Category: Current Affairs

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Fugue State

It’s getting into the warm season again in Iraq. And, if military commanders The New York Times cites are to be believed, it’s far from the last summer our troops will spend chasing insurgents, building Mesopotamian democracy, and cleaning up after our Great Architect of World Liberty:

“In interviews and briefings this week, some of the generals pulled back from recent suggestions, some by the same officers, that positive trends in Iraq could allow a major drawdown in the 138,000 American troops late this year or early in 2006. One officer suggested Wednesday that American military involvement could last ‘many years.’ ”

“Many years.” Profoundly sad. Profoundly depressing. But not really surprising.

I remember Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, how glorious that was, what a thorough vindication of its boldness and military superiority. I don’t recall anyone talking in the immediate aftermath about “Palestinians” or “occupied territories. That came later, and it came to stay. Thirty-eight years after its triumph, Israel is walling itself off from its conquest.

Thirty-eight years. I wonder how long it will take us to get home from Iraq, or whether we ever really will?

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Retractions

By all means, let’s pillory Newsweek for muffing its “Koran in the toilet” revelation, a bit of one-source journalism that’s somehow led millions of people to think most Americans are less than reverent toward Islam. It’s good to know that those who lead us still have some capacity for outrage when the truth of a complex situation is served less than perfectly and lives are needlessly lost. And perhaps Rumsfeld, Rice, their many minions — and, who knows, maybe even the president — can take a lesson from Newsweek and come clean about the untruths they’ve promoted that led to bloodshed. You know what I’m talking about: Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein’s role as international terrorist overlord, and the imminent threat they posed to the United States. There are other matters to say “We’re sorry” for, too — the criminally poor planning for our attack’s aftermath, for instance — but it would be nice to start with a heartfelt retraction and apology to the 20-some thousand who have died because of everything those first untruths set in motion.

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Iraq Reader

Demise of a Hard-Fighting Squad

Washington Post, May 12

“Among the four Marines killed and 10 wounded when an explosive device erupted under their Amtrac on Wednesday were the last battle-ready members of a squad that four days earlier had battled foreign fighters holed up in a house in the town of Ubaydi. In that fight, two squad members were killed and five were wounded.

“In 96 hours of fighting and ambushes in far western Iraq, the squad had ceased to be.

“Every member of the squad — one of three that make up the 1st Platoon of Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Regiment — had been killed or wounded, Marines here said. All told, the 1st Platoon — which Hurley commands — had sustained 60 percent casualties, demolishing it as a fighting force.

” ‘They used to call it Lucky Lima,’ said Maj. Steve Lawson, commander of the company. ‘That turned around and bit us.’ ”

***

Authorities find missing ex-soldier blinded by Iraq blast

(Associated Press, May 11)

“DUNBAR, Pa. — A former soldier blinded by shrapnel while serving in Iraq was found alive Tuesday night, a day after he disappeared after telling an ex-girlfriend he was depressed, police and his family said. …

“Salvatore “Sam” Ross Jr., 23, of Dunbar Township, will be admitted to a veterans’ hospital psychiatric unit for observation, his aunt, Tina Pifer, told The Associated Press. …

” ‘I just don’t understand what low he’s at right now because everything seemed to be coming together with building his house,’ Pifer said. ‘But, you know what? This kid is suffering so bad from depression. People just don’t understand the things this kid has been through over the last two years.’ ”

[I thought there was something familiar to me about Ross when I first read about his disappearance the other day. He’s one of the injured soldiers featured in Nina Berman’s “Purple Hearts — Back from Iraq.”]

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Iraqi police vent anger at US after car bombings

(Australian Broadcasting Corp., May 10)

“Iraqi police hurled insults at US soldiers after two suicide car bomb blasts in Baghdad killed at least seven people and left 19 wounded, including policemen.

” ‘It’s all because you’re here,’ a policeman shouted in Arabic at a group of US soldiers after the latest in a bloody wave of attacks that have rocked Baghdad this month.

” ‘Get out of our country and there will be no more explosions,’ he told the uncomprehending Americans staring at the smouldering wreck of a car bomb.”

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Army to Spend Day Retraining Recruiters

New York Times, May 12

“Responding to reports about widespread abuses of the rules for recruitment, Army officials said yesterday that they would suspend all recruiting on May 20 and use the day to retrain its personnel in military ethics and the laws that govern what can and cannot be done to enlist an applicant.

” … At least one family in Ohio reported that its mentally ill son was signed up, despite rules banning such enlistments and records about his illness that were readily available.

“David McSwane, a 17-year-old who lives outside Denver, also recently caught one recruiter on tape, advising him on how to create a fake diploma, and another helping him buy a product that purportedly cleansed his system of illegal-drug residue. This week, a CBS affiliate in Houston, KHOU-TV, played a voice mail message from a local recruiter that threatened a young man with arrest if he did not appear at a nearby recruiting station.

“Army statistics show that substantiated cases of improprieties have increased by more than 60 percent, to 320 in 2004 from 199 in 1999. Recruiters and former Army officials say they are related to the extraordinary pressure being put on recruiters, who must meet quotas of roughly two recruits a month. The strain is breeding not just abuses, they said, but also stress-related illnesses, damaged marriages and even thoughts of suicide among some.”

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Playing the Numbers

Fortune

We got Chinese food last night from a neighborhood joint. Scarfing my fortune cookie, I briefly looked at the message and the lottery number and thought about buying a ticket (I haven’t bought one in a while; buying one usually gives rise to full-on Walter Mitty reveries surrounding all the generous things I’ll do with the dough. Kind of a mind game to show the universe’s lottery-controlling powers that I’m worthy of a jackpot).

In any case, I haven’t gone out to buy a ticket. But this morning, there’s a great story in The New York Times today about a bunch of people who bought tickets in the Powerball lottery using their fortune-cookie numbers and won:

"Chuck Strutt, executive director of the Multi-State Lottery Association, which runs Powerball, said on Monday that the panic began at 11:30 p.m. March 30 when he got a call from a worried staff member.

"The second-place winners were due $100,000 to $500,000 each, depending on how much they had bet, so paying all 110 meant almost $19 million in unexpected payouts, Mr. Strutt said. (The lottery keeps a $25 million reserve for odd situations.)

" ‘We didn’t sleep a lot that night,’ Mr. Strutt said. ‘Is there someone trying to cheat the system?’ …

… Then the winners started arriving at lottery offices.

" ‘Our first winner came in and said it was a fortune cookie,’ said Rebecca Paul, chief executive of the Tennessee Lottery. ‘The second winner came in and said it was a fortune cookie. The third winner came in and said it was a fortune cookie.’ "

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Citizens of the World

Earlier this week on my friend Endo’s excellent blog, he had a brief comment on the winners of the Webby Awards. He made the comment that his post was part of his "ongoing quest" to care about the prizes. I’m in the same boat. The awards, which started in the Web’s Paleozoic Era (mid-’90s) in San Francisco, have appeared to be a testament to the stamina and ego and hopes of becoming a household name of someone named Tiffany Shlain.

But I digress. My perusal of the Webby list was arrested at the very first entry, for the "activism" category. And the Webby goes to … The World Citizen’s Guide. The link goes to a site from a group called Business for Diplomatic Action. The guide’s home page explains that it’s a project involving students from Southern Methodist University who worked with BDA to get to the bottom of a troubling trend in this global free-trade world of ours: Lots of people outside the United States don’t like the United States very much; more to the point for the business group, many folks outside our borders look on U.S. corporations and brands with a mixture of envy and loathing; that’s a bottom-line problem now and could become a crisis.

So Business for Diplomatic Action sent people out into the world to find out why non-Americans aren’t in love with America, and the guide says the group identified four causes: "our U.S. public policy, the negative effects of globalization, our popular culture, and our collective personality."

"Collective personality"?  That one hurts, especially since I like to be considered a jerk on my own considerable merits instead of getting lumped in with the rest of the rubes and yahoos.

The online guide can’t do much about "our U.S. public policy," or globalism, or our popular culture. So it’s designed to address the collective "Not Only Ugly, But Loud and Ignorant American" issue. That’s a pretty ambitious task in itself, and the online guide is disappointingly thin, consisting of a handful of official resources for Americans traveling abroad; a collection of some of the flags of the world, each accompanied by a fun fact about the country ("While in Syria, pass things with your right hand or both hands, but never pass anything with just your left hand."); and there’s a Harper’s-index style rundown on the world’s population that’s not bad.

There’s an accompanying five-page brochure you can download that offers a lot more traveler-specific advice: Don’t talk religion. Try the local language. Be interested in the local version of "American Idol." Don’t forget to smile (though some travel guides will tell you that smiling is one of the very American habits that non-Americans distrust.

So the least of my questions is what the judges saw here that merited an activism award. I also wonder whether the well-meaning people behind the effort really think this is the kind of "activism" that will make a difference in a world that’s come to distrust and dislike us for a lot more than our habit of raising our voices to make our English easier to understand.

It’s easy to mock an effort like this; but I suppose it’s a good cause — trying to make us all aware that we’re ambassadors for the U.S.A. when we travel. Yet — is my unintentionally boorishness, or some other Yank’s culturally sensitive grace, really going to sway someone who’s real fear of my country comes from what’s becoming a habit of fixing the world by sending in the troops, damn the facts, the expense, and the world’s opinion?

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‘News’: Worse than Pot

The Voice of the West — aka, the San Francisco Chronicle — picked up a two-week-old press release from London Wednesday morning and ran it under this headline and subhead:

E-mail addles the mind

Endless messaging

rots brain worse than

pot, study finds

To be fair to the Chron’s reporter — though he did lift quotes directly from the release, attributing one to "a statement" — he did some imaginative legwork. He visited a couple of San Francisco’s medical marijuana clubs to get the proprietors’ views on email.

The source for the story’s dire yet entertaining revelation is HP’s operation in the United Kingdom. It put out a release on April 22 warning of the dangers of a new malady called "Info-Mania" and reporting the results of a study the company commissioned on how distracting modern information technology can be to office workers.

The press release, complete with important-looking footnotes, has an urgent lead: "The abuse of ‘always-on’ technology has led to a nationwide state of ‘Info-Mania’ where UK workers are literally addicted to checking email and text messages during meetings, in the evening and at weekends." 

Britons checking messages — away from the office. And on weekends. Where will they find  time for soccer hooliganism or producing new episodes of "Masterpiece Theatre"?

Continue reading “‘News’: Worse than Pot”

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April in Iraq

“But Iraq has — have got people there that are willing to kill, and they’re hard-nosed killers. And we will work with the Iraqis to secure their future. A free Iraq in the midst of the Middle East is an important part of spreading peace. It’s a region of the world where a lot of folks in the past never thought democracy could take hold. Democracy is taking hold. And as democracy takes hold, peace will more likely be the norm.”

–Bush, press conference, April 28, 2005

Killed in April:

–51 U.S. troops, including 11 in the month’s final three days. The total for March and April is the lowest two-month toll since February and March 2004, immediately before the Shiite uprisings in Baghdad and elsewhere. The total number of U.S. soldiers who’ve died in the Iraq war is now 1,586.

–501 Iraqi civilians, police and military. The breakdown: 302 civilians, 199 police officers and troops. Those are rough numbers compiled by Iraq Coalition Casualties and don’t include any accounting of insurgent deaths; nor do they resolve uncorroborated casualty reports.

–At least 20 foreign contract workers, from Australia, Britain, Bulgaria, Canada, Fiji, the Philippines, and the United States.

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Our Most Important Product

In connection with my just-posted rant on Steve Jobs and his silly reaction to an unauthorized biography — “iCon: Steve Jobs, the Greatest Second Act in the History of Business” — I looked up the Amazon sales rank for “iCon.” Four weeks before publication, it’s either at No. 92 or Number 131, depending on which Amazon page you believe. Not stunning, but not bad, either.

Then I started looking at what books are on top of Amazon’s sales chart.

A “Harry Potter” title is Number One, natch. “He’s Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys” — yeah, right — is No. 6 (“Be Honest — You’re Not That Into Him, Either” is No. 210). A couple Malcolm Gladwell titles, “The Da Vinci Code,” G.E.’s Jack Welch telling the world, yet again, how great he is, Jane Fonda. I’m getting to the mid-teens on the list when I see a title that prompts me to see what it’s about:

“On Bullshit.”

Knowing nothing about the book — though I see it has been featured in The New York Times, feted on “The Daily Show,” and there appear to be more than 20,000 Google references to it — I was curious.

The writer is an emeritus professor of philosophy from Princeton named Harry Frankfurt. He says, in a video interview on the Princeton University Press site, that he’s interested in bullshit because he believes it “poses certain dangers to the foundations of our civilization.” Bullshit involves “a lack of concern for the difference between truth and falsity,” Frankfurt says, and it’s thoroughly woven into the world we’ve built:

“The increase in the amount of bullshit in contemporary life … is because of the intensity of the marketing motive in contemporary society. We’re constantly marketing things — selling products, selling people, selling candidates, selling programs, selling policies — and once you start out by supposing that your object is to sell something, then your object is not to tell people the truth about it but to get them to believe what you want them to believe about it, and this encourages the resort to bullshit.”

So what’s the danger to “the foundations of civilization” to which Frankfurt refers? The Times story summed it up:

“…Any culture — and he means this culture — rife with [bullshit] is one in danger of rejecting ‘the possibility of knowing how things truly are.’ It follows that any form of political argument or intellectual analysis or commercial appeal is only as legitimate, and true, as it is persuasive. There is no other court of appeal.

“The reader is left to imagine a culture in which institutions, leaders, events, ethics feel improvised and lacking in substance. ‘All that is solid,’ as Marx once wrote, ‘melts into air.’ ”

“On Bullshit” started out as an essay in the 1980s. It has long since spawned a sort of school of philosophical bullshit-parsing (for instance, a rebuttal entitled “Deeper Into Bullshit,” by G.A. Cohen of Oxford).

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Steve Jobs: Marketing Megagenius

Earlier this week, the San Francisco Chronicle (and other sources) reported that

Apple’s Steve Jobs, in a display of his master-of-the-universe clout, had directed his company’s stores to get rid of books from a publisher that’s coming out with a Jobs biography in May.

Today, The New York Times gets around to the story. Much is made of the book’s title, “iCon: Steve Jobs, the Greatest Second Act in the History of Business.” Call me obtuse, but when I saw that the other day, I thought it sounded like hagiography. The Times points out that many read “iCon” as a double entrendre — that the title intends to convey the notion Jobs is a con man. In the article, the book’s co-author, Jeffrey S. Young, is kind of confusing on that point, saying both that rendering “icon” the way he did was meant only as a play on popular Apple product names: iMac, iBook, iPod, and iTunes, for instance. Later in the piece, though, Young is quoted as saying Jobs “has an amazing ability to con people.”

But Young’s real offense isn’t the title — it’s that he tried to breach Jobs’s self-crafted image as creator and savior of the personal computer revolution, product visionary, anti-Microsoft guru, movie-animation mogul, and all-around superstar. Handsome as all get out, too. From what you read about this “iCon” book, that’s how he’s portrayed. But when you’ve risen to the Olympian heights Jobs has — and he’s just one of a growing circle of tech supergeniuses who have all somehow singlehandedly saved the world — you can’t just let some schlub try to tell the public how great you are.

Fair enough. This kind of thin-skinned, hyper-controlling egocentrism among corporate titans is an old story.

What’s not so easy to resign one’s self to is that Jobs, in his pique, feels it’s necessary to punish all the other authors who’ve had Apple-related works put out by John Wiley & Sons, the publisher of “iCon.” For the unauthorized biographizing of one, all must be banned from Apple’s stores. Wiley says sales at Apple’s stores don’t make up a significant fraction of overall trade for the books in question. Still, it’s the nastiness of Jobs’s gesture that counts.

Maybe the best part of the story is that, except for its subject’s meddling, “iCon” likely would have gone unnoticed except among the most devoted Apple acolytes. Thanks to Jobs’s megagenius marketing move, it’s guaranteed a much bigger audience.

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’24’: Week in Review

Week after week, I’ve cursed “24” — like I don’t have anything better to do — for its insistence on portraying senior government officials, even the president — no, especially the president — as cartoonish dolts devoid of common sense and bent on making the wrong decision whenever the opportunity arises. (Tonight’s example: The president — actually the vice president who has taken the helm after the president was critically injured in the downing of Air Force One — orders the Secret Service to arrest a counterterrorist agent who’s in the midst of busting a bad guy who’s determined to set off a nuclear weapon. Because of the president’s idiocy, the bad guy gets away. Of course.)

At the same time, on the strength of seeing the first two or three seasons of “The West Wing” on DVD, I’ve been struck at what an idealistic, admiring portrait of the presidency that show presents. Among liberals, anyway, I think it’s been commonplace to think what a wonderful world this would be if only President Jed Bartlett were running the show (a few years ago, Martin Sheen came to talk at a church here in Berkeley, and the audience treated him with something like reverence that it was clear was due in part to his role as “West Wing” president).

Now I realize that I’ve been cursing and admiring the wrong TV presidents. Yes, the chief executives on “24” are pathetic morons who never let good counsel get in the way of a bad move. And Jed Bartlett’s White House really is too good to be the real nerve center of the free world. But: The “24” version of “reality” is great comic relief, and even the current president looks like a giant compared to the idiots who show up as president on its episodes. “The West Wing” just depresses me with the illusion that we could have leadership so much better than what we’ve settled for.