THE LOWRY FIASCO might not have caused our Gov. to reconsider his past actions, but it still offers the rest of us a lesson: There's not a line between excess chumminess and harassment, there's a continuum. A politician, whose success depends on making and keeping friendships, oughta know enough to err on the safe end of that continuum. If Lowry really was the kind of "traditional politician" conservatives denounce him as, he'd have known this. In the end it doesn't matter that Lowry probably wasn't trying to get those staff women into bed when he nudged or slapped them or whatever. But he should know in the world of politics, persuasion is everything. And in the world of persuasion, perception is everything. NOT FADE AWAY AND RADIATE: I've dissed Wired magazine in the past, but must draw praise toward a one-page plug in its April ish all about Ed Grothus. He's a junk collector in Los Alamos, NM. His Los Alamos Sales Co. shop buys and sells leftover artifacts (computer stuff, office stuff, construction stuff, scientific equipment) from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, birthplace of the atomic bomb and longtime recipient of Cold War spending waste. The piece doesn't mention Ed's son Tom, the Seattle writer-cartoonist who in the '80s made a cute series of exquisitely droll mini-comics (Manzine, Errata, The Bermuda Love Triangle). WEB SITE OF THE WEEK: Better Faster Be$t$ellers (http://www.digimark.net/mful/bselcurr.htm) is a weekly fanciful satire of commercial literature that purports to be "entirely the result of algorithmically compressing (or compacting together) the less dense, slower titles of the current Publishers Weekly bestseller list." It's doubtful, tho, that a random-recombination program could come up with such mirthful titles as "Men are From the Hot Zone, Women Are From the Surface of Common Sense," "The Celestine Bedtime Stories," "Time to Correct the Warrior Treatment" ("by Seinfeld with Fyodor Dostoevsky"), or "Makes Me Wanna Do Ten Highly-Effective Stupid Things to 7 Driven People." The same home page also contains Most Fucked Up Person Alive Tells All, an anonymously written pseudo-autobiography written in a cut-up nonsense style similar to that of Mark Leyner. OF OXFORDS AND BIRKENSTOCKS: While I've admittedly not been Evergreen State's biggest rah-rah booster (the world's a lot more diverse than the world they teach at Evergreen, the mythical world of the New England/Upper Midwest "progressive" utopia), the state House's plan to slash its budget and ratchet up its tuition strikes as pure censorship. Some GOP legislators admit it, using the word "liberal" as an all-purpose purjorative to justify their McCarthyite vindictiveness against the school. But the smear campaign against Evergreen goes beyond demonizing people who look or act different. There's something about the very notion of a school that encourages (or at least claims to encourage) "free thought" that strikes a nerve among some who want to build a sociocultural system of naked fear, greed and obedience.
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