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Wednesday, June 02, 2004

Miller out, Chalabi in at Times

CREDULUS, NY, June 2-- The New York Times announced today that Judith Miller, the controversial reporter who has been responsible for most of the paper’s coverage of alleged WMD programs in Iraq, will be replaced by Ahmad Chalabi as of June 30.

A senior editor at the Times, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the hiring of Chalabi does not raise any “insuperable ethical problems” for the newspaper.  “He’s no longer on the Bush administration payroll,” said the editor, “so it makes sense to eliminate the middleman-- Judy, in this case-- and go straight to the source.  Besides, Ahmad is knowledgeable, forthcoming, and thoroughly fluent in the politics of the region.  He’s also, quite frankly, a lot more fun to be around, and we’re looking forward to working with him.”

Sources say the paper’s editorial staff is planning on a smooth transfer of power, with Chalabi assuming “full sovereignty” over Iraq coverage by the end of the month.

Posted by Michael on 06/02 at 07:51 AM
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Tuesday, June 01, 2004

That was the month that was

After three consecutive months of 20,000 unique-visitors-per (oh, all right, I know some of you came back more than once), this humble little blog hit 44,000 visitors in May.  I’m amazed-- and appalled.  What to do next? It’s blog anxiety!  What am I doing with blog anxiety?! 

Well, first I guess I should thank everyone for stopping by, linking, passing along my Bush quiz and Lieberman rant, and other such things.  And yes, I know the Bush quiz needs more entries-- there are some great suggestions in the comments, and I should probably add one more of my own:

”I like the graft and corruption! I pump my fist in the air and sing that Lee Greenwood song every time Halliburton gouges taxpayers and negotiates lucrative kickbacks or drives empty trucks around Baghdad to boost their fees and jeopardize truck drivers’ lives!” (Thanks to Eric Smith for the links.)

Second, I should meditate on anxiety for a moment. 

One day some years ago I was sweeping up around the house when I had a flashback to one of my college-era part-time jobs, cleaning the Terrace Restaurant in Morningside Heights (the Terrace is famous for its views of upper Manhattan; the job was a $4/hr gig, 7-11 am, which gave me plenty of time to make my class schedule from noon onwards).  Suddenly I remembered, almost viscerally, how much of my life at 19 was defined by anxiety, especially my (entirely justified) anxiety about finding part-time and summer jobs while I was in school.  I was so anxious about work, in fact, that I spent my first week or so on that job terrified that I’d forget to cover some part of the restaurant before the cooks started arriving at 11, and that I would be fired before the end of the day.  So I cleaned like a madman, which struck me (many years later, sweeping up around the house) as strange, since it isn’t as if restaurant-cleaning is ordinarily a high-pressure job. 

When I started to play drums with college bands, I would get all wound up before gigs, worrying (a) that I’d drop a stick or (b) that there would be other drummers in the house who knew that I was self-taught and still learning.  I remember that before my band Normal Men opened for the Ramones in 1982, I sprayed my hands with aerosol deodorant gunk to make them dry and sticky, thinking that the only thing I could do to screw up the band in front of a thousand people would be to drop a stick.  (Funny thing is, I still have a tape of one of Normal Men’s gigs at CBGB during which I did drop a stick-- and you can’t hear it on the tape.  It wasn’t that big a deal.) I even developed a Hierarchy of Musical Mistakes by which to understand my (and my band’s) performance:

E-level screwups:  so egregious that even the guys playing video poker in the bar on the third floor know that the band flubbed one.

D-level:  embarrassing and bad (wrong notes, timing errors), but can only be heard by people who are actually paying attention.

C-level:  can only be heard by people who play your instrument and know what you really meant to do.

B-level:  imperceptible mistakes in which you don’t play exactly what you want but manage to play something entirely passable instead.

A-level:  mistakes that are better than what you intended to play, and which you eventually incorporate into the song.

Interestingly, when I went to graduate school and, toward the end of my first year at Virginia, started playing with Michael Dean and Todd Wilson in a band called Baby Opaque, I never felt a moment’s anxiety about performing; I was so consumed with graduate-school anxiety that I didn’t have any anxiety left over for music.  I would show up for gigs, set up, sound check, play, pack up, and go home, all as if I were fixing sinks or something.  Then when Nick was born, when I was 24, I was so consumed with new-parent-anxiety that I didn’t have any anxiety left over for my dissertation, and . . . you get the idea.  By the same logic, surely one of the reasons that I didn’t have too many assistant-professor tenure-track anxieties in the early 1990s was that I was far more worried about how to take care of a newborn with Down syndrome.

Blog anxiety . . . what a silly thing.  Maybe I’ll go play some music instead.

Posted by Michael on 06/01 at 06:50 AM
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Saturday, May 29, 2004

Special San Francisco edition

As I walked down to the new Embarcadero plaza at the end of Market Street, I stopped in at one of these Left Coast coffee places for some serious, snap-to-attention Left Coast coffee, and goddamn if Otis Redding’s “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” wasn’t on the speakers.  And I really was sitting on the dock of the bay, too.  I suppose they have the tune on 15-minute tape loop.  If I start hearing Richie Havens’ version of “San Francisco Bay” in stores today, then I’ll know itís all about the tourism.

So what am I doing in San Francisco?  Officially, it’s the convention of the American Literature Association, at which I appeared on a roundtable on teaching Don DeLillo’s White Noise.  Unofficially, I’m hanging out with Bay Area friends and writers Joseph Lease and Larry Gallagher, reading about the history of affirmative action, and (at the moment) planning on taking a ferry across the bay.

The sun is out, the air is clear and crisp, and the bay is beautiful beyond belief.  But I’m not blogging about those things.  That would only generate envy and resentment at us jet-setting academics who flit from conference to conference having a grand old time.  (Actually I’ve never been to the ALA before; I don’t go to very many conferences, now that I think of it.) And I don’t want your envy and resentment.  I want your pity and horror!

Really.  I’m serious.  I have flown on exactly five occasions since October.  On four of those five flights, including this one, I have arrived without baggage.  Gainesville, Florida: a four-hour delay in State College, and no bags in Gainesville.  Atlanta: no baggage.  St. Louis: one-hour delay in Pittsburgh, and no baggage.  San Francisco, no baggage.  What the hell is going on?

On two of those flights, I knew perfectly well what was going on: my connecting flight was one of those Brazilian needle-nosed jets, the kind in which one crawls into the fuselage on all fours and is strapped into one’s seat in fetal position.  They were full flights, leaving the northern climes in late winter, which meant that according to the laws of physics, the combined weight of the passengers and their bags would bring the plane down in some catastrophic manner unless my garment bag were unloaded from the plane and put on a later flight.  (I’m not kiddingñ two different airlines actually told me they were doing this.) Well, I’m happy to be inconvenienced slightly if it keeps forty or fifty of my fellow beings from dying a most gruesome death.  But on the St. Louis and San Francisco flights, I wound up being the only passenger whose luggage was mishandled.  This I do not understand.

The irony is that the only reason I travel with a garment bag is to bring a suit for a public presentation.  When the bag doesn’t arrive, I wind up having to speak in my travelling clothes, so that when the bag arrives the next day, I have no real use for it.  I might just as well have brought a tiny overnight bag or small suitcase that would escape the attention of weight-conscious baggage handlers at hubs around the nation.  Now, this isn’t a terrible thing in itself, because academics (yes, even those of us who teach cultural studies) are allowed to appear in public rumpled and disheveled to some degree.  But when you fly for seven hours, arrive in San Francisco at midnight (3 am Eastern), and have no toiletries and nothing fresh to wear for your conference presentation the next day, it’s downright unhygenic.

I do want to acknowledge that US Airways took such pity on my abject state that it issued me a little overnight bag (razor, deodorant, toothbrush-toothpaste, etc.) and even a small clothing allowance.  This allowed me to stop by the Gap yesterday morning for some lightweightñ and clean!ñ summer clothing, so that I was not an offense to the sensibilities of my fellow panelists and conference interlocutors.  I think the fact that this was my fourth bagless voyage may have moved even the heart of the lost-baggage clerk, who, of course, hears nothing all day except complaints about lost baggage.  (My demeanor is this:  I am not an angry airline passenger.  I am merely abject and weary, especially at 3 am Eastern time.)

Anyway, things are all right now.  My bags arrived in my hotelñ the Hyatt Regency at the Embarcadero Center, which should be familiar to all you Mel Brooks fans for its role in the film High Anxietyñ only 21 hours after I did, at 9 pm last night, and now it’s Saturday at noon, and it’s a beautiful day.  When I get back to Pennsylvania, though, I will have to sit down and think this all out: as Freud (and, before him, folk tales) taught us, you only need three occurrences to establish a pattern.  Four is just eerie.  Maybe my bag is being flagged for a reason?  Maybe, just maybe, I should remove all these stickers I put on it last summer?

Posted by Michael on 05/29 at 09:57 AM
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Thursday, May 27, 2004

New York Times reporter Judith Miller warns of possible Cuban bioterror attack

I just thought that this might be a good time to go back to May 2002 and revisit Judith Miller’s seemingly carefully-hedged and scrupulously-attributed claims that Cuba and Iran were teaming up to hit the US with biological weapons.  Of course, Ms. Miller doesn’t come right out and say, “you have to understand, I’m shilling for the far-right tinfoil-helmeted Undersecretary of State John Bolton.” But she doesn’t really need to:

I think what you have here is a problem with how to interpret information about what Cuba is doing. Yes, there is a lot of activity that is suspicious. There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence. And there are a lot of very unsavory contacts, as the administration regards them, between Cuba and especially Iranians who are involved in biological weapons.

And this kind of information led Mr. Bolton and before him another senior State Department official to say that there is a limited offensive effort. Specifically, the State Department said Cuba was experimenting with anthrax and that, of course, got our attention in the press.

But the debate is over how to interpret this information.

This is “embedded journalism” at its finest:  note how Miller embeds “as the administration regards them” in that first paragraph and caps this off with a reference to “debate,” as if she herself is agnostic.  Note also that it’s not just Bolton she’s quoting here:  no, there’s another State Department official before him, so clearly this can’t be looney-tunes saber-rattling Boltonian spin.

What about people who dispute these claims, like former President Carter?  Well, Carter might be a dupe, or he might be in a “camp”:

CNN: Do you have reason to believe that President Carter got duped [Monday]?

MILLER: Well, I think that really how you see this issue depends on what you would like to see. I mean I think that there are many individuals who would like to see a loosening of the four-decade-old embargo against Cuba. And I think that President—former President Carter may be in that camp.

Point being, people, let’s not forget that Miller wasn’t just a Chalabi shill.  She was an all-purpose neocon/extremist shill.

Posted by Michael on 05/27 at 08:22 AM
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Wednesday, May 26, 2004

The 40 percenters

Yeah, yeah, Bush’s numbers are down.  But in order for Democrats to get his approval rating to be where it should be, post-Clarke, post-Abu Ghraib-- that is, somewhere between 5 and 15 percent (somewhat higher in the South)-- we need to understand just why his remaining supporters are still hanging on.

So, as a public service to all the smart, well-informed, snarky progressives and liberals and lefties reading this blog on a regular basis, I’ve devised a handy pop quiz that we can distribute to Bush supporters, in order to discover (in the best traditions of Gramscian cultural studies) the continuing appeal of the Bush presidency.

What is it you like most about the Bush administration and its policies?

___ I like the lying! It turned me on when the President spiked that EPA report on the toxic air quality around Ground Zero, thereby consigning thousands of firefighters, police, Guardsmen, rescue workers, and ordinary citizens to debilitating lifelong respiratory illness!  If people are so worried about a few tiny particles floating around, let them buy those little fiber masks, for goodness’ sake!  Every Ace Hardware sells ‘em.

___ I like the incompetence! It’s so cool the way the President and his advisors blew off legitimate CIA and DIA intelligence on Iraq, and decided instead to take the word of an Iraqi double agent who’s working together with Iranian Islamists.  The post-"Mission Accomplished” occupation of Iraq has been every bit as cool!

___ I like the torture! I came for the tax cuts, but I’m staying for the torture and humiliation of random Arabs from Gitmo to Abu Ghraib!  It’s such a pleasant surprise, and so damn long overdue!  That’ll show whoever-they-all-are that you don’t mess with the U.S.!

___ I like the cuts to veterans’ benefits! Why should a bunch of veterans get all those free medical goodies?  I support the troops, sure, but only by flying a flag from my car.  Don’t come around here asking me to pay more taxes just because some soldier comes home with the sniffles.

___ I like the attacks on overtime pay! I’m sick and tired of people freeloading off the rest of us by working ten or twelve hours a day.  And I’m sick and tired of the way Democrats pander to their special interests.  It’s about time we had a President tough enough to draw the line when it comes to outrageous labor demands.

___ I like the $500 billion deficit! Clinton made me sick with all his feelgood liberal talk about “balancing” the so-called “budget.” Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter!

___ I like the new Medicare plan! Though I wish someone would explain it to me.  What’s this about donuts being covered after two thousand dollars?

___ I like the cowboy hat! I also like the whole Crawford ranch brush-clearing thing.  I think it’s shameful that Bill Clinton left him all that brush to clear.

___ Could you repeat the question? I wasn’t really paying attention.

Please clip and send to a Bush voter near you.  Thanks.

Posted by Michael on 05/26 at 09:21 AM
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Tuesday, May 25, 2004

Finals exam

Stanley Cup finals begin in five minutes.  The call here is Lightning in six, though personally I’d prefer that the series go seven.

Posted by Michael on 05/25 at 01:57 PM
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