Simple answers to insipid questions

From Howie Kurtz in the WaPo:

Krugman calls for focusing on the candidates' policy proposals instead. I'm all for that. But can we really make judgments about Obama and Edwards, for example, based on the differences in their health care plans?

Umm, yes. This has been the first edition to simple answers to insipid questions, inspired, of course, by Atrios.

Odds and ends

I'm busy getting ready to watch The Sopranos' final episode, but wanted to pass along a link to an article about how lightening up roofing and highway materials is a vastly useful environmental technique, since much less heat is absorbed, especially in cities. All it takes is chalk dust. Apparently, the reason we don't do this is because it's too simple to sound impressive. From Mark Kleiman, via Matt Yglesias:

Of course, if we had political reporters who weren't pig-ignorant about science and technology, this wouldn't be as significant a problem as it is. And if politicians weren't in the habit of offering trivial pseudo-solutions to serious problems, journalists would be less cynical about things that seem too easy. But then if my grandmother had wheels she would have been a trolley car.

This is a case where simply repeating the idea until it no longer seems funny could make a difference. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to explain the idea to five people until they stop laughing.

Stop laughing!

By the way, lest we ever forget this, people are morons. This is a fundamental truth of human existence. It applies to those in the tech world who would impose arcane limits on us, crazy warmongering politicians like Joe Lieberman, the same crazy guy agreeing with Barack Obama that the internet is dangerous, etc....though I'll note that, closing the circle, Obama does know how to deal with pig-ignorant journalists.

The wrong man was convicted

Just a quickie this morning, about last week's Repbulican debate, with actual content outsourced to the always good Paul Krugman (link is behind the NYTimes firewall, but if you have an e-mail from an .edu domain, you can see it):

In Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday.

Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the "gaffe of the night"?

Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit....

[I]f there’s one thing I hope we’ve learned from the calamity of the last six and a half years, it’s that it matters who becomes president — and that listening to what candidates say about substantive issues offers a much better way to judge potential presidents than superficial character judgments. Mr. Bush’s tax lies, not his surface amiability, were the true guide to how he would govern.

And I don’t know if this country can survive another four years of Bush-quality leadership.

No Justice, No Peace

Before getting started on this morning's post, I should link to a great editorial in the WaPo from a counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the good guys), arguing that since filesharing is so incredibly easy, the RIAA and universities should just bundle in a music-sharing license in with preexisting fees currently paid by universities to musicians to cover various performances on campus. Anyway, I'll try to post some recent vacation photos tonight, but until then, onto the news of the day.

No Justice: For those not following it, or unable to figure out from the news coverage of the current scandals at the Department of Justice, here is a brief recap. Throughout the Bush administration, but more frequently during the period 2004-present, political posts throughout DoJ were filled with young lawyers lacking any proper experience who happened to be extremely loyal (and thus easily manipulable) conservative Republicans. This list could include Monica Goodling, Kyle Sampson, and yesterday's Congressional hearing embarrassment, Bradley Schlozman (click on links for bios). Said employees seem to have made it their mission to try to politicize the entire justice department by preferentially hiring Republicans, even though this is completely illegal for career positions at DoJ. Why would they do this? Well, the primary offenses revealed so far were at the Civil Rights division, the Voting Rights division, and the US Attorneys themselves, who are responsible for prosecuting crimes involving those two departments. It doesn't take much to infer that the goal was to steer voting rights/voter fraud lawsuits against Democratic groups, and prevent such lawsuits against Republicans. About half of the US Attorneys fired had refused to indict Democrats who weren't guilty of anything, and the other half seem to have been involved in actually prosecuting guilty Republicans, which is an unforgivable offense to the administration. I should make clear of course, that "voter fraud" by minorities, which Republicans like to throw around, is largely a myth designed to suppress the minority vote, since it leans heavily Democratic.

One can further infer who is behind this affair. It can certainly be suggested that the reason so many youngsters were placed in positions of power is because their strings can be pulled by a puppet master, and so far all signs seem to point to Karl Rove. Recall before the 2006 elections, he claimed Republicans would succeed because he was entitled to "THE math" on the elections. Though he never stated such, one could suggest that carefully arranging the balance of who is actually allowed to vote might explain why one might be overconfident. Unfortunately for him, his dreams of a "permanent Republican majority" actually fell victim to the fact his party was perceived as vastly too corrupt to remain in power. Shucks.

No Peace: On the international front, it seems crazy to me that there are forces in the administration pushing for war with Iran, even though Iraq and Afghanistan aren't exactly going well. Who could be doing this, you may ask? Would it shock you that it is the Vice President, Dick Cheney? From Newsweek:

A NEWSWEEK investigation shows that Cheney's national-security team has been actively challenging Rice's Iran strategy in recent months. "We hear a completely different story coming out of Cheney's office, even now, than what we hear from Rice on Iran," says a Western diplomat whose embassy has close dealings with the White House. Officials from the veep's office have been openly dismissive of the nuclear negotiations in think-tank meetings with Middle East analysts in Washington, according to a high-level administration official who asked for anonymity because of his position. Since Tehran has defied two U.N. resolutions calling for a suspension of its uranium-enrichment program, "there's a certain amount of schadenfreude among the hard-liners," says a European diplomat who's involved in the talks but would not comment for the record. And NEWSWEEK has learned that the veep's team seems eager to build a case that Iran is targeting Americans not just in Iraq but along the border of its other neighbor, Afghanistan.

Lest anyone think this is just rumor, It seems to have been confirmed by a bunch of people:

Multiple sources have reported that a senior aide on Vice President Cheney's national security team has been meeting with policy hands of the American Enterprise Institute, one other think tank, and more than one national security consulting house and explicitly stating that Vice President Cheney does not support President Bush's tack towards Condoleezza Rice's diplomatic efforts and fears that the President is taking diplomacy with Iran too seriously.

This White House official has stated to several Washington insiders that Cheney is planning to deploy an "end run strategy" around the President if he and his team lose the policy argument.

What happens, one can ask, when the administration is basically at war with itself, not to mention a bunch of other countries. well, for one thing, you end up with a badly understaffed foreign service. Also, you end up with a bunch of people lying about various matters to all sorts of people. Should the former by Chief of Staff to the Veep, and the latter by a US Attorney, this is not always a good idea, and can end up with said Chief of Staff residing at the Crossbar Hotel for 30 months (can we now call it the Paris Hilton Hilton?).

Imprisonment

A quick summary of the news from this morning:

Imprisoned by the Universe: There is a great article by Dennis Overbye of the NYTimes this morning about dark energy, the stuff that makes the universe accelerate outward, and what this means for the ultimate fate of the galaxy (not planet, which will be long since gone, or humanity, whose future is a mystery trillions of years from now). I'd only add that measurements of dark energy are convincing, but theoretically difficult to explain, and we may yet overhaul our basic cosmological model in the future should a better theoretical grounding come along.

Imprisoned by the Government: Yesterday, a military court basically overturned the whole trial system set up to deal with detainees at Guantanamo, based on the case of a boy who was captured when he was 15. See either a good analysis piece from the NYTimes, or if you really want, a piece that basically just repeats the Bush administration spin from the WaPo.

Imprisoned by outdated moral notions: For all that FoxNews is indecent by design (see below for more on that), the government's treatment of their broadcast network, among others, has certainly been indecent. Thankfully, the courts have thrown out some ridiculously hefty fines imposed on the networks when celebrities used naughty words at live awards ceremonies. There is a boring wrap-up in the WaPo (they just can't win today), and a great one in the NYTimes:

But the judges said vulgar words are just as often used out of frustration or excitement, and not to convey any broader obscene meaning. “In recent times even the top leaders of our government have used variants of these expletives in a manner that no reasonable person would believe referenced sexual or excretory organs or activities.”

Adopting an argument made by lawyers for NBC, the judges then cited examples in which Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney had used the same language that would be penalized under the policy. Mr. Bush was caught on videotape last July using a common vulgarity that the commission finds objectionable in a conversation with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain. Three years ago, Mr. Cheney was widely reported to have muttered an angry obscene version of “get lost” to Senator Patrick Leahy on the floor of the United States Senate.

Imprisoned by the bonds of racism: If the charges against him are true, the Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA) will be going to jail for a long time for corruption and being stupid enough to hide $100K in his freezer!?! If so, honestly, good riddance to him, for being a stain upon our government, and if he takes fellow Dem Allan Mollohan of West Virginia along with him supposing the latter is guilty, all the better. Corrupt Democrats are corrupt officials first, and we are better off without them. Still, only FoxNews could manage to make their own faults the story when describing a 16-count indictment. It seems that FoxNews can't tell black representatives apart, even when one is the current head of the House Judiciary committee and has a moustache, and the other one is not and does not. Idiots.

Imprisoned by our own shortsightedness: What do you do when NASA satellites keep finding evidence of global warming, which is inconvenient for an anti-science administration trying to deny the existence of said phenomenon? Apparently, you cut the funds for the program!

Imprisoned by preconceived notions: Newspapers apparently don't like Google News, because, um, well, I really don't understand. It actually drives their online traffic, and they want to look the gift horse in the mouth, then slaughter it and eat it. See a wise graduate student destroy the arguments of a journalism professor here, and puzzle over the vagaries of the tenure system.

Imprisoned by themselves?: It seems that the Justice Department interprets civil rights and voter rights to mean trying to make sure that minorities don't vote, by any means necessary. Congress is investigating. Perhaps they can sic the DoJ on themselves?

Catching up #3: Technology/Music/Free Concert Clips

As I mentioned back when I was more responsible about daily blogging, I think the whole push by media companies for digital rights management (DRM) software is a load of crap. At best it makes it slightly more inconvenient to copy files illegally, and at worst it means that the CD* copy of Bruce Springsteen's We Shall Overcome album won't play on either my DVD/CD player or my computer, and thus can't be imported onto my iPod (remember, CD* means like a CD, only crappier). In what almost counts as irony, I returned the disc to the store and got it on iTunes instead, and then burned a backup copy to disc, thus freeing it from the DRM software that Apple prefers. For anyone who likes the album, let me recommend that you do this, but rearrange the tracks in alphabetical order. For unknown reasons, this is a vastly better mix than what Springsteen et al. decided to go with. This is true whether you get the additional tracks from iTunes (Bring 'em Home, How Can a Poor Man Stand such times, etc.) or not.

Anyway, Apple recently announced that they are adding non-DRM tracks to their online store, albeit at an additional cost, starting with the non-Fab component of EMI's catalog. More power to them, I say, even if they do charge more for the privilege (which, frankly, is their right). Some people, though, are now up in arms about a hidden bit of the system: apparently, they "watermark" the files by encrypting your account info into the song file. Honestly, I understand that this can be a security threat if your iPod is stolen, but let's not kid ourselves. People are angry because it means that they will have to think carefully about illegally sharing those files. Allow me to play them a dirge on the world's smallest violin....ok, better. Just because DRM is dropped doesn't give people any more right to share the music files than they possessed before, which is absolutely no right whatsoever, unless said album was released under a Creative Commons license, like They're Everywhere, by Jim's Big Ego. For those convinced that they need to share files with their friends, but are afraid of the fuzz, one might suggest the following method is not really so hard.

1. Burn music to CD.
2. Read CD back into computer.

If you aren't willing to put forth that much effort before posting your music to a torrent site, I kinda hope the law does bust you, because you're an idiot.

Speaking of music, I've been listening to a bunch of it, and here are some recommendations:

Via my co-blogger, a Mexican Ska band that just totally will rock your world, Los de Abajo (The Underdogs). Clips from their album LDA vs. the lunatics ca be found here, including the single mix of the title track, which is just awesome. Honestly, given that that link will allow you to play their entire album for free, I don't understand why you are still reading this. You can always come back to my ramblings later, if you think about it.

Speaking of albums being streamed freely over the web, Wilco is doing it again with their latest album, Sky Blue Sky, which just came out recently. Go to this page, and click on "listen" in the lower left. After that, you can buy the album if you'd like, supporting musicians who remember that their fans deserve t be respected, not threatened with lawsuits. As for the album itself, dkon loved it at first listen, but it's taken some time to grow on me, and might need a bit more time still. It's very slow and quiet, much more given to softer pop rock than the atmospherics of their past albums. Jeff Tweedy's voice is in good shape, and the lyrics are a bit more grounded than the past few album's intricate nonsense (that's not an insult, BTW, just the best way I know to describe some of their songs). For what it's worth, I liked the album when I played it outside while chilling on the porch, and it'll do nicely for just about anyone in a "porch music" capacity, to use a term I usually associate with Greg Brown. I can't really rank it above either Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which is just a brilliant, quasi-visionary album, nor Being There, Wilco's second album, a double disc of roots-inflected Rock'n'Roll that just pounds out all that is good about good ol' down home Americana rock. Still, the album is currently playing in the background and my wife has been unable to stop drumming her fingers in time with Sky Blue Sky, so it must be pretty catchy.

Staying on the alt-country vein, I have to also recommend the newest album from Golden Smog, Blood on the Slacks. For those not familiar with them, Golden Smog started off as a side project for Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, a couple members of the Jayhawks, and a bunch of other alt-country artists. Tweedy was apparently too busy with Wilco for this particular release, but the Jayhawks members are more than capable of sustaining the gig. They have a couple of free tracks available on the MySpace page I linked to, but I also have to recommend their rocked out version of David Bowie's Starman.

Delving back slightly further into the history of country rock, I stumbled across a Gram Parsons tribute album while looking for Wilco songs, and it is incredible. Return of the Grievous Angel is a staggeringly good album, and I can't say enough about "$1000 Wedding", covered by Evan Dando and Juliana Hatfield, "Sin City", by Beck and Emmylou Harris, or the title track, as covered by Lucinda Williams and fellow former Byrd David Crosby (Wilco's cover of "One Hundred Years From Now" is also very good, of course).

Finally, we've always known that They Might Be Giants were a bit ahead of the curve, but they are currently trying something that I have to say I can't remember being tried much before. Their new album, The Else, is available on iTunes exclusively, at least until July 10 when they finally ship the CDs. Here is a mashup of my favorite song on the album, Climbing the Walls with highlights from the Lost Season 3 finale (go to 0:47 for the music starting; spoiler warning?), and concert recordings of Take Out the Trash and Shadow Government.

Catching up #2: Movies

Having watched way too many movies in addition to the recent finales of Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, Veronica Mars, Lost, The Office, and Scrubs, and the upcoming ones of The Sopranos and Entourage, here are some reviews.

Far and away the best movie we've seen this year is Hot Fuzz, from the same people who brought you Shaun of the Dead. Lest you think this is some bizarre pick, I'll note that it's currently #109 on the IMBD Top 250, and the only release this year to top it so far is Grindhouse, which we haven't seen. Hot Fuzz is just about the perfect British humor takedown of American action movies that the world has ever seen. Based around a supercop from London sent to the perfectly idyllic countryside for making his colleagues look bad by comparison, the movie somehow manages to provide two different satires of the same genre. In the first half, we have the subtle brilliance of a film edited like an action film, with all the quick cuts, slow-mos, multiple angles, and other familiar tricks, even though nothing in particular is happening other than some brilliant jokes and physical gags. In the second half, when all hell breaks loose, we have shootouts, fistfights, explosions, and cruel but hilarious imitations of the two best cop movies ever (their judgment, not mine), Bad Boys 2 and Point Break (any film that allows its actors to mock Keanu Reeves scores bonus points in my book). Hot Fuzz is probably the first film in years to have multiple "fall out of your chair" moments, and is basically a must see if you possess any kind of sense of humor.

Pirates of the Caribbean 3 is a big, exciting mess, never really making much sense but delivering a decent number of laughs and gorgeously filmed action scenes. It's probably worth seeing on the big screen, since it just won't seem as impressive on a small screen. Shrek 3 is a smaller movie, funny but a bit less consistent than either of its predecessors, and can probably be safely waited upon until it comes out on video.

From the Netflix releases, I have to give some props to "Happiness of the Katakuris", a truly bizarre Japanese movies that plays like a cross between The Sound of Music and The Evil Dead. The claymation (?!?) parts make it even stranger. I'd try to describe it further, but it really doesn't make any sense. We were pretty disappointed by The Weather Man, which didn't really go anywhere at all, and Munich, which did, but took way too long to get there. The Squid and the Whale was understated but very good, personal as only well-told semi-autobiographical works can be, with a good performance from Jeff Bridges, among others. Confetti, starring Martin Freeman (Tim from the British version of The Office), was a good quirky British comedy, and we were surprised how much we liked Now You Know, directed by Jeff Anderson (Randall from Clerks), which basically slots into the subgenre of "quirky comedies about life in New Jersey that feel a deep ambivalence toward the Garden State".

Harry Potter #5 (the movie) comes out on July 11, 10 days before Book 7 appears in print. More on films then.

Catching up #1: Books, Part 1

aka Man's Best Friend Outside of a Dog, #13-16:

The Sherlock Holmes novel(la)s: The Final Solution by Michael Chabon and The Italian Secretary, by Caleb Carr

I don't really know what motivated Michael Chabon to write a Sherlock Holmes-based novella, given that he's not particularly associated with the mystery genre (The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is a coming-of-age novel, not a detective tale). As such, he managed to write a very different sort of Holmes story than what one is used to: in the wrong era (World War II), Holmes as an anonymous protagonist without a Watson to be found, solving what would seem to be a rather insignificant crime (a boy;s lost parrot). Chabon deserves credit for his technique, in that we essentially know more about the end of the tale as readers than his characters do throughout, a rather difficult feat to pull off. Still, this reads more as an exercise in constrained literature, using pre-existing characters placed in unfamiliar settings, than as a true detective story. Chabon's characters come off as very human, especially the more commonly cold and mechanical Holmes, but the detective story feels like an afterthought. I'm still a bit unsure of the global setting of the piece (a WWII story entitled "The Final Solution" should make the subtext clear), which serves more as a disturbing reality check contrasting the relatively calm and rational image of Holmes' Victorian era with the horrors of the 20th century. Still, not a bad quick read, as is Carr's take as well.

Caleb Carr is an obvious choice for writing a Holmes-based story, as his most familiar works, The Alienist and Angel of Darkness, involve turn of the century detectives, albeit ones that prefer the science of the day to pure deductive logic. Carr clearly has a feel for the characters and the proper flow of a detective story. He may be slightly more technically inclined than Arthur Conan Doyle, and more given to filling in some crucial details for a turn of the 21st century reader that would be more familiar to his forbears, but the conversations and plot developments feel more naturally appropriate to a detective story. Still, for all that the setup is appropriately mysterious, involving a perceived threat to the British crown in the late days of Victoria's reign, the conclusion feels more than a bit muddled. In some ways, Carr's talents lie in stretching out the conclusion of a rather straightforward mystery, the literary equivalent if you'd like of a Law and Order episode, whereas here he has to draw out the conclusion of the mystery for too long, tripping over his loose ends and red herrings a bit. More than anything else, it seems like he just should have had one more go at the draft to clean up the ending, but failed to do so. Again, not a bad book, but rather a quick read of middling quality.

The Author I Love To Hate: Remains of the Day, and Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

I hate to go up against both the Booker Prize committee and some members of my book club, but for Ishiguro, how can I not? In essence, these are the same boring book, in which a feckless narrator drives slowly through the English countryside, reminiscing slowly on how useless and feckless they actually are, slowly letting us in on the details. Frankly, it's a terrible style designed to fool the reader into the appearance of deep literature, but it lacks the cleverness that a well-plotted story should have. Essentially, you take a linear plotline, divide the terrible secret into bite-sized chunks, and then place one in each chapter surrounded by long and boring discussions between flat, emotionless characters. There's never any real twist, nor any real action, just a feeling that something more interesting has to lie eventually around the corner (hint: it doesn't). It's "artistic" pacing by dilly-dallying endlessly, and "literary" in its descriptions because the characters are so robotic that it feels like it should be insightful (I have the same complaint about French New Wave directors and their bizarrely robotic characters). In RotD, the main character is Stevens, the butler played memorably in the movie by Anthony Hopkins, who has to face up to the fact that his employer collaborated with the Nazis during WWII, and Stevens never really did a damn thing in his life other than to make exuses. This might have been slightly more interesting had the reader not realized all of this within the first few pages.

SPOILER WARNING AHEAD, skip to the next paragraph unless you want the plot possibly spolied: In NLMG, the narrator is Kathy H, who fecklessly reminisces about her classmates at an isolated boarding school. The big secret, never really well concealed, is that she and her friends are being raised to be organ donors, a la The Island. Suffice it to say, the science in the book is terrible, Ishiguro made no attempt to understand modern bioethics, and he seems to fundamentally misunderstand the notion of marginalized people in society (hint: we prefer to keep them hidden in the shadows, not in front of us everyday, e.g. migrant laborers, wounded Iraqis, third world child laborers, etc.). The book is so unrealistic that it could only work as an allegory, but he never bothers to actually set one up. One particularly caustic review suggested the characters would be more sympathetic if they were revealed to be cows. I would argue that as they go around their feckless, passionless lives in England, that not only does Ishiguro write about england as if he had no experience with the country, where he has lived since age 5, but he writes like he has no actual experience with actual people either. Seriously, I never thought I'd say this, but just watch The Island instead: at least it realizes that with a premise so ridiculous, the best thing to do is turn it into a dumb action flick rather than an insipid, boring novel.

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 12: Running With Scissors, by Augusten Burroughs

Due to a strange bit of scheduling, I read almost this entire book while sitting in the O'Hare Marriott, waiting to meet up with our ride back to Champaign. Let it be said, they have some really comfortable chairs, and are kind enough to not hassle people who spend hour after hour sitting there without any obvious purpose.

If World's Fair was about a family in which nothing too much happened, this could be considered the exact opposite situation. Burroughs' memoir, assuming it is even half truthful, deals with an upbringing about as unconventional and bizarre as just about any ever put into print. As to truthfulness, we'll leave that to the lawyers, and just evaluate the book as if it were a novel. I don't mean this as an insult in any way, because it's basically the way I read Bill Bryson, Erik Larson, and any number of other non-fiction authors whose style is more narrative than informational.

The obvious comparison for Burroughs is David Sedaris, as several hundred reviewers have noted. The comparison isn't exact, of course. Both are funny, and both are gay, but Sedaris' stories are more about minutiae blown up into shaggy dog stories, whereas Burroughs' childhood is so exaggerated that even if slightly falsified, it includes numerous felonies (with him as victim, not perpetrator) and events that should have required intervention by a host of public agencies. The comparison is inexact enough that Salon's reviewer slammed Burroughs in a three-page review for all his narrative flaws, but I find myself feeling vastly more kindly toward him. His writing style is indeed on the simple side (education was hardly his first priority growing up), but the material is so outlandish that it doesn't require verbal fireworks to jump off the page.

Burroughs is a very bemused, surprisingly detached narrator, whose adolescence was so traumatic that it is hard to treat his memoir as anything but a coping mechanism. It's a bit ironic that the family he lived with sued him, given that his tone is so nonjudgmental throughout that one could make a strong suggestion that there is a Stockholm Syndrome effect at play, especially in the case of the daughter who was apparently sold at age 13 to an adult mental patient of her psychiatrist father to be his girlfriend in order to pay the family's bills. This one seems to be on strong footing factwise, as the father lost his license as a result according to public records. In some ways, Burroughs blandness as a narrator could probably be attributed to his lack of finesse as a writer. You just don't always get the feeling he has much more to say about anyone around him. As a result, the appeal of the book is really at its heart the freak-show aspect, lightened up by its good-natured breeziness. I know I should look down on it for that, but it works. Even though his childhood was a trainwreck, the book is anything but, and makes for a disturbingly good read. I'm still surprised that I liked it so much, but I did.

The movie, it should be said, is faithful to the book, with some, but not all, of the more graphic bits removed or edited around. It falls into the category, in fact, of movies that hew so closely to their source material that they add almost nothing to the book whatsoever. Alec Baldwin's performance is good, but nothing else about the film is particularly memorable.

Sunday Concert/Picnic Blogging

Sorry for the extended absence, but I'm back, and will try to resume posting on a mroe regular basis again, as well as clear through a growing backlog of unreviewed books (yes, I know that this is my own personal obsession, but so be it).

Friday night's regularly scheduled post was interrupted by an actual event here in Champaign, a concert at one of the local bars featuring a band from out of town. It marked the second time that we've seen The Tossers, an Irish/Punk band from Chicago. I've linked to one of their videos previously, and would basically describe their music as somewhat punk-influenced Irish. If the Dropkick Murphys are about 60/40 or so Punk/Irish, and Flogging Molly about 35/65, then The Tossers are about 25/75. More than anything else, they sound a great deal like the Pogues, and like the Pogues, tend to perform frequently, and likely best, a few sheets to the wind.

Onstage drunkenness, or at least drinkingness, can have a few interesting effects. Last time we saw them, it was a Sunday night (as quiet in Champaign as just about anywhere), and they were on the last night of a reasonably long tour through the Midwest. The band, who were pretty good and hammered, proceded to play just about every Irish song I know and more (Camptown Races even), and not a single one of their own creations. Not a one, in an hour and a half of continuous music. Last night, we were treated to a mix of the new (their album Agony just came out a few weeks ago), the old (The Valley of the Shadow of Death--cheerful album titles all around), and the older (Several of the Rover songs, and a number of Pogues covers). What can I say, the show rocked. For some examples of what we heard, check out this video or perhaps this one. Drunken Irish music is best played loud (there is a reason I lean toward Irish Punk, and away from the "Celtic Ladies" movement that certain of our readership prefers), and inside a bar, it is extremely loud. Even better, Champaign has a smoking ban, so the air inside was pretty clear (only the band gets to smoke), while all the smokers had to stay outside.

Making the show even better, the opening act was actually pretty good too. I am not sure if JigGsaw is a local college band, but they do pretty good pop/progressive punk for a local band. Thanks to the wonder of the internets, you don't have to take my word for it, and can check out their music on their Myspace page. Perhaps I am kidding myself, but I thought their rhythm section actually did a surprisingly good job of mixing things up, dropping into all sorts of ska-based beats and other things to keep things interesting.

Saturday was a bit calmer, as we went for a picnic at Lake of the Woods park in Mahomet, IL. BTW, let me highly recommend a good picnic basket for anyone who lives anwhere near the outdoors, which I assume is most of you. Very little in life is as relaxing as a nice picnic.

The park is home to the Early American Museum, which is just shockingly well done for a small museum. Rarely have I seen a small museum that manages to combine as thorough a collection of artifacts (in this case 19th century housewares, photographs, and other antique items) with a reasonably good overview of the time period for the area. I particularly liked the exhibit on baseball in Illinois over the past century, something that has sadly disappeared from the area over the past couple decades.

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 11: World's Fair, by E.L. Doctorow

Last week I said I liked two out of the three final books I had read during the trip to Aruba. Oddly enough, this was the one I didn't think much of at all. I have nothing against Doctorow, and rather liked Ragtime, but there must be something up with him that rubs people the wrong way. Suffice it to say, among major literary authors, he has more copies of his works sitting in the $2 rack at used bookstores than anyone else I can think of. Janet Evanovich, Clive Cussler, sure, and about every mystery author who has ever lived, but also a constant stream of Doctorow. I haven't been able to find a single Vintage press copy of anything by Nabokov for less than 3/4 the retail price for years, but I could have owned 10 copies of Water Works or Billy Bathgate had I wanted to. In some ways, it takes some of the fun out of finding them in bookstores, since there's no excitement in the find. A nice copy of Vonnegut is impossible, Calvino a rare treat, and we've found John Irving from just about every printing through years of work, but Doctorow is just too easy.

Anyway, on to the actual review. World's Fair is a fictionalization of what I have to assume is Doctorow's own childhood growing up in New York. Unfortunately, Doctorow seems to have had a childhood much like most of ours, full of events that are only passingly memorable and the rare moment that rises to the level of minor excitement. Unfortunately, that is about the extent of it. In theory, I am supposed to suggest that New York City in the 1930's is itself a character, but the narrator is much too young to really have experienced much of it at all. As a result, the novel is more than a bit flat. The emotion ranges from kind of happy to kind of sad, and even though our narrator's parents certainly have a troubled marriage, nothing ever really comes of it to spark some real dramatic tension. The dramatic ending, in which he sees both the magic but also the tawdriness of the New York World's Fair, similarly fails to inspire, breaking no new ground whatsoever. If you want to really read about the magic and horror of a World's Fair, try Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson.

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 10: Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Having discussed what some of the more backwards amongst us consider to be cultural Armageddon in our first post of the evening, we move onward in our second to a literary take on Armageddon that is vastly more enjoyable than the Left Behind series. Any time the end of the world is foisted upon you by Neil Gaiman, author of The Sandman graphic novels and the brilliant novel American Gods, among others, as well as Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld series, well, you know it has to be good. Just to get the obvious references, both men have the same British wit that is typically associated with Monty Python, Douglas Adams, or maybe Shaun of the Dead. It is unclear why the British are just funnier than Americans, most likely having to do with a certain fatalism inspired by the nasty weather, horrible food, and typically undrinkable coffee. Then again, maybe when you grow up watching your politicians hurl witty insults at each other rather than vapid sound bites, it can be a bit inspirational.

In any case, this little novel, written before either of them became famous, ranges from the drop-dead hilarious to the sidesplittingly funny, even when some of the subjects of the humor are a bit obscure. Still, you have to give them credit that they made me laugh about the M25 Motorway (the loop road around London: think the Beltway, I-95, and the tri-state tollway if you are familiar with DC, Boston, or Chicago; for NY readers, think I-287 with the traffic typical of the BQE or Van Wyck) and the planned town of Milton Keynes. A sample of the book's take on life:

Many phenomena — wars, plagues, sudden audits — have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for exhibit A.

The plot, such as it is, concerns plans by the hosts of heaven and hell to spark Armageddon, each hoping for the ultimate victory, while a pair of friendly demons, realizing that low-level employees for competing firms often have more in common with each other than either has with their corporate management, do everything in their power to stop this from happening. Of great benefit to them is the fact that the Antichrist was misplaced at birth, and many of the supernatural beings about to wage battle are caught in traffic. Honestly, if this plot doesn't grip you yet, you probably need professional help. Fleshing out the novel are a multitude of jokes and witticisms, and it is a fun challenge to try to figure out which author wrote what. Having read a good bit of Gaiman and one book by Pratchett, I was pretty stumped, but I would imagine that an aficionado could do much better. Gaiman is the more Vonnegutian of the two, preferring jokes that rely on timing and misdirection, whereas Pratchett likes the more carefully constructed comic scenarios, but the book flows pretty seamlessly from one to the other without any obvious hitches. Even though it contains something of a moral conclusion, in that humans often act both better and worse than either God or the Devil could even imagine but that life is still better with us having free will than if we didn't, the book avoids adding too much saccharine to the mix.

If I had to choose between Gaiman and Pratchett, I could pretty comfortably choose Gaiman, but life is generous and we are lucky to be able to enjoy both. This one is definitely worth it, start to finish.

It's something no sensible person would do... I wish I was married to you

It was kind of lost in the shuffle this week, what with the continuing scandals that the administration likes to create instead of actually governing, but Governor Eliot Spitzer of New York announced he will be submitting legislation to legalize gay marriage in the state. This is a very good thing, even though it stands almost no chance of passing the Republican-led New York State Senate. It's been debated how much "political capital" he should use to try to impose his will, but short of a State Senate majority, it will have to stand for the moment as a powerful but temporarily symbolic gesture. If New York can manage to pass civil unions instead, which seems likelier at the moment, and Rhode Island also joins New Hampshire in allowing them, you will basically have legalized gay marriage in Massachusetts (all efforts to overturn it have basically gone nowhere), civil unions throughout the rest of the Northeast and West Coast, and additional pressure on the more liberal states in the Midwest that have Democratic governors and state houses to possibly follow suit (that means Illinois, by the way). It would come as no shock whatsoever if a very significant percentage of the country soon has civil unions, and the continuing refusal of Massachusetts to actually break out in Armageddon will only make it more likely that states go further, not retreat. Honestly, once you've got NY and CA, you;ve basically got the cultural centers of America (Chicago would be a bonus, and call me an unreasonable optimist but I truly believe in the power of the media elite to both reflect the culture in which they find themselves and to normalize it for the rest of the country. We've all basically known that someday gay marriage will be viewed like interracial marriages are today, as inherent rights for people opposed by bigots and those who refuse to deal with the modern world, but I think it happens sooner than we think. I give it about twenty years, give or take, especially if the Supreme Court ever goes liberal by a 6-3 majority with younger justices being able to assert themselves.

One can ask, in the midst of this hopeful flight of fancy, if there is a political price to be paid. Honestly, the answer is yes, but not for Spitzer or the NY state Democrats. No, he is way too popular at the moment to be touched, and he's actually going on the offensive against State Senate Republicans for blocking campaign finance reforms. This latter move has the potential to reshape NY State politics for the first time in my lifetime, but some explanations are in order. For basically forever, the State Assembly has had a Democratic majority , and the State Senate a Republican majority. As a result, the leaders of both houses, along with the governor, sit in a room each year and basically run the state. It's a classic top-down, party boss system and in no way allows the interests of the public to be represented at all. The stability of the arrangement has been maintained by an informal, off-the-record truce, in which neither side nor the governor really interferes in the other's affairs. Thankfully, Democrats seem to have realized that with the entire Northeast trending heavily blue, this arrangement basically screws them over for no reason. Earlier this year, they actually picked off a Republican-held State Senate seat, and indications are that they might actually try to win more in 2008 for a change.

It's important to remember that dissatisfaction with the Republicans, which led to the Democratic wave in 2006, shows no signs of retreating. We've got all sorts of indictments either underway or in the works, and public opinion continues to turn against the war in a big way. Just today, it was reported that 55% of Americans agree with Harry Reid that the war is lost, so one could easily argue that no matter how much the Republicans hyperventilate about treason and such, it really does help the Democratic cause, since the war is so bloody unpopular. Call it a hunch, but I think issues like this may carry a bit more weight that Spitzer's take on gay marriage in 2008.

Tuesday Feet blogging

Results of the first big sonogram below. All systems check out perfectly, everything looked good. We got to see the heart (all four chambers), the brain, various appendages, and all sorts of other stuff that was hard to identify. As to the big question, we're still in the dark. It seems the wee lass or laddie curently has the umbilical cord running between his/her legs, which made it impossible to see what does or does not lie beneath.

Left Foot, with approximately 5 toes (along with the giant brain [left]):


Right Foot with approximately 5 toes (looking down the leg):


Side view. Crown of the head is to the left. Face, looking upward, is the brighter area running horizontally on the left. He/she is chewing on one hand, which is balled into a fist. The humerus runs off horizontally to the right about 60% of the way up on the image.

Keeping busy

Just in case anyone took a break from Rooted Cosmopolitans, there are four posts up from today and yesterday. We've got book reviews of Los Gusanos, by author and film director John Sayles, and Dreaming in Cuban, by Cristina Garcia, who for some reason I've been completely misidentifying as a relation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, even though she's Cuban-American and he's rather famously Colombian. UPDATE:Forgot to mention, I'll have reviews out soon of Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, World's Fair, by E.L. Doctorow, and Running With Scissors, by Augusten Burroughs. I like two out of the three. Anyone care to hazard a guess as to which two?

On the political side, we've got my surprising support for the media in light of the Virginia Tech tragedy, though I'll note that NBC's branding of Cho's materials was more than a bit tasteless.

Finally, I seem to have started a trend by complaining about the Great Wall of Baghdad. Just yesterday, it seems, the Iraqi government let us know that they don't want it either. Needless to say, this is a colossal FUBAR on the part of everyone involved. It's getting harder and harder to say with a straight face that they are in charge when we keep disagreeing with their government about whose troops should be doing what, and we're already sounding out overthrowing the government now in power. Even if Harry Reid actually hedged his statements, I see no need. The War is lost.

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 9: Los Gusanos, by John Sayles

For the second half of our Cuban-American double feature, we have Los Gusanos (The Worms), by John Sayles. I should say off the bat that Sayles is one of those guys who has slipped under my radar. Best known as a director (Lone Star, Return of the Seacacus 7, Brother from Another Planet), the only movie of his that I've actually seen is Eight Men Out, and that only because it's about baseball. I can't claim any credit for picking this book up somewhere; as I remember, we got it during a Christmas book exchange, but sometimes you really do get lucky. Like the book I read immediately prior to it, the focus is on the Cuban-American and Cuban communities, though with a primary focus on Miami. Even though the basic setups are roughly the same, spanning decades in the lives of its protagonists, the books could hardly be more different. Sayles has a definite story to tell, and even though we often get looks insides his characters heads, they are very much rooted to their own location and situation. This is not a novel of dreams, but one of concrete histories, showing how we reach our current state through a series of events and experiences. Put another way, whereas the motivating forces in Dreaming in Cuban are primarily internal, here they are almost exclusively external. Characters are much more deeply tied to each other, in the tangled web of politics and culture that is Miami.

In many ways, the governments exist in Los Gusanos immediately off-screen, acting via the CIA and other sources to keep the community constantly in flux. Then again, I think it is fair to say that the Cuban community in Miami does a pretty good job of that all on their own. One of the greatest mysteries to me has been how the US government seems willing to maintain a policy towards Cuba that has never shown any sign of working, all while the expat community supports the vociferously no matter how many times the CIA undercuts their aspirations of retaking the island. From the Bay of Pigs to later failed insurgencies, it seems that some forces in our government are willing to trade something, be it reliable Republican votes, some control over organized crime in Southern Florida, or god only knows what, just so long as they make sure to say really mean things about Fidel. As for the Cuban-American community, you might think that having failed to overthrow Fidel for 40 years now, they might be willing to consider some amount of compromise in order to see long-separated family members...but apparently you'd be wrong.

In the novel, this plays out as a generation torn between the appeal of organized crime, ragtag invasion militias, or quieter, more humdrum lives in the beautiful weather of South Florida. Living so fast, many fail to see just how much they are pawns in the hands of the powerful (or to quote Fidel himself, Gusanos). Through vignettes, we get to see fragments of the life stories of the many protagonists, reminiscent of something one might expect from Robert Altman. It's hard to identify any particular story that is truly more compelling than the rest, but it's interesting to read a big, sprawling novel that can manage to balance any number of competing threads to paint a picture of a city across the years much more successfully than groups of blind men are typically assumed to describe elephants. If the characters themselves are a bit flat, the settings themselves certainly jump out. It's not the language per se, which features a somewhat intimidating amount of Spanish intermixed with decent prose, but rather the clear idea that he has for each chapter, infusing each with a strong sense of narrative flow that carries throughout the novel. I have to say, for a random acquisition, I really liked the book, enough to add several of his films to our Netflix queue.

Man's best friend outside of a dog, 8: Dreaming in Cuban, by Cristina Garcia

There is something of a recurring theme in the female characters that appear in magical realism novels, in that at least one woman per family needs to live at least partially on the spiritual plane. This is very clear in Isabel Allende's "House of the Spirits", forms perhaps the main theme of "Like Water For Chocolate (haven't read it, but I've seen the movie a couple times), and makes up the heart of this novel as well. The story of three generations of a family split between Cuba and New York, the book takes a very ethereal approach to issues of dislocation and separation, much more concerned with people's dreams than their politics. Garcia isn't much of a narrative storyteller, more a spinner of tales that illuminate facets of her characters and their relationships. Perhaps befitting the image of the Cuban community as a wee bit out there (let's face it, every fictional work ever set in Miami basically assumes this as truth, from Scarface to Miami Vice to CSI, or the novels of Dave Barry and Carl Hiaasen, among others), most of the characters are a wee bit insane, at least at times.

If there is a running theme in the book, it is the ways in which isolation can force us to extremes, regardless of whether the isolation is caused by family or by the politics of an embargo. From generation to generation, we have love and other emotions expressed as both alliance and antagonism, as only families can inspire. Most of the action here, such as it is, lies within it's protagonists' minds.They retreat into memory, seek out connections, and basically try to find a place in the world for themselves, all while the potential sources of stability generally conspire against them. Still, it is not so much the events in their lives that define them, but rather their reactions to them, and the people who surround them. Inasmuch as the book is a meditation about mindsets, it is ultimately successful, more a painting than a story to remember. Garcia, it should be noted, writes in English like the world's finest writers write in Spanish, heavy on the adjectives but in a way that explores the bounds of expression. Think Marquez, but with multiple sentences per page. It's rare to find such confident prose stylings, and really stands out among the various Spanish/Latin American authors out there.

The little ones sit by their tv screen, no thoughts to think, no tears to cry, all sucked dry, down to the very last breath

I actually surprised my wife with this one: the Virginia Tech gunman mailed a series of photos and videotapes to NBS news, so should they, and other news agencies, have shown excerpts on their nightly newscasts/websites, etc.? It's easy to suggest no. The killer was already dead by his own hand, and this gives him a posthumous gift of the recognition he wanted, and could in theory motivate others to similar action. Oddly enough, I find this argument wholly unconvincing. Don't get me wrong, after a traumatic experience it can be brutal seeing repeated images of the killer...but that really is a phenomenon over which has some control. Turn off the TV, avoid the newspaper for a couple days, and stop watching Cable news entirely (actually, that last bit of advice applies for everyone, frankly, regardless of the situation). What worries me, among others, is the media declaring a blackout on things that are on their face newsworthy, to prevent us from having our sensibilities challenged. See the arguments by Atrios:

I'm a bit puzzled by all the conversation about whether NBC and other news outlets should've broadcast Cho's videos. While there can always be debates about what should be front and center, the idea that this kind of thing should be withheld by a Media That Knows Best is rather disturbing. Emphasis and placement is always an issue, which is why if nothing else this stuff can be put on the internets where people can make the effort to take a peek if they wish.

And, no, I didn't have much desire to see any of it, I just reject the idea that our Elite Filters really know what's best for us.

and Kevin Drum:

There's no question that these images and videos are intense; they undoubtedly cause pain to the loved ones of the victims; and they might even help promote copycat behavior — though I suspect this is more urban legend than reality. But like it or not, they're also a key part of helping us understand one of the biggest news stories of the year.

I think this is exactly right. When the media acts like gatekeepers, we are shielded from violent images at the true cost of not understanding their context at all. I would argue that the lack of bloodshed from Iraq shown on tv has led us to ignore the deaths of several hundred thousand innocent civilians, since we never see the true picture of all the suicide bombings and executions that plague that country. We don't even see the true effect on our military, since the media is banned from showing soldiers' coffins and they have dropped the ball utterly on the effects of serious injuries on the troops. Until the recent expose of Walter Reed by the Washington Post, the media was basically happy to pretend that these things just didn't deserve widespread attention, even though Salon pointed out many of these issues years ago.

That said, some discretion is called for. Rather than pimping the Cho videos endlessly, it was probably appropriate to show brief snippets and post the remainder to websites, but in the end, it is up to us to decide what we wish to watch and what we would prefer to avoid, not up to them to censor the news for the sake of the most sensitive individuals.

By the way, what of the argument that we are just provoking copycats? More from Kevin Drum at Political Animal:

Still, does publicizing specific mass murders inspire copycats? I'm not so sure about that. In fact, it might be just the opposite: the massive publicity these events generate makes everybody far more vigilant about the possibility of "disturbed loners" in their midst and might actually reduce the likelihood of copycat sprees. What's more, when all is said and done, most of these killers come across in media accounts as delusional, hopeless losers, not as heroes to emulate.

What we all need to remember is that no matter how brutal this killing was, random killing sprees, including those at schools, are extremely rare. There is not some "wave of killings" taking place at schools, just like there is no wave of kidnapped children, or any of the million other problems blown up to ridiculous proportions by the various news outlets. What there is, rather is much more hyperventilating news sources to which we have access, who are willing to make random isolated events into trends so that we may be scared into watching their programs. VT was a true American tragedy, but also a rare and reasonably random occurrence. Some perspective goes a long way into fitting it into a reasonable narrative, and that requires both access to details about the case, as only the news can provide, but also a reasonable approach, which we can rest assured they most definitely won't provide.

PS: It seems that Rosa Brooks of the LA Times feels similar to me about assuming the tragedies and trauma of others, in that it is overdone in modern society:

Convincing ourselves that we've been vicariously traumatized by the pain of strangers has become a cherished national pastime. Thus, the Washington Post this week accompanied online stories about the shooting with a clickable sidebar, "Where to Find Support" — apparently on the assumption that the mere experience of glancing at articles about the tragedy would be so emotionally devastating that readers would require trained therapists...

Our self-indulgent conviction that we have all been traumatized also operates, ironically, to shut down empathy for other, less media-genic victims. On the day of the Virginia Tech shooting, for instance, Army Sgt. Mario K. De Leon of San Francisco (like the Virginia Tech victims) died of "wounds sustained from enemy small-arms fire"). On Wednesday, car bombs killed at least 172 people in Baghdad. But no one has set up a special MySpace page to commemorate those dead.

Some stagger and fall, after all, it's not easy...banging your heart against some mad bugger's wall

So the big news on the international front is that just like Pink Floyd, the US Army is busy building a wall. No, this time it's not a metaphor about shielding oneself off from the public eye, but rather walling off a Sunni neighborhood to "protect" them from Shiites by basically turning their neighborhood into a ghetto in the classical sense. Needless to say, the residents are vastly unhappy, since they now live in a walled-off enclave surrounded by enemies and cut off from friends. Funny that.

Not to say that the news we get from Iraq may be unduly optimistic, but that's basically what I'm suggesting. First, we have very quietly abandoned the latest rationale for our troops doing what they do: that as "they stand up, we'll stand down". Seems like they aren't standing up at all:

Training Iraqi troops, which had been the cornerstone of the Bush administration's Iraq policy since 2005, has dropped in priority, officials in Baghdad and Washington said.

No change has been announced, and a Pentagon spokesman, Col. Gary Keck, said training Iraqis remains important. "We are just adding another leg to our mission," Keck said, referring to the greater U.S. role in establishing security that new troops arriving in Iraq will undertake.

But evidence has been building for months that training Iraqi troops is no longer the focus of U.S. policy. Pentagon officials said they know of no new training resources that have been included in U.S. plans to dispatch 28,000 additional troops to Iraq. The officials spoke only on the condition of anonymity because they aren't authorized to discuss the policy shift publicly. Defense Secretary Robert Gates made no public mention of training Iraqi troops on Thursday during a visit to Iraq.

In a reflection of the need for more U.S. troops, the Pentagon decided earlier this month to increase the length of U.S. Army tours in Iraq from 12 to 15 months. The extension came amid speculation that the U.S. commander there, Army Gen. David Petraeus, will ask that the troop increase be maintained well into 2008.

About that increase in the length of military rotations. Bush tried to blame it on Congress not sending a bill...but a few reporters even picked up on the fact that the increase was announced BEFORE funding "ran out', by which I mean won't really run out at all:

This speculation was fueled by Wednesday’s White House press conference, where Dana Perino explained the strange timing by claiming that President Bush had been in the dark about this major policy shift until the morning it was announced:

Q So why did he tell the American Legion that people would be staying in Iraq longer because of the Democrats, when his own Pentagon, 24 hours later, was going to keep people there longer?

MS. PERINO: Well, one, I don’t know if the President knew about the — the meeting — remember, yesterday morning is when Secretary Gates came and talked to the President. […]

Q And so the President didn’t know about his own policy until Wednesday?

MS. PERINO: I’m not aware that the President knew that there was going to be — that Secretary Gates had come to any decisions.

We might be hearing more about our problems in Iraq, of course, but for the fact that the military is telling officers to keep their mouth shut and won't let them talk to Congress:

national Journal's Congress Daily:

Pentagon lawyers abruptly blocked mid-level active-duty military officers from speaking Thursday during a closed-door House Armed Services Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee briefing about their personal experiences working with Iraqi security forces.

The Pentagon's last-minute refusal to allow the officers' presentations surprised panel members and congressional aides, who are in the middle of an investigation into the effort to train and organize Iraqi forces.

Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Martin Meehan, D-Mass., called the Pentagon's move "outrageous" and left open the possibility of issuing subpoenas.

One correspondent suggests: "My guess: the training is not going well, there are some big gaps, and a bunch of horror stories that the Pentagon doesn't want aired. ... That said, this will backfire."

Right now, the"grown-ups" are debating on the Sunday morning news shows whether Harry Reid was wrong to suggest "The war has been lost" if we continue on our current course. He is right of course, and let me suggest that it only shows the vapidity of today's media that they are discussing this in relation to its effects on politics, rather than asking if he is indeed correct. After all, what are a few thousand deaths in relation to the opportunity to strategize and fundraise for the various political committee's right?

In the water, he was beautiful

It's tempting to talk about politics tonight. For several hours, the Attorney General was schooled by the Congress, including passages where he was reminded that if he was going to suggest that US Attorneys were fired for being poor managers, he should lose his job as well, as well as Chuck Schumer reminding him that the burden of proof lies with Gonzales to explain his actions to Congress, and not the other way around, since Congress isn't actually putting him on trial. It's a bit pathetic, really, that the Attorney General doesn't seem to be so well versed in the whole law thing, but rank incompetence no longer comes as such a surprise.

I'm even going to hold off on the news that the FBI raided Rep. Rick Renzi's (R-AZ) and he had to step down from the Intelligence committee. The investigation likely cost Arizona's US Attorney his job during the abovementioned Attorney firing scandal, just as San Diego's Carol Lam was forced out after successfully prosecuting the now former-Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-CA). Renzi's raid occurs just days after the FBI raided Rep. John Doolittle's (R-CA) house, forcing him to step down from the House Appropriations Committee, a committee whose ranking Republican member is Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), who you may be shocked to find out is also under investigation, in an inquiry started by former US Attorney Carol Lam, who as we mentioned was fired during the US Attorney scandal.

No rather than not mentioning politicians, I thought it would be a good opportunity to not review a book. During our trip, I read "The Sweep of the Second Hand", by Dean Monti, since it cost $2 and the cover review said it begged comparisons to Woody Allen and Nick Hornby. It doesn't. It begs comparison, rather, to Joseph Heller's "Something Happened". This is very, very much not a compliment. I could go on about the book I read, and take some potshots, but what's the point? It's not like anyone who reads this is likely to even see it in print during their lifetimes. Instead, I will take some potshots at Joseph Heller, by comparing him to the guy we killed by going on vacation, Kurt Vonnegut.

It is tempting to link Heller and Vonnegut in a way, as they wrote two of the most famous American novels about war during the previous century, books about WWII that seemed to describe Vietnam just as well. It should be noted that Catch-22 came out in 1961, long before Vietnam had entered into the American consciousness, whereas Slaughterhouse-Five was written in 1969. I have to say, between the two, I'd probably have to take Catch-22 if I was forced to choose. It's satire is as sharp as just about any serious novel ever written, and it is difficult to imagine a time where one can't describe the classic contradiction posed in the novel in any other terms. Without risk of hyperbole, it certainly deserves consideration as possibly the greatest American novel of the century (along with To Kill a Mockingbird, Gatsby, and what? Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck?). It is, sadly, really the only great novel Heller wrote.

This is not much of a criticism, mind you, very few of us have even a readable novel in us, much less a good one. Heller wrote one of the best of all time. Still, why could he never reach that height again? The sequel, Closing Time, felt like a pale imitation of the original (think U2's most recent stuff compared to their mid-80's peak). Good as Gold is like a lesser novel by Bellow, God Knows is funny but hardly memorable, and for the life of me I don't remember a thing about Picture This. Something Happened, on the other hand, is wretchedly awful, a long slog of several hundred depressing pages filled with quasi-ironic "insights" about how much life sucks that we are supposed to find deeply meaningful, as if Heller's discovery of angst is really something new. The contrived ending only makes the rest seem like an even greater waste of time. The question becomes: why did Heller have one great book, and so many more that pale so much in comparison?

I think the answer lies in the way he writes. He is always funny, but it is a cold humor. The insanity he channels throughout Catch-22 is madcap but somewhat passionless at times, and that lack of empathy shows through much more in his later works in which the cold glare falls on our very real lives. Where Catch-22 can be enjoyed for finding humor in what would otherwise be tragedy, the rest of his books basically seem like descriptions of just how tragic life in general tends to be, and the jokes have a gallows quality that kind of ruins the enjoyment. Sure Heller is a satirist, but he just doesn't always seem to care about anything or anyone, and that grates after a while.

Vonnegut, on the other hand, may have been a satirist and a notable pessimist about human behavior, but in the end he remains one of the most deeply humanist authors ever to achieve greatness. I'm not talking about the Secular Humanist sense (which he was), but rather in the sense that he had a deep and powerful love for humans and humanity. It's been said that his books are "bitter-coated sugar pills", with a thin veneer of irony covering an almost cloying desire for people to be better. I can't say that this is description is wrong, but in many ways it is what makes him such a joy to read. No matter how bad things are, and in a Vonnegut book, we're usually talking about Armageddon-level bad, there remains the hope that if people are better, things could improve. It's not that he thinks we'll actually be better, just that we have the potential. He even could see it in himself, in a way. Tonight's post title is taken from his description of himself in the foreword to "Welcome to the Monkeyhouse".

Our book club will be reading Cat's Cradle for next month, perhaps his greatest novel (unless you prefer Breakfast of Champions or Slaughter House-Five), but even a middling Vonnegut novel can stick with you for years. In Slapstick, which Vonnegut himself only graded as a "D" (really!), he manages to introduce a concept for artificial communities that I really think might radically change American society for the better if we ever tried it, by assigning random names and numbers to all people that would serve as communities to which everyone gets to belong. If you think about it, given that we bond with people because of common interests in sports teams, favorite authors, and any number of other random things. Why not give people a few more, in such a way that everyone gets to have some. There is literally no downside, beyond getting used to middle names like Daffodil-11 or Raspberry-19.

It's strange, both men are dead, and I will be forever glad that Heller ha one amazing novel within him, but I feel like I miss Vonnegut and will for a long time.



So it goes.