PASSAGE (George Orwell, quoted by Sam Smith at prorev.com:)

“Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.”

A LOYAL READER going by the moniker The Raven asked me to pass this tidbit on to y’all:

Hi Clark:I propose to rename the USA to “Anglosaxland,” basing on the following reason:

As everyone knows, our “great” leader Richard Cheney told, after GOP “won” the election, that finally this is the land of Anglo-Saxons, and therefore the stolen election was not stolen at all.

BTW, this very Cheney is Norman by origin, descendant of those who conquered these very Anglosaxons in 11th century. Please submit your ideas on how to rename the USA in connection with this, to theraven@linkeseite.zzn.com.

The Raven

I haven’t heard of the statement from which the above correspondent is quoting. I have, of course, heard of the Norman conquests that temporarily drove the proto-Brits into northwestern France (and of The Norman Conquests, Alan Ayckbourn’s too-clever-for-its-own-good ’70s play about a hapless Brit middle-class philanderer).

The title of Michael Moore’s movie The Big One came from his facetious suggestion of that as a new name for the nation. I’ve heard other suggestions in recent years, such as “The Home Office” and “Home of the Whopper” (not to mention the ol’ standby “Amerikkka”).

None of these fully express (and perhaps no one name can express) my vision of Usonia (a name derived from Frank Lloyd Wright) as a big polyglot mongrel mishmosh of ethnic, lingual, religious, and subcultural cliques, all under the increasingly heavy thumb of the corporate overlords and their wholly-owned politicians. If you’ve got an idea, let me and the Raven know.

A WISCONSIN COLLEGE’s list of banished words for 2003 include the far-overdue-for-banishment “Must-See TV,” “Extreme,” “Branding” (referring to the advertising/PR practice, not the fetish), “Homeland Security,” “Undisclosed Secret Location,” and, yes, “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” The only phrase on the list I personally don’t think has been overdone yet: “As Per.”

Like you, we have many dreams and hopes for Ought-Three. We’d like to think no year could be more awful than Ought-Two, but the pro-war politicians keep promising otherwise.

Still, we must hope. Our first hope, natch, is that the purveyors of Armageddon Lite (in this and other countries) be thwarted from their dark dream. We’ve other dreams as well. In our ideal Ought-Three:

• The architects who design ugly, inhospitable office buildings would have to move their own offices into them, instead of hogging all the remaining funky old buildings for themselves.
• Some bigshot economist will realize you can’t maintain a national economy that depends on consumer spending if you systematically decimate the spending power of all non-zillionaires.
• Corporate de-consolidation will begin naturally, without the need for legislation, as unweildy conglomerates (particularly in the media) continue their steady march toward fiscal collapse.
• Indie films will cover topics other than the supposedly wacky lives of indie filmmakers.
• Kazaa and QuarkXPress finally come out for Mac OS X.
• Looney Tunes finally come out on DVD.
• Somebody figures out that if “freedom” is what makes this country distinguishable from the alleged bad guys, then our people should have more freedoms, not fewer.
• City Hall figures out that the answer to every problem is not necessarily a subsidized construction project.
• G.W. Bush finally doesn’t get something he wants. Like a war, for instance.

FOR SEEMINGLY EVER, the right-wing sleaze machine has dismissed liberals and progressives as naysayers, doomsdayers, and what Spiro Agnew called “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Commentator Jeff Madrick opts to disagree. He claims the politicians who claim there are inevitable limits to what we can do for our people and our land, who dismiss as unviable any attempts to improve the lot of the nonrich, are the real pessimists. Those of us who believe this nation must and can do better are the real optimists.

In this regard, the spring print MISC will be all about the “Positive/Negative and Other Opposites.” We’ve interviewed a self-help promoter about thinking your way to a better life. We’re going to interview an author-editor who wants leftists to focus more on promoting positive solutions, rather than settling for protesting and complaining. A metaphysical expert’s tentatively slated to write a piece about the “love based reality” vs. the “fear based reality.”

As usual, your contributions are also most welcome. Email your ideas now.

And the winter print MISC is just a few pages from completion and should be in subscribers’ mailboxes and at select retail outlets any week now.

One thing we’ve learned from the five-month stretch it took to make this “quarterly”: Yr. humble editor can no longer do the whole job. So we could really use more artists, designers, ad sellers and biz-side folks, not just writers. Wanna help out: Contact the email addy above.

In the current Seattle Weekly, editor Knute Berger ponders whether the GOP zeitgeist really is heading in the direction of classic fascism.

He starts by noting the terms “fascist” and “Nazi” have become overused in recent decades to the point of near-meaninglessness. I can agree, having personally listened to a guy describing marijuana laws as a worse abuse of authority than the Holocaust. And, as I’ve already mentioned, the most predictable cliche in online discussion boards is for a “thread” to collapse into mutual Nazi-name calling.

So now we have a national government that achieved power by insider dealmaking, unabashed demagoguery, and outright theft; out to systematically dismantle representative democracy, civil liberties, and most of the Constitution; placing its perceived political opponents on lists of “terror suspects” to be denied freedom to travel; desirious to replace the whole civil-service system with a “privatization” scheme based on big-money cronyism; preaching “Christian morality” but behaving in an extremely un-Christlike manner; adamant about busting the treasury for billionaires’ tax breaks; eager to force its will upon any and every other nation; justifying all its crimes under the telltale slogan “homeland security.”

And the terms that might best describe this particular form of despotism have devolved, among some swaths of the populace, into almost meaningless all-purpose epithets, commonly used to denounce anything from the movie-ratings system to no-parking zones.

The new age people say we become whatever we’re obsessed with, whether that obsession is based in love or hatred. At least since the Reagan era and probably earlier, the post-hippie left has been obsessed with finding fascism everywhere outside its own subculture, so as to smugly claim to be the one and only defenders of freedom. It’s difficult to work for economic justice, to run election campaigns, or to fight class-action lawsuits. It’s far, far easier to simply draw Hitler moustaches onto the faces of every politician, to sneer at “new world orders,” and to dismiss every U.S. citizen outside of your own little clique as a quasi-goosestepper.

I’m not saying the left, mystically yet inadvertantly, willed the current politick into being. But it didn’t help to just assume all these years that it was already here, just so you could feel good about yourself. It didn’t help to vilify the regular citizens you should be defending. It didn’t help to reject actual political participation.

If, as Berger asks, the Republicans really are morphing into fascists, it’s a different kind than the old Italian, German, Japanese, Greek, Chilean, or Spanish versions. For one thing, it’ll claim to not be racist, at least on the higher official levels (welcoming the participation of anti-Castro Cubans and Condoleeza Rice, making convoluted distinctions between “good Arabs” and “bad Arabs”). It might not demand disciplinarian lifestyles, at least not among the affluent. It’ll proclaim freedom of religion (except for Muslims).

But in the aspects that count, the trends are ominous. Militaristic huzzas-huzzas everywhere you look. A fast-narrowing range of acceptable-in-public opinions (that gets even narrower in the big national media). A regime steadily disrobing any claims to be operating on behalf of anyone but big moneybags. Federal spies and goons running about unrestrained.

Working to turn back these trends is the single most important thing any of us can do now. It transcends all single-issue causes, which would be rendered moot if the power-grabbers continue. And it’s a helluva lot more important than individual or collective ego trips.

IN SOMEWHAT HAPPIER NEWS, The Seattle monorail referendum survived the late-absentee count to pass by 868 votes. Yet its opponents, ever-virulant about the people meddling in decisions deemed the exclusive domain of “experts,” will still try to kill it through backdoor state legislation and other tactics. What part of YES don’t you understand?

In times of war-mongering fervor, many sadly predictable events regularly recur.

Among them: Essays, usually but not exclusively written by women, blaming essentially the whole male gender for the actions of a few (usually old and un-virile) men who promote the starting of wars. (These stories almost always invoke the phrase “testosterone poisoning” and comparisons of phalluses to guns and missiles.)

One of these, by LA sex-talk-show host Dr. Susan Block, recently appeared in the lefty newsletter CounterPunch. (The above link is to a posting of the article on Block’s own site, which includes images of dildos with Bush and Saddam caricatures drawn on them.)

Just once, I’d like to see a leftist response to war-aggression hype that DIDN’T turn into a wholesale denounciation of het-male sexuality.

For one thing, the current White House occupant isn’t, as Block calls him, a hormone-crazed “dickhead.” If anything he’s a metaphoric castrato, shrilly and obediently (albeit loudly) singing to the moneyed castes in the opera-house luxury boxes.

And as Block has herself written elsewhere on her website, sex and violence are not linked but opposed to one another. A penis is not a missile, a gun, or a torpedo, but biology. It is made to bring joy; to bring people together; to replenish the species, not deplete it. (Though its improper use can lead to heartbreak, broken homes, and STDs.) Cocks have nothing to do with the starting of wars, or at least they haven’t since Troy. (Though as we’ve seen in Kosovo, they can become abused, as weapons of abuse, once a war has commenced.)

I’d like to propose a different vision: Peepees for Peace. Men publicly proclaiming the dedication of their manhood toward “erecting” positive loving alternatives to war-fear, invoking vigor and courage to resist the calls to blind obedience, working alongside (and often-times beneath) all the wise and compassionate women.

This is a little more complicated than the old slogan “Make Love Not War,” but ultimately comes down to the same conclusion. Active love, not passivity, is the true opposite of war (or of fear, one of the key emotional underpinnings of war).

I personally plan to be a warm, firm, blood-filled, snug-fitting, well-lubed, properly-sheathed, rhythmically synchronized advocate for long-term solutions to one of the planet’s most joyless regions. I will use my capacities to help make my nation more responsive to the peace message. And as a writer and public speaker, my fingers and tongue will untiringly pursue procedures which might help lead to a long-lasting, fulfilling resolution.

Gus Van Sant’s movie My Own Private Idaho envisioned Portland street gangs with colorful names, strict internal codes of conduct, and allusions to classic literature. Apparently the town’s real teen thugs are much like Van Sant’s fictional ones. Where he referenced Shakespeare, the author of the above-linked newspaper story tells of “a subculture that resembles Fagan’s gang in the classic tale of Oliver Twist.” Just don’t romanticize ’em: These teens and young adults exist in a milieu as sad as Dickens’s, and as prone to (figurative or literal) backstabbing as Shakespeare’s.

…not included on the station’s website, claims Seattle’s second (and Portland’s first) in the number of unmarried living-together couples. The news item claims one in four Seatown pairs haven’t bothered to get the legal certificate of wedlock, compared with one in ten nationally. The station didn’t say whether the region’s lousy economy (which causes folks to delay or forego all sorts of commitments) might have something to do with it.

…the real start of autumn in the GreatNW. Before long, there’ll be as little as eight and a half hours of daylight—and even when there is daylight, there won’t be much of it.

I luuvv what other folks think of as Seasonal Affective Disorder season. The air is crisp. The light is diffuse. An overriding blanket of gray hovers over everything like a half-comforting, half-smothering blanket. It’s the closest you can come in the Lower 48 to Alaska’s wintertime “midday moon.”

It’s time to break out the sweaters, scarves, boots, and long coats.

Time to spend long nights and short mornings cuddling for warmth, or to spend short afternoons and long evenings in cozy gathering places in search of a co-cuddler.

Time for cocoa, mochas, hot buttered rums, and red wine.

Time for thick oatmeal, toasted foccacia sandwiches, stew, chili, lasagne, teriyaki bowls, and roasted veggies.

Time for bright interior colors and dimmer switches turned up to 11.

Time for video-viewing marathons, group dinners, and house parties.

Time for basketball, ice skating, bowling, skiing, and pool. Time for home beer-brewing, bookshelf-building, book-writing, and political organizing.

Time to reconnect with what makes each of us truly human.

I DON’T THINK majhonng, miniskirts, and trampolines belong on a site devoted to “Bad Fads,” but at least CB radios and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles made the list.

…have it better if if they live where there aren’t rich people– i.e., whether socioeconomic inequality itself is a harbinger of disease and destitution.

FREDERICK ZACKEL WRITES about the history of Judeo-Christian prejudice against cities and city-dwellers in the essay “Life on Earth Deserves to be Lived in Vegas.”

SCROLL DOWN the document at this link and read the fascinating story of a retired mechanical-pencil-company executive. Really.

British scientist Steve Jones (no relation to the ex-Sex Pistols guitarist) claims in his new book Y: The Descent of Men that human males don’t have much of a future. Not only have average sperm counts declined in recent decades, but the Y chromosome itself is slowly but irrevocably devolving into uselessness. The result, as Jones tells Britain’s weekly Observer: “‘The chromosome unique to men is a microscopic metaphor for those who bear it,’ Jones concludes. ‘For it is the most decayed, redundant and parasitic of the lot… From sperm count to social status, and from fertilisation to death, as civilisation advances those who bear Y chromosomes are in relative decline.’… ‘the Y chromosome will eventually disappear and be taken over by another sex-determining mechanism.’