I’m glad that Howard Dean, the doctor running for president, is raising the issue of Bush’s shameful stem-cell research policy. (I wrote about it in 2001, when it was announced.) Bush’s wrongheaded plan restricts vital medical research using a religious rationale that, if consistently applied, would also require the banning of a wide variety of commonly used fertility treatments. That would cause a political uproar, of course, and when has Bush ever cared about consistency? His Rove-driven policies are all about targeting electoral constituencies. Released in the summer before 9/11 with considerable ballyhoo, Bush’s stem-cell research ban (that’s essentially what it is, though he trumpeted a dubious loophole allowing extremely limited research to proceed) got lost in the post-9/11 news torrent. Dean deserves credit for putting this story back in the spotlight and reminding us where Bush went wrong.
Love me, I’m a liberal
The “liberal” label has been on a long journey from its Victorian-era origins — the root is from the Latin for “free,” of course, and the original liberals were proponents of free trade (which means that today’s anti-globalism liberals have now come a full 180 degrees).
Jeff Jarvis has been posting recently about the meaning of the term “liberal” today. Jarvis’s ardent pro-war positions have placed him at odds with a lot of people who think of themselves as liberals, but he’s determined not to give up the label.
Good for him: Liberalism should be a big tent, and surely, just as there were “Cold War liberals” who shared some positions, but not all, with their dovish liberal coevals, there has to be room for “terror war liberals” today — even if their conversations with their antiwar brethren escalate into shouting matches.
This discussion prompted Jarvis to offer extensive quotes from a 1960 John F. Kennedy speech defining liberalism. What’s fascinating to me about Kennedy’s rhetoric is not to try to parse how it relates to today’s war debate (I don’t think it much does at all) but rather to notice the one gigantic thing it’s missing: It’s entirely secular. No mention of God. No dutiful punching of the religious-belief card. All the beliefs are specifically and proudly humanist:
| I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas. It is, I believe, the faith in our fellow citizens as individuals and as people that lies at the heart of the liberal faith. |
Human dignity — not divine dignity — as the source of national purpose. Faith in our fellow citizens — not faith in a deity or a scripture. For Kennedy, as a Catholic trying to become the first president of his faith, keeping God out of his politics made perfect political sense, but it also made moral sense. It still does.
Kennedy’s speech reminds us that one of the key freedoms liberals hold dear is freedom from state religion. By keeping government out of religion, we keep religion free for each individual. And one of the things that unites liberals today is a deep anger at our present administration’s deliberate efforts to mix up religion with government. There’s a constituency for that, to be sure. But don’t underestimate the liberal constituency. I’ve still got some “faith in my fellow citizens as individuals.”
“Writing is like driving at night in the fog”
While we’re on the subject, I can’t resist repeating a quotation about writing that Cory Doctorow recently posted on BoingBoing. It’s by E.L. Doctorow, and, well, it’s just the truth:
| Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing. . . . Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. |
“0wnz0red” is h0n0red
In case you haven’t already seen the notice we posted today on our home page, Salon is super-proud that the short story by Cory Doctorow we published last year, “0wnz0red,” is a Nebula Award finalist. Congratulations to the author. If you haven’t read the story yet, hey, this is the Web — it’s still there. What are you waiting for?
MoveOn up
My colleague Joan Walsh has done a thorough job of explaining the political dynamics around the Republican National Committee’s disingenuous assault on MoveOn’s “Bush in 30 Seconds” ad contest. But there’s one aspect of this into which I want to delve a little more deeply.
At BloggerCon last fall, where talk about candidates’ blogs was the rage, it was clear that the doomsday scenario for political campaigns experimenting with “emergent democracy” went something like this: (a) Overenthusiastic supporter of candidate, “un-controlled” by headquarters, posts something impolitic on a candidate’s blog or message board. (b) Candidate’s opponents jump on the posting, spotlighting it in attack ads as if it were the campaign’s official line. (c) Candidate finds him/herself in trouble, and wonders whether all this idealistic stuff about “emergent democracy” was worth it.
Well, the scenario has now happened — albeit in a somewhat different form, since MoveOn is an advocacy group rather than a candidacy. Anyone familiar with the online world is unlikely to be fooled by the RNC attack on MoveOn: It’s painfully obvious that MoveOn was running an open competition, that some of the entries were bound to be outre or inappropriate, and that the open voting process was likely to insure that (as happened) the good entries rose to the top.
What the Republicans are doing is pretending that every single entry in the contest was endorsed by MoveOn. It’s as if I went over to the New York Times’ message boards, found some idiot’s rant about how the Trilateral Commission controls the universe, and held a press conference denouncing Arthur Sulzberger for condoning wacked-out conspiracy theories.
Except for one thing: MoveOn was apparently vetting the entries “for legal issues.” And once you start vetting submitted content, you’re considered (under the law) more like a publisher. So MoveOn does have an iota of responsibility here.
In reaction to the controversy, MoveOn organizers say they will vet more carefully in the future. An alternative they should consider: Vet less. Open the mike even more. Make yourself less of a publisher, and thus less open to spurious attack. In the long run, I’m quite confident that the public will be able to understand the difference between user-generated content and a campaign’s or organization’s official material. In the short term, the Republicans are getting some dubious mileage out of deliberately confusing people.
The poetry of spam
As part of a recent cycle in the arms race between spam senders and spam filters, the spammers have begun raiding the English dictionary for random obscure words to seed their subject lines, helping evade intelligent filters like SpamAssassin. Thus I am seeing some of their messages. And I have to say, though I am no happier at receiving their e-mail than anyone else, and have less than zero interest in the herbal viagra and penis patches they are peddling, the random verbiage in their subject lines sometimes catches my fancy.
Perhaps spam is, as my colleague Sumana Harihareswara has proposed and chronicled, a kind of folk art. Consider some of the recent examples I’ve culled. These are juxtapositions of words that might inspire a new generation of band names, or spark a screenwriter’s imagination. Herewith, the subject lines, and my attempt at interpretation:
interlace possibility
— A TV engineer daydreams of romance
origami inflation
— Paper money is always at risk
yarmulke bedaub
— No baptism please, we’re Jewish
antimacassar asymmetry
— Headrests in need of some thoughtful rearrangement
And my favorite:
aerogene flagstaff phantasy haze
— special effects smoke generator deployed for Jimi Hendrix Arizona gig!
Art is so much a matter of projection, anyway. The Rain Parade had an album title, “Emergency Third Rail Power Trip,” which struck me — when, as a resident of Boston in the mid-1980s, I purchased the LP — as a psychedelic word-poem about electrocuted megalomaniacs. When I moved to San Francisco I discovered its more prosaic origin, as a utility sign posted near the BART tracks.
BONUS LINKS: Spam poetry.
Other Google links for spam poetry
Move right along
MoveOn.org has winnowed down the 1500 entries in its “Bush in 30 Seconds” contest to 15 finalists, via an open online vote. This one is my favorite among the finalists.
There’s an absurd dustup being fanned by the Republicans about how one of the entries in the original 1500 likened Bush to Hitler. Excessive? Sure. Godwin’s Law manifestation? Sure. But look, guys, it was an open competition: far as I can tell, MoveOn screened the entries for basic video quality and to screen out obscenities — it wasn’t exercising editorial control. Note that the Nazi comparison didn’t make it into the finalist round. If this is the best MoveOn’s opponents can do, it doesn’t say much for them.
Random links
Real Live Preacher is wrestling with the question of his anonymity.
Tim Bray is exploring the factors that make different technologies into successes or failures.
There and back again
I finally saw “Return of the King” yesterday (life with two four-year-old boys keeps my moviegoing to the bare minimum). It delivers exactly what the first two films suggested it would — which is to say, it’s a marvel. There are certain spots where director Peter Jackson actually improves upon Tolkien: It’s been a few years since my last re-reading of the trilogy, but I don’t recall the lighting of the beacons from Gondor to Rohan being such a soaring moment, with what look like isolated Himalayan-high eyries passing their message across the roof of the world; and Aragorn’s passage through the Paths of the Dead feels as if it has some extra fillips of chill. Jackson closely follows Tolkien’s script for the ebb and flow of fortune during the Battle of the Pellenor Fields, and the result, with bows to Kurosawa, is a battle scene up there with cinema’s all-time landmarks. And the exquisite presentation of Gollum’s tormented split personality, begun in “The Two Towers,” runs its awful, world-changing course.
There are of course some minor disappointments: Denethor is turned from a figure of Shakespearian tragedy into more of a Jacobean-ogre caricature; the loss of “The Scouring of the Shire” (entirely understandable from the vantage of running time) upsets the balance of Tolkien’s bittersweet conclusion. But overall, the movie is an improbably wonderful achievement, a cinematic realization of Tolkien’s world that can proudly stand next to its original. When Barad-Dur collapses, in ceaseless cascades of plunging ebony masonry, it’s as if all the movie trilogy’s vertiginous pinnacles of terror — from the bridge of Khazad-Dum to Orthanc to Cirith Ungol — are falling at once, and forever.
BONUS LINK: A research project exploring reactions to the LotR movies around the world needs you to answer its questionnaire. [Link courtesy Henry Jenkins]
Truth or gaffes?
Howard Dean’s Democratic rivals are yapping at his heels for two statements he has made that supposedly indicate how unsuited he is for the presidency. What are the two beyond-the-pale Dean quotes?
First, Dean told a New Hampshire newspaper that he believes Osama bin Laden should receive a fair trial. Here are Dean’s words: “‘I’ve resisted pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found,’ Dean said in the interview. ‘I will have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials.'”
So I scratch my head and wonder, for those people who find this comment outrageous, what’s the alternative? Assuming bin Laden is captured at some point — and not killed during combat as he is being captured — what do those who object to Dean’s statement propose to do? Do we lynch the guy? Shoot him like a dog? Carry his head around on the end of a pole?
When the U.S. captured Nazi war criminals at the end of World War II, we didn’t summarily execute them — we put them on trial. Surely that respect for legal process and rejection of vigilantism is part of what we’re fighting for in the “war on terror.”
In subsequent comments Dean has said that he feels, as I imagine the great majority of Americans do, that bin Laden deserves the death penalty — but after a trial, not before. Anyone who reads the candidate’s words can see that this is what he means, and it’s surely not a controversial position. But the media’s anecdote-manufacturing machine has somehow turned this incident into a “gaffe.” Dean said something he wasn’t supposed to say. And the other Democratic candidates are seizing the incident as ammunition.
The other statement that Dean is being pilloried for is this one: “‘The capture of Saddam is a good thing which I hope very much will keep our soldiers in Iraq and around the world safer,’ Dean said. ‘But the capture of Saddam has not made America safer.'”
What am I missing here: Can anyone seriously argue with that statement? Did Saddam in his tunnel pose Americans any kind of threat? Tactically, in the field in Iraq, it’s an open question whether his capture will help improve things: Maybe the ex-dictator was running the Iraqi attacks from his hole in the ground, maybe he wasn’t. That’s important for our troops and for Iraqis — and Dean gives it its due. But in terms of the big issue of our day — protecting Americans at home from more terror attacks a la 9/11 — the capture of Saddam was and is irrelevant. The war in Iraq wasn’t a war on the people who perpetrated 9/11. The terror alert is “orange,” international air traffic is being disrupted, and, we’re told, the threat of a terror attack is higher now than at any time since 9/11.
So how was it, exactly, that America got safer when Saddam was hauled into the daylight? And how is it, exactly, that Dean’s pointing this out is a “gaffe”?
More questions: Why are Dean’s rivals playing into their Republican opponents’ hands by portraying either of these statements as out-of-bounds outrages? And why is the political press — like this Sunday New York Times piece — playing along?