I’ll be attending a wedding and offline till Monday, so no new posting for a bit.
Back to the future
In a previous life I spent my time writing about plays and movies. At the S.F. Examiner — may it rest in peace — I had the privilege of being movie critic from 1992 to 1994. One of the challenges of the job was finding ways to respond creatively, and uniquely, to products that were rolling off Hollywood’s assembly line with depressing uniformity. Another of the challenges was to do so between the hours of 10:30 p.m., when a movie screening often ended, and my 2 a.m. deadline.
Sometimes I found ways to have fun. Today’s sad news from the recall election reminded me of one of those occasions, when, bored beyond reason by Schwarzenegger’s 1993 dud “The Last Action Hero,” I discarded the usual review format and instead wrote up an imaginary dialogue between video archivists of the future. It was clear to me then that Arnold’s career as an action star was tanking. I was not sufficiently prescient to predict his second career (third, really, if you count bodybuilder and movie star as one and two) as a demagogue.
I’m posting the piece here for those looking for some Schwarzenegger-y diversion.
Krugman in hardcover
My review of the new Paul Krugman collection is up today.
Spam deconstruction contest
This is cool: Mark Hoback of Fried Green Al-Qaedas is sponsoring a “Spam Deconstruction Contest” — and the judge is none other than Bill Griffith, the amazing creator of Zippy the Pinhead. (If there is a character anywhere well-suited to the appreciation of the finer points of spam, it would be Zippy.) Entries are due Aug. 26. Full info here. Prizes, too.
When I went to work for the old San Francisco Examiner back in 1986, I worried a bit about the prospect of connecting my career with a Hearst paper. What helped sell me on the Examiner was that it ran Zippy every day — at that time (and perhaps still?) a rarity among U.S. dailies.
More grist for Mill
Every now and then I get to pull back from my managerial duties and write a full-length piece. Today in Salon you can find my essay on John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty.” It’s part of the series we’ve been running called “Documents of Freedom” — a look back at some of the pieces of writing and speech that form the foundation of the liberties Americans often take for granted. (Here’s the full list so far.)
David Weinberger has posted an interesting response. David raises questions about what he sees as Mill’s too-rational vision: “Nevertheless, Mill has always struck me, in his views on liberty as well as his utilitarianism’s calm calculus of interests, as being overly rationalistic in his proposed methodologies, even while repudiating authority and legislated principle.”
I think it’s probably impossible that Mill, given who he was and how he was raised to be the Ultimate Utilitarian, could avoid seeming overly rational to us — steeped as we are in all the irrationality that followed his era, in heaps of Freud and gobs of Nietzsche and decades of 20th-century horrors that have made us justifiably suspicious of Victorian progressives’ optimism. And yet it’s also clear to me that “On Liberty” intended to expand the boundaries of that utilitarianism in what, to Mill himself at least, probably felt like profoundly non-rational ways — to encompass all of the eccentric traits and organically developed characteristics that make us individuals and that enrich the world without necessarily being useful in a way that Bentham would have recognized.
Time off
I’m on vacation this week as Salon slows its publishing cycle a bit. Blogging will be sporadic.
Anniversary
Bruce Umbaugh reminds us that today marks the one-year anniversary of the launch of Salon Blogs. (Here’s a link to my first day’s posts from a year ago.) Thanks to everyone who has chosen to pitch their blog-tents on our virtual turf!
Semi snooties
My kids love a book called “Big Truck and Little Truck,” in which a little pickup tries to make his way through the big world. On one page, plucky Little Truck encounters what the book describes as “snooty semis.”
Matthew and Jack often have near-total recall of the phrases in their bedtime books, but they somehow transposed “snooty semis” into “semi snooties.” The word was too wonderful to correct at first, and over time I have come to find it of some use.
“Semi-snooty,” for instance, is now the word that pops into my brain when the word “semiotic” is uttered within my earshot. Many are the crimes against common sense that have been committed in this word’s name. But last week at the Stanford/Harvard ILaw seminar Terry Fisher used it in a context that actually made sense to me.
The phrase he used was “semiotic democracy,” a term that apparently has been kicking around academe for some time but that I have not encountered before. Fisher described a “concentration of the power of meaning making” as a corollary to the concentration of media ownership and the prevalence of broadcast media technology. So if “political democracy” describes a system in which everyone gets to participate in the exercise of political power, “semiotic democracy” describes a system in which everyone gets to participate in the creation of cultural meaning.
Which sounds like a pretty great ideal to me. However far we may be from ever achieving it, it’s a useful yardstick, something new to weigh in the equation of social value. And it is exactly what has attracted me over the years to the phenomenon of digital storytelling. Which leads me to…
On the vine
I’m opening the doors today on a new project — something I’m doing on the side, not affiliated with Salon — called Storyvine. It’s a themed blog, focusing on digital storytelling — the description is “the digital storytelling grapevine.” Here’s the mission statement: “I’ve got two goals for this blog: First, by providing timely news and links I hope to provide a useful service to the existing community that has formed around the idea of digital storytelling over the last decade or so, since the first Digital Storytelling Festival in Crested Butte, Colorado, in 1995. Second, I hope to help people who are curious about this phenomenon get a clearer handle on what it is, and where to find out more.”
I intend to update it as regularly as there’s news, information, links or thoughts that are of interest to the people who are interested in this subject. Come visit.
If it quacks like a quagmire…
Back in March, on the eve of war, I quoted one knowledgeable observer’s predictions:
| In a Fresh Air interview tonight that I can only describe as “dreadful,” in the primal meaning of the word, CIA historian Thomas Powers put details on the face of these fears. He predicted, as everyone does, a swift U.S. victory in a month or so. Then a couple months of calm. Then, a gradual awareness: That this project of installing a client government in Iraq, even in the sunniest of outcomes, must last a generation or more. That hundreds of thousands of American troops have now become sitting-duck targets for suicidal terrorists who will have no need to hijack a plane to access their foes. That these troops will now sit on the border with another “axis of evil” enemy, Iran, which, like Saddam’s Iraq, also seeks nuclear weapons. That this war, like Bush’s larger “war on terrorism,” has no clear definition of its aims, its scope or its foes — and that such a war has no end in sight and can have no victory. |
That’s pretty much the way it’s gone. This analysis from the New York Times’ Michael Gordon outlines the shape of the guerrilla war we are now locked in, in which each day’s news brings another report of an ambush or an attack, another dead American soldier, another reprisal against some Baathist holdout, another batch of Iraqis wounded or killed.
The warmongering crowd sneered at those who cautioned of this likelihood; we were lily-livered traitors whose use of the word “quagmire” was lampooned as a ludicrous artifact of the Vietnam era.
Then consider this quote which appeared in a dispatch from the Times’ Steven Lee Myers, who appears to have spent enough time with the troops he is covering to win their trust:
| “You call Donald Rumsfeld and tell him our sorry asses are ready to go home,” Pfc. Matthew C. O’Dell, an infantryman in Sergeant Betancourt’s platoon, said as he stood guard on Tuesday. “Tell him to come spend a night in our building.” |
Something tells me this serviceman — unlike the armchair warriors who stoked this war with bloated rhetoric and false evidence — might not find the word “quagmire” so objectionable.
Bringing up the rear
SIDE NOTE: My jaw dropped to read that word “asses” on the Times front page, given the paper’s tightlaced history. My own, now-ancient experience as a freelancer with the Times had led me to believe the paper was much more careful about such posterior references.
Back in the mid-’80s I’d interviewed Italian playwright/performer Dario Fo and written it up for the Times Arts and Leisure section. In the course of the article I needed to refer to a particular scene from Fo’s signature work, “Mistero Buffo,” a solo comic performance drawn from the iconoclastic commedia dell’arte tradition. There is a moment in which Fo plays a Pope who gets a kick to his, if you’ll pardon me, butt. I knew “butt” was out of the question for the Times, so I wrote “rear,” figuring it was sufficiently innocuous. But I got a call from the Times copy desk: “rear” didn’t pass muster. Hmm, I thought, OK; er, how about “behind” — who could possibly object to that? The copy editor sounded only partially mollified but we left it there.
When the article was published, if I remember correctly, the Pope’s bottom had become a “backside.” I could only marvel at an institution whose sense of propriety had such infinitesimal gradations.