Say Good Night, David

Damn! First it was Kurt Vonnegut. Now, within the same month, another writer who had a strong influence on my choice of career, David Halberstam--author of The Powers That Be, The Best and the Brightest, and assorted other books--has died. Killed in a car crash yesterday south of San Francisco, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist was only 73 years old.

The New York Times, for which he once covered the Vietnam War, has a fine remembrance here. Salon offers a trio of print interviews with the author here, while National Public Radio archives eight interviews with Halberstam on subjects ranging from the war on Iraq to baseball. Listen to those here.

“A Gang of Clueless Bozos”

I’m old enough to remember the cult of business sycophants who gathered about Lee Iacocca’s feet in the 1980s, when he was restructuring and reviving what was then the Chrysler Corporation (but is now DaimlerChrysler Motors Company), which had been flirting with bankruptcy. At the time, I was a recent college graduate, dismissive of America’s subservience to corporate power, and so thought of Iacocca in less than flattering terms. His friendly association with Ronald Reagan, whose presidency I saw as damaging to the economic strength and liberal traditions of the United States, did not improve my opinions of Iacocca. Nor did that aging mogul’s endorsement of George W. Bush over the far better qualified Al Gore for the U.S. presidency in 2000.

However, my outlook on Iacocca started to change after he announced that he would support Democratic Senator John Kerry over Bush in 2004. And it’s been further altered by an excerpt I just read from his new book, Where Have All the Leaders Gone? This extract is hosted by the Borders Books Web site:

Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.”

Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

You might think I’m getting senile, that I’ve gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don’t need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we’re fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That’s not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I’ve had enough. How about you?

I’ll go a step further. You can’t call yourself a patriot if you're not outraged. This is a fight I’m ready and willing to have.

My friends tell me to calm down. They say, “Lee, you're eighty-two years old. Leave the rage to the young people.” I’d love to--as soon as I can pry them away from their iPods for five seconds and get them to pay attention. I’m going to speak up because it’s my patriotic duty. I think people will listen to me. They say I have a reputation as a straight shooter. So I’ll tell you how I see it, and it’s not pretty, but at least it’s real. I’m hoping to strike a nerve in those young folks who say they don’t vote because they don’t trust politicians to represent their interests. Hey, America, wake up. These guys work for us.

Who Are These Guys, Anyway?

Why are we in this mess? How did we end up with this crowd in Washington? Well, we voted for them--or at least some of us did. But I’ll tell you what we didn’t do. We didn’t agree to suspend the Constitution. We didn’t agree to stop asking questions or demanding answers. Some of us are sick and tired of people who call free speech treason. Where I come from that’s a dictatorship, not a democracy.

And don’t tell me it’s all the fault of right-wing Republicans or liberal Democrats. That’s an intellectually lazy argument, and it’s part of the reason we’re in this stew. We’re not just a nation of factions. We’re a people. We share common principles and ideals. And we rise and fall together.

Where are the voices of leaders who can inspire us to action and make us stand taller? What happened to the strong and resolute party of Lincoln? What happened to the courageous, populist party of FDR and Truman? There was a time in this country when the voices of great leaders lifted us up and made us want to do better. Where have all the leaders gone? ...

The Biggest C is Crisis

Leaders are made, not born. Leadership is forged in times of crisis. It’s easy to sit there with your feet up on the desk and talk theory. Or send someone else’s kids off to war when you’ve never seen a battlefield yourself. It’s another thing to lead when your world comes tumbling down.

On September 11, 2001, we needed a strong leader more than any other time in our history. We needed a steady hand to guide us out of the ashes. Where was George Bush? He was reading a story about a pet goat to kids in Florida when he heard about the attacks. He kept sitting there for twenty minutes with a baffled look on his face. It’s all on tape. You can see it for yourself. Then, instead of taking the quickest route back to Washington and immediately going on the air to reassure the panicked people of this country, he decided it wasn’t safe to return to the White House. He basically went into hiding for the day--and he told Vice President Dick Cheney to stay put in his bunker. We were all frozen in front of our TVs, scared out of our wits, waiting for our leaders to tell us that we were going to be okay, and there was nobody home. It took Bush a couple of days to get his bearings and devise the right photo op at Ground Zero.

That was George Bush’s moment of truth, and he was paralyzed. And what did he do when he’d regained his composure? He led us down the road to Iraq--a road his own father had considered disastrous when he was President. But Bush didn’t listen to Daddy. He listened to a higher father. He prides himself on being faith based, not reality based. If that doesn’t scare the crap out of you, I don’t know what will.

You can read the whole excerpt here.

So It Goes

I was saddened to hear that renowned satirical author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. died yesterday in New York at age 84, of brain injuries suffered as a result of a fall several weeks ago. The Indianapolis, Indiana-born writer was just 29 years old when his first novel, Player Piano, was published in 1952. He went on to pen 13 others, including the semiautobiographical Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Breakfast of Champions (1973, in which the author himself appeared), Jailbird (1979, the first of his novels I read and enjoyed), and his final work of fiction, Timequake (1997).

The New York Times’ Dinitia Smith eulogizes today that

Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and ’70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States.

Like Mark Twain, Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?

He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. “Mark Twain,” Vonnegut wrote in his 1991 book, “Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage,” “finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died.”

Politics had always been a significant interest of Vonnegut’s, and had informed much of his fiction. But in recent years, he turned increasingly to remarking on the often disastrous situation in which the United States and the world find themselves. He was especially critical of George W. Bush’s White House, opining in the politically progressive magazine In These Times that “our leaders are punch-drunk chimpanzees,” and remarking, in a 2006 interview with Rolling Stone, “Honestly, I wish Nixon were president. Bush is so ignorant.” Considering Vonnegut’s contempt for the Watergate scandal’s chief architect and most tragic figure (he once described Republican Richard M. Nixon as the “first president to hate American people and all they stand for”), such criticism is biting, indeed.

Much of this man’s philosophy about politics and life can be better understood by reading his most recent book, A Man Without a Country (2005), portions of which were originally published in In These Times. An index to Vonnegut’s stories in that magazine can also be found here.

Although Vonnegut could sound cynical at times, his work promoted the public’s enjoyment of fiction, and often of life in general. He spoke his truths without fear or hesitation. And for all of those reasons, we all owe him a giant debt of gratitude.

Kilgore Trout weeps.

* * *

The media are (justifiably) filled today with Kurt Vonnegut encomia, including the Los Angeles Times, Salon, Time, and what was once his hometown newspaper, The Indianapolis Star. If you’re still craving more, Salon offers up a five-minute audio clip of Vonnegut reading from Slaughterhouse-Five. Click here to listen. And Rolling Stone has archived a 1998 essay by Vonnegut in which he “ruminates on the American Dream and the fate of the planet in the dawn of the twenty-first century.” You can read that here. Finally, the author’s Web site today features what may be the most heartfelt good-bye of all, in the form of a simple illustration, presumably by Vonnegut himself. See it while you can.

READ MORE: “High School Vonnegut,” by Liesl Schillinger (Slate); “The Night I Shared a Beer with Vonnegut,” by Stephen Miller (January Magazine); “Kurt Vonnegut: A Blogger Tribute” (Bloggasm).

A Comic at Hart

Cartoonist Johnny Hart, creator of the popular, long-running American comic strip B.C. and co-creator (with Brant Parker) of The Wizard of Id, died at his New York home on Saturday. He was 76 years old. The Associated Press quotes his wife, Bobby, as saying that Hart “had a stroke. He died at his storyboard.”

Is that a perfect way for a cartoonist to go, or what?

My father, an architect and aspiring cartoonist himself, introduced me to B.C. when I was very young and still reading newspaper comics pages. The strip followed a small settlement of prehistoric cavemen, who were far wittier and more philosophical than their era would have suggested. But that absurdity, of course, was part of what made B.C. so funny. The strip was launched in 1958 and now appears in 1,300 newspapers. The Wizard of Id, which features the inhabitants of a fairly scruffy medieval European kingdom, Id (“the land of milk and honey”), debuted back in 1964 and currently runs in about 1,000 papers worldwide.

Although Hart was occasionally lambasted for his themes (especially those construed as being critical of religions), I found his humor dry, clever, and altogether satisfying. I was particularly entertained by his unconventional Wiley’s Dictionary definitions of common terms. Such panels usually found one of Hart’s cave dwellers gazing into an open, weighty book atop a huge rock, only to find definitions such as:

BORDERLINE OBESE: Won’t fit through the turnstile at the immigration booth.

GINGER SNAPS: The reason why nobody pets Ginger anymore.

POLITICAL PRISONERS: Everybody that didn’t vote for the guy that won.

If there really is a Heaven someplace, maybe Johnny Hart is already making the angels wet their robes with laughter.

FOLLOW-UP: Yipes! Just a week after Johnny Hart died, his “Wizard of Id” co-creator, cartoonist Brant Parker, has passed away as well. The Los Angeles Times has the obituary.

READ MORE: An Interview with Johnny Hart (Hogan’s Alley).

Strike Up the Band

I’ve frequently mentioned my fondness for old TV theme songs, and perhaps I should finally explain why those tunes provoke my nostalgic feelings. You see, when I was growing up many years ago in Portland, Oregon, my very proper mother (herself the daughter of a very proper British former schoolteacher) thought it incumbent upon her to safeguard my brother and me from the damaging affects of too much American television. Therefore, she insisted that we be in bed or otherwise engaged before the “worst” programs appeared on our toaster-size black-and-white TV set. This meant turning off the television, or at least turning it over to my father by the stroke of 9 p.m.

Unfortunately, many of the crime dramas I most wanted to watch were broadcast after that witching hour. Therefore, if I was to enjoy, say, Columbo or The Streets of San Francisco or Ironside, I had to find some way other than simply flipping on the tube. My solution: a TV-band radio. That thing was about the size of Pittsburgh (be thankful for the present age of miniaturization), and it belonged to my dad, so I had to be extremely sneaky about smuggling it into my bedroom, and then prevent my mother from catching me with the earphone plugged into my head.

Many a night in the 1970s I spent either in bed, in the dark, listening to TV series that were often barely comprehensible without seeing the action as it transpired onscreen; or else sitting up in a chair, with a book in front of my face but that radio earphone concealed beneath my long hair (hey, this was the shaggy 1970s, after all) and the unit itself secreted behind me. Amazingly, my mother never once caught me at this entertaining pastime--or if she did, she never said anything about it.

One of the consequences of my having had to resort to these measures in order to enjoy TV crime series of the ’70s, is that I am now left with strong memories of the introductory music employed on those shows. For instance, I can still whistle the themes from the NBC Mystery Movie, Barnaby Jones, Cannon, and myriad other shows, even though I haven’t seen most of those series in 30 years. It’s interesting nowadays to revisit, on DVD, some the programs I only listened to originally, and watch them through for the very first time. Just hearing their main title themes makes my heart beat faster.

Which is why I was so excited to discover a French Web site called Coucoucircus.org. In addition to music from international cartoon and anime series, it also features a wealth of themes from U.S. and British TV programs--many of them crime shows.

You want to shut your eyes and revisit the Mike Connors private-eye series Mannix? Just click here. How ’bout The Mod Squad? Click here. Coucoucircus.org’s collection of themes runs the spectrum from the famous (Peter Gunn, Hawaii Five-O, Miami Vice, and Mission : Impossible) to the forgettable (Kojak, Joe Forrester, and Vega$). Some of the shows represented here were so short-lived, that it’s likely you’ll have trouble remembering that you ever heard their title music, no matter how terrific it was (Dan August, City of Angels, Banacek, The Magician, and Assignment Vienna being good examples); others ran long enough that it’s hard to forget the tunes that introduced them (The Avengers, Cagney & Lacey, The Streets of San Francisco, Ironside, and NYPD Blue fall into that category). You’ll find here not only the theme from Spenser: For Hire, but also one from its disappointing Avery Brooks spinoff series, A Man Called Hawk; the original 1951 Dragnet theme as well as the 2003 Mike Post retooling of that march-like melody; and the introductory music from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. along with the modified version that welcomed viewers to The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. I found that, while I couldn’t immediately dredge from memory the title tunes associated with, say, the Eddie Albert-Robert Wagner series Switch, or Gene Barry’s stylish cop show Burke’s Law, or David Janssen’s The Fugitive, I did immediately recognize all of those upon first hearing at Coucoucircus.org. The same goes for the themes from Cannon, I Spy, McCloud, Adam-12, and Scarecrow and Mrs. King. Curiously, the intro tunes from The Rockford Files and Ellery Queen and McMillan & Wife, all of which I would have found much more familiar, aren’t to be found on this French site.

But many non-crime series themes are available here, too. Including those from Bonanza, The Munsters, China Beach, Here Come the Brides, and a number of more easily forgotten shows such as Claude Akins’ trucker drama, Movin’ On, James Arness’ post-Gunsmoke western, How the West Was Won, and Mel Brooks’ truly awful Robin Hood sitcom, When Things Were Rotten. (That theme is pretty damn rotten, as well.)

Browse to your heart’s--and your ears’--content. I know I shall.

LISTEN UP: Still more TV tunes can be found on Mark Little’s MyThemes.TV, Tellytunes.com, and the Wave Themes Home Page.

READ MORE: “The Onion Picks the Openings that Fit Their Shows Perfectly,” by Bob Sassone (TV Squad).

Downtime in the Big Easy

I returned to Seattle yesterday morning at an ungodly hour, after spending five days in New Orleans. I’d ventured down south to celebrate my birthday in one of America’s most captivating and distinctive towns. Although this was my third trip to the Crescent City, it was the first time I had been there when there wasn’t some kind of festival going on. (I had previously visited during Mardi Gras and the French Quarter Festival.)

After blogging at length two years ago about the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans, and George W. Bush’s feeble, too-little-too-late response to one of the worst natural disasters in American history, I was concerned that this once proud and fun-loving burg would now appear withered and defeated. That’s the reason I stayed away for as long as I did, and I’ll wager, why so many of my countrymen who’ve enjoyed New Orleans in the past have likewise hesitated to visit since the fall of 2005: we fear having our hearts broken by what we’ll see of the city in Katrina’s wake.

Fortunately, my worries seem to have been overblown. Although the first official post-Katrina population census estimates that the greater New Orleans area has lost something like 300,000 people (a 22 percent change) since 2000--raising fears about how this shrinking of the state’s most Democratic district might affect Louisiana’s future voting tendencies--and crime has surged in some inner neighborhoods, the city doesn’t give off the air of defeat. Rather, there seems hopefulness in every thoroughfare and public square, often tinged with humor. (T-shirts reading “Make Levees Not War” are big sellers on Decatur Street.) Yes, inside pages of The Times-Picayune--a daily paper that bravely continued to turn out stories (albeit online), even in the thick of Katrina’s violence--are rife with ads for service personnel at hotels and restaurants, confirming the post-hurricane population exodus; and the French Quarter, which is so tourism-dependent, has had a harder time than some other parts of town recovering since the Big Blow. But most of the eateries in that 100-block, wrought-iron-filled historic district look to be in operation again, including the landmark Café du Monde, renowned for its café au laits and plates of hot beignets, heaped with powdered sugar (a genuine hazard in any sort of wind), and K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen, where during this trip I savored what may be the best Shrimp Étouffée I’ve had in my life. Musical groups still draw crowds of travelers at street corners; I blissfully exhausted much of one afternoon listening to a lively jazz combo called Loose Marbles (shown at right) play its heart out on Royal Street, in the Quarter. And tours of the town--some of which will take you north of the Quarter to the 17th Street Canal Levee, which was breached after Katrina and flooded adjacent neighborhoods--are in high demand, as visitors check out for themselves what they’ve only previously seen on their TV screens: houses in dire disrepair, streaked with thick yellow lines showing how high the sewage-infested floodwaters climbed, right next to others being gutted by young volunteers and repaired for future occupancy.

I flew out of New Orleans with faith that, despite the ravages of nature, the hollow promises of an incompetent president, and the reluctance of mealy mouthed insurers to actually pay for residential and other property damage they said they’d cover, this city at the southern mouth of the Mississippi River is well on its road to recovery. Maybe sometime soon I can visit again, to take in the other major festival I still haven’t attended: the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Be still, my unbroken heart.

The Ghosts and Mr. Raines

As far as I’m concerned, this has been a pretty lousy year for American television. Deadwood is off the air, after three incredible seasons. The West Wing is gone after two presidential terms. There’s talk of NBC canceling Crossing Jordan, which stars the ever-lovely Jill Hennessy. The fate of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which is the only network series I’ve added to my previous TV-viewing schedule this year, hangs in the balance. And pretty much everything else is a mindless game or reality show, a series that should’ve been a one-off “movie of the week,” or another formulaic CSI or Law & Order clone.

Which explains why my fingers are crossed for Raines, the new Jeff Goldblum crime drama debuting on NBC next Thursday night, March 15, in ER’s timeslot (10 p.m. ET/PT). I am feeling particularly in need these days of a different sort of police or private-eye series (sorry, Andy Barker, P.I., just won’t do), and Raines is definitely different. At least judging from the pilot episode, this is not Ghost Whisperer meets Dragnet, as some critics have charged. (Nor is it “Ghost Whisperer minus the boobs,” as one TV Squad wit put it.) Instead, it’s a personality-driven serial that finds the stuttering Goldblum as Los Angeles police detective Michael Raines, who has recently returned to duty after being shot, along with his partner. That attack left Raines more than a bit off; he’s now seeing people. Dead people. The victims of homicides he’s charged with investigating. In the pilot, for instance, he’s confronted by what seems to be the ghost of a college student and likely prostitute, who, much to Raines’ consternation, won’t go “back to whatever dark, twisted malfunctioning part of my brain you come from” until he solves her slaying.

Admittedly, this does initially sound like Ghost Whisperer, or maybe Medium. But the crucial and reality-respecting distinction here is that these spirits aren’t spirits at all; they’re being necessarily manifested by Raines’ unconscious both to give him somebody off whom to bounce his thoughts about the case at hand--and to provide him with greater sympathy for the people who’ve been murdered. As the fatality in the pilot (played by the fetching Alexa Davalos) tells him, “I only know what you know,” and that’s because she represents his own questioning self, prodding him to dig further into the available clues, to doubt the easy evidence and, in a nice turn, forcing him to address the prejudices and stereotypes that can hinder a police investigation. Rather than adopt the easy Ghost Whisperer comparison, I’d liken the concept here to what the mother and son who write as “Charles Todd” do with their post-World War I mystery-fiction series starring Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge (A False Mirror, Watchers of Time), burdening their shell-shocked protagonist with a troubled conscience that takes the form of a loquacious Scottish soldier Rutledge had ordered executed on the battlefield. Raines is equally weighted down in this new series by loneliness and self-doubt, which he seems to escape only by successfully resolving crimes.

Which isn’t to suggest that Raines is a one-man show. It also brings back a few performers we haven’t seen enough of lately, including Linda Park (formerly of Star Trek: Enterprise), playing Detective Kim Lance; Matt Craven, who I remember best from his role in the short-lived Rob Lowe legal series, The Lyon’s Den, but who here plays LAPD Captain Daniel Lewis, worried by Raines’ apparently new habit of conversing with himself; and Nicole Sheridan, who used to play the ditzy dog walker, Holly, on King of Queens, but who here does a fine job as some sort of hyper-effective LAPD researcher.

I can’t say that the Raines pilot is flawless. The twist at the end was pretty obvious, though I liked to be right about it. The episode is a bit too self-consciously noirish for its own good, winging in a jazz trumpet-filled soundtrack and moving the plot forward with Goldblum’s narration, as if to give us the impression that this is a modern cop drama with Chandleresque roots. Yet the eccentric nature of the series isn’t as over-the-top as I’d expected (actually, feared). And in a field of network programming distinguished by its almost complete absence of novelty, Raines should be graded on a curve for at least trying to be something special.

But see for yourself. Although the series doesn’t premiere until next Wednesday, the pilot--penned by Graham Yost (who did a lot of writing for another unusual series, Boomtown, a few years back)--is already available on NBC’s First Look Web site. Let’s hope this show wins enough viewership that it can stick around longer than some of Detective Raines’ vaporous visions.

Forget Reality. Gimme That Old-Time Religion

Is it just me, or do American conservatives seem increasingly adamant (even shrill) about asserting their waning political influence? This last November’s midterm elections, which found Democrats executing a complete shutout of Republican’ts on Capitol Hill and in state governorships, has led to such idiotic stunts as right-wing political commentator Ann Coulter calling former Senator John Edwards a “faggot,” pro-war candidate John McCain sucking up to Christianists by flip-flopping on his abortion stance, and George W. Bush threatening again to start a war with Iran in order to assert his relevance in the post-Rovian United States.

But the creation of Conservapedia, a right-wing alternative to the allegedly “anti-Christian and anti-American” Wikipedia online information bank, may be the clearest indication yet that political conservatives are determined to counter any viewpoints not in line with their own reactionary, denial-based, and too often exclusionary perspective on the world and its history. “Conservapedia is an online resource and meeting place where we favor Christianity and America,” the site says on its front page. “Conservapedia has easy-to-use indexes to facilitate review of topics. You will much prefer using Conservapedia compared to Wikipedia if you want concise answers free of ‘political correctness.’” Hmm. So how exactly does Conservapedia demonstrate its greater adherence to the truth and its rejection of “political correctness”?

• In its write-up about former President Bill Clinton, it leads with the reminder that “Clinton never won a majority of the popular vote.” That’s followed immediately by the unsubtle editorialization that “In his first two years in office, 1993 through 1994, Clinton failed at his massive attempt to ‘reform’ health-care in the United States by some sort of government-backed universal health-care insurance, which would result in effective government control of the health care system.”

• In an entry about “intelligent design,” a religion-based “alternative” to Charles Darwin’s accepted theory of evolution, Conservapedia insists that “Design Theory enjoys broad support within the scientific community which is steadily growing.” It goes on to denounce a federal judge (and a Republican) who ruled in a Pennsylvania case that intelligent design “cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents” as “an activist judge ... whose ruling has been described by influential opinion-makers as ‘biased and religiously bigoted.’” (Gee, way to go Conservapedia: no bias in your own write-up, is there?)

• On a page devoted to the four-term presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Conservapedia contributors say absolutely nothing about FDR’s efforts to beat the Great Depression, beef up employment, and help Britain and France survive World War II. Instead, they devote 173 words of their 276-word profile of the 20th century’s greatest U.S. chief executive to Roosevelt’s statements about religion. (It seems he was for it.)

• Defining the term “theocracy,” Conservapedia writes: “Government ruled by a divine means or by leaders considered to be divinely guided. Israel was a theocracy before King Saul. Modern theocracies include Iran, Turkey, and Afghanistan prior to the ousting of the Taliban by the military of the United States of America. With any luck, a new modern theocracy will be established within the United States by the end of the decade.”

• Remarking on the presidency of George Washington, the site proclaims: “Washington is perhaps the only person other than Jesus who declined enormous worldly power, in Washington’s case by voluntarily stepping aside as the ruler of a prosperous nation.”

• On a page about the Democratic Party, the site says little more than this: “The official platform of the Democratic party emphasizes strengthening America. Right-wing critics claim, however, that the Democrat [sic] voting record reveals a true agenda of cowering to terrorism, treasonous anti-Americanism, and comtempt [sic] for America’s founding principles such as freedom of religion.”

• Trying further to make the case that it’s “an online encyclopedia you can trust,” Conservapedia has this to say on the important subject of global warming:

On February 2, 2007, an internatonal [sic] panel of hundreds of scientists and representatives of 113 governments issued a report concluding:

The observed widespread warming of the atmosphere and ocean, together with ice-mass loss, support the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that global climate change of the past 50 years can be explained without external forcing, and very likely that is not due to known natural causes alone.

It should be noted that these scientists are motivated by a need for grant money in their field of climatology. Therefore, their work can not be considered unbiased, though no more than any scientist in any other field. Also, these scientists are mostly liberal athiests [sic], untroubled by the hubris that man can destroy the Earth which God gave him.

• And I’m not sure what to make of Conservapedia’s entry under the word “religion.” I’d assumed, given the goals of this site, that it would have much to say on this controversial subject. However, the page contains nothing but this text:

Types of Religion
There is only one type of religion, Christianity. The others are frauds.

Sources of Religion
Christians used to look to the Bible for God’s word, but now they have the Blog of the Gods, which relays His word directly in modern language people can understand. It is also less silly than the Bible.

(Most of the Web links above have been added by yours truly, in order that readers can find more information on certain subjects. However, don’t blame me for that weird Blog of the Gods link; it’s original to Conservapedia.)

Obviously, Conservapedia is still in its formative stages, with subjects of seemingly greatest interest to its originators receiving the most attention first. Which might explain why, after attacking Bill Clinton for most of a 519-word write-up, its creators then devote only 168 words to his successor; and why extensive entries are written about homosexuality and abortion--both abject sources of evil, apparently--yet the site offers absolutely no information about the U.S. Congress, only a quote from Mark Twain: “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”

The creation of this sort of online “resource” isn’t really surprising. As Steve Benen of The Carpetbagger Report remarks: “A Bush White House aide famously said a few years ago, ‘We create our own reality.’ I suppose it stands to reason, then, that Bush’s supporters would want to do the same thing.”

And the whole enterprise would be quite hilarious, were it not merely pathetic. The idea that self-styled conservatives--trying to counter what they see as a too-liberal interpretation of the world’s complications by intellectuals and encyclopedia authors--need to edit history to fit their own biases simply emphasizes their minority viewpoints. Furthermore, in its effort to avoid what project leader Andy Schlafly (son of longtime conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly) calls the gossip, vulgarity, and long-winded writing of Wikipedia, this site actually insults its readers’ intelligence by trying to shield them from other opinions--not unlike what FOX News does by, say, sinking its resources into seemingly endless coverage of former Playboy playmate Anna Nicole Smith’s death, rather than reporting on the day-by-day increase of body counts from Bush’s Iraq occupation. Can’t let those readers find out what’s really happening in the world, and that most people think differently than they do, lest the sheep start to abandon their right-wing shepherds. Only chaos can ensue from that, am I right?

Of course, as Wired News points out, “Conservapedia isn’t the first example of the religious right turning to social software to reach a wider web audience--there’s also CreationWiki, an encyclopedia of creation science written from a Christian perspective.” And we all know how influential that site has been. Getting worked up about Conservapedia is probably just as much wasted energy.

READ MORE: “Worst. Encyclopedia. Ever,” by Andrew Leonard (Salon); “Create Your Own Reality,” by DarkSyde (Daily Kos); “Sources, Sources,” by Carl Zimmer (The Loom); “Conservapedia,” by Jon Swift; “Repressed Republicans, Part 273,” by David Terrenoire (A Dark Planet).

I’m at Twentysomething and I’ll Keep Bein’ Me

As is pretty obvious by now, George W. Bush insists that he doesn’t run his White House according to public poll ratings, because those ratings demonstrate such a marked intolerance for his willful ignorance of Iraq war realities, his disconnect between talk and action (Hello, New Orleans!), his persistent grabs for more power, his failures as a steward of the nation’s economy, and his oft-demonstrated incompetence as a leader. Yet those polls continue to be conducted, much to the administration’s dismay.

The latest New York Times/CBS News survey may carry the bitterest news for a White House that’s determinedly catered over the last six years to its extremist right-wing base. It shows that the prez “has lost substantial support among members of his own party. ... Mr. Bush’s approval rating dropped 13 percentage points since last fall among Republicans, 65 percent of whom now say they approve of the way he is handling his job as president, compared with 78 percent last October.” Bush’s general job approval stands “at one of its lowest points,” the Times reports, “with 29 percent of all Americans saying they approve of the way he is doing his job, compared with 34 percent at the end of October. Sixty-one percent disapproved, compared with 58 percent in October, within the margin of sampling error.”

A mere 23 percent of survey respondents say they approve of the way the prez has handled the Iraq nightmare, with just 25 percent endorsing his overall conduct of foreign policy. And while Bush has sought to make his anti-terrorism tactics a strength and a legacy, only 40 percent of Americans polled approve of his efforts; 53 percent disapprove. “Seventy percent, including 52 percent of Republicans, say there is not much the United States military can do to reduce the sectarian fighting in Iraq.”

When asked whether the country is going in the right or wrong direction, a whopping 68 percent say it’s “on the wrong track.” The White House might try to ignore such a statistic, but it affects how both parties in Congress treat Bush’s proposals, and will have an affect on who voters cast their ballots for in November 2008.

A Fighter for History Gone

February, the shortest month of the year, finally brought to a close the life and career of one of America’s foremost political historians and social critics, Pulitzer Prize-winner and former Kennedy administration advisor Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. He died in Manhattan last night, after being stricken with a heart attack while dining out. Schlesinger was 89 years old.

Born in Columbus, Ohio, in October 1917, Schlesinger was the son and namesake of Arthur M. Schlesinger, a Progressive Era intellectual and Harvard University history professor who may have been best known for surveying U.S. historians on the significance of past presidencies. After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard himself in 1938, during World War II “Schlesinger drafted some statements for President [Franklin D.] Roosevelt and served as an intelligence analyst for the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner to the CIA,” according to an Associated Press obituary. His emergence from his famous father’s shadow was most clearly realized in 1945, when he published The Age of Jackson, a historical text that “offered a new, class-based interpretation of the [Andrew] Jackson administration, destroying the old myth that the country was once an egalitarian paradise. The book remained influential despite eventual criticism--even by Schlesinger--for overlooking Jackson’s appeasement of slavery and his harsh treatment of Indians.”

In the mid-’40s, Schlesinger helped found (with Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, and others) Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal organization that, while it espoused anti-communism, also opposed the dogmatic Communist witch-hunting practiced during the 1950s by Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) and the nearly as “obsessive” anti-communism promoted by the Left. In 1949, he saw published The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, in which he advocated liberal democratic ideals but adamantly rejected totalitarianism (“Neither fascism nor communism can win so long as there remains a democratic middle way,” he wrote in The New York Times in 1948). Schlesinger’s staunch liberalism led him to pen speeches for Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956, and then to do the same for John F. Kennedy in 1960. (Schlesinger conceded that switching his loyalty from Stevenson to the junior U.S. senator from Massachusetts was difficult; he called Stevenson, the former governor of Illinois, a “much richer, more thoughtful, more creative person,” but was drawn to Kennedy’s “cool, measured, intelligent concern.”)

After Kennedy’s thin conquest over GOP candidate Richard M. Nixon, Schlesinger served in the White House as a speech writer and presidential special assistant for Latin American affairs. At the time of Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Schlesinger was left with voluminous notes he’d taken for the president, which Kennedy planned to use in writing his autobiography. Instead, Schlesinger used them to craft his own book, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award in 1966. He returned to the Kennedy family more than a decade later with Robert Kennedy and His Times.

Although his job and inclination was to view politics through the lens of what had gone (and failed) before, he could also be a fierce Democratic partisan. And that had the unfortunate result of coloring his perceptions of what was possible. During the 1972 U.S. presidential election, for instance, Schlesinger forecast a decisive win for South Dakota Senator George McGovern “because he was ‘leading a constituency as broad as Roosevelt’s coalition in 1932,’” recalls Britain’s Guardian newspaper. Nixon, though, won re-election in a landslide. Schlesinger bet the wrong horse again in 1980, when he laid wagers on Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy stealing the Democratic nomination away from incumbent President Jimmy Carter. “Anyone observing that campaign,” opines The Guardian’s Harold Jackson, “could foresee the outcome almost from the start. Clearly Schlesinger was talking from his heart not his head and, as the years went by, it became increasingly important to determine which organ prevailed.”

Despite such disappointments, however, Schlesinger remained what he called, upon turning 80 in 1997, “an unrepentant and unreconstructed liberal and New Dealer. ... That means I favor the use of government to improve opportunities and to enlarge freedoms for ordinary people.” But he vociferously opposed the misapplication of political authority to advance extremist causes. In 1998, he joined more than 400 historians to denounce the poisonously partisan impeachment of President Bill Clinton, and he blasted George W. Bush’s decision to invade Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003, calling Bush’s supposed “preventive war” strategy “a fatal turn in U.S. foreign policy.” His 2004 book, War and the American Presidency, spoke disparagingly of Bush’s expansion of presidential power and the dangers of an “imperial presidency,” a term Schlesinger popularized (if not coined) during the Nixon administration. During an interview he did with Salon in 2004, the then 87-year-old historian predicted that Americans would come to “hate” themselves for sanctioning Bush’s abuses of power:

Well, there’s a lengthy history of us doing just that. The Red Scare from the First World War, for example. The Wilson administration arrested a lot of people, sent them to prison, including Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party candidate, and deported some others of foreign birth. After the war, people began to wonder what the actual threat had been and we hated ourselves in the morning. As a result, the American Civil Liberties Union was founded and [Oliver Wendell] Holmes [Jr.] and [Louis] Brandeis led the judicial reaction.

After the Second World War, we finally paid reparations to the Japanese who had been interned. After the Civil War, the Supreme Court regarded Mulligan [a case in which a Confederate sympathizer from Indiana was imprisoned without charges] as a miscarriage of justice.

I think the best current example might be the Patriot Act--its excesses are a lot like those of the Alien and Sedition Acts. In fact, the spinmeisters of 1798 should have called the Alien and Sedition Acts “the Patriot Act.” America was engaged in undeclared naval warfare against France at the time, but afterward, the Alien and Sedition Acts were quickly repented as an overreaction to criticism of government.

We overreact and then we’re sorry. Panic is not a wise basis for judgment. I think it will happen like that again. The rather conservative Supreme Court has already rebuked the imperial president by ruling that the Guantánamo prison detainees are subject to due process.

However, as we’ve seen, the great virtue of democracy is its capacity for self-correction.

But it wasn’t as a result of his political confrontations that Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. became most important to those of us who thrill at the thoughtful examination of American historical developments and presidencies. It was his books that made his name known to us, whether we’re talking about The Age of Jackson or Robert Kennedy and His Times (both of which I have displayed on a high shelf beside my desk), or his three-volume history of the New Deal, The Age of Roosevelt, and what was to have been the first part of his memoirs, A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950.

Lately I’ve been working my way through a still-growing series of U.S. presidential biographies, edited by Schlesinger for Times Books, and have been reminded not only of this bowtie-wearing historian’s knowledge of America’s past, but his curiosity about it, as well. Contrary to what many history teachers seem to believe, the past isn’t merely a collection of occurrences with dates and players attached. It is a vital, ever-revealing stew of truths, tragedies, and triumphs that can only be fully understood by those who are made curious about its twists, not made resentful of having to learn it by rote. Schlesinger, understandably inspired to his future by his father, showed an obvious curiosity about what had been and what was to come, together with a faith that history is more tutor than tyrant--indicating but not demanding repetition. We owe him greatly for what he left behind, now that he himself is history.

READ MORE: “Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Dies at 89,” by Debbi Wilgoren (The Washington Post); “Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.: 1917-2007,” by Christy Hardin Smith (Firedoglake); “Not Just Camelot’s Historian,” by Daniel Greenberg (Slate); “A Historian’s Valedictory,” by Robert B. Semple Jr. (The New York Times); “History, Written in the Present Tense,” by Sam Tanenhaus (The New York Times).