The Iraq War Books to Come

George Tenet, the head of the CIA from 1997-2004, has just published a book, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA.  He was interviewed about it on 60 Minutes last night, and will be on Larry King tonight.  I’m sure we’ll see him soon on Charlie Rose, The View, Live with Regis and Kelly, Jon Stewart’s show, and, if it was still on the air, you might see Tenet in animated form on Space Ghost Coast to Coast.

You probably know what this book’s all about, what makes it newsworthy:  Tenet’s claim to have opposed the invasion of Iraq, and his denial that when he told President Bush that evidence of Saddam Hussein’s WMDs was a “slam dunk” that he really meant it was true.  The NY Times’ Michiko Kakutani reviewed the book:

Alternately withholding and aggrieved, earnest and disingenuous, “At the Center of the Storm” is interesting less for any stunning new revelations than for fleshing out a portrait of the Bush White House already sketched by reporters and former administration members. Mr. Tenet depicts an administration riven by factional fighting between the State and Defense Departments, hard-liners and more pragmatic realists, an administration given to out-of-channels policymaking, and ad hoc, improvisatory decision-making.

“There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” he writes of a war that has already resulted in more than 3,300 American military deaths, at least 60,000 Iraqi civilian deaths and already cost more than $420 billion. Nor, he adds, was there “a significant discussion regarding enhanced containment or the costs and benefits of such an approach versus full-out planning for overt and covert regime change.”

Mr. Tenet’s book also ratifies the view articulated by former military, intelligence and Coalition Provisional Authority insiders that the White House repeatedly ignored or rebuffed early warnings about the deteriorating situation in post-invasion Iraq. Mr. Tenet writes that the C.I.A.’s senior officer in Iraq was dismissed as a “defeatist” for warning in 2003 of the dangers of a growing Iraqi insurgency, though it was already clear then that United States political and economic strategies were failing. Although the trends were clear, he adds, those in charge of policy “operated within a closed loop.” In that atmosphere, he says, bad news was ignored: the agency’s subsequent reporting, which would prove “spot-on,” was dismissed.

 Tenet’s book has not gone down well with either Bush supporters or Bush foes.  Arianna Huffington is one of many to ask the sensible question, “Why Didn’t George Tenet Just Resign?”

Poor George Tenet. Flogging his book, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA, on 60 Minutes, Tenet tells Scott Pelley about how his phrase “slam dunk” was misused by the Bush administration. Tenet, you see, didn’t mean it was a “slam dunk” that Hussein actually had WMD, he only meant it was a “slam dunk” that a public case could be made that Hussein had WMD.

I can’t really see that the distinction matters, but Tenet apparently does. “I became campaign talk,” Tenet tells Pelley, “I was a talking point. ‘Look at what the idiot told us, and we decided to go to war.’ Well, let’s not be so disingenuous. Let’s stand up. This is why we did it. This is why, this is how we did it. And let’s tell, let’s everybody tell the truth.”

Great — except he’s about four years too late. Tenet seems to believe there’s a major distinction between lying and standing by silently while others lie, and then proudly receiving a Medal of Freedom from the liars.

And Christopher Hitchens reminds us in his Slate review that Tenet was not just ineffectual and wrong about the invasion of Iraq; he was ineffectual and wrong about 9/11.  Hitchens recalls one of the creepiest things I remember reading about the immediate post 9/11 response. It was in Bush At War by Bob Woodward.  Hitchens uses that quote as a launching pad for an irate attack on Tenet’s credibility and character:

…(I)t was a very favorably disposed chronicler (Woodward) who wrote this, in describing Tenet’s reaction on the terrible morning of Sept. 11, 2001:

“This has bin Laden all over it,” Tenet told Boren. “I’ve got to go.” He also had another reaction, one that raised the real possibility that the CIA and the FBI had not done all that could have been done to prevent the terrorist attack. “I wonder,” Tenet said, “if it has anything to do with this guy taking pilot training.”

Notice the direct quotes that make it clear who is the author of this brilliant insight. And then pause for a second. The author is almost the only man who could have known of Zacarias Moussaoui and his co-conspirators—the very man who positively knew they were among us, in flight schools, and then decided to leave them alone. In his latest effusion, he writes: “I do know one thing in my gut. Al-Qaeda is here and waiting.” Well, we all know that much by now. But Tenet is one of the few who knew it then, and not just in his “gut” but in his small brain, and who left us all under open skies. His ridiculous agency, supposedly committed to “HUMINT” under his leadership, could not even do what John Walker Lindh had done—namely, infiltrate the Taliban and the Bin Laden circle. It’s for this reason that the CIA now has to rely on torturing the few suspects it can catch, a policy, incidentally, that Tenet’s book warmly defends.

So, the only really interesting question is why the president did not fire this vain and useless person on the very first day of the war. Instead, he awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom! Tenet is now so self-pitying that he expects us to believe that he was “not at all sure that [he] really wanted to accept” this honor. But it seems that he allowed or persuaded himself to do so, given that the citation didn’t mention Iraq. You could imagine that Tenet had never sat directly behind Colin Powell at the United Nations, beaming like an overfed cat, as the secretary of state went through his rather ill-starred presentation. And who cares whether his “slam dunk” vulgarity was misquoted or not? We have better evidence than that. Here is what Tenet told the relevant Senate committee in February 2002:

Iraq … has also had contacts with al-Qaida. Their ties may be limited by divergent ideologies, but the two sides’ mutual antipathy toward the United States and the Saudi royal family suggests that tactical cooperation between them is possible, even though Saddam is well aware that such activity would carry serious consequences.

As even the notion of it certainly should have done. At around the same time, on another nontrivial matter, Tenet informed the Senate armed services committee that: “We believe that Saddam never abandoned his nuclear weapons program.” It is a little bit late for him to pose as if Iraq was a threat concocted in some crepuscular corner of the vice president’s office. And it’s pathetic for him to say, even in the feeble way that he chooses to phrase it, that “there was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat.” (Emphasis added.) There had been a very serious debate over the course of at least three preceding administrations, whether Tenet “knew” of it or not. (He was only an intelligence specialist, after all.)
Despite this assault, Tenet stands to profit handsomely from this book, a fact that will not go unnoticed by others currently still serving the Administration.  If a policy goes wrong or becomes unpopular, Tenet’s success shows that no mea culpas are necessary; anyone can distance themselves from unpopular decisions they helped make, even someone as high up as the Director of the CIA.

Still to come: 

The Army I Wanted Wasn’t the Army I Had: Unknown Unknowns Known, By Donald Rumsfeld

Paul Wolfowitz: It Ain’t All About the WMDs, by Paul Wolfowitz

More Years of Magical Thinking, by Laura Bush

The Audacity of Audacity, by Dick Cheney

and…

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy President, by George W. Bush

And it turns out none of them wanted to invade Iraq.  Who knew!?

Soprano Spoiler Futility*

What’s interesting about the constant search for Sopranos spoilers — a big source of traffic for this blog recently because I wrote a post a year ago that had the words “Sopranos spoilers” in the title — is how irrelevant they turn out to be, even if they’re true.

Go onto some of the forums I’ve linked to, and you read these almost operatic endings that “my cousin who works at HBO” or “a guy who worked at an ice cream shop they’re using for a location” convey with gleeful certainty.  Most of these spoiler scenarios are frauds, I suspect. They’re written by the same people who compose the e-mails we get from deposed Nigerian royals who want to give you a $3 million reward.

Even the ones that have a possible ring of truth always omit the ironic, dream-logic context that makes these events meaningful. What actually happens on the show is usually telegraphed far in advance, or easy to predict if you follow the story. But how it is presented — that’s where the surprises are, and no spoiler can convey that.

Like when Big Pussy’s betrayal was discovered and he was murdered. In most of these spoiler discussions, it would have been described just that way: Tony finds proof that Big Pussy has been wearing a wire for the FBI, and along with Silvio and Paulie, murders him on a boat. That was not a surprising outcome. We knew Pussy was wearing a wire for months. It was grimly inevitable.  What made it interesting was Tony finally gave in to his subconscious suspicions. Remember? Tony was suffering from food poisoning, had feverish dreams in between attacks of vomiting and diarrhea. In one of those dreams, he’s in a fish market on the boardwalk. A fish starts talking to him. It’s Pussy, who says that, deep down, Tony always knew he was working for the government.

I could just see how that would’ve gone over on one of these Sopranos spoilers sites. “My cousin delivers bagels to HBO, and the climax of the episode is Tony having this weird dream.”

In last night’s episode, what really happened?

• Tony’s on a losing streak. He’s lost a lot of money gambling. His gambling debts cause conflict with his old friend Hesh and with his wife.
• Tony feels responsible for the family of the slain gay mobster Vito. He tries to figure out how to help his widow deal with her son, who is acting out in extremely peculiar ways.
• Phil (who had murdered Vito in rage over his homosexuality) refuses to assist Tony, even though Vito’s widow is his cousin, and it was in the name of “family honor” that he killed Vito.
• Tony and Carmela resolve their argument with an admission that they’re both worrying about whether Tony’s going to die or get arrested.
• Hesh’s girlfriend dies mysteriously. Tony consoles him by repaying a debt he incurred from gambling.
• A.J. proposes to his girlfriend and she accepts, but soon afterward, she breaks it off.
• A “tough-love” organization — paid for by Tony — comes to Vito’s widow’s house late at night and takes Vito Jr. to a camp somewhere out west. He’s terrified.

But if you saw the episode, was that really what you saw? Are any of those plot points so compelling? If anyone had told you in advance that these things were going to happen, would you have really “gotten” the episode without seeing it? For most TV series, like “24,” if someone tells you what’s going to happen, you don’t really need to see it. But “The Sopranos” is a violent mob story as reimagined by a hybrid of Edith Wharton and James Joyce. And, like those authors, the events they describe can be kind of ho-hum, routine, life creeping forward sorts of events where the significance is all in the subtext.

Yet last night’s episode seemed incredibly significant. Fear of death or imprisonment looms over Tony now like never before. The scene in which Vito, Jr. is taken away evokes one of Tony’s biggest fears — the late-night knock at the door.  Vito Jr.’s mother wanted to move her family to Maine to get her son away from the rumors about her dead husband’s sexual orientation — a clean getaway.  But Tony won’t let himself get away that easily, so he doesn’t let Vito’s family either.

In an earlier episode, Tony expressed knowledge that 80 percent of his peers are murdered or imprisoned — terrible odds that he’s beaten so far, but he keeps on betting, his money and his life.  In their argument, he tells Carmela that, having survived a gunshot wound that should have killed him, he’s still “up,” even though he’s lost a lot of money.  What’s he going to do with his winnings?  The awkward scene when he repays Hesh seemed like a concession — Tony clearing the ledger, resolving things while he’s still got a chance.  He had planned to pay him off with proceeds from a big gambling score; instead he uses working capital, taking chips off the table.

A.J.’s proposal scene was pathetic, and you know this sad kid’s humiliation will become Tony and Carmela’s heartbreak. Plus, there’s an ironic contrast:  Tony commands loyalty under pain of death and damnation; A.J.’s fiancee won’t even stay engaged to him for a week.

I’ve only watched this episode once. The second time is always more rewarding and revealing, which is more proof that spoilers for this particular show are meaningless. But, hey, keep looking for them — I like all the new visitors!

* Edited, 5/1/07

David Broder, Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’

If you read the left-wing blogs, you quickly learn there is no journalist or commentator more despised than David S. Broder, the “Dean” of Washington columnists.  In recent writings, Broder has been less than thrilled with the performance of the new Democratic Congress and its leadership.  To the netroots, it’s still the honeymoon phase; but here’s this old guy, an uncle you sort of have to listen to, standing at the back of the reception saying “You stink!”

What they despise about Broder is his reputation as a liberal, which derives in part from his position at the Washington Post.   The netroots disagree that the Post is actually all that liberal, or that Broder is “one of them,” and it really steams them that Broder’s critical comments about the Democratic party are seen as coming from a sympathetic corner.  

Rush Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter leave no mark; they’re dismissed easily as right-wing crackpots.  But Broder disrupts what the netroots repeatedly call “the narrative.”  When a liberal says what conservatives say, the conservatives’ viewpoints are legitimized.  The netroots don’t really enjoy debating conservatives; they’d rather dismiss them from the debate entirely. It’s harder to do that when they can cite liberals like David Broder as agreeing with them. 

I’m beginning to think David Broder likes provoking the netroots.  What else would explain today’s column, in which he compares Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to…omigod!… Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez!  

The column was prompted by Reid’s much-criticized comment last week that “this war is lost.”

…Reid’s verbal wanderings on the war in Iraq are consequential — not just for his party and the Senate but for the more important question of what happens to U.S. policy in that violent country and to the men and women whose lives are at stake.

Given the way the Constitution divides warmaking power between the president, as commander in chief, and Congress, as sole source of funds to support the armed services, it is essential that at some point Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi be able to negotiate with the White House to determine the course America will follow until a new president takes office.

To say that Reid has sent conflicting signals about his readiness for such discussions is an understatement. It has been impossible for his own members, let alone the White House, to sort out for more than 24 hours at a time what ground Reid is prepared to defend.

Instead of reinforcing the important proposition — defined by the Iraq Study Group– that a military strategy for Iraq is necessary but not sufficient to solve the myriad political problems of that country, Reid has mistakenly argued that the military effort is lost but a diplomatic-political strategy can still succeed.

The Democrats deserve better, and the country needs more, than Harry Reid has offered as Senate majority leader.

Broder’s comparison with Gonzalez is, in fact, quite apt.  The problem with Sen. Reid is that he is an incompetent Senate Majority Leader.  As Michael Dukakis said, “It’s not about ideology. It’s about competence.”  The AG is manifestly unfit for his job, and so is Reid.  Reid can’t manage his own mouth; how can he be expected to manage the U.S. Senate? Vice President Cheney’s stinging retort to Reid drew blood because he mostly just quoted Reid’s own incredibly contradictory pattern of statements about the war over the past few months.

But to the netroots, even pointing out obvious incompetence screws up ”the narrative.”  Here’s what diarist mcjoan says on Daily Kos regarding Broder’s column:

It’s just so sad, so disconnected from anything even remotely resembling reality. We had ample warning that it was coming, but maybe somehow didn’t think it could really, really be as bad as expected. It is. You can go read it, if you like. But there’s really hardly any point any more.

I do have to give this to the Dean. He is somehow adroit enough to hammer the final nail into the coffin that holds all that was left of his ability to reasonably comment on current events. What more is there to say?

And here is what Greg Sargent, a TPM Cafe blogger, says:

Boy, oh, boy. Will Broder really argue that Reid is as inept as Gonzales, despite the fact (or perhaps because of the fact) that Reid has refused to back down on Iraq while simultaneously maintaining public approval of his approach? He’s also maintained a respectable 46% approval rating — far higher than Bush, who Broder says is on the verge of a comeback. What is it that’s so profoundly threatening about Reid’s success to the Broders of the world?

In the respective comment threads, the “blogswarm” goes on a Broder-bashing spree.  Kos himself weighs in:

 What more is there left to say? (22+ / 0-)

That finally it’s clear as day that Broder is simply another run-of-the-mill beltway partisan hack. Once upon a time, he convinced everyone in DC that he was a non-partisan arbiter of conventional wisdom. That fiction is now blown apart. Broder is no better or different than Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly. An inglorious conclusion to a career in hackdom.

by kos on Wed Apr 25, 2007 at 10:56:27 PM PDT

Here’s one from Sargent’s thread:

Its time for the blogshere to do some investigative reporting on Broder and the like.

It’s pretty clear that the Bushies/necons will do anything to advance their cause, protect themselves and manipulate public opinion.

Why has Broder nor Wapo disclosed Broder’s close relationship with Rove?

Broder is either being paid off financially or blackmailed. Cayman Island bank accounts, junkets, or compromising personal information. All of the above?

Posted by:erict
Date: April 25, 2007 08:26 PM

And how about this one from the Washington Post’s own comment thread:

Take the package, Mr. Broder. Retire now before you shred what reputation you have left any further. Old windbag. If the war is so great, why arent your kids and grandkids there? Harry Reid is right. The war is lost. Its time to come home and stop playing cowboy with American lives, which is just making everything in Iraq worse. Bush is the worst disaster in the history of the United States, and Broder was one of his sycophantic cheerleaders after nine one one. The emperor never had any clothes.

By snoopydc | Apr 26, 2007 12:32:42 AM |

Throughout the comments you find the view expressed that Reid’s “war is lost” comment is true, and that polls show the public agrees with it.  What they are overlooking is the American public doesn’t prefer to lose this war.   Reid seems to be egging on that result, especially when he says things like this:

“We’re going to pick up Senate seats as a result of this war. Senator Schumer has shown me numbers that are compelling and astounding.”

Broder isn’t a hack, and he isn’t on the take.  He has a memory.  Memory curses dreams like the netroots’.  

Here’s an inconvenient analysis that draws on my own memories.

At the end of the Vietnam War, the Democrats facilitated the final defeat, denying President Ford’s request for funds to fulfil the promises the U.S. made after we pulled out. In 1975, the politics of that move looked pretty good; the public was sick of Vietnam.  In 1976, Carter beat Ford — but it should have been a landslide because of Watergate, and instead it was a squeaker.  Why?   In 1978, Republicans reversed most of the gains the Democrats had made in Congress in 1974.  In 1980, Reagan clobbered Carter, and the Republicans took the Senate. 

I believe the atrocities that followed the ignominious end to the Vietnam War, and the U.S.’ impotence to stop mass genocide and annihilation of our former supporters fueled those Democratic setbacks.  For the first time in decades, Republicans started talking about an aggressive stance toward the Soviet Union, and after the horrors of postwar Southeast Asia, the message resonated.

Losing Iraq would be another bloody business. It’s not hard to imagine.  Suicide bombings would increase. Civil war would widen. Any Iraqi individual or institution committed to democracy would be targeted for murder. Al Queda could well end up effectively in charge of parts of Iraq. 

And Harry Reid thinks this will help the Democrats win elections?  It’s absurd.  And he’s incompetent for thinking so, much less saying so.

David Halberstam, R.I.P.*

Two of David Halberstam’s books made a huge impact on me: The Best and the Brightest, and The Powers that Be. I don’t think a writer has captured the way bad governmental decisions can metastasize from good intentions into political manipulation better than Halberstam did in Best…. The Powers That Be, an intertwined narrative history of four big news organizations (CBS, Time, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times), contains a superb introductory history of Los Angeles.

Then, Halberstam started to mix books about sports into his public affairs writing career, focusing on particular moments in sports that allowed him to talk about social change in America, without departing too far from the drama of the games and personalities. I particularly recommend October 1964, which happens to be about the first World Series I was really able to follow, pitting the “establishment” New York Yankees against a St. Louis Cardinal team that was dominated by three of the greatest black players of that era: Bob Gibson, Curt Flood and Lou Brock. The morality play isn’t always so neat and tidy, but it gives him a theme to ride as he tells stories about so many baseball legends and follows the Series’ intensely competitive course.

Sadly, David Halberstam was killed an automobile accident Monday morning in Menlo Park, south of San Francisco. He was being driven to an interview with another sports hero, former New York Giant quarterback Y.A. Tittle, a participant in the NFL’s “greatest game,” the Giants’ 1958 championship game against the Baltimore Colts. Halberstam was the only person who died from the accident — he was dead at the scene. A UC Berkeley graduate student in journalism was driving the car, which was broadsided while making a left turn.

Halberstam was a more traditional reporter than some of his 1960s-era counterparts like Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, but he had just as big an impact on the era’s journalism. He was critical of the leaders whose misrule resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of American soldiers in Vietnam, but he built his case not with invective, but with thorough reporting and engrossing storytelling. His passing should prompt interest in his entire catalogue, which will only make him more of an inspiration to non-fiction writers of any era.

*UPDATE, 4/24/07:  Sheesh. Shouldn’t Slate’s Jack Shafer wait til Halberstam’s grave is dug before throwing dirt on him? 

Yeah, okay, he wasn’t a great stylist.  But his sports books were good, less prey to his windy tendencies.  It was interesting to look at a list of Halberstam’s works.  I was under the misimpression that all his books after about 1985 were sports-related.  Just all his best books, I guess.  The sports books, his NY Times Vietnam war reporting and especially The Best and The Brightest will be his legacy.   

**UPDATE, 4/25/07:  This is better.  The Washington Post‘s Henry Allen writes affectionally about Halberstam’s unique style, notes that he had detractors, but shows how the style was a reflection of the man, his values and, yes, his ego:

He started working in the mid-’50s, before journalism was hip. He covered big stories: civil rights in the South, war in Africa, and Vietnam when John Kennedy was getting us into it with the help of “The Best and the Brightest,” as Halberstam called the elite and arrogant aides whose folly brought on our failure there.

He was not cool. He spewed sentences whose dependent clauses piled up into midden heaps of outrage or joy.

As part of an interview at lunch in 1979, he gave me this reaction to a bad review of his 1979 media book, “The Powers That Be.”

“Naturally, you want a book to live and be liked, it’s like children, but there’s a law of averages — you want the book to live. Some people aren’t going to like the book. Some people aren’t going to like you. Some are not going to like the success which — your anticipated success. And, after all, I’m not Tolstoy. It’s a very unusual book, unusual in its conception, unusual in its execution, unusual in its organization.”

All of this erupted from a fierce scrim of incantatory facial gestures, eyebrows divebombing his big nose, his lower lip jutting to show lower teeth but never upper ones while he oraculated to a reporter.

This was in The Summerhouse, a discreetly upscale restaurant just down the street from his townhouse on the Upper East Side. (“This is a wonderful neighborhood, I love living here, a truly remarkable place, one of the last strongholds of the middle class in Manhattan.” I wondered: Middle class? On 91st between Park and Madison?)

His schoolboy earnestness seemed preposterous in a man this famous, sophisticated and well connected, but it was the preposterousness that made him likable rather than insufferable. It even made him lovable unless you were on his enemies list, which was not short.

How he could roar on, gaining sincerity with every word. The New Republic satirized the same book: “David Halberstam. Halberstam, that was what everybody called him (after all, it was his name). They always said that what Halberstam needed was a good editor, his sentences ran on and on, he piled phrase upon phrase and clause upon clause, he used commas the way other men used periods.”

He was only following the writing teacher’s advice by writing the way he talked. He talked that way enough that his friends called him Rolling Thunder, Jehovah and Ahab.

It’s hard to stop quoting.  Just read the whole thing.

The Best Posts About the Sopranos

Since so many of my readers have been coming here lately in search of Sopranos spoilers, and presumably clicking away disappointed in the lack of dish, I’ll do the next best thing:  Here are some of my favorite places to read about the Sopranos, especially the most recent episodes:

• Slate’s TV Club dialogues on the Sopranos.  In the past, they’ve had organized crime experts and psychologists.  This half-season, they’re just using a couple of good writers, Timothy Noah and Jeffrey Goldberg.
• The Television Without Pity forum on the latest episode.
• A brief post by Ann Althouse, plus some good comments.
• MSNBC’s “Sopranos Body Count.”
• TV Squad has a contemplative take.

What everyone seems to be picking up is:  The overt references to The Godfather (Tony with his tomato plants, the christening scene in the previous episode, the brief reign of the New York boss ending with a bullet in the eye like Moe Green got),  the eerie resemblance of the young Asian man incarcerated with Uncle Junior to the Virginia Tech madman, and the prevailing sense that things might end “not with a bang, but a whimper.”

That line is originally from T.S. Eliot, by the way, and that’s what “The Sopranos” reminds me of:  Being an English major.   For all its violence, comedy and great characterizations, what’s most notable “The Sopranos” is the richness of its symbolism, the subconscious parallels between two things that seem unrelated, but connect in our minds and in the characters’ minds, especially Tony, Carmela and Christopher. 

We see the three of them try to make sense out of their world on this deeper level in a way that compares with how we follow another trio’s subconscious thoughts: Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, the main characters in Ulysses.  Part of the joke, though, is that the poet in Tony is the same psychic realm from where his murderous thoughts seem to arise.  Tony vents his rage verbally, but he is most dangerous when he is listening and watching.  Tony is a great listener and watcher

Like last night: For some reason Tony wanted to know if it was Paulie who, years earlier, told Johnny Sack about an offensive joke made at the expense of Sack’s wife, leading to all kinds of headaches for Tony.  What made him think of it?  Listening to Paulie prattle on about his mob life with some prostitutes.  Then listening to one of the prostitutes repeat some of the information back to him in bed.   Somehow, these and other observations come together in his mind; and as a result, he almost murders Paulie on the boat, because sharing the joke with Johnny Sac was a sign of Paulie’s disloyalty.  With war looming with the New York family that Johnny Sac once headed, this is a detail that suddenly alarms Tony.

Water is everywhere in “The Sopranos,” always has been, but especially in these past three episodes.  Tony and Bobby and their wives on the lake.  The FBI interested in what Tony might be learning about Muslim terrorism at the Port of Newark.  Tony and Paulie on a fishing boat.  Tony and Beansie chatting by a swimming pool. Even Junior pissing his pants.  He has to take medicine to control his bladder, but the medicine leaves him too sleepy.

Tony can only control the flow of words from Paulie’s mouth by killing him, but he doesn’t do it.  Water is where bodies are dumped, where bad memories are forgotten, only to float back up again.  Keep an eye on the way water is used in the remaining episodes if you want clues (er, I mean ”spoilers”) to how it’s all going to end.    

Road Rage in New Jersey

Crackberry addicts, even if this story is “dogpile,” it’s worth contemplating next time you pick up your PDA while driving to see if you’ve got a new message:

New Jersey State Police are investigating an allegation that the trooper who was driving Gov. Corzine’s SUV two weeks ago when it crashed going 91 m.p.h. may have been distracted by e-mails sent to his mobile phone or BlackBerry.

A Berkeley Heights police sergeant was quoted in the Star-Ledger of Newark yesterday saying he sent an e-mail shortly before the crash to Trooper Robert Rasinski, confronting him over having a two-year affair with his wife, Susan. He said he enclosed a family photo as an attachment.

Detective Sgt. Michael Mathis said he hoped the angry messages he sent to Rasinski did not cause the April 12 crash on the Garden State Parkway.

“We are confirming that there is this allegation and that it is under investigation,” State Police Lt. Gerald Lewis said yesterday. He declined to comment further.

Police are trying to determine whether Rasinski saw the messages just before the crash and whether they had an effect on his state of mind. The governor’s Chevrolet Suburban, speeding and with lights flashing, was struck by a pickup truck that had swerved to avoid another vehicle. The SUV then spun around and crashed into a guardrail.

Can you imagine the situation, if this is true?  Or, to be fair to Trooper Rasinski, let’s imagine it generically.  You’re driving a VIP to an important meeting (in Gov. Corzine’s case, it happened to be with Don Imus and the Rutgers women’s basketball team).  You notice the signal that a new e-mail has arrived.  You read it and the news is…existentially upsetting. Someone you care about has died.  They found a lump somewhere and they want to biopsy it.  Your pet has disappeared. You’re dumped. You’re fired.  Another 9/11 has occured. 

Okay, not too long ago, it would be considered uncool and uncouth to send such news on an e-mail.  But apparently not anymore, because there is no dispute that Sgt. Mathis did use e-mail to confront Trooper Rasinski with his allegation.  And certainly, Trooper Rasinski would not be the first driver on an American highway to read an e-mail while behind the wheel, traveling at high speed.

The problem of electronic communication devices and driving has been framed up til now as one of distracting the eye and diverting the hand.  But what about the soul?  Should you be driving at 80 or 90 miles per hour simultaneously with getting news that will change your life forever?

Obviously, no.  But how do we stop the news from coming in?

Trooper Rasinski’s union brothers are, of course, standing by him:

Davy Jones, president of the State Troopers Fraternal Association, blasted Mathis’ allegations yesterday and called them “dogpile.”

“My people are out there doing the right thing,” he said yesterday.

Jones told the Star-Ledger the investigators asked Rasinski “all these questions in a taped interview. That’s part of the standard protocols. . . . There’s nothing here other than an understandably aggrieved, soon-to-be ex-husband putting something forward that is totally without merit, and it’s a sin.”

The new twist in the crash investigation came as doctors reported that Corzine is breathing on his own and began taking food yesterday.

Mathis, 40, had posted messages on the Star-Ledger’s Web forum, saying he had sent Rasinski the e-mail with the photo just minutes before the accident. “I hope it didn’t cause the crash,” Mathis wrote in the forum, “but no man in his right mind could have been thinking clearly with the affair exposed.”

Mathis confirmed to the newspaper that he had posted the comments.

Mathis also wrote in the forum that he first contacted Rasinski on April 10 in a phone call and, over the next two days, exchanged text messages with the trooper. He told the newspaper he learned a month ago his wife was having an affair.

So this wasn’t the first Trooper Rasinski would have learned that his affair had been discovered.  But still, he was being harassed by his lover’s husband, and it must have stirred his blood each time he was confronted with the fallout.  And then, over his shoulder, here’s the governor saying Get me through this traffic, Trooper.

Ever since the Clinton/Lewinsky scenario, it’s assumed that everyone can compartmentalize.  They can do anything and everything in their private lives; their jobs won’t be affected.  That’s the position the fraternal association takes on the case now before us.  The issues are completely separate, and only a half-mad jealous husband is capable of the “sin” of thinking Trooper Rasinski’s driving was affected.

So, then why do we want to ban cells phones in moving vehicles? Is it logical to say drivers can compartmentalize themselves from a life-altering event, but not from a trivial phone call?

Thoughts on Virginia Tech and the Rights of the Insane* UPDATED

The Virginia Tech tragedy is not a story about guns, it is a story about the rights of the insane. Cho Seung-Hui was clearly insane, as the tapes and writings now ubiquitous in the media show with painful clarity.  That he was both insane and potentially dangerous was known to university officials and law enforcement.  Despite his insanity, he continued to live in the dormitory and attend classes.

Anyone who lives in a big city like LA with a Skid Row knows there are thousands of crazy people sleeping in the streets and shelters who, if properly treated, could live productive, peaceful and perhaps even happy lives.   This has been going on for hundreds of years.

Unlike the Skid Row denizens, apparently Seung-Hui was functional. He hadn’t flunked out of school, for example. He managed to keep himself fed and clothed.  He knew how to operate a computer.  But the depths of his mental problems were at least glimpsed by officialdom — and then forgotten. Seung-Hui was given opportunities to receive treatment, but basically walked away without consequence.  The choice was his to make, completely, and he decided to go on being insane. 

In the past 40 years or so, we have decided as a society that to compel insane people to submit to involuntary treatment, to confine them, or even to keep track of them is both impossible and impractical.  

The good news is, of course, we don’t have insane people warehoused in bleak Dickensian asylums.  It’s also good news that people who are not insane are unlikely to fall into an institution like that through diagnostic or bureaucratic error.  “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” couldn’t happen in America today.

The bad news is, we haven’t thought of anything better. We’ve just walked away from the problem. An insane person only gets help if he or she is sane enough to recognize they need it; or if they have an aggressive relative who will intervene on their behalf, despite their resistance.

I have an insane person in my family. She is about 80 now. The last time anyone saw her was about 20 years ago. Occasionally she sends a postcard. She is wandering the streets of a major metropolitan area.  She didn’t lose her mind until after she was married and had raised children. But since then…there was nothing anyone could do. Her husband, her brothers, her children, various ministers and doctors, nobody, because she didn’t want help.

To my knowledge, she has never hurt anyone. But neither had Seung-Hui, until yesterday.

Dealing with the insane is one of the most tragic dilemmas our society faces.

It blows my mind to think of those grieving parents and how they must be reacting to the news; about how many dealings this guy had with police and mental health officials, how many people knew there was something wrong with him, and that he might be dangerous. And yet, even after the first shootings, no police officer thought to go check his room. He wasn’t on anyone’s list. “Hey, doesn’t that insane student live here? Should we go up and talk to him?” That question was never posed.

He was in a room in a dorm adjacent to the crime scene, calmly reloading his weapons and packing his ammo belts, undisturbed by anyone who might have suspected a connection. He was in America. He had the right to be left alone, and was able to go about making his murderous plans behind the shield of his rights.

(P.S. This post is based on a comment I left here, on Althouse.)

*UPDATE: One consequence of this policy vacuum in terms of the mentally ill is that the problem is left on the doorstep of professionals who have no competence to deal with it, but no choice but to deal with it — at fearful risk of their lives.  This is well articulated in today’s New York Times’ op-ed by Barbara Oakley, an engineering professor and author:

It’s a simple fact that, for every deranged murderer like Mr. Cho there are thousands more oddballs just below the breaking point. I know one quasi-psychopathic incompetent, for example, who remained on the campus payroll for over a dozen years simply because his supervisor was afraid of being killed if he was fired.

It’s long been in fashion to believe that people are innately good, and that upbringing and environment are responsible for nasty personalities. But research is beginning to show that mean, sometimes outright evil behavior has a strong genetic component. Some of us, in other words, are truly born bad.

Researchers at King’s College London have recently determined that if one identical twin shows psychopathic traits, the other twin, who coincidentally shares precisely the same set of genes, has a very high probability of having the same psychopathic traits. But among fraternal twins, who share only half their genes, the chance that both twins will show psychopathic traits is far smaller. In other words, there is something suspiciously psychopath-inducing in some people’s genes.

What could it be? Medical images of the brain give tantalizing clues — the amygdala, the “fight or flight” decision-making center of the brain, may be smaller than usual, or some areas of the brain may glow only dimly because of low serotonin levels. We may not know precisely what set Mr. Cho off, but we are beginning to home in on the unusual differences in certain neurochemistries that can make people act in bizarre and dysfunctional ways.

Still, the Virginia Tech shootings have already led to calls for all sorts of changes: gun control, more mental health coverage, stricter behavior rules on campuses. Yes, in a perfect world, there would be no guns, no mental illness and no Cho Seung-Huis. But the world is very imperfect. Consider that Britain’s national experiment with gun-free living is proving to be a disaster, with violent and gun crime rates soaring.

In other words, most of the broad social “lessons” we are being told we must learn from the Virginia Tech shootings have little to do with what allowed the horrors to occur. This is about evil, and about how our universities are able to deal with it as a literary subject but not as a fact of life. Can administrators and deans really continue to leave professors and other college personnel to deal with deeply disturbed students on their own, with only pencils in their defense?

The Virginia Tech Tragedy: Blame vs. Accountability

There is no shortage of commentary in the media and blogosphere saying, in effect, Let’s not blame anyone but the killer for the massacre at Virginia Tech yesterday morning. This commentary often decries the tendency to look for scapegoats when something horrible happens. The mature attitude is supposed to be Life is unfair. There are crazy people out there. You can’t do anything about them. The traumatized students who are criticizing the administration are understandably upset. But they’re wrong. Tsk Tsk.

Up to a point, of course I agree. Perfect safety, perfect security, does not exist.

But isn’t the opposite tendency just as telling about our culture? Why the rapid closing of ranks around university and police officials? To me, that is just as premature, and just as sad a reflection on our culture as the rush to assign blame or to exploit the issue for political gain.

Instead of a scapegoat, the students at VT see an emperor with no clothes.

“I don’t know why they let people stay in classrooms,” Sean Glennon, a junior from Centreville and the quarterback on the Hokies football team, said Monday. “A lot of people are angry that campus wasn’t evacuated a little earlier.”

There was a double-homicide on campus. Based on statements made by officials yesterday, the U. decided to treat it as a “domestic dispute” with no possible further ramifications, even though the killer was still at large, still armed, and had killed at least one person who was not a party to the alleged love triangle that drove this student over the edge.

The university also decided not to take advantage of the instantaneous communications available to them for more than two hours. If for no other reason than rumor control, I would have advised them to move much more quickly.

Should they have foreseen 31 more murders? Of course not. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have reacted differently. If they had, would lives have been saved? No one can say that for sure. But officials’ assumption that the crisis was over, despite awareness of a killer still in the wind, seems like muddled and misguided thinking. The traumatized students as well as the victims’ survivors, deserve to understand what went into that thinking.

One term I haven’t seen used anywhere regarding the university’s responsibility: ‘In loco parentis.’ It’s a concept dating back to British common law. We parents send our students to school for several hours each day, or for months at a time if the child goes off to college. We do this in the belief that the university will act as a parent would act. That’s why campuses can have rules that go beyond state or federal law. For example, in Virginia, it’s legal to carry a firearm. But not at Virginia Tech. The university’s administration has decided it needs extra protection to make sure its students are safe. Schools are allowed to search lockers without a search warrant, to censor free speech in the campus newspaper, to prohibit alcohol even for those of legal drinking age.

Much of the case law on ‘in loco parentis’ seems to be focused on whether it is okay to invade students’ constitutional rights (generally the answer is yes.) But isn’t the spirit behind the concept a need for increased vigilance to protect the students, since the parents aren’t there to provide it?

Would a parent have been so slow in notifying their own kids about a killer on the loose in their immediate midst? Just to be safe, and even if it was inconvenient or disruptive, wouldn’t a parent have taken the addition step of telling the child to return home or find a secure location, at least until the situation was under control?

Don’t blame me for the problems of the world is not, to me, an acceptable position for a university president, or any other top school official.

Here’s another thing that bugged me. From the Washington Post, emphasis mine:

Lucinda Roy, an English professor who taught a creative writing class that Cho attended, told CNN that she grew so concerned by some of his writings in the fall of 2005 that she went to university officials to see if anything could be done. She said authorities told her there was nothing they could do because the writings, while disturbing, did not point to an immediate threat and because they did not want to violate Cho’s free speech rights. Roy told the network that she decided to teach him one-on-one for a semester and urged him to get counseling.

“Several of us became concerned,” she said. “I contacted some people to try to get some help for him because I was deeply concerned myself.” She declined to give details of the troubling passages in his written work, citing a request by investigators.

This seems deeply, deeply confused. His “free speech rights” were not the issue. It’s almost absurd. Professor Roy was not talking about censoring Cho, or locking him up for what he said. She was concerned about his well-being and the safety of others.

Did no one at VT think to notify Cho’s parents? They would have been completely within their rights to send the writing samples to the parents and to urge them to get their child help.

Protecting free speech does not equate to being completely numb to the content of the speech. Not all speech is equal. Speech sometimes precedes action — action that could be dangerous and violent. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of the First Amendment to use it as a barrier against acting to pursue possible criminal activity.

Here, from the LA Times, is a description of Cho’s writing, and a fellow student’s reaction following the murders:

“His writing, the plays, were really morbid and grotesque,” (Stephanie) Derry said.

“I remember one of them very well. It was about a son who hated his stepfather. In the play the boy threw a chainsaw around, and hammers at him. But the play ended with the boy violently suffocating the father with a Rice Krispy treat,” she said.

“When I got the call it was Cho who had done this, I started crying, bawling,” Derry said. “I kept having to tell myself there is no way we could have known this was coming. I was just so frustrated that we saw all the signs, but never thought this could happen.“

What Derry is describing is an outgrowth of our culture. Clearly, many of Cho’s fellow students and teachers had a visceral reaction to his writing, and sensed danger. And then suppressed these feelings, believing that to do otherwise would be considered judgmental.

Blame is cheap. There is a lot of blaming going on around this incident that is very cheap. But accountability is precious. The university officials, professors and the police need to be held to account for the decisions they made, decisions they made in loco parentis, beginning with the decision not to react to the disturbing writings. I just want them to explain why they did what they did, not hide behind platitudes. Where their thinking was unsound, I want to highlight it so others can learn from it. Don’t let the leadership off the hook so easily.

The Smartest Person in Los Angeles

It’s been almost 20 years since I met the smartest person in Los Angeles, Cecilia Estolano. She was on the staff of Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, I was on Mayor Bradley’s staff. We were having one of the typical meetings you have in government — too many people who had nothing better to do, clogging up what should have been a smaller, shorter meeting with an excess of posturing. I don’t remember the subject, unfortunately, but it was something to do with the environment.

Suddenly, this voice piped in from the end of the table — a young woman’s. She spoke rapid-fire, impatiently, like a college student in a hot debate. In a few seconds, she summed up everything we needed to think about, framing the issue in macro terms while paying due respect to the many devilish details. For my purposes, at that point the meeting was over. There was nothing left to say.

Who are you? I remember asking her after the meeting was over since, characteristically, she had spoken her name and affiliation too fast for me to process it. She introduced herself with a firm handshake. She was new to Galanter’s staff. Friendly, but intensely focused. She really didn’t fit in at City Hall. It takes forever to get anything done, and most of the people there are unfriendly and unfocused. I figured the slow pace would cause her to spontaneously combust. But it didn’t. When I left the mayor’s office to begin my illustrious PR career, I recommended Cecilia to replace me.

Since then, Estolano has worked for the U.S. EPA, the city attorney’s office, and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Now she’s CEO of the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency. This week’s Downtown News has an interview with her. It’s the first one I’ve seen since she took the job about a year ago. Why the thoughts and plans of this dynamic new leader aren’t of more interest to the city’s more prominent media, I couldn’t tell you.

Two things are interesting about this interview: What it reveals about her management style, and the issues to which she’s directing her attention. Here are a couple of excerpts that illustrate what I mean, (with the key statements in bold letters):

Q: With a name like Community Redevelopment Agency, you would imagine that community building would have been the founding principle from the start. Why hasn’t it and how will you ensure it does?

A: I think in times past, the agency has looked at catalytic projects one by one, project by project, and we really are trying to look at, from a planning perspective, what are all of the different components that make a healthy community? Instead of just doing a one-off deal, we’re also looking at how does the fabric of the community work? Is it a healthy place for families to live, shop and work? What I wanted to do coming on board was set a very clear sense of what the mission of the agency was and communicate that consistently and repeatedly throughout and drive down those goals through every rank of the agency. And I think I’ve been somewhat successful at that. Our budget this year is aimed at reflecting those goals, so that means we’re adding capacity on workforce development, on local hiring, on affordable housing, on green urbanism. We really do want to reflect those values in our budgeting, in the way we measure our performance, in the way that we communicate with the community.

Q: What are the biggest obstacles to taking the agency where you want to take it?

A: I don’t really see a lot of obstacles, to be honest with you. I think it’s a matter of getting people the resources they need. We have an incredibly motivated staff here. It has to be one of the strongest mission-driven workforces I’ve ever been a part of. I compare it to when I worked at the EPA where people were very mission-driven about protecting the environment. I haven’t seen that level of commitment until this job. It’s really impressive. So, I don’t think of it as a challenge so much as an opportunity. The other thing we really want to look at is trying to track more private sector investment. We’re looking at a time when there is more private capital chasing urban in-fill deals than ever in history. And we have to find a way to pull that money into our project areas.

Q: Is your background as an environmental lawyer new for someone in your position? And how does it inform your decisions?

A: I think it’s an unusual package for a redevelopment executive director and it informs everything I do. It’s wonderful to be working for a board and a mayor and council members who see the value of sustainable urbanism. But when I came here I wanted to make sure that was a core value of the agency and so in every speech I gave, and every time I talked to staff members, I made it clear that I expected us to move into sustainable urbanism, that we would find a way to reform the agency’s internal practices as well as our relationship with developers to encourage that kind of activity.

And:

Q: Do you see red flags in Downtown’s boom and do those concerns play into your decision-making?

A: We have to try to maintain a balance of incomes in Downtown. We also have to be mindful of all the people living in the single room occupancy hotels and how precious that resource is as a reservoir of scarce housing. We have to deal with Skid Row; we have to deal with the homelessness problem. That is an enormous challenge that is going to take an extraordinary level of cooperation with the county. You asked me what the biggest challenge is; to me that is probably the single biggest challenge we face as a city – not just for Downtown but as a city – grappling with the homelessness problem and our inter-jurisdictional conflicts.

Q: How would you rate Downtown in terms of being a mixed-economic, mixed-income area?

A: Well, it’s funny you ask that question when we’ve just seen the survey come out from [the Downtown Center Business Improvement District] about the new residents and how they have a much higher median income than the rest of the city. I think it’s a challenge to keep it of a diverse economic background. Right now, we pretty much have a bipolar Downtown residential population. We have the homeless and the SRO dwellers and we have the folks that live in the lofts and there is a big gulf in between. That’s not a healthy community. We need to have more workforce housing; we need to have people who are the administrative assistants who live Downtown as well as the associates of law firms. We’re just happy to see that there is a residential development boom occurring in Downtown – we don’t want to put the skids to that – but we do want to make sure that we have more of an income mix.

The politics are thick and greasy downtown — especially now that so many more developers are making so much more money than before — but Cecilia’s intelligence, clarity and experience will hopefully act as a solvent. I like how she describes her leadership style — no wasted energy, focused on the big picture.

The story repeats a rumor that Estolano is considering a race for a westside City Council seat, a rumor she dismisses. It’s so tempting for intelligent people in public service to go that route, but I hope she doesn’t. It’s been proven over many decades that you don’t really need to be that smart to be a successful councilmember. But downtown LA needs a leader, and the timing of Cecilia’s emergence in this role is perfect.

(Hat tip: LA Observed.)

PR By Association

Let’s say you’re a PR professional. Like I was, you’re interested in public affairs and crisis work. Most of your clients were controversial — to somebody. You looked at your job — or serving your client, if you worked in an agency like I did — as a craft, a profession. You do your job with integrity, you play the role of honest broker between your client (boss) and the media, you implement various tactics to help make sure your target audience hears an accurate version of your client/boss’ position and, hopefully, the audience is persuaded by it. You do your job well, you move on to bigger and better things.

Not so fast.

There is a trend afoot of judging PR people by all their past clients/bosses and what they did for them. Here’s an example, from the hugely popular blog Boing Boing:

DNC appoints RIAA shill to run Public Affairs for convention

Today, Jenni Engebretsen was named “Deputy CEO for Public Affairs,” for the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Denver — but she is better known as the Director of Communications for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The RIAA is the most hated “company” in America, according to a recent poll on the Consumerist. The RIAA’s campaign of suing thousands of American music lovers has been the single biggest PR disaster in recent industrial history — which is why Engebretsen’s employer beat out Halliburton, Blackwater and Wal-Mart for the coveted “Worst Company” slot.

Engebretsen’s PR approach is centered around stonewalling and avoiding difficult press calls. She contacted me in 2005 to deny that the RIAA had sent a takedown notice to a website called RPGFilms.net, and promised to answer my followup questions in a day or two. After four months of emailing and calling her, I finally got through to her (by calling her from a different phone, so she couldn’t see who was phoning).

She said that the RIAA had no comment.

The liberal blogosophere is united on many fronts — not just disliking US foreign policy. We also hate the RIAA — for suing our friends, for lobbying for laws that suspend due process rights of the accused (the RIAA’s favorite law, the DMCA, was used by Diebold to suppress information about failures in its voting machines), and for demanding the right to “pretext” (commit wire fraud) in order to catch “pirates.”

Worse still, the RIAA are part of the initiative to corrupt net neutrality, imposing centralized controls on the transmission of information across the network.

It has been Engebretsen’s job to sell these initiatives to the American public. She’s failed to sell this to the American public. Not only does she take a paycheck for selling gangsters to the public — she’s not very good at it!

The DNC can do better. This represents a potential shear with the left-wing blogosphere. I hate what the GOP has done to this country, but the RIAA isn’t much better.

Funding for the Democratic National Convention comes from a different pool than general DNC operations. Here’s a list of the largest donors to the DNC for the past two election cycles. If you know these people, you can contact them and urge them not to contribute to the DNCC.

You can also contact the DNC directly, using the information on its website.

And it goes on from there. Obviously, the intent here is for the blogger and his supporters to put pressure on a friendly entity, the Democratic National Committee, to fire the former flack for an unfriendly entity, the RIAA.

I don’t know Engebretsen, but it wouldn’t surprise me if helping the recording industry justify its policies was not her passion or her calling. It was her job. I don’t know whether she was “good at it,” which the blogger Cory Doctorow questions. What was her objective? Maybe Engebretsen told the RIAA “no matter what I do, they’ll hate you,” thus lowering expectations. The RIAA is still in business, and no one has stopped them from suing music fans.  Maybe that’s all she was supposed to accomplish — to prevent adverse regulation. 

I think PR people who stonewall the media are misguided, but there are a lot of prominent PR people who do it and get away with it.  So that’s just a matter of taste, style, or strategic thinking.

The question is, should Jenni Engebretsen be tarred for the rest of her career for the work she did at the RIAA?  Is it fair to demand she be fired?  Is it fair to call for a boycott from contributing to the DNC if they don’t?

The answer is: People will do whatever they want to do.  Cory Doctorow and his blog are a major force now.   They can hang a scarlet letter on Engebretsen and any other PR person who works for an entity they don’t like.  If it sticks, it sticks.  But I bet Engebretsen and the thousands of PR people like her weren’t expecting anything like this to happen.  Maybe Engebretsen wouldn’t have taken the RIAA job if she’d known their perceived misdeeds would follow her around like this.

Or maybe this is another sign of the end of the PR industry as we know it.  PR people can’t be “hidden persuaders” anymore. Transparency kills them like sunlight kills vampires. In a polarized political world, PR people are in the free-fire zone, getting strafed by all sides, for what they do, what they did, and what they might do in the future.

For companies, it could become a huge disincentive to engage hired guns who made their names elsewhere.  After Doctorow’s post, all the RIAA baggage has landed on the DNC’s doorstep, and will go away only if Engebretsen goes with it.  How long will she be radioactive like this?  Is she now faced with only one PR career path — back to the RIAA?

This story has a medieval quality to it.  It’s worth watching. If Engebretsen in fact loses her new job, I predict the consequences for the PR industry, and for especially the fieldworkers like Engebretsen, will be immense.

LA Times’ Triple-Dip of Imus

Three fascinating pieces in today’s LA Times about the demise of that tedious (and, I think, clearly racist) old fart Don Imus.

First, in the news section, a story that should get a lot more attention: Imus’ unique role as a conduit for liberal and Democratic politicians to white, male voters:

With Imus’ show canceled indefinitely because of his remarks about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team, some Democratic strategists are worried about how to fill the void. For a national radio audience of white men, Democrats see few if any alternatives.

“This is a real bind for Democrats,” said Dan Gerstein, an advisor to one of Imus’ favorite regulars, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). “Talk radio has become primarily the province of the right, and the blogosphere is largely the province of the left. If Imus loses his microphone, there aren’t many other venues like it around.”

Jim Farrell, a former aide to 2000 presidential candidate and Imus regular Bill Bradley, said the firing “creates a vacuum.”

This week, when Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) was asked by CNN why he picked Imus’ show to announce his presidential candidacy, Dodd explained: “He’s got a huge audience; he gives you enough time to talk, not a 30-second sound bite, a chance to explain your views; … and a chance to reach the audience who doesn’t always watch the Sunday morning talk shows.”

This is sad on so many levels. “Come for the racism, stay for the liberal talking points?” Because, let’s face it, Imus has been doing this kind of schtick for years, as documented here, here, and here, just for starters. But I guess Imus functioned as a kind of good-old-boy cultural guide for elitist Democrats, as best illustrated by his famous “Stop it, you’re going to ruin this,” scolding to John Kerry after the disastrous speech at Pasadena City College. Imus was trying to protect the Democrats’ chances to win over white males in the 2006 election, and he saw Kerry’s insult to the troops as dangerous.

There is at least one good liberal talk show host who seems to have an affinity for white males and vice-versa: Ed Schultz. He’s not a favorite of the left blogosphere, but then, for that matter, neither was Imus.

The next LA Times Imus piece that caught my eye was from an unlikely source: The pathetic “humor” columnist on the op-ed page, Joel Stein. It’s really worth reading! Stein explains that he first discovered Imus in junior high and liked him because he called everybody a “weasel.” Then, in high school, Stein switched to the funnier Howard Stern and forgot about Imus.

I was pretty shocked when Imus reemerged as a political cognoscente. Senators and journalists happily suffered the fool. Imus asked people such as John McCain dumber questions than Stern asked strippers, and they laughed it off. But without the sexy little giggle.

That’s because society’s aspirationals use politics as a refuge for their stupidity. They sucker you into long conversations at dinner parties about how Bush is stupid and how Bush is also really stupid. They feed on political blogs and newspaper columnists that reflect their side and parrot the best one-liners they can find. These are the people who furiously scream about policy decisions mostly because they need to furiously scream about something. If they were one rung down the socioeconomic ladder, instead of yelling about Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Syria they’d be shouting about Kobe’s refusal to pass.

This isn’t to say that politics aren’t important or interesting. It’s to say that most people who talk about politics aren’t important or interesting. And Imus was their king. He got to pretend to be smart with actual smart people.

The arena of politics is too confined to encapsulate all the topics worthy of intellectual debate. It’s as though we all go to a college where everyone has to major in political science. Newspaper columns, talk radio and cable news channels rarely have serious debates about art, literature, technology, sex, fashion or religion. If it weren’t for Monica Lewinsky, newspapers still wouldn’t acknowledge the existence of the thong. Look at the lengths Britney Spears had to go to just to inform us of long-standing fashion changes in personal grooming.

The more serious side of the LA Times emerges in the penseés of Tim Rutten, their ponderous, old-school media columnist.  In his piece, he asks the really important question:  How has Imus gotten away with making these kinds of comments for so long, while retaining the fawning support of the political and media elite?

This guy has been doing this stuff for years — insulting and disparaging not only African Americans but Jews and gays.

This week the Anti-Defamation League distributed a statement pointing out that it has been lodging protests about Imus’ anti-Semitic remarks for years and nothing has been done. There are examples it cites that, frankly, can’t be quoted in this column because they’re too purely offensive, including a characterization of Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz that’s straight out of Julius Streicher. (He habitually referred to the late Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. with a similarly racist epithet.)

Why did he get away with it?

IT happened because he made millions for his network and syndicators and covered himself with a very shrewd strategy. He positioned himself as the thinking person’s shock jock and, when he wasn’t dishing out racism, prejudice or misogyny, invited onto his show a virtual who’s who of the national news media and publishing elite. Those people were only too happy to ignore their responsibility to call Imus on his reprehensible behavior because they profited from the promotional opportunities his program granted them. He helped sell books and journalists’ careers.

Another devil’s bargain, in the same mold as the Democrats’.  What does this say about the cynicism of the writers, broadcasters and politicians who seek to lead and instruct us, that they would find in Imus a useful tool?   Because from what Rutten and the various Democratic spokespersons quoted above are saying, we can expect the sales of books by journalists to drop, along with the percentage of white males voting Democratic, if Imus isn’t there to shine his peculiar light on them.

The mind reels at the implications.

June Christy, Nat King Cole and Mel Tormé

I want to write a book about some of the female jazz singers of the 1950s, particularly the “cool” white women who embodied the tension between the goody-two-shoes image of postwar  suburban America and its desire for normalcy, and the addictive lure of rhythm and the night.  June Christy would be in this book, along with Anita O’Day, Blossom Dearie, Julie London, Irene Kral…. I’m taking suggestions. 

The two most famous members of this set mark out the territory:  Doris Day, a great jazz singer who become the ultimate symbol of modesty and decorum; and Peggy Lee, the North Dakota girl who got the “Fever” and never seemed to shake it.

This sublime video clip of ”the misty Miss Christy” performing with a jazz combo featuring Nat “King” Cole and Mel Tormé shows what I’m talking about.  June’s all smiles, like she just finished baking a cherry pie. But she’s got the syncopation, she’s got the blue notes (especially in the way she ends the song), there’s a hint of smoke, and you can just tell, she might have grown up in a house with a white picket fence, but that’s not where she lives now. 

Nat “King” Cole is a name that should be familiar to you, but you probably think of him more as a singer of great pop songs like “Rambling Rose,” “But Beautiful,” and that Christmas tune that begins “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…”  But he got his start as a pianist, and you get to see him in all his Oscar Peterson-like glory here. 

Welcome to my obsession….

 

How To Get To Dodger Stadium, 2007*

and here’s how to get out:

I’m so lucky that the people with whom I attended today’s game insisted on getting there almost two hours early. The traffic was apocalyptically bad. A relatively small crowd of us saw all this pomp and circumstance. Many more only heard explosions and flyovers from their cars. There were still plenty of empty seats as late as the fourth inning, and traumatized fans started heading for the exits in the seventh, in hopes of avoiding a worse ride home.

The McCourts should

a) apologize;

b) completely ditch the new traffic scheme, which negates the institutional knowledge Dodger fans have developed from dealing with the quirky parking patterns at Chavez Ravine since 1962, without offering any improvement;

c) tell the parking lot attendants who were just standing around, watching this mess passively that, if they can’t think of what to do about it, at least pretend to care.

The owners’ dream of 4 million in attendance will not be achieved this season. In fact, I predict that even if this pretty good Dodger team reaches the playoffs, attendance will take a big step back, because no one will be willing to put up with this nightmare.

The Dodgers lost, 6-3, but the game was okay, the weather was great, and it was fun to see our new ace pitcher, Jason Schmidt, hit a home run. Bowing to advanced age and wisdom, I only drank cold water, but in that sun, it was good as beer. I had a good time, and am grateful I got to go.

But the day will be remembered as the day the McCourts’ incompetence, which is effectively obscured when the team plays well, finally became impossible to ignore. They are in a jam. There is no PR solution to it. They need to admit their grievous error, and fix it fast.

*Update, 4/10/07:  A formerly regular Dodger Thoughts comment poster, Tommy Naccarato, articulates what I was trying to say, except more eloquently. 

This is not just a bunch of sports fans whining about parking.  This is a story out of social anthropology; what happens when outsiders try to fix something that only looked broken, and in doing so, changing what was once a challenging but live-giving experience into something confusing and oppressive: 

You see Dodger Stadium used to be a sanctuary for me. I could escape my life and completely forget about the problems going on. I could think about roster moves; what pitcher should be in the bullpen warming up; Who should be pinch hitting and which mustard was best on my once affordable Dodger Dog. I thought of just how good I had it, right then at that very precise moment.

But that’s all changed now.

Today I experienced something at the Stadium I never fully felt before–I was being controlled from the very moment I entered up until 2 1/2 hours after the Game, when we finally got out of the newly named, “Sunset Lot” through a broken down fence–and fought the traffic out the Academy Gate, down to Stadium Way.

If we would have waited for the Sunset crowd to leave, it would have taken 3/4′s of a tank of gas waiting for it to clear and maybe at least 45 minutes more. Even one of the attendants chided with us of how ridiculous the new system was, knowing that the implementation of the old system would probably mean the end of his job there!

The system that was designed 45 years ago for Walter O’Malley’s dream ballpark had it’s quirks and turns, but knowledge of the ballpark; the ability to get out of the right gate the fastest way in relation to the size of the crowd–well you learned. I know I might be a bit resistant to change and that change is good, but honestly, and I say this knowing that your being released into traffic at rush hour–even at night, this is going to be a disaster, and frankly it’s not something I’m looking forward to for the rest of the year. At least not when you can stay at home, watch the game on T.V. and save money.

I guess it all amounts to this: What was so wrong with the old system? Even during sell outs, like last year’s season ending loss to the Mets, I was out of there quicker then I got in.

But most, it’s presents an even more alarming thought of what is left to come.  

If you want to read the whole thing, it’s comment #157 to this post.  

P.S. Welcome, LA Observed readers, and thank you Kevin Roderick for pointing to this post.

P.P.S. And welcome also to Dodger Thoughts readers.  I’m proud I could make Jon Weisman laugh.

The Sopranos, A Look Back

You didn’t realize it, but this is the Sopranos Decade. Everybody kicks up to the big guy, but the big guy is a whack job.  That’s pretty much the ’00s in a nutshell, isn’t it?

Maybe you missed the whole thing.  Hey, you want to get in on the zeitgeist, you gotta pay!  The zeitgeist is too good for basic cable.  

Okay, here:  Get caught up in seven short minutes!  Right here.

That’s the Way It Was: CBS Evening News in 1975

Take a look at this.  It’s a CBS Evening News broadcast on January 17, 1975 — including the ads! 

If you are a new-media type, under 30, and only watch the network news during disasters or elections, watching this will give you a much better sense why these broadcasts were so important.  A few impressions:

• What’s that rattling sound at the beginning and the end of the broadcast?  Those were teletype machines.  
• The clips from the press conferences are longer, less pithy and visually empty.  This must have been before the PR people figured out that people don’t listen to the news, they watch it; and before they drilled senators, bureaucrats and other spokespersons that if the cameras are rolling, your job is to repeat, repeat, repeat, the talking points script.  People used to be interesting on TV — even boring people.  Now they’re afraid of being interesting.
• Philosophically, the differences between then and now are vast.  It’s not just a simple matter of right vs. left.  It’s as if the basic Milton Friedman precept of “no such thing as a free lunch” didn’t exist.  Energy, the topic at hand, is presumed to be a good that government can allocate, with only the means up for debate.
• Walter Cronkite, however, provides no evidence of any of the political bias the right wing imagines permeated the news back in the 70s.  His summary of the positions of Congressional Democrats, the Republican president, automakers, environmentalists, etc. strikes me as completely fair and comprehensive; delivered without rolling eyes or arched eyebrows.  As the network news audience has shrunk, the bias seems far more pronounced now.
• You could get tires for $18???
• “High nutrition” = a bowl of sweetened cereal, buttered toast, juice and milk. The cereal was called “Bucwheats,” but it isn’t clear if buckwheat is an ingredient.  However, maple syrup was, hence the commercial is set in Nevada near a bunch of maple trees.
• “Munich” was just as potent a metaphor then as now.
• The United States:  Arms merchants to the world.
• You had three choices for over-the-counter pain relief:  Aspirin, buffered aspirin and a product called Anacin, which was made out of aspirin with caffeine.  This was before Tylenol, and long before Advil.
• How quickly we forget:  The world’s primary terror target in 1975 was London. Civil liberties suffered greatly as a result.
• A story about oil tankers in Banfrey Bay, Ireland was illustrated with a ridiculous commercial by Gulf Oil — an Irish ditty, complete with pennywhistle, about “bringin’ home de i-il, me boys” — designed to argue for deep-water oil ports in the US.  The story shows that these kinds of terminals lead to big oil spills that kill fish.  What were Gulf Oil’s flacks thinking!? “Hey, we don’t care about oil spills, we’re dancing an Irish jig!”
• Whatever happened to “breeder nuclear reactors?”  In light of global climate change, will these come back?
• Want soft skin?  Vaseline Petroleum Jelly.  Want lively looking hair?  Johnson’s Baby Shampoo lets you “baby your hair.”
• If you were arrested in an anti-war demonstration on the capitol steps on May 5, 1971, the ACLU won you a $10,000-per-demonstrator settlement.  Did anyone ever get the money?
• A sad little story about Richard Nixon in San Clemente, less than a year after his resignation.  He was sick. He liked talking about sports.  He rode around in a golf cart.  Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra paid him visits, as did Bebe Rebozo.  Anyone remember Bebe Rebozo?  Pretty soon, Nixon faced the end of his free postage privileges. The roses had to be donated: No one to take care of them.
• Anyone remember Skitch Henderson?  He was the bandleader on the Tonight Show during the early Johnny Carson years. Anyone remember he went to prison? (Apparently, he got some bad tax advice…from Leonard Bernstein and Henry Mancini.)
• The insane claims of advertisers!  Ground roast and instant coffee (Taster’s Choice) taste the same?  If that was true, do you think Starbucks would go to all that trouble? 
• Nothing about celebrities. The closest was the story of George Halas’ ex-wife getting season tickets to Chicago Bears games in her divorce agreement.

And that’s the way it is, Friday, January 17, 1975!

Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Wall Street: Lining Up to Run America

Joel Kotkin sees a new power elite and a new political paradigm emerging from behind the ruins of George W. Bush’s failed administration.   The whole essay is worth reading. Here’s a taste:

How much things have changed in the past few decades! Hollywood once split its loyalties carefully among the parties; its only president came from its right. Now, as much as 80 percent of its largesse flows to the Democrats. The schism between Obama supporter David Geffen and those hanging tough with Clinton is important, not only because of how it reflects Hollywood’s endemic pettiness, but because much of the party, instead of regarding these wealthy prima donnas as deluded minstrels, now treats them as enlightened policy gurus.

Not long ago, Silicon Valley was a bastion of middle-of-the-road Republicans like former Congressman Ed Zschau. But as power once vested in industrial firms like Hewlett Packard has shifted to software and internet-based companies, high-tech politics have shifted both left and dark green. The rising powers of the 21st Century Valley, firms like Google and eBay, generally don’t worry about trifles like groundwater regulations or factory emissions since they don’t manufacture anything. Nor do they worry much about labor laws, because their own employees tend to be young, well-educated and well-compensated. This makes it easier to curry favor with enviro-friendly, left-leaning politicians like former Vice President Al Gore.

Perhaps most important of all have been the changes on Wall Street, whose power extends deeply into both Hollywood and Silicon Valley and which now stands as one of the predominant sources of funds for federal office-seekers and related political action committees. Long the bastion of the old Republican establishment and a backer of Bush in his two presidential runs, Wall Street in 2006 gave more money to the Democrats, and that trend seems to be accelerating along with the implosion of the Republicans.

(snip)

How did this corporate power shift occur so quickly and dramatically? To a large extent, the answer lies in the utter failure of George W. Bush and his administration. Bush came to office with the support of a Sun Belt elite that drew its wealth and power from the great economic surge west and south after World War II and for nearly a quarter-century dominated American political life

Donors from this group of businesses propelled the careers of such substantial figures as Arizona’s Barry Goldwater, and California’s Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Arguably, their final triumph, helped by the demographic shift to the South and West, lay with Newt Gingrich’s 1994 congressional takeover.

Back in the late 1970s, founding fathers of the Sun Belt power grab, such as oilman Henry Salvatori and Litton Industries founder Tex Thornton, shared with me their conviction that the old Eastern establishment lacked the power and conviction to lead the country. They felt America needed to be guided by more vital, more clear-headed leaders. Economic malaise of the Jimmy Carter years, as well as the perception of America’s weakness both against the Soviet Union and terrorist states such as Iran, lent credibility to these beliefs among a large part of the public.

Like most successful elites, these leaders possessed a relatively coherent agenda. It centered on gaining a free hand over the nation’s natural resources, a low-tax economic policy and support for a strong national defense. The divisive moral agenda, particularly helpful in wooing working-class and Southern voters, was grafted on later but was never widely embraced by the right’s corporate funders.

Bush’s disastrous tenure has pretty much destroyed his backers’ credibility on all three issues. High energy prices and shifting climate-change politics have decimated the traditional agenda of oil and gas companies. An uneven and poorly shared economic expansion has convinced many middle-class erstwhile conservatives that Bush’s low tax, pro-business policies do not really work for them. Finally, the catastrophe in Iraq has undermined support for the overt, aggressive national defense policy long supported by Sun Belt conservatives and their defense industry allies.

(snip)

Once they recover from their post-Bush euphoria, however, traditional liberals should realize that the ongoing power shift does not necessarily signify the rise of a populist agenda. The wealthiest fifth of Americans are now equally likely to be Democrats or Republicans, a shocking shift from the nearly 70 percent Republican cast of this same quintile just two decades ago. The “party of the people” increasingly now must appeal as much to the affluent as the working-class voter.

I’ve been struggling for a “big picture” that explains the changes in politics in the past couple of years that goes beyond the tactical novelties like the netroots and YouTube.  Kotkin’s is pretty coherent. 

A possible flaw, however, is that his analysis completely omits 9/11, the jihad against the West, the “war on terror.”  Or, is he implying that 9/11 is no longer pertinent, the war on terror is quiescent, and that whole policy arena doesn’t cut politically anymore?  That would come as a huge, rude surprise to the blogospheric right, who think the war on terror is the only issue.  But maybe that’s the case.