Quote of the Week (Runner-Up)

"She's a partner and a soul mate."

-- John McCain, talking about Sarah Palin

Quote of the Week

"This storm is dangerous."

-- George W. Bush, referring to Hurricane Gustav

Sunday Sacrilege

The Lord Works in Mysterious Ways

Apparently there is a God and he's got a hell of a sense of humor.

A couple of weeks ago, fundamentalist Christian asshole James Dobson and his group, Focus on the Family, lead an effort encouraging people to pray for Barack Obama's DNC acceptance speech to be rained out.

Instead, the skies were crystal clear last Thursday night in Denver.

Tomorrow marks the scheduled start of the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.

And look what's expected to slam into the Gulf Coast in 24 hours, possibly disrupting or even postponing the whole damn thing.

(Before the hate mail starts pouring in, no you jerk, of course I'm not insinuating that Gustav is a good thing -- merely pointing out the irony. Of course the argument could be made that I spoke too soon anyway, since Gustav is providing the perfect cover for Bush and Cheney to make the announcement that they're skipping the RNC altogether -- should it happen as scheduled -- which can only benefit McCain.)

It's a Shame About Ray

You've gotta love Ray Nagin; he really is the voice of calm and reason for New Orleans.

Within the past 24 hours, he's called Hurricane Gustav "the mother of all storms," "the storm of the century" (pretty dubious considering that Katrina wiped half of his city off the map only three years ago), and told residents, "you need to be scared."

While media outlets everywhere are no doubt loving Nagin for doing their jobs for them by throwing out one hyperbolically alarmist soundbite after another, is it really good for New Orleans that he's acting more like a mad street prophet -- albeit, one on Quaaludes -- than an assured leader?

Yes, the situation is very serious, and that needs to be made clear to everyone in the path of this storm. Gustav is nothing to screw around with and ordering mandatory evacuations was the right thing to do, to say the least. But I'm not sure Nagin's usual idiotic bluster and over-the-top language -- the kind that incites panic rather than encouraging cool heads -- are what's needed at a time like this.

Then again, maybe I'm making the mistake of basing my opinion on the assumption that New Orleans is like most other cities and not completely fucking crazy.

McCain and Unable II: The Reckoning

Like everyone else with a brain, my friend and fellow ex-CNNer Jacki Schechner is curious (read: shocked) as to why John McCain decided to go with the "naughty librarian" over all the other potential VP candidates he had available to him -- you know, the ones with actual qualifications.

Her take on the whole thing is pretty damn good. She likens Palin not to Dan Quayle but to Harriet Miers. (And proving that great minds think alike -- or at the very least, sick minds -- she went with the same title as my initial piece.)

(Where Was I?: Palin Comparison/8.30.08)

Meanwhile, for an entirely offensive and juvenile perspective, see Votar's post (and if you laugh at it, you're going to hell -- where I'll be your landlord).

(Update, 5:21pm It's a trap!: A very astute theory on why Sarah Palin is more dangerous than she looks -- compliments of Leighton Woodhouse, contributor to the Huffington Post: The Huffington Post: "The Palin Trap" by Leighton Woodhouse/8.31.08.)

Dope Fiend Theater

You know the drill: Swallow that blotter acid about 20 minutes after first putting it on your tongue, then sit back and watch the weirdness. (Deus Ex Malcontent assumes no responsibility for permanent psychological damage which may be caused by viewing the following.)

Saturday Morning Cartoons

Poor Claude.

From 1950, here's the Maltese & Jones tale of neuroses, jealousy and fleas -- Terrier Stricken.

McCain and Unable

I should be glad John McCain picked Sarah Palin to be his running-mate.

I should be glad that in his first true test of leadership -- the one that inescapably sets the tone for what's to come and acts as a yardstick by which to measure his judgment -- he proved that he isn't fit to govern an Elks Lodge, much less the United States of America.

I should be glad that by choosing a self-proclaimed "hockey mom" -- a first-term governor of a state with an unimaginably low population density whose only former role in public service was as a city councilwoman and the mayor of a town of 8,000; a former beauty queen with no experience whatsoever in foreign affairs -- John McCain may have all but handed the election to Barack Obama.

I should be glad.

So why the hell am I so outraged?

Maybe it's because what John McCain just did -- the cynical gamble he's taken in a desperate effort to win the White House -- in fact gambles with the very future of this country. With the safety of its citizens and the lives of its soldiers. By attempting to pander to those Hillary Clinton supporters who may still feel snubbed and disillusioned by the outcome of the Democratic race, and by making a transparent grab for both the shock value that can only come from pure political theater and the chance to regain his "maverick" label, McCain has said something terrifying -- and telling.

He's said that he's perfectly willing to risk the United States -- a country that, as he's so fond of reminding us, has enemies that must be confronted; a country that's currently enmeshed in two wars -- to achieve his goal of getting elected.

Because don't think for a second that he truly believes Sarah Palin is ready to lead the free world should something render him unable to. No, what John McCain believes is that Sarah Palin can lead enough women to the polls to win him the presidency.

It's a thought that should make Americans sick to their stomachs: McCain is counting on Palin's charm and warmth, her admittedly sharp mind and fascinating backstory, to mesmerize voters and recast his campaign and his image in a bright new sheen of youth and vitality. He expects Sarah Palin to be the spark plug that fires up the media, who will surely have to admit that he's turning his back on the past and is ready to reshape and reclaim the Republican Party by making history. And yet at the end of the day, nothing changes the fact that this is actually more of the same from the GOP -- more political opportunism and clever gamesmanship for the sake of achieving the goal of power. Nor does anything change the fact that McCain wants to put someone without a shred of experience in foreign relations, worldwide diplomacy or global conflicts a heartbeat away from having to deal with all three -- with the security of the rest of us hanging in the balance.

As McCain himself has implied about his opponent, the White House is not the place for on-the-job training -- not during these uncertain times, when our country is facing turmoil abroad and unprecedented challenges at home.

Why am I outraged?

Because there's always the possibility that his shifty little parlor trick will actually work.

And then what?

Hit Me Palin One More Time

I rest my case.

Palin Comparison

So John McCain, after all that complaining about Barack Obama not being qualified to lead, picks a 44-year-old political lightweight as his running-mate -- a former beauty pageant runner-up and governor from Alaska in her first term.

Why?

Because she's a woman, and in the apparently senile dream world that McCain now inhabits -- the one where Sarah Palin is comparable to Hillary Clinton and petty tricks win elections -- she'll draw women voters away from Obama.

I think my wife just put it best: "He thinks I'll vote for him just because he put a woman on the ticket? That's insulting."

Not just any woman, though.

One with zero foreign policy experience (compare that with Joe Biden) who would take the reins of the United States and the free world should anything happen to John McCain -- who turns 72 years old today.

America, just go back and watch last night's speech again and wake me on election day.

(Incidentally, is it just me or did Palin in her younger days bear an uncanny resemblance to -- irony of ironies -- Britney Spears? That sound you hear is the Obama campaign dancing a jig and turning cartwheels.)

(Update, 12:48PM: So I just watched Palin's speech: an in-over-the-head hyper-conservative, full of tough talk, who can't pronounce "nuclear," pandering to a crowd that stops every few minutes to chant "USA! USA!" Sound familiar?)

I For One Welcome Our New Amphibious Overlord

I hope CNN does something with this story so I can get one of those new t-shirts with this headline on it:

(MSNBC.com: Museum Defies Pope Over Crucified Frog/8.28.08)

The XXX Files: I Want To Be Laid

Okay, so, you're a sex addict.

Téa Leone's your wife.

What's the problem exactly?

(AP: David Duchovny Enters Rehab for Sex Addiction/8.29.08)

Listening Post

It just seems appropriate on so many different levels this morning.

From 1973, this is the great Marvin Gaye with a gorgeous live version of What's Going On/What's Happening Brother.

A W E S O M E

The Speed of Lies

If you believe Philip Berg, Barack Obama is unfit to be President of the United States; his candidacy is nothing more than a dangerously specious house of cards that will almost surely collapse if allowed to continue.

According to Berg, Barack Obama harbors a secret which disqualifies him outright from running for the office of president -- and it's only a matter of time before the truth comes to light and the resulting embarrassing debacle leaves the entire Democratic Party in chaos.

See, If you believe Philip Berg, Barack Obama isn't a U.S. citizen.

Last Thursday, Berg -- a Philadelphia attorney who's something of a notorious presence within that city's legal community -- filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of Eastern Pennsylvania demanding that an injunction be issued against the official nomination of Obama. The suit charges that the Illinois senator is constitutionally ineligible to become president on the grounds that he has yet to produce a valid U.S. birth certificate -- Berg claiming that the current one on file from Hawaii is a forgery, proven so by "three forensic experts" -- and that he maintains an unresolved dual-citizenship and owes allegiances to both Kenya and Indonesia, where his father was born and where he lived as a child, respectively. Berg says that he has access to copies of Obama's Jakartan school records which show the candidate registered under the surname of his mother's 2nd husband, Lolo Soetoro, and listed as an Indonesian citizen; as if to hedge his bet, he insists that even if Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate is indeed shown to be authentic, the school registry should be enough to keep the candidate out of the White House.

If these allegations sound familiar, they should; in one form or another, each of them has been bandied about the internet or bullhorned across conservative radio for months now in an ongoing effort to paint Barack Obama as "different."

Oh yeah, and they're all basically bullshit.

A couple of weeks back, the Annenberg Political Fact Check -- an organization whose credentials are pretty much bulletproof -- set out to settle once and for all the debate over Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate. The word "debate" deserves no small amount of qualification because, in reality, there never was a legitimate claim to be made that the document was phony -- simply a lot of fantastical conspiracy theorist innuendo, perpetuated and amplified at lightning speed by a million far-right dolts with computers and delusions of Sherlock Holmesian cleverness. Annenberg dispatched staffers to examine the birth certificate and ruled, to the surprise of no one with a modicum of common sense and two brain cells to rub together, that it's 100% legit; Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. As for the claim that Obama holds a dual citizenship or is in any other way beholden to a foreign country -- that was exposed as nonsense months ago.

And yet Philip Berg filed his lawsuit anyway. He filed it knowing full-well, one would have to imagine, that most of its claims are bogus -- that they already had been or easily could be debunked.

So why? What the hell would possess someone to willfully propagate claims that are tenuous at best and outright false at worst -- even going so far as to do it in court?

Because these days, when it comes to politics particularly, the truth is negotiable -- and there's value in the lie.

Whereas once there were a select few sources of information, and those sources were generally deemed credible by all but those on the furthest fringes of the public, now anyone can be his or her own news source. And while -- as this site, ironically, has advanced -- the rise of citizen journalism and hyper-connectivity has been good for the ethics of media as a whole, it's also created a treacherous wasteland of journalistic mini-fiefdoms, each spouting its own version of reality and together making it impossible, at times, to tell honest, well-researched fact from made-up crap conjured out of thin air to further an agenda. Whether the message comes in the form of an e-mail forwarded to your inbox by that paranoid uncle with the survival bunker in his basement who you're always hoping skips Thanksgiving, or as a bitter flamewar on every news aggregation outlet across the blogosphere, the internet has replaced television as the most effective and least regulated tool for political propaganda in America.

Which is why, ironically, it's now become the partial responsibility of television to help keep the corruption in check. It's too bad the good folks in the TV news media are usually unwilling to do it.

Mainstream media managers, as a whole, subscribe fully to the notion that bloggers and their internet realm are of an inferior journalistic stock; they see them as pests constantly circling the carrion of stories already broken by TV, radio and print; they condescend to them, dismissively painting their ilk as pasty, overweight losers, futilely raging against the machine from the comfort of a Middle-American basement, hopped up on Red Bull and basking in the post-orgasmic bliss of an afternoon spent masturbating to Asian porn. Those who adhere to the Mega-Media ethos believe that when a blogger does break a story, the quality of that piece of information can be judged by whether or not it rises to the level of inclusion in a mainstream broadcast, newspaper or magazine. In other words, only those above the radar can make the decision as to what's worth pulling up from under the radar. The problem is, the good stuff -- the powerful investigation, the sometimes penetrating insight -- gets passed over by the larger media outlets because it's, well, boring. It doesn't make for good TV or a quick, sharp read. Meanwhile, unfortunately, the garbage -- the rumor, conjecture, and misdirection -- is often picked up and elevated to the level of "real news" simply because it's so damn juicy and such a sure-fire ratings or circulation enhancer. A crap story thrown out by a few official-sounding blogs -- like the story of Obama's "phony" birth certificate -- can suddenly be granted validation simply by virtue of the fact that the "controversy" surrounding it is being discussed on national television. The lie is amplified inside the 24/7 cable news echo-chamber and, presto, it's suddenly palatable and worthy of serious consideration by 90% of the population.

It would be one thing if mainstream media outlets faced this kind of bullshit head-on and said, "No, this story isn't true, and if you believe it you're a lunatic." But it's better for ratings and revenue to instead ask, "A lot of folks are saying (insert spurious assertion here), but is it true?" (For the record, nobody does this vaguely referenced end-run on responsibility better than Fox News; see "Terrorist Fist Jab.") It goes without saying that this is how political propaganda is perpetuated; by reporting the rumor as its own story -- without sharply and decisively denouncing it -- you're validating it, giving new life to it, and ensuring that enough people will believe it that the very future of the country could wind up eventually hinging on it.

Ask yourself this: How many people still believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim?

Or this: How many people still believe that Iraq was connected to 9/11?

Very few within the mainstream media came right out and unequivocally shot down these ludicrous rumors before they could take root within the consciousness of the masses -- or at the very least, the minds of those who wanted nothing more than to have their preconceived biases confirmed.

There are thousands of Americans who will still claim that they "don't trust" Obama -- and yet they'll base this lack of trust on their willingness to trust an e-mail that got forwarded to them by a friend of a friend of a friend of some guy somewhere.

It's the responsibility of respectable news media everywhere to bring truth to propaganda and refute the fiction proffered for the sole purpose of sowing discord and confusing the electorate. It's incumbent upon the mainstream media, particularly if they value their stature as strongly as they claim, to shine a bright light on the lies, rather than fueling the fire by debating the merits of a story that they know perfectly well has no merits.

Should you believe Philip Berg?

It's a question that doesn't need to be asked, because it's already been answered.

(*Please see author's note in comment page)

Sin Gasolina

Daddy Yankee: OYE! OYE PAPO! BARACK BRO, DADDY YANKEE GOT YOUR BACK, YO! REGGAETON!!!

Barack Obama: Piss off.

Daddy Yankee: Uh, well... OYE! OYE PAPO! MCCAIN BRO, DADDY YANKEE GOT YOUR BACK, YO! REGGAETON!!!

John McCain: Huh? What? You say Cindy hired you to mow the lawn? Uh, sure... come on in.

(The Politico: Daddy Yankee Endorses McCain After Being Rebuffed by Obama/8.27.08)

Making a Mockery of Politics

A quick look back at some of the more memorable -- or at the very least, juvenile -- posts dealing with this year's presidential campaign.

(Here's Johnny!/6.21.08)

(Terry On/6.3.08)

(Mitt-out You/2.7.08)

(Is Barack Obama Gonna Have to Choke a Bitch?/1.7.08)

(The Sectarian Candidate/12.6.07)

Listening Post

From the upcoming release Dig Out Your Soul, it's brand new Oasis -- The Shock of Lightning.

#99: Watch Your Step

(The Huffington Post: Author of "100 Things To Do Before You Die" Dies in Fall at Age 47/8.27.08)

Project Office Mayhem

Your assignment, as usual: Quietly put the following link up on every computer in your office, then crank all the speakers to full volume.

Mischief points: 900

(Milton Resorts to Deadly Force)

News You Can Abuse

Why I love The Daily Show, reason #313:

Jon Stewart just proved once again that he's, ironically, one of the most competent and reputable news show hosts in America. He did it by verbally bitch-slapping the so-called serious media during a breakfast with correspondents covering the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

CNN reports:

"Stewart directed most of his ire at the 24-hour cable news networks, which he called 'gerbil wheels,' and said the media at-large had 'abdicated' to what he called the 'slow-witted beast.'

He said the never-ending television news cycle creates a 'false sense of urgency' and forces reporters to 'follow the veins that have been mined,' instead of pursuing serious and in-depth reporting."

And just how on-the-money is Stewart? Watch this video, edited by the people at 23/6, which shows what happens when the lack of any actual news to report makes CNN's staff go, apparently, insane.

Conventional Wisdom (Or Lack Thereof)

A bit of shameless self-promotion: I'll once again be doing a guest spot on Sirius Radio's Indie Talk, Channel 110, this afternoon beginning at 5:00pm ET.

I'll be talking with "Blog Bunker" host Joe Salzone about the giant mass media circle jerk more commonly known as the Democratic National Convention, and the role that new platform journalism is playing in the coverage. (For the record, don't expect me to even say the word "Twitter" without giggling; can we please just once come up with a slightly masculine sounding name for one of these social networking fads?)

Remember that if you're not a Sirius subscriber, you can get a free pass and listen online at Sirius.com.

She Gave Good Leg

Oh well, at least no one could accuse her of being a streetwalker.

(NY Post: One-Legged Hooker Slain/8.23.08)

Listening Post

A little something to make you stand up on your desk and begin hurling computer monitors in all directions.

This is new music from the Subways -- Boys and Girls.

Ladies' Worst

I may as well get this out there before the blogosphere lights up like Dresden: MSNBC pundit emeritus and apparent recent stroke victim Chris Matthews just called Hillary Clinton hold-outs "wackos" on national television.

He was referring to those few Clinton supporters who claim to be willing to engage in the political equivalent of cutting off their collective nose to spite their face by voting for John McCain; they call themselves PUMAs, an amusing little double entendre which supposedly stands for "Party Unity My Ass." Matthews was tossing to an interview when he indelicately dismissed such hardline nonsense. What's worth noting though is that, like a dog that's been hit with a rolled up newspaper enough times, MSNBC has apparently learned its lesson about the blogger backlash that generally follows whenever one of the network's white-guy talking heads makes a comment that could be considered misogynist: Matthews cracked his best "just joshin'" smile and backed down from the insult about two minutes after making it, no doubt instructed to in his ear by a producer whose face was turning six different shades of red.

The thing is, whether Matthews should've been the one to do it or not, somebody needed to publicly shame these batty Clintonista militants and call them on their folly.

Good going, girls. Way to disprove the dubious notion that women are always hamstrung by emotion and can't use their heads when they need to.

(Update, 8.26.08: As expected, today's edition of Salon.com has a detailed profile of the "PUMAs" which references Matthews's ire toward them. Salon.com: Angry PUMAs on the Prowl in Denver/8.26.08)

Truth in Advertising

Why I love The Daily Show, reason #312:

This billboard, on display just outside the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport -- just in time for the arrival of the delegates attending next week's Republican National Convention.

Interlude

Question: Do you find the above picture hilarious or offensive (or both)?

I don't usually tease what's ahead on this site, but trust me -- this will be important later.

Thinking Outside the Inbox

The e-mail of the week, compliments of one of New York City's larger media PR firms:

Chez,

Are the Olympics to blame for The Hills' recent dip in ratings?

When season 3 of the MTV hit show The Hills premiered last season it was up 40% from season 2's debut. But, according to Mediaweek, there was no such growth for the season 4 premiere that aired on Monday night.

Mediaweek reports The Hills’ debut ratings were down 9% in its key 12-to-34 demographic (2.1 million) and down 5% among total viewers (3.5 million) when compared to its one-hour season 3 debut.

Will the coming weeks without the Olympics provide a better test or are viewers over LC, Speidi and the rest of the crew?

XXXXXX’s TV specialist XXXX XXXXXX, (a.k.a. “Mr. TV”) is available to weigh-in on this topic and discuss the popularity, ratings and future of this reality-show phenom.

For more information, please contact me at XXXXXXXX@XXXXXXXXXXXXX.com.

Best,

Kathleen

Dear Kathleen,

Sounds great! As you know from having obviously read my stuff, I'm a huge fan of those lovable kids on The Hills!

Toodles,

Chez : )

VP! OMFG! CN U BLV ITZ BIDEN? I <3 BIDEN!

I have to admit that it was a pretty clever idea to reveal Barack Obama's running-mate to the press via text message; it goes a long way in demonstrating that Obama represents the future -- technological as well as political and cultural -- of this country (as opposed to John McCain, whose portable phone has a crank on it).

But just wait 'til the McCain camp begins referring to the Obama-Biden ticket as "Obiden," or "Jobama," and secretly funneling gossip to the tabloids about the couple's impending break-up.

Saturday Morning Cartoons

The basic concept for this series of cartoons was just genius; it proved that Michael Maltese and Chuck Jones were pretty much the brightest guys working in the medium.

From 1953, it's Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog in Don't Give Up the Sheep.

Shoot First, Raise Your Hand and Ask Questions Later

Students, welcome to Tombstone Arizona State, home of the Fighting .45's -- where you sure as hell won't find Basic Logic anywhere in the curriculum.

(Newsweek: Armed for Class/8.18.08)

Related:

(Engaging the Safety/1.22.08)

(Blow Back/6.21.07)

(Automatics for the People/5.18.07)

(And All That Could Have Been/4.19.07)

Listening Post

I realize this video thing is getting old, but I'm kind of busy right now. Hope to have something worthwhile up later today or tomorrow morning.

Until then, the perfect Friday song -- from one of the best neo-soul albums around.

Here's the Brand New Heavies, featuring the luscious N'Dea Davenport on vocals, with Dream On Dreamer.

Listening Post: 90s Alt-Pop Edition

I've mentioned before how it's my firm belief that 1992 was the best year for music in the last three decades (at least). I've also held nothing back when it comes to my overall passion for 90s music and culture. Maybe it's simply bittersweet nostalgia having its way with me, but here are a few more of the songs that I loved from that era.

Yes, it's a slow week around these parts. I promise to have something more substantive posted soon.

For now though, enjoy the music and blurry video.



Blind Melon -- Galaxie



Dinosaur Jr -- Start Choppin'



Meat Puppets -- Backwater



The Posies -- Definite Door



Letters to Cleo -- Here and Now

Reading is Fundamental

Yesterday's repost of the piece dealing with my experiences during Hurricane Andrew had a surprising and somewhat unintended consequence: I got a sudden spike in book sales.

So, since I'm eager for as many people to read my little memoir as possible, I figured I'd take this opportunity to once again remind everyone that Dead Star Twilight is available for download by clicking the link to the right.

For those unfamiliar with the story, click the links below; they outline the basics as well as feature extended excerpts from the book and some of the music featured within it. It's basically everything you need to know to get started.

(Welcome to the Monkey House/6.4.07)

(The Ex Files/6.7.07)

(Imperfect Strangers/8.30.07)

(With Love and Resentment, Your Past/9.5.07)

(You Can't Go Home Again/4.5.08)

(The Power and the Gory/4.7.08)

(The Ultimate Listening Post/4.7.08)

(Dead Star Twilight/4.7.08)

(Black and Blue and Read All Over/4.10.08)

Listening Post

Nine Inch Nails is one of the few bands working today -- Radiohead being another -- that could release an album for free via its website and still manage to make money off of it by putting it up for sale in a standard format later.

Here's one of the reasons why: From The Slip, it's Echoplex.

20th Century Fix

You know, I honestly get the feeling that if he can't make Mars into a sworn enemy of the United States, George Bush will have considered his presidency a failure.

(The Huffington Post: Rice Signs Missile Defense Deal with Poland, Russia Promises Retaliation/8.20.08)

Into the Maelstrom (Redux)

As Tropical Storm Fay drenches Florida, I'm reminded that next week marks the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Andrew -- a storm that cut an almost incomprehensible path of destruction across my hometown on August 24th, 1992. Andrew killed 65 people and became the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history (an ignominious title it held until Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in 2005). It remains one of only a handful of Category 5 storms to make landfall in the Atlantic Basin. At the time, I was an associate producer at WSVN in Miami. I was 22 years old and had only been in television news for six months. Andrew was my first big story. What follows is a lengthy piece, but one that's generated an overwhelming amount of positive reaction from readers since it was first published in August of last year.


Part 1: The Gathering Storm


The first order of business was to find some appropriate music.

This sort of task is harder than you might think. I mean, really, what qualifies as a fitting soundtrack to impending catastrophe? It has to be menacing and ominous, yet atmospheric -- creating an almost Nouvelle Vagueish feeling of resigned serenity. It has to say, "In less than 24 hours, your entire hometown will be wiped off the face of the Earth by the wrath of God, and there isn't a damn thing you can do to stop it."

I settled on Ministry's So What and Scarecrow -- on repeat.

It was actually a rather fitting choice, given that I was still nursing a brutal hangover from the previous day's Lollapalooza festival -- the one which featured the spectacular lineup of Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers and, yes, Ministry. A full day's worth of drinking compounded by the sweltering and oppressive August heat should've been enough to lay me out flat for the next day or so, but what I'd found waiting for me on my answering machine when I got home at around midnight let me know in short order that I'd be afforded no such luxury.

My assistant news director had left seven messages -- all slight variations on the Where-the-Hell-Are-You theme.

When I picked up the phone and called him back, sitting down in an effort to steady the room, it sounded as if I had just been connected to the information kiosk in the center of Grand Central Station.

"What the fuck is going on there, Mike?"

"Jesus Chez, haven't you turned on the TV lately?"

"No, I've been at Lollapalooza all day. I told you that's where I'd be when I left work on Friday." I pried myself up from the couch and shuffled across the hardwood floor of my living room, careful not to fall over face-first. "See, this is why I need a pager."

"You have to get in here now. Everybody has to come in," he said over the confusing din in the background. I could practically hear his face turning purple.

I hit the button on the TV and the picture coalesced into sharp focus just as the word "Why?" came out of my mouth.

Before Mike could even answer -- "Forget it. I see why," I said, stunned into a near whisper.

I took a step back in an effort to truly grasp the magnitude of the image before me -- the one which seemed as if it had the potential to burst free of the two-dimensional confines of my television screen and begin drawing all fragile reality into its vortex.

It was a storm -- an infrared image, all furious reds and oranges, of a massive hurricane sitting directly off our coast. It looked like a buzzsaw, threatening to cut Florida in half. This was Andrew.

"I thought it was supposed to miss us," I said.

"It was," Mike said. "Not anymore."

"What the hell happened?" When I left work on Friday evening, the storm had barely reached hurricane strength again after being sheared into pieces by a blast of vertical winds.

"It turned earlier today, and gained strength. It's now a Cat-5," he said, then -- "It'll be directly on top of us in less than 36 hours."

There wasn't a force in the universe steady enough to keep my reality from shifting on its axis. Still, I instinctively started pacing the floor -- trying to knead the remaining fog out of the front of my head with my free hand.

"Alright, listen -- I need at least a few hours of sleep Mike. I've been out drinking all day for God's sake. I'll be in as soon as I can."

"Okay, just make it ASAP please -- and whatever you need to pack up or secure at home, do it before you leave. Once you're here, you're not going back out to the beach until this thing's done with us."

Mike Dreaden was aware that I had moved into my own place on South Beach within the past month -- it was my first time living alone.

Great fucking timing.

"Yeah right, if there's a beach left," I said, then dropped the phone into the cradle and my weight back onto the couch with a dull thump, letting everything swirl into its own pinpoint vortex until all that was left was comforting black.



By the next morning, I had moved the few valuables I owned into a tight space at the top of the closet, packed an overnight bag, then took one last, sad look around the new apartment that I fully expected to never see again and headed off to work. I had little doubt that by the time I emerged from the nearly windowless, concrete enclosure of the WSVN studios the following day, South Florida -- whatever was left of it -- would be a very different place.

As I put the car in drive, the Ministry, for all of its portentous rage, was actually somewhat reassuring.

It was just a little after sunrise when I threw the 1988 Porsche 944 Turbo I had recently bought to reward myself for no longer working at Taco Bell into high gear, only to come around a corner and suddenly face a column of cars at a dead stop -- resting bumper to bumper along what seemed to be the entire length of the MacArthur Causeway leading off the beach to the mainland. I had already done my best to avoid allowing myself to be distracted by the unnerving sight of people running from their apartments along the surface streets of South Beach -- their arms loaded with belongings -- ready to jump into waiting cars that would take them somewhere. Anywhere but here. This sight however, the sight of so many people desperate to get out of the path of the oncoming storm, opened a painful pit in the bottom of my stomach.

I took a deep breath and whipped the car around, downshifting and slamming the gas pedal to the floor -- deciding not to actually leave the beach but instead to travel north along the ocean until I reached the bridge that would take me to North Bay Village, a quiet little island right across the bay from Miami proper and the home of WSVN. I sped along Collins Avenue -- weaving through traffic and silently thanking Al Jourgensen for being born.

One of the most surreal and ironically foreboding features of an oncoming hurricane is the near-perfect weather that it creates before it strikes. The pressure of the storm's powerful revolution pulls all surrounding clouds in toward its center, making for crystal blue skies in the hours leading up to its arrival -- the literal calm before the storm. With the exception of a very light breeze, you'd never suspect that a monster storm, packing 160 mile-an-hour winds, was about to descend on you.

This is what it was like on the morning of August 23rd, 1992. It appeared to be the beginning of a hot, but otherwise gorgeous day.

It was only the palpable unease in the air and the oddly silent march to higher ground that betrayed the fact that something terrible was about to happen.

When I got to the station, I pulled my car into the most protected area of the parking lot I could find -- in the crux of the large, L-shaped three-story concrete building.

Once inside, I was quickly put to work pulling booth duty -- backing-up a rotating roster of producers, each of whom did a four hour control room shift directing our non-stop coverage. We had every crew possible in the field and the chopper in the air over the parking lot that the causeways and I-95 had turned into. I've come to believe that if you're not out doing live shots, the control room is the only place for a producer to be during rolling coverage. Anything else is a waste of his or her talents. I learned this that day at WSVN and would eventually put it into practice in every other shop at which I wound up working. My record is 14 straight hours in the control room, and during breaking news I wouldn't want it any other way.

On the day before Andrew came ashore, I willingly spent seven hours in the control room alongside the producers and directors, and in doing so earned the respect of my co-workers and managers. I had only been moved to the dayside shift -- the land of the living, as opposed to graveyard duty -- two months previously, and in a matter of a half-day, I was positioning myself to vault quickly up the ranks.

I had run to the bathroom and was on my way back to the booth when I heard someone call my name; I turned to see the familiar face of Chris Crane, the station's in-house music composer.

"I need a ride to my apartment," he said. "I gotta get my cat. Can you give me a lift?"

"I'm pulling booth duty man."

"Yeah, I know. I talked to Dreaden, he'll take over for a few minutes."

I'd been to Chris's apartment before; he lived on one of the upper-floors of a gorgeous high-rise building right on the island -- not far from the station. I checked my watch; it was just after five. I hadn't been outside since my arrival early this morning and was curious to see for myself if conditions had noticeably deteriorated, plus I didn't want to be in any way responsible for the death of a cat, so I nodded and we headed for the door.

"Ministry -- fucking perfect," he said as I cranked the engine and the Porsche's speakers came to life.



It was there, in Chris's apartment high above the bay, that the true gravity of what was about to happen -- what was about to hit us -- became overwhelmingly clear.

As Chris called out for his cat, I walked slowly across the living room to the sliding glass doors that led to the balcony outside. Without thinking, seemingly hypnotized, I slid the door open and stepped out onto the balcony; I needed not only to see but to feel the ominous scene that was presented to us from this high up. The edge of the Earth was dark. It looked as if God himself had reached down and pummeled it with his fist -- making the horizon bruised and swollen. The wind had picked up, and as I closed my eyes and felt it wash over me, I realized that the only sound I could hear was the breeze itself.

I opened my eyes and looked down at the streets below.

There wasn't a car in sight.

The island was a ghost town.

And there, at the vanishing point, on a collision course with us, was a storm the likes of which almost no one in South Florida had ever seen.

I walked quickly back inside and slid the door closed. There in the darkened living room was Chris.

"You find your fucking cat?"

"Yup."

"Good, grab her and let's go. We need to get out of here -- now."



When I was nine-years-old, Hurricane David dealt a glancing blow to Miami. I remember my parents boarded up the entire house so that it was pitch black inside except for the few battery-powered lights we chose to keep running. I listened to the storm batter and beat the outside of our home for hours and hours; heard the boards nailed across the windows creak; listened to the storm try to get inside wherever it could. At the time, I drew comparisons in my child's mind to the scene in Close Encounters where the aliens surround Gillian Guiler's house in rural Indiana, submerging it in light and sound in an effort to get to little Barry. I imagined that Hurricane David was trying to do the same thing -- testing every possible entrance in an effort to take me and my family away.

This was at the forefront of my mind as Chris and I slammed the car doors shut and ran back inside the safety of the station just as the first of the heavy, low clouds began to pass over our heads.

As the glass doors of the lobby closed behind us, a steel shutter fell down behind it, locking into place.

Now, just like during David, I was inside a building which had ostensibly been sealed shut.



I got back into the newsroom just in time to overhear Mike Dreaden and the executive producers quietly lamenting over a recent and unfortunate turn of events. WSVN had just within the last couple of months fired its long-time meteorologist Bob Soper, and had yet to find a replacement of his caliber. It basically meant that for the biggest storm in anyone's memory, our weather department was being manned by a bunch of relative novices -- pretty faces who were at the very least untested in the South Florida market, and therefore would probably be deemed untrustworthy by audiences when it really counted, like, oh say, now.

We needed meteorologists; we had Jillian Warry -- who would eventually go on to become Jillian Barberie, FOX's full-time, half-naked, mildly irritating weather vixen.

This was my first experience attempting to work my way around a truly stupid and short-sighted management decision.

It damn sure wouldn't be the last.

After getting a slice of pizza -- because the one thing that can always be said about a newsroom during a crisis is that at least there's free food -- I dodged the chaotic foot traffic in the newsroom and made my way over to the incoming feed area where Abby was sitting down, watching video come in from the trucks in the field. She was wearing her usual ensemble -- a t-shirt and a pair of jeans -- and her auburn hair was tied up in a pony-tail that bounced every time she barked orders through the microphone to our crews. She was as adorable at that moment as she had been a couple of weeks previously, when a few too many drinks at the bar across the street had led to a dangerous level of flirting and teasing between the two of us.

I liked Abby, and as far as I was concerned I could stand a friendly face.

"Don't you dare get near me unless you have an extra slice of pizza," she said without taking her focus away from the monitors in front of her.

"You want one? I can get you one."

"Fuck it." She turned to face me, seemingly annoyed at the distraction -- or maybe that she didn't have time to be distracted. "Just give me a bite of yours."

"Always." I smiled, holding the slice to her mouth.

"Don't start with me right now. In case you can't tell, some of us actually work around here as opposed to just kissing ass."

"I'm hoping to sleep my way to the middle. Busy later?"

She took a bite, dripping cheese on her chin which she quickly grabbed with her fingers and shoveled into her mouth.

"My God I love you," I deadpanned.

"Go away."



As the sun went down, the wind picked up and the approaching storm intensified -- the pressure dropping considerably. Andrew had become so tightly packed that it now resembled a giant tornado more than a hurricane. This was not going to be pretty, and deep down we were all scared beyond words. All day and afternoon, members of our staff had been running to and from their homes, trying desperately to secure what they could -- trying to get their families to safety. Many brought their husbands and wives -- their sons and daughters -- back to the station, as it seemed like the safest place possible given the circumstances.

In truth, this would have been the case were it not for one obvious consideration -- the one that was about to plunge what had already been a hectic and scary night into utterly terrifying confusion.

We were keeping one door open, and that was the back door that led from the newsroom out onto the helipad, and beyond that, the bay. After another hour or so in the control room, I once again felt like I needed to see what was happening for myself. Our crews were reporting intermittent bands of strong winds and light rain -- the outer rings of the storm -- so I ran downstairs from the booth and pushed open the unlocked back door. Outside I found some of our ENG guys gathering sandbags which they were preparing to put in place around what was obviously a weak spot in our defenses, namely the door I'd just come through. The wind was howling now, pushing a mist of salty bay water up over the seawall some fifty yards or so away from us.

Without taking my eyes away from the sight of the now black and roiling bay, I asked the obvious.

"Guys, what's the storm surge supposed to be with this thing?"

"12 to 18 feet," one of them answered.

I remember closing my eyes as I asked the even more obvious follow-up.

"And how high off the bay are we?"

"Not high enough."

As if timed for maximum dramatic effect, it was then that I noticed the red and blue lights casting long, deep shadows from the side of the building and heard the shouts from inside the newsroom.

The police had arrived.

They were forcing everyone out.



"This is a mandatory evacuation!" I heard, from a voice I didn't recognize.

The entire newsroom was in a state of pandemonium. Mike Dreaden and the other managers were trying to explain to the police that we had to continue broadcasting; the police weren't impressed, concerning themselves instead with only one unassailable truth: We were sitting on an island that was likely going to be completely underwater in a few hours. The dilemma for those of us who were currently holding the fort however was equally alarming: Andrew was now right offshore and we were being told to take to the streets and forage for sufficient shelter.

"Mike, what the hell are we doing?" I shouted over the insanity.

He looked around, as if willing himself to come up with a solution that didn't involve everyone being killed. "I have no idea," he huffed, then -- "We'll pack up the remaining trucks and go north to the transmitter. It's in Broward, we can broadcast from there. You guys can go with us -- or you can go inland and look for a safe place to spend the night."

Neither option was particularly appealing.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Abby. As I might've expected, she looked like she was about to try punching one of the cops in the face, which admittedly would've at least landed her in a nice, safe jail cell on the mainland. I ran over to break up what was already turning into what the hippies used to call a "very bad scene."

"Abby, Abby -- knock it off." I put my hand on her shoulder and spun her toward me.

"Where the hell are we supposed to go?" Up close, I realized that she looked less angry than she did genuinely in shock, like a frightened child.

"I don't know. Where do you live?"

"With my mother." I almost forgot that Abby had only turned 21 a few weeks ago. "Up on North Beach."

"Alright, that's not gonna work. We have to go inland. Come on."

And with that, I did something ridiculously impetuous -- or wonderfully noble -- or maybe I was just improvising. I grabbed Abby's purse, latched onto her hand, and we pushed our way through the crush of people moving toward the door and the police who were edging them out. When we got outside into light rain which was now being whipped along by heavy winds, we ran for the car.

I was fishtailing out onto the empty causeway in a matter of seconds, heading as far away from the water as I could get.



Aside from a police cruiser here and there, there wasn't a soul to be found anywhere on the roads. There were only the bands of wind and rain -- followed by the eerie lulls in between, when it felt as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of the atmosphere and replaced by the oppressive silence of absolute absence. The effect was simply chilling.

The Porsche screamed along US-1, the needle pushing 85.

I had no idea what our destination was, but I knew that I obviously had to stop at some point; the worst thing imaginable would be getting caught in the full brunt of the storm while sitting in a car. At one point, we passed the National Hurricane Center and I gave serious consideration to just pulling into the parking lot and banging on their door.

Hey guys, wanna REALLY help some folks out tonight?

But it wasn't long after we'd passed the NHC building that we came upon a small hotel, the lights of which were still inexplicably on. It was a two-story job with outdoor entrances to the rooms; not exactly the underground bunker I'd hoped for, but it would have to do. I pulled the emergency brake and swung the car around, then threw it into first and headed back toward what was at the very least a concrete structure.

I've been thankful for many things in my lifetime: My family's seemingly bottomless reservoir of good will and humor, the ability to survive a brain tumor, the fact that sharks can't breathe air -- but never have I been more thankful than when I realized that not only was the little guy at the Gables Inn sitting behind his desk and willing to open the door for us, but that at a few minutes past midnight on August 24th, 1992 -- the day Hurricane Andrew hit South Florida -- he had one room available.



There was chaos, absolute and infinite -- the terrifying sound of the world being torn apart. It was undeniably beautiful. Intensely sensuous. Abby and I listened to the fury of the wind and the scream of the roof being stripped away. We barely spoke, content to feel each other's husky, labored breathing. Exploding transformers right outside the window hammered the room with staccato blasts of blue and white light that sliced through the blackness and turned our shadows into living art against the wall. A final crack, and a sliver of the ceiling gave way, letting in warm drops of rain to mix with the sweat. Trees were ripped from the ground and slammed into the wall outside, their branches scraping violently against the pulsating window like fingernails across bare skin. It was nature in its simplest, rawest form -- monstrous and powerful and exquisite and pure.



I gently slid Abby down onto the floor between the bed and the wall and pulled the mattress up overtop of her, to keep her safe from any possible debris.

And then I walked hesitantly to the door, because like the child in Close Encounters, I had to see for myself what it looked like -- the monster scratching at the other side. The wind was blowing from the east, while the door to the room faced west; it was theoretically safe to open.

I placed my hand on the doorknob, twisted it gently and pushed.

What I saw when I looked into the storm was beyond description. My reaction, beyond awe. I've never seen such power.

I was in the center of the maelstrom.

I have no idea how long I stood there, but eventually I closed the door and crawled under the mattress with Abby, who was already asleep. I pulled her tightly against me, then closed my eyes and let everything go dark and silent.




Part 2: The Other Side


There was nothing, and that nothing was something -- its own imposing physical presence.

Although I was sure my eyes were open, there was no light; although I believed myself to be awake, there was no sound.

It wasn't until I felt Abby's soft hair in my face that I was sure we still existed at all. I exhaled and twisted my neck slightly, then reached a free arm up from around the young girl pressed against me and pushed hard on the mattress above us, sliding it out of the way. Suddenly, I could see -- the world going from black to shades of muted gray.

"Abby, wake up," I whispered.

She groaned and rolled over onto her back in the tiny shelter we had created between the bed's heavy box spring and the wall of the hotel room. My body ached as I pulled myself up and awkwardly half-crawled out into the space of the room. As reality began to come into a difficult focus, I heard the sound of dripping -- looked up and saw timid light coming through a hole in the ceiling -- water traversing its jagged edges and falling to the soaked carpet below.

I rubbed the haze out of my eyes. When I looked toward the window, I noticed that it was practically opaque -- covered almost completely by the branches of a tree that had fallen and now rested against it. Astonishingly though, the window wasn't even cracked. How it held together I'll never know, but I'll always be grateful that it did.

I slid into my jeans then moved over to the door and pushed it open, bathing the room in soft, white light. I immediately noticed the strong breeze and heard it moving through tree branches that I couldn't see -- pushing leaves and debris along the ground. I stepped out onto the landing and allowed myself a first tentative look around. From my vantage point, facing west, perpendicular to US-1, there was little to see, unless you took into account the miracle of the Gables Inn's ability to have somehow just withstood a Category 5 hurricane without completely evaporating. I saw one or two people -- seemingly shell-shocked -- wandering the parking area directly beneath our second-floor room. I leaned forward and peered over the railing with a lump in my throat, fearing the absolute worst, only to find that aside from being plastered with wayward palm fronds, the Porsche seemed to have survived Andrew unscathed.

I jumped slightly when I felt something brush against me from behind, then closed my eyes and leaned back into the warmth of Abby, who at that moment felt even softer than I had remembered. She'd wrapped herself in a blanket, and was now resting her head against my back.

"How bad is it?" I heard her voice, and felt her breath on my shoulder.

"I honestly don't know. We should get out of here and find out -- get to the station, if we can."

I turned around, held her tightly for a moment -- then kissed her gently and went back inside to get dressed and get my car keys.



It was bad.

It was very bad.

Abby and I drove in silence, slowly and carefully maneuvering the car around the heavy debris that littered the highway -- everything from street lights and powerlines to trees, billboards and even the massive air-conditioning units from the tops of the high buildings nearby; all were strewn across US-1 and had now turned it into a frightening obstacle course. Every so often, the oppressive stillness inside the car would be broken by the sound of Abby's quiet sobs.

Entire buildings were flattened. Once lush trees were made barren skeletons -- standing as sentinels over a wasteland, if they still stood at all. Everywhere, windows had been shattered, turning the structures they once adorned and protected into seemingly atrophied frameworks -- empty and bare. The roofs of homes had been shorn away wholesale and now rested in various spots along the highway so that it would've actually been possible to make a macabre game out of matching the house to its missing canopy.

There were no stop signs. No traffic signals. No electricity. No nothing.

And everywhere you turned your head, there were people trickling out from under shelter looking dazed -- concussed -- the way I always imagined a person looks immediately after being involved in a bad car accident. It's the face of someone who's gone into shock and is seconds away from collapsing -- someone who's already dead, he or she just doesn't know it yet.

We had been warned what a storm like this could do.

Our most dire predictions and worst fears weren't even close.



Abby and I were completely cut off from everyone. We couldn't reach our families, nor could we get in contact with our co-workers. The police had already set up blockades and detours aimed at keeping traffic flowing in certain areas -- safely out of others. With the radio now on and tuned to one of the few stations still broadcasting continuously, we decided to head north, toward Abby's family's condo; it was near water, but from what we were hearing, the storm had veered south at the last minute to come ashore in South Miami-Dade County. Places like Cutler Ridge, Homestead and Saga Bay had all taken direct hits and were now eerie dead zones; there was no information coming out of them. For all we knew at that moment, they simply didn't exist anymore.

The irony of course, which wasn't lost on either of us, was that by heading south on US-1 and ending up in Coral Gables the previous night, without meaning to, we had traveled into the storm as opposed to away from it.

"Next time, I'll let you drive," I said, upon learning of this little revelation.

The farther we got away from the southern end of the county, the more things seemed to return to normal. Power was still out almost everywhere though, and when we finally arrived at Abby's mother's condo, we were forced to grab an emergency flashlight and navigate a dark and damp stairway -- with only the sound of dripping water echoing across concrete -- to get to the upper floors. We eventually made our way down a hallway illuminated by the sad glow of emergency lights, located the right door and dug Abby's keys out of her purse. Once inside, the gun-metal gray sky beyond the condo's floor-to-ceiling windows provided at least a workable amount of light.

Abby called out to her mother. I slipped into the darkened kitchen, found the faucet and splashed cool water on my face.

After a moment, Abby appeared as a silhouette in the doorway leading to the dining room.

"She's not here."

"She leave a note or anything?" I asked as I used the bottom of my t-shirt to dry my face.

"No, she probably went to my aunt's place up in Boca. That would've made the most sense. She'd figure I was okay."

"That'd be her first mistake," I said through a tired smile.

I heard a chuckle come from the silhouette.

"Wanna try using the phone, see if it works -- see who's out there?" I asked, after a moment of deafening silence.

Amazingly, the phone actually did work, the problem of course was that a lot of the ones we were dialing didn't. The station, as far as we could tell, was still out of commission, and Abby and I quietly admitted to each other the grim feeling of calling a television station in a major American city and getting a recording.

With no other legitimate options, and certainly nothing better to do, we turned on a battery-powered radio and laid down on the couch.

We fell asleep listening to stories of the end of the world.




Part 3: Among the Living


I came around the corner at a quick jog, only to be stopped in my tracks by a heavy black bag which hit me square in the chest. I fumbled for a second, caught it, then looked up to see where it came from. Standing in front of me was Mary Alvarez, our senior executive producer.

"Congratulations, you're going to South Dade. Be on the helipad in ten minutes."

She may as well have just spoken to me in Inuit.

"I'm going where?" I said, chasing after her as she turned and began taking long strides back to the newsdesk.

"Cutler Ridge. You'll be field producing for Sally," the back of her head said.

I suddenly debated telling her that, having never actually gone to journalism school, I had absolutely no idea what the hell a field producer did and therefore her choice of me for this particular assignment was a recipe for disaster. I thought the better of it in short order, choosing instead to bullshit around my complete ignorance.

"Uh, okay," I stammered. "Any particulars you're looking for while I'm down there?"

When in doubt, pretend to know things in the abstract while bolstering the ego of management by deferring to it and asserting that only someone of a higher pay grade can be brilliant enough to understand the specifics of anything.

"Find stories. Keep her in check. The first assignment should be a breeze -- God help you with the second."

"Look, Mary--" The cracks were quickly starting to show.

She spun around and looked me right in the eye.

"Nine minutes."



The morning after Abby and I made our exodus from the Gables Inn and our treacherous journey across Miami-Dade county, we were back at the station, which had just officially reopened for business. Right before dawn, we had left the condo -- where the power was still off -- and headed south along I-95, then east toward North Bay Village. We showed our WSVN IDs and had been allowed to pass a police barricade to get across the causeway to the island. Overall, North Bay Village wasn't badly damaged: a few traffic lights down, no power aside from backup generators, debris in the streets, but that was about it.

We hadn't been at work long -- dealing with the trauma of getting the station up and running again -- before Mike Dreaden noticed the two of us standing close together, whispering to each other, calm amid the madness. He lumbered over and asked where we'd each managed to find safety during the storm. Abby and I just laughed a little and separated without saying a word.

Now, the two of us were face to face again.

I had just come back from grabbing my overnight bag out of the car and had both that and the bag Mary threw at me earlier -- the one full of extra equipment for Sally -- slung over my shoulders. I looked like a pack mule.

"You know, I'm trying to stay professional about this whole thing," I said quietly, resisting the urge to run my fingers along Abby's arm.

"Yeah, I know. Do you have any idea how long you'll be gone?"

"None. A few days at least I'm sure. Who the hell knows."

There was silence in the tiny space we occupied together at the center of the newsroom, contrasted by the roar of activity all around us. I checked my watch -- time to go. I glanced up at her and was just opening my mouth to say goodbye when she cut me off.

"Oh fuck it," she said, and leaned in and pressed her mouth hard against mine. "Take care of yourself."

So much for discreet.

A couple of minutes later, I was ducking below the rotor of the chopper -- shielding my eyes against the whirlwind it kicked up. I threw both bags onto the seat in the back, then climbed in and slammed the door shut behind me. After patting the pilot on the shoulder and strapping in, I reached into my overnight bag and pulled out my CD Walkman, plugging the headphones into my ears.

As we lifted off, and the ground receded beneath us, Neil Young began to speak to me -- singing that our only hope was to keep on rockin' in the free world.



From the air, the scope of the destruction became clear. The amount of damage was staggering -- overwhelming.

As the chopper headed south, low along the coast, skeletal high-rises slid past us -- their windows blown out. Below us, houses were in pieces and trees blocked the streets and highways. Cars were overturned and scattered like children's toys.

When we reached the Dinner Key Marina in Coconut Grove, the images were almost beyond belief. Every boat, every yacht and sailboat along the docks, were smashed and sunk in the shallow water. Boats were piled on top of each other in a gruesome parody of dry dock -- splinters of what were once expensive vessels scattered everywhere. As we turned inland to bee-line toward our final destination deep within South Dade, I pulled down my sunglasses and leaned into the window -- awe-struck by what I was seeing.

There, on dry ground, laying against a line of trees at least a half-mile from the edge of the bay, was a ship. A freighter. It was hundreds of feet long. It had been picked up by the storm surge, blown inland -- and then left there when the waters receded.

As we pushed farther and farther into the heart of the dead zone created by the storm's fury, I realized that there was less and less to see -- simply because there was less and less there.

Everything was gone. Leveled. Wiped clean.

Entire communities, once thriving, had vanished as if they'd never existed. It was as if Andrew had a plan -- an actual thought process -- and it involved returning everything to zero. Years of evolution, both structural and cultural, had been obliterated. Thoroughly erased.

After what felt like an eternity, the chopper banked and began to descend. I looked down and once again felt a stab of dizziness penetrate the space directly behind my eyes. Our landing area was the Cutler Ridge Mall -- or where it had once stood anyway. Most of the mall -- formerly a giant enclosed shopping Mecca featuring stores like JC Penney and Sears -- had been flattened. What remained was nothing but rubble. Its parking lot was now a staging area for the National Guard; military green vehicles, hastily-constructed tents and troops at muster seemed to go on forever.

It cemented the impression that we were entering a war zone, which in fact we were.

The chopper set down in a barren area of the lot near what was once the north end of the mall. I ripped off my headphones, grabbed my bags and jumped out -- shouting a thank you to the pilot on my way. In front of me as I once again ducked beneath the rotor was a familiar face: One of our photographers -- a guy named Brad Friedkin.

"Welcome to hell," he shouted over the roar of the chopper.

"Is it all like this?" I returned at equal volume, still shielding my face.

"This? Oh fuck no. It's much worse." He was smiling from ear to ear. "At least they have power generators and air conditioners here."

He grabbed the black supply bag from my shoulder and led me to a waiting Chevy Blazer that was already running. As I climbed into the front seat beside him, the AC did indeed feel wonderful. The heat and humidity outside was punishing; I had only been out in it for a few minutes and I could already feel sweat running down the backs of my legs.

As Brad put the truck into gear, he glanced over at me.

"Do you have any idea what you're supposed to be doing here?"

Now that I was safely miles away from a manager -- "Are you kidding? I was hoping you'd know."

He pushed hard on the gas and the truck twisted out onto a side street.

"Yeah, you're gonna fit in just fine," he said, seemingly as an afterthought.

Brad gunned the truck to the intersection of US-1, our only route down deeper into the scarred heart of the devastation and a straight line to the Cutler Ridge processing center. Unfortunately, the highway was a frozen line of cars; traffic wasn't going anywhere in either direction. Before I could even ask what his plan was or suggest one of my own, Brad had pulled alongside a national guardsman and rolled down his window.

"Excuse me," he shouted, getting the attention of the weary guardsman. "Is that thing loaded?" Brad was pointing to the M16 slung over the guardsman's shoulder -- a weapon which appeared to be missing a clip.

"Not right now," he responded.

"Good."

And with that, Brad swung the Blazer past the guy and sped off along the side of the highway, leaving a cloud of dirt in our wake -- by-passing the traffic completely.



The National Guard and the Office of Emergency Management had taken one of the few structures still standing in Cutler Ridge and turned it into a processing center for the victims of the storm. It was a place where anyone could come and find food and bottled water, both of which were almost impossible to come by otherwise as there was no electricity and no clean water for miles in any direction.

Day and night, the place was packed with crowds of desperate people -- all clamoring for items which they likely had taken for granted up until two days ago. South Dade had been plunged into the dark ages, and after only 48 hours without the modern conveniences that had over the years unwittingly become necessities, an almost feral atmosphere was beginning to take hold. Tempers were short. A primitive rage was practically visible behind the eyes of everyone you came into contact with.

It wasn't a reality anyone recognized anymore. It was a world consumed by madness.

For the first several hours after my arrival, I herded my anchor, Sally Fitz, here and there -- making sure she was in place for her live shots and keeping in constant contact with the station. Having been on the other side, in the control room, I was well aware of what the producers and directors needed from the crews in the field to keep things running smoothly and keep themselves from storming out the door and never coming the hell back. Things went according to plan for the most part, despite the constantly changing situation at the processing center and the fact that in a fit of bizarre anger, Sally had already told another of our photographers, Ralph Rayburn, to "shove it up his ass" live on the air. It was moments like those that forced me to retire to the air conditioned live truck every so often to sit quietly and contemplate a career change.

As the sun set, the darkness began to swallow the entire area whole. With no electricity for miles, a walk even a few feet outside the confines of the processing center would plunge you into impenetrable black. Once again, the world reset by the hand of God -- returned to a time before man and his innovations could lay any claims or plant any flags of progress.

But -- when you looked up, an entirely new reality was revealed. You could see forever. Past the stars. Past the galaxies. Maybe into the center of heaven itself. It was beautiful beyond dreams.

This was what I stared into that first night, before finally closing my eyes to get a couple hours of sleep. That infinite sky.



Somewhere in my dream, Abby told me that we have a problem -- and then told me again.

"We have a problem," came a different voice, one I didn't quite recognize.

I slowly pried open my eyes to find our truck operator towering over me. It was still dark outside.

I groaned, then -- "What's up?"

"The National Guard's threatening to kill Rick," he said matter-of-factly.

I just laid there for a moment.

Finally -- "Well, is there anything we can do to stop them?"

"We should probably try."

"Yeah, I guess you're right."

I pulled myself up off the Astroturf carpet that I'd been laying on and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes with the fingers of one hand -- exhaled heavily -- then trudged off to find the National Guard commander in the hopes of keeping him from killing WSVN's main anchor.

Rick Sanchez was stationed about thirty miles or so south of us, at the second processing center -- the one in the even more heavily damaged city of Homestead. Already a somewhat divisive presence in Miami television, he was either busting his ass to get the word out about the desperate needs of those in the hurricane zone or arrogantly showboating -- taking "The Rick Show" on the road as it were -- depending on your point of view. As it turned out, Sanchez would go on to inspire this same kind of extreme love or hatred throughout his career, even, eventually, on a national level; this crap was just the tip of the iceberg.

I finally found the commander in charge of the Guard detachment at our station.

"Sir, what's the problem?" I asked, still groggy.

He turned around and motioned to a column of semi tractor-trailers over his shoulder which he was, at that very moment, attempting to direct out of the traffic. "That's the problem," he said, frustrated. "Your man in Homestead went on the air and said they needed baby food. Guess what's in those trucks?"

Rick asks for it down there and it appears up here. Fucking lovely.

"Who sent all that?" I asked, pretending like I could somehow exert any control over the situation whatsoever.

"Who knows. One of the markets up in Broward probably. We're still trying to figure that out." He turned around and ordered a guardsman to put flares down in the road, then whipped his head back toward me. "This is the second time this has happened in 24 hours. We're gonna either pull him off the air or just shoot him -- unless you do something about this. We don't have any place to put all this crap and we don't have a way to get it all down to Homestead right now."

"So, it's basically just gonna go bad."

"Give the kid a prize," he said, stomping off.

About two minutes later, I was inside the live truck on the two-way with our newsdesk, trying to explain the situation in terms as unequivocal as possible.

"If we don't put a muzzle on Sanchez, they're gonna dispatch Martin Sheen up the river to take him out."

"Well, you know how it is with Rick," came the response from Dreaden.

They're helpless parents who can't control their problem child.

"Just do something please. They're gonna shut him down -- I'm serious."

As if on cue, there was a knock at the door of the live truck. I reached over and opened it and standing there was a guy in a sweat-soaked t-shirt and a trucker hat.

"Hey, you with the TV? We got a bunch of stuff your guy says they need down in Homestead. Where do you want it?"




It was later that day that I tied a bandana around my head to soak up the filthy sweat and set out with a photographer to find a trailer park that supposedly had been all but annihilated by Andrew. An hour or so previously, Sally Fitz had sought me out to tell me that she'd heard rumors of the tiny community and that it had yet to be photographed by any news crews. So, myself and a shooter named Eddie grabbed some equipment, climbed in the back of a pick-up that was driven by someone who said he knew of the trailer park in question and wanted everyone to understand what had happened there, and were soon on the road headed for God-knows-where.

As we rode under a sky that was nearly white with moisture, as well as the ugly gray clouds that punctuated it, we shot video of the homes and businesses that we passed. All were badly damaged, and yet many looked as if they'd been boarded up after the storm hit, in an effort to protect what could still be salvaged. Everywhere, there were signs on various properties which featured menacing warnings of the harm that would come to looters, should they even consider trying to take what little of value the hurricane had spared. Given that there was almost no law to speak of in South Dade at the time, I tended to believe, say, the sign that read: LOOTERS WILL BE KILLED!

The truck veered off the highway after some time, and pushed down a dirt road and through tall reeds. After several minutes of rough riding that nearly bounced the two of us out of the back on more than one occasion, we entered a clearing -- an open field surrounded by low, barren trees.

It took me a moment to realize that it wasn't a clearing at all. It had once been a trailer park.

There was nothing left of it now. Not a thing was intact. Nothing stood higher than maybe a couple of feet off the ground.

I climbed out of the truck as it stopped and took a few cautious steps forward. There was no sound at all; even the hot breeze seemed to be silent, as it swept not through dense leaves but around desolate and bare branches. I advanced slowly down what had been one of the wide streets between the homes. As I did, I looked to my left and right -- taking in the wreckage of what had once been people's lives.

There was a crib, crushed under the twisted metal of one trailer's roof. Pictures scattered everywhere. Memories. There were toys. A child's shoe. Clothes. Even a wedding dress. A bicycle with training wheels still on it was now perched in what little remained of a tree.

A thumping sound finally broke the crushing silence, the sound of helicopters. As it grew louder, I looked up to see a formation of military choppers glide directly over our heads.

A moment later, the artificial thunder created by the helicopters retreated over the horizon and it was quiet again.

Except for the strange buzz.

And that was what I noticed what had been there all along -- busying themselves above the piles of wreckage where homes once stood. Where people once lived.

Flies.

We were standing several feet apart now, but I turned to Eddie and spoke in a near whisper. Sadly. Desperately. Helplessly.

"They're all dead."

He didn't answer -- just stared, slowly taking in the entire scene.

I swallowed a lump in my throat, which I hoped would help me fight back the tears.

"Yeah, there's no way they all got out," he finally answered quietly -- reverently.

Eddie glanced over at the man who'd driven us to this place. This graveyard. They both simply nodded at each other, and Eddie put his camera on his shoulder and began shooting. I moved back to get out of his shot, then happened to turn my head and look down. On the ground next to me was a picture of a middle-aged couple. They were smiling.



Three days later -- after reporting the story of the trailer park and alerting the overworked authorities to its existence; after mornings, afternoons and nights of live shot after live shot after live shot; after almost no sleep -- I caught a ride back to the makeshift landing pad at the Cutler Ridge Mall. I watched the chopper land. Boarded it. Closed my eyes as it ascended out of the war zone. Opened them only occasionally on the trip back to notice as green returned to the world below; as blue water appeared on the horizon and in time slipped gently beneath us; as the island of North Bay Village materialized ahead -- the island that everyone thought would be covered in water. I'd eventually return home and find that my apartment had also survived the storm. It had come through just fine.

As the chopper touched down on the helipad, its rotors still screaming, I once again thanked the pilot and stepped out into the whirlwind, where I'd spent a lot of time recently.

As I looked up, standing safely outside of the maelstrom was Abby.

She gave me a warm smile, and held me tightly when I reached her. Together we turned and walked toward the rear door of the station.

She held it open for me, and welcomed me back to work.

Listening Post

Yes, I'm filling a little space because there's not much out there right now (and I'm kind of busy anyway).

Here's Ladytron's Ghosts.

Wake Me When It's Over

You know, I turned on the Today show for the first time in a couple of weeks this morning.

Is something going on in Beijing?

If it's important, let me know; I just rolled over and went back to sleep.

Listening Post

An extraordinary video from an act that may single-handedly be trying to bring a little consciousness back to hip-hop.

Here's Flobots, with Handlebars.

Post Whoredom

I think Joan Walsh perfectly put into words my feelings and fears about last night's command performance by Barack Obama and John McCain at the Saddleback Mega-Church in Orange County, California. The candidates came to prostrate themselves before Pastor Rick Warren and, by proxy, his legion of disciples and their particular belief system. This morning in a Salon.com piece entitled "Are We Now Officially a Christian Nation?" Walsh wrote this about Obama, who's taking the walk-of-shame this morning after being used like a drunk sorority sister last night:

"(Obama) did reasonably well, though not overwhelmingly so. I loved his saying he wouldn't have appointed Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court, and his firm support of choice and gay civil unions. He seemed very comfortable talking about his Christian faith. On the other hand, that bothered me a little bit too. I'm not sure why Obama voluntarily sat down for a nationally televised conversation about his private religious faith with a relatively conservative Christian leader, as though that's a reasonable station of the cross, so to speak, for a major American presidential candidate. There's no doubt Rick Warren's congregation has done good things on social justice issues, especially AIDS, but Warren has made no secret of his extreme views on abortion and gay rights (as well as his support for the Iraq war.) Obama visiting the church, speaking there? Smart politics. Attending a nationally televised forum, almost as big deal as a debate, at such a church? I think that was wrong."

Her point, put bluntly: Why should either Barack Obama or John McCain -- let alone both of them -- have to answer to a smugly self-satisfied Rick Warren and his flock? (Besides the most pragmatic of reasons: because they represent a large voting bloc.) If it truly is about a respect for their beliefs, which are no more sound than those of any other religion out there, then why not pander equally to Muslims, or Buddhists, or Hindus, or, for that matter, Atheists? Obama in particular is finding his Christian faith questioned and doubted at every turn by many of the very same people he was forced -- and yes, I'll use that word because it fits -- to put himself in the line of fire of last night.

So why?

If the question of why he allowed it to occur seems too obvious, then try this one: Why have we allowed it? We've seen what happens when our nation is hijacked by one faith above all others and its fundamentalist followers are given an inordinately booming voice in its government. We've lived with the results for eight years. So why aren't the rest of us, the millions and millions of Americans who don't worship at the various altars of Christian dogma, demanding that people like Pastor Rick Warren -- the Oprah of pop-Christianity -- sit the hell down and shut up? Or better yet, why aren't we demanding that our candidates simply not come running like obedient dogs every time someone like Warren snaps his fingers and invokes Jesus and votes and the connection between the two, which apparently will not be denied?

If we're going to continue even further down this path, though -- further than we've already gone -- let's at least be fair about it. I want Obama and McCain to appear before Tom Cruise at a "Scientology Symposium." Xenu commands it.

And after that, they can hit Albus Dumbledore's "Wizard-Con" at Hogwarts to discuss what they plan to do to help protect the country in the coming battle with the Dark Lord Voldemort.

Think this sounds silly? Ask Rick Warren and his church what they believe some time. Trust me: Disneyland isn't the only garish monument to a fairy tale in Orange County.

The Week in Pictures

It's a surreal world after all: Tinkerbell and Minnie Mouse sit handcuffed on a curb outside Disneyland last Wednesday after being arrested during a labor protest. The park workers were among 32 charged with failing to obey a police officer and, one would imagine knowing Disney, copyright infringement.


Misha Mash: You know, at least no one can accuse President Mikheil Saakashvili of downplaying the current crisis in Georgia; he actually looks like a guy who's about to have Russian tanks roll into his capital. Here he is looking less like a calm and confident leader and more like Buddy Cole after a week in prison.


Special Delivery: Sorry folks, I don't think this is ever getting old.

A Very Special Dope Fiend Theater

Gather the children and pull up a seat near the computer screen. (Although I wouldn't recommend their being high for this, you probably should be.)

Ron and Nancy have an important message for you about drug use.

Listening Post (Bonus Saturday Night Chill Edition)

If you're getting ready to go out this evening, there's no better way to start things off than with this: One of the smoothest and most beautiful deep house songs you'll ever find -- the definition of liquid chill, set to images of Ian Schrager-designed dreamworlds.

Crank the speakers and float away; this is Lovetronic's You Are Loved.

And Now, a Message from Your Ruler

WHO IS THIS RICK WARREN?

WHY HAS HE CHOSEN TO DEFY MY RULE BY DEMANDING AN AUDIENCE WITH THESE SO-CALLED LEADERS -- THE ONES VAINLY AND FOOLISHLY PLEADING TO BE GIVEN DOMINION OVER PLANET HOOSTON? THE POWER TO CHOOSE A RULER IS NOT A SLAVE'S TO GRANT! WHY DOES HE DO THIS WHEN HE KNOWS THAT I WILL KILL HIM FOR IT?

PERHAPS THIS RICK WARREN'S STATEMENT THAT "GOD SAYS" HE MUST ASK QUESTIONS OF THE LOWLY SLAVE "LEADERS" IS A SIMPLE MISUNDERSTANDING. PERHAPS HE MISSPOKE, AND MEANT TO SAY "ZOD." EITHER WAY, I WILL PUNISH HIM FOR HIS INSOLENCE AND LACK OF SPELLING ABILITY!

SOON, RICK WARREN, YOU WILL DIE -- DIE AS YOU DESERVE TO!

LIKE THE SON OF JOR-EL, YOU WILL KNEEL BEFORE ZOD!

Quote of the Week

"Canton is known worldwide. You can go anywhere in the world, and people will say, `Canton? Yeah, I know where that is. It's where that big flea market is.'"

-- Andy McCuistion, City Manager of Canton, Texas (pop. 5,100), defending his town after Stephen Colbert jokingly referred to it as an "incorporated outhouse."

Ssaturday Morning Cartoons

You really can milk the concept of one poor guy being sadistically inundated with insanity for comedy gold.

As you watch this cartoon, pay close attention to all the different facial expressions Pa Bear cycles through toward the end; that's pretty much what I look like while I'm reading about stuff like Obama and McCain spending an evening talking faith with Rick Warren, or Oprah extolling the dangers of "Empathy Deficit Disorder."

From 1951, here's the Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese near-masterpiece of lunacy, A Bear for Punishment.

The Warren Commission

I'll make this quick because if I dwell on it for too long my head will explode.

Tomorrow night Barack Obama and John McCain are going to spend an entire evening giving a command performance for Rick Warren -- pastor, author of those insipid Purpose Driven Life books, one-man evangelicatainment phenomenon and a guy who's bested only by Elvis and Jesus himself in the minds of NASCAR America.

Warren promises to ask tough questions of the two candidates as they attend his personal "Compassion Forum," held at the Saddleback "mega-church" in California.

And just what topics will he be grilling them on?

"I'm going to ask them questions about character, competence, about values, vision, virtue, about their convictions in leadership, about their experience. And I'm going to deal with their personal life - because character matters. Their personal life does matter as a leader. God says so."

So just for planning purposes, should anything actually important come up -- you know, war, terrorism, unemployment, $4.50-a-gallon gas, home foreclosures, Russian tanks rolling through Georgia -- you'll know where to find the next leader of the free world.

He'll be shooting the shit with Pastor Rick, discussing how 2,000 year old superstition guides him and bragging about how much he loves Jesus in an effort to nail down that all-important "fucking idiot" vote.

Because God says so.

Related (since I'm too damn frustrated and exhausted to get into this in any more detail):

(He Blinded Me Without Science/8.12.08)

(WWJD? WTF?/11.29.07)

(Faith No More/6.8.07)

An Equal and Opposite Reaction

Maybe I've been wrong all this time.

While a lot of the usual suspects on the left seemed to embrace victimhood at the hands of the Coulters, Limbaughs and Savages of the world, I always kind of dismissed the bellicose mouthpieces of the far-right as little more than Vaudevillian boobs. I looked at them as the media's equivalent of carnival barkers -- cut-rate provocateurs spouting amplified, affectedly shocking nonsense aimed at whipping their audience into a feeding frenzy while enticing new recruits into the tent by playing on their fears of liberal-agenda infestation. Sure, they were obnoxious as hell and probably deserved most of the blame for the complete erosion of civilized political discourse in this country, but in the end they were basically harmless; they'd simply stumbled upon a template for a brand of shtick sure to make them rich and it happened to involve, ironically, exploiting the lily-livered gullibility of Red State America better than anything their sworn enemies could've come up with. The best way to deal with their crap? Ignore it -- because anything else just emboldens the bullies and makes them not only increase the antagonism but laugh in your face for either not being able to "take a joke" or for failing to recognize just how powerless you are against them. Besides, I had always assumed that although plenty of people found these pompous loudmouths entertaining and bought wholly into the sentiment behind the saber-rattling, no one took them that seriously -- did they?

Somewhere along the line, I guess I forgot just who we were talking about here -- just what kind of people would listen intently to someone like Rush Limbaugh day after day and what they might be capable of. This is admittedly a huge oversight on the part of someone who considers himself an avowed misanthrope; I'll try not to make the same mistake again.

The question, though, is this: Would some on the American far-right -- who've had it psychically drilled into them that liberals are to blame for all their ills -- be capable of murder?

What started as a mere whisper has turned into an unrelenting drone throughout the blogosphere after the shooting death of Bill Gwatney, the chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party. Gwatney was gunned down in his office at the Arkansas Democrats' HQ in Little Rock Wednesday by a man who had just been fired from his job at Target. Police say that after shooting Gwatney, 50-year-old Tim Dale Johnson led them on a high-speed chase for 30 miles; it ended with cops shooting and killing him. Although investigators are still trying to officially connect Bill Gwatney to the man who walked into a busy office and seemed to kill him in cold blood for no apparent reason, some are suggesting that the reason, in fact, is as obvious as it is disturbing -- that Johnson, a troubled loner, blamed liberal-leaning governmental politics for the loss of his job and exacted his revenge on the biggest target among Arkansas Democrats. They point to an arsenal of weapons found in Johnson's home after the shooting -- inarguably standard issue for right-wing psychopaths -- and, more disconcertingly, the fact that Wednesday's attack comes so soon after a deadly shooting inside a Tennessee church in which a gunman claimed to be out to kill the liberals who were supposedly controlling the country and preventing him from getting a job.

Is it irresponsible to question whether the two crimes are related? No. It's sort of a no-brainer to make the connection, as the shootings do seem similar and, like the police, most intellectually curious members of the public don't like coincidences. But are the crimes related? That remains to be seen; for now, absolutely not.

Which isn't stopping a vocal segment of the left from already jumping to the conclusion that these attacks on individuals whose politics take a liberal slant represent the inevitable next phase of a conservative "eliminationist" fantasy.

It's an agenda which has, admittedly, been proclaimed and perpetuated -- whether in jest or not -- by people like Limbaugh, Coulter and Savage for some time. These three and others like them have honed their talk of zero-tolerance for the people across the aisle to a knife's edge. For years, they've blanketed the airwaves, bookshelves and internet with ultra-nationalist agitprop which asserts that those who don't think like them are not simply to be argued with and voted down, they must be utterly crushed underfoot by any means necessary -- even if it involves, as Coulter once said, taking a baseball bat to them -- because they are nothing less than the enemy of the United States of America. In the words, if not actually the minds, of these seemingly fascist demagogues, liberals are as dangerous and absolute a threat to our way of life as the terrorists they supposedly coddle.

And there's no doubt that whatever their actual intentions may be -- no matter how much of it is just theater -- people are listening to the rhetoric and absorbing it. But are a few of those people now acting on it, and do the ones allegedly inciting the indignation through their bluster and bombast bear any responsibility for what it may be metastasizing into?

For almost a century, the litmus test for the lengths to which so-called free speech can legally be taken has come from Oliver Wendell Holmes, who famously ruled that "falsely shouting fire in a theater" was beyond protection; it's almost always been illegal to use a public forum to incite panic, violence or imminent lawless action. By that standard, there's just no way that any pundit at any time has crossed the line and broken the law. But legal doesn't always mean ethical, particularly not when you're refusing to take into consideration the fact that a substantial portion of your audience is made up of edgy, easily malleable "oppressed" white guys -- many of whom are now unemployed and looking for someone to blame for it. Although it's never a good idea to allow the potential misbehavior of the lowest common denominator to curb the right to free speech, it's equally inadvisable, not to mention irresponsible, to act as though you're operating in a vacuum -- as if what you say can't possibly have a negative impact, despite its incendiary nature. This was what made it such a pathetically insincere cop-out years ago when some lunatic from the Army of God would gun down an abortion doctor, leading Operation Rescue's Randall Terry to immediately get in front of a camera to offer an anemic and thoroughly horseshit disclaimer that he didn't advocate violence against abortion doctors. Terry set the wheels in motion and let nature take its course; today, the same thing could very easily be happening on an infinitely larger scale.

Once again, whether they mean it to or not, the invective of clowns like Limbaugh does have an impact. Listen long enough to right-wing propaganda and your eyes eventually glaze over, your brain shuts down and you begin to subscribe completely to the alternate reality that it's constructed out of thin air: an America where your new non-white neighbors are terrorists, immigrants are stealing your job, homosexuals want to lure your children into a life of sodomy, and treasonous liberals are plotting against you and your god at every turn. Believe this paranoid fantasy completely and who knows what you'll be capable of doing to defend your way of life.

It's no secret that the natural consequence of the fracturing of media -- of everyone having a voice and being able to put his or her opinions into writing and proffer them over the airwaves and internet -- is that there is no truth anymore. We have no common ground to anchor any argument. The left and right in this country live in completely separate worlds, each with its own set of facts. When we debate, we may as well be speaking foreign languages, so entirely have we allowed a single agreed-upon reality to become muddled by dishonesty on both sides. Rush Limbaugh lies his porcine ass off regularly and no one ever calls him on it; the ones who do are just dismissed by his acolytes as delusional or secretly trying to further the leftist agenda. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal launder George Bush's every sin until he comes out on the other end of the news cycle smelling fresh and clean.

And their listeners, viewers and readers believe every word of it. Their version of the truth, right or wrong, is why a man would shoot up a church in Tennessee, intransigent in the conviction that liberals are in control of the nation (when our president and half of our lawmakers are Republican) and that they've decimated the economy and taken away his job (when it could easily be argued Bush's policies, in fact, bear most if not all of the blame for the current dismal state of things).

For so long, the fire-and-brimstone of political division has been preached from every keyboard and microphone across our land; it was always just a matter of time before anger turned to action. All that rage had to go somewhere.

Maybe it just did.

Listening Post

Steely Dan are one of my favorite bands. Their music has always been beyond easy description: smooth yet quirky; whimsical yet secretly black-hearted; cool yet utterly nerdy; classic yet completely fresh.

For me, they were the soundtrack to life in Los Angeles, and this song shows why.

It's Babylon Sisters, live.

Re-Tarded

Why let a good cheap punchline go?

This classic piece from the Onion was sent to me earlier today by a regular reader (thanks Dave B!) and had me giggling so loud in public that I thought the van from Bellevue might show up at any minute to cart me off.

(The Onion: Clinton Deploys Very Special Forces to Iraq/1.20.99)

Berated "R"

So two nights ago at the premiere of Tropic Thunder, dozens of demonstrators showed up outside the theater to protest the movie's repeated use of the word "retard." Members of the Special Olympics and the American Association of People with Disabilities carried signs that said things like "Tropic Thunder: Colossal Blunder!" "We have abilities, not disabilities!" and "R word is hate speech!"

You know, with all due respect to the amazing cast of Tropic Thunder, between the movie and the protest, which do you think would've been funnier to watch for a couple of hours?

(Yeah, I know -- I suck. As always, feel free to direct your complaints here.)

Listening Post

Next year, this single -- one of the most powerful protest songs of my or any generation -- will turn 20 years old.

The first time I heard it, the sonic assault was like a kick to the chest -- and two decades later, it's lost none of its righteous fury. The damn song still gives me chills.

Long before hip-hop became little more than a goofy caricature, and long before Flavor Flav allowed himself to become the shameful cliché of undignified minstrelsy his bandmates once stood so strongly against, there was this:

The mighty Public Enemy, with Fight the Power.

Project Office Mayhem

Your assignment, as usual: Quietly put the following link up on every computer in your office, then crank all the speakers to full volume.

Mischief points: 277

(Hot Potato)

He Blinded Me Without Science

If you're one of the literally tens of people still upset over missing the opportunity to see Ben Stein's anti-Darwin documentary Expelled on the big screen, your prayers have apparently been answered. Thanks to a recent court decision -- one I didn't even bother noticing until today (sue me) -- the film has been allowed to return to the handful of theaters it was playing in to begin with. Yoko Ono, the only person on the planet even more irritating than Ben Stein, had filed a lawsuit against the movie, claiming it used the ubiquitous John Lennon classic Imagine against the wishes of Lennon's estate. A judge in Manhattan (how's that for irony?) however, sided with the film's producers and ruled that the song could be "fair used." When Expelled was first released back in April, I wrote a piece about it and the Intelligent Design movement in general for the Huffington Post. Here's that column in its entirety.

Ben Stein has a message for Darwin: "Fuck you!"

It seems incomprehensible that Stein -- former Nixon speech writer, game show host, eye drop pitchman and Neil Cavuto love interest -- could find a way to further cement his reputation as the dumbest smart person alive, but, bless his heart, he's done it. Today sees the theatrical release of a full-length documentary presented and narrated by Stein. Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed casts the man with the velvet monotone as a sort of Michael Mooresque troublemaker -- a mischievous imp out to rankle the establishment and challenge the suffocating status quo, all in the name of getting to the truth that they don't want you to know about.

And against which authority figure is Stein playing the role of the uppity insurgent?

Science.

Feel free to stop reading if you've heard this one before, but Expelled assumes the position not only that the theory of evolution and the faith-based hypothesis known as "Intelligent Design" are on close-to-equal scientific footing, but that there's an Illuminatian cabal among the science community, no doubt sitting in a Star Chamber somewhere, seeing to it that any developmental view but Darwin's is suppressed at all costs. It's a hell of a parlor trick really, and one the religious right has become admirably adept at exploiting these days: to turn the tables on their adversaries by adopting the tactics and lexicon traditionally associated with the mutinous left, casting themselves as the victimized and oppressed -- the little guys, taking up the fight against (literally, as opposed to an omnipotent deity) "The Man."

In the end though, that's all it is -- a really clever trick, and one that's played to the hilt in Expelled.

Creating controversy where there is none is positively pedestrian by now, but taking it to the lengths that this new documentary does, and doing it with such a salient level of panache, borders on genius. The SNL writing staff, circa 1977, couldn't have created a more audaciously comical premise than Ben Stein -- a man so square he craps cubes -- writing "I Will Not Question Authority" on a blackboard while dressed like Angus Young. Stein is a Dangerous Mind only if you see mark-to-market accounting as a ballsy show of defiance, which makes him the perfect impertinent hero for the God-said-it-I-believe-it set.

Unfortunately, no matter how creative the packaging, the lesson being sold in Expelled remains little more than nonsense. Stein and company can wrap themselves in the American flag and the freedom to question that it provides; they can grab a handful of ostensible pop culture street cred by aligning themselves with the likes of Bono; in the end, it doesn't make so-called Intelligent Design any more logically sound. It's still a religious assertion, and not a scientific one. It doesn't stand up to even the most rudimentary evidential scrutiny, and while it's always important to ask questions and allow for healthy debate, no matter the topic, at some point a line has to be drawn separating fact from fiction -- or distraction. The truth is important because it's the yardstick by which we measure our reality, and Ben Stein -- or anyone else -- trying to pass off spectacular whimsy as legitimate fact is, yes, damaging. Not everything can be up for discussion, no matter how large a segment of the population might believe otherwise.

And that's the best part of all this: Stein and his supposedly rag-tag little group of freedom fighters are neither rag-tag nor little.

In fact, the idea that we're expected to believe that the religious in this country are few and persecuted is laughable, bordering on offensive.

Last Sunday evening, CNN aired something it called the "Compassion Forum." It was a live event, broadcast from Messiah College in Pennsylvania, in which an entire roomful of religious leaders -- mostly Christian -- were granted an audience with the two Democratic candidates for president, one of whom may eventually be the next leader of the free world. For two hours, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama talked not about war, education and the economy, but about how their faith guides them and, to some extent, who loves Jesus more. The fact that either candidate believes that he or she has the luxury right now to spout metaphysical platitudes is nothing short of staggering -- though certainly not surprising. Just a few days prior to the "Compassion Forum," the entire cast of American Idol, dressed in evangelical white, belted its way through Shout to the Lord not once, but twice on national television. And today, the city in which I live, New York, is at a standstill as thousands crowd the streets -- streets which have been shut down by police -- to reverently welcome an unremarkable man in ridiculous robes and a funny hat who believes that he has a hotline to the creator of the universe and who just wrapped up a meeting with the President of the United States.

In other words, don't even attempt to claim that the religious suffer for their beliefs in this country. Hell, as long as you insist that you're doing it in the name of God, you can swap wives and molest children in The Middle of Nowhere, Texas for years before somebody finally comes and hauls your lunatic ass off to jail.

Ben Stein can rage against the scientific machine all he wants. He can shake his fist and shout, "Don't try to keep me down with your, your gravity, man!" It won't make a spurious assertion -- that intelligent design deserves a seat at the lab station -- any more sound, nor will it make Stein anything more than a rebel without a clue.

Animal Louse

When giving the Fox the keys to the chicken coop isn't enough, fuck it, just let him build the damn thing without a door from the beginning.

(MSNBC.com: Bush to Allow Developers, Not Scientists, to Determine Endangered Species/8.12.08)

"Street" Knowledge

This is pretty much the greatest thing ever.

And If Hillary Clinton Were Barack Obama, She'd Be the Democratic Nominee

Because there's still no depth the Hillary Clinton camp won't plumb when it comes to rank political opportunism and exploitation, be it the unspoken threat of Barack Obama's assassination or, now, John Edwards's extramarital affair -- I give you Clinton aide and smarmy little turd Howard Wolfson.

(ABC News: Wolfson: Edwards's Cover-Up Cost Clinton the Nomination/8.11.08)

The Fast and the Furious

Finally, an idea whose time has come.

(The Onion: New Anger-Powered Cars May Revolutionize the Way We Drive/8.11.08)

Listening Post

The first concert Jayne and I ever went to together was Our Lady Peace at the Hammerstein Ballroom here in New York City. It was back in 2002, on the Gravity tour -- which is why this video brings back some pretty good memories.

I'm a big fan of Our Lady Peace, and here they are with the live version of All For You.

All Fall Down

Stop me if you've heard this one before: A popular and highly respected political leader is watching his career go up in flames after being caught in a scandalous affair that went on for months behind his wife's back.

It's just about the oldest story in politics. I don't need to tell you that you could substitute any one of about a dozen names in place of John Edwards -- Eliot Spitzer, Bill Clinton, Gary Hart, Jim McGreevey, Rudy Giuliani, even Gary Condit to some extent -- and the details and end result would basically be the same. In fact, it's the lack of any real sense of shock that's likely at least partially to blame for the mainstream media's reluctance to pursue the story of Edwards's philandering until he came right out and confessed on national television. Although there's little doubt that many "respectable" news organizations were uncomfortable sifting through a field plowed by the National Enquirer, at least a few journalists must have looked at even the hint of another political sex scandal and thought to themselves, "Dear God, not again." Especially not when there are so many consequential issues to be reported on this election season (which isn't meant to imply that these issues actually are being reported on).

But now, once again, the machinery winds up, the shame and humiliation are piled on, the suspiciously contrived contrition is dispensed and, most of all, the pundits and experts line up to debate the supposedly elusive and incomprehensible question of why.

Why would a person like John Edwards, who seemed to have it all, blow everything he'd worked so hard for in the pursuit of quick sex? What made him think he could get away with it?

The answer to the first question is in the question itself: Edwards wanted to get laid because he's a person, and that's what people do. Where we ever got the idea that anyone is above his or her most basic impulses -- particularly the desire to have sex -- is beyond me. What made Edwards think he could get away with it? Nothing. He wasn't thinking at all, and any attempt to rationalize his behavior -- from some bullshit about how the attention lavished on him made him egotistical and narcissistic, to the lamentation of weakness in the face of temptation -- is essentially folly. John Edwards had been married for 31 years to the same woman, and no matter how attractive, intelligent, loyal or universally admired that woman is, there's one thing she can't possibly ever be: somebody else. And somebody else, even for a short time, is what most men and women -- most human beings -- want after three decades of marriage. It's human nature, and only our absurdly puritanical views on sex, coupled with the social mores and stigmas that are the inevitable products of such beliefs, would render it so unspeakably immoral.

What's immoral, actually, is that the bizarre culturally ingrained sentiment which equates marital fidelity with unassailable integrity put John Edwards in a position where he couldn't admit to his urges and was forced to truly betray both his loved ones and constituents by lying to them all. It's the unrealistic expectation of absolute purity and righteousness that will eventually doom almost every person in authority -- man or woman -- to fail us entirely, and that makes the belief system itself wrong. If I'm not mistaken, the religious -- who bear so much of the blame for these antiquated philosophies -- would call this "hating the sin, not the sinner."

John Edwards cheated on his wife. In chasing down that most enticing of hedonistic thrills, he betrayed her -- and for that painful mistake he has to answer to her and no one else. Although hardly anyone would suggest that putting your marriage at risk in the name of a quick affair is the right thing to do, almost everyone should know by now that it's understandable. Even forgivable. This is true whether the person involved in the affair is a politician or a postal worker. Both are driven by the same desires and either can fall victim to them. The people we elect to office are, at their core, still just people.

There can and will be plenty of debate over whether Edwards used campaign money to further his affair -- a revelation that would in fact be unethical if not outright illegal. And there's plenty of cause for finger wagging at the sheer stupidity of his actions, given that, as a man under intense scrutiny 24/7, there was zero chance of his affair not being discovered at some point. But once again, John Edwards wasn't thinking about that. He wasn't thinking at all.

He was just doing what human beings sometimes do -- what none of us is above.

Related: (Eliot Mess/3.12.08)

The Nocturnal Circus

One of the by-products of sleeping an hour or two at a time (if you're lucky) each night is that your dreams come in the form of rapid-fire, hyper-vivid blasts on the walls of your brain.

At differing points last night, I was sure that I was playing drums for My Chemical Romance and, more memorably, naked in bed with Katee Sackhoff.

Maybe I could get used to this after all.

Dope Fiend Theater

You know the drill: Swallow that blotter acid about 20 minutes after first putting it on your tongue, then sit back and watch the weirdness. (Deus Ex Malcontent assumes no responsibility for permanent psychological damage which may be caused by viewing the following.)

Saturday Morning Cartoons

With the possible exception of the legendary What's Opera Doc?, this could very well be the most popular Warner Brothers cartoon of all time. It's a classic in every sense of the word.

From 1953, here's Chuck Jones's Duck Amuck.

Policing Themselves To Death

Last week, I published CNN's strict new internet writing policy in its entirety on this site (On Notice/8.1.08). The internal memo had been leaked to me by a source on the inside, and in my rush to make it public I didn't bother analyzing or providing any insight as to what it meant or what the possible ramifications of the policy could be; I just put the thing out there, quick and dirty. I promised in the comment section of that post that I'd have more on the subject later, and here now is the full column on the CNN blogging policy that will appear in the Huffington Post later today. You nice folks will recognize a couple of lines cribbed from my original piece last week.

Believe it or not, I'd like nothing more than to let the subject of my firing from CNN go once and for all.

It's been almost six months since I was shown the office door, supposedly for the unpardonable sin of maintaining a personal blog without allowing the network's Standards and Practices department the right to pre-approve the material posted there. During that time, I've not so much lamented losing a job I wasn't enjoying anymore anyway as I've tried to point out the ways in which the public firing of a popular blogger -- as well as the lack of an identifiable policy on employee blogging in general -- proves that CNN's thinking when it comes to the new media revolution is hopelessly ass-backward. I've always maintained that I and others like me shouldn't have been summarily fired, not because we didn't violate the network's policy against blogging and social networking, but because there was no policy in place to violate. CNN managers, however, insisted that the one-line edict in the network's employee handbook forbidding staffers to write on the outside without company approval acted as a kind of catch-all rule-of-thumb, regardless of whatever nuances or gray areas the march of technology might be bringing to the table.

Well, they insisted it up until a few days ago, anyway.

Just when I thought it was safe to finally put the saga of CNN and its passive-aggressive aversion to web-savvy staffers in the ground, someone on the inside e-mailed me the network's official "NEW POLICY REGARDING PERSONAL WRITINGS ONLINE" late last week. It's lengthy. It's thorough. It's shockingly absurd. It's, to put it mildly, Draconian. It also proves not only that CNN still doesn't get it when it comes to what new media means for the future of journalism, but that the network -- either through ignorance or outright stupidity -- is perfectly content to police itself into irrelevancy.

Behold, just a few of the near-totalitarian restrictions on personal communication that you can expect as a CNN employee, as relayed via a mock question-and-answer session with the enlightened beings of Standards and Practices:

CAN I HAVE MY OWN WEBSITE OR BLOG?

Yes. But you should notify your supervisor about it, to have it cleared as a non-conflict for your work... In addition, you should not operate under an alias on your website or blog in order to participate in biased public behavior. Despite your use of an alias to express a view that may present a conflict of interest, it is still your opinion. Your real identity and occupation could be revealed by someone else at any point.

CAN I COMMENT IN A CHAT ROOM?

It depends on what you're commenting on. A chat room is, of course, a public place. If you identify yourself, or could in any way be identified, then you should not comment on anything CNN reports on. Remember, even though you don't say who you are, someone else might reveal your identity. AND if you're discussing things that are in the news, keep in mind you could be seen as representing CNN, and therefore you should not comment on the issues CNN covers.

HOW ABOUT MYSPACE, FACEBOOK OR OTHER SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES?

Again, on these sites only write about something CNN would not report on. Don't list preferences regarding political parties or newsmakers that are the subject of CNN reporting. Local issues that CNN wouldn't report on would be OK. And of course private communication with friends or family about issues that aren't in the news is fine.

WHAT IF I DON'T WORK DIRECTLY WITH NEWS GATHERING OR NEWS REPORTING BUT ELSEWHERE WITHIN THE SUPPORTING DEPARTMENTS OF CNN?

In discussions about this issue with your colleagues across CNN, it was felt by them that it was important to have this policy apply across the board. If you don't follow this policy, and you are officially a CNN employee, the loss of objectivity won't just apply to you, but could be associated with CNN. Therefore this policy applies to all CNN employees in all departments worldwide.

WHAT ABOUT FREELANCE EMPLOYEES AND INTERNS?

Supervisors should make sure freelancers and interns read this policy now -- or on their first day going forward -- and commit to following it.

So, to recap: As a CNN employee -- any CNN employee in any department, even the per diems -- you're not to offer an opinion to anyone in the general public at any time, including your own family, on any story CNN is covering or may cover at some point in the future (which, unless you're psychic, includes just about everything).

Joining a cult wouldn't force you to suppress your emotions and cut yourself off from the outside world this absolutely.

The problem, of course, is that it doesn't have to be this way. In fact, it shouldn't be this way, not if CNN hopes to survive in an era that's seeing sweeping changes in how journalism is practiced and news coverage is disseminated. A friend of mine named Terry Heaton is a vice president and the new media guru for Audience Research and Development, one of the country's largest and most powerful media consulting firms -- and he may have put it best. He recently said about the CNN edict:

"I think this document is ridiculous, because transparency -- not a muzzle -- is the new ethical standard for a reinvented journalism, and frankly, any journalist who can live with this ought to examine his or her own calling. Free speech is not a right to be given up in the name of some hodgepodge nonsense called 'objectivity.' How noble, or not."

This one quote makes two points, and makes them blisteringly clear: A) the way news is covered has changed drastically and any attempt to assert old-school "control," over either the flow of information itself or the image of the almighty mainstream news organization as the trusted arbiter of it, is a fool's errand, and B) objectivity, to put it bluntly, doesn't matter. In fact, the new CNN policy proves in no uncertain terms that objectivity is a lie; it doesn't exist. And yet news organizations have been behaving as if it does, and lauding it as the standard to which all true journalism adheres for decades. What CNN's internet policy implicitly states -- the dirty secret that it inadvertently pulls back the curtain on -- is that the network is perpetrating a fraud on its audience, attempting to convince viewers that because they can't see the bias, there is no bias. Line after line in the memo, CNN makes it clear that the important thing isn't to not have an opinion (because that, believe it or not, would be impossible), it's to not let anyone know what that opinion is. It doesn't matter what you're beaming out to millions of homes, it matters how the people in those millions of homes perceive it.

Once again though, there's no need for it to be this way. A newsroom full of Vulcan-like automatons -- or, in reality, thinking, feeling people who've simply been led to believe that they need to bury the fiercely opinionated nature that's the hallmark of every truly great journalist -- does no one any good, least of all the public that the media purport to serve. What's more, whether they realize it or not, the authors of the CNN memo are effectively carpet-bombing the network's ability to procure future journalists. Does Rick Davis, the Napoleonic head of CNN's S&P department, really believe that the political and cultural leanings of every MySpaced, Facebooked and blog-happy kid recruited by the network from here on out won't be common knowledge by the time he or she first walks through CNN's front door? Digital footprints last a long, long time, and if it really is all about the audience's perception, it'll take a viewer no more than a mouse-click or two to uncover the biases of the next Anderson Cooper.

Unless, of course, CNN has a plan to begin growing its future news staffers in a vat somewhere and sequestering them until they're old enough to be hired.

Which, if the Orwellian tone of this new policy is any indication, it very well might.

Listening Post

Of all the under-the-radar musicians I've tried to pay a little respect to on this site -- bands like Wired All Wrong, theSTART and Abandoned Pools, and artists like Jonatha Brooke -- these guys stand out for me.

Suddenly, Tammy! came out of that hotbed of alternative music, Lancaster, Pennsylvania -- an area whose major claim to fame is that it's to the Amish what Hollywood is to Scientology. They were a Ben Foldsish three-piece that eschewed guitar for piano and played music that sounded like I'd imagined the Peanuts gang would sound had they grown up and put together a band. Fronted by the reedy voice and talented keyboard work of Beth Sorrentino (whose brother Jay played drums), Suddenly, Tammy! were masters of the kind of spare, cinematic pop that always brought to mind elementary school recess on a winter's day somewhere, whether it was spent playing in the snow with friends or off by yourself contemplating what it all means.

They were only on the indie scene for a few years in the early to mid-90s, but if you happen to own a copy of Suddenly, Tammy!'s second album, 1995's We Get There When We Do, you've honestly got yourself a rare musical gem that's worth holding on to and appreciating.

From that album, here's Hard Lesson.



(By the way, Beth Sorrentino is still making some beautiful piano and vocal music on her own. Track her down on iTunes -- you won't be disappointed.)

Search and Destroy

Now that I'm making regular trips to the pediatrician's office again for the first time in decades, I've noticed something that's bugged me since I was a kid. It's a problem that needs to finally be addressed because it seems that it's still going on, even after all this time.

Would the selfish fucking bastards who keep circling the hidden objects in "Highlights" magazine please knock it the hell off? For fuck's sake -- they put the magazines in the goddamned waiting room so that everyone can enjoy them, not just you, you inconsiderate pricks. Jesus Christ, what good is a hidden object puzzle if you've already pointed out where everything is? Thanks, Indy -- hope you feel real fucking good about being the first to dig through the magazine page and find all that buried treasure. Nice of you to double and triple circle the sailboat cleverly concealed in the drawing of the little girl's shoe so the rest of us can have the opportunity to marvel at your keen eye. Next time why not sign your name at the bottom of the picture so your 7th grade skill level at puzzle-solving can really be saved for posterity -- or better yet, just piss all over the goddamned thing to mark your territory. Dammit.

Beijing Year Zero

A few years ago, Naomi Klein wrote a landmark article for Harper's Magazine called "Baghdad Year Zero." It posited that, contrary to popular opinion, the fight for post-war Iraq wasn't a failure and in fact had gone exactly according to plan. The problem was simply that most Americans weren't aware of what the true goal in Iraq had been all along: To topple a Middle-Eastern government in favor of the creation of a fresh, new "blank slate" which global corporations could turn into, literally, their own personal sandbox. Klein found that U.S. fighting forces were in some ways merely the Tip of the Spear, pummeling Iraq's infrastructure and clearing the way for companies like Halliburton and Bechtel to flood the nation with construction equipment and Saudi companies to begin advertising every product under the desert sun. According to the article, the aim of Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority was more to help foment a restriction-free environment for multinational business than anything else -- to create a sort of capitalist utopia where the civilized world's pesky laws and regulations were non-existent and there was nothing to stand in the way of good, old-fashioned, unfettered greed.

While I'm as fascinated as the next guy by conspiracy theories and the half-wits who generally subscribe to them, Klein's conclusions about what was happening in Iraq -- and has continued to happen -- were tough to handily dismiss. She's a smart lady and she really did her research; what she wound up turning out was a crack piece of investigative reporting.

Which is why I paid special attention to a column she just wrote about what's been going on in China during the lead-up to the Olympic Games. Suffice it to say, whereas the hope for Iraq may have always been to wipe the government clean and start the whole place over as the ultimate globalization funhouse, the goal for China seems infinitely more disturbing: The communist nation is quietly proving to the world -- specifically, those who know what to look for -- that it can utilize oppression, coercion and absolute state control to, antithetically, create the perfect climate to sell a wealth of global products. And best of all, we're paying for all of it -- the tools being used to subjugate China's citizenry, particularly those who disagree with the government -- through trade and corporate endorsements.

Honestly, it's worth taking ten minutes out of your day to read.

(The Huffington Post: "Unveiling Police State 2.0" by Naomi Klein/8.7.08)

Serial Killer (Redux)

In the quest to fill some space during a period in my life where I'm sleeping literally two, maybe three hours a night tops (if I'm lucky), I'm dredging up this piece from August of last year -- one that was cross-posted over at Pajiba. It provides a little insight into the man behind Sci-Fi's craptastic reimagining of Flash Gordon. Incidentally, when you're done, I'd highly suggest checking out Daniel Carlson's recent paean to Season One of the infinitely better series reimagining on Sci-Fi: Battlestar Galactica. (Pajiba: "So Say We All" by Daniel Carlson/8.5.08)

When I first heard that Flash Gordon would be returning to television, I admit my interest was mildly piqued. Although never a die-hard fan of the original comic or serial -- both were well before my time -- I'll be the first to proudly proclaim my odd and unyielding devotion to the absolutely God-awful 1980 movie starring Sam J. Jones, Melody Anderson and, for reasons unknown to this day, a host of people who could actually act. In addition to being the single worst career move in Brian Blessed's lifetime -- as there's little doubt that he's since been forced to endure frequent and infuriating shouts of "DIVE!" from various live audiences while attempting to perform, say, Shakespeare's Richard III on the Haymarket stage in London -- the film is best remembered for its campy style, punctuated by a brilliantly absurd score from Queen.

I was curious as to whether the new series would take the traditional route or purposely party like it's 1980 and go completely over-the-top. Regardless, it had one thing going for it right off the bat -- it was being given a run on cable's Sci-Fi network, which, despite having successfully exhausted the entire "O-Saurus" genre, had carved out a certain place in my heart by bringing the whip-smart reimagining of Battlestar Galactica to television.

So, yesterday, I downloaded the pilot episode of the new Flash Gordon free on iTunes, settled in with a bag of Bugles and a depth-charge-sized cup of Crystal-Lite raspberry lemonade and watched from start-to-finish.

And?

It's just fucking terrible.

I'm not talking destined-for-kitschy-cult-classic-status terrible; I'm talking unwatchably bad.

The entire thing feels like an Ark II-esque Saturday-morning venture (and not in the good, old-serial sort of way); it looks like it was produced -- special effects and all -- by a junior high AV class; and the dialogue sounds as if it were written by Dawson of Dawson's Creek when he first got that Spielberg jones -- say, around age five.

The goddamned thing was free, and I still wanted my money back.

I found myself immediately demanding to know just who was responsible for such a painful atrocity, as I hadn't done much in the way of research before sitting down to watch, nor would I have been able to live with myself had I actually taken the time to delve too deeply into the parentage of Flash Gordon. That's when I realized that I had missed the opening credits entirely -- no doubt in the kitchen at the time, grabbing the aforementioned Bugles and Crystal-Lite.

So I skipped back to the beginning, careful not to subject myself to even a momentary second-viewing of the nonsense I'd just witnessed, and when I got there, you can imagine my surprise -- or complete lack thereof -- at what I found.

Robert Halmi Sr.

The Godfather of crap.

For the uninitiated, Robert Halmi Sr. was once known as the "King of the Mini-Series." He was the man responsible (read: to blame) for a huge swath of supposedly epic, Tolkein-on-the-cheap, TV sweeps extravaganzas -- beginning with Gulliver's Travels in 1996, starring (oh dear God) Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen, eventually winding its way through an entire catalogue of fantasy titles like Merlin, The Odyssey, Alice in Wonderland, and The 10th Kingdom, and finally coming to a merciful end with 2002's Dinotopia. During Halmi's heyday, there wasn't a magical land of make-believe beyond his reach, as long as cut-rate CGI could support it.

Infinitely more entertaining though than Halmi's leviathan ten-hour televised elementary school pageants was Halmi himself. A diminutive, 80-something Hungarian immigrant with an obligatory streak of white hair -- his unpredictable temper and bitter disdain for the very TV executives who regularly and inexplicably agreed to fund his schlock was the stuff of legend. I've never actually seen an interview with Halmi, but knowing his demeanor all-too-well, I always picture his mannerisms being quite a bit like Patton Oswalt's impression of surly TV painter William Alexander.


I was still picking up a paycheck from NBC when Halmi's flame-out began -- when his magical fantasy world started to crumble, so to speak, and his banishment from network television seemed all-but-assured.

In 2000, after a series of projects which became known for their consistently escalating budgets and consistently diminishing returns in the way of ratings (as well as one, The Magical Legend of the Leprechauns, which became fodder for late-night comedians everywhere thanks to its rather un-PC portrayal of the Irish), NBC reacted with hesitation when presented with Halmi's opus: The 10th Kingdom. More than a few cracks had developed in the network's once mighty primetime schedule and the powers that be were weighing their sweeps choices more carefully than usual; Garth Ancier, the programming chief at the time, simply wasn't sure it was worth the risk involved in tying up five nights of valuable airtime with another of Angry Bob's whimsical epics.

His Solomon-like solution: Straddle it at the end of the book -- with the first episodes inside the sweeps period and the last ones safely outside. As expected, it bombed -- leading NBC's mini-series chief Lindy DeKoven to fall on her sword for signing the thing in the first place.

Halmi's response to all of this?

He went fucking ballistic.

He screamed to anyone who would listen about NBC's lack of vision and how no one at the network appreciated "imaginative fantasy" anymore, and he vowed to take his next project elsewhere -- leading to the compulsory public statement of remorse from NBC, followed immediately by the private Don't-Let-the-Door-Hit-You-In-the-Ass-On-the-Way-Out party.

That next project, by the way, was 2002's incomparably silly Dinotopia; the "elsewhere" was ABC.

The ratings were as you might expect.

In the space between Halmi's initial descent at NBC and his final crash-and-burn at ABC, he managed to piss-off every other network executive in the contiguous 48 -- at one point inundating CBS big gun Les Moonves with faxes designed to antagonize the living hell out of him after learning that Moonves had publicly insinuated that Halmi did little more than crank out bad special effects.

But time heals all wounds apparently, and Halmi has allowed himself -- and has been allowed -- back under the tent of one of the big networks, as Sci-Fi is owned by NBC Universal. Apparently and unfortunately however, one thing that hasn't changed is his almost preternatural knack for being able to get away with churning out ridiculous garbage -- as evidenced by the new Flash Gordon.

Like much of what Halmi has done in the past, his latest effort is an embarrassment to the network carrying it, and the presence of it makes it crystal clear just how much Sci-Fi is going to suffer when Battlestar wraps-up for good. If this is the kind of brand the network is set on advancing, and NBC is content with accepting, it's pretty much doomed to a consistent level of failure.

But hey, with Halmi on board, at least Sci-Fi can be assured that it'll never run out of badly produced dinosaur movies.

Coming soon: Carnotopia.

Mock the Vote

Well, here's something I thought I'd go to my grave never saying: Paris Hilton's kind of likeable at the moment.

Actually, what makes this soon-to-be-everywhere video funny isn't Paris herself, it's the fact that John McCain was both dumb and hopelessly out-of-touch enough to throw the door wide open for it. His absurd attack ad comparing Barack Obama to the likes of Britney Spears and, yes, Paris Hilton not only made him seem every bit the desperate, befuddled old man he really is, it unwittingly gave Hilton (who never met a promotional opportunity she didn't love) all the excuse she needed to restart the clock on her 15 minutes -- in surprisingly clever fashion, no less.

Good job, John.

Fucking jackass.

(Update: Okay, what's even dumber than McCain's original ad? The fact that the McCain camp is actually responding to the points Paris raises in her video parody. Read it here. Really, congrats guys -- you just got owned by Paris Hilton.)

Project Office Mayhem

Your assignment, as usual: Quietly put the following link up on every computer in your office, then crank all the speakers to full volume.

Mischief points: 160 (15,000 if you happen to work at McDonald's corporate offices)

(Why So Hungry?)

Listening Post

My God, how I love this woman.

From the movie Blow and the spectacular 2001 album Everybody Got Their Something, this is Nikka Costa, with Push and Pull.

Class Act

The Official Absurdly Excessive Hip-Hop Faux-Aristocracy Name Generator

Step 1: Take the name of a popular character from a 70s sitcom.

Step 2: Add an extra syllable commonly found in the names of soap opera family patriarchs and Hamptons yachting instructors.

Step 3: Combine both with a brand of high-end luxury vehicle.

Bonus: Try to make the whole thing sound like a malapropism that's the result of a mistranslation between diametrically opposing cultures.

Example: Fonzworth Bentley (rapper, stylist, and Clown Collegiate host of VH-1's new reality series, From G's to Gents)

Other Possibilities: Squiggington Benz, Cunningham Aston, Dr. Johnny Feverthorn Hummer III

Listening Post

Sheer perfection.

Jeff Buckley's Mojo Pin -- live.

Trendspotting

Which one is more likely to destroy your children?

Judging Nancy

A couple of weeks ago, I did a quick interview with Radar Online magazine for a story it was putting together on the most hated pundits on cable news. At the time, I was just coming off an admittedly questionable decision I'd made to write a somewhat negative piece about Gawker and its sister site, Jezebel.com, and wasn't feeling the need to heap any more career-disadvantageous invective in a fresh direction. I think my exact words to Neel Shah -- the Radar columnist doing the interview -- were, "I've burned enough bridges for one week, thanks." In the end, he and I chatted for a while about the abstracts of the current punditry craze, but I never specifically cited anyone I thought should be held up for more scorn than the others.

In retrospect, I'm kind of sorry I held back -- at least when it comes to one person in particular.

I'm not really going out on much of a limb or breaking any new ground by saying that CNN's Nancy Grace is the most loathsome, feckless troll to currently, inexplicably, have a forum on national television. She's a vile, unscrupulous monster who peddles morbid prurience like a five-dollar whore and whose brand of rank solipsism is matched only by her near-sociopathic disregard for the lives she's ruined and exploited and by her apparent contempt for the tenets of responsible journalism (to say nothing of basic human decency). Seriously, I rarely spew this much unrestrained venom, but the woman could get hit by a bus and I'm not sure the world would be a lesser place for it.

Her tenure at CNN Headline News has brought a heretofore unknown level of shame to the entire operation.

But now, it looks like somebody might finally be about to hold her accountable for her bullshit.

On Thursday, a federal judge in Ocala, Florida refused to heel to the arrogant condescensions of the high-priced lawyers representing Nancy Grace and CNN, ruling against their calls for the quick dismissal of a lawsuit claiming that Grace pushed the mother of a missing toddler into committing suicide two years ago. The family of Melinda Duckett charges that not only did Grace coax the troubled 21 year old mother onto her show, then badger and bully her when she couldn't or wouldn't satisfactorily answer questions about her missing son -- leading Grace to of course imply that Duckett herself was behind the disappearance -- but that Grace then added insult to injury by airing the pre-taped interview after Duckett had shot herself.

Although police do consider Duckett the only viable suspect in the case, which is still open, attorneys for the woman's family rightly point out that whatever information Melinda Duckett may have had about her missing son died with her, thanks to Nancy Grace taking upon herself the role of Grand Inquisitor. Did Duckett kill her little boy? We don't know for sure, and thanks to Grace's purely ratings-driven brand of contrived, overly-aggressive indignation, we probably never will.

In a just world, the Duckett family's lawsuit -- which a skeptic could easily argue is little more than a cynical attempt to cash in on the death of a loved one -- would only be the tip of the iceberg, and Nancy Grace would face criminal charges of obstructing justice (at the very least) in addition to the wrongful death civil action. For now though, the threat of hitting CNN and Grace in both their wallets and the court of public opinion will have to do -- and their argument that a successful suit by the Ducketts would "severely chill" journalists' ability to cover missing persons cases is a staggeringly laughable conceit, given that Nancy Grace is the furthest thing from a journalist.

On the contrary, what she does every night on CNN is an insult to responsible journalism, and if the network were half the unassailable bastion of credibility it purports to be, it would have fired her odious ass a long time ago.

Maybe it will take the justice system -- the one Nancy Grace so vaingloriously touts herself as the defender of -- to do what greedy network executives are unwilling to: force her off the air.

And maybe it will do it by making them all pay.

Saturday Morning Cartoons

There's nothing more sadistic than making someone believe he's slowly going insane. There's also nothing more hilarious -- which is why that particular theme has been the backbone of some of the best comedy ever made.

Here's a perfect example: From 1951, it's the Tex Avery classic -- and probably the only time you'll hear the word "shelaliegh" used in a cartoon -- Droopy's Double Trouble.

On Notice

Believe it or not, I'd really like to let the subject of my untimely dismissal from CNN go once and for all (Say What You Will/2.18.08). As I'm quickly learning now that my new baby is home from the hospital, there really is no sense crying over spilled milk (particularly not when the spill in question happened almost six months ago). Yet every time I promise myself that I'm done bringing up the whole CNN thing, somebody sends me an item like this: Behold, the official memo sent out to all network employees finally stating in no uncertain terms just what CNN's policy is on personal blogging.

You know, the policy they didn't have in place when they made the decision to fire me and a few others like me, and the one that I've openly criticized them for neglecting to enact and clarify?

This was e-mailed to me by someone at CNN yesterday. Enjoy it -- many Bothan spies died to bring us this information.*

***NEW CNN POLICY REGARDING PERSONAL WRITINGS ONLINE***

We’ve gotten a number of questions from CNN staff wanting clarification of CNN policy on communicating publicly about our work, or on news or public affairs -- on the internet. In Blogs. In Chatrooms. On video sharing sites. On social networking sites.

Below are some of the typical questions -- and our answers. We hope this is helpful to everyone,

After reading -- please don’t hesitate to call or email anyone at Standards and Practices if you have further questions. (See contact info below).

MOST IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER:

UNLESS GIVEN PERMISSION BY CNN MANAGEMENT, CNN EMPLOYEES ARE TO AVOID TAKING PUBLIC POSITIONS ON THE ISSUES AND PEOPLE AND ORGANIZATIONS ON WHICH WE REPORT.

The best rule of thumb is, keep in mind whether what you are doing or saying is "in public." In most cases, what you write online is public or can be made public.

CAN I COMMENT IN A CHAT ROOM?

It depends on what you’re commenting on. A chat room is, of course, a public place. If you identify yourself, or could in any way be identified, then you should not comment on anything CNN reports on. Remember, even though you don’t say who you are, someone else might reveal your identity. AND if you’re discussing things that are in the news, keep in mind you could be seen as representing CNN, and therefore you should not comment on the issues CNN covers.

HOW ABOUT MYSPACE, FACEBOOK OR OTHER SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES?

Again, on these sites only write about something CNN would not report on. Don't list preferences regarding political parties or newsmakers that are the subject of CNN reporting. Local issues that CNN wouldn’t report on would be OK. And of course private communication with friends or family about issues that aren’t in the news is fine. If you are not sure, ask your supervisor or S&P for parameters on posting. (S&P contact info is listed below).

Also keep in mind that you should not be commenting or writing about what goes on in the workplace at CNN without specific approval by CNN senior managers. For example, in some cases there have and will be exceptions made to have some staff get information out to an outside audience on platforms like Twitter about our upcoming coverage plans.

But without those approved exceptions, your workplace activity is proprietary and so you should not be writing on these sites about what goes on behind the scenes here at CNN.

CAN I POST MY WORK ON YOUTUBE, PODCASTS OR OTHER VIDEO SHARING SITES?

You should not post any CNN material online unless it is approved. Likewise, if you make a short video on your own time, if there’s any question about it being something that CNN might air, first ask someone before posting it. And again, if the subject touches on anything you might cover or CNN reports or may report on, you should likely stay away from it. If it is a close call, ask your supervisor or S&P.

CAN I POST TO iReport.com?

This site was developed specifically for non-CNN material, so no, you shouldn’t. However, a separate procedure has been developed for CNN’ers to send in material. It’s called weReport and you can see the details for how it works at http://sketch.turner.com/wereport. As always, if you capture pictures or video on news stories call the national desk and they’ll help you arrange to feed it in.

HOW ABOUT SECOND LIFE?

CNN’ers are encouraged to visit Second Life, just keep in mind it’s a public place and the same rules (listed above) apply as they would to “real” public life.

CAN I HAVE MY OWN WEBSITE OR BLOG?

Yes. But you should notify your supervisor about it, to have it cleared as a non-conflict for your work. Your supervisor may choose to then have it cleared at another level or by S&P. And again, you shouldn’t post commentary on anything you might cover in your work or CNN may report on, or write about the CNN workplace or post CNN material without permission by a senior CNN manager.

WHAT ABOUT POSTING LINKS TO OTHER WEBSITES, ARTICLES FROM OTHER PUBLICATIONS AND VIDEO FROM OTHER SOURCES?

Again, if your web activity clearly shows that you are taking a position on an issue CNN reports on or is likely to report on, you should avoid such activity.

In addition, you should not operate under an alias on your website or blog in order to participate in biased public behavior. Despite your use of an alias to express a view that may present a conflict of interest, it is still your opinion. Your real identity and occupation could be revealed by someone else at any point.

WHY SHOULDN’T I COMMENT ON NEWS OR CURRENT AFFAIRS?

Unless given permission to comment publicly on the issues or people we report on as a CNN analyst or commentator, it is important that you and all other CNN employees be independent and objective regarding the news and people that we cover.

If you publicly declare your preference for issues or candidates or one side or the other of the public policy issues CNN reports on, then your ability to be viewed as objective is compromised.

We appreciate that everyone has a life outside work and we encourage all of our employees to get involved with the issues that are important within their communities. That said, you need to avoid any appearance of bias or partiality. It’s just one of the responsibilities associated with working for a news organization.

WHAT IF I DON’T WORK DIRECTLY WITH NEWS GATHERING OR NEWS REPORTING BUT ELSEWHERE WITHIN THE SUPPORTING DEPARTMENTS OF CNN?

In discussions about this issue with your colleagues across CNN, it was felt by them that it was important to have this policy apply across the board. If you don’t follow this policy, and you are officially a CNN employee, the loss of objectivity won’t just apply to you, but could be associated with CNN. Therefore this policy applies to all CNN employees in all departments worldwide.

WHAT ABOUT FREELANCE EMPLOYEES AND INTERNS?

Supervisors should make sure freelancers and interns read this policy now -- or on their first day going forward -- and commit to following it.

CAN I GIVE SPEECHES, OR WRITE ABOUT CNN?

CNN reserves the right to say who gives speeches or makes personal appearances on behalf of CNN. A number of your colleagues do give speeches to schools, colleges, and other organizations. Those requests must first be approved by your supervisor and then will go through CNN PR for review. PR will bring them to S&P for final review and approval taking into consideration who the invitation is from, the subject matter to be discussed -- and/or whether travel expenses/an honorarium are being paid. Our employees write books, and occasionally do other outside writing, but it all must be approved by your supervisor first, and then by PR and by S&P as appropriate. This policy is outlined in Section E of the Standards & Practices Policy Guide. Every employee should have a Guide and should read it and review it. (If you don't have a Guide, please ask your HR representative for one.)

Considering my own story, I love that last line -- just love it.

Speaking of which, let's recap: I publicly chastise the managers of CNN's American Morning on this site and on the Huffington Post and within two weeks the show's EP is fired, followed shortly by his second-in-command. I point out the incompetence of that same show's main copy editor and, likewise, not long after, he's sent packing. Now this: I spend six months claiming that whether they consider it a matter of common sense or not, CNN's upper-level managers must make their stance on the blogging and online networking of staff-members crystal clear (as news outlets like the New York Times have already done), and they finally cave in and do just that.

At this point, I think I can probably get away with charging CNN a consulting fee (although I suppose Jon Stewart could say the same thing about his role in getting Crossfire canceled a few years back).

Regardless, it's about goddamned time, guys. Welcome to the 21st century.

Oh, and I await your Cease & Desist order. Just be glad I edited out Rick Davis's personal phone number.

*The one and only Star Wars reference I'll ever make on this site.

Listening Post

It's tough to pick a favorite U2 song, but this one's close to the top of the list.

Here's All I Want Is You.