BuzzMachine

A new weblolg: The memorial
: I’m going to try to start a new weblog devoted to the New York World Trade Center memorial, for there will be much debate and angst on the topic in the months and years to come and I believe it is vital that we create an appropriate memorial.

The weblog is at: www.buzzmachine.com/memorial.

Saudi snipers: Ready, aim fire!
: Two galling stories in the Sunday Times of London: One says that the Saudis with the help of the FBI just broke up a big bin Laden cell in Saudi Arabia that would have attacked the kingdom itself. The other tells of Saudis edging away from America.

Sontag snipers: Ready, aim, fire!
: Have fun, bloggers: UCLA buys Susan Sontag’s archives for $1.1 million.

Whining Aussies
: So Australians are whining about their Taliban on the barbie at Club Fed. Tough. He went to fight with the Taliban against us. He’s not a citizen of the U.S. He’s a foreigner who fought us. That’s the way the cookie crumbles. Besides: You can bet that he’ll get off a lot lighter than Walker; he’s not a traitor to us, just a bloomin’ idiot.

Do bloggers party hearty?
: I’m jealous of the blog party in L.A., as reported by Ken Layne. There shouldn’t be such a critical mass of bloggers in L.A. Don’t they all know that New York is the center of the universe?

Will Warren’s neat / His is no mean feat / It even beats a bleat
: Will Warren of Unremitting Verse — the weblog with rhythm and rhyme — is the bravest of the bloggers. Any good blog — like any good column — requires the writer to put him or herself on display: the real you, nearly naked, ready to be embraced or shot at. Warren just started his blog in poetry and he puts himself on the line with every line. This is risky to do. It could flop like a stand-up comedy routine. Every time I start reading I get nervous for him. But every time, he wins me over. His latest is an LOL hit and will surely get him lots of hits (because it’s about blogs). With OJR’s Tim Cavanaugh in the role of Hiawatha, Warren sends him on a journey to our land of legend and mystery:

Filled with fear and fascination

Went the trembling Hiawatha,

Went to find the savage Bloggers,

Went to find the fearsome tribesmen,

Went to find the ones who dared to

Offer up their rude and savage

Postings while completely lacking

Institutional umbrella.

He comes upon many of the bloggers (thanks for my stanza, Will) and hits them with bullseyes:

Then he saw the Layne-and-Welch man,

Saw the weasel whipper walking,

Walking on four legs instead of

Two like everybody elseís;

Then he saw the fearsome creature

Was composed of two men fastened,

Fastened by a thousand tiny

Sutures made of links back-atcha….

Sitting in the clearingís center

Sat the largest of the Bloggers,

Sat the fiercest of the Bloggers,

Sat the one called InstaPundit,

And the fearstruck Hiawatha

Saw that he was typing faster,

Typing many times as fast as

All the other fearsome Bloggers;

With his left hand he drank coffee,

With his right hand he sent faxes,

In each ear he wore an earpiece:

In his left ear NPR played,

In his right ear it was C-SPAN;

On his desk sat two computers,

One for input, one for output;

He was writing, at the same time,

Four new posts for rapid posting.

Bravo

The Gating factor
: I didn’t used to read Paul Krugman in the New York Times but after all the fuss that Andrew Sullivan caused around him, I just had to start. And I’m glad I did. Today, Krugman speaks on Enron and the attacks and he concludes:

Why is Enron a problem for conservatives? Even if the Bush administration turns out to be squeaky clean, which we’ll never know unless it starts to be more forthcoming, the scandal threatens perceptions that the right has spent decades creating. After all that effort to discredit concerns about the gap between haves and have-nots as obsolete “class warfare,” along comes a real-life story that reads like a leftist morality play: wealthy executives make off with millions while ordinary workers lose their jobs and their life savings. After all that effort to convince people that the private sector can police itself, the most admired company in America turns out to have been a giant Ponzi scheme ó and the most respected accounting firm turns out to have been an accomplice.

You might think that the shock of the Enron scandal ó and it is shocking, even to us hardened cynics ó would make some conservatives reconsider their beliefs. But the die- hards prefer to sling muck at liberals, hoping it will stick.

They’re both wrong trying to paint this as a political scandal, another what-did-he-know-and-when-did-he-know-it? Nixon/Reagan/Clinton scandal, a *Gate.

No, this is a business scandal, a moral scandal. And unlike all those political scandals, this is a scandal with victims: employees and stockholders and customers and suppliers and the entire U.S. economy.

This is a scandal of greed, of course, of people who thought they were big enough and smart enough to skirt rules and sense and get away with it. We’ve seen it before.

What we need our political leaders to do now is to look toward protecting us from the next one. And that is not accomplished with extreme right-v-left sniping. This isn’t about extremes. All business is not evil. All regulation is not evil. We need appropriate freedom to run a business under appropriate regulation to protect the rights of the victims in this scandal. We need moderation. It worked after Sept. 11. It can work after Enron.

Aw, shucks…
: This humble ‘log is nominated for a Bloggie! as a political site. Mom is proud. I’m amazed and flattered. Here I am, the new kid on the block, and I’m nominated alongside the amazing Andrew Sullivan (whom I do, in fact, respect and admire even if I have been tweaking him these past few days hoping he’d unplug from Enron) and the generous Little Green Footballs (note that I link to them even if they don’t link to me… I should win as Mr. Congeniality) as well as Kill Your TV and Fark. Vote early, vote often.

Porky the Rat
: Were we all amazed at how John The Rat Traitor Superdoofus Walker Lindt has porked out, based on the pictures of his shaven puss in the papers yesterday? He sure won’t be able to argue that he was tortured and starved.

Papa, can you see me?
: A small cultural difference revealed in a Guardian story about Camp Fed (they call it a Carribbean gulag, among other slaps):

“People are asking after their fathers. If they want someone to know where they’re at its their father, not their mother,” said Colonel Terry Carrico, the head of the camp’s internal security force.

Cultural mysogony runs deep.

Images
: A wise essay by Marianne Hirsch on the photographic images that will last and become the icons of our memories of Sept. 11 [in the Chronicle of Higher Education… via Reductio Ad Absurdum:

Every major historical event since the beginning of photography has bequeathed an iconic image — in the 20th century, the picture of the little boy with his hands up in the Warsaw ghetto, or of prisoners in striped uniforms, for the Holocaust; the picture of the naked girl running down the road after a napalm attack for the Vietnam war; the picture of birds in an oil spill for the Persian Gulf war.

What will be the icons for September 11? What elements determine this process of reduction and iconization? And in what ways will the process be determined by aesthetic factors? It was fascinating to me that the four photographers interviewed by Charlie Rose agreed that the icon would be the picture of the three firemen raising the flag on top of the rubble, because it echoes the famous photograph of American GI’s raising the flag at Iwo Jima. In their search for the one lasting image, the panelists were looking for the conventional, not the new.

In the aftermath of an event as monumental as this one, we may need, eventually, to reduce the number of available images to just a few lasting ones that will structure our cultural memory. But we are not yet at that point.

All very true. I keep staring at the photos — once I’ve danced around them to make sure there’s nothing there that is too difficult. I don’t look often, but when I do, I stare. I stare to remember. I stare to find context. I stare to create memory.

I have every book of photos and have been meaning to write reviews of them here but I still dance around them.

Like Hirsch, I went to the Here Is New York gallery and stared. I bought a half-dozen photos that meant something to me, that touched my memory, but they sit in an envelope on a high shelf upstairs.

Hirsch is right: We need time to find out what the images and icons will be. As much as I admire the photo of the firemen raising the flag — and argued with others that it should not be mangled by committee for a PC statue — I know that that is not the image; it is the obvious one; it tries to find context in earlier images instead of this event. No, there will be a new image that means Sept. 11 to us. We will know it when we see it, when we stare at it long enough and see our memories and meaning in it.

Worldwide BlogBlogs
: While poor Thomas Nephew recovers from the flu, send some hits his way by looking down the page at his reports on German blogs.

Made me think that it would be great to have more international reports on blogs. I’d love to see what’s happening in tech-forward Scandinavia and we have two great candidates to give us those reports in Bj¯rn StÊrk and Frederik Norman. What about Eastern Europe (Nick Denton)? France? Spain? Wherever.

We have great English-language blogwatches now with Tim Blair and my home in blogwatchdom, Quasipundit.. Let’s act like the imperialist pigs we are and take on the world.

Excuses, excuses
: So John The Rat Traitor Superdoofus Walker (Lindt) is coming back to the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave today.

I’ve been thinking: When he was discovered in that fetid, death-stench basement in Afghanistan, if he had half a brain — which, obviously, he doesn’t — he would have shouted at the sight of a fellow American: “Thank God [note: God, not Allah], you’ve rescued me! I was held by these crazy terrorists. My God, do you know they’re the ones who attacked America? I had no idea we were going to fight you. I thought I was going to be a Muslim social worker. I tried to get away but they kept threatening to shoot me. Please take me home!”

Now if he had said that, some would have believed him and some wouldn’t and we’d be arguing here in blogdom over the question, “Is he a traitor?” But at least he’d have a chance of convincing people he was some sort of idiot victim instead of a terrorist. And besides, who would testify against him: other terrorists?

As the door slams shut on him today in a Federal prison, I just wonder whether any of this will be going through his mind: “Oh, what a frigging idiot doofus I am!”

: I also fantasize about Walker becoming a character on Oz. Imagine if Verne and his boys got hold of him. The black Muslims wouldn’t take him as one of their own. He’d be shish kebab in no time.

: Fantasy update: When crazy Mike Tyson goes to jail for (a) biting his opponent or (b) rape or (c) whatever he does next, maybe he should room with Walker.

: In New York, we have the honored tradition of the “perp walk,” in which alleged perpetrators are walked from one point to another where news cameras just happen to be so the world can see the guy. I don’t want just courtroom sketches of this guy. I want to see his face.

: Email update: A reader named Jim writes: “The other thing Lindh should have done to save his own ass… Stopped talking in that fake accent. ‘My har-dt h-went out to the peeples…’ Whatever, Latka.”

Flashing blue light special on plastic explosives
: Via Holy Weblog: ABC reports that coupon fraud helped fund the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Tom Ridge’s to-do list
: The Washington Post says this is what Ridge has been up to.

Rhymes with Ridge… uh, Fridge? Smidge?
: Will Warren has a great new verse on his site about one of my very favorite subjects Tom “Do Nothing” Ridge (aka Tom “Remember Me?” Ridge):

Now anthrax has all gone away; I didnít have to budge.

It wonít be coming back, it seems (as best as I can judge).

When people started fretting ëbout the Games in Salt Lake town,

I said, ìWe canít make promisesî and that sure calmed ëem down.

A young Osama wannabe flew right into a bank:

Said I, ìHeís not a terrorist, with such a little tank.î

(Chorus:)

ëCause you donít panic! Youíre not volcanic!

You sure donít have much zing,

Itís pure serenity you bring.

Youíre just not manic! You ainít galvanic!

And thatís by far the most important thing.

I go to lots of meetings and I build bureaucracy;

The more we sit in offices, the more security.

From me the people of this land will rarely hear a peep:

I wouldnít want to say a thing that might disturb their sleep.

My soporific policy is working as it ought:

The nationís doing fine while Iím not doing diddly-squat.

Even more frightening than The Chair
: BBC2 is going to scare the scones out of Brits with a docudrama, Smallpox 2002 — Silent Weapon, killing off 60 million people with a biological attack starting in London and New York. The Day After: the biological sequel.

Just a biased opinion
: Andrew Sullivan is getting boring.

: Alan Keyes’ new MSNBC show is even more boring.

Psst. Instapundit sent me
: Scroll down to yesterday for the Arab/Olympic post.

Fine, leave
: Robert Altman, crackpot director (I always hated Nashville; nonsensical and overrated) fumes about America to the Times of London [via Drudge, NY Post] and once again tries to blame terrorists on Hollywood (as if they were watching Bruce Willis movies in Kabul):

ìI am a political person,î Altman says, ìbut I donít have to put a strong debate into a film. This present government in America I just find disgusting, the idea that George Bush could run a baseball team successfully ó he canít even speak! I just find him an embarrassment. I was over here when the election was on and I couldnít believe it ó and Iím 76 years old. Then when the Supreme Court came in and turned out to be a totally political animal, the last shred of any naivety that was left in me has gone. When I see an American flag flying, itís a joke.î

An enraged Altman suddenly checks himself, aware that he is on sensitive ground in our post-September 11 world. But, controversially, he thinks that Hollywood may have inspired the World Trade Centre attacks. ìWe gave them the ideas ó it was a movie,î he fumes. ìWe should be ashamed of ourselves….

“If you asked would I live in London the rest of my life, yeah, Iíd be very happy to stay here. Thereís nothing in America that I would miss at all.î

It’ll take more than barbed wire to keep us apart
: The British press keeps looking for the moment when we do something to split up the alliance. Remember (I’m too lazy to find the old links but you’ll recall) when they shouted that all our bombing would split apart the alliance with Britain et al. Didn’t happen. Now they say that our prison on the beach will do it. Don’t believe it.

: There is no unified view of our treatment of the prisoners; just look at Tim Blair‘s excellent compilation of confusion.

: The Red Cross complains about our prison. Yes, the Red Cross is an organization with great credibility these days.

Or just stay home under your blanket
: If you were starting to feel normal again, just read this report from an antiterrorism class in the Times of London. Handy tips include:

If your plane gets hijacked, you will have one and a half minutes to take action. Prudent passengers will do the following:

– Once on board, ensure you have an airline blanket, can of Coke, pen, magazine and keys within easy reach.

– If the plane is hijacked, these become instant weapons. The blanket is to smother the terrorist, the belt to garrotte him. The belt can also be swung buckle first.

– Pens and keys can take out eyes and be used on pressure points.

– Roll up the magazine and jab it at the hijackerís eyes or solar plexus, or aim it at an artery.

– Placing shoes on the hands offers some protection.

– A can of Coke can either be thrown at the hijacker or used at close range to give force to a blow on the head or neck.

Or just hope there’s an air marshall on board!

Rightie media bias, cont.
: Andrew Sullivan, still playing his one-note, keeps going after Krugman but handles Bill Kristol with cashmere-lined kid gloves. Kristol revealed that he was paid by Enron. “Good for Bill,” says Andrew. The details? Oh, Andrew’s patient. Looks like a case of media bias to me.

: Even Opinion Journal’s Taranto says Sullivan is over-reacting.

This man needs intervention. Call Redbaiters Anonymous, quick. He needs a sponsor. 12 steps back to the middleground.

: Update: Sullivan has checked himself into rehab: “NO MORE KRUGMAN: I promise. Point made. But keep your eyes peeled for any other Enron-sponsored pundits on their high horses.”