An old tradition in my family ("old" meaning it dates back to the dawn of, well, my life): Reading or listening to Dylan Thomas’s "A Child’s Christmas in Wales." So here it is, Infospigot-style
Berkeley Braces for Xmas
Even in Berkeley, overrun as it is by irreligious leftists (like me) and know-it-alls (like me) who will tell you (are you listening?) without you ever thinking of asking that you’d be better off (you would) to just skip this whole December holiday deal with its materialistic and reactionary churchish trappings, we have Christmas light displays. This one’s on a street called The Arlington, one of two streets in the north end of town that carry a definite article in their name but stand unadorned by designation as street or avenue or way. The Arlington has been in such bad repair for so long (it’s getting fixed now) that one refers to each of the multitude of pavement issues along the street as "a pothole." Indefinite article. Or maybe "other-abled asphalt." I’m sure a city commission has ruled on the matter.
In any case, a walk this evening took me from an automatic teller to a bookstore up some long flights of neighborhood steps to The Arlington, where the above-depicted scene held pedestrians and motorists in thrall. I walked back by way of the open-till-midnight drug store and several more quietly lighted streets.
More on Christmas lights tomorrow.
‘Let’s Stay in Iraq … for a Month’
A remarkable human-in-the-street story in The New York Times on Wednesday about how the American public feels about the war. The story cites another poll that illustrates doubts about what the whole thing is about: This time, a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll that shows 47 percent of respondents feel the war is going worse than it was a year ago, 32 percent think it’s about the same, and 20 percent think it’s going better than it was then. Those 20 percent must be on antidepressants.
The article is full of quotes from people who mostly sound resigned to the thing just dragging on the way it is now. One guy, identified as a cotton farmer in Texas, opines that opinion polls and public debate about the war are aiding and abetting the enemy. Not a single person comes out and says that they thought the war was a good idea to begin with. Most striking to me was one woman, a U.S. Army civilian employee in Virginia, who is quoted as saying she supports the troops’ presence in Iraq now and backs Bush’s plan. But look at the way she qualifies her support:
” ‘I think we should stay through the elections. I support the president’s plan up to there. But if we’re going to focus on Iraq without support of other nations, I see the violence increasing. I can’t see a democratic Iraq. So what are we doing there?’ ”
This is another way of saying, “I can stand for this for another five weeks.” How many people like this are out there, both conflicted and just about at the end of their rope?
It Was 9/11, Stupid
I just got around to reading a New Yorker piece from the December 6 issue; which is pretty good for me, actually; I usually don’t open New Yorker issues for a month or so after they arrive. There’s a post-mortem piece on election polling by Louis Menand called “Permanent Fatal Errors: Did the voters send a message?” (unfortunately, it’s not posted on The New Yorker site; a Google search turns up a doubtless unauthorized copy of it here). Menand sat in on a meeting of “political scientists and polling experts” at Stanford a week after the election.
The piece talks briefly about how far the exit polls were off in a bunch of key states (not just Ohio and Florida), but doesn’t get into anyone’s thinking about why that happened.
Two interesting take-aways from the article, though. Even a Bush pollster concluded that voters’ concern about “moral issues,” supposedly such a driving force for so many Bush voters, was way overblown in post-election reporting. More important was one pollster’s conclusions about the issue that really locked things up for Bush:
“Why did President Bush win this election?” Gary Langer, the director of polling at ABC News, said at the Stanford conference. “I would suggest that the answer can be expressed in a single phrase: 9/11.” No one there disagreed. “Fifty-four per cent of voters on Election Day said that the country was safer now than it was before September 11, 2001,” Langer pointed out. “And perhaps, I would suggest, more important, forty-nine per cent of voters said they trusted only President Bush to handle terrorism, eighteen points more than said they trusted only John Kerry.” He went on, “Among those who trust only Bush to handle terrorism, ninety-seven per cent, quite logically, voted for him. Now, right there, if forty-nine per cent of Americans trust only Bush to handle terrorism and ninety-seven per cent of them voted for him, those are forty-eight of his total fifty-one percentage points in this election. Throw in a few more votes on ancillary issues and that’s all she wrote.” Langer thinks that a key statistic is the change in the votes of married women. Gore won the women’s vote by eleven per cent; Kerry won by only three per cent, and he lost most of those votes among married women. Bush got forty-nine per cent of the votes of married women in 2000; he got fifty-five per cent this year. And when you ask married women whom they trust to keep the country safe from terrorists fifty-three per cent say “only Bush.” (The really salient demographic statistic from the election is one that most Democrats probably don’t even want to think about: If white men could not vote, Kerry would have defeated Bush by seven million votes.
I know this isn’t news so much anymore. I’m just trying to keep track of how we got where we’ve gotten.
A Reading, an Observation
–First, I’d like to recognize a letter in the arts section of the San Francisco Chronicle. The missive from sonemone named Neil Gelineau complains in a tone of rising pique about the rudeness of play-goers and the cramped seating in the city’s theaters. Then he concludes:
“San Francisco deserves better theaters in better locations. The Golden Gate Theatre is in the Tenderloin, and it disgusts me to walk the block or two into and out of the show with the lowest forms of human life I have ever witnessed.”
Wow.
–Second, through happenstance I just found out that if you plug the term life inspirations into Google — just those two words, in that order, with no quote marks — an entry on Infospigot comes up Number 5 of 699,000 entries. It’s titled “Real True-to-Life Inspirations … ,” and until I looked at it, I had no recollection of the life-affirming words I had offered to help light our sad, despairing world. Now that I’ve read the item, I’m kind of choked up.
Solstice
Strange to say "happy solstice," at least here in the northern hemisphere. Or maybe not — this is where things turn around and get brighter and brighter, right?
Anyway, I went looking for a site that might depict the light and dark areas of the Earth, reasonably sure that I’d find something interesting out there. And I wasn’t disappointed. The World Sunlight Map uses NASA, Defense Department, and weather satellite images along with geomapping software to render a current picture of sunlight and cloud cover all over the world. The picture above is today’s noon PST image.
Those Crazy Americans
You’ve got to love those crazy Americans. Wait, that’s me, too. Change that to “us crazy Americans.” Just seven weeks ago, we had a chance to fire the guy who decided that the single most important thing to do in the whole wide world, just couldn’t wait to get it done, was to bust world-class bad guy and former U.S. ally (those crazy Americans!) Saddam Hussein.
But no. For reasons still inadequately explained (and no, I’m not buying fraud as the answer, or the “morality” thing, either) and perhaps irretrievably buried in the minds of tens of millions of voters, the guy was re-elected.
Now, the Washington Post and ABC News are out with a new poll: A majority of us crazy Americans now think the war’s, like, a mistake:
“Most Americans now believe the war with Iraq was not worth fighting and more than half want to fire embattled Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the chief architect of that conflict, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.
“The survey found that 56 percent of the country now believes that the cost of the conflict in Iraq outweighs the benefits, while 42 percent disagreed. It marked the first time since the war began that a clear majority of Americans have judged the war to have been a mistake.
“Barely a third of the country approves of the job that Rumsfeld is doing as defense secretary, and 52 percent said President Bush should sack Rumsfeld, a view shared by a big majority of Democrats and political independents.”
But then comes the number that probably partly explains the way we crazy Americans voted last month: “… Nearly six in 10 — 58 percent — said the United States should keep its military forces in Iraq rather than withdraw them, a proportion that has not changed in seven months.”
OK — that’s honorable. Let’s not cut and run and leave those nice Iraqis in the lurch. The thing you have to question about that sort of thinking, though, is the assumption that our indefinite presence is a stabilizing, positive influence. I mean, we sure can’t imagine anyplace in the world that doesn’t benefit from our warm attention, but at some point you have to consider the possibility that Iraq could be better off with some different kind of foreign oversight, or regime, than what we’re trying to impose.
Free (from Rhapsody) at Last
[Updated April 2005]
First, let me just say that to cancel your Rhapsody subscription, call 1 866 834 5509 (the message on that line announces you’ve reached the "Rhapsody Cancellation Team"). Per a comment below, 1 866 311 0566 also works; the number currently listed online is 1 866 563 6157. All three appear to work. The listed hours of operation are 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time from Monday through Friday and 10:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time on Saturday and Sunday.
Now to our story:
I subscribed to Listen.com’s Rhapsody music service sometime early last year. I was done with my free ("illegal") music downloading, still wanted to listen to stuff on my computer, and for one reason or another wasn’t into any of the other paid alternatives. So I signed up for ten bucks a month and streamed music to my heart’s occasional content (the absence of Aretha Franklin’s "Until You Come Back to Me" from the Rhapsody library was a near-fatal flaw). But late in the spring, the TechTV layoff separated me from my Windows laptop, and I bought a little iBook as its more-than-capable replacement. Alas, Rhapsody doesn’t play on the Mac. Although I could still use the service from Windows machines installed at Infospigot World Headquarters, I decided to cancel the service. …
The Always-On Military
Monday’s New York Times features a long story on how the military’s speeded-up schedule of war-zone deployments and redeployments is affecting troops and their families. One thing comes through in so many of these stories: the lack of enthusiasm so many of the interviewed service members have for the job that’s been dumped in their lap. They come off as stoic and steadfast, determined to carry through on their military commitment and to stand up for their buddies. But you don’t read about any of the lower-rung troops who get quoted in these stories to talk about the “march of freedom” or “transformative power of liberty” or any of the other catch-phrases that Bush and his crowd throw around. Maybe the reporters just leave out those quotes and focus on the doubts and dissatisfactions they’re hearing. Or maybe the ones who have to go and face the reality of this war aren’t really seeing or feeling the nobility of the cause. Or hell, maybe even in World War II, which my generation and those following see at a great distance, the men sent to fight saw it just as a job. Maybe, even then, there was no explicit talk about the bigger issues and forces involved.
Anyway, you feel for these people and their families, so many of whom are now subject to constant upheaval in their lives, not knowing when the next deployment will happen of what it will bring when it comes. The story ends:
“In Tucson, Elena Zurheide is preparing Christmas for her 7-and-a-half-month-old son, Robert III. ‘I hate Christmas,’ Ms. Zurheide said. ‘I hate holidays. I hate everything right now.’
“Her husband, Robert Jr., was a lance corporal in the Marines. He was killed in Falluja this spring, a few weeks before their son was born. He was on his second tour to Iraq.
” ‘I never wanted him to go a second time,’ she said. ‘I just started having the feeling that we were pushing our luck too far, and he thought so, too.’
“She said she wrote to Corporal Zurheide’s commander before he left, asking that her huband be permitted to stay behind – or that he at least be allowed to wait for the birth of their son. She said she never heard back.
” ‘I should have broken his arm to keep him here,’ she said. “‘ knew it was too much to go again.’
“Her son, Ms. Zurheide said, looks just like his father.”
The story says that 100 of the 1,300 U.S. military fatalities in Iraq have occurred among soldiers and Marines on their second tours. Times columnist Bob Herbert’s Monday column, talks a little more bluntly about the effects of the repeat deployments.
The Man Who Wouldn’t Go Away
After an absence of a few years, “Hawaii Five-O” is back on local television in the Bay Area. For nostalgia’s sake, and because our hundreds of channels of DirecTV are filled with a whole lot of crap, Kate turned it on last night while she was stringing lights on our tree, and I wound up watching nearly the whole thing. The show became a favorite back in the ’80s in reruns because the shallow characters, formulaic plots, cliched scripts, and bad acting made it ideal for the “Mystery Science Theater” treatment: We’d watch and supply our own dialogue. Fun for the whole family, no controlled substances necessary.
As bad as ” Hawaii Five-O” looked back in the ’80s, it hasn’t aged well. I’d guess it looks worse than ever largely because a host of superior — at least as far as commercial TV goes — police dramas have come out since McGarrett, Dan-O, Chin Ho, Zulu as Kono, and Herman Wedemeyer as Duke vanished after their 13 seasons on CBS (then the longest-running police show in prime-time history; I think ABC;s “NYPD Blue” is in its 13th season now). First, “Hill Street Blues,” which died a more or less noble death, canceled before it could get bad. Then, in no particular order, “Homicide: Life on the Street” (killed prematurely), “NYPD Blue” (which has long overstayed its welcome), “Law and Order” (which has produced one-spinoff too many with “L&O: Criminal Intent”), “CSI” (the Las Vegas original; the Miami version’s David Caruso is the Jack Lord of the now generation, a portentous and puffed-up mainland McGarrett), HBO’s “The Wire,” and, for good measure, the British import “Prime Suspect.”
The main thing all these shows have going for them is that — while all too often succumbing to the temptation to tie up stories with neat endings — they’ve dropped the pretense that cop business is clean, orderly, or enlightened. It’s sort of the same thing that’s happened with medical dramas: “Dr. Kildare,” “Ben Casey,” and “Marcus Welby” gave way to “St. Elsewhere,” “Chicago Hope,” and “ER”; the newer generation of shows appear to resemble actual hospitals and maybe even real life a bit more than the earlier doctors-as-demigods offerings.
But back to last night’s “Hawaii Five-O.” The episode involved a wrongly convicted murder suspect, a prison siege, a doctor with a shotgun taped to his neck, a crooked defense lawyer, a frightened witness, cartoonish thugs, an inscrutable Chinese gambler who actually said, “Things are not always as they appear,” and lots of the usual Jack Lord pose-striking. Everything about the show reeked, even the lighting, camera work, and sets. How did it get the ratings to stay on the air so long? One clue: at one point, Kate said unprompted, “Jack Lord was really handsome.” And obviously they were the product of an era where lots of people wanted to believe in an invincible, two-fisted straight-shooter like McGarrett.
What I started to wonder, though, is whether the current crop of cop shows are going to look just as wretched, crude, and artless in 25 years, when they’ve been superceded by something newer and better and we’re looking at them with different eyes.