THIS MODERN WORLD

I’ve alluded to the fact that I’ve got a new book coming out soon. There’s been a longer-than-usual break between books — I switched publishers after St. Martin’s dropped the ball so badly on the last one, which threw things off. Which means this one’s a little longer than the standard two-year compilation, with work going all the way back to the runup to war in 2002. So when I was putting it together, I was trying to think of a title and a cover image that would succinctly sum up everything we’ve been through since then … and, well, this is what I came up with:

Think I’m gonna get any crap for this one?

You can pre-order it here. (…available March 23.)

Comments open.

… I know the Amazon ranking numbers are essentially meaningless, especially when comparing a few pre-orders today to absolutely no sales yesterday. But still, you gotta love this:

Let’s hope that trend continues.

A letter to the editor in this morning’s New York Times, on the topic of the NSA spying scandal, reiterates a familiar refrain: the innocent have nothing to hide.

You hear this a lot lately, from Bush supporters who are perfectly willing — eager, even — to trade essential liberty for temporary safety. Because the world is a very, very, very scary place. Because we’ve never faced such a dire threat before. And of course, because we learned on September 11 that oceans no longer protect us.

I know I’ve said this before, but those of you of a certain vintage probably remember how safe you felt growing up, with those great big oceans out there, when all you had to worry about was, you know, the constant threat of imminent nuclear annihilation. You all felt awfully safe back then, didn’t you, with the duck and cover drills and the back yard bomb shelters and the Cuban missile crisis and the rest of it.

But now, things are different. We’re no longer as secure as we were back then, in the good old days, with the oceans and all. Which is why we have to let the president do whatever he feels is necessary to protect us, and we can’t let some old scrap of paper like the Constitution stand in our way.

Anyway, if you’re innocent, you have nothing to hide.

I don’t know if the good citizens who chant this mantra are really as virtuous as they claim, of course. I don’t know if they have any toys stashed under the bed that they’d rather their neighbors didn’t know about, if there are any items of clothing they like to wear when no one else is around, if they fudge the numbers on their tax returns or maybe drink a little more than they should or drive too fast or have phone conversations that they don’t want their spouses to know about or indulge, one way or another, in any one of a myriad of minor sins which are not unfamiliar to most human beings. But more likely, they’re just not thinking in those terms. What they mean is, “If I’m not planning a terrorist attack, I have nothing to worry about.” Oblivious to the lessons of history, they’re not thinking about anything else. They’re not worried about the abuse of power because they just can’t imagine themselves as the target of an abusive government. They see themselves as Right Thinking Citizens, and when push comes to shove, they imagine that the policeman or the FBI agent will notice the flag pin on their lapel and give them a knowing wink and move on down the line to harass some dirty America-hating ACLU type who deserves to be harassed by the government.

It’s often suggested that these misguided souls might be led to the path of enlightment if only the argument were framed in terms they might understand: What if Hitlery Clintoon steals the election in 2008? Do you want her poking through your email, listening to your phone conversations? But somehow even that doesn’t really seem to get through. Maybe the possibility of Hitlery Clintoon as president is just too far-fetched to take seriously. Or maybe they can barely think past tomorrow morning, and just don’t care about the consequences of their short-sighted acquiesence to clearly illegal behavior on the part of their government.

I honestly don’t know. It all seems pretty straightforward to me. As I was growing up, the lessons were clear, the difference between this country and our ideological opponents was obvious. We were free citizens — they lived in fear and suspicion, constantly monitored by an intrusive government. But I guess there were a lot of crazy ideas floating around back during the freewheeling seventies. Free love, disco, respect for the Bill of Rights — that sort of thing. These days, we know better. We understand that we need a watchful, protective presence — a kind of big brother, if you will — to keep us safe from Emmannuel Goldstein The Terrorists.

And anyway, the innocent have nothing to hide.

Right?

… crossposted this one over at the Huffington Post. Since comments are open there, I might as well throw them open here as well.

…from comments:

The NKVD (Stalin’s internal security apparatus) slogan was, “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”

Does anybody know if this is accurate? Many references on Google, but I can’t find a specific confirmation. Any Soviet scholars in the house?

David Sirota wrote this great piece about the beltway babies who are are responsible for the Democrats near-permanent minority status :

Just look at yesterday’s piece in Roll Call where you had this same Democratic cabal saying the party shouldn’t mount an aggressive lobbying/ethics crackdown, or look back at the Iraq War where you had the Democratic strategic class saying it was good politics to just blindly follow the Bush administration’s lies (incredibly, they are still preaching this kind of acquiescence on Iraq even today). These “strategists” are the Washington, D.C. parasites who are far more concerned about protecting their own tiny rackets of DCCC contracts and candidate consulting gigs than actually helping the party take back the majority.

Today, these “strategists” are publicly worrying that Democrats challenging the President’s illegal behavior “could threaten the party in this year’s elections.” The first quote in the piece goes to an unnamed Democratic “strategist” who says “If Democrats want to be the party of people who think [the government] is too tough and the Republicans are the party of people who are tough, I don’t see how that helps us.”

This supposed “strategist,” of course, is dishonestly spinning the situation to benefit his opponents – not exactly “strategic.” The debate over the domestic surveillance is not a debate over spying on terrorists vs. not spying on terrorists, as this “strategist” – and then Brownstein – assert. Oh sure, as I documented earlier, the media has done everything it can to try to force the scandal into that frame – reporters behavior in this has been nothing short of disgusting. But that’s not what this is about. This is about whether this president – or any president – can ignore the Constitution and federal laws to order any kind of spying he wants without a court order. And the fact that these “strategists” aren’t even mentioning the fact that the President broke the law – even with Republican Senators admitting he did break the law – should indicate exactly why the Democratic Party today seems so rudderless and poorly run: because the “strategists” running it are morons.

I agree with everything Sirota wrote, but I’ve got to take issue with that last bit. Democratic strategists aren’t morons, they’re geniuses.

After all, these guys have found a way to make a killing on the Democratic “woe is me” mentality without ever having to accomplish the task they claim to be good at : winning elections. It’s a pretty damn good racket they’ve got going. Mix equal parts harsh reality (“Republicans are unbeatable”) and flattery (“Americans agree with Democrats”) which naturally lead your mark to the solutions that you’re about to sell (“I can help you craft the perfect message”). Like any good con, the last thing you want is for your victim to get the self-confidence they need to see they’re getting played, so every time there’s some good news, you’ve gotta make sure to use it to beat down your “client’s” self-esteem even more. (“We shouldn’t politicize this issue”) And as long as you can safely straddle that line between “We’re doomed” and “We’re doing great”, you can lose all the elections you want and still get hired again.

The point here, of course, isn’t that Democrats shouldn’t get advice from strategists but that they shouldn’t keep hiring the same losers over and over again. For those of us on the outside looking in, it’s heartbreaking to see that the incestuous circles of politicos in D.C. exist more to keep friends and relatives employed than advancing some meaningful public policy. I know you guys vacation in Martha’s Vineyard together and your kids attend the same private school, but being cool isn’t enough to undo the fact that a lot of these guys really suck at their jobs. What’s worse though is that even the wannabe Dems who aren’t invited to all the cool parties are often so starstruck that they’ll hire anybody with some big names on their resume. (“Wow, you worked for Tom Daschle and Wes Clark? You’re hired!”) It’s bad enough to see this shit go on in the business world, where a CEO can hop from bankrupt company to bankrupt company without ever taking pay cut, but the lack of accountability in Washington is enough to make you wonder if we’ll ever get something like universal healthcare or a minimum wage that doesn’t keep people in poverty.

Wolcott recaps a print-only article from Los Angeles magazine about the PJMedia fiasco-in-progress, the author of which has apparently been keeping an eye on things from the start. (Which means he’s well situated to write the inevitable history-of-a-clusterfuck book after the whole sorry enterprise inevitably implodes. If anyone cares enough to publish it, that is.)

Smith ends his report with an account of the starry PeePee media launch in Manhattan’s Rainbow Room to get the buzz snowballing. In attendance were such totemic Play-Doh figures as Lucianne Goldberg, John Podhoretz, and keynoter Judith Miller, who had just had a bitter kissoff from The New York Times. At the end of her keynote speech, Miller, flanked by a couple of bodyguards (possibly to keep some excitable, gin-crazed blogger from pawing her), is ready to face the music.

“…it’s time for questions, and none in the crowd asks Miller a single stinging inquiry. Not even anything especially critical, though this is one of the few times she’s fielded questions in the days after announcing she would leave The New York Times. Maybe those bodyguards were just too intimidating.

“All day long, bloggers had celebrated themselves as ‘the Tom Paines of the 21st century.’ I could be wrong, but Tom Paine probably would have had his notebook out when Miller took questions. Bloggers across the board want to be considered the equal of journalists, but the way they froze in the lights of the old media shows the field has a distance to go. So does Pajamas Media.”

The author also brings up something I’ve wondered about — do advertisers like, say, Victoria’s Secret or AT&T (both of whom have, in fact, purchased ads from PJM) really want to be prominently associated with a rightwing hate site like LGF? Maybe it’s just me, but somehow it doesn’t seem like quite the image either company is probably looking for.

And then there’s this tidbit (again, as recapped by Wolcott):

Nor can Smith get a reply when he inquires into the investment backing for PeePee, its main moneyman a former software designer named Aubrey Chernick whose company NC4 is “deeply involved in preparing for potential terrorist attacks on Los Angeles and New York City.” Chernick was also listed in 2000 as a trustee for the pro-Israeli lobby AIPAC, which has the been the tense scene of some interesting drama during the last year.

Be interesting to find out what Chernick expects and wants from his investment in PeePee, what he hopes the financial and ideological payoff to be. But, quelle surprise, “Chernick declined requests for an interview.”

* * *

Speaking of the jammies crowd, I just want to say — you know that painfully self-aware shtick where a writer pretends to have a real-time editor commenting on what they’re writing? Man, that really just makes my teeth hurt when they do that.

(You mean like this? –ed.)

Yeah, I mean like that. As authorial tics go, it’s right up there with inappropriate exclamation marks!

Of which I am also not a big fan.

The war on rationality continues unabated:

The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. “They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public,” he said.

Dean Acosta, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at the space agency, said there was no effort to silence Dr. Hansen. “That’s not the way we operate here at NASA,” Mr. Acosta said. “We promote openness and we speak with the facts.”

He said the restrictions on Dr. Hansen applied to all National Aeronautics and Space Administration personnel. He added that government scientists were free to discuss scientific findings, but that policy statements should be left to policy makers and appointed spokesmen.

Mr. Acosta said other reasons for requiring press officers to review interview requests were to have an orderly flow of information out of a sprawling agency and to avoid surprises. “This is not about any individual or any issue like global warming,” he said. “It’s about coordination.”

Dr. Hansen strongly disagreed with this characterization, saying such procedures had already prevented the public from fully grasping recent findings about climate change that point to risks ahead.

“Communicating with the public seems to be essential,” he said, “because public concern is probably the only thing capable of overcoming the special interests that have obfuscated the topic.”

Dr. Hansen, 63, a physicist who joined the space agency in 1967, directs efforts to simulate the global climate on computers at the Goddard Institute in Morningside Heights in Manhattan.

* * *

Irrelevant but tangentially related anecdote: I lived up near Columbia for several years, back when my wife the professor was still in grad school, and I probably walked past the Goddard Institute at least once a day. Now, when you hear that the global climate is being simulated on computers in a research facility whose full name is the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, you might imagine that it’s all taking place in a high tech building of glass and steel — something like this, say:

Or maybe this:

In reality, the Goddard Institute occupies space in this completely unremarkable brick building at the corner of 112th and Broadway:

And if you look closer, you may recognize the building from a completely different context, at least if you were ever a “Seinfeld” fan:

I always thought it was a strange juxtaposition — at ground level, tourists constantly stop and pose for photos in front of a restaurant famous because it was used as an establishing shot on a popular television show (and whose interior, incidentally, bears absolutely no resemblence to the diner on the show), while a few floors above, scientists are trying to predict the fate of the planet.

(Bonus trivia: Tom’s was also the inspiration for a song on Suzanne Vega’s first second album.)