So the President is planning a surge, is he? All the warning signs are there–Dad’s friends on the Iraq Study Group embarrassed him, and he knows he has to announce some kind of change, so why not go for broke and double down on America’s military future?

So The Surge^TM gets floated in some neoconservative rag, like the Weekly Standard:

Relevant historical examples do not support the notion that hundreds of thousands more troops are needed to improve security in Iraq. A study of post-conflict operations in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and elsewhere conducted by Ambassador James Dobbins showed that success in those operations–characterized by severe ethnic and sectarian violence–required force ratios of 1 soldier per 100 inhabitants. Iraq poses challenges that are in some respects more severe, at the moment, but it also offers its own rules-of-thumb. Successful clear-and-hold operations in Tal Afar required a force ratio of around 1 soldier (counting both U.S. and Iraqi troops) for every 40 inhabitants. On the other hand, in 2004 Major General Peter Chiarelli suppressed a widespread uprising in Sadr City (an area inhabited by about 2.5 million Shiites) with fewer than 20,000 U.S. soldiers–a ratio of about 1 to 125.

OK, Iraq has about 26,074,906 people, according to a July 2005 estimate. Of course, the Iraqi government estimated last week that something like 25,000 Iraqis have been killed since then. (“But here’s something you’re unlikely to read about in the Post — Iraq is making substantial economic strides,” Powerline informs us in the same breath). That leaves 26,049,906; which makes the Tal Afar standard for successful ‘clear-and-hold operations’ Iraq-wide is… any hands? 651,247.65 troops (that 65/100th of a soldier was wounded–just kidding!). But wait, Kagan says, the Sadr City standard needs only 208,579 troops to ‘suppress widespread uprising’ Iraq-wide.

Then there’s the question of the size of the population to be pacified. Most of Iraq is relatively calm. Instances of violence in the Kurdish north and the Shia south are rare. No responsible analyst advocates sending large numbers of troops into either area–they are not needed and would not be welcomed. Disarming the Shia militias is a process that must be undertaken only after the Sunni Arab insurgency is under control, and it cannot be undertaken primarily by American forces directly confronting the Shiite population. Using all of Iraq’s 27 million people as a baseline for estimating force ratios is, therefore, an invalid approach. The U.S. command repeatedly and correctly points out that about 80 percent of the violence in Iraq occurs within a 35-mile radius of Baghdad, among a population of perhaps 10 million. Baghdad itself has roughly 6.5 million inhabitants, including the 2.5 million Shiites in Sadr City. These figures provide the basis for a more realistic estimate of the force levels needed. Applying the high-end ratio used in Tal Afar over the entire metropolitan Baghdad area would generate a requirement of 250,000 troops–both U.S. and Iraqi. There are currently about 100,000 Iraqi army troops that the U.S. command considers trained and ready. There are almost 150,000 American troops in Iraq now, including perhaps 70,000 combat troops. Conducting Tal Afar-type operations across the entire capital region all at once would require concentrating all available forces in the area and a “surge” of about 80,000 U.S. soldiers–a large number, to be sure, but very far from the “hundreds of thousands” or even “millions” generated by the use of specious historical examples.

Translation: the Kurdish militias work for us. So we’d only need 162,500 combat troops to patrol Baghdad if we want to go with the lower ‘Sadr City’ standard of 125 Iraqis per soldier (watch for this, it’s going to become a theme) and about 120,000 troops for the rest of the country (less 17.5% of the population for the Kurds, less 6.5 million in Baghdad), totalling 282,500 troops on the ground.

Kagan says we have 70,000 combat troops and the Iraqis have 100,000, so we’d only need another 112,500 troops shipped to Iraq pronto to make the place ‘Sadr City’ safe (Kagan says 80,000; someone’s math is wrong–probably mine).

The problem, according to much anecdotal evidence and the recent testimony of the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, General Michael D. Maples, is that the U.S. military command did not leave American forces behind in the areas that had been cleared. That mistake allowed insurgents to reinfiltrate those neighborhoods and begin the cycle of violence again.

So, we need to clear out Iraq burg by burg and stay there. But it’s not an escalation, it’s a “surge,” which Wikipedia defines as ‘a citrus soft drink first introduced in Norway.’ I don’t trust everything on the Internet, but something tells me the intensification of the foreign occupation from a Muslim country is going to go down Iraqi throats like a refreshing orange soda.

Note the use of ‘anecdotal evidence’–it’s a good thing this is a serious analysis piece that will become the basis of policy affecting actual people’s lives, otherwise I wouldn’t trust this kind of thing. (Were that Iraq itself were like ‘hunger’ according to Ed Meese, eh boys?)

Sigh. Wait! There’s more:

There are a number of ways of mitigating the resulting difficulties in Iraq. The most unsatisfactory would probably be to delay the beginning of the major security operations until the second wave was nearly ready. Another would be to proceed more slowly, spacing the clear-and-hold phases further apart to gain time. Still another would be to accept greater risk in areas outside the capital such as al Anbar province or the north in order to concentrate forces in the capital now, counting on the arrival of reinforcements in a number of weeks or months to repair any damage done in those areas by the temporary withdrawal. A variant of this approach would be to deploy U.S. forces at slightly lower levels of readiness into the more pacified areas of the country where they could complete their training in situ while also providing a basic military presence. This, incidentally, was what was done following Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, when many Army units completed essential training in Saudi Arabia (not in combat conditions but under sporadic missile attack) before launching the ground attack in February 1991. All such approaches carry risk; none is impossible or inconceivable.

Webster defines ‘surge’ as “to rise suddenly to an excessive or abnormal value ” Those wacky pinkos at Webster have it right on the nose–thousands more fresh, untrained recruits are going to be GREAT PR. From Haditha to Abu Ghraib, we’ve learned that untrained troops are actually handier cannon fodder in the courts and media than on the ground. They can blame all the latest atrocities on the new recruits–who because we will have to lower standards to up recruitment, will likely have its share of ‘bad apples.’ But remember:

This approach is not just a matter of throwing more troops at the problem. It involves a fundamental change in U.S. military strategy in Iraq.

Oh! I think I got it! Is what’s different about this approach that we’re going to acknowledge there’s a problem?

In a further blow to the President’s speechwriters, Kagan issues a direct challenge to Bush:

The U.S. military has never set itself the goal of establishing and maintaining security. It has always prioritized training Iraqi forces and allowing them to undertake such operations on their own. This strategy might have had some merit when the principal problem in Iraq was the Sunni Arab insurgency (although it was dubious even then). It has little or no merit today, when sectarian violence is the most important challenge. More resources are needed to support a changed strategy, but changing the strategy is essential. Establishing security in Iraq should be our primary objective, with training Iraqi forces a close second.

Translation: we need to keep more troops on the ground for a much longer time, because the benchmark of training Iraqi troops and police is too scary a prospect for the planners of a long invasion.

The U.S. military, partnered with Iraqi army units capable of assisting, needs to clear and hold troubled neighborhoods in order to bring the sectarian conflict under control. At the same time, the coalition must reinvigorate its efforts to reconstruct cleared areas, bringing jobs, food, and water to the Iraqi people along with safety.

Translation: even though the schools our contractors build are literally falling apart, they need more money. But more importantly, we must prevent Iraqis from getting enough wealth to funnel any more towards the insurgency.

To begin with, the Defense Department has just announced plans to deploy over 50,000 troops to Iraq this spring, including more than 20,000 combat troops, as part of a rotational plan to relieve forces currently in the theater. If, instead of bringing those forces home, we extended their tours, we would immediately have generated a surge of 20,000 combat troops.

This is what President Bush is widely expected to announce. I won’t subject you to any more of Kagan’s Weekly Standard article, which goes on to suggest that we merely strand the rest of the troops going to Iraq there until we stabilize the country (cough).

Now, according to a recent Gallup poll, 15% of Americans surveyed favor immediate withdrawal, 39% say withdraw within a year, 31% say to take as many years as needed, 12% say send more troops (the surge’s natural constituency) and 2% had no opinion.

So speaking as one who favors immediate withdrawal, we still beat the surgers by 3 points. And that feels good, I have to admit, after being in the minority for so long.

It must be noted that any sensible victory involves withdrawing from Iraq at the end, as the President has stated. But he has also stated the inverse–the only way we lose by leaving. As long as we stayed, we used to be winning, but lately we’ve been ‘not winning and not losing.’ As NASCAR shows, not winning and not losing will let you keep your corporate sponsorship in any case. (How long before the troops start wearing branded gear? come on–that’s potential millions, maybe billions in ad revenue!)

Recently, David Asman of Fox News’ program “Forbes on Fox” asked the following question:

“Bashing our military: seems like it’s a new sport for our media! But could all the negative headlines and lack of reporting about anything positive our brave men and women are doing there hurt America and our markets?”

Naturally, Asman turns stage right to some decrepit old businessman who professes his anger that “all we read about are atrocities” and how the nobility of our soldiers who might occasionally “go berserk” are, in actuality, just victimized heroes who “save Iraqi lives every day.” But thankfully, most of his guests see right through this ruse, for example, Forbes’ Silicon Valley bureau chief Quentin Hardy, who zings back:

I can’t agree with a single thing you’re talking about. There have been positive stories, from Jessica Lynch to ‘Mission Accomplished’ to Tal Afar a few months ago. In this case you’re just blaming the messenger.

Steve Forbes actually cracked a smile on the split-screen at that one. But just as quickly, he shakes his grey head and bleats:

The back of this insurgency has been broken, what you see in Baghdad now, this chaos, the Iraqi government has to establish order, but we broke the back of this thing and no one knows this.

Steve’s right–nobody knows this, even the insurgents. It’s so top secret only Fox News viewers have heard about it.

Anyway, why did I just transcribe all of this? It wasn’t because I love right-wing television news. It’s because this exchange illustrates perfectly the moral twists and turns of the new information age as typified by the post-modern Bush administration and its cronies and supporters in the media.

Let’s return, for a moment, to Asman’s original question. When he talks about ‘our media,’ strangely, he cannot be referring to his own Fox News, which painstakingly highlights the positive news from Iraq whenever possible. No, he refers to ‘the mainstream media’ elsewhere in the program, as if Fox News is some kind of little known upstart in cable news. Fox, of course, prides itself on being ‘fair and balanced,’ but in this case the ‘balance’ is what’s important here.

The underlying assumption of Asman’s question, and indeed, the whole program, is that there’s more good being done by our soldiers than harm, which none of his guests bothered to refute. Steve Forbes’ psychic connection to the Iraqi people notwithstanding, almost every quality-of-life metric shows that daily life in Iraq is even worse today than the years of the massively corrupt Food For Oil program.

Not that you would hear about these problems over at Fox News. If you want to get a sense of the ‘balance’ Fox touts, do a search for “Quality of life Iraq” and you’ll see that the results for Fox News itself contains headlines like “In Iraq, Civilian ‘Troops’ Are UnKnown (sic) Heroes,” (which is actually a story about the death of a PX salesman) and “Army Teaches Troops How to Pick a Spouse.” Interestingly, their search page also links to Yahoo and Google, whose results are much less equivocal, with results like “Quality Of Life In Iraq Still Poor,” a story from the government-sponsored Voice of America, and the Brookings Institute’s Iraq Index, which gives a comprehensive (if estimated) picture of what life in Iraq is actually like and how much our troops are actually helping.

Remember all those surveys which showed that Fox News viewers were more likely to believe that Saddam was responsible for 9/11 or that the 2004 election wasn’t stolen? The problem with studies like this, as all social scientists know, is that the correlation between those two facts doesn’t tell us whether Fox convinced these people or simply told them what they wanted to hear. And here we come to the underlying current here: the commoditization of information, and the use of disinformation as weapon.

People watch Fox News because they have an expectation of hearing what they probably want to hear, in a way that’s different from the expectations of, say, a CNN viewer (not that I’m such a huge fan of CNN, either). They fill a market need, and without casting a moral judgement on the accuracy of their news service, they certainly service their customers admirably. This is but one aspect of the commodization of information.

When Adam Smith wrote about perfect information being a prerequisite for perfect competition, he scarcely conceived that information itself would become a marketable item. But today’s capitalists are acutely aware of the advantages of paying both for the dissemination and reception of information.

One person who probably gets this more than anyone else is John Rendon of the Rendon Group. You may have read the Rolling Stone profile entitled “The Man Who Sold the War”. An excerpt:

A recent congressional report suggests that the Pentagon may be relying on “covert psychological operations affecting audiences within friendly nations.” In a “secret amendment” to Pentagon policy, the report warns, “psyops funds might be used to publish stories favorable to American policies, or hire outside contractors without obvious ties to the Pentagon to organize rallies in support of administration policies.” The report also concludes that military planners are shifting away from the Cold War view that power comes from superior weapons systems. Instead, the Pentagon now believes that “combat power can be enhanced by communications networks and technologies that control access to, and directly manipulate, information. As a result, information itself is now both a tool and a target of warfare.” It is a belief John Rendon encapsulated in a speech to cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1996. “I am not a national-security strategist or a military tactician,” he declared. “I am a politician, a person who uses communication to meet public-policy or corporate-policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager.”

The Rendon group is a PR firm who have been hired by almost every administration to clandestinely advance their agenda in wars and various foreign entaglements, from Nicaragua to Iraq. This is more than just spin or rumor mongering, but media manipulation on a grand scale. But the work of the Rendon group is scarcely the only disinformation on which our government spends money. The General Accounting Office has repeatedly chastised the Bush administration for illegal propagandizing, from the Armstrong Williams payola scandal to their fake news pieces promoting their Medicare plans or their ONDCP anti-drug videos. And then (just when you thougth I had lost sight of my original point), there’s the multi-million dollar propaganda campaign where the Bush administration employed the Lincoln group to buy positive news coverage in Iraqi newspapers. The GAO found that the Bush administration has spends about a billion dollars a year for propaganda (and that’s just official funding).

So, David Asman and ilk, if you’re wondering why there isn’t more positive coverage of our progress in Iraq in the ‘mainstream media,’ the answer is simple economics: the government hasn’t been paying our information vendors enough to run it. Because clearly there isn’t sufficient market demand for this propaganda; it’s the kind of thing the government needs to subsidize, and even our CEO-in-Chief knows it.

Now, Asman didn’t invent the idea of killing the messenger; that was the ancient Greeks. But unlike the ancient Greek rulers who actually killed the bearers of bad news, today’s messenger-blamers are employing the tactic in order to shift the blame for our failures away from those ultimately responsible. and as we know, it’s not just the conservative media outlets who are doing this, it’s the administration itself which has been taking up the ‘it’s the media’s fault’ line. And no wonder, they’ve repeated it often enough they seem to believe it themselves.

It’s curious that all of this media attention being paid to the atrocities our troops have committed is coming so late in the game. And the reson for this has everything to do with the market for information and our government’s interference, if you will, in that market. Let’s get back to Rendon and Rolling Stone for a moment:

Rendon is already thinking ahead. Last year, he attended a conference on information operations in London, where he offered an assessment on the Pentagon’s efforts to manipulate the media. According to those present, Rendon applauded the practice of embedding journalists with American forces. “He said the embedded idea was great,” says an Air Force colonel who attended the talk. “It worked as they had found in the test. It was the war version of reality television, and for the most part they did not lose control of the story.” But Rendon also cautioned that individual news organizations were often able to “take control of the story,” shaping the news before the Pentagon asserted its spin on the day’s events. “We lost control of the context,” Rendon warned. “That has to be fixed for the next war.”

In the period where the most civilians were killed by our troops, when the most atrocities actually occurred, there was almost no reporting about it in the mainstream American media. And no wonder–they were embedded with the killers, not the killed. Reporters were actually being shot at and the military was still largely given a pass. Of course, you’ll notice that reporting of bad news has increased with the general dissatisfaction with the war, in the same corrollary fashion as the Fox News audience and their reporting I mentioned above.

The truth of the matter was that the administration had done a bang-up job of information control from the march to war up until, I’d say, Abu Ghraib. They spent just enough money and effort convincing a large part of the public. But unfortunately for them, information wants to be free. The truth can really only be contained for so long, particulraly with the short-term information management strategies we were employing.

My Enron cartoon from 2002

Call it the Enron model of government. It’s cheaper to create the appearance of doing a good job than to actually do one, as long as the public never finds out about it. But, like Enron, the ax has to fall eventually.

If you look at it from an “perception management” perspective, the emblematic failure of the Bush administration is Hurricane Katrina. And the reason for it is simple: they couldn’t control the media in New Orleans. Even Fox News’ coverage, when unembedded, has to show the devastation and utter failures of the government. the footage was raw in every sense of the word. As with Enron’s book-cooking, there is always an unavoidable accountability moment. You can only misdirect people for a certain amount of time. The really successful practicioners can keep a ruse going for years, but the show has to end at some point.

The central tenet of information war is, “if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, it never really fell.” Media is powerful, but it isn’t monolithic. But people on the ground are seldom fooled. For every Haditha, Ishaqi, Hasbaniya, there were thousands of civilian killings whcih went unreported. Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki responded to the news about the Haditha investigation by pointing out that American soldiers are killing Iraqi civilians daily. I’m all for interspersing the real, complete coverage of these killings with clips of other soldiers building infrastructure and handing out food. But even Fox News will admit that one set of footage is far more powerful than the other. These actions aren’t exchangible for one another; how many MREs do we have to hand out after shooting a pregnant woman and her mother? Numbers fail to do anyone involved justice.

Most of the guests on Asman’s show said that the coverage of the Haditha investigation was good for our markets because it showed that we were being serious about addressing our shortcomings and regaining our ‘moral authority,’ in the same way I’m sure they would say that the Enron verdicts were good for American capitalism because they showed we were serious about combatting corporate fraud. However, all indications seem to show we’re not willing to go nearly far enough.

From:     D. J. Waletzky
To:       Martin Nutt
Subject:  Re: Disappearing accents

On Fri, 2005-12-23 at 18:31 -0500, M_a_r_t_i_n_n_u_t_t___X_@_X__a_o_l_._c_o_m wrote:
In your page http://waletzky.com/dj/permalink.php?uid=104 (Sunday, 12 Sep 2004 ) you state

The only country (to my knowledge, please correct me) that didn't build its TV networks this way is the United States, where television was invented.

Please see attachment.

That’s fascinating–I guess I was thinking about Philo Farnsworth, who invented cathode ray tubes in ’27. But there were definitely many previous and contributing inventions which made television as we know it today possible.

Soviet textbooks claimed the USSR invented both the television and the car, so suffice it to say that each nation has its own narrative of television’s invention. I guess in terms of tracing the impact of television (more about this in a bit), the commercial television system in use throughout the world today defiitely runs through Farnsworth’s CRT, if not begins with it.

All the same, I thank you sincerely for the correction; I always love when readers take the time to call me out on things I claim no authority over. =)

My real interest at the moment is regional accents. I've heard Brooklyn, and you reckon that there is Queens. What about the other boroughs? Can you identify them? What about say Austin, Texas?

What’s interesting about New York accents is that they have more to do with class than geographic origin. I’ve lived in Brooklyn for most of my life, and I can tell you that there are many different accents within New York City, but one would have great difficulty distinguishing, say, a working-class Bronx accent from a working-class Brooklyn accent today. Also, these accents have been changing over time; not to mention the fact that the ‘toid-n-toity-toid’ (i.e., 3rd and 33rd) accent has spread into the suburbs in the last generation, whereas a more Southern-inflected but still distinctly New York accent has sprung up here in the black populations who moved here from Jim Crow country since the 1960s.

That being said, however, I have noticed differences even between neighborhoods in New York; the Canarsie accent of my primary school appended an ‘r’ to words like ‘idea’ and removed it from the ends of words like ‘career.’ Having grown up across the borough in Prospect Heights, I used to make fun of my friends who spoke like that (Canarsie was mostly Jewish and Italian then) only to have them chide me for inflecting words like ‘while.’ I.e., I say “wahl” like a Southerner, (while they say “woyl,”) in the dialect of my neighborhood, which was mostly Southern and Caribbean black then. At the same time, we inflected the majority of our vowels and consonants similarly, though there was some variation. My school had students from all over Brooklyn, and the kids were either working or middle class.

These small differences aside, I can absolutely say that accents vary more by neighborhood and social class than by borough. The greatest interborough distinction you could draw would be between Manhattan (which skews towards middle- or upper-class) and the other boroughs of New York City (Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx or Staten Island).

As for the rest of the country, I can also testify that there is definitely a distinct accent for most metropoli in America, as well as generally regionalized groups–the Bostonian accent is as distinct from a Southern Drawl as it is from Cockney.

Any place as big, both geographically and population-wise, as the United States could be said to have ‘very few’ distinct accents. William Labov, Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg have a map with several maps and charts. There are not only over a dozen dialects but cyclic vowel shifts (one for the north and one for the south).

Someone pointed out, in reference to the piece I wrote about accents, that I discounted the phenomenon called ‘code-switching,’ which is the adoption of different accents based on different social situations. This is something all people, New Yorkers included do; they use not only a different vocabulary but different inflections and avoid certain sounds that they suspect would make them unintelligible or betray a working-class background. I actually do this in reverse when I get in a cab or go to a pizzeria; I use a more working class accent to show the person I’m dealing with I’m from here, and the reverse in business settings–something all New Yorkers do.

I’m no Professor Higgins, but did not notice many different, identifiable American accents (though Brooklyn was obvious). I understand that people are beginning to revise the once universally-held view that there were very few American accents, just as they're disappearing. The same thing has happened over here in England, though it has been happening longer, and like you, people blame Television (though my father used to blame Radio before that).

The point I was trying to make about television is that it is the most national medium today, as radio was during before WWII. But radio in America was more regional than television is today. What I was worrying about is the growth of the generalized Western-Midlands hybrid which television uses as a lingua franca as opposed to an organic dialect.

With the third anniversary of the War in Iraq, our attentions have turned, naturally, to Iran. A while ago (before Iran’s nuclear program was making front-page news), I was talking to a friend about liberal interventionism, and of course, Iran came up. What did I ultimately propose to do, she asked, about the human rights violations there? I said there was no justified interventionist action we could possibly take. We both agreed that the use of force wasn’t a good option, and the U.S. has been embargoing Iran since 1979, so that clearly hasn’t worked, either. She suggested we spend money to fund democratic movements there, and I pointed out that they already have somewhat of a democracy and that we wouldn’t be able to help that way.

We have (as we’ve had from the beginning of the occupation) a civil war in Iraq and Iran, who have more influence in Iraq than anyone besides the U.S., have offered to talk with the Americans, who have been hammering Iran’s supposedly civilian nuclear program in rather threatening terms.

Lately, the Bush administration has been talking about Iran in much the same way it had been talking about Iraq in 2002, so I thought I should write about the challenges we face with Iran. Now, I just fixed this blog’s search engine so that I could look for all the occurrences of the word “Iran” in the past two-and-five-sixths years. Here’s a small review:

So now it comes as no surprise that Iran is talking tough about ramping up its nuclear program, which it says it needs for civilian purposes–a claim as likely to be true as Bush’s claim that Iraq was an imminent threat. Now, just because they have nukes doesn’t mean they will use them; in today’s nuclear environment, atomic weapons are more of an insurance policy against invasion. And who’s the only country which does any invading anymore? Why, the only country which has ever used nuclear weapons in a war (on civilian targets, nonetheless). Some might say that the overextension of U.S. troops at present neutralies any military threats we might be able to hang over other countries’ heads, but it’s just as likely we could “redeploy” all of our troops from the civil-war-ravaged states of Iraq and Afghanistan into Iran if we felt it might get the President’s approval rating back above 29%.

The facts of Iran’s support of terrorist groups including Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, its human rights abuses, and involvement in Iraq are known; many have long said that the causus belli against Iran was a much stronger case than against Iraq. A few days ago, political analysts were all over Bush’s speeches mentioning Iran, but they couldn’t decide whether he was taking a hard or soft line against the regime:

The international community is also speaking with one voice to the radical regime in Tehran. Iran is a nation held hostage by a small clerical elite that is isolating and repressing its people, and denying them basic liberties and human rights. The Iranian regime sponsors terrorists and is actively working to expand its influence in the region. The Iranian regime has advocated the destruction of our ally, Israel. And the Iranian regime is defying the world with its ambitions for nuclear weapons. America will continue to rally the world to confront these threats, and Iran’s aggressive behavior and pursuit of nuclear weapons is increasing its international isolation. When Iran’s case was brought before the IAEA earlier this month, 27 nations voted against Iran, including Russia and China and India and Brazil and Sri Lanka and Egypt and Yemen. The only nations to support Iran were Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela. Now Iran’s case will be taken up to the U.N. Security Council. The free world is sending the regime in Tehran a clear message: We’re not going to allow Iran to have nuclear weapons.

So far, it sounds like the kind of rhetoric the White House was spouting against Iraq in 2002. Iran is pursuing weapons of mass destruction, is a threat to its neighbors, etc. For those who still recall the hype with which Bush whipped up the nation’s war machine in preparation for Iraq, it certainly seems like this speech qualifies as a “hard line” against the Islamic republic. But then, take a look at the next part of the speech:

The world’s free nations are also worried because the Iranian regime is not transparent. You see, a non-transparent society that is the world’s premier state sponsor of terror cannot be allowed to possess the world’s most dangerous weapons. So, as we confront Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions, we’re also reaching out to the Iranian people to support their desire to be free; to build a free, democratic, and transparent society.

Bush’s complaints about Iran’s democracy not being transparent are ironic, to say the least. The Bush White House has done everything in its power to make the American government more opaque than any administration since Nixon, yet when an Islamic democracy whose inner workings are a matter of public record wants nuclear weapons, suddenly Americans deserve transparency–not from their own elected government, but from someone else’s.

Iran’s human rights violations are legion. But the government is democratically elected, even the clerical branch. Just having elections is no safeguard for human rights; just ask any of the ‘enemy combatants’ at Guantanamo. The political oppression in Iran is a blueprint for a semi-facist theocracy which justifies itslef according to religious and democratic principles. Transparency is really the least of their problems; repression is carried out in the name of the people and in the light of day.

The United States government under Bush is nowehere near as repressive as Iran, and it’s extremely unlikely that it could ever become that bad. But America is heading down a similar path of domestic spying and political repression in the name of ‘security’ and so forth. Bush was right in this regard; the increased opacity of government is what enables this kind of violation of rights to happen, and the pseudo-populism he espouses cloaks a campaign against free speech and popular dissent.

Again, Bush isn’t anywhere near as bad, solely in terms of internal repressive policies, as Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Iran’s president. Ahmedinejad is no less of a controversial figure in his own country, by the way. Although Ahmadinejad was elected with over 60% of the vote against reformer and former President Rafsanjani, his opponents claimed election fraud and that the clerical branch of the government had illegally intervened in the election to help his campaign effort.

Both Presidents are religious conservatives belonging to apocalyptic sects, and both have been faltering with regards to their effectiveness within their own governments. Both seem to think taking a harder line against each other will result in greater internal political support, regardless of the larger implications for regional stability and world peace.

These are the kind of nutjobs we have running the asylums.

At any rate, let’s return to Bush’s plans for the new most-dangerous-country-in-the-world:

To support the Iranian people’s efforts to win their own freedom, my administration is requesting $75 million in emergency funds to support democracy in Iran. This is more than a fourfold increase over current levels of funding. These new funds will allow us to expand radio and television broadcasts into Iran. They will support reformers and dissidents and human rights activists and civil society organizers in Iran, so Iranians can organize and challenge the repressive policies of the clerical regime. They will support student exchanges, so we can build bridges of understanding between our people and expose more Iranians to life in a free society. By supporting democratic change in Iran, we will hasten the day when the people of Iran can determine their own future and be free to choose their own leaders. Freedom in the Middle East requires freedom for the Iranian people, and America looks forward to the day when our nation can be the closest of friends with a free and democratic Iran.

So this is the so-called soft-line diplomatic solution: tens of millions of dollars of propaganda! The problem is, the very reformers Bush supposedly want to fund in their mission say that the taint of American support harms them more than it helps. Here’s an excerpt from a must-read Washington Post article:

We are under pressure here both from hard-liners in the judiciary and that stupid George Bush,” human rights activist Emad Baghi said as he waited anxiously for his wife and daughter to emerge from interrogation last week. “When he says he wants to promote democracy in Iran, he gives money to these outside groups and we’re in here suffering.” The fallout illustrates the steep challenge facing the Bush administration as it seeks to play a role in a country where American influence is called unwelcome even by many who share the goal of increasing democratic freedoms.

“Unfortunately, I’ve got to say it has a negative effect, not a positive one,” said Abdolfattah Soltani, a human rights lawyer recently released from seven months in prison. After writing in a newspaper that his clients were beaten while in jail, Soltani was charged with offenses that included spying for the United States.

“This is something we all know, that a way of dealing with human rights activists is to claim they have secret relations with foreign powers,” said Soltani, who co-founded a human rights defense group with Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi. “This very much limits our actions. It is very dangerous to our society.”

So, in announcing his big diplomatic plan, he has essentially cornered the very people he purports to want to help. And anyone who has an understanding of Iranian society could have told him as much. Unfortunately, our history of involvement with Iran has yet to yield a single positive result (more about that in a minute), and we aren’t making any progress with this stupid initiative.

Now, I’d like to take the opportunity to call out the Democratic Iran-hawks on their blustering and supremely dangerous demagoguery. I’m thinking, in particular, of presidential hopeful Evan Bayh, who thinks he can outflank the Republicans on the right by echoing Bush’s Iraq rhetoric for Iran (emphasis mine):

First, Iran must be made to understand that a nuclear Iran is not negotiable. We will not let a government that calls for the end of the United States or Israel acquire a nuclear weapon. It is that simple. With that as our non-negotiable position, the administration must immediately go to the United Nations Security Council and call for strong economic, political, and diplomatic sanctions. If its nuclear activities persist, there will be consequences beyond that, including the use of force. We cannot afford to wait. The Iranian government must understand that if its nuclear activity continues, it will be treated as a pariah state.

Second, supplies of refined gasoline to Iran should be cut off. Iran may be one of the world’s largest exporters of oil, but currently imports 40 percent of their refined gasoline. By cutting that supply off, the Iranian economy will be hurt badly.

Third, Iran must be isolated diplomatically, financially, and culturally. Their delegations should no longer be welcomed in countries around the world. Iranian assets should be frozen and financial and banking ties severed. Travel to and from Iran should be cut off and international flights should not be allowed to land or originate from the country. Most importantly, Iran should be denied the foreign investment for its energy sector that it so clearly craves.

I used to think (way back in 2002) that there’s no way we would be stupid enough to try and occupy Iraq because it’s a no-win situation. Now I know that no matter how improbable the logistics of attacking and “liberating” a country about 3.7 times Iraq’s size and 2.6 times larger population-wise, we might still do it if, say, we’re feeling down about the size of our military-industrial erection.

American exceptionalism is the word of the day here, folks. I know we have inherited this great “can-do” attitude about the world, and in many respects it has served us well. But this idea that we can achieve any foreign policy goal if we just set our minds to it is tragically false. After WWII we got the idea that if we send enough troops, money, or both, we can effect any change we desire in the world in our own interests. You’d think that Vietnam would have dispelled this notion, but somehow we managed to neutralize the lessons we should have learned (I blame Sylvester Stallone and Rambo, for one).

When considering the morality of interventions, I find it useful to try the “shoe-on-the-other-foot” test. For example, what would happen if Ahmadinejad were to employ the same reasoning Bush is using against us? After all, the U.S. is a classic example of an aggressor; while America (again, the only nation to have actually used nukes in wartime) retains the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and refuses to disarm in the name of self-defense, it has attacked and destroyed two bordering states and threatened the Iranian regime, all the while trying to shame Iran for “meddling in Iraq’s internal affairs” without the slightest hint of irony. We already placed sanctions on Iran a generation ago, and our history of supporting the brutal regime of the Shah, twice deposing democratic Iranian governments in the name of oil security, hasn’t garnered any credibility with Iranians. An American invasion in the name of democracy would only destroy any hope for it in Iran, as we did in the 1970s.

The shoe-on-the-other-foot test applies to our ridiculous “democracy initiative” as well as for any military invasion. Imagine if Iran bombarded us with broken English leaflets urging us to junk the Electoral College or guarantee paper trails for electronic voting machines–do you think it would help or hinder our democracy? What if Iran were to funnel money to the the DNC or MoveOn.org the way we propose to fund democracy initiatives? It’s a fool’s errand, and liberal interventionalists are just the fools to propose it.

Bombing Iranian civilians as punishment for Ahmadinejad’s nuclear aspirations makes as much sense as Iran bombing the US as punishment for Bush’s recent violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. There is no greater threat to the Muslim world than the United States, as we have been demonstrating for the last five years. Our sabre-rattling has had the predictable effect of driving Iran to the hard right, and dropping $75 million worth of leaflets is not going to convince anyone that we have their best interests at heart.

Speaking of Iranian elections, the damage we did in 2005 by helping elect the mystic madman Ahmadinejad (not to mention strengthening Iran’s position in the Middle East immeasurably since the invasion of Iraq) is nothing compared to the potential Iranian voters will have this year to set back the progress-clock in the upcoming clerical elections.

As I’ve pointed out before, the Iranian system is set up to moderate progress by means of clerical intervention. Later this year, the Assembly of Experts, who meet annually, will be popularly elected. The cycle of Iranian democracy is simple: reformers are elected to Parliament and make modest progress, then they are barred from running for reelection by the Council of Guardians so that conservatives can regain power. Rinse, repeat. The Assembly are clerics, popularly elected to eight-year terms; they, in turn, elect the Velayat-i-faqih, or Supreme Leader from among themselves, who then appoints the Judiciary and half of the Council of Guardians.

If there is any real progress that will be made in Iran, it will have to begin with the Assembly elections, which have eight-year repercussions. If our actions convince Iran it will soon be under attack, the people will likely elect some real reactionaries and hopes will be set back for another eight years, losing another generation to extremism.

Real ‘progress’ in Iran will never be made until the people elect moderate clergy. A clergy which understands the value of free speech and civil rights for women. The United States was in such a position a two hundred years ago, when the clergy was racist and sexist and so forth, but over time the people have forced the message further toward humanism with every generation.

Take the Catholic Church, for example. They just voted out the idea of “Limbo” the other day. Why? Because it caused problems in the minds of ancestor-worshipping potential converts to think their ancestors would never get to Heaven. Poof! Cardinals vote–dogma forever changed! The rules are more flexible than people realize. All religions are slowly, slowly getting more inclusive, some faster than others. Orthodoxy just makes it harder, but some people will abandon or change the things they don’t like.

So, of course, our pal, Georgie, has marshalled all of his energies to command a brutal expedition in radicalizing Islam by invading Iraq and Afghanistan. We get ourselves in front of the whole world with images of dead and tortured civilians because we think that a humiliation strategy is the most appropriate response to dealing with Arab sensibilities. We think that trying to inspire fear in people with our formidable progress in destabilizing Iraq will help our cause. We’re like the drunken idiot in a bar trying to fix a broken jukebox by smashing the glass and fumbling with the records.

Sorry, but there are some things the U.S. Armed Forces under Bush are not qaulified to do, and it’s time we stopped pretending. Like so many prominent conservatives lately. Elephant said to me the other day that we could have accomplished our neocon-style goals in Iraq if we had sent a different army, say, a force of 200,000 language specialists from all around the world. I agree it probably would have worked better, but the fact remains that you can’t really start a democracy overnight from the top down. And if we were to invade Iran’s fledgling democracy, for example, we would irrevocably poison the well for generations to come (right now we’re working on poisoning one generation at a time).

So now Iran has offered to talk to the U.S., presumably about nuclear weapons and Iraq. Are they offering a deal? Will they ask the U.S. for permission to join the nuclear club in exchange for exerting some influence with worldwide Islamist elements? And would we take such a deal?

President Bush is now saying that he will deal with the issue of Iran’s nukes with “diplomacy,” and with the way our military resources have been wasted, one has to wonder whether there are really any other viable options. And the $6 billion dollar question remains–what effect does an overextended military have on the delicate balance of mutually assured destruction?

I’m in the middle of writing a very, very long post about Iraq, but in the meantime, I have discovered that my favorite book of all time, Penguin Island by Anatole France, is available entirely free as a plaintext file! Three cheers for the public domain!

And although it was written in 1908, it’s an amazingly prescient book. I’ll just link to the last chapter, which is pretty much independent from the rest of the book:

The houses were never high enough to satisfy them; they kept on making them still higher and built them of thirty or forty storeys with offices, shops, banks, societies one above another; they dug cellars and tunnels ever deeper downwards.
Fifteen millions of men laboured in a giant town by the light of beacons which shed forth their glare both day and night.
…
Clair stopped himself, gave a dry laugh, and handed the child back to his mother. Then he took out his watch again, and kneeling on the bench with his elbows resting on its back he gazed at the town. As far as the eye could reach, the multitude of houses stood out in their tiny immensity.
Caroline turned her eyes in the same direction.
“What splendid weather it is!” said she. “The sun’s rays change the smoke on the horizon into gold. The worst thing about civilization is that it deprives one of the light of day.”
He did not answer; his looks remained fixed on a place in the town.
After some seconds of silence they saw about half a mile away, in the richer district on the other side of the river, a sort of tragic fog rearing itself upwards. A moment afterwards an explosion was heard even where they were sitting, and an immense tree of smoke mounted towards the pure sky. Little by little the air was filled with an imperceptible murmur caused by the shouts of thousands of men. Cries burst forth quite close to the square.
“What has been blown up?”
The bewilderment was great, for although accidents were common, such a violent explosion as this one had never been seen, and everybody perceived that something terribly strange had happened.
Attempts were made to locate the place of the accident; districts, streets, different buildings, clubs, theatres, and shops were mentioned. Information gradually became more precise and at last the truth was known.
“The Steel Trust has just been blown up.”
Clair put his watch back into his pocket.
Caroline looked at him closely and her eyes filled with astonishment.
At last she whispered in his ear:
“Did you know it? Were you expecting it? Was it you…”

Click here to read Penguin Island in its entirety, translated from the French by A. W. Evans. It’s hilarious and smarter than any fiction I’ve read published since.

Warning: Penguin Island contains references to God, the Devil, penguins, sex, and the Dreyfus affair. May not be suitable for those unschooled in Western Traditional classics.

Update: So, there I was having spent several hours working on that Iraq post, and then I accidentally deleted all my work. I’m so fed up I don’t even want to think about Iraq any more. So for those who are really bored at work today, why don’t you read about my favorite manga artist in the meantime? She’s featured in MoMA’s anime exhibit, opening today.

Last week, I pitched a TV show to a certain famous filmmaker and TV producer, and I have yet to hear a response. So, I figure I might as well share it with you, dear readers, because based on the horrified responses I get from other people I tell about it, it’ll never get made. Much like my pitch for the Brown Bunny remake, it looks like another one of my brilliant ideas will never see the light of network TV. Anyway, enjoy:

Dear Mr. Xxx,

I was arguing with some conservatives about our use of torture on detainees in the "War on Terror," and a brilliant idea struck me as to how to explain the situation in terms the American people understand--reality television.

Since so many are convinced that our 'stress and duress' techniques and systemic sexual humiliation couldn't be that much worse than a fraternity hazing, the only way to address their argument is to have them put their asses where their mouths are--for money!

The show would be called "A Day at the Beach in the Gulag," and in it, contestants would compete to outlast each other in a private 'detention facility' run by the show's producers. Playing the parts of detainees who are eventually released without charges (as most of them were), participants would have to last a minimum amount of days to qualify for any prize money; then the remaining contestants try to outlast each other for the largest share of the prize pool. Contestants would be treated according to the minimal dictates of Bush's policies, but no specific type of measure could be applied without two videotaped testimonials from former prisoners or officers that such measures were used. Once a contestant cries uncle, they are immediately taken to the "Geneva Convention camp" where "[p]risoners of war shall be quartered under conditions as favourable as those for the forces of the Detaining Power who are billeted in the same area." As the contest goes on, we'll be seeing as much of the Geneva Convention camp as the torture chambers. (Of course, the losing contestants have to stay detained until the winner cries uncle.)

The torture techniques the military uses now are designed to survive description by soundbite (sleep deprivation doesn't SOUND that bad), but actually watching people go through them is a different matter. (In Hollywood parlance, think 'Crossfire' meets 'Fear Factor' by way of Milgram's famous prison experiment.)

Your ideal contestant is a militant right-winger who would love to get their hands on a few thousand bucks for proving that the conditions at Camp X-Ray are no big deal. The appeal of this show is cross-factional, because conservatives will root for the contestants and liberals will root for the producers, but either way our human rights abuses will be well-detailed and widely known.

In order to get the right kind of contestant, we'd put out the call for this show as "the McCain-Hussein Challenge" and play up the opportunity for participants to soapbox about liberal whiners, etc. (perhaps a meme will be planted in the right-wing blogosphere?).

The most fun segments of the show will be the psychological torture. Think Red State POWs at the hands of Blue State troops; those who scoff at interrogators playing Christina Aguilera might feel differently when we blast NPR or hire the local Communist party to yell at them 24 hours a day, etc. The psy-ops possibilities are endless--celebrity torturers? Sexual humiliation on national TV? Bible abuse? Flag desecration? The sky's the limit, really.

It would be a great way to hold people at their word when they're being flip about torture, but it would also be riveting entertainment. Long story short, this would require a fair amount of money in consulting fees for lawyers and doctors (we'd need them on staff and on camera during the producers' televised torture strategy sessions), but otherwise the actual production costs are pretty low. I raided my living room sofa, but it looks like I may need some help.

When I mentioned this idea to a roomful of people at a party last night, one of them said to me, “you just want to torture conservatives.” Not true–I just want to torture people who approve of torture. I couldn’t think of any better way to get my point across, do you?

You may recall, from last November, the media talking about "values," which is the politically correct word for "Christian." Political correctness, by the way, is just another invention of the market in that political operative have become brand managers–they've carefully chosen the word "values" to mean something very specific. And yet, the word "values" is so broadly common as to make the claim to the word rather audacious.

There's a culture war (some might say 'culture wars') going on at all economic levels and in all corners of the country. It is a battle, literally, for the heart and soul of America, and everybody knows it. Perhaps you think I'm being dramatic, but consider what builds and sustains a nation–any nation. A shared history is one thing, but there are several other pillars involved; namely, a shared culture.

Think about America today–the two camps, which we have seen fit to call 'Red' and 'Blue'–are developing parallel cultural developments. Their own media outlets, movies, music, books and videos, and an array of targeted TV programming, and even a national Christian satelite provider named 'Sky Angel.' Look at the blogosphere: parallel (though sometimes overlapping) hemispheres of left and right.

The chief theorist of nationalism, Benedict Anderson talks about the invention of the printing press (and therefore mass media) as the catalyst for the creation of the democratic nation-state. In order to think of someone you've never met, never heard of, and will never interact with in your entire life as a 'fellow citizen' and pretend to bear them in mind when voting, you have to become part of what Anderson called the "imagined community." What builds the nation? Literature, in the age before television, and then radio, etc., but always, always mass media.

America, by the way, is the only country in the world where the government didn't install television broadcast equipment in order to foster a national culture. This is because some guy working in his garage invented it in Utah, so America being the land of the free and enterprising, we have the world's only private television broadcasting network, which is still regulated (poorly) by the government.

What I'm trying to get at here is that the two Americas are separating and forming their own national identities. We're basically split down the middle, and with the array of consumer choices in the cultural market, nationalism is on sale and you can pick which nation you want to be a part of. Will the Union ultimately survive this growing chasm? Should it? Will one America subsume the other, or can they get along?

Let's get back to values, because that's what this whole thing is about–this essay, this blog, politics, human interaction as a whole, take your pick. What drives me crazy about the appropriation of the word "values" is that everybody has 'values.' This is crucial to understanding the genesis of the two Americas, but more importantly, <b>why people who are just as smart as you are disagree about politics</b>.

Each of us contains within ourselves a base fear for the country and the government. For some people, it's the fear that the government will take their guns away. For some, it's that the government will herd minorities into slave and death camps, or that free speech will be abolished, or the gap between rich and poor will grow unsustainable. For some, it's that lazy indigents will get a free ride on their hard-earned tax dollars, or that millions of unborn babies will be killed yearly. And so forth; each has a nightmare scenario; for some people, they are living that nightmare.

These fears are installed early, and are the post powerful political motivators on the planet. The point about these fears is that they're not really rational, in that they are installed in us psychologically at a young age rather than the result of a bipartisan debate. As the descendent of Holocaust survivors, you can imagine my nightmare scenario for a democratic government–and these fears were practically inborn. Did you know there is an excellent chance that you have the same party affiliation your father had when you were 15? (In a smaller number of cases, your values may be the diametric opposite of those views, which is another version of the above).

The flipside of fears are hopes, and those hopes are called "values." Politically speaking, values are what each person considers inviolable principles. Everything else is a matter of expedience, really. In our two-party system, you vote for the lesser of two evils, so we choose the one who threatens our values the least.

We all have a base set of assumptions, which are rooted in our fears. We build our universes around them. I have long maintained that people are more alike than they are different, but I mean it in this very specific way. In "The Fog of War," McNamara talks about the importance of "empathizing with the enemy." It's a crucial step towards a real understanding of politics. Once you realize your enemy is much like yourself save for a different set of axioms, you can make progress, in either war, or peace. Everybody's built the same, just using different parts.

For example, if you value security (as many suburban GOP voters do), the administration has likely played upon your fears with great success (even while they do everything they can to destabilize the world and our military). Consider the demographic footprint of 'Red' and 'Blue'–note that the greatest targets (i.e., urban areas like New York and DC) for terrorist attacks are always 'Blue', while the least likely targets are mostly 'Red.' What's really interesting is that the same fears which motivated suburbanites and exurbanites or their ancestors to move away from the cities linger on in their consciousnesses. The people who were behind the wars were seldom real targets in their own right (which allowed them to be cavalier about sending troops to fight for our supposed values). We know they're behind the war because they're not in front of it; the war is a policy point that few Republicans outside of PNAC are really wedded to, but can easily support without it costing them anything.

Consider an issue like "states' rights." Unless you're the governor, the words "states' rights" are necessarily a canard, a mask for your real agenda. Notice how when a party is out of power they take up the states' rights banner as quickly as they put it down again when they return to office? It's not an accident. Very few people take the issue seriously, which is why the states' rights agenda is such a useful and flexible tool.

To identify someone's fear (as good political operatives are trained to do) you can use that fear as a fulcrum for your agenda, which in itself is mutable as long as it includes your base fear.

Today we're reviewing some points I raised earlier in the blog and their progress since I wrote about them.

1. Terry Schiavo: speaking of cheap political exploitation, the parents sold their mailing list to some GOP direct marketers, in case you were wondering where their principles are.

2. For close to two years, I've been warning people of the dangers of generating ill will abroad. International goodwill, I was remarking to a friend one day, is very difficult to build but terribly easy to squander. The Bush White House response to the problems generated by their clumsy foreign policy is to rehire Karen Walker to run a United States Government PR department to "sell America" abroad. How utterly… corporate.

3. I mentioned the impulse of cable news toward unseemly inclusiveness in the context of "intelligent design" and the new creationists hijacking liberal tolerance (which, by the way, I appreciate, as a serious student of politics).

TV has a McLuhanesque problem when it comes to promoting "fair" coverage, which is that arguments must be abbreviated into tiny segments so as not to lose the viewer's attention. It's partly the constraints of the media which make it possible for TV to try and sell "fairness" as giving any two opposing viewpoints equal time. Consider how the point-counterpoint format gives the appearance of being fair ("equal time"), while obscuring the important larger statements being made in the <b>choice</b> of viewpoints.

At any rate, I heard that C-SPAN was set to include a Holocaust denier to "balance out" an actual scholar–Deborah Lipstat, who refused to appear in light of this decision. The holders of any viewpoint deserve their free speech and their day in court, both of which have already been afforded to the revisionist historians in question. People should read John Stuart Mill's defense of free speech–in a nutshell, free speech is a preeminently good idea because allows truth not only to be aired, but challenged. But repeating and amplifying a proven lie is not the kind of choice a responsible network would make. Giving liars a soapbox and a megaphone is hardly as worthy an exercise of free speech as defending them from government prosecution for speaking.

6. Egyptian political reforms? Empty threats as long as Mubarak's main opposition candidate remains in jail.

7. "The Iraq war isn't over by a longshot" –Dec. 15th, 2003

8. "Reports on life in Iraq now do sound terrible; violent crime, riots, looting, no water, no electricity, massive unemployment, foreign companies coming in to take oil profits, etc." –Jul. 18th, 2003

Normally, I wouldn't comment on something like the Terry Schiavo case, but the periphery surrounding the whole issue is so complex that it warrants a missive from yours truly in several parts:

Just to be clear from the get-go, I think they should let the husband pull her plug. I'd like to remind everyone that this is not an easy decision to make on his part, no matter how the media or bloggers spin it. At the same time, I have to respect those who sincerely disagree with me–in their eyes, this is a state-sanctioned murder. If I felt that way (and I lived near the hospital), I would be out there protesting with them.

Sincere disagreement is one thing, but Congress' latest round of political posturing is another. With so many serious problems that affect millions of people, it makes you wonder what the minimum standard are for emergency weekend Congressional sessions. There are a litany of actual crises in America, and all we get are hearings about steroid use in baseball and bullshit speeches about a woman none of these Congresspeople know or could give a shit about personally. If you want proof that they don't care, watch the GOP (and the President) distance themselves from the case while they read the polls saying the majority of Americans think the government should stay out of it. The President has already started backpedalling.

Speaking of the President and how he doesn't give a shit about Terry Schiavo independent of her perceived political value, my real concern about this case (and where I might side with those trying to keep her alive) is that HMOs will insist on pulling the plug on patients for economic reasons. I mentioned the President because he signed a bill in Texas which makes ability to pay a factor in whether or not to keep unfortunates like Terry Schiavo artificially rescussitated. If euthenasia becomes standard practice, it'll be poor people who die in droves.

The economics of keeping someone like Schiavo alive are heartwrenching, because keeping someone on life support can bankrupt their family. There are terrible calculations to be made, and the rising cost of healthcare is just making the situation more dire for more families faced with similar decisions.

You know, it's funny that while pollution and car accidents and new diseases are killing more people than ever before, medical science has been steadily improving life expectancy. For all this blather about God's will and the sanctity of life, one has to wonder about where the boundaries are between keeping someone alive 'unnaturally' and killing them outright.

All this was compuncted the other day by a headline in one of the local tabloids a few days ago which read, "Terry's Doomed." How is that news? Why didn't they run that headline when she had her heart attack in 1990?

Doubtless you've already heard about Hunter S. Thompson's suicide Sunday night. I'm sure it comes as no surprise to readers and fellow Hunter fans that he had a great influence on me.

I remember very distinctly the day I walked into the Astor Place Barnes & Noble after school, found a copy of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and read it cover to cover in about 3 hours (I'm trying to recall why I picked that book–it probably had someting to do with Uncle Duke). At any rate, it changed my life, and my writing. Without getting too maudlin about it, I'll say that Hunter was my hero–and apparently, I wasn't alone, judging from the notes on most of the websites I frequent.

They don't make 'em like Hunter anymore. Not for lack of trying–he has many imitators. and why not? It's <b>fun</b> to write like Hunter. I myself wrote a piece a few years ago that I will steadfastly maintain I wrote as an homage to gonzo political reporting (I dug up the pdf file for your amusement). My hope for Hunter's literary memory, however, is that people copy his substance more than his style.

The man had a tremendous impact on writers all over the world, although I think we can all agree that Hunter was quintessentially American. I'd say he was one of the best things about the place. Here was a guy who made you believe he was living the story as it unfolded, and you weren't even sure what was going on but you didn't want him to stop telling you about it. Nowadays, we seem to be deluged with a lot of whiny and inaccurate memoirs (I believe the euphemism the publishing industry employs is "narrative non-fiction") written by sheltered, boring people.

A thought occurred to me today; the deaths of famous people I admire are moments are endless and unrelenting milestones. It helps that I tend to idolize the heroes of previous generations, the same way I tend to watch old movies and read old books.

What was bugging me was–why? All I had heard was that he ahd shot himself, but I wasn't satisfied with that. Some more research revealed medical problems were plaguing the good Doctor; but I couldn't help wondering if there was more to it than some broken bones. And I wonder about a suicide note. I mean, what writer doesn't leave a suicide note? Wait, did Hemingway leave one? I've been reading a lot of comparisons between the two of them.

At any rate, I hope they televise the scattering of his ashes from a cannon, as specified in his will. In the meantime, raise a glass or three, won't you?

With precious hours left until Election Day, I've been going crazy worrying about what will happen. In 2000, I didn't even consider that Bush could win (lo and behold, he didn't really), and now I have to say his chances of being reelected are fairly good. And readers, I am not kidding when I say a Bush victory could very well compel me to leave the country again.

How on earth could Bush win this election? Well, first of all, a majority of his supporters are viciously uninformed. The Program on International Policy Attitudes has released a poll which shows that Bush supporters are likely to believe that Saddam had something to do with 9/11 and/or that Iraq had a weapons of mass destruction program. Of course, this poll echoes their previous report on how Fox News viewers share pretty much the same misperceptions.

This is what the Bush White House is talking about when they laugh disdainfully at the 'reality-based' news community. For Rove and his ilk, 1984 is a manual, not a caution. People watch Fox News because it's entertaining and stupid, just like the people who rely on it for their news. And as Mencken said, democracy ensures we get no better government than we deserve.

But what about the rest of the news media? With the economic pressure to compete against Fox News Channel (who understand that they're running a business, not a public service) and the reflexive jingoism of 9/11 fading ever so slowly, the media establishment are trying to come around to the truth as best they can. One wonders if they would have allowed criticism of Bush if we weren't having an election to remind them that this is supposedly a democracy.

There's something curious I've noticed about TV coverage of the phone polls in swing states: when Kerry has a small lead, the words "margin of error" are never far behind, but when Bush leads are in the same margin, no such words are uttered. I beg for counter-examples, but I've never seen any.

I know I'm going to get in trouble with the English majors who read me, but I have to air a gripe about political fiction.

This particular rant was prompted by seeing the new WB drama "Jack and Bobby" the other night. First of all, who the hell approved this show? Jack and Bobby "McCloskey" will grow up to be President and Attorney General in 2025 or something like that, but in the meantime they're being raised by their caricature ultra-liberal academic mother. Somewhat unclear as to why they bother to call them "Jack" and "Bobby," no?

Anyway, the show is really annoying. It occurs to me that one of the reasons I don't enjoy political fiction in general is that the arguments tend towards the 'strawman fallacy' (note, this does not apply to political satire, because what's great about satire is that it's totally open with its biases).

Our friends at Wikipedia say it fairly succinctly: "The straw-man rhetorical technique (sometimes called straw person) is the practice of refuting weaker arguments than your opponents actually offer." When you construct a dialogue between two imaginary characters, often there is the temptation (or, in many cases, limitation) to weaken your rhetorical opponents' case even as you offer both sides in an argument. And because the author controls both sides of the debate, this technique might not even technically qualify as a strawman because the arguments themselves are crippled.

This is one of the tricky things about bringing reality into fiction. You have no idea how much it bugs me when somebody says something on "The West Wing" that wasn't properly fact-checked. Not because I rely on the show for information, but because a) perhaps other people do even though they shouldn't, and b) it's a disruption on the smooth surface of the narrative when you happen to know it's not true.

In a strawman fallacy, you construct a different person (hence the name) with different views than your rhetorical opponent so that you can more easily refute their argument than if you directly addressed them. Isn't that the essence of political fiction?

Today was a proud day for me, because I made a pertinent McLuhan reference at work and it was accepted at face value.

I’m working on a piece for PBS’s Frontline as an assistant editor, and I was talking with the editor about interviews (of which I have seen many, many hours at this point). We were talking about Thomas Friedman’s show, where he goes around the world in an attempt to prove that globalization is just the greatest thing ever.

“That’s one of the problems with documentaries,” I said. The filmmakers sell the network on a pre-conceived notion (e.g., ‘Bush is the worst president ever’, or ‘Bush is the greatest president ever’) and then we cull relevant footage from the interviews and news clips and vox pops material.

“That’s McLuhan for you–the medium is the message.” Lots of people don’t really understand what this little snippet of McLuhanism means. For example, the website Marshall McLuhan Was Wrong; which begins with the foreword

What McLuhan was saying is that the peculiar constraints of various media shape the content being delivered. For example, you are never going to be able to make a cogent argument about, say, economic policy in the form of a three-chord pop song. But you can talk about the emotional impact of policies on an family, or even a whole community.

Consider, for example, the film American History X, which is one of my favorite films of all time. The movie is full of people making speeches that sound reasonable and contain figures, but it’s only the neo-Nazis who are allowed to express themselves this way. The message of the film is in the emotional content, the human aspect of real (imaginary) people which shows our equality. It makes an argument against Nazism without having to debate on the facts.

Now, that’s fine for a movie, but I was writing a book about the neo-Nazi movement, that certainly wouldn’t be the tack I would take. That’s OK–movies have certain limitations inherent in the medium.

You can’t hold up a pie chart during the course of a radio single, you can’t hear a mother’s cry for her dead child in a newspaper article. So, for example, when you’re making an argument against McLuhan (to be fair, “McLuhan Was…” takes issue with another utterance, namely “people will not accept a war on TV”) in the form of an animated GIF, you can’t, for example, play a sound clip. You can’t ever hear McLuhan say anything at all, for that matter.

McLuhan wasn’t saying that everything you say in a particular medium means the same thing, only that things said in a single medium all sound kind of the same.

I invite you Woody Allen-types to correct me about McLuhan, because I haven’t read everything he wrote, I admit.

Dear readers, I implore you to purchase the latest issue of Heeb Magazine (Issue #7), which is on the newsstands now. Below is the original draft of the piece I did about esteemed (I think perhaps a bit too esteemed) actor Norman Fell. It's not exactly the version which ended up in the magazine, but I think you'll enjoy it nonetheless.

<big>AMERICA, FELL IN LOVE</big>
<br>Hollywood's real-life Zelig finally gets his due.

If it's true that there are no small actors, only small roles, then Norman Fell is the champion bit-part player in Hollywood. Born Norman Feld in Philadelphia, Fell
made a name for himself as a perenial bit part player in over a hundred and fifty films and television series. Not that it was a big name, but a name nonetheless.

Yes, wherever there was a non-descript cameo to be cast, Hollywood often turned to Fell, because a) brother can pass for Anglo Saxon, and b) you could count on good old Norman to never steal a scene. It's as if the studio execs got together and said, "he studied with Stella Adler, he ought to be able to pull off a twelve line part. But any more is pushing it!"

Of course, Fell will forever be known as George Roper, the nosy and undersexed landlord on Three's Company. His one shot at a starring role was the ill-fated spin-off, The Ropers, which lasted one-and-a-half seasons. Why one-and-a-half? It seems Fell had made an agreement with the studio that if The Ropers ran less than a season, he would still have an option to return to Three's Company. Those wily studio execs had screwed him yet again.

Doing the research for this article involved many trips to the video store. The first time I did this, I requested three movies: <i>Transylvania 6-5000</i>, <i>C.H.U.D. II – Bud the Chud</i>, and <i>The Kinky Coaches and the Pom Pom Pussycats</i>. The clerk looked at me like I was some kind of pervert, so I said, "I'm doing a piece on Norman Fell for a magazine."<br>
"Who's he?" aksed the clerk. <br>
"You know, he was Mr. Roper on Three's Company. He's in all of these movies…" <br>
"Oh yeah! He's in everything! He's like the most famous guy who's not famous!" <br>
It doesn't get any more succinct than that.

I present to you the most comprehensive analysis of Norman Fell's extensive ouevre to date, and by "extensive ouevre" I mean "the only Fell movies they had at my video store."

<b>Ocean's Eleven</b>: Fell probably has the most on-screen minutes in this Rat Pack flick out of all his movies. Not because he's a particularly important character (OK, he's one of the Eleven), but because the movie is about fourteen-and-a-half hours long. Fell has the least amount of lines of any of the title characters; while almost every other character has some sort of on-screen backstory, Fell is just… well, around. It seems like they threw in his character because Ocean's Ten didn't sound as good as Ocean's Eleven. Basically, what I'm saying is that Norman Fell makes the entire premise of the film possible.

<b>Inherit the Wind</b>: Fell plays the radio technician for WGN. Never has a six-line cameo been imbued with such monumental symbolic significance. Fell's are the hands who whisk the microphone away from the blustering Brady as it becomes clear the crowd has lost their interest (and faith) in him. Then Gene Kelly makes a crack about loudspeakers. Norman Fell, ladies and gentlemen, is the future.

<b>Bullitt</b>: Fell's role in Bullitt as one of many cops is about as pointless as the movie as a whole. This could just as easily mean his performance is about equal with the balance of the film.

<b>It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World</b>: As much as I love this movie, the truth is that the best gag occurs in the first ten minutes. Immediately following this climax, Fell's character (one of the detectives who chases Smiler Grogan off the road) appears, playing the straight man to Milton Berle, Buddy Hackett, Jonathan Winters, Mickey Rooney, and Sid Caesar, delivering a crucial twenty-line exposition. Who else but Norman Fell would get stuck playing the only serious role in a movie in which every other actor is a bigshot comedian?

<b>Catch-22</b>: Fell plays Major Major's secretary, Sgt. Towser–the only character who is neither mad with power nor mad from the abuse of power. Sgt. Towser unquestioningly follows orders, no matter how absurd. Apparently, the man prepared for this role by being an actor in the Hollywood studio system for a decade or so. Also, Fell actually was a tail gunner in the air force during WWII, but it was in the Pacific, which was a completely different theater.

<b>The Graduate</b>: The first of Fell's great series of roles as 'the landlord.' Why is it that Fell's best roles are playing nosy landlords? Usually the man has basically nothing to work with in terms of lines (and, to be frank, he doesn't do much with nothing). But his portrayal of Benjamin Braddock's paranoid landlord is really Fell's finest hour on film, and it's only fifteen lines.

* Sorry, that is not Norman Fell doing an uncredited cameo in the original Thomas Crown Affair. If you read this footnote, you likely checked the Internet Movie Database and thought I forgot to include it, didn't you. It is merely an actor who bears a passing resemblance.

<b>Acting By Numbers With Norman Fell</b>:

Fell had a simple philosophy as an actor–pick the three emotions you convey best, and use them as the pallette for all of your future roles. In his case, these are either a)
exasperation, b) curiosity, or c) unamused annoyance. For example:

<b>Exasperated + curious = Policeman</b> (e.g., <i>Detective </i> in It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, <i>Captain Baker</i> in Bullitt)

<b>Exasperated + unamused = Army Sergeant</b> (e.g., Sergeants <i>Coleman, Dell, Towser, Wadley, Wilentz, or Winkler</i>)

<b>Curious + unamused = Landlord</b> (<i>Mr. Roper</i> in Three's Company, <i>Mr. McCleery</i> in The Graduate)
Ever wonder why Fell shines as the landlord? You try playing curious and unamused at the same time… not so easy, is it? That's why he has a Golden Globe nomination and you don't.