GREAT weekend to be an invalid with free Showtime, as Tracey Ullman's State of the Union debuts, Sundance plays David Buckland's Art from the Arctic, and the previous season of Top Gear makes it to BBC America. I'm sure the kids will have them up on the YouTube at some point.
Really, it's one thing for British car shows to be smarter than our car shows; it's quite another that they're smarter than our news programs.
(Tracey's 5AM Buffalo news anchor, looking over copy for Today's Top International Stories: "Oh, Paris Hilton miscarried in Dubai! So sad.")
Me, I've been climbing stairs since Saturday, used the cane instead of crutches since I got home, and can now sleep on my stomach again, which is what I'm heading upstairs to do more of.
Monday, March 31
Friday, March 28
All Is, Well...
"THE war that I prefer." Also translated into French. There's two lines of Italian at the top, but it's too hard to read the print well enough to stick it in a translator. Like the man said, who'd have suspected that fifty years after the war we'd be buying Japanese electronics, driving German cars, and performing cunnilingus?
Thanks for all the good wishes. I did wake up, though apparently about a half-hour later than they expected. I'm about 50% more hobbled than before, and soreness is starting to set in, making it advisable not to sit or lie in one position for very long, but the doc said I could walk on it as I saw fit. He said that in the presence of my Poor Wife, but it didn't take; she's been on my case every time I get up to do something for myself. I getting around with my cane. The crutches are a bit much for motoring between three rooms. The prep nurse wanted me to get a walker, due to my advancing years. That was probably the worst part of the whole experience.
Even though my relationship with allopathy remains chilly, I must say I marvel every time I come into contact with its workers, who do a difficult job with a near-universal good cheer, and always laugh at my jokes.
Too painful right now to consider sitting long enough to write. Enjoy the weekend.
Wednesday, March 26
Olio
• I'm spending the day trying to figure out how to survive on one floor of the house for four days, which is not as easy as it sounds. My main concern is having everything I'm gonna want at hand, because asking my Poor Wife to go fetch something is just going to make her want to kill me that much more excruciatingly.
• I have to make sure that, should I fail to wake from anesthesia, I die knowing, if only in a medulla oblongata sort of way, that I once bravely shook an impotent fist at WRTV-6 News, the Six Flags Over Newark of local news teams, an operation remarkably incompetent even by local Indianapolis news standards, which don't even exist.
WRTV began life as WFBM ("Woof-Boom"), Indiana's first television station. They seriously lost the thread in the late-70s, when the newly-ascendant schlock merchants at ABC demanded more oomph, more zazz, in their local affiliates, and picked up RTV, leaving perennial wallflower WTHR-13 (formerly WLW-I) with the choice of switching to NBC or committing corporate suicide after leaving an ugly, self-pitying note. (It chose wrong.) But ABC was a horrible match for 6; it was the home of Nightly "News" with a Speech Impediment, the "triumph" of "style" over information, while 6 News had long since perfected the art of lacking luster with a Hoosier flair. The two never seemed to mesh. A decade ago 6 tried having their married co-anchors have an affair, then divorce their spouses and marry each other, but even that didn't help the ratings. (I remain convinced the station contrived this, perhaps even introducing aphrodisiacs into the office coffee.)
They've been mired in last place now forever, while once-skinned-and-scorned Channel 13, which manages to embrace and embody the concept of wasting a nightly ninety-minutes' worth of television resources on openly self-satisfied pecksniffery and $2 corporate blowjobs, reigns supreme.
Six got desperate enough last fall to tout the selection of a New Anchor Team. I don't know, but I strongly suspect, that people in The Industry realize how fugging futile this sort of thing is. For one thing, what are you going to find with a nationwide Anchor Search? Answer, some permutation of exactly what they got, which is a racially-balanced duo ("One black, one white, one ash blonde") who appear to have majored in Artificiality with a minor in Polished Surfaces. And they promoted these two like Centrally-sited Hoosiers were environmentally-impoverished zoo animals eager to give anything thrown over the bars of their cages a hopeful sniff. Olfaction is very old, and very basic! Desperation unmistakably smells like desperation!
Anyway, it must not have succeeded in accordance with their hopes, since this winter they hit upon the stratagem of running their newscasts when no one else was still on the air--namely at 7PM--which means that my Poor Wife may now grab the controls and tune them in when the other six weather forecasts she's viewed in the past two hours didn't yield satisfactory results. And I happened into the room last night around :20 past just in time to hear their story on--no, I swear, and this time I mean it--Pizza Hut's new delivery menu items.
And...that's not all! Mr. Porn 'Stach kept pronouncing it "Pisa".
• Sap's rising: Last week minute "Libertarian" Republican governor Mitch Daniels signed into law a bill requiring new businesses which sell "sexually-explicit materials" to register with the Indiana Attorney General, in order to make it easier for local police to "monitor" them. A booksellers' group is threatening a First Amendment lawsuit, claiming the law would require registration by anyone selling anything containing something an Indiana state legislator would describe as "sexual content" while he perused it on his lunch hour. The group says it first suspected the law was unconstitutionally broad when it realized the Indiana state legislature was considering it.
More fun with unselfconscious public admissions as the fine folks in Carmel return from wherever it is they winter in time to renew objections to scurrilously-posed Victoria's Secret mannequins. The Racist Star attends the debate:
See ya on the Other Side, and thanks again for the cranes, D.
• I have to make sure that, should I fail to wake from anesthesia, I die knowing, if only in a medulla oblongata sort of way, that I once bravely shook an impotent fist at WRTV-6 News, the Six Flags Over Newark of local news teams, an operation remarkably incompetent even by local Indianapolis news standards, which don't even exist.
WRTV began life as WFBM ("Woof-Boom"), Indiana's first television station. They seriously lost the thread in the late-70s, when the newly-ascendant schlock merchants at ABC demanded more oomph, more zazz, in their local affiliates, and picked up RTV, leaving perennial wallflower WTHR-13 (formerly WLW-I) with the choice of switching to NBC or committing corporate suicide after leaving an ugly, self-pitying note. (It chose wrong.) But ABC was a horrible match for 6; it was the home of Nightly "News" with a Speech Impediment, the "triumph" of "style" over information, while 6 News had long since perfected the art of lacking luster with a Hoosier flair. The two never seemed to mesh. A decade ago 6 tried having their married co-anchors have an affair, then divorce their spouses and marry each other, but even that didn't help the ratings. (I remain convinced the station contrived this, perhaps even introducing aphrodisiacs into the office coffee.)
They've been mired in last place now forever, while once-skinned-and-scorned Channel 13, which manages to embrace and embody the concept of wasting a nightly ninety-minutes' worth of television resources on openly self-satisfied pecksniffery and $2 corporate blowjobs, reigns supreme.
Six got desperate enough last fall to tout the selection of a New Anchor Team. I don't know, but I strongly suspect, that people in The Industry realize how fugging futile this sort of thing is. For one thing, what are you going to find with a nationwide Anchor Search? Answer, some permutation of exactly what they got, which is a racially-balanced duo ("One black, one white, one ash blonde") who appear to have majored in Artificiality with a minor in Polished Surfaces. And they promoted these two like Centrally-sited Hoosiers were environmentally-impoverished zoo animals eager to give anything thrown over the bars of their cages a hopeful sniff. Olfaction is very old, and very basic! Desperation unmistakably smells like desperation!
Anyway, it must not have succeeded in accordance with their hopes, since this winter they hit upon the stratagem of running their newscasts when no one else was still on the air--namely at 7PM--which means that my Poor Wife may now grab the controls and tune them in when the other six weather forecasts she's viewed in the past two hours didn't yield satisfactory results. And I happened into the room last night around :20 past just in time to hear their story on--no, I swear, and this time I mean it--Pizza Hut's new delivery menu items.
And...that's not all! Mr. Porn 'Stach kept pronouncing it "Pisa".
• Sap's rising: Last week minute "Libertarian" Republican governor Mitch Daniels signed into law a bill requiring new businesses which sell "sexually-explicit materials" to register with the Indiana Attorney General, in order to make it easier for local police to "monitor" them. A booksellers' group is threatening a First Amendment lawsuit, claiming the law would require registration by anyone selling anything containing something an Indiana state legislator would describe as "sexual content" while he perused it on his lunch hour. The group says it first suspected the law was unconstitutionally broad when it realized the Indiana state legislature was considering it.
More fun with unselfconscious public admissions as the fine folks in Carmel return from wherever it is they winter in time to renew objections to scurrilously-posed Victoria's Secret mannequins. The Racist Star attends the debate:
“I’m concerned about our children. Why are they having sex at 12?” Victoria’s Secret protester Lori Baxter said in an interview before the council vote March 17. “Could it be that we’ve promoted sex so long, we’ve become desensitized?”Maybe you're just doin' it wrong.
See ya on the Other Side, and thanks again for the cranes, D.
Tuesday, March 25
Sitting Targets
I'M not sure now where I ran into this, a couple weeks back--was someone using it to contrast John McCain's commitment to civilian military leadership, or his willingness to criticize it, then and now? Anyway, it's from his 1999 book Faith of My Fathers:
We'd like to avoid calling this complete and utter bullshit; in order to do so, Senator McCain needs to admit that the reason he found no post-war evidence to revise the judgment is that he never looked for any, this being the only possible way it works.
Meanwhile, we'll just pass over the question of how McCain comes to know "what it takes to win a war".
John McCain's combat assignment in Vietnam began in the spring of 1967. The active phase ended when he was shot down on October 26.
For entertainment purposes only, here's a brief timeline of the bombing restrictions imposed on Operation Rolling Thunder (which began on March 2, 1965), which McCain was a part of:
• Until May, 1965, American bombing attacks were confined to the area south of the 20th Parallel unless there was special authorization.
• President Johnson lifted that restriction in May, but maintained a thirty-mile restricted zone around Hanoi and the Chinese border, and a ten-mile zone around Haiphong.
• In April 1966 restrictions were lifted on the rest of the North. In June, petroleum storage facilities in Hanoi and Haiphong were added.
• In February 1967--that is, before the Forrestal was assigned to Operation Rolling Thunder--restrictions on all other Hanoi-area targets was lifted. (John McCain would be shot down over Hanoi.)
In all of this the emphasis was on so-called "armed reconnaissance" missions, in which pilots were free to choose any promising target they found. In 1966--with greater restrictions on choice of target than McCain would experience--only 1000 of our 79,000 sorties were aimed at targets directed by the White House. We flew 108,000 bombing missions in 1967.
There was a restriction on the total number of targets we hit in North Vietnam; we were able to identify fewer than thirty major industrial targets in a country which was basically agricultural. In the event we managed to hit in total nearly a hundred industrial and military targets in the North. This points out something that is seldom remarked upon: not only did we drop more than three times our WWII bomb tonnage on Vietnam, we did so in pursuit of every available target, not the selective bombing of the European theatre.
Oh, it gets better. McCain's "postwar studies" seem to have failed to include a few well-understood aspects of civilian control, such as, oh, the general philosophy behind bombing of the North.
One does not have to be an admirer of the program, or the people behind it, in order to understand it, just as one need not read too far into military history (or any other type of history) to recognize there is often a minimum of two sides per story. Similarly one need not read too much about American involvement Vietnam to get the sense that rewriting that history in an effort to excuse or exonerate the military brass (such as Admiral John S. McCain, who, as Commander-in-Chief of the US Pacific Command from 1968-1972 was directly responsible for all bombing north of the DMZ) for its abysmal performance has been a growth industry for most of the thirty years since we left.
The game continues, incrementally adjusting itself over time to unpleasant realities that were undeniable to everyone else forty years ago. We're still fighting over the petty jealousies aroused by Kennedy returning Maxwell Taylor to active duty and eventually making him Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (see H.R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty), even though he retired again (to become ambassador to South Vietnam) before we began bombing the North ("officially" should be understood in almost any statement about that war). Taylor supposedly chose ingratiating himself with his civilian masters over relaying the more aggressive approach favored by the "real soldiers" of the Joint Chiefs, which supposedly created a retroactive power vacuum that Johnson/McNamara moved into. It's the classic stab-in-the-back routine, which manages to ignore--in the interest of persuading the uninitiated, apparently--the fact that the Johnson administration nevertheless, in technical parlance, still bombed the living shit out of the North. The much-derided "political considerations" it factored into the equation consisted of a) trying not to provoke a million Chinese from entering the ground war, b) intending to convince the North that we were serious and intended to stay for the duration, which we took to be the bête noir of their ignorant peasant hopes, and c) maintaining the primary targets in the North until last, so that the Viet minh had something worth salvaging to bring them to the bargaining table. That these considerations were met with derision (or simple ignorance) by McCain's squadron, if true, is one reason we do not conduct military affairs on the basis of a straw poll among fighter jocks.
That this did not work in no way invalidates it as strategy, and, if anything, it points to the fact that a more compact schedule--more compact than the ten months between bombing above the 20th Parallel and essentially removing all restrictions--would have been a bigger failure still. Hanoi anticipated that the US would avail itself of the Big Zoom Zoom Big Boom Boom approach as less costly economically and politically than using infantry (which, of course, we'd manage to do as well). Petroleum storage was already underground before Rolling Thunder began. In places there were ten alternative routes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Once the US destroyed a steel bridge it was replaced with a pontoon bridge which could be hidden during the day. Industry was moved into the mountains and the jungle; the population of Hanoi decreased by three-quarters. These were a largely agrarian people not just used to throwing out foreign invaders--they were used to dealing with monsoons.
The political and military leadership of the North understood the war to be primarily political. We didn't, and we still don't. We never understood the Vietnamese, or how to fight an insurgency; our commanders tried to refight WWII. Our largely indiscriminate bombing program in the South, and ham-fisted relocation efforts, served to magnify Vietnamese resentment of the Western colonials and their corrupt Catholic puppets. And yet some of us are still trying to argue that if we'd only fought a little more WWII we'd have won. Like the tout sheet says we were supposed to.
And that, really, is all the answer you need.
When I was first on the Forrestal, every man in my squadron had thought Washington’s air war plans were senseless. The target list was so restricted that we had to go back and hit the same targets over and over again. It’s hard to get a sense that you are advancing the war effort when you are prevented from doing anything more than bouncing the rubble of an utterly insignificant target. When President Johnson ordered an end to Operation Rolling Thunder in 1968, the campaign was judged to have had no measurable impact on the enemy. Most of our pilots flying the missions believed that our targets were virtually worthless. In all candor, we thought our civilian commanders were complete idiots who didn’t have the least notion of what it took to win the war. I found no evidence in postwar studies of the Johnson administration’s political and military decision-making during the war that caused me to revise that harsh judgement.
We'd like to avoid calling this complete and utter bullshit; in order to do so, Senator McCain needs to admit that the reason he found no post-war evidence to revise the judgment is that he never looked for any, this being the only possible way it works.
Meanwhile, we'll just pass over the question of how McCain comes to know "what it takes to win a war".
John McCain's combat assignment in Vietnam began in the spring of 1967. The active phase ended when he was shot down on October 26.
For entertainment purposes only, here's a brief timeline of the bombing restrictions imposed on Operation Rolling Thunder (which began on March 2, 1965), which McCain was a part of:
• Until May, 1965, American bombing attacks were confined to the area south of the 20th Parallel unless there was special authorization.
• President Johnson lifted that restriction in May, but maintained a thirty-mile restricted zone around Hanoi and the Chinese border, and a ten-mile zone around Haiphong.
• In April 1966 restrictions were lifted on the rest of the North. In June, petroleum storage facilities in Hanoi and Haiphong were added.
• In February 1967--that is, before the Forrestal was assigned to Operation Rolling Thunder--restrictions on all other Hanoi-area targets was lifted. (John McCain would be shot down over Hanoi.)
In all of this the emphasis was on so-called "armed reconnaissance" missions, in which pilots were free to choose any promising target they found. In 1966--with greater restrictions on choice of target than McCain would experience--only 1000 of our 79,000 sorties were aimed at targets directed by the White House. We flew 108,000 bombing missions in 1967.
There was a restriction on the total number of targets we hit in North Vietnam; we were able to identify fewer than thirty major industrial targets in a country which was basically agricultural. In the event we managed to hit in total nearly a hundred industrial and military targets in the North. This points out something that is seldom remarked upon: not only did we drop more than three times our WWII bomb tonnage on Vietnam, we did so in pursuit of every available target, not the selective bombing of the European theatre.
Oh, it gets better. McCain's "postwar studies" seem to have failed to include a few well-understood aspects of civilian control, such as, oh, the general philosophy behind bombing of the North.
One does not have to be an admirer of the program, or the people behind it, in order to understand it, just as one need not read too far into military history (or any other type of history) to recognize there is often a minimum of two sides per story. Similarly one need not read too much about American involvement Vietnam to get the sense that rewriting that history in an effort to excuse or exonerate the military brass (such as Admiral John S. McCain, who, as Commander-in-Chief of the US Pacific Command from 1968-1972 was directly responsible for all bombing north of the DMZ) for its abysmal performance has been a growth industry for most of the thirty years since we left.
The game continues, incrementally adjusting itself over time to unpleasant realities that were undeniable to everyone else forty years ago. We're still fighting over the petty jealousies aroused by Kennedy returning Maxwell Taylor to active duty and eventually making him Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (see H.R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty), even though he retired again (to become ambassador to South Vietnam) before we began bombing the North ("officially" should be understood in almost any statement about that war). Taylor supposedly chose ingratiating himself with his civilian masters over relaying the more aggressive approach favored by the "real soldiers" of the Joint Chiefs, which supposedly created a retroactive power vacuum that Johnson/McNamara moved into. It's the classic stab-in-the-back routine, which manages to ignore--in the interest of persuading the uninitiated, apparently--the fact that the Johnson administration nevertheless, in technical parlance, still bombed the living shit out of the North. The much-derided "political considerations" it factored into the equation consisted of a) trying not to provoke a million Chinese from entering the ground war, b) intending to convince the North that we were serious and intended to stay for the duration, which we took to be the bête noir of their ignorant peasant hopes, and c) maintaining the primary targets in the North until last, so that the Viet minh had something worth salvaging to bring them to the bargaining table. That these considerations were met with derision (or simple ignorance) by McCain's squadron, if true, is one reason we do not conduct military affairs on the basis of a straw poll among fighter jocks.
That this did not work in no way invalidates it as strategy, and, if anything, it points to the fact that a more compact schedule--more compact than the ten months between bombing above the 20th Parallel and essentially removing all restrictions--would have been a bigger failure still. Hanoi anticipated that the US would avail itself of the Big Zoom Zoom Big Boom Boom approach as less costly economically and politically than using infantry (which, of course, we'd manage to do as well). Petroleum storage was already underground before Rolling Thunder began. In places there were ten alternative routes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Once the US destroyed a steel bridge it was replaced with a pontoon bridge which could be hidden during the day. Industry was moved into the mountains and the jungle; the population of Hanoi decreased by three-quarters. These were a largely agrarian people not just used to throwing out foreign invaders--they were used to dealing with monsoons.
The political and military leadership of the North understood the war to be primarily political. We didn't, and we still don't. We never understood the Vietnamese, or how to fight an insurgency; our commanders tried to refight WWII. Our largely indiscriminate bombing program in the South, and ham-fisted relocation efforts, served to magnify Vietnamese resentment of the Western colonials and their corrupt Catholic puppets. And yet some of us are still trying to argue that if we'd only fought a little more WWII we'd have won. Like the tout sheet says we were supposed to.
And that, really, is all the answer you need.
Monday, March 24
When This Sort Of Impulse Strikes, Sit Down And Try To Remain Calm Until It Passes.
Elaine Sciolino, "A Guide to the French. Handle With Care." Times, March 23
SOMEWHERE in Nabokov--I can't find the quote online, so I suspect it's not in his fiction but something he relayed somewhere about the strange country he lived in for a time, the one called "America"--is the travel writer who says "The fjords are too famous to mention, and all Norwegians love flowers." It's one of two fjord-based lines with currency Chez Riley, the other coming from Bart and Lisa's disappointment with the predictability of Knightboat ("The Crime-Solving Boat!") scripts:
Bart: Oh, every week there's a canal.
Lisa: Or an inlet.
Bart: Or a fjord.
Sciolino exits the Times Paris bureau she's chiefed since 2002, and she writes a throwaway about how to stereotype Parisians in order to seem more like a stereotypical American. A harmless enough bon-bon, even if it was made out of melted Hershey bars. The only reason I stopped was the quickening dread of sensing Maureen Dowd just pages away.
But then we started off badly, Ms Sciolino and I, not to mention it was the weekend and they'd just refilled my Vicodin prescription:
Is it just me, or the Vicodin, or has this construction suddenly taken off like home makeovers? I swear to god I recently saw "The novelist Leo Tolstoy once said...." As opposed to Leo Tolstoy, the upholsterer? Would "wrote Henri de Bornier" have left millions of Times readers stranded before they got past the drop cap? Would the Ombudsman's inbox be flooded with, "Henri de Bornier did not say that. A character in a play he wrote said it. Oh, and he was also a poet. Cancel my subsription." ?
Okay, okay, so maybe it would have left an unconscionable amount of white space. Still, I would have been in a sunnier mood when I reached:
Welcome Home, Ms Sciolino! You'll have plenty of time to unpack before joining your fellow Americans drinking themselves into a stupor for Cinco de Mayo.
But then it got ugly.
Sheesh, your own paper has spent most of the past decade "correcting" the statements of George W. Bush to make him sound like a native speaker of English, let alone one not suffering from alcohol-induced brain bubbles. And before that it was busy proving Al Gore was a serial prevaricator by quoting stuff that might have been a lie if he'd said it. The French system sounds like sanity itself compared with that. In fact it sounds close to ideal, avoiding mass hysteria over stupid off-the-cuff gaffes, provided we know what's going on.
And considering the eagerness with which your paper and others granted anonymity to the real, proven liars of the Bush administration, one is forced to conclude that what is missing from the French system in your estimation is the right of journalists to decide who gets gunned down. The continual expressions of working journalists of faith in their field is truly remarkable, especially when you consider you can't find an ounce of it in anyone outside the field.
I like to think it's the casual slobbiness of Americans (moi aussi) which is at fault here, although I'm not exactly certain this holds in all those American versions of the Rue du Bac, either. I get eyeballed at Keystone at the Crossing, fer chrissakes, although the more astute among the haute monde note the $600 sunglasses and $200 rock-climbing shoes and visibly relax, having pegged me as a harmless eccentric. Still, if only Sciolino had skimped on the introduction she could have managed to work in one or two more ambassadors, a mid-level British peer, and the ghosts of F. Scott and Zelda.
Elaine F. Scolino, born Buffalo, New York, circa 1949, per Wikipedia.
SOMEWHERE in Nabokov--I can't find the quote online, so I suspect it's not in his fiction but something he relayed somewhere about the strange country he lived in for a time, the one called "America"--is the travel writer who says "The fjords are too famous to mention, and all Norwegians love flowers." It's one of two fjord-based lines with currency Chez Riley, the other coming from Bart and Lisa's disappointment with the predictability of Knightboat ("The Crime-Solving Boat!") scripts:
Bart: Oh, every week there's a canal.
Lisa: Or an inlet.
Bart: Or a fjord.
Sciolino exits the Times Paris bureau she's chiefed since 2002, and she writes a throwaway about how to stereotype Parisians in order to seem more like a stereotypical American. A harmless enough bon-bon, even if it was made out of melted Hershey bars. The only reason I stopped was the quickening dread of sensing Maureen Dowd just pages away.
But then we started off badly, Ms Sciolino and I, not to mention it was the weekend and they'd just refilled my Vicodin prescription:
“Every man has two countries, his own and France,” says a character in a play by the 19th- century poet and playwright Henri de Bornier.
Is it just me, or the Vicodin, or has this construction suddenly taken off like home makeovers? I swear to god I recently saw "The novelist Leo Tolstoy once said...." As opposed to Leo Tolstoy, the upholsterer? Would "wrote Henri de Bornier" have left millions of Times readers stranded before they got past the drop cap? Would the Ombudsman's inbox be flooded with, "Henri de Bornier did not say that. A character in a play he wrote said it. Oh, and he was also a poet. Cancel my subsription." ?
Okay, okay, so maybe it would have left an unconscionable amount of white space. Still, I would have been in a sunnier mood when I reached:
1: Look in the Rear-View Mirror
To begin to understand France, you have to look back. The French are obsessed with history. Part of this feeling is a genuine affinity for the past, part a desire to cling to lost glory, part an insecurity that comes with a tepid economy and the struggle to integrate a growing Arab and African population.
Marie-Antoinette regularly makes the covers of magazines. So does Napoleon Bonaparte.
No anniversary is too minor to celebrate. In my time here, France has marked the 20th anniversary of France’s sinking of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior, the 200th anniversary of the high school baccalaureate diploma, the 60th anniversary of the bikini and the 100th anniversary of the brassiere.
For the 100th anniversary of her birth in January, Simone de Beauvoir was celebrated with half a dozen biographies, a DVD series, a three-day scholarly symposium and a cover of the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur with a nude photo of her from the back.
Welcome Home, Ms Sciolino! You'll have plenty of time to unpack before joining your fellow Americans drinking themselves into a stupor for Cinco de Mayo.
But then it got ugly.
2: An Interview Is Sometimes Not an Interview
Their love of history doesn’t mean the French always render it accurately. It has long been common practice for journalists in France to allow their interview subjects to edit their words. “Read and corrected,” the system is called.
I once took part in an interview with Jacques Chirac, when he was president, in which he said it would not be all that dangerous for Iran to have a nuclear weapon or two. That certainly was not French policy. So the official Élysée Palace transcript left out the line and replaced it with this: “I do not see what type of scenario could justify Iran’s recourse to an atomic bomb.”
Sheesh, your own paper has spent most of the past decade "correcting" the statements of George W. Bush to make him sound like a native speaker of English, let alone one not suffering from alcohol-induced brain bubbles. And before that it was busy proving Al Gore was a serial prevaricator by quoting stuff that might have been a lie if he'd said it. The French system sounds like sanity itself compared with that. In fact it sounds close to ideal, avoiding mass hysteria over stupid off-the-cuff gaffes, provided we know what's going on.
And considering the eagerness with which your paper and others granted anonymity to the real, proven liars of the Bush administration, one is forced to conclude that what is missing from the French system in your estimation is the right of journalists to decide who gets gunned down. The continual expressions of working journalists of faith in their field is truly remarkable, especially when you consider you can't find an ounce of it in anyone outside the field.
6: Don’t Wear Jogging Clothes to Buy a Pound of Butter
Rules govern even the smallest activities. I was making chocolate chip cookies one Saturday afternoon and ran out of butter. Dusted with flour, still in my morning jogging clothes, I dashed out to the convenience store up the street. The problem was that it is not just any street. It’s the Rue du Bac, one of the most chic places to see and be seen on Saturdays. I heard my name called and turned to face a senior Foreign Ministry official, dressed in pressed jeans and a soft-as-butter leather jacket, wearing an amused look, and carrying a small Nespresso shopping bag.
We went to a corner cafe for a drink. The Swedish ambassador and his wife stopped as they were riding by on their bikes. Both were in tailored tweed blazers, slim pants and loafers. Then Robert M. Kimmitt, the deputy treasury secretary, walked by.
He and my foreign ministry friend joked that my style didn’t match the setting. I made the point that it was my neighborhood and I could dress however I wanted. But as my French women friends told me afterward, jogging clothes (shoes included) are to be removed as soon as one’s exercise is over.
I like to think it's the casual slobbiness of Americans (moi aussi) which is at fault here, although I'm not exactly certain this holds in all those American versions of the Rue du Bac, either. I get eyeballed at Keystone at the Crossing, fer chrissakes, although the more astute among the haute monde note the $600 sunglasses and $200 rock-climbing shoes and visibly relax, having pegged me as a harmless eccentric. Still, if only Sciolino had skimped on the introduction she could have managed to work in one or two more ambassadors, a mid-level British peer, and the ghosts of F. Scott and Zelda.
7: Feeling Sexy Is a State of Mind, or: Buy Good Lingerie
In her close-fitting sweaters and pants and tailored leather jackets, Eliane Victor is both stylish and alluring. The retired author and journalist is in her late 80s.
For French women, being sexy has nothing to do with age and everything to do with attitude. Arielle Dombasle, the actress and cabaret singer married to the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, dared to expose her breasts on the cover of Paris Match and took off her clothes in a song-and-dance revue at Crazy Horse in Paris. Some people feel she tries too hard. But give the lady some credit. She’s turning 50 and has a Barbie-doll body.
A 600-page sociological study of sexuality in France released this month concluded that 9 out of 10 women over 50 are sexually active. The sexiest French women seem naturally skilled in the art of moving, smiling and flirting.
Elaine F. Scolino, born Buffalo, New York, circa 1949, per Wikipedia.
Friday, March 21
A plus ça change Is Gonna Come.
Okay, But Are You Really Sure?
LESSEE, Senator Obama says "I was married there; my daughters were baptized there" as a means of emphasizing his connection to Trinity Church, something he was being baited to downplay. This, then, is somehow picked up and parroted as though someone who is married in a church is more of a member than than someone who elopes to Vegas, and as though having the pastor of your church baptize your daughters is just one of many options the young urban couple might avail themselves of (like having the local lifeguard do it, perhaps, or ordering the Home Hot-Tub Baptismal Kit from Ron Popeil). Then his own admission turns somehow sinister...not just a member, MARRIED THERE! as though the Right was prepared to ignore simple God Damn America pew-filling until it discovered Holy Matrimony had been besmirched in the process. Children's ice cream, Mandrake! Then we're in full I Told You He Was A Muslim mode.
It's like a cosmic game of Telephone, except you're playing for money and the house is crooked.
Wright brought Obama to Christianity, officiated at his wedding, baptized his daughters...
-Nedra Pickler, AP
Wright baptized Obama's daughters; he officiated at Obama's wedding...
-Brian Ross and Rehab el-Buri, ABC
Wright baptized Obama's daughters; he officiated at Obama's wedding.
-Jonah Goldberg
Obama's relationship with Wright is a deep one. Wright officiated at the wedding of Obama and his wife, Michelle, baptized their two daughters...
-Scott Helman, Boston Globe
Garrett: OK. Were you and Michelle married there and did Rev. Wright preside?
Obama: Yes.
Garrett: Were your two daughters baptized there and did Rev. Wright preside over the baptisms?
Obama: That is correct, Major.
-interview with Major Garrett of FNC, quoted at vlemx news
he and his wife were married there and their daughters baptised
-Suzanne Goldenberg, Guardian UK
married his wife there, and had his children baptized there
-Kevin Drum
...he didn’t just “marry his wife” there. Wright married them. And the Obama daughters were passively baptized at Trinity. Wright baptized them.
-Kurt Schulzke at I Perceive
Barack HUSSEIN Obama was married by the minister of this church, his kids were baptized in this church
-sharprightturn, cutting to the chase
LESSEE, Senator Obama says "I was married there; my daughters were baptized there" as a means of emphasizing his connection to Trinity Church, something he was being baited to downplay. This, then, is somehow picked up and parroted as though someone who is married in a church is more of a member than than someone who elopes to Vegas, and as though having the pastor of your church baptize your daughters is just one of many options the young urban couple might avail themselves of (like having the local lifeguard do it, perhaps, or ordering the Home Hot-Tub Baptismal Kit from Ron Popeil). Then his own admission turns somehow sinister...not just a member, MARRIED THERE! as though the Right was prepared to ignore simple God Damn America pew-filling until it discovered Holy Matrimony had been besmirched in the process. Children's ice cream, Mandrake! Then we're in full I Told You He Was A Muslim mode.
It's like a cosmic game of Telephone, except you're playing for money and the house is crooked.
Thursday, March 20
"Segregated Schools Were, and Are, Inferior Schools..."
WELL Sir, welcome to Indianapolis, where a lot of African-Americans of a certain age can tell you it ain't necessarily so, or not entirely: there's Crispus Attucks, built back in the 1920s when D.C. Stephenson and the Klan controlled the state, and the mayor, and the school board. Attucks recruited top talent for its (also segregated, on the grounds this would make segregation "seem less offensive") teaching staff, and boasted more teachers with advanced degrees than any other public school, though we ought to surround that phrase in quotes, since the state athletic commission decided black schools weren't "public" for competition purposes.
We don't mention this to nit-pick, and certainly not to recommend the practice, but to introduce you to the idea that it's the quality of the schools, not their racial makeup, that should be our first order of business.
As does health care, nutrition, economic opportunities or the lack thereof, home environment, early enrichment programs, and a host of other things. And several of those are more important than the schools.
Or computers. Forty-five percent of African-American students, and 39% of Hispanics, rely on schools for their computer access.
So, once again, welcome to Indianapolis, capitol of a state where what the President, or the next President, or the Congress has to say about education doesn't really change things much. At last count there were forty-nine others.
The Circle City is the very model of what White Flight (and the Black Menace--they work together) and political meddling have accomplished in the fifty years since Brown (which, one feels the need to inform the historicity-challenged Obama campaign, marked a Supreme Court decision, and--pointedly--not the beginning of desegregation of schools).
In the mid-60s Republicans found themselves in complete control of Indianapolis government (under now-Sinecured Senator Dick Lugar) and annexed the entire county for voting purposes, but kept the county township school systems in place. This should be enough to tell you whose votes were being added. In the early 70s, or fifteen years after Brown. the Federal courts ruled that the Indianapolis Public School system was still segregated, on the grounds that it still was. The court ordered the busing of inner-city students (from inside the old city limits) to the township schools. And the court ordered the citizens of the old city to foot the bill.
And this meant that the very people who'd been discriminated against were now taking money from their own schools to pay to desegregate the districts the perpetrators of that system had fled to, and who were now free to spend all the state and federal monies attached to those minority students, as well as all of their own, on their own, still-separate, schools. We are still in the process of phasing-out the program thirty-four years later, at a time when natural population growth has achieved something like racial balance in most of the old county township systems. The other remnants of the old township system--all survived because of their political juice back in the 60s--are gone or in the process of being dismantled. The city police and county sheriff finally merged last year. Most of the fire departments have opted in to city management. Nobody says a word about consolidating schools. Nobody needs to. The (old) city schools are 76% non-white and 72% free lunch. Like the man said, it's National Brotherhood Week.
And all of this, of course, has occurred to the constant drum beat about Failing Schools.
Welcome to Indianapolis! You can drive around it on I-465 and see the shining whiteness of the doughnut counties school systems, the ones that had no worries about their political boundaries being breached. The ones that experienced explosive growth beginning in the 1980s, although by then no one would call it White Flight, because whites were the new victims.
These are not the bastions of people whose "resentment built over time". They're people who ran for the hills. They want to feel safe, they want to feel their children are safe, they want them to receive a quality education. These things are understandable. What isn't is why they'd just as soon Those Others die poor, and stupid, and somewhere else. Every time I hear someone talk about Our Failing Schools I'm reminded of how long I've been hearing it, and what's happened to urban school districts during that time.
Four years ago the citizens of Indiana--apparently of their own free will--elected as governor the man who'd just finished getting the ball rolling on the Bush II economy. And practically his first act as Entrepreneur-in-Chief was to promote a phony balancing of the budget, which is to say he found a different and more cryptic way to amortize budget shortfalls than the Democrats had been using. The major urban school districts were caught in the crossfire. They took a two-year hit; now they're about to take another of at least equal size because of an orchestrated "revolt" over property taxes. Meanwhile, the governor's two great educational initiatives of his first term involved moving Stupid State Standardized Testing (SSST) from fall to spring, thereby, I dunno, changing the weather patterns that follow it, and changing the law to permit organized volume purchasing by multiple school districts, which proved to be a roaring success when it turned out they already had the right to do so, and in several instances already were.
(Post-revolt and pre-election, the Guv now wants the state to pick up 100% of eduction costs. When this results in something approaching equality of spending per student. let alone putting our money where our mouth has been for thirty years, I'll be sure to let you know.)
Regardless of what a President can do about it, a discussion of race and education in this country is welcome. And an honest one even more so.
We don't mention this to nit-pick, and certainly not to recommend the practice, but to introduce you to the idea that it's the quality of the schools, not their racial makeup, that should be our first order of business.
we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.
As does health care, nutrition, economic opportunities or the lack thereof, home environment, early enrichment programs, and a host of other things. And several of those are more important than the schools.
Or computers. Forty-five percent of African-American students, and 39% of Hispanics, rely on schools for their computer access.
So, once again, welcome to Indianapolis, capitol of a state where what the President, or the next President, or the Congress has to say about education doesn't really change things much. At last count there were forty-nine others.
The Circle City is the very model of what White Flight (and the Black Menace--they work together) and political meddling have accomplished in the fifty years since Brown (which, one feels the need to inform the historicity-challenged Obama campaign, marked a Supreme Court decision, and--pointedly--not the beginning of desegregation of schools).
In the mid-60s Republicans found themselves in complete control of Indianapolis government (under now-Sinecured Senator Dick Lugar) and annexed the entire county for voting purposes, but kept the county township school systems in place. This should be enough to tell you whose votes were being added. In the early 70s, or fifteen years after Brown. the Federal courts ruled that the Indianapolis Public School system was still segregated, on the grounds that it still was. The court ordered the busing of inner-city students (from inside the old city limits) to the township schools. And the court ordered the citizens of the old city to foot the bill.
And this meant that the very people who'd been discriminated against were now taking money from their own schools to pay to desegregate the districts the perpetrators of that system had fled to, and who were now free to spend all the state and federal monies attached to those minority students, as well as all of their own, on their own, still-separate, schools. We are still in the process of phasing-out the program thirty-four years later, at a time when natural population growth has achieved something like racial balance in most of the old county township systems. The other remnants of the old township system--all survived because of their political juice back in the 60s--are gone or in the process of being dismantled. The city police and county sheriff finally merged last year. Most of the fire departments have opted in to city management. Nobody says a word about consolidating schools. Nobody needs to. The (old) city schools are 76% non-white and 72% free lunch. Like the man said, it's National Brotherhood Week.
And all of this, of course, has occurred to the constant drum beat about Failing Schools.
Welcome to Indianapolis! You can drive around it on I-465 and see the shining whiteness of the doughnut counties school systems, the ones that had no worries about their political boundaries being breached. The ones that experienced explosive growth beginning in the 1980s, although by then no one would call it White Flight, because whites were the new victims.
These are not the bastions of people whose "resentment built over time". They're people who ran for the hills. They want to feel safe, they want to feel their children are safe, they want them to receive a quality education. These things are understandable. What isn't is why they'd just as soon Those Others die poor, and stupid, and somewhere else. Every time I hear someone talk about Our Failing Schools I'm reminded of how long I've been hearing it, and what's happened to urban school districts during that time.
Four years ago the citizens of Indiana--apparently of their own free will--elected as governor the man who'd just finished getting the ball rolling on the Bush II economy. And practically his first act as Entrepreneur-in-Chief was to promote a phony balancing of the budget, which is to say he found a different and more cryptic way to amortize budget shortfalls than the Democrats had been using. The major urban school districts were caught in the crossfire. They took a two-year hit; now they're about to take another of at least equal size because of an orchestrated "revolt" over property taxes. Meanwhile, the governor's two great educational initiatives of his first term involved moving Stupid State Standardized Testing (SSST) from fall to spring, thereby, I dunno, changing the weather patterns that follow it, and changing the law to permit organized volume purchasing by multiple school districts, which proved to be a roaring success when it turned out they already had the right to do so, and in several instances already were.
(Post-revolt and pre-election, the Guv now wants the state to pick up 100% of eduction costs. When this results in something approaching equality of spending per student. let alone putting our money where our mouth has been for thirty years, I'll be sure to let you know.)
Regardless of what a President can do about it, a discussion of race and education in this country is welcome. And an honest one even more so.
Wednesday, March 19
The Audacity of Cluelessness
I watched Senator Obama's speech at YouTube!, where this comment was high up enough to catch my eye without scrolling:
robnum1
The best! He represents the next generation. Goodbye 60's and babyboomers, hello playstation (or Wii) generation :-D.
Which to many of us educated in a previous century may seem a curious way to celebrate a speech limning American diversity, but which I myself see as a golden opportunity to welcome our new I've Spent My Entire Life In Front Of A Screen, Thumbing Things overlords.
Caution: First Five Rows May Get Wet.
OKAY, before we get started I wanted to take a moment to savor David Brooks' Monday column, in which he basically said, sure, economic libertarianism is fine when there's nothing more at stake than maintaining power, racking up obscene profits, and bankrupting a reasonable number of widows and orphans (and filling column inches), but now that we've got a real crisis the government needs to act now to bail out all the greedheads who behaved precisely as he was claiming as recently as three days ago was still the Answer to Everything. Except, of course, that he pointedly rejects public assistance for them, since that's the reasonable-soundng thing to do and once the program is in place they or their cohort'll get to suck it dry anyway. My daddy always said that if you lived long enough you'd see everything twice, and the real trick was developing enough grace that you could make it look like you thought it was just as funny the second time around.
In Bobo's honor we quote the inimitable R. Porrofatto:
In all, pretty good speech, as long as he used his inside voice--I noticed here for the first time that once the applause thing started rolling in the second half he'd SHOUT over it and then KEEP GOING for half a sentence after it died down. It was almost as if he caught himself. Maybe someone in the campaign reads this blog. For their sake, I hope not. Stop and let it die down! fer chrissakes.
Anyway, MOD-u-LA-tion! It can't be stressed enough. I'm married to a teacher, and it's not uncommon for her to come home still using the voice she talks to fifteen-year-olds with. It insults the intelligence, which I have to take from her, but not from Presidential candidates. Using it on adoring throngs but catching yourself with a roomful of invited guests is going to start looking like a tell. MOD-u-LA-tion! I much prefer the indoor, pensive Obama, and I'll always vote for unscripted over scripted, but then there's no fire, which he seems able to kindle only with a blowtorch.
That's parole; what about langue? He's got good speech writers, but they're still overmatched by the demands of working in poll-engendered buzzphrases (nice to see Reagan make an appearance sans halo, but you could still see the shoehorn that paragraph was inserted with sticking out), and they're still in need of a competent historian (I'm sorry, but the Constitution enshrined the answer to slavery? Declaration of Independence on Line two. And she sounds pissed.)
Or, y'know, maybe that's one and the same problem. This New Generation stuff was crafted years ago as a way to move up from the pack. Its limitations should have been seen fairly quickly, but this is a campaign which took two months to get around to (correctively) bashing Ronald Reagan in front of Democrats. Now, with the obligation to govern--or at least to recapture some traditional Democratic votes next fall--staring him in the face the seams are straining mightily.
(Incidentally: am I the only one who was made more than slightly uncomfortable by Barack Obama explaining the raucous laughter and bawdy humor of the Black church to "the uninitiated"?)
Which brings us to the point of the exercise. Pastor Wright is another prisoner of Old Style Thinking, now reimagined not as the huge bloc of patchouli-scented excess-peddlers of the 60s and 70s, but a more rapidly dwindling demo:
And kick them to the curb.
This is a crock, and if I may be excused for dredging metaphors from my current chore list, it's the tiny chip of paint that when touched by a scraper leads in short order to replastering an entire ceiling.
First, Jeremiah Wright is 66 years old. Believe it or not, this does not in and of itself mean that he's been oblivious to the world around him for the past three decades. It means that in his early teens he witnessed the Brown decision, and the Montgomery bus boycott (led by another preacher who came of age in the 50s). Seeing segregation and racial restriction was not unique to his generation. Jim Crow laws lasted well into the living memory of Barack Obama, among millions of others. Pastor Wright, in fact, belongs to the first generation of African-Americans who came of age with the knowledge that things might, in fact, actually get better during their lifetimes, and who can personally attest--rather than pay lip service--to the sort of sacrifices that required. I can't vouch for the man himself; maybe Senator Obama is spilling his actual personal history, but if so it dovetails neatly into his campaign sloganeering.
What I can say is this: a hell of a lot of Americans agree with him, even in extremis. Perhaps Wright cynically exploits them for personal gain; I have no idea. If so we might ask--as many already have--where the demands for denunciation of white religious crackpots and charlatans has been hiding the past thirty years. If not, then let us at least respect the more than well-earned right to distrust and dislike the rigged game of American politics, even as we promise to hope things will get better once the sun shines fully on the enlightened playstation (or Wii!) generation.
In Bobo's honor we quote the inimitable R. Porrofatto:
The idea that the sub-prime earthquake is what unleashed the economic tsunami we are about to endure, as opposed to lucrative structural tectonic deformation brought about by decades of deregulation (or in the case of hedge funds, zero regulation) generating billion-dollar bonus fault lines is the cause stupidé to feed the cable news masses.Now then: I've been painting for the last four days, beginning at 9PM, after Larry's put in his room for the night (washing primer out of his tail once is quite enough, thank you), in an effort to get the inside Spring chores done before next week's horrible medical mix-up waiting to happen robs me of my good leg. I know, I know; this sort of negativism already puts me on the outs with Senator Obama. Well, fuck him. I read the thing was forty-five minutes long, and I vowed to give him thirty, tops; but it turned out to be 37:change, so I met him in the middle. Besides, he's dreamy.
In all, pretty good speech, as long as he used his inside voice--I noticed here for the first time that once the applause thing started rolling in the second half he'd SHOUT over it and then KEEP GOING for half a sentence after it died down. It was almost as if he caught himself. Maybe someone in the campaign reads this blog. For their sake, I hope not. Stop and let it die down! fer chrissakes.
Anyway, MOD-u-LA-tion! It can't be stressed enough. I'm married to a teacher, and it's not uncommon for her to come home still using the voice she talks to fifteen-year-olds with. It insults the intelligence, which I have to take from her, but not from Presidential candidates. Using it on adoring throngs but catching yourself with a roomful of invited guests is going to start looking like a tell. MOD-u-LA-tion! I much prefer the indoor, pensive Obama, and I'll always vote for unscripted over scripted, but then there's no fire, which he seems able to kindle only with a blowtorch.
That's parole; what about langue? He's got good speech writers, but they're still overmatched by the demands of working in poll-engendered buzzphrases (nice to see Reagan make an appearance sans halo, but you could still see the shoehorn that paragraph was inserted with sticking out), and they're still in need of a competent historian (I'm sorry, but the Constitution enshrined the answer to slavery? Declaration of Independence on Line two. And she sounds pissed.)
Or, y'know, maybe that's one and the same problem. This New Generation stuff was crafted years ago as a way to move up from the pack. Its limitations should have been seen fairly quickly, but this is a campaign which took two months to get around to (correctively) bashing Ronald Reagan in front of Democrats. Now, with the obligation to govern--or at least to recapture some traditional Democratic votes next fall--staring him in the face the seams are straining mightily.
(Incidentally: am I the only one who was made more than slightly uncomfortable by Barack Obama explaining the raucous laughter and bawdy humor of the Black church to "the uninitiated"?)
Which brings us to the point of the exercise. Pastor Wright is another prisoner of Old Style Thinking, now reimagined not as the huge bloc of patchouli-scented excess-peddlers of the 60s and 70s, but a more rapidly dwindling demo:
This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What's remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.
And kick them to the curb.
This is a crock, and if I may be excused for dredging metaphors from my current chore list, it's the tiny chip of paint that when touched by a scraper leads in short order to replastering an entire ceiling.
First, Jeremiah Wright is 66 years old. Believe it or not, this does not in and of itself mean that he's been oblivious to the world around him for the past three decades. It means that in his early teens he witnessed the Brown decision, and the Montgomery bus boycott (led by another preacher who came of age in the 50s). Seeing segregation and racial restriction was not unique to his generation. Jim Crow laws lasted well into the living memory of Barack Obama, among millions of others. Pastor Wright, in fact, belongs to the first generation of African-Americans who came of age with the knowledge that things might, in fact, actually get better during their lifetimes, and who can personally attest--rather than pay lip service--to the sort of sacrifices that required. I can't vouch for the man himself; maybe Senator Obama is spilling his actual personal history, but if so it dovetails neatly into his campaign sloganeering.
What I can say is this: a hell of a lot of Americans agree with him, even in extremis. Perhaps Wright cynically exploits them for personal gain; I have no idea. If so we might ask--as many already have--where the demands for denunciation of white religious crackpots and charlatans has been hiding the past thirty years. If not, then let us at least respect the more than well-earned right to distrust and dislike the rigged game of American politics, even as we promise to hope things will get better once the sun shines fully on the enlightened playstation (or Wii!) generation.
Tuesday, March 18
The Press Corps We Deserve.
Richard Cohen: "How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I THOUGHT WE HAD A CHANCE TO STABILIZE AN UNSTABLE REGION, AND—I ADMIT IT—I WANTED TO STRIKE BACK."Slate March 18 [shouting in original]
I wonder if anyone wading through the swamp of forced-faux-contrarian warflogging five years back had any idea they were witnessing the birth of a franchise. I know I didn't. (The faux-contrarianism--they were a little more subtle with it in those days, as the preferred instrument was the trowel, not the skip-loader--was a little tough to pull off at a time when no newscast, network or cable, lacked a ribbon of bunting, but they still managed to act as though Liberal Vietnam Syndrome was the dominant position around the country, the better to bravely face it down.)
So the fifth anniversary is the opportunity for "Liberal" Hawks Do-Over Vol. 2: Stupid Is Forever, in which the painfully obvious is revealed all over again. Today, the deep thoughts of Richard Cohen:
Y'know what else there was ample reason to do? Follow the story.
Not long afterwards there was ample reason to do something else: doubt that it had anything to do with 9/11, Saddam Hussein, or International Islamofascism, Inc. The text of the letters in and of itself was reason for suspicion bordering on dismissal; they could have been written by my A-rab hatin' brother-in-law.
[Left: to the New York Post. Right: to Senator Daschle's office]
Then came the reason to believe the FBI was fogging the case, at least publicly; the understanding that the anthrax used in the later attacks had come from US chemical weapon stocks we had previously claimed had been destroyed, developed in a lab we claimed hadn't done that sort of thing in thirty years; a reasonable certainty that the President of the United States was lying about it at least in part for partisan political gain; and the realization that The Washington Post and the New York Times, whose chemical weapons beat reporter was one Judith Miller, were intent on flogging the It Could Have Been Saddam angle regardless of the baldness of that lie.
Personally, I found it fairly easy to control my desire to get even with Saddam Hussein for the anthrax attacks by that point.
I wonder if anyone wading through the swamp of forced-faux-contrarian warflogging five years back had any idea they were witnessing the birth of a franchise. I know I didn't. (The faux-contrarianism--they were a little more subtle with it in those days, as the preferred instrument was the trowel, not the skip-loader--was a little tough to pull off at a time when no newscast, network or cable, lacked a ribbon of bunting, but they still managed to act as though Liberal Vietnam Syndrome was the dominant position around the country, the better to bravely face it down.)
So the fifth anniversary is the opportunity for "Liberal" Hawks Do-Over Vol. 2: Stupid Is Forever, in which the painfully obvious is revealed all over again. Today, the deep thoughts of Richard Cohen:
Anthrax. Remember anthrax? It seems no one does anymore—at least it's never mentioned. But right after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, letters laced with anthrax were received at the New York Post and Tom Brokaw's office at NBC. In the following days, more anthrax-contaminated letters were received by other news organizations—CBS News and, presumably, ABC, where traces of anthrax were found in the newsroom. Weirdly, even the Sun, a supermarket tabloid, also got a letter, and a photo editor, Bob Stevens, was fatally infected. Other letters were sent to Sen. Tom Daschle's Capitol Hill office, and in Washington, D.C., a postal worker, Thomas L. Morris Jr., died. There was ample reason to be afraid.
Y'know what else there was ample reason to do? Follow the story.
Not long afterwards there was ample reason to do something else: doubt that it had anything to do with 9/11, Saddam Hussein, or International Islamofascism, Inc. The text of the letters in and of itself was reason for suspicion bordering on dismissal; they could have been written by my A-rab hatin' brother-in-law.
[Left: to the New York Post. Right: to Senator Daschle's office]
Then came the reason to believe the FBI was fogging the case, at least publicly; the understanding that the anthrax used in the later attacks had come from US chemical weapon stocks we had previously claimed had been destroyed, developed in a lab we claimed hadn't done that sort of thing in thirty years; a reasonable certainty that the President of the United States was lying about it at least in part for partisan political gain; and the realization that The Washington Post and the New York Times, whose chemical weapons beat reporter was one Judith Miller, were intent on flogging the It Could Have Been Saddam angle regardless of the baldness of that lie.
Personally, I found it fairly easy to control my desire to get even with Saddam Hussein for the anthrax attacks by that point.
And all this came to me, a guy who had to rely on media reports and a few scientific papers readily available on the internets, and it was all pretty solidly understood by that December. But not to a guy with Cohen's insider status:
Interesting, no? Of course, "news" gathering organizations were a focus of the attacks, and anthrax a rather well-known agent of Scaring the Shit Out of People, with the added benefit of it being the one you can be immunized for. Then again, scaring the shit out of people who own precious inches of journalistic real estate in Our Nation's Capitol might have its benefits, however obscure, even if we want to dismiss the coincidence as tin-foil hat territory. You'd think this might have occurred to Cohen himself, but if so he ain't talking. We wonder when's the next time he scheduled to take questions online? Such as:
• Where'd you get the Cipro?
• Did you clue in any of the people at WaPo who might, y'know, actually handle mail?
• Why, after all this time and its role in the establishment of your reputation as a public dipshit* is the "high government official" still anonymous, especially if it came to you as it circled a roundabout?
The attacks were not entirely unexpected. I had been told soon after Sept. 11 to secure Cipro, the antidote to anthrax. The tip had come in a roundabout way from a high government official, and I immediately acted on it. I was carrying Cipro way before most people had ever heard of it.
Interesting, no? Of course, "news" gathering organizations were a focus of the attacks, and anthrax a rather well-known agent of Scaring the Shit Out of People, with the added benefit of it being the one you can be immunized for. Then again, scaring the shit out of people who own precious inches of journalistic real estate in Our Nation's Capitol might have its benefits, however obscure, even if we want to dismiss the coincidence as tin-foil hat territory. You'd think this might have occurred to Cohen himself, but if so he ain't talking. We wonder when's the next time he scheduled to take questions online? Such as:
• Where'd you get the Cipro?
• Did you clue in any of the people at WaPo who might, y'know, actually handle mail?
• Why, after all this time and its role in the establishment of your reputation as a public dipshit* is the "high government official" still anonymous, especially if it came to you as it circled a roundabout?
___________
* meaning "by your own lights". The rest of us already knew.
Monday, March 17
See, This Is What I Like About Bill Kristol. If You're Going To Get Any Facts From Him You Get 'Em Right At The Top.
"Generation Obama? Perhaps Not."
YOU may have already begun to suspect that the reason why the above wasn't simply inserted parenthetically into the piece at the appropriate place was that the "citation" accounted for the entire column, or at least that portion of it that wasn't given over to grousing about Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner.
The source, by the way, was Ronald Kessler, modestly identified as "a journalist who has written about Wright's ministry", but who is in fact the Ronald Kessler who is the chief Washington correspondent for Newsmax and the author of seventeen books, including The CIA at War: Inside the Secret Campaign Against Terror; A Matter of Character: Inside the White House of George W. Bush; and Laura Bush: An Intimate Portrait of the First Lady, which is, so far as I can tell, the only one of the seventeen that would really have benefitted from the Inside he's slapped on most of his other works, generally somewhere around the colon. In fact, Inside Laura Bush's Colon is a book I'd be proud to own. At any rate, in his defense we might note that Kristol could have had no way of knowing that Kessler might be telling a somewhat slanted story, and we ought also to give him props for not identifying the source as "Michelle Malkin".
In this column, I cite a report that Sen. Obama had attended services at Trinity Church on July 22, 2007. The Obama camapaign has provided information showing that Sen. Obama did not attend Trinity that day. I regret the error.
YOU may have already begun to suspect that the reason why the above wasn't simply inserted parenthetically into the piece at the appropriate place was that the "citation" accounted for the entire column, or at least that portion of it that wasn't given over to grousing about Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner.
The source, by the way, was Ronald Kessler, modestly identified as "a journalist who has written about Wright's ministry", but who is in fact the Ronald Kessler who is the chief Washington correspondent for Newsmax and the author of seventeen books, including The CIA at War: Inside the Secret Campaign Against Terror; A Matter of Character: Inside the White House of George W. Bush; and Laura Bush: An Intimate Portrait of the First Lady, which is, so far as I can tell, the only one of the seventeen that would really have benefitted from the Inside he's slapped on most of his other works, generally somewhere around the colon. In fact, Inside Laura Bush's Colon is a book I'd be proud to own. At any rate, in his defense we might note that Kristol could have had no way of knowing that Kessler might be telling a somewhat slanted story, and we ought also to give him props for not identifying the source as "Michelle Malkin".
Fun With Monogamy, Vol. LXXI
NBC News teaser: "Plus, John McCain makes an unscheduled visit to Baghdad..."
Me: Unscheduled? Th' fuck? Just last year he walked through that market practically unaccompanied, and now he has to go in unannounced?
PW: He probably thought they'd raise prices if they knew he was coming.
Me: Unscheduled? Th' fuck? Just last year he walked through that market practically unaccompanied, and now he has to go in unannounced?
PW: He probably thought they'd raise prices if they knew he was coming.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)