“The Los Angeles Times has ordered its reporters to stop describing anti-American forces in Iraq as ‘resistance fighters,’ saying the term romanticizes them and evokes World War II-era heroism.

The ban was issued by Melissa McCoy, a Times assistant managing editor, who told the staff in an e-mail circulated on Monday night that the phrase conveyed unintended meaning and asked them to instead use the terms ‘insurgents’ or ‘guerrillas.'” —Reuters . Supposedly, the ‘resistance fighters’ term evokes “the French Resistance or Jews who fought against Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto.” The assistant managing editor of the New York Times told Reuters he agreed with the LA Times‘ decision ( “I don’t think it’s the kind of cool, neutral language we like to see.”), but the foreign desk editor of the Washington Post disagrees, on the grounds that the term is a technically accurate description.

On what grounds did McCoy make the call, I wonder, that (a) that is the connotation readers will take from her reporters’ choice of terms; or that (b) the alternative terms suggested will be more neutral or innocuous? I actually find both “guerrilla” and “insurgent” to have heroic connotations, my political sentiments having been shaped by my opposition to the US intervention in Vietnam and support for a number of guerrilla insurgencies since. She claims it is not on the basis of reader complaints, but even if it were, how would that be an accurate gauge of (a) those readers who had not reacted negatively to the connotations of ‘resistance fighter’ and (b) the relative merits of alternative terms to which readers had not been exposed and therefore about which they could not complain? Sorry to spin out my tortured, hairsplitting logic, but I just don’t get it. Hey, at least the LA Times reporters weren’t using the term ‘freedom fighters’ instead…

Website collecting the writing of this prolific, incisive fellow-traveller who has been publishing in Wired recently but whose output I have been following since the days of his associations with the Grateful Dead and Allen Ginsberg. In the past few years, he had the privilege of an extended interview with the reclusive inspired neurologist Oliver Sacks (I linked here to his resulting portrait of Sacks in Wired) his research for which led Silberman, made curious about the comment made by a waggish admirer of FmH who called me ‘the Oliver Sacks of weblogging’, to my site here.

Responding to my link below to a piece about the sculptural works of a profoundly mentally handicapped woman surely unaware she is ‘making art’, Steve wrote to say he is working on a piece about jazz pianist Matt Savage, an 11-year-old ‘musical savant’ with an autistic-spectrum disorder — “an in-depth examination of what the brains of rare prodigies like Savage tell us about the biological nature of intelligence and creativity…” Autistic phenomena have been another of Steve’s interests (as it is one of mine), I glean, dating at least from the acclaimed piece he wrote (again in Wired) in December, 2001 (and, again, to which I linked here at the time) on the ‘geek syndrome’, about the connection between autistic traits and technology. The term ‘geek syndrome’, coined as a headline for his story, has become lingua franca for this association. You FmH’ers are among the ‘relentlessly curious’ for whose benefit he posts a slew of links to some of his older writings; dig in.

Addendum: Ironically, as I finish the above, I am pointed to another piece by Silberman about an experience, again bearing a resonance to something I post here, whose potency leaves him concluding that “talking about things I had or had not written seemed ridiculous, like gossiping in front of a mountain.”

I hadn’t realized, until I saw this linked to at Booknotes, that only six senators were present for the voice vote on the $87b Iraq appropriation. USA Today calls them courageous for sticking around for the vote and says we have ninety-four cowards among these august representatives. More telling, of the six only Sen. Robert Byrd voted no. To my way of thinking, we have ninety-nine cowards, not ninety-four. And among them are several men who are vying for your vote next November, of course.

When I linked a few days ago to the USA Today article about the superiority of the intelligence the insurgents are using in fighting against the US occupation, a reader —[thanks, ezrael] commented that someone must have been asleep at the paper’s editorial desk. This is another piece that might be interpreted as uncharacteristically critical of the powers-that-be.

… that may stretch our conception of art:

• Art for Cockroaches:
  

  monochrom invites artists to design a gallery-space for cockroaches. Each design is exhibited for a month and then replaced. The audience — consisting of 40 individuals — are fed fresh fruit daily (preferably apples or bananas) and are cared for. You can come and visit the audience, every Thursday, when monochrom has its weekly meeting at Museumsquartier/Vienna. monochrom guarantees the well-being of visitors.

  “I think it’s about time to herald the era of a new awareness in the
  
  human-cockroach-relationship.” (Don Pollock)

• jwz receives a gift of a painting…
  

  …by an actor who was Johnny Weissmuller’s costar in the Tarzan movies in the 1930s and 1940s. The artist is now 71 years old and living in Palm Springs, Florida, enjoying his new career as a painter.

  His name is Cheeta, and he’s the world’s oldest living primate.

• Judith Scott (born 1943), a fifty-five year old woman with Down’s Syndrome, has spent the past ten years producing a series of totally non-functional objects which, to us, appear to be works of sculpture…
  

  …except that the notion of sculpture is far beyond Judith’s understanding. As well as being mentally handicapped, Judith cannot hear or speak, and she has little concept of language. There is no way of asking her what she is doing, yet her compulsive involvement with the shaping of abstract forms in space seems to imply that at some level she knows. Judith possesses no concept of art, no understanding of its meaning or function. She does not know that she is an artist, nor does she understand that the objects she creates are perceived by others as works of art. Whatever she is doing she is definitely not concerned with the making of art. What then is she doing? Unmistakably she is working, and working hard. Her formidable concentration surpasses that of most professional artists. Is it possible that she is obsessionally involved in an activity that is without meaning? Does serious mental retardation invariably preclude the creation of true works of art? Is it plausible to imagine an artist of stature emerging in the context of massively impaired intellectual development?

From Atrios:

“At this point, I think we need to not ‘fail miserably.’ I’d like that to be a resounding success, with a liberal democracy, complete with gay marriage and all, flourishing in Iraq, but the plutocratic colony we’re in the process of establishing to the benefit of our war profiteers isn’t exactly moving in that direction. The truth is, as Big Media Matt points out, the Bush administration is in the process of ‘cutting and running’ as much or more as any of the Dem candidates (even Kucinich!) are suggesting. I have a hard time believing that the promises of troop reduction will ever really materialize, but in the end it’ll be a war between Rove and the Neocons. Normally I’d put my money on Rove, but I’m not sure in this case.”

I love how succinctly he puts the dysadministration dilemma — Rove vs. the Neocons. This would imply, however, that Rove’s expertise at selling presidential Bu**sh** is based on less rabid ideological grounds than the Perles, Wolfowitzs, etc. What exactly are Rove’s conservative bona fides?

Bruce Sterling is back in the weblogging business, courtesy of a new blogspace Wired is developing. Sterling’s outlook has always seemed to me to be quite amenable to weblog-consciousness and I was always disappointed with the lack of investment he made in his previous venture in this area. Schism Matrix. He pledges to be prolific this time around (possibly because Wired is paying him for this effort?). IMHO, so far what he has got up at BtB makes up for volume by lacking in depth, however. Not compelling.

I hadn’t realized, until I saw this linked to at Booknotes, that only six senators were present for the voice vote on the $87b Iraq appropriation. USA Today calls them courageous for sticking around for the vote and says we have ninety-four cowards among these august representatives. More telling, of the six only Sen. Robert Byrd voted no. To my way of thinking, we have ninety-nine cowards, not ninety-four. And among them are several men who are vying for your vote next November, of course.

When I linked a few days ago to the USA Today article about the superiority of the intelligence the insurgents are using in fighting against the US occupation, a reader —[thanks, ezrael] commented that someone must have been asleep at the paper’s editorial desk. This is another piece that might be interpreted as uncharacteristically critical of the powers-that-be.