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democracy now - broadcast April 24 from boise

BSU Looses Poinsettia Bowl

With the economy giving even the strongest optimist pause, winter weather which is downright wintery, and the dull ache of the holiday-of-holiday's Christmas nearing - our hometown-heros lost their battle in the interpretive smash-up contest otherwise known as the Poinsettia Bowl.

Last year there were people storming the statehouse after Boise State came from behind to win the Fiesta Bowl.  Bronco Fever overcame the city.  We had won.  Well, not us specifically, but our team had won.  The team that lives in our city and goes to our university.  And so therefor, for a brief moment of time, we were all winners.  Degrees from Boise State suddenly carried more cache.  What was labeled "the best college bowl game of all time" became canonized with DVD-Rentals, television talk show appearances, and commemorative books.  Gone were the days of BSU/UofI rivalry - Boise had just clicked up one strata into a new level of football consciousness.

We watched the Poinsettia Bowl unfold at The Falcon Tavern - a downtown pub with excellent beer, surprisingly good food and a comfy view of several televisions as well as Main Street.  One Jalapeno Burger, One Corned Beef & Pastrami Sandwich, One Nutbrown Ale and One Stout kicked off our football watching.  As the game drew on, the third quarter required some coffee.  We were treated to many commercials advertising better pee-flow for men and various insurance/banking companies.

When the fourth quarter started, BSU was behind.  They kicked a field goal and got some points - but found themselves an unfortunate single-point behind TCU nearing the conclusion. (TCU is Texas Christian University) The team huddles up, devises a strategy, the quarterback throws - and with 1:53 left in the game - the ball is intercepted by the other team.  With that small amount of time left, it is almost impossible to get the ball back and make a touchdown - and the loss becomes clear.

From inside the pub, i didn't sense sadness or despair, but an overt numbness.  What does it mean to choke in the last moments of a game?  What must #11 feel right now, with so many adoring fans left hanging and feeling disappointed in their return to "regular" fan status without an undefeated team to seek exceptions for.

Stopping at the original Albertsons grocery afterward, reminded that the store had a "new look" yet would never be the local hometown favorite it once was, we spotted many in their BSU team gear.

Having played sports - i understand the psychological pressure of the last moments of a close game - which can turn anyones solid mental state into mush.  The anticipation turns performance upside down and creates the very thing the anxiety was trying to avoid - failure. 

What can we do to deal with this city-wide sense of defeat numbness?  Continue on and study ourselves.  For it is only in the realization that we are not "our team", that binary competition of us-vs-them has become obsolete, and that performance anxiety is crippling, in all areas of life. 

I am, Unfortunately, Randy Newman

Macworld Expo 2008, Randy Newman at Apple Keynote

Lewis H. Lapham, The Gulf of Time

"He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth."--Goethe

During my years as editor of Harper’s Magazine, I could rely on the post office to mark the degree to which I was living in what Goethe surely would have regarded as straitened circumstances. Every morning at ten o’clock, I sat down to a desk occupied by five newspapers and seven periodicals (four of them embroiled in politics, the others concerned with socio-economic theory or scientific discovery), three volumes of ancient or modern history (the War of 1812, the death of Christopher Marlowe, the life of Suleiman the Magnificent), a public opinion poll sifting America’s attitude toward family values and assault weapons, and at least fifteen manuscripts, solicited and unsolicited, whose authors assured me in their cover letters that they had unearthed, among other items of interest, the true reason for the Kennedy assassinations and the secret of the universe.

The afternoon mail added to the weight of evidence making the case for what I didn’t know and wasn’t likely ever to know, and, over a period of years, I came up with a risk-assessment model wired to the sound of the human voice. If, on first looking through a dispatch from the Yale University library or the White House Situation Room, I couldn’t hear the voice of its author, I let it go the way of the Carolina Parakeet. The device operated as a loophole through which I escaped the tax of having to read most of what rolled out of the presses in any given year in one or another of the dead languages designed for television broadcast or the teaching of better business management. The volume of email traffic and the expansions of the Internet over the last two decades have broadened the market for “multimedia interfacing” and “innovative delivery strategies,” brightening our horizons with “quicker access to valued customers,” accelerating the transmission of unintelligible messages written in academic cipher or ideological code. The surfeit of new and newer news, “prioritized” and “context-sensitive,” now comes so quickly to hand that, although we may wish it otherwise, we’re smothered in the feathers of the stuff—on air, in print, online; as broadcast, podcast, broadsheet, blog. Within the wind tunnels of the high-speed electronic media, the time is always now; the data blow away or shred, and what gets lost is all thought of what happened yesterday, last week, three months or twenty years ago. Unlike moths and goldfish, human beings deprived of memory tend to become disoriented and easily frightened. Not only do we lose track of our own stories (who we are, where we’ve been, where we might be going), but our elected representatives forget why sovereign nations go to war.

On the assumption that the blessed states of amnesia cannot support either the hope of individual liberty or the practice of democratic self-government, Lapham’s Quarterly grounds its editorial premise on the risk-assessment model that allowed me to edit Harper’s Magazine. If the words on the page translate into the sound of a human voice, I don’t much care whether the author sets up the mise-en-scène in 1740s Paris or Harlem in the 1920s. Some years ago on its editorial page, the New York Times handed down the ruling that, “Great publications magnify beyond measure the voice of any single writer.” The sentence employed the wrong verb. The instruments of the media amplify a voice, serving much the same purposes as a loudspeaker in a ballpark or a prison. What magnifies a voice is the force of mind and the power of expression, which is why Shakespeare’s plays still draw a crowd in Central Park, and why we find the present in the past, the past in the present, in voices that have survived the wreck of empires and the accidents of fortune.

As a college student, I acquired the habit of reading with a pencil in my hand, and, in books that I’ve encountered more than once, I discover marginalia ten or forty years out of date, most of it amended or revised to match a change in attitude or plan. In a worn copy of Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, in what I take to be my handwriting at age nineteen, I find a series of exclamation points subsequently crossed out and accompanied by the remark, in my handwriting circa the age of thirty, “Too romantic.” In a biography of Aaron Burr, I come across a note, “Too cynical,” corrected at a later date and with a different pen, by the further note, “Maybe not.” Reading the work of authors reporting from the front lines of different centuries, it sometimes happens that I find myself at different periods in the history of the same map coordinates—Herodotus and T. E. Lawrence exploring the deserts of Arabia; George Orwell, Martin Amis, and Samuel Johnson tempted by the seductions of London. When I complicate the proceedings with a superimposition of marginalia reaching across a distance of fifty years and written while traveling in cities as unlike one another as Chicago and Havana, I can begin to guess at what the physicists have in mind when they talk about the continuum of space and time.

It’s been said that over the span of nine months, the human embryo ascends through a sequence congruent with fifty million years of evolution; that within the first six years of life, the human mind replicates the dream of its five-thousand-year journey from the sand castle cities of ancient Mesopotamia. The figures in the dream have left the signs of their passing in what we know as the historical record, navigational lights flashing across the gulf of time on scraps of papyrus and scratchings in stone, on ships’ logs and bronze coins, as epic poems and totem poles and painted ceilings, in confessions voluntary and coerced, in five-act plays and three-part songs.

The record is our inheritance, the one that Goethe had in mind when he suggested a restructuring of the deal that Satan offered Faust. It isn’t with magic that men make their immortality. They do so with what they’ve learned on their travels across the frontiers of five millennia, salvaging from the ruin of families and the death of cities what they find to be useful or beautiful or true. We have nothing else with which to build the future except the lumber of the past—history exploited as natural resource and applied technology, telling us that the story painted on the old walls and printed in the old books is also our own.

Cicero made the point fifty years before the birth of Christ: “Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child.” The American historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., made the same point in the essay that served as his epitaph when it was published in the New York Times on January 1, 2007, two months before he died. Under the heading, “Folly’s Antidote,” he prescribed strong doses of history as a cure for “the delusions of omnipotence and omniscience,” akin to those that persuaded the Bush Administration to stage a rerun in Iraq of America’s misadventure in Vietnam. The failure to connect the then with the now Schlesinger diagnosed as an illness which, if left untreated, he thought likely to lead to the death of the American idea. Children unfamiliar with the world in time make easy marks for the dealers in fascist politics and quack religion. The number of people in the United States at the moment who believe in the literal truth of the Book of Revelation exceeds the number of people who lived in all of medieval Christendom.

An acquaintance with history doesn’t pay the rent or predict the outcome of next year’s election, but, as the season or occasion requires, it makes possible the revolt against what G. K. Chesterton once called, “the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about”; instills a sense of humor; and brings with it the tray of “examples and warnings” offered by the Roman historian Livy as, “fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.” About the methods of pacifying cities bloodied by civil war, I learn more from Machiavelli’s Discourses or the Memoirs of William Tecumseh Sherman than from the testimony of General David Petraeus or the commentary on Fox News. When I see Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani being bundled around the country in a flutter of media consultants fitting words into their mouths, I think of the makeup artists adjusting the ribbons in Emperor Nero’s hair before sending him into an amphitheater to sing with a choir of prostitutes. The remembrance of the good old days in ancient Rome serves as a program note for the performances on set with Diane Sawyer and Tim Russert.

To bring at least some of the voices of the past up to the microphone of the present, Lapham’s Quarterly chooses a topic prominent in the news and, within the perimeter of that topic, assembles a set of relevant texts—literary narrative and philosophical commentary, diaries, speeches, letters, and proclamations, as well as essays and reviews by contemporary historians. The method assumes that all writing, whether scientific treatise, tabloid headline, or minimalist novel, is an attempt to tell a true story. Some stories are more complicated or more beautiful than others. Some stories are immortal, others incoherent. Homer told a story, and so did Albert Einstein; so do Jay Leno and Donald Duck. The stories that bear a second reading are true in the sense that the voice of the author emerges from the struggle to get at the truth of what he or she thinks, has seen, remembers, can find language to express. I know of no task more difficult, but it is the joint venture entered into by writer and reader—the writer’s labor turned to the wheel of the reader’s imagination—that produces the freedoms of mind from which a society gathers its common stores of energy and hope.

My sense of such an enterprise I gathered from a prolonged correspondence with the readers of Harper’s Magazine—people whom I never met and wouldn’t recognize if I came across them in an elevator or a police lineup. The return addresses on their envelopes didn’t amount to a demographic profile valuable to an advertising agency (some of the readers drank a great deal of brandy; others subsisted on mushrooms and dried fruit; some had attended as many as seven universities; others had yet to graduate from high school), but if I couldn’t guess at the weight of anybody’s automobile or stock portfolio, I knew that I was talking to people bound together by their interest in the meaning of words. When they found something amiss in a published manuscript, they took the trouble to correct a wrong fact or repair a disjointed paragraph. No matter what the subject under discussion—the authorship of the Bible, the moral bankruptcy of the Reagan or Clinton administrations, the trouble with New York literary critics, the neglected reasons for the fall of the Ming Dynasty—the care taken with the composition of their letters testified to the importance they attached to the telling of a truer story. Like the writers whose work appeared in the magazine, its readers were unafraid of the first-person singular, willing to think out loud, to bet the pot on a metaphor, to look for words that maybe could settle the wilderness of their experience with the fence posts of a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Addressed to readers similarly inclined, Lapham’s Quarterly doesn’t aspire to the status of homework. It undertakes to foster and extend an acquaintance with history, to suggest that the uses of the past are as rich in possibility as were the American forests before the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Again, I’m indebted to Arthur Schlesinger, whose enthusiasms were communicable. Knowing that the four most expensive words in the English language are “This time it’s different,” Arthur also knew that the study of history is a perpetual work in progress carried forward under the headings of the provisional, destined never to reach a final verdict or discover the lost gold mines of the imperishable truth. Some things change, others don’t, but absent a knowledge of which is which, how then do we find our bearings in the drift of time?

So also is Lapham’s Quarterly a work in progress, provisional and incomplete, its elements forthcoming from a quorum of contributing historians and at the suggestion of readers who send texts and commentaries to www.laphamsquarterly.org; its subscribers can expect the eventual additions of Letters to the Editor, Notes on New Books, Counterfactual Speculations, and Recommended Reading. Because the contents will never qualify for the label “comprehensive,” the editorial choices come down to the difference between writing that’s a pleasure to read and writing that isn’t. Neither the holder of an advanced academic degree nor a candidate for university tenure, I can afford to take liberties with the rules of scholarly category and definition, and from an author whom I admire I will listen to anything and everything—to reports of marvels in Samarkand or Winesburg, Ohio, to descriptions of Talleyrand’s mistresses or Kaiser Wilhelm’s uniforms, to suspicions of fraud in Albany, or to a rumor of giant ants standing watch over the treasure of Peru. If I’m to believe the physicists and the evolutionary record, the figures in the dream inhabit the continuum of space and time, which means that they depend for their existence on acts of the imagination.

Heraclitus named war “the father of all things,” and so it is with the first issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. The decision wasn’t hard to reach. The history of Western Civilization bills itself as the romance of war. On whom else do we bestow the prize of immortality (Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Adolf Hitler) if not on the champions of mortal destruction? For generations it’s been said that man’s destiny is war, the trials by combat endorsed by the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, as the “terrible,” but “necessary” purgative that “saves the state from social petrification and stagnation,” praised by the poet, William Ernest Henley, as the “giver of kingship, the fame-smith, the song-master.”

An old story, told and retold, in different languages, under different flags, with the blessing of different holy names, across the span of a hundred generations, the lines of bloodstained succession as fiercely preserved as a family inheritance. Pick up the thread of the narrative in Babylon in the days of Cyrus the Great, move forward in time to the triumphs of Alexander of Macedon, student of Aristotle, to Caesar’s legions governing what they knew as the province of Mesopotamia, through the centuries of languid despotism imposed on the valley of the Euphrates by the grand viziers of the Sublime Porte, to the division of the Ottoman spoils at the Treaty of Versailles, and so at last, with a new store of fireworks and a fresh set of headlines, to President George W. Bush’s theory of democratic empire at play in the wreckage of downtown Baghdad.

No matter how often told, the story begins with a call to arms and ends with a cortege of postmortems. The sequence of texts in this issue of the Quarterly follows the customary procedure, the rules of engagement subject to change on short notice, the fields of honor seldom as advertised. Had it occurred to President Bush and his adjutants to conduct a similar review—of their thinking about war as well as about the disposition of their horses and guns—it’s at least conceivable that the U.S. Army might not have been sent to trample out the vintage where Saddam Hussein supposedly had stored the grapes of wrath. The industrial-strength bloodletting on the Western Front in World War I discredited the notion of war as a glorious undertaking certain to provide proofs of selfless valor and noble character; the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945 mothballed the use of large-scale warfare as the heavyweight instrument of foreign policy. If it’s true that all societies trace their origins to the god of war, it’s also true that over time they learn to limit the collateral damage, to no longer regard war as a law of nature but as a form of cultural expression, like the wearing of togas and Halloween masks.

The military historian John Keegan observes in A History of Warfare that sooner or later the captains and the kings find more cost-effective ways of keeping the peace and robbing the populace. “War, it seems to me, after a lifetime of reading about the subject, mingling with men of war, visiting the sites of war and observing its effects, may well be ceasing to commend itself to human beings as a desirable or productive, let alone rational, means of reconciling their discontents.” Not as tentative as Keegan, the historian John Mueller (from whom an essay, “Band of Brigands,” appears on page 193) shapes the argument of his book The Remnants of War on the premise that “unlike breathing, eating, or sex, war is not something that is somehow required by the human condition or by the forces of history. Accordingly, war can shrivel up and disappear, and it seems to be in the process of doing so.”

Consistent with the story lines of the twentieth century’s wars to end all wars, the conclusions drawn by Keegan and by Mueller suggest that President Bush’s splendid little war in Iraq is the work of a man imprisoned in an obsolete tense. His adjutants apparently find it hard to say anything in his presence that doesn’t go well with the sound of bugles, and in the speeches staged against a backdrop of flags and high-ranking uniforms, he presents himself as a military commander in the romantic tradition of General George Patton (page 24), captivated by the song of the sword that Oliver Wendell Holmes brought to the students at Harvard University in 1895 (page 30), content with the blessing of Saint Augustine (page 36). To accept as a consequence the price being paid to the piper in Iraq is to acknowledge the truth of the old Arab proverb that says we have less reason to fear what might happen tomorrow than to beware of what happened yesterday. I know of no better reason to read history. Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.

> LAPHAMS ONLINE INTERVIEWS, LISTEN HERE

featuring

Sir Harold Evans is Editor at Large of The Week Magazine and the author of the critically acclaimed They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators (Little, Brown and Company, 2004). Evans was the President and Publisher of Random House trade group from 1990-1997.

Listen ~

Michael Lind is Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. He is the author of the ground-breaking study of American grand strategy, The American Way of Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life (Oxford, 2006).

Listen ~

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of fourteen books, including the New York Times bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch.  A frequent contributor to Harper's and The Nation, she has been a columnist at The New York Times and Time magazine.

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Michael Hudson is the President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends and Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the author, most recently, of Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance (Pluto Press, 2003).

Listen ~

Tim Weiner is author of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday, 2007).

Listen ~

abe lincoln screenprint by jnrx

"...that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."  - Abraham Lincoln

Where are we to begin?

"So, seeing all this, where are we to begin? Where does one begin to bring about this fundamental change which is so obviously essential in the social order? Surely, the individual problem is the world problem. Society is what we have made it. There are those who have, and those who have not, those who know, and those who are ignorant, those who are fulfilling their ambition, and those who are frustrated; there are the various religions, with their ceremonies and dogmatic beliefs, and the ceaseless battle within society, this everlast­ing competition with each other to achieve, to become. All this is what you and I have created. Social reforms may be brought about through legislation or through tyranny, but unless the individual radically changes, he will always overcome the new pattern to suit his psycho­logical demands—which is again what is happening in the world."

- JKrishnamurti, Collected Works, Vol. IX - 226

- found @ Huckleberries Online

You've got to get to know Dana Milbank, the Washington Post "political theater" writer.

A national political reporter for the Post, Milbank writes Washington Sketch, an observational column about political theater in the White House, Congress and elsewhere in the capital. He covered the 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns and President Bush's first term.

Before coming to the Post as a Style political writer in 2000, he covered the Clinton White House for the New Republic and Congress for the Wall Street Journal.

 

 

> Milbank's "Washington Sketch" Page (articles and video)

 

 

> Read His Recent Washington Post Articles

 

Watch A Few Of His Recent Washington Post Videos
> Little Green Vote

 

 

> Senate Slumber Party

 

 

> Here Lies A Man Impeached

news knitter

 

News Knitter is a data visualization project which focuses on knitted garments as an alternative medium to visualize large scale data. -link

 

If I had no concept about myself, what would happen to me?

Why have I, who have lived forty, fifty, sixty—or whatever number of years it is that one has lived—why have I gathered this store-houseful of what I think, what I feel, what I am, what I should be, this accumulation of experience, knowledge? And if I had not done that, what would happen? Do you understand? If I had no concept about myself, what would happen to me? I would be lost, wouldn’t I? I would be uncertain, terribly frightened of life. So I build an image, a myth, a concept, a conclusion about myself, because without this framework life would become for me utterly meaningless, uncertain, fearful: there would be no security. I may be secure outwardly; I may have a job, a house, and all the rest of it, but inwardly also I want to be completely secure. And it is the desire to be secure that compels me to build this image of myself, which is verbal. Do you understand? It has no reality at all; it is merely a concept, a memory, an idea, a conclusion.

JKrishnamurti.org - Daily Quote
-The Collected Works, Vol. XV - 193

      

the someday lounge (portland, or) has a huge archive of web-streamed performances.

also, clips on the tube

German Spacecraft TerraSAR-X is taking high-resolution images of earth from orbit  (from metafilter)

from the morass of the Neurolux Message Board, someone alledging to work for the Royal Towers construction team snapped this photo of some super-hero video action being filmed on top of the Neurolux roof . . . anyone know anything about this?  email me if you know what this project is - i'd love to know more about it.

Dr. Michael Parenti: "Lies, War, and Empire" given May 12, 2007 at Antioch University in Seattle

engaging talks from NYPL

Guntar Grass and Norman Mailer  (watch or listen)

Miranda July, Becky Stark & David Byrne (listen)

Werner Hertzog "Was the 20th Century a Mistake?"

two thoughts for today

"If our life lacks a constant magic, it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form instead of being impelled by their force.

No matter how loudly we clamor for magic in our lives, we are really afraid of pursuing an existence entirely under its influence and sign."

-- ANTONIN ARTAUD

EVENT:  It's Happening Now



One makes oneself a visionary by a long, immense, and reasoned disordering of the senses.

-- RIMBAUD

TECHNOLOGY:  Pure Data

the YES MEN strike again . . . this time in Alberta at the Calgary Stampede!!
(via mediageek)

VIVOLEUM (un-offical website)   
video of their presentation
video remembering Reggie Spangler
video from their presentation

VINTAGE 1974 FILM ABOUT TELEPHONES

  

RADIO AND RECORDS
SPACE PATROL (old time radio show)
the space alphabet (record)
journey to the moon (record)
space songs (record)
ronald mcdonald visits america (record)

declare independence

we are design (flickr pool)
sophie treadwell (flickr photos featuring kitsune)