Bush this morning: “Our troops will come home when Iraq is capable of defending herself.” (Interesting choice of pronoun.)
OK: Protecting herself from what, exactly?
Herself, apparently. It’s gonna be a long stay.
’24’: Arab Americans Are People, Too
The New York Times talked yesterday about all the challenges facing several series, including “24,” whose writers and producers are still trying to figure out how to wrap up their season-long plot lines. Over the last couple of weeks, “24” has fallen into one of those plot lulls that make you wish the bad guys would nuke Fox network HQ. Essentially, the show has slumped back into a soap-opera stew as viewers wait for the Islamic terrorists — who seem to be getting more and more non-Islamic help –to spring their next nasty scheme. Something awful is coming: The script, in combination with the preview for next week, is telegraphing a terror strike against the president, who is in his 13th consecutive hour flying somewhere in Air Force One. But the mold-growing-on-bread pace of the latest plot makes you wonder whether the writers had any idea themselves of what’s coming next. In last night’s episode, it took one of the terror operatives a full hour to put on a uniform he’s using as a disguise.
In the moments when action was allowed to occur last night:
–A team of mercenary commandos working for an Evil Defense Contractor implicated in the day’s terrorist attacks goes after Jack and Paul. The team was led by a guy who at first glance looked kind of like Prince. Jack killed him.
–The Evil Defense Contractor’s security chief is terminated, too; but not before playing dead and nearly succeeding in shooting Jack. Paul, who at one time looked like a terrorist mole, heroically takes the bullet meant for Jack. Not sure whether Fox’s patented miracle medical technology will be able to save him from the killed-in-action list.
–In an effort to show they know that Arab Americans are loyal citizens, the show’s writers have the gun battle between Jack, Paul and the Evil Defense Contractor commandos take place at a sporting goods store owned by two Arab American brothers. After Jack forces his way in to get guns and ammo for the upcoming fight — he appears to find a state-of-the-art assault rifle just waiting for him, and he didn’t even have to wait for a background check — he urges the brothers to leave. But they selflessly stay and fight — to defend the store their dad started and to make a stand against terrorism with Jack, the United States of America, and Fox TV.
The scene was so self-conciously uplifting I forgot to cry, though I did get a little weepy when Jack promised government help to repair damage to the sporting goods establishment. Rule One in the War on Terror: Torture when you must, but always take responsibility for property damage.
Al and the Ides
March 14th is Albert Einstein’s birthday. Since I’m unconversant with mathematics — though I can show off every once in a while with arithmetic — I can’t pretend to understand much about his theories of relativity except some of the changes they’ve brought. Lots of us leave a world completely changed from the one we were born into; he’s one of the very few who left a world his ideas had transformed.
And then there’s the 15th. The Ides of March, and if you want to know why it was called that — well, check here. All the historical and literary interest in the date stems from Julius Caesar getting knifed (44 B.C.) by pals. More personal interest attaches to the date because it begins a run of March and April dates that were birthdays of close friends growing up (and my sister’s birthday, too) — on the 15th, 21st, 22nd, 26th, 30th, 31st, and the 6th of April. Not dates I’ve written down — they just happened to stick in my memory, maybe because of the proximity of my own birthday. Whether I’ve been in touch with any of these people or not, I still think about each of them, if only briefly, as the days come each year.
News and ‘News’
In The New York Times this morning: “Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged News.” It’s a neat roundup of how successful the administration has been in producing news segments (video news releases, or VNRs, in industry parlance) that broadcast outlets around the United States uncritically pick up and run as “real news.” The story’s been growing since early last year, when it came to light that a government contractor had produced thinly disguised Bush propaganda stories that hundreds of stations across the nation had run virtually unchanged. The practice has proven so successful for government agencies that at least one state administration, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s here in California, is sending out its own video stories.
The Times makes a couple of obvious points about how government VNRs keep appearing on news shows: First, that despite an industry code of ethics that frowns on the practice, the government’s news releases keep showing up on the air because TV news departments are often doing more programming with fewer resources, so there’s unceasing pressure to find stuff to fill out the newscast. Second, it’s common practice for stations to take stories from “network feeds” to which they subscribe and rework them to fit their own local needs.
This is something we did frequently on our half-hour daily news show on TechTV; the reality is that when you’re under the gun to get something on the air — and for our show, we needed to produce 22 minutes of something every day to go along with our 8 minutes of commercials — you need external help. Nothing wrong with that. We’re used to newspapers using wire reports, or complementing their own reporters’ work with material from other sources (wires or freelancers). It’s innocuous — no, it can make help you serve your reader or viewer better — if the work is done conscientiously and you’re always careful both to know and to say, when necessary, where the facts you’re reporting come from.
But here’s the danger in putting together news this way. A reporter or producer is handed a story package with an intro and some unknown reporter’s voiceover and standup and given orders to rework it. Depending on factors such as how well the original material is written and how good the video is, the script might get a rewrite, the order of the video shots might be changed, the new reporter will retrack the script and might include his or her own standup. When you see a local reporter doing some way-out-of-town story but still appearing live on the station’s set, you can assume that this is how they did it. The station usually doesn’t disclose what’s going on; I think the general belief is that viewers are smart enough to figure it out, if they care at all.
The problem is that the source of the original material can becomes secondary to getting it on the air; reporters and producers stop thinking about where it’s coming from because their job is to get the story done in time for the show. And pretty soon, the good-news gruel from the State Department Pentagon or Department of Homeland Security blends in with all the stories coming over the feed from CNN and the Associated Press.
At the point you stop thinking about where the information is coming from — and the implications of turning your operation into an accessory for government-produced messages masquerading as news — you’re not in the journalism business anymore. And that’s the bottom line of the Times’s report: It’s not that Bush and Schwarzenegger and their cronies are so damned clever putting out propaganda and calling it news, it’s that so many of the people who are supposed to care enough to recognize the difference simply don’t.
The Habit
Dad and I talked on the phone earlier. The first thing he said was, “Are you all right?”
“Sure. Why?”
“There’s been nothing new on the blog since Thursday!”
How’s that for drama in real life? He was kidding, but he was right. And the remarkable thing is that I was conscious of it and trying to organize my poor thoughts into some kind of post earlier in the evening. This has gotten to be, for better mostly but on occasion worse, a daily habit. I told Dad I knew I had missed some days recently — partly because I’ve been out doing other stuff or partly because I needed to give the blog a rest — but that I was pretty sure I hadn’t missed two days in a row (and still haven’t) for several months. Saying that meant that I had to go back and check. And the last time I went two days without posting something — we’re not talking quality here, just regularity — was August 28-29.
The Madness
I’m a distant member of the Davis Bike Club. Although I live in Berkeley, I’ve joined this club 60 miles away because it sponsors all sorts of long-distance cycling events, like the qualifying brevets (that’s French for “long-ass bike ride) for Paris-Brest-Paris and other butt-numbing feats of cycling endurance. One of the things the club is known for is its annual “March Madness” frenzy. Members are encouraged to ride lots of miles. For every member mile recorded, the club donates a penny to buy bike helmets for kids.
It sounds like a mild-mannered, fun, civic-minded undertaking. But beneath bizarre, extreme behavior lurks just beneath that veneer of innocence and public-spiritedness. Every year, a handful of club members — people with lives it’s hard for me to imagine — put in 100 miles or more on the bike every day for the whole month. Here we are on the 12th of March, and there’s a real horse race among four riders: One, listed as “Howard Hughes,” has ridden 1,442.38 miles this month — an average of 120.2 a day. Howard’s followed by three guys bunched between 1,237 and 1,247 miles. (Fpr comparison’s sake, and for an idea of what saner people are doing — and this is one of the few times I’d ever advertise myself as “sane” — I’ve ridden 312 miles since the 1st; that happens to be about two miles below the overall average for the 142 people signed up.)
From what I remember, the record March Madness total is something like 4,130 miles. That’s more than 130 miles a day. There was controversy on the club email list that March over allegations that some riders were getting rides way up north in the Sacramento Valley so that they could take advantage of strong tailwinds to enhance their mileage totals. Wind or no wind, I can’t even imagine what it would be like to eat enough to ride all those miles, and I don’t want to contemplate what some of the physical wear and tear must be like.
[Addendum: Checking the mileage totals for last year, the top total was a shocking 4,486 miles, 144.7 miles a day. Still can’t imagine. Also, 11 riders topped 2,000 miles and 50 others topped 1,000.]
Fish, Water, Traffic
Well, it turned out that my insecurities about being a fish out of water at the VON bloggers panel didn’t get a chance to act themselves out. I managed to get stuck in a horrendous traffic jam in Oakland on the way down Interstate 880 (the Nimitz, to locals) and got to the panel … five minutes late. So — no horrible gaffes or brilliant bon mots. I just sat in the audience and took it all in and saw a couple of old friends (including one from the 1980 Daily Cal staff).
I wrote all about the session, though, on the IP Inferno site: VON Panel, the Sequel.
Fish, Water, Et Cetera
I’ll be headed down to San Jose in a little while to attend VON, a big trade show on VoIP — Voice over Internet Protocol. For the last few months, I’ve been contributing to my friend Ted’s IP Inferno blog, which led to an invitation from a fellow named Andy Abramson to join a panel of VoIP bloggers today to discuss the industry and maybe to talk about the experience of blogging on it, too. I confess to some trepidation: I think I’m a little bit of a fish out of water on this panel. Andy himself does a blog called VoIP Watch that’s a pretty good (and widely read) daily journal of significant happenings in the industry, and the other five or six people in the group are likewise what I’d call experts (for instance, Jeff Pulver, who probably deserves the title “father of VoIP” here in the States). In contrast, I’m someone who 1) doesn’t have much experience in this field (I’ve done some reporting on it, but that’s it) and 2) differs from the rest of the group in that I don’t start from a position that the telecom industry or VoIP startups are, in themselves, wonderful things that ought to be celebrated for all they’re doing for humanity. In fact, I’ve come to feel that the goal of the telecommunications companies is to serve investors first and give the consumers, the source of all the revenue, the crumbs (while telling them they’re enjoying a seven-course meal). That’s partly just my cynicism after watching the way so many of the people behind big capital behave; but I think it’s also reflected in the widespread decline of customer service, on one hand, and the treatment of workers, on the other.
I’ll write about the session later.
Trivia Smackdown: Asklepian vs. Caduceus
It’s too horrible to ponder what life would be without trivia, so I won’t (and besides, everyone knows that trivia isn’t really trivia at all, but precious knowledge nuggets that must be nurtured and cherished and trotted out the next time there’s a lull in conversation).
Today’s precious knowledge nugget comes by way of The New York Times Science section: "Slithery Medical Symbolism: Worm or Snake? One or Two?" It’s a discussion of the Asklepian (as the Times has it; a more common usage in English appears to be Aesculapian, checking both Merriam-Webster online and the number of Google hits that come up) versus the caduceus as the proper symbol of the medical profession. Paraphrasing Albert Brooks, you know the symbol as the stick thing with a snake (or snakes) wound around it. I haven’t been looking closely enough these past decades, because the difference had escaped me. And a difference there is:
"In Greek mythology, Asclepius was a half-mortal who had the power to heal the dead. He learned it by seeing a snake he had killed with his staff revived by another snake, which had crammed herbs into its mouth.
"Using the same herbs, Asclepius saved a man killed by one of Zeus’s thunderbolts. (Zeus frowned on that presumption, which also threatened to put his brother Hades, the god of the dead, out of business, so he zapped Asclepius too. Zeus later relented and made Asclepius the god of medicine.)
"Several historians blame the mix-up on a 19th-century British publisher and an American Army surgeon. The publisher, John Churchill of London, used the caduceus on popular medical texts he exported – but as a printer’s mark, because Hermes was the god of commerce.
"The surgeon, Capt. Frederick Reynolds, lobbied hard in 1902 to have a gold caduceus adopted as the badge of Army doctors. ‘From Captain Reynolds’s correspondence with the surgeon general’s office,’ two Australian medical historians sniffed last year in The Annals of Internal Medicine, ‘it is apparent that he was unaware of the distinction.’
"…Doctors who know the classics are particularly offended because Hermes was also the god of thieves and, even more ominously, was charged with leading the souls of the dead to the underworld.
Benefit of the Doubt
Today’s New York Times is running a John Burns story on shootings at U.S. security checkpoints in Iraq, like the one late last week that nearly turned a freed Italian captive into a freed dead Italian captive. So, while the dust settles on that incident — our troops say they followed all the rules before firing on a car they regarded as suspicious; survivors from the car deny anything happened to arouse suspicion — the Times takes a look at other episodes in which apparently innocent people have wound up dead, wounded, or scared witless.
The article ends with a discussion of a widely reported January incident in which an American patrol accompanied by a press photographer opened fire on a car carrying a father, mother, four of their children, and two other kids. The parents were killed; except for seeing their dad’s head blown off and their mom riddled with bullets, the children were unharmed. Burns’s story concludes with an account from the photographer, Getty Images’ Chris Hondros:
“Back at a base in Tal Afar, the soldiers and Mr. Hondros filled out forms with their observations on the incident. The company commander told the soldiers that there would be an investigation, but that they had followed the rules of engagement and that they should tell the truth, Mr. Hondros said. ‘I’ll stick up for you,’ the captain told the soldiers, Mr. Hondros recalled. He said the platoon involved in the incident had been engaged in an intense firefight with insurgents in Tal Afar two days before the incident. ‘It was a jangling experience,’ he said.”
What gets me about these incidents, besides the wanton waste of life, is our forces’ attitude toward what I guess I’d call consequences. It’s great that these soldiers’ captain said he’d stick up for them. But where in this situation is the one who’s sticking up for this family, who’s up front acknowledging responsibility and acknowledging that we have a double-homicide on our hands? (No — the usual canned statement of regret doesn’t work. Neither does patting the kids on the head and saying we’re sorry.)
Yes, the people who concocted this war for us have sent our troops into a situation that is a) next to impossible to handle cleanly and b) one for which they appear to be ill trained to handle with anything other than force. But even given that, how is it that whatever happens, whoever dies, our troops get the benefit of the doubt nearly every time while the hapless Iraqis and others who wander into their gunsights almost never do? How do we think this looks to the people who know they’re going to be shot at if they make the wrong move; who know that if they’re killed, well, that’s just the breaks and at least Saddam Hussein didn’t do it?