Tethered Swimming

“Demand?  Who are you to demand anything?  I run this town!  You’re just a bunch of low-income nobodies!” - Mayor Quimby

“Uh…election in November…election in November…” - Mayor’s Aide

“What, again?  This stupid country…” - Mayor Quimby

I voted for Bill Clinton in 2000.  I had to write in his name, but of all the people in this country, he was the only one whom I was comfortable with occupying 1600.  Of course, Clinton wasn’t running for office in 2000.  Despite being relatively young and quite popular, Al Gore was the Democratic candidate.  This is like benching your starting quarterback for the Super Bowl.[1]

It would’ve been a hell of a campaign with tremendous storylines: the son rising up against the man who dethroned his father, a referendum on the world’s most famous blowjob, a choice on two very different foreign policy theories, etcetera.  It is too often lost amidst the hullabaloo that went down in Florida, but the actual 2000 campaign was a very humdrum affair.

Whatever else you can say about Clinton, he was popular; his approval ratings were in the high fifties and low sixties in the summer of 2000.  That popularity baffled a lot of people, but it can’t be denied.[2]  Real conservatives would’ve welcomed the idea of running against Clinton with someone other than a decent but geriatric Kansas senator.

I’m almost certain that Clinton would’ve won and I think the ghost of Lee Atwater would agree with me.  11 September 2001 may or may not have passed without the World Trade Center falling down, but either way our world would be a vastly different place right now.  Clinton might have embraced the added powers of the USA Patriot Act, but he certainly wouldn’t have opened a prison in Cuba or invaded Iraq.  Who knows what the issues in 2004 would’ve been?  If just Guantanamo and Iraq were different the lives of millions of people would be demonstrably better.

The Twenty-Second Amendment prevents anyone from being elected President more than twice.  It was passed by Congress in 1947 and ratified in 1951.  It was a reaction to the record breaking presidency of Franklin Roosevelt.  He was elected in 1932 during the deepest days of the Depression and won his unprecedented third term in 1940, before the US got into the war.  (The attack on Pearl Harbor occurred a mere 87 days deeper into Roosevelt’s third term than the Trade Center attack would’ve been into a third Clinton term.)  By the time 1944 rolled around the war was going very well for the Allies, but Roosevelt’s health was far worse than was publicly known.

The big players in the Democratic Party knew Roosevelt was unlikely to survive his fourth term.  When they settled on Harry Truman as the vice-presidential candidate (Roosevelt’s third) they were aware that they were selecting a president.  It was a pretty sleazy move, one worthy of a large and all but invincible political machine.  Later discomfort with that decision and a general feeling of unease over how Roosevelt had lingered in office led directly to the Twenty-Second.

Let’s run down the presidents since it was ratified.  Truman had only been elected once (in the “Give ‘em Hell Harry” election of 1948), so he could’ve run in 1952 if he wanted to, but he didn’t (the Korean War was the main issue and Truman had taken a lot of heat for his handling of it).  Eisenhower could’ve run again in 1960, he didn’t die until 1969, but his health was declining (he had a heart attack during his first term) and he seemed eager to be rid of office.  Kennedy was, obviously, assassinated.  Johnson voluntarily declined to run in 1968 because he knew he’d lose.  Nixon was impeached and resigned two and a half years before his second term expired.  Carter lost in 1980.  Reagan’s popularity was in decline leading up to the 1988 election (this rarely gets remembered) and he was already visibly suffering from what we later learned was Alzheimer’s.  Bush the Elder lost in 1992.  Clinton was the first to really be effected.

This is not some liberal fantasy trying to make the nightmare of the Bush Administration go away the same way regular nightmares do.  If Clinton hadn’t been prohibited from running in 2000, we would’ve had a direct way to take him to task, or not, for his dalliance.  We’d have a resolution far more final than wondering if Gore could’ve won if he’d let Clinton loose on the campaign trail.  Even if Bush the Younger took office in 2000 by beating Clinton, he’d currently be deciding if he could or should run in 2008 instead of running out the clock and promising to dump his messes on his successor.

There is an honest case to be made for term limits in other, less scrutinized, offices but it just doesn’t make sense for the presidency.  Legislators, mayors, judges, governors et al can slink by without garnering too much attention if they so desire.  Corruption and stalemate result.  The presidency has a far brighter spotlight on it.  The citizenry can be trusted to throw out a bum president far better than we can be trusted to throw out a bum congressman or state legislator.

Finding a decent occupant of that office is really hard; judging from the forty-three examples so far, the odds are less than 50-50 that we’ll get someone we’re proud of twenty years after the fact.  Why on Earth would we disqualify someone who has held the office successfully for eight years?

The Twenty-Second Amendment was designed to protect us from a demagogue eternally dominating our political scene.  It was a bad idea and the reality has been far different.  Instead it protects second term incumbents from us, not the other way around.  The Law of Unintended Consequences, as it is known to do, came down from up on high and had us all once again.

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[1] I’m assuming here that Clinton would’ve wanted to run.  At his age, with his vigor and intelligence, I can’t believe he would’ve turned down the chance.

[2] A whole other set of people have had the exact same experience with his successor.

“Do you want to know the terrifying truth? Or do you wanna see me sock a few dingers?” - Mark McGwire

“Dingers! Dingers!” - Springfield Townspeople

With Barry Bonds getting closer to 755 home runs and Jason Giambi agreeing to talk to George Mitchell, today seems like a good time to color some pixels about steroids. After all, a celebrity (sort of) is going in front of a blue ribbon panel. It’s the media equivalent of finding a twenty in your pants - it doesn’t happen that often but when it does you want to make it last that much longer.

Allow me to set the stage. Inne ye olde tymes sports were a celebration of the purest humanity. Strength and speed against strength and speed, winners won on the merits of their skill and dedication, losers shook their hands, and all was right with the sporting world. Today we live in the debauched ruins of that fine time, sports, and by extension all of us, have been debased by endorsement deals, advertising and grotesque free agent contracts. I’d keep going, but bullshit is beginning to bubble up from my keyboard.

Steroids must be serious, they were mentioned in a State of the Union address for cryin’ out loud. The big tip off, for me at least, was neither the size of Barry Bonds head nor the deterioration of Mark McGwire’s complexion. It was when the relatively benign, often hilarious tendency of athletes to try getting ahead with chemistry migrated from the sports section to the front page. Any issue making that leap usually has the awful clattering of moral outrage to thank.

Sports columnists puffing up the sacrosanct nature of record books is one thing, dangerous and appealing drugs that, gulp, teenagers might be using is quite another. To protect the children we must now rise up in outrage and demonize steroids, cast suspicion on successful athletes, and add another layer of guilt and irony to some of our favorite pastimes. Count me out.

Steroids are just another one of the many ways that science in general and biochemistry in particular are changing the world we inhabit. They are a fact of life as surely as anti-depressants, recreational drugs, cholesterol medication and dick pills. At the moment we’ve chosen to treat them as a threat, something that must be combated with an eye towards eventual elimination. This is the exact kind of stupidity that leads to ever scarier warning labels on cigarette packs and delusional organizations like The Partnership for a Drug Free America.

Testing is the only real weapon against performance enhancing drugs. At best it is deeply flawed and at an inherent disadvantage. The people using drugs, hormones, pixie dust and whatever else for an edge know what they’re doing. The users will always be ahead for the simple reason that they know what the testers are looking for, while the testers do not know what the users are using. Try playing all your cards face up on the table some time while the other guy keeps his hand close. See where that gets you.

Testing serves a purpose because it puts cheaters in jeopardy for cheating. Pitchers are not allowed to put foreign substances on the ball, batters are not allowed to use corked bats. Those things are against the rules. You can break the rules but by doing so you tacitly acknowledge that you understand the penalties: a tarnished reputation (including any past glories) and suspension from play. For cheating of any type, at any competition, at any level, those seem like appropriate penalties. Why on earth do we need to involve the law?

Once it becomes illegal two things happen immediately and they’re both bad. One, the financial stakes of cheating rise immediately, and that kind of money attracts all sorts of trouble. Two, anyone who is cheating has an increased incentive to keep cheating until caught red handed.

If steroids were legally available to all but understood to be not allowed in organized competition the price would plummet. The only real market that I can think of would be body builder types who want beach muscles and maybe the odd guy doing manual labor. But they are illegal and that means that there is money to be made by concocting newer and less detectable versions. That money comes from athletes with no other options and goes to criminals and mad scientist types who would otherwise need to seek gainful employment. If they get arrested they will be replaced by others because the demand remains unaddressed.

The incentive for self-policing amongst competitive athletes would also go way up if steroids and the like were legal. A guy on a high school football team that’s cheating might not be well liked, he might even be hated, but would a teammate really turn him in knowing that the consequences could include jail, questions about where they came from, and getting caught between the police and guys who might be scarier than the police? If turning that guy in meant he got kicked off the team and banned from sports for a year the other players would be far more likely to drop a hint or two to someone in authority. (It also opens up playing time, don’t underestimate that.) The players are the only ones who ever know what’s really going on in a locker room, in any sport. They are the only hope of enforcement.

Instead of doing that, we’ve gone down the usual path of demonization. That means motivational speakers, consultants, and youth oriented advertising firms will get to suck the tits of various levels of governments. It leads to dishonesty and scare tactics on the part of authority. The idea that a teenager, reflexively belittled in most adult minds as just a kid, is capable of making coherent decisions is lost almost immediately.

The central message couldn’t be simpler: winning at sports, even ones as lionized as baseball and football, is insignificant next to becoming a healthy adult.

Just tell them that, honestly and simply, and let them make their own decisions, which is what they’re going to do anyway. Don’t make expensive, computer generated television commercials with crumbling Adonis statues. The most obvious message of that commercial is not that steroids grind you up and leave you as dust. It’s that steroids get you that Adonis body in the first place.

High school students[1] might be doing something that’s bad for them. I am shocked. I’d also be willing to bet that pretty much everyone over the age of nineteen has regrets about some of the things they did or didn’t do when they were teenagers. The same way people over the age of twenty-nine do about their twenties, and so on throughout the decades of life.

There are adverse, long term effects from steroid use. They probably vary greatly depending on the specific drug, the quantity involved, frequency and duration of use, and a whole host of other factors: gender, genetics, nutrition, stress (sport related and otherwise), overall levels of fitness and health, etc. I could go on, but it’s best summed up in a single word: life. Some will use chemistry as a means to improve athletic performance, some of them will benefit and get away with it, others will benefit and get caught. A final, unfortunate group will screw themselves up, possibly permanently, up to and including death, for little to no real gain. That’s life, and if the medical consensus is that the risks far outweigh the benefits, that’s fine with me. Go out and tell the people. But don’t moralize, don’t preach, and don’t be surprised when, a few years from now, the problem is worse.

A brief endnote on Barry Bonds:

Bonds has always denied using steroids and for all I know he’s telling the truth. Nobody really believes him, but let’s think about it for a second. For all we know, sometime in the mid-nineties Bonds changed up his workout routine and diet. He started hitting the weights with abandon and upped his protein intake radically. His body, which one way or another is at the far right side of the bell curve for athletic ability, responded. That appears to be his story.

There is a lot of circumstantial evidence that he is lying and that is the general opinion. I have no practical experience with steroids and I’m not a big baseball fan, but I don’t like basing my conclusions, in any subject, on something that thin. Regardless there are only two possibilities. Either he is telling the truth and has been the target of a massive, if uncoordinated, smear campaign or he is lying and is the target of a massive, if uncoordinated, public outrage. In either case, harping on him all the time is a really dumb course of action. Believing his denials costs us nothing while attacking him just makes him more defensive and less likely to fess up. He’s a man, and if he has been lying he’ll have to square that with himself someday or die a disillusioned fool. That will be far more punishment to him than anything the sporting press can do.

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[1] Because that’s not shocking enough anymore we’ve thrown middle school students as well. Come to think of it, that goes for a lot of things. Epidemic of oral sex anyone? Paging Dr. Phil.

“Well I believe I’ll vote for a third party candidate.” - Voter

“Go ahead, throw your vote away!” - Kang

This wasn’t the topic I had planned for today, but I thought I’d try my hand at a little instant analysis.  Yesterday New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared himself an independent, ditching the Republican affiliation that got him his current job, for which he ditched a previous Democratic affiliation.  He is, all together now, “fiscally conservative and socially liberal” and he just might be running for president.

The Democrats won’t have him, not after he rolled out the red carpet for the Republican convention the last go round.  The Republican nomination might be within reach, but it’s a stretch.  Sure he’s divorced and in favor of all those nasty things like gay rights and abortion but, but if his predecessor can be considered one of the major candidates, why couldn’t he?  I suppose there just isn’t enough room for two mayors.  That leaves us with what is already being speculated about: the dreaded independent/third party candidacy.

Bloomberg isn’t stupid.  He is certainly aware of the dismal history of third party and independent presidential bids.  But he isn’t just a rich guy who thinks he’d make a good president.  He has held elective office, as an executive not merely a legislator.[1]  Could he be Henry Ross Perot without the crazy aphorisms?  Perot did win 19% of the vote even after dropping out, getting back in and then finding a running mate who made Dan Quayle look good by comparison.[2]  It can’t be that hard to avoid those types of mistakes.

My guess, and it is only a guess, is that he made this announcement now to get it out of the way.  It ratchets up his press coverage a tad and allows him to bide his time while making as much hay as he can out of being the independent mayor of New York City.  His odds of winning without a major party behind him are completely dependent on the nominees of the major parties; in the meantime he can sit back and watch the primary campaigns.  He’s rich enough to throw his hat into the ring at any time if a favorable situation develops; if one doesn’t, he can go on being mayor and then decide what to do with the rest of his life from there.  He’s got nothing to lose by ditching the Republican tag now.

In about nine months we ought to have both nominees pretty well figured out (if Bloomberg is lucky both nominations will be slogs).  That’s when I’d make my move if I were him.  Both nominees will be fresh off months of overacting for their respective bases and he could stake out a big chunk of the center while the other two are at their most liberal and conservative.[3]  His chance to win is right through the middle.  “Rudy Giuliani vs Hillary Clinton” would be ideal for him, but something like “John McCain vs John Edwards” could work as well.  In either of those scenarios (plus quite a few more) there would be an enormous gap between the two nominees and Bloomberg could make a push as a viable alternative.

That’s a workable plan, and it’s probably the best shot an independent/third party candidate has had in a long time.  It’s at least as good a situation as Perot had, maybe better.  He’s got the money, and he’d be running in a year when a good number of people are fed up with both parties (but when isn’t that the case, eh?).  Bloomberg/Somebody ‘08 would need to catch a few breaks, but every campaign needs some luck.  He wouldn’t make a bad president either, he might not be a great one, but I don’t think he’d be a bad one.  Ah well, it’s almost certain that none of this will matter, but hey, it’s fun to speculate and that’s what it looks like to me on a first pass.  If nothing else, we ought to get a John Anderson sighting out of all this.

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[1] New York City would be the twelfth largest state by population, right between North Carolina and Virginia.

[2] Stockdale earned a truly unfair reputation from that 1992 fiasco.  He was a smart, decent guy who had never been in anything like that kind of a spotlight before.  I doubt you could hang an entire doctoral dissertation on it, but rehabilitating Admiral Stockdale would be a great counter-intuitive term paper for an undergraduate political science class.

[3] Not to mention he might be able to pick up the remnants of some losing candidates’ state campaign infrastructures.

“I am a public servant, and not permitted to use my own judgment in any way.” - Superintendent Chalmers

As I mentioned in the site news post Wednesday, I’m traveling this weekend. Mercifully, I don’t need to fly. The inconvenience of air travel is a pretty well established general grievance. Anybody who has ever flown has some kind of story about it. Sympathizing with travelers, poor humble citizens being jerked around yet again, comes naturally. The people I really feel for here though are the poor bastards who have to work the security lines and take responsibility.

Short of strip searching everyone and making us all fly naked (and wouldn’t that be a sight!) there is no way to completely secure an airliner. It cannot be done. Airport security is a charade to make people feel safe about traveling while providing maximum ass cover for the officials in charge. We have extremely secure air travel. But it’s not because we restrict liquids or make people put their shoes through the x-ray machine. It’s because we have better locks on cockpit doors, computers that can land the plane without human help and, most important, well trained personnel at every step of the way.

The ban on liquids last year was illuminating. First they prohibited all carry on liquids, which from a strictly security point of view is the only thing to do. The news was immediately filled with unseemly tales of the absurd: people giving away valuable bottles of perfume, mothers having to drink breast milk in front of security, etc. It was too insane to last and it ended in a forced compromise that is the worst of both worlds: you can bring liquids, but only in small sizes and only in a clear, plastic bag.

The travel size liquids and plastic bags make flying that much more inconvenient and daunting. But anyone with a decent knowledge of chemistry (read: B- or above in high school) has the basic understanding needed to construct a small explosive out of things you could hide in a couple of travel sized bottles. We’re causing more anxiety but are still unable to provide the impossible standard of security we’ve set for ourselves.

Let’s look at something they haven’t banned yet: electronics. From a physics and chemistry standpoint, they should ban all carry on electronics immediately. To you and me it’s something to do on the plane to help pass all that boring, uncomfortable time in the pipe. To security it’s a sealed plastic shell that could contain anything. Inside something as large as a laptop you could put any number of dangerous chemicals that would look utterly laptop-like on x-ray machine display. (If you wanted to be really clever, you could even preserve the functionality so it at least appeared to boot up if activated.) Of course they can’t ban laptops or other electronics. The business travelers would stage an immediate torch and pitchfork style rebellion and parents would be deprived of the miracle of portable video entertainment.

There are also all sorts of places on the human body you can conceal things. It’s pretty easy to get items in to and out of the rectum and the stomach if you’re willing to make the effort. Glass eyes, false teeth, and prostheses spring to mind as well.

To combat all that we’ve got massive amounts of technology and piles of complicated regulations. I suspect that most of those machines in the concourses, and all the new ones that will surely make an appearance in the coming years, are predominantly a boondoggle for any idiot who can dream up some crazy new security device and hire a lobbyist to make it seem like the safety of America rests on adopting this new (patented) device or technique. As long as people and their bags get from one place to another (most of the time) everything else will be made ever more cumbersome and convoluted in the name of security. But inconvenience does not equal safety, and pushing the screening process to the limits of human tolerance doesn’t make flying any safer, just more annoying.

That’s the hideous reality for our security personnel. Every passenger and item that passes through must be treated as a threat, no matter how preposterous it is to consider. They are the tangible, uniformed proof of how serious we are about security yet the rules and regulations that they must follow make them objects of ridicule and annoyance.

Airport security ought to resemble a relaxed border crossing more than anything else. Step up, show your identification, answer a few questions to give the agent a quick appraisal of your state of mind, and be on your way. If the agent doesn’t like something, you get pulled aside. That would certainly result in some racial disparities, which is unfortunate, but it would be less onerous and more honest than what we’re currently doing. We should ease up on the goofy rules and put our trust in the people at the airport.

“Paris Hilton is a nobody!  She may have money, but she’s a thoughtless, talentless lowlife.” - Mr. Slave

Despite my sincerest efforts to avoid her, Paris Hilton barged into my life again this week.  Near as I can tell she was in and out of jail on account of getting caught behind the wheel of a car while intoxicated.  The overtly smarmy coverage precipitated the usual pleas for sanity from serious journalists.  (Quick, bi-coastal examples: Steve Lopez in the Los Angeles Times on 8 June and Bob Herbert in the New York Times on 9 June.)  The point of these gripes is basically that we have real problems and spending even a tiny amount of attention on someone as inconsequential as this is a waste.  I couldn’t agree more, it’s just that I don’t care.

We’ve always had real problems and we’ve always had frivolous distractions.  I doubt any of the media people there at the courthouse would be reporting from Baghdad or Kabul if this ditsy broad had decided to call a cab.  There are heartrending stories going unreported in those far away lands and here at home, but we couldn’t cover them all even if we sent every accredited journalist in the world.

The reply to that line of escapism is that it is about focus, that there is only so much media oxygen to go around.  I suppose that’s true, but so what?  I suspect that anyone following the Hilton story with rapt attention isn’t going to be following the news from the Middle East anyway.  It’s not like all the bad stories in the world are going anywhere.  One does not need to keep up with the daily calamities to have an informed opinion any more than one need follow the entire twenty four months of presidential campaigning to vote.

Let those who are interested follow the travails of Hilton.  Let those with columns to file and airtime to fill act indignant about it.  Try to remember in a month you’ll barely remember the entire affair, and six months from now, when every media outlet in the country is doing a year-in-review piece, you’ll go, “Oh yeah…” and then move right on to the next item.

“Doesn’t your job start tomorrow?” - Marge Simpson

“Ahh somebody’ll cover for me.” - Homer Simpson

I’ll be traveling this weekend, and while I will endeavor to get a post up on Sunday, it may not happen.  So far I’m enjoying the Sunday/Wednesday schedule and I’m quite confident that I would’ve already abandoned this entire effort without it.  Several of the posts could have benefited greatly from another rewrite or two, but without the self imposed deadlines they’d just be rotting on my hard drive waiting for me to get around to them.  Posted and flawed is better than hidden and perfect I suppose.

“Welcome to Decision ‘96, it’s eighteen months until the election and tonight we’ll focus on the vice-presidential candidates. Since this is so boring and pointless, we will periodically be inserting clips from Baywatch.” - Debate Host

Each party staged a debate this week, no casualties were reported. I managed to avoid watching a single second of either and it wasn’t even that hard. It’s not going to get any easier though; according to The Note there are six Republican debates and a whopping twelve Democratic debates between now and January. This is more than a little insane given just how little gets said.

With two in one week and eighteen more in the next eight months, we are officially at ludicrous speed. On the bright side, we probably won’t need to endure this many four years from now. For the ‘08 election there is no incumbent running and there is no designated successor to the incumbent; that hasn’t happened in a long time. ‘68 comes close, but the fix was pretty much in for Nixon after the Republican debacle in ‘64. That puts as all the way back to ‘52, where both Stevenson and Eisenhower had to fight for their spots. That was a hell of a long time ago; do you know how old someone is today who was old enough to vote in 1952? Seventy-six. That’s more than the three score and ten you get in the Bible.

There were only four television channels in 1952 and one of them was the DuMont network! Today we’ve got more channels than anyone can possible watch and they all want to host a debate. The rub is that these primary debates are caught between two contradictory forces. On one side is the enormous advantage the premier candidates have in terms of fame and fortune. On the other is the tattered principal of equal participation and equal time. The campaign is run and covered with enormous bias towards those premier candidates, but coming out and saying so, by limiting participation in the primary debates like we do the general election debates, is prohibited. It’s a sop to the idea that anyone can win. But there’s no salary cap in politics, so the idea that anyone can win is utter fiction.

The only people these debates serve are the premier candidates and the press geeks. The premier candidates get to glide ever closer to the primaries without engaging one other or opening the door to other challengers. There’s no point in really knocking on each other; all of the big names have the deep pockets to go the distance anyway, so why bother? They also have no interest in allowing anyone else into the club of the anointed, and so long as they avoid saying anything too horrifying that club remains closed to new members.

The press gets something to report that, by the low standards of the day, qualifies as news. If your job, seventeen months out from the vote, is full time election coverage, you need the debates. It’s news of little to no substance that’s easy to report and all the reporters need to do is sit there or watch it on television. What’s better than that? Imagine how excruciating it must be to have to come up with new, readable and watchable stories every day when we’re this far from the big event. Nobody is broadcasting full time coverage of next year’s Summer Olympics yet, are they? There’s a reason.

Here’s the beauty of it, you don’t need to waste your time watching any of them. If something noteworthy happens, you’ll hear about it. Then you can watch it on TiVo or look it up on-line, in print or video. Unless someone is paying you to do so, or you’ve got a masochistic fetish for sound bites, you can just ignore the primary debates completely.

This grotesque panoply of debates is basically pornography to help people fantasize about what life might be like with a different guy in the White House. There is a certain amount of fun to be had following those lines of thought, but I can do it without the porn.

“Dad, was that your commercial?” - Lisa Simpson

“I don’t know.” - Homer Simpson

Most practiced observers believe that tonight will be the end of the Stanley Cup finals.  Tomorrow night will is the beginning of the NBA finals.  Since I almost never watch baseball on television, the end of the hockey and basketball seasons also ends my limited exposure to television commercials.  TiVo, combined with the easy availability of most programs on DVD or on-line, has insulated me from television advertisements almost completely.  Sports programming is the only remaining gap in my defenses.

It’s gotten to the point where I’ve grown so accustomed to not watching advertising that when I do watch a program live, I usually turn the sound off.  With the sound, the cloying images and scattershot soundtracks make my brain feel like it has been battered with a cudgel.  Music is my preferred alternative, but even silence is better than the crap the television networks bleat out.  I don’t miss the game announcers much and it makes the commercials bearable and even entertaining.

The majority of the ads on the sports broadcasts I watch consist of a series of impossibly fast visual cuts.  The soundtrack, be it a little jingle, narration, or something else, is what ties it together.  If you take away the sound, the entire ad, all thirty seconds and 900 frames of it becomes a disjointed hodgepodge of mostly unrelated images and exaggerated emotions.

They’re strangely anachronistic as well.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a commercial with an interracial or homosexual couple, for example.  If one of the actors is playing the buffoon, it will still invariably be a white guy.  That’s an artifact of political correctness, but it serves as a healthy barometer for larger things.  As long it is overwhelmingly white guys playing the buffoon, you can be sure that it’s still white guys really running the country.

Some of my favorites are the ones where an attractive yet non-threatening person speaks directly into the camera.  I’m not talking about celebrity pitches either, just random actors who can be made to look normal enough to get commercial work.  The actor speaks directly to you about the prescription drug or the home security system.  Each one is paid to make a personal connection, to relax the depths of your mind by reminding you of some familiar situation or person in your life.[1]

With the sound turned off the ads are revealed for the absurdities that they are.  What you’re looking at is a person (albeit an attractive, stylishly dressed person) walking in front of something, or sitting on a couch, or eating dinner, nothing more.  You are at home, watching television on a Thursday night, but for that person it’s ten-thirty in the morning on a Tuesday in Los Angeles or New York.  That’s the gap the actor and the commercial try to bridge.

The job is to connect, personally with you, (Yes you!) through that camera lens.  Whilst you’re sitting on your couch, the woman in the home security commercial just went through forty-five minutes in a makeup chair and tried on three different pajama sets to get the look just right.  As you wonder what time you ought to go to bed, the guy dressed as the wisecracking, beer drinking roommate is actually a vegan yoga enthusiast who played Hamlet in college.  Once you start down that line of thought, it’s impossible to take the ads seriously ever again, no matter how ironic or knowingly they present themselves.

Try it some time.  Watch the commercials with the sound off and really pay attention.  Look for the impossibly ecstatic face that just bit into a slice of pizza.  Then remember that it took a whole slew of takes to get that face perfectly orgasmic and that the actor probably spit out all of the pizza.[2]  Watch a gargantuan vehicle drive down a street that has no cracks or potholes to pick up kids from a soccer practice that managed to leave their uniforms spotless and their cleats devoid of mud.  Etcetera, etcetera, ad nauseum.

Some of the products you see are probably decent items, others are likely garbage.  The ads are a poor way to differentiate though.  When I do watch them, I try to keep my perspective slightly off kilter so I can more easily detect the slight of hand and see the seams in the craftsmanship.  It’s not profound, just a bit of fun where there otherwise wouldn’t be, and new ones await me come football season.

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[1] Or a familiar situation or person you’d like to have in your life.  Aspiration is the heart of advertising.

[2] Assuming it wasn’t plastic.

“Even as we speak, Ayatollah Razmara and his cadre of fanatics are consolidating their power.” - Homer Simpson

There is an understandable but overblown fear going around that we are moving toward an attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran.  If you’re worried about this, I’ve got good news: it ain’t gonna happen.

There are certainly people in an around Washington D.C. who would like to attack Iran.  But their insider positions don’t matter a damn when weighed against their political unpopularity.  They are in no position to convince the American people that we need to attack Iran at all, much less in the short time before Bush the Younger leaves office.  Any public argument in favor of an attack on Iran is dead on arrival because of domestic American politics.

(Anyone seriously thinking about attacking Iran given the current situations in Iraq and Afghanistan probably has very little use for the inevitable and vehement objections of the United Nations, the European Union, or any other international institution.  So let’s just skip them.)

There are two ways to lead the American Republic to war, either the people must feel legitimately threatened or they must be lied to.  Of our two current wars, Afghanistan is (arguably) the former and Iraq is definitely the latter.  Let’s take a quick look at how we got there, shall we?

On the evening of the mighty day itself, CNN had a live webcam[1] from Kabul where bombs were already falling.  Speculation was rampant that this was the beginning of our counter attack.  It wasn’t, our bombs didn’t start dropping for six weeks, but that was the mood of this country.  People in Afghanistan were responsible for bringing fear to America.  Our response was appropriate and legitimate; the entire world was with us.

(There is a case to be made that the whole adventure was unnecessary, especially as that misbegotten land slides back into the miserable condition it was in before we invaded.  It goes something like this: we were at least partly responsible for the fact that it was a basket case country in the first place, and if we’d leaned on the Taliban harder we could’ve gotten them to cough up Osama bin Laden in exchange for international recognition and drawn them out over time.  I don’t entirely agree with that, but we’ll save it for a different post.)

Things were a lot different for the Iraq campaign.  The first public rumblings about striking Iraq began in the fall of 2001.  By summer of 2002 it was obvious that Iraq was on the mind of the Administration and it was September of that year when Andrew Card made his famous, “from a marketing point of view, you don’t roll out a new product in August” quip to the New York Times.  From the first rumblings to that idiotic vote in Congress in October of ‘02 was almost a year.  It was a year in which there was great debate over whether or not we should go to war.  Bush the Younger had to make a case; he had to convince us and the rest of the world that this was necessary.

It was comic right from the beginning.  The “Coalition of the Willing”, Powell’s ridiculous U.N. presentation, the kabuki theater of Hans Blix and the fig leaf of giving inspections a chance to avert war.  It took a year and change to get it off the ground and it was still a controversial decision.  The popularity of the war soared after the deceptively quick march on Baghdad and a lot of people forgot that it was a controversial war from the get go.  After those first few weeks it felt like the Gulf War all over again, cowardly Democrats had balked, but our troops had won handily despite dire predictions from some quarters.

Those were heady days for people who would solve the world’s problems with American troops.  Now they seem all the more foolish.  The infamous “Mission Accomplished” photo op gets lampooned a lot, but what rarely gets mentioned is that the insurgency was well under way as the S-3 touched down. [2]  Bush the Younger couldn’t claim “victory” in his speech because even then our boys were still getting killed; he had to settle for the euphemistic “major combat operations”.   The idea that the same people would be believed again about the need to attack is laughable.

Even if their credibility wasn’t completely shot, the Administration simply does not have enough days left to deceive us into Iran.  Relative to Bush the Younger’s first term, the time to start really making the case would’ve been last summer.[3]  Now we’re only a few months away from the true silly season of presidential campaigning.  It is a poor time to start politicking for another war.

The overall political situation is vastly different as well.  That quote from Andrew Card was published 07 September 02, four days from the first anniversary.  The House was solidly Republican and the Senate was in its last days of Jeffords/Democratic control.  Today that pesky, equal branch of government is firmly controlled by a newly empowered Democratic majority.  The posturing rhetoric of presidential candidates aside, there is no way in hell that this Congress signs off on another war.  Quite the opposite, this Congress would take action to prevent our involvement in another war.

That leaves us with the more paranoid scenario of a pre-emptive strike without prior public debate which is just as laughable.  Again, there are certainly people who would have no problem with skipping the debate and moving right to the air strikes.  I do not doubt their intentions; I do doubt their ability to keep it quiet.  Any attempt to ready even a modest air assault would involve, at a minimum, both the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department.  Some of the people in those cubicles are the same ones who were intimidated into silence the last go round.  They’ve had front row seats to our government’s inept Iraq war management and they won’t take it lying down again.  Some of them will pick up the phone and start calling all kinds of troublesome people: senators, representatives, and reporters (many of them with much wider audiences than Seymour Hersh).

Then we’ve got the Army and the Marines.  They aren’t stupid and they know through experience that they’ll be the ones who have to go in and clean up the mess when the laptop bombardiers from the Navy and the Air Force can’t deliver on their outlandish promises of disarming Iran from the air.  The ground pounders are just as capable of dialing a telephone as their civilian counterparts.  A few days of warning or a credible report that the planes were standing by would be more than enough for public outcry and Congressional reaction.

We’re already two wars deep, which is at least one (and probably two) more than the electorate is willing to tolerate.  Even with their proven ability to lie and spin with reckless abandon, any attempt to win a debate over an attack against Iran is doomed to failure.  Forgoing the debate and attempting an attack in secret will leak.  Either way, Congress and the public will find out, and we don’t attack.

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[1] They kept apologizing for the quality of the picture.  I was impressed that there were any live images at all.

[2] Though the word “insurgency” was not yet being used by our government.

[3] Which they sort of tried but which went nowhere.

“You will speak the blasphemous and self-denigrating dialogue that has been written for you.” - Captain Rahim

“Like I’m not used to that.” - Jay Sherman

Welcome to Tethered Swimming.  As of this writing I have only the dimmest ideas of what these posts will be about, or even how they’ll be written.[1]  I do know that I enjoy thinking and learning for the sake of thinking and learning, and that there’s no better way to organize your thoughts than to write them down.  Having no desire to hear the Fates laugh, I will announce no plans.  I’m just going to write.  Hopefully the words that go up will be worth someone else’s time to read.

If this little endeavor was just going to be me typing and posting at random, I think it would die pretty quickly; so I’m going to at least try to adhere to a loose schedule of posting on Sunday and Wednesday.  Of course, it can still die quickly, pretty much at any time.  I might get lazy, or bored, or I might find something good on TV.  I make no promises.

I’d like to get one explanation out of the way quickly.  I titled this thing “Tethered Swimming” for two reasons.  The first is that I can think of nothing more boring and pointless than tethered swimming.[2]  The second is that I wanted a Simpsons reference that no one else had yet used on a masthead.  Besides all that, I need to show a little humility to atone for being pretentious enough to take “Zeno Amerikanos” as my nom de guerre.[3]

There you have it.  I don’t know what I’m doing, and if there’s one thing writing professionally has taught me, it’s that first efforts are always a catastrophe.  Regardless, I’m pressing ahead for now, and I hope it’ll be fun.

NOTE:  I originally posted this last Sunday, but I accidentally deleted it just now and I can’t find an un-delete command.  Lesson learned.  I’m posting it again for the sake of completeness.

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[1] Come to think of it, there’s a good chance I’ll get disillusioned and there will never be another.

[2] Boredom and pointlessness being two of the founding pillars of the internet.

[3] And, for that matter, being pretentious enough to use nom de guerre in place of “pen name” or “screen name”.