Month: April 2006

Sorry, but the first thing that pops to mind when something is referred to as ‚Äúpornographic,‚Äù particularly in the metaphorical sense, is not that it is staged. More to the point, it’s not the attacks themselves that I regard as pornographic (you may have hit the nail on the head with ‚Äúdemonic‚Äù), but rather the replaying of them for, perhaps not the express purpose, but certainly the purpose of provoking a gut-level, oh-my-God, can‚Äôt-look-away response both in the Moussaoui jurors and in the readers of the newspapers that didn‚Äôt just report on the tapes, but ran the transcripts in special little boxes complete with colorful graphics and reconstructed timelines. Graphic detail. Specific intent to provoke. Even without Paris Hilton involved, I’m sticking with "pornographic."

As for your serene indifference to Moussaoui‚Äôs fate: I envy you but obviously disagree. Not paying attention to how our government dealt with these death-loving holy warriors in the past has led to some nasty consequences. Without question, the United States can‚Äôt worry so much about fueling anti-American sentiment that we in any way compromise national security, but if you really think this guy‚Äôs sentencing doesn’t matter one way or the other, why even risk turning him into a poster child for the cause? You can argue that justice demands that Moussaoui die or even that the victims‚Äô families deserve closure, but to argue that you can‚Äôt be bothered… I‚Äôd feel better about that stance if I thought the bad guys (and potential bad guys) were content to stay home folding their laundry as well. 

—Michelle

      

This is the danger and the beauty, Andrew, of letting two writers sub for you at once.

Michelle: How can a tape recording of the struggle on hijacked, crashing Flight 93 be “pornographic?” Then life is pornographic. And maybe so. But I was affected by what happened that morning — emotionally, politically, imaginatively — and I don’t feel guilty about my interest in knowing exactly how such crimes go down and in hearing the voices of people trying to foil one. Pornography, remember, is staged. This is something else entirely. (Demonism, maybe.) Though perhaps the terrorists have some right to privacy. I mean, what kind of country are we becoming when four consenting adult males can’t commit fanatical mass murder in the privacy of their own jet airliner?

Honestly, I don’t care what they do with him. Let the system work its will — I have dishes to do, wet laundry to dry. If a bulletin comes on the radio announcing that Mr.M (my contempt for whom is such that I’ve never bothered to learn to spell his name) has been sentenced to die, I’ll probably just open up the dryer and toss a sheet of Bounce into the load.

“And the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…”

–Walter

A few readers have pointed out (and many more are thinking), that the Domino Effect or Domino Theory that so excited folks back in the days of Vietnam is not identical to the Tipping Point notion that influenced the planners of the Iraq campaign. But I lumped them together for a reason. The Domino Theory was a fear that that once Vietnam fell to the communists, the rest of Asia would go on falling, while the Tipping Point idea was a hope that once Iraq jumped up to welcome democracy, the rest of the Middle East would go on rising. The ying-and-yang of military psuedo-science drawn from frothy management books.

I wonder if they ‘firewalk’ at the Pentagon? Or if Cheney has ever let himself fall backwards into Rumsfeld’s arms as a team-building, trust-enhancing exercize? They could all do it, right on back to McNamara. All the clever former CEOs.

I liked General Patton’s ideas much better, the bloody old coot. They arose from what he’d seen and suffered through, not from books he’d skimmed on airplanes. Or had his assistants skim on airplanes.

If Jack Welch gets a call about Iran we’ll know that Armageddon looms.

–Walter

I’m sorry, but I can only bring myself to skim today’s reports on the playing of the cockpit voice recorder from Flight 93 for jurors in the Moussaoui trial. The pleading, the struggling, the creepy chanting about Allah as the hijackers prepared to slaughter a planeload of people. I know it’s important for everyone to remember how horrifying the attacks were, but the tidbits in today’s papers border on the pornographic.

This of course is exactly the gut-level revulsion that the Moussaoui prosecutors are hoping to provoke in jurors now deciding whether to sentence this sorry excuse for a human being to death. But while I see the logic of their strategy, I question its rightness. The contents of these tapes can only cloud jurors’ ability to approach their sentencing duties with anything resembling reason, and theirs is too important a duty to carry out based on raw emotion.

It‚Äôs not that I doubt that Moussaoui is complete scum. But there is a strong case to be made that he does not deserve to die‚Äînot because death would be too harsh a penalty, but because it would be too easy. I mean, how bad can the idea of lethal injection be to a guy who was ready to fly a plane into a building? So while I personally believe that, in a just world, Moussauoi would be torn apart by angry ferrets, I can‚Äôt help but question our rush to turn him into a shining example of martyrdom for all his aspiring terrorist pals. Better to throw the failed jihadist into a cell with a large, surly redneck with a scorching case of xenophobia and let him spend the rest of his miserable life learning about pain and terror firsthand. —Michelle

There, I’ve plugged my new novel on Slate.Com, just as Andrew asked me to as part of the successful charm offensive that convinced me to do something — help fill in for him — that I swore I’d never do again when I dropped exhausted into bed after trying it the first time late last summer. But I have "product" now, as they say in Hollywood, and because my product is on the Web, just a click away from Andrew’s product, here I am. With my long, un-Webbish sentences, my inability to put up links and my lack of interest (based on inability) in delivering little excerpts from outside articles. These flaws and incompetencies were pointed out to me — massively, repeatedly, acidically– during my last stop here. Get connected, lazybones.

The Unbinding is my attempt to do that. It’s a novel that’s not just being published on the Web, it’s being written there. The whole idea seemed gimmicky at first (oh no, not hypertext; not pictures; not tricky sounds) but now I’m realizing that it’s not at all. It represents a return to fundamentals. Much as blogging is returning journalism to its arresting, imperfect, assertive origins, spinning a tale before one knows the ending, and doing so without the opportunity to double back and fiddle with the beginning, is storytelling in its wild, natural state. (Although The Unbinding has an expert editor, Meghan O’ Rourke, who trained at the New Yorker.) Next time you make up a children’s bedtime story, you’ll see exactly what I mean. The only direction is onward. Trust in inspiration, not second thoughts. In foresight, not hindsight. In spells, not science. And glance around the bedroom for ideas. That painting of a sailing ship? It’s time to send one of your characters to sea, perhaps. That other painting of an idyllic farm? That’s what your character dreams of once he’s shipwrecked on the barren Pacific island.

But long stories in prose have become confused with books, which is like confusing music with CDs or art with galleries. Books are merely shipping containers for stories. Unfortunately, the stories designed to fit in books are becoming, it seems to me, more and more like iceberg lettuce — genetically manipulated to travel well and not to rot, turn colors or change in taste (which motivates growers to first remove their taste) during the roughly year-long interval between being finished and landing in the store. To switch images, such stories are studio albums, not concert recordings. Poses, not performances.

I sound like a Beat poet. "That’s typing, not writing," Capote said of Kerouac’s On the Road, which fiction’s great jazz man, lacking a computer, poured out onto a scroll of teletype paper (after having meditated on it for ages). Well, whatever it was, at least his masterpiece wasn’t Breakfast at Tiffanys — a vaccum-packed little preservative-sprayed nodule of absolute elegance and pert inertia. Capote’s book became a movie, which kept it in print and spread its name. Kerouac’s book has never spawned a movie, and it goes on selling (wildly, unstoppably, to people who want to read it, not just own it) despite the fact. Because On the Road was a movie in the first place. A movie which swept up the present as it traveled and yet, paradoxically, still lives. All that’s left of Capote is Phillip Seymour-Hoffman.

And though On the Road’s maker was a famed outsider, he knew how to plug himself by appearing on programs such The Steve Allen Show (possibly while drunk or high) and inviting viewers to join the trip, man. Kerouac was a loner in lots of way, but one who believed in picking up hitch-hikers.

—Walter

For Iraq, I blame the managers, of course, but I also blame their reading lists. More than once, while predicting victory, Donald Rumsfeld has used the magic words “Tipping Point.” This new pop formula for achieving vast results from relatively limited efforts has turned out to be one disastrous abracadabra. Saddam goes, they all go. We don’t need a huge army. Iraq is ready for democracy — just give it a strategic nudge. The entire Middle East will follow.

Behind every failed war is a failed metaphor (remember The Domino Effect, the Vietnam-era version of The Tipping Point?) that mesmerized its masters into waging it, kept them waging it once they started losing it, and immobilized them with disbelief when it turned back into intellectual smoke. From business-section bestseller to Pentagon battle-plan. Only in America. And it was a phony, decrepit notion to start with, despite being updated for today’s executives and cleverly remarketed to every no one who ever dreamed of being a someone by working at home, in his or her spare time. The idea that one straw can break the camel’s back, that one well-placed lever can move the world, that one added particle can bring on “critical mass” is the delusion that wears a thousand faces. It’s the manic creed of the assassin: fire a single bullet, alter history. The principle rarely works when applied on purpose, but because it quite often works by accident (or seems to have worked, when viewed in retrospect; Henry Ford built his Model T and, presto, freeways!) it never loses its appeal.

What’s next? The Freakonomics war? The Six-Sigma attack against Iran? The Blink campaign against global terrorism? Capturing Osama the Warren Buffett Way?

–Walter

Call me cynical, but this headline from yesterday’s Washington Post strikes me as the week’s winner for non-shocking news: "Comparison of Schizophrenia Drugs Often Favors Firm Funding Study." Turns out that, with a bit of tinkering here and there, a comparative drug trial can be (and often is) structured to stack the deck in favor of the company footing the bill. Wow. Who ever would have guessed such studies weren’t entirely impartial? —Michelle

These are trying times for the Bush White House, what with their poll numbers drooping lower than Karl Rove‚Äôs third chin. As such, I‚Äôm always on the lookout for signs that this dangerously insular administration realizes exactly how desperately it needs to get its act together. Latest bit of evidence: Just starting this week, each time I open my email I find two or three new dispatches from the White House Communications Office, alerting me to some inspirational speech Bush is giving, some new initiative his folks are hard at work on, some sinister bit of misinformation the Dems are spreading, or some positive coverage the administration has just received from the typically-dismissed-as-hatefully-biased mainstream media. If the White House has decided to start wooing avowed critics like me, they really must be getting nervous. Good.  —Michelle

Forgot to sign my earlier Rummy post. Hazard of co-blogging–and not enough caffeine. Don’t blame Walter for it. All me. —Michelle

I‚Äôm generally uneasy when any entity winds up with as much concentrated power as Wal-Mart. So my head tells me to root for regulators to reject the global retailing behemoth‚Äôs pleas this week for permission to start dabbling in the banking business. Then again, we‚Äôre not talking about Wal-Mart going up against the corner hardware store. We‚Äôre talking about the banking industry‚Äîan industry that arrogantly clings to a shameless screw-the-consumer business model filled with unnecessary user fees and handy accounting tricks that somehow never seem to work in the customer’s favor. So I must admit there‚Äôs a certain gut appeal to the thought of the cost obsessive Wal-Mart jumping into the banking game and forcing a little industry-wide soul-searching. Currently, Wal-Mart is asking only to set up a bank that would process credit card transactions, but critics insist–and, are probably correct–that such a move would inevitably lead to the retailer‚Äôs entry into consumer banking. And say what you will about Sam Walton‚Äôs evil empire, it unquestionably knows how to cut the fat (in this case, think absurdly high ATM fees) out of whatever business it touches. The New York Times‚Äô David Leonhardt did a compelling column on this issue a few weeks ago. Still, I realize that a banking industry controlled from Bentonville would have its downsides, so financial experts feel free to send along your thoughts on this. No gratuitous anti-Wal-Mart profanity, please. —Michelle