Words in a Time of War
        Taking the Measure of the First Rhetoric-Major President
        By Mark Danner

        [Note: This commencement address was given to graduates of the Department of Rhetoric at Zellerbach Hall, University of California, Berkeley, on May 10, 2007]

        When my assistant greeted me, a number of weeks ago, with the news that I had been invited to deliver the commencement address to the Department of Rhetoric, I thought it was a bad joke. There is a sense, I'm afraid, that being invited to deliver The Speech to students of Rhetoric is akin to being asked out for a romantic evening by a porn star: Whatever prospect you might have of pleasure is inevitably dampened by performance anxiety -- the suspicion that your efforts, however enthusiastic, will inevitably be judged according to stern professional standards. A daunting prospect.

        The only course, in both cases, is surely to plunge boldly ahead. And that means, first of all, saluting the family members gathered here, and in particular you, the parents.

        Dear parents, I welcome you today to your moment of triumph. For if a higher education is about acquiring the skills and knowledge that allow one to comprehend and thereby get on in the world -- and I use "get on in the world" in the very broadest sense -- well then, oh esteemed parents, it is your children, not those boringly practical business majors and pre-meds your sanctimonious friends have sired, who have chosen with unerring grace and wisdom the course of study that will best guide them in this very strange polity of ours. For our age, ladies and gentlemen, is truly the Age of Rhetoric.

        Now I turn to you, my proper audience, the graduating students of the Department of Rhetoric of 2007, and I salute you most heartily. In making the choice you have, you confirmed that you understand something intrinsic, something indeed.... intimate about this age we live in. Perhaps that should not surprise us. After all, you have spent your entire undergraduate years during time of war -- and what a very strange wartime it has been.

        When most of you arrived on this campus, in September 2003, the rhetorical construction known as the War on Terror was already two years old and that very real war to which it gave painful birth, the war in Iraq, was just hitting its half-year mark. Indeed, the Iraq War had already ended once, in that great victory scene on the USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast of San Diego, where the President, clad jauntily in a flight suit, had swaggered across the flight deck and, beneath a banner famously marked "Mission Accomplished," had declared: "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."

        Of the great body of rich material encompassed by my theme today -- "Words in a Time of War" -- surely those words of George W. Bush must stand as among the era's most famous, and most rhetorically unstable. For whatever they may have meant when the President uttered them on that sunny afternoon of May 1, 2003, they mean something quite different today, almost exactly four years later. The President has lost control of those words, as of so much else.

        At first glance, the grand spectacle of May 1, 2003 fits handily into the history of the pageantries of power. Indeed, with its banners and ranks of cheering, uniformed extras gathered on the stage of that vast aircraft carrier -- a stage, by the way, that had to be turned in a complicated maneuver so that the skyline of San Diego, a few miles off, would not be glimpsed by the television audience -- the event and its staging would have been quite familiar to, and no doubt envied by, the late Leni Riefenstahl (who, as filmmaker to the Nazis, had no giant aircraft carriers to play with). Though vast and impressive, the May 1 extravaganza was a propaganda event of a traditional sort, intended to bind the country together in a second precise image of victory -- the first being the pulling down of Saddam's statue in Baghdad, also staged -- an image that would fit neatly into campaign ads for the 2004 election. The President was the star, the sailors and airmen and their enormous dreadnought props in his extravaganza.

        However ambitiously conceived, these were all very traditional techniques, familiar to any fan of Riefenstahl's famous film spectacular of the 1934 Nuremberg rally, Triumph of the Will. As trained rhetoricians, however, you may well have noticed something different here, a slightly familiar flavor just beneath the surface. If ever there was a need for a "disciplined grasp" of the "symbolic and institutional dimensions of discourse" -- as your Rhetoric Department's website puts it -- surely it is now. For we have today an administration that not only is radical -- unprecedentedly so -- in its attitudes toward rhetoric and reality, toward words and things, but is willing, to our great benefit, to state this attitude clearly.

        I give you my favorite quotation from the Bush administration, put forward by the proverbial "unnamed Administration official" and published in the New York Times Magazine by the fine journalist Ron Suskind in October 2004. Here, in Suskind's recounting, is what that "unnamed Administration official" told him:

                "The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors.... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

        I must admit to you that I love that quotation; indeed, with your permission, I would like hereby to nominate it for inscription over the door of the Rhetoric Department, akin to Dante's welcome above the gates of Hell, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."

        Both admonitions have an admirable bluntness. These words from "Bush's Brain" -- for the unnamed official speaking to Suskind seems to have been none other than the selfsame architect of the aircraft-carrier moment, Karl Rove, who bears that pungent nickname -- these words sketch out with breathtaking frankness a radical view in which power frankly determines reality, and rhetoric, the science of flounces and folderols, follows meekly and subserviently in its train. Those in the "reality-based community" -- those such as we -- are figures a mite pathetic, for we have failed to realize the singular new principle of the new age: Power has made reality its bitch.

        Given such sweeping claims for power, it is hard to expect much respect for truth; or perhaps it should be "truth" -- in quotation marks -- for, when you can alter reality at will, why pay much attention to the idea of fidelity in describing it? What faith, after all, is owed to the bitch that is wholly in your power, a creature of your own creation?

        Of course I should not say "those such as we" here, for you, dear graduates of the Rhetoric Department of 2007, you are somewhere else altogether. This is, after all, old hat to you; the line of thinking you imbibe with your daily study, for it is present in striking fashion in Foucault and many other intellectual titans of these last decades -- though even they might have been nonplussed to find it so crisply expressed by a finely tailored man sitting in the White House. Though we in the "reality-based community" may just now be discovering it, you have known for years the presiding truth of our age, which is that the object has become subject and we have a fanatical follower of Foucault in the Oval Office. Graduates, let me say it plainly and incontrovertibly: George W. Bush is the first Rhetoric-Major President.

        The Dirtied Face of Power

        I overstate perhaps, but only for a bit of -- I hope -- permitted rhetorical pleasure. Let us gaze a moment at the signposts of the history of the present age. In January 2001, the Rhetoric Major President came to power after a savage and unprecedented electoral battle that was decided not by the ballots of American voters -- for of these he had 540,000 fewer than his Democrat rival -- but by the votes of Supreme Court Justices, where Republicans prevailed 5 to 4, making George W. Bush the first president in more than a century to come to the White House with fewer votes than those of his opponent.

        In this singular condition, and with a Senate precisely divided between parties, President Bush proceeded to behave as if he had won an overwhelming electoral victory, demanding tax cuts greater and more regressive than those he had outlined in the campaign. And despite what would seem to have been debilitating political weakness, the President shortly achieved this first success in "creating his own reality." To act as if he had overwhelming political power would mean he had overwhelming political power.

        This, however, was only the overture of the vast symphonic work to come, a work heralded by the huge, clanging, echoing cacophony of 9/11. We are so embedded in its age that it is easy to forget the stark, overwhelming shock of it: Nineteen young men with box cutters seized enormous transcontinental airliners and brought those towers down. In an age in which we have become accustomed to two, three, four, five suicide attacks in a single day -- often these multiple attacks from Baghdad don't even make the front pages of our papers -- it is easy to forget the blunt, scathing shock of it, the impossible image of the second airliner disappearing into the great office tower, almost weirdly absorbed by it, and emerging, transformed into a great yellow and red blossom of flame, on the other side; and then, half an hour later, the astonishing flowering collapse of the hundred-story structure, transforming itself, in a dozen seconds, from mighty tower to great plume of heaven-reaching white smoke.

        The image remains, will always remain, with us; for truly the weapon that day was not box cutters in the hands of nineteen young men, nor airliners at their command. The weapon that day was the television set. It was the television set that made the image possible, and inextinguishable. If terror is first of all a way of talking -- the propaganda of the deed, indeed -- then that day the television was the indispensable conveyer of the conversation: the recruitment poster for fundamentalism, the only symbolic arena in which America's weakness and vulnerability could be dramatized on an adequate scale. Terror -- as Menachem Begin, the late Israeli prime minister and the successful terrorist who drove the British from Mandate Palestine, remarked in his memoirs -- terror is about destroying the prestige of the imperial regime; terror is about "dirtying the face of power."

        President Bush and his lieutenants surely realized this and it is in that knowledge, I believe, that we can find the beginning of the answer to one of the more intriguing puzzles of these last few years: What exactly lay at the root of the almost fanatical determination of administration officials to attack and occupy Iraq? It was, obviously, the classic "over-determined" decision, a tangle of fear, in the form of those infamous weapons of mass destruction; of imperial ambition, in the form of the neoconservative project to "remake the Middle East"; and of realpolitik, in the form of the "vital interest" of securing the industrial world's oil supplies.

        In the beginning, though, was the felt need on the part of our nation's leaders, men and women so worshipful of the idea of power and its ability to remake reality itself, to restore the nation's prestige, to wipe clean that dirtied face. Henry Kissinger, a confidant of the President, when asked by Bush's speechwriter why he had supported the Iraq War, responded: "Because Afghanistan was not enough." The radical Islamists, he said, want to humiliate us. "And we need to humiliate them." In other words, the presiding image of The War on Terror -- the burning towers collapsing on the television screen -- had to be supplanted by another, the image of American tanks rumbling proudly through a vanquished Arab capital. It is no accident that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, at the first "war cabinet" meeting at Camp David the Saturday after the 9/11 attacks, fretted over the "lack of targets" in Afghanistan and wondered whether we "shouldn't do Iraq first." He wanted to see those advancing tanks marching across our television screens, and soon.

        In the end, of course, the enemy preferred not to fight with tanks, though they were perfectly happy to have us do so, the better to destroy these multi-million dollar anachronisms with so-called IEDs, improvised explosive devices, worth a few hundred bucks apiece. This is called asymmetrical warfare and one should note here with some astonishment how successful it has been these last half dozen years. In the post-Cold War world, after all, as one neo-conservative theorist explained shortly after 9/11, the United States was enjoying a rare "uni-polar moment." It deployed the greatest military and economic power the world has ever seen. It spent more on its weapons, its Army, Navy, and Air Force, than the rest of the world combined.

        It was the assumption of this so-called preponderance that lay behind the philosophy of power enunciated by Bush's Brain and that led to an attitude toward international law and alliances that is, in my view, quite unprecedented in American history. That radical attitude is brilliantly encapsulated in a single sentence drawn from the National Security Strategy of the United States of 2003: "Our strength as a nation-state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes and terrorism." Let me repeat that little troika of "weapons of the weak": international fora (meaning the United Nations and like institutions), judicial processes (meaning courts, domestic and international), and.... terrorism. This strange gathering, put forward by the government of the United States, stems from the idea that power is, in fact, everything. In such a world, courts -- indeed, law itself -- can only limit the power of the most powerful state. Wielding preponderant power, what need has it for law? The latter must be, by definition, a weapon of the weak. The most powerful state, after all, makes reality.

        Asymmetric Warfare and Dumb Luck.

        Now, here's an astonishing fact: Fewer than half a dozen years into this "uni-polar moment," the greatest military power in the history of the world stands on the brink of defeat in Iraq. Its vastly expensive and all-powerful military has been humbled by a congeries of secret organizations fighting mainly by means of suicide vests, car bombs and improvised explosive devices -- all of them cheap, simple, and effective, indeed so effective that these techniques now comprise a kind of ready-made insurgency kit freely available on the Internet and spreading in popularity around the world, most obviously to Afghanistan, that land of few targets.

        As I stand here, one of our two major political parties advocates the withdrawal -- gradual, or otherwise -- of American combat forces from Iraq and many in the other party are feeling the increasing urge to go along. As for the Bush administration's broader War on Terror, as the State Department detailed recently in its annual report on the subject, the number of terrorist attacks worldwide has never been higher, nor more effective. True, al-Qaeda has not attacked again within the United States. They do not need to. They are alive and flourishing. Indeed, it might even be said that they are winning. For their goal, despite the rhetoric of the Bush administration, was not simply to kill Americans but, by challenging the United States in this spectacular fashion, to recruit great numbers to their cause and to move their insurgency into the heart of the Middle East. And all these things they have done.

        How could such a thing have happened? In their choice of enemy, one might say that the terrorists of al-Qaeda had a great deal of dumb luck, for they attacked a country run by an administration that had a radical conception of the potency of power. At the heart of the principle of asymmetric warfare -- al-Qaeda's kind of warfare -- is the notion of using your opponents' power against him. How does a small group of insurgents without an army, or even heavy weapons, defeat the greatest conventional military force the world has ever known? How do you defeat such an army if you don't have an army? Well, you borrow your enemy's. And this is precisely what al-Qaeda did. Using the classic strategy of provocation, the group tried to tempt the superpower into its adopted homeland. The original strategy behind the 9/11 attacks -- apart from humbling the superpower and creating the greatest recruiting poster the world had ever seen -- was to lure the United States into a ground war in Afghanistan, where the one remaining superpower (like the Soviet Union before it) was to be trapped, stranded, and destroyed. It was to prepare for this war that Osama bin Laden arranged for the assassination, two days before 9/11 -- via bombs secreted in the video cameras of two terrorists posing as reporters -- of the Afghan Northern Alliance leader, Ahmed Shah Massood, who would have been the United States' most powerful ally.

        Well aware of the Soviets' Afghanistan debacle -- after all, the U.S. had supplied most of the weapons that defeated the Soviets there -- the Bush administration tried to avoid a quagmire by sending plenty of air support, lots of cash, and, most important, very few troops, relying instead on its Afghan allies. But if bin Laden was disappointed in this, he would soon have a far more valuable gift: the invasion of Iraq, a country that, unlike Afghanistan, was at the heart of the Middle East and central to Arab concerns, and, what's more, a nation that sat squarely on the critical Sunni-Shia divide, a potential ignition switch for al-Qaeda's great dream of a regional civil war. It is on that precipice that we find ourselves teetering today.

        Critical to this strange and unlikely history were the administration's peculiar ideas about power and its relation to reality -- and beneath that a familiar imperial attitude, if put forward in a strikingly crude and harsh form: "We're an empire now and when we act we create our own reality." Power, untrammeled by law or custom; power, unlimited by the so-called weapons of the weak, be they international institutions, courts, or terrorism -- power can remake reality. It is no accident that one of Karl Rove's heroes is President William McKinley, who stood at the apex of America's first imperial moment, and led the country into a glorious colonial adventure in the Philippines that was also meant to be the military equivalent of a stroll in the park and that, in the event, led to several years of bloody insurgency -- an insurgency, it bears noticing, that was only finally put down with the help of the extensive use of torture, most notably water-boarding, which has made its reappearance in the imperial battles of our own times.

        If we are an empire now, as Mr. Rove says, perhaps we should add, as he might not, that we are also a democracy, and therein, Rhetoric graduates of 2007, lies the rub. A democratic empire, as even the Athenians discovered, is an odd beast, like one of those mythological creatures born equally of lion and bird, or man and horse. If one longs to invade Iraq to restore the empire's prestige, one must convince the democracy's people of the necessity of such a step. Herein lies the pathos of the famous weapons-of-mass-destruction issue, which has become a kind of synecdoche for the entire lying mess of the past few years. The center stage of our public life is now dominated by a simple melodrama: Bush wanted to invade Iraq; Bush told Americans that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction; Iraq did not have such weapons. Therefore Bush lied, and the war was born of lies and deception.

        I hesitate to use that most overused of rhetorical terms -- irony -- to describe the emergence of this narrative at the center of our national life, but nonetheless, and with apologies: It is ironic. The fact is that officials of the Bush administration did believe there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, though they vastly exaggerated the evidence they had to prove it and, even more, the threat that those weapons might have posed, had they been there. In doing this, the officials believed themselves to be "framing a guilty man"; that is, like cops planting a bit of evidence in the murderer's car, they believed their underlying case was true; they just needed to dramatize it a bit to make it clear and convincing to the public. What matter, once the tanks were rumbling through Baghdad and the war was won? Weapons would be found, surely; and if only a few were found, who would care? By then, the United States military would have created a new reality.

        I have often had a daydream about this. I see a solitary Army private -- a cook perhaps, or a quartermaster -- breaking the padlock on some forgotten warehouse on an Iraqi military base, poking about and finding a few hundred, even a few thousand, old artillery shells, leaking chemicals. These shells -- forgotten, unusable -- might have dated from the time of the first Gulf War, when Iraq unquestionably possessed chemical munitions. (Indeed, in the 1980s, the United States had supplied targeting intelligence that helped the Iraqis use them effectively against the Iranians.) And though now they had been forgotten, leaking, unusable, still they would indeed be weapons of mass destruction -- to use the misleading and absurd construction that has headlined our age -- and my solitary cook or quartermaster would be a hero, for he would have, all unwittingly, "proved" the case.

        My daydream could easily have come to pass. Why not? It is nigh unto miraculous that the Iraqi regime, even with the help of the United Nations, managed so thoroughly to destroy or remove its once existing stockpile. And if my private had found those leaky old shells what would have been changed thereby? Yes, the administration could have pointed to them in triumph and trumpeted the proven character of Saddam's threat. So much less embarrassing than the "weapons of mass destruction program related activities" that the administration still doggedly asserts were "discovered." But, in fact, the underlying calculus would have remained: that, in the months leading up to the war, the administration relentlessly exaggerated the threat Saddam posed to the United States and relentlessly understated the risk the United States would run in invading and occupying Iraq. And it would have remained true and incontestable that -- as the quaintly fact-bound British Foreign Secretary put it eight months before the war, in a secret British cabinet meeting made famous by the so-called Downing Street Memo -- "the case [for attacking Iraq] was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."

        Which is to say, the weapons were a rhetorical prop and, satisfying as it has been to see the administration beaten about the head with that prop, we forget this underlying fact at our peril. The issue was never whether the weapons were there or not; indeed, had the weapons really been the issue, why could the administration not let the UN inspectors take the time to find them (as, of course, they never would have)? The administration needed, wanted, had to have, the Iraq war. The weapons were but a symbol, the necessary casus belli, what Hitchcock called the Maguffin -- that glowing mysterious object in the suitcase in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction: that is, a satisfyingly concrete object on which to fasten a rhetorical or narrative end, in this case a war to restore American prestige, project its power, remake the Middle East.

        The famous weapons were chosen to play this leading role for "bureaucratic reasons," as Paul Wolfowitz, then Deputy Secretary of Defense and until quite recently the unhappy president of the World Bank, once remarked to a lucky journalist. Had a handful of those weapons been found, the underlying truth would have remained: Saddam posed nowhere remotely near the threat to the United States that would have justified running the enormous metaphysical risk that a war of choice with Iraq posed. Of course, when you are focused on magical phrases like "preponderant power" and "the uni-polar moment," matters like numbers of troops at your disposal -- and the simple fact that the United States had too few to sustain a long-term occupation of a country the size of Iraq -- must seem mundane indeed.

        Imperial Words and the Reality-Based Universe

        I must apologize to you, Rhetoric Class of 2007. Ineluctably, uncontrollably, I find myself slipping back into the dull and unimaginative language of the reality-based community. It must grate a bit on your ears. After all, we live in a world in which the presumption that we were misled into war, that the Bush officials knew there were no weapons and touted them anyway, has supplanted the glowing, magical image of the weapons themselves. It is a presumption of great use to those regretful souls who once backed the war so fervently, not least a number of Democratic politicians we all could name, as well as many of my friends in the so-called liberal punditocracy who now need a suitable excuse for their own rashness, gullibility, and stupidity. For this, Bush's mendacity seems perfectly sized and ready to hand.

        There is, however, full enough of that mendacity, without artificially adding to the stockpile. Indeed, all around us we've been hearing these last many months the sound of ice breaking, as the accumulated frozen scandals of this administration slowly crack open to reveal their queasy secrets. And yet the problem, of course, is that they are not secrets at all: One of the most painful principles of our age is that scandals are doomed to be revealed -- and to remain stinking there before us, unexcised, unpunished, unfinished.

        If this Age of Rhetoric has a tragic symbol, then surely this is it: the frozen scandal, doomed to be revealed, and revealed, and revealed, in a never-ending torture familiar to the rock-bound Prometheus and his poor half-eaten liver. A full three years ago, the photographs from Abu Ghraib were broadcast by CBS on Sixty Minutes II and published by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker; nearly as far back I wrote a book entitled Torture and Truth, made up largely of Bush administration documents that detailed the decision to use "extreme interrogation techniques" or -- in the First President of Rhetoric's phrase -- "an alternative set of procedures" on prisoners in the War on Terror.

        He used this phrase last September in a White House speech kicking off the 2006 midterm election campaign, at a time when accusing the Democrats of evidencing a continued softness on terror -- and a lamentable unwillingness to show the needed harshness in "interrogating terrorists" -- seemed a winning electoral strategy. And indeed Democrats seemed fully to agree, for they warily elected not to filibuster the Military Commissions Act of last October, which arguably made many of these "alternative sets of procedures" explicitly legal. And Democrats did win both houses of Congress, a victory perhaps owed in part to their refusal to block Bush's interrogation law. Who can say? What we can say is that if torture today remains a "scandal," a "crisis," it is a crisis in that same peculiar way that crime or AIDS or global warming are crises: that is, they are all things we have learned to live with.

        Perhaps the commencement address to the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley is not the worst of places to call for a halt to this spinning merry-go-round. I know it will brand me forever a member of the reality-based community if I suggest that the one invaluable service the new Democratic Congress can provide all Americans is a clear accounting of how we came to find ourselves in this present time of war: an authorized version, as it were, which is, I know, the most pathetically retrograde of ideas.

        This would require that people like Mr. Wolfowitz, Mr. Rumsfeld, and many others be called before a select, bipartisan committee of Congress to tell us what, in their view, really happened. I squirm with embarrassment putting forward such a pathetically unsophisticated notion, but failing at least the minimally authorized version that Congress could provide, we will find ourselves forever striving -- by chasing down byways like the revelation of the identity of Valerie Plame, or the question of whether or not George Tenet bolstered his slam dunk exclamation in the Oval Office with an accompanying Michael Jordan-like leap -- to understand how precisely decisions were made between September 11, 2001 and the invasion of Iraq eighteen months later.

        Don't worry, though, Rhetoric graduates: such a proposal has about it the dusty feel of past decades; it is as "reality-based" as can be and we are unlikely to see it in our time. What we are likely to see is the ongoing collapse of our first Rhetoric-Major President, who, with fewer than one American in three now willing to say they approve of the job he is doing, is seeing his power ebb by the day. Tempting as it is, I will urge you not to draw too many overarching conclusions from his fate. He has had, after all, a very long run -- and I say this with the wonder that perhaps can only come from having covered both the 2000 and 2004 election campaigns, from Florida, and the Iraq War.

        I last visited that war in December, when Baghdad was cold and grey and I spent a good deal of time drawing black X's through the sources listed in my address book, finding them, one after another, either departed or dead. Baghdad seemed a sad and empty place, with even its customary traffic jams gone, and the periodic, resonating explosions attracting barely glances from those few Iraqis to be found on the streets.

        How, in these "words in a time of war," can I convey to you the reality of that place at this time? Let me read to you a bit of an account from a young Iraqi woman of how that war has touched her and her family, drawn from a newsroom blog. The words may be terrible and hard to bear, but -- for those of you who have made such a determined effort to learn to read and understand -- this is the most reality I could find to tell you. This is what lies behind the headlines and the news reports and it is as it is.

                "We were asked to send the next of kin to whom the remains of my nephew, killed on Monday in a horrific explosion downtown, can be handed over...

                "So we went, his mum, his other aunt and I...

                "When we got there, we were given his remains. And remains they were. From the waist down was all they could give us. 'We identified him by the cell phone in his pants' pocket. If you want the rest, you will just have to look for yourselves. We don't know what he looks like.'

                "...We were led away, and before long a foul stench clogged my nose and I retched. With no more warning we came to a clearing that was probably an inside garden at one time; all round it were patios and rooms with large-pane windows to catch the evening breeze Baghdad is renowned for. But now it had become a slaughterhouse, only instead of cattle, all around were human bodies. On this side; complete bodies; on that side halves; and everywhere body parts.

                "We were asked what we were looking for; 'upper half' replied my companion, for I was rendered speechless. 'Over there.' We looked for our boy's broken body between tens of other boys' remains; with our bare hands sifting them and turning them.

                "Millennia later we found him, took both parts home, and began the mourning ceremony."

        The foregoing were words from an Iraqi family, who find themselves as far as they can possibly be from the idea that, when they act, they create their own reality -- that they are, as Bush's Brain put it, "history's actors." The voices you heard come from history's objects and we must ponder who the subjects are, who exactly is acting upon them.

        The car bomb that so changed their lives was not set by Americans; indeed, young Americans even now are dying to prevent such things. I have known a few of these young Americans. Perhaps you have as well, perhaps they are in the circles of your family or of your friends. I remember one of them, a young lieutenant, a beautiful young man with a puffy, sleepy face, looking at me when I asked whether or not he was scared when he went out on patrol -- this was October 2003, as the insurgency was exploding. I remember him smiling a moment and then saying with evident pity for a reporter's lack of understanding. "This is war. We shoot, they shoot. We shoot, they shoot. Some days they shoot better than we do." He was patient in his answer, smiling sleepily in his young beauty, and I could tell he regarded me as from another world, a man who could never understand the world in which he lived. Three days after our interview, an explosion near Fallujah killed him.

        Contingency, accidents, the metaphysical ironies that seem to stitch history together like a lopsided quilt -- all these have no place in the imperial vision. A perception of one's self as "history's actor" leaves no place for them. But they exist and it is invariably others, closer to the ground, who see them, know them, and suffer their consequences.

        You have chosen a path that will let you look beyond the rhetoric that you have studied and into the heart of those consequences. Of all people you have chosen to learn how to see the gaps and the loose stitches and the remnant threads. Ours is a grim age, this Age of Rhetoric, still infused with the remnant perfume of imperial dreams. You have made your study in a propitious time, oh graduates, and that bold choice may well bring you pain, for you have devoted yourselves to seeing what it is that stands before you. If clear sight were not so painful, many more would elect to have it. Today, you do not conclude but begin: today you commence. My blessings upon you, and my gratitude to you for training yourself to see. Reality, it seems, has caught up with you.

        Mark Danner, who has written about foreign affairs and politics for two decades, is the author of The Secret Way to War; Torture and Truth; and The Massacre at El Mozote, among other books. He is Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard College. His writing on Iraq and other subjects appear regularly in The New York Review of Books. His work is archived at MarkDanner.com.

Copyright 2007 Mark Danner

I guess i'm on some sort of deer kick.

Buck Breaks Into Okla. School, Flunks Math

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 22, 2005

Filed at 7:11 p.m. ET

YUKON, Okla. (AP) -- Officials at Yukon High School say a 100 to 150 pound deer broke into the school and caused extensive damage to computer equipment.

The buck apparently jumped through a glass window into a math classroom at the 9th and 10th grade building and spent the weekend in the room.

Maintenance director Rick Roberts says a veterinarian from El Reno tranquilized the animal and took it back to his office for treatment. He says the deer will be released on a ranch in Canadian County.

Man Kills Buck With Bare Hands in Bedroom
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 5:45 p.m. ET

BENTONVILLE, Ark. (AP) -- It looked like a crime scene, but no charges will be filed after Wayne Goldsberry killed a buck with his bare hands in his daughter's bedroom. The engagement lasted an exhausting 40 minutes, but Goldsberry finally subdued the five-point whitetail deer that crashed through a bedroom window at his daughter's home Friday.

When it was over, blood splattered the walls and the deer lay on the bedroom floor, its neck broken.

Goldsberry was at his daughter's home when he heard glass breaking. He went back to check on the noise and found the deer.

''I was standing about like this peeking around the corner when the deer came out of the bedroom,'' said Goldsberry, demonstrating while peering around his kitchen wall. The deer ran down the hall and into the master bedroom -- ''jumping back and forth across the bed.''

''I could tell he was really tearing up the place back there,'' Goldsberry said.

Goldsberry entered the bedroom to confront the deer and, after a brief struggle, emerged to tell his wife to call police. After returning to the bedroom, the fight continued. Goldsberry finally was able to grip the animal and twist its neck, killing it.

''He was trying to get up a corner wall and I just came in behind him and grabbed him by the horns and just started pushing down,'' said Goldsberry.

Goldsberry, sore from the struggle, dragged the dead animal out of the house.

Benton County Sheriff Keith Ferguson said that when he arrived he found the deer dead in the front yard. Goldsberry intended to have the deer processed for its meat.

On Monday in Pine Bluff, the principal of Coleman Elementary School rid his building of a deer by opening a door. Students were preparing for dismissal Monday when a deer crashed through a window and bounded through a hallway.

The buck floundered on the school's slick floor for about three minutes exiting via a door along the side of a hallway. Principal Bill Tietz said the deer was slightly injured from the glass and lost an antler. Tietz says the animal leapt a six-foot fence after leaving the school.

from ScienceNOW

Cite Your Reviewers

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS--If you want to get a manuscript accepted, cite your potential reviewers. That's a common piece of advice professors pass down to their students, but is it more than just wishful thinking? Maybe not, according to a new study that indicates that reviewers referenced multiple times in a manuscript are less likely to recommend its rejection.
The unusual study was inspired by a journal editor's concern that his reviewers might be influenced by citations to their own work. "I myself get a bit unhappy when our contributions aren't cited," says Matthias Egger, an epidemiologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland and an associate editor of the International Journal of Epidemiology (IJE). "As an editor, I wondered if there might be something to this."

So Egger and colleagues examined 2023 comments submitted by peer reviewers to IJE over the past 3 years. For each report, the reviewer had to make one of four decisions regarding the fate of the manuscript: accept as is, accept with minor revisions, accept with major revisions, or reject. While the researchers didn't notice any clear trends for the first three categories, they did observe that reviewers cited multiple times were 30% less likely to recommend rejecting a manuscript than those who were not cited. One reason may be that reviewers are flattered by citations, says Eggers, who presented the findings here last week at the Fifth International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication. In addition, higher quality manuscripts tend to include more references, he says, and these papers are more likely to pass peer review. And, he adds, older scientists are often cited more because they've been around longer, and they tend to be less strict in their reviews.

The results are "surprising," says R. Brian Haynes, a clinical epidemiologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. "Perhaps this indicates ego enters into the process." But David Nordstrom, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis cautions that the findings may not be generalizable to other publications. Regardless, he tells his students to cite the work of those likely to review their papers. "We do this to avoid a failure to reference important and relevant work," he says. "It's not about kissing up."

--DAVID GRIMM

...who choreographs interpretative jazz dances about how genetically modified food will destroy humanity"

The MacArthur Geniuses
How to become one of them.
By David Plotz
Posted Friday, July 7, 2000, at 6:30 PM PT

When Peter Hayes learned that he had won a $500,000 MacArthur genius grant last month, he was stunned: It's "like being hit by a Mack truck. It's a little disorienting," he told the San Francisco Chronicle. Hayes shouldn't have been too disoriented. It would have been surprising if he hadn't collected a MacArthur. He helps North Korea develop windmills as an alternative to nuclear power. He takes underprivileged kids sailing in San Francisco Bay during his free time. And he lives in Berkeley, Calif., where you can't buy a latte without meeting a MacArthur-stamped brainiac.

Since 1981, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has awarded 588 "fellowships" worth nearly $200 million to Americans "who show exceptional merit and promise for continued and enhanced creative work." (The foundation detests the word "genius" because it "because it connotes a singular characteristic of intellectual prowess.") The fellowship is a no-strings-attached grant: Each 2000 winner will get $100,000 a year for five years. MacArthur calls the cash a gift of time, because it frees winners from financial constraints on their art, science, or activism. (The $4 billion foundation is the estate of John D. MacArthur, a skinflint who became the second-richest American by selling cut-rate insurance through the mail. His son Rod grabbed control of the trust after John's 1978 death and pushed the genius project.)

The MacArthur has become the United States' most famous philanthropy project not because it rewards stellar peoplethough it doesbut because it's mysterious. Several hundred talent scouts, whose identities are secret, suggest nominees to the selection committee. The committee, whose members are also secret, covertly gathers dossiers on the nominees and selects two-dozen-odd winners. In a nation where self-promotion is a constitutional right, the MacArthur is endlessly frustrating: You can't nominate yourself, you can't nominate a friend, you can't lobby for it if you are nominated. What's an unappreciated genius to do?

Don't fear, the MacArthur is less cryptic than it seems. It can be gamed. You may not be able to guarantee yourself half-a-million bucks and a reputation for brilliance, but you can certainly improve your odds. Here's a how-to guide for becoming a certifiable genius.

Rule No. 1: Live in New York or San Francisco. New Yorkers and San Franciscans act like they're the most interesting people in the world. MacArthur agrees with them. Fully one-sixth of all MacArthurs live in Manhattan, and nearly as many live in the Bay Area. (Six of this year's 25 MacArthurs are Manhattanites, and three are from Berkeley.)

No matter what, don't live in the South. Southerners rarely qualify as geniuses unless they're sensitive writers or colorful advocates for the poor. (This year's only Southern winner is typical: Auburn Professor Samuel Mockbee builds houses for poor Alabamans out of old tires and hay bales.) The Great Plains and Rockies are equally inhospitable to genius: You're unlikely to win unless you've started a bank or college on an Indian reservation. Stick to the Northeast and the West Coast.

Rule No. 2: Be a professor. Specifically, be a professor at Harvard or Stanford, where they hand out MacArthurs like candy. If you're a humanities professor, choose Harvard (which has 35 MacArthurs) or University of California, Berkeley (which has 23). Hard scientists should land a job at Stanford (24) or Princeton (20). Physicists at one of those two universities seem to win MacArthurs more easily than tenure. In a pinch, University of Chicago, University of Michigan, Columbia, and New York University are acceptable backups, but avoid Yale! It's got only six geniuses. You'd be better off with Bard College, whose tiny faculty has won four MacArthurs. (As Harvard grads have always suspected, Yale is approximately one-sixth as good as Harvard.)

But it's not enough to be a professor. You also must choose the right specialty. Ancient civilizations win MacArthurs. Revisionist scholars of classical Greece do well, and MacArthur has identified not one, but two geniuses who decipher ancient Mayan glyphs and a third who deciphers ancient Andean knotted mnemonic devices (whatever they may be). Literature, philosophy, and history all win plenty of MacArthurs. Economics is unpromising, unless you study something odd. 2000 winner Matthew Rabin, for example, analyzes the economic implications of procrastination. Physics, math, and computer science are beloved of MacArthur. Chemistry is a lost cause. Environmentalism is a sure winner. Biologists should study evolution, dinosaurs, or primates, and little else.

Rule No. 3: If you don't want to teach college, make art. Preferably in New York: One in 10 MacArthurs is a writer, choreographer, artist, musician, or director in New York City. Again, pick the right specialty. Be a poet or a choreographer. Novelists, painters, and film directors seem underrepresented. Among musicians, jazz is good, and free jazz is even better. Needless to say, no matter what kind of artist you are, be avant-garde.

Rule No. 4: Do not, under any circumstances, work for the government or the private sector. This cannot be stressed enough. Many MacArthur geniuses advocate government activism, but all fellows assiduously avoid public service. I found only two MacArthur winners from the public sector, small-town Mayor Unita Blackwell and then-Congressional Budget Office Director Alice Rivlin. Similarly, geniuses should not soil themselves with earning a profit. It's fine to run a nonprofit that helps disadvantaged people start their own businesses, but almost no MacArthurs run or work for profit-seeking corporations.

Rule No. 5: Upset conventional wisdom. You don't have to be right, but you must be provocative. It's not enough to study quantum physics. You must, like 1999 winner Eva Silverstein, "question the fundamentals of quantum physics." MacArthur honored the classicist who reinterpreted the Parthenon friezes as a human sacrifice and the paleontologist who says that Tyrannosaurus Rex ate carrion rather than hunted. If you're a mathematician, set yourself one of math's great insoluble problems: MacArthur knighted Andrew Wiles for cracking Fermat's Theorem and Michael Freedman for proving the four-dimensional case of Poincare's Conjecture.

The best kind of provocation is a doomsday theory. MacArthur adores folks who foresee the end of the world, especially if that end is caused by Western avarice or stupidity. MacArthur has blessed Paul "Population Explosion" Ehrlich; Richard Turco, who popularized the idea of nuclear winter; and several scientists who have sounded warnings about global warming. (Prediction: MacArthur will soon reward someone who studies how water shortage is plunging Africa and the Middle East into war.)

Rule No. 6: Be left wing. MacArthur generally finds genius on the left. Only a handful of the 588 genies could be considered conservative. (Black community developer Robert Woodson is the most notable.) On the other hand, four Dissent editorial board members have won the MacArthur, according to the American Spectator. The foundation likes artists who campaign for racial minorities and the needy. Alfredo Jaar, a 2000 winner, creates art that "focuses on injustices around the worldpoverty, exploitation, genocide." 1997 winner Kara Walker constructs silhouettes about racial and sexual exploitation. 2000 fellow David Isay produces brilliant radio documentaries about the lives of poor Americans. The foundation favors activists who fight for low-income housing, disability rights, and racial justice. Libertarians, religious conservatives, and free marketeers are never geniuses. MacArthur routinely consecrates the causes célèbres of the left, from sex discrimination to right-wing human rights abuses in Central America (see: Mark Danner, Tina Rosenberg, and Alma Guillermoprieto).

The MacArthur's reliable support of left-wing causes makes it fun to guess future winners. My bets: 1) Jerry Berman from the Center for Democracy and Technology for lobbying to protect Internet privacy; 2) an agriculture activist for showing the dire health risks of genetically modified food; and 3) Edward Hopper, author of The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS, for theorizing that vaccination experiments in Southern Africa caused the HIV virus to cross from monkeys to humans.

Rule No. 7: Be slightly, but not dangerously, quirky. MacArthur favors the eccentric choice over the ordinary. Economist Rabin wears tie-dyes, listens to Abba, and has Johnny Depp posters all over his office wall. David Stuart won when he was an 18-year-old prodigy. Recluse Thomas Pynchon took a MacArthur; social butterfly John Updike has not. And it surely helped Seattle "sound sculptor" Trimpin that he goes by only one name.

All the rules suggest that the perfect MacArthur genius is still out there: a one-named Berkeley professor who choreographs interpretative jazz dances about how genetically modified food will destroy humanity.

is the new york times making up cultural trends when in fact they do not exist? good thing i'm a metrosexual and not an echoboomer looking forward to opting out of a career and raising kids.

Weasel-Words Rip My Flesh!
Spotting a bogus trend story on Page One of today's New York Times.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2005, at 3:38 PM PT

How many "many's" are too many for one news story?

Like its fellow weasel-wordssome, few, often, seems, likely, moremany serves writers who haven't found the data to support their argument. A light splash of weasel-words in a news story is acceptable if only because journalism is not an exact science and deadlines must be observed. But when a reporter pours a whole jug of weasel-words into a piece, as Louise Story does on Page One of today's (Sept. 20) New York Times in "Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood," she needlessly exposes one of the trade's best-kept secrets for all to see. She deserves a week in the stockades. And her editor deserves a month.

Story uses the particularly useful weasel-word "many" 12 timesincluding once in the headlineto illustrate the emerging trend of Ivy League-class women who attend top schools but have no intention of assuming the careers they prepared for.

She informs readers that "many of these women" being groomed for the occupational elite "say that is not what they want." She repeats the weasel-word three more times in the next two paragraphs and returns to it whenever she needs to express impressive quantity but has no real numbers. She writes:

Many women at the nation's most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children. Though some of these students are not planning to have children and some hope to have a family and work full time, many others, like Ms. Liu, say they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood their main commitment.

Much attention has been focused on career women who leave the work force to rear children. What seems to be changing is that while many women in college two or three decades ago expected to have full-time careers, their daughters, while still in college, say they have already decided to suspend or end their careers when they have children.

Many students say staying home is not a shocking idea among their friends. Shannon Flynn, an 18-year-old from Guilford, Conn., who is a freshman at Harvard, says many of her girlfriends do not want to work full time.

Yet the likelihood that so many young women plan to opt out of high-powered careers presents a conundrum.

What seems new is that while many of their mothers expected to have hard-charging careers, then scaled back their professional plans only after having children, the women of this generation expect their careers to take second place to child rearing.

Sarah Currie, a senior at Harvard, said many of the men in her American Family class last fall approved of women's plans to stay home with their children.

For many feminists, it may come as a shock to hear how unbothered many young women at the nation's top schools are by the strictures of traditional roles.

None of these many's quantify anything. You could as easily substitute the word some for every many and not gain or lose any information. Or substitute the word few and lose only the wind in Story's sails. By fudging the available facts with weasel-words, Story makes a flaccid concept stand upas long as nobody examines it closely.

For instance, Story writes that she interviewed "Ivy League students, including 138 freshman and senior females at Yale who replied to e-mail questions sent to members of two residential colleges over the last school year." Because she doesn't attribute the preparation of the e-mail survey to anyone, one must assume that she or somebody at the Times composed and sent it. A questionnaire answered by 138 Yale women sounds like it may contain useful information. But even a social-science dropout wouldn't consider the findings to be anything but anecdotal unless he knew 1) what questions were asked (Story doesn't say), 2) how many questionnaires were distributed, and 3) why freshman and seniors received the questionnaires to the exclusion of sophomores and juniors. Also, 4) a social-science dropout would ask if the Times contaminated its e-mailed survey with leading questions and hence attracted a disproportionate number of respondents who sympathize with the article's underlying and predetermined thesis.

To say Story's piece contains a thesis oversells it. Early on, she squishes out on the whole concept with the weasel-word seems. She writes, "What seems to be changing is that while many women in college two or three decades ago expected to have full-time careers, their daughters, while still in college, say they have already decided to suspend or end their careers when they have children."

To say the piece was edited would also be to oversell it. Story rewrites this seems sentence about two-thirds of the way through the piece without adding any new information. "What seems new is that while many of their mothers expected to have hard-charging careers, then scaled back their professional plans only after having children, the women of this generation expect their careers to take second place to child rearing." [Emphasis added.]

Halfway through, Story discounts her allegedly newsworthy findings by acknowledging that a "person's expectations at age 18 are less than perfect predictors of their life choices 10 years later." If they're less than perfect predictors, then why are we reading about their predictions on Page One of the Times?

While bogus, "Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood" isn't false: It can't be false because it never says anything sturdy enough to be tested. So, how did it get to Page One? Is there a New York Times conspiracy afoot to drive feminists crazy and persuade young women that their place is in the home? Did the paper dispatch Times columnist John Tierney to write a pair of provocative columns on this theme earlier this year (early May and late May) and recruit Lisa Belkin to dance the idea around in an October 2003 Times Magazine feature titled "The Opt-Out Revolution"?

Nah.

I suspect a Times editor glommed onto the idea while overhearing some cocktail party chatter"Say, did you hear that Sam blew hundreds of thousands of dollars sending his daughter to Yale and now she and her friends say all they want in the future is to get married and stay at home?"and passed the concept to the writer or her editors and asked them to develop it.

You can see the editorial gears whirring: The press has already drained our collective anxiety about well-educated women assuming greater power in the workplace. So, the only editorial vein left to mine is our collective anxiety about well-educated women deciding not to work instead. Evidence that the Times editors know how to push our buttons can be found in the fact that as I write, this slight article about college students is the "Most E-Mailed" article on the newspaper's Web site.

ScienceNOW
Authors: Know Your Assassins

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS--Amidst all the drudgery, the manuscript submission forms of many journals ask authors a simple but surprising question: Are there any individuals you would like to suggest or exclude as potential reviewers? Many authors decline to answer--but maybe they should fill in the blank. Three studies presented here last week at the Fifth International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication suggest that selecting reviewers can significantly increase a manuscript's chances of being accepted.

Having a say over one's reviewers has benefits for authors: They may be more familiar than editors with who is best qualified to review their work and may have valid reasons for keeping sensitive results out of the hands of a close competitor. But authors also worry that such suggestions can make a manuscript appear suspect or that their responses may offend other scientists. As a result, many decline to suggest reviewers, and only a small percentage opts to reject.

That may not be smart, according to the new findings. When Sara Schroter of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) Publishing Group and colleagues compared 788 peer reviews sent to 10 publications owned by BMJ, they found that, compared to editor-suggested reviewers, author-suggested reviewers were slightly more likely to recommend manuscript publication (55.7% versus 49.5%) and quite less likely to recommend rejection (14.4% versus 24.1%). Elizabeth Wager and colleagues at BioMed Central, an open access publisher of online journals, achieved almost identical results in a study of 100 manuscripts submitted to 40 online journals owned by the publisher.

Opting to exclude reviewers may have a more dramatic effect. A team led by Lowell Goldsmith, a dermatological geneticist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the editor of the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, looked at 228 consecutive manuscript submissions to the journal in 2003. The team found that manuscripts whose authors had excluded reviewers were twice as likely to be accepted than those whose authors had not. "Excluding reviewers ends up being very, very important," says Goldsmith. "People know their assassins."

So is this a good thing? R. Brian Haynes, a clinical epidemiologist at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, and the editor of two clinical journals, says the findings suggest authors could bias the review system. But the opposite may be true, says Matthias Egger, an epidemiologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland and an associate editor of the International Journal of Epidemiology. Some reviewers hold grudges or have conflicts of interests, he says, and taking them out of the equation may be warranted.

--DAVID GRIMM

Making Roberts Talk
By JOHN TIERNEY The New York Times
Published: Sep 14, 2005

He came, he charmed, he shut up. During the opening statements, the senators blathered away their time and more; Judge John Roberts used less than half of his to utter a few graceful generalities. He has made a career out of not saying the wrong thing. Why start now?

A lawyer who has been cross- examined dozens of times by the Supreme Court will not be caught off guard by senators posing as legal scholars.

The only hope for Democrats is to try the tactics used by interrogation pros like Israeli airport screeners and U.S. customs agents. These pros know that a smart criminal will have a good cover story for, say, what he was doing in London and why he's going to New York.

But if he's asked something unexpected - how he liked the London weather, whether he's planning to visit Times Square - he has to change mental gears. He's apt to exhibit telltale signs of stress, like gazing upward and to his right as he answers.

I'm not suggesting that anything the Democrats ask could stop Roberts from being confirmed. But they might at least keep TV viewers awake by trying questions like these:

If Roe vs. Wade were a tree, what kind of tree would it be?

After seeing a judge's robes in a Gilbert and Sullivan production, Chief Justice Rehnquist added gold stripes to his robe. If confirmed, will you keep the stripes, or do you have a whole new look in mind?

From your analysis of constitutional history, would you classify James Madison as a dog person or a cat person?

You've said you're a devotee of P.G. Wodehouse. Of the current justices, who is most like Jeeves? Who's most like Bertie Wooster? Would you consider instituting a casual Friday dress policy on the bench?

Would it be a violation of Lois Lane's so-called right to privacy if Superman used his X-ray vision to look through her clothes?

Would you think it's cool if a professional wrestler dubbed himself Chief Justice, or would you sue him for trademark infringement?

During the announcement of your nomination at the White House, President Bush was distracted by your son's impromptu dance. When you got home that night, what happened to him?

Would Thomas Jefferson have preferred the Beatles or the Stones?

After Justice Souter's opinion in the Kelo case endorsed the use of eminent domain to seize people's homes for a higher ``public use,'' a group proposed that the town of Weare, N. H., increase its tax revenue by taking Souter's property there so that a developer could build a resort called the Lost Liberty Hotel. Would your family ever vacation there?

What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three legs in the evening?

When you were a clerk at the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Warren Burger was disliked for his pretentiousness. What nickname did the clerks have for him? Burger King?

Does President Bush have a nickname for you yet?

When justices have birthday parties, should they invite all the other justices, or can they invite just the ones they like?

If Judge Judy isn't afraid of television cameras in her courtroom, why is the Supreme Court so chicken?

Your passion for correct grammar and syntax is well-known. But you have yet to inform the American people of your position on the serial comma. In the phrase ``Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,'' should there be a comma after liberty?

How would you edit this sentence to make it grammatically correct: ``I swear I ain't never gonna overturn Roe vs. Wade''?

Why did you turn to the right and look upward?

nytimes.com
September 20, 2005
Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood
By LOUISE STORY

Cynthia Liu is precisely the kind of high achiever Yale wants: smart (1510 SAT), disciplined (4.0 grade point average), competitive (finalist in Texas oratory competition), musical (pianist), athletic (runner) and altruistic (hospital volunteer). And at the start of her sophomore year at Yale, Ms. Liu is full of ambition, planning to go to law school.

So will she join the long tradition of famous Ivy League graduates? Not likely. By the time she is 30, this accomplished 19-year-old expects to be a stay-at-home mom.

"My mother's always told me you can't be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time," Ms. Liu said matter-of-factly. "You always have to choose one over the other."

At Yale and other top colleges, women are being groomed to take their place in an ever more diverse professional elite. It is almost taken for granted that, just as they make up half the students at these institutions, they will move into leadership roles on an equal basis with their male classmates.

There is just one problem with this scenario: many of these women say that is not what they want.

Many women at the nation's most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children. Though some of these students are not planning to have children and some hope to have a family and work full time, many others, like Ms. Liu, say they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood their main commitment.

Much attention has been focused on career women who leave the work force to rear children. What seems to be changing is that while many women in college two or three decades ago expected to have full-time careers, their daughters, while still in college, say they have already decided to suspend or end their careers when they have children.

"At the height of the women's movement and shortly thereafter, women were much more firm in their expectation that they could somehow combine full-time work with child rearing," said Cynthia E. Russett, a professor of American history who has taught at Yale since 1967. "The women today are, in effect, turning realistic."

Dr. Russett is among more than a dozen faculty members and administrators at the most exclusive institutions who have been on campus for decades and who said in interviews that they had noticed the changing attitude.

Many students say staying home is not a shocking idea among their friends. Shannon Flynn, an 18-year-old from Guilford, Conn., who is a freshman at Harvard, says many of her girlfriends do not want to work full time.

"Most probably do feel like me, maybe even tending toward wanting to not work at all," said Ms. Flynn, who plans to work part time after having children, though she is torn because she has worked so hard in school.

"Men really aren't put in that position," she said.

Uzezi Abugo, a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania who hopes to become a lawyer, says she, too, wants to be home with her children at least until they are in school.

"I've seen the difference between kids who did have their mother stay at home and kids who didn't, and it's kind of like an obvious difference when you look at it," said Ms. Abugo, whose mother, a nurse, stayed home until Ms. Abugo was in first grade.

While the changing attitudes are difficult to quantify, the shift emerges repeatedly in interviews with Ivy League students, including 138 freshman and senior females at Yale who replied to e-mail questions sent to members of two residential colleges over the last school year.

The interviews found that 85 of the students, or roughly 60 percent, said that when they had children, they planned to cut back on work or stop working entirely. About half of those women said they planned to work part time, and about half wanted to stop work for at least a few years.

Two of the women interviewed said they expected their husbands to stay home with the children while they pursued their careers. Two others said either they or their husbands would stay home, depending on whose career was furthest along.

The women said that pursuing a rigorous college education was worth the time and money because it would help position them to work in meaningful part-time jobs when their children are young or to attain good jobs when their children leave home.

In recent years, elite colleges have emphasized the important roles they expect their alumni - both men and women - to play in society.

For example, earlier this month, Shirley M. Tilghman, the president of Princeton University, welcomed new freshmen, saying: "The goal of a Princeton education is to prepare young men and women to take up positions of leadership in the 21st century. Of course, the word 'leadership' conjures up images of presidents and C.E.O.'s, but I want to stress that my idea of a leader is much broader than that."

She listed education, medicine and engineering as other areas where students could become leaders.

In an e-mail response to a question, Dr. Tilghman added: "There is nothing inconsistent with being a leader and a stay-at-home parent. Some women (and a handful of men) whom I have known who have done this have had a powerful impact on their communities."

Yet the likelihood that so many young women plan to opt out of high-powered careers presents a conundrum.

"It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?" said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, who served as dean for coeducation in the late 1970's and early 1980's.

It is a complicated issue and one that most schools have not addressed. The women they are counting on to lead society are likely to marry men who will make enough money to give them a real choice about whether to be full-time mothers, unlike those women who must work out of economic necessity.

It is less than clear what universities should, or could, do about it. For one, a person's expectations at age 18 are less than perfect predictors of their life choices 10 years later. And in any case, admissions officers are not likely to ask applicants whether they plan to become stay-at-home moms.

University officials said that success meant different things to different people and that universities were trying to broaden students' minds, not simply prepare them for jobs.

"What does concern me," said Peter Salovey, the dean of Yale College, "is that so few students seem to be able to think outside the box; so few students seem to be able to imagine a life for themselves that isn't constructed along traditional gender roles."

There is, of course, nothing new about women being more likely than men to stay home to rear children.

According to a 2000 survey of Yale alumni from the classes of 1979, 1984, 1989 and 1994, conducted by the Yale Office of Institutional Research, more men from each of those classes than women said that work was their primary activity - a gap that was small among alumni in their 20's but widened as women moved into their prime child-rearing years. Among the alumni surveyed who had reached their 40's, only 56 percent of the women still worked, compared with 90 percent of the men.

A 2005 study of comparable Yale alumni classes found that the pattern had not changed. Among the alumni who had reached their early 40's, just over half said work was their primary activity, compared with 90 percent of the men. Among the women who had reached their late 40's, some said they had returned to work, but the percentage of women working was still far behind the percentage of men.

A 2001 survey of Harvard Business School graduates found that 31 percent of the women from the classes of 1981, 1985 and 1991 who answered the survey worked only part time or on contract, and another 31 percent did not work at all, levels strikingly similar to the percentages of the Yale students interviewed who predicted they would stay at home or work part time in their 30's and 40's.

What seems new is that while many of their mothers expected to have hard-charging careers, then scaled back their professional plans only after having children, the women of this generation expect their careers to take second place to child rearing.

"It never occurred to me," Rebecca W. Bushnell, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, said about working versus raising children. "Thirty years ago when I was heading out, I guess I was just taking it one step at a time."

Dr. Bushnell said young women today, in contrast, are thinking and talking about part-time or flexible work options for when they have children. "People have a heightened awareness of trying to get the right balance between work and family."

Sarah Currie, a senior at Harvard, said many of the men in her American Family class last fall approved of women's plans to stay home with their children.

"A lot of the guys were like, 'I think that's really great,' " Ms. Currie said. "One of the guys was like, 'I think that's sexy.' Staying at home with your children isn't as polarizing of an issue as I envision it is for women who are in their 30's now."

For most of the young women who responded to e-mail questions, a major factor shaping their attitudes seemed to be their experience with their own mothers, about three out of five of whom did not work at all, took several years off or worked only part time.

"My stepmom's very proud of my choice because it makes her feel more valuable," said Kellie Zesch, a Texan who graduated from the University of North Carolina two years ago and who said that once she had children, she intended to stay home for at least five years and then consider working part time. "It justified it to her, that I don't look down on her for not having a career."

Similarly, students who are committed to full-time careers, without breaks, also cited their mothers as influences. Laura Sullivan, a sophomore at Yale who wants to be a lawyer, called her mother's choice to work full time the "greatest gift."

"She showed me what it meant to be an amazing mother and maintain a career," Ms. Sullivan said.

Some of these women's mothers, who said they did not think about these issues so early in their lives, said they were surprised to hear that their college-age daughters had already formed their plans.

Emily Lechner, one of Ms. Liu's roommates, hopes to stay home a few years, then work part time as a lawyer once her children are in school.

Her mother, Carol, who once thought she would have a full-time career but gave it up when her children were born, was pleasantly surprised to hear that. "I do have this bias that the parents can do it best," she said. "I see a lot of women in their 30's who have full-time nannies, and I just question if their kids are getting the best."

For many feminists, it may come as a shock to hear how unbothered many young women at the nation's top schools are by the strictures of traditional roles.

"They are still thinking of this as a private issue; they're accepting it," said Laura Wexler, a professor of American studies and women's and gender studies at Yale. "Women have been given full-time working career opportunities and encouragement with no social changes to support it.

"I really believed 25 years ago," Dr. Wexler added, "that this would be solved by now."

Angie Ku, another of Ms. Liu's roommates who had a stay-at-home mom, talks nonchalantly about attending law or business school, having perhaps a 10-year career and then staying home with her children.

"Parents have such an influence on their children," Ms. Ku said. "I want to have that influence. Me!"

She said she did not mind if that limited her career potential.

"I'll have a career until I have two kids," she said. "It doesn't necessarily matter how far you get. It's kind of like the experience: I have tried what I wanted to do."

Ms. Ku added that she did not think it was a problem that women usually do most of the work raising kids.

"I accept things how they are," she said. "I don't mind the status quo. I don't see why I have to go against it."

After all, she added, those roles got her where she is.

"It worked so well for me," she said, "and I don't see in my life why it wouldn't work."

60 minutes
The Echo Boomers
Sept. 4, 2005

If you've ever wondered why corporate America, Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the media all seem obsessed with the youth culture, the answer is simple.

The largest generation of young people since the '60s is beginning to come of age. They're called "echo boomers" because they're the genetic offspring and demographic echo of their parents, the baby boomers.

Born between 1982 and 1995, there are nearly 80 million of them, and they're already having a huge impact on entire segments of the economy. And as the population ages, they will be become the next dominant generation of Americans.

Who are they? What do they want? As Correspondent Steve Kroft first reported last October, you'll be surprised. The oldest are barely out of college, and the youngest are still in grade school.

And whether you call them "echo boomers," "Generation Y" or "millennials," they already make up nearly a third of the U.S. population, and already spend $170 billion a year of their own and their parents' money.

Almost none of it is spent on boring things like mortgages and medication, and the world is falling all over itself trying to sell them things.

What brands do they love? Sony, Patagonia, Gap, Gillette, Aveda.

Only a small percentage are eligible to vote, yet they are already one of the must studied generations in history -- by sociologists, demographers and marketing consultants like Jane Buckingham of the Intelligence Group.

Buckingham uses focus groups to gather information for clients such as NBC, Chanel, Nike and Levi Strauss.

Echo boomers are a reflection of the sweeping changes in American life over the past 20 years. They are the first to grow up with computers at home, in a 500-channel TV universe. They are multi-taskers with cell phones, music downloads, and Instant Messaging on the Internet. They are totally plugged- in citizens of a worldwide community.

Nick Summers of Columbia University and Andie Gissing from Middlebury College in Vermont are college seniors and editors of their college newspapers. They are both in touch with the echo boomer ethos.

(Note: Since 60 Minutes first broadcast this story, these college editors have become college graduates, and Neil Howe and colleague William Strauss have completed another study of the echo boom generation, "Millennials and the Pop Culture," to be published this fall.)

"I would say that my generation tends to be very overachieving, over-managed," says Summers. "Very pressured."

"I would agree with that," adds Gissing. "A lot of people work hard or want to do well, I guess."

And it's no wonder they feel that way. From when they were toddlers, they have been belted into car seats, and driven off to some form of organized group activity. After graduating from "Gymboree" and "Mommy and Me," they have been shuttled to play dates and soccer practice, with barely a day off, by parents who've felt their kids needed structure, and a sense of mission.

Dr. Mel Levine, a professor at the University of North Carolina, is one of the best-known pediatricians in the country. He says it's had as much to do with shaping this generation as technology.

"They have been heavily programmed. The kids who have had soccer Monday, Kung Fu Tuesday, religious classes Wednesday, clarinet lessons Thursday. Whose whole lives have really been based on what some adult tells them to do," says Levine.

"This is a generation that has long aimed to please. They've wanted to please their parents, their friends, their teachers, their college admissions officers."

It's a generation in which rules seem to have replaced rebellion, convention is winning out over individualism, and values are very traditional.

They are also the most diverse generation ever: 35 percent are non-white, and the most tolerant, believing everyone should be part of the community.Historian Neil Howe, along with co-author William Strauss, has made a career studying different generations. Howe says all the research on echo boomers always reflects the same thing: They are much different than their self-absorbed, egocentric baby boomer parents.

"Nothing could be more anti-boom than being a good team player, right? Fitting in. Worrying less about leadership than follower-ship," says Howe. "If you go into a public school today, teamwork is stressed everywhere. Team teaching, team grading, collaborative sports, community service, service learning, student juries. I mean, the list goes on and on."

Howe thinks they are more like their grandparents, the great World War II generation -- more interested in building things up than tearing them down.

"When you ask kids, 'What do you most hope to achieve there?' Where they used to say, 'I wanna be No. 1. I wanna be the best,' increasingly they're saying, 'I wanna be an effective member of the team. I wanna do everything that's required of me,'" says Howe.

And you can already see some results. Violent crime among teenagers is down 60 to 70 percent. The use of tobacco and alcohol are at all-time lows. So is teen pregnancy. Five out of 10 echo boomers say they trust the government, and virtually all of them trust mom and dad.

Through sheer numbers, they're beginning to change society. They have affected school construction, college enrollments, product development, and media content. And according to Buckingham, they are changing the way things are sold, from clothing to cars, because mass marketing doesn't always reach them.

"They're not watching the traditional networks as much because they have so many choices. They're playing on the Internet. They're playing videogames," says Buckingham. "They're out and about, shopping a lot. So, the traditional 30-second commercial isn't always working the way it was."

They are the most sophisticated generation ever when it comes to media. They create their own Web sites, make their own CDs and DVDs, and are cynical of packaged messages. They take their cues from each other. A well-placed product on one of their pop idols, like Paris Hilton or Ashton Kutcher, can launch a brand of $40 T-shirts and trucker hats. But they also shop at vintage clothing shops.

Buckingham employs the services of some 1,500 young people scattered around the country, and relies on their regular reports on what's hot and what's not to keep her and her clients ahead of the latest trends.

"One of the things with this generation is word of mouth. Buzz is more important today than it's ever been," says Buckingham. "And that can get started on the Internet. That can get started just through friends. And it's very hard for a marketer to tap into that unless it's really a product that they like."

Toyota is already betting hundreds of millions of dollars to try to create that buzz, in launching a car division aimed exclusively at echo boomers.

"They've affected clothing. They've affected beverage. And now, they're just about to affect the car business," says Jim Farley, head of Toyota's Scion division.

Toyota is quietly peddling its new $15,000 cars, with air conditioning and power windows, by sponsoring events like street basketball/break dance festivals, where they always have cars on hand for people to look at and sometimes even test drive.

"People kind of just stumble on our product, and it's cool that way," says Farley. That's what the company wants. "This is like regular car companies are on TV. This is our regular activity. This is how we expose our cars to young people."

Seventy percent of Scion's promotion is being spent on those events. Only 30 percent is spent on traditional advertising, and much of that is on the Internet, where echo boomers can fill out a Scion order form, customize their car with 40 different options, and drop off the form at the dealership without ever hearing a sales pitch.

It's early yet, but Farley says Scion is meeting its sales projections: "I think how we've looked at it is that we can't afford not to do this."

Echo boomers have their own television network, the WB, and their own stores, with multimedia presentations and disc jockeys to lure them in the door. It's a generation used to being catered to.

"They are more protected," says Howe. "They regard themselves as collectively special, because of the time in which they were raised."

Why do they consider themselves special?

"Because they came along at a time when we started re-valuing kids. During the '60s and '70s, the frontier of reproductive medicine was contraception," says Howe. "During the '80s and beyond, it's been fertility and scouring the world to find orphan kids that we can adopt. ...The culture looked down on kids. Now it wants kids; it celebrates them."

Echo boomers are the most watched-over generation in history. Most have never ridden a bike without a helmet, ridden in a car without a seat belt, or eaten in a cafeteria that serves peanut butter.

"Sometimes, they don't know what to do if they're just left outside and you say, 'Well, just do something by yourself for a while,'" says Howe. "They'll look around stunned. You know, 'What are we supposed to do now?'"

They're hovered over by what college administrators call "helicopter parents." Protected and polished, they are trophy children in every sense of the word.

"Everyone is above average in our generation," says Summers.

"Everybody gets a trophy at the end of the year. It's something you're used to," adds Gissing. "And you have the rows of trophies lined up on your windowsill, or whatever."

"Parents feel as if they're holding onto a piece of Baccarat crystal or something that could somehow shatter at any point," says Levine. "And so parents really have a sense their kids are fragile. And parents therefore are protecting them, inflating their egos. Massaging them, fighting their battles for them."

Levine, who is considered one of the foremost authorities in the country on how children learn, is now researching a book on young people entering their 20s. He is concerned that groupthink is stifling initiative. And because they have always been rewarded for participation, not achievement, they don't have a strong sense what they are good at and what they're not.

For instance, when a young person shows up for work at his or her first job, what do they expect and what are they finding?

"They expect to be immediate heroes and heroines. They expect a lot of feedback on a daily basis. They expect grade inflation, they expect to be told what a wonderful job they're doing," says Levine.

"[They expect] that they're gonna be allowed to rise to the top quickly. That they're gonna get all the credit they need for everything they do. And boy, are they naive. Totally naive, in terms of what's really gonna happen."

Levine says that is not the only part of their cultural conditioning that's going to require an adjustment in the workplace.

"I talked to the CEO of a major corporation recently and I said, 'What characterizes your youngest employees nowadays?'" says Levine. "And he said, 'There's one major thing.' He said, 'They can't think long-range. Everything has to be immediate, like a video game. And they have a lot of trouble sort of doing things in a stepwise fashion, delaying gratification. Really reflecting as they go along.' I think that's new."

Levine calls the phenomenon visual motor ecstasy, where any cultural accoutrement that doesn't produce instant satisfaction is boring. As echo boomers grow up, they'll have to learn that life is not just a series of headlines and highlight reels.

But this may be something that, for now, echo boomers can deal with.
"What would you call your generation?" Buckingham asked Scott, one of her focus group participants.

"Perfect," he says, laughing.

Man dies after online game marathon

SEOUL, South Korea (Reuters) -- A South Korean man who played computer games for 50 hours almost non-stop died of heart failure minutes after finishing his mammoth session in an Internet cafe, authorities said on Tuesday.

The 28-year-old man, identified only by his family name Lee, had been playing online battle simulation games at the cybercafe in the southeastern city of Taegu, police said.

Lee had planted himself in front of a computer monitor to play on-line games on August 3. He only left the spot over the next three days to go to the toilet and take brief naps on a makeshift bed, they said.

"We presume the cause of death was heart failure stemming from exhaustion," a Taegu provincial police official said by telephone.

Lee had recently quit his job to spend more time playing games, the daily JoongAng Ilbo reported after interviewing former work colleagues and staff at the Internet cafe.

After he failed to return home, Lee's mother asked his former colleagues to find him. When they reached the cafe, Lee said he would finish the game and then go home, the paper reported.

He died a few minutes later, it said.

South Korea, one of the most wired countries in the world, has a large and highly developed game industry.

nytimes.com published an article about what the most celebrated chefs in america eat when they're on the road. it turns out they don't actually confine their taste buds to truffle oil and foie gras. Here are some excerpts:

Busman's Holiday, Famous Chef Edition
By JANE L. LEVERE

Published: March 1, 2005

What do famous chefs have for breakfast when they travel? Oatmeal, mostly.

For lunch? Something light, perhaps grilled fish or an egg salad sandwich on whole-wheat toast. For a quick bite? A Whopper and fries will do nicely.

Yes, when they are on the road, the stars of restaurants like Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., and Daniel in Manhattan eat pretty much like you and me before 8 p.m.

....

But for breakfast on the road, Mr. Boulud is content with granola, plain yogurt, fresh fruit, orange juice and coffee. "Granola's much healthier than a croissant," said Mr. Boulud, a native of Lyon, France.

Plain old cereal was the most cited choice of the 10 chefs interviewed for this article (most of whom work at two or more restaurants). Thomas Keller of French Laundry in Yountville, Calif., brings instant oatmeal in a bag for breakfast on business trips. "It's a healthy fast food," he said. Gray Kunz, the chef of Café Gray in Manhattan, favors Irish oatmeal with milk and brown sugar, plus plain yogurt with fresh fruit, ideally berries. At home, when he can make the oatmeal himself, he adds salt, sugar, shredded apples and cinnamon. Mr. O'Connell likes his oatmeal served with honey and skim milk. "I'm not too picky as long as they can get it to me hot," he said.

The chefs are equally unfussy about lunch, generally choosing sparse fare like fish or a salad, and asking for bottled water rather than a glass of wine. Why such restraint? "A lot of food with wine makes me sleepy," said Wolfgang Puck, the chef at Spago in Los Angeles.

Others tuck unapologetically into fat-laden fast food or calorie-rich soul food. Recently, Mr. Boulud went out of his way to try the hamburger at a Los Angeles landmark, the Apple Pan; while visiting Nashville, he lined up for grits, barbecued ribs and chicken, pulled pork, collard greens and cornbread at Nick's Famous Barbecue.

Mr. Keller says he used to have a weakness for Burger King's Whopper with extra cheese and French fries, but now that he lives in California, he has switched his allegiance to the cheeseburgers at In-N-Out Burger, with French fries and a milkshake. He also favors Krispy Kreme doughnuts. "I like pretty much all junk food," he said.

Mr. O'Connell likes New York delis, especially the Carnegie on Seventh Avenue and 55th Street, where he orders "a sandwich so tall I can't get it in my mouth," thick with corned beef or pastrami. Wherever he has lunch, he drinks iced tea, even if he has to brew it himself. He particularly craves that drink when traveling in England and France. "They think you're not supposed to have it, so I want it that much more," he said....

A librarian's retort to bloggers, published in the prestigious Library Journal:

Revenge of the Blog People!
By Michael Gorman -- 2/15/2005
Commentary > Backtalk

A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web. (Though it sounds like something you would find stuck in a drain, the ugly neologism blog is a contraction of "web log.") Until recently, I had not spent much time thinking about blogs or Blog People.

McGoogle

I had heard of the activities of the latter and of the absurd idea of giving them press credentials (though, since the credentials were issued for political conventions, they were just absurd icing on absurd cakes). I was not truly aware of them until shortly after I published an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times ("Google and God's Mind," December 17, 2004). Then, thanks to kind friends with nothing but my welfare in mind, I rapidly learned more about the blog subcultures.

My piece had the temerity to question the usefulness of Google digitizing millions of books and making bits of them available via its notoriously inefficient search engine. The Google phenomenon is a wonderfully modern manifestation of the triumph of hope and boosterism over reality. Hailed as the ultimate example of information retrieval, Google is, in fact, the device that gives you thousands of "hits" (which may or may not be relevant) in no very useful order.

Digitized books

Those characteristics are ignored and excused by those who think that Google is the creation of "God's mind," because it gives the searcher its heaps of irrelevance in nanoseconds. Speed is of the essence to the Google boosters, just as it is to consumers of fast "food," but, as with fast food, rubbish is rubbish, no matter how speedily it is delivered.

In the eyes of bloggers, my sin lay in suggesting that Google is OK at giving access to random bits of information but would be terrible at giving access to the recorded knowledge that is the substance of scholarly books. I went further and came up with the unoriginal idea that the thing to do with a scholarly book is to read it, preferably not on a screen. It turns out that the Blog People (or their subclass who are interested in computers and the glorification of information) have a fanatical belief in the transforming power of digitization and a consequent horror of, and contempt for, heretics who do not share that belief.

How could I possibly be against access to the world's knowledge? Of course, like most sane people, I am not against it and, after more than 40 years of working in libraries, am rather for it. I have spent a lot of my long professional life working on aspects of the noble aim of Universal Bibliographic Controla mechanism by which all the world's recorded knowledge would be known, and available, to the people of the world. My sin against bloggery is that I do not believe this particular project will give us anything that comes anywhere near access to the world's knowledge.

Who are the Blog People?

It is obvious that the Blog People read what they want to read rather than what is in front of them and judge me to be wrong on the basis of what they think rather than what I actually wrote. Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs. In that case, their rejection of my view is quite understandable.

At least two of the blog excerpts sent to me (each written under pseudonyms) come from self-proclaimed "conservatives," which I find odd because many of the others come from people who call me a Luddite and are, presumably, technology-obsessed progressives. The Luddite label is because my mild remarks have been portrayed as those of someone worried about the job security of librarians (I am not) rather than one who has a different point of view on the usefulness of this latest expression of Google hubris and vast expenditure of money involved.

I'm no Antidigitalist

If a fraction of the latter were devoted to buying books and providing librarians for the library-starved children of California, the effort would be of far more use to humanity and society. Perhaps that latter thought will reinforce the opinion of the Blog Person who included "Michael Gorman is an idiot" in his reasoned critique, because no opinion that comes from someone who is "antidigital" (in the words of another Blog Person) could possibly be correct. For the record, though I may have associated with Antidigitalists, I am not and have never been a member of the Antidigitalist party and would be willing to testify to that under oath. I doubt even that would save me from being burned at the virtual stake, or, at best, being placed in a virtual pillory to be pelted with blogs. Ugh!

Author Information
Michael Gorman, president-elect of the American Library Association, is Dean of Library Services, Madden Library, California State University, Fresno.

two articles from the AP on a not so slow news day:

Massive Manure Fire Burns Into Third Month
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: January 28, 2005
Filed at 3:48 p.m. ET

MILFORD, Neb. (AP) -- Urban dwellers who enjoy dining on filet mignon at five-star restaurants would probably just as soon not know about David Dickinson's dilemma. Bad for the appetite, you know. But Dickinson, who makes his living in the cattle business, has an environmental problem on his hands that is vexing state officials: a 2,000-ton pile of burning cow manure.

Dickinson owns and manages Midwest Feeding Co. about 20 miles west of Lincoln, which takes in as many as 12,000 cows at a time from farmers and ranchers and fattens them for market.

Byproducts from the massive operation resulted in a dung pile measuring 100 feet long, 30 feet high and 50 feet wide that began burning about two months ago and continues to smolder despite Herculean attempts to douse it.

While city folks might have trouble imagining a dung pile of such proportions, they are common sites in rural states.

In July, crews fighting a blaze in a three-acre manure lagoon at a dairy farm in Washington smothered the flames with more of the same -- a blanket of wet cow manure.

In December, Montana officials ordered the owner of a horse feedlot to extinguish a large manure fire that sent a stench over a nearby town.

The Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality has informed Dickinson that his smoldering dung pile violates clean-air laws and is working with him to find the best solution to extinguish it, said agency spokesman Rich Webster.

Simply dumping water on the heap is not the answer, Webster said, because of concerns about runoff to any nearby water source.

Dickinson first tried using heavy equipment to spread out the smoldering pile and extinguish the fire.

``But the problem was, it started in another spot,'' he said. ``We've also had the fire department out a couple of times.''

And still it burns.

No one is sure how the fire started, but a common theory is that heat from the decomposing manure deep inside the pile eventually ignited the manure.

Wilma Roth, who manages a restaurant along Interstate 80 about a mile north of the feedlot, said her customers have complained about the smoke, which wafts for miles.

``I'd just as soon forget about it,'' she said.

Dickinson said the smoke is not particularly malodorous -- although that comes from a man who works full-time around manure.

``I guess it's just all perspective,'' he said. ``To me, it just smells like smoke. I really don't know how to describe it.''

Decades ago, most farmers and ranchers kept their own cows and pigs until they were shipped to market and slaughtered into filet mignon, hamburger, pork chops and bacon.

And with all those animals spread far apart at thousands of farms, it was easier to dispose of the manure.

But huge feedlots -- where animals are shipped to fatten on a high-grain diet for their last several months -- have become commonplace.

Dickinson has an average of 12,000 animals on hand, each eating about 25 pounds of feed daily, resulting in as much as nine pounds of manure a day per animal -- some 54 tons every 24 hours.

Most big feedlots spread the manure over farm fields or compost it to spread later or sell commercially to gardeners.

Farmers in several states are experimenting with using the methane gas from livestock manure to produce electricity. The manure is heated and produces methane gas as it breaks down. The gas is collected and used to power a generator, which sends electricity onto a power grid.

Dickinson acknowledged that while some folks see the humor in his predicament, he takes the fire seriously.

``It's a nuisance, and obviously we are trying to get it resolved,'' he said. ``Everybody's been really patient.''

Curler's Suspension Causes a Stir
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: January 28, 2005
Filed at 4:58 p.m. ET

Curling has officially hit the big time in Olympic sports. The curlers don't have a fat TV contract yet, and Nike isn't trotting out ads featuring them and their brooms. But seven years after making its debut as a medal sport at the Nagano Olympics, curling has what's become a rite of passage these days: its first doping violation.

Now put the stones and brooms down, it's not quite what it sounds. Mitchell Marks, a promising young curler, was suspended for two years because he refused to take an out-of-competition drug test in October, an automatic violation.

But his suspension has caused quite the stir because it's believed to be the first in the sport's history and he's, well, a curler.

``I really can't believe it's gotten this much attention,'' Marks said. ``Knowing all the stuff going on now, I probably would take it if they knocked on my door because of all the negative publicity on my name.''

Curling may be mocked as shuffleboard on ice or the X Games' answer to housecleaning, with athletes who look more like the next-door neighbor than a finely-honed physical specimen. But it takes cunning and skill. Teams start by sliding a 42-pound stone down a sheet of ice toward a circular target about 93 feet away. Two members of the four-person team escort the stone, vigorously brushing the ice to melt the top layer and reduce friction so the stone travels straighter and further.

The rest of the game is spent trying to smack the opponent's stones out of the target area while trying to prevent their own from suffering a similar, disastrous fate.

``I was in eighth grade when I started. I went to a junior open house, got to throw a few stones, and loved it ever since,'' said Marks, now 22. ``It's just fun, just the psychology of the game.''

Which is what made his suspension so stunning.

``Curling's not a big-time professional sport where drugs are an issue, and they're not an issue with Mitchell,'' said Craig Brown, a top U.S. curler and one of Marks' teammates last season.

Brown and Marks' team advanced to the semifinals of the national championships last season, putting them in the pool of athletes eligible for testing by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. On Oct. 30, Marks was selected for an out-of-competition test.

The automatic penalty for refusing to take such a test is a two-year suspension, and Marks was well aware of it.

``The rules are very clear,'' said Travis Tygart, USADA's general counsel. ``When you're in the out-of-competition testing pool, you have obligation to update us with your information. If you're not competing at that level, you have to send in formal written notice of retirement.''

Marks didn't compete this season because he was finishing his sociology degree at the University of Wisconsin. He knew he wouldn't be competing next year, either, because USA Curling is picking the team for the Turin Olympics next month. The only problem was he'd never notified USADA, so the agency said he had to take the test.

After weighing his options, Marks decided he wasn't going to bother. He refused the test, and was suspended.

``I didn't really like the whole process,'' he said. ``I guess if you want to play their game, you have to play by their rules. But I'm not playing their game.''

Doping violations by any athlete are big news these days -- as Marks soon discovered. Friends read about him in papers across the country. One heard someone on the radio talking about it. It was a topic for discussion in a curling chat room.

Marks insists he had no reason other than principle to refuse the test. He's not taking any kind of drugs, he said, pointing to his recent application to the Madison Police Department.

``Obviously I wouldn't be doing (drugs) if I'm applying for that job,'' he said. ``I really can't change some people's minds. People are going to think what they want to think, regardless of what you tell them.''

But rules are rules. The Olympic movement can't make exceptions in its pursuit of drug cheats, no matter how frivolous the offense might seem.

``The lesson learned from it all?'' Marks said. ``I guess take the test when they come knock on my door.''

that's it. a bit anticlimactic, don't you think? maybe you just have to be in boston to feel the exhilaration. well, no more curse talk from me for another 80 or so years.