I've traditionally encouraged everyone I know to vote. I realize now, much to late, that this was a bad idea.

I mean... look at who we've elected? Clearly, someone out there has not only cancelled out my vote, but then someone else has gone and tipped the balance in the other (wrong) direction.

So, I have a new policy this year. I'm encouraging everyone not to vote. Please. You know you don't pay any attention anyway. You know that it won't make any difference which way you vote. So, stay at home. Don't bother. I'm only going to cancel out your dumb vote, anyway.

And, you *know* it's true. Especially if you've voted for people who ended up winning. Did they go on to do anything worthwhile? No.

Take it from me: democracy is a bad idea. If your state has referenda, vote "no" on all of them (if you vote at all). Better yet, just don't vote. You'll be glad you didn't -- and, so will I.

Thank you.

You heard it here, first.

No matter who ends up "winning" the current Presidential election, eventually both Al Gore and George W. Bush will serve in the Oval Office. This is certain. Odds are, the one who does not "win" this year's election will end up winning in '04 or '08. He'll win in '12 at the latest. Mark my words.

Because of the closeness of this election, I expect a lot more political participation and heated exchanges among even those who have been politically apathetic for the past decade. Passions will be ignited. Whoever claims victory this year will undoubtedly come under extremely heavy fire as a cheat and a fraud who is backed by some unscrupulous, unsavory characters. (nevermind that this is almost certainly true, regardless, of both candidates :).

In other exciting world news... has anyone tried that green ketchup from Heinz, yet?

Remember how the commie pinko liberals among us call or have called the '80's the Decade of Greed. Well, my friends, allow me to set the record straight.

The 90's will ultimately be remembered as the decade of greed. While philanthropy (both as an absolute dollar value and as a percentage of income) was up in the 80's, the 90's marked a particularly dark corner in the American psyche. This is nowhere more apparent than in the high tech sector, where young "players" in the stock market speculated wildly on the dot com stocks and college grads with comp. sci. degrees hopped from job to job based solely upon the salary and -- more importantly -- the all-important stock option grant.

When I write my book called "Dot Com", it will feature these catch-phrases that typify life in the high tech industry in the waning days of the 20th century:

"Yes, but how'd the stock do?"

"But, how'd the stock do?"

"They did what? How'd the stock do?"

As the market continues to correct itself, and the day traders are losing their shirts, it becomes all the more obvious just how much the "gimme" attitudes of the 90's are leading us (as a nation) into some hard times ahead.

And, more to the point, I didn't get to participate in any of that ephemeral success. Bummer.

Remember when Vice President Gore accepted all that money from certain foreign parties in the form of campaign contributions while he was overseas and which were deemed by most observers as unethical (at the least) and illegal (had it happened on US soil or involved other US parties)? Rather than saying he didn't do anything wrong (because, one presumes, he *knew* it was wrong), he said "there is no legally governing body" to handle such situations. In other words, it may be a conflict of interest -- it may even be a flat out bribe -- but there's no explicit jurisdiction defined to address this particular situation. So, there. Can't touch me. Neener, neener.

Turns out, a certain Senator-elect, who will be representing New York State soon, continues to exhibit the very same kind of behavior that has typified the current-but-not-for-long administration's attitudes toward what's "okay" and what's "legal".

Check out any online news source, such as this article from ABCNews.com. The Senator-elect has taken a huge book advance despite the fact that this is frowned upon by ethics committees and is actually against the rules for other elected officials. Again, the message is loud and clear: if our political adversaries do it, it's outrageous. But, if we do it, it is not technically illegal, so it must be okay.

Depending upon what your definition of 'is' is, I guess.

Just a little observation today, as I have much else to do, but have you noticed that being picked as Time's "Person of the Year" is not usually a harbinger of good things to come?

Example: Ted Turner, President of Turner Communications and Ted Turner Industries, was Time Magazine's "Person of the Year" in 1991. You know what happened after that? His company got onto shaky ground and he had to be bought out. By whom? Time Warner. Ted Turner became an employee of Time Warner four years after being Person of the Year.

Last year's "Person of the Year" was Jeff Bezos, the founder and President of Amazon.com. Copies of that cover can be seen all along the hallways of Amazon's various corporate headquarter buildings. This creates a spooky "Jeff is Watching You" feeling reminiscent of a certain George Orwell novel. One year later, Amazon's stock is worth about one tenth what it was a year ago, and Jeff's not laughing as much as he used to. (For those of you who don't know, Mr. Bezos is famous for his laugh. Just like Bill Gates is famous for rocking back and forth on the edge of his seat like a nervous first-grader who has to go to the bathroom.)

Anyway, this year's "Person of the Year" is President Elect George W. Bush. I'm not quite sure why... I mean, what has he done this year that was so compelling? He won an election. Presidential elections happen every four years, and sooner or later, someone is declared the winner for each of them. This year, it was Bush. Would Vice President Gore be gracing the cover if *he* had won? I don't get it.

So, the President-elect graces the cover of Time Magazine with a very dubious honor. Let us hope that President Bush does better with his administration than President Bezos has done with Amazon. Or, for that matter, better than President Turner has done with his own organization. I'd hate for the US government to be taken over by the guys at Time Warner.

For a few weeks now, I've been intending to write an essay here called "The Race Thing". The upshot is this: I don't get it. I don't get the race thing. I don't understand racism and I have no tolerance for racism. At the same time, I haven't been exposed to the kinds of racism that many of my friends experience on a daily basis. I don't know to what extent racism pervades our society today; I've simply never seen it in the computer industry and I haven't been terribly active in those sectors of the population where it allegedly prevails.

Don't get me wrong; I *know* that it exists. A relative of mine who is a cop makes that obvious in the stories he tells. And, sadly, I do know several people who have expressed unflattering opinions about people based upon their skin color. I can only chalk this up to ignorance and frustration, and I've seen it happen with people of all different ethnic backgrounds.

Just because I haven't seen it in the computer industry doesn't mean it doesn't happen, of course. But, nonetheless, because I'm not reminded of *my* skin color every day, I guess that can make it difficult for me to imagine that *some* folks *are*. When I get into a conversation on the topic, I am therefore constrained to intellectual observations rather than any real first hand data.

(perhaps when I get around to writing this essay, I'll mention my experiences as a "minority" at Bennett High School, but I'm getting ahead of myself...)

Nonetheless, I find the recent news that a major employer in the computer industry is being sued for discrimination to be particularly hard to fathom.

The lawsuit alleges that the company in question maintains a "plantation mentality" when it comes to its African-American employees. When I read this, my first thought was: "Well, Duh, assholes! They have a plantation mentality toward ALL their employees!" I have known people to have to seek psychiatric help over their working situation with this particular employer. The suicide rate seemed rather fantastic while I was there: pretty much every other week, the corporate newsletter mentioned the passing of some co-worker from some undefined cause.

This wasn't a race thing. This was an everything thing. You either "drank the kool-aid" or you were an outsider. If you allowed the borg to assimilate you, then congratulations, you were eligible for promotion... and, you could do well. But, if you clung to a life that was outside of the corporate culture, you surely would not succeed there. I have many brilliant friends of all ethnic backgrounds who are doing well there; but, their lifestyle choices are more amenable to that style of working situation. The plantation life ain't so bad, I guess, if you like that kind of work.

It was clear that if you kissed The Man's ass, you got promoted, and if you didn't, you didn't. HOW IS THIS DIFFERENT FROM ANY OTHER CONTEMPORARY WORKING ENVIRONMENT? The folks filing this lawsuit are seeking a class action remedy because they (the seven plaintiffs) were "passed over" for promotions that were given to others (whites) who were "less qualified". I have some news that may shock some: LOTS OF PEOPLE GET PASSED-OVER FOR PROMOTION IN FAVOR OF TWITS WHO ARE LESS QUALIFIED.

Note to all y'all who feel oppressed because of your gender, race, religion, or whatever: the key to success in this corporate world is to learn what to kiss and when to kiss it. If you really want to be "equal" to the straight white male who got that promotion, learn to kiss ass like he does.

If you're above kissing ass, then you're above being promoted. Whoever thought that being promoted was glamorous missed a class somewhere.

Now that I've insulted all of my former colleagues who have ever gotten promoted, I think I'm going to take a breather. I'm getting worked up.

In my next installment, I'll insult several ethnic groups, deride America's educational system, and further expose my raw, naked bitterness (even more fully than I already have here) before I finally capitulate and admit that I really don't know what I'm talking about, apologize to my former overlords, and beg for mercy from my new masters.

National Politics is a sport, and popularity points are the tally by which we determine the winners. At least, that's the case presented by the national media, which continues to sink to depths even lower than those described in James Fallow's excellent book, Breaking the News.

Former President Ronald Reagan recently fell and broke his hip, requiring surgery. This 'news' article recounts the details of his hip replacement surgery in fairly straightforward mannger before it gives us the score update:

According to an ABCNEWS.com poll taken last year, 64 percent of Americans now approve of Reagan's performance while he was in office. That's eight points better than Reagan's average job approval rating while he was in office, 56 percent.

Reagan's career average lands him at the center of the pack of postwar presidents, behind John F. Kennedy, Dwight D. Eisenhower and George Bush, and tied with Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton. His ratings ranged from a low of 42 percent in early 1983, several months after unemployment soared to heights unseen since 1940, to a high of 73 in 1981, just after John Hinckley Jr. shot him.

Reads like a sports column, no? It's like they are talking about how a team fared over the years in the standings of its league.

What is up with that?

This is ABCNews! This is the Associated Press! These are the pinacle sources of 'news' in this country! And, they're reporting on national statesmen as if they were athletes vying for the record books with their accumulation and averages of popularity points!

So, here's the question to make you stay up at night: is the alleged 'news' media cynically reporting on politicians like this because they believe that Americans are that stupid, are they doing this because *they* (the reporters and editors themselves) are that stupid, or is the American public, in generally, really that stupid? Perhaps the national contest for the White House really is nothing more than a pageant and the results have no more meaning in our daily lives than who wins the Miss America contest. I don't know.

Either way, I'm very unhappy about this. Grrrr.

As many of you know, I used to host a radio comedy show called A Night at the Asylum at WVBR-FM in Ithaca, NY. The show was largely inspired by Dr. Demento, only we focused more on comedy and less on novelty records.

Recently, one of my fellow former producers of said comedy show discovered that someone she knew was wanted by the police for child molestation. The culprit was caught, and as the facts about his predatory practices were revealed, it became clear that this very sick individual had messed up a great many people's lives... including friends who were very near and dear to her.

As we discussed this traumatic chain of events, my fellow former comedy show producers and I came around to the question of a routine we used to play on the show: Kinko the Clown, by Ogden Edsl. None of us could remember ever really liking this particular song, and we all wondered why we'd every played it. It didn't have any particularly funny lines, and it's rather insenstive to a nasty subject.

But... I've been thinking about this more and more lately. I think that, in fact, we *did* find it funny at the time; we've simply forgotten why. Our context has changed.

The reason I believe this to be the case is because I happened to see Dr. Demento in a live performance this weekend. Focusing on "things [he] can't play on the radio", the syndicated radio show host played songs and videos of a number of bits that don't (currently) pass FCC muster. Some of these items would never, ever make it, but were very funny (including an extremely rude Mick Jagger tune that he recorded with the *intent* of being so bad that the record company would never release it, simply to fulfill a contract that he wanted out of). Others used to be playable on the radio, but have since elicited fines from the FCC. This collection surprised me, in particular, because it included a number of routines we used to play all the time: Monty Python's "Sit on my Face", for example.

Then, the good doctor showed us a music video and prefaced it by saying, "This song used to be one of the most requested on the Dr. Demento show, but I haven't played it in a couple of years, given the aftermath of the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorodo." The video was for Julie Brown's, "The Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun."

Wow. I was stunned. This song was frequently featured on our show. And, as the video unfolded, it was so patently clear why playing it now would be so beyond the bounds of acceptable taste. Given the events that transpired in Littleton, there was no way to interpret this song as anything other than a sick and depraved acting-out.

But, the thing is... this was recorded *years* before Littleton, and it was mocking high school homecoming pagentry; it was not advocating violence. The song and video were so clearly cartoonish; the humor so obviously a coy swipe at high school's culture of popularity. Yet, in the context of a post-Littleton world, it is both mean and savage; an indictment of a culture of violence.

Watching this video on Saturday, I completely agreed with Dr. D: even if the FCC had no reason to fine you for playing it, this was one routine worth dropping from the playlist. And, yet...

And yet the fact is that, in its day, this piece was actually quite funny. It still is, in it's own juvey way, if you can overlook Littleton.

But Littleton did happen.

And there really are maniacs who go around molesting little children.

And context is everything.

Lately, I've taken to writing the beginnings of these magnum opus essays on this site, which I have then never gotten around to finishing. I finally got called on it.

A long and thoughtful e-mail took me to task for the part of an argument I'd left unfinished. And so, allow me to continue my thoughts about comedy and context. I offer no promises that this completes my thoughts on the subject, but at least I can get into it more now that I know where the dialog is heading.

The reader's e-mail begins: "You seem to imply that 'The Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun' was only funny pre-Littleton."

My essay does imply this, but the implication comes from an omission on my part. Rather, the events at Littleton changed the context in which I (and others, I'm sure) receive the song, and *that* changes the nature of the humor with which it is received.

Pre-Littleton, the song is funny because it is an absurdist fantasy. High school punishes all who enters its doors -- students and faculty alike. But to the typical student, the Homecoming Queen (or Prom Queen, or Captain of the Cheerleading Squad, or whatever) appears to be the one little darling least affected. This song's humor lay in the fact that it tweaks our recognition both of the frustration that leads to such a seemingly unlikely event, and the casting-against-type of the actual perpetrator. We recognize and empathize with both the antagonist and the protagonists in the song. It's ludicrous. Impossible to imagine... and yet, it's perversely satisfying at the same time. A Homecoming Queen reigning destruction upon the previously celebratory event.

Post-Littleton, the scenario is not so absurd; not so foreign to the imagination. I agree with the reader that any reasonably intelligent person would have deduced when this song was first released in the '80's that a Littleton-style event was not only possible, but even *probable*, eventually. But, it was nonetheless outside the realm of our actual experience. The schoolyard shootings leading up to, including, and following Littleton banished that little false sense of "it can't happen here."

And, so, anyone who is familiar with the school shootings (and related events) that have taken place in the '90's receives "Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun" with a different context: the situation itself is no longer absurd; only the particular angel of vengence.

(I will remind the audience that back in the '80's, high schoolers who felt particularly frustrated with their situations tended to commit suicide rather than homicide. That, or they played Dungeons and Dragons. I'm not sure which was worse...)

I was picking apart the structure of the song to myself as I sat at the concert hall listening to it, and it really is an exellently constructed bit of humor. I won't bore you with my analysis (I'll bore you with my rant about context instead), but I agree with the reader's e-mail that the song is still funny. *However*, because the context has changed, so has the nature of the joke.

The reader goes on to state (and, I think this is the heart of the matter):

"All this being said, I probably wouldn't have bothered to write except I think the idea that context is everything is rather offensive if not mildly dangerous.

"I remember years ago I was telling you about an episode I liked of 'Homicide, Life on the Streets.' I actually agree with you about what you found offensive, but I still liked the writing and presentation. Anyway, the plot revolved around some clean cut kid who committed a murder. He got his hands on a gun, and once he held it he felt it had power over him and he had to shoot someone. That's really simplifying but it's the basic idea. You were very right in that it played to the anti-gun lobby's contention that it's guns that are bad, and the shooters aren't responsible.

"In a sense I see the same sort of danger in ideas like 'song's about molesters are only funny until you know someone who has been molested.' This implies an inability to reason from the abstract to the specific. It also gives creedence to the idea that only those who have suffered from a gun crime should be allowed to have an opinion on gun laws. Or, to speak to another of your recent essays, the idea that only those who have suffered from racism should be allowed to have an opinion on affirmative action or other laws."

[snip]

While I see the point, I believe there are two distinct issues here. The songs "Kinko the Clown" and "Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun" remain the same as they ever were, before and after the potential listener becomes involved in an outrageous event such as the ones that serve as the setting for these songs. The outrageous event in the song is absurd. The outrageous event in real life is tragic. (The same can be said for Olivia Newton-John's "Let's Get Physical," I suppose.)

But, the listener may well interpret the songs differently after having actually experienced an event such as those depicted in these songs.

Our tastes in humor necessarily change over time, and I contend that this is largely because of our expanding library of context. Many people I know find the old Warner Brothers cartoons much funnier once they're adults than they did when they were children, because they had more context in which to fit more of the jokes. Alas, just as context can enhance the meaning of a joke, it can also sometimes detract from a joke's effectiveness.

I, for one, have outgrown scatalogical humor, but I've found an increasing love of puns. Go figure.

But there's a different, underlying issue that the reader points to, and it is one of politics, not aesthetics. Here, we come back to my original title, "Censorship and Context".

We may agree or disagree as to whether it is appropriate to play a song for a wide public audience that attempts to be funny against a backdrop of violence (or some other potentially tragic setting). As I stated in my last essay, I agree with Dr. Demento's decision not to play "Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun" on his radio show, given the events at Littleton. And if I were still hosting a radio show of my own, I would make the same decision.

I neglected to say in my previous essay, however, that I nonetheless believe that this is and should be a matter of taste -- to be exercised by the host (or performer), and not to be imposed by the government appointed arbiters of the airwaves.

Dr. Demento willingly refrains from playing "Homecoming Queen", although I suspect he looks forward to the chance to play it again on the radio one day. No doubt, his decision is as much motivated by business concerns as it is by any sensitivity on his part. Nevertheless, I would find it particularly offensive to have the government dictate his playlist by banning this song... just as I am offended that the government does see fit to dictate that certain other songs are stricken from the airwaves.

One of the many ironies here is that Dr. D can play a funny song about an absurd school shooting, but chooses not to, while he is prohibited from playing a lovely little ditty called "Sit on My Face (and Tell Me That You Love Me)" -- set against a pleasant backdrop of mutually consentual gratification -- but you can be certain that he'd play it if he were allowed.

How long will it be before the FCC finally regulates the thoughts we choose to express on the Internet (either on the web or via e-mail)? I shudder at the idea.

Maybe, as posited by the ubergovernment in George Orwell's 1984, changing how people speak really does change how they think and, in turn, changes the reality in which we live.

For example, we see doublespeak like this in the financial papers:

"According to First Call/Thomson Financial's research analyst Ken Perkins, of the 137 retailers monitored by First Call the sector overall is expected to show negative growth of about 5.4 percent year-over-year, which is down slightly from the 6.5 percent recorded in the third quarter."

Retail sales are expected to show negative growth? Negative growth? Hello? There used to be a term in economics that described "negative growth": recession.

Can you say "recession" boys and girls? I thought so.

While my employer has been right-sizing to optimize for our negative growth scenario -- which is double-plus ungood, if you happen to be on the unright side of the right-sizing -- I've become increasingly sensitive (a good, healthy American word if ever there was one) to the manipulations of meaning being broadcast by our decision makers.

I would say that my employers are, in fact, lying to my face, but I'm being constantly reminded by my peers that this is an unright way to look at it. They are not lying to us. They are not even telling us "untruths". They are simply assuaging the negative growth in our expecations with non-truths because that is completely appropriate in an environment such as this.

Language, in theory, is a tool for communicating meaning. Lately, however, it is increasingly being used as a tool for obfuscating meaning. From the former President ("That depends upon what your definition of 'is' is," and, more recently, "[sure she gave me lots of money, and sure I pardoned her husband, but] there was absolutely no quid pro quo."*) to the captains of industry to tell us "We all need to be in this for the long term" while they take $26 million out of the company as the stock price continues to plummet.

My favorite nontruth was recently uttered by a Vice President (my employer now has an organization that goes three Vice Presidents deep. Three! There are three VPs between me and the President of the company. How can we possibly need that many VPs?) when a fellow employee asked point blank "Are there plans for any more layoffs this year," and the VP said with a straight face, "No, there are no plans for any more layoffs this year."

Meanwhile, I'm being told to figure out how to manage my team with at least one fewer person on my staff by this summer. (BTW, in corporatespeak, people are not people. They are "headcount". In national security terms, layoff casualties are "collateral damage." Thus, I am not actually losing people... I'm decreasing headcount.)

My staff now has a better bead on the truth here than I do, because the rumors they hear are often more accurate than the official line I'm told by those higher up the food chain than I am. I think this is partly because the folks on the front lines don't bullshit each other the way upper management bullshits their staff.

Did I say bullshit? I meant to say "lie through their teeth."

Telling the truth doesn't make reality any more palatable, but it *does* make it more likely that you'll be able to negotiate reality's treacherous waters successfully. But, neither our news media nor our captains of industry seem to think we can handle the truth.

---

*note: the second quote above [with my paraphraseology in brackets] is attributed to Clinton by ABCNews' account of the incident in this online article. ABCNews claims to quote the former President's statement in an Op-Ed piece which appeared in the New York Times, but I have not seen the original article.

When Everett and I were at grad school together, we often tossed about the idea of working on a paper comparing the parallel evolution of American Science Fiction movies and the prevailing political attitudes of the day.

The argument was pretty obvious, but we hadn't seen anybody address it in the academic press, and we thought it might be fun. Here's the obvious:

Fear of nuclear bomb testing was obvious in such cheesy grade-B movies as They!, Godzilla, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman!, and so on.

Worried about communist perversion of the American ideal? There were scores of invasion flicks that highlighted that theme, but the best by far had to be Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

For fear of nuclear war, look no further than the parable in The Day the Earth Stood Still or the more literal Fail Safe and Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove.

We began to feel a little bit more optimistic at the power of our ingenuity in 2001: A Space Odessey, as well as the Star Wars and Star Trek sagas that came a decade later.

Concurrently in the 70's and 80's, the popular sci-fi movies presented growing concerns about technology getting us in over our heads in Alien, Logan's Run, and Mad Max -- and, later, Terminator and its many rip-offs.

My thesis stopped there; this was, after all, 1991 at the time I contemplated writing this scholarly work.

I've been reminded of this little idea, though, as I've been preparing to host a get together of some friends to watch a movie. This group gets together on a monthly basis with the members taking turns hosting. The host can assign homework that pertains to the movie that the host intends to show.

I decided, for various reasons (mostly pertaining to the fact that certain members of the group are big into conspiracy theories), to show The Parallax View. I assigned as homework for the members of the group to watch either The Conversation or Three Days of the Condor.

These three movies came out in 1974 and 1975, and each are about conspiracies and the use of very plausible, very real technology in carrying out those conspiracies. Having now seen all three quite recently, I have to confess that I don't think Parallax holds up as well as I remembered. It feels a little dated, and the conspiracy is simply too far fetched... but, then, that's quite possibly the point. Alas, all three films have their flaws. In the end, though, I think Conversation holds up the best. Francis Ford Coppola is expert at making every scene count.

The fact that all three films came out at the same time is no coincidence. The assassinations of JFK, King, and RFK had started to take their toll on the American psyche, and the revelations of Watergate fueled a national mood of distrust -- both of the government and of technology.

This distrust was echoed again and again in the mid-70's, in mainstream films like All the President's Men as well as in the science fiction of the day. Aside from Logan's Run and others, there was the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. This one is particularly telling. In the original, 1956 version, the G-men save the day at the very last minute. In the 1978 version, the government has already been co-opted. Authority can not be trusted. In the end, no one can save us.

Getting back to my three conspiracy movies of 1974 and '75: it's been fun for the past week to watch these movies and pick apart their similarities and their differences. But, in the interrim, I happened to catch up on a movie I've been meaning to see for some time: The 13th Floor.

Interestingly, this movie came out at around the same time as three other movies with the exact same theme. If The Conversation, Three Days of the Condor, and The Parallax View are all representative of a culture that is increasingly paranoid about conspiracies, what should one make of the period of 1998 and 1999 producing four movies that focus on the idea that our reality is merely a construct by some outside power?

I maintain that The Truman Show, The Matrix, eXistenZ (written and directed by the same man who brought us the 1978 version of Body Snatchers), and The 13th Floor are representative of a new undercurrent in American political thought. As a nation, we are in the midst of an incredible identity crisis, completely uncertain about what is real -- what is true. In Truman and Matrix, the message seems to be that we are at least partly culpable for our part in confusing reality with make-believe... willingly participating in, if not actively encouraging, the deception.

Do these movies resonate with the public because they ultimately forgive the pop culture for its lack of moral conviction? I'm inclined to think not. Rather, I'm inclined to believe that these movies have tapped into a growing ennui that must, eventually, lead to an awakening. We laugh at the conceit of The Truman Show even though we know the joke is on us. But as the nation contemplates, in its own politicorganic way, the nature of reality, I have a sneaking suspicion that the wake-up call is not too far behind.

So, I guess I should get mad here at ol' Rev. Jesse Jackson. He got caught with his hand in the cookie jar again; this time, for paying his mistress $120,000 as an employee of one of his non-profits and failing to declare her on the tax disclosure forms.

Whatever. Whether this "oversight" was intentional or unintentional is generally irrelevant... until Jesse spouts out with quotes like this:

"There is no evidence that there is any inconsistency or impropriety."

This kind of nonsense just pisses me off. The Rev. is not asserting innocence, but is claiming virtue by way of an alleged *lack* of evidence to the contrary. Not "I didn't do it," but "You can't prove I did it."

This is not a new tactic; Jesse did not invent the "There is no evidence, so there must be no crime" shtick. Everyone knows that Al Gore invented that (shortly after he invented the Internet).

I say that tongue-in-cheek, but let's acknowledge that when Al was caught taking bribes in Japan, he didn't protest that they weren't bribes. He said "there is no legal governing authority" that had jurisdiction in such a case. Ergo, no crime was committed, technically speaking.

President Clinton, likewise, used technicalities to obfuscate meaning when he claimed, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." When challenged later, he argued the definition of every word, even going so far as to say, "That depends upon what your definition of 'is' is."

Now, I realize I'm going off on a rant here, and it's taking me toward a generally recurring theme that you've seen on these pages before: the use of language to communicate meaning versus the use of language to obfuscate meaning.

This generation did not invent the use of language to confuse. Neither liberals nor conservatives; Democrats nor Republicans nor Socialists nor Communists; politicians nor citizens nor corporations nor academics nor lawyers -- none of these can lay claim to inventing or cornering the use of language to confuse. (Well, Al Gore can claim he invented it, but he'd be exaggerating.)

And, quite frankly, I don't think it's getting worse. Or better. But, it nonetheless rankles me. Just like crime rankles people in Detroit who nonetheless refuse to move.

But, just as the folks in Detroit may have recourse, of sorts, to try to at least curb the problem of crime (even if they can't eliminate it), there must certainly be *some* recourse to curb this doublespeak that is so steeped into our culture.

The first step, I believe, is to call bullshit where bullshit needs to be called. I am only one man; but, I can at least refuse the bullshit on a microsocietal level. So, here's my tiny public message to the Rev. Jesse Jackson:

"If the glove don't fit, I don't give a shit. Pay your taxes and shut up."

In the aftermath of the recent shooting at Santana High School in Santee, CA, four students have been prohibited from returning to school.

The four students were friends or acquantances of the alleged shooter and had not taken him seriously when he boasted that he would take a gun to school to shoot kids who had been taunting him. Because the alleged shooter was known to be a bit of a joker, these acquaintances apparently assumed this, too, was a joke, and didn't warn anybody.

These four students were initially barred from the school because "the investigation is still on-going." Later news reports say that they're barred from the school "for their own protection." In a recent town meeting, residents said they blamed these individuals for what happened, because they should have told somebody.

So, I would just like to set the record straight, here. We all make judgement calls on a daily basis; we all do the best we can. These four kids, recognizing a pattern of behavior, assumed that what they saw fit into the pattern they had come to know.

But, when it comes to assessing blame, we get back to the same problem as the Columbine shooting and so many others like it. Don't blame the neighbors. The Friends. The music the shooters listend to. The books they read. Their parents. The movies they watched. The video games they played. Images in the media. The bullies who taunted them. The girls (or boys) who turned them down for dates. The internet. The bomb-making materials. The pistols.

Accountability starts at home. It starts with the person who pulled the trigger.

Everyone who has ever been to high school -- anyone who has ever had a pulse -- has had to deal with bullshit. Has been taunted or teased or laughed at or disagreed with. Has had bad days. Has had things stolen. Has had problems with parents. Has been denied something. Has been surrounded by idiots with a different world view.

Shooting your fellow classmates (or co-workers, as in several other recent incidents) is not a legitimate form of expression. Accountability starts with the perp, first and foremost. If you must assess blame, blame the shooter.

Seems these days all I do is carp (karp?) about my job or politics. My plan today was to take a lighter subject write about "Quotable Underpants" (you'll see what I'm talking about when I get around to writing that essay), but a friend of mine called me twice this morning about what he saw on TV, and it brought me right back. I keep trying to get out, but they keep pulling me back in.

Seems that on this morning's "This Week with Sam Donaldson", Jeff Bezos came on and Sam grilled him about what it means to become "pro-forma profitable". My friend was incensed. "Where were theses guys last year? Why didn't they hold Jeff's feet to the fire last year instead of making him Time's Man of the Year?"

My reply: "Last year, the stock price was high and Amazon was still promising to *lose* money. As long as you promise to *lose* money, it's really not important which accounting method you use."

Anyway. I'll karp (carp?) more about work in another essay. My friend went back to watching TV, and then called me again a half an hour later. "George Will was just on. He says that Barlett's Familiar Quotations is coming out with a new edition, and it will contain only three quotes from Bill Clinton. Guess which three."

Now, this is a fun game. The first one was easy. "I did not have sexual relations with that woman. Miss Lewinski."

"Yup. Next?"

The second one was also easy. "That depends on what your definition of 'is' is."

"You're two for two. Next?"

I must confess that I had to think about it. It took me almost five seconds. But, I finally came up with, "I didn't inhale."

My friend told me that, indeed, those were the three Clinton quotes that made it into Bartlett's. He said that George Will then went on to compare these quotes to the many Kennedy quotes that appear in the book.

After our conversation, I thought about this. What are three memorable quotes from Bush? Reagan? Carter? Ford? Nixon? Let alone Kennedy and Johnson. I also realized that, truthfully, comparing Clinton to Kennedy is a little disingenuous... even though Clinton has long maintained that he wants to be considered the modern JFK. Observe:

The three quotes that come immediately to mind for George Bush are not all that wonderful.

"Read my lips: no new taxes." A broken promise.

"A thousand points of light." A vague campaign analogy.

"Voodoo economics." A slam against Reagan's proposed economic plan when the two man opposed each other for the Republican nomination in 1980.

(My copy of Barlett's does refer to all of these. It is a 1992 edition. Barlett's also reminded me of one that didn't make my initial three: "I want a kinder, gentler nation.")

If we grant Bush "kinder, gentler nation" and drop one of my other three, then I guess we get a mix of good intentions, but still not terribly strong stuff.

Well, I started having fun with this. Name the first three quotes that come to mind of a recent President, and see what Bartlett's recorded.

You may want to try this before you read what I came up with (and what my 1992 edition of Barlett's came up with). It's fun.

Reagan: I didn't have to think long at all to come up with three quotes from this man. First, there's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Interestingly, this doesn't appear in my copy of Bartlett's. I can only hope they add(ed) it in a later edition.

The second one that popped into my head was "I didn't leave the Democratic Party. They left me." This one also doesn't appear in my copy of Barlett's.

My third quote from Reagan (or, rather, the third one that came to my mind) was his reference to the Soviet Union as "the Evil Empire." This one did make it into Bartlett's.

After I perused Bartlett's (there's a good one about "Government is like a big baby -- an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other."), I was reminded of another one that didn't make my initial list of three but should have, and which also isn't in Barlett's but should be. It was a gaffe; Reagan was performing a microphone test prior to a radio address, and someone had recorded his joke test message and sent it to the media. It caused quite a stir.

"I am pleased to announce that we have just passed legislation outlawing Russia. The bombs will be flying in ten minutes."

So. The quotes that come immediately to mind about Reagan convey power of conviction, if nothing else. Bush's echo with unfulfilled good intentions. Clinton's are defensive nonsense designed to confuse, not to clarify.

What about Carter? I'm sorry to say that the only quote that came to mind was from an interview when he admitted to having lusted after other women in his heart. This was hardly strong stuff, but Carter was a born-again Christian, so I guess it made waves in that context. (According to Barlett's, he said "I've committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do -- and I have done it -- and God forgives me for it.") There are other quotes attributed to Carter in Bartlett's, but none of them sound either familiar or important.

Ford? Again, I come up short. There's only one that sticks in my mind: "Our long national nightmare is over." (This was in his first address to the nation after Nixon resigned.)

Barlett's also includes "I'm a Ford, not a Lincoln" and a gaffe from a debate with Carter. It does not mention his "Whip Inflation Now" slogan. Okay, so that's two I came up with.

Nixon? Ha!

"I am not a crook." (in Bartlett's)
"Peace without dishonor." (not in Bartlett's -- I'm thinking that he said something along these lines with regard to pulling out of Vietnam)
"You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore..." (this one is in Bartlett's)

Nixon also coined the phrase "silent majority", which is a great term. I'd forgotten that was him. But, I *did* remember the famous Checkers speech, in which he successfully deflected accusations of an illicit slush fund by saying that the only potentially inappropriate contribution he'd received was a puppy named Checkers, and by golly, he and his family were going to keep that puppy.

I'm going to skip to Kennedy now. Each of the above mentioned Presidents only has a few quotations listed in Bartlett's. Kennedy has a couple dozen. I don't necessarily recognize each of these allegedly familiar quotations, and I don't think the man was any more quotable than Reagan, but I'll let that go for the moment. Kennedy certainly resonated for a generation in a manner that no President has since.

Here's my top three for Kennedy (all of which appear in Bartlett's):

"Ich bin ein Berliner." (Barlett's points out, correctly, that this translates literally to "I am a jelly donut." But, it also notes, correctly, that the Germans understood the point he was trying to make... even if it did raise a few chuckles at the same time.)

"Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." (Bartlett's also notes that this sentiment appears in speeches by three other prominent statesmen: Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1884, LeBaron Russell Briggs in 1904, and Warren G. Harding in 1916. Bartlett's further notes that Kennedy had been dwelling upon this idea for some time; a quote from Rousseau appears in his early private papers that expresses the same sentiment.)

"I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth." (I needed Barlett's help in getting that one exactly right, but I've always linked this famous sentiment to Kennedy.)

Kennedy's familiar quotations are about goals; about getting off our collective butts and accomplishing something. Even if you disagree with his statist positions ("ask not what your country can do for you..." at first sounds like a repudiation of the welfare state, but then "but what you can do for your country" keeps the state firmly at the center of individuals' lives...), there is a motivational and unambiguous quality to Kennedy's familiar quotes. In this regard, I think that he and Reagan are particularly similar. Reagan vocally advocated a space-based defense initiative; he proclaimed that the United States would never yeild to terrorism; he stood up to the "evil empire" and then boldly negotiated nuclear arms reductions with the Soviet Union.

Most who admire one of these Presidents tend to find many faults with the other, but I think the case can be made that both were men of action who spoke of goals and of attaining those goals. Ford and Bush also spoke of goals, but were vague about how to attain them. Ultimately, they proved to be ineffective.

And, Clinton? If you look at his familiar quotations, he comes across as most similar to Nixon -- a man who also would have been impeached, had he not stepped down. Their most familiar quotes center upon the self: "I'm not a crook" and "I didn't inhale." Their most famous speeches concern defending themselves against accusations of impropriety.

Both men were obviously smart. Both men were obviously quite capable. But, both men also were blind to their own fallibilities, and they blamed the media and the public for the problems they brought upon themselves.

Clinton expressed many brilliant thoughts; he also expressed many terrible ideas. This is true of any man to hold the office of President. Nonetheless, when we look at *familiar quotations* of these men, we come to the inevitable conclusion that Kennedy (involuntarily) and Reagan left the office in such a way so as to allow us to remember the bright and powerful things they said. Clinton, like Nixon, managed to leave the office in such a way so as to only remind us of his terrible foibles and his wasted potential.

There's no shortage of news like this throughout the country these days, but I'm amazed at this news item, nonetheless. In Buffalo, NY, the Powers That Be (read: the idiot lawmakers) have decided to try an education experiment that will be funded with federal money.

They are going to pay students $5.00 per hour to attend summer school who require the summer session in order to advance from 8th to 9th grade. That's right: students who are not meeting the state minimum requirements to be admitted into high school are going to be paid to attend summer school.

What are these nitwits thinking? The are going to financially reward students for failing to meet statewide minimum standards. This is as perverse a system of educational incentives as any I've ever heard.

In school districts around the country (including the one in which I briefly taught eighth grade math), honors and "advanced" classes are being scrapped for fear that their very existence might hurt the self esteem of those students who are not selected. Being ahead of the intelligence curve (or, simply applying one's brain at all) is not being encouraged or fostered. That's already bad.

But rewarding sub-par performance? This is somehow going to improve the "outcome-based" results of public education?

I guess the theory behind the new program is that requiring students to attend summer school is not enough, and we should provide added incentives for them to attend. I, for one, am in favor of a more traditional incentive: let's *really* not let them into the high school until they have legitimately fulfilled the requirements of entry. (There are another few essays in me regarding why students are promoted without having met the minimum requirements, but those will have to wait for another day.)

There is an old -- and rather ironic -- Russian phrase that says "people will get the government that they deserve." While we may agree or disagree with this sentiment, the fact is that when the government engages in social engineering -- and any and every policy regarding the education of its citizenry or future citizenry is, by definition, a social engineering project -- the government does end up with the citizenry it deserves.

We have seen numerous examples of how, when the population is rewarded for bad behavior, the result is an increase in the undesirable results. The welfare system in New York State (and other states, as it so happens) that rewards pregnancy and punishes marriage has resulted in a disproportionate number of unwed mothers among the poor in New York State. This, in turn, has resulted in a number of societal ills: single-parent families in poverty are more likely to stay in poverty than two-parent families; children in single-parent families are more likely to be abused; children in single-parent families are more likely to engage in drug use, crime, and the like.

What, then, can we expect of a system that pays our society's children to perform poorly? What can we expect of any system that reinforces any behavior? We can expect to see an increase in that behavior over time, until it is endemic. In this case, we can expect to see a stellar increase in poor performance.

Let's not reinforce poor educational practices. Let us, instead, reward excellent performance. Let's recognize those who do well, and give children across the board unequivocal incentive to excel.

As for Buffalo; if they enact this policy as they are currently planning, the performance of its children will decline significantly in the coming years. And that is a crying shame.

beginrant

So, people are still making snide comments in e-mails and web postings about "the stolen election" and how the Supreme Court "gave him the office". They do this apropos of nothing, discussing topics that are in no way otherwise related to politics or government. I see it repeatedly on any number of listserves I'm on and websites I track.

Now, I have to confess that our Fearless Leader is not impressing me thus far. Aside from his general ungoodspeakeness and his dubious handling of certain foreign affairs issues (the one area where his father particularly outshone the eight-year interim office holder), I'm most bothered by el Presidente's insistence upon making faith-based charity organizations into yet another government welfare baby. When some administration down the line chooses to cut this particularly dangerous cord -- and this will happen, someday -- these organizations will suffer the same withdrawal symptoms from the crack cocaine known as Federal Subsidies that so many other local- and state-based organizations have suffered when their own supply was cut. (Remember what happened when President Reagan finally pulled the plug on those ill-advised educational welfare programs in the mid-80's, anyone? Now, *that* was painful... and, totally avoidable had the crack not been handed out so gleefully by previous administrations.)

But, all that being said, the problem remains that whether y'all like the facts or not, our current President was selected by the very same system that has been in place (with a few tweaks from time to time) since the Constitution was adopted. You can bang your drums about how just one more recount might have changed the results, or how the Florida ballot unfairly penalized idiots who couldn't remember to read the bloody directions (the form, interestingly, was designed by a member of the losing political party and was approved by a bipartisan panel and had been used, in various incarnations, repeatedly both in certain Florida counties and other counties throughout the country for decades), but the facts remain these:

1) the vote was a statistical tie
2) supporters of the losing candidate were going to be bitter about the results, regardless of who eventually "won"
3) in the end, this country determined the results of a bitterly contested and pretty much evenly-divided election through legal institutions and not through more nefarious means.

So, please, for crying out loud: Get over it!.

We survived Bubba; we'll survive Dubya. Now, stop your whining.

And if it bothers you that much, get involved in your local elections later this year. The reality of the situation is that your local and state legislators have a much more dramatic impact on your daily quality of life than any yammerhead in Washington. If you don't believe me, spend some quality time in Buffalo, Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco all in one month. Same country, same Federal programs. Very different economic and cultural climates. Why? Local politics.

I know, I know. It's easier to whine about how things didn't go the way you think they shoulda down in some backwoods southern districts than it is for you to get off of your lazy butt and try to do something that might actually make a real difference in your life. Quite frankly, I was more bummed about the results of the national primaries last year than I was about the results of the general election. But I'm tired of hearing about it. It's over. Let it go. Please.

endrant

For various reasons -- mostly having to do with some short story ideas I'm kicking around and a general love of science -- I've been reviewing the famous theories of relativity. As is so often my wont, I'm always struck by the parallel between the so-called "hard sciences" and the "social sciences" when it comes to enduring principles.

For instance, in Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity, it has been established that two events that occur simultaneously in one frame of reference will occur *non* simultaneously in other frames of references. A description goes something like this:

Bob the Observer is sitting on a planet when two ludicrously speedy spaceships heading in opposite directions pass each directly above him. Both spaceships were made at the same factory to the same specifications. To Bob, they appear to be equal size and shape, are travelling at equal speeds, and they each are aligned so that the tip of the tail of Spaceship 1 passes the tip of the nose of Spaceship 2 at exactly the same instant as the tip of the tail of Spaceship 2 passes the tip of the nose of Spaceship 1.

No big deal, right? Since both ships are the same length and are heading in opposite directions, it stands to reason that their respective noses pass the others' tails at exactly the same instant.

But, because of special relativity, if we observe the exact same event from Spaceship 1, it turns out that the tip of our spaceship passes by the tail of Spaceship 2 a split second *before* the nose of Spaceship 2 passes by our tail. This is because, relative to those of us in Spaceship 1, the second spaceship is travelling a most ludicrous speed and is therefore *compressed* in time and space relative to us. The second ship appears to be smaller, and hence not as long as our own spaceship. The simultaneous events witnessed by Bob are not simultaneous when witnessed from Spaceship 1.

Likewise, Spaceship 2 sees the rapidly approaching Spaceship1 as a smaller craft, and they, too, witness these events non-simultaneously. In fact, they view these events as happening in the reverse order from the observations made from Spaceship 1.

Okay, okay, I'm getting confusing here. The point is, events A and B appear to happen at exactly the same moment from one frame of reference, A precedes B from another, and B precedes A from yet another. All of these are correct, accurate, verifiable, reproducible. And they all follow a logic that is irrefutable.

No, I will not explain why. That's a lot of ground to cover, and I don't have that much time tonight. Just take my word for it: this is one of the consequences of special relativity.

As I was reminded of this juicy little tidbit, it reminded me of the cause of World War I. Don't stare at this screen blankly; just go with me on this one. It'll all make sense.

Observed from one frame of reference, Russia and Austria made their respective decisions to mobilize their forces, thereby triggering WWI, *simultaneously*. Observed from the Austrian point of reference, however, it was *they* who mobilized first. Likewise, the Russian point of reference would reveal that it was the Russians who mobilized first.

Historians have debated ever since over which events were *truly* the start of the War. Unlike their cousins in the hard sciences, the social scientists have failed to show the imagination necessary to accept the idea that all three positions can be correct at the same time; just not from the same point of reference.

This is a key point, one which I think would help political scientists and other social scientists to better understand the nature of the political and social world in which they live, and their motion through it.

Heard this at a panel on the future of the space program, and it got quite a laugh out of the audience. One of the folks on the panel is a Heinlein-style libertarian.

Q: How many libertarians does it take to stop a Nazi Panzer division?

A: None. The market will take care of it.

This is what is known as an "off year election" -- a year during which there are no major federal elected positions up for grabs.

Alas, it is during the so-called off year elections where most of the real business gets done. Your city and county councils do more that directly affects your life on a day-to-day basis than anything any President or US Senator has ever done. Take it from a former news horse and one who still attends city council meetings from time to time: these are the folks that determine more about your quality of life than any other political officials.

Tuesday, November 6th, is Election Day. Time to get out there and determine who is going to make or break the rules that determine whether your neighborhood will get DSL, or competition among the cable companies, or which streets get torn up and rebuilt and which traffic lights will be installed or taken out.

...and, how much of your money is being spent on exactly what.

So, get out there and vote!

--Allan

The news these days is very weird, what with our nebulous war against the al Queda, spontaneous outbreaks of anthrax in New Jersey... and, of all places, Chile, and with Russia poised to obtain a veto in NATO operations.

But, what I find most interesting of all -- at this moment, anyway -- is a little ditty I saw on my instant messenger ticker about China's space program. The news reports say that China plans to put a man on the moon by the year 2005.

I firmly believe that we need to have a strong, productive space program. I very much believe that as a race, we can not afford *not* to spread our wings and start exploring our solar system and the stars beyond.

Perhaps with China getting into the fray in this fashion, Americans and others might once again look to our future beyond this planet and get excited again about the possibilities. Perhaps we will see renewed support for a robust space program.

I'm also particularly intrigued to see how well the Chinese are able to execute on their plans. China may yet become a player with the rest of the grown-ups at the table. Very interesting, indeed.

My Fellow Americans,

I should be working on my novel-in-progress right now, but I've been chastised for not updating my web journal often enough. Far be it from me to let down The Public, so let me tell you what I've been up to when I haven't been writing The Do Over.

Last weekend, I attended "Campaign Manager College", which was actually targeted at both political campaign managers and candidates/hopefuls. There were a lot of charts and graphs about what kinds of voters in this part of the country dwell upon what kinds of issues; there was some excellent advice on how to manage a campaign and how to develop one; and there were many dubious interpretations of the available data.

You'll recall that about a month ago I had posted a satiric note about how we (mis)interpret data... which ended up getting me in trouble with the very people I least wanted to offend. And, so, allow me to be direct rather than clever:

One of the points that came up during a poll was that residents of the area indicated that they don't like negative ad campaigns. WELL, DUH. Issue number one with this assertion is: what would *any* self-respecting American say if a poll asked them, "Does a negative ad campaign appeal to you?"

But, the problems of polling aside, there is also a misinterpretation of cause and effect. Most campaigns do not start out negative; in general, there is a perception that negative ad campaigns should be avoided. Thus, negative campaigns are only attempted as a last resort, WHEN A CANDIDATE IS ALREADY LIKELY TO LOSE. As a result, you can see a correlation between negative ad campaigns and losing elections. But which one is the cause and which one is the effect? My contention is that the negative ad campaign may not be the cause of the loss; but, rather, that a campaign that appears to be losing is more likely to attempt a negative approach. Once a campaign goes negative, it holds that label as if it had been so right from the beginning.

I spent my high school and undergraduate years in New York State, where a certain governor ran every single one of his campaigns as target practice against his opponent from Day One. (Jeff Bezos loves to say "Today is Day One", which is why I've taken to capitalizing it.) Governor Mario Cuomo never in his political life stood *for* anything; he always ran *against* someone else, or *against* a particular platform. I even remember how he cackled with glee to the press about how one of his opponents had finally had to break down and resort to negative campaigning after he (Cuomo) had successfully managed to derail every attempt by his opponent to actually bring *issues* into the race.

Yeah, yeah, we all hate negative political campaigns, but I'm not convinced that they don't work.

Amazon.com now puts up pop-up windows when you visit their site, advertising one special or another. Pop-up windows are as annoying as telemarketer calls during dinner, but they use this annoying tactic for one reason and one reason only: pop-up windows increase sales. It's true. It's a bona fide fact.

So, market research shows that customers hate pop-up windows. Serious analysis of the data also shows that pop-up windows increase sales. Do voters hate negative ads? You betcha. Surveys show it time and time again. But, as Mario Cuomo (and George H. W. Bush, et al) and others have proven, they can and do win elections.

I have no intention of setting up an e-commerce site that uses pop-up windows. I also have no intention of ever running or being party to a negative political campaign. But I remain unconvinced that neither of these is a viable tactic, when push comes to shove, for achieving one's ultimate goals.

It's a weird, weird world in which we live.

---

Next post, I'll keep you updated on how The Do Over is going....

I am disgusted.

The idea was that the US would, at its prime, establish institutions that could outlast US hegemony. That is to say, while the United States remained one of the most powerful (economically and militarily) nations on the planet, it would help to build international institutions (such as the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, et al) that would seek the betterment of populations throughout the world and help to foster the democratization of the world's nations. Because these institutions would be built with the cooperation of many other peoples, the result was to be that long after the United States' relative power waned, it's legacy of a balancing and democratizing world system would endure -- *without* requiring perpetual unilateral support by the American government.

A grand idea. Little did the architects of this dream realize -- at least, at the time -- that the biggest threat to America's legacy would be America itself.

Now, intelligent people may argue amongst each other whether the global system that was built by the US and like-minded world leaders in the 20th century has proven to be such a good idea. The UN has had its share of successes in defusing some pretty bad situations, but it has also had its share of embarrassing blunders and even costly non-action. The World Bank and the IMF may have helped to save a few nation-states from collapsing, but they have also, arguably, managed to destroy a number of economies along the way, and they've created more than a few economically dependent "client states" (for lack of a better term).

Intelligent people may even disagree on the absolute merits of democracy or capitalism versus various of other governmental and economic systems.

But for good or ill, the hope had been to create an enduring, stabilizing force that would help to preserve the peace and foster a cooperative, democratic world.

The first time this was attempted (Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations), the whole scheme was undermined by the isolationist US Congress which felt, at the time, that the United States needed to mind its own business and the the rest of the world take care of itself. Soon thereafter, Hitler, Stalin, and Hirohito provided excellent arguments for why this was a bad way of looking at things.

The second attempt (FDR, Churchill, and the United Nations, et al) has enjoyed a little bit of a longer run. And once again, it is the United States that is pulling out and going it alone.

It's not so much that the US has stopped providing economic support (we haven't paid our UN dues since Reagan was President -- or was it Bush the elder?). And acting against the general will of the UN is not terribly new behavior, either... for the US or any other nation, for that matter.

No, the troublesome new trend is the overt, blatant, stand-offish, and unilateral withdrawal of the United States from its treaty obligations. The flagrant disavowal of any kind of rule of law (international law, in this case). It's bad enough that our bureaucracies routinely violate NAFTA and similar international agreements. It continues to be a disgrace that our government circumvents its treaties with the native American tribes. It gets much worse when the US unilaterally decides to freshly violate long-standing trade agreements by imposing stiff steel import tariffs that are tantamount to embargoes. But for the President of the United States to tell the world, essentially, "We just don't feel like honoring the ABM Treaty anymore, so go piss up a rope," is so obnoxious and dangerous as to be genuinely disgusting.

What good is the word of the American government when it tells the nuclear nations of the world that it just doesn't *feel* like continuing to honor it's promises regarding nuclear weapons? How can any nation take the US seriously when it comes time to negotiate new treaties regarding nuclear weapons? What is to keep any other nation from ignoring what it perceives to be its national interests when deciding whether to honor its own commitments regarding nuclear weapons?

Or the Geneva Convention?

The United States, because of its current power, cannot help but lead by example. Our government is now establishing a most terrifying precedent. Instead of leading by example toward cooperation, the US is showing that promises mean nothing and expediency is everything. (I will also note that the moves of the US government to violate these treaties began *before* having September 11 as an excuse.)

Now, some of you who have read this far may be saying, "Yeah, so? Machiavelli told us this is the way of the world. When has it ever been different?"

But it *has* been different. In times of cooperation, peace and prosperity were allowed to flourish. In times of stand-offishness and cavalier unilateralism, the results have always been destructive.

Speaking as an historian, I am particularly worried about the direction the political climate is heading. If the inactions of our nation's previous administration invited the tragedy of September 11th (perhaps an essay for another time), the actions of the current administration may well be taking us into darker territory, still.

A few days ago, some high ranking official (hmm... where to put the hyphen?) of the North Korean government said that North Korea could launch a preemptive strike against the United States by launching a nuclear bomb aimed at... Seattle.

Now, I hope that someone has pointed out to the North Korean powers-that-be that taking out Seattle will not, in and of itself, eliminate the nuclear arsenal of the United States government. A preemptive strike only works when your attack disarms your opponent. If you don't successfully disarm your opponent, then it isn't much of a preemptive strike. See: Japan v. U.S., 1941.

In the case of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese were at least *trying* to disarm the American government by crippling the nation's Pacific fleet. Why North Korea thinks that taking out Seattle will prevent the United States from fighting back, I do not know. I think that's why our current administration has stated that they don't take North Korea's sabre rattling seriously. And while I agree with this sentiment, I'm not sure that telling the North Korean government "you lie" is a particularly face-saving gesture. Maybe, someday, the administration of the United States government will ask for my advice concerning diplomacy.

But I digress. You see, I didn't want to comment on foreign policy so much as discuss personal ramifications if Seattle were to be hit by a nuclear bomb.

I currently live in a suburb of Seattle called Redmond. If downtown Seattle were to be hit by a reasonably-sized nuclear detonation, either in the air or at ground level, then my neighborhood would quickly become a radioactive fallout zone. Our buildings would probably remain standing, but the quality of life (short though it may be) would decrease dramatically. If I read the charts correctly, the radiation would likely kill the healthy adults in my neighborhood within an hour or two. Of course, this assumes that the bomb is on target, and doesn't accidentally hit Everett or Renton by mistake (in which case we might actually escape with our lives).

The point being, it's hard for me to conceive of a more lame, albeit newsworthy, way to end my concerns than to have a nuclear bomb detonated near my neighborhood. I mean, I've got a mortgage to pay off, a business I'm trying to get off the ground, a child to raise, and a marriage to tend, let alone a writing career I'm trying to develop... I've got issues I'm working on. With each passing year, I manage to make a little headway here, experience some setbacks there. I hope to reach the end of my life able to say that, all things told, I done okay.

Speaking purely from a personal point of view, I would be profoundly disappointed to have my life end in the middle of all this tension (I'm talking about my own personal struggles here, not international diplomatic tension) with simply some bolt from the blue. I mean, a random death would be annoying, but *this* kind of random death would be doubly annoying.

Can you imagine reading a big, thick novel with dozens and dozens of interesting characters, all with their own story arcs and intersecting in fascinating ways, with various plot reversals and complications and funny anecdotes, when halfway through the story -]BAM[- there's a nuclear explosion and nothing but blank pages for the rest of the book? *That's* what I'm talking about. No denouement, no nothing. If you read a novel like that, you'd say, "What was the point?"

And that's my point.

Nuking Seattle would be annoying. So, North Korea, if you're listening: please allow me to recommend bombing Paris, instead.

Should the United States go to war with Iraq? Some say we should; others say we shouldn't.

Back when I was in the sixth grade, one of my teachers, Mr. Z, sat us all down and told us there was only one thing in the world that we ever *had* to do. "Nuh-uh," was the general response. He said he didn't think we even knew what that one thing was.

"I have to take out the garbage on Thursday nights."

"No you don't."

"I have to do my homework when I get home from school."

"No you don't."

And so on when the conversation, each child holding up his or her hand to volunteer the one thing he or she had to do. Mostly, we started with chores. Then there was the occasional, "I have to breathe," or, "I have to wear a coat in the winter."

But Mr. Z kept responding that we didn't have to do those things.

So what was the one thing we *had* to do? He let us in on it: we had to pay the consequences for everything we did or didn't do.

We didn't have to wear a coat in the middle of winter. But we had to pay the consequences for that choice. We didn't have to do our homework. But we had to pay the consequences for that choice. And so on and so on. You get the picture.

This was a very liberating and a very troubling idea for a sixth-grader to behold. It gave us -- those of us who chose to think about it, anyway -- an immense sense of... responsibility. We could make any decision we wanted. It was okay. But we had to pay the consequences. Responsibility, as I've learned in the years since then, is a very powerful thing. It can be used to shape your life in any number of ways. When you accept responsibility for your life, you own it all. Success and failure alike.

Taking this principle, it is a truism that we all have the right to say whatever we want. But we also have to pay the consequences. In Soviet Russia, you could criticize the government in public. Of course, the consequences were pretty severe... severe enough to probably prevent you from being physically able to do so a second time.

Should the United States go to war with Iraq? Some say we should. Others say we shouldn't.

Happily, I was born a citizen of a country where the law says that the government shall not interfere with my right to speak one way or the other on that, or any other, issue. My friends and I have discussed this issue in public and in private. We are sometimes agreed, and sometimes we disagree. Sometimes, we raise our voices. Or, in e-mail, we might TYPE IN ALL CAPS. If I wanted to, I could even broadcast my views on the possibility of a US war in Iraq right here on this web page, where literally *dozens* of people could read it.

The only thing I would have to do is pay the consequences.

As I said, my government is proscribed by law from interfering with me for expressing my views, even if said opinions should run counter to the current administration's views. But that doesn't mean there wouldn't be consequences.

Take Martin Sheen, for instance, who has a higher profile than I do (if only a little). He has stated publicly that he disagrees with our current administration's stance on war. His language has been more colorful than that, but you get the idea. He's been rather adamant in expressing his opinions.

Now, coincidentally, this actor happens to play the President in a popular television series. The network that carries that show has expressed some concerns about the publicity surrounding Sheen's comments. Visa has stopped airing commercials featuring Sheen. And now some Hollywood folks are expressing concerns that this could escalate into a rebirth of McCarthy-era blacklisting.

Visa denies that they pulled the commercials for political reasons. Let us suppose, however, that their decision may have been at least partially influenced by the controversy surrounding Sheen's remarks. If so, does this mean that they are resorting to McCarthy-era blacklisting? I argue that the answer is, "No."

If the *government* were to step in and say, "Sheen should not be allowed to work in this industry because of his stated opinions," then that would be McCarthyism. That would be a violation of the first amendment. If an individual advertiser says, "Hmm, do we want to continue to have a controversial critic of the government representing our product," that's different. Visa, in such a case, is defending its own freedom of speech.

Speech involves more than just the text of the words. Speech includes how they are said. When an organization picks a spokesperson -- be it a rock star, an actor, a sports celebrity, or a cartoon camel -- that spokesperson becomes a part of the message. It's all fine and well to say that Martin Sheen should be allowed to speak his mind. With that, I whole heartedly agree.

But it is also appropriate for Visa to exercise its own freedom of speech. When they present their message, it is appropriate for them to evaluate whether the message is diluted because it is presented in a controversial form or through a controversial medium -- or, in this case, by a controversial spokesperson. When Visa delivers their message ("our credit cards make your life easier"), they want you to think about their message rather than think about war, the government, actors who insert themselves into the political arena, or whether you admire or hate the spokesperson for his outspoken political views.

The Dixie Chicks, during a recent concert in England, reportedly announced to the crowd that they were ashamed of the current administration in the United States. The Dixie Chicks are from Texas and, according to the report, they said they were ashamed that the President came from their home state.

In Texas, some people who hold a differing view called up radio stations and asked them to stop playing the Dixie Chicks. Some radio stations have made the decision to remove the Chicks from their playlists. Are the Dixie Chicks losing their right to speak? No. They continue to enjoy the right to express their opinions. But it is also within the purview of the radio stations to choose what message *they* want to convey. If they don't want to be identified with the Chicks' opinions (or, for that matter, if they wish to give the message that they actively disagree with the Chicks), then it is entirely reasonable for them to decide to remove the Chicks from their playlist. It is even reasonable, as was the case with one station, for them to announce that they'd rather destroy Chicks CDs than play them and encourage others to do likewise. Should that station be allowed to say such things? Should the Chicks be allowed to say what they said? *MY* opinion, of course, is that yes, they should. In both cases. The right to free speech unhindered by government intervention applies to those on both sides of any given issue. Even if they be boneheads.

Martin Sheen, the Dixie Chicks, Visa, and Dallas radio stations have the right to speak their message. You and I have the right to agree or disagree with any of them, and to express our views publicly or privately, as we see fit. But there's one thing the Constitution of the United States simply can not address: while the state is not allowed to abridge your speech, it also is powerless to save you from the consequences of your speech.

When Sheen's chosen speech is at odds with Visa's chosen speech, the two will part ways. Both parties will suffer or enjoy consequences for their decisions, both leading up to and following these events. Perhaps Sheen's decisions will lead to world peace. Perhaps it will lead him to new acting roles that he will get simply on the basis of his principled action. Perhaps it will lead to loss of work because potential employers wish to avoid controversy. Perhaps Visa will gain or lose customers on the basis of their decision to drop the Sheen ad. Perhaps the consequences for either party will be trivial.

An advertiser's aversion to controversy is not the same as McCarthyism. And while Sheen's rights should not be abridged, nor should his responsibility.

Should the United States go to war with Iraq? Some say we should, and others say we shouldn't. Some say nothing at all. But regardless of what we say or don't say, the only thing for certain is that we will all have to face the consequences of our action or inaction.

What say *you* on the topic of freedom of speech? Feel free to enter your comments... or pay the consequences for your silence!

Rodney King, witnessing the riots in LA that were touched off by the "not guilty" verdicts for the police officers who were charged with brutality against him, asked the profound question: "Can't we all just get along?"

It's becoming increasingly obvious to me that the answer is, "No."

I am one of the board members for my home owners' association, and I see how little, itty bitty, minor differences of opinion can lead people to do very hostile things toward each other. What starts off as an honest disagreement over who should be allowed to park where becomes a feud involving threats, intimidation, and "coalition building" of neighbors against neighbors. It's surreal to see. In the once case that is currently on my mind, both parties are generally reasonable folks who just want to live and let live. Until their desires clash, and then it's dog eat dog.

Our home owners association has, oh, about one hundred forty units. Something like that. There's usually one (and only one) feud going on in our neighborhood at any given time (I've been on the board now for roughly four years). The feud always ends the same way: first, one party moves out, and then the other party moves out, too. Then, somebody else gets upset with some other somebody, and another feud is born.

I attended a science fiction writers convention recently, and author Stephen Barnes commented on the reason racism persists in science fiction in particular and throughout America in general. He gave one theory that I found particularly resonant. He speculated that nasty behavior in groups is often the result of ever-so-minor tendencies among individuals that aggregate into something larger. In other words, most people are actually quite tolerant folks. Left to their own devices, most people will behave well in most situations. However, there might be one area where any given person will *tend* to not be as tolerant. One area where there is a distinct "us versus them" feeling.

When you gather a large group of people, these small tendencies toward intolerance will tend to aggregate around some particular issue, cohere, and become more obvious. More pronounced. Quiet disagreement or dislike becomes overt resistance or animosity, which in turn becomes outright hostility and hatred as the group gets larger still.

(Keep in mind, this idea is my extrapolation of one part of what I heard Mr. Barnes say, and may not actually represent his views.)

This is not to say that all large groups must inevitably tend toward violence (although, now that I think about it, a case can be made for just that). But, rather, the idea is that the larger the group, the more likely some manner of intolerance will be expressed.

Mr. Barnes also made another observation, which is even more pertinent. Let us suppose that most people are basically good. Mr. Barnes asked us to consider that, say, nine out of ten people are good, but I'll go further: let's suppose that 99 out of every 100 people are basically good. What does that leave us with? It leaves us with the one out of a hundred who are inherently -- to borrow Mr. Barnes eloquent terminology -- assholes.

So. You have a hundred people. A microcosm of humanity. For the sake of argument, we'll say that 99 are decent folks. One is an asshole. Never mind that the substantial majority of these people will tend to be good, there's still going to be trouble in River City because that one guy is gonna stir up trouble. That one guy is going to cause problems. And he *will*, I assure you, even get some of his basically good neighbors to occasionally do basically bad things.

And this brings us to an item I saw in the news today which is proof positive that we will never, ever, see "world peace." NEVER. This news article I read on cnn.com talks about an online game called "The Sims Online." This game boasts a community of 100,000 players. The object of the game is to pilot your virtual character through simulated cites, acquire simulated jobs and simulated families, and make simulated friends. There are no guns in Simland. But, as the article explains, there are nonetheless malcontents within this simulated land who gang up and harass their simulated neighbors. It's like a Sim Mafia. They target players, raid their accounts, and/or use the rules of the game to bring the target's score down (through the use of "red links").

As the article goes on to describe, the Sim Thugs have done enough damage to enough people that now there's a Sim Vigilante group (they call themselves the "Sim Shadow Government" -- think of it!) that boasts around a thousand members. Even the nice, friendly environment like Sims Online has it's own Sim Department of Homeland Security, thanks to the Sim Terrorists.

And that's the point. If an online game where you've essentially got grownups playing with Barbie Houses -- where you only score points by making friends (simulated, of course) -- can't escape this kind of virtual violence, how can we expect in the real world to circumvent real violence?

World peace is a noble goal. But as long as kids still fight each other in school playgrounds, nations will keep going to war. It is as inevitable as a Sim Mafia in the Sims Online; as enduring as bickering neighbors in otherwise quiet housing developments.

I remember hearing the "Lucky Once" concept expressed in reference to the IRA, but the concept theoretically applies to terrorist organizations anywhere. The terrorist has an advantage -- up to a point -- with the idea that the government has to be lucky all the time in order to prevent terrorism, whereas the terrorist only has to be lucky once to be successful. True enough.

But once a terrorist organization is identified *and targetted*, that rule regarding luck gets flipped around. Now the fugitive has to stay lucky all the time, whereas the government forces only have to get lucky once.

The task forces set up by the US and its allies to capture "Iraq's Most Wanted" (remember the playing cards?) and al Queda have been working at it for a while. They expand their intelligence, they capture more members, which expands their intelligence, and the cycle continues. As long as the task forces remain focused on their task, they must, inevitably, succeed.

Saddam Hussein had to stay lucky forever. We only had to get lucky once. And luck always gets better the more you work at it. We've been working at it. Mr. Hussein's luck ran out when the US finally captured the guy who could point to where Hussein was hiding out.

There's all kinds of irony that abounds here. al Queda had to get lucky to bring down the twin towers; in fact, it has been reported that they weren't expecting quite that much luck. But now they and similar terrorist organizations might find themselves done in by their own initial success.* They finally got our attention.

Now that they do, in fact, have our full attention, can they stay lucky forever?

Unless the federal government loses its will, Osama Bin Laden and the remains of the al Queda network will be found. We only need to get lucky once.

* Note that the terrorists have succeeded, on a few occasions, in carrying out terrorist acts. They have not, by and large, succeeded in their supposed political goals. What was the point of striking the twin towers? To crush the US? To encourage us to pull out of the Middle East? To convince us to abandon Israel? This is the problem with the "lucky once" concept. It's not enough to be lucky in your means. The idea is to be lucky in attaining your goals. Terrorism can be a means to expelling an invading army. Sometimes. But as a foreign policy tool, it really isn't a terribly effective means for attaining your goals.

It's gotta be tough to be the President.

No matter where you go, no matter what you do, somebody is going to hate you. Our society has developed a culture that encourages vocal dissent -- and that's not necessarily a bad thing -- which means that no matter where the President is, you will find protesters (protestors?) near at hand, shouting their disapproval of one thing or the other.

It doesn't matter which political party the President claims as his own, and it doesn't matter how decorated or how dubious his record before or while in office. He's going to be protested everywhere he travels, and he's going to be protested right outside his domicile when he stays home.

And so, he must travel in isolation from the people. Secret Service agents must sweep the area long before the President can be allowed to arrive; he must travel in motorcades and private aircraft.

Much the same can be said for so many other elected officials. The more visible the position, the more the office holder must isolate him or herself from the protesters and, at the same time, *all* of their constituents.

I'm reminded of all of this right now because today I've been working in a building across the street from where the President came in to give a talk at a fund-raising lunch. Traffic -- human, car, and air -- had to be rerouted and local businesses saw huge swings (some up, some down) in their activity levels. I wasn't much affected, which is fine by me. But I noticed that even as the Secret Service began to make their presence known in the area last night, so, too, did the protesters this morning.

I'm not sure, since I couldn't read their signs from up here on the fifteenth floor of the office building where I'm working today, but I think the issue for these particular protesters had to do with employment. I'm sure the President traveled to other events today as well, where he may well have been greeting by protesters concerned about marriage rights or world trade or the Middle East.

Anyone who signs up for the job at the Oval Office is taking on the bad with the good, and that's just the way it goes. But these willy-nilly protests are a bother that have the unintended consequence of isolating the leaders from the general population.

What can we do about this?

We should streamline the haphazard means of expressing our discontent. The first and most obvious change that we simply must pursue is institutionalizing and formalizing our petitions for redress.

First: we must initiate impeachment proceedings the day after each new President is sworn into office. Make this a formal, standing arrangement. If the impeachment should fail, the next impeachment process should be initiated two weeks later, thereby allowing all parties to enjoy a brief vacation before work resumes. This should be codified in the Constitution.

Second: encourage the development of a permanent, professional protester corps. Disaffected Americans can register their complaints with the professional protesters, who will picket and shout on behalf of the population following established rules of protesting etiquette. This should help to reduce the impact of Presidential visits upon local businesses and residents, and free up ad hoc protesters to pursue their daily business with minimal discomfort.

And, while I propose these two actions with tongue firmly planted in cheek, don't be surprised when, fifty years from now, what I have proposed has come to pass.

As many of my faithful readers know, I'm not very good at remembering names or dates -- which makes my choice of being a history major in college something of a mystery even to me.

So I can't remember if it was Attorney General Edwin Meese or Senator Jesse Helms, but *someone* up there in the federal government during the 1980's, when unable to actually define what constitutes pornography, uttered the famous words: "I know it when I see it."

The Supreme Court, equally decisive in condemning offensive material and vague in defining exactly what constitutes the same, favored the notion of relying upon "community standards" to determine what is, and what is not, offensive.

The FCC at the time was less vague. I worked in broadcast commercial radio at the time, and we had very clear guidelines on what was acceptable. The "seven dirty words" (as memorialized in George Carlin's comedy routine about an earlier Supreme Court decision banning seven specific words from the public airwaves) were never appropriate. Innuendo was fine any time of day, but any overt sexuality (such as the Dr. Ruth show) was to be saved for after 10pm.

For a couple of years, I ran a two-hour comedy show each week on Sunday nights at 11pm. We set and followed our own guidelines, whereby material we deemed to be risque would be held until after midnight.

Certainly, accidents happened, both at the station as a whole and during my comedy show in particular. These mistakes could take the form of a miscued bleep of one of the aforementioned dirty words, or somebody making an error and swearing while his or her microphone was accidentally left on. One idiot at our station referred to Aretha Franklin as "Urethra Franklin" on air by mistake because he'd gotten into the habit of doing so off the air.

There was a procedure for handling these kinds of situations. We'd log what happened in our daily FCC log, and we'd prepare to face the music if anyone ever complained to the FCC.

As it so happens, no one in Ithaca, New York ever complained about such mistakes, which were not common but not unheard of.

Flash forward fifteen years or so. Half-time acts during the Super Bowl regularly make a spectacle out of themselves by grabbing their crotches and undulating on stage, draping flags around themselves and singing about punching out cops and bonking their fuck-buddies. This has been going on for several years, and I guess the lines have been getting blurry. With an apparent lack of guidelines as to what is and is not appropriate for the public airwaves, the ambiguity of "community standards" when talking about a national audience, and the problem of who knows what when they see what, the lines have gotten so blurred that the notion of offensive material was almost forgotten by those waltzing along the lines.

Then, this year, Janet Jackson flashed a pasty (pastie?) covered boob in a choreographed routine that positively exuded sex with a hint of violence, and someone at the FCC jumped up and said, "That's it! I see it! I knew I'd know it when I saw it! That's offensive!"

I'm not making this up: I actually heard a sound clip of the FCC chariman refer to the Super Bowl halftime show as a "sacred moment", the enjoyment of which was permanently soured when his family was so unexpectedly exposed to this . . . this . . . boob.

So, like, Mr. FCC Man: what freaking planet are you living on? The Super Bowl is a popular sporting event. It is not sacred. Get over it.

And where were you during all the crotch grabbing?

Where were you when Kid Rock danced on the stage wearing an American flag that had been torn in the middle and turned into a poncho?

Where were you during the songs about punching out cops?

And why was any of the sexual suggestivity on the stage any more suggestive than the freaking *cheerleaders* who shake their groove thang in front of the cameras going into every single commercial break? Mr. FCC Guy: how did you explain cheerleaders to your young and impressionable progeny?

Why are you more afraid of a boob than you are of rows and rows of heavy thugs lining up time after time on opposite sides of a pig-skin with the singular purpose of pummeling each other into the ground?

Americans are more afraid of sex than of violence. I acknowledge this fact intellectually, even though I don't understand it. (As a history major, I can give you all kinds of reasons, stemming from our Puritan roots. It's still insane.)

Let me go on record as saying that I prefer sex to violence, and I'd rather see a shapely breast than a boxing match. (And, let me also concede that, having said this, I was watching the Super Bowl nonetheless with the expectation of seeing a football game rather than a peep show.)

Janet and her buddy Justin, though, combined sex with implied violence, which I guess makes it a little worse than even just sex.

So the American public was all atwitter about what happened during the Super Bowl, and the media couldn't stop talking about it for weeks. Nor could the rest of us. Often I'd go out to various meetings, only to have the issue come up. Some folks thought Janet's performance was obscene. Some thought the rest of the halftime show was obscene. Others thought football was obscene. Still others thought there wasn't a problem at all.

Janet revealed more than a little bit of skin that afternoon. She revealed that community standards are not. She revealed that while while all "know it when we see it," we all see it differently.

Obscenity is in the mind of the beholder.

I'm not the first to make this observation. Even in Genesis, Adam and Eve's reaction to nudity was all in their minds. Before they became "enlightened", nudity was no problem. But after eating from the tree of knowledge, boy did they become uptight. Get me a fig leaf, quick!

Okay. So obscenity is all in the mind, and we all have different minds, so we are all offended by different things. Are we all on the same page?

Janet has been forgotten. But the FCC has not. The FCC is on the prowl. It feels it has let the American public down (and, in many ways, it has), and it wants to atone. So it's going after that most dreaded den of obscenity: talk radio.

Congress has not adequately defined obscenity. The Supreme Court has dodged behind community standards. But the FCC sure knows it when they see it. Or hear it. So, they are fining stations that carry talk radio shows that say things that they (the FCC) find offensive. But they (the FCC) have not issued guidelines as to what counts as offensive and what doesn't.

It's an effective strategy. The government won't define it, but it *will* take violators of the unwritten rules to court. And the government *will* fine violators of these unwritten rules. The result? Terror. Radio stations are muzzling their talk show hosts, telling them to lay low for a while while they try to figure out what kind of policies they should follow in order to best avoid getting fined.

As a tactic for keeping broadcasters on their heels, it's brilliant. Of course, it doesn't produce better (or even, necessarily, less offensive) programming. But it *does* produce *nervous* broadcasting.

Long before we bestowed the term "terrorist" upon rogue elements who sought to earn sympathy for their political causes by murdering people (a stretch of logic I still don't quite understand), historians singled out a particular kind of government tactic as rule of terror. Here's how it works:

First, ban some behavior using vague terms.

Next, enforce this ban haphazardly, seemingly on a whim, and make the punishment excessively punitive.

The result? A scared, scared population.

This is exactly the road down which broadcast radio and television are currently heading.

There is a great deal to be said in favor of regulating standards of conduct among public broadcast frequencies. (Private broadcasting mechanisms, such as cable television, is another matter and one for another discussion.)

But what Janet revealed is that those standards need to be specific and well-defined. They must not be left up to the whim of whomever happens to be watching from the FCC that particular day. They must not be left up to the whim of what a given judge in a given court finds offensive on a given day.

This is partially a question of favoring rule of law over rule of terror . . . I, for one, prefer that the United States not slide down that slippery slope that has engulfed so many other democracies which have relied upon rule of terror instead of the rule of law.

But it's also a question of accomplishing your stated goals in the first place. The best way to make sure that standards are adhered to is to publicize exactly what those standards are and enforce them consistently. Don't leave it up to "you'll know it when you see it." The producers at MTV have different standards from the producers of PAX. (And quite frankly, I find both offensive, but for different reasons.)

If *I* set the standards, Beyonce Knowles would have had the center stage for the entire halftime show (she did an amazing rendition of the national anthem at the start of the game, don't you agree?), there would be none of those fireworks or laser light shows or any of that nonsense, and the cheerleaders would have been allowed to perform topless during the game. But only if they wanted to.

--Allan

PS: if you want to read a funny story from the point of view of a cheerleader, check out this story by my friend Joseph Paul Haines.

It annoys me when a political campaign tries to have it both ways. Of course, all political campaigns try to have it both ways, and this is nothing new. But it still annoys me.

Today I'm going to point out one particular annoying aspect of one of the presidential campaigns. There are many other examples to use, from any campaign you choose. But here I go:

When you think of Senator Ted Kennedy, what do you think of? Well, aside from the alcoholism, womanizing, intellectual bankruptcy, Chappaquidic, his many dead brothers and nephews, and the family fortune built upon bootleg liquor and other illegal connections, I mean. When you think of Senator Kennedy, what do you think of his politics?

If you're at all like me, you probably think of him as not merely a liberal, but a staunch liberal. Somewhat of a neo-socialist on certain matters (socialized medicine, various welfare programs, affirmative action, etc.). Staunch in that he holds the line firmly. He is unabashed about his position. You know where he stands, and he stands firmly on the left, and that's that -- non-negotiable.

Now, this may or may not be true, but it is, nonetheless, what many folks (including myself) think of first when they think of the politics of Ted Kennedy.

So, if somebody says that there's someone even more liberal than Kennedy, what would you think of that person? That they are even, er, stauncher? That they lean even further to the left? That their views are even more firm, even less negotiable, perhaps?

That's what I would think.

Now let's suppose that a campaign described a candidate as a flip-flopper. What would you think that means? That they are *not* staunch, perhaps? That they do not consistently lean either to the left or to the right? Rather, that they are sometimes left-leaning and sometimes right-leaning? That their views are hard to pin down, perhaps? In fact, that their views might be open to negotiation?

That's what I would think.

So, then. Let's connect the dots. When the Bush campaign refers to Senator John Kerry as even more liberal than Senator Kennedy and, at the same time, as a flip-flopper... which is it? Is he a neo-socialist? Or is he a moderate? Is he a hard-liner commie symp, or a wishy-washy middle-of-the-roader? Is it possible to be both at the same time?

I remember a poster from one of my grade school classrooms (from when I was a student, not from when I was a teacher) that featured a quote from Garfield. The cartoon cat, not the President.

Garfield said: "If you can't convince 'em, confuse 'em."

I am shamelessly ripping off a joke from a friend of mine, and re-writing it to suit my own sense of irony. Barry -- please forgive me!

Ripped from Today's Headlines: Florida has been ravaged by two (so far) hurricanes, wreaking havoc with electricity, cable, phone, and other infrastructure utilities. Fortunately, however, the computerized results from the upcoming election have already been backed-up.

I was reminded of the current federal election -- and the one we had four years ago, and the one four years before that -- when I saw this quote from a bumper sticker from the Nixon/Kennedy presidential campaign, 1960:

"Be Thankful Only One of Them Can Win."

A wry message of optimism dealing with a dubious decision. But then I thought about it, and I realized...

Eventually, *both* of them won. It was a lie! It was all wrong! They *could* both win!

[sigh]

On that downer note, here's a trivia question for you: when's the last time the Republican party fielded a bid for the White House that did *not* feature either a Bush or a Dole on the ticket?

(Remember, ticket = President & Vice President)

There exists today a technology to implant a locator chip into a living body so that, if the subject should become lost, the subject can be located by the use of a special electronic tracker device.

These chips are currently used primarily for pets. In my own neighborho