Outage 

The power's been out on my block for about an hour now. I knew immediately when it happened, even though it's daytime and there weren't any lights turned on in the house, because of an ominous pop from somewhere down the road, followed by an uncanny quiet, as all of the house's little motors and fans came to a sudden stop. These things are like a kind of heartbeat, a kind of breathing, and when they stopped, it was as if the air in the house hung suddenly still where it was: no pulse.

It hasn't occurred to me to call the electric company, because I assume someone else on the block will have done it by now—but then I wonder, how long would we all sit here in the quiet, in the dark, waiting for the others to call? How much direct inconvenience would I need before I reported the situation to the someone who might be able to resolve it? And, is this what it was like in Nazi Germany—a community of otherwise good people, sitting in the dark, lighting candles, writing in their journals about what's wrong with the world, and doing nothing?

Conestoga Wagon 

(This story appears in the February 2013 issue of DOGZPLOT.)

Bride of Frankenstein 

During the sex scandal, the Bride of Frankenstein stood by her man, silent and strong.

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How to Make an American Omelette 

“ You can't make an American omelette without breaking some Middle Eastern eggs.

Weak and Fruitless Words 

“ I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.

No one wants to say it exactly, but September 11 has become a holiday in the United States—a sort of New Year's wrapped in Memorial Day, a chance for righteous indignation and self-aggrandizement: the day we all meant something, on account of the spilling of sacred (read: American) blood, valued so much higher than other kinds. (So much higher, than, for instance, the civilian deaths in Iraq since the U.S. Invasion.)

On this anniversary day, ten years since those attacks, we're giving pause to consider how things have changed over the decade, a decade during which "safety" and "security" justified turning America's enormous economic engine away from its own people—people who are now poorer, with fewer opportunities, and are less safe and less secure than they were a decade ago.

At tonight's memorial service, George W. Bush, the man most responsible for those changes (though his successor has done his part to ensure their continuance) read the passage above, originally spoken by Abraham Lincoln after the Civil War, citing as consolation the fact that the deceased gave their lives in order to save the Republic.

If we're to honor the 2,977 killed on September 11 by saving the Republic, then I say let's get to it, because these past ten years have been spent in the wrong direction.

Bedtime Stories, circa 2020 

“ Daddy, tell us what it was like when gas was only $4 a gallon and the U.S. was a superpower.

Faux Logic 

A Syllogism

Major premise:
All men are mortal.

Minor premise: 
All of the attackers on September 11 were men.

Conclusion:
No men should be allowed to build community centers or churches near the World Trade Center site.

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Though this is no longer a "hot" news item, it's apparently hot enough that Bill O'Reilly managed to offend his hosts on The View earlier today, stating "Muslims killed us on 9/11!" A slightly less tongue-in-cheek version of the above syllogism is of course the one employed by Fox News: since the attackers were Muslim, no Muslim should be allowed to build a community center or church, etc.

The Fox version of the syllogism doesn't offer a "major premise," though, so in addition to being fallacious, it's also badly constructed.

But for the Grace of God 

On the day that Glenn Beck and his horde of infantile angry white men converged by the Lincoln Memorial to "restore the honor" of America, I was carrying a woman with a broken hip into a friend's car. She'd been evicted from the hospital earlier in the week, after her Medicare coverage ran out: they gave her a walker, put her in a cab, paid the fare, and sent her back to the third story apartment she shares with her very-literally-deranged daughter. When she got out of the car, someone stole her walker, and she waited at the curb until some guys who lived in her apartment building carried her up the three flights of stairs and set her down on her olive green sofa, where she stayed till we heard from her a few days later because she was hungry. It had taken her this long to get the phone from her daughter, who shouted in the background of the phone call, "Don't talk to them about how I treat you!"

So we went over with some groceries, and in the end, decided to carry her out and return her to the hospital.

The feeling of a 72-year-old, 87-pound woman clinging to my neck and crying in pain is outside my normal range of experience and I won't forget it any time soon. While I carried her, I worried I'd drop her, of course; but I also worried that from her pain she'd vomit on my new shirt. The thoughts that pop into one's head are sometimes an unpleasant surprise.

"Thank you," she said.

"You don't have to thank me."

This isn't a story about me or any good deed of mine: I was, in this, just an orderly, and an accidental one who just happened to be nearby. My friends are saints: they stock her fridge, and they decided to cover the cost of re-admitting the woman to the hospital. (In the end, this wound up being a daily copay, only: the woman was thrown out, broken hip and all, because she couldn't pay $100 a day...)

After we got the woman into the car, my friend drove off to the hospital, and I—still with the old woman's smell on me—walked off through Hollywood. Very few people walk in Hollywood: sometimes it feels like I and homeless people are the only ones who walk in Hollywood. I walked by a man with no shirt and a white, chest-length beard. His hands looked like they'd been tarred. He curled one of them into a fist and he shook it weakly at the sky. His lips moved but he didn't make any sound.

This, at the corner of Selma and Ivar, the spot where tomorrow morning there will be a luxe farmer's market selling handmade soaps and organic produce, but where today a man with tarry hands lives out of a shopping cart and curses God, and a woman with a broken hip pisses in her sofa for days because she can't cover a $100 copay; and I just broke, right there, shaking, with the disparity of so much privilege—a Siddhartha moment: the suffering of people is so real sometimes it pervades right through all the creature comforts we erect to shield ourselves from it. "You don't have to thank me," I'd told her, not to be polite, but because the world owes her some kindness. This same day that Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin marched on Washington to "restore traditional values" to America—the traditional values that led to slavery and segregation, the values that led to rail barons and child labor, the values that espouse neglect of the disenfranchised, abandonment of the helpless, enrichment of the coddled—values that in wiser times of history are, once adopted by the state, called fascism; and any society that willfully chooses not to take care of its own doesn't deserve to be called a society at all.

Change We Can Believe In 

When in the course of human events 

“It's important not to confuse 'Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' with 'An opportunity to shop.'

Manufacturing Dissent 

or, Why Yankees vs. Red Sox is a Red Herring

If the Bush years weren't enough to prove out Chomsky, then the Obama years seem like they will be. It's one thing when a self-identified "conservative" delivers corporate handouts, wiretaps its citizens, sells national parkland to oil companies, and actually tries to construct "legal" arguments for torture and offshore detention camps. At least, in those moments, the dissenters can fixate on the term "conservative," and try to align themselves at the other end of the assumed spectrum. But when the self-identified "liberals" return to power and continue the same policies, then one must begin to wonder: is there a spectrum at all?

("There is no spoon.")

I still argue against people who claim that the Left is indistinguishable from the Right, and I think the recent "health care" "debate" is a good example—though I've put each of those terms in quotes for separate reasons, and I think "health insurance" "posturing" is closer to the truth. Still, one side of the aisle lobbied diligently to get health coverage for many disenfranchised people (while also promising to fill the coffers of private insurance companies); and the other side sat on their thumbs—which is presumably what they would have done on this particular issue even if they had been in power.

That is a not-insubstantial difference.

Yet... we're led to believe that the Democrats and Republicans are polar opposites, and that just isn't true. It strikes me like the belief (held widely in these parts) that the entire world of sports is contained in the rivalry between the Yankees and the Red Sox, two of the oldest American League professional baseball teams, both based in large metropolitan areas on the East Coast of the United States, each with vastly high payrolls and rabidly loyal fans. On the most substantive issues, these two rivals are nearly interchangeable; and the rivalry is manufactured by the media that purports to cover them. The inflation of this rivalry leaves everyone else out of the dialogue—the other 28 teams in the MLB, the intense and exciting "grassroots" stick ball in the playground by my apartment, the Wiffle Ball I play at picnics—not to mention the athletes who compete in hugely popular (socialist?) sports like soccer and cycling around the world.

On the most substantive issues, the Democrats and Republicans are nearly interchangeable; and the rivalry is manufactured by the media that purports to cover them; and the inflation of the rivalry leaves nearly everyone else out of the dialogue.

I am not a cynic. Not even a little. I have no interest in trying to take the vigor out of good things. But I believe it's important to fight against those who try to inject false vigor into lifeless things with ideological Botox.

Media, in most of its current popular forms, exists to sell things: to sell movies, to sell iPads, to sell more media. When it sells political ideology as if it were a reality show or a sports rivalry, what it is selling is a contrived competition: Obama and the Republicans, locked in a heated battle, and only one can win! Just like an episode of Top Chef.

What if the result of this contrived competition were of no more substantial value than Top Chef? What if, no matter who wins, there will be corporate handouts, wiretapping, drilling in parkland, and torture in secret prisons?

If you're looking for a more substantial choice: "God offers to everyone his choice between truth and repose," said Emerson. "Take which you please: you can never have both."

This is the Enemy 

The Real Dangers of Communism

Some warning signs that your government may have given over to Communism, or its less-understood cousin Socialism. If you detect any of the following, take up arms:

1. Roads
   If your roads were paid for with tax money and built by the government—they are socialist. In a perfect, free market world, each stretch of road would be a privately-owned toll road, and you'd move around it like it's a Monopoly board, paying each property owner as you go.


2. 911
   If your town allows you to place free 911 calls, then call 911 immediately to report Commies in your midst. If a private corporation isn't making money off of your emergency, then there truly is an emergency: the Reds have taken over.
   


3. Medicare
   "Are you now or have you ever been on Medicare?" This government program poses as necessary relief for the elderly, but any red-blooded American knows that if you get sick or injured, it's only logical that your employer should pay the bill—not the government. Medicare reveals the elderly to be what they truly are: Communist sychophants who are useless to the free market society.


4. Mortgages
   If you can't buy a house in cash, you shouldn't have a house. If you have a mortgage, it's because the government has intervened: they've incentivized it by offering tax breaks to you and to the banks. There is nothing free market about that. Keep big government out of your house! Pay for it in cash, and waive the tax break.


5. Marriage
   If you are married, you're a Leftie pinko. Again, the government has intervened against the free market by offering tax incentives to marry: they've got their big government hands on your wife! Also: people who marry are choosing a life where they share with one another, instead of selfishly hoarding. That's the definition of communism.


6. Public schools
   The only people who should be able to read and write are those who can pay for private education. Everyone else is a serf, and should stay that way. Educating the electorate is a luxury that should not be paid for by tax-payers. Instead, we should have a democracy run by illiterates, Tea Partiers, and Joe the Plumber.

It's not too late to save America. Act now!

The Falconer Cannot Hear the Falcon 

"Are we going to be forever hostage to the U.S. Congress?" - Bernarditas Muller, negotiator at this week's international conference on climate change, in Copenhagen

I wonder if most people, at most moments in history, look at news headlines and see in them the end of their own civilization.

It comes from all sides, it seems. The very day that NASA released a statement assuring that the world would not end in 2012 (since when does science purport to predict the future?), every other headline seems to indicate the opposite—if not the end of the world, then at least the end of U.S. dominion over it: the economy is in ruins (beholden to the Chinese and the Saudis, through unsustainable consumption, a failure of manufacturing, a terminus of natural resources, and a vicious cycle of debt). Sea levels are on the rise; ice caps are melting; the world's climate has already changed irreparably. Hate and fear have replaced reason and compassion: the social divides that keep us from coming together to resolve these issues seem to get more vast.

"The falcon cannot hear the falconer."

Yet the biggest threat to our society is that it will be forgotten altogether—society being made up, by definition, of people, who seem to be more and more forgotten each day. The biggest threat to our society is that corporate interests will entirely supersede the needs of the citizenry; and in this decade, this has already been realized. Every political agenda, every key issue inside Washington, is now entirely in the pocket of profiteering corporations.

Of this, there can no longer be any doubt.

Your elected officials do not have your best interest at heart. They are not working to make you and your fellow Americans happier or healthier. They to work to ensure their own re-election, by securing the interests of the companies that pay for those elections.

Your nation is not only for sale; it is bought, sold, packaged, and shipped.

That is the thesis here: our politicians are indecent and corrupt without compunction. They are trying to hurt us; and they are succeeding.

It is difficult to cite a single example, when every article in every newspaper seems to assert the point. Any topic—war? health care? climate change?—will do as an example.

Start with a more trivial one, though: Net Neutrality—the proposition that Internet service providers should allow equal access to all of the available content on the web, rather than offer preferential treatment to some (i.e., their own) content. The ISPs—the gatekeepers of the Internet (who, after all, take public bandwidth and then sell it to the public)—should do nothing to inhibit the competition and free market economy within that space; content creators should not be able to pay an ISP to suppress the content of other creators.

The only people who should oppose this idea aren't people at all: they are the telecommunication companies, who hope to be able to sell off prominent corners of the Internet as if they were beachfront property. John McCain—ostensibly a "free market" kind of guy—opposes free market on the Internet, opposes Net Neutrality. John McCain is also the number one recipient of donations from the telecom industry and its lobbyists for the past three years. John McCain is bought, sold, packaged, and shipped.

Tick through the laundry list of contentious issues in Washington to see the pattern: Joe Liebermann today announced that he would join a Republican filibuster against health care reform. (A filibuster, you'll remember, is where a minority party temporarily shuts down government, in order to circumvent democracy and refuse the will of the people.) Liebermann claims he's worried about "increasing the national debt and putting more of a burden on taxpayers," which, if it's true, is noble and patriotic, and he should vote in favor of the health care reform: it's been structured so as not to cost taxpayers a dime, and actually reduce the costs on Medicare. The only people who should oppose this aren't people at all: they are the industry already getting rich off of overpriced insurance premiums.

But Joe Liebermann opposes it, Joe Liebermann, the independent senator from Connecticut—headquarters of (wait for it...) the insurance industry. (When you, the uninsured mother of four, need prescription medication to stay alive, remember that this is the man who didn't want you to have it, because he needed someone to finance his re-election.)

Which brings us, finally, to climate change. Dispute the science of global warming, if you like (notwithstanding the fact that scientists do not dispute the science of it); even then, still, it is impossible to dispute that the world in general, and the U.S. economy in particular, would be better off if it were liberated from dependence on oil and other fossil fuels. It is impossible now to be concerned with the U.S. economy or with its national security, and not be concerned with its oil consumption.

But Senator Jim Inhofe opposes the curbing of oil consumption: in fact, he disputes climate change altogether, and has compared the environmental movement to the Third Reich.

Inhofe's home state of Oklahoma is the nation's second-largest producer of natural gas, and fifth-largest producer of crude oil. Want to guess who is paying for his political campaigns?

When the leaders in a democracy no longer serve the needs of their constituents, but rather are motivated to answer corporate interests, then it is no longer a democracy. The falconer has forgotten the falcon; the center cannot hold. It is no longer democracy.

Tomorrow, pt. 3 

"Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness."—Martin Luther King

In many ways, it was better when Bush was president. Being a progressive was easier: it was fueled with anger and righteousness—rightness—and the genuine need to get "their" guy out of office, before he did  any more lasting harm.

A champion rose on the left, beautiful and wise: he spoke with the tongue of angels and he inspired us to put aside our despair.  "Hope," he said. We had a vague memory of the feeling, but we wondered aloud if it was still possible.  In the face of so much, can we still make the world a better place?

"Yes we can," our champion counseled. He saw this better world already, clearly, as if it were a place he'd already visited. He described it to us:

Where there was war, there will be peace. Where there was lawlessness, there will be respect. Where there was sickness and suffering amongst the poor, there will be care and compassion. Where there was torture inflicted, there will be swift justice. And where the voice of the people has been drowned out by the gold of the oligarchs, there will be democracy.

Inspired by these promises, we lifted him onto our shoulders and carried him to victory.

Now it's "our" guy in office. The gold continues to flow to the oligarchs; the prisoners are still nameless in foreign prisons while their torturers are free; there are still executive signing orders and redactions; and each passing day, the sick continue to languish. There is no peace.

Where there was anger, there will be anger again. But where there was hope—only hopelessness.

Now, our champion seems to wonder aloud if, in the face of so much, we can still make the world a better place. Now, we must lift him again on our shoulders, and counsel him:

Yes we can.

Tomorrow, pt. 2 

I'm going to cry tomorrow, when Barack Obama is sworn in as President of the United States.

I wonder what that means: that my idea of success for my own culture is wrapped up in the election of someone who is not like me. I wonder if I'm a racist against my own people, or if it's a symptom of self-loathing.

But the fact is—the fact that Barack Obama is not white is such a small part of the larger, idealist whole that I don't even think about it, and I won't be thinking about it at all, while I'm weeping in pride and joy and hope for the nation I call home.

Mission Accomplished? 

A gangly Illinois politician ... once pointed out that you can fool some of the people all of the time. We now know how many “some” is: twenty-seven per cent. That’s the proportion of Americans who, according to CNN, cling to the belief that George W. Bush has done a good job. - Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker

Today, President George W. Bush held the final press conference of his administration.

Facing a battered, frightened, but still hopeful nation, a nation whose economy has proven to be rudderless, sinking, and with too few lifeboats, a nation slowly sold off piecemeal to oil barons, short sellers and mercenaries, this President counseled his successor: the most urgent threat to America, warned George W. Bush, is "an attack on our homeland."1

Compare this with Hertzberg's assessment of the threats facing our nation:

During the eight years of the second President Bush, the unemployment rate went from 4.2 per cent to 7.2 per cent and climbing; consumer confidence dropped to an all-time low; a budget surplus of two hundred billion dollars became a deficit of that plus a trillion; more than a million families fell into poverty; the ranks of those without health insurance rose by six million; and the fruits of the nation’s economic growth went almost entirely to the rich, while family incomes in the middle and below declined.

One begins to wonder: if bin Laden's goal was to humble and bankrupt the United States,2 then perhaps the threat of terrorist attack is nearly passed. Perhaps the war is nearly over. Perhaps bin Laden stands now, arms raised, in front of a cheering crowd of loyal soldiers, under a banner that reads, "Mission Accomplished."

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1. In what must be one of the worst (and hopefully one of the final) "Bushisms," the President said today:
"There's still an enemy out there that would like to inflict damage on America -- Americans." Looking back on the last eight years, it is surely safe to say that Americans have inflicted severe damage upon America.

2. From bin Laden's October 2004 video: "[It is] easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there and cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses ... This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat."

Tomorrow 

Tomorrow, when we elect Barack Obama, all my worries will go away and my blood pressure will drop twenty points. The stock market will soar and the price of oil will plummet. The weather will be sunny and cool and breezy, like for flying a kite.

The pothole outside my house will fill in, and the garbage smell will lift away. Mail will never be lost again. Sinks will flow with chocolate and champagne. Credit card debt will be forgiven. We will all lose ten pounds. Our teeth will floss themselves.

Tomorrow, when we elect Barack Obama, the world will fill with flowers. The milk carton children will return. Heartbreaks of the past will turn to wistful happy memories; we will shed our fear of all things, and we'll dance and make love in the streets, except the streets will be better, too, and won't give brush burns.

When results are in, and he has made his acceptance speech, we will gasp in genuine awe at the rightness of things; we will get choked up to have rediscovered our lost faith; and we will believe, like our forefathers believed, in the power of democracy, and in the good that lies buried (sometimes too deep) inside the human heart, tomorrow, when we elect Barack Obama.

Sunset 

All that's left now is whatever comes next.

Matter / Antimatter 

or, Will the Real Sarah Palin Please Stand Up (and Go Away)

For all the fear last month that the new particle accelerator at CERN would unleash a black hole and end life as we know it, the event came much closer to passing last night, on NBC's Saturday Night Live, during the very-near collision of matter (Tina Fey) and antimatter (Sarah Palin).

During the brief time the two of them shared the stage, they sped past one another nearly as quickly as a pair of charged protons, not speaking or even making eye contact. Though there was no explosion, and no evidence pointing to the elusive "Higgs boson," one thing that was a scientific certainty is the obvious contempt the two women feel for one another.

Blame it on the soft focus in the above photo, but it's really hard to get a sense of who hates the other more.

Joe Six Pack and the Weight of the World 

Responsibility for the fate of the Western world and the only society we've ever known has been laid squarely at the feet of "Joe Six Pack." Joe might never have wanted this. But it is his.

The rest of us won't sleep now, or even breathe much, till the day after Election Day; and when we do, it'll be with our passports under our pillows. I doubt that I or the nation can take another heartbreak.

Unexpressed Electoral Anger, circa 2004 

You elected a fool because, of the two men, he was the one with whom you could imagine having a beer. I'm not suggesting that you should pick someone thoughtful, wise, or qualified for the job—but why would you want to have beer with a fool?

P.S. He's a twelve-stepper. He doesn't drink.

Congress Plays At Game Theory, Loses 

It's already been widely reported that the U.S. House of Representatives voted "nay" to the $700+ billion "bailout" package (now being re-branded by its supporters as a "rescue" package, instead).

The bailout, we're told, is necessary to prevent a major collapse of the domestic and world economies. Unfortunately, it would also have sent unprecedented truckloads of cash (the exact amount of which is impossible to define—but roughly in the neighborhood of South Korea's gross domestic product) to Wall Street investors—the very same people who got us into this mess in the first place. Meanwhile, for the middle Americans saddled with skyrocketing mortgages at home... no "rescue" in sight.

Congress was being asked to endorse a package that "privatizes gain and socializes loss"—a tough pill for any elected official to swallow, particularly this close to a key election, particularly if your party advocates "small government" and champions (so-called) "free market capitalism"...

So, though both parties could agree on the importance of the bailout—ahem, I mean, rescue—no one on either side of the aisle wanted to get caught holding the blame if the plan were to fail. Collectively, Congress wanted it to pass; individually, no Congressperson was keen to vote for it. (Especially those in tight election races...)

Game theorists (and fans of this summer's blockbuster, The Dark Knight) will recognize this as an almost textbook example of the classic "Prisoner's Dilemma":

Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies ("defects") for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both remain silent ("cooperate"), both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should the prisoners act?

The rational answer to the puzzle is that it is in everyone's interest to work with each other—to share the smaller harm and reap the larger gain, to cooperate—as long as you have some degree of trust, and some reason to believe that the other person will also act rationally—two conditions which were obviously lacking in D.C. last night...

Bubble-Gum on Bush's Shoe 

"It's your money. You paid for it." - George W. Bush

The headline must be a joke, right?: Markets Surge on News of $1 Trillion Loan.

Because what would make the supposedly non-interventionist financiers happier than the Feds writing a check the size of South Korea's gross national product? Government intervention on a scale beyond the imagination of FDR¹, and these Wall Street champions of small government² celebrate? No wonder they call it the "free market": they're free to plunder us for record profits, and they get out of jail free whenever they lose. Who doesn't bet on a sure thing? They're probably all out celebrating with "free beer."

The bursting of the bubble might pass enough gas to clear the haze, to reveal indisputably to anyone who will look: non-regulation doesn't work. Two-time Nobel winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, long treated like a village idiot by the conservative media, this week sounded more like the prophet Isaiah:

The fall of Wall Street is for market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for communism—it tells the world that this way of economic organization turns out not to be sustainable. In the end, everyone³ says, that model doesn't work. This moment is a marker that the claims of financial market liberalization were bogus.

But don't hate the player; hate the game. That's the (expensive) moral to this too-late-breaking story: if the bankers suddenly look like cats who ate the $1 trillion canary, well, we shouldn't have left the cage door open, now, should we?

Why is it never fun to say, "I told you so"?

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1. Unimaginable by FDR partly because he favored long-term sustainable projects instead of record-breaking cash payouts of what is essentially imaginary money, most likely financed by China.

2. It evokes memories of the bailout during California's energy crisis in 2001, when the state forked over a then-record payment to Enron (who was still posting record profits in other sectors). One proposal before the state legislature would have had California give money to Enron in exchange for state ownership of power lines and other hard assets. But this went against the principles of "free market capitalism," and in the end, California gave the money away without asking for anything in return. Cf. "free beer" (ibid).

3. Stiglitz may be overstating "everyone."

Black Holes And Revelations 

Well, it's been great knowing you.¹ By the time you read this, we'll all be dead: while we sleep, the nuclear scientists at CERN will have flipped the switch at their shiny new super-collider, the "Large Hadron Collider," and—as I'm sure you've all heard—they will accidentally create a black hole that will destroy the Earth and life as we know it.

Not a moment too soon, if you ask me: we are stuck in the slowest of news cycles! Hurricane Gustav, expected to destroy New Orleans all over again, turned out to be a complete bust. And we're tired of talking about our other infamous national disaster: the one in the White House. Things are so slow on the news front that the press is actually entertaining the notion of Sarah Palin's qualifications for that job.²

We all like a good disaster, but come on.

That's the lesson here: whatever mysteries of the universe will be unlocked by the LHC, they will likely shed no further light on this simple fact of human psychology: we do like a good disaster. People are hungry for something terrible to happen, some gut-wrenching catharsis to break up the monotony—because it's the pity and fear that make us most human. Everyone writing about the "improbable" odds of a disaster at CERN is secretly excited by the prospect of one, just as the people who read those stories would be flattered to be so important as to live at the end of days.

It is inevitable, and we know it. If ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, and the tiny acorn contains the whole of the oak, then so too our own human nature must contain in it the seed of its destruction.

Tomorrow, scientists will flip the switch hoping for a glimpse of the "God particle," while the rest of us hope, more simply, for some terrible accident that will show us God.

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1. Most of you.

2. The stories usually mention "moose hunting," and question whether or not her glasses are prescription. I personally don't believe they are. How good does your vision have to be to shoot something the size of a moose?

The Naughts 

One example of how I wish I could write. By Roger D. Hodge:

The 2000s—perhaps we should call them the Naughts, since they will be remembered chiefly for their wants—were a decade in which the American Republic finally succumbed to a kind of autoimmune disorder, in which the social and political systems normally responsible for maintaining the healthy functioning of the body politic have instead turned against it with particular savagery, as if our very Constitution were an invasive foreign organism. The causes of the disorder are obscure. As with other such diseases, this one masks itself with opportunistic infections, hides under assumed names, and thus has often escaped accurate diagnosis. The humdrum corruption of political machinery, the passivity of screen- addled citizens, ignorant pedagogues, job-gobbling immigrants, malevolent divines, greedy corporate grandees, the timidity of bourgeois journalists, the sinister conniving of neoconservative and liberal intellectuals, and homosexuals living in holy matrimony have all been adduced as causes of the national decline. Proximity cannot be denied, yet none of these putative causes appears to be sufficient to the magnitude of the disorder. What can be said with some certainty, however, is that we are now exiles in a strange land; America is no longer America...

Full text available—for subscribers only¹—at Harpers.com.

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1. WTF, Harpers? It is utterly shameful that you are not at the forefront of the open source movement, but rather you are bringing up the rear, with your so-called important ideas locked up behind your effete, elitist password protection. How progressive can you be, if you only care to persuade people who will pay? I will not renew my subscription till you unlock your ideas!

The McGovern Moment 

The Audacity of History

Generally, I avoid historical comparisons to current events, mainly because I'm bad at it. I'm just not well enough informed to be able to draw the smart, sweeping conclusions I'd like to make.¹

But I'd like to suggest that Barack Obama is about to enter his George McGovern moment.

Like McGovern, Obama has emerged as a surprising front-runner in the Democratic primaries, though he was originally considered too progressive for mainstream America. He literally came out of "Left" field, and despite the protestations of Hillary Clinton and Karl Rve both, Obama is now thought of as electable, even in "flyover" country.

He is on the eve of announcing his running mate—the moment that knocked the McGovern campaign off its fast track to the White House. McGovern's missteps in selecting a VP resulted in a catastrophic landslide victory for Richard Nixon, and one could argue that victory was the turning point in securing a Republican Empire last (at least) the next forty years. One could argue that it was the turning point that broke the heart, will, and political backbone of the American Left.

As Obama hopes to rise from McGovern's ashes,² we wish him luck at this critical step.

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1. This makes me a bit of a black sheep in my family, many of whom have advanced degrees in and/or teach history, and many of whom make their living or their pasttime drawing exactly these kinds of smart, sweeping conclusions. Oh well...

2. But don't call him a "liberal"!

Repeal the Constitution! 

or, Unindependence Day

"With the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high-water mark—the place where the wave broke and rolled back." - Hunter S. Thompson, on the peaking of the Left in 1968

Today, the Democratic-led Congress (and I use the term "led" very loosely) voted to allow the Bush Administration to continue its domestic wiretapping, despite the fact that this practice directly conflicts with the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. As an added bonus, the bill grants immunity to the parties who originally broke the law to enact this wiretapping (because yes, wiretapping a U.S. citizen without a warrant is categorically illegal—at least until the President signs this bill into law).

When the President of the United States is sworn into office, they affirm a simple oath, one sentence long, without any bell-ringer words:

I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Before we add perjury to the list of Bush's crimes (for the obvious lie he told when he took that pledge), consider the wonders he has done to "execute" the office of President: since he took the position, the office has so little credibility that it really has been a kind of execution: the office of President as a defender of the Constitution is dead and gone.

The last line of defense protecting rule of law from Bush-style totalitarianism is Congress; but it would appear that our lame-duck President has "executed" them, too.

It's time to repeal the Constitution. It's obviously a useless piece of paper, anyway.

Operation: Dystopia 

Life at the End of Oil

U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan, sans combustion engines

A few years ago, at the beginning of the Iraq War, I posited that the sub rosa motivation for invading the Middle East was based on an undisclosed drastic shortfall in world oil reserves. Conventional wisdom says there are 100-200 years worth of oil left in the earth; suppose that number is closer to 10-20? If the end is actually nigh, then the neocons would want to keep this secret, and also stake claim to whatever oil is left.

But one doesn't need to believe in a neocon conspiracy theory to wonder if the end is nigh. As a simple result of increasing demand,1 oil prices continue rising to new highs, including this week's largest single jump ever; the G8 leaders are expressing "serious concerns" about the impact it will have on the world economy.

Given that the end of the oil economy is inevitable (sooner or later), still, economists have yet to present us a clear picture of what this "impact" will be: what will our lives be like, at the end of oil?

Instead, this portraiture has been left to the film makers and fiction writers (as perhaps it should?), who lately offer us more and more vivid depictions of dystopia—stories which are no longer relegated to the pulpy science fiction section, but rather have worked their way into the mainstream: Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men shows us the last generation of humanity, in a not-too-distant future where people have lost the ability to procreate; Cormac McCarthy's The Road doesn't even bother to describe the nature of its particular apocalypse, focusing instead on the stricken brutality of getting by in this terrible but imaginable future.

Both tales depict the quick failure the values we've come to associate with "enlightenment" and even "humanity"; both show an ongoing conflict between an almost habitual will toward kindness to others, and a required escalation of self-serving (often violent) greed for self-preservation.

Between that future (the complete faltering of civilization) and this present (the age when we're first able to say, without exaggeration or even conjecture, that our current lifestyle is no longer tenable), what can we realistically expect and imagine?

Imagine a World Without Oil (more...)

Do No Evil 

"There are moments—increasingly rare in risk-abhorrent modern campaigns—when politicians are called upon to bare their fundamental beliefs. In the best of these moments, the speaker does not just salve the current political wound, but also illuminates larger, troubling issues that the nation is wrestling with." — New York Times editorial on Barack Obama's "More Perfect Union" speech of March 18, 2008

I had many reactions to Barack Obama's speech yesterday in Pennsylvania, but first among them was one that caught me completely by surprise:

Hillary Clinton should step down, and concede the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.1

This opinion is different than the one I expressed here, or here, or even here. It is an opinion that's shifted gradually, over this last Machiavellian month, and then suddenly, when Obama stood up in Philadelphia and delivered his much-discussed "More Perfect Union" speech.

Consider that during the same news cycle, the press was combing through Clinton's "First Lady" papers, sniffing for evidence of scandals real or imagined; her own campaign continued its deceptive shell games in Michigan and Florida and Pennsylvania, arguing that though Obama now has the weight of the popular vote and the balance of delegates, in November, only she, Clinton, could pull the states that "matter." Elsewhere in politics, President Bush again declared "victory" in Iraq (beginning to beg the question not what the word "victory" means, but rather if words, in politics, mean anything); and newly-sworn-in New York governor David Paterson volunteered his chronicle of extramarital affairs, literally as if to give himself an air of credibility, because we all know by now, any politician who wants to be taken seriously must cheat on their spouse.

All of which is to say that if we, the electorate, are exhausted by the charade that is contemporary big media politics, and jaded, and detached, and disenfranchised, then of course we were caught off guard when Barack Obama took the podium and spoke to us honestly. In the midst of his own (possibly actual, serious) scandal—his association with "racist" pastor Jeremiah Wright—Obama avoided easy platitudes, sound bytes, and disavowals, and instead spoke to us "as though we were adults."

Both Obama and Clinton have promised us that they are candidates of "change." In Clinton's hands, this word is an honest and well-intended one, describing her intentions to improve our nation's economy, health care, and reputation abroad. Obama, too, wants these things, but it is becoming clearer that his idea of "change" is more fundamental:

He wants, first of all, to repair our dysfunctional, dumbed-down democracy (a system which has alienated nearly every citizen I know, and a system in which Clinton is as deeply implicated as anyone). This is not "change you can xerox;" until recently, I did not even believe it was change that was possible. But I am beginning to believe.

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1. Upon further consideration, what I really mean by this is that she should rise to Obama's level of rhetoric, or she should bow out—preferably the former.

Greed, Lust 

The most-asked question in New York this week was on the subject of now-former governor Eliot Spitzer (more popularly known as "That Idiot"):

What was he thinking???

It is likely that we will never know what internal thought process led Spitzer to interrupt his years-long righteous crusade against mob-related prostitution (which he called "modern-day slavery"), in order to engage in the services of mob-related prostitution. His initial apology was too general to offer any clues:

I have acted in a way that violates my obligations to my family and violates my, or any, sense of right and wrong. I apologize first and most importantly to my family. I apologize to the public to whom I promised better. I have disappointed and failed to live up to the standard I expected of myself.1 I must now dedicate some time to regain the trust of my family.2

His resignation speech added little as to what motivated him, and in fact he was already returning to his strident tones of yesteryear (or last week):

Over the course of my public life, I have insisted, I believe correctly, that people, regardless of their position or power, take responsibility for their conduct. I can and will ask no less of myself.

Ever the champion of Good and Right, he suggests that he is doing us the honor of going back into battle on our behalf once more — that is, doing us the honor of resigning, so he will be free "to serve the common good and to move toward the ideals and solutions which I believe can build a future of hope and opportunity for us and for our children."

That's big of you, Spitz. Don't let the door hit you on your way out.

Since he's unlikely to explain his actions any further (at least until he's offered a lucrative book deal), it's up to us to conjecture how this otherwise joyless crusader was led so thoroughly into temptation. How could a man who had made his career attacking the sex trade have been brought down by it, so spectacularly, thoroughly, and ridiculously?3 Here are a few ideas:

Hubris: The classic Greek reading of this story is that Spitzer was blinded by his own ambition: he was so powerful or so good that the law simply didn't apply to him. Perhaps he met with "Kristen" out of love, or perhaps he was trying to save her (though he reportedly sometimes asked the women “to do things that, like, you might not think were safe”).

Too Much Disposable Income: Never having wanted for money, perhaps Spitzer was simply at a loss as to where to put all that spare change. Would that he had learned from one of his predecessors in the governor's mansion, Nelson Rockefeller, or from possible successor Michael Bloomberg -- neither of whom have particularly seemed to struggle with how to spend their money well. 4

Honesty: Perhaps Spitzer's tragic flaw was, simply, his truthfulness. Maybe he had too much integrity to take a mistress. Prostitution, at its root, is a simple, honest transaction; it wouldn't require any of the deception or subterfuge of a woman on the side. Further, Spitzer insisted on paying out of his own pocket. He might have let any number of powerful benefactors pick up the tab, thereby leaving few traces for a sting operation -- but he is a man of integrity, who would never allow himself to be beholden to the special interests of a patron. Spitzer insisted on being a free man, even if, in this case, freedom proved to be very expensive...

He wanted to be caught. Despite his new "Idiot" moniker, Eliot Spitzer is not a dumb man. Also, as a former prosecutor, he is intimately (ahem) familiar with how prostitution rings get busted. He had every reason to know full well which of his own calls, credit card transactions, etc. were bound straight for the DA. Yet he did it anyway.

Rather than assume he made a foolish mistake, doesn't it make more sense for us to believe that Spitzer wanted to be caught? Perhaps he was tired of all of the righteous posturing, or Albany; perhaps he realized that being governor wasn't as fun as he'd expected, and he wanted out. Maybe he's not an "idiot" at all.

Maybe that's what he was thinking.

We'll never know.

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1. And committed a felony.

2. By, first of all, trotting them out in front of the cameras for these humiliating press conferences. His wife, Silda Wall Spitzer, wore a possibly now-permanent mask of incredulous contempt: "That idiot," her look seemed to say. "What was he thinking???"

3. Bill Maher's anti-analysis misses the point: I don't think people are shocked or alarmed that Spitzer would cheat on his wife. No slight intended upon her; that's just something people do -- especially, it seems, the egomaniacal people who gravitate toward politics. What gets people all riled up -- and curious -- is that he would pay $1000 an hour for something that he a) fought so hard against; and b) could have gotten for free. (Maher's misunderstanding of the issue stems from the fact that $1000 is probably a normal amount for him to pay for sex.)

4. Of the many ways in which Spitzer betrayed many people through his behavior, one was simply to have such bad judgment that $80,000 seemed to him a reasonable amount to spend to have sex with a 22-year old. This is the kind of bargain-hunter we entrusted with the fiscal decision-making of our state?

Not News 

Every major news outlet this morning reported that today might be the day that the Democratic race for president gets decided once and for all. (Read: for Obama.)

Here's a little tip to my friends in the fourth estate: if it hasn't happened yet, it isn't news.

Today might be the day that California falls into the ocean, the day that Tom Cruise comes out of the closet, or the day Cheney finally keels over from heart failure. It might be the day dinosaurs make a comeback. Today might be the day that the media reveals its pro-Obama bias.

Oh, wait—that did happen today. So that is news. But everything else is just conjecture, or in the case of our objective (?) press, wishful thinking.

Death in Texas 

Maybe you watched last night's Democratic debate on CNN. Maybe you saw the moment when the candidates were asked to discuss Obama's recent "plagiarism" "scandal." (I couldn't decide which of the two words more deserved to put in quotes.) Maybe you heard Clinton tell Obama that "lifting whole passages from someone else's speeches is not 'Change you can believe in.' It's change you can Xerox."

Maybe you heard, after that, what the press widely describes as "booing."

If it was booing, then I find that strangely encouraging, because I think of booing as belonging to the quaint, pre-media politics of yesteryear (i.e., when people's opinions could still be heard, so people bothered to voice them). To me, though, it sounded more like the air being let out of an enormous balloon—like the death rattle of a Macy's Day parade float.

Even while she was trying to argue that Obama is a candidate of empty words and she a candidate of substance, Clinton offered up a line so pat and pre-canned that it had all the resonance of a bad TV commercial, so catty and empty that it might have been said by Rush Limbaugh, so disingenuous and cheap that people actually booed.

In that moment, she confirmed everyone's worst fear: that she is disingenuous.¹

But worse than that: she thought we would fall for it. As if we're not inundated with 1,500 messages a day, each one trying to sell us something. As if that doesn't teach us to discern a good ad (or product, or soundbyte) from a bad one.

As if we were dumb.²

If Clinton wants to start speaking to Obama's base, then she'd do well to learn that their native tongue is media: they speak it fluently and know when its grammar and cadences don't ring true—and in those moments, they will boo you, "bury" you, blog about it, and post it on "the YouTube."

There's nothing wrong with being old, being older, being of a different generation. But if you start to believe that dying your hair and painting your face makes you young, well, that has the makings of a tragedy.

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1. dis·in·gen·u·ous. (adj.) Not straightforward or candid; insincere or calculating. Contrast with my worst fear of Obama: that he is ingenuous. in·gen·u·ous. (adj.) Lacking in cunning, guile, or worldliness; simple; naive. Obama the ingenue.

2. Obama's response to the "plagiarism scandal"—that politics has entered its "silly season"—struck me as one of the most honest, media-aware lines I've ever heard from a politician, because he expects / demands that we acknowledge the degree to which the spectacle of contemporary politics is "silly"—something we were all thinking already...

Suicide for Dummies 

Feeling all alone? Unbearable pressures at home and at work? Do you feel unloved? In deep pain, with no end in sight? Thinking of killing yourself? 

Go for it.

If you want to commit suicide, that is your prerogative. Maybe you could hang in there a little longer, try some counseling, switch to a new medication. Maybe not. If you really want to end your own life, then no one is going to be able to stop you.

But on your way out, please don't shoot anyone.

This week has seen five school shootings—murder-suicides—in Illinois, Ohio, Louisiana, Tennessee and California, with a total death toll over two dozen. Don't these kids have any manners? Offing one's self is rude enough: someone—probably someone who loves you—is going to have to clean up the mess. But the urge to empty a rifle clip into a crowd full of strangers before you go... that's a whole other sort of unfathomable.

How is it possible that we're left wishing for the "good old days," when people simply slit their wrists in the tub? How is it possible to be nostalgic for the shootings at Columbine, when these things were still shocking, when we could act as though this was uncommon?

If you are contemplating suicide, here are a few simple tips:

1. With a little planning and research, you can self-medicate. You won't even need a gun—which is good, because there's no lawful justification for anyone to have a gun in the first place.
2. If you do decide to use a gun to kill yourself, there is absolutely no reason to load it with more than one bullet. If the first shot doesn't kill you, then you'll probably be bleeding, brain-damaged, in terrible pain, and/or tremendously relieved—and in none of those scenarios will you be in any shape to pull the trigger a second time. If you must have a gun, then one bullet only.
3. Though you are not thinking rationally—you're upset, and that's understandable—still, even you aren't such a fool to believe that you're getting "revenge" on people who wronged or misunderstood you. You know that revenge is when you SuperGlue someone's locker shut, or when you embarrass them by outsmarting them. You also know that you won't look very smart laid out on the coroner's stainless steel table, while people talk about how your stupid school shooting was unoriginal, uninspired, and simply proved everything they already knew and disliked about you.
4. If, after all that, you still do want to kill yourself, it's got nothing to do with anybody else. Leave them out of it. Leave your automatic rifle and your copy of Catcher in the Rye at home, and jump off a bridge. Bridges really work.

Or call a hotline and get help. 1-800-784-2433. (Yes, that really is 1-800-SUICIDE.)

The Idealist Versus the Progressive  

Are we voting with our hearts or with our heads?

The difference between the idealist and the progressive: the idealist is pursuing abstract principles of an imagined better world; the progressive is working step by step for change. The progressive works to create, one policy at a time, a world fit for the idealist to live in.

[Many on the left are picking their candidate based on one issue: the war. The war, as an issue, is a red herring. It's silly. There is no war. Fix what is broken—the sanctity of civil liberties and human rights, the mutual respect between nations, the economy—and let Bush's shameful, egomaniacal invasion of Iraq follow its natural course from that. If there was ever a time for easy answers ("Get the troops out now!"), now is not that time. Troop withdrawal solves what? Who cares who voted for the war? It is an obsolete footnote now in history.]

The question is whether Obama's idealism can spark the fire for sweeping progressive reform—is he tilting at windmills, or is he the "long-awaited champion" of the Democratic Party?—and whether Clinton's pragmatic furnace is the better engine for change.

Open Letter to Senator Barack Obama 

Dear Senator Obama,

I am, and have been, a strong supporter of your main rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton—and I'd like to begin this letter by saying what she, these last few days, seems to have been unable to say:

Congratulations.

Congratulations for your brilliant, inspiring campaign, and for galvanizing the hope of so many who have become disillusioned with the American electoral process. During your campaign, you have proven yourself to be a leader who can rally people's hope, and I think this is as important now as ever in our nation's history.

I am feeling what many in the Clinton camp also seem to be feeling: that the tide is turning, irrevocably, from her and toward you. And, without compromising my belief that Ms. Clinton would make an excellent forty-fourth president, I am also beginning to get excited at the prospect of a President Barack Obama.

I am writing this letter today, though, to ask that you remember what, exactly, you have been pursuing these past months, and what you have been promising. You have stirred a lot of hope. The electorate is pouring its hope into you, and I ask that you accept this as its vessel—without hubris and with great humility. For it is a truly humbling responsibility.

Please never lose sight that the goal is not to run a brilliant campaign, nor garner votes, nor chase approval ratings, nor say kind words, but to repair a broken nation—a task which is sure to come with cost, and which could likely cost you the popularity you enjoy today. That is the office you seek, and if you fail to deliver on this promise, then you will surely have done much greater harm than good to the very people whose hope you stirred.

So much of America believes in you. I wish you all of the strength and wisdom you will need for the hard times ahead.

Sincerely,
Christopher DeWan

World War CO2 

When Joseph Romm lists the litany of reasons that a vote for McCain in the upcoming presidential election would be a disaster for the global environment ("No Climate for Old Men," Salon.com), he also necessarily describes what he thinks is needed to arrest global warming.

While McCain may understand the scale of the climate problem, he does not appear to understand the scale of the solution. He understands the country needs to put in place a mandatory cap on GHG emissions and a trading system to energize American innovation. But in a recent Republican debate, he denied that a cap and trade system is a mandate, even though it would arguably be the most far-reaching government mandate ever legislated.

"The most far-reaching government mandate ever legislated." Or, to use a popular parlance: the next president must declare war on carbon emissions.

* * *

During the Reagan administration, when Neo-Conservatives really were "neo," they hijacked the word "war" for their own gains. They were careful to explain that the invasions of Grenada and Panama, though involving actual soldiers, bullets, and deaths, were not "wars;" they were "conflicts," "police actions." The Clinton administration continued to leverage this rhetorical shift during the "action" in Kosovo—which was sometimes "bombing" and sometimes "peace-keeping," but never "war."

Meanwhile, "war" became a term used strictly metaphorically, to describe pitched, heroic battles against abstract foes: Drugs, Terror, etc. These "wars" were "declared" (though never in the legal sense) in order to inspire patriotism and nationalism, through metonymic slight-of-hand: the DEA agents are "entrenched" on the "front line," "protecting us" from the "invasion" of "chemical weapons" such as cocaine and marijuana. That is not to say that the job of a DEA agent does not involve risk (or bullets), but rather to say that if the term "police action" were ever to be honestly, appropriately applied, then this would be one such place, because the DEA are literally police.

Though my nation is currently, notoriously, at "war," I would like to suggest that this is only true metaphorically. I side with Baudrillard: for Americans, at least, the Iraq War did not take place—because if there is anything to distinguish a "war" from a "police action" or "skirmish" or "battle," then it must be the impact that it has on the larger culture. Soldiers go to battle; societies go to war. And as of yet in my lifetime, I have never rationed canned goods, I have never sent aluminum to the front, I have never had loved ones snatched up by a draft or made into refugees or killed. The deepest impact that these so-called "wars" have had on the wider culture is to interrupt regular programming on CNN, to infect political discourse with more strident (and sometimes fascist) tones, and to affect the price of gasoline (though for better, or worse, I'm not even sure).

* * *

If the science is correct (and there are fewer and fewer reasons to doubt it), then the forward march of greenhouse gases against polar ice is more significant than the march of the Panzer division across Europe. As this idea moves into the mainstream, our leaders will, sooner or later, declare "war" on carbon dioxide. If they truly are leaders, they would do well to remind us, the electorate, that we don't understand the term "war"—that its meaning has been stolen from us by flag-waving politicians, and that war—actual war—is state-sanctioned, nation-wide discomfort the like of which my generation has never known.

That is something I can vote for.

Super Bowl Tuesday 

It all comes down to this. A chance at immortality. Because history is written by the winners.

In cities across America, each week, they've been suiting up, going onto the field, and playing their hearts out. These would-be heroes have been putting it in the air and they've been pounding it into the ground. They've been marching it down the field and they've been knocking on the door. But this game is won in the trenches, and there can only be one champion.

Tonight, it will all be decided. The moment you've been waiting for. The best and the brightest, the strongest and the fastest, the meanest and the hungriest: they have trained hard and tonight they're going head to head in a dazzling show, surrounded by thralls of fans and millions of dollars of advertising. When the night is over and the game clock has run down, we'll look up at the scoreboard and know we have a new champion.

Of course I'm not talking about the entertaining, surprising, NFL championship game that played a few nights ago, but rather a game with far more elaborate and arcane rules even than American football: the electing of delegates for the United States presidency. We, the so-called electorate, seize on the excitement with the rabidity of sports fans. We cheer, we groan, we hope our team comes out ahead, and don't worry so much that we've reduced our government to the passionate whims of fandom.

By morning, the candidates will be decided, and we'll have our champions—though half the country has yet to vote.

Fucking Hillary Clinton 

(This piece originally appeared in the literary journal Cargo.)

The ice cubes in my glass freeze together head to head, like a kiss. At the point where they've decided they best fit, they become one, melt together, away from the world, and I twirl them around in the midst of their disappearance, to hear the music they make against the glass, clink clink.

The phone is ringing and I'm not answering it. I'm playing with my ice cubes and their wonderful music, clink clink, and the dull thump when they slide against the lime.

The answering machine will pick up, like a good answering machine.

I'm thinking of fucking Hillary Clinton. I'm thinking of taking her in a darkened room of the White House, under the titillated eyes of the Secret Service, on a desk once used by Andrew Jackson. I'm thinking of pulling Hillary Clinton by her hair, biting the diamonds on her earlobes, biting her neck, while she writhes to reach the clasp of her dress. I'm thinking of  thrusting my way into American history.

The answering machine picks up, as it's wont to do. Whoever's calling hangs up. It's annoying, especially 3am. But that's the way the game is played. The ball is in my court.

Things I have trouble imagining: Hillary in the throes of orgasm; Hillary with morning breath and raspy voice; Hillary cooking me breakfast; Hillary unrolling a condom onto me; Hillary letting me do her without a condom.

The harder these things are to imagine, the more they turn me on—so when she does them, so goes the game.

I pick up the phone and dial *69, but after the first ring, I hang up. I'm getting too old for this.

I like the image of Hillary pacing by the phone, feeling junior high, trying to get up the courage to call. I like to picture her hanging up after she hears my voice. I like Hillary flustered. I like knowing I just *69ed Hillary Clinton.

I pour myself another Scotch and watch the ice cubes fade into oblivion. The phone is ringing again: she's 69ed me right back. I reach to turn off the machine, cover up the evidence, shred the papers. She knows the drill. But I change my mind. I'm no good at being coy. Let her know what she's dealing with.

I enjoy watching Hillary at press conferences, on TV, wearing tailor-made suits of red or blue, crafted by conservative designers who are well paid but will never be known by name. I like watching her and guessing which panties she's wearing. I like knowing Hillary is cool and collected and smart and tough with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but that she can't sleep nights, thinking of me. I like not calling her back, and standing her up for our secret, elaborate, tightly-scheduled rendezvous, pushing her nearly far enough to put my own life in danger. I like making Hillary Clinton cry.

And I think she likes it too.

Oh the games people play.

The machine picks up, and she hangs up again. Maybe she's thinking of Bill right now, somewhere in the back of her mind, thinking of a long time ago, when she was in love; when she still believed in love. I don't know what she's thinking, and I never will. I can only try to love her in the ways I think she wants to be loved, in the ways I think she needs to be loved.

And I do. Every day, I do.

May Contain Traces of Peanuts 

It's hard not to love that Barack Obama guy, what with all of his moderate talk about bringing people together, and about change. He's mastered a firm and honest-sounding subtly that's mostly lacking from political discourse: you get the sense that cares, and that, above that, he understands. He's got ideas, and he's also listening, and if someone has a better idea, then he's willing to change his own idea to make it work better.

He's smart, articulate, compassionate, and committed to the work. We could do a lot worse—we are doing a lot worse—than Barack Obama for president.

But now that he's taken the Iowa caucus and is gaining momentum en route to New Hampshire, it's easy to glaze over one of the criticisms of the oh-so-slick Clinton campaign—that as an outsider, Obama may be well-positioned to be an idealist, but not as well-positioned to achieve the change he desires.

Think about the last time the Democrats elected a young, smart, idealistic "Washington outsider" to president...

Dynamite! 

If it weren't already completely clear that Hillary Clinton is the heir apparent to the Oval Office, it became a little more so yesterday, when she became the candidate to blow up: a man walked into her New Hampshire campaign office with sticks of what appeared to be dynamite strapped to his chest.

The fact that the crazies are coming at her elevates her to the next tier of legitimacy. Consider: Mark David Chapman did not shoot one of The Monkees, and John Hinkley Jr. didn't shoot Dan Quayle. No one tried to explode Joe Biden's campaign headquarters. Welcome to the big league, Hill.

(It's good to know that, five weeks before the New Hampshire primary, someone cares about the upcoming presidential election—even if it is just a drunk in search of mental health care.)

The other candidates must be jealous of the extra attention Clinton received, thanks to this bona fide, uninvited crisis in the midst of a campaign that has otherwise been maybe too orchestrated. In the end, the dynamite wasn't real—but Hillary was.

"It looked and sounded presidential," said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. "This was an instance of the White House experience of this campaign. They knew how to handle this."

And just after reports that her lead was slipping. Of course, just because the Clinton camp stood to gain from the crisis is not to suggest they might have staged it. No one is that Machiavellian. Right?

Just don't blow it, Hill.

What Would Jason Do? 

Walking by the Gare de L'Est on my way out of Paris, I got a sense of déjà vu ¹—and realized something that eluded me the whole time I'd been there:

I want to be Jason Bourne.

Sure, Jason Bourne—the amnesiac assassin played, in a trio of recent movies, by Matt Damon—is a stone killer, as liable to murder a man with a paperback book as with a knife, gun, or his own well-trained hands. But still... this corn-fed, athletic, Midwestern ex-pat boy is a role model for Americans everywhere.

1. He lives in Paris. That's cool.
2. He is fluent in no fewer than six languages (French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish and English), and has no xenophobia about relating to people from outside the United States.
3. He can handle a Mini Cooper like a NASCAR driver.
4. He has great taste in women.
5. He can run really really fast.
6. He's adept at picking up new skills and new technologies.

Last, and I'm sure most important: despite his first-hand knowledge of the terrors that beset the world, Jason Bourne has a conscience. He knows right from wrong, and acts accordingly—even when it flies in the face of his own government's position. He knows, for instance, that water-boarding is torture (having himself been subjected to it by the CIA).

Bourne is smart, no doubt, but he's no brooding liberal either: he's a military man driven to action by the un-American activities of his own government. Bourne proves out that you don't have to be a fan of Bill O'Reilly to be patriotic.

1. Which is, itself, French: "already seen". And related to amnesia...

Unusual Cognition 

or, Voices in the Noise

I read a scientific study on the Internet that claimed "Hearing 'Messages' Embedded In Noise Could Be An Early Sign Of Schizophrenia." And it's the Internet so it must be true. So I've been listening to a lot of static lately, you know, just to be sure. To see if I hear voices. I don't think I do, but it's hard to be sure...

I've also been listening to this singer named Pete Galub, who played some sort of atonal alt-country rock opera at Magnetic Fields the other night. I don't really know what those scientists meant when they said "noise": one man's noise is another man's symphony. Some of Pete Galub's stuff was pretty noisy. And I definitely heard voices. But I loved it: if this is schizophrenia, it's not so bad.

The words people hear inside the noise, which indicate that they're crazy, are "increase," "children," "A-OK," and "Republican." These are words I hear pretty often (except maybe "A-OK").

I read another scientific study on the Internet that claimed schizophrenics get all kinds of tail. And it's the Internet so it must be true. People find schizophrenics sexy on account of their "unusual cognition." They find them sexy and this leads to an "increase" in "children," "A-OK"?

I can only speculate why schizophrenics hear the word "Republican" in the noise.

But I did read something on the Internet about this today, which claimed George Bush is a psychotic who should be put in a straightjacket. (In order to commit someone to a mental institution against their will, you have to prove they are a danger to themselves or others...) It was on the Internet, so I guess that means it's true. But then, the Internet is just another kind of noise, and these are just the voices I'm hearing...

An Inconvenient Syllogism 

Now that Al Gore has won the Nobel Prize for Peace, the right half of the blogosphere is making a lot of noise about how the Norwegian Nobel Committee, the people who select the recipient of the peace prize, is "anti-Bush."

Call me simple, but isn't that because Bush is "anti-peace"?

Independents Day 

"Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

"He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good."

- from the "Indictment" of the Declaration of Independence

 

First, a sincere thank you to our President and Commander-in-Chief, for giving his largely complacent electorate a good reason to review the wise words of our Forefathers on this Fourth of July holiday: when George W. Bush commuted the prison sentence of his staffer Scooter Libby, he offered a clear reminder why we had to shuck off monarchy in the first place: because it breeds cronyism and corruption. The President refused to assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

Second, a sincere thank you to Keith Olbermann, for being brave, lucid, and for being a true patriot and independent—that is, thanks for reminding us what we're celebrating today.

---

"Democracy doesn't mean much if people have to confront concentrated systems of economic power as isolated individuals. Democracy means something if people can organize to gain information, to have thoughts for that matter, to make plans, to enter into the political system in some active way, to put forth programs and so on. If organizations of that kind exist, then democracy can exist too. Otherwise it's a matter of pushing a lever every couple of years; it's like having the choice between Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola."

-Noam Chomsky, Intervention in Vietnam and Central America: Parallels and Differences (1985)

Very 

More from the "How Dumb Does He Think We Are?" department:

Exhibit A: From the groundbreaking of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial

President Bush on Monday said, "We have gathered in tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, to the ideals he held and to the life he lived. Dr. King showed us that a life of conscience and purpose can lift up many souls. And on this ground, a monument will rise that preserves his legacy for the ages." (Source: www.whitehouse.gov)

Exhibit B: From the District of Columbia Court of Appeals

The Bush administration said Monday that Guantanamo Bay prisoners have no right to challenge their detentions in civilian courts and that lawsuits by hundreds of detainees should be dismissed.

In court documents filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the Justice Department defended the military's authority to arrest people overseas and detain them indefinitely without access to courts. (Source: the Associated Press.)

Party's Over 

"Well, that was exciting!," my sister writes. "One little election and we all believe in democracy again!"

I raise a drink (each) to Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Howard Dean, and a local brew to new Massachusetts mayor Deval Patrick. And smash a glass of "Mazel tov" good riddance to myhome state's senator Rick Santorum and to Donald Rumsfeld. (See you at the war crimes trials, Rummy. Payback is a bitch, ... and so is the loss of diplomatic immunity.)

And yet...

What is it about optimism that I find so unsettling?

Is it that this elation is the exact same thing I was feeling in November of 2000, when Al Gore won the presidency (for a few hours)?

[You know that old saying they have in Texas (and maybe Tennessee): "Fool me once, shame on ... shame on you. Fool me, ... you can't get fooled again." That old saying.]

Or is it the gnawing sense that what we've just witnessed isn't a Democratic win so much as a Republican loss—that, end of the day, I still don't have much faith in the Democratic leadership, only faith in the Bush administration's ability to fuck things up?

Why did I find it so nerve-wracking when Dean appeared on the Daily Show and thanked Jon Stewart for delivering the night's wins? Nice sentiment, and even true to a point, but still I'd rather the leader of the party weren't so dependent on Comedy Central. (Stewart himself seems to shudder at the prospect of being taken seriously: "Nothing says 'I am ashamed of you my government' more than 'Stewart/Colbert '08'.")

Republicans were ousted on Tuesday, but the press has been quick to point out that more often than not, it was an ouster of moderate Republicans, leaving in place many of the more reactionary ones, and leaving also perhaps not very much opportunity for the bipartisanship we keep hearing is in our Congressional future.

The battle between Republicans and Democrats, during my adult life, has been a battle for the middle: if moderate Republicans have been replaced by moderate Democrats, then all the better that the party I favor is now in a position to entrench itself squarely in the middle of the aisle; the party I disfavor has given itself over to the evangelicals on the fringe anyway. If I were a fiscally-conservative small government Republican, I'd be pissed, and not at the Democrats, but at the neocons and religious fanatics who stole the party.

What I wonder—what I hope for, because it's the closest thing we might ever see to change in our government—is that the Republican Party might split in half: the economic conservatives on the one side and the zealots on the other. And I hope the same thing for the Democratic Party: the watered-down version of what has come to pass for progressive, the Hillarys and Liebermans, on the one side, and on the other, some seats reserved for genuine progressives, for people with agenda and integrity who don't shy away from the word "liberal". These factions exist already and a two-party system can't hold them, and that's a big reason our democracy is as broken as it is. I hope for an end of the two-party system. I hope for a legislature that actually represents the populace, even if that means they have to negotiate with one another and form coalitions (like they do in functional democracies).

While I'm wishing, I might as well say what I'd really like, which is a parliament and an end to the Electoral College. That is, what I'd really like is a democracy. (The current administration, so intent on installing "democracy" across the third world, seems oddly, consistently resistant to the idea here at home. In Bush's first radio address after the election, he stated: "All Americans can take pride in the example our democracy sets for the world by holding elections even in a time of war." Gee, thanks, mister, for not canceling our elections. HOw democratic of you!) Since that won't happen, I'll wish for the next best thing, which is the civility that is sure to arise out of the democratic anarchy of a four-party system.

One little election, and I believe in democracy again...

Election Night Haiku 

A text message haiku (of sorts) from a friend:

America is
showing signs of life! I'm drunk!
I'm in Brooklyn!

Happy happy night.

---

Thinking of Elephants 

or, Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones, but Metaphors Win Elections

It's that time of year. The air is getting crisp, the leaves are starting to turn, and the Democrats are getting hopeful.

Silly Democrats.

A year and a half ago I saw a speech by George Lakoff, cognitive linguist and founder of the progressive think tank The Rockridge Institute.

I heard him preach and I am a believer.

The reason that Lakoff gave up his academic dueling with Noam Chomsky in favor of the political front line is that he believes the human brain is wired to favor metaphors over hard facts—even when the metaphor contradicts the facts. And he believes that Republicans have been using this to their advantage for years, while the Democrats have been righteously spouting facts, and losing elections.

Think, "Liberate Iraq." Think, "Mission accomplished."

Think, "Making the country safer", "No child left behind", "Defending freedom."

Think of all of the pretty phrases we hear from the White House press secretaries that have no correspondence with fact.

Think about the fact that conservative think tanks have had thirty years to get their story straight. Think about the fact that they get together for Sunday brunch each week to uniformly decide how to deride the Left, and then hit the radio stations and newspapers with ... what?

Metaphors.

Meanwhile, the Democrats spout more facts, do more righteous posturing, and change nothing about the way they conduct their discourse.

The Democrats might actually do well this November: polls show they have a decent chance of taking both the House and the Senate. The election is theirs to lose (just like it was last time...). But if they do win, it's not for anything they're doing: their strategy has been to sit in the back and hope to go unnoticed, and if they stand any chance on Election Day, then it's a testament only to just how inept and corrupt the Republicans have been.

"The Republicans are inept and corrupt." You see how easy that is? It's not very artful, but say it enough and it will stick. My point is, "Changing the rhetoric of the discourse" sounds more difficult than it really is. You just gotta go all schoolyard:

Bush is a "liar."

Republicans are "liars." They're "cheats." They're "immoral." They "don't trust the American public," they're "bankrupting America," while "making the world less safe." They "don't believe in the importance of freedom or the value of the Constitution or the rule of law, " which makes them (here's the bell ringer) "un-American."

Just start saying those over and over. Then the Democrats will have the metaphors and the facts on their side, instead of just the latter.

Good luck with those elections.

State of the Union 

Ever since the last Election Day, I've been completely incapable of political discourse, stymied both here and in conversation. I've been stuck on the same two ideas all year. I can't get past the fact that either:

1. the election was fraudulently stolen in Ohio and maybe elsewhere, or
2. the election wasn't fraudulently stolen, and a majority of people actually thought Bush would be a good president.

I'm not really sure which is worse.

I've heard many Democrats take encouragement from Bush's record-low approval ratings (the lowest of any president since Nixon during Watergate), but I'm skeptical as to how much these things matter. (I'm especially skeptical how much these will matter in three years...) One thing that separates the results of these approval surveys from the results of elections is that elections only happen at the polls: you have to care enough, and believe enough, to vote. If Bush were up for election today, would all of these disgruntled people go to the polls?

Are you going to the polls today?

P.S. Some people are still watching Ohio.

---

This looks familiar... but I find it so much less distrubing. Open call for essays explaining why...

The Highlight of My Week 

Every day for the last ten, I've been compulsively checking the Huffington Post, the Drudge Report, and the shiny new Department of Justice site for the Office of the Special Council, waiting for the announcement that will confirm the months of rumors that Karl Rove will be going to jail.

I am so excessively stupidly excited that President Bush's most trusted advisor might actually be getting a mugshot the same week as Tom DeLay, the same week that Bill Frist got caught in another bald-faced lie about his "alleged" insider trading, the same week that Harriet Miers will likely withdraw from consideration for the Supreme Court.

In short, I am so excessively stupidly excited at the complete and thorough collapse of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the U.S. government.

Then it dawns on me that this isn't actually the most constructive thing in the world (let alone charitable). I know that, for the good of my country, I should put my partisan feelings aside and look toward healing and reconcilation.

But I can't do it. So instead, I'm just going to point out where you can get Karl Rove Line-Up t-shirts.

See you in 6 to 8, Karl.

P.S. George Packer from The New Yorker is a bigger man than I: rather than simply gloat, he's able to articulate his feelings into an actionable plan for the Democrats. I subscribe to nearly every word. Please read it and spread the faith.

Instant Classic 

This is making the rounds on the Internet, an open letter of sorts to George Bush:

"Mr. President, this job can't be fun for you any more. There's no more money to spend—you used up all of that. You can't start another war because you used up the army. And now, darn the luck, the rest of your term has become the Bush family nightmare: helping poor people. Listen to your Mom. The cupboard's bare, the credit cards maxed out. No one's speaking to you. Mission accomplished.

"Now it's time to do what you've always done best: lose interest and walk away. Like you did with your military service and the oil company and the baseball team. It's time. Time to move on and try the next fantasy job. How about cowboy or space man? Now I know what you're saying: there's so many other things that you as President could involve yourself in. Please don't. I know, I know. There's a lot left to do. There's a war with Venezuela. Eliminating the sales tax on yachts. Turning the space program over to the church. And Social Security to Fannie Mae. Giving embryos the vote.

"But, Sir, none of that is going to happen now. Why? Because you govern like Billy Joel drives. You've performed so poorly I'm surprised that you haven't given yourself a medal. You're a catastrophe that walks like a man. Herbert Hoover was a shitty president, but even he never conceded an entire city to rising water and snakes.

"On your watch, we've lost almost all of our allies, the surplus, four airliners, two trade centers, a piece of the Pentagon and the City of New Orleans. Maybe you're just not lucky. I'm not saying you don't love this country. I'm just wondering how much worse it could be if you were on the other side.

"So, yes, God does speak to you. What he is saying is: 'Take a hint.' "

The above, of course, is comedian Bill Maher taking potshots at an easy target. Why can't he leave Billy Joel alone?!?

---

Salt in the Wound 

"Karl Rove is like the Pillsbury Dough Boy, if the chef had used salt everywhere that the recipe had called for sugar."

Hazy 

In case I haven't been clear on this, I'm not a supporter of the current U.S. president or his policies. I believe the Bush Administration has been fraudulent with the American people, especially (but not exclusively) in regards to the war in Iraq and its motivations; his lying to Congress and to voters in order to incite war (and war-profiteering) must constitute a "high crime and misdemeanor" (somewhere between perjury and treason), and I don't doubt that he deserves to be impeached—except that "deserving" has little to do with the political popularity contest we call impeachment.

The most striking and consistent of these lies and deceptions involve:

1. Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction, and
2. Iraq's connection to the September 11 attacks.

If Iraq had really big bombs and was also supplying them to the terrorists known as Al-Qaeda (contrast this with this), we'd sure be in trouble: Al-Qaeda has said, unequivocally, that if they had weapons of mass destruction, they would use them in American and European cities. (Well, even that is an overstatement, since I'm not sure how a headless body like Al-Qaeda can say anything unequivocally...)

Bush has gone to no small trouble to conflate Iraq and Al-Qaeda, an effort to make his invasion seem commonsensical rather than arbitrary, misdirected, imperialist, oil-grabbing, Oedipal, or Orestean. And this effort has been largely successful (the dismally low support of the war notwithstanding)—leading at least in part to Congressional approval of the invasion, Kerry's defeat in November, and even a North Carolina Congressman to say, explicitly, that Saddam was "very much involved in 9/11."

None of this is new, or at this point, surprising.

But whether there was a connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, there is now. The Group of al Qaeda of Jihad Organization in Europe, who claimed responsibility for the London bombings on Thursday, stated, "It is time of revenge against the crusader and Zionist British government has come in response to the massacres committed by Iraq and Afghanistan."

Some on the left have taken the London bombings as a renewed excuse to pull out of Iraq—not exactly to turn tail, but to refocus the "war on terror's" attention back to Al-Qaeda, where they say it belongs. But is this even an option anymore? The U.S. has now replaced suspected terrorist training grounds with real ones. Is there any choice but to stay?

What do we do now?

"Reply hazy. Try again."

---

Gassy 

The Bush Administration is finally willing to concede that there might be a connection between carbon emissions and global warming. They're even finally willing to talk about global warming as a possible problem – that human activity is "to some extent" to blame. However, they insist that the dialogue shift away from trying to reduce these emissions.

"My hope is—and I think the hope of Tony Blair is—to move beyond the Kyoto debate and to collaborate on new technologies that will enable the United States and other countries to diversify away from fossil fuels," Bush said. You remember, he refused to sign the Kyoto Treaty—a promise to reduce carbon emissions—because it would be bad for our economy.

This week, oil hit a record $62 a barrel this week, and two separate papers were published, one announcing that, due to rising river temperatures, Alaskan salmon are dying by the millions; the other, that the entire North Atlantic is degrees warmer than has ever been historically recorded.

I'm not sure where Mr. Bush does his shopping, but I'm thinking it's got to be bad for the economy when the coastal cities are underwater, when oil runs out, and when America has no means of transportation, distribution, or generating electricity. (It turns out James Howard Kunstler thinks so too...)

Deeper and Deeper 

Thank God that's settled!

To be honest, I don't give a damn who "Deep Throat" was; I thought, as a dramatic character, he had more intensity when he was still lurking in the shadows. I do give a damn that people have been conjecturing about this for years, and have narrowed it down to a list of a dozen people who knew that President Nixon was lying to the voting public, and that only one of the twelve ever stepped forward.

Contrast that with, say, now. On May 1, the Times of London released the leaked "Downing Street Memo," an internal brief circulated among Tony Blair's staff, in which it was stated, clearly and unflinchingly, that the U.S. "fixed" its intelligence on WMDs in order to justify an invasion of Iraq:

Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

- from "The Downing Street Memo", dated July 23, 2002

In the Nixon years, a dozen men knew the President was lying and one did something. Today, anyone who reads a newspaper should know that the President is lying, yet we sit idly by; it seems the only thing that leads an elected official toward impeachment is the other kind of deep throat...

Texas Chainsaw Massacre 

"Now, of course, he spends his days clearing brush, cutting trails, taking down trees, or, as the girls call it, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. George's answer to any problem at the ranch is to cut it down with a chainsaw —which I think is why he and Cheney and Rumsfeld get along so well."

- First Lady Laura Bush at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner, April 30

Sometimes I wonder if the main difference between Democrats and Republicans is a sense of irony...

Unholy Alliance 

I've recently come out in this forum as anti-Pope, though the reasons for my vehemence are unclear even to me. (I like to think I'm championing Catholic gays and women who might fear excommunication more than I do.) I'm also consistently, predictably anti-Bush, a subject so consistent, predictable, and in my mind obvious that I barely even write about it any more.

I'd prefer not to repeat myself, so I'll mostly lay off the passing of the pontiff. But I refuse to sit by quietly while Bush co-opts the death of the Pope as an opportunity to stake a fresh claim on "compassionate conservatism."

Oxymoronic bullshit.

Call me a bitter, atheistic, hell-bound heathen, but I don't think my tax dollars should be spent on a love-fest between the Texan "pro-lifer" who, as governor, upheld 152 executions, and the Catholic holy man who denied prophylactics to AIDS-ridden Africa on the grounds of morality, while shielding the Church's known child molesters from prosecution.

I'd prefer not to repeat myself, so I'll mostly lay off the passing of the pontiff. If you want to read more, may I point you to this essay by Christopher Hitchens, this one by Damon Linker, or this one by Amy Sullivan?

---

��

Sainthood 

My friend started seeing a therapist because she's too nice. She feels she spends too much energy trying to be "nice" to everyone, trying to get everyone to like her, at the expense of her own opinions and desires. In her first session, she went on and on describing this to the therapist, and at the end, he said, "You've gone a half-hour over, so I'm going to charge you $210 instead of the $140 we agreed upon." And she said, "Well, thanks for giving me the extra time" and wrote him a check. When he asked her why she'd let him get away with something like that, she replied "I wanted you to like me." He said, "Good. That'll be $140."

* * *

Bush was on the TV talking about Terri Schiavo, probably righteously, but I couldn't tell for sure because I was at a bar, and the sound was down. The guy next to me looked at the President in obvious disgust, then stood up and announced, "A born-again-Christian is just a lapsed atheist." Then he spat—actually spat—and walked out the door.

* * *

On the subway the other day, an old woman got on the train, and I stood up to offer my seat. But she rolled her eyes and looked at me like I was a total fool. The train was empty. There were a dozen empty seats.

* * *

Saint Catherine of Sienna was canonized because, in 1373, she was visited by a vision of Christ. Catherine had been nursing an older member of her order, Andrea, a woman who had persecuted Catherine for years before coming down with breast cancer. Catherine devoted herself fully to the care of her enemy, and finally, in a gesture of humility and devotion, drank a bowl filled with the old nun's pus. The infectious soup gave her a fever, visions, and finally, sainthood.

My point is that maybe that's not a good thing.

Oil / Rigged 

Happy anniversary! Do you know where you were two years ago today, when the United States launched its war on Iraq? I was in a bar in Los Angeles, catching up with some friends, and pontificating, the way one does when one's nation goes to war, the way one does when in a bar and catching up with friends.

"Bullshit," one of them said, as the fireworks exploded over Baghdad. "Bullshit," agreed another.

"No, no, it all makes sense," I pontificated, "if the Bush Administration knows something we don't. It makes complete sense if they know something they're not telling us."

There was some unanimous conspiracy-theory eye-rolling, but they let me continue.

"Bush and Cheney called their old pals at Enron to advise on the energy policy, right? The Enron guys came and talked, and what they actually said is a secret to this day. Well, here's my theory:

"Enron comes to D.C. to explain we're out of oil. 'The world is just about empty. We tell people there are reserves to last 100 years, 200 years, but we're making those numbers up. In fact, we're looking at more like 10 years. The well has run dry.'

"So the energy policy, according to Enron, goes like this:

1. Attempt to destabilize the current regime in Venezuela and install an American puppet government, so the U.S. can control Latin America's flow of petroleum;
2. Prospect for oil in every square inch of Alaska, including the federally-protected wildlife reserves;
3. Follow up on any possible excuse to invade any oil-rich nation in the Middle East (i.e., Iraq), and/or any Asian country with a major oil pipeline (i.e., Afghanistan).

"So, the Iraqi War is not bullshit. It is an act consistent with a highly-classified energy policy—to seize all available oil-bearing land, before it's too late."

I'd been drinking, so maybe I can be forgiven for my uninformed grand-standing. But let's cut forward two years and a few wars later (I'm counting Iraq, Afghanistan, and the failed coup attempt in Venezuela as "a few"...): the price of crude is hovering at a record-high $57 a barrel, and there's not a thing OPEC can do about it; meanwhile, energy companies are lining up like Sooners at the border of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, waiting for Congress to fire the starter pistol and begin the race for oil exploitation.

Now, a team of researches has published a sobering version of my barroom rant—the revelation that the world's major oil companies are nearly tapped out, that though the world's demand for oil is still steeply rising, its ability to produce oil has already peaked.

Pretty soon, the only thing spouting in the world might be me.

Happy anniversary.

---

��

Bogus 

"So what Jefferson was saying was 'Hey! You know, we left this England place because it was bogus. So if we don't get some cool rules ourselves, pronto, we'll just be bogus too.' Yeah?"

Sean Penn's had his share of words on domestic and world politics since Fast Times at Ridgemont High. A lot of them are pretty bone-headed, and all of them could stand a going-over for grammar, which might make Spicoli's summation the clearest and truest among them. But Spicoli is a genius compared to Penn critic Steve Darnell at Pravda:

"Most liberals are still unable to accept the fact that after four years of trying to discredit President Bush using the New York Times and the rest of the liberal media, along with moronic statements by Sean Penn, Barbara Streisand and other idiotic liberal entertainers, the President still won. The liberals took the news so hard a few are actually looking for citizenship in Canada and France. I guess they cannot take four more years of inspirational leadership by President Bush, but would rather live in a socialist country that appeases terrorists."

Yikes! Socialist? Where??? Actually, Steve, I don't know about that "terrorist-appeasing," but France is actually what they call a republic, which is, you know, what we have here in the States. Up there in Canada, they have this radical system they call a parliamentary democracy: that's one where everyone's vote actually counts. Pretty crazy, eh?

I understand how you might see all that vote-counting as a kind of terrorist activity, especially since some of their electorate is liberal. How does backwater Canada manage? They don't even have an offshore prison for undesirables, like we do.

The is U.S. History, Steve. I see a globe right there.

Flunking Out of Electoral College 

The population of Wyoming is roughly half a million; the state gets three electoral votes to cast in presidential elections. The state of California has fifty-five electoral votes - 18 times as many as Wyoming - but has 70 times as many people (thirty-five million). So a vote cast for president in Dick Cheney's home state of Wyoming is worth four a vote cast in left-leaning California.

The Electoral College clearly doesn't offer a major in math.

Imagine this: California could split into seventy states the size of Wyoming, and send 140 senators to Washington instead of two. So why is there a Republican majority in Congress? And why are we waging war in Iraq for democracy when we don't have it in California?

Misunderestimations (and Vitriol) 

By now, all the good headlines are taken. (Thank you, Daily Mirror, for printing the question we've all been asking — half of us, anyway....) I'm trying to let go of the urge to be pithier than the next guy.

As the dust settles on the battlefield, I'm getting stuck on how different this election was from the last. In Bush v. Gore, we were bamboozled by Rove & Co. in 50 different ways : Bush misrepresented himself as a "compassionate conservative", lost the popular vote, and then kicked and gouged his way to the White House. This time out, the electorate knew what they were getting. They chose him. How can 59 million people be so dumb?

This election wasn't lost because Democrats "misunderestimated" Bush, but because we overestimated the voting public. The Village Idiot of Crawford, Texas is not the enemy; the 59 million are.

Here in the U.S., we're happily backtracking on the Enlightenment. Dialogue, discourse, and dialectic are losing ground to thoughtless dogma — and the ever-ruthless, ever-capitalist Republicans are all too eager to leverage people's inclinations toward fear and superstitious fundamentalism, just to make a quick buck (or billion).

I remember, early in the campaigning, I thought about moving to Missouri, or one of the other of the vast sea of undifferentiated red states, to "build bridges," to understand my brethren. Now I want to hit them with a stick. I want to knock them off of their so-called "moral" perch so that people will see Republican policies for what they are — immoral choices that result in the suffering of others, the loss of freedoms, and a departure from the American "values" described in such holy texts as the Declaration of Independance, the Bill of Rights, and, yes, the fucking Bible. (When it comes time to give a tax break, what would Jesus do?)

Maybe it's time we start loving our red state brothers by tirelessly calling them on Republican hypocrisy, time we start loving them with a big, relentless stick called Reason.

Jon Stewart for President 

It's hard not to think of this as the most interesting TV moment of a generation. Remind me to buy his book for everyone for Christmas.

Jon Stewart: Crossfire "hurting America"

"I think you're a lot more fun on your show," said Tucker Carlson to "Crossfire" guest Jon Stewart this afternoon. "And I think you're as much of a dick on your show as on any other," Stewart shot back. It wasn't the faux avuncularity we've come to expect from Stewart on "The Daily Show" but there, of course, he's playing a role. Here he was himself — and he wasn't buying any of it.

From the moment Stewart sat down he made no secret of how repugnant he found the show. In fact, he said to Carlson and co-host Paul Begala that he had been so hard on the show he felt it was his duty to come on and say to their faces what he has said to friends and in interviews. What he said was that their show was "hurting America," and he was being only slightly hyperbolic. Stewart told them that when America needed journalists to be journalists they had instead chosen to present theater.

Carlson, trying to affect an air of dry amusement that a comedian would presume to lecture him, important pundit that he is, but looking as if his bow-tie were about to start spinning, could barely contain his outrage. In an absolutely mind-boggling moment, Carlson tried to counter Stewart's criticism by pointing out that during John Kerry's recent appearance on "The Daily Show," Stewart asked the candidate softball questions. "If you want to measure yourself against a comedy show," Stewart said, "be my guest."

Paul Begala tried to put a more conciliatory face on things by pointing out that theirs was a "debate" show. Stewart was having none of it. "I would love to see a real debate show," he said. And went on to tell them that instead of holding politicians' feet to the fire by asking tough question, "you're part of their strategy. You're partisan — what's the word? — uh, hacks."

It's almost a cliche by now to talk about "The Daily Show" being more trusted than real newscasts, but Stewart showed why. He pointed out to Carlson that he had asked Kerry if he really were in Cambodia but "I don't care," and when Carlson asked him what he thought about the "Bill O'Reilly vibrator flap," Stewart said, "I don't." It was as concise a demonstration of the triviality of the media as you could hope for.

"I thought you were going to be funny," Carlson said toward the end of the interview. Stewart responded, "No, I'm not going to be your monkey." And that was what was so bracing.

Stewart's "Crossfire" appearance is going to generate talk about how prickly he was, how he wasn't "nice" like he is on "The Daily Show." But prickliness is just what was needed. If you've built your reputation as a satirist pointing out how the media falls down on the job, you're not going to make yourself a part of their charade.

I've heard people talk about "The Daily Show" as an oasis of sanity, a public service. I couldn't agree more. Stewart's appearance on "Crossfire" was another public service. He went on and acted as if the show's purpose really was to confront tough issues, instead of being the political equivalent of pro wrestling. Given a chance to say absolutely what he thought, Stewart took it. He accomplished what almost never happens on television anymore: He made the dots come alive.

— Charles Taylor, Salon.com

And maybe Martha Stewart for his running mate? Well, that's another discussion altogether. At the very least, she'd take all those tacky Texas landscape paintings out of the Oval Office....

(The video clip, and a transcript, are also available.)

Just Because You're Paranoid 

An excerpt from an interview I just watched on terrorism:

INTERVIEWER
Do you think that the government is winning the battle against terrorists?

MINISTER
On yes. Our morale is much higher than theirs, we're fielding all their strokes, running a lot of them out, and pretty consistently knocking them for six. I'd say they're nearly out of the game.

INTERVIEWER
But the bombing campaign is now in its thirteenth year ...

MINISTER
Beginner's luck.

The "minister" in the interview is not Donald Rumsfeld, but rather Deputy Minister of Information Helpman, in the opening scene of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. (If you like, you can read the full text of the "interview", and the rest of the script at http://www.trond.com/brazil/brazil_script.htm.)

As if the news media's fear-mongering isn't enough, I've decided to round out my paranoia by entertaining myself with Brazil, and Gilliam's other homage to paranoid delusions-which-turn-out-to-be-real, 12 Monkeys. Both imagine a "future" (really now a past, since one is set in 1996, and the other "sometime in the 20th century"...) of broken-down machines and institutional information mismanagement — in other words, the United States, maybe ten years from now, after a decade under the Patriot Act and a $5 trillion deficit.

In Brazil, a paperwork error results in the stratosphere abduction of a man named "Buttle" (they were looking for "Tuttle"), and the protagonist, Sam Lowry, struggles through imbecilic, gun-happy bureaucracy as he tries to clear things up. If the movie were made today, perhaps it would be set in Guantanamo Bay, with a soundtrack by Cat Stevens (aka Yusef Islam). In one scene in the movie, Jill asks Sam to justify the state's many invasions of privacy: "How many terrorists have you met, Sam? Actual terrorists?"

When it came out (read: before 9/11), Brazil was considered an odd, if visually-stunning tale. Perhaps now, twenty years later, we're twenty years closer to Mr. Gilliam's vision...

It's About the Power, Stupid 

Donald Rumsfeld, Meet Nick Couldry. Nick Couldry, Donald Rumsfeld.

Poor Donald Rumsfeld. On paper, it all looked so good — Saddam's regime toppled and a "mission accomplished" over a year ago. But now everyone's calling on Rummy to resign. How could things have gone from so good to so bad?

Digital cameras.

It's those pesky photos from the front line, ruining everything. When the Senate Armed Services Committee asked Rumsfeld about alleged abuses in the U.S.-run prison of Abu Ghraib, his frustrated response was, "We're functioning — with peacetime restraints, with legal requirements in a wartime situation, in the information age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon."

Who knew that, in the course of bringing democracy to Iraq, freedom of expression would be such a setback? They are amazing, these newfangled digital camera things. You point them at what's in front of you, press a button, and instantly, you have an "unbelievable" photograph. Un-believable. Not to be believed. Contrasted, I suppose, with the believable photographs published by the Pentagon.

Believe it, Rummy. Now you know why they call it the information age.

Don't you just hate it when things get out of your control?

* * *

"Unbelievable photographs." One might suggest that it's unwise for a representative of the Defense Department, of all places, to pursue this line of thought. It opens up questions that might otherwise slip by unnoticed: What makes some photographs believable when others aren't? Were the photos from Iwo Jima believable? Was there something in the media coverage of the JFK assassination that might have been somehow less than real? What about the footage from Granada, Panama, or the last Gulf War? Who took these pictures (digital, most of them), and how is it we came to see those, and not, well, the "unbelievable" ones?

The events of Abu Ghraib, and the social, political, and media maelstrom which has followed, have grown into what Nick Couldry calls a "media event." Couldry doesn't coin the term in his book, Media Rituals: A Critical Approach; but his rigorous analysis leads to some conclusions about the media which Rumsfeld and his fellow spin-doctors would do well to understand.
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