Friday, February 21, 2003

TONITE'S PANEL DISCUSSION at the (beautiful) main Tacoma Public Library was a smash. Some 60 Citizens of Destiny listened to me, KIRO-AM's Dave Ross, and two Tacoma News Tribune writers debate whether or not we're all amusing ourselves into oblivion. I, as I told you here I would, said we're not.

If anything, I said, the current would-be social controllers aren't trying to get us to ignore serious issues by force-feeding us light entertainment. They're trying to get us obsessed with certain serious issues at a non-rational level of fear and obedience.

As I'd expected, there were several cranky old hippies who pined for the pre-TV golden age they were absolutely convinced had existed just before they were born, and who didn't believe me when I told them the old newsreels had war theme songs long before CNN. I also tried to reassure some of the library loyalists in the crowd that books weren't going away anytime soon (even if library budgets are currently big on DVDs and, in Seattle's case, on building projects rather than on book buying); whether the stuff inside tomorrow's books will be worth reading is a different question.

One woman in the audience noted that Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (the topic of an everybody-in-town-reads-one-book promotion to which this panel was a tie-in event) ended with a scene of people reciting from their favorite banned books, which they'd cared to memorize. In a variation on the old "desert island disc" question, she asked the panel what books we'd prefer to memorize. I mumbled something about The Gambler and Fanny Hill, saying they represented skills and pursuits that some people in a post-apocalyptic situation might not consider vital to survival but I would. I'm sure tomorrow I'll think of a few tomes far more appropriate to the hypothetical situation. If you've any desert-island books, feel free to email the titles and reasons why you'd choose them.

posted by clark 12:51 AM

Thursday, February 20, 2003

WE'RE JUST SO COMPLETELY BURNED OUT on celebrity interviews; but here's one that's not boring, with Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Wheadon.

posted by clark 9:44 AM

Wednesday, February 19, 2003

I DON'T ALWAYS AGREE with web-pundit Sam Smith. (A self-identified "progressive" who felt betrayed by Bill Clinton's conservatism-lite, Smith fell too easily for some of the impeachment gang's worst allegations.) But he's just posted a very lucid li'l piece about what the peace movement needs to do next. (Scroll to the second item down on the linked page.)

posted by clark 10:02 AM

Monday, February 17, 2003

AMUSEMENT PARKING: I've been recruited into speaking this Thursday at the Tacoma Public Library's main branch (1102 Tacoma Avenue South; 7 pm).

They're running one of those "everybody in town reads the same book" promos, based this time on Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. The panel I'll be at will discuss Bradbury's premise of a future dystopia where audiovisual media are drugs and books are outlawed.

This nightmare image has been very popular among highbrow technophobes, particuarly by Neil Postman. In his 1986 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman essentially argued that Those Kids Today were all a bunch of TV-addicted idiots; that new info technologies were always inherently reactionary and anti-thought; and that The Word was good for you and The Image was bad for you.

I've written about Postman in the past: I disagreed with his premises then and still do.

The Simpsons and The Sopranos are, I argue, more intelligent than the books of Danielle Steel and John Grisham. Secondary and tertiary cable channels provide more highbrow arts and culture than PBS ever did. The Internet has helped to democratize the written word (and helped get the current peace movement jump-started).

And kids' attention spans seem to be getting longer these days. I've written before how every Harry Potter book is at least 100 pages longer than the previous one; and about those PC adventure games where you have to methodically explore and experiment for weeks or months before discovering the solution.

Postman, and most of his leftist pop-culture-haters, apparently believe there had been a pre-TV golden age when everybody was a Serious Reader, every newspaper was a junior New York Times, and every magazine was a junior Atlantic Monthly.

Not so. Escapism has always been with us. We are a species that craves stories, pleasure, beauty, and diversion. Bradbury himself is an entertainer. (In the early '50s he sold stories to EC Comics, whose Tales from the Crypt and other titles were denounced in the U.S. Congress as corrupters of innocent youth.)

And no, The Word isn't in decline. We're more dependent upon words than ever. Rather than dying, the book biz seems to be weathering the current fiscal storm better than the TV networks, and a lot better than the movie theater chains and the cable TV operators.

And those words aren't always progressive or enlightening. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the anti-Jewish hoax that's become recently popular among Islamic fundamentalists, is a book. The Bell Curve, a pile of pseudo-scientific gibberish intended as an excuse for anti-black racism, is a book.

Entertainment can give a context for ideas and propose a way of seeing the world. Few people knew this more fully than Francois Truffaut, who directed the movie version of Fahrenheit 451. Truffaut was a lifelong student and admirer of great films. He wrote elequently about how the perfect scene, or even the perfect single image, could immediately express whole ranges of thoughts and feelings.

The question should really be what contexts and worldviews emanate from the entertainments we're being given. That's what I hope to ask in Tacoma this Thursday. Hope you can attend.

posted by clark 1:39 PM

IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN offers a different theory behind the warmongering. He suspects it's not for oil nor for "liberation," but plain ol' warmongering for warmongering's sake:

"The hawks... believe that the world position of the United States has been steadily declining since at least the Vietnam War. They believe that the basic explanation for this decline is the fact that U.S. governments have been weak and vacillating in their world policies. (They believe this is even true of the Reagan administration, although they do not dare to say this aloud.) They see a remedy, a simple remedy. The U.S. must assert itself forcefully and demonstrate its iron will and its overwhelming military superiority. Once that is done, the rest of the world will recognize and accept U.S. primacy in everything. The Europeans will fall into line. The potential nuclear powers will abandon their projects. The U.S. dollar will once again rise supreme. The Islamic fundamentalists will fade away or be crushed. And we shall enter into a new era of prosperity and high profit.

"We need to understand that they really believe all of this, and with a great sense of certitude and determination. That is why all the public debate, worldwide, about the wisdom of launching a war has been falling on deaf ears. They are deaf because they are absolutely sure that everyone else is wrong, and furthermore that shortly everyone else will realize that they have been wrong.

"It is important to note one further element in the self-confidence of the hawks. They believe that a swift and relatively easy military victory is at hand - a war of weeks, not of months and certainly not of still longer. The fact that virtually all the prominent retired generals in the U.S. and the U.K. have publicly stated their doubts on this military assessment is simply ignored. The hawks (almost all civilians) do not even bother to answer them."

posted by clark 11:15 AM

Sunday, February 16, 2003

THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY TASTES LIKE: It just so happened that the big rally starting off Saturday's peace march took place outside Fisher Pavilion (where the Flag Plaza used to be). Inside the pavilion was Festival Sundiata, an annual African American crafts and culture fair. That was the reason Philly's Best, the black-owned cheesesteak house at 23rd & Union, brought its mobile van there that day.

Its delectable sandwiches happened to be the perfect peace-march meal—hearty, flavorful, made with person-to-person care by an independent business, and named for the birthplace of modern democracy.

The march attracted at least 30,000 people and possibly many more. The police kept to themselves. The marchers were remarkably upbeat. There was such a vibe of togetherness and optimism, one wishes the march had led to a closing rally-party in a park rather than merely to a dispersal point in front of the INS jailhouse.

The question remains: Did anybody in power pay attention to the thousands marching here, and the millions marching worldwide?

We can be reasonably certain the Bush goon squad has privately pooh-poohed all the protests as the impotent work of a few scattered '60s relics who refuse to get with the proverbial program. The professional bigots on hate-talk radio and the Fox Fiction Channel are assuredly poring over their theasauri this afternoon, devising newer and meaner epithets to hurl against anybody who dares to question instead of obey.

But Saturday's events prove more and more of us refuse to be cowed by the fearmongers.

We can stand up and resist. We can answer deliberate fear with compassionate love.

Even if the near-right Democrats are afraid to come along, we can let them know it's in their best electoral interest to listen to us.

We can encourage individual Republican politicians to break off from the hate machine if they're ever going to win another "swing district" election.

We close today with a line from the ineptly directed, but politically prescient, Attack of the Clones:

"The day we stop believing democracy can work is the day we lose it."

posted by clark 6:47 PM

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