Entries from August 2003 ↓

English is the best language on earth. And I don’t say that lightly. I’ve come to this conclusion after some pretty exhaustive research into all of the other 12 or 13 languages on the planet. I picked up the Basque edition of The Little Prince the other day, for example, and found it quite dull, far duller than the English version. It might have been a bit more exciting if I understood a single word of Basque, but the fact that those people insist on writing and speaking unintelligible gibberish isn’t my problem. It’s their problem.

And don’t even get me started on French. Is it just me, or do lots of words in French sound suspiciously similar to their English equivalents? Chaise and chair, chat and cat, perdu and Perdue, amour and armor, and lots more. Who do they think they’re kidding? I mean, I understand that it’s hard to come up with your own language, all that vocabulary and grammar and punctuation and stuff, but jeez, at least give some credit to the people you’re ripping off. Call it Frenglish, or something. And on those few occasions when the French try to make up their own words, they totally screw it up. You know what they call a swimming pool? A piscine. Yeah. Now, I don’t know about you, but if I came across a large body of water called a piscine, my first thought wouldn’t be: “Hey, that looks like a fun thing to jump into!” Right? Am I totally off base here?

Ok, so scratch Basque and French. German is cool, because no matter what you say it sounds like you want to kill the person you’re talking to and then rip off their arm and use it to bludgeon the rest of their family to death. But it’s too sticky. I mean the words stick together. Seriously, they merge words into bigger and bigger words. It’s like they can’t help themselves. I once saw a word in German that spanned three pages. I asked this German guy what it meant, but when he started telling me I thought he was going to kill me so I high-tailed it out of there. I looked it up the other day. It means swimming pool.

Basque, French, German … that’s about it, I think. No, wait! Belgian. Belgian is a funny language, because it’s waffle based. Really, it’s all variations on the word waffle. When a Belgian asks you where the bathroom is, he says: “Waffle waffloovira waffle waff? Le?” Seriously. I once spent a day in Belgium, for research, and I just went around saying “Waffle waffle waffle waffle”, and everybody thought they understood what I was talking about. Sometimes I’d make it sound like a question: “Waffle waffoolyara wa?” And sometimes I’d get all peremptory with it and shit: “Waffle wavorfivaffle!” I fit right in, it was totally cool. But still, it’s not much of a language.

Then there’s Australian. Nicole Kidman speaks Australian, I think, and Nicole Kidman is a total babe, so it’s got that going for it. Plus it sounds sort of like English, and that’s good too. The problem with Australian is that, in order to speak it correctly, you’ve got to pretend you’ve got a small rodent wedged way up in your mouth, somewhere near the back of your throat. Seriously. What the hell are those people saying? I went to see Crocodile Dundee for research the other day. First of all, that’s a bad movie. It’s not a good movie. Second of all, whenever “Crocodile” said anything, I couldn’t understand a god damn word. Every so often he’d mention shrimps and barbies, and he’d call everyone mate, that I understood. But beyond that, nada. Nothing. What kind of language is that? It’s no kind of language.

Ok, I think I’ve made my point. There are other languages out there, but I’m pretty sure they all suck. English rules, end of story. So if you’re reading this, but you can’t understand it because you don’t speak English, then learn English dude! It’s not that hard. Start with small words, like eat and prong and monster truck rally, and then work your way up to stuff like plinth and dromedary. In no time at all you’ll be telling all your friends about that cool camel statue you saw at the monster truck rally, and you’ll be doing it in English. Now wouldn’t that be cool? Yes. Yes, it would be.

We went down to the Howard Dean rally in Virginia today. It’s the first stop in his Sleepless Summer Tour, an ambitious, four-day, eight-city barnstorm across the country. Dean is suddenly big-time: he has money now, and name recognition, and he’s apparently determined to make it count.

The rally was held at Cherry Hill park, a nice little splash of green in the middle of a gently aging neighborhood in Falls Church. As soon as we got into the park, we were herded into a sort of corral, fenced in with metal barriers and yellow caution tape. There was a bank of cameras on a high platform at the back of the area, and a stage in front, with a rustic, photogenic barn in the background. Large speakers and spotlights on either side of the stage, and a reggae band strumming and wailing between them. We found a tiny open space, and sat down. It was a perfect day, blue skies, fluffy white clouds, cool breeze.

After the band finished their set, someone threw a beachball into the corral, and it bounced along the surface of the crowd, careening off of balled fists and open palms and unsuspecting heads like one of those little sing-along dots that used to guide the audience through song lyrics in old movies — except this one looked like it was trying to keep up with a Pixes tune mixed in with something by Marilyn Manson. Soon it was joined by another, much larger beachball, a striped galumphing boulder of a ball; and then by a third. We played three-ball-bounce for twenty minutes while we waited. Somehow, it was really a lot of fun.

Then the warm-up speakers arrived at the podium: a democratic party youth organizer, the mayor of Falls Church, a former English teacher, the superintendent of Virginia schools, and, finally, the mayor of Alexandria. Most of the speeches were merely competent, hitting all the expected notes at the expected times, and my mind sort of wandered, and my gaze with it. A guy in front of me was wearing a red t-shirt with the McDonald’s M inverted to look like a W — specifically, the W in George W Bush. It said: “George W Bush: One million rich guys served.” Another t-shirt exhorted its readers to impeach Bush. Off to my left, a little girl tugged at the hem of this guy’s shirt until he hoisted her onto his shoulders; her sister noticed, and then found her own guy to climb. An extremely pierced teenager in black everything stood near the front of the crowd, holding up her Dean for President placard and bellowing with each applause line. A black man off to my right, wearing one of those long drooping beret-looking knit hats, stood with his hands behind his back, staring ahead through aviator shades, motionless. He remained motionless throughout, an odd stillness in the midst of what was rapidly becoming a restless, kinetic, tumultous, exciting afternoon.

And then Dean stepped up to the podium, and the crowd went wild, as crowds will do from time to time. It was exhilarating, it really was. I’d seem him in photographs and on TV hundreds of times, of course, but it’s another thing entirely to see the man in the flesh. I clapped and shouted with the rest. Dean basked in our adulation for a little while, then thanked us and started talking.

The first thing he did was lay out the structure of his speech, and — I imagine — of his campaign. He’d tell us everything that Bush was doing wrong, he said, then explain why it was wrong in concrete terms, then offer alternatives. This is textbook, the classic recipe for an insurgent campaign. But the speech never got bogged down in boilerplate, or felt forced, or canned, or hackneyed. It was fresh, and surprising, and frequently inspired. It didn’t go through the paces so much as it hacked through the underbrush: it was the speech of a man with the same goals as his competitors, but bent on getting there the right way, which is also — almost by definition, these days — the hard way.

He started with the economy, because — let’s face it — that’s pretty low-hanging fruit. There was the depressing litany of statistics: the highest deficit this country has ever seen, less money for the states, high unemployment, the 3.1 trillion dollar tax cut largely-targeted at the richest among us, a budget that is so far in the red that it’ll soon shift out of the visible spectrum. He pointed out that no Republican president has balanced a budget in 35 years. “You just can’t trust those guys with money,” he said. “It’s always borrow and spend with them, borrow and spend.” I thought that was nice little rhetorical sleight of hand, taking the perennial criticism traditionally leveled at the democrats and turning it on its head.

He did a lot of that, actually. When he talked about defense, he pointed out that Bush had taken away a large chunk of veteran health care benefits, failed to adequately fund the port authority’s inspection of inbound containers, failed to provide money for homeland security to the states, and, in particular, New York. He went through all of the lies that Bush and his merry band told us to justify our entry into Iraq: the uranium, the ties to Al-Quaida, the nearly operational nuclear program, etc. And then he said this: “I supported the first war in Iraq, because Saddam Hussein invaded one of our allies, and it was our moral duty to do something about it. I supported the war in Afghanistan, because we had to go after Al-Quaida and the government that was sheltering them: they killed 3000 people on our soil, and would have killed many more, given the chance. If I’m elected president, I will not hesitate to use American forces to protect our national security. But I promise you this: I will never send our men and women to die on foreign soil without telling the American people the truth about why I’m doing it.”

Well, that was just breathtaking. Not only did it take Bush to task for systematically lying to us, it neatly countered what promises to be a strong line of Republican attack: Dean’s opposition to the war. And this is Dean’s secret weapon, I think: he’s talking like a fire-breathing liberal, now, but he’s much more moderate than he seems, and he’s got the record to prove it. This take on the war in Iraq is just one example of that.

There were lots of genuinely great moments in the speech. Whether he was scolding Bush for refusing to negotiate with Kim Jong-Il because he doesn’t like the man (”we shouldn’t have a foreign policy based on petulance”), or lamenting the fact that, nearly alone in the first world, we do not have a national health care system (”I’m tired of being a second class citizen in the industrialized world”), or pointing out that the Bush team’s reputation as defensive stalwarts just doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny (”as they say in Texas, the man’s all hat and no cattle”), he was always articulate, pithy, forceful and forthright, and just completely in command of the situation. It was a bravura performance.

I was very sorry when it was over. I trailed the clot of admirers that followed him to his car, buzzing around his little entourage like gnats, then watched him drive off into the sunset. It was a perfect departure (right down to the people’s car he drove off in, a black Honda Civic), but I couldn’t quite enjoy it as much as I should have. Because there was still the nagging question, the one that followed me to the rally, whispering itself into my ear all through his speech, whispering even now: does he really have a chance?

I’m not sure. There are a lot of people against him, both outside the party and in. But he has this going for him: he’s no pie-in-sky left-wing ideologue. There’s a rough-hewn practicality to his agenda, a realistic assessment of what’s possible that tempers its idealism, in some ways, but enhances it in others — by making its goals realistic, and therefore achievable.

In one sense, this campaign may still be entirely quixotic, and end up shattering itself against the walls of Money and Power and Influence, in the same way that the McCain insurgency did three years ago. But, in another sense, it’s already succeeded: Dean has injected real feeling and hope and purpose into the sad, soiled process of electing a president, and has managed to get a bunch of disaffected people interested in the direction that their country is taking, a magnificent achievement in and of itself. He may not be our country’s salvation, but, at the very least, he’s a salve for its wounds. And he’s got my vote.

It’s coming. You can smell it: the scent of barbecue drifting across the parking lots of shuttered stadiums; the stink of sweat and manliness billowing out of locker rooms in a maldiferous fog; the sizzling, milling odor of violence rising off of the gridirons. Football season is approaching, my friends, and not a moment too soon. It’s been a long year. Pity the poor sports nut: stuck in the doldrums of summer, nothing to do but look back on a dull, disappointing basketball season, or try to muster the will to give a shit about hockey, or sit in a ball park and stare listlessly at ten guys standing around on a diamond-shaped lawn doing lots of not very much. But that’s all over now. The Pigskin is back.

I’m not sure where my affinity for football came from. Maybe it was planted early on, sometime during our many visits to Texas (arguably the sports-nuttiest state in this sports-obsessed country). Maybe its some latent love of violence. Whatever, it’s there. And, lately, it even has a purpose: I’ve been playing fantasy football for a couple of years, and have my own actual team, The Legion of Doom, with phantom players based on actual players, competing in phantom games based on actual games during a phantom season based on the actual season. It’s all very exciting. Really.

Alas, last season, I came as close to finishing in last place as you can get without actually finishing in last place, and then proceeded to lose the battle of the losers we call the Toilet Bowl. It was not my proudest moment.

But I’m planning to avenge my poor showing this year. Well, maybe “planning” is too strong a word. It’s more like “hoping”: that sad, dismal sort of hope with which children stare at carnival displays of candy on the other side of shop windows. The problem is that I don’t know very much about football, or its players, and can’t be bothered to learn. Whenever I find myself in the middle of a serious football discussion, I’m pretty much instantly bewildered, as most of what’s being said sails high above my head; and I mean high, high, above, so high and so fast that I only know it’s been there if I can still make out the contrails.

But I persist, undaunted. As our country’s current leadership attests, ignorance is no bar to success, as long as you have enough money and enough cronies. And so that shall be my strategy for the 2003 season: Money and Cronies. At the beginning of the season, after the draft (which I will inevitably flub), I will approach my fellow owners and offer to “trade” for the men I need; it’ll be a special kind of trade, though, in which they give me a player, and, in return, I give them large sums of cash. It’ll sort of be like “buying”, really. But “buying” players is kind of illegal, and might upset the other owners, so I shall call it “trading”. Language is a wonderful thing.

But even stuffing my roster with top-notch athletes may not be enough. Given the everpresent threat of season-ending injuries, and the vagaries of fate, and my aforementioned ignorance, there’s always a chance that I’ll still manage to totally screw things up. And so, through a complex network of favors granted and services offered, I plan to get in good with the folks at ESPN, who run our league. Fantasy football is based entirely on statistics, and so it’s vitally important that our league’s overseers get it right. “Right” is a very fluid term, however — or at least I hope to make it so. Yards will be shaved off here, added there; touchdowns will be forgotten, or concocted, as the situation warrants; entire games will be “reinterpreted” by a determined phalanx of football fabulists, if necessary, to ensure that every week is my week. I plan to have the best record that money can buy.

Let the games begin, then, and may the richest, best-connected man win.

Over the years, I’ve made many attempts to find myself. I’ve tried the standard monotheistic religions, self-help books, week-long meanders down the Appalachian trail, obsessive navel gazing, Buddhism, Taoism, Maoism, Jackiechanism, Waynism, Garthism, Neoism (which involves the wearing of latex and the ritual repetition of the word “Whoa”), Scientology (”Your application has been rejected due to insufficient funds”), Objectivism (”Your application has been rejected due to insufficient selfishness”), and so on, and so forth, endlessly and to no avail.

I’ve tried hallucinogens, uppers, downers, barbiturates. Hedonism, ascetism, hedonascetism (a way of life that involves days of binge drinking and rampant wish fulfillment, following by long nights of self-flagellation and desert-wandering), activism, passivism, nihilism, Pollyannaism, despair.

And when none of that worked, I tried to shock myself out of myself: alcoholism, drug abuse, marathon viewings of the movie Titanic, ritual chanting of pro-Bush mantras. I tried visiting novice acupuncturists who used rusty nails instead of needles, malevolent nazi dentists with pain fetishes, Stalinist lesbian proctologists with broken broom handles in their hands and cruel gleams in their eyes.

But none of it worked. I had no idea who I was. I could see myself in the mirror, of course, and touch myself, and listen to the sound of my breathing, and taste the sweat on my lips. But all of those were mere confirmations of my physical presence, my meatware. I sought a more spiritual brand of affirmation.

And so, finally, despairing, I decided to turn to the one friend that has never let me down. The companion who has, without fail, day in and day out, given me exactly what I need.

Google.

I sat down at my computer, brought up my browser, and typed in the magical words: http://www.google.com.

It appeared before me. The spartan page. The simple prompt. The grey, implacable buttons. I swallowed, steeled myself, gathered my resolve, and typed my name: “Lapsed Cannibal.” Then hit enter.

Google thought for a moment. It thought for a moment longer. The page went blank. I stared at it for a what seemed like a very long time: one minute, two minutes, five minutes. The progress bar at the bottom of the browser inched (centimetered, millimetered, microned) forward, imperceptibly, and nothing appeared. A single bead of perspiration formed on my forehead and crept down between my eyes, down the slope of my nose, and dangled on the tip, shimmering like a rubbery, unformed diamond in the bright light of the CRT.

And then Google came back. It said: “Your search - Lapsed Cannibal - did not match any documents. Did you mean Piebald Leafblower?”

The disappointment descended quickly. My head felt heavier, as if I had suddenly donned a couple of forty-pound earrings. I sagged forward, tilting toward my desk, until my forehead rested on the keyboard, mashing the keys, sending my computer a sudden clot of ASCII gibberish. It bleeped and booped indignantly. I felt tears coming to my eyes. Not even Google knew who I was.

And then: a light, a moment of epiphany, a tiny smoldering ember of hope. Piebald Leafblower? What the hell is Piebald Leafblower? Piebald Leafblower has nothing to do with Lapsed Cannibal. Surely Google’s matching algorithms couldn’t have screwed up that badly. No. It was trying to tell me something.

I sat up, stared at the screen, mouth open, the beginning of a grin playing across my lips. My fingers quivering, I keyed in the words “Piebald Leafblower”, and hit enter.

Google took even longer now. The second hand of the clock swept across its face once, twice, ten times, and still no answer. But the answer was there. I could feel it building behind the glass of my monitor, pulsing between the pixels of the display.

And when it came, it came slowly, each character etching itself on the face of the browser as if some invisible electronic calligrapher was writing it longhand.

It said: “Your search - Piebald Leafblower - did not match any documents. Did you mean Lapsed Cannibal?”

No. No. No. I wouldn’t be dissuaded that easily. Not when I was so close. I typed “Lapsed Cannibal”, and hit enter, and waited. An hour later, I typed “Piebald Leafblower”, and waited. An hour after that, “Lapsed Cannibal.” And then: “Piebald Leafblower”. And then: “Lapsed Cannibal”.

And I’ve been doing that ever since, hour after hour, staring at the monitor, typing, staring, typing, staring, for the past three months. The rest of my life has ended. The confused then concerned then angry messages from work have stopped coming; my wife has left me; my landlord is beating on my door, demanding rent, threatening police. They’ve cut off my phone, my gas, and soon they will cut off my power.

But I’m close, now. I can feel it. This is a test, it’s a journey, and — best of all — it’s an answer. What if my purpose in life is nothing more than to seek my purpose in life? Maybe that’s what Google is telling me, and helping me to do.

Not find. Search. Endlessly.

Lapsed Cannibal. Piebald Leafblower. Lapsed Cannibal. Piebald Leafblower. Lapsed Cannibal. Piebald Leafblower. Lapsed Cannibal. Piebald Leafblower.Lapsed Cann

My my my. It seems that Fox News, inveterate spewer of Republican propaganda and unabashed proponent of all things conservative, trademarked the phrase “Fair & Balanced” back in 1995. Yeah. And that’s not even the punchline. They’re currently suing Al Franken for using it in the title of his latest book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.

This is, of course, so funny that it’s nearly impossible to say anything funny about it. It would be like trying to shine a flashlight on the sun. It is worth noting, though, that Degree of Ridiculousness is apparently not a consideration over at Ye Old Patent & Trademark Office, which is far too busy granting rights to things like one-click purchases, sections of the human genome, and the word “windows” to worry about dumbness.

Dumbness is what Fox news is all about, however. They can apparently make claims that Franken is “shrill”, “unstable”, and a “C-level commentator” without blinking an eye, or, more to the point, catching a glimpse of themselves in the mirror. Does anyone over there actually watch The O’Reilly Factor?

I expect that this is going to be the beginning of a trend. Even as I write this, lightbulbs are appearing over the heads of convervative political figures all over the country. I look forward to a future in which the Bush administration trademarks the phrase “Weapons of Mass Destruction”, to prevent reporters from writing embarassing stories about their conspicuous absence in Iraq. In fact, just to be safe, they’ll probably trademark “lie”, “exaggerate”, “state of the union”. “yellowcake”, “uranium”, “Paul Wolfowitz”, and “Donald Rumsfeld” too. And then they’ll trademark “Iraq”. Why not? They own it.

With the possible exception of late night comedians and newspaper headline punsters, the California recall circus is pretty much bad for everyone: bad for Democrats, bad for Republicans, bad for the state, bad for the country. California’s strange recall process was originally instituted by turn-of the-century reformers as a bulwark against the re-emergence of the evil corporate oligarchists who ran the state for many years. It was certainly not intended to remove governors who are just doing a bad job, as Gray Davis clearly is. That’s what elections are for. Remember elections? That’s where lots of people get together and cast votes for their favorite candidates, and then the votes are counted, and then the candidate with the most votes win. That’s what we call “democracy”. Democracy is why Al Gore, the person who got the most votes in 2000, is our president today. I’m not sure why he hasn’t moved into the White House yet, or why he’s been letting that mean doofus sleep in his bed for all these years, but I’m sure there’s a good explanation.

Anyway. About 158 people wound up registering for the recall. Given the fact that all you need is 75 signatures and $3500 to do so, I’m kind of surprised there weren’t more. There’s Ariana Huffington and Arnold Schwarzenegger, of course, and a porn star, and a smut peddler, and an old baseball commissioner, and — yawn — the current Lieutenant Governor. And those are just the famous ones.

So it was with some enthusiasm that I turned to this list of candidate bios. I was hoping for a treasure trove of strangeness, a distilled bonanza of west coast eccentricity, drawn to the spotlight like moths to flame. To my disappointment, however, these out-of-the-woodwork candidates seem largely banal, and are playing this game much more earnestly than the occasion warrants. Most of them promise, if elected, to bring the government back down to the level of the people, cull wastefulness, kill corruption, restore integrity, and so on, a depressing litany of hackneyed political bromides delivered without the slick, oily sheen we’ve come to expect from our professional politicians.

Some of their reasons for running are interesting, though, or funny, or at least weird. Here are a couple of the better ones:

Howard Allen Gershater, 60, nonpartisan, Hearing-aid-store owner: “If I’m supposed to run for this office, please let there be some sign. At that very instant, this giant comet streaks across the sky and the comet is as bright as can be for five seconds OK, thank you, I got the message.”

Leo Gallagher, 57, Nonpartisan, Comedian: “Anybody can be meat and potatoes; I’m the spice in this election. We’re having fun with it. I’m not going to be elected.”

Richard Gosse, 54, Republican, Educator/author: ” ‘Fairness for singles’ ó that’s my platform Someone has to stand up for the 34% of the population that is single and neglected by the politicians Single people pay more taxes than married people. Single people pay a much higher auto insurance rate than married people.”

Ivan Hall, 42, Green, Owner of denture manufacturing business: “What I’m sick and tired of is the baloney. Whether you get an actor with no experience or Gray Davis with tons of experience, all we get is a bunch of hoopla.”

Edward T. Kennedy, 49, Democrat, Businessman: “The purpose of government is to get you born healthy, educated, to live securely and to die with integrity. The current team is striking out on all of these. They are greedy people doing the work of special interests with no oversight.”

Paul “Chip” Mailander, 37, Democrat, Golf professional: “One of our members came in last Sunday and said that of all the people, I should run. He said I was a great person and would make a great governor. I’d have to look at the fiscal crisis, then chip away at it, as they say in golf.”

Paul Mariano, 56, Democrat, Public defender: “I’m running because I’m opposed to the recall process. If elected, I would institute Gray Davis as my chief of staff. That would make him the de facto governor of California, the position to which he was duly elected.”

Ned F. Roscoe, 42, Libertarian, President of family-owned national discount cigarette chain: “No new taxes, no new stupid laws I have a better chance of winning the election than I do of purchasing a winning lottery ticket.”

Mathilda Karel Spak, 100, Nonpartisan, Hospital and senior center volunteer: “They’re some very important and wealthy people. But I’ll fight it out. With my experience at [nearly] 101 years old, I can outlive all of them.”

Shu Yih Liu, 58, Nonpartisan, CEO of the Stuttz automobile company: “I don’t have any interest in personal fame. I see that there is a big solution for the deficit. California has lost its chi ó it’s aura ó and I have the solution. As soon as I am in the position to do so, I will announce plan to solve the problems in California.”

I’m reading A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson, and I can’t stop: it sucked me in from the first sentence, and it won’t let go. One of the blurbs on the back of the book describes Bryson as a synthesis of Garrison Keillor, Michael Kinsley, and Dave Barry, and that sound about right to me. There’s something cool, or interesting, or hillarious happening on pretty much every page, almost every paragraph.

This, for example: before he set out on his journey up the Appalachian Trail, Bryson did a lot of research into all the horrible things that could happen to you out in the wilderness, with a special emphasis on bear attacks. Here he describes his reaction on seeing a picture of four bears invading a campground out West:

The photograph caught four black bears as they puzzled over a suspended food bag. The bears were clearly startled but not remotely alarmed by the flash. It was not the size or demeanor of the bears that troubled me — they almost looked comically unaggressive, like four guys who had gotten a Frisbee caught up a tree — but their numbers. Up to that moment it had not occured to me that bears might prowl in parties. What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out my backside like one of those unrolling paper streamers you get at children’s parties — I daresay it would even give a merry toot — and bleed to a messy death in my sleeping bag.

Now that’s entertainment.

Ok, it looks like the Evil Brain behind the Total Information Awareness act has finally found a way to get around the will of Congress. TIA is one of the many twisted, fearmongering initiatives born in the wake of 9/11, and possibly the scariest: a federal plan to compile a huge database of information on every person in the country, ostensibly to help keep an eye out for the terrorist element. But the House and Senate have taken some unusually sensible steps to limit its insane, bigbrotherish mandate, so TIA has been faltering lately, thanks to a sharp decrease in funding and the threat of outright cancellation. So what’s a self-respecting domestic spy network to do? Pick up its ball and go elsewhere, that’s what: in this case, down to the state level.

According to this Washington Post article, Florida is about to start using a new system called Matrix that allows law enforcement agencies to do pretty much what TIA was promising: track people down using information culled from a wealth of law enforcement and consumer databases, merging data from several sources to compile exacting profiles of individuals, their activities and proclivities, their buying habits, their reading preferences, their medical history, and probably a lot more.

It’s all in the name of preventing terrorism, of course, and you can’t really blame the cops for being extremely excited at the prospect of typing a search string into a Matrix node in the basement of a precinct in Tallahassee, or whatever, and getting back a bunch of data on some suspect’s little league batting average, the number of times he’s flipped through 2600 magazine at the bookstore, or the frequency of his visits to the Victoria’s Secret website. But I don’t think I’m overstating things when I say that this system’s Abuse Potential Index (API) is off the scale. Florida’s already making it available to other states. But why stop there? Why not sell access to private detectives, or corporations trying to chase down their debtors, or — really — anyone who’s willing to pay?

And the real kicker, here, is that all of this is happening with the support of the federal government. And I don’t just mean moral support. The Justice Department has already ponied up $4 million to fund this system, and the Department of Homeland Security is promising $8 million. The guy who started this ball rolling — Hank Asher, CEO of Seisant, the company behind Matrix — has volunteered his services to the FBI and other federal agencies in the past. Florida claims that Asher contacted them with the suggestion for this system, and I have no reason to doubt that. But at who’s urging? In my mind’s eye, I’m seeing a frustrated John Ashcroft/John Poindexter/Dick Cheney, unable to convince recalcitrant senators to erect their digital Eye of Sauron, picking up the phone in the middle of the night, placing a call to Seisent Industries. Chatting, lamenting, complaining. Making suggestions, maybe? Would it be nice if .. what we need is some wealthy entrepreneur to take the initiative and … the good of the country … civic duty … blah blah blah.

You’ll have to forgive me for being a little jumpy, here; they did, after all, name this thing after a near-future computer system that takes over the world and subjugates all of mankind. Maybe they’re doing a reverse psychology thing, hiding their intentions in plain sight, or whatever. It doesn’t matter. What’s important, here, is that if the Bush administration wants something done, they will find a way to get it done, no matter what. And that’s definitely something to be afraid of.