Having carried the weight of the US on his shoulders for a few months, President Obama went to the G20 summit this week to try balancing the weight of the world as well. Normally these kinds of economic summits don’t warrant that much attention. They’re like watching a MLB all-star game with, say, Barry Bonds in it. If you’re so good, how come we’re never in the series?

But Bond is gone and so is Bush, which explains a lot of the interest in Obama this year. That and the dire, not-since-the-thirties state of economic peril the whole world is in. Those days were on the minds of the press who questioned the president (and literally cheered when he left), and the answer he gave was most telling: “If there’s just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy,” he said, “that’s an easier negotiation. “But that’s not the world we live in, and it shouldn’t be the world we live in.”

That outlook, the “shouldn’t” part particularly, is what sets Obama apart from his predecessor. Here he is literally the anti-Bush, telling the world that the US cannot dictate terms to the rest of the world (though he strove, with some success, to limit protectionism among the other nations and to get them to commit to stimulus packages of their own) but also should not. That is literally the good news and the bad news: We’re in this together which also means you have to help me carry this load. Lend a shoulder. 

What some of the international press saw as his aloofness can be attributed to that Obama cool (you want heat, go get Berlusconi) and the fact that he was fighting a cold throughout the trip. But even at the top of his game, Obama would have been playing reality check with his audience. It reminds me of that famous Churchill story: A temperance woman approaches him after a campaign speech in a rural church and says, “Mr. Prime Minister, do you realize that all the brandy you had drunk in your life would nearly fill this hall?”

Churchill looked up at the ceiling and said, “So little time, so much to do.”

Lost in the New York Times profile of rising Fox News star Glenn Beck is any mention of his out-there (in every sense) bio. Sure, Beck (who was a best-selling author and popular talk radio star before Fox lured him away from HLN) cries about how much he loves America and worries about what will happen when Marxism-under-Obama begins and FEMA opens its concentration camps.  But did you know that he is also a recovering alcoholic? The kind that won’t shut up?

As a friend of Bill W‘s myself, I have a lot of respect for the power of recovery and the demands of honesty it  places on people, really I do. And in many a 12-step meeting I have grappled with my own feelings of impatience, judgment and flat-out orneriness while someone has droned on about their cat or their printer. “But enough about me, let me tell you about my miserable childhood.” For a good example of what I’m talking about, check out Anne Hathaway’s painful rehearsal party speech in Rachel Getting Married. 

The tendency to say anything, and believe it’s valid and important because I’ve said and felt it, doggone it, can make for good comedy. Al Franken, back before he was an almost-Senator, had great fun with 12-step earnestness in the guise of Stuart Smalley, and Beck’s own unhinged rants are already being collected as found poetry on Salon. I’m sure many non-conservatives Tivo Beck’s five o’clock newscast just so they can watch him later as they smoke a fatty. (When Stephen Colbert parodied Beck you couldn’t tell which twin had the tony. As Colbert said in admiration, “Crank up the crazy and rip off the knob.”)

But I think underlying Beck’s appeal — aside from the blatant populism and fear-mongering of Fox’s traditionally paranoid audience — is his emotional nature. Look at Obama: he’s too cool for school. When Leno asked him about his first ride on Air Force One, he riffed on his daughters who were only interested in the containers full of Starbursts. “That’s a whole ‘nother level of cool,” he said, given that they were now the president’s daughters and they were flying over the Washington Monument. A kind of cool that’s genetic. 

What Beck has is the anti-cool. He’s cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Shown a clip of Lawrence Harvey’s famous rant in Network (“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”), the anchor said he could relate. Anger is an energy, as Johnny Rotten observed. And the right could use some energy about now. 

Obama’ press conference last night may have marked the end of the mainstream media’s love affair with our new president — though as the man himself said, when asked about the nation’s pride in electing its first African-American to the top job, “That lasted about a day.” Could it have had something to do with the fact that Obama bypassed the New York Times and the Washington Post in favor of such marginal media players as Politico, Essence and Stars & Stripes?

What a thing to say! Actually the bloom was off the rose this weekend with the Times entire Sunday section dog-piling on the new administration. Most notable was Frank Rich, who wondered if the economic meltdown and Obama’s reaction to it was his “Katrina moment.” Goodness! Sixty-four days into the job, with approval ratings of about the same number, and one of the Times leading liberal poohbahs sounds not unlike CNN’s Republican scold Alex Castellanos, who busted-up even moderate David Gergen last night when he suggested that we were looking at “a one-term president.” 

You guys are worse than Yankee fans! To say these are early innings is an understatement; it’s his first at-bat!. And to say that the man can’t win seems also incontrovertible: if he makes jokes and goes on Leno, he’s pandering to the proletariat; if he is serious and gives thoughtful answers (average last night was about four minutes per question) he’s “professor in chief,” as the Times put it, “offering familiar arguments in long paragraphs.”

Most telling was the photograph the paper ran in the late edition. Here was Obama, mouth open, looking tired and wan, like a man who has been driving all night and then was pulled over by the highway patrol when he veered out of his lane. He’s explaining that he hadn’t slept because he needed to get across the border for this job that was really important and didn’t have time to rest. Perhaps you can relate. 

Stories about new forms of communication and community — from Facebook to email to Twitter — seem to reach some kind of critical mass in the media this week. It began Sunday, in the Times magazine, with Peggy Orenstein fretting about les faux amis she was accumulating on Facebook, while grieving for today’s teens who were being denied the right to a past by the phenomenon of portable community. “[S]omething is drowned in that virtual coffee cup,” she wrote, “an opportunity for insight, for growth through loneliness.” (The fact that she admitted that she had left home as a teenager with Marlo Thomas’s That Girl and Mary Tyler Moore’s Mary Richards as role models only put a small dent in her argument. Aside from the fact that both were fictional characters, consider the hair.)

Then in Wednesday’s Times there was an alarming front page story about jury trials that ended in mistrial because of jurors who were doing freelance research on the case online — and texting and Twittering their friends throughout. (A juror in a case involving a company called Stoam Holdings sent this text message to his friends: “oh and nobody buy Stoam. It’s bad mojo and they’ll probably cease to exist, now that their wallet is 12m lighter.”)

That same day WNYC’s Soundcheck devoted half its program to a Twitter battle between Lily Allen and Perez Hilton (come on, act like you care) with the guests, prompted by host John Schaefer, trying to stay on the topic of the importance of Twitter. And on Thursday, the NPR station’s Brian Lehrer played host to the authors of Love, Mom, a book about  mothers endless email relationships with their daughters.  (“Stay out of my chat room!” she cried, slamming the door.)

Usually by the time the media is obsessing over a story as old as instant electronic communications and Its Implications for Society, the issue is pretty much dead. People communicate anyway they can, and for many growing up, the faster the better. The argument takes pretty silly detours: one of Schaefer’s guests actually compared those fretting about Twittering to those who objected to Elvis’s pelvis on the Ed Sullivan show, when the point was a) America did not get to see the man’s pelvis and b) the cat really knew how to shake that thing. To say that I don’t care what Perez Hilton thinks of Lily Allen — or that David Gregory ate a muffin — I would need to reinvent the concept of understatement. 

But is instant, endless communication bad? I like some silence in my life, and get plenty, even in NY, but when I do want to reach out, it’s nice to know that there is someone there. Yes, maybe there was great American art that was born of isolation and unconventionality (Faulkner, Pollock) but the by-product of that was sometimes alcoholism and madness (Faulkner, Pollock) — so maybe there’s a trade off. But if you don’t care for the endless tsups and chatter, you can always turn the devices off, no?

Hit me back, girl.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer published without a print edition today and are the paper boys ever confused! (Lost in the coverage of all death-of-print stories are any memorials to the dying art of newspaper delivery, once a rite of passage for countless small-town kids.) It is impossible to tell yet if the decision, handed down by the P-I’s owner, the Hearst Corporation, is the end of an era or the beginning of a new one, but it’s fair to say it was inevitable. 

Last week I was decrying the new age of ignorance a world without newspapers would herald: Why, countless citizens would know nothing of what’s happening in Pakistan and care only about who was up on American Idol! Impossible to imagine! Though, snobby as it sounds, it has been that way for a while. I remember a stoner friend of mine in HS saying, “I don’t know why you get all worked up about what’s happening in Cambodia or whatever. Dude, who gives a shit? What does it have to do with my life?”

His point, taken without the hair and hash residue, is one shared by countless others. We all have problems (and pleasures) enough without dispatches from East New York, let alone the Far East. But if history is any teacher (and why else make kids read Daniel Defoe, who practically invented journalism three hundred years ago?), journalism will exist as long as someone puts a farthing down for the news. And there will follow (history, again) all those arguments about trustworthiness, objectivity, influence and the other essentially moral questions that separate journalism from gossip and hearsay.

I suspect that in the not too distant future, we will look back on the time when a bunch of people were decrying the death of daily papers — the kind you can hold in your hand — as quaint. Because there will be Kindle-type devices that will convey the news in an easier to handle, take-it-on-the-subway form and we will gladly pay for it and argue with it (perhaps literally, shouting at our screens) and wonder how we can live without it.

Though I will still miss picking the paper up from the front stoop each morning and carrying it upstairs with my coffee. Just as Seattle is waking up to the notion that they can’t buy the Post-Intelligencer on the street today (though the inferior rival Seattle Times still exists, for a moment) but you can pick up a non-fat latte on practically any corner. And it costs a whole lot more.