As a blogger, I often feel obliged to comment upon the news of the day. A combination of work and a mild case of blog depression has kept me from that self-appointed task as of late.
But there are times when an event cuts through the haze of disaffection and demands comment — an event that brings startling clarity of expression to what has before been only implied or insinuated. At such times, the blogger must not remain silent.
I speak, of course, of the sweet words of affection that Mel Gibson allegedly addressed to the police officers who arrested him for driving under the influence of alcohol on Friday night. I do not doubt that those words fell from his lips with a deep sense of conviction, a profound feeling of passion, and a tequila-hued string of drool.
No, the purpose of this post is simple — I wish to contribute, to the extent to which this blog may, to the enduring public humiliation of Mel Gibson:
Gibson became agitated after he was stopped on Pacific Coast Highway and told he was to be detained for drunk driving Friday morning in Malibu. The actor began swearing uncontrollably. Gibson repeatedly said, “My life is f****d.” Law enforcement sources say the deputy, worried that Gibson might become violent, told the actor that he was supposed to cuff him but would not, as long as Gibson cooperated. As the two stood next to the hood of the patrol car, the deputy asked Gibson to get inside. Deputy Mee then walked over to the passenger door and opened it. The report says Gibson then said, “I’m not going to get in your car,” and bolted to his car. The deputy quickly subdued Gibson, cuffed him and put him inside the patrol car.
TMZ has learned that Deputy Mee audiotaped the entire exchange between himself and Gibson, from the time of the traffic stop to the time Gibson was put in the patrol car, and that the tape fully corroborates the written report.
Once inside the car, a source directly connected with the case says Gibson began banging himself against the seat. The report says Gibson told the deputy, “You mother f****r. I’m going to f*** you.” The report also says “Gibson almost continually [sic] threatened me saying he ‘owns Malibu’ and will spend all of his money to ‘get even’ with me.”
The report says Gibson then launched into a barrage of anti-Semitic statements: “F*****g Jews… The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” Gibson then asked the deputy, “Are you a Jew?”
The deputy became alarmed as Gibson’s tirade escalated, and called ahead for a sergeant to meet them when they arrived at the station. When they arrived, a sergeant began videotaping Gibson, who noticed the camera and then said, “What the f*** do you think you’re doing?”
A law enforcement source says Gibson then noticed another female sergeant and yelled, “What do you think you’re looking at, sugar tits?”
The answer to that question, I think, is no longer in doubt.
The State Department agency in charge of $1.4 billion in reconstruction money in Iraq used an accounting shell game to hide ballooning cost overruns on its projects there and knowingly withheld information on schedule delays from Congress, a federal audit released late Friday has found.
[. . .]
In another case cited in the report, a power station project in Musayyib, the direct construction cost cited by the development agency was $6.6 million, while the overhead cost was $27.6 million.
The result is that the project’s overhead, a figure that normally runs to a maximum of 30 percent, was a stunning 418 percent.
The figures were even adjusted in the opposite direction when that helped the agency balance its books, the inspector general found. On an electricity project at the Baghdad South power station, direct construction costs were reported by the agency as $164.3 million and indirect or overhead costs as $1.4 million.
Sadly, it is increasingly clear that this collapse was not brought about by the isolated acts of rogue employees. A disaster of this magnitude requires the complicity of far more than a few bad apples. From senior managers to corporate directors, to outside counsel and accountants, almost no one who had the power to sound the alarm, correct the situation or prevent this debacle did so.
[. . .]
One final note: Like many Americans, I have tried to keep some perspective on this whole tawdry affair and to provide some perspective as well, but the truth is that this story of financial collapse and betrayal is of epic proportions. It is almost biblical in scope, so perhaps we need to look beyond all the greedy details of avarice and appetite to a larger lesson that all of us can share. In the 11th Chapter of the Book of Proverbs, the authors offer these prophetic words: “He that troubleth his own house will inherit the wind. And the fool will be a servant to the wise in heart.'’ Perhaps that is the true lesson of Enron’s failure.
– W.J. “Billy'’ Tauzin (R-LA), Chairman Financial Collapse of Enron Corp
The Committee on Energy and Commerce, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations
February 7, 2002
You may have heard that Bob Dylan has been hosting a show on satellite radio. But you may not have heard it, because you don’t have satellite radio. Redemption is now at hand: visit White Man Stew to download archived versions of the show, which is organized around themes such as “Weather,” “Drinking,” “Baseball,” “Coffee,” “Jail,” and “Divorce” (via Philebrity Reader).
Once you’ve heard Bob Dylan introduce music by Lonnie the Cat, Blur, and L.L. Cool J, you won’t look back.
I’ve said my piece about the war here and here, and I’ll say more about it when I have more to say. Plenty of liberal bloggers on my blogroll have been writing about the war; I think that the assertation that the left has been silent about it is a bit of a canard.
Speaking of war in the Middle East, Terry Gross hosted an excellent program about the subject today on Fresh Air. She interviewed Georgetown Professor Daniel Byman, who provided a remarkably even-handed, and wonderfully edifying, view of the situation. It’s well worth a listen — Byman presents Middle Eastern history and politics in all of their multi-faceted complexity. He affirms certain points currently being trumpeted by American conservatives (such as the deep connections between Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah) who are calling for more war, but he also says that Israel’s response to the kidnapping of its soldiers was disproportionate (that was the point, he argues), and that an American or Israeli attack on Iran is likely to end badly.
If you listen, please let me know whether you agree that Byman’s views were non-partisan.
Two of my daily reads, Lance Mannion and Dan Rubin, wrote about MyHeritage.com, a site that uses facial recognition software to analyze your photos and tell you which celebrities you most resemble.
I thought the whole thing was a crock until I learned that I resemble Heath Ledger (62%), Johnny Depp (59%), River Phoenix (50%), and Michael Vartan (50%). I am now MyHeritage.com’s biggest fan, even if it also pulled up Alan Alda (58%), Dan Rather (57%), and (gasp) Steven Seagal (48%). Hey — any programmer worth her salt will tell you that every piece of software has its glitches. . .
Update: If you like the Dylan shows above, also check out Down in the Flood, a podcast series by Jason Chervokas. Chervokas also writes a very fine blog called Trickster.
Regular readers of this blog know that I was quite upset by the recent spill of cyanide into Philadelphia’s water system. My initial horror at the early reports of a “fish kill” turned to anger when I found out that the spill involved cyanide. That anger turned to indignation when I learned that Merck, the pharmaceutical company responsible for the spill, did not notify government officials of it until a week after the incident.
After reading one Daily News article that minimized the issue, I compiled a list of questions that remained unanswered. Susie agreed that the investigation should not be left in the hands of an agency, and a federal administration, that had spent the last five years weakening our nation’s environmental laws. This was a local story that cried out for some old-fashioned muckraking.
As the weeks passed without further coverage, I wondered why the Inquirer didn’t seem to be actively investigating the story. Although I was tempted to write angry posts condemning the paper, I decided to do the responsible thing — to contact the paper in an effort to figure out what was going on.
Dan Rubin, an Inquirer journalist who writes eloquently about the Philadelphia blogosphere on Blinq, put me in touch with Carl Lavin, Deputy Managing Editor of the Inquirer. Carl very graciously agreed to an interview.
He was not able to answer all of the questions I asked. I can’t say I blame him; here is one of the questions he skipped:
From my perspective, the spill brings up a number of controversial, and potentially explosive, issues. It’s a local story with national implications: it involves a real threat to the public health; it relates to national politics (the Bush administration’s weakening of environmental protection laws); and it deals with issues of corporate responsibility and governmental oversight at a time when the city is hoping to encourage corporate investment in the region. And, of course, the week-long delay in Merck’s announcement of the spill brings up a host of questions that have yet to be answered fully — foremost among them the possibility that other, unreported spills may have occurred. Do you agree with that assessment? Am I overstating the scope of this incident, or the implications of the larger story?
It’s hard to blame him for passing on that one.
At any rate, I’m extremely grateful for the dialogue that Carl and I did end up having during the interview process. His responses below remind me, as a blogger, of the human realities in which journalists operate. And his willingness to take part in a dialogue affirmed my sense that bloggers and journalists can and should make better efforts to communicate with one another.
Matt: How does the Inquirer decide which stories are worth investigative, rather than factual or topical, reporting?
Carl Lavin: There are more than 400 journalists at the Inquirer, and we share a certain discipline and an approach to our jobs. Accuracy, fairness, curiosity, skepticism, context, story telling, relevance, impact on the lives of our readers and immediacy are all values we cherish. Each of us might have a slightly different list, but I think there is a consensus around those core values. We each bring to our jobs a wealth of experience, as journalists, but also as people — with histories, families, connections, and a full range of personal interests. Any good journalist tries to chase a story with an investigative zeal, if by investigative you mean that we want to do more than serve as stenographers to press agents and officials.
We want to avoid cynicism, but we don’t want to be passive about the flow of information we each face every day. We sift, we challenge, we triple check, we look for discrepancies, for holes. We also are aware of the people in each story — the people who are the decision makers and the people who read our paper, the ones who don’t have the time or ability to sate their own curiosity but who want to know what really happened. We can find the answers, trace how their tax money is spent, uncover the broken promises made by the officials who represent them, and point out ways that their world — our world — can be made better. We also celebrate success, capture drama and emotion, listen to the music of the soul and the poetry of the heart.
We tell stories. We help readers make sense of the tumult of the world. We tell the truth. We are limited in what we can do each day, each week. We always have ambitions that overshadow our resources. We make mistakes. We try to be efficient and to pick the paths that will lead to stories that illuminate powerful forces. We hit brick walls. We sometimes find the path is easier than we expected. Luck works both ways. We try through conversation, planning, training and experience to make it work for us as often as possible.
Do you, as an editor at the paper, see this as a story that warrants more investigation?
As an editor at this paper, I do want to know more about chemical spills in our watershed, and I want to know more about this specific spill.
In fact, Carl has informed me that the Inquirer will publish a new article on the spill in tomorrow’s paper. When I asked him whether that article stemmed, in any way, from our conversation, he replied that it had not — the paper’s environmental reporter had been working on it beforehand. But he added that “hearing from readers always helps us as we make decisions about news coverage.”
Let us, as readers of the paper, make sure that neither we, nor our local journalists, forget that.
UPDATE: Here is the story: Merck faces fines for June fish kill. It is not the investigative piece I had hoped it would be (I’m thinking Woodward and Bernstein here), but it’s a start, and I’m happy to see continuing coverage of the offiicial investigation.
A few days ago, Adams caused some controversy on Stereogum when he waded into the comments of the blog to respond (at length!) to those who had criticized him for releasing three albums in the same year. It’s an entertaining read (via The BM Rant).
As long as Adams is making songs like this, I think he should release as many albums as he can.
Michael guesses that I might have something to say about the poem, and he’s right, but he catches me as I’m working against a dissertation-related deadline (don’t worry — I assure you that the dissertation is in its last throes).
Until I’m better able to address his post, I offer you the following take on The Big Lebowski. It’s not quite as eloquent as Yeats’ commentary on the human condition, but it shares a vaguely similar leitmotif. I like to think of it as a gloss on the lines “Caught in that sensual music all neglect / Monuments of unageing intellect.”
The Big Lebowski - F_cking Short Version
(caution: this video contains more profanity than a G8 Summit Meeting, so put on some headphones if you’re at work, and cover the ears of your children if you’re at home)
Eliot Shepard, who runs the acclaimed photoblog Slower.net, has come up with an absolutely brilliant idea: a flickr group dedicated to the art of Pre-1990 Sports Card Portraiture.
So often, we miss what is right in front of us; I looked at baseball cards throughout my youth without registering them as photographic objects. Perhaps that was due to their ubiquity or to my age; or, perhaps, I’m not “slower,” only slow.
Good photographs often perform a defamiliarizing function: they make the things we know seem strange and uncanny. And therein lies the wonder of Eliot’s idea: once you consider the commercial portraits on baseball cards as art, you’ll never see them the same way again.
If you have some cards lying around, I encourage you to take them out and view them with new eyes. From the wild hairstyles to the unkempt mustaches to the sometimes penetrating stares of the players, old sports cards offer a veritable treasure trove of overlooked pop-culture art.
There is no official caption — this is a screenshot from a video — but if there were, it might read, “At the G8 summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel recoils in horror as American President George W. Bush walks behind her and attempts to massage her shoulders.”
Perhaps the Bush Pilot got a little overexcited at the sight of his countrywoman.
The New York Timesreports this morning that President Bush used an expletive while talking to British Prime Minister Tony Blair:
He went on to say the U.N. should directly enlist the Syrians to intervene. “I feel like telling Kofi to get on the phone with Assad and make something happen,” he said to Mr. Blair, referring to Syria’s president, Bashir Assad.
“See, the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over,” Mr. Bush said.
The web edition of the Times initially reported Bush’s word as “[expletive]”; it has since put the word “shit” onto its web page, figuring, I guess, that you can’t write an entire article about a curse word without revealing what that curse actually was.
The Times also tells us that Bush made the remark while he “thoughtfully chewed on a roll.” I ask you to watch the video for yourself, and decide whether you would describe his mastication in the same way. To me, he looks like a cow chomping on a piece of cud. Don’t they teach table manners at Andover?
The incident is perhaps a minor one, but it nevertheless reveals something about Bush’s “diplomacy.” Recent Time cover stories notwithstanding, it appears that “cowboy diplomacy” remains the lay of the land.
James Wolcott argued recently that the real problem on the world stage has to do with the overproduction of testosterone — or, as he put it, “male arrogance and insanity sheathed in metal.”
In light of today’s diplomatic incident, I find it hard to disagree — the current warmongering and posturing does seem emblematic of “brute expressions of patriarchal force.” And, though Wolcott’s post does reify traditional gender stereotypes, it’s hard to complain about that at a time when many world leaders are living up to them.
But Bush has always been a taker, not a giver. He wasn’t giving Merkel a massage, he was taking possession of her, letting everybody know, “This little lady’s mine.” I wonder what Merkel’s husband thought of Bush’s handy familiarity. I can’t imagine Laura Bush was too thrilled.
No matter what the trappings or the ceremonies require of the leader of the free world, he brings the same DKE bearing and cadences, the same insouciance and smart-alecky attitude, the same simplistic approach — swearing, swaggering, talking to Tony Blair with his mouth full of buttered roll, and giving a startled Angela Merkel an impromptu shoulder rub. He can make even a global summit meeting seem like a kegger.
[. . . ]
He treated Tony “As It Were” Blair like the servant in “The Remains of the Day,’’ blowing off his offer to help with the Israel-Lebanon crisis, and changing the subject from substance to fluff at one point, noting about his 60th-birthday Burberry gift: “Thanks for the sweater. Awfully thoughtful of you.’’ Then he razzed the British prime minister, who was hovering and wheedling like an abused wife: “I know you picked it out yourself.”
After doing his best to undermine the U.N. and Kofi Annan, W. talked about the secretary general like a fraternity pledge he wanted to send out for more beer or a keg of Diet Coke: “I felt like telling Kofi to get on the phone with Assad and make something happen.’’
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