Scientific American is not normally a place where you'd go looking for political commentary, but the new June issue positively goes off on the Bush administration...
Given that it's in a popular science magazine, the concluding paragraph is rather devastating:
"It would be nice not to have to shell out money for emissions controls. It would be nice to have a magic shield against all nuclear threats. It would be nice to be perfectly sure about everything, to get 365 vacation days a year and to spend some of that time on Mars. But we can't confuse wants with facts. As Richard Feynman said, 'Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself.' The dangers of ignoring its messages are greater than merely making politicians look foolish."
It's unusual to see the scientific community?or at least science journalists?getting so riled up. Throw in a separate article assailing the administration on that arsenic-in-drinking-water business, and this issue looks rather like a gauntlet tossed.
(5/18)
The blue-ribbon panel in Colorado, after poring over 11,000 pages of documents and interviewing 120 people, came to the conclusion that the whole to-do could've have been stopped much sooner had police actually entered the school after they arrived on the scene?and could have been avoided completely had the "warning signs" displayed by Harris and Klebold been heeded.
(Conclusions I think we all pretty much arrived at some time ago.)
Meanwhile, [the Post is reporting] that last Friday at La Guardia High School (one of those snooty performing arts schools), someone had scrawled a threat on the wall that claimed they were going to kill all the blacks, Hispanics and Jews in the school. Then on Monday, someone phoned in a bomb and sniper threat. Then on Tuesday, another graffito appeared, announcing that an explosion would take place Thursday.
In response to all this, the principal kept his mouth shut?and asked those few others who knew to do the same. After word got out, however, he sent a letter home to parents announcing that the bomb threat and the graffiti were unrelated?and that he wasn't going to evacuate the school or any other such nonsense, suspecting that it would only lead to other bomb threats (probably on the days of big exams).
And you know, he probably has a point there.
One student quoted in the Post story had other ideas concerning the whys and wherefores of the silence.
"We have a very prestigious school and they don't want it to get a bad name."
The unnamed student has a point, too. Racist graffiti and bomb threats can do that to a place.
In the end, however, I'm with the principal. It's good to see there's still someone at an American high school who hasn't succumbed to the post-Columbine paranoia, who's not yet ready and willing to cart students away for getting funny haircuts, wearing black clothes or not being a smiling ray of sunshine all the fucking time. Hell, kids?especially at a snooty performing arts school?are going to do things like that. Lord knows I made my share of bomb threats when I was that age. Let's face it, when you're a teenager, it's fun to scare adults.
Of course, had a bomb actually gone off yesterday, boy, I bet that principal's face would've been red!
(5/18)
Seated slightly beneath them, perfectly centered, in a chair turned backward?in the same manner that Captain Kangaroo used to take a seat?is the one and only Lex Grey. Veteran blues-singer, Coney Island native. She's still at it. This is good news, because her voice soars above the boarded-up pool table behind her and behind the dim amplifiers of her backing band, the Urban Pioneers. The fiddle player couldn't sound better. The Schaeffer drafts couldn't be colder. Lex is wearing her trademark cowboy hat with the raccoon tail stuck to the back. The Pirates have lost nine of 10, but it doesn't matter for this five and a half minutes. Lex's outfits have gone a bit more conservative of late, but then again, it has been a while since we had some beers together at the Right Bank, back in the New York magazine cover days of Williamsburg's sudden-infant-death-syndrome hipster refugee era of the very late 80s.
If anyone should sing the national anthem at the first Brooklyn Cyclones Minor-League baseball tilt in Coney Island next month, it should be Lex Grey. Madame Chairperson, I hereby nominate ye.
(5/18)
Speculation has been rampant online ("Slide" on gay sports site [Outsports.com's] discussion board wistfully posted, "Paul O'Neill (I wish)," and around the water cooler. However, my seven-member slapdash Internet baseball roundtable has figured it out. But since it doesn't really matter, and it's the guy's business in the first place, we're not telling. (Hint: he's not on a New York team.)
The comments, though, that flew in the process of elimination have been pretty funny. Before landing on the likely candidate, there was a lot of nominating. One person asked if Atlanta counted as an East Coast team, since it had to be John Rocker. Another pointed out that it couldn't, in fact, be Rocker, who is too much of a redneck to actually date another man, and more likely prefers intimacy with farm animals. Other choices: Mike Piazza, for that Christopher St./Honcho mustache and the hyperhootered Playboy Bunny beards he favors. Or Pedro Martinez, who flits around the field when not mowing down opposing batters. (These were considered and discarded because they are their teams' biggest stars. Plus, one roundtable member, a cameraman at Fenway, has seen Pedro route notes to "tank-topped blondes behind the dugout.")
The best comment, though, came from one of the three Mets fans in the group, who picked the New York team's undependable relief pitcher: "It's John Franco. Fifty-thousand people telling you you're a cocksucker can't all be wrong."
(5/17)
"Mr. Watt called for tapping energy on public land, and in recent weeks Vice President Dick Cheney has said production should take precedence over conservation.
"'Twenty years later, it sounds like they've dusted off the old work,' Mr. Watt said in an interview with The Denver Post."
(5/17)
Perhaps few incidents illustrate how unnerved we're feeling about things in general than [what happened in Oklahoma City yesterday].
Workers fled buildings around the Oklahoma City bombing memorial on Wednesday after a pick-up plastered with anti-government slogans was spotted parked at the site on the day Timothy McVeigh was to have died for detonating a truck bomb there in 1995.
There was no evacuation order by the police?people apparently saw the pickup by the memorial, perhaps saw the cops taking an interest in the pickup, and simply fled.
It would be easy, I suppose, for us to say, "Well, we never would have been so cowardly, running away like that." But then again, had we actually seen the pickup?which apparently was sporting several fiery photographs of the Waco massacre, and a banner that read "Thy Kingdom Come"?and had we known that it was being driven by the widow of a former Branch Davidian leader, well, we might have decided to go to the bar a little earlier, too.
(5/17)
Here's the dinner guest Phaedrus speaking: "Take the case of a man in love who is caught acting disgracefully or undergoing something disgraceful because he fails to defend himself out of cowardice. I think it would cause him more pain to be seen in this situation by his boyfriend than by his father, his friends or anyone else."
Phaedrus also expresses the ancient Greek opinion that homosexuality is a basis for military valor: "The last person a lover could bear to be seen by, when leaving his place in the battle-line or abandoning his weapons, is his boyfriend; instead, he'd prefer to die many times."
The next speaker on the nature of love at the dinner party is Pausanias, who claims: "Common Love is genuinely 'common' and undiscriminating in its effects; this is the kind of love that inferior people feel. People like this are attracted to women as much as boys, and to bodies rather than minds."
Also: "You can also distinguish, within the general class of those attracted to boys, the ones who are motivated purely by the heavenly type of love. These are attracted to boys only when they start to have developed intelligence, and this happens around the time that they begin to grow a beard."
The great comedic playwright Aristophanes, also a guest, says this: "Those who are cut from the male gender go for males. While they are boys...they are attracted to men and enjoy sleeping with men and being embraced by them. These are the best of their generation, both as boys and young men, because they are naturally the bravest."
Then there's the moment at which the brilliant and physically attractive statesman and general Alcibiades drunkenly shows up at the dinner party, and interrupts the proceedings by describing his frustrated romantic passion for Socrates. He also describes the philosopher's hardiness when they served together in the Athenian ranks. "The first thing to note is that he put up with the rigours of warfare better than me?better than everyone else, in fact."
Socrates, the father of Western philosophy, says of Alcibiades: "What a nuisance my love for this man has become! Ever since I started loving him, I haven't been able to look at or talk to a single attractive man without his getting so jealous and resentful that he goes crazy and shouts at me and almost beats me up."
This is stuff that's equally offensive and mystifying to both the p.c. left and the cultural right: at the heart of the Western tradition, a bunch of at once deeply intellectual and militarily valorous pederast queers, all of them very much concerned with morality and the most ethical way to live. The p.c. left can deal with the homosexuality, and maybe even with pederasty, and the cultural right with the military valor and the talk about "values." But combine all of this and what you get is a lot of confused ideologues, all over the political spectrum.
The good news is that neither the William Bennetts nor the shrill 18-year-old campus feminists of the world actually ever read this stuff. To paraphrase Ezra Pound's line, the thought of what would happen in America if the classics had a wide circulation troubles my sleep.
(5/17)
Shouldn't the kind of generational navel-gazing associated with this tired old billygoat's 60th birthday have been packed away after, say, his 40th birthday? Back then, Dylan was in the midst of righteously pissing off his numbnuts fans? the ones who didn't listen to him when he sang "don't follow leaders" more than a decade earlier?with his Christian phase. What kind of shit is this? Sixty-year-olds still trying to convince everyone they're cutting edge and hip? It's hard to be that way while qualifying for AARP, much less living a lifestyle that's proven to be even more materialistic and shallow than that of the World War II-era parents they rebelled against.
There's no way I'd argue against the fact that Dylan was IT; in his prime, he was a genius who changed everything about music, a few times over. Now he may be concerned with changing his Depend undergarments. And that's fine?this is what happens to people as they get older. It's no crime; you age, and you die. Plenty of old bluesmen have aged gracefully, perhaps attaining a hard-edged sincerity they didn't have in their youth. But there's still something sickly and depressing about how we're culturally being coerced into continuously paying homage to icons like Dylan. The CDs are in the store, and they speak loudly enough to me or to anyone else who wants to listen. Frankly, if Dylan wanted to rent a private plane for his 60th birthday, then dive it into a lake in Wisconsin, I wouldn't hold it against him...until the inevitable spate of memorial concerts.
(5/17)
But hairsplitters, take note: although Stipe has been shifty about his sexuality and would often remark that he'd been in relationships with men and women in that irritating, faux-bisexual way, *[The Advocate says] that "this new revelation falls short of full disclosure."
Really? Stipe tells Time that he's now comfortable calling himself a "queer artist." How much more disclosure do you want? Perhaps he should post some pictures of him and his boyfriend having sex on the Web. But seriously, why did Stipe waffle, or simply refuse to answer, whenever an interviewer asked about his sexuality? "I was being made to be a coward about it," he told Farley, "rather than someone who felt like it really was a very private thing."
The obvious follow-up, which apparently didn't occur to Farley, was: Who or what "made" Stipe shroud his own sexuality in a cloak of ambiguity? My first guess: An executive at Warner Bros., or someone else who thought they had Stipe's best interests in mind.
(5/16)
What can you do sometimes, apart from sigh and shake your head?
The group, led by Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind, is demanding that the Arafat statue be removed from public display. They've even approached the Mayor (who has experience in these things) and the Governor (who isn't the brightest bulb himself) for help.
"It really glorifies Arafat," Hikind said in this morning's Post, "and as far as I'm concerned, that man is a terrorist."
Sheldon Silver, who, like Hikind, is apparently a man with too much time on his hands, and is unaware of any real problems here in the city, claims he isn't advocating censorship by demanding the wax museum remove a piece that he doesn't like. He didn't go on to explain what he was advocating, though, saying only, in proper schoolyard fashion, "They censor themselves. They have chosen not to do Adolf Hitler in New York because they obviously didn't think it was appropriate."
Now, I can't say for sure whether or not a replica of Hitler is in the museum, as I haven't been there yet. I know there are statues of the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. and Fidel Castro?as well as Gov. Pataki and Mayor Giuliani. Nobody seems to have any trouble with those. I also know that in the London branch of Madame Tussaud's?which I have visited?there is indeed a Hitler, but he's not with the other world leaders?he was downstairs, standing outside the entrance to the "Chamber of Horrors."
Maybe these boys haven't been down there yet.
To their credit, the people at Madame Toussaud's smirked a little, explained that the museum doesn't use a religious or political litmus test in deciding who they display, then kindly told the lawmakers to go away.
Tomorrow, Hikind (should he be able to get a bunch of signatures on his crybaby petition) plans to hold a protest outside the museum.
I guess the city must be in much better shape than any of us ever realized.
But you know, I have a solution that should make everyone happy. Should Hikind go any crazier with this, and should the Governor find a legal way to strongarm the museum into removing Mr. Arafat, what Toussaud's should do is this?move the statue from the "world leaders" section to the "rock stars" section, then change the name card to read "Ringo Starr."
(5/16)
Nahhhh, it's got to be a joke. Right? Is it a joke? Judge for yourself. (It's got to be a joke.)
(5/16)
Now comes news that Pride is being used as a guinea pig for copy-protected CDs: his new album being released by Music City Records is using encryption methods provided by SunnComm, a Phoenix-based company. What this means is that the consumer will not be able to copy this CD onto a CD-R, or download tracks from it onto the Web for file-sharing purposes. He can make MP3 copies for himself, but it's unclear whether he can pass these on to fellow fans for their own use, the same way they have done for years with cassette tapes.
In how many ways is this a warped scenario? For starters, this is Music City Records' first release, meaning we're not talking Sony or BMG. In the few press releases I've seen, none of them even mentions the name of the album, at the expense of this wonderful "new technology" that protects the album itself. So if this record tanks, there may be extraneous factors, like inexperience and bad marketing, that play into its failure.
Pride is no longer a superstar whose name value will make CDs fly off shelves; the only things flying off shelves in his career these days are dinner trays at the all-you-can-eat buffets in Branson. He's wise to play that circuit?the audiences there are captive, lucrative and will tolerate any sort of embalmed showbiz vet?but it's also a creative dead-end of the sort Elvis made for himself in Vegas. I'm certain Pride could go on playing live shows indefinitely in a manner that would make any recording artist envious in terms of tour profits. But he is also tying in his name value with a marketing practice that will prove to be reprehensible when the major labels launch their own experiments in copy protection with more contemporary acts.
In the past few years, CD-Rs have grown into a huge market, one fans are comfortable with and enjoy, much as they did with cassette tapes throughout the 80s. As Napster's once-strong 35-million-per-month user base demonstrates, the market for MP3s is also burgeoning, although the majors are consistently dragging their asses on this front, possibly in hopes that this new format will go away all by itself. Copy protection for CDs would be an unprecedented move in the industry, which is to say it would be the first time the industry dictated to consumers how they could use their products after purchase. It reeks of paranoia and insecurity, two qualities that are advantageous to the industry in many ways.
The industry is applying these feelings to a physical product when it should be focusing them on the future wrath of fans, especially the younger audiences?their target audiences, the pioneers in MP3 usage. It's not like they're going to be rushing out to buy a Charley Pride album?who in their right minds is these days? Still, there's something unsettling when a man who is the Jackie Robinson of contemporary country music ends up being pushed to the battle front as cannon fodder in what will surely be the most senseless, self-destructive war the recording industry will ever fight.
(5/16)
However, the mushy pundits?who don't comprehend politics at all, but need to fill an allotment of column inches in order to send their kids to private schools?might be joining the ladies and children in the lifeboats leaving the sinking SS Clinton.
Exhibit A: New York's media critic Michael Wolff. Hired in the midst of the dotcom nirvana, Wolff, who was conversant about that world, found himself by the end of last year with a shortage of topics to pontificate about. So he turned, disastrously, to national politics. And as a reflexive Manhattan liberal, Wolff huffed and puffed about the election results, even insinuating in a Dec. 18 column that Bush was a drunk, and that was why "he looks so addled and walleyed." A few sentences later he repeated, in some detail, the rumor that Gov. Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris had an affair. Wolff wrote: "A good rumor is a way to explain what is not being explained, a way to help figure out what's wrong with this picture. And certainly one would have to be mighty foolish to believe it could not be true."
A month later, just before Bush's inauguration, Wolff was still in denial, and demonstrably upset that not enough of his colleagues (aside from those at The Nation and Salon) were contributing discretionary income for a mass billboard campaign that would shout "BUSH STOLE THE ELECTION!" He said: "Assuming things are really cockeyed, how do you express it? I mean without being a bore or a crank. A crime, an irregularity, any various allegations, if they are manifested through the proper channels, all right. But how do you deal with what you can't quite acknowledge has happened?even though everyone knows what has happened? Here's an absolutely novel circumstance?a tainted American election?and there is no language with which to express it. The New York Times can't call the president a pretender or usurper?no more than it could say Bill Clinton fucked Gennifer Flowers, even though every reporter knew he had."
Wolff's tone-deaf delusions continued in New York's Feb. 5 issue, a celebration of Bill Clinton's certain dominance in American political culture, a post-Marc Rich column that compared the disgraced 42nd president to the Beatles, the Pope and John F. Kennedy. He speculated that Clinton will dwarf the dunderhead Bush: "The conflict is real. Bush will represent small-town, country-club, Anglo-Saxon, nuclear-family, Republican America; Clinton will represent media-influenced, urban-sprawl, sexually laissez-faire, open-family, changing-color America... Bush will be constrained by all manner of political concerns and handlers; Clinton will be as free and as voluble as a conservative radio commentator. Bush will speak from the government capital; Clinton will speak from the media capital. It hardly seems like a contest."
But now it's May and Wolff is safe on a dinghy, waving goodbye to diehard Bush-Olson-Rumsfeld-Cheney bashers like Conason, Gene Lyons, Maureen Dowd and Howell Raines. Wolff's latest exercise in profundity (May 21) is a glaring gear-change: Bush is "smart" and "may be on his way to giving better speeches than any modern president save Roosevelt and Kennedy."
What turned the New Media guru around was a recent address Bush gave to the American Jewish Committee. Considering all the mumbo-jumbo trash Wolff has written about the President, the following is simply mind-altering:
"[Bush] began his own remarks with just a slight stumble (more endearing than comic), welcoming, among others, the 'foreign dignities.'
"Then he spent a large part of his twelve minutes complimenting the other speakers, and, unhurried, sharing personal anecdotes about the people he knew at the dinner, getting in a not-too-forced joke or two. He was light and graceful. He was in his element. He was tipping his hat, paying respects, demonstrating some keen understanding of not-so-well-followed social rules.
"He did not speak with a particular emphasis about Israel, which would have been the obvious way to handle the occasion. Instead, he spoke, however briefly, about tolerance around the world. It was a fine speech. Not necessarily memorable, but as smooth as the deftest after-dinner talk. And again, oddly, not about him?he was just the cheerful tummler... He does not, apparently, need or desire to call attention to himself. He is able and willing to pass largely unnoticed. It's bizarre. And apparently smart."
What's next for the born-again Wolff? Never can tell, but a column defending Jeb Bush against all the vicious rumormongers in the media wouldn't surprise me. Yesterday, Gov. Bush told an Orlando Sentinel editor, in reference to a query about his alleged philandering, "The fact that you have to ask that question and I have to answer it is sickening."
Wolff's possible take? "The courageous action of Jeb Bush last week means?finally?that our long national nightmare is over."
(5/15)
I'm stunned by Fleischer's statement. It's hard to get my mind around it, around its ugliness and Babbittry; it's unassimilable to any ethical canon I'm acquainted with; I can't even argue with it. Just as shocking, however, is how "conservatives" have claimed for themselves proprietary rights over the definition of, to use Fleischer's cliche, "the American way of life." This way of life (which isn't "conservative") is defined by aggressive profligacy, by disrespect for what's decent and reasonable, by contempt for the sanctity of limits and for the inherent value of places and cultures and landscapes?in short, for the world. It's predicated on a mean, willful destructiveness and wastefulness that no parent, even a "conservative" one, would want to see in his or her children. George W. Bush would be disgusted if one of his daughters squandered her trustfund?her resources?on consumerist trinkets and baubles. But for some reason he considers it appropriate that a civilization should be founded on exactly such anal-expulsive arrogance, violence, unsustainability and decadence.
It's also indisputable that what Bush defines as "the American way of life" would have repelled such diverse figures as, just off the top of my head, Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, John Muir, Barry Goldwater, H.L. Mencken, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Penn, George Patton, Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, Jefferson Davis and every other Southern agrarian foe of the ravages and vulgarities of Yankee money-lust and industrialism, Cotton Mather, John Winthrop, Walt Whitman, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Thomas Cole and on and on.
Husbandry, dignity and care for and obligation to the world are now un-American. The sage of Monticello was un-American. Farmers are, by definition, un-American. The mind reels. You wonder how much longer this can go on.
(5/15)
The cliched response from a grizzled old Baltimoron who remembers Waters from back when would be a big sigh and a tut-tut. "Who could've imagined, back in the days of Multiple Maniacs and Pink Flamingos, that someday there'd be a John Waters musical on Broadway?" And so on.
But that would be foolish. Everybody grows up?or should. Waters outgrew his wild child gross-out films a very long time ago?at least by the time of Hairspray (1988), though one could argue for the 1981 Polyester as well. And although I'll personally always consider Maniacs, Flamingos and Mondo Trasho his three greatest, I'd put Serial Mom in the top five (with Female Trouble) and enjoyed Pecker a lot.
Anyway, at this stage, if John Waters wants a Broadway musical, God knows he deserves one. There will be fans who'll say that it's a logical next step in his career arc?from drag queens to chorus girls?and I wouldn't argue against that. And in a post-Rocky Horror Broadway, a musical Hairspray makes perfect sense. In fact, I say why stop there? Maybe it's time to extend the Waters franchise in a lot of new directions. I can see Multiple Maniacs or Female Trouble as a Saturday morning cartoon show. Divine dolls replacing Barbie as a gender-role model for little girls and boys. A Spike Jonze remake of Mondo Trasho, in color, with an all-new soundtrack. Why not?
(5/15)