Dave Cullen: Politics

Tingly

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 07:30:32 GMT

woohoo! i just saw my first presidential ad of the year. it was for barack, on the news in denver.

(and being colorado, it had the irony of being followed immediately by an ad for The Tanner Gun show, famous for being the event where the Columbine killers purchased three of the four guns they used to kill all those kids. how nice. the commercial was appalling. lots of close-up shots of tables strewn with high-powered rifles as submachine guns, and then these displays of knives with curving twelve-inch blades (also very similar to the knives the Columbine killers carried into the attack, but did not use.)

well, it is colorado.

meanwhile . . .

my friend in LA said TV commercials have just ramped up in the last 24 hours there, mostly the caroline one for barack. i found it on youtube here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVlnL1_xXJM

wow. i was not quite expecting that. they are not kidding around with the comparison to JFK. good call.

i always roll my eyes when people try to stretch to make those connections (eg, when bill clinton first ran, and endlessly milked the photo of him shaking hands with JFK when bill was a teen. big deal: bill wanted to be the next Kennedy. the connection felt manufactured to me.

but this time, caroline really endorsed barack at the right moment: after that sense of 1960 and 1968 had so clearly returned. months after even barack's rightwing enemies began to acknowledge it, and after the iowa and south caroline victories started to make the dream feel real.

it reminded me of what frank rich said about brokeback in his new york times column about a week after its release, when the film was the talk of the nation. i don't have the exact quote, but i believe it was something like: This film is having such an impact at this moment, because it is ratifying a movement, rather than leading it.

i thought he got that exactly right. there are pioneers, who prep the rock-hard soil, and that is really hard work, and vital. for gay rights that included the stonewall drag queens, and maybe the ACT Up people and all sorts of pioneers. in the media, it included The Real World and Ellen and Will and Grace. we are well past that stage, now. the ground had been ready, but someone or something had to come along and really take advantage of that. Brokeback was that moment.

i think in their own way, hillary and barack are kind of those people, too. people martin luther king and susan b anthony feel like their predecessors, who broke the ground and made today's road possible. and many others, of course. (also gloria steinem, and Betty Friedan on the women's side). these two today are poised to be ratifiers: the country is finally ready for a woman or a black as president--not necessarily eager, or asking for one, but ready, if the moment presents itself. a person of great strength had to come along and make it so.

i do believe that we have two people of great strength today, with very different talents, one of whom will make it so. we will finally have either a woman president, or an african american.

hmmmmmmm. i drifted astray there.

one idea that i was grasping for was that by luck or design, caroline got the timing of her announcement perfect.

if she had done it a month earlier, it would not have worked the same. the obama movement was already rising--very powerfully in some circles--but most of the country, which ignores politics until the moment is almost at hand--had not yet felt it themselves.

most people had not yet felt anything like 1960 or 1968, so if they heard caroline's commercial and saw those images a month ago, they would have felt she was trying to make that connection for them. it would have felt like a bit of a reach.

now i think so many people have felt it--or at least heard about it from people they know--that when she says it overtly, and the commercial shows the images of her dad . . . it ratifies a feeling they already had. it takes an existing hazy connection inside the viewer and transports them directly there: it is 1960 again, we had a leader the country rallied behind. this is how it feels to unite. this is how we can feel again. this is how we will feel, if we make this really happen.

i get tingly when i watch it. i've had my hopes dashed before, and i'm a little afraid to dream again. but i want to.

Inside the Obama precinct captains' meeting

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 06:11:22 GMT

it was illuminating to sit in the obama precinct captains' meeting wednesday, too. not for exactly the reasons i expected.

i looked around a lot, and what really caught my eye, over and over, was a cluster of the national staffers, who were mostly standing up along railing. (there were 500-600 precinct captains in that meeting, btw, so it was not an intimate experience. they had driven from all over the state, some six hours or more away. those people must have gotten up around midnight to start their journey.)

so the meeting was held in the basketball court in the same complex with the arena, and we were packed into the bleachers. i picked a seat up at the very top, in the handicapped section, partly because there were actual chairs and my back was aching (i have two six-inch rods in my back and seven fused vertabrae), and partly to watch the participants. i was more interested in watching them than the candidate.

when barack came out, i looked over my right shoulder to see how the full-time staffers were reacting. they were pretty used to this stuff, and had been unfazed by anything throughout the morning, but when he came out on the court below us, those guys up top just glowed.

one guy, in particular, i was watching: the one who had recruited me first thing in the morning, six hous before. he had been very nice all day--and really freaking good at his job--but i'd never seen him smile. he had been pleasant, but intent. now, he was beaming. he turned to the guy beside him--one of the guys with a radio in his ear all day--and they exchanged the nicest smile. they were so proud.

is this what it felt like in '68?

bobby's bid didn't pan out, of course, for very sad reasons. it might not have anyway, even if he lived. his brother really excited the country in 1960, too--both were before my time, but i always pictured '68 being more powerful. both ended painfully, but JFK's legacy lives on, both in what he did and what he set up for LBJ to do.

this barack phenom may or may not pan out. he's got a big institutional power to unseat in the clintons. in a week or a month for next december, he might be yesterday's news.

but either way, it will have been exciting and illuminating just to experience it as it unfolded.

Adventures in ObamaMania

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 06:06:43 GMT

(i wrote this immediately after i got home wednesday, so the timing in it is two days off. and i was too damn tired to capitalize. hehehe):

i just got home from obamamania. quite a day. obama campaign to Denver today, and unexpected chaos ensued.

the campaign announced on Monday that he would come to Colorado at 10 a.m. Wednesday. They booked a 7,200-seat arena on the University of Denver campus and planned on filling about a third or half of it on a weekday morning with 36 hours notice. they thought 2 or 3 thousand would be great. fifteen thousand showed up.

it was nuts.

it's not that that was such an outlandish number of people, it was that no one was equipped to handle that. sporting events handle 50, 60 thousand or more all the time. but they have huge teams set up, and paid employees who handle the same thing every day, and standard processes they use over and over at the place, and facilities, and so on. t

his was planned in 36 hours, mostly using volunteers with little or no experience in this sort of stuff. even the 2 to 3 thousand they expected would have taxxed their ability to control them well. this mob, nobody had a clue how to get ahold of.

obama was set to arrive at 10 a.m., doors were opening at 8:30 and i got there at 7:30 to help set up. (my field organizer said don't come at 7, there would be nothing to do yet.) i expected early birds to start showing up around 8.

large numbers were lining up at 6 a.m., in the dark, temp about 9 degrees, about an hour before sunrise.

when i got there, at 7:30, thousands were massed around the entrance, and it was crazy out there. i could barely get in. security refused to let me in as a set-up worker. hundreds of people were pushing forward trying to use that. i said the name of noah, my area coordinator, and someone back there recognized it and said to let me in.

i was in about 30 seconds when a guy came around with clipboards asking for volunteers who were dressed warmly to go back out and do crowd control stuff. that sounded fun, or at least interesting. it took me about one second to volunteer.

people had all sorts of printed web-reservation reciepts, and VIP badges, and lots of other VIP connections to get in, and tons of people who didn't know they needed to bring a printout, and we were also signing up volunteers on the spot.

someone in the campaign made a great logistical decision: no way could they deal with the bottleneck of trying to figure all that stuff out at the entrance. the security people allowing people into the building had to go by one standard thing to stand in instead of a "ticket."

in the end, no matter who you are, or what you had, the only way you could get in that arena was with a big X on the back of your right hand from a dark highlighter.

a handful of us with highlighters roamed the crowd converting all the different entry papers and sob stories and volunteer offers into Xs. it worked really well. i spent three hours working the line, which spanned the length of much of the campus, shouting, "does everyone have an x! you must have an x to get in!"

it was fun.

i did all sorts of jobs--i would see one and just start doing it. had a blast.

how exhilarating to be a part of something like that. i knew pretty early on that i was going to lose my seat in the VIP area if i didn't turn in my highlighter and clipboard and go in. but big deal. i've met politicians. the thrill for me was outside, in the mass of confusion. you don't get mobs every day.

when barack spoke, i was out on the lacrosse field, with the people from the very tail end and lots of organizers. we had told the crowd barack could come out to speak to us afterward, but he came out first, and so did special guest caroline kennedy, and that was nice.

there was a precinct captains meeting afterward, and he came to that, too. he's really something.

---

i learned a lot. and there were a few odd moments. just because i happened to be there--and was willing to run to the end of the block to tell people--i got to make the announcement to huge numbers of people that they would not get in, but barack was going to meet with them outside. i parroted the phrase the campaign manager said to me, "the senator will address you/them." i started telling one chunk of crowd at a time--the line still stretched about two blocks--and they did seem that excited about it. and about the tenth group, a lady asked, with a little disgust, "what senator?" i was taken aback. "barack." the went nuts. then i started telling the other groups "barack will come out to address you," and i got the same excitement. that cracked me up.

i can't wait till Super Tuesday. it's cool that most of America gets to be a part of choosing the nominees again. we get our chance in Colorado that day. i've never lived in a state where i had a voice. exciting.

A small gift from Chile

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 07:43:37 GMT

I tivo Charlie Rose every day. I don't always get to them right away. I use them as radio--while I cook breakfast, clean up, exercise . . .

The great joy of that show is the incredible breadth of ideas and perspectives you hear. I tend to get the most out of the various sorts of artists he has on the show, though those are people I can often hear elsewhere, just not in such depth. (Outside of Fresh Air, the other great source.)

But weeks like this are always special, when most of the world leaders are in NY for the UN assembly, and so many of them stop by his studio for a chat. (It kinda started midweek and will continue through much of next week, if he follows his past pattern.)

In general, politicians are the least interesting guests on his show, but he either culls out the few who are not full of hot air, or perhaps they're not windbags when they're not talking to a domestic audience. These people aren't running for anything here. They do have an agenda with the American public, of course, but most of the ones he has on are smart enough to know they're going to impress us a lot more if they leave the BS at home and just talk candidly. (Or am I just used to American politicians--have they not gotten so slick and full of shit everywhere else?)

It can also be a tough week, because you have to deal with a lot of accents--tougher if you're in the kitchen cooking and trying to listen with one ear and one brain hemisphere, and sometimes the ideas sound a little foreign . . . it's a little more work, but usually worth it.

Tonight, was pure pleasure. The President of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, a woman I'd never heard of--OK, I didn't even know they had elected a woman, I'm embarassed to admit--was something of a revelation. What an incredibly intelligent person. And such a wise, thoughtful take on everything. She had been tortured by Pinochet's goons, and her father, a general, had been murdered by them, but she spoke about it without anger. She spoke of the horrible anger she'd had in the past, but it was clear from her demeanor that it really was gone.

I think she was most refreshing the way she talked about issues passionately, but with none of the us/them mentality we have in our politics now. In fact, she talked about her frustration reading our press, which she sees as still speaking in a Cold War vocabulary, about good guys and bad guys in her region. She sees those countries struggling to enact economic reforms that will build their economies in the long run, but also improve people's lives, and how difficult that balance is, and how everyone is looking for the right answers. Essentially, she says that there are a lot of well-meaning people trying different approaches down there, and for us to split them down the middle and slap half of them with the goodguy label and half badguy is ludicrous, yet we do it with barely a thought.

She had a lot to say. I can't convey more than a fraction of it, but I'm the richer for having been exposed to her. I can't wait for the rest of the week.

My Nigga Moment

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 04:20:17 GMT

I've been loving this Boondocks TV series.

Makes me kinda squeamish sometimes, though. If this were written by a white guy, it would have been cancelled after one episode, and any TV executive involved in greenlighting it fired in disgrace.

But it's freaking funny.

And . . . how do you say this without sounding REALLY white . . . ? I'm understanding better.

Thought I understood the race stuff pretty well. Not well enough, apparently.

So I'm loving the show, for a whole lotta reasons. But the Nigga Moment episode--officially titled "Grandad's Fight"--that one was just too much. Grandad gets beaten up by a mean old blind man, and humilated for it. Everyone involved is black, including the narrator, who tells us and grandad about twenty times that it's just a nigga moment--where two niggas find themselves in a situation where they find themselves driven to act stupid, and it always ends badly.

Halfway through I literally felt like I was going to throw up. And all i could think was: I don't care how black the writer is, it's still freaking racist.

And I sure felt racist chuckling at it. And it was hard not to, it was funny. But good lord. Man, did I feel dirty.

I turned it off, but didn't delete it from the tivo.

Came back about a month later and decided to finish. More nigga nigga nigga, dumb niggas, stupid niggas, Goooooooood!

But finally, the episode climaxes with gramps and the blind guy in a rematch that ends horribly, followed by a mini riot among the crowd gathered to watch. Riley--the angry (eight year old?) grandson who set up the whole disgusting fight and took bets and charged admission and then instigated the riot to get the hell out of there when it went sour--stands back, looks at the mostly white crowd acting like idiots, and says, ruefully, "niggas!"

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Wow. Nicely done. Almost sounds heavy handed describing it now, but it sure lured me in. And enlightened me, too. And not just about white people, but about us, too. And the whole idea of niggas. Or one crucial nigga idea, at least.

This is the first show in ages that makes me feel like a nerdy white guy, and/or a white-guilt kinda guy. Discomforting, because I thought I was way past all that, but I guess that means I wasn't.

And it's funny as hell.

(FYI, It's on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. Sunday at 11, I read at one point, but I have no idea. That's what your tivo is for.)

Salon included me in their classics

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 05:38:35 GMT

This is kind of cool. Salon is celebrating its tenth and anniversary and every day the past week they have been highlighting their top stories from a single year.

I did most of my work for them in 1999 and 2000, and two of my stories made the list each year. The lists for 1999 & 2000.

From 1999, they picked two of my Columbine stories:

”I smell like the presence of Satan”
Is Littleton's evangelical subculture a solution to the youth alienation that played a role in the Columbine killings, or a reflection of it?
By Dave Cullen

Inside the Columbine High investigation
Everything you know about the Littleton killings is wrong. But the truth may be scarier than the myths.
By Dave Cullen

And in 2000 they featured, this two-part series on one of the last bastions of blatant discrimination toward gays in America. (I hate to call it a "gays in the military" story, even though it technically is, because that has phrase has like the mind-numbingly tired politico piece I specifically wanted to avoid):

Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t fall in love, Part I of II
A rare peek inside the lives of gay military officers, a world filled with staggering sacrifice, loneliness and glass ceilings.
By Dave Cullen

A heartbreaking decision, Part II
Gay officers must choose between personal happiness and the careers they've spent years building.
By Dave Cullen

Harriet Miers once answered gay rights questionnaire

Mon, 10 Oct 2005 04:05:38 GMT

Oddly enough, Harriet Miers' greatest political triumph--her ascendancy to the Dallas city council--may end up providing the biggest clues on her attitude toward us homos.

From The Advocate (more at the link):

Harriet Miers, President Bush's pick to fill the U.S. Supreme Court vacancy left by the retiring justice Sandra Day O'Connor, once filled out a questionnaire for a gay rights group in which she agreed that gay men and lesbians should have equal rights. But she immediately followed that answer by stating that she did not support the repeal of the Texas sodomy law, which was eventually struck down by the high court.

As part of their endorsement screening process for city council candidates, the Lesbian/Gay Political Coalition of Dallas in 1989 asked then-candidate Miers if she would fill out their standard questionnaire and appear before the coalition to discuss the answers. Miers agreed. “It was not uncommon to get vague or contradictory answers [from candidates],” Louise Young, a member of the coalition at the time, told Advocate.com. “Hers were certainly vague.”

Hmmmm. Yes, it goes on and quite a few contradictions. Hard to know, really. But gives me some hope.

More disturbing is her work with Exodus Ministries. Good God. Anyone deeply enough in denial who actually thinks gays are being that way by choice and can just learn to be straight . . .

Right. And if you're a straightguy, you could take a gay class and suddenly you'd start getting attracted to men.

Is that really how it works?

NOTICE: See you on the weekends

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 18:17:40 GMT

Hey. You might have noticed I'm rarely here during the week these days.

Yes, by design. Trying to keep my focus entirely on my book during the week. Hence the big one-day bursts on Saturdays and Sundays. So look for me then. (Or on Mondays when you get back to trolling the web at the office, while your boss is away. heeheehee.)

OK, better try that bigger:

LOOK FOR ME MOSTLY ON THE WEEKENDS UNTIL THIS BOOK IS DONE!

Occasionally I may stop by in an evening, if I've had a great day and deserve an indulgence, or maybe once in awhile for a quickie. (Like just now. I figured since I was here to let you know this, I could pound out a quick reaction to the Housewives.)

But hopefully you'll see a lot of self-control.

See you Saturday.

Ray Charles and the Prime Minister of Turkey

Sat, 17 Sep 2005 21:51:11 GMT

Somehow watching the two of them intermittently. Ray through Taylor Hackford's film version of his life, and the prime minister on a Charlie Rose appearance this week.

Guess who is more interesting?

Ray was prolly more interesting as an actual person, but the prime minister is blowing him away in this format.

This in spite of my extreme distaste for politicians and their blatherings, and the emotionally lethal energy-suck of a translator.

But the Turk could not be more intelligent, insightful or enlightened about the world he's living in. Far better grasp than any of our leaders.

And when he talks about Turkey entering the EU as a path to the integration of civilizations instead of the clash of civilizations, my heart sings.

Or is it my head. He speaks from a long historical perspective, of how the two have fed off each other through the ages, grown when they were receptive to the advances across the seas, stagnated when they ignored them. The East is greedily gobbling up much of what they are learning from the West, he says. If the West chooses to ignore the East it will surely stagnate.

Who could argue with that? It has always worked like that.

Meanwhile, Ray is incredibly interesting in theory, but the movie is just plain boring.

I'm still 90 minutes into it--60 still to go--and it's taken me three sittings already to get there. It just drags.

Unbelievable. Who could make Ray Charles dull?

David Edelstein posed an interesting theory, in Slate last fall, when we had a flurry of stunning performances in lame biopics--this included, if not the prime example. He said biopics almost never work. He actually challenged readers to come up with a single biopic in the history of cinema that succeeded.

(They came up with a handful, Coal Miner's Daughter leading the list, if I recall.) But a minuscule percentage.

I can't recall whether the following take on it was his or mine, but I'm going to toss it out here: So much plot to cover, so little time to focus on the intimate details that make a story come alive.

You can sure see that here.

And a conscious choice, I think: Taylor only had time to focus on Ray The Artist or Ray The Star. He chose the latter. He chose to chart out the unfolding of a career. This betrayal led to that band led to that tour led to that sound led to that hit . . .

Interesting, kinda, but such an emotional snooze. And an intellectual one. Only a two-dimensional conception of the man, and not the slightest glimmer of insight into what made him create such wonders.

And not much emotional involvement either. Bland bland bland. Not sure when I'll find time to trudge through the rest of it.

But can't wait to get back to the prime minister.

Update:

Finished Ray. The last hour finally wrung some powerful emotion out of me, but it also got trashier, cheesier and outright embarrassing in its "effects." I felt so bad for them during the drug rehab sequence. Nice little experiment, but some attempts just don't work. This was so far from working, surely most of the people involved knew. Were they all hoping they were the only one who thought so?

Puzzling. I was under the impression Taylor Hackford had made some good films.

So I looked him up. Man! Trashmeister. His credits list sure explains this shallow schmaltz. Only film I liked in his whole long list was An Officer And A Gentlemen, which was nearly his first, and over 20 years ago.

And I adored it, but it was pure formula done expertly well. (Or maybe I was just primed for it. Came just about the time I was enlisting.) Not much promise there as a great director, none realized.

I feel so much better. Always hurts me when talented people produce junk. Not that Ray was terrible, just sub-par. So much talent up on the screen though, just seems like a waste.

A Columbine no-brainer?

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 16:46:36 GMT

I always wanted to attend a supreme court hearing.

Fascinating. Not the U.S. court I slipped into, but the Colorado court. Presumably less distinguished jurors, but the same process.

And a very important issue--for a couple reasons, it turns out--at least two of them very dear to my heart. A third one two, as it turned out, being argued from the other side. (But not so well, I think.)

The issue was the Columbine killers' writings and recordings, particularly the two most crucial chunks of evidence in the case, which are still being withheld more than six years later: Eric Harris' journal, and The Basement Tapes.

So much to say, and I will, hopefully later today. Got to run to get a CT scan, though. Finally getting my old injury checked out, and they need to do an extra series.

More soon.

AP story here. (And advance story on it from yesterday here.)

Save your fire

Thu, 28 Jul 2005 00:08:52 GMT

Garrison Keillor is back writing a weekly column for Salon. (Every Wednesday.)

Yeaaaa!

They started with a one-time twofer, and the second column, Save Your Fire, neatly captures my feelings on the John Roberts nomination. His opening:

Had the president nominated a bullet-headed troglodyte for the Supreme Court, Democrats were prepared to take to the phones, fire up the Web sites, and sic the dogs of direct mail on him, but when he brought forth a summa cum laude Harvard man, the crowd quieted down and the dogs crawled back under the porch. The gentleman, John G. Roberts, has a fine résumé and did well at Harvard. Barring some unsavory revelation about close ties to the Gambino family or membership in a secret militia group, welcome to the Court, sir.

His conclusion:

There were worse nominees Mr. Bush might have sent up and he did not. So save your fire for another day.

And my favorite passage of all, because it's a truth so often lost in the current climate:

There is of course a good chance that beneath this cool exterior is a cool interior and this thought gives conservatives acid reflux. Maybe Harvard got into the gentleman's head and he does not aspire to be a crusading knight and wreak vengeance on the forces of secularism. He was nominated because he doesn't give off a strong enough scent to get the dogs excited, but maybe he doesn't smell conservative because he is actually a moderate. Yikes. The truth is that every conservative has a liberal hopping around inside and vice-versa. None of us is purely one or the other. Life is messy and if you experience it close-up and not just from books, you're going to be inconsistent. A good mind confronts the essential facts and does not necessarily see what other minds see.

The tragedy of Larry Kramer

Wed, 20 Jul 2005 07:08:05 GMT

So help me out here. Has Larry Kramer always been nuts?

For straight people or younger gays or non hardcore gay activists--i.e., just about everyone--he's some legendary gay activist, apparently. I've heard his name repeatedly through the years, but typically from goofballs too strident and boring for words, so I never found the stomach to look into what the heck he was all about.

I did skim a speech that I think he delivered months ago, which sounded pretty chicken little. But I'm watching him right now on Charlie Rose, and the man is clearly out of his mind.

He's got a book out called The Tragedy of Today's Gays, and the tragedy as he explains it is that "We don't have a friend anywhere . . . We don't have anything . . . They hate us! The problem is people hate gay people. And it's getting worse."

Larry, Larry, Larry. You live in a different world than me.

Sure, some people still hate us, but it's getting better by leaps and bounds.

Some people can only see the dark side.

This guy . . .

Next, he sites a Kinsey statistic that 40% of men have sex with another male at least once during their lives. Aside from the well-documented flaws in some of Kinsey's sampling, so what? Lots of people experiment. He leaps to the conclusion that these guys all love men to some degree and hate themselves for it, so they persecute us in retaliation. Good lord.

And now he's saying the government is using AIDS to try to exterminate us.

I realize the guy has been through a lot. Friends died all around him in the AIDS epidemic, he nearly died himself. That could send you over the mental edge, I suppose. Is that what happened? Or was he always beamed in from another solar system? I'm sure some of you people can help me out in the comments.

Here's the thing, though. Why would an intellectual show like Charlie Rose spend time on such a nutcase? As a sop to gays? I think we can do better.

It's as bad as the networks that put on ghastly Ann Coulter.

Kind of infuriating. Sorry, straight people. Please disregard that madman flapping his arms around the curtain insisting there is no curtain. Every family has their crazies.

The sex sites take on Bush

Fri, 24 Jun 2005 17:46:29 GMT

Well. Sex and . . . romance, perhaps.

So I logged onto gay.com yesterday morning--and here's the disclaimer: gay.com includes a lot more than just a place to meet guys for "dates," but that seems to be its main role in life, or at least among my demo.

So I log on and nearly all the pictures are replaced with one of those big red roadsign signals for NO!--a red circle with a diagonal slash through it--followed by the text: "ADULT PHOTOS TEMPORARILY UNAVAILABLE DUE TO THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION."

Hmmmmmm.

They have a lengthy manifesto here, but I'll provide the opening for all of you too lazy to click:

CENSORED! BY US GOVERNMENT!
Changes to our photo policy mandated by the Bush Administration
Always on the lookout for hot guys and ways to keep people from having fun, the US Dept. of Justice is taking a break from prosecuting terrorists to do something they think is more important: restricting your right to view and share photos online.

All member photos identified as adult on our site are temporarily unavailable for public view, due to the sudden, and unconstitutional, decision by the US Dept. of Justice to place new restrictions on all web sites around the world that do business in the US (I guess nobody ever told them the internet is borderless). Gay.com thinks your adult photos should be sexy, secure, and legally protected, so we've joined with other companies to seek an injunction against this ruling. We're doing everything possible to minimize its impact on you.

They say just adult photos, but at first it was nearly all photos. They gradually added more and more back throughout the day--but just the "clean" ones.

Update:

Well, the battle seems to be over. Hard to tell whether they came to a sudden agreement, or it was all a publicity stunt. (A well-intentioned and very necessary stunt perhaps, but . . .)

Here's the new message:

Legal victory over government censorship!
Gay.com is back to normal — hot, fun and uncensored!

We bent over backwards to defend your right to view and share photos of guys bending over. Adult photos and Video Chat on our site are once again available for public viewing by consenting adults — thanks to an agreement that stops the U.S. Dept. of Justice from expanding restrictions on online content. The current agreement only protects plaintiffs and sites that belong to the Free Speech Coalition, of which Gay.com is a member.
There are many other web sites and companies that are NOT PROTECTED under this agreement.
We've won this battle, but the war's not over. We have joined with other companies to continue the legal fight and overturn the restrictions altogether. Since the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has already found these restrictions (18 U.S.C. §2257, for all you legal queens) to be unconstitutional, we're confident that freedom and hot gay sex will ultimately prevail over the forces of censorship and oppression. After all, the guys at the Dept. of Justice need dates, too.
To find out what you can do to help, see below.

For my readers, you'll have to follow the link for the rest.

And I have a feeling Radar is going to have something about it soon. Check with them later today.

Deep Throat, finally

Tue, 31 May 2005 19:47:24 GMT

Apparently it was the FBI guy. (W. Mark Felt, the #2 guy at the FBI then. Now 91.) No confirmation yet, though.

Interesting. Woodward and Berstein were heros of mine in high school, and I was the mystery drove me crazy for years.

Ahhhhh, but then I read a few more Woodward books and learned the dangers of taking yourself of not understanding your limits. And slowly, ever so slowly developed a little patience. Been waiting 30 years for this secret, though.

Can't wait to hear the rest of the story. Like did Deep Throat really move the flower pot around on his apartment balcony as a signal, or did they do something similar, but fabricate that detail to deflect suspicion from him? It will be a very interesting discussion if details were changed. Interesting and annoying. Journos can be such nitwits.

Update:

Slate has posted an archive of their bouts of speculation on the identity. A lot of speculation. Very interesting to catch a glimpse of how it played out. And at least one of the pieces cites the "definitive" Deep Throat piece as an Atlantic story way back in 1992 where James Mann correctly deduced it had to be an FBI guy.

Slate's Timothy Noah repeatedly cited Felt as the most probable source. And guess who else got it right? Richard Nixon. That according to this 1999 Slate piece highlighting Mann's theory.

But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the 30-year secret is that Berstein's kid blurted it out at summer camp in 1991. The indiscretion held for eleven years, until the kid, then 19, told The Hartford Courant, and the story was picked up by the AP.

The Bersteins' explanation has always been that their boy got the story from his mother, Nora Ephron, who was merely guessing. (Good account of that who episode here. A few more eyebrows were raised when Bob Woodward made a trip to see Felt shortly afterward. Some speculated that he was there to see if it was time to give up the secret. Looks like they were right.)

Second Update:

You can read the Vanity Fair piece here.

If you thought YOUR youth was fleeting . . .

Tue, 18 Jan 2005 23:33:35 GMT

Well, it whizzes by pretty fast for a human, but for a new art form . . .

Or communication form . . .

I'd say it officially ended for blogland with the current dispute over Kos accepting money from Dean and other unnamed candidates while writing about them during the last election cycle--about Dean for sure; the others, who knows, hence the problem.

Two good pieces about it from our two best web sources, Salon and Slate (more or less)--Scott Rosenberg and Chris Suellentrop, respectively.

Have you been following any of this? Man. Quite the eruption of anger, frustration and middle fingers at this pivotal moment in the blog childhood. I certainly understand it. We're essentially facing a call for new rules of some sort, more restrictions, tighter self-policing . . .

Who the hell wants that?

Well . . .

I blog, addictively. I've tried to quit several times, but I just enjoy it too much. I love the freedom I have there -- express myself a lot more loosely than I would in a magazine or newspaper (and in my case, lazily; I don't even proofread for typos there.)

So the last thing I really want is rules. Except . . .

Except come on. Nobody gets away with a blissfully stringless world where can jaunt about all day gushing out art and opinions with never a question raised about the man, woman, family or corporation(s) quietly supplying the money to feed, house and entertain you. Not if you want an audience to actually consume your work.

Even if you're Pablo Picasso, if you were accepting large sums from some predecessor to Amnesty International for six months before you painted Guernica, you can bet you'd have a lot of 'splaining to do. Your admirers and detractors would still be arguing about it 50 years later. With good reason.

It's not pleasant. It's nicer to answer to no one. And for awhile, we could. Blogs were so new, so fragmented, so inconsequential to the larger culture at first, we could do anything we wanted. Infants get away with anything.

But the minute we started having a real impact, we should have seen those days were numbered. Once you DO matter, you enter a vastly different arena, and the rules really are different. I'm certainly not suggesting the same rules as journalists--I love my blog freedom, and I'm not ready to adhere to all the rules of journalism there, but it would be silly an irresponsible to presume that I don't have any rules to live by.

I understand the urge for people like Kos to lift their middle finger. But he’s a smart man, smart enough that he’ll be embarrassed by that response one day.

For the period in question, I think disclosure of the Dean money was fine. I remember thinking about it at the time, and thinking that we’re all muddling along here, he’s putting tremendous time into this blog, and he needs the freedom to pursue an income and pursue this blog. And he’s being up-front about it, so fine.

(Though my inclination is also to agree with Chris Suellentrop that Kos was wrong in refusing to disclose which other candidates he worked for, even while setting up funding drives to support certain candidates. )

But that was 2003-2004. The blogworld changed fast. He ended that election cycle a completely different force than he began it. It would be way, way, way irresponsible to do it in again in 2008, or even 2006.

He did nothing wrong taking money from Dean. But that doesn’t me, he, you, me, or anyone else can get live by those rules in the future.

In Kos' case--or the case of any blog that wants to be taken remotely seriously in the political realm--that means no money from politicians. That's a no-brainer. (I won't repeat those arguments. Check out the Slate piece or any number of others if it seems kind of brainerish to you.)

Other blogs, other choices. We're all starting to face them.

It was never money for me, because nobody ever offered me money for my blog services. The toughest one for me involves my personal life: how much of sordid details can reveal and still be respected as a journalist? But that's a restriction imposed from the other direction. A better example for this discussion is my ability to discuss other artists, writers, reality-show contestants . . . I assumed I could trash anybody out there who I thought deserved it. I was just a speck out in the great void, it's not like I was going to offend them personally.

Then I got an email from a writer asking why I had written about her work so mercilessly. Man. I felt like crap. Never expected her to read it. And when I went back and reread it, I had been pretty careless in dismissing her anyway. It was more a disagreement in taste.

That was the first of tough lessons for me that what I write there can have consequences. Which imposes responsibilities on me, whether I want to acknowledge them or not. I can decide which ones I'm willing to accept, but they're still there.

It seems a little silly that I had to learn that one. I've been a journo for years, and of course I know I have to think through my critique very carefully if I "published" it. But the blog was supposed to be different. I could act a lot looser there, just share my opinions as I might hanging out with a group of friends. Salon was big enough to get noticed, my blog was just a speck, so I could say whatever I wanted.

Not in the age of google. And not with the amount of effort I was putting into the blog at that time. The more energy I devoted to it, the higher my google rank rose, and the more likely people I was writing about would stumble upon themselves there.

Welcome to responsibilityland. Of course I still had the constitutional right to trash anybody I felt like, but I could no longer do it in blissful ignorance that it would never hurt anyone.

I imposed a new set of rules on myself. But I get lots of exceptions. Reality-show contestants, for one. The way I see it, the whole reason for their television existence lies in chiefly in our ability to have fun with them: to pick the ones we like and dislike, the ones we admire and the ones that drive us freaking nuts! That’s what they’re there for, they know that, they buy into that by participating, so they’re really fair game.

(Unlike, say politicians or actors or any forms of artists. Most of them are there for politics or art, and their fame is a byproduct--integral to their reach, but not the goal in itself. Different set of rules, in my book.)

Reality contestants are an easy exception. The rest of my rules get kind of fuzzy sometimes. I'm still working them out, but I've got a pretty good idea in most cases, and I still feel comfy acting a lot looser here than I would "in print." We'll see how long that lasts. Or whether I regret it.

But nothing is nearly as loose as the day I first signed up for this blog 2.5 years ago.

Childhood is over friends. Hope you got in on the fun while we were still kids. Hope you enjoyed it while it lasted. I know I did.

. . . as read by children

Fri, 14 Jan 2005 05:27:01 GMT

Have you seen the occasional segment on The Daily Show, of Great Moments in Punditry (something like that), as read by children?

Take a transcript of two or three talking idiots making asses of themselves on one of those shouter shows like Hardball (or this week, Meet The Press--nearly as insipid), and have little kids read it, each taking a different part.

There is no way I can express what it's like to see and hear it, but it is one of the most brilliant things you'll ever witness.

I think maybe it's because you realize as you're listening to it, that no eight-year-old would ever act that immature. Seriously. It sounds so preposterous coming out of their mouths. They haven't learned how to be such jackasses yet.

Puts it all into perspective.

Now then. When are we coming up with a new word for journalist, which we can start applying to actual journalists? Who's working on that?

The problem -- The media elite problem

Wed, 29 Dec 2004 00:12:13 GMT

Salon's cover story today is a great piece by Andrew O'Hehir about the New York Times. If you want to understand how the paper shapes the entire press corps--even a deliberate outsider like Salon, who prides itself on staying well ahead of the Times on cultural issues, and nearly always does.

This paragraph and a half will give you a good idea:

Savvy as we may all think we are about the Times, and much as we may scrutinize and second-guess its perceived missteps, the decisions made by its editors dictate our agenda more than we would like to admit.

During Salon's daily conference call of desk editors, there is nearly always some discussion of the day's Times: How has the paper's coverage of Bush, or of Iraq, shifted recently? What books or movies were reviewed? What trends were spotted embarrassingly late -- or distressingly early? What stories has the Times covered that we've missed? And what stories do we need to jump on before the Gray Lady airs them out?

Now extrapolate like crazy for the more traditional media outlets.

But that's not what provoked me to write. It was the half paragraph immediately preceding that little excerpt:

Every morning's edition of the Times defines what the terms of discourse will be on that day for the political, intellectual and media elites of the United States. Like almost everyone else I know, I read the Times first thing in the morning, and I did so long before I moved to New York.

Gave me the shivers. Litearlly, I shivered. And praised God that much as I admire Andrew's writing, I'm not someone he knows. And that I haven't moved to NY yet. And that when I do, I'll continue not reading the NYT first thing every morning. Nor later in the day, outside the Sunday Arts, section, the magazine, and an occasional glance at the regular paper.

Aside from the incredibly bad writing--bland, dull, uninspired, lack of storytelling skills--why in the hell would I want to be stamped into the same damn thought-mold as everyone in the--what was it? "political, intellectual and media elites"?

God. How about an intellectual discussion with ideas bouncing in from all over the map?

I reached out of bed and began my morning with a couple pages from Black Hawk Down today. Last week I was finishing off The Perfect Storm. Yes, I'm on a narrative nonfiction run. I'm writing a nonfiction book that will read like a novel, so I'm gobbling up a bunch of those. Figured I'd include a couple that had made a mark on the national psyche the past couple years. Before that, it was Devil in the White City and The Professor and the Madman. Not so many newspapers or magazines in between.

I still follow pop culture stories religiously--as well as consuming plenty of pop culture directly--gulp down a steady stream of Slate and Salon stories, and click on the more interesting AP stories from Salon's newswire. So I have a pretty good idea of the big events unfolding in the world, but I'm mostly hanging out in a whole different universe of ideas than the daily myopia of the daily news grind.

I'm certainly not suggesting everyone bury themselves in book-length narrative nonfiction for the next six months. But I am suggesting that at least three-quarters of the media and/or intellectual elite ought to be burying themselves in different things every morning. And I'm sure most of them are reading additional things, but how about a good chunk of them actually avoiding indoctrinating themselves with the same freaking thing?

No wonder I shake my head and wonder what world some of these pundits are living in when they spout so much of their nonsense on those blasted "news" shows I still stumble into from time to time.

They're constantly chastising one another for being lost inside the beltway--here's an idea: Try leaving it once in awhile! Intellectually, as well as geographically.

If you're all reading the same damn thing every morning--and then following up with a bunch of news sources falling somewhat into step with that same agenda--good God, what do you think you're all likely to produce? Why do you think we're all so sick of reading it?

Ukranians win!

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 18:51:41 GMT

Wow. I have been almost afraid to watch this story play out. Too much heartbreak for me already this year, just couldn't allow myself to get too emotionally invested and watch these freedom fighters get crushed.

Sure was hoping, though. The idea that ordinary men and women can demand democracy in a country that routinely laughs at the idea, and then pour into the streets and make it true . . .

I'm tempeted to say that idea sends shivers down my spine, because that's literally what happened the past few weeks, same as it happened in Russia for Yeltsin and Romania when they drove out Ceausescu, and in a somewhat different manner, in Berlin, when they busted down that wall.

But it's a lot more than tingling going on, even for a person like me, thousands of miles away and not directly affected by any of it. I am indirectly affected. Profoundly. Of all the intellectual experiences I am aware of, these distant street surges have been the most powerful. They give me hope that I live in a glorious time. The possibilities seem endless. People do have the power to overcome. To be heard. To dispense with tyrants who assume they're above us. Anything is possible.

Now I'm still willing to be we're not completely out of the woods on this ordeal, nor especially has democracy been firmly ensconced in this country.

But it's a pretty dramatic win for the good guys. (I try to avoid that good-guys terminology, as it nearly always merely equates to "my guys," but now and then, it hard to argue with.)

From AP:

Ukraine court: election results invalid

Dec. 3, 2004 | Kiev, Ukraine -- The Supreme Court declared the results of Ukraine's disputed presidential run-off election invalid on Friday and ruled that the run-off should be repeated on Dec. 26, bringing cheers and fireworks from tens of thousands of opposition supporters massed in Kiev's main square.

The ruling, made after five days of hearings by the court's 18 justices, was a major victory for opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko, who had rejected the government's demands that an entirely new election be held.

The opposition had pinned its hopes on the court's ruling in its bid to overturn the results of the Nov. 21 run-off vote in which Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych was declared the winner. The opposition said the vote was rigged to cheat Yushchenko of victory.

Fireworks crackled in Independence Square, and the opposition supporters who have massed there for nearly two weeks waved orange flags and chanted "Yushchenko! Yushchenko!" Passing cars blasted their horns three times to sound out the three syllables in "Yush-chen-ko."

The ruling is final and can't be appealed, and both sides have promised to abide by the decision. There was no immediate reaction from Yanukovych or his supporters. Representatives from Yanukovych and the Central Election Commission left the courthouse before the judges announced their decision.

How to be an ambassador

Fri, 19 Nov 2004 04:33:54 GMT

Oh, this is nice.

AP headline:

A third of Bush fund-raisers got appointments

Nov. 18, 2004 | Washington -- One-third of President Bush's top 2000 fund-raisers or their spouses--[246 "pioneers" who raised at least $100,000]--were appointed to positions in his first administration, from ambassadorships in Europe to seats on policy-setting boards, an Associated Press review found.

And after all that harping about Clinton and the Lincoln bedroom.

At least he was just giving them a chance to meet the pres, not putting them on the payroll.

And of course the Bushies rewarded their pioneers with white house stays as well.

Drinking Liberally

Thu, 11 Nov 2004 23:35:32 GMT

I think someone told me about Drinking Liberally while back, but we didn't have one out here in the hinterlands.

New group starting tonight, though. For locals, it's from 7-10 p.m., at The Tavern, at 17th and Pearl, in Denver.

Everywhere else in the country, it's somewhere else, though the same time, like a meetup. Follow the link for more info.

See you there.

Should blogs be partisan?

Thu, 11 Nov 2004 21:05:57 GMT

This little entry has been simmering in my head for weeks, but I'm going to use the occasion of an Atrios entry to jump in.

Here's the entire entry:

I'm Not a Big Fan of MoDo

She's far too willing to take cheap shots at liberals just to show that she's one of the cool kids. But I'd never call her a high brow hussy from New York City.

(My first reaction was incredulity that anyone would describe MoDo as highbrow. Those cutesy little columns she writes are lucky to hit middle. Now that I have that out of the way, my real point):

I have grown more and more unsettled about the idea that everyone in our society needs to be an advocate or a partisan.

Atrios, who I love, didn't diss her for speaking against liberals in general, but for the far more specific charge of taking cheap shots to show that she's one of the cool kids--a great summation of her approach, by the way.

Atrios didn't make the wider charge, but read the endless stream of comments on the post and you'll find that sentiment strongly endorsed. This one was representative: "If you prefer one candidate over the other, stop dumping on the candidate you prefer."

There are a lot like it here, and at Kos, God help you if you see the other side's point of view on anything.

And that has really begun to trouble me.

It's a tough question, though--I know, because I faced the question personally as a blogger all through the past 18 months of the campaign. (The part where I was active both blogging and campaigning.)

At first, I insisted on neutrality. I had already begun my Dean swoon, but I wasn't about to give up my position as an independent voice. The hardcore supporters couldn't quite understand it: If you really think this guy ought to be president, like we do, shouldn't you be doing everything you can to help elect him? Especially when he's such a prohibitive underdog--which he was in the summer of 2003--and we need every ounce of support we can get?

No. You don't understand what you're asking. I don't have much influence anyway, but suppose I did. Suppose I were as influential, as, say, Kos, or Atrios, and I could have a real impact. Suppose I were more influential, and could actually have gotten Dean nominated. Would it have been worth the price?

I don't think so. I mean yes, if I could actually get him nominated, and could only compromise the indepence of my voice just a teeny weeny bit for just a short little while.

But the world just doesn't work that way, does it? The more influence I have, the more visibility, meaning the more a compromise would taint me. At the other end of the scale, on an itty bitty blog, the impact is minor, as is the damage to your reputation--cause who the hell sees the compromise.

It really comes down to this: What's my job? On this earth. What am I here to do? To pick one guy, put blinders on and work to rally the country behind him, defending every word he says no matter what comes out of his mouth?

No. That job is available, and it's not the one I chose. It's called party opperative. Politician. Politico.

If James Carville were to slam Kerry in public, that would be a big problem. Promoting one guy, one party, one set of ideas, that's his job.

Not mine. Not Maureen Dowd's.

Op-ed pages are supposed to be about ideas, a place to go to learn more, to understand our world a little better.

I actually have the opposite problem with them--and all the ghastly shouter shows they have inspired on cable "news" nets. Nothing but a bunch of people keeping half their authentic opinions to themselves, only uttering the words that make their own side look good.

Worthless. I stopped reading and watching a long time ago.

And blogs, by the way, have been taking the same road.

Is that really healthy?

Especially after getting taken by such surprise last Tuesday?

I don't think so. But I lost sight of it through much of the campaign. From time to time I admit I took on the job of partisan cheerleader, and for that I apologize. With Dean I refused to even officially endorse him until something like last December, and even then I spoke out against him here and on the Dean blog. And you should have heard some of the traitor cries.

That didn't bother me much, and it wasn't a tough choice to make. My goal then was to find the strongest candidate we could, and if Dean turned out not to be that guy, then so be it.

The general election was a lot trickier. I really wanted Bush out this time.

I never said anything I didn't believe, but I did hold my tongue quite a bit on Kerry. And I did find myself cheerleading only the good poll days. I noticed what I was doing in the last week of the campaign--I was turning into one of those partisan hacks!--and started trying to make amends, at least posting some of the bad-day numbers.

But I was really torn. At that point, was it disloyal to say anything that could hurt the guy I really wanted?

Yes, I thought through most of the campaign.

But who the hell is going to keep listening to me if I keep that up? Or if I fall back into that mode at all the important moments?

Who will listen, and what will they get out of it? I don't want to mimick the dumbass shouter shows, where you know exactly what you're going to get from my mouth, because it's always going to be the same truth and only half the truth. I don't want to be that guy. I want you to come here to hear what I really think, regardless of how ugly or pretty it may sound to your ears.

I like to think that I mostly kept to the independent truth side of that spectrum--what I would characterize as The Left side, incidentially, and ironically--but I slid a lot further than I really intended to. I want to apologize for that again. That's not what I want to do here, or anywhere else in my writing life.

I realize I just put partisan writers in the most negative light. Maybe I just need to convince myself of it, because there's a strong temptation to be that guy, but it's not the one I want to become.

The key point is that like all writers, every blogger has to decide what they are. A partisan cheerleader rallying the populace to a party/cause, or an independent voice driven primarily by the truth, whoever it hurts or offends.

At least those are two ends to the spectrum. You can pick place on it you like, you just have to realize that you're picking a place and you're likely to be stuck with it.

And I'm wondering how many other bloggers have been pulled to one choice or another without fully realizing the ramifications. We're still young, blogging is in its infancy. Few infants see the whole rest of their lives clearly.

Maybe they do, and they have just made a different choice than me. But why do so many blogs seem to be drifting down the partisan route?

A few weeks before the election, I was stunned to read Kos describe his site as a Democrat blog.

I can't find the exact reference, but he was addressing readers about the community that had developed, and had warned that you would get pummelled if you said anything negative about a Democrat. As he was, whenever he criticized (the DLC I think), he noted. This is Democrat blog, after all, he said.

It was an interesting post. He gave himself permission to speak out selectively, but the label he applied and the predominant theme was that it was not OK, or rarely OK to criticize the party or the candidate, at least during the closing weeks, where it was time to rally the forces. (He explicitly made that point about timing.)

The bit about timing was hard to argue with. If you want to be a rallyer. (Rallier? My dictionary recognizes no such form of that word.)

Which I do, of course, partly, but it's such a dangerous road for a writer. I don't want to be primarily a rallier. And I find it a little hard to believe that a writer can really carve out that niche: part-time rallyer, most-time independent.

Kos, I know, has a very different agenda than me. He's heavily engaged in the party and the process as a participant. He has built an entire community, a force in its own right, and they have carved out a fantastic role as a place to get and exchange information.

More information, than ideas, though. I have enjoyed many hours over there, but the groupthink I encounter really gives me the willies sometimes.

OK, I'm putting this post out of its misery and ending it. I know it's rambling and unfocused, and an altogether disorganized swag at a subject that has been eating away at me for weeks now.

But I'm going to leave it this way, because that's just the point. I still haven't figured it out. I know in my heart what the right answer is for me, but I'm still extremely conflicted about it. And about just how far I can go as a cheerleader, and when, and when it really is a little trecherous to keep my big mouth open when it doesn't need to be.

It's a start. This is how I figure these things out. I write about them. And on my blog, you get to see them before I fully know what I think myself.

'Hearts & Minds' in the red states

Thu, 11 Nov 2004 20:44:06 GMT

Ahhhhhhh. I think I finally got why the red states prevailed last Tuesday.

And why they'll keep hammering us if we don't start listening differently.

I'm watching last night's Charlie Rose, a discussion of the attack on Faluujah, and this thoughtful prof woman is saying that we can and win every battle militarily, and we could still lose the war. Because, obviously, this is a political battle.

The old hearts and minds concept. Which we learned at such a bitter price in Vietam. But did we really learn it? I grew up in the midst of that, came of age in the aftermath--born in 61, started high school four months after the fall of Saigon. I was out there in the heartland, in a good Catholic household the reddest part of what was then a swing state, the arch-conservative northwest suburbs of Chicago, just a mile or two north of notorious DuPage County, which gave the nation Phil Crane as a congressman, then Henry Hyde.

And the sense I always got in redstateland, was that most of the people never really bought into the Hearts & Minds concept. They recoiled at the phrase. We lost the war because we didn't really try, they said. We gave up on our boys and let them down. If we want to win a war, we have to mean it.

That was there lesson. If we had just mowed down twice as many American troops, and killed a few million more Vietnamese, we could have conquored them.

Even now, they don't get it. If you have not visited Vietnam, it's an amazing place. And most amazing to us is that we did win. In spite of ourselves. They are rabid little capitalists at heart, and slowly but surely, they are adopting our system. Only once we quit trying to force capitalism and democracy down their their throats, they quietly began drifting toward it.

You can't instill democracy at gunpoint.

Duh.

It's not practical, and you're only going to undermine your intentions with the gun.

(Would you ever trust anyone trying to convince you of anything with a gun pointed at your head? Picture yourself trapped in a dead-end carrer and a guy broke into your house, put a gun to your head and demanded you take an aptitude test, and then followed you to the career counselor to review the results.)

Of course the neocons never learned that lesson, and 40 years later the only advance we've registered is a trek across that expansive continent. Southeast Asia to Southwest Asia, same stupid lesson we're attempting to teach at gunpoint.

And we're learning the same damn lesson the hard way.

With a cruel little twist, this time. The public did not make the same mistake again, we got suckered into it. You could never have rallied this country to invade the Middle East to teach them democracy. You would have been lucky to rally five percent of the population for a scheme like that.

And once we discovered there was no WMD, no firm link to Al Qaeda, no real reason for sending boys and girls to die in the desert except another attempt at Democracy At Gunpoint, the polls quickly began to buckle for Bush. And once the inevitable quagmire began to resurface 50 to 100 million people suddenly went, Uh Oh. We've been here before. How the hell did we fall for this one again?

But here's why we lost the election. Half the country did not.

Yes, more than half regretted heading back to Asia with that same foolish agenda. Polls showed a majority against the invasion, against re-election of Bush . . . right on track with us on everything that seemed to matter.

So what happened? One powerful theory is that Kerry was just too weak a candidate. People were pissed at the predicament Bush had gotten us into and ready to dump him, just not for someone they trusted even less.

I definitely find a lot of merit in that argument.

But I think there was another thing going on, undercurrents the polls were not picking up. I think we trust the polls too much in the sense that we assume people have figured out exactly how they feel about things, and they they have come to firm, unambiguous and unconflicted conclusions. We see a poll saying 60 percent of Americans think we never should have gone to Iraq, and we say, Great! Most of the country is right on board with us.

No, not really. I think a great deal of that majority was heavily conflicted.

Yes, the mounting evidence in the paper and on the TV every day were convincing them that we have ourselves in one hell of a mess over there, but . . .

But.

But from the red-staters I've been talking to, and really, looking back on what I've heard from them for the past 30 years, I believe in their hearts they still believe in the concept. Maybe we haven't gone about it right in Iraq, they think, maybe we haven't invested enough resources, but if we could just gut it out long enough, those damn Iraqis would eventually see the light.

What the hell is wrong with those people, with those stupid Iraqis, why can't they see that we're there to help them?

The red states, I'm afraid, are full of a lot of people who deep down in there hearts firmly believe you can force democracy at gunpoint. Who when they hear this professor lady on Charlie Rose say off-handedly, that we can and win every battle militarily, and we still lose the war, they do not respond, in their heads, You've got that right!

They scream: What the hell are you talking about, you spineless lefty weanie! Or they just roll their eyes and tune her out.

When never finished the Hearts & Minds conversation. We never won it the way we thought we did. And last Tuesday, we paid the price.

Ashcroft Resigns!

Tue, 09 Nov 2004 23:54:10 GMT

Ahhhhhh.

Brief AP story here.

It's getting better already.

And a minor annoyance, Commerce Secretary Don Evans, who made me want to retch everytime they put him on TV, went with him.

Of course I have mild mixed feelings, because a lightning rod for public disgust is gone. But good riddance, all the same.

Women and Islam, the great big irony

Tue, 09 Nov 2004 20:57:25 GMT

This Clash of Civilizations bs scares me a bit. But one early victor seems to be emerging, which is as pleasing as it is unexepcted.

Perhaps the most prominent of all Western charges against Islam has been its treatment of women. Leading of course, to the standard strange bedfellows: feminists joining the neocons and the Christian Right. With the latter two leading the charge, since it's primarily their fight.

I can't tell you the number of times in the past year I have heard conservatives advance one particularly powerful argument: That a society choosing to supress half its population is doomed against adversaries who can always double their output.

The longer this goes on, they more they internalize that idea: that suddenly we need our women to advance to the top ranks of medicine, technology, art, business, politics. If we hinder their advance, they cannot unleash their potential, and we, collectively cannot unleash ours. We fail to advance on our foolhardy Eastern cousins as we could have, and we may actually fall behind our allies, who will once again overtake us. Especially those pesky Japanese.

This is the argument being advanced from The Right!

It's remarkable how quickly the women's movement--just gaining steam 40 years ago--has gone from women demanding rights, the old order making them fight to the death for every last inch, to the old order beginning to see them as an opportunity. They picked a good time to launch their movement, just a step or two ahead of the emergence of Globalization. As long as we saw the American economy as a zero sum game, every gain for women translated into an equal loss for men.

Or a loss for families and institutions led by men and/or whose wealth, status and power was built on a world run by then, and therefore at risk in a male/female power-sharing arrangement where the rules would be fundamentally alterted. Which means just about anyone who had significant wealth, status and power to weild. Including most of the women in those positions.

No wonder women still only earn a few cents more per hour than they did 40 years ago.

Of course a lot of enlightened men and women were willing to risk it all for that grand idea of equality, but when it comes right down to it, most people will go to the mat with you to retain every last ounce of inequality they've been lucky enough to muster.

But the more we see America as just one world contender--military, financially, etc.--the more we think in terms of marshalling all our resources. Still, we tend not to let go of old, ingrained notions like that until we really feel threatened.

And we spot a sharp contrast.

Suddenly we feel very threatened, and it's hard not to notice the gulf. When spotted the Japanese economic engine in the rear view mirror in the 70s and started panicking about them into the 80s, nothing about the struggle suggested using women as a weapon. No more than, say, using underutilized blacks or latinos. We did notice the Japanese and quite a few other countries beating the crap out of us in childhood test scores, and that's when Education suddenly became our focus, particularly math and science.

But The Islamic Threat seems to be thrusting women to the forefront. Suddenly we see them as Our Competitive Advantage.

Ahhhhhh. The panacea of the business-school set. If you're not familiar with the phrase, google it for a quick 4.56 million entries. This opening entry from QuickMBA.com gives you the general idea:

When a firm sustains profits that exceed the average for its industry, the firm is said to possess a competive advantage over its rivals. [Emphasis theirs.] The goal of much of business strategy is to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.

It's one of the few grand business-school ideas that actually makes profound sense in practice. Find one powerful advantage you can always hold over your competition, figure out how to exploit it effectively, and as long as you don't screw up the rest of the operation horribly, you're always going to find yourself leading the pack.

It's a pretty powerful idea.

And appealing for a whole lot of reasons. We've got a whole lot more women around here than blacks or latinos or any other underutilized--notice the different mindset from "underpriveldged"; shifting from a focus on what we have to give them, to what we might get out of them. Women present a unique opportunity to actually double the output of our adversaries.

That's in addition to all the advantages we know we're starting with. Those can get a little scary sometimes, because we know tortises have tendency to catch up. Especially when the rules shift, and suddenly we discover, say, a few trillion barrells of oil nestled underneath their sand. We could lose our starting advantage. But year after year, keep doubling their output with double the brainpower, and we're certain we've got them licked.

It's also comforting to know that we've already got these women right here woven into our very own families. We get to double our wealth, and keep it!

And none of those pesky damn problems with the education system we never figured out how to fix in the 80s anyway, because we knew the underlying source of the problem was that rich and powerful nations always grow a little lazier, and our kids our never going to feel the same hunger their ancestors did, unless we let more of the damn ferners into the country. (Sarcasm alert, in case you weren't onto it.)

These women actually want to share their ideas in the workplace. Win wins all around.

Not the dose of reality. I'm not suggesting the women's struggle for equality is all magically ended. There are innumerable barriers still in place, not least of which is the paradox of their inherent strength. Women, taken as a whole are different than men, taken as a whole. Duh. We know this. That's what's so powerful about what they have to offer: not just double the manpower, they also offer new ideas and new approaches.

We'll be massively more powerful and successful once we fully integrate them and take advantage of them (in a different sense than we've been taking advantage of them the past few millenia), but it's going to be one hell of an upheaval to get there, and God knows how much we humans hate change.

So it will be awhile.

What I am suggesting is that we may have reached a turning point, here.

As long as it remains a battle for rights, it's going to be a painful struggle at a glacial pace. But when the old guard sees opportunity, it changes everything. They quit trying to beat the women down from the walls of the castle, open up the gates and escort them up to the highest chambers to see what they can gain from them. That's a whole different world. And the drive is coming from the hardest right of the old right, old guard.

Odd how women might look back a hundred years from now and point to Islam as their ultimate savior in The West.

Why do I keep beating my brain against the Mike Leigh wall?

Mon, 08 Nov 2004 20:00:40 GMT

Mike Leigh. Why do I keep sitting through his interminable films?

I hated High Hopes, despised Life is Sweet all the more--with extra resentment for the ironic titles, which nevertheless suckered my naive optimism.

Despite all that, Naked just fascinated me too much, and I took a chance and adored it.

OK, I guess that's why. I'll sit through several hours of dreck for one gem.

Plus, the critics keep taunting me with ecstatic reviews. Leigh's Rotten Tomatoes page is a nearly unprecedented list of 80s, 90s, and an actual 100--for that revolting Life is Sweet, though it's only based on six reviews.

Obviously, they have a different conception of cinematic greatness than I do. I love a thought-provoking film, but I also prefer it to be watchable. Oh, and provoking an occasional thought is usually helpful.

This time, I saw a clip for Vera Drake on the Ebert & Fake Siskel show. It looked compelling, and Rog was all over it (along with that dullard he shares the set with). The reviews were stellar, so I talked it up to an unfortunate friend, and off we went.

Ugh.

Like most Mike Leigh films, it starts out bleak and depressing, rolls steadily downhill from there.

Leigh is pretty artless in his storytelling. An endless sequence of roughly the same scenes played over and over, of Vera cleaning houses, aiding the infirm, and generally giving everyone she meets a smile. She's a great character, idea for a character, actually, but the story--"story"--plods along excruiatingly.

Almost nothing happens. Which is generally a critical weakness in a film, but can be overcome by fascinating interaction within the scenes.

The sad fact is, that for all its pretensions at Serious Drama, these early scenes are incredibly shallow. They are incredibly simplictic. Leigh could have saved us all a lot of time, with a little card that read, "Vera is a selfless and tireless saint, toiling away in rich peoples' houses, where she brightens every room with her smile, choosing to overlook the condescension of the evil aristocracy." Then he could have given us one quick scene and we'd have got it. Nothing much beyond this simplistic notion is developed.

And much as I loved her, she's little more than a caricature. As real as Imelda Staunton made her--the acting is all superb, I'll give them that--I had a lot of trouble buying her. Here's this old woman still bent over cleaning out all the little nooks and crannies in some rich tart's hearth at the age of (sixty?) and her back never seems to bother her. No apparent trouble with the knees. I'll buy that she keeps a good attitude despite the decades of back-breaking work, but we see no signs of even difficulty with it--until later, when she can hardly walk or talk, when the cops show up.

It's sort of the reaction I had to Fight Club. The fights were brutally, but except for Jared Leto, they were all glistening prettyboys two days later, with nothing more than a temporary shiner that just made them hotter. The fundamental dishonesty of the situation undermined everything else going on for me.

It hurts me to say this, but Vera is an incredibly simplistic character, with almost no complexities until her One Dramatic Unexpected Shocking Behavior is introduced. Sorry, that single addition doesn't make her a complex character. Only distracts us into thinking she is.

So the shocking behavior is that she's performing abortions, helping young girls in trouble, in her view.

It's an interesting idea, but again, it's not explored very deeply. The act is just presented, we get several examples, and that's it.

It's always risky to conclude why a production fell apart when you weren't there to witness it, but in this case, the culprit seems pretty clear. Take this passage from the Rotten Tomatoes synopsis, presumably pulled off a press release: ". . . in typical Mike Leigh fashion, the story, characters, and script were built from a grueling and intricate improvisation process, resulting in a film that burns with heart-wrenching sincerity."

It does burn with heart-wrenching sincerity. I'll give it that. That and the acting are about all it has going for it. What it lacks is a freaking story. Complex characters. A interesting point of view. Provocative dialogue. Confrotations, conflicts and moral dilemmas beyond the one Great Big Obivous ones. A guiding hand, would be nice. This just feels like fascinating material that no one ever figured out how to flesh out into great drama. They just hashed out individual scenes, realistic in isolation, but which failed to add up to anything.

Here's the thing that pisses me off about critics praising this: movies don't have to be excruciatingly dull to be thought-provoking. (Try Eternal Shunshine, for a quick example.) Only the artless approach them that way. A good storyteller who has an idea for you to mull over figures out a way to tell a compelling story to get you involved in it. Consider the way Dead Man Walking whipped us back and forth between the two sides of the ancient question of capital punishment.

But the unforgivable failing for a would-be thought provoker is a dearth of thoughts provoked. The three- or four-minute preview on Ebert & Fake Siskel made me think a little about how rich girls could get abortions legally via psychiatrist, but poor girls had to use dangerous and illegal avenues. It wasn't a particularly new topic, but it did cause me to think a little.

The film did not. I left the theatre with no more than I brought in.I sat there in interminable silence, with nothing to do but think, and the film gave me almost nothing to think about. It had it all figured out, and simply handed it to me--what did that leave me to grapple? And all it hand to hand over what that one simple idea, that could be summed up in one line by Roger Ebert, and was.

So they didn't really have to make the movie, and I didn't have to waste two hours watching it--all they had to produce was the Ebert clip.

Sad.

Zero stars.