a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Tuesday, September 30, 2003 Blazing DuffersI don't know who Timothy Peters is, but I'm glad he's got a dictionary. Someone should tell him that Bildungsroman is a perfectly solid German word, not a "German-French hybrid" -- at least no more than "coming-of-age novel" is an "English-French hybrid."Critics can be so thick sometimes. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 9:22 PM Thursday, September 25, 2003 Mike for GovernorLast night's amusing debate convinced me to declare myself a write-in candidate for California governor. So, please: This October 7, vote no on the recall, write in "Michael Scott Moore" in case things fall through, then come to my reading at Borders. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 9:29 PMFCC and Michael PowellMarc at Misanthropicity spanks Michael Powell for his dull-minded response to all the criticism. "There was a concerted grass-roots effort to attack the commission from the outside in," Powell actually said. Marc answers, "Perhaps the headline should have read, 'Media giants cruelly attacked by American people.'" The colorful variety of normally bickering groups that united to criticize Powell was a grass-roots effort in the best sense, and at Radio Free Mike we think outside-in attacks on a lousy government commission are a lot better than "inside-out" attacks by the commission on the public.Powell defended himself by saying that large media networks need to dominate more local markets, so they can go on paying multimillion-dollar salaries to the likes of Jennifer Aniston. You pay, after all, for quality. Georgists would say that's a perfect example of how big monopolies redistribute wealth, leading to gross salaries for TV actors and big-name athletes. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 7:00 PM Wednesday, September 24, 2003 Mike at Litquake ... last weekend, with a display copy of the book propped on his water bottle. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:47 PM Primate poesyLoudmouths and Dilettantes has a lemur poem. (Link may expire.) And the editrix of Waterbones points out, privately, that she has a lemur tattoo. (No photo, sorry.) And I'm not sure, but it sounds like Waterbones is suggesting that Chinese officials misunderstood the capybara and put one in the Dog Zoo. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 5:08 AMMonday, September 22, 2003 Dean vs. ClarkSteve over at Golgonooza is crying out for some kind of answer, so here it is, in broad strokes of paint:Last month I mentioned Howard Dean's mysterious talent for seeming one thing, and being another, which is indispensible in politics. Josh Marshall calls him on it. Marshall is right that Clark has been more consistent and clear-minded about the war, and the fact that he's the one guy Karl Rove fears is enough to make me like him. To me Clark and Dean are both in the ballpark; both also have deep flaws. Taking sides between them is more than I can handle right now. However: My all-time favorite animal is the lemur. UPDATE: In particular the aye-aye, a nocturnal lemur, which was not on display at the zoo today. (Summuvabitch!) posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:03 AM Friday, September 19, 2003 California readingsI just posted a full schedule of fall book signings and readings from Too Much of Nothing at the bottom of the usual page. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:08 PMIraqis cheering American deathsThis whole story strikes me as pretty bad news, especially coming from the Washington Times. I know the demonstration happened near Tikrit, I know they're Saddam supporters; but the last thing we need is more instances of a nervous army murdering, and alienating, Iraqi citizens. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:06 PMGiant. Extinct. Guinea Pig.My favorite rodent is the capybara, but "Goya" puts it to shame. Stephen Jay Gould once quoted some colleague of his saying that the reason boys liked dinosaurs could be captured in three words: "Giant. Extinct. Lizards." (Quoting from memory.) If paleontologists find enough of these rodent fossils, will girls get into big prehistoric fuzzy things with just as much glee? Or is that a sexist question? posted by Michael Scott Moore | 10:56 PMTuesday, September 16, 2003 Radio Free Mike!People in or near Connecticut may be able to catch an interview with me Tuesday the 16th about Too Much of Nothing, on "Poets of the Tabloid Murder," a radio show on noir novels out of Storrs, CT -- on WHUS 91.7 FM at 5pm eastern time.It's my first time on an actual radio. And I had no idea I'd written a noir novel. UPDATE: I'll post mp3 excerpts from the interview a bit later. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 7:31 AM Monday, September 15, 2003 Clown Civilization 2I just noticed that the web version of Agnes de Mille's "clown civilization" essay on Henry George (her grandfather) lacks the promised paragraph on Proposition 13. It was cut. So here -- from a print version -- is the passage I want everyone to read, the stuff that still resonates during recall season. It's long, I know. Read it anyway:"We have reached the deplorable circumstance where in large measure a very powerful few are in possession of the earth's resources, the land and its riches and all the other privileges that yield a return. These monopolistic positions are kept by a handful of men who are maintained virtually without taxation; they are immune to the demands made on others. The very poor, who have nothing, are the object of compulsory charity. And the rest -- the workers, the middle-class, the backbone of the country -- are made to support the lot by their labor [meaning income tax, which is a tax on labor or profit. De Mille and her grandfather wanted a single, simple tax on land, not the same thing as a property tax.] "We are taxed at every point of our lives, on everything we earn, on everything we save, on much that we inherit, on much that we buy at every stage of the manufacture and on the final purchase. The taxes are punishing, crippling, demoralizing. Also they are, to a great extent, unnecessary. "It was rage at unjust and proliferating taxation that drove the people of California to revolt. In June, 1978, they voted overwhelmingly to adopt Proposition 13, an amendment to the state constitution which would greatly diminish all taxes on real property -- on land, houses, gardens, farms, buildings. This was neither a thoughtful nor a searching reform since the improvements and the site and all natural resources were lumped together, and income and sales tax rates were not separated. Under the so-called reform, the great landholdings remained intact and therefore the great profiteering untouched. "The voters believed that there was too much wastage in government, too much public welfare, and that they could do very well with a great deal less of both. The results so far have not been what was intended. State funds will undoubtedly be commandeered to bail out local treasuries and probably the state funding of schools, universities, libraries, symphony orchestras, museums and archives will be drastically reduced while the bureaucracy and welfare remain relatively untouched. [Written in 1979. But de Mille is still right. - msm] ... "All this is galling and destructive, but it is still, in a measure, superficial. The great sinister fact, the one that we must live with, is that we are yielding up sovereignty. The nation is no longer comprised of the thirteen original states, nor of the thirty-seven younger sister states, but of the real powers: the cartels, the corporations. Owning the bulk of our productive resources [including land, which a land tax was meant to remedy -- msm], they are the issue of that concentration of ownership that George saw evolving, and warned against. ... "I do not wish to be misunderstood as falling into the trap of the socialists and communists who condemn all privately owned business, all factories, all machinery and organizations for producing wealth. There is nothing wrong with private corporations owning the means of producing wealth -- with, as the socialists would say, Capitalism. All Georgists believe in private enterprise, and in its virtues and incentives to produce at maximum efficiency. It is the insidious linking together of special privilege -- the unjust outright private ownership of natural or public resources, monopolies, franchises -- that produce unfair domination and autocracy. The means of producing wealth differ at the root: some is thieved from the people and some is honestly earned. George differentiated; Marx did not. The consequences of our failure to discern lie at the heart of the trouble. "This clown civilization is ours. We have achieved it out of the hopeful agrarian society that flourished in the eighteenth century, out of a new government we had every right to believe was founded on reasonableness, wisdom, and justice. We were not compelled to come to this. We knew neither king nor conqueror. We chose this of our own free will, in our own free democracy, with all the means to legislate intelligently readily at hand. We chose this because we insisted on following the worn-out European grooves, because it suited a few people to have us do so. They counted on our mental indolence and we freely and obediently conformed. We chose not to think. "Our government, alas, was predicated for its effectiveness in expansion on free land. Now there is no more free land, and the flaw in the great plan grows evident. We have reached the boundaries and we turn back on ourselves and devour. "Henry George was a lucid voice, direct and bold, that pointed out basic truths, that cut through the confusion which developed like rot. Each age has known such diseases and each age has gone down for lack of understanding. It is not valid to say that our times are more complex. The problems are, on the whole, the same. The fact that we now have electricity and computers does not in any way controvert the fact that we can succumb to the injustices that toppled Rome. "To avert such a calamity, to eliminate involuntary poverty and unemployment, and to enable each individual to attain his maximum potential, George wrote his extraordinary treatise a hundred years ago. His ideas stand: He who makes should have; he who saves should enjoy; what the community produces belongs to the community for communal uses; and God's earth, all of it, is the right of the people who inhabit the earth. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, 'The earth belongs in usufruct to the living.' "This is simple and this is unanswerable. The ramifications may not be simple but they do not alter the fundamental logic." Agnes George de Mille was a choreographer, not some kind of social critic. But as you can see she had a trenchant mind. For more on her grandfather, click here. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:31 PM Saturday, September 13, 2003 Clown CivilizationMy friend Steve Cahn wins the prize for guessing the source of this phrase (see "Extra Credit Points," below). He already has a copy of the novel. I'll put a shiny green star by his name instead.Agnes George de Mille coined the phrase "this clown civilization is ours" in a powerful essay on her grandfather, the economist Henry George. She wrote the piece in 1979, just after Prop. 13 passed. Prop. 13 has held down property taxes in California (a good thing, for some people) and all but gutted the schools (a bad thing for everyone). For clarity on the tax and budget issues at the heart of our clown-show recall I'd ask everyone to read the essay; she even mentions Prop. 13. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:59 PM Friday, September 12, 2003 Oh Come, Angel BandJohnny Cash is dead. I have his boxed set (which is divided into three elemental cagetories -- Murder, Love, and God), and his late wife tells this interesting little story in the liner notes:"He was stooped down on one knee and grasping a guitar trying to tune it to somewhere near the correct pitch to make a correct chord ring -- 'Everybody knows where you go when the sun goes down, Ah-ummmm -- Ah-ummmmm,' and he'd strike the guitar again. Plink; plunk; 'A-ummm...' What are you trying to do, I asked. 'I'm trying to tune this blame guitar, honey, and I'm trying to sing like Johnny cash.' Who is Johnny Cash, I asked Elvis Presley, and I grabbed the guitar away from him." posted by Michael Scott Moore | 10:25 PM Progress, after two years?Does it strike anyone as strange that the latest video of bin Laden and al Zawahiri came with a separate audio track, in a voice making up-to-date references that is, however, probably not bin Laden's? The peaceful wandering figure on green hillsides looks more than ever like a ghost.UPDATE: Christopher Hitchens agrees. UPDATE 2: One voice is al Zawahiri's, the other is bin Laden's, according to the New York Times. However: "The voice said to be Mr. bin Laden's refers to the 9/11 hijackers, but makes no reference to more recent events." posted by Michael Scott Moore | 1:57 AM Extra credit points... or a free copy of the novel to anyone who can identify the allusion in yesterday's blog entry (see below): "...this clown civilization is ours." posted by Michael Scott Moore | 1:55 AMWednesday, September 10, 2003 Howard Stern is a journalist... Schwarzenegger may be governor of California, the FCC is a bitter joke, and this clown civilization is ours. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 9:32 PMThe War Against AmericaAndrew Sullivan is touting this piece in the Washington Post as fine evidence that the flypaper strategy is working: We invaded Iraq to create a battlefield against terrorists on their own turf, to distract them from bringing their war against America over to our shores. Josh Marshall is skeptical. "The [Iraq] war itself," he writes, "-- the supposed remedy for the tie between Iraq and al Qaida -- ended up making the Iraq/al Qaida mumbo-jumbo into a reality." That's obviously a lot closer to the truth. And the CIA predicted it: "Last fall, in a classified assessment of Iraq," writes Steven Chapman, to take just one report of a "secret" memo that's now rather well picked-over, "the CIA said the only thing that might induce Saddam Hussein to give weapons to terrorists was an American invasion."Iraq, in other words, is Arabic for Afghanistan.* Al Qaeda has teamed up with Ba'athists because of the war, and parts of the Iraqi countryside (like Afghanistan in the 1980s) will serve as a new training ground for young bin Ladens to organize against an evil superpower. Will that distract Al Qaeda, really? Will it keep terrorists from attacking us here? Or is it just a blowhard's excuse for some heavy miscalculation? I want to believe Sullivan's anxious cheerleading, I really do. But when he writes, "The U.S. did everything to win the support of as many countries as we could for a war which many, frankly, do not have the stomach to fight," he might as well excuse himself from the planet. The U.S. did everything to win U.N. support except tell the truth. Europe looked at our evidence -- on weapons of mass destruction and Baghdad's links to Al Qaeda -- and said, "Is this all you have?" And now we see the result. *Republican bumper sticker from the 1980s: "Nicaragua is Spanish for Afghanistan." posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:10 AM Tuesday, September 09, 2003 Too Much of NothingPublisher's Weekly calls it "a satisfying bildungsroman, combining a wry but heartfelt take on teen passions with a serious ethical concern for the fine line between freedom and nihilism." More on review coverage is here and here.posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:40 PM Monday, September 08, 2003 Paddling MachineIn advance of big-surf season I just bought a used Al Merrick gun, 8'0", from an Australian down the street, who told me, "Mate, this boahd's a peddlin' machine." He's right. I just took it out in some lame Ocean Beach wind chop, and managed to have a good time.The board won't fit in the closet, so it has to stand in my office, where in this photo Bruno the cat sits helpfully nearby, for scale. 
posted by Michael Scott Moore |
12:25 AM
Saturday, September 06, 2003 The Reluctant BloggerMy friend Marc Levy finally has a site, but as you'll see he's being dragged reluctantly, skeptically into the blogosphere. Back in the day Marc and I co-founded a magazine called Cruel World.posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:27 PM Friday, September 05, 2003 Man Dies After Magpie Attack... in Australia. Really. Does this kind of thing happen anywhere else? posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:16 PM
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 Too Much of Nothing, a novel  Politics and Prose  about our editor 
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