Lance Mannion

There be witches here

The main business of Salem is witchcraft.

Besides the several museums devoted to the subject---we visited the Salem Witch Museum, which is more a work of theater than a regular museum.  I'll explain in another post.---there are shops all over town that deal in the occult, hocus pocus, spiritualism, fortune telling, and a New Age-ish potpouri of phony Celtic, Egyptian, Druid, and Native American trinkets, charms, and books.  Looked to me as we were walking around town yesterday that there are more of these stores than there are bars and funeral parlors in certain Irish neighborhoods in Boston.

More of them than decent lunch counters too, although we found a good one, Derby Fish and Lobster, which serves excellent chowder.

Some of these shops are in business to sell souvenirs to tourists.  But some deal seriously in magic for believers.  It was hard to tell looking in their windows which was which.  Or which was witch.  We were told at the Witch Museum that Salem has a significant population of practicing Wiccans and we were asked to be tolerant and open-minded should we meet up with any during our stay in town.  By which I assumed was meant, Please refrain from giggling.  But probably the museum guide wasn't talking to me.  There are fundamentalist Christians even in the bluest state and plenty come from other states on vacation.  They don't like our politics but they love our beaches and seafood.

Salem has an official witch. Laurie Cabot.  Back when he was governor, Michael Dukakis proclaimed her the official witch as a way of honoring her for her community service work.  The Wiccans are so proud:

While this certainly was a compliment to Laurie Cabot, it was and is today a symbol of hope for all Witches who do good works on behalf of their community and nation. Equally as important, it serves as a testament that Witches have a place in America today and are recognized as practicing a legitimate and honorable religion which shows a path of dedication for the good of all. This was the first time in history that a high standing politician openly recognized a Witch for their good works.

Cabot is also a shrewd businesswoman.  Besides being a dot com and running her shop in Salem, she's franchising.  She's also diversified.  She owns a lingerie shop in Melrose.

I didn't go inside the official witch's store.  I didn't go into any of these shops.  Not trusting myself to practice tolerance with a straight face, I tried to steer us clear of them.  But the 11 year old is fascinated by Celtic and Egyptian mythology and something along these lines caught his eye from the window of Nu Aeon.  He asked to go inside to poke around.  The 9 year old was brought up short by a whiff of incense as he stepped through the doorway and decided he liked the smell of sea air better, so he and I waited outside while his brother and mother went browsing.

I liked Nu Aeon's signs---the ones on the building, not the signs and portents sort.  Big sign above the window promised "Excellence and Authenticity in Witchcraft and Magickal Supplies."

Stand up sign on the sidewalk said, "Real Magick.  Real Witchcraft.  Spells and Potions that Keep on Giving."

You have to like witches with a sense of humor.

Up the street at The Oracle Chamber they're more serious about what they do, which is mainly fortune telling.

"Psychic, Tarot, and Spiritual Readings."

"No appointment necessary."

I guess they know you're coming.

Local authors

We put off our visit to Salem until today and went out to Lexington and Concord yesterday instead.  Full of history and a good lunch, we wound up at the Concord Bookshop.

In most bookstores, outside of the big cities, when you  browse the Local Authors shelf,  you think, Who are these people and how much did they pay to get their "books" published?

At the Concord Bookshop the names of the local authors are vaguely familiar.

Hawthorne, Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau...

There was a time when you couldn't throw a brick in Concord without hitting someone carrying a fresh letter of acceptance from the Atlantic Monthly in their pocket.

The Transcendentalists would like the way the owner of the book store has arranged his wares.  In the Classics section you find only the Classics---Homer, Virgil, Hesiod, Plato.  If it wasn't translated from Greek or Latin, you have to look for it in the regular Fiction section, no matter how many college syllabi it appears on.

I grabbed a copy of Walden---I had a wide assortment of editions to pick from;  I chose the new one from Princeton---and a book of excerpts from Emerson's journals, found a chair, and sat down to read.

I read the first chapter of Walden and got a kick out of this passage

I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders "until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach"; or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars- even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor. They have no friend Iolaus to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra's head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up.

I laughed, because many of the buildings that lined the main streets of Concord in Thoreau's day are still standing, still in use, still housing shops and little businesses that I had just walked by and peeked in the windows of, and they'd all looked like quite cheerful places to me, full of smiling rather than penitential faces.   Life was harder in the 19th Century, but sometimes, when the subject was other human beings, and not plants, animals, and the weather, Thoreau saw a little too much of what he expected to see and not enough of what was really there.  Or as his friend Emerson put it, perhaps thinking of Thoreau, who sometimes got on his nerves, Thoreau made a difficult friend:

People only see what they are prepared to see.

There are entries in his journal where, writing about a visit from Henry, Emerson sounds as though he wishes that he'd pulled the drapes and hid behind the furniture, pretending not to be home, when he saw Thoreau coming up the walk.

The collection of excerpts from the journals is one I've read through many times before.  It's my favorite.  Emphatically Emerson edited by Ralph Crocitto.

Sitting there in the bookstore, I found at least 20 quotes I want to copy down, memorize, put to work.   I had a notebook with me but didn't use it, because I was pretty certain I already had most of the quotes that struck me saved in my own journals.  Sure enough.

The maker of a sentence, like the other artist, launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.

The sum of life ought to be valuable when the fractions and particles are so sweet.

Who can blame men for seeking excitement?  They are polar, and would you have them sleep in dull eternity of equilibrium?  Religion, love, ambition, money, war, brandy—some fierce antagonism must break the round of perfect circulation or no spark, no joy, no event can be.

Are you not scared by seeing the Gypsies are more attractive to us than the Apostles?  For though we love goodness and not stealing, yet also we love freedom and not preaching.

The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.

Fools and clowns and sots make the fringes of every one’s tapestry of life, and give a certain reality to the picture.  What could we do in Concord without Bigelow’s and Wesson’s bar-rooms and their dependencies?  What without such fixtures as Uncle Sol, and old Moore who sleeps in Doctor Hurd’s barn, and the red charity house over the brook?  Tragedy and comedy always go hand in hand.

God had infinite time to give us; but how did He give it?  In one immense tract of a lazy millennium?  No, but He cut it up into neat succession of new mornings, and with each, therefore, a new idea, new inventions, and new applications.

Every poem must be made up of lines that are poems.

If I should write an honest diary, what should I say?  Alas, that life has halfness, shallowness.  I have almost completed thirty-nine years, and I have not yet adjusted my relation to my fellows on the planet, or to my own work.  Always too young or too old, I do not justify myself; how can I satisfy others?

The sannup and the squaw do not get drunk at the same time.  They take turns in keeping sober, and husband and wife should never be low-spirited at the same time, but each should be able to cheer the other.

Emerson is my bible.  I can open up his essays and journals at any page and find a passage that matches my mood, addresses my concerns, makes the point I am struggling to make on my own.

Still sulking about being stuck with this handyman’s nightmare of a house, Lance?

When I bought my farm, I did not know what a bargain I had in the bluebirds, bobolinks, and thrushes; as little did I know what sublime mornings and sunsets I was buying.

Need to be flogged into doing some work?

Like the New England soil, my talent is good only whilst I work it.  If I cease to task myself, I have no thoughts.

Worrying about the 11 year old heading off to junior high and the nightmare of his initiation into the adolescent social scene?

When I was thirteen years old, my Uncle Samuel Ripley one day asked me, “How is it, Ralph, that all the boys dislike you and quarrel with you, whilst the grown people are fond of you?”  Now am I thirty-six and the fact is reversed—the old people suspect and dislike me, and young love me.

Feeling a little full of myself?

Every man I meet is in some way my superior.

Feeling a little too much the other way at the end of the day, crushed by an insight into my own worthlessness, and unable to fall asleep as I count and recount today's mistakes and failures, a nightly occupation for me?

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

Not at all comforted by that quote and close to deciding to chuck it all and light out for the territories?

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

Emerson would have made a wonderful blogger.  So would have Thoreau.  Their journals read very much like blogs.  Thoreau would probably have been a Libertarian blogger.  Emerson a Liberal:

All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.

Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner.

Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory.

But he was not an un-self-critical Liberal:

Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry.

So it's no surprise that Emerson has a lot of good advice for bloggers.

Trying to make sense of the rage of the dittoheads on the Right and some on the Left, as well?

Henry Thoreau made, last night, the fine remark that, as long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way, governments, society, and even the sun and moon and stars, as astrology may testify.

Thinking of posting something pithy about Bush and the Blair memo?

America should affirm and establish that in no instance should the guns go in advance of the perfect right.

DeLay, Rove, Frist?

These rabble in Washington are really better than the sniveling opposition.  They have a sort of genius of a bold and manly cast, though Satanic.  They see, against the unanimous expression of the people, how much a little well-directed effrontery can achieve, how much crime the people will bear, and they proceed from step to step...

Disgusted by what you read in the newspapers, watch on CNN, hear on the radio, overhear in lines at the supermarket and at the water cooler at work?

To what base uses we put this ineffable intellect!  To reading all day murders and railroad accidents, to choosing patterns for waistcoats and scarfs.

Thinking maybe you're quoting too much from Emerson?

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

Of course the editor of Emphatically Emerson chose the journal selections based on his judgment of their universal applicability.  And I have been reading and thinking about Emerson for such a long time now that he’s hardwired into all my thoughts, into my outlook, probably into my very habits of thinking and seeing.  When I was teaching I made a conscious effort to become a Transcendentalist.  I went looking for Emerson everywhere and made sure I caught him, brought him home, and pinned him like a butterfly on every other page of my notebooks.  So reading Emerson is just looking into the mirror and using it to arrange my thoughts the way I use the mirror to shave and comb my hair, to see what I know intimately is already there but can’t groom without aid.  And, as for all that, would it have mattered if I’d never read a word of his or Thoreau’s all day?

I can get the same result from reading the newspaper, Dickens, a poem, the back of a cereal box, or thinking and writing too much about Star Wars.

I can find my biography in every fable.

May 28, 1988

This date in history is important to somebody for some reason.  I just can't remember who and why.

Let me think.

Nope.  I'm drawing a blank.

Oh well.   Happy whatever, whoever you are!

I hate cats

I hate cats.

Have I ever mentioned that?

I hate cats.

It's no use telling me there are good cats and bad cats.  At the core they are all the same.  Sooner or later out pops the cloven hoof.

I hate cats.

You want to know why I hate cats?

I'm allergic to them.

Not their fault, you say?  No sense blaming them for my body chemistry, you say?

Ha!

I hate cats because I am allergic to them and they know I'm allergic to them.

And they all want to be my friend, because of it.

They see me come in the door, size me up immediately, throw each other a nod and a wink, and go to work.   As soon as I sit down anywhere within a dozen yards of a cat, I wind up with a lapful of purring feline.

I hate cats.

This is a problem right now.  We're here in Boston.  Had a lovely drive up, thanks for asking.  We're staying with the boys' Uncle Merlin, and he has two cats.

They're not his.  They're interlopers.  Merlin's a dog man.  Actually, he's a dog's man.  He's owned by an English bull terrier named Aloysius.  The cats belong to his parents, who have parked them here while they are traveling.

Merlin's 80 year old parents are in Iran.  Last week they were in Uzbekistan.  Now there are a couple whose blog you'd like to be reading right now, I'll bet.  They have more on their minds than cats at the moment, I'm sure.  Cats probably haven't entered their thoughts in weeks.   Maybe when they get to Istanbul on Tuesday they'll remember they have cats...and a son who hasn't heard from them since they entered Uzbekistan.

Istanbul, you ask?  What, they're skipping Bagdad and Kabul?

Next trip.

Anyway, the cats who are torturing me at the moment belong to them.

Before we came I reminded Merlin about my hatred for cats and its cause.  Not to worry, he said.  These cats don't like anybody.  People scare them.  They're a couple of scardy cats.  They won't come within a mile of you and your cat-sensitive nose and eyes, he said.

He doesn't know cats, doesn't comprehend their bottomless capacity for evil.

The cats haven't left my side since we arrived.  One is at my feet now.  I don't know where the other one is.  Lying in ambush somewhere, I expect.

I hate cats.

And we'll be here for three more days.

Anyway, the Tylenol Allergy medicine has worked well enough that I've stopped sneezing and my eyes aren't swollen quite so tightly shut.  I am looking at the screen through a pair of watery slits.  And tomorrow we will be out of the house most of the day.  Salem in the afternoon, Star Wars Episode III Revenge of the Sith in the evening.

But the cats will be here when we get back.  Waiting.  Ready to pounce.

You think the Sith are evil.  The Sith take lessons from cats.

I hate cats.

Except your cats.  They're darlings.

We now return to our regularly scheduled program

We're off to Boston.  We'll have a good time, I'm sure, thanks to the folks who have hit the tip jar over the last couple of days.  You've all been far too generous.  Thanks to all of you!

Blogging will continue through the weekend.  Please stay tuned.

Why we didn't watch The Life Aquatic for family movie night

Besides the fact that it's rated R.

Despite their love for killer whales and other forms of marine life, the boys vetoed it.

The 9 year old explains:

"I'm sure it's a good movie and we might like it when we get older but right now we wouldn't understand it.  We need to learn more about being married and growing up through life to really get the jokes."

No Pat Tillman

The Cincinnati Reds have a new outfielder.  Player named Josh Holden.  Batted .348 last season for the Reds' farm club, the Gulf Coast Reds.

He only had 89 at bats though and he struck out 25 times with no home runs and only 4 RBI.  He's 24, not that old for a rookie these days, not with so many players coming out of college programs, which Holden did, but he's been busy with other things besides baseball since leaving school.

He's an officer in the United States Army.  His alma mater is West Point.

But this is not another Pat Tillman story.  Josh Holden is no Pat Tillman.  He's his opposite.  Tillman gave up a promising career in the NFL to fight, and die, in Afghanistan.  No way Holden wants to go fight for anything, except through his agent for a fat new contract.

Cadets at West Point commit to a five year hitch after graduation.  Holden has put in two.  Not that his deuce has been a hardship.  Most West Point grads are assigned to combat units, that's what they're trained for. Holden has been serving at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.  Story in this morning's paper doesn't say how he managed to play for the Gulf Coast Reds in Sarasota from there.  Heck of a commute.   But the Army's decided that having to commute to Cincinnati would be too much to ask of one of their soldiers.  So they're letting him out early

They have a new policy, exclusively for athletes.

It works like this.  Come to the Academy.  Play ball.  Play it well enough that a pro team gets interested in you, and the Army will forget that the real purpose of letting you into West Point was to train you to be an officer in the United States Army.  You can pack up your duffel bag and split.

This is the complement to the stop loss programs and extended tours of duty for National Guardsmen that has filled Bagdad and Kabul with middle-aged mothers and fathers who haven't seen their families for over a year.

Somebody's got to take Holden's place.

Holden's family is excited for him.  Now he gets to pursue his dream of playing pro ball.  You might ask why if that was his dream he didn't pick another college back when he was 18.  You might also ask, knowing that places at the military academies are few and very hard to get, why if his dream was to play baseball he was taking away a spot that could have gone to a kid whose dream was to serve the country as an officer in the U.S. Army.

You might ask, but you'd probably get blank looks.  Holden is most likely a typical star athlete, which means he's been treated like a prince since he was in Little League and everybody around him, his family, his coaches, and his friends have subsumed their egos in his developing career.

Of course their boy should be allowed every latitude to pursue his dream.  Didn't you see him pitch today?  Didn't you see him dunk?  Didn't you see him run that punt back 80 yards?

What's your kid done?

Holden is the first athlete to benefit from the new policy.  There will be plenty more.  And, as you guessed, the purpose of this policy is not altruistic.  The Army isn't at all concerned about anybody's getting to pursue their dreams, least of all any soldier or officer stupid enough to actually want to fullfill their commitment by serving in Iraq, especially if they can't hit a major league curveball.

The point of this is to make sure that Army always beats Navy.

From the story by Sal Interdonato and Justin Rodriguez in today's Times Herald-Record:

The new early release policy, which was first reported by the Times Herald-Record on April 29, should help recruiting at the Academy. For instance, football coach Bobby Ross can now walk into a recruit's home and tell him he has a better shot at playing in the NFL. Ross drafted a memo to NFL player personnel directors earlier this month, informing them of the new policy.

Great.  Now West Point can recruit officers from the same pool of spoiled, semi-literate thugs that Division I schools recruit their football and basketball teams from.

Holden doesn't get away free and clear.  He has to serve six years in the reserves.   As a recruiter.

This is how it's going to be for all the athletes who luck out under this policy.  The Times Herald-Record reports:

Players who have potential to be successful in the pros can be assigned to an Army recruiting unit closest to the team. Players will be allowed to compete with the team while conducting Army recruiting activities.

So now the Army can use the glamour of these pro athletes to help convince more kids to sign up and be sent to the Mideast where the athletes themselves will never set foot.

Holden's path to the majors is not smooth.  There's a snag in the contract negotiations.  Holden's agent, Jeff Frye, and the Reds are fighting, over money, of course.

[A]thletes who take advantage of the early release program must reimburse the government for the unserved portion of their service obligation. The reimbursement rate is approximately $33,600 per year of unserved obligation for 2004 West Point graduates.

Frye said that Holden owes West Point about $96,000 for education, $3,000 for 18 extra leave days he took during last season and 2005 spring training and $16,000 for a military loan issued in his junior year.

In a statement that's going to endear him to graduates of medical schools and law schools all over America, Frye said, "It would be hard for anyone to jump into the real world with that kind of debt."

Sure is.

So Frye, being a good agent, is doing the right thing for his client.  He's trying to get the Reds to pay what Holden owes the Army.  Apparently Holden thinks he's entitled to a Get Out Of That Obligation Free Too card.

Like I said.

No Pat Tillman.

 

A tin nose

I'm enjoying Ken MacLeod's Cosmonaut Keep quite a bit, although I'm having a bit of trouble keeping track of all the characters and where they are in time and space.  Seems to me like a novel that would benefit from being an ebook with hypertext.  But then I'm only about 70 pages in.

Let me emphasize that I think it's good, because I'm about to nitpick the writing.  One paragraph of it, anyway.

At one point the first person narrator telling portions of the story---I haven't picked up his name yet---enters a building on Earth, or a version of Earth, some time in the future---or is it an alternative reality?---when Europe has been conquored by the Russians---or the Soviet Union? I told you I'm having trouble---I'm not sure what the building is, it's called, mysteriously, the IWWWW building (Somebody help!), and this is how he describes his impressions upon walking in the door:

The entrance lobby was empty except for the guy at the reception desk, who glanced up then returned to his book.  I inhaled deeply of the familiar smell of the place---the rubber flooring, the faint waft of sweat and chlorine from the gym and swimming-pool downstairs; the tang of alcohol and herbal smoke from the bar on the first floor alongside the warmer, steamier cafeteria odors; and underlying it all the sharp notes of wire and plastic and fresh cement from the ongoing overhaul of the electronics.

An aromatic place, no?

Excuse me, though.  I don't have the best sense of smell in the world, but wouldn't you have to have a nose like dog's to pick up and sort out all those different odors?

Mind you, I don't know that the narrator is actually human.  I think he is.  There's been no mention yet of his having any canine qualities and all the characters around him seem to be human beings.

MacLeod is a good writer---and a top knotch blogger---but it seems to me that he's faking it here.  He wants to tell us all the things that are in the building---gym, swimming pool, bar, etc.---but he doesn't want to get caught making a list.  So he tries to distract us by piling up the phony sense impressions.

Oh yes, I can smell all that, we're supposed to say, how real!

But would any of us really smell all that if we walked into such a building?

I think a better strategy, not just here but any time writers' write themselves into the position of having to describe a room, is to slip the details to us in as active a way as they can.  Move people around.  The narrator didn't have to sniff.  He could have seen.  He could have had to make his way past people coming out of the bar or going into the gym.  He could have had to duck around the electricians at work.  In fact the next paragraph does a little of this.

Jadey, too, was sniffing, watching a middle-aged man and a couple of young women, all carrying towels and soft drinks, stroll past.

Wouldn't have taken much to leave Jadey's nose out of it and work in the cafeteria where the sodas were bought and the pool where the towels would be put to use.

But like I said, I don't sniff so good.

I've got a tin nose.

Unbalanced. Episode II: The Separation of Art and State

Lots of excellent comments on my post on Orson Scott Card's absurd Right Wing religious condemnation of Revenge of the Sith, and I hope you'll take some time to read them.  Here are a couple of my favorites:

harry near indy wrote:

i try to do two things in my life.

one, i don't read, let alone follow, the political viewpoints of artists.

two, i don't read/see/hear the artistic products of politicians and government officials.

And N.H. followed up with:

Ah, the separation of Art and State! A wise division.

Even though I hear Churchill was a talented painter and at least one of Disraeli's novels was actually pretty good, these are sentiments I heartily endorse, and I would like to see liberals as well as Right Wing intellectual types take it to heart.

But a part of me is getting a real kick out of the Right Wing intellectual types like John Podhorertz and Orson Scott Card declaring Revenge of the Sith a counter-revolutionary film.

I am imagining a whole generation of high school age young conservative boys being told that they must choose between the Absolute Good represented by George Bush or the unmanly, elitist, peackenikky relativism of George Lucas.

You're either with us or against us, Podhorertz and the comintern declare.  Pick.  Us or them.  Vader or Obi-wan.  Sidious or Yoda.   Subscribe to the National Review or go watch Episode III.

And a whole generation of potential Right Wingers is lost in the flash of a light saber.

Some nitwit is even calling for a boycott of the movie.

Oooooh.  Lucas is so scared!

It's funny.  Their arguments are silly, simplistic, and so easy to refute, it's almost not worth the trouble.

Just start with Podhorertz's expressed horror at Lucas' supposedly betraying the spirit of the originals by suddenly adopting an anti-war theme in the prequels.

You didn't know that the originals were pro-war, did you?

Of course they were.  We're supposed to root for the Rebellion to defeat the Empire, root for Luke to blow up the Death Star, root for the Ewoks to give those mean old uncuddly Stormtroopers a whupping.   The outcome of those battles is good, therefore the war in which those battles are fought is good.  War in all the original Star Wars movies is a positive, manly, virtuous enterprise, worthy of celebration in story and song.

James Wolcott, Roy Edroso, and TBogg have each explored the comedy of that tubby little chickenhawk cheering the manly art of war from his desk at the National Review.

The flaw---well, one of the flaws, there are just so many, but the main flaw---is Podhorertz's failure to recognize that it is possible to hate a war and still want to win it and to celebrate victory when it's over.

There are a few examples from our own history.

All decent people hate war.  They always have.  The Iliad is an anti-war poem.  The story of King Arthur as told by Mallory is an anti-war romance.  (Mallory was writing in horror of the Wars of the Roses.) Washington hated his war.  Lincoln hated his.  Roosevelt hated his.

Being determined and courageous in the fighting of a war is not the same as being pro-war.

In Star Wars, the Emperor started the war by imposing his evil rule on the galaxy.  The Rebels are fighting back.  We want them to win because we want good to triumph over evil.  It's that wish that makes us cheer when the Death Star explodes, not a collective glee at the beauties and glories of war itself.

The Rebellion is a war that should never have had to be fought.  The littlest fans of the movies understand this intiutively.  Depending on where you came in, the saga started with a great big Imperial cruiser attacking a tiny and nearly defenseless Rebel blockade runner and then, on the orders of Darth Vader, slaughtering its crew. or it starts with the minions of Darth Sidious blowing up an unarmed transport and its crew and attempting to murder Qui-gon Jinn and Obi-wan Kenobi, who are there on a mission of peace.

All wars should never have had to be fought.  The Trojan War, the Wars of the Roses, the Civil War, World War II were all started by acts of stupidity and naked aggression by bad men.

Even the American Revolution should not have had to be fought.  The Americans asked repeatedly for "a peaceful redress of grievences," and they meant it.  The king and his ministers stupidly and aggressively rebuffed them and the shot heard round the world was fired by the British.

Bad guys start wars.  Good guys, forced to fight back, finish them off as fast as they can.

Podhorertz almost certainly knows this in his heart of hearts, which I grant you is probably smaller than the Grinch's at the start of the story, but still a heart.  Which is why his whining about Episode III is ridiculous and ought to be hardly worth discussing.

Except of course that Podhorertz is only using Episode III to advance an argument that is not ridiculous---or not ridiculous in the same childish, inconsequential way.

Podhorertz isn't arguing that war is good and that being against it is bad.  He is arguing that a particular war is good and being against it is bad.

He is talking about the war Bush started in Iraq.

This is why he is trying to rewrite the original movies in his head and in the heads of other Right Wingers in such a way that the Rebels started their war.

Starting wars is always bad.  George Bush started a war.  George Bush is bad.

This is not a syllogism the Right can accept at the moment.  They've put too much faith and trust in George Bush.  Too much of their own intellectual vanity is at stake.

Again, this is so obvious and silly as to be almost not worth discussing.

Except.  There's always an except.

The Right Wing's attempt to politicize the movies didn't begin with Revenge of the Sith and it's not going to end with it.  It's been going on for a long time now.

Scott Lemieux spots the next big argument on the horizon.  Cinderella Man.

As Roy Edroso has argued many times, the Right wants to manage art, the same as it wants to manage the news and manage academia.  Despairing of take over from within---or too impatient to wait for their infiltrators to rise to positions of power---Right Wing intellectual types and politicans have been trying to browbeat journalists, college professors, and artists---particularly popular artists into censoring themselves.

The Right Wingers know, as do authoritarians of every stripe, that the free flow of ideas works against them and that art is particularly dangerous to them because it both passes along ideas and encourages the opening of people's imagination to the possibilities of alternative worlds, to inspire them to think "You mean it doesn't always have to be like this?" and then start dreaming up ways to bring about those alternatives.

This is of course more proof that the only students paying close attention to the po-mo Marxist/Feminist/Deconstructionist/ist-istish professors of the 80s and 90s were their most conservative students.  It was the conservative kids who came out of college convinced that all art is and ought to be propaganda.

An amusing irony, as teratologist notes:

I'm just snickering at this because I seem to recall that a decade or so ago, there was one side of the 'culture wars' that reacted with shock and tongue-clicking dismay to this new-fangled notion of interpreting texts from 'evil' perspectives, and decried such interpretations as evidence of rampant and/or creeping moral relativism on the part of the other side.

And it would be funnier if the Right Wing intellectual types were just a bunch of quack college professors.

But they are part of a large-scale and well-financed and increasingly powerful authoritarian movement that wants to break down the walls between art and state, church and state, business and state, the military and state, and individuals and state in order to control all aspects of people's lives.

Just because a lot of Right Wing politicians, preachers, and intellectual types don't know they're fascists and can therefore express sincere outrage at being called fascists, that does't mean that their methods and goals aren't fascistic.

After all, one of the first teachings of fascist movements is that War is as beautiful and glorious as blowing up a Death Star.

Coming soon!  Unbalanced.  Episode III: The Liberal Menace!

Send a blogger to Boston

From the Department of Striking While the Iron is Hot.

Welcome to all our many new readers, especially the multitudes of you thronging in from Pandagon and Atrios' place this morning---Be sure to visit our cafeteria.  Today's Entree:  The Miracle Special.  All the loaves and fishes you can eat.  A buck ninety five.

It's great to to have you and I hope you'll keep coming back, which I suspect after reading this post you'll think twice before doing.

As I mentioned the other day, the Mannions are heading off to Boston this weekend to visit some old and dear friends---the boy's favorite uncle, Merlin, my old pal Miller, Obi-wan, Chewbacca, R2D2...

We're going to have a weekend of Stargate (Uncle Merlin's the one who got the boys hooked), Salem, the USS Constitution, and, of course, Star Wars.

Should be a lot of fun.

Should be expensive, too, and, wouldn't you know it, I've got to take the car in for repairs today.  Nothing serious, but you know how it is.  And you've guessed what's coming next, haven't you?

That's right.  Fundraising.

Wait!  Wait!  Don't run away!  Please!  Hear me out!

First, I hate to do this and I promise not to make it a habit.  (I'm thinking of adding advertising, though.  Anybody got any thoughts on BlogAds vs. GoogleAds?  Anybody want to buy an ad?)  Second, I'm not fundraising solely on my own behalf here.  I'm pitching for contributions to bloggers everywhere.  Well, except for the guys at the Corner.  They took their shot.

When I put up the Tip Jar (over there, at the top of the right hand column), I wasn't expecting to start packing away the dough by the sackful.  I hoped that every now and then regular vistiors would think to throw a buck or two my way and over time it would add up enough to buy a new hard drive or maybe a good digital camera.

That's not exactly what's happened.  A few people have donated, but they've all given more than a buck or two.  They've been exceedingly generous and I'm very grateful.  Thank you all very much.

Now.  When a friend of mine was starting up her blog she asked me, "What's the etiquette on tip jars and donations?"

I told her, there is no etiquette.  Not that I've heard of, anyway. 

Since Amazon's fixed it so that donations are anonymous people can donate whatever they feel like, including nothing. Amazon sets the minimum donation at a buck but I think it can be lowered to a penny. I think that bloggers who go fishing for tips ought to be grateful for whatever anybody feels like chipping in.  A dime, a quarter, whatever.  And there's no obligation or expectation that people visiting websites should donate. 

I put the tip jar out the way that a sidewalk musician leaves his guitar case open.  The musician hopes people will throw some money in but he's really there to practice in public so he's actually donating his music.  That's how I feel about the webpage.  I'm practicing in public.

That's true.  I really do think of what I do here as being akin to what a sidewalk artist or musician does.  Sure, they'd all be thrilled if Mr Pickwick happened to be passing by and sneaked a hundred pound note into the cup, but mostly they're grateful if at the end of the day they've collected enough for a nice lunch and the train fare home.  What they really want is people to listen or watch and applaud.

I started Lance Mannion Forge and Foundry to create a new line on the old resume, build an online portfolio of sorts, force myself back into the habit of writing every day, and, with luck, get some people to stop, look, listen, and applaud.

Boy, have I been rewarded on that last one!  Far more than I deserve!  A lot of you found me first thanks to Gentleman Jim Wolcott, and I'm awful grateful to him, he's been incredibly generous.  But I owe this blog to Nancy Nall.  She got me started, kept me going, keeps me going, and still inspires me.  Thanks, old pal.

Nobody goes into blogging to get rich.  You can't even expect to make it a paying job.   Some bloggers have hit pay dirt, but for most of us it's a labor of love...or compulsion.  The best situation is to be able to blog as a part of your real job or as an extension of it, which is the case for the professors, activists, working journalists, and publishing writers.

Everybody else, though, is taking their chances.

One thing that is happening is that some of the most popular bloggers are finding that their real jobs are becoming day jobs as blogging takes up more and more of their time, focus, and energy.

This is a situation that is bound to produce guilt, paranoia, self-doubt, and resentment as those bloggers feel themselves more and more torn.  Applause and increased readership are wonderful, but they are intangible and so they don't supply enough justification to keep going.

I haven't reached that point myself, yet, but I think I see it happening to other bloggers and I can imagine the day arriving.

I think it is wrong for people to expect online news content for free.  Nance and I were talking about this the other day and she, having spent her whole working life as a journalist, feels pretty strongly about this.  Newspapers and magazines spend a lot of money putting themselves together but if they keep giving themselves away online they'll go out of business.  Either advertising revenue has to increase tremendously or readers have to kick in.  Most newspapers and magazines are still struggling to figure out how to do this without driving readers away.  (The Times' plan to sell their op-ed columnists for 50 bucks a year is a bad idea.  But they have to do something.)

But bloggers are in a different boat.  We accepted a sort of open-source ethic when we signed up.

If you read a hundred bloggers a day and don't donate a penny to a single one, you aren't doing anything you should feel the least bit guilty about.  You're under no more obligation to pony up for us than you are for that mime who annoys you every morning at the subway stop.  He's sticking his silly white face in your face without your invitation and if all he collects from you when he holds out his cap is a wadded up gum wrapper, that's more than he has any right to expect.

But then there's that cellist down on the platform.  She's sitting quietly off by herself, playing her heart out, and all those people passing by are ignoring her and yet she doesn't seem to notice or care, she just plays.  And her music is beautiful, just beautiful.  You're happy she's there.  Some evenings on your way home from a bad day at work, her playing's the saving of your day.   And when she's not there, you're disappointed and you miss her.  A buck in her open cello case is a nice gesture, and a lot less than she's earned, when you think about it.  You can't afford to give every day, but now and then?  Maybe over the course of a year you'll kick in 20 bucks.  Less than the cost of a ticket to a concert.

I think that's a good way to treat your favorite bloggers.  Anyway, it's how I do it.  I can't give to everyone whose blog I read, but I've picked four or five whose tip jars I make a point of hitting every couple of weeks.  I figure by the end of the year I'll have donated no more than a hundred bucks.  None of them gets more than 20 bucks, but if their other readers are doing it too, it adds up.

So what I'm saying is, Give to your favorite bloggers today (while praying I'm one of them).  They're having a bandwidth crisis over at The American Street.  Susie could use some help.  And Coturnix really needs a new computer.  But everybody can make use of whatever you can spare.  Pick three and give 'em each a buck or two.  Make their day.

One more thing, though.  The Right Wing Noise Machine is growing louder and louder and the regular media is becoming more and more afraid.  We blogs on the left aren't samizdat yet.  But you know if they can find a way they'll push us as far in that direction as they can.  Money is going to be needed to keep us up and blogging, if it comes to that.

Something to think about, that's all.  Today it's just a matter of showing some love.

If you've got some love to spare for me, great.  Thank you very much.  I promise to blog from Boston in return.

But like I said, no obligations, no expectations.  I'm here for your dining and dancing pleasure twenty four hours a day.  No cover charge, no minimum.  It would be nice if you remembered the piano player on your way out, but really I'm just glad you're here and I hope you'll keep coming back, tip jar or no tip jar.

But, Mr Pickwick?  About that hundred pound note?

A lean and hungry look

Scott Lemieux loves the theater.  But he never comes late.  That's why the blogger is a tramp.

Couple weeks ago he saw the revival of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross starring Alan Alda, Liev Schrieber, Gordon Clapp, Jeffrey Tambor, Tom Wopat, and some young actor I've never heard of who must be having the time of his life working with all those guys.

Frederick Weller.

Scott gives the show a rave.   He thought the movie was one of the best films of the 1990s.  But, he says, this production is even better.

You may think that you don't really need to see the play if you've seen the movie, but you do; if you have the opportunity and like, or think you might like, Mamet at his best you have to see it. The rhythm of the dialogue is a very deep pleasure indeed when performed this well, and seeing a live performance is an irreplaceable experience. The greatest potential concern would be comparing this cast to the one assembled for the film, and yet despite the less-famous names it's a wash at worst. To my eye and ear, only Jonathan Pryce's Lingk and Kevin Spacey's Williamson are clearly preferable to their counterparts in this production (played respectively by Tom Lopat and Frederick Weller--the latter's sometimes forced readings and excessive early telegraphing of Williamson's buried toughness and canniness are the only significant flaws in the performance I saw.) If anything, Alan Alda's Levine, Gordon Clapp's Moss, and (especially) Jeffrey Tambor's Aaronson are better than the estimable performances of [Jack] Lemmon, [Ed] Harris, and [Alan] Arkin. And, most surprisingly, Liev Schreiber's Roma holds its own. Pacino's Roma is about as good as acting gets, but Schreiber's is also superb, and is arguably truer to Mamet's conception of the character.

I'm there.

I hope.

When we moved down here one of the things we looked forward to was that, being only an hour or so from New York City, we'd get into Manhattan a few times a year.  Hasn't happened for me yet.  The blonde's been twice.  Once to chaperon the sixth grade's field trip to the Cloisters and once to see Spamalot.  You may ask how is that she got to see Spamalot without her loving husband?

Priced the tickets to a Broadway musical lately?

A friend was going and we flipped a coin to see which of us would get to go with him.

Which means Glengarry Glen Ross ought to be all mine.

She'll find a way to tag along, I just know she will.

We were planning to see Denzel Washington in Julius Caesar but we were scared off by the lukewarm reviews.  If Broadway ticket prices were like London's West End's, not much more than the price of movie tickets, a lot more people would risk going to see shows the critics were iffy about.  But we aren't going to spend a month's mortgage payment to see a play we've already seen done superbly and with one of the same actors playing the same role and doing with it what he did with it when we saw him.  Did you follow that?

The actor was Colm Feore.  He played Cassius.  We saw him at the Stratford Festival in Canada in 1990, and he stole the show from the actors playing Antony and Brutus.  Which, it turns out, is what he's been doing in New York, or so says Terry Teachout.

According to the posters, Denzel Washington is the star of “Julius Caesar,” which opened Sunday at the Belasco Theatre. The fine young ladies in the balcony signified agreement by squealing when he made his entrance in a sharp-looking business suit, this being a modern-dress version of Shakespeare’s classic tale of dirty work in ancient Rome. Don’t let appearances fool you, though: The real star of this mostly horrible show is Colm Feore, who is high-strung and lustrously precise as Cassius. Next to him, Mr. Washington comes off like a well-meaning amateur, standing stiff as a weathervane and gabbling his way through Brutus’ lines.

Terry blames Washington, but it's all Feore's doing, I'm sure.  When we saw him do Cassius, Brutus was played by Brian Bedford, a far more accomplished Shakespearean actor than Washington, and Bedford, who we saw another time work magic as Salieri in Amadeus, spent most of Julius Caesar rocked back on his heels, staring in helpless wonder at the show Feore was putting on.

I swear he was as lost in the enjoyment of watching Feore work as we were and there were moments after Feore finished off a speech when Bedford took a beat before beginning his line, as if to say, "Oh, is it my turn again?"

Feore turned Julius Caesar into the Tragedy of Cassius and it was wonderful!

Denzel must be having a similar problem.  It is awful hard to concentrate on your part when the actor playing opposite you is on fire.  Sometimes you just can't resist the temptation to sit back and watch him go to town.

From 1986 to 1995 the blonde and I made an annual trip up to Stratford.  We were usually joined by Nancy Nall and her husband Alan.  And during those years Colm Feore was the company's main leading man.  We saw him play Iago, Petruchio, Richard III, Hamlet, the Pirate King in Pirates of Penzance, Cyrano, Benedick, Angelo, Iachimo, Mercutio, Athos in The Three Musketeers, and Cassius, and he was never less than brilliant---except as Benedick, but that production of Much Ado was totally misconceived.

It should be noted that in those days he could make young women in the audience squeal and squirm in their seats as well as Denzel.

At least, the two young women on either side of me used to squirm and squeal.

That's Nance and the Blonde in front of the main theater at Stratford in 1995.  The gleams in their eyes are her Kate and our 9 year old.

For some reason, in 1990, when we saw Julius Caesar, Alan didn't go with us. It was just the three of us.  I'd like to tell you about a menage a trois, but the two of them barely noticed me.

They only had eyes for Colm Feore.

So, imagine their delight when, after the show, as we walking down the wide lawn from the theater to our car we met up with Feore hurrying away from the stage door.

Our paths intersected and without having to chase him down we walked right up to him, natural and casual as can be.  He said hello.  I said hello.  Then I started to tell him how much we had enjoyed the show, how much we had admired his work over the years, how we were looking forward to...

At this point I looked off to my left, wondering why I, who usually could barely get a word in edgewise when I was in the company of Nance and the blonde, was doing all the talking here and I discovered there was no we at the moment.

We weren't there.

We had faded deep into the background.

We two hardbitten newspaperwomen were standing twenty feet away from our idol, giggling and blushing like we were a couple of freshmen girls who'd just met the captain of the high school football team and he'd remembered our names!

The bullies win

So, was the fight really only about preserving a cherished rule?

I thought it was about keeping extremist judges like Priscilla Owen off the bench.

Judicial nominee Priscilla Owen gets the vote she's been awaiting for more than four years, the most immediate beneficiary of a deal worked out by Senate moderates to avoid a debilitating fight over filibusters.

U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals based in New Orleans. With the threat of a filibuster by Democrats removed, she was nearly certain then to get the simple majority vote needed to give her the seat that long has eluded her, perhaps as early as Tuesday.

The agreement, crafted over the past several weeks by seven Republicans and seven Democrats, also opened the way for yes-or-no votes on two other of President Bush's judicial picks who have been in nomination limbo for more than two years — William H. Pryor Jr. for the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Janice Rogers Brown for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Which means that Bush gets every single judge he wants appointed appointed.  Two nominees are staying in "limbo," but Bush will probably give them pocket appointments as soon as he gets the chance.

And what did the Democrats get out of this "compromise?"

The agreement, which applies to Supreme Court nominees, said future judicial nominations should "only be filibustered under extraordinary circumstances," with each Democratic senator holding the discretion to decide when those conditions had been met...

"In light of the spirit and continuing commitments made in this agreement," Republicans said they would oppose any attempt to make changes in the application of filibuster rules. But Sen. Mike DeWine (news, bio, voting record), R-Ohio, said the agreement was conditional on Democrats upholding their end of the deal.

Which sounds to me as though the Republicans think the deal is that the right to filibuster will be preserved only as long as the Democrats promise never to use it.  What do you want to bet that the Republicans will never agree that any extraordinary circumstances have arrived?

But I don't just mean the Democratic Senators.  I mean all Democrats.  What good did this do us?  They might just as well have lost the fight for all the good it does.

Does anybody believe that when Bush makes his first appointment to the Supreme Court he will choose a moderate now?  Does anybody believe if the Democrats try to block that nominee Bill Frist will abide by this compromise?

Frist, who had joined with party conservatives in pressing for an end to judicial filibusters, stressed that he was not a party to the agreement. He said he hoped it would end a "miserable chapter in the history of the Senate," but said that what he called the "constitutional option" was still on the table. He said he "will monitor this agreement closely."

As far as I can tell this "compromise" lets George Bush and Bill Frist have everything they want and they don't even have to promise to play nice in the future.  The Democrats have to rely on John Warner and John McCain to get mad on their behalf the next time Frist tries to castrate them.

All we need to know is that the leader of the Democratic Centrists on this one was Jumping Joe Lieberman.

When will the word Lieberman replace Quisling in the dictionary?

Jack Shannon had it right.

...I have concluded that I am opposed to a compromise on this one.  This filibuster debate is not about rational discussion or debate or informed disagreement.  It is not about agreeing to disagree the way reasonable, thinking people often do.

It is about whether we believe that extremism is acceptable.  It is about whether it is appropriate to continue to believe that the behaviors that the majority of us have found more or less acceptable in years past are still normative.  The belief that those behaviors should continue to influence the public discourse.  That reasoned discussion and compromise that leads to consensus and shared belief is a more effective way to lead, govern and protect the interests of our great republic.

It is past time to challenge the belief that the kind of increasingly belligerent behavior exhibited these past weeks, months and years by certain of the leadership of our public institutions and organizations is not only permissible but also acceptable.

I, for one, do not think any of it is acceptable.  Nor should it be permissible.  I am not talking about free speech.  I am talking about abuse.  The tyranny of the majority...

The alternative is to continue to appease the extremists.  Appeasement never works.  A bully is a bully is a bully.  We have been afflicted with more bullies than any rational being should have to tolerate.  DeLay, Santorum, Dobson and their ilk are all bullies.  They depend on fear and intimidation.  You always reach a point with a bully where you stand up and say no more.  If you blink when that point comes you will forever regret the blink.  We all know in our hearts that that time has now come.

When he was a little kid, Joe Lieberman probably wasn't the type to stand up to bullies.  He was the type who went looking for the bullies to volunatarily give them all his lunch money and snitch on the other little kids who were thinking about standing up to the bullies.

He was the type of little weasel who didn't just want the bullies to leave him alone.  He wanted the bullies to like him.

When Lieberman stood up on the Senate floor to denounce Bill Clinton back during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he wasn't speaking as a moral man outraged at the President's bad behavior.

He was speaking as that sniveling little kid.  He was saying to the bullies in Congress, "Here's my lunch money!   Now please don't hurt me!  Go get Billy.  He's doesn't like you!"

And when he helped broker this deal he was doing the same thing.

McCain and Warner and the other Republican "centrists" aren't much better.  The compromise lets them off the hook.  They avoid having to stand up for principle at the risk of earning the wrath of the Right Wingers.

The bullies get their way and Joe Lieberman feels like he's part of the bullies' club and the media go away and the rest of us get jumped on our way home.

Perspective

Up at school this morning, as the boys were locking up their scooters, another little kid pedaled up to the bike rack and began chatting with us.  He wasn't one of my guys' friends.  They didn't know him.  He looked to be in the fourth grade, while they're in third and sixth.  But he was in an excited mood and needed to talk to somebody about the source of his excitement.

He was early to school today, he told us.  Usually he arrives at the time when the bread truck pulls up to the cafeteria to deliver the hamburger rolls.  But he woke up with the birds, he said, because he just couldn't wait to begin the day.  He was in a hurry for tonight to come.  Because...well, you can guess why.

His parents were taking him to Revenge of the Sith.

"It's going to be the greatest one," he said.  "It's going to be like all of Episode I and Episode II all put together.  I've been waiting for this one since, like, well it feels like my whole life.  I just know I'll love it.  I just hope that I'm not too excited to relax and enjoy it!"

It's their movie.

My boys sympathized with him completely.  They told him how they are waiting to see it in Boston this weekend.  He said he didn't think he'd be able to wait that long.  They admitted they were getting impatient.  All three agreed that Episode III was going to be their favorite.

It's their movie.

Last night, the blonde, feeling herself growing a little excited at the prospect of seeing the movie, tried to rally us all for a showing of the original Star Wars.  "Let's all watch the first one!" she said.

She put in the DVD.  The trumpets blared.  The crawl began.  And the 11 year old, snug on the couch beside her, piped up in dismay, "Hey, you said we were going to watch the first one!"

"We are," the blonde said reassuringly, thinking he'd missed something.

"No, we aren't.  This is Episode IV!"

The blonde was baffled.  "Right.  That's the first one."

"No," said the 11 year old.  "Episode I is the first one, mom."

He's right, of course.   Now it is.  And he didn't mean that it was just the first one he saw.  He meant that Star Wars is not just that popcorn movie we all saw when we were young.  Star Wars is all the movies, they make up one long story, and Episode I is the first chapter.  There are no prequels.  There is just the story.

They are their movies.

You remember the last scene in Peter Pan?  When Peter comes back to the Darling house and finds that in what he thinks is the short time he's been gone Wendy has grown up?  He wants to take her back to Neverland with him, but she tells him she can't go play at being his mother, she's a real mother now.

Peter is only momentarily disappointed.  He cheers up as soon as he meets Wendy's daughter.  He takes her to Neverland, leaving Wendy staring sadly after them out the window, remembering.  Remembering

George Lucas has returned to take Wendy's daughter, and your kids, and my sons, and that little boy at the bike rack, and all the children with him back to Neverland.

How do you get to that galaxy that's a long time ago and far away?

Second star to the right, and straight on till morning.

Unbalanced

This post now has a sequel.  Unbalanced.  Episode II:  The Separation of Art and State.

My brother Larry Mannion sent this link to an article by Orson Scott Card.  Larry wonders if Lucas got the idea for the Jedi from the Jesuits.  I'll have to ask him to explain that later.  The main point right now is that Orson Scott Card is a right wing idiot and that the Right Wing Maoists' re-education of George Lucas is proceeding apace.

Having decided that Revenge of the Sith is as blantantly an anti-Bush movie as Fahrenheit 9/11, the Right Wing Mao Squad has undertaken the rehabilitiation of...wait for it...

Darth Sidious.

The first step is to prove that the Jedi are the real villains of the story.

Card, who is supposedly a pretty good sci fi writer, is a wholly derivative polemicist, riffing off a piece Jonathan Last wrote for the Weekly Standard when Attack of the Clones came out.  In that article, Last decided that the Empire represented a better form of government than whatever the Jedi represented.  "I'll take Empire," Last concluded infamously, setting the stage for the Right Wing Maoist rejection of Revenge of the Sith.

Card doesn't like the Jedi because they are elitist, intellectual, meritocratic relativists---in other words, Liberals.

He's too busy trashing Liberals---I mean, the Jedi---to notice that Lucas himself thinks that the Jedi religion needs to be reformed.  That's the point behind the need to bring the Force back into balance.

Card and the other cultural revolutionists have paid just enough attention to the movies to notice that the Republic has become corrupt, the Jedi are in fact fighting on the wrong side---Qui-gon Jinn is the only one who knows this, that's why he's been out looking for the Chosen One---but not enough to notice that a lot of their ideas are ones Lucas put in the story.  Lucas intends us to see that a change is needed.  They think they were the only ones smart enough to see that the Republic is a mess.  And, without being aware that it is Lucas's theme, they reject his point that if the right changes aren't made or made soon enough an evil dictatorship is going to be the end result.

The fact that this happened in Rome and Weimar Germany only makes them more determined to challenge it.

In their minds the Emperor represents George Bush and because George Bush is their saint and hero it must follow that the Emperor---a fictional creation of someone else's imagination---must not be what the creator of that fictional character says.  They are attempting to invade and colonize George Lucas' imagination.  The history books must be rewritten.  The Emperor must be shown to be a good guy.

Better than the Jedi anyway.

(Pay no attention to the slaughter of the children at the Jedi Temple.  Collateral damage.  Like the children in Iraq.  I'll bet when Vader got done in there he ordered the walls in the classrooms repainted.)

Better to have an evil dictator than a bunch of Liberals running the show.

Card, being a moral relativist, like all Right Wingers, because morality is never really the issue with them, power and self-interest are all they care about and morality gets in the way of both unless it is explained away, argues that the Jedi are no better than the Emperor and in some ways worse.

Why, they don't believe that Good is an absolute!  Darth Sidious does.  That he believes it is because it is his own exact opposite and he hates it and wants it destroyed is apparently forgivable.  It's more important to believe that Good is absolute than to try to do good if you don't believe it is an absolute condition.

Better a hell on earth than admitting there is no heaven.

Their moral relavitism allows them to overlook one little detail in comparing the Jedi to the Sith and deciding the Sith are the real heroes.

The Death Star.

The Emperor and his minions, including Darth Vader, are genocidists.

You know, the Star Wars movies are just movies, and pretty goofy movies at that.  Whatever poltics is in them are as meaningless as the video game style action sequences, the violations of the laws of physics, and the fashion design.  But for the Right Wing Kulturkampfers they've become quite the Rorschach Test, haven't they?

(Update:  The French think it's an anti-Bush propaganda piece too.  The French!  The Right Wingers are thinking like the French?

Roy Edroso reports on the Right Wing Mao Squad's Film Club meltdown.

Jaquandor explains it to them, very slowly so they can follow it, twice, here and here.

PZ Myers, who has the proper perspective on the Star Wars phenomenon---"Can I learn this power, Master Myers?"  "Not from a Jedi."---explains a few things about Orson Scott Card.

Reader Mike sent along a link to a new article by Last in which he takes an almost purely aesthetic look at the first trilogy.  Last makes many points I agree with, although I think he's way off base trying to claim that Qui-gon makes the wrong call on Anakin, but I can't help feeling that his relief at having the prequels over and done with now so that they can be forgotten and we can all get back to enjoying the originals for their own sakes' stems from his belief that the prequels are politically counter-revolutionary, while the original trilogy can be seen as espousing the proper Maoist sentiments.  I also supsect that Last will have to explain to fellow members of the Politburo why he didn't explicitly condemn RotS for its political heresies.

Are you telling us, Comrade Last, that you approve of the anti-war sentiments of the non-person Lucas?

No, comrades.  I am very much pro-war.

You should have said so, then, shouldn't you have?

Yes, comrades.  My apologies.

And on the question of aboslutes, are you with us or against us?

Well, I used to think that only a Sith thinks in terms of absolutes.

But now?

Now I understand.  The Jedi are relativists.  There is absolute good and absolute evil.

We didn't find any such sentiment in your article.

Well, I took it for granted that was understood.

Did you?  Or did you doubt?  Comrade Last, why do you hesitate?

I didn't hestitate.  I had to sneeze.

You hesitated.  A good conservative never hesitates.  Comrade Last, we find you guilty of counter-revolutionary thought crimes too vague to define.  You will report to the re-education camp immediatley.  Do you have anything to say in your defense?

Yes.

What is it?

I have a bad feeling about this.)

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Coturnix is having some computer problems at home and asked me to post this picture so he can snatch it back somehow for a post he's working on for Science and Politics.  I can't wait to read it.  I wonder if it's illustrating a scientific problem or a political one or Coturnix's feelings about his computer.

Update:  Coturnix got the post up, with no help from me.  It's called "Some thoughts on the use of animals in research and teaching." Very interesting.  Go read.

Today's Gospel reading comes to us from the Book of Rick

Steve Benen at the Carpetbagger Report is getting a good laugh out of Rick Santorum's admission that he hasn't read the Bible "cover to cover."

What's more, Santorum says that his views on religion are shaped by his reading of magazines and journals.  Benan is flabbergasted by this:

I...find it a little odd that a senator, who frequently offers his religious perspective on political issues, has shaped his entire life, worldview, and governing philosophy on a book he hasn’t read.

It’s one thing to accept the idea that Scripture offers believers a guide on how best to lead one’s life. It’s another thing to accept that belief while relying on magazines to tell you what Scripture says.

Santorum is obviously a would-be theocrat, but I don't think he's ever passed himself off as a bible-thumper like a lot of his fellow Republican theocrats.  He boasts that his politics are guided by his faith and he routinely, and hypocritically, offers religious justifcations for what are wholly political, and partisan, opinions.

But his faith isn't a faith that requires regular Scripture reading or even recommends it.

Santorum is Catholic. A very conservative Catholic but still a Catholic.  Catholicism is not an evangelical religion.  Catholics aren't required to read the Bible.

In fact for a long time the Church actively discouraged it.

Universal literacy is a Protestant invention.  Protestant churches encouraged their flocks to learn to read so that they could read the Bible on their own in order to have a direct, personal connection with God.

But the Catholic Church wanted to keep the priests between the people and the Bible because the Bible is a very strange book, full of internal contractions, bad history, dietary laws appropriate for living in a desert but without much application in the Italian alps or the bogs of Ireland, fairy tales, allegories of doubtful origin and meaning, lunatic or drug-induced ravings by mad holy men (Ezekial, Revelation), and just plain weirdness---Lot's daughters, the Levite's concubine---all presided over by a God of unstable temperament with a distinctly split personality.

The Church insists that the authority of its teachings is Scriptural, but it is also adamant that the interpretation of Scripture is a job the Faithful should leave to the Church's scholars and that individuals who usurp the job for themselves are risking their immortal souls.

A Catholic whose faith is based on a personal, emotional encounter with Scripture is a heretic.

So Catholics don't need to read their Bibles cover to cover.  They only need to be familiar with a few parts of it---the Gospels, the Epistles (Paul's first of all, Peter's next, and then, if you have time, that bleeding heart James'), Isaiah, and the Psalms.  After that you're free to enjoy the Books of  Ecclesiastes and Wisdom and, if you're hurting for entertainment, a prophet here and there.  Certain stories from the Bible are important---Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and the angel, Joseph and his amazing technicolor dreamcoat, Moses, David, Solomon, and Daniel in the Lion's den.  But only the historical stories are meant to be taken literally. 

Little Catholics don't begin their education in the faith with the Bible.  They don't get to read the New Testament until they're in fifth grade, and the Old Testament in sixth, if at all.

Children are taught bible stories as stories---as exemplary tales, fables, and history lessons, not as the revealed word of God.

No Catholics believe that the whole Bible is literally true.  I should say, Catholics aren't supposed to believe it is.

Every mass includes four readings from the Bible---one reading from the Old Testament, one from the Epistles or the Acts of the Apostles, and one from the Gospels, plus a Psalm, which isn't usually done as a reading but as a song.  And those readings are pretty much the same readings recycled over the course of three years.  Which is to say on any given Sunday the reading you are listening to you heard already three years ago today and you will hear again three years hence.

I think Protestant ministers are free to choose their Scipture readings from the whole Bible---except the Apocrypha, which are not included in their Bibles, anyway, although several books are part of the Catholic bible, which is a potential source of argument between Protestant bible thumpers and Catholic bible thumpers.  If they didn't have abortion and faggots to get mad about together they'd be at each other's throats.

But Catholic priests can't pick and choose.  Their readings are set by the Church calender, which is handed down to them from Rome.

So there is nothing inherently silly, contradictory, hypocritical, or theologically improper about Santorum's lack of Bible training. Getting his understanding of Scripture through reading magazines isn't the wrong way for a Catholic to go about it.   Good, studious Catholics do and should keep themselves schooled in their faith through outside reading.  How well-schooled they are depends on the books and journals they read.

I'd be surprised if Santorum was a regular reader of Commonweal or if there's a dog-eared copy of Summa Theologica on his bookshelf.

But if the last time he opened the family bible was to record the date of his kid's confirmation, that doesn't make him a bad Catholic.

Even if it did, that's his business.  How a man comes to his faith is between him and his God.  I just wish he felt the same way.

Santorum's politics are open to criticism---and to condemnation---because they are un-American.  Santorum and his fellow priest-ridden God-botherers want to make the rest of us believe what they believe and worship the god they worship or at least conduct our lives as if we do.

I don't care if Santorum aquired all of his Scripture knowledge by reading comic books and watching Veggie Tales.

I do care that he somehow came to his beliefs about how this country is supposed to run without having read Jefferson, the Federalist, or Lincoln, or, if he has, without understanding a word.

And I do care that he is on the take and that he is a liar, a hate-mongerer, and a pandering demogogue.

His contempt for the poor and groveling to the rich makes him a bad Catholic, much more than does his choice of religious reading matter, but in both those pursuits he is no worse than most bishops and no different than most of his fellow Republican senators.

But if he hasn't read the Bible cover to cover, so what?  It would be nice, though, if he could spend some time studying one small part of it.

(Hats off to Shakespeare's Sister, John Byrne at The Raw Story and Will Bunch at Attytood.  And thanks to Susie for pointing the way to Will's posts and to Avedon Carol for the link to the Carpetbagger Report.)

Post script that really ought to be a separate post:  As the Carpetbagger admits, Santorum's lackadaisical interest in the Bible makes him no different than most Americans who claim to be Christian.

Coturnix has the numbers from a poll that shows this.  Some of the results:

   * Perhaps 15 percent of Americans participate in Bible studies.
   * The number of people who read the Bible, at least occasionally is 59 percent.
   * Less than 50 percent of Americans can name the first book of the Bible (Genesis).
   * Only 1/3 of Americans know who delivered the Sermon on the Mount (more people identified Billy Graham rather than Jesus).
    * Twenty-five percent of Americans don't know what is celebrated on Easter (the Resurrection of Christ, the foundational event of Christianity).
   * Twelve percent of Christians think that Noah's wife is Joan of Arc.
    * Eighty percent of born-again Christians (including George W. Bush) think it is the Bible that says "God helps them that help themselves." (Actually it was said by Benjamin Franklin.)

You have to take these stats for what they're worth.  They come from the webpage of a professor of anthropology at McNeese State University in Louisiana, but he doesn't say where he got them.  But, as I wrote in a comment at Coturnix's place, this fits with my experience living and teaching in Indiana, one of the Godbotheringest states north of Alabama. Folks there talked a good game when it came to religion---Fort Wayne even calls itself the City of Churches, with good reason---but when you tried to get into detail with them, they were lost. Most of my students claimed to be practicing Christians, but they were routinely stumped by Biblical allusions in the books and poems I assigned and I would have to tell them stories like Jonah and the Whale, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and Sampson and Delilah.

"What did you talk about in Sunday School?" I'd ask them, because they'd all gone to Sunday school.

Shrugs all around.

(A nice, polite welcome followed by rude, shameless begging :  Welcome to all of you sent over here from The Daou Report, The Sideshow, Nancy Nall, Shakespeare's Sister, and Pandagon.   I'm really glad you're here and I hope you'll come back, time and time again.  This page has gotten a lot of kind but unexpected attention from some big blogs lately.  Besides Mr Daou, Mrs Shakes, AC, Nance, and Amanda, in the last week the Daily Howler, Eschaton, Buzz Flash, AlterNet, Wolcott, and a number of other fine blogs have linked to us here at The Mannionville Bar and Grille.   I'm thrilled, but it's a giant leap forward in traffic and I'm not really set up for it yet.  It's doing a number on my bandwidth and disk allottment and I need to make some big changes in a hurry.   I'm hoping some of you will be kind enough to hit my Amazon or PayPal buttons in the tip jar up there at the top of the right hand column on your way out or click here.  Thanks very much.)

Very steep marching indeed

I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should  like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.  Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which  also I believe--"That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is  at best  but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.  The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and  deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government.  The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted  before  the people can act through it.  Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure.  

This American government--what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring  to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity?  It has not the vitality and  force of a  single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will.  It is a sort of wooden gun to the people  themselves.  But it is not the less necessary  for this; for the people must  have some complicated machinery or other, and  hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have. Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed upon, even impose  on themselves, for their own advantage. It is excellent, we must all allow.  Yet this government never of itself  furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way.  It does not keep the country free.  It does not settle the West.  It does not educate.  The character inherent in the American people  has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have  done somewhat more, if  the government had  not sometimes got in its way.  For government is an expedient, by which men would fain succeed in letting one another alone; and, as has been said, when it is most expedient, the governed are most let alone by it.  Trade and  commerce, if they were not made  of india-rubber, would never  manage to bounce over  obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way; and if one were to judge  these men  wholly by  the effects of their actions and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed  and punished with those mischievious persons who put obstructions on the railroads.  

But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.   Let every man make known what  kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.  

After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are  permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule is not because  they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest.  But a government in which the majority rule  in all cases can not be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.  Can there not  be a government in which the majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?--in which majorities decide only those questions to which the  rule of  expediency is applicable?   Must the citizen ever for a  moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the  legislator?   Why has every man a conscience then?  I think that we should be men first,  and subjects afterward.   It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.  The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.  It is truly enough said that  a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation  with a conscience.  Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of  their respect for it, even the well-disposed  are daily made  the agents of injustice.   A common and natural result of an undue respect for the law is that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and  consciences, which makes it very steep marching  indeed...

----from Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau.

Trick of the mind

Jefferson never said "That goverment is best which governs least."   Thoreau thought he did, but nobody has found the quote in any of Jefferson's writings.

For that matter, I've never been able to find in Thoreau's writings Thoreau saying Jefferson said this.

But Jefferson did say many things that certainly implied he prefered governments have limited powers and that when tempted to exercise even those limited powers they restrained themselves.

So it could be that Thoreau was summarizing and didn't mean to quote or that his memory played a trick on him and turned the lessons he'd derived from his reading of Jefferson's writings into a single quote of his own that he mistakenly attributed to Jefferson.

I think something like that might have happened to me yesterday when I wrote that Jefferson said that people were made for society and were therefore made for government, because since I wrote it I've been searching through his letters in my Portable Jefferson where I was sure I'd read it and I haven't come across it yet.  I've googled versions of it too and haven't turned it up on the web either.  I found two that were close.  This one, in which Jefferson is discussing morality not government or politics:

He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler, if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science. For one man of science, there are thousands who are not. What would have become of them?  Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong, merely relative to this.

And this one:

Man is capable of living in society, governing itself by laws self-imposed, and securing to its members the enjoyment of life, liberty, property, and peace...

Which is suggestive but not as conclusive as the quote I thought I was remembering.

I might still find the quote. I've got other sources around the house to look through, so I'm not ready to issue a retraction.  I'm more tough-minded than the editors of Newsweek.  But I am wondering if I did what I think Thoreau might have done, come up with my own idea based on what I read and given the credit to Jefferson.

I wish I had one of those memories that could retain quotes whole, with proper attribution, and spout them at the exact right moment whenever I needed them, like Rumpole who has the Oxford Book of English Verse (Quiller-Couch edition, of course) memorized and can intone whole poems to confound judges, sway juries, flummox the other members of Number 3 Equity Court, and console himself when all of the above or She Who Must Be Obeyed have him down.  But I don't.

I have a few lines from Shakespeare, bits and pieces from Frost, two whole poems by Philip Larkin, a handful of zingers from P.G. Wodehouse, most of the Gettsyburg Address, and at least half of Gunga Din all down pat, otherwise I have to reach for a book or run to Google, which, as you can imagine, disrupts the flow of conversation.  I thought I had at least that little bit of Jefferson.

The mind plays tricks, memory fails, imagination and prejudice rule the brain.  This morning while I was searching for the one quote from Jefferson, I came across another that struck me as perfect fodder for a post.  I was inspired!  I worked out in my head a whole piece on how The devil can cite Scripture for his purposes. (Shakespeare.  The Merchant of Venice.  And I had to look it up to get it exact.)

I planned to show how something Jefferson said about the People being the source of the government's authority, which on the face of it would appear to be a repudiation of all that the Right Wing Republicans are up to, can be, and in fact has been, turned into a justification for what they're doing.  All it takes is for them to redefine "the People" in such a way that most of the People are in fact excluded from the definition.

And the Right has managed to do this, with the complicity of many supposedly liberal members of the media.

All the talk about Democrats being creatures of the "Special Interests" and all the malarky about the Democrats needing to find ways to appeal to "Real Americans" is based on the idea that "the People," at least the only people who count, are straight, white, Southern Protestants.

The great deception in this is that the leaders of the Right don't believe that the People, even defined that narrowly, to the point of being a minority of Americans, should have any say in how they are governed.  They aren't looking for the People's consent, only their acquiescense.

The main purpose of the Right Wing noise machine is to divide the People and trick a segment of them into thinking they are the whole, that their consent, and their consent alone, is all that's needed to give legitimacy to the government; trick them again into believing that the government is proceeding without their, minority, consent, and then deny that segment the information they need to even know what they should consent to.

To put it plainly, the Right Wing elites tell the "People," Vote how we tell you to vote, hate those we tell you to hate, get mad when we tell you to get mad, recite the lines we've taught you to recite, believe what we've convinced you to believe, run where we tell you to run, hide when we tell you to hide, and the whole time you can congratulate yourselves on what fine brave Americans you are and we'll flatter you that it's true, you are "the People," just leave us alone to run the country as we see fit, to our own best advantange and reward.

Not an original idea for a post, but still a good one, I thought.

Trouble was, I walked away from the computer for a few minutes to get a cup of coffee and when I sat down again and looked over the page where I'd found the quote that inspired me I discovered that...

The quote wasn't there!

There were plenty of quotes like it.

But the exact, perfect quote I'd read only moments ago had disappeared.

I can't tell you what happened.  I guess that either I'd misread the quote in the first place or that when I read it the first time it had triggered all kinds of unconscious associations, those associations had become part and parcel of the quote in my memory, and when I read it again none of those associations reappeared and without the context I'd given it that "quote" became unrecognizable.

Without that quote, I can't write that post about what clever liars and knaves make up the Right Wing elites.

A government of priests and preachers

In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.

 --- Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Horatio G. Spafford. March 17, 1814.

People were made for government

Happened to be in Sears yesterday, hunting for some new tools, trying to talk myself into picking up a weed wacker and out of the temptation to buy a chain saw---"Be not afraid of the chain saw," says Neddie Jingo.  "Fear not the chain saw."

I heard Neddie's voice intoning in my head like Obi-wan's telling Luke to trust the Force.  "I once was, like you, afraid of the chain saw. I am no longer so afflicted. The chain saw rocks. I use the chain saw to mow the lawn. I use the chain saw to carve turkey. Yea, I use it to shave. For the chain saw ROCKS. Fear it not."

On my way to the hardware department I passed by electronics.  Forty-eight television screens were tuned in to the news, and for a moment I thought something momentous must have occured.  Why else would the news be on in the middle of the afternoon, I asked myself, naively.  There must have been an earthquake, an assassination, or a verdict in the Michael Jackson trial!

Yes, I know. I'm still living in the days before CNN.

Last week I wrote that the reason I am, marginally---I repeat, marginally.  A lot of people missed that modifier in my post---more hopeful about the survival of the Republic (this one, not the one falling apart in Return of the Sith) is my belief that people are no damn good.

But another reason I am, marginally, more optimistic and cheerful than your average blogger is that I don't watch TV news.

No CNN.  No Fox.  No 60 Minutes.  No Jennings, Rather, or Brokow, when it was Jennings, Rather, and Brokow---I don't even know who has replaced Rather or Brokow.  No Nightline.  No Sunday morning shout fests and clown shows.

I don't even watch the local news.

All I know is what I read in the newspapers.

And on the web.

I recommend this.  Stop watching the news.  You'll feel better almost instantly.  It's like giving up smoking or red meat but without the resulting urge to go around bragging to your friends about how much healthier you are now.  Because unlike cigarettes and hamburgers, once you give it up you never miss it.

A lot of people have made the same decision.  Even Fox News' ratings are down, reports Ron Beasley.

(Link via the indispensible Jack Shannon.)

On the other hand, newspapers aren't in such good shape either.

(Update:  Bob Somerby doesn't think highly of the Kevin Drum post l linked to there.  In fact, he doesn't think that highly of Drum, period.  I come in for some justified cricitism too.)

At any rate, because I was dumbfounded to see the news on at a time I still think of as prime soap opera time, I didn't catch which network I was watching.  Probably didn't matter.  They all look the same, I think.  Screens splits three ways from Sunday, crawls, a well-coiffed female bobblehead frowning earnestly, a couple of not so well-coiffed male bobbleheads smiling in a way meant to be earnest and folksy and which immediately identifies them as politicians, one Democrat and one Republican.

I was too far away to read their names.  One of the politicians looked like a graying Ray Bolger when he was out of his scarecrow makeup and playing the farmhand in Wizard of Oz.  I think that was Henry Reid.  The other pol had white hair slicked down and parted in the middle like Herbert Hoover, ears that stuck straight out from the sides of his head like Alfred E. Newman, a lean, square-jawed but still boyishly handsome face that when he was younger probably earned him a lot of compliments of the you look just like Tom Cruise variety, and a pleased with himself smile that suggested he agreed with the comparison.  I have no idea who he was.

I couldn't read the captions, the crawls, or the network logo, but the big title letters were clear.

SENATE SHOWDOWN.

Oh, right.  The filibuster debate.

The sound on the nearest TV was turned up just enough for me to hear the female bobblehead ask Reid and Tom Cruise there something very close to, "What do you say to people who say this is all just poltics?"

She spoke in the hectoring tone of a high school principal who's caught her least favorite members of the student council embezzling from the funds for the senior class trip.

How dare you two politicians engage in politics when you're supposed to be doing your jobs running the country and taking care of the people's business and, well, um, engaging in politics?

There's no point in inquiring into the motives of that particular bobblehead for asking that question.  It's a reflexive cliche of the news business.   It's asked the same way local TV reporters, sticking their mics into the faces of victims of train crashes or winners of lotteries,  ask, "How does it feel?"

But the question itself arises out of the assumption that the American people on the whole are disgusted by the very idea of politics and if they had their way there'd be no more politics or politicians, which may be what people think they think.

Implicit in the question, too, though, is the idea that there is or ought to be some way for us to govern ourselves without politics coming into it and if only the damn politicians would do something about it we wouldn't have to worry about it.

We are social animals, Jefferson said.  We are made to be governed.

He meant that we want to, have to, live in society, that is, with each other, and if we're going to get along, then we have to put restraints on ourselves and on each other---we have to negoitiate and compromise---play politics---and come to decisions about how our society will manage itself and then see that it does it---we must govern ourselves.

Jefferson had misgivings about how much governing should be done and where the center of the power to govern should reside, but he was no Libertarian.  If anything he was a conservative Democrat.

People are made to be governed.  Which means people are made for politics, and fortunately, people like politics.

We don't like partisanship because it gets in the way of our own brand of politics carrying the day.  But we like to politic among ourselves and we are naturals at it and when left to our own devices, without professional politicians around to get in our way, we go at it with gusto and are, I can state without fear of contradiction, mean, nasty, petty, vicious, and thorough-going scoundrels and cads when we go about it, as any one who has had to deal in office politics, parish politics, school board politics, drama club politics, academic politics, Little Leauge politics, and Girl Scout politics can attest to.

To be good at politics takes a certain callousness, a certain hardness of heart, and a certain vulgarity that most of us aren't capable of sustaining for the long periods necessary to get the business of governing ourselves done.  We tucker out.

This leaves us with two choices.   Soceity won't run itself.  We will be governed.  But either we leave it up to professional politicians or we leave it to people who won't bother with politics, who won't govern us---they'll just rule.  Despots.

And Plato was wrong about despots of any kind.  Their benevolence extends only as far as themselves and, maybe, their family and a few trustworthy (that is, weak and frightened) friends.

It turns out that the choice between government by politicians and government by despots pretty much sums up the divide between Democrats and Republicans.

Republicans want the country run by as few people as possible.  When they say they want limited government, they mean they want its power limited to themselves.  Traditional Republicans, of the kind that has absolutely no more power in the Party these days, want to put the government in the hands of an aristocracy made up of rich businessmen and their heirs, whom they assume will act benevolently.  Right Wing Christian Republicans want it run by the Preachers who will leave all questions of benevelonce up to God to take care of.  Neo-cons want it run by intellectual militarists with the help of compliant generals.  And the Bush Leaguers want to run it all by themselves, bankrolled by a few Texas oil millionaires, and have no interest in benevolence.

They all want to limit the involvement and the say of the People, which is to say they want to govern us without having to play politics.

Ronald Reagan's "Government is the problem" is a foolish and self-hating principle for a democratic people who supposedly revere Abraham Lincoln to embrace.

If we have government of the people, by the people, for the people, and we decide government is the problem, we are deciding we the people are the problem.

Which plays right into the hands of the Right wing Republicans and Bush Leaguers.  Their contempt for the Constitution begins with its opening three words.

"Senator, what do you say to people who say this all just politics?"

"I say, damn straight!  And a good thing.  Considering the alternative."

Build it higher!

After 9/11, a friend of mine, a former Manhattanite whose soul stayed behind in the East Village while the corporeal part of him exiled itself to the Midwest, was thinking about what he'd like to see built on the site of the fallen World Trade Center.

He decided he wanted to see the towers rebuilt exactly as they were.  Except for one small detail.

"Make them 111 stories high."

Bill wasn't speaking as a patriot shaking his fist at those who would bring this wonderful country to its knees just because they hate our freedom.  He's far from that kind of patriot.  Which is to say he's a patriot not a jingo.

He was speaking as a New Yorker.  New York City is all about defiance---of convention, of limits, of onrushing traffic, of gravity.  Mess with me, will ya?  I'll show you.

I haven't asked Bill what he thinks of the proposed design of the Freedom Tower.  He's probably glad that it was intended to be the world's tallest building but disappointed there was only going to be a single tower.  Putting up one building where there used to be two looks like timidity.  Not a New York state of mind, timidity.

I don't like the design myself.  It's a nice color, but I think it looks like the handle of a giant disposable razor stuck in the ground.  They've gone back to the drawing board, and I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with, although I'm sure a radical redesign isn't in the cards.

Donald Trump doesn't like it, either.  Trump is not someone whose views on architectural aesthetics anyone should take seriously, usually, but he's right on this.

The terra-ists targeted the WTC because it was a symbol.  You want to show defiance?  Rebuild the symbol.  As Trump says:

"If something happened to the Statue of Liberty, you wouldn't rebuild it as something other than the Statue of Liberty."

Exactly.

My friend Bill's probably nodding his head approvingly over Trump's plans, mainly because Trump's architects have designed their new towers to be 111 stories high.

The right people aren't taking Trump seriously.  They're committed to The Freedom Tower, as a design, as concept, and a brand name.

Somewhere in their thinking, too, is that it's also a memorial.

More than I dislike the design, I hate the brand name.

Freedom Tower.

Decoding the semiotics of that choice of names would be worth at least a doctoral dissertation.

Start with the fact that the name is a functional misnomer.  Freedom Tower doesn't describe either its purpose or its history.  The new tower won't be about freedom the way Independence Hall is about independence or the Liberty Bell is about liberty.

It's simply a euphemism.  It's meant to commemorate what happened there without making anyone actually think about what happened, the way calling it by what would be a far more appropriate name, The 9/11 Memorial Tower, would.

At the same time, it's meant to be a polite disguise for what will be going on there, so that anyone who might be offended by the gritty, grubby, all too normal way life will go on there where so many people died, won't be reminded that ground that is essentially a cemetery is being walked all over by people out to do pretty much nothing but make money.

I kind of like that.  I think it's a good idea that the same business that was conducted there on September 10, 2001 will be conducted there on September 12, 2101.  That's defiance.  Mess with us New Yorkers, will you?  Show you.

But what I really can't stand about the name is its sentimentality.

I'm sure the people who picked it would defend their choice as a fist shaken in the face of the terrorists.  "They hate us for our freedom, right?  So we name the building after the thing they hate and tried to destroy!  Get it?"

No, I don't.  I don't see it as a fist being shaken.  I see it as a thumb being sucked and a blanket being hugged tight.

The name's inspired by the same mingling of maudlin self-congratulation and gross self-pity that overcame most of the country after 9/11, except for New York.

Well, most of New York.  Yankee Stadium was a pretty soggy place to be during every seventh inning stretch.  Might still be.  Are they still singing God Bless America instead of Take Me Out to the Ballgame?

What idiot decided that the best way to show our fighting spirit was to replace a rousing, cheerful, integral part of a baseball game with a funeral service?  There's no reason God Bless America can't be sung after the Star Spangled Banner at the beginning of every game.  Why do we have to stop the game two thirds of the way through to share a good cry and a big group hug?

We mourned the victims of 9/11, over and over and over.  But we mourned them not as people.  We mourned them as symbols.  And not symbols of courage, or freedom, or sacrifice, or the American spirit.  We mourned them as symbols of our own scared little selves.

I'm convinced of this.  Every time I hear someone who did not lose a friend or relative or neighbor or colleague that day start weeping over how we don't remember the victims of 9/11 or how we aren't still angry enough or outraged enough, what I'm really hearing is a squeeky little cowardly voice bleating, "It could have been me!  I might have died!  I still might die!  I'm mortal!  It's so unfair!"

Because of that, I hear the name Freedom Tower as a cry not of defiance but of fear.

"We're still free, aren't we?  They didn't really hurt us, did they?"

Best way to show that we are and they didn't is to go on just as before without missing a step.

Want a truly defiant name, not just a fist shaken in their faces, but a finger in their eye?

Trump said.

The World Trade Center.

Post script by a writer utterly ignorant on the subjects of architecture and urban planning:

I don't really like Trump's design either.  In fact, I don't understand why any super-skyscrapers have to be erected on the spot.  How many 20 or 30 story buildings would fit on the same footprint?  If I ruled the world, the new buildings wouldn't even be that high.  Forget 9/11 for the moment.  Say the WTC had had to be torn down for the reasons that all buildings have to be torn down someday.  In the 30 odd years since the towers went up haven't we learned that gigantic skyscrapers waste space, waste energy, and waste manpower and money in upkeep, maintenance, and repair?  Haven't we learned that they are not safe places to be in the event of an emergency?  Haven't we noticed that 9 out of 10 are ugly as sin?

Guess not.

As the defiant New Yorker Roy Edroso has noted, New York City seems determined to turn itself into a monumental office park:

New York has always liked to tear down and renovate, but lately this tendency has become a mania; where once we more or less inadvertently toppled monuments to vanished ways of life, now our civic bulldozers are ever revved and eager to erase anything predating the Giuliani era.

Roy doesn't much care for Trump's plans, or for Trump.  He'd like to see something truly beautiful and inspiring built on the old WTC site, but he isn't holding his breath:

The original WTC was an eyesore and a monument to waste and fraud. Of course the enormous slaughter that took place there would, in a better world, demand the very best that our builders could come up with, but there was never any chance that we would get it, given the enormous number of crooks, scoundrels, and egos -- now increased by one -- involved with its reconstruction.

Dooku

Updated.

Anthony Lane pans Revenge of the Sith in the latest New Yorker.

Lane isn't a fan of Star Wars, and even the most loyal fans, over the age of 12, have had trouble enjoying the previous three movies.  Despite all the advance buzz that this final Star Wars film is as as good as the first two, I suspect that ROTS (and there's an unfortunate acronym) benefits mostly from a collective relief that it isn't as bad as Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace and from fans' satisfaction at finally getting to see what they've been waiting to see since Empire Strikes Back, which is the story that should have been the basis for Episodes I and II but which Lucas put on the backburner while he played around with his new digital tools---Anakin Skywalker's seduction by the Dark Side.

Lane, not being caught up in the story, couldn't care less.  That leaves him out in the cold, all by himself, stuck actually watching the movie George Lucas made instead of the pop myth summoned up out of the collective not quite unconcious of millions of obsessed fans.

And, however highly you might rate Lucas' abilities as a moviemaker, the movies' fans' collaborative talents as mythmakers are much greater than his talents as a storyteller.

But Lane leads off his review with a curious complaint.  He doesn't like the names Lucas has given to his creations.

Sith. What kind of a word is that? Sith. It sounds to me like the noise that emerges when you block one nostril and blow through the other, but to George Lucas it is a name that trumpets evil. What is proved beyond question by “Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith,” the latest—and, you will be shattered to hear, the last—installment of his sci-fi bonanza, is that Lucas, though his eye may be greedy for sensation, has an ear of purest cloth.  All those who concoct imagined worlds must populate and name them, and the resonance of those names is a fairly accurate guide to the mettle of the imagination in question. Tolkien, earthed in Old English, had a head start that led him straight to the flinty perfection of Mordor and Orc. Here, by contrast, are some Lucas inventions: Palpatine. Sidious. Mace Windu. (Isn’t that something you spray on colicky babies?) Bail Organa. And Sith.

He forgot the absolute worst name.

Princess Leia Organa.

I have to say, though, that Lucas' poor naming technique is the least of the problems caused by his cloth ear.

By the way, Lane's using the phrase cloth ear instead of tin ear is a reminder that he's English and so it may be that the names that sound silly to him don't sound quite so silly to an ear like Lucas' which was trained in the laid-back inflections of Southern California.  Anyway, I think Mace Windu is a cool name.

As Lane says, coming up with names for people and places in an imaginary world is tricky.  It's tough even when your imaginary world is meant to be a close approximation of this one in this time.  How many contemporary novelists have truly inspired names for their characters?  Lots of sci fi and fantasy writers have tried and failed at this task, but it hasn't done real damage to their works.  George R. R. Martin barely bothers inventing names in his Song of Fire and Ice series.  Although his stories are set in a world as fantastic as Middle Earth, he has main characters named Jon and Ed and Dany (Ok, Eddard and Daenerys, but come on).  The characters with those names and the world they inhabit are so compelling that it doesn't matter what they're called.  That Luke Sykwalker lives on a planet with a name that sounds like a combination of a sneeze and a spit and a giggle, Tatooine, and has an aunt named Beru, a mother named Padme, and a grandmother named Schmoo---sorry, I meant Shmi---is mildly amusing if you think about it, but also pretty easy to forget once you get caught up in Luke's story.

Where Lucas' tin or cloth ear does the most harm is in his dialogue.  He's notoriously bad at giving his actors lines they can work with.  In fact, his dialogue is so bad that it turns good actors into bad ones.  They have to struggle so hard to make a speech sound like it makes sense that they have to forget about infusing it with anything like emotion or character.

All the movies have worked best when their narratives are taken over and driven by their visuals---I don't mean the moments when Lucas gets carried away with his visual effects.  I mean the moments when the story can be told through images instead of dialogue.  You can watch most of the original with the sound off and follow it right through to the end, and I suspect that's what's going to be good about Revenge of the Sith.

Lucas' incompetence as a writer of dialogue must be obvious even to himself.  You'd think then he'd hire someone to do it for him.  But he won't.  It's a control issue.  But it's also a sign of his single greatest flaw as an artist---he refuses to learn from other artists.  He is unable to properly credit either the sources of his inspiration or the artists, technicians, and actors who've worked with him.  He thanks them, he rewards them well, he allows them to take the stage, but he will not ever admit that he owes them.  He doesn't need to say it, and he can say it without meaning it.  He just needs to listen and follow their lead when they know better what to do.

It was unfair of Lane to compare Lucas' fumbling with names to Tolkien's great skill at it.  Tolkien could probably have written his books in Elf or Orc if he'd had the time.  His names grew out of his talent and learning as a linguist and they have a logic and consistency that gives them the authenticity of names in the real world.

KIng Theoden's son is named Theodred.  The brother and sister who are Theoden's niece and nephew are Eowyn and Eomer and they live in Edoras---their names are more connected to the place they live than the King's, which is right, because they will inherit the kingdom.  There are the brothers Boromir and Faramir, but their father's name is Denethor, so the suffix mir could be a maternal reference.  They are their mother's sons and not their father's, which is a good thing, considering what kind of man Denethor is.  But all three, Denethor, Boromir, and Faramir are men of Gondor, which is uncomfortably close in both geography and sound to Mordor.  Good and evil live side by side in place and rhyme and the father and the brother are connected by rhyme to both places, establishing the connections and the temptations all three must wrestle with.

The best Lucas can do along these lines is name all his evil characters Darth.

But I don't think Lane brought up Tolkien just to prove that Lucas isn't a poet or a scholar.

I think he wanted to remind readers, without having to get into it, that Star Wars has borrowed a lot from the Lord of the Rings but that all the borrowing hasn't lifted the movies to the same level of artistic achievement as the books---or even the movies based on the books.

I don't know for a fact that Lucas ever read the Lord of the Rings or if he's seen the movies.  If he has he appears to have learned about as much from them as he would have by giving them the skip.

Besides learning how to have avoided naming a cool planet after what sounds like a card game---Kamino---one of the things he could have learned, and should have learned was that every single character doesn't have to fit into his main scheme.

In Lord of the Rings the greatest temptation is wanting the Ring to use its power to do good.  Power uses its possessor, that's Tolkien's lesson.  But there is in fact only one character who succumbs to this temptation, Ysildir, and he's more a memory than a character.  Boromir is tempted and comes close to giving in.  Gandalf and Galadriel are tempted for the briefest moment.  Aragorn is never tempted.  That's the sign he is the true king.  Wanting power, even to do good, is the sin.

This, as it turns out, is the sin that corrupts Anakin.

Unfortunately it is also the sin that corrupted Count Dooku, apparently, which makes Dooku---another really stupid name---merely a double for Darth Vader.  So of course we're not surprised that Anakin and Dooku face off in a duel in front of the Emperor in a scene that looks exactly like Luke and Vader's duel in Return of the Jedi.

Oh, look, Lucas is doubling.  How mythic!

How boring.  Lucas has taken a potentially interesting character and turned him into a cardboard cutout.

In Lord of the Rings there are plenty of other ways for characters to lose their ways and their souls than putting on the ring.  Putting on the ring doesn't do the same thing to every character who wears it either.  Hobbits, for instance, get cranky and pathologically anti-social.  But Saruman doesn't care a fig about the Ring.  He doesn't need it.  He's already got the power he needs; what he wants, apparently, is worshippers.  He talks of sharing power with Sauron, but he probably thinks he can get rid of Sauron when the time comes.  Saruman wants to be a god on earth and he sets out to remake the world by destroying it.  How neo-con of him.

Denethor goes mad because he can't let go of past glory not because he covets power.  He can't step aside although he knows that his time has passed.  The reason he favors Boromir over Faramir is that he sees Boromir as an extension of himself.  Faramir is too much his own person.  (One of the failures of the movies is the way Farmair as a character is weakened.  His only motivation is to gain his daddy's love.  In the books, he angered his father by spending all his time running after Gandalf and Aragorn.)  Denethor's undoing is his vanity.

Theoden ends a hero, but when we meet him he is almost lost to his despair.  He has the same trouble Denethor has facing the fact that his time is over---Tolkien doubled with the best of them---but instead of resisting in anger like Denethor, he gives in to sadness and self-pity.

Then there's Boromir.

Dooku is introduced in Attack of the Clones as if he's going to be a Boromir.  We're told that he's an idealist who has left the Jedi order for no reason that the Jedi themselves either understand or are willing to talk about but which we can guess is that he knows evil is afoot, the Jedi are helpless to stop it, and he's gone off to find the power to combat it on his own.

When he starts explaining himself to his prisoner Obi-wan he compares himself to Obi-wan's master, Qui-gon Jinn, whom we know is a true idealist and who had also estranged himself from the Jedi Council, although without leaving the order.  Qui-gon knew something was rotten in Coruscant.  All of the Jedi seem to know in Episode I that the Force is out of balance, but Qui-gon is the only one who seems to understand that this is a problem.  It would have been interesting and tragic if Dooku understood this better than Qui-gon and had set out to fix it and in doing so had wound up doing evil himself because the problem can't be solved through an exercise of power and will but by the exact opposite, through renunciation of power and self.  That's what Luke does when he refuses to kill Vader.

It's apparently what Qui-gon had in mind.

Had Lucas allowed Dooku to develop this way, let him be a hero who goes wrong attempting to do good, he'd have have made Dooku not only a double of Anakin but also a double for Qui-gon, Obi-wan, Yoda, and Luke.  He'd have created a more morally complex universe in which we had reason to worry about those characters' souls as well as Anakin's.  There's  not a one of them who'd have been truly tempted by the dark side.  But only Luke---the story's Galahad---is above all temptation.

Except that there aren't any other temptations in Lucas' world.  We don't have to worry about the souls of the heroes, and that allows us not to have to worry about our own.

Dooku would also have been more compelling as a character if he was another Saruman, an idea that should have occured to Lucas.  After all, both characters are played by the great Christopher Lee.  Suppose Dooku didn't serve Darth Sidious but was his rival.  Then Anakin and the other Jedi could be plausibly fooled into opposing him.  They wouldn't just be dupes, they'd be fighting a real enemy, not a shadow of their real enemy.  The trouble would be that they'd be so caught up in fighting the first enemy they don't see the other.  This is sort of what happens, but not really.  Basically, Sidious pulls the wool over their eyes and all their heroics in the Clone Wars are really just puppet shows.

Sarumon is, in reality, a fallen angel.  He is Lucifer.  Sauron is not the devil.  He's just earthly evil.  That's why he has no personality.  He is the evil that men do.  Saruman is something more.  Lucas could have made Dooku a fallen angel, and in doing so given his universe another, powerful villain.  An actually charismatic villain, too.  Palpatine is supposed to be a charmer, but he's such an obvious snake in the garden, that it's actually another sign of Anakin's weakness that he prefers Palpatine's company to Obi-wan's and even Padme's, and we're distanced from Anakin even further and attracted to Palpatine not at all.

A villain who is a great warrior and leader in his own right, however, is compelling.  You can almost root for him.

But Dooku turns out to be nothing more than another evil henchman.

The Sith aren't very interesting villains.  Even Darth Vader is just an evil henchman.  They aren't evil, they just do evil.  They take orders.  They are in fact less interesting than orcs.  Orcs don't know they are the bad guys.  This gives them personality and something to talk about.  The Sith can't talk about anything but the power of the Dark Side.  Think about it.  Vader has no conversation.  All he can talk about his ancient religion.  He bores Grand Moff Tarkin to tears.

"The Jedi are extinct, my friend.  Their power has gone out of the universe.  You are all that's left of their ancient religion."

So for the love of the Force will you please shut up?

By making Dooku just another Sith and becoming a Sith the only path to the Dark Side and turning to the Dark Side the only form of evil, Lucas has let us all off the hook.

He allows everybody in the audience to say, well, hey, I'm not a Sith, I'm not angry, I'm not afraid, I'm not anybody's evil henchman.  I must be a Jedi!  What a good fellow I am!

Which is not the message he had in mind.

Exegesical updates:  Raoul Vega catches me in a big mistake about Saruman.  As he points out, Saruman was interested in the Ring.  He just couldn't find it.  My fault for remembering the movies more clearly than the books.  But it's still true that Saruman creates his own path to evil---he's undone by his intellectual arrogance without having to touch the ring.

Raoul also makes an interesting point about the characters of Theoden and Denethor, another case of doubling.

Meanwhile, Jaquandor is a more forgiving fan of Lucas than I am.  Not an uncritical fan, just more inclined to focus on what's good in the movies.  He has written many posts about Star Wars and you can start on his front page and make your way through his archives.  Or you can go here and here and watch him deal handily with the blockheaded Right Wing intellectual-types who refuse to let Star Wars be just a movie and insist on seeing it as an anti-Bush allegory.  As Jaquandor says, this makes:

Lucas a friggin' genius. I mean, this filmmaker from Modesto was so prescient that he was able to start laying the groundwork for an allegorical space-opera polemic about our current President, over twenty-five years before our current President was ever elected!

Spitting on the Koran

Updated.

Gitmo is a horror.  We torture the prisoners there.  We torture prisoners in Iraq and we torture them in Afghanistan.  Our main method of torture is psychological.  We humiliate prisoners in every and any way that the sadists in charge can think of.  We insult them, we insult their religion, we attack their pride and their very sense of self.

This has meant treating Islam as a joke and debasing and degrading its beliefs, practices, and its adherents.

It has meant shaving their beards, refusing to let them pray, and subjecting them to all kinds of abuses designed to crush their pride, their egos, their souls.

Did somebody flush a Koran?

Sure, they did.

That's been reported all over the world by journalists who still do their jobs and aren't terrified by Karl Rove.

It happened.  Newsweek's "retraction" doesn't deny it happened.  All it says is that a government report that it reported says it happened doesn't say that.  Some other report does!

But the people of the Middle East don't need that as a reason to hate us and riot in protest.  They know we hate and despise Islam.  They know we torture prisoners.  They know we are killing Iraqi citizens every day and telling their widows, orphans, and suriviving relatives and friends that the dead are better off than they would have been under Saddam.  We freed them.  They've been democraticized to death.

They know we have a "Christian" president who despite his weak denials that we are not at war against Islam allows to flourish and even encourages a vociferous right wing "Christian" wing in his own party, none of whom are at all shy about proclaiming their hatred of Islam and their belief that we are in fact at war with Islam.

They know we have a general who has declared that Islam is a false religion.

They know we have a loud, incessantly chattering, angry, racist, bigoted and ubiquitious Right Wing propaganda machine that controls the radio, several major newspapers' op-ed pages, a bunch of magazines, an entire television network, and a good chunk of the Internet, and is energetically working to control as much of the rest of the media as it can and bullying into surrender what it can't take control of.

They know that the mouthpieces for this propaganda machine regard torture as fun, think nothing of the deaths of even our own soldiers nevermind Iraqi and Afghani women and children, and can't go a day without insulting, condemning, and, when their guard drops, advocating the eradication of Islam, even if that means killing thousands and thousands of Muslims---conversion by death.

They know that the blowhards are quick to brand any of their fellow Americans who speak out against the torture and the killing and the stupidity and viciousness of the war traitors and recommend, sometimes in code, but often explicitly, violence to shut them up.

They know that one of the most visible and celebrated of the blowhards has been arguing for rounding up and putting into concentration camps American Muslims.

They know what the White House's plans are for Iran.

Did some sadistic cretin flush a Koran down the toilet?

Sure, but it doesn't matter.

We've been spitting on it as a nation for three years now.

The Islamic peoples of the Middle East know this.  They've been paying attention to us in a way we are too arrogant to pay attention to them.

They hear President Bush express more anger and outrage at the temerity of Newsweek for reporting facts that make him look bad than he was able to muster at the news that his soldiers had become torturers.

They hear him being more passionate about the black eye to his administration than he was about the death and destruction caused by the tsunami, many of the victims of which were Muslims.

They hear him and his lackeys go on and on about those 16 deaths in the Afghanistan riots and yet say nothing about the hundreds who are dying in Uzbekistan on the orders of one of his few friends.

They know the story is true.  That it is true in fact and that, even more damning, it is true symbolically.

As Juan Cole reports,  even if the story wasn't true---and, as Cole shows, it is.  It's not even news.  It's an old story.---the Islamic people of the Middle East don't need this story in order to hate us, fear us, and riot against us.

They know that President Bush doesn't care about the 16 people who died in the riots any more than he cares about the tens of thousands of people who have died in his personal crusade in Iraq.  He doesn't care about the Americans who have died.  Why would he care about 16 more Muslims?

They know that the President's first instinct upon hearing the story wasn't to apologize or even to look into the incident.  It was to set his henchmen the task of discrediting the story, demonizing Newsweek, and bullying the rest of the media into running away from the story.  As Arthur Silber makes clear, all the President's men aren't going to stop there.

They are going to use it as a weapon in their campaign to impose censorship on the American press.  They are going to try to make sure that no more stories about our despicable war against Islam---the Administration has never been serious about our war against terra; Islam is their enemy---make sure that no more stories like that are heard by the American people so that the Bush Leaguers can continue to do what they've been doing without any more fear of discovery.

Not that they are that afraid.  They just don't like the extra work of having to lie to the American people every time the truth threatens to get out.

(Links to Silber and Common Dreams courtesy of Avedon Carol.  Link to Steve Clemons via Wolcott.

Update that dares to be skeptical of a fellow blogger's claims of outrage-fatigue:  Shakespeare's Sister swears she just can't bring herself to care about this story.  Too much of a muchness, as it were.  Same old, same old, she explains.  I don't know.  She sounds angry to me.   At any rate, she provides this link to TBogg who provides this link to Keith Olbermann who provides this link to a Dept. of Defense transcript that shows that during the riots General Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, didn't think they were caused by Newsweek's story.

Nico at Think Progress explains the "mistake" that wasn't a mistake:

Newsweek and its source stand by their stories regarding the use of the Quran during interrogations. The source “clearly recalled reading investigative reports about mishandling the Qur’an, including a toilet incident,” Newsweek says. Indeed, variou s other reports in the media and by NGOs suggest that U.S. interrogators have desecrated the Quran on multiple occassions. The “error” in the Newsweek story is not in whether the desecration happened but in whether or not details about it are included in a new SouthCom report on Guantanamo.

See also Riggsveda at Corrente for links to stories about our methods of torture.  Also at Corrente, the Farmer lists a bunch of other news outlets who reported on the desecration of the Koran before Newsweek got around to it.

And then there's this from Riverbend:

Now Newsweek have retracted the story- obviously under pressure from the White House. Is it true? Probably… We've seen enough blatant disregard and disrespect for Islam in Iraq the last two years to make this story sound very plausible. On a daily basis, mosques are raided, clerics are dragged away with bags over their heads… Several months ago the world witnessed the execution of an unarmed Iraqi prisoner inside a mosque. Is this latest so very surprising?

Detainees coming back after weeks or months in prison talk of being forced to eat pork, not being allowed to pray, being exposed to dogs, having Islam insulted and generally being treated like animals trapped in a small cage. At the end of the day, it's not about words or holy books or pork or dogs or any of that. It's about what these things symbolize on a personal level. It is infuriating to see objects that we hold sacred degraded and debased by foreigners who felt the need to travel thousands of kilometers to do this. That's not to say that all troops disrespect Islam- some of them seem to genuinely want to understand our beliefs. It does seem like the people in charge have decided to make degradation and humiliation a policy.)

Miles of aisles

Ann Althouse has been stewing about something for over 35 years and it's been eating at her so long it's finally chewed its way out of her and she has to vent.

Speaking of sincere, how sincere was Joni Mitchell in "Woodstock"? She didn't attend, and, in fact, she played at the Atlantic City Pop Festival, a few weeks before, and walked off in the middle of her set, after ranting at the audience for failing to pay rapt attention to her. We were milling around, dancing and talking, and acting like a big bunch of hippies. She did not like it one bit. She steered way clear of Woodstock, then wrote a song idealizing it.

An artist who is temperamental, demanding, thin-skinned, and egocentric, and who expects people to pay attention to her art!  How about that?

Atlhouse may have thought she and her friends and fellow music-ignorers were just being, like, you know, cool, man, going with the flow, living in the moment, and groovin' on the scene.  But things look different from the stage than they do from the cheap seats.  Althouse, being a professor, should know this.  One of the things I used to like to spring on my students when I was teaching was the news that I could see them.

When I started teaching, I'd say, on a day when the daydreaming was too widespread to ignore, the thing that surprised me was that the students aren't invisible!  When I was in your shoes, I said, I never worried about whether or not the professor could see me napping, doodling, girl watching, doing homework for another class, or reading a book the class wasn't discussing at the moment.  I figured I was safely lost in the crowd.

Turns out not to be true, I'd tell my students, pointedly making eye contact with as many of them as I could.  I can seeeeeeeeeeee you!

You'd be surprised at how engaged everybody became after I gave that little speech.  Worked like a charm, every time.

Althouse must have had the same experience when she stepped up to the podium for the first time and looked at out at all those individual faces.

But maybe not.

Maybe she's one of those professors who never looks at her students.  Maybe she lectures without ever looking up from her notes.  Hard to believe from reading her blog she could be that big a bore and a stiff, but who knows.

Or maybe she's just never had the experience of losing a class's attention, even for a moment, and had to find a way of calling all those wandering minds back.  Maybe her students are always so rapt and well-behaved that she never feels like slamming a book down and storming out of the room.

So she can't imagine what it was like for Mitchell to face an essentially hostile audience, that is to say an audience that wasn't prepared to pay attention.

Mitchell wasn't on stage that day in Atlantic City as a hippie chick who just happened to bring her guitar.  She was there as a performer.  Different dharma.

The ettiquette is different too.  People didn't go to see the Dead expecting the crowd to sit still and mute, rapt, carried away only by the music.  Same things when they went to see the Stones.

Mitchell was not a rock and roller.  She was a folk singer.  I guess she still is, but calling her a folk singer seems inadequate.  Like calling Sinatra a crooner of pop standards or Johnny Cash a graduate of the Grand Old Opry.

Folkies weren't hippies.  Neither were peace activists and war protesters, for that matter.  Hippies drifted in and out of all those groups and annoyed everyone they came into contact with.  Hippies were the mimes of the counterculture.  If Althouse and the people around her were hippies, they were at the wrong concert.  Most of the audiences who came to listen to Mitchell sing were folkies.  Mitchell came to sing to them.  It's not surprising or the least bit insincere for an artist to be disappointed and upset when a great chunk of the audience is rude.

Back in high school, our drama club went on a field trip to see a professional theater company's production of Twelfth Night.  It was a special matinee for high school students, though, so while the actors on stage were pros, the audience was made up of mostly amateurs at theater going.  Some of them weren't on their best behavior.

One of them threw an egg at Malvolio.

It missed.  But the actress playing Viola was incensed!  She stopped the show and stepped forward to lecture us for 15 minutes on the proper way to behave, and she promised that if there was another incident like that the curtain would wring down and we'd all be sent home.

In Shakespeare's day the groundlings were a lot more unruly, and you could say that that actress wasn't being sincere or true to her Shakespearean traditions, taking umbrage at a harmless bit of tom foolery that wouldn't have caused Richard Burbage to drop so much as a single iamb from To be, or not to be.

Different times, different traditions, different ettiquette.

Mitchell wanted her audience to pay attention.  Doesn't mean she didn't want them to have a good time.  She didn't necessarily want everyone sitting still and hushed as if they were at the Philharmoic listening to a violin concerto.  She wouldn't have minded if people sang along or even danced.

I know that because I was at one of her concerts where everyone sang along and danced and she played for two and a half hours and did three encores.

Maybe that's the way it was in Atlantic City when Althouse was there.  Maybe Mitchell was having a bad day.  Maybe when I saw her she'd been sharing some excellent weed before the show with her band.  Maybe the day Alhouse saw her Neil Young had just dumped her again.

Maybe in the ten years between when Althouse saw her in Atlantic City and I saw her in Syracuse, New York, Mitchell grew up.

I'm guessing, though, it was that the crowd in Atlantic City was just too rowdy for Mitchell.  She was a folk singer playing for an audience of Deadheads.  She wasn't used to it, didn't know how to handle it, and she got upset and threw a temper tantrum.

I saw Elvis Costello do that for the very opposite reason.  He stormed off the stage 45 minutes into his act because, he said, nobody was dancing.  (Up in the balcony we were all dancing but he couldn't see us with the spots shining in his eyes.  People in front of the stage must have been stiffs.)  This was at a local college and the student promoting the concert tried to force Costello back out on stage.  They got into a fist fight.   Costello won and left.

Same college, I don't remember if it was before or after Costello:  I saw Warren Zevon.  He played for 20 minutes.

He didn't storm off.  He was carried off on a stretcher.

In the middle of Werewolf of London he tried to do a split and hurt himself in the groin area.

Zevon got a little too sincere.

Saw Kenny Loggins once.  A girlfriend dragged me to it, ok?  Warm up act was a hard rocking band whose name I've forgotten.  Wrong band to warm up for Loggins, as it turned out.  The band was good but they put the crowd in the mood for a night of rock and roll.

Loggins came out, started House at Pooh Corner, and was practically booed off the stage.

What did he do?

He shrugged.  Had a quick conference with the band.  Launched into an especially raucous version of Your Mama Don't Dance and never looked back.  Might have played three more of his own songs all the rest of the night.  He did Johnny B Goode, Twist and Shout, Get Back.  He did Peggy Sue, he did Blue Suede Shoes.  He did two hours of classic rock and roll.  Everybody had a great time.  Loggins most of all.

Different nights, different artists, different circumstances.  Turns out they were all "sincere," including Mitchell.

Behavior that would have been appropriate in the mud before the main stage at Woodstock was not at all appropriate while listening to Mitchell sing at another venue weeks before.

As for Mitchell being insincere because she wrote a song about an event she missed---well, do we know Stephen Foster was actually ever at the Camptown Races?  Do the ladies really sing dis song, doo da, doo da, and if they do, do they do da it all de live long day?

Expecting a singer or a poet to "believe" in her songs or poems means you think Keats really loved Grecian Urns or that it matters whether or not Shakespeare was bisexual or there really was a dark lady.

The same goes for any artist.  Dickens didn't "believe" all of London looked like Tom-all-alones.  Van Gogh didn't really see sunflowers that way.  There was probably no young man who looked like Michelangelo's David and the Mona Lisa might have been Da Vinci's self-portrait.

Beethoven's Third Symphony isn't better or worse because he changed his mind about Napoleon.

How sincere was Mitchell, Althouse asks?  About what?  Being an artist?  Or being a hippie?

Or about the idea that bomber jet planes should turn into butterflies?

There are more important issues in that song than whether or not Joni Mitchell really wanted to hold hands with Ann Althouse at Yasger's Farm.

A question for Althouse.  How sincere a hippie was she?  Mitchell's still singing and being demanding of herself and her art.  Althouse is a conservative law professor.

She couldn't get any farther from being a hippie without joining a country club.

But sincerity isn't the issue here.  Ego is.

What Mitchell wasn't, and isn't, is somebody Ann Althouse wants to admit matters more than she does.

Althouse's little gotcha moment, 35 frigging years later, is nothing more than the stereotypical triumphant bleat of a mediocre nobody finding a way to feel superior to a greater personality.

Yeah, yeah, I know.  Althouse is a famous blogger!  She's also a law professor at a first rate university.  So I'm doing it too, aren't I?

Human of me, all too human.  We all do it.  The cat scratches the dog.  The rat bites the cat's tail.  The flea bites the rat.

But I can't resist.  And I want to point out one more thing.  About the song Woodstock itself.

A jazz player named Larry Arlotta once told me how when he was putting together his first album he wanted to do Someday My Prince Will Come.  Arlotta was a piano player, but he heard the song with a horn taking the lead, and he knew just which horn player he wanted playing it with him.

Sal Amico.

"We gotta get Sal," he told his producer.  "He owns that song."

I don't know about you, but when I listen to Woodstock in my head, I don't hear Joni Mitchell's voice.  I hear Stephen Stills'.

Mitchell wrote the song.  But Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young made it a hit.  They own that song.

And they were there.

No damn good

I have been asked how in the face of all that is rotten in the world I maintain my chirpy, cheery, optimistic and generally sunny outlook on life.

Seriously.

I swear.

People have asked me that.

I'm just as surprised as you.  Frankly, I consider myself one grumpy, sour, mean and nasty son of a bitch, a misanthropic, malcontented, pessimistic, anti-social bastard and jerk.  Cheerful?  My guiding philosophy is Murphy's Law, intensified.  I believe that it's not just that anything that can go wrong will go wrong.  It's that anything that can go wrong already has gone wrong, way, way, way wrong, and you won't even have begun to notice just how badly it's all gone wrong until the paramedics and the police arrive.

I'm not a the glass is half-empty-er.  I'm a the glass is dirty and the milk in it has curdled and came from sick cows anway-er.

Apparently these character flaws don't always come across, and not only on this page, where it could be the case that I'm just not making myself clear, but in my analog life, where it should be obvious to anyone spending five minutes with me that there is no pleasure to be had in my company.

Personally, I'd rather spend a night on the town with Pope Benedict than with me.  At least he lightens up once in a while.

But still some people insist I'm a cheerful guy with nary a care in the world and they want to know my secret.

I will tell you.  It's because I have a simple faith.  It has one tenet, a single golden rule.

People are no damn good.

That sounds a little harsh.

Let me put it another way.

People stink and they are stupid.

By people I mean, well, people.  The whole damned human race, every one of us, except for my parents, my sisters, and my pal Gary.

I'm at the top of my list.  I'm rotten and I can prove it.

You, I'm not so sure about.  I hardly know you after all.  You could be all right.  I'll try to keep an open mind should we meet, but I'm doubtful.

People stink and they're stupid.

There are a number of questions that arise from such a philosophy, of course, the first being, if people are that Christ-awful, Lance, how come the world isn't even more of a hell than it is?

I've got an answer for that, which doesn't posit divine intervention, but I'll save it for another day.

The main point of this post is to explain how my complete lack of faith and hope in my fellow man and woman gives me what other people regard as a positive outlook on life.

You wouldn't think that anybody who thinks like I do could go about with a smile on his lips and a song in his heart.  In fact you might think that somebody like me would find it hard to go about at all, that just forcing myself out the door would be too much for my fragile emotional state, that a mere glance out the window would sink me into a slough of despond.

Some days...

I guess it works---if it does work---the way Ben Franklin said pessimism worked for him.  If you never expect anything good to happen, you are never disappointed.

Anyway, I should define my terms.  What do I mean when I say people stink and they are stupid?

Pretty much this.  That when faced with any moral or ethical choice, people will almost always do what they want to do instead of what they know they should do.  If doing the wrong thing will make them feel better than doing the right thing, they will do the wrong thing, and, proving just how rotten they are, will insist to the world, swear on a stack of Bibles, go into court or on TV or before Congress to declare that they in fact acted entirely from principle, that they did the right thing regardless of how it looks to you or the family of the bloody corpse they left on the floor.

And they are stupid in this way:  That when contemplating doing the wrong thing and in the very act of doing it they will know that it is wrong, they will know that it won't only hurt other people but it will be a personal disaster for themselves, that they will be caught at some point and punished, and that when they try to explain and beg forgiveness or mercy nobody will believe what they did was the right thing to do so that they will show themselves up not just as villains later, but as liars and fools, and that knowing all this, they will still go ahead and do the wrong thing.

But that's only when they are thinking.  Usually, they don't think, they're that stupid.  I call this my Driving Only One Car Length Ahead theory, which goes like this.

Most bad drivers are bad because when they are driving they are only looking forward at the car right in front of them.  They don't look right or left, they don't use their rearview or side mirrors.  They fixate on the bumper of the car directly ahead, they don't look through its windows or over its roof or past it on either side, and so they don't see the car ahead of that one stalling out, the light turning red at the next corner, the kid darting out into traffic half a block up, the ambulance coming down the road, or the signs telling everyone to merge left.  They see only what the car in front of them is doing at that moment and they think that as long it's still moving forward everything must be fine on the road ahead and they relax and go into a trance, absurdly secure in their expectations that the way things are right now is how they will continue indefinitely.

Both Avendon Carol and Digby have been looking at the brazen destructiveness of the Republicans in Washington and it's got them worried sick.

They can't understand why the Republicans want to change things in DC in way that will come back to haunt them when the day finally comes when the Democrats are back in power.   It seems foolish.  It makes no sense, unless they know that the Democrats will never be back in power.

Filling in for Atrios, Avedon writes:

One reason I don't think it's at all paranoid to suspect that the Republicans have deliberately taken over the voting system in order to cheat is that they keep doing things that don't otherwise make sense. There's a rather long list of things you just wouldn't expect them to think they could get away with unless they really thought they could control the ballot box, because otherwise they would have to expect that the public would kick enough of them out to not only end some political careers but also make impeachment - and prison - a distinct possibility.

And Digby follows up:

You have to wonder why they would do this when the shoe could easily be on the other foot at any given time. You have to believe that it has always been that threat that kept previous majorities from enacting such a fundamental change to our system that could only help a party intent upon enacting its agenda unimpeded --- but which could be used by either party to do it. These last few elections have been close. The GOP majority is not solid. And while I have argued that the double standard is entrenched because of the republicans' willingness to make nonsensical arguments that confuse the press and render any accountability useless, it will not do them much good if the rules have been changed and a new Democratic majority operates as ruthlessly unconcerned with public opinion as they do.

No, you really do have to wonder how they think they can get away with such radical changes that have no constitutional or even popular support. It really does make you have to at least consider the possibility that they know they will not lose elections

(Thanks to Jack Shannon again for the links.)

Now, I agree that the Bush Leaguers stole votes the last time out.  I don't know if they stole enough to steal the election, but they stole as many as they felt they could get away with stealing, and given the corruption of the American media and the ineffectiveness of the Democrats, that means they stole a lot of votes.

I know they did this because, for one thing, they made obvious moves to set out to do it and, for another, they complained all through the campaign about how the Democrats were trying to steal votes.

This is the salient psychological truth about the American Right.  Whatever outrageous behavior they accuse Democrats of doing, they are doing themselves.

My main reason, though, for believing they stole votes is that stealing votes is an old and enthusiastically practiced American tradition.  Anyone in the media, and especially any blogger left of Glenn Reynolds, who expresses doubts that the election could have been stolen is an ignoramous and should be sent back to high school for remedial study in American history.

They should also be forced to read from the collected works of Mike Royko and Jimmy Breslin every night until they meet their final deadline or blog their last post.

So they stole votes.  They'll steal votes in the next election too.

But do they plan to do this on a scale large enough and for a length of time long enough to keep themselves in power forever.?  Can they do it secretly enough, competently enough, and consistently enough to manage that?

Well, they would probably try if they thought of it.  But I don't think they're thinking that way.

Why not?

Because they are people and people stink and they are stupid.

I believe that the Republicans are driving one car-length ahead.

These are not even particularly bright stupid people.  They are for the most part thieves and thugs.  They are, an amazing number of them, seriously, seriously sexually screwed-up, which makes them neurotic, paranoid, angry, and constantly on the brink of being swallowed up whole by their own weird impulses and repressed desires.  (See Jim West.)  The thugs and thieves among them are not only stupid, they are arrogant.   They don't believe they will ever get caught.  They think that the way things are going is the way they will always go.

The thieves among them don't care that all the bad policy they are making now will be unmade in the future, that things they are trying to get rid of now will come back later in spades---when the country is truly bankrupt and people are crying to the government for help, how high do you think the tax rates the Democrats will impose on the wealthy will be?

But the thieves don't care, because they are thieves, and thieves want their money now and that's all that concerns them.

The thugs aren't worried that the rules they are eliminating now might be needed later by them to protect themselves.  They aren't concerned that the friends and allies they are alienating won't forgive and forget when they need their help in the future.  They don't give a damn that the programs they are destroying will cost them at the ballott box and will be restored at a later date so there is hardly any point to destroying them.  They don't because they are thugs and for thugs the joy is doing damage for its own sake.

Those among them who are thinking and who can see the day when they are out of power aren't preparing for that day, because they stink, just like people who cheat on their husbands and wives don't prepare for divorce court, people who steal from their employers don't prepare for the arrival of the auditors, people who want something they know they shouldn't have don't prepare for the day when that something will reveal itself to be poisoned fruit.

They are driving one car length ahead.

Bill Frist is looking forward only as far as the first Republican primary in 2008.

Tom DeLay had been looking only as far ahead as the next deal and his next payday.

Now he is looking only as far ahead as his next chance to head off an investigation that will lead to his prosecution.

And this is why I'm, marginally, not as worried as Avedon and Digby.  This is why I am, marginally, more optimistic.  And this is why I might appear more upbeat, cheerful, and positive.  Optimistic is a relative condition.

I am not not worried.  And I am not all that optimistic.

These are dishonest, dangerous, and destructive people, and I'm not relying on the Democrats or the media to put a stop to them.

But I am betting on their own stupidity and viciousness catching up with them.

I'm also expecting local prosecutors to start coming down on them.  Not because I think local prosecutors are heroes and saints and don't stink, but because they do.

I'm counting not on their virtue but on their ambition and vanity.

Some hotshot Republican prosecutor is going to see that his or her best way to fame and fortune is nailing one of these guys.

But remember, I'm a people.

Which means that I stink.

And I'm stupid.

(Shameless begging to prove I stink:  Welcome to all of you coming from Buzz Flash, AlterNet, Wolcott, and the other fine blogs linking to this post.  I'm really glad you're here and I hope you'll come back, time and time again.  I'm hoping though some of you will be kind enough to hit my Amazon or PayPal buttons in the tip jar up there at the top of the right hand column on your way out or click here.  All this welcome but unexpected traffic is doing a number on my bandwidth and disk allottment and I need to upgrade.  Thanks very much.)