Thoughts on culture, politics, music and stuff by Eric Olsen, Marty Thau and Mike Crooker, who are among other things, producers.

 
All to Sell Beer to Minorities?
Here is the latest word on Marty's battle with Heineken over his Red Star label name from the antiMUSIC site - push is coming to shove:

Whether a company wants to market to a certain demographic, be it an age group, an ethnic group etc, is another issue entirely, the problem here is their attempt in trying to cloak their marketing efforts by claiming it is a goodhearted attempt to help a minority group of recording artists, which is appalling. That and the main fact that remains here, Marty Thau established Red Star Records in 1977 and since then the label has a reputation as representing a certain genre of music, now we have a major record company diluting his brand name and reputation and then trying to excuse it by claiming to help minority-recording artists? It doesn’t add up. I hope Marty wins his battle with Epic and Heineken, and the people responsible for the ludicrous statements reportedly made to Marty about using the Red Star name to promote Urban artists are ashamed of themselves. Come on people, these people want to make money and sell beer; it has nothing to do with helping anyone but themselves! They are in business to make money, there is nothing wrong with that, so why try and lie about their intentions?

With that claim in mind, I will leave you with a statement RIAA President and Chief Executive Officer Hilary Rosen made in March of 2001, “It comes as no surprise to see the gain rap and hip-hop has made when you consider that all of our major record labels produced many successful multi-platinum albums of the genre throughout the year".

P.S. Let's not forget the ultimate platform at the label's disposal to promote urban artists, MTV! They don't seem to have any difficulty getting coverage there and a few well placed Heineken commercials on the network would surely be a way to expose urban artists but it would also be an excellent vehicle to sell beer to a predominantly under legal drinking age audience. Humm, interesting thought there.

posted by Anonymous at 10:25 PM

 
Keen Vision
Matt Moore at the extravagantly polysyllabic The Blog of the Century of the Week has been doing some penetrating peering into blogland lately: this post points out that measurements of the importance of blogs must be calculated in both directions - not just on the audience, but also on bloggers. This one compares the penile throw-weight of bloggers who see themselves as part of a community (the great Matt Welch) and those who don't (others). Moore sees blogging as "recursive, meta, and karmic." He is exactly right.

This post examines the gripping topic of pudendal aeration and its application vis-a-vis dissembling emigrants: these are must-reads.
posted by Anonymous at 10:01 PM

 
"Homophobe, You're a Homophobe"
The always provocative Jim Treacher has the gayest of polls up on his site right now (scroll down on the left). It is both hilarious and sagacious.
posted by Anonymous at 9:47 PM

 
Preening Sontag
We got a great and far-ranging letter from new friend Gary Gissing who was rummaging around in the archives:

Hi Eric,
Love your blog, and was poking around and read that horrid Terry Eagleton piece linked from a few weeks ago. Interesting that European academics have found new sport in insulting Americans with such blithe merriment and watching their American counterparts piggy back and condemn us, too, out of fear of not seeming international and cosmopolitan. Eagleton is a quintessential academic; btw, has spent his whole tiresome life in it; his distinction between 'intellectual' and 'academic' is wish-fulfillment.

But I have to object to your characterization of Susan Sontag's attitude as "reflexive self-hatred". When people talk as she does, they are demonstrating that they are "different" from the people they think should hate themselves (like patriotic Americans, for instance.) Likewise, Terry Eagleton thinks I should hate myself because I am an American (from Britain originally, came when I was 14), unless I agree with Eagleton himself, in which case I am an exception who uses his thought to break free from dependence upon American patriotism. It is simply too stupid an imputation for even a career academic to make, and he is vile for it.

Sontag similarly pretends that people who want to die and smush thousands of unarmed innocents with jet planes, are as courageous as those who don't want to die and risk (or sacrifice) their lives saving others. And as a rich white person, her condemnations of white people as a 'cancer' do not at all suggest self-hatred but preening of the most disgusting kind (perhaps a rich, Euro-steeped white person kind? I bet Eagleton, a white guy, thinks such crap passes for "radical politics" even outside his beloved academe.)

If you read the obsequious article about Sontag herself that appeared last year (by a lifelong friend of hers) in the New Yorker, you might note that she actually lives like the wealthy darling she is, at least when she isn't travelling to academic confrences devoted to her, or to art shows and other events she rewards with her presence. She doesn't feel anything like self-hatred, any more than other penthoused jet-setting millionaires hungry for Euro-status feel it. And this schmoozing is typical of those trying to stay famous. Eagleton recently dedicated a book to Edward Said, just in case people forget about Eagleton himself (who had spent most of his career doing Marxish literary criticism, until it became passe, and has had to work furiously to remain contemporary.)

Sorry, but 'reflexive self-hatred' is what she expects icky average people to feel; even Camille Paglia, not exactly Ms Modest, laughs at Sontag's preening and her groupie entourage. And no matter how often she hangs out in the Balkans, she's no Rebecca West, which I hope eats at her. Hating the US when you are a "a devout Europhile", in Eagelton's phrase, is to despise those whom you regard as different from yourself. I'm tempted to call it a prejudice, but these types claim to loathe prejudice more than icky prejudiced people (Americans) do, what with their patriotism and not being European.

Anyway, I greatly admire your site, and thought the 9/11 piece, re the impact of concepts of time as it relates to the terrorist attacks, was terrific. I love McTaggart's stuff stuff ever since university.
Best Wishes
Gary Gissing

I think Gary is right about Sontag - my previous take was too shallow and pat, and anyone who likes my "9/11 and Time" post must be damn perspicacious. Thanks Gary!
posted by Anonymous at 9:24 PM

 
"Real" Women
I was snagging my ticket at the entrance to the Ohio Turnpike yesterday when I saw this sticker on the booth: "Cleveland Fusion: Real Women Real Football." My first thought was real women as opposed to what, holograms? My next thought was, where have I been? I hadn't heard a thing about a women's football league. My next thought was, putting stickers on turnpike booths is a damn good marketing idea.

My curiosity piqued, I started snooping around. There is an actual Nation Women's Football League and it began in 2000:

The NWFL was formed in August, 2000 by well known sports and entertainment entrepreneur, Catherine Masters. Masters who has more than 25 years experience in the top levels of these industries, decided it was time for women to have the chance to play full contact football in a well organized and professionally run league.

Starting with two teams, the Nashville Dream and the Alabama Renegades, the league held a pre-season showcase of six games. This pre-season ran from October 14,2000 until December 2, 2000. The pre-season was a rousing success with thousands of fans in the stands and incredible support from the media worldwide.

Between January and March of 2001, Masters added an another 8 teams bringing the total of teams for the 2001 season to 10. These 10 teams played a wild and wooly season with the Philadelphia Liberty Belles barely beating the Mass Mutiny for a chance to play the Pensacola Power in the league's first championship. More than 5,000 fans packed the stands at the championship game where the Belles blew out the Power 40-7.

Then, between August, 2001 and November 2001, Masters added another 11 teams bringing the total of teams gearing up for the 2002 season to 21. One of the new owners now are part of the NWFL is world famous boxer, Roy Jones, Jr. These 21 teams play in five divisions. Additional teams are already being sold for the 2003 season. The NWFL has been the subject of a great deal of attention from the media and articles or stories have appeared in more than 250 newspapers, magazines, TV and radio programs.

None of which had I ever seen. I'm either not following women or football closely enough.

I started boning up on the league, reading articles and team websites, including our very own Cleveland Fusion, which just began play this year. The Plain Dealer ran a story last week that I somehow missed:

They don't play like the Cleveland Browns or the Ohio State Buckeyes or even a championship boys high school football team.

But the Cleveland Fusion are out to prove they're a competitive and entertaining women's professional football team that can attract loyal fans.

They got off to a good start last night when they won their first home game in their inaugural season in the National Women's Football League in front of 1,863 fans at a chilly Bedford Stadium. They beat the Southwest Michigan Jaguars, 18-0, on a cloudy, cold night that felt more like October than May.

Doing my research, I noted that the preponderance of players profiled in the articles and on the team sites are MOTHERS, and that the Fusion's logo features a woman's hand on a football with PAINTED FINGERNAILS: those things coupled with the league motto, "Real Women Real Football," makes it pretty clear that what they are trying to convey is WE AREN'T A BUNCH OF LAND ROVER, STEROID-FREAK DYKES - WE ARE REAL WOMEN WHO HAPPEN TO LIKE FOOTBALL.

The whole women's sports thing is very delicate as it is. We are willing to support women as athletes, and we want them to be competitive and skillful, but we also don't want them to be men. We want them to be the best they can be but in a ladylike manner. We just don't think it's cricket when women don't look like women anymore and become athletes first and women second. We like that grace part, that's why the most popular women's sports still value femininity: figure skating, gymnastics, diving; even basketball, soccer, and volleyball emphasize grace and skill above brute force and aggression.

If we want brute force and aggression we might as well watch men because they are going to be better at it anyway. The individual pro sports like tennis and golf bear out these rules as well. Who is the most popular woman tennis player? Anna Kournikova, and it has VERY little to do with her tennis ability. I mean on the one hand it's pretty remarkable a babe this hot can chew gum without breaking a nail, but this one can play tennis well enough to be the 55th best woman in the world (she has been as high as 9th).

But on the other hand, she is ONLY the 55th best woman player in the world: shouldn't we know the 54 ahead of her better? I admit that although I am a pretty big sports fan, I am not much of a tennis fan; even so, I find it alarming that moving up the list from Anna, the names look like a seeing eye chart to me until you get up into the top 10. Who are these people? Damn fine tennis players I'm sure, but anonymous toilers to me because they are just tennis players.

We are interested in Anna because she is a babe who happens to be a tennis player - our priority is on the babe part. All we really care about the tennis part is that she be good enough to stay competitive. She is an embarrassment of sorts to the Women's Tour because she is so popular yet so mediocre - why isn't it about the tennis?

It isn't about the tennis because this world still values spectacular femininity above athletic ability in a woman. Hence the the dual marketing of women's sports as both competitive AND feminine. If the women's FOOTBALL league is emphasizing femininity, then you know this is still a major issue. As "Beez" Schnell puts it:

When female athletes are the focus of media attention, the images often sexualize and trivialize their efforts. This lack of representation combined with stereotypical depictions may lead many to believe that few women are interested in sports and those who do participate are successful only when they “fit” traditional standards of appropriate female behavior.

What We See: The Sexualization of Women Athletes
In written texts, visual images, and spoken commentaries, women athletes are often portrayed as sexual objects available for male consumption rather than as competitive athletes. For example, the June 5, 2000 Sports Illustrated cover and several inside photographs of tennis player, Anna Kournikova, show her posing seductively for the camera in her off-court wear. When notable female athletes are not pictured, pretty models are often used to portray “ideal” feminine athleticism or represent society’s traditional notions of women’s role in sport (passive, non-competitive, weak, and emotional). Such portrayals create an image of a “heterosexy” (Griffin, 1998) female athlete who can be athletic while maintaining heterosexual sex appeal. This ultra-sexy image underscores physical beauty and femininity more so than athletic skill, power, and strength.

One way media may sexualize women athletes is by focusing on their physical appearance. Characteristics favored in visual media are those commonly associated with feminine beauty, such as smiling, unblemished skin, slender and toned physique, and long blonde hair. Generally, the content of sport photographs suggests that only the most glamorous women athletes are worthy of being pictured, and their nonactive poses often resemble soft-core pornography (Duncan, 1990). My recent investigation into the now-defunct CN/WS&F magazine revealed that most covers and story photographs featured white, slender models wearing scanty fitness clothes exposing those body parts equated with feminine sexuality, such as thighs, abdominals, cleavage, and buttocks. Such images divert attention from women’s achievements as serious athletes and reinforce misguided assumptions that women in sport are noncompetitive and interested only in sex-appropriate sport.

I think we know for which team "Beez" is playing, but that isn't the point. This woman fairly spits out the name "Anna Kournikova."

Much HAS changed: women are allowed to be competitive, muscular within reason, focused on sport. That's okay, even admirable. But the athletes are still supposed to be "Real Women" first and foremost - even in football. That won't change anytime soon.
posted by Anonymous at 7:24 PM

 
It's a Charleston
This afternoon we cruised on over to Ravenna to meet with Wayne Homes, "Building Better for Less," about converting our 3 1/2 acre wooded lot in Aurora into the new homestead. We started with this plan - four bedrooms, a basement, and not living in a shithole next to neo-Nazi snowmobilers being our main stipulations.

Let me tell you, the model homes are mighty nice - I especially love the hollow books and ceramic puppy next to the dog food bowl - and the Wayne people are friendly with a capital "F," but this being the real world, when you sit down and answer "yes" to such questions as "Do you want a front door?" and "Do you want a driveway or muddy ruts?" then the $125,500 model comes in around $165,000.

It's everything we could reasonably want right now, its neighbors all run $300K+, so what the hell? You only live once and we are all really, really ready to move on from our current flophouse and become real homeowners in the real world with our own sinks and driveway and stuff - yippee! - so it's time to bite the bullet and make the commitment.

You guys are going to have to do a WAY better job of hitting the PayPal button over there on the left, though. We are counting on the old Tres Producers tip jar to cover the toilet paper dispensers for our two new bathrooms. So get on it, please, we move in before Christmas.
posted by Anonymous at 6:46 PM

 
Very Exciting Day
We are going to meet with the builder ABOUT OUR NEW HOUSE - very exciting. Back later with info. Lot's of other interesting things going on as well - please check back later this afternoon. Thanks!
posted by Anonymous at 1:24 PM

 
It Would Appear the Slump Is Over
I still bleed Dodger Blue now and then:

Shawn Green came to the land of beer and bratwurst mired in the worst slump of his eight-year career, a season-long slide that punctured his reputation as one of the game's premier power hitters, shattered his confidence and prompted fans in Dodger Stadium to boo him during the last home stand.

The Dodger right fielder left Milwaukee on Thursday with his name etched alongside Hall of Famers such as Lou Gehrig, Willie Mays and Mike Schmidt and plastered all over baseball's record books.

Green enjoyed one of the most prolific single-game performances in baseball history, smashing four home runs and amassing a major league-record 19 total bases to lead the Dodgers to a 16-3 shellacking of the Milwaukee Brewers before 26,728 in Miller Park.

posted by Anonymous at 11:12 PM

 
Creepier and Creepier
This is a day of repressed memories zigzagging to the surface like gas in a swamp. On my way back from taping the radio show this afternoon, a kid ran right out in front of me. I had just pulled forward from a light, so I was able to slam on my brakes and stop short of him. He gave an odd little smile and I had a total flashback.

I have mentioned before that I went to college at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. "America's quiet surprise" was selected as Newsweek's "Typical American City" in 1981, a couple years after I left. An entire issue was devoted to an exhaustive examination of the town.

While Springfield doubtless exemplifies Middle America, Middle America isn't all barbershop quartets and ice cream socials. When I was there in the mid-to-late '70s, Springfield featured a cult in the cemetery, clusters of inhumanly pale townspeople, shootings, rapes, fires (not just mine); and credible reports of oily sexual liaisons involving odd numbers of people and kitchen utensils.

Toward the beginning of my sophomore year, there was a series of puzzling incidents in the cemetery that abutted the west end the school: graves were desecrated, charred animal remains were found in various states of dismemberment, cryptic symbols were found throughout the hilly necropolis.

The school's rumor mill churned: witchcraft, satanic worship, a Jean Dixon prediction of ritualistic murder near a small Midwestern school (it didn't happen), frightened virgins, frightened libertines, networks of caves, trapdoors and secret passageways under school buildings.

This all led to one ripsnorting Halloween in the old graveyard as dozens of costumed snoops sneaked around with butterflies in their stomachs and chemicals in their bloodstreams, endeavoring to espy diabolical perpetrators. This heady confluence produced little but an overwhelming flow of young adult hormones. The police were puzzled by the Great Halloween Cemetery Fornication Epidemic of 1976.

Bright and early the next afternoon, All Saint's Day, my girlfriend and I sought to tether ourselves to the real world with an across-town trip to a favorite pizza haven for a becalming lunch. We ate uneventfully and headed back to school in my late grandmother's Mercury. She had only been gone a year and I thought fondly of her often, especially riding in her car.

A few blocks from the pizza place, I peripherally noted a figure ahead on the sidewalk out of the corner of my left eye. I glanced toward the figure. The sky was cloudless, but the light was washed-out like the sun wasn't trying very hard. The woman was short, boxy, and middle-aged, of featureless commonality.

I returned my attention to the road as we traveled between lights at a leisurely 20 mph. I glanced compulsively over at the woman with an inexplicable apprehension as we drew nearer to her.

Her face transformed into a hideous, frozen rictus; her enormous blank eyes bore through the protective barriers of speed, steel and glass, through my eyes and into the back of my skull with the force of pure evil.

I was transfixed in the malevolent, grinning gaze. I knew I had to look at the road, guide the car, get past the glaring evil. I couldn't TURN MY HEAD. My girlfriend, panicked, screamed, "Look out, what the hell are you doing?" The eyes released mine just in time for me to swerve back into my own lane, barely avoiding a honking, gesticulating, oncoming car.

The huge dead eyes then seemed to fix on the grill of my car, and the woman dashed right for us: the eyes wanted death, their own or ours.

My girlfriend screamed impressively; I stomped down on the brakes with both feet; they squealed as we lurched to the left to avoid the kamikaze zombie. She careened off of the front right grill and off to the right as we skidded past.

I shouted in fear and surprise; my girlfriend screamed then croaked out: "Her eyes, her eyes, her eyes..."

In a panic, I peered in the rearview mirror, where the eyes once again met mine. They narrowed a bit into circles of contempt as the woman's lips pulled completely back to reveal huge, cruel teeth as she shook with sickening silent laughter and waved us on. I looked around for some confirmation of this hellish visitation: no pedestrians, no cars in sight. I righted the car and looked back again. The woman was gone.

My girlfriend and I looked over at each other - a look of disbelief - but we knew we had just been confronted by the demonic. I believe in God because I have seen the face of a devil.
posted by Anonymous at 6:39 PM

 
Spooky
For various reasons - my daughter Kristen graduating from high school in a couple of weeks, our upcoming family reunion in Hawaii, the passage of time - I have been thinking about my childhood quite a bit lately.

Yesterday in the car I was flipping around the radio dial and somehow ended up on the oldies station, which is a very rare occurrence: they play the same songs over and over just like everyone else and I am very resentful that these great songs have had the juice drained from them do to promiscuous overplay.

On the other hand, it's not the song's fault; so once in a while I drop the attitude (I've had a bad attitude all week it is only fair to mention) and just dig on the tunes, most of which have worn deep, deep grooves into my psyche, like running water carving rock.

All the songs fit comfortably into their nested grooves until the spare, insinuating, literally haunting opening guitar riff of "Spooky"by the Classics IV (which is also on the new Six Feet Under soundtrack) came on - "daa-da-daa da-da-daa, daa-da-daa da-da-daa."

The song has always creeped me out, but this time it really disturbed me. It bugged me so much I was going to pull over and try to figure it out, but then the memory came back to me while I sat at a light.

I knew a boy at South Shores elementary school who sang "Spooky" incessantly for months after its release in late 1967. He drew attention to himself and fit in - of a sort - by singing songs or reciting comedy bits upon demand: a court jester for elementary kids. Even younger kids commanded performances, and he complied:

"In the cool of the evening when everything is getting kind of groovy..."

He also sang the Spiderman theme from the cartoon:

"Spiderman, Spiderman, does whatever a spider can,
Spins a web, any size, catches theives just like flies,
Look out! Here comes the Spiderman."

He knew all of the lines to the Bill Cosby monologues: "Fat Albert, Hey, Hey, Hey." He was unable or unwilling to communicate without borrowed words. Kids laughed with him, but mostly they laughed at him. He had a kind of unformed look, like the DNA didn't quite line up the way it is supposed to. He wore big thick glasses; his mouth always had flecks of saliva around it; his clothes never fit right. The boy was small, but some whispered he possessed the superhuman strength of the disturbed. The children were, truth be known, a little afraid of him.

The boy's mother was dead. He lived with his father, who was of grandfatherly age, and an almost grown brother. The year after "Spooky" came out we went on to junior high. I saw him occasionally on the grounds of the enormous school, but he averted his eyes against the embarrassment of recognition. The boy was always alone, off in a far flung corner of the school grounds. Once I was startled to see him crouched down between two bungalows nibbling on something he held between his hands.

We moved to Ohio when I was 14; friends told me about this when I visited about a year later:

One sunny Sunday, shortly after his 15th birthday, the boy told his father and brother that he wasn't feeling up to going to church. As his elders drove off, the boy reached deep into the hall closet for his father's shotgun. He could still barely reach the closet shelf on his tippy toes.

The keys were in the ignition of the other car. He had never driven before. The boy managed to back the car out of the garage and onto the street. He had watched his father do it a million times, and he had a real good memory. He hummed a song, his favorite.

The boy drove down the hill into San Pedro, careful to obey all of the traffic signs. Then he robbed a liquor store. Just like a real robber. The boy pulled the shotgun from inside his big overcoat like Clint Eastwood and made the clerk put all of the money from the cash register and put it into a paper bag. Just like a real robber. He startled the clerk - who had never been robbed by a small bespectacled white boy before - more than a little.

Then things went wrong. The clerk didn't stay down like the boy told him to do. As the boy backed out of the store, the clerk came running out of the store screaming like a mad man: "Stop! Thief! Police! Stop!"

The boy didn't know how much money was in the bag, but it felt good and heavy.

He peeled out of the lot, tires squealing, kicking up gravel into the caterwauling clerk's face. He headed toward the freeway.

"Cops! They're right behind me."

He ran the lights, swerving around bewildered drivers as he had recently seen Gene Hackman do in The French Connection. He felt great, exhilarated even.

"Nya coppers. You'll never get me alive."

The boy/robber careened onto the freeway on-ramp, just missing a woman pushing a grocery cart. There was more than one cop car behind him now. The speedomoter read 60, 70, 85, 95. He thought of the words to "Hot Rod Lincoln":

"Pulled out of San Pedro late one night,
The moon and stars were shing bright,
Rolling up grapevine hill,
Passing cars like they were standing still."

There were cops up ahead now, too. They were blocking the road. The boy veered across the median at 85 and up onto the other side of the freeway. Cars were coming at him now and scattering and honking like huge metallic geese. He wrenched the wheel back toward the median and back onto the right side of the freeway.

"Hah, hah, hah, you filthy coppers."

No spittle filled the corners of his mouth. He drove for miles, ten, then fifteen at speeds in excess of 100 mph. "This is fun!" They would probably have to give him his license early after this demonstration!

The cops had the road blocked ahead of him again, and they were on either side of him. He slammed the brakes as the world whirled around and past him. He skidded, almost rolled, and ended up on the median again.

He leapt out of the car on the passenger's side so that the car was between him and the gathering horde of police. They looked agitated. He got the gun out of the back seat to show them that it was empty. He'd give the money back. He didn't care about that now. Look at what he'd done! This was the coolest day of his life. He held the gun up to show the police that it was empty. He turned toward the police and yelled something.

No one heard what the boy yelled because several policemen opened fire on him simultaneously. The police ran up to the bent bloody boy. He looked very young. The empty shotgun lay cracked open at his side. He gestured to a female officer to come closer. The policewoman bent her ear to the mouth that sprayed red bubbles on her left cheek:

"Love is kinda crazy with a spooky little girl like you..."

Then he died.

posted by Anonymous at 8:55 AM

 
Campaign
Granted: this hasn't been my sexiest week, but I promise to be sexier in word and deed in the future. A vote for me is a vote for a sexy way of life, and since most of the other nominees have solicited votes, it is time for me - a team player - to do the same. Thank you for your time.
posted by Anonymous at 8:43 AM

 
"Partisanship and Gamesmanship"
Oliver Willis has a thought-provoking and very fine post on the War on Terrorism, George W. Bush, and (unpopular in blogland) Tom Daschle:

In the aftermath of 9.11, Americans of all political persuasions looked towards George W. Bush to provide leadership. First for compassion and to vocalize a sense of national anguish and anger, then to plot out the course of action over the ensuing months.

While some like myself felt he would falter, he didn't. Perhaps when allowed outside of the Fleischer-Hughes spin corridor, Bush was able to portray actual emotion. His emergency speech to a joint session of congress explained that the goal of military operations was to eliminate and nullify the forces of Al Qaeda's globe-spanning operation. To this day he continues to receive bipartisan support in pursuit of this goal.

On the other hand, George Bush has utterly failed to lead when voices stand up and ask for a game plan with regards to a long term plan to combat terror. When Senator Tom Daschle dared to ask what our specific objectives were (straight out of Secretary of State Powell's war doctrine), he was shouted down for the preposterous charge of giving "aid and comfort" to the enemy.

These transparent attempts to obfuscate the activities of the Bush administration have reached a fevered pitch now, and the life of every American lies in the balance. Our security and intelligence infrastructure is clearly broken. Agencies either do not do their job with any level of competency (INS) or refuse to communicate over asinine turf wars (CIA, FBI). Other agencies have huge budgets but no power or specified role to play, like the Office of Homeland Security. While it was possible under Clinton's presidency to prevent terrorist attacks on the eve of the millenium, both the attack on the USS Cole and the bombing of the World Trade Center occured. Reaching back, America suffered the bombing of the marine barracks under Reagan's watch.

Bush's attempts to downplay criticism of these agencies and the actions of his administration when given relevant information are almost pathetic. The threat of terror this week may or may not be higher than in previous weeks, but it comes across as a straight out attempt to "wag the dog". GOP operatives who claim criticism of intelligence failures blame 9.11 on George Bush insult and endager Americans. This is not a Democrat or Republican problem. This is an American problem. Our tax dollars, and most importantly our faith are invested in these agencies and the executive office working together to protect us, and ensure the future growth of our country.

The activities of the intelligence/law enforcement agencies, in concert with how that information was acted upon by the Clinton/Bush/Bush/Reagan administrations must be investigated and remedied. Partisanship and gamesmanship have their place in numerous domestic and other policies, but none in security. President Bush must stand before America as he did in the days after 9.11 and explain that the entire apparatus will be picked apart and investigated, that real change will be made to protect the American people.

Repeated attempts to portray anyone who has the sense to recognize our infrastructure has problems as "dangerous" or "unAmerican" are acts in themselves I would consider treasonous. Attempts to continue the game of business as usual in Washington, not learning the lessons of September 11, puts the blood of innocents on all of our hands.

posted by Anonymous at 2:53 PM

 
Tour O the Blogs - Virginia Postrel
Virginia Postrel, the "dynamist," is one of our most serious, creative, and independent thinkers. Camille Paglia has called her "one of the smartest women in America." She is also a great blogger. Neither a Cassandra nor a Polyanna, her eye is clear and her voice speaks with the force of, appropriately enough, reason.

I am very drawn to Postrel's "dynamism" thesis - the basis of her exceptional book The Future and Its Enemies - which deals with the criticality of allowing for a socio-cultural infrastructure committed to open-ended experimentation. Only in this environment can the fruits of serendipity benefit humankind. As the synopsis of the book states:

In areas of endeavor ranging from fashion to fisheries, from movies to medicine, from contact lenses to computers, she shows how and why unplanned, open-ended trial and error - not conformity to one central vision - is the key to human betterment. Thus, the true enemies of humanity's future are those who insist on prescribing outcomes in advance, circumventing the process of competition and experiment in favor of their own preconceptions and prejudices.

Postrel argues that these conflicting views of progress, rather than the traditional left and right, increasingly define our political and cultural debate. On one side, she identifies a collection of strange bedfellows: Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader standing shoulder to shoulder against international trade; "right-wing" nativists and "left-wing" environmentalists opposing immigration; traditionalists and technocrats denouncing Wal-Mart, biotechnology, the Internet, and suburban "sprawl." Some prefer a pre-industrial past, while others envision a bureaucratically engineered future, but all share a devotion to what she calls "stasis," a controlled, uniform society that changes only with permission from some central authority.

On the other side is an emerging coalition in support of what Postrel calls "dynamism": an open-ended society where creativity and enterprise, operating under predictable rules, generate progress in unpredictable ways. Dynamists are united not by a single political agenda but by an appreciation for such complex evolutionary processes as scientific inquiry, market competition, artistic development, and technological invention. Entrepreneurs and artists, scientists and legal theorists, cultural analysts and computer programmers, dynamists are, says Postrel, "the party of life."

Postrel's vision has visceral appeal for me and sheds light on some of my own predispositions and prejudices. It explains why I found the "planning" courses in my major of political science so sterile and dull. What could be more tedious than a "planned community"? Among the most lifeless and dull human beings I have ever met was my "Urban Planning" professor.

Planning for outcome rather than creating a structure in which an open-ended future can be best allowed to create itself is the surest way to stultify Postrel's "party of life." This is the real fatal flaw of communism, even more so than its human nature disincentive to achievement: the "party," the effervescence and energy that makes life fun and exciting is crushed by the attempt to preordain a collective outcome. Her example from the book's introduction is instructive:

In May 1998, for the third time in its history, Disneyland opened a revamped Tomorrowland. It didn't just add an attraction or two. It reimagined the future. Gone is the impersonal chrome and steel of the old buildings, along with the Mission to Mars ride, the PeopleMover, and the Circle-Vision theater. In their place is a kinder, gentler tomorrow where the buildings are decorated in lush jewel tones and the gardens are filled with fruit trees and edible plants. Tomorrowland still has spaceships aplenty - the new Rocket Rods ride is the fastest in the park - but it hasn't shut out things that grow.

Nor has it jettisoned the past to make way for the future. Just as the food plants connect human beings with nature, the new attractions connect yesterday and tomorrow. The area's design draws on the long-ago visions of Jules Verne and Leonardo da Vinci, and Tomorrowland has restored some of its own history, its new restaurant is decorated with posters of 1960s rides, and Disney has rebuilt the classic Buck Rogers-style Moonliner rocket it once dumped as out-of-date.

...Rather than prescribing a single ideal, the "one best way" to progress, the park offers a "culture of futures" that celebrates many different visions, both historical and contemporary. The goal, says Baxter, "is to get your dream machine working in your mind, rather than turning you off by creating a clinically sterile future."

The old modernist ideal was indeed too sterile for most tastes. Real people don't want to live in generic high-rise apartments and walk their dogs on treadmills, à la The Jetsons. Real people want some connection to the past and to the natural world. And Disneyland is in the business of catering to real people. It can't force customers to embrace its favorite future. All the park can do is propose possible futures and test them against the public's own dreams. When those dreams change, or the present becomes too much like "the future," Tomorrowland has to change too. "It is always right when you do it," says Bruce Gordon, who headed construction of the new Tomorrowland. "The question is, How long will it last?"

Postrel rightfully lauds the Disney people for allowing this to happen, for allowing their creation to be organic and alive.

Outside Disneyland's walls, too, the future is alive. Like the present, the future is not a single, uniform state but an ongoing process that reflects the plenitude of human life. There is in fact no single future; "the" future encompasses the many microfutures of individuals and their associations....As a system, the future is natural, out of anyone's control, though it is driven by the artificial: by individual attempts (including Disneyland) to fashion realms of personal control. This open-ended future can't be contained in the vision of a single person or organization. And, as Judith Adams says of technology, it is something we can never be caught up with.

How we feel about the evolving future tells us who we are as individuals and as a civilization: Do we search for stasis—a regulated, engineered world? Or do we embrace dynamism—a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition? Do we value stability and control, or evolution and learning?

Postrel's vision has stark political ramifications:

Our conventional left-right categories don't work on a lot of very hot issues. They don't tell us why Pat Buchanan and Jeremy Rifkin can go on Crossfire and spend the whole show agreeing with each other that the future looks bleak and economic change is dangerous. They don't explain why "left-wing" environmentalists and "right-wing" nativists both oppose immigration. They don't tell us why people on both the left and the right are denouncing popular culture, Wal-Mart, international trade, and the Internet. And they don't explain why you also have a left-right convergence in the opposite direction: "conservatives" and "liberals" who support open markets, technological innovation, new media competition, or a simpler, less manipulative tax code. The old categories don't explain why both the left and the right seem to have cracked up. Something important is going on that conventional political and cultural analysts are missing.

Postrel's worldview also has profound implications for the absolute cultural divisions brought excruciatingly to light by the events of September 11:

Then you have the stasists who absolutely hate the idea of progress, who are determined to keep the world's peasants yoked behind their water buffalo for all eternity. That's profoundly inhumane. They dress it up in pretty prose, but what the stasist ideal of "stability" offers is poverty, disease, ignorance, and death.

Pretty well sums up much of the Islamic world, and the entirety of the world the Islamist would impose upon us given the chance.

Given her stated worldview, it is only natural that Postrel would take to the interactive, developing dynamic that is the Internet as exemplified by blogs. She is a natural. Another natural outgrowth of her philosophy is the Franklin Society, which she founded. Their manifesto states:

The Franklin Society is a group of individuals who support the American tradition of free scientific inquiry and technological innovation in the pursuit of knowledge and the betterment of human life.

Along with more traditional means, we use the 21st-century version of Benjamin Franklin's printing press, the Internet, to engage in pamphleteering, petitioning, and other forms of activism in defense of freedom of inquiry and innovation.

...Our current project is a campaign against efforts to criminalize somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), colloquially known as "therapeutic cloning." The Senate will soon vote on legislation to make cloning human cells a crime punishable by up to 10 years in federal prison. This bill, a version of which has already passed the House, would also make it a crime to import therapies or receive treatments developed abroad using this technique. You can read the petition we submitted to senators, along with our press releases and additional information on the issue, including how you can help stop this attack on biomedical progress.

I have signed the petition and agree with its premise:

Therapeutic Cloning Should NOT Be Banned

We the undersigned recognize that the cloning of cells offers scientists the chance to advance medical research and perhaps one day treat devastating illnesses such as juvenile diabetes, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's by replacing lost or debilitated cells.

Congress should not outlaw this research despite recent pressure from various political factions. Nor should Congress impose a moratorium on this research, which would have the effect of halting the advances that are currently being made.

We the undersigned--many of us conservatives, some of us scientists, all of us concerned for the future--want it known that "therapeutic cloning" has supporters from across the political spectrum. To halt this research would be a terrible blow to science and public health.

This is dynamism in action, the Society's take on the basic facts of the issue is as follows:

Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), a cell-research procedure colloquially known as "therapeutic cloning," has recently become the target of opponents of genetic medicine, as well as some (though not all) traditional abortion opponents. They have been seeking legislation that would make this technique a federal crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

In this procedure, a biologist takes a human cell, injects it into an egg from which the nucleus has been removed, zaps the combination with electricity, and hopes that the product will start duplicating to produce a small cluster of cells, or blastocyst from which stem cells may be removed.

Although the research is still at a very early stage, many biologists believe SCNT will be directly or indirectly important in producing treatments for such diseases as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, heart disease, and diabetes. The tissues produced in this way would be a nearly exact match for those of the person from which the original cell was taken, avoiding the problem of rejection. Creating duplicate cell lines could also be useful in understanding the mutations that cause cancer and other diseases.

The Senate will soon vote on the Brownback-Landrieu bill, S. 1899, which would make using this procedure a federal crime. It would also be illegal for Americans to import therapies or receive treatments developed through this technique abroad.

Postrel's excellent position statement on the issue stems directly from her belief in dynamism:

ACT and others in the field are still doing very basic research, not developing clinical therapies. Indeed, because of the difficulty of obtaining eggs, therapeutic cloning may ultimately prove impractical for clinical treatments. It could be more important as a technique for understanding cell development or studying the mutations that lead to cancer. We simply don't know right now. Science is about exploring the unknown and cannot offer guarantees.

Politics, however, feeds on fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and the word "cloning" arouses those emotions. While its scientific importance remains to be seen, ACT's announcement has rekindled the campaign to criminalize nucleus transplantation and any therapies derived from that process. Under a bill passed by the House and endorsed by the president, scientists who transfer a human nucleus into an egg cell would be subject to 10-year federal prison sentences and $1 million fines. So would anyone who imports therapies developed through such research in countries where it is legal, such as Britain. The bill represents an unprecedented attempt to criminalize basic biomedical research.

The action advocated by the bill makes no sense and protects no one. There is no "slippery slope" toward cloned human beings, "reproductive cloning," inherent in this research. The fight is a good one. Postrel's argument concludes:

Biomedicine does have the potential to alter the human experience. Indeed, it already has. Life expectancy has doubled worldwide in the past century. Childbirth is no longer a peril to mother and infant. Childhood is no longer a time for early death. The pervasive sense of mortality that down through the ages shaped art, religion, and culture has waned.

Our lives are different from our ancestors' in fundamental ways. We rarely remark on the change, however, because it occurred incrementally. That's how culture evolves and how science works. We should let the process continue.

Though I am less sanguine than Postrel toward the prospect of reproductive cloning, this does not detract from our shared position that therapeutic cloning should be allowed to continue apace: an egg is not a person.

A graduate from Princeton in English, Virginia's journalistic credentials are impeccable: from July 1989 to January 2000, she was editor of Reason magazine, which was selected as a finalist for the National Magazine Awards for essays in 1993 and public interest journalism in 1996 and 1998 under her guidance. She also founded Reason Online, the magazine's website, in 1995, and was the magazine's editor-at-large through 2001.

Apart from Reason, she has been a columnist for Forbes, its companion technology magazine Forbes ASAP, and has written for The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and Inc.

In addition to her "Spaces" column (on "the built environment in the Dallas area, with an eye toward broader social, political, and economic trends") for D Magazine, Postrel currently writes the monthly "Economic Scene" column for the NY Times, today's version of which is a fascinating snapshot of her current book in progress, Look and Feel, (due out in early 2003) about the "growing importance of aesthetics and its many implications—for economics, politics, culture, and personal life":

Whatever happened to Lisa, Mary, Karen, Susan and Kimberly? On top in the 1960's, they've been shoved aside by Emily, Madison, Hannah, Ashley and Alexis. Those were the most popular names for American girls born in 2001, according to data released last week by the Social Security Administration.

As for Michael, David, John, James and Robert — the top five for boys in the 1960's — only Michael remains. The others have been replaced by Jacob, Matthew, Joshua, and Christopher.

Nobody runs ads to persuade parents to choose Emily or Joshua for their newborns. No magazine editors dictate that Ryan is the new Michael. But names still shift according to fashion. Once-popular names seem tired and out of date, new ones exciting. Old-fashioned names, like Emily, take on the allure of vintage clothing. Style revivals happen in names, too.

Contrary to what many critics of markets believe (and many fashion industry executives wish), fashion isn't a predictable commercial phenomenon driven by manipulation and advertising. Fashion — the process by which form seems exhausted and then refreshed, without regard to functional improvements — exists even in completely noncommercial "markets."

Again, consistent with her theory of dynamism. Some of her discoveries shed light on my own experience:

Like designers who experiment with new ideas, parents have to choose babies' names without knowing exactly what other parents are choosing. The result is a complex, often surprising, dynamic.

Parents frequently find that the name they "just liked" is suddenly common, expressing aesthetic preferences. Professor Lieberson became interested in names after he and his wife named their first daughter Rebecca, only to find there were little Beckys everywhere

Interestingly, the names of my own children have reflected elements of this dynamic. My daughter Kristen was born 18 years ago. We were looking for a Norwegian name that bore some resemblance to a close family name. My middle name is Christopher; "Kristen" was close and the spelling reflected our preference for an "en" ending as in "Olsen." Yet this very personal logic yielded the 38th most popular girl's name for the '80s.

My son Christopher was born 15 years ago (next week) and the process was simply that we still liked the name, thought it was kind of funny how similar it was to Kristen, and said "go for it." Christopher was the 544th most popular boy's name for the '80s, but it shot up to 2nd for the '90s, so we were a little ahead of the curve on that one.

Lily was born in 1999. We liked the idea of flower names - traditional but ever-blooming - and Lily was my favorite of those. I also liked the shortened "Lil," which I had heard with regularity on the Rugrats cartoon show, and I had always liked the TV character "Lily Munster" - eccentric, spunky, lovely in her own way, maternal - and her name had stayed with me. Lily was the 155th most popular girl's name for 1999, but up to 103rd for 2001, so Lily would appear to be on the rise.

These eccentric and personal decisions come together to form a bottom-up aggregate called "fashion": again, dynamism in action.

We should now have a fair idea of how Virginia Postrel's mind works: consistent but imaginative, brilliantly spotting macro "forests" from the micro trees of independent, self-directed action. She is one of our finest thinkers indeed and her site - where she teases out and accumulates these ideas - is an absolute must-read.

Please also see "A Late Valentine" below.

Update
Virginia just found this cool Name-O-Meter:

The Name-O-Meter graphs the top 1000 names of each decade of the 20th century. Some of the 4,139 names that make the cut are consistently high, others fade in and out of popularity. Some names appear only in one or two decades.

posted by Anonymous at 1:32 PM

 
More Serious
Bill Quick:

There is a sea change now starting to occur in higher education. We are seeing only the beginning of the wave, but before it finally subsides it will sweep away the rank, moldering remains of the dead carcass of sixties thought: reverse racism, political correctness, runaway relativism, post-modernism, gender theory, ethnic studies, bilingual education, parlor Marxism, and all the other failed relics of a time that did much good, but much harm as well.

Credit (or blame, if you prefer) the 9/11 attacks. Much of the dross still surviving the sixties is essentially frivolous in nature, and like it or not, we are becoming a more serious nation. Compared with the possibility of being incinerated in our homes, offices, and airplanes, telling a professor she's full of shit doesn't seem quite as daunting as it once did.

posted by Anonymous at 11:04 AM

 
Winds of Change
Words of wisdom.

As fluidly cooperative forms and patterns emerge in the Blogosphere, they will occupy more and more significance in its ecosystem. New dynamics will emerge - this is in its infancy, and we have several evolutionary cycles to go before some of the things I see in my mind's eye come to pass. But come they will.

...But all of this is his free choice in the Blogosphere's hybrid gift economy...Work as your spirit and intellect guide you, and just grow up along with the medium....Co-evolution stops for no man.

Meanwhile, there seems to be no shortage of real fights that require our attention.
Joe Katzman

posted by Anonymous at 10:58 AM

 
Blog Burst
I was, well, whining earlier about never having enough time to get to all the things I want to write about, etc. Reader Yehudit pointed me to an amazing project being run by Joe Katzman at Winds of Change contradicting my complaint that you can't assign "ideas to anyone else":

A "Blog Burst"? Yes. It's a more time-limited version of a similar idea I've been kicking around called a "Blog Circle." Here's how it works:


Each member who signs up joins the Blog Burst. They get a couple of follow-up pieces that they agree in advance to post and comment on. No-one gets the whole thing (it's almost 400K!) but everyone gets 2-3 pieces they can pick from. We'll have overlap built in, and this will allow us to cover more facets of the issue.


This dispersion also ensures wider distribution and reach... and incidentally makes this incident more of a focal point for "SFSU" Google searches. Just by participating, you'll be making a broader contribution.


All blogs posting as part of the circle agree to include a link to a central index, which will be updated as new links roll in. The index ensures that other circle members benefit from a blogger's audience, and vice versa. It also lends coherence to the whole flurry - otherwise the broad reach will be counterbalanced by the fragmentary presentation (one of the lessons of the Dale debates).


Every Blog Burst member who posts a related blog also agrees to email the keeper of the index with their permalink(s), in order to keep our central index up to date and robust. I'll handle the index (shudder).


Potential foci for your briefings and subsequent posts include:

Other anti-semitic events on the SFSU campus.

Data re: rise of anti-semitic incidents in the SF Bay area.

Personal experiences of SFSU students about their experiences, both on campus generally and at the demonstration.

Response of the Academic Senate.

Response of the Administration: damage control, not justice.

Detailed description of university policies flouted, and information about past instances.

Detailed description of California laws that may have been broken, and your thoughts on demonstrators' legal options and strategies.

Media bias in regards to this incident: articles for dissection
A short preface will be optional, but it will make it very easy for participants to remind readers what this is all about if they wish to paste it in. Or, you can link to your own postings on the matter.

I intend to run the blog burst early next week, preferably on Monday, May 27, 2002.

Quite brilliant and worthwhile.


posted by Anonymous at 8:49 PM

 
Once More Into the Fray
I had hoped to move on from this topic, even writing something conciliatory toward Andrew Sullivan last night, but I guess I have to address his post aimed at me because it is riddled with inaccuracies. I would give you the permanent link to his post, but it, um, doesn't work. Sorry.

Sullivan begins:

By the way, the tedious Eric Olsen has been whining that I'm not a blogging team player by responding to his every email (they come almost every other day and I got exhausted responding, especially when they keep having URGENT in the contents line).

Please consider this from Virginia Postrel before I begin:

If you must mention someone less prominent than you are, make sure it is someone much less well known, so you can be recognized for your wide reading or noblesse oblige.

In short: Promote your friends. Mention your (more famous) mentors. But don't be a fool. There is no career-enhancing reason ever to cite someone who might prove a competitor, make a cogent argument against you, or get credit for an idea you could have claimed. Andrew Sullivan is so good at this strategy that he probably doesn't even realize he's following it.

Note the totally dismissive, contemptuous manner with which Sullivan begins: "I can't believe I have to deal with this...PERSON when I have so many more important things to do, places to go, thoughts to think, articles to write for NY Times Magazine."

As to the accusation of "whining": the tone of my original post on the matter is one of concern, criticism, mild ridicule, even anger, but there is not a whine to be found. I welcome any specific contentions otherwise.

Regarding "emails coming almost every other day": Fortunately for me, I save my outgoing emails. Representing the blogger 9/11 book, not myself, I have written exactly FOUR emails, two of which were marked "Urgent." Here they are:

4/15/02, "Urgent - 9/11 Blogger Book"
Andrew, I'm sure you saw Matt Welch's post about putting together a 9/11 book of essays from bloggers re 9/11. The proceeds could go to charity. If you got behind this, it would take off. Glenn Reynolds has agreed to select his favorites. Permission to use your "Bloggers Manifesto" and perhaps a new forward from you would be key. I have an agent ready to go on this. Your participation would ensure success. Best Wishes, Eric Olsen

No response.

4/16/02 "Truly, No Kidding, Urgent"
Andrew, I know you're super busy - I'm very excited about your return to acting. Break several freaking legs, buddy.

Let's get down to the nitty gritty. You are the best-known and most important blogger for two reasons: you are the most consistent thinker/writer, you are the best self-promoter. Glenn Reynolds is going to post something this morning on the new 9/11 warblogger book project, and the site set up to collect nominations for inclusion for the book will explode.

You stand to benefit most of all from this going down right, as you are most visible blogger. A little enthusiasm, a little public support, the use of one of your essays (your choice), and perhaps a brief intro, preface, whatever, would guarantee visibility and success. Max Power has suggested the Magen David Adom charity for the proceeds - you are welcome to make another suggestion, although this one should be right up your alley - totally up to you.

As with all things in blogland - this is moving very quickly and a word from you is key. THIS is the time I really need to hear from you. Best Wishes, Eric Olsen

No response.

4/17/02 "Greetings Thespian"
Andrew, I'm sure you are getting wind of all the hoohaw around the 9/11 bloggers book. Everyone is on board, but no one has heard from you. As I mentioned yesterday, you don't really have to do anything except endorse the concept and let us use something you have done re 9/11. We would love for you to write some kind of intro or whatever, but that's up to you. We got over a thousand visits to the site today, with a mention from you, that would triple at least, as well as be the final seal of approval. Glenn Reynolds is official selector, I will copy edit and compile. It's going to be great and VINDICATE ALL YOU HAVE BEEN SAYING.

Nice article in Wired by the way. have you seen my series on bloggers in the media, done two parts, very well received, probably will be republished somewhere. Join the party King of the Bloggers, your subjects await you. No shit.
Best, Eric Olsen

No response.

4/25/02 "Blog Book, etc."
Andrew, It sounds like things are calming down for you - please give me some word on your response to the blogger 9/11 charity book. We await your thoughts - everyone else is in.

Also, very glad to say pt 3 of the blogs in the media series is up. Took all freaking day. I hope you like it.
Best Wishes, Eric Olsen

No response.

That's it. There have been no more emails on the subject. Two were marked "Urgent." This is the "(they come almost every other day and I got exhausted responding, especially when they keep having URGENT in the contents line)." There were no responses WHATSOEVER, so the writer's exhaustion must have come from another, perhaps non-somatic source such as a feverish imagination. Or perhaps he was exhausted from writing to another "Eric Olsen," the one who would put up with this kind of blatant prevarication.

I have written two other emails to Sullivan with "Urgent" in the heading - he responded to neither. On 5/8/02 I requested background information regarding his "A Blogger Manifesto" prior to an interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer because I wanted to make sure I didn't misrepresent him in any way.

The other "Urgent" was a joke, my parody of Bush's Farm Bill speech which I thought he might find amusing. No response.

Memo to Eric: reprint any 1000 words you like from my blog for your warblog book. Good luck with the project. Now please stop spamming my email tray.

Thanks, that's great news, on May 22. "Spam" is a very ugly and dismissive word. Rational people might reserve its use for such annoyances as mass mailings, nonpersonal solicitations, etc. I am not under the impression that "spam" applies to the above in the service of a blog-wide project, in hope of preventing any misrepresentation in an interview, and in sending the URL of a joke post.

Going back to the first of the year I have received exactly two responses from Sullivan: one a brief response to a "Happy New Year" greeting, the other a one-sentence response to a question of fact regarding background for an article I was working on.

As to the rest of his post, I leave it up to you to judge:

But can I say a word about the notion of a "blogging community" to which we allegedly owe obligations, deference and respect? Phooey. The reason I'm a blogger is because I'm a pesky individualist who simply wants to write what I think and have a great interaction with readers in real time. Every time I hear the word "community," my bullshit detector goes off. And when I hear about "obligations to the community" blah blah blah, I wanna retch. I have nothing but respect for my fellow bloggers. I read them; I've encouraged others to blog; I link whenever I find something I find interesting; I believe in the genre; I've lost lucrative jobs for the medium. But please don't start creating some sort of community of bloggers, and calling us on our dues. This is the Wild Web, buddy, not a condo association. Don't tread on me. (As for the permalinks, I'm such a loser I didn't even know what these were. Thanks to Eric and others, I do now. I'll add them ASAP.)

Speaking of "bullshit detectors," mine started singing like an air raid siren with Sullivan's last parenthetical statement regarding the links. Wait, please...I have to shut it off. Helen Keller couldn't have missed the requests, warnings, inquiries, protestations, and public complaining from all corners of the blog universe about the malfunctioning links. The assertion defies credulity and is an utter insult to the dozens of bloggers who have made mention of this issue over the past several months. The only possible way this statement could be true is if Sullivan hadn't read a blog in months. He isn't stupid - sorry, don't buy it.

I have nothing to hide: please read my posts over the last two days and see if I have called for any of the mentioned restrictions upon Sullivan or anyone else's freedom or individuality. I asked for a response to a request for participation in the book project in a reasonable, respectful manner, as a representative of my fellow bloggers. I asked why his richly-funded site's permanent links have been out of service for many months preventing bloggers from linking to him.

I asked why he behaves as if he were a narcissistic, selfish, childish, faux-aristocratic, paranoid jackass. Sullivan's response would seem to verify that he is just that.
posted by Anonymous at 7:06 PM

 
Too Sexy, Senior
Well, it would appear I have touched a nerve or eight. I will be responding to the vile canards shortly - in the meantime please go do something important: vote for the sexiest blogger on Dawn's site. She even included Andrew Sullivan on the ballot.
posted by Anonymous at 3:22 PM

 
Fact-Checking
Chas Rich of Sardonic Views sets the record straight on a serpentine chain of events henceforth known as the "fact-check your ass affair." And they say bloggers have no affect on the world at large.
posted by Anonymous at 3:04 PM

 
Ironies
Eric Mauro, who has some brilliant animation on display at Qhead.com, doesn't buy the "honor/shame thing" as discussed here, and by Bill Quick here:

Ugh. This honor/shame thing is taken way too far. The original theory got the most play around the "shame society" of imperial Japan. Unfortunately for the theory it took only a couple years for the Japanese to adopt and perform well under constitutional democracy, so the culture argument went out the window.

It's all well and good to present this argument for some anthropological review, but the truth is that "shame" and it's supposed opposite "guilt" are present in all societies.

But if it's presented here as the reason why "we've just got to kill them, because they're different from us, and they don't understand westernized humanistic rationality" then the theory ought to be subjected to a little tougher examination. Otherwise it's just a fig leaf, which isn't fair even to the discredited theory itself.
Eric

The fact that Japan adapted well after the War doesn't contradict the theory, it helps to confirm it. The other part of the theory is that the only way to deal with the culture that feels "shamed" and acts aggressively accordingly is to defeat them utterly, to crush them, to douse the fire and stir the ashes. Japan was thus crushed to conclude WWII and was thereby, ironically, "freed" from its past, as was Germany for that matter.

Of course shame and guilt are present in all societies, but in some they dominate the culture as was the case in Imperial Japan, and is the case in fundamentalist Islam.

Craig Schamp also has some interesting thoughts on the same post:

Interesting. It reminded me of Bernard Lewis's instructive comparison of the "foundation myths" (his term) of the three Abrahamic religions. Moses forced to wander the desert and barred from entering promised land. Jesus humiliated, scorned, and sentenced to death. His followers persecuted as an underground religion until the Constantine conversion. Mohammed was not only spiritual leader, but political figure and militarily successful. "He was his own Constantine," as Lewis said. There may be more to Lewis's illustration than I originally believed.

Mohammed's political and military success ironically seems to doom Islam to a compulsion to literally "rule the world." This would seem to confirm the wisdom of Jesus's dictate to "Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's" (Matt. 22:21), and to speak volumes in favor of the separation of church and state.
posted by Anonymous at 2:30 PM

 
A Late Valentine
The great Virginia Postrel is feeling feisty but a little down as she rounds into summer. First, yesterday, she far more succinctly and surgically vivisected Andrew Sullivan than I could have ever hoped to, noting something I hadn't:

Eric might have also noted that Andrew is the rare blogger who never identifies readers who send him letters, regardless of what those readers might wish. (Obviously, some would prefer to be anonymous. But they're almost certainly a minority.) A single byline keeps the focus on the Main Man. It's a savvy media strategy.

This is the way the professional media world is. You become prominent, first and foremost, by knowing the right people and then, secondarily, by attacking or crediting people more prominent than yourself. (They stay prominent by not responding to you by name, a tactic well-honed by neocon intellectuals who almost never identify, much less quote, the objects of their criticism. Exhibit A: Francis Fukuyama.) If you must mention someone less prominent than you are, make sure it is someone much less well known, so you can be recognized for your wide reading or noblesse oblige.

In short: Promote your friends. Mention your (more famous) mentors. But don't be a fool. There is no career-enhancing reason ever to cite someone who might prove a competitor, make a cogent argument against you, or get credit for an idea you could have claimed. Andrew Sullivan is so good at this strategy that he probably doesn't even realize he's following it.

Honey baby sweety mama, that's a surgical strike well delivered. It doesn't even sound mean, which makes it that much meaner, in a good way.

Then, later in the day she tweaked Glenn Reynolds for rather glibly addressing her Sullivan post:

He thinks I was talking about workaday reporters in my discussion below of how Andrew Sullivan adeptly plays the fame-and-influence game. I wasn't. Workaday reporters don't worry about fame or influence. They worry (and gripe constantly) about deadlines, sources who don't return phone calls, and their bosses. I was talking about people who aspire to have their ideas influence the public debate. Influencing the public debate is different from getting your name mentioned in articles about blogging. Glenn's intellectual influence has little to do with his blogging, most of which is of the "linking" rather than "thinking" variety. (And mighty fine and abundant links they are.) Glenn's influence comes from his legal scholarship, for which he gets paid. Blogging is his hobby. No wonder he's smug.

My challenge to bloggers who think the blogosphere is immensely influential is the same as it has been for months: Oh yeah? Then why isn't anyone outside the blog world talking about Brink Lindsey's book? Why hasn't it been reviewed in the NYT Book Review? Why did The Washington Post kiss it off in one nasty paragraph? Why isn't Brink on NPR all the time? Why haven't Time and Newsweek quoted him? It hasn't even been reviewed in National Review or The Weekly Standard. All these places have plenty of room for far less worthy authors.

My response to Virginia - other than don't despair - is that these things take time. A few months ago most people, even the well-read educated types, hadn't heard of blogs. Now most have. This is due to the flood of articles in the mainstream press about them - AND EQUALLY IMPORTANTLY - the impressive quality of thinking and writing those readers found when they entered blogville. The articles don't mean squat if the readers don't find anything of interest, but indeed they have.

My friend John Scalzi and I debated elements of this last month in these pages and I invite you to revisit these discussions if you are interested (scroll up from link for continuation of discussion), but things have changed even in just the last month. No, the numbers of readers (anywhere between 50 and 70,000 daily) at individual blogs does not approach that of the mainstream media, and having an issue all over the blogosphere does not guarantee mainstream media "success" for a concept (or product as Virginia mentions), but there can be no doubt that ideas are being minted and polished in the blogosphere and that work is bubbling up to the mainstream WITH GREATER AND GREATER FREQUENCY. Just in the last few weeks several mainstream writers have started blogs, even those who have previously dissed blogs. Unless these people are congenitally stupid, they are choosing to join what they feel they cannot beat or otherwise feel the time and energy spent will profit them. Many mainstream publications are adding blogs, and Mickey Kaus was annexed by Microsoft's Slate.

These movements are real and reflect a reality that will bloom in the near future when they reach a "tipping point" or "critical mass" (depending on which cultural theorist you trust), but bloom they will. We shouldn't look at how little influence we have, we should realize how much influence we have gained so quickly, although that influence remains somewhat amorphous and inchoate FOR THE MOMENT.

The numbers are real and growing, and with them influence. The early adapters are with us now: they aren't going away, they will bring secondary adapters with them and so on and so on. Will the rules of mainstream media politics apply to the blogosphere? To a certain extent they always apply, but the insistent voice of a thousand personalities will not be silenced and I believe from the bottom of my heart THAT TALENT WILL OUT. It always does, eventually, regardless of politics. Andrew may have arrived sooner than others because he plays the game, but others will arrive "there" also, even if they don't play the game, as long as they don't give up or despair.

We need you Virginia: we don't want you to be sad or to give up.
posted by Anonymous at 1:09 PM

 
If Bush Thought Like bin Laden
The Canadians are pulling out of Afghanistan:

Canada will pull most of its ground troops out of Afghanistan this summer, leaving a few planes, ships and a handful of special forces soldiers in place, Defence Minister Art Eggleton announced Tuesday.

"This decision took into account a number of operational factors, including the need to provide a rest and training period for our troops," Eggleton told a news conference. The decision came despite a request from the U.S. military that the Canadian infantry stay on to help in the ground war against terrorism. Canada will keep some forces in the area, including five planes, three warships and about 40 commandos from JTF-2, the special operations group.

Relegated to the bottom of the story is a certain ugly fact:

The Canadian mission has won high praise from senior U.S. commanders. It was marred last month by the deaths of four soldiers killed by a U.S. bomb dropped in error on a Canadian night training exercise. Eggleton said that had nothing to do with the decision to withdraw.

America said the same thing when it withdrew from Somalia in early-'94:

Bin Laden associates, including Mohamed Atef, went to Somalia to disrupt American peacekeeping efforts there; 18 American soldiers were killed in a Mogadishu ambush in October ‘93 that featured at least some al Qaeda members in affiliation with the Somali al Ittihad al Islami (AIAI) militant Islamist organization. Bin Laden was both amused and disgusted by what he felt was a gross overreaction by the American public and government to the loss of a "mere" 18 soldiers, as America withdrew from Somalia within six months after the deaths.

The BBC discussed this last September in a report speculating upon where bin Laden might end up should he be forced from Afghanistan:

In 1992 US troops used Kenya's seaport and airport in the coastal city of Mombassa as bases during a UN-led humanitarian intervention in Somalia where civil war and famine were killing large numbers of people. However, the US withdrew...after suffering higher than expected casualties in fighting with local militia fighters.

Some observers have suggested that this history of US humiliation would make Somalia an attractive destination for Bin Laden.

Therefore, if George W. Bush thought like Osama bin Laden, he would view the Canadian withdrawal from Afghanistan after the loss of "only" four soldiers as a sign of weakness to be exploited, and order an invasion. After all, WE are the strong horse, and if those wuss-bag Canucks can't handle losing a measly FOUR - I would give up 4 MILLION gladly for the glorification of Allah! - of their citizens, then it is our duty to force them to submit!

Hell, they have annoyed us with their European-style "universal health care," their "mommy help me" "Canadian content" media regulations; half of them speak FRENCH, the universal language of cowards, for Allah's sake. We are REQUIRED by all that is holy to smite the wimps and MAKE THEM act American. And no more of this "ooot and abooot" shit either.

I realize this sounds like Canadian Bacon, but this is truly how bin Laden and his ilk think. This is the kind of absolute territorial primitive malignity we face, and I'm not kidding.
posted by Anonymous at 12:10 PM

 
That's the Old Ball Game
Readers may have noted that I haven't written much about baseball lately. This is for three reasons, the first being that I have always been a fan of "The Game," but never in the abstract. I have always viewed the game through the prism of a given team: the Dodgers when lived in L.A., and the Indians when I have lived in Cleveland. There is no queston I have been spoiled by the Indians' success - or I should say relative success since they have NEVER WON THE BIG ONE since I have been a fan (or, for that matter, for as long as I have been alive - it could be worse, I could be a Red Sox or Cubs fan) - since 1994, and this year they are not only a losing team, but they are a really, really BORING losing team.

At least John Hart knew one thing: the best way to keep the fans happy - apart from a championship, which can never be guaranteed, right most-hated Yankees? - is to keep the offense moving around the bases. The Indians offense of the previous eight years was an awesome sight to behold and distracted attention away from the fact that the team wilted in the '95 World Series against the Braves, and choked in the 7th game of the World Series in '97.

Fans distracted themselves with mind-boggling offensive stats even in losses, and took infinite satisfaction out of beating the ever loving shit out of the opposition with alarming frequency: "We may have lost in the playoffs to you last year (insert one: Orioles, Yankees, Yankees, Red Sox) but we will pummel (single-walk-3 run home run) your (double-double-double-2 run home run) skeevy (single-single-single-triple) asses (walk-stolen base-bunt single-walk-GRAND SLAM, YOU SHIT-STAIN) RIGHT NOW!!!

Now the team is losing, the offense is among the most ineffectual - let's call a spade a spade and say IMPOTENT - in the majors, and it's all just one big depressing mess.

Another reason I have been shying away from the game is that for the last 12 years or so I have played ball with my son almost every nice day, and for the last eight years he has played on a team so we were working toward something. This year he hurt his shoulder early in the high school practice season (March) and is out for the year so we won't have a team to work for. We still play and it's still fun, but without a team, the motivation isn't the same. It's sad, and I'm worried that his shoulder problem may be chronic.

The final reason this year blows baseball-wise is that two years ago (after 20 years off from hardball, playing softball or not playing at all) I very hesitantly joined a men's hardball league, and to my horror did pretty well. Well, the reality is more complicated than that: this was a fairly high-end league - a lot of former college and even low-minors players - and in order to do well, I had to use my entire repertoir of pitches and throw at the absolute limit of my strength thereby putting my (2 years ago) 41-year-old body under great duress, which of course led to injury.

I fried out my elbow the first year throwing too many curves, and last year I fried out my shoulder just throwing too damned hard (no "free and easy motion" here, I strain like a fat washer woman), so it was pointless to even try this year. This really bums me out because my body is just too damned old to compete at this level, and there really aren't any other levels available. It's all or nothing, so I guess it's nothing. I'm sick of softball - I'm just not big enough to be a power hitter and I HATE being a singles hitter - and I'm so much better at baseball than softball anyway. It's really depressing.

This hell ALSO reminds me that the real problem isn't even age, just the fragility of my body because a shoulder injury ended my college pitching carrer 23 years ago, so I don't really even have the age excuse. I just have the crappy body excuse.

So when I see all those Major League pitchers with their great 6' 3", 210 lb. bodies EASILY throwing 90-95 MPH - WITH MOVEMENT - and I have to KILL MYSELF to throw 78 MPH (though, being left-handed, I do have pretty good tailing action in my fastball), well, it just FROSTS MY FLAKES something fierce and I can't enjoy it. I'm a mess, but not as big a mess as the Indians. I'm sure I'll get over it.
posted by Anonymous at 9:44 AM

 
Bring On the Clones
In a very nice email Howard Owens complimented us on some longer pieces and lamented his lack of time to pursue same.

First, Howard is doing an excellent job of keeping up with the immense burden of presenting the news of the world on "Global News Watch" - I wouldn't even attempt something so ambitious - and, he also is doing a fine job with longer think pieces as evidenced by a probing analysis of the India/Pakistan confrontation, and a thoughtful denunciation of the Cuba trade embargo. So Howard, lament not.

But this brings up the subject of time, which I have been thinking about a lot lately, and not all of my own volition. I had this persistent, B movie-grade dream last night of being chased by an array of movie villains - a hairy, gaunt Scott Glenn in Vertical Limit-type character is the most memorable - and the villains never let up as I endlessly ran through a series of urban alleys, in and out of warehouse windows, bleak industrial offices, around grimy corners dogged by one implacable fiend after another. The hokeyness of the whole affair didn't lessen the anxiety, but seemed to increase it.

I can only conclude that I am dogged by time: no matter how proud I was of my son Chris last night, once his part of the presentation was over I wanted to get the hell out of there and get back to writing up all the ideas fermenting in my brain: if for no other reason than to get rid of them. I have read on several occasions of bloggers, especially new bloggers, fearing and resenting the blank page. I love the blank page, it is the clock I fear and resent.

There are always reserves of ideas I want to excavate and mine; there is never enough time to get to them all, and at times I feel myself resenting ANY time away from getting these hyperactive little pissants OUT OF MY HEAD, where, left to their own devices, they can disrupt my sleep, give me indigestion, and distract me from such things as LIVING MY LIFE.

Not that this is all bad - there are worse problems than too many ideas and not enough time to delineate them - but it reminds of when I ran the DJ company in L.A. in the '80s. A maddening aspect of the DJ business is that most of the parties tend to be ON THE SAME NIGHT. Fridays and Saturdays, the whole month of December - if I could have done all the parties myself, I would have been RICH, RICH, RICH. This is a very personality-driven business, and when someone sees you at a party and hires you to do their party - especially something important like a wedding - they want YOU to do that party, not a reasonable facsimile. But you can only be in one place at a time so you have to choose, which is always hell, and many, many times I wished I could clone myself and send off a freaking army of Erics to work the 15 Christmas parties the Saturday before Christmas and KEEP ALL THE MONEY FOR MYSELF.

Blogging is a lot like that: it's not like I can assign the "ideas" to anyone else, as the ideas involve my thoughts and experiences and freaky weirdness. So I always feel pressed by time and find myself typing really fast - and really badly - racing time to get the idea out and down before I forget it, or am interrupted by such things as LIFE, which really pisses me off. Any ideas?
posted by Anonymous at 8:53 AM

 
Pride
You may have noticed we were away from the blog desk for most of last night (even missed the final episode of 24!). My 9th grade son Chris got two academic awards last night as part of a very long honors presentation: top German 1 student ( I pretty well suck at foreign languages - not enough patience) and for being a member of the Algebra 1 Academic Team (I also suck at post-arithmetic math). We are all very proud of him. He has adjusted exceptionally well to a new school system and a reversed schedule. I love you, Pher!
posted by Anonymous at 8:27 AM

 
The Reason It Matters
Dr Frank has an excellent post that rights the ship a bit regarding Andrew Sullivan's place in the scheme of things:

Sullivan has been severely criticized recently for lack of good behavior as a blogosphere citizen, but there's no question that he is among the best at what he does, even though he should link more often. His blog is staggeringly popular because of how great it is.

This is exactly right: the reason I have been so disappointed with Andrew's citizenship is BECAUSE he is such an important and original voice, not because he sucks. If he sucked it wouldn't matter, but the fact that he is among the very best - and at his best he is THE best - makes it that much more important that he not disregard courtesy.
posted by Anonymous at 7:04 PM

 
Stings and Killers
I would like to follow up on the psychology of Islamists and other killers as begun yesterday here. This is also relates to, and underscores, Bill Quick's groundbreaking honor/shame theory.

Elias Canetti's 1981 Nobel Prize was awarded largely on the basis of an astonishing book published originally in Germany in 1960, Crowds and Power, a book of which Richard Farr writes:

Ranging from soccer crowds and political rallies to Bushmen and the pilgrimage to Mecca, Canetti exhaustively reviews the way crowds form, develop, and dissolve, using this taxonomy of mass movement as a key to the dynamics of social life. The style is abstract, erudite, and anecdotal, which makes Crowds and Power the sort of work that awes some readers with its profundity while irritating others with its elusiveness. Canetti loves to say something brilliant but counterintuitive, and then leave the reader to figure out both why he said it and whether it's really true.

I found it to be much more profound than irritating and extremely apt regarding our concerns today. Over forty years ago Canetti declared Islam to be a religion of war:

Devout Mohammedans assemble in four ways.

1. They assemble several times daily for prayer, summoned by a voice from on high. The small rhythmic groups formed on these occasions may be called prayer packs. Each movement is exactly prescribed and orientated in one direction - towards Mecca.
2. They assemble for the Holy War (jihad) against unbelievers.
3. They assemble in Mecca, during the great Pilgrimage.
4. They assemble at the Last Judgment.

As in all religions, invisible crowds are of the greatest importance, but in Islam, more strongly than in any of the other world religions, these are invisible double crowds, standing in opposition to each other.

When the trumpet of the Last Judgment sounds, the dead all rise from their graves and rush to the Field of Judgment "like men rallying to a Standard." There they take up their station before God, in two mighty crowds separated from each other, the faithful on one side and the unbelieving on the other; and each individual is judged by God.

All the generations of men are thus assembled and to each man it seems as though he had only been buried the day before. None has any notion of the immeasurable spaces of time he may have lain in his grave; his death has been without dream or remembrance. But the sound of the Trumpet is heard by all. "On that day men will come in scattered bands." "On that day We will let them come in tumultuous throngs." The "bands" and "throngs" of this great moment recur repeatedly in the Koran; it is the most comprehensive idea of a crowd the Mohammedan can imagine. No one can conceive of a larger number of human beings than that of all those who have ever lived; and here they are pressed closely together on one spot. This is the only crowd which cannot grow, and it is also the densest, for each single man stands face to face with his Judge.

But, notwithstanding its size and density, it remains, from beginning to end, divided into two. Each man knows what he may expect; there is hope for some and terror for the others. "On that day there shall be beaming faces, smiling and joyful. On that day there shall be faces veiled with darkness, covered with dust. These shall be the faces of the wicked and unbelieving." Since the justice of the sentence is absolute - for each deed has been recorded and can be proved in writing - no one can escape from that half of the crowd to which he rightfully belongs.

The bi-partition of the crowd in Islam is unconditional. The faithful and the unbelieving are fated to be separate forever and to fight each other. The War of Religion is a sacred duty and thus, though in a less comprehensive form, the double crowd of the Last Judgment is prefigured in every earthly battle.

..."Mohammed" says one of the greatest experts on Islam [I. Goldziher] "is the prophet of fighting and of war...What he first achieved in his Arabian sphere he leaves as a testament for the future of his community: the fight against the infidels, the expansion, not so much of the faith as of its sphere of power, which is the sphere of power of Allah. What matters to the fighters for Islam is not so much the conversion as the subjection of infidels." The Koran, the book of the prophet inspired by God, leaves no doubt of this.
"When the sacred months are over,
slay the idolaters
wherever you find them.
Arrest them, besiege them and lie in ambush for them."

Thus every battle is apocalyptic: every fight against the infidel prefigures Final Judgment and all of mankind are divided, absolutely, into Us and Them. It is the duty of Islam to subjugate "Them," pure and simple.

To fail at this subjugation is to suffer the greatest humiliation, a humiliation that has been building up now for about 700 years or so. No wonder the Islamists seem so irrational and desperate. No wonder suicide attacks are such a satisfying method of warfare: in one socially praised act the attacker "subjugates" with prejudice the enemy from within his own ranks, and catapults the attacker directly to Judgment Day - do not pass go. Everything boils down to those two crowds and the Islamic duty to subjugate those on the other side. No danger of relativism here. This is as starkly Manichaean - good/bad, light/dark, all/nothing - as human thinking gets and what we are up against with the Islamists.

Canetti also has something to say about the nature of command and how humans respond to it:

The power of those who give commands appears to grow all the time. Every command, however trivial, adds something to it, not only because in practice it generally benefits the person who gives it, but because, by the very nature of commands - their knife-edged precision and the recognition they exact in the whole sphere they traverse - it tends in every way to augment and secure his power.

Command, then, seems to carry momentum with it: those giving commands accumulate power.

Power discharges commands like a hail of magical arrows; those who are hit must surrender themselves. The command wounds them and also summons and guides them to the seat of power.

But the simplicity and homogeneity of the command, which at first sight seems absolute and unquestionable, is seen on closer inspection to be openly apparent. A command can be taken to pieces, and must be if it is to be really understood.

Every command consists of momentum and sting. The momentum forces the recipient to act, and to act in accordance with the content of the command; the sting remains behind in him. When a command functions normally and as one expects, there is nothing to be seen of the sting; it is hidden and unsuspected and may only reveal its existence by some faint, scarcely perceptible recalcitrance before the command is obeyed.

But the sting sinks deep into the person who has carried out the command and remains in him unchanged. In the whole psychological structure of man there is nothing less subject to change. The content of the command - its force, range and definition - was fixed forever in that moment in which it was first promulgated, and this, or rather its exact image in miniature, is stored up in the recipient forever and may remain submerged for years and decades before it comes to light again. But it is never lost, and it is essential to realize this. The fulfillment of a command is not the end; it remains stored up forever.

...everything...will change sooner than the shape of the command which has lodged in him as a sting and which is preserved unaltered UNTIL HE HIMSELF PRODUCES IT AGAIN [emphasis mine]....This reproduction of earlier situations, but in reverse, is one of the chief sources of energy. What spurs men to achievement is the deep urge to be rid of the commands once laid on them....there is no man who does not turn against a command imposed on him from outside; in this case everyone speaks of pressure and reserves the right to vengeance or rebellion.

Some, even most, people discharge their "stings" in positive ways generating "energy." Some like Harris and Klebold are consumed by their stings, see no "normal" way to unload them, and turn homicidal imposing their "commands" - the most stringent commands of all, death - upon those who have inflicted the stings, or even those who didn't prevent them: virtually everyone.

Sometimes entire cultures become so obsessed with returning their stings - again look at Islam's history of failure vis-a-vis the West, now most prominently represented by American and Israel - and behave in a similarly desperate manner, dispensing with stings almost indiscriminately, thrashing wildly about in an attempt to reconcile what they believe SHOULD be the world order with their cognitively dissonant apprehension of the way the world actually is.

Understanding what we are up against is a giant step toward dealing with it.
posted by Anonymous at 5:36 PM