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Friday, February 08, 2002
A slice and some sorrow, please  This is what pizza boxes in New York City look like after September 11. I'm not entirely sure whose prayers are with whom--is the pizza guy praying for me? is the printer praying for both of us?--but maybe I think about these things too much.
You watch the tv, the tv watches you Apparently there is snow falling in hell today, because I have finally discovered an issue on which I am in agreement with Rush Limbaugh. I haven't paid much attention to how the digital recording system TiVo works--I assumed you just a dedicated box with a lot of storage capacity that you plugged into your system in place of a VCR--but it turns out to be much more invasive than that. You evidently have to install a dedicated phone line which gives the box access to a program schedule database, and as it turns out, also gives the company the ability to watch what you're watching. For instance: TiVo monitored 10,000 Super Bowl viewers--without their knowledge, as far as I can tell (though as always, I could be wrong™)--and discovered (because TiVo's buffer memory allows you to "rewind" a program in real time) that viewers were far more interested in Britney Spears than in the game itself. And we all get a little chuckle out of that and get on with our day, right? But the whole thing is a little creepy to me--and to Rush, who was ranting about it the other day (though I expect that Rush will change his tune as soon as TiVo buys some ad time on his program). I mean, sure, mostly it doesn't matter if some marketer knows that I never miss an episode of Farscape (best show on tv, by the way, with the possible exception of The Sopranos), but somehow, there's just something about this that leaves me uneasy. I could come up with some worst-case paranoid scenarios ("Mr. Tomorrow, we see you were watching that left-wing political documentary the other night"), but it's really not that specific for me. I think it's more just the troubling notion of being watched in what should be the privacy of your own home, possibly without your knowledge. It turns your living room into a focus group session, with unseen observers behind one-way glass, monitoring your every move, all so that they can serve you better, thank you. And of course, they absolutely cross-their-hearts-and-hope-to-die promise not to abuse the information they have collected on you. But here's a thought: if everyone with TiVo made a point of continually recording completely random programs in which they have no actual interest--cable access, Mandarin language programming, anything starring Robert Urich, whatever--then all the data the company compiles and analyzes and sells to marketers...would have absolutely no value whatsoever. -------------------- Thursday, February 07, 2002
We have nothing to fear but ... really scary monsters! Andrew R. Heinze, on historynewsnetwork.org: ...The phrase to define our new epoch, I learned, is "Let’s Roll." It’s hard to imagine a less substantive, less specific idea. Stalin must have uttered the Russian version of this more than a few times, as Hitler did when looking toward Stalingrad. The active verb here is catchy but it implies no objective, and certainly no moral objective. Maybe the people of Sodom said "Let’s roll" when trying to bang down the door of Lot’s house. Of course, the first time that the President cited these words he meant to honor the heroic passenger who used them as a charge to take back an airline from hijackers. That citation, which came in the informal context of a press conference, was appropriate. But in the context of the State of the Union address, as a catchphrase for a generation or an era, the phrase is unfortunately a rhetorical lead balloon. It would be the same as Franklin Roosevelt saying, "We have nothing to fear but … really scary things like monsters, or fiscal conservatives…" Or Lincoln referring to "a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that … we’re damn good, especially compared to those Limeys." Or King: "I have a dream that one day … will be the first day of the rest of my life." (More.)
You guys are swell Posting the cranky letters seems to have inspired many of the rest of you to write--I've been getting a ton of overwhelmingly, embarassingly supportive messages lately. Since a lot of these will inevitably go unanswered (I'm way behind in my email right now), I just wanted to post a note of thanks for all the good will you kids have been sending my way. It is appreciated. -------------------- Wednesday, February 06, 2002
Another bubble burst Michael Moore's new book is finally about to hit the bookstores--and I'm bitterly disappointed. The book was scheduled to come out last September, but the country hit a little snag back then (you might have read something about it), and his publisher got cold feet. As Michael tells it: I was told that, unless I re-wrote large sections of my book ...plus change the title and the cover -- and then, after all that, reimburse the publisher of up to $100,000 out of my pocket (!) so this new version could be reprinted -- then the powers-that-be might actually destroy the ENTIRE run of 50,000 copies that had already been printed! My book would be sent to the shredder and "pulped." I would then have to wait for up to a year before I could take it to another publisher. In other words, the book would be toast. (More.) Now the publisher has had a change of heart. The problem is that a couple of months ago, Michael gave me one of the very few copies of the book not being held hostage by the publisher, and I figured once the print run was shredded, that baby was money in the bank. And now...now I must watch helplessly, as my dreams of avarice are cruelly swept away, and the value of my copy plummets faster than a share of Enron stock. It is indeed a dark day in the Tomorrow household.
More from the mailbag Got this one last night: OK your're pickin up a little steam now. The state of the union cartoon was really good, didn't pull any punches. I'd been kinda disappointed by your post 9/11 cartoons cos they seemed a tad safe.... And the irony is, this guy undoubtedly meant well, undoubtedly intended this as a message of encouragement. You know: your work for the past four months has been kind of lame, but the new cartoon was pretty good. For a change. * * * But then I also get something like this: I’ve been a reader of This Modern World since the day I realized I would be voting in the presidential election and began forming opinions about the actions and policies of our government. Your comic is printed weekly in a local paper, Cleveland’s own Free Times (http://www.freetimes.com). I have to say, I haven’t agreed with you on one thing (well, maybe one thing, though I can’t remember what). I find myself picking up the Free Times and going straight to your comic because I know it will challenge the beliefs I hold and value. Recently, I’ve had the pleasure of reading your blog, meaning that I don’t have to wait for a weekly dose. I’ve never had more fun disagreeing with someone. Regardless of philosophy, your words are presented intelligently and with great compassion. You will have a reader for as long as you keep it up. As a college Senior, I believe now more than ever in the importance of listening to and learning from the opinions and beliefs of others. Thanks for rounding out my education on a daily basis. Best of luck for the future. It gets back to what I was talking about yesterday: you just never know what people are going to take from these things once they've been set loose into the world. But sometimes you are pleasantly surprised.
Cast out of heaven, and now this It's official: The prince of darkness is not welcome in the town of Inglis, Florida. (Thanks to Burt Humburg for the link). -------------------- Tuesday, February 05, 2002
Lives of their own When musicians put their songs out into the world, the songs often take on lives of their own. The riff in the unofficial Rush Limbaugh theme is, of course, taken from an old Pretenders song decrying corporate strip mall culture--not exactly a Rush Limbaugh kind of message. And if you're a bit younger, maybe all you know of "Fortunate Son" is that quick snatch of patriotic music in the jeans commercial: Some folks are born made to wave the flag, This one is particularly egregious, the equivalent of the movie review which originally states, "It's amazing how bad this movie is" and is taken out of context on the movie poster to simply read, "Amazing!" (And yes, I understand that somebody had to sell the song rights to make this happen, but that's another topic.) The rest of the lyrics, for the record: And when the band plays "Hail to the chief" It ain't me, it ain't me, I'm no senator's son. Some folks are born silver spoon in hand, It ain't me, it ain't me, I'm no millionaire's son. Some folks inherit star spangled eyes, It ain't me, it ain't me, I'm no military's son. * * * This happens with cartoons, to a lesser extent. You put it out there, you try to be as clear as you can about what you're trying to say, but you can't ever predict how people are actually going to take your words and filter them through the morass of their own beliefs and experiences and general base of knowledge. A case in point comes in this morning, in reference to this week's State of the Union cartoon: "As we gather tonight, our nation is at war with terrorists we help You aren't trying to suggest that the inhabitants of oil-producing nations I'm not suggesting wink wink nudge nudge what?? I'm not completely sure what the author of this email is trying to imply, but I do think it says more about him than it does about me. Whatever it is that he has taken from that cartoon, it was surely not placed there by me. Sometimes that's just the way it works out, I guess.
Somehow I'm not reassured by this From the London Telegraph: President Bush has been keeping a "war on terrorism scorecard" in his desk drawer and using it to cross off photographs of al-Qa'eda and Taliban leaders as they have been killed or captured. "Early on, I said, 'I'm a baseball fan. I want a scorecard'," Mr Bush explained in an interview with Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. "And I understood that when you're fighting an enemy like al-Qa'eda, people- including me - didn't have a sense of who we're fighting. And I have actually got a chart." Pointing to a photograph of Muhammad Atef, Osama bin Laden's military chief and planner of the September 11 attacks, who was killed in November, he said: "There's an X right there." -------------------- Monday, February 04, 2002
Sanctuary Two weeks after the September 11 attacks, my wife and I packed up the dog and went on vacation to a dog-friendly cabin--more of a cottage, really--nestled in a small valley in a remote corner of Pennsylvannia. We'd actually had a reservation starting a few days after 9/11, which we cancelled for obvious reasons, but after a couple of weeks had passed, we decided to salvage what we could of our long-planned vacation. In those first few weeks, of course, we were constantly on edge. Every plane flying overhead seemed like a harbinger of disaster, and if memory serves, the whole anthrax business was well underway at that point. And of course, the image of the collapsing towers was still searing and fresh, and the grief around us was constant and palpable. The hellish smell of that smoldering charnel house across the river would haunt our neighborhood for months to come; some mornings when I first went outside, it would be hanging in the air, thick enough to choke on. So it is hard to express what it was like to find ourselves off in the woods, far from any threat of hijacked airplanes or anthrax mailings or whatever the hell else, to begin to reclaim that essential part of ourselves which had been subsumed by terror and exhaustion and shock. We played catch with the dog out on the lawn, and went for walks through the woods and down to the small nearby pond. We tried taking the dog out on the pond on a little paddleboat provided by the cabin's owners, but he was having none of that, though he did take great delight in splashing around at the water's edge. We drank wine at night, and watched DVDs on my laptop, and read books which had nothing to do with terrorism or world events (I finished Dugan Underground and started on what is now one of my favorite books ever, Carter Beats the Devil). And mostly, for the first time in weeks, we allowed ourselves to relax, allowed ourselves to come down off high alert for a few glorious days. There was a radio in the cottage, which could tune in maybe one or two stations, and barely at that. I would turn it on at the beginning of each day, and if the distant voices, crackling with static, were still speaking of September 11 and the World Trade Center, then I knew nothing new and even more terrible had happened, and I turned the radio off for the day. We also both got quite a lot of writing done. I had two things due, an introduction for Shannon Wheeler's new Too Much Coffee Man collection, and an email interview with an arts journal published by American expats in Paris called Kilometer Zero. They have both just been posted in the Interviews and Articles section of this site (click on the button in the left side nav bar). The interview is one of the longer and more complete I have ever done, largely because it was written and not spoken, and I had time to consider my words more carefully, and because I was in a very reflective mood at the time. I do not know if it will be obvious to you, but to me, both pieces seem suffused with the shock of then-recent events and the uncertainty of where the road ahead might lead--but are also clearly written by someone who has begun, however hesitantly, to relax. It seems like a million years ago.
Equal time It's important to understand the other side's mindset, and I think this one sums it up pretty well. It always kind of scares me how badly you liberals distort the facts toward your own liberal agendas. I was pretty angry at how badly distorted your Saturday January 26th strip was but I am glad I waited to write until after the worse strip you wrote this past Saturday. Lets take a look at the January 26th strip. The first panal you make fun of the administration for NOT getting involved when they really have no business getting involved. The fact that the Clinton administration helped Enron as much as they did the last eight years is proof at what can happen when an a morally bankrupty administration does get involved. The Bush administration did the right thing by staying out of the mess. The second panal is about how Enron helped to write the Bush administration policy. What a joke. Enron was strongly in favor of the Keyoto Treaty which the Bush Administration refused to pass and helped to kill world wide. The VP met with several members of the energy field to help try and solve the mess that California got itself into following the liberal tree huggers. At no time did Bush or Cheney meet with Ken Lay by himself. Are you aware of the several times that Ken Lay stayed in the Lincoln bedroom and had breakfast with Bill Clinton and "had his ear" all by himself? I am encouraged all the time to purchase my companies stock and sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. No one puts a gun to my head, if I choose to buy and the company tanks, well, that is my fault not the government. Lastly, trying to tie the open zipper policy of Clinton to the Bushes administration policy on Enron is a really bad streatch for anyone. Clinton was a perverted man who only thought with his penis. Bush has morals and it is ashame you can't tell the difference. This weeks strip showed even more how really liberal and out of touch you are. I choose to drive an SUV so I am helping to finance terrorists, what a joke. If the tree huggers in this country would allow us to safely develope our OWN oil, we would not have to depend on foreign oil, so my feeling is lets thank the tree huggers. Have you ever really researched the social services that the Bush administration is looking into cutting? Well, I guess you feel that every inner city person should have a free air conditioner in the summer paid for by our taxes. Take a look sometime (I mean a real look) at how much money we waste on the "so called poor" in this country. Maybe you like your tax dollars wasted but I don't. Well, I know this won't make any difference to you because most liberals are to closed minded to ever have a thought on their own. It is a shame because you are a talented comic who with a little more time spent researching his topic could be even better.
More to the story, again Joshua Micah Marshall examines the origins of that Al Jazeera tape more closely in the Premium section of today's Salon. At the time, Al-Jazeera denied that an interview had taken place -- even to CNN, to which the Qatar-based network apparently had a legal obligation to make the tape available. Later, Al-Jazeera representatives alternated between explanations, saying first that the interview was not newsworthy, and then that their reporter had been intimidated by bin Laden. On Friday, an anonymous Al-Jazeera journalist, quoted by Reuters, said that the network had held off on airing the tape because "we decided under the circumstances at that time that airing the interview would have strengthened the belief that we are a mouthpiece for bin Laden." As a number of commentators have noted, some of Al-Jazeera's explanations contradict others; but the similarity connecting each of them is that none passes the smell test. Al-Jazeera's main argument has been the interview's lack of newsworthiness -- that highly elastic and often inconsistent standard that U.S. networks have also used to resist showing bin Laden material. Always, always, always more to the story.
The morning mailbag Alert reader Jake Sexton brings up a point I'd missed in reference to the bin Laden interview I quoted in yesterday's post: that bin laden interview you cite in your latest blog was not aired on al-jazeera because it was controlled by bin laden. the reporter was kidnapped and told what questions to ask while soldiers waited outside. al jazeera opted not to broadcast it. cnn didn't take such precaution. all so damn ironic considering that american politicos kept claiming that al-jazeera was a mouthpiece for bin laden. now who's the mouthpiece? * * * And Anthony B. Geraci sends this thoughtful critique: Who are you commie assholes??? And where were you when President Blowjob was in office? I'd like to know. * * * I get some variation on this one with tedious regularity. There's always somebody late to the party, barging into conversations before they take the time to really understand what's going on. Anyone who spends five minutes browsing through the archives will discover that I was in fact extremely critical of Bill Clinton for much of his time in office (frequently infuriating many of you)...and that the underlying critique-- my small, pathetic attempt to shine a weak light from a cheap novelty flashlight with dying batteries into the vast corrosive cesspool where money and politics collide--was generally consistent with the cartoons I've been doing since the Enron thing broke. The players change, the plotline gets revised, but the underlying story remains the same. But the last time I looked, Bill Clinton was a private citizen and George W. Bush Junior the Second had assumed the mantle of power, and unless we've passed through a warp in the space/time continuum without my noticing, cartoons about Bill Clinton in February of 2002 are somewhat beside the point. Commenting on the abuses of power of the current president rather than the former president--that's just the kind of cutting-edge political cartoonist I am. I could go on, but my comrades in the Karl Marx study group are waiting for me to join them in a rousing rendition of "The Internationale." -------------------- Sunday, February 03, 2002
Bin Laden speaks From that Al Jazeera interview CNN has been airing: "I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people and the West in general into an unbearable hell and a choking life." Can it be spelled out any more clearly? This isn't just about bringing down skyscrapers and murdering civilians and wreaking havoc and discord--it's about setting into motion a chain of events through which we end up doing irreperable damage to ourselves, to that part of our society which can only be destroyed from within, to the very ideals which define us. The trap lies in wait before us, open and beckoning. And I have seen little evidence so far that we are wise enough to avoid it. --------------------
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