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Saturday, March 30, 2002
The morning after Last night's post inspired quite a few responses; many suggested links, as well as several who questioned my shorthand reference to "lefty" blogs. To clarify the latter, I'm certainly not seeking out any adherence to a party line. Hell, I don't even like parties very much--I'm more of a stay-at-home kind of guy, myself. Ha, ha. Ba doom boom. But seriously, folks: I was amused and somewhat pleased to learn recently that I was much too "conservative" for the employees of a certain Communist bookstore (employees sounds wrong--the members of the collective? The comrade workers?). So, no--no party lines. I guess what I mean by "lefty" is bloggers who are more skeptical than not of the war effort, which is just not something I'm seeing very often. But maybe I'm off base on this whole thing, maybe the range of bloggy debate is actually much wider than I think it is. I'm not only late to the party, I'm late to a party where everybody else seems to already know each other--so, as always, I could be wrong™. As for all those links coming in--I'll put up a list later, when I've had time to sort through them. (Some of them coming in, I realize that I have actually seen before--my apologies there. The blog is always going to be off the cuff, the thing I squeeze in when my real responsibilities are taken care of. You should probably take everything here with a grain of salt, if not a shaker full.) -------------------- Friday, March 29, 2002
Couldn't have seen this one coming Turns out those feel-good humanitarian food drops that Bush nearly broke his arm patting himself on the back about...were "largely ineffective and at times counterproductive." (And that's not Robert Fiske or the Guardian of London or any of the usual suspects talking--that's according to a report by retired US special forces officers being circulated in the Defense Department.) Who'd a thunk it? (Link stolen from a Southern Dissident's Livejournal, the second lefty blog I've been made aware of today. Are there more of you out there? Let us redefine the blogging paradigm, expand the range of predictable debate, and generally storm the ramparts of this lopsided castle!)
The misshapen blogosphere If you spend any time at all traipsing amongst the political blogs (the term "warblogger" grates on my nerves--as I have previously noted, it sounds like a misguided effort to combine "waterlogged" with "blowhard," perhaps by way of "warbling"), you have probably noticed a certain uniformity of opinion, a range which tends to stretch from libertarian-slash-conservative to moderate-right-leaning-democrat, and not much further. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Though I disagree with much that is written in this wacky world o' blogs, I respect the intelligence and wit of many of the writers. One rarely encounters Limbaugh-level diatribes while sloshing through the bloggerglades. But, unfortunately, neither does one often stumble across that most elusive of species--the bloggus liberal-leftus. (This space modestly excludes itself from the terms of this discussion, given that it had a ready-made audience from the get-go.) So: in order to introduce a little balance into this badly listing vessel of ours, allow me to introduce you to a recent correspondent, Scoobie Davis-- blogger, surfer dude, and Oscars-crasher. That is all.
When "drinking the Kool Aid" meant something entirely different My friend Rachel Lehmann-Haupt has a sad remembrance of her late uncle, one of the Merry Pranksters immortalized by Tom Wolfe, in the current New York Observer.
Just when you think you're being too cynical The Bush administration spent renewable energy funds to pay the printing bill for its energy plan. (Requires login. Thanks to Gil Gillman for the link.)
Earthquake update Thanks to reader Ken Mohnkern for this link to a BBC story on the subject, which quotes the US National Earthquake Information Center statement on the Afghan quake: However, those of you who found the whole topic too crazy for consideration should contemplate this morsel of information: Near-surface earthquakes have been caused in the past by human activity such as mining. All I know is, if we disturb the Mole People, we're all gonna be real, real sorry.  -------------------- Thursday, March 28, 2002
Take a bite outta crime A New Jersey police officer who used to visit local schools dressed as McGruff the Crime Fighting Dog has been arrested on charges of pedophilia and child pornography.
Oh, Man... ...you gotta love the irony of an hour-long prime time Bill O'Reilly special decrying the coarsening of popular culture...on the Fox network.
One more thing This quote was in the signature line of an email from a reader named Sarah Olmstead, and I thought it was worth posting: "The holy word of God is on everyone's lips...but...we see almost everyone presenting their own versions of God's word, with the sole purpose of using religion as a pretext for making others think as they do." In that context, it seems somehow appropriate to post this charming thought from a self-described Christian: God Guns and Country and FUCK YOU!!!! Go figure.
This and that Thanks to alert reader Mark Geralds for pointing out that the earthquake toon I mentioned yesterday is, in fact, in the archives after all. Recieved several emails from geologists confirming the possibility of a correlation between underground explosives and seismic activity, and several more from skeptics who find it all highly unlikely. I remain agnostic, though as a former longtime Californian, I am fascinated by the subject, and how little we understand about it. When you live on a faultline, you just have to learn to live with the knowledge that the world can turn upside down at any moment, and everything you love can be lost just as quickly. Which isn't a bad summary of the world we're all living in these days. * * * My head's in an echo chamber and my brain is packed in insulating foam, so bear with me this morning. * * * About those civilian deaths. I haven't followed the controversy closely, so I'm not going to weigh in as to whether Marc Herold's estimate of five thousand civilians killed so far in Afghanistan has or has not been authoritatively debunked. What I find interesting, in my anthropologist-from-Mars mode, is why it matters either way--why pro-war types are so eager to champion the lower figure of "only" a thousand dead. I guess the basic argument goes like this: --Look how many innocent people have been killed in the callous, careless pursuit of this war! --No, you're wrong--the number is much lower, because the military has done everything possible to keep civilian casualties to a minimum! Chances are the truth is somewhere in the middle, but this is the real question to me: what is an "acceptable" level of civilian casualties? The implication seems to be that as long as the number is lower than the number of Americans who died in the September 11 attacks, America's claim to the moral high ground remains unchallenged. But a thousand people is still a thousand people. (If you're willing to try to make those people real in your mind, not just as statistics, but as living, breathing men and women and children who were neither combatants nor terrorists, whose only crime was to have been born into that particular godforsaken region in which Osama bin Laden found refuge, you might want to take a look at this.) A thousand people. My guess is, you could gather your entire family together, as well as all the friends you've ever known, and a good percentage of your random acquaintances, and still not hit the thousand mark. But a thousand is acceptable, and five thousand is not? I think that once you've accepted the necessity of collateral damage, then arguing about the numbers is just a theological exercise, like trying to calculate the number of dancing angels for which there is room on the head of an average pin. Or, to put it another way, it is a variation on the old punchline: we've already determined what you are, we're just arguing about the price. But this goes both ways. I have noticed that when I mention the dead of Sept. 11, someone invariably feels it necessary to write and remind me of these Afghan casualties, and of the Palestinian dead, the Iraqi dead, the Nicaraguan dead, all of those who have been sacrificed at the altar of American foreign policy over the years. And I am in absolute agreement that we should remember, we should not allow our government to gloss over the human cost of its actions---but we must be careful. To allow this to become a championship round of competing statistics in which the loss of human life is diminished and made abstract for one's own particular ideological purposes is a very slippery slope. When I spoke recently of the widows of Sept. 11, I was surprised at how many dismissive responses I received--surprised that anyone could so thoroughly dissociate themselves from the reality of grief and loss. But I'll tell you this: if you are outraged by the civilian casualties in Afghanistan, by the reality of carnage which underlies the sanitary abstractions of collateral damage, yet you are capable of similarly dismissing the reality of those who died on American soil on the morning of September 11-- well, your own perch on the tenuous cliffs of some perceived moral high ground is a shaky one indeed. * * * And now for something completely different. Eric Alterman recently took on Andrew Sullivan, in a column for The Nation, and while I am loathe to take Sullivan's side on almost any issue, Alterman's piece was sadly diminished by its lack of understanding of --and apparent contempt for--the online world. Now Sullivan has launched a career in the brave new world of "blogging," or vanity websites. And while his site arouses a certain gruesome car-wreck fascination, it serves primarily as a reminder to writers of why we need editors. Andrewsullivan.com sets a standard for narcissistic egocentricity that makes Henry Kissinger look like St. Francis of Assisi. Readers are informed, for instance, that Andy's toilet recently overflowed; that he had a rollicking dinner chez Hitchens; that he might have seen Tina Brown across a hotel lobby, but he's not sure; and that, in separate, apparently unrelated incidents, he had a nightmare and ate a bad tuna-fish sandwich that upset his tummy, requiring many "stomach evacuations." Let's acknowledge that as the proprietor of a "vanity website" myself, I have a dog in this fight. But is it "vanity" when you have a demonstrable audience? Before I started blogging, this site got about 40,000 visitors a month; as of this month, it's up to about 160,000, and growing. And Sullivan's numbers dwarf mine. I mean, I don't much care for Rush Limbaugh's show, but I understand that it would be foolish to describe it as a "vanity broadcast." (Updated bonus afterthought: if "vanity website" is meant to denigrate those online writers who pursue their obsession sans compensation, then Sullivan is the worst example you could come up with, since, as far as I can tell, he's actually the only one making any money doing this.) Alterman seems to consider the blog as nothing more than a magazine column gone bad, an undisciplined self-referential travesty against all that is good and decent. Sure, grandpa, and that rap music--it's just noise! Blogs are not, in fact, magazine columns with more personal anecdotes, any more than novels are investigative reporting with fewer facts, or Farscape is Ricki Lake with more aliens. Blogging is its own beast, and while I very much doubt that it will live up to the expectations of its most earnest advocates--such as Sullivan--I don't think it's going to go away any time soon, either. I could go on, but there's work to be done, so in true blogging fashion, I will instead link to the blog of Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who describes Alterman's column as a "call to arms from the battlements of the credentialed." -------------------- Wednesday, March 27, 2002
Food for thought This is from Sam Smith's daily Undernews listserv (it's probably on his site as well, but I'm feeling lazy): CHRIS HARRIES, TASMANIA, [to the Australian] - On March 5 The Australian reported that U.S. forces began dropping for the first time deep penetration bombs in an effort to eliminate remnant Taliban fighters. The new bomb technology is designed to transmit shock waves deep into the earth and shatter cave systems that provide underground hideouts. Within 24 hours of that bombing campaign, world media sources independently reported on a significant earthquake in Northern Afghanistan, measuring 6.3 on the open-ended Richter scale. Concerned about a possible connection between these events, I immediately contacted a Washington-based news agency who very kindly undertook a search and followed up with a report quoting an expert seismologist opinion that the quake, untypical of that region, was 'likely to have been triggered by the bombing campaign.’ Don't know what to think about that--though it does pass the common-sense test that deep penetration bombs could trigger seismic instability, because that's pretty much what they're designed to do, isn't it? So either somebody's god is very, very cruel, or we have yet another example of the Law of Unintended Consequences here. At any rate, I'm confident there will be two recurrent themes in my email tomorrow morning: (1) dismissive messages from readers who think that any mention whatsoever of collateral damage is a peacenik ploy to be debunked and/or disregarded, the sort of person who prefers to believe that "only" 1,000 Afghan civilians have died in this war, as opposed to the widely-reported and controversial estimate of 5,000 or more--which brings up the question of what, exactly, constitutes an "acceptable" number of civilian deaths, but we'll leave that for another day; and (2) messages from that percentage of you who will inevitably choose to believe that the military actually meant for this to happen, which makes you rather more cynical than me, and I'm no slouch when it comes to the blackguard-with-faulty-vision department. On a related note, I did a cartoon several years back (which I would link to, but it doesn't seem to be in the archives), based on news accounts which drew a correlation between some underground nuclear testing in Nevada and a subsequent series of earthquakes in southern California. (Oddly enough, I was alerted to that one by Patrick MacNee, the actor who played John Steed on the Avengers, with whom I had just had dinner--he was on a book tour, and my girlfriend at the time handled author events for a San Francisco bookstore. Same reason I met Marilyn Quayle, author of the disturbingly-titled spy thriller "Embrace the Serpent." But, once again, I digress.) Make of it all what you will. I'm done for the day--I'm going to go settle into bed with one of my guilty pleasures--a new Spenser novel--and try to beat this cold back once and for all.
A quick correction Reader Rick Scully informs me that I am mistaken--that Fox has, in fact, put the episode in which the Simpsons visit New York back into rotation. This space, as always, regrets the error. (Update: I forgot to put a link to Rick's site. I'm a bad, bad blogger.)
Poor Alfred, again Carol Lay has a good cartoon about the whoring of an icon who taught many of us to view the dark art of advertising with a healthy skepticism. Somewhere I have a photo I took of Bill Gaines when, as a young high school lad on a class trip to New York City, I snuck away to make a pilgrimage to the offices of Mad magazine (much as Bart Simpson did during that episode of The Simpsons which, due to the prominence of the twin towers in the story, we may never see again). I'll post it if it ever turns up.
From the mailbag In lieu of new content from your overworked correspondent, an interesting perspective from Barcelona, Spain: I have been reading your blog (and cartoons) for a few weeks. Sometimes I can not follow all the references to US internal political affairs, but even so I find the reading very interesting. Mainly, it helps me (a foreigner for you) to get a better grasp on how you (US people) think and on your culture. Anyway, I wanted just to comment on one of your "blog" entries. A link you pointed out writes (among other things) about European-style care systems: "Because of national health insurance and other policies that reduce social inequality, residents of other industrialized countries have lower infant mortality, longer life expectancies, and fewer worries about whether the health care system will be there for them when they fall ill. They truly have "health security" and don't want U.S.-style for-profit health care." I can not agree more with this statement. From what I know of the US health system (through some friends that have been living there, your movies and some reading) I would not be my choice at all. Access to healt care is just something we do not worry about; sometimes we complain about the waiting lists in some services and the quality of some centers, but I know for sure that if me or my family have a health problem we will be properly assisted. Period. No questions about costs or services included (ranging from pediatry to major sugery, including all types of transplants). If you want arguments in favour of a "single-payer health system", what about this: it works. An it's working not in some small backwater country, but in one of the top-level economies of the world, the European Union. And we love it: nobody will vote a party even suggesting to downgrade it. To this respect, it is sometimes shocking to read in your blog/cartoons that some of your opinions are considered "liberal" (intended as deprecative), I guess meaning what we would call here a "left-wing extremist", while in Europe they would be considered just "common sense". For instance: - National Health Insurance I wonder what people calling you "liberal" for that thinks of us. Here even communist parties are legal and have representatives in the Parliament. -------------------- Tuesday, March 26, 2002
Technical difficulties, please stand by I'm back. But I have a cold, and I have deadlines. So the implied promise of this space to amuse and delight all comers, or double your money back, must remain unfulfilled for now. But soon, my friends, soon, we shall talk of ships and shoes and sealing wax, and whether pigs have wings, and how Eric Alterman screws it up even when he gets it right. But not today. --------------------
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