Tom Watson

Longboat Key Sunset

Longboat Key Sunset, originally uploaded by Tom Watson.

We spent a long weekend away in Florida, where the sun was bright if not particularly warm (though we left on a nine-degree morning and returned to tonight's snow showers). For a few days, we battled migrating seniors for dinner reservations, looked at T-shirts, took in the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg and the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Tampa. We ate some grouper sandwiches and crabcakes and key lime pie. I took a swim, despite the chill. Had a massage. Read the forthcoming Iggy biography. Hunted some seashells on the shore. Mostly, we put the top down. Just a two-seater on this trip, a hot little number at high speed. And watched the birds, sailing against a very blue, Florida sky. Till sunset.

Scene and Heard

Last night, we had the perfect sunset over the Gulf of Mexico after flying away from a nine-degree morning in New York. A true marvel, this travel thing. So we're down for a few days' R&R in the Congressional District of former Congresswoman Katherine Harris, but catching up on some feeds nonetheless. A couple of quick ones while I'm away:

Steve Gilliard has it right. The Libby trial is about to blow up, big-time. The confluence of Scooter's total defense aqnd throwing Rove and Cheney into the mix of witnesses is going to shine that light into the dark Mordor-like recesses of the Bush Adminstration. Time to start following FDL indeed. This will be one for the historians - it's too late for Bush, really.

Mannion jumps on Howard Fineman and other oldster purveyors of hackneyed political metaphors in defense of Hillary Clinton; this is something I've been following for a while - the pathetic and easy sexism that so-called analysts fall into when discussing the Senator from New York. Lance's post is a keeper.

Ralph DeMarco does the SOTU (sorry for the late link) and reminds me of one of the worst GOP moments on this long national nightmare: "I remember the thousands of delegates on the floor of Madison Square Garden wearing Swift boat purple heart band-aids and waving rubber flip-flops in the air like lunatics. It was fucking scary." Indeed.

Jim Webb and Graham Greene

When it’s good - and at times it’s very good indeed - Lost Soldiers by Senator James Webb forms a worthy bookend to Graham Greene’s classic tale of French colonialism and American intrigue, The Quiet American. Full review over at newcritics - read and comment, por favor.

Happy Birthday to You! We! Us!

Yes, congratulations indeed, dear reader. Today is the day this little journal, this occasional scrawling, this community, this blessed plot, this realm, this blog turns three years old. A baby in human terms, prime time for horses, positively ancient in online years.

So I'm pulling a Time magazine and holding up a mirror to you guys - because, this sucker wouldn't still breathe without you. I'm not a writer who has to write or, shark-like, sink and die. I write to be read, and I prefer to provoke reaction, good and bad. Now, I haven't come up with the blog equivalent of Time's shiny mirror cover, so here's a screen shot from MyBlogLog, which shows the icons of a few of the regulars (great service, by the way). Take a look - that's the real anniversary right there, the real partners.

So, the numbers 652 posts and 4,462 comments. More than a post every other day, but less than one a day. Something like four a week.

That's been consistent here since the start. I'm not a complete blogger; I don't feel compelled to share every thought or publish every jot. I don't blog about my work, except very rarely. Same thing with my home life, except for now and again. I blog about my "third life" - the one that's neither home or the office, the one that's part virtual part real, part online conversation and part walk down the street.

That's why I've fallen into politics and media as the major topics here; I've been a  media critic before, and I was a political reporter for a decade. I don't do these things now, but the interest - occasionally the passion - remain, and so when I write in the space between family and profession, these are most natural starting points.

Sports of course, dominated by the New York Mets. And culture, pop and otherwise. Lately, much of that has migrated to my own spin-off, the Jeffersons to this All in the Family, over at the gorgeous little newcritics.com (oh yeah, I love it there). And my travels - things I notice, conversations I overhear, people I meet, places I get to see. Some of that I share. Some of it I don't.

Back to those 4,462 comments - there are hundreds of thousands of words in there. Hundreds of people. Hundreds of conversations. Serious arguments. Real diversity. Plenty of bullshit.

The comments are why I still blog - this little community. Many of you have written almost as much as I have. Take the dynamic duo, for instance, Slappy and Tom K, each with well over 300 comments and tens of thousands of words. These guys have almost become synonymous with this blog. I've met people in the street, introduced myself, gotten to talking, moved onto blogging and had these new acquaintances exclaim: "How about that Slappy? Tom K sure does hate him!" Or vice versa.

In three years, I've written the equivalent of several books here. I've met dozens of people offline who I first encountered here. And I've made dozens of real online friendships. Further, I know there are a bunch of near-silent lurkers here, readers who lie in the weeds, rarely if ever leave a comment, but are real readers and take my ideas and links and posts with them into the world. I value them as well; can feel them there most days in the ghost-like pageview counts.

There will be weeks when this place goes silent. There will be times when I'll feel like packing it in. And then someone will drop a comment on something I've written - maybe an old post from two years ago they found on Google. And I'll smile. And think a little. And knock out another post. Thanks, and many happy returns.

State of Denial

Every year at State of the Union time, I look for one key sign that all is as it should be in the House chamber: Eliot Engel's giant head. My large-noggined Representative plants himself on the aisle, down front, well ahead of the President's arrival each and every year - more the better for getting that TV time that Congressmen crave.

And, yes, there it is! The MSNBC cameras picked it up. The Congressional Cranium has been spotted, nodding furiously at Hillary Clinton. Okay, the Republic still stands. The House and Senate are gathered. Engel gets his spotlight and the sergeant at arms can do his duty.

9:05 - The pre-game question seems to be centered on whether Bush can change the story away from the national disaster that is Iraq to issues like the environment, immigration and health care. The answer is no, short of a massive bombshell.

9:09 - Here's Bush, skipping many Democrats I notice, including poor Eliot Engel. He did kiss Jean Schmidt, the hateful warmonger from Ohio, however.

9:11 - Nancy Pelosi's career moment, shaking the President's hand in a spot occupied heretofore only by politicians of my particular gender. "You ready to go?" Bush asks Pelosi. "Welcome, Mr. President," she answers, and she introduces him. The President's gracenote in congratulating Pelosi has the chamber echoing.

9:17 - More enterprise. Uh-huh. "The country is on the move." So is Barbara O'Brien, who's live-blogging and get details I'd miss. This is annoying, says my daughter, they stand for everything. This is the easy stuff, I say. Wait a while.

9:22 - Still mom and apple pie. Math and science skills. Dems sitting on hands for no child left behind. Cheney adjusting underwear, apparently. Pelosi looks composed.

9:25 - Affordable health care. Savings accounts. Small business. Helping the states. Nothing national. "Junk lawsuits." Did Pfizer write this speech?

9:27 - Immigration. Ooooh. This could be good. Will the Republicans applaud? "The great tradition of the melting pot." Lots of applause for "comprehensive immigration reform," but of course, that means different things to different pols - especially those who support vigilante groups and oppose any expanded guest worker programs or amnesty.

9:31 - His big proposal - cutting gas usage by 20% in ten years.

9:33 - Heh-heh, heh-heh. He said "global climate change." Heh-heh, heh-heh. I thought Cheney was gonna plotz. Accident Pelosi's wearing green?

9:36 - Macao again. Ed Asner saying Macao is a sound that's going to haunt me to my grave.

9:37 - We all love the troops. Cut to generals. The full standing O.

9:38 - It is me, or is his constant use of "the terrorists" - as if they were a unified, monolithic Reich on the march - just this side of insanity? Does he believe this? Did he really just say Shia and Sunni "have the same wicked purposes?" A decisive ideological struggle - I dunno. The artist asks: "why is he going on and on with this, just to justify himself?" I think she's got it.

9:42 - McCain is asleep.

9:43 - Writes Barbara: "Must … not … throw … lamp … at… television." Easy there, blogger.

9:44 - "Victory" is such an empty word when perched upon those pursed presidential lips.

9:47 - There's nothing new here. The same tired words with a higher death count. "We can expect an epic battle..." Cut to Lieberman. And they do.

9:49 - Dramatic shot of Pelosi sitting quietly with her hands folded, as Cheney and the Republicans stand and applaud.

9:52 - Sendin' civilians abroad to where we need 'em. I thought we called that "Halliburton."

9:54 - We're in laundry list land. There's Teddy Kennedy next to Barak Obama. There's Homer Simpson on my picture in picture.

9:56 - Gallery time. In the paint, there's Dikembe Mut-ummmmmmbbbbboooo. And the foul. And Laura.

9:58 - My cable TV listing has this down as the Jim Webb Pre-Game Show.

10:00 - Hey a New Yorker! Wes Autrey, subway hero, takes a bow.

10:01 - Here's a preview from Webb's speech, as he continues to gain with his populism:

In the early days of our republic, President Andrew Jackson established an important principle of American-style democracy - that we should measure the health of our society not at its apex, but at its base. Not with the numbers that come out of Wall Street, but with the living conditions that exist on Main Street.  We must recapture that spirit today.

10:02 - "God bless"?!? From a deli man, that's a rave.

10:08 - The postgame. Brokaw really hammers Bush is a quiet way: "It was interesting watch him try to glide over Iraq with a list of things we've all heard before and how quiet it was on both sides of the House." Good summation.

10:16 - Senator Webb is on, from his office. Not a great teleprompter man yet, but who cares. He's got two messages. One - most of the middle class is being left behind in this narrow, upscale boom. Two - the war is a disaster. Here's the key passage:

The President took us into this war recklessly.  He disregarded warnings from the national security adviser during the first Gulf War, the chief of staff of the army, two former commanding generals of the Central Command, whose jurisdiction includes Iraq,  the director of operations on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many, many others with great integrity and long experience in national security affairs.  We are now, as a nation, held hostage to the predictable - and predicted - disarray that has followed. 

The war's costs to our nation have been staggering. Financially. The damage to our reputation around the world. The lost opportunities to defeat the forces of international terrorism. And especially the precious blood of our citizens who have stepped forward to serve.

The majority of the nation no longer supports the way this war is being fought; nor does the majority of our military.  We need a new direction.  Not one step back from the war against international terrorism.  Not a precipitous withdrawal that ignores the possibility of further chaos.  But an immediate shift toward strong regionally-based diplomacy, a policy that takes our soldiers off the streets of Iraq's cities, and a formula that will in short order allow our combat forces to leave Iraq.

I think I'll leave it there. The team over at DMI will have instant research up very shortly, to check in over there.

Tag: DMIsotu2007

Wasteland of the Mind

I catch him when he's strayin' like any brother would
Man turns his back on his family well he just ain't no good...

Trouble comes to us all, if we live long enough or engage at all in human interaction. In families, it's guaranteed. At seven on a January night, a cold and dirty mist hung over East 42nd Street, as the commuters streamed toward the subway or the commuter trains. The headlights backed up to the west like a stream of red, migrating birds in formation, following the sullen, forgotten winter sun. Not cold enough for snow. Not nearly. But with the wind and the fog and the damp, foul sheen on every surface, midtown was colder than a snowstorm. The gutters ran, the lights blinked, the signs changed and people moved and stopped and moved again.

And I considered the loss that comes with change.

Management consultants often argue that people don't change, that they merely rise to the level of their incompetence and float along in the economic slipstream. A label of striver or artist or clock-puncher can be ascribed in, say, the late 20s and it will still apply when it's retirement time four decades later. Experience tells me, however, that these so-called human resources people are dead wrong; they just love their formulae and their forms, and the rest of us have to fit.

I've seen people change, and recently, and quite personally, I've seen the disaster than can result. If the human mind is physical in nature and part of biology, then certainly chemical shifts can and do change it. And when mental illness enters a family, it can make you wish for a simple tumor or a basic clogged artery.

When a shifty and rootless interloper invades a perfectly sound and serious mind, all the notions of science and all the tenets of faith may lose their power. Good intentions, appeals to common sense, the entreaties about the living future of young children are like that winter mist washing down on cold, grey, empty limestone. The water washes off, the curtain wall holds firm, but the building is empty or remodeled, a strange new tenant moved in to replace old, comforting space. This kind of change can leave you bereft, even beyond the basic decisions that must be made and actions that must be taken to keep other lives moving forward.

As an Irish Catholic, I was marked from the first day with the permanent dye of family. Family, my grandmother said, always comes first. Yet always there's a restless tide in a large family, a jockeying for leadership or accommodation; some competition, healthy and otherwise. Coming and goings. This latest, this close-in scourge, a person entirely changed, has caught me. And I am ill-prepared for its grip, I must tell you. This episode is like somebody's massive thumb on high, pressing a dull and constant pressure down on top of my head, for a year, with no escape. There are times these days when I shuffle along like a man carrying a heavy load.

So the mist turned to straight rain and people fumbled for umbrellas and hats. An older woman talked to her daughter loudly on a cellphone. The light changed, and she began to cross Third Avenue. Remember your brothers, she said. Remember your children. Then she moved into the crowd and was gone.

The Executioner’s Songs

[Cross-posted from newcritics.com]: Televised executions are all the rage these days, but the long drops in Iraq brought to mind two made-for-television movies that I saw decades ago, but remain fairly vivid for their imagery and their unshaking lens. They were seen as anti-death penalty arguments on the small screen, but as I remember, both The Execution of Private Slovik and The Executioner’s Song were delivered straight up. And because we don’t televise our executions in America, they became stand-ins for what was then a raging discussion about the morality of capital punishment, as the death chamber came back into active use across the United States.

Of the two, Martin Sheen’s portrayal of the scared and confused Eddie Slovik, the first American shot for desertion since the Civil War, has the most staying power (this is possibly because Gary Gilmore, played well by Tommy Lee Jones, was convicted of one murder and suspected in several others). Slovik was clearly an innocent, whose death warrant was approved by Eisenhower to send a message to an Army facing a desperate and dangerous enemy in Europe - an American force whose desertion and AWOL rates were growing rapidly in 1944.

In the 1974 TV flick, Sheen portrays a very simple person, a 24-year-old draftee rifleman from Detroit, who decides he simply won’t fight anymore and would rather take the prison time. Thinking the court martial will go better for him if he simply admits his guilt and offers no defense, Slovik submits to the court - which (as the movie portrays) has no choice but to sentence him to death. When the brass punches Eddie’s ticket - to the evident surprise of the officers who sentenced him to die - the film moves to its most effecting and haunting sequence.

As filmed by veteran TV director Lamont Johnson (who co-wrote the screenplay with author William Bradford Huie), the execution segment is shown in real-time, without any melodrama. From a cell to the snow-covered back garden of the French house, Sheen moves slowly and looks with friendly eyes to his guards; he even greets the firing squad of hand-picked sharpshooter GIs. Ned Beatty plays the priest who sees Pvt. Slovak through his last hours, torn between the evident injustice and the fulsome carrying out of his duty as a military chaplain. A radio plays Bing Crosby singing Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas just before the execution. Blindfolded, the prisoner begins to recite the Hail Mary, over and over as the squad lines up and takes aim. The shots interrupt the prayer. When he’s shot, Sheen slumps and moans on the ground before dying. Then his body is covered and removed.

The partial documentary style removes any forced emotion; so the “actual” feelings of the men attending to the killing are that more starkly portrayed. Their horror is that much more evident. The end of minor criminal Gilmore’s life became a major national story in 1977, when convicted of murder, he opted for the firing squad and refused appeals for his life. Only three months after his conviction in the cold-blooded murder of a Utah gas station attendant, he was taken out to a prison storage room, strapped to a chair, and shot.

Sheen didn’t play Slovik as smart, and Jones doesn’t play Gilmore as particularly noble; that puts the execution itself at center stage - its method (considered brutal back in the more genteel 70s) and those who vehemently opposed it. Gilmore was the first man to be executed after the U. S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, and in those days, a state’s ritual killing was news. The impending execution was national news for weeks, and the Saturday Night Live cast famously sang “Let’s Kill Gary Gilmore For Christmas” to the tune of Winter Wonderland.

The TV film was aired five years after Gilmore was shot and Jones won an Emmy for his portrayal; it was based on Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, which copped a Pulitzer. Unlike Slovik, who was simple and innocent, Gilmore was smart and guilty - not the first sociopath to stir the artist’s pen. He reportedly quoted Nietzsche to his brother at their final meeting: “time comes when a man should rise to meet the occasion.” Gilmore’s appointment with the Utah marksmen took on the noble quality of the monster in life facing death with dignity - we’ve seen this scene recently, I think, in some blurry cameraphone footage.

Shining a Light

During the long and fascinating investigation into the shameful, politically-motivated leak of a CIA officer's name to the press, one blog made its reputation - FireDogLake. Because FDL did two things incredibly well - collating all the important links and posts, and doing its own analysis of documents - it became Plame Central online and its reputation and readership grew rapidly.

As the case finally hits the courtroom, FDL is throwing all its resources at the story, assigning its team to cover everything from jury selection to pre-trial motions. I'll admit that I'm not as obsessed with the case since the confession of former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage - it doesn't seem Watergate-big anymore - but I am still very much interested in how the Plame affair puts the actions of this government into perspective. And I do believe the trial will shine a light into the inner workings of the Bush Administration, especially into the Vice President's office.

Sadly, the lead voice of FDL won't be there to cover the start of the trial she helped make into a national cause - Jane Hamsher faces surgery in the third go-around of her battle against breast cancer. I've tangled with Jane a bit, and with some of the FDL regulars, as readers here know. She's tough, hard-headed, and knows how to deliver a beating in the hardscrabble back alley of blogging. But I wish her the very best, and I'm looking forward to FDL's ground-breaking flood-the-zone coverage. C'mon, and shine that light.

Meet the Newcritics

You may have noticed a slight slackening here the last few days, the appearance of distraction, of a mind engaged elsewhere. All true.

Friends, meet the newcritics. Newcritics.com is a fledgling effort that promises "web-based criticism in literature, music, television, film, technology, theater and art from a diverse group of bloggers."

That promise is my promise; I cobbled the site together over the past few weeks and invited a few bloggers to post. Last week, the first posts hit the clickstream.

Newcritics is an experiment for me - it came about after a gathering of political bloggers a couple of months back. What I expected to be a hard-core politicalfest actually became and meandering and fascinating discussion of culture, both high and low. I loved it, and thought about extending the conversation; newcritics is my answer to that problem.

I hope you read the posts there, subscribe to the feeds, link to them, and comment often. So far, there have been some terrific articles - here's a few:

Band of Brothers: The Game by Tony Alva, on role-playing games and soldiers
Steve Bowbrick's Crime for Kids, a review of Carl Hiaasen's latest
Talking on the WhyPhone by Brendan Tween, a reaction to Apple's media domination
Blue Girl's Promises Kept. Chapter One on Calvin Trillin's memoir of love
Sidewalks of New York, by Lance Mannion, which discusses film characters who are controlled by their appetites and emotions

Then there's what I hope will be the first of many "list" postings - argument-provoking Top 10 affairs that spur reaction. Jason Chervokas and I take a shot at the ten best American domestic sit-coms of all-time, those classic situations revolving around a home and a family. Sure, we've all got The Honeymooners, I Love Lucy, and All in the Family...but what's on your list? That's the point! Read Blondie's Children: the Best Domestic Sitcoms and let us know.

Consider what's up the first week, and my reaction is this: that's a magazine I'd read. Lots of voices, shared interests, conversation. We got one comment this week from Roxtar that really hit home, and made it feel (thus far) worthwhile:

A round-table, free-wheeling discussion of popular culture, on the other hand, can spin off in an infinite number of directions. It can take you from poetry to music to television, to literature, to film, to sociology and psychology, to marketing and persuasion, to technology and its role in the future…. I suspect your dinner last November touched on most, if not all, of those areas, and more besides.

Popular culture is not a trifle, or an idle diversion. It is like water to a fish; it surrounds us and, to a large degree, it defines us. But unlike our finny friends, we can actively participate in evaluating and determining the quality of our environment. Which I suppose is what you have in mind.

Exactly. I'm not giving up blogging here by any means. This will still be my personal space, and I'll probably cross-post most media/culture pieces. I'll only blog politics here. No politics on newcritics - it's a place for discussing what unites us, not what divides us. C'mon and set a spell.

Scene and Heard

A special "wheels coming off" edition of this little occasional link-fest today, apropos of the vehicle of state screeching along down Pennsylvania Avenue on sparking rims.

• Bob Geiger (he of the in-depth Senate coverage) reports on something I must've missed in the newspapers: Senator Jim Webb's proposal for a new GI Bill of sorts for returning war veterans. Says Geiger: "Webb did more for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan on his first day in the Senate than the man he ousted, George Felix Allen, did in the entire previous Congress." And be sure to read Bob's personal postscript about his own post-service education.
• Lance Mannion is en fuego with his takedown of warmonger and faux liberale Joe "Anonymous" Klein today: "I know he's just another Cliff Clavin of the Washington Punditocracy, fancying himself an expert on any and every subject that comes up, endlessly spouting off, happy to substitute opinion and conjecture for actual knowledge and asserting unreliable and even nonexistent experts to back him up, and retreating into bluster, paranoia, and hysteria when anyone challenges him on the facts, and I ought to ignore him." Smack.
• Says Chervokas: "Before the November elections Dick Cheney told ABC News that no matter what the outcome of the vote it would be full speed ahead in Iraq.Turns out he wasn't kidding." And he believes Congress will shut him down. Hope so.
• Steve Gilliard continues to believe - as he has for more than a year now - that Bush cannot survive in office; that his presidency must fall. He hasn't said it in a while - perhaps he's as weary as I became - but he's back on it today: "...in the end, I think America has had enough. Sending the Guard back is an insane political mistake. Two tours for part-time solders? ... I think Bush will lose the country, and eventually leave in disgrace because his plan will fail. It will fail badly and bloodily and he will be exposed as the weak little man he is and we will not have long to wait."
• Jim Wolcott quotes Steve and compares Bush with Richard Nixon, the last (and only) man drummed out of office by his own party. But he finds a key difference: "Bush will not enjoy a lion-in-winter third act. For better or worse, Nixon was his own man, a stark lesson in the possibilities and limits of self-reliance. Bush, who has always relied upon others to bail him out of jams, is not his own man. If he were, he wouldn't let Cheney secretly run the show."
• And while Cheney and Rice plot war on Iran and Syria, the Republicans peal off. The voluble Chris Bowers has the language from 12 - count 'em, 12 - members of the minority in the Senate who have had enough.