find mistakes in actual belief structures.” It is the comic who pokes fun at the ridiculous ideas that people proclaim as true.

     Daniel Gilbert, now a Harvard psychology professor, wrote a most interesting article that appeared in the American Psychologist in February 1991, entitled “How Mental Systems Believe.” Gilbert argued that to comprehend a statement or idea, a person must first believe it. After that, upon reflection, he or she can continue to believe it, or suspend judgment, or yield to doubt and dismiss the notion.

     Daniel Kahneman in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, calls the first belief that coincides with comprehension “thinking fast,” or our brain’s System 1. It is quick, nimble, and impulsive. The second belief, or what we may call doubt, he calls “thinking slow,” or our brain’s System 2. It is ponderous, less enthusiastic to commit, and demands further information before proceeding.

     Kahneman writes, “System 1 is gullible and biased to believe, System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving.” This two-tiered system balances our thoughts, and works to keep us out of trouble. He also points out that “when System 2 is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything. System 2 is sometime busy and often lazy.” On those occasions, you and I will jump to a premature conclusion.

     It is then that the comic should, or even must, step in and do her or his job. We need the comic to take center stage, burst into a monologue, wake us up, jar us loose from our hidebound thoughts, and bring into the light a superior set of ideas.

     Jon Stewart hosted The Daily Show, a satirical news program on Comedy Central, from 1999 until 2015. David Letterman hosted The Late Show with David Letterman until May 20, 2015. I say that both comedians retired two years too early. We need them today. Still, we have Alec Baldwin imitating Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live, but we need more comedians now, far more.

     On March 5, David Marchese, of the New York magazine, interviewed a full-bearded David Letterman, now 69-years-old. Marchese asked him, “How would you interview Donald Trump?”

     Letterman said, “I would start with a list. ‘You did this. You did that. Don’t you feel stupid for having done that, Don? And who’s this goon, Steve Bannon, and why do you want a white supremacist as one of your advisers? Come on, Don, we both know you’re lying. Now, stop it.’ Yeah, I would like an hour with Donald Trump; an hour and a half.”

     Over the years, Letterman interviewed Trump a number of times. Letterman remembers, “He was a joke of a wealthy guy. We didn’t take him seriously. He’d sit down, and I would just start making fun of him. He never had any retort. He was big and doughy, and you could beat him up. He seemed to have a good time, and the audience loved it.”

     Letterman perceives the need for more comedy now. “We gotta figure out ways to protect ourselves from him. We gotta take care of ourselves here now. Comedy’s one of the ways that we can protect ourselves. Alec Baldwin deserves a Presidential Medal of Freedom.”

     In Shakespeare’s play, Henry VI, Part II, his character Dick the Butcher says, “The first thing we do. Let’s kill all the lawyers.” A modern-day Shakespeare would instead have his character say, “The first thing we do. Let’s kill all the comedians.” Today, jesters can upset the kings more than the lawyers. It is the comedians who pose the greater threat to a dictator’s power.

     In anticipation of April Fool’s Day, join me in reciting King Lear’s words. “I cry that we have come to this great stage of fools.”    

Richard Nixon vs. the Media

by William H. Benson

March 9, 2017

     Lyndon Baines Johnson was ensconced in the White House when the war in Vietnam was raging and spinning out of control. The nation’s media—the newspapers and television—reported to the public the war’s horrific battles, and the numbers killed each week. It was an ugly time.

     On February 27, 1968, Walter Cronkite offered “a rare, brief, and potent editorial” on the war at the close of his television news broadcast. He said that the U.S. should cease the fighting now.  ‘[T]he only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.”     

     In the White House, LBJ watched Cronkite’s editorial and then remarked, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America,” meaning that if he ran, he would lose the 1968 election. Two weeks later, on March 12, LBJ announced he would decline to run for a second term. Walter Cronkite, a member of the unelected media, helped lead Johnson out of the Presidency.

     The British historian, Paul Johnson, said that Johnson’s “will to win the war sagged at this time,” mainly because of “media criticism, especially from its East Coast power-centers.” He also said that, “The trouble with the Washington establishment was that it believed what it read in the newspapers—always a fatal error for politicians.”

     If Johnson had difficulty with the media, his successor into the Oval Office, Richard Nixon, initiated an all-out war. His animosity for the press was reciprocated. Each loathed the other.

     In 1962, Nixon had run for California’s governor and lost. After the election, Nixon lashed out at the press. “Just think how much you’re going to be missing. You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” That proved not true, because he won the 1968 Presidential election, and endured several press conferences thereafter.

     Nixon displayed a paranoid attitude towards the press. He told his staff, “Remember, the press is the enemy. When news is concerned, nobody in the press is a friend. They are all enemies.”

     One commentator at the time said, “The men and the movement that broke Lyndon Johnson’s authority in 1968 are out to break Richard Nixon in 1969; breaking a president is, like most feats, easier to accomplish the second time round.”

     Paul Johnson remarks that, “It was something new for the American media to wish to diminish the presidency.” Instead of “goading a comatose legislature” into action, the press now scrutinized and attacked the President, convinced that “something was going on.” Johnson said, “The anti-Nixon campaign, especially in the Washington Post and the New York Times, was continual, venomous, unscrupulous, inventive, and sometimes unlawful.”

     On June 13, 1971, Nixon and his staff were startled to read the “Pentagon papers,” in the New York Times, “a 7,000 word survey of American involvement in Vietnam from the end of World War Two until 1968.” Its author was Daniel Ellsberg, a Rand Corporation employee.

     Convinced that White House employees had leaked certain information to Ellsberg, Nixon’s staff assembled an anti-leak unit that received the name “Plumbers.” It was a short step then to criminal activities: breaking into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, and into the Democratic Party’s campaign office in Washington’s Watergate Hotel.

     Nixon learned of these events afterwards, but then he participated in the coverup, a mistake that led to his impeachment and forced his resignation.

     Our current president, after just weeks into the job, decided to attack the media, because he did not appreciate all that he read in the newspapers and saw and heard on television. He lashed out at the reporters and called them “dishonest,” peddlers of “fake news,” and said the press “is out of control.”

     He then labelled the media, “the enemy of the people,” a quick phrase that the twentieth century’s most vicious tyrants pinned on anyone who dared to question their authority. Senator John McCain remarked that an attack upon the press’s veracity and legitimacy is “how dictators get started.”

     On February 25, the president announced he will not attend the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner at the end of April. Only one of him against dozens of reporters.

     When a hostile press confronts a president, some, like Johnson, will rollover and die, but others, like Nixon, will declare war. Journalists, though, when provoked, can and will fight back. “If anything, ‘journalism as an institution has reasserted itself’ in the Age of Trump.” Today the media is convinced that “something is going on” between Trump and Putin, and they will leave no stone unturned.

     Nixon learned too late Mark Twain’s maxim, “Never pick a fight with people who buy printers ink by the barrel.” Breaking a president is, like most feats, easier to accomplish the third time around. One wonders who will win this war, Trump or the media?