几天前，房东跟我说Walter Cronkite过世了，我一时不知如何回答，因为不知此何人也。这也难怪，Walter Cronkite做CBS主播的时候是60年代到80年代初，他的故事对我在时间和空间上都过于遥远了。但之后的几天里，这位退休了30年的老新闻人的故事一再被提起，他报道过越南战争，登月，肯尼迪遇刺，马丁路德金遇刺等重大事件.今年恰逢登月40周年,我们还有机会一再听到他当年的声音.除此之外,他一生中最高的荣誉是当选为美国最受信任的人。

我在一则访谈节目中听到嘉宾这样说,现在的媒体不可能出Walter Cronkite这样的人物了.因为市场的需求,媒体以各种政治,宗教派别和种族细分自己的观众群.他们向观众提供的不再是一个独立调查的事实真相,而是提供一种对这个观众群已经确立的观点的确认.(Let me put it this way, pre-exist opinions is literally "prejudice" in English. The media today finds fact to support the prejudice rather than finds the truth itself.). 所以,你只需要每天看你想看的那几个台,相信你愿意相信,并且已经相信的东西. 当然,这并不意味这今天的美国人就无从知道真相了,这只是说你必须掌握大量信息(比如同时看几个频道的新闻),并且足够的小心的分析每一条信息(如同当年写GRE作文那样),而不落入任何逻辑上的圈套.

在这个时代,要不被愚弄,我们首先要了解的是可靠的事实,而不是轻易接受观点.尤其要警惕对事实过于简单的解释,因为经验告诉我们那样的解释,即便不是错误的,也是极其肤浅的.这个道理,无论在中国还是美国,都是一样的.

___________________________________________下面转载美联社的纪念文章___________________________________________________

By TED ANTHONY (AP) – 21 hours ago

WASHINGTON — "And that's the way it is," he'd say. It wasn't, but we wanted that reassurance. The idea that someone could wrangle the world each night and boil it down to a sensible, digestible half hour was so comforting.

Barely a generation has passed since Walter Cronkite disappeared from our evenings. But the notion of one man — a single, authoritative, empathetic man, morally reassuring and mild of temper — wrapping up the world after dinner for America seems incalculably quaint in the technological coliseum that is 21st-century communications.

Many of the network farewells to the CBS anchorman, who died Friday at 92, seemed built around the notion of the father figure. Anchors and reporters who are part of another age — a still-unfolding era of community feedback, viewer outreach and social-media interaction — struggled to summon the idea of anchor as monolith.

"We'd all let him watch our kids when we went out to the supermarket if we had the chance," NBC anchorman Brian Williams said. Hard to imagine Bill O'Reilly or Keith Olbermann, vigorous though they are, as national baby sitters.

"Uncle Walter," we called him. But on the Internet, there's not much use for uncles.

We are now confronted with a rushing, 24-hour river of information, much of it chaotic and raw, with no one to shepherd us through it.

Though network TV news remains popular, its demographic is older and it has struggled, losing about 1 million viewers a year in the years since Cronkite retired as anchor in 1981.

At the end of last year, according to Gallup, 31 percent of Americans considered the Internet to be a daily news source, a 50 percent gain since 2006. That's almost 100 million people actively reaching out to get their news rather than flipping on the TV and waiting for it to come to them.

At the same time, people now want a stake in their news and direct attention from the people who deliver it. They're demanding it, and they're getting it.

NBC's Williams, for example, does a daily blog. CNN anchor Rick Sanchez has built his midafternoon show around feedback from followers on Twitter and Facebook. News has become a two-way street, something to create community around.

That can be at once productive and perilous.

It gives an exhilarating voice to the voiceless. Yet it also can encourage consensus reality. If enough of us say it loudly enough, it must be true. In the 1960s and 1970s, Cronkite was accepted as the everyday incarnation of empirical truth — "a voice of certainty in an uncertain world," as President Barack Obama put it Friday night.

Cronkite's legendary assessment of Vietnam's quagmire — the one that led Lyndon Johnson to lament, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America" — is often cast as a barometer of the anchor's power at the time. What shouldn't be ignored is that, even then, the waning of that kind of power had begun.

"Middle America" then generally meant white and over 30, the very people that the young, energetic game-changers of the late 1960s were insisting shouldn't be trusted. Power to the people was upending the national hierarchy, and the Age of Many Voices was approaching.

Four decades later, cacophony reigns. What room is there for the conscience of a nation, for history's anchorman, for the father we all wanted?

In 2009, even trust, at least in the public realm, seems an uneasy notion. It's something we continue to desire. But in an age of wholesale, instantaneous, unprecedented lying, trust is something that may not be that wise when it comes to evaluating our sources of information.

That's what has changed since Cronkite's heyday.

Today's model works more like this: Everyone vies to get his personalized, customized, agenda-driven version of "that's the way it is" enshrined in the cultural canon. We shout, cajole, maneuver, horse-trade. We demonize the opposition. We brand ideas as products and send them on their way, ready to do battle in the marketplace.

Our anchors follow suit, riding the rising crest of expectation and anticipation and, sometimes, misusing it. "It's not the old voice of reassuring honesty that they cultivate, but one of perpetual anxiety," Los Angeles Times TV critic Robert Lloyd wrote in his Cronkite eulogy.

The coliseum is always open for business. If you've got a TV or a laptop, you're plugged in to the whole planet and can have your say. No one person can speak for us all — we don't even pretend that's the case anymore — and those who tried would be put in their places as fast as you can say Edward R. Murrow.

That can be a glorious expression of democracy, or it can lead, as it did Saturday morning, to the most e-mailed story on Yahoo! News being the one about the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile crashing into a house in Wisconsin. Democracy has a way of being quite democratic.

Nightly American comfort, Cronkite style, is a thing of the past, if it ever really existed at all. Perhaps, in the Age of Many Voices, comfort and reassurance is not meant to be our lot. Maybe that's just the way it is.

EDITOR'S NOTE _ Ted Anthony covers American culture for The Associated Press.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

 

看到有人用最后三句说张爱玲的身世，所以就把全诗找来读了一下。除了末三句外，“上方孤罄定行云” 也写的很妙。


浣 溪 沙

山寺微茫背夕曛，鸟飞不到半山昏。上方孤罄定行云。
试上高峰窥皓月，偶开天眼觑红尘，可怜身是眼中人。

王国维

　这是一部黑白片，不光是因为用的黑白胶片，而是电影是如此单纯,如此泾渭分明。好人就是好人，坏人就是坏人。通常，我是不喜欢泾渭分明的人物形象的，因为这 样的人物很容易变得单薄，很假。但是这部电影里面人物却是很真实的。好人虽然勇敢，但不做无畏的冒险，虽然相信正义，但也洞悉这世上的无奈。好人的一切的 善举和英勇行为都是有所根据的，非常适度的，毫不过分，毫不造作，一如儒家所说的道中庸。
　　
　　坏人和好人的形象同样丰富，甚至更加值得玩味。恶人不是无端的恶，这种恶是有着古老的来源——自私，并衍生出来其他的恶德，比如冷酷，狡诈。 恶人虽然不做不必要的杀戮，但为保全自己可以不择手段，没有任何的道德底线。他们手持武器时的不可一世，在风暴面前却无比怯懦，求生时毫无尊严。当一个人 只为躯壳活着而丧失任何道德信仰的时候便是如此，更可笑的是他们以为所有的人都和他们一样。
　　
　　这部电影情节布置的非常周密，人物形象的点滴在细枝末节上就逐渐展现开来了。电影的大半部分都是关于好人和坏人在一个暴风雨夜里的对 峙，一种紧张的空气时刻笼罩着观众。这不是剑拔弩张的对峙，而是一种精神信仰的较量，在暴雨面前，在枪口下，好人的智慧和勇气已然注定了他们的胜利，这比 起最后的枪战来要更精彩。而最后枪战的胜利也是智慧和勇气的胜利，这两样东西恰恰是坏人没有的。
　　
　　毫无原因地，我被最后一个镜头所感动。我已经预料到了，在音乐中，女主人公打开窗，一片光明照耀近来，这是再浅白不过的结局了。我本以为这是 俗套，可以一笑了之的，可是不知道是什么力量把我击中，使我感到非常的震撼。这真是化腐朽为神奇。也许一个半小时沉浸在黑暗压抑的暴风雨夜之后，我们需要 的只是这么单纯的光明战胜黑暗的信仰。这种单纯的美也许就是film noir乃至更多老电影的恒久魅力。

在本杰明 弗兰克林的履历上赫然列着美国开国元勋（Founding Fathers)，政治家，外交家，作家，科学家，发明家，总而言之通才（Polymath)。看完这个履历，我们就不难理解歹徒们打劫杂货店不过是为了在100美元的钞票上一睹这位伟人的尊容了。即便如此，Wikipedia 的编纂者们在本杰明的履历上也不忘记上一笔，他曾当过出版商（printer). 我们很难想象出版商这个头衔怎么和以上种种勋功和伟业相提并论，可是偏偏这个头衔竟还排在相当靠前的地位。况且，这位国父一直自豪地用B. Franklin, Printer作为自己的签名。莫非其中也有良苦的用心？

 

我仔细揣度之后相信这确实应当有个缘故的。首先，印刷是本杰明的第一份工作。他早年在印刷所做学徒。我们无从考证本杰明当时是否像很多励志故事中那样，在工作之余如饥似渴地阅读印刷品。不过无论如何，他酷爱读书是毋庸置疑的，因为他后来还组织了一个图书馆，今天遍布美国各地的公立图书馆系统恐怕要追溯到本杰明的这个私人爱好了。

 

后来本杰明开了一个印刷所，就成为上文所说的printer （或者publisher)了。这个印刷所对于本杰明的人生有着几重的意义。首先，这个印刷所为本杰明以后的事业提供了充足的经济保证。那时的本杰明也算是年轻有为的企业家了，当他买下费城的一家重要报纸的时候只有25岁。打一个极不恰当的比方，他就好比今天硅谷那些年轻的成功创业者。这已经足够令人羡慕了，他本可以下半辈子守着这份产业，不断扩张垄断，一如后世的许多财阀。不过这就不是我们的citizen Franklin了。他拿这些钱办图书馆，医院和大学（宾大的前身），搞科研和发明创造（想必当时也没有写Proposal找funding这条道路）。这些事业成为了他除了在独立宣言上的那个签名以外最大的Legacy.

 

其次，他找到了一个抒发自己见解的媒介。他出版报纸，并经常发表文章。他也出过书，据说还很畅销。正是因为这些作品，本杰明能够召集起志同道合的人，并且赢得了人们的尊重。这也不难理解多年之后，这位德高望重的弗兰克林先生自然而然地被推举为宾州的代表了。

 

更为重要的是，这个印刷所也许和当时遍布美国各地的印刷所一样，成为传播新思潮的先锋。我无从考证这个印刷所到底印过什么。但是，我曾拜访过位于费城弗兰克林故居的这个印刷所，它离Independence Hall不过一步之遥。不难想象，当各州代表签完独立宣言之后，次日凌晨，街头巷尾人们传颂着"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. "人们手中的文本恐怕就出自本杰明的这个小印刷所。而在此之前的数十年中，又有多少启蒙思想通过这个印刷所夜以继日地传遍这块大陆，逐渐深入人心，而最终成为self-evident truth。

历史有时候在不同的时间，不同的地点，以不同的面目上演。1920年代的法国，一群中国留学生用着和弗兰克林时代差不多的技术，印着这样的文字："让统治阶级在共产主义革命面前发抖吧。无产者在这个革命中失去的只是锁链。他们获得的将是整个世界。",后来他们被取缔了.60多年之后,一群差不多年纪的青年人, 为了出一个文学刊物,他们也找到了同样的技术,这次他们写下:"新的转机和闪闪星斗/正在缀满没有遮拦的天空。那是五千年的象形文字/那是未来人们凝视的眼睛",他们呐喊出"我不相信",后来他们不出意外地也被取缔了.

 不过我相信这样的历史不会再重演了，今天印刷所的使命正在被互联网所取代.所以我们看到，伊朗的抗议活动是在twitter 和 facebook 上召集的。我们也不再听说取缔印刷所之类的故事，而是遭遇各种莫名其妙的技术困难。防民之口，甚于防川，古训恐怕还没有过时吧。但是，遗憾的是我们很难想象在180个字符间我们能够读到如上文引述的深有见地而发人深省的文字，通过今天的印刷所（互联网）广为传颂的是什么呢?不能只是grass mud horse 吧?

 

这是一部非常经典的电影。通常看完一步好电影之后，我都能在豆瓣上找到可以共鸣的好影评。有趣的是这里的推荐影评好像都有点干涩，像是电影理论课的作业。
　　
　　50年后，我们很难对当时意大利的社会现实和穷人的困境产生太多的共鸣。在寻觅艺术电影的我们，生活太优渥了，看完电影，虽然可以发些同情的 言论，毕竟是动不了真感情的。只有当片尾，当里奇竭尽全力甚至放弃尊严，仍然无法守住眼看到手的幸福，这种无助是任何人都必然经历过的。当他啜泣着抓住孩 子的手的时候，我们为他感到一阵欣慰，因为孩子，家庭，这才是他的希望和真正幸福的源泉，他把这些牢牢的抓在手里就没有无法度过的难关。我们终于可以目送 着对父子消失在人群中了

历史书里面没有如果这个词。尤其对于如中国这样的大国，且由几千年历史所塑就，一人一事是不足以改变历史进程的。所以，当我们看待中国近代史上的几次重大的事件，大可不必为一次次的挫败或错失良机而扼腕痛惜。一则，这些事件本无成功的可能性，偌大的中国并非一纸诏书或宣言，一种思想或制度所能够轻易改变的。二来，这一次次挫败，未必不是为未来求索所埋下的伏笔。

下面这篇文章如作者所说在观点上并无新意，大概不出钱穆国史大纲的范围。钱穆指出变法失败的四个原因（我的转述）：一，皇帝无实权，不靠谱。二，变法超乎常规，而又不是革命。三，求全变速变，而无按部就班的可行方案。四，守旧势力的强大。概括的说下面的文章讲了戊戌变法的几个现象:一,国家利益和王朝利益之间的冲突.这一点接近于钱说的第四点,不过又进了一步.他指出反对派守的不是旧,而是利.说穿了,不是意识形态之辨,而是既得利益之争.二,变法派误把无实权的皇帝当作权利核心.(而忘了还有太上皇).三,变法后,浙江读书人的倒戈.

虽说这篇文章没有太大的新意，但是仔细读来，却是暗藏玄机，岂曲笔呼。作者选取的以上逐条之后又一一应验于现代的一些大事变,难道历史在循环? 这里不妨再添两条:一是,这次变法中,最值得同情恐是那个光绪皇帝,因为他知其不可为而为之.而与他同盟的康有为则未必真把皇帝的安危记挂在心上.二是,自古变法,无论成败都有不少机会主义者的参与.变法成了,便是变法的领袖,败了,则望风而逃, 而始终缺少象谭嗣同这样可以担当成败的人

以下转载余英时为戊戌变法百年所作的文章，也算是对百年来中国历史上的各个大事变的一种回忆。

戊戌政变今读

这恐怕是苏轼人生最低点的诗吧，只看头两句就知道了。

自我来黄州，已过三寒食。年年欲惜春，春去不容惜。