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Friday, September 06, 2002
Lessons of the past More than 10 years later, I can still recall my brother Sean's face. It was bright red. Furious. Not one given to fits of temper, Sean was in an uproar. He was a father, and he had just heard that Iraqi soldiers had taken scores of babies out of incubators in Kuwait City and left them to die. The Iraqis had shipped the incubators back to Baghdad. A pacifist by nature, my brother was not in a peaceful mood that day. "We've got to go and get Saddam Hussein. Now," he said passionately. I completely understood his feelings. Although I had no family of my own then, who could countenance such brutality? The news of the slaughter had come at a key moment in the deliberations about whether the US would invade Iraq. Those who watched the non-stop debates on TV saw that many of those who had previously wavered on the issue had been turned into warriors by this shocking incident. Too bad it never happened. The babies in the incubator story is a classic example of how easy it is for the public and legislators to be mislead during moments of high tension. It's also a vivid example of how the media can be manipulated if we do not keep our guards up. Complete column here. Worth remembering, as stories like this conveniently begin to pop up. Update: Well, that didn't take long. (Scroll down column to "Bush Misstates 'Facts.'")
If I can't dance in a heavy penguin costume, Because we try not to take ourselves too seriously here at thismodernworld.com: as promised, photos of your humble narrator as a penguin have been posted in the Grab Bag section.
This shape we're in Overview of Changes to Legal Rights September 5, 2002, 11:44 AM EDT Some of the fundamental changes to Americans' legal rights by the Bush administration and the USA Patriot Act following the terror attacks: * FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION: Government may monitor religious and political * FREEDOM OF INFORMATION: Government has closed once-public immigration hearings, has secretly detained hundreds of people without charges, and has encouraged bureaucrats to resist public records requests. * FREEDOM OF SPEECH: Government may prosecute librarians or keepers of any other records if they tell anyone that the government subpoenaed information * RIGHT TO LEGAL REPRESENTATION: Government may monitor federal prison * FREEDOM FROM UNREASONABLE SEARCHES: Government may search and seize Americans' papers and effects without probable cause to assist terror * RIGHT TO A SPEEDY AND PUBLIC TRIAL: Government may jail Americans * RIGHT TO LIBERTY: Americans may be jailed without being charged or being -------------------- Thursday, September 05, 2002
I rest my case Because everything is about television and "American Idol" is the hottest thing on TV this summer, tonight's winner of Fox's create-a-pop-star competition has been invited to sing the national anthem at the Lincoln Memorial on Sept. 11 -- a day of mourning for the more than 3,000 victims of last year's terrorist attacks. At the place where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous "I have a dream" speech, where Marian Anderson was invited by the FDR administration to sing "America" after the Daughters of the American Revolution snubbed her for being black, the "American Idol" winner will make his or her appearance during the day-long ceremonies commemorating the first anniversary of the attacks -- six days before the first single by the newly minted superstar is released. Thanks to alert reader Christopher Loental for this one. You can read the complete column here, but it looks like you have to go through some annoying intermediate stage and supply a birthdate and zipcode. Whether or not they are accurate is, of course, up to you. -------------------- Wednesday, September 04, 2002
It begins The anniversary's a week away, and already we're getting saturation coverage on cable news. Images of the attack will be replayed so continually over the next week, they might as well just cancel their regular shows and run a constant loop--the fire, the collapse, the gasps and cries, until it all completely loses meaning, like a word you've repeated too many times in short succession. September 11 wasn't just some goddamned tv show, and it shouldn't be turned into one now. As one interviewee in this article puts it, "We’re aware of what happened. We know it’s the anniversary. What more is there to say?" Update: the Onion's take on the issue. And an afterthought, because I always have afterthoughts: If I express a certain reluctance to spend the next week wallowing in the emotions of that day--well, unless you were here, you have no idea. This wasn't something I watched on television. I experienced it all in glorious surround-sound three dimensional smell-o-vision, kiddos, and I don't need to buy the souvenir DVD--I've already got the damn memories to last a lifetime. Am I a shockingly callous leftist, putting it all behind me, pretending it never happened, so that I can get on with the important work of denouncing American imperialism? Well, no. I'm a New Yorker, and like every other New Yorker, I've had to live with this one every minute of every day for the past year--choking on the stench of that terrible funeral pyre for weeks; cringing at the sound of low-flying planes for months; and wondering what happens next for...well, for the indeterminate future, that's for damn sure. So I'll be dealing with this in my own way, thank you very much, and you'll just have to forgive me if that includes taking a pass on the Great Vicarious Day of National Grief Hosted By Bryant Gumbel and Sponsored by the Refreshing New Taste of Pepsi Light.
Doublethink... ...was defined as--I'm paraphrasing from memory here--the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one's mind and simultaneously believe them both to be true. (It may be cliche to bring up Orwell these days, but I just reread 1984, and--what can I say?--to deprive ourselves of the wealth of applicable metaphor contained therein would be needlessly self-limiting). Thought of this when I read this bit by Jon Carroll this morning: It is interesting that the oligarchy presents Iraq as (a) a terrible threat to the world with unlimited capacity for raining down death and (b) a nation with a demoralized and scattered army that we can take over in a matter of weeks using our fine new weapons systems and maybe a soldier or two. Complete column here. -------------------- Tuesday, September 03, 2002
Roadside detours I was in Vermont over the weekend and visited the remarkable Shelburne museum, a 45 acre spread onto which various examples of early American architecture have been moved, including an old lighthouse, a train station, a fully-stocked general store, a working printing press, a blacksmith, a covered bridge, and even a fully furnished "1950's house." But that’s just the beginning--the museum also boasts a luxury rail car built in 1890 and—I kid you not—a completely restored steamboat sitting in the middle of a field, two miles from the nearest body of water. The reason I’d heard of the place, and the reason we made it a point to visit, however, was the museum’s current American Wanderlust exhibit of numerous Airstream-style trailers, all of which you are free to wander through. That I am fascinated with these old trailers—not to be confused with modern RV’s, mind you--will not come as a surprise to anyone who has poked around this site long enough to discover the photos of our visit to the Shady Dell trailer park in Bisbee, Arizona, where you can rent old Airstreams and Spartan Manors (fully decked out in period furnishings and acoutrements) like motel rooms—it’s like a museum exhibit, but you get to step over the velvet rope and hang out and play. I’m not going to try to explain why I love these things—you either get it or you don’t. It’s not that I’d ever have any interest whatsoever in actually taking a road trip hauling what is, effectively, a small studio apartment behind my car—but if I had a place to put it, in a backyard or a driveway or something, you can bet I’d try to find one to buy, even if only to use as a studio or a place for adventurous guests to stay when they came to visit-- a guest bedroom wrapped in curved sheets of shining aluminum, a beautifully designed and utterly impractical artifact of a distant era. (Given that I currently live in Brooklyn, it’s not gonna happen anytime soon, but hey, a man’s nothing without his dreams.) The American Wanderlust exhibit is only on display through late October, by the way. * * * I bought a great book at the museum’s gift shop--God Bless Americana, by a guy named Charles Phoenix, who spent a lot of time buying up old fifties-era vacation slides at flea markets and compiled his best finds into a slide show performance, from which this book is apparently taken. It doesn’t sound like a promising concept, I’ll admit, but it actually works really well—these aren’t old advertising photos of models posing in front of tourist attractions, these are the photos the tourists themselves took, and they’re wonderfully evocative, and often side-splittingly funny—the photo of the man wearing the bathing suit his wife made for him is worth the price of the book by itself, not to mention the woman who tours several states always wearing the same purple dress. Okay, it’s probably not for everyone, but those of you who share my obsession with roadside America will probably get a kick out of it. * * * In other news, John McCrea has emailed photos of your humble correspondent wearing a penguin costume for the Flaming Lips set, which I will post as soon as I have time.
A quick one This is a must read (especially for tough minded, independent thinkers who have come to the conclusion, in a tough minded, independent thinking kind of way, that we must attack Iraq because Saddam is a very bad man who has used weapons of mass destruction on his own people yadda yadda yadda). --------------------
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