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Saturday, January 26, 2002
Hubcaps from hell On the front page of Friday's Wall Street Journal, in that middle column where they always run the wacky trend stories, there's a piece about the current popularityof wide rim chrome hubcaps, which sometimes cost more than the car itself--though not always; the trend apparently cuts across class lines. From low-wage earners driving junkers to soccer moms in SUVs, fancy hubcaps are evidently all the rage. Maybe this is old news to you; the culture of New York City is not especially car-oriented, so I have to admit, this isn't one I'd already picked up on. A woman who lives in some small town somewhere (the paper seems to have vanished magically from my apartment, or else I'd look it up) complains that, because the hubcap fashion thing has been largely inspired by rap videos, people in her town are concerned that the chrome hubcaps on her SUV are "un-Christian." It is entirely possible that I will leave this city at some point in the next few years, depending on various circumstances, but I think this is my new rule of thumb: I never, ever, ever want to live in a place where people worry about whether or not my hubcaps are Christian enough. * * * This site's archive of my cartoons from The American Prospect has been updated (thanks, Kareem!)--click on the Cartoon Archives button and follow the links. Also in Cartoon Archives, we should have some updates to the Illustrations and Rarities section up soon, including more New Yorker Back Pages. And another note--due to some glitch no one's had time to track down, this site seems to work better in Explorer than in Netscape. I know, I know, I hate Microsoft too.
-------------------- Friday, January 25, 2002
Ground zeroland  As I've mentioned before, the area around the World Trade Center was my stomping ground for a couple of years, when I was renting an illegal loft studio in Tribeca, and I've been feeling the need lately to go down to ground zero and see it for myself. I've only been in the neighborhood once since September 11, and at that point, you couldn't get within eight or nine blocks of the site. I was more or less caught up on my work this afternoon, and decided it was time to go into the city and get this thing over with. Just one catch: ground zero is a goddamn tourist attraction now. I mean, I knew that from news reports, but somehow it didn't sink in until I discovered that you need a ticket to access the viewing platform, available free of charge at the South Street Seaport--a touristy shopping-and-dining area somewhat akin to San Francisco's Pier 39, maybe ten or eleven blocks away from the WTC site. There's a ticket booth already in place there, so I guess it makes sense, but it still seemed inappropriate, as if the tickets were being handed out by someone in a clown suit or a giant happy mouse costume. But I figured I'd already taken the time off, so I walked down and stood in a long line and finally got my little ticket....and discovered I would not be allowed onto the platform for another four hours. I didn't really have four hours worth of errands to run in the city, so I gave up and came home. Maybe some other time.
All Walker, all the time We're going to hear a lot more about John Walker Lindh over the next few weeks. We don't know where Osama bin Laden is, we don't know where Mullah Omar is--but by god, an al Qaeda fighter in the hand is worth however many have evaded the Bush. Conservatives have--ludicrously enough-- been beating liberals over the head with this guy for weeks now. Marin County, parents with alternative lifestyles, permissiveness, hot tubs, Clinton-era moral relativism, yadda yadda yadda. Nothing discredits liberalism like an aberrant goofball-turned-right-wing-religious-fundamentalist, that's what I always say. Of course, there are probably hundreds of thousands of kids who have been raised in similarly permissive households over the past few decades. If the moral relativism of John Walker Lindh's childhood is to blame for his peculiar path in life, then surely we should have seen thousands and thousands of confused young Americans joining him in his quest for the structure and moral certainty which apparently only al Qaeda could provide. Hell, half the Taliban should have been carrying American passports. And, let's see, how Americans actually joined al Qaeda? Oh yes, that's right. One. This is a silly and losing game for conservative pundits to play. After all, the kid who crashed the plane into the skyscraper in Florida, after allegedly leaving behind a note expressing sympathy for Osama bin Laden, was a member of the Young Republicans. And let's not forget Timothy McVeigh, who was not exactly a poster boy for the absolute and unwavering moral steadfastness of conservativism. There will always be those who carry a darkness within them, a cancer of thought and belief, which can be nurtured and sustained by any idiotic belief system--but the darkness has to be there to begin with. None of these cases--Walker or McVeigh or anyone else--are about ideology as much as they are about that cancer of the human spirit. Conservatives would do well to keep this in mind, before this guilt-by-association nonsense turns around and bites them on the ass.
-------------------- Thursday, January 24, 2002
Always more to the story According to the newly-released book "Bin Laden, the Forbidden Truth," by French journalists Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, the Bush administration was blocking investigations into Al Qaeda terrorism last year, as it bargained with the Taliban in an effort to gain access to the vast oil reserves of Central Asia. (A pipeline running through Afghanistan would of course negate the need to deal with the Russians in the delivery of this oil). The authors claim that the Bush administration was actually hoping to consolidate the Taliban's position, which they saw a source of stability in the region. (Yes, you read that right.) Interestingly, when the Taliban refused to accept U.S. conditions, they were told (before September 11, remember), "Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold or we bury you under a carpet of bombs." Former FBI Deputy Director John O'Neill--who resigned in July in protest of the Bush Administration's obstructionist policy--was interviewed at length for the book. According to the authors, O'Neill said that "the main obstacles to investigate Islamic terrorism were U.S. oil corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it." The authors further allege that the Bushies started negotiating with the Taliban almost immediately after the inauguration. US and Taliban representatives are said to have met several times, in Washington, Berlin and Islamabad. The Taliban apparently even hired a PR person to help spruce up their image--Laila Helms, niece of former CIA director Richard Helms. (I guess it's a small world after all.) The last meeting between Taliban and Bush administration officials took place five weeks before September 11, according to the authors. I haven't read this book--I'm not even sure it's out in English yet--but from what I can tell from the various summaries I've read, the authors do not claim that the war in Afghanistan has been primarily motivated by the desire of the oilmen in the administration to build their pipeline. And to be clear, that's not what I'm suggesting either--though it does seem more than remotely possible that the pipeline will turn out to be--how should I put this?--a happy side effect of the war. Particularly given Bush's nomination of a former Unocal advisor as the US special envoy to Afghanistan. But this is the thing: what if it's true that the Bushies told the FBI to back off Al Qaeda last year, as they pursued their little pipe(line) dream? What might the investigators have learned if they hadn't been hobbled by oil company priorities? What if the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon could have been prevented? John O'Neill is no longer able to address these questions. After he resigned his position at the FBI, he took a job as head of security at the World Trade Center. He was killed on September 11.
Let's make a support drop with "first aid" and "food"  I just thought you should know that this exists. -------------------- Tuesday, January 22, 2002
This is interesting Media Whores Online is reporting this morning that Dick Cheney's old company, Halliburton, is on the verge of becoming another Enron, "thanks to a mountain of asbestos lawsuits linked to its 1998 acquisition, under then-CEO Cheney, of Dressler Industries. The company has paid out more than $150 million in recent damages for asbestos cases -- and has about 260,000 related lawsuits still pending. More than $19 billion in Halliburton shareholder value has vanished since the summer of 2001 -- an undisclosed amount of it in employee 401(k) plans and other pension funds." Halliburton releases an earnings report on Wednesday, at which point all hell may break loose. And here's a fun tidbit MWO reprints from the December, 2000 issue of Business Week: Facing shaky markets, antsy consumers, and political turmoil, Bush is shopping for a powerhouse Treasury Secretary who projects wisdom and calm--and understands global markets. In short, confesses one Bushie, ''we need someone like Bob Rubin,'' the ultrasmooth Wall Street veteran who was Clinton's Treasury Secretary before Lawrence H. Summers. But whom to pick? Transition scouts are said to be eyeing heavyweights such as retired Chase Manhattan (CMB) Chairman Walter V. Shipley and businessmen like Enron (ENE) CEO Kenneth Lay. Okay, now I really have to get to work.
Quick reminder The World War 3 Illustrated event is tonight at the Theatre for the New City in Manhattan (155 First Ave between 9th and 10th) at 8 pm. I'll be there along with a bunch of other artists, talking and showing slides. And I should have another piece on the Back Page of this week's New Yorker. This one's been inexplicably bumped for about three weeks in a row, so I'll believe it when I actually see it. I've got a lot of work to do today, so that's all for now. -------------------- Monday, January 21, 2002
Happy MLK day This is true: actor James Earl Jones was given a plaque at a celebration of the life of Martin Luther King. Due to an unexplained engraving error, the plaque read, "Thank you James Earl Ray for keeping the dream alive." Ooops. -------------------- Sunday, January 20, 2002
Walkin' the dog  You know, I'm just going to come right out and say it, and damn the ensuing controversy: owning a dog in the city is a whole lotta work. As freelancers, my wife and I could theoretically sleep until noon every day if we wanted to. In reality, we're up by 7:45 every morning (which I know is probably a late morning for a lot of you with jobs, but everything is relative), in order to take the dog on a long walk through the park during off-leash hours (before 9:00). Get home by 9:30, have some breakfast and try to get some work done. Take him out to pee once around noon, and maybe once more sometime in the afternoon. Take him back up to the park at 5:00 for another hour long walk. One more final walk around the block at around ten or eleven. Then we're usually okay, unless he gets sick at two or three in the morning and one of us has to get out of bed and run him out into the cold night, and then spend a couple of hours taking care of him until his stomach settles down. But I wouldn't have it any other way. Especially on a morning like this, when we wake up to a world transformed by the season's first snowfall, and the dog runs through the park diving into the snow with sheer exuberant joy, and the long gently sloping expanse of the park is dotted with people and their dogs well into the distance and the snow is still fresh and clean, and the whole scene looks like something out an old Currier & Ives print of an idyllic winter's morning in the city. But you'll have to excuse me now; I have to run the dog out. --------------------
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