Room to maneuver. Julie Kay of the Daily Business Review has a worthy article (reprinted at law.com) on turmoil in the Miami law enforcement community, as a new interim U.S. Attorney there re-prioritizes:

When FBI supervisors in Miami met with new interim U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta last month, they wondered what the top enforcement priority for Acosta and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would be.

Would it be terrorism? Organized crime? Narcotics trafficking? Immigration? Or maybe public corruption?

The agents were stunned to learn that a top prosecutorial priority of Acosta and the Department of Justice was none of the above. Instead, Acosta told them, it's obscenity. Not pornography involving children, but pornographic material featuring consenting adults.

Acosta's stated goal of prosecuting distributors of adult porn has angered federal and local law enforcement officials, as well as prosecutors in his own office. They say there are far more important issues in a high-crime area like South Florida, which is an international hub at risk for terrorism, money laundering and other dangerous activities.

His own prosecutors have warned Acosta that prioritizing adult porn would reduce resources for prosecuting other crimes, including porn involving children. According to high-level sources who did not want to be identified, Acosta has assigned prosecutors porn cases over their objections. ...

Acosta, a Miami native who formerly held a high-level position in the Justice Department, is having a hard time persuading other law enforcement officials in South Florida, including his own assistant U.S. attorneys, to join the anti-porn crusade.

Sources say Acosta was told by the FBI officials during last month's meeting that obscenity prosecution would have to be handled by the crimes against children unit. But that unit is already overworked and would have to take agents off cases of child endangerment to work on adult porn cases. Acosta replied that this was Attorney General Gonzales' mandate.

The article goes on to make it clear that Acosta, per Gonzales, is operating at the behest of Christian rightist pressure groups, in particular the Mississippi-based American Family Association, whose media spokesman obviously knows more about the law-enforcement biz than any of those weak-kneed goonies who actually work in it:

[Randy] Sharp of the Family Association ... said any prosecutors who object to prosecuting obscenity don't understand the law. "Most attorneys have been led to believe that what is illegal is not illegal in terms of obscenity," Sharp said. "They have a misconception of what should be prosecuted. They think because it's consenting adults, it's not illegal."

Sharp said the initiative is necessary because local law enforcement and city attorneys get "crushed" by high-powered lawyers hired by adult book stores or video stores when there are efforts to shut those establishments down.

"You need the federal government to assist," said Sharp, who takes credit for closing six adult bookstores in his hometown in Mississippi.

But should porn be a priority in a place like Miami, where serious crime is rampant? "It's all part of the same thing, of the organized crime syndicate," Sharp said. "It has an effect on children."

Can't argue with that logic. Mere actual child endangerment, which in Florida is of no particular concern anyway, is peanuts by comparison to the distant possible structural enabling of child endangerment through the tentacles of the porn empire.

This report comes on the same day as Michael Scherer's Salon article on the "The FCC's cable crackdown," which points to the establishment of a fairly significant theo-winger beachhead in that agency:

[New FCC Commissioner Kevin J.] Martin, a former White House aide to President Bush, has been meeting privately with evangelical activists to assure them of his commitment to change the television landscape.  ... In one session this summer, Martin told activists that he is privately reaching out to industry leaders to address racy content on basic cable and satellite television, says Rick Schatz, the president of the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families, a Christian ministry. "He said the free rein of cable and satellite and satellite radio is not acceptable," says Schatz, who sat in on the meeting. "He's committed to seeing something is done during his tenure." ...

Worried about the bottom line, the cable and satellite industry has responded by launching a campaign to educate parents about available technology, like the V-Chip, that can block certain channels from any single television. The campaign has been opposed by a powerful coterie of family advocacy groups and activists with close ties to major evangelical ministries and the Bush White House. "It will be war," says Schatz, of the coming battle over cable and satellite regulation. "There will be tremendous grass-roots pressure brought to bear."

This summer, Martin hired one of the activists, Penny Nance, to work in the FCC's Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis, a position that will allow her to advise on indecency issues. Nance founded the Kids First Coalition, a group that fights abortion, cloning and indecency in the name of "pro-child, pro-family public policy." She has long been one of the nation's leading anti-pornography crusaders, testifying repeatedly before Congress.

Nance is a nutjob/opportunist who, the article goes on to note, describes herself as a "suburban stay-at-home mom" in spite of her activist career, and who considers herself a "victim of pornography" because, she says, a man who watched porn once tried to rape her.

Now, putting aside the obvious and inevitable first reactions to this stuff, what are we looking at here? If you ask me, these read like the signs of a strategic retreat: the Rove coalition having passed its high-water mark. In a different political dispensation, you might expect the GOP to come through with a nice, distracting little cultural hygeine campaign at this point—you might expect it to try to leverage the concerns of the Christianist base to improve its position at the margins, grab the allegiance of a few more of the more easily ruffled "values" voters. And yet one has no sense that anything of the sort is in the offing—or would have a prayer of success if it were, when the political oxygen for the foreseeable future is going to be sucked up by the disaster unfolding in Iraq. (Not to mention the Patrick Fitzgerald wild card yet to be played ...) An overt and general campaign, in fact, would be likelier to alienate than attract unaffiliated voters, who thanks to the Schiavo travesty have already been well seeded with the "GOP captive of theocrats" meme.

No, I suspect the administration would like these sorts of initiatives to see as little daylight as possible. (No FCC or other administration official, for instance, would be quoted for the Salon piece—it's basically Christianists only.) The accommodations reported in these articles are the sort made by a party that has little political room left to maneuver—a party concerned that its core activist elements might hive off unless they're continually and practically placated, no matter how much that might limit the party's appeal in the wider electorate. More indication, in other words, that the Republican masterminds realize that their old lip-service formula—pay off the theos with words, not policy—can no longer hold the center. And you know, it seems kind of remarkable to me: that within a few months of a successful reelection campaign, the governing party should be in a position where, far from thinking about expanding or solidifying a majority, it's devoting all its energy just to keep swimming in place.

posted by michael  1:46:39 PM  
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Unless, that is, they're poor brown people that one of my freedom-loving friends has had killed:

"I will never be silent about the death of those who cannot speak for themselves," the former senator wrote in "Here's Where I Stand," which is scheduled for release Tuesday.

—Jesse Helms, congratulating himself on his moral fortitude in opposition to abortion in a new memoir (via TBogg)

Helms has long maintained an extensive network of contacts in Latin America that serves as a sort of shadow State Department. "For years he had a cadre of young people who were very well-connected," says a committee staff member. "You could have set them down in any South American junta and they would have been right at home."

The problem, say those familiar with his network, is that the information it provides is one-sided. "When I bring people to his office to tell him what we've seen, we aren't even allowed in," says Gail Phares, who leads delegations to Central America through Witness for Peace. "I remember when one delegation managed to get in and told his staff what they'd seen and heard in Nicaragua about the contras killing doctors and nurses and children, their response was, 'Well, they're just Communists--they deserve to die.'"

Eric Bates, Mother Jones, May 1995

All I know is that [Roberto] D'Aubuisson is a free enterprise man and deeply religious.

—Jesse Helms, congratulating himself on his support of the political leader of El Salvador's death squads in the 1980s and the man who ordered the murder of Archbishop Romero

posted by michael  10:57:56 AM  
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Psychiatric explorations of the fetus with needles. Not that I want to seem to be poaching on the good folks at Sadly, No! Industries, but I've got to throw a little love in the direction of their latest (and most priceless) winger discovery: Bruce L. Thiessen, the singing (alleged) psychologist. I think I can say, with little fear of contradiction, that Dr. BLT (as he styles himself) is the greatest right-wing pop performer named after a sandwich of this or any other era.

Dr. Tuna-on-Toast (whose jukebox of free mp3 downloads is here) hails from Saskatchewan originally, per his online bio, but currently inflicts psychology and music on the Sacramento area. There's nothing to indicate where he got his degree: and I admit I'm a little nervous about his credentials, based on his habit of diagnosing people like, say, Michael Moore as paranoid psychotics, based solely on his disagreeing with them politically. Probably just means he studied under Charles Krauthammer.

But it's not about the psychology, is it? It's about the music—and the political rants tricked up as songs—and the youth-oriented product placement—and, well, maybe about the psychology too. Considering that we are talking about a man who's penned such masterpieces as "Great Sex Can Ruin Your Life" (sadly no longer available on the free page), whose message to the kids seems to be, great sex can ruin your life. Or, my nominee for his chef-d'ouevre, "Womb Tomb," the inspiration for the title of this post, a dirge (whose inappropriately BUBBLY bass line and FUNKY bongos make it somehow even more ineffably dirge-like) that laments the fate of a soon-to-be-aborted "Baby Jane Doe"—unless Dr. Ham-and-Swiss can intervene in time! (Which is what seems to be happening about midway through the number, if you can get that far.)

[Among the non-topical songs, I highly recommend the Doc's cover of "Norwegian Wood," though I warn you you have to start out listening to it just a few seconds at a time. Actually, that's pretty much true of everything he's got on offer. I'm aiming within a few weeks to be able to make it all the way through one of these pieces without my ears starting to bleed; it's a form of endurance training. What doesn't induce hysterical deafness only makes us stronger.]

The thing that fascinates me about this body of work—in its ever-out-of-step rhythms, its weirdly slack, affectless vocals, its fetish for misplaced psychelic gestures—not to mention the sub-literacy and the attraction to useless punning—is how perfectly it seems to be a musical expression of the hive-mind qualities of the Great Right Wingosphere. Dr. Italian-Beef-with-Peppers makes the sort of music a politically deranged android would make, one with access to a library of forms but with no idea what music was actually supposed to do. This is what the Borg would sound like if it tried to put on a hootenanny.

Dr. Corned-Beef-with-Sauerkraut will take everything you ever thought or felt about pop songs, kill it, reanimate the corpse, and kill it again. That's just how powerful this music is. A perfect soundtrack for the next time you're heh-indeeding your way across the internets.

posted by michael  2:17:21 PM  
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If you want a very clear understanding of the threat that Hurricane Katrina presents to New Orleans, this article in the Times-Pic series on The Big One is indispensable. There's a real sense that the survival of New Orleans itself, in anything like the way we've known it, is at risk here. Which means that in addition to the potential for significant loss of life, there's the prospect of a great hole being gouged out of our common cultural patrimony.

I lived just up the road a piece from NO in the nineties, and it's true: in its mixture of graciousness and insanity, in its historical meaning, it's like no other city in the country. Nothing to do but hope the storm turns.

posted by michael  1:05:50 PM  
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Iraq and left-wing political maturity. I missed this post from Marc Cooper a couple of days ago, in which Cooper praises Russ Feingold's call for an Iraq withdrawal timetable, and Juan Cole's detailed proposal for gradual disengagement.

Now that the dam of public opinion is bursting on the Bush Iraq policy, we opponents of the war have a greater burden than ever to pose viable – I repeat, viable - alternatives.

When there was still a strong majority support for the war, I suppose it was enough for some to just say they were against it. But with Bush policy on the ground in Iraq so dramatically faltering and with the administration unable to offer anything except a call to stay the course, Americans need a realistic, alternative policy.

The more activist wing of the anti-war movement doesn't seem much up to the job. Some of its more moderate factions risk their credibility by once again allying with fringe groups like ANSWER in supporting a joint September 24 rally in Washington. Someone once said, “But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao…”

The friend who sent me this link wasn't trying to raise my blood pressure—I don't think—but this just pisses me off. You know, for the life of me I just don't get this stuff—this "now's the time for maturity from the anti-war left" stuff. I can think of at least a few more important things to be concerned about when it comes to Iraq than whether the anti-war left is going to shed itself of the damn hippies.

I read the Juan Cole post Cooper links to, and I thought it represented a kind of policy fantasy, a pardonable effort at prophylaxis on the part of somebody who's been documenting just how relentlessly things are going to shit and must get tired of feeling completely hopeless most of the time. But I couldn't take it very seriously. A good detailed rebuttal, in terms of the ground realities in Iraq, comes from greenboy at Needlenose, for my money the best and most insightful Iraq war blog out there. More to the point (a point greenboy doesn't make)—who exactly is the audience for this sort of policy wanking supposed to be? Other than a tiny community of Beltway or Beltway-oriented intellectuals, or wannabes. The anti-war left is nowhere near the seat of power. Power is held, in fact, by a gang that regards opposition in general, and opposition to the war in particular, as tantamount to treason. We're supposed to have a nice, polite, national debate over an endgame strategy? Debate, with this crowd? Even if we had detailed, rational and realistic policy advice to give, they wouldn't listen to it. In fact, to the extent it was rational and realistic, and persuaded anybody, they'd likely run in exactly the opposite direction. We've had five years now, and people like Cooper still don't get the psychology of the Bush administration?

It's not "unserious" or "immature" or whatever other bullshit terms are favored by the Beltway types to advocate the simple message Out Now. On the contrary—advocating such messages is the only real political space within which we have to operate. Our job is not to pretend we're living under a different regime than we are, one that takes policy proposals seriously. Our job is to do the only thing we really can do, namely cause as much domestic pain as possible for Bush over the war. (Digby is entirely correct and on point about this.) You want to have a real effect on Iraq policy? Drive Bush's numbers down, drive the GOP's numbers down, take their Congressional majority away from them, take the White House back. That's not done with policy prescriptions—which (again, has Cooper been paying attention these last few years?) the vast majority of the American public will never hear, or hear an honest version of, anyway.

A statement like "Americans need a realistic, alternative policy"—much less the notion that the "burden" is on the left to produce it—shows just how far Cooper's self-congratulating "maturity" is from any actual political realism. Americans in general need no such thing, certainly not from the opposition. What they need is to have their attention focused on the disaster that's shaping up in Iraq, to the extent it's not focused there already, and to see a political representation of their own increasing worry and disaffection. Their worry and disaffection, to put it another way, need to be made political, a task only just beginning, a task made a great deal more difficult (and more vital) because of how far the corporate media have narrowed the space of the political in these last years. And that's the task undertaken by people like Cindy Sheehan and "fringe groups like ANSWER." By those hippies that Cooper's sort think are so grotty. Yeah, a big-ass anti-war march ain't policy-making—so the fuck what? It's a better and more salient response to the actual situation we find ourselves in than anything Cooper and his sort are going to come up with, for damn sure.

Check out the update Marc Cooper thoughtfully added to his post, if you want to see a more unmediated version of his real politics:

Some of the more delusional responses [to the Juan Cole essay] predictably enough come from the Idiot Right who accuse Cole of being a traitor. And, yes, also from those who want immediate, unconditional, un-thought-out withdrawal on the Unrepentant Idiot Left. One of the more prolific buffoons from that corner — Louis Proyect the self-described "Unrepentant Marxist"— can offer no better response than to compare Cole with Dick Nixon and then further suggest I undergo a lobotomy for having linked to Cole and to cure what he diagnoses as my incipient Hitchens Syndrome (Ahh.. for the good old days of the Show Trials when prosecutor Vishinsky would end his feverish closing statements with a call to "Shoot these mad dogs!"). Oh well... I suppose every day that political Neanderthals like this have their mitts far, far, far from any levers of power is, at least, an OK day. For that I give thanks.

Still fighting the anti-Communist battles of the fifties, I see. And how are those "Neanderthals" (I make no endorsement of Proyect, by the way) any closer to power than you yourself are, Marc? And how close to power do you really think gloating over their lack of it is going to get you, or the people you endorse?

When you boil it all down, Cooper's just indulging himself in some easy left bashing—a favorite sport of certain moderate/moderate-left types, and I'm sick of it. It's contemptible, it gives aid and comfort to rightists, and JUST STOP IT. Somehow, Cooper actually seems to think opponents of the war are more responsible for getting us out of it than, you know, the shits who got us into it, and are keeping us in it. (The urgent thing is that the lefties are supposed to wake up and listen to Juan Cole's policy proposals? Fuck off.) Finding examples of "buffoons" on the "unrepentant idiot left" to take to task makes Cooper not very much different from, or better than, assholes like Instapundit. Ward Churchill, anybody?

posted by michael  9:18:42 AM  
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Because he's such a schmuck. Last year, after the election, I comforted myself—and tried to comfort a few friends—with a prediction that Bush was going to end his second term, if not impeached then easily one of the most widely reviled Presidents in American history.

And if I wasn't being all hiatus-y at the time, I'd have committed that to blog. Wish I had: then I could be linking back to myself and dazzling everybody with my prescience. Instead, you'll just have to take my word for it.

At the rate things are going, it won't be too long before Condi finds President Flop Sweat talking to the Lincoln portrait.

posted by michael  5:58:24 PM  
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Another credibility triumph! In May, when I wrote about the Times' so-called Credibility Group report—in its most significant statement, a flat capitulation to the Bozell/Horowitz language police—I said, attempting to achieve some kind of snark maximum, "About the only thing missing here is the Times admitting that its Science section has persecuted Christians by being insufficiently skeptical about evolution."

As they say, beware what you pretend to wish for. Yesterday, in the second installment of the paper's promised (threatened?) series on the Intelligent Design "debate," Kenneth Chang came pretty close to making the snark come true ("In Explaining Life's Complexity, Darwinists and Doubters Clash"). Arthur Silber and PZ Myers both read the thing, and Arthur concludes that he was right, reacting to Jodi Wilgoren's first installment in the series, to call the Times (a dire but apt, not to mention catchy, phrase) "a know-nothing paper for a know-nothing nation." (Arthur, if they put that slogan in place of "All the news that's fit to print" I hope they give you some kind of royalty on it.)

Silber and Myers both see yesterday's article as another debased example of, as PZ puts it, the "old tired he-said-she-said journalism": a lazy, credulous reporter unable to recognize "that he was selling him the Brooklyn bridge, and she was representing the judicious opinion of thousands of competent scientists who were all saying he is a con artist." Ah, if it were only a simple matter of standard bad, heedless practice. But—with the Credibility Group report, and Bill Keller's wholehearted endorsement of same in the background—I'm incapable of believing that Kenneth Chang is simply getting conned because he only knows the Beltway political-tennis style of journalism, because he hasn't bothered (or hasn't had time) to educate himself enough on the science. I suspect that Mr. Chang has, in fact, learned all the lessons that matter, the ones his bosses really want him to have learned.

The excerpt below spans the entire introduction to the piece, the portion of it that comes before the jump—the only portion of the article, that is, that a majority of readers will actually read.

At the heart of the debate over intelligent design is this question: Can a scientific explanation of the history of life include the actions of an unseen higher being?

The proponents of intelligent design, a school of thought that some have argued should be taught alongside evolution in the nation's schools, say that the complexity and diversity of life go beyond what evolution can explain.

Biological marvels like the optical precision of an eye, the little spinning motors that propel bacteria and the cascade of proteins that cause blood to clot, they say, point to the hand of a higher being at work in the world. ...

It is an argument that appeals to many Americans of faith.

But mainstream scientists say that the claims of intelligent design run counter to a century of research supporting the explanatory and predictive power of Darwinian evolution, and that the design approach suffers from fundamental problems that place it outside the realm of science. For one thing, these scientists say, invoking a higher being as an explanation is unscientific.

"One of the rules of science is, no miracles allowed," said Douglas H. Erwin, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution. "That's a fundamental presumption of what we do."

That does not mean that scientists do not believe in God. Many do. But they see science as an effort to find out how the material world works, with nothing to say about why we are here or how we should live.

Let's let go the fact that the article, as this frames it, gives the impetus to the ID "critics," with the scientific community thus forced to play defense (after a full five paragraphs, snipped above, devoted to retailing the IDers favorite anti-evolution "gotchas"): that much is straight out of Beltway Journalism 101, Let the Attackers (as long as they're attacking from the right) Write Your Lead. The key to this thing is in that highlighted single-sentence graf: "[ID] is an argument that appeals to many Americans of faith."

This, folks, is straight out of the "credibility" playbook. Look at Keller's June memo, and its Horowitzian employment of the right-Stalinist code-word "diversity":

In a lengthy memo published the newspaper's Web site, Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, announced several new policies in response to a recent report by the paper's Credibility Committee. Among them is a fresh attempt to diversify the Times' staff and viewpoints, and not in the usual racial or gender ways, but in political, religious and cultural areas as well. ...

The point, Keller wrote, "is not that we should begin recruiting reporters and editors for their political outlook; it is part of our professional code that we keep our political views out of the paper. The point is that we want a range of experience. ... First and foremost we hire the best reporters, editors, photographers and artists in the business. But we will make an extra effort to focus on diversity of religious upbringing and military experience, of region and class."

Kenneth Chang, obedient to the Times' new version of PC, is so far from wanting to offend the sensibilities of faith-based Americans that he's basically willing to give the game away to them entirely, at least in that part of the article he expects them to read. Having been charged to write about the science of the ID controversy, what, in Chang's mind, is the most urgent "scientific" question his article needs to address? Whether science can properly "include the actions of an unseen higher being."

With respect to Arthur Silber, this is no kind of merely passive know-nothingism. In the reporter's own voice, in the lead graf, he states the ID position as if it were legitimately a question for science, as opposed to what it is in fact, a hoary theologically-based argument against scientific materialism. And rounds off his introduction by offering the weakest possible answer to that argument, the vapidly tautological statement that science doesn't consider "higher beings" because doing so would be "unscientific"—very nearly as if "no miracles allowed" were a statement of arbitrary intellectual preference, rather than the founding instrumentality of scientific practice. Hell, at the end of the excerpt Chang (again in his own voice) actually feels the need to apologize to his audience on behalf of the scientific community: they're not all disbelievers, he avers, they just have this ideology that doesn't let them think about the really big questions, an ideology "with nothing to say about why we are here or how we should live."

In its crucial gestures, that is to say, the article betrays the assumption that its audience is crucially composed of "Americans of faith"—and that the writer's proper pose is to situate himself intellectually among them, if only for purposes of mollifying them about whatever more informed discussion of the actual science might follow. You know, it's a laughably small thing to ask, that a great national newspaper published from one of the country's most liberal and best-educated cities, and this far into the history of the modern scientific project, exhibit an unshakeable commitment to empirical rationality. There shouldn't even be a question about it. And it would be bad enough if laziness and thoughtlessness in the work of such a newspaper were in effect to connive at giving some anti-empirical irrationalism (like ID) a hearing it didn't deserve. But the Chang article goes well beyond even that level of bad.

And, as I keep saying when the subject comes up, don't expect it to get any better. Just a couple months in to Bill Keller's PC credibility campaign, and the Times is already showing symptoms of the most advanced intellectual and political rot. Can front-page reprints of Tech Central Station pieces be very far behind?

posted by michael  1:25:14 PM  
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Cheap-ass leaving-town Friday excuse for a post, AKA Friday random ten. Haven't done one of these before: I've just twigged to how usable iTunes is, and I now feel motivated to import CDs to it, in idle moments. With only about 50 discs in so far, there's a long way to go yet. But this first official shuffle turns out to be a decent sample anyway of stuff I'm happy listening to. And, much more important, happy to be seen to be listening to.

• William, It Was Really Nothing – The Smiths
• Kiss Me on the Bus – The Replacements
• I Can See for Miles – The Who
• Psychiatric Explorations of the Fetus with Needles – The Flaming Lips
• What's Going Ahn – Big Star
• Bullet Proof..I Wish I Was – Radiohead
• Victoria – The Kinks
• Green Shirt – Elvis Costello & The Attractions
• To Be Someone – The Jam
• And Your Bird Can Sing – The Beatles

I'm off for a wedding in St. Louis—happy weekend, everybody.

posted by michael  10:44:03 AM  
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When epidemiologists start using words like "inevitable," referring to an outbreak of pandemic illness, the time when a thinking person might remain in ignorance is past. And if, to this point, you haven't begun educating yourself about the life-and-death threat posed by the H5N1 flu now migrating through bird populations Asia, and soon to expand beyond—well, start.

The bottom line is that avian influenza is endemic and probably ineradicable among poultry in Southeast Asia, and now seems to be spreading at pandemic velocity amongst migratory birds, with the potential to reach most of the earth in the next year.

Each new outpost of H5N1 -- whether among ducks in Siberia, pigs in Indonesia, or humans in Vietnam -- is a further opportunity for the rapidly evolving virus to acquire the gene or even simply the protein mutation that it needs to become a mass-killer of humans.

This exponential multiplication of hot spots and silent reservoirs (as among infected but asymptomatic ducks) is why the chorus of warnings from scientists, public-health officials, and finally, governments has become so plangently insistent in recent months.

The new U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt told the Associated Press in early August that an influenza pandemic was now an "absolute certainty," echoing repeated warnings from the World Health Organization that it was "inevitable." Likewise Science magazine observed that expert opinion held the odds of a global outbreak as "100 percent."

Mike Davis, "The Coming Avian Flu Pandemic"

Reminders of the great flu pandemic of 1918-19 are circulating. Nearly a century on, we seem to have gained little advantage over our grandparents and great-grandparents, in the matter of planning: our vision of course is immeasurably sharpened, and when the storm breaks, it won't be a surprise this time, not to anybody that's paid attention at least. But all we'll have to show for it, apparently, may be the awful, slow-motion oncoming-crash sensation you get reading the news from Thailand or Indonesia or Siberia. Any preventive ability we've theoretically gained these last decades will almost certainly be overwhelmed by systematic failures in a public health policy massively distorted by the profit motive.

Please don't imagine that some miracle vaccine's going to allow us to cheat disaster. Based on the news from Asia, time seems to be getting short, and for an outbreak beginning any time in the next couple of years the logistical window is all but closed.

What if the next pandemic were to start tonight? If it were determined that several cities in Vietnam had major outbreaks of H5N1 infection associated with high mortality, there would be a scramble to stop the virus from entering other countries by greatly reducing or even prohibiting foreign travel and trade. The global economy would come to a halt, and since we could not expect appropriate vaccines to be available for many months and we have very limited stockpiles of antiviral drugs, we would be facing a 1918-like scenario.

Production of a vaccine would take a minimum of six months after isolation of the circulating strain, and given the capacity of all the current international vaccine manufacturers, supplies during those next six months would be limited to fewer than a billion monovalent doses. Since two doses may be required for protection, we could vaccinate fewer than 500 million people — approximately 14 percent of the world's population. And owing to our global "just-in-time delivery" economy, we would have no surge capacity for health care, food supplies, and many other products and services. ...

What if the pandemic were 10 years away and we embarked today on a worldwide influenza Manhattan Project aimed at producing and delivering a pandemic vaccine for everyone in the world soon after the onset of sustained human-to-human transmission? In this scenario, we just might make a real difference.

Michael T. Osterholm, New England Journal of Medicine

Lost in its foolish dreams of a global crusade against evil, and committed besides to a policy of allowing Big Pharma to cash in as and where it chooses, no planning or leadership has come from the Bush administration, nor will.

Two things: first, this is a political issue if ever there was one—an issue in which masses of people must work to change the priorities of their government (and of a class of elites who seem, still, all but heedless of the growing danger). Prospects look dim for the kind of movement necessary, but every voice raised (even on a small, haphazardly maintained blog like this one) adds a bit of weight. Which is one reason I say, educate yourself, and then do whatever's in your power to spread the word. Melanie, at Just a Bump in the Beltway, has been doing easily the most consistent and forward-looking blogging of anyone on the subject—grab her feed if you haven't already. The Flu Wiki she's set up is an invaluable resource, and probably the best place to start. You should certainly also bookmark the dedicated flu blog H5N1.

Which brings me to the second thing. "Inevitable" in the mouth of an epidemiologist doesn't mean, "H5N1 is the inevitable agent of pandemic," it doesn't mean, "Pandemic is inevitable in a month," or in six months, or eighteen. It doesn't even mean an H5N1 pandemic will inevitably be the once-in-a-century, maximally virulent infectious event we have most to fear. (Though that body of despairing opinion, as Melanie will attest, is out there and well represented in the scientific community.) Some combination of genetic luck and conscious political agency in the next several years may yet avert the worst. But don't count on it. It becomes a crucial exercise of imagination to picture a world in which significant numbers of people—not foreign people on the teevee, either, but us historically exempt Americans—are dying, in which the ordinary comforts of life are radically diminished or absent, in which simple prudence forces people to quarantine themselves, to avoid almost all unscreened human contact, for months at a time. That's going to be a hard world to live in, for whatever the duration of the pandemic. You need to think about protecting yourself: you need to consider things like stockpiling food and water, for instance. (If that sounds like an unduly alarmist thing to say, trust me, it won't when you've done your reading.) The personal and family preparedness section of the Flu Wiki makes a good jumping-off point.

posted by michael  3:11:47 PM  
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Political theater, or, Where's Jesse? Probably the most socially meaningful, certainly the most engaged, of the various things I did in my grad-student days to procrastinate my dissertation was to work as an organizer for Yale's fledgling TA/student labor union (GESO, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization—still have my old union card in my wallet). I wouldn't be able to itemize all the rallies and job actions we held in the years of my involvement, in the late 80s - early 90s. One thing I can remember distinctly, though, is a gray late-winter day on the gray-white expanse of Beinecke plaza, the endpoint of a large, heartening march and rally, where as the program was winding down I got to shake hands and exchange a few quick words with Jesse Jackson. He wasn't there for us that day—though he would be on other occasions—he was meeting with the administration, over what (probably labor-related) issue I can't remember, but seeing the crowd couldn't forbear interrupting his quick walk from the limo over to Woodbridge Hall. For all that the event was winding down, for all that Jesse had other business that day, his presence on the plaza sent a palpable stir into the air.

Jackson has been pilloried throughout his career as an opportunist: well, show me a politician who isn't. Show me a politician who doesn't need to be. What I knew back in my union days was that Jesse Jackson was the one national Democratic figure who could be counted on to show up—the one who would reliably be there when working people put bodies on the street to agitate for their rights. None of the rest of them gave a fuck. With what admixture of calculation and principle he did it, it would have been impossible to say: perhaps there was no real disentangling principle from calculation anyway, in someone who had built his political career and his constituency the way Jackson had. It didn't really matter: however you cut it, Jackson's was an enlightened opportunism. When you needed him, Jesse was there on the line. And that earned him, in my case, a gut-level loyalty that lingers even now, fifteen years on.

Which brings me to the question of the day: where are the enlightened Democratic opportunists now, and what's keeping them from being on the line at Camp Casey?

Put it another way: do we have any national Democrats who understand the uses and virtues of political theater? I notice in commentary here and there, among the more weak-kneed of our brothers and sisters (weakness of knee seeming to increase in direct proportion with nearness to the political center, or to D.C.), a tendency to disparage the Cindy phenomenon as "merely" theatrical, a political stunt. Though it's a touch less on point than it might be, this post by Ezra Klein is near enough (and near to hand), and besides it really sticks in my craw:

John Cole's right, this Michelle Malkin post, digging into the court records of Cindy Sheehan's divorce (which happened after Casey's death), is pretty damn vile. But in some ways, it's comforting. Michelle Malkin is doing her absolute best to clarify who is good and who is evil here, and she's doing it by being a vicious, repulsive, and base as she possibly can. I'm a little uncomfortable with Code Pink's involvement and the general explosion of Sheehan's encampment, but Malkin's actions seem custom designed to keep my support from flagging. Wherever that evil hack stands, I know I want to be on the other side.

"A little uncomfortable": my, Ezra, how delicate we are! For myself, I don't need some extraordinary vileness from Michelle Malkin to remind me what fucking side I'm on in this one—it was never in doubt.

Every so often I'm brought up short by the "discomfort" within the operative class, current or wannabe, toward political demonstration—as if it would be slumming to stand on a hot tarmac with a bunch of sweaty people holding a sign; as if it showed a lack of that so-prized seriousness to speak in and with symbols, rather than engaging in policy debate. As Cindy Sheehan is reminding us, we don't especially need policy debate right now. What we need, very badly need, are stories: and story is just what the theater of Camp Casey is giving us. The right-wing talking point—that Cindy Sheehan doesn't really want to engage in dialogue with George Bush, that her demand for the dialogue he won't give her (and wouldn't, even if he were improbably to meet with her) is a sort of playacting—is accurate, but beside the point. The relations of power are difficult to conceptualize, and can be even for people trained to do that sort of thing. There is nothing difficult, on the other hand, about the mother of a dead soldier standing ignored at the end of the man's driveway who sent her son to be killed, waiting stoically in the Texas sun for an answer she knows will never come. Nor is there anything about it that doesn't speak volumes of truth to the ugly situation in which we find our country, five years on in the Rove/Cheney regime.

I'm flabbergasted that anybody on the left has even a moment's hesitation about this, has the least qualm about making use of the gift of symbol Cindy Sheehan is presenting us. As far as I can tell, no elected Democrat other than Maxine Waters has showed up in Crawford to stand with Cindy, not even for a day—not even for an hour. Aren't they all on vacation now? What better things could they possibly have to do? The question at the head of this post isn't literal, of course: Jesse's not what he was in the days of his Presidential candidacy, or near-candidacy, and he seemingly has other fish to fry. And with all due respect to Rep. Waters, she's not where the action is either. But I imagine the electricity if someone with genuine star power and national presence—say, Barack Obama—were to make his way to Arlington West to pay a tribute. I imagine what it would do, the stir it would make, if someone with that kind of stature were to go down there and say, simply, I'm here for as long as Cindy is.

Forget principle. The people at Camp Casey are easy: as I can attest from my own brief activist career, a little love goes a long way. Isn't there a Democrat out there who wants to win some elections, and knows a bargain when he sees it? Isn't it worth trading a day's sweat for a place in the story, and the unending loyalty of Cindy Sheehan's base?

posted by michael  5:13:46 PM  
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Radical grief. So I come to check the blogs of a silly Saturday, when you don't expect much to be happening, and hey lookee, there's been something of a dust-up: at The Poor Man, The Editors has administered a righteous and thoroughly deserved ass-whupping to John Cole, on the occasion of this rancid little screed re: Cindy Sheehan, in which Cole rips off the mask of thoughtfulness and civility that had seduced a few lefty bloggers (er, ahem, harrr) into thinking he was some sort of reachable conservative. So thoroughly did The Poor Man eviscerate the poor man, so petulant and incoherent the victim's response, that anything further from me would be piling on.

Allow me, then, to pile on. I'm struck by the end of Cole's post, where he summarizes his position (if a series of angry, spasmodic twitches can properly be called a position) on the Cindy Sheehan matter:

I think the pimps in the anti-war left who are cynically exploiting this woman’s tragedy are evil. Even if she wants the attention to aid her cause. Atrios and the human debris such as he know what they are doing, and they represent the worst of the Democratic party.

"Cynically exploiting"? The anti-war left now rallying arouund Cindy Sheehan—and being rallied by her—has persevered in opposition to the war for three years and more, since the bully adventure was first bruited: in face of the contemptuous indifference of the corporate media, in face of repeated accusations, widely disseminated in that same media (as well as by John Cole's right-blogging compatriots), full of "objectively pro-terrorist" this and "borderline treasonous" that. We have been abused and vilified, and have held fast anyway to a deep and principled belief that what we've done in Iraq is wrong. Nobody's against the war because it's such a great way to make out. We might be guilty of an impractical excess of sincerity, but by what sane measure can the anti-war left be accused of cynicism here?

Is Cindy Sheehan being used? Yes, obviously: exactly because, and just to the extent that, she has worked for the last year to make herself useful. To whom? To the very people who are supposed to be "cynically exploiting" her—and would be guilty of it, according to Cole, "even if she wanted the attention to aid her cause." Slick work with the pronoun there, John, but ultimately too little too late: it's not possible to forget that "her" cause is the cause of the antiwar left, that they're one and the same thing.

Cindy Sheehan is a conscious political actor, as Cole himself is able to acknowledge (and does, several times in the course of his rant, in an injured tone) when it suits him polemically. Able to acknowledge, but painfully unable to comprehend. The "cynical exploiters" frame Cole recurs to—regardless that it would refute his argument that Cindy Sheehan has made herself a public figure who "gets no free pass" (at least Cole knows enough to stay away from the phrase "fair game")—is an index of what I take to be an ingrained, almost unconscious elitism. (A word that's supposed to be reserved solely for winger usage, I know, but it's too apt here to pass up.) Cole mutters darkly about how Atrios and the rest of the anti-war scum "know what they are doing": and their knowing is the obverse of what Cole assumes is Cindy Sheehan's unknowing. In this little drama of left-wing perfidy, Sheehan is a strayed and endangered naif, a woman addled by grieving; nothing in Cole's imagination allows him to credit an ordinary American citizen, a housewife and mother no less, with having taken real political agency for herself.

Which is to say that John Cole has no genuine notion of citizenship in a democratic republic.

So what do I think of the whole situation? I think she should be left alone and ignored. She is a grieving mother, and she can do or say what she wants, and hopefully, some day, she will find her peace.

But she doesn’t have the right to set policy, she doesn’t have the right to make demands of the President, and she most certainly doesn’t have the right to be used as a weapon by people, who, like herself, want only to savagely attack this administration and expect that everyone will just sit back and take it and not respond.

[Let's pass in silence the ludicrous, self-cancelling illogic of an expression that has Sheehan being "used as a weapon" by people like herself. Not to mention the ludicrous idea that the attack dogs of the right have to be defended against her, lest us overbearing lefties cow them into embarrassed, morally constrained silence.] Apparently, I was brought up wrong. Somewhere in my young life I picked up the idea that the great glory of America was that this was a nation of Cindy Sheehans—all of us with not just the right and opportunity but the obligation to consider policy, to agitate for our understanding of the public good, to hold the leaders of our government—officials elected by us, or appointed in our names—to account. I have to thank John Cole for pointing out how dangerously such an idea approaches to lèse majesté: I mean, to think of some nobody demanding things of His Highness the President!

The Sheehans may hail from California, but as far as Cole and his ilk are concerned they're flyover Americans: the sort of suburbanites that make good political props, and otherwise exhaust their usefulness in voting Republican and supplying young men and women to die in the latest crusade. Cole makes the requisite sympathetic noises about Cindy Sheehan's tragedy and her grief, but it's a little hard to take "I sympathize" all that seriously when it's followed immediately by, "Now shut the fuck up." In any case it's clear that these noises are merely a rhetorical ploy. Cole has no genuine respect for Mrs. Sheehan's grief, and can't, because he has no template for understanding it. This is not a private grief being exploited for some (almost by definition illegitimate) public purpose. Cindy Sheehan's grief isn't being used to advance a politics, whether hers or someone else's: Cindy Sheehan's grief is her politics. Politics was the cause of it, and politics is the necessary site for its resolution.

After years of practice reducing all national discourse to the affective plane—insisting that everything be justified, or condemned, with respect to the wound we suffered on 9/11—you'd think the wingers would have a better grasp of Cindy Sheehan's politics than they seem to. But maybe it's just that disorienting to see your own central propaganda move turned against you. Add John Cole to the growing list of evidence that the war party recognize the threat in Cindy Sheehan, and what she represents, and have no remote idea what to do about it.

posted by michael  1:03:38 AM  
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Where have you gone, Cary Grant? Before reading Salon's Richard Speer, I don't think I'd understood how the death of Peter Jennings registered in the symbolic realm:

When Peter Jennings succumbed to lung cancer on Aug. 7, the world lost more than a news anchor; it lost an archetype. Above and beyond his contributions as a journalist, Jennings held an appeal in the popular mind owing as much to the Golden Age of Hollywood as to the "Big Three" glory days of network news. The essence of that appeal, his smooth urbanity and air of cultivation, was the precise charisma that had made film stars Frederic March, Cary Grant and David Niven such icons of sophistication in their day; and it is this same appeal that now, with Jennings gone, is utterly missing from a news universe populated by smarmy Shepard Smiths and hipper-than-thou Anderson Coopers.

Peter Jennings and the death of panache

"Discriminating viewers in recent years had but one choice if they sought an evening news presenter who would deliver the day's stories intelligently and with a lagniappe of soul-soothing panache," says Speer: myself, I suppose I was never "discriminating" enough to realize I was making a primarily aesthetic choice when I flipped on the network news. I can't recall ever watching any of those programs for the "soul-soothing" qualities of their presenters, either—I shudder a bit at the thought of having a soul that might be soothed by one of the talking-haircut tribe, no matter what the degree of male suavity exhibited. But then, I stopped watching network news (to the extent that I ever watched habitually enough for it to be something I actively stopped doing) a long time ago, given how limited the actual information payout was from that 22 1/2 minutes (or whatever it now is) of non-commercial airtime. I can think of lots better ways to kill a half-hour, if it comes to that.

Doghouse Riley, while giving Jennings his due as a "pretty good newsman" and "by far the best of the lot in the aftermath of 9/11," has the appropriate specific response to Speer:

Peter Jennings will always represent, to me, the rapid downward spiral of television news from, well, news to entertainment. He's not Cary Grant; he's the guy in the prop Burberry reporting from London in case the semi-literate couldn't figure out why it was called World News Tonite.

But what I really like about DR's post is how the Speer piece leads him to meditate on the peculiar horror of Other People's Nostalgias:

Reading someone waxing nostalgic about Peter Jennings makes me wish that someone somewhere had explained nostalgia to me the same way they explained the Galactic Red Shift, with a balloon covered in dots. You blow the thing up and all the other dots recede from you. This is your nostalgia. But those other galactic dots contain populated worlds full of people born later than you, and their nostalgia will be your Painful Enough To Live Through the First Time. And it will never get any better. First disposable commercial anachronistic "fun" like Freedom Rock or the return of Disco will zoom past you accompanied by Doppler sound effects, and you think that little shudder you felt was just the breeze it created. Next thing you know, that audience is in its thirties and getting down to the serious business of pining away for its lost youth, and people are actually remembering Queen fondly. Or elbowing each other in the ribs about some Commodore 64 screen capture. Once that one whooshes by you you know those goosebumps aren't due to a temporary temperature drop. It's the chill of the grave. And under the circumstances it doesn't seem all that bad.

I don't usually rip off somebody else's posts quite this shamelessly, but damn that's good. I'm putting it up here so I don't forget about it.

posted by michael  12:47:45 PM  
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All quiet on the blogstern front. April may be poetically cruel, but August in the Midwest is the brutalest month.

I'm not a creature of the heat: one of the unexpected trials of my near-decade's residence in the South in the '90s was missing fall (real fall) and winter. The eight months of summer were bad enough on their own, but I also found out that my emotional rhythms were tied to the progress of seasons; I felt always obscurely wrong-footed living with the two (wet-hot and wet-cool) Louisiana gave me. It's easy to complain about the Chicago winter—everybody does—but I feel there's a certain solidarity in the complaining. In the north, winter is somehow entirely objective: it's too massive an event for you to be able to take it personally—it's just something that happens, and it happens to everybody equally. Once in Louisiana, I recall, we had a December day that never made it out of the twenties (LSU actually cancelled classes because of the threat of frost), and I stepped out of doors into the meat-locker version of Baton Rouge and thought, why is the air doing this to me? I was mad at everybody all day.

[Fall, by the way, has a taste of its own. To me the most delicious day of the year is that day in late summer, towards evening, where something in the tang of the cooling air and the sound of the leaves prophesies the year's turning. No, it's not fall yet: but fall is there, just over the northern horizon, moving stealthily on.]

Right now my mom and my sisters are on a week's vacation in Pensacola. Every July and August, after I turned 10, we'd head to the Gulf Coast to catch the rays and the off-season rates: and I'd stay in the air-conditioning with whatever reading material I could scrounge while the family walked up and down the hot, sticky beach collecting buckets full of utterly common seashells that somebody always thought we'd "do something" with, in the crafts way: and never did. This year, I begged off, pleading work—there's a lot of it to get through this month—but as much as I want to be with my family now, close to the first anniversary of my dad's death, Florida in the second week of August would have been a tough sell even if I could have got away cleanly from Chicago.

August saps me. A suite of 90-degree days, head down shuttling between artificially cooled caves, leaves me lethargic and weltschmerzy. This is the month of deja vu: everything seems like it's being done or said as just one more in an endless series of repetitions. Bush vacation? Check. Torture stories? Tell me a new one. Outrageous political appointments? Electoral manipulations? Wars, and rumors of war? Done it all already, haven't we?

At the moment, I don't have enough in me for passionate blogging, or for feeling like I can make any very worthwhile intervention in any of the current topics. And I don't really like to blog for purely phatic purposes (though this entry comes close)—I like to imagine when I post that I'm doing something useful, at least in some theoretical sense. I'm pretty sure I'll get the mojo back—but for the time being, updates here will be sporadic. Let me plug, collectively, the great blogs listed over on the left—they all come out of my Bloglines subscriptions, so you know they make up my own daily or near daily-reading. Most of the time, somebody there has already said whatever I might have thought to say, anyway.

posted by michael  2:35:03 PM  
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Another one of nature's Republicans in Democratic clothing—and another in the lengthening list of reasons why I've virtually stopped checking in over at Daily Kos. Here's Squealer (Kosname, Armando), handing down the word (to mix Orwell metaphors) on thoughtcrime and punishment, the post in its entirety:

Let me be the first asshole to tell you that bullshit fraud theories and bullshit conspiracy theories are not welcome.

Markos has said it. He means it.

I believe tonight was a great night and a sign that a Fighting Dem Party can and will take back the Congress in 2006.

I don't want to hear baseless theories on fraud and other nonsense. I think, no, I know markos feels the same way.

You want to waste your time, do it somewhere else.

My tip jar will be the fraudster's chance to troll rate me. Cuz once you start diarying your cock and bull fraud theories, markos will show you the door. With my applause in the background.

Via well-known bomb-thrower Ron Brynaert, who contrasts this, aptly and sadly, with Billmon's thoughfully jaundiced post about Clermont County and Ohio electoral shenanigans. "Aptly" because, in dKos terms, Billmon's an Old Bolshevik: apparently the Revolution (as interpreted by Armando) has moved on, and left him in its historical wake.

Quite a performance, no? I've never seen anybody puff his chest out quite so far, or strut quite so hard (outside of, say, some of the Hindrocket's bolder forays), just to proclaim himself somebody else's bitch.

A thug's a thug whatever his ideology. On an inspirational night when an insurgent Democratic candidate came within an eyelash of taking a safer-than-safe GOP House seat, buoyed by a campaign that testified to the strength of the revivified Democratic grass roots, you or I might not have felt moved to such bloody-mindedness as to immediately (and with such ugly relish) threaten our own community with a purge. Then again, we're not queueing up for the chance to be operators in the Grand New Kos Reform Democratic Party, either. Know what? If that's what it looks like, count me the fuck out.

posted by michael  9:50:33 PM  
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Uncommon knowledge. In the NYT business section today (a place where politics goes to die), John Markoff reports on a new round shaping up in the war between P2P filesharing and the corporate power opposed to it, using anonymous, trust-based networks called "darknets": and introduces the subject, tellingly, from the vantage of threatened corporate prerogative:

Briefly buoyed by their Supreme Court victory on file sharing, Hollywood and the recording industry are on the verge of confronting more technically sophisticated opponents.

At a computer security conference in Las Vegas on Thursday, an Irish software designer described a new version of a peer-to-peer file-sharing system that he says will make it easier to share digital information anonymously and make detection by corporations and governments far more difficult.

My own quick reaction to this, by contrast, was to be thankful that Ireland's still a more or less free country.

The question is, how much of a cretin do you have to be to write this, as a third-graf summary of the case for readers who won't go any farther—

Others have described similar efforts to build a so-called darknet that aims to shield the identities of those sharing information. The issue is complicated by the fact that the small group of technologists designing the new systems say their goal is to create tools to circumvent censorship and political repression - not to abet copyright violation.

when barely an inch down the page you follow it with this:

The Irish programmer, Ian Clarke, is a 28-year-old free-speech advocate who five years ago introduced a software system called Freenet that was intended to make it impossible for governments and corporations to restrict the flow of any kind of digital information. ... Though he says his aim is political - helping dissidents in countries where computer traffic is monitored by the government, for example - Mr. Clarke is open about his disdain for copyright laws, asserting that his technology would produce a world in which all information is freely shared.

Cretinous enough, I guess—so cocooned in corporatist ideology, so glibly, thoughtlessly certain that there's no politics in the politics of copyright and "intellectual property"—as to be deaf to the contradiction between what you claim the P2P activists are doing and what they actually say they're doing.

The late-20th century stealth revolution of enclosure—which is destroying the American intellectual commons as surely as the English agricultural commons was destroyed two centuries earlier—is in its very late stages now. It involves and is a form of political repression every bit as much as, even often as nakedly as, the direct government-sponsored censorship of speech. (BTW, if you've never read Seth Finkelstein, blogging his unhappy experience as a foot soldier in the DMCA wars, this is as good a time as any to start.) It's a revolution against which copyright violation is, as far as I'm concerned, a form of (for the most part sadly unconscious) guerrilla warfare. I'm far from imagining that a New York Times tech reporter would demonstrate any sensitivity to Free Culture-style critique. I might have hoped, though, that he'd show at least a glimmer of awareness that such critique existed—or that when people talk about freedom, and create tools to realize it, that's a political act.

posted by michael  2:17:30 PM  
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