…that I only reached level three on “The Geek Test,” a Cosmo-like quiz to learn how geeky you truly are.

…(no apparent relation to former Meet the Press MC Lawrence Spivak) wants progressives to stop being so darned defensive. She says the left has to do more than just react against the right; and it has do do so through old-fashioned marketing.

…not to be judgmental about judgmental people anymore. But sometimes I can’t help it. Such as when KOMO’s voice-O-relative-sanity Ken Schram gently lambastes the NIMBY hypocrites fighting he homeless “Tent City” camp in Bothell.

…on her website (and soon to be book) Class Matters, that there are more “Others” in this nation besides just upscale women and upscale gays.

…are so cynically resistant to sales pitches, even video-game companies don’t know how to sell to ’em!

…the pix of grinning female US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners as a sign that women aren’t necessarily more “moral” than men after all:

“A uterus is not a substitute for a conscience. This doesn’t mean gender equality isn’t worth fighting for for its own sake. It is. If we believe in democracy, then we believe in a woman’s right to do and achieve whatever men can do and achieve, even the bad things. It’s just that gender equality cannot, all alone, bring about a just and peaceful world….”In short, we need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and subvert them.”

…that the Iraqi prisoner-abuse scandal is simply the most visible recent symptom of a decades-long decline in U.S. values; a decline driven, he believes, not by sex and liberals but by corporate power-madness and individual greed. Smith quotes urban historian Jane Jacobs:

“A culture is unsalvageable if stabilizing forces themselves become ruined and irrelevant. . . The collapse of one sustaining cultural institution enfeebles others, makes it more likely that others will give way . . . until finally the whole enfeebled, intractable contraption collapses.”

…in a recent column, quotes Pat Moynihan:

“The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

I’m a liberal, and I believe the first part of Moynihan’s statement. I believe politics is a subset of culture, not the other way around.

We can’t just elect or defeat a Presidential candidate and really change things.

We can’t just protest, no matter how spectacularly, and really change things.

We can’t just “deconstruct texts” and really change things.

We’ve gotta do the hard, lifelong work of building a national, permanent, progressive-populist movement.

And to do that, we’ve gotta construct a culture. Not just a “counterculture” or a culture of opposition, but a forward-looking, all-embracing, universally-welcoming aesthetic/zeitgeist.

All the aspects of current hipster and historic coopertative cultures can be part of this: Music, books, video/film, food/drink, architecture, small business, non-profits, artists, craftspeople, sidewalk philosophers, preachers, cafes, bars, “third places,” the Net, and so on.

They don’t have to be all coordinated or uniformly “on message”—the point is to free up human ingenuity to solve human problems.

And yes, there will be political rifts and divisions within such a non-top-down culture. There will always be geographic and other interests wanting, say, more funding for their own areas of interest.

And yes, there will be “cuture wars” within such a culture. There will be hammered-dulcimer people who don’t like heavy-metal people, sexually-reserved women who don’t care much for sexually-expressive women, etc. etc.

But all that’s part of the whole point—to liberate the whole mongrel beauty that is the US from the twin dictatorships of Hollywood/Madison Avenue corporate culture and right-wing authoritarian culture. To advocate a third choice, which is really millions of third choices.

It’s a task for the long haul, not for an election cycle. So take your vitamins, get into shape, and live for it.

You have, I’m sure, heard of the infamous “Stanford Prison Experiment.”

…suggests that, just maybe, wealth and happiness don’t necessarily mesh together.

While the Bushies have blanketed the airwaves with one slick, fraudulant attack ad after another, the Kerry camp’s been toying with little-seen test-market commercials, looking for a single “theme” slogan that would rise above the clutter.

I say they should have lotsa themes, lotsa slogans, lotsa attack angles.

Last week, I berated the influence of product-style “branding” in US politics. But forget that beration for a moment and imagine some of the most successful brand campaigns of all time.

Small- and medium-time brands, with limited ad budgets, are the ones that benefit the most from single-message themes. The truly dominant brands use multi-faceted campaigns that illuminate the product’s image from different angles.

Budweiser has the eagle, the “B” crown, the horses, the cartoon “Bud Man” (who never appears on TV, only in bar merchandise), the serious commercials, the jokey commercials, and a panalopy of slogans, some used simultaneously. The effect is to position Bud as a brand too large, too magnificent, to be summed up by just one phrase or just one symbol.

So should a Presidency, and a Presidential campaign.

The messes created and/or compounded by right-wing peurilety are too many, and too varied, for their solutions to fall under one memorable rubric. We’ve gotta figure at least a semi-graceful exit out of Iraq, get working folk working again, reverse the consolidation of wealth and power, fix health care, put out fewer greenhouse gases, wean ourselves off of petroleum addiction, rebuild communities, promote tolerance, break up a media monopoly or two, stare down the radio demagogues, etc. etc. etc.

How can you stick all that in one pithy mouthful? I say don’t even try. Instead, have different sub-themes, about all the things Kerry promises (or oughta promise) to do.

As for an overarching meta-theme, Kerry’s recent ads already have one: “Together, we can build a stronger America.”

It’s longish, but it’s stuffed w/meanings.

The very first word implies a sharp change-O-course from the divisive, hyper-competitive social ethos of the past decade or two.

Imagine: Instead of early economist Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of competition, society grows via folk working hand-in-hand. Legislation gets enacted on the basis of what might work best for the most people, not what might attract the most campaign contributions. People in high office seek consensus, not domination.

Could it happen? I insist it could, not just that it should.

Kerry & co. should also so insist.

Sometimes, our present-day life in occupied America seems like a bad science fiction novel.

By “bad science fiction novel,” I don’t mean a brisk, high-energy pulp adventure story of 1950s vintage.

I mean a ponderous, relentlessly grim-n’-geeky, multi-volume saga of 1980s vintage.

You know, those thousand-page trilogies that tried to shoehorn in all possible fan-favorite elements in the same story—”hard” science, magic, sword and sorcery, palace infighting. monsters, and a sniggering teen-nerd sexuality; all delivered in an ultra-humorless tone, with extraneous sublots and sub-subplots dangling every which where, distracting readers away from the lack of a compelling main narrative.

Sci-fi trilogies of the pre-cyberpunk years often depict scary, foreboding worlds. Similarly, the geeks running today’s conservative establishment posit a vision of a scary, foreboding America, eternally besieged within an even scarier, more foreboding world.

Trilogies are full of near-incomprehensible jargon, catch words, acronyms, and bureaucratic geekspeak phrases that often conceal more than they reveal. So does today’s U.S. federal government, with its straight-faced doubletalk about “weapons of mass destruction related program activities” and such.

Trilogies depict freakishly misunderstood stereotypes of human behavior and interaction, and demand the reader accept them as just the way things are in this fictional universe, with no questioning allowed. So do the likes of Karl Rove, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, et al., who, with their incessant screeching and posturing, insist that we can make the rest of the world adore us by shoving them around, that we can defend “freedom” by destroying it, and that anybody who disagrees with this is a terrorist.

Grim sci-fi, just as much as the less pretentious pulp sci-fi, wallows in physical impossibilities portrayed as hard science. Exploding spaceships might not make noises in trilogy novels (as they wouldn’t in real life); but the writers do play havoc with accepted real-life laws of mass, energy, and matter; often coming up with convoluted pseudo-explanatory excuses for doing so. Likewise, the right wing’s yarn-spinners insist to us, with no hint of irony permitted, that monopolies are good for competition, imperial invasions are good for democracy, pollution is good for the environment, conservative-only talk TV is “fair and balanced,” bigotry is Christlike, and the best way to persuade others toward your point of view is to insult and belittle them.

And most importantly, grim SF offers up a skewed definition of heroism and/or antiheroism. Grim-SF protagonists don’t have to be noble, inspiring, or all that heroic. They’re the good guys because the writers say they are; they can do evil things and it’s still OK. And in our century, we’ve got a ruthless gang of powermongers who regularly whore themselves out to big campaign contributors, who put the greed of the few ahead of the need of the many, who deliberately consign the domestic economy and the global environment to the figurative toilet, and who still, with total sincerity, believe themselves to be the noblest, most righteous figures on our planet.

Oh yeah—grim SF “trilogies” don’t always top out at three volumes. They can go on for seemingly ever, spreading their joyless aesthetic of bitter struggle, until people stop buying them.

Let’s hope people stop buying the fictions of our federal storytellers soon.

As the local media cheerlead over the official start of Boeing 7E7 production, the current-affairs zine The Next American City has a long, lucid essay about “Seattle’s Boeing Fixation.”

Writer Sarah Kavage cites the 7E7 assembly-plant location derby as a classic example of corporate job blackmail, a now-familiar ritual that encourages communities to give companies too much to get too little back. (In the case of Seattle/Everett, it’s a mere 1,000 final assembly jobs.) Kavage suggests cities and states find the courage to back away from the game:

“Ultimately, the Puget Sound region will likely have to wean itself off of Boeing, whether it wants to or not. Even if the company stays in town, the region’s influence over it, for better or for worse, will continue to diminish….”Nationwide, our leaders must better manage the difficult balance between long-term regional needs and the needs of large employers. Doing so requires more than passing regulations and bribing companies with incentives. It means actively investing in the infrastructure, environmental protection, education, and social services that keep the quality of life high. And it means investing in local business development and potentially forging agreements with other states and countries to limit the size and nature of incentives.”

…whether the government and the news media (and, by extension, the private sector) are now run by autistics.

One of my long-standing “received ideas” about the failures of the ’60s was that hedonism was a lousy pretext for a revolution, though a great way to advertise one.

Every now and then, I find someone who begs to differ. These would include the Scandinavians who’ve started a nonprofit porn site to benefit rainforest preservation. (Found via Pagan Moss.)