The Rage Diaries

More on ... your logic makes my head hurt

Few people took the news about Sinclair's decision not to air tonight's Nightline with equanimity. The Poynter letters column has some of the responses. U.S. Senator John McCain gets in on the action with his own statement:

There is no valid reason for Sinclair to shirk its responsibility in what I assume is a very misguided attempt to prevent your viewers from completely appreciating the extraordinary sacrifices made on their behalf by Americans serving in Iraq. War is an awful, but sometimes necessary business. Your decision to deny your viewers an opportunity to be reminded of war’s terrible costs, in all their heartbreaking detail, is a gross disservice to the public, and to the men and women of the United States Armed Forces. It is, in short, sir, unpatriotic. I hope it meets with the public opprobrium it most certainly deserves.

Sinclair's rebuttal:

It is "Nightline's" failure to present the entire story, however, to which Sinclair objects. "Nightline" is not reporting news; it is doing nothing more than making a political statement. In simply reading the names of our fallen heroes, this program has adopted a strategy employed by numerous anti-war demonstrators who wish to focus attention solely on the cost of war. In fact, lest there be any doubt about "Nightline's" motivation, both Mr. Koppel and "Nightline's" executive producer have acknowledged that tonight's episode was influenced by the Life Magazine article listing the names of dead soldiers in Vietnam, which article was widely credited with furthering the opposition to the Vietnam war and with creating a backlash of public opinion against the members of the U.S. military who had proudly served in that conflict.

When not calling the ABC folks liars and ascribing motivations to them, Sinclair was busy asking Ted Koppel for an interview on their program that would cover ... their decision to boycott his program ("Stations to Boycott 'Nightline's' List of the Fallen," WaPo, April 29, 04).

Well, that's one way to guarantee the kind of news coverage you'd want to see -- make the news yourself. For more details on this program by Sinclair about Sinclair, see "Some Stations to Block 'Nightline.'" (NYT, April 30, 04)

Meanwhile, WaPo coverage, Ted Koppel called out WaPo scribe DeMoraes' comments about the show as a ratings stunt in the letters to the editor section, and ABC set a Sinclair runaround in motion in key markets ("ABC Makes End Run Around Conservative Blackout of Nightline," Washingtonian, April 30, 04).

The furor over how to treat the names and/or images of the war dead in the media will probably not die down after tonight. To understand why imagery matters so much, read "Yes, We Can Handle the Truth" (Newsweek, May 3, 04), or "Photos of Coffins Draped in Evasion" (Denver Post, April 29, 04).

mixing/ Memory and desire

And now I've found the website where I will be whiling away all of my free time today: 'The Wasteland' by T.S. Eliot as Hypertext.

I so love T.S. Eliot. When my dad was at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago, he set "The Hollow Men" to music as a student project. Needless to say, it remained a private work -- the Eliot estate cast a gimlet eye on anyone using the poet's works -- but I remember sitting on the floor of the living room at age 8, reading along on the sheet music as my dad played piano:

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

I didn't have any clue what the poem was about then; I'm still not sure I fully understand it now. Fortunately, since I only read poetry, not write it, I have a lot more time to figure it out. ("Going Early into That Good Night," NYT, April 24, 04)

The bitch in the bookstore

Edited at 1:45 p.m. PDT.

I do not feel nearly so guilty as I should over furtively reading books while still in the bookstore. Six times out of ten, I end up buying the book anyway because I know I'll want to re-read it at home; the other four times, I put down the book (carefully thumbed through, so as not to wrinkle the pages or crack the spine) and walk away with a distinct sense of relief.

This is how I've come to read The Bitch in the House without actually paying for it. I will probably also flip through the completely unnecessary follow-up, The Bastard on the Couch, when I'm aimlessly wandering through a bookstore on my lunch hour. I feel like I've already read The Bastard on the Couch, what with having slogged through one tiresome and self-congratulatory essay on the household division of labor courtesy of the excerpt printed in Real Simple and then, against my better judgment, having read "A Brief History of the (Over)Involved Father" in Salon (April 29, 04).

Here's a brief summation of a genre that sets my teeth on edge: people with enviable problems writing about how hard it is to be them. It's boring. It lacks either perspective or wit. It doesn't offer any observations or insights into how a personal phenomenon relates to society at large; indeed, it inverts that relationship in an epic feat of navel-gazing.

Fortunately, I'm not the only one who feels that way. Meghan O'Rourke goes to town on the whole trend of catharsis lit in Slate's "Girl Talk" (April 29, 04). And Jessa offers her succinct take in Bookslut.

ETA: I posted this before going back through Slate and discovering Ann Hulbert's April 29, 04 take on The Bastard on the Couch, "Men Reveal All." And it turns out I've read even more of this book than I thought I had, as I'd recently read Sean Elder's "Why My Wife Won't Sleep With Me," in New York, which was a quaint look at what happens when women get careers and get over the idea that:

Wives used to put out for their husbands because they had to ... It was part of paying the rent, part of what women gave in exchange for food and lodging, to say nothing of the college fund for the children.

But as that sort of traditional marriage grows scarce, at least in many Western countries, the old answers don’t work. For men such as myself—outearned by their wives, with their very work identities cast into doubt—the mantle of breadwinner, and the assumed benefits thereof, simply no longer apply.

So I'm three for however-many essays in that book. At this rate of excerption, I won't even have to thumb through it in the bookstore before deciding that nope, still not buying it.

Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!

So I ran across the Mother Jones article, "The Revolution Will Not Be Blogged," (May/June '04) and it posits:

A curious thing about this rarefied world is that bloggers are almost unfailingly contemptuous toward everyone except one another. They are also nearly without exception men (this form of combat seems too naked for more than a very few women).

That maybe sensible people of all genders have better things to do than acquire and retain digital nemeses in what basically amounts to online performance art -- and can still examine and discuss both general and esoteric points of policy -- seems not to have been considered at all. Instead, this is just another piece on the insulated media. I pulled the quote above largely because the gender remark seemed weirdly out of place to me.

For another, link-rich take on poltical weblogs, travel back in time to the OnePeople weblog entry, "Web diaries, collaborative filtering, and scale-free networks." This approaches the issue from a reader perspective, not a "whither the punditocracy" one.

Home, sweet ... not so fast

Last time I e-mailed my Mom, we were shooting the breeze about the unparalleled joys of springtime in DC, where "unparalleled" is shorthand for "watch out for that one last cold snap that'll kill your plants in April" and "joys" means "but it won't do a thing about the pollen count, which will coat your car and your lungs in a fine yellow haze." April may be the cruelest month for all but vendors of over-the-counter antihistamines.

And that reminded me: there are two new DC-area weblogs I want to add to the list at right. Swamp City's editorial tone amuses me, and I like the range of topics. And why.i.hate.dc is a masterpiece of sustained bile, with juicy links and scalding commentary.

If you've ever lived in D.C. -- or wondered what life there is like -- read these, and the City Paper. Why, I'm practically watering at the eyes in remembrance -- or with a sympathy allergy attack.

Your logic makes my head hurt

Despite a part of my black plastic heart agreeing with Lisa DeMoraes that ("On 'Nightline,' a Grim Sweeps Roll Call," April 27, 04) that the decision to read the names of the people killed in Iraq may be "a cheap, content-free stunt designed to tug at our heartstrings and bag a big number on the second night of the May ratings race" as well as an effective way to put faces and names to the people dying in combat, I see no reason why it shouldn't air. I imagine many of the people who lost a loved one in the fighting would want the world to see and know their loss.

However, Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which has gone on the record as being "sick and tired of all that supposedly 'bad news' coming out of Iraq," has decided that its eight ABC stations will not air the broadcast because "the action appears to be motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq."

Again -- I think Nightline's motives may not be among the purest, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt in that someone, somewhere in this thing may have said, "Why not put faces and names to the people dying? They're doing it in our name. Let's see who we sent over to die."

(And I also wonder if maybe, as a ratings stunt, this is a bad idea, if only because Ted Koppel reading names reminds me of a piece of performance art I saw as a grad student, where the artist sat in a corner and read the names of death-row occupants for 16 hours: kind of interesting from an abstract perspective, certainly a statement on attaching individual identities to a phenomenon spoken about in mass generalizations, but not all that riveting.)

To write the whole thing off as a political stunt -- mind you, Nightline is reading names, nothing more or less, much like memorial services do -- is a cheap and cynical justification for pushing its own political agenda. The people affected by Sinclair's unilateral decision vis a vis the appropriateness of programming should be furious that the decision to watch has been taken out of their hands.

On the war issue, one side talks about the people who are true patriots doing their all for the U.S., and the other talks about people being killed in our name. Both sides should get a chance to see who these people they talk about are. It may help them clarify their convictions.

*

And as an extra P.S. ... the Sinclair bulletin gets shirty with, "We would ask that you first question Mr. Koppel as to why he chose to read the names of the 523 troops killed in combat in Iraq, rather than the names of the thousands of private citizens killed in terrorists attacks since and including the events of September 11, 2001. In his answer, you will find the real motivation behind his action scheduled for this Friday." There are several answers to this:

1. The 9/11 victims got a print treatment from the NYT's "Portraits of Grief" project, a medium that seemed exquisitely well-suited to handling the scope of the deaths and hammering home what was lost.

2. There's a distinct difference between people dying in combat in our name and people killed in a terrorist act. One group died in the service of what was supposedly the will of the people; the people should see who's dying for them. We haven't yet, unless we're Army Times readers.

3. ABC already broadcast the names.

4. Nightline ain't an all-night marathon. There's a difference between 500-and-rising names, and a couple thousand.

Also, guys -- playing the 9/11 card is hardly a politically neutral argument. Nice.

Oh, so spoiled

One of the most delightful things about being an As fan -- aside from the joy that comes with watching them blow an 8-4 lead owing to baffling bullpen decisions -- is that the As play in NetAss.

(And yes, I realize that it's now McAfee, but whatever: NetAss it was, and NetAss it shall forever be. NetAss is what you get after sitting through God knows how many 13-inning games over 3 years.)

The As venue was fine for many reasons -- cheap bleacher seats, excellent concessions, the actual baseball games therein -- but I liked it for two big ones: it was on the BART line, and it was a 20-minute drive from our apartment. A 20-minute drive on surface streets, no less. Getting to weeknight games was easy: drive to BART lot in morning. Take train to work. Work. Take train from work. Exit turnstiles; go left toward NetAss instead of right toward car. Watch game. Drive home.

I should also point out that on the rare occasions when we went to games at PacBell park (again: don't care that it's SBC now; I'm officially getting cranky about these things. I'm off to tie an onion to my belt), getting to and from the games was also trauma-free, what with the stadium being about three blocks from my office and within handy walking distance to both BART and the ferries.

Public transportation is a fine, fine baseball enabler. I had never consciously clung to this conviction until I went to an Anaheim game last week, and then to a Dodgers game last night. And while I'm somewhat pleased to have attended games at three of California's five MLB venues in the last 3 weeks, getting in and out of two of those venues nearly gave me a heart attack -- and that's with reserved parking.

So, my nutshell review of the Dodger Stadium: when someone invents a way to teleport to and from the game -- or maybe hires some damn traffic attendants to control traffic after the game so the parking lot doesn't turn into a game of bumper cars, only with SUVs and the added complication of pedestrians aimlessly milling through the rare traffic opening -- then, I'll happily go all the time. Until then, I'll sigh and wonder why on Earth forces have conspired to keep Los Angeles from having anything resembling effective public transportation to and from publicly-available entertainments.

Return of the Frankenfish

Whoa! No sooner do I recall the northern snakehead scare of '02, thanks to a few links, than I read today that one has been found in Wheaton, MD. ("A Creepy Catch of the Day," WaPo, April 29, 04)

Night of the Frankenfish

The beauty of the Internet is that the odds are high I am not the only one who was enthralled by the Frankenfish Saga of '02. For those unfamiliar with the story: the northern snakehead (Channa argus) popped up in the greater Maryland/DC Metro area, several thousand miles from its Asian habitat. Eradicating the fish -- which was a voracious predator and prolific little piscine, two qualities you don't want in your invading species -- turned into a summer-long event.

And now, Zoogoer dissects the phenomenon in the Feb '04 "Fish Out of Water."

If you'd like to move on to worrying about new invader species, read the AP story that ran today, "Aggressive vs. Non-native Species," which focuses on the zebra mussel (Dreissena polymorpha) (read more about the menacing mollusk here) and its migration toward the Chesapeake Bay.

Alternately, you can partly like it's 2002 again by catching up on the WaPo snakehead coverage from beginning to end. It's great reading.

I realize wildlife-management drama may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I'm all for it. Think of the TV potential! It's like CSI: SPCA, only instead of dead bodies, you'd have square-jawed hotties looking for invasive species or endangered animals or what-have-you. Animals + procedural investigation = ratings.

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream

I am piqued that I missed the Ben & Jerry's free ice cream day yesterday; there's a scoop shop over in Howard Hughes center, and the $1 I would have had to pay for parking would have in no way diminished my pleasure over getting a scoop of coconut almond fudge chip* ice cream for free.

(Also, ice cream prices are due to surge this summer owing to an unholy trinity of events: bad weather in Madagascar wiping out the vanilla crop, war in Western Africa jeopardizng the chocolate supply, and general flailing about in the international dairy market. Any ice cream price break is a good one.)

However, I may just pony up for a mail order of Star Spangled Ice Cream. Positioning itself as the right-wing alternative to Ben & Jerry's (never mind that Unilever, which owns Ben & Jerry's, is hardly a bastion of lefty ideology ...), the Star Spangled line includes Choc and Awe, Nutty Environmentalist, and Prale to the Chief.

I want to do an ideological ice cream taste-test: four Star Spangled flavors against four Ben and Jerry's offerings. Anyone who's interested in courting lactose intolerance in the interest of answering the question, "Which tastes better -- the left wing, or the right wing?" is welcome to join me.

* NB: I am in no way abandoning my beloved Chubby Hubby. It's just that I can stock up on pints of that food-of-the-Gods when I go to a scoop shop -- and I have been, in the interest of hoarding before the ice cream prices rise -- but the coconut almond fudge chip isn't available in the pint form anymore, so I take it when I can get it. It's somewhat sad that I have such detailed rationales for my ice cream.