The family of a terror victim in Israel has asked bloggers aroundthe world to link to her memorial page. I’m honored to comply. Go to Remembering Shiri Negari, and be reminded that while we wave our hands and have high-level discussions about policy, real people with real lives bleed and die. It will give you perspective.
I do not doubt that there is real tragedy on the Palestinian side as well; when they stop trying to get my attention by killing Shiri’s, I’ll be happy to talk about it.
Link thanks to Ted Barlow.

Well, two of my favorite bloggers are having a dustup over fun, of all things. Instapundit and Ted Barlow are bickering over Alex Beam’s column in the Boston Globe, in which he discusses the idea that:

Is it true, to paraphrase the famous Clairol marketing campaign: Do conservatives really have more fun? The answer is yes, incontrovertibly so. Who would you rather be? Me, plodding through errands on my bicycle, sporting my pathetic ”One Less Car” T-shirt, or one of the many SUV drivers who blast exhaust in my face as they roar off to fill up on cheap gas?

Instapundit gets all ironic about it:

This is funny, but it’s a serious problem for the Left. Like Sweden, it’s cruised for a long time on a reputation for free-wheeling hedonism that no longer holds. The hair-shirt left is alienating to a lot of people — I mean, which would you rather have, wild sex and high living or Andrea Dworkin and a spare lifestyle relieved only by an affected moral superiority?

and then Ted gets genuinely upset:

Glenn has fairly complained about liberals who look at the Right as if it’s always and everywhere Birmingham in 1963. Then he turns around and talks about the left as if it’s always and everywhere Berkeley in 1985.

Geez, guys, lighten up.
First, and foremost, am I the only one who caught a whiff of self-depreciating irony in Beam’s column? The last half of the paragraph above drives the skewer right home:

Who would you rather be? Goo-goo good guy Warren Tolman, painstakingly explaining his position on the School Building Assistance Program? Or Mitt Romney, who has his own, no-frills education plan: Send them to (private, tony) Belmont Hill! It worked for his kids – why won’t it work for everybody?

and does it in what I’d consider to be a pretty damn fair (hence pro-liberal way). I read Beam’s column as a mild satire, playing on the stereotype of the humorless, crunchy liberal while actually hammering home a few pretty good pro-liberal points – good government and building schools is a liberal program, sending your kids to tony private schools isn’t. Beam then goes on to throw a few well-placed elbows at the stereotype…including Taki as an example of the ‘fun-loving’ right.
The danger of daily punditry is that quick reads miss obvious things, and we’re all reading too damn quickly. I think that Beam’s column was a bit of pointed fluff, that Glenn picked up on it to beat one of his favorite dead horses, and that Ted rose to the bait like a trout.
Look, here’s the deal. There are a bunch of people in the world…on the left and right…who are pissy and unhappy by nature. They tend to become bad bureaucrats and bad pastors. Somehow, about the time George McGovern got nominated, they captured the levers of liberal power over here (I don’t know European political history well enough to know when it happened over there, but it did), and the ‘don’t play with scissors’ crowd became the vanguard of leftist thought.
Me, I’m a leftist; how are — government-sponsored health care, support for unions, a higher minimum wage, stronger environmental laws, a biiig gas tax, support for same-sex marriage, progressive taxation, strong public schools, support for a woman’s right to choose – as credentials? I do think we need to temper those with the understanding that Stalinist command-and-control aren’t always the best way to get there, and that the new information technologies and the social and management structures enabled by those technologies ought to change the tactics we use to get from here to there. And most of all, I think that we need to design these in a way that encourages responsibility and individual accountability.
But enough serious stuff; I’ve led a life with just too damn much fun; my sexual history would make Dawn blush; vodka, hell – I’ve pretty much exhausted the possibilities in the pharmacopoeia; I’ve seen U2 at the Roxy, Nureyev at the SF Opera House, the Beatles at the Bowl; dated centerfolds from Playboy and Penthouse; been married to two great women; held my sons when they were born, and spent their first night with them sleeping on my chest; driven away from my oldest son as he moved into his own home (but still took him to the drugstore to buy him condoms); sailed in through the Golden Gate at dawn; seen 145 on the speedometer of a motorcycle; spent the night with a dying friend; and seen the dawn just sitting and talking with the amazing friends I have made; and maybejusy maybe am lucky enough to have finally found the right woman for the rest of my life.
I’m off today to take my 15 year old to the ‘Inland Invasion’ punk show. I’ll be the 49-year old guy with glasses in the mosh pit.
So here’s the deal folks. I do think that the visible Left needs to connect with its joy, and its aggressiveness. We need leftwing Vodkapundits, and leftwing Rush Limbaughs…well, maybe not…and leftwing Instapundits, too. And we need the same things on the Right, and in the Radical Center and from the Libertarians, and the Vegitarian Unitarian Veterinarians, for that matter. I said something once on this blog a while ago:

Forgive me if this sounds sappy, but there are voices out there folks, a great chorus of different voices, and when you listen to the song we’re all singing…well, to me, the song sounds sort of like America.

William Burton lays out our foreign policy pretty damn clearly. A sample:

So, remember. We don’t want to kill anyone and we’ll try hard not to, but if we have to defend ourselves we will. Don’t think that any bad stuff that may happen is intentional. It’s not. We’re just as likely to fuck up as anyone else, we just do it with bigger ordinance. And if there’s any way to interpret what we say in a way that doesn’t make you angry or sad, that’s the way we meant it. Honest.
We’d also like to apologize for not learning your languages. We bought the tapes and have been meaning to get around to it, but the game was on and a friend came over with some beer. Next thing we knew it was 3am and we were on our way to Padre. You know how it is.

“Two Cities”, by Mark Doty

I had grown sick of human works,
which seemed to me a sum
and expression of failure: spoilers,
brutalizers of animals and one another,
self-absorbed until we couldn’t see
that we ruined, finally,
ourselves – what could we make?
An epidemic ran unhalted,
The ill circumscribed as worthless and unclean;
the promises of change seem hollow,
the poor and marginal hopelessly marginal,
endlessly poor. I saw no progress,
and the steeping ink of this perception
colored everything, until I felt surrounded
by weakness and limit, and my own energies
failed, or were failing, though I tried
not to think so. I awoke
in Manhattan, just after dawn,
in the tunnels approaching Grand Central:
a few haunted lamps, unreadable signs.
And with a thousand others,
Each of us fixed on the fixed point
of our destination, whatever
connection awaited us, I spilled
up the ramp and under the vault
and lugged my bag out onto 42nd Street,
looking for the Carey Bus.
The dawn was angling into the city,
A smoky, thumb-smudged gold. It struck
first a face, not human, terracotta,
on an office building’s intricate portico,
seeming to fire the material from within,
so that the skin was kindled,
glowing. And then I looked up: the ramparts
of Park Avenue were radiant, barbaric;
they were continuous with every city’s dream
of itself, the made world’s
angled assault on heaven.
The city was one splendidly lit idea –
its promises intact and held
in a disturbed, golden suspension.
Weeks later, there was a second city;
not really a city at all:
nights, in the coastal town
where I live, voices, engines
cough over the water
from the end of the pier
where trawlers cluster
and fog-rimmed lamps shimmer
the undulant harbor, so that wharf’s end
becomes a distant city,
foreign, storied: extended downward
in the flung glitter of reflection
(as if it floated, on pylons of light,
above a gilded, Oriental double,
domes and towers blurred by rising smokes)
and radiating upwards, also, above itself,
in the mist’s ethereal wash: a Venice,
a city dreaming itself into being?
Had I walked out there,
as I have, some nights,
I wouldn’t have reached it;
That city’s coherent only from this distance,
a fable, a Venice not merely
because it is built on water,
but because it is built,
even though it is the capital of inwardness,
built and erased and drawn again
as surely as Manhattan is:
liquid avenues, archives of all
we’ve imagined, our haunted, interior architecture
“Venice,” Nietzsche said,
“is a city of a hundred solitudes.”
New York is a city of ten million,
And my American Venice
– phantom boulevards rippling
and doubled in the dark – a city
of two hundred and fifty million
solitaires, the restless dreamers’
dreamed magnificence: our longing’s
troubled mirror, vaporous capitol.

A slightly different version is in the book Atlantis: Poems.
I feel in my gut that posting this entire work is probably a violation of Doty’s property rights; I hope that some people will buy his book and get him paid a bit for it. After doing it twice tonight, I won’t do it again.
But to me, this poem perfectly symbolizes the antidote to the anomie and despair below. You don’t need brutality and death to transcend despair; the human mind and soul can find it in the brilliant smudge of sun on a building’s wall, and in the appreciation for the “banal” works of humankind, for ‘the made world’s angled assault on heaven’.

Full of news some good, some bad, some awe-ful. The fool with ‘Daddy’s Money’ is back in the race for Governor against ‘SkyBox’ Davis. There’s a ship which may be radioactive off of New Jersey. Bush gave a damn good speech, and the hopes in my letter below seem to be being supported.
Close to home, some terrible news about Warren Zevon, who I don’t know, but who is a friend to Brian Linse, who I do. I’ve been glancing at my poetry books, trying to readjust my attitude, when this came to mind:

He said it doesn’t look good
he said it looks bad in fact real bad
he said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before
I quit counting them
I said I’m glad I wouldn’t want to know
about any more being there than that
he said are you a religious man do you kneel down
in forest groves and let yourself ask for help
when you come to a waterfall
mist blowing against your face and arms
do you stop and ask for understanding at those moments
I said not yet but I intend to start today
he said I’m real sorry he said
I wish I had some other kind of news to give you
I said Amen and he said something else
I didn’t catch and not knowing what else to do
and not wanting him to have to repeat it
and me to have to fully digest it
I just looked at him
for a minute and he looked back it was then
I jumped up and shook hands with this man who’d just given me
something no one else on earth had ever given me
I may have even thanked him habit being so strong

— “What The Doctor Said”, By Ray Carver.

From the controversial Salon piece, ”Forbidden thoughts about 9-11: Readers respond”:

When the towers started collapsing and all chaos broke loose, I felt actual excitement. Here was an event that broke banality. Finally, here was something meaningful. I had grown so tired of the meaningless fluff our continent had become so enamored with. Here was an issue of raw emotions. I was glad that this was happening to snap people back into reality, to snap them back to mortality. My last sinful thought was that of genocide — lets just send nuclear missiles to all of the Middle East and let it be done once and for all.
– Name withheld
I played the part, of course; I expressed the mandatory shock, outrage and sadness while watching events unfold with co-workers. I was, in outward appearence, the very picture of solemnity and sympathy. Inside, though, I was excited. I got the same weird sense of roller-coaster joy I do when a hurricane comes up the coast or a blizzard shuts down the city. In the chaos of the initial reports, I found myself disappointed to find out that some of the early reports of additional targets being hit were erroneous.
As the second tower collapsed, I found myself with a terrible sense of satisfaction. It was almost like, somewhere deep in the parts of my soul that don’t see the sun, I was rooting for the event to be even bigger — for it to cut so deeply through the banality of daily life, that things would never be the same. I suspect I am not alone. Whether it’s shark attacks, wars, school shootings or child abductions, something in human nature gives people a sick thrill in such horrific voyeurism. That’s what drives the infotainment industry we like to call the nightly news. In the Civil War, spectators went out to watch the battle.
Until fairly recently, watching public executions was regular entertainment for the masses. Few have the guts to admit it publicly, but we’re all monsters.
— Michael Middleton
For nearly every single day since Sept. 11, 2001, I’ve been saying, “When’s the other shoe going to drop?” The dirty secret that I’ve never revealed to anyone is that there’s a part of me that actually wants it to drop. Rationally, not really — I’ve got family and friends who would be in serious danger if something happened in our major cities.
But the little devil on my shoulder keeps saying, “Come on already, let’s get this fucking apocalypse OVER WITH.” I mean, there are times when I’d almost feel relieved if something happened — it would be better than this awful waiting accompanied by an overwhelming sense of looming doom.
— Female writer, living in Texas

…emphasis added

So what do you think the odds are that this yearning to “break through the banality” has anything to do with the Romantic urge for the ultimate self-affirming, all-consuming moment? That orgasmic instant of annihilation when the will to power overcomes the humble stones of the world around us? And if you lived in squalor, felt oppressed, were told every day that the hated oppressor was the reason for your misery, would this underlying repugnance of the world as it is be a fertile medium of the kind of memes that make strapping on a Semtex belt seem like the absolutely right thing to do?
I’m suddenly finding myself becoming a fan of banality.

The Hon. Dianne Feinstein
Senator from California
331 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington D. C. 20510
The Hon. Barbara Boxer
Senator from California
112 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510
The Hon. Jane Harman
Congresswoman, 36th District
229 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
Dear Senator Feinstein, Senator Boxer, Congresswoman Harman:
Senator Feinstein, I met you when you were on the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco and I worked on affordable housing projects in Chinatown with CCHC.
Senator Boxer, I similarly met you when you were a Supervisor in Marin.
Congresswoman Harman, we met in Venice at one of the first coffees hosted for your first campaign.
I have followed all your careers with interest, and while we may not agree on all issues, I am thrilled to be represented by three capable and forceful women such as yourselves.
But I am writing all of you today – on September 11th – in response to the anniversary and to what I see we have done and left undone in the intervening year.
Overall, I believe that we are doing a terrible job. We are vacillating between belligerence without real menace and accommodation without action. You – the visible leadership in Washington – appear to those of us at home to be more concerned with political advantage and advancing pre-existing agendas than in securing the safety of our children. No one appears to be taking this with the level of seriousness or commitment that will be necessary to see our way through this.
I expect more.
The money used to kill our people came from the dollars we spent to fill our gas tanks. No one will take us seriously, nor should we be taken seriously, until we do something to reduce our dependence on imported energy and our use of energy overall. A gas tax to encourage reduced consumption has been avoided for decades, as our railroads become rights-of-way for fiber optics and our dependence on trucking and taste for SUV’s increases our thirst for oil. We will have to better exploit our own reserves, and the environmentalist in me is willing to trade away some measure of greater exploration and exploitation for meaningful overall reductions in consumption at the retail end.
We must continue to aggressively support Israel, both because the Israelis represent a model for democracy and development in the Middle East, and because Palestinian and Al-Quieda terrorists are brothers in ideology and in the means they are willing to use against the hated West. But there has to be some light at the end of the tunnel for the average Palestinian, and we should, independent of UNRWA, begin to find our own ways to encourage trade and education in the Palestinian territories, and begin to cultivate, support and protect the moderate people who live there and who are the real hope for peace.
As to Iraq, Senator Feinstein’s speech on September 5 was fine, to a point. I believe that it is important to build and keep alliances where possible, and certainly believe that an effective inspection regime (which we have never had – I will direct you to Charles Duelfer’s article in the September Arms Control Today – online at http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2002_09/duelfer_sept02.asp) should be tried before overwhelming military action. But the reality is that we have allowed a toxic hatred of America to become the platform autocratic, ineffective regimes use to keep themselves in power. And as long as we do that, there will be an endless crop of angry young men and women who can be armed with the weapons purchased with our money recycled, as it were, from gasoline into violence. Iraq is a key and vulnerable link in the team of nations that is forming to oppose our interests in the world…and to do so by brutally oppressing the hopes and dreams of the average citizens who live there. Nothing short of absolute and unfettered access…not the kind of playacting that Scott Ritter saw (before his dramatic and unexplained conversion)…should keep us from enforcing the terms of the ceasefire agreed to by the Iraqi government at the conclusion of the war that they started. And opponents of an immediate invasion should be absolutely clear and resolute that absent such real and useful inspections, the terms of the ceasefire will be enforced by whatever means the Iraqi government makes necessary.
We must implement effective domestic security measures. I am friends with a number of members of the police and military forces, and their opinion, which I echo, is that we have a Potemkin Village of a security system…designed to look good on television or in front of your hearings, but of doubtful effectiveness. We are imposing massive, top-down bureaucratic structures in the hopes of solving critical problems…just as those kinds of structures are being proved relatively ineffective in the corporate world. In this month’s Atlantic magazine is an excellent article by Bruce Schneier on security. A few quotes:

The moral, Schneier came to believe, is that security measures are characterized less by their success than by their manner of failure. All security systems eventually miscarry in one way or another. But when this happens to the good ones, they stretch and sag before breaking, each component failure leaving the whole as unaffected as possible.

and

Few of the new airport-security proposals address this problem. Instead, Schneier told me in Los Angeles, they address problems that don’t exist. “The idea that to stop bombings cars have to park three hundred feet away from the terminal, but meanwhile they can drop off passengers right up front like they always have …” He laughed. “The only ideas I’ve heard that make any sense are reinforcing the cockpit door and getting the passengers to fight back.” Both measures test well against Kerckhoffs’s principle: knowing ahead of time that law-abiding passengers may forcefully resist a hijacking en masse, for example, doesn’t help hijackers to fend off their assault. Both are small-scale, compartmentalized measures that make the system more ductile, because no matter how hijackers get aboard, beefed-up doors and resistant passengers will make it harder for them to fly into a nuclear plant. And neither measure has any adverse effect on civil liberties.

What is needed is not a super-secret security apparatus locked away in bunkers while the rest of us walk through our lives in ignorance. What is needed is a system which empowers and informs the average citizen; the baggage clerk, the ticket agent, the average police officer on the street. Our expensive security apparatus didn’t do anything effective last year, the informed and active citizens on Flight 93 did. Help us all become informed and effective; trust us as we trust you.
I have two teenage sons and one in first grade; it is for their sake that we must sacrifice, must be smarter, and most of all, must be determined to bring these issues to a conclusion in our lifetime, not theirs.
This is a rare time to be in our government. You are each blessed and cursed by being in office now. My thoughts are with you, and my eyes and the eyes of my neighbors are on you.

From frontline: faith and doubt at ground zero | PBS.
Maybe this blog is my way of reaching out and holding hands with all of you. Nothing I write today or tomorrow can touch the magnitude of my feelings on this, so I’m going to step aside and ask that everyone reading this just reach out and hold someone’s hand. Tomorrow night I’ll write my Congressman and Senators, and put the letters up here.

Scanning the blogs at lunch, I came across Jeff Cooper’s link to Jeanne d’Arc’s post about the Manhattan ‘wilding’ arrests, and the news that a recent confession and DNA testing are set to exonerate the youths convicted back in 1989.
Jeff’s reaction is cautionary:

The large quantity of cases reversed by DNA evidence over the past several years ought to give us pause as the government seeks broad new investigative and prosecutorial powers as part of the war on terror. Much as I admire prosecutors (full disclosure: my wife was a deputy prosecutor in Indianapolis for five years), there is a tendency—not invariable, but nevertheless real—on the part of police and prosecutors to sink their teeth into particular suspects and hold on regardless of contrary evidence. Why should we be confident that prosecutorial abuses would be less of a problem in secret or military courts with secret evidence than they are in the public trials that produced verdicts that we now know were erroneous?

While Jeanne’s is more…I’m looking for a word…self-satisfied:

A lot of people say that September 11 changed everything, which is nonsense, of course, but it changed a lot of things, among them Americans’ willingness to set aside the Constitution and launch wars that no one can explain. Some stories change the way we view the world, and the story of the Central Park jogger was one of those. It emboldened people who were already filled with hate, and made those of us who weren’t a little more defensive. I, for one, grew more embarrassed by people like Al Sharpton, who seemed to cry racism at every turn. (It should be noted now — for whatever it’s worth — that one of the few people to stand up for the Central Park “rapists” was Al Sharpton). I became less likely to wonder if racism lay behind an arrest. I assumed the boys were guilty. And I became more likely to assume that if a nagging suspicion that something was wrong tugged at me, I was simply guilty of having an embarrassing “bleeding heart.”
The revised story wasn’t widely covered. It won’t have an emotional impact on as many people as the original story had. It probably won’t change anything big.
But it will make me trust my bleeding heart again. And nobody’s going to make me feel embarrassed or defensive about it.

My reaction is actually surprisingly different. I’m thrilled. And excited. And proud. I feel bad for the youths wrongly convicted (although my bad feelings are somewhat offset by the admitted fact that they had been wilding…randomly assaulting innocent people in the park…). I’m bothered by the fact that poor kids of color get worse legal representation than rich white guys like Skakel.
But none of this changes the fact that I’m proud because we live in a society where we are willing to face up to and admit our mistakes. To correct them where possible. No politically connected prosecutor was able to bury the confession or prevent the DNA testing that ultimately appears to have exonerated them. I’m thrilled that we have been able to take the fruits of our technology and apply them, fairly and objectively to support the interests of people who would normally be beneath consideration. I’m excited because I believe that these tools…the technology and the open legal system…that are the product of this society will be used in the future to prevent bad things from happening…like convicting the wrong people of horrible crimes.
I’m interested in why our three reactions are so disparate, and it cuts to one of my significant core issues, the alienation of many of us from our society and the overt disgust with all the instruments of government. In other words, the collapse of legitimacy.
I’m interested in why it is, when we correct the injustices of the past, and devise tools to ensure that it will be difficult to make the same mistakes again, we are dwelling on the “Oh, no, we were so bad” rather than the “we’re getting better”. See, I think that real liberalism…the kind that builds schools and water systems and improves people’s lives…comes from a belief in progress.
We aren’t perfect. No one is or ever will be…to quote William Goldman, “Life is pain, Highness! Anyone who says differently is selling something.” But we can either keep trying to get there or sit on the floor dwelling on our shortcomings. Which one would you rather do, and why?

Sorry, but real life continues to interfere with time in front of the computer; yesterday Tenacious G (my SO) managed her re-entry motorcycle ride into the Santa Monica mountains, where we met and breakfasted with friends. She hasn’t ridden in the mountain roads since her two accidents last year, and to be blunt, I haven’t exactly encouraged her.
She did great, a good time was had by all, and I will slowly learn to give up trying to ride her motorcycle and mine at the same time. It’s not easy to live in anxiety about someone you care for, but in order to care for them you have to respect their choices…even the ones that make you anxious.
This somehow plays into today’s Steve Lopez column in the LA Times (signin ‘laexaminer’/’laexaminer’), in which he tells the story of a young man who ultimately succeeded in committing suicide, despite the efforts of his mother to protect him. He ultimately shot himself with his handgun – which had been taken away by the LAPD when he had been picked up and taken in for evaluation, and then given back by the LAPD when he was not admitted.
We have a terrible mental health system here in California, where care for ill people takes a back seat to ‘respect’ for their rights, and a desire not to spend any money on them. The results can be seen daily on Main and Los Angeles streets downtown, where the homeless congregate. And can be seen in this small tragedy.
And above all the policy issues, we want to make things better and to keep our children safe.
So again, in today’s Times, an article about a high school here in Southern California which is being used as a testbed for surveillance technology, in part because

” Schools are among the first to embrace new technology, often because companies view campuses as perfect testing grounds before rolling products out to corporate America.
For instance, one of the companies behind West Hills’ system, PacketVideo Corp., predicts that demand for products like SkyWitness will grow, as people are tracked at factories, office parks, stadiums–even places such as the Third Street Promenade shopping district in Santa Monica.
Companies like the fact that students enjoy fewer constitutional protections than adults and have lower expectations of privacy than their parents.”

The desire to keep our kids safe places them in Bentham’s Panopticon, the perfect prison where visibility would ensure behavior. This is ass-backwards; I’ll try and get into why it doesn’t work later, but for now, simply want to say that, hard as it is to say and do, we cannot provide total safety to those we love. I don’t know enough facts about the case Lopez talks about, but I do know the feeling I get when someone I love straddles her motorcycle and rides away. And despite those feelings, I know that I simply have to put my head down, ride my own motorcycle, and let her ride her own.
Anyway, a great dinner with friends last night, too much Big House Red, lunch and a movie today with my brother (who still owes me for this), and another dinner with friends tonight.
It’s a rough life, isn’t it?
But I’m working on a review of Embattled Dreams and some other stuff…so please come back tomorrow!