Saturday night.

* The TSA has finally put an end to the terrorist's favorite toy: snowglobes.

* When your neighbor is unemployed: Bob Herbert has a good column in the New York Times today about the disparate rates of unemployment on different socioeconomic groups.

* 2010 will be the year of the deficit hawk.

* Poetry fight: Stephen King in Playboy vs. an ode to Megan Fox.

* "History should record that whether through unprecedented administrative incompetence or orchestrated mendacity, the American people were misled about the nation’s response to the 9/11 attacks."

* As of July 2009, California's budget shortfall was 49.3% of its general funds. States have considered drastic options to fill such gaps. "I looked as hard as I could at how states could declare bankruptcy," said Michael Genest, director of the California Department of Finance who is stepping down at the end of the year. "I literally looked at the federal constitution to see if there was a way for states to return to territory status." Via Edge of the American West, where eric asks, "Seriously, though, what does it mean—this is not a rhetorical question, I’d really like to know and don’t have an answer—when it seems more plausible to engage in constitutional shenanigans than to, for example, restore the vehicle licensing fee to its full former level, and other measures of that sort?"

Wake up, sheeple! Health care reform is just like 9/11.

We're off to sample Detroit today. While we're waiting for showers to finish here are a few links I never got around to yesterday.

* Dollhouse 2.3, which I haven't seen yet, ticked upwards in the ratings, managing this week to beat reruns on ABC. Related: Ten TV Spin-offs That Were Better Than the Original Shows includes Angel—I agree in the main—Daria, Xena, DS9, and, The Simpsons. Also related: Flashforward is falling fast, endorsing Bill's thesis that the show is blowing it. Related and ridiculous: "Is science fiction becoming feminized?" Mary Shelley will be heartbroken.

* Josh Marshall on the Nobel: [T]he unmistakable message of the award is one of the consequences of a period in which the most powerful country in the world, the 'hyper-power' as the French have it, became the focus of destabilization and in real if limited ways lawlessness. A harsh judgment, yes. But a dark period. And Obama has begun, if fitfully and very imperfectly to many of his supporters, to steer the ship of state in a different direction. If that seems like a meager accomplishment to many of the usual Washington types it's a profound reflection of their own enablement of the Bush era and how compromised they are by it, how much they perpetuated the belief that it was 'normal history' rather than dark aberration. More from Steve Benen.

* Something, something, something, Detroit.

* The big Moon bombing appears not to have gone so well. Did the aliens step in?

* Iceland, an epicenter of the last financial crisis, looks to recover with data centers that offer free air-side cooling.

* The L.A. Times discusses the Fantastic Mr. Fox directing controversy. (via)

* Some bad news: Universe To End Sooner Than Thought.

* And more bad news: time has not ceased its unrelenting march.

Sunday night links.

* Details on the Franklin Center's Sun Ra event this Friday.

* Nigeria has banned District 9.

* Consumer electronics and the Jevons Paradox.

* Atheists: we're #1.

* See also: Terry Eagleton and "religion for radicals."

* Does this video from College Humor mean it's now okay to joke about 9/11?

* And a Daily Kos diary on Ayn Rand.

Interestingly, despite her general disdain for humanity, there were people she seemed to admire greatly, such as William Edward Hickman, whose credo, "What is good for me is right," she described in her Journals as, "The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I have heard." But Hickman was no simple expositor of personal greed and self-interest; no mere modern day libertarian; no pedestrian practitioner of excessive self-love. No indeed. He was a sociopathic murderer. In 1927 he kidnapped a 12-year old girl from a school in Los Angeles by the name of Marian Parker, chopped off her legs, cut our her internal organs, drained all of her blood and then spread parts of her body all over the city.

Of Hickman, this sick murderer, Rand had almost nothing but positive things to say.

Late night Friday.

* As expected, Waxman-Markey passed the House earlier tonight, despite the usual deranged opposition. (Voting breakdown from FiveThirtyEight.) Ezra and Matt pour over a chart that demonstrates just how little this will cost, despite what Republicans are claiming, while Grist considers whether cap and trade has ever actually achieved its stated goals. I'm disappointed with the bill and terrified about what the Senate will pass.

* MoveOn will target Kay Hagan for her opposition to the public option. Good.

* Froomkin's last column at the Washington Post takes the media to task for completely failing us over the last few decade.

And while this wasn't as readily apparent until President Obama took office, it's now very clear that the Bush years were all about kicking the can down the road – either ignoring problems or, even worse, creating them and not solving them. This was true of a huge range of issues including the economy, energy, health care, global warming – and of course Iraq and Afghanistan.

How did the media cover it all? Not well. Reading pretty much everything that was written about Bush on a daily basis, as I did, one could certainly see the major themes emerging. But by and large, mainstream-media journalism missed the real Bush story for way too long. The handful of people who did exceptional investigative reporting during this era really deserve our gratitude: People such as Ron Suskind, Seymour Hersh, Jane Mayer, Murray Waas, Michael Massing, Mark Danner, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau (better late than never), Dana Priest, Walter Pincus, Charlie Savage and Philippe Sands; there was also some fine investigative blogging over at Talking Points Memo and by Marcy Wheeler. Notably not on this list: The likes of Bob Woodward and Tim Russert. Hopefully, the next time the nation faces a grave national security crisis, we will listen to the people who were right, not the people who were wrong, and heed those who reported the truth, not those who served as stenographers to liars.

* But I think Ezra Klein makes the point more strongly:

I think that analytically honest political commentators right now should be struggling with a pretty hard choice: Do you try to maximize the possibility of good, if still insufficient, outcomes? Or do you admit what many people already know and say that our political process has gone into total system failure and the overriding priority is building the long-term case for structural reform of America's lawmaking process? Put another way, can you really solve any of our policy problems until you solve our fundamental political problem? And don't think about it in terms of when your team is in power. Think of it in terms of the next 30 years, and the challenges we face.

* Posthumously cleared after twenty-five years. Via MeFi.

* We had to lie about Sotomayor because we're still mad about Robert Bork. Right. Of course.

* More on how Obama forced Mark Sanford to shirk his responsibilities and flee the country. This is politics at its worst.

* I'm with Joe Strummer: If you don't like Springsteen you're a pretentious Martian from Venus. Via Shankar D.

* And of course we're still coming to terms with Michael Jackson:
Web grinds to a halt after Michael Jackson dies. Secret library of 100 songs could be released. Google mistakes the explosion of searches for an attack. Spike in SMS traffic outpaces 9/11. Will Bruno face a last-minute edit? (Some of these via @negaratduke.)

One of my favorite obscure writers is about to become a lost less obscure; Wells Tower's first collection of short stories is coming out after a too-long wait. I've taught Towers's Viking-flavored story "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" a few times and I appreciate it more each time I read it. Knowing nothing about the circumstances of its writing beyond its original publication date (2002), I see it as one of the great fictional commentaries on the psychic state of post-9/11 America. The ending, still, just kills me.

Purist that I am, I'll quote the original version here behind a [+/-], which I think is better than the book's slightly modified version. But don't read it until you've read the whole thing, or unless you're existentially certain you never will.

Where had the good times gone? I didn't know, but when Pila and me had our little twins and we put a family together, I got an understanding of how terrible love can be. You wish you hated those people, your wife and children, because you know what awful things the world will do to them, because you have done some of those things yourself. It's crazy-making, but you cling to them with everything and close your eyes against the rest of it. But still you wake up late at night and lie there listening for the creak and splash of oars, the clank of steel, the sound of men rowing toward your home.

Scott Eric Kaufman finally gets around to watching Watchmen. Special attention is paid to the absurd ubiquity of the Twin Towers throughout the film, something my viewing group mocked afterwards but which hasn't come up in discussions here thus far.

My review was also a focus of the discussion on the Poli-Sci-Fi Radio podcast this week, to which my rage-filled rebuttal is currently being shouted impotently into the void.

Seventy-six percent of Americans questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Wednesday said Obama is a strong and decisive leader.

"That's the best number an incoming president has gotten on that dimension since Ronald Reagan took office in 1981," CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said. "The public's rating of his leadership skills is already as high as George W. Bush's was after 9/11 and easily beats the numbers that both Bush and Bill Clinton got at the start of their first terms in office."

A lot of people are linking to these numbers, but best-in-show goes to TPM's Eric Kleefield, who writes: "A new poll suggests that Barack Obama's high ratings aren't just your average political honeymoon, but could effectively be the same as when the people rally around their leader after a disaster." Only I wouldn't say it's "effectively the same"—that's exactly what it is.

Confidential to the Obama White House: popularity is political capital. Use it, or you lose it. Let's go change the world.

A few random links of the sort that's been crowded out by Obamania.

* Kevin Kelly is looking for evidence of a global superorganism.

* Fire > language: Humans built fires 500 thousand years before they could speak.

* Haruki Murakami: "We are living in the future now, in a kind of science fiction - 9/11 itself was kind of unreal to me, those images of planes diving into the buildings. I felt like I stepped into the wrong world." I've felt that way about nearly everything since the 2000 election, to be honest.

* The Apocalypse according to Dan Clowes.

* Cosmic apocalypses at Discover.

At TPM, Paul Rieckhoff asks: "Seven Years Later: Why Is There Still A Hole at Ground Zero?" I actually wrote a little bit about this myself at the end of a paper on 9/11 for a class last year. Here were my thoughts.



Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop

Although I grew up forty miles from New York City, I was in Cleveland, Ohio, on September 11, 2001, finishing my senior year of college. From the time my father called to wake me and let me know about the first attack, I watched the news coverage nearly continuously. I remember, vividly, the chaos, the violence, and the uncertainty, but I also remember events which are no longer referenced, the phantom attacks: false reports of car bombs on New York Bridges and outside the State Department, threats and evacuations across the country reported once and then never mentioned again. In Cleveland, at least, it was initially reported that United 93 had crashed into Camp David; the anchor also told us that there were as many as 20 planes out of contact with the FAA still in the air and that any number of them—possibly all—could have been hijacked. One of the planes forced to land at Cleveland Hopkins airport was raided (on live TV), believed to have terrorists aboard; this was later revealed to have been entirely a false alarm.

In the face of so many reports, only four attacks becomes something like a relief—the violence of that day might have been so much worse. It might have never ended. And yet the deluge of phantom attacks, attacks which seemed to have happened but which never actually did, which like the collapse of the Towers themselves have been put under erasure, have left us for a long time with the foreboding sense that another attack is always just around the corner, that at any moment the world will again be shattered by terrible violence. We are waiting for the other shoe to drop. The Department of Homeland Security’s threat level is, after all, always “Elevated,” if not “High”; nightly news reports regale us with wild possibilities of where the terrorists might strike next, anything from blowing up the Hoover Dam to poisoning local gumball machines.*

This feeling of permanent, unmitigated existential threat may have diminished somewhat since September 11, but it has never really left us, and it feeds into the sensation of temporal loop caused by the day’s reconsumption as a spectacle. Though the attacks lasted only a few hours on one very devastating morning, on the level of the symbolic—on the level of spectacle—they remain ongoing and unending. This is why, I think, Freedom Tower, long scheduled to be built on the ruins of Ground Zero, remains unbuilt and perhaps in some real sense unbuildable. We remain deeply embedded in the singularity; although time passes, it cannot progress. More than anything else, this loss of temporal perspective, the foreshortening of memory itself, is the psychic cost of the refusal to come to terms with September 11, the cost of rebranding the shocking anti-spectacle of September 11 as the spectacle of “9/11” and consuming it anew, over and over again. On the level of the spectacle, the towers are always smoking; though we all saw it happen, we can never allow them to collapse.


--
* I’m partial to this story because it concerns the town next door to the town in which I grew up, and because it involves the most ludicrous potential terror attack I’ve heard of. Stories like this one have aired across the country since September 11—perhaps, somewhere or another, every single night.

Something's a little off at MSNBC: after last night's Keith Olbermann Special Comment rant about the Republicans' exploitation of 9/11, it seems a little strange to hear from Gawker that the network is currently playing its footage from 9/11/01 in real time. What's the old saying? You can't put lipstick on that pig. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

I generally like KO, but the Special Comment segment should simply be taken out behind the barn thrown under the bus retired. The novelty, and thus the power, is gone, and all that's left is a deeply overused ratings stunt they now start advertising two days in advance. Last night was the worst, I think: the rant turned in the end to John McCain's non-existent secret plan to capture Osama bin Laden, all but accusing McCain of treason for failing to share this plan with the rest of us. But the point, of course, is exactly the opposite. It's not that McCain "knows how" to capture Osama bin Laden because he "knows wars" and "knows how to win them"—the point, sir, the point is that John McCain's tough talk is plainly empty on its face, and therefore worthy only to be mocked.

Good night and good luck.

Thursday links about politics and other junk.

* Utne takes a look inside the 9/11 Truth Movement.

* Via Ezra Klein, Rootless Cosmopolitan looks at the complicated and contradictory legacy of Fidel Castro.

What fascinates me, however, is the guilty pleasure with which so many millions of people around the world revere Fidel Castro — revere him, but wouldn’t dream of emulating his approach to economics or governance. People, in other words, who would not be comfortable actually living in Castro’s Cuba, much as they like the idea of him sticking it the arrogant yanqui, his physical and political survival a sure sign that Washington’s awesome power has limits — and can therefore be challenged.

* Glenn Greenwald looks at a week of incredibly petty mass-media attacks on Barack Obama (all suddenly materializing in the moment that he is the presumptive nominee, as if by some kind of magic!):

The point isn't that this reflects poorly on Obama's electability -- it doesn't, at all (it might do the opposite). The point is that that one should expect what's coming, and realize -- most importantly -- that our establishment press takes its cues in all sorts of ways from exactly the dark crevices from which this filth spews and they will lead the way in helping to spread it. The establishment press is dependent upon the GOP establishment, which for years has provided them with their sources and access, and helping to spread this poison is what they do.

All four of these so-called scandals are completely ridiculous, but it's Bill O'Reilly's "lynching party" comment that really blows me away—how could a remark like that be anything but deliberate?

And for the record, while I can't really speak on the merits of last night's John McCain non-story without knowing what was "lawyered out," in its current form it looks as if it should probably have been spiked altogether, and I'm sorry to see so many liberal bloggers linking to it with such (understandable) glee. The material in the story that's either actually relevant or actually damning—Keating, corporate jets, favors for lobbyists, and so forth—is completely drowned out by the silly whiff of sex scandal.

And of course, we should note that it's not exactly against McCain's interests to be perceived as being smeared by the New York Times... This is a lot better press for him than their endorsement was.

* Other Obama links: Andrew Sullivan's list of Obama's legislative accomplishments in a post entitled "Dear Chris Matthews: Please Do Your Job"—and please don't think I take any pleasure in linking approvingly to something written by Sullivan—and news that Obama has won Democrats Abroad by a 2-to-1 margin, bringing the streak to 11-0.

Word has what looks like a great interview with the great Alan Moore, though unfortunately only bits of it are online. NeilAlien links to excerpts, as well as bits that were cut from the print version at Word itself.

Word:You're very scathing on the state of today's superhero comics. Did you watch Heroes?

Moore: I was persuaded to watch it by people who said it nods to Watchmen but God, what a load of rubbish! It's a late-70s X-Men at best and full of terrible ideas and characters who've all been done to death. Beyond death. And the writing shows such contempt for the viewer. The climax, a man who is going to explode is carried off into the air by his brother... did anybody bother to compare the effects of a groundburst with an airburst nuclear explosion? I'll take the former over the latter, thanks. This is supposed to be the sort of thing that superhero stories are good at. I tell you, if we are ever threatened with a scenario like that in real life I hope the superheroes aren't American because we'll be sunk.

Word: Graphic novels like Watchmen, V For Vendetta and Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns were supposed to usher in a new era of comics for adults. What went wrong?

Moore: Ah yes, the new era of grown-up comics! That worked out, didn't it? There really should have been more to comics than 20 years of grim, nasty remakes of Watchmen. The comics world was very optimistic in the late 80s and maybe what we thought was the beginning was actually the high point......And the other side of the comics industry, the achingly trendy, avant garde books, they're mired in a teenage worldview too. All they provide are comfort eating comics about neuroses and the emptiness of modern life and fear of dying alone.

I'm intrigued too by the hints about his next project, Jerusalem:

Moore: The idea is to rewrite the human paradigm of life after death in an entirely rational way. All your questions about the meaning of life and where we go when it ends will be answered, I guarantee. It'll be about 750,000 words and physically thicker than any book before. They're going to have to invent quantum glue to hold it together.

I'm becoming increasingly convinced that Rudy Giuliani's campaign is actually a high-concept piece of performance art. Here's what he had to say about his sixth-place finish in Iowa last night:

"None of this worries me—Sept. 11, there were times I was worried."

Thomas Friedman mea culpas without mea culpaing and declares "9/11 is over."

* Oscar buzz for Darjeeling? And does that suggest it will be good or bad?

* George Lucas on track to ruin another classic movie franchise: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is very nearly the worst possible title for Indy IV, with almost any variant (...and the Crystal Skull, ...and the Kingdom of Crystal, ... and the Kingdom of the Skull) being superior. I'm quite suspicious about the alien connection, too—it's got to be a Chariot of the Gods situation, because Close Encounters just isn't going to work. MetaFilter has a little bit more.

* Only the best need apply. $21k for full time June 25 - Aug 20 employment.

* Analyzing the logos of terrorist organizations.

* Bitter Laughter duckspeak thoughtcrime doubleplusungood 9/11.

Two years ago when I taught 1984, I realized that not a single person in my class knew what Osama bin Laden really wanted--what his grievances were, what his ideology looks like, etc. All they knew was that he was inimical to "us," and that he was the enemy. "Enmity" is mightily empty category, and a dangerous one at that, if you refuse to allow it to have content.

And that's exactly what bin Laden is for Americans, an enemy without content. The fact of the matter is that Osama bin Laden is not isomorphic with himself. That is, "Osama bin Laden," as that name is understood in this country, is a simulacrum of the actual man. We do not need to listen to what he has to say because we know what he is -- after all, he is our creation. He represents for us something to fight against, the implement against which we sharpen our knives and define ourselves. His words are not relevant since they communicate a version of himself that does not square with our understanding of him. Why would we both listen or give credence to his video musings?

* Michael Tomasky on Citizen Gore.

* George Saunders on the teevee.

While we're on the subject, Talking Points Memo has more about Giuliani's incompetence, including an interesting piece from last week on the real reason he insisted that the New York City command center be placed in the one location most likely to be attacked by terrorists:

The mayor was so personally focused on the siting and construction of the bunker that the city administrator who oversaw it testified in a subsequent lawsuit that "very senior officials," specifically including Giuliani, "were involved," which he said was a major difference between this and other projects.

Giuliani's office had a humidor for cigars and mementos from City Hall, including a fire horn, police hats and fire hats, as well as monogrammed towels in his bathroom. His suite was bulletproofed and he visited it often, even on weekends, bringing his girlfriend Judi Nathan there long before the relationship surfaced. He had his own elevator.

Naturally, in a world in which John Edwards gets haircuts and Hillary Clinton has cleavage, this has gone completely unreported.

As obscene as the right-wing's fetishization of 9/11 normally is, it takes a special kind of myopic self-delusion to go the extra mile and openly long for another attack.

"I don't know this America anymore. I don't recognize it," he said. "There's an empty space where America used to be."

Maybe it's because I don't read Don DeLillo novels hoping to connect with the characters, or maybe I was just born to be a contrarian, but I liked Falling Man quite a bit more than the reviewers seemed to. I thought it was probably his best book since Underworld, and maybe earlier. As is often the case with DeLillo, the characters are not real people, and barely even qualify as simulacra of real people—but for this book, at least, about the psychic aftermath of 9/11, that emptiness and stilted disconnectedness made a great deal of sense. It's interesting that once again, as in Libra, DeLillo's best character work is in representing those consciousnesses that might popularly be considered unrepresentable: here, the minds of the terrorists.

I'm not sure what 9/11 novel people were hoping DeLillo might write, but a novel about PTSD was more or less what I was expecting. Honestly I think it's probably the only sort of 9/11 novel that is capable of being either written or widely published, at least for a couple decades—which is just one of the reasons why DeLillo has thus far been the only exception to my rigorous personal ban on all 9/11 novels.

You have to look for them a bit—and I think the fact of that looking was one of the things the reviewers didn't care for—but DeLillo still manages to get in a few nice DeLilloesque grand pronouncements, though he's careful always to put them into the mouths of his characters rather than in untagged text, almost as if even six years later he still needs the protection of a proxy to talk about these things:

"But that's why you built the towers, isn't it? Weren't the towers built as fantasies of wealth and power that would one day become fantasies of destruction? You build a thing like that so you can see it come down. The provocation is obvious. What other reason would there be to go so high and then to double it, do it twice? It's a fantasy, so why not do it twice? You are saying, Here it is, bring it down."

and

He said,"It still looks like an accident, the first one. Even from this distance, way outside the thing, how many days later, I'm standing here thinking it's an accident."

"Because it has to be."

"It has to be," she said.

"The way the camera sort of shows surprise."

"But only the first one."

"Only the first," she said.

"The second plane, by the time the second plane appears," he said, "we're all a bit older and wiser."