Apocalypse, or The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread

There may be five people in America who don't know that the Red Sox have reversed the Curse of the Bambino that has ostensibly hobbled them since 1918 . . . and those five people don't care. Notice that the player who made the last out for the Cardinals was wearing number 3, the number worn by Babe Ruth after he was traded to the Yankees. (Trivia question: What number did Ruth wear when he played for the Red Sox? Answer: None. The Yankees invented uniform numbers, and they originally indicated one's position in the batting order: Ruth batted third.)

Some say a Red Sox World Series championship is a sign of the apocalypse, but then that's what people used to think about eclipses. Hmm, there was a lunar eclipse during the game . . .

(Just as long as our fundy president and his cadre don't consider this encouragement to cause the apocalypse.)

I wrote here that I am retiring a short story that is no longer saleable, now that the curse has been beaten. For those who are feeling a touch of nostalgia for those old accursed days, I've put the story up here.

Congratulations to the Red Sox on a heck of a postseason. Now, it's time for the Cubs . . .


P.S. Sliced bread came ten years after the Red Sox's previous World Series win in 1918.

The Issues

New York public radio host Brian Lehrer has done a great service to those voters (you know who you are) who want to be informed rather than make their decision based on sound bites and attack ads. He covered one issue a day for thirty days, inviting representatives of both sides to share their points of view. The big plus is that a number of issues that have received little attention during the campaign have been covered by Lehrer's series, and some that have been dumbed down to catch phrases have been examined in detail.

The Daily Show can only fill in so much of the knowledge gap. Lehrer's WNYC program is on the web here.

Curse Ball

If baseball is scripted, then the author of the Red Sox's come-from-way-behind win of the ALCS should rack up some awards. But what I am finding most amazing in the aftermath is how the science fiction world has come alive to baseball, with serious discussion and great humor. (Click on that second one for sure. It's worth it.) Who knew these people were baseball fans, too?

Yes, as a Cub fan, I will be rooting for the Red Sox, of course. Not just because of the curse thing, although I have always felt for the Red Sox fans, just as Boston fans feel for us Cub fans--we are partners in pain. Not just because I don't want to listen to Cardinals fans next year yelling about their WS championship and see Tony LaRussa strutting around like he's won the Nobel Prize for Baseball.

No, I'll be rooting for them because I wrote a short story that turns on the Red Sox being cursed--now that they are not cursed, the story will of course have to be shelved. See, but I also wrote one that depends on the Cubs being cursed. So if this is how it works, it's only a matter of time now . . .

That's Why He's Called Duh-bya

The smart money is on Kerry, according to Antonius, who has correlated the ranking of states by education with how the polls show each of those states leaning.

But then we shouldn't be surprised that people in states with lousy educational infrastructures are more likely to support a guy who is barely competent to compose a sentence and whose campaign is based on shameless manipulation and empty rhetoric. He's playing to the people who aren't astute enough to know better, or can't be bothered to think too hard about anything. Sadly, there are entirely too many of those. Which is another reason "No child left behind" is sloganeering at best, and detrimental to public education at worst (I'll invite Rob to explain why, as he has the front-line viewpoint): the Bush administration has absolutely no incentive to make people smarter. In fact, it seems to be to their benefit to do the opposite.

Pictures Worth Thousands of Words

Video from security camera in the Atocha railway station of the bomb attacks of March 11 is available here. (It's a Madrid newspaper's web site, so it's in Spanish. If you don't read Spanish, all you need to know is to click on Atocha below the image on the right side of the article to download the entire video. You have a choice of Windows Media Player or Real.)

Although the video is grainy and indistinct, it's still eerily reminiscent of the images we in the U.S. became so familiar with after September 11, 2001, of people fleeing a smoky scene.

When I read that this video was out there, I felt compelled to seek it out and see it, much as I was glued to the television after 9/11 (and felt compelled to visit the site--or get as close as the public was allowed--in the days immediately after). Rob had the opposite reaction after 9/11, as did many folks, and he and others will I'm sure not want to see this video. I guess we each respond in our own way. For me, it's as if I can't wrap my mind around events of this magnitude without seeing them (to whatever degree possible) with my own eyes. The intensity of my need to visit Ground Zero was almost beyond my control; to use a fictional analogy, I felt driven like the characters in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. (What had Spielberg witnessed that made him so cognizant of that feeling, that need? Did something make that mark in his life the way 9/11 did in mine?) I wasn't the only one with the need to go to Ground Zero; even now, people come from all over, even though there is nothing to see there but a big concrete pit. I don't know, but I imagine that in Spain people felt compelled to come to Atocha and the other sites of the bombings. And likewise there are probably many who felt a comparable almost physical repulsion, an inability to go near the site of the mangled trains.

I don't know what drives those powerful reactions to these events, or what determines which reaction an individual will have. I would guess their intensity is in some proportion to proximity, though, that the effect spreads among us like ripples on a pond or electromagnetic waves propagating from a place and time of such--what? drama, intensity, sorrow, tragedy? all those words are so overused and made common that, like swear words, they have been robbed of the heft to convey something of such enormity. We may not have the language, but we have the images to speak on their own behalf.

"Osama Is at Hand," or, A Lesson in History

Makes me feel old that so few people I talk with remember this, but in 1972 (on the verge of a landslide victory, no less), Richard Nixon was sufficiently worried about his main Achilles heel, the Vietnam war, to trot out Henry Kissinger with a late-night "emergency" press conference to announce that "peace is at hand." In point of fact, nothing substantial had changed in the peace negotiations; this was the effort of a paranoid politician to go to any lengths to assure his victory (the Watergate break-in that ultimately cost him his presidency had not yielded much, in terms of information for the Republicans nor in terms of scandal yet reaching the highest levels).

Back in those days, scaring us into submission didn't work. (Today, the disruptions of 1968--the assassination of a candidate on the campaign trail; the riots in Chicago--and 1972--the shooting of another candidate--would probably result in even more draconian security measures than we have now. I doubt they would have been tolerated then, because fear as a political tool had yet to be exploited.) So instead, in order to assure its victory, the Secretary of State, who was held in high regard within and outside his own party, was deployed to political ends.

Those who don't remember history are doomed to get sucker-punched by those who do.

I am on record predicting that the October surprise will be Osama's corpse (with a dramatic tale attached), miraculously appearing close enough to the election that any efforts to investigate whether (a) it's really Bin Laden, (b) how long he's been dead, (c) how long the White House might have known his whereabouts, will not have time to come to fruition before the election.

But enough other people are saying something similar to perhaps raise doubts in the public mind, should this occur. Perhaps instead the White House will take a lesson from the Nixon White House. They do, after all, also have a Secretary of State, in Colin Powell, who is seen as diverging some from the White House. They know the failure to find Osama, after initially claiming it as a key goal in their proclaimed "war on terrorism" is a potential weakness for Bush. (You can't trade on fear as your political currency, then not at least pretend to be protecting people against what people are being reminded constantly to fear.)

So, I will change my prediction. (Yup, flip-flopper: that's me.) I predict Colin Powell will be trotted out--because he is more credible than Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, et al.--to announce something to the effect that "we have Osama in our grasp." The implication will be made plainly--maybe even explicitly--that changing administrations will destroy the U.S.'s ability to catch Osama.

They can do this without Colin Powell, of course. But everyone knows he has had his differences with Bush and his cronies, and that he will not be around in the second term. So Powell has a level of credibility that the rest of the cabal lack. He has already sunk his future as a potential nominee for President or Vice President on the Republican ticket. I wonder whether he will find enough shreds of his tattered integrity to refuse to play this game.

So, look forward to the announcement that "Osama is at hand." And start setting down your bets as to whether it will be Powell or someone else making it.

In Case This Isn't Enough...

Check out Antonius for cogent liberal political essay (despite its title, his diatribes are not boring--and note his excellent taste in template choice!), and Rex Saxi for more, with a pacifist/Quaker angle. Both authors are friends of Rob's and mine; my only question is, why am I the only liberal willing to blog under my actual name?

Hey, is that John Ashcroft knocking at my door?

Why the World Loves America

The Washington Post has an article about the rebuilding of an Iraqi city, which gives a view of the before, during, and after. It does not give me hope that the U.S. will ever accomplish anything there. Saddest part is that the U.S. military folk quoted seem to be well intentioned, but that doesn't seem to make much difference: the officer in charge admits to his own cluelessness about Iraq. And of course there's this from an Iraqi doctor working with U.S. officials to plan the rebuilding:

"The citizens are frustrated; everyone is frustrated," he said. "My house, for example, has been searched three times, and the last time they were very aggressive. They broke down my door. I was asleep in my house with my children, and suddenly [a soldier] was standing in front of me. I said, 'I am a doctor.' He said, '[Expletive] you.' "

That's how we treat a guy who's working on our side. Then there's this:

Staff Sgt. Patrick Bloomer, who participated in the fighting, said he was frustrated that U.S. forces did not provide food, water or other assistance to people fleeing the city. "It seemed like the military part of the operation was sound, but if we're over here to help the people, we should at least try to do something," he said.
"For the last few days it's been bugging the crap out of me," Bloomer said. "You had pregnant women and children, and we have all this food and water stockpiled. We could have easily gotten it to them."

They're trying to do that now, but it's rather too little, too late.

Is it any wonder Americans are not being welcomed with open arms? I don't think the rest of the world is looking forward to our bringing this to their doorsteps. Nor am I.

All It Would Take Is a Deal with the Devil to Make Me President

Wonkette's play-by-play on the vice presidential debate is pretty hilarious:

Bush-Cheney's global test: You must be able to beat up Howard Dean. "If [Kerry] can't stand up to the pressures of Howard Dean, how can he stand up to terrorists?" Of course: the terrorist threat posed by Howard Dean. We're pretty sure we saw him trying to set his shoes on fire during Letterman last night. . .

What no one has been saying in response to those Cheney remarks, though, is the logical conclusion that arises: Cheney posits that Kerry reconsidered his position on the war because Howard Dean was becoming immensely popular for opposing the war. Therefore, opposition to the war is popular, i.e., voters don't like the war. Therefore, Bush-Cheney in supporting the war are supporting a position that is in opposition to what the American people want.

You'd think Edwards the hotshot trial lawyer might have caught on to this, but he didn't. Conclusion: I am smarter than all these candidates. But then so are a lot of people.

The Smoothest Ass You've Never Seen, and Other Miscellany

Our victorious candidate for the Bod Squad had a butt facial on his first outing. And here's me feeling decadent about regular manicures.

Okay, why are people surprised by Fox News making up Kerry quotes? This is the same media empire whose New York Post in January 2003 replaced the heads of the French and German UN ambassadors with weasel heads on their cover. (Sorry, it's not online. But if you saw it, you could hardly forget it.) Or did everyone really think that's what the ambassadors looked like?

Watching the vice presidential debate: I want moderator Gwen Ifill for vice president. She's more on the ball than either Cheney or Edwards.

Col. David H. Hackworth (USA Ret.) argues that there will so be a draft. And that it won't just be your sons; your daughters are going, too. (And that leaves me with such mixed feelings: I am proud to see women serving, showing that their mettle is every bit as strong as that of their male colleagues. I want to say hooray for the military recognizing their contributions, and the equality of women. But I hate war, I hate the idea of the draft, under any circumstances.)

On a cheerier note, this makes me laugh. Probably because I don't have a bad, bad name.