 This week's New Yorker has a lead commentary
by Hendrik Hertzberg (his picture at right). I've raved about his
writing for years, and whenever I find his name in the contributors
list of my weekly edition, I drop everything to read it. This week he
discusses the astonishing reality that the best (and perhaps only) way
to get the president of the US to do something to protect America from
the threat of nuclear war is to make a movie about it, give it away,
and hope he (or someone he talks to) watches it. The movie in question
is Last Best Chance, a
45-minute thriller showing how easy it would be for a garden variety
terrorist to assemble and detonate a substantial nuclear bomb in any US
city. It's sponsored by Ted Turner, Warren Buffett, Republican Richard
Lugar, Democrat Sam Nunn. several non-partisan foundations and the 9/11
Commission. You'll see it soon on HBO, and a book on the same subject, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe by Graham Allison is now out in paperback.
This
all ties into the theme I've hit so much lately: No one in the world is
in control. The president of the most powerful nation in the history of
civilization has shown that even he, and his country, are utterly
impotent in the face of a chicken disease (new report says if it morphs
again it could kill 150 million), in the face of a bunch of
self-righteous wackos with box-cutters, in the face of a motley crew of
guerrillas determined to fight to the death against the ungodly West,
in the face of a hurricane that fell far short of maximum damage and
had been predicted as a short-term certainty in every study of threats
to Homeland Security, and, coming soon, runaway glaciers, rising tides,
and, very probably, a nuclear attack by someone on someone. I'll buy Allison's book, but I'm
not sure even a competent US administration could prevent it. It was
only a few years ago that a bunch of students flew a very small
drone airplane with a dummy payload across the Atlantic completely
undetected by the staggeringly expensive and presumably sophisticated
defenses of NORAD -- just to prove it could be done (and still could
today). Maybe next time they do the test they should fly it onto the
White House lawn with a payload of copies of Last Best Chance.
While I was reading the magazine (in the airport terminal) I was drinking a Starbucks chai latte. I noticed it had these curious words on the side of a cup (good reading material in airports is hard to find):
The Way I See It #23
chances are you are scared of fictions --
chances are you
are only fleetingly happy --
chances are you
know much less than you think you do -- chances are you
feel a little guilty --
chances are you
want people to lie to you --perhaps the answer lies on the side of a coffee cup: you are lost
(by writer-comedian David Cross)
What
do these two items have in common? Well, I threw out the New Yorker
when I'd finished reading it, keeping only Hertzberg's article, which I
tore out to write this post, and will then throw it out as well. I have
never considered buying his new book, Politics, containing some of his
best columns, because no matter how well it is written, it is very soon
all old news. Absorb and discard, the same as we do the magazine, and
the newspaper.
And after writing down the 'poem' above on the
page with Hertzberg's article, and violating copyright by putting it on
my blog, I also threw out the coffee cup. [Clarification: these items
went in the 'paper only' airport recycling bin]
We do need to
invent a more durable form of publication, where the content is
frequently reviewed and updated. For now, blogs are the best model we
have -- when an update occurs, you blog it and link back to your
archive where the original post resides. I've recently developed a
proposal for a weekly hard-copy magazine that contains only news and
commentary of ongoing import (i.e. stuff that is 'durable' and
actionable, with suggested actions appended to each article), with each
article separable from the others in each weekly edition, and binders
and tabs where the articles can be filed by subject (kind of like blog
categories, but in the hard copy world), so that the binders become a
hard-copy diary of information and history that matters, as it unfolds,
showing the actions we personally took, or should have taken, as a
result. I think it's a brilliant idea, but I'm equally sure no
newspaper would underwrite it or pay to have it included with their
Sunday edition. They have no interest in durable information. I would
be delighted if someone were to 'steal' this idea and prove me wrong.
And
what does it say about our society that more people probably read
poetry on the side of coffee cups than read poetry in books, anthologies and websites?
Whew, what a week. Sleep come free me.
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5:50:36 PM 
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
