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Saturday, April 06, 2002
Possible snafu Alert reader Alex Boese writes to point out that the President's schedule below looks like it might be from 2001, rather than 2002. If so, sorry about that. I tossed it up in kind of a hurry without checking the research of the people at the PR industry newsletter where the column ran, because hey, if you can't trust the PR industry, who can you trust? (I'll try to track this down for sure when I have time, just wanted to post this clarification right away.) Update: Post pulled--the idiot columnist mistook 2001 for 2002, and because I had to head out for the day, I didn't take the time to verify his research for myself. Sorry about that. -------------------- Thursday, April 04, 2002
More Hi Ho fun boys and girls are having! Hi Ho! William Grewe-Mullins has uncovered further adventures in incomprehensibility: Too inexplicable to summarize Hi Ho wackiness! Hi Ho meets Jaws--wacky fun is had!
One more Moore Andrew Sullivan claims that the notion that Michael Moore's book "was published and unalterable by September 11 is simply untrue." To clarify the matter, I sent Moore (who is, just so all the cards are out on the table here, something of a friend of mine) an email. This is his response: All 50,000 copies were printed and bound and sitting on a shipping dock by sept.10. Not a single other copy was printed until after the book became a best seller after it was released on feb 19, and even then getting them to print more books was like pulling teeth. To recount one final time: not only was Sullivan utterly off-base in his initial claim that Michael Moore did not discuss the war in his book due to some festering left-wing hypocrisy--which turns the entire Times of London column into an extended Emily Latella rant ("what's all this I hear about sax and violins on teevee?")--but his clumsy after-the-fact spin is complete nonsense as well. And that's enough time on that one, I hope. -------------------- Wednesday, April 03, 2002
For lucky best wash, use Mr. Sparkle! It seems somehow important that you see this. I can't explain it. Just go look. Trust me. (Link via Xoverboard.)
Sullivan responds... ...not to this space, but to Spinsanity and Romenesko--by refusing to admit any error on his part. As justification, he quotes this piece from Salon, which recounts the story of Moore's battle with his publisher after the book's initial release date of Oct. 2 was put on hold: By mid-October there were 50,000 books out of an announced first printing of 100,000) collecting a month's worth of dust in a Scranton, Pa., warehouse, and ReganBooks had yet to schedule a new release date for "Stupid White Men." It was holding off in hopes that Moore would include new material to address the recent events and would change the title and cover art. in hopes that Moore would include new material to address the recent events, and would change the title and cover art. Moore says he readily agreed to these requests. But once HarperCollins had his consent, it asked Moore to rewrite sections -- up to 50 percent of the book -- that it deemed politically offensive given the current climate. In addition, the Rupert Murdoch-owned publishing house wanted Moore to help defray half the cost of destroying the old copies and of producing the new edition, by contributing $100,000 from his royalty account. Moore was aghast. "They wanted me to censor myself and then pay for the right to censor myself," he declared. "I'm not going to do that!" After close to three months of relentless negotiations that threatened to embarrass one of the country's leading publishing houses, the potentially explosive drama was suddenly resolved when HarperCollins announced on Dec. 18 its plans to publish "Stupid White Men" as is, slating the title for early March 2002. Sullivan acknowledges that "it was unfair for the publishing house to demand that he make a financial sacrifice," which is big of him. But he goes on to argue that "it's simply not true that the book was already published by September 11 and that no changes were in any way possible." Well, take a look at the line in bold type above. I'm no math whiz, but if a warehouse full of books has been gathering dust for a month as of mid-October, wouldn't that mean they've been sitting there since, um mid-September--i.e., since the day of the terrorist attacks, or within a few days of them at most? This reluctant acknowledgement of Sullivan's, of course, completely undercuts the point he was trying to make in his original piece, that Moore avoided the subject in his book because, as a wacko leftist, thinking about it gave him a severe case of the heebie jeebies. As Sullivan also now acknowledges, at least implicitly, Moore did not amend the book for the very straightforward reason that he did not want to spend a hundred grand out of his own pocket and delay the publication date even further--I'd guess this would have pushed the release back to summer, at the very earliest, and more probably next fall or winter. At which point Moore's book would have, at best, a hastily tacked-on afterword, and Andrew Sullivan would still have berated him for barely mentioning the war. (Unless of course, Moore had agreed to rewrite fifty percent of the book at his own expense--a ludicrous demand, whether or not you agree that it constitutes "censorship," and one which would have pushed the pub date back much, much further still.) (Bonus afterthought: this whole discussion of whether or not the book should have been pulped and rewritten is a bit of a red herring, as Sullivan made no such assertion in his initial column. The basic point remains: Sullivan tries to paint Moore as unwilling to discuss the war, when he has, in reality, discussed it at length-- on his website.) (Waiting to for Blogger to come back online so I can post this, I see that Sullivan now explains that he used the word "barely" because he wanted to be sure he made no factual errors. Well. All right, then. Ironic how that one worked out. He also links to one of Moore's accounts of the whole imbroglio, which does little to support the spin he's trying to put on this, as far as I can see.) Sullivan concludes, bizarrely, by accusing Jim Romenesko of having "a gay-left agenda" (as if this is the first time Romenesko has ever pointed his readers toward a journalistic contratemps, and such bizarre, uncharacteristic behavior can therefore only be attributed to devious motivations), and accusing Brendan Nyhan of Spinsanity of harboring an unspecified agenda of his own (as a student, he was involved in bringing Moore to his campus to give a talk, something he acknowledges at the end of his piece), not to mention declaring that "the left wing jihad"--of which he presumably imagines himself a victim--"continues." And further--it is to laugh, I tell you, laugh!--he suggests that both writers owe him a retraction. Let's just acknowledge up front that I myself probably do have an agenda here--I know Moore, and I'm inclined to defend him, at least against something this egregiously off-base. But I've been reading Romenesko for a long time and had absolutely no idea he was either gay or a left-winger--assuming either are true (and leaving aside why either would matter), and Nyhan--well, just read Spinsanity's deconstruction of "Stupid White Men" (it's on Salon Premium now, but it'll be available for free in a few days), and then tell me these guys have a pro-Moore agenda. I don't think so. It would have been a lot easier to just say, you know, I screwed up, sorry about that, and move on. Instead, Sullivan has chosen to quibble over technicalities (i.e., whether or not it was literally possible for this book to have been revised), ignore inconvenient facts ("gathering dust for a month"), and accuse his attackers of harboring secret and unseemly agendas. Remind you of anyone? -------------------- Tuesday, April 02, 2002
Memo to Michael Moore: next time, hire Madame Cleo This is from a critique of the left Andrew Sullivan wrote for the Times of London: There is also barely a mention in (Michael) Moore's book about the current war on terrorism. You can understand why. It raises questions the left simply doesn't want to answer. Was the American intervention in Afghanistan, which many leftists opposed, a liberating mission after all? How can leftists bemoan the removal of a viciously oppressive, sexist, homophobic tyranny? But how at the same time could they support a war conducted by a president inimical to their beliefs and interests? Um...maybe the war on terror doesn't come up because the book had already been printed and was sitting in the warehouse on the morning of September 11, a story with which anyone who pays the slightest attention to Michael Moore is certainly familiar by now--and one that any writer addressing the topic for a major newspaper should certainly have known. I mean, I understand that opinion pieces are not held up to the same standards of accuracy as news stories--I can think of half a dozen columnists off the top of my head who would not have careers if they were--but still. Isn't it a bit much to take someone to task for failing to comment on events which had not yet occurred at the time of his deadline? (I should note, I've only seen the first printing of this book. Maybe they managed to squeeze something about the war into subsequent editions. But even if that's the case, anyone familiar with the publishing industry would understand the last-minute nature of the addition. Except for Sullivan, apparently.) Update: Several readers write to inform me that no such additional material was tacked on to subsequent editions, so consider the implied benefit-of-the-doubt withdrawn. Sullivan writes that the war receives "barely a mention in Moore's book," implicity suggesting that it is mentioned, but quickly glossed over. Any such reference is entirely the product of Sullivan's imagination. Coming up next: why did Charles Dickens refuse to address the war in Vietnam? Does this expose the underlying hypocrisy and cowardice of the so-called social reformers of the Victorian era? Second update: It also occurs to me that Michael Moore has, in fact, written extensively about the war on terror--on his website. You may not agree with everything he has to say, but it is extraordinarily disingenuous to claim he has not said it, particularly when you are contrasting his pre-Sept. 11 trees-and-ink book with an article by another author which has been primarily disseminated online. And one more: I see that the folks at Spinsanity, who are not exactly Friends of Michael, have also made note of this little discrepancy.
Reality check Gary Kamiya in Salon Premium: The Bush administration's foreign policy is in shambles. Each passing day in the Middle East brings new horrors, new bloodshed, new hatred. And it isn't just the Middle East: The bankruptcy of the Republican administration's approach, not just to the most explosive and strategically crucial region in the world, but to foreign policy in general, has become impossible to ignore. In a little over a year in office, Bush has allowed the Israeli-Palestinian crisis to explode from a small brush fire to a raging conflagration; squandered the global goodwill toward the United States after Sept. 11; set back the cause of moderates in Iran with a comic-book invocation of "evil"; endangered key allies in South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Egypt; failed to pursue vital peacekeeping and nation-building efforts in Afghanistan; clumsily pushed the Arab world into greater solidarity with Saddam Hussein; put forward a potentially dangerous new first-use nuclear doctrine; and filled our European allies with contempt and rage at our heavy-handed unilateralism. The Bush administration is rapidly staking a claim as the most incompetent foreign policy presidency in the post-Vietnam era. The most alarming thing is that Bush's foreign-policy train wreck is no accident: He and his advisors planned the whole mess. As Nicholas Lemann pointed out last week in his revealing New Yorker report on the Bush administration's global strategy, key strategists like Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz drafted a brief laying out their aggressive vision of America's global role back in 1990 during Bush I. The centerpiece: a vision of the U.S. as world hegemon, "shaping" (i.e., initiating) rather than reacting to events, and preventing any other country from challenging our domination.
Inside out The other side of the Intel coin from the Chronicle's Jon Carroll. Those of you who do not live or have not lived in the Bay Area may be unfamiliar with Carroll's column; the loss is yours. This is a column he wrote several years back, which spoke to me profoundly during a time of enormous transition and upheaval, when I was contemplating a blind leap of faith into an uncertain future, and wasn't entirely sure I had the courage to do it. He is also much too smart about the online world to ever write something like this.
Corporate stupidity of the day Mark Stephens is trying to stay calm. He's taking deep breaths. He's meditating. But it isn't easy keeping cool when you've angered the biggest semiconductor company in the world. Stephens, founder of the Yoga Inside Foundation in Venice (Los Angeles County), has been duking it out with Santa Clara's Intel Corp. for more than a year over whether his do-gooding nonprofit violates the chipmaker's "Intel Inside" trademark. The two sides are still nowhere close to resolving the dispute . . . Yoga Inside has nothing to do with computers. It provides free yoga classes in schools, reatment facilities, shelters, prisons and underprivileged communities. The nationwide program is represented in the Bay Area at more than a dozen schools and correctional facilities from Petaluma to San Jose. In December, it was honored by Berkeley's Yoga Journal magazine for helping make yoga "come alive in the world." Yoga Inside began with gang members in Southern California juvenile- detention facilities. The "inside" refers to incarceration. "But it has a double meaning," Stephens said. "It also refers to taking yoga within you. At no point in time was there a connection to Intel. It never even crossed my mind." In documents filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Intel notes that the "Intel Inside" logo appears on "millions and millions" of computers around the world, and that the company has spent "billions of dollars" promoting the phrase. Because of this, Intel argues, the linguistic construction "(Blank) Inside," whether concerning state-of-the-art technology or a centuries-old spiritual practice, should uniquely belong to the chipmaker. -------------------- Monday, April 01, 2002
I'm busy, go read this guy instead Okay, so August J. Pollak is a young progressive cartoonist and blogger, as well as a fan of your humble correspondent...but that's not why I'm giving him a very strong recommendation here. His summation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the few things I've read on the topic that seems to strike exactly the right note--you might call it optimistic despair. Or, if you had more time, you might think of a better description. But I don't. Just go read it.
Not necessarily a warbling log Sometimes I stay away from topics in this space until I have written about them in my cartoon, preferring for the former not to step on the heels of the latter. And sometimes, I just don't feel like I have anything more insightful to add to the conversation than, basically, oh, shit. Which is pretty much how I feel as I watch intractable opponents locked into an apparently inescapable cycle of reprisal and counter-reprisal and counter-counter-reprisal, and so on ad infinitum, just waiting for matter and anti-matter to come into contact and blow us all into the next life--except that I don't really believe in a next life, and to tell you the truth, I think the world might be a better place if fewer people did. I understand that this argument can go both ways, that religion theoretically imposes a system of ethical guidelines by which people can live their lives, offering the dangling carrot of of an eternal afterlife to keep them on track (at least, in most cases; the afterlife is not central to Judaism, as I understand it)--and maybe without that, half the population would be off on some nihilistic rampage. I don't know. I don't really buy into it, yet I somehow manage to restrain myself from looting and pillaging, at least most days. And in this world of suicide bombers and jihad and hopes for peace scuttled by squabbling over this or that piece of "holy" real estate--well, it kind of seems like the whole religion thing is pretty much a wash right now. And the thought nags me, as my wife and I walk the dog through the park on a pleasantly mild morning: how much longer until the chaos returns to disrupt the placidity of this scene once again? And --what form will it take this time? Will life again turn into a bad Jerry Bruckheimer movie, as the Onion once put it, or will New York City eventually become Jerusalem, suffering a series of localized tragedies until its citizens think twice before heading to a sidewalk cafe? Waiting for the end of the world... You know what we need? We need an advanced race of alien beings to transport Sharon and Arafat to those rocky outcroppings in the Los Angeles area, the ones they always used on Star Trek, and with the fate of two societies hanging in the balance, they can attempt to outwit each other, until one of them figures out how to fashion a primitive cannon out of a length of bamboo stalk and various chemical compounds lying around in neat piles on the rocks-- Oh, never mind. We are watching as one of Rube Goldberg's unlikely machines is set into motion, but this one will not culminate in delightful amusement as a gloved mechanical hand plucks toast out of the toaster or drops a letter in the mailbox. We are in all likelihood sliding inexorably toward events too terrible to contemplate--as if we haven't had enough of those lately--and as with any series of mishaps which end in catastrophe, there are steps all along the way that you will look back on afterwards and think, if only. But for now, we wait and wonder: what rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem this time, waiting to be born? -------------------- Sunday, March 31, 2002
Because it's still Easter for a couple more hours I found the link to these peculiar images on a blog called Ultrasparky (no relation to our own lovable penguin that I can see). It's a series of...oh, gosh, let's just let the artist explain it: The...images are from 11x14 pencil drawings that are the result of an undertaking that began on Thanksgiving Day, 1987. I was awakened in the middle of the night with a clear, vivid impression that the Lord wanted me to do some special drawings -- drawings depicting ordinary people in their everyday environment . . . . with one important addition: the presence of Jesus Christ and His involvement in those routine activities.
Watch your mouth A woman in Chile is being sued by McDonald's for $1.25 million, for complaining that her son came down with food poisoning after eating one of their burgers. It's true. The story is here.
And because there haven't been enough pictures of my dog around here lately...  ...here he is reading "The Clash of Fundamentalisms" by Tariq Ali, while the cat looks over his shoulder. (Photo not set up, I swear.)
Another roadside attraction...  ...crossed off my list of things to do before I die. Your humble correspondent in front of Lucy the Elephant, in Margate, New Jersey last week.
Blogrolling Gary Farber has put a whole lot of thought into what defines the left, specifically in terms of the war (which he supports). In a personal email, he also notes that the range of debate in blogland is much wider than I have suggested, and he's got the links on his page to prove it. I just don't have the energy to sort through it all today, but I wanted to at least pass it along before this space veers off in some entirely unrelated direction. So go forth, ye, and surf. I have no idea what the name of his blog means, incidentally.
Lazy Sunday Well, thanks for about two million links, give or take one million nine hundred ninety nine thousand and change. I'll do my best to poke through them and get the links page updated before the turn of the next millenium. It's what I get for Posting Without Thinking, I guess, or at least for Posting While Under the Influence of the Head Cold From Hell, said cold being a more worthy adversary than I initially realized. Each time I think I've got it routed, it regroups and attacks on a new front, and suddenly my energy level plummets faster than a tech stock and my brain starts to approach the concept of coherent thought like a wary traveller in an uncertain land. Oh, and did I mention I was up half the night with a pukey dog? We are not lacking for unpleasant bodily fluids here at chez Tomorrow these days, though that's probably more than you wanted to know. But I'm in a good mood today, nonetheless, and for no real reason. Of course, one must always be wary of acknowledging such things. The character in a television series, a police drama, maybe, who says something like, "you know, Chief--for the first time in my life, I'm really happy!"--well, you can bet that some perp is going to take that character out before the end of the episode, allowing either the actor to move on to a better gig, or the producers to rid themselves of a troublesome cast member. So I'm not acknowledging any pervasive sense of happiness or contentment, no indeed--as Captain Kirk declares after depriving his crew and the settlers of Omicron Ceti 3 of a chance to live in paradisical bliss, "Maybe we weren't meant for paradise! Maybe we were meant to fight our way through, struggle, claw our way up, scratch for every inch of the way!" And no, I didn't quote that from memory--who needs a functioning memory when you've got high speed internet access? (My friend Bob Harris, the voice of Sparky in our online animated series, actually does have a functioning memory--in addition to his many other accomplishments, he is a bona fide "Jeopardy!" champion. Me, I need Google.) So. A new week rolls around tomorrow, and the cycle begins anew. Deadlines, as usual, are clustered toward the beginning of the week, so posting here may be sporadic. Then again, it may not. But hey, it's not like you're paying for any of this, now is it? --------------------
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