[I wrote the post over a day and a half, from the evening of February 23rd until the afternoon of the 24th.]

9:48 p.m.—

Just returned from a nice extended visit to the Library of Congress. The ride back wasn't as interesting as the ride there. Why can't every Metro trip have a magician with live doves? Cleaning costs, maybe. Or safety—doves can actually be quite violent animals.

Have just shaved.

9:57 p.m.—

Reading about Egyptian President Mubarak and the Muslim Brotherhood, who sound like the villains from a Sherlock Holmes novella. Eating Cheerios®.

10:20 p.m.—

I picked up a copy of East of the River, my neighborhood's local indie newspaper. (Yay for D.C. having local indie newspapers!) In the back page, a report on local crime rates. The job corps center I'm on is in the middle of Police Service Area 706. Last year, we had 520 major thefts or robberies, 190 assaults with a deadly weapon, and 12 homicides. Two of the murder victims were students at this school. Every PSA on this side of the Anacostia River reported at least 200 felonies; 706 had over a thousand.

Well, except for the people in 707, which is just on the other side of the freeway from us; they had no murders and just one burglary.

The next time I hear someone complaining about the housing on Air Force bases, I'm going to accidentally spill my drink down their pants.

10:43—

At least this new paper has a good political gossip column. Of D.C. Councilman Vincent Orange, “The Nose” observes

It is said that the ubiquitous Orange will attend the opening of an envelope.

I don't know if Orange is my councilmember, or if someone else represents my ward. I do know that I'm several blocks south of the ward represented by Marion Barry. The former mayor was scheduled to visit the center Monday, but cancelled at the last minute. Scuttlebutt is, his son was caught with marijuana.

We'll now break for irony.

10:43 p.m.—

Did Peter Kalivas turn Sam down for a date or something?

Peter Kalivas's solo "Shifting" was the low point of the night, proving that narcissism alone can only hold an audience for about three minutes. Even if you have had an amazing career in New York City.

10:57 p.m.—

Joesph Braude makes an interesting, subscription-only point: There is really no such language as Arabic.

Not only are 70 million Arabs unable to read or write; a much larger number of the region's 280 million people do not fully speak or understand the standardized Arabic language (known as "Fus'ha") that is used in broadcast news as well as official discourse and the academy. Fus'ha was introduced in schools across the region beginning about 90 years ago as a component of pan-Arab nationalism. It is a formal construct, gleaned from classical Arabic grammar and wholly consistent with Koranic syntax, designed to unite the 20-odd Arab countries culturally and politically. But nine decades later it unites, in effect, only the region's elites.

Most everybody else prefers to speak a version of their country's vernacular. Ninety percent of Moroccans, for example, can only understand their unique brand of Arabic, which is heavily infused with Berber phonics and French vocabulary--testimony to the country's multiethnic and colonial history. The Moroccan language, in turn, is barely comprehensible to, say, Iraqis, whose unique idioms and usages reflect more ancient Mesopotamian tongues as well as the country's proximity to Turkey, Iran, and the Kurdish mountains. These vernaculars, derided by pan-Arab ideologues "dialects," are in fact the region's major living languages. They are the contemporary Middle Eastern equivalent of Romance languages, which, of course, were all derived from Latin and were also once known as dialects--but now are known as Spanish, Italian, and French.

Could this be part of the reason the governments in the middle east are so autocratic? After all, most of the leaders in Arab countries
are either strongmen like Quadhafi and Musharraf or monarchies like in Saudi Arabia or the UAE. Even sorta-democratic Egypt has degenerated from almost-democratically-elected Sadat to not-really-democratically-elected-at-all Mubarak in the last three decades.

I don't know enough about this to say anything really insightful; and it's far to late in the day for me to make up something that sounds more insightful than it really is like I usually do.

7:52 a.m.—

It's really quite nice out: light flurries of snow have been drifting down all night, and there's about an inch and a half on the ground. It's not sticking to the pavement, so you don't have to worry about your shoes. The trees and buildings are all trimmed in white and the air is crisp. Threw on a sweater and an windbreaker.

And the city of Washington has shut down. Over an inch and a half on the ground.

I always thought people were joking when they talked about this sort of thing.

11:45 a.m.—

It was funny, but now it's just sad. I figure, schools closed, there's less than an inch and a half of snow on the ground, I'm from Utah; I'm gonna walk down to the bus stop and head downtown and do something fun today.

I've spent more than four hours running from one end of center to the other, trying to get a curfew pass. Everyone is stunned—just stunned—by the snow, and doesn't want to give me a pass. When I point out that there's less than two inches on the ground, they immediately pass the buck. I've been to see the heads of three different departments, and every one of them has sent me to another department.

I should have just left this morning. No one would have cared, but now all the security staff know I'm trying to leave and that I'm not likely to get a pass, so they'd stop me. This is incredibly frustrating.

12:13 p.m.—

It has just been pointed out that my windbreaker is bright red, and half the campus now suspects I'm a blood. Lucky I didn't leave; the bus stop is in a heavily Crip neighborhood.

Have changed into a black sweater, making a third round to see the department heads.

3:12 p.m.—

Screw this. People in D.C. are nuts. I'm gonna a video or something.

6:43 p.m.—

Just saw Dark Blue. The same writer as Training Day, but a few years earlier and marginalized because he could only get Ving Rhames and not Denzel. Pity. Dark Blue is modern-day Shakespeare; and while I'm not the biggest fan of the Bard in the world (prefer Voltaire) that's pretty damn good for a Kurt Russell movie. Russell, by the way, chews the scenery as the embodiment of white machismo: a casually racist, terminally sexist, asshole cop, bad father and worse husband with a drinking problem and questionable morals. And he's not even the worst person in the film: Brendan Gleeson is the biggest asshole on film since the James Bond franchise ran out of good bad guys. When I said this was Shakespearian, I wasn't talking Comedy of Errors. I was talking the Scottish Play. Compared to everyone else in the film, Rhames' manipulative, political police chief looks like a saint.

And the timing is just right so that it doesn't seem like grandstanding for the climax to take place just as the Rodney King riots are erupting. Why didn't this get nominated for any Oscars?

Oh, and people in D.C. are still nuts.

I had the day off today, and there was a nice light snowfall outside. It's pretty, and you only need a nice thick sweater for warmth, not a bulky jacket. I'm at the Library of Congress, as usual, but I made a stop at the congressional office buildings to check in with the schedulers and policy advisors I met earlier this month. The underground tunnel between the three congressional office buildings is always crowded when it's closed. But the pace is a little slower when congress it out of session, and no one's keeping up appearances for the tourists, who never come this way.

(When I flew into National last weekend, I played myself up to a group of high school kids doing the high-school-trip-to-D.C. thing. My one-day job shadow with Congressman Clay became “working in a congressman's office up on the hill.” I told them that D.C. is nothing like you see in the movies; that it's a lot more like New Orleans. “You see, something like 80% of the people in this city work for the federal government. They understand how our country really works. So naturally, they drink a lot.”)

I got a couple of people who promised to help me find a job when I start sending out resumes in a few months. I could probably find an internship pretty easy, but I'd either need to do both an internship and a night job somewhere like 7-11 (incredible hours, but not impossible) or try and find a real job for the government without a degree or much of a resume (incredibly unlikely, but not impossible).

But that's in the future. For now, I missed the Oscars yesterday. Pity, too—I had very much been looking forward to seeing Chris Rock host.

Oscars are not as big a deal as everyone makes them out to be, but I did have people I was rooting for, of course. Morgan Freeman for best supporting actor was one of them. His speech near the end of Million Dollar Baby is without question the best part of the film. The only person who got even close to his level was Jamie Foxx in Collateral; and hey, he was up for Ray anyway.

Which I still haven't seen, and I am ashamed. I'm sure Foxx deserves it, though. I've seen everyone else nominated for best actor, and none of them impressed me that much—not even Eastwood, much as I loved his directing in Baby. I know my father was rooting for The Aviator, but I still think it was a bit aimless. The scenes were all beautifully constructed (especially the plane crashes) but there was no overall arc tying the story together. (I felt the same way about Gangs of New York and even Taxi Driver, which I finally saw this weekend.) Scorsese should have won best director for the performances he got out of Alan Alda, John C. Rilley, and Cate Blanchett—all of whom surpassed Eastwood and Hillary Swank's acting in Baby—but you can put all the great performances and great scenes in the world in your movie, you still need a real solid story at the bottom of it.

Ah, well. The only award I'm upset about is best actress. Not because Hillary Swank won (although I wasn't that impressed with her) but because it's the only category where I haven't seen most of the nominees' films. After all, the Oscars aren't one hundredth as important as the movies they're for.

I'm really glad I stopped watching The West Wing when Sorkin stopped writing it. Peter David observes:

You want to know how dire "West Wing" has become? If it were happening in the real world, I'd be giving serious consideration to voting for Alan Alda, despite the fact that it would mean having a president who is (a) Republican and (b) named Arnold.

Today at breakfast, I found out one of my friends on center did a tour in the infantry in Iraq.

Since my next post will be reaction to the Oscars, and I also have two large, non-current-event-type posts in the works, I thought it was time for a little reminder that there is still a war going on there.

Of course we can't spend every second of every day thinking about Iraq. Even the time we spend thinking about affairs in the mid-east can't just be about Iraq; a lot's happened in Syria lately, and Mubarak is pushing for freer elections, proving Joseph Braude eerily prescient.

And I only have five minutes left in the lab, so this will be a depressingly short post. But every now and then, a reminder that Iraq exists is in order, to keep America's painfully short attention span from drifting.

I'm still working on my final post about my grandmother. It's taking a while to knock into shape.

I was riding the metro not an hour ago, doing my little sitting-down-reading-a-book-riding-the-train thing (it's a cool thing) and this twelve-year-old kid dressed in a pinstripe sport coat, bright yellow scarf, and ragged jeans approached me. He told me he had a trick he'd like to try out on me. A magic trick.

This kid, he had showmanship. He was all smiles and immediately engaging. He actually said “I've got nothing up my sleeves” without a trace of irony—he really was just showing me that he had nothing up his sleeves! He introduced himself—Joe—and flourished his scarf, “to show you that it's empty.” He asked me to yell ‘abra-cadabra’ at the top of my voice, and I of course obliged, attracting stares from all the passengers. Joe was unperturbed and nonchalantly balled the scarf up, gave it a yank,

and a live dove popped out and settled calmly onto his arm.

It was just damn cool, is what it was. The entire train was impressed. The passengers would have burst into applause if this weren't D.C. and everyone here wasn't hardwired to be terminally cynical; but it is, and so they didn't. It's okay. I got to talking with Joe (pictured here by the Capitol Dome because why not?) and I got him a hot dog. We chilled for a while and had a good time. Joe claims to be one of the best child magicians in the country, although the website he gave me is broken, and he couldn't afford his own hot dog. (Neither could I, really. I'll have to sneak back onto the metro; but it's an easy crime to commit, and worthwhile in this case.)

In any case, this one little thing really brightened my day. I mean, it was just a dove in a scarf, but it restored my faith in humanity.

Thanks, Joe.

...just keeps on coming.

The Salt Lake Tribune:

Arthur Miller, the playwright ... whose Willy Loman character gave a face to modern American tragedy, died Thursday. He was 89. Asked in a 2001 interview why Loman's story seemed timeless for modern audiences, Miller said, "A lot of people give a lot of their lives to a company or even the government, and when they are no longer needed, when they are used up, they're tossed aside."

E.J. Dionne reflects on Miller's other timeless classic:

Miller instructed us on the individual's obligation to stand up to frightened, and thus dangerous, majorities. ... To say that "The Crucible," first produced in 1953, reads as if it were a response to today's headlines is just to repeat what has been said for half a century - by former dissidents in post-communist Eastern Europe no less than by American liberals during the McCarthy period. "I can always tell what the political situation is in a country when the play is suddenly a hit there," Miller wrote in his autobiography. "It is either a warning of tyranny on the way or a reminder of tyranny just past."

For our own moment, consider this speech by Deputy Gov. Danforth defending the role of Salem's witch-hunting court. "But you must understand, sir, that a person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between. This is a sharp time, now, a precise time - we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world. "Now, by God's grace, the shining sun is up, and them that fear not light will surely praise it. I hope you will be one of those."

The Trib continues:

The playwright had the great misfortune of achieving his greatest popular and critical success with Salesman at the age of 33, and living a long life thereafter in which he was alternately proclaimed a master and a has-been.

If there's anyone who could appreciate the irony in that, it was Arthur Miller.

I've been doing a little reading on the first president of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Apparently, in modern times, only two leaders have taken a word that means “teacher” as their title, Ataturk and Tanzanaian President Julius Nyerere. The picture of Ataturk below comes from his famous campaign to teach his entire population the Latin alphabet in just three months. (It took closer to six.)



I had a really good point I was getting to with all this, one that involved a tribute to Miller and some reflection on human nature, but they're kicking me out of the computer lab now. R.I.P Arthur Miller

Is that I have no idea what's going on with those two posts below. Blogger's server has decided that it hates me or maybe just wants to get my attention by acting out aggressively, like so many servers on the cusp of adulthood.

The original post was about the passing of Arthur Miller, and was very long, thoughtful, and even managed to comment on the first president of Turkey, Ataturk. By the way, if anyone ever asks you a bout Ataturk, remember: Ataturk rocked the Casbah. He rocked it hardcore.

If I get a chance, I will try and reconstruct the Miller post©but that's unlikely. I have convinced the federal government to fly me out to Detroit for free to attend my Grandmother's funeral. I fly back to D.C. on monday.

(I flew out of Reagan National, which is an airport so small, the gates don't have numbers, just letters. I flew out of gate 3. That's right, not 3-A or B36 like in some other airports, but simply gate 3. I have a great photo of it, but I can't download pictures on my aunt's laptop, because it's a company computer paid for by Univision. That I'll try and put up soon.)

So I don't know if there'll be much posting this weekend. Pity, too: I'd like to be able to talk about Miller's death, the bombings in Lybia and some of the really cool quotes in this week's US News & World Report, but that's how it goes.

Just in case you needed another reminder that America's laws are about as sexually mature as a 12-year-old:

Gordon Lee, a Georgia comics retailer ... is being prosecuted under Georgia law ... so sweeping that the following titles can get retailers arrested and charged with fines and jail time: "Watchmen." "Contract With God." "Sandman."

If a comic book publisher produces a comic biography of the artist Michelangelo, and accurately depicts his statue of David or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, any retailer in Georgia who sells it can be arrested. To say nothing of the publisher using the US mails to send out review copies. Distributing obscene material through the mails has some pretty stiff penalties...

And by the way, Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic books are as much high art as Michelangelo. Check 'em out.

The new symbol of narcissism is Googling yourself. Which, of course, I did. And I discovered that a gentlemen named J. Myle has written the following article for The British Journal of Radiology:

Polysplenia

Polysplenia is a rare syndrome of visceral anomalies. The diagnosis in vivo may be difficult. Recently Vaughan, Hawkins and Elliott (1971) stressed the importance of visceral arteriography for a correct diagnosis. A patient with this condition was seen by us and the angiographic findings are reported hereby.

Special Preview Edition!

Because my blogging time is so limited and my leisure time is so plentiful this blog is going to resemble a column in the New York Times Review of Books for the next few months. So I thought a little sneak peek on what's on tap.

I've been chipping away on a book on group psychology for the better part of a month now. Thick, academic text from a professor who is obviously trying very hard to hide his bias as a liberal college professor. But who has some really interesting ideas. People have an individual identity and several group identities. For example, I am, of course, myself. And I am a Jew, in the Woody Allen sense, at least. And I am a Utahn. And I am an American, and I am a liberal Democrat, and I am a libertarian, and I am all sorts of other things, many of them unpublishable.

This professor spends a lot of time talking about how these different group identities function—but right now I just want to talk about this: people's group identities become more important to them when they are under stress, or trauma. For example, American's became very focused on their group-identities after 9-11. And I have been thinking a great deal about my Jewish identity the last week, because my grandmother has been in extremely poor health.

She's in the hospital in Detroit now, and not really expected to last much longer. I keep thinking about some of the stories I've heard from or about her. She saw Diego Rivera painting murals in Detroit. She took one look at Richard Nixon in 1956 and announced, “that man is a crook.”

I wish I had known her better. I think I project some of the things I love about my liberal secular Jewish heritage onto her. She was from the first generation raised in this country, the generation that adapted the culture of European Jews to America, creating the American Jewish culture that even today secretly runs Hollywood with only the Gay Mafia as a check on their power. Her children went on to raise families of their own, to read the paper and vote, and travel the world.

She knew that all politicians are crooks, and that so are all businessmen, any priest who is more preacher than scholar, and anyone else who seeks power. She also knew that humanity is not hopeless, and that our hope lies in the scientists, the scholars and—most of all—the artists.

Or at least I like to think so.

Today I have been the victim of a SNAFU of truly preposterous proportions. The RA on my dorm was in a hideously bad mood for reasons that are beyond my ken. She dro...

On second thought, it's a very boring story of paperwork and bureaucracy keeping me from seeing a movie with a friend of mine. Nothing special about that, and I long ago took a vow to keep this blog from being angsty. So here's something uplifting:

There is a secret subway running from the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., to the senate office buildings. It's only for Senators and their staff. It would be a violation of national security if some civilian were able to sneak on this subway. And since I'm not in the habit of posting pictures of myself violating national security on this web page, just pretend the photo below doesn't exist.

I remember a passage from a book—I think it was Q-Squared—that went something like this: “she threw herself into her work, pulling more shifts than she had since med school. ‘Sleep’ was something she used to do, but gave up for the sake of her career.”

I'm not exactly throwing myself into TCU. It's more the other way around. But when you combine the schedule with the lack of easy computer access, my opportunities to blog are far fewer than I'd like. On the plus side, I have managed to blow through a couple of books:

Number Four:
A Shortage of Engineers
By Robert Grossbach


The comic strip Dilbert had a hard time making the jump to a television series. The painful ironies that flourish in modern day cube farms easily translate into a three panel comic strip or a one paragraph e-mail (or a blog post). But when UPN turned Scott Adam's comic into a thirty-minute animated series, they had to come up with something generally lacking in the chaotic randomness of the corporate world: a story.

UPN went the wacky route—what my old drama teacher would call “lots of squiggly lines” humor—escape tunnels, Mothra and lots of Simpsons-style randomness. It didn't work particularly well. In his novel, Grossbach faces some of the same problems.

His setting is slightly grander and more specific than Dilbert: an engineering firm with DOD contracts at the end of the cold war. It's fascinating and funny, and every little detail is engrossing, from the absurd lengths the firm will go to in order to please an Air Force colonel to the day the protagonist, during his morning commute, hears a radio report that Bush has invaded Panama to get at Noriega. And Grossbach is very good at pacing himself; the good stuff doesn't taper off or come in bunches, but comes at you evenly and authentically. In fact, ‘authentic’ is a good word to describe most of the book. I wouldn't want to accuse Grossbach, an engineer himself, of being at all autobiographical, but the project being worked on throughout the book sounds, to a layman, suspiciously like the Air Force's real IFF transmitter/receiver system.

Then Grossbach bumps into the same problem that Dilbert bumped into. Once you've got the cool setting and the funny stuff, you need a story. Grossbach picks a classic: the young man, just out of college, trying to figure out this whole ‘real life’ thing. And that's where the authenticity breaks down. Virtually all the character development and plot points take place outside of our protagonists job. And none of them are as real or engrossing as the stuff that does take place back in the lab.

Number Five:
Aunt Erma's Cope Book
By Erma Bombeck


Growing up, there were a few books on my family's bookshelf I kept making little mental notes to read, but never got around to sitting down with. Now there's a little checklist in my head with those names: X, Oscar Wilde, P.J. O'Rourke and a few others. Erma Bombeck is the first name I've checked off the list, ant it was purely by chance. A copy of Aunt Erma's Cope Book was sitting in the magazine rack in the entrance stairwell to the building my classes are held in.

Taking aim at self-help books and their cult-like following is hardly a new subject. But this was published in 1985, which might just make Bombeck the first to devote a book to the subject. I can't quite figure out if the Cope Book is a collection of essays or a narrative. The chapters are far more thematically similar than you'd usually find in a collection by, say, E.B. White or Gore Vidal. And they're in chronological order. But most of them stand up by themselves as a comment on a particular self-help book Erma Bombeck read at one point or another.

Essay collection or novel, Aunt Erma's Cope Book is still extremely funny. You'd think it'd be hard to make a 150 page book out of “people need to take it easy and laugh a little.” Then again, self-help books can turn “take responsibility” into a five-hundred page tome.

So there you go.

Number Six:
The Caveman's Valentine
By George Dawes Green


I know the Samuel L. Jackson movie based on this book is crap. Not because I've seen it—I haven't—but because of my rule:

Good movies make bad books, and visa versa.

And this book is a very, very good book.

I once took a very good picture of a homeless man looking much like an ancient shaman come to life to play chess with an accounts manager in the shadow of Philadelphia's city hall. While The Caveman's Valentine is set in New York, not Philadelphia, and the Caveman is a pianist and not a grandmaster, I kept coming back to that image as I read this book. The man who is smart enough and polished enough to play chess during the lunch hour, but too out-of-step to secure even a basic shelter for himself. What causes this?

Romulus Ledbetter would tell you what causes this: Cornelius Gould Stuyvesant, the man who transmits Y-rays of dispair from his secret lair at the top of the Chrystler building. Green takes us deep into Ledbetters damaged psyche of Brian Typhoons (which some insolent psychatrists have misdiagnosed as “schitzophrenia”) while simultainiously weaving a complicated detective story. And it's funny, too.

Without question the best book on my list so far. This book was phenominal. And has made me very greatful to the magazine rack in the enterance stairwell.

Representative Katherine Harris recently gave a speech to the House Government Reform Committee. The full text is on her website. An excerpt:

While we must ensure that dangerous criminals remain where they belong — in prison — I also strongly believe that we must offer more opportunities for rehabilitation.

I was there for that speech. If you saw a video, you might even be able to catch me in the background, looking very uncomfortable when Harris spoke the quote above. Uncomfortable because whatever the prepared text might say, what came out of Harris' mouth wasn't “dangerous criminals.” It was “nature's criminals.”

That comment came at the end of a the speech, and the part about rehabilitation was strictly an afterthought. The first half of the talk was a horror story about “the kidnap, brutal rape and murder of a precious 11-year old girl, Carlie Brucia.” Cue Helen Lvejoy, because Harris stuck to the script for this:

Criminals who use society's second chances to commit further crimes have an undeniable impact upon our communities. Tragically, their actions often affect our most vulnerable citizens: our children.

In response to this tragedy, I introduced legislation entitled Carlie's law during the 108th Congress. This bill would have expanded the grounds for mandatory revocation of probation and supervised release to encompass violent felony crimes or an offense intended to facilitate unlawful sexual conduct with a minor.

The hearing was about increasing services for felons who have served their sentences. By far the majority of these men are non-violent drug offenders; the worst were generally gang members involved in gang-related robbery. When they get out of prison, they can't get a job, can't vote, can't get services — and people wonder why they go right back to dealing drugs and end up back in prison!

D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton gave a long speech, too: a talk about the nearly-insurmountable obstacles released felons face going legit. She was interrupted by the chair and asked to “wrap things up.” But Rep. Harris' long digression into sex crime panic was met with approving nods.

You want sex offenders exempted from this program? Two minutes and everyone on the committee would agree. But Harris wanted to talk about violent sex crimes as much and as often as possible. It's a good obsession for a congresswoman to have. There are at least two must read books (here and here) on how easy it is to tap into America's irrational, pathological fixation with sexual deviancy. (Ironically, the fixation itself is the most unhealthy deviance in the country.)

And it's happening again. The New York Time's Frank Rich sums up the year in the entertainment industry:

On the first anniversary of the Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction that shook the world, it's clear that just one was big enough to wreak havoc. The ensuing Washington indecency crusade has unleashed a wave of self-censorship on American television unrivaled since the McCarthy era, with everyone from the dying D-Day heroes in "Saving Private Ryan" to cuddly animated animals on daytime television getting the ax. Even NBC's presentation of the Olympics last summer, in which actors donned body suits to simulate "nude" ancient Greek statues, is currently under federal investigation.

Public television is now so fearful of crossing its government patrons that it is flirting with self-immolation. Having disowned lesbians in the children's show "Postcards From Buster" and stripped suspect language from "Prime Suspect" on "Masterpiece Theater," PBS is editing its Feb. 23 broadcast of "Dirty War," the HBO-BBC film about a terrorist attack, to remove a glimpse of female nudity in a scene depicting nuclear detoxification. Next thing you know they'll be snipping lascivious flesh out of a documentary about Auschwitz.

I am personally appalled by PBS's lack of balls. I was raised on KUED, the University of Utah's PBS station, and I would like to think that Public Television had more balls. But in general, I disagree with Rich's comparison of the FCC to the McCarthy era. Think instead of the Hays Code in the 1930's. Wait for a bestselling book eerily similar to “Secuction of the Innocent.” Think of the Parents Television Council as the Legion of Decency.

Mark Twain said “history does not repeat itself—it rhymes.” So I'd be weary of drawing specific conclusions from my FCC/Hays Code analogy. Except for one: this thing is just getting started.

Well, I hate to be cynical—no, I mean it this time—but...

As he spoke on social security reform and the Iraqi elections, the nation was once again remined that there was a reason our President was a cheerleader in college: George W. Bush is a damn good cheerleader.

A cheerleader can help people who are excited by something be even more excited about it. In the case of the Iraqi elections, all sensible people were excited and thrilled. Bush kicked that up a notch.

But Bush's biggest challenge doesn't require a cheerleader, it requires as salesman to sell Social Security reform to it's skeptics. There are already a few notable dissenters in the Republican ranks, and Harry Reid, despite being half the politician Bush is, has managed to circle the democratic wagons pretty damn well. Reagan, the best salesman since Karl Marx, could have pulled this off. But Bush?

In any case, only Rachel has any really insightful commentary on SOTU:

So John and I were watching the president's speech last night, as we do every year for the State of the Union, but I don't know. We got bored this time, real bored. And I'll be honest with you. We put the speech on the little TV and played Halo on the big TV with our best friend, Mr. X-Box.

Man, I wish I'd found this quote a year and a half ago:

Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame on the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.

—Mark Twain
1910

I have, at times, been accused of disliking capitalism because I say things like “I don't like capitalism.” Certainly even capitalism's most intelligent, well-spoken defenders (notably Ayn Rand) have always seemed a bit cheerleader-y in their pronouncements on this economic system. But I would like to state for the record, my _support_ of capitalism: I have found the best case for capitalism, from—no surprise here—the man who wrote the best case for democracy:

Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.

—H.L. Mencken

I live in a real city now! Whoot!

It's Washington, D.C.! Whoot whoot!

On my very first full day here, I met folks in the offices of three congressmen (including one actual congressman), got back in touch with a casual friend from a senators office, got a card for the Library of Congress (yay!), met the division chief of the capitol police for congressional offices and violated capitol hill security rules twice! (I didn't do the last two at the same time, but I could've!) Triple whoot with a cherry on top!

I'm writing a full account and putting up some pictures. For now, here's a portrait of Ayn Rand.