It's been a disagreeable week or so here at the home office. For starters, our anniversary dinner (which included that rare feature, babysitting) was interrupted by a fever which waited until after the entrees were on their way before moving from theoretical to hey-that's-a-lot-of-shivering undeniably real. (A sushi doggie bag, by the way, is a deeply hilarious item to confront twelve hours later).
This was followed several days later, by the arrival of a separate illness, which seemed to be the flu, in sufficient strength to knock me out of work for two days. It took the appearance of red dots on my hands to begin the process of discovering that I was playing host to something a bit different than the usual influenza virus, and would involve a whole extra round of weird and uncomfortable symptoms which, while minor, made me feel as if I had been given a leper costume for this year's Halloween parade. And which may or may not show up in Helena next.
Oh, and the Health Department inspected the day care center we send our daughter to. And told them they had too many children under 2 years of age for their licence. Guess which part-time attendee got notified that she'll have to leave? Now guess how many available slots there are within other day care facilities within reasonable reach of our house? If you guessed "Helena" and "Zero," then you are either a good guesser or are good at understanding heavy-handed, quasi-humorous, whining riddles.*
All this is of course more than bearable, though you wouldn't know if from the way we grumped through the weekend around here. Daylight savings time ended -- which has just seemed to give us a bonus hour of bad karma. I'd like to go to bed to put the blank on it all, but the upstairs neighbors have decided to put on the bedroom TV and rearrange the position of the wardrobe.
Is there a point to sharing this litany of gripes? Not really -- except perhaps to note that I've been so immersed in the sundries of Kleenex, Tylenol and local family day care homes that the upcoming election day has almost receded into the background. The feeling of disconnection is disturbing but palpable. Not that I have ceased to care: but my caring about the outcome no longer threatens to tear me to pieces with anxiety everytime I click on the Slate
Election Scorecard.
But I do care enough to notice when others are doing what I can't. I've been sidelined by microbes and the complexities of my own life, but from this little world of crap I send this packet of messages: if you're gearing up to travel to an electoral melee-zone for Nov. 2 (or are already there: Hi Josh!); if you're going to work as a poll watcher (or poll watcher-watcher) on Tuesday in one of those swingin' states; if you've been working the phones from home or in some union hall -- thanks. Thanks. Thanks.
*For the Aussies reading: "whingeing riddles."
Your recently flu-bestricken Wombat totters as he arises from his fevered bed to offer this week's...well, I'm actually back at the office, not really tottering, but still, you know, not really feeling, you know, the full marsupial. In any event, if this week's fact-ina fails to amuse, blame it on Big Pharma. I have tried, however, to choose a thematically related topic:
Dr. Leslie Enraught Keeley of the village of Dwight, Illinois, attained a brief period of fame in the 1890s as thousands flocked to the village to receive his series of curative injections. Given by his assistants in large hypodermics, the sought-after solution was red, white, and blue in color, and was sometimes called "the barber pole." The injections left a large yellow blemish on the skin. Keeley's remedy (which he also marketed in oral doses) which had apparently euphoric and quasi-amnesiac side effects, was famously based on a particular ingredient, which lent the "cure" it's best-known name.
What condition did Keeley's solution claim to alleviate? For a bonus point, what substance in its makeup lent it its popular moniker ("The [Blank] Cure")
NOTE: This one comes from Erik Larson's book The Devil in the White City, so those who've recently perused that informative volume should probably sit this one out and get me a cup of hot tea.
First correct answer posted to comments wins a challenged vote of their choice in either southern Florida or Cuyahoga County, Ohio. No Googling or logging onto QuackeryToday.com. One guess per comment, please, but you may comment as often as you like.
David Wondrich, from whose book we nabbed this question, contends that the 20th Century, in an important sense, began on Saturday, January 27, 1917, when Nick LaRocca, Larry Shields, Eddie Edwards, Henry Ragas, and Tony Sbarbaro did something at 8th Avenue and 58th Street in New York City. They weren't New Yorkers. A month and a half later, they were nationally known (although not by their individual names), and had kicked off what is widely recognized as the first large-scale marketing of a new American phenomenon.
Under what four-word collective moniker did these men become famous? Answer this question, and their place of origin will probably be somewhat obvious.
First correct answer posted to comments wins a case of expired Sunny Delight. No Googling or calling Dave at home -- we hear he's nursing a Sidecar hangover. One guess per comment, please, but comment as often as you like.
**Note: the bonus point answer to last week's quiz was airplane pilots and technicians. Go figure.
As I was saying about last weekend's Ron Suskind article on Bush, faith, and the current administration, the paragraph in which a senior aide touts the imperial triumph over reality is only the second-most important passage therein.
The most important is the bit about the cultural-political divide claimed by Mark McKinnon, a media-consultant member of Team Bush:
And for those who don't get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. ''You think he's an idiot, don't you?'' I said, no, I didn't. ''No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!'' In this instance, the final ''you,'' of course, meant the entire reality-based community.
This is important for two reasons. The first is that McKinnon is signalling a vital part of the administration's media strategy (he should know): play up Bush's faults as populist points of solidarity with "busy working people," and look for ways to put critics on the defensive. He dares Suskind to call Bush stupid, and then when Suskind says he doesn't think Bush is stupid, mocks him for his dishonesty. It's a ploy designed to heighten the current conservative cariacature of the press as uniformly cynical, high-handed, and prejudiced against ordinary people and their abilities.
(And it can be devastatingly effective. This accusation has helped spike consistent questioning of the President's intellectual fitness for the working of governance. Indeed, in one of the few places where I think the article is weak, Suskind is careful to quote Democratic Senator Carl Levin as saying "He's plenty smart enough to do the job," as if to innoculate against the counter-criticism that these critics 'misunderestimate' the Commander-in-Chief. But Suskind's general accusation -- that the President and his team have replaced fact, inquiry and curiosity with faith in their own untested instincts -- is at its heart about intelligence. Why don't we always run our businesses or manage foreign policy solely by consulting instinct and following the dicta of our hearts? Because that's just not very bright.)
Where was I? Oh, yes, the second thing about McKinnon's little "you're outnumbered" rant? It's a lie so bold they've been getting away with it for years now. Apparently only a sliver of the country -- or, rather, two slivers of the country -- are at all interested in the question of the President's capabilities, or put off by his inarticulate and factually confused attempts at public speaking. Those who red-stately revere him, who admire "his confidence" (as opposed to his abilities or accomplishments!) outnumber the isolated Coasties by a two to one margin. Yes, 2/3 of America, that "big, wide middle" has put their hand in the hand of the man who Accomplished the Mission of Confidence.
But of course that's utter crap. While the polls still show Bush with an electoral lead, a look at the near-50% split reveals that even in Midwestern states where Bush support is for practical purposes strong, his lead is often barely above the margin of error. (I know, McKinnon was speaking in 2002, pre-Iraq, but still -- a 2/3 majority that admired Bush unreservedly?) And while public perceptions have altered since 2000, McKinnon's little diatribe glosses awfully quickly over Bush's popular-vote loss in that election.
I can't speak to campaign odds -- a narrow lead, if stable, is all anybody needs to win a state, of course. But still: would a narrow victory in Missouri mean that everyone in that decidedly Midwestern state dismisses Bush's faults? Is Michigan a hopelessly elitist outer district of New England? Is Ohio bounded by an ocean I hadn't heard about? Michael Moore: he's from Flint, um, California, isn't he? If an intelligent person laughs at a Presidential malapropism in Colorado, does it make a sound? One expects each side to claim that they actually represent the majority. But two-thirds? To paraphrase the President, that sounds like one of their "exaggerations."
This tale of two countries -- one of the Nascar-loving, Camembert-loathing loyalist and one of the haut-yuppie latte lover -- is the best line the GOP has had since "Morning in America." The grain of truth behind it -- that there is a regional correspondence with the party divide in the country -- is inflated into a myth of Heartland Security, in which the geographic, emotional and symbolic center is connected to Bush. In the absence of a real majority of broad support this myth lends the illusion of destiny to the Bush Presidency.
And given that the media have had no success in deflating it, it's still working.
I had a long post here about the fight against comment spam. And then in an attempt to open another window and make a link I erased everything I'd written.
I just wanted to tell you about that.
I was listening to Harry Shearer's Le Show today (archived from the weekend -- following a tip from Dr. Green) and Shearer made a brief point of reading aloud a bit of the Ron Suskind article on the administration's "faith-based" worldview that I linked below. It was one of the parts that had struck me most forcefully as well:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
It's all clear to me now. That was no mere "adviser". It wasn't even Karl Rove.
It was Dr. Doom. Or maybe Dr. Octopus. Or Dr. No, or Hank Scorpio, or Dr. Evil. They've got one of those guys. It had to be. They're the only ones who can talk like that and not make people giggle. Or rather, if people do giggle, they crush them with mechanical gloves and whatnot.
One wonders what happened after the "senior adviser" gave this little speech? Did he raise Suskind up using his telekinetic power over "reality," sending the journalist's rag-doll-like body hurtling back through the office door, there to languish in its feeble mortality? Did he walk out to a balcony, there to overlook his teeming army of Uruk-hai?
That said, this was only the second-most important quotation in the article. I'll get to that one tomorrow.
Stop Sinclair.org is soliciting contributions to pay for full-page ads in the markets where Sinclair is forcing its TV stations to run anti-Kerry propaganda under the guise of news.
A grey morning inspires the Wombat's morbid streak. Therefore this week's quiz is a memento mori:
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the most frequently seen cause of workplace death in 2003 (as in previous years) was transportation incidents (mostly on highways). The next largest was falls. What was the third largest? Until recent years, it was a very strong #2 -- in the early 1990s, almost tied with highway incidents as the leading work-related "fatal event."
Bonus question: in 2003, the fatality rate (deaths per 100,000 people employed) for logging workers was the highest, at 131.6. What profession had the second-highest fatality rate?
First correct answer to comments wins a tattered copy of the shooting script for the highway safety film "The Last Prom." No Googling or consulting the all-seeing eye of Agamotto. One guess per comment please, but you may comment as often as you like.
...nothing. We're going to attempt a little Speedysnail-enabled upgrade, so stand by. There is a Coney Island-bound F train approaching York Street, one station away. Please stand clear of the platform edge as trains enter and leave the station.
It seemed pretty obvious to me tonight's debate was for any person not already a Bush/GOP partisan a terrific performance by Kerry, and further evidence of GWB's almost tragic unfitness for high office. As I obviously have a deep-seated prejudice going into this, I wouldn't expect supposed neutrals and undecideds to weigh in quite so heavily pro-Kerry. But only those who have already bought the myth that Bush's pigheaded, shrill insistence on a black-and-white world of his own describing equals strength could have interpreted his blustery stumbling tonight to be evidence of competence. Even if you like Bush, you have to admit that in this forum, he sounds stupid, makes excuses, lies poorly, and is truly inarticulate much of the time.
The funhouse-mirror effect of telejournalism, in which shrill and pigheaded gets reflected back as fiery and tough went into effect on the post-debate "analysis" offered up for our edification by CNN's Blitzer, Greenfield & Co. While they offer a little pro-forma fact checking (making sure to challenge each candidate the same number of times), they are as usual only truly comfortable discussing their perception of what America's perception will be -- and that already-hazy subject is quickly rendered more amorphous by the constant turn toward the feelings produced by the candidates.
It's all the more sickening when one realizes how hard these people are working to disattach and discard what small portion of substance remains in the much-mediated circumstance of these highly-choreographed debates. Through the thicket of stagy conventions, preposterous limitations and relentlessly predictable phraseology, one can yet -- if dimly -- make out actual STUFF THE CANDIDATES ARE SAYING. It's as if, despite it all, these "words" which they are using, actually mean things: as if despite our marketer-trained minds, we can't help but notice that language is also a medium for communication and not merely an empty performance of evocative sound-forms. Hey! Kerry just made a commitment to a particular tax policy! Gosh, the President just made a critique of that policy. And look -- that critique was based on false premises! This language shit is amazing -- the words not only mean things, but we can investigate, test, even evaluate those meanings!
And then the analysis begins -- and those meanings, real-seeming though they might be, prove to be impossibly fugitive to rate among the concerns of the talking heads. What were the "themes" each candidate returned to? How "strong" did he seem? Did he seem more energetic or less so? These are the concerns we find ourselves deeply involved with. One of the CNN commentators (it might have been Carlos Watson) tonight suggested that in the case of this debate, the question of "who won" would not merely be decided by the public and reflected on the Sunday morning talk shows -- but in this case, presumably because it's Friday -- the Sunday morning shows would do much of the heavy lifting in picking a winner.
I don't know what more there is to say about that. Except that Joan Didion (see below) is certainly a better person to read on this subject than me. So I'll stop. But what I saw tonight was a clear Kerry victory instantly transformed, through the magic of low expectations, into a preposterous fantasy of a tie with the man he scored on time and again.
Join me in a little pre-debate distraction with another grey-matter relaxant in the form of our Friday Quiz.
Local residents at one time maintained that its creation was due to a fight between the gods Llao and Skell. John Wesley Hillman, Henry Klippel and Isaac Skeeters were the first men of European descent to discover it. Thirty-three years after their arrival, Captain Clarence Dutton explored it in the Cleetwood and made record-setting findings that were confirmed by advanced technological tools more than half a century later.
What did Captain Dutton explore? For a bonus point, what record did Dutton's measurements establish?
First correct answer posted to comments wins a pair of Sigmund and the Sea Monsters commemorative salt-and-pepper shakers (in the shape of Sigmund brothers Blurp and Slurp). No Googling or making fun of Mr. Skeeters' surname. One guess per comment, please, but you may comment as frequently as your browser can load the page.
"What were we doing here? What kind of profound amnesia had overtaken us? How had it taken hold, come to prevent the laying down of not only political but cultural long-term memory? Could we no longer hold a thought long enough to connect it to the events we were seeing and hearing and reading about? Did we not find it remarkable that the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission to concentrate our intelligence functions in the White House would have been met with general approval? That former members of Congress would urge action by executive order to enact a plan that would limit the congressional role to "oversight"? That the only reservations expressed would be those reflecting issues of agency turf?
"Did we not remember the Nixon White House and the point to which its lust for collecting intelligence had taken it? The helicopter on the lawn, the weeping daughter, the felony indictments? Did we not remember what "congressional oversight" had recently meant? Did we have no memory that the Reagan administration had been operating under congressional oversight even as it gave us Iran-contra? Had we lost even the names of the players? Did "Manucher Ghorbanifar" no longer resonate? Had we lost all memory of Ronald Reagan except in the role assigned him by his creators and certified by the coverage in the week of his death, that of "sunny optimist"? Did we not remember that it was his administration, through its use of Islamic fundamentalists to wage our war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, that had underwritten the dream of unending jihad? Was no trace left of what we had learned about actions and their consequences?"
--Joan Didion in the New York Review of Books (via Mefi).
Columbus & Cortez: Conquerors for Christ
...why all the controversy over these explorers? Is it really to correct the historical record? Or is it an assault on the values of Western Civilization and Christianity which is the source of those values?
Exactly. Everybody knows that Hernando was more or less a high-minded guy on a mission to rescue souls. We just pretend otherwise to further undermine this infuriatingly persistent Western Civilization so that we can get down to some serious gay marryin' and polytheistic good times.
What is it about these damned debates that gives me the shivering geezies? In this one, it seems to be the combo of evil cyborg, crazy rules, goofy questions, the absence of instant onscreen fact-checking by an independent organization, and just the relentless tedious repetition of the damn thing. Some sort of nervous twitch in my jawbone sets up, and the ultrasonic vibrations are enough to send the cat out of the room.
I think this one was a toss-up (which is of course what the press is saying, so I'm being completely ho-hum here)-- Edwards got some good punches in but to many Cheney's grim holding of the company line will look like gravitas. The bases on both sides will be OK with it, but I can't see it moving the story one way or another. On the whole, a somewhat missed opportunity for KE04, but not a setback.
I'm a wreck, however. Watching this just leaves me a ragged scrap of a Wombat.
Poynter has Wall Street Journal reporter Farnaz Fassihi e-mail to friends about what it's like being a journalist in Iraq right now.
Granted, the very circumstances she describes ("virtual house arrest") may mean that her ability to gauge the mood of Iraqis with regard to upcoming elections is compromised. But still.
Meanwhile, the L.A. Times says that as a result of Fassihi's e-mail, the Journal has suspended her reporting until after the election.
This morning finds the Wombat still reeling from political overstimulation. 90 minutes of desperately hoping that John Kerry would, during the debates, demand that we all "stop pretending to take this pathetic half-wit seriously," took their toll. I'm still a quivering wreck and my fur is a SIGHT. Oh, Trivia, take me away!
In terms of total square miles, The United States of America is the largest country in the world whose name is taken from that of a real person (15th-century Genoan navigator Amerigo Vespucci). Colombia (named of course for Peter Falk's beloved TV detective for Vespucci's fellow Ligurian Christopher Columbus) is No. 3 in terms of area.
By the same measure, what is the second-largest nation whose official name is derived from that of a person?
For extra credit, name countries #4 and #5 on the list.
First correct answer posted to comments wins an autographed CD single of Zach Allen's terrifying performance of "Coming to America." No Googling or leafing through that stack of National Geographic magazines in your parents' basement. One guess per comment, but you may comment as often as you like.
...or I would have been watching on C-Span. Instead, we caught the debate on PBS, which was fine enough, and offered enough "reaction shots" to display Bush's preferred expression of petulance and irritation with the fact that Kerry kept making him have to think about what he was going to say.
I was hoping that the postgame comments on PBS would be a little less vapid than that which I've been suffering through from the other "news" outfits this year -- the inability to actually discuss or analyze what happened, as opposed to the move immediately to designated partisans and their insta-marketing of whatever headline they'd like to see emerge.
But PBS, while eschewing immediate spin-tennis from the likes of a Carville/Matalin duo, trod a respectable-looking version of the same road, that wound up meandering in the same pointless direction -- and, as has generally been the case, served the Bush campaign quite well. David Brooks, in his current role as liberally-credentialed apologist for the Rovians, dug right in, insisting that Bush had brought a lot of facts to the table, and instantly applying the obvious Republican strategy should the President look, as he did, like a poorly programmed robot, spitting out an array of garbled catchphrases and looking peevish when challenged.
That is, Brooks immediately argued for a Draw. Since any attempt to call it an out and out win for the President -- whose ability to hold it together waned as Kerry's confidence and point-scoring waxed -- would have been a hard sell, he made the sell for a genial "both did well" approach. Considering the lowered expectations already attached to every Bush performance (he merely has to do better than awful to earn plaudits from an astonishingly compliant press), a tie for Bush is a win. This is the line being handed out on CNN as well. And as with the Gore debate, the Rove team will work feverishly to bully the press into reporting more Bush "positives" (his folksy inability to speak nearly as well as his patrician opponent, for example) as if they were significant realities, in the hopes of eroding whatever gains in stature Kerry's fairly obvious victory tonight might give him.
Oh, and the "liberal" side of the PBS commentary? Handled by Mark Shields, of course, who slumped before Brooks' sunny conservative beaming like a bowl of tapioca pudding left out on the porch. Yes, the left really does well in this new media world of ours, where everything is just as fair and balanced as can be, and there's really no point to asking questions.