"It's not the information, it's the politics …

...It's not that we were lacking information. It's that, when that information came out, it was denied and those in power were able to impose their view of reality. Political power decided what reality was, despite clear information to the contrary."

So says Mark Danner, a professor at Berkeley's Journalism School and the author of "Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror" (a book that he managed to publish seemingly within months of those grinning, sickening photos). He's talking about what went on in El Salvador with its U.S. funded death squads, but he's also applying it to the current administration It's a perfect summary of why we have a rage-inducing disconnect (on both sides) between the reality-based communities on the coast and the horseshit-relishing Red Staters. We scream "Lies!" and they scream back "Politics!" And we're both right.

[Warning: Full-throttle rant ahead.]

Danner has always seemed an opportunist to me in person, someone motivated not only by truth but equally by the acclaim awarded to those who uncover the truth, but I realized after reading this interview by TomDispatch's Tom Engelhardt that I was wrong. Sure, he likes the spotlight, leading packed Zellerbach Hall in questions for Robert McNamara or debating Christopher Hitchens, that shape-shifting snake charmer, but that's not what drives him. He's an idealist, a moralist who believes that America Should Not Be Doing These Things -- torturing people, assassinating leaders, wiretapping its citizens, the whole bucket of creepy crawly Bill of Rights-eating worms. And neither do I.

Which is why it's been a rough week for my required reading. Jane Mayer's piece in the New Yorker about Alberto Mora, the Navy's top legal counsel, the one guy who tried to stop the authorization of systematic torture of suspected terror suspects being held in the no-man's-land at Guantanamo, who had access to the highest levels and yet was blithely, smugly circumvented by Rumsfeld's second-in-command -- this pissed me off so royally that I had to go hit the heavy bag in the studio for at least 10 minutes, all the while imagining John Yoo's face.

John Yoo, incidentally, is also a professor at Berkeley. I have never met or interviewed him. As I hit the punching bag I fantasized alternately between being the one to break him in an interview -- not by inflicting pain but by leading him gently and inescapably to the understanding that he had not only failed to stop America's enemies, he had created more and caused America's defenders to doubt themselves -- and spitting on him. Me, spitting on him. I have never hawked a loogey at anyone in my life, but that is the impulse I feel most vividly toward this placid, bland law professor.

I'm lazy. Here's Jane Mayer describing why Yoo is spittle worthy:

Yoo "…had helped to formulate the argument that the treatment of Al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, unlike that of all other foreign enemies, was not covered by the Geneva conventions; Yoo had also helped to write the Torture Memo. Before joining the Administration, Yoo, a graduate of Yale Law School, had clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas and taught law at Berkeley. Like many conservative legal scholars, he was skeptical of international law, and believed that liberal congressional overreaction to the Vietnam War and Watergate had weakened the Presidency, the C.I.A., and the military. However, Yoo took these arguments further than most. Constitutional scholars generally agreed that the founders had purposefully divided the power to wage war between Congress and the executive branch; Yoo believed that the President's role as Commander-in-Chief gave him virtually unlimited authority to decide whether America should respond militarily to a terror attack, and, if so, what kind of force to use. “Those decisions, under our Constitution, are for the President alone to make,” he wrote in a law article.

So the main thrust of the New Yorker article, which should have been heartening -- at least there were some high-level people in NCIS and the Navy who thought, hey, the Geneva Conventions protect our soldiers too, once we throw them out and let the president do whatever he wants just because we're at war, we might as well be living under SADDAM HUSSEIN for fucksakes. Mora, the guy who tried to point this out, is the son of a Hungarian and a Cuban. As he says, people who went through the brutal crushing of the 1956 anti-Communist uprising in Hungary and fascism in Cuba, among other things, "tend to have very strong views about the rule of law, totalitarianism, and America." As in, We Don't Do That.

But we do. Or rather, our leaders and their minions do. As a populace we have become so inured to the moral corruption of our government -- putative Christians loving thy neighbor as long as Mr. Neighbor is rich, white, and heterosexual, toasting each other with crude oil and the genocidal blood of countries we could never be bothered to "let freedom ring in" because there's no spoils there for us, nothing at stake.

(I'm getting myself so worked up again that if I weren't completely clogged with a cold, I'd have to go out and punch the bag some more.)

Anyway, as Mark Danner says, America now bears more than a sneering resemblance to Eastern Europe in the 1950s and '60s, "in the Soviet system where everyone realized the corruption, the abuse of power, the mediocrity of the government, the yawning gap between what was said and what was really going on, but no one could do anything about it." We feel powerless. The cancer is so deep, so rotten, that you think, how can I possibly do one-hundredth of what John Kerry and Paul Krugman and Jimmy Carter have tried and failed to do -- to wake up this country?

I believe Americans are narcotized by our wealth and choices of entertainment. We are so obsessed with surfaces, with celebrities and consumer culture, that we are easily manipulated by someone who seems -- seems being all that is necessary -- tough, honest, and with moral certainty.

Which brings me to Required Reading No. 3, Frances Fukuyama's dense, overtly dull but actually fascinating cover essay in last week's NY Times Magazine, "After Neoconservatism." (Really, this essay was a riveting page turner. I felt like someone took my tiny peanut-brain up to 30,000 feet and said, Look down, you can see all the funny little patterns the ants are scratching in history's dirt.) Once upon a time, Fukuyama or "Fuke Yo Mama," as I like to call him, was a card-carrying neoconservative. (Alas, his card did not have his nickname.) And then he saw the light, and the light was, oops! neocons are actually more Leninists than Trotskyites. They forgot that social engineering does not mix with the transformational uses of power, and they thought they could cram democracy down Iraq's throat and it would sit up and beg for more. In the words of my boy Frances:

They believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.

Go, Frances, go! Among other things, he makes a persuasive case that Iraq may finally bring those pesky neocommies to their knees. Good ole boys did not mind going off to war when it meant saving Mom, Sis, and Apple Pie from dirty bombs. They're a little less keen when the project gets shifted around to bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East so that eventually, the world can be a better place and some daisies will grow in the desert. Say what? Fukuyama says, and I think he is correct, that "Americans are not, at heart, an imperial people. Even benevolent hegemons sometimes have to act ruthlessly, and they need a staying power that does not come easily to people who are reasonably content with their own lives and society." Or to people who really like watching American Idol and believe that their government is only spying on and torturing the bad guys, not just Ahmed from the corner store who sells phone cards for Egypt.

So, I close this endless rant, which I seriously doubt anyone has bothered to read all the way to here -- I wouldn't, but I'm writing this for my peace of mind, not yours, because if I don't these feelings of impotent rage will plague me all night long-- I'm going to wrap up with some inspirational words from Mr. Danner.

It's a difficult time for those of us who care about the truth and who don't believe, as I think this administration does, that the truth is actually determined by what those in power think. I take comfort from the fact that a lot of people don't believe that.


There are two borderline dangers here. One is to go off into a state of political debility in which you think that none of this matters. To hell with politics, let's try to live our lives. And that's a very natural response, to kind of bow out of political engagement, but I think that would be very wrong and very harmful. The other risk is to equal the administration in their exaggerations and their distortions, in their stunning lack of fidelity to what is happening. To exaggerate, to overstate, to alter the truth in the cause of a political goal -- this, I think, is very tempting ... very tempting. When you see Fox News existing as it does, you want something of the same on the other side. But I don't think that's my job and I'm glad it's not the job of a lot of writers and journalists out there.

So, that's what motivated this rant in the first place. I can't just avoid reading this stuff while I moon over whether I will ever finish my "romantic comedy slash family drama" of a novel. We have to engage. However small that engagement is, we have to do it. For me, it's continuing to get the thoughts and observations and oratorical fire of the Berkeley peeps out there into the world, where others can blog them and print them to pass around and get fired up.

I idolspize Dave Eggers!

There, I said it.

Ann Hornaday has a great column in today's Washington Post "That Wonderful Woman! Oh, How I Loathe Her.", about her feelings for Susan Orlean, that is, people one simultaneously idolizes and despises, usually because they are close enough to you in age, chosen career, and talent for you to think "that could/should be me, dammit!"

Now, I don't think idolspize is going to catch on as a phrase immediately, given that most of us don't want to own up to being envious, petty, smallminded creatures. Oh wait, is it just me in here, idolspizing Dave Eggers? Am I the only wannabe writer in my mid-30s who thinks Mr. Curly-Haired Orphan was in the right place to catch the memoir wave and surf it all the way to the zeitgeist picnic, and yet is somehow even more personally offended that he has chosen to parlay that fame and fortune into do-gooding, I mean really doing an astounding amount of good -- starting after-school writing programs for inner-city kids all over the country, publishing cool magazines and books by other people, and writing op-eds in the New York Times about Teach for America? Is it so much to ask that I not have to come across the Hipster Posterboy's name practically daily, doing something that once again shows that he's not only talented, he has a big heart, a wide and loving circle of ridiculously cool friends like David Byrne, a lovely, talented writer for a wife, and ... and .... I could go on, but my spleen hurts.

According to Hornaday, "We all have them, those close friends, colleagues, casual acquaintances or complete strangers whose lives and careers exist -- it seems to us -- solely as a rebuke to our own. We respect them, admire them from afar, maybe even love them -- but with a twinge of . . . what exactly? Jealousy? Envy? White-knuckled rage? They're the people who are constantly reminding us that we'll never quite measure up. They're the valedictorians to our salutatorians, the bestsellers to our mid-listers, the mid-listers to our never-published, the homecoming queens to our also-rans. They seem to have sprung fully formed from our ugliest competitive streaks, our egos at their most fragile, our deepest self-loathing. They are our own squandered potential, fully realized."

She nailed it. Squandered potential, yep, ouch, leggo my ego, Eggers. See, I don't idolspize Zadie Smith -- even though she's writing exactly the kind of books I would love to write, and she's a year younger than me yet getting shortlisted for the Booker Award over and over....she's so out of my league, I can only bow before her as Salieri did before Mozart. But although I liked "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," I thought it was light. Not important. Certainly not insightful enolugh to qualify one as The Voice of His Generation...or is it the conscience? who knows. And yet. I really admire what he's done with 802 Valencia. I even like the damn pirate shop. McSweeney's is a consistently great magazine. I find his celebrity reluctance and sullenness oddly charming. Dammit!

How much time have I wasted idolspizing? Probably more than I have spent actually writing. Which explains a lot.

What do you want to DoMaTh?

I was contemplating what I'm trying to do here, and I've concluded it's a way to keep track of my thoughts and productive activities, for myself. If people read it, fine, but I can't worry about whether I'm amusing my current readers in Seattle and Austin (although I love you guys immensely and am so glad you're now part of my extended family).

My motivation is the nagging sense that I spend way too much time consuming -- magazines, Web, TV, books, and movies -- and I'd like to concentrate more on the "Do / Make / Think" activities (which could be the name for a cool magazine, if one-third of it weren't already one). So, this blog shall be a record of what I'm DoMaTh-ing. I've been terrible about keeping a journal ever since college when my crazy ex used to read it secretly and then tailor his behavior to whatever I was saying about him. I'm also bad about jotting down my ideas in a notebook for future use as I absolutely hate writing by hand. I'm crippled if I can't type (although I can't even touch type, I'm just a speedy hunt-and-pecker). Perhaps this can take the place of those things.

It probably won't be very funny. I tend to only be funny by accident. I'll leave the comic writing to all my fellow family bloggers, who are genetically more suited to it. (Has anyone ever done a study of whether a sense of humor runs in families?)

Not just another pedicure

Last night I went to the Suitcase Clinic, a 10-year-old "clinic" run by UC Berkeley students for local homeless and low-income patrons. I'll be writing about it later in the week. There's about 45 students running 3 weekly clinics -- a general one, one for women, and one for teens -- that serve about 50 people each, helping them write resumes and find jobs, as well as getting them haircuts, free chiropractice sessions, medical evaluations, eye exams, and washing their feet. Yep, the students wash their feet. It's not a Christ thing, but a way to relax the clients and get them to talk; also, they spend a lot of time on their feet and don't have access to showers very often, so this is a real health issue. The students wash their feet and trim their toenails, then put on lotion and give them clean socks to wear.

It was a really powerful thing to watch these 20-something men and women on their knees carefully trimming the gnarliest toenails while cheerfully chatting with people. I felt like a big chicken, actually. Despite living in the 'hood and having spent time in psychiatric hospitals (just visiting), I still felt pretty anxious surrounded by homeless men, many of whom were mentally ill. Eventually, I started talking to people, and realized how much prejudice I have. In one of the discussion groups run by the students, I met several homeless people who were incredibly articulate and insightful into the nature of homelessness and what could be done about it. One of them, who was wearing white shorts over black sweatpants, used the word "milieu" completely unselfconsciously in a sentence.

After I'd been there a few hours and chatted with enough people, I felt brave enough to bring the camera out. Nobody wanted to have their picture taken, which I can understand, but they did understand that I needed photos of the students for the story, so a few let me take pictures of their backs or, in this case, feet. The sweatshirt the girl is wearing with Gandhi's famous "Be the change you want to see in the world" quote on it is official Suitcase Clinic garb I'd say they're doing a pretty good job of putting good intentions into action. It was balm for my cynical eyes.

♥ of Glass

I "finished" my last freelance story last night at 11:30 – or at least I hit Send and dumped it in the editor's lap. I suspect he'll be sending it right back in a few days, so I am not celebrating. It's Valentine's Day, one of those holidays that I really and truly don't care about but am willing to accept that other people do. This year I meant to do something for my parents and my grandmother, but I barely let myself out of freelance jail for the past week and therefore, as usual, I am full of good intentions and nothing else.

Well, I'm only slightly full of good intentions. The rest of me has been colonized by some sort of restless dissatisfaction and sadness. I always get like this around February and March – and I always forget that I do, so each year I panic and think, How can/should/must I change my life — right now!

I happened to go to iTunes and saw a link for a new EP from Michael Stipe, for which all proceeds go to help Gulf Coast victims. It's six versions of a song called "In the Sun" by Joseph Arthur, an Ohio artist who I'd never heard of. I bought it and was immediately blindsided by its haunting, melancholy sweetness, even though it has phrases like "God's love" in it, which usually turn me off. When I heard the lines "'cause if I find / If I find my own way / How much will I find," my eyes started leaking like mad, just as they did when I watched my cousin-law-Erika's slideshow tribute to her dead brother, who I never met. Clearly I'm one lightning strike away from a thunderstorm. (Or one metaphor away from being too embarrassed to continue this blog.)

Anyway, it's a beautiful song, and you can listen to a free sample of it here (I like #4 best). It reminded me so much of my good friend Al, who's struggling to put his mom's house back together in New Orleans. That city was his whole life: he was writing his dissertation about its music, he planned to get married and have kids there and never leave. He still does, but it won't be the same life. Selfishly, I think about how I will never be able to go back to the place where my first serious stretch of growing up happened. An entire city's population, displaced and forgotten.

What's shocking is that it isn't shocking — just one of the many vile things this administration has either directly caused or allowed to happen, confident that even if it can't lie its way out of it, people will forget by the next news cycle.

Happy Valentine's Day, Al. (Here's a picture of us from last October, when I was visiting my grandmother in Pensacola and he stopped by on his way back to school from New Orleans. Hard to believe such devastation could come from that beautiful Gulf of Mexico behind us.)

I'm in hell

I've been working on the same freelance story for days. It should be an easy company profile, but I'm overwhelmed and can't seem to get my brain to work. It may have something to do with it being my third in the last two months, with one due last Monday over which I sweated bullets, blood, and even a puppy eyeball or two.

So last night in a fit of panic-stricken pique I practically ran to the gas station across the street and bought a pack of cigarettes. Bart tried to dissuade me, saying all the right things -- "this won't make you feel better," "just wait a little bit" -- but nothing could stop me. I opened them, stuck one in my mouth, and lit it. Before I even inhaled, the smell woke me up. I thought how ridiculous I was being. I am finally past the point where I miss smoking, and here I was about to re-addict myself. I wanted a magic wand, not a cigarette. So I put it out and threw the pack over the fence. (The halfway house people will be overjoyed that the cigarette fairy is back.) Even the slight residual taste grossed me out. Fortunately I was able to get rid of it with the help of four or five Godiva truffles, courtesy of my wonderful dad who sent them early for Valentine's Day. I said I stood at the edge of the cliff and looked over but didn't jump. My friend Deborah corrected me and said it was more like I slipped off, but got caught on a branch and managed to claw my way back up.

Anyway, the only good thing about today is that we published a profile I wrote about Bryan Goodwin, a cool student here at Berkeley who happens to have grown up in a wheelchair. It also took me days to write, because of this strange psychological thing I am currently inflicting on myself, but at least I am pretty happy with it. Also, I like this picture of Bryan I took in his new shirt and cute red wheelchair. (Bart spiffed it up in Photoshop for me.) You can't see it, but he has a "Boys Suck!" sticker on the back of it.

Confessions of a celebrity stalker

Or two. Last night at a dinner party I discovered that one of my friends is perhaps even more obsessed with Angelina Jolie than I am. Bart and I saw Mr. and Mrs. Smith last week, which just cemented my adoration of Ms. Pillow Lips. I had no expectations for the movie and so was pleasantly surprised when it turned out to have some original action sequences as part of a really great postfeminist, kick-ass, woman-takes-no-prisoners-AND-never-has-to-be-rescued (!) plot. It was funny, sexy, and exciting. I can take or leave Brad Pitt: I liked him in Thelma and Louise but aside from bright moments in Snatch and Fight Club I think he's just an adequate actor and generic pretty boy whose attempts to look intelligent and brooding consist of him sticking out his lower lip and looking mildly retarded instead.

My Jolie-jonesing friend Sean is a he (and straight), so his infatuation makes a bit more sense, but he's every bit as enamored with her do-gooding trips to Cambodian refugee camps and her speeches at Davos as I am. We kept gravitating to each other to discuss Brad Pitt ("can't believe she's having a baby with him: whatever happened to adopting 10 more orphans?" and "Brad Pitt is just such a safe choice -- I wasn't a fan of Billy Bob's but at least he could act and could probably not only spell Schopenhauer, but quote him"). Sean and I ascertained that Brad is the controllee in the relationship: she's the lion tamer and he's jumping through her hoops. ("Sure Angie, I'll start visiting refugee camps instead of high-end design showrooms! Sounds awesome!") We would stop talking about her and pretend like it was just a joke so as to placate our eye-rolling significant others, but as soon as they weren't paying attention it was back to: "so did you like Tomb Raider?" "Not really. Gia, though, wow." "See her on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer? She rocked the house!"

I confess I was able to feel a tiny bit superior to Sean because I had never visited any fan sites. Note past tense. This morning I procrastinated getting started on my freelance story by visiting the ones that he'd mentioned. I spent hours looking at pictures of Angelina Jolie from various photo shoots, from her awkward adolescences to her Goth Oscar night brother-loving act to her t-shirted refugee camp look. (Here's the mother lode of all such photos should my dear readers lean the same way.) I don't know what it is about her: she's too skinny and one of those beautiful women whose features by themselves can appear freakish. In interviews she comes across as alternatively brilliant, crazy, down to earth, shy, ballsy, hilarious, and confused -- in short, just like my favorite female friends. The photo-clicking spree began when I ran across this picture of her as a teenager and thought she'd since had a nose job. I have pored over many, many photos and can safely say now that I don't think she has...fortunately, since I would just be so disappointed in her. I think her face just got a lot skinnier and her nose slenderized with it.

So there you have it. An otherwise sane, intelligent woman in her 30s who does not subscribe to People is fascinated with a celebrity. It's because it's a common condition that really galls me. I don't want to be a celebrity stalker! I don't want to imagine bumping into Angelina in some dark corner of Africa and becoming friends, getting late-night phone calls from her about Brad ("He's really not very bright, but god he has a nice ass, and Maddox loves him"). I just realized I don't know the name of the daughter she adopted from Ethiopia. So maybe I'm not that obsessed.

Bart made me do it

I wanted to comment on his blog but I had to have one to do it. Besides, everyone else has one ... I felt like the last kid to get the Tretorns with the pink (or red, or blue, or if you were really cool, plaid) slash on the side. Again!