I’m keeping my head down to work on my book, most of the time, but Kerry Lauerman asked for contributions to a package about “Star Wars,” and, well, I couldn’t resist. You can read my thoughts on why I, as a passionate teenage science fiction fan in the 1970s, was never a fan of George Lucas’s epic, here.

On a related subject, I watched “Spaceballs” for the first time during my last vacation, in the company of my family, and while it was as, well, slight as I expected, there was something about the notion of “The Schwartz” (Mel Brooks’ answer to the Force) that really seemed to charm my five-year-old boys, who took up the concept as a rallying cry and did not let it go.

Poor David Brooks — the guy’s timing is simply awful. Here he is, offering a column — “Meet the Poor Republicans” — that tries to explain why a particular contingent of not-so-well-off voters has lately been voting for the GOP. His answer? Unlike the poor folks who vote for the Democrats, these poor people “agree with Horatio Alger”: they believe that they’ve got a reasonable shot at moving up the ladder, living the American dream, making a fortune and leaving that word “poor” behind. Poor Democrats, on the other hand, tend to be people who think that the cards are stacked against them.

Unfortunately for Brooks, his column ran on the very same day that the Times kicked off a mega-series on “Class in America” — the central premise of which is that there’s a lot less class mobility in America than people believe. (Lest you conservatives fear that this is simply a plot by that filthy liberal Times rag to fill our heads with lies, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story last week reporting pretty much exactly the same thing.)

This juxtaposition of material couldn’t possibly have been intended by the Times’ news editors to make Brooks look like a condescending idiot or a closet Democrat, but that’s the result. Because there’s no way to put these two articles together without concluding that those poor people out there who vote Republican because they think they have a chance to get ahead, those people whose praises Brooks are singing, are, sadly, chumps. They have been sold a bridge. They believe in something that, like creationism or Saddam Hussein’s WMD arsenal, is contra-factual. On the other hand, those poor Democrats, however unfashionably glum and not-with-the-morning-in-America program they may be, seem to have a clearer picture of the state of the union.

One could go further and begin to lay out how the policies of the Bush-era GOP, supported by Brooks’ “poor Republicans,” are only further locking in the sort of class immobility the Times (and Journal) articles note. But let’s not kick Brooks while his own paper has tripped him sprawling, face-down, on the political floor.

Tonight, if you’re in the Bay Area, there’s a party in honor of J.D. Lasica’s new book Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation and a general get-together for the whole “citizen’s media”/independent-journalists-who-use-blogs etc. thing. It’s at the Varnish Gallery Friday evening, 6-9 p.m. Address: 77 Natoma street between 1st and 2nd St. and Mission and Howard. I’ll be there — these days it’s useful for me to share the company of People Who Have Already Finished Books…

The response to my idea in January that newsrooms borrow a page from the open-source playbook and adopt bug-tracking systems wasn’t exactly thunderous (not that I had any reason to expect anything else!). But I was pleasantly surprised — while reading the New York Times’ recent internal report recommending a variety of smart moves the paper should take to combat the erosion of readers’ trust — to see that the flagship paper of American journalism is talking about taking a step in this direction. The Times committee proposes that the paper begin to use a database to track errors:

This is OK, as far as it goes, but notice that the responsibility for entering the error falls on the party least motivated to do so — the “individual responsible for an error.” The resulting system may help the Times notice patterns of errors that it can try to remedy. But it won’t fundamentally improve the feedback loop between the paper and the world it is trying to cover — unless and until the database goes public. Why not open it up and let readers file “bugs” against stories? As I wrote in a follow-up post in January, “I think this approach would pay off best for a newsroom that is having difficulty convincing readers that the publication is actually listening to them. If you showed the public that you were recording and responding to the issues they raised — whether you end up publishing a correction or simply saying, ‘We don’t think that needs correcting, and here’s why’ — I think you’d start to bank some confidence and trust pretty quickly.”

The difference between a private database and a public bug-tracker is the difference between a management tool and an open channel of communication. The former isn’t a bad thing, but the latter is what you want if you really intend to restore public trust.

The report seems overly worried that tying names of journalists to numbers of errors would be unfair to individuals (”Only masthead editors, department heads and the editor in charge of overseeing the error-tracking system should have access to names in the database”). Certainly, the paper’s managers are being enlightened to say that they’re not going to judge reporters based on “raw counts of an individual’s errors,” which “can be simplistic and misleading.” Well and good. But the idea that these numbers need to be kept private seems both overprotective and naive.

The readers who know a subject well enough to know that an error has been made in coverage of that subject also know very well exactly which reporter(s) were responsible for the goof. Bylines are public. Journalism is public. Errors are public. If a particular reporter ends up embarrassed because of an unduly large number of errors associated with his name, he should be. A well-designed public error-tracker for a newspaper could help make sure that those reporters who have real problems getting their facts straight either improve or are eventually retired or moved to less sensitive jobs. Meanwhile, if readers complain repeatedly about a particular reporter’s errors and the paper feels they’re not errors at all, then at least its response and defense of that reporter would be on the record.

The Internet ensures that criticism of journalists and complaints of their mistakes will be public and will name names. Newspapers can’t reverse that. But if they handle things right, they can provide an orderly and reliable record of complaints lodged against them, of actions taken to correct errors or to demonstrate that charges of error are simply mistaken. If they do so, they will help bolster public trust in their work. If they don’t do it on their own terms, the distributed intelligence of the Net will continue to do it on terms that editors will find less and less hospitable.

The heart of conservatism, as elucidated by its progenitor, Edmund Burke, is a healthy respect for the messy, inconsistency-laden reality of human institutions as they have actually evolved across generations. Such institutions are necessarily imperfect, but have value by the simple virtue of having withstood pressure over time. You discard such institutions only with great caution; what is destroyed overnight can take decades to rebuild. This is where we get the very term “conservative”; conservatives believe in the conservation of human institutions and values. Conversely, the word “radical” derives from the Latin for “roots,” because radicalism is all about digging things up at the roots and starting over.

Both impulses have their place in society. But our national politics have reached the strange tipping point at which the two labels have become reversed: they now hang from the necks of our politicians and parties like mixed-up nametags.

The Republican, “red state” agenda can be called “conservative” only by force of habit. Abroad, President Bush pursues a messianic vision, one part religious war and one part democratic crusade, neither pursued with any consistency but both leading to regime changes, bloodshed and the casual abandonment of carefully built institutions and alliances. At home, Bush, having enacted massive changes to the federal tax structure that are steadily bankrupting the government, seeks to scuttle Social Security, the most successful social program in American history.

The president is a radical. It is his Democratic opponents, fighting a rearguard action to protect the institutions of the liberal state that their predecessors built over the last century, who are now conservatives.

I’m thinking in this framework as I ponder the Senate’s “nuclear option” mess. (For a guide to the intricacies of this contorted political conflict, there’s no better starting point than Tim Grieve’s Q&A in today’s Salon.) What’s interesting about the Senate’s procedural civil war is how completely the Republicans, in their triumphant eternal Now, have taken their eye off the past and the future. The past tells us that every party in power sooner or later falls out of the majority. In the future, the Republicans will surely want and need the filibuster that they are so gung-ho to eliminate today.

The Senate leadership’s inability or unwillingness to imagine a future shoe-on-the-other-foot scenario has an analogue in the administration’s casual attitude toward the Geneva Accords and other safeguards against torture. The military has traditionally understood the vital importance of sticking to these agreements, even with despicable and immoral enemies, because it’s the only way you have any hope of insuring that your own people won’t be tortured when they end up in the other side’s prisons. But the Bush administration’s end-justifies-the-means thinking has left this tradition in tatters.

Having squeaked into the White House twice in a row, these guys, it seems, can’t picture a future in which they are no longer running the world. And their short-sightedness is not only beginning to wreck the government; it’s trashing their own conservative tradition. I can’t claim to understand why. Perhaps the millennarian streak of the religious right provides those under its sway with a sort of safety hatch: Like Jim Morrison said, the future’s uncertain and the end is always near. If the end times are nigh, then why worry about the Democrats regaining the majority in a de-filibustered Senate? But I think it’s less likely that the Republican leadership is counting on the apocalypse than that they’re just slaves to short-term thinking.

If a suicide bomber attacks and the media don’t cover it, are the victims still dead?

Today the New York Times’ rookie conservative columnist, John Tierney, offers a variation on the See No Evil argument about Iraq (itself a variation of the Blame the Messenger gambit). The real problem with Iraq, Tierney argues, isn’t that the nation is drifting into civil war and that two years after Saddam Hussein’s overthrow the U.S. still can’t provide any measure of personal safety for those Iraqis brave enough to volunteer to serve in the new government, or show any sign that it has begun to figure out how to reduce the level of violence in the country. The problem, says Tierney, is that the U.S. media is too darn determined to report on the Iraqi rebels’ attacks.

Tierney spins his case by donning the cape of a crusader for media quality: Sensationalist journalists are just too easily distracted by gory photo opportunities. There’s no news here, the columnist argues; seen one suicide bombing, seen ‘em all. “How much shock value or mystery is there anymore to suicide bombings? How intrigued are people by murders when the motive, the weapon and the murderer’s fate are never in doubt?”

In this view, the bombings in Iraq are context-free acts of brutality set apart from any historical continuum. Tierney thinks the media should show “a little restraint” and “reconsider their own fondness for covering suicide bombings.” In his formulation, everything that’s happening in Iraq — all the complex interaction between Sunnis and Kurds and Shiites and American forces, all the ethnic and religious cross-currents, all the backdrop of oil politics and the post-9/11 war with al-Qaeda — gets reduced to the phrase “suicide bombings.” Don’t think that we’re dealing with the latest chapter in a war started by our own government; it’s just a strange rash of “suicide bombings.” Putting the bombers on TV only encourages them! But if we stop the cameras, maybe they will go away.

Tierney’s column is self-evidently ridiculous, but it’s worth noting that it also represents an odd twist in conservative rhetoric. Before the Iraq war, it was liberals who argued that there was no compelling reason to send an army into Iraq — that the equivalent of international police action was doing the job and would continue to do so. (Some liberals also argued for the “police action” approach against Al-Qaeda: Frame the 9/11 attackers as criminals, not as wartime enemies. But the president’s religio-apocalyptic “War on Terror” rhetoric became America’s marching orders instead.) Now that there really is a sad, bloody, endless war in Iraq, the conservatives’ line is shifting: They don’t want us to think of it as a war at all. It really is policing, now, even though we’ve still got a few divisions in the field and soldiers are dying every day. We should deal with it, Tierney says, the way Rudy Giuliani dealt with criminals. Cutting out the press worked in New York City; let’s try it in Baghdad!

The trouble is, while obviously the bombers in Iraq treat media coverage as a part of their strategy, every CNN camera could switch off and every American reporter could come home — you could have a complete blackout of U.S. coverage of every bombing — and the Iraqi rebels would continue to pursue their goals. The U.S. is only one part of a bigger game to them. The horrific bombing attacks in Iraq are not random acts of brutality; they are part of a calculated war plan aimed at undermining any chance of success for the Bush administration’s project in Iraq.

If you were an Iraqi contemplating whether to run for office or serve in the Iraqi police force, you might be reasonably afraid of being targeted by a fanatic with a bomb strapped to his chest. You might overcome your fear; you might choose the better part of valor. One thing I seriously doubt you’d consider was whether said fanatic’s bomb attack was going to get U.S. press coverage or not. Life might be a little easier for the Republicans in Washington if the American media paid less attention to Iraqi suicide bombers, but things wouldn’t get any better for Iraqis.

It’s true that the Bush administration has had some success in applying a See No Evil strategy to U.S. casualties in Iraq. Not allowing the American media to show pictures of American coffins returning home really has helped the administration keep the lid on domestic discontent with its policies. So we might expect White House officials to like the idea of extending the tactic more widely to the Iraq field of operations. What’s hard to fathom is why a journalist would propose anything of the sort.

Longtime readers here know of my enthusiasm for the music of the Mountain Goats. Their new album, The Sunset Tree, is out, and it’s extraordinary. Singer/songwriter John Darnielle gets directly autobiographical here; where his previous outing, We Shall All Be Healed, was a series of recollections and epitaphs for friends and acquaintances from time spent among doomed speed freaks, this one is about his own experiences trying to grow up in a house with a violent stepfather.

That of course makes it sound like the most tiresome sort of confessional singer-songwriting; but when you take this kind of autobiographical material and run it through the loom of the imagination rather than the mill of therapy, something different emerges. There’s poetry here, and exquisite music-making, and more than a little wry humor, and a sense that youthful pain remembered and sung about is better than youth simply forgotten.

And so we have songs like “This Year,” a beaten-down teenage boy’s answer to “I Will Survive” (”I am gonna make it through this year / IF IT KILLS ME”) set to an ostinato hook, and “Dance Music,” with a perky melody playing counterpoint to scenes of domestic mayhem, and “Up the Wolves’s” Romulus-and-Remus parable of growing up wild, and “Pale Green Things,” a delicate tune that close out the album on a note less of reconciliation than of simple witness.

There’s less of We Shall All Be Healed’s Velvets-derived rock, more cello and mandolin in the mix. Each song is memorable, the production (John Vanderslice) is autumnally intimate, the effect stunning. I’m tempted to say something like “abuse never sounded so good,” but rather than trivialize The Sunset Tree with that kind of throwaway line, I’ll just say how glad I am to have it in my ears and head.

(Amazon has a good interview with Darnielle, and streams four songs from the album. For more Goats detail, there’s Jim Fisher’s in-depth study.)

With the controversy over John Bolton’s nomination to become Bush’s ambassador to the U.N., it’s been possible for the administration’s supporters to paint Bolton’s opponents as whiners. The Democrats, it seems, don’t like Bolton because he’s, you know, tough. Raises his voice. Pushes around his inferiors. Well, ask the Republicans, what’s wrong with that? Shouldn’t we want a tough guy at the U.N.? We’re the strongest nation on the planet! Why should we care if one of our diplomats is a hardass? We’re supposed to reject an appointment because the guy yells?

Of course, if you’ve been following the story, you may understand that the issue here isn’t one of bad manners — it’s about bad management and bad judgment. Bolton isn’t just a tough guy; he’s a tough guy who apparently used his ire to bludgeon intelligence reports into the shape he sought. It’s one thing to push around your subordinates; it’s quite another to push around the information on which the lives of Americans and American troops depend. The reason Bolton’s nomination strikes so many observers, including me, as so profoundly wrong is that it’s precisely Bolton’s management style — one shared by, and endorsed by, the Vice President’s office — that led to the debacle of American intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion.

In the “whatever happened to those WMD?” game, the Bush team has been pretty successful at shrugging off blame or diverting it at the intelligence community: Darn that CIA! How could they have misled us so badly? But Bolton’s confirmation hearings stand as a blunt reminder of what really happened: Bush’s men hammered the intelligence “community”, raged at their troops, threw fits and tantrums and delivered threats and ultimatums until the information flowing up from the field matched the fantasy their ideology dictated. When that fantasy collided with the reality on the ground in Iraq — look, ma, no WMD after all! — these men turned around and said, well, we acted on the best information we had at the time. First they pushed around their subordinates; then they blamed their subordinates. Classy! And, sadly, genuinely dangerous in the realm of national security, which is why the intelligence field has a strong tradition of trying to keep its reports insulated from the political tide — one more tradition, like the Senate filibuster, that the pseudo-conservatives of the Bush cadres are casually tossing overboard.

The Bolton saga strikes a chord with the American public because we’ve all worked with, and most of us have worked for, a Bolton or two in our time, and we know how it goes: Mad Boss shouts at the top of his (it’s usually, though not always, a male phenomenon) lungs until the things people say to him match the things he wants to hear.

I first encountered the world of Mad Bosses in various jobs I held as a college kid and later as a fledgling journalist. I assumed that this was the way of the world — that somehow the role of Being In Charge carried with it a dose of generic rage, and that all bosses would inevitably, at some point, explode and abuse their employees. The macho culture of old-school American newsrooms certainly spawned its share of Mad Bosses, and I’d have my run-ins with them. For me, one of the grand things about leaving the comfortable nest of the newsroom and helping found a company was doing my small part to shape a different, more civilized workplace culture, in which people treated each other — superior and subordinate alike — as colleagues, not kicking posts.

I came to realize that Mad Bossism was not an inevitability; it is, in fact, an anachronism. It flows less from power than from frustration at powerlessness. The boss explodes because the world won’t bend to his will — and it’s supposed to! What good is being boss if it won’t?

This has given me a tad more empathy for the bulging-veined, red-faced bosses of my past, though I’m firm in my determination never to work anywhere near the type again. The truth is, it’s no longer as easy as it used to be to get away with this kind of behavior: Joe or Jane Subordinate is going to be blogging every last twitch of Mad Boss’s tantrums. Just look at what’s happened to the director of Los Alamos National Labs, G. Peter Nanos. If the postings about him on a largely anonymous Los Alamos insiders’ blog are true, he’s a classic Mad Boss. Yet the scientists and engineers who work for him, having reached their limit, aren’t giving up; they’ve used the Web to shame him. Mad Boss may have met his match in Mad Blogger.

I can’t say I’m sad to see the field so leveled. The Web is criticized, and often rightly so, for the incivility of so much of its dialogue. But here’s one instance in which it can actually help counter the sort of offline incivility that for too long has been simply a given of the workplace.

Dave Winer just turned 50. Here’s a happy birthday to send his way.

I first met Dave over a decade ago at one of Sylvia Paull’s digital salon gatherings. I didn’t know what to make of him but he was clearly smart and creative, as well as argumentative. I crossed paths with him again in the days of the San Francisco Free Press, when he pitched in with some code to help us post our stories during the newspaper strike. I joined his DaveNet mailing list and read his Wired column. In 1999, after I wrote about blogs (before we called them that), he came to visit us at Salon and urged us to start using his new Manila software, but we’d just built our own content management system and couldn’t face trying to integrate a whole different platform. Then Dave started writing about something called RSS, and at first I didn’t understand what the fuss was all about. Later I did.

I think I’ve been reading Dave’s stuff longer than I’ve read anyone else online, watching as he developed new ideas in full public glare, made mistakes and made history. At first, there was something unique about a software developer stepping forward and saying, “I’m tired of journalists messing up my story — I’m going to tell it my way.” Now there are thousands of programmers doing the same thing; the Web hums with their conversations. As I work on my book I’m tuning in to a lot of them, amazed at how much understanding is unfolding in this abstruse and hitherto cloistered field — and how great an example the programmers are setting for other groups going down the same road. I don’t think these conversations would be happening in quite the same way without Winer’s difficult, challenging, inspired example.

Last week was spring break for the kids, so we went off to Sea Ranch, wandered the wind-swept beaches and spied on baby seals and their mums. It was grand.

I could deal with the 2500 emails piled up for my return (90 percent’s spam, anyway). But the RSS reader backlog is a scary thing. And unlike the spam, these are posts I want to read — otherwise, I wouldn’t be subscribed in the first place. The Net is a harsh mistress: abandon it for a spell and it will have its revenge.