Hotspur's Naked Singularity

Take Another Little Piece of My Heart

2006-05-23T17:26:00.000-07:00

Long time no blog, I know. And I have lots of legitimate excuses - a wife, an eight-month old baby, a job that's been sixteen hours a day for the last several months. All of which are good reasons.

But none of which, perhaps, are the main reason.

Those of you who are still occasionally lurking around the fringes of this blog in hopes that I might someday get off my ass and start posting more often might recall that there was a time when I tended less toward irate political commentary and more toward what Derek St. Hubbins referred to in "This Is Spinal Tap" as "Spinal Tap Mark II: Jazz Odyssey": free-form fiction and musing from whatever exotic psychological locale my mind was in at the moment. Some of those posts were so personal that I actually took them down; this is not a totally anonymous blog, and at times I felt too exposed, too open. Which is a weird way for me to feel; historically I have a compulsion to vomit myself forward for perusal like Caligula after a big pasta dinner. I actually feel most free when I'm hanging it all out there for everyone to see, warts and all. Like I said, weird.

But lately I feel... I don't know. Tied up. (And not in a good way.) I could comment seventeen times a day about what is now clearly the worst presidential administration in American history, a collection of religious extremists and thugs who loathe the laws they swore to uphold and the system they pledged to defend. But why? To what end? It changes nothing. I'm all for "being the change I wish to see in the world," but I can't stop those criminals, not one bit. They laugh at people like me. You know, Americans.

And I work so hard... and I love what I do, but I'm just tired. Bone tired, physically, emotionally, spiritually. Maybe it's just new parenthood - and don't get me wrong, I adore my daughter - or maybe it's the job, or maybe it's the state of the world, which I feel utterly powerless to remedy. I know, elections in November, etc., but I'll believe the Democratic Party has really grabbed a piece of the zeitgeist when I see it, thanks. I just don't know that I see the point in caring until then, in getting my hopes up for a renaissance in lucidity on the part of an American electorate that has, to this point, shown very little inclination to pay any attention at all to the systematic dismantling of its soul. I know how that sounds. I've bucked up people like me on countless occasions over the past several years. And now I've slid inexorably into the whirlpool with them, slowly at first, but with a coldly certain acceleration.

Have you ever felt so muddled and full of thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears and loves and hates that you CAN'T create anymore? That art feels inadequate to the task of making sense of it all, or even a decent catharsis? That's how I feel. That's how I've felt for months - years, even. I can't be beautiful or graceful or elegant or raw or passionate or ANYTHING about it all. I feel numbed by the enormity of it, watching the water swirl around me as I sink, making no effort to swim or even call for help. Just going slowly down.

Nothing pretty today. Sorry. Just ugly truth.

Free At Last

2006-03-30T13:41:00.000-08:00

I have a very specific nausea reflex when it comes to acts of violence. Like most Americans my age, I'm not generally affected by depictions of violence in film, TV or videogames (although the more graphic the depiction, the less sanguine I remain; the data about such depictions desensitizing test subjects to acts of real-life violence are increasingly conclusive). I'm swiftly moved to the point of physical illness, however, by depictions of violence done to innocents, whether real-life or fictional. I can't bear to stay in the room, for example, while my wife cheerfully digests the true-crime docudrama cable shows produced by Bill Kurtis and his ilk; I know many women, particularly, derive from such programs a sense of vicarious triumph over the understandable anxieties that dog them any time they hear footsteps in a parking garage, and they're welcome to it, but I can hardly stomach the recounting of the cold-blooded slaughter of innocent people, much less the re-enacting of it. (Hell, I got sick once when I accidentally caught the cold opening of a "Law & Order" episode in which two college students using an out-of-town parent's apartment for a little nookie were walked in on by thieves and then methodically blown away, despite tearful pleas for mercy. It may not surprise you to learn I'm not a fan of the show.) This reaction doesn't disturb me; on the contrary, I find my visceral response to such things a welcome confirmation of my own persistent humanity.

All of that is to say that few things sicken me more than when terrorists kidnap innocent people, particularly aid workers or journalists who are there to help non-combatants and get their stories out to the world unfiltered by the military, paramilitary or government powers-that-be. If there's a clearer-cut category of self-defeating evildoing than threatening to take the life of a person not only with whom one has no quarrel, but who is actively trying to do something that aids one's own supposed cause, I can't imagine what it is. I am, for a number of reasons, in foursquare opposition to our misadventures in Iraq, but when I hear of a hostage being beheaded on camera with a knife, for God's sake - no matter who they are: military, contractor, U.N. worker, whatever - my reasoned opposition is sorely, sorely tested. Such acts are not, sad to say, inhuman in the strict sense, but they are acute reminders that the purveyors of "intelligent design" and such nonsense are demonstrably full of crap. We are descended from animals; of that, there is no doubt.

And so today I'm literally overcome with flushed, tangible relief. I rejoice, as I'm sure every person with a beating heart does, to hear that Jill Carroll is a free woman. She says that her captors, though they publicly threatened to take her life on several occasions, treated her well and subjected her to no acts of physical violence at all (although the emotional trauma of her ordeal can only be massive). If that is indeed the case, I am profoundly grateful.

I am not a religious man, but at times like this I often wish I were, if only so I might thank the providence which allowed this mercy to come to pass. I have been sick for three months over Jill Carroll's predicament. Today I am, as my homegirls Emily and Amy would say, a little bit closer to fine.

Welcome home, Ms. Carroll.

jill carroll
Politics
Iraq

Take That, Howie!

2006-03-26T23:03:00.000-08:00

You know, Howard Kurtz used to seem like a reasonable guy, but this Domenech debacle over at Washingtonpost.com has got his moral compass all discombobulated. So imagine my joy to see, via Crooks and Liars, his recent forays into Dittoheadedness utterly refuted - by a plucky young journalist whose passion and righteous indignation had me leaping to my feet like a midnight showing of Norma Rae on TNT. I do believe I've got me a wee crush on Lara Logan. (I assume my wife will forgive me; she's currently swooning over the fellow that plays the "Night Detective" on BBC America. Fair's fair.)

The cause of my infatuation is not merely Ms. Logan's pulchritude, although that is considerable. It's that she clearly takes great pride in her job and has had it up to her cargo vest with right-wing macaws repeating, ad nauseam, the craven falsehood that the problem with Iraq lies not with our war, dear reader, but with the coverage of it. As if sixty people a day weren't dying in that country in the civil conflict they placidly deny exists. Now that my family's got a member serving in our American armed forces in Baghdad (and a shout out to you, Funky, if you're reading), my patience for such outright butchery of the truth is running somewhat short. So is Ms. Logan's, thank goodness - and in the linked clip, from Kurtz's Reliable Sources show on CNN, she demonstrates herself to be a most reliable source indeed.

Of South African birth and sporting an impressive resumé, Ms. Logan lets loose a controlled yet appropriately passionate defense of herself and her colleagues that leaves Mr. Kurtz practically speechless (to be fair, the effect is abetted by a five second time delay, as Ms. Logan is speaking via satellite from a Baghdad rooftop). Wish we made 'em like her in America. (And yes, I'm looking at you, Laurie Dhue, my erstwhile classmate and Jessica Savitch-manqué, who hath leaped from the dubious frying pan of Fox News updates into the pathetic fire of Geraldo at Large; hope it's all been worth losing your soul over, Laurie).

Politics

Excuses, Excuses

2005-12-21T23:31:00.000-08:00

Just so you have some vague idea of why I would disappear for so long... Say hello to Little Lady Hotspur.

Destroying Our Democracy in Order to Save It

2005-12-21T23:07:00.000-08:00

If you're like me, you've shut down. (No jokes; I know how long it's been since my last post, and thanks - I missed you too.) Gone fishin'. Closed up shop and gone south for the winter. Figure you can't change the situation: Bush is it, Bush is gonna be it for over three more years, and with the GOP controlling all three branches of the Federal government, there's no point in wasting emotional energy fighting what can only be a losing battle. Might as well pack it in and wait until 2008, or at least 2006.

But.

But.

But.

In this Salon piece, Michelle Goldberg quotes smart people asking the key question. All this yammering about laws, about facts, about what it means to be an American - it's all come down to a crystalline point so hard and sharp, you could use it to etch the Bill of Rights onto the Hope Diamond. The president broke the law and violated the Constitution. The president, far from being contrite, is defiant about having done so. The president proclaims he will keep right on doing it, and that no one is in a position to stop him.

The rubber has met the road, ladies and gentlemen. This is what it comes down to: In the clearest possible terms, your president has proudly acknowledged destroying this democracy in order to save it.

Which means there is only one question left:

What are we - what are YOU - going to do about it?

A Heartbeat Away

2005-06-28T10:22:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I know - it's been a month since I posted. Some of you have been kind enough to point that out in a gentle and appreciative way, and I thank you. The truth is, there are several reasons why I've been derelict in my duty.

First, I got a new gig - I won't go into the details, but let's just say you should be very afraid - and while I've been having a ball, I've been so busy lately I've had no time to post. Second, frankly, this blog had been sliding toward filterhood for a while - you know, one of those snarky Gawker-type deals where the whole thing just consists of as many tiny postings as one can find (or receive in one's inbox from amateur publicists) and write some sarcastic little in-joke about. My intention was always for Naked Singularity to be more reflective than that, for it to be about thoughtful analysis, not a tangled mass of self-satisfied hyperlinks, hit count be damned. And NS was getting away from that, so I felt a slight reboot wasn't out of order.

Third, and by no means least, there hasn't been a lot going on that I felt anyone needed to hear from me about. The tragedy in Iraq, the Downing Street Memo, Bush's plunging ratings, Episode III sucking less than its predecessors (and ain't that damning with faint praise), Crash and Batman Begins rocking the world, Nikka Costa's new album being the Fat Man and Little Boy of modern pop-funk-soul-rock - these things have all been either self-evident or adequately covered by the Mainstream Media (well, except Nikka's record, but plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose). I've always seen my purpose here as at least partly to point out issues or points of view that may not be getting the play they deserve in the media at large, and I haven't felt an urgent need for that of late.

But today's a new day, and Salon's War Room is reporting today that no less august a super sleuth than Arianna Huffington spotted your Vice President being rushed off the tarmac to a Colorado hospital for emergency EKGs and the like. It's not a smoking crash cart paddle, I'll grant you, but we all know the likelihood of Dick Cheney completing two terms was chancy at best.

So I'll go out on a limb here, because I love using the phrase "you heard it here first" and I'm so rarely proven right in the fullness of time. But here's my prognostication: sometime before January, 2008, Dick Cheney will resign for health reasons - and George W. Bush, who seems determined to see himself as a battler for diversity despite evidence to the contrary, will name to replace him your Secretary of State, Miss Condoleeza Rice. Dr. Rice will then become both the first black and the first female Vice President in American history, thus throwing the race for the Republican nomination in 2008 into complete chaos.

You heard it here first.

News; Politics; News and politics

Chung-Chung!

2005-05-27T11:56:00.000-07:00

Well, let there be no doubt about who's responsible for the multiple messes the world is in. First we found out that the ongoing FUBAR SNAFU in Iraq and surrounding regions was Newsweek's fault. (Whew! Finally, somebody set the record straight! It's so helpful to have the Bushies and their ilk to show us where to direct our mindless rage.)

Now Tom DeLay makes it clear that the real bad guys in all this judge-killin' weren't the psychopaths who pulled the various triggers, and certainly weren't the ones calling in coded language for the judges to be killed (like him).

Nope, the real bad guys are the media.

From Reuters:

"DELAY CLASHES WITH NBC OVER 'LAW & ORDER'
"By Steve Gorman, Reuters

"LOS ANGELES (May 26) - House Majority Leader Tom DeLay accused NBC on Thursday of slurring his name by including an unflattering reference to him on the NBC police drama 'Law & Order: Criminal Intent.'

"DeLay's name surfaced on Wednesday night on the show's season finale, which centered on the fictional slayings of two judges by suspected right-wing extremists.

"In the episode, police are frustrated by a lack of clues, leading one officer to quip, 'Maybe we should put out an APB (all-points-bulletin) for somebody in a Tom DeLay T-shirt.'

"In a letter to NBC Universal Television Group President Jeff Zucker, DeLay wrote: 'This manipulation of my name and trivialization of the sensitive issue of judicial security represents a reckless disregard for the suffering initiated by recent tragedies and a great disservice to public discourse.'

"The Texas Republican went on to suggest the 'slur' against him was intended as a jab at comments he had made about 'the need for Congress to closely monitor the federal judiciary.'

"NBC Entertainment President Kevin Reilly responded in a statement that the dialogue in question 'was neither a political comment nor an accusation.'

"'The script line involved an exasperated detective bedeviled by a lack of clues, making a sarcastic comment about the futility of looking for a suspect when no specific description existed,' Reilly said.

"He added: 'It's not unusual for "Law & Order" to mention real names in its fictional stories. We're confident in our viewers' ability to distinguish between the two.'

"The show, which frequently incorporates stories and themes ripped from the headlines, aired weeks after a white supremacist was sentenced to 40 years in prison for plotting to assassinate a federal judge whose husband and elderly mother were later slain by another man angry at the judge.

"That judge, Joan Lefkow, appeared earlier this month before the Senate Judiciary Committee to rebuke politicians and other public figures who have used inflammatory language to criticize judicial decisions they disagreed with. She said such rhetoric encouraged violence against judges.

"Some leading Republicans used harsh terms to condemn judges earlier this year after courts failed to intervene to save the life of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman who died after her feeding tube was removed at her husband's request but against her parents' wishes.

"At the time, DeLay said, 'The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior.'

Producer Dick Wolf, creator of the 'Law & Order' franchise, took a swipe at DeLay in his own statement on Thursday, saying, 'I ... congratulate Congressman DeLay for switching the spotlight from his own problems to an episode of a TV show.'

"The flap came as ethics questions swirling around DeLay mounted with a Texas judge ruling on Thursday that a political action committee formed by the congressman violated state law by failing to disclose $600,000 in mostly corporate donations.

"The show's season finale drew 14.5 million viewers, but DeLay wasn't one of them. An aide said he heard about the show through his wife, who learned of it from someone else who saw the episode."

(Check out the big lip on Dick Wolf! And I do believe he's a Republican to boot. Just goes to show, "Republican" and "fundamentally insane" don't have to go together like Scott McClellan and James Guckert.)

Now, notwithstanding that I do work in the quote-unquote entertainment industry, kids, I'm no media apologist. I think the state of broadcast TV in general (and broadcast news in particular) is such that every network exec and soi-disant TV journalist in America ought to be walking around with a paper bag over his/her head in shame. (Which also explains why The Daily Show, which is first and foremost a satirical chronicler of said shameful media hackitude, is not only the best but the most profoundly urgent TV show since The Simpsons.)

Having said that, I gotta hand it to DeLay. Even in a party known for surviving scandals by simply being brazenly unapologetic about the dastardly shite they've been caught red-handed at, DeLay sets a new standard. The man is simply unparalleled in his willingness to shift the spotlight onto somebody - anybody - else. If he was discovered in a Capitol Hill washroom in a heavy-petting three-way with McClellan and Guckert, I have no doubt he'd blame it all on the woman who planted the severed finger in the chili at Wendy's.

And he'd get away with it, too. 'Cause the media would lick that chili up.

News; Politics; News and politics; Television; TV

I Think I'm Getting a Military-Industrial Complex

2005-05-24T11:23:00.000-07:00

Pop quiz, politico savants. Who said:

""Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are [a] few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

The answer, of course, is President Dwight D. Eisenhower, on November 8, 1954.

You know, when the wisest president your party has put up in nearly a century is a guy who spent most of his two terms on the golf course, you're in a bad way.

On the other hand, look at those "stupid" Texas oil millionaires now, Ma!

Filibuster? I Hardly Filiknow Her!

2005-05-18T17:02:00.000-07:00

God forbid tiny fringe news outlets like CNN, The Associated Press, and NPR - NPR! - should get their facts right on niggling details like who coined the phrase "nuclear option"; we let it slide because the Mainstream Media are like those sibling-cousins everybody else in your extended family knows are a little slow; we can't just bust on 'em because we're sort of related and all.

But the Senate Republicans are another issue, thank Tip O'Neill (hey, if they can reject evolution, we can reject being genetically related to them; works both ways). And therefore let us be grateful for David Brock (it's really true what they say: there's no liberal convert like a gay ex-Republican liberal convert) and his watchdog website, Media Matters, which, Salon's War Room informs us, has assembled a dandy little rebuttal to the GOP filibuster battle disinformation that's been of late lying around and, shock of shocks, getting reprinted verbatim in the MSM.

The Media Matters fact sheet sets the record straight on malarkey big ("Why, the Democrats' filibusterin' of President Bush's judicial nominees is simply unprecedented!") and small ("Oh yeah? Well... well... We confirmed a lot more of Clinton's judges!"). It won't shut Frist and company up, but at least now if you're being attacked by a frothing GOP senator (and really, is there any other kind?), you know where to get some ammunition for the showdown.

Politics
News and politics

(Insert "Loan Shark" Joke Here)

2005-05-18T16:30:00.000-07:00

THIS JUST IN: There are some weird freakin' people in this country.

From Salon:

"MOTHER: WENDY'S FINGER USED TO SETTLE DEBT

"May 18, 2005 | San Jose, Calif. -- A Pennsylvania woman says her son -- who lost a fingertip in a work accident -- gave the digit to the husband of the Las Vegas woman now accused of planting it in a cup of Wendy's chili to settle a $50 debt.

"'My son is the victim in this,' Brenda Shouey told the San Francisco Chronicle for a story Wednesday. 'I believe he got caught in something, and he didn't understand what was going on.'

"Shouey said her son, Brian Paul Rossiter, 36, of Las Vegas, lost part of his finger when his gloved hand was caught in a mechanical truck lift in December at a paving firm where he worked with James Plascencia, the husband of Anna Ayala, who was arrested last month and was set to be arraigned Wednesday. Plascencia was arrested earlier this month on unrelated charges of failing to pay child support in a previous relationship.

"San Jose police announced last week the finger was obtained from an associate of Plascencia, but they have refused to identify him because he is cooperating in the investigation.

"Shouey said her son was desperate for cash when he gave his finger away.

"'He had a money problem. He owed $50 to this character, James,' Shouey said, adding she just learned of her son's involvement when he called her Monday night.

"Shouey declined to give details of how the finger was preserved, the nature of her son's debt, or whether Rossiter knew why Plascencia allegedly wanted the finger. She said her son is keeping a low profile after undergoing intense police questioning in the case.

"'My son is a happy-go-lucky guy. He thought it was cute to show' the severed finger, Shouey said. 'It's like a man thing. If a woman had her finger severed, she would never show it to anyone. But he would show it to the girls in the office if they asked.'"

It's "like a man thing"? Is she serious? I'm a man, last time I checked, and in the distasteful eventuality I found myself the victim of an industrial accident and suddenly dedigitated, I cannot imagine "showing it to the girls in the office" as some sort of bizarre flirting behavior.

And are there really women out there who would, upon seeing a bloody, severed finger, reward its owner with their company and/or sexual favors?

Can I get a show of hands? Er, fingers?

News

Fubascists!

2005-05-17T00:45:00.000-07:00

God bless Bill Moyers for refusing to take the Bush administration's attempts to muzzle him and turn PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting into yet another right-wing line-toeing propaganda stream spouting the perspectives of Fortune 500 companies on a channel paid for by Joe and Jenny Taxpayer. Christ, but this government makes me sick.

Politics

We Aren't Siamese, If You Please

2005-05-17T00:08:00.000-07:00

THIS JUST IN: Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have actually voted differently on a case before the Court, casting into doubt the long-established theory that they are in fact conjoined twins, perhaps even using the same single brain. (To be fair, comparisons of their respective speeches - based on clandestine recordings smuggled out of Bob Jones University by three liberals working undercover as closeted gay Republicans - have rendered that last bit rather unlikely.)

For their next trick, Naked Singularity has learned, Thomas will appear on American Idol, where he plans to sing the Destiny's Child hit "Bootylicious" while Scalia drinks a glass of water.

(And yes, I know the appropriate term is "conjoined." For that matter, Thailand isn't Siam anymore, either. Sheesh.)

Politics

Tell Me Why I Don't Like Monday (Brunch)

2005-05-16T09:35:00.000-07:00

A smattering of the wise, the weird, and the wonderful from the World Wide Web. Wow! (Free reggie required for the N.Y. Times stuff.)

• Paul Krugman restores balance to the Force by actually discussing the Downing Street Memo in the pages of the Gray Lady. (Naked Singularity, of course, hipped you to it days ago.) Incredibly, no Sulzburger has yet been struck down by lightning for this breach of Mainstream Media etiquette, although the day is still young. Of course, the Other Times's reluctance to talk about the Bushies' now inarguably cooked-up case for war in Iraq is understandable, since the Other Times itself, as we know, contributed to that misbegotten conflict by reporting the crap that was oozing daily from the mouths of Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Wolfie, and li'l Scott McClellan. Oh, the wages of sin are high, and don't begin to cover the nut for an 800-square-foot walk-up on the Upper West Side.

• The Gray Lady also finally gets around to covering the East Waynesville, N.C., Baptist Church scandal; apparently poor Rev. Chan Chandler has been forced to resign for telling his parishioners that God didn't want them if they didn't vote for Bush, and the nine members he had kicked out have been invited back, along with the forty or so who had left the congregation in protest. Chandler plans to start a new church with some of the members who backed him all along - a group which includes, distressingly, most of the youngest of the flock. I don't fully understand what's happened to the place I grew up in, but it seems clear that all that stands between the south and total regression to the Dark Ages is older folks who remember Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Soon I may never be able to go home again.

• In happier religious news, Nick Kristof spotlights the ever-provocative Bishop Spong's new book, The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible's Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love. Seeing liberal Christians fighting to take back their faith from the righty wackos never fails to bring a smile to my hot little lips.

• In a not unrelated Sunday column, Frank Rich takes on the Christian Right's anti-gay frothing, documenting their 30-year effort to demonize homosexuality which is now coming to a boil as a chief offensive in the culture war. He also drags into the harsh light of scrutiny the phenomenon, not new but just lately starting to come out of the closet (as it were), of the Christian Right's loudest anti-gay crusaders being either relatives of gay people (Phyllis Schlafly, Randell Terry, Alan Keyes) or, once the truth doth out, gay themselves (Terry Dolan, Arthur Finkelstein, James E. West). Not that there's anything wrong with that.

• Here in Gomorrah West, the mayoral race is just about over, with City Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa poised to take the job he should have won four years ago and kick Jimmy "The Guttersnake" Hahn to the curb in the process. This, of course, hasn't stopped Hahn from once again trying to defame Villaraigosa with depraved and sleazy eleventh-hour attack ads; this time around, he has a weeping mother of a shooting victim telling Angelenos that Antonio loves child-killers. What is it about politics that brings out the best in our public servants?

• And finally, it's Monday, and this is Naked Singularity - two excellent reasons to provide a link to this week's This Modern World, which tweaks the Right's "War on Rationality." I am in deep gratitude to Tom Tomorrow and, indeed, anyone else who can make laughing matters out of cultural trends which are, in truth, so massively frightening.

Welcome to the Boomtown, folks.

Politics

Try Our Tri-Tip!

2005-05-13T16:21:00.000-07:00

Mystery solved. Now you can enjoy your weekend.

From the Associated Press via Salon:

"FINGER TRACED TO WOMAN WHO BLAMES WENDY'S

"By Greg Sandoval

"May 13, 2005 | San Jose, Calif. -- The finger that a woman said she found in a bowl of Wendy's chili came from an associate of her husband who lost the digit in an industrial accident, police said Friday.

"'The jig is up. The puzzle pieces are beginning to fall into place,' Police Chief Rob Davis said.

"The man is from Nevada and lost a part of his finger in an accident last December, Davis said. His identity was traced through a tip made to Wendy's hot line, he said.

"He said authorities 'positively confirmed that this subject was in fact the source of the fingertip.'

"Anna Ayala, the woman who said she found the finger, was arrested last month at her suburban Las Vegas home.

"Ayala said she bit down on a 1 1/2 inch-long finger fragment while dining with her family in March at a San Jose Wendy's.

"But authorities had said they believed the story was a hoax.

"Wendy's had offered $100,000 for information on the origin of the finger."

Okay, a fingertip. That I can believe. Finally, a little sanity is restored to Dave's World.

News

This Is Your Government On Drugs

2005-05-13T13:45:00.000-07:00

You're not going to believe this.

I heard Randi Rhodes talking about this on Air America yesterday. It was a rerun of the Monday show, I think. My question is, why was I hearing about it for the first time on Thursday? What the hell do CNN and MSNBC and ABC News and CBS News and NBC News do all day? (I know what Fox News does.)

Okay. Breathe, Hotspur.

Here's the offending interchange, from an official transcript of Tim Russert's "Meet the Press" program broadcast this past Sunday, May 8th. Mother's Day. The guest is Gary Schroen, a 32 year CIA veteran and the author of "First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan."

MR. RUSSERT: On September 1, 2001, you began a 90-day phaseout retiring from the CIA. Then came the horrific day of 8:46 AM, September 11, 2001. All our lives changed. You were asked to stay on at the CIA. On September 13th, you were summoned to the office of Cofer Black, the head of counterterrorism for the CIA. What did he tell you? What was your mission?

MR. SCHROEN: The mission was to--the first part of it was to go in and link up with the Northern Alliance, formerly headed by Ahmed Al-Massoud, and to win their confidence and their agreement to cooperate militarily with us. They were the only armed force on the ground in Afghanistan opposing the Taliban. The second part of it was, once the Taliban were broken, to attack the al-Qaeda organization, find bin Laden and his senior lieutenants and kill them.

MR. RUSSERT: Kill them?

MR. SCHROEN: Kill them.

MR. RUSSERT: Wasn't it illegal for us to kill foreign leaders?

MR. SCHROEN: I don't think at that point that the--I think the administration had gotten to the point where bin Laden and his guys were fair game.

MR. RUSSERT: As part of war?

MR. SCHROEN: As part of war.

MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Black gave you specific instructions on what he wanted you to bring home.

MR. SCHROEN: That's true. He did ask that once we got bin Laden and killed him, that we send his head back in a cardboard box on dry ice so that he could take it down and show the president.

MR. RUSSERT: Where would you find the dry ice in Afghanistan?

MR. SCHROEN: That's what I mentioned to him. I said, "Cofer, I think that I can come up with pikes to put the heads of the lieutenants on," which is the second part of what he wanted done. "Dry ice, we'll have to improvise."

Now here are my real questions. What kind of country are we, that we elected twice (well, once) a president who WANTS the severed, bloody head of an enemy brought to him in a cardboard box? Who WANTS the severed, bloody heads of said enemy's lieutenants brought to him on pikes? Who the hell does Bush think he is? Caligula?

And - I'm copping from Randi on this one, but it's the question that popped into my head, too, when I first heard the tape of the show - what the hell is Russert thinking? What kind of ludicrous follow-up to the disclosure of our president's wanting our enemy's severed head brought to him in a box is Russert's "Where would you find the dry ice in Afghanistan?" If it's not apparent from the text, it was clear even listening to the playback on radio that Russert was making a little joke; he seemed utterly unfazed by the revelation that had just been plopped in his lap. Russert, the alleged bulldog interviewer, doesn't even bite a little at the news that the leader of the free world and his minions are freaking barbarians?

I mean, come on. If I hadn't heard the tape myself, I don't think I would have believed it.

What in the world are we doing?

Politics

Repent! (Sort Of)

2005-05-11T12:34:00.000-07:00

Well, it looks like the Reverend Chan Chandler of the East Waynesville, N.C., Baptist Church - you remember, the one who told his parishioners who supported John Kerry to repent or be kicked out of the congregation - has revised and extended his remarks. Unfortunately for him, his previous statements were captured for posterity.

As Salon's War Room says today:

"Chan Chandler, the Baptist pastor who recently banished nine congregants from his North Carolina church for their failure to support President Bush, appeared to change his gospel this past weekend. He told the Associated Press that the incident was a 'great misunderstanding,' and invited the excommunicated members -- who say they were booted for supporting John Kerry last fall -- back into the church for Sunday services. According to Cox News Service, on Sunday Chandler apparently preached reconciliation, urging congregants to 'love on each other' -- which everyone apparently then did, 'circulating for about five minutes, shaking hands and hugging.'"

(To my ear, that's creepily reminiscent of President Bush's skeevy campaign comment in Poplar Bluff, Mo., on Sept. 6, 2004, to wit, "Too many gynecologists aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country.")

"According to the AP, over the weekend Chandler also denied ever having enforced guidelines from a partisan pulpit. 'No one has ever been voted from the membership of this church due to an individual's support or lack of support for a political party or candidate,' he said in a statement through his lawyer.

"He didn't address the fact that, during a taped sermon in October 2004, he admonished, 'If you vote for John Kerry this year, you need to repent or resign.'"

But that's not all. It got worse:

"'We've been catering to Satan, catering to the enemy, we've not been making the stand that God wants us to make,' Chandler told his flock at the height of campaign season. Later, he added, 'If you're going to be offended today, take it up with the most high. I am merely the spokesperson. Don't kill the messenger.' Chandler also offered these remarks for Kerry supporters in the pews: 'Why do you support an unbeliever over a believer? Let me see, do I support a Christian or a non-Christian? Do I support someone who kills babies or I support someone who says, "Let's let 'em live." Do I support someone who says, "Let's marry the gays," or someone who says, "Let's uphold God's law and not"?'"

So what's to be done? How do we deal with this two-bit rabble-rouser? Help may be on the way - from an unlikely source...

"On Monday, Americans United for Separation of Church and State sent a letter to the IRS asking the agency to investigate the matter, on grounds that Chandler's comments violated the no-electioneering laws governing churches and other charities.

"'Pastor Chandler seems to have confused his church with a Republican Party caucus meeting,' said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, the group's executive director, in a statement. 'It's time for the IRS to give him a swift reminder of the laws of the land.'"

Nice work, Rev. Lynn. You know, it's funny; we Americans bad-mouth the Internal Revenue Service all the time, but they brought down Al Capone and now they just may be ready to put this jerk in his place. Maybe it's time we all re-evaluated our opinion of the IRS...

(On the other hand, let's not go all hog-wild.)

Religion

The Blunder of the Beast

2005-05-09T23:35:00.000-07:00

Have some sympathy for the millions of evangelicals the world over who are presumably picking up the shards of their fractured existence. According to pithy McDigest The Week:

"Bad week for biblical literalists, after historians studying a newly discovered fragment of the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament announced that the legendary 'mark of the beast' is probably 616, rather than 666."

Holy white raisins! As faithful Naked Singularity reader Jason H. of San Diego put it, this must mean all those little anti-Christs running around will have to stop torturing the neighbor's Doberman and get their tattoos laser-erased and altered. What a massive pain in the forked tail.

Seriously, don't you just hate it when thousands of years of alarmist religious propaganda are rendered moot in the twinkling of a red, slit-pupiled eye? If the Bible is indeed the divinely inspired Word of God, every syllable to be taken as literal truth, it's no simple matter to call for rewrite on one of the Good Book's oftest-quoted little bon mots. (Not to mention, poor Iron Maiden is going to have to re-record one of their best songs. There, there, Eddie.)

Once you start revising this stuff, where do you stop? Next they'll be telling us that Jacob thumb-wrestled the angel, or that Pilate didn't so much wash his hands as use one of those lemon-scented hot towelettes the geishas start you off with at Benihana. Or that Mary was just a teenager who couldn't bear to tell her parents her boyfriend knocked her up...

Ahem.

Religion

Another Day, Another Impeachable Offense

2005-05-07T21:09:00.000-07:00

Ho-hum. While your big American Mainstream Media was sleeping, Faithful Reader(s), the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times of London was uncovering a three-year-old memo containing the minutes of a July 2002 meeting of the Blair Cabinet. As Salon's Joe Conason reports:

"...Those in attendance included the defense secretary, the foreign secretary, the attorney general, the intelligence chief and Blair's closest personal aides.

"The minutes of that meeting, set down in a memorandum by foreign policy advisor Matthew Rycroft, were circulated to all who were present. Dated July 23, 2002, the Rycroft memo begins with the following admonishment: 'This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents...'

"What the minutes clearly show is that Bush and Blair secretly agreed to wage war for 'regime change' nearly a year before the invasion -- and months before they asked the United Nations Security Council to support renewed weapons inspections as an alternative to armed conflict (my italics). The minutes also reveal the lingering doubts over the legal and moral justifications for war within the Blair government.

"But for Americans, the most important lines in the July 23 minutes are those attributed to Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, who in spy jargon is to be referred to only as 'C.' The minutes indicate that Sir Richard had discovered certain harsh realities during a visit to the United States that summer:

"'C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the U.N. route ... There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.'

"At the same meeting, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw confirmed Sir Richard's assessment:

"'The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.'"

It will not shock you to hear that this little bombshell caused enough of a stir earlier in the week in Great Britain, where it was front-page, "our-top-story" stuff all over the media, that for a brief moment there was actually some question as to whether it might keep Blair from being re-elected. In the event, he kept his job (albeit with a smaller majority), but the fact that so many British subjects not only understood the import of this memo, but cared about its implications for their government and their country, only supports my contention that the average Brit's IQ is at least twenty points higher than the average American's. (I figure it's either the bangers or the mash.)

Now, when I walked into a studio in Santa Monica on Friday morning, having just heard a friend of mine discuss this development on a nationally sydicated radio show during my drive in, I repeated it for my colleagues, wonderful people all and none-too-slow on the uptake. I was stunned to see it sink with barely a ripple; the general reaction was a collective shrug ("I didn't vote for president" was the only verbal response I got, from a twentysomething recently transplanted to L.A. from the upper Midwest).

Why, I wondered in concert with Joe Conason, doesn't anybody care about this in America?

Because in case you hadn't heard, this stuff is kerosene poured on an already blazing fire in the U.K., folks. Blair may have kept his job, but only because there was no serious alternative. Last week New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote a skeptical profile in that magazine on Blair and his re-election efforts, entitled "The Masochistic Campaign," and if Remnick has captured the P.M. at all, the man's on thin ice with his constituents and he knows it. When pressed to explain his continued fealty to the invasion of Iraq on grounds of destroying Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction - despite nearly universal agreement at this point that those weapons did not exist - Blair sticks nervously but stubbornly to his guns like an evangelical at a convention of evolutionary biologists. Saddam had W.M.D. before we attacked, he repeats doggedly, and then somehow, incredibly, managed to get rid of them by the time we got there. (One imagines Blair seeing David Copperfield disappear the Statue of Liberty on T.V., as happened some years back, and then calling Michael Bloomberg anxiously to offer Britain's full assistance in tracking it down.)

As Blair admits, in his mind September 11 changed everything; whereas before bin Laden's attacks he would have erred, as he says, on the side of non-action, he now feels compelled to err on the side of action. This seems an incisive insight as well into the mindset of the Bush administration, if we shall be charitable and grant their sincerity in the matter. As Blair puts it to Remnick, in the wake of the attacks the issue became simple: regimes which may present threats can no longer be permitted to stand, and since Saddam Hussein had been long known to represent at least a potential threat - and, crucially, was believed, according to what we now know was highly selective and frequently erroneous intelligence, to be in violation of United Nations resolutions - Blair had no choice but to line up behind Bush and go into Iraq. Under the stress of the aftermath of 9/11, the logic, paranoid and self-serving though it was, made sense to both leaders.

And thus they failed us. What the new revelation of the Downing Street memo makes unmistakably clear is not only that the decision to invade Iraq was made long before the tanks rolled into Baghdad - a fact well known to those of us familiar with Paul Wolfowitz's 1996 Project for a New American Century article laying out a thorough invasion blueprint lacking only the pretext so thoughtfully provided by Osama bin Laden - but that Bush and his representatives lied publicly, repeatedly, knowingly, about that decision. They intentionally misled the American public and the world, in order to invade a country which posed no threat, because the dictator they had installed there twenty years before had long since ceased to do what they told him to. (And, of course, because he had "tried to kill Dubya's dad.")

And now most Americans, and virtually all American media organizations, perhaps eager to forget their own complicity at the time, are ignoring the story. We don't like being reminded that we're not always the good guys. We don't like that at all. We don't like it so much, we're willing to turn two blind eyes to the worst president since Herbert Hoover, just so we won't have to look ourselves in the mirror and face what we see there.

But straw boaters off to the Brits, who at least have the decency to act properly ashamed of what their government did in their name. Would that we might show as much character as a nation.

Politics

Blessed Are The Bigots

2005-05-07T20:43:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the longish layoff, Faithful Reader(s). Sometimes one is lucky in having enough work that the luxuries of life, like blogging and sleep, have to take a back seat for a while. Silly me, I was afraid that by the time I had a moment to post, there might be nothing going on worth posting about.

Fortunately, the morons of the world just keep chugging along, doing the moronic things that they do. Down in North Carolina, ABC affiliate WLOS-TV is reporting that the Reverend Chan Chandler, pastor of the East Waynesville Baptist Church, has given nine members of his flock an ultimatum: support George W. Bush, or resign their church membership. To their credit, many of the church's congregation are disputing Chandler's right under Southern Baptist bylaws to cast members out for political disagreement with their preacher; more than forty members have left East Waynesville Baptist in protest, proving once again that most southerners, and most Christians, are not as stupid or intolerant as the idiots who claim to lead them. Rev. Chandler has had no comment, other than to assert that his "actions were not politically motivated."

Blessed are the bigots, for they shall make asses of themselves.

Religion

Level 42

2005-05-02T23:20:00.000-07:00

The weekend is over and the money crunchers at Disney are kicking up their heels. The long-awaited film adaptation of Douglas Adams's 1980 novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy arrived in theaters on Friday, and it soundly thrashed XXX: State of the Union at the box office, to the surprise of everyone in Hollywood, none of whom would ever be caught dead reading a piece of geek cult fodder like Hitchhiker's. (Who am I kidding? Make that: none of whom would ever be caught dead reading.) Oblivious as they are to the fact that Hitchhiker's $21.7 million total is probably more a reflection of a huge fanbase who've been waiting twenty-five years to see this film than a true indicator of its global financial legs, the denizens of the Hollywood brain trust are busy reading all the wrong messages from this.

(My favorite quote, from Rory Breuer, Head of Distribution for Sony, whose Vin Diesel-less XXX brought in a measley 13.7 million: "Certainly, we're disappointed, because it's a film we all believed in. We have Ice Cube, who is a big star, and I think he's one of those rare actors who really can do just about anything." Yeah, Rory, those of us who couldn't get enough of his Hamlet at Lincoln Center last year are just as shocked. Not to mention his Willy Loman at the Long Wharf: a revelation, pure and simple. Sigh... Just another case of the spaceman keepin' the brother-man down.)

In any case, the movie itself, for those of you who care, is a bit of a mixed bag; certainly it's bound to provoke some lively after-theater coffee conversation, especially if you or your date is a fan of the book. The reactions of the fan community, and reviewers in general, have been all over the map. Some Adams enthusiasts, including several close friends of his and/or participants in the first BBC radio play version of the story, have proclaimed it to be all the author would have hoped, had he not died of a heart attack on a treadmill in the gym of a Santa Barbara hotel in 2001 (he had a hand in the script before his death). Even some reviewers who have no particular love of the book seem amused. Others, however, don't see what all the fuss is about, saying the movie isn't bad, just not that... funny. And some hardcore fans have been outraged at what they perceived as a hailstorm of radical plot changes.

There are plot changes, it's true, but they don't amount to much: a couple of extra characters (John Malkovich's Humma Kavula, the heretofore unnamed opponent defeated by Sam Rockwell's Zaphod Beeblebrox in his campaign to become President of the Galaxy, and Anna Chancellor's Questular Rontok, Zaphod's heretofore unnamed vice president and would-be lover - neither of whom matter much in the grand scheme of things), a modified love triangle (between Zaphod, Zooey Deschanel as Trillian, and Martin Freeman's Arthur Dent, the putative protagonist), an added prop (the Point-of-View gun, which zaps one's quarry with a few minutes of seeing things from his attacker's perspective). And anyway, as Adams often said, every version of the Hitchhiker's universe, from the radio plays to the books to the BBC TV mini-series to this, has been altered to fit its medium; the results are best seen, he advised, as alternate-universe versions of the same basic story.

Adams wrote for, and was clearly influenced by, Monty Python; the sense of humor of the books is wry, subtle, and fairly intellectual if supremely silly. The difficulty of translating that tone successfully to film was one major cause for the length of time it took to get this movie made, and constituted perhaps the main reason many fans of the books feared - or hoped - that a cinematic version would never come to pass. Does it work? In some aspects, yes - but perhaps not surprisingly, it often works best where the filmmakers, U.K. video-meisters Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith, A.K.A. "Hammer & Tongs," and co-screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick, come up with new, more cinematic whimsies in that same ol' Janx spirit.

The movie opens, for example, with a song-and-dance number, "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish" (hear it here), performed by the dolphins of Earth immediately prior to their fleeing our planet, which, being the second-most intelligent Earth species (humans are only the third), they know is about to be demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. (If that strikes you as funny, you'll probably like the movie.) Another good example is the handling of the titular Guide itself, a sort of e-book which has been elegantly rendered not only with Stephen Fry's tone-perfect voice-over of the entries, but also with Flash-like animation which does not simply visualize the narration but complements it. The entry on the Improbablity Drive which propels the protagonists' spaceship Heart of Gold, for instance, verbally describes the Drive's conception as the result of long hours of lonely, thankless work even as it visually depicts its socially maladroit scientist-creators banging on their lab ceiling with a mop handle in anger at a raucous party upstairs - a party of the sort to which, the Guide mentions sadly, they are never invited. (Again, if this strikes you as funny, you'll like the movie.)

But the possibility for such visual additions points up the reason fan reactions can be so all over the map. A lot of the fans who disapprove of the movie seem to do so because the characters and scenes don't look like what they imagined in their heads. (I will allow this was a reaction I shared.) Peter Jackson got around this by bringing in long-time Lord of the Rings artists to generate conceptual art and design cues for his adaptation of the Tolkien saga, and the result was legions of blissful fans who were treated to the spectacle of already familiar visualizations being brought to life.

The Hitchhiker's crew couldn't do that, however, for two reasons. One, there is not the same wealth of fan-generated or -approved art out there for Adams's books. Two, Adams himself was not a very visual writer. Read the books again now and you'll be struck by the thoroughly verbal nature of the enterprise (which did, to be fair, start out as a radio play). The physical descriptions are few and far between (contrast them to Tolkien's, which went on for whole chapters at a time). Adams tends to describe things in a manner calculated for humorous value, not visual fulsomeness:

"Space," the introduction to the Guide states, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space. Listen..."

Funny, yes, but if you don't know what outer space looks like beforehand, you're not likely to be able to imagine it more effectively now. And when it comes to things we haven't seen before - like, say, Marvin the Paranoid Android (voiced by Alan Rickman), one's of Adams's most inspired creations, a robot prototype with personality programming whose demeanor is at once egomaniacal and morose - well, all Adams gives us is the word "android" and the fact of two little red triangular-shaped eyes. The reader has plenty of room to draw in the rest in her imagination, and legions of fans have done just that. (Mine looks like See-Threepio.) Fine and dandy for a book - but when a movie, as it must, fills in all those missing details, the result can be significantly at variance with what the reader pictured.

The filmmakers worsen the situation by frequently changing what little was actually described in the books. The Heart of Gold, which Adams wrote looked something like a giant running shoe, has been rendered here as a giant sphere, for instance. Marvin's eyes, while indeed triangular, are green instead of red, for no apparent reason. That's not such a big deal; that his head has been rendered as another giant sphere in what is either design continuity or a crass attempt at selling Marvin plushies or both, however, is. (Much of the film's design work is, in fact, inspired, but one wonders why the filmmakers chose to depart so freely from what few concrete cues they actually had.)

And then there's the issue of taking characters written as British and turning them into Americans. This seems to bother a lot of fans, particularly in England, and I can understand their pain. The script turns some of these changes into virtues (Arthur, on finding out his friend Ford Prefect (Mos Def) is not from Guildford, as he has been led to believe, but rather from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse: "Well, that explains the accent..."), and the actors are winning enough that I, for one, was not bothered. Of course I'm American, so as I read the book for the first time at the age of twelve, in my mind, I must confess, so too was Trillian. Ford, being an alien, was kind of fuzzy for me, his bland car-model name somehow connoting the aregionality of TV spokesmen; thus Mos Def jibes okay with the vision in my head. Your mileage may vary.

I always had very specific ideas on Zaphod, however, who is described by Adams as a sort of hippie rock-star type with a megawatt smile and a rather small brain; I used to picture him as a two-headed, Plastic Ono Band-era John Lennon. Sam Rockwell, never short on creativity, has made him instead a 70s southern rocker - he would look very much in place onstage with .38 Special - and added a Dubya-esque accent that, while entirely outside Adams's intentions, matches nicely with the character's cluelessness. The resolution of the love triangle in this telling, combined with Rockwell's choices, makes Zaphod less the charming rogue of the books, however, than just an amusing doofus, a change which does not redound to the story's benefit.

By far the most successful characterization belongs to Bill Nighy, who takes Slartibartfast, craftsman of coastlines and a bit of a cypher in the book, and makes of him a living, breathing, slightly befuddled tinkerer who takes justifiable pride in his work. He's like a shy Swiss watchmaker, the latest of a long line of master artisans who derives all his happiness from a well-placed cog, and he somehow embodies the sweetness of Adams's worldview in a way that no one else - not even Freeman as Arthur - manages to do. If there's a sequel, I have one request: more Slartibartfast, please.

One could quibble over this or that detail, but I like forests more than trees, so I won't. My moviegoing companions were split in their reactions; Sweetness & Light, like myself a fan who had not read the books in a long time, was fairly pleased overall, while Big Joe, a newbie, found the whole thing "just not that funny." I feared as much. The handling of the property is so loving and gentle that opportunities for excitement - which are not that plentiful to begin with and thus not to be squandered - are passed by in favor of maintaining the droll, meandering pace and tone of the original prose. The script, while incorporating several bits from Hitchhiker's sequels, unwisely omits two of the best action sequences from the second book, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: one, in which our foursome escape the titular restaurant, Milliways, in a stolen spaceship programmed to be autopiloted into a supernova as part of a rock band's reeeeeeeally big stage show; the other, the sequence at Milliways itself, which was part of the original radio play and which plays something like a Vegas show directed by Terry Gilliam as diners protected in a temporal bubble watch the universe end over... and over... and over. This movie could have used the suspense and fun of these sequences, so I'll add to my break-in-case-of-sequel requests: Milliways, Disaster Area, and Hotblack Desiato, please.

Is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy everything fans have hoped for? I'd have to say no. But it's no worse than the BBC TV show, and better than we had any reason to expect from Disney, the studio where live-action generally goes to die. Props to the Mouse for handing this project to Brits, who understand it best; points off for entrusting it to a director/producer team whose experience is all in commercials and music videos. (Someday some clever studio exec may actually figure out that making a two-hour movie requires a sense of long-form pacing and character that wunderkinder who've never made a film longer than three-and-a-half minutes simply haven't yet learned. Today, sadly, is not that day.) It's diverting, and yes, it's amusing in places. But it's not definitive, and probably never could be.

For that, you'll just have to read the book. Ain't that always the way?

Movies

Over One Thousand Served!

2005-04-30T10:29:00.000-07:00

It gives the staff here at Naked Singularity tremendous pleasure to announce the marking of a milestone: Late last night, while we were all off seeing The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, this site received its one-thousandth visitor!

(Brief pause for wild applause, cheers, catcalls, gushing confessions of love, etc.)

The lucky customer is a Mrs. Edith Turnipseed, 57, of French Lick, Indiana, who happened across Naked Singularity last night at exactly 11:23 pm, Central Standard Time, while performing a web search on Costa Rica for her granddaughter's 7th grade anti-drug report. One thing led to another. She uses AOL; what can I tell you?

Mrs. Turnipseed was more than gratified by the festivities surrounding her arrival. She writes: "As a contributor to the Family Research Council, I am pleased to see that the violence on your blog is minimal, and the sex largely restricted to mood, tone, and metaphor which no ordinary person can make any sense of, anyway. Points off for the word "naked" in the title, however. And I do wish you'd stop using such big words."

Criticism accepted in the spirit in which it was given. For her inadvertant singularity, Mrs. Turnipseed will recieve a 2001 Kia Spectra courtesy of Bigg Dogg's Pre-Owned Auto Mart in Macon, GA - retail value: $299.99!

Thanks for the visit, Mrs. T. And to the rest of you who contributed hits to the counter in this, perhaps the most auspicious blog launch in the history of modern media, we here at Naked Singularity salute you - and thank you, from the bottom of our hot little hearts, for your support.

You... you complete us.

Men of Steel

2005-04-29T14:25:00.000-07:00

It's Friday, and in a new Naked Singularity tradition I am hereby declaring, that means it's time for Hotspur to gush.

You might not know it from my erudite manner and Cary Grant-ish accent and physique, but your Friendly Neighborhood Fire God is something of a pop culture junkie. Being the generalist that I am, I can't claim to match the fanboy monomania of some of the Comic Book Store Guys out here in cyberspace, but the diary of my heart is replete with entries chronicling the crushes, infatuations, obsessions, heartaches, and long-term romances I've had with various denizens of the pop-cult multiverse. (Last week you met one, Nikka Costa.)

This week's torch is lit in honor of a coming attraction featuring one of my all-time favorite fictional creations: the son of Jor-El, the last survivor of Krypton, the original stranger in a strange land, the heir to Hercules and Beowulf and Galahad, the prototypical superhero.

Still don't know who I'm talking about? Check Shaquille O'Neal's bicep tattoo.

It's more than just the fact that, with the creation of Superman, whole genres - whole media, practically - came into being or gelled into their modern forms. His historical significance needs no elaboration. At one point in the 20th century, one pithy observer noted that there were three fictional names known to practically every human being on the face of the planet: Sherlock Holmes, Mickey Mouse, and Superman. That's all impressive, but my fondness for the character supercedes (as usual) any influence from elsewhere; even if he was the lowliest, most pathetic demigod in the comic book universe, I'd still love him best.

Almost alone most major superhero characters, Kal-El is not moonlighting when he's flying around in the cape - he is the cape. He's a good boy, saved by birth parents who sacrificed themselves that he might live, raised by loving foster parents who have no truck with moral ambivalence, and he wants badly to make all his parents proud of him. There is right, he is taught, and there is wrong; the right generally involves doing something to help someone else, and the wrong generally involves putting your own wants above the well-being of others (see my recently discussed list of political principles for elaboration and an insight into how this mindset has influenced my own). The problem, of course, is that he is fighting an unwinnable battle; he can never fully succeed at the mission his parents give him, because there's always someone else who needs saving (hell, three of his four parents are dead before he even gets out of high school, so he'll never even hear most of them tell him he's a good son).

So Superman is motivated not by a need for revenge, the chic raison du jour in this self-involved, paranoid era, but rather by an honest fealty to an ideal of what being a truly good person means. Superman has a dark side, but it's not the darkness of Batman or Daredevil or Wolverine - it's the Sisyphean weight of literally unfulfillable responsibility. Frank Miller, in the Dark Knight books, depicts him dismissively as a prig, a self-superior boy scout, but that's just because Miller can't wrap his brain around the man's situation, so obsessed is he with his own Catholic impulses of sin and expiation. In his vision, Batman and other heroes well acquainted with Superman's history always refer to him not as "Superman" or as "Kal-El" but as "Clark"; Miller doesn't get even the most basic fact of the character's identity. "Clark Kent" doesn't exist; he's an alias, a cypher. Superman, the real man, is an alien; he looks human enough to pass, but he never loses that sense of not belonging, of being an outsider, a poser. He is a great and a good man, but the moral politics of his calling require that he hide his light under a bushel, and he's forever unable to shake the constant, nagging fear of being found out. I find him fascinating and deeply sympathetic, and yeah, if you're into that cocktail party question, I would choose the power of flight faster than you could say "Rocketeer." I also dig the suit.

Anyway, enough armchair analysis. What I really came here to do is give you a peek at the new Superman.

Bryan Singer is currently directing Superman Returns for Warner Brothers in Australia (the writers are Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris, who previously worked on Singer's X2). After the way Joel Schumacher eviscerated all that was worthy in the Batman franchise - and God bless Chris Nolan, by the way, whose Batman Begins looks to set that train back on the rails this June - any fan of DC characters (and I'm one of the few who will admit to preferring them to Marvel's as a group) would be forgiven for feeling trepidation at the prospect of a new opportunity for Hollywood to screw up the greatest name in the pantheon. Happily, such pessimism seems thus far unwarranted. Singer professes a love for the first two Donner/Lester films from the 70s - indeed, he took the job knowing it might well queer his relationship with Fox and X3, which it did - and has proven it by publicly proclaiming his intention to use John Williams's spectacular theme music and to make his movie a sequel to Superman II. (But wait, the eagle-eyed among you shout; weren't there already sequels, viz. Supermen III and IV? Yes, and they sucked. That Singer knows this and has chosen to ignore them is further proof that he was the right man for the task.)

A few details about the Donner/Lester films. Richard Donner, now known as a very solid mainstream Hollywood director/producer, shot footage for both Superman and Superman II during principal photography for the first film. For reasons which are still in dispute, producers Ilya and Alexander Salkind took the second film away from him before the first had been released - the early buzz was negative, though it turned out to be wrong - and had Richard Lester (A Hard Day's Night) finish the job. I like both movies, but the fanboy contingent argues incessantly that Donner was unfairly screwed (which he was), that Lester was a catastrophe (which he wasn't), and that Warners ought to release the Donner version of Superman II, as if such a thing even existed.

But none of that hullabaloo mattered, ultimately, because of one man: Christopher Reeve.

It may surprise some of you to know that Reeve is a controversial figure in the disabled community; most able-bodied folks assume that he must have been as towering a hero to disabled people as he was to the rest of the world following his accident. In fact, that is not uniformly the case. Many disabled folks saw his insistence that he would one day walk again as a rejection of the realities of their lives and a tacit endorsement of the notion of disability as a fate worse than death. Regardless, my memories of Chris Reeve come dressed in a sky-blue leotard, and a more gratifying personification of the Man of Steel it is hard to conceive. He had the requisite height and he gained the requisite muscle, but Reeve was an accomplished stage actor and from the beginning he grasped the underlying truths of the character. His Clark Kent is a comic tour de force, but Reeve knows "Clark" is just an act; when the tie comes off and the cape comes out, Reeve believes totally in the essential goodness, the self-sacrificing decency, of the man he's playing. He simply becomes Superman - makes him flesh-and-blood and human while rendering utterly plausible his quasi-divinity - in a way unthinkable before or, for me, since.

It's very gratifying, therefore, to see that, at least in terms of looks, Bryan Singer is really sticking to the blueprint. The photos of the new Superman, Brandon Routh, are striking insofar as the effort made to make Routh look like Reeve. Check out these Clark Photos. Here's Reeve:

And now here's Routh:

Spooky, huh? And I just love how the clothes and the haircut are almost identical. Singer clearly isn't kidding when he says he's continuing the story from Superman II. I wish he were being as faithful with the main event:

Granted, Routh looks great, and I like the beveled edge on the shield. I'm not crazy about the darkening of the red to maroon (I'm hoping this is just a dark or improperly timed shot, but Singer is on record as saying the cape and trim are maroon, not red, despite the fact that anyone who's ever used a color wheel knows cyan wants red, not maroon, as a complement) and the smaller chest shield diminishes, in my mind, what should never be diminished.

Nonetheless, the overall effect is still super.

Oh, and if you're interested in seeing Singer, Routh, and the rest of the crew in action, Rastar shot some great amateur video on the set in Sydney a couple of weeks ago and has cut it together to the theme music. It's a terrific first look at the next chapter in my personal favorite mythology.

June 2006. Can't hardly wait.

(Fanboy geekout postscript: I'll be seeing The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy tonight, a movie I've only been awaiting for twenty years. Review to come...!)

Politics

The Crow Flies North

2005-04-29T11:40:00.000-07:00

The Blog-A-Thon continues: Laine of As The Crow Flies... has flown in and perched on the interviewee's couch, thence to be incisively analyzed by yours truly. So without further ado, here are your questions, Madame Crow:

HOTSPUR'S BLOG-A-THON QUESTIONS FOR LAINE

1. A movie is being made of your life, and, shockingly, you have veto power over every choice made in the production. (Hey, this is fantasy.) Who do you choose to play you, and why?

2. Recount your most vivid and memorable dream, and what you came away from it with (what you thought it meant, if you're into that, or just the response it provoked in you).

3. You are, as Sole U.S. Legislator of the Day, allowed to make one ironclad national law which can never be revoked without your consent. Describe that law and the reasoning behind it.

4. How has your experience of being a parent differed from what you expected before the fact?

5. Tell us one thing you've never told anyone before. Ever.

Earn This

2005-04-28T16:13:00.000-07:00

THIS JUST IN: The Associated Press, via the Washington Post, is reporting that the Pentagon has finally relented after over three years and released photos of flag-draped coffins containing the remains of United States military personnel being returned from Afghanistan and Iraq. Mighty Christian of 'em.

How nice to see that "Support Our Troops" is no longer just a bumper sticker to Dubya and Rummy. Now maybe we can see about getting those kids some armor. Or am I just being hopelessly naïve?

Politics

The Thrill of Victory, The Agony of Defeat

2005-04-28T14:41:00.000-07:00

Poor Dennis Hastert. He and the House Republicans have officially thrown in the towel on their attempt to defang the Ethics Committee after Democrats simply refused to meet if the committee wasn't going to have any power to do its job. I gotta tell you, Denny, Tom DeLay simply isn't worth the public approval hit you guys have been taking on this thing as you've circled the wagons; he's lower than the insects his company exterminates. Oh, but you already figured that out, didn't you? Hence the surrender.

I also have to hand it to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Bush and his Congressional allies have been stymied at every major turn since the second term began in January. Social Security privatization? Sorry. Using the federal government to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case? Not so much. John Bolton as U.N. ambassador? Doesn't look good. And now this. (Yeah, they passed the Bankruptcy Bill, but with the financial lobby outweighing the consumer lobby by about a billion dollars to none, there was no realistic way anybody was going to stop that one.) Plus, the chances of Bill Frist actually pushing the little red button on the "nuclear option" are looking weaker than Condi Rice saying, "I think the title was something like 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside The United States.'"

So despite GOP control of the executive branch, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, and much of the federal judiciary, if you're scoring at home (or even if you're by yourself, bah-DUM-bump) the card now looks like this:

Democrats.....4
Republicans....1

With a Dem in scoring position and no outs. This is David-and-Goliath stuff, folks.

But then again, a few months ago the Boston Red Sox came back from an 0-3 deficit to beat the Yankees and win the World Series, didn't they? Must be something in the water...

Politics

Interview with the Fire God

2005-04-27T02:12:00.000-07:00

So Cricket over at Boobs and Legs has started this little diversion called the BLOG-A-THON, where one blogger gets asked questions from another and posts the responses, and then asks questions to any other blogger who wants to join the fray. My questions come courtesy of Rednaked (of Rednaked Woman), and a dandy set they are. So buckle up tight - and keep your arms and hands inside the vehicle and on the bar in front of you at all times - as we take off on the E-ticket thrill-ride that is an unfiltered glimpse into the mind of your Friendly Neighborhood Fire God...

REDNAKED'S BLOG-A-THON QUESTIONS FOR HOTSPUR:

1. Where do you expect to be seven years from now? (In any or all life aspects.)

Umm... I was told there would be no math...

Seven? Not five? Not ten? ('Cause those I have answers for.)

Sorry. This is serious. I'll be serious.

The easy answer is: Seattle. Next year in Seattle.

The harder answer is to the unspoken question: Doing what? And that, I do not know. I can't imagine I won't be writing, which is what I do more of nowadays than anything else (screenplays seem unlikely to be a big hit up there, so maybe I'll turn to novels or plays). I hope I'm making music in some way, shape or form (and I don't mean just sneaking out to karaoke bars; I need to play some bass again, and write and record some music). Directing some theatre, perhaps; maybe even filmmaking, if I feel the urge. Eating some really fine Alaskan salmon on a regular basis. Drinking better coffee than in L.A. Playing with my kid.

It's not that I have no ambitions, but you didn't ask what I hoped or wanted to be doing, you asked what I expected. And if I've learned anything in all my travails, it's that life has a way of mocking one's expectations. John Lennon said life is what happens while you're busy making other plans, and I think I've finally come around to focusing on that and not worrying so much about the plans themselves. In seven years I'll hopefully be doing things that make me happy; if they make me prosperous and successful as well, so be it.

2. What do you wish you had more time in your daily life to do?

Besides all of the above? Read, think, create, watch movies, exercise, play piano, sing, spend time with the people I love.

3. If you were to run for a political office, what would your slogan and platform be?

Ah. I sense the good Rednaked Woman is trying to draw me out a bit... Well, no sweat. I am not known for my reticence.

Slogan: Common Sense, Common Ground.

Platform: Well, let's talk philosophy first. Let's start with the really important stuff.

I believe the Enlightenment was a good thing. I'm not a big fan of the Dark Ages, and I am discomfited almost as much by the current threat of their return as I am by the number of people, in America and worldwide, who seem utterly unconcerned by that threat.

I believe in empiricism over religion when it comes to matters of governance. We can never all hope to agree on who (or if) God is or what s/he wants us to do, and in any case the issue is moot; the principal point of law and government is to provide a means by which human beings can get along in the same general space without killing each other. Therefore, screaming at people, hurling epithets, dividing the populace according to religion, race, gender, sexual orientation, region, class, or anything else is manifestly counterproductive to the purpose; the more people define themselves by what separates them from their neighbor rather than what unites them, the more impossible it becomes for them all to coexist. I submit to you that coexistence is a value. If you think your god wants you to kill or oppress me, you and I have a serious problem and need to step outside.

I further believe that the proper function of government - and this is so obvious, it astounds me we can't all agree on it - is to help people where it can and get out of their way the rest of the time.

(A lot of people have been misled by the Republican Party into thinking that liberals want government involved in every aspect of their lives. This is hogwash. Liberals want government to help people live better where it can. And some Republicans are hypocritical on the issue; they only want government out of their lives in the areas they want them out of their lives in. They're happy to get all up in your bedroom, your doctor's office, your hospital room, your funeral, etc.; they're happy to use government to impose their religious or "moral" views on you in your private life, even where no reasonable person could discern any possible harm to them either way. Cf. Whoopi Goldberg on gay marriage: "Don't want gay people to get married? Then don't marry one.")

Anyway, as a guiding principle for governance, I think that credo is plenty: Help people where you can, and then get out of their way.

As for platform planks... Franklin Roosevelt, in his 1944 State of the Union address, set out a vision of a second Bill of Rights, "under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race or creed," including:

"The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.
"The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.
"The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.
"The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad.
"The right of every family to a decent home.
"The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.
"The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.
"The right to a good education."

Now, as Frank Herbert noted the other day in the right-coast Times, imagine a president today saying something like that. It's almost inconceivable; he'd be ripped to shreds in the Fox-Limbaugh-Dobson echobox. And yet, I think those are entirely appropriate goals - indeed, in a country with as much creativity and resources and wealth floating around as ours has, it is in no way unreasonable to consider them rights. We have the material ability to ensure them; we lack only the political will. Were I running for office and looking for a concrete platform, this list would make a pretty damn good start.

4. What are your prejudices?

This is an excellent question, and a vital one for a liberal. Conservatives are supposed to be oblivious to their own biases; it's part of the job description these days. But liberals are lampooned for the opposite - taking on so much guilt for crimes for which they themselves can hardly be indicted that they snap like joss sticks at a Dead concert under the weight of cultural shame. It's a fair cop. So I'll answer the question as honestly as I can.

I am prejudiced against people who don't use whatever brains they have. I do not think less of them if they are not as smart as I am - they have no more control over what intelligence they are born with than do I over mine - but I most certainly think less of them if they don't have the drive to think as much and as well as they are capable of doing. Stupidity is not a sin; mental laziness is.

I am prejudiced against people who habitually put their own personal interests above those of others, particularly when those others form a community of which they should by rights be considered part. I don't know what higher human aspiration there could be than to make someone else's life a little better just because it's within your power to do so. This is not entirely altruistic; if enough people did it, we'd all be doing it together and we'd all be a lot happier. But especially living in Los Angeles and working in the entertainment industry, I've just about had it with the greed and overweening ambition and self-serving callousness. And L.A. is America writ small, sad to say.

I am prejudiced against people who never make the slightest effort to consider what it might be like to be someone else - to have grown up and lived life under a different set of circumstances, to consider the impact those circumstances might have on a person's experience. (Being an artist forces one admirably to flex those mental muscles, which, I think, explains quite a bit about why so many of us are social liberals.)

(Note that I did not say I am prejudiced against Republicans, because I'm not - although a snarkier blogger than I might suggest that the above-described traits are characteristic of some members of that group. I have no personal quarrel with empathetic, clear-headed conservatives, and I enjoy discussing politics with sharp-minded individuals of any persuasion who have the betterment of their world and their fellow human beings as their primary objective. Those who do not - them I am prejudiced against, regardless of party or lack thereof.)

I am, it gives me no pride to admit, prejudiced against beautiful people and people born to wealth, because, notwithstanding the personal problems they go through like any human beings, they get so much so easily without having earned it and so few of them take the trouble to be grateful. (Also a reason why L.A. is a bad place for me to live.) I am likewise prejudiced against people whose lives have been cakewalks. Not that it's their fault; it's not, and I try not to hold it against them too much. But the shallowness that obtains as a result... that gets to me. I've known some people who had all the ingredients you need for a truly first-rate human being - only they had no depth whatsoever, because nothing bad had ever happened to them. Not knowing first-hand the possibility of loss or heartbreak, they sauntered through their lives blithely, without the ability to truly care about or for another human being. I resent them for that.

I am prejudiced against athletic men, because they receive adulation completely out of proportion to the contribution they make to society, and because, in my experience, most of them are shallow and narcissistic as a result. Athletic women, not so much; they don't get the big bucks and the endorsement deals. Although that is changing. Brace yourselves, ladies.

Finally, I am prejudiced against people who hate and fear and mistrust that which is different from them. By the same token, I am a human being, and like all human beings I have a brain which is the result of millions of years of evolution aimed at increasing my odds of survival by identifying threats as quickly as possible. One way we do this is through the evolved impulse to classify people, almost at first glance; we are biologically hard-wired to associate unfamiliar people with known groups so as to shorten the response time when they appear on top of yonder ridge and we have only scant moments to decide whether to shake their hand, invite them to dinner, attack them pre-emptively, or run.

So the urge to generalize - to BE prejudiced - is one which is written indelibly in our genes, specifically in our limbic systems, the oldest parts of the brain which we share with ancient cousins like reptiles. Our newer, mammalian cerebral cortexes, on the other hand, are capable of imposing rational thought on those emotional responses, and so we have a responsibility to use our higher minds to regulate our lower ones. The tricky bit is, the lower ones do their magic via electrical impulse, which is literally lightning-fast; the higher ones, sad to say, do theirs chemically, which takes a little longer. The upshot is that time lag we all know so well, between the first blinding flash of an emotional response and the delayed and smoother buzz of an intellectual one. Our brains are marvels, but they are works in progress; notwithstanding the Judeo-Christian tradition of viewing humanity as the glorious end-point of God's inscrutable process, we are nothing like finished products. We are a jumble of different systems working at times uncomfortably together, at best. But that's part of what makes human life so interesting, and human social life such a challenge.

All of that to say: we all have prejudices, and we all have an obligation to try not to let them dictate our choices. I'm no different from anybody else in this regard.

5. You've been given the chance to view the last 10 minutes of your life. Will you watch and why / why not?

Sad to say, I won't be able to prevent myself. I'm the kind of guy who suddenly stops in the middle of books and flips to the end to see who's dead and who's left standing. I can't keep secrets and I hate when they're kept from me. If somebody's offering me the opportunity to see how I shuffle off this mortal coil, I will undoubtedly feel compelled to do so, if for no other reason than that, if it strikes me as insufficiently aesthetic, I may want to do a rewrite/reshoot. I will have an Oscar-worthy death scene, so help me God.

Which is a very true and, I suppose, very weird glimpse of one of my more idiosyncratic traits: I can't stop being an artist. Ever. Everything I do, there's a third eye watching and evaluating it as to its artistic merits and appeal. For example, at times it pains me that I'm not more externally beautiful than I am (I'm no ogre, but George Clooney can rest easy), simply because the aesthete in me sees my mind and heart and soul as gorgeous, but finds my outside to be incongruously incommensurate. But maybe everybody feels like that sometimes. (Except Paris Hilton.)

Anyway, pop the popcorn and save me a seat; I'm there. Hope it's a good show.

Thanks, Rednaked! (And forgive me for taking so long; I wanted to do this justice.)

Blog-A-Thon Instructions:
Here’s how it works:

Leave a comment saying "interview me" if you’d like to be interviewed.
I’ll respond by asking you 5 questions here. They’ll be different than those above.
Update your blog with your answers to the questions.
When you do so, include this same explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same manner.
When others comment asking to be interviewed, you’ll ask them five new questions.

Politics

You Can't Fool All of the People All of the Time

2005-04-26T09:59:00.000-07:00

Gosh, it pains me to be the bearer of bad tidings for the Bush administration, it really does. But those of us living in the reality-based world have a responsibility to face up to the facts. Since, by their own proclamation, that doesn't include the Bushies, they'll probably ignore this new polling info (that is, if anyone in their tiny little circle even tells them about it.)

From the Washington Post:

"FILIBUSTER RULE CHANGE OPPOSED

"As the Senate moves toward a major confrontation over judicial appointments, a strong majority of Americans oppose changing the rules to make it easier for Republican leaders to win confirmation of President Bush's court nominees, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll.

"GOP leaders are threatening a rule change to prohibit the use of filibusters to block judicial nominees and have stepped up their criticism of the Democrats for using the tactic on some of Bush's nominees to the federal appellate courts. They say they are prepared to invoke what has become known as the "nuclear option" to ensure that Bush's nominees receive an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor.

"But by a 2 to 1 ratio, the public rejected easing Senate rules in a way that would make it harder for Democratic senators to prevent final action on Bush's nominees. Even many Republicans were reluctant to abandon current Senate confirmation procedures: Nearly half opposed any rule changes, joining eight in 10 Democrats and seven in 10 political independents, the poll found..."

Let's go to the numbers:

SUPPORT FOR SOCIAL SECURITY PRIVATIZATION PLANS: 51%-45% against (up from 44%-56% in mid-March)

"The biggest changes in opinion came on Social Security, which Bush has made the principal domestic priority of his second term. Three in 10 (31 percent) approved of the job Bush is doing on Social Security, while 64 percent disapproved, an eight-point increase in disapproval in a month. Only a third said they trust Bush more than the Democrats to handle the Social Security issue, a new low for the president.

"In little more than a month, there has been a double-digit shift in sentiment. In mid-March, 56 percent favored private accounts, compared with 45 percent in the latest poll, which marked the first time in Post-ABC News polling that less than half of the public supported allowing workers to invest some of their Social Security contributions in the stock market.

"The decline in support was widespread. The poll found that support among Republicans fell by nine percentage points, among Democrats by 10 percentage points and among political independents by 12 percentage points..."

SHOULD TOM DELAY STEP DOWN? 40% in favor (including 66% of those who say they have been following the DeLay scandals, a group which comprises 36% of the total poll group)

BUSH OVERALL JOB APPROVAL RATING: 47% favorable (matches his all-time low in Post-ABC News polls), 50% unfavorable. Nice going, voters.

"The poll also registered drops in key Bush performance ratings, growing pessimism about the economy and continuing concern about U.S. involvement in Iraq..."

"Taken together, the findings suggest that Bush is off to a difficult start in his second term, with Democrats far less willing to accommodate him and his agenda than his reelection victory last November may have foreshadowed. Beyond that, the survey highlights the divisions within the Republican Party, whether that involves Bush's signature Social Security proposal or the intersection of religion and politics that has become a defining characteristic of today's GOP...

"On several other key measures of performance, Bush's standing with the public was at or near new lows, with less than half the public supporting the way the president is handling the economy, energy policy and Iraq..."

BUSH'S HANDLING OF THE ECONOMY: 40% in favor (down six points since the start of the year).

"Slightly more than a third of the public approved of Bush's energy policies, and Americans were more inclined to blame the president rather than oil companies or other countries for soaring gasoline prices..."

BUSH'S HANDLING OF IRAQ: 42 % in favor (a slight increase from the all-time low in March of 39%).

"Almost six in 10 (58 percent) said the United States has gotten bogged down there, and 39 percent said they are confident Iraq will have a stable, democratic government in a year...

"Bush continues to get strong marks on his handling of the campaign against terrorism, with 56 percent supporting his actions, down five points since January. But the survey also found that the sluggish economy has eclipsed terrorism on the public's list of top priorities, fueling Bush's drop in the polls...

"Neither party is held completely blameless in the increasingly acrimonious Senate battle over judgeships, with only four in 10 saying they approved of the way Democrats or Republicans were handling the confirmation process. But other findings suggested that Senate GOP leaders risk alienating the public over their efforts to circumvent opposition to nominees who Democrats say are far too conservative.

"So far, the Senate has confirmed 35 federal appeals court judges nominated by Bush, while Senate Democrats have blocked 10 others by threatening to filibuster. According to the poll, nearly half of the public said Democrats are right to block the 10 contested Bush appointees, while slightly more than a third said they are wrong..."

Shh. Put your ear to the ground, Dubya. You too, Karl. Dick, Rummy, Wolfie, Bug-boy, Fristian. All of you.

Listen.

You hear that? Far, far away?

That's the sound of a distant drum. Beating for you.

Boom.

And it's getting louder.

Boom

And it's getting closer.

Boom...

Politics

Cruising Under Your Radar, Watching the Seattlites

2005-04-25T12:05:00.000-07:00

With apologies to XTC, do they need another 2 (er, 3; er, 4 if you count Mickey) Seattlites?

I think we may be about to find out.

(Thanks, Rosalie!)

Monday Brunch

2005-04-25T09:56:00.000-07:00

A mid-morning buffet of scintillating news and opinion items, selected for your palate personally by Chef Hotspur. BAM! (Free registration required for the N.Y. Times stuff.)

• The invaluable Paul Krugman notes that, so far in their second term, Bush and the GOP leaders in Washington have been on the wrong (that is, unpopular) side of nearly every major public issue: Social Security privatization, Terry Schiavo, you name it. One of their limitations, says Krugman, is the fact that they only ever talk to each other, the radical Christian Right, or the wealthy CEOs they see in the restaurant at the club when they're having lunch; they don't know what people who make less than $500,000 a year (and who live off wages, not dividends or interest) think or feel about anything. This syndrome was previously noted regarding where they were getting their information on Saddam Hussein's mondo cache of WMDs, and look how well that turned out. Difference being, Krugman sports a rasher of polls showing the American people aren't following Dubya and his well-heeled pals off the cliff this time.

• Speaking of our delightful Iraqi adventure, the east coast Times relates that some Marines stationed there are going public about their anger at their lack of Humvee armor. One unit, after losing a third of its people to ambushes on their Humvees and getting no armor to protect them despite repeated requests to the insensible Department of Defense, apparently took to finding and making its own; for this ingenuity in the care of his people, its previously lauded commander was removed from his post and may be discharged.

• It doesn't look good for Bush U.N. nominee John Bolton. You know, for once it's nice to see somebody who treated people like crap on his way up paying a price for it down the line.

• James Dobson and Tony Perkins's "Justice Sunday" TV hate-a-thon went out to churches all over the nation as planned last night. (Special guest star via the miracle of video technology: Bill Frist!) And Frank Rich rips through the whole charade with panache, as usual, tying in observations regarding the immoral tendencies of moralizers and the coded gay-bashing they spout - both of which are talking points you've read in this very blog over the last two weeks, you lucky dog.

Politics

Head-Scratcher of the Week (digitally challenged version)

2005-04-23T12:14:00.000-07:00

From the Associated Press, via Salon:

"WENDY'S HOPES ARREST WOOS BACK CUSTOMERS

"April 23, 2005 | SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Wendy's restaurants are hoping business will bounce back now that a woman who claimed she found a finger in her bowl of chili has been arrested and investigators say the whole case was likely a hoax.

"Anna Ayala is accused of attempted grand larceny, a charge authorities said relates to the financial losses Wendy's has suffered since Ayala claimed she bit down a 1 1/2-inch finger tip in a mouthful of her chili on March 22.

"The loss to Wendy's restaurants in the Bay area is $2.5 million, according to the felony complaint against her.

'''Indeed, what we have found is that thus far our evidence suggests the truest victims in this case are indeed the Wendy's owner, operators and employees here in San Jose,' San Jose Police Chief Rob Davis said Friday.

"Sales dropped at Wendy's in Northern California because of the furor, forcing layoffs and reduced hours...

"Ayala's claim that she found the well-manicured finger during her meal at a San Jose Wendy's initially drew sympathy. She hired a lawyer and filed a claim against the franchise owner, but dropped the lawsuit threat soon after suspicion fell on her.

"Ayala, who has a history of bringing claims against big corporations, was arrested at her suburban Las Vegas home Thursday. A court appearance is scheduled for Tuesday.

"San Jose Police Capt. David Keneller said police consider Ayala's claim a hoax. Police refused to say where the finger originated and exactly how the hoax was carried out.

"But according to a person knowledgeable about the case who spoke on condition of anonymity, the charge stemmed from San Jose police interviews with people who said Ayala described putting a finger in the chili..."

Now, having read Eric Schlosser's head-spinning Fast Food Nation and seen Morgan Spurlock's only slightly less alarming Super-Size Me, I no longer patronize fast food chains not named In & Out - and that one only sparingly. (If you haven't availed yourself of those two little gems of infotainment, I suggest you do so at your earliest convenience; your conscience and your waistline will thank you.) Nonetheless, given the particular fondness that characterizes my childhood memories of Wendy's, I am compelled to ask two questions:

1. What kind of total wacko wants a payoff badly enough to acquire a severed human finger and drop it into a bowl of chili?

2. Where exactly does the aforementioned so-inclined total wacko get a severed human finger for the purpose? Fingers-R-Us?

News

Joining a Fan Club

2005-04-22T17:20:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, ladies and gents, I am reduced to helpless gushing. Resistance is futile. I just have to gush until I'm all gushed out. When I like someone or something, my effusiveness can be embarrassing for all involved, especially me.

Those of you who know me at all know this about me.

So at the risk of becoming a walking caricature of myself, here's a quick little post for no good reason other than that it gives me joy to do it:

If you've read my profile, you know that I am, among other things, a musician, and you further know that the only halfway-current musical artist on my list of faves is Nikka Costa. This is no accident. Nikka Costa, 33, is what you would get if you rolled Tina Turner, Janis Joplin and Chaka Khan in beignet dough, flash-fried the tiny, delectable result, drizzled it in caramel, and set it down on a stage in front of a stack of Marshalls. She evokes new ways of spelling the word "tasty," not to mention pronouncing it. She is the only young female singer-songwriter-performer-knockout of international stature who seems not only to love rock, blues and funk but to want to take them to new places. I have yet to see her perform live, but I hear it's a religious experience and I don't plan to make the mistake of missing her the next time she's in town...

Which should be soon. May 22, to be exact.

If you haven't heard la bellisima Costa's first album, Everybody Got Their Something, then rundon'twalk your little fingertips over to Amazon or iTunes and get to work. If you have, you will rejoice with me to hear that her long-delayed second album, cantneverdidnothin, has been given a firm release date of May 24, 2005. The first single, "Till I Get to You," can be heard on her newly revamped website, and it's a funky harbinger of things to come. And if you're into it, the tour dates are listed there as well.

I love this woman. I love her so much that I'm writing a screenplay for the express purpose of giving her a cinematic vehicle for her fabulosity. If you are mired in Death Cab for Cutie, she might not be your thing. But if you love Tina and Janis and Prince and Chaka Khan and Zeppelin... well, you'll be in bluesy-funk-rock nirvana.

Which, in my humble opinion, is a fine place to be.

Music

Friday Political Digest

2005-04-22T16:32:00.000-07:00

You know, as Dennis Miller used to say back when he was still cool and marginally sane, I don't wanna get off on a rant here...

So I won't.

It's Marine-Layer Friday here in the City of Angels, which means an uncharacteristic melancholy in the air - a vibe I actually find quite salutory. Nice change of pace and all that. So I'm not going to sully my Friday mellow by going postal over the run-of-the-mill crap going on in our nation's capital. This has not been my most carefree week ever, and I ain't gettin' worked up over the same-old-same-old.

Instead, I'll just toss out for you two items of note off the Salon wires.

One is the return of that sinking feeling for Washington Republicans as it slowly starts to dawn on them that

a) a majority of unexpectedly lucid Americans of every political stripe are suddenly realizing that their party, whichever it may be, may not always have the same number of Senate seats from now until the end of time - and, realizing that, have arrived at the opinion that doing away with the filibuster rule might not be such a great idea;

b) that same majority of Americans are starting to get the uncomfortable feeling that their president and Congressional leaders are overreaching bull-goose loonies who are making their party look like a bunch of nut-cases (when in fact most Republicans are very nice, very reasonable folks who love their country and want to play well with others).

The second - and I know I could be inviting a hornet's nest of flaming spam here, but hey, I've never been one to shy away from controversy - is a fascinating article by Corey Pein that discusses the apparently impending English-language international version of Al-Jazeera, the Arabic news channel reviled by some as a disseminator of anti-semitic, anti-American propaganda, while championed by others as a lone independent voice on the Arabian peninsula (and a source of much-needed counter-perspective to obsequious American TV news coverage of the war in Iraq). Interestingly, the Bush Administration itself is apparently considering whether the network, which it has repeatedly defamed, might in fact be an asset in the ongoing campaign to democratize the Middle East.

Most of what I know about Al-Jazeera I know from watching the excellent documentary Control Room, which, while not explicitly on the network's side, is nontheless somewhat sympathetic to its own idea of what it is. Pein seems to think Al-Jazeera is more pro-radical Western than anti-American, and from what little I know I'd tend to agree. I've never watched it myself - and wouldn't get much out of it if I did, since I don't speak Arabic - but, though I am sensitive to the accusations of its anti-Israel bias (discussed in the article), I must say that if I have to live with Fox News Channel and the Rodan-like damage it's doing to civil media discourse in this country, I don't see why what's good for the goose oughtn't to be good for the gander. I will invoke the First Amendment; I say, let all voices be heard, and let the public decide who's right and who's full of hummus. At the very least, we could use a news channel in this country that isn't in thrall to American corporate advertisers and whatever political administration happens to be in power at the moment. (No, BBC International doesn't count; Adelphia doesn't offer it in the Valley, the bastards. Maybe after Time Warner takes them over.)

Anyway, if you feel strongly on the issue, by all means comment below. But save your vitriol for Al-Jazeera or those who oppose it. Me, I got no pups in this little skirmish, aside from being a fan of divesre points-of-view. If you're not into that, you probably stopped reading a couple of paragraphs back, anyhow.

Politics

Dark Horse Under Big Sky

2005-04-19T11:02:00.000-07:00

Those of you who read this blog regularly may recall my having mentioned the opinion of my stepfather, the wisest man I know, that the only way for the Democratic Party to recapture the White House in 2008 is by running a red-state governor. I think he's definitely onto something; by-and-large, voters don't have to time to parse issues and read up on things, and it's been suggested and supported elsewhere (most recently last year in The Atlantic Monthly) that they tend to make their choice based on a kind of empathic short-hand. Who's the candidate, they ask themselves, who seems the most like me, in the sense that I figure, having done the reading and issue-parsing, he'll be likely to come to the same common-sense conclusion that I'd come to if I had time?

My theory is that voters then answer that question using the criterion of perceived authenticity: they tend, all things considered, to go with the candidate who seems the most real, the least contrived and artificial and programmed and focus-group tested and fake, because they sense that candidate is the most likely to be like them - i.e. a real human being. (That they often fall for the candidate who has simply been contrived and programmed and focus-group tested to seem authentic is an irony that never fails to leave me crying in my beer. I'm lookin' at you, Dubya.) Point being, my stepfather would then add, that outside-the-Beltway Dems with legitimate executive-branch experience and solid-seeming authenticity are a lot more likely to slice off enough slivers of the electorate in the next big dance than the D.C. insiders who are more familiar with the best restaurants in Georgetown than the best places to eat in their own "home" states.

I mention all that as preamble to a terrific piece in today's Salon, part of a new series they're doing on the future for the Donkeys called "Life of the Party." Today's article profiles Brian Schweitzer, Democrat and governor of Montana (don't rub your eyes; you read it right): rancher, gun-owner, beer-drinker, bowler, pro-choice defender, education and medical coverage reformer. He's all heart and big-sky plain-spokenness, and he makes George W. Bush look like Howdy Doody.

My favorite quote:

"Kerry may have been the best candidate, but he wasn't selected because he was the best candidate from the heart. He was selected because in Iowa and New Hampshire people intellectualized it. They said -- and remember, this wasn't Joe and Mary Six-Pack making this decision -- 'I love Howard Dean, but I think I'll marry John Kerry because Mom and Dad are going to like him better.'"

Now that's what I'm talkin' about. We could do a hell of a lot worse than this cowboy.

Politics

Down (But Not Out)

2005-04-19T00:23:00.000-07:00

Photo: William Rain, Black Feather, 1998

Hope is the thing with feathers...
- Emily Dickinson, "Hope," 1924

Hope is not "the thing with feathers." The thing with feathers has turned out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich.
- Woody Allen, Without Feathers, 1975

It's a glorious day to be naked and alive, my friends.

I Say It Here, It Comes Out There...

2005-04-18T09:23:00.000-07:00

Never one to miss an opportunity to point out the rare occasions when I may have actually blazed a trail, I can't help providing a link to this morning's Doonesbury. Looks like I'm not the only one convinced Tom DeLay is a dead man walking.

No sweat, Garry. Anytime. Call me; we'll do lunch. Kisses to Jane and the kids.

By the way, in the New York Times over the weekend, Frank Rich pointed out the particular scandalous straw he thinks may finally crack the spine of DeLay's little dromedary, in the public mind at least (click here for a newsy explication). You will be as shocked as Claude Rains at Rick's Café Americain to hear that it involves rank hypocrisy, wrapping DeLay, Ralph Reed, the suddenly ubiquitous Jack Abramoff, and GOP poster-rabbi Daniel Lapin up in a bow with money made from casinos, despite the Bennettesque rantings of DeLay and Reed over the years against the mortal dangers of gambling. Jeez, sometimes these people make it so easy.

Word to the wise among you contemplating public service: the trouble with moralizing is, at the end of the day we are all of us human. The holier-than-thou they come, the harder they fall.

Politics

Can I Get An "Amen"?

2005-04-15T14:54:00.000-07:00

Okay, let me make something clear: It was not my intention to celebrate my triumphant return from Mexico by posting several times in succession about things that are pissing me off. That was most definitely NOT the plan. The plan was to climb back up on my virtual soapbox, luxuriate in my Cuervo Gold tan, bask in some trivial but pleasant musings, etc.

Sorry, folks. No such luck.

From today's New York Times:

"WASHINGTON, April 14 - As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as 'against people of faith' for blocking President Bush's nominees...

"Organizers say they hope to reach more than a million people by distributing the telecast to churches around the country, over the Internet and over Christian television and radio networks and stations...

"Some of the nation's most influential evangelical Protestants are participating in the teleconference in Louisville, including Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family; Chuck Colson, the born-again Watergate figure and founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries; and Dr. Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

"The event is taking place as Democrats and Republicans alike are escalating their public relations campaigns in anticipation of an imminent confrontation. The Democratic minority has blocked confirmation of 10 of President Bush's judicial nominees by preventing Republicans from gaining the 60 votes needed to close debate, using the filibuster tactic often used by political minorities and most notoriously employed by opponents of civil rights.

"Dr. Frist has threatened that the Republican majority might change the rules to require only a majority vote on nominees, and Democrats have vowed to bring Senate business to a standstill if he does.

"On Thursday, one wavering Republican, Senator John McCain of Arizona, told a television interviewer, Chris Matthews, that he would vote against the change.

"'By the way, when Bill Clinton was president, we, effectively, in the Judiciary Committee blocked a number of his nominees,' Mr. McCain said...

"The telecast also signals an escalation of the campaign for the rule change by Christian conservatives who see the current court battle as the climax of a 30-year culture war, a chance to reverse decades of legal decisions about abortion, religion in public life, gay rights and marriage.

"'As the liberal, anti-Christian dogma of the left has been repudiated in almost every recent election, the courts have become the last great bastion for liberalism,' Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and organizer of the telecast, wrote in a message on the group's Web site. 'For years activist courts, aided by liberal interest groups like the A.C.L.U., have been quietly working under the veil of the judiciary, like thieves in the night, to rob us of our Christian heritage and our religious freedoms.'

"... Mr. Perkins stood by the characterization of Democrats as hostile to faith. 'What they have done is, they have targeted people for reasons of their faith or moral position,' he said, referring to Democratic criticisms of nominees over their views of cases about abortion rights or public religious expressions..."

Now, I'm not going to waste space or energy explaining why this little TV special is massively offensive, even by this crowd's standards. You good people are all smart enough to figure that out without my telling you, and the couple of you wandering through who aren't can just click up there on "Next Blog" and move right along. The old Fire God has no time to blow tossing pearls to piggies, anyway.

What I am going to do is this:

I may not call myself a Christian, but I was raised one. Got baptized Methodist, grew up in a liberal Presyterian church (where I was confirmed, just before it started to occur to me to wonder whether I really wanted to be), spent some time in a couple of Episcopal ones in high school. In the process I read the Bible, cover-to-cover. On top of all that, as a southerner I carry a certain spirituality around in my DNA; gospel music gets my heart racing like a teenager's on his first movie date. I may not go to church, but I am of the church; I know the church.

And knowing the church as I do, I know that there are a great many marvelous churchgoing people in America who know the Christian Right is full of crap. I know them; they tell me so. Some of them are reading this blog right now.

Knowing the church as I do, I know that there a great many American Christians who actually make some effort to honor the teachings of Jesus, not just use them as a pretext on which to impose their own agenda on other people. I know there are a great many American Christians who actually believe in loving their neighbor as themselves, who actually believe killing is wrong - and who actually believe in giving people who don't believe the same things they do the room to follow their own spiritual north star.

And since I know that, I am asking them - you - to speak up. I appreciate those of you who have taken the time to make comments on this blog; it means a great deal to me. I read them all and respond to most. But I know some of you haven't even noticed that little thing below each post that says "COMMENTS," much less clicked on it. Now's your chance.

I'd just like those religious folks (of any persuasion) who are reading this to weigh in publicly. Just give me a "hallelujah," or a "hell yeah," or whatever you feel like. I know you're out there, because, like I said, some of you are friends or family. So do me a favor: click on that link below, and when the pop-up window pops up, add your voice to the choir. Make a statement. Tell Bill Frist and Jim Dobson and Chuck fuh-petes-sake Colson that they do NOT speak for all Americans of faith.

Let's see how many we can get. Sing it, sisters and brothers. Can I get an "Amen"?

Religion

Bastard Out of Carolina

2005-04-14T00:20:00.000-07:00

I remember the day I heard Atlanta, my hometown, had won the right to host the Summer Olympics. I was living in Philadelphia, sleeping on an apartment floor belonging to a good friend's magnanimous mom. This was the fall of 1991, a glorious season that began improbably for me with the eerie sound, first heard over a television speaker from another room, of 52,000 people chanting in unison as they swung little foam tomahawks (I know it's ridiculous and jingoistic, but understand, 52,000 people had never done anything at a Braves game before, and the chant was otherworldly; it made goosebumps stand out on my skin). It was a season that would culminate in the greatest World Series ever played - and in the middle of the baseball delirium somewhere, there sticks in my memory this Headline News clip of Juan Antonio Samaranch at a podium before an assembled crowd, announcing in his strangled little voice: "The 1996 Summer Olympics have been awarded to the city of... ATLANTA!" Prior to that golden autumn, most Atlantans would have placed the odds of either the Braves making the World Series or Atlanta winning the Olympics at approximately whatareyousmoking-to-one.

Pride swelled in the heart of this Georgia boy.

Dissolve to five years later. I went home in July to visit the family, maybe sit in with the old band (still playing around town with a new lead singer), and, of course, go to the Olympics. People in Atlanta had ordered their tickets months ahead of time. We saw basketball, we saw baseball, we saw track and field. In between, we went to Centennial Olympic Park and watched all the happy people milling around like flower children in the Haight in 1967. It was an incredible moment; I don't know that I've ever again seen that many people looking that contented. Everyone was smiling, everyone was kind to everyone else, everyone was having a great time.

And then one night, after the 'rents went to bed, I popped on the tube in my old bedroom around 11:45... and saw Centennial Olympic Park, the happy gathering place I had been standing in only hours before, filled with cops and flashing lights and people screaming, some with blood dripping down their faces. A shrapnel bomb in a bag had exploded at the bottom of the Coca-Cola tower at the south end of the plaza. Killed an innocent woman named Alice Hawthorne and injured 111 other folks whose crime was joyful participation in the greatest moment in their city's history.

America, meet terrorism. Innocence, get lost.

This was, I realized years later, my first real brush with terrorism close-up. Before that, it was something that happened somewhere else - Israel, usually, if you'd asked me (and, of course, 9/11/01 was not yet even a tear in my eye). Now it was suddenly not just close to home but literally in my home, on a spot I had been standing at earlier that very day. My mind was scrambled: why on earth would someone want to explode a bomb in the middle of that celebration? They just hated Coke that much?

The first thing that happened was, the FBI investigators realized that a moonlighting security guard named Richard Jewell had noticed the bag before it went off and tried to move spectators away from it. They hailed him as a hero, and opined that the perpetrator must have been a foreign national. (Only foreigners are evil enough to kill Americans, you know.)

The second thing that happened was, they noticed that he was a fat redneck with a crappy mustache and that he lived alone with his mother. Having no other leads and being FBI investigators, they jumped immediately to the only logical conclusion. (Only loner rednecks are evil enough to kill normal family folk, you know.)

Richard Jewell spent the next several years being wrongly vilified, indicted, and ultimately, quietly, cleared. The man's life was ruined, and all he had done was prevent more people from being hurt or killed by the real bomber. But who was the real bomber? No one seemed to know.

Six months later, a similar bomb exploded in an abortion clinic in Birmingham. A year later, another at one in suburban Atlanta. A month later, another in a midtown Atlanta gay and lesbian nightclub. Those of us who lived in Atlanta or kept up with the news there noticed these things, and wondered what the hell was going on. This was not the place we knew; this was like something out of a Stephen King novel, a town silently invaded by some indefinable, implacable evil and slowly transmogrified into a twisted, cancerous parody of itself. And anyone who thinks of Atlanta as some sort of hick backwater (impossible if one has actually been there) need only look at the targets in this trail of tears to discern how the REAL backwater hicks see it: one notch below New York and San Francisco on the sliding scale of Irredeemable Sin.

No, those of us who knew the city knew something was wrong. We could smell it; we could taste it. This was not the work of a local, and it was not the work of a foreigner.

It was the work of a backwater hick.

An ingenious, bilious backwater hick.

And now he's going down.

As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (yes, the fish-wrapper) reports today, Eric Rudolph - Freeper, white supremacist, religious radical, slimeball hatemonger - has pleaded guilty to all four bombings. Rudolph easily eluded the FBI for years whilst hiding out in the North Carolina mountains (with the help of backwoods locals who brought him food and lied to the authorities about his whereabouts), and was caught only when a local deputy in a small N.C. hamlet spotted him rummaging through a dumpster behind a strip mall in the middle of the night and took him in for vagrancy. The lucky cop didn't recognize Rudolph at all; he was utterly unaware of the size of the fish he had landed.

Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good.

Rudolph, characteristically, was a smug creep during the court proceeding. He crowed that, in pleading guilty, he had cheated the United States Government out of its ultimate goal of putting him to death. Fella knows how to find a silver lining, I'll give him that.

Personally, I'm anti-death penalty - not because there aren't people who deserve it, but because I don't believe in handing the state the power to kill its citizens. Especially given how often convictions in such cases have been subsequently confirmed as erroneous. Our justice system is built around the notion that it is better that a hundred guilty men go free than that one innocent man be imprisoned or, God forbid, put to death. Capital punishment clearly violates that principle.

But I will say that if there is a circumstance which ever in the dark of night causes me to question my conviction, it is the intentional murder of innocent people. Such coldness, such brick-hard inhumanity, literally makes my stomach turn. (It's only made exponentially worse when discovered to be the result of the religious extremism, irrespective of sect, that now threatens to crumble the columns of our civilization.)

I will not support the right of my government to kill the monsters who do such things (although I delight in its right to lock them up and throw away the key, which actually seems to me a far worse fate), but if somewhere and somewhen down the line the monsters are held accountable in another, less worldly forum...

... notwithstanding the fact that I generally don't believe in that either...

Well, I will shed not one blessed tear.

Sleep well in your cell tonight, Mr. Rudolph. And I sincerely hope, for your sake, that you're wrong about your God - because if his Hell exists, there is most certainly a place there waiting for you.

Lavender Hearts

2005-04-13T16:17:00.000-07:00

From the Associated Press, via the Chicago Sun-Times:

"WASHINGTON -- An Army sergeant who was wounded in Iraq wants a chance to remain in the military as an openly gay soldier, a desire that's bringing him into conflict with the Pentagon's 'don't ask, don't tell' policy.

"Sgt. Robert Stout, 23, says he has not encountered trouble from fellow soldiers and would like to stay if not for the policy that permits gay men and women to serve only if they keep their sexual orientation a secret.

"'I know a ton of gay men that would be more than willing to stay in the Army if they could just be open,' Stout said. 'But if we have to stay here and hide our lives all the time, it's just not worth it.'

"Stout, of Utica, Ohio, was awarded the Purple Heart after a grenade sent pieces of shrapnel into his arm, face and legs while he was operating a machine gun on an armored Humvee last May.

"He is believed to be the first gay soldier wounded in Iraq to publicly discuss his sexuality, said Aaron Belkin, director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military at the University of California-Santa Barbara.

"'We can't keep hiding the fact that there's gay people in the military and they aren't causing any harm,' said Stout.

"Stout, who served in Iraq for more than a year as a combat engineer, said by acknowledging he is gay, he could be jailed and probably will be discharged before his scheduled release date of May 31.

"'The old armchair thought that gay people destroy unit camaraderie and cohesion is just wrong,' Stout said. 'They said the same things when they tried to integrate African-Americans and women into the military.'

"Martha Rudd, a spokeswoman for the Army, said soldiers who are discharged under 'don't ask, don't tell' typically receive honorable discharges. She wouldn't comment on Stout's case."

I don't have a lot to add here, other than to say: what the hell? Will someone please explain to me how it is that a military overstretched to fight two wars in two different theaters and gearing up for more, a military already hurting from AWOLs and declining recruiting numbers and dissatisfied soldiers, can possibly justify excluding anybody? Especially on the basis of who they prefer to sleep with when they're not on duty? This is a guy who took bullets for his country. How dare they call him a second-class citizen? How dare they threaten him with even the possibility of dishonorable discharge? The only thing dishonorable here, ladies and gents, is the way this United States military is being run - starting with this moronic policy...

Okay, you know what? I do have something to say. It's generalized and it's sloppy and it probably won't be as pretty as some of the things I write, but what it may lack in organization it will sure as hell make up for in passion.

I am a straight man, folks. I would give myself about a 1.5 on the Kinsey scale, max. When I think about sex - and we're all adults here, so let's not dissemble on that point; we all think about sex - women are what I think about. I love women. LOVE them. Can't for the life of me figure out what they see in men, sometimes, but I do love them.

I tell you that so you will know where I'm coming from when I say:

WHERE DOES ANYBODY GET OFF TELLING OTHER PEOPLE WHO THEY CAN SLEEP WITH?

I am sick and tired of gay and lesbian people getting bashed and mocked and denied rights that everybody else takes for granted. I am sick and tired of straight people (if indeed that's what they are, he said with a sneer) accusing gays and lesbians of "sick" and "immoral" behavior - as if these same "straight" people don't get up to some pretty freaky business in the privacy of their own bedrooms or computer chat rooms. I am sick and tired of the ignorant derision focused on gays and lesbians: that all dykes want to be men, or that all fags want to screw every man they see (especially the homophobes), or, worst of all, that gay people are sexual predators, constantly on the prowl for children to molest. I am absolutely sick to death of all of it.

Most of all, I am sick of the hypocrites. Because you and I know that the people who rail against "immorality" with the greatest fervor are usually the ones getting the weirdest behind closed doors. You know what I'm talking about: the Jim Bakkers, the Jimmy Swaggarts, the Dick Morrises, the J. Edgar Hoovers. The ones who declaim the loudest are usually fighting what they see as demons inside themselves. And the rest of us are too often forced to pay the price for their self-loathing, as minorities of moralizers impose their sociopathy on everyone else.

Well, I've bloody well had it. Bring it on, Freepers. Bring it, Righties. Bring it, Jesumaniacs and Allahmaniacs and anybody else who thinks it's his or her God-given right to tell other adults how to live their lives - to tell them whom they can and cannot love. I'll take on the lot of you, right here and now. You don't scare me. You're nothing but a bunch of cowards, compelled by your cowardice to take out your self-hatred on people you think are safe to bash. You're pathetic.

You say gay people are un-American? Let me tell you something: There is nothing more fundamentally American than the right to be who you want to be, to be who you are. The principle, set in stone by some Supreme Court justice (I forget which one), is very simple, and very direct: Your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.

And not one goddamn inch beyond.

You think the very presence of gay people in your community threatens you or your children in that sense? You're a fool. Move. Move to Saudi Arabia. Move to Pakistan. Move somewhere where they love repression, where they love fascism, where they love bigotry and hatred and even murder in the name of God. You are in the wrong country, my friend. This is the land of the free. That doesn't mean just the people you agree with; it means everybody. If you can't handle that, then get the hell out. You don't deserve this country.

Just wanted to get that off my chest.

Signs of the Apocalypse: The Cult of Paris Hilton

2005-04-12T20:10:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: This is the first in a running and irregular series of articles detailing the decline and fall of American civilization, as evidenced by crap that could never happen in a world that had its act together.

Paris Hilton. Paris Hilton, man.

Walked ever on this earth a bigger waste of water and carbon? A more worthless excuse for a human being?

This is a woman who never finished high school, who has never accomplished anything or even attempted to accomplish anything, who was born a multimillionaire and has led the life of a spoiled child ever since. She is famous, as one can be only in this ludicrous joke of a culture, for being rich and stupid and frequently naked on film or tape or cell phone. Her single legitimate claim to fame, if it can be called that, is co-starring with another spoiled heiress in a reality TV show that revolves around the two of them laughing at poorer people.

Paris Hilton makes George W. Bush look like Mahatma Gandhi.

The improbable nature of her celebrity alone qualifies her as the (drumroll, please...) First Official Naked Singularity Sign of the Impending Apocalypse. But it's apparently about to get worse.

According to an interview she did with MTV.com, there is "some talk" of her starring in remakes of The Seven-Year-Itch and Some Like It Hot.

Sorry. I need a moment to cool down.

(tick... tick... tick... strangled scream into a pillow)

Don't get me wrong: The Seven-Year-Itch is no cinematic classic. But Some Like It Hot? Who the hell gets the Curtis and Lemmon roles - Seann William Scott and Ashton Kutcher?

All I have to say is: Paris - and unnamed movie studio executives who might actually be contemplating such a travesty - I knew Marilyn Monroe. I watched Marilyn Monroe, I breathed Marilyn Monroe, I loved Marilyn Monroe. Screwed-up dame that she was.

And you, Paris Hilton, are no Marilyn Monroe.

Not in your wildest freaking dreams.

I can take GOP election fixing and I can take the Christian Right perverting everything this country stands for in a hubristic power-grab of breathtaking boldness.

But I can't take this.

Next week: Michael Bay directs a stirring remake of Laurence of Arabia starring Jimmy Fallon!

UPDATE: Apparently truth is nearly as strange as fiction. Would you believe Will Smith in Bridge on the River Kwai?

Soy El Mar

2005-04-10T20:27:00.000-07:00

The following is a partial transcript from a postcard delivered this morning by mule to the U.S. Consular Office in Mexico City. The front of the card featured a clearly digitally altered photograph of Salma Hayek semi-clothed in a toreador costume; its significance has so far eluded the local authorities.

They spiked the damn beer. Of that I have no doubt.

That was no ordinary Negro Modelo. I know Negro Modelo like the milk of my mother's mammaries, and it's glorious stuff: the dark secretions of a million humid fantasies en español, the sweat of a million entwined lovers, collected from between sun-licked shoulder blades in the humid Caribbean night. But as I think back now, that bottle was perfect - too perfect, like a platonic ideal of Negro Modelo that last existed in the split-second before the very first bottle of the real-world stuff rolled off the line.

One second I'm onstage at Tía Juanita's House of Questionable Judgment, sitting in with the house band, led by the incomparable Miguelito de los Huevos on Spanish guitar - and this gato can really strum, let me tell you; he makes grown Merchant Marines weep with longing...

... and the next I'm downing black-and-Yucatáns with the working chicas at the bar, making cracks in broken Spanglish about the American frat jerks in the back and what they expect for 150 pesos, and drinking in the ladies' spiky liquid laughter like seven tiny swallows of mezcál drunk from seven silver shot glasses...

... and the next I wake up in this tiny room, closet really, hotter than el Inferno and twice as badly decorated, tied to a seatless john with my own bass strings, the room moving up-and-down and side-to-side. Although I'm used to that last bit lately.

Possessing as I do the superhuman strength of one hundred ordinary writer-directors, I break the ties that bind me, thanking God and Jaco Pastorius that they only used the D and G strings. Probably used a pick, too. Suckers.

I burst from my diminutive prison cell into dazzling sunlight, to find myself on a finely appointed catamaran - well, finely appointed as catamarans go. The first thing I see is the cooler full of tequila jello shots and crab legs. (Did I mention the seafood here?)

The second thing I see is Tía Juanita at the helm, hands on her hips and smiling, one dulce de leche dimple piercing her cheek knowingly as the corner of her mouth curls under a nose like a family heirloom passed down from a Mayan queen.

"Kukulcán," she whispers.

The third thing I see, of course, is the whitewashed two-by-four she's swinging with uncommon force at my skull. Like my head needed help with the whole pounding thing. I had it coming, I expect, though I'm damned if I can remember what for.

Over the side I go, into an azure expanse that swallows me up lovingly. It occurs to me that perhaps the sea exists to give us poor humans a hint of just how many shades of blue there actually are in the world. Why did I never notice that before?

The surface billows above me like a silvery down comforter, the sun beyond it fractured into a million shards, all of them brilliant, all of them blinding. I should have spent more time beneath the surface; the view is radically unexpected.

As I fall, bubbles trailing skyward from my nostrils like tiny crystalline thought balloons, I see a devil ray - a huge, majestic beast with a seven-foot wingspan, gliding above the sand below me - to dart elegantly into a coral reef of surpassing beauty, beyond which the ocean floor drops off into an apparently infinite chasm, blue fading to black. I am caught up in the magnificent creature's wake, dragged, willingly at this point, by currents to hover for a moment over the abyss.

A glint floating in space to my right. My hand reaches out, closes instinctively. I look down into my palm...

A gold coin. Spanish doubloon, minting date 1720, its edges flattened but its luster undimmed. I kiss it like a holy relic and slip it under my tongue. A toll for the ferryman.

Wasn't it grand?

I exhale.

I sink.

Blue fading to black...

And that's when I see it.

What's the Spanish word for sea serpent?

Because that's what rises up from the inky depths below: a great snake, a serpent sporting feathers the colors on blankets the locals sell from their roadside shacks, saturated hues that sear themselves onto my corneas like phosphene firebrands. Twenty - no, thirty feet long, or so it seems; I've nothing to scale it against.

It occurs to me it's been an uncomfortably long time since I last took a breath. A moment ago this bothered me not a whit. Now it suddenly seems relevant.

The serpent ascends and writhes around me, its feathers tickling my skin, its scales whispering across me with a cool underwater rasp:

Kukulcán.

Phantasmagoric images cascade into my brain with electric abruptness: visions of small brown people at the feet of limestone temples oriented to the cardinal points, dancing atop a seaside cliff, silhouetted against the rising sun, singing paeans to zero, hymns to the notion of nothingness.

Let it go, says the serpent, or maybe thinks it. Let it all go. The sea washes all things clean in time.

So I do. I lean back, shut my eyes and let my limbs go limp. I stop fighting dying, I stop fighting living, I stop fighting drowning, I stop fighting breathing, I stop fighting pain, I stop fighting joy. I give up. I submit to the current.

And the serpent slides between my legs like a lover's thigh in sleep and lifts me up. It carries me back toward the surface, back toward the sky, back toward the sun hanging high in the sky like a 1720 Spanish doubloon. I sprawl backward across the convex curve of its spine, six feet in diameter, a broken shipwrecked sailor on a rock, oblivious to consequence, as the serpent rises through the water and up past the coral reef and rock to deposit me as gently as a new mother on the sand of a beach.

I feel as if I've been kissed. Hello or goodbye is the question to which I have no answer. Maybe both.

The serpent loops up and over the surf, once, twice, in farewell, its Mayan-blanket feathers sparkling wet in the wind. I hear it again:

Kukulcán.

Somewhere, from across the waves, I imagine I hear a baby crying softly.

I lie on the beach, unable to move, dripping, depleted - but warming slowly, like a snake, in the golden embrace of the doubloon sun... and I wonder if it's me.

Pssst...Que Bueno...

2005-04-06T16:01:00.000-07:00

The following is a message written in the margin of a torn-out scrap of p. 42 of a paperback copy of the 1970 edition of The Motorcycle Diaries. The scrap was found, worm-eaten, in the bottom of an empty mezcál bottle found in the corner of a local lock-up in Cozumél, Quintana Roo, Mexico, behind a seatless toilet.

Dear God... If anyone finds this, please help... I don't know how much longer I can hold on. The deputy speaks no English and I have essentially no Spanish at all, but that hasn't prevented him from taking forty freakin' hands of Baja Hold 'Em in a row, and with them every last peso I had left after the incident with the border police at La Iguana Turquesa. Oh, but the taste of salt on skin lingers on my tongue like a fever dream in a a summer solstice. Although I do think I should probably consult a doctor if I ever manage to make it back across the border...

My mind does cartwheels at the jewel-toned Mayan memories - but how much was real, and how much imagined? I can no longer tell. I can only say that my every waking moment since I got here seems tinged with soul-bending psychedelic sounds and colors, and I sit bolt upright in the middle of the heat-soaked nights with the unshakable certainty that I am only just now finally asleep. North is south and the shallows hide unplumbed depths. I need another drink like I need this stupid tattoo I noticed yesterday morning on my shoulder. Come here, wormie... Inch a little farther down the hatch, and take me sliding with you...

Dios mio, but the shrimp tacos are exquisite.

Here comes the guard; I've got to look comatose again...

¿Vas a extrañarme?

2005-04-03T13:05:00.000-07:00

I know, I know: you just now got used to my being back, and here I am going away again. Why, Hotspur cariño, why must you leave me so soon? you moan breathlessly as one tiny, perfect tear trickles from the corner of your eye and down your caramel cheek.

Nothing personal, I assure you; it's just been one hell of a tough ride lately for El Dio del Fuego and he's gonna go cool his hot heels on a Mexican beach for a few days. I wish I was rich and tech-savvy enough to take my 17-inch Power Book out by the water and post to you lovely people from the comfort of my lagoon-side cabaña chair - like in a Corona commercial, only with decent beer. But I don't have a 17-inch Power Book, and frankly I don't even know if they have internet cafés down there.

But I promise to try and find one, and to post as much as possible if I can. If I can't, rest assured I'll be back and waxing virtual again by Monday the 11th, if not sooner. Check back then, if not before, and I'll whisper lime-scented reveries in your ear.

Until then, in the words of my cell phone's greeting:

Be naked. Be singular.

Hey, it works for me.

Sin-cerity (or, Valkyrie Shot the Fool!)

2005-04-02T22:49:00.000-08:00

It says plenty about the current what-passes-for-thinking in the corporate cesspool we call Hollywood that March has come in like Simba and gone out like that little shorn fella in Boundin', and yet so far this year we've had not a single major American film release good enough to merit even getting your friends to help you sneak in the back door of the theater. The studios have reduced the year to two seasons: Summer, for blockbusters, and Christmas, for awards (and they've precious little interest in those baubles any more, truth be told). In between come the Fallows, dumping months for movies which exist for no reason but to remind us that there are other, more pleasurable things to do with our time and money. Dental surgery, for instance.

So it's exhilarating to finally have a reason to go to the movies for the first time since Oscar season expired (and with it, praise Kurosawa, the nagging guilt a quote-unquote film industry professional like, oh, say, myself might still be nursing over never having mustered the masochistic force of will to sit through, oh, say, Being Julia). And whatever else you might say about Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez's Sin City, it's unquestionably the first wide release of 2005 that feels even vaguely like it wasn't the product of studio notes, market research, and focus group testing. The content may be soporifically derivative, but the form is breathtakingly original - and a screaming success, at least on its own terms.

Sin City is comprised of three stories which are all really the same story: Noirish tough-guy anti-hero finds jaded-heart solace in the person of a virginal whore/stripper, whom he then must protect against villains of almost otherworldly perversion, at the ultimate cost, in two of the three cases, of his life. The anti-heroes wear trenchcoats, guzzle whiskey, and bleed copious amounts in various colors; the dames wear dominatrix lingerie and smirk like porn stars. Women exist to be saved and men exist to die saving them, preferably while taking down as many creeps in as disgusting a manner as possible. It's the standard noir moral landscape taken by Miller, in his graphic novels which form the film's source material, to a ludicrous extreme.

But it's that very ludicrousness that gives the movie its electric jolt. For example, in the best story of the three, "The Hard Goodbye," Mickey Rourke (Mickey Rourke!)'s Marv marauds around the city and its outer environs, popping anti-psychotic medication, in search of the silent, bespectacled freak (the good and freaky Elijah Wood) who murdered hooker Goldie (Jamie King), an "angel of mercy" who won Marv's heart by being the first woman ever to let his hideous mug within ten feet of her. (And she didn't even charge him.)

The delight one starts to feel watching this bizarre guignol comes from the swift realization that, whether because of the purity of his devotion to his "angel" or just because he's too big and too hard-headed to go down, Marv simply can't be stopped. He falls ten stories, gets hit head-on by several cars (and several times by one car), gets shot with hundreds of bullets, and yet shrugs it all off. Alone among the three major protagonists, Marv is morally unambiguous (unless you count killing slowly and painfully people who unquestionably deserve it, and in a movie like this, if you've got that sort of qualm, you'd best go turn in your ticket and get your money back). He's a lovable monster, and when he finally goes down it's only with his own consent; even then, he doesn't go easily. The performance would be a career-jumpstarter if only Rourke were actually recognizable under all those hulking prosthetics and House-of-Wax facelifts. (Probably just as well; that scrawny chihuahua of his would only waste away pining for him while he was away on location anyhow.)

The other two performances that jump out are Rosario Dawson's and Carla Gugino's. Clive Owen's Dwight calls Dawson's Gail his Valkyrie, and when you see the glee with which she pumps Uzi bullets in a fishnet body-stocking you can't help but laugh admiringly. In voice-over (and there's more voice-over here than in any given forty-seven episodes of "The Wonder Years") he repeats her earlier line that she "will always, and never, be" his - a line which underscores the abused-adolescent nature of the hearts beating in the perforated chests of these wiseguys. You can sneer at the retrograde sexual politics of the stories, you can decry the reduction of the women to porno icons on pedestals, but you can't deny the naked, futile longing the men feel for them. The guys may be pathetic, but they're sincere. Gugino, as a lesbian parole officer, is notable for a) being easily the best actor in the film, and b) spending nearly all of her screen time in nothing but a g-string or less. I point this out because her body, voluptuous and womanly and real in all the best senses, bears little similarity to the standard Hollywood ideal; that she is naked at all in this post-porn age of neutered American cinema is a minor miracle, and that she is unapologetically so with the body she sports is a sign of just how iconoclastic a project Sin City is. No major studio would have put up with it, or her. Their loss.

Other actors don't fare as well. Brittany Murphy seems to be in another movie, channeling Adelaide from Guys and Dolls and nearly ruining her scenes with a screwball comic tone 180-degrees out of sync with the poker-faced seriousness of the rest of the cast. And Jessica Alba, as the 11-year-old saved from rape and murder by Bruce Willis's Hardigan and now all grown up into The Purest Yet Hottest Stripper Ever, was surely cast in the part because any random survey of straight American men aged 18-45 would no doubt rank her as the Second Hottest Starlet in America (behind Angelina Jolie, who has her beat by a country mile but is too old for the role). What an inopportune moment to show the world that she unmistakably cannot act.

Neither actress is helped by Rodriguez, who has in his filmmaking career demostrated two principle traits: a manic work ethic that makes Thomas Edison look like a stoner, and a total lack of understanding of anything having to do with actors. I'm sure they like him fine to work with, but he clearly doesn't relate to their process and he's apparently not interested in trying. As a result, the acting in his films is a little uneven in the same way that the Himalayas are a little hilly; the actors are left to sink or swim on their own, essentially undirected, and only the good ones like Gugino, the smart ones who can figure out the overall tone of the movie on their own and gauge their performances to fit in like a good jigsaw puzzle piece, come out looking good. It's not that Brittany Murphy is untalented - anyone who's ever heard her voice-over work as LuAnne on "King of the Hill" or seen her turn in "Clueless," back before she sold her soul to Satan in an unsuccessful effort to become Cameron Diaz, knows that's not the case at all. It's just that she needs to be directed. Absent a knowledgable jockey, Smarty Jones may make it across the finish line, but he's not likely to win the race.

This is especially sad given the ambitious technical achievement the film represents. Shot digitally, as are all Rodriguez's projects now, Sin City represents the fruition of a bold and simple idea: Put the comic book on the screen - literally. The actors were shot against green screens and the rest was filled in digitally after the fact. This still-nascent approach has its pitfalls - witness the static, lifeless camerawork of the Star Wars prequels, or the flat fuzziness of Kerry Conran's hugely disappointing Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow - but Rodriguez, working hand in hand with Miller (and, in one of the best sequences, with "special guest director" Quentin Tarantino), manages to avoid most of them. The camera moves dynamically, the images are clear (in an inky black-and-white with occasional splashes of color that niftily replicates the look of Miller's graphic novels), and if the frequent use of long lenses and flat space seems too wedded at times to its comic book inspirations... well, hey, it was an aesthetic choice, and it just doesn't always work. No shame in that. Jesus, it's just nice to see anybody trying anything in this day and age, when the phrase "independent film" usually implies low budgets, kitchen-sink realism, and no plot to speak of. ( I'm looking at YOU, Gallo.) Sin City is totally independent cinema in the best sense - it has ambition, ideas, the gumption to try things that the Wharton weenies running the studios would never sign off on. It has the courage to try grandly, and to fail grandly - and, having that courage, it succeeds.

Again, that success is on its own terms, the terms it sets up. You may not like it. You may, in fact, loathe it - and God knows there's a lot on view here that's loathesome, from cannabalism to manual emasculation to the literal pounding of one baddie's head into yellow goo. (Sounds nasty, and it is, but it's also highly abstract in its visualization - the only way this hellride could possibly have gotten an 'R' rating - and thus less disturbing than, for instance, a similar scene last year in Gaspar Noë's more naturalistic Irreversible.) But one thing is certain: you will emerge from the theater having just seen something unlike any other movie you've seen this year. Maybe ever.

And in this day and age, that's worth something. That's worth a lot.

Movies

Is This On?

2005-04-01T17:36:00.001-08:00

You know, it's not that I want to talk any more about Terri Schiavo. Quite the contrary. I am sick of the whole spectacle, as I suspect you are.

But having taken a big, fat bat to the GOP piñata for their disgraceful exploitation of the situation, I notice I have neglected the media hogs also fatting themselves at the Schiavo feeding tube. They, too, deserve a few hundred good, strong whacks.

Luckily for me, Salon's Eric Boehlert has saved me the trouble, revealing the lunatic circus in all its seedy glory as it camped outside the Florida hospice, allowing the self-aggrandizing horn-tooting of a few to stand in for the appalled disapproval of the many. It's a Felliniesque spectacle and Boehlert captures it perfectly, if you have the stomach. I recommend putting on a Nino Rota album before you start reading. (Google him, cinema-illiterates.)

This may not end up being the very last word I'll have to say, or link to, anyway, on the subject - I've a line in the water that may or may not get a bite - but I rather hope it is. Is there anyone at all who came out of all this looking better than when he or she went in?

DeLay Praises Restrained Judiciary!

2005-04-01T12:43:00.000-08:00

And a happy April Fools' Day to you, too!

In fact, as Salon's War Room reports, DeLay not only didn't thank the 23 state and federal judges who upheld the law in the Terri Schiavo case, he actually hit them with a right to the solar plexus, saying "the time will come for the men responsible" for Schiavo's death "to answer for their behavior."

Now the good part: Senator Frank Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, has sent DeLay a letter suggesting the Hammer's remarks constituted a possibly felonious threat to the safety of the judges in question - a particularly poor choice, given the murders of a judge, a judge's family, and various court officers in Chicago and Atlanta in the last three weeks.

Lautenberg: "As you are surely aware, the family of Federal Judge Joan H. Lefkow of Illinois was recently murdered in their home. And at the state level, Judge Rowland W. Barnes and others in his courtroom were gunned down in Georgia.

"Our nation’s judges must be concerned for their safety and security when they are asked to make difficult decisions every day. That’s why comments like those you made are not only irresponsible, but downright dangerous. To make matters worse, is it appropriate to make threats directed at specific federal and state judges? You should be aware that your comments yesterday may violate a federal criminal statute, 18 U.S.C. Sec. 115 (a)(1)(B). That law states:

"'Whoever threatens to assault…. or murder, a United States judge… with intent to retaliate against such… judge…. on account of the performance of official duties, shall be punished [by up to six years in prison].'

"Threats against specific federal judges are not only a serious crime, but also beneath a member of Congress. In my view, the true measure of democracy is how it dispenses justice. Your attempt to intimidate judges in America not only threatens our courts, but our fundamental democracy as well.

"Federal judges, as well as state and local judges in our nation, are honorable public servants who make difficult decisions every day. You owe them – and all Americans – an apology for your reckless statements."

Nice going, Frank. I said it before and I'll say it again. Given that the House Majority Leader is under indictment and facing growing opposition at home in both parties, mark my words: one way or another, Tom DeLay will not be returned to the U.S. Congress in 2006.

On a day dedicated to celebrating fools, that's a cheerful thought.

Politics

With Friends Like These, Who Needs Democrats?

2005-03-31T10:57:00.000-08:00

Stop the presses! A Republican judge is defending the Constitution!

Terri Schiavo is dead, and God bless her, whatever form he may take. At the risk of ruining the Radical Right's pity party, however, I think it only appropriate to quote, by way of eulogaic remarks, the words of 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Stanley Birch, a hard-Right Republican and a Bush I appointee. From his supporting opinion declining to accept the Schiavo case for a 23rd time (thanks to Salon's War Room):

"A popular epithet directed by some members of society, including some members of Congress, toward the judiciary involves the denunciation of 'activist judges. Generally, the definition of an 'activist judge' is one who decides the outcome of a controversy before him according to personal conviction, even one sincerely held, as opposed to the dictates of the law as constrained by legal precedent and, ultimately, our Constitution. In resolving the Schiavo controversy, it is my judgment that, despite sincere and altruistic motivation, the legislative and executive branches of our government have acted in a manner demonstrably at odds with our Founding Fathers' blueprint for the governance of a free people -- our Constitution."

Salon goes on:

"While other judges have been content to assume the constitutionality of the emergency legislation enacted by Congress on behalf of Schiavo's parents while rejecting their appeals on other grounds, Birch said that it was time to cease indulging in that assumption. While Congress and the president might have had the constitutional authority to confer jurisdiction over the Schiavo matter on the federal courts, Birch said that they lacked the authority to dictate the way in which the courts exercised that jurisdiction. As Birch explained, the emergency legislation purported to tell the courts that they must apply a 'de novo' standard of review to the case; that they could not consider whether Schiavo's parents claims were previously adjudicated in state courts; that they could not abstain from hearing the case on the grounds that proceedings were already under way in state courts; and that they could not decline the case on the grounds that remedies in state courts had not yet been exhausted. 'Because these provisions constitute legislative dictation of how a federal court should exercise its judicial functions," Birch wrote, the Schiavo legislation "invades the province of the judiciary and violates the separation of powers principle.'"

Birch: "...when the fervor of political passions moves the executive and legislative branches to act in ways inimical to basic constitutional principles, it is the duty of the judiciary to intervene. If sacrifices to the independence of the judiciary are permitted today, precedent is established for the constitutional transgressions of tomorrow. Accordingly, we must conscientiously guard the independence of our judiciary and safeguard the Constitution, even in the face of the unfathomable human tragedy that has befallen Mrs. Schiavo and her family and the recent events related to her plight which have troubled the consciences of many. Realizing this duty, I conclude that the [Schiavo legislation] is an unconstitutional infringement on core tenets underlying our constitutional system."

Salon: "Birch said that the Florida legislature or Congress might re-write the laws governing end of life decisions, but that -- failing to do so -- they could not mandate that the courts change existing laws through judicial fiat. 'Were the courts to change the law, as the petitioners and Congress invite us to do, an 'activist judge' criticism would be valid.'"

In other words: The hypocrisy stops here. Just as we know the Radical Right are for government getting out of people's lives - except when they're not (i.e. when it's intruding in other people's lives), we now see clearly they're totally, 100% against "activist judges" - except when those judges might find for them. These people wouldn't know intellectual consistency if it came up and smacked 'em upside the head with a cricket bat. Fortunately, there are still some Republicans out there who love not just their country but the principles for which it stands. Memo to the other twelve of you: you better do something to take back your party pretty soon, because if you don't... well, let's just say no governmental death-grip lasts forever.

Thank you, Judge Birch. A better memorial for Terri Schiavo would be hard to imagine.

Politics

Southern Comfort

2005-03-30T09:56:00.000-08:00

Well, as Sam Gamgee said, I'm back.

I have no explanation for that Burtonesque character with the Victorian diction who apparently succeeded in passing off his deranged ramblings as my own "journal entries" (recovered via time machine from the future!) while I was gone. None. Although I did enjoy reading that Dickey poem.

But I'll tell you this, honest and true: it was nice to go home for a while.

Living in Los Angeles is a wearing experience. You arrive with sparkling eyes, expecting overnight success, and for a time the city seems full of possibility, like the girl at the punch stand at your high school prom who seems a bit out of your league but you'd swear is giving you friendly looks. When the overnight success doesn't come, you adjust. You grow accustomed over time to the superficiality, the rudeness, the Machiavellian careerism, the high school girls with breast implants and the middle-aged men with lifted faces. You learn to tune them out and focus on the weather - although after a few years even a 80-degree sunny day starts to feel oppressive in its own way. Living in LA is perhaps the most pleasant form of auto-anesthesia ever devised by the human mind.

Of course, if you're not careful with the anesthesia, it can become auto-euthanasia.

Don't worry; I am not going to sit here and wax sentimental about the place I was born and grew up in, because it merits no so such treatment. Atlanta is, in the words of a high school friend of mine, The Big Sofa: it's really comfortable, and if you know what's good for you you really need to drag yourself up off it and go outside. It's perhaps as unsouthern as a southern city can be.

But.

Those of you whose experience of the southern United States is limited to "Dukes of Hazzard" may have entrenched assumptions about that part of the country. I will not sully myself with attempting to change them. Ignorance takes many forms, regional self-superiority being one of the more common, and we southerners are used to being whipping boys for the rest of the country. If it makes you feel better about yourself to be able to think, "Well, at least I'm not from THERE," as if poverty, racism, corruption and lack of education don't exist in your little corner of the world, you go right ahead. Like I said, I'm over trying to enlighten the willfully ignorant on this subject.

But I will attest that being southern does most certainly shape the way you see things. There is a connectedness with the land, a sense of history that comes with the birth certificate - not the "We shall rise again" crap, just a tacit understanding that there IS a history to be learned and wrestled with. (Americans as a group don't really "do" history; we prefer looking forward, so as not to have to wrestle with our national history and the holes it would poke in our national mythology. Southerners, on the other hand, have no choice; we got beat, and the ones who beat us have never let us forget it.)

Enlightened southerners, who exist in only slightly smaller proportion than enlightened people in other parts of the world, are thus burdened from the beginning with a rich and mournful knowledge of what casual evil human beings are capable of. It gives us depth in a way I believe people from other parts of America are hard pressed to match. Angelenos are skin-deep.

(By the way, don't mistake anything I'm saying for the faux populism so in vogue among the current beneficiaries of flyover-state ignorance. David Brooks can stuff his bobos up his nose. I'm an overeducated, coastal, blue-state intellectual and proud of it.)

The point is, when I go home - for that is what it always will be - and spend a little time among dogwood trees and people who age normally, it recharges me. It's like putting a live wire to the earth; I feel grounded, put back in touch with the real. LA is a big movie set, and as on any studio backlot, if you look around you'll see the buildings are nothing more than hollow façades. It's a convincing simulacrum of reality, but only from a distance. (Angeleno readers will recognize this as the "Angelyne" principle.)

Did it change my life, this six-day respite in the land that birthed me? Fix all my problems? Of course not. But one thing I have come to know unshakably about myself is that I yearn always for connection, for intimacy, for truth, for passion, for chances to commune with the real. For six days last week, I did that. Like that Victorian imposter said, it was a balm for my soul. I wish you all a similarly healing experience sometime soon.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming, already in progress...

Squandering "Political Capital": Priceless.

2005-03-27T14:06:00.000-08:00

This just in, courtesy of Naked Singularity reader Jason H. of Los Angeles. It's off the Reuters wire. And I quote:

"BUSH APPROVAL RATING HITS LOW MARK

"WASHINGTON (March 26) - President Bush's job approval slipped into the mid 40s in national polls released this week as he lost some support among men and other groups of core supporters.

"Public approval for Bush slipped from 52 percent in a CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll over the weekend to 45 percent in that same poll released Thursday. A CBS News poll released earlier in the week found Bush's approval slipping six points to 43 percent.

"The Gallup poll found Bush losing support among men, self-described conservatives and churchgoers while the CBS poll found a drop among men and Republicans.

"The polls come after Congress and the president intervened in the case of Terri Schiavo, a 41-year-old woman whose feeding tube had been removed. The federal intervention was widely unpopular, even with conservatives and evangelicals.

"But Bush's dip in the polls also comes at a time that gas prices have been on the rise and the president is involved in an uphill campaign for changes in Social Security.

"The Gallup poll of 1,001 adults was taken Monday through Wednesday and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The CBS News poll of 737 adults was taken Monday and Tuesday and has a 4 percentage point margin of error."

Gee, go figure: you screw the public mercilessly on every single issue for months on end, and eventually they actually start to notice. How about that?

Politics

Seeds of Resistance, Y'all!

2005-03-26T17:44:00.000-08:00

We continue today with transcribed entries from a recovered journal recounting Hotspur's adventures on a March 2005 safari back to Atlanta, the village of his birth, deep in the heart of Red State darkness. This entry contains copyrighted material, the unauthorized reproduction here of which probably violates the letter of some law somewhere; given the spirit of the reproduction's purpose, however, we here at Naked Singularity feel certain the author (if not his estate) would approve. Please don't sue us; we're not making a dime off it, and no one will be happier than we if the result is a marked increase in revenues due to the sale of said author's poetry.

March 26: The aforementioned tribal ritual took place, but I was not in attendance, as my traveling companion proved unequal to the rigors of the journey required to witness it; granted, my traveling companion is 82-and-one-half years of age, so I deferred to her wishes with, I hope, adequate equanimity. The mysteries of the chopping tomahawk and the Diamondvision await an expedition of more intrepid explorers.

However, I was pleased instead to accompany my mother on a sojourn to visit the homestead of my brother and his family. They have somehow managed to carve out an existence in the harsh environment of western Dekalb County, and it cheered me to see how they now thrive despite the concomitant hardships. My niece and nephew harvested homegrown carrots and picked wild grasses for Easter baskets - how the niceties of civilization are preserved even here in the suburbs off Lavista! - as we adults tarried in the shade of their lean-to's lanai with a cool drink.

I was dismayed, however, to hear that my brother and his wife have endured significant mistreatment at the hands of anonymous neighbors due, apparently, to their political affiliation. I should note that their minivan still sports a Howard Dean sticker and their front lawn a Kerry/Edwards campaign sign; even so, I fail to see any justification for the dead rat left recently on my sister-in-law's windshield. Even in this relatively Blue city, the hatred inculcated by the sinister Professor Rove is evidently sufficient to snuff out basic southern decency, not to say politesse. Thank goodness, as my sister-in-law noted, that the miscreants in question respected the power of disease enough first to insert the deceased rodent in a Ziploc bag. (Who, we asked rhetorically, is so twisted as to seek out rats, dispatch them to their reward, and stick them in a plastic baggie in preparation for the moment when they might come upon a car with a Democratic sticker on it? The mind fairly reels at the unbalanced nature of such an imagination.)

Nonethless, my sister-in-law, who was to the best of my knowledge the first and most rabid Deaniac in northeast Atlanta, continues to meet with like-minded professional women of her acquaintance who share the goal of becoming the change they wish to see. One idea they have had is to go around to Sunday School classes with a presentation on Jim Wallis's God's Politics, thereby to introduce some of the area's less enlightened Christians to the compatibility of their religion with liberal political philosophy. I think this a capital notion, particularly in this part of the world; any Christian who thinks his religion is best represented by the policies of the Bush administration understands precious little about his religion. My sister-in-law, a lawyer, is also half-seriously entertaining (with some encouragement from her compatriots) the thought of running for the United States Senate from Georgia. Could she win? I haven't the slightest idea, but I think she'd do our home territory proud should she indeed prevail, and I have pledged to provide her what financial support I could should she choose to make her candidacy official. Attention, Georgian Democrats: keep an eye peeled for lawn signs sporting a jaunty ¡Ortega! logo.

I also had further occasion to discuss politics with my stepfather, the wisest man I know, which conversation actually grew out of a dinner table discussion with my mother on poetry. I allowed as how, while I understand and respect poetry as a form, too often I have been left cold by its practioners of the last 65 years or so, whose work I frequently find willfully obscure. (It's as if, having read "The Four Quartets," all most late 20th Century poets got out of the experience was that opacity equals profundity.) I also sense that some of these same poets - and I don't mean the great ones, now, but rather those on the next level down - enjoy the feeling of self-superiority they derive from their audience's befuddlement. If I, as overeducated a rascal as you are likely to find and one with no mean schooling in poetry appreciation, can make no sense of the poet's work, the reason is most likely not my lack of sufficient erudition but the poem's lack of sufficient sense.

In response, my stepfather pulled out a book and read to me, in his Atticus Finch voice:

CHERRYLOG ROAD

Off Highway 106
At Cherrylog Road I entered
The '34 Ford without wheels,
Smothered in kudzu,
With a seat pulled out to run
Corn whiskey down from the hills,

And then from the other side
Crept into an Essex
With a rumble seat of red leather
And then out again, aboard
A blue Chevrolet, releasing
The rust from its other color,

Reared up on three building blocks.
None had the same body heat;
I changed with them inward, toward
The weedy heart of the junkyard,
For I knew that Doris Holbrook
Would escape from her father at noon

And would come from the farm
To seek parts owned by the sun
Among the abandoned chassis,
Sitting in each in turn
As I did, leaning forward
As in a wild stock-car race

In the parking lot of the dead.
Time after time, I climbed in
And outthe other side, like
An envoy or movie star
Met at the station by crickets.
A radiator cap raised its head,

Become a real toad or a kingsnake
As I neared the hub of the yard,
Passing through many states,
Many lives, to reach
Some grandmother's long Pierce-Arrow
Sending platters of blindness forth

From its nickel hubcaps
And spilling its tender upholstery
On sleepy roaches,
The glass panel in between
Lady and colored driver
Not all the way broken out,

The back-seat phone
Still on its hook.
I got in as though to exclaim,
"Let us go to the orphan asylum,
John; I have some old toys
For children who say their prayers."

I popped with sweat as I thought
I heard Doris Holbrook scrape
Like a mouse in the southern-state sun
That was eating the paint in blisters
>>From a hundred car tops and hoods.
She was tapping like code,

Loosening the screws,
Carrying off headlights,
Sparkplugs, bumpers,
Cracked mirrors and gear-knobs,
Getting ready, already,
To go back with something to show

Other than her lips' new trembling
I would hold to me soon, soon
Where I sat in the ripped back seat
Talking over the interphone,
Praying for Doris Holbrook
To come from her father's farm

And to get back there
With no trace of me on her face
To be seen by her red-haired father
Who would change, in the squalling barn,
Her back's pale skin with a strop,
Then lay for me

In a bootlegger's roasting car
With a sting-triggered 12-guage shotgun
To blast the breath from the air.
Not cut by the jagged windshields,
Through the acres of wrecks she came
With a wrench in her hand,

Through dust where the blacksnake dies
Of boredom, and the beetle knows
The compost has no more life.
Someone's outside would have seen
The oldest car's door inexplicably
Close from within:

I held her and held her and held her,
Convoyed at terrific speed
By the stalled, dreaming traffic around us,
So the blacksnake, stiff
With inaction, curved back
Into life, and hunted the mouse

With deadly overexcitement,
The beetles reclaimed their field
As we clung, glued together
With the hooks of the seat springs
Working through to catch us red-handed
Amidst the gray breathless batting

That burst from the seat at our backs.
We left by separate doors
Into the changed, other bodies
Of cars, she down Cherrylog Road
And I to my motorcycle
Parked like the soul of the junkyard

Restored, a bicycle fleshed
With power, and tore off
Up Highway 106, continually
Drunk on the wind in my mouth,
Wringing the handlebar for speed,
Wild to be wreckage forever.

The poet was Atlanta's James Dickey, and the poem was simply smashing, as well as the antithesis of all I had previously decried: not oblique but crystalline, not pretentious but earthy, not elitist but democratic (with a small "d") - and if at all intellectual, its intellectualism was of a sort any reasonably intelligent English-speaker could access. I was overcome; the unexpected bliss of exquisite art - particularly art with such a strong southern tang, as I recuperated here in the heart of my homeland - was a balm for my soul.

It also occurred to me instantly that in this exchange my parents and I had put our collective finger on a principle whose relevance to current American politics was direct and urgent. Where Red Staters recoil in mistrust from the liberals so ably demonized by conservative media gurus, it is often in reaction against the self-superior intellectualism they have been trained to see in every word and deed profferred by anyone on the Left - and while this accusation is frequently empty, it is not exclusively so. The Democratic Party in America, I suddenly saw with the clarion force of revelation, must make as one of its main goals the redress of this hateful characterization - and must seek to ensure it is a mischaracterization. We became the great political power in America for forty years because of our identification with the problems, causes, heartaches and unflagging strength of ordinary working people. We must remember that eloquent truth is not the exclusive province of the intelligentsia. Great poetry need not be incomprehensible, and great politics need not be inaccessible.

There is in simplicity, in directness, the possibility for true connection, for clarity. Artifice is the enemy of art.

Oh, the joy of sudden insight! What a profitable trip this is turning out to be!

Hell Freezes Over

2005-03-25T18:45:00.000-08:00

THIS JUST IN: The Duke Blue Devils have been defeated by Michigan State in the NCAA Tournament.

I chose Duke to win the championship this year in every bracket I submitted, figuring that either way, I'd win. But their ouster so early in the proceedings now has me questioning my most cherished assumptions. Over the last five years I have become so very used to Pure Evil triumphing in all circumstances: Bush, Jim Hahn, Schwarzeneggar, Bush again... It just became a knee-jerk assumption, like knowing every live-action Disney release would suck.

But now that Duke has lost, Pure Evil's string of unbroken triumphs has been broken. And I am left here on the floor, shattered, depleted, bereft. How to put back together the shards of my fractured world-view? How to make sense of a universe in which Pure Evil can actually be defeated?

Poor Coach K and his orphanage full of hard-luck tykes. Who will they play dirty ball against now?

Like Paper in Fire

2005-03-25T17:44:00.002-08:00

The story so far: Hotspur has ventured into the wilds of deepest, darkest Red America to visit his ancestral village, known as Atlanta. In a twist of archaeological fortune involving a bottle of Southern Comfort and a time machine, the remnants of his safari journal have been/will be discovered in the year 2075 in the smoldering ruins of a barbecue restaurant fire of suspicious origin. Herewith are presented excerpts from this historic trek.

March 25: I am pleased to note that the quality of Chinese cuisine in Atlanta, which I have found to be inexplicably unmatched anywhere else in America I've visited, is entirely undiminished. May God and Lao-Tsu save and protect the good proprietors of the House of Chan!

Time to respond to reader inquiries. A Mrs. Juana McCorkindale of Eugene, OR, asks, "If you find the time, dearest Mr. Hotspur, could you provide elucidation as to the condition of local media coverage deep in the continent?"

Madame, I can and I will. In regards to the largest print daily, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution - or, as it is more familiarly known to the natives, the "fish-wrapper" - I can report that it remains the most astonishingly poor excuse for a big-city newspaper to be found anywhere outside Texas. As evidence I submit two notable features of today's edition:

1. Four and one-half complete front-section pages (including the front page, above the fold) devoted entirely to the Terri Schiavo situation, notwithstanding the fact that the Supreme Court has refused to take the case and Jeb Bush has rejected calls to take Ms. Schiavo's essentially lifeless body "into protective custody," and

2. A large ad on Page A2 teasing the incipient arrival in Saturday's edition of the weekly "Faith & Values" section. This week: "Born Again: The Southern Baptist Convention has a goal of 1 million baptisms this year. We tell the stories of three people baptized recently!"

This is news?

As for Atlanta's broadcast media, I can only aver it continues to be as mind-numbing an embarrassment as ever. (Needless to say, it is nonetheless light years better than that of Los Angeles.)

Tomorrow I hope to attend, weather permitting, a local tribal ritual. The largest HDTV screen in the world is to be unveiled at the home arena of the town's most dominant gladiatorial organization. Apparently three-story, full-color tomahawks will be seen to chop in glorious "Diamondvision"; what, exactly, they may chop is still a bit murky, but undoubtedly all will be made clear on the morrow. What a smashing opportunity for anthropological science!

I drift to sleep to the dulcet tones of Green Day's "American Idiot" - a lullaby tailored especially for my needs by my ingenious iPod Shuffle - followed by Lyle Lovett and his Large Band, singing the wondrous "Church." Now that's a religion worth devoting the space of an entire newspaper.

Until tomorrow!

Stop the InsHannity!

2005-03-24T14:40:00.000-08:00

From Hotspur's Safari Journal, recently discovered in a late-Seventies "Electrowoman & Dynagirl" lunchbox found in the smoldering ruins of Sonny's Barbecue in Marietta, GA, and sold by Christie's at auction for $3.59:

March 24: Day One of my foray into deepest, darkest Red America has brought me little insight into this bewildering land. It is hard to believe I was born here, raised here, became a man on these mean streets. It is all so familiar, and yet so foreign. Thank God for the Chipotle newly established on Hwy. 41 at Akers Mill next to the Chick-fil-A, on premises formerly occupied by Longhorn Steaks. (How hard it is not to read a political portent in that turn of events, though I shall do my best to keep my native optimism in check.)

But the opportunity to commune with my beloved family provides welcome cheer. A hardier clan of southern Democrats it is difficult to imagine. "Keep hope alive," indeed.

My stepfather, the wisest man I know, is pleased with Howard Dean's ascension to the top of the party and hopeful that Dean's grass-roots fundraising prowess and focus on putting the power in the party back into the hands of those on the state and local levels will bring about the progressive renaissance for which we all fervently pray. He also believes it is essential that the Dems run a non-Beltway type in 2008, preferably a midwestern or western governor. He has mentioned Brad Henry, of Oklahoma. I can see his point, though I myself tend more toward the notion of nominating somehow with a modicum of charisma. How can we get John Edwards a better resumé?

Driving the Atlantan veldt in my borrowed Infiniti Land Cruiser this afternoon, I searched in vain for a local AM radio affiliate with the intestinal fortitude to broadcast Air America, thinking I had heard it was available here. Perhaps I was misinformed. In any case, I did stumble across Sean Hannity's show, where could be heard the Blow-Dried Irishman and his devotées carping to the heavens over the gall - the gall! - of that untrustworthy (Republican-majority) Florida legislature, that scoundrel (Republican) governor Jeb Bush, and, worst of all, that despicable (Republican-nominated majority) United States Supreme Court, none of whom had the courage to step in and protect Terri Schiavo's right to be shamelessly exploited by Tom DeLay and the Fundamentalist Fringe. (Jeb they were mostly mad at because he has thus far refused to order the Florida State Patrol to enter the hospital and forcibly take Mrs. Schiavo from it. Yes, you heard me; they want him to use state police to abduct her.)

The Righties were apoplectic; Hannity himself decried the unfairness of an unelected judiciary taking away the power from "our elected officials." Conveniently ignoring, of course, the apparent lack of representation in the current Congress for the 65% of Americans who think what DeLay did was unconscionable. I thought poor Sean might have an aneurism on the spot.

All in all, a salutary first day!

Politics

Red Lenses

2005-03-22T13:50:00.000-08:00

April Fool's Day is coming - and what better way to mark it than with a foray into Red America? (By the way, are you like me? Is it impossible for you to get used to painting the conservative states with a color that is indelibly linked in our national consciousness to Commies and liberals? Do you find yourself inadvertently switching the Red and Blue appellations?)

That's right: starting tomorrow, I'll be going on safari into deepest, darkest Georgia. Well, okay, not so deep and dark. Atlanta. Which is itself a pretty blue city. But still.

I'll be sending dispatches from the heart of the Democratic southern resistance all week. If you've got questions for the natives, by all means post them in the comments and I'll do my best to find answers. The indigenous fauna spook pretty easily, but I think I can coax them out a bit.

'Til my next post from the interior...

You Don't Really Love Me, You Just Keep Me Hanging On

2005-03-22T00:28:00.000-08:00

Oh, what a tragic state of affairs.

I will not take up the defense of Michael Schiavo. He has no need of my defense. I am on record in this very space as being in favor of the right-to-die, which nearly thirty judges - including, now, a federal judge who only received the case because Congress altered the law to allow such a thing to happen - have upheld is a right which, as far as anyone knows, Terri Schiavo would have wanted to exercise. (And just so you know exactly where I'm coming from, I have made clear to my wife that, were I in a similar position, I would wish to be allowed to die if, and only if, my brain should have no meaningful higher function at all. If my mind's intact inside my head, even if I can't communicate, I want to live, dammit.)

Michael Schiavo's wife has been dead for all practical purposes for fifteen years, according to the only meaningful metric which exists for such a question. This is fact. Wishful thinking will not unmake it. Her brain is damaged beyond hope of any real recovery, according to the doctors who have actually bothered to examine her at a range measured in feet rather than hundreds of miles.

Michael and Terri Schiavo's marriage was not perfect (whose is?); they were in the early stages of separating when Terri's heart stopped due to a lack of potassium brought about by her bulimia, and the brain damage was exacerbated by other mishaps having to do with the EMTs who attended her. That some see vague responsiveness in her face and voice, where they so long to see it, is understandable but certainly a mirage, a trick of the mind, and cannot qualify as actionable evidence. We always hope against hope that our loved ones will come back to us. Sooner or later, every single one of them fails to do so.

In the intervening fifteen years, Michael Schiavo has done what, I think, only the most insensitive soul would begrudge him: knowing his wife is essentially dead, he has gone on with his life. He has a new life partner, and children by her. Were my spouse in his place, I pray fervently she would do the same.

Neither will I condemn Terri Schiavo's family. They love her; they miss her. Every flutter of a lash, every gutteral sound that emanates from her throat, suggests to their eyes and ears against all reason that hope, Emily Dickinson's "thing with feathers," is not lost. Who cannot imagine their desperation, their need? Who cannot feel for their pain?

So I will not enter the arena of attacking or supporting one or the other of Terri Schiavo's family members, who have all been through more than I hope any of us ever has to. Their experience has been harrowing, excruciating, and not one of us who has not lived it has earned the right to scorn any of them.

No, let's reserve our scorn for those who have truly earned it by exploiting this sorrowful situation for their own political gain. For the radical religious zealots who have used and misused Terri Schiavo's parents and siblings. For Jeb Bush and Bill Frist and the other politicians who have abused this family's tragedy as a way to score political points. Most especially for Tom DeLay, who has grabbed onto this situation as a way of detracting attention from his own impending indictment. "One thing that God has brought to us," DeLay told a Family Research Council conference a couple of days ago, "is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America. This is exactly the issue that is going on in America, of attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others."

According to the New York Times, "DeLay complained that 'the other side' had figured out how 'to defeat the conservative movement,' by waging personal attacks, linking with liberal organizations and persuading the national news media to report the story. He charged that 'the whole syndicate' was 'a huge nationwide concerted effort to destroy everything we believe in.'"

It's about him, you see. It'a about the huge liberal forces arrayed to destroy him and his kind. Not about Terri Schiavo. The man's narcissism and paranoia are breathtaking.

"The whole syndicate." What does he mean?

Surely not the 65% of Americans who every poll taken has indicated support Michael Schiavo's wish to allow his wife to die with dignity.

Surely not the 87% of Americans who an ABC News/WPost poll last week indicated would want their spouse to allow them to die, were they so unfortunate as to be in that state.

Surely not the mainstream media, who have essentially ignored the public's feelings on the issue.

Surely not the Democrats in the federal government, who are out of power in every branch.

In a time when we have seen crass and craven politics of the most disgusting sort, I would venture to say this beats all. This may be the most despicable political exploitation of human suffering we have yet seen in America this century, which, in only five short years, has racked up an impressive list of moral affronts.

And so this I say to you, the ordinary Americans: What kind of people are we if we allow this to go on? What kind of country are we if we let our elected representatives pervert the federal government and the Constitution and exacerbate this family's unimaginable torment? What kind of people are we if we patronize a media who allows these crimes against human decency to go entirely unquestioned?

Who are we? What has happened to us?

Good For What Ailes You

2005-03-21T10:04:00.000-08:00

Apoplectic over the pseudo-journalistic outrage that is Fox News? Just don't know how to quantify your intuition for use by the water cooler when that jerkoff CSUN grad who works in Operations starts spouting off about how much sense Bill O'Reilly makes? Wondering what ever happened to actual NEWS?

Howard Kurtz's most recent Media Notes column in the WPost contains some of the most damning information, via the Project for Excellence in Journalism, about the state of broadcast news in general and the Fox News Channel yet seen. Naturally, the rest of the media world has yawned in response.

Rather than summarizing, let me quote:

"In covering the Iraq war last year, 73 percent of the stories on Fox News included the opinions of the anchors and journalists reporting them, a new study says.

"By contrast, 29 percent of the war reports on MSNBC and 2 percent of those on CNN included the journalists' own views."

Huh? Are you freakin' KIDDING me? The Clinton News Network only scored 2% on the Editorializ-o-meter? Oh, imagine the Free Republic bulletin board about now...

"The project defines opinion as views that are not attributed to others."

You want examples?

"Last March, Fox reporter Todd Connor said that 'Iraq has a new interim constitution and is well on its way to democracy.'

"'Let's pray it works out,' said anchor David Asman.

"Another time, after hearing that Iraqis helped capture a Saddam Hussein henchman, Asman said: 'Boy, that's good news if true, the Iraqis in the lead.'

"Fox legal editor Stan Goldman challenged the hiring of attorney Gloria Allred to represent Amber Frey (Scott Peterson's mistress), saying: 'If you want to keep a low profile, Gloria is not the lawyer to represent you.'"

"The Project for Excellence in Journalism, a Washington-based research group, offers a three-part breakdown of cable journalists voicing their opinions. From 11 a.m. to noon, this happened on 52 percent of the stories on Fox, 50 percent on MSNBC and 2.3 percent on CNN. Among news-oriented evening shows, journalist opinions were voiced on 70 percent of the stories on Fox's 'Special Report With Brit Hume,' due in part to its regular analysts panel at the show's end; 9 percent on MSNBC's 'Countdown With Keith Olbermann'; and 9 percent on CNN's 'NewsNight With Aaron Brown.'"

Let me repeat that: opinions voiced on 9% of Olbermann and Brown's shows, versus 70% on Hume's.

"As for the most popular prime-time shows, nearly every story -- 97 percent -- contained opinion on Fox's 'O'Reilly Factor'; 24 percent on MSNBC's 'Hardball With Chris Matthews'; and 0.9 percent on CNN's 'Larry King Live.'"

"The project describes cable news reporting as pretty thin compared with the ABC, NBC and CBS evening newscasts. Only a quarter of the cable stories examined contained two or more identifiable sources, compared with 49 percent of network evening news stories and 81 percent of newspaper front-page stories."

In other words, friends and neighbors, the distinction between the pseudo-journalism done by Fox and the actual journalism done by the other cable news nets and the broadcast nets is, by any objective standard, cavernous. Not to mention loud.

Clip 'n' Save!

Politics

It's Only a Day Away

2005-03-21T09:55:00.000-08:00

It's Monday, and that means a new and brilliant "This Modern World." In today's edition, Tom Tomorrow flips the channel to the Bush News Network. Sweetheart that I am, I'm pushing the buttons on your remote, too. Enjoy.

No Pulp

2005-03-18T14:44:00.000-08:00

First off, sorry for the unexpected layoff, folks. Knowing full well that it's bad business to stop blogging just when people are starting to read you, I promise there will be no more nine-day layoffs between posts. (Partly, I just didn't have much to add to the ever-more-irrational world. Also, I strive in this space to provide not moment-by-moment commentary in the manner of some blogs, but rather thoughtful analysis with some perspective - and sometimes perspective takes a little time to set in. Anyway, I'm back. And nationwide. Worldwide, even.)

That being said, I'll begin this post the way I began the last one: with a link to a piece in today's Salon. (By the way, if you're not familiar with Salon, rundon'twalk to the link over there on the right side of this page and avail yourself of the wonderous wisdom of the best news/analysis publication on the Worldddd Widdddde Webbbb.) Kevin Berger's article on yesterday's Congressional Oversight Committee steroid hearings is easily the best collection of thoughts on that ridiculous circus I've seen. Berger wastes no time in calling out the pontificating politicians for their grandstanding while ignoring baseball's true travesty, the sport's can-you-believe-they're still-doing-that antitrust exemption (not to mention stuff that really matters, like, oh, say, the Bush administration's falsification of evidence for the war in Iraq).

Where Berger really shines, though, is in the way he identifies José Canseco, the man whose self-glorifying tell-all book started this latest round of navel-gazing, neither as crusading savior or damnable liar but rather, in all his messy, charming glory, as The Accidental Hero: a man whose inability to control his human failings has forced the issue out into the open. Canseco, Berger writes, slowly unraveled before the committee, his eyes growing bloodshot, his tie loosening, his answers becoming ever more self-contradictory - in contrast to the smooth, rehearsed, politician-like performances of Mark McGuire, Rafael Palmeiro, Sammy Sosa, and Curt Schilling. Canseco can't cover up his humanity like they can; he doesn't have the discipline (which is why he needed steroids). He's an X-factor, a free radical; he's the wild mustang they couldn't tame, who bashes himself bloody but breaks down the fence in the process and lets the other horses out.

The fact is, this whole issue is a farce. Athletes have been doing whatever they could to give themselves advantages, fair or not, since the beginning of athletic competition. The disctinction between shooting up with steroids and getting laser eye surgery - another scientific enhancement the advantages of which on pitching and hitting are well-documented - is really no distinction at all. It's an arbitrary line. This is a smoke-screen issue that the Powers That Be, both Congressional and in Major League Baseball, are happy to allow to divert the public from the serious stuff. And Berger nails them for it. Check it out.

Captain Walker Didn't Come Home

2005-03-08T13:23:00.000-08:00

There’s a thought-provoking article by Alessandro Camon in today’s Salon that discusses the modern mafia-lit/show genre as one long deconstruction of patriarchy, in both the political and personal senses. Camon traces the path from “The Godfather” through “The Sopranos” and finally the reality show “Growing Up Gotti”; he charts how the father’s traditional role as the protector of family in this genre slowly erodes (sometimes causing the very destruction of the family the father sought to protect), and makes some astute observations about the relationship between this through-line and the mafia genre’s enduring popularity (especially in the modern-day gangsta subculture).

He also connects that popularity to the general cultural phenomenon of emotional or actual fatherlessness in America. I can’t help thinking that phenomenon began with the Baby-Boomers and their emotionally distant fathers, returned from World War II or Korea with psychic scars that could never heal. The men in my family who served were fortunate enough to be spared serious combat experiences and the concomitant trauma (with one significant exception, about whom more in a bit). Of course, that’s just what they’ve told me. I know people whose fathers and grandfathers refuse to this day to discuss with anyone except their fellow soldiers what they experienced and how it affected them. That’s how they keep their heads screwed on semi-straight, and when you watch a particularly well-made documentary on the subject or a movie like “Band of Brothers,” you can understand why. It’s no self-contradiction for a liberal like me to appreciate how much of their sanity our fathers left on those battlefields, or to feel grateful and lucky to have been myself spared that particular trauma.

But of course that’s not the whole story. What about those fathers’ sons?

Having been kowtowed to by Madison Avenue as they aged from childhood through adolescence, the male Baby-Boomers took out their hurt by rebelling against everything their fathers’ generation represented. In some ways this was a good thing: mainstream America in the Fifties was a bland, deferential place where no one questioned authority – and the Sixties were spent showing just how wrongheaded authority could be. The Boomers blew the lid off that self-satisfied patriarchy, which is why conservatives today still loathe everything about the Sixties: they perceive it rightly as an affront to the culture of their fathers. (They are willfully blind to the flaws of that culture, and of the fathers who created it; acknowledging those flaws would mean acknowledging their own, and that ain’t gonna happen.)

But then the Seventies came along, and slowly, surely, the male boomers screwed it up. (The women didn’t; they figured out after a while that “free love” just meant the boys expected them to put out on demand, and they started rethinking just what being truly liberated meant.) The men forgot the good that came out of the Sixties; they spent the Seventies gratifying themselves, with little or no thought of how it impacted others in their lives. How better to refute the self-enslavement of their fathers to obligation, to responsibility, than by eschewing responsibility and obligation? Which was all well and good, except… the sex was good, man, see? The grass and blow were primo! It was the freakin’ “Me” Decade, for cryin’ out loud! What was a self-indulgent Boomer man to do?

Well, apparently he couldn’t muster the self-restraint not to have families. Instead, he got married and had kids – and only THEN realized the responsibility was less fun than the partying had been. And realizing that, the Boomer men left. In droves. They reacted to their fathers’ emotional inaccessibility by becoming a generation of crappy fathers. (A decade or so down the line, having finally grown up a little or partied themselves weary, many of them went back in for second or third marriages and families, and now, finally sober, they became they most anxious parents imaginable - which is why the children of the Baby Boomlet now find their lives scheduled and structured to within an inch of their sanity; the Boomer dads are damned if they’re gonna screw this up again. Oh, and of course now they belatedly lionize their fathers as the “Greatest Generation”; how like the Baby-Boomers to take something of profound substance and reduce it to a marketing slogan.)

If I sound like I take this stuff personally, it’s because I do. This is the story of my life – or, more properly, of my father’s life. Born in 1943, he was at the very leading edge of the Baby Boom. He reacted to his distant father and withholding mother at first by trying to be the Best Boy He Could Be; got great grades, turned down a partial scholarship to Harvard because his parents couldn’t afford the other half, took a full scholarship to Emory instead, became a doctor, married the high school sweetheart who shared his birthday, had a couple of kids…

And then went to Vietnam.

Well, okay, not actually Vietnam. Thailand. An army doctor.

Started drinking. A lot. Maybe drugs; who knows?

And when he came back, he was… different.

The screws had come loose.

He left his family, moved hundreds of miles away so he wouldn’t have to see the people who knew him witnessing what he’d become. Practically disappeared from his kids’ lives. Moved from place to place as job after job turned sour. Who wants a doctor, even a good one, who’s a drunk? His mind was messed up; on several occasions he told me about experiences he had in Thailand during the war… experiences I only years later realized were subplots from “M*A*S*H." He had lost the ability to distinguish between the real and the unreal.

Every once in a while I track him down to see if he’s still alive. Last time I talked to him, seven years ago or so, he was harboring an ex-girlfriend, a nurse about my age, and her two-year-old toddler by another man. And he waxed on happily about how great it was to watch her son growing up, how it reminded him of me.

Unbelievable.

Now, I dredge all this up not simply for the thrill of putting my personal life on display for the world to see, an unseemly compulsion I hope I have managed over time to expunge from my soul as a baker squeezes air bubbles out of dough with a rolling pin. I’m doing it just to give some specifics: a case study, if you will. Because while my father is certainly unique, there are millions of other similarly unique (!) stories out there. A lot of Boomer fathers just couldn’t take the responsibility, and left. Some didn’t, but a lot did. (And for entirely different reasons, some Gen-Yers are doing the same now, except they’re skipping the whole “start the family” part to begin with. They’re just planting seeds they have no intention of cultivating; they’d rather be “my baby’s daddy.” We Gen-Xers, the original latchkey generation, seem a little more committed to making these family situations work, probably because so many of us remember what it was like to be a kid without a father around.)

And all that is to say: This is a thorny, complex area, this whole issue, in 2005, of fathers. The father is receding in our culture; his importance is on the wane. We all have fathers, somewhere. But so often today, the somewhere isn’t here. What happens to a society whose fathers disappear? What’s the impact down the road? Men are abdicating their roles; what are we becoming as a result? I don’t know the answer, but the question seems urgent. I’ve always looked forward to the day when I might become a father and have a chance to experience a healthy father-son relationship, albeit from the other side. But what kind of father will I, whose father was absent, be to my child? Will I be complete? Or will there necessarily be something missing, some vital key ingredient that I simply won’t be able to supply because my father never gave it to me?

I wonder.

One final thought: Camon frames the phenomenon as, at least partially, a response to the emergent empowerment of women in American society over the last forty years. And I guess that may be true, but I must say I can’t relate to it. Because while my father was out in the world losing his mind, I was being raised by strong women – learning to love and respect and value them (and, eventually, to marry one). I was raised by my glorious mother and grandmother… and by my grandfather, and later my stepfather, both WWII vets, both better fathers to me than my own ever tried to be.

How about that?

That Sinking Feeling

2005-03-04T10:28:00.001-08:00

What's a president to do when he spends a month trying to rally public support for the GOP's 40-year old dream scheme to gut Social Security - and instead sees the public turn AGAINST him as, mirabile dictu, it occurs to them that a decrease in benefits doesn't really sound like such a great deal after all?

But the real piñata de la dia is Alan Greenspan, the Artist Formerly Known as the Fed Chairman Who Could Do No Wrong, whose cheerful impaling of his own reputation over the past five years seems finally to be breaking the skin. First Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid calls Greenspan "one of the biggest political hacks we have in Washington" while speaking live on CNN, and now the heroic Paul Krugman, having abandoned his book sabbatical to come back and do battle with the president's faith-based economic brain trust, calls out Mr. Andrea Mitchell for his rank hypocrisy in the service of fealty to America's Finest Political Family Dynasty®. Feels good to land a few whacks, don't it? And who knows what candy may lurk inside...

Politics

Can't Help Lovin' That Bush o' Mine

2005-03-03T10:24:00.000-08:00

This just in: According to a new New York Times/CBS poll, more Americans disagree with the president on more issues than at any time since before 9/11/01 - especially on turning Social Security into a big Roulette wheel. And yet your burgeoning sense of wonder at the irrepressible, essential wisdom of the American voter will be stomped back into the mud by the codicil adding that Bush's personal approval rating remains steady at 49%.

My favorite quote:

"'There are so many other things that seem to me to be more critical and immediate: I think the national debt is absolutely an immediate thing to address,' said Irv Packer, 66, a Missouri Republican. He added, 'Another one that I'd really like to see people working on is the environment.'"

And that, naturally, is why he voted for Bush. Hey, the logic is unassailable.

Politics

When in Doubt, Rip 'em Out

2005-03-02T19:28:00.000-08:00

Not satisfied with attempting the wholesale demolition of the social safety net built 70 years ago by Franklin Roosevelt to protect future Americans from disasters like the (Republican-created) Great Depression, the Bush administration has now clearly set out to destroy the Fourth Estate. No matter that the United States Constitution goes out of its way to proclaim the essential need for the existence and protection of a vital, challenging press. No, the little buggers are itching the Bushies like crabs, so eradicated they must be.

First, it was "no press conferences"; the Bush White House made clear from the start it mistrusts journalists completely, and thus this president held in his first term the fewest press conferences of any in the modern era. Then it was fake news: the video propaganda pieces featuring "reporter" Karen Ryan, trumpeting administration policies, sent out to local TV news editors across the country and played over the air, no doubt inadvertently, as if they were locally produced coverage on the evening news. Then live fake reporters - like the gay-escort-turned-Talon "News" correspondent Jeff Gannon - er, James Guckert - who was allowed into the White House daily briefings every day for two years on a one-day pass despite having no journalistic credentials, using a fake name, and working for a web news site that is literally nothing more than a front for a Republican PAC. And of course, let's not forget the so-called "real" reporters, the Armstrong Williams types who accepted money from the administration to plug its policies in their newspaper and magazine columns.

But as Eric Boehlert's new piece in Salon and Frank Rich's new column in the New York Times make clear, the real agenda of this White House is more far-reaching, and more lethal to the health of our democracy, than even those sinister tactics would indicate. The forces behind Bush aim to undermine the very institution of the press - to reduce it in the public's mind to nothing more than a jumble of voices whose veracity is unconfirmable in the media din - and thus, having removed the notion of "facts" from the public lexicon, to be free to say whatever lies they want, secure in the knowledge that their word cannot be challenged.

It would be easier to retain some faith in the ability of the vital, challenging American press to withstand such a fundamental and apocalyptic attack if one were, in fact, convinced that such a press still existed. The ease with which the Bush administration has controlled, manipulated and rendered impotent the Washington press corps and the rest of the mainstream media, however, suggests that, like a cancer spreading silently under the skin, the threat may have already metastasized and potentially fatal damage been done. Those of us living in the reality-based world should grab our Fun-Savers and take a few snapshots; this may well be what the decline and fall of a civilization looks like.

Mo Cuishle Bréagach

2005-03-01T00:41:00.001-08:00

Well, it happened. Early on, “The Aviator” swept up every “technical” award around (and I loved the guy who pointed out the inanity of that all-purpose term, as if editors don’t make aesthetic choices), but as my friend Joe (who had seen none of the nominees) tried to convince me the signs were presaging it as Marty’s night, a nagging ache in the pit of my stomach told me the Academy voters were just giving him consolation prizes. Man, do I hate being right.

So “The Aviator,” easily the best of the five nominees, had, according to the AMPAS, the best photography, the best editing, the best art direction, the best costume design, and one of the four best performances… but it wasn’t the best-made movie. (1+1+1+1+1=0, evidently. Ah, Hollywood logic.) Which puts Martin Scorsese in the august company of Hitchcock, Altman, Kubrick, and Welles, none of whom ever won a Best Director Oscar – and excludes him from the ranks of Robert Redford, Kevin Costner, and Clint Eastwood, the last three directors to whom Scorsese has lost. (At least his other two losses were to Barry Levinson and Roman Polanski, who are actually primarily directors. Did I mention that actors comprise over a third of the Academy’s voting population?)

(And that is not to slam the aforementioned movie-star-cum-helmsmen. I like “Ordinary People” and “Dances with Wolves,” and I liked ¾ of “Million Dollar Baby.” And all three films were well directed, and all three actor-directors have done enough good work since their first Directing wins to prove they were no mere pan-flashes. But ranking Kevin Costner over Martin Scorsese as a director is like ranking Sydney Pollack over Ian McKellen as an actor.)

After the show, Scorsese was reportedly heard to respond: “I get the message” – the message apparently being that Hollywood respects him enough to acknowledge him but doesn’t love him enough to actually put its little bald gold guy where its mouth is. At this moment, I can’t help being reminded of the recent decision by a majority of the Golden State’s infinitely engaged and informed voters to throw the results of a fair election out the window because they thought it would be totally cool to have the Terminator as their governor. Which is to say – and I’ve been one for ten years, so I can say it – Californians are shallow flakes. Basically good people, but shallow flakes. It logically follows that the voters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, being predominantly Californian, are likewise shallow and flaky. Naturally, they chose their tall, handsome movie-star friend over the short, obsessive-compulsive, motor-mouthed, more talented auteur from the Lower East Side.

Like I said before, Marty: it’s a compliment.

What’s even worse to me, though, is the scuttlebutt that what gave “Million Dollar Baby” its momentum over “The Aviator,” the early favorite, was a liberal backlash against a conservative backlash.

STOP READING NOW IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN “MILLION DOLLAR BABY” AND DON’T WANT TO HAVE THE PLOT SPOILED FOR YOU.

It seems that conservative anti-euthanasia groups have gotten into a tizzie over “MDB’s” out-of-nowhere plot twist. Hillary Swank (who, by the way, needs to get Chad to hire some serious bodyguard action, because Annette Bening is certain at this point to put out a hit on her) plays Maggie, a lovable, gritty, dirt-poor, none-too-young, up-by-her-bootstraps refugee from an Ozark trailer park who gets Clint Eastwood’s Frankie to train her as a boxer. In the climactic match, her opponent, a dirty fighter, takes a swipe at Maggie after the bell; Maggie goes down, breaks her neck on her stool, and ends up a quadriplegic on a respirator. Before long, she decides she’d rather be dead than live as a quadriplegic and asks Frankie to euthanize her, and, after some soul-searching, he does so. Many tears are shed by Maggie, by Frankie, and of course by the audience, which is one reason why “MDB” won the hearts of the Academy.

It’s also one of two reasons I think a great injustice was perpetrated at the Kodak Theatre. (Okay, “great injustice” may be a little strong, but I’m a film industry professional; these things matter to me.) A greater hankie-factor was almost certainly the reason Redford’s “Ordinary People” beat Scorsese’s “Raging Bull” in 1980, and it was almost certainly the reason Costner’s “Dances with Wolves” beat Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” in 1990. In other words, Marty’s emotionally and morally ambivalent pictures keep getting clocked by movies that are more straightforwardly cathartic – which does not necessarily mean they’re better.

More importantly, the twist of Maggie’s injury derails Eastwood’s train and transforms a beautifully observed, minimalist character study into a manipulative piece of melodrama, a far lesser genre. It also strikes me as a wholesale betrayal of the character of Maggie, who has been, up to this moment, defined by her dogged willingness to fight on far past the point where lesser mortals would throw in the towel. Are we to believe that this young woman, who against every possible odd has made herself into the best female boxer in the world at an age when most people can’t even muster the drive to go to the gym regularly, just gives up when faced with an admittedly daunting disability? I don’t buy it, and I think it ruins the movie. Of course, that's an aesthetic opinion, differences of which you and I and the members of the Academy are all entitled to have. But just so we’re clear, my first issue is with the artistic choice, which I find catastrophic for the film.

My second issue is with the social and political ramifications of that choice. Now, I care not one whit for the protestations of the right-wing anti-euthanasia lobby, the sort who bill themselves as “pro-life,” but who tend to, for instance, throw all their energy into fighting for the rights of a fetus but none whatsoever into fighting for the welfare of the child it becomes (not to speak of the mother). I don’t know where these people get off telling an adult human being what he or she can and can’t do with his or her own body and life when it’s not concretely impacting anyone else. So I find the aforementioned conservative backlash utterly without merit.

It disturbs me to think, however, that some knee-jerk Hollywood liberals voted for Clint and “MDB” even partly because they thought they were sticking it to the Religious Right – that they thought they were standing up for the right-to-die. Don’t get me wrong; I love liberals – I just prefer the type who think. And as a liberal myself wholly in favor of the right-to-die, I have to say that if that’s why any of these people voted the way they did, the Botox has gone to their brains. They’ve missed the point entirely. Having the RIGHT to die is not to be confused with having a good REASON to die.

Thus I was mightily offended as I watched the end of "Million Dollar Baby," not by the fact that Frankie kills Maggie at her request - in this I have nothing in common with conservative opponents of euthanasia - but by the fact that the movie seems to endorse her view that, having become a quadriplegic, she has every legitimate reason to request it. Her life, as she sees it, is over - certainly not worth continuing in her state. This strikes me as a macho, literary romanticization of a decidedly unromantic real-life situation; in the tradition of Dickens, Faulkner and Hemingway - yes, and Shakespeare - the writers and filmmakers are more concerned with disability as a poetical symbol than as an actual circumstance under which millions of people live, struggle and prosper.

I understand the symbolic value of the choice; as the immortal Joe Elliott once put it, it’s better to burn out than fade away, and none of us relishes the prospect of having someday to live with the certain knowledge that we’re on the downside of our lives. But that’s just the point: though Maggie’s life as a boxer is obviously over, her life as a fighter is not. In fact, she’s just been introduced to her most fearsome opponent yet. But the melancholy machismo of Eastwood’s vision precludes her from choosing to engage it.

Eastwood says he had no intention of endorsing Maggie’s wish to die, and I take him at his word; Frankie does suggest that Maggie go to college and get on with her life… but he doesn’t try very hard, and the decision to euthanize her is one he reaches speedily, if at clear cost to his own inner peace. (I should note also that Eastwood made enemies of the disability rights community a few years back when he tried to fight legislative requirements that his ranch resort in Carmel conform to ADA standards for disabled accessiblility. He is thus not helped in this matter by what is construed by many as a history of callousness toward the disabled community. It would be easy to infer that the same callousness blinded him to the potential message “MDB” could be perceived as sending; as I am not a mind reader, however, I will not traffic in such speculations.)

Maureen Dowd, who has been eager to champion the liberal counter-backlash, wrote in a column on the controversy that to ascribe to “Million Dollar Baby” any social or political agenda at all is to see ghosts where none exist; "the purpose of art,” she wrote, “is not always to send messages." But this view is naïve; art always sends messages, whether that is its conscious purpose or not. And the message "Million Dollar Baby" sends, in my view, is that, having once been a great athlete, Maggie now would be better off dead than consigned to breathing through a tracheal tube and taking her marvelous mind to college in a motorized, mouth-operated wheelchair. Certainly Maggie thinks so, and by the end so does Frankie. How pleased quadriplegic viewers of the movie must be to see their lives depicted as so horrible that any sane person would sooner choose death.

Dowd goes on to make an analogy to "Romeo and Juliet”: should we condemn Shakespeare’s play, she asks, because it could perhaps be read as an endorsement of teenaged suicide as a response to forbidden loves? But the analogy is inapt. There is virtually no chance that teenagers in love will see Shakespeare's play and become offended that he did not provide his lovers a happy ending; the frustrated longing of Romeo and Juliet mirrors that of real-life teenagers, and their mutual suicide seems a romantic protest against a world which will not accommodate their love. There may well be a chance, however, that a newly disabled person, struggling with the life changes that disability brings, might see "Million Dollar Baby" and decide that if somebody as cool as Clint Eastwood thinks it's better to die than be a quadriplegic, he must be right. How insurmountable that person's struggle will suddenly seem - how futile any attempt to live a full and rewarding life. Nonetheless, somehow millions of disabled people can and do. But how will this viewer know that? All he knows is what he sees at the movies.

Choosing to end one’s life before the pain or dementia of a terminal illness destroys one’s mind is a right no human being should ever be denied – but choosing to end one’s life because it has suddenly become more challenging, even supremely so, is a choice born of despair. That choice, so irrevocable, should not be applauded, understandable though the feeling it represents may be. And a movie that seems to suggest that choice is an appropriate response to such an injury certainly should not be rewarded for doing so. And yet it has been – at the expense, frankly, of a superior work of art.

Let no one misunderstand me: unlike knee-jerkers (or the Religious Right), I support Eastwood’s right to make the movie he wanted to make. I, by the same token, have the right to respond to it, sincerely, as I see fit. If it made you cry and pushed all your buttons in a pleasing way, so be it; I’m glad you felt your ten bucks were well spent. But to me, the pulse of this movie’s heart beats a false rhythm; its tragedy is cheap and unearned, and shows a saddening lack of sensitivity. Ten years from now, “Million Dollar Baby” will be seen for what it was: a weak winner in a generally weak field. “The Aviator,” on the other hand, will be remembered as perhaps the last chance Hollywood had to properly honor one of the great directors in the history of cinema… a chance that Hollywood blew.

Oh, Marty, mo cuishle.

Movies

Stars Fell on Hollywood Boulevard

2005-02-25T19:04:00.000-08:00

The Academy Awards have always been my Super Bowl. (Yeah, I watch that too, but more out of a desire not to be left out of the loop than anything else.) Even after having worked in the film industry for the last ten years – an apprenticeship in disillusionment which you’d think might inoculate me against the more transparently, seductively corrosive elements of Hollywood culture – I nonetheless remain drawn inexorably to the annual La-La love-in like a gypsy moth to a bug zapper.

So here I sit, preparing for the Oscars, with this gleaming new blog-space just waiting to be filled with bon mots and pithy predictions. Problem is, I’ve got very little to say, beyond: What the hell?

I mean, like most people with some modicum of actual taste (and not just a Pavlovian response to marketing tactics), I’m used to the melancholy experience of turning on the TV on the last Monday in March – er, last Sunday in February – and watching the movies I dig most get beat. Lately, I’m growing accustomed to the ones I liked best not being nominated at all. And I’m not some hoity-toity film elitist who’s outraged that Lars Von Trier isn’t up for Best Director. I loved “Titanic.” So there.

But things have gotten out of whack, a screaming symptom of the illness of American cinema. Yeah, the studios are flush. (They say they’re not, but they avoid mentioning how, between DVD’s and foreign theatrical ticket sales, their revenue stream has more than doubled over the last decade. Anyway, Jeffrey Katzenberg still eats at $75/entrée Beverly Hills restaurants for dinner every night, and I seem to recall Mike Ovitz got a pretty little $200 million golden parachute for putting up with Eisner for a year. So let’s just say nobody’s going hungry.) But if money isn’t one’s only criterion – and notice I’m not being such a stark ravin’ commie pinko to suggest it ought not be on the table at all, no sir, and God forbid I should bring up the A word in this context – then it’s clear the patient is sick.

Exhibit A: Of the five Best Picture nominees (“The Aviator,” “Finding Neverland,” “Million Dollar Baby,” “Ray,” and “Sideways”), not one – not ONE – has yet reached the $100 million domestic theatrical watermark. Without a win, it’s unlikely any of them will.

Now that’s not to say they’re not good. I’m a big fan of “The Aviator.” I do think more has been made of the very good “Sideways” than it really deserves (an opinion shared by its writers and director, apparently, according to their comments at a forum the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik moderated in NYC the other night), and I find the otherwise lovely “Million Dollar Baby’s” plot twist disastrous, for reasons I’ll get to another time. “Ray” is a traditional crowd-pleaser that I give points for great performances and taking a few chances, and “Finding Neverland” is a sorta-true, tear-jerking period piece of the type the Academy generally likes. I’m certainly not sorry I saw any of them. However, the fact that none of them managed to connect solidly with large audiences is disquieting - as is the fact that, with one giant exception (about which more in a moment), they seem to have been the cream of the crop, give or take.

Furthermore, look at the other movies that got significant nominations: “Hotel Rwanda,” a well-intentioned but mediocre movie about a tragically ignored true-life genocide, saved by two magnificent performances – which almost no one saw. “Closer,” a foul-mouthed, rather poorly reviewed spiritual sequel to “Carnal Knowledge” – which no one saw. “Vera Drake,” a perfect little character study replete with compassion for every character in it – which no one saw. “Being Julia,” a Somerset Maugham adaptation – which no one saw. “Maria Full Of Grace,” a sturdy if overrated little indie in the tradition of Upton Sinclair – which no one saw. You get the idea.

Now, none of these movies are sublime classics. That honor, and the only such one I’m prepared to bestow on the class of 2004, belongs only to “The Incredibles,” an achievement of mainstream narrative cinematic craft so outstanding in every way that it’s hard to fathom its being relegated to sharing a category with “Shrek 2” and “Shark Tale,” much less its being ignored for Best Picture of the Year, which it most clearly is. But the inability of Academy voters to take a movie like “The Incredibles” seriously merely because its sets were built inside a computer instead of outside is the most astonishing head-scratcher since… since, um…

Hey – since Paul Giamatti was left out of the Best Actor field. As I said, I don’t think “Sideways” is anything more than a well-written, well-directed, well-acted little character comedy for grown-ups – and God bless it. It’s the sort of thing we should be able to expect when we go to the movies. But it’s not really the sort of thing we should be forced, for lack of decent competition, to give Best Picture Oscars to. However, I’m all over honoring the actors, each of whom was fantastic - especially Sandra Oh, the other member of the foursome to be tragically ignored by the MPAA. Why did they leave her out? Maybe because she’s married to the director? Because she’s Asian and the Academy voters found Virginia Madsen so blonde-hot they just didn’t have room in their little heads to fantasize about another female “Sideways” cast member?

Whatever the reason, they can’t use it to justify the exclusion of Paul Giamatti for the inconceivable second straight year. That’s right, Paul Giamatti should have won Best Actor last year for “American Splendor,” perhaps 2003’s best film (and one which was, naturally, not nominated for Best Picture), and he should win this year for “Sideways.” Of course, he won’t, because he received nominations for neither. I have searched my soul for possible justifications for these twin crimes against art – they thought his father should have gone easier on Pete Rose? They hate “Judging Amy”? They can't get over his having once played a character called "Pig Vomit" in a Howard Stern movie? – but the one that rings truest is the one that gets deepest under my skin: They hate Paul Giamatti because he’s not pretty.

That, of course, is one of the things that makes him such a satisfying actor: he looks, as well as acts, like a real human being. But in Hollywood, looking like a real human being is a liability. In Hollywood, people whose livelihoods in no way depend on going before a camera nonetheless spend thousands upon thousands of dollars on botox and collagen and facial peels and on and on. What’s worse, to me anyway, is that I suspect these are the same popular-and-beautiful people who hold the social reins from kindergarten on up. (I was shocked when I grew up to find that, incredibly, the P&Bs continued somehow to control things after high school, as well, despite having no apparent qualifications for social superiority other than looks and, sometimes, money. Man, I was one naïve cracker.)

So maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think so. I think the Hollywood elite are freezing Pauly out because he’s short and dumpy and has narrow shoulders. I think they’re freezing him out because his father was president of Yale and they’re intimidated by his intellectual pedigree. I think they’re freezing him out because he lives on the East Coast and picks parts for the artistic challenge and doesn’t schmooze Hollywood players for awards.

Hey, wait a minute… When you think about it that way, maybe it’s a compliment.

(And while we’re at it, what about the women of “Ray”? The luminous Kerry Washington, the arresting Sharon Warren, the incomparable Regina King? You mean to tell me NONE of those women deserved a nomination? Wigga, PLEASE.)

In any case, for my money we’ve got a Best Picture field with only one real candidate worthy of consideration. “The Aviator” is an epic art film about a fascinatingly flawed real-live American billionaire who made movies, dated starlets, flew experimental planes, and went nuts in front of America’s eyes – what’s not to love? – and it’s rendered with a level of technical craft hardly ever seen anymore in American movies outside of films directed by, um, Martin Scorsese. (Who they say will lose again, to Clint, for Best Director. Like I said, Marty: a compliment.)

You don’t believe me? Watch “The Aviator” again; notice how the first third of the picture is digitally altered so the colors resemble the cyan-magenta-yellow three-strip process of the earliest color movies. Cool, right? But that’s not the best part. Two hours later – after the four-strip Technicolor section, after we’ve long since returned to a naturalistic, modern color look - when Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale) returns from Howard Hughes’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) past to help him pull his crazy self together to appear before a congressional committee, she enters his shadowy, monochromatic mansion – wearing a brilliant cyan-and-magenta dress that pops off the screen like 3-D. Old Hollywood coming to the rescue, one last time. Folks, THAT is filmmaking, the kind you don’t see in this country anymore, the kind where every element of the visual and aural presentation has been chosen to support the thematic content of the story. Sublime.

And Marty will lose. Unbelievable.

Look. Right now, the American public still goes to the movies. They’ll watch what you put in front of them. If you give them “The Incredibles,” they’ll watch it; if all they get is “Catwoman,” they’ll watch that. (Until they won’t. In the five years after WWII, movie viewership plummeted – not because of TV, which wasn’t widely available yet, but just… because. Maybe because the war reminded people there were other things they might want to spend their free time doing, not knowing when it might end. Today’s audiences live in a universe of innumerable entertainment options – and the young ones are already starting to desert the TV networks in droves. You think theatrical movie theaters can’t go the way of the roller skating rink? Think again.)

Given that fact, I will never for the life of me understand why the lazy P&Bs who run Hollywood aren’t willing to put a little effort into making good movies as well as profitable ones. Granted, it takes more work, and the ability to trust one's own taste – and theirs is mostly in their mouths, these days, which I guess is why they don’t use it anymore – but it sure makes it easier to sleep at night, and it might even give one something to look back on at the end of one’s life and feel good about. A sense of achievement, not just accumulation; a sense not just of having taken, but of having given something back. I would think that would be worth the effort.

But like I said, I’m one naïve cracker.

Movies

The Big Bang

2005-02-25T12:55:00.000-08:00

For once in my life, I was ahead of the curve.

It pains me to admit that I'm just not really a cutting-edge kind of guy; growing up in Atlanta, my friends and I were still OD'ing on Pink Floyd and Rush when the kool kids on the koasts were listening to Elvis Costello and Robyn Hitchcock and the Cure and, later, Soundgarden and Nirvana. Some of those bands I found later and grew to love, some I found and never got. The point is: I am just culturally aware enough to know how unhip I have always been, and to feel shame for it. (Oh, yes: shame. Catholics and Jews, y'all got nothing on a liberal white Southern Protestant straight boy when it comes to shame.) And I have to thank the New Yorkers, Bostonians, and Californians I've met throughout my life for making sure I was searingly aware of said rube-osity. (Cue the Mayberry whistler. Never mind I grew up in a city of four million people.)

But here it was, 1995, and I, having graduated in a year from the training wheels of AOL (oh, the shame rushes back) to the banana-seated Schwinn Sting-Ray of the then-way-cool Earthlink, discovered that 2MB (!) of website space came with my new ISP package. Damn if I wasn't gonna make hay out of that.

A struggling young fim student living alone, I decompressed by creating for myself an outlet into which I might pour all the witty and erudite observations on the things that mattered the most to me: movies, politics, baseball. Learned enough HTML to put together a crude site under the pleasingly obscure title, "Hotspur's Ground Zero." (With a visually punny wallpaper of an underwater scene - get it? Get it? Oh, and can I say how glad I am that rubric was defunct by 9/11/01?)

In other words - no joke, kids - I was blogging when Atrios and Wonkette were in virtual diapers. Not that anyone was calling it that then. Then, it was just a personal website. And a pretty crummy one, at that, at least from a design standpoint. I flatter myself to recall the writing as pretty good.

A year later, as my ambitions began to outstrip seriously my command of HTML, I redid the site as "Hotspur's Naked City," a website-cum-interactive film noir screenplay. Hey, I had figured out how to make Courier my site font; the whole idea seemed to make sense at the time. (Last time I checked, that site was still active over at Earthlink, even though I finally left their sorry, Sprint-owned, overcharging ass almost a year ago. Doesn't anybody over there erase old crap?)

But one thing led to another; life rolled on like Robbie Robertson's blue train, drifting somewhere down a crazy river. After a while, I had no time for maintaining the site. By the time I had both time and impetus to say something publically on a regular basis (oh, around the 2000 election - perhaps you recall it?), the web-publishing world had moved so far beyond what I knew that I was struck with a terminal case of technical terror. I resorted to circulating screeds and found articles to an email list that, gratifyingly, grew and grew as my friends each told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on. (Wella Balsam, junior. Or was it Fabergé Organic?)

And every few weeks someone would write me and say, "You know, you really ought to start a blog." And I'd blow it off, saying hey, I've been there, I've done that, I was blogging when Atrios and Wonkette were in virtual diapers...

Only that wasn't the real reason. The real reason was: I was scared. 'Cause, now, see, it's 2004 (chew on THAT, Orwell), and I download demos of a few of the blogging tools out there - and I don't have the slightest idea what it is I'm looking at. I feel like Johnny Smith coming out of his coma in "The Dead Zone" (the novel, not the TV show; I've never seen it, 'cause I worked with [Anthony] Mike Hall once, and he was about as big a jerk to me as it's possible for one spoiled, 13-year-old Manhattanite to be). I don't recognize anything in front of me; it's a totally unfamiliar world. I'm a stranger in a strange land.

Suddenly I flash on all those old men you see wearing Brylcreem in their hair and pants up to their nipples, listening to scratchy Glenn Miller 45's, and I understand why they are the way they are. Once time kicks you out of the teenaged demo that for some ludicrous reason gets to set the cultural agenda in this society, the New starts to become not only Unknown but terrifyingly Unknowable. Which is to say: I'm not old, folks, but I'm starting to glimpse my potential future...

Hopefully, in time to change it.

So now you know the story so far. And with that lengthy preamble out of the way...

Welcome to Hotspur's Naked Singularity.

Why Hotspur? Because I love the Henry IV plays and just thought it was a cool, flashy sounding nom de web. (You footballer fans who may have happened upon this blog seeking discussion of your beloved Tottenham Hotspurs are out of luck here, I'm afraid.) I never had a nickname in my life, so I picked my own.

Why Naked Singularity? Well, that's a little more involved.

Malcolm W. Browne, in the New York Times (February 12, 1997), defined the term thusly: "A singularity is a mathematical point at which space and time are infinitely distorted, where matter is infinitely dense, and where the rules of relativistic physics and quantum mechanics break down. Singularities are believed to lurk at the hearts of black holes, which conceal their existence from the outer world. A naked singularity would be a singularity bereft of a concealing black-hole shell, and therefore visible, in principle, to outside observers." And that's as lucid an explanation for the non-physicist as you're likely to find.

The goal of this blog, then, is to take social, poltical, cultural, and any other-al phenomena and try to unclothe them: get inside, figure them out, explode myths, subvert and rebuild paradigms. All of which is just a fancy way of saying: I'm gonna talk about what I find interesting - which covers a lot of ground, believe me - and link to things I think other people should see. It's that simple, in theory, anyway. I hope to evolve over time into a sort of Frank Richy, James Wolcotty, Hendrik Hertzbergy, Rob Neyery, King Kaufmany, Paul Krugmany kind of voice, synthesizing the shards of this utterly fantastical world of ours into some sort of coherent -

Ah, screw it. Come back and check it out. It'll be what it'll be. But I promise one thing: I'll do my best to make it stimulating.