Published in the Asbury Park Press 10/01/04
Springsteen's political tour inflames fan passions
Many irate as Boss plays 1st concert tonight
By KELLY-JANE COTTER
When Bruce Springsteen takes the stage tonight at Wachovia Center in Philadelphia, he will be taking a stand many fans find long overdue and others find annoying.
After the tour was announced this summer, the Asbury Park Press received dozens of letters to the editor from happy fans, angry fans, new fans, ex-fans and nonfans.
Springsteen, this quintessential Jersey guy, had spoken out in no uncertain terms on an important, volatile issue -- the presidential election. Many of his fellow New Jerseyans felt compelled to respond, either to proclaim their support or to say, "Who does he think he is?"
While it's not unusual for outspoken celebrities to spark reaction from the public, Springsteen's fans have taken his political opinions personally. They either feel validated or betrayed, more so than they would if another well-loved famous person had expressed a preference for a candidate.
Part of this reaction seems to stem from the art form itself: Music fosters intimacy.
But the visceral reaction to Springsteen seems exceptional. Not only is he a musician, he's a local guy, one of us. He symbolizes New Jersey and, so, he symbolizes all of us; that is, until he asserts his individuality as he's done during this campaign.
At 'Loose Ends'
Chris Phillips, editor of the North Carolina-based Springsteen fanzine Backstreets, has been astounded by the varied reactions to the Vote for Change tour. On the "Loose Ends" forum on www.backstreets.com, fans on both sides of the issue attacked each other venomously.
"His political stance doesn't come as a surprise to me," Phillips said from his office in Chapel Hill, N.C. "But we've seen some violent reactions against it. To me, it's a shift for him to play Vote for Change, but only because now he's putting his cards on the table. But you always knew what cards he held."
Rob Kulessa of Toms River disagrees. Kulessa is no ordinary Springsteen fan -- he is a devout, hardcore Bruce kook. He drums for Glory Days, a Springsteen tribute band that will play Nov. 7 at Harry's Roadhouse in Asbury Park as an annex to the Light of Day fund-raisers for Parkinson's disease scheduled for that weekend at The Stone Pony in Asbury Park.
Glory Days is no ordinary tribute band either. These guys play "Prove It All Night," but they'll play it the way it appeared on some '70s bootleg. Or they'll delve into the B-sides, the outtakes, the incredibly esoteric stuff.
Kulessa, 39, has been this nutty since he was about 13. He'll defy anyone to question his credibility as a Bruce fan. Yet, he's a diehard Republican, and he's tired of being considered a lunkhead who doesn't pay attention to lyrics.
"My love of Springsteen is as deep as the Atlantic Ocean, and this is breaking my heart," Kulessa said. "When Bruce asked me to stand up against hunger in Africa, or told us that our brothers and sisters are dying of AIDS, or that there are kids in Asbury Park who need our help, I listened. There are liberals and conservatives who gather together to do good deeds. But when he comes out and says, 'Vote for Kerry,' that's something he's never done before."
Kulessa is an Army veteran who supports Bush's invasion of Iraq. He says he has analyzed Springsteen lyrics and has found 14 songs that have a distinctly liberal message.
"'So much of his music is about freedom, or about love lost and found," Kulessa said. "I'm a Republican. Caring about Vietnam veterans should be an American thing, not a liberal or conservative thing. I will not concede the moral high ground to the Democrats."
Kevin Coyne is baffled by Kulessa's sense of betrayal. Coyne, too, has serious credibility as a Springsteen fan. He's a lifelong Democrat in his 40s, about 10 years younger than Springsteen, and grew up in Freehold as Springsteen was being hailed as the local boy who had gone on to big things. Coyne is now a borough councilman in Freehold and the town historian.
"Much of my time as historian is spent either talking to fourth-graders about the Battle of Monmouth or dealing with foreign journalists who come to Freehold to learn about Bruce," Coyne said. "Bruce Springsteen has become a big part of this town's heritage."
Coyne reads lyrics, too, and he sees traditionally Democratic values embedded in verse and chorus. And while Springsteen can paint stories with a broad brush, Coyne maintains that his characters would not be voting Republican.
"I don't know how anyone can listen and not expect him to be a Democrat," Coyne said. "That's disingenuous. It means you were listening about as closely as Reagan was listening in 1984. They're not anonymous songs -- for 30 years, Bruce has been writing a novel with these characters and it would be completely out of character for them to suddenly become conservative.
"And, after all, Bruce is the guy who played the No Nukes concert with Jackson Browne, the preeminent rock 'n' roll liberal," Coyne said. "How much more explicitly political can you get?"
Neither Coyne nor Kulessa will be in the audience at Wachovia Center tonight. Work and family obligations keep Coyne from getting to many concerts these days. Kulessa does not want to contribute to the cause, though he will tailgate and meet some friends from the Backstreets Web site before the show begins.
Music 'transcends politics'
Phillips, meanwhile, is grappling over how to cover the Vote for Change tour in his magazine, wondering how he can give the shows their due without becoming too partisan.
"I don't want to alienate conservative fans, because, maybe more than with other artists out there, fans really identify with him. The intense, personal relatability of his lyrics, the frustration and passion he expresses, are pretty universal. The appeal of a lot of rock stars is their otherworldly hugeness, whereas with Bruce, he seems like a guy you could hang out with in a bar," he said.
"It's easy to impose your idealistic vision of what he'd be like," he added. "And if the reality doesn't match what you thought, I can see how that would be disappointing."
Coyne can imagine that, too.
"Sure, it would disappoint me if I disagreed with Bruce on politics," Coyne said. "But it wouldn't change my appreciation for the music, or for his technical ability. That transcends all politics."
Kulessa still loves Bruce and was thrilled to get an autograph after Wednesday's rehearsal at Convention Hall in Asbury Park. He took the opportunity to tell Springsteen he's against Vote for Change, and Springsteen nodded politely and shook his hand.
"I'm going to give him a pass this time," Kulessa said, "but if Bush wins, and he goes out on a grumpy old man, sour grapes tour, I'm gonna have to re-evaluate."
Saturday, October 02, 2004
Friday, October 01, 2004
Pollardites in the Pentagon?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Originally Published September 8, 2004
In 1987, Jonathan Pollard, U.S. Navy intelligence analyst, was imprisoned for life for selling a roomful of U.S. secret documents to Israel. Tel Aviv refused to return them. At the Clinton-Netanyahu summit at Wye River, Pollard became a subject of contention.
"Bibi" Netanyahu wanted to fly the American traitor back to Israel where he is a hero. Clinton balked. CIA's George Tenet would resign, Clinton told Netanyahu, if he pardoned Pollard.
This history is recalled for a reason. Washington today is rife with reports the FBI has been investigating whether or not a nest of Pollardites inside the Pentagon has been funneling secrets, through the Israeli lobby AIPAC, to the Reno Road embassy and on to Sharon.
Suspected mole Larry Franklin, a Pentagon Iranian analyst, was reportedly sighted trying to hand over to an AIPAC official a draft copy of a National Security Presidential Directive on Iran. With the mullahs apparently pursuing atomic bombs, Israel wants the United States to attack, denuclearize and bring down its No. 1 enemy, the regime in Tehran.
Franklin popped up on FBI radar when he joined a breakfast meeting between an AIPAC man and an Israeli diplomat. AIPAC had been under FBI surveillance for over two years as a probable conduit to Israel of the fruits of espionage against the United States.
Franklin, a devout Catholic and hawk on Iran, is now said to be cooperating with the FBI. His boss, William Luti, is the deputy to the Pentagon's No. 3, Douglas Feith, who has close ties to Likud.
According to the Washington Post, the FBI is now interviewing present and ex-officials from Cheney's office and the Pentagon as to whether Feith, Richard Perle, David Wurmser and Paul Wolfowitz might have leaked U.S. security secrets to Israel, AIPAC or Ahmed Chalabi.
Chalabi, once the Pentagon's candidate to succeed Saddam, has lately fallen from favor. Reportedly, he was caught telling Iran's intelligence station chief in Baghdad that friends in the Pentagon informed him they had broken Iran's code and were listening in on Iran's secret communications between Baghdad and Tehran.
AIPAC and the Israelis deny any spying. Cooperation between the Bush and Sharon governments is so close, they insist, there is no need to commit espionage or thieve U.S. documents. Perhaps, but the men about whom the FBI is inquiring have old, deep and questionable ties to Israel and the Likud Party of Ariel Sharon.
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Originally Published September 8, 2004
In 1987, Jonathan Pollard, U.S. Navy intelligence analyst, was imprisoned for life for selling a roomful of U.S. secret documents to Israel. Tel Aviv refused to return them. At the Clinton-Netanyahu summit at Wye River, Pollard became a subject of contention.
"Bibi" Netanyahu wanted to fly the American traitor back to Israel where he is a hero. Clinton balked. CIA's George Tenet would resign, Clinton told Netanyahu, if he pardoned Pollard.
This history is recalled for a reason. Washington today is rife with reports the FBI has been investigating whether or not a nest of Pollardites inside the Pentagon has been funneling secrets, through the Israeli lobby AIPAC, to the Reno Road embassy and on to Sharon.
Suspected mole Larry Franklin, a Pentagon Iranian analyst, was reportedly sighted trying to hand over to an AIPAC official a draft copy of a National Security Presidential Directive on Iran. With the mullahs apparently pursuing atomic bombs, Israel wants the United States to attack, denuclearize and bring down its No. 1 enemy, the regime in Tehran.
Franklin popped up on FBI radar when he joined a breakfast meeting between an AIPAC man and an Israeli diplomat. AIPAC had been under FBI surveillance for over two years as a probable conduit to Israel of the fruits of espionage against the United States.
Franklin, a devout Catholic and hawk on Iran, is now said to be cooperating with the FBI. His boss, William Luti, is the deputy to the Pentagon's No. 3, Douglas Feith, who has close ties to Likud.
According to the Washington Post, the FBI is now interviewing present and ex-officials from Cheney's office and the Pentagon as to whether Feith, Richard Perle, David Wurmser and Paul Wolfowitz might have leaked U.S. security secrets to Israel, AIPAC or Ahmed Chalabi.
Chalabi, once the Pentagon's candidate to succeed Saddam, has lately fallen from favor. Reportedly, he was caught telling Iran's intelligence station chief in Baghdad that friends in the Pentagon informed him they had broken Iran's code and were listening in on Iran's secret communications between Baghdad and Tehran.
AIPAC and the Israelis deny any spying. Cooperation between the Bush and Sharon governments is so close, they insist, there is no need to commit espionage or thieve U.S. documents. Perhaps, but the men about whom the FBI is inquiring have old, deep and questionable ties to Israel and the Likud Party of Ariel Sharon.
* In 1970, Perle was picked up on an FBI wiretap discussing NSC secrets with the Israeli Embassy. In 1981, as assistant secretary of defense, Perle got a top-secret security clearance for his chosen deputy Stephen Bryen, who is said to have narrowly eluded indictment for offering top-secret documents to Mossad's man in Washington.
* In 1982, Feith was the object of an inquiry as to whether he had given secret documents to the Israeli Embassy. Fired from the NSC, he was hired by Perle. Feith left the Pentagon in 1986 to form a law firm – in Israel. Hired by Rumsfeld in 2001, Feith set up the Office of Special Plans, which cherry-picked the intelligence to the White House that turned out to be false, but facilitated the war on Iraq.
* In 1996, Perle, Feith and Wurmser co-authored a paper for Netanyahu calling for ditching Oslo, reoccupying the West Bank and overthrowing Saddam as "an important Israeli strategic objective."
* In 1998, Wolfowitz and Perle signed an open letter from the neoconservative front group PNAC to Clinton, urging him to ditch diplomacy and wage war on Iraq, and pledging their full support.
* On Jan. 1, 2001, eight months before 9-11, Wurmser, at AEI, called for joint U.S.-Israeli air strikes on Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya.
* According to White House anti-terror chief Richard Clarke, Wolfowitz, in April 2001, wanted Osama put on a back burner and for us to go after Iraq. In the first hours after 9-11, according to Bob Woodward and Clarke, Wolfowitz wanted Iraq invaded, not Afghanistan. For his role in steering us into war, Wolfowitz was named Man of the Year – by the Jerusalem Post.
In my new book, "Where the Right Went Wrong," there is a line that now appears prophetic: "America needs a Middle East policy made in the USA, not in Tel Aviv, or at AIPAC or AEI."
Having promised him a cakewalk to Baghdad and a rose garden thereafter, neoconservatives misled President Bush. He should have fired the lot of them. Having failed to do so, he ought now, in his own interests, as well as our nation's, name Patrick "Bulldog" Fitzgerald, now heading up the investigation into the Valerie Plame leak, to head up the investigation of Israeli espionage, and possible treason, against the United States.
If there has been a recurrence of Pollardism at the Pentagon, we need to know and the president needs to act, as Truman did not with Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White.
Halting the spread of WMD
By Bill Gertz
A FRENCH-MADE Roland surface-to-air missile slammed into an A-10 jet flying close air support for U.S. troops near Baghdad on April 8, 2003. The missile nearly killed the pilot and destroyed a $13 million warplane.
The French government would later claim the Rolands fired at U.S. aircraft and found stored in Iraq were sold before the United Nations imposed sanctions on Saddam Hussein's regime in 1991. But a Pentagon report produced in February disputed that claim. It stated that "while Iraq had Roland missiles before Operation Desert Storm, the serial number on the missile [found in 2003] indicates that transfers occurred after 1991."
The current Iraq war exposed the danger to the United States of allowing rogue states such as North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria to acquire weapons and military supplies that could threaten and kill American troops. But, shockingly, France is not the only nation that has placed greed over principle in arming tyrants such as Mr. Hussein. Other supposed allies and friends such as Germany, Russia and China have been involved in illegal weapons deals. And more European countries have gotten into the illegal arms game as well, including Ukraine and Belarus.
The Pentagon report, produced by the office of John A. "Jack" Shaw, deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, about weapons found in Iraq in 2003 revealed a staggering amount of armaments, nearly all foreign-made. The report reached this stark conclusion: "Foreign munitions were used against coalition forces during the war and continue to be a potential source of explosives for improvised explosive devices still being used to kill U.S. soldiers."
"Over the coming decade, depending on how the world community conducts itself, there could be another five nuclear powers," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told me. "There could be several more countries with chemical and biological programs, and there could be additional countries with the ability to deliver those capabilities long distances. The effect of that to the extent that those countries are not democracies, but rather countries on the terrorist list -- the inevitable effect of that is to make the world a more dangerous place."
The discovery this year of Chinese-language documents in Libya included data on how to design a small nuclear warhead for a missile, illustrating that the danger of nuclear attack is growing. The documents were initially passed by Beijing to Pakistan in the 1980s and then "re-proliferated" covertly by the nuclear supplier network headed by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, according to Bush administration officials involved in Libya's nuclear disarmament.
The transfer of dangerous weapons and related technology is the most significant threat to U.S. national security for the foreseeable future. The global war against terrorism is making progress at rooting out Islamist and other terrorist groups, and it has also forced some rogue regimes such as Libya to change their approach.
But the arms control regimes and policies of the past will not be able to provide the framework for keeping arms and weapons technologies out of the hands of terrorists and rogue states. Unless new systems are established to deal effectively with the spread of weapons of mass destruction and missiles, the danger will grow and a strike against the United States with these horrendous mass casualty weapons will be inevitable.
The United States must act, including taking military action, when nonproliferation agreements fail.
"The greatest threat to peace is the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons," President Bush said in the Proliferation Security Initiative in May 2003 that called for halting arms transfers worldwide. "When weapons of mass destruction or their components are in transit, we must have the means and authority to seize them," he said, noting new pacts are needed to allow authorities to "search planes and ships carrying suspect cargo and to seize illegal weapons or missile technologies."
A partnership with like-minded countries is needed urgently because it has become clear that dangerous regimes and terrorist groups will go to any lengths to get weapons and will find no shortage of willing suppliers.
Preparing for swift military action, continuing to develop advanced weapons technology and improving intelligence capabilities will go a long way toward stopping illicit weapons transfers that make our enemies more dangerous.
The last component of any anti-proliferation program is waging an ideological war against weapons transfers, educating friendly nations about the dangers of proliferation and deterring arms dealers from continuing to sell to rogue states and terrorist groups. The war of words should be nothing less than the kind of ideological effort launched against expansionist communism during the Cold War.
The task of making the world safe from weapons of mass destruction will not be easy. But the likelihood of sustaining an attack from nuclear, chemical and biological weapons has never been higher. The work, therefore, is urgent.
Bill Gertz, a defense reporter for The Washington Times, is author of Treachery: How America's Friends and Foes Are Secretly Arming Our Enemies.
By Bill Gertz
A FRENCH-MADE Roland surface-to-air missile slammed into an A-10 jet flying close air support for U.S. troops near Baghdad on April 8, 2003. The missile nearly killed the pilot and destroyed a $13 million warplane.
The French government would later claim the Rolands fired at U.S. aircraft and found stored in Iraq were sold before the United Nations imposed sanctions on Saddam Hussein's regime in 1991. But a Pentagon report produced in February disputed that claim. It stated that "while Iraq had Roland missiles before Operation Desert Storm, the serial number on the missile [found in 2003] indicates that transfers occurred after 1991."
The current Iraq war exposed the danger to the United States of allowing rogue states such as North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria to acquire weapons and military supplies that could threaten and kill American troops. But, shockingly, France is not the only nation that has placed greed over principle in arming tyrants such as Mr. Hussein. Other supposed allies and friends such as Germany, Russia and China have been involved in illegal weapons deals. And more European countries have gotten into the illegal arms game as well, including Ukraine and Belarus.
The Pentagon report, produced by the office of John A. "Jack" Shaw, deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, about weapons found in Iraq in 2003 revealed a staggering amount of armaments, nearly all foreign-made. The report reached this stark conclusion: "Foreign munitions were used against coalition forces during the war and continue to be a potential source of explosives for improvised explosive devices still being used to kill U.S. soldiers."
"Over the coming decade, depending on how the world community conducts itself, there could be another five nuclear powers," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told me. "There could be several more countries with chemical and biological programs, and there could be additional countries with the ability to deliver those capabilities long distances. The effect of that to the extent that those countries are not democracies, but rather countries on the terrorist list -- the inevitable effect of that is to make the world a more dangerous place."
The discovery this year of Chinese-language documents in Libya included data on how to design a small nuclear warhead for a missile, illustrating that the danger of nuclear attack is growing. The documents were initially passed by Beijing to Pakistan in the 1980s and then "re-proliferated" covertly by the nuclear supplier network headed by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, according to Bush administration officials involved in Libya's nuclear disarmament.
The transfer of dangerous weapons and related technology is the most significant threat to U.S. national security for the foreseeable future. The global war against terrorism is making progress at rooting out Islamist and other terrorist groups, and it has also forced some rogue regimes such as Libya to change their approach.
But the arms control regimes and policies of the past will not be able to provide the framework for keeping arms and weapons technologies out of the hands of terrorists and rogue states. Unless new systems are established to deal effectively with the spread of weapons of mass destruction and missiles, the danger will grow and a strike against the United States with these horrendous mass casualty weapons will be inevitable.
The United States must act, including taking military action, when nonproliferation agreements fail.
"The greatest threat to peace is the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons," President Bush said in the Proliferation Security Initiative in May 2003 that called for halting arms transfers worldwide. "When weapons of mass destruction or their components are in transit, we must have the means and authority to seize them," he said, noting new pacts are needed to allow authorities to "search planes and ships carrying suspect cargo and to seize illegal weapons or missile technologies."
A partnership with like-minded countries is needed urgently because it has become clear that dangerous regimes and terrorist groups will go to any lengths to get weapons and will find no shortage of willing suppliers.
Preparing for swift military action, continuing to develop advanced weapons technology and improving intelligence capabilities will go a long way toward stopping illicit weapons transfers that make our enemies more dangerous.
The last component of any anti-proliferation program is waging an ideological war against weapons transfers, educating friendly nations about the dangers of proliferation and deterring arms dealers from continuing to sell to rogue states and terrorist groups. The war of words should be nothing less than the kind of ideological effort launched against expansionist communism during the Cold War.
The task of making the world safe from weapons of mass destruction will not be easy. But the likelihood of sustaining an attack from nuclear, chemical and biological weapons has never been higher. The work, therefore, is urgent.
Bill Gertz, a defense reporter for The Washington Times, is author of Treachery: How America's Friends and Foes Are Secretly Arming Our Enemies.
Thursday, September 30, 2004
Bush vs. Kerry 1
It was a draw, or "push," as Nick Bakay would say, with a marginal advantage going to Bush. At the beginning it looked like the President was going to massacre Kerry, judging by style points as well as by content. Bush's answers were crisper, more succinct, and he seemed more relaxed. Kerry by contrast seemed more self conscious, and his answers convoluted. As the debate wore on, though, Bush went to the well again and again with what seemed to me to be a pretty tiresome point. Yeah, you're steadfast. So what?
The emphasis should have been more to the point that Kerry's overall philosophy is dangerous to the security of the United States. If Kerry were more resolute about what he believes, that wouldn't make him any less wrong. Bush seemed to me to miss a valuable opportunity to both point out the cipher that is Kerry's "record" of accomplishment in the Senate, and also to get on the record Kerry's continual opposition to anything resembling a weapon or weapons system which could benefit the United States.
On balance, it was a pretty good debate as these non-debates go. There were substantive issues discussed, and Bush seemed to at the very least hold his own. Overall, though, it may be that Kerry made the better impression to the undecided voter to whom the President's resoluteness in an Iraq that seems less and less like a good idea every day may appear not to be a sign of strength but a stubbornness in pursuit of disaster.
It was a draw, or "push," as Nick Bakay would say, with a marginal advantage going to Bush. At the beginning it looked like the President was going to massacre Kerry, judging by style points as well as by content. Bush's answers were crisper, more succinct, and he seemed more relaxed. Kerry by contrast seemed more self conscious, and his answers convoluted. As the debate wore on, though, Bush went to the well again and again with what seemed to me to be a pretty tiresome point. Yeah, you're steadfast. So what?
The emphasis should have been more to the point that Kerry's overall philosophy is dangerous to the security of the United States. If Kerry were more resolute about what he believes, that wouldn't make him any less wrong. Bush seemed to me to miss a valuable opportunity to both point out the cipher that is Kerry's "record" of accomplishment in the Senate, and also to get on the record Kerry's continual opposition to anything resembling a weapon or weapons system which could benefit the United States.
On balance, it was a pretty good debate as these non-debates go. There were substantive issues discussed, and Bush seemed to at the very least hold his own. Overall, though, it may be that Kerry made the better impression to the undecided voter to whom the President's resoluteness in an Iraq that seems less and less like a good idea every day may appear not to be a sign of strength but a stubbornness in pursuit of disaster.
Despite New Charges, Democrats Still Lead In Low-Blow Dept.
By Mort Kondracke
The New York Times and Washington Post finally have caught up to the fact that this is a very nasty presidential campaign. But they're blaming it all on Republicans and utterly ignoring the mud thrown by Democrats.
In an editorial Saturday, the Times accused President Bush's campaign of indulging in "despicable" and "un-American" politics and of conducting "an organized effort to paint [Sen. John Kerry] as a friend to terrorists."
Earlier in the week, in a blatant piece of editorializing played as a front-page news story, the Post's Dana Milbank declared that "President Bush and leading Republicans are increasingly charging that [Kerry] and others in his party are giving comfort to terrorists and undermining the war in Iraq - a line of attack that tests the conventional bounds of political rhetoric."
It's true that Bush and others have charged that "mixed messages" can embolden the enemy and dispirit U.S. troops and the Iraqi people, and that al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents would prefer Kerry over Bush.
Such comments, I'd say, are close to the line of low-blow campaigning, but they are far from deserving to be compared, as they were by Milbank, to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1789 or the McCarthy era of the 1950s, when Americans actually were jailed or ruined for their political opinions.
And no one in the Bush campaign has ever actually challenged Kerry's patriotism, as Democrats repeatedly claim, nor called Kerry "a friend to terrorists" or said he's "giving aid and comfort to the enemy," as the Times charged.
Even anti-Kerry 527 groups like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and the Progress for America Voter Fund haven't accused the Democrat of lacking patriotism. In fact, assertions that someone is "unpatriotic" or "un-American" have been leveled exclusively - so far as I can find - by Democrats against Bush.
Those who've used such words include Kerry, former candidates Wesley Clark and Howard Dean, Teresa Heinz Kerry, Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) and Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe.
And the Media Fund, a Democratic 527, has charged that Bush is beholden to Saudi Arabia's royal family and is concealing its sponsorship of terrorism.
Republicans ought not try to stifle debate on the most important issue of the presidential campaign by saying that Kerry's criticism of conditions in Iraq and Bush's conduct of the war will embolden the enemy or undermine the war effort.
Everyone who follows American politics - including U.S. troops, Iraqi allies and insurgents - knows that the United States is divided over the war. For Kerry to finish out the campaign by calling conditions in Iraq "chaotic" or even "a quagmire" are not likely to affect morale in Iraq decisively.
Moreover, Republicans howled excessively when Kerry accused Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi of putting a "best face" on progress in Iraq. That was a fair comment, especially since Allawi virtually endorsed Bush during his visit last week, declaring that invading Iraq was "the right decision."
Senior Kerry adviser Joe Lockhart called Allawi a "puppet" of the Bush administration. That led Bush's campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, to charge that the Kerry campaign was "echoing what the enemy is saying."
It's true, what Lockhart said does parallel what the enemy says - but Lockhart's saying it is not likely to materially affect Allawi's standing in Iraq.
The Bush campaign doesn't need to even hint that Kerry's rhetoric, so far, has made the war harder to win. Bush is doing just fine politically by pointing to the multiple inconsistencies in Kerry's Iraq statements and to his weak overall foreign policy record.
All this said, most media scorekeepers have bought into the Kerry line that he has been ruthlessly "smeared" by the Bush campaign and have utterly ignored excesses pouring out from the Democratic side.
The media overplayed Vice President Cheney's remark - later restated - that Kerry's election would lead to new al Qaeda attacks.
Milbank and the Times reacted with outrage to Speaker Dennis Hastert's (R-Ill.) speculation that al Qaeda would prefer a Kerry presidency and statements by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage that terrorists are trying to defeat Bush.
No one has accused Kerry of favoring terrorists. They're saying that Bush is a better terror-fighter than Kerry and that al Qaeda knows it. It's what the American people think, too, by a wide margin.
In the meantime, Kerry & Co. are getting a virtual pass from the media for hinting that Bush might reinstitute the draft or, as Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) charged this week, that Bush's election would make nuclear war more likely.
And the media has reported without comment the Kerry camp's daily assertions that Bush "lied," "misled" and "deceived" the country to lead the way into Iraq. While the Bush campaign - as opposed to the 527 group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth - has never questioned Kerry's Vietnam service, McAuliffe has charged that Bush was "AWOL" from the Texas National Guard and Kerry himself said that Bush and Cheney "refused to serve when they could have."
The latest Gallup poll shows that voters think that both parties have been equally unfair in attacking each other. By my reckoning, the Democrats are still well out in front.
By Mort Kondracke
The New York Times and Washington Post finally have caught up to the fact that this is a very nasty presidential campaign. But they're blaming it all on Republicans and utterly ignoring the mud thrown by Democrats.
In an editorial Saturday, the Times accused President Bush's campaign of indulging in "despicable" and "un-American" politics and of conducting "an organized effort to paint [Sen. John Kerry] as a friend to terrorists."
Earlier in the week, in a blatant piece of editorializing played as a front-page news story, the Post's Dana Milbank declared that "President Bush and leading Republicans are increasingly charging that [Kerry] and others in his party are giving comfort to terrorists and undermining the war in Iraq - a line of attack that tests the conventional bounds of political rhetoric."
It's true that Bush and others have charged that "mixed messages" can embolden the enemy and dispirit U.S. troops and the Iraqi people, and that al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents would prefer Kerry over Bush.
Such comments, I'd say, are close to the line of low-blow campaigning, but they are far from deserving to be compared, as they were by Milbank, to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1789 or the McCarthy era of the 1950s, when Americans actually were jailed or ruined for their political opinions.
And no one in the Bush campaign has ever actually challenged Kerry's patriotism, as Democrats repeatedly claim, nor called Kerry "a friend to terrorists" or said he's "giving aid and comfort to the enemy," as the Times charged.
Even anti-Kerry 527 groups like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and the Progress for America Voter Fund haven't accused the Democrat of lacking patriotism. In fact, assertions that someone is "unpatriotic" or "un-American" have been leveled exclusively - so far as I can find - by Democrats against Bush.
Those who've used such words include Kerry, former candidates Wesley Clark and Howard Dean, Teresa Heinz Kerry, Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) and Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe.
And the Media Fund, a Democratic 527, has charged that Bush is beholden to Saudi Arabia's royal family and is concealing its sponsorship of terrorism.
Republicans ought not try to stifle debate on the most important issue of the presidential campaign by saying that Kerry's criticism of conditions in Iraq and Bush's conduct of the war will embolden the enemy or undermine the war effort.
Everyone who follows American politics - including U.S. troops, Iraqi allies and insurgents - knows that the United States is divided over the war. For Kerry to finish out the campaign by calling conditions in Iraq "chaotic" or even "a quagmire" are not likely to affect morale in Iraq decisively.
Moreover, Republicans howled excessively when Kerry accused Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi of putting a "best face" on progress in Iraq. That was a fair comment, especially since Allawi virtually endorsed Bush during his visit last week, declaring that invading Iraq was "the right decision."
Senior Kerry adviser Joe Lockhart called Allawi a "puppet" of the Bush administration. That led Bush's campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, to charge that the Kerry campaign was "echoing what the enemy is saying."
It's true, what Lockhart said does parallel what the enemy says - but Lockhart's saying it is not likely to materially affect Allawi's standing in Iraq.
The Bush campaign doesn't need to even hint that Kerry's rhetoric, so far, has made the war harder to win. Bush is doing just fine politically by pointing to the multiple inconsistencies in Kerry's Iraq statements and to his weak overall foreign policy record.
All this said, most media scorekeepers have bought into the Kerry line that he has been ruthlessly "smeared" by the Bush campaign and have utterly ignored excesses pouring out from the Democratic side.
The media overplayed Vice President Cheney's remark - later restated - that Kerry's election would lead to new al Qaeda attacks.
Milbank and the Times reacted with outrage to Speaker Dennis Hastert's (R-Ill.) speculation that al Qaeda would prefer a Kerry presidency and statements by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage that terrorists are trying to defeat Bush.
No one has accused Kerry of favoring terrorists. They're saying that Bush is a better terror-fighter than Kerry and that al Qaeda knows it. It's what the American people think, too, by a wide margin.
In the meantime, Kerry & Co. are getting a virtual pass from the media for hinting that Bush might reinstitute the draft or, as Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) charged this week, that Bush's election would make nuclear war more likely.
And the media has reported without comment the Kerry camp's daily assertions that Bush "lied," "misled" and "deceived" the country to lead the way into Iraq. While the Bush campaign - as opposed to the 527 group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth - has never questioned Kerry's Vietnam service, McAuliffe has charged that Bush was "AWOL" from the Texas National Guard and Kerry himself said that Bush and Cheney "refused to serve when they could have."
The latest Gallup poll shows that voters think that both parties have been equally unfair in attacking each other. By my reckoning, the Democrats are still well out in front.
from washingtonpost.com:
At Last, A Team to Call Our Own
By Thomas Boswell
This was the day when the phones rang everywhere in the Washington area for everyone who loves baseball.
"Don't tell me what you're going to write, Boz," said ex-Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson, just speaking as one D.C. kid who grew up loving the Senators to another. "Tell me what you feel."
I couldn't then. Maybe I can now. Generations of Washington area children will now get to feel some contemporary version of what captivated me from 1956 to 1971, when I took the streetcar to Griffith Stadium to root for Roy Sievers or rode my bike to RFK Stadium to watch Frank Howard's homers or took my dad to the last Nats' game 33 years ago today.
The modes of transportation and the names of the parks don't matter. In the Senators' first era here, they changed plenty between 1900 and 1971. But the central quality remains the same. That sweet interlacing of a dependable daily pleasure throughout your entire youth -- 162 times a year -- becomes part of the fabric of what you come to recognize as happiness.
"Mazel Tov," said Larry Lucchino, who used to run the Orioles and Padres, but now bosses the Red Sox. I assume he meant the phrase in honor of the late Shirley Povich who wrote about the Nats -- and getting them back -- from 1924 until 1998.
Lucchino was the force behind both Camden Yards and the new waterfront ballpark in San Diego that has been met with raves. And he loves the Southeast stadium site. The possibilities remind him of so many neglected, low-density urban areas that, once revived by a baseball stadium, suddenly became part of the heartbeat of their cities.
The Embarcadero in San Francisco was a dismal dump until Pac Bell was built. Now, it hums with beauty and vibrant city life. The first time I saw the proposed location, I said, "In a city as beautiful as San Francisco, they're going to build a ballpark here?" That's the point. Turn ugly into gorgeous. Now, McCovey Cove is one of Frisco's prime attractions.
The banks of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland stunk to heaven before Jacobs Field was built nearby. Now, you can dine in outdoor cafes a few yards from that river. I took a Washington friend, who'd grown up in Cleveland, to eat lunch there a few years ago. He just kept shaking his head and laughing through the meal. "This was just about the worst place in town," he said.
Now, it's one of the best. Isn't it funny how money is suddenly found to clean up pollution when it's next to economically important tourist venues? My guess is that the Anacostia River's days as an open sewer will be numbered.
For many years, I've tried to champion baseball for Washington, sometimes to bemused or indulgent laughter. Though I never advertised the fact, I was often a secret Doubting Thomas. It's one thing to believe that the District deserved and would support a team. But that's not the same as believing in your heart of hearts that "Senators III" would be a roaring success or, from the perspective of the entire city, a truly worthwhile civic project. A nagging cliche often echoed in my ear: "Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it."
Sometime in the last decade, however, that annoying skepticism changed. Perhaps the opening and success of both MCI Center and the new Washington Convention Center were final pieces of the picture. My doubts gradually evaporated until now only certainty remains. Washington should no longer be nagged by the unspoken worry that the return of baseball will somehow be a booby trap or a cruel joke, a waste of a third of a century or a financial blow to the best interests of the city as a whole.
"Sometimes, things are worth waiting for," Commissioner of Baseball Bud Selig told me in a telephone interview yesterday. "Maybe baseball and Washington came back together at just the right time. . . . It must seem like it took forever to the people there. But the sport is in the middle of an unbelievable renaissance. You're getting the game back when it's at its best. We're setting attendance records.
"For so long everybody's been saying 'Washington is a completely different town than when it lost the Senators twice.' Well, I know that," said Selig, who has endured my harangues on that subject for more than 25 years. "But the District just seems to get better and better with the years. Now, you've got a mayor and a city government that are really committed and competent.
"The site of the new ballpark helps, too," said Selig, referring to the Anacostia waterfront location in Southeast in the midst of a blighted barely used area of town just 15 blocks from the U.S. Capitol that weeps for any kind of economic development. "Sociologically, that's something we like to do. It's always a very positive consideration."
So, finally, it's just the right time?
"Baseball can seem very slow moving and resistant to change. There's a lot of agonizing over decisions," Selig said. "Look at how long it took us to get three divisions and the wild card. But, my goodness gracious, now everybody loves it."
When a city's baseball fate is in the hands of a man who still says "my goodness gracious" -- and means it -- maybe sometimes it takes 33 years to fix an obvious problem. What's a third of a century? At least for those who live to see it.
"Let joy be unconfined. No sleep 'til morn," Lord Byron said.
What superb advice. Anybody got a National Bohemian, circa 1971?
Yes, the Washington Senators are coming back! We are finally getting exactly what we wished for so long. But we no longer need to be careful -- fearful -- about what the consequences of that deep desire will be. Selig senses this sea change from a distance. We should feel it, too.
Far from being some perverse trick, the announcement that the Expos are coming to Washington is exactly the joyous event we should desire and the outcome that we deserve.
At Last, A Team to Call Our Own
By Thomas Boswell
This was the day when the phones rang everywhere in the Washington area for everyone who loves baseball.
"Don't tell me what you're going to write, Boz," said ex-Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson, just speaking as one D.C. kid who grew up loving the Senators to another. "Tell me what you feel."
I couldn't then. Maybe I can now. Generations of Washington area children will now get to feel some contemporary version of what captivated me from 1956 to 1971, when I took the streetcar to Griffith Stadium to root for Roy Sievers or rode my bike to RFK Stadium to watch Frank Howard's homers or took my dad to the last Nats' game 33 years ago today.
The modes of transportation and the names of the parks don't matter. In the Senators' first era here, they changed plenty between 1900 and 1971. But the central quality remains the same. That sweet interlacing of a dependable daily pleasure throughout your entire youth -- 162 times a year -- becomes part of the fabric of what you come to recognize as happiness.
"Mazel Tov," said Larry Lucchino, who used to run the Orioles and Padres, but now bosses the Red Sox. I assume he meant the phrase in honor of the late Shirley Povich who wrote about the Nats -- and getting them back -- from 1924 until 1998.
Lucchino was the force behind both Camden Yards and the new waterfront ballpark in San Diego that has been met with raves. And he loves the Southeast stadium site. The possibilities remind him of so many neglected, low-density urban areas that, once revived by a baseball stadium, suddenly became part of the heartbeat of their cities.
The Embarcadero in San Francisco was a dismal dump until Pac Bell was built. Now, it hums with beauty and vibrant city life. The first time I saw the proposed location, I said, "In a city as beautiful as San Francisco, they're going to build a ballpark here?" That's the point. Turn ugly into gorgeous. Now, McCovey Cove is one of Frisco's prime attractions.
The banks of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland stunk to heaven before Jacobs Field was built nearby. Now, you can dine in outdoor cafes a few yards from that river. I took a Washington friend, who'd grown up in Cleveland, to eat lunch there a few years ago. He just kept shaking his head and laughing through the meal. "This was just about the worst place in town," he said.
Now, it's one of the best. Isn't it funny how money is suddenly found to clean up pollution when it's next to economically important tourist venues? My guess is that the Anacostia River's days as an open sewer will be numbered.
For many years, I've tried to champion baseball for Washington, sometimes to bemused or indulgent laughter. Though I never advertised the fact, I was often a secret Doubting Thomas. It's one thing to believe that the District deserved and would support a team. But that's not the same as believing in your heart of hearts that "Senators III" would be a roaring success or, from the perspective of the entire city, a truly worthwhile civic project. A nagging cliche often echoed in my ear: "Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it."
Sometime in the last decade, however, that annoying skepticism changed. Perhaps the opening and success of both MCI Center and the new Washington Convention Center were final pieces of the picture. My doubts gradually evaporated until now only certainty remains. Washington should no longer be nagged by the unspoken worry that the return of baseball will somehow be a booby trap or a cruel joke, a waste of a third of a century or a financial blow to the best interests of the city as a whole.
"Sometimes, things are worth waiting for," Commissioner of Baseball Bud Selig told me in a telephone interview yesterday. "Maybe baseball and Washington came back together at just the right time. . . . It must seem like it took forever to the people there. But the sport is in the middle of an unbelievable renaissance. You're getting the game back when it's at its best. We're setting attendance records.
"For so long everybody's been saying 'Washington is a completely different town than when it lost the Senators twice.' Well, I know that," said Selig, who has endured my harangues on that subject for more than 25 years. "But the District just seems to get better and better with the years. Now, you've got a mayor and a city government that are really committed and competent.
"The site of the new ballpark helps, too," said Selig, referring to the Anacostia waterfront location in Southeast in the midst of a blighted barely used area of town just 15 blocks from the U.S. Capitol that weeps for any kind of economic development. "Sociologically, that's something we like to do. It's always a very positive consideration."
So, finally, it's just the right time?
"Baseball can seem very slow moving and resistant to change. There's a lot of agonizing over decisions," Selig said. "Look at how long it took us to get three divisions and the wild card. But, my goodness gracious, now everybody loves it."
When a city's baseball fate is in the hands of a man who still says "my goodness gracious" -- and means it -- maybe sometimes it takes 33 years to fix an obvious problem. What's a third of a century? At least for those who live to see it.
"Let joy be unconfined. No sleep 'til morn," Lord Byron said.
What superb advice. Anybody got a National Bohemian, circa 1971?
Yes, the Washington Senators are coming back! We are finally getting exactly what we wished for so long. But we no longer need to be careful -- fearful -- about what the consequences of that deep desire will be. Selig senses this sea change from a distance. We should feel it, too.
Far from being some perverse trick, the announcement that the Expos are coming to Washington is exactly the joyous event we should desire and the outcome that we deserve.
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Can't Wait Too Long
The Americana myth of Brian Wilson's Smile
by Brian Doherty
9/28/2004
Today, a pop album is released that was 38 years in the making. Some devotees—I'm one of them—will tell you that its quality and heft make it worth every minute of waiting.
The album is called Smile. In 1966-67 it was in the works as the Beach Boys' follow-up to their now-acknowledged classic Pet Sounds, and a further step into the abstract from their surf- and cars- and girls-rooted early successes. Beach Boys auteur Brian Wilson, who composed the album and worked with Van Dyke Parks on the lyrics, eventually decided to abandon the ambitious project, even though it was already widely praised in the burgeoning pop press at the time.
Some of the songs meant for Smile appeared on what became Pet Sounds' follow-up, the low-key and charmingly addled, but still beautiful and joyous, Smiley Smile. Other tracks appeared on later Beach Boys records or box sets, but much of Smile's wreckage was searchable only through hours of bootlegged session tapes that fed a stream of fanatical underground devotees, who in turn fed Smile's legend and awaited its return to claim its glory (usurped by the British Beatles' Sgt. Peppers) like clandestine squadrons of sixties-pop Jacobites.
Smile as a concept has been one of the most argued about works in popular music history, with entire books and reams of fanzine articles and Internet postings speculating endlessly on the mysterious song titles in the vault tapes, on the "link tracks," on what really constituted "the elements suite" (a part of the original Smile myth completely elided in this finished version), on what overarching concept ties together songs as disparate as the endlessly charming goof "Vegetables" and the almost disturbingly lilting "Cabinessence," and on what was the real reason Brian abandoned it. Was it that he really hated the music (as he sometimes asserted over the years), that he feared he'd never be able to top it, that the philistine objections of his reputedly art-hating, cash-hungry colleagues sapped his will, or that the decision was just made out of neurotic fear and then doggedly stuck to for decades. (That a Beach Boys band craving formulaic success released Smiley Smile, an even more uncommercial record than Smile would have been, to me has always put the lie to the notion that their perfidy killed the original work.)
Every once in a while for decades rumors would spread that either the Beach Boys, or the suits at Capitol who bankrolled Brian's months-long obsession with this project (and even printed up hundreds of thousands of record sleeves for the album he never delivered), would finally pick up all these glistening shards of melody and construct the album that would blow the world away and show, as patriotic lyricist Van Dyke Parks wanted, that even in the wake of a British invasion, American music and American voices and the spiritual history of America still mattered.
Now the myth is over and Smile exists, as a Brian Wilson solo project, not a Beach Boys album. And while the saga of Smile has its own fascinations even beyond the music—I've probably spent as much time over the years reading and talking about it as I have listening to its existing fragments, as have many fans—you'll forget the lore upon hearing the songs as presented here.
There are quibbles that any obsessive will have. For example, it wasn't the greatest idea to re-record "Good Vibrations" with its original, inferior lyrics. (The only thing they seem to have going for them, to some people, is that they aren't by Mike Love—now an estranged villain in the Smile saga for questioning Parks' avant-garde lyrics, although he gamely sang them, and very well, in the original sessions.) And a "Cabinessence" without Carl Wilson on lead seems a leaden thing indeed after years of being awed by the original Beach Boys version.
But tracks like "Wonderful" seem even more a thick swirl of pure love in the new version. Newly completed tracks like "Barnyard" and "Song for Children" brought this old fan to tears, and I believe it could do so even to those for whom the phrase "George Fell into his French Horn" is meaningless, not argument-starting. As someone who believes that the arranged voices of Brian, Carl, Dennis, Mike, and Al are about the most beautiful sounds imaginable, I do miss the Beach Boys' voices on this. But Brian and his current gang have done an impeccable job of making this sound glorious even without them.
How this was all able to happen is an interesting saga in how the machineries of pop production, both legal and illegal, work to create magic despite being bogged down, as an endless string of laments launched by the Byrds "So You Wanna Be A Rock n' Roll Star" attest, by motives sleazy and venal. Brian, as the fabulously successful leader of the Beach Boys, got money and support from Capitol Records—even while he was suing them for back royalties—to record the basics of his extreme vision in Smile. Then waves of bootleggers, profiteering off work the artists didn't want us to hear, kept afloat the Smile legend, and helped create Brian Wilson superfan Darian Sahanaja of the quirky L.A. pop revivalists Wondermints, who have formed the nucleus of Brian's touring band since 1999.
Upon first witnessing the Wondermints play his music at a Beach Boys cover charity show in 1995—I was there that night as well, and was as amazed as Mr. Wilson—Wilson famously declared that, if he'd had them at his disposal in 1967, he could have taken Smile on the road. In 2003 he did, and he did. He added final touch-ups and some material, some remembered by Wilson and Parks and some freshly conceived. With the supervision of Sahanaja, who knew more about this project then either of its creators at this far remove (he spent more time listening to and loving the bootleg tapes over the years than they did), they took that road show into the studio. The Time Warner imprint Nonesuch—famous for rescuing Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, another piece of pop art unwisely dismissed by studio suits at the band's label, Reprise—released it today.
The saga of Smile turned out as mythic-American as its music, an interesting side note and another part of the often fascinating webs with which modern plentitude embraces art. We can have endless fun fun fun, as Beach Boys fans have, not just with base works of culture, but with the equally endless discussions they engender.
But listening to this heartwarmingly gorgeous slab of vocal melody pop, the final processing of the ambitions of a young Southern California man with lots of money, lots of success, lots of ambition, and lots of love for the sound of American voices (particularly the voices of his brothers, cousin, and school chum) raised in song—from old work songs to western ballads to turn of the century pop to doo-wop—makes all the myths of genius ignored, thwarted, throttled by considerations of gross commerce, seem a whole lot less interesting than adding this music to your day.
The music was too good to die. Its relentless bootlegging and mythologizing helped bring it to the attention of Sahanaja, the godfather to its rebirth; all the machineries of pop production and pop mythology clicked and churned in ways as mysterious as those of the American history that parts of this album limn so lovingly: the rolling trains and chanting voices that took us west on the iron horse to make Grand Coulee dams and sail to Hawaii.
Smile makes something lilting out of tragedy ("Bicycle rider/see see what you've done/To the Church of the American Indian") and heavy out of love ("Lost and found a kiss below there/Constellations ebb and flow there") and while it is almost certainly a conceptual mess, that's more than fine: The best thing about it is, you don't need to know any of the history, believe any of the myth, take sides in any of the debates (art vs. commerce, America vs. Brit, artist intentions vs. fan desires) that dog Smile's history, to groove to this brilliantly unique and joyous work.
Brian Doherty is a senior editor of Reason and author of This Is Burning Man, (Little, Brown).
The Americana myth of Brian Wilson's Smile
by Brian Doherty
9/28/2004
Today, a pop album is released that was 38 years in the making. Some devotees—I'm one of them—will tell you that its quality and heft make it worth every minute of waiting.
The album is called Smile. In 1966-67 it was in the works as the Beach Boys' follow-up to their now-acknowledged classic Pet Sounds, and a further step into the abstract from their surf- and cars- and girls-rooted early successes. Beach Boys auteur Brian Wilson, who composed the album and worked with Van Dyke Parks on the lyrics, eventually decided to abandon the ambitious project, even though it was already widely praised in the burgeoning pop press at the time.
Some of the songs meant for Smile appeared on what became Pet Sounds' follow-up, the low-key and charmingly addled, but still beautiful and joyous, Smiley Smile. Other tracks appeared on later Beach Boys records or box sets, but much of Smile's wreckage was searchable only through hours of bootlegged session tapes that fed a stream of fanatical underground devotees, who in turn fed Smile's legend and awaited its return to claim its glory (usurped by the British Beatles' Sgt. Peppers) like clandestine squadrons of sixties-pop Jacobites.
Smile as a concept has been one of the most argued about works in popular music history, with entire books and reams of fanzine articles and Internet postings speculating endlessly on the mysterious song titles in the vault tapes, on the "link tracks," on what really constituted "the elements suite" (a part of the original Smile myth completely elided in this finished version), on what overarching concept ties together songs as disparate as the endlessly charming goof "Vegetables" and the almost disturbingly lilting "Cabinessence," and on what was the real reason Brian abandoned it. Was it that he really hated the music (as he sometimes asserted over the years), that he feared he'd never be able to top it, that the philistine objections of his reputedly art-hating, cash-hungry colleagues sapped his will, or that the decision was just made out of neurotic fear and then doggedly stuck to for decades. (That a Beach Boys band craving formulaic success released Smiley Smile, an even more uncommercial record than Smile would have been, to me has always put the lie to the notion that their perfidy killed the original work.)
Every once in a while for decades rumors would spread that either the Beach Boys, or the suits at Capitol who bankrolled Brian's months-long obsession with this project (and even printed up hundreds of thousands of record sleeves for the album he never delivered), would finally pick up all these glistening shards of melody and construct the album that would blow the world away and show, as patriotic lyricist Van Dyke Parks wanted, that even in the wake of a British invasion, American music and American voices and the spiritual history of America still mattered.
Now the myth is over and Smile exists, as a Brian Wilson solo project, not a Beach Boys album. And while the saga of Smile has its own fascinations even beyond the music—I've probably spent as much time over the years reading and talking about it as I have listening to its existing fragments, as have many fans—you'll forget the lore upon hearing the songs as presented here.
There are quibbles that any obsessive will have. For example, it wasn't the greatest idea to re-record "Good Vibrations" with its original, inferior lyrics. (The only thing they seem to have going for them, to some people, is that they aren't by Mike Love—now an estranged villain in the Smile saga for questioning Parks' avant-garde lyrics, although he gamely sang them, and very well, in the original sessions.) And a "Cabinessence" without Carl Wilson on lead seems a leaden thing indeed after years of being awed by the original Beach Boys version.
But tracks like "Wonderful" seem even more a thick swirl of pure love in the new version. Newly completed tracks like "Barnyard" and "Song for Children" brought this old fan to tears, and I believe it could do so even to those for whom the phrase "George Fell into his French Horn" is meaningless, not argument-starting. As someone who believes that the arranged voices of Brian, Carl, Dennis, Mike, and Al are about the most beautiful sounds imaginable, I do miss the Beach Boys' voices on this. But Brian and his current gang have done an impeccable job of making this sound glorious even without them.
How this was all able to happen is an interesting saga in how the machineries of pop production, both legal and illegal, work to create magic despite being bogged down, as an endless string of laments launched by the Byrds "So You Wanna Be A Rock n' Roll Star" attest, by motives sleazy and venal. Brian, as the fabulously successful leader of the Beach Boys, got money and support from Capitol Records—even while he was suing them for back royalties—to record the basics of his extreme vision in Smile. Then waves of bootleggers, profiteering off work the artists didn't want us to hear, kept afloat the Smile legend, and helped create Brian Wilson superfan Darian Sahanaja of the quirky L.A. pop revivalists Wondermints, who have formed the nucleus of Brian's touring band since 1999.
Upon first witnessing the Wondermints play his music at a Beach Boys cover charity show in 1995—I was there that night as well, and was as amazed as Mr. Wilson—Wilson famously declared that, if he'd had them at his disposal in 1967, he could have taken Smile on the road. In 2003 he did, and he did. He added final touch-ups and some material, some remembered by Wilson and Parks and some freshly conceived. With the supervision of Sahanaja, who knew more about this project then either of its creators at this far remove (he spent more time listening to and loving the bootleg tapes over the years than they did), they took that road show into the studio. The Time Warner imprint Nonesuch—famous for rescuing Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, another piece of pop art unwisely dismissed by studio suits at the band's label, Reprise—released it today.
The saga of Smile turned out as mythic-American as its music, an interesting side note and another part of the often fascinating webs with which modern plentitude embraces art. We can have endless fun fun fun, as Beach Boys fans have, not just with base works of culture, but with the equally endless discussions they engender.
But listening to this heartwarmingly gorgeous slab of vocal melody pop, the final processing of the ambitions of a young Southern California man with lots of money, lots of success, lots of ambition, and lots of love for the sound of American voices (particularly the voices of his brothers, cousin, and school chum) raised in song—from old work songs to western ballads to turn of the century pop to doo-wop—makes all the myths of genius ignored, thwarted, throttled by considerations of gross commerce, seem a whole lot less interesting than adding this music to your day.
The music was too good to die. Its relentless bootlegging and mythologizing helped bring it to the attention of Sahanaja, the godfather to its rebirth; all the machineries of pop production and pop mythology clicked and churned in ways as mysterious as those of the American history that parts of this album limn so lovingly: the rolling trains and chanting voices that took us west on the iron horse to make Grand Coulee dams and sail to Hawaii.
Smile makes something lilting out of tragedy ("Bicycle rider/see see what you've done/To the Church of the American Indian") and heavy out of love ("Lost and found a kiss below there/Constellations ebb and flow there") and while it is almost certainly a conceptual mess, that's more than fine: The best thing about it is, you don't need to know any of the history, believe any of the myth, take sides in any of the debates (art vs. commerce, America vs. Brit, artist intentions vs. fan desires) that dog Smile's history, to groove to this brilliantly unique and joyous work.
Brian Doherty is a senior editor of Reason and author of This Is Burning Man, (Little, Brown).
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
From The Wall Street Journal:
The Florida Myth
Spinning tales about 2000 to boost black turnout.
In case you were lucky enough to miss it, here's a recent fund-raising letter from New Jersey Democratic Senator Jon Corzine:
"Voter suppression and intimidation . . . in Florida again!? The GOP used voter intimidation and outright fraud to hand Florida to George W. Bush in 2000, and if we don't stop them, they'll do it again."
Yes, the political urban legend that black voters in Florida were harassed and intimidated on Election Day four years ago is making a comeback. Only yesterday Jimmy Carter, fresh from blessing Hugo Chavez's dubious victory in Venezuela, moaned that in 2000 "several thousand ballots of African Americans were thrown out on technicalities" in Florida, and that this year more black than (Republican) Hispanic felons are being disqualified to vote--as if all felons weren't supposed to be barred, regardless of race.
As the Corzine letter and the "Jim Crow" pamphlet nearby suggest, this is all election-year demagoguery. Democrats and their acolytes are raising this myth from the dead to scare up black turnout and lay the groundwork for challenges in court if John Kerry loses. So, before Dan Rather concludes this is another scoop, let's all remember the fraud that didn't happen in 2000.
In June 2001, following a six-month investigation that included subpoenas of Florida state officials from Governor Jeb Bush on down, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report that found no evidence of voter intimidation, no evidence of voter harassment, and no evidence of intentional or systematic disenfranchisement of black voters.
Headed by a fiercely partisan Democrat, Mary Frances Berry, the Commission was very critical of Florida election officials (many of whom were Democrats). For example, "Potential voters confronted inexperienced poll workers, antiquated machinery, inaccessible polling locations, and other barriers to being able to exercise their right to vote." But the report found no basis for the contention that officials conspired to disenfranchise voters. "Moreover," it said, "even if it was foreseeable that certain actions by officials led to voter disenfranchisement, this alone does not mean that intentional discrimination occurred," let alone racial discrimination.
The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division conducted a separate investigation of these charges and also came up empty. In a May 2002 letter to Democratic Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont, who at the time headed the Judiciary Committee, Assistant Attorney General Ralph Boyd wrote, "The Civil Rights Division found no credible evidence in our investigations that Floridians were intentionally denied their right to vote during the November 2000 election."
Peter Kirsanow, a Republican member of the Civil Rights Commission, told us in an interview that "the press has tried to spin what happened in Florida into something sinister. But there's a disconnect between what was actually found [in these various investigations] and how it's been portrayed."
Senator Corzine's letter references the New York Times, where heavy-breathing columnists are trying to link a routine investigation of voter fraud in an Orlando mayoral election with a statewide effort by Governor Jeb Bush to intimidate blacks into staying home in November. Elsewhere, the NAACP and People for the American Way have issued a report claiming that "intimidation" led to racially motivated voter disenfranchisement in Florida. These and other left-wing groups are planning to dispatch 5,000 lawyers nationwide on Election Day in the name of "voter protection," presumably to prevent a "repeat" of something that didn't happen the first time.
Another prong of the attack on the legitimacy of the Florida outcome, at least as it pertains to the notion the black voters were intentionally disenfranchised, is the number of black voters whose ballots were spoiled. The Civil Rights Commission concluded that blacks were more likely to spoil their votes than whites by a factor of 10 to 1. Other investigations put that ratio closer to 3 to 1. In any case, the numbers are educated guesses extrapolated from sample precincts because ballots don't record the race of the voter.
But the idea that racial animus rather than all-around incompetence produced higher spoilage rates for blacks, or accounted for their misplacement on the infamously inaccurate "felon purge list," is fanciful at best. In Florida, as in many other states, the manner in which elections are conducted, including all of the essentials of the voting process, is determined at the county level.
Which leaves the "stolen election" crowd with these inconvenient facts: In 24 of the 25 Florida counties with the highest ballot spoilage rate, the county supervisor was a Democrat. In the 25th county, the supervisor was an Independent. And as for the "felon purge list," the Miami Herald found that whites were twice as likely to be incorrectly placed on the list as blacks.
The real spectacle here is that some Democrats are only too willing to exploit the painful history of black voter disenfranchisement for some short-term partisan advantage. And it just might backfire. Democrats played up the Florida fiasco in the 2002 midterm elections, repeatedly telling blacks that their votes hadn't been counted in 2000. Rather than being riled up, many black voters believed what they were told and stayed home.
The Florida Myth
Spinning tales about 2000 to boost black turnout.
In case you were lucky enough to miss it, here's a recent fund-raising letter from New Jersey Democratic Senator Jon Corzine:
"Voter suppression and intimidation . . . in Florida again!? The GOP used voter intimidation and outright fraud to hand Florida to George W. Bush in 2000, and if we don't stop them, they'll do it again."
Yes, the political urban legend that black voters in Florida were harassed and intimidated on Election Day four years ago is making a comeback. Only yesterday Jimmy Carter, fresh from blessing Hugo Chavez's dubious victory in Venezuela, moaned that in 2000 "several thousand ballots of African Americans were thrown out on technicalities" in Florida, and that this year more black than (Republican) Hispanic felons are being disqualified to vote--as if all felons weren't supposed to be barred, regardless of race.
As the Corzine letter and the "Jim Crow" pamphlet nearby suggest, this is all election-year demagoguery. Democrats and their acolytes are raising this myth from the dead to scare up black turnout and lay the groundwork for challenges in court if John Kerry loses. So, before Dan Rather concludes this is another scoop, let's all remember the fraud that didn't happen in 2000.
In June 2001, following a six-month investigation that included subpoenas of Florida state officials from Governor Jeb Bush on down, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report that found no evidence of voter intimidation, no evidence of voter harassment, and no evidence of intentional or systematic disenfranchisement of black voters.
Headed by a fiercely partisan Democrat, Mary Frances Berry, the Commission was very critical of Florida election officials (many of whom were Democrats). For example, "Potential voters confronted inexperienced poll workers, antiquated machinery, inaccessible polling locations, and other barriers to being able to exercise their right to vote." But the report found no basis for the contention that officials conspired to disenfranchise voters. "Moreover," it said, "even if it was foreseeable that certain actions by officials led to voter disenfranchisement, this alone does not mean that intentional discrimination occurred," let alone racial discrimination.
The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division conducted a separate investigation of these charges and also came up empty. In a May 2002 letter to Democratic Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont, who at the time headed the Judiciary Committee, Assistant Attorney General Ralph Boyd wrote, "The Civil Rights Division found no credible evidence in our investigations that Floridians were intentionally denied their right to vote during the November 2000 election."
Peter Kirsanow, a Republican member of the Civil Rights Commission, told us in an interview that "the press has tried to spin what happened in Florida into something sinister. But there's a disconnect between what was actually found [in these various investigations] and how it's been portrayed."
Senator Corzine's letter references the New York Times, where heavy-breathing columnists are trying to link a routine investigation of voter fraud in an Orlando mayoral election with a statewide effort by Governor Jeb Bush to intimidate blacks into staying home in November. Elsewhere, the NAACP and People for the American Way have issued a report claiming that "intimidation" led to racially motivated voter disenfranchisement in Florida. These and other left-wing groups are planning to dispatch 5,000 lawyers nationwide on Election Day in the name of "voter protection," presumably to prevent a "repeat" of something that didn't happen the first time.
Another prong of the attack on the legitimacy of the Florida outcome, at least as it pertains to the notion the black voters were intentionally disenfranchised, is the number of black voters whose ballots were spoiled. The Civil Rights Commission concluded that blacks were more likely to spoil their votes than whites by a factor of 10 to 1. Other investigations put that ratio closer to 3 to 1. In any case, the numbers are educated guesses extrapolated from sample precincts because ballots don't record the race of the voter.
But the idea that racial animus rather than all-around incompetence produced higher spoilage rates for blacks, or accounted for their misplacement on the infamously inaccurate "felon purge list," is fanciful at best. In Florida, as in many other states, the manner in which elections are conducted, including all of the essentials of the voting process, is determined at the county level.
Which leaves the "stolen election" crowd with these inconvenient facts: In 24 of the 25 Florida counties with the highest ballot spoilage rate, the county supervisor was a Democrat. In the 25th county, the supervisor was an Independent. And as for the "felon purge list," the Miami Herald found that whites were twice as likely to be incorrectly placed on the list as blacks.
The real spectacle here is that some Democrats are only too willing to exploit the painful history of black voter disenfranchisement for some short-term partisan advantage. And it just might backfire. Democrats played up the Florida fiasco in the 2002 midterm elections, repeatedly telling blacks that their votes hadn't been counted in 2000. Rather than being riled up, many black voters believed what they were told and stayed home.
From The Rocky Mountain News:
Coming to grips with war
by Paul Campos
Eddie Adams, who died last week, took perhaps the most famous photograph of the Vietnam war: an image of a South Vietnamese general executing a Viet Cong soldier on a Saigon street, by shooting him in the temple at point blank range.
The most powerful image of war I know isn't a photograph: it's Goya's painting The Third of May, 1808, which hangs in the Prado in Madrid. A copy of it can be viewed at http://history.hanover.edu/courses/art/goyamy3.html, although any reproduction can only hint at the impact of the painting itself.
The power of Goya's depiction of the dead, the dying, and those about to die comes from the artist's willingness to tell the truth. War, Goya's painting tells us, is evil, disgusting and horrifying to the core. The only way to avoid this truth is to avert one's eyes from the thing itself.
The best war photographs capture the same truth: that is why the Pentagon has gone to such extraordinary lengths to make sure we see no images of dead bodies, or wounded soldiers, or even flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq.
War is evil, disgusting and horrifying, but it is sometimes the lesser of two evils. That is another truth - and one that is especially difficult to deal with. For once you've decided that, in this particular case, it is the lesser evil, then you must be willing to do evil, disgusting and horrifying things, such as shooting a man who has his hands tied behind his back, or firing high explosives into neighborhoods full of women and children.
If it were somehow possible to extract an honest answer from either George Bush or John Kerry to just one question, here's the one I would choose: Are you going to fight this war, or not?
Both men have spent the last few weeks dodging this question. Bush keeps repeating that his plan to transform the Middle East into a region friendly to the United States is proceeding on schedule, and that, while he is willing to send more troops to Iraq, he doesn't believe this will be necessary.
Kerry keeps pointing out that the situation in Iraq is bad and getting worse, but to this point he hasn't offered much in the way of an alternative to the status quo, other than vague promises about internationalizing the war, and pledging to get U.S. troops out within four years.
Both Bush and Kerry are talking nonsense. Each candidate should be asked point blank: Are you willing to sacrifice the lives of thousands of American troops, and kill tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, to crush resistance to the U.S. occupation?
And if not, are you willing to allow Iraq to descend into even more chaos, including perhaps a full-scale civil war, that could fracture the country into perpetually warring factions?
This is the grim choice that will face the man who wins the upcoming election. The pleasant fantasy presented to the American people by the Bush administration - that our troops would be greeted as liberators rather than occupiers - has been destroyed.
This doesn't necessarily mean the war was a mistake. It only means that the war was sold to the American people on a false premise: that the invasion of Iraq wouldn't really be an invasion, and that the occupation of the country wouldn't really be an occupation - in short, that the war wouldn't really be a war.
It is a war. It isn't a humanitarian relief effort, or a civics lesson with guns. Whoever wins on Nov. 2 will either have to kill a lot more people a lot more quickly, or get the hell out.
Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. He can be reached at paul.campos@colorado.edu.
Coming to grips with war
by Paul Campos
Eddie Adams, who died last week, took perhaps the most famous photograph of the Vietnam war: an image of a South Vietnamese general executing a Viet Cong soldier on a Saigon street, by shooting him in the temple at point blank range.
The most powerful image of war I know isn't a photograph: it's Goya's painting The Third of May, 1808, which hangs in the Prado in Madrid. A copy of it can be viewed at http://history.hanover.edu/courses/art/goyamy3.html, although any reproduction can only hint at the impact of the painting itself.
The power of Goya's depiction of the dead, the dying, and those about to die comes from the artist's willingness to tell the truth. War, Goya's painting tells us, is evil, disgusting and horrifying to the core. The only way to avoid this truth is to avert one's eyes from the thing itself.
The best war photographs capture the same truth: that is why the Pentagon has gone to such extraordinary lengths to make sure we see no images of dead bodies, or wounded soldiers, or even flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq.
War is evil, disgusting and horrifying, but it is sometimes the lesser of two evils. That is another truth - and one that is especially difficult to deal with. For once you've decided that, in this particular case, it is the lesser evil, then you must be willing to do evil, disgusting and horrifying things, such as shooting a man who has his hands tied behind his back, or firing high explosives into neighborhoods full of women and children.
If it were somehow possible to extract an honest answer from either George Bush or John Kerry to just one question, here's the one I would choose: Are you going to fight this war, or not?
Both men have spent the last few weeks dodging this question. Bush keeps repeating that his plan to transform the Middle East into a region friendly to the United States is proceeding on schedule, and that, while he is willing to send more troops to Iraq, he doesn't believe this will be necessary.
Kerry keeps pointing out that the situation in Iraq is bad and getting worse, but to this point he hasn't offered much in the way of an alternative to the status quo, other than vague promises about internationalizing the war, and pledging to get U.S. troops out within four years.
Both Bush and Kerry are talking nonsense. Each candidate should be asked point blank: Are you willing to sacrifice the lives of thousands of American troops, and kill tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, to crush resistance to the U.S. occupation?
And if not, are you willing to allow Iraq to descend into even more chaos, including perhaps a full-scale civil war, that could fracture the country into perpetually warring factions?
This is the grim choice that will face the man who wins the upcoming election. The pleasant fantasy presented to the American people by the Bush administration - that our troops would be greeted as liberators rather than occupiers - has been destroyed.
This doesn't necessarily mean the war was a mistake. It only means that the war was sold to the American people on a false premise: that the invasion of Iraq wouldn't really be an invasion, and that the occupation of the country wouldn't really be an occupation - in short, that the war wouldn't really be a war.
It is a war. It isn't a humanitarian relief effort, or a civics lesson with guns. Whoever wins on Nov. 2 will either have to kill a lot more people a lot more quickly, or get the hell out.
Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. He can be reached at paul.campos@colorado.edu.
From Slate:
Flirting With Disaster
The vile spectacle of Democrats rooting for bad news in Iraq and Afghanistan.
By Christopher Hitchens
There it was at the tail end of Brian Faler's "Politics" roundup column in last Saturday's Washington Post. It was headed, simply, "Quotable":
"I wouldn't be surprised if he appeared in the next month." Teresa Heinz Kerry to the Phoenix Business Journal, referring to a possible capture of Osama bin Laden before Election Day.
As well as being "quotable" (and I wish it had been more widely reported, and I hope that someone will ask the Kerry campaign or the nominee himself to disown it), this is also many other words ending in "-able." Deplorable, detestable, unforgivable. …
The plain implication is that the Bush administration is stashing Bin Laden somewhere, or somehow keeping his arrest in reserve, for an "October surprise." This innuendo would appear, on the face of it, to go a little further than "impugning the patriotism" of the president. It argues, after all, for something like collusion on his part with a man who has murdered thousands of Americans as well as hundreds of Muslim civilians in other countries.
Continue Article
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I am not one of those who likes to tease Mrs. Kerry for her "loose cannon" style. This is only the second time I have ever mentioned her in print. But I happen to know that this is not an instance of loose lips. She has heard that very remark being made by senior Democrats, and—which is worse—she has not heard anyone in her circle respond to it by saying, "Don't be so bloody stupid." I first heard this "October surprise" theory mentioned seriously, by a prominent foreign-policy Democrat, at an open dinner table in Washington about six months ago. Since then, I've heard it said seriously or semiseriously, by responsible and liberal people who ought to know better, all over the place. It got even worse when the Democratic establishment decided on an arm's-length or closer relationship with Michael Moore and his supposedly vote-getting piece of mendacity and paranoia, Fahrenheit 9/11. (The DNC's boss, Terence McAuliffe, asked outside the Uptown cinema on Connecticut Avenue whether he honestly believed that the administration had invaded Afghanistan for the sake of an oil or perhaps gas pipeline, breezily responded, "I do now.")
What will it take to convince these people that this is not a year, or a time, to be dicking around? Americans are patrolling a front line in Afghanistan, where it would be impossible with 10 times the troop strength to protect all potential voters on Oct. 9 from Taliban/al-Qaida murder and sabotage. We are invited to believe that these hard-pressed soldiers of ours take time off to keep Osama Bin Laden in a secret cave, ready to uncork him when they get a call from Karl Rove? For shame.
Ever since The New Yorker published a near-obituary piece for the Kerry campaign, in the form of an autopsy for the Robert Shrum style, there has been a salad of articles prematurely analyzing "what went wrong." This must be nasty for Democratic activists to read, and I say "nasty" because I hear the way they respond to it. A few pin a vague hope on the so-called "debates"—which are actually joint press conferences allowing no direct exchange between the candidates—but most are much more cynical. Some really bad news from Iraq, or perhaps Afghanistan, and/or a sudden collapse or crisis in the stock market, and Kerry might yet "turn things around." You have heard it, all right, and perhaps even said it. But you may not have appreciated how depraved are its implications. If you calculate that only a disaster of some kind can save your candidate, then you are in danger of harboring a subliminal need for bad news. And it will show. What else explains the amazingly crude and philistine remarks of that campaign genius Joe Lockhart, commenting on the visit of the new Iraqi prime minister and calling him a "puppet"? Here is the only regional leader who is even trying to hold an election, and he is greeted with an ungenerous sneer.
The unfortunately necessary corollary of this—that bad news for the American cause in wartime would be good for Kerry—is that good news would be bad for him. Thus, in Mrs. Kerry's brainless and witless offhand yet pregnant remark, we hear the sick thud of the other shoe dropping. How can the Democrats possibly have gotten themselves into a position where they even suspect that a victory for the Zarqawi or Bin Laden forces would in some way be welcome to them? Or that the capture or killing of Bin Laden would not be something to celebrate with a whole heart?
I think that this detail is very important because the Kerry camp often strives to give the impression that its difference with the president is one of degree but not of kind. Of course we all welcome the end of Taliban rule and even the departure of Saddam Hussein, but we can't remain silent about the way policy has been messed up and compromised and even lied about. I know what it's like to feel that way because it is the way I actually do feel. But I also know the difference when I see it, and I have known some of the liberal world quite well and for a long time, and there are quite obviously people close to the leadership of today's Democratic Party who do not at all hope that the battle goes well in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I have written before in this space that I think Bin Laden is probably dead, and I certainly think that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a far more ruthless and dangerous jihadist, who is trying to take a much more important country into the orbit of medieval fanaticism and misery. One might argue about that: I could even maintain that it's important to oppose and defeat both gentlemen and their supporters. But unless he conclusively repudiates the obvious defeatists in his own party (and maybe even his own family), we shall be able to say that John Kerry's campaign is a distraction from the fight against al-Qaida.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His new collection of essays, Love, Poverty and War, is forthcoming in October.
Flirting With Disaster
The vile spectacle of Democrats rooting for bad news in Iraq and Afghanistan.
By Christopher Hitchens
There it was at the tail end of Brian Faler's "Politics" roundup column in last Saturday's Washington Post. It was headed, simply, "Quotable":
"I wouldn't be surprised if he appeared in the next month." Teresa Heinz Kerry to the Phoenix Business Journal, referring to a possible capture of Osama bin Laden before Election Day.
As well as being "quotable" (and I wish it had been more widely reported, and I hope that someone will ask the Kerry campaign or the nominee himself to disown it), this is also many other words ending in "-able." Deplorable, detestable, unforgivable. …
The plain implication is that the Bush administration is stashing Bin Laden somewhere, or somehow keeping his arrest in reserve, for an "October surprise." This innuendo would appear, on the face of it, to go a little further than "impugning the patriotism" of the president. It argues, after all, for something like collusion on his part with a man who has murdered thousands of Americans as well as hundreds of Muslim civilians in other countries.
Continue Article
------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am not one of those who likes to tease Mrs. Kerry for her "loose cannon" style. This is only the second time I have ever mentioned her in print. But I happen to know that this is not an instance of loose lips. She has heard that very remark being made by senior Democrats, and—which is worse—she has not heard anyone in her circle respond to it by saying, "Don't be so bloody stupid." I first heard this "October surprise" theory mentioned seriously, by a prominent foreign-policy Democrat, at an open dinner table in Washington about six months ago. Since then, I've heard it said seriously or semiseriously, by responsible and liberal people who ought to know better, all over the place. It got even worse when the Democratic establishment decided on an arm's-length or closer relationship with Michael Moore and his supposedly vote-getting piece of mendacity and paranoia, Fahrenheit 9/11. (The DNC's boss, Terence McAuliffe, asked outside the Uptown cinema on Connecticut Avenue whether he honestly believed that the administration had invaded Afghanistan for the sake of an oil or perhaps gas pipeline, breezily responded, "I do now.")
What will it take to convince these people that this is not a year, or a time, to be dicking around? Americans are patrolling a front line in Afghanistan, where it would be impossible with 10 times the troop strength to protect all potential voters on Oct. 9 from Taliban/al-Qaida murder and sabotage. We are invited to believe that these hard-pressed soldiers of ours take time off to keep Osama Bin Laden in a secret cave, ready to uncork him when they get a call from Karl Rove? For shame.
Ever since The New Yorker published a near-obituary piece for the Kerry campaign, in the form of an autopsy for the Robert Shrum style, there has been a salad of articles prematurely analyzing "what went wrong." This must be nasty for Democratic activists to read, and I say "nasty" because I hear the way they respond to it. A few pin a vague hope on the so-called "debates"—which are actually joint press conferences allowing no direct exchange between the candidates—but most are much more cynical. Some really bad news from Iraq, or perhaps Afghanistan, and/or a sudden collapse or crisis in the stock market, and Kerry might yet "turn things around." You have heard it, all right, and perhaps even said it. But you may not have appreciated how depraved are its implications. If you calculate that only a disaster of some kind can save your candidate, then you are in danger of harboring a subliminal need for bad news. And it will show. What else explains the amazingly crude and philistine remarks of that campaign genius Joe Lockhart, commenting on the visit of the new Iraqi prime minister and calling him a "puppet"? Here is the only regional leader who is even trying to hold an election, and he is greeted with an ungenerous sneer.
The unfortunately necessary corollary of this—that bad news for the American cause in wartime would be good for Kerry—is that good news would be bad for him. Thus, in Mrs. Kerry's brainless and witless offhand yet pregnant remark, we hear the sick thud of the other shoe dropping. How can the Democrats possibly have gotten themselves into a position where they even suspect that a victory for the Zarqawi or Bin Laden forces would in some way be welcome to them? Or that the capture or killing of Bin Laden would not be something to celebrate with a whole heart?
I think that this detail is very important because the Kerry camp often strives to give the impression that its difference with the president is one of degree but not of kind. Of course we all welcome the end of Taliban rule and even the departure of Saddam Hussein, but we can't remain silent about the way policy has been messed up and compromised and even lied about. I know what it's like to feel that way because it is the way I actually do feel. But I also know the difference when I see it, and I have known some of the liberal world quite well and for a long time, and there are quite obviously people close to the leadership of today's Democratic Party who do not at all hope that the battle goes well in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I have written before in this space that I think Bin Laden is probably dead, and I certainly think that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a far more ruthless and dangerous jihadist, who is trying to take a much more important country into the orbit of medieval fanaticism and misery. One might argue about that: I could even maintain that it's important to oppose and defeat both gentlemen and their supporters. But unless he conclusively repudiates the obvious defeatists in his own party (and maybe even his own family), we shall be able to say that John Kerry's campaign is a distraction from the fight against al-Qaida.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His new collection of essays, Love, Poverty and War, is forthcoming in October.
Monday, September 27, 2004
The Cult of Che
Don't applaud The Motorcycle Diaries.
By Paul Berman
Portrait of the insurgent as a young manThe cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's "labor camp" system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che's imagination. In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for "two, three, many Vietnams," he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: "Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …"— and so on. He was killed in Bolivia in 1967, leading a guerrilla movement that had failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant. And yet he succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin-Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own. And these insurgencies likewise accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin-American democracy—a tragedy on the hugest scale.
The present-day cult of Che—the T-shirts, the bars, the posters—has succeeded in obscuring this dreadful reality. And Walter Salles' movie The Motorcycle Diaries will now take its place at the heart of this cult. It has already received a standing ovation at Robert Redford's Sundance film festival (Redford is the executive producer of The Motorcycle Diaries) and glowing admiration in the press. Che was an enemy of freedom, and yet he has been erected into a symbol of freedom. He helped establish an unjust social system in Cuba and has been erected into a symbol of social justice. He stood for the ancient rigidities of Latin-American thought, in a Marxist-Leninist version, and he has been celebrated as a free-thinker and a rebel. And thus it is in Salles' Motorcycle Diaries.
A vagabond tour of South AmericaThe film follows the young Che and his friend Alberto Granado on a vagabond tour of South America in 1951-52—which Che described in a book published under the title Motorcycle Diaries, and Granado in a book of his own. Che was a medical student in those days, and Granado a biochemist, and in real life, as in the movie, the two men spent a few weeks toiling as volunteers in a Peruvian leper colony. These weeks at the leper colony constitute the dramatic core of the movie. The colony is tyrannized by nuns, who maintain a cruel social hierarchy between the staff and the patients. The nuns refuse to feed people who fail to attend mass. Young Che, in his insistent honesty, rebels against these strictures, and his rebellion is bracing to witness. You think you are observing a noble protest against the oppressive customs and authoritarian habits of an obscurantist Catholic Church at its most reactionary.
Yet the entire movie, in its concept and tone, exudes a Christological cult of martyrdom, a cult of adoration for the spiritually superior person who is veering toward death—precisely the kind of adoration that Latin America's Catholic Church promoted for several centuries, with miserable consequences. The rebellion against reactionary Catholicism in this movie is itself an expression of reactionary Catholicism. The traditional churches of Latin America are full of statues of gruesome bleeding saints. And the masochistic allure of those statues is precisely what you see in the movie's many depictions of young Che coughing out his lungs from asthma and testing himself by swimming in cold water—all of which is rendered beautiful and alluring by a sensual backdrop of grays and browns and greens, and the lovely gaunt cheeks of one actor after another, and the violent Andean landscapes.
The movie in its story line sticks fairly close to Che's diaries, with a few additions from other sources. The diaries tend to be haphazard and nonideological except for a very few passages. Che had not yet become an ideologue when he went on this trip. He reflected on the layered history of Latin America, and he expressed attitudes that managed to be pro-Indian and, at the same time, pro-conquistador. But the film is considerably more ideological, keen on expressing an "indigenist" attitude (to use the Latin-American Marxist term) of sympathy for the Indians and hostility to the conquistadors. Some Peruvian Marxist texts duly appear on the screen. I can imagine that Salles and his screenwriter, José Rivera, have been influenced more by Subcomandante Marcos and his "indigenist" rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico, than by Che.
And yet, for all the ostensible indigenism in this movie, the pathos here has very little to do with the Indian past, or even with the New World. The pathos is Spanish, in the most archaic fashion—a pathos that combines the Catholic martyrdom of the Christlike scenes with the on-the-road spirit not of Jack Kerouac (as some people may imagine) but of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, a tried-and-true formula in Spanish culture. (See Benito Pérez Galdós' classic 19th-century novel NazarÃn.) If you were to compare Salles' The Motorcycle Diaries, with its pious tone, to the irrevent, humorous, ironic, libertarian films of Pedro Almodóvar, you could easily imagine that Salles' film comes from the long-ago past, perhaps from the dark reactionary times of Franco—and Almodóvar's movies come from the modern age that has rebelled against Franco.
The modern-day cult of Che blinds us not just to the past but also to the present. Right now a tremendous social struggle is taking place in Cuba. Dissident liberals have demanded fundamental human rights, and the dictatorship has rounded up all but one or two of the dissident leaders and sentenced them to many years in prison. Among those imprisoned leaders is an important Cuban poet and journalist, Raúl Rivero, who is serving a 20-year sentence. In the last couple of years the dissident movement has sprung up in yet another form in Cuba, as a campaign to establish independent libraries, free of state control; and state repression has fallen on this campaign, too.
These Cuban events have attracted the attention of a number of intellectuals and liberals around the world. Václav Havel has organized a campaign of solidarity with the Cuban dissidents and, together with Elena Bonner and other heroic liberals from the old Soviet bloc, has rushed to support the Cuban librarians. A group of American librarians has extended its solidarity to its Cuban colleagues, but, in order to do so, the American librarians have had to put up a fight within their own librarians' organization, where the Castro dictatorship still has a number of sympathizers. And yet none of this has aroused much attention in the United States, apart from a newspaper column or two by Nat Hentoff and perhaps a few other journalists, and an occasional letter to the editor. The statements and manifestos that Havel has signed have been published in Le Monde in Paris, and in Letras Libres magazine in Mexico, but have remained practically invisible in the United States. The days when American intellectuals rallied in any significant way to the cause of liberal dissidents in other countries, the days when Havel's statements were regarded by Americans as important calls for intellectual responsibility—those days appear to be over.
I wonder if people who stand up to cheer a hagiography of Che Guevara, as the Sundance audience did, will ever give a damn about the oppressed people of Cuba—will ever lift a finger on behalf of the Cuban liberals and dissidents. It's easy in the world of film to make a movie about Che, but who among that cheering audience is going to make a movie about Raúl Rivero?
As a protest against the ovation at Sundance, I would like to append one of Rivero's poems to my comment here. The police confiscated Rivero's books and papers at the time of his arrest, but the poet's wife, Blanca Reyes, was able to rescue the manuscript of a poem describing an earlier police raid on his home. Letras Libres published the poem in Mexico. I hope that Rivero will forgive me for my translation. I like this poem because it shows that the modern, Almodóvar-like qualities of impudence, wit, irreverence, irony, playfulness, and freedom, so badly missing from Salles' pious work of cinematic genuflection, are fully alive in Latin America, and can be found right now in a Cuban prison.
Search Order
by Raúl Rivero
What are these gentlemen looking for
in my house?
What is this officer doing
reading the sheet of paper
on which I've written
the words "ambition," "lightness," and "brittle"?
What hint of conspiracy
speaks to him from the photo without a dedication
of my father in a guayabera (black tie)
in the fields of the National Capitol?
How does he interpret my certificates of divorce?
Where will his techniques of harassment lead him
when he reads the ten-line poems
and discovers the war wounds
of my great-grandfather?
Eight policemen
are examining the texts and drawings of my daughters,
and are infiltrating themselves into my emotional networks
and want to know where little Andrea sleeps
and what does her asthma have to do
with my carpets.
They want the code of a message from Zucu
in the upper part
of a cryptic text (here a light triumphal smile
of the comrade):
"Castles with music box. I won't let the boy
hang out with the boogeyman. Jennie."
A specialist in aporia came,
a literary critic with the rank of interim corporal
who examined at the point of a gun
the hills of poetry books.
Eight policemen
in my house
with a search order,
a clean operation,
a full victory
for the vanguard of the proletariat
who confiscated my Consul typewriter,
one hundred forty-two blank pages
and a sad and personal heap of papers
—the most perishable of the perishable
from this summer.
Paul Berman is the author of Terror and Liberalism and The Passion of Joschka Fischer.
Don't applaud The Motorcycle Diaries.
By Paul Berman
Portrait of the insurgent as a young manThe cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's "labor camp" system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che's imagination. In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for "two, three, many Vietnams," he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: "Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …"— and so on. He was killed in Bolivia in 1967, leading a guerrilla movement that had failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant. And yet he succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin-Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own. And these insurgencies likewise accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin-American democracy—a tragedy on the hugest scale.
The present-day cult of Che—the T-shirts, the bars, the posters—has succeeded in obscuring this dreadful reality. And Walter Salles' movie The Motorcycle Diaries will now take its place at the heart of this cult. It has already received a standing ovation at Robert Redford's Sundance film festival (Redford is the executive producer of The Motorcycle Diaries) and glowing admiration in the press. Che was an enemy of freedom, and yet he has been erected into a symbol of freedom. He helped establish an unjust social system in Cuba and has been erected into a symbol of social justice. He stood for the ancient rigidities of Latin-American thought, in a Marxist-Leninist version, and he has been celebrated as a free-thinker and a rebel. And thus it is in Salles' Motorcycle Diaries.
A vagabond tour of South AmericaThe film follows the young Che and his friend Alberto Granado on a vagabond tour of South America in 1951-52—which Che described in a book published under the title Motorcycle Diaries, and Granado in a book of his own. Che was a medical student in those days, and Granado a biochemist, and in real life, as in the movie, the two men spent a few weeks toiling as volunteers in a Peruvian leper colony. These weeks at the leper colony constitute the dramatic core of the movie. The colony is tyrannized by nuns, who maintain a cruel social hierarchy between the staff and the patients. The nuns refuse to feed people who fail to attend mass. Young Che, in his insistent honesty, rebels against these strictures, and his rebellion is bracing to witness. You think you are observing a noble protest against the oppressive customs and authoritarian habits of an obscurantist Catholic Church at its most reactionary.
Yet the entire movie, in its concept and tone, exudes a Christological cult of martyrdom, a cult of adoration for the spiritually superior person who is veering toward death—precisely the kind of adoration that Latin America's Catholic Church promoted for several centuries, with miserable consequences. The rebellion against reactionary Catholicism in this movie is itself an expression of reactionary Catholicism. The traditional churches of Latin America are full of statues of gruesome bleeding saints. And the masochistic allure of those statues is precisely what you see in the movie's many depictions of young Che coughing out his lungs from asthma and testing himself by swimming in cold water—all of which is rendered beautiful and alluring by a sensual backdrop of grays and browns and greens, and the lovely gaunt cheeks of one actor after another, and the violent Andean landscapes.
The movie in its story line sticks fairly close to Che's diaries, with a few additions from other sources. The diaries tend to be haphazard and nonideological except for a very few passages. Che had not yet become an ideologue when he went on this trip. He reflected on the layered history of Latin America, and he expressed attitudes that managed to be pro-Indian and, at the same time, pro-conquistador. But the film is considerably more ideological, keen on expressing an "indigenist" attitude (to use the Latin-American Marxist term) of sympathy for the Indians and hostility to the conquistadors. Some Peruvian Marxist texts duly appear on the screen. I can imagine that Salles and his screenwriter, José Rivera, have been influenced more by Subcomandante Marcos and his "indigenist" rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico, than by Che.
And yet, for all the ostensible indigenism in this movie, the pathos here has very little to do with the Indian past, or even with the New World. The pathos is Spanish, in the most archaic fashion—a pathos that combines the Catholic martyrdom of the Christlike scenes with the on-the-road spirit not of Jack Kerouac (as some people may imagine) but of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, a tried-and-true formula in Spanish culture. (See Benito Pérez Galdós' classic 19th-century novel NazarÃn.) If you were to compare Salles' The Motorcycle Diaries, with its pious tone, to the irrevent, humorous, ironic, libertarian films of Pedro Almodóvar, you could easily imagine that Salles' film comes from the long-ago past, perhaps from the dark reactionary times of Franco—and Almodóvar's movies come from the modern age that has rebelled against Franco.
The modern-day cult of Che blinds us not just to the past but also to the present. Right now a tremendous social struggle is taking place in Cuba. Dissident liberals have demanded fundamental human rights, and the dictatorship has rounded up all but one or two of the dissident leaders and sentenced them to many years in prison. Among those imprisoned leaders is an important Cuban poet and journalist, Raúl Rivero, who is serving a 20-year sentence. In the last couple of years the dissident movement has sprung up in yet another form in Cuba, as a campaign to establish independent libraries, free of state control; and state repression has fallen on this campaign, too.
These Cuban events have attracted the attention of a number of intellectuals and liberals around the world. Václav Havel has organized a campaign of solidarity with the Cuban dissidents and, together with Elena Bonner and other heroic liberals from the old Soviet bloc, has rushed to support the Cuban librarians. A group of American librarians has extended its solidarity to its Cuban colleagues, but, in order to do so, the American librarians have had to put up a fight within their own librarians' organization, where the Castro dictatorship still has a number of sympathizers. And yet none of this has aroused much attention in the United States, apart from a newspaper column or two by Nat Hentoff and perhaps a few other journalists, and an occasional letter to the editor. The statements and manifestos that Havel has signed have been published in Le Monde in Paris, and in Letras Libres magazine in Mexico, but have remained practically invisible in the United States. The days when American intellectuals rallied in any significant way to the cause of liberal dissidents in other countries, the days when Havel's statements were regarded by Americans as important calls for intellectual responsibility—those days appear to be over.
I wonder if people who stand up to cheer a hagiography of Che Guevara, as the Sundance audience did, will ever give a damn about the oppressed people of Cuba—will ever lift a finger on behalf of the Cuban liberals and dissidents. It's easy in the world of film to make a movie about Che, but who among that cheering audience is going to make a movie about Raúl Rivero?
As a protest against the ovation at Sundance, I would like to append one of Rivero's poems to my comment here. The police confiscated Rivero's books and papers at the time of his arrest, but the poet's wife, Blanca Reyes, was able to rescue the manuscript of a poem describing an earlier police raid on his home. Letras Libres published the poem in Mexico. I hope that Rivero will forgive me for my translation. I like this poem because it shows that the modern, Almodóvar-like qualities of impudence, wit, irreverence, irony, playfulness, and freedom, so badly missing from Salles' pious work of cinematic genuflection, are fully alive in Latin America, and can be found right now in a Cuban prison.
Search Order
by Raúl Rivero
What are these gentlemen looking for
in my house?
What is this officer doing
reading the sheet of paper
on which I've written
the words "ambition," "lightness," and "brittle"?
What hint of conspiracy
speaks to him from the photo without a dedication
of my father in a guayabera (black tie)
in the fields of the National Capitol?
How does he interpret my certificates of divorce?
Where will his techniques of harassment lead him
when he reads the ten-line poems
and discovers the war wounds
of my great-grandfather?
Eight policemen
are examining the texts and drawings of my daughters,
and are infiltrating themselves into my emotional networks
and want to know where little Andrea sleeps
and what does her asthma have to do
with my carpets.
They want the code of a message from Zucu
in the upper part
of a cryptic text (here a light triumphal smile
of the comrade):
"Castles with music box. I won't let the boy
hang out with the boogeyman. Jennie."
A specialist in aporia came,
a literary critic with the rank of interim corporal
who examined at the point of a gun
the hills of poetry books.
Eight policemen
in my house
with a search order,
a clean operation,
a full victory
for the vanguard of the proletariat
who confiscated my Consul typewriter,
one hundred forty-two blank pages
and a sad and personal heap of papers
—the most perishable of the perishable
from this summer.
Paul Berman is the author of Terror and Liberalism and The Passion of Joschka Fischer.
Good review of Garden State, a thoughtful, engaging film.
Yes, You Can
In the Garden State, home is where Zach Braff's heart is
BY ROBERT WILONSKY
Garden State
Directed By: Zach Braff
Starring: Zach Braff, Natalie Portman and Peter Sarsgaard
Written By: Zach Braff
A good friend likes to say that there's only one kind of great pop song--the song that someone had to create, as though the writer and performer had no choice. The song can be corny or cynical, upbeat or downhearted; it doesn't matter. All that counts is that the person performing the song does so without guile, without pretense and without caring what anyone else thinks. What matters for the songwriter is the release; how you choose to catch it is your business.
The Shins are a band a lot like that--guys who wear their pet sounds and rubber souls on their shirtsleeves and make you love them for daring to be so bold about being so vulnerable. Their albums sound like memories of old songs and of old thoughts and old emotions, commingled in melodies and lyrics that sound like they were made by men who had to perform them to keep on existing. They're the kind of band that will "change your life, I swear," says Sam (Natalie Portman), the girl in the movie Garden State who will change the life of a boy in need of drastic alteration. The music of the Shins, and bands of similar origin and intent, shimmers throughout much of Garden State, in which Portman plays a girl who lies to make herself more interesting and Zach Braff plays a man who lies to pay the rent. Braff's character is named Andrew Largeman, a small-screen actor best known for playing "the retarded quarterback" in a made-for-TV movie. Andrew acts, he says, because he's comfortable only in other people's skin.
Sam and Andrew, who goes by "Large," strike up their relationship in a doctor's office. She tells him she's there with a friend, which is a lie. He tells her he's there because of a sudden onslaught of splitting headaches, the result of his deciding to stop taking the anti-depressants his father, a psychiatrist played by Ian Holm, has been prescribing since Andrew was 9, when something tragic happened in the Largeman household. Rather than deal with it, dear old Dad thought better to deaden it; it's hard to talk about bad things with a mouth full of pills and a brain full of fog. It doesn't take us long to find out what that bad thing is. Braff, who also wrote and directed the movie, spills it to Sam just before their like turns to love. The movie is not about hidden secrets but about the effect they have on people who don't know how to cope with bad things and don't believe in good things when they finally do happen.
Garden State arrives in theaters bearing the burden of having arrived at the Sundance Film Festival in January as an unheralded little movie made by a TV actor and having left Utah $5 million richer, thanks to Fox Searchlight and Miramax. The audience that might have been wooed now expects to be wowed, to make sure they get every bang out of the bucks spent on the thing. It withstands such expectations. Garden State charms with ease and moves with grace; it's warm but never mushy, languorous but never groggy, rueful but never despondent. It's like a perfect pop song--that thing that makes you smile and tear up at the same time.
It should have been bad--could have been, if you just read the synopsis and recall the countless other movies you've seen that sound familiar. A struggling actor ditches his job as a waiter to come home to a brown-grass-and-gray-skies Unpleasantville (suburban New Jersey, in this instance). His distant dad calls to tell him that his mother has drowned in the bathtub. When he returns home, the actor is reunited with all his old pals, two of whom are digging his mother's grave. They refer to him as "Jersey's De Niro," sort of reverentially and sort of sarcastically. The actor meets a beautiful, quirky girl who will change his life. And so it goes--look homeward, Large. And the name "Largeman" is a rookie mistake. He's small; we get it.
But Garden State, with its strange detours and loving details, has the feel of something too personal to be dismissed; it wants to be liked but doesn't beg for your affection. Braff populates his movie with people you've never met but would like, from Sam's ingenuously affectionate mom to Andrew's old pal Mark (Peter Sarsgaard), who smokes dope and robs graves and steals from hardware stores but has only good intentions toward old friends. Even Holm's Gideon Largeman isn't a bad guy; he just doesn't know how to talk to his own son or deal with the 26-year-old, especially as he's coming out of his funk and emerging as someone who can feel for himself. Especially lovable is Sam, and not only because it's a role that reminds how wondrous an actress Portman can be when not choking on George Lucas' dry variant of the English language.
Braff, winsome and just shy of whiny on Scrubs, plays Largeman as damaged goods but isn't looking for sympathy; he finds his tragic life a little bit funny, too. He's just a guy without a home ("A family," he figures, "is just a group of people that miss the same imaginary place") and looking for something to feel and someone to love. Garden State will remind some of Wes Anderson, others of Hal Ashby, still others of young Mike Nichols; they're his influences and muses, the echoes in his melody. But Garden State feels like autobiography, like something only Braff could have made, with all the me-myself-and-I's taken out, and that leaves plenty of room for you.
Yes, You Can
In the Garden State, home is where Zach Braff's heart is
BY ROBERT WILONSKY
Garden State
Directed By: Zach Braff
Starring: Zach Braff, Natalie Portman and Peter Sarsgaard
Written By: Zach Braff
A good friend likes to say that there's only one kind of great pop song--the song that someone had to create, as though the writer and performer had no choice. The song can be corny or cynical, upbeat or downhearted; it doesn't matter. All that counts is that the person performing the song does so without guile, without pretense and without caring what anyone else thinks. What matters for the songwriter is the release; how you choose to catch it is your business.
The Shins are a band a lot like that--guys who wear their pet sounds and rubber souls on their shirtsleeves and make you love them for daring to be so bold about being so vulnerable. Their albums sound like memories of old songs and of old thoughts and old emotions, commingled in melodies and lyrics that sound like they were made by men who had to perform them to keep on existing. They're the kind of band that will "change your life, I swear," says Sam (Natalie Portman), the girl in the movie Garden State who will change the life of a boy in need of drastic alteration. The music of the Shins, and bands of similar origin and intent, shimmers throughout much of Garden State, in which Portman plays a girl who lies to make herself more interesting and Zach Braff plays a man who lies to pay the rent. Braff's character is named Andrew Largeman, a small-screen actor best known for playing "the retarded quarterback" in a made-for-TV movie. Andrew acts, he says, because he's comfortable only in other people's skin.
Sam and Andrew, who goes by "Large," strike up their relationship in a doctor's office. She tells him she's there with a friend, which is a lie. He tells her he's there because of a sudden onslaught of splitting headaches, the result of his deciding to stop taking the anti-depressants his father, a psychiatrist played by Ian Holm, has been prescribing since Andrew was 9, when something tragic happened in the Largeman household. Rather than deal with it, dear old Dad thought better to deaden it; it's hard to talk about bad things with a mouth full of pills and a brain full of fog. It doesn't take us long to find out what that bad thing is. Braff, who also wrote and directed the movie, spills it to Sam just before their like turns to love. The movie is not about hidden secrets but about the effect they have on people who don't know how to cope with bad things and don't believe in good things when they finally do happen.
Garden State arrives in theaters bearing the burden of having arrived at the Sundance Film Festival in January as an unheralded little movie made by a TV actor and having left Utah $5 million richer, thanks to Fox Searchlight and Miramax. The audience that might have been wooed now expects to be wowed, to make sure they get every bang out of the bucks spent on the thing. It withstands such expectations. Garden State charms with ease and moves with grace; it's warm but never mushy, languorous but never groggy, rueful but never despondent. It's like a perfect pop song--that thing that makes you smile and tear up at the same time.
It should have been bad--could have been, if you just read the synopsis and recall the countless other movies you've seen that sound familiar. A struggling actor ditches his job as a waiter to come home to a brown-grass-and-gray-skies Unpleasantville (suburban New Jersey, in this instance). His distant dad calls to tell him that his mother has drowned in the bathtub. When he returns home, the actor is reunited with all his old pals, two of whom are digging his mother's grave. They refer to him as "Jersey's De Niro," sort of reverentially and sort of sarcastically. The actor meets a beautiful, quirky girl who will change his life. And so it goes--look homeward, Large. And the name "Largeman" is a rookie mistake. He's small; we get it.
But Garden State, with its strange detours and loving details, has the feel of something too personal to be dismissed; it wants to be liked but doesn't beg for your affection. Braff populates his movie with people you've never met but would like, from Sam's ingenuously affectionate mom to Andrew's old pal Mark (Peter Sarsgaard), who smokes dope and robs graves and steals from hardware stores but has only good intentions toward old friends. Even Holm's Gideon Largeman isn't a bad guy; he just doesn't know how to talk to his own son or deal with the 26-year-old, especially as he's coming out of his funk and emerging as someone who can feel for himself. Especially lovable is Sam, and not only because it's a role that reminds how wondrous an actress Portman can be when not choking on George Lucas' dry variant of the English language.
Braff, winsome and just shy of whiny on Scrubs, plays Largeman as damaged goods but isn't looking for sympathy; he finds his tragic life a little bit funny, too. He's just a guy without a home ("A family," he figures, "is just a group of people that miss the same imaginary place") and looking for something to feel and someone to love. Garden State will remind some of Wes Anderson, others of Hal Ashby, still others of young Mike Nichols; they're his influences and muses, the echoes in his melody. But Garden State feels like autobiography, like something only Braff could have made, with all the me-myself-and-I's taken out, and that leaves plenty of room for you.
From National Review Online:
THAT TIMES ARTICLE ....
by David Frum
Matthew Klam’s NYT Magazine article on the blogosphere has triggered frenzied discussion in the blog world.
Conservative blogs have complained that the piece is liberal propaganda that unfairly ignores conservative bloggers.
Meanwhile, the left-wing blogs have counter-complained that the piece is establishment propaganda that outrageously belittles them!
And just about everyone with a blogspot seems to be muttering, “Hey! Why didn’t they write about me?!”
Disregard the heckling. The piece is riveting: vivid, remorseless, and deadly. Klam has that magic interviewer's gift for inducing his intended victims to place their lives in his hands. Yes, he dealt with left bloggers only. The right-wing bloggers should be grateful to have been spared. Anyway, why shouldn't Klam focus on left-wing bloggers? They’re an important story - from the point of view of the Times and its constituencies, a supremely important story.
Back when Howard Dean was still running for president, we heard a great deal about the energy and excitement that left-wing blogs were sparking among young voters. Then, after all that energy and excitement blew out Dean’s fuses, the left-wing bloggers went to work for their new hero, John Kerry.
By now, it’s pretty clear that all this energy and enthusiasm has done Kerry nothing but harm. Consider the case of Josh Marshall of www.talkingpointsmemo.com. Marshall is intelligent, learned, politically committed but also imbued with a deep sense of historical perspective. He could have been the Arthur Schlesinger Jr. of his generation, Maybe someday he will be. Right now though he has gone completely off his nut. Here’s his post from Friday:
"A generous way to put it -- the lede of Dana Milbank's piece in tomorrow's Post: 'President Bush and leading Republicans are increasingly charging that Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry and others in his party are giving comfort to terrorists and undermining the war in Iraq -- a line of attack that tests the conventional bounds of political rhetoric.'
"Can we re-check the sprinkler system in the Reichstag?"
The reference, in case you missed it, is to the 1933 fire in the German Parliament that Hitler used as an excuse to pass an Enabling Act giving him dictatorial control over the German state.
Leave aside for a moment the historical illiteracy and moral outrageousness of the analogy. Concentrate only on itsself-destructive political lunacy.
In politics as in retailing, you never argue with the customer. If the polls are accurate, the American people perceive George W. Bush as a upright and honorable man. On the other hand, they don't much like his economic policies, and they worry that he may be too much of a risk-taker in foreign affairs.
A smart political operation would work on those pre-existing weaknesses. It wouldn’t waste time trying to convince an incredulous public that the genial likeable man they see on television is in reality the reincarnation of Adolph Hitler.
But the Democratic political operation of 2004 has not been smart. It has in fact been astonishingly, gaspingly, Guiness Book of Records stupid. It has been simultaneously hysterical and harmless, irate and irrelevant, paranoid and purblind.
The left-wing blogs have to take a considerable share of the blame for this disaster. They were a crucial part of the in-group conversation by which the most partisan Democrats convinced each other that the country feared and hated George W. Bush as much as they did. This delusion – combined with the decision to nominate a man to whom haughty disdain came all too naturally – pushed the Democrats to mistake after mistake and blinded them to opportunity after opportunity.
Matthew Klam’s piece pays little attention to the political consequences of left-wing blogging. He amuses himself instead with a brutal evisceration of the ambitions and delusions of three of the best-known left-wing bloggers in his gunsights: the above-mentioned Marshall, Ann Marie Cox of Wonkette.com, and Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos.com. Klam deftly portrays Marshall’s obsessive hunting of Great White Whale conspiracies, the grungy ideological fanaticism of the Daily Kos, and the desperately flailing attention seeking of Wonkette. Klam's piece cannot make for pleasant reading for any of his subjects. And I suspect that the unpleasantness must have come as quite a shock.
A post at Daily Kos attacks Klam for exhibiting the allegedly characteristic vices of the New York Times: “contempt and loathing for passionate liberalism, a contrasting and mysterious silence about right-wing excesses, and plenty of old-fashioned class snobbery.” Few others have ever noticed this alleged loathing for liberalism at the Times or the supposedly concomitant silence about the excesses of the right. Class prejudice? Yes, of that the Times is frequently guilty, but not I think in this case.
While Klam certainly does emphasize Marshall’s disheveled clothes, Moulitsas’ boorish loudmouthing, and Cox’s delight in scoring a free meal on Klam’s expense account, he does not do so from the point of view of some being of superior status. Klam is a freelance contributor to the Times. That biography suggests that he is probably not unacquainted with life’s ups and downs himself. If he is unimpressed by the left-wing bloggers, it’s not for failing to uphold the standards of St. Paul’s and the Racquet Club.
So what’s bugging Klam? Let me hazard a guess: Klam is witnessing the failure of a revolution-that-never-was. When liberal pundits began hailing the emergence of left-wing blogging as a counterweight to conservative talk-radio (and for that matter the pro-war blogging of sites like LittleGreenFootballs.com, Instapundit.com, HughHewitt.com, BelmontClubBlogspot.com, AndrewSullivan.com, NRO, and so many others) they did so because they hoped to find in the left blogs a substitute for the fading dominance of the old-line liberal media.
But that was never going to happen. For conservatives, the advent of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and FoxNews and the blogosphere is all good news. But for liberals, the move from a world dominated by three big liberal networks, two big liberal newsmagazines, and two great liberal newspapers to a world in which bloggers can bring down a network anchor and the Times' own executive editor is an absolute and utter catastrophe, even if some of those bloggers happen to be liberal themselves.
American are living now in a world of media diversity. It’s the worst thing to happen to Democratic hopes since the Sunbelt went Republican. It’s understandable that the Times should feel surly. The only wonder is that this time it chose to vent that surliness against bloggers who want nothing more than to contribute their mite to the Times’ own team.
THAT TIMES ARTICLE ....
by David Frum
Matthew Klam’s NYT Magazine article on the blogosphere has triggered frenzied discussion in the blog world.
Conservative blogs have complained that the piece is liberal propaganda that unfairly ignores conservative bloggers.
Meanwhile, the left-wing blogs have counter-complained that the piece is establishment propaganda that outrageously belittles them!
And just about everyone with a blogspot seems to be muttering, “Hey! Why didn’t they write about me?!”
Disregard the heckling. The piece is riveting: vivid, remorseless, and deadly. Klam has that magic interviewer's gift for inducing his intended victims to place their lives in his hands. Yes, he dealt with left bloggers only. The right-wing bloggers should be grateful to have been spared. Anyway, why shouldn't Klam focus on left-wing bloggers? They’re an important story - from the point of view of the Times and its constituencies, a supremely important story.
Back when Howard Dean was still running for president, we heard a great deal about the energy and excitement that left-wing blogs were sparking among young voters. Then, after all that energy and excitement blew out Dean’s fuses, the left-wing bloggers went to work for their new hero, John Kerry.
By now, it’s pretty clear that all this energy and enthusiasm has done Kerry nothing but harm. Consider the case of Josh Marshall of www.talkingpointsmemo.com. Marshall is intelligent, learned, politically committed but also imbued with a deep sense of historical perspective. He could have been the Arthur Schlesinger Jr. of his generation, Maybe someday he will be. Right now though he has gone completely off his nut. Here’s his post from Friday:
"A generous way to put it -- the lede of Dana Milbank's piece in tomorrow's Post: 'President Bush and leading Republicans are increasingly charging that Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry and others in his party are giving comfort to terrorists and undermining the war in Iraq -- a line of attack that tests the conventional bounds of political rhetoric.'
"Can we re-check the sprinkler system in the Reichstag?"
The reference, in case you missed it, is to the 1933 fire in the German Parliament that Hitler used as an excuse to pass an Enabling Act giving him dictatorial control over the German state.
Leave aside for a moment the historical illiteracy and moral outrageousness of the analogy. Concentrate only on itsself-destructive political lunacy.
In politics as in retailing, you never argue with the customer. If the polls are accurate, the American people perceive George W. Bush as a upright and honorable man. On the other hand, they don't much like his economic policies, and they worry that he may be too much of a risk-taker in foreign affairs.
A smart political operation would work on those pre-existing weaknesses. It wouldn’t waste time trying to convince an incredulous public that the genial likeable man they see on television is in reality the reincarnation of Adolph Hitler.
But the Democratic political operation of 2004 has not been smart. It has in fact been astonishingly, gaspingly, Guiness Book of Records stupid. It has been simultaneously hysterical and harmless, irate and irrelevant, paranoid and purblind.
The left-wing blogs have to take a considerable share of the blame for this disaster. They were a crucial part of the in-group conversation by which the most partisan Democrats convinced each other that the country feared and hated George W. Bush as much as they did. This delusion – combined with the decision to nominate a man to whom haughty disdain came all too naturally – pushed the Democrats to mistake after mistake and blinded them to opportunity after opportunity.
Matthew Klam’s piece pays little attention to the political consequences of left-wing blogging. He amuses himself instead with a brutal evisceration of the ambitions and delusions of three of the best-known left-wing bloggers in his gunsights: the above-mentioned Marshall, Ann Marie Cox of Wonkette.com, and Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos.com. Klam deftly portrays Marshall’s obsessive hunting of Great White Whale conspiracies, the grungy ideological fanaticism of the Daily Kos, and the desperately flailing attention seeking of Wonkette. Klam's piece cannot make for pleasant reading for any of his subjects. And I suspect that the unpleasantness must have come as quite a shock.
A post at Daily Kos attacks Klam for exhibiting the allegedly characteristic vices of the New York Times: “contempt and loathing for passionate liberalism, a contrasting and mysterious silence about right-wing excesses, and plenty of old-fashioned class snobbery.” Few others have ever noticed this alleged loathing for liberalism at the Times or the supposedly concomitant silence about the excesses of the right. Class prejudice? Yes, of that the Times is frequently guilty, but not I think in this case.
While Klam certainly does emphasize Marshall’s disheveled clothes, Moulitsas’ boorish loudmouthing, and Cox’s delight in scoring a free meal on Klam’s expense account, he does not do so from the point of view of some being of superior status. Klam is a freelance contributor to the Times. That biography suggests that he is probably not unacquainted with life’s ups and downs himself. If he is unimpressed by the left-wing bloggers, it’s not for failing to uphold the standards of St. Paul’s and the Racquet Club.
So what’s bugging Klam? Let me hazard a guess: Klam is witnessing the failure of a revolution-that-never-was. When liberal pundits began hailing the emergence of left-wing blogging as a counterweight to conservative talk-radio (and for that matter the pro-war blogging of sites like LittleGreenFootballs.com, Instapundit.com, HughHewitt.com, BelmontClubBlogspot.com, AndrewSullivan.com, NRO, and so many others) they did so because they hoped to find in the left blogs a substitute for the fading dominance of the old-line liberal media.
But that was never going to happen. For conservatives, the advent of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and FoxNews and the blogosphere is all good news. But for liberals, the move from a world dominated by three big liberal networks, two big liberal newsmagazines, and two great liberal newspapers to a world in which bloggers can bring down a network anchor and the Times' own executive editor is an absolute and utter catastrophe, even if some of those bloggers happen to be liberal themselves.
American are living now in a world of media diversity. It’s the worst thing to happen to Democratic hopes since the Sunbelt went Republican. It’s understandable that the Times should feel surly. The only wonder is that this time it chose to vent that surliness against bloggers who want nothing more than to contribute their mite to the Times’ own team.
Sunday, September 26, 2004
From Chronicles:
MISUNDERSTANDING THE ENEMY:
THE ISLAMIC THREAT AND THE U.S. MEDIA
by Srdja Trifkovic
On September 19 the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune published an article entitled Struggle for the Soul of Islam: A rare look at secretive Brotherhood in America. This 5,000-word feature sought to reveal the existence, methods and ultimate goals of the American offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, "the world’s most influential Islamic fundamentalist group." The Tribune story is important for revealing the magnitude of the threat America faces no less than for revealing the underlying misunderstanding of that threat by the American elite class in general and the media in particular.
The Brotherhood’s slogan, ever since it was founded in Egypt in 1928, has been unambiguous: "Allah is our goal; the Messenger [Muhammad] is our model; the Koran is our constitution; jihad is our means; and martyrdom in the way of Allah is our aspiration." It has had a major impact on Islam in America by establishing mosques, Islamic schools, summer youth camps and Muslim organizations. Since 1993 it has operated under the name of Muslim American Society (MAS), a "charitable, religious, social, cultural and educational not-for-profit organization" with 10,000 members in 53 chapters nationwide.
The article claims that "because of its hard-line beliefs, the U.S. Brotherhood has been an increasingly divisive force within Islam in America, fueling the often bitter struggle between moderate and conservative Muslims." While separation of church and state is a bedrock principle of American democracy, the article says, "the international Brotherhood preaches that religion and politics cannot be separated and that governments eventually should be Islamic."
Other facts of the case concerning the Brotherhood, as revealed by the Tribune, can be summarized in seven key points:
1. Its long-term goal is the establishment of a world-wide Islamic state.
2. It does not seek "the overthrow of the U.S. government" but wants to convert the nation to Islam so that one day Americans will choose to be governed by Islamic law.
3. It endeavors to "save" the younger generations of Muslims in the United States from "melting into the American lifestyle."
4. Its ideologues believe "the Koran justified violence to overthrow un-Islamic governments."
5. Its current leaders praise Palestinian and Iraqi suicide bombers, call for the destruction of Israel and assert that the U.S. has no proof that Al Qaeda was to blame for 9-11.
6. Its leaders scout mosques, Islamic classes and Muslim organizations for those "with orthodox religious beliefs consistent with Brotherhood views."
7. Its proselytizing in the U.S. is backed financially by the Saudi Arabian government, "which shares the Brotherhood’s fundamentalist goals."
The problem with the Tribune story is not faulty research but flawed editorial paradigm. "Muslims [are] divided on Brotherhood," the sub-headline asserts, and the story itself suggests that the group’s goals are "controversial" and that its "hard-line views" have "alienated many moderate Muslims." The claim that the Brotherhood is in tension or even conflict with the Islamic "mainstream" is a figment of the liberal mind, however. In reality the tenets of the Muslim Brotherhood, its methods and its goals—as enumerated by the Tribune—are in full accordance with standard Islamic teaching and practice. Such editorial slant reflects a structural problem: the refusal of the American opinion-forming elite to accept that Islam as such poses a threat, and not some allegedly aberrant variety of it.
The failure to come to grips with the message and implications of Islam, its sacred texts and teaching, its historical record and its contemporary political ambitions, is not limited to the media. It is endemic to the American elite class, which is prone to interpret the world by "Americanizing" reality. All religions are supposedly equally peaceful and tolerant, Islam is a religion, ergo it is also peaceful and tolerant. A blatant casuistic fallacy has become establishmentarian orthodoxy.
The most serious security implication of such mindset is manifest in the failure of the elite to examine the implications of Muslim immigration in the United States. It is evident that the existence of that multi-million-strong Muslim presence in the Western world is essential in providing the terrorists with the recruits, the infrastructure, the mobility, and the relative invisibility without which they would not be able to operate. Terrorist plots involving Muslim immigrants and their children or native-born converts are on the notable increase both in the United States and in Western Europe. That there is a correlation between the presence of a Muslim population in a country and the danger that it or some other Western country will be subjected to a terrorist attack is a demonstrable fact. Muslims are the only group, in Western Europe or North America, that harbors a substantial segment of individuals who share the key objectives with the terrorists, even if they do not all approve of all of their methods.
The Tribune asserts that the Brotherhood is in tension with the Muslim mainstream in America, but that claim is at odds with recent studies. In a survey of newly naturalized citizens, 90 percent of Muslim immigrants said that if there were a conflict between the United States and their country of origin, they would be inclined to support their country of origin. In Detroit 81 percent of Muslims "strongly agree" or "somewhat agree" that Shari’a should be the law of the land. This internal threat to America is increasing. Between 1987 and 1997 8 percent of all immigrants—two million—came from Muslim countries, but that proportion is rapidly increasing. While overall immigration (legal and illegal) has grown by 300 percent since 1970, growth of immigration from the Middle East has gone up 700 percent, from under 200,000 in 1970 to 1.5 million in 2000. Expected number of immigrants from the Middle East in 2010 will be 2,500,000. These figures are matched and likely to be exceeded by the number of Muslim immigrants from the Indian Sub-Continent (Pakistan, India, Bangladesh). Currently Muslims account for close to one-tenth of all naturalizations, and their birth rates exceed those of any other significant immigrant group. Even a conservative estimate of their number of three million, or one-percent of the population, has alarming security implications and the potential for disproportionate growth. A coherent long-term counter-terrorist strategy therefore must entail denying Islam the foothold inside the United States. The application of ideological and political criteria in determining the eligibility of prospective visitors or immigrants has been and remains an essential ingredient of any anti-terrorist strategy, whereby Islamic activism would be treated as eminently political rather than "religious" activity.
The problem of Muslim influx is inseparable from the phenomenon of Islam itself, and in particular from that faith’s impact on its adherents as a political ideology and a program of action. The notion that terrorism is an aberration of Islam, and not a predictable consequence of the ideology of Jihad that is inseparable from it, reflects an elite consensus that is ideological in nature and dogmatic in application. That elite consensus is flawed, and it costs lives and treasure. Three years after the worst terrorist outrage in history the "war against terror" needs to be rethought before it is effectively lost. As it is currently conceived it cannot be won.
The enemy is well aware of the opportunity. The Tribune article quotes the MAS Chicago chapter’s Web site as saying that Western secularism and materialism are evil and that Muslims should "pursue this evil force to its own lands" and "invade its Western heartland." Ultimately the outcome of the war against terrorists will depend on our ability to halt this ongoing invasion. That will demand a more acute understanding of the nature of the threat—that the violent message of the Kuran is the problem, and not the Brotherhood’s reinterpretation of Muhammad’s "revelations." That message is a huge problem for all Muslims. We cannot solve it for them, and we should not be asked to pretend that the Kuran is a pacifist tract. Those who submit to that faith must solve the problem they set themselves.
Muslim immigrants to America may draw very different things from their religion, its scripture and traditions, but anti-infidel violence is a hardy perennial. The challenge is how to prevent theocratic terror from sheltering behind secular-liberal toleration. While it is too much to hope that our elites will become pro-Christian any time soon, for the sake of survival they should rethink the refusal to legislate the practice of any religion in any way. Islam should be treated as a special case because it is, on its own admission, much more than "just a religion." It needs to be understood as, and subjected to the same supervision and legal restrains that apply to other cults prone to violence, and to violent political hate groups whose avowed aim is the destruction of our order of life.
Muslim activists in non-Muslim countries invoke those institutions when they clamor for every kind of indulgence for their own beliefs and customs. They demand full democratic privileges to organize and propagate their views, while acknowledging to each other that, given the power to do so, they would impose their own beliefs and customs, and eliminate all others. Once it is accepted that "true Islam" does not recognize a priori the right of any other religion or world outlook to exist—least of all the atheistic secular humanism—a serious anti-terrorist strategy will finally become possible.
MISUNDERSTANDING THE ENEMY:
THE ISLAMIC THREAT AND THE U.S. MEDIA
by Srdja Trifkovic
On September 19 the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune published an article entitled Struggle for the Soul of Islam: A rare look at secretive Brotherhood in America. This 5,000-word feature sought to reveal the existence, methods and ultimate goals of the American offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, "the world’s most influential Islamic fundamentalist group." The Tribune story is important for revealing the magnitude of the threat America faces no less than for revealing the underlying misunderstanding of that threat by the American elite class in general and the media in particular.
The Brotherhood’s slogan, ever since it was founded in Egypt in 1928, has been unambiguous: "Allah is our goal; the Messenger [Muhammad] is our model; the Koran is our constitution; jihad is our means; and martyrdom in the way of Allah is our aspiration." It has had a major impact on Islam in America by establishing mosques, Islamic schools, summer youth camps and Muslim organizations. Since 1993 it has operated under the name of Muslim American Society (MAS), a "charitable, religious, social, cultural and educational not-for-profit organization" with 10,000 members in 53 chapters nationwide.
The article claims that "because of its hard-line beliefs, the U.S. Brotherhood has been an increasingly divisive force within Islam in America, fueling the often bitter struggle between moderate and conservative Muslims." While separation of church and state is a bedrock principle of American democracy, the article says, "the international Brotherhood preaches that religion and politics cannot be separated and that governments eventually should be Islamic."
Other facts of the case concerning the Brotherhood, as revealed by the Tribune, can be summarized in seven key points:
1. Its long-term goal is the establishment of a world-wide Islamic state.
2. It does not seek "the overthrow of the U.S. government" but wants to convert the nation to Islam so that one day Americans will choose to be governed by Islamic law.
3. It endeavors to "save" the younger generations of Muslims in the United States from "melting into the American lifestyle."
4. Its ideologues believe "the Koran justified violence to overthrow un-Islamic governments."
5. Its current leaders praise Palestinian and Iraqi suicide bombers, call for the destruction of Israel and assert that the U.S. has no proof that Al Qaeda was to blame for 9-11.
6. Its leaders scout mosques, Islamic classes and Muslim organizations for those "with orthodox religious beliefs consistent with Brotherhood views."
7. Its proselytizing in the U.S. is backed financially by the Saudi Arabian government, "which shares the Brotherhood’s fundamentalist goals."
The problem with the Tribune story is not faulty research but flawed editorial paradigm. "Muslims [are] divided on Brotherhood," the sub-headline asserts, and the story itself suggests that the group’s goals are "controversial" and that its "hard-line views" have "alienated many moderate Muslims." The claim that the Brotherhood is in tension or even conflict with the Islamic "mainstream" is a figment of the liberal mind, however. In reality the tenets of the Muslim Brotherhood, its methods and its goals—as enumerated by the Tribune—are in full accordance with standard Islamic teaching and practice. Such editorial slant reflects a structural problem: the refusal of the American opinion-forming elite to accept that Islam as such poses a threat, and not some allegedly aberrant variety of it.
The failure to come to grips with the message and implications of Islam, its sacred texts and teaching, its historical record and its contemporary political ambitions, is not limited to the media. It is endemic to the American elite class, which is prone to interpret the world by "Americanizing" reality. All religions are supposedly equally peaceful and tolerant, Islam is a religion, ergo it is also peaceful and tolerant. A blatant casuistic fallacy has become establishmentarian orthodoxy.
The most serious security implication of such mindset is manifest in the failure of the elite to examine the implications of Muslim immigration in the United States. It is evident that the existence of that multi-million-strong Muslim presence in the Western world is essential in providing the terrorists with the recruits, the infrastructure, the mobility, and the relative invisibility without which they would not be able to operate. Terrorist plots involving Muslim immigrants and their children or native-born converts are on the notable increase both in the United States and in Western Europe. That there is a correlation between the presence of a Muslim population in a country and the danger that it or some other Western country will be subjected to a terrorist attack is a demonstrable fact. Muslims are the only group, in Western Europe or North America, that harbors a substantial segment of individuals who share the key objectives with the terrorists, even if they do not all approve of all of their methods.
The Tribune asserts that the Brotherhood is in tension with the Muslim mainstream in America, but that claim is at odds with recent studies. In a survey of newly naturalized citizens, 90 percent of Muslim immigrants said that if there were a conflict between the United States and their country of origin, they would be inclined to support their country of origin. In Detroit 81 percent of Muslims "strongly agree" or "somewhat agree" that Shari’a should be the law of the land. This internal threat to America is increasing. Between 1987 and 1997 8 percent of all immigrants—two million—came from Muslim countries, but that proportion is rapidly increasing. While overall immigration (legal and illegal) has grown by 300 percent since 1970, growth of immigration from the Middle East has gone up 700 percent, from under 200,000 in 1970 to 1.5 million in 2000. Expected number of immigrants from the Middle East in 2010 will be 2,500,000. These figures are matched and likely to be exceeded by the number of Muslim immigrants from the Indian Sub-Continent (Pakistan, India, Bangladesh). Currently Muslims account for close to one-tenth of all naturalizations, and their birth rates exceed those of any other significant immigrant group. Even a conservative estimate of their number of three million, or one-percent of the population, has alarming security implications and the potential for disproportionate growth. A coherent long-term counter-terrorist strategy therefore must entail denying Islam the foothold inside the United States. The application of ideological and political criteria in determining the eligibility of prospective visitors or immigrants has been and remains an essential ingredient of any anti-terrorist strategy, whereby Islamic activism would be treated as eminently political rather than "religious" activity.
The problem of Muslim influx is inseparable from the phenomenon of Islam itself, and in particular from that faith’s impact on its adherents as a political ideology and a program of action. The notion that terrorism is an aberration of Islam, and not a predictable consequence of the ideology of Jihad that is inseparable from it, reflects an elite consensus that is ideological in nature and dogmatic in application. That elite consensus is flawed, and it costs lives and treasure. Three years after the worst terrorist outrage in history the "war against terror" needs to be rethought before it is effectively lost. As it is currently conceived it cannot be won.
The enemy is well aware of the opportunity. The Tribune article quotes the MAS Chicago chapter’s Web site as saying that Western secularism and materialism are evil and that Muslims should "pursue this evil force to its own lands" and "invade its Western heartland." Ultimately the outcome of the war against terrorists will depend on our ability to halt this ongoing invasion. That will demand a more acute understanding of the nature of the threat—that the violent message of the Kuran is the problem, and not the Brotherhood’s reinterpretation of Muhammad’s "revelations." That message is a huge problem for all Muslims. We cannot solve it for them, and we should not be asked to pretend that the Kuran is a pacifist tract. Those who submit to that faith must solve the problem they set themselves.
Muslim immigrants to America may draw very different things from their religion, its scripture and traditions, but anti-infidel violence is a hardy perennial. The challenge is how to prevent theocratic terror from sheltering behind secular-liberal toleration. While it is too much to hope that our elites will become pro-Christian any time soon, for the sake of survival they should rethink the refusal to legislate the practice of any religion in any way. Islam should be treated as a special case because it is, on its own admission, much more than "just a religion." It needs to be understood as, and subjected to the same supervision and legal restrains that apply to other cults prone to violence, and to violent political hate groups whose avowed aim is the destruction of our order of life.
Muslim activists in non-Muslim countries invoke those institutions when they clamor for every kind of indulgence for their own beliefs and customs. They demand full democratic privileges to organize and propagate their views, while acknowledging to each other that, given the power to do so, they would impose their own beliefs and customs, and eliminate all others. Once it is accepted that "true Islam" does not recognize a priori the right of any other religion or world outlook to exist—least of all the atheistic secular humanism—a serious anti-terrorist strategy will finally become possible.
From The New York Times:
Another Triumph for the U.N.
By DAVID BROOKS
And so we went the multilateral route.
Confronted with the murder of 50,000 in Sudan, we eschewed all that nasty old unilateralism, all that hegemonic, imperialist, go-it-alone, neocon, empire, coalition-of-the-coerced stuff. Our response to this crisis would be so exquisitely multilateral, meticulously consultative, collegially cooperative and ally-friendly that it would make John Kerry swoon and a million editorialists nod in sage approval.
And so we Americans mustered our outrage at the massacres in Darfur and went to the United Nations. And calls were issued and exhortations were made and platitudes spread like béarnaise. The great hum of diplomacy signaled that the global community was whirring into action.
Meanwhile helicopter gunships were strafing children in Darfur.
We did everything basically right. The president was involved, the secretary of state was bold and clearheaded, the U.N. ambassador was eloquent, and the Congress was united. And, following the strictures of international law, we had the debate that, of course, is going to be the top priority while planes are bombing villages.
We had a discussion over whether the extermination of human beings in this instance is sufficiently concentrated to meet the technical definition of genocide. For if it is, then the "competent organs of the United Nations" may be called in to take appropriate action, and you know how fearsome the competent organs may be when they may indeed be called.
The United States said the killing in Darfur was indeed genocide, the Europeans weren't so sure, and the Arab League said definitely not, and hairs were split and legalisms were parsed, and the debate over how many corpses you can fit on the head of a pin proceeded in stentorian tones while the mass extermination of human beings continued at a pace that may or may not rise to the level of genocide.
For people are still starving and perishing in Darfur.
But the multilateral process moved along in its dignified way. The U.N. general secretary was making preparations to set up a commission. Preliminary U.N. resolutions were passed, and the mass murderers were told they should stop - often in frosty tones. The world community - well skilled in the art of expressing disapproval, having expressed fusillades of disapproval over Rwanda, the Congo, the Balkans, Iraq, etc. - expressed its disapproval.
And, meanwhile, 1.2 million were driven from their homes in Darfur.
There was even some talk of sending U.S. troops to stop the violence, which, of course, would have been a brutal act of oil-greedy unilateralist empire-building, and would have been protested by a million lovers of peace in the streets. Instead, the U.S. proposed a resolution threatening sanctions on Sudan, which began another round of communiqué-issuing.
The Russians, who sell military planes to Sudan, decided sanctions would not be in the interests of humanity. The Chinese, whose oil companies have a significant presence in Sudan, threatened a veto. And so began the great watering-down. Finally, a week ago, the Security Council passed a resolution threatening to "consider" sanctions against Sudan at some point, though at no time soon.
The Security Council debate had all the decorous dullness you'd expect. The Algerian delegate had "profound concern." The Russian delegate pronounced the situation "complex." The Sudanese government was praised because the massacres are proceeding more slowly. The air was filled with nuanced obfuscations, technocratic jargon and the amoral blandness of multilateral deliberation.
The resolution passed, and it was a good day for alliance-nurturing and burden-sharing - for the burden of doing nothing was shared equally by all. And we are by now used to the pattern. Every time there is an ongoing atrocity, we watch the world community go through the same series of stages: (1) shock and concern (2) gathering resolve (3) fruitless negotiation (4) pathetic inaction (5) shame and humiliation (6) steadfast vows to never let this happen again.
The "never again" always comes. But still, we have all agreed, this sad cycle is better than having some impromptu coalition of nations actually go in "unilaterally" and do something. That would lack legitimacy! Strain alliances! Menace international law! Threaten the multilateral ideal!
It's a pity about the poor dead people in Darfur. Their numbers are still rising, at 6,000 to 10,000 a month.
Another Triumph for the U.N.
By DAVID BROOKS
And so we went the multilateral route.
Confronted with the murder of 50,000 in Sudan, we eschewed all that nasty old unilateralism, all that hegemonic, imperialist, go-it-alone, neocon, empire, coalition-of-the-coerced stuff. Our response to this crisis would be so exquisitely multilateral, meticulously consultative, collegially cooperative and ally-friendly that it would make John Kerry swoon and a million editorialists nod in sage approval.
And so we Americans mustered our outrage at the massacres in Darfur and went to the United Nations. And calls were issued and exhortations were made and platitudes spread like béarnaise. The great hum of diplomacy signaled that the global community was whirring into action.
Meanwhile helicopter gunships were strafing children in Darfur.
We did everything basically right. The president was involved, the secretary of state was bold and clearheaded, the U.N. ambassador was eloquent, and the Congress was united. And, following the strictures of international law, we had the debate that, of course, is going to be the top priority while planes are bombing villages.
We had a discussion over whether the extermination of human beings in this instance is sufficiently concentrated to meet the technical definition of genocide. For if it is, then the "competent organs of the United Nations" may be called in to take appropriate action, and you know how fearsome the competent organs may be when they may indeed be called.
The United States said the killing in Darfur was indeed genocide, the Europeans weren't so sure, and the Arab League said definitely not, and hairs were split and legalisms were parsed, and the debate over how many corpses you can fit on the head of a pin proceeded in stentorian tones while the mass extermination of human beings continued at a pace that may or may not rise to the level of genocide.
For people are still starving and perishing in Darfur.
But the multilateral process moved along in its dignified way. The U.N. general secretary was making preparations to set up a commission. Preliminary U.N. resolutions were passed, and the mass murderers were told they should stop - often in frosty tones. The world community - well skilled in the art of expressing disapproval, having expressed fusillades of disapproval over Rwanda, the Congo, the Balkans, Iraq, etc. - expressed its disapproval.
And, meanwhile, 1.2 million were driven from their homes in Darfur.
There was even some talk of sending U.S. troops to stop the violence, which, of course, would have been a brutal act of oil-greedy unilateralist empire-building, and would have been protested by a million lovers of peace in the streets. Instead, the U.S. proposed a resolution threatening sanctions on Sudan, which began another round of communiqué-issuing.
The Russians, who sell military planes to Sudan, decided sanctions would not be in the interests of humanity. The Chinese, whose oil companies have a significant presence in Sudan, threatened a veto. And so began the great watering-down. Finally, a week ago, the Security Council passed a resolution threatening to "consider" sanctions against Sudan at some point, though at no time soon.
The Security Council debate had all the decorous dullness you'd expect. The Algerian delegate had "profound concern." The Russian delegate pronounced the situation "complex." The Sudanese government was praised because the massacres are proceeding more slowly. The air was filled with nuanced obfuscations, technocratic jargon and the amoral blandness of multilateral deliberation.
The resolution passed, and it was a good day for alliance-nurturing and burden-sharing - for the burden of doing nothing was shared equally by all. And we are by now used to the pattern. Every time there is an ongoing atrocity, we watch the world community go through the same series of stages: (1) shock and concern (2) gathering resolve (3) fruitless negotiation (4) pathetic inaction (5) shame and humiliation (6) steadfast vows to never let this happen again.
The "never again" always comes. But still, we have all agreed, this sad cycle is better than having some impromptu coalition of nations actually go in "unilaterally" and do something. That would lack legitimacy! Strain alliances! Menace international law! Threaten the multilateral ideal!
It's a pity about the poor dead people in Darfur. Their numbers are still rising, at 6,000 to 10,000 a month.
From Investor's Business Daily:
Insulting A Friend
Sen. John Kerry and his crew have proved Sen. Zell Miller right. They really will say anything to get elected, even if that means undermining a courageous ally and greasing the skids to defeat in Iraq.
It was the renegade Democrat Miller who roused the 2004 Republican convention and raised the ire of the taste police with lines like these:
"Now, while young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats' manic obsession to bring down our commander in chief."
Strong stuff. At the time, even some on the GOP side suggested that Miller had gone too far. But after the events of the past week, we're wondering if he might not have gone far enough.
That "manic obsession" described by Miller has so consumed Kerry and his campaign aides that they don't seem to care how much harm they do to the national interest or to America's allies.
One of those allies, maybe the most important one at this point, is Iraq's interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. Allawi is a true hero, a man who has stepped forward for the hazardous mission of forming an effective Iraqi government and shepherding the nation toward democracy. Terrorists have marked him for death. Even critics of President Bush's policies owe Allawi some respect.
They owe him support as well. If he fails, Iraq would slide closer to chaos, and the danger to U.S. troops and civilians would rise accordingly. Whether the goal is to win or just get out unscathed, it would be harder to achieve.
So how did the Democratic presidential nominee show his respect and support for Allawi? By snubbing his Thursday speech to Congress (along with a number of other Democrats) and, as soon as it ended, calling him little better than a liar and a lap dog.
It was an insult as ignoble as Kerry's description of the coalition allies as "the bribed, the coerced, the bought and the extorted."
In his speech, Allawi said the situation in Iraq is less chaotic than news reports make it seem, and the country should be able to hold national elections as scheduled in January. Kerry, who has pegged his campaign on persuading the American people that the Iraq war is an unwinnable fiasco, couldn't let such optimism go unchallenged, even when it came from a man who actually lives in Iraq.
So he suggested, not so subtly, that Allawi was bending the truth just to give Bush a boost.
"The prime minister and the president are here obviously to put their best face on the (Iraq) policy," he said, "but the fact is that the CIA estimates, reporting, the ground operations and the troops all tell a different story."
That was "relatively restrained," as Los Angeles Times' Ron Brownstein noted, in comparison to what some Kerry aides were suggesting. Brownstein quoted one of them, senior adviser Joe Lockhart, as saying of the courageous Allawi: "The last thing you want to be seen as is a puppet of the United States, and you can almost see the hand underneath the shirt today moving the lips."
What might Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and our other enemies make of such comments? Kerry and Lockhart have played into their hands. To the extent that the Kerry campaign's view of Allawi gets around in Iraq, it will weaken the prime minister's government. It's never helpful to a leader to be seen as anyone's puppet, yet here's Kerry and his crew calling Allawi just that.
Are we saying that the Kerry campaign is deliberately seeking to undermine Allawi, destabilize Iraq, embolden terrorists and bring about a U.S. defeat?
No. But Kerry's insulting treatment of a key ally shows him to be irresponsible, graceless and obsessively bent on winning office at all costs. Three little words come to mind: unfit to serve.
Insulting A Friend
Sen. John Kerry and his crew have proved Sen. Zell Miller right. They really will say anything to get elected, even if that means undermining a courageous ally and greasing the skids to defeat in Iraq.
It was the renegade Democrat Miller who roused the 2004 Republican convention and raised the ire of the taste police with lines like these:
"Now, while young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats' manic obsession to bring down our commander in chief."
Strong stuff. At the time, even some on the GOP side suggested that Miller had gone too far. But after the events of the past week, we're wondering if he might not have gone far enough.
That "manic obsession" described by Miller has so consumed Kerry and his campaign aides that they don't seem to care how much harm they do to the national interest or to America's allies.
One of those allies, maybe the most important one at this point, is Iraq's interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. Allawi is a true hero, a man who has stepped forward for the hazardous mission of forming an effective Iraqi government and shepherding the nation toward democracy. Terrorists have marked him for death. Even critics of President Bush's policies owe Allawi some respect.
They owe him support as well. If he fails, Iraq would slide closer to chaos, and the danger to U.S. troops and civilians would rise accordingly. Whether the goal is to win or just get out unscathed, it would be harder to achieve.
So how did the Democratic presidential nominee show his respect and support for Allawi? By snubbing his Thursday speech to Congress (along with a number of other Democrats) and, as soon as it ended, calling him little better than a liar and a lap dog.
It was an insult as ignoble as Kerry's description of the coalition allies as "the bribed, the coerced, the bought and the extorted."
In his speech, Allawi said the situation in Iraq is less chaotic than news reports make it seem, and the country should be able to hold national elections as scheduled in January. Kerry, who has pegged his campaign on persuading the American people that the Iraq war is an unwinnable fiasco, couldn't let such optimism go unchallenged, even when it came from a man who actually lives in Iraq.
So he suggested, not so subtly, that Allawi was bending the truth just to give Bush a boost.
"The prime minister and the president are here obviously to put their best face on the (Iraq) policy," he said, "but the fact is that the CIA estimates, reporting, the ground operations and the troops all tell a different story."
That was "relatively restrained," as Los Angeles Times' Ron Brownstein noted, in comparison to what some Kerry aides were suggesting. Brownstein quoted one of them, senior adviser Joe Lockhart, as saying of the courageous Allawi: "The last thing you want to be seen as is a puppet of the United States, and you can almost see the hand underneath the shirt today moving the lips."
What might Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and our other enemies make of such comments? Kerry and Lockhart have played into their hands. To the extent that the Kerry campaign's view of Allawi gets around in Iraq, it will weaken the prime minister's government. It's never helpful to a leader to be seen as anyone's puppet, yet here's Kerry and his crew calling Allawi just that.
Are we saying that the Kerry campaign is deliberately seeking to undermine Allawi, destabilize Iraq, embolden terrorists and bring about a U.S. defeat?
No. But Kerry's insulting treatment of a key ally shows him to be irresponsible, graceless and obsessively bent on winning office at all costs. Three little words come to mind: unfit to serve.
The latest on the debacle that's Carolina football, from swaggersays.com:
Nearer My God To Thee ...
... MAY DAY man the lifeboats!
by Bob Lee Swagger
Now, where did I file that Doomsday Scenario column? Oh, here it is. …..OK, Tar Heel faithful … yes, you can cue the Marchin’ Tar Heels to play “Nearer My God To Thee”. Yes, we COULD win a couple of the rest … but UNC is now the Dennis Kucinich of college football 2004. We don’t have a chance. Everybody knows it. We will enter each week’s primary anyway. The Death Spiral has officially begun.
All I can say for those of you not in Kenan on Saturday is “it was NOT as bad as the Hooville Horror”. The Football Gods are giggling up a storm. They dangled a sliver of hope over Chapel Hill last Saturday and Tar Heel fans devoured that morsel like the last Pringle in the can …which it quite likely was.
A mere loss to Louisville was not unexpected … but a 34-0 listless rout was not among the “we can live with” possibilities.
I credit John Bunting and his staff and the players that they rebounded from the UVa rout to beat convincingly a decent Yellow Jacket team. It was painfully obvious versus Louisville that whatever fumes were still in the tank ain’t there any more. She be on “E” with seven games still left to go. This team’s “get up and go” went last week.
It is Officially “Gut Check Time” for The Sons & Daughters of The Old Well”.
You highly intelligent readers of this website WILL set the standards for Carolina Gentlemen & Ladies decorum over the stormy weeks to come. It will be very difficult. Those infernal Wuffies will be stuffing “crow” and “humble pie” down our throats 24/7. Do whatever it takes to survive but maintain your dignity. WE ARE CAROLINA BY GAWD … but we are also football road kill right now. Be Proud but don’t be braying jackasses for goodness sakes.
Sure … you can “quit” and claim you are just a Carolina “Basketball fan” … as many have already done.
Sure … you can blame and defame The Dickster and Goofy Moe … as a GREAT many have done and will REALLY start doing now. And that helps How?
OR … you can simply say “Aw Sh*t” and go on about your life. A reorganized UNC Football program will emerge from this ash heap regardless.
There will be a new football coach at UNC next year. Dickie Baddour will not have an active role in selecting that individual. That individual is 99% certain not to be Steve Spurrier. You can join the howler monkeys in the Internet Asylums plotting some peasants rebellion of South Building if you choose. I got a buddy who can sell you pitchforks and torches at a terrific price.
Regardless of how much bile you choose to gin up … the mechanism for a change is now in motion. A 50-0 rout over the Wolfpack on October 9th MIGHT slow down the process but probably not.
I’m very sorry for John Bunting. I know John on a casual basis. I wanted him to succeed. If “want to” was all it took he would be BCS-bound. He has had a ton of “want to” from Day One. His unfamiliarity with the nuances of modern big time college football did him in. The learning curve was simply too steep “thanks” to the rapid success of Mssrs Amato, Friedgen, Groh and Grobe … and Johnny Swofford’s silly “New ACC”.
I had a “dream job” once. I don’t have it any more. I reorganized my priorities and now I have a much better “dream job”. I hope The Buntings find a much better “dream situation”.
The best advice I can give is in this picture. 90% of the crap from here on out will be coming from either “Bud Bundy” or “Al Bundy”. Which one of these “shining stars” do you trust … 19 y/o human zits or 40 y/o guys with $20,000/year careers?
99% of the Bloviating Bundys on those infernal message boards have no connection to UNC other than a mesh-back Carolina cap they shoplifted from Wal-Mart. (Pun fully intended!) DO NOT E-MAIL ME TO VERIFY A “BUNDY RUMOR”! I swear I will zap you from our subscriber list if you bring me any “Bundy Boy crap” you read on a message board … I’m serious!
A coaching change does not have to be a slaughterhouse wherein everyone involved tries to disembowel each other in senseless rage. Calling John Bunting obscene names does not lead us in any positive direction. AND ... do not even suggest JB as AD ... incredibly foolish idea! John is a "football coach", just not a successful head football coach at Carolina at this point in time!
Moving with the assumption that John Bunting will not be UNC’s Head Coach on November 22, we can then consider how that process will be orchestrated. A few possibilities to consider.
1. Dickie storms down to the sidelines as TA McLendon scores his 6th TD on Oct 9 and snatches the headset off of John’s head. Just hold that visual for 8 seconds … … … OK, lets move on to the next one,
2. UNC pulls a NY Mets … who just fired Art Howe effective at the end of the season. Create an official “lame duck / dead duck” situation by announcing subtly in late October that John will not need Thanksgiving dinner reservations at Top Of The Hill.
3. Have the Kenan equipment manager replace all the coaches’ caps with “visors” on the way back from Utah.
4. “Rita from Chester” does not call the Thursday Radio Show.
It’s not inconceivable that John could take a bullet for his alma mater and announce his intent to resign in late October. Depending on just how painful the next 8 weeks are, that is a possibility. I expect John Bunting will be on the UNC sidelines at Wallace Wade on November 20 but I ain’t betting Kid’s allowance on it..
Don’t worry one whit about “recruiting”. Verbal commitments are not worth the paper they are not printed on … unless Dan Rather produces them … then they are collectors’ items getting $10,000/each on e-bay. The new coach will have plenty of time to romance Billy BlueChip and fawn insincerely over his mamma’s peach cobbler.
The most important question that all Tar Heel fans should be asking is not WHO the next coach will be but … WHO will NOT make that decision. Dickie Baddour’s stock is lower than Enron’s among Tar Heels. If Dickie brought in Steve Spurrier with The Stoops Boys as coordinators, all three of’em plus The Dickster would be hung in effigy from The Davie Poplar before the shiny water pitchers were put away in the Skipper Bowles Hire & Fire Coaches Room at The Smith Center.
If Goofy Ol’ Moeser tries any scenario that has Dick Baddour involved in the search he will have the tightly clenched fingers of Charlie Winston, Johnny Harris, Mo Koury, and Eddie Smith wrapped around his scrawny neck before he can “hark a sound”.
I don’t know just yet how The Dickster will be “dealt with” but “dealt with” he will be. Chaining the Little Prince to a radiator deep in the bowels of Venable Hall until the whole process is completed is the best idea I’ve heard so far but better ideas may surface.
“They” may create one of those classic UNC “Noah’s Ark committees” composed of 2 of every species on the planet … but don’t panic if they do. The albino marxist dwarf, lesbian John Edwards lookalike, and 3-legged Peruvian grad student will not really have votes. Trust me, I am sure on this point. The jock-hating faculty squirrels will be excluded this go-round. They don’t know that yet. Don’t tell’em.
Real adults who have experience and proven skill at choosing talented executive managers PLUS knowledge of success traits of major college football coaches will be steering the ship this time around. NOW … that does not mean they will select your choice. 99% of you dear wonderful SSays readers just know “more than Dickie does” and we need a bit more expertise than that.
“UNC is a Sleeping Giant” is garbage … I am hereby retiring that worn-out cliché to that same dumpster where we put the “they even hung Dean Smith in effigy” cliché several years ago. It “might” have been partially true in the mid 90s. It is absolutely NOT true in 2004. Top coaches are NOT dying to come to UNC. The aura of The Old Well, Franklin Street, and “where Brian Blados played” does not resonate nearly as well as Tar Heels with liver spots and severly bruised egos want to believe it does.
Coming into a ruthlessly competitive ACC, inheriting a shell-shocked team and a very impatient fan base is like marrying J-Lo … the honeymoon will be mighty fine but that’s as good as it will ever get. Don’t bet on celebrating that 5th anniversary. It will take more than a stroll through Coker Arboretum and a copy of Look Homeward Angel to attract anyone that anyone has heard of.
As this Tar Heel Dance Macabre is played out in the weeks to come, you can play Nickle Roulette. Take the 20+ names that are going to pop up via the Bundy Pipeline and bet a nickel on each one. Odds are you will hit a winner and win a nickel back.
The Dance has just begun. I’ll be here to guide you each step along the way. There’ll be potholes aplenty but we will get through it. Look out, here comes a wild ass rumor – DUCK!
Nearer My God To Thee ...
... MAY DAY man the lifeboats!
by Bob Lee Swagger
Now, where did I file that Doomsday Scenario column? Oh, here it is. …..OK, Tar Heel faithful … yes, you can cue the Marchin’ Tar Heels to play “Nearer My God To Thee”. Yes, we COULD win a couple of the rest … but UNC is now the Dennis Kucinich of college football 2004. We don’t have a chance. Everybody knows it. We will enter each week’s primary anyway. The Death Spiral has officially begun.
All I can say for those of you not in Kenan on Saturday is “it was NOT as bad as the Hooville Horror”. The Football Gods are giggling up a storm. They dangled a sliver of hope over Chapel Hill last Saturday and Tar Heel fans devoured that morsel like the last Pringle in the can …which it quite likely was.
A mere loss to Louisville was not unexpected … but a 34-0 listless rout was not among the “we can live with” possibilities.
I credit John Bunting and his staff and the players that they rebounded from the UVa rout to beat convincingly a decent Yellow Jacket team. It was painfully obvious versus Louisville that whatever fumes were still in the tank ain’t there any more. She be on “E” with seven games still left to go. This team’s “get up and go” went last week.
It is Officially “Gut Check Time” for The Sons & Daughters of The Old Well”.
You highly intelligent readers of this website WILL set the standards for Carolina Gentlemen & Ladies decorum over the stormy weeks to come. It will be very difficult. Those infernal Wuffies will be stuffing “crow” and “humble pie” down our throats 24/7. Do whatever it takes to survive but maintain your dignity. WE ARE CAROLINA BY GAWD … but we are also football road kill right now. Be Proud but don’t be braying jackasses for goodness sakes.
Sure … you can “quit” and claim you are just a Carolina “Basketball fan” … as many have already done.
Sure … you can blame and defame The Dickster and Goofy Moe … as a GREAT many have done and will REALLY start doing now. And that helps How?
OR … you can simply say “Aw Sh*t” and go on about your life. A reorganized UNC Football program will emerge from this ash heap regardless.
There will be a new football coach at UNC next year. Dickie Baddour will not have an active role in selecting that individual. That individual is 99% certain not to be Steve Spurrier. You can join the howler monkeys in the Internet Asylums plotting some peasants rebellion of South Building if you choose. I got a buddy who can sell you pitchforks and torches at a terrific price.
Regardless of how much bile you choose to gin up … the mechanism for a change is now in motion. A 50-0 rout over the Wolfpack on October 9th MIGHT slow down the process but probably not.
I’m very sorry for John Bunting. I know John on a casual basis. I wanted him to succeed. If “want to” was all it took he would be BCS-bound. He has had a ton of “want to” from Day One. His unfamiliarity with the nuances of modern big time college football did him in. The learning curve was simply too steep “thanks” to the rapid success of Mssrs Amato, Friedgen, Groh and Grobe … and Johnny Swofford’s silly “New ACC”.
I had a “dream job” once. I don’t have it any more. I reorganized my priorities and now I have a much better “dream job”. I hope The Buntings find a much better “dream situation”.
The best advice I can give is in this picture. 90% of the crap from here on out will be coming from either “Bud Bundy” or “Al Bundy”. Which one of these “shining stars” do you trust … 19 y/o human zits or 40 y/o guys with $20,000/year careers?
99% of the Bloviating Bundys on those infernal message boards have no connection to UNC other than a mesh-back Carolina cap they shoplifted from Wal-Mart. (Pun fully intended!) DO NOT E-MAIL ME TO VERIFY A “BUNDY RUMOR”! I swear I will zap you from our subscriber list if you bring me any “Bundy Boy crap” you read on a message board … I’m serious!
A coaching change does not have to be a slaughterhouse wherein everyone involved tries to disembowel each other in senseless rage. Calling John Bunting obscene names does not lead us in any positive direction. AND ... do not even suggest JB as AD ... incredibly foolish idea! John is a "football coach", just not a successful head football coach at Carolina at this point in time!
Moving with the assumption that John Bunting will not be UNC’s Head Coach on November 22, we can then consider how that process will be orchestrated. A few possibilities to consider.
1. Dickie storms down to the sidelines as TA McLendon scores his 6th TD on Oct 9 and snatches the headset off of John’s head. Just hold that visual for 8 seconds … … … OK, lets move on to the next one,
2. UNC pulls a NY Mets … who just fired Art Howe effective at the end of the season. Create an official “lame duck / dead duck” situation by announcing subtly in late October that John will not need Thanksgiving dinner reservations at Top Of The Hill.
3. Have the Kenan equipment manager replace all the coaches’ caps with “visors” on the way back from Utah.
4. “Rita from Chester” does not call the Thursday Radio Show.
It’s not inconceivable that John could take a bullet for his alma mater and announce his intent to resign in late October. Depending on just how painful the next 8 weeks are, that is a possibility. I expect John Bunting will be on the UNC sidelines at Wallace Wade on November 20 but I ain’t betting Kid’s allowance on it..
Don’t worry one whit about “recruiting”. Verbal commitments are not worth the paper they are not printed on … unless Dan Rather produces them … then they are collectors’ items getting $10,000/each on e-bay. The new coach will have plenty of time to romance Billy BlueChip and fawn insincerely over his mamma’s peach cobbler.
The most important question that all Tar Heel fans should be asking is not WHO the next coach will be but … WHO will NOT make that decision. Dickie Baddour’s stock is lower than Enron’s among Tar Heels. If Dickie brought in Steve Spurrier with The Stoops Boys as coordinators, all three of’em plus The Dickster would be hung in effigy from The Davie Poplar before the shiny water pitchers were put away in the Skipper Bowles Hire & Fire Coaches Room at The Smith Center.
If Goofy Ol’ Moeser tries any scenario that has Dick Baddour involved in the search he will have the tightly clenched fingers of Charlie Winston, Johnny Harris, Mo Koury, and Eddie Smith wrapped around his scrawny neck before he can “hark a sound”.
I don’t know just yet how The Dickster will be “dealt with” but “dealt with” he will be. Chaining the Little Prince to a radiator deep in the bowels of Venable Hall until the whole process is completed is the best idea I’ve heard so far but better ideas may surface.
“They” may create one of those classic UNC “Noah’s Ark committees” composed of 2 of every species on the planet … but don’t panic if they do. The albino marxist dwarf, lesbian John Edwards lookalike, and 3-legged Peruvian grad student will not really have votes. Trust me, I am sure on this point. The jock-hating faculty squirrels will be excluded this go-round. They don’t know that yet. Don’t tell’em.
Real adults who have experience and proven skill at choosing talented executive managers PLUS knowledge of success traits of major college football coaches will be steering the ship this time around. NOW … that does not mean they will select your choice. 99% of you dear wonderful SSays readers just know “more than Dickie does” and we need a bit more expertise than that.
“UNC is a Sleeping Giant” is garbage … I am hereby retiring that worn-out cliché to that same dumpster where we put the “they even hung Dean Smith in effigy” cliché several years ago. It “might” have been partially true in the mid 90s. It is absolutely NOT true in 2004. Top coaches are NOT dying to come to UNC. The aura of The Old Well, Franklin Street, and “where Brian Blados played” does not resonate nearly as well as Tar Heels with liver spots and severly bruised egos want to believe it does.
Coming into a ruthlessly competitive ACC, inheriting a shell-shocked team and a very impatient fan base is like marrying J-Lo … the honeymoon will be mighty fine but that’s as good as it will ever get. Don’t bet on celebrating that 5th anniversary. It will take more than a stroll through Coker Arboretum and a copy of Look Homeward Angel to attract anyone that anyone has heard of.
As this Tar Heel Dance Macabre is played out in the weeks to come, you can play Nickle Roulette. Take the 20+ names that are going to pop up via the Bundy Pipeline and bet a nickel on each one. Odds are you will hit a winner and win a nickel back.
The Dance has just begun. I’ll be here to guide you each step along the way. There’ll be potholes aplenty but we will get through it. Look out, here comes a wild ass rumor – DUCK!
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