After seven years of making matters worse by a bizarre combination
of indifference and misdirected meddling the Bush Administration has finally convened Arabs and Jews at Annapolis, Maryland, and guess what’s missing? What, not who.

The media are yakking about extremist Hamas and Iran not being there. Forget them, what’s conspicuously absent is any acknowledgment that Christian and Jewish extremists have had a hand bringing the world to this awful pass. Muslim intransigence is one third of the equation, Christian and Jewish intransigence comprise the other two thirds.

But who is saying so? Certainly not us.

Report after report in recent days has speculated about the agendas of Hamas and Iran, but what about the agendas of extreme Zionists and their apocalypse-thirsty evangelical allies here who have pushed the conflict to the brink? Their polarized positions historically foreshadowed our own polarized politics.

I would say to the media what Senator Sam Ervin once said to Joseph McCarthy, Have you no decency?

How can there be discourse about this most vexatious cauldron of
events without admitting that extremists among all three great religions involved have kept it boiling all these years? How can we go on taking part in this charade, acting as if only Muslim terrorists were the problem? How can we save ourselves from choking on our own hypocrisy?

—DM

As a young man I spent an inordinate amount of time fretting that I would giggle at funerals and be the one jerk at weddings who couldn’t forever hold his peace in spite of hardly knowing the bride or the groom.

So it wasn’t surprising that one evening as a reporter sitting without a gas mask in the midst of a political gas attack, dutifully taking notes, I listened to a senatorial hopeful claiming that big government means waste. I sat there wondering if he would be willing to extend that analogy to his own ilk. For example, what is the difference between a big-time politician and a small-time politician? Is it that the big-timer produces more waste? Once this notion plopped into my nonsensical mind I let out a cackle, which didn’t endear me to Mister Serioso up there on the stage.

I thought often of this incident in the last presidential campaign. There was the comically pugnacious W, pretending that he knew just how to do everything and actually convincing more than half of us (depending on who you believe about what happened at the polls). I loathed his style. Then there was The Big K and his mortuarial portentousness. Once I heard that mimicry of everything we hate in a politician, I thought, This turkey is done.

Between snake oil on the Democratic side and feckless belligerence on the Republican side, they did a lot for global warming, and we’re still choking and gagging on it.

The Greeks had high hopes politics might enlighten us. Little could they foresee that politics in our mouths would degenerate into methane production. Next time some big shot—like most of the Republicans and, oh yes, Mister Nobel Prize—talks about government waste, look twice to see just who is producing the most waste. We happen to have one of the best civil services in the world, in spite of what the gas bags of the left and the right and the middle have to say, which happens to be entirely too much.

Mr. Nobel Prize tried to reinvent the government until civil service morale was in the toilet. Then came W, outsourcing government, kit and kaboodle, lining buddies’ pockets, demoralizing what was left of the civil service, and corrupting everything in sight. Nor should we excuse our finest ex-president. Jimmy Carter and his provincials came to Washington inveighing against imaginary evils in the very  civil service they needed to execute their agenda. Is it any wonder four lousy years ensued?

Why should the production of simple methane (methane molecule, inset) be so godawfully expensive? Ask yourselves that the next time you hear the pols blabber about campaign finance. Ask yourselves that the next time you hear a politician bad-mouthing a civil service whose biggest problem is tampering by fork-tongued politicians.

—DM

It’s always good to see journalists pushing the envelope. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer nudged it into rare metaphysical territory November 9 when he interviewed Joel Osteen, the best-selling pastor of Houston’s Lakewood Church, which draws more than 47,000 attendees a week.

“Well, beyond the devil, are there groups, organizations, individuals you feel are part of this group that you call the enemy?” the intrepid anchor asked. Osteen, had he been an evangelical fringe dweller, could, of course, have listed NOW, Al Qaeda, the interchangeable Democratic or Republican parties, La Raza or eighty-five percent of all Americans, for starters, but he replied thoughtfully that he doesn’t do politics.

We know the devil does. And, him being in the details, it was admirable of Blitzer to try to pin the pastor down about this. Journalism is usually so tame and unenterprising. Maybe Larry King will follow up by interviewing the devil himself. Maybe he’ll even ask him how he feels about the triumph of greed in American life. God forbid we should ask the pastors.

—DM

I feel a sob gathering in my chest every time I open our mailbox. All those glossy catalogues haunted by dead trees. I feel shame. So when Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com unveiled Kindle, a new reader capable of storing two hundred books, I wondered yet again if the world is ready to weigh the beauty of the paper-and-ink book against the relentless destruction of our essential forests.

Surely those catalogues and newspapers and magazines are greater offenders than the book, and surely the book of poems or literary fiction are even humbler ecoogical offenders. We know that reading seems to be in decline. And we know our invaluable forests are in decline, butchered for profit. We know why we need trees. They produce oxygen and carbon dioxide. They replenish soil, control erosion, reduce air pollution, and contribute to fish and wildlife protection. But we tend to think these considerations should bedevil our grandchildren, not us.

I’m a writer. I love books, even when they push me out the door and make me sneeze. I revere the technology that gave us books. But I see an inevitability in electronic readers such as Kindle. I don’t pretend to know when they will become popular. I’m not a marketer. But they make sense to me. More than that, I’m not offended or intimidated by them as a writer, and I think my sentiment is soundly rooted in history. (more…)

It’s always the ones we overlook who are changing the world in concert with angels. It’s the ones who want our attention for it we should distrust.

If we want men with fire in the belly who never flip-flop, we’ll get what we deserve, and we’ll deserve it in poverty, ill health and miserable dupedom.

A leader who never changes his mind (that facet of intelligence which ideologues call flip-flopping) is by definition a fool. A man who always knows who his enemies are and is prepared for you to die for it has never looked around or scarcely looked within (where the enemy usually resides). He’s more concerned with bamboozling you than growing up. In fact, that’s what he does in lieu of growing up.

Anyone who needs somebody to be wrong in order to be right is unworthy of your trust. He hasn’t given the world enough thought to get out of diapers, much less to lead anybody anywhere.

You’d do better to trust your affairs to a good gardener than to such a charlatan. The gardener knows nothing beautiful grows out of ideology. The most infertile soil is an ism. He works hard to improve the soil. He doesn’t praise its aridity.

Never trust a back-slapping glad-hander; he’s a licensed pickpocket. And guess who licensed him? There are bums in the street doing more for you than these high-visibility corruptors.

—DM 

(This is the transcript of Hot Copy No. 35, my regular podcast for The Student Operated Press)

If you imagine any subject as a puzzle with a thousand pieces you can begin to visualize how the press covers the news. It reports this piece and that piece, or this cluster of pieces and that cluster, but the entire picture remains fragmented. You may see a face, but not a crowd. A country but not a continent. An issue but not its context.

Take the recent disastrous California fires, which are becoming an annual event. We get the firefighting. We get the usual photo opportunities—you know, the governor or the president flying to the scene and saying something predictable. We get the evacuations. The dislocation and human misery. And finally, like icing on the cake, we get the insurance story—how State Farm, for example, is abandoning California to nature and its desecrators. All this passes for the big picture. But it isn’t the big picture. It’s merely a handful of pieces, as if they had been chucked into the air in the hope that they would come down intelligibly.

What is missing? What is missing from the California fires story is pretty much what was missing from the run-up to the catastrophic Iraq war. It’s called context. What are the consequences to our society of an unregulated insurance industry making all it can in a region or a state and then picking up its marbles and saying it won’t make nice anymore? What are the consequences of a state failing to conserve enough water or enough land to create firebreaks? Once the fires are out, once the death and destruction is reported, the press moves on, but the underlying problem remains and will come back to haunt us again. Is this responsible journalism or is it news as entertainment? What is the difference between this kind of reporting and televised football? (more…)

I’ve been opening the wrong doors lately—well, maybe it’s nothing new—but what is new is that I expect to walk into rooms I don’t live in anymore. I expect them to be just as they were when I lived in them. I don’t think I expect myself to be just as I was, no, just the rooms. And I’m finding it disturbing they’re not there, that this new, unfamiliar room is there instead.

I said goodbye to most of those places. I always do. I thank them for their hospitality and note the particular pleasures I’ll cherish. So that should be the end of it, right? I never imagine anyone else living in my old spaces, but that’s a symptom of egomania, so I’ll skip over it slyly. What interests me is the confusion: I expect things to be where I put them years ago in other places. Things have no right to change behind my back.

The strangest aspect of this is that I can’t find books in my library because they’re in all the different places they used to be in more than twenty different habitats. And the ones I’ve recently acquired are hiding behind the veterans. (more…)

I have another entry for the Lost Story Department. Where does the Christian Right stand on Objectivism? Where does it stand on Ayn Rand’s idea of enlightened selfishness? (Now there’s a tortured term). It seems only fair to ask, because the Bush Administration, a slavish disciple of Randian theory, draws its most ardent support from the Christian Right.

Can the Christian Right, watching so approvingly as Atlast Shrugged, countenance Jesus shrugging? And is it beneath the press’s dignity to raise such questions— the same press that indulges in complaints about Americans not saving enough while studiously avoiding the subject of piratical profit margins. And would those who now so vociferously call for a return to values wish us to return to the Puritan value of Christian charity?

How has it eluded so many Christians that Objectivist economics can’t be reconciled with the Christian conscience? And why is the subject beyond the pale?

—DM