…a similarity between the already-infamous White House snub against “the reality-based community” and an Orwell line about “Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth.”

…Bush’s continued election viability to his appeal to “our lizard brains,” manipulating the populace into a pre-rational state that leaves us “shrouded in the fog of fear.”

…writing for The Progressive Populist, has some scathing remarks about you-know-what:

“I don’t think it’s accurate to describe America as polarized between Democrats and Republicans, or between liberals and conservatives. It’s polarized between the people who believe George Bush and the people who do not. Thanks to some contested ballots in a state governed by the president’s brother, a once-proud country has been delivered into the hands of liars, thugs, bullies, fanatics and thieves…. What this election will test is the power of money and media to fool us, to obscure the truth and alter the obvious, to hide a great crime against the public trust under a blood-soaked flag.”

…the Des Moines Register has an editorial comparing Bush’s war talk with language George Orwell’s characters might have used.

As I’d predicted, Bush’s big speech was competently written, passably delivered, and largely content-free. He offered few plans for the future. He brought up war, terror, and the war on terror repeatedly. He bashed Kerry “politely.” He made sure to lie about Kerry’s platform, among other topics, along the way. He presented himself as the no-choice-possible “brand” for a demographic target market of “NASCAR dads” and swing-state suburban whites. And, oh yeah, he hinted oh-so subtly that anybody who dared oppose or disagree with him on anything was unpatriotic, un-American, etc.

The only thing I didn’t expect was the humanity, the near-humility, one could see in Bush’s face and his body language (if not in his script). Like Jimmy Carter in 1980, Bush has clearly aged beyond his years in office. He seemed weary, struggling to get through the script without a flubbed line. I pitied him. I still want him removed from office, but now I have another reason why—I want him relieved of his heavy burdens.

Public speaking, of course, isn’t Bush’s strong point. Heck, being President isn’t his strong point. His strengths are as a backroom dealmaker, a fundraiser for the hard right, and a policy whore for certain industries. He called Kerry unqualified to take over the White House; but he’s proven himself unqualified to run anything but a campaign.

And even at that, he’s gotten scared and desperate, as seen in the ever-shriller attack ads and the insult-filled convention speeches he delegated to his underlings.

The Republicans’ bully aesthetic, which Bush has encouraged, just might fatally disgrace him. Bill Clinton announced he was going into a hospital for heart bypass surgery. Bush mentioned this in a campaign speech on Friday. Bush asked his audience to remember the ex-President in their prayers. Instead, the audience loudly booed. Bush did nothing to discourage them. In one moment, the party’s mean side was revealed in all its grossness.

New-age philosopher and “medical intuitive” Caroline Myss once wrote that the fall of Communism came in a sudden, unexpected flash. In a relative instant, seven decades of clunky, kludgy ideology blew away.

Could we be witnessing, at last, the start of neoconservatism’s own dissolving?

ABOVE, AN EXAMPLE of what will keep the Left out of power in the US forever.

I happen to know the gents behind this poster; some of them were also behind the post-industrial rock band ¡TchKung!. I’d argued with them in the past about the futulity of square-bashing.

To dehumanize those whose lifestyles are different from yours—even under the guise of parody—is to become that which you claim to hate.

…is a disturbingly deep element of the USA’s cultural heritage: The early history of Parker Brothers, one of the many toy-and-game companies now consolidated under Hasbro.

The sixteen-year-old George Parker, it seems, had grown up in Salem, MA being bored by something called The Mansion of Happiness, an early board game invented by one Anne Abbott and designed “to teach moral principles.” (Here’s a small picture of the game board.) Young Parker knew there’d be a market for games kids would actually want to play. He also knew many New England parents didn’t allow their kids to play with regular playing-card decks, because of their association with the vice of gambling. That gave him an opportunity to create his own card game, Banking, in 1883. It had a pseudo-financial payoff, but wasn’t played for real money (at least not in the official rules) and offered parents a pseudo-educational, pro-capitalistic element. And, as an original creation, George and his brother Charles could copyright and trademark it, turning them into intellectual-property tycoons.

Fifty years later, in a recently-disputed sequence of events, the Parkers’ firm added Monopoly to its lineup and secured a place in pop-cult history.

…look at the cultural aspects of dieting.

…The Death Clock, I’m going to live to be 98. And I’ll probably still be complaining about the older generation.

A U of Wisconsin study’s named Seattle #2 in “America’s Most Literate Cities.” Minneapolis, our ol’ sister city at the other end of the historic Great Northern RR line, is #1; Portland’s #9. And where would you imagine the third-busiest readers to be? Why, Pittsburgh, of course.

Some people who sincerely want social workers to understand today’s teens have compiled a somewhat ridiculous glossary of supposed youth buzzwords. Some of the terms on the list are at least a decade out of date (“baby daddy,” “mack”). Most are demeaning, particularly when stuffed and mounted in this particular context (“skeeza,” “thugged,” “pigeon”). If anyone, besides clueless white mall rats, actually uses more than a few of the phrases in everyday conversation, I’d be truly surprised.

There’s another one of those research reports out that claims nobody’s reading in America anymore. And, like most prior reports of its type, its findings aren’t as dire as its headlines suggest.

Actual book sales, it turns out, have been flat or slightly increasing during the recent economic sadness. And that’s not counting audio books, e-books, and the good ol’ Internet (which is for the most part a reading exercise).

It’s the consumption of “literature,” that amorphously-defined area of non-genre fiction, that’s not kept up with population growth, or even fallen a bit, over the past two decades. (Although its audience decline in that era is not nearly as precipitous as that of network TV in the same period.)

I’m currently trying to get a PR job in a book-related company. What I’ll tell them is what I’ll tell you: Books aren’t going away any time soon. They are, as a character on Max Headroom once said, “a non-volatile storage medium.”

As for “literature,” it’s always been a specialty taste in this country. When book people wax nostalgic for the days when NYC publishing was run by tweed-suited gentlemen in funky little offices, they’re pining for a day when the book biz was so small and concentrated as to have been a boutique industry. The peak years of fiction book sales, roughly the ’50s through the ’70s, coincided with the peak years of mass-market paperbacks, when everything from Orwell to Salinger could be found on the drugstore spinner racks.

Among consumer-product industries in this country, the book industry is among the most resistant to change. Yet change it must, if it’s ever going to achieve its full potential as a business and as a force for influence on the culture at large.

More about all this later, maybe.

“Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.”

An NY Times Sunday-magazine piece claims “the happier your mood, the more liable you are to make bigoted judgments.”

…the real dividing point in U.S. politics is “between those who know they are right and those who are a bit doubtful.”