…this AOL puff piece, Seattle ranks a respectable #7 among US cities with “the best looking people.” That renowned closeted-sailor hangout of San Diego, CA placed #1; our neighbors to the south in Portland placed ninth; neither NY nor LA made the top 10.

YOU MIGHT’VE READ a little op-ed piece in the tiny P-I-edited section of the local Sunday paper, in which one Renana Brooks, billed as a “clinical psychologist,” claimed George W. Bush isn’t really a verbal stumbler but a master communicator of fear, dependency, and “empty language.”

On the site of her Sommet Institute for the Study of Power and Persuasion, Brooks goes on to condemn Bush further. She claims he’s “the hero in his own fairy tale fantasies that are passed off as a vision for the rest of the country.” She even compares his rhetorical stance with “the communication structure of an abusive personality”:

“The hallmark of the abusive personality is the need to cast itself as the savior though personalization, creating a dependency dynamic. In order to present himself as the only man for the job, Bush uses personalization to contrast his positive ‘optimistic personality with the difficult times at hand. Bush openly identifies himself as the only person capable of producing positive outcomes, even when the actions required are vaguely understood. Contrast Bush’s signature line in his speech to Congress ,’I will not falter, I will not tire, I will not fail..’ with Kennedy’s signature line “ask not what your country can do for you, ask rather what you can do for your country.”

And she accuses him of deliberately “governing by crisis,” to keep people despondent and dependent:

“Bush uses crisis ‘empty language” statements to place himself in a “one up” position vis a vis the American people. [He may have learned this both as a younger brother in a home driven by as domineering mother and an absent father, and honed it as a response to the pressures of needing to succeed in a world where he felt that it was necessary to build a persona that avoided difficult truths in relationships with more driven people than himself.] Whatever its ultimate root, Bush has become a master at using empty language to succeed.

“Even his many malapropisms may be explained as areas where empty language is being used to grapple with uncomfortable or unknown subjects, and that these malapropisms disappear as Bush grows more familiar and powerful in the subjects.

“This relentless pessimism coupled with repeated depictions of himself in a positive light by means of empty language is suggestive of the dynamics that occur in spousal abuse. There the abuser copes with underlying feelings of helplessness or anxiety and maintains dominance and control by consistently describing his partner as deficient and inadequate with no hope of improving. In cases of spousal abuse the more that the abused spouse is criticized the more she ‘appreciates’ her spouse even while disagreeing within.

“This may explain why the President’s poll ratings remain high despite the fact that people express disagreement with specific policies.”

For once, somebody’s finally put linguistic “deconstruction” analysis to a useful purpose. Now, if enough people would listen, so’s we can get started on the biz of re-constructing democracy.

NEAL POLLACK sez it’s way past time Americans started fighting for their right to party:

“These are tense times. People want to loosen the steam valve a little bit. They want to participate in culture outside of the jurisdiction of federal ‘morality’ educators. We don’t want the government telling us how to spend our free time, sussing out and prosecuting casual drug users and harassing nightclub owners. And for heaven’s sake, give the kids some condoms.

“Sex and drugs and live music make life great. These are the kinds of things that were outlawed in Taliban-run Afghanistan. If they can’t be legal and easy in America, then I don’t want to live here anymore. I want to live in a place where drugs and sex are tolerated, where the government provides a sane level of social services, where religion isn’t always threatening to take over the state.”

I heartily concur.

Down with the Republican sex police AND the Democrat music censors!

Proponents of pot legalization should give up their pious guises, admit they’re really out to legalize recreational toking, and take pride in that.

We should allow and even endorse such wholesome frolics as the Fremont Parade nudists. Even set aside a clothing-optional public beach or two.

The Seattle City Council shouldn’t just approve bigger parking lots for strip clubs, it should dump its decade-long moratorium against licensing any new strip clubs.

Let’s fess up and admit our teens (and adults) are gonna be gettin’ it on w/one another, and prepare ’em for the potential physical (and psychological) consequences.

And consentin’ adults of whatever gender oughta be able to get it on w/other consentin’ adults of whatever gender, even for material gifts, as long as they don’t keep the neighbors awake at night.

Hedonistically-related activities that do impunge on the well-being of others, such as stinky meth labs that could explode and take out the whole block any day now, could still be prosecuted under those reasons.

Heck, I’d even lower the drinking age a year or two, under certain circumstances and with certain driving-related caveats.

There. Now I’ve gone and ruined any chance of ever getting elected to the U.S. Senate.

Unless a bunch of us go out and do what Pollack asks–form a “Party Party” built around the right to live our own lives our own way.

As I’ve written in the past, Seattle’s civic history has always involved the dichotomy between sober civic-building and boistrous partying-for-fun-and-profit. (Frenchie theorist Jean Baudrillard would call it “production” vs. “seduction.”) The past decade of the hi-tech boom saw great public and private investment in the “production” half of the equation, but all that remains standing from much of that are monuments to the bureaucrat-acceptable parts of the “seduction” industries–sports and recreation sites, big comfy homes, museums, and performing-arts palaces. The newest of these, McCaw Hall (the revamped Opera House), has its open house this Sunday. (Yes, it’s a theater named for a family whose fortune was made in that bane of theater operators everywhere, cell phones.)

Las Vegas is realizing the economic value of fun. It’s time our regional (and national) leaders did likewise, or got replaced with other leaders who do.

(PS: I know the cyber-Libertarians would insist to me that they fully support the right to party. Alas, some of these dudes also support the right to pollute, the right to discriminate, the right to pay shit wages, and the right to bust unions.)

(PPS: Ex-Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg discusses some of this in his new book, Dispatches from the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit. Goldberg makes the supposedly provocative, but actually common-sensical, point that the Demos can’t successfully court what used to be known as “the youth vote” if they’re sucking up to censors and wallowing in baby-boomer bias.)

…that hasn’t already been said and will continue to be said, ad infinitum, about the local mainstream media’s current favorite tabloid-sleaze saga, the tragic case of the wife-abusing Tacoma police chief who fatally shot his estranged spouse and then himself.

Except this: Above-the-law misbehavior, control freakishness, and delusions of omnipotence among the law’s supposed protectors should come as no surprise.

JILL NELSON writes on MSNBC about the rise of a “mean-spirited America:”

“…Americans go along with the program or remain silent, too afraid of the Muslim bogeymen thousands of miles away to recognize the Christian ones in our midst. Fearful that we will be verbally attacked, or shunned, or lose our livelihoods if we dare question the meanness that characterizes our government and, increasingly, defines our national character.

I do not feel safer now than I did six, or 12, or 24 months ago. In fact, I feel far more vulnerable and frightened than I ever have in my 50 years on the planet. It is the United States government I am afraid of. In less than two years the Bush administration has used the attacks of 9/11 to manipulate our fear of terrorism and desire for revenge into a blank check to blatantly pursue imperialist objectives internationally and to begin the rollback of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and most of the advances of the 20th century…

“Three years ago, before the bloodless coup d’etat that made George W. Bush president, America was a far-from-perfect nation. Yet there was the possibility, almost gone now, that our country might evolve into a place that lived up to its loftiest democratic rhetoric. Today, I live in an America that makes my stomach hurt and fills me with terror. A nation run by greedy, frightened, violent bullies. It is time to take our country back before it is too late.”

(Found by Kurt Nimmo’s Another Day in the Empire.)

…to “Value Added Marketing” and “The Fake Little Laugh That Means ‘Bad Acting,'” Phil Agre’s compiled a long, thoughtful, personal list of “Minor Annoyances and What They Teach Us.”

WHILE SEARCHING FOR SOMETHING ELSE, I stumbled across an essay by a former Yahoo staff programmer named Paul Graham about “Why Nerds Are Unpopular.” Among its astute observations on the emptiness and counterproductivity of the average US high school are these:

“Even if nerds cared as much as other kids about popularity, being popular would be more work for them. The popular kids learned to be popular, and to want to be popular, the same way the nerds learned to be smart, and to want to be smart: from their parents. While the nerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please….

“I didn’t really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a twinkie. Not just school, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.

Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things that could endanger children.

And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids all locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.

What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren’t told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they’re called misfits.”

…what the heck “patriotism” means anymore.

…”we need to make love to the Iraqis after we’ve made war.”

RICK GIOMBETTI writes at Eat the State:

“We have long since passed the stage in our history when opposition to militarism are merely values to be cherished. Given the awesome destructive power of the weapons at our government’s disposal, we have no choice but to oppose the Bush administration’s belligerence. It is a prerequisite for our survival.”

…sez we shouldn’t consttantly rail against Bush’s language blunders. For one thing, we can still “criticize the U.S. President based on his bad policies. It ain’t like there’s a shortage of those.” For another, “Language bullying — or prescriptivism, as it’s more
politely called — is conservative in the worst sense. It advances a stuffy
and old-fashioned view of language, the rules of which it considers set by
supposed experts, such as the authors of grammar books, rather than common
usage. It is deeply anti-populist and snobby, not to mention just plain
wrong and cranky.”

DAVID BRODER breaks from the Washington Post‘s recent deluge of Dubya-worship to dare to question a new Federal budget that sacrifices almost everything from education to children’s health, all for the sake of the gazillionaires’ sacred tax cuts….

WHILE SUSAN FALUDI ponders whether we’re seeing the death of certain American mythologies, such as those of morality and justice.

FRANK RICH isn’t the first one to notice how the Chicago movie reflects today’s cynical media manipulations. But I haven’t yet read of anybody who’s noticed the political relevance that almost redeems Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones. A republic slowly devolves into an empire while fighting both large-scale battles and sneak terror attacks–and while its supposed leaders are actually conspiring with the attackers, to generate an atmosphere of instability and to promote the “emergency” suspension of democracy. Lucasfilm is now filming the next sequel, in which (as we all already know) the forces of empire win and the defenders of freedom scatter into far-flung exiles. Let’s hope we can improvise a happier ending to our real-life clone wars.

…a little further on the addictive quest for what my previous post referred to as “abstract power,” the destructive madness that’s fueling our governmental elite during its current drive toward doom.

Some of you who lived through the Watergate era remember the “Blind Ambition,” as Nixon aide John Dean described the White House mindset of the time.

Look at the number of un-reconstructed Nixonians back in the White House now, imagine three decades’ worth of stewing grudges and revenge fantasies.

Next, consider the “Reality Distortion Field.”

That’s the late-’80s-coined phrase with which Apple Computer cofounder Steve Jobs was accused of being selectively unaware of business conditions that didn’t fit what he chose to believe. The lieutenants and yes-men who surrounded Jobs, according to this theory, held such personal loyalty to their boss that they came to share his delusions?and to feed them back to him, by giving him highly edited market data and highly weighted interpretations of that data.

Finally, we have the example of Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal.

This documentary, currently airing on the Game Show Network, tells the tragic life story of Michael Larson, an unemployed ice-cream truck driver from Ohio with three kids by three different mothers, a man obsessed with finding the perfect get-rich-quick scheme that would set him up for life. He spent his jobless days watching the four or five TV sets he’d stacked in his tiny apartment. He watched the now-classic Press Your Luck until he realized the show’s big game board wasn’t really random, that he could predict the order of its blinking lights and stop it on any prize square he wanted. He got to LA, somehow got through the contestant-casting process, and legally took the network for over $100,000. He then promptly lost it all between a shady real-estate deal and a burglary at his home (yes, he’d kept thousands in small bills lying around the apartment!).

Anyhoo, during the documentary a staff member on the old show recalls seeing a steely, emotionless stare in Larson’s eyes. The staffer says he saw the same look years later, when his teenage son started getting hooked on video games. It’s the “in the zone” stare one gets when one has become one with the game. Total zen-like concentration on making the right moves in the right sequence, and on the power-rush rewards for success. Total obliviousness to everything that is neither the screen nor the control console.

This country, my loyal readers, is being run by people who try to run government, and war, as one big video game. The chickenhawks don’t want to fight. They never wanted to fight. They just want to manipulate the joysticks of power by all means available, including by the means of making other people fight for them, whilst they remain in their posh office suites and luxurious homes bossing everybody around.

I could give a fourth metaphor here, but you already know about the hubris and comeuppance of those ol’ dot-com bosses.

NEWSWEEK VET ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE recently gave a long speech to the Foreign Press Association on the messier-every-day mess the right wing sleaze machine has gotten us into, entitled “Clash of Civilizations or New World Disorder?” Some highlights:

“All I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty is that the

world today is a lot safer than it will be in 10 years from now, as the

forces of nationalism, fundamentalism, globalism, and increasingly

transnationalism sort themselves out. The new nexus that I can see at my work at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)—where I direct a program about transnational threats—is an emerging link between fanaticism, religion, and science….”Somebody, somewhere today is planning a post-capital world. I see some of the Phd dissertations being written all the way from Singapore to Spain following the scandals we had recently and still have on Wall Street. If present trends continue with democratic governance dominated by political leaders whose main concern is how to get themselves re-elected, then I’m afraid that democracy and the public good may be deemed incompatible, as indeed they were in Europe in the 1920’s and 1930’s.

“I don’t think it takes rocket science to figure out how much damage was done to the United States – the citadel of capitalism – by the age of gluttony on Wall Street. These crypto-capitalists saboteurs, as I call them in a column are the fodder that feeds transnational progressivism, which is a new ideology rooted in the NGOs….

“Last fall, Hewlett Packard received a patent for a new computer of

breakthrough technology that will enable them to manufacture a computer

smaller than a spec of dust. There is already a cell telephone so small that

it can be planted in a tooth. So the technology revolution is bound to be an

integral part of whatever emerges, as invisible molecular structures

embedded in conventional chips will be worn, ingested, or implanted. Imagine entire chemical labs the size of a computer chip. Technology is neutral, but one can easily imagine that the forces of evil will harness it to their objectives….

“[Washington] has become a bilingual city where truth is the second language…

“Are the networks in favor of war for ideological reasons or because ratings go up? I would tend to agree with the latter. They want a war. I am convinced of that.”