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An old front in the campaign against public broadcasting opened up again the other day. For weeks, Kenneth Tomlinson, the Bush chair of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, has inveighed against the left wing bias of public broadcasting, and has taken steps to impose his own right wing views. This is despite the overwhelming listener support of public radio and television.

It is not surprising that Fox News would echo Tomlinson’s views. Fox is after all a model of the “fair and balanced” reporting to which public broadcasting presumably should aspire. But a Fox reporter has offered another twist on the theme. Here’s what Scott Novell, chief of the Fox London bureau, told The Wall Street Journal on May 20th:

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Boston was a center of student activism in the 60s, and it was common to attribute this to the many colleges there, and, more vaguely, to the city’s Abolitionist past. Something less obvious was involved as well — namely, sports.

To be a kid in Boston in the 50s was to suffer the hopeless Red Sox, year after year. Not coincidentally, the Red Sox were the last team in the majors to employ a black player. In the fall, you would watch Hank Aaron and Jackie Robinson, Junior Gilliam and Willie Mays perform on the heroic stage of the World Series. The next spring, at Fenway Park, the home team would trot out another cast of plodding white guys. I know that’s a stereotype, but if you were there then you know. A fourth place finish was success. The message was not lost upon those who would become the student-citizens of the next decade.

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It was my good fortune as a child that the local library was just a couple blocks from my elementary school. Once a week, starting in the second or third grade, our teacher would march us past the row of shops, and to the land of books. In my memory it is a brick and Tudor structure, one story, set back on a shady corner lot. Inside were long oak tables and lamps with green glass shades. The windows I think were leaded. It felt a little like a church, except more friendly and inviting.

The librarian was Mrs. Leif, who kept her glasses on a cord around her neck, and whose voice was magic. Mrs. Leif would sit at a window seat in the children’s section, and read to us. The boyhood biographies of American heroes. Charlotte’s Web. Thor, the Norse god. When she was done we were in a feeding frenzy. To this day I can remember where my favorites were — the biographies with the silhouette pictures and dense black type; the John R. Tunis baseball books; even Freddy the Pig, which was the first book of poetry I ever read and definitely the first that made me laugh.

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Which comes first, prosperity or virtue? Jack Kemp, then a vice-presidential candidate, argued in a debate with Al Gore that material wealth comes first. Enact “supply side” tax cuts, boost the churn of money through the economy, and virtue will follow as heat follows flame.

There actually is a lineage to this line of thought. It goes back to an American economist by the name of Simon Patten, who was prominent around the turn of the last century. Patten tried to reconcile the burgeoning consumer culture with the traditional values of probity, hard work and thrift. It was the old virtues, Patten said, that had to go. The new economy would usher in a new and finer form of humanity, with more discerning tastes and more philanthropic views.

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Selling is your business, your reason for being. Then you discover that people are shopped out. They want to simplify their lives.

What do you do?

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My son, who is a little over two, has an interest in trucks. Actually that’s like saying Tom DeLay, the House Republican Whip, has an interest in power. Josh is obsessed with trucks, consumed by the thought of them. He talks trucks when he wakes up in the morning and when he goes to bed at night. He plays with them, watches for them out the window, issues regular truck reports to his mother and myself. The arrival of the garbage truck on Tuesdays sends him into a frenzy. When we ask him if he has friends at playschool he says, “Trucks.”

If you ever have perused a picture book of trucks with a two-year-old hundreds of times over, and each time tried to think of something new to say about a dump truck and a front end loader, then you will understand why, one evening, I resorted to the Web. It was a lark, really. Josh was in my office, badgering me to read a truck book with him. I thought, “Hey, maybe we can see some new truck pictures on the Web.” I typed “truck pictures” on the Google bar, hit “go”, and found myself in one of those unlikely little worlds that flourish on the Web: truck picture aficionados.

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With a President who touts “faith-based initiatives” as the answer to the nation’s problems, it is instructive to revisit the time when people conceived their entire communities in just those terms.

One example is Dedham, Massachusetts, which was settled by Puritans in 1636. As Kenneth A. Lockridge detailed in his graceful little book “A New England Town: The First Hundred Years” (Norton 1970) the early Dedhamites were not compartmentalizers, the way boisterous religionists today tend to be. They didn’t separate their economic strivings from the moral force field of their faith. To the contrary they deemed pecuniary lust as evil as the more strictly physical kinds, and made their economic arrangements accordingly.

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