Nostalgia Ain't What It Used To Be

Richard Speer in Salon: Peter Jennings and the Death of Panache

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.

It's odd; this hits me on a day I was already pondering my own nostalgic tendencies, to wit: I'm not really nostalgic for much that happened during my own youth. Yeah, I wish the 60s Top-40 attitude would return to radio, and I wish braless women I don't know would stop me after class and ask if I'd like to get high, but that's because I think those things are desirable on the merits. My own nostalgia is for things that were never actually part of my own life: fedoras, train travel, the Golden Age of Radio, those phones where the earpiece speaker hung on the cradle and the mic was on the body and you double-clutched the cradle and told Sarah to connect you to Lem's Hardware. My own nostalgic yearnings come in noir-ish greyscale, not Peter Max day-glo. I have no real explanation for that.

But 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.

'Cause 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. Nothing against Peter, mind you, who turned into a pretty good newsman and was by far the best of the lot in the aftermath of 9/11. It's just that his job was to look like Cary Grant's stand-in while ABC skewed its reporting to the right, and now somebody's nostalgic for that because 1) he was never aware it was a shell game to begin with and 2) things have gotten so much worse that yesterday's ratings pandering looks like reasoned discourse. And it just depends on where you were standing at the time. So I'll have a shot of rye, bartender. Make it a double. Unless it's become trendy.

The Forgotten Bomb

Refined plutonium buttons used in the core of the Fat Man

Nagasaki was the most Christian city in Japan, probably the most Catholic city in Asia outside the Philippines. Urakami Cathedral was less than 500m from Ground Zero.

Nagasaki was not the primary target of Special Mission No. 16. It had not even been on the original list of four possible targets, but replaced Kyoto reportedly after a world-travelling friend happened to tell Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, how beautiful Kyoto was.

The mission was one near-disaster after another. Shortly before the flight Maj. Charles Sweeney was informed that due to a malfunctioning pump the 600 gallons of reserve fuel would not be available. Sweeney chose to go ahead with the mission. Shortly after takeoff a warning light on the black box which monitored the bomb's electrical circuitry went off. Two switch positions had been reversed. Had it been one of the timing fuses the bomb would have gone off in 53 seconds. It took more than that to find the problem. Then the camera plane missed the rendezvous point, causing a 45-minute delay. Sweeney probably wouldn't have waited that long had he known the camera operator had missed the flight, but they were maintaining strict radio silence.

The primary target was the arsenal at Kokura. The clear skies reported by the observation planes was now filling with broken clouds. Under orders to drop the bomb visually only--not by radar--the bombardier was able to make out landscape features, but the target was obscured by smoke from a nearby factory which had been bombed two days earlier. Three bomb runs from two different directions were aborted, under increasingly heavy flak. Kokura was one of the best defended cities in the Empire.

The delay had also allowed a cold front to move in on Nagasaki. There was fuel for one bomb run only if they were to make it to Okinawa. The decision was made to drop the bomb by radar, contrary to orders, but the bombardier found a hole in the clouds near the secondary target, the Mitsubishi Steel Works in the Urakami Valley. The bomb exploded at 1600 feet at 1102 hours, August 9, 1945.

There's no way of knowing how many people were killed by the bomb in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Prewar census figures are unreliable. Though the plutonium bomb was considerably more powerful than the uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the fact that Nagasaki is a city of hills and valleys, and the dropping of the bomb near the secondary target, away from the center of the city, probably means that there were a couple thousand fewer casualties at Nagasaki. Whatever that means. Certainly, people kept dying for decades from the effects of radiation and the heavy metals which were scattered about.

And of course the debate rages on. Did dropping the bomb--dropping two bombs--save a million US casualties in an invasion of the home islands? Was Hiroshima, plus the Soviet entry into the war on August 7, enough? The Japanese high command was in deliberation all that time, with the hardliners holding out for fighting until total destruction, but they were eventually overruled by direct intervention of Hirohito. A message to the Americans regarding impending surrender came through unofficial channels and was discounted.

Was the US intent on dictating the terms of post-war settlement? Did we use the bomb in an attempt to scare the Russians off their designs on Asia and, possibly, Europe as well? Personally I've never given it much consideration; we're not going to change the decision now. In later years Truman seemed to change his story depending on who he was talking to. What can be said is that the military value of the targets was overplayed. Justified or not, we dropped the bomb on civilian populations.

On August 10 the US Army Air Force dropped warning leaflets on the ruins of Nagasaki.

Stupefying

Last Thursday Eric Alterman turned over the lead piece on his blog to Princeton sociology professor Douglas S. Massey. In an excerpt from his post-election book, Return of the 'L" Word: A Liberal Vision for the New Century, Massey takes a look at how liberals managed to Throw It All Away. Any of us who haunt blog comment boards has heard the arguments a couple thousand times by now, but this comes from a genuine liberal, not a libertarian in sheep's clothing (although Massey does seem to have caught a touch of Milton Friedmanitis while at the U. of Chicago). And the good Professor actually took the time to write a book about it, though Publisher's Weekly called it a "slim manifesto":

Liberal pundits are asking why middle class Americans so often vote against their own economic interests.  Mostly they look outside the liberal movement for answers.  If they are being charitable, they chalk it up to the pervasiveness of “traditional values.”  If they are being less charitable, they portray voters as dim-witted dupes of lying right-wing politicians.  Often they just throw their hands up in exasperation and wail, “What’s the matter with Kansas?”  Yet survey data do not show a fundamental cleavage of values among Americans; and constantly asking people “what’s wrong with you?” is unlikely to win elections.  Maybe it’s about time liberals looked to themselves and ask what they have done to drive so many people away from a party it is in their material interests to support.

Liberals are such sneering elitists that they piss off even liberal elitists. Every time I read something like this I wonder how many times the writer had to fly over Middle America before his thesis took hold. Which liberal pundits exactly, Professor, or was that the teaser to get me to buy the manifesto? Because I may have seen this sort of thing in Atrios' comments section, but otherwise it doesn't exactly seem to come along with the frequency of green bean casserole at a family gathering. 2004 was a hard election to lose, and the "moral values" ad campaign followed right on its heels, so it's only to be expected that it attracted some chatter. And rightly so. Same goes for sneering, because the sneer is the natural, and, it turns out, the correct response to all that blather. There is a real question about why certain groups--former Dixiecrats, say, or Plains States libertarians, consistently vote against their economic self-interests, but it seems to me, Red State resident that I am, that the bigger part of the problem there is in reducing the anti-liberal voter to some sociological category, not in the fact that its natural enemy behaves like, well, an enemy.

But lest we believe that Massey has just conflated some random punditry with, say, the actual stated positions of the Democratic Party, he gives us a rundown of the liberals' Fall From Grace. And it's interesting, much as I say a wine is "interesting" when it's not pure vinegar but isn't exactly an oenophilic dream date. Here he provides a helpful summary:

Although liberals accomplished great things during the first three quarters of the 20th century, thereafter they stumbled badly.  When they encountered resistance to black civil rights among poor and working class whites—some of it racially motivated some of it not—rather than dealing with the resistance politically, liberal elites sought to impose solutions from above by taking advantage of their privileged access to judicial and executive power.  Then, rather than telling Americans honestly about the likely costs and consequences of a military intervention in Southeast Asia and trust them to make the correct decisions, they used lies and deception to trick voters into supporting an unwinnable war that was fought mostly by the poor and working classes; and when the war came too close to home, they quickly forgot about the lower class combatants and their sacrifices they had made.  Then after liberals’ attempt to support guns and butter set off hyperinflation to erode the real value of wages, they callously thought up new ways to spend the windfall of tax revenue rather than adjust tax brackets to relieve the unsustainable burden on the middle class.  Finally, when faced with political revolt because of these misguided policies, they retreated into arcane ideologies to wage a rearguard cultural insurgency from the safety of the ivory tower.  Is it any wonder that liberals lost the public trust?

Er, um, uh. Let's accept, for the sake of argument, the idea that some opposition to "black civil rights" was not racially motivated. What was it, then? What form did it take? That that portion of the white working class which did not already work in an integrated environment and which continued to live in a segregated one had a theoretical objection to school desegregation and affirmative action? Because I'll tell ya, doc, from the perspective of someone who's lived and worked with those people for four decades, I think they tell a little different story when they're answering questionnaires than they do after three beers when they think all their listeners are in agreement. They were not convinced by Republican arguments about "reverse discrimination". Those arguments were crafted to give them an out for their racist beliefs. Having said that, I have to admit I'm not really sure what constitutes liberals having crammed civil rights down white people's throats using the courts and the executive branch.

Then there's the V word. This seems nothing more than a projection of liberal anti-war views onto the working class to make a point. Nixon's silent majority supported the war, fer chrissakes. The Eisenhower administration took up the White Man's Burden when the French dropped it; the Johnson administration sent draftees to fight; Nixon also expanded the war militarily. Frankly--and again, this is a personal perspective--though I was too young to be very savvy about the war until '67 or '68, I remember being astonished to learn that our fighting force was primarily poor and black, and it was much later when I learned that some well-connected types cut in the National Guard line so they could stay home. Opposition to the war was about the war; the matter of a selective selective service was more in retrospect. And that whole Domino Theory/stopping the spread of Communism business was a matter of national politics, not crusading liberal do-gooderism. That Right of which we speak equates liberalism with opposition to the war. You may have noticed, they'd kept all the "Go live in Russia, you traitorous bastards," rhetoric on simmer all these years, and it had all boiled over again before the first grunt got on an Iraq-bound transport.

As for economic policies, in the article Professor Massey does acknowledge the effects of the Oil Embargo of 1973, though he claims the result was magnified in the US because of the guns and butter spending habits of liberals, unlike the "severe but manageable" recessions in Europe and Japan. I dunno. Could it be that unlike those others we were guzzlers of energy we believed would remain cheap and plentiful forever?

There's a nostalgic quality in all this: Schiavo, the Social Security debacle, the continuing disaster in Iraq and Bush's plummeting poll numbers give it a sort of sepia-toned charm. I'd be the last one to argue that Democrats have betrayed a preternatural competence over the last four decades. And when a liberal writes: "To the delight of conservatives everywhere, liberals often ended up in attacking each other..." in the midst of a piece that ticks every item off the Reagan L-word laundry list it doesn't improve my expectations for the immediate future.

Next on Dateline: The Horrors of Internet Porn (Warning: Contains Internet Porn)

I walked into the living room Friday night to find my wife had left the teevee on, gone upstairs, and forgotten all about it. It was NBC's Dateline, with the tale of a teenaged girl undergoing aversion therapy for her fear of spiders, which might have been what drove my mildly arachnophobic spouse from the field in the first place. I kept watching, mostly because they kept referring to aversion therapy as "controversial" and I wanted to hear the explanation for that. Because it seems to me first that any psychological regimen can be described as "controversial", same as any economic theory can be, but never is, and second, because aversion therapy has been around since at least thirty years ago, when I heard about it in freshman psychology, shortly before Dr. Bob Hartley took his fear of flying group on a plane trip. Naturally there was no answer and I was left once again to suspect that teevee news may occasionally use words just to sensationalize a story, as much as I hate to think so.

The next story concerned John Hockenberry tracking down a real live porn spammer, so I stayed tuned. Again, call me cynical, but there was a tiny voice in my head, among all those others, suggesting that it just might be that the interest here was in the porn, rather than the spam. "Hey, tiny voice," I heard another voice say, "let's at least hear the story first."

It turned out there wasn't any need, because right off the bat they're comparing porn spam to someone delivering "X-rated leaflets" unbidden to your front door. Only the picture they choose to illustrate this hypothetical homeowner hell is a shot of a Penthouse-type magazine. It takes about ninety seconds more before Penthouse and Hustler are actually named; after the first break we'll get a picture of Larry Flynt splashed across the screen for good measure. To the best of my knowledge Mr. Flynt does not engage in pornographic spamming. I hope his lawyers were watching and he's feeling litigious this week.

Incidentally, whatever you may think of Mr. Hockenberry, he is, or seems to be, smarter than your average CNN hairdo, and I find it difficult to believe that the glaring omissions in the story are accidental.

In the meantime we've had our little "controversial therapy" moment. "It's perfectly legal" Hockenberry assures us. Well, no it ain't, as even his own story will admit momentarily. But investigating the truth of the matter might shed some light, so instead let's go straight to the anecdotes.

Parent A--our two complainants are both capital-P Parents, naturally, to explain their status as Particularly Aggrieved--resides in Kansas and received "the vilest stuff imaginable" via email one day. Okay, imaginations vary, but I had barely begun to ponder this when Parent B, from "suburban Texas" wherever that is, appeared with the topper: she was sent an ad for a website which showed sex with animals. She, we were informed, has had enough, implying a level of tolerance just recently breeched which I found somewhat surprising, not to mention impossible to believe.

One of these mothers--I lost track of which--claims she opened the offending email because the subject line promised beagles for sale, which is apparently one of her turn-ons. I know you're way ahead of me on this but it is 2005 and anybody foolish enough to open unsolicited email probably ought to consider themselves lucky if the penalty is an unwanted glimpse of Sin and not a hard drive dissolving instantaneously into a puddle of noxious goo. But that doesn't excuse porn spamming, let us agree.

The rest of the segment involved the search for the actual spammer (of course we were seeking the bestiality site, because a simple thing like a shot of Janet Jackson's breast ornamentation wouldn't raise any reasonable mother's ire). I'll only take the time for a couple of observations. One, that the search involved filming people surreptitiously, which for me is not really so morally elevated over spamming porn. The second is that the name of the site in question was "Spunkfarm" a term so offensive that Hockenberry mentioned it only twenty-three times in the report, according to the transcript. Twenty-three times.

What's the truth here? Well, first, as the story later tried to slip by us, under the CAN-SPAM act of 2004 such emails have to be labelled "sexually explicit". So an ad for an agricultural sploogefest which was entitled "Free puppies to a good home" is something less than "perfectly legal". And the fact that the law is basically nothing more than the sort of photo opportunity much beloved of our legislators, while legislation which has at least some teeth has stalled, can be laid directly at the feet of the party which controls Congress and has been promising to "protect families" and legislate morality for twenty-five years now. But Hockenberry never so much as mentioned the law.

It's irritating enough that practically every story which ever touches upon sexually explicit material simply ignores the practical impossibility of legally defining "obscenity", thereby reinforcing the right-wing mythos of a country held hostage by judges gone wild. Maybe they could sneak a camera into a reasonably intelligent attorney's office some day. I'm willing to bet that you could sit down with Missus Kansas and the Lone Star Suburbanite and tie their personal prejudices in knots in two minutes flat. But ignoring the fact that there's really a simple solution--if not an actual solution, at least a major legal correction--available which would have a broad-based support is even worse. Ban spam. Put some real criminal penalties on the books, and invest federal resources in tracking it down. Sure it can easily move overseas, but make it illegal and extremely risky to engage in commercial spamming in this country. After that we can worry about the rest of the world. But I suppose telling the story that way might irritate the wrong people, huh? Besides, anti-porn crusades are just so sexy.

Friday Shuffle, Adolescent Smut Edition

The genesis here being weeding the garden, which included pulling a lot of clover, and finding myself singing "Roll me over/In the clover...." This happens to me a lot. Not with that particular song, but generally. I'm often able to trace a particular earworm to some physical event, and I'm growing more and more concerned that the day is not far off when I'll start singing this stuff out loud, in the grocery store. And probably having forgotten to wear pants.

My interest, aside from using dirty words while pretending to be a social scientist, is that these all had a folkloric quality, even though it turns out most of them were actually commercially recorded efforts. So I'm curious about your own experiences. Did you "have" any of these, or were they time specific? Does Barnacle Bill still introduce himself to Fair Young Maidens on playgrounds across the country, or do kids just download stuff and create an iPod Playground Mix these days? I'd go to the playground myself and ask, but I don't look good in orange.

So here, with notes, were pretty much all I could think of, excepting popular songs where we just added gratuitous fucking or hard-ons to the lyrics:


Bang Bang Lulu This Lulu had a boyfriend named Chuck. Or an uncle, depending on who you asked.

Barnacle Bill the Sailor Hands down (oh, sorry) the most popular, with about thirty verses including some composed by yours truly which involved local education officials.

Put Your Legs 'Round My Shoulders To the tune of the Paul Anka smash, this had no other lyric I was aware of. Although I doesn't really need any.

Louie Louie The Kingsmen. Of course you had to supply your own dirty lyric here, doubly so if you lived in Indiana, which managed to ban the thing for about four months in 1964. It was, naturally, one of two songs on my garage band's set list, and being that I was the only one brave enough to sing (plus, I owned the only microphone) I sang it at the fifth grade talent show, dirty lyric and all, and afterwards fellow students complained that they couldn't understand what I was saying.

If You Don't Blow Me Right Now Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes' "If You Don't Know Me By Now" got the treatment while I was in college (not by me). Included here because, as Einstein said about Jean Piaget, it's so simple only a genius could have recognized it.

Shave 'Em Dry Lucille Brogan. We knew only the line about big nipples and making a dead man come, and didn't know the melody. I thought I must have read it somewhere in the aftermath (sorry) of the Stones' using the latter line, but that was from "Start Me Up" and we definitely had it in high school, so I'm not sure now where it came from. "Lemon squeezing" was current then, too, but only from Led Zeppelin; I didn't hear Robert Johnson until I was in college.

Baby Let Me Bang Your Box Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts. Once I started touring the city playing dances for no money, this one was always requested. I bought a copy at Lyric Record Shop so I could learn it. They carried the whole line of risqué gag items behind the glass at the register. Little white gift boxes with seemingly provocative titles that would have some trinket inside that served as a punchline. Sort of 3-D greeting cards people gave each other in the Fifties. The only one I remember--because someone had given it to my Dad--said "For your High Balls" on the box, and inside was a miniature jock strap sized to fit a cocktail glass. A million yucks.

Roll Me Over WWII holdover. It has a countdown, or rather a running tally, like "This is number seven/ I took her straight to heaven" which was particularly lame. We just sang the chorus.

What'd I Say Ray Charles. The sine qua non of Sixties garage band smut. Concerned girls wearing different colors of clothing--all solids--and their social proclivities. The young lady in pink had poor personal hygiene.

Last Night (I Stayed Up Late and Masturbated) To the particularly annoying tune of "Finiculi-Finicula" which made it doubly satisfying. Plus, as a paean to self-abuse it doesn't objectify women, which was really important to me at the time, as you can well imagine. In fact the chorus expresses a preference for the caress that is truly knowing. Also had about a dozen verses, of which "It felt so neat/I used my feet" was always my favorite.

Okay, what'd I leave out?

Birthday Greetings, Gate

Louis Armstrong, 1901-1971

God, Made Simple

Okay, we're all agreed April is the cruelest month (breeding), but where do you suppose August was ranked in the coaches' poll? August is tiresome and irritable to its core. August is the smug, unreflecting smile of the born cheerleader, the irrepressible booster, just before she dies in a prom-night car crash or worse, graduates. August is a month of Groundhog Days, in both current senses. Six more weeks of this? Sure. But you know what, how 'bout instead of the brave promise of Earth's Green Bounty and bluebells in the meadow, we following this one with entire forests of orange flame, with the long, lingering soul kisses tasting of apple cider, and maybe a little roll in the hay for Harvest Home. And just a little touch of frost, darling, a little love nip, just enough teeth to make it interesting. Then the warmth will return, she promises, warm and bright and you can wear that new sweater you like so much for the slight morning chill.

Then she's walking out, and takin' your ball glove with her just for spite.

Well, it isn't actually like that for me. I like winter. I'm always ready for change. I'm a little tired by this point of getting up early to make sure everything in the garden is watered, but I don't think that's it. It's a psychic malaise, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with my personal psyche. And it's confined to the morning. I'm terrible at waking up under the best of circumstances. I don't sleep much, but I'm not worth much for roughly ninety minutes after I get out of bed. The past three days it's been more like stirring out of hibernation than cursing the alarm clock. You may be familiar with that sense that comes with having ingested certain types of intoxicating substances where the body is too leaden to respond to the brain's commands. This is like that, only my brain's dead, too.

But there are plants to be watered--we've hit another stretch of mid-90s here--and a kitten to be romped, and another cat to be fed and reassured that we'll be straightening out said kitten any day now, and while I'm under the influence of whatever this is I'm really sick of all of it, even though the garden is still peaceful in the early morning and the kitten is Most Agreeable, and I feel guilty about the stuff Stinky has had to go through on top of his recent illness.

So I blame August, or some mystic chord that's now lost that once equated late summer with jumping fish and tall cotton. There's a reason why sensible cultures with continental climates take the month of August off, while we're busy extending Employee Pricing and Christmas in July sales into one final week. August is God's way of telling us what He really thinks of Calvinists.

[By the way, are you as disgusted as I am with the overcommercialization of Christmas in July?]

I don't know what this has to do with God. In fact I don't know what anything has to do with God, and I wish more people who seek His care would admit they don't either. We'd all get along much better. But Stephanie filled in for Chris Clarke last week with a Chris-worthy piece about an old cemetary, and Lindsay had a piece about the latest sighting of Jesus in a bag of Fritos, and they both collected comments decrying their unfairness to people of faith, and it bothered me more than such things usually do. Maybe it's just August, I dunno. I'd be a lot more impressed by such people if their religion called on them to deny themselves something they really wanted, instead of grousing about what other people are up to all the time. How 'bout "Air conditioning is the Devil's back rub" or something? There's a 19th Century cemetery in Monroe County, about a quarter mile off a hiking trail through Morgan-Monroe State Forest, and there's a large stone for two parents and eight of their children who didn't make it past eleven. Those were God-fearing people (I'm supposing) who had real reason to fear, who probably didn't have time for a God who was interested in trivialities. Winter meant more to such people than bringing the potted plants indoors and wondering how much Ice Melt to buy. And the sweat of August was probably as welcome to them as a good spring rain.

Hoosier Rock Legend Quote of the Week

If you walk into the grocery store and it looks more like a kid's store you probably should walk out...Strawberries aren't supposed to be that big.

-John Mellencamp

Public Idiocy

So George W. Bush joins Ronald Reagan as the two modern presidents willing to publicly demonstrate their ignorance of science. Well, there goes the Hinderocket American DaVinci Award.

It's one thing to pander to the base. It's one thing to be wrong, even intentionally wrong, about the facts. It is quite another to be abyssmally misinformed about a matter any reasonably intelligent person should have a reasonable familiarity with, let alone to show ignorance of the concept of science which approaches the total. There are ways of making political hay out of Intelligent Design that would not require one to look like a total ass. Maybe we next need to start rooting around for a definition of "intelligence" that would make the Hinder's assessment somehow meaningful.

Bush was allowed--"assisted" is probably a better word--to play coy about his supposed personal opinion, to spin this as the familiar "students should hear all sides" canard which dates back to the failed, but more honest, "Creation Science" (which then Governor Bush also shilled). But the middle ground he supposedly occupies doesn't exist. I haven't been able to find a transcript of his "meeting with a small group of reporters", or what I like to call "flacking flack flackers". I'd like to know who exactly asked him the question, and why. What did it add to the story besides an out he'd already negated? There's no scientific reason to suggest there's a question here with two sides, no peer-reviewed publications, not even consistent basic definitions, just a well-financed PR machine. The very act of according it scientific standing chooses sides. Claiming you do so while remaining noncommittal amounts to jumping in the ocean while denying it was your intention to get wet.

Evolution is a fact. It is an observable fact. That does not mean that for all time it could never be disproven in some way by some seismic shift in our understanding. It means that as of today it is simply perverse for any intelligent person to insist otherwise.

Now if, for political reasons, we need to refight established 19th Century science, let's begin by understanding what we're talking about, a good first step in any scientific investigation. I don't expect that of Mr. Bush, but maybe the newspapers could get it right. Ron Hutcheson, from Knight Ridder:

Scientists concede that evolution doesn't answer every question about the creation of life, but most consider intelligent design an attempt to inject religion into science courses.

Just what scientists did you speak with, Mr. Hutcheson? I'd have thought that every last one of them would have explained to you that evolution doesn't answer any questions about the creation of life. For that matter, neither does "Intelligent Design", but at least evolution has the advantage of explaining something.

Mitch Watch

Y'know, if this was real journalism I'd have some snazzy graphics to go with this by now.

Emperor Governor Mitch Daniels is off junketing in the Far East with around ninety of his closest associates this week, but he's still managing to make news on the home front, in person and by proxy.

The trip, which isn't costing Hoosier taxpayers a cent as it's all paid for by corporate donors*, has been played to the hilt in local media, of course. I especially enjoyed this bit from the Indy Star's Larry Ingraham:

The governor, as the state's top CEO, must take an active role in leading Indiana's investment-attraction efforts. Corporate CEOs around the world will ultimately make decisions based on where they feel they have been most welcomed.

Larry, Indiana does have a journalist shield law, but it's still illegal to stick your tongue that far up another person's fundament in public. Just so you know. And next time, just to keep things interesting, you might try "state's supremo CEO" or maybe "Big Chief".

My favorite moment in all the hoopla was when the mayor of Anderson showed the cameras his business card which was printed in ideograms. "So, they translated it into Asian?" my wife said. She's a pip.

Anyhoo, before he left Mitch, who is fairly short for an adult male, mixed it up with his own Speaker of the House, Brian Bosma, over license branch closings. After a letter Bosma wrote to the state's top CEO became public, Mitch released another letter to make Bosma appear conflicted. And today came the surprise announcement that the governor's new Grand Inquisitor Inspector General had cleared his boss of any wrongdoing in the big RVgate scandal. So that's settled. Look for the Mitchmobile at a Republican fundraiser near you, assuming your state representative voted for daylight savings time after promising he wouldn't.

But the real fun--God, I just realized it's only Tuesday--was this week's license branch news. Joel Silverman, the top chief Commissioner of the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and former ultimate head President of Galyan's, the now defunct Indiana-based sporting goods retailer which under his watch got its lunch money stolen by an out-of-state competitor, announced his new and improved improvements for whatever branches we have left. And dadgum if it doesn't take a real top CEO with genuine retail experience to make employees feel like peons and make noises about "serving the customer" while treating him like a addle-pated cypher. Among the new rules:

• Employees must wear khaki pants and dark blue shirts. This is, of course, the preferred peon dress code of CEOs whose fashion sense derives from the golf course.

• No gum or tobacco chewing, visible tattoos or body piercings, hats, or "fashion hair coloring, i.e. rainbow colors".

• No clocks in public view. Silverman explained this one by saying the reason was "the tendency of government workers to be clock-watchers," but the memo said the reason was to "alleviate additional stress from customers who are constantly watching the clock."

• Only approved signage. No putting up employees' kid's drawings or ads for local businesses. Or presumably, one of those "You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps" signs, all of which add to customer stress.

• Every customer must be greeted within ten seconds. Because nothing ameliorates a four-hour wait like the fond memories of the mechanical "Good Morning" some geezer gave you at the door.

• Only approved BMV-supplied Christmas decorations with BMV ornaments -- cars, license plates, BMV logos, stop signs, road signs". I sense an anti-Christian bias here.

Not content to look like an idiot, Silverman was happy to sound like one, too. He said he'll be wearing the regulation uniform when he's in the branches, which I'm guessing will be about as often as he's in a Galyan's. Of the complaints of a "few" workers that they had to buy new clothes, Silverman replied, "I had to buy a few extra (polo shirts) myself." Because nothing assuages the feelings of a clerk who's just learned he has to cough up for forty hours a week worth of clothing he wouldn't be caught dead in while he deals with the actual customers who couldn't give a shit how he's dressed like knowing that the little dictator who ordered it will be writing a couple more golf shirts off his taxes next year.

But the real treat was this howler: "The biggest complaint has been the inconsistency."

I've been patronizing Indiana's antiquated, political-patronage run license branches for thirty-five years now. I've heard people complain about the long lines, the inconvenient hours, the fact that we're practically the only state in the nation which collects vehicle excise taxes when you buy your license, the hoops you have to jump through if your plate is stolen or you lose your driver's license. I've never heard anybody complain about a clerk wearing blue jeans or having green hair. And we managed to find the one guy in Indiana who thinks our problems will be solved by closing thirty branches and having every employee wear one of those nine-inch diameter "How May I Help You?" buttons to run things.

* It's interesting how Republicans are always pointing out that businesses don't pay taxes, they just pass the cost on to consumers, but when it comes to lobbying expenses or donating RVs or picking up the tab for world travel they go silent. Ain't it?

That's One Way Of Putting It, Although Accurately Would Have Been A Better Choice

Richard A. Posner: "Bad News," The New York Times Book Review

THE conventional news media are embattled. Attacked by both left and right in book after book, rocked by scandals, challenged by upstart bloggers, they have become a focus of controversy and concern. Their audience is in decline, their credibility with the public in shreds. In a recent poll conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, 65 percent of the respondents thought that most news organizations, if they discover they've made a mistake, try to ignore it or cover it up, and 79 percent opined that a media company would hesitate to carry negative stories about a corporation from which it received substantial advertising revenues.

Another Sunday Times, another page one review that has little to do with the actual books involved. (The count here is eight, none of which slow Judge Posner down for as much as a paragraph of his almost 4700 words, though he thoughtfully takes the time to dismiss Eric Alterman and Bill Moyers as hyperbolic.)

Let's begin with two observations. One, there is such a cacophony surrounding the subject that no one is going to persuasively argue anything from a "liberals say this, conservatives say that" perspective. This is why, say, actually reviewing the books in question rather than choosing the occasional blipquote to fit the frame might have improved the piece. We already know what Mr. Liberal and Mr. Conservative are said to think. Second, there's a very clear history of the argument leading right into the Nixon White House. It's a curious omission in a piece that runs to 110 column inches. For some reason "conservatives" don't seem to enjoy being reminded they been making essentially the same claims of bias since the days of rabbit ears.

And "public intellectuals" need do no more than recycle conventional wisdom to rate that sort of space. We barely reach the point where "liberal" and "conservative" views converge before we get this:

Liberals, including most journalists (because most journalists are liberals), believe that the decline of the formerly dominant ''mainstream'' media has caused a deterioration in quality. They attribute this decline to the rise of irresponsible journalism on the right, typified by the Fox News Channel (the most-watched cable television news channel), Rush Limbaugh's radio talk show and right-wing blogs by Matt Drudge and others. But they do not spare the mainstream media, which, they contend, provide in the name of balance an echo chamber for the right. To these critics, the deterioration of journalism is exemplified by the attack of the ''Swift boat'' Vietnam veterans on Senator John Kerry during the 2004 election campaign. The critics describe the attack as consisting of lies propagated by the new right-wing media and reported as news by mainstream media made supine by anxiety over their declining fortunes.

That's it? I know a lot of liberals who agree that Rush, Drudge, et.al., have contributed to the decline of mass-market journalism (I know a few conservatives who think so, too) but hardly any who trace its decline to their appearance. Most thoughtful people I know find the roots of that decline in the Nixon (there's that name again) administration's aggressive anti-media campaigns and Big Media's subsequent retreat. "Happy talk" news and the trivializing, fact-obscuring exercise of faux balance are creations of the 70s, your Honor. A public intellectual such as yourself ought to know that. And if I find the need of an exemplar for the deterioration of journalism it is Clinton Scandals, Inc. and the coverage of the 2000 Presidential election. What happened to John Kerry--which was the propagation of lies, however "critics" choose to describe it--was just more of the same.

But this seems to be what you get when "Conservatives", including their credentialed Big Thinkers play the objective observer. History begins when they say it does. They've been talking to themselves for so long that asking them to characterize the "liberal" argument is like asking James Dobson to give you a brief overview of Islam.

Of course, we're now within shouting distance of the sine qua non of media bias claims, which we've already slipped in while you were sleeping:

Fourteen percent of Americans describe themselves as liberals, and 26 percent as conservatives. The corresponding figures for journalists are 56 percent and 18 percent. This means that of all journalists who consider themselves either liberal or conservative, 76 percent consider themselves liberal, compared with only 35 percent of the public that has a stated political position.

The amazing thing here is not that this nonsense is trotted out; if he'd been honest Ronald Reagan would have listed it as the Republican 11th Commandment in 1980. It's not that a highly respected Republican jurist posing as a thoughtful essayist selectively quotes some poll without regard for its accuracy or its context. It's not even that deceitful little "if you artificially make the sample smaller it sounds even worse" coda. I'm not even going to mention that in the event some vengeful God turned me into a "conservative" journalist I'd tell any pollster who asked I was liberal just to keep the ball in play. It's that this continues to be offered as evidence that the news itself is biased. This is sloppy beyond belief when it comes from the knuckle-draggers on the Right. But from a "public intellectual"? And a legal scholar, at that, someone who has to understand the distinction between grounds for suspicion of bias and the actual finding of fact. But Posner's just getting warmed up. After the required mention of Rathergate and the Newsweek Koran flushing stories (with no pause to reflect that each case consisted of improperly sourced material while the charges of bias concern the stories themselves, which were both newsworthy and factually correct), we get this:

The rise of the conservative Fox News Channel caused CNN to shift to the left.

I'm not sure that "Conservatives" are even able to note when they step Through the Looking Glass anymore; we've got a sixty-year-old rug with less of a wear pattern. But I'd sure like to hear what the evidence looks like over there, at least occasionally. Who's the ragin'est liberal of that CNN bunch in Fantasyland? Daryn Kagan? Bill Schneider? Is Lou Dobbs a socialist? Does Candy Crowley fellate Democrats for a change? I think we have a real problem when saying "Up is Down" no longer carries any sense of exaggeration.

But this just passes as if it were too common to require discussion, because Posner wants to shoehorn the entire media bias debate into his University of Chicago Ayn Rand School of Economic Mumbo-Jumbo worldview. Because, you see, it's now okay that journalists are, by unanimous consent, somewhat to the left of Noam Chomsky, because modern technological advancements like cable and, god help us, blogs, have all but eradicated old-fashioned concepts like fairness, accuracy, and public ownership of the airwaves. So help me, the last third of this tiresome exercise is given over to recycled platitudes about blogging disguised as revelation. One and a half pages of stuff like:

The rapidity with which vast masses of information are pooled and sifted leaves the conventional media in the dust. Not only are there millions of blogs, and thousands of bloggers who specialize, but, what is more, readers post comments that augment the blogs, and the information in those comments, as in the blogs themselves, zips around blogland at the speed of electronic transmission.

and:

In effect, the blogosphere is a collective enterprise - not 12 million separate enterprises, but one enterprise with 12 million reporters, feature writers and editorialists, yet with almost no costs. It's as if The Associated Press or Reuters had millions of reporters, many of them experts, all working with no salary for free newspapers that carried no advertising.

Really, now, couldn't the Times find the Judge some science fiction to review? And one great thing about electronic media: I was able to print out three copies of that last quote and tape one up in each bathroom. Because the damn bureaucrats took Syrup of Ipecac off the market last year.

TV Guide™: What Went Wrong?

By now you will have learned that TV Guide™, once the weekly publication with the greatest circulation in the country, nay, the world, will soon cease to publish actual television listings. It will no longer serve as our Guide. They are, as it were, getting rid of the difficult math section. The size will change, too: no longer will our wait in the supermarket checkout line be assuaged by thumbing through the two-to-eight Collector's Editions nestled snug in their racks, hardly bigger than one of those index cards that are bigger than real index cards. In jettisoning the Listings section the magazine will actually become larger, in defiance of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. We live in disturbing times.

Oh, I know there are scoffers out there among you. The snazzily dressed, technologically savvy, postmodern young urbanites with your digital recording and your onscreen menus; the libertarians who say the market determines value; and yes, even my fellow liberals who say Walter Annenberg was a slimy, scum-sucking, mobbed-up bastard of a Nixon crony who should be dug up and killed again just to make sure. To you TV Guide is antiquated, strictly for "squares", one more example of how The Man just don't get it. To which I reply, fine. I'm just an old Luddite who answered when his country called so that you'd one day be free to sneer at me on the street. I'm unfashionable, incontinently nostalgic, and my turn signal goes on for blocks without my noticing. Sure, what you call my analog ways aren't "cool", and I guess there's no place anymore for my near-encyclopedic command of Laugh-In cast members and British Invasion-era singles in today's world. You don't need the collected wisdom of the elderly anymore. You've got the internet.

Or maybe you're even one of those people who claims to despise television, to be too good for its anodyne amusements and lockstep "USA! USA!" 24-hour news coverage. And all I can say is, I'm sorry for you. Because once upon a time this country was about community, a Golden Age when all Americans, regardless of which Protestant denomination they belonged to, could choose one of two or three available sitcoms or Westerns, depending on reception, that showed us what the real America was like.

Look to yourself, Young American. Wake up, smell the coffee, and enjoy the mind-numbing celebrity-based chitchat on the morning news programs while you still can. Because just as my day is here, yours is coming. And trust me, it won't be pretty.