Entries from September 2003 ↓

I recently contributed some money to Maryland Public Television, which broadcasts The News Hour with Jim Lehrer at 6:00, every weekday. I love the News Hour, I love their dull sets, their dry, monotonous, unchanging delivery, their lack of flash and bang and pizzaz, I love the amount of time they lavish on every story they do. I love their impartiality, their deeply serious approach to the news.

To my dismay, however, I just got a letter from MPT telling me that, if I didn’t want them to broadcast the personal information I’d just given them to other organizations, I had to explicitly ask them not to. I hate this opt-out shit, it’s deceptive, it’s mean, and it should be illegal. It’s bad enough when the amoral corporations to whom we (foolishly) entrust our personal information decide to spread it around. But that’s big business, I sort of expect them to screw me. I didn’t expect public tv to get in on the act, however. So I wrote this letter, and plan to mail it to MPT, along with my opt-out request:

Dear Sir or Madam: I have enclosed a request that MPT not release my name, address, and personal information to other organizations. I find it mildly irritating, and somewhat depressing, that I have to do this. While the effort involved in asking you not do to something I never asked you to do in the first place is fairly minor, the psychic toll of having to do so with a non-profit group whose broadcasts I look to as the last bastion of responsibility and integrity in the increasingly facile, docile, and morally bankrupt media landscape, is profound. I’m sure you have your reasons for doing this, and I’m sure they’re good reasons. Nevertheless: I don’t like the idea of public television selling me out. It’s like being betrayed by a good friend. So please refrain from following the lead of corporate America, and take a stand against this opt-out scourge. If I wanted my name and address scattered to the four winds, I would do so myself. I don’t, and I haven’t, and neither should you. Thanks for listening.

And now I’m wondering whether to actually send it. It’s a harsh letter, and I know MPT, and public broadcasting in general, is really scrambling for dollars these days. It would be really horrible if they went away for lack of funds. But is their survival really contingent on their willingness to betray their loyal viewers? And, if it is, what does that imply? Am I overreacting here?

So it emerges that the Justice Department had been using many of the intrusive, privacy-thwarting provisions of the USA Patriot Act to pursue run-of-the-mill, non-terrorist criminals. This despite the fact that the Act was promoted, and has been defended, exclusively as a bulwark against the terrorist evildoers who wish to destroy our country:

The government is using its expanded authority under the far-reaching law to investigate suspected drug traffickers, white-collar criminals, blackmailers, child pornographers, money launderers, spies and even corrupt foreign leaders, federal officials said. Justice Department officials say they are simply using all the tools now available to them to pursue criminals — terrorists or otherwise. But critics of the administration’s antiterrorism tactics assert that such use of the law is evidence the administration is using terrorism as a guise to pursue a broader law enforcement agenda … A study in January by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, concluded that while the number of terrorism investigations at the Justice Department soared after the Sept. 11 attacks, 75 percent of the convictions that the department classified as “international terrorism” were wrongly labeled. Many dealt with more common crimes like document forgery … Justice Department officials say such criticism has not deterred them. “There are many provisions in the Patriot Act that can be used in the general criminal law,” Mark Corallo, a department spokesman, said. “And I think any reasonable person would agree that we have an obligation to do everything we can to protect the lives and liberties of Americans from attack, whether it’s from terrorists or garden-variety criminals.”

It’s beginning.

Technology has changed our lives in many wonderful, wonderful ways. There’s the automobile, for example, which has enabled us to drop large housing subdivisions on pristine forests without having to worry about how its human residents will traverse the many miles that now separate them from their jobs. There are cell phones, which not only ensure that our employers will be able to get in touch with us wherever we are, but will also allow the federal government to pinpoint our exact position at all times, in case we turn out to be terrorists in need of capture. And there’s the internet: email, web pages, and instant messaging, expanding and enhancing the network of human contact in hundreds of new and interesting ways, enabling levels of interaction never before seen.

For example, here’s the transcript of a recent IM conversation I had with my brother; a conversation that, I stress, would not have been possible without technology:

Lapsed Cannibal: You know what’s interesting? Magma hats.

Dirk DeBomb: Ducks are interesting too. I like ducks. And cookies.

Lapsed Cannibal: But do ducks like cookies? I think that’s the question here.

Dirk DeBomb: That’s definately a question.

Lapsed Cannibal: Here’s another one: if pigeons had big hands instead of wings, would they crush their little bodies every time they tried to clap?

Dirk DeBomb: Or, if hands had pigeons for fingers, would the pigeons fight a lot because they were so close together?

Lapsed Cannibal: Hmmm. Yes, fascinating. I’m going to spend the rest of the day meditating on that one.

Dirk DeBomb: Let me know what you come up with - that one’s been dogging me for years.

Lapsed Cannibal: Ok. So here’s what on my plate for today: magma hats, pigeons with big white hands instead of wings, and pigeonfingers. This is going to take some time. My schedule is going to slip here at work, but I think the brass will understand. I mean, magma hats!

Dirk DeBomb: Before you dig in, maybe you could tell me what magma hats are?

Lapsed Cannibal: Ah, yes, that would be nice, wouldn’t it? But you don’t just “tell” someone about magma hats. No. It requires years and years of intensive study, and a lifetime of living among magma hats, to come to a true understanding of their nature.

Lapsed Cannibal: But here’s a taste: they’re hats. Made out of MAGMA.

Dirk DeBomb: these are popular, then?

Lapsed Cannibal: Sadly, no. Their day will come, though. Mark my words. Their day will come.

Dirk DeBomb: I think that day will have to be preceded by asbestos hair day.

This is not the kind of chat you have face to face, or even on the phone. This is heavy, serious stuff, an exchange possible only through the magic of instant messaging. It makes me sad to think about our forbears, doomed to lifetimes of nothing but personal, face-to-face contact. It must have been horrible.

I just belched, very loudly. Normally, this would not be a big deal, but I am unfortunately at work, in cubeland, sitting in a 10 by 10 three-sided roofless cloth enclosure in close proximity to many people who must have heard my recent indelicacy, and, if they did not hear it, almost surely felt the seismic reverberations of its passage. There are ladies present, and I have no doubt offended their sensibilities, and damaged my already shaky reputation beyond repair. I am a repulsive worm. I am mortified.

But every poisonous cloud-like gaseous emission has a silver lining, as they say. I used the occasion to search the web for belch-related sites, and to my intense delight, discovered a veritable treasure trove. There are sites that provide audio facsimiles of various flavors of belch, lots and lots of dictionary definitions, medical explanations of the anatomical underpinnings of the belch, and even, god bless it, an all-female belch site. I also found a reasonable approximation of my own meager efforts, here.

Just visit google and type “belch”. You’ll be glad you did.

Holy ululating monkey spunk, Batman! Dick Cheney gave an interview to Meet The Press’s Tim Russert yesterday in which he staunchly defended everything the administration said and did to get us into the Iraqi war. The half-baked uranium charges, the spurious accusations of a link with Al-Quiada, the ludicrously underplanned occupation, the spiraling costs: it’s all true, it’s all good, our leaders were expecting all of it, and it’s all going to be ok. Trust them. Have they ever lied to you before?

The Washington Post has a nice article debunking pretty much everything Cheney said. Talking Points Memo has an excellent commentary, too, and today’s This Modern World is distressingly poignant.

Exposing the lies of this administration (and the right-wing punditry that worships at its feet) is becoming something of a cottage industry, and rightly so; but (as far as I can tell) the truth about their untruths hasn’t quite seeped into the national consciousness yet. Hopefully, as the lies become increasingly pathological, both in terms of volume and of sheer brazenness, then maybe more people will start taking notice. Anyone Else in 2004, indeed.

Men have several unwritten rules of conduct with respect to their behavior in shared lavatory situations. There are certain things that one must do, and must not do, when one meets one’s peers in a restroom, and most of us understand what those things are.

However, there are certain individuals who, due to errors in their upbringing, or unfortunate genetic defects, or extreme lack of intelligence, do not have the innate sense of propriety required for a full understanding of these rules. I have therefore taken the liberty of writing up the Six Commandments of Male Restroom Conduct.

They are as follows:

1. Thou shalt not glance over the dividing wall between thine urinal and thine neighbor’s. Even if you fix your gaze at a spot on the ceiling, even if your eyes are closed, even if you are a blind one-eyed Lilliputian wearing a bag over your head, you should not glance over, because your neighbor will inevitably assume that you are sneaking a peek at his John Thomas, and take appropriate measures. So to speak.

2. Thou shalt not speak to another male whilst standing at thine urinal, except in cases of extreme emergency. The definition of “extreme emergency” is of course open to interpretation, but, as a rule of thumb, your neighbor’s clothing should be on fire, or a small contingent of Vietcong should be creeping up behind him with murder in their eyes, or tiny monkeys should be clambering into his ass with daggers clenched between their teeth. And even then, it’s debatable.

3. Thou shalt make a credible show of washing thine hands after relieving thineself. This doesn’t have to involve soap, and water need not actually touch your skin. However, you must turn on the tap and stand in front of it for not less than five seconds, while making vigorous handwashing motions.

4. Thou shalt not spend longer than three seconds gazing at thineself in the mirror before leaving the restroom. It is of course important to ensure that your hair isn’t too terribly awry, or that a wad of toilet paper isn’t stuck in your teeth, or that you haven’t mistakenly put your pants on backwards. But these cursory checks should not take more than three seconds. Any longer and you will be marked as vain, effeminate, and possibly gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

5. Thou shalt not fart too liberally, too loudly, or too long. We all understand that there is gas in our bodies, and that it wants to get out, and that we should not stand in its way. But you should be careful to control its egress, making every effort to limit its volume to a murmur, and its duration to no more than five seconds. If necessary, you may emit a series of not more than three (3) five second blasts, no less than ten seconds apart. Under no circumstances should you allow any gaseousness to escape your body outside of your stall. Flatulence has its time and its place.

6. Thou shalt relegate any bathroom conversation to one of the following topics: (1) sports; (2) sports; (3) monster truck rallies; (4) sports. Any other subjects may take you down conversational paths that lead into extreme impropriety and embarrassment. For example, a conversation about one’s morning coffee preferences may lead to a discussion of Starbucks which may lead to a humorous exchange on the silly and inappropriate size names they give their beverages which will inevitably lead someone to say “Yeah, I showed my wife my Grande the other day, and she said it looked like a Small to her.” Which will lead to an embarrassed silence, extreme discomfort, the clearing of throats, and much averting of eyes at subsequent chance meetings in the hall.

I propose that these commandments be posted above the urinals of all bathrooms in our great land, and on the inside and outside of all stall doors, and on the underside of toilet seats. I understand that putting these rules in print, and thereby rendering the unspoken painfully manifest, will itself be considered, in some quarters, a breach of protocol. But something must be done about the scourge of inappropriate restroom behavior that is sweeping the nation. All men should strive to live by these rules. It will make the unpleasant reality of shared bathroom life much more tolerable for everyone.

Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo has had some extremely sharp words for the Bush administration lately, and for Bush himself. This, for example, on the world’s prevailing attitude towards the US:

Fred Kaplan has an excellent piece in Slate this week about the missed opportunity of September 12th. “By the summer of 2003,” writes Kaplan, “it could fairly be said that most of the world hated the United States, or at least feared the current U.S. government.” That sounds like such an extreme, over-the-top statement. “Hate” is a pretty subjective word. But it’s hard to read the papers regularly and not realize that what Kaplan says is true. It’s sickening.

Or this, on our increasingly plaintive calls for troops and money for the not-quagmire in Iraq:

The truth is that we do need other countries’ help. But it’s only the president’s folly which has put us in the position of needing to beg.

Or this:

Department of Homeland Security: 36 billion dollars … Current Projected Cost of War-fighting and Reconstruction in Iraq: 241 billion dollars … Having a president who’s got a friggin’ clue: Priceless

I find Marshall to be a calm, even-handed, lucid thinker when it comes to matters of policy, both foreign and domestic, and it’s low-grade shocking to see him loosing these kinds of rhetorical salvos; to my mind, it says something very unpleasant about our current state of affairs. It’s the second anniversary of September 11th today: we are mourning our dead and struggling through an economy that’s improving without seeming to improve; our leaders are lying to us every day about any number of things, and trying to curtail our civil liberties in new and interesting ways; we are overextended and under siege in Iraq and Afghanistan, but still barking flacid, dangerous threats at axes of evil; our politicians snap and carp and strut like badly-raised children, and the rest of the world doesn’t seem to like us very much at all. A sad day, indeed.

Today is my birthday. I’m thirty-three years old. This means that I’ve managed to not die for almost a third of a century, which is not too shabby, if you ask me. I’ve survived typhoid, a civil war, high school, adolescence, a nasty car crash, an extended bout with anemia, a beagle, and the continuous ingestion of massive amounts of junkfood. I’ve already lived longer than Janis Joplin, James Dean, Jesus Christ, Joan of Arc, and Jim Morrison (and that’s just the J’s).

This is my third palindromatic birthday. P-days are important waypoints in a person’s life, magical moments in time when all of the universes of causality and possibility flow to the same place. No matter which way you look at thirty-three, it’s always thirty-three, and that’s strangely comforting.

But I won’t lie to you. Thirty-three is also pretty alarming. In dog years, I’m 221. In fruit fly years, I’m 32,109. In geological time, I’m only .0000000008 , but my life expectancy is about .00000000083, so that’s no comfort, really. I was expecting this birthday to be just another milestone in my gentle downward slope toward death. It sort of surprised me, though, dropped like a piano from the heavens and shook me out of my reverie with a great cacophony of jangling cords and rattling ivory and splintering wood. I feel like a guy who sets out early in the morning for a hike, and so loses himself in the workaday details of putting one foot in front of the other, and puzzling over maps, and admiring scenery, that when he finally thinks to check his watch it’s already mid-afternoon, and where has all the time gone?

And that’s a very dangerous question. I find myself tempted to look back over my shoulder, gauge my progress, assess my accomplishments, and that’s not a good idea, not for me. I am not a goal-oriented person. I do not have long-term plans, nor any coherent aspirations that extend beyond the end of the week. So it’s difficult to make a useful assessment of my progress: having no goals, I’ve both succeeded in doing everything, and failed to do anything, I set out to do. Either way, not something I want to dwell on.

But, then again, thirty-three is pretty cool, too, because three is a very powerful number. Three stooges, three wise men, three apostles (whose names I can remember), three members of the Violent Femmes, three sides to a triangle, three laws of thermodynamics. Trinity from The Matrix. That’s all good stuff. And I’ve got two threes to my name, now, double fudge, twins. What more could you ask for in a birthday?

I feel like I should be saying something profound about aging and destiny and mortality at this point, but profundity eludes me this morning. Well, it always eludes me, actually, but I thought that it might slow down and let me grab ahold of it, briefly, on this the occasion of my third palindromatic birthday. Whatever. I guess I’ll settle for the usual wash of regret, instead, and the same dark, low-grade apprehension about what the future might bring.

Anyway. Goodbye, thirty-two. If past birthdays are any indication, I’ll quickly forget you. In fact, I’ve mostly forgotten you already: you’re just one of the years I had to clamber over to get where I am now, as featureless and unremarkable as all the others. That’s not fair to you, I know, but I don’t make the rules, I just live them. But I’m sure we’ll meet again, in my memory: me in the vestments of old age, you in the dull sepia tones of nostalgia. Maybe I’ll make you a cup of coffee, and we’ll sit on the porch, and chat about old times.

Robert Cringely has a great column this week about the cunning malefactors in today’s corporate world who have learned to skirt the bounds of legality in their business dealings, doing bad things and getting away with them by hovering so close to the border of right that it’s hard to tell when they stray into wrong. In fact, they’re so good at it now that it’s often not worth pursuing it when they screw you:

Alas, there is a lot of sharp business being conducted recently. Enron, Tyco, Adelphia, Worldcom, bad brokers, bad bankers, and now bad lawyers are everywhere among us. Every week some big company is paying a $100 million fine for knowingly and blatantly doing something against the law. And though they pay the money, they never admit guilt. They never come truly clean. And the result is that we all become cynics. We trust less and less and some of us consider behaving sharply ourselves because we know that for every $100 million fine payer there are probably 10 other companies just as guilty who weren’t caught.

But Cringely also makes a larger point about the fate of any creative idea that finds success in the marketplace: that, as it tries to consolidate and retain its hold on the business, it inevitably betrays and then forgets whatever ideals it represented in the first place, and becomes a creature of pure survival:

At some point in every market leader the creative energy runs out and what’s left is just corporate power, which is to say smart business. It is all technique from then on. That’s when companies are beaten not just in the marketplace but any way they can be beaten. “Winning isn’t the important thing,” said Vince Lombardi, “it is the only thing.”

It seems to me that this principal probably applies to all fields of human endeavor. Maybe a person’s creative life is a special kind of car that runs on a special kind of gas that only you can make, drawn and refined out of the muck of your subconscious. And it’s a great ride, while it lasts. But once the raw materials are gone, and there’s no more gas, the car just stops. At that point, you should probably get out and find a new one.

There are alternatives, though. You could steal some gas from someone else, or concoct some bastardized, sullied version of whatever it was you used to use. Your vehicle maybe won’t run as well as it used to, but it’ll move, and that’s ok, because somewhere along the line you forgot that your original goals encompassed something more that simple forward progress. So you stay in the same car, fueled now with stolen gas instead of the dreams and the ambitions that it started with, and you get to Point B, and then you get to Point C, and then, on the way to Point D, Death taps you on the shoulder and mutters something in your ear, and you shamble slowly into oblivion, and discover that it’s not much different than the place where you’ve lived since that day, long ago, when you first ran out of gas. That seems like a really crappy way to travel.

Dear Weather God,

We couldn’t help but notice that you’ve spent the better part of the last six months raining on us, and hurling lightning at our neighborhoods, and producing great peals of thunder to frighten our children and upset our dogs. That you have blackened the sky with clouds more often than you haven’t, and hidden the sun from world, and the world from the sun. That you have toppled trees, flooded roads, and cut our power. That you have made our air heavy and thick with moisture, suffusing the few bright days you’ve granted us with humidity and unpleasantness.

This note is just to let you know that we are not impressed. Sure, all of this persistent, sodden gloom is kind of a downer, and we’d certainly prefer a summer that included some small modicum of actual sun; sure, we’d like to be able to walk our dogs without having to worry about being spun away to Oz in a freak tornado; sure, we’d like to think of our golf clubs as something more than portable lightning rods. But we can live with all of that. And should you decide to bury us under thick layers of snow again this winter, that’s fine too. Bring it on. We’ve endured worse. Remember the dust bowl? Noah’s flood? The ice age? We do. We survived it all, and we’ll survive whatever else you decide to hurl our way.

But … we’re not unreasonable people. We understand that, as a god, you have needs, and that perhaps we have been somewhat lax in satisfying those needs of late. So we’re prepared to make you an offer. In exchange for a normal autumn and a moderate, or even pleasant, winter, we have decided to give you permission to claim large segments of our society as human sacrifices. Your initial allocation will include:

1. All right wing talk show hosts, without exception. In fact, we’ll be happy to rustle up Bill O’Reilly for you, and drop him into the bottomless pit of your choice.
2. The RIAA.
3. Every member of every boy band that ever existed, including, but not limited to, N-Sync, the Backstreet Boys, Take That, and New Kids on the Block (if you can find them; we’re not sure where they went).
4. All CEOs everywhere.
5. Ann Coulter. We realize she’s just one person, but please take her away. Please.
6. All religious fundamentalist zealots. We understand that you may anger the gods that these nuts worship by taking them as sacrifices, but really, you’ll probably be doing them a favor. I mean, do you think that the Christian god really wants Jerry Falwell as a spokesman? No, we don’t think so either.

If there are other elements of the populace that you would like to sample, please let us know, we’ll happily take your request into consideration.

Thank you, and have a nice day. And give us one while you’re at it.

Sincerely, The Eastern Seaboard