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A brief word on vitriol. I mentioned in my last post that I sent a note to Josh Marshall the other day, objecting to a point he’d made about the Israeli incursion into Lebanon; and then, incredibly, I accused him of being in favor of murdering civilians.

Every time I read over my note, that nasty bit of unsubstantiated, outrageous meanness reaches out and slaps me in the face; and the more I read it, the harder it slaps. It’s punching me now, full roundhouse punches, nose crunching blood-spattering punches. Really, I can’t believe i said it.

I sent him an apology, of course, but the fact remains that the words dribbled out of my fingers and onto the screen without first passing through my decency filter, which I like to think stretches across the aperture of my mind like the Great Wall of China: unporous, impassible, absolute. Don’t know how it got through, but it did.

I agree with what Kevin Drum said recently, about why bloggers — and in particular, liberal bloggers — are so reluctant to post anything about the Middle East:

1. It sparks unusually vicious comment threads, something this blog hardly needs since comments here spin out of control often enough anyway. Needless to say, this phenomenon is fairly universal …

2. As with the conflict itself, punditry is heavily dominated by extremists on both sides. I normally take my cues on subjects I’m inexpert in from people whose sensibilities are similar to mine, but it’s nearly impossible to figure out who those people might be in this case.

Is this me? Is he describing me? One of my policies in life it to always approach a mirror prepared. Know where they are, don’t let them sneak up on you, and when you do look into one, make sure your face is composed into the person you expect to see. Firm up those jowls. Smile pleasantly, or glower handsomely. Don’t slouch.

Reading my note to Josh is like being surprised by a mirror, over and over again, and over and over again seeing someone you’d really rather not be.

I don’t think I’m wrong about what’s going in Lebanon right now. I don’t think I’m wrong about the basic injustice of the Israeli bombardment. I don’t think I’m wrong in my assessment of Bush’s stance on this whole issue.

But still: I wish I could be less unattractively right.

Josh Marshall, the brains behind Talking Points Memo, is one of the best things about the blogoverse. He’s smart, deeply knowledgeable, well-spoken, and just way cool. I often trust him to make up my mind for me.

But, in a recent post about the Israeli attack on Lebanon, he said this:

I think it is correct to see a good part of this as the soundings of groups allied with Syria and Iran, and to a degree acting in concert with him, to strike a new balance of power in the region … With that said, I think Israel is entirely within her right to react strongly to these provocations. [emphasis mine]

He goes on to say that invading Lebanon isn’t a wise thing to do, strategically — which is true. But it’s more than just unwise. It’s reprehensible, nonsensical, indefensible. I just can’t understand the argument that what Israel’s doing is ok, and I doubly can’t understand it coming from Mr Marshall.

I wrote a note to tell him that. Here’s some of what I said:

Lebanon is a sovereign nation, with a functional government that has very little control of the terrorist organization that lives within its borders, and a 3-million strong population of everyday people who have even less to do with them. Israel’s attack on the government and infrastructure of Lebanon isn’t just an overreaction — it’s a complete non-sequitur. It’s unhinged, and it’s almost guaranteed to accomplish the exact opposite of its aims …

I hope I don’t sound unhinged myself here. I lived in Beirut in the 70’s, so I know what it is to be caught in the middle of a larger battle — to be, in every important sense, a battlefield. I certainly don’t mean to trivialize or over-simplify this situation: I know that there are larger forces at play there, historical animosities and political realities expressing themselves through this latest conflict. All I’m saying is that the people of Lebanon are blameless here, and they don’t deserve to have this happen to them. Again.

He wrote back, and very civilly refuted a couple of my more facile arguments, while tactfully failing to mention that, early in my note, I’d essentially accused him of being a fan of murdering civilians. I feel very bad that this is my first correspondence with him. I’m sure he thinks that I’m a crackpot and an asshole, which I probably slightly am, on both counts.

Nevertheless: I don’t think I’m wrong here. Lebanon is triply cursed: they have to contend with Syria’s despotic regime to the North and East, Israels paranoiac jingoism to the South, Hizbullah’s uncompromising extremism within. But no matter what the geopolitical realities are here, the fact remains that Lebanon, and its people, are innocents, and they need someone to stand up for them. Specifically, they need us to stand up for them.

That’s not going to happen, of course. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Bush has no problem with what Israel’s doing, because, you know, the terrorists. His position seems to be “don’t bomb the fuck out of those innocent civilians too much.” Beirut was supposed to be Bush’s big success in the middle east, the first glimmerings of the promised wave of democracy emanating from the carnage in Iraq. Now he’s calmly standing by and watching all of that getting blown to pieces.

Who speaks for Lebanon?

This is being blogged everywhere, but I just can’t resist mentioning it here. Ted Stevens, Senator from Alaska, took it upon himself to describe the Internet to us, in the course of explaining why he’s against Net Neutrality:

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

[...]

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.

It’s a series of tubes.

And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

[...]

Now I think these people are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to consider if they should develop a system themselves.

Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it’s not using what consumers use every day.

It’s not using the messaging service that is essential to small businesses, to our operation of families.

This is possibly one of the funniest, most pathetic displays of proud, wilful ignorance I’ve seen since … well, since Bush last said something, about anything. But it’s hard to laugh too long here, because Stevens and people like him are making actual policy based on their ludicrous misapprehensions.

I don’t have anything against not knowing stuff, because that would make me a hypocrite. You could drive a universe through the vast, ragged holes in my understanding of pretty much everything. But still … I wouldn’t legislate based on my ignorance, and neither should Stevens.

So, yeah, I don’t want or expect him to grasp all the details of how the Internet works. But if he’s going to be making important decisions about the future of what’s arguably the most important communications medium in the world, he should fucking ask somebody.

I met an angel today, in Target.

I was there on important business, toaster over business. The only thing I know how to buy in Target is Advil and Tostitos, so I wondered disconsolately around the first floor for a while, failing to find toaster ovens. This was annoying because I had very important Frappuccino business to transact at the Starbucks down the road, and didn’t have time to fritter away on fruitless appliance expeditions.

So I rode the escalator up to the second floor, and passed a stocky Asian kid loitering at the top, blocking traffic. He didn’t get out of the way, so I had to squeeze around him. This additional annoyance settled on top of the trouble with the toaster oven, propelling me gently into the realm of mild pissiness.

I wondered around the second floor for a while, peering down aisles that didn’t have toaster ovens in them, then spun on my heel and went the other way. I was going past the escalators, lost in speculative Target schematics, kitchen appliance location probability graphs, Frappucino acquisition heuristics, when the Asian kid stepped out in front of me.

“Excuse,” he said, and took my hand. I stopped short, and looked at him, and all of a sudden I couldn’t breathe.

He had soft hands, a round, pleasant face, a placid, serene smile. He looked at me, but not quite at me, his eyes fixed on a point just over my head, radiating friendship, love, peace.

I froze. I couldn’t move. I didn’t know if he needed help, or if he was messing with me, or if he just wanted to hold my hand for a while. I didn’t ask. I didn’t smile. I didn’t do anything.

But he went on holding my hand. The bright fluorescent bustle of Target fell away, and we were in a bubble, the kid’s quiet serenity mixing with the ugly miasma of uncertainty leaking out of me. I was paralyzed, but the kid never stopped smiling.

And then it was over. He let go of me and stepped onto the escalator. I watched him ride down, watched him step off at the bottom and hang around there, studying the moving rubber handrail, letting it slide by under his hands. The whole episode couldn’t have lasted more than a couple of seconds.

After a while, I got on the escalator too. I didn’t know what my motives were, exactly. I didn’t know whether I’d stop and see if he needed help, or take him to wherever you take kids who’ve become detached from their parents … or what. And I’ll never know: before I got down there, a woman came up and touched his arm, and they walked away together, the kid looking around at racks of shorts, folded t-shirts, banks of sunglasses, with a kind of gentle, curious innocence.

I think we each of us meet angels at least once in our lifetimes. They come to us unannounced, when we’re vulnerable and naked, and strip us of the encrustations of adulthood, of all the callused artifice and cynicisms of age. They present themselves to our tenderest, truest selves, and ask: are you ready for this? Are you worthy of it?

I met my angel about an hour ago, at the top of the escalators, in Target, and couldn’t even find the voice to tell him that I wasn’t.

I admire soccer players. All that endless chasing after balls, kicking balls, hitting balls with your head, letting balls glance off your chest. Doing everything you can possibly do with a ball except the one thing you really want to do: pick the fucking thing up.

Seriously, I don’t know how they stand it. It’s unnatural. What if God had issued us all mouths and only let us eat through our noses? What if GM made cars with steering wheels but voided our warranty if we ever actually touched them? What if Prometheus told us that we could only use fire to singe off our eyebrows? We wouldn’t stand for it. And yet soccer players happily subject themselves to exactly this kind of frustration. It’s a global rash of masochism, played out day after day on soccer fields the world over.

Soccer was invented three hundred years ago in Tushanka, a rustic Russian village populated entirely by armless goatherds. For a long time, their lives consisted of little more than eating, sleeping, and teetering after ill-behaved flocks of emaciated goats. Then one day a young goatherd named Igor Radanadan fashioned a primitive ball out of tar and thornbushes, commissioned a couple of fat and lazy goats to act as goalposts, and started kicking the ball between them. Other boys joined him, setting up goat goals a little bit farther down the mountain. A primitive set of rules ensued. Soccer was born.

It stayed in Tushanka for many years, punching tiny thornholes into a whole generation of young Tushankans, until a passing troupe of ascetics, looking for some new way to bring their brand of agony-driven joy to the masses, adopted the sport and took it into Europe. It wasn’t just the thornball they liked — it was the inability to use your hands, exactly the kind of mental torment that made their twisted lives worth living.

The thornball itself fell out of favor, as did many of the original Tushankan rules (the ten minutes of goat-polo after half time, for example), but the central torment remained: no hands.

I think that’s why soccer hasn’t taken hold in America yet: we may be puritanical, but we’re not masochists. We like to pick up our balls. We like to touch them with our hands, like normal people. That’s one reason, anyway. The other reason is that the rest of the world insists on calling the sport “football”, despite the fact that we already have a sport called football. Sure, you’d be hard-pressed to call that pighide ellipse a ball, and, yeah, the vast majority of football players never actually touch the ball with their feet … but we’re America, god damn it! Stop using our names for your degenerate sports!

A third reason soccer hasn’t caught on is because it’s boring. If you go to a basketball game (where it’s illegal to touch the ball with your foot, God bless America) and the score is, say, 64-54, you’d be like, Jesus that game sucked. But then tune into any soccer sports show and watch those sportscasters gush like schoolgirls over a game that went 4-2. 4-2! Oh my god, that’s, like, six total points! In only ninety minutes! It’s like six soccer games all rolled up into one!

This would make sense if you got like a tenth of a point for every goal you score. Or if they subtract a point every time some whiney European “footballer” fakes an injury. But you don’t. You get a full point, and they can’t take it away from you. Even if you’re French.

So I’m forced to conclude that the problem here is that all soccer players suck. I mean, their goals are huge. Ten times wider and ten times higher than a hockey goal. Why can’t these guys score more points? Oh, that’s right: they can’t using their fucking hands.

Madness.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and, in close consultation with others, have come up with several suggestions for making soccer worth watching:

1. Exploding balls. Every ball is packed with explosives, set to go off after it’s been kicked a certain number of times. The kick count is random, of course. This won’t increase the number of points scored, but it’ll dramatically increase the number of players blowing up.

2. Fat Dwarven Goalies. No goalie can be taller than two feet, or lighter than two hundred pounds. This should help alleviate the scoring problem, somewhat, assuming that these incompetents ever manage to foot-hurl the ball in the general direction of their giant goals. The only alternative is to make the goal even bigger, but, come on, rest of the world: isn’t the size of this thing already embarrassing enough?

3. Wild Boars. After twenty minutes of desultory, scoreless play, a pack of angry, hungry, wild boars are released into the field. The players have been pre-smeared with goat-fat (in a nod to this sport’s humble Tushankan origins), rendering them both incompetent and yummy. Again, this will do nothing for the scoring problem, but it’ll be fun to see those guys scampering away from ravenous boars, instead of toward a little ball that they can’t fucking pick up.

I’ve written to FIFA, the organization responsible for perpetuating the tragedy of soccer, with my suggestions. Hopefully they implement them before the the World Cup is over. Because watching exploding boar-pursued athletes is a lot of fun, whether or not they’re using their hands.

The House rejected the Net Neutrality bill last week, a huge blow to the notion of a free internet and a major notch in the belt of the corporate/government megalith that wants desperately to consume the one true egalitarian institution in this country.

What makes this worse is that 58 Democrats voted against the bill … among them, my representative, Albert Wynn. This actually pissed me off enough to write a letter, the first time I’ve ever done that. My usual strategy of carping and spitting apoplectically from the sidelines seemed ill-suited to the occasion.

Anyway. Here’s what I wrote:

Dear Representative Wynn:

It came as a shock to see that you were among the 58 Democrats who voted against the recently rejected Net Neutrality bill … but not as very much of a shock, I’m afraid. I’ve watched in dismay as, over the past couple of years, you’ve voted repeatedly for legislation that favors the agenda of large corporations over the needs — and the rights — of your constituency.

In my mind, the internet embodies the principles on which America was founded: a free-flowing market of information, an egalitarian forum in which the lowliest blogger and the mightiest corporation have identical rights, identical privileges, and identical access to the resources the network makes available.

This kind of freedom is not just one aspect of the internet; it’s woven deeply into its fabric. In a very real sense, it is the internet. So this notion that our networks’ gatekeepers should be allowed to artificially throttle the bandwidth of those sites that cannot pay for the privilege of full access to this public resource — that they should be allowed to impose the same kind of class structure on the internet that plagues so many other aspects of our society — does not just change our world wide web; it destroys it, and replaces it with something else entirely.

Capitalism can be a wonderful thing. It spurs innovation, it imbues entrepreneurs with the kind of drive and ambition that benefits us all, it builds bridges across social classes and economic strata. But unchecked capitalism is a nightmare, because it inevitably allows the very rich to rise to the top of the economic ladder, while the rest of us huddle at the bottom. That’s why we have safeguards in our constitution: antitrust laws, estate taxes and their ilk prevent our country from degenerating into the same kind of aristocracy against which our founders rebelled. I believe that Net Neutrality must be one of those safeguards.

I realize this letter comes to you too late. I wish I’d written it a week ago. But you should know that many of your constituents expect better from their representatives. Your voting record in many other areas is impeccable, and I know that you’ve come down on the right side of issues involving the environment, taxation, and the war in Iraq. But the threat of de-facto hegemonic corporate rule embodied in the rejection of the Net Neutrality legislation — and in many other of Congress’s decisions in recent years — is, I believe, at least as important, and worrisome, as the other issues facing our country today.

I hope you will take this into consideration in your future votes. Thank you.

I suspect that this was a pointless exercise, though, because (a) the letter will arrive too late to make a difference, and (b) Wynn will almost certainly never read it, and (c) if he does read it, he’ll likely discard it as the ravings of one of the crackpot Montgomery County people that were foisted on him during the great gerrymandering of 2002.

But still. It kind of makes me feel better.

Here’s my problem: I can’t sit and read at the same time. There’s something about stillness that shreds my concentration, just completely shatters my ability to focus. It wasn’t always this way. When I was small, I could inhale books no matter what position my body happened to be in.

But then something strange and catastrophic happened. I remember it well. I remember the day, the minute it all ended. I was on the bus, on my way to school, reading an Elfquest comic book. And, though I was mostly engrossed in the story, there was something nagging at me. Some tiny, anonymous kernel of worry, a little pinprick of dark potentiality lurking on the borders of my subconscious. Whispering at me. Saying: “I’m going to stop up your brain, little man. I’m going to take this thing you treasure, that you don’t even know you treasure, and I’m going to coat it with burs and brambles, barbs and thorns. I’m going to dip it in tallow and roll it in tar. I’m going to wrap it in chains and drop it down a well.”

I’d been hearing this vague and inscrutable threat for weeks, but then, right then, it happened: the line of dialogue I was reading dissolved into an atomic, disassociated cloud of letters, an acrostic jumble of meaningless words. I read the sentence again, and again, and again, until finally it sunk in. The same thing happened to the next sentence. And the next. And the next. And to many, many sentences since then.

I don’t know why it happened. I don’t even know if it happened, but suddenly reading became a chore. Every paragraph seemed to burst out of the page like a clutch of startled quail, and getting it all back together was a herculean task, a small miracle of concentration.

It’s gotten a lot better over the years, as I’ve learned various ways around the chaos. But the only method that works consistently is motion. If I walk, or pace, or peddle, I have no problems at all. If I sit, or lie down, or even stand in one place for too long, my mind wanders, or rebels, or just puts me to sleep. It’s a strange little gypsy curse that sends me down sidewalks or twisted forest paths with a book in my hand, marching past the mental barriers that the curse throws up in front of me.

I get my share of ridicule for this, of course. There’s something irresistibly mockable about a guy walking around with his head in a book. I’ve gotten lots of grief from passing motorists: taunts hurled out of speeding cars, coming out of nowhere, stopping my heart, then dopplering away into silence. Harmless, I suppose, but weird. Shouldn’t these people feel some sympathy for my affliction? Why do I have suffer it and their scorn?

Today, some guy in an SUV screamed “Read that book!” as he sped by, a self-appointed literacy drill sergeant barking orders at his brigade of one. This was, sadly, one of the more creative taunts I’ve heard over the years. I usually get inchoate yells, or high-pitched screams, or mock ululations, laced here and there with obscenity.

It could be worse, I suppose. The curse could have made reading possible only if I was hanging upsidedown, or sitting in bathtub full of eels, or snorting carrot juice, or watching Fear Factor. At least I can read. That’s plenty to be thankful of right there. And, really, I’m not sure this whole “transformation” thing isn’t something my mind cooked up on its own, some lost paradise to strive after.

Last week I sat through the worst meeting in the world, and survived. It was a perfect cocktail of all the classic ingredients of unbearable meetings: powerpoint slides packed densely with unreadable text; a droning, inflectionless voice on the other end of a conference call reading those slides, verbatim; crushingly dull subject matter; and a room so full of fellow sufferers that the gravitational pull of peer pressure prevented us from achieving sufficient escape velocity to run screaming from the room.

It lasted an hour and a half, give or take an eternity, and at the end of it everybody rushed out so fast that they set off a little cascade of sonic booms, like popping popcorn. Most people were crying; a few hurled themselves ineffectually at locked and shatterproof windows; a mini-epidemic of epileptic seizures shuddered through the crowd; rational people beat their heads bloody against walls to dislodge the memory of the horror. A corps of grief counselors fanned out through the wailing throngs and administered massive doses of anti-depressants, intravenously.

Most of us survived, but not unscathed. Every so often, when you hear a blood-curdling scream echoing down the halls, or see some poor distraught geek running naked past your office batting at his body sobbing “Get the meeting off me! Get it off me!“, you know that it hasn’t quite gone away. That it’ll never really go away.

But in the spirit of that old maxim, whatever doesn’t kill you will probably get around to killing you eventually, I’ve put together a little list of tips to help the unfortunate prole survive the horror of a company meeting. Follow this guidebook, and you’ll probably get through it, with most of your sanity intact.

1. Visualize a happier time: childhood, a vacation at the beach, your first kiss. Now set that time on fire, and cackle maniacally over its ashes. Do this for the same reason that the retreating Russian army set fire to their cities during WWII: so the enemy can’t get hold of them. Do not let the meeting take control of your precious memories. They will become process zombie recollections, and turn on you, spouting business maxims. Your old girlfriend will pull back from that first kiss, and smile, and say: “Oh Honey. Are you maximizing your vertically leveraged F2F business imperatives?” And then your brain will eat itself. Do not let this happen.

2. Try deep breathing exercises. Not your normal deep breathing: I’m talking about hyperventilation, enough to flood your brain with oxygen and knock you out. Or, at the very least, drown out the droning, horrible voice that holds you captive.

3. Start singing the Star Spangled Banner. This will almost certainly either bring the meeting to halt, or get you ejected. The beauty of this technique is that they can’t make you stop, and they can’t punish you for it. If they do, simply call up the Department of Homeland Security and let them know that your company is quashing your patriotism and attempting to suppress your love of country. This will undoubtedly get some senior executives sent off to Guantanamo, but, hey: this is war. It’s either you or them.

4. Chew off your fingers. Start with the pinky, which isn’t really very useful anyway. The physical pain will dull the mental anguish, and allow you to hold onto your sanity. If you chew slowly enough, you should be able to make that finger last for the duration of a standard two-hour meeting. If the meeting goes longer, move onto the pinky of your other hand, and then inward, toward the thumb. This technique should be used carefully, of course. I’ve known some people stuck in all-day CMM compliance meetings who’ve chewed off whole arms, up to the shoulder. A good rule of thumb is to stop at the elbow. But, you know, you do what you have to.

5. Claw out your eyes. This worked for Oedipus, who blinded himself after he found out that he’d killed his father and had sex with his mother. Of course, sitting through this goddam meeting is probably far worse than incest and patricide, but there are OSHA regulations mandating that companies release employees from meetings in the the event of an eye-clawing-out incident, so this will definitely spring you.

These steps may seem extreme, but, trust me, they’re not. Sometimes your only choices are bad, worse, and unspeakably horrible. Choose bad. Or choose worse. Just don’t let unspeakably horrible happen to you.

Just came back from watching United 93. When I first heard that they were making this movie, I immediately jumped to lots of conclusions: that it would be exploitative, sentimental, sensationalistic. That it would be a callow vehicle for scoring cheap political points. That it would be hastily thrown together and shoddily, disrespectfully made. I was wrong, on every count.

The movie treats the story of that flight the way it deserves to be treated: unflinchingly. It gives us the confusion of that day, the horror, the insanity, the tragedy, without a whiff of sensationalism or sentimentality. The characters aren’t puffed up with backstories; we aren’t prodded to shed any tears; aren’t guided toward any conclusions. And when the movie ended, in the way that it had to end, I sat dumbstruck, staring, feeling the tragedy of that day more viscerally than I had on the day itself.

I can’t recommend this movie highly enough.

An article in today’s New York Times, puts the blame for the NSA’s post-9/11 surveillance practices squarely on Dick Cheney’s shoulders:

In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser argued that the National Security Agency should intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants in the hunt for terrorists, according to two senior intelligence officials.

---

On one side was a strong-willed vice president and his longtime legal adviser, David S. Addington, who believed that the Constitution permitted spy agencies to take sweeping measures to defend the country. Later, Mr. Cheney would personally arrange tightly controlled briefings on the program for select members of Congress.

On the other side were some lawyers and officials at the largest American intelligence agency, which was battered by eavesdropping scandals in the 1970’s and has since wielded its powerful technology with extreme care to avoid accusations of spying on Americans.

I have no doubt that Cheney and his deputies were instrumental in getting this program going. Still, I’m suspicious: we’ve seen lots of articles like this recently, deflecting the blame for various governmental outrages toward the office of the Vice President. If we are to believe the anonymous sources that pepper these stories, Cheney is responsible for all the dark clouds of evil that have billowed out of this administration for the past six years. He’s like a black hole of malfeasance, a gravity well that swallows all misdeeds; that bends the weft of misdeed-space around him.

And really, he’s the perfect sop. His approval ratings are approaching negative levels anyway, and it’s clear that Bush has no plans to get rid of him. Why not blame everything on Cheney?

Don’t buy it. There are many, many players in this scandal: in the White House, in Congress, in the corporations that this government has all but merged with. Cheney is the most visible, and possibly the worst. But he’s not the only one. Not by a long shot.