James A. McClure

It would be tempting to mourn the passing of the golden age of journalism.

In the 1960s the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University initiated me into a quasi-priesthood of accuracy, fairness and balance. It was a reporters’ boot camp where crusty, ex-editor professors like the legendary Richard Hainey unleashed withering scorn on any unchecked fact or unattributed source. It was drummed into us that our first responsibility was to our readers and our stories were bigger than we were.

In my first job as a reporter for a community newspaper I was delighted when my stories angered people on both sides of an issue. Later, as a corporate media spokesman in Chicago, I encountered occasional bias and sloppy reporting but found the vast majority of reporters to be straight shooters. In those days we venerated Walter Cronkite and cheered the meticulous digging of Woodward and Bernstein.

The media landscape that nourished a couple of generations of great journalism has been paved over by economics and technology. Metropolitan newspapers and news magazines are withering:  Those that have survived declining advertising revenue have downsized their editorial staffs. The major television networks have lost chunks of their audience to cable TV and can no longer afford blue-ribbon news operations. And both print and broadcast media face growing competition from the Internet.

At a time when nobody can afford to hire reporters, technology has put the news cycle on steroids. Stories that went unreported until the evening newscast or morning paper now go viral on the Internet and are quickly picked up by multiple cable news outlets to fill 24 hours of airtime.

One result is the tabloidization of news. Local police stories such as missing toddlers or hostage situations are now national news because they build ratings and are cheaper to cover than the economy or the nuances of foreign relations. The media herd instinct means that a sensational but trivial story such as the Casey Anthony trial sucks the oxygen out of the news schedule for weeks at a time. For a news junkie like me, it’s a helpless feeling to get on the treadmill at the gym and realize that there will be no actual news on any of the TV news channels for at least half an hour… so it’s either the sports channel or the Home Shopping Network.

Think of the great news coverage we could have seen if the media had assigned all the reporters who covered Michael Jackson’s death to develop stories on the economy instead. But would anyone have watched it?

Another trend is the breakdown of boundaries between news, entertainment and opinion. Network news anchors are chosen for celebrity appeal rather than reporting skill, and political operatives double as news magazine columnists and television news show hosts. One result is that political coverage – fueled by today’s climate of hyper-partisanship and the celebrity appeal of President Obama – has become more overtly partisan. Wonder what my journalism professors would think of Al Sharpton hosting a TV news show one day and leading a demonstration the next?

It had never occurred to me to watch Fox News until I saw Charlie Gibson’s interview with Sarah Palin on ABC News during the 2008 campaign. I’m no fan of Palin, but Gibson’s interview was a textbook display of bias: the raised eyebrow, patronizing tone and “gotcha” questions, especially compared with his fawning interview of candidate Obama. So I now channel-surf between CNN and Fox in the hope that the truth will be somewhere in the middle.

This year’s presidential campaign is a bonanza for media-watchers. Was there a connection between political-operative-turned-newscaster George Stephanopoulos’ unexpected question about birth control during a Republican debate and the Obama administration’s birth-control mandate a few weeks later? One wonders. Why does the Washington Post do a front-page story about Mitt Romney’s high-school pranks when polls show voters are most concerned about the economy? Does anyone outside network newsrooms really believe that gay marriage, free birth control and student loans are the most important issues to the electorate?

Amid all the controversy there’s not much reporting going on. National TV news programs are more likely to rely on pundit panels than reporters, and the Washington Post “expose” on Romney’s antics 50 years ago appears to be flunking the Woodward-Bernstein test.

It’s hard to tell whether this is a vast, left-wing media conspiracy, as Fox News claims, or merely a half-vast effort to boost ratings and circulation by grabbing the easy headline. Either way, it’s going to be a nasty campaign that may further tarnish the credibility of the national news media, especially if they fail to re-elect President Obama.

I don’t see partisan news media as a threat to democracy. We’ve survived worse. The fulminations of Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann and, for that matter, the SuperPAC attack ads, are tame compared to what newspapers of yore published about John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

The silver lining is that the Internet has democratized newsgathering and put it into a fishbowl. Everything that happens anywhere is going to be reported on somebody’s blog, everyone with a cell phone is a photojournalist and the whole world is watching. The traditional news media no longer have a monopoly on news coverage. Anything they decline to report, or that their thin-spread news staffs miss, will inevitably pop up on the web and quickly go public. A growing number of national stories now originate in blogs and are picked up by the media.

If you’re as addicted to news and opinion as I am, today’s media scene is hog heaven. I channel-surf several news networks and read a local newspaper, a couple of news magazines, the Wall Street Journal website and selected blogs. My consumption of news and information is limited only by my desire to get a life. 

One can argue that more obvious media bias may help citizens become the thoughtful voters the framers of the Constitution had in mind. It’s easy to tell where MSNBC, Fox News, the Huffington Post and the Daily Caller are coming from, and consumers can weigh the alternative viewpoints of multiple sources. Everybody trusted Walter Cronkite a generation ago but today’s viewers are more skeptical, as evidenced by the rapid growth of cable news and the decline of the major networks. Some folks will flock to media that mirror their political views, but the diversity of media outlets means that issues will be raised and opposing viewpoints will be heard.

What has not changed is that the hardcore journalism is I learned is still alive and well in local newsrooms. Local newspapers and TV stations, even in a secondary market such as Albuquerque, are doing superb investigative reporting and earning Pulitzer prizes the old-fashioned way. Last week a local TV station followed city employees around with camera crews and sifted through records to expose illegal use of handicapped parking passes. The TV networks may be giving President Obama a pass, but the mayor had better watch out.

The Boomer generation is destined to be the handicapped parking generation. I got my handicapped parking pass sooner than expected. Happily, it’s temporary.

The blue placard with the wheelchair logo is the result of my first snowshoe hike in the mountains in early February. Snowshoeing is easy, they told me. If you can walk you can snowshoe, they said. Well, some of us cannot snowshoe and chew gum at the same time. I tripped, went down and felt the tendon above my knee snap. A few days later they wheeled me into surgery at the local veterans’ hospital.

I was impressed with the VA hospital, by the way. I received excellent care and was treated with more respect than my late wife got in a succession of private hospitals. It was fun to swap war stories with my roommates, and I was reminded of how lucky I am when the x-ray technician asked if I had any shrapnel or steel plates in my body.

When I came home from the hospital I knew what to expect because my wife was disabled for many years. I have her to thank for our decision to buy a one-story house with a walk-in shower. I had it easy because my knee was not especially painful, just immobilized in a knee brace that kept my left leg straight.

Being disabled required reorganizing my lifestyle. After years of walking across the house on impulse, I learned to plan every perambulation by wheelchair or walker: Do I have everything I need before leaving the bedroom in the morning? What else do I expect to use from the kitchen cabinet that’s within reach? I forwarded incoming phone calls to my cell phone and moved frequently used objects from high shelves to my desk and countertop.

How do you put on a sock when you can’t reach your foot? One of my wife’s handicapped gadgets, a plastic half-pipe with straps, solved that problem. A long-handled grabber device helped me retrieve the morning paper and put the cats’ food dishes on the floor. I learned to bathe by sitting on a shower seat, sticking my towel-wrapped bum leg out the shower door and using the hand shower.

Carrying things is a challenge when you need both hands to hold yourself up on a walker or crutches. A travel mug helped me transport my ever-present coffee or soda from the kitchen to my desk without spills. Dining entailed a multi-step process to move the plate from one kitchen counter to another and eventually to the table.

Fear of running out of reading material was a handy excuse to buy a Kindle e-book reader, which also fits neatly into a pocket of my cargo pants for those long waits at the doctor’s office.

I don’t need my left leg to drive, but was housebound for a while because my immobilized leg would not fit through the door opening of my Subaru. Eventually I was able to tilt the power seat back, do some gymnastics to maneuver my leg into the car and start using that handicapped parking pass. The electric carts stores provide for the disabled are handy but are too slow – and are not much help in reaching the top grocery shelf or opening the tall, glass doors in the frozen food aisle.

Two months after my surgery, my left leg is no longer immobilized in a brace and I will soon switch from a crutch to a cane. I expect to stop using my handicapped parking pass long before it expires. In the meantime, it’s handy to park close to any building (except the VA hospital, where the number of disabled vets far exceeds the available parking space).

I’m grateful my disability is temporary, and that my introduction to disabled living taught me some lessons that will be helpful in my inevitable geriatric future.

If politicians did not exist I probably would be a big fan of professional wrestling. But politicians are so much more colorful and comic.

It’s probably my upbringing. I grew up in Chicago, was an avid reader of Mike Royko’s columns and covered city hall as a college-student reporter for a community newspaper. In the years when the Sox and the Bears were losing it was always entertaining to watch City Hall. You never knew what Mayor Daley was going to say, or which alderman or ex-governor would be indicted next.

So I feel right at home in New Mexico. Politicians here are just as corrupt as the ones in Illinois but have a banana-republic obviousness that I find endearing.

Typical New Mexico voters

The latest reality show is the border town of Sunland Park, where a candidate for mayor was arrested for extortion after he threatened to release a video of his opponent getting a lap dance. The extortionist was elected mayor, but under the terms of his bond is not permitted to set foot in city hall or talk to city employees. He plans to take the oath of office by phone. Other city employees are facing charges of voter fraud, including bringing Texas residents across the border to vote. The last mayor of Sunland Park has not been seen since he admitted that he was drunk when he signed a major city contract. City council meetings there have been compared to the Jerry Springer show.

In Columbus, another border town, much of the city government is in jail for smuggling guns to a Mexican drug cartel. Perhaps it’s payback for Pancho Villa’s raid in 1916.

One of the state’s elected public utility commissioners resigned in a plea bargain after he was charged with campaign fund violations, embezzlement and a massive spending spree with a government gasoline credit card. Auditors got suspicious when he bought huge quantities of gas and charged a chimichanga at a convenience store. The commissioner’s defense was that he has a drug problem (and the munchies, apparently).  Earlier, another commissioner was convicted of assault after she attacked a romantic rival with a rock. The courts had to remove her from office after her conviction because she wanted to continue serving until she actually began her prison sentence. You can’t make this stuff up.

When the leader of the state senate was convicted in a kickback scheme a few years ago, local politicians held a going-away party for him. Months later the National Hispanic Cultural Center removed his name from a building dedicated in his honor. The move was controversial because the senator had done a lot for the community before the feds caught him.

New Mexico’s tiny population (about two million in the entire state) makes government accessible in a small-town kind of way. My state legislator answers emails personally. Everybody who has lived here for a generation or two seems to know everybody else and many of them are related. Last year I had a pleasant chat at a social function with a former state official who’s awaiting trial for misuse of federal funds, and later learned that one of my neighbors was on the grand jury that indicted her.

This community feeling may be why there seems to be a higher tolerance for official misconduct here than in most places, even Chicago. The standard questionnaire the Albuquerque Journal issues to candidates for office routinely asks if they have been convicted of a crime. Hardly a week goes by without news of a government official being arrested (often for drunk driving) and an inordinate number of government employees are on paid leave awaiting criminal charges.

New Mexico’s spirit of tolerance and forgiveness extends to dead criminals as well as living ones. Former Gov. Bill Richardson’s last act as he left office was to consider a retroactive pardon for Billy the Kid. After extensive public discussion, including comments by descendants of the sheriff who shot Billy in 1881, the Gov decided against the pardon. But it was a near thing.

That’s how it is in New Mexico and I’m enjoying the show.

I’ve been writing for money since I was 19 but had not planned on writing a book. Writing is my favorite activity and I have been incredibly privileged to make it my career. But I never aspired to write the Great American Novel, nor felt a book inside me yearning to be released through my keyboard.

I’ve written just about everything else: newspaper and magazine articles, executive speeches, business white papers, booklets and brochures, opinion survey analysis, legislative testimony and, more recently, web content. I have been the editor of more than a dozen corporate magazines and newsletters and enjoy editing nearly as much as writing, especially when I can help writers bring out the best in their work.

So when my neighbor asked me for help with a book he was writing I agreed to take a look at it. He had known a World War II veteran who had survived a Japanese POW camp and made a deathbed promise to write the guy’s story. My neighbor had been working for years to sift through interviews and family memories, had researched military records and was working on a rough draft of the narrative.

I know a good story when I see one and accepted my neighbor’s invitation to sign on as co-author nearly a year ago. I edited my neighbor’s draft, added more research and writing and helped shepherd it to publication. The project was mind candy for me, and in the process of collaboration we gained a deeper insight into the heart of the story: why this guy survived when so many prisoners of war did not.

The result is Don Jose, An American Soldier’s Courage and Faith in Japanese Captivity. You can read about the book, and the story behind the book, on our website. Our copies of the book finally arrived a few days ago, and we have launched an aggressive marketing campaign that will dominate our lives for a year or two.

It feels a little odd to have my name on something that’s registered with the Library of Congress. I started my career as a newspaper reporter with the understanding that my work would line birdcages in a day or two. Permanence was never part of the deal. All the trees I’ve killed over the decades have long since been recycled, and much of my more recent work (such as this blog) exists only on the Internet as bits rather than atoms. Now I’ve helped create an artifact that may outlast me. People are even asking me to sign it.

Promoting something I’ve written is another new experience. I’ve learned a lot about book promotion from my daughter, the semi-famous author. I’m generating publicity, and my co-author and I are organizing book signings and working our networks. I’m getting accustomed to promoting the book shamelessly to everyone I know. And I’m trying not to obsess about the book rankings on Amazon. 

I think solar power is a great idea. Free electricity: how cool is that? I’d love to use it at home because my house is an ideal solar site:, with a big flat roof under a New Mexico sun that shines 300-plus days a year.

Problem is, it’s too expensive. The last time I checked, converting my house to solar power would require an investment of tens of thousands of dollars. Even with the savings on utility bills and all those tax credits, it would take as much as a decade to recover my costs. I could break even about the time they wheel me off to a nursing home.

I suspect that one reason why solar power is expensive is because solar equipment still lacks the economies of scale needed to make it affordable. The more of something you manufacture, the lower the cost of each unit. That’s why many things that used to be expensive, like flat-screen TV sets and cell phones, are now available at WalMart.

Solar energy is still overpriced despite years of government subsidies. At this point the biggest reasons to go solar are noneconomic: ecological guilt and government mandates. My utility company offered me a deal a couple of years ago to pay a voluntary surcharge for the assurance that some of my electricity would come from renewable sources. Seriously? My bills are likely to go up anyway because of government mandates that utilities use more solar and wind power. Forcing us to pay more for something because it’s good for us is not a compelling strategy.

The telecommunication industry faced a similar dilemma in the 1990s. Fiber optic cable was many times more efficient than copper cable, but the stuff was expensive. That was frustrating to telcom executives who wanted to convert more of their networks to fiber but could not justify its cost. Ameritech solved the problem by offering long-term, large-scale contracts to suppliers who could offer fiber cable at a price comparable to copper. Suppliers jumped at the deal because the long-term contracts enabled them to expand their manufacturing volume and achieve lower costs.

Government programs to encourage renewable energy may be falling short because they tend to focus on subsidizing manufacturing and creating artificial demand without reducing costs. There is a lot government can do by focusing its efforts on the areas where government is most effective.

It makes sense for the government to fund research, because research grants and subsidized national laboratories can perform more basic research and development than most private companies can afford.

Government also can create markets in its role as the biggest customer in the country for practically everything. Instead of paying companies like Solyndra to build luxurious factories in expensive locations, I’d like to see the feds announce a program to spend, say, $500 million a year for the next five years to convert government buildings to solar power and award contracts to the lowest bidders.

Companies with the winning bids could then raise private capital to build factories, with investors looking over their shoulders to ensure that the companies are managed prudently. The likely outcome is that a lot more solar panels would be manufactured and, as a result, costs would go down. Not only would the government get something for its money (for once), but solar panels would be more affordable for the rest of us.

I don’t like snow. Really, I don’t. That realization came to me on a snowshoe hike in the mountains in the light of the full moon. I thought: “This would be more fun without all this effing snow.” (And that was before I fell and ruptured a tendon.)

Winter sports are big here in New Mexico. We have lots of mountains and, I am told, some of the best skiing in the country. I know a guy who moved to Santa Fe primarily for the skiing. There’s downhill skiing, snowboarding, cross-country skiing. And snowshoeing, of course. The TV newscast has a ski report every night. My neighborhood mountain, Sandia Peak, boasts the world’s longest tramway to whisk snow fanciers the vertical mile to the top.

My lack of interest in winter sports may be a result of spending most of my life in Chicago. For Chicagoans, skiing entails a long drive to Michigan or Wisconsin for mediocre skiing, or an expensive airplane ride to the Rockies. I could never see the point of spending money to travel from one cold climate to another. It made more sense to board an airplane in the winter if there was a tropical beach at the other end.

As a child I enjoyed playing in the snow as much as the next kid: snow angels, sledding, skating, snowball fights, building snow forts and snowmen, getting a running start to slide as far as possible down an icy sidewalk. The novelty fades, however, when the snow sticks around until April, you have to put on galoshes whenever you venture outside and remember that your mother told you to never eat yellow snow. Spending more time with a shovel than on a sled made snow something to be endured rather than enjoyed.

Snow in Chicago means shoveling the end of your driveway again after the city snowplow pushes the snow back… trudging through ankle-deep slush everywhere … spending an extra hour to drive home in a rush-hour blizzard… hoping the weight of the second fifty-year snow in three years won’t collapse the garage roof. I will confess that I was a little less grumpy about snow once I bought a big, noisy snowblower.

Snow is easier to enjoy in New Mexico because in most parts of the state it’s optional. When snow falls in the mountains by the foot, everyplace else gets a dusting or none at all. My neighbors in Albuquerque do not own snow shovels and snowplows are scarce. While cities like Chicago take snow in stride, the rare equivalent of a heavy Midwestern frost paralyzes Albuquerque. A moderate snowstorm closes the schools and shuts down the Interstate.

For the most part, however, snow in New Mexico is a choice and not a mandatory condition. You can be on a ski slope within an hour’s drive but can be a weather wimp the rest of the time. You can spend the day snowboarding and come home to a dry driveway. If you really, really love snow you can live in the mountains, buy a four-wheel-drive vehicle and savor the adventure of being snowbound. It’s your choice.

That’s one of the reasons I moved here. I enjoy looking out my window to see snow on the mountains but not on my driveway. If there’s snow on my deck in the morning it’s probably going to melt by noon.

I’m looking forward to hiking in the mountains this summer.

I’ve been watching the unfolding story of the Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster and the growing list of ways in which the captain and others screwed up. I have a little experience in things nautical even though I spent more of my Navy career behind a desk than at sea.

The Costa Concordia grounding looks like a classic case of human error rather than weather or mechanical malfunction. This was no uncharted reef: people have been sailing ships along the coast of Italy for 3,000 years. Piloting a ship along a coast is the most accurate kind of navigation because you can see landmarks on shore, either visually or on radar, and can plot the ship’s position within a matter of feet. The guys on the Costa Concordia’s bridge should have known exactly where the rocks were and where their ship was.

The risk of bumping into things makes mariners extra-careful when they’re close to shore. When they enter or leave a harbor ships post extra lookouts, watch every radar display and depth indicator, and often hire a local harbor pilot who knows all the shoals and currents. This is when the captain’s reputation is most on the line, so skippers are on the bridge micromanaging and tend to avoid distractions such as blondes.

Cruise ships are especially good at close-quarters maneuvering because they enter and leave harbors every day. Most have side thrusters (jets that nudge the ship from side to side) that make them highly maneuverable for their size. When I took a couple of cruises a few years ago, I was impressed by the skill with which the captains parked their ships alongside the pier. That’s not easy to do, even for the nimble minesweeper I served on.

Update: Apparently the Costa Concordia was going 16 knots as it approached the island. That’s a good cruising speed in the open ocean, but close to shore it’s the equivalent of navigating the WalMart parking lot at 50 mph. When the ship turned, its excess speed carried it onto the rocks.

One effect of the Costa Concordia disaster is that cruising will be safer than ever (for a while, at least) because the cruise ship industry will overreact by doubling down on safety measures. I saw this happen in the Navy.

Pratas Reef is a tiny, uninhabited island in the middle of the South China Sea. It’s marked on all the charts and can be seen from space, so ships know where it is and have used it as a navigational aid to fix their positions. Easy as it is to find (or miss), the destroyer USS Frank Knox (DD742) somehow ran bang into Pratas Reef in 1965, resulting in a massive salvage effort and several courts-martial.

The following year my ship passed through the area on a course that took us within about 50 miles of Pratas Reef. The captain doubled the watches and was on the bridge all night. Can’t argue with his logic: If there’s anything worse than being the first captain to hit Pratas Reef, it’s being the second.

As I write this, every cruise line is reviewing its safety procedures and issuing stern memoranda to its captains. Cruise ships may be the safest places on the planet in the near future. I’ll bet the Costa line is offering some terrific deals. If you don’t mind a lifeboat drill every hour, that is.

Politics is my favorite spectator sport. It’s often amusing, a little like watching monkeys at the zoo. But when politicians tinker with the economy they’re downright scary. The continuing recession (or recovery, depending on which party is talking) means that the economy will be a political football until the November election.

Most of us don’t fully understand the economy. I sure don’t. But the economic causes and solutions we’re hearing from the politicians set off my bullshit alarm practically every day. Every government attempt to fix the economy, especially in recent years, seems to result in unintended consequences. The only certainty seems to be that you get more of what you subsidize and less of what you tax.

The economists are no help. Every approach to the economy, however loony, is supported by at least one professor of economics. Want to starve a bunch of economists? Lock them in a room until they agree on a pizza order.

So we hear economists and politicians urging the kind of central planning and government spending that is bankrupting Europe. Some want us to emulate China, where a planned economy is headed for a crash and the high-speed trains already are crashing. Others urge a return to Reaganomics, which grew the economy in the 1980s but resulted in leveraged buyouts, junk bonds, and the migration of talent from productive business to the financial sector. All of this politico-economic blather is filtered through the lens of a mostly partisan news media.

A political campaign ought to focus on ideas about the economy and the government’s role in it. Can we reform the tax code to tax entrepreneurs at a lower rate than hedge-fund managers? Must energy policy and environmental protection remain mutually exclusive? Can a targeted job training program help unemployed workers qualify for all those unfilled manufacturing jobs? How can government and the banks team up to allow the housing market to hit bottom with a soft landing for homeowners?

But we’re not going to hear any ideas, are we? Instead, the economy will be fair game for demagoguery such as the attack on capitalism by Republicans who claim to support a free-market economy. Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry in particular revealed their ignorance of business and disdain for the private sector when they attacked Mitt Romney for Bain Capital’s corporate reorganizations. Just think what we’ll hear from the Democrats.

As I understand it, Romney did the same thing my neighbor does when he flips houses. This neighbor bought the crappiest house on the block and invested in a major rehab. In the process he scrapped the inefficient furnace and outdated cabinets, and that sounds like what Bain Capital did to turn around failing companies. Wonder if the executive branch of the federal government could use some remodeling?

The vulture-capitalist schtick is only the beginning. We’re going to hear that Democrats want a socialist system that will bankrupt the economy, and that Republicans want to help millionaires oppress the middle class and cancel Grandma’s Medicare.

It’s going to be a long, depressing campaign. What few economic ideas emerge will be written in crayon.

It’s Black Friday and I have not set foot in a single store. My objective is to avoid shopping malls and big-box chains until 2012.

Christmas shopping is intended to get everyone into the holiday spirit. Not me. My shopping is strictly utilitarian:  enter store, find what I need (or not), exit store. The only store I actually browse is Home Depot. Christmas shopping in crowded stores, especially under pressure to find something (anything!) for a hard-to-buy-for loved one, is a bah-humbug experience. I can’t enjoy the holidays until the ordeal of shopping is over.

My aversion to Christmas shopping is nothing new. When the Navy sent us to Japan in 1966, my wife and I were looking forward to a non-commercial Christmas in a mostly non-Christian country. To our dismay, the Tokyo merchants had recently discovered Christmas and were embracing it with same manic enthusiasm the Japanese bring to manufacturing and baseball. Every store in the Ginza pulsated with decorations. Christmas carols blared from loudspeakers. One memorable sign read: “Melly Xmas.”

My holiday outlook has not softened over the years. I’m even grateful I do not have grandchildren at Christmas time, because the obvious delight of watching grandkids open presents might not compensate for the traumatic feeding frenzy of a Toys”R”Us store.

Last year I did Black Friday for the first time to get a sale price on something I needed. I stumbled into the store at dawn, found what I wanted in five minutes, and then spent an hour in the longest checkout line I’ve ever seen. Never again.

This year I needed to buy a couple of items of clothing for the holidays, so I anticipated Black Friday by visiting a Kohl’s store just before Thanksgiving. The store didn’t have what I wanted in my size but Kohl’s web site did. Paying $6.95 for shipping beats an hour in the checkout line.

What gets me in the Christmas spirit is the Internet. Ho-ho-ho to you, Al Gore. Amazon.com has been my family’s Santa for years. The kids and I post our wish lists on the Amazon web site and finish our holiday shopping in minutes. I’d set out milk and cookies for Amazon.com if I could.

I won’t avoid all the stores, of course. In a week or two I will spend a leisurely evening on Albuquerque’s luminaria-bedecked Old Town plaza and pick up a few artsy stocking stuffers in tiny, adobe-walled shops. And as I speed past the gridlocked shopping centers I may murmur “Melly Xmas.”

It must be tough for this season’s new TV shows to compete with the soap opera of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Tents! Drums! Anarchists with iPhones! Convoluted speeches and loony signs! Celebrities and the homeless! Liberal mayors unleashing the cops! You can’t make this stuff up.

What’s nearly as entertaining as the Monty Python antics of the protesters is the strained attempts of the news media and politicians to take them seriously. The consensus seems to be that the occupiers are similar to the Tea Party as an expression of economic discontent, which is like comparing Spring Break to a Realtors’ convention.

Tea Party envy may be driving union bosses and liberal politicians to gingerly embrace the occupiers. There also may be some nostalgia for the anti-war protests of my generation that changed the world and elected Richard Nixon. (I missed out on those because I was in Vietnam.)

Albuquerque’s protest, with a distinctive New Mexico spin, is called (Un)Occupy Albuquerque in recognition of New Mexico’s historic occupation by the Spanish and Anglos. This implies that the place actually belongs to the Indians, but no Native Americans appear to be participating in the protests. Perhaps they’re busy running their casinos.

To better understand the protesters’ demands, I checked the movement’s web site — http://www.occupytogether.org/ — and learned that the occupiers blame corporations for all the ills of the world. They do not advocate any specific solution, such as electing a president who will unleash the power of government to defeat the corporations. Didn’t we already do that?

There are some legitimate issues in there somewhere that many of us might support, but at this point the protesters are not saying much about the economy. Instead, the protest itself has become the cause as occupiers fight for their constitutional right to sleep in the park. This strategy has been a spectacular success in mobilizing the homeless. Why stay in a boring shelter when you can hit on college students, get free food and maybe get on television?

In Albuquerque, the protesters wore Day of the Dead costumes (big holiday here) to mourn the death of their civil rights. One protester claimed they were standing up for their First and Second-Amendment rights (which is a little odd because New Mexico does not require gun registration). Another got on every newscast by announcing a hunger strike until the university president meets with him. The whole issue may wind up in court because the protesters have lawyers. Is this a great country, or what?

All of this is great theater, but whether it can change the course of the nation remains to be seen. The Tea Party had the right idea: They came, they protested and then they went home. Now they occupy the House of Representatives.