Memorials

For Memorial Day, a quote from our master memorialist, Maya Lin, who gave us the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington DC from an interview with her in The New Yorker.

Lin has a simple view of what the disputes boiled down to: she was the only one who understood that the design would work. She expresses no surprise that the memorial has been almost universally accepted as success, even by some of its most obnoxious early critics. She always knew that she was right. When the wall was being constructed, the fund's project director, Robert Doubek, asked her what she thought people would do when they first saw it. “I think he wanted me to say, ‘They're gonna love it,” ’ Lin told the Times, when she recounted the story. “And I said something like ‘Well, I think they're going to be really moved by it.’ What I didn't tell him is that they are probably going to cry and cry and cry.”

The assumption in the article is that a memorial that “works” is one that hurts. Not everyone shares that assumption. But the article is correct: we should feel at least a brush with the pain of loss as we memorialize our fallen soldiers.

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Update: Maya Lin in The New York Review of Books: Making The Memorial.

These were all the thoughts that were in my mind before I went to see the site.

Without having seen it, I couldn’t design the memorial, so a few of us traveled to Washington, D.C., and it was at the site that the idea for the design took shape. The site was a beautiful park surrounded by trees, with traffic and noise coming from one side—Constitution Avenue.

I had a simple impulse to cut into the earth.

Public good

The tech industry is full of libertarians who think that government meddling only causes trouble, and the free market would take care of all of our needs if we just got rid of that pesky, wasteful government. This isn't even true of the tech industry itself: Google demonstrates that government investment in public knowledge infrastructure accomplishes things that private investment would not.

What is not widely known is the contribution that federal research funding played in creating Google. Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergei Brin --- two computer science graduate students at Stanford University. Stanford was one of a number of universities that received funding under the ''Digital Libraries Initiative''
...
Larry Page was funded under the DLI as a graduate student researcher, and Sergei Brin was supported with an NSF graduate student fellowship.
...
Google was also prototyped on equipment paid for by the federal government's Digital Library Initiative.

Today's quote

Here's Kenneth "The Threatening Storm" Pollack describing a Certain World Leader.

[He] has a number of pathologies ... he is an inveterate gambler and risk-taker who regularly twists his calculation of the odds to suit his preferred course of action. He bases his calculations on assumptions that outsiders often find bizarre and has little understanding of the larger world. He is a solitary decision-maker who relies little on advice from others. And he has poor sources of information about matters outside [the country], along with intelligence services that generally tell him what they believe he wants to hear.

Who do you think he's talking about?

Wheels within wheels

Brad DeLong points out that the Guardian reports that the CIA is thinking we've been played by the Iranians.

An urgent investigation has been launched in Washington into whether Iran played a role in manipulating the US into the Iraq war by passing on bogus intelligence through Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, it emerged yesterday.

Some intelligence officials now believe that Iran used the hawks in the Pentagon and the White House to get rid of a hostile neighbour, and pave the way for a Shia-ruled Iraq.
...
"It's pretty clear that Iranians had us for breakfast, lunch and dinner," said an intelligence source in Washington yesterday. "Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the US for several years through Chalabi."

Larry Johnson, a former senior counter-terrorist official at the state department, said: "When the story ultimately comes out we'll see that Iran has run one of the most masterful intelligence operations in history. They persuaded the US and Britain to dispose of its greatest enemy."

As the man said, the question is not "are you paranoid?" The question is, "are you paranoid enough?"

Choice

Bitch magazine is super-cool. Dig this new article about the semantics of "choice" in pseudo-feminist rhetoric.

The word’s primacy in the arena of reproductive rights has slowly caused the phrase "It’s my choice" to become synonymous with "It's a feminist thing to do" --- or, perhaps more precisely, "It is antifeminist to criticize my decision." The result has been a rapid depoliticizing of the term and an often misguided application of feminist ideology to consumer imperatives, invoked not only for the right to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy, but also for the right to buy all manner of products marketed to women, from cigarettes to antidepressants to diet frozen pizzas.

Plenty more good stuff in the Bitch archives, too.

Sontag

Susan Sontag risks asinine misreadings from the right to bring you her thoughts on Abu Ghraib. It's so complex and good, I refuse to excerpt it, since you should go read the whole thing.

(A belated thank you to the brilliant and gorgeous Thorn Coyle for passing this one on to me!)

Whoops! So sorry!

Just guess: who is this unsigned editorial talking about?

Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.

New York Times 26 May 2004

Yep! They're talking about themselves, the New York Times! The alleged flagship of the supposedly "liberal" media. Salon has more.

Paranoia will destroy ya

Conspiracy theories flourish in an environment where good information is not available ... like our media environment in which the Bush administration has the press corps cowed. Most conspiracy theories are wrong, but under these circumstances they're tempting. So:

Need a little extra paranoia today? Then play Osama bin Lotto!

My money's on 10 October --- fill the airwaves in the run-up to Election Day ...

You had to be there

A very odd story from Long story, short pier, by way of A 20'x20' Room. It's, you know, the sort of thing you'll like if you like that sort of thing.

If you do like that sort of thing, there's a good chance that you'll really like the punchline at the end.

... we were headed off elsewhere, we found the Resistance and Morah didn’t want to talk to them since she thought she was dead, too, and there was some more stuff with red dust and giant metal bugs and an ancient city, and the important thing here aside from the fact that we did in the end manage to stop the red dust from swallowing pretty much the entire world is that in the course of fighting off an attack by the soldiers from one of the city ships that fly across the sky ...

Art

You may not have heard of the Museum of Bad Art. It's more than just a joke --- though it is, of course, mostly that --- there's something valuable about looking at how bad art works, just as there's value in criticism that looks at how good art works.

And their online gallery is a classic addictive web-procrastination tool.

Antiwar meme

I just received this chain letter from my mother.

When Norway was occupied by Germany in 1940, Norwegian women began to knit red caps for children as a way of letting everyone know that they did not like what was happening in their country. The result was that whenever Norwegians left their homes: to go to the store, to work, etc, they could see that the majority opposed what was going on in their country.

Many of us strongly oppose what this administration has done and we need to recognize each other very easily so we can see that thinking people are still the majority.

Please wear RED every Friday between now and election day. Wear a little or a lot --- just be sure that when you leave your house to go about your day --- to work, to school, to the store, to the gas station, wherever you go in your daily routine --- that everyone who sees you will see that you are wearing red because you don't approve of our current administration's policies.

I think it's an elegant idea. Pass it on.

Today's couplet

Amazing what you find in the pages of The Economist. On the subject of rock 'n' roll lifestyle, Ted Nugent tells us that he's wiser than Jerry Garcia.

Jerry got high and Jerry is dead
I went hunting and I'm still Ted

Blather

Reading opaque contemporary academic theory-head writing is a vice of mine. I love it when Donna Haraway says stuff like

The evidence is building of a need for a theory of ‘difference” whose geometries, paradigms, and logics break out of binaries, dialectics, and nature/culture models of any kind. Otherwise, threes will always reduce to twos, which quickly become lonely ones in the vanguard. And no one learns to count to four. These things matter politically.

and I'm not afraid to admit it.

But.

For every sentence of difficult theory-head prose which says something incisive like that, there's an entire Routledge book that doesn't seem to say anything at all — beyond being a kind of eruption of ugly lefty academic poetry.

Mark Crispin Miller, himself a lefty academic, has some ideas about where this stuff comes from.

The merciless abstractness of the prose, with its consciousness-defying sentences, dependent clauses tacked onto (and tucked into) dependent clauses, and almost every word a ponderous multisyllable, inhibits us from noticing how much of all this work is merely self-obsessed and self-promotional. Theory's heavy leftish filigree, moreover, even has its audience, and the likes of Roger Kimball, thinking that the stuff is radical. Such affectation is especially important in an institution as completely out-of-it, politically, as the academy, whose members mostly never go to “meet the people where they are,” because they don't have time, and don't know how, and probably don't even want to, since the institution won't award them any brownie points for doing it. Thus shunted off into the furthest margins, the theorists wax “political” as if to reassure themselves that they are where it's happening, and that they do make a difference — but their peculiar view of “power” prevents them from connecting, ever, with reality as most people inhabit it. Indeed, that view induces them to see that very failure as itself politically progressive. Since “power” so values clarity and logic, good grammar and a solid argument, it must be really right-on to do sloppy work.

Of course, he can't manage the trick without using “scare quotes” on a few problematic “words,” but I forgive him.

(Also: Miller is a vigorous critic of our president, most notably in being the author of the smart, serious, and scary book The Bush Dyslexicon, which I cannot recommend highly enough.)

Google's ten things

On their corporate information pages, you can see a list of ten things Google has found to be true.

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow
2. It's best to do one thing really, really well
3. Fast is better than slow
4. Democracy on the web works
5. You don't need to be at your desk to need an answer
6. You can make money without doing evil
7. There's always more information out there
8. The need for information crosses all borders
9. You can be serious without a suit
10. Great just isn't good enough

There's lots more about each of these points there. Not anything that would surprise anyone wise, but strong stuff for the general shape of the industry.

An exercise for the student: Which of these things does Microsoft know?

An advanced exercise for the student: Which of these things does Microsoft mistakenly think that they know?

Get your war on

It's political, incisive, made with clip art, full of bad language, and funny as hell. I cannot describe the majesty of Get Your War On.

The most recent installment delivers the goods, though my favorite remains the bit when Kissenger was named chair of the commission to investigate 9/11.

Seder

My seders are not like this. Mostly not, anyway.

The Four Questions (re-written for a Lesbian Feminist Santa Cruz Seder that strangely is NOT vegetarian)

Deja vu all over again

O people of Baghdad remember that for 26 generations you have suffered under strange tyrants who have ever endeavoured to set on Arab house against another in order that they might profit by your dissensions. This policy is abhorrent to Great Britain and her Allies, for there can be neither peace nor prosperity where there is enmity and misgovernment. Therefore I am commanded to invite you, through your nobles and elders and representatives, to participate in the management of your civil affairs in collaboration with the political representatives of Great Britain who accompany the British Army, so that you may be united with your kinsmen in North, East, South, and West in realising the aspirations of your race.

Sir Stanley Maude, 19 March 1917

I can't imagine why the Iraqis have trouble trusting our good intentions.

I know the feeling

It's a dilemma we all face.

I've either got to narrow the scope of things I claim to have an informed opinion on, clone myself, acquire a staff, or give up sleep.

Brad DeLong

Hitch

From Long story; short pier, a weblog full of strange stuff, this gem:

Roz Kaveney knew Christopher Hitchens. And you, sir --

Oh, my. Here’s Andrew Sullivan quoting Christopher Hitchens, holding forth in Scarborough Country last night on the subject of Michael Moore:

But speaking here in my capacity as a polished, sophisticated European as well, it seems to me the laugh here is on the polished, sophisticated Europeans. They think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they’ve taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.

And here’s what Roz has to say about that:

This is, after all, a charming effete fop with an interest in alcohol who has become the house ex-lefty of a lot of American right-wingers who think that all European intellectuals are self-hating, effete wits.

Chin-chin.

Today's quote

Mind you, she said it in New York City, not in a place like where most Americans live.

Our songs and cities are the best things about us.

Jane Jacobs

Read!

You have likely seen those American Library Association posters with celebrities holding books under the big injunction Read. It turns out they have an online catalogue of the posters, which is strangely fascinating, because obviously some of the celebs have chosen their own books and others have just taken whatever was issued to them. It seems Tim Robbins is reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, and ''Weird'' Al Yankovic has been working on Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Hawking himself has a biography of Marilyn Monroe tucked into his chair --- make of that what you will.

What of Mel Gibson and Christina Ricci? You'll have to go find out for yourself: I promise it's worth the trip.

Today's quote

Remind the DJ or band that they work for you, and they'll damn well play anything you want. For some reason I think this may be less of a problem at gay weddings. Thank God.

A Quick Note to About-To-Be Married Gays and Lesbians

Today's quote

You know, back in 2000 a Republican friend of mine warned me that if I voted for Al Gore and he won, the stock market would tank, we'd lose millions of jobs, and our military would be totally overstretched. You know what: I did vote for Al Gore, he did win, and I'll be damned if all those things didn't come true.

James Carville

Rhetoric

I'm feeling mighty pleased about the gay marriages happening back East right now. As the culture battles rev up again, Pandagon has a good comment for us lefty culture warriors.

We need to win this one softly, respecting beliefs that stand in our way but quietly circumventing them with pictures of loving couples and arguments based on shared values. When the right is able to create divisions and spin our winning arguments into the loser's lasting shame, they come out ahead. We gain our victory but they harden, and occasionally expand, their constituency. The only way to break that cycle is to avoid arguments that shame the other side. When the Weekly Standard and the talking heads begin making offensive and clearly specious arguments against gay marriage, you know their aim isn't victory but provocation. If they can provoke one prominent Democrat to overreact and unleash a retort belittling traditionalists, they'll have won the day. As Jonathan notes, tradition isn't always logical, but that makes it no less real. Conservative strategists understand this, it's time we did as well.

Valentine's Day in May

More wedding pictures, folks!

Old skool cyberkultur

So in the process of looking for something else entirely, I stumbled across this site of old cyber-stuff, apparently last updated in 1997. Most of the files are plain text.

There's an FTP Guide to VR sites from 1993. (For my young readers: ''VR'' stands for ''virtual reality,'' which is 1993-speak for the Matrix, and was thought to be the Next Big Thing right before the Web came along.)

There's an email from Adam Curry telling the sad tale of mtv.com. While Curry was running it, "The site quickly became a frequently accessed 'hangout' on the net, with an average of 35000 accesses daily from Mosaic clients alone.'' Thirty-five thousand hits a day! Wow! (Mosaic was a web browser from before Netscape was a company. Pages came up with a gray background by default, and you had to shovel coal into the back of your computers about once an hour or so.)

There's lots of stuff about Gender in Cyberspace. A long article by Sandy Stone, before she went to go work for Microsoft. An interview with Brenda Laurel (before she worked for Purple Moon) from Mondo 2000. An article about the LambdaMOO ''rape'' from The Villiage Voice.

There's an article called ''Fiction That Bleeds Truth'' about cyberpunk going mainstream from the pages of bOING bOING. (It was a print publication back in those days, boys and girls, so it had real pages.)

There's even samples of spam so old that the spelling and formatting are good, and there's no mention of Nigeria, Viagra, or pornography of any kind. (At the time Nigeria was a country, and pornography had been invented ... but Viagra had not.)

It makes me feel like an old man.

Judicial activism

Fifty years ago today — within living memory — the United States Supreme Court overturned local law and custom in the landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education.

Segregation of white and Negro children in the public schools of a State solely on the basis of race, pursuant to state laws permitting or requiring such segregation, denies to Negro children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment — even though the physical facilities and other “tangible” factors of white and Negro schools may be equal.

1. The history of the Fourteenth Amendment is inconclusive as to its intended effect on public education.
2. The question presented in these cases must be determined not on the basis of conditions existing when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, but in the light of the full development of public education and its present place in American life throughout the Nation.
3. Where a State has undertaken to provide an opportunity for an education in its public schools, such an opportunity is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.
4. Segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race deprives children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities, even though the physical facilities and other “tangible” factors may be equal.
5. The “separate but equal” doctrine adopted in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, has no place in the field of public education.

Today, the political Right in the US expresses great concern with what they call “judicial activism,” as demonstrated by the Warren Court which made this decision. As Thomas Sowell's essay Judicial Activism Reconsidered (the ^#2 ranked Google result for “judicial activism” at the time I write this) says:

If no authorization is needed for judges to introduce “change,” neither is it needed for generals and admirals to do the same — as in fact happens in a number of countries. Judges can conduct limited coups d'état surreptitiously, while a military coup is usually overt and sweeping. Nevertheless, the dangers to constitutional government are no less real in the long run from judicial activism — both because of the cumulative effect of small usurpations and because small usurpations both generate pressures and provide the precedents for larger usurpations by others with different social visions.

The claim that judicial activism is necessary to rescue us from bondage to the past — from having the writers of the Constitution “rule us from the grave” — defies both logic and history.

Such sober concern with the potentially overwhelming power of judges to usurp democratic governance! But surely that anti-judicial-activist article doesn't question the logic of the Brown decision, with its merits so obvious today?

Take another look at item b from the Brown syllabus above, then this from Sowell's article:

Advocates of judicial activism often refer to changes which have taken place, and others deemed desirable, as reasons for going beyond the original cognitive meanings of laws, including the Constitution. According to Justice William J. Brennan:

Those who would restrict claims of right to the values of 1789 specifically articulated in the Constitution turn a blind eye to social progress and eschew adaptation of overarching principles to changes of social circumstances.

According to Justice Brennan, “the genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs.”
....
Social changes — even changes of a profound and far-reaching nature — do not of course necessarily require changes in the U.S. Constitution. Many statutes and state constitutions serve as instruments of change, as do an ever-increasing number of administrative agencies at all levels of government, and an ever-expanding galaxy of private individual and corporate arrangements. The proposition that publicly desired changes are thwarted for lack of institutional instruments, so that judges are the public's last resort, not only flies in the face of this evidence but is also inconsistent with the courts' plummeting prestige as they putatively carried out the public's otherwise thwarted desires for change.

Oh. I guess Sowell does think that Brown was a bad idea. Not to worry, though. Mr. Sowell feels confident that other institutional instruments in, say, Arkansas, would have brought about school integration just as well. I find myself less confident, but I suppose reasonable people may differ.

Surely Mr. Sowell and most other commentators on the Right in their vigilance against judicial activism do not intend anyone to interpert their critique as meaning anything like the article “Judicial activism causes crime.”

Fraudulent, or at least speculative, Supreme Court opinions contemporaneous with the surge in crime rates not only made it a lot harder to lock up criminals, they also supported many other causes of crime.  They ruined our urban public school systems. Failed public schools lead directly to an increase in the criminal population.

Surely the sentiment that integration “ruined our urban public school systems” is rare on the Right. Surely discomfort with school integration is not at the root of the Right's objections to “judicial activism.” Surely there's some other explanation for all of the inbound links to “Judicial activism causes crime” that make it rank ^#1 on a Google search of “judicial activism.”

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Update: It turns out that conservatives are quite comfortable with judicial activism for their causes.

Doggerel sequels

Everyone knows the question

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

For years I have known that this question does in fact have the traditional answer

Well a woodchuck would chuck what a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.

Recently I learned that there is a sequel to Gelett Burgess' immortal poem

I never saw a purple cow
I never hope to see one
But I can tell you anyhow
I'd rather see than be one.

It seems that Mr. Burgess lived to rue the fame of his little doggerel, and eventually wrote

Ah yes I wrote ''The Purple Cow:''
I'm sorry now I wrote it.
But I can tell you anyhow,
I'll kill you if you quote it.

Simulacrum

If you like paragraphs like this one

Baudrillard's concept of simulation is the creation of the real through conceptual or "mythological" models which have no connection or origin in reality. The model becomes the determinant of our perception of reality --- the real. Homes, relationships, fashion, art, music, all become dictated by their ideal models presented through the media. Thus the boundary between the image, or simulation, and reality implodes (breaks down). This creates a world of hyperreality where the distinctions between real and unreal are blurred.

then you'll be appropriately spooked and fascinated by this photograph.

Stem cells

Another demonstration of our president and public being terrifyingly scientifically illiterate is the blocking of stem cell research. When people finally catch on to what this is about, our policy will change and we will embark on some very aggressive funding. Stem cells are the #@*!! Holy Grail of new medical technologies --- the applications we can think of now are like science fiction, and there's good cause to think that a decade or two of new research and development will make those ideas look like asprin and band-aids in comparison.

Here's a recent taste:

The procedure is fairly simple. Doctors take stem cells from the patient. These are unique in their ability to form any of the tissues that make up the body. By carefully nurturing the stem cells in a laboratory, scientists can nudge the cells down a path that will make them grow into a tooth. After a couple of weeks, the ball of cells, known as a bud, is ready to be implanted. Tests reveal what type of tooth --- for example, a molar or an incisor --- the bud will form.

Using a local anaesthetic, the tooth bud is inserted through a small incision into the gum. Within months, the cells will have matured into a fully-formed tooth, fused to the jawbone. As the tooth grows, it releases chemicals that encourage nerves and blood vessels to link up with it.

Tests have shown the technique to work in mice, where new teeth took weeks to grow. "There's no reason why it shouldn't work in humans, the principles are the same," said Prof Sharpe.

The Guardian 3 May 2004