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Thursday, April 11, 2002
Further proof that Tom will do anything to avoid finishing up his taxes and balancing his checkbook You're looking at it.
Today: something to annoy everyone! My email pal Ken Layne has a thoughtful response to my summary of the Tariq Ali talk last night; unsurprisingly (if you're familiar with his blog), he disagrees with my general pessimism. Well, I'll tell you--one of these days I'm going to go out to Los Angeles, and I'll drink Mr. Happy there under the damn table and by god, by the end of the evening, he'll either share my cynical, angry, bitter, the-worst-is-going-to-happen-sooner-than-later worldview, or my name isn't Tom Tomorrow. Of course, my name on my driver's license isn't Tom Tomorrow. And that's not really a strictly accurate summary of my worldview. And chances are, I'll end up under the table just as quickly. I do wish I shared his optimism, that this is all going to work out just fine. But I don't. It's not that I claim to have any real answers, just a lot of questions I don't see a lot of people addressing. American intellectuals are widely denounced these days, but the problems we face cannot be solved with purely emotional responses--such as the revenge motivation which Charles Krauthammer so freely acknowledges. It's not very popular to look at underlying causes right now, to acknowledge that the world did not simply spring into being on Sept. 11, 2001...but god help you if you ever get sick and go to a doctor who tries to treat your condition without trying to understand why it developed. There's something I've been thinking about that sort of ties in here: the almost obligatory construct of left/skeptical arguments which begins, "Of course X is very bad, but." As in, "Of course suicide bombs are very bad, but Israel has only exacerbated the situation." It's a construct I find incredibly offensive, to say the very least, because it puts me, and those who share my perspective, in the position of having to defend our very humanity. Jesus H. Christ on a crutch--of course I am repelled by suicide bombers. Of course I am shocked and saddened by the senseless deaths of Israeli citizens. Do I have to say this every time? Do I have to begin every speech with a disclaimer, that I do not beat my dog or steal candy from small children, or tear the wings off of helpless insects? Bullshit on that. I believe this construct should be abandoned forthwith, that the "but" should be replaced with an "and"--i.e., I am shocked by X and I am shocked by Y. And this goes both ways, I've said this before--if you sympathize greatly with the suffering of the Palestinian people, or the Afghani people, or the Iraqi people, but you dismiss out of hand the suffering of the Israelis, or even that of your own countrymen in the aftermath of Sept. 11, then your perch atop the moral high ground is a shaky one at best. This is not moral relativism. It is the first necessary step toward moving the hands on the Doomsday Clock a little further away from midnight. Something else that should, but often seems not, to go without saying: I do not criticize this country because I think it is an evil, vile place, without hope of redemption. I criticize this country because I believe in its promise, and find the betrayal of that promise maddening beyond belief. Ken asks, "Wasn't MLK Jr. an optimist? Bobby Kennedy? FDR?" Well,yes, they were--but they were also very harsh critics of the injustice they saw around them. King, in particular, has undergone a sort of Hallmark card revisionism, which does no justice to his memory or the things he really stood for. And this country is a better place today as a result of the fact that they were honest enough to see what was wrong with it, and optimistic enough to try to change it. Ken argues: ...there's a straight line from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution to Women's Suffrage to the Civil Rights Act to the Moon Landing to the EPA (thanks Nixon!) to the Internet to the Space Station to Moscow and Washington dropping two-thirds of their nuclear weapons (that happened a couple months ago) to Robot Dogs to the End of Cancer to Space Colonies all over this filthy galaxy. But as a fellow once said, in rather a different context, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Leaving aside, for the moment, the many times that this straight line has, in fact, veered off course already--one interesting comment Ali made last night was that, according to his research, the greatest celebrations of the Sept. 11 attacks took place, not in the Arab world, but throughout those Latin American countries which have borne the brunt of so much American-sponsored terrorism--but leaving that aside, the problem here is, I think, that if we take for granted the justness of our cause and the wisdom of our leaders, if we don't ask hard questions and demand accountability, then this straight line into some wise and peaceful Star Trek future...well, it's just not going to happen. It's going to veer off into a future I just don't want to live in. This is really nothing more than enlightened self-interest: we can paint this pretty picture of ourselves, and hang it on the mantlepiece and spend much time admiring the noble thrust of our jaw and the steely glint of determination in our eyes, but if the rest of the world doesn't buy it, then it just doesn't matter how many locks we put on our door, or how high we build the gates around our compound--we will never be secure. There's always going to be someone sitting out there with a suitcase nuke or a lab full of anthrax, or even just a couple of box cutters and a monstrous determination. "Winning" a war on terror is an oxymoron; at best we can hold back the tide. So we have two choices, really: we either obliterate every last man, woman and child who might ever commit such deeds, just wipe them off the face of the earth, eliminating every possible terrorist everywhere...or we find a way to coexist in the world. And that doesn't mean surrender. It just means we have to be smart, and maybe just a little more concerned with world stability than with the administration's purported fixation on the dominance of our own Empire. This isn't rocket science, but those space colonies all over the galaxy are hanging in the balance. And I'd like to see them just as much as Ken would. So maybe there's a tiny spark of optimism in this old dark heart of mine after all. -------------------- Wednesday, April 10, 2002
Clash of fundamentalisms I went to a talk given by Tariq Ali tonight. He hit many of the same points he discusses in this interview in the New York Press, so rather than delay my dinner any longer than necessary, I'm going to point you there for an overview, and just recount a couple of quick things that stick out in my mind. He pointed out that the only senior member of al Qaeda member in custody so far was captured not as a result of the war in Afghanistan, but as a result of a police investigation in Pakistan. And he described a debate with Charles Krauthammer on some Canadian news show, during which he argued that the war has really been about nothing but revenge--to which Krauthammer replied, essentially, yes, of course, what's your point? So--this is me talking now, not Ali--now we've had our revenge, and yes, we've taken down the Taliban--a foreign policy objective I don't remember many conservatives advocating in the decade preceding Sept. 11, during which the loudest voices decrying that brutal regime were, well, leftists and feminists--and now we're set to pull out and leave the country to the various feuding warlords once again, just like we did in the late eighties. And gosh, it sure worked out well that time, didn't it? Ali closed with two quotes from respected American military commanders--the famous Eisenhower "military-industrial complex" warning, and most of this excerpt from a 1933 speech by Marine General Smedley Butler: War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. . . . There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism. It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
The path to peace By David Clark, a former special advisor to the British Foreign Office: Yesterday's carnage in the West Bank provided a bloody illustration of the limits of Ariel Sharon's military strategy. Armed force cannot provide his people with the security they crave because the terrorist infrastructure he has set out to destroy consists of little more than the willingness of ordinary Palestinians to kill themselves while taking as many Israelis with them as possible. This week, the hatred on which it is built burns deeper than ever. Israeli leaders are trapped in a mindset in which further military escalation appears to be their only option. Yet it is difficult to see how much further they can go without triggering a wider regional conflagration that might threaten the state of Israel itself. The "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians from large tracts of the occupied territories? The murder of Arafat? The consequences are unthinkable. Left to his own devices, Ariel Sharon may yet turn out to be the ultimate suicide bomber. * * * With Israel, it will be necessary to challenge some deeply held illusions about the peace process and why it broke down. Chief among these is the assertion that the Palestinians rejected a "generous" Israeli offer at Camp David two years ago. It is a view that spans the Israeli political spectrum, uniting the hard right with born-again rejectionists like Ehud Barak, confirming all in their belief that political dialogue has been exhausted and that Arafat is an inveterate terrorist. It is time for some constructive revisionism. Barak's proposal for a Palestinian state based on 91% of the West Bank sounded substantive, but even the most cursory glance at the map revealed the bad faith inherent in it. It showed the West Bank carved into three chunks, surrounded by Israeli troops and settlers, without direct access to its own international borders. The land-swap that was supposed to compensate the Palestinians for the loss of prime agricultural land in the West Bank merely added insult to injury. The only territory offered to Palestinian negotiators consisted of stretches of desert adjacent to the Gaza Strip that Israel currently uses for toxic waste dumping. The proposals on East Jerusalem were no better, permitting the Palestinians control of a few scattered fragments of what had been theirs before 1967.
So you think you're something special Rice has a more complex genetic blueprint than you do. Yes, that's right--rice. (Thanks to Matt Hotujec for the sad news.)
In which your humble correspondent thanks you for stopping by and then politely directs you elsewhere I got a nice email from a cartoonist named Mikhaela Blake Reid recently. Her work runs in the student paper at Harvard, the Crimson, and apparently the editors, and more importantly, lawyers at that paper are giving her a bit of a hard time about what she is and is not allowed to say in her cartoon. I'm somewhat surprised to hear this; I believe the Crimson has been an off-and-on client of my own over the years, unless I'm confusing it with some other student paper there--which is always a possibility, given that what I laughingly refer to as my memory is probably roughly comparable to that of my dog. Actually that might be unfair to my dog--he always remembers to pause and sniff at the storm drain where he once lost a ball, or the fence behind which he once saw a cat. But I digress. Anyway, one of the problems Mikhaela is having is that her editors will not allow her to publish her email or web address along with the cartoon, because, they explain, it would be unfair to paying advertisers. This is, of course, as unclear on the concept as it is humanly possible to be, particularly given that writers in the paper are allowed to publish their email addresses; it's also the sort of reasoning that gives me a dull red ache behind the eyes. So, in the interests of supporting another young cartoonist who might just as easily give up on the whole game and devote her energies toward a career in which the chances of succeeding are at least marginally higher than of, say, winning the lottery or being hit by lightning (and I realize, I speak as a mildly singed, mid-level lottery winner), I thought it might be a Good Thing for readers of this page to throw some support her way. Her, yes, blog is here, and her cartoons are here. Joe-Bob says, check 'em out. -------------------- Tuesday, April 09, 2002
100th death row inmate exonerated From deathpenaltyinfo.org: Former death row inmate Ray Krone was released from prison on Monday in Arizona after DNA testing showed that he did not commit the murder for which he was convicted 10 years ago. Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley and Phoenix Police Chief Harold Hurtt announced at a news conference on Monday that new DNA tests vindicated Krone and that they would seek his release pending a hearing next month to vacate the murder conviction. Romley stated, "[Krone] deserves an apology from us, that's for sure. A mistake was made here. . . . What do you say to him? An injustice was done and we will try to do better. And we're sorry." At the risk of repeating myself (always a risk I seem willing to take), there are two very simple reasons you should support the abolition of the death penalty, no matter what your politics may be on any other issue: (1) we are human, and therefore fallible, as stories like this one continue to prove, and (2) the state should not be in the business of executing its citizens, particularly when any chance of error exists (see first reason). This simply shouldn't be debatable: the execution of a single innocent person is too high a price to pay.
The mystery unfolds Notes from a Japanese reader on Hi Ho: First of all, the translation by Aaron Batty in your web is very correct. (Where he learned Japanese?) I could spot only one mistake, which is; >The grandmother next door has also made her debut Grandmother is too old. In this case, it means just a middle-aged woman in the neighborhood. Also I'd like to make some comment on "FOODPOISONING HI-HO". (the title itself is not correct, see below.) Because I found it is very difficult to understand for western people. Apparently this clip is made for New-Years season. There are many references to traditional custom regarding New Year in Japan. 1) Children covered their faces with some ink. This represents kakizome. You know Japanese calligraphy? Japanese kids and adults do some calligraphy in New Years Day. It is called Kakizome. (making calligraphy in New Years Day) and its content represents the goal in their life for new year. The kids here have wrote that, and therefore, their faces covered with ink. Sadly, this beautiful custom is about to be obsolete these days. 2) Foodpoisoning (?) First of all, this is not foodpoisoning. The boy (?) in the middle is just gagged his throat with rice cake. We eat rice cakes in winter. It's very popular snack. The food is soft like rubber and sometimes could be very dangerous. It is favorite of, especially, older persons and many of them died by jamming them in their throat. Such cases are regularly reported in the newspaper, every year, in new year season. (If you think this is a joke, ask any Japanese native around you. I'M NOT KIDDING.) 3) make some contribution in the temple. In new years day, the family go to temple nearby, make their wish, and give some contribution in the box. Boy throwed a coin, then dad put 10,000 yen bill in the box. It is a mistake. 10,000 yen is about 80 US dollar. Dad try to retrive it but no avail. Mom and boy make him stop but dad refused. Finally dad gave it up. Sorry for poor grammar. You can alter as much as you want if you put this on your web. I've been reading your works since Mike Gunderloy's period of Factsheet Five. Your works taught me lot, especially society called America. These days I feel *very* uneasy about current Bush administration and I believe many of you understand that. Thank you.
A hobby, not a profession John Scalzi looks at how blogging numbers are distorted, making this whole thing look like much more than it really is. (You know the routine: "Wow! Record traffic yesterday!") This site has experienced extraordinary growth since I started blogging--I jumped from an average of 40,000 visitors a month to almost 180,000 in March (and if I wanted to make it look really impressive to some gullible journalist, I could point out that I average more than a million hits a month, a statistic Scalzi also deconstructs). Unfortunately, I suspect a lot of those visitors are the same people, checking in a couple of times a week, if not a couple of times a day. If I were forced at gunpoint to guess, I'd say my actual audience here is probably somewhere between 10,000 and--at the most ludicrously optimistic high end-- 50,000 readers a month. And I'm delighted to have you--please, come in, kick off your shoes, can I get you a cup of coffee? But as Scalzi rightly notes, these are are relatively miniscule numbers, compared to traditional media. In my own case, my cartoon runs in about 150 newspapers whose circulations range from 5,000 to maybe 250,000 a week (and on Salon, whose numbers I don't know offhand), and add into that the work I do for The New Yorker and The American Prospect, and the occasional piece for The New York Times; while I'm much too lazy to bother trying to work up any specific numbers, let's just say that even if only a miniscule fraction of the readers of those publications pay any attention whatsoever to my modest offerings, I've still got an audience of at least a bazillion readers, give or take a couple of gajillion. And those publications pay me. So why do I do this? Because I enjoy it--I can let my hair down here, kick back, and of course, post pictures of my dog. (And this is what Alterman missed in his column on Sullivan--blogs don't need editors; blogging would be destroyed by editors.) This is essentially my little daily newsletter for my more enthusiastic readers, a small way of saying thank you for supporting my work, and as such, I hope to keep doing it even after the blog crash, the inevitable point at which the number of blog readers is surpassed by the number of blog writers, all of whom spend their time linking to one another in one huge circle jerk, while the trend watchers all move on to the next big internet phenomenon, downloadable smell-o-vision or web sites that appear in three stunning dimensions when you wear special red and blue glasses, or some damned gimmick or another. Don't get me wrong--I think blogging is a great thing, proof that the internet, unlike any other mass communications medium, will always have room for the individual voice. I mean, if you want to play the numbers game, think of it this way: when I was a young cartoonist in Iowa, I had to xerox up little zines of my work, in editions of fifty or a hundred, and convince the local bookstore to try to sell them, and after a month or two, I might have sold twenty or thirty copies to other people living in that one small town. Today, a young cartoonist like August Pollok can reach ten times that number of people in a single week, and in terms of self-publishing, that's extraordinary. But that should be the standard by which bloggers judge their audiences --not traditional print media whose circulation and resources they can never hope to match. I guess what I'm trying to say is, bloggers should be wary of playing Charlie Brown, with blogging's most enthusiastic proponents in the role of Lucy proferring the football, lest they find themselves laying on their backs with their shoes and socks and sometimes even shirts inexplicably missing, and a scratchy black inkline of frustration hovering ominously over their heads. Of course, as always--I could be wrong!™ (And by the way: record traffic yesterday! ) -------------------- Monday, April 08, 2002
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang  I met my friend Ken, who works for a company headquartered next to ground zero, for lunch last week, and he took me up to a fortieth floor lobby overlooking the site--which now appears almost entirely cleaned out, at least to the untrained eye. It's hard to reconcile with the images we all have seared into our memories of the immediate aftermath, those incomprehensible mountains of rubble and twisted steel, and harder still to reconcile with the memory of the towers themselves. We stood up there comparing what we were seeing with a map of the World Trade Center plaza, trying to place it all--that's where the sculpture was, the Border's was in that corner, the footbridge was over there. Or was it there? The truly extraordinary thing is that almost all the buildings on the immediate perimeter are still standing. This is also difficult to reconcile with one's memory of those massive towers--how is this possible? I mean, there's no need to send me explanations, I understand what happened--but the enormity of it really hits you when you view the whole scene. In the photo above, there's one building missing, but I think that's the only one around the entire perimeter that came down, out of all these buildings that were just across the street. I walked around the neighborhood a bit after lunch--it is my old stomping ground, and I was glad to see that it seems to have rebounded so well. The debris on the streets is now just the usual byproduct of a city full of people who can't seem to be bothered to find a corner trash can, the soldiers patrolling the streets are gone, the crushed vehicles long since towed away. If you walk down certain streets and avoid looking south, you can almost imagine none of this ever happened. Except for all the tourists, the ones who are so clearly not from here, traipsing around the neighborhood with their cameras and camcorders, pausing at corners and literally staring at nothing, at the brutal emptiness, the hole in the sky. And it is truly a gaping hole--I don't know if other people ever took them for granted, but when I had my office in Tribeca, glancing up at the towers was an almost unconscious reflex--I would turn a certain corner and know the view would be there, and without even breaking stride or pausing in my chain of thought, I'd glance up and some small voice in the back of my mind would say, yep, they sure are big. Walking around the neighborhood now, I find that that reflex is still disorientingly present. * * * I took Friday off because it was, well, my birthday (and man, those years sure keep piling on), and went museum hopping with my wife. We saw the Surrealist show at the Met, which at the risk of sounding like a philistine, I found underwhelming, and then cabbed across the park to the Museum of Natural History. They've got a special exhibit on butterflies set up, a sort of temporary greenhouse you walk through, so that there's no barrier between you and the butterflies--people in other places call this "walking outside," but this is how we have to do it here in New York. We went through that, and went to the Rose Planetarium (which is what we have in lieu of "looking up at the night sky"), but the thing I really love about that museum are the old dioramas, the animals and primitive humans frozen perpetually on the verge--of the kill or the attack or the chase or whatever it is--it's always the moment before, the moment of anticipation never satisfied, like Tantalus perpetually at the water's edge. Some day they will probably renovate the museum, and the dioramas will be spruced up and modernized and in the process they will be completely stripped of their charm, but for now, walking through exhibit halls which are probably largely unchanged since they were initially installed, it's kind of like travelling in time. New York is like that, in some places, a city where bits of the past constantly creep into the present, somehow surviving in pockets of suspended time, and you never know exactly when you're going to stumble into one of them. One of these days I'll turn a corner and the streets will be full of large Checker cabs with drivers who call you "Mack," and brightly lit phone booths with rotary phones and men wearing hats and women in nylons and large cigarette billboards blowing puffs of smoke out into the night sky of a city which has yet to imagine that such towers could ever be built, let alone destroyed in the course of a few hours. Well, no, I won't. But, boy, it would be something to see, wouldn't it?
The Japanese word for "Hi Ho" is "Hi Ho" Several readers living in Japan have written to explain that the Hi Ho animations are commercials for an ISP. One of them, Aaron Batty, earns bonus points for providing a couple of translations, which, as you will soon see, make just as much sense as the commercials themselves. Note: according to Aaron, "a lot of it is just crazy sounds for rhythm." See previous posts for links. * * * (Internet Hi-Ho!) The mail has flown (Yes!) Dream Internet Chat chat * * * The mouse dances (Yes!) Romantic love Internet * * * It's an internet star (Yes!) Love Internet --------------------
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