Wake Me When The Great Awakening Is Over

While farting around this morning, I came across Michael Kazin's essay, which argued for Democrats to return to the politics of William Jennings Bryan. It depressed me deeply, because while I don't see much hope for progressive politics in the U.S. generally, I find even less in the progressive politics he propounds. My reason is that the schism between religious and secular liberals, largely buried between Bryan's first run for the Presidency and the Scopes trial, has already emerged. We don't really trust each other. Religious liberals blame secular liberals for losing the red states (because we keep bringing up gay marriage and supporting abortion rights, I suppose); and secular liberals suspect that we have no place in the revival that religious liberals like Kazin propose:

More than 80 percent of Americans hold strong religious beliefs, and that is unlikely to change anytime soon. Even Christians who don’t regularly attend church regard the Scriptures and the example of Christ as moral touchstones that dovetail with the ideals of Americanism itself. Secular liberals ought to make their peace with this reality, while making sure that no religious faction -- such as creationists -- can install its doctrine into law.

Okay, so we do occupy a position. We exist to stop creationists (like we could with less than 20% of the population). But as charming as that future sounds, Kazin ought to remember that one of the creationists secular liberals had to fight was Kazin's favorite religious liberal, William Jennings Bryan. Darrow's relationship with Bryan and his followersduring the early years of the 20th century broke down over evolution and race, two things that seem like worthy reasons for dissolving political ties. Why should the secular left think another collaboration should turn out any better? What happens if a faction of the religious left tries to install its doctrines into law? Are secular liberals to make peace with that reality? Are we partners in this relationship, or are we to be kept as pets?

Kazin says that secular liberals mistrust the devout because we "still harbor a nagging contempt for the God-fearing, the unhip, and the poorly educated". Perhaps, but let's not forget the contempt that the religious sling at the secular for being the "enemy of normal Americans", "Communists" and so on. I often think of Woody Allen's line in Annie Hall "Don't you see the rest of the country looks upon New York like we're left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers? I think of us that way sometimes and I live here."

The religious left needn't ask my permission to take control of the Democratic party. In reality, they already have it, though they may not be aware of it. No elected officials at the national level make claims to atheism or agnoticism, and it's not likely in the current environment that any could. Any candidate who wants votes better make sure everyone knows how often he prays and which church he goes to.

Pundits wearing every color of parisan livery exaggerate the secular left's power, mainly so that it can be the scapegoat whenever things go wrong for the left. I don't have figures, but of the 20% of the population that is secular I wouldn't expect more than half to consider themselves leftists. There are secular libertarians, anarchists, objectivists, moderates, and business/supply-side Republicans out there as well. The secular movement (if you can call it that) is disorganized. It lacks leadership. It can't agree on spokespeople. It has no lobby. It has no influence over who gets nominated for judgeships. If you ignore all this, what is left is earth-shaking power. I can't deny it.

So, if the religious left wants to make a revival tent out of the Democratic Party, it seems to me that they're at liberty to do so. If, however, they'd like the secular left to come along, they need to show respect for its issues, not all of which revolve around the teaching of evolution in schools. They need to understand that some of their brothers would still help the poor whether Jesus endorsed it or not, and that many of their sisters reached their moral conclusions in spite of, rather than because of, organized religion. They need to understand that secular people have had believers' footprints on their backs since civilization first came out, so many of them are touchy and suspicious. And they need to respect the secular left's desire for public policy to be based on reason, rather than on competing interpretations of Biblical passages. I don't expect this to happen because politicians don't do anything unless necessity forces them to; but if Kazin wants a leftist reunion for sentimental reasons, it's what has to happen.

Toward the end of his essay, Kazin quotes Czeslaw Milosz:

If there is no God,
Not everything is permitted to man.
He is still his brother’s keeper
And he is not permitted to sadden his brother,
By saying that there is no God.

To which I reply (with a poem that proves that I should stick to prose):

I'm sorry I can't validate
Beliefs you say you have
I'm sorry that my doubtful words
Have made you very sad.
But if your faith is strong and true
What harm can my words do to you?
Since I don't resent it when you have to pray,
Stop telling me what I can and can't say.

The Myth of The Moderate Republican

Wondering where John McCain was when Bush said he'd violate McCain's new torture ban whenever he felt like it? Wondering why the only time Arlen Specter actually talks tough against the religious right is during election season? So is Andrew Altschul in his blog post The Myth of the Moderate Republican Check it out.

A Joke

Someone really needs to flay Ann Coulter alive with clam shells, cut off her head, and sell her corpse to the people who make Hygrade hot dogs.

Laugh it up, Ann.

Good News For Planet Hunters

Astronomers caught a brief glimpse of a rocky world of about seven times the Earth's mass orbiting a red star about 21,000 light years from here. Its discovery (made because of an extraordinary coincidence) suggests that smaller, rocky worlds may be more common than giant Jupiter-like planets, giving us better odds of someday spying a planet similar to our own. (LINK)

It's this kind of news that keeps me going after I read things like Jacob Weisberg's column on NSA spying. (LINK). In it, he recognizes that the claims of executive power the Bush administration is making lay the groundwork for dictatorship--albiet a dictatorship that is obliged to face elections occasionally.

Weisberg doesn't suggest this will lead to such things as the jailing of political opponents, and neither do I. Our reasons differ though. Weisberg thinks Congress would stand up to the President if he went that far. I don't. The administration has been going too far for years with scarcely a peep from Congress. The upcoming hearings on the NSA scandal will probably be a joke. No, I think the Bush administration, and its ideological allies, want to preserve the political opposition for the same reason that The Party in Orwell's 1984 preserved Goldsteinism--so that they can have something to drag out and humiliate whenever they need a propaganda boost. Having perfected their engines of slander and insinuation, the Rovists no longer need to do anything so crude as imprison a wayward writer or member of congress. They want instead to make each election a ritual of humiliation, where their candidate (righteous, patriotic, strong, religious, a Reformer with Results) will crush yet another weak, flip-flopping, bible-hating, gay-loving, Osama-backing opponent.

If the Rovists have their way, elections will be to the United States what trials were to the Soviet Union. The outcome will be decided in advance, but everyone loves a show.

It's a good thing scientists are finding other rocky worlds. We just might need to move to one of them.

Winfrey Dumps Frey

"I made a mistake," Winfrey said at the beginning of her show, shown this morning in Chicago, according to a transcript prepared by ShadowTV, a website that monitors broadcasts. "I left the impression that the truth does not matter, and I am deeply sorry about that. But that is not what I believe."

Link

Run I Tells You! Run and Hide!

Bush has a new health care plan.

Why Bush Can Spy On You

According to General Hayden, who manages the wiretapping program, the NSA can spy on you if they have a "reasonable basis to believe" that you are working with Osama. Not probable cause, not evidence, "a reasonable basis to believe".

Given the other things Bush claimed to have a reasonable basis to believe, this is a pretty fucking frightening standard. I suppose this means that if your neighbor is captured by the CIA, taken for a two-year long torture stretch in the People's Democratic Republic of Scrotumrippia, and he screams out your name while he has an elephant's foot rammed up his ass, you can have your phone tapped (pending confirmation of your reservation in the Shiny Happy People's Democratic Republic of Boilyournutsoffwhileyouwatchia).

Don't laugh. This is pretty much how they connected Osama Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein.

I Was Born To Be Wild. My Mom Said I Was.

Last Frey post. Did any of you catch the Larry King Live appearance where Frey goes on King with his mom? There's the badass spirit.

All the Lies That Aren't His Life

I haven't gloated so far about James Frey's misfortune at having been caught in so many lies in his memoir/novel A Million Little Pieces. It is nice to see a guy who was a jerk about how "real" he supposedly was in comparison to Dave Eggers get his comeuppance. I never did buy his yarn, because it seemed like Frey's persona fit so neatly with the story he was trying to tell--a smart-but-alienated suburban student suffers a tragedy that turns him into a badass-druggie before he finds redemption in rehab. The slimy bathroom details of Frey's book aside, how many crime novels, movies-of-the-week, Hallmark Hall of Fame presentations, and ABC afterschool specials fit this general narrative arc? (Take the drugs out of the picture, and it closely matches the plot of I Accuse My Parents, an addlepated good-suburban-kid-gone-bad story that became a popular MST3K episode.) The way I figure it, Frey picked the narrative first, then fashioned a persona to match it.

This may explain why A Million Little Pieces never made it as a literary novel. When the protagonist fits the story too neatly, readers will lose the illusion that the protagonist's decisions (or the untamable, contingent forces of life) drive story events. They'll feel, instead, that the protagonist is merely a part of the author's prefabricated construct--a widget built to the author's specifications. Again, that's fine in genre fiction, which we read more to enjoy the unfolding of the plot than to explore the existence of a person, but it doesn't work for the kind of book Frey aimed to write. Editors, reading the book as a novel, probably found it too pat, too shopworn a tale, to capture their interest. And it's why, as nonfiction, the book raised so many questions. Perceptive readers sensed the fiction in the nonfiction, even if they didn't bother to check up on Frey.

Now, if Frey wanted to do some literary non-fiction, I've got a pitch for him. Why not do a book, film feature, or documentary, in the style of Sherman's March, Adaptation, Out of Sheer Rage, where Frey, a failed fiction writer, looks back in his life and transforms his unremarkable, vanilla suburban experiences into an exciting, page-turning, baditudinous, graphically violent "memoir" that fools Oprah Winfrey and brings him riches the truth could never earn? The theme could be "I can't believe people really think life is really this neat, much less that they'd fill my bank account for confirming their belief."

Check out The Onion's take here.

Gay Panic

Chris Matthews and Don Imus share an "I am so heterosexual" moment (from James Wolcott):

"MATTHEWS (1/18/06): Have you gone to see it yet? I’ve seen everything else but that. I just—

IMUS: No, I haven’t seen it. Why would I want to see that?

MATTHEWS: I don’t know. No opinion on that. I haven’t seen it either, so—

IMUS: So they were—it was out when I was in New Mexico and—it doesn’t resonate with real cowboys who I know.

MATTHEWS: Yeah—

IMUS: But then, maybe there’s stuff going on on the ranch that I don’t know about. Not on my ranch, but you know—

MATTHEWS: Well, the wonderful Michael Savage, who’s on 570 in DC, who shares a station with you at least, he calls it [laughter]—what’s he call it?—he calls it Bare-back Mount-ing. That’s his name for the movie.

IMUS: Of course, Bernard calls it Fudgepack Mountain..."

The transcript doesn't indicate whether buttocks were slapped or potted beef products were consumed during this exchange of manly views.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm getting mighty sick of this straight male pose that says "We can't (do this/go there/watch this) because we're too straight." I hear Brokeback Mountain is a pretty good picture, and I'll probably check it out either in the theaters or on DVD. I won't go there for an erotic charge because unlike Mickey Kaus I grew up and figured out that not all movies with sex in them are meant to be straight-guy stroke material, and because my track record of turning down offers of gay nookie makes my arousal unlikely. (Though not impossible. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal are good looking guys, and I imagine if anyone could induce me to suck a dick, it would be one, or both, of them.)

Besides, I'll never get to be a gay cowboy trying to thread his way through a very straight culture. It might be interesting to consider what that's like. Why not? In my imaginative life I've used books and movies and plays to explore existence as a king, a prince, a princess, a slave, a beggar, a child prodigy, a private detective, a professor, an out-of-work auto mechanic, a boxer, an actor, a Soviet dissident, a victim of the Nazis, a British spy, a singer, a gangster, a starship captain, an alien, an FBI agent, a teacher, a lawyer, a tribal chief, an radio commentator, a serial killer, and a hundred other kinds of things. Why not add a gay cowboy to the list? It may not get me off, but that's not the only way for a story to capture my interest.

Another Memory

A long time ago, I was an actor. And once upon a time, I auditioned for two shows. One audition was for a part in a short film where I played a dimwitted mafia enforcer. The other, which injured me in ways that make me leery of ever returning to the acting trade, was one I arranged just as something else to do while in town. It was held in this little coffee shop/cocktail lounge run by two older women with beehive hairdos. The director was a large, flamboyant black man; the writer was bald and mousy. Their play, they said, was called "In Tandem With Vicki", and my part, they said, was that of her gay friend.

They asked me to camp it up, and I did. But even as I sat there I wondered how the writer, Alan Neff, had the patience to sit and write sixty-some pages of this nonsense. The script contained dialog Ed Wood, Jr. might have written if someone removed his talent for unintentional hilarity. It was attempt at a campy take on the murder of Vicki Morgan, a hustler who'd somehow gotten mixed up with the married Republican millionaire Arthur Bloomingdale. If we take Susan Sontag's definition of camp as failed seriousness, then what do we call failed camp? Even as I read it, I knew I didn't want to do it. I also knew, when I flopped on Neil's futon later that afternoon, that Neff would offer the part to me the first chance he got.

So began four miserable weeks, which ended, mercifully, with them firing me. It wasn't all bad, of course. I learned during the course of the costume fitting that an S&M lifestyle is very hard on the wallet. I learned, by watching a negative example. how important it is to treat actors nicely if you're paying them nothing and holding fourteen-hour rehearsals. Another negative example showed me how dreadfully misguided the maxim "Never give up on your dreams" is. Alan Neff was nothing if not persistent in pursuit of his, as I learned some years later in The Seattle Times:

Up until a few years ago, he directed his creative energies to free-lance movie reviewing. Then one day he checked out of the public library a biography of Vicki Morgan, a 1970s Hollywood call girl. He read the book in a single day and couldn't shake its images from his head.

So, for reasons never much clearer than "I woke up one morning and realized I didn't have a life," he sat down and wrote a play. Lo and behold, he was eventually able to persuade the Northwest Actor's Studio to produce it. He accomplished this largely by badgering the studio's director for months, until she finally relented.

"If I do this, will you leave me alone forever?" was the way the proposition was put to Neff. He accepted. The show went on and Neff still occasionally sweeps the stairs of the Actor's Studio in gratitude.

Yes, Alan Neff never said die, which was too bad really. After I was fired, my agent called me and told me that Neff and the Gang showed up during the intermission of the Northwest Actor's Studio's production of MacBeth and started doing scenes from In Tandem With Vicki on the MacBeth stage. They apparently did this without the knowledge or consent of MacBeth's director. Anger and recrimination followed. My agent told me that I got out at exactly the right time.

She was wrong. I should have gotten out before I got in. But I was my own victim here. I thought I could reach into the pile of offal that was Neff's script and extract a good performance for myself. With similar optimism, Napoleon escaped Elba.

Still, looking back, I wonder what happened to Neff. I've heard nothing from him in the last few years, and a quick google of his name turned up nothing. Maybe his job as a bill collector absorbed more and more of his time and he found his true calling. Maybe he gave up after spending tens of thousands of his own dollars on plays that only drew a handful of ticket buyers per run. He was not a better writer than Ed Wood Jr., but I hope he came, or comes, to a better end. I really do. These are the last lines of Neff's lone story in the Times

The production has a lot of "Hey guys, let's find a barn and put on a play" quality to it. There is not much polish but everybody seemed to enjoy themselves immensely. The cast and crew, who outnumber the audience about two to one, all work for nothing. Still, the production overhead is likely to come in at around $10,000. It is, Neff says, "not a very financially gratifying business."

That, not the quality of the work, is what initially interested me in this story. I wanted to know what might motivate people like Neff to spend so much time and money pursuing such high-risk, low-gain adventures.

What goes on inside their heads? I wondered.

I still don't have a clue, and after seeing the play I'm not entirely sure I want to find out. I do know this, however: We are a very unusual species."

Yeah. That's about the size of it.

Preach on, Brother Al! Testify!

Al Gore gave on hell of a speech yesterday. If you haven't caught it yet, go to CSPAN and check it out. (You'll need Realplayer, and it runs a little over an hour).

Five Little Known Things About Me

Last list for a while, I swear:

1. I, like Majikthise, once tried out for the teen version of Jeopardy!. I actually got pretty far. I passed the test and won all the simulated games, but two things probably killed me. I was kind of a cold fish in the interview (the story of my life right there), and I had, at the time, a case of acne that America really wasn't prepared to see.

2. I have a large collection of teddy bears, and I have invented personalities for each of them. (Hey, you spend most of your free time alone with pages and pages of your own prose and see if you don't invent a few friends.)

3. Someone once successfully dropped my name to Middle Passage author Charles Johnson.

4. In the early months of 1997, I had an affair with a polyamorous married woman. It didn't last for the following reasons: her husband kept pestering me to read his 300-page screenplay, the couple's raging homophobia turned me off, and I balked at having a MMF threesome.

5. Harlan Ellison once called me up and yelled at me because I wrote him to complain about the delay in the publication of "The Knife Man" in Pulphouse. Why did I write him about this? In retrospect, I haven't the foggiest. Ellison wasn't the publisher, and the publisher, Dean Wesley Smith, had a very good reason for delaying publication--his magazine was going broke at the time. I chalk this incident up to adolescent frustrations gone way too far. When Ellison told me I was being an asshole "five different ways", he was underestimating me. Dean was cool about it, though, and the story came out a few months later.

So, I figure this takes care of any future blackmail attempts, unless someone finds out about...no fuck you, I only have to name five things in this list. This blog post is over.

Explain America In Ten Movies

From Lance Mannion

Explain America to someone from somewhere else by giving them 10 movies to watch.

The idea is not to give them a history lesson, so you don't have to start with The New World and end with Jarhead.

What you're trying to do is give them a sense of who we are---your take on our dreams, our attitudes, our idioms, what we think we are, what we are afraid we are, what we really might be.

My list:

1. Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
This movie explores better than any in film history our misplaced faith in technological/systemic solutions to human problems.

2. Goodfellas
An excellent portrayal of not only organized crime in America, but also our drive for status and first-class treatment.

3. Superman: The Movie
We've always wanted to believe a man can fly.

4. Inherit the Wind
Don't mistake it for a documentary on the Scopes trial, but it gets the feelings right.

5. Full Metal Jacket
Because we still want to see exotic lands, meet strange and wonderful people, and kill them.

6. JFK
If you want to understand why Americans are cynical about their government, this is as good a place as any to start. Again, it is not to be confused with a documentary.

7. In The Heat of the Night
A genre film that nonetheless confronts racial issues in an intelligent way.

8. Network
So others can understand what our TV diet is doing to us, and what it might someday do to them.

9. Glengarry Glen Ross
So that other countries can know that this is the way we keep score, buhbie.

10. Pearl Harbor
Not that I'd actually wish this movie on anyone, but it does show how some of us, desperate for cash and certain that the audience is stupid, are willing to turn a terrible national nightmare that plunged our country into four bloody years of war into the backdrop for a badly written love triangle.

I invite LADblog and Bitterspice to play.

Quite A Weekend

The Patriots go down, as all good people wanted them to. The Colts and Steelers fought one hell of a game, and the Seahawks finally win in the post-season.

To me the Colts game illustrated one fallacy that dooms a lot of good teams--the belief that resting the starters once home field is won is a worthwhile idea. The Colts took a quarter and a half to find their rhythm, and it was during this time that the Steelers built their 14-0 lead. Maybe if they'd played their starters the last three weeks, they'd have preserved their timing on offense and come into the game sharp. Did they learn nothing from their blowouts of the Denver Broncos over the last two seasons?

It is true that James Dungy's suicide was a horrible distraction, but that's all the more reason to have the team play through the end of the season. It gives players something else to focus on.

It's too bad, really. I was looking forward to seeing Peyton Manning in a Super Bowl. He's a fun quarterback to watch.

Maybe next year.

The Newest Fashions for 2006

I do love election years, when the new grave threats come out.

You May Be In A Jerry Bruckheimer Movie If...

Well, I'll let McSweeney'sbrief you.

I'll just add one more:

20. Someone is always reminding you that "The clock is ticking" and that various objects are "going to blow."

Jerry Bruckheimer used to work in advertising. If only he'd listened to Bill Hicks.

People Sometimes Say the Dumbest Things

LB Joey Porter on the tactics the Colts used to beat his team a couple of months ago:

"They don't want to just sit there, line up and play football," Porter told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "They want to try to catch you off guard. They don't want to play smash-mouth football, they want to trick you. ... They want to catch you substituting. Know what I mean? They don't want to just call a play, get up there and run a play. They want to make you think. They want it to be a thinking game instead of a football game."

Hmm, a team doing everything they can within the rules to win a game. I can see where that might be upsetting. Porter's opponents should be obligated to do exactly what he expects them to do. Only then is the game fair.

This doesn't quite reach the level of that Jets player who, after losing to the Raiders said, "We didn't lose, we just ran out of time." It's still pretty dumb.

The Alito Hearings

The hearings are a kind of banality-of-evil-fest, wherein a dull technocrat to whom people (especially those who are poor, black, and female) are simply gum stuck in the gears of an otherwise perfect legal engine, sits in front of a tribunal and engages in sophistic sparring matches with Senators (ones where the Senators do most of the talking). These are tiresome ceremonies. Alito's a bad guy, and will probably be a very bad justice, but there's nothing to be done. He'll be on the court. The best that can be done is to educate the public on just how bad he'll be; but, if they don't know, they'll find out soon enough.


Side note: I didn't catch the crying jag that Alito's wife had, and I couldn't care less that she had it. There's her poor husband, who has to sit through, at most, two more days of futile questioning before the Republicans hand him a lifetime job. I'll save my pity for people with actual problems.

Not Our Spokesman

The fundamentalists in this country have taken to claiming that Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who say a lot of batshit crazy things, aren't their spokesmen. Well, let's see, there's Jack Van Impe, who believes that the aliens in UFOs are fallen angels and that the Illuminati have been engaged in a conspiracy to usher in the reign of the antichrist. Or there's Ann Coulter's pal Rod Parsley, who's tells his worshippers to burn their bills and send the money to him to get out of debt.
Or there's this guy that Majikthise caught up with:

"Dinosaurs were lizards. Lizards never stop growing. That's why old alligators and crocodiles can grow to 25 feet or more. If they lived longer, they would grow even bigger. Before the flood, life lasted longer. Men lived to be 400 to 900 years old. I am sure you don't wish to embrace that thought, but if you embrace God, you embrace His word, and He does not lie. The climate changed after the flood. The earth itself burst open and poured forth floodwaters. The rift probably split the continents asunder, created the mountains, and even tilted the earth off an even 0-degree axis to a 23-degree angle to its orbit. Seasons were born, and winter is hostile to lizards. Thus the dinosaurs died out." MeInKC

So if the fundies don't want Roberston or Falwell as their spokesmen, that's okay with me. There's a sumptuous banquet of batshit crazy to pick from in their spiritual neighborhood.

Translating the Delay Departure in Star Wars Terms

Headline (AP) Coruscant: DARTH MAUL is out as second in command of the Lords of the Sith.

Potential successors include Darth Tyrannus and--after a recent party switch--Darth Vader. A closed-session lightsaber duel between these two Dark Lords will decide the matter, and the Empire waits to unite behind the victor. Each stands ready to deploy Force Lightning against all who "hate freedom".

You can check out the real world equivalent here. Finding out who wins this battle is kind of like finding out whether you're going to be impaled or disemboweled.

Damn

It looks like the Patriots are going to win going away. (I've stopped watching.) Could someone please destroy these bastards?

Yaweh Soprano Makes Another Hit

From JTA--Global News Service of the Jewish People

The Rev. Pat Robertson said Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is being punished by God for dividing the Land of Israel. Robertson, speaking on the “700 Club” on Thursday, suggested Sharon, who is currently in an induced coma, and former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated by an Israeli extremist in 1995, were being treated with enmity by God for dividing Israel. “He was dividing God’s land,” Robertson said. “And I would say, Woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the E.U., the United Nations or the United States of America. God says, This land belongs to me. You better leave it alone.”

So the manifestation of God's punishment is to give a heavy man in his late seventies a stroke? I guess that's as logical as saying God broke George Burns's hip when He didn't think Burns was funny anymore. First intelligent design and now intellegent gerontology. New sciences spring from the fecund mind of Pat Robertson.

Realignments

Josh Marshall and Max Sawicky discuss the parallels between the congressional elections of 1974 and 2006 here. And for those of us on the left side of the ledger these parallels won't blow a lot of sunshine up our skirts:

But it does at least suggest one point worth considering: the other side's scandals can reshuffle the political cards temporarily. But it probably won't be for that long if the scandals aren't intrinsically connected to the bases of the afflicted party's power or if their fall-out doesn't catalyze a some deeper political and ideological reconfiguration in the country. Nixon's dirty-tricksterism wasn't at the heart of the rise of the American right in the late 20th century. So it continued on without him.

I'm not convinced that the Democrats will do nearly as well in 2006 as they did in 1974. The Right has learned a lot since then, and while none of it has been in the areas of good government that betters people's lives, they've learned better how to contain scandals. They have a well set up media apparatus that Nixon didn't have during Watergate, and they know how to get their people on television to muddy things up just enough so that their boy can get away more or less clean. Further, unlike 1974, we don't have a majority in either house that can do some genuine investigating. Even if we took back the House or Senate this year, the shredders will have been given a year (two if you count the year The New York Times sat on the story) to run. Also, Nixon never had the advantage of a cluck like Joseph Lieberman, who'll throw downfield blocks for Bush by running to every network to caution us about the national security implications of trashing the President. (Isn't bipartisanship sweet?)

And ultimately, even if Bush were to go down, it doesn't mean much unless he brings Dick Cheney, Speaker Dennis Hastert, and Senator Ted Stevens with him. As long as the rich get their money and the fanatics get their judges, they don't care who's delivering the goods. Tear down Bush, they'll put up someone else just like him--another plainspoken guy from the sticks who's honest as the tress are tall and who cares, really truly madly deeply cares, about the poor. He'll call himself a "different kind of Republican", and all his commercials will be in soft focus. And you and I, knowing what unctuous crap is being mass dumped on our minds, will shake our heads, thinking "This can't work again. No way is this going to work again."

It'll work again.

As George Carlin once said "I gave up hope and it worked out fine."

Happy Fucking New Year

Bitterspice and I turned the calendar over while watching a DVD of Bill Hicks's HBO specials. Is there a better way to start a year off? I don't think so. If anything, it's probably all downhill from here.

Old Acquaintences

While farting around my place today I came across an old videotape containing footage of me, Larry Dahlke, and Tim Riley fooling around for the camera in my dorm room either before or after graduation. (I don't remember which). High on pizza grease and Coca-Cola, we came up with this interview where Arthur Helluvit (Larry), questions Maximillian Moucynski (Me).

My hair was so black then.

Want To Be Depressed?

The Kurds are looking to overrun Kirkuk in anticipation of ethnic civil war in Iraq. Both they and the Shiites have, apparently, been using America's training and equipping of Iraqi army to prepare their own militias for the coming battle:

Firas Ahmed, the assistant to the head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party office in Mosul, invited a Knight Ridder reporter to inspect the local Peshmerga brigade, motioning to a compound across the street.

It housed the headquarters of the 4th Brigade of the Iraqi army's 2nd Division.
"We cannot openly say they are Peshmerga," Ahmed said. "We will take you to see the Peshmerga, but they will be wearing Iraqi army uniforms."

Kirkuk is a a majority Kurdish town, but only barely. There are large Arab and Turkmen populations there. The threat is that in a coming war they will be forced out of the city at gunpoint, or murdered where they stand.

Our tax dollars at work.

What Made My Dryer Squeak

I've noticed that a few people who've come here have been looking for information on what is making their dryers squeak. From what I understand, a couple of things can cause this. Either there's something wrong with the dryer's bearings (in my dryer's case, a screw was missing from one of the bearings and the screw in another bearing had come loose), or the drive belt is worn. It's a cheap, simple fix either way. The Sears guy who came to fix my dryer finished in five minutes and didn't bother to charge me.

Hope that helps.

An Expression That Needs To Go

Yes, Virginia [insert facts here].

I've come to hate this expression for two reasons. It reeks of presumed superiority, placing the speaker among those who presumably know what the unwashed, stupid masses don't. I may be a sneering elitist, but the arrogance of the expression makes my back teeth itch.

And when did Virginia get mixed up in this? Is Virginia a notable home of the unaware? The University of Virginia is a world renowned school founded by Thomas Jefferson. It serves as headquarters to one of the premier political science schools in the U.S., an indication that a good many people in Virginia are conscious of trends in the outside world. Virginia houses many of the more conservative media types and politicos who labor in D.C. They can be silly and ignorant, but their ignorance is more a function of their self-serving omissions of unflattering or inconvenient truths than it is of abject idiocy. Virginia native Jerry Falwell may be a bigot and a twit, but he's a well-educated bigot and twit. If it's educational dead zones you're after, you need to go farther south.

When confronted with phrases like "Yes, Virginia", I'm reminded of William Strunk's advice on the use of an emptier phrase: "The fact that". Yes, Virginia, those who believe they are possessed of truths or facts should simply state them, without advance billing. Otherwise, the writer looks like he's just dressing up his obvious points with flourishes meant to make him look cleverer than he is.

UPDATE: Well, I fucked up. I had no idea that Virginia referred to a little girl whose father wrote the New York Sun requesting an article that would reassure his daughter that Santa Claus existed. I apologize for the error. Even so, the phrase needs to go because it is doubly condescending to speak to adult readers as if they were eight-year olds.

Moonraker Gains Credibility

Jeff Bezos is involved in secretive space project.

Bezos has been the most tight-lipped of all the rocketeers, revealing little about the technology he's exploring. Blue Origin's bare-bones Web site offers scant information, and the company isn't listed in phone books.

Blue Origin spokesman Bruce Hicks said officials don't want to discuss the project. "They're not at that stage yet," he said. "The time will come."

That's right, 007. And when the time comes, it will be too late.

Natural Selection In the Gym

This New York Times story describes the people who've gone in for Cross-fit, a new and potentially lethal exercise form:

WHILE many gymgoers complain that they might not survive a tough workout, Brian Anderson can speak from experience. For his first CrossFit session, he swung a 44-pound steel ball with a handle over his head and between his legs. The aim was to do 50 quick repetitions, rest and repeat. After 30 minutes, Mr. Anderson, a 38-year-old member of the special weapons and tactics team in the sheriff's office in Tacoma, Wash., left the gym with his muscles sapped and back pain so excruciating that he had to lie in the driveway to collect himself.

That night he went to the emergency room, where doctors told him he had rhabdomyolysis, which is caused when muscle fiber breaks down and is released into the bloodstream, poisoning the kidneys. He spent six days in intensive care.

Yet six months later Mr. Anderson, a former Army Ranger, was back in the gym, performing the very exercises that nearly killed him. "I see pushing my body to the point where the muscles destroy themselves as a huge benefit of CrossFit," he said.

I'm more of a pilates/walking/bus-chasing guy, but I do understand the appeal. There's is a certain sexual thrill to be derived in abusing one's body nearly to the point of death. Masochism isn't confined to the vanilla leather play of overpaid, unimaginative, doughy suburbanites. Those people need to retain a measure of control. The possibility of actual death would frighten them right out of their hard-ons. Guys like Mr. Anderson however (what a wonderfully bland name), are probably a lot like the protagonists in J.G. Ballard's Crash who find sexual satisfaction in being in car accidents. Unlike the characters in Ballard's book, Mr. Anderson is engaged in an ostensibly healthy and normal thing: an exercise program. This makes his fetish something he can brag about to his friends. To his buddies he can say, "See how close to death I came?" To himself he can say "I came so close to death I came."

This is probably why Greg Glassman, who dreamed up Cross-fit, is so comfortable about describing his regimen's risks. To his potential clients, they're the selling point. When the sports doctor says in the article that "There's no way inexperienced people doing this are not going to hurt themselves," a small group of readers, nipples hardening, will shout "Finally, a reason to go to the gym!"

How do I judge this? I don't, except to say that any scheme for universal health coverage should make these people pay triple. Aside from that, this really is just natural selection at work. If there were more people like Mr. Anderson, there'd be fewer people like Mr. Anderson.

Hardcore Barry on Bill Action

Merry Solstice,' Bill

At a time when the nation found itself distracted by frivolities such as an unjust and illegal war, torture scandals, congressional scandals, statewide scandals, energy prices plunging an icy dagger into the hearts of American families, the continued calamitous ramifications of Katrina, and a White House overrun by felons and even traitors, leave it to Bill O'Reilly to bring the focus back to an issue we've all been ducking for far too long: holiday salutations. And who better than O'Reilly to appoint himself as Jesus' personal savior? Even if the FOX News host has things he'd much rather be doing with a marital aid, his anus, his leprechaunic Irish penis, a speaker phone, a loofa, some falafel, and an unwilling employee, he found the time to speak up for the vast majority of Americans: the oft-overlooked Christians. Christians who had become much too lax with department-store employees' godless use of phrases such as "Happy Holidays."

O'Reilly saw through this Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, pagan, Wicca, agnostic, atheist plot and spearheaded a drive to forcibly put the phrase "Merry Christmas" back in the mouths of those who during the rest of the year sincerely urge us to "have a good one."

By way of thanks, I'd like to send along this special holiday greeting to Mr. O'Reilly: Go fuck yourself ... you have the technology.

--Barry Crimmins

The Path Al Davis May Take

According to press reports, the Raiders's players are going to petition Al Davis to allow Norv Turner and the coaching staff to keep their jobs. The defensive players in particular feel that their unit has improved dramatically in comparison to last year's model, and they believe in the system. While this view has a lot going for it, I doubt it's enough to save Turner from the axe that will most surely fall on him. The offense's failures, despite the acquisitions of Randy Moss and Lamont Jordan, plus Turner's poor handling of the quarterback situation, make it hard to see how Turner can keep his job.

Defensive coordinator Rob Ryan is another story.

If Davis fires Turner, as everyone expects, it would be hard for him to keep Rob Ryan as defensive coordinator. New head coaches typically prefer to bring in their own staffs, and many candidates would be reluctant to take a head coaching job if they had to accept the incumbent defensive coordinator as a condition of employment. If Davis listens to his defensive players, who like Ryan's defensive system, and Davis has difficulty finding an immediate replacement that would let Ryan stay, there is a way to fire Turner while keeping the defense intact: promote Rob Ryan to head coach.

While Davis prefers offensive-minded head coaches (Flores, Shell, Gruden), there is precedent in Raider history for Davis's promoting a defensive coach. The last time it happened was in 1969 when John Madden, the Raiders's linebacking coach, rose to replace Head Coach Johnny Rauch. And Rob Ryan, a firey guy who looks like he spent the last few years living in the woods, not only has the respect and loyalty of his players, but he's also the only Raiders coach in the last three seasons who's actually presided over an improving squad. Seeing as he managed to develop that defense in spite of a depleted secondary and a linebacking corps that lacks established playmakers, Rob Ryan looks at least as impressive as any of the other coordinators Davis would be likely to interview. Couple Ryan with a good offensive coordinator and some good things might happen.

I'm not saying it will go down this way, but this scenario would allow Davis to please both his defensive players and the ticket holders who (quite reasonably) want to see both Collins and Turner pay for their blunders.

The Bush Speech

I caught a portion of it while flipping channels. I usually don't watch Bush on TV, because if I'm going to be lied to, I'd rather read the lies in print than watch them on C-Span. It's a time saver. Anyway, at one point Bush took time out to talk to me, saying that, now that we're in Iraq, the only options are victory and defeat, implying that I should just forget about how we got into the war and just go with him on his course without further complaint.

(I thought it was a laugh when Bush said he'd "heard" his opponents on the war. Sure he did. His wiretappers are pros.)

Okay, now I'm speaking to the President who B.S.'d us into a war:

The victory versus defeat choice is a false one. Very few wars result in total victory or total defeat. Most of the time they settle down to a political arrangement that allows hostilities to cease and both sides, who may still think of each other as absolute evil, to find more productive uses for their time. The task in Iraq is to identify the best realistic outcome we can envision, and determine what policies are most likely to move us toward that outcome. We have to decide whether the presence of our troops helps or hurts Iraq's stability. (I'd say it does much more harm than good to have them there now. The longer they stay, the less the Iraqi people will believe that the governments they've been voting for will fulfill their hopes for national dignity and sovereignty. If the troops are no longer useful in the job of bringing stability to Iraq, calling for their withdrawl is not defeatism; it's intelligence.

As for his wish for us to stop talking about how he got us into the war, Bush is conveniently forgetting something. His pre-war statements, to the American people and to the world, have everything to do with why we're finding it so hard to get international help into Iraq and why so many of our allies around the world hold us in so much contempt. Bush's lack of credibility on Iraq, and on terrorism in general, makes it harder for the U.S. in all phases of foreign policy. Fewer nations trust our judgement, fewer world leaders want to be seen with us, and fewer leaders take us at our word. And why should they? I don't know if Bush has figured this out yet, but crediblity is not something that comes with being an American; credibility comes from a diciplined, daily commitment to making sense.

I'm numbed to it now, but it used to amaze me how conservatives could be so upset with Bill Clinton's lies about oval office fellatio, while they're so casual about the torrent of untruths that spill out of Bush's mouth whenever he approaches a microphone. Which lies have been, in the end, more damaging to American policy and objectives around the world?

If we're ever going to recover the trust of the world, we have to begin by demanding that the truth about our decision to invade Iraq come out. Such an accounting will be very painful. It's never fun to admit you've been conned. (Don't worry. I won't say "I told you so" too loud.) Bush's lies couldn't have advanced so far if they hadn't played on the hopes and ideals of a great many people. But the sooner we start telling ourselves the truth, the sooner the rest of the world will regain their comfort with us as a great power. For Bush to lie to us is a crime and an insult; for us to lie to ourselves is an invitation to disaster.

And havent' we sent out enough of those?

John Spencer Died

He's probably best known for playing Leo on The West Wing but I've been following him since he shared screen time with Michael Madsen in the opening sequence of War Games. 58 is far too young to go.

Bush and McCain Come Together On Torture

And thus do these two GOP Giants join hands and stride boldly forward into the mid-19th century. Zippedy-dooh-dah! An agreement sure to endure until Bush's minions at the justice department find a way around it, or until the Dick Cheney discovers a new super-secret-double-dog method of shipping prisoners to Uzbeckistan for their boilings and beatings.

I Don't Blame You a Bit, Tui

Norv Turner's switch back to Kerry Collins has Tuiasosopo pissed off. I don't blame him. Here are Tui's stats for his first start:

14-26-124 1 TD, 2 INTs, 2 Fumbles Lost

Looks pretty bad, but check out Kerry Collins's first full start as a Raider (Week 4, 2004, versus the Texans):

21-38-244 0 TD, 3 INTs, 1 Fumble Lost

Or, for other comparisons, check out Drew Brees's first game:

15-27-221 1 TD, 0 INTs, 2 Fumbles Lost

Or Peyton Manning:

21-37-302 1 TD, 3 INTs

Or Donovan McNabb:

8-20-68 0 TD, 1 INT

Or Matt Hasselbeck:

20-34-178 0 TD, 2 INT

Even my man Rich Gannon, in his first Raider start:

16-31-227 0 TDs, 1 INT

My point? That with rare exceptions elite quarterbacks have a period where they look bad before they start looking good. Sometimes they find (or rediscover) their rhythm in a week or two. Some take half a season or longer. Many of them, like Hasselbeck, have to endure the doubts of those who think the plodding, vanilla veteran behind them in the depth chart is in fact superior. Still, if they have a coach sees potential in them and is enough of a leader to keep his team together through the growing pains, they can end up where the Seattle Seahawks have ended up. If, however, his coach is a jackass, a quarterback like Tui has to wait for an opportunity to grow, usually on another team.

Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions about Tui though. Some quarterbacks start mediocre and stay there. I've seen it. This year, boy have I seen it. Still, I guess Norv Turner figures it this way--why go with someone who might be lousy when we can go with someone we know is lousy.

Richard Pryor's Dead

I know he'd been suffering for a long time, but it still sucks.

Something I Like

As those who read this blog regularly know very well, I hate a lot. I try to hate with style and with wit, but I really do despise a lot of people and things. So I thought I'd break the pattern by writing about something I actually like.

I just watched my DVD of Mystic River, and it knocked me out all over again. Very few filmmakers handle old wounds as well as Clint Eastwood does, and the performances he got from Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, and Kevin Bacon transported me to wonderful, terrible places. Brian Hegeland's script built a Boston neighborhood that felt lived-in, and successfully imported the feeling of density that the Lehane novel had. Very few adaptations can pull that off. Most movies dodge complexity; Mystic River seeks it out, finds it, and invites you to linger over it.

Thanks, Clint.

Now This Is Just Pretty Fucked Up

First she helps Bush into the White House, and in 2001 she commissioned a study of supernatural wateras a citrus tree protectant.

Next up: Harris commissions the Skywalker ranch to offer Jedi training to U.S. troops in Iraq.

We now return you to the reality-based community.

Merry Daily Show

All this Bill O'Reilly shit about Christmas would be a lot harder to take if Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert weren't around to mercilessly mock him. But in a way I have to give it up to our most famous falafel consumer. He's a man with his finger firmly on the railway track on which America travels. He saw that with all the problems in America--the War, the deficit, the willfully ignorant sociopath who somehow gets to run stuff--that what America really needs to pull itself together is a bullshit, fake-ass problem which can be blamed on invisible enemies that only Bill O'Reilly can see. And, like any helpful bus station lunatic, O'Reilly is delighted to point wildly at those enemies and call them by their proper names.

I'm not saying, by the way, that Bill O'Reilly is a common bus station lunatic. Can a bus station lunatic tie a full windsor knot? He may try, but the demon monkeys will always thwart him.

So, if you're out there, Bill, here's a message from me to you, simulcast directly into your skull via secret satellites of the great secular conspiracy (which meets every Saturday in the Factoria Mall Applebees at 7pm): Happy fucking Holidays, you diseased weeping pustule.

UPDATE: You can check out Jon Stewart's beatdown of O'Reilly here

Miss America Conservatives

Mark Schmitt gets credit for the term, which I think is a wonderful way to describe many "maverick" conservatives--including John McCain:

Each of the so-called moderate Republicans seems to have a "platform" issue on which they break with the party, much like a Miss America contestant who chooses an issue that makes her seem thoughtful and altruistic, but as soon as the platform segment is over, she resumes her place in a degrading spectacle.

You can read more about how he developed this idea here. It seems like one that's as applicable to McCain on torture as it is to Gordon Smith on Medicaid, or Dominici on Mental Health Coverage. While it's certainly a good thing that McCain wants to pile on the administration concerning its torture policies now, why didn't he push his anti-torture legislation in the summer of 2004, when it our policies of extraordinary rendition and the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib were already major scandals costing us credibility around the world? Reason, it wouldn't messed up McCain's future political prospects in the Bush's Republican party. Instead of sticking up not just for his principles but for his own experience of torture at the hands of the V.C., McCain aggressively campaigned for Bush's re-election. Only now does McCain want us to know that, even though he's a Republican, he's not in favor of torture.

What does he want? A cookie? Republicans aren't supposed to favor torture. If McCain had said that last sentence to Bush a year ago, when it might have mattered, I'd have been impressed. Now, it just reads like another Republican politician trying to look moderate and thoughtful in comparison with the administration. Oh, to be more thoughtful and moderate than G.W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Who can you brag to about that?

A Wish Come True

AP reports that Norv Turner is leaning toward starting Tui over Collins this week. And Beethoven's 9th, 4th movement, begins.

Colts 35; Titans 3

I didn't get to see this game, and have very little to say about it actually. I just wanted to write about a game where a team I like actually won, where I look at the starting quarterback and can understand why he's starting, where, well you get the idea. Colts win again!

Congress Springs Into Action

To find out if the BCS College Bowl system is flawed. Next up, a hearing on whether the Knave of Hearts, who stole the tarts, acted alone.

Gay Marriage Ruled Constitutional In South Africa

If you'd told me twenty years ago that one day soon South Africa would be ahead of the U.S. in any aspect of human rights, I'd have said you were crazy.

We torture; they permit gay marriage. Funny how the world turns out, eh?

And Someone Wins Bad Sex In Unclear Headline Prize

Coren Wins Bad Sex in Fiction Prize

For a second there I pictured poor Coren winning a night in a hotel room with my lunchlady from West Elementary School in Tooele. (And she was wearing leather and carrying both a whip and a garden hose.) Then I remembered it was that time of the year again. This year's "winner" of the Bad Sex in Fiction Prize is Giles Coren, the author of Winkler:

And he came hard in her mouth and his dick jumped around and rattled on her teeth and he blacked out and she took his dick out of her mouth and lifted herself from his face and whipped the pillow away and he gasped and glugged at the air, and he came again so hard that his dick wrenched out of her hand and a shot of it hit him straight in the eye and stung like nothing he'd ever had in there, and he yelled with the pain, but the yell could have been anything, and as she grabbed at his dick, which was leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath, she scratched his back deeply with the nails of both hands and he shot three more times, in thick stripes on her chest. Like Zorro.

That's one athletic dick, but I can't quite picture how it leaps around "like a shower dropped in an empty bath". (Showers leap? Shower heads stay still, unless they're broken; and the water doesn't leap, it falls. He did say the shower "dropped" in the empty bath, but dropping is a different motion from leaping, and since when were showers characterized by their tendency to drop? Sorry, I'm spending way too much time in this simile.) Still, the protagonist did manage to get enough control over his member to make the sign of the Z on her chest.

Coren's prose reads like the porn spam I sometimes get. I'm amazed that this passage managed to get past an agent, a battery of editors, and a publisher. (Unless, of course, the effect Coren was going for required him to write like a porn e-mail spammer.) Having read this, I'd say that Coren deserves to win a night with my lunchlady in an hourly-rate hotel room. We'll see if he, too, can make the sign of the Z.

Read all the other finalists here. Some pretty famous names are here, an indication of just how easy it is to foul up a sex scene. I guess Milan Kundera was on to something when he said that there is a certain--hard to take--comedy in sexuality. With all that rattling and wrenching, it's hard to take indeed.

It's The End of Toronto As We Know It

No, this is not a post about the no-confidence vote that dissolved the Canadian parliament, but rather a link to Grady Hendrix's very funny take on Kirk Cameron's el-supremo-cheapo Left Behind movies. Apparently, if you spend $1.65 (Canadian), Toronto can stand in for "New York, Chicago, and Israel. Also, Washington, D.C. And Egypt. London, too."

I almost want to watch the movies now, just to see if they made the same mistakes the Glitter crew made when they included shots of the CN Tower in their "New York" backgrounds. I'll bet when they pan across the Western Wall or some Cairo neighborhood, you can see the Sky Dome, or pay phones with little maple leafs on them.

On a dark, sticky, stygian level, it pleases me to know that while Jerry Bruckheimer makes high priced crap like National Treasure (a movie that must be seen to be disbelieved), Kirk Cameron is up in Canada making even crappier movies for less money. Economic efficiency, that's what NAFTA was all about.

Vaguely Discontented

I don't often blog about my mood, not directly anyway. I think it's pretty clear from the tone of the entries that it varies from psychotic anger to bemused detachment. Still, at the moment I just feel disturbed--querulous, carping, crabby, and generally unkind--but I'm not quite sure what's getting on my nerves. Things in general are going reasonably well--not perfectly, but not unusually imperfectly. The new novella is reading better than I thought it would, the car's okay, and my digestive system is in order. I have to get my dryer fixed, which will cost some money, but that's far less annoying than the squeaking noise that my dryer is making right now. The Raiders are playing poorly, but that's not news either. Indeed, I've already started rooting for the Colts and Bucs, just so I can keep my head in the season.

I'll deal with it. I've got a book to revise and a play to write. I probably haven't been working hard enough. Yeah, that's probably it. When I don't push myself at work I start driving myself crazy. It's shoulder to the wheel time again.

Yet Another Part of the Bush Act I'm Tired Of

Headline from AP: Bush Tones Down Attack on Iraq War Critics

We should be used to this pattern by now:

1. Bush attacks somebody's patriotism.

2. Bush's surrogates and lackeys spend a week pressing the attack, writing op-eds, making inflammatory speeches in Congress, sniping on the Sunday Chat Shows, airing ads morphing Democrats into Osama Bin Laden, and the like.

3. Bush says he never attacks anyone's patriotism and welcomes open debate.

It has a certain lather-rinse-repeat quality to it, doesn't it?

Raiders 16; Indigenous Persons 13

The Raider defense comes through to seal the game, through Jerry Porter contributes a lot with 140+ yards receiving and a touchdown.

Errand Completed

I handed in my application for the Jack Straw Writer-In-Residence program. It took an age to compile everything, but it'll be worth it if I can get some of my material on the radio. They don't pay, so I think I have a pretty good shot.

Gee, I Always Thought of Myself As A Fairly Friendly Atheist

I got this from Majikthise, who got it from someone else:

Hardhat

You are an atheist, a rationalist, a believer in the triumph of science and of reason over libido. You can’t stand mumbo jumbo, ritual, spiritual nonsense of any kind, and you refuse to allow for these longings in others.


Astrologers, Scientologists and new–age crystal ball creeps are no different in your view from priests, rabbis and imams. They’re all just weak–minded pilgrims on the road to easy answers. Nature as revealed by science is awesome enough for you, but it’s a nature that needs curbing and taming by us on our evolutionary journey to perfection.


Your heros are Einstein, Darwin, Marx and — these days — Gould, Blakemore, Watson, Crick and Rosalind Franklin. Could you be hiding a little behind those absolutist views, worried that, if you let in a few doubts and contradictory ideas, the whole edifice might crumble? Loosen up a bit and try to enjoy the amazing variety of human belief systems. Don’t worry — it’s unlikely you’ll end up chanting your days away in some distant mountain cult.

What kind of humanist are you? Click here to find out.

My desire for a tidy garden--actually, I don't even own a houseplant because they're too much effort--means I think we're on an evolutionary journey to perfection? I don't think that. Evolution has nothing to do with perfection. It has everything to do with effective breeding and food gathering. Take the Bush family. They suck, both as individuals and as a community, but they breed prodigiously and have plenty of resources. Morally, they seem to be worsening with successive generations, but unless that becomes a factor in sexual selection, it won't stop them.

As for the other charge, I don't think that my impatience with those people in the 60s who imagined they could lift the Pentagon with their minds makes me guilty of absolutism. When it comes to the woo-woo stuff I have an open mind, just not one so open that my brains fall out.

Nice quiz.

I Only Said that Because I Wanted Them To Hire Me

That's what Alito told Diane Feinstein when she questioned him about his comments on Roe v. Wade in 1985. Fair enough, I guess, but isn't Alito now seeking another job, one with lifetime tenure and tons of perks? As Kevin Drum points out, the position he takes on Roe in the letter is not "Roe vs. Wade bothers me because I abhor abortion" but that "the constitution does not protect the right to an abortion." That's a statement of his view not just of abortion, but of the legitimacy of law that allows it. Should Senators not ask whether Alito's positions on the law change when the job he's seeking changes? What happens when he gets on the Supreme Court and no longer has to worry about unemployment?

A New Goof

Because the movie got me when I was a youngster, I take special pleasure in beating up Damien Omen II. But whoever runs Cold Fusion found a plot hole that, damn it all, didn't occur to me:

Unfortunately, the forces of EE-vil don't want Brugenhagen's next set of sacred daggers to make into Thorn's hands (is there a Blessed Vending Machine dispensing these things by the gross somewhere in the Holy Land?), and causes a cave-in, burying the two men for a good many years.

Yeah! The dinks who made the film forgot that the seven daggers--supposedly the only weapons in the world that can kill Damien--were with Robert Thorn in England. How did that bearded dude in Israel manage to get them back so fast, particularly when, in the opening scene, he's only just found out what happened to Gregory Peck? How the hell did I miss that?

Denver 31; Oakland 17

Three interceptions, with one returned for a touchdown. Can we please bench Kerry Collins now?

Good One

I'm not usually an avid reader of poetry reviews, but a good joke is a good joke:

The most obvious problem with "Good Poems for Hard Times" is that it proposes that "the meaning of poetry is to give courage." That is not the meaning of poetry; that is the meaning of Scotch.

Nice. Read the rest of the review if you want to learn how Garrison Keillor incited literary controversy.

Bush Accuses Iraq War Critics of Undercutting America's Troops

They say you're an alcoholic when you repeat yourself. They say you're an alcoholic when you repeat yourself. They say you're an alcoholic when you...oh damn it, damn it, goddamn it!

No T.O.

Because someone who wanted to know about Al Davis acuqiring Terrell Owens landed here, I'll throw in my opinion on the matter: not a chance.

The Raiders have taken on controversial characters in the past, and certainly some have imagined a Moss-Owens tandem and drooled. Still, the Raiders won't do it for these reasons:

1) They still have a defense to rebuild. The Raiders will need to go hunting for linebackers next offseason. The defensive line has come together and developed an identity, and the secondary has a lot of upside to it. But we need some playmakers (other than Morrison and Clark) at LB, or the Raiders will be stuck in the big nickel for the rest of their lives.

2) They have a crew of talented receivers to complement Moss already. They only this year gave Jerry Porter a very rich long term deal. Terrell Owens might be an upgrade over Porter, but is he enough of one to put up with all the nonsense he brings with him? I doubt it.

3) At 3-5, the Raiders are in a fragile psychological state. Another couple of losses and the coaches may have a hard time keeping the team together as it is. Why bring in Owens and blow everything up?

4) Owens's age. He's already in his thirties, and the Raiders can't expect to get too many more good years out of him. While that hasn't stopped Oakland before, it might here, because they're trying to develop so many talented younger players at the position.

5) Drew Rosenhaus. The Raiders have enough problems with Poston (Charles Woodson's agent). Why should Davis, Trask, and Lombardi make their lives harder still by taking on not only Owens but his miserable representative?

6) The Salary Cap: The Raiders don't have the revenue to pay Owens the guaranteed money that he would almost certainly demand, nor can they afford the hit against the cap they'd take for him.

There are teams I can see taking a flyer on Owens--the Jets, Baltimore, Chicago, Miami, Atlanta, or Tampa Bay. But the Raiders don't really need him, can't really afford him, and probably don't want him.

Now watch them trade for him and make me look like a dork. It's happened before.

Is It Just Assassins This Time, Pat, Or Do They Get A Hurricane Too?

Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius. --Abbot Arnold Amaury, attributed.

From Majikthise:


Pat Robertson warned the citizens of Dover that they'd better not expect help from God after letting him down on the whole intelligent design thing.

You can watch the video of it. Well, maybe you can. I couldn't get it to work. It would be amusing to think that this is just the wind that blows from an isolated, increasingly crazy man, but too many people spend too much money to keep him on the air, and too many people in halls of right wing power are either too frightened or too mesmerized by him (actually, it's not an either-or choice. It could be, and probably is, both) for me to think of this as anything other than horrifically dangerous. For a man as quick to excoriate Hollywood films for the potential social effects of their violence and carnality, Robertson is awfully free with language that could drive his more unbalanced suppliants to kill their neighbors.

Week after week Robertson sits on the set of the 700 Club, sounding like Barney Fife getting an anal probe, calling down the wrath of God and the faithful on anyone who dares to ask an impertinent question or defy the Book of Leviticus. Surely if the God of Robertson is willing to wipe out half the population of Florida because Disney gives the partners of gay employees spousal benefits, surely that same God could spare a sincere believer a heretic of his own to kill?

Roberston would be interested to know who else has subscribed to this brand of theology:


LECKTOR
When you were so depressed after
you shot Mr. Garrett Jacob Hobbs to
death, it wasn't the act that got
you down. Didn't you really feel
so bad because killing him felt so
good?
(ironic)
And why shouldn't it feel good?! It
must feel good to God. God does it
all the time!

Graham laughs. Then he starts to listen closely. There is
something here for him:

GRAHAM
I don't believe in God.

LECKTOR
You should, Will. God's terrific!
(beat)
He dropped a church roof on thirty-
four of His worshippers in Texas last
Wednesday night. Just as they were
grovelling to Him and singing a hymn.
Don't you think that felt good?
(beat)
He wouldn't begrudge you two measly
murders.

GRAHAM
Why does it feel good?

LECKTOR
It feels good because: if you do as
God does, enough times, you become
as God is: powerful...

Will Graham thinks about this.

LECKTOR
(fading)
God's a champ! He got a hundred and
sixty Philippines in one plane crash
two months ago... Remember the big
earthquake in Italy last spring...?

--Michael Mann Manhunter

I needn't have gone to fiction for my example. Many of Robertson's theological ancestors have subscribed to the God-as-righteous-serial-killer thesis. The blood stains everyone from St. Jerome to Luther to Torquemada to Jim Jones to Charles Manson. Lector explains the appeal of such a God most straightforwardly, though. It's a God that speaks to our darkest impulses and cruelest tendencies. It's a God that would endorse the use of the rack, the pear, the chair, or the wheel. Use these, the God would say, and become an instrument of My holy will. This holds great appeal to those so confused, damaged, or frustrated by the modern world that their ultimate hope is for their tormentors--the gay, the secular, the liberal, the feminist--to suffer God's merciful, yet sadistic and bloody, vengeance. And if they can pitch in and help, they can not only feel closer to God, they can become as He is.

It must feel so wonderful to be Pat Robertson. Every time a gay person drowns in a flood, Robertson knows that his belief allows him to share in the glorious power that broke the levy or eroded the river bank. And if a believer happened to drown with the homosexual, well, God will sort that out, won't He? And what's more, God and Roberston are willing to invite you to share their power with them (for a price). Such generocity! Such selflessness! Some religions are dumb enough to stop at offering succor for the afflicted, but with Robertson you get the full package of benefits for your money--the might to call plague and burning and horror on all the world's heretics.

Why would you want that power, you ask?

Because as a Christian, you love your enemies.

The Situation Room

Dear CNN,

Enough with lame names for newscasts. Jerry Bruckheimerizing your news set and giving it a name out of Air Force One is not going to sex up Wolf Blitzer. I don't watch a lot of cable news, and the reason I don't is its incessant need to punch up even the most trivial story with graphics and sample music and tricks. ANOTHER HOT BLONDE MISSING! Dun-dun-dun-DUNNNNN. Let's go LIVE to the SITUATION ROOM and watch WOLF BLITZER point at PHILIPS HIGH DEFINITION TVs! PHILIPS TVS! Dun-dun-dun-DUNNNNNNN!!!!!

Just sit behind the desk and read the news copy, jerks. Stop trying to turn the world into a Michael Bay movie. We get quite enough of that from Michael Bay.

Another bit of friendly advice from,

Your Uncle Jim

Poppin' Fresh Nude Unicycles

Not a real post here. I just wanted to see what the ad thing would do.

Update 10:21pm: No change in the ads that I can see, but three people came here having searched for "nude". Thus have I increased my visibility among those seeking something to masturbate to. Maybe I should help them out:

Oh [your name here], when your strong manly hands caressed my silken thigh, only then did I know how it felt to be a real woman.

You can take it from there, can't you? Hey! Dammit! Now you've made the post all sticky, asswipe!

Carlin Interview

Just read a well-done interview with George Carlin at The Onion A.V. Club. This part in particular touches on something that still gnaws at me:


AVC: What's bothersome about the Katrina and "I Am A Bad American" e-mails is that they sound kind of bullying, which raises a tricky question: Do you think it's possible to be truly funny from a position of power? For instance, Dennis Miller, who's always been a smart, funny comedian, has undergone a political conversion over the past decade, and now his comedy is rooted in his support of the Bush administration. And he seems less funny.

GC: For some reason, there aren't as many right-wing comedians as there are left or center or non-political. I read something about this recently that made sense, and I've forgotten what it said, of course. I have great respect for Dennis Miller's mind and ability as a comedian, but I agree that I am not as personally entertained [by] his new material, which you describe as "coming from a position of power." Of course, he always did come from a position of presumed superiority, and I don't necessarily say that pejoratively. He did come from what appeared to be a smartass, superior platform. That's part of what made him work, as a stand-up.

I think your premise is correct, that it's harder to be funny from the position of power. That's a good description for it. Might be a couple other ways of describing it that I can't think of.

I think of it this way. Dennis Miller's pose of pissy narcissism was tolerable in part because he made it clear it was a pose--a pose that did not escape his mockery in his act. In one moment where he kidded his image, he said, "There's nothing wrong with being shallow as long as you're insightful about it." What also made it work was that his irreverance was total. He demonstrated a unversal skepticism which made everyone a target, powerful and powerless alike.

What's made Miller's act less attractive is his hero worship of George W. Bush and his transformation into Bush's on-stage toady. It reminds me of Mort Sahl's totemizing Reagan in the 1980s. It's never fun to see someone who used to hassle The Man become his shill. I'll bet Renfield, for example, was a much livelier conversationalist before he became blindly loyal to Dracula. Afterwards it was all "Dracula this" and "Dracula that" and "I hate the breathing". Tedious.

I also have to say that with Miller I feel rejected. His most recent act says to me, "Get out of here, lefty punk. You don't belong in my audience anymore." While it doesn't depress me, I do feel a little sad about it. Yeah, I've got new friends in David Cross and Patten Oswalt, and I remember the good times. Still, the whole thing leaves a bitter residue.

Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.

Raiders 23; Chiefs 27

I don't have the heart to talk about this one. Please, Indy, crush the loathesome, scabby Patriots and salvage my week.

My Random Ten

From my iTunes Party Shuffle:

1. Bootleg of 2003 Concert...Elvis Costello
2. Hairshirt...R.E.M.
3. Can't Ignore the Train...10,000 Maniacs
4. The Black Velvet Band...The Irish Rovers
5. Oh Well...Fiona Apple
6. My Wave...Soundgarden
7. Tongue...R.E.M.
8. Medley: Tenderly/You'll Never Walk Alone...Louis Armstrong
9. Floutino Concerto I. Allegro...Antonio Vivaldi
10. "La Notte" III. Largo...Antonio Vivaldi

Work

Now that I've got a first draft of a new novella, I'm turning my attention to a theater project. Your friend and humble narrator will next start a five act satire of the Gulf War soon. It should keep me occupied for a year or two. Long projects are where I live.

Raiders 34 Titans 25

The Raiders were, at one time, up 17-0, then let the Titans back into it with some poor 3rd down defense and an inexcusable Collins interception that was returned for a late touchdown. Warren Sapp was really the player of the game. He sacked Steve McNair three times and a forced fumble that Jerrod Cooper recovered for a touchdown. The Raiders went up late in the game on a 44-yard TD pass from Collins to Jerry Porter. (Collins finally realized that Porter does, in fact, exist.) That was the ball game.

So the Raiders have managed to crawl their way to 3-4 with a game ahead at Arrowhead Stadium against the Chefs. Good for them. Here's hoping that Moss is healthier and the Raiders can once again appear on TV.

Oh, and if anyone out there knows, could someone tell me why, with few exceptions, only one of the two major networks gets to show a doubleheader on Sunday? I know all about the blackout rules when a home team is on TV, but today the Seahawks had a bye week. FOX showed two games, but CBS only showed the late game, flooding the early time slot with infomercials hawking fake cures for cancer. Is it the affiliate's option, or do they make that decision at network? Either way, what makes them think that opposing the other network with informericals instead of games makes financial sense? If the Raiders-Titans game, just as a for-instance, had been on TV, CBS might have drawn a lot of viewers away from a snoozer of a Giants-Indigenous Persons game. I have to figure there's some kind of NFL rule working here, but I can't figure out what it might be. Would someone who knows please explain?

Again, For Those Keeping Track

I managed to complete a first draft of the new novella. Soon the revising begins.

Brace Yourselves

With Harriet Miers out of the picture, will George W. Bush take the responsible course and nominate a proven professional with the capacity to judge fairly, or will he decide to use the nomination as a means to stick it to his political enemies? Need I ask?

Raiders 38, Bills 17

Jordan was dominant in today's game, running for over 100 yards and scoring three touchdowns. These were the Raiders we were promised at the beginning of the season. May it continue.

Behind the Scenes At the Factory

Those of you keeping track might be wondering why "Is the Library Burning?", Novella #3 of the long delayed Escape Velocities collection isn't done yet. I'd promised to wrap the thing up by the end of August, but, well, I'll explain...

In mid-September, I'd reached page 90 of the novella. My financial problems were a distraction, but I'd still been able to maintain a decent rhythm. Writing long fiction is more a question of dogged, grinding work than inspiration, and after three years writing The Ice Age, that's the pace I'm accustomed to. Anyway, I'd reached the 90th page, when I found myself pausing and procrastinating. My thumbs started to hurt from late night Madden football games. Each time I tried to get back to work, I'd stare at the screen, tap keys, and move to check my e-mail or read news that hadn't changed in the five minutes since I'd last read it.

For a couple of weeks I blamed the stress of finances, but after my hearing at court, I came to realize the truth. I'd written ninety frigging pages and had no idea how to end the fucking story. If I went ahead with the ideas I had, the novella wouldn't so much end as it would splat, like a tomato thrown off a skyscraper. I spent a few days wavering between total panic and abject depression. Tutoring sessions and my birthday trip kept me grounded, but I couldn't see a solution and saw visions of four months of wasted effort--me and Sisyphus working for the same temp agency.

But then Seattle's horrible traffic came to my aid. On a day when it took me forty minutes to travel six miles, I went over the story in my mind. "Is the Library Burning?" is about a woman named Theresa who, while recovering in Cairo from injuries she suffered in a bus bombing, wonders whether she wants to return to the United States or move to the E.U. and leave the what she sees as the fanaticism of the U.S. behind. Included in her deliberations--most of which are about the deaths of Hypatia of Alexandria and Cicero, who failed to extract themselves from societies descending into tyranny before the mob could catch up with them--is the question of abandoning her mother, who fears travel. I realized while groaning at the hideous standstill of I-5, that while I'd done a good job exploring Theresa's thoughts on history and the decline of the U.S., I'd given the problem of her mother nowhere to go. They got along too well at the beginning, and their one argument over whether to leave the U.S. lacked a personal element. It was entirely ideological. I'd lost an opportunity to explore the larger issue of abandonment. I'd already established that Theresa was divorced. If I could work more in that area, perhaps making the divorce a source of tension between mother and daughter, I might solve the problem of the ending. The stakes can rise from the relatively narrow question of leaving the U.S. to the larger issue of the role of abandonment and disillusionment in Theresa's life.

Will it work? I don't know yet. I had to go back and do a lot of revising in the early sections. I feel like I have an ending in mind, but it remains to be seen whether this one will be the right one, or even mean what I think it means. Still, I feel a lot better at this point in the month than I did at the beginning, and I guess we will see what we will see.

Bits of Light in the Gloom

Yes, we live in a fascist state, New Orleans and Iraq are wrecks, and the Raiders couldn't cross the goal line in a tank; but there are small reasons to live. The Rockford Files, after endless delays, will come out on DVD December 6th. I can't wait.

The Wish For Kings

In his "Notebook" column in this month's Harper's Lewis Lapham points to an Umberto Eco essay on the common ideological points of all species of fascism:

"The truth is revealed once and only once.
"Parliamentary democracy is by definition rotten because it doesn't represent the voice of the people, which is that of the sublime leader.
"Doctrine outpoints reason, and science is always suspect.
"Critical thought is the province of degenerate intellectuals, who betray the culture and subvert traditional values.
"The national identity is provided by the nation's enemies.
"Argument is tantamount to treason.
"Perpetually at war, the state must govern with the instruments of fear.
"Citizens do not act; they play the supporting role of 'the people' in the grand opera that is the state."

This reads like a checklist of the reasons why the U.S. is in so much trouble now. For me, it's always gone beyond Bush. He's simply one of the nastier symptoms of the underlying disease. I'm afraid that a large percentage of Americans have simply lost the habits of mind necessary to sustain a democracy. They have lost faith in their ability to reason and to learn something new, and prefer the assurances of those who claim to hear the voices of gods. The government of capable but flawed human beings seems to them less attractive than rule by the decree of a leader whose heart is always pure (because he says it is) and whose guts are always right (because his wise counselors always praise them). Given the right ad campaign and a little more social conditioning, the House of Bush could probably have itself installed as an official dynasty, with James Dobson as their Archbishop and Dick Cheney as the Lord High Executioner.

According to Lapham's satirical riff, America won't change very much under fascism. Our overlords needn't burn books--only a few people read them, and they're easily caricatured by their choice of pricey caffienated beverage. Also, although a playwright could become president of the Czech republic and a poet might as recently as ten years ago become President of Russia, writers are so deeply in the margins of American society that, however rudely they might treat Laura Bush at a book fair, nobody outside a few coffeehouses has heard of most of them. Besides, most writers are so busy chasing after a spot in the Oprah Book Club that they have little time for planning assaults on the palaces of the mighty.*

Further, our overlords needn't destroy the radio stations. Their allies own most of them, and given the way they've written the rules, they should be able to buy the rest without any ugly resort to bloodshed. Most of our labor unions have already been broken up, and once Wal Mart gets into other lines of business, they should be able to clear out the rest. Besides, the corporations promise that if you work hard and ruthlessly and avoid the trap of friendship, you can rise high enough in the corporate structure to eventually become Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. (They'll probably rename it C.E.O. of the U.S. Treasury, to avoid unnecessary confusion in titles.) So there's no real reason to comb the middle classes for signs of incipient rebellion. (Making it possible to include promoting unrest as a reason to lower credit scores or raise health insurance rates out to take care of most troublemakers. Much more civilized than a concentration camp, you have to admit.)

Reading Lapham's essay helps me understand why I feel so little joy at Bush's 37% approval rating. We had to lose an entire city to get it down there, and under the circumstances 37% seems awfully high, doesn't it? If the President launched a nuclear missile at the San Andreas fault and sank the West Coast into the sea, we might get it down to 30%. (Though it might pop back up once Pat Robertson points out that Bush destroyed the unholy sewers of both Hollywood and the Castro District in one quick strike. I'm sure that Bush's handlers could work out the spin for that. They're clever people.) And even if we should rid ourselves of Bush, can we say we've cured ourselves of the affliction that brought him to us? Or will we just turn to another would be Duce and nod our heads at his crackpot notions of how the world works? What do we have to do to cure both the symptom of Bush and the underlying illness? No less than restore to Americans the idea that we are citizens, with a responsibility to continue learning and questioning not only our governments, but also our bosses and our clergymen. We have to drum it into our own heads that any problems that we have will need to be solved by other citizens who are both as intelligent and as ignorant as we are; and that no citizen should be able to claim sole possession of the unerrant truth without the rest of us laughing him out of the building.

That's a hard thing to fix, and I fear it's already too late to start. Sad. Sad. Sad.

*Just in case Oprah is reading this, I don't mean to imply that the Oprah Book Club is a bad thing. I'm glad you started picking living writers for it again, and even though your first choice, James Frey, seems like an uninspired one, I have every confidence that it'll get better and every hope that you'll (please-oh-please-oh-please) include my own work in it someday. Listen, it'll be great, Oprah! Me and you! Wait, where are you going? PLEASE! I'M SO BROKE!

A Barren Source of Amusement

San Diego 27; Oakland 14

Randy Moss suffered an injury early in the game. LaMont Jordan ran for two touchdowns and gained 100 combined yards, but the Raiders sink to 1-4. I stopped listening to the game toward the end of the 1st half, when San Diego took a 24-7 lead, choosing instead to watch Misery. Kerry Collins still can't find the end zone without a map, in spite of two weeks of practice. The offense can't find rhythm or consistency when it counts, and Collins's streak of pass attempts without an interception came to an end.

The New Bond

It's Daniel Craig. (I won't bother linking to anything. You couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a story about it.) He looks like he'll be all right in the role, though I'd rather they retained Pierce for a last film. It would be nice if someone would dig down to the truth about Brosnan's dismissal, but that won't happen as long as film journalism remains with the likes of US Weekly.

I'm less sanguine about the producers turning Casino Royale into an origin story. It wasn't one initially; Bond was already a "00" agent at the beginning of the book, and though the novel establishes several characters, there's a sense that Bond already knows most of them--either through work or by reputation. We have a sense that we're entering a universe that was already running when we got here, which is an underrated sensation. Honestly, I can't think of anything duller than finding out how Bond got his number--a story Fleming told only in summary because it was, really, kind of dull and grim--or how he got his Aston Martin. (I already know, actually. We saw it in Goldfinger. Q-Branch retired Bond's Bentley and assigned him the Aston Martin DB-5, which Bond proceeded to ruin by crashing it into a wall at Goldfinger's plant.) Over the years, the films have given us hints of backstory--the deaths of Bond's parents in a climbing accident (Goldeneye) or his failure to graduate from Cambridge (The Spy Who Loved Me), but nothing too specific.

I prefer it that way, really. It's possible to write about Bond as a man in the grip of his own past, riven by deep-seated interior conflict, etcetera, etcetera; but was that ever what made his movies fun in the first place? It's a mistake to confuse Bond with Batman. Batman's internal struggles are interesting mainly because there has to be some explanation for why a good-looking grown man with a life to lead would choose to assume the identity of a flying predator and battle criminals in the Gotham night. But Bond doesn't assume other identities. He's always 007. He likes drinks, hot women, sports, fast cars, and good suits. He also has a keen interest in the natural sciences and speaks an astonishing array of languages. He seems to be supremely at home with himself, never interrupting the action to contemplate his inner demons (which, if he has them, he has the good British decency to keep well-hidden while in company). The last thing I want to see is a Bond who dwells, and what is an origin story but a place where we give the hero things to dwell over?

For an example of what I mean, think of Bond's clubland literary ancestor, "The Saint". The TV series (and the books) never got into Simon Templar's origins, but the 1995 movie did (he was supposedly an orphan in Hong Kong who chose his name after one of the brutal warders beat him). Which would you rather watch--Roger Moore in a pair of the TV episodes, or Val Kilmer in the movie? If you answer the latter, you are beyond pleasure, beyond pity, and beyond hope.

Dispatches

The meeting with the Jack Straw people was productive. The demon voices in my hair have stopped, and I'm going to stick with the literature project for now. My other labors stand where they've stood. In a way, it hardly seems worth blogging about, but it was my long day and I'm beat.

Before I go, however, I will mention that I saw Maggie Smith in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie last night. The novel on which it was based was a brilliant twist on the inspriational teacher formula of Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and the movie picks it up brilliantly. I can't imagine anyone but Maggie Smith in the role of the fascistic Jean Brodie, and the cast of young actresses who played her students was excellent. See it. Live it. Love it. Be it.

Two Cheers For Ron Sims

Hip! Hip! Uh--What took you so long, Ron? Our county executive finally rejected Southwest Airlines' plans to move from SeaTac airport to Boeing Field. I saw no reason to give Southwest Airlines the right to force millions of dollars worth of road upgrades on us, as well as all the air traffic and noise difficulties that would have arisen from having another major airport five miles away from SeaTac. Sims should have rejected the idea out of hand, but at least we won't have to speak any more about it.

Southwest has threatened to move their operations to Everett or out of the area altogether. If that's what they want to do, let them. After that 11-hour flight I took to Chicago, they can go as far away as they like. They'd open their gates up to another airline--one that may actually believe in getting their passengers where they're going in less time than it would take to walk. Let's face it, even if Southwest moved from Seattle to Everett, they'd probably take ten years and go through Renton, Bellevue, North Bend, Woodinville, Marysville, and Bellingham first.

Happy Birthday To Me

It's tomorrow actually, but because Monday's a business day for me, I celebrated over the weekend with bitterspice and my father. We had a great time. I made some of the Chicken with Herbs and Yogurt and my dad went out, bought some oysters, and fried them up for poor boy sandwiches. Good stuff all around.

This year I used my birthday money for a food processor and DVDs of The Incredibles, Psycho, and Misery. Now I'm turning my attention to the Jack Straw writing fellowship. I'd already planned to submit a story for the writer's portion, but the demon monkey who live in my head are telling me to submit a portion of Diary of A Superfluous Man to their artist's project fellowship to see if I can pick up 20 hours of free studio time and put together a radio version of the play. The only question I have is what I'd do with the fucker once I had it. Anybody who knows radio drama--Larry, I'm talking to you--give me a shout so that I can learn how that world works.

Speaking of Ads

A bit of political reform I'd like to see--no more bullshit names for political action committees. I'm tired of ads sponsored by Patients and Doctors for Responsible Reform (the insurance industry) or Voters and Entrepreneurs for Unfettered Street Commerce (pimps). Of course it's pretty easy to figure out that this or that ad is sponsored by Big [insert industry here] instead of a genuine grassroots organization; it's the dishonesty of the formulation that grates on me. They should make the ad producers put their corporate sponsors' logos in the ad, kind of like a race car sticks its sponsors' logos all over the chassis. I realize this might have a chilling effect on fake-grassroots advertising, but...hmm...where's the problem?

Me Again

Yeah, I've sold out. I put ads on the blog. Why? Because nothing makes me happier than forcing a giant corporation that could crush me like a bug to send me a check for $0.35 every month.

I'm Beat

Who knew that two minutes in Federal Court being interviewed by a woman who hasn't had a good laugh since Sputnik could be so enervating? All went well, though. It looks like the legal process will, for me, be much less Kafkaesque than I feared.

I need to unwind and rest, so that I can get up for thinking about the misery of life under Bush, Iraq, bird flu, my student loans, advancing decrepitude (my birthday is in six days), my career, the sorry state of the Oakland Raiders' red zone offense, the problems that have crept into my new novella, and assorted worries, cavils, and carps.

See y'all later.

George W. Bush is the most brilliant man I know

Now that I've said this, can I be on the Supreme Court too?

August Wilson Dead

It was something I knew was coming, but it's still crushing. He was a giant.

Cowboys 13; Raiders 19

At last. Lamont Jordan and Sebastian Janikowski are clearly the big heroes here. Yes, Moss had 125 yards against the Cowboys defense, but it was Jordan's running (126 yards) and SeaBass's foot (4 FGs, two from 40+ yards) that gave the game to Oakland. The Raiders have victory #1.

Some causes for concern.

1) Collins is still streakier than I'd like. He needs to develop more consistency.

2) The Raider defense was excellent until late in the 4th quarter, when they suddenly broke down and handed the Cowboys two long passes that put them in position to steal the game.

3) Jake Grove left the game with a knee injury. I don't remember hearing that he was back in the lineup. This bears watching, because he is a fine pass-blocker with remarkable skills for such a young player.

4) Adam Treu, the long snapper, gave both Lechler and Janikowski a few high snaps today, putting the kicking game in unnecessary peril. He's usually good about these things. Let's hope it's just a temporary problem.

5) As always, penalties. The Raiders should have won this game by a lot more than they did, but drive sustaining and drive killing penalties kept the Cowboys in it. Warren Sapp did something unusually stupid when, having already wrapped up Drew Bledsoe, he threw him down to the turf, forcing the referees to hand the Cowboys fifteen big yards on a 3rd and 8. The Cowboys ended up getting a field goal a few plays later. Yes, the refs have it in for the Raiders. We need to count on seven or eight penalties per game. Still, that's no reason to make things worse than they need to be.

Some reasons for optimism.

1) The Raiders found their running game, against a defense that hadn't given up 100 yards to a rusher since early last year. Over time, this should help the Raiders with play action and give Collins more chances to look down the field.

2) Randy Moss is still Randy Moss, and is consistently good for at least one spectacular play per game.

3) Kerry Collins still hasn't thrown an interception, though he came close a couple of times today.

4) The defense really seems to be coming together. They're still missing some pieces, and will break down from time to time, but we're seeing much greater solidity from them as a unit. As long as the defense sustains this level of play, the Raiders need only score more than 20 points per game to win consistently.