David Halberstam’s 1972 book The Best and the Brightest

vividly describes the steps by which the Kennedy-Johnson administration, chock full of Ivy League thinkers and respected analysts, stumbled into the morass that was the Vietnam war. Among the most important factors in the stumble, according to Halmerstam, were the limited perspectives these operatives chose to view. They decided early on that theirs was a winnable war to defend a stable, pro-democracy ally; they chose to ignore any analyis or research that differed from the scenario. (I’m naturally vastly oversimplifying Halmerstam here; read the book itself for the whole sad story.)

The same thing’s happening now. Only the people doing it know they’re doing it. Our current battle-criers decided long ago they wanted to conquer and colonize Iraq. (An Australian newspaper story claims they’d started plans for an Iraq war even before Bush’s inaguration.)

We’ve got a whole Executive Branch establishment that, for all intents and purposes, proudly only listens to Rush Limbaugh, only watches the Fox News Channel, and only reads The Weekly Standard and books from ideological publishers like Regnery. This establishment does have staff people who scan CNN and the NY Times, but just to learn what its “Others” are saying in order to craft virulent rebuttals.

This establishment loves to scoff at liberals’ “political correctness,” but is fetishistically devoted to ideological conformity within its own ranks. It believes it’s always right, not because it’s smart but because it’s pure.

Actually, “pure” isn’t the right word, because it implies a sense of moralistic self-denial. These guys (and a few gals) want everybody else to do all the sacrificing; while they grow ever wealthier and more powerful.

We started with a book reference; we’ll move now to a film reference.

There’s a film, based on a stage play, set in an era in which a ruling class lived as libertine wastrels and the masses were subjected to strict authoritarianism.

An era enmeshed with domestic turmoil and colonial wars. An era of fierce political name-calling and backbiting. An era in which defenders of the corrupt social order will do anything to maintain their privileged status, despite the hindrance of an unelected ruler who often talks nonsense and behaves absentmindedly.

In short, an era with resemblances to our own.

Yes, we’re all currently suffering from, and for, the madness of King George.

…has long been one of those New Republic liberal-buts. (That’s a fella who says “I’m a liberal, but…” just before he endorses every conservative position.) But now, even Kinsley’s sounding the alarm on war posturing as a domestic attack against democracy:

“The official U.S. government message on how citizens should decide about going to war is, ‘Don’t worry your pretty little heads about it.’ Last week the White House issued a sort of Official Souvenir Guide to the Bush administration’s national security policy, and it is full of rhetoric about democracy. Yet that policy itself, including at least one likely war, has been imposed on the country entirely without benefit of democracy. George W.’s war on Iraq will be the reductio ad absurdum of America’s long, slow abandonment of any pretense that the people have any say in the question of whether their government will send some of them far away to kill and die.”

THE VILLAGE VOICE has got a quite lucid piece by James Ridgway clearly detailing the real threats to America right now; most of them from within.

AUTHOR-CRITIC NEAL GABLER has a different way to describe what some other critics call ironical PoMo entertainments. He calls ’em “simulated entertainment.”

I KNOW UPDATES HAVE BEEN SPARSE this past week. But the print MISC is out now, so we’ll be adding more stuff soon (including pix taken in the past few weeks, and some recent print MISC texts).

The NY Times ran a long and rather dumb article on Wednesday about the Montreal Jazz Festival, one of the largest events of its type on Earth. The feature’s writer loves the festival all right, but questions what the heck the culture of jazz music has to do with La Belle Provence.

I’ll tell you what. Quebec has long thought of itself as the bastion of European civilization in North America. Jazz, or rather certain flavors of classic and modern jazz, have long been commercially centered in Europe, particularly in France. You can hence think of the Montreal fest as a gift of the Francophone world, graciously giving a North American-invented genre back to us.

Also, a major feature of the festival is a nightly downtown street party with high-energy “world music” acts. I just saw one such performance tonight on the Francophone cable channel TV5. A big street party’s the sort of event everybody around the world can dig (they even had ’em at the Salt Lake Olympics). But in a city of hot passions and often cold weather, a summer night’s especially worthy of celebrating. And the Quebecois I saw did just that, splendidly.

(APOLOGIES to those who’ve found the site inaccessible for much of the past three days. My server provider insists things are now back to normal, or will be soon.)

During this biggest advertising slump of the past umpteen years, Rolling Stone has decided to abscond with one of the last links to its past, the occasional long articles and essays on non-celebrity topics. It’s hired an editor from the British-born “bloke mag” FHM, who claims (as so many middle-aged people have always claimed about their youngers) that Those Kids Today just don’t like to read. What rot.

The shortening-down (dumbing-down?) tactic is nothing new, but is endemic to publications whose runners are now much older than their target readers, who imagine their (the publishers’) own generation were young geniuses but Those Kids Today don’t know nuttin’. I’m actually noticing, at least in my own town, a longer-attention-span generation of adolescents, and an even-longer-attention-span generation of grade schoolers following them.

But short attention spans are what advertisers wish audiences to have–all the better to bombard with flashy brand images. The new Rolling Stone won’t be more reader-friendly, it’ll be more advertiser-friendly. RS publisher Jann Wenner, ever the generational-bias hypocrite, simply refuses to publicly admit it.

THERE IS NO JOY IN B-BALL VILLE. The Lucking Fakers took it all again. Damn it. At least the righteous Red Wings won the hockey title.

REMEMBER THOSE ADS in comic books that combined superheroes with Hostess Twinkies? Here’s the memoir of one of the guys who wrote ’em.

…with images from the 1971 Sears catalog.

THE WORLD’S OLDEST humor mag, Britain’s venerable Punch, is folding. For the second time. Sorta. (i.e., the website will still be replenished with new material, but no more print issues for the foreseeable future.)

FROM, OF ALL LEAST-LIKELY SOURCES, a straight-talkin’ non-exploitative essay on FoxNews.com:

• “Last week, U.S. News ran a rather sensational cover story on teen-age sex, making what I think is the mistake of treating teen-age sex as something novel or unnatural.”Teen-agers have been having sex forever. Their bodies are maturing, their hormones are raging and doing what comes naturally is, well, natural. Indeed, for most of human history, teen sex was an entirely normal part of life, since people tended to marry and be treated as adults at what were, by modern standards, very early ages. Programs that don’t take that into account aren’t likely to succeed, and media coverage based on sensationalism doesn’t help.”

…to the memory of LInda Lovelace, whose topsy-turvy life (now ended with a car crash at age 53) pivoted around her status as the first woman to become an above-ground celebrity for appearing in an explicit sex film.

Hardcore porn on theater screens, and pubic hair in magazines, emerged in 1970-71, which meant the media became obsessed with sex at exactly the same time I did. (But by the time I was old enough to legally view hardcore films, they’d already started to become the formulaic tripe porno videos are now. I preferred softcore, and still do, because it was more attractive to look at and gave me female characters to fall in love with, not just female physiques to hunger for.)

Lovelace’s post-porn memoirs were believed by conservatives who’d never read them to be righteous indictments against the whole genre of sex films. The books could be more accurately described as tales of a personal abusive relationship with a controlling husband-manager and his small-time-hood cronies. (I’ve never heard anyone invoke the marital ordeals of Ronnie Spector or Tina Turner as a pretext to condemn the entire institution of pop music.)

Her private troubles and triumphs aside, Lovelace will forever be the first real Sex Star. There had been famous upper-class courtesans thoughout history; some of whom performed in live sex shows at discreet venues for the decadent rich; there had also been “stag reel” hardcore films screened surreptitiously in private clubs and homes. But those women were still perceived all too often as “fallen women,” unfit to be mentioned in polite society. There had been famous nude models and dancers in North America and Europe for decades, but these were women who proudly displayed themselves with an essence of decorum and dignity. The early-’70s porn queens, in contrast, were shown doing the full down-‘n’-dirty, to the point of total out-of-control mindless ecstasy (or at least imitations of it), in garish color images projected ten feet tall. And for doing this they were marketed as not just respectable ladies but as admirable goddesses.

If you remember that this had never been done before in anything even close to “mainstream” American culture, you might more easily understand how it would rile a lot of people–not just political conservatives but also many progressives and feminists who’d traditionally equated women’s empowerment with rising above such tawdriness. You can also imagine how, when Lovelace had left both the relationship and the business, she could have identified the two as interchangeable incarnations of extreme ickiness.

Nowadays, porn is just another corporate, LA-monopolized entertainment enterprise. There’s also a more “respectable” (though almost as formulaic) parallel genre of woman-friendly “erotica.” (There’s even a whole consumer trade show of middle-class-couple oriented “sex-positive” seminars and merch sales in Vancouver this weekend.)

In her last published interviews, Lovelace claimed to have come to terms with both her porn and anti-porn careers. She said she’d never found anything wrong with being or looking sexy, that she didn’t advocate censorship but simply “awareness,” and that the best sex she’d ever had was in an ongoing relationsip with a guy she liked. She’d finally become an ordinary woman who’d found her peace with the world.

ONE OF THE ODD THINGS about the Net is the way news articles might not appear (or no longer appear) on the site of the organization that originated them, but might still be found on sites that buy syndicated content. Thus, this link peculiarly takes you to a site in India discussing a magazine that, to the best of my knowledge, still can’t legally be obtained there.

The magazine in question, Penthouse, is suffering from the publishing/advertising slump worse than most. Thirty-three years after it first launched as Playboy’s most ambitious rival to date (early slogan: “We’re going rabbit hunting”), and three years after bringing true hardcore porn imagery to regular newsstand-distributed magazines, it’s swimming in red ink and can’t borrow any more money. Bossman Bob Guccione (now a 70-year-old widower who’s battled cancer) has put his art collection up for hock and his NYC mansion up for sale. Circulation has fallen, as all the other skin mags (except Playboy and Perfect 10) have quickly moved to match its sleaze quotient, and as hardcore video and pay-per-view have grabbed a bigger share of American self-loving males’ inspiration budgets. Many of the magazine’s advertisers, meanwhile, have fled to the bureaucratically safer (though ultimately just as stupid) nipple-free “tease” magazines of the Maxim/FHM formula. Penthouse has tried to make some bucks in Net porn, but that effort was undercut by the fiscal troubles at its erstwhile online partner, Seattle-based Internet Entertainment Group.

If Penthouse does disappear sometime this or next year, as some financial analysts predict, it would mean the end to one of the odder experiments in magazine entertainment photography–the ongoing attempt to gussy up porn scenes (up to and including actual coitus) with pretentiously “arty” lighting and composition. (Of course, any aesthetic ambitions in the photo-narratives are immediately negated by the models’ kabuki-like copious amounts of bleach, silicone, and heel lengths.)

There’s still money to be made in 2-D representations of 3-D physiques. But the sleaze side of that market is way too overcrowded. The softcore side is almost totally the property of Playboy, which in its current ossified state is a tired (and not very enticing) remnant of its old formula. What this country needs is a good, respectable hetero sex mag. Those who would wish to help me start one can contact the email address below for investment opportunities.

DIDN’T MENTION IT HERE yet, but The Stranger has indeed run a feature-piece by me. It concerns the (slight but extant) possibility of a revival of hipness in Belltown.

A BASTION FALLS: Beginning today, the Wall St. Journal introduces a loud new graphic design featuring bigger headlines, more white space, and color every which where. It’s as much a symbol as anything we’ve seen that the business community (and, by extension, business journalism) doesn’t want to be perceived as having stodginess, solidness, continuity, reliability, trustworthiness, confidence, or understated good taste. Everything’s gotta be NOW-NOW-NOW, POW-POW-POW, all hustle and jive and hard sell.

I’ve long disagreed with almost everything written on the WSJ editorial pages; but I felt I could trust the accuracy of the matter on its news pages. Its front page had always been a form-following-function endeavor–three columns of news briefs (one on a topic that rotated throughout the week), two major news stories, and one well-written light feature. This page-one layout only changed on days when there was real, real big news (Pearl Harbor, 9/11). Now, it’s changed permanently, and will likely change from day to day.

To summarize: The old WSJ was like the reliable, grey-suited neighborhood banker who offered low-key, sensible advice on providing for one’s loved ones. The new WSJ is more like the boiler-room office that spews forth telemarketing cold calls about the latest sure-to-exponentially-rise-to-the-stratosphere tech-company IPO.

SOME MORE REASONS why you should oppose the big-media power grab.

The Stranger, the weekly free tabloid with which I have an off-and-on stormy relationship, celebrated its tenth anniversary this week. The actual ten-year mark came last September, but obviously a lot of folks weren’t in the mood for celebrating anything back then.

I was asked to write something for it. It didn’t run in that issue (they promise it’ll run next week).

It’s a remembrance of local publications that have come and gone during the Stranger’s lifetime:

• The Rocket: The bible of Northwest rock had already been going for 12 years when the Stranger started. Shortly after that, publisher Charles Cross sold out to some Californians who drove it into the ground. Its demise in October 2000 is still mourned by many.
• Kutie: Sometime Stranger art director Hank Trotter’s moonlighting venture was a skin mag in the classic early-’60s style, full of the tease and style missing from today’s formula porn. Sometimes, the only way you knew the pictures were new was from the models’ tattoos. Five issues came out between 1997 and 2000; content from the unpublished issue #6 can be seen at www.kutie.com.
• Seattle Union Record: During the big newspaper strike of November 2000-January 2001, Newspaper Guild members put out their own thrice-weekly free tabloid. Freed from the dumbing-down demands of management, the newsies created a model for some future alternative urban daily.
• Metropolitan Living: The former publisher of The Employment Paper had what seemed in 1999 to be a smash idea: A slick, oversize monthly about local celebrities and upscale lifestyles; given away free to all at vending boxes, but intended strictly for the platinum-card elites. It lasted about a year and a half.
• Arts Journal: Another vehicle for luxury-goods ads, this one was mailed free to people who’d given money to Seattle’s bigtime arts groups. Its content was often outstanding; too bad most folks who’d really care about it (artists, actors, playwrights, etc.) seldom got to see it.
• Redheaded Stepchild: A visual-arts zine that was almost all text, this photocopied monthly newsletter chiefly covered professional and personal survival issues for contemporary art-makers. It started in mid-1999 and ran a little over a year, before its volunteer staff found better things to do.
• Seattle Gay Standard: An ambitious effort at a real competitor to the long-established Seattle Gay News. The Standard had ambitious stories, gorgeous color photos, and a relative paucity of boys-arguing-about-the-wallpaper cartoons. But it got caught up in the same 2001 ad slump that befell Metropolitan Living and Arts Journal.
• Perv: The Stranger’s own Dan Savage was one of the masterminds behind this 1996 gay-print alternative, a monthly four-page broadsheet focusing on the Capitol Hill queer club scene.
• Rock Paper Scissors: Ex-musician Thomas Marchese’s attempt to fill the Rocket’s void. The defiantly un-slick weekly free tabloid ran weekly from June to August 2001, and gave particular emphasis to the neo-metal community.
• The Seattle Scroll: Matt Asher’s fortnightly essay-and-opinion paper started in the fall of 1996 with a novel format–a single oversize sheet of book-stock paper, rolled up instead of folded. By its end one year later, it had become a regular tabloid. Asher was last heard from writing a novel in Vermont. The Scroll’s “media editor,” Jesse Walker, later worked in LA for a libertarian-leaning think tank.

…on the intellectual property cartel and efforts to fight back against its brazen encroachments on our lives and cultural progress.