Suppose we won the war but lost our freedom:

‘…Every commentator on this conflict – and I write as one who supports it – seems to have got it wrong. What’s frightening isn’t the prospect of the Americans becoming bogged down, as in Vietnam; what’s frightening is the almost contemptuous ease with which they are winning it.

And what can be done on the battlefield can be done with equal efficiency on the home front. I do not mean that David Blunkett intends to have Predators cruising up and down above British motorways (although I wouldn’t put it past him), but rather that the new technologies have the potential to destroy human privacy, and the Government now means to exploit the situation under cover of fighting terrorism….’Telegraph UK

Phil Agre:
Understanding Jargon

Americans are upset at the blizzard of irrational jargon that now substitutes for political discourse in the United States, and they increasingly recognize that it isn’t going away until it is named and confronted. To that end, I have enclosed a short list of books about propaganda, public relations, ideology, and related topics. (I sent out another list on the topic last year, and for convenience I’ve attached that list to the end of this one.) I’ve included books from several perspectives, including manuals for practitioners.

If you want a single starting-place for your reading, I recommend the works of Robert Jackall. Jackall is an ethicist who does field studies and writes powerful books about the ethical nightmares he finds. I recommend his book Moral Mazes to students who are about to start working in the real world, and he has a recent book about the world of issue advocacy. Otherwise, there’s something for everyone. People on the left will enjoy Alex Carey’s excellent Taking the Risk Out of Democracy, people on the right will enjoy Marvin Olasky’s history of the public relations department at AT&T, those seeking a blood-curdling PR manual will enjoy Philip Lesly’s Overcoming Opposition, those wishing a more analytical approach to PR might consult James Grunig and Todd Hunt’s Managing Public Relations (I’ve used it in teaching the subject myself — it’s a little dated but still useful), those seeking pure scandal will enjoy the works of Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, and those wishing to understand conservative policy campaigns might consult Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado’s No Mercy.

Also, here is a page that contains my own informal articles about the currently fashionable political jargon. Red Rock Eater Digest

Michael Kinsley:
Consuming Gets Complicated: ‘My first thought was: What a deal!

My second thought was: Have I been overpaying all along? Are we supposed to negotiate now?’ Slate

An excursion into Context, ‘a forum for literary arts and culture.’ To begin with, reading guides:

• the most influential critical works of the 20th century
  

• the most influential novels of the 20th century
  

• the pre-20th-century novels that most influenced the 20th century novel
  

• the 20th century novels students most like
  

• novels that will be considered the most important literary works of the 20th century in the year 2100

Curtis White: All That You Know Not to Be Is Utterly Real: Wherein lies the greatness of the great books? Does Harold Bloom (The Western Canon etc.) in particular have anything of worth to say about this?

“…Unfortunately, … Bloom has taken far less care than he ought to make important discriminations about the thought of deconstruction or of feminism or postmodernism. Rather, he lumps them into one monstrous and threatening whole, just like any Reagan-era hack, called variously the School of Resentment or simply (when he’s feeling very mean-spirited, the well-paid champion of right wing pundits everywhere) cheerleaders. He also strongly implies, just as Bennett, Dinesh D’Souza, Roger Kimball, George Will, Lynne Cheney, et al, have done, that we are in a moment of crisis and theorists, feminists, and multiculturalists are to blame. He also simplifies and misrepresents crucial ideas, like the Death of the Author, to suit his own polemical purpose.”

And in the second part of the essay, he points to places we may get help with alternate aesthetics. Context

Curtis White: Whatever, Dude: the author is troubled that all too often his reactions to a serious film, like those of so many others, come down to whether he “liked” it or not, whether it “sucks” or “rocks”, perhaps not surprising in a “culture that thrives on thoughtless and ephemeral enthusiasms.” He struggles to articulate a more sophisticated way in which, essentially, a film can be a work of art embodying an aesthetic. Case in point — his favorite cowboy movie. Context

Gertrude Stein:

What are master-pieces and why after all are there so few of them:

“… I was going to talk to you but actually it is impossible to talk about master-pieces and what they are because talking essentially has nothing to do with creation. I talk a lot I like to talk and I talk even more than that I may say I talk most of the time and I listen a fair amount too and as I have said the essence of being a genius is to be able to talk and listen to listen while talking and talk while listening but and this is very important very important indeed talking has nothing to do with creation. What are master-pieces and why after all are there so few of them. You may say after all there are a good many of them but in any kind of proportion with everything that anybody who does anything is doing there are really very few of them. All this summer I meditated and wrote about this subject and it finally came to be a discussion of the relation of human nature and the human mind and identity. The thing one gradually comes to find out is that one has no identity that is when one is in the act of doing anything. Identity is recognition, you know who you are because you and others remember anything about yourself but essentially you are not that when you are doing anything. I am I because my little dog knows me but, creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are you and your recognizing that he knows, that is what destroys creation. That is what makes school. Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.” Context

William Carlos Williams: The Work of Gertrude Stein:

“…Let it be granted that whatever is new in literature the germ of it will be found somewhere in the writings of other times; only the modern emphasis gives work a present distinction.

The necessity for this modern focus and the meaning of the changes involved are, however, another matter, the everlasting stumbling block to criticism. Here is a theme worth development in the case of Gertrude Stein–yet signally neglected.

Why in fact have we not heard more generally from American scholars upon the writings of Miss Stein? Is it lack of heart or ability or just that theirs is an enthusiasm which fades rapidly of its own nature before the risks of today?” Context

Curtis White: The Middle Mind

I have suspected for some time that there is something missing in the way we usually construct the Culture Wars. Bennett, Cheney, D’Souza, Kimball, etc., on one side. Fish, Graff, Berube, Mapplethorpe, etc., on the other. I’ve been as involved and absorbed in this faux drama as anyone, but at the same time, dimly, I have wondered: do these characters really stand for things people care about? I mean, in places other than the Chronicle for Higher Education and the National Review?

And then at last it occurred to me that this titanic agon (as dear Harold Bloom might put it) was just a diversion from the real action. There is another cultural politics in our midst, perhaps even more organic then the academic Left or ideological Right. It is moving, making its way, accumulating its forces, winning while putative conservatives and tenured radicals beat the bloody hell out of each other to no end at all. This third force I call our Middle Mind. It is a vast mind, my friends, and I fear it is already something towering and permanent on our national horizon. Context

Now, out of context:

Human sweat packs a germ-killing punch “People working up a lather at the gym may be doing more than shedding a few pounds. They could be protecting their skin from infection.

In an upcoming Nature Immunology, German researchers report that human sweat contains a novel microbe-killing molecule, which they’ve dubbed dermicidin. Further study of this small protein, or peptide, may lead to new ways of defeating disease-causing germs, the scientists suggest. The peptide may even explain how sweat glands originally arose in animals, adds another biologist.” Science News

Maureen Dowd:
Blessings and Bombings:

In “The Crack-Up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

So now we know for sure that George W. Bush has a first-rate intelligence.

The president, his team and the rest of us have been juggling a lot of contradictory notions since Sept. 11. NY Times

In Utah, a Government Hater Sells a Germ-Warfare Book: ‘Next to the Indian handicraft booth, Timothy W. Tobiason was selling printed and CD copies of his book, Scientific Principles of Improvised Warfare and Home Defense Volume 6-1: Advanced Biological Weapons Design and Manufacture, a germ-warfare cookbook that bioterrorism experts say is accurate enough to be dangerous.’ NY Times

FBI software cracks encryption wall

The FBI is developing software capable of inserting a computer virus onto a suspect?s machine and obtaining encryption keys, a source familiar with the project told MSNBC.com. The software, known as “Magic Lantern“, enables agents to read data that had been scrambled, a tactic often employed by criminals to hide information and evade law enforcement. The best snooping technology that the FBI currently uses, the controversial software called Carnivore, has been useless against suspects clever enough to encrypt their files. MSNBC

Photoshop: It’s All the Rage… “(D)octoring images — or Photoshopping, as its practitioners call it — is a booming online pastime for hobbyists and graphic designers whose altered documents have taken up residence in the popular imagination alongside political cartoons and satirical text, like that published by The Onion.” Wired

Is it ‘Monsters, Inc.’ or ‘Shrek’ for new Academy Award for best animated feature?

97th anniversary of the birth of late tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins. Read about his life in the link, which is to his 1969 New York Times obituary.

A Police Force Rebuffs F.B.I. on Querying Mideast Men

The Portland, Ore., police will not

cooperate with the Federal Bureau

of Investigation in its efforts to interview

5,000 young Middle Eastern men

nationwide because such questioning

violates state law, the department’s acting

police chief, Andrew Kirkland, said

yesterday.

The decision is the first known case of a

city’s refusing to go along with the

antiterrorism effort, which was announced

last week by Attorney General John

Ashcroft.

But top police officials in several other cities have also said that Mr.

Ashcroft’s plan raises troubling questions about racial profiling — an issue

that has brought endless grief to police departments nationwide — and

may violate local and state laws about issues like intelligence gathering

for political purposes. NY Times

94 year-old Connecticut woman diagnosed with and dies of inhalation anthrax. No obvious source of the infection.

“Mrs. Lundgren lived in the rural part of Oxford, a postage-stamp of a

town in Connecticut’s Naugatuck River Valley. A niece told The Hartford

Courant that Mrs. Lundgren gave up her driver’s license a year ago, and

Mr. Rowland said her travels were mostly limited to local shops and

activities. “

NY Times I’m wondering if this, as well as the Kathy Nguyen case in the Bronx, aren’t sporadic cases which, before the era of heightened vigilance, would have been diagnosed as atypical pneumonia with few further qeustions.

Direction of Global War on Terror Raises Unsettling Questions

One great task of wartime leadership, said Eliot A. Cohen, a professor of

strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University, “is not only to communicate

resolve and determination and will, but to explain what you are doing

and why you are doing it.”

“I think thus far that is not quite what we have seen,” he said. “We have

seen a tremendous pulse of staunchness, but we have not seen the more

intellectual side of war leadership, making the case for what we are

doing and laying out the arguments for what we do next.” NY Times