BuzzMachine

Drop that bone
: Ted Barlow said it before I did but I had the same reaction he did reading Andrew Sullivan today praising Colin Powell’s performance on MTV (echoing, by the way, the New York Times — “With Candor, Powell Charms Global MTV Audience”). Said Sullivan:

Contrast Bill Clinton’s excruciating dialogue with MTV viewers not so long ago with Colin Powell’s masterful, engaged colloquy. No boxers or briefs questions. No attempt to pander shamelessly for votes. Just a principled and effective defense of America’s role in the world to a global generation that desperately needs to hear it.

Said Barlow:

I think that Sullivan should retire the word “Clinton” from his vocabulary, because it does funny things to his head. Two thoughts:

1. Funny how Powell doesn’t “pander for votes,” considering he’s not running for anything, huh?

2. How the hell is Clinton supposed to be responsible for the GODDAMN QUESTIONS THAT SOMEBODY ELSE ASKS HIM? Tell you what. I’m going to write to Andrew Sullivan, call him a doodyhead, then criticize him for getting email that calls him a doodyhead.

Think, Sully, think.

Said me:

Right on. I don’t intend to start another whinefest about Sullivan whining about people. But why must he always measure his world from the perspective of what he doesn’t like about Bill Clinton or the liberal du jour? What’s wrong with simply praising Powell? This incessant nattering is shrill and tiresome.

Sex is good
: And Oliver Willis said this before I could, though I thought the same thing he did. Man, I’m slowing down with age (and work). Willis on Bill O’Reilly attacking HBO for sex:

Bill O’Reilly grills HBO’s chief for showing graphic television? Has O’Reilly called up Rupert Murdoch, the guy who signs his paychecks? Fox is the network that brought us When Animals Attack, World’s Wildest Police Videos, Married With Children, and The Chamber, among others. Most of those way before HBO had become recognized for it’s creative output. Fox was Fear Factor when Fear Factor was a pre-coital sperm! I personally have no problem with those programs, hell nobody loves trash tv more than I – but O’Reilly’s posturing seems more along the line of pot-kettle-black.

Amen. There’s nothing wrong with the sex or violence on HBO. The world the Sopranos depicts is ugly and violent. The women on Sex and the City are pretty and sexy. That’s OK. Life has these extremes.

How about you Libertarians out there rallying to the defense of free speech for HBO and its artists and audiece?

What would O’Reilly have us do: let some official commission rule on what HBO can and can’t say? I can’t imagine he’d really want that.

I’m offended by the culture of the offended trying to cut everything in life and art down to a least offensive denominator.

You don’t hear people — at least people this side of Nazi Germany — saying these things about books; they say this about TV because they have no repect for the medium or its mass audience; they have no respect for our own ability to judge what we want to watch and what we find offensive; we don’t need O’Reilly or anyone else judging that for us, thank you.

I used to attend a church in my area and was asked to give a class on TV since I was then the TV critic for TV Guide. In my spiel, I said that one of my favorite shows of all times was Cheers and I got attacked by a church lady and then another because Cheers offended them. Why, ladies? Well Cheers has sex.

Well so does life, you shriveled prunes — or life for most people. I left that church and I don’t want to start attending O’Reilly’s either.

Gold medal in cynicism
: The mistake is thinking that sports is any different from business or show business or politics or religion or the academe: Each is a terribly human instititution prone to all our human sins of greed, ego, corruption, and politics for politics’ sake.

Baseball is not the All-American pastime and its players are not heroes; it’s a business and its players are, well, players who, given too much money, too often get in trouble with drugs and gambling and sex. Hollywood is all about power politics (just watch HBO’s Project Greenlight to see atomic aholes in action). I’ve watched churches collapse under terroritorial wars. The academe is, of course, about kingdoms. And politics is all about, well, politics.

So it’s no surprise, sadly, that the Olympics and their sports are just as corrupt as any other human organization — moreso, actually, since they aren’t honest enough to just negotiate the money and power and fame (as sports and show business do); they have to act above it all — and then get sneaky about getting what really matters: money and turf.

As Today’s New York Post puts it: <"What you have to understand is that the foofs have fiefs that must be maintained. The people who govern international sports federations are charged with the protection of the integrity of the competition. But how they really see their function is protecting their lifestyles and turf." The Globe & Mail says that the Canadian silver-skaters are likely to get gold medals and I say that’s great. But when it gets down to what really matters for them — their careers, their fame, their future — the truth is that they have already won. Jamie Sale is gorgeous and magnetic and David Pelletier is charming; the Russians are slightly freaky: she a kewpie, he’s goofy. The scandal is making the Canadians sympathetic and their agent says they are getting offers aplenty. They have star quality.

Meanwhile, NBC is making ratings off this.

It’s not about ideals, folks; hasn’t been for a century. It’s about money. That’s the gold that matters.

: Sale and Pelletier where just awarded gold medals. Some justice.

Face time
: Beliefnet complains about Greta Van Susteren’s facelift, arguing that we should live with the faces God gives us. Hooey. I didn’t live with the engorged thyroid lump God or fate gave me; I got rid of it. Greta got rid of the 10-gallon bags under her eyes because she’s on TV and wants to look better. And catch the irony: On the same Beliefnet page, there’s a big ad promising you’ll lose 10 pounds by March 18. But didn’t God give me those pounds?

: I don’t mean to be shallow and catty but, hey, I’m a cynic and I’m only talking about TV. Is anybody else slightly scared by the sight of Jim McKay on the Olympics? Some people get triple chins. He has triple jowels. As my colleage Peter put it, “He’s melting.”

The He Decade
: At his briefing yesterday, a reporter said she wanted to ask Donald Rumsfeld a question on a “touchy-feely” topic and he cut her off with laughter, looking at the general to his side, and saying, “You’ve come to the wrong guys.”

Note the trend:

The American flag is back. The military-industrial complex is back. And testosterone is back.

No more Me Decade. No more We Decade. No more Re Decade.

This is the He Decade.

7 chances
: PBS Frontline counts seven chances to catch the hijackers before they acted, but each was muffed. [via Metafilter]

Rules for safe flying
: 1. Do not rush the cockpit and stick your head into the door doing your imitation of Jack Nicholson doing his imitation of Johnny Carson. You will be hit on the head with an axe.

2. Do not get up to go to the bathroom in the last 30 minutes of your flight. You will go to jail. In either case, you will end up peeing in your pants.

3. Do not smoke crack and have repeated gay sex in the restroom. You will be sent back home.

Olympic ideal? Ha!
: Drugs. Bribery. Corruption.

Crazy after all these years
: A super Thomas Friedman column in today’s NY Times, as insightful as it is amusing. He writes from London that Europe can’t stand Bush’s Axis of Evil and he says the critics are right with various complaints. Nonetheless, Friedman is glad that Bush said it.

Because the critics are missing the larger point, which is this: Sept. 11 happened because America had lost its deterrent capability. We lost it because for 20 years we never retaliated against, or brought to justice, those who murdered Americans. From the first suicide bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in April 1983, to the bombing of the Marine barracks at the Beirut airport a few months later, to the T.W.A. hijacking, to the attack on U.S. troops at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, to the suicide bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, to the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, innocent Americans were killed and we did nothing.

So our enemies took us less and less seriously and became more and more emboldened. Indeed, they became so emboldened that a group of individuals ó think about that for a second: not a state but a group of individuals ó attacked America in its own backyard. Why not? The terrorists and the states that harbor them thought we were soft, and they were right. They thought that they could always “out-crazy” us, and they were right. They thought we would always listen to the Europeans and opt for “constructive engagement” with rogues, not a fist in the face, and they were right.

America’s enemies smelled weakness all over us, and we paid a huge price for that….

Friedman says it is time for us to restore our deterrence and one way to do that is to act not only big and powerful and angry but also a little crazy and unpredictable so the bad guys — the evil guys — actually fear what they unleash. His punchline:

No, the axis-of-evil idea isn’t thought through ó but that’s what I like about it. It says to these countries and their terrorist pals: “We know what you’re cooking in your bathtubs. We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do about it, but if you think we are going to just sit back and take another dose from you, you’re wrong. Meet Don Rumsfeld ó he’s even crazier than you are.”

Finding a good use for newspapers
: A French-Canadian reporter locks himself out of his hotel room — naked — while grabbing the morning paper. He finds his way to the lobby with sections of the paper covering his front and back. Hotel officials in Mormonville unamused; they call the cops; he’s evicted. (Via Romenesko)

Mouth, meet foot
: Ted Turner and AOL Time Warner backtrack from his remark about “brave” terrorists:

“What Ted Turner said in no way reflects AOL Time Warner’s view about this terrible tragedy,” spokesman Ed Adler said.

In a written statement Tuesday, Turner said his comments “were reported out of context, and I deeply regret any pain they may have caused. I abhor violence in any form and wholeheartedly support the campaign to free the world from the threat of terrorism.”

First Mom
: Laura Bush speaks to the SF Chronicle — or tries to — about John The Rat Traitor Superdoofus Walker Lindh. I can’t make much sense out of what she’s trying to say but I’m amused that they connect her problems with her kids to Lindh’s parents’ problem with theirs:

First lady Laura Bush said the “sad” journey of John Walker Lindh from Marin teenager to Taliban fighter provided both a cautionary tale and “a couple of lessons for parents” and others raising children.

“Certainly . . . make sure your children are mature before you allow them to do certain things,” said Bush, in an interview yesterday with The Chronicle, delivering her most detailed remarks to date on Lindh’s case. “In some ways, it’s sort of the extreme of what American parents want their children to do . . . travel the world.”

Saying the 20-year-old’s parents deserve sympathy, Bush said she believes Lindh’s parents, Frank Lindh and Marilyn Walker “feel terrible — no matter what their responsibility might have been to start with. They feel terrible now.”…

Saying she believes they are “certainly” deserving of sympathy now that their son faces multiple federal charges, Bush said parents must recognize the children’s level of maturity in allowing them the freedom to grow into adulthood.

“As all parents know, there’s a certain time when children are not going to do what their parents want them to,” said Bush, whose own teenagers’ foibles have been the subject of news coverage. “(They) get to a certain age where it doesn’t matter what you say to them.”

But parents fighting against inappropriate influences from the culture, media or television must “just continue to say . . . ‘these aren’t our values, ‘ ” she said.

Tourist meets terrorist
: A Guardian writer’s close encounter with the purported kidnapper of Daniel Pearl.

I am me
: I don’ t why this amuses me — I sometimes don’t know why things do — but I chuckled at Tim Blair‘s author bio at the bottom of his piece in The Australian defending his homeland against an American assault: “Tim Blair is editor of timblair.blogspot.com.” Who needs editors?

Where were you in the war, Daddy?
: So now I understand what Photoshop Tennis is, now that I see More Than Zero(MTZ_ and Mind Over What Matters (MOWM) place themselves on a 9.11 aerial view. I’ve joined in: I was between WTC 1 and 5, then across the street, then along Broadway, then at Liberty when WTC 2 came down.

: I just added Live from WTC (WFWTC)‘s location.

Alert R Us
: Life in New York on High Alert Day (formerly Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday)… Three people can’t get to a meeting on time this morning because they closed the Lincoln Tunnel, just like the old days of five months ago…. I’m riding the PATH train back from New York (not enjoying being in a tunnel under water on this fine holiday) when we are detoured around a station because of “police action” there. As the announcement is made, everyone on the train looks at each other: wide-eyed eye contact all around, not reflecting irritation (as before 9.11) or panic (as shortly after 9.11) but worry, clearly worry. A reminder.

Ted opens his mouth
: As an unwilling stockholder in AOL (oh, how I wish I’d gotten rid of my Time Warner before the damned AOL merger), I regret that they’ve rehired Ted Turner, who made the mistake of opening his yap today:

“The reason that the World Trade Center got hit is because there are a lot of people living in abject poverty out there who don’t have any hope for a better life,” he said.

He said the attacks were an act of desperation, and that Americans lack an understanding of a willingness to die for one’s country.

“I think they were brave at the very least,” Turner said of the 19 airliner hijackers believed to have committed the attacks, adding that they “might have been a little nuts.”

The World Bridge
: I posted this on my 9.11 memorial blog as well but I like the idea so much I’m posting it here, too:

The more I hear about the proposed 9.11 memorial building a bridge for people across the Hudson River, the more I like it. The Jersey Journal in Jersey City has a feature on the plan:

“This is a place for people to go to, not just to go through,” said [architect Eytan] Kaufman, whose company has mostly redeveloped commercial buildings for residential use.

The World Bridge would be a completely people-oriented tourist attraction and no cars would be allowed to rumble through any of its six to eight floors. With a promenade, restaurants, shops and hotel accommodations, the 6 million-square-foot bridge would offer everything found on a New York City block – except it would span the Hudson River. Kaufman also proposes creating a public park for recreation and leisure.

“Its scale would be like the scale of the disaster,” said Kaufman, who drafted the proposal for his own benefit before he learned of the exhibit.

Futuristic in structure and function, the bridge would also help eliminate what Kaufman perceives as long-time disparities between New York and New Jersey.

“You tend to think of New York as the dominant partner,” he said, citing shared ventures between the two states such as the Port Authority. He also pointed out that many Sept. 11 victims were from New Jersey.

“I realized how good it might be for two financial centers, one already made and one in the making; this bridge would physically connect these two centers,” said Kaufman. “It would be a stronger symbol of the two states than a tower in Manhattan.”…

“I feel the towers sent a different signal before, a signal of dominance and a signal of power,” he said. “It looks to me now more important to recognize the other part of the world.”…

[Kaufman] envisions a bridge that would be some 250 feet above the water, just a little higher than the George Washington Bridge, so it wouldn’t affect shipping traffic.

Our flag
: After my post on wearing the American flag — and when and whether to take it off — I got email. Charles Austin wrote that he never put on a pin: “It seems to me that wearing a pin is symptomatic of the empty belief that it is important for other people to know that ‘you care.’ I will happily hold my patriotism up with anybody’s, but that’s not the point.” That’s a good and proper reaction to the pin overreaction: yellow pins, pink pins, red pins, we all needed a scorecard to figure out who on the Oscars cared about what. Yes, this was show-off morality and I find that distasteful. That’s why I felt doubly odd wearing the pin myself: It’s a flag and it’s showing off. But I took it not as bragging but rather as defiance against those who would try to kill us just because we are American. F you, it said.

Then Daniel Hartung sent me a link to a great Doonesbury, in which the liberal berates the conservative for having stolen the flag for so many years:

You guys hijacked the flag years ago, during the Cold War, especially the Vietnam era, turning it into a symbol of unquestioning, jingoistic nationalism. Now it’s back to being a symbol of patriotism and love of country, not a particular political agenda. So thanks for restoring it to ALL of us.”

I still have my pin on.

Heroes
: They found the bodies of five Port Authority Police officers who had been in the lobby of 1 World Trade Center (and now are 60 feet and five stories underground. The NY Times reports that they appear to have died selflessly trying to carry an obese woman out of the building as it collapsed, even knowing — after the collapse of the other tower — that the danger was imminent. God bless you.

Five months after: Love and fear
: Soon after our first child was born, 10 years ago, I promised myself that our children would never go to sleep without hearing that we loved them; it’s a small moment but it matters. Over time, this has evolved into what we now call “special words,” a nightly litany of all the people (and a deity) who love our children “all the way to the sky, as high as high, forever and ever.”

After 9.11, my son has added his own tradition. He — and now his little sister as well — will not let my wife or me leave their sight without making sure to say, “I love you.” Every morning from the garage door as I back out; every night as I close the bedroom door; sometimes even when I run out for coffee: “I love you.” And I, of course, repeat the words.

As I’ve mentioned before in this space, this small act at once fills me with joy but also sorrow, for it betrays an obvious but deep fear of what did not happen, but could have happened to me and my family five months ago today. We have never discussed the details or the what-if’s of 9.11. But we do not need to. For behind these private words is a quiet but profound recognition of what changed that day.

It is a lesson for me. If today for a rare moment I try to think that life is returning to some old normal or that the changes in life since that day are not so shattering, all I have to do is leave for work or get ready for bed to be reminded that the change is, in fact, findamental — the potential for change is always with us now.

Now we must say “I love you” because the greatest fear of all is what would happen if we did not. We never expected to be attacked from the sky that day. We can’t know what to expect next. So all we can do now is hold onto each other and remind ourselves how much that matters (and how everything else, from politics to money, does not matter). That is all we can control and so we grasp for it. That very need, that sudden compulsion, is a daily reminder of the change and uncertainty and fear we live with now.

So, today, five months after, I am struck by the depth of the change in our lives even as, superficially, that change is less evident.

And I am struck by the simple, profound wisdom of a child in the face of this change and this fear: Without ever saying so, it is clear that he knows what it means and what matters and what we can do about it.