Month: August 2007

"Democrats are showing us with their every word and grimace that what is good news for our country, what is good news for the war against Islamic terror, what is god news for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what is good news for the cause of peace – real peace – and stability in the Middle East is bad news, really bad news, for Democrats. Many of these people with that "D" after their names would gladly sacrifice any semblance of victory in Iraq and against the scourge of Islamic fascism if it would mean maintaining and strengthening their hold on power in Washington.. and willing the presidency.

Has there ever before been a time in America where a major political party would virtually pray for our defeat in a war so that they could demonize the leader of the opposition and turn that defeat into victory for them at the polls? Well, you’re seeing just that right now," – Neal Boortz, fresh from a meeting with the Decider.

Some Christianist mud-slinging.

Read TNR’s accounting. It is as I predicted: honorable and, except for one small inaccuracy, it checks out. All the aspects aggressively challenged by the usual propaganda organs have been verified and corroborated. The military is now conducting its own investigation. Given the record of such formal investigations, I’m not as confident in the Pentagon as I am in TNR. Can we now expect apologies from the people who smeared and maligned the magazine and its soldier-reporter? I doubt it. The attackers are not the kind to acknowledge their own errors.

The Guardian’s Sean Smith brings you video and photography that you don’t often see in the American mainstream media. What we are subjecting these soldiers to – the risk, the climate, and the inability to recuperate in any way – is beyond belief.

Yesterday was almost the Platonic idea of a summer day. The heat had depth and the light had a white glow about it. There’s no cold edge to the air any more, even out here in the often-chilly Cape. We spent the second afternoon in the tidal pools at the end of the peninsula. Dan Savage, his husband and son are staying for the week – alongside countless other gay families here for Family Week. So it was floatie time in the currents. No one in the Savage family has been here before so I had the privilege of introducing them. The nine-year-old’s grin belied his occasional nine-year-old diffidence.

Some people ask me why I don’t travel elsewhere for a summer break. I’ve been coming to the same place for almost two decades. For the past decade, I’ve come here in June and not left till September if I can possibly help it. It’s by no means all vacation. The blog and the column don’t write themselves. In some ways, I seem to work harder here. But it is a break, a change of pace and atmosphere from the Washington bubble. I spent my first full summer here just after I was diagnosed with HIV. It seemed a good place to learn how to die. But it helped teach me how to live, which, you eventually realize, amounts to the same thing.

It isn’t just the gay subtext, although it’s great to have vibrant little patches of counter-culture and post-gay culture vying with each other on a strip of sand. It isn’t just that I lucked out in buying a little beach condo when I could afford one. It’s the larger place itself, the mixture of elements that make up a minimalist, sublime, pure expression of nature and nature’s God. There are really only three elements to the landscape out here: dune and water and air. When you get past the town into the pristine Province Lands National Seashore (thanks, JFK!), there are no dating landmarks, no cars to place you in any decade, no architecture to pinion you to any specific time. Yes, the landscape has changed drastically over the centuries. It isn’t what the Pilgrims first saw. But it is largely as it was at the tip as when Thoreau rhapsodized about it. It is a place where you can leave all America behind.

But time in this timeless place is also acutely present. It’s present because of the enormous, expansive, insistent tides. I live on water, which means the view changes all the time. Every day shifts with the lunar rhythms. My backyard is both an ocean and a desert, depending on the time of day. And it is almost any color you can imagine. That’s what so much light and water will do. In the tidal pools, the timelessness of the scene is intersected with the always-shifting timeliness of the water coming in and out, traveling vast distances of very shallow coastal marshes and dunes, to transform a dusty beach into a blue and green watery expanse in mere hours. There is never any still, even when the air won’t move. That’s why it’s where I’ve asked my ashes to go one day. I want them dispersed into the nothingness on the horizon, to become specks of matter that will experience a pure summer day eternally. They will be there in the rough winter storms; but they will wait for the perfect summer afternoon.

Until then, it is as close as I’ll get to heaven on earth. And one of those places is enough for me.

First Romney, now McCain. Is there a pattern here? Money quote from McCain’s just-completed blogger conference call:

Perhaps the most surprising statement in the call, on Iraq: "In upcoming months, you could see Americans withdrawing." That, he said, could happen as Americans hand over more authority to Iraqis. Of course, he noted, it would be a long, hard process.

UPDATE I (2:46 p.m.): The senator clarified his thoughts on Iraq a bit later in the call…

"What Petraeus is going to say is not that we can start to withdraw," Mr. McCain said. "We’re seeing progress," he said, and the Iraqi army is getting better. That means: "We’re going to be able, in months ahead, to move into bases." And then, "when the situation warrants it," we’ll be able to take the next step of withdrawing.

Hmmm.

A reader writes:

Let me dissent from the lamentations over the publishing industry and suggest there are multiple facets to the situation. There is the "industry" which commits all the sins you and your readers are enumerating. They publish things like The Secret or turn James Frey’s novel into a "memoir of emotional truth." Then there is publishing, which continues on displaying a love of the written word, something I believe to be exemplified by my own employer, McSweeney’s, which published a seven volume treatise on violence by William Vollman (Rising Up and Rising Down) that would never have seen the light of day, as well as Lawrence Weschler’s "Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences," which is both beautiful and edifying. I’m getting into what I hope is a melding between publishing and industry myself this fall, with the launch of an imprint dedicated to humorous books, TOW Books. I can tell you that I and my corporate partners/overlords are taking tremendous care with the preparation of the books and I’ve not only read the manuscripts, but read them seven or eight times. The authors have collaborated on the design and illustration of the books through the whole process. Obviously a book is product, but it’s a product that my authors will love. I’m behind this project enough that I’ve decided to publish my next book through the imprint, putting my own money where I hope my mouth is.

Anyway, there’s those of us out there who love publishing and do still work in publishing. Next time you’re looking to publish a book, go indie, you won’t go back.

Another reader defends Big Publishing:

As your author/reader points out publishing sales reps, of which I’m one, don’t travel with the actual books, which aren’t ready when we sell in, but often with galleys (when they are ready), and catalogs with info about the book. Each season I have to sell several 100 adult and children’s books to mom-and-pop stores, if I were to carry in that many books it would require a couple of SUVs – not good for the environment – and the owners of the stores would look at me like I’m nuts.

What the author doesn’t mention or doesn’t know is that the publishers send out galleys to stores, as do reps, as they become available, so that stores have an opportunity to read and look over books.  Also, sales reps read many of these books in manuscript before they sell them, and spend hours prepping by going through tons of material provided by editors before they go in and sell so that they can sell the appropriate books to the appropriate bookstore.  I’m not going to waste the time of a literary bookstore by discussing a diet or self-help book with them.

Publishing, like the pharmaceutical industry, is not perfect, nor has it ever been.  There was never some gold age of publishing.  And books, like pharmaceuticals, are subject to market forces, whether we like it or not.  There are salaries to pay, benefits to provide, paper to buy, shipping to pay for (which goes up as gas goes up), royalties and advances to pay (the biggest percentage of the cost of most books), and on-and-on.  And like pharmaceuticals there are the occasional execs who will make questionable decisions (believe me I’ve seem them in action), however, like big pharma big publishing still turns out quality.  I can point to hundreds of good and important books that have been published in the last few years from nonfiction, like Fiasco and your book, to fiction, like Lay of the Land or the novels Orhan Pamuk.

And finally, there are the readers.  Publishers are going to publish what people want to buy.  And a large number of people want the likes of James Patterson and Dan Brown.  We live in a market economy, and as I mentioned before, this affects book publishing.  How can you isolate books from what you think the rest of the economy should be subject to?

If Petraeus reports that the surge is working in September, Romney says that’s a reason to withdraw troops. Here’s the audio. More here. It’s a deft maneuver: pro-surge, pro-withdrawal. Maybe only Romney can be for both simultaneously. He aims to please.

Here’s the official statement from the Brownback for President campaign:

"Baptists for Brownback is clearly a parody. Frankly, our campaign is flattered that an individual would take hours out of their day and sit behind a computer anonymously to make a parody of Senator Brownback and his consistent, conservative positions on the issues. It certainly is one of the weirder hobbies out there."