(Display Name not set)November 2004 Archives

With his latest column, "Good News About Poverty," David "Bobo" Brooks continues his wayward adventures in idiocy.

Making the case for globalization, he points to the "spectacular decline in poverty in East and South Asia" as evidence that the world's poorer nations are leading a global economic surge. How so? Well, of roughly 472 million people living on less than $1 a day in 1990, about 200 million have graduated to less than extreme poverty (perhaps $2 a day).

Accordingly, when life on $3 a day (or, miracle of miracles, $4 a day) becomes a reality for hundreds of millions in the distant future, we can expect a column headlined "Superspectacular News About Poverty."

Meantime, his colleague Nicholas "On-the-One-Hand-on-the-Other-Hand" Kristof offers more of his adventures in equivocation with his latest column, "Saving the Iraqi Children."

And by the way, don't miss Ashcroft's house of cards.

A note on copy editing. A friend who teaches at USC's Annenberg School for Communication tells me her journalism students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels know so little basic grammar that they can't tell the difference between a noun and a verb.

It's not that bad at the new, improved New York Times Book Review. Yet. But consider this sentence from the excellent essay in yesterday's edition by Thomas Frank, a nekkid pundit I admire:

Despite its naked partisanship and its extreme vulnerability to refutation, the red-blue narrative held the punditry in such awe that, inevitably, it generated its precise antithesis ...

Somebody (a copy editor?) should have caught the error (minor, it's true, but this is the Book Review after all). The incorrect phrase should have been written: "... the red-blue narrative WAS held BY the punditry in such awe that ..."

Using the passive voice would not have been great, but adding those two little words would have fixed the problem without rejiggering the sentence to keep it in the active voice (like so: "The punditry held the red-blue narrative in such awe, despite its naked partisanship and its extreme vulnerability to refutation, that ..." etc.).

Class dismissed.

Here's why, according to him:

• You've been looking for that perfect gift for your toddler who's learning to read.
• Chances are you can't bring your PC into the bathroom.
• You want to own a copy before Miramax gets a hold of it and changes the ending and makes the story about a French woman who makes chocolate and inspires Shakespeare to write "Peter Pan."
• You need to kill that cockroach but can't find the phonebook.

With Thanksgiving approaching I thought I was through blogging this week, but Dan Rather's sudden resignation as CBS news anchor brought out the worst in me: A sentimental memory of my news story about the resignation of his predecessor, Walter Cronkite, nearly a quarter century ago. It appeared on the front page of the Chicago Sun-Times on March 7, 1981 -- a Saturday -- which would account for the major play except for the fact that Cronkite's exit, unlike Rather's, was regarded as the departure of everybody's favorite uncle.

Cronkite said what was expected of him ("This is but a transition, a passing of the baton," etc.). He mentioned the "great broadcaster and gentleman" who preceded him, Doug Edwards, and the one who would follow him, Dan Rather. He noted that Rather "will be sitting in here for the next few years." Given the $23 million CBS had agreed to pay Rather for the next 10 years, it was probable, I wrote, that Cronkite did not intend the remark to forecast a premature departure for his successor.

But perhaps he did unconsciously hope that Rather might be a flop. Because, as I see from my story, Cronkite, who had never displayed a sense of humor in the anchor's chair (at least none that I can recall), during a break "looked at the script he had written for his closing -- which had been kept secret -- and began kidding: 'I'm not gonna read this!' Then he turned and shouted into the 'fishbowl,' the glass-enclosed area where his producers sit: 'I've changed my mind! Tell Rather I've changed my mind!'"

When "Cybeline" had its world premiere last March in Los Angeles at the Walt Disney Hall concert complex, I offered a rundown about its authors, a couple of friends of mine -- composer-musicologist-technical-wizard Bill Osborne and singer-actress-artist-lyricist-musician Abbie Conant. The premiere, a multimedia music-theater performance, was part of the cutting-edge REDCAT Musical Exploration Series.

According to Osborne's program notes:

Cybeline is about a cyborg trying to be a talk show host to prove she is human. It is about nature, virtual reality, biotechnology, and the mass media -- and about finding the heart and poetry in technology as it also contemplates its horrors. What does a fifty-year-old structure of silicon have to teach a five-billion-year-old structure of carbon?

The reply is a mixed-media message involving:

Schubert Lieder, the Egyptian Goddess Maat, Native American poetry, dismemberment, trombone playing, a cyborg talkshow host, a talking hand, sacred cartoons, a vengeful opera singer, a martyred math geek, Hildegard von Bingen, fighter jets, commercials for synthetic flesh, cyborgian attack dogs, and personality-enhancement chips, psalms, a country western song, Mother Nature, and a tribute to Joni Mitchell . . . all integrated into a 45-minute, surround-sound, mini opera with computer-generated accompaniment, video and live electronics.

This morning it is a pleasure to bring you the country-western song from "Cybeline" called "Number-Crunchin' Cowboy." The lyrics and cartoons are by Conant, who also does the singing. The music, video and sound design are by Osborne.

(Turn up the sound level on your computer, click on the song title, follow the lyrics, and enjoy.)

"NUMBER-CRUNCHIN' COWBOY"

Just the other day I was surfin' on the bay
When a big roan horse came a gallopin' my way
The cowboy on his back had a rhinestone power mac
And I could clearly hear he was callin' out my number

He's a number crunchin' cowboy,
And if I calculate just right
He'll be workin' at my keyboard
His arms around me tight.

He's a number crunchin' cowboy,
He's the man up on my screen,
He's the best of all statistics,
He's the email of my dreams.


He's no Microsoft when we head up to the loft.
He's the best programmer out of greater Albuquerque.
Exchangin' gigabytes on his laptop late at night,
He's got my heart on-line and I'm learnin' some trigonometry.

He's a number crunchin' cowboy,
And if I calculate just right
He'll be workin' at my keyboard
His arms around me tight.

Back next week after the Thanksgiving weekend.

I love it when a critic knows what he's talking about. ... Do you remember what it's like to turn 30? I don't. ... Our chief ignoramus cancelled agreement between nouns and verbs. ... Paul Krugman hoped the next administration would "throw open the records" and not be "too magnanimous" to this one. "I believe the sunshine is going to be quite deadly," he said in May. Such a long time ago, and no sunshine since.

Have you read "Open Letter to Devil Dogs of the 3.1" by combat photographer Kevin Sites? It's his eye-witness account of what happened nine days ago in the Falluja mosque where he videotaped a U.S. Marine shooting and killing a wounded, unarmed Iraqi prisoner.

Explaining his motives to the Marines he was with during the battle of Falluja, he writes:

It's time [for] you to have the facts from me, in my own words, about what I saw -- without imposing on that Marine -- guilt or innocence or anything in between. I want you to read my account and make up your own minds about whether you think what I did was right or wrong. All the other armchair analysts don't mean a damn to me.

Sites posted his lengthy, gripping, detailed account on Sunday in his personal weblog. Shocked that he's been "painted as some kind of anti-war activist" because of what he captured on camera, Sites points out that he has never been "a 'gotcha' reporter -- hoping for people to commit wrongdoings so I can catch them at it."

No one, especially someone like me who has lived in a war zone with you, would deny that a solider or Marine could legitimately err on the side of caution under those circumstances. War is about killing your enemy before he kills you. ...

But observing all of this as an experienced war reporter who always bore in mind the dark perils of this conflict, even knowing the possibilities of mitigating circumstances -- it appeared to me very plainly that something was not right.

Sites wrestles with his conscience. He tells the Marines that "making sure you know the basis for my choices after the incident is as important to me as knowing how the incident went down. I did not in any way feel like I had captured some kind of 'prize' video. In fact, I was heartsick."

His conclusion is worth chiseling in stone. Go read it.

The redesigned Museum of Modern Art in New York has sent the architecture critics into a swoon. Blair Kamen of the Chicago Tribune echoed the raves of many others yesterday when he called the $425-million renovation and expansion "serene, urbane and blissfully understated."

But even at those prices Straight Up poet Leon Freilich, who attended the MoMA opening Sunday night, was underwhelmed. He had to resort to prose for his review:

"The line for MoMA members (not benefactors, for sure) at last night's party snaked from mid-53rd Street up to Fifth Avenue and down to the end of 54th Street. My wife Rose and I passed someone who said the museum had signed up 47,000 new members. 'And they're all here,' Rose commented.

"Luckily it was a mild evening. And luckily again, my two-hour waiting-time estimate was off by an hour and a half. Not so bad. Rose saw someone she knows from the nabe, and I spotted an established Park Slope 'painteress' (her irascible realtor-husband's term) who exhibits in Soho and teaches at St. John's.

"Tiny sandwiches and tall drinks were served on every floor. And the place was manageable; certainly not like Saturday, when the doors were flung open to the public for a free day.

"The interior rises six floors to form a dullish atrium. Floor 2 consists of giant rooms with little on the walls. If only I'd remembered to bring a Magic Marker. The other floors have a series of smaller rooms, which worked better for me. Familiar Matisses, Picassos, Mondrians, Duchamps and a Man Ray (I didn't know he painted).

"I saw not a single chair or bench. Yet the older members -- and there were quite a few -- seemed comfortable enough. Toilets on every floor. The sculpture garden was closed; it looked good through the glass first-floor wall.

"Most people were dressed to the nines, maybe sevens. I thought I'd be the only sucker; Rose pressured me into putting on shoes, but I held fast on socks.

"MoMA talked 50 Bush Leaguers and billionair Democrats into shelling out the $425 mil for this enlarged building. But compare it to any of a dozen concert halls throughout the world and it looks like an art warehouse. Forgetting about the oranges and comparing it to apples, it lacks the Louvre's unique glass entrance and the Met Museum's grand staircases (inside & outside). But Rose is happy with the building and considers her $75-membership well spent. She loved the paintings -- especially Kandinsky, Miro, I forget who else -- immensely.

"In an exotic or ascetic touch, no red wine was served -- only white. I was unhappy with that last night. This morning I think I can make out the reason, and appreciate it. While I was backing away from a serving table with a glass of wine, a careless, or tipsy, woman bounced off me, spilling wine all over my jacket and shirt. I was thankful the wine was white. Next time, though, I expect to see a picket line of dry cleaners at MoMA's entrance."

Others, even some critics, have also been underwhelmed. Which reminds: The museum at the Getty Center in L.A. is/was way overrated. Great location, not so great galleries. And the garden? Way WAY overrated.

Since the Central Intelligence Agency is so much in the news these days -- what with the agency shakeup by the new CIA chief Porter Goss, his leaked "rules of the road" memo telling agency employees it's their job to "support the administration and its policies," and a possible compromise intelligence bill -- my staff of thousands thought it useful to recall some of the CIA's monumental gaffes and pranks of the past, which are either forgotten, little known, or just too weird to believe.

Let's start with the weird. We've all heard about the CIA's failed efforts to embarrass Fidel Castro by powdering his shoes with a depilatory so his beard would fall out. But you probably haven't heard of this screwy propaganda stunt from the early days of the Cold War. One idea for the agency's "psychological warfare" campaign was to drop "extra-large condoms -- labeled 'medium' in English -- on the Soviet Union in order to make Russian women think all American men were exceptionally virile." So writes Evan Thomas in "The Very Best Men," a terrifically entertaining history of the agency's early years.

The condom drop wasn't taken seriously. But how about this? To undermine the regime of Indonesian strongman Achmed Sukarno, a lascivious thug with an insatiable sexual appetite whose political "crime was neutralism," the CIA "spread the rumor that [he] had been seduced by a good-looking blond airline stewardess who worked for the KGB." Needing documentation, Thomas writes, the CIA "commissioned a blue movie to be made of a Sukarno look-alike in the amorous embrace of a porn actress posing as the Russian spy. To play Sukarno, the moviemakers (Bing Crosby and his brother) chose a bald Chicano wearing a latex face mask." Why bald? Because "Sukarno was vain about his own baldness and always wore a skullcap, except, presumably, in bed." (You read it right: Bing Crosby and his brother.)

And this: A CIA operative who ran guerrilla operations in Asia "sent back a film to Washington which, he claimed, showed his guerrillas clambering ashore behind enemy lines" in North Korea. Trouble was, when the film was screened for the Pentagon brass, to prove the value of the agency's secret operations, a CIA officer noticed "the infiltration was taking place in broad daylight." Oops. Turns out, the film showed "a training exercise, not a real operation." Add this: "A secret CIA history of [actual] operations in Korea notes that [the] guerrillas were dressed in captured army uniforms and Korean civilian clothing, but unfortunately wore self-incriminating U.S. Army issue underwear."

At one point, Thomas writes, a top agency officer dispatched to inspect the Psychological Warfare Workshop "reported back that he had found the merry pranksters shooting at balloons in their office with BB guns." The pranksters were part of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), a purposely innocuous name for a branch of the CIA tasked in "the language of its secret charter" to counter "the vicious covert activities of the USSR, its satellite countries and Communist groups to discredit the aims and activities of the U.S. and other Western powers."

Sometimes certifiable crazies joined the pranksers. According to Thomas, "when one OPCer was shipped off to St. Elizabeth's mental hospital for demonstrating a passion for farm animals," Walter Bedell Smith, the CIA director at the time, demanded, "Can't I get people who don't hire people who bugger cows?"

Is it any wonder "the CIA failed to predict the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950," just as it failed to anticipate the communist coup in Czechoslovakia two years earlier? And let's not forget the Hungarian revolution in 1956, which cost 30,000 lives. The CIA was deeply involved in pushing for the uprising, but then failed to support it with weapons and ran for cover when the Soviets sent in tanks and troops to put it down. ("Sure, we never said rise up and revolt," Thomas quotes a CIA official as saying, "but there was a lot of propaganda that led the Hungarians to believe that we would help.")

Yes, we know: The Bay of Pigs notwithstanding, the CIA has worked wonders and always meant to do noble things, such as making the world safe for democracy. But its peculiar history underscores the realization that getting things wrong in Iraq was just par for the course. And the fact that Porter Goss is goosing his troops to "support the administration and its policies" instead of offering it a dose of reality doesn't lend much hope that the agency will be getting things right in the future. (Also makes you wonder about Colin Powell's as yet unverified farewell disclosure.)

It's also no sign of hope that Goss was part of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and worked with Edward Lansdale, the model for the blundering CIA agent in Vietnam in Graham Greene's "The Quiet American." It's even more hopeless when you realize that Goss is a wealthy, patrician Yalie of the ol' boy cloak-and-dagger network that set the agency on its merry way and that earlier in his career as a clandestine CIA agent he worked with Tracy Barnes, William Harvey and Ted Shackley, all of whom had key roles in one or the other of the agency's most infamous "black ops."

In case anyone needs reminding, these black operations included the coup d'état that overthrew the Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 at the behest of the United Fruit Company, the military coup against South Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963 that ended in his assassination, the military coup that overthrew Salvadore Allende in Chile in 1973 that ended in his assassination, and attempted assassinations of the Congo's Patrice Lumumba, Iraq's Abd al-Karim Kassem, and, of course, Cuba's Fidel Castro.

Clyde Haberman asks: "Have you noticed the large number of plays in recent years, on and off Broadway, whose titles consist of only one word?" And answers:

To list a few, we now have "Rent," "Bug," "Sin," "Doubt," "Stomp," "Svejk," "Whoopi," "Hairspray," "Chicago," "Brooklyn," "Dracula," not to mention words like "Reckless," "Wicked," "Trying" and "Cookin'." Say this for "Democracy." It is at least a long word, like "Guantánamo" and "Cinderella" ...

But something called "Our Cellphone Symphony" at the Brooks Atkinson Theater -- where Michael Frayn's "Democracy" had its Broadway premiere last night -- is the really fascinating stuff. Go read the column.

One thing struck me on my vacation in Offlineville that left me dumbfounded. Many old friends, from former editors and current reporters to artists and writers, don't bother going online. When they do, it's only to seek particular information. They don't even Web surf. I tried to tell them how much they're missing (like the "Bushchimps" illustration, courtesy of an online friend), but I didn't seem to make much of a dent.

Postscript: On- and offline, it's the time of the toadies. But you already knew that, dincha.

The Red Eye was full to brimming. We landed at JFK and pulled up to the gate in the early ayem. But the gate (a k a "the jetway") was not there. Apparently our arrival was unexpected, although we'd boarded a regularly scheduled flight. So we waited. And waited. And waited some more. The cap'n came on with an apology for the delay. There were occasional updates. "We've got an electrical problem. The mechanics are all over it." Other developments followed. At last the cap'n came on again. "The jetway is approaching the aircraft." I don't believe in UFOs, but that line put me in mind of them. Maybe you hadda be there.

Blogger burnout, it's not. Yet. I'm just hitting the toggle switch for a bit of offline vacation. Back next week. I leave you with some wishful thinking from our poet:

IF ONLY

George Walker Bush, a Texas gent,
Somehow came and went,
Not so much a president
As an embarrassment.

--Leon Freilich

Kofi Annan, global musicologist? "Today, our subject is music," the U.N. Secretary-General told his audience yesterday in New York. "What's that got to do with the U.N.?, you may be asking. My answer is that music has to do with everything."

It's the "soundtrack" of our lives, Annan said, beginning with "the first lullaby sung to us as newborn babies." It penetrates our daily existence so thoroughly, he added, that "many of us take it for granted -- just as we do the soundtrack of a film." He even quoted Plato, who wrote that music "gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination."

Annan spoke about clashing values, world diversity and the unifying force of music. Aware that his orotund remarks might be a bit much, he caught himself and said: "You see, I am getting carried away I'd better stop."

With that he introduced the real musicologist, professor Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra, who had come to the U.N. to lecture on "why music matters."

The U.N. Secretary-General was merely playing the genial host, as he has done for previous lectures on more familiar U.N. topics such as human rights, cloning, Islam, globalization and climate change.

I have no idea what Botstein himself said. It's doubtful, however, that anything he might have said about the unifying force of music could heal the divide between the United States of Canada and Jesusland.

So what happened to the overnight reviews at The New York Times? Not having seen any since the first one ran on Nov. 1 in the Metro section of the print edition, I wondered whether my report had been wrong.

This morning I asked Jonathan Landman, the cultural editor of the Times, in a gmail message: "Can readers expect to see more overnights in the future? Are you phasing them in slowly or have you dropped the idea (and if so, why)?"

He replied: "You were right, though a tad premature. We hope to start these on a regular basis in a couple of months. until then, we'll do it when the occasion warrants -- probably a bit more often than we've done it in the past, but not on any fixed schedule."

Once the policy goes full bore, will overnights run in the arts section, where readers are accustomed to looking for reviews? Or will they continue to run in the Metro section of the print edition? We didn't get into that. My guess is Metro, due to its later production deadlines, unless the paper rejiggers its printing schedule.

Meantime, this morning's front page had a surprise for classical musicians who've been feeling as desperate about their base as Democrats about theirs. When was the last time the paper gave front-page treatment to a non-news feature profile about a fill-in opera singer? Not in recent memory. Maybe never?

Spurred by four collections of essays by A.J. Liebling, which have just been published, Russell Baker recalls an era "when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were." His point, of course, is that that's not the case today.

Nor was it the case by the time Liebling died in 1963. The "modest style" had already succumbed to what Baker calls "the imperial state of mind," when "the press" was already becoming "the media." In fact, Liebling's own rule of thumb about the journalistic pecking order in his own time, which Baker cites, best summarizes our own.

There are three kinds of writers of news in our generation. In inverse order of worldly consideration, they are:

1. The reporter, who writes what he sees.
2. The interpretive reporter, who writes what he sees and what he construes to be its meaning.
3. The expert, who writes what he construes to be the meaning of what he hasn't seen.

Liebling elaborates on "the expert" with a contempt clearly intended for the magazine mandarins and royal op-ed sages who got under his skin.

All is manifest to him, since his powers are not limited by his powers of observation. Logistics, to borrow a word from the military species of the genus, favor him, since it is possible to not see many things at the same time. For example, a correspondent cannot cover a front and the Pentagon simultaneously. An expert can, and from an office in New York, at that.

Ironically, today's media barons of print and television have the same sort of contempt for bloggers. If Liebling were alive today, my sense is that he'd curse us all. Or cure us.

The big news at Guantanamo Bay is that a federal judge in Washington shut down the "military commissions," otherwise known as tribunals, being held on the U.S. base in Cuba. Proceedings were halted against a former driver for Osama Bin Laden, who denies he was a terrorist and disputes his prisoner status as an "enemy combatant."

Reporters dispatched to cover the tribunals had been entertaining the local wildlife. One of the reporters, seen in the photo, is feeding a Gitmo lizard. The lizards, I'm told, are as animated as puppies and just as friendly. "They will eat out of your hand, but never bite." That's more than you can say for the U.S. Justice Department, which is appealing the judge's ruling.

Postscript: "The order stunned military officials here" The Wall Street Journal reported from Guantanamo on Tuesday. The judge "rejected the government's position that the president, as commander in chief, inherently holds 'untrammeled power to establish military tribunals' without specific authorization from Congress."

According to the report, "the judge also dismissed the administration's claim that the Geneva Conventions had no force in the Afghan conflict because it was conducted against a terrorist organization and its allied militia, rather than a conventional army." He ruled, too, that "the Bush administration's military commission violated the convention, since it offers a lesser degree of rights to enemy prisoners than those that would be afforded to U.S. soldiers facing trial."

Did he really say it? Yes he did: "This is no longer George Bush's war. This is America's war." -- Barack Obama, speaking this morning about the war in Iraq on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopolous."

Too bad what Obama said is true to the extent that a heaping majority of the electorate -- 59 million Americans -- voted for the Boy King. It's also disgusting, especially when the great black hope says it with a tone of approval in his voice.

On the same program Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. cited a poll, which he didn't identify, indicating that Americans actually "voted 3-to-1 against the war." Huh?

Oh, brother: A newly revised "science curriculum to allow the teaching of creationism" is causing a ruckus in Wisconsin.

A state law governing the teaching of evolution was regarded by a local school board as too restrictive, the AP reports. The science curriculum "should not be totally inclusive of just one scientific theory," said Joni Burgin, superintendent of the Grantsburg district of 1,000 students in northwest Wisconsin.

The science curriculum? Evolution as one theory and creationism as another? It's reassuring to know that 43 deans at Wisconsin public universities have protested the revision, along with hundreds of educators. Let's see if the crackpots budge.

The Blessèd Reverend Repulski writes: "Dropped into the Albany town library and there noticed Hunter Thompson's name on the current Rolling Stone cover. Guess what? He fell for the shoe-in Kerry jive too. Some forecasts are too painful to consider. He mistook the citizens of Aspen for the folks. Unwise."

Famous last words from the good doctor:

Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush went belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who hammered poor George into jelly. It was pitiful. ...

Bush signed his own death warrant in the opening round, when he finally had to speak without a TelePrompTer. ...

This year's first presidential debate was such a disaster for George Bush that his handlers had to be crazy to let him get in the ring with John Kerry again. Yet Karl Rove let it happen, and we can only wonder why. But there is no doubt that the president has lost his nerve, and his career in the White House is finished. NO MAS. ...

Hélas, as zee froggies would say. Quelle méprise!

Have you seen Sorry Everybody? It's the website that keeps on saying "please remember that some of us -- hopefully most of us -- are truly, truly sorry." Such good intentions. So many photo apologies. Such victimhood. So pathetic, exceptions notwithstanding. And such a hit magnet you may not be able to download it.

Few political analysts were more blistering about the Boy King before and during the 2004 election campaign than Kevin Phillips, the former Republican who identified and crafted the "Southern strategy" back in the late-'60s, which was exploited by Nixon and Reagan and which is now largely responsible for the Boy King's second coronation.

But Phillips, who is also the author of "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush," was just as harsh about John Kerry. "If Kerry wants to be stamped second-rate he can keep on being a stiff. He'll join Dukakis and Gore," Phillips told a stellar gathering of liberal Democrats last May. "But if Kerry loses, historians will have to put him in a category not invented yet."

Are historians already out there working on that category? It's a shame to have to ask.

How can Nicholas Kristof be so DUMB? Here's how: "Time To Get Religion," his column this morning, in which he offers the Democrats four suggestions for future success:

• Don't be afraid of religion.
• Pick battles of substance, not symbolism.
• Accept that today, gun control is a nonstarter.
• Hold your nose and work with President Bush.

Call me an effete-pinko-commie-atheist-liberal-antiwar idjit, but who wants that kind of success? Did the red-white-and-blue-religious-conservative-right-wing-Republican-neocon-hawk matadors achieve success through compromise?

And anyway, nothing the Democrats do -- from bending their principles to outright appeasement -- will gain them an inch with Republicans, who see their election victory as a diktat from, by, and for the people that gives them the right to rule with impunity.

Postscript: Smarter and funnier than me.

The dust from the election of the chief ignoramus has not settled. May it never. Others are saying that, too. Straight Upper Joan Daniels, a regular reader, writes:

I have come to the conclusion that the "majority" of Americans are simply morons and nothing now will ever convince me otherwise. I'm amazed by the people in the streets cheering for Bush -- people who will be unemployed and disinfranchised over the next 4 years because they've reelected him.

There's now nothing holding back the "regime." They're free to do whatever they wish and they wish to do a lot and it's all very bad. And I don't want to hear any talk of "binding wounds" and "reuniting Americans" either.

The people who voted for him perhaps deserve to have him as their president, but I didn't do anything to deserve him and I'm not endorsing him. How could people vote for him?

And what's with all this hypocritical talk about moral values? Is what we are doing (and will continue to do!) in Iraq moral? What is the rest of the world going to think of Americans now that we've reelected those monsters???

I commented to a friend before the election that I'd like to tell myself, if Bush won, it wouldn't be the end of the world. But the fact of the matter is, I fear it may be exactly that. This country may never recover, ever, from 8 years of George W. Bush, God's chosen President.

It shouldn't have been a close election, it should've been a landslide for John Kerry. The American people have spoken and informed the world they are complete idiots.

Her comments jibe with these and these and these, all by Kyle ("No Time to Retreat") Gann, who said early and well what had to be said, and these by Jane ("The unteachable ignorance of the red states") Smiley, who sounds remarkably like someone separated at birth from Gann.

And now comes sorry news that our far-seeing standard-bearer of bad tidings, Paul ("No Surrender") Krugman, is taking a leave from his column until sometime in January to complete an economic textbook. His departing words bring further warning of nasty times ahead:

I don't hope for more and worse scandals and failures during Mr. Bush's second term, but I do expect them. The resurgence of Al Qaeda, the debacle in Iraq, the explosion of the budget deficit and the failure to create jobs weren't things that just happened to occur on Mr. Bush's watch. They were the consequences of bad policies made by people who let ideology trump reality. Those people still have Mr. Bush's ear, and his election victory will only give them the confidence to make even bigger mistakes.

If the dust does settle, it's likely to be our own.

"Democrats face this terrible arithmetic in the Electoral College where if they don't carry any of the 11 Southern states [of the Old Confederacy] they need to win 70% of everything else," says Merle Black, an expert on Southern politics at Emory University.

BLESSED BE THE TRUE BELIEVERS

A positive approach is needed
In these days of infamy;
Why not ask the Southern states
To re-form the Confederacy?

The folks of fervid faith can chant,
"Holy, holy, hola!
O Lord, send us a worthy Son,
A Dixie Ayatollah."

-- Leon Freilich

And in response to this item earlier today, our Calvin Trillin writes:

THE HAVES AND THE HAVE-FEARS

The theocrats have Bush
And the plutocrats have Cheney;
And what do the rest of us have?
A country going down the drainy.

Annie J. writes a blog called anniej's livejournal, which was brought to my attention by a friend. Subtitled "the moon & antarctica," it lives on a popular online publishing site.

Annie J.'s journal is a pop culture fandom diary about, among other things, "porn, werewolves, wizards, gay boys fucking, and the hotness of David Thewlis" and, not least, Harry Potter. (That's her own description.) Unfortunately, she posted something political not long ago that brought the Secret Service to her door.

If you take a look at her diary (click the link), you'll see it's chatty, very well produced, pretty ordinary fandom stuff, not at all pornographic as far as I could tell, not even the slightest bit kinky.

I know nothing about Annie J. except what she says in her "about me" note -- she was born Nov. 6, 1981, in South Carolina -- and what I can deduce from her postings. I also don't know what she said in the post that got her into trouble. She's taken it down to avoid further investigation, she says, and to protect the privacy of people who commented in response.

Here's her story in her own words, posted on Oct. 27, 2004 (shortly before the election needless to say), which I find entirely credible:

For all my LJ-loving friends, this is a word of warning, a word to the wise, and a word of utter exhaustion after the wringer I've been put through in the last twenty-four hours.

A couple of weeks ago, following the last presidential debate, I said some rather inflammatory things about George W. Bush in a public post in my LJ, done in a satirical style. We laughed, we ranted, we all said some things. I thought it was a fairly harmless (and rather obvious) attempt at humor in the face of annoyance, and while a couple of people were offended, as is typical behavior from me, I saw something shiny and forgot about it, thinking that the whole thing was over and done and nothing else would come of what I said.

I was wrong.

At 9:45 last night, the Secret Service showed up on my mother's front door to talk to me about what I said about the President, as what I said could apparently be misconstrued as a threat to his life. After about ten minutes of talking to me and my family, they quickly came to the conclusion that I was not a threat to national security (mostly because we are the least threatening people in the entire world) and told me that they would not recommend that any further action be taken with my case. However, I do now have a file with the FBI that includes my photograph, my e-mail address, and the location of my LJ. This will follow me around for the rest of my life, regardless of the fact that the Secret Service knows that I am not a threat.

Obviously, I cannot link to the original LJ post that I made, because I have removed it from my LJ to protect myself and those who commented in that thread from receiving any further visits from the FBI. [See point of information below.] I apologized for the miscommunication, though I did not apologize for voicing my opinion of George W. Bush. I will never apologize for speaking my mind. I will, however, apologize when I say something [the] wrong way and for unintentionally offending/threatening someone, because I am an extremely nonviolent person.

After having consulted an attorney to make sure that speaking about what happened to me will not incur another visit from the Secret Service, I am making this public post to tell you all several things.

Annie J. then adds a lengthy statement, couched in terms that sound like legal advice. She repeats that she is a non-violent person, and says 1) she has never had any military or weapons training; 2) she would never harm anyone, let alone the president, and would never encourage anyone else to harm him; 3) she wants to warn people to be careful about what they say on the Internet; 4) she's concerned about having an FBI file because she doesn't know what it will mean for her future.

She emphasizes that the Secret Service did not come looking for her as part of a federal fishing expedition, but because somebody denounced her. The FBI "received a report about my post," she writes, from somebody who had visited her site (whom she suspects she knows). She says she doesn't believe her rights were violated by the Secret Service agents who visited her, and she's not now considering filing a complaint. She also claims she doesn't feel intimidated.

To judge by her statement, however, it's pretty obvious she does feel intimidated. Which is not surprising. I'd bet most of us would feel intimidated if paid a visit by the Secret Service.

Question: Was what happened to Annie J. just a fluke? A friend of mine with a law degree, who regularly writes about the machinations of the U.S. government, says he's not surprised by what happened to her. It's not usual for citizens to be investigated by the FBI or the Secret Service, but it's not that uncommon.

Other questions: In the wake of the election, will a Justice Department led by Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft be freshly emboldened by the religious-right Moral Majority mandate of 59 million voters? Will FBI or Secret Service visits become all too common? Will friendly agent drop-ins become usual? Will denunciations become the norm? Is it paranoid to ask?

Lastly, as a point of information: Annie J. uses the terms "FBI" and "Secret Service" interchangeably, which gives the wrong impression. They are not one and the same. The FBI is the investigative arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, charged with various law-enforcement duties. It's top priority once was to investigate crime. Now it's to protect the U.S. from terrorist attack. The Secret Service is a branch of the U.S. Treasury Department, charged with protecting the president and the vice president.

Now that 11 states have voted by overwhelming margins for amendments to their state consitutions to ban gay marriage -- Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Montana, Utah, Ohio, Michigan and Oregon -- lending huge support to seven other states that already define marriage as exclusively heterosexual, will we soon be seeing "no-go zones" for gays?

If you think that's far fetched, think about how far the lunatic fringe, now the right-wing majority, has come -- and how far it believes its mandate from the election goes. For one thing, efforts to institute a federal ban may be on the not too distant horizon. "With five new Republican senators elected Tuesday, opponents of same-sex marriage maintain, an amendment to the U.S. Constitution could be introduced and conceivably passed as soon as the next congressional session," Elizabeth Mehren reports.

(Image by Mort Subiet.)

"Now comes the revolution," the influential, far-right conservative Richard Viguerie tells reporter David D. Kirkpatrick. "If you don't implement a conservative agenda now, when do you?" Viguerie, he reports, wrote in a memorandum to conservative leaders: "Make no mistake -- conservative Christians and 'values voters' won this election for George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress. It's crucial that the Republican leadership not forget this -- as much as some will try."

Kirkpatrick reports that Christian conservatives -- who, don't forget, turned the election into a rout in the popular vote for the Ignoramus in Chief -- believe the nation is "on the verge of self-destruction" because it lacks traditional family values, according to James C. Dobson, an evangelical Christian who founded Focus on the Family. With the election of the Ignoramus to a second term, "God has given us a reprieve," Dobson says. "But I believe it is a short reprieve."

Think about this: These right-wing Christian conservatives believe they have just four years to ban gay marriage, stop abortion and embryonic stem-cell research, and, above all, give the U.S. Supreme Court a complete makeover so as to overturn Roe v. Wade.

If they succeed, how far fetched would it be to see no-go zones not only for gays, but for embryonic stem-cell researchers, scientists who believe or, worse, preach evolution, and for women seeking abortions. (Hell, the lunatic fringe even hopes to pass one measure called the "Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act," which, Kirkpatrick reports, would require "some women seeking abortions to be offered anesthesia for their fetuses.")

(Image by Mort Subiet.)

Now think about this: Jews were almost the only religious group that did not vote for the Ignoramus in Chief. They favored Kerry by roughly 75 percent. But they are just three percent of the electorate (like gays, a tiny minority). Will we be seeing constitutional amendments to ban interfaith marriages to Jews, maybe even marriage between Jews? It wasn't so long ago that marriage between enslaved African-Americans was banned. How about no-go zones for Jews? (But Christian evangelicals support the Jewish state of Israel, you say. Well, how about deporting the Jews to where they belong?)

We were deluded by polls that said a majority of American voters believed the Ignoramus had mismanaged both the war in Iraq and the U.S. economy. The polls deluded us into thinking the election would be decided on the moral issues of lying to the American people about weapons of mass destruction; torturing U.S.-held prisoners; the deaths of more than 1,100 American soldiers, and nearly 10,000 wounded; the uncounted deaths of Iraqi civilians, perhaps 100,000 according to a recent report; social issues involving morality such as poverty, the increasing divide between rich and poor, tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, privatizing Social Security.

In the real world, when polls show high disapproval ratings for a sitting president -- as they did just before the election -- they would indicate a brewing defeat for him. But this is America, which seems to be living in a dream world. Are we in shit too deep to climb out? I recall asking, Will voters suddenly wake up on election day and make the right decision? Now we know.

A majority of American voters stuck its head up its ass yesterday and, by 58,154,413 to 54,616,818 (with 99 percent of all votes in), proved daredevil columnist Jimmy Breslin wrong, to say nothing of daredevil pollster John Zogby. Unless things change in Ohio, when the final final count is tallied, or some other miracle occurs, the Ignoramus in Chief and Bunker Boy will remain in power with their thuggish minions, and the American electorate will have only itself to blame for endorsing the failed policies of the Republican junta's last four years and failing to appreciate what's to come. To top that off, NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw spoke this morning (as he had all night) from cutesily named "Democracy Plaza" (the gag-making moniker for NBC's Rockefeller Center location), remarking especially on the "infinite wisdom" of the American people. Oh please.

The bookies are still giving shorter odds on Bush, which means bettors continue to favor the Ignoramus. But Kerry backers are closing the gap. There may be evidence that crowd wisdom under the right circumstances is smarter than the smartest, best-informed expert. But every time a long shot wins at the racetrack, there's evidence to the contrary. My bet's on Kerry, and I'm heading out to vote -- like the rest of you, I hope.

Postscript: Jimmy Breslin, going naked, wrote a great fucking column today. It's also his last.

It's two-hour-old news by now, but here it is anyway: John Kerry will be the next president of the United States, according to daredevil pollster John Zogby. He had it right the last time when everybody else had it wrong, and now he predicts Kerry will beat Bush in the Electoral College, 311 to 213 (with 14 other votes "too close to call," none of which would change the outcome). Fabulous, ain't it!

Coming from Zogby that news may not be as suprising as it sounds. Six months ago, back in May, Zogby wrote: "I have made a career of taking bungee jumps in my election calls. Sometimes I haven't had a helmet and I have gotten a little scratched. But here is my jump for 2004: John Kerry will win the election." Muddying today's prediction, however, get this: Zogy also predicts Bush will win the popular vote 49.4% to Kerry's 49.1%. Uh-oh.

Voting was a snap in my election district. So I'm back earlier than I expected, and happy to see a joke called "The Balloonist" about Republicans and Democrats, which is making the email rounds. It's being attributed to Garrison Keillor.

The attribution could well be apocryphal. (Remember Kurt Vonnegut's bogus commencement address at MIT a few years ago? Here's the story behind that.) But I can see the Keillor connection because whoever wrote the joke has improved upon a version of it submitted four years ago to "A Prairie Home Companion's" Fifth Annual Joke Show (scroll down) by Rick Higgs, of New Palestine, Indiana.

Here's the joke ascribed to Keillor:

The Balloonist

A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost. She lowered her altitude and spotted a man in a boat below. She shouted to him, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The man consulted his portable GPS and replied, "You're in a hot air balloon approximately 30 feet above a ground elevation of 346 feet above sea level. You are 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude."

She rolled her eyes and said, "You must be a Democrat."

"I am," replied the man. "How did you know?"

"Well," answered the balloonist, "Everything you told me is technically correct but I have no idea what to make of your information and I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help to me."

The man smiled and responded, "You must be a Republican."

"I am," replied the balloonist. "How did you know?"

"Well," said the man, "you don't know where you are or where you're going. You've risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise that you have no idea how to keep and you expect me to solve your problem. You're in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but somehow, now it's my fault."

Exactly. And perfect for this Election Day. Meantime, here's another commentary whose attribution I can vouch for:

GOP WISHLIST

Overnight reviews are back, in case you hadn't noticed, at The New York Times. The first one in years -- an opera review by Anthony Tommasini, of "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" -- appeared this morning in the Metro section on page B2. (Online it's listed in the Arts section.) Overnight notices used to be the custom for ink-stained critics. I recall pushing midnight deadlines on theater reviews for the morning edition at the Chicago Sun-Times. Not all NY Times reviews will be overnights, according to classical music editor James R. Oestreich, only those deemed practical and/or appropriate because of an event's importance. He told a conference of music critics at Columbia University several weeks ago that the move is part of the paper's effort to give its arts coverage more zing.

Postscript: Here's an update on those overnights.

Please note: The odds that bookmakers are giving on the presidential election are subject to change. Some, as given here on Sunday, already have changed (though not by much). These are the latest betting lines.

Has free speech in America come to this? The 2003 Nobel Peace Prize laureate cannot publish her memoirs in this country because of a U.S. trade embargo regulation "intended to punish repressive governments such as the regime in Tehran that once sent her to jail," The Wall Street Journal reports this morning.

The irony is mind-boggling. WSJ reporter Jess Bravin writes, "When Shirin Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, President Bush congratulated the Iranian lawyer and children's advocate for 'her lifetime championing human rights and democracy.'" Yet "when Ms. Ebadi sought to publish her memoirs in the U.S., she was startled to discover that doing so would be illegal. ..."

So last week Ebadi's American literary agency sued the U.S. Treasury Department, which enforces the embargo regulation, for ignoring "congressional directives to exempt information and creative works from the trade sanctions, and more broadly violat[ing] the First Amendment rights of Americans to read what they wish."

Ebadi contends in an affidavit that the restrictions "seem to defy the values the United States promotes throughout the world, which always include free expression and the free exchange of ideas." Seem to? That's being charitable.

And here's another peculiar irony. "The way the Treasury Department interprets the trade embargo," Bravin writes, "Ms. Ebadi would have been free to publish a translation of her book in the U.S. had it originally been issued in Iran."

If this were a movie pitch, it would be Shirin Ebadi meets Franz Kafka in "Amerika," a claustrophobic land where, as one reviewer put it, the Statue of Liberty holds "the sword in her hand instead of the torch -- a symbol of war and violence instead of freedom and enlightenment."

When it comes to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, the editorial page of The New York Times has been especially strong in condemning the White House and the Pentagon. My take was that "nobody has said it better." Well, maybe somebody has: Intel Dump blogger Phillip Carter.

Carter writes in a review of Seymour Hersh's "Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib" for the November issue of Washington Monthly (also posted on Intel Dump):

The devastating scandal of Abu Ghraib wasn't a failure of implementation, as Rice and other administration defenders have admitted. It was a direct -- and predictable -- consequence of a policy, hatched at the highest levels of the administration, by senior White House officials and lawyers, in the weeks and months after 9/11. Yet the administration has largely managed to escape responsibility for those decisions; ... almost no one in the press or the political class is talking about what is, without question, the worst scandal to emerge from President Bush's nearly four years in office.

The Straight Up reader who pointed out Carter's review notes: "The last paragraph, in particular the last two sentences, makes a very important point that seems to have been unmentioned in nearly everything else I have seen." To wit:

[T]here's a reason why most of the investigations into Abu Ghraib have punted on the essential question of executive responsibility. To judge the administration's decisions to have been wrong, after all, requires us to discern what the right decisions would have been. And to do that, we must put ourselves in their shoes. Given the particular conditions faced by the president and his deputies after 9/11 -- a war against terrorists, in which the need to extract intelligence via interrogations was intensely pressing, but the limits placed by international law on interrogation techniques were very constricting -- did those leaders have better alternatives than the one they chose? The answer is that they did. And we will be living with the consequences of the choices they made for years to come.

A key question for American voters to decide on Nov. 2, therefore, is whether to hold the Ignoramus in Chief and his cronies accountable and, by turning them out of office, elect a president who will choose the better alternatives from here on in. If the W. gang is returned to office, voters will have condoned willful bad judgment, moral myopia and deliberate deception -- and they will have only themselves to blame when the nation's reputation, already dragged through the mud, sinks still lower.

Postscript: This could be the weirdest thing you ever read about Abu Ghraib.