Blog of Jeff

George Benet’s new book seems to follow the same standard as every other book from former White House officials. (Washington Post coverage at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/30/AR2007043000185.html)

First, if you say things are peachy inside the administration, you will have no credibility. If you say every thing is horrible, you sell a lot of books and get denouncements from your former buddies. The  thing that seems to make this a little tackier is the accepting of that big shiny Medal of Freedom before he wrote his book. The president must be thinking, “If the highest civilian award in the land won’t shut you up, what will?”

Anyway, it seems that Tenet gives President Bush more credit than most of the other “insider-turned-critic” folks have. Tenet paints Cheney and Rumsfield as much more to blame for Iraq. He also continues to endorse torture, however, so it’s still OK to hate George Tenet purely for humanitarian reasons …

I came close to buying Christopher Hitchens’ new book “God is not Great” today, because he is a very intelligent guy and I suspect he makes a really good case for aetheism versus faith. There are excerpts on Slate (http://www.slate.com/id/2165033/entry/2165035/) that are pretty interesting.

However, I found a collector’s edition of the complete “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” novels by Douglas Adams and I suddenly realized that it pretty much made the same point about the evils associated with organized religion, but with jokes and smaller words.

So, I got the “Hitchhiker’s Guide” and left Hitchens on the shelf. As smart and talented as Hitchens is, he still writes like a self-righteous, pompous windbag showing off his vocabulary way too often. After all, if there is no God, then why spend precious moments of your one and only life struggling with never-ending essays about how precious your one and only life is?

I say have a beer and trust the guide. The universe is big, stupid and random. Enjoy it anyway.

I’m still pondering Gonzales’ testimony from last week. He said the process was not as rigorous as it should have been, but the outcome was correct. He also failed to articulate a clear reason for any of the prosecutors to be fired and couldn’t recall who actually came up with the list. So, he fired a bunch of people for some good reason that someone else had, but he can’t remember who the someone else was or what the reason was.

President Bush’s take on the testimony is that he is MORE confident in the AG’s abilities. I guess I would be too. Gonzales marched right down to congress and demonstrated that they were powerless to do anything about his quality blend of dishonesty, stupidity and incompetence. He has turned into a great distraction from anything else that might get the administration in trouble. It’s like he’s a giant bug light that’s pulling in journalists, congressmen and other critics that might get in the president’s way. They really want to go after Bush, but they can’t even see him past Gonzales’ white hot glow anymore.

The part that bothers me the most is that Gonzales supposedly practiced for his performance. He spent hours and days preparing a defense of “I don’t recall?” Why does anyone need to practice not remembering?

My new guess is that he said he was spending hours practicing to make congress feel like he was taking this testimony seriously, but that he actually spent the time drinking beer and playing video games. That’s what I would do if I was planning to go in front of congress and not remember anything. You don’t want to cloud a perfectly good “I’m a moron” defense with any pesky facts that might show you actually are smarter than you look.

Well, I was able to complete and submit a short story for the WritersWeekly Spring contest. It looks like it had around 400 registrants, but my guess is that not everybody submitted a story. I had a lot of things come up that wrenched up my plans and it would have been easy to forget about it. I was just desperate to get something written.

The topic was strange, which makes sense since they to prevent people from coming into the contest with a planned story. Creativity and originality count for as much as writing in this particular venue. The topic had to somehow include a woman in darkness, near the ocean, with a Nor’easter storm approaching and her somehow having one last chance involving the throwing of a bottle. It would be pretty hard to walk into the contest with a planned story and adjust it to fit that specific of a topic.

I will probably put my entry on the website tomorrow. It will be a month before I find out how I did. I am pretty realistic about my odds of coming in 1st, 2nd or 3rd. However, there are 20 honorable mentions and I will be pretty disappointed if I don’t at least get one of those.

I just caught a CSPAN moment where a Republican representative was giving a passionate speech about how our recent tax policy created jobs, increased treasury revenues and grew the gross domestic product. He was really excited about the recent past and gave a horrifying view of upcoming giant tax increases by Democrats.

I lean a little on the conservative side, so I was willing to give the guy a chance. However, after watching the entire spiel, I have to admit that I am a little confused about how he could be so happy about our recent move from no deficit to giant deficit. Sure, we can create jobs, increase the GDP and be swimming in cash if we borrow trillions of dollars from China to pay for things that our tax revenues can’t afford. I can also live in a giant mansion if I can get my credit card limit upped a couple of million dollars. That doesn’t make it a good idea.

It’s one thing to believe that low taxes encourage growth and productivity, which I do believe. It is quite another to believe that borrowing money is the best way to fund wars, education, security, Medicare and those silly bridges that Senator Stevens always gets for Alaska. (Here’s a good rule of the GOP. He had to give up his chairmanship of the appropriations committee due to a term limit on chairmanships. That rule probably saved us from building a bridge from Alaska to Japan.) (This is probably also a good time to remember that he threatened to quit if his funding for one of those precious bridges was redirected to hurricane relief efforts. That’s the sort of pro-Alaska, anti-America sentiment that makes the Senate great.)

Anyway, I am pretty annoyed at this young Republican shmuck for talking about his party’s great job of managing our fiscal policy the past 6 years without even mentioning that it was made possible by massive deficit spending. Every soldier and contractor we have in Iraq and Afghanistan should probably carry a thank-you letter that reads “this war was made possible by generous loans from China and other nations.”

That last paragraph made me think for a minute about the potential irony of countries like China opposing the war and yet loaning us the money to wage it. Then I remembered my MBA studies and realized that there is no irony to it, because it was a logical economic decision. China decided it could get a better return on investment by loaning us money than they could get through business dealings with Sadam. If there was no war, however, they would have kept right on dealing with Sadam. Economically, they positioned themselves to win either way.

It may be time to stop talking about China’s primitive free market system and start talking about how much money China is making by loaning us the cash for our domestic and foreign policies.

This is the first entry in a few days. I didn’t want to blog about the Virginia Tech. incident and it didn’t feel right to blog about anything else, so that led to a short break.

The only thing that really makes sense right now is to offer condolences for everyone and anyone affected by the tragedy. The media blitz is in full force, but it seems premature for all the judgements that the commentators are now making. Of course, they really don’t have a choice either. It seems offensive to talk about anything else and they have to grasp at any possible point of controversy to fill their shows.

The only observation that I hope many Americans note is that violence of an even greater scale is happening in Iraq on an almost daily basis. As we come to terms with our own pain, we should also be empathetic to the suffering of innocents there. People dying senselessly and without warning is a tragedy anywhere it happens. Again, I offer condolences to all affected by the violence, here and there.

I’m reading “3 Cups of Tea” now and it is a good book. It is the true story of a man who has been building schools in rural areas of Pakistan. The book was written by a reporter who spent nearly 3 years researching and interviewing the subject of the book. While the book is good and I recommend it, this post is really more about the writing style.

When I read now, I try to pay more attention to how things are written. In this particular book, one thing that bothers me is that it seems over-descriptive. Every noun seems to have a string of adjectives with it. It is still a good read, but I think the writer is so focused on describing everything that it takes away some from the key points. If everything is described completely, how do I easily know which parts deserve more or less of my attention?

My writing tends to the sparse side, not because I have trouble finding adjectives, but because I think they need to be important. If a character is only going to be in a story for a short period of time and is primarily a device to advance the plot, I don’t want to spend a lot of time and words building that character up. An important character should be described frequently and fully, with consistency through-out the work. I find the over-description of the unimportant to be just as annoying as the under-description of the important.

I also think that style of writing misses the power of the reader. If it does not matter whether a character is fat or thin, then let the reader’s mind fill in the character any way that seems appropriate to the reader. For any story, there is a balance between what the writer tells the reader and what the reader’s imagination brings to the story.

To me, that balance is one of the biggest things that separates the artistry of great writing from mere technical skill. A person with excellent grammar and a strong vocabulary can write effectively and descriptively, but artistic writing gives room for reader inferences, detours and interpretations.

Here’s a truly classic example. In the King James version of the Bible, God prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. It doesn’t get more sparse than that description. (Book of Jonah, Chapter 1, verse 17)

How big? We don’t know. Did it have teeth? We don’t know. Could it have been a whale? Might have been. Could it have been a robot fish made by God just for the sole purpose of swallowing Jonah? Sure, why not? Could it have just been a naturally occuring sea bubble released from a volcanic eruption that happened to have 3 days of air in it? No, that’s the kind of scientific mumbo-jumbo that will get you banned from textbooks in Kansas.

The beauty of this example is that it doesn’t really matter. All that matters is that God was powerful enough to get Jonah inside a sea phenomenon and keep him alive for 3 days. A few details might have made the story more interesting, but they also would have taken the focus off the guy who made the fish. And since some of us think whales, some think sharks and some think giant robots, the story lets us pick our individual favorite. The focus stays on the story and main characters, not on describing a fish that peeks our curiousity, but ultimately is irrelevant.

Well, it is done and Imus is gone. He was completely unsympathetic and completely guilty of doing what he was accused of doing. And, a lot of it had to do with advertisers pulling out, which is really more about the free market than censorship, so I won’t spend much time or energy on that thought.

However, it still irritates me that this firestorm was over an insult. What caused more harm and embarassment to those basketball players? Imus and his relatively small audience or all of the comedians and news media repeating the remarks over and over and over to their much larger audiences.

Harvey Fierstein has an interesting editorial in the NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/13/opinion/13fierstein.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) about not being able to figure out which people get protected status and which ones don’t. His particular example is that it seems perfectly OK to insult fat people and gay people, while female college basketball players are now apparently in the protected class.

Anyway,  radio is still the home to a lot of trash as bad or worse than Imus. We still have Rush, despite his tendency to implicate the Clintons in the murder of Vince Foster. We still have DJ’s that have contests encouraging people to have sex in churches. Stern is now on satellite, but he didn’t exactly build his empire on puritan values. In fact, his success in the early NY days was largely built on being a lower-class alternative to Imus.

I have a feeling that Don will spend a time in exile and then return either through books or satellite to an even bigger audience than he had before all of this, which is still the biggest irony to the whole event. Calls for censorship make martyrs out of people who should be ignored and gives their work far more respect than it deserves.

Well, it happened. Imus is off TV and there are still calls for him to be off the radio. Apparently, it doesn’t matter that his comments were actually quite mild compared to a lot of his own older material and lots of other shock jocks. It doesn’t even matter than Cheney has been quoted being more offensive in congress.

Let’s consider what Imus did. He insulted a group of women in a way that is also insulting to all blacks and women. The entire headline of this story is “Shock jock insults people.” And yet, somehow, it caught everyone in the United States by total surprise.

The sad thing is that he isn’t going down for his quote. Imus is going down for the complicity that all of his listeners and advertisers are feeling. They knew Imus made offensive jokes and they have known it for years. For all practical purposes, they sponsored that joke and had no problems selling their wares to an audience that liked that joke; just like they did for all the more offensive jokes he has been making for years. But they are all pretending that they are shocked, simply shocked, that this radio host would say such a thing.

The TV commercials for “Saw,” “Grindhouse” and “Hostel” are more offensive than what Imus said. Of course, that is only my opinion, which means absolutely nothing. I don’t want to live in a sterlized world where my sensitivities define my world; I want to live in the real world where sometimes people get insulted and offended. I just wish the opinions of these self-proclaimed leaders also meant absolutely nothing. They don’t care about the particular women who were insulted any more than Imus does. They just see a grand stage for a political statement.

By the way, how much attention do you think Sharpton paid to his ratings on the day Imus apologized? I’m a little offended by Sharpton giving a voice to racists like Imus, so maybe he should be fired. Of course, Sharpton is fine with Imus having a voice as long as it is under his scrutiny and control. (and brings in the ratings for his show …) Sharpton’s calls for Imus to be off radio might have rung a little more true for me if Sharpton didn’t turn around and hand him a microphone for a radio show.

I wonder how he and Jesse Jackson split up the apologizing racists. Jesse got the Michael Richards apology. Oddly enough, I don’t think Mel Gibson apologized on either of their radio shows. Maybe they aren’t as worried about other races being insulted. I’m not sure where anti-semites are supposed to go to apologize; maybe Jon Stewart should try and grab that niche. That approach to booking guests seems to keep Al and Jesse’s plates full.

I don’t listen to Imus, but my working assumptions are that he is:

1. a racist jerk
2. a man who makes a living by appealing to racist jerks
3. a combination of the above

With that in mind, I have no problem with audiences or advertisers leaving him. However, the calls for his firing or for FCC investigations strikes way too close to censorship for my tastes.

The other part of this whole thing that stinks is that there are blatantly racist, violent and degrading elements the media that rate far worse than Imus’ comments. An excellent LA Times editorial (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-rice11apr11,0,5538321.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail) makes the point that there is an entire musical genre dedicated to degrading women. I have no problem with the Al Sharpton’s and Jesse Jackson’s of the world denoucing Imus, but if they are going to try and censor him, then they should also go after all those musicians making money from songs about beating women, killing cops and taking drugs.

I also have a bone to pick with the ACLU. I used to member of that organization, because that’s just the sort of group that college jounalists join. I dropped my membership several years ago and one of the reasons I dropped it was that they started to demonstrate a preference for certain people and types of free speech over others. They are perfectly willing to go to the Supreme Court for crazy, violent and minority individuals’ rights to free speech, but as of this posting, haven’t written a single word about Don on the free speech section of their website. Not even a single token “censorship is bad.” Apparently, national calls for censorship of a rich white jerk don’t concern them as much as national calls to censor muslim clerics preaching death to America.

Well, censorship is censorship. And, if it is true that the bad guys automatically win when we change who we are by giving up civil liberties, it is just as true for Don Imus. Let the free market determine if he stays or goes, not the sensitivities of the offended.