Flypaper Follies

"Perhaps genocide will be unable to dispel my ennui. Then, then I will put all my efforts into politics."
--Joseph Stalin, speaking to Charlie Chaplin on the set of Gold Rush.

OK, so Joseph Stalin never said that. But he did meet Chaplin on the set of Gold Rush. He is rumored to have played the bear in the famous bear-in-the-cabin scene. Hence Russia's national nickname, the Bear.

None of that is true, either, of course. I'm not sure what compels me to write such things. I suppose it has something to do with my need to complete an essay, being burned out as a writer--particularly a writer concerned with accuracy--and because I am in fact horrified by politics.

We are slowly inoculated to the horror over our lifetimes. Lots of little needles--a lie here, a fabrication there, something worthy of 1984 every now and then. If we like the politician, the pin prick doesn't hurt as much and we can endure more of them more quickly. In this way, we can be quickly become immune to even the most toxic dose of political lies. (I suppose it could be argued that Ronald Reagan set the stage for Republican acceptance of W.)

Before you know it, all manner of untruths can pass before our eyes and between our ears and barely raise a hive. We can be told that it is dangerous to speak against the government, that it is the equivalent of giving "Aid and comfort to the enemy" as John Ashcroft said, (when it is in fact essential to our democracy, essential to reasonable debate and wise decisions) and it sounds quite reasonable.

It takes something even more violent and horrible than the corruption of our language and morality to snap us out of it. A long and increasingly bloody war, one which we can no longer ignore, seems to be doing quite nicely.

But what about all the schools we've painted in Iraq? you might ask. Why do they get so much less coverage than car bombs? The very fact that this is occasionally in some corners deemed a reasonable statement is itself testimony to the continued corruption of our capacity for rational thought. When, sincerely, have you ever seen, in this country or any other, the painting or building of a school overshadow the fatal explosion of a bomb in terms of news coverage? Are bombs often ignored in your community? How about school renovations?

That this argument every held even a drop of water is a tribute to the high level of immunity imparted to Republicans everywhere by years of nasty little pin pricks.

You are not a fire chief: A brief essay on our pretend society

We pretend too much. As soon as we are old enough to sit up, we are encouraged to do little else. We are given toys and costumes so we can pretend more dramatically, which may be just the opposite of what we should be doing. We pretend to be something until we tire of it, or can no longer believe it, then we pretend to be something else. It’s Superman one Halloween, Batman the next, then Harry Potter.

Sometimes we pretend to be something we might actually become, like a fire chief, but our pretending bears no resemblance to the reality. In fact, it can discourage pursuit of the actual career. Pretend by its very nature focuses on the dramatic, not the work-a-day. Pretend creates a swashbuckling caricature that bears no resemblance to real life. Real life looks horribly dull by comparison. Perhaps it is this realization that moves us to pretend to be something else.

On the other hand, life has a way of pulling back the curtains. Some time around puberty, most children lose forever the ability to leap to the next imaginary hero. They’ve been encouraged to pretend their whole lives, to pretend they can do anything, and then they realize they can’t. Or maybe they can, but the reality of what they can do bears no resemblance to the thing they’ve been pretending to be. The illusion they’ve been living is gone. They don’t like the reality.

In particularly dramatic examples, they begin to dress like zombies and listen to music that would move almost anyone to entertain at least fleeting thoughts of suicide. I think these are the children who were best at pretending and therefore the most scarred by disillusionment. Their illusions were so beautiful that losing them forced them to proclaim in the starkest possible terms that life is dark and horrible in comparison.

Still, much of our adult lives are predicated on the need to pretend. Our radio stations blast soaring inspirational ballads. Reality shows are in effect illusions, showing people doing things that most of us will never get the chance to do. Even if we did do the things they show, no one would be watching so it wouldn’t be the same. In fact, that’s the only time it would be reality – if no one was watching.

Marketing preys on our need to pretend. Thanks to years of pretending, we can easily believe that we will soon have bodies of unbelievable beauty or new careers that will quickly turn us into millionaires. We can become investment wizards overnight or make $100,000 a year working part time from home. We can buy SUVs and become rugged individualists. Mini mansions will turn our families into happy families with full, rich lives.

Worst of all, we can become the kind of people that skillful politicians tell us we are. There was a time when our abilities to pretend were laughably modest. If we could conjure up a chicken in every pot we were happy.

Over the last few decades, we’ve cut loose. Now we can believe almost anything about ourselves. We can believe we are a beacon of freedom and democracy, though we work hard to topple unfriendly democracies and some of our closest allies are horrible dictatorships. We can believe we are good people who never torture after seeing dozens of lurid photos of Americans torturing other people. We can believe that freedom is on the march in the Middle East and blame the messenger when the marchers get blown to bits.

We can’t stop our children from pretending. But maybe we should work harder to disillusion them. We should make sure that they know that they’re pretending and that the real world is much more difficult and less entertaining than their pretend world. We should tell them to believe their eyes and ears instead of comforting fantasies. We should tell them:

“You are not a fireman or an astronaut. You are not an action hero. You are nothing but a little boy sitting in the grass. You might one day become fire chief, or mayor, or a fighter pilot, but not by pretending.”

We can invade Iraq without losing our focus on terror

But we can't make a phone call and treat gunshot wounds at the same time:

McClellan said Monday that Cheney's staff didn't immediately inform the media because the first priority was tending to Whittington's health.

Damn I forgot! They listen in!

From the dccc.org stakeholder blog:

For weeks and weeks we've heard about how the NYT story on domestic spying damaged national security, but we've never been told why. Sen. Joe Biden asked Att. General Alberto Gonzales. Gonzales acknowledged that Al Qaeda was probably already aware that we were trying to conduct surveillance on them, but that as long as it wasn't in the newspapers, sometimes they forget.

Below is the link where I found this and here’s the relevant part of the transcript:

SEN. BIDEN: General, how has this revelation damaged the program?

I'm almost confused by it but, I mean, it seems to presuppose that these very sophisticated Al Qaida folks didn't think we were intercepting their phone calls.

I mean, I'm a little confused. How did it damage this?

GONZALES: Well, Senator, I would first refer to the experts in the Intel Committee who are making that statement, first of all. I'm just the lawyer.

And so, when the director of the CIA says this should really damage our intel capabilities, I would defer to that statement. I think, based on my experience, it is true -- you would assume that the enemy is presuming that we are engaged in some kind of surveillance.

But if they're not reminded about it all the time in the newspapers and in stories, they sometimes forget.

(LAUGHTER)

http://www.dccc.org/stakeholder/archives/004310.html

We need a mob mentality index. We as a society need a way to measure the many factors that contribute to irrational groupthink, aka mob mentality. If we knew that and watched those numbers, we could at any given time predict the percentage of voters who will vote Republican.

Think about it. Bush took off as a president only after a horribly bloody tragedy, the kind of event that makes humans much less rational and much more prone to violence. His reelection strategy involves invoking this incident as often as possible, and tying it to his other actions in as many ways as possible.

In other words, his strategy is not to offer a rational explanation for his actions. Quite the contrary. His strategy is to cripple our reasoning, to blind us to logic and complex thoughts. His strategy is to hide his actions behind a tragedy that tends to make people abandon reason in favor of more primitive instincts, notably violence and impulsiveness.

Perhaps pollsters could measure the emotional weight of various events (911 would be at the top of the list for this election.) The more weight they hold, the more they will influence the election in favor of the candidate who wields them.

For this election, this allows Bush to obfuscate any logic that Kerry might offer by attacking that logic with rythmic or otherwise instinctively appealing rhetoric. Think "Flip-flop." As long as the flip-flop charge works, Bush can use it to trump any Kerry argument with a much simpler and much more emotionally satisfying response. Not only is Kerry's argument ignored, his character is damaged with each repitition.

And, by lumping the war in Iraq in with the "War on Terror" Bush can cover any mistake as a mistake made in pursuit of a noble (and emotionally weighted) endeavor.

Kerry's only hope is that the emotional impact of 911 is wearing or will wear thin among undecided voters, or that one or more of Bush's actions will make it obvious (even to the logic-impaired) that he is exploiting our national tragedy.

0 days without a politics-related injury
As anyone who has been reading along might surmise, my political passions run hot and cold. My convictions remain the same, but my desire to express them fluctuates wildly. When the Republic-cons won the 2002 elections I thought I might go nuts with anger. When some 70 percent of Americans supported Bush in his (not the least bit believable) push for war, I did the next best thing: I marched against the war, then I started a blog. Then another.

At my most passionate, I wrote (almost) daily. I wrote subversive satire and imagined my arrest and imprisonment at the hands of the Justice Department, which certainly considered me to be providing aid and comfort to the enemy, under John Ashcroft's definition. I jeopardized relationships by sending my blogs to Republican friends. I sent money to MoveOn and wrote letters to publications across the political spectrum. I like to think that my scathing feedback killed Scarborough's regular opinion column on MSNBC, which committed the heinous crime of pretending to be a blog whilst offering no links.

Meanwhile, as hundreds of thousands of dedicated readers skipped my blogs daily, the mood of the country began to change. I basked in the changing tides and turned my (fleeting) attention to other matters large and small. This is my first post in almost three months.

My level of passion has slipped to the point that I am today writing about the Kerry/Edwards sticker that will soon adorn my bumper. Said bumper, along with the rest of the car, will then travel across the South to Florida with me behind the wheel, carefully gauging the level of animosity and violence I generate.

Fruitless? Let's hope so. I'll keep you posted.

They could be famous, like Carville and whats-her-name
Howard Kurtz hacks me off about every other time I read him. Sanctimonious is what he is. And biased. So anyways, I emailed his ombudsman the other day:

Dear Ombudsman

I heard recently that Howard Kurtz’ wife works for Republicans, including a stint with the California governor.

Shouldn’t he be required to disclose this, since he writes about politics?

And received this reply from a gentleman named Mike Getler getlerm@washpost.com:

That's wrong. She worked for a brief period more than a year ago in California for him. She was not married to, or living with, or in the same city as Kurtz at the time.

I thought that was fairly weak, so I did a little Googling and put together this reply:

She didn't just work for Arnold, she was his press secretary. And her association with the GOP continues.

* As recently as Saturday, On Hardball with Chris Matthews she was described as "GOP media strategist Sheri Annis...." http://www.mail-archive.com/hardball@lists.msnbc.com/msg00328.html

* In February on the same show, she was described as "a Republican media analyst."

* On July 29th, 2003, The Post described her as
"a political consultant and former aide to Schwarzenegger." http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64967-2003Jul29?language=printer

* The right-wing Claremont Institute describes her as "Our friend Sheri Annis..." http://www.claremont.org/weblog/2003_05.html

All I'm saying is that Kurtz should disclose that his wife works for the GOP, particularly when he's writing about the GOP. Seems like a simple common-sense request to me.

In the course of writing that email, I came across one of Kurtz columns that made me want to cuss, so I wrote another email and sent it just behind the email above:

Particularly when he writes copy like this:

"I can't help but think that if some of these stories had been obtained by one of our mainstream media muckety-mucks, as opposed to Sean Hannity or the Weekly Standard, it would be treated as a much bigger deal.

"The dismissive notion that conservatives leak to outlets on the right for ideological reasons ignores the fact that liberals often do the same thing with news organizations that are either left-of-center or likely to be sympathetic to the message being peddled. Most leakers have self-serving motives. That doesn't mean the information they're peddling is marginal or bogus.

"It's little wonder that some on the right are complaining once again about media bias."

I think the reader should know of his GOP contacts.

Have I heard anything in reply? No. Do I expect to? No. Am I the first fellow to run against this brick wall? Uh-uh. I've heard several complaints about it in the blogosphere. And several weeks ago, mediawhoresonline.com made it look like the whole thing was coming to a head. But it hasn't. Yet.