R.I.P. Ingmar Bergman, Bill Walsh and Tom Snyder

A more unlikely threesome to make that celestial voyage together, one could not imagine. Except I can imagine Bergman and Walsh doing interviews on Snyder’s old “Tomorrow” show.

Snyder was an underrated journalist. He was an easily-parodied personality, but he hit the most important mark: He asked questions that elicited interesting answers. Compare that with Charlie Rose, who has an enviable spot on PBS, can book the most interesting and informed guests — and will not shut up about himself. Rose gets more respect from TV critics, but Snyder’s show was more informative.

Of course, like everyone in LA for a certain duration, we remember that at one time, KNBC, Channel 4, featured Snyder, Tom Brokaw, Pat Sajak and Bryant Gumble, all on the same local broadcast.

Of Walsh and Bergman I have less to say because so many others will say it better. They were confirmed in their respective genius by prodigious achievements over their entire careers. Walsh remade football. Bergman remade the movies. Both were cerebral in a business where thinkers were suspect. But despite their highly abstract thinking prowess, both provided fans with moments that made you gasp and gave you chills. Few movies hit me as hard as “Cries and Whispers.” Few moments made me happier than Montana-to-Clark in the closing moments of the NFC championship game in 1981.

It’s a big day in the history of the 20th Century, which the 21st Century relentlessly digests.

Bold Wankers

The Iraq war is a failure. The surge is a failure. General Petraeus? Impressive man, but a failure. If we pulled our forces out now, or as soon as possible, things in Iraq would improve. Meanwhile, that would free up resources to fight terrorists, who are in a lot of other places, but not Iraq.

That’s what we’re supposed to think unless we’re part of the dwindling-yet-vast right wing conspiracy. It is no longer a position. It is an orthodoxy.

So how bold was it for two liberal think-tankers, Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack, to publish this op-ed in the New York Times today? And to title it “A War We Just Might Win.”

VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

Swimming In It

There’s a beach near Portuguese Bend in Palos Verdes where you can feel like you’re swimming off Baja California’s miles and miles of unoccupied coast. If you overlook the few clifftop houses, you can feel completely alone there, especially when you’re bobbing around in the blue surf.

I hiked to this beach Sunday. It is covered with weathered stones, some as big as melons, and the rocks continue almost to the surfline, except at low tide, which exposes a stretch of coarse, brown sand. When I was thinking about my swim, I could see the sand, but by the time I got there, the tide had come up, erasing the swimmable section of the beach.

Now the surf was sucking against the rocks, meaning if I wanted to swim, I’d have to deal with the possibility of stubbing my feet against them. But the water looked so inviting! The whole weekend had been a hot and sticky one, running around on various family obligations, wiping sweat out of my eyes, toweling sweat out of my hair. To spend a few minutes in that surf would be such an antidote.

So I went in. I kept my sandals on, and went in. It was everything I wanted it to be: the water a soothing temperature; the setting sun turning the cliffs into golden monuments . I was alone, and it was quiet except for the sounds of water.

Then I thought about Jeremy Blake, the artist who apparently killed himself in despair over his longtime girlfriend Theresa Duncan’s suicide; the sad, baffling story that has generated so much writing across the blogosphere and in the mainstream press during the past week. So much writing about it, but as Bob Dylan would say, “Nothing is revealed.”

Blake killed himself, apparently, by walking into the ocean at New York’s Rockaway Beach. Just took off all his clothes and walked out into the surf, at night. To die.

How does somebody do that? How does someone swim to their own death?

New Civil Libertarians?

Radar working overtime, I’ve noticed that the trials of Lewis Libby, Conrad Black and the Duke University lacrosse players have generated new recruits to the cause of civil liberties — a cause that used to be embraced by liberals and the news media, but has been an orphan lately for all save those incarcerated at Gitmo. Well, seeing a political hero like Libby and a business hero like Black fall into the grasp of federal prosecutors has awakened the right wing to the need for due process — and the government’s faltering observance of it.

Best recent example is writer Mark Steyn’s blog post of last week reflecting on the Black trial:

Here’s just a random half-dozen reforms the US justice system would benefit from:

1) An end to the near universal reliance on plea bargains, a feature unknown to most other countries in the Common Law tradition. This assures that a convicted man is doubly penalized, first for the crime and second for insisting on his right to trial by jury. The principal casualty of this plea-coppers’ parade is justice itself: for when two men commit the same act but the first is jailed for the rest of his life and dies in prison while the second does six months of golf therapy and community theatre on a British Columbia farm and then resumes his business career, the one thing that can be said with certainty is that such an outcome is unjust.

Listening to Maria McKee, the Willard Grant Conspiracy and Nick Lowe

So I came back from the Maria McKee/Willard Grant Conspiracy concert at McCabe’s week before last with three CDs:

• Maria McKee’s most recent, “Late December.”
• Also by McKee, “Live in Hamburg”
• The Willard Grant Conspiracy’s “Let it Roll”

And since then, I’ve picked up another one I’d like to talk about, too: Nick Lowe’s “At My Age.”

Maybe It’s Time for Some Good News

Like, how about a biodiesel motorcycle!?

Here’s a video link.

When I was a reporter, my AP Stylebook said Diesel should always be capitalized — because  Diesel was his name-o.  Shouldn’t we call it bioDiesel now?

Breezin’ Along with the Breeze

I have been trying to keep in mind Tony Soprano’s sixth-season admonition, “‘Remember When’ is the lowest form of conversation.”

I’m in my fifties now, I’ve seen a lot of things here in my little world, and I find history both pleasurable and important. But I also think change is good, new things excite me and as a father of an incoming high-school senior, the future is far more important to me now than the past. For me, too. It has to be. What I once thought of as my life has ended abruptly, twice, with no turning back. This is a condition of everyone’s existence. Sometimes this truth is hidden, but it’s there.

I remember floating on a water taxi in Venice early one foggy morning, seeing these ornate palaces emerge from the opaque dampness, one-by-one like a procession of ghosts. Whoever built these gilded homes never imagined that mighty Venice would ever lose its grip on the world of commerce. But it did. When the end came — in the form of Napoleon’s armies — Venice didn’t even put up a fight. They wanted to save the palaces to remind them and future generations of how rich and powerful and glorious they were, once. So, in exchange for no bombardment, Venetians handed over the keys to the invader. And now the whole place is sinking.

Someday they’ll say of Venice: “Remember when?”

Curiously, I thought of all that when I came across LA Observed‘s link to a post on Life on the Edge, a San Pedro blog. The post is about the Daily Breeze, the supposed newspaper of record for my part of Los Angeles, the South Bay and Harbor areas. When longtime owner Copley News sold it to Dean Singleton’s Los Angeles Newspaper Group a year or two ago, it was inevitable that we would read about the Breeze’s descent into the lower depths of journalism. LANG’s a cheapo-cheopo organization, proudly so. They buy up newspapers in a region, they consolidate as much of the operation as they can, and then they cut cut cut.

“…the Apparent Double Suicide…” *UPDATED

A rank odor rises from the LA Times’ belated coverage of blogger/filmmaker Theresa Duncan’s death and the subsequent disappearance of her boyfriend, the artist Jeremy Blake. After rehashing what everyone else said days ago — the deaths were “confounding,” the art world is in shock — writer Chris Lee gropes in the dark for explanations that are clearly beyond the facts in his notebook, and in doing so, inflicts needless damage to their reputations.

If someone knows why two talented, popular people with the world on a string would kill themselves, they can choose to tell that story. When it comes to prominent people — and there’s no question Duncan and Blake courted attention — the trade-off between violating the privacy of the deceased and offering a coherent narrative to explain a senseless act tends to favor telling the story. But only if you have a story to tell. Lee doesn’t. He has a hodge-podge of disquieting details that add up to a big, contradictory blob of nothing that perhaps tells us more about Lee than his subjects.

I Never Knew Theresa Duncan

I never knew Theresa Duncan, author of the blog The Wit of the Staircase among many other creative accomplishments. But I happened to get a note from an admirer of hers last week, asking if I could confirm her death.

Our connection was LA Observed. Kevin Roderick loved Duncan’s blog, and he says nice things about this one, too. Somehow, the e-mailer thought we might know each other, and hoped I might be able to dispel what was then just a rumor.

This thread led me on a search through the Internet to find out what had happened. The facts are unbelievably sad and frankly bewildering. Not only is Duncan gone, but so is her boyfriend of 12 years, the well-known artist Jeremy Blake, who apparently drowned himself a few days after finding Duncan’s body in their New York apartment.

The New York papers have all now weighed in. The most straightforward account appeared in Saturday’s New York Daily News:

Officer Rutten on the Media Beat: No Embargoes for Wizards

Last week, LA Times media columnist Tim Rutten instructed the LA news media that the only real issue in Mayor Villaraigosa’s extramarital affair was “the fact that (girlfriend Mirthala) Salinas continued to report on the mayor while they were involved in this fashion….”

Since that column, the Times’ reporters have dutifully focused on that aspect, writing the ultimate “who cares?” story today:

Mirthala Salinas was a rising star at one of Los Angeles’ premier Spanish-language television stations before she came to be known as the other woman in Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s life.

A respected and aggressive journalist, she anchored a newscast that won two local Emmy Awards at KVEA-TV Channel 52 during her 10 years at the Telemundo station. She earned a Golden Mike broadcasting award as well.

“She was very smart and always had her finger on the pulse of the community,” said one former Telemundo executive, who recalled the 35-year-old newscaster as poised and articulate.

(Where was her finger again?)

Now, Salinas’ career hangs in the balance as Telemundo executives decide as early as Monday whether to fire her for having a romantic relationship with Villaraigosa while she was covering him as a political reporter.

The City Hall beat’s course thusly corrected, Rutten has moved on to Harry Potter, specifically the controversy over two book reviewers — the NY Times‘ Michiko Kakutani, the Baltimore Sun’s Mary Carole McCauley — publishing reviews in advance of the release of the final novel in the series early this morning. There was an agreement of some kind with media getting advance copies that they would not do this.

Rutten wants us all to know that, from his Olympian perch, he sees nothing wrong with what the reviewers did.

Usually, what the public trusts a newspaper to do is to tell things, not withhold information, but maybe those rules don’t apply to “the boy who lived” any more than the laws of nature do.

(snip)

(Author J.K. Rowling) told the British press that she was “staggered that some American newspapers have decided to publish purported spoilers in the form of reviews in complete disregard of the wishes of literally millions of readers, particularly children, who wanted to reach Harry’s final destination by themselves, in their own time. I am incredibly grateful to all those newspapers, booksellers and others who have chosen not to attempt to spoil Harry’s last adventure for fans.”

Fair enough. She’s the author, and she’s entitled. The fact of the matter is, though, that both Kakutani and the Sun’s Mary Carole McCauley are accomplished critics whose reviews scrupulously avoided giving away anything that could be considered a plot spoiler. Even the most passionate Potterites could read their pieces without fear of compromising their pleasure in this new book.

Really? How does Rutten know this? Both reviews made it pretty clear that, to answer one big question in fans’ minds, Harry does not die. You had to read between the lines, but the tone and carefully chosen words in both reviews could only lead you to one conclusion.

From the Sun:

So, while we really can’t divulge the ending of Book 7, we can tell you this much:

As the series draws to a close, Rowling gives her favorite character a rare and precious gift, a treasure that outshines any other boon she can imagine — including immortality.

She gives Harry a family.

The Times’ Kakutani is more circumspect about the ending, but her descriptions of the novel tell readers what to expect along the way to it:

No wonder then that Harry often seems overwhelmed with disillusionment and doubt in the final installment of this seven-volume bildungsroman. He continues to struggle to control his temper, and as he and Ron and Hermione search for the missing Horcruxes (secret magical objects in which Voldemort has stashed parts of his soul, objects that Harry must destroy if he hopes to kill the evil lord), he literally enters a dark wood, in which he must do battle not only with the Death Eaters, but also with the temptations of hubris and despair.

Rutten wants us to know that Rowling — who, he emphasizes, has become a billionaire from her writings — isn’t really concerned, as she says, about “children, who wanted to reach Harry’s final destination by themselves, in their own time.” Nope. Rutten has deduced that “it’s about money.” After acknowledging there are bad guys — on the Internet! — who posted PDFs of the book, he goes on to make an obvious but pointless distinction.

Embargoes on reviews and discussions are another matter. All the outrage surrounding this particular book notwithstanding, contemporary publishers impose these blackouts not in the interest of readers but to protect the carefully planned publicity campaigns they create for books on which they have advanced large sums of money.

This is the economic imperative that leads publishers to withhold the contents of even nonfiction manuscripts that contain news that the public has a vital interest in knowing.

It’s also why newspapers, including this one, routinely break those embargoes without any pang of conscience. Our first and most compelling obligation is to our readers’ right to know and not to the commercial interests of publishers.

That’s right, everybody. It takes guts for journalists to ferret out the news from…uh, their own desks. You, my readers, have a right to know plot points in a work of fiction that was sent to me by the publisher. It’s my solemn duty to report this information, even though I agreed not to.

What Rutten is alluding to are the embargoes of non-fiction books written by journalists on the payroll of a newspaper, where legitimate news is squirreled away for maximum commercial impact, to the detriment of the public’s interest. The Washington Post, in particular, is famous for doing this, keeping accounts of secret White House deliberations under wraps so as not to spoil a book launch.

How is the Harry Potter series anything like that? Rutten is being excruciatingly literal here. But he also fails to support his case. How is money implicated? Spoiling the surprises wouldn’t have stopped readers from buying “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” As Rutten himself reports, some 1.8 million readers had already advance-ordered it from Amazon alone.

No; the only result of spoiling the surprises is spoiling the surprises.

Rowling is an artist of suspense. She knows what she wants readers to experience and when. But because Tim Rutten doesn’t get that, he’s let the word go forth that journalists have a right, nay a duty, to break embargoes for works of fiction. Just as he has ruled that Mayor Villaraigosa’s private life is none of our business, unless it creates a conflict of interest for a member of the sacred class of journalists.

Okay, Rutten, so what about this: What if an elected official was married to a novelist, and the novelist told the elected official the ending to his or her next book, not knowing that the elected official was also sleeping with a reporter? Would it be appropriate for the reporter to review the novel?

Thank You Oregon

Some coastal views:

And this one, the result of using the “solarize” setting.  That button seldom helps as much as it did here:

Portland has a lot to recommend it, especially:

…which is about to have an onslaught of Harry Potter fans.  The store will welcome them, but the folks at the coffee shop? 

 

Maybe not as much.

Scary Oregon

Signs like this one are posted up and down the northern Pacific coast of Oregon.  My son has a lifelong fear of tsunamis, so when I told him about the sign, he urged me to leave immediately.

“You know what happens just before a tsunami, right?”

“Yeah, the tide goes way out, and–”

“I could just see you running out to take pictures instead of finding higher ground!”

“There won’t be any tsumanis while we’re here, I swear.”

“How do you know?”

“We’re leaving now, so stop worrying.”

I knew it would freak him out.  Long before I became a father, I was an older brother. It’s a hard habit to break.

The little guy, running away from the big wave…doesn’t look like he’s got much of a chance, does it?

P.S.  Just figured out, this was my 500th post!  That hardly seems possible.

Maria McKee: The Voice, Up Close, at McCabe’s

It’s a little room, smaller than the smallest theater in a suburban multi-plex, where Maria McKee performed Friday night.  Although every seat was filled, the crowd at McCabe’s Guitar Shop couldn’t have been more than 200 people.  It’s almost crazy: How could a performer with so much talent be presented, how could she be available, in such an intimate setting? 

Maria McKee is only 42 years old.  She is still in her prime, some 22 years after the hyped debut of Lone Justice, her original band.  She has an opera singer’s range and power.  She masters songs that are sometimes fiendishly complex, poetic and emotionally overwhelming.  She skillfully accompanies herself on piano or guitar.  She looks like she could do this for another 25 years.  There is still time for you to hear her.

Onstage, McKee is nervous and obsessive, but has a sense of humor about it, stumbling around trying to read her set list, find a water bottle or fix a broken strand of jet.  Then she starts up a song and… I can’t think of any apt comparison.  Aretha Franklin?  Bruce Springsteen? Patsy Cline? Elvis Presley? Janis Joplin?  Maria McKee is as good a singer as any of them, as good as anyone I’ve ever heard, including Beverly Sills and Renee Fleming. 

McKee called herself a “dilettante,” and joked that because of problems wrangling her instruments, her shows in Europe from night to night changed styles, from Broadway to folk to power-trio.   But what that really means is she can sing anything and make it authentic.  Some of that’s due to her musical pedigree, but mostly it’s because her voice and stylings are so compelling, she transcends any genre.

Back in 1984-5, I had no problem with the Lone Justice/Maria McKee hype.  I probably added to it, my enthusiasm the beat of a butterfly wing that swirled into a hurricane.  I stumbled across Lone Justice one night in that brief period when L.A. nightclubs were teeming with great bands that defied radio fashions.  Oh my God, who was that singer?  She was 19, spooky-pretty, and when she opened her mouth, it was the loudest thing I ever heard, louder even than Captain Beefheart, who was so loud my ears leaked.  Lone Justice was a “cowpunk” band when it started — metal twang. The guitars were fierce but McKee had no problem being heard over them.  I figured I had discovered the next big singing star, the next great band. 

Lone Justice put out an album that had all the songs I’d learned from watching them a few times, but the album did not capture what I recalled hearing.   Then they put out another one that didn’t sound remotely like what I’d heard; in fact it sounded like the quintessential tinkly-synth crap I was trying to escape.   Then Lone Justice broke up, and Maria McKee disappeared for awhile.  

In the early 1990s, McKee started up a solo career. Her first couple of albums were better than the Lone Justice albums, but still didn’t give me what I was looking for.  How could all these different producers and record-company executives not understand her talent?  Or maybe she was someone you had to hear live and live only.  A lot of the other LA bands I loved also didn’t translate that well in the studio — the Blasters and X in particular.  I figured that was McKee’s problem, too. 

She says it’s because she didn’t really care enough about being a star to make herself into one.  But who are the big pop divas of the past 20 years?  Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Beyonce — all of them talented, but all of them using an overdramatized style heavily dependent on melisma, defined as “the technique of changing the note (pitch) of a single syllable of text while it is being sung,” but that you all know as the “woah-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-eee-ohhhh.”  It’s showy but totally unmusical. 

Maria McKee, by contrast, has a natural vibrato, perfect pitch and rhythm, and respect for the lyrics. She’s dramatic too, but authentically so.  She wrings emotion out of the words, not a roller-coaster ride.   Which means her style was out of fashion.  McKee was the ultimate flowering of the folk/rock/soul style — think Linda Ronstadt, but much better — and she arrived too late.  I think she would have been huge if her first album had come out in, say, 1969.

But for talent like McKee’s, it’s never too late.   She will eventually find an audience, and in the meantime, she is building a distinctive body of work for her future fans to obsess over.  Time is on her side. From all appearances, McKee has not lived a decadent life.  I doubt she smokes; her voice is too pure, her skin so smooth she bragged about it onstage, swearing she hadn’t had plastic surgery.  She takes care of her instrument.  The melisma style will eventually get old, and, with a little luck, McKee’s style will come back in fashion.

The concert was my wife’s Father’s Day gift to me.  I bow down to her!  We hadn’t been out together alone for awhile. We’ve been in a sort of bunker for the past few months awaiting the big news that turned out to be good news.  This was our first chance to be free, to be ourselves, to dress up a little and have fun, in a long time.  Well, Nicky looked pretty anyway.  I’m the guy who gets mistaken for Michael Moore.  Anyway.  What a performance to see on your coming-out party!  Nicky has been following Maria McKee’s career as long as I have, and is actually a more knowledgeable fan.  I only recognized about three songs, while she recognized about half of them.  On the way home, driving through the beach cities on a cool, soft night, we couldn’t stop talking about what we’d seen.  It still seems unbelievable.

The opening act, the Willard Grant Conspiracy, is worthy of another post that I’ll probably never write.  Or maybe I will after I hear their CD.  That’s how good they were: I didn’t just buy two McKee CDs on the way out, I bought the opening act’s too.  That alone is high enough praise.

Oh, and there was a celebrity sighting: Gary Shandling.  Exactly who I figured to run into!

P.S. Listening again, the Lone Justice albums and McKee’s solo records sound a lot better than I remember them.  I don’ t want to leave the impression you shouldn’t listen to them; you should.  I applied too high a standard to them when they came out.

P.P.S.  This article, a recent piece in Paste, describes McKee’s current artistic focus, and her successful collaboration with her husband Jim Akin, who accompanied her on bass.  She discloses she has “rapid-cycling bipolar disorder.”

P.P.P.S.  I just found this MySpace fan tribute page.  Some great video clips are collected here.   

So, Who’s Taking Churchill’s Spot?

Does anyone understand the rationale behind this?

Britain’s World War II prime minister Winston Churchill has been cut from a list of key historical figures recommended for teaching in English secondary schools, a government agency says.

The radical overhaul of the school curriculum for 11- to 14-year-olds is designed to bring secondary education up to date and allow teachers more flexibility in the subjects they teach, the Government said.

But although Adolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi, Joseph Stalin and Martin Luther King have also been dropped from the detailed guidance accompanying the curriculum, Sir Winston’s exclusion is likely to leave traditionalists aghast.

A spokesman for the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority said the new curriculum, to be taught from September 2008, does not prescribe to teachers what they must include.

But he added: “Teachers know that they need to mention these pivotal figures. They don’t need to be instructed by law to mention them in every history class.

So, it’s not as if they are forbidding mention of Churchill. But given the tendency we see in this country for teachers to “teach to the test,” a legally-mandated curriculum that omits a part of history as vast as the one occupied by Churchill is a curriculum in which discussion of him will eventually disappear.

Because so many of George W. Bush’s supporters have invoked Churchill, I’ve noticed a new tendency to denigrate Churchill. I wonder if this is part of that. The entire paradigm of World War II — the rise of an evil, expansionist ideology, initially appeased, finally opposed when it is almost too late, and overcome only through enormous and tragic effort — has become a model many prefer to avoid discussing.

Particularly the word “appeasement.” Expect a severe rebuke if you associate any current political leaders with that word. There’s no appeasing going on here. No, we’re just “listening to the American people,” and “restoring credibility with our allies.”

The famous George Santayana saying, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” might be up for amendment next.

P.S. Unlike the “traditionalists” invoked in the story, I’m equally “aghast” at the move to drop Hitler, Gandhi, King and Stalin from the Brits’ canon as well. I mean, who are we making room for? Simon Cowell? Paris Hilton? Pac Man?

Iced Cappucino, Scourge of Starbucks

If you order an iced cappucino at Starbucks, the cashier will tell you “we’re not supposed to make iced cappucino, but we’ll make one for you.” I guess you’re supposed to feel like they’re cutting you a break but, shh, don’t tell everyone.

Perhaps inspired by the current book I’m reading, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” I had an overly literal reaction to this disclosure. I pointed to the menu on the wall above the barrista’s station. It listed all the coffee drinks including cappucino. Each one could be purchased “hot or iced.”

“You got us on a technicality,” one of the employees said, laughing like the jig was up.

A technicality? “It’s on your menu. It’s been there for years.”

Finally, they let me in on the real secret. Apparently, the Starbucks corporation is worried about the possibility of bacteria forming growing when the heated foam hits the ice cubes. So employees are instructed to say what the cashier said to me. I assume the company’s lawyers came up with this.  Perhaps they have gotten a ruling that the company would not be liable if I come down with food poisoning after such a dialogue.

If I keel over in the next few hours, Starbucks will be able to say, “We warned him, but he ignored us, the poor chap.”

It’s a weird way to manage a liability problem, to orchestrate a conversation between employees and customers that’s supposed to seem friendly, spontaneous and intimate.

Corporate practices like this tend to replicate themselves.  I’m already used to being asked at Pavillion’s whether I want help carrying my groceries to my car, even if I’m only buying a tube of toothpaste.  You’d think the clerks would have figured out by now that I’m perfectly capable of pushing a cartful of groceries.  I’ve been shopping there for years, and I don’t recall ever passing out from exhaustion in their presence. But, of course, “we’re required to ask,” so this charade of a friendly offer will continue, and I will continue to be forced to say, “No, but thank you.”

But the Starbucks variation — “We’re not supposed to make it for you” — is a new one.  Anyone else run into something like this?

Not Hating Barry Today

Today’s All-Star game in San Francisco, which Barry Bonds will start in left field, has prompted sportswriters all over the country to get in one more lick against the controversial slugger before he breaks Henry Aaron’s home run record. Like the ever-predictable Bill Plaschke:

(Bonds) thinks he can disappear this winter having avoided asterisk and indictment. He will probably be voted into the Hall of Fame by those who consider him greater than his flaws.

It’s all finally coming together. The perfect crime is nearing completion.

Barry Bonds thinks he’s getting away with the murder of baseball’s integrity.

And here in the final stretch of his great escape, man, did he rub it in.

“Do you know me?” he scolded one of the dozens of reporters who surrounded him Monday. “What have I done? Do you know anything I’ve done? Have you seen me do anything wrong? I ask you a question. Have you seen me do anything wrong? So how can you judge me?”

I hate Barry Bonds because he is a member of the San Francisco Giants. I hate all the Giants, unless like Jeff Kent and Jason Schmidt they join the Dodgers. It comes with being a Dodger fan. I also hate Barry Bonds because he sounds like a complete jerk, a toxic personality.

But I don’t hate Barry because he allegedly used steroids and human growth hormone, which allegedly helped him hit a lot of his home runs. I’ve made my peace with his record, and I don’t think it should be stigmatized. His home runs are a reflection of his talent and perseverance, not his cheating.

First of all, you can’t take a drug that improves your hand-eye coordination. No matter how much extra muscle Barry might have added, his ability to put wood on the ball didn’t come with it. He was a Hall-of-Fame level hitter when he was still skinny and presumably substance-free.

But the more compelling reason Bonds’ record should be acknowledged is this: Steroids and whatever he used were being used throughout baseball during the entirety of his career. If Bonds’ home run records are tainted, then so is every baseball record from roughly 1987-2003. During that period, some have estimated that 50-90 percent of all players used something. Barry Bonds’ substance abuse didn’t give him a competitive edge. It met the competitive level he faced — including that of pitchers.

The league and the teams knew that a lot of players were doping themselves, but did nothing until their hands were forced by the embarrassment of Jose Canseco’s revelations. Bonds surely figured, as many players figured, that this is what his profession demanded of him — what he was being paid all that money to do. He was supposed to help his team win, and he did that job. The home runs were hit in games. They weren’t just an exhibition of strength. They were runs, and all those runs helped the Giants win.

Who is to say that if all these chemicals had been effectively banned throughout Bonds’ career, so that a clean Bonds only faced clean pitchers, we might not be right where we are now, on the verge of Aaron’s record being broken? Seeing fewer 96 mph pitches might have compensated for the loss of an inch or two on his biceps. For all we know, steroids vs. steroids left us with a wash, competitively.

If a baseball fan wants to be angry at anybody today, be angry at the commissioner and the team owners. They had to know what was going on, the health risks all the players were taking for the sake of staying in the competition, and they did nothing about it for nearly two decades.

High-level baseball officials gave all would-be ballplayers a Hobson’s choice between doing what needed to be done to stay competitive, or protecting their health and likely falling out of the majors.  There’s no document they sent to young ballplayers where they said this explicitly, so they undoubtedly think their hands are clean.  But the league bears the moral responsibility.

Right now, former Senator George Mitchell is slowly completing an investigation of steroids, etc. What I hope Mitchell has the courage to say is, steroids and growth hormones were ubiquitous in baseball for many years. Because they were ubiquitous, they did not effect overall competition. But because the players were taking a major health risk, the league should have been policed the game better.  For that, the league should be ashamed, and should impose some kind of sanction on itself that hits the pocketbooks of owners, not players.

Players shouldn’t take the blame for the failure of the league–not even the obnoxious Barry Bonds.

Gossip Counts the Most*

In the previous post about Live Earth, I tried to weave in a mindblowing article from the Sunday NY Times Magazine, “The Gregarious Brain.” The article is about Williams Syndrome, a genetic developmental disorder. Among its symptoms is extreme friendliness and aggressive conversational gregariousness, which shows up at an early age.

But while the victims of this syndrome are charming in small doses, they often find themselves socially isolated because their lack of social fear leads to a lack of “social savvy.”

Most of us know when our conversation partners have had enough of us. Williams sufferers do not. In studying how the Williams syndrome brain differs from a normal human brain, some neurological scientists believe the development of social skills, in particular the ability to get information about our peers via conversation, was a key to both individual survival and, ultimately, our species’ dominance.

The people with Williams syndrome bring the nature of those social skills into sharper relief.  It’s a tightrope walk between getting what we need out of our association with a group, and managing our (rational) fears about the group members on whom we must depend.

To get across this tightrope, we depend on our ability to suss people out. Our brains are very attuned to getting information about the people in our group. We figure out who to trust by what others say about them. We’re not like Williams syndrome people, friendly to one and all. We are careful, even among people we’ve known and worked with for a long time.

We get the signals we need from gossip.  If we didn’t have access to gossip, our social fabric would fall apart.  An enormous percentage of our mental energies are devoted to gathering and processing gossip, and our brains have evolved accordingly.

We bring the same wary habits to our public acts, as voters and consumers. We are all part of a global “group” now, processing information not just about our local cohorts, but about our cultural, economic and political leaders from what we learn about them in the media.

When the media puts up artificial filters, they say they do it for our own good. But we don’t feel protected. We feel trapped, and we look for a way out. In totalitarian societies, people are willing to risk imprisonment or death to obtain gossip about their governments.  The controls over information in American society are looser, but they undeniably exist.  When the mainstream media sits on information because they don’t think it’s appropriate to answer its consumers’ questions, we now can turn to the internet, the id of mass communication, to get the gossip we need.

Consider the case of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

In the past week or so, we have learned first from blogs, then from the mainstream press, that his wife is divorcing him, because he has been unfaithful to her with a reporter who covers him for Telemundo. There are unconfirmed reports about other affairs; the reporter might or might not be his current girlfriend. All these shenanigans played out during the past year, a difficult year for Villaraigosa politically. His signature issue, school reform, crashed and burned in part because of the mayor’s mistaken judgments and temporary loss of political mastery.

To LA Times columnist Tim Rutten, all this is none of our business, so shame on us for our interest in Villaraigosa’s private life and shame on the bloggers who dug it out.

Hang onto something solid, Rutten bloviates up a stiff wind here:

When it comes to reporting on politics and elected officials, distinguishing between what is properly private and what is necessarily public becomes more difficult all the time.

It’s easy to blame the news media for this — for all the obvious reasons. They include an increasing number of editors willing to take their cue from journalism’s lowest common denominator, the gossip sheets, whether online or on slick paper, that continue to proliferate like informational vermin. By its very nature, gossip does not respect the distinction between public and private because it doesn’t acknowledge the existence of such a dichotomy. In fact, part of gossip’s guilty appeal comes from thumbing its nose at such niceties. The insatiable maw of the 24-hour news cycle also is a factor, as is the generalized collapse of confidence by newspapers engendered by print journalism’s passage through an economically wrenching transformation.

He goes on to point out that prior LA mayors had affairs that weren’t reported “because, even if City Hall reporters had been inclined to pursue the story, it would have been virtually impossible to make it conform to the standards their editors enforced.”

Were those editors — who also covered up the misdeeds of national politicians — more virtuous than today’s? Or were they depriving us of information we could’ve used and were entitled to?

Luckily, an even more senior LA Times‘ columnist gets it intuitively. George Skelton writes today:

Those who claim this is nobody’s business except for the people directly involved ignore the fact that many Angelenos voted for Villaraigosa believing he’d be an inspirational mayor and someone whom Latino kids could look up to as a role model. This infidelity is these voters’ business too. The first Latino mayor of modern L.A. has soiled his image and spoiled their dreams.

Some voters insist that they don’t care about a politician’s dalliances. Fine, they can click the remote or turn the page. Others do care. They’ll factor it into their attitudes about the man.

Outside the Los Angeles Basin, Villaraigosa has been little known. Now, he’s being introduced statewide as a serial philanderer who dumped on his wife years ago, sweet-talked her back into the house, used her as a political prop and returned to the pattern of womanizing. The family breakup is especially disturbing because the mayor and his wife have two teen children.

Later Skelton points out the crucial difference between Villaraigosa and other philandering politicians like Bill Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger: Villaraigosa’s wife has demanded a divorce. Corrina is not “standing by her man.” That’s an important detail. Another crucial difference? Villaraigosa wants more from us. He wants to put the genie back in the bottle, become again “someone whom Latino kids could look up to as a role model,” and run for governor.

Rutten ultimately joins Skelton in condemning Villaraigosa, but for the most weightless of reasons: Because his lover is a journalist!

Villaraigosa’s personal connection with Salinas is a private issue that legitimately concerns only the two of them and their families. No one else has a moral or rhetorical right to an opinion on that aspect of their conduct. However, the fact that Salinas continued to report on the mayor while they were involved in this fashion is a public issue.

(snip)

Villaraigosa knows perfectly well that an intimate relationship with a reporter is bound to raise questions about whether he granted her special access. Worse, it also raises profound conflict-of-interest questions for Telemundo. Has the network’s reporting on his tenure been manicured by a reporter in love with her subject? Has that subject used his mutual affection with the reporter to manipulate coverage of his agenda?

Those aren’t particularly pleasant questions, but Salinas and Villaraigosa have behaved recklessly in an environment that, for better or worse, has become unforgiving.

Yeah, Rutten. That’s probably the first question Mrs. Villaraigosa asked. “Did you grant her…special access??” And then the flying plates.

Rutten is a smart man, but writing like this makes him seem almost as disconnected from reality as the Williams’ syndrome people. The ethics of journalism aren’t the only ethics that matter. In fact they won’t matter, if and when Antonio presents himself to the voters again. We’ll be talking about his affair and whether or not he has found the way back to being seen as trustworthy. We’ll be talking about whether he got his act together and saved his mayoralty. We’ll be talking about whether he’s a good person — or not.

We’ll look for clues to the real Antonio, and if we have to search for them on those dreaded “online media” sites — because the LA Times loves its “standards” more than its readers — that’s where we’ll go. It’ s not because we’ve succumbed to “informational vermin.” It’s because that’s how we’re wired as humans.

*Edited, 7/10/07

Tired Earth*

Not too long ago, having a celebrity at your environmental press conference was a sure way to attract the cameras and spread the word. Luckily, most of the celebs who agreed to appear were walk-the-walk types, like Ed Begley, Jr. You wouldn’t invite anyone who wasn’t serious about it. Begley would bicycle all the way from the Valley to Santa Monica to stand up for Heal the Bay or the Coalition for Clean Air. If someone had taken a satellite photo of his home, it would have embarassed neither him nor his cause. And he was never sanctimonious.

Now, the celeb phase of the environmental movement has achieved its absurd apotheosis and badly needs to be shut down. Billed as a massive teach-in on climate change, the Live Earth concerts were, politically, a train wreck. From Rasmussen Reports, a polling site:

The Live Earth concert promoted by former Vice President Al Gore received plenty of media coverage and hype, but most Americans tuned out. Just 22% said they followed news stories about the concert Somewhat or Very Closely. Seventy-five percent (75%) did not follow coverage of the event.

By way of comparison, eight-in-ten voters routinely said they were following news coverage of the recent Senate debate over immigration. Fifty-four percent (54%) said they followed news coverage of the President’s decision to commute Scooter Libby’s sentence.

Skepticism about the participants may have been a factor in creating this low level of interest. Most Americans (52%) believe the performers take part in such events because it is good for their image. Only 24% say the celebrities really believe in the cause while another 24% are not sure. One rock star who apparently shared that view is Matt Bellamy of the band Muse. Earlier in the week, he jokingly referred to Live Earth as “private jets for climate change.”

Only 34% believe that events like Live Earth actually help the cause they are intended to serve. Forty-one percent (41%) disagree. Those figures include 10% who believe the events are Very Helpful and 20% who say they are Not at All Helfpul. Adding to the skepticism, an earlier survey found that just 24% of Americans consider Al Gore an expert on Global Warming.

Given a choice of four major issues before the United States today, 36% named the war in Iraq as most important. Twenty-five percent (25%) named immigration, 20% selected the economy and only 12% thought Global Warming was the top issue.

Whatever needs to happen next to bring about a reversal of man-made global warming, that goal is now farther away, thanks to Al Gore, Madonna, Leo DiCaprio and the global concerteers, who only managed to persuade the public they received some personal benefit from their association with the issue. Neither the celebrities nor the event organizers never answered the question of their basic hypocrisy. In a TMZ/Defamer/Murdoch world, of course we’re all going to find out how much energy the movement’s stars use, how many times they fly in private jets, tour demands completely at odds with their stated positions, huge stock positions in companies that pollute the most, and the vast amounts of energy burned and pollution released by the concerts themselves.

Gore and the celebrities complain about the tabloidization of the news, and are especially bitter if the snark gets in the way of their unselfish efforts to, you know, change the world. But an intriguing NY Times Magazine piece about a neurological disorder called Williams Syndrome and its implications for understanding why the human brain evolved the way it did, contains a profound nugget of insight into why celebrities hurt the causes they seek to help, unless they’re willing to be more like Ed Begley, Jr., and less like the people we saw on those concert stages Saturday.

Bear with me, it will all make sense:

Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist and social-brain theorist, and others have documented correlations between brain size and social-group size in many primate species. The bigger an animal’s typical group size (20 or so for macaques, for instance, 50 or so for chimps), the larger the percentage of brain devoted to neocortex, the thin but critical outer layer that accounts for most of a primate’s cognitive abilities. In most mammals the neocortex accounts for 30 percent to 40 percent of brain volume. In the highly social primates it occupies about 50 percent to 65 percent. In humans, it’s 80 percent.

According to Dunbar, no such strong correlation exists between neocortex size and tasks like hunting, navigating or creating shelter. Understanding one another, it seems, is our greatest cognitive challenge. And the only way humans could handle groups of more than 50, Dunbar suggests, was to learn how to talk.

“The conventional view,” Dunbar notes in his book “Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language,” “is that language evolved to enable males to do things like coordinate hunts more effectively. . . . I am suggesting that language evolved to allow us to gossip.”

Dunbar’s assertion about the origin of language is controversial. But you needn’t agree with it to see that talk provides a far more powerful and efficient way to exchange social information than grooming does. In the social-brain theory’s broad definition, gossip means any conversation about social relationships: who did what to whom, who is what to whom, at every level, from family to work or school group to global politics. Defined this way, gossip accounts for about two-thirds of our conversation. All this yakking — murmured asides in the kitchen, gripefests in the office coffee room — yields vital data about changing alliances; shocking machinations; new, wished-for and missed opportunities; falling kings and rising stars; dangerous rivals and potential friends. These conversations tell us too what our gossipmates think about it all, and about us, all of which is crucial to maintaining our own alliances.

For we are all gossiped about, constantly evaluated by two criteria: Whether we can contribute, and whether we can be trusted. This reflects what Ralph Adolphs, a social neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology, calls the “complex and dynamic interplay between two opposing factors: on the one hand, groups can provide better security from predators, better mate choice and more reliable food; on the other hand, mates and food are available also to competitors from within the group.” You’re part of a team, but you’re competing with team members. Your teammates hope you’ll contribute skills and intergroup competitive spirit — without, however, offering too much competition within the group, or at least not cheating when you do. So, even if they like you, they constantly assess your trustworthiness. They know you can’t afford not to compete, and they worry you might do it sneakily.

The sentence I emphasized suggests why a global TV event featuring movie stars and pop-music performers might be just about the worst way to convey environmental information — or in fact, any important political message. In the very same global village Live Earth sought to educate, we are consumed with gossip about the stars who pretend to teach us–the truth about how they live as opposed to what they want us to hear and believe.

Stars attract attention, but the audience’s relationship with them is complex. We’re suspicious of their motives, don’t completely buy their idealism, and are on the lookout for hypocrisy — which this group of stars gave us by the carload. The media doesn’t create this; it’s human nature.

That is why the “carbon offset” concept is not working and should be dumped forthwith. All it does is emphasize that rich entertainers can’t bear to sacrifice and will buy their way out of living their lives in anything remotely resembling the fashion the rest of us must do. It destroys any possibility of consensus on dealing with climate change.

Climate change is a scientific issue. It raises complex issues for governments. Individuals can’t do very much about it, but they are avidly interested in considering viable solutions offered by experts. Of course, we might want to know something about those experts to determine if they’re trustworthy, but we wouldn’t be bombarded on a daily basis with stories about their incredibly opulent lives. Instead, the focus would be where it belongs, on the points of debate leading toward a political solution that, one would hope, would make a difference in earth’s environment.

Ironically, in “the entertainment capitol of the world,” there was no Live Earth concert. Just Mayor Villaraigosa, Begley, produce Lawrence Bender and a few supporting-actor types from TV like Daphne Zuniga and Sharon Lawrence, turning on some lights that made City Hall look green. I was glad the mayor mentioned that “Los Angeles recycles more than any other metropolitan city.” Hurray for the Bureau of Sanitation!

*Edited, 7/9/07

Fourth of July Traveling Wilburys Party

The Traveling Wilburys were a lovely coda to the rock and roll era — a holiday from the angst and self-importance that crept into the music in the 1980s and hasn’t entirely left.  Five legendary performers (Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne) who melded into an egoless whole, creating a sound rich with humor, camaraderie and the joy of making music. 

The Traveling Wilburys were out of fashion when they arrived, and have remained so.  That’s why I love them. 

The impact of the Traveling Wilbury holiday on the careers of their members was uniformly positive.  Orbison was rediscovered by a new audience — hopefully feeling the love just before he died a few months after the first album came out.  Harrison proved he was more than “All Things Must Pass.”  Petty loosened up:  All his best music came out in the period of the Wilburys.  Lynne’s work here cast a retroactive glow on the underrated artistry of his work with ELO.  And Bob Dylan exposed his comic side, which has been a source of his late-career blossoming.

In connection with the long overdue re-release of their music, their videos are all up on YouTube.  Here they are.  Have a safe holiday.

“Handle With Care,” which started it all.  Amazing to hear a vocal passed from George Harrison, to Roy Orbison, to Bob Dylan, and on such a nice little song:

“End of the Line.”  This is most people’s favorite Wilburys tune:

“Inside Out.”  Bob Dylan sings lead.  You really get to hear the Jeff Lynne “sound” on this one:

“She’s My Baby.”  The kickoff track to their second album, entitled “Vol. 3.”  A punchy rocker.

Finally, the hilarious “Wilbury Twist.”  Here they were, in the late 80s, making fun of how old they were getting.  What would they sing about if the survivors got back together now?

(“Wilbury Twist,” was having trouble loading when I posted this. I’ll check again after the holiday.)

The Abyss: Two Versions of War in Iraq

When one person talks about the “war in Iraq,” he or she doesn’t always mean the same thing as another person.  There’s a disconnect, factually and emotionally, an abyss of meaning, a condition of double vision where people see just one and not the other.   

Here’s the “war in Iraq” as seen by the leaders of Congress:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi threw down a new gauntlet Friday before President Bush and Republicans in Congress, saying the House will vote in July on legislation to withdraw almost all American troops from Iraq by April.

In the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said there also will be votes on the future course of the Iraq war next month, although he said he is consulting with other top Democrats on exactly what the legislation might entail.

The statements by Congress’ top two Democrats mean that the renewed confrontation with Bush over Iraq won’t wait until September, when the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, are scheduled to issue a report on how the surge of American troops has worked to quell sectarian violence in the Iraqi capital and other cities.

Pelosi and Reid, talking to reporters in the Capitol as Congress left town for its weeklong July Fourth break, made it clear that they want to pressure Republican members on their continued support for the war. They think a major break in GOP support for Bush is possible, after statements this week by senior Republican Sens. Richard Lugar of Indiana and George Voinovich of Ohio, who said Bush’s strategy isn’t working and called on him to start withdrawing the 160,000 U.S. forces in Iraq.

“We will put everyone on record,” Pelosi said. “We’re encouraged by the public demand for this. Hopefully, it will be heard by the president and the Republicans in Congress. I see some signs that that is happening.”

Fundamentally, for Reid and Pelosi, “war in Iraq” is a political issue.  The big event?  “Statements this week by senior Republican senators.”  To Reid and Pelosi and the people who take them seriously, these press releases landed with the force of a shoulder-fired rocket.   After those statements, why, everything is different now!  We can pass different resolutions.  Those who thought we would hold back until September:  Not!   The time to attack is now.

The embedded blogger Michael Yon describes a series of events from a completely different “war in Iraq” in this post:

On 29 June, American and Iraqi soldiers were again fighting side-by-side as soldiers from Charley Company 1-12 CAV—led by Captain Clayton Combs—and Iraqi soldiers from the 5th IA, closed in on a village on the outskirts of Baqubah. The village had the apparent misfortune of being located near a main road—about 3.5 miles from FOB Warhorse—that al Qaeda liked to bomb. Al Qaeda had taken over the village. As Iraqi and American soldiers moved in, they came under light contact; but the bombs planted in the roads (and maybe in the houses) were the real threat.

The firefight progressed. American missiles were fired. The enemy might have been trying to bait Iraqi and American soldiers into ambush, but it did not work. The village was riddled with bombs, some of them large enough to destroy a tank. One by one, experts destroyed the bombs, leaving small and large craters in the unpaved roads.

The village was abandoned. All the people were gone. But where?

Yon presents many photos of Baqubah villagers — men, women, children and their farm animals — after they were murdered by Al Queda during the period of occupation and retreat.  Children and animals that had been rigged with explosives.  Mass graves.  I won’t show the gruesome photos — if you can stomach it, you should go look for yourself — but here’s one caption:

Soldiers from 5th IA said al Qaeda had cut the heads off the children. Had al Qaeda murdered the children in front of their parents? Maybe it had been the other way around: maybe they had murdered the parents in front of the children. Maybe they had forced the father to dig the graves of his children.

And here’s more from Yon’s post:

Later in the day, some of the soldiers from the unit I share a tent with, the C-52, told me that one of their Kit Carson scouts (comprised of some of our previous enemies who have turned on al Qaeda) had pointed out an al Qaeda who had cut off the heads of children. Soldiers from C-52 say that the Kit Carson scout freaked out and tried to hide when he spotted the man he identified as an al Qaeda operative. Just how (or if) the scout really knew the man had beheaded children was unknown to the soldiers of C-52, but they took the suspected al Qaeda to the police, who knew the man. C-52 soldiers told me the Iraqi police were inflamed, and that one policeman in particular was crazed with intent to kill the man who they said had the blood of Iraqi children on his hands. According to the story told to me on 30 June, it took almost 45 minutes for the C-52 soldiers to calm down the policeman who had drawn his pistol to execute the al Qaeda man. That same policeman nearly lost his mind when an American soldier then gave the al Qaeda man a drink of cold water. 

I’m not trying to make Pelosi, Reid, Voinivich or Lugar look bad.  They’re reacting as politicians should to the pleas of the people who elected them.   They’re reacting, one hopes, to their own consciences, which are probably telling them Iraq is a lost cause, and it’s immoral to sacrifice American lives to a lost cause.  The war itself, and the blundering, lying Administration running it — that’s the enemy.  It’s a political enemy, one that can be defeated by press releases.

But the “war in Iraq” they’re talking about couldn’t possibly be the same war Michael Yon describes. Yon’s war is a war against pure evil.  There’s no withdrawing from that war, because it will follow you.

More specifically, Yon describes a war in which US soldiers fight alongside Iraqis, against invaders.  To be sure, Al Queda in Iraq has indigenous supporters, but essentially they are turncoats.  The Iraqi Al Queda members aren’t fighting US invaders.  They’re fighting to destroy any hope of civil peace in Iraq on terms other than their own. They will kill anyone in pursuit of chaos, fear and failure, and then booby-trap the bodies of their victims to kill more.

This vision of the war is not consistent with the one Pelosi, et. al. describe.  Linguistically, to square their policies with the war Yon describes, the politicos would have to say things like:

• “The war against Al Queda is lost.”  
• “Al Queda will control Iraq, and there is nothing further we can do to stop them.” 
• “We must redeploy to other countries where Al Queda is not strong, so we won’t have to fight them.” 
• “Al Queda is killing too many American soldiers, so we have to retreat.”

Are any of these comments untruthful representations of the meaning of a U.S. pullout right now?

If the anti-war members of Congress spoke in those terms, how much would that change the politics around this issue?