This Is Sports Center with Unqualified Offerings - Along with messing with Movable Type and the new issue of Liberty, Unqualified Offerings must sacrifice posting time this weekend to - the NFL playoffs! In advance of that, I offer a brief apologia for football. (Note to our overseas readers: I don't mean that game with the round ball, the nets and the spectator riots.)
George Will probably takes the prize for the wittiest denunciation of football: It "combines two of the most disagreeable features of American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings." Will is a baseball man, as is an absurd number of intellectuals and literary people. I have hung out with many literary people in my time, mostly poets, and I've only ever met two writers who would qualify as football fans, the poet R.S. Gwynn and the literary polymath George Garrett. (Note: If anyone wants to start checking up these anecdotes, I guarantee that Garrett will remember neither meeting me nor that I exist at all. But I've heard him speak enthusiastically of the game.)
It's odd that baseball gets the intellectual cachet, since football is a far more intellectually-challenging game. Offensive and defensive playbooks are famously complicated, and their intricacy and depth goes beyond the sheer volume of material to be memorized. Behind an offensive system is a set of principles given concrete expression in a precise vocabulary, combined and recombined into individual plays and entire game plans. Dip into Brian Billick's Developing an Offensive Game Plan or Carroll et al's indispensible The Hidden Game of Football if you don't believe me.
To Will's jibe, I would say, Yes, football is violent. That's part of its value. Violence remains a salient feature of our world, as we have lately been reminded. Football is a way of channeling violence into something that, if the Washington Redskins aren't playing, has a fair chance of becoming beautiful and a better chance of being instructive. (Just tonight football instructed Jet fans that throwing short of the goal line when time is running out and your team is behind can cause heightened levels of anxiety and frustration.) As for the committee meetings (huddles), on one level they are just the temporal capital that funds those complex and beautiful playbooks.
On another level, they contribute to football's distinctive rhythm. In certain moods I would argue that the rhythm of football is why the NFL remains more popular in the US than soccer, hockey or basketball, none of which feature, as their partisans never tire of claiming, rest periods after every significant chunk of action. But that's football's characteristic greatness: the recurring cycle of pause, anticipation, action, resolution, pause. The teams huddle up. They break the huddle and come to the line. Suspense: will the offense run or pass, and how? Will the defense blita, lay off, press receivers, play zones? Is that motion man tipping off the direction of the play, or is he a decoy? Will some great physical effort vitiate an otherwise superb tactic? There is the snap, a period of action that resolves the suspense. And then the pause. During the pause, audience and announcers have time to reflect on what just happened, to discuss it, to watch the play again on instant replay, to consider how what just happened has changed the balance of forces in the game as a whole - if it has. And that brings the cycle around to the anticipation of the next play.
One also hears scoffs at the idea that many football players should even be considered athletes. Aren't a lot of them fat, not to say steroid-soaked, lummoxes? Leaving aside the steroid question, a lot of football players are big, fat and tall. They're called linemen. As it happens, offensive linemen are likely to be the smartest players on the field. Other football players are much thinner and much faster. There is a mild advantage to being shortish if you are a running back and a substantial advantage to being tall if you are a receiver or a defender. Some quarterbacks are very slow and some are very fast. So let me turn the complaint around and throw in a totem word for good measure: Football makes productive use of a greater diversity of somatic types than any other sport. You can be a 340# lineman, a 240# linebacker or a 180# cornerback. What has baseball to offer the 300-pounder? Should they all just sit around feeling sorry for themselves?
This gets to a source of football's intricacy: the rules require a starker specialization than other team sports. In basketball, the center sort of has a different role than the power forward who sort of has a different role from the small forward who sort of has a different role than the shooting guard who sort of has a different role from the point guard. In fact, centers and power forwards will often sub into the other position, likewise small forward-power forward, small forward-shooting guard, shooting guard-point guard. You aren't likely to slide more than one link along in the chain - centers don't end up subbing for shooting guards, for instance. But while the positions emphasis somewhat different skill sets, nevertheless, every player on the court may dribble, pass, shoot, rebound and defend. In football, by rule, five of eleven offensive players may never, in the ordinary course of things, handle the ball and attempt to gain yardage. So you end up with five ineligible ball-handlers, five backs and receivers, and the quarterback as a fulcrum between the two groups.
(Canada's welfare state policies damage this symmetry by mandating employment for a sixth eligible receiver. Arena "Football" puts eight players on a side when symmetry clearly implies it should use seven - three ineligible receivers, three eligible receivers and a quarterback. So both socialism and capitalism can screw things up. Baseball can claim a high degree of defensive specialization, of course. And hockey and soccer have goalies, but aside from that one player, any specialization is de facto rather than de jure.)
Also, it's cool to see guys run fast, and very cool to see really hard tackles. Though it sucks that both my teams lost today.
This Is Sports Center, with Mr. Rogers - Anklebiters' League basketball is not about winning or losing. It's about learning to play the game. Five and six-year-olds learn to dribble, pass, shoot and stand in roughly the right places in a zone defense. It is not that Wheaton Boys and Girls Clubs is against competition per se, but rather that it doesn't want children to lose sight of what's important at the very beginning of their education, in basketball and in life.
We tied the little bastards 10-10. Add that to last week's 6-4 win and Your Wheaton Pirates are undefeated to start the season.
One, Two, Many Khobar Towers - It's been noted that the government of Singapore has arrested members of an al-Qaeda cell that was planning to attack American military and civilian targets in Singapore. Unqualified Offerings has some things to say about this, but Offering Boy has a basketball game this morning (Anklebiters League), and so anon.
Redemption - Back in its infancy, Unqualified Offerings tried to direct its many loyal reader [sic] to streaming audio of three new Butthole Surfers tracks. The original link was from the Onion and it disappeared in the space of a day. Tonight, UO found the link again. It's accessible from, uh, www.buttholesurfers.com. Say it with me now: D'oh!
These songs are really good. IUOHO. The Surfers (the Buttholes?) also have an entire late-80s live "bootleg" free in mp3 format.
Speaking of Bad Businesses - Charles Dodgson notes the bad rep starting to attach to Arthur Anderson, auditors of Enron, Sunbeam and Waste Management. The same piece includes a citation of Paul Krugman from which I draw a different lesson than he does:
[Charles, not Krugman, writes] This was part of a pattern of state tax cuts (many pushed through by Republican governors) in the boom of the late '90s, many of which were based on similar tricks --- Republican Governor James Gilmore of Virginia, for instance, booked the value of all future payments in the tobacco settlement as current revenue.The states are now feeling the squeeze, since they're heading into deficits, and, in most cases, their constitutions won't let them borrow to cover.
There are two ways of looking at this syndrome: 1) It's shrewd grand strategy by antigovernment visionaries - empty the expansive state tank of its fuel now, forcing it to shorten its trips and carpool more later. 2) It's the sort of chicanery politicians are reduced to when they haven't got the guts to make the case for reducing government. When Thomas Nephew adds this topic to his rotating polls, Unqualified Offerings will pick "Both of the Above."
Hey! Are You Talkin' to Me? - Brian Linse Ain't No Bad Dude, but he comes perilously close to gettin' on the fightin' side of Unqualified Offerings, sticking its given name in the middle of a list thereafter characterized as "conservobloggers." Unqualified Offerings will say this one more time: it is a libertarian. Unlike that Newspaper-Reading Libertarian, it is willing to be called "right wing," and you may call it "an antigovernment extremist sowing a climate of fear and division," because it has been called that by experts. But it will not accept "conservative," for a couple of reasons: 1) It ain't one; 2) Okay, one reason.
Anyway, while Brian has hurt his chances of winning Least Annoying Liberal next year, he has otherwise been very kind to UO, so he gets off with a warning. What got him worked up in the first place is that "I've checked most of my favorite Conservo and Lib Blogs, and haven't seen much notice taken on" the Enron bankruptcy. Your liberal bloggers have been all over this story from the first, with Enron neighbor Ginger Stampley doing an especially good job of providing links and commentary early and late. I was actually most inclined to say something about Enron early, in response to a couple of Ginger's posts. It would have been what the audience wanted too, since back then Ginger was the audience for Unqualified Offerings.
As a libertarian, I have no emotional stake in the Republican Party. I have a mild personal fondness for Dubya, or the image of him, and I despise just about everyone in the Democratic Party leadership, starting with Tom Daschle. (Senator Leahy gets a pass for his work during the Ruby Ridge hearings and his fandom of the great Buddy and Julie Miller.) I have a strong philosophical stake in (drumroll please!) the free market, but near as I can tell, Enron had little contact with such a thing - it was another gang of rent-seekers panning for gold in the loopholes of highly regulated industries. (Telecom and California's bizarrely constricted energy "market" most famously.) Ginger notes that "72% of Enron's $2.4 million in contributions for the 2000 election" went to Republicans, which makes sense - for Republicans, corporate welfare is up there with the Pledge of Allegiance among the highest goods. (As for the other 27%, blogger Bill Quick has a handy list of where it went.)
Libertarians tend to be strong supporters of one particular liberal Law: Kinsley's. ("The scandal is what's legal.") So long as government has almost limitless power to make or break fortunes, some businesses will try to buy protection for themselves and trouble for their rivals. Believers in a free market also believe that bad businesses can and should fail. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Enron was a bad business, wasn't it?
Near as I can tell, the following things are true. I invite correction.
Beguiling Images - a Wilderness of Mirrors Parable - Years ago, a college friend visited DC to do some onsite work on a computer visual recognition project his company was working on for "the government." We'll call him Drowsy, in honor of his prodigious capacity for sleep. He took Toiler and I to his office to show us the cool stuff he was working on. On a massive 21" Sun monitor, he brought up an odd, intricate collage, a rectangle comprising hundreds of miniscule photo images, none large enough to merit the term "thumbnail." But the file used a fractal storage algorithm, so when you zoomed in on one of the unrecognizably small bits, it expanded with a subjective gain of detail. One of the images drew immediate interest from Toiler - a Soviet freighter in a Soviet port, photographed from directly above, and sharp enough to locate individual sailors on deck.
"Seriously, Drowsy," Toiler said, "you ought to take that one out. They wouldn't want to see it." Meaning, they wouldn't want to see it in Drowsy's file, since, after all, Drowsy's company's clients loved seeing such pictures and went to (our) great expense to procure them.
The frisson I felt then was a feeling of being "in the know." I was seeing something that was not for the rubes, so for that long, I was not one myself. The Cold War offered an entire class of people steady doses of that feeling. In Veil, I think it was, Bob Woodward relates that when Jimmy Carter first took office, he moved the big globe out of the Oval Office. But later, he had it moved back in. It was his world, after all. Christopher Hitchens once wrote something to the effect that he became a journalist so that he didn't want to settle for what passes for news among non-journalists. Andrew Sullivan, just yesterday, draws reassurance from "people I trust close to the administration."
This site has featured some wild-assed reading between the lines of foreign policy, doubtless including a lot of misreadings, of everyone from the Chinese to the Saudis. Oh wait - that's pretty much the entire list, isn't it? But that wasn't my point! My point is, It's kind of fun to speculate about that kind of thing, isn't it?
That's precisely the danger: international relations, secret diplomacy and war are alluring. As stimulating as it can be to watch, it must be far more tempting to do. The joy of being "in the know" should not be underrated. The structural problem is that at times the finite class of doers is in a position to control their own dosage. (The claim is just a kind of psychic Public Choice theory.) Now is one of those times. And their overdoses may be our bad trip. The Wilderness of Mirrors is big enough for everyone. But the Greenbrier holds so many people and no more.
Heh Heh - Oh... - "Alert kausfiles reader JC" provides the following:
Best Buddy Conspiracy Theory: A revenge killing for the murder of Kathleen Willey's cat! ...
Which was funny for the length of time it took to remember, "Oh yeah. They did kill Kathleen Willey's cat."
Welcome Back If You Were Gone - Some Loyal Readers may have been unable to load this site at times yesterday. I know I was. The highclearing.com empire upgraded its hosting package this month, the idea being to move off Blogger and onto Movable Type. That meant a hosting move, which hosed stats among other things. The hosting company appears to have Done Something yesterday involving DNS. With luck, everything will be shaken out soon.
Good Grief - Christopher Caldwell posted his last "Hill of Beans" column for New York Press this week. Caldwell had been writing the weekly Washington column since 1996, though I didn't discover it until early 1999. In retrospect, the departure could be foreseen: since, well, mid-September as a matter of fact, Caldwell has not come close to posting weekly.
The first Caldwell piece I read was not about Capitol Hill at all, though it was in many ways about, and wisely about politics. And art. "Against Snoopy" was a superb appreciation of Early Peanuts and critique of Late Peanuts. I thought of Caldwell's piece a year later, when Schulz's astonishing Sunday cartoon of January 2, 2000 appeared, full of bitterness at death and at the limits of what one of us can do for any other of us in the face of it. Colon cancer was weeks from killing Schulz and everyone knew it. Consciousness of death obliterated the cozy sentimentality that Caldwell had decried in the strip's dotage, leaving expression of pure grief. The strip appears not to be available on the web. I am almost glad, because the ink work on newsprint is crucial to the effect (it is raining on the ballfield as it has so often in the land of Peanuts, but this rain won't be ending) and wouldn't translate to an image file. I urge you, you people who keep showing up in my server stats, and thank you, go to the library. Get a copy of a January 2, 2000 paper with a comics page, one that gives at least the major cartoons the space they deserve. The Post's printing that day was excellent. Hold the physical artifact in your hands, read, look and absorb.
But that's not what I was going to write about! I wanted to appreciate Caldwell on his way out the NY Press door. Why he says he is leaving gives some hint of why he was so good at covering politics:
Pretty much all writers arrive here full of idealistic desire to "make a difference" and "be a part of" our democracy, "clearing the air" on policy differences, "speaking truth to power," uncovering what really goes on in those "smoke-filled rooms." (If I told you people in Washington actually thought and talked this way, you wouldn’t believe it, so we can let it drop.)And then practically all of them go bad in one of two ways. The first way is not to change. It’s great to believe when you’re 21 that what Sen. Spats really cares about most is not getting votes but helping the poor. But if you still believe that at 31… Well, if you still believe that at 31, you’re probably Sen. Spats’ p.r. guy.
...
Most writers lose that idealism. For one thing, they tend to notice that history is looping around and repeating itself. The stories are all the same and so are the characters, even if they have different names...The moment a reporter gets cynical enough to recognize this, or to say, "Oh, shit, another corrupt congressman story this week," it’s all over. For one thing, he’ll never work up the energy to write anything but cliches for the rest of his life. For another, he’ll be too oppressed by the pattern of Washington to notice something new if it actually does come up.
Now especially we need his clarity. The 90s, Caldwell says, were not earthshaking times. He notes that in 1996 he wrote several columns about New Hampshire politico Dick Swett - and had fun doing it. As Lou Reed sang, Those were different times:
It was vapidity, yes, but the four months of real, no-bull history we’ve had since Sept. 11 ought to make us nostalgic for it. I hope it is not just nostalgia that is making me think of the rank hypocrisy of the late 1990s as a simpler, kinder, more wholesome kind of rank hypocrisy. Vapidity good! Hypocrisy good! In this light, Newt Gingrich’s intellectual vanity, Bill Clinton’s amazing sense of entitlement and the smiley-face imperialism of the Kosovo war were probably the high points of the last half-decade for me.
It's all the more amazing to see a paragraph like that from a writer associated with the Weekly Standard. Every third scold hails the New Seriousness, but I've said it before and I'll keep saying it: The only sane goal of US strategy now is to build a bridge to less interesting times.
The Great Game - Best NAI of the Web also scooped Unqualified Offerings on its own turf - not just the Pakistani Press but The International News! In what the News ironically characterizes as "an unannounced development" - ironic since the News piece seems to constitute the announcement - China shipped extra aircraft to Pakistan at the height of recent Indo-Pak tensions:
...the Peoples Republic of China sharply reduced a marked imbalance between the Indian and Pakistan Air Force by sending five ships -- in a space of only 10 days late last month -- loaded with cargo ranging from cartons of unassembled brand new combat aircraft and a variety of air force-related weapons and equipment to the port in Karachi, senior Pakistani officials confirmed.
Now, for all we know, the Chinese actually sent five ships full of Rocket Tops to Karachi, in which case Unqualified Offerings will be pissed, since Offering Boy's Christmas shipment of the things still hasn't arrived. But what counts here is that the Indians (and Americans?) worry about what was in those ships, and about "a speedy delivery of spares and related equipment for Pakistan's strategic assets through Korakram highway, a little before the snow created major obstacles on this crucial communication line between Pakistan and China before Christmas."
Before the Chinese assistance reached Pakistan last week, the Indian Air Force had 730 aircraft as compared to PAF's 340. Because of the military security reasons, Pakistani officials are withholding the exact number of fighter aircraft added to the PAF with Chinese assistance in the last few weeks.
Other interesting nuggets in the article:
Before the arrival of PAF cargo from China late last month, the air force had arrangements ready to shift the unassembled aircraft from the Karachi port to various PAF facilities where Pakistani and Chinese officials worked together to assemble and deploy them in a record time.
The point here is, We already put the planes together, Indian Dogs! So don't go feeling smug about China shipping us unassembled places! But there may be more points than that. No doubt trained intelligence analysts could look at the ships and satellite photos of the ships unloading and tell you exactly how many planes, if any, China sent - if you are cleared for that information, comrade. Lacking that kind of information or skill, let's stick to a SWAG of 25-50 planes. ("Silly Wild-Ass Guess" for our non-technical readers.) Does Pakistan have that many spare trained pilots? One wonders. So very possibly the article is telling us that the Chinese have provided Pakistan with extra pilots as well. There's plenty of precedent for this kind of thing. I've read accounts of the Israeli-Arab air war of 1970-71 that maintain that Soviet pilots were flying Migs for the Egyptian air force. Russians also supposedly crewed SAM batteries during the Vietnam war. These kinds of direct, small-scale confrontations happen and the sides keep them quiet by mutual agreement - it's how limited wars stay limited.
The other thing worth noting is that it means Pakistan is crawling with Chinese military officers (and spies) during the very period when "bin Laden and his buddies have escaped to Pakistan" rumors are flying. That might not be a coincidence. Even if Toiler's theory that the Chinese were behind the September massacres is wrong, they may still find it in their interests to help bin Laden escape the US.
Or maybe it is a coincidence. Conspiracy theories aside, China has a longstanding rivalry with India and a longstanding alliance with Pakistan. If China had somehow never heard of bin Laden before September 2001, they would still want to hold India down and build Pakistan up. Pakistan and the US had been doing nicely together all fall, which has to hurt if you're the Chinese. With US support for Pakistan against India unsteady in the wake of the Delhi bombings, some quick arms shipments represent a pickup of some cheap diplomatic points. The hell of it is, the aid is probably in US interests. It has real deterrent value, India seemed more eager to fight than Pakistan, and the last thing the US wants right now is an Indo-Pak war. That way madness lies.
Follow the Money - Best (Say it with me now!) [Neocon-Approved Items] of the Web has been pretty good at patrolling the "Our Good Friends, the Saudis" beat. (Unable to replicate the original Postrelian meme without error, they typically omit "Good" from the hedders.) Today's link is just about smoking gun-level, a US News story on US/Saudi/al Qaeda relations:
Protection money. Strained relations between Washington and Riyadh are nothing new. But since September 11, tensions have increased markedly. One reason, high-level intelligence sources tell U.S. News, is that at least two Saudi princes had been paying, on behalf of the king-dom, what amounts to protection money to Osama bin Laden since 1995. In November of that year, a bomb at the Saudi National Guard headquarters in Riyadh killed several American military advisers who worked closely with the force. One source, a former senior Clinton administration official, said that the two princes, whose names have not been disclosed, began making payments to bin Laden soon after the bombing. The official added that Washington did not learn of the payments until at least two years later. "There's no question they did buy protection from bin Laden," he says. "The deal was, they would turn a blind eye to what he was doing elsewhere. 'You don't conduct operations here, and we won't disrupt them elsewhere.' "
My my. So a) Saudi princes are paying bin Laden "on behalf of the government." Where has Unqualified Offerings heard that before? b) Washington didn't learn of payments until at least two years later?? Two years from 1995 would be...why, that would be 1997. So the US government knew of an official Saudi/al Qaeda financial relationship for up to four years before September 11. Knew about it when the African embassies were bombed. Knew about it when the Cole was bombed. These are the folks who are going to, in Michael Barone's formulation, do the National Greatness stuff overseas.
If that's too depressing, here's some comedy - the next paragraph of the same article:
Adel Al-Jubeir, a top Saudi official, denied the payments took place. "Where's the evidence? Nobody offers proof. There's no paper trail. . . . "
Oh! Forget we said anything then. And one final bit of disingenuousness from Sheik Al-Jubeir:
Why would they [princes] pay? These people threaten us more than they threaten you," he said.
But that's just it, isn't it? They don't.
Defining Terrorism Down - According to the Justice Department, it gained 236 terrorism convictions in FY 2000. According to the Saint Petersburg Times, their investigation shows those figures to be not just cooked but stuffed:
Is a drunk, rowdy passenger on an airplane a terrorist? Is a man who pushes a judge? They are according to annual reports from the Department of Justice. An investigation by the Miami Herald found that the department routinely overstates the number of terrorist arrests and convictions it makes every year. It does so, apparently, to cook the numbers for Congress, as a way to justify its annual $22-billion budget of which counterterrorism is a part.In the department's most recent annual report, released in May, the department claims there were 236 terrorism convictions in the fiscal year ending September 2000. But when pressed to provide specifics, the department refused to release information backing up that number or disclosing the details of those convictions.
In its investigation, Herald reporters reviewed dozens of so-called terrorism cases over a five-year period, examining files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The reporters found that numerous convictions labeled as terrorism were just ordinary crimes, having nothing to do with a politically motivated agenda. For example, the department listed as a case of domestic terrorism, the conviction of a man from Arizona who got drunk while returning from Shanghai. He had continually demanded liquor and manhandled a flight attendant. The judge in the case called it a case of a man "being an annoyance beyond belief," but not terrorism.
But wait! There's more!
Disturbingly, the federal prosecutor office in San Francisco was the office that listed the most cases of domestic terrorism over the past three years. For much of that time, Robert Mueller, now director of the FBI, was at its helm.
Budgetary chicanery is bad enough. The blurring of accountability is bad too. ("Especially now, following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, Congress and the public have a right to expect that any reports to come out of the department provide a full and accurate accounting of the level of domestic terror activities in the United States. If prosecutions of al-Qaida members are combined with those of drunken airline passengers, it will be impossible to gauge which offenses constitute real terrorism and which have been listed as such merely to pad the numbers," as the Times editor puts it.)
But it gets worse. They told us and tell us that the extraordinary provisions of the USA-PATR - Sorry. Unqualified Offerings can't even bring itself to dignify the law in question by typing it's name fully. They told us the snoop-friendly provisions of that law were narrowly tailored to a specific threat: "terrorism." But federal law enforcement has enormous leeway in how they classify any given alleged offense. Which makes the tailoring "relaxed fit."
But Is It Good for the Chickens? That's the first question Unqualified Offerings' mother always asked whenever the latest bit of new from the wider world reached us in the barnyard. So it was painful to find Best (Neocon-Approved Items) of the Web sniffing yesterday at Karen Davis' cri de couer de poule on behalf of chickenkind in the Vegan Voice:
Moreover, the survivors of the September 11 attack and their loved ones have an array of consolations--patriotism, the satisfaction of U.S. retaliation, religious faith, TV ads calling them heroes, etc--that the chickens, whose lives are continuously painful and miserable, including being condemned to live in human-imposed circumstances that are inimical and alien to them as chickens, do not have available. They suffer raw, without the palliatives. Doubtless the majority, if not every single one, of the people who suffered and/or died as a result of the September 11 attack ate, and if they are now alive continue to eat, chickens. . . .
Oh they laughed, those neocons, despite the fact that in the western canon they supposedly love, some of our greatest three-name poets, from William Butler Yeats ("I have seen them clucking at close of day...") to Samuel Taylor Coleridge ("In Xanadu did Kublai Khan / a stately chicken hutch decree") have expressed the deepest longings of chickenkind. Perhaps the true lesson of September 11th, 2001, is that the poultry reckoning Yeats famously foresaw is finally at hand:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The chicken cannot hear the chickener;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the chicken,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of chickenhood is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of chickenlike intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Chicken is at hand.
The Second Chicken! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a chicken,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its braised thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert chickens.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony beaks
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking chicken,
And what rough bird, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be hatched?
'Tis the Season for disappointed NFL owners to fire coaches. Here in DC, AP provides an update on the Marty Schottenheimer Deathwatch - this very evening Redskin owner Dan Snyder and Schottenheimer are meeting to, you know, have some coffee and talk - no big whoop. Rumor is that Snyder wants Steve Spurrier, late of the University of Florida, driven out of his job there by the University of Maryland team's successful martyrdom operation in the Orange Bowl last week.
There's a good reason to fire Snyder, more principled than "He's a garrulous blowhard who is less interested in being tough than in making sure you know he is." Last year, Dan Snyder fired the ambiguously hapless Norv Turner with three games left in the season and the Skins' standing at 7-6. That was the outcome of an injury-riddled, kicker-haunted season that began with a big big payroll and hopes to match. When Snyder fired Turner, he set an implicit challenge: This roster is so talented only a bad coach could fail to succeed with it. Marty Schottenheimer wimped out on the challenge. Once hired as coach and poobah of all personnel matters, Schottenheimer immediately gutted the 2000-season roster, tossing out most of the stars that made Dan Snyder think he had such a surefire team in the first place. He replaced them with journeymen. Some of them have done okay for themselves and okay by the team, but as a whole the 2001 roster fairly screamed "rebuilding year," and that by the deliberate, gratuitous decision of the coach.
So for using his personnel power to deflate the expectations for the team, Schottenheimer cheated the house. That's a hanging offense, and it would be fun to see him swing. And yet, if Snyder dumps him, that will be three coaches Snyder has tossed in thirteen months. Snyder already has a reputation around the league as mean and stupid. (Fairly or unfairly, and Unqualified Offerings feels that it is only partly fair.) After a point, mean and stupid people have trouble getting the best candidates to work for them.
It's a Blog Eat Blog World... - Unqualified Offerings noted a particular harrumph! on Ken Layne's site yesterday, about the (deceased) Tampa Bay Tailgunner:
Why does Do-Nothing Tom Ridge insist this has "nothing to do with terrorism"? Somebody commits a terrorist act -- a suicide crash of a hijacked plane into an American skyscraper -- in support of a terrorist war against the West. It doesn't matter if the kid acted alone (which it seems he did) or if the kid went crazy (which of the Saudi hijackers wasn't crazy?). It's a terrorist act. Deal with it, Tom. Or go back to goddamned Pennsylvania.
Which begs the obvious question: Okay, just what does Ken Layne want Tom Ridge to do by way of Dealing With It? But that Newspaper-Reading Libertarian, who apparently didn't work late this evening, beat me to it:
They say this is obviously terrorism and that Tom Ridge should be doing something about it. But how is this terrorism just because some disturbed kid thought the Sept. 11 attacks were cool before committing this act? It seems to me you're going to lose the real meaning of the term. And what exactly is Ridge supposed to do about it, besides the steps that flight schools are (presumably) taking after this incident? Put his parents in front of a military tribunal?
Uh, what he said. (Mutter, mutter. And what about some Big-Government-style work rules? If you're going to bill yourself as the "newspaper guy," then "blog-reading guy" ought to be a separate set-aside, with applications made to the Federal Blog Commission during an annual licensing period. Am I right??)
Anyway, stuck for some kind of value add, Unqualified Offerings will venture the following outlandish suggestion: This whole note thing may turn out to be a lot less than meets the eye. Yeah, there's probably something stupid in it about Osama bin Laden - fifteen-year olds are incapable of writing other than stupidly. But this is precisely the kind of incident where the police would be muttering darkly about video games or RPGs if the kid happened to have an account on a Quake server, or a copy of Vampire: The Masquerade in his room somewhere.(UO remembers a juvenile suicide in Virginia in the early 80s where the sherrif told the Washington Post that he had found "D&D paraphernalia" in the boy's room. Don't bogart that saving throw, man!)
Irreconcilable Differences - Over in the Insolvent Republic of Blogistan they are hot to assimilate Canada into the US. Unqualified Offerings is against this. Those people have been damned surly to previous welcoming committees, and the US will inevitably end up with the metric system, six-week waits for routine x-rays and money Argentina wouldn't touch. But one part of the Blogistan Preferred Package is bittersweet:
Which I think should only be agreed to if the CFL gets to merge with the NFL while keeping all the CFL rules (12 men on the field, goal posts in the inzone, etc.) alive in CFL stadiums, a la the American League-National League split in baseball. This is obviously the most important point to be made about any potential US-Canada merger.
Presumably, if your name is "Slotman," you figure a deal like this might mean work for you as an inside receiver. But UO sees some problems. First, it foresees new entitlements, with the Lower 48 required to provide the Northern Acquisitions with defenses and running games. Second, and sadly, since UO actually likes Canadian-rules football, we have no room for them here. A CFL field is 30 yards longer than a US-rules "pitch," and about a dozen yards wider too. But the trend in US football stadia has been towards ever-increasing intimacy, with the stands built closer and closer to the field. There is no chance whatsoever, for instance, of fitting a CFL gridiron into the Redskins' Fedex Field. Besides, if one merged the CFL with the NFL, it practically requires an end-of-season championship between the leagues. Since NFL teams can play CFL style ball if they have to (viz. Saint Louis) and CFL teams couldn't stop an NFL-grade rushing offense with a wall of zambonis, it would be pretty brutal.
WARNING: The preceding item contains a snare for pedants! Spot it if you can...
Esthetic Adventures - After completing the previous post, Unqualified Offerings subtly (it hopes) widened its content column. Speak up if it ruins the site for you, please.
Another Lost Soul - Andrew Sullivan has gone over to the Dark Side. No, I don't mean the "save the entire world by invading it" people - he's been on that team for quite awhile now. I mean he's become one of the "wide column people." He joins Instapundit.com, Libertarian Samizdata, the Newsrack blog and too many others in setting his weblog text in columns wider than God intended. Anyone who has ever read a book on web or hardcopy text design knows that maximum readability is achieved at around 10 words across. Newspapers and magazines didn't go with the columnar look on a whim. (Note that Instapundit.com actually falls just outside readability guidelines, with many lines having as few as a dozen words.)
Sullivan also moves his site perilously close to Tombstone (see any glossary of fancy designer slang) by making his titles not only bold and all-caps but a larger point size than his body text - at least if he's going to continue keeping titles and body text on the same line.
A few resolute bloggers hew to the True Path. There is, of course, Unqualified Offerings. Its compadres include Ginger Stampley, Mickey Kaus and Virginia Postrel. May these worthies forever keep the faith, though UO admits that, for its part, it is pushing the limit on the narrow end.
Joys of Capitalism, Believe It or Not - The San Diego Union-Tribune has a profile of one of my longtime favorite singer-songwriters, Graham Parker, whose Squeezing Out Sparks album is on my Desert Island list no matter how short it gets. Parker has never been a chart presence in the US. As a result, he has written more bitter songs about the music business than he owns up to in the Union-Tribune article. I've never shared his politics, which are pretty standard-issue British Left, though I eventually came to share the views of the Panama invasion and (first) Gulf War that he expresses in "She Wants So Many Things" and "Turn It Into Hate." Parker has used the music biz as a metaphor for a number of standard-issue anticapitalist songs, livened by biting wit and compelling hooks.
The indictment you'll hear from leftist rock&rollers is that music proves "the market" is malign because the market values [Your Current Bete Noire Here] over [Your Underappreciated Fave]. Supposedly, "the market" declares Britney Spears to be better than Graham Parker because Britney Spears records make orders of magnitude more money. But what "the market" has really done is let Parker and Spears each reach their audience. Neither Parker nor Unqualified Offerings all-time fave Elvis Costello has ever been a US chart-monster. But each has been able to get record contracts from big or small companies for a quarter-century, to make a living at their chosen field and in Costello's case, to be able to afford to flit just about anywhere on the globe seemingly at will. For every label that dropped them, another has picked them up. Parker has even taken advantage of such market advances as internet-only distribution when it seemed to make financial sense. That Spears' market dwarfs Parker's, and that this pains the discriminating taste, is beyond the power of the market to fix. I daresay it is beyond the power of a wise and caring government to address too. What the market can do is provide the means, including ever cheaper recording and distribution technologies, for Parker to keep working, and for those of us who love Parker to benefit from his work. (And to save Parker from being thrown over by the sort of fan who would savagely turn on him if he actually sold enough records to go "mainstream.")
Parker himself says, with slight inaccuracy, in the Union-Tribune that
"There's no market for what I do," he says flatly.Yet, on a creative level, it seems he couldn't be happier about it. "Just to be able to write great songs is so pleasing to me," he says. "I don't have to second-guess myself now. I'm free."
The man was born in England, lives in Woodstock, put out an album of new material and two compilations last year, has a new compilation coming out this spring, and is interviewed in a San Diego paper because he is in town to play for people who will pay money to see him. That's a market. And the part about not having to second-guess himself? That's the pursuit of happiness, and successful at that. And that final bit, "I'm free?" That's truth.
Odd Claim in the Washington Post - That Newspaper-Reading Libertarian puts his readers on to an op-ed by former Clinton Administration and Kissinger Associates official David J. Rothkopf. I was struck by a different part:
The administration's tax cuts, for which others share the blame, to be sure, were ill-timed and too small to have any substantial impact on the economy.
So far, not too bad! The tax cuts should surely have been bigger. But in the very next sentence, Rothkopf says
Indeed, as it turned out almost half the people who received the money saved it rather than using it to stimulate the economy -- not what was predicted and a sign that the American people, at least, knew things were getting worse even when Treasury did not.
One hardly knows whether to say Whoah! or Hunh? On the Hunh? side is Rothkopf's strange, presumably Keynesian notion that saving money somehow doesn't help an economy, even one where the investment sector is depressed and capital has grown scarce. Does Rothkopf imagine that "saved" money sits in a vault somewhere getting mildewed? What he's actually saying is that about half the tax cut went from government coffers into capital markets that needed the money.
Let's look at the Whoah! side now: these people who saved the money "knew," according to Rothkopf, that "things were getting worse." Which is to say that saving their money was an act of prudence, which is to say that, once the government returned some of their money to them, they used it wisely. I'll bet they could have stood to do more of that, too. And it contrasts rather starkly with the forebodings of Rothkopf's old boss and allies like Senator Patty Murray who always warned that people would just blow their tax cuts on VCRs. (Murray especially was always obsessed that someone might buy a VCR with a tax cut, which must mean that there are no VCR makers in her state...)
Metacontext Alert - Here is the beginning of Mickey Kaus's latest Slate column:
1. Safe at Any Speed: To the surprise of commentators (including this one), Congress has failed to pass a "stimulus bill." It also didn't pass a big farm bill, a big energy bill, and a big insurance bill. Ron Brownstein of the L.A. Times blames a deep, ideological gulf between the parties: "Republicans and Democrats remain so divided about government's proper role that it will be difficult for them to reach productive compromises on many big domestic issues." But wait a minute—are the parties really more divided about the role of government than they were, say, during Ronald Reagan's first term? Maybe something else is to blame. Here's a suspect—gerrymandering, the process of drawing congressional district lines so as to reap political advantage.
One might doubt that a partisan agenda is hidden here: Kaus and Brownstein sound like they would be as happy with Congress' performance if it were to pass a "Republican-friendly" farm bill, or energy bill or insurance bill. The ideological assumptions are buried deeper: that a Congress that does not add to the volume of the nation's laws has "failed," and merits "blame." The metacontext here and everywhere in the establishment media is that the government must produce political "solutions" to officially designated problems. It's easy to imagine an alternate metacontext - analysis pieces in the major media adducing reasons why "A partisan gulf has prevented Congress from even taking up, let alone completing, the tasks of repealing asset forfeiture laws, removing federal prohibitions on medical marijuana and eliminating the system of so-called administrative law courts." It is possible to judge Congresses by the number of laws they repeal rather than the number they pass. It's even possible to imagine a truly neutral establishment media where, say, the LA Times was as likely to run one kind of analysis as the other. But we do not have that establishment media. We have a media where, however much they imagine that they "question authority," the only question is whether the existing authority has adequately served the needs and ideals of the Shepherd class.
(Note that Kaus is desperately trying to disprove claims of his cryptolibertarianism all of a sudden! Hm!)