We’re 17! (And You Know What I Mean)
By 
I think you know why I’m writing — it’s Clint Eastwood’s birthday! Happy Birthday legendary American-weirdo filmmaker!! Your preoccupations with jazz and war and covered bridges have defined seventy years of national id and we salute you as we salute so many of our bright flowering young men who died at Khe Sanh, at Langdok, at Hill 364…
Wait a minute! I’m not writing about Clint Eastwood’s 112th birthday! Why would that make sense? I’ve got an even more important birthday to discuss. Happy Birthday LG&M!! If Clint Eastwood is “America’s Filmmaker” then LG&M is nothing less than “America’s Blog.” Today it turns 17, an age where it can officially drive recklessly and unchaperoned through the teeming byways of Long Island, if its experience is anything like mine. Will LG&M attend it’s prom? It will probably pretend it doesn’t want to until somebody finally friggin’ asks it. You’ve taken LG&M into your heart — now won’t you take it to the prom? And by that I mean: send money.
Let’s look back at what was happening seventeen years ago. This was the ending of an eventful May: on the plus side Randy “The Big Unit” Johnson had thrown a perfect game against the Atlanta Braves, and Massachusetts had just legalized gay marriage. Less good was the death of genius guitarist Robert Quine and the New York Times mea culpa in which they admitted their reporting leading up to the Iraq War had been relentlessly shoddy and misleading, lending credence to a monumentally destabilizing and tragic foreign escapade resulting in untold carnage and loss of national prestige — but hey, they were sorry! Sometimes you just print lies about stockpiles of weapons that don’t exist and several hundred thousand people die! Surely Clint Eastwood would understand!
It was around this time that many of us realized we could use some rigorous governors on the information we were receiving. And it was at this time that three men named Farley, Lemieux and Watkins stepped into the arena. I don’t need to attest to any regular reader what LG&M has meant to the discourse right from the beginning. In an onset era of mind-bendingly fractious, agenda-driven journalism when the mere act of scanning the headlines can feel like an unplanned acid experience, this site has truly been a beacon: a rational actor amidst a roiling sea of phantasmagoric misinformation. Seriously: what price do you place on an entity which can be counted on to calmly and clearly remind you of your own sanity? I typically just write about dumb shit, but I honestly cannot imagine my days without LG&M’s peerless crew of qualified experts helping me to make sense out of everything from the national security apparatus to the politics of the pandemic to the gyrations of the Supreme Court. I’m betting a lot of you derived an awful lot of comfort from these pages during this past year — lord knows I did. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say LG&M is a life saver.
It’s also fun! LG&M is a community as well as an endlessly replenishing source of vital information and gimlet-eyed interpretations of the news cycle. The comment board is lively, witty, thoughtful and only occasionally inappropriate: in other words an absolute unicorn. On a personal note, as a long time devotee who joined up in an official basis a couple years back, working alongside the other front pagers and interacting with the commenters has been an absolute highlight of my career in media (even if “Newshound” feels very strongly that I will never, ever grasp the 1960s.)
One other thing about LG&M is: it’s free. For seventeen years, this site has thrown open it’s doors and required nothing in return except baseline decency. The folks who bring this blog to you work tirelessly and without meaningful compensation because they recognized the need and a sense of civic responsibility compelled them to fill the void. The donations we are asking for today are for the simple purpose of keeping the lights on and the servers up and running. Please contribute only what you can afford, but also please consider what this blog affords you. LG&M may feel like a magical place — it does to me — but it’s not a given. I don’t want it to go anywhere and neither do you. There’s only one way we can make sure this won’t happen.
Here’s the donation links — dealer’s choice:
Venmo: @lefarkins