Change a few of the nouns turn a couple of other parts sideways, and this Richard Cohen essay deriding “the myth of American exceptionalism” could easily be used against the myth of “alternative culture” exceptionalism.

Lots of media outlets, even the BBC, did the whole Obama/Osama confusion thang last week.

Some outfit calling itself the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center has just declared Seattle to be America’s “Most Walkable City.” Yes, even with all the hills.

Wicked beats, sampled and altered and available freely for re-sampling, all based on the clicks, pops, and hisses from vinyl records’ end grooves.

All you people out there who love to boast at the tops of your voices about not having owned a TV in ___ years: You’re not nearly as “special” as you think you are.

The film version of (part of) Atlas Shrugged has come to and mostly gone from America’s cinemas. (Around here, it’s still playing at one multiplex in Bellevue.)

All progressively-minded film critics and political pundits have used this apparently mediocre movie to make big snarky laffs at the expense of the story’s original author, the eminently and deservedly mockable Ayn Rand.

As is usually the case, Roger Ebert expressed this conventional wisdom better than anybody. (Though Paul Constant at the Stranger gave it a good try.)

So why am I writing about it this late in the game?

Because there’s something ironic, and not in a cute/funny way, about art-world people calling Rand and her followers arrogant elitists.

There’s an outfit in Italy called the Manifesto Project. It gathered short essays on graphic design and commercial art (in English) from 24 leading designers around the world.

One of these is by the eminent American magazine, book and poster designer Milton Glaser. During a passage about how “doubt is better than certainty,” Glaser starts discussing why so many designers can’t embrace either doubt or collaboration:

There is a significant sense of self–righteousness in both the art and design world. Perhaps it begins at school. Art school often begins with the Ayn Rand model of the single personality resisting the ideas of the surrounding culture. The theory of the avant garde is that as an individual you can transform the world, which is true up to a point. One of the signs of a damaged ego is absolute certainty.

Schools encourage the idea of not compromising and defending your work at all costs. Well, the issue at work is usually all about the nature of compromise. You just have to know what to compromise. Blind pursuit of your own ends which excludes the possibility that others may be right does not allow for the fact that in design we are always dealing with a triad—the client, the audience and you.

Ideally, making everyone win through acts of accommodation is desirable. But self–righteousness is often the enemy. Self–righteousness and narcissism generally come out of some sort of childhood trauma, which we do not have to go into. It is a consistently difficult thing in human affairs. Some years ago I read a most remarkable thing about love, that also applies to the nature of co–existing with others. It was a quotation from Iris Murdoch in her obituary. It read “Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” Isn’t that fantastic! The best insight on the subject of love that one can imagine.

I’ve ranted umpteen times in the past about “alt” culture’s silly tendencies toward us-vs.-them nonsense. All the anti-“mainstream” pomposity. The brutal stereotypes against anyone who can be sufficiently categorized (suburbanites, sports fans, meat eaters).

The real purpose of art and culture isn’t to show off how awesome you are. It’s to communicate something to somebody else, to strengthen the bonds that tie all of this mongrel species together.

When we fail at this, are we no better than Atlas Shrugged’s cocktail-downin’ snobs (only with hipper clothes)?

Like many loyal Americans, I was watching the 14-inning Mets/Phillies game last night when the first text messages came in on cell phones around the bar, followed by the scrolling news on ESPN’s “bottom line.”

My first thought: THIS is considered big news? Hadn’t bin Laden been unofficially declared dead four or five times now?

My second thought: Even in non-sports breaking news, ESPN’s “bottom line” managers were true Disney corporate loyalists, by referring their viewers to turn to ABC for the details.

My third thought: Just what was bin Laden’s organization responsible for in recent years, besides their own survival? Afghanistan’s networks of warlords and insurgents are basically home-grown. The revolts against the Middle East’s corrupt monarchies and dictatorships are also largely home-grown, and largely intended to replace those regimes with democracy or something like it, not with Iran-esque theocracies like bin Laden wanted.

Then, once the game was over (and two of the old Big Three broadcast networks had returned to regular programming), I saw the footage on ABC and the cable news channels of the small crowds gathering in NY and DC, well after midnight Eastern Time, whooping it up and chanting “USA! USA!”

Tacky, I thought.

David Sirota, as is to be expected, has more lucid thoughts:

…We have begun vaguely mimicking those we say we despise, sometimes celebrating bloodshed against those we see as Bad Guys just as vigorously as our enemies celebrate bloodshed against innocent Americans they (wrongly) deem as Bad Guys. Indeed, an America that once carefully refrained from flaunting gruesome pictures of our victims for fear of engaging in ugly death euphoria now ogles pictures of Uday and Qusay’s corpses, rejoices over images of Saddam Hussein’s hanging and throws a party at news that bin Laden was shot in the head.

This is bin Laden’s lamentable victory — he has changed America’s psyche from one that saw violence as a regrettable-if-sometimes-necessary act into one that finds orgasmic euphoria in news of bloodshed. In other words, he’s helped drag us down into his sick nihilism by making us like too many other bellicose societies in history — the ones that aggressively cheer on killing, as long as it is the Bad Guy that is being killed.

•

A few days ago, I sent out another of my occasional desperate Facebook messages asking if anyone knew of a day job I could take. I said specifically I wasn’t looking for a writing gig (even if it didn’t pay); I was looking for a paying gig (even if it wasn’t “writing”).

As always happens when I try this, most of the responses were either in the form of snide “humor” or of “You should write about…” topic suggestions. Exactly what I didn’t want.

And, of course, one of these topic suggestions is usually that I should write murder mysteries.

I hate murder mysteries, at least of the formula genre variety. The heroic (or anti-heroic) detective. The clues as a big puzzle; the admiration at the hero’s ability to solve it. The utter lack of mourning or any other authentic emotion. The wanton destruction of human life, depicted as light entertainment. (This last attribute is also why a lot of shows on Adult Swim don’t appeal to me.)

Today we have something ickier. We have people “celebrating” the killing of a man who was best known for “celebrating,” and taking credit for, thousands of others’ deaths.

If there is anything positive to note on this day, it is the more heartfelt responsed by the likes of Sirota and, at Huffington Post, by Paul Brandeis Raushenbush:

All humans have the potential for grace, but we also all have the potential to sin and do evil. It is a tempting yet dangerous practice to look around the world for evil people and target them. That is just what Osama Bin Laden thought he was doing. We must be vigilant that we do not become what we despise. We must be careful in the way we use religion and the name of God to further our own causes or to ever manipulate people into hate or hate.

So, let us mute our celebrations. Let any satisfaction be grim and grounded in the foundation of justice for all who have suffered at bin Laden’s bloody hands. And also justice for crimes against God — for using God as an instrument of terror and and promoting distrust between peoples of different religions and nations. Let us put bin Laden’s body in the ground, and in doing so bury his disastrous and blasphemous religious legacy.

In political news so far outside “the Beltway” even Rachel Maddow isn’t talking about it yet, Canada might make a sharp left turn in next week’s parliamentary elections.

The New Democratic Party, longtime scourge of Canadian corporate cronies, says it’s got enough momentum to become the fulcrum of power in the next Government, potentially winning more seats than the currently ensconsed Conservatives.

We’ll know the results next Tuesday night (or Wednesday morning), a lot sooner than we’ll know, say, the results of the NHL playoffs’ second round.

The things I do now don’t earn me a living income. But they’re the only things some of you know me for. I’m trying to find other (perhaps extremely “other”) things to do with my skills. Things that aren’t simply more of the same, because the same ain’t working for me.

This search for a new and/or improved career will be the topic of my newest category of web posts, Monetize Me!

Further details will show up over the next few days.

As part of my ongoing obsession with cross-genre pollination (and yes, this does lead eventually into my quest for monetizable work), I’m looking for examples of stories that contain investigations or puzzle solving, OTHER THAN formula whodunits and spy capers.

Examples of what I’m looking for:

• “Jane Eyre” and “Rebecca”: Who was that mystery ex-lover?
• “Forbidden Planet”: What happened to the Krell?
• “A Letter to Three Wives”: Whose marriage is kaput?

UPDATE: Some of your responses (thank you):

“Crying of Lot 49”: structured as a mystery, not solved at the end.
“Death and the Compass” (Borges): hard to explain, just read it, it’s short.

…then howcum it brought the world the abominable mortgage-monster that was the bubble-era WaMu?

My ex-boss S.P. Miskowski offers the timely reminder that even “little, wonderful, not-like-the-others US” aren’t immune to the economic nonsense.

An edited, improved version of my snarky li’l manifesto piece from earlier this month became my first contribution to Crosscut.com. That’s the local punditry site founded by original Seattle Weekly publisher David Brewster.

It was up for just a few hours when all of Crosscut went down, a victim of last week’s Amazon “cloud computing services” crash.

But it’s up now. And it’s got a lively comment thread.

The Intiman Theater, the third jewel in Seattle’s live theater crown, has called off the rest of its current season. The board says it will regroup and try to figure out whether to mount any more plays next year.

Someone with something to say about this is Alison Narver, who helped start Annex Theatre and was in the process of saving the Empty Space when that company’s board pulled the plug. As you might expect, she’s not pleased with how Intiman’s board has managed or mismanaged that group’s operations.