Beethoven composed elegance, vast and beautiful.  Listeners of the day had to warm to his passionate scores.  Because they did, his masterpieces live on.

With songwriting, brevity is key.  Gone are the days when the bards preserved whole histories through song.  People don’t stick around for that sort of thing.  We have books now, and Google.

Having just read such a book, filled with storied minutia about how print and broadcast media (dying life forms?) came to be, I’m charmed by the author’s élan.  The LA Times, CBS and Time, Inc. are the protagonists of David Halberstam’s gripping saga, The Powers That Be.  Power, politics and greed disregard justice or conscience and repeatedly give short shrift to a citizen’s need to know.  It’s the old story of democracy dashed on the rocks of the bottom line.  But the details, like notes in a Beethoven sonata, make the story live.

The book is a worthy, time consuming read.  Mr. Halberstam melds a composer’s lush ethos with a songwriter’s cut to the chase in segments like this:

Reporters and editors were at their best when motivated by instincts of social conscience, and belief in justice.  But those very instincts, given the curious value system in America, often made them stars.  It was heady stuff, this new touch of the bitch goddess.
David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

Our best instinct leading to our worst inclination: hardly a new phenomenon.  Ironically, it was the ever increasing reach of the media that magnified celebrity, goading even its best reporters and editors to follow fame’s fancy, to the detriment of honest reportage.

The Powers That Be predates Facebook, Youtube and the like.  Today’s web media give the impression that all of us have a shot at the spotlight, robbing the bitch goddess of her six inch nails.  Surely the saintly blogger can be trusted to honor truth?

Maybe someday, when we, the new journalist-citizenry, yearn to ride herd on our own rude hubris.

Public domain painting Evelyn de Morgan, The Worship of Mammon