Jack Valenti, who passed away on Thursday, was an LBJ political operative who moved to Hollywood to become the film industry’s spokes-hack, a job he kept for nearly four decades. He masterminded the industry’s move from overt self-censorship to a “ratings” system that essentially accomplished the same goals. Lest we forget, Valenti also tried to outlaw home video. In the name of global media monoliths, his successors still regularly harass file sharers, DVD backup software coders, and other harmless li’l guys.

(From BoingBoing.net, here’s a short 2004-compiled list of “stupid” Valenti quotes about the industry.)

Meanwhile, a real Profile in Courage moment came in Champaign, IL on Wednesday, when Roger Ebert appeared at a film festival he’d cofounded, after losing his voice to cancer surgery. As noted by my ol’ UW Daily pal Jim Emerson, now Ebert’s Webmaster, Ebert’s wife spoke on his behalf at the festival, quoting a line from his screenplay for Russ Meyer’s cult classic Beyond the Valley of the Dolls–a film the likes of which we may never again see from a U.S.-based producer so long as the MPAA’s secretive ratings thugs still hold sway.

…these lists of “the 100 Sexiest Women in the World” that keep popping up. All of them are celebrities of one sort or another (actresses, models, singers, porn queens, one tennis player, and one racecar driver); as if baristas, schoolteachers, policewomen, seamstresses, lady lawyers, etc. can’t be steamin’. All are English speakers and almost all are from the U.S., Canada, or the U.K.; as if there couldn’t be alluring, captivating females in (or from) the rest of the planet. And don’t start me on the uniform mainstream perky thinness of most of the list.

…that the Virginia Tech shooter, like so many other Deranged Loner Males, was a lifelong victim of bullying who might have been helped by some serious medical attention, and by efforts in the schools to encourage self-respect.

Fleetwood also notes that Washington’s state legislature passed a law to encourage anti-bullying programs in schools, but that it was opposed by Republican legislators. Well, why not? After all, the school bullies of today are the right-wing politicians, executives, and commentators of tomorrow.

…since the gruesome tragedy at Virginia Tech. I’m writing this installment from within line-O-sight of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle office, where another Deranged Loner Male (DLM) went on a destructive rampage last July, one of two fatal DLM attacks in Seattle that year.

All week, pundits and bloggers have asked how come this country not only breeds DLMs but attracts them from far-off lands. I could say a lot of things about this that don’t really matter, just like many of the pundits and bloggers have.

I could say we need more familial love and social bonding, but that would be trite.

I could say we can only stop guns with more guns, but that would be false. (And trite.)

Perhaps all I can say is this is a long-term thang.

America’s “culture of violence” ain’t going away by itself, and it ain’t going away anytime soon. It’s ingrained in the very fiber of our nation’s identity, from Wild West bad men to Southern lynch mobs to Northeast urban gangs; from bloodfest movies to pro wrestling to the verbal “shots” doled out by insult comics and talk-radio bullies.

But censoring video games and comic books won’t prevent the development of more DLMs. Indeed, the culture of repression, that oft-ignored symbiotic partner to the culture of violence, might be a more direct cause in DLM-festering. It’s repression that does a lot toward turning shy outcasts into seething would-be avengers. It’s self-repression that helps cause DLMs to lose affinity with the rest of the human species.

So let’s stop harassing the misfits. Let’s invite the lonely and the forlorn to share solace and comfort wherever it can be found–in music, in nature, in art, in everything beautiful and warm and prosocial.

Yeah, like that’s gonna be easy. Remember after the Columbine shootings, when school administrators around the country sought to track every bullied and put-upon non-jock boy, so these boys could be bullied and put-upon with official sanction?

…named Naill Ferguson, writing in Vanity Fair, claims the “American empire” is in inevitable decline, with Europe already further along the road to oblivion. He cites many of the usual cultural-conservative whinge targets–sexual libertinism, pop-culture dumbness, immigrants, cultural diversity, a lack of intellectual and fiscal discipline, kids who don’t respect their elders, disinterest in religious authority, and particularly diminished military capacity in the form of fewer foot soldiers who receive inferior training and, yeah, discipline.

Ferguson compares today’s western powers to ancient Rome. Like that decadent and overstretched power, he thinks we’re on a path of converging historical forces heading straight for a decline-n’-fall.

Ferguson doesn’t ask whether empires are, by and of themselves, a good thing to have, and whether ceasing to be an empire is, by and of itself, a bad thing to be.

I will ask.

And my answers, as you might expect: No and no.

As we all should have learned in recent years, military conquest/occupation is a crude, wasteful, and usually futile way to spread influence.

As we all should have learned from the Soviet debacle, militarist/authoritarian culture is a lousy way to foster democracy, self-reliance, artistic achievement, material prosperity, or social health. It doesn’t even do that reliable a job of keeping its own elites in power.

A post-imperial America, a post-imperial world, is worth promoting/defending. And you can’t effectively promote or defend such a world by imperial means.

A Pew Research study claims today’s 18-25-year-olds are more tolerant and more Democratic-leaning than their elders, have more casual sex and binge drinking, and are more eager to make tons of money.

…the same things from the progressives that Drinking Liberally wants–less pomposity, more fun in our revolutionizin’.

Author Marybeth Hamilton claims blues music, from its first appearance on 78 rpm records, has always been a vehicle for white intellectuals and curators to fantasize about the supposed primeval “authenticity” of ethnic folks. And it has continued to be so, on to the recent fad for Paul Simonized “world” music and the thug stereotypes deliberately perpetuated by gangsta rap.

WELL-DUH DEPT. #2: The TV show 24 is produced and written by pro-war Republicans. Who else would so lovingly depict torture as an act of heroism?

…makes #48 in the Guardian’s UK-centric list of “the 50 men who really understand women.” (George Clooney’s #1.)

…of new-age philosophy evolves ever more passive-aggressive odes to hyper-happy obedience, a Rice U. researcher claims “grumpy workers” make the best employees.

A former supermarket tabloid stringer finds solace in berating his youngers for finally getting old.

Sheesh.

Yeah, Cobain’s image has been showing up on tacky nostalgia-kitsch merchandise. But it has been almost since his death.

Elsewhere in the no-shit-Sherlock realm, David Bowie just turned 60. Debbie Harry already passed that milestone. Joe Strummer and Joey Ramone didn’t get the chance to do so. Macauley Culkin’s been married and divorced. And the Earth revolves around the sun approximately once per calendar year.

“Gen X” never vowed to die before it got old. Rather, it (or some of its more vocal members) vowed not to look ridiculous while doing so.

…points out exactly where the American left made its big wrong turn, in learning “to love ‘identity’ and ignore inequality.”

Megatrends author John Naisbitt, quoted at Poynter Online (a great media-news site), repeats the old baby-boomer canard that them kids these days aren’t reading anything. To illustrate this, the Poynter editors used a stock photo of wristbands–all festooned with words.

I’ve said it before, and it’s worth repeating until the boomer bigots finally listen: People younger than you or me are not necessarily a subhuman species. Yes, they can read.

Indeed, words are more pervasive than ever. All these millions of blogs, MySpace sites, and online forums–they’re all about words. (They’re certainly not about the graphic design.) Text messaging, IRC chats, email–all about words. Talk radio, podcasts–all about spoken words.

What media companies have to ask themselves is whether the words they’re generating are worth reading.

…an Anglophone web designer based in Japan, discusses “What Internet workers can learn from the old Greeks.”

…postulates that people just might choose their mates based partly on an unconscious to be of one mind.