n+1: Notes on a News Cycle

Kristin Dembock on the Giffords shooting:

René Girard wrote in Violence and the Sacred that people never look more similar than they do when they’re fighting. Violence is mimetic. And mimesis, Girard argued there and elsewhere, is where violence comes from in the first place. Not from difference, which is what we usually think, but from sameness. We only become who we are by imitating others, which means we imitate even their desires (we want their things, their careers, the girl, the political power, even the power to tell the story, to find the answer), and then in that moment when we reach for the same thing, we catch a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror of the other and want to smash it.

[via George Lazenby]

Rocky Mountain National Park closes Trail Ridge Road for winter conditions - Boulder Daily Camera

Things have definitely cooled off this week.

Should you pre-rinse your dishes before loading the dishwasher? on Shine

I need to stop reading Yahoo news.

Aspen cyclist comes out on losing end of collision with coyote | Colorado Springs Gazette, CO

Even Coyotes know bikers are annoying.

The Stuff They're Using to Clean the Oil Spill Is Poisonous, Too

From Gawker:

BP's oil isn't leaking 'four or fives times' faster than everyone thought—at a rate of 4 million gallons per day—it's twenty times worse than BP thought. And the chemical they're using to 'disperse' it is toxic, too.

Paintings Worth Millions Stolen in Paris | User Submitted

I find it strangely heartening that people still try to steal priceless works of art. It's nice to know that they care.

"Richard Nixon" - Adam Curtis from Newswipe

Newswipe - Series 2 Episode 3

Part One:


Part Two:


Part Three:

Nobel Oblige

Regarding the new Nobel Laureate for literature:

Doris Lessing pulled up in a black cab where a media horde was waiting Thursday in front of her leafy north London home. Reporters opened the door and told her she had won the Nobel Prize for literature, to which she responded: "Oh Christ! ... I couldn't care less."

Must admit that I haven't read Lessing's work, but I think I like her already. She's like the Kathy Griffin of world lit.

Jumping Someone Else's Train

Robert Smith to work with Ashlee Simpson? A member of Fall Out Boy is a mutual friend? Something inside me has died.

A New Low for Bill O'Reilly

I prefer to pretend that he doesn't exist, and I don't like to blog about stuff I don't like or I'm not interested in, but this is too good to pass up. O'Reilly objects to coverage of the war, asserts the meaninglessness of bombings, and invents a story about censorship in World War II.

Keith Olbermann has a lovely response. One might even call it fair and balanced.

Monday Mundane Meh

News in brief:

• Red Wings lose at home on two unlucky goals. Backs are against the wall.
• Heroes finale tonight - will we learn how to stop an exploding man?
• "Mirrored" by Battles looks like the next must have.

If firing Imus was the right thing to do...

Tina Fey should fire Alec Baldwin. Just saying.

How To Win In Iraq

If Slate is interested, I have plan G for them. Like many Americans I have been confused and disappointed by the war in Iraq. But unlike the Republicans I do not believe that the Iraqi insurgents are killing people with magical fairies that only explode when liberals and Noam Chomsky criticize the Bush Administration.

I think they're using bombs. Call me crazy.

From the beginning, I think we've been losing the war because the Bush Administration, The Republican Party, Conservatives, the Religious Right, and people who hang Thomas Kinkade paintings in their homes, have lacked the courage of their convictions.

Instead of fighting the actual war in Iraq, or even the larger war on terror, they've used the fact of troops on the ground to fight the only war they actually care about: the war on the Democratic party, liberals, universities, hollywood, artists, minorities, and anyone else with the ability to challenge their grip on the federal government as an agent for protecting the wealthy and the powerful.

The real war has always been an excuse to fight a propaganda war. A war of rhetoric and words. "Fight 'em there, so we don't have to fight 'em here", "you're either with us or against us", "axis of evil", etc. And in a rhetorical war, words matter more than actions. Why else would internal criticism of administration actions be likened to appeasement, aid and comfort, or treason.

So far as I know, no one in the Democratic party has offered terms of surrender to the insurgents. No one has written up a peace treaty that offers the insurgents a complete withdrawal and Guam. No one in Hollywood is organizing pro-insurgent fund-raisers. No one is gun running or selling Apache helicopters on the black market. Y'know, things that would be actual appeasement, aid and comfort, and treason.

No, the right wing only attacks virtual enemies. What we like to call straw men. Easy to punch, decorative in the Fall, and they keep the crows out of the corn. But they don't win wars.

So what is my plan G. I call it my Right-wing Put-Up-Or-Shut-Up To Win The War Once And For All plan. Here's how it works:

• Announce under no uncertain terms that we invaded Iraq in order to reassert our absolute and infallible hegemony in the middle east as the world's only super power.
  
• Assert our right to establish a permanent military base in Iraq to guarantee access to cheap middle east oil until the supply is exhausted.
• Reinstate the Draft (it's put up or shut up time for Young Republicans as well. Also, research the correlation between gun violence and the draft - these things didn't happen when angry young men were routinely shipped to Germany, Korea, and Vietnam).
  
• Put 500,000 troops in Iraq to lock it down once and for all. Do what's necessary but don't be evil.
  
• Establish a permanent civilian government in Iraq only after the ability to mount an insurgency has been destroyed. Constitutions and elections, as Rove has taught us, are for suckers.
  
• Forget "we'll stand down, when they stand up". We didn't build new armies after World War II. Give them baseball, pop music, cars, and blue jeans. Look what it did for Germany and Japan. Wars are not fought by countries with civilian populations that have jobs to go to in the morning and TVs at home (unless you count this one).
• Don't get hung up on cultural or religious differences. Have you seen Dubai? Wealth and consumerism is the universal language of peace.
  
• Remind Iran that we are never planning to leave. Never, never, never.
  
• Use our leverage to force Pakistan to help us destroy Al-Qaeda's hideouts along the border it shares with Afghanistan.

Also, and just for good measure:

• Quit patronizing the troops! These are professional and highly trained individuals. Not dough boys. This isn't easy company with its heartwarming cross-section of American stereotypes. These are career-level people with spouses and mortgages. This is their job. They don't need our yellow ribbons, they need the tools and the freedom to get on with the task at hand.
• Remember that our soldiers are most successful when they go on the offensive. From what I've learned on TV, victory always goes to the side that wants to destroy stuff, not the side that wants to protect stuff. The trick is to be the guys who destroy stuff last (see for example Pearl Harbor vs. Nagasaki, Germany's invasion of France vs. the Allied invasion at Normandy). We won early on because our guys were on the offensive and Saddam's forces were running for the hills. Things have turned because now it's the insurgents who play offense while our guys are standing flat-footed on street corners and in the so-called green zone waiting for the next explosion.

So that's my plan: maximum troop levels and permanent military presence. If my plan sounds crazy, ill-informed, stupid, wildly reckless, politically impractical, or logistically implausible to you, then you must not have wanted to win this war in the first place. Traitor.

Meanwhile in Iraq...

160 Killed In Terrible Massacre.

What do you call this? Truth. Irony. Satire. It exists in a category we didn't have before George W.

Ha, ha, just deadly serious.

Acceptable Risks

As you might have predicted, many people are saying very, very foolish and self-serving things about the Virginia Tech incident.

• We need more gun control.
• We need more guns.
• They should have fought back.
• It's a cultural problem.
• It's an immigration problem.
• etc.
  

Some comments are more disgusting than others, particularly John Derbyshire's at NRO Corner, but I'm not here to debate these reactions. Most of them have no merit:

• As far as we know, the guns were all bought legally.
• After the initial attack, there was enough confusion that even the guns of the police were ineffective.
• We don't know that people didn't fight back. We also don't know what made him shoot himself.
• His Korean-American background complicates the red state/blue state culture war divide rendering it meaningless. Also his writings and other behavior seem to hint that he may have been mentally ill.
• He came to America as a child.
  

But instead of hashing out these points, I think it's more important to see them within the larger context. And I think each reaction, no matter how disagreeable, is perfectly understandable in the context of the Kubler-Ross model (a.k.a. the stages of grief). As with any sorrowful or violent event, our natural response is to try to work our way backwards to where we felt more in control, when the world was not in turmoil.

We want to rewrite the story in our minds so that everything fits together and makes sense. We want to know that there were signs so that everything that happened was for a reason, that it had a source and a motive. But we also want to know that it was not inevitable, that with a change here or there, it might not have happened at all.

In addition to these thoughts and reflections, we want to take action (or think that in that situation we would have taken action). We want to to make changes to the world so that these incidents can't happen again. We want to arm ourselves and disarm our foes. We want to make the violence of others more difficult to achieve, and the protection of our loved ones easier. We want to assure ourselves that something like this wouldn't happen to us.

But for me, this is just bargaining with a dash of anger or denial thrown in for good measure (depending on the person). These are easy reactions, and you can see that they are easy because no one is afraid to say these things. They are words that have already been rehearsed and thought out before hand. We know them by heart because of Columbine and because of 9/11 and because of every roadside bomb and Shuttle disaster. There is no real shock here because otherwise there wouldn't be so many words. The president wouldn't have found it so easy to go down there and speak and go through the ritual of grieving if there wasn't something in this event that we hadn't already rationalized and accepted within our larger mental landscape.

Tragedy, that misused word of grief, has become a reflex in American life.

Every year thousands of people die needlessly in traffic accidents. I don't know the exact statistics but we do know it's more dangerous to drive than to fly. It's certainly more dangerous to drive than to go to school. And every time you get in the car you are risking your life, the lives of your family, and the lives of other travellers. But you won't stay home. You won't sell your car. Why? Because it is an acceptable risk. You've worked it out (the pros and cons), and come to the conclusion that it is worth it to go out and live your life.

I think in America we have also said, yes, guns are dangerous, our culture is violent, but these are the risks we have to take to preserve a free and open society. Most of the time things work fine. In rare circumstances, things go off the rails. We can't account for every outcome, nor can we control individual behavior.

So America, what we have here is a fatal traffic accident on a mass scale. It is a sad time, but we must not be surprised. The massacre at Virginia Tech is the bargain we have made with the devil of modern life. People kill people. Guns kill people. Motivations are dark, perverse, guarded, and mysterious. We can't hope to understand why things like this happen. Nor can we say that this incident is the necessary outcome of a chain of events. It is nothing you could have predicted and certainly no one is to blame. It didn't happen last month, it probably won't happen next month.

But, and this is the important part, it is and will continue to be a very real possibility.

And based on the way we have structured our gun laws, arranged our cultural freedoms, and established our social norms, we have at some level already accepted this possibility. We have unconsciously decided that horrible things like this are a risk we as a people are willing to take in order to have the benefits that go along with them. Life, liberty, and the pursuit. At some level, if you embrace the 2nd amendment, you are saying this is acceptable and freedom isn't free.

From denial, anger, and bargaining, we move to depression and acceptance.

Now that I've gotten out my two cents worth of stupidity, I will retreat into silence. The realities of this situation, the true pain and reckoning do not belong to me. They belong to the Virginia Tech community. Everyone else should just shut up.

L'affaire Imus

I'm behind in my blogging, but I wanted to get in my two-cents before this completely drifted from memory.

I watched Imus's show some mornings on MSNBC, and enjoyed certain aspects. I liked the interviews he did with authors and the fact that he promoted books. I liked the phone calls from media people on the news of the day. I liked the Ranch in New Mexico and the charity work he did.

His taste in music was baffling and his desire to make everyone hear it was often cringe-worthy.

On the other hand the show was juvenile, and Bernhard the producer and Bo Dietl the ex-cop were complete knuckle-draggers who always pushed the program down and brought out the worst in Imus's so-called "sense of humor". If anything caused Imus to feel like he could say what he said, it was those dopes.

For the most part he was a grouch and a bully, and many mornings it seemed like it was all they could do to keep him from abusing everyone he came in contact with.

It is just that he was fired, but the world is not a better place. He just happened to be in a situation (being on MSNBC) where he was too visible to be let off the hook. Limbaugh, who was fired from ESPN and unsuccessful on television, has the luxury of living in the margins, and therefore can continue to be as vile as his little audience want him to be. Just like Michael Savage and Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly and the rest of the hardcore 30%ers. Glenn Beck is on CNN and lets hope he won't waste too much time saying something as stupid as humanly possible.

Until then we should be grateful for John Stewart and Stephen Colbert and Keith Olbermann.

Think Good Thoughts for the People at Virginia Tech

This is a horrible event and our thoughts should go out to all the families, students, and faculty at Virginia Tech.

But anyone who tries to tell you why this happened should be ignored. Anyone who tries to spin this situation to score political points for their favorite hobby horse should be shunned. It is contemptible to invent a meaning for what is essentially a meaningless act of violence and hatred.

Obama's Money and HDTV

If Obama's money is really on par with Hillary's then he's got everything he needs for 2008. Clinton's hopes were based on having an overwhelming war chest and a sense of inevitability. I hope Bill has the good sense to stay home and not get involved.

As a side note, I also like the idea that the campaign will be won and lost on the HDTVs that will become increasingly more common in voting households. It's Nixon/Kennedy for the 21st century, and not even Giuliani's 9/11 appeal can survive the glare of high-rez.

I can't wait for the Republicans to start complaining about the lack of substance in the campaign.

Whither World War IV

Matthew Yglesias makes a convincing argument on BloggingHeads that the Republican foreign policy is failing because no one takes this notion of World War IV seriously anymore.

My take is that instead of a global battle of good against evil, we've entangled ourselves in an old-fashioned post-colonial struggle.