…HE’S GOING DEAF: Since I don’t share his brand of insult “humor,” I won’t make the kind of obvious put-down gag that he would surely have made if a Clinton administration official had faced the same personal tragedy. I will say that the news contradicts the longstanding folkloric equivalence of deafness with saintliness and humility.

A Muslim-American is “shamed by the language and attitudes I find some of my fellow Americans using about Islam.”

The “commodification of ugliness.”

Love French pop singers (and who wouldn’t)? Then check out The Ye-Ye Girls tribute site.

A friend saw a late-night TV program (or was it an infomercial?), which she swears was on PBS affiliate KCTS. It offered tickets to a free seminar at the Sheraton, which would be all about helping individuals get government loans and grants (for home buying/improvement, business, education, etc.). She couldn’t make it that day, so invited me to attend in her stead. Turned out advance tickets weren’t necessary. Anyone who wanted to could enter the ballroom; about 200 did.

What we all got: Not an info-backed lesson in the grant process but a 2.5-hour sales pitch for a $799 weekend seminar which, according to the salesman, would provide the information we’d been promised to get this day.

It was easy to spot the glib hypemaster’s real agenda from the start. He didn’t matter-of-factly list categories and sources of grants, application tips, etc. Instead, he gave a highly emotionally manipulative marathon spiel. It was a sort of cross between a revival sermon and a medicine-show pitch, illustrated with PowerPoint animated images on a big-screen monitor.

The spiel was heavily seasoned with neuro-linguistic-programming shticks. He frequently asked us all to think about our current lives, then to imagine how much better our lives would be with lots of money, a secure retirement, a new home, a new car, and a business of our own where we’re in control of our own agenda.

Then he proclaimed all this was possible with government money–but that the money is hard to find, hidden among hundreds of agencies (federal, state, local) with thousands of programs, all with different eligibility requirements and application processes. If you try to play the grants game yourself, he insisted, you were doomed from the get-go.

Then he said you could successfully navigate the bureaucratic sea with the help of a profressional grant writer or a specialist attorney on your side–except that anybody who’s any good at the job would charge far more money than most newcomers to the game can afford.

The solution? None other than the company he works for, the Boca Raton, FL-based National Grants Conferences Inc.

With the localized, freshly-updated info you’d get at the conference (and in its documentation and on its members-only website), you could start applying right away for just the right program for you. He even claimed you could grab enough public-trough cash to pay for the conference before its price shows up on your credit-card bill.

At one time, I almost thought his pitch to be semi-plausible; particularly when he warned us that the majority of our grant applications would be turned down, and that we’d have to be persistent and professional about the quest.

But that kind of caveat (as I’d once learned from Jim Rose, when he talked about his days as a pest-control salesman) can really be just part of the carefully crafted pitch. That’s how it turned out, when he revved up his fast-‘n’-loud act for the big finish.

This phase began when he told us how he didn’t used to be the dynamic, charismatic, confident man he told us we were seeing now. He’d been just another schmoe in Rochester, NY, loaded with debts and lacking in self-esteem. Then he went to a seminar about getting rich in real estate with no money down. (You remember, that earlier infomercial fad that collapsed when one of its leading promoters went bankrupt, after too many course-takers demanded refunds.)

That course, he forthrightly pronounced, had changed his life; just as this new course, more detailed and more attuned to present-day opportunities, would assuredly change ours. (But we’d have to Act Now, because space was limited and the best time of the year for submitting applications was drawing nigh.)

But the real clincher, the part where I knew I’d never take the course, came when he switched the big-screen monitor’s image to that now-ubiquitous photo of firefighters raising a U.S. flag at the NYC disaster site. He told the crowd an ever-so-slightly distorted version of one of the post-attack news items–that men allegedly connected to the terrorist network had received a grant to run a crop-dusting operation. The pitchman, in full-aggression mode, challenged us to imagine: If such purely evil people could attain government cash, how much easier could it be for good-hearted, all-American do-gooders such as ourselves? He came just this short of demanding we buy the course as our patriotic duty. The moment was even more tacky and obscene than I relate here.

He closed by exhorting us to rush with all deliberate speed to the front of the room, checkbooks and/or credit cards in hand. Instead, a healthy majority took the opportunity to get the heck outta there.

(This article’s permanent link.)

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD WRITES at The Progressive magazine’s site:

“How many innocent people will die in this act of vengeance against thekilling of innocent people? And how many seeds of terror will the U.S. retaliation sow?”

And Howard Zinn writes on the same site:

“We are at war, they said. And I thought: They have learned nothing, absolutely nothing, from the history of the twentieth century, from a hundred years of retaliation, vengeance, war, a hundred years of terrorism and counter-terrorism, of violence met with violence in an unending cycle of stupidity.”

‘FORBES’ WRITER BRIGID MCMENAMIN asks, “Must Americans sacrifice their liberty to achieve safety?”

MICHAEL MOORE WRITES:

“Well, the pundits are in full diarrhea mode, gushing on about the ‘terrorist threat’ and today’s scariest dude on planet earth–Osama bin Laden. Hey, who knows, maybe he did it. But, something just doesn’t add up.

Am I being asked to believe that this guy who sleeps in a tent in a desert has been training pilots to fly our most modern, sophisticated jumbo jets with such pinpoint accuracy that they are able to hit these three targets without anyone wondering why these planes were so far off path?

Or am I being asked to believe that there were four religious/political fanatics who JUST HAPPENED to be skilled airline pilots who JUST HAPPENED to want to kill themselves today?

Maybe you can find one jumbo jet pilot willing to die for the cause–but FOUR? Ok, maybe you can–I don’t know.

What I do know is that all day long I have heard everything about this bin Laden guy except this one fact–WE created the monster known as Osama bin Laden!

Where did he go to terrorist school? At the CIA!

Don’t take my word for it–I saw a piece on MSNBC last year that laid it all out. When the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan, the CIA trained him and his buddies in how to commits acts of terrorism against the Soviet forces. It worked! The Soviets turned and ran.

Bin Laden was grateful for what we taught him and thought it might be fun to use those same techniques against us.

“We abhor terrorism–unless we’re the ones doing the terrorizing.

We paid and trained and armed a group of terrorists in Nicaragua in the 1980s who killed over 30,000 civilians. That was OUR work. You and me. Thirty thousand murdered civilians and who the hell even remembers!

We fund a lot of oppressive regimes that have killed a lot of innocent people, and we never let the human suffering THAT causes to interrupt our day one single bit.

“…Let’s mourn, let’s grieve, and when it’s appropriate let’s examine our contribution to the unsafe world we live in.”

Thanks to Comedy Central, I just realized the perfect fictional portrayal of George W. Bush, decades before the fact–Charles Grodin’s act as a Saturday Night Live guest host who, in a running-gag storyline, didn’t realize it was live and didn’t show up until the day of the show. The gag climaxed with Grodin stumbling through a fake public-service ad, “Hire the Incompetent.”

ELSEWHERE:

“Instant Ramen–The Invention That Changed the 20th Century World” (found by Larkfarm).

The amazing breadth and scope of Yugoslav cuss words….

AS LONGTIME READERS KNOW, I’m no conspiracy theorist.

That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in the behind-the-scenes leveraging of power and influence.

I just believe it doesn’t work the way the conspiracy people claim. Power in modern-day America doesn’t flow through the Knights Templar or the Bildebungen. It flows through golf-course gladhanding, alumni dinners, and especially the flow of political campaign money. You don’t need to romanticize about the Illuminati–the ugly truth about the power elite is mostly out in the harsh bright open.

This has never been as true as it is with the current Presidential administration.

George W. Bush, appointed by appointed Supreme Court justices, has no electoral mandate and knows it. His First Hundred Days (aside from an overhyped diplomatic rift with China) was entirely devoted to proposing measures to help the only three groups of people he cares about:

• The rich,
• the very rich, and
• the extremely rich.

Well, actually, that’s not exactly the case. Bush fils doesn’t even care about all the rich. He doesn’t care about manufacturing or shipping or agriculture or media or those troubled tech companies.

He only cares about the specific interest groups that funded his campaign–specifically, the oil, mining, and other extraction-based industries.

Which brings us to Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel

Underworld.

The book’s sprawling narrative encompasses many themes, but chief among them is a highly linear sense of American history. DeLillo’s trajectory follows the center of U.S. influence and money away from the Northeast (as symbolized by New York’s onetime domination of baseball) toward the inland west (as symbolized by giant chain-owned landfills).

At the time it first came out, I thought it was a kind of reverse nostalgia piece, a complaint about a trend that had already ended. The Yankees were back in dynasty mode, and finance was considered far more important than industry–especially those boring old resource industries, industries that deal in heavy-dirty things and don’t have hip urban offices with Foosball tables.

Oil was cheap, the metals markets were glutted with third-world imports, and in any event the future was going to be all about “pushing bits, not atoms,” as somebody at Wired once wrote.

I should have remembered something I always said in scoffing at linear-future sci-fi novels: Trends don’t keep going in the same direction forever. There are backlashes, and backlashes to the backlashes.

The Age of W. is such a backlash. Call it the Revenge of the Oilmen. Bush’s sponsors/beneficiaries are the executives who were left behind by yesterday’s allegedly New Economy.

He’s doing his darnedest to put his friends back on top of the power-and-money heap, even if he has to put the whole rest of the country into a recession in the process.

If he has his way, he could try to turn all of America into an economy like that of certain rural Texas counties where a few oil and ranching families own everything and everyone else struggles.

NEXT: The real reason why delivery e-tailers are failing.

ELSEWHERE:

• “The majority of Americans consider themselves to be members of an elite moral minority….”

AS THE ECONOMY CHURNS, influenced partly by wave after wave of dot-comeuppance, more of you are likely to suffer the humiliations and guilt-trips associated with America’s social-services system.

All the hassles, the short office hours, the long lines, the complicated forms, all the miserable eligibility requirements presumably designed to appease politicians who want poor people who feel awful about themselves.

Don’t think for a minute that our appointed President’s idea to turn whole chunks of the system over to churches (oops, “faith-based initiatives”) will make this situation any better. American religion is one whole history of guilt trips.

So, why not privatize welfare, unemployment, et al.?

If local governments can hire companies to handle everything from operating school buses to operating prisons, they could surely contract out the customer-service aspects of benefit disbursement (and their union-contracted staffs) to bidders promising to treat the needy less like suspects and more like valued customers.

Of course, just saying this brings potential problems to mind.

For one thing, what if the politicians and bureaucrats choose contractors to do just what the current civil-service staffs have done–treat the clientele with disdain? And what if the companies are chosen by the lowest bid, encouraging them to slash operating costs by making the application processes even more inconvenient and humiliating?

No, on third or fourth thought, the social-services system is corrupt from the top. Putting a different set of middlemen in charge of day-to-day operations likely won’t change it for the better.

Perhaps the system really needs to be reinvented from the top down. I don’t mean that “ending welfare as we know it” crap that just puts people through more humiliation loops and leaves some of the neediest all washed up.

No, I mean a top-down reinvention of the system of qualifying for and receiving benefits, based on service rather than shame. And to do that properly, we’ll need to keep the whole system, or at least most of it, under fully-accountable public authority.

Some improved customer-service manners, though, could at least be a good start.

NEXT: Could you be turning into a hippie without knowing it?

ELSEWHERE:

• Sorry to say, I’ve only seen 10 of the Internet Movie Database’s current list of the 100 worst films of all time (and why isn’t 10 to Midnight or At Long Last Love on it?)….

AS I KEEP TELLING YOU, I’m no conspiracy theorist.

But if I were, this is how I might consider the current electric-shortage mania:

I. Certain entrepreneurs, hustlers, and speculators successfully muscle their way into the generating side of the power biz; thanks to bought-and-paid-for politicians who push “deregulation” legislation in several big states.

Many of these hustlers just so happen to be among the biggest and earliest contributors to G.W. Bush’s Presidential campaign, which wrapped up the GOP nomination early in 2000 thanks to its having vastly outspent the competition.

2. Once it’s clear that Bush has indeed attained the White House, these suppliers suddenly start exorbitantly hiking the price, and limiting the supply, of power to Calif. (a state which voted for the other guy).

The instant crisis (which oddly didn’t happen last summer, when much of Calif. uses much more power) spreads to those states with contracted supply-swapping arrangements with the Fool’s-Golden State, including Ore. and Wash. (which also voted for the other guy).

3. Bush’s official response, as you might expect, is that the “crisis” can best be “solved” by giving his power-generation hustler pals everything they want, and to just make us ordinary consumers pay through the you-know-what.

4. But unofficial spokespeople (and this is where the real conspiratorial stuff starts) offer another long-term suggestion. They start suggesting that office parks, aluminum plants, etc. get the heck outta the shortage-stricken states and into regions where the juice is still plentiful and comparatively cheap. These just happen to be Texas, Utah, Oklahoma, and other Republican strongholds.

You see, the onward march of U.S. population growth used to flow in an almost-constant direction away from traditionally Demo-controlled areas (northeastern cities) toward traditionally Repo-controlled areas (the ex-rural south and west).

But the Clinton crowd’s pursuit of suburban “soccer mom” votes, the trend toward office-based jobs instead of those in heavy industry and farming, and the comebacks of many once-moribund central cities have changed that pattern. Now, the population growth is concentrating in cities and suburbs that either have been traditionally Demo-voting or have become that way (or at least less solidly Republican).

Many of the strongest regions for Republicans last November either have limited population growth or are actually losing people (such as much of the rural inland west). Bush supporters sometimes like to claim their guy was the clear favorite in a majority of America’s counties, but a lot of those counties are losing people and clout.

So, this particular theory would continue, you could expect more such falderal from Republicans and Republican-leaning business “leaders” in the months to come. Incentive programs to lure developers inland might be combined with traditional Repo indifference toward urban concerns in new and extreme ways.

But since I’m not really a conspiracy theorist, I’ll wait to believe it until I see it.

NEXT: The more-or-less annual “I Love Snow” article.

ELSEWHERE:

• Another second-string tourist attraction I’d like to see, the Museum of Beverage Containers & Advertising….

WHAT WE KNOW about Bush Administration deux after a little over one week:

• You shouldn’t boycott the “W” hotel chain just because it uses the same initial.
• The guy’s got all Reagan’s weaknesses (oversimplified worldviews, lack of strategic thinking, general wussiness toward big-money hustlers) without any of Reagan’s strengths (the abilities to give a stirring speech and wear a good suit).
• Clinton was an apologetic champion for corporate raiders, consolidators, questionable financiers, and environmental rapiers. Bush fils will continue these same destructive policies, just without the apologies.
• That “bipartisan,” “building,” and “unity” talk was just talk. But you knew that already.
• He’s not a religious-right idealogue, but he willingly goes through a rote routine of pandering to them: Sticking it to Planned Parenthood; shafting public schools in order to shunt govt. $$ to private schools; letting John Ashcroft play the Bad Cop far-right hothead (and possibly sacrificing the guy in the Senate confirmations).

  I predict: He’ll see how much stink these actions raise; then, if they raise sufficient stink, he’ll pretend to be reluctantly disappointed as he backs off from the positions he’s now pretending to uphold.

• He was more passionate about becoming President than about actually doing anything thereafter.

  He’s a dealmaker, the kind of business tycoon who accomplishes power-building transactions, then lets others sort out the resulting operations. (Except he’s generally gotten along in business (and Texas statehouse politics) because of his name, and let other guys do even the dealmaking details.)

  He’ll play out his term as an affable head of state, kowtowing to whatever national agenda Federal Reserve head Alan Greenspan pushes–just like Clinton eventually did.

• “Liberal” media? Bah! The NY Times did just a thorough job of deliberately ignoring the inauguration protests as the Fox News Channel did.

NEXT: What’s wrong with Playboy isn’t what feminists think is wrong with it.

IN OTHER NEWS: If you haven’t noticed, I’ve cut out about a third of the clutter around the left and right sides of this page. If anyone still has trouble loading the site properly, please let me know.

ELSEWHERE:

• Exactly a year ago in these virtual pages, almost, I joked about ex-radical intellectuals raking in big bucks for their now-conservative views. According to the academic journal Lingua Franca, this trend may be reversing (found by Robot Wisdom)….

LAST FRIDAY AND YESTERDAY, we discussed the growing ’80s nostalgia fetishism.

Today, we continue an itemized explanation of how ’80s nostalgia differs from the real time:

• Onlne Communication: Before there was the WWW, there was the BBS (Bulletin Board System) and Usenet, and also the early all-text version of CompuServe. I still run into folks from those days who miss the cameraderie of the old nerd underground (though I recall many, many insult trades and “flame wars”).

  By the latter part of the decade there were the centrally-controlled Prodigy and AOL, with their sloooow graphics and censored chatrooms.

• Economics: The rich got ever-richer; the poor got ever-poorer; young people faced an apparent permanent shortage of real opportunities.

  Now, there are at least enough jobs to go around for college graduates (i.e., those who could still get into college after the ’80s decimation of student aid), for nice suburban scions who haven’t gotten stuck into manufacturing or farm labor.

• Politics (conservative): Despite the poster image popular at the time with both his fans and his haters, Ronald Reagan was not Rambo. He was a doddering yet personable script reader, a front man for the financiers and weapons contractors who really ran things (and still do).
• Politics (liberal): The last whiffs of the New Deal coalition, in which labor unions and teachers and “mainstream” environmentalists toned down any serious demands in exchange for “a place at the table.” By ’89, Clinton, Lieberman, and Co. made sure corporate power would rule the Democratic Party feast from then on.
• Politics (radical): The Reagan/Thatcher crowd was in seemingly firm control, propping up every genocidal despot who used anticommunism as his excuse. No viable alternative appeared on the horizon. That made it easy to get into apparently unviable alternatives.

  All you had to do to proclaim your radicalness was to distribute posters of U.S. politicians with Hitler moustaches. You didn’t have to organize any coalitions, propose any agendas beyond protesting, or reach out to any constituency beyond your own drinking buddies.

  Indeed, you could boast that you were “too political” to get involved in anything as morally impure as politics.

  Eighties radicalism wasn’t about getting anything done. It was just about proving your own superiority over all those know-nothing squares out there in the Real America. Today’s way-new left appears to be getting beyond this tired nonsense, thankfully.

• The ‘Alternative’ Scene: We really did think there was just one (1) “mainstream culture” and just one (1) “alternative” to that culture. This way-oversimplified dualism conveniently allowed many white, middle-class suburban kids to believe themselves part of, if not the entirety of, “The Other.”

  It also helped forge a vague unity-of-purpose among a vast assortment of subcultures, from drag queens and performance artists to sex-yoga teachers and health-food elitists. With the years, many of these groups drifted apart from one another, or just plain drifted apart.

In fact, there’s a lot I miss about the ’80s Seattle I hated then. The money-mania was not quite so pronounced; there were more low-rent spaces; there seemed to be more non-life-controlling jobs around; downtown stil had Penney’s and didn’t have penne.

But do I want the ’80s back? Hell no! I’d rather be forced to listen to nonstop Linda Ronstadt ballads for eternity (which, circa 1982, was what I was doing in office-drone jobs).

TOMORROW: Nostalgia for the Bell System.

ELSEWHERE:

• The “future of urban transportation,” Taxi 2000…
• Another listing of real eBay weirdness, “Disturbing Auctions” (found by Larkfarm)….

AS PROMISED about a month ago, here’s my reiteration of my sordid past with current Republican gubernatorial candidate and sometime talk-radio hatemonger John Carlson.

It’s a tale that goes back two decades and a few months, to the start of his career.

I was editor of the UW Daily. Carlson was an up-and-coming political operative who, thanks to a little frathouse gladhanding, had become a student representative on the Board of Student Publications.

Two of Carlson’s buddies had submitted freelance pieces to the paper. One was a dull profile of country singer Larry Gatlin, written on one of those old script-typeface typewriters. The arts and entertainment editor, Craig Tomashoff (later with People magazine) asked the writer to resubmit it on a regular typewriter, with changes. The revised version was still in script-type and was only marginally better; Tomashoff declined to use it.

Carlson’s other pal submitted a “humor” piece for the opinion page about Ted Kennedy (then challenging incumbent President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination). I forget the specifics of the “jokes,” but I think one of them was that a President Ted would have no qualms about sending our boys into war, having already been a killer. I ran it, but with the more gruesome and potentially libelous remarks toned down.

I would soon learn that no matter how glibly Carlson boasted about his hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, he could instantly turn into a sniveling self-proclaimed victim when he didn’t get everything he wanted.

He put in a motion to the board to have me fired as editor, proclaiming me a one-man PC Thought Police out to spitefully stifle his noble friends’ courageous voices of dissent.

At the board meeting, only Carlson’s two freelancer pals spoke in favor of his motion, which was defeated (I either don’t remember the vote tally or never knew it).

It soon came out that this was all part of a larger scheme of Carlson’s. He was raising money from rich guys to start his own right-wing paper, The Washington Spectator. Its content was fashioned after similar unofficial right-wing papers at Dartmouth and a few other campuses; lotsa cheap insults, borderline-racist “jokes,” wholesale character-assassination attacks on just about everybody who wasn’t a conservative, all of it in the supposed name of protecting family values or Christian heritages or the free-market system.

Carlson went back to the Board of Student Publications when his Spectator was ready to roll. He wanted to use the Daily‘s on-campus dropoff spots for his paper on Daily non-publication days. The board turned him down. He threw another tantrum, calling on the moneyed and powerful men he was already sucking up to to try to force a deal through the UW bureaucracy.

Even without the coveted Daily drop boxes, Carlson’s Spectator got enough attention to help Carlson get funding for his own conservative think tank, which led to his newspaper columns, his radio bully pulit (emphasis on the “bully” part), his KIRO-TV commentary slots, his campaigns to kill affirmative action and public transportation in Washington state, and now his drive to become the state’s chief executive.

It should be said that Carlson’s own signed material in the Spectator wasn’t as insulting or as bigoted as some of the material in the other off-campus conservative papers during the Reagan era. Carlson probably was wary of anything that could haunt him in a future run for high office.

And I don’t believe he personally disliked me, or even really wanted me ousted as Daily editor.

He was simply perfectly willing, at the time, to step over anyone on his way to the top.

Some who’ve known him in more recent years tell me he’s become a civil, polite gent in private, even as he remains a smirking demagogue in public.

But if, through some unfortunate happenstance, he becomes governor of the state of Washington, we all could be in for a wild ride. The moment any legislator or separately-elected department head says anything different from his line, the second one piece of his legislative agenda gets voted down, will he turn on the crocodile tears to his zillionaire benefactors again? Will he whine about being the trampled-upon little victim, just because he wanted to give more powers and privileges to those who already have most of these?

TOMORROW: Can Stephen King jump-start the e-book biz? Should he?

ELSEWHERE:

• The next great post-Napster hope?…

BEFORE TODAY’S MAIN TOPIC, the next live MISCmedia event will be a part of the live event of the litzine Klang. It’s Thursday, 5/18 (20 years after the Big Boom) at the Hopvine Pub, 507 15th Ave. E. on Capitol Hill, starting around 8 p.m. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.

YOU DON’T HAVE to be a Republican to be tired of demographic-butt-kissing paeans to the Sixties Generation.

But apparently you have to be a Republican to be willing to publicly express such weariness.

Today’s case in point: Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, a new book by card-carrying Weekly Standard essayist David Brooks.

Brooks’s official point is to skewer the ever-pandered-to upscale ex-radicals and their younger brethern, whom Brooks collectively brands as “bobos” or “bourgeois bohemians,” engaged in a united lifelong cult of self-congratulation.

His real point, natch, is to himself pander to his own audience. Brooks depicts Those Nasty Liberals as today’s version of Spiro Agnew’s “effette snobs,” so as to let his conservative readers smugly imagine themselves as at least relatively populistic and unpretentious in comparison.

Nevertheless, Brooks does have a few points left-of-center folk should ponder.

Like Tom Frank’s The Conquest of Cool, Brooks chronicles how marketers and the media took ’60s-generation “identity politics” and successfully took all the politics out, leaving pure demographic target marketing. Advertisers re-defined political activism as something the special people of the special generation used to do, something that helped make them so gosh-darned special and hence deserving of some really special consumer products.

But the ads and the TV human-interest pieces and the newspaper columns lavishing praise beyond praise upon the Generation That Thinks It’s God always depict activism as an activity of a past, never-to-be-repeated Golden Age. Speaking out today, on behalf of anything more threatening than the right to the very freshest produce, is considered so beyond-the-pale as to be unmentionable.

“But,” you say, “activism’s come back, perhaps stronger than ever, thanks to the Way-New Left, as shown at the WTO and IMF protests.”

(Well, maybe you’d say it a little more conversationally than that, but you catch my drift.)

Yeah, but the Way-New Left’s threatening already to get trapped in many of the same mistakes that doomed the old New Left to effective irrelevance.

Some of the noisier, more easily caricaturable elements of the new protest movement are too easily tempted by oversimplistic us-vs.-them platitudes (vegan vs. carnivore, hip vs. square, raver vs. jock, neopagan vs. Christian, etc.). The very sort of see-how-special-we-are identity ploys that so easily devolve into mere ad slogans. (“Some people want to change the world. We just want to change your oil.”)

So, for this and all future generations, a few words of reminder:

Politics isn’t about being, it’s about doing.

Politics isn’t always fun or thrilling or even sexy. If hedonistic thrills are what you’re after, consumer-materialism will always provide those more consistently.

Politics isn’t always hip. A lot of it has to do with improving the lives of whole classes of people who’ve never lived in college towns or been to a single punk concert.

TOMORROW: Mount St. Helens, still a boomin’ favorite after twenty years.

ELSEWHERE:

LI>Recalling a previous age of capitalistic excess and of public revolt against same, The Dramas of Haymarket….

HARPER’S MAGAZINE still doesn’t have a full-content website, so I’ll have to tell you about its May issue, which has several items relating to topics we’ve been discussing here.

First up: The main article, “Notes From Underground: Among the Radicals of the Pacific Northwest,” in which writer David Samuels hangs out with some of those Dreaded Eugene Anarchists.

He essentially depicts them as well-meaning children of suburban affluence who’ve sadly but understandably gotten sidetracked from the complexities of the world, instead preferring oversimplified ideologies that allow them to imagine themselves as Totally Good and the culture of their upper- and upper-middle-class parents as Totally Evil (almost completely ignoring all other cultural and subcultural differentiations in late-modern society).

Anarchism, as Samuels interprets its young adherents, isn’t an ideology about empowering The People but an excuse for these girls and boys to imagine themselves as the world’s rightful would-be dictators, philosopher-kings who’d decide what’s best for the world on the basis of what feeds their own self-righteousness.

(Samuels’s depictions may have helped inspire P-I cartoonist David Horsey to recently depict young radicals as snot-faced idiots irresponsibly meddling in issues that should be left to the Real Experts.)

Samuels’s anarchist portrayals contrast with the memoir of oldtime radical Emma Goldman, excerpted elsewhere in the same issue. While Samuels essentially depicts anarchism as just another flavor of elitism, Goldman insists it’s a means toward the abolition of all elites. As an opponent of all centralized states, Goldman wound up seeing capitalism, socialism, and fascism as more or less equally repressive. She undoubtedly would have felt the same about philosopher-king fantasies.

Elsewhere in the issue are pieces that tellingly indict aspects of the current-day elitist regime, the rule of corporate power and money:

• Nick Bromell’s “Show Them the Money,” a satire purporting to be a fundraising letter from a respect-for-the-rich lobby, includes a number of scary stats about the increasing concentration of wealth in the U.S. and the relative silencing of any public debate about it.
• Mark Weisbrot’s essay “Globalism for Dummies” provides a succint summary of just why the Global Business power-grab isn’t the greatest thing for working folk, the environment, or democracy.
• And Ellen Ullman’s “The Museum of Me” bitterly yet cleverly chastizes selfish cyber-Libertarians for turning their backs on cities, interpersonal relationships, civil society, and anything else that gets in the way of the New Elite making even more money.

A reader who gets through the whole May Harper’s can easily conclude that Samuels’s Eugene anarchists, even if they’re really like his negative characterizations, might be more emotionally than rationally driven (like those now-fetishized ’60s radicals), still have a point. There’s got to be some way for society to seriously consider other priorities than just helping the rich get richer.

TOMORROW: Safeco Field, where the best seats are the worst.

ELSEWHERE:

• Another site recalling the humble, sacrificed sporting house, MyKingdome.com….