Crossing His Fingers

Bob Dole, Bob Dole - this is an interesting screw up. Dole, on CNN to help prop up the collapsing scaffold of Swift Boat lying liars, added a bit of off-mic commentary: when the camera's cut to show Kerry's "Old Tricks" ad (the one with McCain telling George Bush he should be ashamed), Bob Dole said - on camera, but not being aired - "he was right". Slate has the video, and some commentary....

Musical Jokes Welcome, though Superfluous

I can't seem to get serious. Well - this is serious news:

Dave Matthews sued for dumping 800 pounds of "liquid human waste" into the Chicago River - directly onto a boat carrying "100 people on an architecture sightseeing cruise".

How to Draw a Three Headed Cowgirl

Here's a bit of whimsy for your morning enjoyment: Presidential doodles. Link courtesy of Belle Waring.

Swift Boat Vets for - never mind...

Not much left to it I guess - The New York Times takes a closer look and doesn't leave much standing. (Via Crooked Timber, who include excerpts.)

Meanwhile - oops! - guess whose campaign got caught handing out flyers for the Swift Boat Veterans for "Truth"? What's more surprising - today, they actually have a picture of their candidate up - the last couple days, all the images - at least the ones at the top of the page, were of Kerry - negative, obviously - but still. They're pushing Party for the President Day - so they actually have Georgie up there.

I'm afraid I can't participate. That's the anniversary of my friend's death in Iraq.

5 more months, and we'll be shed of this lying bastard, I dearly hope and pray.

What they said

Via Crooked Timber comes this link to a discussion of gender neutrality in Canada. (More or less. Let's call it that.) Is "he" sex-neutral? It is not - can we say, per Pullum, "Was it your father or your mother who broke his leg on a ski trip?"? No we cannot. Then (parenthetically) he adds (and I bless him for it):

The commonest way to get around the gender problem here is to use singular they: Was it your father or your mother who broke their leg on a ski trip?; Either the husband or the wife has perjured themself. Shakespeare used it; Jane Austen used it; loads of fine authors use it. Get used to it. And if you have a usage book like Strunk and White that declares singular they to be an error, throw that book away.

This is a practice long overdue in English writing, my friends. When I read books that, in referring to generic individuals, switch randomly back and forth between he and she, I think - they - use they! Stop annoying me! If a writer does not mean to refer to a man or a woman, they should just use "they"! Let us hope this practice spreads.

Quick Hits (On the Cultural Tip)

Comics in Libraries:
Steve Leiber starts a meme - collecting lists of the 11 comic books that your local library should stock.

Link found on Long Story, Short Pier)

Spelling
Fistful of Euros has a great story about German (and other languages) spelling standardization. Key line: "Thanks to the effectively universal use of a single word processing suite, English spelling is what Bill Gates says that it is."

Thank you, Belle Waring
The Top Ten Most Ridiculous Black Metal Pics of All Time - thank you. Complete with wrestling-theme Easter Eggs! It's too wonderful for words.

Naked political grandstanding? Us?

Bob Harris has a post on Tom Tomorrow's blog about "National Preparedness Month" - September, you'll be surprised to hear. Though perhaps not all of September, as the announcement will be made September 9th. To get into the Friday papers before the 9/11 memorials, Harris suspects. He is not impressed:

This is transparently a continuation of the Bush campaign by other means, financed with everyone's tax dollars, out of funds that could be used, say, to hire more actual first-responders, Pushtun translators, or troops to replace the exhausted guardsmen.

That sounds about right.

Krugman

I just want to post this: Paul Krugman's latest column deals with the way the handover in Iraq has caused Americans to stop paying attention, even though things have continued to get worse there.

The trouble with this shift of attention is that if we don't have a clear picture of what's actually happening in Iraq, we can't have a serious discussion of the options that remain for making the best of a very bad situation.

The military reality in Iraq is that there has been no letup in the insurgency, and large parts of the country seem to be effectively under the control of groups hostile to the U.S.-supported government.

There it is. This war is or biggest problem right now, and we have to take it seriously.

Rock politics

Well, now - here's The Bruce - in the New York Times. Boilerplate liberal-speak (don't get the impression Bruce did any of the writing there), but hey! Fight the good fight, and do it on the right side, and who can complain?

Eric Alterman, of course, is in a tizzy. He has a book to flog - not that he needs much excuse to go Bruce crazy. Another link here, to an interview with The Man atBackstreets, which comes off a lot more natural sounding than the op-ed.

Meanwhile, related only in featuring a very cool musician with left wing politics - it's Mike Watt's page - useful!

Speaking Truth to Power

Our president:

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."

Yeah, yeah, maybe that's a cheap shot - but look at the rest of the speech - "We must never stop thinking about how best to defend our country when we all must always be forward-thinking." - is that much better? lord.

Politics and Terrorism

From The New York Times:

Much of the information that led the authorities to raise the terror alert at several large financial institutions in the New York City and Washington areas was three or four years old, intelligence and law enforcement officials said on Monday. They reported that they had not yet found concrete evidence that a terrorist plot or preparatory surveillance operations were still under way.

The Bush administration has established a clear pattern of deceit through the years, to the point where I, at least, cannot take a word they say at face value. So when I heard about this terrorism alert, my first thought was of Fahrenheit 9/11 - there they go again, inventing fear. (It didn't help that I saw a clip on CNN with a reporter acting all jumpy when an ice cream truck went by. Could Michael Moore invent a better illustration of his point?) Later, I saw the news about the information found after the recent arrests - maybe they had something, I thought. But even if they do, why do they think this is going to happen this week?

So today the reports come in that the information they are using pre-dates 9/11. I wonder, then, what the odds are that this was done to counter the DNC's impact, and to support Bush's announcements about implementing the 9/11 Commission's recommendations.

Oh yeah, on that subject - read Josh Marshall today. He says that while Bush claims to be implementing the commission's recommendations, in fact, he is changing them in significant ways - primarily, by gutting their recommendation that there be an centralized intelligence overseer, with budgetary powers and powers to hire and fire. It's all there.

Combined with the terrorism alert - doesn't this add up to nothing but another piece of theater? The President claims to be implementing the commission's recommendations - he does it in the context of a high alert, with armed soldiers walking the streets and subways of New York - hoping (knowing) people will read the headlines, see the clips on the news, and say, "gosh, he is taking this seriously!" But in fact he is watering down the commission's recommendations to near irrelevance (creating another bureaucratic post that duplicates at least one post (the Director of Central Intelligence) and possibly a couple others (what is this position supposed to do that the Department of Homeland Security shouldn't be doing? for instance), while allowing a major disruption of the country based on old information, timed, well, you get the drift.

The more paranoid among us will perhaps speculate that they are working on getting the public used to seeing armed guards on the subways, and making high profile terrorist alerts common enough to erode resistance and skepticism to them. It may not work that way of course - getting used to them might lead people to never trust anything Bush says or does (and by extension, nothing the government says or does). Who knows. That is the obvious risk, though - that their overt manipulation of terrorist warnings and the like for political ends will undermine real efforts to prevent real terrorism. Again - one of the themes of Fahrenheit 9/11, though not the one people tend to talk about. (Because talking about it would imply the critics were paying attention and not playing stupid, pretending not to understand Moore's arguments.)

Infinite Denseness

I've been away, letting the blog go to pot. Too bad. I suppose I could come back with something profound about the Democratic Convention, or prices in Old Port Portland, or Nomah, but that will have to wait, I fear. What I can offer is a bit of Gregg Easterbook bashing, courtesy of Brad DeLong.

Seems Easterbrook is making fun of Stephen Hawking this time. (Linik is here - it's subscriber only, though...) Here's the first paragraph:

So Stephen Hawking now says he was completely wrong about black holes--they don't crush reality out of existence, and they aren't doorways to alternate universes. Bear in mind that Hawking also once argued that time may someday run in reverse, with the cosmos getting younger and people able to remember the future but having no knowledge of the past. Later Hawking withdrew that idea, too. Do the hundreds of thousands of people who bought his bestseller A Brief History of Time--which was "sexed up" with speculation that black holes destroy reality and the entire universe may someday operate in reverse-time--now get their money back?

That's quality stuff. Pure snark, and idiotic snark, too. Easterbrook adds: "It would be tempting to say that Hawking was able to become internationally famous while saying kooky things because today physicists have the status once held by medieval priests: People don't challenge their mumbo-jumbo." Something is missing here - perhaps it is the fact that Hawking himself corrected himself. (And, of course, people were arguing with him all along - he lost a bet for example, with another physicist, John Preskill, over this question.) Isn't this how science usually works? People take the data available - they analyze it and try to come up with a theory that explains it - they test the theory, argue about the theory, and if new data comes in that contradicts the theory, they correct it. Thus Hawking. How this incident is supposed to discredit Hawking is a mystery.

I used to like Easterbrook's football articles (though they got boring after awhile, with the cheerleader obsession and gratuitous political swipes overpowering the content), but I have yet to come across anything else by him that isn't silly. Even before he became something of a blogosphere whipping boy - I'd seen some of his writing on religion and science and found it very lacking. "Intelligent Design" - barely - since he is so dismissive of science (as in this article) he never gets any traction. And even here - DeLong also quotes Easterbrook mocking the Big Bang theory - "What came before the Big Bang? Cosmologists hate this question, but it's haunting nonetheless." This is a question - a rhetorical question, I mean, used to undermine the Big Bang theory - that leads, inevitably, to God, to Intelligent Design, and etc. from there. And that's all Easterbrook is after there - he's playing gotcha, and is about to pull out Genesis...

Anyway - check out DeLong's site - read the comments. Well worth it.

This and That

Salon has an interview with Alan Moore - click through the ads...

A good deal of Ralph bashing from Michael Berube.

And World O' Crap brings us another installment in the dangers of Syrian rock bands.

For now, that is all.

Snippets

Via Slacktivist, I find this ad from the ACLU. Very clever and not far from reality - retailers everywhere drool.

Meanwhile, back on Slacktivist, check out his discussion of Bush's visit to the Amish.

On a more ghastly front - Boing boing posts excerpts from the Taguba report related to torture and sexual abuse of teenagers at Abu Ghraib. It doesn't seem to be driving quite the level of dismay it drove a month ago - do we just assume the worst these days and leave it at that? Since the worst is pretty much what we seem to get from Bush and co.

What SIde Are We On Again?

According to The Agonist (who read it at Stratfor, which is unfortunately a pay site - for the full content), we (the United States) are negotiating with Russia for some 40,000 troops to go to Iraq this fall. Just in time for the elections, I imagine. Digby notes the irony of asking the Russians to help fight Mujahadeen - we can all smile at the ironies of this whole situation. Who won the cold war again?

But no, seriously and all... superpowers have to stick together to keep the little people in line. Right? Especially right before an election.

Housekeeping

Not that there seems to be anyone to care, but I put some more effort into the blogroll, so to speak. Nothign serious. Added three more to each category. I am adding things slowly and somewhat deliberately - I am not sure what the purpose is quite yet, or how I intend to maintain it - whether as a complete listing of what I recommend or find interesting, or what seems hottest at a given time, or what I read the most - I don't know yet. Right now, it is somehting like the sites I find the most interesting - the crucial political sites I look at - the best culture sites... Yes, it skews heavily to the left - though with a couple token rightish sites - Sullivan and the Volokh Conspiracy seem to be the rightish sites I read the most. Definitely because of their libertarian leanings, and social/cultural positions - bad as right wing attitudes toward the war (and similar issues) are, I find conservative cultural positions almost impossible to pretend to take seriously. Probably because they don't deserve to be taken seriously: God Bless John Cornyn - "It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle. But that does not mean it is right. . . . Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife."

Plain sanity is a prerequisite to getting me to listen. Sullivan - far more than the Volokh crowd - often drives me to wrath - but I'm willing to listen, when I have to...

Useful Uselessness

There is nothing, really, quite so invigorating to the soul - well, my soul, stunted and smelling of the lamp as it is - than a big article on the Trials of Academia. At least if it's not a long cliche, usually,Those damned lefty english professors use sich big woids! - or whatever... So - people (Michael Berube and Crooked Timber at least, and that's a good start) have been linking to this article by Gideon Lewis-Krause in The Believer about last year's MLA convention. It's interesting - take this quote:

Once I get past the requisite "Oh, another MLA-vilifying piece?" with each new person I meet, I find that there are exactly two conversational avenues they want to pursue: tenure, publishing, and other academic pressures, which make them wince; and teaching, which makes them glow. The topic of literature itself straddles the two: literature is either "what you're writing your tenure book on" or "what you teach to your students," and the responses vary accordingly.

This is fascinating, because that is what most of the enemies of academia say - that teaching is good - writing, tenure, all that jazz is bad. Which is what the teachers say. It may be true - though I imagine there are those who love the writing as much as the teaching. Maybe - since it is equally likely I guess that one would love not the teaching but the writing...

That's just the beginning though - it goes on, presenting level on level of academic hell, the demands of tenure committees and the marketplace and politics and relevance and all the rest, before coming through the other side,a nd trying to explain why it's not quite hell... Largely about accountability - to whom, on what criteria:

As scholars. Because of course they're accountable beyond their own ranks as teachers—accountable to their students, to the parents of their students, to the taxpayers paying their salaries in the case of public universities. And of course they're accountable beyond their own ranks as poets or punks or whatever they are in their nonprofessional time. The problems arise when they're held accountable for the wrong things to the wrong people. When scholarship—which is not intended to produce a profit—is tossed to the market. When academic writing—which is neither conceived nor written for a wide readership—is held accountable to a general audience. When the work of someone like Charlie—which is a part of an ongoing discussion deep within his remote professional galaxy—is disparaged for its everyday irrelevance.

And it's also, in the end, a defense of something that's really outside accountability. Take this passage:

As San Francisco State Univerity's Professor Saul Steier puts it, "I have a moral obligation as a teacher to work against efficiency as best I can," and the idea is not to demean the George Babbitts in gray flannel suits (although that does happen), but to exemplify an alternative. And this is where the dark hollow of anti-academic unrest is laid bare: critics of the academy are not really afraid of explicit political indoctrination, they're afraid of these preserves of communal autonomy. They're afraid of the flowering of the arcane, the unmarketable, the unprofitable. They're afraid that their children will become scruffy bohemian types.

It's one of the themes of the piece - the "uselessness" of academia - though a useful kind of uselessness. (Oh, can't you see the academic manque in me coming out? Paradox! wordplay! scare quotes!) The value of pleasure - the value of investing the world, every piece of it, with value. Which is what art does, in a sense - and what those who study art do, in their turn - invest the world with value - value it has, but which is, somehow, recognized in the representation of it. That is where the air gets fairyish - but it's still - right.

And yet... Lewis-Krause sighs a bit about academic jargon (or slang), and sniffs about academics' occasional desire to be hip - "trying to kill two birds with one unwieldy stone" (writing - in full academese - about The Bachelorette will do that) - but he's missing something. It isn't just about being relevant, though it is that - it's about the fact that those things - bad TV etc. - are also worthy of attention. If there is a problem is is really the fact that somewhere along the line they are not going to take something seriously - they are going to treat bad TV with condescension, or with fake respect - they sneer, or they pander. That is not the same as trying to wed unweddable things - because you can write about reality TV with all the seriousness of writing about Shakespeare - it is that they inevitably take a position on the relative worth of these things, but without making the position clear. And - that they don't quite get across the sense of discovery that, I think, really, is at the core of art and criticism and scholarship. That sense of finding value in things and getting other people to appreciate that value - if that's lacking, that's your problem.

But I have to confess - I find it in an awful lot of academic writing. This post - What MLA Panels really look like from George Williams' blog, probably evens the score - a good amount of this looks pretty interesting. If it's your thing (it's not quite mine, English/MLA things, not really - history and film are more my things), most fo these panels will give what I said I wanted. Finding something interesting, and communicating, to people sort of interested, your deeper interest. Making us all better off, but the time it spreads far enough. (Link from Crooked Timber comments...)

I have to stop or I will be able to publish this as a monograph.

Games People Play

This seems to be this week's craze, on the blogs I read - Terry Teachout's Cultural Cuncurrence Index. This is a list of 100 either/or choices, drawn mostly from the arts and culture, but with some miscellaneous questions ("Sushi: yes or no?") mixed in. The point of it all is to create a kind of map to Teachout's taste. You, the reader, can find out how closely your taste matches his by comparing your answers to his, calculating the percentages. That's great fun - though its almost as much fun - and almost as revealing - to look at the kinds of questions he asks, and what that tells you about him. He asks many music and lit type questions - what you would expect from a drama and music critic - with strong samples of art and movie questions, a few dance questions, and a chunk of general cultural stuff. What he asks within those categories is revealing as well - no punk or rap (to name 2 genres) in the music questions, no foreign films in the movie questions, no sports questions, nothing about sculpture or politics, etc.

I don't know enough about Terry Teachout himself to get too excited about what his taste is and how mine matches up (about 60%, actually) - but big pointless parlor games are fun, especially when they kind of do have a point, even if the point is revealing the tastes of a critic I've never actually read. (I suspect, though, that will change - partly because 60% is pretty good, and somehow the matches seem stronger than the misses - matching on Astaire and Keaton and Grace Kelly and To Have and Have Not is much stronger than missing on, say, Picasso vs. Matisse, or the subway vs. the bus. And, I must say - Teachout's blog seems quite enjoyable.) And for all that this quiz is designed to map Teachout's taste, a good many of the questions are (seem to me) to be excellent general questions, applicable to the culture at large - that is, they should be on almost anyone's Cultural Concurrence Index. Astaire vs. Kelly? Grace Kelly vs. Marilyn Monroe? Keaton vs. Chaplin? Comedy vs. Tragedy? Sushi: yes or no? Subway or Bus? Picasso vs. Matisse? Cats or dogs? - all indespensible questions, I think.

Savaged by a Sheep?

And how was our Dear Leader received in Ireland? See here:

On the eve of his arrival the normal Irish hostility to Bush had settled at the level of a disgruntled murmur rather than an angry roar. But Bush himself turned out to be the best cheerleader--or, rather, roarleader--that anti-war activists could have hoped for: while numbers at demonstrations were only middling (10,000-plus in Dublin was the most we mustered, a small fraction of what Ronald Reagan attracted in the now-forgotten protests of 1984), the radio phone-ins and Sunday newspapers suggest a new level of bitterness toward Dubya. Boston may be the next parish west, but John Kerry must wish Ireland had its own electoral votes, because he'd sweep them in a landslide.

He also comments, rather amusingly, on the infamous interview with Carole Coleman:

Coleman is perhaps the least likely journalist to find herself in the midst of this sort of flap. ("Savaged by a sheep" is the phrase that springs to mind.) Reporting from Washington for RTE for a few years now, she's never appeared particularly interested in the place or in her work. She's the sort of foreign correspondent who is content to find her line in the local mainstream media, regurgitating wisdom about the world as seen by CNN and the Washington Post. To be sure, as the US media has found a small amount of election-year aggression, her work has reflected that, albeit faintly and soporifically. But the White House would have felt safe to assume that her 12 allotted minutes with the president--something of a tradition for the national broadcaster in the event of such a visit--would consist of softball questions about our nations' historic links, the peace process blah blah blah, stuff even Bush could handle in his sleep.

Instead, Coleman looked like she'd downed six cups of coffee to steady her nerves and launched an aggressive-if-slightly-vapid line of questions about the deadly consequences of the Iraq invasion, interrupting Bush when he waffled or wandered. Bush wagged a finger at her and interrupted her back. By the time they got to her pointed question about whether he felt he was guided by God, he finished his evasive stammerings about his "personal relationship with the Good Lord" by declaring "that doesn't make me a better person than you"--and you could tell he didn't mean it: he hated her.

Good old W, representing us abroad.

(Link found on Brian Leiter's blog.

Mommy! She's being mean to me!

Updating yesterday's post about President Bush's appearance on Irish TV: Mitch Cohen cites a story in the Irish Independent on the reaction by the White House to the interview.

THE White House has lodged a complaint with the Irish Embassy in Washington over RTE journalist Carole Coleman's interview with US President George Bush.

...

The Irish Independent learned last night that the White House told Ms Coleman that she interrupted the president unnecessarily and was disrespectful.

She also received a call from the White House in which she was admonished for her tone.

And it emerged last night that presidential staff suggested to Ms Coleman as she went into the interview that she ask him a question on the outfit that Taoiseach Bertie Ahern wore to the G8 summit.

Cohen also has the transcript - you can check it, and see when and where she "interrupted" him. He complains 5 times in all - and, if you watch the clip, you se at least one other time where she says something, and he just closes his eyes and waits, then goes back to his script. It's a fascinating performance. It's interesting that at least once, he interrupted her, and when he claims she's not letting him finish, in fact, he never let her finish the question. (She starts asking a question about the world being more dangerous - gives and example - he interrupts her before she finishes, and then won't let her finish.)

It's all very strange. Her tone, in fact, is politice and deferential - she asks tough questions, questions that challenge him - but you'd think he'd be able to take somethign like that. And her "interruptions" aren't terribly rude - they don't come off as rude at all. They come off as someone thinking on her feet - she asks something, he says something, she tries to follow up - he tells her to wait, and proceeds to move away from the question... Her interjections are, indeed, logical, polite - she never talks over his speechmaking - more than once, her "interruptions" come after full stops by the president....

He apparently had the questions three days in advance - he must have memorized his answers - she must have come in expecting an interview, while he expected to make a speech. That they are crying about this is extremely embarrassing. It's obvious Bush can't defend his policies in any forum where his audience is anything but passive viewers - he does not have the capacity, as a person, to have a conversation with another person - not that there are any good answers for a lot of the things he'd get called on. Change the subject on Abu Ghraib - change the subject and make stuff up on Weapons of Mass Destruction, change the subject and evade on the Palestinian issue - most of all, charge straight ahead and don't let the other guy get a word in anywhere.