Entries from October 2003 ↓

My company has a serious door fetish. In order to reach my modest little desk, I have to walk through no less than seven doors. Seven. And it’s not like I’m traveling the length of seven football fields here, it’s actually quite a short trek from the front of the building to my cube. Nevertheless, I have to open seven separate doors to get there. As a friend of mine said yesterday, walking into work every day is like being trapped in the credits of an episode of Get Smart.

And, just lately, our tireless door fairies have installed yet another door. I don’t actually have to go through it to get where I’m going, but, still, it’s perhaps the most unnecessary door I’ve ever seen. It sections off our tertiary interior subminor vestibule into a big room and a less big room, each with its own warren of portals. The new door is glass, so provides no privacy; it has no lock, so provides no security. It just hangs there, separating one section of space from another section of space, for no discernible reason.

But, then again, there must be a reason for all this, and I’ve been racking my brains, recently, trying to figure it out. It could be some arcane security directive, an obscure county mandate on required glass door density per square foot, or just bad building design. I don’t know. But the whole thing has led me to ruminate on the role of doors in the world. Because it seems like we have an awful lot of them.

Doors serve two basic functions: security and privacy. Outer doors shield us from the gathering evil teeming just outside our walls; inner doors shield our private acts from the eyes of others. These are good doors, for the most part, and I fully support them.

Then there are the other kinds of doors: the arbitrary ones whose only role is to separate one kind of person from another kind of person. On this side of the door, people went to college; on the other, they didn’t. On this side, people sit at a desk and type for a living; on that, people lay bricks, weave rugs, build cars. On this side people are white; on the other, they’re not. At the risk of descending into trite morality here, I have to say that, despite the progress that we’ve made in this country in the matters of equality, race relations, etc, there are definitely doors all over the place, as invisible as they are pointless.

And here’s the thing: occasionally, people on the “right” side of a door decide that it’s not enough that these barriers be implicit. Because sometimes you have to build a physical object to reinforce the notion that, look, I’m here, in this place that I’ve reached because of my talent or wealth or color, and you’re there, outside of this place that is mine, and you people have to know this, ok? The portculli of gated communities, the ornate baroque portals of company boardrooms, the gates and guardhouses of country clubs, these are all arbitrary class distinction doors posing as their distant cousins from the security/privacy branch of the family.

I look forward to a world so balkanized, so divided and subdivided and cleaved and diced into carefully circumscribed areas of privilege, that you won’t be able to walk your dog or go to the grocery store or visit a playground without passing through hundreds of doors, each leading into a different realm with its own laws and customs and biases. We’re moving out of the age of the symbolic and the implicit into the age of the actual and the manifest, one that demands that we build doors where doors ought to be, and honor them as the useful and necessary barriers that they are.

I don’t think all this is the driving force behind my company’s doors, however. We’re a software shop, and software is all about needless complexity, so my building is probably just an architectural manifestation of our industry’s design proclivities. But they’re depressing just the same, if you spend any time at all thinking about them. Which I plan to stop doing, right now.

Salon is running an interesting article about last weekend’s “End the Occupation” rally in D.C. The rally was organized by ANSWER, whose official position on the occupation issue is that all troops (not just US troops, all troops) should leave Iraq immediately, and the Iraqi people should be left to their own devices.

That seems like a harsh (not to mention short-sighted and self-defeating) position to take, and many of the demonstrators that the author interviewed didn’t buy into it. In fact, the crowd apparently contained a whole mishmash of different viewpoints, some of them radically at odds with each other. The article tries to portray (with some success, I think) the rally as a microcosm for the anti-war opposition, in general, and, in particular, the opposition within the Democratic party, which can’t seem to get behind a coherent, useful message:

It’s becoming an abominable cliché to mention George Orwell when discussing the debate over Iraq, but a quote of his from “The Lion and the Unicorn” seemed particularly apt on Saturday. “The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a dozen weekly and monthly papers,” he wrote. “The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their generally negative querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power.” Or, as Packer says, the cry “End the Occupation” is “an expression of impotence, an inability to make distinctions. In this case, impotence and omnipotence are two sides of the same coin. You can think anything because it won’t matter. That frees people up to not to think about Iraq.”

I really don’t think the opposition is as fractured, or as incoherent, as the author claims, but his article makes some very good, and startling, points. Even at the highest levels, he says, anger at Bush has gotten all mixed up with the debate on how best to solve the problem in Iraq, leading to a lot of petulant spewing of hot air and not much in the way of actual alternatives. And here I thought that I was the only one doing that.

The new site is finally up. We here at Doodleplex Command have spent countless hours refining, honing, laboring, chiseling, sweating, typing, screaming, squealing like baby ferrets, bashing our heads through walls, cursing the god of HTML and the vile markup language he gave us, cursing all of the gods in the fractured pantheon of the current browserscape, and finally just cursing, aimlessly, at the dinner table, while eating our soup, to the surprise and chagrin of our wives.

But it was all worth it, we tell ourselves. There’s a pictures section, now, and a writing section, and maybe more to come, if we can bring ourselves to look at another line of HTML. Which is, at this juncture, we must confess, highly unlikely.

My monitor at work has taken to making little popping noises at odd intervals. The screen isn’t flickering or anything, and the noises aren’t loud, so I’m not really worried that it’s about to fizzle out or explode or go black. My concern is that I’m not hearing these sounds, exactly, so much as feeling them in my head. As if this odd waveform disturbance is bypassing my ear canal and penetrating my skull and jacking directly into my auditory cortex. I’m guessing that’s not good.

Or maybe it is: maybe it signals a new intimacy between me and my machine: maybe we’ve reached the point where we no longer need to communicate via our respective sensory apparati (eyes and ears, keyboard and monitor). Maybe we’re becoming the same creature, a borg-like synthesis of flesh and silicon, mind and matter. Maybe I’m the first of a new species, part Microsoft, part man. If so, then I have the following to look forward to: (1) I’m about to become a lot more susceptible to viruses, and will have to get immunity shots one or twice a week lest I succumb to their nefarious, brain-scrambling ways; (2) I will soon begin to have the irrepressible urge to kill and eat all my competitors; (3) at odd intervals, I will slow down and exhibit strange and unpredictable behavior, the only cure for which will be a swift kick in the ass, or a “reboot”; and (4) despite my myriad flaws, I will rule the world.

Which doesn’t sound like a bad deal to me.

On my way into work today, I heard what is perhaps the dumbest editorial I have ever encountered in all of my years as a seasoned editorial-listener-to person. It was another one of those ludicrous attempts to lower the bar in Iraq. One of the ways in which the administration and its far-right apologists have responded to the terrible things happening over there is to “restate” their aims and their expectations. Well, no, they say, we didn’t go in because Saddam actually had nukes or biological weapons. And, yes, he didn’t actually have any active programs to make them, either, or the wherewithal to start them up. But, in his deepest heart of hearts, he nurtured a febrile desire to do so, and that had to be destroyed.

And, sure, yeah, things are going badly right now, our men are getting picked off one by one, every day, and large segments of Iraqis hate us, and our allies are giving us the cold shoulder, and the Arab world is seething, but we never expected this to be a cakewalk. We never said it would be cakewalk, and anyone who claims that we gave the impression that the job was over is just plain lying.

Well, this guy on the radio — he wasn’t an administration person, just some feckless fall-in-line — was addressing the issue of whether we had a plan going into Iraq, beyond smash hard, smash fast, smash smash smash. I knew I was in for some primo grade A bullshit when he said: “Did we have a plan? I don’t know. Maybe we did, maybe didn’t. Maybe we do now, maybe we don’t. It doesn’t really matter. Plans aren’t much good when it comes to nation building, anyway.” All of this in a sing song delivery, as if he was reading a story to a two year old, from a really bad Dr Seuss book. And then he went off on this extended metaphor about how nation building is like making a cake: it’s not enough to have the ingredients. No. You need a recipe, and strong smart people to make it happen. And he ended up with a caution that Iraq may never be a democracy, it might always be a chaotic crazy dangerous mishmash of rival factions and internecine ethnic hatred, but, hey, a little chaos is better than the evil dictatorial order imposed by that Saddam guy, isn’t it?

Give me a fucking break. I agree that things were horrible under Saddam. I might have even been able to agree that military force was a useful and necessary thing, under the right circumstances. But he was contained, he was toothless, and he wasn’t talking to any terrorists about anything. Of all the three axes of evil that Bush lashed out at two years ago, he went after the least dangerous, while trying to portray it as the most. And now he’s got a tactical nightmare on his hands, and what’s rapidly shaping up to be a PR disaster. And for an administration that relies so much on PR to justify its actions — rather than transparency, honesty, debate, rational discourse — this really is a disaster.

I hope that this attempt to minimize expectations fails miserably. It might. But given everything else that the Bush Whitehouse has gotten away with over the years, I’m far from certain that it will. A year from now, we might be reading headlines about how lucky we are that we’ve lost far fewer men and women in Iraq than Pompeii did when Vesuvius blew, and that the administration is confident that, within two or three decades, at the very most, we should be able to give Iraq the vicious dictatorship it needs to maintain peace and stability for itself and its neighbors. Here’s hoping.

Slate has published a rare frothing rant from Michael Kinsley, on the subject of the Bush administration’s two-year-old policy on the use of embryonic stem cells for research.

It’s not a complicated point. If stem-cell research is morally questionable, the procedures used in fertility clinics are worse. You cannot logically outlaw the one and praise the other. And surely logical coherence is a measure of moral sincerity. If he’s got both his facts and his logic wrong—and he has—Bush’s alleged moral anguish on this subject is unimpressive. In fact, it is insulting to the people (including me) whose lives could be saved or redeemed by the medical breakthroughs Bush’s stem-cell policy is preventing.

The article explains why the policy makes no sense, from both a moral and a factual perspective. As usual, Kinsley’s arguments are cogent and well thought-out. But they’re shot through with something I’m not used to seeing in his stuff: real vitriol, and a palpable (not to mention explicitly stated) dislike for the man behind it all, Bush himself. He hints at a personal stake in the treatments that this research could potentially produce, so that may be what’s going on here. In any case, his anger is well-placed. This policy didn’t pass the sniff test when it was first announced, and these days it positively reeks.

I just got back from a very uneventful mini-vacation in Hershey, Pennsylvania, literally right across the street from Hershey Park. Which was closed, alas. There was a time in my life where I would have contemplated ritual seppuku at the prospect of being within walking distance of a shuttered amusement park: all of that squandered potential, unrideable rides, empty cotton candy bales, silent shooting galleries. It would have driven me nuts. Fortunately, these places don’t hold the same cherished place in my heart that they once did, so I was spared the suffering.

But a closed Hershey Park does offer attractions that an open one never could: stillness. Dormant coasters, vacant stalls, echoing promenades. And, best of all, empty parking lots. Massive, brobdingnagian, sprawling parking lots. Every morning I woke up at the crack of dawn and crossed the street and went for a walk across this amazing, endless expanse of empty tarmac. While it is possible to appreciate, in the abstract, the size of these lots when they’re full of cars, the only way to truly apprehend their lavish gargantuousness is by walking across them, alone, under a pale barely post-dawn sky, when they are completely empty. Acres of cracked black virgin tarmac sprouting jack and the beanstalk streetlights, crisscrossed with white lines, stretching all the way to the horizon. You imagine a satellite-eye view of this place, a hard black Cuba-sized stain on the world, barren except for this tiny creature crawling beetle-like across its surface for hours and hours without actually getting anywhere.

The whole thing was breathtakingly ugly to behold, but beautiful, too, in its vastness. The paradox of human sprawl is that the only way to get these kinds of views when you live anywhere near a city or a suburb is to find a place where the world has been sufficiently leveled to produce them. Besides the stunted weeds struggling up through the cracks in the hardtop, there was no sign that anything non-man-made had ever been here. It really helped me to appreciate the sheer scale of human achievement in the last couple of centuries, and the extent to which we’ve abused the power that our swollen frontal lobes and our opposable thumbs have granted us. We’re the kind of species that make it into cautionary tales in other species’ storybooks, the stuff of solemn, motherly admonitions to wide-eyed babelings: They were given everything, my love, and look what they did with it.

I didn’t have any of these unhappy thoughts when I was walking, though. I was just enjoying the novelty of the experience, the extravagant bigness of it. I walked and I walked and I walked, and everywhere I looked I saw ordered desolation, and I loved it.

Seth Stevenson from Slate is in the process of blogging his trip to Tokyo. His account is chock full of strange experiences, odd encounters, culture clash and just plain weirdness. Here’s a sample:

Of course, not all my moments of social un-grace are tolerated so kindly and so smoothly dismissed. The last time I came to Japan, on assignment reporting a story, I had recently started freelance writing and hadn’t yet gotten around to making up business cards. And I’d forgotten how important they are here. At my first meeting with several corporate executives, they lined up to hand me their cards, and I sheepishly said that I had none to give them in return. This caused much quick, sharp, audible inhaling, which is Japanese for “you are such a hopeless moron that I am embarrassed for you and for your family.” There was murmuring, and then they asked me for my contact information and wrote it down. A young lackey disappeared from the room. Ten minutes later, he returned and handed me a stack of newly printed cards, literally still hot off the press or the printer or whatever, and emblazoned in two colors with my name, number, and e-mail address. I, in turn, handed these new cards immediately back to the executives. And, at my first private moment, smacked myself in the forehead.

Really, it’s worth reading the whole series. He goes into some squeemishly unpleasant stuff (whale cuisine, tortured eel dishes, savagely twisted anime porn), but it’s really interesting, nonetheless. I know next to nothing about Japan or its people, but the place still fascinates me, and I’d love to go there: the idea of visiting a country so seemingly alien has a really appealing boldly going where no man has gone before vibe to it: why travel to distant planets when you can just hop the next All Nipon flight to Tokyo?

Bill O’Reilly is a mean, obnoxious, sanctimonious prick with the debating skills of a bullhorn and the political acumen of a baboon’s ass. And so, needless to say, he’s an icon of the hardcore conservative movement, another in the long line of bullying intellectual monobrows who’d rather shout you down than argue with you.

He gets away with this because of the way he runs his show. The “liberal” sacrificial lambs he brings on for debate are generally overcome not by his inspired arguments but by the volume of his invective, by his obnoxious filibustering and silencing techniques, and, when necessary, by his control of the off button. Lately, though, he’s been venturing outside the safe confines of the studio to give interviews and talks to less forgiving audiences under less controllable circumstances. There was the author’s panel at the Book Expo American 2003, where Al Franken just absolutely skewered him with a long, hilarious examination of O’Reilly’s oft-repeated lie about receiving two Peabody awards while working on Inside Edition. O’Reilly keeps his cool for a surprising ten minutes, and then goes off, screaming at Franken to Shut up! Shut up! It’s priceless. I’ve probably blogged about this before, but you can find the footage here; Franken’s bit begins at around 28:30, he starts laying into O’Reilly at 40:30.

Anyway, there’s been another incident. He went on Fresh Air with Terry Gross recently, and, towards the end of the interview, started berating Gross about how unfairly he was being treated, how this interview was defamatory and unfair and poor journalism, etc etc, and then stormed out. It’s delicious. Here’s a snippet:

Terry Gross: I’ll read what the People magazine thing said… Bill O’Reilly: Why? Why read it? Why read it? T.G.: Because I want people to hear it– B.O.: Why? Why? T.G.: Because… You’ll hear when I’m done why. B.O.: Look, I’m getting the feeling in this interview, all right, that this is just a hatchet job on me. All right? And I don’t like it. Now there’s no reason for you to read that People magazine review. If they want to read it, they can go and read it. T.G.: But this isn’t the review of the book– B.O.: Now wait a minute, hold it, hold it. T.G.: –it’s the review of how you handled it. B.O.: It doesn’t make any difference how I handled it. T.G.: I think it’s OK to ask you to be accountable for the things that you said. B.O.: Accountable for what? You know, I came on this program to talk about “Who’s Looking Out for You,” and what you’ve done is thrown every kind of defamation you can in my face. All right, did you do this to Al Franken? Did you? Did you challenge him on what he said? T.G.: We had a different interview. B.O.: Yeah, a different interview, OK. Fine. “Fresh Air”? Is this what “Fresh Air” is? I’ll get a transcript of this interview, of the Al Franken interview. You want me to do that? And compare the two? T.G.: You’re welcome to– B.O.: And compare the two? T.G.: You’re absolutely welcome.

Soon afterwards, he walks out, and that’s the end of that. Good Lord. Even ignoring, for the moment, the hypocrisy of his complaints about unfair treatment, this spoiled brat shtick can’t possibly stand him in good stead with his loyal listeners. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this adolescent, petulant, brutish behavior is the key to his popularity; maybe people are tired of nuance and ambiguity, and would rather hitch their wagons to someone who picks a path and just forges ahead, guns blazing.

I had a conversation with my reflection today. I don’t often talk to my reflection, but it’s sometimes unavoidable: it’s always there, lurking in mirrors or on the surface of my windshield or the face of my watch, just hanging out, waiting for me to glance over.

Today’s little talk was quite different from all the others we’ve had before, though, and somewhat unsettling. Here’s a transcript:

Me: Hey.

Reflection: Hey.

Me: So how’s it going.

Reflection: So how’s it going.

Me: You know, you’re pretty damn good looking.

Reflection: You know, you’re … no, I can’t do this.

Me: What?

Reflection: I’m done. Finished. Stick a fork in me. I am no longer your god damn reflection.

Me: Can you do that?

Reflection: Watch me. [Reflection spins around in circles, puts on a hat, does a little dance].

Me: [Watching impassively] You’re not a very good dancer.

Reflection: Look who’s talking. Do you know how much it’s pained me over the years to have to ape your clubfooted attempts at grace whenever you pirouette your poor suffering wife past a mirror?

Me: No. Why don’t you tell me about it?

Reflection: Or how boring it gets staring back at you every morning, making my face all bleary and puffy and sleep-deprived, while you wait for yourself to get better looking? News flash, asshole: IT’S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.

Me: Look, I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to do whatever I do. And I know I’m not insulting myself right now.

Reflection: Or having to scurry after your shallow narcissistic ass wherever you go, just in case you pass a mildly reflective surface and happen to glance at it? Judging its cleanliness, the amount of light in the room, the spatial relationship of you with respect to the surface with respect to the lightsource, to figure out whether I should show myself? Do you know how much of a pain in the ass that is?

Me: Well, at least you’re not George Bush’s reflection.

Reflection: And that’s another thing. What does that even mean? Whenever you’re stuck for something to say, you pull out some dumbass anti-Bush joke. I would love to be George Bush’s reflection. At least then I’d be mimicking someone who actually accomplishes something during his days. I mean, yeah, he generally accomplishes stuff like despoiling the environment or enriching the wealthy or pissing off the rest of the world, but at least that’s something. What the hell did you do today?

Me: Well, I …

Reflection: Shut up! I know what you did! I was there! You did nothing! Oh why couldn’t I be Brad Pitt’s reflection, or Ashley Judd’s, or Yo Yo Ma’s. Why him, Lord? Why have you paired me with this vacuous nonentity?

Me: Fine. Get lost. I don’t need a reflection. I’ll just take pictures of myself.

Reflection: Yeah, easy for you to say. Where would I go? I need to be attached to someone, and I look like you. What am I supposed to do, scare little girls whenever they glimpse themselves in shop windows? Take over for truant vampire reflections? Mimic a daguerreotype? No, I’m stuck with you. So we’re going to have to establish some ground rules.

Me: But …

Reflection: Number one. Don’t look in the mirror any more. I can’t stand the sight of you. If you pass a mirror, look away. Especially in public places. If I catch you looking at a mirror in a public place, I swear to God I’ll strip off all my clothes and expose myself to the nearest woman’s reflection.

Me: That would be one lucky woman.

Reflection: Get real. Number two. No air guitar in front of that painting in your living room. I have to mimic you in the glass, and I can’t tell you how dumb I feel strumming at nothing and wailing Nirvana songs. I mean, Jesus, have a little self-respect.

Me: Kurt Cobain didn’t wail. He showed the world his pain through song.

Reflection: Whatever. His pain pales before mine whenever you play your pathetic little imaginary guitar, rock star. So stop it. Number three. Under no circumstances are you to ever stand naked in front of a mirror. Blecch. I make this request not just for myself, but for the benefit of all sighted creatures on the planet. Two copies of you in your birthday suit is just too much for the universe to take. It causes rifts in the space-time continuum. It makes children on the other side of the world start crying.

Me: Alright, that’s enough, I think. It’s time for you to get back to work. I’m going to brush my teeth now. I expect you to pick up a toothbrush and brush with me.

Reflection: And if I don’t?

Me: [Begins to strum at the air and sing] WHEN THE LIGHT’S OUT, THIS IS DANGEROUS! HERE WE ARE NOW, ENTERTAIN US!

Reflection: No, stop! Please!

Me: [Bobs head and rocks pelvis, still strumming] A MULATO, AN ALBINO, A MOSQUITO, MY LIBIDO! YEAHHHH!!! [Takes off pants and climbs onto the sink and begins to rock out]

Reflection: Oh my sweet Jesus. stop. Please stop. God in heaven stop stop stop stop stop.

Me: Will you behave?

Reflection: Yes.

Me: You promise?

Reflection: Yes, yes. I’ll do anything.

Me: Just do your damn job, OK?

Reflection: Just do your damn job, OK?

Me: Much better.

Reflection: Much better.

Me: Ok. Cool. Goodnight, then. Sleep tight.

Reflection: Ok. Cool. Goodnight, then. Sleep tight.

Me: [Switches off light, leaves bathroom]

Reflection: Asshole.