Since I started this sordid little fling with journalism, I keep revisiting this one ethical and artistic battle I carry on with myself.In my role as a writer, should I presume positivity, presenting the few cool and interesting things I find out there in the nothing-is-new-under-the-sun world?

Or should I restrict myself to the more popular “keep ’em honest” approach: criticizing the massive heaps of droll consumerist fecal matter and societal malevolence and black ops government conspiracies that pollute my life and must be stopped or at least spit out by me and my readers like so many pieces of unsavory fatty gristle.

Mainly, should I be a curmudgeon in hopes of exposing ne’er-do-wells and repelling other honest citizens away from their filth?

Or should I pretend like it’s all hunky dory, send my readers a ‘slice of nice’ and not seem like an asshole.

Case-in-point: I wrote a column for the Daily Beacon at the grand old University of Tennessee Knoxville in 2003.

I was attempting a face-off with something as massive and faceless as technology.

My premise was the idea that cell phones and AIM were the cause of the de-personalization of communication. I claimed that such technological ‘advancements’ created a culture of millions of ‘kind-of’ friends.

You send Facebook messages and mass texts to them but you would never spend a quiet afternoon listening to records and talking about your problems with them.

We now stylize life to keep us from having to accept its realities and hurts, and deal with them in any real way.

My stance was that, in the ’70s, my dad might have made a plan via payphone to meet his friend at the bus stop and then proceed to a party.

But he feels more obligated to keep his commitment because he can’t text his way out five minutes before when something cooler is beamed in to him on a Smart Phone.

He couldn’t break up with a girl over e-mail. He couldn’t immediately confess to all acquaintances his darkest hurt in a poetic emo turn via a Twitter post. He had to actually call a real individual, whose number he had memorized, and deal with that person in telling his truth, verbally.

My roommate, already sickly after reading my other articles condemning product-placement hip-hop, fraternities’ petulant displays of machismo, TV’s insipid turn to trash reality programming, simply remarked:

“Well, I see a common thread here, you’ve definitely found your voice. You just criticize the things everybody else likes” (inferred: so you can feel like a superior gatekeeper instead of like an outsider who doesn’t get it).

Well, that stuck with me, and I’ve tried to stick to the “if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all” credo.

But it struck me one day while I was watching so many news programs glorifying the party to which their board members belong – is it any secret the Donkeys own CNN, the Elephants own Fox, and so on ad nauseum – this isn’t journalism.

This isn’t writing, this isn’t art. This is advertising.

Advertising tells you nice things about whatever topic is up for discussion.

Public relations is there to spread the word about even worthy causes.

Praise music is there to lift people up, People magazine is there to offer trite observations about celebrity weddings and diets.

But real journalism, music and art have always been and still are centered on challenging people, traditions, viewpoints, laws and accepted ways of thinking.

We are there to keep people honest, confront people with ideas so they can at least be informed even if they still sniff out the filth because it’s easy and pre-packaged for them.

We’re there to challenge the positive creative people to create less mediocrity and more stuff that’s positively amazing. It’s our social responsibility.

I’m not a cynic, I hope for happiness and belonging and togetherness and peace with anybody I come across.

But I am a critic and there’s an important difference: a cynic sees trashing something as a simple nihilistic release, because really there’s nothing especially good that could come out of it in such a horrible world, right?

I criticize because I believe there is better out there.

We can learn to let go of all the non-vital, all the shallow and fake, and we can find real and satisfying things out there in life, things that fulfill you.

Things that will not just float through your transom as you drift through life on autopilot.

It’s an apathetic world, but there’s still so much to believe in.

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