High Masculine Tones

This is what weenie-punditry looks like, from a corporate weblogger-for-hire, one who is apparently held in high regard by some of my favorite linkmongers:

Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell and most of the opinion media have done everything in their power to scare the daylights out of Americans, going so far as to invent links between Sept. 11 and Saddam Hussein. And it hasn't worked. The people are smarter than that, even though they may be largely ignorant about key facts. This does not mean that they won't support a war when it finally comes. I will too. But that support will be shallow and will start to dissipate in the war's aftermath with the (inevitable, according to the CIA) terrorist attacks against us and the expensive and probably unsuccessful attempt to build an Iraq more to our liking afterward.

Let's gingerly step past, as it were a steaming pile of dogshit on the sidewalk, the smug and squishy statement that Americans may be ignorant, but dammit they've got good common sense. It's tougher to avoid the internal logic of his assertion:

a) this war is being justified by lies and fear-mongering
b) but once the shooting starts, I'll fall right into line
c) even though I'm pretty sure it's going to go horribly wrong (and you'll be sure to hear from me once we're past the point of no return)

No wonder so many Americans regard the term "liberal" with such contempt. Mealy-mouthed unprincipled pandering, wrapped in empty, oppositional-sounding rhetoric. Alterman should consider running for office as a Democrat.

Vancouver, Canada -- 30,000 or so...


A fun stroll through downtown Vancouver yesterday... and though of course estimates vary on how many people were out, suffice it to say there were far more than expected. The final assembly point was desperately undersized, and the overflow of protesters solidly filled more than eight city blocks.

The numbers represented by this and hundreds of other marches are so substantive, and the constituencies so obviously diverse, that they can't be easily ignored or sniggered away. But will the protests change many minds, or significantly shift the terms of debate? Probably not, but undeniably one tangible benefit was won -- today, at least, people need not feel lost within an embattled minority. This disastrous folly that awaits us is being entered into without our consent.

This war will be fought in clear defiance of democratic will worldwide. The biggest marches (in London, Rome, throughout Spain) took place in countries nominally supportive of the Bush administration's position. The abuse in the American press directed at the "disloyalty" of allies such as France and Germany (and yes, Canada) obscures that these governments are simply respecting their publics' overwhelming opposition to a pre-emptive attack. Conversely, the mythical "coalition of the willing" is made up of governments that have been coerced, cajoled, or bribed into cooperation, and who defy and shame their people in doing so. These massive protests are not anomalies -- they are soundly backed by poll after poll.

Sadly, this is unlikely to have any effect on the fevered policy mania emanating from the White House.

We in Canada and other nations who suggest that the Bush administration is on a disastrous course and unworthy of support are frequently charged with "anti-Americanism" -- a vain and peculiar folly, or a moral crime akin to racism ...

Johano Strasser, president of the German PEN Center, the international writers' organization that defends freedom of expression, said that if disagreeing with the United States meant being anti-American, "I know many Americans who are also anti-American.

"I think it's nonsense to talk about pro-Americanism and anti-Americanism," he said. "People have different opinions on very important political questions. Let's talk about the opinions and not the motivation behind them."

For sheer rhetorical fury, I doubt any cheese-eating surrender monkey or resident of Soviet Canuckistan can begin to approach the jeremiad unleashed by U.S. Senator Robert Byrd on the Senate floor:

This Administration, now in power for a little over two years, must be judged on its record. I believe that that record is dismal.

In that scant two years, this Administration has squandered a large projected surplus of some $5.6 trillion over the next decade and taken us to projected deficits as far as the eye can see. This Administration's domestic policy has put many of our states in dire financial condition, under funding scores of essential programs for our people. This Administration has fostered policies which have slowed economic growth. This Administration has ignored urgent matters such as the crisis in health care for our elderly. This Administration has been slow to provide adequate funding for homeland security. This Administration has been reluctant to better protect our long and porous borders.

In foreign policy, this Administration has failed to find Osama bin Laden. In fact, just yesterday we heard from him again marshaling his forces and urging them to kill. This Administration has split traditional alliances, possibly crippling, for all time, International order-keeping entities like the United Nations and NATO. This Administration has called into question the traditional worldwide perception of the United States as well-intentioned, peacekeeper. This Administration has turned the patient art of diplomacy into threats, labeling, and name calling of the sort that reflects quite poorly on the intelligence and sensitivity of our leaders, and which will have consequences for years to come.

... In only the space of two short years this reckless and arrogant Administration has initiated policies which may reap disastrous consequences for years.

One can understand the anger and shock of any President after the savage attacks of September 11. One can appreciate the frustration of having only a shadow to chase and an amorphous, fleeting enemy on which it is nearly impossible to exact retribution.

But to turn one's frustration and anger into the kind of extremely destabilizing and dangerous foreign policy debacle that the world is currently witnessing is inexcusable from any Administration charged with the awesome power and responsibility of guiding the destiny of the greatest superpower on the planet. Frankly many of the pronouncements made by this Administration are outrageous. There is no other word.

Yet this chamber is hauntingly silent.

::Sarah Lyall, New York Times: A Sense of Fine Qualities Trampled and of Something 'Terribly Wrong'
::US Senator Robert Byrd, Reckless Administration May Reap Disastrous Consequences via BookNotes

Weapons in America's overwhelming Shock and Awe arsenal


As the prospect of total war lurches ever-closer to reality, it appears that America's planners intend to attack according to the principles of "Shock and Awe" -- an apocaplyptic rain of warheads, thousands fired in a matter of hours, generating a shitstorm that will make Desert Storm seem like kids playing with peashooters in the backyard. The intention is to leave the Iraqis as stunned and dispirited as the Japanese were after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, twinned cities of megadeath that serve as the inspiration for this approach.

Laura at net.narrative environments has put together a fine posting about Shock and Awe, which she puts into the context of that venerable Rumsfeld hobby-horse, the Revolution in Military Affairs, which in turn is "what happens when the U.S. Military starts waking up to complexity, network dynamics, and the power of simulation."

I won't rip off too many of her links here, but can't resist pointing to the complete text of the book Shock and Awe, written by the model's creators, Harlan Ullman and James Wade.

If an online book is too much about too grim a subject, I happened to be listening when CBC Radio's smart international affairs program Dispatches interviewed Dr. Ullman last week. The first part of the interview proceeds as you might expect, with Ullman methodically outlining his theory and justifying it on humanitarian grounds (arguing that in the long run it reduces casualties to both military and civilian populations). It gets more interesting towards the end, when host Rick MacInnes-Rae draws out Ullman on his broader opinion of the impending conflict. Ullman raises a number of factors why this attack charts a perilous course -- violent backlash in the Arab world, and the absence of the international support required to withstand a vulnerable post-war occupation. The architect of what may be the war's battle plan clearly has doubts about the mission.

Listen to the interview (RealAudio 2.4 MB download)

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[This posting is best enjoyed while listening to the accompanying soundtrack -- a 7.9 MB download of "Creative Freakout" by The Hellers, available as part of Otis Fodder's 365 Days project. While enduring the tedium of download-time, why not fix yourself a tasty, brand-name beverage? Treat yourself right and consume quantities of processed liquids, while we still have the freedom to enjoy them...]


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Rebel anthems by the likes of The Clash sold off for TV commercials are nothing new, culturally speaking. Uber-Baffler Tom Frank's first book The Conquest of Cool is an inspiring tale of swinging sixties marketeers who instinctively knew that values defined in opposition to The Man -- The Hip, The Weird, The Cool -- could in fact be used as selling points for positioning and moving The Product.

Frank stresses throughout that the countercultural attitude of advertisers was not simply a form of co-optation, a strategy to snare the new disposable income of baby boomers. Ad-men at agencies such as Doyle Dane Bernbach sincerely saw themselves as hipster revolutionaries, upending order and ushering in a new age of personal liberation and creativity.

Frank writes:

... their concentration on the symbols of first youth and then culture-rebel owed more to new understandings of consumption and business culture than to a desire to sell the kids. The counterculture served corporate revolutionaries as a projection of the new ideology of business, a living embodiment of attitudes that reflected their own. In its hostility to established tastes, the counterculture seemed to be preparing young people to rebel against whatever they had patronized before and to view the cycles of the new without the suspicion of earlier eras. Its simultaneous craving for authenticity and suspicion of tradition seemed to make the counterculture an ideal vehicle for a vast sea-change in American consuming habits. Through its symbols and myths, leaders of the menswear and advertising industries imagined a consumerism markedly different from its 1950s permutation, a hip consumerism driven by disgust with mass society itself.

Now about this posting's soundtrack... A groovy primary artifact of the Madison Avenue maverick mindset recently popped up on the 365 Days project. "Creative Freakout" was distributed by the LA-based Heller Corporation as a promotional record to its clients. Packed with limp parodies of the protest movement, mixed in with examples of the cheesy jingles that were Heller's bread and butter, the marketer as the true hipster is its unifying theme.

It opens with a narration by a hardboiled Chandleresque character, a "private ear" for the Heller Corporation who suddenly finds himself caught in the midst of a "psychedelic freakout in a parking lot at a Bank of America."

A chick with hair down to her bare feet and a one hundred foot stare in a ten foot room screamed into my ear, "we shall overcome!"

I said, "baby, we did. Haven't you heard our advertising story?"

"Mass media", she sneered, and hit me with a 9X12 picture of Mario Savio.

"Don't knock it kid," I replied, "remember..."

The online excerpt of The Conquest of Cool concludes: If we really want to understand American culture in the sixties, we must acknowledge at least the possibility that the co-opters had it right, that Madison Avenue's vision of the counterculture was in some ways correct."

Or put another way, one reason why marketers are so adept at working rebellious themes into their pitches is that they helped to define those themes in the first place.

It makes sense that the inventive sensibility behind Sharpeworld should come from such pedigree. It's difficult to imagine a better designer than Jennifer Sharpe to bring the singular comedy of Jim Coyle and her father Mal Sharpe to the web...

To my mind, Coyle and Sharpe are the great unknown comic geniuses. They stand alone among all the unknown comic geniuses that I know.

After a few pathetic attempts, I've given up trying to describe their particular brand of anarchic comedy/performance-art/psychodrama. I'll spare you the cliches, and simply urge you check out their material (free, presumably legal MP3's) and the host of articles and photos that the site has collected.

I'll add another favorite artifact: Mal Sharpe guests on Kenny G's WFMU radio show in 2001... The host plays Mal a disturbing fan-tape sent in by a listener, one who obviously has the DJ confused with that other Kenny G. A planned tribute is deferred in favour of a surprisingly gentle live telephone interview with the fan. The rest of the show is packed with rare recordings. Radio at its best. Listen (RealAudio)

::The Official Coyle & Sharpe Website

A Spanish art historian has uncovered what was alleged to be the first use of modern art as a deliberate form of torture, with the discovery that mind-bending prison cells were built by anarchist artists 65 years ago during the country's bloody civil war.

Bauhaus artists such as Kandinsky, Klee and Itten, as well as the surrealist film-maker Luis Bunuel and his friend Salvador Dali, were said to be the inspiration behind a series of secret cells and torture centres built in Barcelona and elsewhere, yesterday's El Pais newspaper reported.

Most were the work of an enthusiastic French anarchist, Alphonse Laurencic, who invented a form of "psychotechnic" torture, according to the research of the historian Jose Milicua.

::Giles Tremlett, The Guardian: Anarchists and the fine art of torture

I never had much regard for that "Colin Powell the dove" line -- did anybody doubt this "shift" would come eventually?

Some US government sources have suggested that Mr Bush told Mr Powell to "get with the programme" and recognise that war was inevitable. It is perhaps more likely that Mr Powell himself saw the writing was on the wall. "He felt he would have more influence inside the tent than outside it," said one senior European diplomat in Washington. "That's been Powell's pattern over the years. He knew the president had crossed a line so he followed him."

And let's not forget this, as the claims mount...

There are no current links between the Iraqi regime and the al-Qaeda network, according to an official British intelligence report seen by BBC News.

The classified document, written by defence intelligence staff three weeks ago, says there has been contact between the two in the past.

But it assessed that any fledgling relationship foundered due to mistrust and incompatible ideologies.

That conclusion flatly contradicts one of the main charges laid against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein by the United States and Britain - that he has cultivated contacts with the group blamed for the 11 September attacks.

The report emerges even as Washington was calling Saddam a liar for denying, in a television interview with former Labour MP and minister Tony Benn, that he had any links to al-Qaeda.

::Toby Harnden, London Telegraph: French betrayal turns reluctant warrior Powell into a hawk
::BBC: Leaked report rejects Iraqi al-Qaeda link

...both (and much, much worse) via Dack