It's the FBI, Stupid

Via Tom Tomorrow and Skippy (links at sidebar), Da Boys don't want you should read this article. 'Cause they might just come pay you a visit, you know what I mean? And you wouldn't want something should happen to those nice little civil rights you think you have. [As to the article itself, I liked the bit excoriating Murdoch and Ailes and Fox, oh my, but the rest of it sounded a bit like a shrill fishwife, or that character in Plan 9 sputtering in apoplexy, "Your stupid minds! Stupid, stupid!" It's one thing to observe that government/media propaganda is successful; it's another thing entirely to tell people taken in by it that they're dumb or intellectually challenged or lazy or whatever. They tend not to take kindly to insults, particularly ones couched in ivory-tower liberalese. Besides, smart people are duped all the time; I think it's rather in keeping with human nature to want to believe the best of others, particularly those who hold power over you.]

Not Tanned, Not Rested, But Ready

If you haven't checked my sidebar in a few days, you probably don't know that I've registered for Blogathon 2003 after all. I've grown less and less tentative as the week has progressed and I seem to be back up to around 3-5 entries daily, and as I said back on July 7 it falls at the end of my vacation week so the timing works out pretty well, and who knows? I might very well be rested by then. (Although not tanned, I assure you, I am of Eastern European "we don't tan we burn" stock.) So, please consider this my first official announcement and daily reminder. Please sponsor me in Blogathon 2003 by clicking the appropriate link which I've moved to the top of the sidebar. I'll also entertain all sorts of suggestions in the comments section on what to blog about during the 24-hour period.

Cheesy Writing

Via Gianna (link at sidebar), the announcement of this year's winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for (deliberately) bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. I'm feeling a bit peckish already. You can read all the results - as well as a brief history of the contest - here, if you dare.

Unconventional

The San Diego Comic-Con International is the biggest and most amazing comic book convention in the country. It's considered The Place To Be if you're into comics. It's also very exhausting and prohibitively expensive if you haven't saved up. We won't be there this year. At least three people on my "Top Six" will, however - check out the blogs of Neil Gaiman, Wil Wheaton and Mark Evanier for more specific plans of where they can be found.

We had planned to attend a couple more conventions later this year, one in NYC and one in Ohio, but they're being held on exactly the same weekend (argh!) and we're already committed to the latter. We continue to be impressed with the way Wizard World has treated us in the aftermath of their Philly con (to which we plan on returning next year), and the announcement that they're planning a convention in Long Beach, CA next March has us interested (it's a week before my Los Angeles-based brother's birthday and JetBlue's airfares look pretty good), but as with everything else it's all finance-dependent. Meanwhile, I'm getting psyched to spend a vacation week pretty much at home (with the exception of a couple medical appointments and a possible overnight at Chez 'Rents).

Your Daily Supplement

My suggestion this week for the MadKane (link at sidebar) link to Humor I Wish I Wrote is the very valuable service provided by the Daily Show Web-Only Headlines.

Taking Back the Radio

The latest successors to the grand Firesign tradigion of excellent political comedy/commentary are "American Stranger" (Don Waller) and "Symbolman" (Micheal Stinson), who invite you to their Take Back the Media Radio webshow. Good stuff! Now, when are they going to invite the 4or5 as guests? (Via Lisa English and Cowboy Kahlil, links at sidebar; thanks folks!)

Wholly Fug!

Via Avedon Carol (link at sidebar), this article from the NY Times - which I pulled from Google's news section because of, well, see the entry below - about the Fugs' latest album, The Fugs Final CD (released last week), and the gig they're playing tonight at the Village Underground on West Third Street. Dang, I wish I'd known about this earlier. Avedon's not the only one who's corresponded with Tuli Kupferberg; Tuli was a staff artist for my INSIDE JOKE zine in the '80s, and I even had the pleasure of visiting his apartment once. Based on the photo accompanying the article, he doesn't appear to have changed at all since I knew him, and looks damn good for 79!

Ooh Ooh That Smell...

What is it? Burnt waffles? Mendacity? Maureen Dowd sniffs it out. Via Jenny (link at sidebar) and Google's news site so you don't have to go through the NY Times' overly intrusive registration process. Yes, my one-woman "subvert the Times links" crusade continues. [Here's Krugman's latest, NYT-reg-free.]

None of Our Business

Last night we caught the tail end of an AMC documentary about Hollywood and the Muslim World. Overall it was pretty informative, but contrary to Real Arab/Real Americans' breathless reassurance that "It's highly unusual for American television programs not to present an American point of view, but this entire one-hour documentary consists solely of Arab voices. No American opinions are expressed," the American POV was more than present in the narration, as "award-winning" documentarian Charlie Stuart seemed to intone "What he/she had to say really surprised me" a few too many times to make it 100% credible. Is Stuart, credentialed out the wazoo, honestly that provincial? Goodness, this is the same person who did Into the Shadows: The CIA In Hollywood, should any affect American culture has on the rest of the world truly surprise him? That it would surprise viewers may come as no shock, of course. American culture, which these days goes hand and hand with American business, is incredibly pervasive in many Arab countries. One eloquent young man said he thinks this inescapable invasion of secular capitalism (or, more accurately, capitalism as a substitute for spiritualism) was one of the main things driving many young folks toward a more fundamentalist mindset. Chew on that: our culture - more accurately, our way of doing business, whether it's show business or the shoe business - might be creating terrorists by its very ubiquity. If you can ignore Stuart's repeated "I was amazed!"s, this docu is very worth watching. [Robin is convinced that it was no coincidence to air a docu observing that, among other things, American movies crank out piss-poor stereotypes of Arab cultures, right before a showing of Midnight Express. "Muslim stereotypes are bad - now, here's a movie about a Turkish prison!"]

Also musing about the business of America is Jeanne D'Orleans (yes, it's All Jeanne All The Time Day here at Pen-Elayne), who pretty much expresses how I feel every time I hear the phrase "American interests" (i.e., that whenever it's uttered I invariably assume the word "business" is implied between "American" and "interests").

Intellectually Improper

Via Jeanne D'Orleans (link at sidebar), a rethinking of her previous decision to give Bill Gates' philanthropy the benefit of many doubts, courtesy of the latest blog entry from Greg Palast (link now at sidebar under "Journalists" - thanks Jeanne! and thanks to Tim Dunlop, link at sidebar, as well!) discussing how the WTO's Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) rules actually serve to block low-cost medicines to tons more Africans than any charitable gestures or fancy promises in Bush's speeches will help.

Joyeux le 14 Juliett!

Merci a Max Sawicky (link at sidebar) for reminding us all that today is Bastille Day! As MaxSpeak has taken care of reproing the English lyrics to the French national anthem, I thought I'd just link folks to Allan Sherman's immortal You Went the Wrong Way, Old King Louie.

Not Exactly Gandhi's Footsteps

Via Maru Soze (link at sidebar), India refuses U.S. request to send troops to Iraq. Wonder if this means the Bush administration will finally be criticizing the Indian government for the Gujurat pogrom?

Why Does Bush Hate Science?

Via Mark Evanier (link at sidebar), an article by Nicholas Thompson in the Washington Monthly entitled Science Friction which bolsters the claims of Anne Zook (link at sidebar) and others regarding the current administration's contempt for both academia and truth. I was particularly surprised to read the following: "Bush, for instance, has half as many Ph.D.s in his cabinet as Clinton had two years into his term. Among the White House inner circle, Condoleezza Rice's doctorate distinguishes her as much as her race and more than her sex. Consider also the length of time the administration left top scientific positions vacant. It took 20 months to choose an FDA director, 14 months to choose an NIH director, and seven months to choose a White House science adviser for the Office of Science and Technology Policy." This kind of thing certainly pushes me further towards Anne's theories! Update: Bush seems to hate schools too, particularly ones that are performing well. Jo Fish (link at sidebar) is on the story and observes, "Imagine that, President C-minus aiming for mediocrity."

"Surrealpolitik"

Via too many folks on my blogroll to mention (well, okay, Avedon Carol and Neil Gaiman and at least one other person but I can't remember who at the moment), this interesting profile of Christopher Hitchens from one who knows, Roz Kaveney. As far as I know she coined the word I used in the header, riffing on Henry Kissinger's old modus operandi, but it sounds like something Firesign would say too, doesn't it?

Blogs of Peace

Sometimes it's kinda nice that I'm enough under the radar (at slightly over 100 readers, from what I gather via Extreme's statistics) not to make Blogs of War's nasty little hitlist (mentioned today by Neil Gaiman, link at sidebar). I'm not going to link to John Little (appropriate handle, methinks), who makes Freepers look reasonable, but I do want to congratulate all the folks on my blogroll listed as "Loony Leftists on the Web," the folks his skewed view describes as "anti-war, anti-American, anti-capitalism, anti-Bush, or just anti-everything-most-Americans-value." I wasn't aware most Americans valued war or Bush, but then I have no idea what color the sky is in Penis Tiny's world either. Probably blood-red. Anyway, I'm going to use the list to add to my blogroll, so I thank Penis Tiny for his recommendations.

Who's the Anti-Democratic Wimp?

Via Dwight Meredith (link at sidebar), a terrific entry by Terry Welch (now blogrolled on the sidebar as well) entitled Democracy: It Isn't For the Weak. I don't usually applaud a macho stance, but I really like this one. Guy's got ovaries. :) [Yes, blogging kinda late today, keeping Robin company whilst he finishes inking the last seven pages of this...]

The Latest Skein

There are so many varieties of wool the Bush administration is attempting to pull over American citizens' eyes that it gets mighty hard to catalog. Thank goodness for the blogosphere. Ampersand (link at sidebar) has done a couple great entries on companies, Nike and Monsanto, trying to subvert the free market and hoodwink consumers by making false claims, bringing lawsuits, and generally acting scummy and getting away with it. On Amp's comment section, Evan mentions this entry from Mitch Ratcliffe discussing how the FDA has now lowered limits on food manufacturers where, "instead of having to be able to back statements with 'significant scientific agreement' (which is usually purchased with sponsored studies today), companies may make any claim and then must disclose whether anyone agrees... through the placement of a letter 'grade' (A through D, as defined by the FDA) 'evidence-based rating system'," a lovely little piece of doublespeak. He quotes the FDA Commissioner extolling the virtues of this nontruth-in-advertising scheme as beneficial and "protecting consumers by helping them get better nutrition information"! And he makes the astute observation that "The interesting phenomenon here is the way this language is couched in the same terms as the security pronouncements of the Bush Administration." Worth reading, even with the slightly fatphobic slip (some of us obviously don't agree with the statement "There's no doubt we're getting fat and that this is bad").

Lies Our Leaders Tell Us

Every now and then I like to catch up online with Glen Rangwala, one of my current heroes. Dr. Rangwala, who lectures on politics at Newnham College in Cambridge, was the alert Middle East Review of International Affairs Journal reader who spotted the similarities between the infamous "dodgy dossier" on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and this article by Dr. Ibrahim al-Marashi. (Incidentally, I found the MERIA Journal's response to the plagiarism highly amusing.) Occasionally I wonder what he's been up to, and thanks to Jeralyn Merritt (link at sidebar) I was able to read his latest (co-written) article in the Independent, 20 Lies About the War. A nice little summary, handy for future reference.

Cultural Sensibility

Emma of Late Night Thoughts (link at sidebar) doesn't blog nearly as often as I wish she did, but as the saying goes "what's there is cherce." I've never seen a bad or throwaway entry from her. Check out her latest on cultural sensitivity. "I don't care if this makes me 'insensitive' or 'incorrect' or whatever the hell moniker you're giving these days to those who make cultural judgments and find some cultures wanting. Women are valuable beings in their own right, and a culture that systematically victimizes them is not one that I consider worthy of survival. I don't care if it's based on the Bible, the Koran, the Upanishads or the Sixteen Commandments of UggaBugga." I love this woman.

Political Goo-Goo

Well, I promised Anne Zook (link on sidebar) I'd do a follow-up to my comments last month about anti-intellectualism, because she's been talking about it on her blog. What prompted all this was Anne's link to Justin Cartwright's somewhat paternalistic article, Rise of the new infantilism, in the Guardian. [Guess Cartwright's too intellectual to start his header with a definite article; maybe there's more than one Rise.] I suspected I was in trouble when the first paragraph contained stuff like "I stopped at a diner for breakfast, where everyone was eating generous combinations of kiddies' food: pancakes with syrup, eggs over easy or sunny side up..." Now okay, 12-packs of Pop-Tarts are kiddies' food, I'll admit that. But pancakes? Eggs? Has this Brit, like, never heard of farms? I mean, what the fuck is wrong with eggs?

Well, we see it's not just eggs, it's what they represent. Rotundness, you see. "The puzzle... is why the popular mood has changed so radically from one of cautious self-restraint to a religious zeal for gratification. The demonstrable result of this change is the extraordinary number of obese people who lumber around our streets and presumably even more who stay at home because they can't lumber at all." A-ha! It's the fat people! How dare they leave their houses to "lumber around" - or, as less intellectual people might say, go for a walk and, you know, get some exercise?

Oops, I'm sorry. Fat people don't exercise, do we? (Only walked a mile today, fat and lazy scum that I am!) And there's obviously no correlation between obesity and environment, is there?, so we shouldn't even consider investigating the chemicals and preservatives that go into our bodies. After all, goes the wisdom, fat is caused by overeating, period. And no thin people overeat, and all fat people do (as my skinny friend Jan and I used to note when we would order the exact same lunch.)

Cartwright goes on to assure us "But over-eating is in a sense only the obvious and visible sign of a fall from grace, a sort of perversion of the sacraments." Because, again, in the World According to Justin overeating and obesity are the same thing. And the rest of his article is all about our love of instant self-gratification and quick fixes and pretty much what I was saying last week when I noted that "the reality of modern America tends towards multiple-choice questions rather than thought-out essays." But any points he tries to weave together were lost for me the minute I read his snobbish fatphobia, which had very little to do with anything else he said (despite his poor attempt at a segue) and just seemed to exist so he could trumpet his superiority.

Look, I grew up being an educational snob, I remember what it's like. It's a sort of infantilism in and of itself, isn't it? It's a little security blanket you can pull over yourself to feel better about being a smart freak or geek when the bullies make fun of you. But see, I grew out of that (well, mostly) and ventured into the real world and met people of all kinds of backgrounds, good people and bad people, and it's just not always as cut-and-dried as "look at all the stupid people being duped in our country." Equating stupidity with gullibility is as faulty as equating being fat with overeating. There's undoubtedly overlap, but a lot of smart people are easily duped, and a lot of stupid people have more common sense than many ivory tower intellectuals.

Okay, now please read Anne's essay linked to above. First off, she writes, "My reference to the (I think, very real) 'cult of anti-intellectualism' was, specifically, to the Republican Party's long history of dismissing the Democrats as, 'intellectually effete' as though the two were synonymous and bad. Intellectualism in this country is also linked (usually by the Right) to ineptitude. The clear inference is that to be intellectual is to be an incompetent wimp. It's as though you can either think or act, but you can't be good at both." Well, consider a minute. Who was President before Bush? A friggin' Rhodes scholar. Of course the idea of "smart people aren't to be trusted" is going to be one of the weapons in the Repubs' continuing anti-Clinton arsenal, particularly given the very real incompetence and obvious lack of smarts (both of book learning and common sense) of the current President. But look at Cheney, at Rove - heck, at Grover Norquist, one of the smartest intellectuals I've seen in recent months. It's the same-old projection pre-emptive strike at work - accuse your opponent of something you know you're doing before he can accuse you. Witness how Bush has begun repeating the meme "revisionist history" in attempts to throw people off the trail of his own administration's constant revisionism. This "I'm rubber, you're glue" tactic is infantilism at its worst.

Anne asks, "When did the unspoken agreement come into place that what we want are politicians we'd like to have a beer with and discuss the All Star Game, instead of politicians with the education and smarts to understand incredibly complex issues?" Well, aside from the fact that most of the American public did not vote for this man ("millions of voters" weren't "turned off" to the perceived-boring, competent, smart Gore; but the equally smart and better-connected cabal pulled strings in a Bush-run state and the Supreme Court intellectuals sealed the deal), I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting our elected representatives to be nice people. I'd far rather have a diplomat with an every-man attitude in office than the boob currently alienating over half the countries in the world with his misguided policies. In my book, acting polite and civilized is certainly preferable to adopting a smirking fratboy attitude.

I think Anne's main point might be "So, we need elected officials we can trust to be smart enough to have investigated ramifications and potential outcomes of the steps they take," but I don't consider this an issue of thought as much as one of forethought. And very few politicians, businesses, or anyone else in power appears to want to operate with anything approaching deliberation and forethought. Heck with the seventh generation, most people today don't look beyond the current quarterly report. And the need for this immediate self-gratification, the future be damned, is endemic to most people in power, no matter what their political affiliation. But doing stupid things, like being short-sighted, is not the same as being stupid.