Hey, would be would-be book banners: Go take a Soma pill and chill out.

At AlterNet, Clarisse Thorn asks the musical question, “Why do we demonize men who are honest about their sexual needs?”

Her answer: Because many women see men, particularly straight men, particularly unfamiliar men, as potential threats. It’s one thing to disdain a woman as a “slut.” It’s vastly more dehumanizing to dismiss a man as a “creep.”

At my sometime stomping grounds of  Seattle PostGlobe, Eric Ruthford writes about a potential PR campaign to curb demand for child prostitutes.

He writes of such campaigns in other cities, campaigns based on shaming the “John,” or on stern lectures about criminal penalties.

He also quotes Debra Boyer, a local anthropologist who’s studied child prostitution:

“We need to somehow educate people so that they can see what harm they’re doing,” she said. “How do we create empathy in people who have objectified women?”

You’re not going to persuade these men by using words like “objectifying.”

And you’re sure not going to persuade these men by objectifying or stereotyping them.

Instead appeal to pride, to dignity even.

Say “Your sex drive can bring life. It can bring joy. It can even bring love. Or it can contribute to a living horror.”

Say “You really want to give your money to a pimp, so you can contribute to a child’s hell?”

Say “You’re better than that.”

Say “Make love, not hurt.”

As part of the big megaproject to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct, the City wants to redevelop the pedestrian areas of Seattle’s central waterfront. Four competing proposals for this will be publicly unveiled this week.

My onetime housemate Steve “Fnarf” Thornton hasn’t seen all these proposals yet, but he suspects he’ll hate them all.

In an essay at the Seattle Transit Blog, he persuasively explains what downtown doesn’t need—more windswept plazas and cavernous boulevards.

And he delineates what downtown does need—more places like the Pike Place Market, places alive with the cacophony of commerce and the bustling mix of human activities.

In the case of the waterfront, this means more piers, more stuff going on on the piers, more vendors and food carts, and (in a big duh) more boats. The waterfront’s original purpose, Thornton knows, will never be reclaimed in an age of containerized cargo. But other water-based uses wait to be put in there.

I agree with most everything in Thornton’s premise.

To paraphrase an old slogan for a sea-originated product, we don’t need a waterfront with good taste.

We need a waterfront that tastes good.

Could recent college students actually be more narcissistic than their baby-boomer forbearers? Is this even possible?

It’s a few days late, but CBS.com has finally posted the Letterman segment with author Bill McKibben. (Fast forward to the last 10 minutes of the video.)

Since I am probably the only McKibben reader who continues to own and use a TV set, I got to see this segment on its original air date. He forcefully argues that not only do we have to act to save the planet, but that we can.

US socialist historian Lance Selfa asks, “Is America a right-wing country?”

His answer: Not really.

Selfa proposes, and I agree, that today’s pseudo-populist right is a marketing gimmick devised and/or exploited by big corporate funders. The object: To channel some traditionalists’ fear of social change into a rage against “government,” which would lead to weaker governance all around, especially toward corporate regulation/taxation.

A deeper look, Selfa argues, would see a nation steadily adopting more progressive views on health care reform, gay rights, race/gender issues, et al.

So why do leftists buy into the far right fringe’s claims to universal popularity—when they KNOW those dorks are LYING about everything else?

I’ve always guessed it’s because defeatism can be so comfortable. It’s so easy to just retreat into your boho tribes and exchange sneers against Evil Mainstream America.

Actually persuading people to your point of view is harder.

Actually organizing a movement is harder.

Actually organizing a movement for positive change, instead of merely protesting, is harder still.

But we saw in ’08 that it could be done.

Our task, in this midterm election and beyond, is not to retrieve that spirit but to move beyond it, to make working for change an everyday thing. To evolve from an ecstatic affair with activism into a marriage.

On this Labor Day, a lot of folks are thinking about what ever happened to labor.

Where did those unions go?

And more immediately, where did those jobs go?

The two might be more connected than you might think.

E.J. Dionne Jr. writes that “When unions mattered, prosperity was shared.” We had less of what one notorious Citibank memo referred to as “plutonomy,” a concentration of wealth among the few at the top. Working families got to share in the material bounty they’d created.

This wasn’t just given. It was fought for, in decades of organizing and struggle.

But it created the consumer power that drove the US economy to new heights.

If you believe a Harris poll published in Forbes (and there’s no reason why you should), Seattle now ranks #3 on a list of “America’s Coolest Cities”. Only NYC and Vegas outdo us in the pollsters’ matrix of arts & entertainment, recreational opportunities, and economic confidence.

It’s been a couple of months since I read it, but I continue to be impressed or haunted (I’m not sure) by Seattle author David Sheilds’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto.

Parts of it are like an essay anthology, even if they were written expressly to be in the book. I’m particularly thinking of the part where he tells other authors what their books are really about.

Other parts fit more closely into the “manifesto” concept.

And it’s all written in a short and breezy fashion, like Marshall McLuhan’s better known works.

Now if you know my work here, you know I believe there’s absolutely nothing inferior about aphoristic writing, despite four or more decades’ worth of hi-brow ranting against it. Long, cumbersome prose is not inherently insightful. Short, pithy, precision writing is not necessarily dumbed down writing.

In this case, Shields has thoroughly whittled and sanded down his arguments to a fine point.

His main premise: North American white suburban life has become so plasticized, so sanitized, that humans have developed an insatiable craving for “reality.” Even if it’s virtual reality, or faked reality, or fictional narratives disguised as reality.

Hence, we get “reality” TV series. We get the protagonists of these series treated as “celebrities,” splashed over the covers of gossip magazines.

We get first-person novels falsely and deliberately promoted as the real-life memoirs of young drug addicts and street orphans.

We get radio and cable “news” pundits who don’t relay information so much as they spin narratives, creating overarching explanations of how the world works—even if, in some cases, they fudge the facts or just plain lie to make their worldviews fit together.

We get fantasy entertainments (movies, video games) executed in highly hyper-realistic fashions, complete with ultra-detailed 3D computer graphics.

So far, Shields’ argument makes perfect sense.

Now for the “yeah, but” part:

In the past two or three years, most non-billionaire Americans and Canadians have been forced to face a lot of reality; a lot of unpleasant reality at that. Some of us have had all too much reality.

“Reality” entertainment can be seen as just another style of escapism. An escapism that promises total immersion. An escapism that promises, however falsely, to offer an alternate reality, one that’s more dramatic or more comprehensible than the audience’s “real” reality could ever be.

This doesn’t mean Shields’ main premise is wrong.

Millions of people could, indeed, be desperate for more “real” lives.

But they won’t find it in the highly edited and curated “reality” entertainments.

They’ll only get a scratch that makes the itch worse.

What got him initially out of the sub-basement depths of despair and self-pity, on the road toward creativity and fame, sure as hell wasn’t that manic, unquestioning  “positive psychology.”

It was something deeper, richer, truer.

Call it the power of positive negativity. Call it the gallows humor you find among hardcore AA members. Call it radical reality.

It’s what saved Callahan.

And it might just be the only thing that can save us all.

Ruth Rosen at AlterNet ponders “Why Women Dominate the Right-Wing Tea Party.”

Rosen finds at least a half-truth in the conservative womens’ claim to be the true heiresses to Susan B. Anthony and co., who had campaigned for Prohibition with the same fervor with which they had fought for women’s suffrage.

In the ’80s, the late antiporn crusader Andrea Dworkin wrote an essay called “Right Wing Women.” She admired those women for many things. She particularly admired their sexual prudery and also their dream for a world driven less by macho posturing and more by rules and traditions.

The left-O-center conventional wisdom is that there is, or ought to be, a singular collective entity of Women. This big gender-encompassing entity would, by its very nature, be of one mind on most major sociopolitical issues. This mass of Women would always support gay rights, progressive politics, peace, ecology, humanitarian aid, legalizing pot, outlawing fructose, and every other left-O-center stance.

I say fifty-two percent of the species won’t ever think exactly alike.

Gender is but one of countless factors influencing a person’s social and tribal identity. There’s also family, education, religion, economic caste, nationality, ethnicity, culture, subculture, sub-subculture, et al.

Every culture has included women who identified themselves as traditionalists. These women have always sought relative security from a hostile world in the realms of home, family, and clear rules for behavior. The lobbyists and politicians backing the various non-unified tea party strands know how to market their wares to these women.

And so should we.

What do progressives have to offer to traditionalist women?

We offer more careful stewardship of the land.

We offer more economic opportunity for more people, including working-class families.

We offer greater personal freedoms for everyone, including those who follow various religious faiths.

And as (non-Hispanic) whites slowly lose majority status in this country, we offer a vision of cultural diversity that respects minority cultures, including minority cultures that used to be majority cultures.

Once again, we celebrate the anniversary of colonial business bosses’ forcible  secession from the government that had made their success possible.

And once again, the American ideology of bottom-line-above-all has us in a mess. Several messes, in fact, and huge ones at that.

We now have a national economy based on, as Intel cofounder Andy Grove puts it, “highly paid people doing high-value-added work—and masses of unemployed.”

We have wars for oil, or more precisely for geopolitical alliances based on oil.

We have massive amounts of this self-same gunk polluting a seabed of incalculable value. We now know that it’s not one company’s fault. The entire industry was spending as little money or effort as legally possible on safety and cleanup (expenses which don’t immediately contribute to profits). The particular two or three companies behind Deepwater Horizon were simply the ones that happened to lose at this very American version of Russian roulette.

And around the country, state and local governments spar over how many social safety nets they can get away with letting rot—because, after all, asking anything from Sacred Business just isn’t done. Especially not here in the state By the Upscale, Of the Upscale, and For the Upscale.

But still, there is hope.

There is always hope, so long as America’s primal contradiction continues to hold.

I speak of the contradiction between America’s ugly realities (a nation built by financiers, conquerors, slavers, and merchant middlemen) and its lofty ideals (a nation professing devotion to freedom, justice, and democracy).

We came dangerously close in the Bush era toward resolving this contradiction in the worst way possible, by junking the ideals and becoming unabashed, unshameable mega-hustlers.

It didn’t work.

Even the furthest reaches of the Far Right found they could not win even core base support for their assorted schemes without making at least nominal appeals to citizens’ more noble natures.

That’s what the professional organizers and corporate lobbyists behind the faux-populist “tea party” nonsense understand. That’s why they disguise their ultra-corporate agenda in images of patriotic kitsch.

Even the money-grubbers’ and power-grabbers’ last remaining loyal followers believe in (at least the symbols 0f) America’s higher ideals.

This is an opportunity for those of us who wish to promote a more progressive agenda.

It’s why I still believe in what this land can become.

Seattle’s about halfway through an ambitious timeline to somehow end homelessness. As you may have guessed, the scheme’s nowhere near its lofty goals.

Hi-tech designer/author/pundit Clay Shirky has seen too many of his NYU female students fail to become industry movers n’ shakers. His conclusion: Women today just aren’t good enough braggarts and liars.