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 Sunday, June 2, 2002
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Who says satire is dead? Michael Kinsley skewers Dick Cheney, Halliburton (the company for which Cheney was CEO before he became VP of the U.S.), and all other companies who are now trying to blame Arthur Anderson for their illegal and unethical accounting practices. Kinsley writes:
 OF COURSE it[base ']s no big deal to fire Arthur Andersen, ever since the firm got cooties last fall in connection with the Enron scandal. By now nearly every company lucky enough to have employed Arthur Andersen has seized the opportunity to establish its own enormous integrity by inviting the beleaguered bookkeepers to drop by for a chat, gently removing their glasses and eyeshades, punching their owlish faces in, and then kneeing them in the double-entry bookkeeping for good measure.
One imagines the scene: an orgy of self-righteousness. [base "]You despicable swine![per thou] these companies shriek at the trembling, cowering number-crunchers. [base "]How dare you sully the sacred title of auditor? We counted on you to stop us from cooking our own books. That[base ']s what auditors are paid to do. If you[base ']re going to look the other way and then shred documents to cover up our misbehavior, there[base ']s no telling the terrible things we might do. Shame on you, Arthur Andersen. Shame! Shame![per thou] 
Oh, and while Halliburton is being investigated by the S.E.C. for its fraudulent accounting, the company and its former CEO (Cheney) both maintain that Cheney knew nothing about the cooking of the books. Kinsley:
And where was the future vice president while this was going on? The company insists, graciously, that a mere $100 million flyspeck on the company accounts (1999 income: $438 million) was beneath the notice of a busy CEO like Dick Cheney. This is believable. Cheney[base ']s income in 2000, his last year at Halliburton, was $36 million in salary, bonuses, benefits, deferred compensation, restricted stock sales, exercised options, frequent-flier miles, a turkey at Christmas, and other standard elements of the modern CEO compensation package. It is a vital responsibility of anyone who is that valuable to remain completely ignorant of anything improper going on around him. He owes it to the company to be untainted.
Satire at its finest, my friends. ;-) 1:52:10 PM 
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The Ford Motor Co. has been running a series of ads featuring its new president, William Clay Ford Jr., talking about what Ford is all about. But, according to Andrew Beck Grace, the spots are, um, disingenuous at best. For example:
In "Family," the image of corporation as living being is displayed at full tilt. "I think the thing that is special about Ford is, we're not just another nameless, faceless company," Ford explains. "We're a company that has a soul." The Ford employees who will be affected by the company's January announcement that it will close five plants and cut 21,500 jobs in North America might disagree.
And this is really what I was talking about below about Bush and Co. and the real priorities of corporate America. If Ford has a soul, it sure as heck doesn't care much about people (or the world they live in, for that matter, c.f.: Ford Explorer, Lincoln Navigator, etc). 12:38:04 PM
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Tom Bissell's recent essay about books he's ashamed of being unable to read has sparked some great comments on Salon, largely from people who want to defend the "great" books. William Faulkner is high on Bissell's list of authors he really can't relate to, and having spent some time recently reading a good deal of Faulkner I can say that I can understand where Bissell is coming from. However, I also think that, for example, As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury are worth the effort it takes to get through them. You may never "like" or "relate to" a book like this, but, again, I think that's part of the point of the book. Faulkner's characters aren't, by and large, very likeable. His scenes are often hot and sticky and dirty and creepy and all the kinds of things we'd really prefer not to think about. But a lot of the world is like that -- uglier than we'd like it to be -- and we can't just "choose" not to look at or think about those parts of life because we don't "like" them. In fact, many of the writers Bissell denounces -- Henry James, R.W. Emerson, Theodore Dreiser, Herman Melville -- are writers whose texts seem explicitly to challenge their readers' vision of the world. As readers, we often don't like to face our own stereotypes or to see the the things we take for granted exposed as illusory or corrupt, but it's something we probably should do now and then, don't you think?
At the same time, a lot of "great" books really are overrated. Bissell's great mistake was in admitting he'd never really read most of the writers he condemns. Now if he reads them and still hates them, well, then he might have something... 11:36:36 AM
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This weblog gets a few hits once in a while, and a few weeks ago it got quite a lot of traffic, mostly focused on the subject of backlinks. However, none of the traffic lasts, and it has never translated into what appear to be "regular" readers (unless people are subscribing to the RSS feed, in which case I wouldn't know they were reading, right?). At any rate, I've long suspected that I won't get a lot of readers so long as I continue to express sentiments like McKinney's Prescience. These are not popular positions these days, and I'm guessing that people who drift across these pages and see such ideas are likely to dismiss "there is no spoon" as the rantings of a mad conspiracy theorist. Why would anyone want to read that?
Why, indeed. For the past few months one of my goals as a "blogger" has been to provide another outlet for different ways of thinking, perspectives that challenge the prevailing discourse and the mainstream media. In addition, I've assumed that if this goal makes me sound like a crackpot, so be it. However, today, after reading David Corn's The September 11 X-Files, I've realized I'm probably just shooting myself in my own foot if people dismiss me as a crack-headed conspiracy theorist. Corn's article details -- and, to a degree, debunks -- a few of the more popular conspiracy theories surrounding 9-11, including:
George W. Bush did it. The Mossad did it. The CIA did it. Or they purposely did not thwart the assault--either to have an excuse for war, to increase the military budget or to replace the Taliban with a government sympathetic to the West and the oil industry. The theories claim that secret agendas either caused the attacks or drove the post-9/11 response, and these dark accounts have found an audience of passionate devotees.
While I haven't really followed any of these conspiracy theories closely enough to assess their validity (I'm not even sure what "the Mossad" is), I see them as united by an underlying "theory" for which there really is a lot of evidence, namely: Bush and Co. (and corporate America, generally) cares very little about anything other than business, money, and reducing all barriers that stand in the way of the wealthiest Americans to continue amassing huge quantities of wealth. Bush and Co's policies comprise a massive body of evidence that this is true. From the administration's refusal to support environmental protections like the Kyoto Treaty, to the extreme haste with which it moves to eliminate worker-friendly measures like the ergonomics laws that would have held employers responsible for repetitive stress and other on-the-job injuries, to its attempts to "reform" welfare to eliminate assistance for the most needy in our country -- I could go on, but the point is: Bush and Co. wears its priorities on its sleeve, yet it constantly says things like "we care about the environment" and "we really want to help the poor people in this country." In other words, Bush and Co. lies as a matter of policy, so why should anyone believe what it's saying about 9-11?
Nevertheless, Corn's conclusions have caused me to rethink my strategies for getting my readers to think about what I see as the contradictions between what Bush and Co. says and what it does. Corn concludes that conspiracy theories often distract from the truth, which is often bad enough:
One problem with conspiracy theorizing is that it can distract from the true and (sometimes mundane) misdeeds and mistakes of government. But when the government is reluctant to probe its own errors, it opens the door wider for those who would turn anomalies into theories or spin curious fact--or speculation--into outlandish explanation. Not that all who do so need much encouragement. September 11 was so traumatic, so large, that there will always be people who look to color it--or exploit it--by adding more drama and intrigue, who seek to discern hidden meanings, who desire to make more sense of the awful act. And there will be people who want to believe them.
Corn is right: the truth -- whatever it turns out to be -- is bad enough, and getting all worked up over conspiracy theories does less good than serious and meaningful consideration of ways to improve the world we find ourselves in today. So my own conclusion is that I'll continue to follow and comment upon the issues that seem important, and to thank people like McKinney for having the courage to voice unpopular opinions. However, I'll try to clearly separate my conspiracy theorizing (which really can be quite fun -- as an imaginative exercise) from the things that can be proven and which therefore matter more. 9:50:33 AM
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Although he's never been hugely popular here in the U.S., I really do think Billy Bragg is one of the greatest songwriters of the last 20 years. Most people know him from his collaboration with Wilco on the Woody Guthrie archive material that comprised the "Mermaid Avenue" volumes, but Bragg put out about a dozen discs on his own before that. The Nation is currently running a terrific interview with Bragg in which he comments on global justice and why the AFL-CIO should sponsor free rock concerts (kind of a no-brainer, really; unfortunately, labor leaders sometimes act as if they had no brains -- only sometimes, ok?). Another great bit:
We do have a strong tradition on the left, and one of the things we have to gain from the demise of the Stalinism of the Soviet Union and the Berlin wall is that we have an opportunity to create a leftist idea outside the shadow of totalitarianism.
What a great way to see the world. Speaking of which, it was nice to see this argument for peace make DayPop recently (thanks to Scripting News -- Dave Winer has power in the blog community!) along with the Amnesty International 2002 Annual Report. Is blogdom taking a left turn here, or are these just being used as giant targets for the warbloggers to shoot down? 9:49:12 AM
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