Monday, August 30, 2004
Katha Pollitt's snippets from the party-- I mean, the protests-- in New York in The Nation show what a great antiwar everyone is having:
I met people who had traveled for days to shout, "Boooo!" while sweeping past Madison Square Garden
Pink, by the way, is definitely becoming the new black of protest culture...I saw lots of pink T-shirts in the crowd. And why not? Pink carries so many meanings we like: female, gay, antimacho, peaceful, playful and, well, pinko.
There were papier-mache monsters, a giant globe, whistles and kazoos, Raging Grannies and Men without Pants (in flag-patterned boxers--hmmm, is underwear the new protest outerwear?), and endless vaginal puns on Bush.
Sticker that best sums it all up: "'Yee-ha' is not a foreign policy."
What is the subject that they are protesting? Oh, right, the forcible ending of this. But let's not bring that up, it's so dreary. The important thing is that:
Protest culture has been reborn. Our demos get better and better, our organizations smarter (thank you, United for Peace and Justice !), our crowds bigger, more diverse, more attractive to newcomers. A few years ago, the savvy word was that street protests were hopelessly old- fashioned and square, the very embodiment of the cultural stodginess of the left: Demonstrations were boring to the media and irrelevant to the young, busy with their computers and skateboards. Wrong. Yesterday's demo got lots of press and it was full of young people--to my eye at least half the crowd looked under 30.
Because "got lots of press" and "full of young people" are the two things that justify anything done on the two coasts-- the common thread that runs through every ultrachic event from The O.C. to the Manson Family murders.
When you read about the party these New York swells had, you can't help but remember the scene in the great movie My Man Godfrey where they have to acquire a "forgotten" (i.e., homeless) man as one of the "things" needed to win a scavenger hunt, and when the homeless man (William Powell) asks what the purpose of this hunt is, Carole Lombard explains:
Lombard: Well, a scavenger hunt is exactly like a treasure hunt, except in a treasure hunt you try to find something you want, and in a scavenger hunt you try to find something that nobody wants.
Powell: Hmm, like a forgotten man?
Lombard: That's right, and the one who wins gets a prize, only there really isn't a prize. It's just the honor of winning, because all the money goes to charity, that is, if there is any money left over, but there never is.
Ah, the exquisite compassion of the bright young things, timelessly alive in the streets of New York yesterday.
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Found this revealing little anecdote in James Mann's terrific book Rise of the Vulcans, a non-partisan account of how the Bush administration came to think the way it does on foreign policy, which would be an excellent book with which to shut up people who froth "Halliburton" or "Neocon" and think they've explained everything if, that is, they could be trusted to read something solidly researched and not merely out to score cheap points from whichever direction. Anyway, here's the story (pp. 297-8) which I, at least, have never seen mentioned anywhere:
A delegation of fourteen journalists from local Chinese television stations happened to be touring the United States as guests of the Institute of International Education. Inside a meeting room, as a large-screen television set aired the pictures of the planes hitting the World Trade Center, American onlookers saw to their astonishment that a few of the Chinese journalists were laughing or cheering.
The incident touched off a brief, intense debate inside the State Department... The separate State Department unit for educational and cultural affairs... argued that what looked like laughter might have been merely a sign of tension or embarassment; perhaps the behavior was just a reflection of cultural differences between Americans and Chinese. Moreover, these doves argued, the journalists were potentially important people... the internal wrangling made its way up the State Department bureaucracy to [#2 under Colin Powell Richard] Armitage...
The deputy secretary was in no mood for a Solomonic splitting of differences or for cultural relativism. "Send them home," Armitage ordered. "These people ought to be on the next plane out of here." ... Accounts of the dispute and of Armitage's handling of it made the rounds of the State Department. It was taken as a sign of a new era, one in which Americans would reject long-winded explanations of the inexplicable.
Since Bush's policies, like Clinton's, FDR's, Grover Cleveland's, and many other polarizing figures, are nowhere near extreme enough or unusual enough to warrant the incredible hatred and imputations of extreme evil aimed at him--
--yeah, yeah, Patriot Ashcroft whatever, I'll worry that he's Goering Junior when he finally murders as many women and children as that nice Janet Reno lady did; and if you don't like big tax cuts for the rich and deficits well, me neither, but if we're both over 18 this isn't the first time in history we've seen either one--
--the student of sociology has to look at other causes to explain this hysteria (a fair word in view of the signage at yesterday's protests, for instance).
It is, of course, not hard to find, no farther than all the talk about red vs. blue states and so on, not to mention the personas of the two candidates running. What the elites hate about Bush, what the intelligentsia find so personally distasteful about the man, is his middle-Americanness, his bourgeois ordinariness-- his fundamentalist faith, his pickup truck and baseball lifestyle, his Clint Eastwood taciturnity (and regular guy inability to speak the language of therapy, which his predecessor of course understood was the ultimate pickup language), and of course, his heretical belief that objectively, America is better than Taliban Afghanistan. Worst of all, of course, is that Bush is not just some hick, a Falwell or Dobson who grew up in Dogpatch worshiping a Redeemer who would kick city boy butt, but that of course he is the quintessential preppy, third generation politician, one of two Skull & Bonesmen in the race and the one with considerably bluer blood than John Kerry, son of a Polish Jew with adopted Protestant religion and Irish Catholic name.
Like FDR, then, Bush is hated as a traitor to his class-- but where in 1932, FDR was hated for betraying the political philosophy of the New England wealthy, Bush is hated for betraying their lifestyle, for having had the chance to remain urbane and upper crust, and throwing it away for Texas and Jesus. Since even the people who despise him for that recognize that, deep down, doing so is kind of shallow-- nothing shows lack of breeding more than openly judging people by their class-- they have to find more serious-seeming and self-acceptable reasons to hate him.
Thus we have the extraordinary acts of psychological projection by which the crimes and attributes of Bush's opponents are literally attributed to him. Our self-declared enemy is (or, more likely, was) an Islamic terrorist leader who seeks the establishment of a global Caliphate and the imposition of Taliban-style theocracy, and would use nukes if he had 'em to purify the world. That his dream that the West will submit to hijab-wearing and Islamic dysfunctional behaviors is so nutty (There are some parts of Brooklyn, Osama, that I wouldn't advise even the Jihad to enter) is beside the point; he did a lot of damage demonstrating that he was a tactical idiot for his cause. The very disappearance, and probable death, of this leader, though, makes it easy for people to mentally refashion Bush exactly along his lines-- like Osama, Bush gave up luxury and loose living for a sternly practical and religious life in a dusty, unpleasant desert, therefore they must both be animated by an identical desire to wage war and inflict mass suffering in the name of establishing a final theocracy to the glory of their respective gods.
To rational folks like ourselves, Bush-- the son who inherited his father's business and like so many second generation leaders combines a shrewd set of instincts born of being close to power (and the power-hungry and sycophantic) all his life, with a certain narrowness and lack of intellectual curiosity that is not atypical for those born at third base-- may or may not seem an admirable figure, but it is absurd to put such religio-Napoleonic dreams on his shoulders. It is much more profitable to see his administration in the terms of trendy business books by Tom Peters or Peter Drucker, and to recognize that Bush approaches the world like a CEO facing a marketplace that has changed, with new technologies and foreign competitors:
What do the Honda Supercub, Intel's 8088 processor, and hydraulic excavators have in common?... These products did not come about as the result of successful companies carrying out sound business practices in established markets. In The Innovator's Dilemma, author Clayton M. Christensen shows how these and other products cut into the low end of the marketplace and eventually evolved to displace high-end competitors and their reigning technologies.
That summary of a recent business bestseller describes exactly Bush's way of going around the UN and the traditional (high-end) powers and forming his own coalition of low-end powers from Poland to Australia. Many other such books explain more-- what is Bush if not a One-Minute Manager? What is his contempt for the slow, cautious foreign policy elite and the Kissingerian status quo they want to protect if not the entrepreneur's contempt for the cubicled drones at a hidebound old Fortune 500 company? Donald Rumsfeld's attempts to reshape a drastically smaller military for new challenges could hardly be more obviously corporate in inspiration.
But even faced with an administration full of CEOs, even as the name Halliburton is routinely dropped as all the evidence anyone needs for the most outrageous claims, no one recognizes CEO-like behavior when it's right in front of them. The commentariat doesn't read business books, so they've missed the most obvious key to Bush's behavior-- and invent one out of another fact (his religiosity) they are more aware of, if hardly any more comprehending of.
Sunday, August 29, 2004
Even though I'm sure he was half-joking, I always thought it was nutty when someone like Mickey Kaus would suggest, up practically to the moment of "I'm reporting for duty!", that there was still time for the Democratic party to decide John Kerry was a stiff and deny him the nomination in favor of someone else (Edwards or Hillary, depending on your level of delusion). Those things JUST... DON'T... HAPPEN. (To presidential nominees, that is-- ask Tom Eagleton about VP nominees.) At least, minus a major scandal. And there was no major scandal on the horizon (a Kerry bimbo eruption had been an apparently false alarm) and not, as yet, dissatisfaction with Kerry on any major level. (Lack of satisfaction is not quite the same as dissatisfaction.)
But say this whole questionable-citation-on-the-mdeals thing got bad enough-- which would be LOT worse than it is now-- so that Kerry would be compelled to drop out. Extraordinary, something that hasn't happened in eons (ever? maybe) but then so was a candidate winning the popular vote but losing the Electoral College-- before 2000.
Again, let me stress I find it 99+% unlikely, not to mention fairly tasteless even to talk about such possibilities in the complete absence of allegations, proof or anything else. But as long as we're playing Fantasy League Politics, let's play it all the way before going back to the reality in which we will be up late watching Bush-- who WILL be running with Cheney-- and Kerry duking it out swing state by swing state.
If Kerry had to step off the ticket, then what? Obviously the most likely scenario is that Edwards rises to the top. He had the second-most delegates, he's in the number two slot, any other choice by party bigshots would cause endless commotion. But who gets the number two slot? There is no obviously appealing choice among the remaining candidates-- maybe Wesley Clark, barely, as a counterbalance on the military side, assuming the Dems still want to play the military card (and immediately see Clark's decorations examined one by one).
Is this the Draft Hillary scenario at last? McCain's switch to the Dems? And then do the Bushies counter that by dumping Cheney for Condi, to gain the votes of about 15 bloggers? Dream on....
Monday, August 23, 2004
My friend Stephan Wanger is spending his mid-life crisis or something cycling 25,000 miles, eventually to South America, for charity. Here is his blog,there may be more about saddlesores than you need, strictly speaking, but there's also a lot of heart in how a German who loves America sees it from the top of two wheels. Day 17 is especially inspiring/interesting in equal measure:
Now it was 3:30 pm and I only had 56 miles in so far. Not enough, lousy day I am thinking, especially because earlier this morning my chain went down also and I lost a half-hour fixing it. Anyway, as I am about to leave the bike shop I am meet Morgan and Bill from Orlando, FL. We exchanged a few sentences about the Continental Pedal and its causes and it turns out that Morgan cycled from Fredericksburg to Orlando a couple of years ago and she gave me a few pieces of advice. I also have a home in Orlando now. Morgan’s parents both suffer also from Alzheimer’s. Morgan’s mom has a hard time with it and resents the difficulties that come with the disease. Her dad on the other hand takes Alzheimer’s with a grain of salt and with incredible humor. Morgan shared with me that her dad just said the other day smiling, “Shucks, where am I again?” It made me smile as well. I gave Morgan the contact info for the AFA in New York which focuses on the caring element for patients that have Alzheimer’s. I am certain that Morgan knows pretty much everything about the disease since both of her parents have it, but who knows? What was humbling to me is the fact that Morgan offered to donate to Aspire to Inspire. Morgan, wow, we are doing the pedal for you and your parents. My heart and energy go out to you and I will be thinking about you as I continue this project...
I cycled fast to Ashland and made 93 miles by around 7:00 pm and checked into a cheap motel again and had lots of junk food. I am closing out my evenings with one big milkshake and so I walked to McDonald’s and then Burger King, but both told me that they were out of milkshakes (WHAT???). Then I noticed a Waffle House and thought that a waffle with whip cream and blueberries sounds good as well (I had such a craving). First I decided to give Wendy’s a chance, but to no avail – they just have frosties. Ok, I am not going to walk to Arby’s now… so I made for the Waffle House. As I walk in, I see at the counter an elderly couple and a magazine that looked too familiar. First, I thought: “I have lost it,” but then I looked again and it was the “Amerika Woche” with the feature on the Continental Pedal. “It is him!” said a woman in German. Can you believe this? So I met Inge and her American husband Brian and we talked about the Pedal. Inge made me sign my picture and I signed with “Es gibt keine Zufaelle” (There are no coincidences), both gave me $20 for my next dinner they said. How nice and what a day.
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
I once thought about writing a screenplay called The Passion of Coolidge. Basically it would have been a satire on Dan Quayle, on the idea of a goofy idiot president who goes and does silly things (like pose, pokerfaced, in Indian garb) in order to distract the press and the country from whatever the White House didn't want to see in the news. (Remember that Coolidge succeeded the scandal-ridden Warren Harding, so there would have been a lot of that.)
Coolidge's image as Silent Cal has always been a mild figure of fun, and I was influenced further by the story that H.L. Mencken told of a Massachusetts reporter at the GOP convention telling him to bet on Governor Coolidge getting the veep slot under Harding in 1920, and then going straight to the presidency-- because Coolidge was the luckiest man the reporter had ever seen, and always got what he wanted. Forget talent, Mencken was saying, some men are just destined to be lucky and get everything easily that far superior men strive for and fail to achieve. (The luck ultimately extended to exiting the White House before getting blamed for the Depression-- Coolidge could have run for a second full term of his own in 1928, but left that to the infinitely more impressive, but as it turned out fatally unlucky, Herbert Hoover.)
As I did some research, however, the image of Coolidge as the bumbling lucky fool became hard to sustain, because the reality suggested a man with a dry and caustic sense of humor whose "Silent Cal" persona was the way he flew under the press's radar. In fact, his press conferences suggested a scathing contempt barely being held in check-- far from a Quayle, Coolidge was closer to a Rumsfeld. (A less charming Rumsfeld.) Then there was also a tragic element-- like Lincoln, who lost his beloved Willie while in the White House, or Franklin Pierce, whose son died in a train accident which his wife came to see as punishment for Pierce's ambition, Coolidge lost a son while he was president, to an infection which set in from an absurdly minor blister. In short, the more I learned, the less fun and satirizable Coolidge's story got.
Well, as this (subscriber-only) Atlantic piece reports, Coolidge's real story is not only not funny, one could well write The Tragedy of Coolidge-- a story of how one man's personal tragedy in the White House may have crippled him so completely that the course of the 20th century changed for the worse (much, much worse). The article stops short of suggesting it, but you have to wonder-- without that blister, would there have been a Great Depression? (The author says yes, Coolidge's policies would likely have been the same, but who knows?) And without the Great Depression, what else wouldn't have happened in the 20th century?
Pretty Irrelevant Addendum: Coolidge-era music is here. You notice how it's already not astounding that some guy, totally on his own, programs a 24-hour "radio station" of 20s dance-band music (not jazz, but the softer white peoples' stuff), something that radio professionals would find about as commercial as an all-ancient-Latin-speeches format. And the whole world (well, apart from Burma or North Korea) can listen to it. Like there's anything exceptional about any of that.
Sunday, August 15, 2004
Here's a post at LTHForum.com, the Chicago-based culinary chat site which I help moderate, on a really out-there meal I had in Chicago at an ultrachic place called Moto. There's lots of stuff by me there, more than here obviously, just calling out ones that will be of general interest/amusement here.
(Note: a bit of topical humor I rescued from an email to a friend, after hearing Kerry's decidedly State of the Union-like convention acceptance speech.)
BUSH: ...Too many Americans find themselves cut off from the multitude of television channels that other Americans take for granted. They find themselves leading basic lives under the cruel sentence of basic cable. That is why, Mr. Speaker, I call for a national premium channel benefit, so that no child is left behind without HBO Family. And no budding young filmmaker finds himself unable to watch his own movie on the Sundance Channel.
[Republicans rise and cheer.]
30 minutes later, on Hardball:
DASCHLE: ...Wellllll, Chris, I'm just disappointed that the president said nothing about making sure that every American has a cellular phone with the ability to download unique rings based on the latest hiphop hit singles. [Dismayed shake of head.] I meet a lot of people, hardworking South Dakotans, whose cell phones still have black and white screens and just make a BRRRING-BRRRING noise. [Look of dismayed concern.] And I want colorful phones that can play Ludacris and Missy Elliott for all Americans, not just for the wealthy and the special interests. [Dismayed exhalation of nasal passages.]
Americans ate crappy fast food in the 70s. They got fat. They got more prosperous in the 80s and 90s, and started going to slightly more real places like Bennigan's or Italian Garden or P.F. Chang's or Cheesecake Factory (well, they're more real than Arby's or Taco Bell, anyway). And yet they got fatter. Why am this?
Atkins culties will tell you that the reason is potatoes and bread, and they bear their share of the blame, sure. But one of the problems with all this supposedly more real food that you get at higher-up-the-evolutionary-chain chain restaurants is that it is nevertheless full of sugar-- much, much sweeter than the equivalent dishes at non-chain restaurants.
The main reason (besides the toys) McDonald's is so insanely popular with kids is that everything is sweeter than at a more adult-oriented place like Wendy's-- let alone than at the German bar where your great-grandfather ate a liverwurst sandwich and two pickled eggs for lunch every weekday in 1910. The fries are sprayed with sugar water so they caramelize, the ketchup is sweeter than at other places (that's a taste-test you can perform for yourself with the packets you shoved in that kitchen drawer), the mustard and onions are milder. Basically, you're eating a hamburger candy bar and potato lollipops-- a highly sweetened, harsh-adult-flavor-free version of some archetypal American dishes.
Now this same tactic is put to work at ostensibly more grownup chain restaurants, in order to keep the kids who grew up on McDonald's hooked as grownups who think they're eating better, or at least more civilized. I can think of two meals I've had in the last month at such places where the sweetness factor has been dialed up to noticeably kid-like levels-- and neither were dishes that anyone under puberty would be expected to order.
At Big Bowl, the supposedly Thai coconut curry shrimp was so lacking in any appreciably Thai-seeming stinky fish sauce flavor, and yet so full of a sweet lime-coconut flavor, that it was like eating shrimp cooked in a lime colada, or Pez. Gross after two bites.
And at California Pizza Kitchen, what was once a simple, ever so slightly tart gorgonzola and walnut salad has been tarted up with 1) pear slices and 2) candied walnuts. I wouldn't mind the former, that's a typical enough combination, but the latter brought it much closer to Baskin-Robbins' Praline Crunch ice cream than it had any business being. (At least they haven't felt the urge to put slices of Vidalia onion or Heath Bar or whatever on the pizza of theirs that I order because you'd never guess that it was a Californa Pizza Kitchen pizza, the Rustico. A surprisingly decent combination of capers, black olives, actual Roma tomatoes rather than tomato sauce, and lots of red pepper flakes on a crackly-thin Italian-style crust.)
