New year is off to a very interesting start. It's amazing what one can accomplish when one has both the Pacific Ocean and the Moomintrolls on one's side. If I'm a poor correspondent for a while again, now it's for a good reason.
As Howard Fishman sings:
Can we stop the clock?
Let's give it a shot.
I don't want to talk...
I like you a lot...
Will this night ever end if we stay right here?
Your guess is just as good as mine.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm-hm.
Don't say any prayers for me,
just wet your finger, & pass it through the flame.
Remember me by the tricks I have taught you.
—Mother Said, Hal SirowitzHere is the ribbon she tied to the grass stem. It's blue, fluttering in the same wind. It's realer than it was when she put it there, it's more than itself. "What is it?" Max says to his mind. "Is it that reality isn't real to me the first time around?"
"What it is," says his mind, "is that you aren't always real the first time around."
—Her Name Was Lola, Russell Hoban
Also: The brilliant and so very personable Phoebe Gloeckner (who, wouldn't you know it, moved east shortly before I moved west) has started writing a weblog. In this item she offers a simple test for whether your sense of humor is as twisted as hers. Apparently, mine is.
And: My past and future complaints about Arnold Schwarzenegger, that horrible man, are addressed much more thoroughly on The Gropinator—whose author deserves special credit for the phrase "macabre ass-covering."
Just so I don't get too awfully cheerful going on about good things in San Francisco, let's have some reading on a really depressing topic. How about fascism.
I've always been fascinated with right-wing lunacy but in different ways. For a long time it was like my fascination with horror movies, or the way a certain kind of morbid-but-harmless teenager may read about serial killers. I devoured all of James Ridgeway's reporting on crazed Aryanists in the boonies, people you'd surely never meet but you'd better know how evil they are just in case. On a grander scale, my bad dreams were stoked by The Origins of Totalitarianism on the nonfictional side151;which provides the non-religious with a way to believe in the Devil—and The Handmaid's Tale, which boils the big picture down to a personal nightmare.
Later—based really on nothing except the desire for things to make sense, and the fact that you can't sustain a morbid horror-movie fascination forever, that that's just a mood like any other mood—I was inclined to trust the prevailing opinion that the violent fringe and the merely awful ruling mainstream have nothing to do with each other. On the one side there's annoying urbane conservative Tucker Carlson saying "How many white supremacists are there in America? There are about nine, and they're all mentally retarded." On the other there's annoying urbane leftist Alexander Cockburn who, apparently because he likes guns and likes provoking people, keeps saying that the militia guys who worship at the altar of Ruby Ridge don't really want to shoot all the sheriffs and lynch all the Jews, they're just individualists with a thing for uniforms, and in fact if we just knew how to speak their language they'd be natural allies of the left.
David Niewert's writing has gone a long way toward curing me of that view and making me afraid again, though now it's not such an entertaining fear, more of a dull ache. If you have some time on your hands, read his very thorough piece—book, really—on Rush, Newspeak and Fascism. (You may want to start at the end, where he addresses the problems with talking effectively about the secular version of Satan.)
The host of Whiskey Bar, writing about a particularly awful piece of crap by Ralph Peters in the New York Post, pointed out that the first step in getting people to accept violent extremism has always been to say that the other guy is planning violent extremism. So you get the Post calling Howard Dean not just a leftist weenie or a Saddam-coddling peacenik or whatever, but a dangerous demagogue and a would-be Lenin with an army of "brownshirts" out to silence dissent by any means necessary.
It's natural to figure that such a balls-out feat of projection won't fool anyone except a few paranoid shut-ins, that it's just desperate flailing. Well, Mr. Peters may just be babbling uncontrollably, but that doesn't mean his editor is stupid; the Whiskey Bar article is dead right that there's a history of this kind of thing working awfully well. Why? According to Arendt—and Robert Jay Lifton, in his many great books—if people feel threatened, and they know there's something bad in the air, they'll listen to whoever acknowledges their fear and points at a source for it, no matter where they're pointing.
I don't just mean people being afraid of Al Qaeda—I mean I think a lot of people are scared by the political and economic climate here, the general sense of things falling apart.
So, if there are rumors of werewolves creeping around town, and the police keep quietly trying to track them down while issuing lots of public denials so they don't sound crazy, a werewolf's best bet may be to jump up on a soapbox and shout: You're about to be eaten by monsters! The police are covering it up! FOLLOW ME!
I picked up the out-of-town edition of the New York Times today and on page A9, accompanying this article, I saw a photograph of Senator Joseph Lieberman—someone of whom I'm not very fond—with holy radiance beaming out of his head.
I hereby affirm that I did not retouch the photo. Also, I'm only reproducing this copyrighted image for educational, review, and parody purposes. Lesson, criticism, and parody follows:
What the fuck?
Here are some pictures I took while being unusually happy, by the ocean and in the hills and in a graveyard.
My new favorite Internet habit is the Find of the Week archive at FOUND Magazine, where you can see photos of notes and photos that allegedly someone dropped somewhere some time. My favorite is... jeez, I can't pick one. But Riverboat Richard's introduction card, Crossing the Delaware, and Vote & Beer are pretty special. FOUND may be coming to your town soon. (Thanks to Noise Footprint.)
And, checking in on my previous favorite habit, the Arcata Eye Police Log:
Thursday, December 18 5:59 p.m. A man on Alliance Road claimed that a woman in a van parked across the street was attempting to contact him via third party intermediaries. The woman in the mobile embassy denied it and police told her to keep away while the man obtained a restraining order formally severing diplomatic relations.
11:42 a.m. A woman found not breathing was thought to be a coroner’s case, to put it gently. But when emergency forces arrived, she was alert and breathing. They took her to the hospital anyway.
8:50 a.m.
Two sweatshirted, slithery gnomes
Ran down Heindon Road from a home
Where elders are stored
With booty they’d scored -
The sign from a handicapped zone.
I was in a bad mood yesterday for all kinds of reasons, but reading this front-page story in the San Francisco Chronicle put some extra steam in my ears:
Bush's homeless czar is a man on a mission
At first, John and Angie Brady didn't know what to make of the blue-suited man with slicked-back gray hair walking up to them ....
Then Philip Mangano, the Bush administration's "homeless czar," cocked his head, grinned and said, "Hi. How long you been on the streets?"
"Seven years," John Brady said.
"Hard, huh?" Mangano said slowly, and as the two stared at each other a moment, Brady visibly relaxed ...
. . .
"[O]nce Phil starts talking, you can't help but listen. He's dynamic."
. . .
In a three-hour interview as he strolled near City Hall and ate lunch, Mangano seemed like a man on a mission ... It all came out in an excited, rapid-fire delivery, each subject sliding into the next.
. . .
"Remoralize" is just one of several unusual words Mangano uses to punctuate his conversations. Another is "constellate," as in drawing together different agencies to work on homelessness.
He continually talks of "changing the vocabulary of homelessness, from enabling to engaging," and "changing the verb of homelessness from maintaining to ending."
. . .
Mangano paused in his meal a moment, then held up his hand and pointed to the far wall. "We know what to do, and right now, sitting right here, I can see the end of homelessness," he said urgently, shaking his finger as he pointed.
. . .
[T]he couple finally asked Mangano who he was, and as he told them their eyes went wide.
"Just call me Phil," he said as he walked away.
"It's hard to climb back up after you've fallen this far," John Brady said.
"That's the truth," Mangano muttered to himself. Then he turned back to the couple for a moment.
"Then pray for me," he said. "I'm trying to help you."
Lest you think my summary is unfair, you can read the whole thing ... it's half a page long and there's no more substance to it than that. He's in town in order to suggest to our new mayor (whom the Chron loves dearly) that we should make a 10-year plan. That's it. The author interviewed this man for three hours and didn't even get any background on what he's been doing in the federal government for the last two years, or what he did in his previous career in Massachusetts. Actually, despite his use of hideous Dilbert-speak, his background is somewhat impressive, from the little bit I got in five seconds on the Internet; since the Chron didn't even give that much, I have to assume the reporter just didn't care to write anything other than this feel-good piece of ick.
I wrote my first letter to the Chron and tried to be nice:
I was intrigued to learn from Kevin Fagan's article that there is such a thing as a federal "homeless czar." I only wish the article had told me anything else of substance. Instead, I read a lot of breathless praise of Mr. Mangano's forceful personality, without a single mention of anything concrete he has ever done (other than speaking to two people on the street), or of why he has suddenly deigned to notice San Francisco. Apparently, he and Gavin Newsom are planning to make a plan. If and when they do so, that will be front-page news; this story certainly isn't.
I don't have to be so diplomatic here, so I'll just add: You are lazy and you don't really give a damn, you'd just like us to think something is being done and forget about it. And, "remoralize"? "Constellate"? BARF.
For those who haven't been following the insane and horrifying case of Maher Arar, Katherine R. at Obsidian Wings has been writing a comprehensive review of press coverage and recent developments. I didn't know the half of it.
This kind of thing (and it's not the only case, just the most blatant) is why, when I made the mistake of watching the Premier address the Kremlin last night, a two-second image of John Ashcroft's face in the audience made me sicker than anything in the speech. But I doubt anyone's going to take it seriously till it starts happening to non-Muslims.
So... as of yesterday, Tim and a few other cartoonists and maybe one page of headlines will be pretty much my only sources of current-events-related information on the Web. All this blog-reading was getting way, way out of hand: on any given day, at work or at home, I was likely to try to read every new item on Cursor, This Modern World, Eschaton, Daily Kos, Calpundit, Body and Soul, Slacktivist, Orcinus, Brad DeLong, Busy, Busy, Busy, and maybe one or two other political blogs and two or three other personal ones, not to mention the Comics Journal Message Board. All of these have good reading on them, and if I were using them as a source of information I'd probably be pretty well informed on a few things. But in my case it was just about distraction—every time I had ten seconds to spare, or got bored with my boring job, like every five minutes, I'd be scrounging desperately for some random piece of commentary... just to see if someone was saying something. It was such an automatic habit that even when I wanted to concentrate on something interesting, I couldn't. Plus, comment boards contain many annoying nitwits who go there in order to make people mad, and that works really well on me. So anyway, I'm currently making a big deal out of staying away from all that stuff for the next few weeks at least, and reading these new-fangled "newspaper" things instead. Wish me luck.
From Arundhati Roy's article "The New American Century" in The Nation:
We need to aim at real targets ... Gandhi's salt march was not just political theater. When, in a simple act of defiance, thousands of Indians marched to the sea and made their own salt, they broke the salt tax laws. It was a direct strike at the economic underpinning of the British Empire. It was real. While our movement has won some important victories, we must not allow nonviolent resistance to atrophy into ineffectual, feel-good, political theater. It is a very precious weapon that must be constantly honed and reimagined. It cannot be allowed to become a mere spectacle, a photo opportunity for the media.
It was wonderful that on February 15 last year, in a spectacular display of public morality, 10 million people on five continents marched against the war on Iraq. It was wonderful, but it was not enough. February 15 was a weekend. Nobody had to so much as miss a day of work. Holiday protests don't stop wars. George Bush knows that. The confidence with which he disregarded overwhelming public opinion should be a lesson to us all. ....
Our resistance has to begin with a refusal to accept the legitimacy of the US occupation of Iraq. It means acting to make it materially impossible for Empire to achieve its aims. It means soldiers should refuse to fight, reservists should refuse to serve, workers should refuse to load ships and aircraft with weapons ...
In the same article and elsewhere Roy has described how far India has fallen since the principles of the salt march gave way to the logic of superpowers. More about that from another perspective here and here.
On my crankier days I think of computers as enemies of culture, devices for encouraging a short attention span and ... hmm, I forgot what I was going to say ...
Well anyway, as you may know, there is an international computer standard called Unicode which assigns a number between 1 and umpty-thousand to each character in (ideally) every known alphabet, plus all sorts of punctuation marks and goofy symbols. This is meant to replace the old English-oriented ASCII code which used only 1 through 127. So, for instance, the letter Alef is 1488, and a lowercase L with a slash (the Polish "w") is 322; then there are about ninety thousand Chinese ideograms and so on.
I'm one of those techies who never bother to read the standards unless they have to, but then when I got Mac OS X 10.3 I started playing with the Character Palette utility and found that it contains a list of all the Unicode alphabet subsets. And I realized that committees of obsessive geeks really do play a role in preserving culture, or at least embalming it ...
Besides the obvious (Cyrillic, Arabic, kana, Tibetan, Braille) and the goofy symbols (White Smiley Face, Eight Petalled Outlined Black Florette, Umbrella, Snowman), the Unicode committee has catalogued
Anyway, getting toward the bottom of the list, I was mildly surprised to see the Mormon alphabet Deseret ... and then "Shavian." I hadn't heard of the latter and at first I thought, no, that can't have anything to do with G.B. Shaw, it must be some obscure dialect from Atlantis or something. Then reading the names of the letters—Peep, Thigh, Ha-Ha—I figured it for a joke by Apple programmers. Just goes to show my ignorance: the Shavian alphabet, a time- and ink-saving invention for which the wonderfully-named Kingsley Read won 125 pounds in 1958, has in fact been accepted by the Unicode Technical Committee—who drily note that "it has not come into general use."
When I was eleven years old, filling up notebooks with made-up systems of everything, I would've thought there could be no greater achievement than Mr. Read's ... though I would've been badly irked, as I imagine he is, to find my inarguably perfect invention ending up in a list as one among hundreds instead of taking over the world.