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Why Not Jeb?

Jeb
To dabble for a moment in dark speculations: I just got done watching Jeb Bush doing his “OK, everyone, another hurricane is coming” thing on TV. Every time I hear him, I wonder: Between the two brothers, why is he not the Chosen One? He sounds smarter and more thoughtful than his brother; Jeb, logical thought, and the English language do not appear to be irreconcilable entities. After giving his statement in English, he flipped over into Spanish; though he was speaking from a statement, it appeared he was making some extemporaneous remarks, too. That’s always impressive to an English-only type like me.

Anyway, I’m sure not hoping that we have to contend with a third Bush in the White House. But given what the ordinary person like myself can see (and maybe I have to start reading the Bush family histories out there), it seems rather extraordinary that the seemingly more limited of the siblings made it to the top. Or made it to the top first, at least.

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X Prize Update: da Vinci Delay

Monday I plan to go down to Southern California to cover Burt Rutan’s first X Prize flight for Wired News. I had been debating going up to Saskatchewan at the end of the week for the planned rocket launch by da Vinci Project. The launch was supposed to happen next Saturday, Oct. 2, and I had gotten a motel reservation in Kindersley, the launch site. But Wired News wasn’t too keen on paying for me to go up there, so it was going to be a matter of going on my own dime or trying to report it over the phone or something (the latter being a rather lame excuse for covering this kind of story). But the da Vinci Project, whose plans have drawn lots of skepticism (as I noted in a post in early August), made the decision easier for me, announcing last night that they’re postponing their flight. Wired News posted my story on the delay about an hour ago.

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CSI: The Dark, Moody One

Yes, we here at the Infospigot headquarters and residence in Berkeley, California, indulge ourselves in all sorts of low-brow entertainments. For instance: Over the past couple of years, Thursday night has meant “Survivor” and “CSI,” viewed as we eat burritos in front of our flickering Sony. (Actually, this is kind of a high-brow evening, given that for a brief time our Thursday night habit was WWF’s “Smackdown.” That turned out to be time well spent, though, because we got to see The Rock in the day of “the People’s Elbow — the most electrifying move in sports entertainment.” But I digress.)

Now, we never cottoned to the Miami version of “CSI,” and quit watching after six episodes or so. Even though the same creative team is behind both shows, the Miami production just doesn’t feel like it’s up to the same level as the original, set in Las Vegas. The Miami lead actor, David Caruso, is one obvious difference. Sure, his Las Vegas counterpart, William Petersen, can be arch, but I can actually buy him as an inquisitive, creative investigator, and one who has some interesting character quirks. His acting has some range. Caruso’s work, by contrast, has all the subtlety and nuance of someone banging iron bars together outside your window. It’s relentless. Not particularly pleasant to watch or hear. One wonders how he’s gotten so far with this act.

The differences between the shows go further than that. Both shows share a sort of MTV/music video visual style, especially when they go into their crime-scene/crime-lab montages with the investigators and technicians doing their thing. But the style, which has a slick but natural feel in the Las Vegas show, feels pasted-on and artificial in the Miami version. I think that’s because the ensemble cast, one of the original show’s strong points, is weaker in Miami, or at least hasn’t developed the chemistry the Las Vegas show thrives on: The folks surrounding Caruso look like they’ve been hired because they’re beautiful people, period.

Now comes the third entry in the “CSI” franchise, a show set in New York City. The creators have come up with something much different in tone and maybe in substance from the Las Vegas and Miami series. Whereas the earlier shows use a lot of flash and attitude and humor and try to capitalize on the exotic nature of their locations, the New York show was dark and somber; in fact, the “CSI” characters seemed subdued and preoccupied to the point of depression. A key conversation involved the lead investigator, played by Gary Sinise, and a paralyzed, gravely injured victim who could communicate only by blinking. The exotic locations included brief forays into a garbage scow and a wasteland on the Brooklyn side of the Manhattan Bridge.The preview of next week’s show seemed to promise the same, tone-wise; and the little we found out about the characters suggests they’re in a justifiable funk and that it’s going to be some time before they emerge from it.

As far as the episode itself: The producers tried to jam too much into it. Partly that’s the burden imposed by having to introduce characters, suggest some history, and get them rolling on a complex case. That burden will get lighter as the series develops. It’ll be interesting to see whether the tone of the show gets lighter, too.

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Willfully Blind

By way of my brother John, a good online piece from Newsweek’s Christopher Dickey refuting complaints that critics of the Iraqi war are guilty of Monday-morning quarterbacking.

“To be sure, the State Department did its homework in 2002 with the ‘Future of Iraq Project‘ (my link, not Dickey’s) and came up with some answers. But the Pentagon threw away the studies and effectively banned anyone who had worked on them (meaning just about anyone who knew anything about Iraq) from participating in the ‘transition.’

“This was the real intelligence failure in Iraq—the willful blindness of an administration that did not want to discuss the risks ahead. Didn’t even want to know them. To have talked too much about such things might have made the American public and the American Congress as cautious about this war as the warriors were. It might have given some inkling why most Europeans and our Arab allies and Asians and Africans and Latin Americas were skeptical about the whole venture. Did they hate democracy? No. They hated occupation. They knew its humiliations and its risks.”

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We’re Winning the War …

… against Cat Stevens. Or Yusuf Islam. Or whatever he wants to be called. Allah be praised that our terrorist trackers realized the singer was on a Washington-bound airliner and diverted it to Maine before he could run amok in our capital. Terrorist trackers up there in the woods questioned Stevens/Islam, and now they’re deporting him, Allah be praised.

Why? Praise Allah, now that’s a story.

I just love the way the Associated Press describes the grounds for sending the guy’s plane elsewhere, detaining him, then ordering him out of the country:

“… [A] government official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, said Islam was placed on a watch list after multiple intelligence sources in recent weeks indicated the peace activist may have associations with potential terrorists.”

Got that? He may be linked to potential terrorists. Making allowances for a possibly clumsy rendition of what the anonymous government official said, it’d be nice to get the specifics out into broad daylight, because just about anyone may be linked to potential terrorists.

The anonymous official also indicates that this information was reported recently. But the AP story goes on to cite suggestions and whispers dating back to 1988 that Stevens/Islam donated money that wound up in the hands of Hamas and a sheikh convicted for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Stevens/Islam denies ever knowingly giving money to terrorist groups, the AP story notes, adding that he’s been donating royalties from one recent CD release to a 9/11 victims fund.

Again: It’d be nice for the government, which saw fit to disrupt the liberty of an entire planeload of passengers, to put its cards on the table: Exactly who is saying what about this guy, and what’s the evidence they’ve got against him? Of course, asking for such elementary respect for civil liberties these days — from a bunch of people who proved impotent to spot or stop a squad of real killers three years ago and who ultimately responded to that attack by fabricating a case for an irrelevant but ruinous war — is probably a bit much.

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An Old Impulse

I’ve mentioned Minnesota Public Radio’s “The Writer’s Almanac” before. Kate started getting it a while ago and started reading me some of the poetry and literary notes that are part of the daily email. Then she signed me up, and then I signed my dad up. It’s the best day-to-day email “newsletter” I’ve ever gotten and usually superbly written and edited.

A recent example: While I was back in Chicago, I missed the almanac for Sept. 11 (the archiving isn’t ideal; you’ll have to scroll down to find the day’s entry). The poem offered that day was “To a Terrorist,” by Stephen Dunn (from his book “Between Angels“):

“For the historical ache, the ache passed down

which finds its circumstance and becomes

the present ache, I offer this poem

without hope, knowing there’s nothing,

not even revenge, which alleviates

a life like yours. I offer it as one

might offer his father’s ashes

to the wind, a gesture

when there’s nothing else to do.

Still, I must say to you:

I hate your good reasons.

I hate the hatefulness that makes you fall

in love with death, your own included.

Perhaps you’re hating me now,

I who own my own house

and live in a country so muscular,

so smug, it thinks its terror is meant

only to mean well, and to protect.

Christ turned his singular cheek,

one man’s holiness another’s absurdity.

Like you, the rest of us obey the sting,

the surge. I’m just speaking out loud

to cancel my silence. Consider it an old impulse,

doomed to become mere words.

The first poet probably spoke to thunder

and, for a while, believed

thunder had an ear and a choice.”

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Ambushed by History

Philip Roth had a long essay in the Sunday New York Times book review section. The subject was his new novel, a sort of reimagining of American history if the isolationist, anti-semitic Hitler apologist Charles Lindbergh had been elected president in 1940 instead of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Most of the piece is an explanation of the book’s origins and an exploration of method. But he takes a detour near the end to puncture our most comforting national myth: That the purity of our devotion to freedom has made us somehow indestructible, immune from history:

“History claims everybody, whether they know it or not and whether they like it or not. In recent books, including this new one, I take that simple fact of life and magnify it through the lens of critical moments I’ve lived through as a 20th-century American. I was born in 1933, the year Hitler came to power and F.D.R. was first inaugurated as president and Fiorello La Guardia was elected mayor of New York and Meyer Ellenstein became the mayor of Newark, my city’s first and only Jewish mayor. As a small child I heard on our living room radio the voices of Nazi Germany’s Fuhrer and America’s Father Coughlin delivering their anti-Semitic rants. Fighting and winning the Second World War was the great national preoccupation from December 1941 to August 1945, the heart of my grade school years. The cold war and the anti-Communist crusade overshadowed my high school and college years as did the uncovering of the monstrous truth of the Holocaust and the beginning of the terror of the atomic era. The Korean War ended shortly before I was drafted into the Army, and the Vietnam War and the domestic upheaval it fomented — along with the assassinations of American political leaders — clamored for my attention every day throughout my 30’s.

“And now Aristophanes, who surely must be God, has given us George W. Bush, a man unfit to run a hardware store let alone a nation like this one, and who has merely reaffirmed for me the maxim that informed the writing of all these books and that makes our lives as Americans as precarious as anyone else’s: all the assurances are provisional, even here in a 200-year-old democracy. We are ambushed, even as free Americans in a powerful republic armed to the teeth, by the unpredictability that is history. May I conclude with a quotation from my book? ”Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as “History,” harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.’

“In writing these books I’ve tried to turn the epic back into the disaster as it was suffered without foreknowledge, without preparation, by people whose American expectations, though neither innocent nor delusional, were for something very different from what they got.”

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A Real Infospigot

From The New York Times this morning: “A Walking, Wisecracking Encyclopedia,” a review of a book by a guy who set out to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, and did it:

“BRITANNICA

“The venerable encyclopedia that Mr. Jacobs chose to read from cover to cover. It comprises 32 volumes, or 44 million words. ‘Reading the Britannica is like channel surfing on a very highbrow cable system, one with no shortage of shows about Sumerian cities,’ he writes. To accommodate this exercise he decides to cut back on watching reality television.”

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Gathered ‘Round the Laptop

Cimg2031_1It’s a heartwarming scene that would inspire Currier & Ives or Norman Rockwell: Three generations of a Chicago clan, gathered ’round the laptop for some wholesome family entertainment. This unstaged scene, Friday night on the North Side, shows a multigenerational Brekke gathering watching JibJab’s “This Land Is Your Land” parody online. Seriously.

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Disappointed Office-Seeker, redux

HarrisonAs I mentioned in today’s post on the James A. Garfield assassination, the stock phrase used to describe his killer is “disappointed office-seeker.” Google turns up a bit that comedian Robert Klein once did based on that cliche. But Garfield wasn’t the only elected official of his era done in by someone who expected an appointment that didn’t come through.

Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison was shot to death in October 1893, the day before the scheduled closing of the World’s Columbian Exposition in the city. The killer was an apparently mentally ill man named Prendergast who believed he merited an appointment to a senior city position for services rendered to Harrison. He didn’t get the job he fancied, general counsel for the city, so he went to Harrison’s home with a gun.

Harrison was a five-term mayor (though terms were just two years in his day). His death prompted an orgy of mourning. By one account, the day of his funeral, more than half a million people lined the route to the cemetery. Later, his son, Carter Harrison II, also won five mayoral elections (so the Richards Daley were not the first to pull off that feat).

The other day, when Dad and I went down to Randolph and Desplaines streets to take a look at the new Haymarket statue, he mentioned he thought the original Haymarket sculpture, which depicts a cop trying to calm the waters of unrest, might be over in a park a few blocks to the west. We drove by, and found Union Park. On one edge is Spaulding Elementary School, where my mom’s mom, Anne O’Malley Hogan, taught back in the 1920s. We could see driving by that there was a statue in the park, but it was obscured by trees and I couldn’t see whether it was the Haymarket cop.

Dad went back down there today and called from the statue to report his findings. It’s a statue of Carter Harrison, who it turns out lived nearby when he was assassinated. (And, to connect back to Haymarket, was on the scene of the bombing before the blast took place. The Chicago Historical Society has a great writeup of the event, and Harrison’s part in it, here.)