Trapped indoors by the heat I had the opportunity to watch the evening news tonight on several networks: The NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams at 6:30 and Jim Lehrer’s News Hour on PBS. It was a busy news day by anyone’s standards — a new build-up of Israeli troops on the Lebanon border; more intense sectarian violence in Iraq; Fidel at death’s door; and the Mel Gibson meltdown (do you think any of those girls he was canoodling with at Moonshadows before the arrest were Jewish?). But it was so hot all across the US that heat was a top story on both broadcasts. And neither Williams nor PBS’s Gwen Ifill mentioned global warming.

This would not have been surprising a year ago when the Greenhouse Effect was deemed too boring for words, even as record heat waves buckled roads and killed old people from France to Phoenix. But in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a number of news organizations got religion on the subject. Williams was among the most prominent newscasters who talked about understanding the hurricane in the context of global warning; the Daily Nightly blog he helped launch has given plenty of space to the phenomenon; and NBC News chief science Robert Bazell devoted several special reports to the relationship between global warming and current weather disasters. All of that attention to context, as well as the story on the ground (or in the water) in NO earned NBC several Emmys and Peabody awards.

So what happened? Even as Al Gore’s book and movie An Inconvenient Truth converts new skeptics daily in part by keeping it topical, if not tropical (the current newspaper ad campaign asks “How hot is it in your city?”) the news talks about the heat without even a hint that it may be part of a larger, scarier picture. What happened, Brian? Too hot to talk?

I suspect the silence may owe more to corporate sponsors (even News Hour is funded in part by British Petroleum; reactionary media “watchdogs” like the right-wing front the Media Research Center and its NewsBusters blog; and general public apathy. After all, how can people be expected to remain concerned about global warming when no one has yet laid eyes on Tom Cruise’s baby? The fact that little Suri will live to see the polar ice caps melt and the coasts of our nation submerged is just another fun fact to add to the mix. Talk about a silent scream.

When my wife and I put our daughter on a bus bound for camp last weekend we made an effort not to appear anxious or anything other than thrilled for her, even though she knew no one who was getting on board, and they all seemed to know each other, and hardly any of them were anything but white (Franny was born in Paraguay, and always does a quick tally of white versus non-white in any group situation). We smiled and waved, my wife being much more controlled than she was the first time we did this three years ago and she cried all the way driving back to New York…

But this was a new camp, one our daughter had researched and chosen based on a referral from a classmate. She is good at making friends and the first one to wade into any gang approximately her age (13), not sitting back sulkily as I did when I was that old. We tried to watch her through the darkened glass of the bus windows (“I think she’s talking to the girl in the seat next to her,” my wife said) and kept waving and smiling as they finally pulled out. And once they were gone the parents in the Queens parking lot burst into applause and cheers, anticipating a month’s freedom.

Freedom to miss their kids, that is. We had dinner with some friends last night (great time for restaurant reservations in NY). They are in the same boat; their son Jack is gone to a camp in Maine for a month, and we spent the majority of our time talking about them, how they were doing, what we imagined the experience was like etc. We had just received our first note from Franny at camp, written on the second day, and it was tinged with a little homesickness — and perhaps some buyer’s remorse. Yes, she had made friends but she was one of the few first-timers, I gathered, and in a PS she wrote, “I’m the only non-white person here, I swear.” (Good thing she’s not prejudiced.)

Where once NY dads sent away kids AND wife for the summer to get into mischief on their own (remember The Seven Year Itch?), now single-child-centric families experience a different kind of comedy with their kids away. My friend Paul told me that with his son gone, he had no excuse to go see a matinee of Miami Vice (I volunteered). And I’m sure my wife, curling up to watch Project Runway, longs for our daughter’s company. We need them both to remind us we’re parents and to help us be children again.

Which is more surprising: that Robert DeNiro and his partners at Tribeca films wanted to buy the New York Observer or that owner Arthur Carter got cold feet at the last minute? The Observer, the salmon-colored, slightly skewed weekly celebration of NY’s political-society-media world and its fascination with itself, has been an anomaly forever. A perpetual money-loser, the paper is still considered essential reading to a small yet powerful audience who long to see themselves caricatured on the front page. It would have been a vanity move for DeNiro & co, akin to Harvey Weinstein’s commitment to launch Tina Brown’s Talk magazine with Hearst. Though it presumably would have cost far less.

I have no insider knowledge of Carter and what did or did not go down at the eleventh hour; I certainly have no idea why a movie star would want to own a paper, unless it’s to make sure he gets the kid-glove treatment the next time he gets divorced. But I have to admit, I would have enjoyed a slight replay of the Talk fiasco if for nothing but schadenfreude. Like many writers in New York, I have my own personal ax to grind with the Observer and like to send occasional bits of bad juju its way.

In 2000, basking in the publicity that came from having been laid off from my job as a media columnist at Salon, I heard from a former Observer reporter that editor Peter Kaplan was looking for a writer to do something media related in the paper and that I should go see him. Getting into his inner sanctum proved more difficult than getting an audience with the Wizard of Oz and it was ultimately about as enlightening. Famously forgetful and more disorganized than your average college professor, Kaplan is protected by a more professional staff and has helped the careers of many NYO editors and reporters. Despite several blown appointments and at least one missed lunch date, I persevered. When I finally found my way into his lair — a veritable rag-and-bone shop of toppling piles of books and manuscripts — he told me excitedly about a new column he wanted me to write, a compliment to their weekly media column Off the Record.

I had what I thought was a great idea for the first one: a “magazine ICU,” rounding up some publications that were on their last legs. For starters I suggested Brill’s Content, George and Talk (all now defunct) and proceded with Kaplan’s blessing. The people at the publications themselves were surprisingly eager to talk, painting a rosy picture of their prospects even as they bailed water. I turned the piece in and after some back and forth with the editor (he thought I had been too nice to Talk, which was desperately trying to get its act together before Harvey pulled the plug) he agreed it would run…soon.

Time passed, things changed. My son was suddenly having serious emotional issues and I was flying to SF every other week, trying to sort him out. I remember standing outside of a clinic that Thanksgiving weekend, where a therapist had just suggested my son be hospitalized, trying to reach Kaplan on the phone and find out what the hell had happened to my column. At that point I was concerned that the magazines in question would go out of business before the column ran. What I got from Kaplan’s assistant was the runaround. I later learned that the then Off the Record reporter had screamed loudly when he learned I would be sharing his beat, and perhaps Kaplan got cold feet himself. Maybe he just didn’t like my column. But rather than tell me or even make up some convenient lie about what might be wrong, he whiffled and waffled and avoided me until I went away, sending me smarmy a thank you email before I put in for the kill fee.

What I remember thinking that day was that I wanted to get on plane, go back to NY and break his glasses while they were still on his face, though I’m sure my frustration over my son had something to do with my reaction. Such violence certainly wouldn’t have done much for my career here, such as it is. Though it might have got me caricatured in the Observer.

Airports have been the catalyst for a lot of mawkish movie moments. The risible British flick Love, Actually was bookended by scenes of people greeting each other in slo-mo while Hugh Grant reflected warmly on getting a blow-job from a Hollywood hooker. Oh, sorry. I mean the meaning of love. All the more risible was the fact that he invoked 9/11, the mother of all airplane disaster days.

Dropping my son at JFK for his return to San Francisco I heard the whistles of the terminal traffic cops: “Hurry please, it’s time.” It is hard to avoid those intimations of mortality, not because I ever put anyone on a plane thinking it would crash (remember flight 222, on the Twilight Zone?) but because it is such a big fat obvious Hollywood metaphor. They’re leaving, you’re staying. They are going off to have adventures while you wait on the sidelines, as parents do, and wish for the best. In Adam’s case he is going back to CA to have an Outward Bound adventure in the Sierras, a trip he has been preparing for by training daily, quitting cigarettes, etc. We spent the last two days (and tons of $$ — caveat emptor) getting mountaineering gear. Our best experience was at a crowded little store near City Hall called Tents and Trails. Unlike some of the salesmen at Paragon, everyone we talked to there looked like they did a fair amount of wilderness wandering themselves. And all were impressed with the fact Adam was doing Outward Bound.

Young men need a challenge, a fire to walk through on the way to manhood. Left without some of the more traditional rites of passage (military service, walkabouts) American men are forced to invent their own. Me, I got in lots of trouble: drink, jail, drugs, more jail. It is my hope that by providing my son with a more controlled challenge (as an OB instructor said, “We haven’t lost anyone yet,” a promise the military can’t match) he will feel emboldened to take other risks. Finish school. Get a job. Clean his room. Not necessarily in that order.

He’s in the air now, lost to me for the time being. I feel at these times like I’m holding a kite string, all tangled up as it comforts and cuts me at once, back here, on the ground.

Any cause worthy of the name draws its strength from people of diverse backgrounds, who may not agree on anything save who the enemy is. Think of the forces allied against Hitler before the US got involved: communists, anarchists, loyalists, royalists. The only thing they had in common was a love of freedom and a shared sense that the Nazis were out to exterminate them all.

At a rally today for Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, a few diverse communities got a glimpse of each other and resolved that the common enemy — Bruce Ratner and his Cleveland-based development group, that wants to choke downtown with skyscrapers — was more important than their differences. From the beginning, Ratner and his henchmen have sought to make this a racial issue, portraying those objecting to the development as rich white homeowners (mostly in Ft. Greene and Clinton Hill) while those who would benefit would be working class black families (from Prospect Heights and Bed-Stuy). As blacks and whites together wised up to Ratner’s tactics — and the fact that the jobs and affordable housing he is holding out as a carrot are not, in fact, guaranteed — the front has grown more unified, even if they’re not always reading from the same hymn book.

At a Rally Against Ratner today held in Prospect Park, about 500 sweltering opponents to the Atlantic Yards project were entertained by the Reverend Billy and his Stop Shopping Gospel Choir, practitioners of the sort of political theater that was the staple of most San Francisco rallies and protests: not funny enough to classify as entertainment, but not as strident as your usual rabble rouser. The Rev. Billy is a performance artist of sorts who has made a career of sorts fighting Wal Mart and other developers; though not a preacher, he does a fair impression of a third-tier Jimmy Swaggert type, getting a little epileptic as he reached his pitch. His choir, while robed, had not been picked for their voices, making them unlike any church choir I’ve heard.

He came, he camped, he left — and the following three speakers took issue with his satire. “I come from the real church community,” said Assemblyman James Brennan, and went on to imply that some of these white hipsters need to tread lightly when making fun of church. Brooklyn activist (and former Black Panther) Bob Law said much the same thing and the one real man of the cloth on the dais today, the Reverend Dennis Dillon, had his second speak for him. Was this the sign of some great divide? No, just a reminder that you best be careful when messing with Jesus.