Creedocide

Getting rid of mice the spiritual way.

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Chickenhawks: President must over-dramatically scold and condemn from home (not Hawaii) to be serious on terror

Glenn Greenwald says Obama's calm is what he likes about him. This is in response to media drumbeaters straight from the mainstream media and/or neocon butcher shops attacking Obama for his so-called lack of a hysterical, over-dramatic return to "defend" us from terrorism and say "bring it on" in from the White House (or heroic as this fearful wing of the Right characterize it) after the failed attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253. I like that aspect of Obama too. Sometimes his glib aloofness is both a gift and a curse, but in this case, it serves him well.

Greenwald on the struggle to spin Obama's treatment of Flight 253 and our addiction to terror melodramas:

That's because Obama reacted as though this is exactly what it actually is: a lame, failed attempt to kill people by a fractured band of criminals. It's not the Cuban Missile Crisis or the attack on Pearl Harbor, as disappointing and unfulfilling as it is to accept that. It merits analysis, investigation and possibly policy changes by the responsible government agencies -- not a bright-red-alert, bell-ringing, siren-sounding government-wide emergency that venerates Al Qaeda into a threat so profound that the President can't even be away from Washington lest they get us all. As always, Al Qaeda's greatest allies are the ones in the U.S. who tremble with the most fear at the very mention of their name and who quite obviously crave a return of that stimulating, all-consuming, elevating 9/12 glory.

We are so afraid. Why? It's as if we possess only a hairline-sensitive ability -- or disability -- to not lose our minds when an event like Flight 253 happens. The sole interest for cable networks and the rest of the mainstream media is to whip up lame tripes about his bonafides, safe, safe, are you safe, what's Obama doing? Why is he "soft" on terror, which is ridiculously ironic since he's near a 5-front war on Musliim countries right now, with Iran looming in the background. That old right-wing state of fury and vengeance is really drilled into Americans' heads. I fear some did not learn lessons of the Iraq War run-up.

Hubris ... overweening pride

Torture-memo author John Yoo will never go away. He'll continue to pop up to defend torture, a de facto defense of his own egregious behavior as a stooge Office of Legal Counsel lawyer for the Justice Department who was more than giddy to rubber stamp whatever his dear leader Bush wanted: the torture of other human beings in the name of "national security."

Yet it's still a little disorienting to read quips like the ones he offered The New York Times Magazine.

Do you regret writing the so-called torture memos, which claimed that President Bush was legally entitled to ignore laws prohibiting torture?
No, I had to write them. It was my job. As a lawyer, I had a client. The client needed a legal question answered.

When you say you had “a client,” do you mean President Bush?
Yes, I mean the president, but also the U.S. government as a whole.

But isn’t a lawyer in the Department of Justice there to serve the people of this country?
Yes, I think you are quite right, when the government is executing the laws, but if there’s a conflict between the president and the Congress, then you have to pick one or the other.

Were you close to George Bush?
No, I’ve never met him. I don’t know Cheney either. I have not gone hunting with him, which is probably a good thing for me.

"It was my job. As a lawyer, I had a client. The client needed a legal question answered." Unbelievable. Does he hear what's coming out of mouth? I get it, defend yourself at all costs John. But understand that you'll have keep up this pathetic, soul-sucking charade the rest of your miserable life. Maybe it's not a charade, maybe he's convinced himself through extreme delusion that what he did was just. But then why does he continue to pop up in such inane "interviews" like this that only make him look more like the tool he is? Why does he keep writing op-eds?

He knows what he's validated. And he'll have to keep it up, at least for the next 20 years or so.

My holiday

He is watching

Another disappointment

With so much else going on (health care, Afghanistan, Wall St. hackery, 20 inches of snow), I'll admit I don't think much about judicial appointments made by the president. Just not my thing. But I do understand the gravity behind these lifetime appointees that are trusted to uphold the law, of course.

So it's further disheartening -- after all the other shortcomings -- that the Obama administration is woefully behind, or just slow, in filling so many important vacancies. On top of that, Obama has shown a nasty moderate streak. Firedoglake's bmaz has an excellent take on the state of judicial nominees. In Obama's world, he's A) afraid of looking to liberal, B) STILL taking the GOP in somewhat good faith and C) well, he's not a liberal.

bmaz:

Obama’s Infirm Lump Of Coal Judicial Policy

At what point do progressives quit perpetuating the unsupportable dream fixation of a living, breathing principled progressive lurking beneath the slick dick political marketing gloss that is Barack Obama? Obama is not a patsy and he is most certainly no “Constitutional scholar”; if he were, he would not be letting the health and future of American Article III courts wither while he dithers. Instead, Mr. Obama is a common retail politician that is willing to say what it takes to get and stay elected; principles are seemingly merely the vehicle for attracting the support he needs at any one time.

He wants "empathetic moderates" bmaz writes. Good luck.

Justice John Paul Stevens is done after this term, that is a given; but also Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s chair may come open as well. The problem here is that Mr. Obama, even when replacing sitting liberal justices, seems hell bent to move the overall composition of the court markedly to the right with his stated desire to appoint “empathetic moderates” whatever in the world that is in practice. If Stevens and Bader Ginsburg are replaced by a couple of mealy mouthed David Hamiltons, not only will we regret it, but so will our children; that is the gravitas of lifetime appointments. Barack Obama must not be allowed to further shift the Supreme Court to the right.

This business of restricting abortions in health-care reform has been startling enough, now what may happen if one of Obama's moderates is appointed to the SC and flips Roe v. Wade? Any that case is only the tip of the iceberg. Progressives, liberals, all have to step up, because with no pressure, it's too easy for him.

Proof: Jesus must love us

365 Photo: Walking to work Sunday, along Mass. Ave.

Get me off this crazy ride Jane

Most Americans agree: The Bush decade fucking sucked. That's about as eloquent as I can get on that one.

Are we forever desensitized by torture in America?

I like to highlight the Post's consistent online successes when I can. Sometimes it seems there aren't a lot, but that's another topic. One of the lasting gems of the site is online discussions. They get some great guests, politics and otherwise. Today, they invited (a real) conservative writer Reihan Salam and Slate senior editor and legal blogger Dahlia Lithwick to talk about some of the "worst ideas" of the 2000s, an Sunday Outlook feature where Salam wrote about compassionate conservatism and Lithwick about the torture memos. They answered questions about those topics and suggestions from readers.

I was lucky enough to get a response on my torture memo question from the always insightful Lithwick. (I'm Des Moines. Sometimes I'm Baltimore. And I figured out why those two: one, I'm keeping touch with an outsider, Midwestern "perspective" with Des Moines and with Baltimore, I'm a east coaster, yet somewhat local to DC. Weird.)

Des Moines, Iowa: Thank you both for being with us and writing excellent, concise takes on these two "worst ideas" of the decade.

Re: torture memos, the tragic legacy of the memos has now become the apparent refusal of the Obama adm. to thoroughly investigate and prosecute those responsible. It's possibly the prime example of modern Washington's corroded morals. In refusing to rise above the "political ramifications" of taking such action, it seems Obama has simply left the door wide open for more abuses, as you alluded to Ms. Lithwick. Is it almost inevitable that we'll walk down this road again, but with even less resistance due to the institutionalization of torture?

washingtonpost.com: The torture memos (Post, Dec. 20)

Dahlia Lithwick: Hi there and thanks to all of you who read the feature and to those of you who are writing in. Des Moines, this is the question that worries me more than almost any other. Without accountability for the acts of torture and without a probing investigation into how this could have happened, it does seem almost inevitable that we will, sometime down the road, feel justified in doing it again. Certainly the Obama Administration has renounced torture and the memos I referenced were withdrawn. But the issue isn't just these memos but a legal process that was warped. My other nagging fear is that American public opinion has really shifted on torture. Remember how horrified we were by the images from Abu Ghraib? I am not sure we would be as horrified next time. Polling suggests we have come to think of abuse as justified in some instances, despite the fact that the legal prohibition is absolute.

Your Bush-Obama America, December 21, 2009.

Flaming Lips do Pink Floyd

This sounds pretty amazing:

The Flaming Lips will release their version of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (one of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums) digitally starting December 22nd. The Lips’ Dark Side — full title The Flaming Lips and Stardeath and White Dwarfs With Henry Rollins and Peaches Doing The Dark Side of the Moon — will be an iTunes exclusive for one week until December 29th, at which point it’ll head over to the other digital retailers. As you probably guessed from the rerecording’s epically long title, both Henry Rollins and Peaches contribute “vocal assistance,” or those talking-head bits that served as segues between songs on the original TDSOTM.

I can't wait to hear what they do with Dark Side of the Moon, especially Time. If any band can do the album justice, it's the Flaming Lips.

DC apocablizzard '09

365 Photo: Intelligence in the snowstorm.

Colbert is The Force in American socio-political humor

You want three reasons Stephen Colbert is the prime political satirist and pure entertainer of our time. These are the final three "scenes" of the four-part episode.

First, this part of tonight's "Word" as the segment's called. He essentially apes Bill O'Reilly's talking points, where the text on screen is suggestive and "summarizes" (or adds to) or Bill's thoughts. Anyway, Colbert shows his razor sharp social commentary in discussing the near expiration of some of the Patriot Act and how Obama is advocating to continue the powers, but that's just basically a further civil liberty issue Obama (and the entire party frankly) has reneged on a promise on. (The three videos all have the same preview screenshot -- with Tiger Woods -- but they should be different.)



Here, Stephen interviews Steven King in his "Better get to know a Steven" series (Stephen Colbert meets a Steven with a V). He chats with Steven King. Colbert shows why he's such a great interviewer in this absurdist character he plays. The improviser in him comes out when responding to a guest, though usually the question is just a trap and puts the guest in a no win position. But that's not always an easy feat. Plus, the horror "visions" of Stephen's are hilarious.



And here why he's also an extremely intelligent, concerned citizen watching Rome burn and wondering what the hell is happening. He's with Tom Brokaw talking about the failures of the last decade. Who's to blame? Brokaw cops out and says everyone. Brokaw also tears into the decisions that were pretty obviously impacted by the Bush administration. But he refuses to place blame. Anyway, Colbert shows his depth here, yet he never loses to comedic touch.

Bike things

365 Photo: New Eastern Market bike ... things.

The nonexistent cultural critique of Obama in music

As I've asked before, where are the artists in the age of Obama? Is all we are left with a shambles of half-ass celebrity musicians at this point? On Washington Post's poll of most influential band/musicians of the 2000s, their list rightfully included Radiohead, The White Stripes and Kanye West. But they included Taylor Swift and one or two other marginally talented but largely vacuous acts.

So this Washington Post discussion with Chris Richards and Dave Malitz piqued my interest, The Best of the Decade in Music. I asked the following about the best of the decade that contained some low lights for music's power to inspire dissent and cultural/political/social scrutiny. Chris responded. (By the way, in these chats, I never use Washington. I say I'm from Des Moines usually. Today was Bal'mor.)

Baltimore, Md.: In one end-of-the-year review, someone commented that The Strokes' first album title pretty much summed up the decade: Is This It.

The 2000s seemed pretty lackluster to me. But the more fractured the music scene becomes, the harder it is to pinpoint what was influential and, really, what the consensus is on anything in music.

Focusing on rock only, I'd throw The White Stripes, The Strokes, Modest Mouse, The Flaming Lips and Radiohead into the mix of most impactful. Veterans like Sleater-Kinney and Sonic Youth continued a steady buzzsaw through rock music (and younger peers). S-K was particularly important in that One Beat was a crisp commentary on the state of America, especially in light of 9/11 and the Iraq war. Where were all the other voices pushing against the Bush administration? It was left to, what, Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam and Green Day? Among others. Those bands are fine and all, but not exactly the youthful voice of dissent? And now the question that seems to be long overdue in getting at least an initial answer is what the Obama era will sound like. Any "hope and change" feel-good moments are long gone. Where's the pushback to simply more rampant corporatism, escalated war, an ultimate letdown on health care and largely continuing Bush's egregious record on government secrecy and civil liberties? Or what about is impact on hip-hop? Who will be the first artist in that world to say, 'Where's the follow up?' Where's our cultural response to Obama? Is America in too much of a haze to care? Where are the artists?

Chris Richards: Our time is running out, but this is a thoughtful question we wanted to share.

Very quick response: I think there was a lot of political music in the 00s (just in hip-hop I'm thinking of Lil Wayne's Katrina response "Georgia Bush" and Young Jeezy's response to Obama's candidacy "My President Is Black"), but not enough.

By and large, I think a desire for escapism really dominated American culture.

I don't know Richards, but I largely agree with him. Well, it's unclear if he actually thinks there was a lot of "political music" in the decade or not. But I agree with the escapism. That's spot on, I think. (And yes, I like to be called thoughtful.)

The point is, we are pretty deep in the Obama era -- almost a year just as president and 3 or 4 years as a political phenom -- and I can't really identify one prod at Obama and what he's done as president in music. Are there bands singing about a hard economy? The gripping paralysis of our increasingly economic-unbalanced society? The thirst for imperialism? Militarism? Civil liberty snatching? Torture advocacy? Rampant corporatism? The forgotten swaths of America? Are black artists, hip-hop and otherwise, seeing where Black America is going under the first black president -- largely nowhere they weren't before I'd boldly say? Is anyone calling attention to the morally-deluded pack of whores we call leaders? I'm sure bands are out there, but I'm not hearing it. Maybe I should look harder. I hope I'm not looking hard enough, but I'm not sure.

Right on cue

365 Photo: Teabaggers decide to wear red and cry about Socialism. Someone tell these numbskulls that health-care reform is being controlled by industry and jackoff senators, financial reform is handled by the former Wall St. executives that populate the Obama White House and the president is actively opening the door for more torture in America's future. But no, the black guy with a funny name and silver tongue must be a Commie.

That is rich: Joe Lieberman edition

What a dick.

“I don’t feel like a spoiler,” Mr. Lieberman said. “I feel like somebody who has wanted to be for health care reform. We have within reach — the core parts of this bill are a historic accomplishment. I mean, think about it, 30 million people who can’t afford health insurance in our country today are going to get it under this bill. The cost curve is going to be bent down.”

We're supposed to thank Joe Lieberman for all his work on reform? Fuck that. This obstructionist, sour grapes, vain drama queen has ostensibly done more than any Republican to block true meaningful reform since he's part of the block of 60 votes that are supposedly behind reform. And he's got the balls to say he should be hailed as a positive force in this?

Basically what getting 30 million of the 45 or 47 million uninsured people under some kind of insurance means is that those 30M will HAVE TO BUY INSURANCE out of their own pocket from a private insurer. That is reform? That is the liberal answer to this colossal clusterfuck? Digby:

Nobody's "getting covered" here. After all, people are already "free" to buy private insurance and one must assume they have reasons for not doing it already. Whether those reasons are good or bad won't make a difference when they are suddenly forced to write big checks to Aetna or Blue Cross that they previously had decided they couldn't or didn't want to write. Indeed, it actually looks like the worst caricature of liberals: taking people's money against their will, saying it's for their own good. --- and doing it without even the cover that FDR wisely insisted upon with social security, by having it withdrawn from paychecks. People don't miss the money as much when they never see it.

And don't let anyone say there are solid reforms sprinkled throughout the Senate's proposal that will actually mean something to a decent amount of people. Why? Because the forces of Washington will water them down and eventually strip them of any substance, especially if Republicans ever have power again, which they will.

Nice work Democrats. You let the likes of Joe "Elmer Fudd" Lieberman and Ben "Ralph Wiggum" Nelson derail reform (Although that may give those vanity whores too much credit; Obama and Harry Reid have been completely ineffectual for the liberal cause). And any so-called progressive in Congress, especially the Senate, has been walked right over.

Par for the course in 2009, the year of Obama. Maybe we should all write our congressman. I wonder what they would write back?

Don't surrender

Here are two good reads for the day.

Cary Tennis of Salon on identity and self-expression.

The "common-sense" assumption is that "underneath" we are all just regular joes. The true self may be extraordinary and fine. It is axiomatic that if each of us is unique, our true self will be something the world has never seen before. If we are completely ourselves, we may not be recognized. We hide the true self, fearing rejection by the crowd. So we "dumb down," you might say. We find a million ways to conceal.

One of the tricks I have learned is that by seeming to reveal all we can conceal much. The more we reveal, the more we can hide. What we really wish to conceal lies at the bottom of the heap of revelations. Often what we truly wish to hide is our own weakness, fear and vulnerability. That is how I felt at that meeting -- weak, fearful, vulnerable. Yet I found myself thinking my way through it and not acting. "What, indeed, is the exact effect of speaking to others about our condition?" Blah, blah, blah.

And Glenn W. Smith at Firedoglake talks us off the ledge and injects some hope of his own into the ruins of Obama's multi-layered mess.

While we struggle to overcome that fundamental error, we run the risk of demoralizing Americans. In the long run, we need one another more than we need Obama. I might even say that inspiration should be our first and most important strategy. Our demoralization is certainly a key strategy of our opponents, as it has been with all authoritarians. A great essay on the renewal of hope in the face demoralizing tyranny is Vaclav Havel’s, “The Power of the Powerless.”

I have many acquaintances who can no longer even read news about the health care reform because they find it depressing. This demands recognition and action. These anxious folk are not weak or apathetic. Their hopes need renewing. We rely on our individual resources, but also upon one another for inspiration. If we don’t take steps to relieve the anxiety and restore hope, we will set the movement back a decade. The 2010 elections will be lost, but that may turn out to be the least of our problems.

[...]

Hope requires a tougher realism than either cynicism or surrender. Without an eyes-wide-open view of what is, the necessary steps for change are impossible to determine. Also, hope can easily devolve into a sentimental “everything’s gonna be alright” passivity or naivety. Popular melodrama sells a lot of this.

It takes much more character to hope in bleak times than it does to give up. That's invaluable advice.

Outside the Portrait Gallery

365 Photo: Along F St.

Window dressing for a serial killer's fantasy camp

Humans are rats

It's often difficult to make the distinction between the two.

Herndon man says he killed wife; police find female body in suitcase

A man showed up at Herndon police headquarters Friday morning with a note saying he had killed his wife, police said, and when officers went to the couple's apartment, they found a woman's body stuffed inside a suitcase on the apartment balcony.

The 36-year-old woman's name was not released, pending notification of her family. Police think she was strangled, Lt. Jeff Coulter said, and her body was not dismembered or otherwise harmed. She apparently was small enough to fit inside a large suitcase, police said.

The man, Jamie A. Kuhne, 34, was charged with murder. He is being held in the Fairfax County jail.

The couple have a 1-year-old son. Police said Kuhne apparently took the boy to day care early Friday, then drove to the police station shortly after 7 a.m. and turned himself in.

Sunsets and smokestacks

365 Photo: A view of south Washington, from Pennsylvania Ave.

Buy war bonds

Atrios:

Can't wait until I can buy some war bonds. Hopefully when you buy them they put your name on a freedom bomb.

Maybe Obama will introduce a new revenue stream in these dire, kick-the-dog-in-the-mouth economic conditions: The Adopt-a-Freedom Bomb Program. For only $300 (or 30,000 cents, for 30,000 new troops), you can put your name, or picture of your family, or a "patriotic message for our fighting men and women" on a Freedom Bomb shot from the Uncle Sam Mobile (or Predator Drone) on those evil "Muslim turrrists."

Speaking of Muslims, I got a braindead chain e-mail today that proclaims elementary schools in Europe are backing off teaching the Holocaust for fear of offending Muslims. First off, this is transparently a dog whistle for political correctness fetishists. But even so, it turns out this chain e-mail is years old, not to mention bogus. Disgustingly-stupid chain e-mails are one thing the bigoted wing of the American Right does best, because its intellect-suspicious, xenophobic deadender following will believe anything to fit their narrative of a persecuted white race.

It's here!

365 Photo:

The GOP loves Franken

Just saw Al Franken on the Senate floor during the vote for Ben "Ralph Wiggum" Nelson's regressive abortion amendment. (It failed, but that's beside the point.) Franken lingered on the floor the entire vote. He would quickly attach himself to a senator, or group of, and proceed to crack up. His cackle is unmistakable. The most remarkable thing about this, though, was the company he sought. With the exception of fellow freshman Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand, he solely interacted with Republicans. Keep in mind, this is during a failing abortion amendment to a health care bill that is despised by 98% of the GOP in the Senate.

Franken begins with Foghorn Leghorn's nephew, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama. Franken booms more than once on C-Span. He moves. Lindsay Graham. Three mega Franken laughs. Orrin Hatch, sponsor of the amendment. They love Franken, by the way. Their grabbing him by the arms. Patting his back. Chuck Grassley joins in. Franken cackles even louder. He pays attention to Chuck Grassley like you or I with a kindly old demented uncle. John Cornyn (Biiiiig Joooohn!). George Lemieux. Franken even occupies philandering laughingstock (and daddy's boy) John Ensign for a few minutes. Oh, the jokes.

Does this say more about Franken or the average Republican senator? I'm not sure.

And while Al can't stop laughing, Mad scientist Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) always votes, half-heartedly wanders around looking for a conversation he might like to commit to, then shuffles off when he realizes those hypothetical conversations with these mongoloids aren't worth his suffering. Good stuff.

Yellows

365 Photo: Cleaning at 15th and G, across from Treasury.

The indistinguishables

I'm obviously six days late, but I've finally taken in what happened with Obama's speech six days ago. Who did he sound like last week? 9/11 this, 9/11 that. Fear, paranoia, 9/11. 18-year-old kids going to war next year were 10 years old on 9/11; this thing is fueled by legends and folklore to them at this point. I guess we knew he would do this, from day one. But that doesn't make it any less disheartening. A candidate Obama doesn't have near the responsibility and access to hard truths like a President Obama. It was another one of "those" dark days.

Holding it at West Point? Mistake. It was not a rousing speech. It was the most somber war escalation speech in history, I'd boldly presume. Like any other president that has sent troops to war -- much less a botched, near-impossible war started by someone else -- the soldiers that die are his kids now. Haunting stuff. But they're so paralyzed by the powerlust and sheer death hold the system has on them.

What, is he giving the generals "one last try" to get it right? How war-tested and noble of our commander-in-chief. What about all the death, of us and Afghanis? You can't stop fucking terrorism (in this case al-Qaeda), and you definitely will only help coalesce al-Qaeda and the Taliban. You think escalating is a deterrent for them? This is what they want: To contribute to America's self-inflicted bleeding of lives, resources, principles. And Washington, like most everyone else in the U.S. it seems, fiddles while Rome burns. That's what I thought of our president. It reminds me a little of the last scene in Orwell's "Animal Farm" sometimes.

Update: This post by Glenn Greenwald exemplifies the "Animal Farm" comparison:

As (Harper's Scott) Horton writes, the claim that government officials enjoy a virtually impenetrable shield of immunity even in the commission of war crimes "has emerged as a sort of ignoble mantra for the Justice Department, uniting both the Bush and Obama administrations." Indeed, that is the common strain of virtually every act undertaken by the Obama DOJ with regard to our government's war crimes and other felonies, from torture to renditions to illegal eavesdropping.

With revelations of serious, recent abuse at an ongoing "black site" prison in Afghanistan, serious questions have been raised about the extent to which detainee abuse has actually been curbed under Obama. But there's no question that the single greatest impediment to disclosure and accountability for past abuses is the Obama Justice Department, which has repeatedly gone far beyond the call of duty in its attempt to protect Bush war crimes and other illegal acts. This new Seton Hall Report regarding these three detainees deaths illustrates not only how perverse and unjust, but also how futile, such efforts are. War crimes never stay hidden, and the only question from the start was whether the Obama DOJ would be complicit in the attempt to shield them from disclosure. That question has now been answered rather decisively.

Better China

365 Photo: Snowy day bookstore browsing

The system we live in ...

... is this:

The firestorm of criticism over the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, should not obscure a darker truth: Trial is only one prong of Obama's Guantanamo strategy. Some of the Guantanamo prisoners, including those who have been detained for seven or eight years, will remain imprisoned indefinitely with no prospects of ever seeing the inside of a courtroom. Obama's much-lauded intention to close Guantanamo will not change the fate of these prisoners, who will be transferred to other prisons in the United States or abroad, and as a result, the president will perpetuate one of the most troubling policies of the Bush administration. If Obama does not repudiate this policy, it will define what the government can do in the future.

And in a cruel twist, I can't communicate.

What did Osama bin Laden envision for America?

I've often wondered just what Osama bin Laden envisioned as he was planning 9/11. What did he think was probably going to happen in America if the attacks were anything like what they turned out to be: 3,000 dead and destruction that lingers today. Did he envision a war in Afghanistan, a holy war at that? In his wildest dreams, did he ever think we would turn out the way we did? And then, should we escalate when no one is sure what will happen, or, really, or whether we can ever claim this entire war was worth it?

Radley Balko gives his answer:

Here’s a question for the politicians who support Obama’s plan, as well as those to the right of him who think it isn’t warmongery enough: What exactly does “victory” in Afghanistan look like? Certainly no one in his right mind thinks the country is going to look like, say, Iowa in 20 years. Same for Iraq. Are we expending what in the end will be a few trillion dollars and likely the lives of 6,ooo-7,000 troops to create another . . . Saudi Arabia? Another Egypt?

We do have a pretty good idea how bin Laden pictured victory. It looks a lot like what we’re seeing now. He wanted a holy war. We gave him two. We’ve compromised our values, rolled back civil liberties, and let our politicians generally scare the crap out of us whenever they want new powers. Oh, and we’ve let the bastard live to gloat about it all.

This war should have been over the moment we disposed of the Taliban. The military doesn’t build liberal societies. They destroy illiberal ones (and they do it very well). I’ll wager we have at least 50,000 troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan by the end of Obama’s first term. In fact, I’ll bet it’s closer to 75,000. Lovely that this was the anti-war candidate.

I'm not convinced bin Laden had thought America would go quite as far as it did. Actually, I think going to Iraq was the unexpected, bombshell cherry-on-top for him, if he's still alive. At the very best, I think bin Laden expected America would come to Afghanistan and blitz the Taliban, have general "success" and leave after a few years. I'm sure the religious aspect was prominent in his mind. If he was anywhere near all of this, he's a genius. (I'm certainly not condoning mass murder, I'm just saying he would have had incredible foresight.)

But the economic costs? Humanitarian tragedies? Gitmo? Wiretapping? No way. And definitely not Iraq. Has this ever occurred to any of these neo-cons and hawk "tough guy" torture-enthusiast warmongers in our government and political establishment? That we gave him what he wanted and so much more? Doubtful.

Last of the golden boys

Was Tiger possibly the last American golden boy? I mean, I never thought of him in any scandal situation. He just seemed determined, or something. Turns out he was bored. Or I assume he was. I imagine if you're the best in the world at something, you're beyond rich and you're married to a Norwegian model, reality is skewed and you need a new thrill. He could do whatever he wanted. What person wouldn't take it advantage. You'd almost be crazy not to. I'm not condoning infidelity (though I don't really care b/c it's not my business). He'll get hounded, but this isn't the end of course. And, as Michael Wilbon points out in Tiger's remarks, it's a shame this personal sin has to be splayed out and filleted for the whole world to see. Again, no one suffers like the victims, and even more so in the public eye. THAT should have deterred him. It didn't.

Briefly....

365 from yesterday and today. World HIV/AIDS Day outside the White House.

More rain.

Oh my golly!

I went to Constitution Hall last night to see the Pixies. Daughters of the Revolution's Constitution Hall is not really a great place to see a rock show, especially one as loud as the Pixies. While it was a tad better than I expected, it was still pretty weak. I thought the show was solid, if only because it's an amazing album (they played Doolittle and a few others in the last encore).

While I thought it was mostly the venue's fault at first, I may have changed my mind now that I think about it. First off, the giant screen behind them may not have been the best choice. Kind of a diversion. I'll say they were half awesome, half obviously there to cash in 20 years later. Not that that always makes for a bad performance, but I didn't notice much interest in them. The video screen did help give them personality within the show, even though it was a recording. Bizarre. It's like saying, "I don't want to be who you want me to be, but we will throw a bone your way with these 'wacky' videos that we may or may not have approved or had much sway over."

That's actually not a bad way to go about it, if I were them. They have neither the desire, nor the energy to come out every night and live up to myths and exaggerations of the past. True, they're still good and can wipe the floor with most "current" bands. But the sense of going-through-the-motions was palpable.

Cheney (and Politico) could give a shit, apparently

All that can be said about Dick Cheney's despicable interview with Politico has been said already today. This is a sad, bitter, frightened man scrambling to preserve some shred of a legacy that doesn't put him at the center of preemptive war, torture, lies upon lies to the American people and a genuine disregard for humanity.

And Politico, as a so-called "news organization," sunk to new depths seeking (or being called by) Cheney to comment on the day Obama is ADDING troops (The irony here is stunning and, frankly, a bit confusing.). I have enough disdain already for Politico's vapid, sloppy, "win-the-day" bullshit journalism. But giving Cheney an open forum to say whatever he wants without, seemingly, follow-ups to his egregious answers is embarrassing at best, a gross malfeasance to the already sorry state of modern mainstream journalism at worst.

But back to Lord Death, from the interview:

In a 90-minute interview at his suburban Washington house, Cheney said the president’s “agonizing” about Afghanistan strategy “has consequences for your forces in the field.”

“I begin to get nervous when I see the commander in chief making decisions apparently for what I would describe as small ‘p’ political reasons, where he’s trying to balance off different competing groups in society,” Cheney said.

“Every time he delays, defers, debates, changes his position, it begins to raise questions: Is the commander in chief really behind what they’ve been asked to do?”

[...]

Cheney was asked if he thinks the Bush administration bears any responsibility for the disintegration of Afghanistan because of the attention and resources that were diverted to Iraq. “I basically don’t,” he replied without elaborating.

[...]

“Here’s a guy without much experience, who campaigned against much of what we put in place ... and who now travels around the world apologizing,” Cheney said. “I think our adversaries — especially when that’s preceded by a deep bow ... — see that as a sign of weakness.”

Read the whole thing for a complete picture of this insidious, pathetic man.

But the disappointment goes beyond Cheney. We expect bile from him. Today, Barack Obama is just another George W. Bush. This is now his war. He's the pseudo-tough guy that will "win this war once and for all." He will leave the White House at 5:30 tonight, heading to West Point for his speech where he will outline a troop escalation of around 30,000, more troops than Bush's Iraq surge. Exit strategy optional. I'll be there in front of the White House with fellow protesters to see him off. I fear this is a colossal mistake, a cherry on top of a multi-faceted mess in America. Something has to give.

Like a sickle through the wheat

Carrie Brownstein reminds us why Sonic Youth may be the only band to truly live up to their moniker as they continue to mow down just about every other act out there despite being 30 years their senior.

Seeing Sonic Youth perform marked the perfect end to weeks spent writing about the last 10 years in music and pondering why a lot of music, particularly what has become popular amongst connoisseurs and purveyors of all things "indie," has gotten soft. Sonic Youth is LOUD. It is an all-caps, exclamation-point (points!!!), effed-up punctuation, good-luck-trying-to-form-a-sentence-or-concentrate-while-it's-playing loud. And while I've certainly been enjoying the subtler forms of rock and the sweet sounds of folk -- freak or otherwise -- and, in general, the not-so-discreet charm of the musical bourgeoisie, let's just say that I was elated to be pummeled by artful noise played at an unapologetically intrusive volume. Sonic Youth was a reminder that I don't always need to ponder or reflect while I listen to music. In fact, sometimes I want the songs to obliterate both the pleasantries and the contemplation.

I've seen SY twice. Both shows were amazing (and she's right about SY songs being timeless and non-generational and having had no discernible eras or phases), but the first time was vicious. It was during their tour for Rather Ripped. And there's absolutely no fucking around with them; the force they bring is all they need. I'm hoping the Pixies follow suit tomorrow. It's sad bands 20 years after their "prime" have to provide the voice.

Gouge Away

Andrew Sullivan characteristically explains the world we live in, the age of Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin:

They represent a real populist and authoritarian option for a declining power. In the face of a bewilderingly changing world, they stand for white America, the extension of its power across the globe, the elevation of torture as a core American value, the permanent Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and American occupation of client states like Iraq and Afghanistan. They represent a contempt for addressing climate change, and an indifference to debt - both Palin and Cheney have records of appalling fiscal profligacy. They also represent religious fundamentalism as the core Republican political philosophy. Cheney supports a party that would strip his own daughter - and has stripped his own daughter - of basic civil rights. Palin would criminalize all abortion.

The appeal of populist simplicity in complicated, demoralizing times is real and eternal. Obama has not in office been able to muster a scintilla of popular energy the way this rump right has. In fact, his moderate conservative governance has defused the energy of his campaign in ways that remain quite stunning. In this emotional game, the far right has the advantage of "us" vs "them." There are no real solutions to deep problems - no actual spending cuts proposed, nothing but the use of force abroad, nothing in energy policy but more carbon exploration, no immigration policy that isn't obsessed with resisting any sort of amnesty, and on and on.

One imagines that the American people - when they have to decide on a president who will actually have to govern - will turn away from a Palin. But that such a farce remains the most powerful figure on the right should sober anyone with complacency.

We live in a fundamentalist age. And there is only one fundamentalist party. Unless it is beaten repeatedly at the polls, it will at some point govern again.

And he's spot on about Obama. I never imagined the deflation of so much energy from his support group. No, it's not feasible to match that campaign's fervor -- Obama's historical run plus the national disdain for Bush was a powerful combo. But he's not leading the way he pledged during the campaign. Adopting way too many of Bush's most egregious policies is no change.

We're desperate, get used to it

While the world chippers about a couple of starfucking attention whores getting into the White House, our president is about to add 30,000 troops into a sinkhole of a war. But that's tomorrow, when the Salahi's will probably get a TV show on Bravo. What about today? Today's ignored national affront goes to the noble Supreme Court further -- and maybe permanently -- suppressing torture photos.

NYT:

The justices sent the case back to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan, which ruled in 2008 that the pictures should be released to the public. But at the request of the Obama administration, the Second Circuit later postponed its own order, setting the stage for the administration to take the case to the Supreme Court.

On Monday, the justices told the Second Circuit to give “further consideration” to the issue in light of a Congressional action authorizing the Defense Department to keep the pictures from the public. With the issue on its way back to the Second Circuit, a final decision will probably not be made for months.

In light of tomorrow, that is downright a tragedy masterpiece. This is the week to remember Obama's first year by.

I hope Black Francis gives the White House the finger tomorrow night.

Libra sabotage

I think embarrassing is the word to describe Tiger Woods' little predicament. Refusing the police three times? It has to be serious if it's gone this far. PR nightmare. (Did I just say PR nightmare? God, I hate media-speak.)

Tiger Woods finally gave his side of the story Sunday — on his Web site, not to police — and took the blame for an "embarrassing" car crash that gave him cuts, bruises and public scrutiny like never before.

His statement failed to clear up any questions about the middle-of-the-night accident outside his Isleworth estate in which his wife told police she used a golf club to smash the back windows of the Cadillac SUV to help him out.

"This situation is my fault, and it's obviously embarrassing to my family and me," Woods said on his Web site. "I'm human and I'm not perfect. I will certainly make sure this doesn't happen again."

Then he's got the balls to say this:

"Although I understand there is curiosity, the many false, unfounded and malicious rumors that are currently circulating about my family and me are irresponsible," he said. "The only person responsible for the accident is me. My wife, Elin, acted courageously when she saw I was hurt and in trouble. She was the first person to help me. Any other assertion is absolutely false."

And the authorities:

"We have been informed by the Florida Highway Patrol that further discussion with them is both voluntary and optional," Mark Steinberg, his agent at IMG, said in an e-mail. "Although Tiger realizes that there is a great deal of public curiosity, it has been conveyed to FHP that he simply has nothing more to add and wishes to protect the privacy of his family."

Woods' wife turned troopers away from their home in the exclusive gated community outside Orlando on Friday, the day of the accident, because she said he was sleeping. Steinberg called troopers en route to Woods' house on Saturday and postponed the meeting until Sunday.

"We're just continuing our traffic crash investigation," Montes said. "If we have somebody who we feel is pertinent to the investigation, then we will interview them."

And no matter whether this was an innocuous accident or a savage scandal or whatever, there will be no discussion of the affluent getting preferential treatment from the law.

New York

365 Photo: Fuck Skool

NYC Postal building

Waterfront

365 Photo: Alley between 11th and 10th, just north of Massachusetts NE

Feel the greatness?

365 Photo: That's Baltimore.

Letting the trolls out

Andrew Sullivan on the Gitmo-cheering Cheney family M.O. at this point, as exemplified by Liz's demagoguery of the prisoner transfer "debate":

It's so bizarre that transferring prisoners to mainland jails in order to shut down the objective black eye of Gitmo is receiving so much resistance from the pro-torture right. We can argue about how to try these suspects, but their location should surely be a non-issue.

What Cheney fears, I suspect, is that Gitmo will be shut down, that history will record it as the lowest point in US human rights ever, that the Cheney family will be tarred as the brand that destroyed America's moral standing, and that Dick Cheney will become one of the darkest figures in modern American history.

But if you can keep Gitmo open, if you prevent detainee transfer, if you can spin the next terror attack as caused by the refusal to torture ... you have a chance to rescue the narrative again. And so America's cold civil war continues ...

To rescue the narrative, they would need the media. And surely the media has no qualms about letting these trolls out of the cellar to spew pro-torture bile all over airwaves.

Divas

Is there any species roaming the earth today that is more vain than a "centrist" Democratic U.S. senator?

Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D., Ark.) announced Saturday that she would vote to begin debate on a $848 billion health-care overhaul measure, putting Democrats on a path to reach a 60-vote threshold needed to approve an initial procedural motion on the bill.

Lincoln's announcement appears to give Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) the final vote needed to prevent a filibuster on the test vote. Lincoln warned that she would not support the bill in a vote on final passage if it included a "robust" public health insurance option, however.

"Although I don't agree with everything in this bill, I have concluded that I agree it is more important that we begin this debate to improve this health care system rather than simply drop the issue and walk away," Lincoln said, adding that Saturday's vote is "not my last or only opportunity to have an impact on health reform."

Lincoln's announcement came soon after Sen. Mary Landrieu (D., La.) announced that she would support the motion. Landrieu also said she had not decided whether to support passing the bill in a final Senate vote.

The vote on the procedural motion, which if approved would allow the Senate to formally begin debate on the measure after it returns from a Thanksgiving recess, is set for 8 p.m. EST Saturday.

Lincoln's and Landrieu's announcements follow a similar announcement by Sen. Ben Nelson (D., Neb.) another centrist, on Friday.

So kind of you three. Thanks.

Casual Entrance

365 Photo: Back alley, Casual Entrance.


Check out my complete Flickr page.

Obama gets no backup, headed for colossal mistake

Dan Froomkin again writes what I've been thinking, but have not been good enough at articulating. He dissects the debate in Washington over Afghanistan (sure escalation, if only for politicking's sake) vs. the national reality (more want to get the fuck out).

As it happens, in this case political reality actually diverges quite markedly from public opinion. The public overwhelmingly opposes the war -- 57 percent to 39 percent, according to the latest Associated Press poll. And disengagement from Afghanistan -- even though it's not even being discussed as a serious option in political circles -- is considerably more popular with the American public than escalation, which is almost all anyone in Washington can talk about. The latest CNN poll found that 49 percent of Americans favored reducing the number of troops in Afghanistan -- with 28 percent saying they should all be withdrawn immediately -- compared to less than 40 percent who want to send more.

Generalized public sentiment alone, however, is unlikely to force any American president to consider a military withdrawal without victory. "It is always easier in the short term to stay in than to get out," says Walt. "And therefore the temptation to take one more drink is always there."

What it would take is a great deal of organized political pressure. But there is no significant peace movement pushing for withdrawal. There is, in fact, almost no political manifestation whatsoever of what is the majority view. The political pressure is all coming from one side.

But no pushback. And that's on us. We are a country and a culture in a daze. We have too much shit to care about to adequately assess a faceless war half a world away. I'm not blaming anyone. I mean it. The economy, health care, swine flu, everything else the media tells us to worry about, crime, just living life, it all gets in the way. Our culture has fractured off into subgroups, fostered by the Internet's vast playgrounds and possibilities. Engaging in a war debate (unless you're a military family) is the furthest from the every day mindset.

The most fascinating thing to ponder is if Obama announced a re-institution of the draft in an effort to ramp up the war. I know that's completely unrealistic, but I really wonder how we would react. Would people start to change their attitude, draft-eligible or not?

Again, we are a country and a culture in an multifaceted daze and I don't know what to do about it.

Barack O. Bush

Glenn Greenwald tears into the Obama/Holder model of justice:

(On Holder's Senate Judiciary hearing yesterday in which he struggled to defend his decision to trial KSM in New York)

Once you endorse the notion that the Government has the right to imprison people not captured on any battlefield without giving them trials -- as the Obama administration is doing explicitly and implicitly -- what convincing rationale can anyone offer to justify giving Mohammed and other 9/11 defendants a real trial in New York? If you're taking the position that military commissions and even indefinite detention are perfectly legitimate tools to imprison people -- as Holder has done -- then what is the answer to the Right's objections that Mohammed himself belongs in a military commission? If the administration believes Omar Khadr belongs in a military commission, and if they believe others can be held indefinitely without any charges, why isn't that true of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? By denying jury trials to a large number of detainees, Obama officials have completely gutted their own case for why they did the right thing in giving Mohammed a trial in New York.

Even worse, Holder was reduced to admitting -- even boasting -- that this concocted multi-tiered justice system (trials for some, commissions for others, indefinite detention for the rest) enables the Government to pick and choose what level of due process someone gets based on the Government's assessment as to where and how they're most likely to get a conviction ...

How will prominent, respected lawyers Barack Obama (constitutional law) and Attorney General Eric Holder feel about themselves in 10 years? How can they reconcile their pure thoughts about the law with their adoption of so much of Bush administration rhetoric and fear of using our own legal system to handle terrorists? Needless to say, they know what they're doing and it's keeping them up at nights. Whether this happened long ago or not, it doesn't matter, but these men have adopted the corrosive, toxic, insidious aspects of Washington (and American) culture. It doesn't matter who the king and his minions are, they will always be the most powerful. They got to the throne by pretending to care about the lesser among us. That was their ticket. Now they walk upright, and are no longer to be bothered by what's going on in the barn.

Nail in the coffin

Catching up on some news from last week, remember those torture photos that Joe Lieberman (and the Obama administration) successfully suppressed through an amendment to the Homeland Security appropriations bill that gave the power to shield them to Defense Sec. Gates?

Well, Gates has used his new jurisdiction in Congress's business to withhold the damning photos, thwarting a court order in the process.

Mother Jones:

Gates' new authority comes from a law, signed by President Barack Obama last month, that gives the Secretary of Defense the power to rule that photos of detainees are exempt from release under the Freedom of Information Act. Gates' action on Friday was the first use of the new FOIA exemption since it passed Congress last month. The photos in question are the subject of a years-long legal fight by the American Civil Liberties Union, which first filed a FOIA request for records pertaining to detainee treatment, rendition, and death in May of 2005. The case is currently being reviewed by the Supreme Court.

A court filing [pdf] Friday revealed Gates' action.

Let's remember things like this when we're telling the history of the post-9/11 era of America.

Get off my lawn!

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) does his best head-up-his-own-ass impression:

U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said on Tuesday that a Democratic bill to revamp regulation of the financial industry must be revised to win support from his side of the political aisle.

"It's a long way from being ready to go forward on any bipartisan basis," McConnell told reporters after Senate Republicans were briefed on the massive measure drafted by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd.

McConnell denounced the Dodd bill, saying like pending healthcare legislation, it is another proposal that "seeks to re-work a major part of our country."

Citing public opinion polls, McConnell said: "The public is saying to all of us: 'Quit passing 1,000-page bills (and) concentrate on trying to improve the economy.'"

Note to Mitch: Things need to be significantly changed. Where were you the last eight years? Hell, where were you last September. There's a kind of nihilistic quality to Republicans, but maybe it's nihilism in a classist sense. "I'm rich and doing just fine, so stop changing shit." Thanks Mitch.

An electoral virus

Ever really thought deeply about what it would take to achieve something seemingly unreachable (reasons: will, talent, intelligence, money) and, if only for fun, considered that it might be possible? That anyone in the age of social networking and Internet domination could make a work of art out of how to inject oneself into the national conversation? No. Yes. Whatever?

I think I could get 1% of the popular vote in the next presidential election. I know what you're saying: John, quit huffin' that gas can and get rererere-real. Sure.

But 1% of the country is 3 million (I believe we're still at 300 million as a country). And, of course, not every adult votes. About 122.4 million, or 54% of the eligible population, voted. So that means roughly 1.25 million is 1% of the vote, ultimately.

I could drum that up with a cleverly self-marketed campaign via Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/Wiki-Wiki and such. Boom, 1.25 million.

Of course, there's the ballot issue. But you say from the beginning, "Write me in. Write me in all over the nation. Make a joke out of it. A vote for John is a win for you."

This might take a little more web savvy than I seem to be giving it credit for, but screw it. Maybe a group of people good with many different web platforms could pull something off. A comedy act, possibly? "Viral gone heywire!" That's what they'll call it on CNN.

It's the future!

365 Photo: Liftoff of the Millennium Falcon.

Anesthetized

Agence France Presse on the lack of care in a sustained anti-war movement among the young:

When student Hemnecher Amen joined a protest outside the White House recently, it was the latest visible opposition here to US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hardly anyone took notice.

"There's a lot of apathy and a growing disconnectedness to what's going on in world affairs," the frustrated Howard University junior told AFP as some 200 people, including a handful of students, gathered for the march.

Students are more interested in trying to get a job and make money. That's essentially the bottom line."

With the US military several years into two faraway wars, American students like Amen are taking to the streets less often -- and to less effect -- than their Vietnam-era predecessors who were the vanguard of the anti-war movement in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Mounting economic and academic pressures on today's youth, intimidation by authorities, online distractions and conflicted views about the "good" war in Afghanistan, not to mention other causes such as health care and slashed school budgets clawing for attention, have conspired to snuff out anti-war activism on campus, experts and students say.

They acknowledge, too, that US President Barack Obama has paradoxically hampered the movement because many of the largely leftist protest groups haven't wanted to openly oppose him so early in his first term.

"There's this trust that he's going to fix it all," said Shara Esbenshade, 19, a sophomore at Stanford University and member of Stanford Says No To War.

What would it take to motivate this generation to mobilize, outside of a draft or a presidential election?

Defeat Smash Mouth

Absurdist bizarro-comedian Neil Hamburger with the AV Club, on his fans:

AVC: You seem to have a lot of reverence for the entertainment industry, yet you do these sick jokes about celebrities. How do you reconcile that?

NH: I think it’s an honor to the great entertainers—to the Bob Hopes and the Stan Laurels—for me to keep with the times and tell the sorts of jokes these crowds want, especially when you look at the types of crowds I’m performing for. These people are druggies, they have horrible, horrible taste in music, a lot of them are suffering from chronic depression, on every anti-depressant you can think of. I’ll tell you, when James Dean died in 1955, if you’d come out with a joke about that you would’ve gone straight to jail! Now, if Michael Jackson dies and you don’t have a joke, you go straight to jail.

And the contempt he has for ... absurdist bizzaro-band Smash Mouth:

AVC: It’s even more surprising how much you joke about Smash Mouth.

NH: That’s really ghastly music, you know? And a lot of people are upset about it. There is a public consciousness of despair when anything by those guys comes on the radio. I have had people come up to me and say, “Neil, I can’t take it anymore. You’ve gotta quit comedy and devote all your energies to breaking Smash Mouth’s legs so that they can’t tour anymore.” Well, I’m not gonna do that, but I will write some jokes at their expense.

The new star

The Atlantic's Patrick Chovanec profiles the nine regions of China, highlighting the complex and, at times, tenuous relationships amongst them. Reading through these, I'm reminded how much China and U.S. do and don't have alike, as well as how little the average American understands about China, and vice versa I would imagine.

As China’s economy becomes more integrated, these regional differences are taking on greater importance than ever before. Each of the Nine Nations faces a unique set of challenges and opportunities in carving out its own competitive niche. Anyone who wants to do business in China, make policy towards China, or simply comprehend the dramatic changes happening there should understand the Nine Nations and the role each of them is playing in shaping China’s future.

(Nice work by The Atlantic here, I think, in design, functionality and simpleness coexisting in the graphic. Good, basic statistics (nothing too overkill), eye-pleasing and, most of all, every region has a great story, and Chovanec aptly dissected in so many words. Well done.)

Jazzbot Xtreme!

Something more mature and sophisicated!

I've got John Yoo on line one. He wants to say something.

Torture memo author John Yoo crawls out from under a rock to give his view of terrorism trials in New York.

'This is a prosecutorial decision as well as a national security decision," President Barack Obama said last week about the attorney general's announcement that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other al Qaeda operatives will be put on trial in New York City federal court.

No, it is not. It is a presidential decision—one about the hard, ever-present trade-off between civil liberties and national security.

Trying KSM in civilian court will be an intelligence bonanza for al Qaeda and the hostile nations that will view the U.S. intelligence methods and sources that such a trial will reveal. The proceedings will tie up judges for years on issues best left to the president and Congress.

Whether a jury ultimately convicts KSM and his fellows, or sentences them to death, is beside the point. The treatment of the 9/11 attacks as a criminal matter rather than as an act of war will cripple American efforts to fight terrorism. It is in effect a declaration that this nation is no longer at war.

This man has no credibility.

Newspaper as community

http://harpers.org/archive/2009/11/0082712?redirect=1482511298

Posting the Harper's November cover story here, since it's awesome.

--------
Twilight of the American newspaper

By Richard Rodriguez

A scholar I know, a woman who is ninety-six years old, grew up in a tin shack on the American prairie, near the Canadian border. She learned to read from the pages of the Chicago Tribune in a one-room schoolhouse. Her teacher, who had no more than an eighth-grade education, had once been to Chicago—had been to the opera! Women in Chicago went to the opera with bare shoulders and long gloves, the teacher imparted to her pupils. Because the teacher had once been to Chicago, she subscribed to the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune, which came on the train by Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest.

Several generations of children learned to read from that text. The schoolroom had a wind-up phonograph, its bell shaped like a morning glory, and one record, from which a distant female voice sang “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life.”

Is it better to have or to want? My friend says her teacher knew one great thing: There was something out there. She told her class she did not expect to see even a fraction of what the world had to offer. But she hoped they might.

I became a reader of the San Francisco Chronicle when I was in high school and lived ninety miles inland, in Sacramento. On my way home from school, twenty-five cents bought me a connection with a gray maritime city at odds with the postwar California suburbs. Herb Caen, whose column I read immediately—second section, corner left—invited me into the provincial cosmopolitanism that characterized the city’s outward regard: “Isn’t it nice that people who prefer Los Angeles to San Francisco live there?”

Newspapers have become deadweight commodities linked to other media commodities in chains that are coupled or uncoupled by accountants and lawyers and executive vice presidents and boards of directors in offices thousands of miles from where the man bit the dog and drew ink. The San Francisco Chronicle is owned by the Hearst Corporation, once the Chronicle’s archrival. The Hearst Corporation has its headquarters in New York City. According to Hearst, the Chronicle has been losing a million dollars a week. In San Francisco there have been buyouts and firings of truck drivers, printers, reporters, artists, editors, critics. With a certain élan, the San Francisco Chronicle has taken to publishing letters from readers who remark the diminishing pleasure or usefulness of the San Francisco Chronicle.

When a newspaper dies in America, it is not simply that a commercial enterprise has failed; a sense of place has failed. If the San Francisco Chronicle is near death—and why else would the editors celebrate its 144th anniversary? and why else would the editors devote a week to feature articles on fog?—it is because San Francisco’s sense of itself as a city is perishing.

Most newspapers that are dying today were born in the nineteenth century. The Seattle Post–Intelligencer died 2009, born 1863. The Rocky Mountain News died 2009, born 1859. The Ann Arbor News died 2009, born 1835. It was the pride and the function of the American newspaper in the nineteenth century to declare the forming congregation of buildings and services a city—a place busy enough or populated enough to have news. Frontier American journalism preserved a vestige of the low-church impulse toward universal literacy whereby the new country imagined it could read and write itself into existence. We were the Gutenberg Nation.

Nineteenth-century newspapers draped bunting about their mastheads and brandished an inflated diction and a Gothic type to name themselves the Herald, the Eagle, the Tribune, the Mercury, the Globe, the Sun. With the passage of time, the name of the city was commonly attached to the name of the newspaper, not only to distinguish the Alexandria Gazette from the New York Gazette but because the paper described the city and the city described the paper.

The Daily Dramatic Chronicle, precursor to the San Francisco Chronicle, was founded in 1865 by two teenage brothers on a borrowed twenty-dollar gold piece. Charles and Michael de Young (a third brother, Gustavus, was initially a partner in the publishing venture) had come west with their widowed mother from St. Louis. In California, the brothers invented themselves as descendants of French aristocracy. They were adolescents of extraordinary gumption at a time when San Francisco was a city of gumption and of stranded young men.

Karl Marx wrote that Gold Rush California was “thickly populated by men of all races, from the Yankee to the Chinese, from the Negro to the Indian and Malay, from the Creole and Mestizo to the European.” Oscar Wilde seconded Karl Marx: “It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be in San Francisco.” What must Gold Rush San Francisco have been like? Melville’s Nantucket? Burning Man? An arms bazaar in Yemen? There were Russians, Chileans, Frenchmen, Welshmen, and Mexicans. There were Australian toughs, the worst of the lot by most accounts—“Sydney Ducks”—prowling the waterfront. There were Chinese opium dens beneath the streets and Chinese opera houses above them. Historians relish the old young city’s foggy wharves and alleyways, its frigates, fleas, mud, and hazard. Two words attached to the lawless city the de Young brothers moved about in. One was “vigilante,” from the Spanish. The other was “hoodlum”—a word coined in San Francisco to name the young men loitering about corners, threatening especially to the Chinese.

The de Young brothers named their newspaper the Daily Dramatic Chronicle because stranded young men seek entertainment. The city very early developed a taste for limelight that was as urgent as its taste for red light. In 1865, there were competing opera houses in the city; there were six or seven or twelve theaters. The Daily Dramatic Chronicle was a theatrical sheet delivered free of charge to the city’s saloons and cafés and reading rooms. San Francisco desperately appreciated minstrel shows and circuses and melodeons and Shakespeare. Stages were set up in gambling halls and saloons where Shakespearean actors, their velvets much the worse for wear, pointed to a ghost rising at the back of the house: Peace, break thee off. Look where it comes again.

An Italian who came to San Francisco to study medicine in 2003 swears he saw the ghost of a forty-niner, in early light, when he slept and then woke in an old house out by the ocean. The forty-niner was very young, my friend said, with a power of sadness about him. He did not speak. He had red hair and wore a dark shirt.

We can imagine marooned opera singers, not of the second, perhaps not even of the third rank, enunciating elaborate prayers and curses from the Italian repertoire as they stumbled among the pebbles and stones of cold running creeks on their way to perform in Gold Rush towns along the American River. It was as though the grandiose nineteenth-century musical form sought its natural echo in the canyons of the Sierra Nevada. The miners loved opera. (Puccini reversed the circuit and took David Belasco’s melodrama of the Gold Rush back to Europe as La Fanciulla del West.)

In 1860, San Francisco had a population of 57,000. By 1870, the population had almost tripled, to 149,000. Within three years of its founding, by 1868, the Daily Dramatic Chronicle would evolve with its hormonal city to become the Daily Morning Chronicle. The de Young brothers were in their early twenties. Along with theatrical and operatic listings, the Chronicle then published news of ships sailing into and out of the bay and the dollar equivalents of treasure in their holds, and bank robberies, and saloon shootings, and gold strikes and drownings, an extraordinary number of suicides, likewise fires, for San Francisco was a wooden city, as it still is in many of its districts.

It is still possible, very occasionally, to visit the Gold Rush city when one attends a crowded theater. Audiences here, more than in any city I know, possess a wit in common and can react as one—in pleasure, but also in derision. I often think our impulse toward hoot and holler might be related to our founding sense of isolation, to our being “an oasis of civilization in the California desert,” in the phrase of Addison DeWitt (in All About Eve), who, though a Hollywood figment, is about as good a rendition as I can summon of the sensibility (“New York critics”) we have courted here for one hundred and fifty years. And deplored.

The nineteenth-century city felt itself surrounded by vacancy—to the west, the gray court of the Pacific; to the east, the Livermore Valley, the San Joaquin Valley, the Sierra Nevada range. Shipping and mining were crucial to the wealth of the city, but they were never the consolations the city sought. The city looked, rather, to Addison DeWitt—to the eastern United States, to Europe, for approbation. If there was a pathetic sense of insecurity in living at the edge of the continent—San Francisco proclaiming itself “the Paris of the Pacific”!—the city also raised men of visionary self-interest who squinted into the distance and conceived of opening trade to Asia or cutting down redwood forests or laying track across a sea of yellow grass.

Readers in other parts of the country were fascinated by any scrap of detail about the Gold Rush city. Here is a fragment (July 9, 1866) from Bret Harte’s dispatch to readers of the Springfield Republican (from a collection of such dispatches edited by Gary Scharnhorst). The description remains accurate:

Midsummer! . . . To dwellers in Atlantic cities, what visions of heated pavements, of staring bricks, of grateful shade trees, of straw hats and white muslin, are conjured up in this word. . . . In San Francisco it means equal proportions of fog and wind. On the evening of the Fourth of July it was a pleasant and instructive sight to observe the population, in great-coats and thick shawls, warming themselves by bonfires, watching the sky-rockets lose themselves in the thick fog, and returning soberly home to their firesides and warm blankets.

From its inception, the San Francisco Chronicle borrowed a tone of merriment and swagger from the city it daily invented—on one occasion with fatal consequences: in 1879, the Chronicle ran an exposé of the Reverend Isaac Smith Kalloch, a recent arrival to the city (“driven forth from Boston like an Unclean Leper”) who had put himself up as a candidate for mayor. The Chronicle recounted Kalloch’s trial for adultery in Massachusetts (“his escapade with one of the Tremont Temple choristers”). Kalloch responded by denouncing the “bawdy house breeding” of the de Young boys, implying that Charles and Michael’s mother kept a whorehouse in St. Louis. Charles rose immediately to his mother’s defense; he shot Kalloch, who recovered and won City Hall. De Young never served jail time. A year later, in 1880, Kalloch’s son shot and killed Charles de Young in the offices of the Chronicle.

“Hatred of de Young is the first and best test of a gentleman,” Ambrose Bierce later remarked of Michael, the surviving brother. However just or unjust Bierce’s estimation, the de Young brothers lived and died according to their notion of a newspaper’s purpose—that it should entertain and incite the population.

In 1884, Michael was shot by Adolph Spreckels, the brother of a rival newspaper publisher and the son of the sugar magnate Claus Spreckels, after the Chronicle accused the Spreckels Sugar Company of labor practices in Hawaii amounting to slavery. De Young was not mortally wounded and Spreckels was acquitted on a claim of reasonable cause.

When he died in 1925, Michael de Young bequeathed the ownership of the Chronicle to his four daughters with the stipulation that it could not be sold out of the family until the death of the last surviving daughter.

San Francisco gentility has roots as shallow and as belligerent as those of the Australian blue gum trees that were planted heedlessly throughout the city and now configure and scent our Sunday walks. In 1961, Holiday magazine came to town to devote an entire issue to San Francisco. The three living daughters of Michael de Young were photographed seated on an antique high-backed causeuse in the gallery of the old M. H. de Young Memorial Museum their father had donated to the city to house his collection of paintings and curiosities (including a scabrous old mummy beloved of generations of schoolchildren—now considered too gauche to be displayed). For the same issue, Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, widow of Adolph, was photographed taking tea in her Pacific Heights mansion in what looks to be a fur-trimmed, floor-length velvet gown. The Spreckels family donated to the city a replica of the Palais de la Legion d’Honneur in Paris to house a collection of European paintings and rooms and furniture. One Spreckels and three de Youngs make four Margaret Dumonts—a San Francisco royal flush.

In 1972, the museum donated by Michael de Young merged with the museum created by the family of the man who tried to murder Michael de Young to become the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Men, usually men, who assumed the sole proprietorships of newspapers in the nineteenth century were the sort of men to be attracted by the way a newspaper could magnify an already fatted ego. Newspaper publishers were accustomed to lord over cities.

William Randolph Hearst was given the San Francisco Examiner by his father, a mining millionaire and U.S. senator, who may or may not have won it in a poker game in 1880. As it happened, young Hearst was born to run a newspaper. He turned the Examiner into the largest-circulation paper in San Francisco before he moved on to New York, where, in 1895, he acquired the New York Journal. Hearst quickly engaged in a yellow-journalism rivalry with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Both Hearst and Pulitzer assumed political careers. Hearst served in the Congress of the United States—served is not quite the word—as did Pulitzer, briefly.

We remember Joseph Pulitzer not as a sensationalist journalist but as the philanthropist who endowed an award for excellence in journalism and the arts. We remember William Randolph Hearst because his castle overlooking the Pacific—fifty miles of ocean frontage—is as forthright a temple to grandiosity as this nation can boast. And we remember Hearst as the original for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. Welles portrayed Charles Foster Kane with the mix of populism and egomania audiences of the time easily recognized as Hearst. Kane the champion of the common man becomes Kane the autocrat. Kane builds an opera house for his paramour. Kane invents a war.

The San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner were both losing money when, in 1965, Charles Thieriot, grandson of Michael de Young, met with William Randolph Hearst Jr. to collaborate on what they called the San Francisco Newspaper Agency. The Agency was a third entity designed to share production and administrative costs. The papers were to maintain editorial discretion and separate staffs. In addition, an incoherent Sunday edition shuffled together sections from both the Chronicle and the Examiner. The terms of the publishers’ agreement eventually favored the afternoon Hearst newspaper, for it was soon to fall behind, to become the lesser newspaper in a two-paper town. The Examiner nevertheless continued to collect half the profits of both.

In January 1988, Phyllis Tucker, the last surviving daughter of Michael de Young, died in San Francisco. Tucker’s daughter, Nan Tucker McEvoy, managed to forestall the sale of the paper for several years. But in 1999, the founding publisher’s posthumous grip was pried loose by a majority vote of family members to sell. At that time, the Hearst Corporation was desirous of reclaiming the San Francisco market. Hearst paid $660 million to the de Young heirs for the San Francisco Chronicle.

To satisfy antitrust concerns of the Justice Department, the Hearst Corporation sold the still-extant San Francisco Examiner to the politically connected Fang family, owners of Asianweek, the oldest and largest English-language Asian-American newspaper. The Hearst Corporation paid the Fangs a subsidy of $66 million to run the Examiner. Florence Fang placed her son, Ted Fang, in the editor’s chair. Within a year, Florence Fang fired her son; Ted Fang threatened to sue his mother. In 2004, the Fang family sold the Examiner to Philip Anschutz, a scattershot entrepreneur from Colorado who deflated William Randolph Hearst’s “Monarch of the Dailies” to a freebie tabloid that gets delivered to houses up and down the street twice a week, willy-nilly, and litters the floors of San Francisco municipal buses.

The day after I was born in San Francisco, my tiny existential fact was noted in several of the papers that were barked through the downtown streets. In truth, the noun “newspaper” is something of a misnomer. More than purveyors only of news, American newspapers were entrusted to be keepers of public record—papers were daily or weekly cumulative almanacs of tabular information. A newspaper’s morgue was scrutable evidence of the existence of a city. Newspapers published obituaries and they published birth announcements. They published wedding announcements and bankruptcy notices. They published weather forecasts (even in San Francisco, where on most days the weather is optimistic and unremarkable—fog clearing by noon). They published the fire department’s log and high school basketball scores. In a port city like San Francisco, there were listings of the arrivals and departures of ships. None of this constituted news exactly; it was a record of a city’s mundane progress. News was old as soon as it was dry—“fishwrap,” as Herb Caen often called it.

Unwilling to forfeit any fraction of my quarter, I even studied the classifieds—-unrelieved columns laid out like city blocks: Room for rent. Marina. No pets. File clerk position. Heavy phones. Ticket agent for busy downtown box office. Must be bonded. Norman, we’re still here. Only once did I find the titillation I was looking for, a listing worthy of a barbershop magazine, an Argosy, or a Mickey Spillane: “Ex-Green Beret will do anything legal for cash.” Newspapers were sustained by classifieds, as well as by department-store ads and automobile ads. I admired the urbanity of the drawings of newspaper ads in those years, and I took from them a conception of the posture of downtown San Francisco. Despite glimpses into the classified life of the city, despite the hauteur of ad-art mannerism, the Chronicle offered some assurance (to an adolescent such as I was) it would have been difficult for me to describe. I will call it now an implied continuity. There was continuity in the comics and on the sports page, but nowhere more than in the columns.

During Scott Newhall’s tenure as executive editor, from 1952 to 1971, the Chronicle achieved something of a golden age. Newhall was flamboyant in ways that were congenial to the city. At a time when the Los Angeles Times was attracting admiration from the East Coast for its fleet of foreign bureaus, Newhall reverted to an eighteenth-century model of a newspaper as first-person observer.

For nearly two decades the city that prized its singularity was entertained by idiosyncratic voices. At the shallow end of the Chronicle’s roster (under the cipher of a coronet) appeared Count Marco, a Liberace of the typewriter who concerned himself with fashion and beauty and l’amour. At the deep end—a snug corner at Gino and Carlo’s bar in North Beach—sat “Charles McCabe, Esq.,” an erudite connoisseur of books, spirits, and failed marriages. Terrence O’Flaherty watched television. Stanton Delaplane, to my mind the best writer among them, wrote “Postcard”—a travel series with charm and humor. Art Hoppe concocted political satire. Harold Gilliam expounded on wind and tide and fog. Alfred Frankenstein was an art critic of international reputation. There was a book column by William Hogan and a society column by Frances Moffat. Allan Temko wrote architectural criticism against the grain of the city’s sensibility, a sensibility he sometimes characterized as a liberal spirit at odds with a timorous aesthetic. All the Chronicle columnists and critics had constituents, but the name above the banner was Herb Caen.

Herb Caen began writing a column for the Chronicle before the Second World War. At that time, Caen was in his twenties and probably resembled the fresh, fast-talking smarty-pants he pitched his voice to portray in print. Item. . .item. . .who’s gotta item? In 1950, he was lured over to the Examiner at a considerable hike in salary, and circulation followed at his heels. He knew all the places; he knew the maître d’s, the bartenders, the bouncers, the flower-sellers, the cops, the madams, the shopkeepers—knew them in the sense that they all knew him and knew he could be dangerous. In 1958, Caen returned to the Chronicle, and, again, circulation tilted.

Each day except Saturday, for forty years, Caen set the conversation for San Francisco. Who was in town. Who was in the hospital and would appreciate a card. Who was seen drinking champagne out of a rent boy’s tennis shoe. His last column began: “And how was your Christmas?” He persuaded hundreds of thousands of readers (crowded on buses, on the way to work) that his was the city we lived in. Monday through Friday, Caen was an omniscient table-hopping bitch. On Sunday, he dropped all that; he reverted to an ingenue—a sailor on leave, a sentimental flaneur infatuated with his dream “Baghdad-by-the-Bay.” The point of the Sunday perambulation was simple relish—fog clearing by noon; evidence that the mystical, witty, sourdough city had survived one more week.

After a time, Caen stopped writing Sunday panegyrics; he said it was not the same city anymore, and it wasn’t. He wasn’t. Los Angeles, even San Jose—two cities created by suburbanization—had become more influential in the world than the “cool grey city of love,” a George Sterling line Caen favored. The Chinese city did not figure in Caen’s novel, except atmospherically—lanterns and dragons, chorus girls at the Forbidden City, Danny Kaye taking over the kitchen at Kan’s, that sort of thing. The growing Filipino, Latin-American city did not figure at all.

In Caen’s heyday, the San Francisco Chronicle reflected the self-infatuated city. But it was not the city entire that drew the world’s attention. In the 1950s, the version of San Francisco that interested the world was Jack Kerouac’s parish—a few North Beach coffeehouses habituated by beatniks (a word Caen coined) and City Lights Bookstore. By the time I was a teenager, the path to City Lights was electrified by the marquees of topless clubs and bad wolves with flashlights beckoning passersby toward red velvet curtains. Anyway, the scene had moved by that time to the fog-shrouded Grateful Dead concerts in Golden Gate Park and to the Haight Ashbury. A decade later, the most famous neighborhood in the city was the homosexual Castro District. San Francisco never seemed to grow old the way other cities grow old.

In 1967, the Chronicle’s rock and jazz critic, Ralph J. Gleason, teamed up with a renegade cherub named Jann Wenner to publish Rolling Stone magazine. What this disparate twosome intuited was that by chronicling the rising influence of rock music, they were effectively covering a revolution. In New York, writers were cultivating, in the manner of Thackeray, a self-referential point of view and calling it the “New Journalism.” In San Francisco, Rolling Stone was publishing a gospel “I” that found itself in a world without precedent: Greil Marcus, Cameron Crowe, Patti Smith, Timothy Ferris, Hunter S. Thompson. I remember sitting in an Indian tea shop in South London in 1970 (in the manner of the New Journalism) and being gripped by envy potent enough to be called homesickness as I read John Burks’s account of the Stones concert at Altamont. It was like reading a dispatch from the Gold Rush city.

One morning in the 1970s, the Chronicle began to publish Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City—adding sex and drugs and local branding to the nineteenth-century gimmick of serial fiction. At a time when American families were trending to the suburbs, Maupin’s novel insisted that San Francisco was still magnetic for single lives. In those same years, Cyra McFadden was writing satirically about the sexual eccentricities of suburban Marin County in a series (“The Serial”) for an alternative newspaper called the Pacific Sun.

In those same years, Joan Didion wrote, in The White Album, that for many people in Los Angeles “the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the (Manson family) murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community.” To borrow for a moment the oracular deadpan: In San Francisco, the Sixties came to an end for many people in 1977, when Jann Wenner packed up and moved Rolling Stone to New York. As he departed, the moss-covered wunderkind griped to a young reporter standing by that San Francisco was a “provincial backwater.”

What no one could have imagined in 1977, not even Jann Wenner, was that a suburban industrial region thirty miles to the south of the city contained an epic lode. Silicon Valley would, within twenty years, become the capital of Nowhere. What no one could have imagined in 1977 was that San Francisco would become a bedroom community for a suburban industrial region that lay thirty miles to the south.

Don’t kid a kidder. Herb Caen died in 1997. With the loss of that daily hectoring voice, the Chronicle seemed to lose its narrative thread, as did the city. The Chronicle began to reprint Caen columns, to the bewilderment of anyone younger than thirty.

If you die in San Francisco, unless you are judged notable by our know-nothing newspaper (it is unlikely you will be judged notable unless your obituary has already appeared in the Washington Post or the New York Times), your death will be noted in a paid obituary submitted to the Chronicle by your mourners. More likely, there will be no public notice taken at all. As much as any vacancy in the Chronicle I can point to, the dearth of obituaries measures its decline.

In the nineteenth-century newspaper, the relationship between observer and observed was reciprocal: the newspaper described the city; the newspaper, in turn, was sustained by readers who were curious about the strangers that circumstance had placed proximate to them. So, I suppose, it is incomplete to notice that the San Francisco Chronicle has become remiss in its obituary department. Of four friends of mine who died recently in San Francisco, not one wanted a published obituary or any other public notice taken of his absence. This seems to me a serious abrogation of the responsibility of living in a city and as good an explanation as any of why newspapers are dying. All four of my friends requested cremation; three wanted their ashes consigned to the obscurity of Nature. Perhaps the cemetery is as doomed in America as the newspaper, and for the same reason: we do not imagine death as a city.

We no longer imagine the newspaper as a city or the city as a newspaper. Whatever I may say in the rant that follows, I do not believe the decline of newspapers has been the result solely of computer technology or of the Internet. The forces working against newspapers are probably as varied and foregone as the Model-T Ford and the birth-control pill. We like to say that the invention of the internal-combustion engine changed us, changed the way we live. In truth, we built the Model-T Ford because we had changed; we wanted to remake the world to accommodate our restlessness. We might now say: Newspapers will be lost because technology will force us to acquire information in new ways. In that case, who will tell us what it means to live as citizens of Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor? The truth is we no longer want to live in Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor. Our inclination has led us to invent a digital cosmopolitanism that begins and ends with “I.” Careening down Geary Boulevard on the 38 bus, I can talk to my my dear Auntie in Delhi or I can view snapshots of my cousin’s wedding in Recife or I can listen to girl punk from Glasgow. The cost of my cyber-urban experience is disconnection from body, from presence, from city.

A few months ago there was an item in the paper about a young woman so plugged into her personal sounds and her texting apparatus that she stepped off the curb and was mowed down by a honking bus.

In this morning’s paper there is a quote from an interview San Francisco’s mayor, Gavin Newsom, gave to The Economist concerning the likelihood that San Francisco will soon be a city without a newspaper: “People under thirty won’t even notice.”

The other day I came upon a coffeehouse that resembled, as I judged from its nineteenth-century exterior, the sort of café where the de Young brothers might have distributed their paper. The café was only a couple of blocks from the lively gay ambience of upper Market Street yet far removed from the clamorous San Francisco of the nineteenth century. Several men and women sat alone at separate tables. No one spoke. The café advertised free wi-fi; all but one of the customers had laptops open before them. (The exception was playing solitaire with a real deck of cards.) The only sounds were the hissing of an espresso machine and the clattering of a few saucers. A man in his forties, sitting by the door, stared at a screen upon which a cartoon animal, perhaps a dog, loped silently.

I should mention that the café, like every coffeehouse in the city, had stacks of the Bay Guardian, S.F. Weekly, the Bay Area Reporter—free and roughly equivalent to the Daily Dramatic Chronicle of yore. I should mention that San Francisco has always been a city of stranded youth, and the city apparently continues to provide entertainments for youth:

Gosta Berling, Kid Mud, Skeletal System El Rio. 8pm, $5. Davis Jones, Eric Andersen and Tyler Stafford, Melissa McClelland Hotel Utah. 8pm, $7. Ben Kweller, Jones Street Station, Princeton Slim’s. 8:30pm, $19. Harvey Mandel and the Snake Crew Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $16. Queers, Mansfields, Hot Toddies, Atom Age Bottom of the Hill. 8:30pm, $12.

The colleague I am meeting for coffee tells me (occasioned by my puzzlement at the wi-fi séance) that more and more often he is finding sex on Craigslist. As you know better than I do, one goes to Craigslist to sell or to buy an old couch or a concert ticket or to look for a job. But also to arrange for sexual Lego with a body as free of narrative as possible. (Im bored 26-Oakland-east.)

Another friend, a journalist born in India, who has heard me connect newspapers with place once too often, does not dispute my argument, but neither is he troubled by it: “If I think of what many of my friends and I read these days, it is still a newspaper, but it is clipped and forwarded in bits and pieces on email—a story from the New York Times, a piece from Salon, a blog from the Huffington Post, something from the Times of India, from YouTube. It is like a giant newspaper being assembled at all hours, from every corner of the world, still with news but no roots in a place. Perhaps we do not need a sense of place anymore.”

So what is lost? Only bricks and mortar. (The contemptuous reply.) Cities are bricks and mortar. Cities are bricks and mortar and bodies. In Chicago, women go to the opera with bare shoulders.

Something funny I have noticed, perhaps you have noticed it, too. You know what futurists and online-ists and cut-out-the-middle-man-ists and Davos-ists and deconstructionists of every stripe want for themselves? They want exactly what they tell you you no longer need, you pathetic, overweight, disembodied Kindle reader. They want white linen tablecloths on trestle tables in the middle of vineyards on soft blowy afternoons. (You can click your bottle of wine online. Cheaper.) They want to go shopping on Saturday afternoons on the Avenue Victor Hugo; they want the pages of their New York Times all kind of greasy from croissant crumbs and butter at a café table in Aspen; they want to see their names in hard copy in the “New Establishment” issue of Vanity Fair; they want a nineteenth-century bookshop; they want to see the plays in London, they want to float down the Nile in a felucca; they want five-star bricks and mortar and do not disturb signs and views of the park. And in order to reserve these things for themselves they will plug up your eyes and your ears and your mouth, and if they can figure out a way to pump episodes of The Simpsons through the darkening corridors of your brain as you expire (add to shopping cart), they will do it.

We will end up with one and a half cities in America—Washington, D.C., and American Idol. We will all live in Washington, D.C., where the conversation is a droning, never advancing, debate between “conservatives” and “liberals.” We will not read about newlyweds. We will not read about the death of salesmen. We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels. We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are without professional book reviewers and art critics and essays about what it might mean that our local newspaper has died. We are a nation of Amazon reader responses (Moby Dick is “not a really good piece of fiction”—Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald J. Bingle, Saint Charles, Ill.—two stars out of five). We are without obituaries, but the famous will achieve immortality by a Wikipedia entry.

National newspapers may try to impersonate regional newspapers that are dying or dead. (There have been reports that the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal will soon publish San Francisco Bay Area editions.) We already live in the America of USA Today, which appears, unsolicited, in a plastic chrysalis suspended from your doorknob at a Nebraska Holiday Inn or a Maine Marriott. We check the airport weather. We fly from one CNN Headline News monitor to another. We end up where we started.

An obituary does not propose a solution.

Techno-puritanism that wars with the body must also resist the weight of paper. I remember that weight. It was the weight of the world, carried by boys.

Late in grammar school and into high school, I delivered the Sacramento Bee, a newspaper that was, in those years, published in the afternoon, Monday through Saturday, and in the morning on Sundays. My route comprised one hundred and forty subscribers—nearly every house in three square blocks.

The papers were barely dry when I got them, warm to the touch and clean—if you were caught short, you could deliver a baby on newspaper. The smell of newspapers was a slick petroleum smell of ink. I would fold each paper in triptych, then snap on a rubber band. On Thursdays, the Bee plumped with a cooking section and with supermarket ads. On Sundays, there was added the weight of comics, of real estate and automobile sections, and supplements like Parade and the television guide.

I stuffed half my load of newspapers into the canvas bag I tied onto my bicycle’s handlebars; the rest went into saddlebags on the back. I never learned to throw a baseball with confidence, but I knew how to aim a newspaper well enough. I could make my mark from the sidewalk—one hand on the handlebar—with dead-eye nonchalance. The paper flew over my shoulder; it twirled over hedges and open sprinklers to land with a fine plop only inches from the door.

In the growling gray light (San Francisco still has foghorns), I collect the San Francisco Chronicle from the wet steps. I am so lonely I must subscribe to three papers—the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle. I remark their thinness as I climb the stairs. The three together equal what I remember.