I got into Phoenix for PC Forum very late last night, missing the Sunday afternoon festivities and panels. But there’s plenty to talk about from today. The WiFi here is great, but the combination of a shortage of AC outlets and my own desire to pay attention to the speakers rather than on posting means that I don’t think I’ll be doing too much live-from-the-conference blogging. Look instead for more of a roundup report later this week. Unless I change my mind or some time for writing opens up in the schedule!
Justice is duck-hunt blind
I have a little rant up in the War Room, Salon’s election-and-politics blog, about Justice Antonin Scalia’s broadside yesterday — the one in which he argues that we should all go home and stop worrying about his duck-hunting trip with Dick Cheney. Here’s a taste:
| The energy task force scandal itself hinges on the question of whether it’s appropriate for the vice president to conduct the public’s business as a private matter among clubby business chums. The Supreme Court must rule on that issue — but here’s Scalia saying the public should not be troubled that his own relationship with Cheney is exactly analogous to the relationships at issue in the energy task force dispute. Scalia just can’t seem to get his inflated head around this; he seems to think that the public is worried that he and Cheney discussed details of the energy case while shooting ducks. Scalia’s memo drips with contempt for both the public and the media –but we’re not that stupid. |
Programmers — and writers — at work
I had the pleasure on Tuesday of attending the “Programmers at Work” reunion panel at SDWest. My column covering the talk — which featured Andy Hertzfeld, Charles Simonyi, Dan Bricklin, Jaron Lanier, Scott Kim, Bob Carr and Jef Raskin — is now up, here.
As it turned out, the discussion centered on some questions about software development that fascinate me. In truth, they have obsessed me for the last year and a half. During that time, an idea for a book on this subject gradually assembled itself out of the bits and pieces of my enthusiasm. The idea acquired its own force. I could not ignore it. After a career of helping friends write book proposals, I wrote one myself (I’d done this only once before, in my previous incarnation as a theater critic, and the results were negligible). One thing led to another, and now, to my amazement, I have a deal to publish it (with Crown, a division of Random House).
So it looks as if I am actually going to get to write the book I want to write. Which is really all any writer can hope of the world.
Though I don’t plan to write the book on this blog, I’ll probably be posting occasionally about it, as time permits. If you’re curious, today’s column touches on many of the themes I’ll be exploring. I’m not leaving Salon — not after pouring my heart into it for 8 1/2 years! — but beginning soon, I’ll split my days between my job and research on the book. I feel comfortable doing this because — compared with some of the bumpier periods since the collapse of the Internet boom — Salon is in a good way, overall, with lots of new editorial energy and strong business leadership.
Now, if we can only unseat the Bush administration, 2004 may turn out to be a pretty good year!
Dialogue in Spanish
The comments discussion of my post about the elections on Spain continues to bubble. I wanted to draw your attention to two reports from Spain. The first is from the comments below, from Jose:
| Yesterday we were shown on tv pictures of Bush mentioning cowardice in his response to a question about possible withdrawel of troops from Iraq. But we are not cowards. We did not vote against Aznar on Sunday because we are scared by Al qaeda. Spain has suffered terrorism for many years (ETA) and we believe in fighting terrorism. But we never supported the invasion of Iraq for the reasons (weapons of mass destructing) presented to us. |
And Luke Robinson, who was in Barcelona over the weekend, emailed me to point to his posting:
|
Aznar has not been the most popular man in Spain for quite some time, and, like Bush, questions have arisen surrounding his grasp of the facts (and the truth) regarding the war on terrorism and the invasion of Iraq. I could not say this more clearly: The Spanish were not voting in fear, but in defiance…. as of 5PM on the day of the bombings functionaries within the Spanish government had been told from on high to exploit every opportunity to blame ETA. Aznar himself called several newspapers (including Britain’s Observer) to personally press this line. This was too much for the Spanish to take… They were not voting to withdraw from the war on terrorism – not to be confused with the war on Iraq, which they will probably abandon – but to fight under new leadership that hopefully will do a better job of representing the people of Spain… |
The whole post is worth a read.
Also well-argued is Steven Johnson’s post on this subject.
Democracy at work
Those darn Spanish voters — they just don’t do what George Bush wants them to do. No wonder the administration often seems more comfortable working with dictators.
If you read today’s New York Times op-ed page, you will be treated to dueling hissy-fits about the outcome of the Spanish elections. Voters there — following the awful carnage of last week’s terrorist attacks on Madrid trains — threw out their pro-Iraq War government and put in power a Socialist party committed to withdrawal from Iraq.
First there’s David Brooks, who suggests that the election results constitute “appeasement,” and that Spanish voters have granted al-Qaida’s “wish list.” Then there’s Edward Luttwak, who whined, “Spanish voters have allowed a small band of terrorists to dictate the outcome of their national elections.” In a similar vein, Andrew Sullivan — who never met a conflict he couldn’t find an appeaser in — declares on his own blog, “It is hard to view the results in Spain as anything but a choice between Bush and al Qaeda. Al Qaeda won.”
So let’s look at what really happened here. Ninety percent of the Spanish people — who had to wait decades for their own democracy, until their U.S.-backed fascist dictator died — opposed Bush’s war on Iraq. The Spanish prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, decided to cast his lot with America’s war party anyway. Five days before the election, with the polls showing Aznar with a slight lead, terrorists struck.
It seemed pretty obvious from the start — given the date (2 1/2 years exactly after 9/11) and the coordinated nature of the multiple attacks, an al-Qaida signature — that this was the work of al-Qaida. But Aznar’s government, fearful of a backlash, kept insisting that Basque terrorists were to blame, even as the evidence grew overwhelming to the contrary. At best, this was a pathetic attempt at spin; at worst, an awful deception regarding a grave matter.
I think it’s pretty clear that the vote against Aznar was at least as much a final burst of disgust at this disastrous coverup as it was a general repudiation of the Iraq war. Either way, the lesson here is not that the Spanish people have suddenly become toadies of al-Qaida; it’s that, if you’re trying to lead a democracy in a war against terrorists, your first duty is to tell the truth. You can’t summon the national will required to go the distance against a devious network of murderers if you lose the trust of your own people. And if you make the kind of terrible strategic error that the war in Iraq clearly was — it toppled a brutal regime but distracted the world from the fundamentalist terrorists with whom we really are at war — then don’t be surprised if voters give you the sack.
Is the White House listening? Or did Spain’s elections just reconfirm the contempt for voters it inherited from the 2000 presidential-election debacle?
As the wheel turns
Next week I’m heading out for Esther Dyson’s legendary PC Forum conference (March 21-23), to hear people like Google’s Eric Schmidt, Neal Stephenson, AOL’s Jonathan Miller, Steven Johnson and many more.
I interviewed Dyson back in 1997, on the threshold of Internet-investment mania. A lot of people were saying a lot of silly things in those days; a surprisingly high percentage of Dyson’s observations remain not only unembarrassing but actually relevant:
| The point I’m trying to make is not that intellectual property is valueless, but that the price of copies is going down dramatically, so you need to think of other ways to exploit the content. And a creator is now in a much better position than a publisher. |
At that moment, Napster had yet to begin haunting music execs’ dreams, Salon’s first story on the MP3 revolution was still three months in the future, and blogs were a concept waiting for software to make real.
So I talked to Dyson again yesterday to preview this year’s conference. I’d just read the 70-page “documentation” — a special edition of Dyson’s “Release 1.0” newsletter in which Dyson personally interviews each of the speakers at her conference. You don’t often find that level of focus and attention at tech conferences, where routine pitches and boilerplate Powerpoint presentations are the norm.
I asked Dyson how the ebb and flow of the tech industry’s fortunes over the last half-decade have made themselves felt at PC Forums past: “There were a few years when it was all business models and eyeballs.” Then the wheel of the tech-industry cycle turned downward. “Last year, it was, ‘you gotta have faith and it’s coming back.’ This year, people are ready to get excited again.”
Does she see any signs of boom-era insanity creeping back into the conversation? Not yet, for the most part. “I think people are getting a little overexcited about Google — which is certainly deserving of love, but it’s human, too. I want people to get excited without losing their heads — rational exuberance.”
Depending on the vagaries of Wi-fi and Radio Userland, I’ll be filing from Scottsdale early next week.
Spot the fallacy
Valdis Krebs’ neat chart showing how people who read books by Joe Conason and people who read books by Ann Coulter don’t tend to overlap much in their choice of reading was a useful reminder of how polarized our political culture has become, and it coursed quickly through the blogosphere when it was first published.
It made the New York Times today. In the accompanying article by Emily Eakin you will read the following:
| [Krebs’] finding appears to buttress the argument made by Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago, in his influential study “Republic.com” (Princeton University Press, 2001) that contemporary media and the Internet have abetted a culture of polarization, in which people primarily seek out points of view to which they already subscribe. |
This sounds good until you think for a nanosecond. Yes, Krebs’ chart is a vivid indication that our culture is divided. But it doesn’t offer much help figuring out how we got there. Sure, it’s possible that “contemporary media and the Internet” are at fault, but how does Krebs’ chart buttress that argument? (Note, also, how two very different forces are lumped together in that phrase. “Contemporary media” includes Fox News, which does its share to polarize America; but when it comes to the Internet, I lean more to David Weinberger’s argument, which points out that the Net provides more opportunity for cross-camp dialogue than any other medium, even if we don’t use it as much as we might.)
The logical fallacy in the Times piece is a simple one: Krebs’ chart is about book purchases. Books are wonderful things, but they don’t exactly fit under the rubric of “contemporary media and the Internet.” If we’re blaming media technologies for political polarization based on the Krebs study then we’d better start pointing fingers at the dreaded printing press. Let us restrict the flow of ink! Or, more sensibly, we should stop blaming technology and start looking at the content of our communication. It may be that our readership of books today is polarized because our nation is deeply and fundamentally split about very basic subjects and ideas.
Last night on Fresh Air I heard Terry Gross interview the lunatic Tim LaHaye, author of the appallingly popular “Left Behind” novels about the apocalypse and the end days and the coming of the Antichrist. LaHaye believes I’m going to burn in hell because I don’t believe in his god. It’s very hard for me to think that there is any overlap between his idea of America and mine. But he sells many more books than Salon ever has, or probably will. We’re beyond polarized — we’re living in parallel universes that happen to share the same continent and electoral system.
Does anyone at Dow Jones know what an adverb is?
The Wall Street Journal is a great American newspaper, and I have a high regard for the journalists who put out its news pages. (The editorial page — well, forget it.) But surely someone who understands English grammar could have caught the absurdity buried within the front-page Journal story today headlined “A Job for Solomon: Was Bono’s Blurt
A Verb or Modifier?” The piece profiles David Solomon, the FCC’s “chief of enforcement” — in other words, the guy who gets to decide when someone is indecent enough on the air to require chastisement. Here’s the offending passage:
| After a nine-month review, Mr. Solomon ruled that the exclamation survived the three-pronged test: It wasn’t sexually explicit, intended to titillate or sustained. “The performer used the word as an adjective or expletive to emphasize exclamation,” Mr. Solomon wrote. (Technically, Bono’s expletive was used as an adverb, modifying the adjective “brilliant.”) |
No, no, no. Solomon was right, and the reporter here, who butts in with a supercilious parenthesis to correct Solomon, has made a fool of herself. Bono’s expletive (what he said, apparently, is “This is really, really fucking brilliant”) is a participle, which is the adjectival form of a verb. Since it’s being used as an expletive, and not to convey the original meaning of the root verb, this pretty much doesn’t matter. But under no possible reading is it an adverb. An adverb modifies a verb, so it’s awfully hard to turn a verb into an adverb. “Fuckly”? “Fuckingly”? It just doesn’t fly.
Some people get offended by four-letter words. I get offended by grammatical illiteracy in places where people should know better.
FOLLOWUP 3/16/04: As the comments show, I owe the Journal an apology for my uncharacteristically intemperate outburst. I still think it was a little uncharitable to shanghai Mr. Solomon’s quote in this fashion, but clearly I was at least equally uncharitable in my response. Fucking — it’s a participle! It’s an adjective! And it’s an adverb! Fucking versatile word…
SECOND FOLLOWUP 3/24/04: Linguist Geoff Nunberg weighs in on our comments below and takes my side in this still-brewing controversy.
Bruno Wassertheil, 1935-2004
I first met Bruno Wassertheil nearly 15 years ago, shortly after I started dating the woman I’d later marry. Dayna had frequently referred to her mother’s companion by his first name, but it was only right before I met Bruno that she told me his last name. The moment she did, I could hear the former CBS Radio News correspondent’s plummy voice in my ear, as I’d heard it so many times through the years on my mom’s kitchen radio, which she kept tuned to CBS News every evening as she prepared dinner while I was growing up. I’d heard Bruno’s reporting from Israel through most of the ’70s, but in all that time I never knew how to spell his name.
When we did meet, it was inevitable that we’d end up arguing over politics: Bruno, who’d lived for decades in Israel and raised a family there, held views on Middle East issues that were often at odds with mine. Our disagreements didn’t keep us from becoming friends; if anything, they brought us closer. I learned in that first argument with him something that held through all the subsequent years of dinner-table debates: Bruno’s views were always rooted in a careful and respectful assessment of facts. He always knew what he was talking about, and he listened carefully to those who saw things differently. The same trait that made him such a good mealtime conversationalist was what had made him such a sterling news correspondent.
Bruno Wassertheil died last week. It happened very quickly — his cancer was first diagnosed in December — and I’m still a little in shock. The S.F. Chronicle wrote up a good obituary that you can find here. I’d add to its report that he was a brilliant Scrabble player; a wonderful step-grandpa to my children; a true pro as a journalist; and in everything a gentleman. I will miss him.
Back from the road
I’m back from travels, trying to catch up with the backlog of — everything. As the song goes on the album I’m currently infatuated with, the Mountain Goats’ “We Shall All Be Healed”: “The arteries are clogging in the mainframes / There’s too much information in the pipes.”
In the meantime, I note with pleasure that Slate now has an RSS feed, a previous lack that I complained about a month ago. More information in more pipes!