BY DAN
KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
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See the World Through My Daughter's Eyes (Rodale, October 2003),
click
here.
Friday, January 31, 2003
Myths and images from a strange
mind. Nearly 100 percent of what I know about the literary critic
Leslie Fiedler comes from reading the obituaries in today's
New
York Times and
Boston
Globe. I love the
detail that he once attended a Bob Dylan concert with O.J. Simpson --
surely a better choice than, say, attending an O.J. film festival
with Mr. Z.
Last year, while doing research for
my book on dwarfism, I came across Fiedler's Freaks: Myths and
Images of the Secret Self (1978). I wasn't able to do much with
it. As Jacqueline Ann Clipsham, an artist and political activist
who's also a dwarf, has written, Freaks is "a horrendous book,
not about people with disabilities but unwittingly about the author's
own narcissism and prejudicial fears."
This morning, in looking over the
notes I'd taken on Freaks, I came across one passage I thought
was worth sharing. Mind you, I'm not endorsing it. But it is a pretty
good example of an unusual mind at work. Fielder is writing about the
transition of the dwarf community from a gaggle of Freaks (his word,
and his capitalization) to an organized interest group, from jesters,
sideshow performers, and even gods to agitators for normality and
equal rights. He continues:
Looking back over their
five thousand years of recorded history, it seems to me that the
Dwarfs are, in a real sense, the Jews of the Freaks: the most
favored, the most successful, the most conspicuous and articulate;
but by the same token, the most feared and reviled, not only in
gossip and the popular press, but in enduring works of art, the
Great Books and Great Paintings of the West. They have been, in
short, a "Chosen People," which is to say, a people with no choice
at all; but they have begun, like the children of Israel, to
choose at least to choose. How appropriate, then, that they, who
began their escape from oppression via the back doors of the great
courts of Europe and have prospered in show business in America,
take the lead now in organizing for mutual defense,
consciousness-raising, and social action.
If, like some Jews, some of them
long to disappear into the "normal" world around them, even this
seems to me finally fitting and proper.
Odd stuff. To me, at least, this
sort of thing sounds thought-provoking, but means little or
nothing when you hold it up to scrutiny.
posted at 9:54 AM |
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Thursday, January 30, 2003
"Shock and Awe" and death and
revenge. Today's Phoenix includes a column I wrote on
the
media's one-dimensional reaction
to Monday's reports by UN weapons inspectors Hans Blix and Mohamed
ElBaradei. There's one point I want to expand on -- a report, which I
found on Dan
"Tom Tomorrow" Perkins's weblog,
that the Pentagon has already decided to open the war against Iraq by
bombing Baghdad into a pile of rubble, occupied by no one except the
dead.
According to the CBS News report
that Perkins cites (via a story in Australia's Sydney Morning
Herald), the strategy has been labeled "Shock and Awe." I found
this
description on a Department
of Defense website, ascribing it to Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. But what
the Pentagon has in mind goes way, way beyond what those military
thinkers ever could have imagined. The Herald piece continues:
... between 300 and 400
cruise missiles would fall on Iraq each day for two consecutive
days. It would be more than twice the number of missiles launched
during the entire 40 days of the 1991 Gulf War.
"There will not be a safe place
in Baghdad," a Pentagon official told America's CBS News after a
briefing on the plan. "The sheer size of this has never been seen
before, never been contemplated before."
The idea, according to the
Herald, is to break the Iraqi people "physically, emotionally
and psychologically." (The paper uses quotation marks around this
phrase, but the attribution is unclear.) This is sick, outrageous,
and -- more to the point -- completely counter to US
interests.
The
original CBS News report
contains still more horrifying details:
The battle plan is based
on a concept developed at the National Defense University. It's
called "Shock and Awe" and it focuses on the psychological
destruction of the enemy's will to fight rather than the physical
destruction of his military forces.
"We want them to quit. We want
them not to fight," says Harlan Ullman, one of the authors of the
Shock and Awe concept which relies on large numbers of precision
guided weapons.
"So that you have this
simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima,
not taking days or weeks but in minutes," says Ullman.
Think about this: Ullman is
explicitly saying that the US is willing to kill vast numbers of
Iraqi civilians in order to terrify the Iraqi military into
surrendering. Am I twisting this? Is the real intent to destroy
buildings while sparing lives? Well, look again. It's Ullman who
makes the Hiroshima analogy. I assume he was choosing his words
carefully.
It is difficult for someone with no
background in military matters to speak out about such things, but
each of us has an obligation to think hard and not remain silent.
Remember, they're doing this in our name. I oppose George W. Bush's
obsession with invading Iraq. But let's face it, it's going to
happen. There are ways to do it that would enhance our international
reputation, bringing down Saddam -- one of the worst people on the
face of the earth -- and doing it with a minimal loss of civilian
lives. The Iraqi people would be liberated, sanctions would be
lifted, and rebuilding would commence. (And Saddam might blow up his
oil fields, launch missiles at Israel, and dispatch terror teams to
the US.)
Trouble is, the right way to
do it might involve the deaths of more American troops than would
"Shock and Awe." Thus it's a terrible argument that I am trying to
make: that it is worth the lives of some unknown number of US
soldiers in order to avoid a holocaust in Baghdad. What an offensive,
arrogant thing to say! To which I respond, if this war can't be
prevented, then we should at least do it in such a way that will
result in the fewest American casualties -- not four weeks from now,
but over the next 20 years.
The reaction of the Iraqi people,
and of the Arab world in general, will depend a lot on whether the US
behaves as a liberator, or as an imperialist power bent on wreaking
"Shock and Awe."
In his State of the Union message
this week, Bush spoke of the hypothetical threat of an Iraqi
terrorist team entering the US with a small quantity of weapons of
mass destruction, the sort of weapons that could take many more lives
than the attacks of 9/11.
"Shock and Awe" would surely make
such an attack more likely.
posted at 10:32 AM |
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Romney buys time. So
Governor Mitt Romney bought himself another month, announcing last
night that his cuts for the current fiscal year won't be nearly as
bad as what he had led us to believe a couple of weeks ago (gee, what
a surprise), and putting off until late February or early March his
proposal to reorganize state government. That gives him another few
weeks to figure out how he's going to explain that his reorg won't
accomplish much, and that he really is going to have to slash "core"
services, raise taxes, or both.
But give the governor a break.
There's no such thing as a bad day when it includes MDC commissioner
David Balfour's being told to hit the bricks. Even better, Romney
wants to do away with the MDC entirely. (Click here
for Globe coverage, and here
for the Herald's take.)
Meanwhile, the Globe's
Frank
Phillips today has a useful
analysis of how inaccessible Romney has proved to be, especially when
compared to his four immediate predecessors -- Democrat Michael
Dukakis and Republicans Bill Weld, Paul Cellucci, and Jane Swift. To
update Harry Truman, Romney already knows he can't stand the heat, so
he's staying out of the kitchen.
posted at 10:31 AM |
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Wednesday, January 29, 2003
Seen but not spoken of. More
tax cuts for the rich? Well, what did you expect? War with Iraq?
Whatever. The real news in last night's State of the Union address
was in what President Bush didn't do. For the first time in
nearly a generation, the president eschewed the treacly practice of
introducing the guests who get invited to sit with the first lady.
Last year, in his
first State of the Union address,
Bush had no choice: the wounds of 9/11 were still raw. He paid
tribute to Shannon Spann, the widow of CIA agent Michael Spann, who
was killed during an attempted jail break in Afghanistan; the newly
installed Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, and his minister of women's
affairs; and the flight attendants who stopped would-be shoe-bomber
Richard Reid.
This time, though, his
guests were seen but not
acknowledged. And thus a cheap publicity stunt begun two decades ago
by Ronald Reagan, and continued by George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton,
was finally brought to a close, if only for one year. George W. may
yet ruin the country, but at least he restored a bit of dignity to a
solemn occasion.
posted at 10:48 AM |
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What was he thinking? I'm
still trying to wrap my brain around something that Syracuse
University television scholar Robert
Thompson told the Globe's
Mark Jurkowitz, who weighs in today with a piece on new 60
Minutes executive producer Jeff Fager. Noting that 60
Minutes' ratings have been falling during the last few years of
the Don Hewitt era, Thompson said, ''Once 24-hour cable television
kicked in, 60 Minutes couldn't stay in the same cultural
positioning it once had.''
Now what, exactly, is Thompson
referring to? The lamebrained idiocy of the Fox News Channel's
Hannity & Colmes? The tabloid trash of Connie Chung's show
on CNN? The breathless efforts of the well-meaning Phil Donahue as he
fails in his attempt to prove to MSNBC that he's still
relevant?
There are a few good shows on cable
news, but not many, and precisely zero with the deep reporting of
60 Minutes. Or perhaps Thompson was thinking of MSNBC
Investigates, with its hard-hitting stories on tattoos and --
gasp! -- the shocking things that are picked up by in-store security
cameras.
As Fager himself told Jurkowitz:
"It's amazing how much crap makes it on TV."
posted at 10:47 AM |
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Tuesday, January 28, 2003
Farewell to David Shribman.
The Globe's soon-to-be-former Washington-bureau chief,
David
Shribman, has his last
weekly "National Perspective" column in today's edition. It's a
moving piece about his uncle, who was killed on a PT boat in World
War II, and the relevance of his heroism to the all-but-certain war
with Iraq. Whether you agree with Shribman's conclusion will depend,
in part, on where you stand on President Bush's aggressive foreign
policy:
At stake are not only the
freedoms that the nation was founded on and the freedoms that
generations of Americans have fought to add to our national
culture, but also, as the World War II generation used to put it
in an evocative shorthand, the right to boo the Dodgers. At stake
are all those things, plus -- and this is what makes our
home-front war different -- the right to go to a Dodgers game or
to the mall or to the airport in safety.
I don't buy Shribman's notion --
suggested but not quite explicitly stated -- that Bush's eagerness to
launch a pre-emptive strike against Saddam Hussein is the moral
equivalent of World War II. But his appreciation for his uncle's
sacrifice is beyond argument.
Shribman now assumes the reins as
executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and will
continue writing a weekly column. According to the Globe, that
column will appear on the Globe's op-ed page "periodically."
Well, gee. Shribman is one of a tiny handful of columnists ever to
win a Pulitzer Prize for the Globe, and he's got local roots
as well, having grown up on the North Shore. If the man's going to
write a weekly column, you'd think it would be a no-brainer for
Globe editorial-page editor Renée Loth to run 'em
all.
posted at 9:22 AM |
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Backhanded compliment. An
odd column today from the
Herald's Wayne Woodlief,
who devotes half his space to an analysis of how Governor Mitt Romney
is handling the budget crisis. Woodlief praises Romney for his "fast
and stylish start," but what appears to impress Woodlief most is
Romney's ... disingenuousness:
Romney and his aides are
playing a great game of good-cop, bad-cop on some $500 million in
cuts the governor is set to make this week to meet an emergency
revenue shortfall in the state budget for the fiscal year that
ends in June.
In orchestrated leaks to the
press, aides revealed that Romney has decided against cuts in
basic education aid under Chapter 70 to some poorer schools (of
course, the state might have been sued on constitutional grounds
if they had been cut) -- and also rejected slashes in money for
veterans.
Yeah, great job, Mitt. Woodlief
might also have noted that Romney got elected, at least in part, by
being the only candidate for governor last year to claim that there
wouldn't be a budget crisis in the first place.
posted at 9:21 AM |
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Who's a neocon? Regarding my
post yesterday on the
antitrust investigation of
the LA Weekly and the now-defunct New Times LA, reader
CS writes: "First Meyerson, and now you. Whatever else NT was, it was
NEVER -- by any stretch of the imagination -- neocon.
Jeez!"
I should have made it more explicit
that I was attributing that judgment to LA Weekly columnist
Harold Meyerson. As a side note, I am reliably told that Meyerson is,
indeed, still at the American Prospect as editor-at-large, and
that his position at the Weekly is strictly part-time. The
LA Times' description of Meyerson as the Weekly's
executive editor was wrong.
posted at 9:19 AM |
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Monday, January 27, 2003
The politics of media antitrust
enforcement. The Justice Department's decision to
end
its antitrust probe of the
alt-weekly chains Village Voice Media and New Times Media -- and to
settle on the cheap -- raises some troubling questions.
On the one hand, the deal that the
two chains reached last fall would appear to be classic collusion.
Each agreed to shut down a weekly paper rather than continue to
compete. New Times closed New Times LA, a market long
dominated by the Voice-owned LA Weekly. In Cleveland, Voice
Media stopped publishing its Cleveland Free Times, ceding the
market to New Times's Cleveland Scene. Moreover, Voice Media
paid New Times a reported $8 million for its LA disappearing act; New
Times, in return, paid a much smaller sum to Voice Media for the
Cleveland deal.
On the other hand, you've got to
wonder what the motivation was for John Ashcroft's Justice Department
to get involved. As Richard Karpel, executive director of the
Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, told the NY Times'
David Carr, it is indeed "odd that the government decided it must
prevent two small newspapers from closing after it stood on the
sidelines for years as the AOL Time Warners of the world swallowed
entire industries."
I'm not about to start criticizing
any effort by regulators to do something, at long last, about media
consolidation. But as Tim Rutten reported in Saturday's
Los Angeles Times,
there are reasons to believe that Justice's unprecedented quick
action had as much to do with politics as it did with the economics
of antitrust law. The LA Weekly's respected political analyst,
Harold Meyerson, reports the details in
a column this week.
The key passage in Meyerson's piece
is his assertion that "according to people close to the case to whom
I've spoken, the government is concerned that the assisted suicide of
New Times in Los Angeles reflects a narrowing of political
perspectives in the city, and that it is the government's
responsibility to create more ideological space." This is, as
Meyerson observes, a breathtakingly broad view of antitrust law."
Both the late New Times LA and the LA Weekly are free
papers; the law is intended not to protect political viewpoints but,
rather, advertisers, who would presumably be hurt by the
monopolization of the alt-weekly market in a given
community.
If that sounds crass, consider the
absurdity of requiring publishers to keep putting out free
papers, against their will, in order to protect a certain political
viewpoint. Yet the Justice Department may have come perilously close
to doing just that, particularly in LA, one of the nation's leading
media capitals. Surely it's no coincidence that New Times took
a neoconservative stance, and that the LA Weekly is a
left-leaning paper. And surely it's no coincidence that -- as Carr
reports -- Voice Media, as a result of the settlement with Justice,
had to agree to help former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan launch
a new conservative weekly in Los Angeles later this year.
By the way, what's the deal with
Meyerson? It's 5:45 a.m. on the West Coast as I write this, so I'm
not going to call him up. But has his incredibly shrinking job with
the American Prospect shrunk still further? Meyerson
was hired away from LA in
June 2001 in order to become the executive editor of the
Prospect. Rutten's LA Times piece describes him as the
"executive editor" of the LA Weekly, the job he held before
moving to Washington. But the Weekly's online
masthead describes Meyerson
as the paper's "political editor," a position he could presumably
hold while continuing to work at the Prospect. And
the
Prospect's Meyerson bio
calls him the magazine's "editor-at-large," the position he assumed
last year because (a) it was just an incredibly wonderful opportunity
or (b) he had clashed one too many times with co-editor Robert
Kuttner.
Inquiring minds want to know: did
Rutten make a mistake, or has Meyerson packed up his bags and moved
back to LA?
posted at 9:09 AM |
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Paranoia runs deep. Reader
YH told me to check out the
latest from Peggy Noonan on
OpinionJournal.com. It includes this passage:
Four months ago a friend
who had recently met with the president on other business reported
to me that in conversation the president had said that he has been
having some trouble sleeping, and that when he awakes in the
morning the first thing he often thinks is: I wonder if this is
the day Saddam will do it....
Which begs the question, what
does Mr. Bush know that he hasn't said about Saddam's intentions
and ability to strike America?
Of course, Noonan is prepared to
give President Bush the benefit of the doubt, and then some. What's
interesting, though, is that even a sycophant such as Noonan
acknowledges that Bush hasn't even begun to make a case for why war
is necessary. What seems not to have occurred to her is that perhaps
there isn't a reasonable case to make.
posted at 9:09 AM |
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A strong critique of the
MCAS. Boston Herald political editor Joe Sciacca today
has a good column on what's
wrong with the MCAS,
arguing that high-stakes testing makes no sense in a time of deep
cuts in the education budget. And he offers this advice to Governor
Mitt Romney: "If the governor truly wants to do something bold, he
will revisit MCAS and ask, honestly, whether it is realistic to pump
resources into a single and expensive high-stakes test at the expense
of overall educational quality."
posted at 9:08 AM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
