(Display Name not set)December 2004 Archives

Rummy Boy in Iraq, speaking to the troops: "We're on the side of freedom. You're on the side of freedom. And that's the side to be on." Golly gee willikers.

I should have said, "Back in '05, if not sooner." Sooner because I wanted to link to the video of all 50-plus minutes of Bill Moyers's keynote speech to the National Conference on Media Reform. It was posted on the Web this morning by Democracy Now!, the best daily TV-radio-Internet news broadcast we've got.

A video of roughly half the speech, which Moyers gave a year ago (Nov. 18, 2003), was posted last spring by Democracy Now!, but it's worth hearing every last word of what he had to say. You can also read the transcript. (It includes policy recommendations he decided to skip in his speech.) If you prefer a summary, here's mine.

Moyers's eloquence was tasty stuff:

In earlier times our governing bodies tried to squelch journalistic freedom with the blunt instruments of the law: padlocks for the presses and jail cells for outspoken editors and writers. Over time, with spectacular wartime exceptions, the courts and the Constitution struck those weapons out of their hands. But they've found new ones now, in the name of "national security." ...

Never has there been an administration so disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep in keeping information from the people at large and -- in defiance of the Constitution -- from their representatives in Congress. Never has so powerful a media oligopoly -- the word is Barry Diller's, not mine -- been so unabashed in reaching like Caesar for still more wealth and power. Never have hand and glove fitted together so comfortably to manipulate free political debate, sow contempt for the idea of government itself, and trivialize the people's need to know.

One other thing. When Moyers retired from broadcast journalism, appearing eight days ago for the last time on his weekly PBS program "Now," he said it would continue with David Brancaccio as host. And it will. But "without Moyers's influence at PBS," I was concerned that "you have to wonder how long the show will last." Well, the signs are already lousy. "Now" will be cut down from 60 minutes to 30 minutes, Amy Goodman reports.

Gone ice-fishing. Best wishes for the New Year. Back in '05.

Reflecting on last week's farewell to Bill Moyers, a reader let me know what he thought. Larry Lippman writes:

Hey Jan, I can understand (sometimes) that in the battle of ideas, well-meaning and even bright people can have a different idea of what ought to be. But adulation for the sanctimonious, sans clerical collar Bill Moyers is a little over the top. Your bullshit detector needs some fine tuning.

It's good to hear from people like Larry the Lip. One thing it tells me is I'm not just preaching to the choir. But the truth is another reader, Bill Osborne, made a lot more sense reflecting on Moyers via George Orwell:

If people would read books like William Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," they would learn something about the conflagrations that can be created when the mass media is used to exploit hatred and fear. These social forces, when propagated through the mass media, can quickly become virulent and swallow up all voices of reason.

This is not something particular to Hitler, or Germans, or communists, or class hatred, or fanatical religious groups. It is the nature of mass communication, which has an inherent potential to conflate hatred and fear and set in motion self-reinforcing cycles that unify people in madness.

Radio was only a few years old by the time Hitler and Goebbels discovered this social phenomenon. They quickly saw that media-enhanced hatred could be channeled to gain and consolidate political power. The neocons have learned this, and now all reason is being destroyed.

The equal time laws in America served as a safety valve to check the media's susceptibility to virulent hatred. We usually took time to consider the other voice. People will someday realize that when Reagan eliminated the equal time laws, he caused grave damage to our country. Once the media begins to make hatred a standard mode of operation, there is almost no way of turning back. Our only hope would be to return to the equal time laws, but that is obviously not going to happen.

We are now at the point where millions cannot live without Limbaugh. Part of the reason the media has these susceptibilities is that hatred and fear are not only virulent, they are addictive. I do not think the neocons fully understand the darkly inexorable forces they have set in motion. I think the day will come when we finally realize something has to be done. Our success in returning to a wiser path will be a test of the American character.

Can there be any doubt that Larry the Lip would disagree?

Guess who's joined the conservationists fighting to preserve the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Robert Kennedy was gunned down. According to Preservation Online, it's none other than Sirhan Shirhan. In a lawsuit to keep the structure from being demolished to make way for a school, he claims that evidence lodged in the hotel walls shows Kennedy was killed by bullets from more than one gun. Sirhan Sirhan, you may recall, is serving a life sentence for shooting Kennedy to death in the hotel's pantry in 1968. Before the assassination, the Ambassador was most famous for its nightclub, the Cocoanut Grove, which became an iconic celebrity hangout where the Academy Awards were held during Hollywood's so-called Golden Age of the '30s and '40s.

Talking the other day about Orwell's portrait of the future, I should have mentioned that it's not only hatred and fear which serve as the twin engines of misrule. It's also love and worship.

As Orwell's doomed hero Winston Smith learns to his everlasting degradation, it is so important in the scheme of things to love, worship and adore Big Brother, the all-powerful, all-seeing ruler of Oceania, that those who don't are not just arrested; they are brainwashed -- must be brainwashed -- to love him even if they're to be executed immediately afterward.

Here's the sad last paragraph of "1984":

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustrache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

If the day ever comes when I've learned to love Little Brother I'll take it as a sign that I, too, have lost my mind. Did you see his press conference this morning? What self-serving baloney!

When 1984 came around smack in the middle of the rose-tinted Reagan era, many in the commentariat had a field day noting that George Orwell, for all his genius, had overstated his case. The future he'd warned of in "1984" simply hadn't come to pass.

Yeah, right. Thinking of Bill Moyers this morning, it occurred to me that the subversive heresies of Big Brother's chief enemy, Emmanuel Goldstein, are worth quoting. They come from Goldstein's historical treatise, "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism," which is embedded in Orwell's novel and is smuggled to its doomed hero Winston Smith, who reads it avidly.

Goldstein's first chapter begins:

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude toward one another, have varied from age to age, but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.

Goldstein goes on to point out that the "aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable":

The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim -- for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives -- is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.

Orwell's pessimism, expressed through Goldstein, is inescapable. It is Goldstein who writes that "no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer." But there can be no question that it is Orwell who's speaking.

And here we come to a passage in Goldstein's treatise that might as well have been addressed to those of us who've lived long past 1984 into the 21st century:

The heirs of the French, English, and American revolutions had partly believed in their own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the like, and had even allowed their conduct to be influenced by them to some extent. But by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable. Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation. And in the general hardening of outlook that set in round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years -- imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages and the deportation of whole populations -- not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened liberals.

OK, so Goldstein doesn't actually exist. He's a fiction created by the oligarchy (the High caste of the Inner Party that rules in the name of Big Brother). He's an enemy of the people, a strawman to divert attention from the failures of the oligarchy, a way to focus patriotic hatred, just as Big Brother himself is a fiction created by the oligarchy to instill fear.

These many years later in the midst of the neocon era -- when the twin engines of misrule are also hatred and fear -- I'd say Orwell's portrait of the future rings even truer than it did 20 years ago.

Bob Herbert took the words right out of my mouth this morning.

The departure of Bill Moyers from "Now" -- tonight will be his last broadcast -- is a huge loss for mainstream television journalism and the nation. His views on truth and journalism, as noted in June, are more striking than ever:

In earlier times our governing bodies tried to squelch journalistic freedom with the blunt instruments of the law: padlocks for the presses and jail cells for outspoken editors and writers. Over time, with spectacular wartime exceptions, the courts and the Constitution struck those weapons out of their hands. But they've found new ones now, in the name of "national security."

His warnings that the TV news networks "have raced to the bottom" are so familiar by now that they've become a commonplace. But Moyers takes the point further, which is typical of him, by pointing out that we must "nurture the spirit of independent journalism in this country, or we'll not save capitalism from its own excesses, and we'll not save democracy from its own inertia."

The good news is that "Now" will continue with David Brancaccio taking charge. Brancaccio is excellent and has terrific accomplishments. But without Moyers's influence at PBS, you have to wonder how long the show will last.

Surprise! Surprise! The latest news from the Center for Media Research: Biddys and Geezers Drive Internet Growth

Six weeks after The Wall Street Journal reported that Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi had sued the U.S. Treasury Department for denying her right to free speech by ruling that she could not publish her memoir in this country, the government has backed off. It has now dropped restrictions on writers from Cuba, Iran and Sudan publishing original works in the U.S., the WSJ reported today.

If proof were needed that the Los Angeles Times is still covering its ass when it comes to Gary Webb, the investigative reporter who was found dead on Dec. 10 (an apparent suicide), the paper provided it Sunday with an obituary that is nothing less than character assassination. It's a bloody hatchet job on Webb and, equally important, a factual distortion of his revelatory 1996 series about Contra-related drug trafficking in Los Angeles during the '80s.

Why the Times has continued its willful campaign against Webb and his series is open to speculation. Is it because it is still ashamed that an outsider from a smaller California newspaper uncovered a national scandal with local L.A. track marks, which the Times itself should have been brave and smart enough to uncover on its own turf? Is it because it is still ashamed that, having been scooped at the time, it then went to extraordinary lengths to debunk the series, ostensibly to learn the truth but actually to re-assert its status as California's most informative daily?

If those are the institutional motives -- and not just the plain stupidity of individual editors and writers -- it has dangerous implications for the fourth estate, calling to mind the worst case Orwellian scenario of "1984," in which Big Brother's legion of scribes are employed in the Ministry of Truth, where they spend their lives "rewriting the past." And why are they bothering to rewrite the past? Because, as the Inner Party knows so well, rewriting the past (along with unending war) is the chief means of controlling the future.

The infamous slogans of the Inner Party, etched in elegant lettering on the white facade of the Ministry of Truth,

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

are no more far-fetched today than they were during the onset of the Cold War, when Orwell wrote his cautionary novel. Though he took the Communist Party as the model for the Inner Party and was extrapolating from the Soviet Union for the totalitarian society of Oceania, Orwell might, if he were around today, find the current U.S. situation too close for comfort.

The war on terror (which we've been told has no forseeable end) is eerily reminiscent of Oceania's endless war against Eurasia or Eastasia (the enemy keeps changing). The Patriot Act (which threatens civil liberties while designed to protect us), the invasion of Iraq (which we are now told is intended to liberate its people, bringing democracy at the point of a gun), the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and other detention camps (which was rationalized as legal in White House and Pentagon memoranda) the closed circle of neocon advisers to the Ignoramus in Chief who never made a mistake (which he believes was confirmed by the recent election), all have parallels in Oceania.

I believe, or would like to think, that Gary Webb's obituary in the Los Angeles Times is a matter of short-sighted individuals and not institutional motives. Either way, it's inexcusable. As my friend Bill Osborne writes:

Notice there is no mention whatsoever in the obit that the investigation of the CIA's General Inspector corroborated the main themes of Webb's reports: The CIA knew that people closely tied to the Contras were selling drugs in the United States to fund their war in Nicaragua, and that the CIA hindered police investigations into the operation. This is not some sort of conspiracy theory, but the findings of our own government's investigation.

The obit also does not mention that this Contra-related drug operation established the first large crack market in the U.S., and that it was centered in South-Central Los Angeles. Nor do they mention Webb's very plausible hypothesis that this contributed to an extremely destructive chain reaction that strongly damaged black communities throughout the country during the 1980s and early '90s.

Osborne also speculates:

If the truth of the government's corroboratory investigation of Contra drug-running had been squarely reported at the time, it would probably have eventually led to major reforms in our government that would have very likely put the neocons out of power. This suggests that the mainstream media might have, at least in part, been politically motivated to overlook the story. Apparently, it still is.

In any case, these events illustrate failures in the press that need to be thoroughly researched and analyzed. The recent press failures regarding the build up to the invasion of Iraq are another example pointing to a continuing problem.

There are probably many levels to the situation that involve the psychology, sociology and ethics of journalism as shaped (and even coerced) by a very complex governmental, economic and social context. Taken together, these factors seem to create a systemic problem in American journalism. The explanations might not be simple, but they could probably be established. This would help lead to remedies.

Sadly, the truth about the Contras will probably not be widely reported until the vested interests of those in power, both on the left and right, and in the government and the media, no longer remain.

"In the meantime," he asks, "what are we to do?"

Postscript: I see, courtesy of Jim Romenesko, that Marc Cooper also rips into the Times and does it better. And here's more on the Webb takedown from David Corn.

"Just one more example," a friend writes, "of why I have so little respect for American journalism. Much of the work done does not even deserve the name of journalism. But the real blame rests on the American public. It gets the government and journalism it deserves." Here's what he's talking about:

In 1996, journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of articles that forced a long-overdue investigation of a very dark chapter of recent U.S. foreign policy -- the Reagan-Bush administration's protection of cocaine traffickers who operated under the cover of the Nicaraguan contra war in the 1980s.

For his brave reporting at the San Jose Mercury News, Webb paid a high price. He was attacked by journalistic colleagues at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the American Journalism Review and even the Nation magazine. Under this media pressure, his editor Jerry Ceppos sold out the story and demoted Webb, causing him to quit the Mercury News. Even Webb's marriage broke up.

On Friday, Dec. 10, Gary Webb, 49, died of an apparent suicide, a gunshot wound to the head.

That's just the beginning of what Robert Parry had to say yesterday. Go read the complete story. Then get hold of "Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth,'" his 1999 book on the Iran-Contra scandal and how the mainstream media "throughly kept [the American public] in the dark about the unsavory secrets of the past half century."

Satellite radio has buzz, with Howard Stern, Eminem, Maxim magazine signed to host shows for big bucks, and now moviemeister Robert Evans signing up. But the great radio medium is already here. It's on the Web, and it's not part of any commercial hype.

For instance, Alternative Radio lets you to hear Arunditi Roy speaking about "Public Power in the Age of Empire," or giving an interview entitled "Seize the Time," or Bill Moyers on "Journalism & Democracy," or John Sayles on his latest film, or Howard Zinn on "Resistance & the Role of Artists." And fellow ArtsJournal blogger Kyle Gann's Postclassic Radio" offers the latest in contemporary serious music that you'd never hear anywhere else.

I mention all of that by way of introducing Doug Gordon's terrific new program "New Audio Showroom" on Wisconsin Public Radio, which is available on the Web. There have only been three broadcasts so far, and the title is not the greatest. (It sounds like an auto dealership.) But I'm hoping the show becomes a mainstay.

Gordon is a longtime radio producer who has great taste in pop culture. It's a gas listening to Monty Python's Eric Idle sing "That's Death" à la Sinatra's "That's Life" in his interview with Gordon on the first broadcast, "The Rumpus Room" (scroll down and click to listen); or hear Idle singing the lyrics of another song:

Always look on the bright side of death
Just before you draw your terminal breath

Idle does a great little sketch about his dead mother à la Joe Orton, and Gordon gets him talking about mockumentaries, a genre he believes he originated, and about his upcoming Broadway musical, "Spamalot."

The hour-long show also includes an exquisite film chat by drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs, whose latest book, "Profoundly Disturbing," features 15 essays on flicks "your momma didn't want ya to see." What makes them disturbing, Briggs says, is "they're movies that went farther than movies before them. Bottom line, they rearrange our view of what constitutes normal or acceptable."

Examples? The first slasher-gore film. "'Blood Feast' -- definitely not acceptable in 1953," Briggs says. He includes "And God Created Woman," because "Brigitte Bardot was not accceptable in 1956" and the film "changed women." The gore film "changed punk bands." Profoundly disturbing films "work on the culture in different ways," he says. "Some of 'em bubble up from the underground and some of them have a direct effect on the way we talk, dress and act."

Speaking about "Crash," the 1996 flick directed by David Cronenberg, Briggs claims it's the first sex movie that avoids gratuitous sex. In other words, it has a lot of necessary sex. Here's part of the interview:

'Crash' is very disturbing. It disturbs me. Even people who like it find it really hard to deal with. It's about a world in which people have been so drained of emotion and ability to feel that the only way they can feel is through mutilation carried to the extreme -- and in this case, car crashes. Now it sounds like a silly idea when you first hear it. And, in fact, it was treated like a silly idea by most of the critics who reviewed it.

It's based on a novel by J.G. Ballard, but what [Cronenberg] has done is he's filmed it so pristinely and so coldly and directly that it's trancelike, It really pulls you in. ... What's interesting to me is that critics forever have been saying, "Well, you can always just take the sex scenes out of a movie and the movie's still there. Sex is always gratutitous." ... David Cronenberg makes a movie in which almost every scene is a sex scene, and if you remove any of the sex scenes you lose the whole thread of the movie. Every sex scene is integral to the plot. It's integral to telling the story. ...

The movie starts with three sex scenes, one after another. Hardly any dialogue. And when the public first watched it they were sort of, like, disoriented. What's going on here? When is the movie going to start? Well, the movie had started. You were learning a lot about these characters from the way they have sex. Now he didn't get any credit for this. He had made the first sex movie without any gratuitous sex in it. In fact, he was vilified for this movie.

The second broadcast, "This Canadian Existence" (scroll down and click to listen), has Canadian author Sara Vowell talking about "Cowboys vs. Mounties," Kyle McCulloch on his job writing for "South Park," comedian Dave Thomas on the SCTV characters he created (Bob and Doug McKenzie) and others discussing what it means to be a Canadian, or how it feels to live there as an American expatriate.

The third broadcast, "Audio Mavericks" (scroll down etc.), profiles "people who have discovered innovative ways to use sound, whether it's music, spoken word, ambient noise, or perhaps even the sounds of silence." They range from John Linnell and John Flansburgh of the alt-rock duo They Might Be Giants discussing their "Dial-A-Song" phone service to Steve Nieve on "music he has made with, and without, Elvis Costello."

Forget working today, listen at your desk and make believe you're furiously trying to out-produce your neighbor in the next cubicle. Before you know it, the boss will come over and pat you on the head to thank you for doing such a great job.

Have a look at "Slow-Rolling Democracy in Ohio" by Robert Parry, who broke many Iran-Contra stories for AP and Newsweek. He writes: "George W. Bush's political allies appear to be slow-rolling a requested recount in Ohio, leaving so little time that even if widespread voting fraud is discovered, the finding will come too late to derail Bush's second term." Parry also has a new book out, "Secrecy & Privilege" about the rise of the Bush dynasty since Watergate.

The (London) Guardian reports that "Pride and Prejudice," Jane Austen's "salty-tongued commentary on the plight of women in the 19th century, perhaps best known today for providing Colin Firth with the opportunity to pose in a wet shirt in front of many grateful viewers," has won the Women's Watershed Fiction poll.

Although Austen's novel was published in 1813, it struck the 14,000 voters who were polled (93 percent women), according to the Guardian, as the one that either spoke most personally to them, or changed the way they looked at themselves, or simply made them happy to be women.

But author-journalist Julie Birchill doubted the value of the poll: "I think if people had been hooked up to lie detectors the winner would have been Jackie Collins." The runner-up was Lee Harper's "To Kill a Mockingbird," followed by Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre," Marilyn French's "The Women's Room" and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale."

Burchill, who has written eight books including a biography of Princess Diana, dismissed the choice of all five novels. She was especially scathing about the contemporary relevance of "Pride and Prejudice," noting that "if Jane Austen heard women today talking about clitorises she'd faint."

Couldn't help noticing that PC has reached a new height. A New York City councilman is demanding an apology from the mayor for his aide's use of the term "drunken sailor," because it denigrates the men and women in the Navy.

After the aide accused the council of "spending money like a drunken sailor" earlier this week, the councilman issued a press release claiming that the "slur against sailors" was "unacceptable" -- especially because it occurred on Dec. 7, Pearl Harbor day.

The mayor wisely refused to apologize. He pointed out that when describing the council's spending "drunken sailor is about as nice a ways as you can phrase it."

Today, the same day that kerfluffel was reported in The New York Times, the paper's pop music critic Kelefa Sanneh called Jesus a Jewish "birthday boy" in his review of Clay Aiken's Christmas concert at the Theater in Madison Square Garden.

Sanneh writes that since the concert coincided with "the third night of Hanukkah, Mr. Aiken turned his second act into a celebration of Jews. Well, one Jew: Jesus. Whereas other seasonal gatherings evoked a secular or multifaith 'holiday spirit,' Mr. Aiken's concert was one party where the birthday boy got all the attention."

Will PC Christians and Jews demand an apology from Sanneh for his insouciant treatment of -- pick one, a) the son of God or b) the guy who was not the messiah -- and will the editors of the Times be excoriated for their insensitivity? And if he gets wind of this before his departure, what will Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent have to say?

Postscript: "Following up on your PC Christianity," a reader writes, "if Dan Brown is on to something and Jesus did marry Mary Magdalene, does that make her the daughter-in-law of God? If so, Mrs. Christ deserves her due. Renaming St. Patrick's Cathedral in her honor would be a healthy start, or a casino in Sin City. Maybe Caesars Palace on the Las Vegas strip?"

Remember the name Pablo Paredes. He's an enlisted sailor who has protested the war in Iraq by refusing to board his ship for deployment to the Persian Gulf. More than anyone so far, Paredes recalls the Vietnam war resisters.

He showed up four days ago on the naval pier in San Diego where the USS Bonhomme Richard, which ferries Marines to Iraq as part of the Expeditionary Strike Group 5, was about to depart. According to a local NBC report and others, instead of his uniform, he wore a T-shirt that said Like A Cabinet Member (on the front) I Resign (on the back) and waited to be arrested.

"I'd rather do a year in a prison in the military than do six months of dirty work for a war I don't believe in -- and not many people believe in -- and get Marines in harm's way," Paredes, 23, told NBC's local San Diego reporter. Paredes was berated by other sailors but was not detained. He believes the Navy did not want to be seen arresting him on camera. Paredes had notified reporters of his protest, and he is continuing to speak out as publicly as possible.

This morning he was interviewed from an undisclosed location by Democracy Now! Contrary to its description of him, however, Paredes said he is not a deserter or a fugitive in hiding -- he said he is categorized as "U.A.," the military term for unauthorized absence -- and expects to turn himself in.

In the interview, Paredes emphasized that his protest is "based on principle" and is "not a decision based on personal fear" for his own safety. He explained that his job as an electronics technician for the ship's defensive missile system was not dangerous and would not be even if he'd gone to the Persian Gulf.

Paredes said he simply did not want to be part of the military "muscle" serving an "ideology that is not promoting peace." He said he understood that the war in Afghanistan "made sense" as a response to 9/11. But, he added, "I don't understand why we are in Iraq."

Earlier Paredes told NBC's local reporter, "It's sad to me that some people don't understand what I'm doing, don't understand that this fight takes a lot more courage and that I'm fighting for the very people that they're putting in harm's way." He said he couldn't sleep at night knowing that he would be part of a mission to ferry thousands of Marines to Iraq and that hundreds would be killed.

Have a look at this morning's Paredes interview and see for yourself how brave this guy is to take on the Navy. I have no doubt that he'll be going to prison for his principles -- and I think neither does he. Paredes is made of sterner, finer stuff than most of us.

Now meet the elf overseer at Macy's world-famous store on 34th Street, where this former actor's job is "to promote the annual rite of good cheer." No matter that he used to play "monsters, murderers, even Dracula." Or that in his office eight floors above Santaland, where he leafs through "The Elfin Manual," he keeps "a scowling photo of himself" looking "like a cross between Charles Manson and Rasputin."

Which brings us to the truth of the season in verse:

REASON'S GREETING

Religious fervor's taking off,
And half the land's unstrung;
But superstition's nothing new --
This too shall pass, like dung.

-- Leon Freilich

A reader writes in re: yesterday's KERIK CONNECTION: "Bernard Kerik was named Iraq's interim interior minister through a misunderstanding. As a former NYC cop, he was an expert on hookers, not hookahs. Thus are insurgencies born." In re: HIGH COLONIC, he also writes: "Could an inside examination of Bush's presidency be considered a solonoscopy?" And lastly, in re: COLIN POWELL'S NEW RAP: "After a Colinoscopy that lasted four years, Bush has decided that Powell was nothing more than a pain in the ass."

Because Rev. Jerry Falwell invariably points 180 degrees in the wrong direction on any subject, whatever he says helps me set my compass. See, courtesy of Wonkette, The Biggest Decision of His Life, an interview that includes his typically flaky remarks (thoughts, if you like) about homosexuality.

It's worth catching Richard Clarke's entertaining speech to the New York Society for Ethical Culture, which he gave last night in an event co-sponosored by Pacifica Radio. The former counterterrorism chief under both Bill Clinton and Georgie Boy had some funny lines. "If the old Cabinet was a closed circle, this Cabinet," Clarke said, referring to Georgie's new nominees, "is an infinite dot."

When he got serious, Clarke recommended a slim book by various authors called "Defeating the Jihadists: A Blueprint for Action." You can buy it online (proceeds go to The Century Foundation, which just published it), or you can download it for free.

Also speaking last night was the freelance investigative reporter Greg Palast, who works for the BBC and who used to write a column for The Guardian in London (as one of George Orwell's successors). "There are kooks and crazies out there on the Internet who think Kerry won," he said, italicizing his remarks as in Oh my god! Palast is one of those maybe not-so-crazy kooks. And the reason, according to this self-described "mainstream guy," has to do with America's "apartheid ballot-counting system" in the last election.

Palast talks about the "spoiled" ballots in black communities in Ohio that were never counted as just the tip of the iceberg, a mere surface indication of Republican attempts to disenfranchise black voters through illegal manipulation and/or technical challenges. He said that after he and others brought this to light he received a letter from The New York Times asking if he was 1) "a conspiracy nut" and 2) "a sore loser."

I'm not sure whether Palast was serious when he mentioned the letter. But he was serious when he said the Times subsequently printed a story headlined "Internet Rumors ... Debunked." I recall that front-page piece. The online headline is "Vote Fraud Theories, Spread By Blogs, Are Quickly Buried." Here's the lede:

The e-mail messages and Web postings had all the twitchy cloak-and-dagger thrust of a Hollywood blockbuster. "Evidence mounts that the vote may have been hacked," trumpeted a headline on the Web site CommonDreams.org.

But the very untwitchy Palast emphasizes that the hacked votes in Ohio were not products of the high-tech "black boxes" vulnerable to hacking that everybody was suspcious of. The hacked votes were, in fact, the "spoiled" ballots produced by the lousy punchcard machines widely used in black voting districts, a distribution he believes was purposeful.

And it is these votes, Palast has written, "the uncounted ballots in Ohio -- more than a quarter million designated 'spoiled' or 'provisional' -- [that] undoubtedly contain[ed] enough votes to overturn George Bush's 'victory' margin of 136,000."

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell got down the other night in Washington D.C. -- or thought he did -- when he paid tribute to Warren Beatty at the Kennedy Center Honors with a rap that went like this:

I'm Colin Luther Powell.
Public service is my thing.
Don't do it for the fame.
Don't do it for the bling.

Harlem Globe Trottahs
Got nuthin' on me.
Been everywhere
That a brutha can be.

Been a soldier,
Brass stars on my shouldah,
Ran JCS an' NSC,
Hung it up, 'stablished a char-i-tee,

Came back into office as Secretar-ee.
And what comes aftah this
Y'all jes'
Hafta wait an' see.

Then, according to this report, he pounded his chest once and shouted to Beatty: "Representing, my bruthah!" Now we know why Colin Powell has had so little influence on foreign policy.

Why can't Rudy Giuliani's former chauffeur and body guard become U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security? Well, he can. Everyone says Bernie Kerik will be confirmed. But should he be? Ellis Henican has doubts. And so does Fred Kaplan. Both also made their case this morning on Democracy Now!

Give this man the Katie Couric prize.

The editorials are starting to dribble in. They don't address the irony of Georgie Boy's call for "a full and open" accounting of the U.N. $64-billion oil-for-food program in Iraq -- which would be a bagatelle, I suppose. But they do take up the issue as an attempt to mug the U.N. Philip Gourevitch calls it a "defensive assault" in The New Yorker, out this morning. Yesterday The New York Times called it part of a campaign of "ever-shriller attacks." Of course, Democracy Now! was out in front of them both on Friday. Still waiting for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times to weigh in.

A recent article about a conference on the current state of classical music criticism by John Fleming, the performing arts critic of the St. Petersburg Times, has really pissed off my composer friend William Osborne. What bugged him was a recurring theme of the conference, namely that so many critics seemed willing to accomodate pop junk in support of crossover music.

Fleming notes that "the next generation of classical music critics, if there is one, is probably listening to more rock than Bach." And he points to John Rockwell of The New York Times as "a pivotal figure in that respect, having been the paper's first staff rock critic in the '70s, then a classical music critic, roving cultural correspondent, editor and even an impresario, as founding director of the Lincoln Center Festival."

Osborne writes:

It is somewhat ridiculous that John Rockwell's ideas about crossover are so celebrated. Britney, Eminem, Madonna, Radio Head, etc. are now the key to our future -- or so we are told, time and time again. I'll bet Sony, RCA, Bertlesman, EMI, Warner and Co. are all pleased. People seem to forget the critical analysis of the increasing corporatization of our culture. Let's just go to Wal-Mart and buy the high art from Hollywood and Disneyland. Those who suggest there might be something a bit zomboid in all that are just tired old leftists out of touch with the brave new world. Thanks, John.

In fairness to Rockwell, we should point out he "had some cautionary words about newspapers' increased emphasis on pop culture coverage, often at the expense of classical coverage," as Fleming also reports. And he quotes from Rockwell's prepared remarks at the conference that the "people who make those decisions, by and large, know little and care less about music (or films or television). They want news, because they were trained as reporters. And they want pop culture because they think it will lure younger readers. Which it may or may not do, since young readers usually want to think of themselves as out of the mainstream, and big-city newspapers are nothing if not mainstream."

Osborne continues:

Crossover is not even new. Before the baby-boomers, jazz was used for crossover, and it even had an official name: "Third Stream" music. Its champions ranged from Gershwin to Bernstein, and in its more academic vein, Gunther Schuller was the principle spokesperson. Schuller even had a fine ensemble in Boston largely devoted to the music of Scott Joplin. The crossover with popular music is just the continuation of an old American tradition, now in its baby-boomer manifestation, and yet Rockwell shouts from the soap box like it is some sort of new idea. This is an almost classic example of the pompously naive pandering of old hat that gives journalism a bad name.

In a prelude to the conference, ArtsJournal had a 10-day blogging debate, called Critical Conversation, which teemed with critics and readers who were just as nettled as Osborne, if not more so. Rockwell cited the blogging debate at the conference, noting that two ideas had kept it hopping. One, he said, was that "the real action in musical creativity was coming out of the worlds of pop and rock." The other was that "classical composition was kind of old news."

That's the stuff that drives Osborne up the wall:

Isn't it interesting how critics talk about the death of classical music and its criticism, and few if any of them compare the situation in the States with the lively cultural atmosphere in Europe created by its public funding. Instead they talk about new gimmicks for journalistic writing and new kinds of crossover. These are only the small genuflections at the end of the corporate tether. What ever happened to arts journalists really willing to take on the system?

Instead of my answer, here's a link to Osborne's own critical writings (which go a long way toward taking on the system). And here are more links to excerpts from his and Abbie Conant's "Cybeline," a multimedia mini-opera that uses the mass media and demonstrates, among other things, an entertaining sense of humor you might not expect from him:

"The Overture"

"Opera Singer Crushes Computer Geek"

"Industrially Mediated Realities"

"But Memory Is Everywhere"

For the complete "Cybeline" website, including "Cybeline's Vision" and "Number-Crunchin' Cowboy," previously posted as SONG OF THE WEEK, you can go here and scroll down.

Where are the editorials noting the irony of Georgie Boy's call for "a full and open" accounting of the U.N. $64-billion oil-for-food program in Iraq? He's never given a similar accounting of his own tainted $200-billion war for democracy in Iraq or any of the other questionable programs on his agenda.

Besides, if you watched Democracy Now! this morning, you would have learned that the United States itself -- as one of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (along with Britain, France, Russia and China) -- bears great responsibility in the first place for approving crooked contracts that allowed Saddam Hussein to reap billions of dollars in kickbacks.

So said Joy Gordon, a Fairfield University professor who is working on a book about the Iraq sanctions to be published by Harvard University Press. In fact, from 1994 on, the U.S. and Britain had all the information they needed about the corruption to know something was wrong, she said.

Therefore the scandal can't be laid only on the U.N. and Secretary-General Kofi Annan, a view also taken by Dennis Halliday, the former U.N. co-ordinator for humanitarian aid in Iraq.

Although she waited until today to say it, Alessandra Stanley is right:

However sad it was to see Mr. Brokaw leave on Wednesday night, it was sadder to watch NBC milk the transition for every drop of bathos and promotional padding. On "Today" and a special "Dateline" this week, the changing of the NBC news anchor was pumped up like the finale of "Friends."

Familiar words. See ANCHOR AWAY, CELEBRITY-STYLE, posted Wednesday.

David Thomson, reviewing "Just Enough Liebling" in the Dec. 13 issue of The Nation, makes a candid confession of the sort you rarely ever hear from a reviewer. "I am bound to admit," he writes, "that before this assignment I honored the name without knowing the books." But Thomson (biographer, film scholar, movie critic, essayist, and novelist) is nothing if not a quick study.

In "a few weeks" he became a Liebling connoiseur, "tracking down odd titles" and discovering a writer "who can hardly write a sentence without making you smile." Thomson proves his connoiseurship by distilling the essence of Liebling to this: "[T]he joke lies so often in the noble way splendid prose and wry stoicism have drawn a brief veil over all the ordinary forms of hell."

Clive James and James Wolcott combined would have a hard time beating that description. Then Thomson adds the pièce de résistance: "It is a sprightliness in the face of everyday horror that held Mark Twain together." Pardon a mixed metaphor (readers who know Liebling's devotion to food and boxing will forgive me), but that's dessert topped by a straight right to the chin.

A reader writes:

Chomsky has a point. [Scroll to the end of SWITCHING NEWS CHANNELS.] But the overarching reason the Bush brigade will steer clear of a draft is that it would incite college students to go to the streets, burn their draft cards and take up the Johnson-Nixon era chant, "Hell, no, we won't go." While students don't know half as much as they think they do, they're certainly onto a good thing in believing that victimhood needs to be resisted. A draft would swell immigration to Canada from the south and turn the White House into a beleaguered fortress. Again.

Now that Tom Brokaw is gone as NBC News anchor, his handsome successor Brian Edwards has already begun filling his shoes. "I feel the weight of history," Edwards said in an interview this morning on the network's "Today" show. It's that kind of baloney that's objectionable in him, not his handsomeness.

But the truth is that baloney is an occupational hazard for all the network news anchors, even ABC's Peter Jennings, who is the least pretentious among them.

So why not switch channels to the one daily news program that refuses to offer baloney from the anchor's chair? Why not try the morning broadcast of Democracy Now!, where Amy Goodman runs the show with co-host Juan Gonzalez? She's not just smart or a woman -- Hey, Ms. Dowd, get with it -- she and her cohorts have the best intro music of all the national news programs.

Yes, Democracy Now! may be seen every morning from 8 to 9 on local TV stations across the country and in Canada. Can't catch it at that hour? Then listen and/or watch it on the Web.

The program offers depth and perspective lacking on newscasts everywhere else. For instance, here's Noam Chomsky speaking about Yasser Arafat, Iraq and the draft. Chomsky offers the most cogent analysis you're likely to hear on television about what's going on in the Middle East and how it is distorted by the news media (led by The New York Times in presenting the official view of historic events).

He refers, for instance, to the forgotten fact that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat offered the same peace treaty to Israel in 1971 that was finally accepted in 1979, following the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and Sadat's 1977 visit to Jerusalem, and the equally important but conveniently overlooked U.S. objection to the settlement in the first place ("what Kissinger called stalemate in his memoirs").

"The U.S. refusal to accept a peaceful settlement in 1971 led to a terrible war, very dangerous" for Israel, including a nuclear alert, Chomsky points out, as well as "years of suffering and misery with effects that still are very much there. But it shows the advantages of owning history. You can kind of reshape it into your own -- to satisfy your own needs."

You don't get that kind of commentary on the nightly network news shows.

Chomsky also explains why we won't see a draft to put more soldiers in Iraq: The Army learned in Vietnam that draftees, as opposed to professional mercenaries, cannot be depended upon to fight unjust wars when they're long and hard. Once citizen soldiers discover they're fighting in a wrong cause, they lose their willingness to fight. They begin "fragging" their officers, and so on.

As casualties mount, moreover, the nation at large pays the price in blood for a draftee army, not just the narrower, more easily contained segment of the population represented by military families. We already see that happening with the unpopular call-up of the National Guard.

Postscript: Is the FBI watching you surf the Web? Check this.

George says the U.N. must come clean on the Iraq oil scandal. Hey, George, we're still waiting for you to come clean on a few scandals yourself. Let's see ... Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Halliburton, WMD, etc. How about the whole damned Iraq war scandal, George? Here's a deal: If Kofi tells all, you tell all. (Never happen.)

Maybe I was over-turkified. Still can't get a grip. Must be the tryptophan, or possibly the halo effect of Tom Brokaw's protracted departure. His celebrity-style leave-taking as NBC News anchor, so long-winded and self-important, has been milked to a fare-thee-well. The fact that he has gone along with it or worse, encouraged it, would make any right-minded citizen puke.

Postscript: Asked about replacing Dan Rather, who departs as CBS news anchor in March, network overseer Leslie Moonves said yesterday: "We may bring in the cast of 'Friends' to do the evening news. ... Anything's possible." It was, uhm, a joke.