…the place to be for ambitious young techno-careerists, “a striving class of young Americans for whom race, ethnicity and geographic origin tend to be less meaningful than professional achievement, business connections and income.” In other words, don’t expect parking in Belltown on a Saturday night to get any easier any time soon.

…the Frankfurt Book Fair last week (whose schedule is one reason the Northwest Bookfest doesn’t have as many global bigname authors these days). Anyhoo, she gave a long but intriguing speech about the recent Euro/American rift, with the following closing benediction: “In a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.”

The NYU professor and longtime showbiz-basher passed away last Sunday, but (perhaps appropriately, given his contempt for all things media-esque) the papers didn’t mention it until Thursday.

The following is not intended as a “flame” message, but I always felt frustrated at Neil Postman’s writings. He said he wanted people to avoid deceptively simple ideas, but his books were full of those.

In the past, I’d publicly belittled Postman as a grumpy ol’ baby-boomer elistist of a character type I used to know in college, whose examples were always stringy-bearded, always disdainful of anything in culture or entertainment that didn’t remind them of The Late Sixties, and always contemptuous of anyone who dared commit the mortal sin of being younger than them.

This past February, some of you might recall, I was asked to join a panel discussion at the Tacoma Public Library entitled, “Are We Amusing Ourselves To Death?” (from the title of Postman’s best-known book). I found myself essentially arguing against the premise, vs. a stringy-bearded baby-boomer film critic who essentially argued that anyone whose lifestyle or demographics were different from his was automatically a dumb mainstream dupe.

I argued, and would still argue, that popular culture is not intrinsically evil (and neither are heterosexuality, meat, or non-co-op grocery stores). I would also argue that the world situation is not nearly as one-dimensionally simplistic as Postman claimed it to be (even while he denounced the masses’ excess simplicity). The books of his that I’d read were full of a priori arguments, gross overgeneralizations, ageisms, sexisms, and us-vs.-them dichotomies (although, like all my stringy-bearded professors, Postman often said “us” when he really meant to say “them”; when he wrote “we,” you could tell he meant “all those ignorami out there in dorky mainstream America who don’t know what we know and wouldn’t understand it if they heard it”).

Some of you reading this might imagine that I must be a right-winger who disliked Postman as a left-winger. NO, NO, NO. I believe Postman wasn’t too radical, he was too conservative. He was too comfortable in his hermetically-sealed ideology. As far as I’ve been able to determine, he never acknowledged that life, politics, et al. are complex, and that our schoolchildren need to learn to deal with these complexities; that there are more than two sides to most issues, and that there are a lot more than just two kinds of people in this country.

If I can now say something positive on Postman’s behalf, it’s that, at times, he did proclaim the need for critical thinking, even if he insufficiently practiced his own prescription.

…via an MIT online journal, offers a list of “Ten Technologies That Deserve to Die.” I agree with almost everything on his list.

• Nuclear weapons; land mines: Only a GOP-machine politico could like those.
• Coal mines; internal combustion engines: Powerful and nostalgic, but wasteful as all heck and often fatal to their operators.
• Cosmetic implants: Usually dorky-looking.
• Lie detectors: Overrated and way fallible.
• Prisons (not really a “technology” but a social institution): A costly waste of human energy, particularly in the war-on-some-drugs US.
• Manned spaceflight: Now Sterling gets into potentially pissin’ offi some of his own sci-fi fandom. But is there really anything those dozen dead shuttle crewpeople did that a radio-controlled robotic space explorer can’t do?
• DVDs: The miracle movie medium doesn’t impress Sterling one whit. He hates their frailty and their copy-protection schemes. He seems to prefer unprotected digital downloads, but fails to answer how downloaders will conveniently store their acquired data. I happen to feel the discs are still way useful, if that dumb CSS and Macrovision can be gotten rid of.
• Incandescent light bulbs: As long as fluorescents are as irritating as they are, the warmth of the classic Edison bulb will, I say in opposition to Sterling, remain most welcome.

…in an essay about today’s global/corporate elite, suggests British Prime Minister John Major would likely feel more comfortable in a Seattle wine bar than among the everyday citizens of his own country.

…the fulcrum of the US economy, and hence of US culture, is flowing away from NY/LA/SF and toward the likes of second-tier cities such as Omaha and Orlando. (He doesn’t mention Seattle, except to claim Asian immigrants are increasingly settling in the Midwest instead of here.)

…about sex, TV sets, death, song lyrics, food, etc. (and a few grownup misunderstandings about same) can be seen at “I Used to Believe.”

…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.