• I’ve ranted here in the past about certain dot-coms whose whole reason for being is verbal content, but which refuse to pay their writers. Turns out that even “content mill” dot-coms that do pay their writers work them to death. Lots of unpaid overtime, high quotas, short schedules, no pretense of quality, everything search-engine-optimized to smithereens. And the results didn’t even work fiscally, as recounted by “an AOL content slave.”
• Non-news of the day: Ebooks don’t need printers but they still need editors.
• The Brave New Films dudes have a handy dandy guide to the Koch Bros.’ moves behind the scenes of the right wing opinion machine; while Mr Jon Stewart lists a few dozen Fox News lies.
• As you know, I don’t like it whenever a woman brands “men,” as a singular collective entity, as “potential rapists.” I also don’t like it when a man does much the same thing—as a convoluted explanation of/justification for sexual assault. This man, whom I sorry to say shares my birth date, is the real Dilbert.
• Daily Kos has uncovered a Congressmember who loves Green Lantern and is willing to admit it.

Change a few of the nouns turn a couple of other parts sideways, and this Richard Cohen essay deriding “the myth of American exceptionalism” could easily be used against the myth of “alternative culture” exceptionalism.

The film version of (part of) Atlas Shrugged has come to and mostly gone from America’s cinemas. (Around here, it’s still playing at one multiplex in Bellevue.)

All progressively-minded film critics and political pundits have used this apparently mediocre movie to make big snarky laffs at the expense of the story’s original author, the eminently and deservedly mockable Ayn Rand.

As is usually the case, Roger Ebert expressed this conventional wisdom better than anybody. (Though Paul Constant at the Stranger gave it a good try.)

So why am I writing about it this late in the game?

Because there’s something ironic, and not in a cute/funny way, about art-world people calling Rand and her followers arrogant elitists.

There’s an outfit in Italy called the Manifesto Project. It gathered short essays on graphic design and commercial art (in English) from 24 leading designers around the world.

One of these is by the eminent American magazine, book and poster designer Milton Glaser. During a passage about how “doubt is better than certainty,” Glaser starts discussing why so many designers can’t embrace either doubt or collaboration:

There is a significant sense of self–righteousness in both the art and design world. Perhaps it begins at school. Art school often begins with the Ayn Rand model of the single personality resisting the ideas of the surrounding culture. The theory of the avant garde is that as an individual you can transform the world, which is true up to a point. One of the signs of a damaged ego is absolute certainty.

Schools encourage the idea of not compromising and defending your work at all costs. Well, the issue at work is usually all about the nature of compromise. You just have to know what to compromise. Blind pursuit of your own ends which excludes the possibility that others may be right does not allow for the fact that in design we are always dealing with a triad—the client, the audience and you.

Ideally, making everyone win through acts of accommodation is desirable. But self–righteousness is often the enemy. Self–righteousness and narcissism generally come out of some sort of childhood trauma, which we do not have to go into. It is a consistently difficult thing in human affairs. Some years ago I read a most remarkable thing about love, that also applies to the nature of co–existing with others. It was a quotation from Iris Murdoch in her obituary. It read “Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” Isn’t that fantastic! The best insight on the subject of love that one can imagine.

I’ve ranted umpteen times in the past about “alt” culture’s silly tendencies toward us-vs.-them nonsense. All the anti-“mainstream” pomposity. The brutal stereotypes against anyone who can be sufficiently categorized (suburbanites, sports fans, meat eaters).

The real purpose of art and culture isn’t to show off how awesome you are. It’s to communicate something to somebody else, to strengthen the bonds that tie all of this mongrel species together.

When we fail at this, are we no better than Atlas Shrugged’s cocktail-downin’ snobs (only with hipper clothes)?

Like many loyal Americans, I was watching the 14-inning Mets/Phillies game last night when the first text messages came in on cell phones around the bar, followed by the scrolling news on ESPN’s “bottom line.”

My first thought: THIS is considered big news? Hadn’t bin Laden been unofficially declared dead four or five times now?

My second thought: Even in non-sports breaking news, ESPN’s “bottom line” managers were true Disney corporate loyalists, by referring their viewers to turn to ABC for the details.

My third thought: Just what was bin Laden’s organization responsible for in recent years, besides their own survival? Afghanistan’s networks of warlords and insurgents are basically home-grown. The revolts against the Middle East’s corrupt monarchies and dictatorships are also largely home-grown, and largely intended to replace those regimes with democracy or something like it, not with Iran-esque theocracies like bin Laden wanted.

Then, once the game was over (and two of the old Big Three broadcast networks had returned to regular programming), I saw the footage on ABC and the cable news channels of the small crowds gathering in NY and DC, well after midnight Eastern Time, whooping it up and chanting “USA! USA!”

Tacky, I thought.

David Sirota, as is to be expected, has more lucid thoughts:

…We have begun vaguely mimicking those we say we despise, sometimes celebrating bloodshed against those we see as Bad Guys just as vigorously as our enemies celebrate bloodshed against innocent Americans they (wrongly) deem as Bad Guys. Indeed, an America that once carefully refrained from flaunting gruesome pictures of our victims for fear of engaging in ugly death euphoria now ogles pictures of Uday and Qusay’s corpses, rejoices over images of Saddam Hussein’s hanging and throws a party at news that bin Laden was shot in the head.

This is bin Laden’s lamentable victory — he has changed America’s psyche from one that saw violence as a regrettable-if-sometimes-necessary act into one that finds orgasmic euphoria in news of bloodshed. In other words, he’s helped drag us down into his sick nihilism by making us like too many other bellicose societies in history — the ones that aggressively cheer on killing, as long as it is the Bad Guy that is being killed.

•

A few days ago, I sent out another of my occasional desperate Facebook messages asking if anyone knew of a day job I could take. I said specifically I wasn’t looking for a writing gig (even if it didn’t pay); I was looking for a paying gig (even if it wasn’t “writing”).

As always happens when I try this, most of the responses were either in the form of snide “humor” or of “You should write about…” topic suggestions. Exactly what I didn’t want.

And, of course, one of these topic suggestions is usually that I should write murder mysteries.

I hate murder mysteries, at least of the formula genre variety. The heroic (or anti-heroic) detective. The clues as a big puzzle; the admiration at the hero’s ability to solve it. The utter lack of mourning or any other authentic emotion. The wanton destruction of human life, depicted as light entertainment. (This last attribute is also why a lot of shows on Adult Swim don’t appeal to me.)

Today we have something ickier. We have people “celebrating” the killing of a man who was best known for “celebrating,” and taking credit for, thousands of others’ deaths.

If there is anything positive to note on this day, it is the more heartfelt responsed by the likes of Sirota and, at Huffington Post, by Paul Brandeis Raushenbush:

All humans have the potential for grace, but we also all have the potential to sin and do evil. It is a tempting yet dangerous practice to look around the world for evil people and target them. That is just what Osama Bin Laden thought he was doing. We must be vigilant that we do not become what we despise. We must be careful in the way we use religion and the name of God to further our own causes or to ever manipulate people into hate or hate.

So, let us mute our celebrations. Let any satisfaction be grim and grounded in the foundation of justice for all who have suffered at bin Laden’s bloody hands. And also justice for crimes against God — for using God as an instrument of terror and and promoting distrust between peoples of different religions and nations. Let us put bin Laden’s body in the ground, and in doing so bury his disastrous and blasphemous religious legacy.

In political news so far outside “the Beltway” even Rachel Maddow isn’t talking about it yet, Canada might make a sharp left turn in next week’s parliamentary elections.

The New Democratic Party, longtime scourge of Canadian corporate cronies, says it’s got enough momentum to become the fulcrum of power in the next Government, potentially winning more seats than the currently ensconsed Conservatives.

We’ll know the results next Tuesday night (or Wednesday morning), a lot sooner than we’ll know, say, the results of the NHL playoffs’ second round.

An edited, improved version of my snarky li’l manifesto piece from earlier this month became my first contribution to Crosscut.com. That’s the local punditry site founded by original Seattle Weekly publisher David Brewster.

It was up for just a few hours when all of Crosscut went down, a victim of last week’s Amazon “cloud computing services” crash.

But it’s up now. And it’s got a lively comment thread.

Mayor Mike McGinn is one of the civic leaders who’ve submitted short essays to Dan Bertolet’s new CityTank.org, on the topic of celebrating urban life.

McGinn’s piece is a photo essay (merely excerpted below) that reads like a manifesto:

Sarah Palin and other figures on the right like to talk about “small town values” as being “the real America.” We know better. These are our values:

• We have great urban places, where people can live and shop in the same building. And we protect them.
• Seattleites create and use urban spaces – their way. From the bottom up.
• We take care of each other – and we feed each other.
• We’re not scared of new ideas.
• We think idealism is a virtue.
• We play like it matters, because it does.
• We stand up for each other.
• We share our cultures with each other. And the music, the art, the food…is astounding.
• We love race and social justice.
• We expect our youth to achieve.

President Barack Obama called on America to win the future. Mr. President, the people of Seattle are ready.

Since I believe one good manifesto deserves another, I hereby offer my own:

David Guterson and other figures on Bainbridge Island like to talk about the countryside as being the only real place to live. We know better. These are our values:

• We value diverse workplaces and gatherings. Upscale white men alongside upscale white women—and even upscale white gays.
• Yet we also admire African Americans; preferably if they are both musical and dead.
• We champion the institution of public education, as long as our own kids can get into a private school.
• We celebrate people’s expressions of sexuality, provided they’re not too, you know, sexual.
• We strive toward progressive, inclusive laws and policies except when they would inconvenience business.
• We take pride in our urban identity, as we build more huge edifices and monuments to desperately prove how world class we are.
• We support the arts, particularly when that support doesn’t stick us in the same room with unkempt artists.
• We value regional planning and cooperation, even with those mouth-breathing hicks out there.
• We protect and enhance the environment, particularly those environments we drive 40 miles or more to hike in.
• We love a strong, vital music scene that’s in someone else’s neighborhood.
• We appreciate our heritage. We moan about how everything in this town sucks; then, years later, we claim it was great back then but all sucks now.
• We value a strong, independent news media, regularly alerting us to the city’s 103 Best Podiatrists.
• We admire innovation and original ideas, especially if they’re just like something from New York or San Francisco.
• We support locally-based businesses until they get too big.

President Barack Obama has advocated “the fierce urgency of now.” Mr. President, the people of Seattle will get around to it once they’ve finished playing Halo: Reach.

Joseph Stiglitz, writing in Vanity Fair, is hardly the only commentator to notice how modern America’s grossly disproportionate concentration of wealth by the richest 1 percent is bad for the nation, and the world, as a whole.

Stiglitz’s addition to this argument is his observation that the richest’s pigginess isn’t good for the richest either. America’s (and the “industrialized” world’s) prosperity is a direct result of publicly-funded infrastructure, from roads and shipping lanes to the now embattled “social safety net.”

Then there’s the simple matter of having a middle class with enough disposable wealth to buy the stuff the rich people’s companies sell.

If all those are in tatters, Stiglitz asserts, the basis of the richest’s own prosperity is endangered.

His solution, like a lot of “solutions” offered in essays such as this, is vague. But it’s centered on the need to finally pay attention to the needs of the less than filthy rich.

In other words, those who aren’t the targets of Vanity Fair’s advertisers.

Stiglitz and his editors at VF have achieved an impressive rhetorical feat.

They’ve framed an anti-elitist argument in a manner compatible with the mission of an elitist publication.

It’s not the first time this has happened, however.

A few years back, a freelance writer whose name I unfortunately forget told of submitting a story proposal about hunger in America to the NY Times Sunday magazine. Its editors wrote back to him asking him to make it “more upscale.”

A lot of our allegedly “liberal” media institutions are so exclusively aimed at “the target demographic” (i.e., the upper-upper middle class and above), they have nothing to say to, or about, today’s epidemic of downward mobility.

That’s even the case of so-called “alternative” media outlets. If you’re not likely to hang out in hip bars or wear the coolest new styles or consume either gourmet burgers or wheat-germ smoothies, they’d rather not have you mussing up their audience metrics.

The building of a true populist socio-political movement will have to address all this (and, of course, much more).

Alas, after 22 years, Lloyd Dangle is retiring Troubletown, one of the finest sociopolitical comics to ever grace “alternative” newspaper pages.

Certain other “leftist” strips in the alt-weeklies are really less about politics and all about making their readers feel superior about themselves. But Dangle’s strip really was about the nonsense of politicians, the X-treme idiocy of the Bush era, the ongoing organized economic violence. And it covered them with wit and even grace.

If (as I believe) every satire contains, within its aesthetic, the world it would rather see, then Dangle’s dystopian panels advocated a contrasting utopia of intelligence, defiance, and principled action.

I’ll miss Troubletown.

To any sane person (other than a marketer or a techie), the current Hollywood major-studio feature films are by and large loud and idiotic.

How did they get this way?

Mark Harris, writing in GQ, has his own theory. To Harris, there was a time when the likes of Star Wars and Jaws could coexist in the multiplexes with the likes of An Officer and a Gentleman and The Shining. Then….

Then came Top Gun. The man calling the shots may have been Tony Scott, but the film’s real auteurs were producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, two men who pioneered the “high-concept” blockbuster—films for which the trailer or even the tagline told the story instantly. At their most basic, their movies weren’t movies; they were pure product—stitched-together amalgams of amphetamine action beats, star casting, music videos, and a diamond-hard laminate of technological adrenaline all designed to distract you from their lack of internal coherence, narrative credibility, or recognizable human qualities. They were rails of celluloid cocaine with only one goal: the transient heightening of sensation.

That’s exactly what’s also wrong with America’s political discourse.

A cable TV channel (founded by a Hollywood studio) has taken effective control of one of the two major parties. Along with its radio pundit counterparts, it dumbs down all debate into simplistic emotional manipulations. You’re not even supposed to think about what they’re saying. You’re just supposed to react with anger/hubris/fear on cue.

PS: The 2011 Oscars? What a bore of self congratulatory tripe. Even more than usual.

The celebrities and their handlers are not even pretending, for the most part, to be living in a world remotely resembling the real America of the bottom 98 percent.

the ordeal was “sped up” in the wrong way, by taking out any potential for spontaneity and water cooler moments, leaving the bare bones outline of the massive droning ritual with no “breathing room,” no chance for personality or creativity. Much like your standard assembly line major studio movies themselves. The only “moments,” such as they were, were a senile Kirk Douglas refusing to stick to the script and the appearance of Mr Trent Reznor in a tux. That and a sharp political barb by the Best Documentary winner were, I am afraid, it.

One more reason for me to say: Save the movies. Kill Hollywood.

I know a LOT of people who are spending this day and upcoming night wishing a good riddance to this epic fail of a year we’ve had.

The economy in much of the world (for non-zillionaires) just continued to sluggishly sputter and cough. Thousands more lost jobs, homes, 401Ks, etc.

The implosion of the national Republican Party organization cleared the way (though not in this state) for a wave of pseudo-populist demagogue candidates who only appeared in right-wing media, because those were the only places where their nonsensical worldviews made pseudo-sense. Enough of these candidates made enough of a stir to take control of the US House of Reps., which they have already turned back over to their mega-corporate masters.

And we had the BP spill, continuing mideast/Afghan turmoils, violent drug-turf wars in several countries, floods in Pakistan, a bad quake in Haiti, the deaths of a lot of good people, and a hundred channels of stupid “reality” shows.

Locally, a number of ballot measures were introduced to at least stem the state’s horrid tax unfairness, while staving off the worst public-service budget cuts. They all failed.

And the South Park bridge was removed without a clear replacement schedule, the Deeply Boring Tunnel project continued apace, the Seattle Times got ever crankier (though it stopped getting thinner), and our major men’s sports teams were mediocre as ever. Seattle Center bosses chose to replace a populist for-profit concession (the Fun Forest) with an upscale-kitsch for-profit concession (Chihuly).

Alleviating factors: (Most) American troops are out of Iraq. Something approximating health care reform, and something approximating the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, both passed. Conan O’Brien resurfaced; Jon and Stephen worked to restore sanity and/or fear. The Storm won another title. The football Huskies had a triumphant last hurrah; the Seahawks might get the same. Cool thingamajigs like the iPad and Kinect showed up. Seattle has emerged as the fulcrum of the ebook industry, America’s fastest growing media genre. The Boeing 787’s continued hangups have proven some technologies just can’t be outsourced.

My personal resolution in 1/1/11 and days beyond: To find myself a post-freelance, post-journalism career.

You’ve heard of paid signature gatherers. Now, George Monbiot ponders whether corporate and right-wing forces are hiring paid Internet comment trolls.

I do know this site’s comment threads have been attacked in recent weeks by spam bots. In my efforts to “moderate” those pitch people off of the site, I might have inadvertently excised an actual comment by one of you dear readers. My apologies.

Our ol’ pal David Meinert suggests at Publicola that Seattle could get at least a little out of its deep fiscal hole by opening itself up to casinos, slot machines, and booze in strip clubs.

(UPDATE: And our other ol’ pal Goldy thinks it’s a lousy idea.)

In typical DC Beltway pundit pomposity, the New Republic’s Noam Scheiber claims “Wikileaks Will Kill Big Business and Big Government.”

Scheiber’s claim: In an age when organizational secrets are porous commodities, big orgs shouldn’t have a lot of people around who know them. That, in turn, will require smaller, more cohesive orgs. Perhaps no bigger than 500 workers (the size of Obama’s campaign organization, which held great internal discipline).

“The Wikileaks revolution isn’t only about airing secrets and transacting information.” Scheiber asserts. “It’s about dismantling large organizations—from corporations to government bureaucracies. It may well lead to their extinction.”

We’ve discussed this dream of de-consolidation in the past, with local author David C. Korten’s 1999 book The Post Corporate World. Where Korten saw utopian promise in small businesses and housing co-ops, Scheiber sees business (and government) as usual (or close to it) surviving by becoming smaller, nimbler and tighter.

At once, Scheiber’s and Korten’s visions contradict and support one another.

Scheiber sees big institutions going small to retain strict top-down control.

Korten sees grassroots people-power ventures offering an alternative to strict top-down control.

In reality, both could happen. And in some ways, they already are.

The Republican wins this past midterm election largely occurred in spite of the national Republican Party. They were the works of more decentralized big-money whores of all genders and many ethnicities, who’d directly solicited big campaign cash from corporations and billionaires.

And with so much of America’s personal wealth concentrated on the top one or two percent of the population, a lobbyist-lovin’ politician only has to successfully nab a few mega-donors to run a “friend of the little guy” campaign.

And as we’ve learned in the ecological and economic and workplace-abuse fields in recent years, an institution doesn’t have to be big to do bad things.

Still, decentralization is an interesting starting point for a conversation about the world and its future. Lots of folks these days despise the world of global business and its capacity for harm, but I’ve not met many people with well-thought-out alternatives to today’s capitalist system.

If you’re to believe political cartoonist and radical essayist Ted Rall, everything’s just going to keep getting worse, and the only answer is to actively speed up the process.

He’s got a book out, The Anti-American Manifesto.

In it, he claims that “it’s time for our revolution.”

He doesn’t mean a “creative revolution,” or a “revolution in business.”

And he sure doesn’t mean a “tea party revolution” that just reinforces the big-money powers’ grip on control.

Rall wants to see an actual uprising, that would lead to the actual overthrow of our country’s political/corporate system.

He acknowledges that such a revolt would be violent. Many innocent people would be hurt or killed; many types of infrastructure would be destroyed; and what would rise from those ashes could very well be a dictatorship and/or reign of terror.

Rall doesn’t seem to mind all of that.

He claims that even if we end up with a Robspierre or a Napoleon or even a Pol Pot, the long-term result would still be an eventual overall improvement for the continent’s, and the world’s, people.

I wouldn’t be quite so sure about that.

But at least Rall, unlike some I know who’ve bandied about the “R word,” realizes it would be a serious action with serious consequences.