As our part of the effort to get at the remaining 5 percent of Americans who haven't yet signed up with AOL, my newspaper sent out those silly CD's last week. One CD to every one of our nearly 50,000 subscribrs.
But because they were paying us to deliver them, we ordered 52,000 of them and we still have 2,000 left over.
Anyone want them?
They're really good if you're a hacker with a virus you want to upload. You can use the anonymous username and password on the CD box to get online and leave your present.
When the right detection equipment is on hand, smuggling a nuclear weapon is like trying to smuggle a siren -- while it's going off.
It gets better.
The phrase comes from a sentence lifted in its entirety from an op-ed piece by an Ohio Republican congressman and published in an Ohio newspaper weeks ago.
Either Bush's speechwriter's are incredibly blatant plagiarists ...
... or they wrote the op-ed piece too.
Does anyone notice the fine irony of a Heinlein discussion here in the world of left-leaning blogs, which seems to be maintained to a large degree by the Heinlein demographic?
By that, I mean computer-savvy, SF reading left-libertarians, many with some military experience. For example: DailyKos, Calpundit, Brad Delong, Steve Gilliard.
This isn't quite what Heinlein envisioned, but it seems to be something he helped create.
You know, we ARE talking about the guy who wrote "Methuselah's Children," in which Libby runs up the passageway and says: "I've just invented a spaceship drive that will let us get away from the Earth cops and travel to other stars. Plug it in and let's go."
Everyone realizes that the science and technology in science fiction are metaphors, right? I mean, Heinlein wasn't raising money to build the rolling roads, he was just making up a story.
I was just trying to imagine the context in which Heinlein wrote "For Us The Living" and immediately thought of Katherine Hepburn's early films.
Hepburn was born May 12, 1907, 2 months before Heinlein. In 1939, she was on Broadway in "The Philadelphia Story" -- before it became a movie.
It's not hard to imagine an era where men wore suits with wide lapels and slicked their hair back like (the very young) Jimmy Stewart. An era where nudity, libertarianism, and videophones were as radical as you could get.
I admit it. I think of ordinary Americans as "them."
But not because of my political persuasions. It comes from 25 years in newspapers, taking "their" phone calls, reporting "their" lies, reading "their" letters to the editor, walking around "their" schools, going to "their" Town Council and Planning and Zoning meetings, compiling "their" school bus schedules, and all the other work that has brought me an unwanted intimate knowledge of "them."
Which is why, after 18 years of daily news writing, I was considered to surly to be allowed out in public and was promoted from newspaper reporter to newspaper editor.
When you call a newspaper and you are suddenly struck by the paranoid fear that it's just a big room full of people who will all laugh at you when you hang up, remember this: it's not paranoia and we really do laugh at you.
When it comes to "us" vs. "them" newspapers have it all over "the Left" -- no matter who has taken it over.
No woe from me.
I see a tremendous creative ferment going on across the country, with lots of people voicing their opposition to the authoritarian agenda being foist upon us. And not just on the Internet -- Buzzflash links to dozens of newspaper editorial pages where criticism is not being suppressed and language is not being censored or tempered.
I expect the coming decade or two to be very exciting, with victory ultimately ours. There's nothing like a pack of evil weasels seizing power to concentrate the attention, efforts, and ideology of everyone who has ever had an anti-authoritarian thought.
This is just the germinating phase when much of the activity is still under the surface. When the struggle emerges full-blown, things will get really interesting (as in the old Chinese curse).
But this is the way such narratives go. Evil gets a head start, but good finally rallies against it.
Actually, a large segment of the Left consists of Evangelical Lutherans, Unitarian-Universalists, Congregationalists, and other church-going folk who have managed to apply their moral values to their political lives without screwing it up (as so many of their Republican brethren have managed to do). But this part of the Left doesn't get the media play that the fringier elements do.
Also lurking beneath the radar are a number of unions -- I remember the Machinists when Willy Wimpisinger was their leader.
Real Democrats (as oppposed to Fifth Column DLC Democrats) are still around in large numbers without making much of a footprint on the national consciousness (yet).
And then there's the Pete Seeger/Arlo Guthrie Left in places like interior New England; upstate New York; the Pacific Northwest; northern California; Madison, Wisc.; and other refuges.
These folks provide a large but hidden bulk of the 43 percent of the country that never gave up on Bill Clinton and continue to consistently oppose the Smirking Chimp (and an even larger share of the 25 percent that still believe the election in 2000 was stolen).
One of the particularly interesting things that have happened politically in the past couple of years is the mooshing together of everyone to the left of, say, Bob Dole, into one big, seething, disenfranchised, powerless glob.
Liberals, progressives, Trotskyites, DLCers, Jim Jeffords, and all the rest have suddenly found common ground against the evil weasels who have seized power. Our differences over the various solutions to the world's problems have paled in significance to the underlying problem: the weasels want those problems to get worse and not better.
In some ways, this is a good thing. I'm looking forward to the day when we all get it together and take back the planet -- and get back to squabbling over the details of the proper path to the future.
While everyone is focusing on the "heathen" remarks, I think it's much more interesting that he had to warn his troops to avoid making "damn catcalls."
Given that the pResident feels safe making public speeches only before audiences who can be locked up in the brig or stockade for voicing dissent, this is significant. If even the uniformed military is starting to chafe at his imperial rule, he's in more trouble than anyone wants to let on.
It's not quite the same as a state-owned newspaper, but the best description of the NYT that I've heard is that "it's the way the ruling class of America communicates with itself."
As a journalist, a newspaper editor, and a former writer for The New York Times, I feel uniquely qualified to comment on this issue.
It is the height of hypocrisy for the Times and everyone else to make a huge deal out of Jayson Blair and ignore Jeff Gerth (whose false stories about Whitewater contributed to a lost decade of public discourse) and Frank Bruni (whose coverage of the Bush 200 campaign helped us get into the current nightmare), both of whom have done more to tarnish the Times reputation than anything that Blair ever did.
Those who continue to believe in the myth of a "liberal" New York Times are working entirely on the inertia of the recently passed century, and not on a critical reading of the news.
For more details, I refer you all to www.mediawhoresonline.com, www.dailyhowler.com, and books by Joe Conason, Gene Lyons, Eric Alterman, and others who have put much more coherent thought into their critiques than I have.
You should all know that there's a much broader debate about the state of journalism in America than would appear if you don't check in with those critical (in more than one sense) Web sites.
All that being said, I agree with Patrick that the New York Times is a significantly better paper than most. My own experience is that they are demanding and professional in the extreme. They certainly subjected me to the most withering editorial fire I've ever experienced -- and I was much the better for it.
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| 2004 | 7 |
| 2003 | 7 |
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