No news is good news

This story, over at the Daily Dish, has me trying to work out why the biggest online news aggregator in America, The Drudge Report, is right-leaning. I don't mean the personal reasons why it's editor, Matt Drudge, leans to the right but why it might be that a news-website that leans to the right might be more successful than one that leans to the left.

It could just be that it is better, that Drudge has killer tabloid instincts, etc. But there's more to it than that, I think. Surveying a recent page of his, at random, I found stories about:—

— how Netanyahu is "defying" Obama
— Muslim riots in Athens
— a shoot out at a Sikh temple in Vienna
— a guy who mowed down a traffic cop
— another flu alert
— a NYPD forensics investigator stabbed to death in bed
— the Lars Vin Trier film Anti-Christ getting an award at Cannes
— British banks "revolting" against Obama's tax plan
— Iran wanting nukes

You get the picture: the world is a scary place. Muslims lurk around every corner. People are getting knifed in their beds. The French worship at the altar of the anti-christ. And our president is a wimp. Compare that to the leading liberal news aggregator, The Huffington Post, which today has stories about:

— Timothy Geithner disclaiming the accusation of "socialism"

— Colin Powell calling Rush Limbaugh "shrill"

— A woman in her fifties dying of swine flu

— the possibility of Afghanistan becoming second Iraq

— Bill Maher defending himself Sean Hannity

— Cannes gives top honors to film about Nazism

— An Iraqi interrogator calling Cheney on his facts

And so on. The only people dying of flu are old. The French know great filmmaking when they see it. America is not turning communist. The world is not such a scary place. The only scary thing about the world, in fact, is that it contains Republicans. The bulk of the left's stories involve defending themselves from the falsehoods and exaggerations coming from the right. One lights fires; the other puts them out. 

There's no question which world-view I find more helpful and yet the fact is: I read the Drudge Report way more than I read the Huffington Post. I'm tempted to explain that via an old debate that started up in England a few years back, when Martin Lewis, one of the BBC's blander anchors, complained that they reported too much bad news. His opinion was ridiculed by many senior journalists: what does he want? Stories about meals on wheels and puppy dogs? Most news, they pointed out, tends to be bad news by definition. I think much the same way about Drudge. Scary news is better than non-scary news. And the right has better scare stories than the left. Therefore, it makes sense that the biggest news aggregator in the country would be right-leaning. I'm none too certain about this theory but will continue to ponder the matter further.

The sidewalks of New York

Whenever someone asks you why I am in New York, tradition dictates that I reply with a sentence that uses the words "dream" or "opportunity". If pressed, I point to the fact that I was offered a job here, although the magazine I came out for is no longer in existence and the number of stamps in my passport tells you I was headed here long before that. America has been in my head for as long as I can remember. The simplest and most truthful answer to why I am here, in fact, is, "the sidewalks."

My vision of New York has always been bound up with its sidewalks. I can remember seeing Sesame Street when I was eight, or thereabouts, and being struck by them — big concrete walkways, the concrete a much lighter colour than it is in the UK, with the neatest of grooves separating each slab. They seemed so wide and inviting, big boulevards crying out for all manner of activity. The sidewalk, after all, is where most kids get to roam free. Roads are off limits: noisy dangerous places you cross with your mother attached to your elbow. And buildings are boring: the places the adults go to do their business. Which leaves, you, aged 8, with the sidewalk. That's your kingdom, as a kid. That's where you roam free.

We didn't have sidewalks in the UK; we had pavements, a very different thing, narrower, pinched walkways between roads and buildings which people funnelled down on their way to work. Ech. Some kids skateboarded on them, others rollerskated. I used to draw on them, using coloured chalks, outside my mother's shop in Brighton: pictures of Superman, mostly, and Batman, and Darth Vadar. I had a hat which passersby dropped money into, thus supplementing my pocket money so I could then go buy more Superman comics to study and transcribe. I used to get quite a lot of money, although once I was accosted by a crusty old man who told me it was "disgusting" that a child as young as I was was should be begging. I told him that I wasn't begging, I was drawing, but he didn't listen and staulked off.

What I really needed, of course, was a New York sidewalk. People draw on them all the time. They've got acres of room, plenty of admiring pedestrians and nobody calling them beggars. They're street artists. I'm no longer drawing, but sometimes, I'll be walking down one of the avenues, the sunlight will hit the sidewalk, dazzlingly, and I'll look about and think: this is the life. A nice, big, wide sidewalk. I could do anything.

Clues in search of a mystery

There's a moment near the beginning of the new Tom Hanks film, Angels and Demons, when Ewan McGregor, who plays a young priest, explains that he once joined the Swiss Gaurd and was trained to fly a helicopter. There's no reason for the speech except to set up the denoument in which McGregor leaps behind the controls of a helicopter and saves the day. The filmmakers were presumably worried that the sight of a priest piloting a copter might otherwise prove incongruous. What's incongruous to me is that they bothered at all. I mean what was it about that detail, in the blizzard of bullshit that is the rest of the movie, that cried out for their urgent attention? It's weird what some people get hung up on. Far more pressing to me, for instance, was how the clues to a current-day terrorist plot happen to be contained in a number of prominent Roman tourist sites dating back several centuries — St Peters, a Bernini sculpture, the manuscripts of Galilleo. Did the criminals nip back in time and plant the clues, just on the off chance that someone would want to solve the mystery, a few centuries later? Why would they do that? Wouldn't they want to get off scot-free? This movie is bonkers. I spent most of it staring at Tom Hanks hair, as I tend to do these days, impressed by his implants but certain they were beyond my price range. Why can Nick Cage not afford hair like that?

So what's he up to?

What would happen if the rule of law were to be suddenly admitted to Guantanamo? Most likely, the innocent would go free, some of the guilty would be prosecuted, but many would walk, irregardless of guilt or innocence, because the case against them was so tainted my the torture used to extract it. They might even have legal recourse to sue the people who had tortured them and the Bush officials who facilitated that torture. That will not happen of course. No sitting president can risk the possibility of freeing terrorists who later return to the battle field. Therefore, it follows, the rule of law can only be partially, or incrementally, applied. It's a little like like a drunk that is trying to get sober: sometimes, a drink is even necessary to stop someone dying of withdrawal. That's the best argument I can come up with as to why Obama has seen fit to re-instate, with modifications, the military tribunals established by Bush: the system set in place was so thoroughly corrupt, that to suddenly go cold turkey would most likely kill the patient.

I am going to have to take it on trust that were Obama to design the system himself, it would look nothing like Bush's. I am also going to assume that there exists a category of prisoner whom the government is 99% certain are dangerous terrorists, but against whom the case is so tainted that they cannot be let near a court. That puts me two assumptions away from being disappointed. It's uncomfortable.

America's Next Top Model: Season 12

I am proud of my abysmal record in picking the winners of America's Next Top Model. Season after season, my pick gets booted off by Tyra often for the very same reasons I liked them. Seeing as Tyra is a maniac, this feels like vindication. "She was too good for them," I think, as they skip gaily off the stage to better lives for themselves far away from the snarling bearpit that is the judging panel. But this season I excelled myself, picking Natalie and Fo as finalists, with Fo winning. Naturally, Natalie went out four weeks before the end, followed by Fo a week later (for her height!?). Feeling like I had done pretty well for myself, I decided to cave and meet the Tyra halfway. I would play by her rules, just to show that I really could pick the winners — I was just choosing not to. Out of the remaining three girls — Allison, Aminat and Teyona — I picked Aminat to win. She was the first to go out. Now it was down to two: I chose Allison. She lost to Teyona. That means I got three seperate chances to pick the winner, with increasingly favourable odds, and I got it wrong every time, right through to the end. Only the end of the compeititon — the sight of the winner, Teyona, standing there, weeping — stopped me from getting it wrong again.

This is disconcerting. All the time that I was picking the non-winner so consistently, I felt that I was, in essence picking the winners, but in reverse: you simply took the opposite girl to the one I chose and — presto — you had the winning girl. But Tyra has really screwed with my head this time. Even when I attempted that process of reverse-engineered selection, I still picked losers. This leave me with two options: either I am genuinely and randomly clueless, or Tyra really is, as I have long suspected, a cruel and wicked God, impenetrable to fumbling mortal minds.

Seriously, a New Deal

"More recent presidents have had trouble making their labels stick. Mr. Clinton called for a New Covenant in a series of speeches at Georgetown in 1991 as he ran for president, but pollsters turned thumbs down and he largely dropped it. George W. Bush championed an Ownership Society when he ran for re-election in 2004, but that also made little public impression.

Robert Dallek, a presidential historian, suspects Mr. Obama’s expression may suffer the same fate.“I’m not sure what it means,” Mr. Dallek said. “The successful slogans tied in a convincing way to current events. T.R.’s Square Deal, F.D.R.’ s New Deal, J.F.K.’s New Frontier and L.B.J.’s Great Society all resonated because they summed up what their presidents intended and what the public was eager for at the time. I guess you could say the same for the New Foundation, but foundation doesn’t strike me as a word people will comfortably take to.” — NYT

New foundations has problems: it's hard to imagine giving a building a new foundation. New foundation means new building. You can't just let it hang in the air while you slip in and replace only the bottom. It's like taking a card from the bottom of the deck, or removing a tablecloth while people are still eating.

Sugar on top

"You know you've arrived when, at the tender ages of 32 and 29, your films merit their own 'ism'" — from my interview with Ryan Fleck and Anna Bode, the directors of Sugar, in The Guardian

Those torture pics

Some of the photographs that Obama just suppressed have, nonetheless, come to light, courtesy of the Australian news channel SBS. Warning: the pic to the left is the least dismaying. Meanwhile, evidence continues to accumulate that Cheney ordered "enhanced interrogation techniques" to be used, not in order to stop further attacks, but in order to prove a non-existent link between Al Qeada and Iraq, as the pressure to justify the war reached its high-point. From McClatchy:

Interrogators at Guantanamo and other prison camps were ordered to find evidence of alleged cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein — despite CIA reports that there were only sporadic, insignificant contacts between the militant Islamic group and the secular Iraqi dictatorship.

During the same period, two alleged senior al Qaida operatives in CIA custody were waterboarded repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times and Khalid Sheik Mohammed at least 183 times.

A U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Paul Burney, told the Army Inspector General's office in 2006 that during the same period, interrogators at Guantanamo were under pressure to produce evidence of al Qaida-Iraq ties, but were unable to do so.

"The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results," Burney said, according excerpts of an interview published in a declassified Senate Armed Services Committee report released on April 22.

Cheney is probably right to bet that popular opinion will come to his rescue all the time that torture is justified by the 'ticking-time' bomb scenario; but the possibility that he ordered it to prop up the teetering casus belli for the Iraq invasion will not, I believe, be looked on so kindly. Fighting terrorism is popular; the Iraq war is not.

Ol' blue eyes

Scorsese has announced plans for a Sinatra movie, prompting a flurry of speculation as to cenral casting. Nikki Finke has Johnny Depp as the front runner but he's too pensive-technical for my tastes. My wife just came up with the perfect suggestion: Daniel Craig. It gets better the more I think about it; just the right mixture of knuckled intensity and powder-blue smoulder power, plus he brings his own tux. And while we're at it, for Dean Martin: Michael Madsen. Ava Gardner: Ashley Judd.

Tick, tock...

The moment Nancy Pelosi swung into the frame as a possible target in the torture debate, I rejoiced; maybe with a Democrat as a target, the Republicans might have more of an incentive to put their shoulders to the wheel and — without knowing they were doing so —  ramp up the pressure for an investigation. Bingo: Today, Karl Rove calls her an "accomplice to torture." 

American facts

My novel appears to have found an American publisher so naturally I'm petrified. It has American characters, you see, and American settings and American pop culture references, the whole works. There's only one patch of Englishness in the whole thing and that's the hero. And while this was fine all the time it was only being published in London, where nobody really knows the names of the girls on America's Next Top Model or which team made it to the Superbowl in February of 2008 and whether they did so by means of a 28-yard touch-down, the chances that I have made some egregious error, and maybe even insulted my host country, have just increased exponentially. Obama is president — I got that much right.

One less for Cheney to worry about

"A former CIA high-value detainee, who provided bogus information that was cited by the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war, has died in a Libyan prison, an apparent suicide, according to a Libyan newspaper.

Libi was captured fleeing Afghanistan in late 2001, and he vanished into the secret detention system run by the Bush administration. He became the unnamed source, according to Senate investigators, behind Bush administration claims in 2002 and 2003 that Iraq had provided training in chemical and biological weapons to al-Qaeda operatives. The claim was most famously delivered by then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in his address to the United Nations in February 2003.

Libi made up the story about Iraqi training after he was beaten and subjected to a "mock burial" by his Egyptian interrogators, who put him in a cramped box for 17 hours. Libi recanted the story after being returned to CIA custody in 2004.

"I would speculate that he was missing because he was such an embarrassment to the Bush administration," said Tom Malinowski, the head of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch. "He was Exhibit A in the narrative that tortured confessions contributed to the massive intelligence failure that preceded the Iraq war."

The Libyan newspaper Oed reported Sunday that Libi was found dead in his cell after killing himself, but added that friends of the 46-year-old former preacher, who ran a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan, questioned the alleged cause of death" — Washington Post

One of the ironies of Cheney's position these days is that he is beholden to the opinion polls which he once affected to despise. From a legal standpoint he is probably guilty of war crimes. His one hope is that even if he is guilty, the American public are not in the mood to see him tried. And so he must double down, take to the airwaves, to acquit himself in the court of public opinion.

Good love in the house

Michael Steele's cringe-inducing co-option of black street slang has been a regular feature of this political semester. The other night, it met with a withering response from the only person on the planet with any authority to call him on it. "Where's Michael Steele?" asked Obama at the Washington Correspondent's dinner on Saturday night. "Michael Steele is in the house tonight. Or, as he would say, 'in the heezy.' Wassup? Where is Michael?" One of his better jokes, I thought. Until I heard Steele's response today: apparently Obama's shout-out constituted "good love between brothers." Incredible.

Live long and prosper

"I've met him twice. The first time was a couple years ago, very early on when he had just announced his candidacy. He was in Los Angeles, speaking at a luncheon we were invited to. There was a very small crowd - minuscule compared to the crowd that he gathered later - at a private home in Los Angeles. And we were standing on the back patio, waiting for him. And he came through the house, saw me and immediately put his hand up in the Vulcan gesture. He said, "They told me you were here." We had a wonderful brief conversation and I said, "It would be logical if you would become president." — Leonard Nimoy

Watching the new film I definitely felt a mind meld of sorts going on between Spock and Obama. He's mixed-race. He radiates skinny logician cool. He believes in the rule of law and follows a course of sober intergalactic diplomacy. Kirk, on the other hand, is played by Chris Pine as a scrappy hothead — a n'er-do well bar-brawler with a famous father, who finally follows his footsteps into the starfleet. Remind you of anyone? He even refuses to negotiate with terrorists — sorry Romulans — after the way they jerked his dad around.... More of my thoughts on the Star Trek reboot at the Daily Beast here.

Opening weekend guess: $75 million.

TPES round-up

My podcast about interviewing J G Ballard for The New Yorker here. My interview with Millicent Monks for The Guardian here. My book can be pre-ordered on Amazon here.
I'm currently laboring to finish a piece about John Cheever for Arete; someone remind me never to write a profile of a short story-writer ever again: all those stories, all those characters, each one demanding your utmost attention and most concentrated skills of precis. Next time could I please have a writer famous for a single, long masterpiece? A one-hit wonder like Kerouac, or Exley, please.

Casting Dick Cheney

Which movie bad guy is Dick Cheney? A debate has started up after Maureen Down reported that George Lucas rejected the analogy to Darth Vader: Cheney, Lucas said, is the wicked emperor who pulled the strings and turned his protégé to the dark side.

Lucas explained politely as I listened contritely. Anakin Skywalker is a promising young man who is turned to the dark side by an older politician and becomes Darth Vader. “George Bush is Darth Vader,” he said. “Cheney is the emperor.”

The New Yorker's George Packer objects:

Bush as Vader is ludicrous. The comparison betrays a failure on Lucas’s part to understand the resonance of his own characters, which explains a lot, especially about Episodes I & VI. Other than being the father of twins, Anakin Skywalker, born a slave, with extraordinary abilities (the “best pilot in the galaxy”), has almost nothing in common with Bush, born to privilege and not much of an advertisement for the notion of a natural aristocracy. Is Jenna going to be Luke and bring him back from the Dark Side? If we are going to play this game, Bush has more in common with Count Dooku, the Jedi dropout turned warmonger, or, better yet, Jar Jar Binks, who, after a buffoonish youth, improbably rises to a prominent political position and obliviously fronts for the soon-to-be emperor in getting the “Star Wars” equivalent of the Patriot Act passed. Of course, all this can be taken too far (Condoleezza Rice as Asajj Ventress), but one thing is clear: Donald Rumsfeld is Grand Moff Tarkin.

So who is Cheney? Andrew Sullivan has been running a tally of contenders: Dr Strangelove, Colonal Kurtz, Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men. New York's David Edelstein suggests:

"Cheney is Palpatine with a soupçon of Sauron, a pinch of Voldemort, a dash of Mabuse, a jigger of Fu, with some Elmer Fudd and Richard Nixon folded in."

Lucas was right, I think: Cheney is Palpatine. A comparison to one character does not imply a corresponding comparison must exist for the entire cast or we would get nowhere. Which isn't to say that Lucas's films don't work as a broad allegory, mapping America's imperial leanings over the last few decades. In the first Star Wars, it was clear: the good guys were the rebels, mostly Americans but also inclusive of Wookies and droids, as befits a country built on its immigrants. They believed in Force that surrounds us all, binds us all together, and which was open to everyone, even a poor farmboy from Tatooine. The bad guys were the Europeans: they looked like Germans, sounded like Brits and disposed of their garbage like the French, which is to say: by means of hefty taxes and heavy centralised government.

By the second film and third films, this had begun to change: Luke was revealed as the Son of Darth Vadar and the brother of s princess. He was no farm boy. He had blue blood running in his veins. The saga took on a more dynastic, European tinge: the Force was no longer open to all but a matter of good breeding.* By the time of the prequels, this Europeanisation was complete, both in the film's gargantuan Renaissence-fair set designs and ceremonial deference towards titular privelage ("The count, your highness...."). Lucas was like one of those self-made American millionaires (Hearst, Hughes) who go shopping for a castle. The republic was shown voting in the tyrant who would centralise all executive power and turn it into an evil empire. "This is how liberty dies — to thunderous applause." Voila: the Florida recount.

*Talking of which Publius has a very good take on Republican fear-mongering re cloning.

The first one hundred

From a new Flickr photostream marking the president's first 100 days. Slate (below) marks the occasion on Facebook. 

	Barack Obama joined the Washington, D.C. network.
	Barack Obama is taking the oath of office.
	Barack Obama is taking the oath of office.
	Barack Obama deleted the group I'm a Lobbyist AND I Work at the White House!
	Barack Obama deleted the group Guantanamo Bay Detainees 4EVA. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed likes this.
	Reggie Love wrote on Beyonce Knowles' Wall. Not ready to put a ring on it, but I do like it.

Movie of the year

When I first saw the trailer for Anvil! The Story of Anvil, I thought it was a put-on — a Spinal Tap reheat. Indeed, it features a drummer called Robb Reiner, a volume dial that really does go to eleven, and a hilarious disquisition on the origins of a song called Thumb-Hang ("its from the Spanish Inquisition"). But Anvil are real alright and the film is a joy — funny and touching and rousing, in large part because of the lead singer Lips, a wide-eyed, big-hearted overflowing spillage of a man who exhorts his band through thick and thin with speeches that veer between indefatigable optimism and outright delusion. After everything on their tour goes wrong, he points out, “at least there was a tour for it to go wrong on.” Look on the bright side, he says, as he drives back to his job at a children's catering company in frozen Ontario. "It could never be worse than it already is." By the end of the movie I was tapping my foot to their awful, earsplitting songs, like the proudest of mothers, and I left the theatre with tears streaking my face. Just glorious.

If its not one thing it's another

“The Zen experience of forgetting the self was very natural to me. I had already been engaged in forgetting and abandoning the self in my childhood, which was filled with the fear of how unreal things seemed. But that forgetting was pathological. I always had some deeper sense that I wasn’t really there, that my life and my marriages didn’t seem real. In therapy with Jeffrey I began to realize this feeling of invisibility wasn’t just a peculiar experience but was maybe the central theme of my life." — A Zen Master who entered a course of psychotherapy to deal with the loss of self he attained through meditating.

Quote of the day

"Yes it's against the law but there's a higher moral law at work here. That's what Dr King was all about" — Pat Buchanan, defending torture on Hardball

Ghandi, too, if I remember correctly. 

Pretty much how I feel

I've changed my mind over the whole torture prosecution debate. I've been inclined to trust Obama's maneuvring on the subject — maybe a prosecution would be too disruptive, maybe it would impede his ability to do his job, etc, etc. But yesterday we found out something important: the factor on which the decision to torture hinged — the piece of information Bush and Cheney were so desperate to get their hands on — was the phantom link between Al Qeada and Iraq.

The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, what led them to ramp up the interrogation on KSM and Zubaydah, waterboarding them 266 times in a single month was no 'ticking time bomb' scenario, but their desire to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections — an act of such heartbreakingly wicked it's difficult to know what to say except: time to prosecute.

Handshake earthquake

"The importance of the Chavez hand shake is the report you did just now, on the jump in book sales from #54,000 to number 2. Everywhere in Latin America, enemies of America are going to use the picture of Chavez smiling and being with the President as proof that Chavez is now legitimate, that he's acceptable. He's a dictatorial figure, he's an anti American figure."

Newt Gingrich on Fox News, reacting to the calamity that was Obama's handshake with Hugo Chavez. Numerous bloggers have already pointed out the number of former presidents who have indulged in this nefarious activity — Kennedy/Khrushchev, Nixon/Brezhnev, Reagan/Gorbachev — but at least grant that Gingrich is consistent. It was he who, in 1985, predicted the sky would fall following Reagan's rapprochement with Gorbachev, calling it "the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Chamberlain in 1938 at Munich." Thank goodness we have Newt around to protect us.

Tortured logic

"We have laid it all out for our enemies. Publicizing the techniques does grave damage to our national security by ensuring they can never be used again" — Anonymous Bush administration official, protesting Obama's release of the torture memos.

Isn't that the point? I would have thought that Obama's ban on torture (effective Jan 21) was the thing that tipped off our enemies that we weren't going to be torturing them. He wasn't too secretive about it as I remember. I saw it on TV.*

“I don't believe Obama would intentionally endanger the nation, so it must be that he thinks either 1. the previous administration, including the CIA professionals who have defended this program, is lying about its importance and effectiveness, or 2. he believes we are no longer really at war and no longer face the kind of grave threat to our national security this program has protected against.”

The former. To date, the Bush administration have not been able to name a single piece of actionable intelligence that came from torturing suspects, although in the WSJ today Mukasey and Hadley trot out the usual claims about Abu Zubaydah:

The terrorist Abu Zubaydah... disclosed some information voluntarily. But he was coerced into disclosing information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh, another of the planners of Sept. 11, who in turn disclosed information which -- when combined with what was learned from Abu Zubaydah -- helped lead to the capture of KSM and other senior terrorists, and the disruption of follow-on plots aimed at both Europe and the U.S.

Zubaydah is the suspect they waterboarded 83 times, and whose coerced testimony triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantom plots — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty — none of which turned out to have any basis in reality. “What we got was pabulum,” said FBI agent Jack Cloonan. "We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms," said one intelligence official.

Instead, watching his torment caused great distress to his captors, the official said. Even for those who believed that brutal treatment could produce results, the official said, “seeing these depths of human misery and degradation has a traumatic effect.”

That's as good as it gets — the administration's one success story. Asked by a journalist whether he knew of any attacks on America that had been disrupted by information gained from torture, FBI director Robert Mueller at first declined to answer. “I’m really reluctant to answer that,” he said, then paused, looked at an aide, and added: “I don’t believe that has been the case.”

*Former CIA director Michael Hayden was allowed to get away with this on Fox news today. “It describes the box within which Americans will not go beyond. To me, that’s very useful for our enemies."

I understand that Fox is the channel of barbarians, but even so. The argument is so fallacious, it barely even registers as an argument: it just clears its throat and implodes. If the interrogation methods are no longer being used, why would the legal justifications used to justify those methods be of any intelligence value to our enemies? Not just that but "very very useful"? And yet, incredibly, this appears to be the main pro-torture talking point coming in response to Obama's release of those memos. Even more incredibly, it is getting repeated on news channels — and not just Fox but MSNBC and CNN — where it is listened to by news anchors who nod, as if they were hearing sentences in English that reasonable people might be expected to consider. Sometimes I wonder if the news media's dedication to the notion of fair-mindedness would one day lead them to say, "yes but, in all fairness, some would point out that 2 plus 2 equals five." How nonsensical does an argument have to get for them to intercede and help out? Hayden is dribbling soup down his shirt — he's whispering to the faeries at the bottom of the garden — and they're sitting there nodding, sagely.

Showing great enterprise

I have to say: I'm excited. I am far from being a Trekkie, or even on the footslopes of Trekkiedom, but I always loved the Starship Enterprise itself.* No space ship design has come close for distinctiveness, although I certainly was a big fan of the x-wing and the Nostromo. Above all I love the delicateness of the stems on which the cabin-saucer and side rockets sit — exactly the sort of ergonomic elegance that zero-air resistance might allow. In the new posters (left), it looks like the sort of shape that might form when molten glass is dropped into water.

*The man who designed it, Matt Jeffries, flew B-17, B-24, B-25 bombers in the second world war.

Reclaiming "socialism"

A new Rasmussen poll finds that while 53 per cent of Americans think “capitalism” is better than “socialism,” 20 per cent think socialism is better and 27 per cent aren’t sure which of the two is better. Few can fail to be delighted by this ascent of American politics into the realms of higher nonsense. It's not too hard to see what's happened here: the right have called Obama's programs socialist enough times that the word has come to mean "whatever it is Obama is doing"; and enough people like whatever it is Obama is doing, that socialism has been reclaimed to mean "the thing that 53% of the country voted for." Heaven.

Cheney vs Obama

I've been thinking long and hard about what might motivate former vice-president Cheney to say that Obama's repeal of the Bush torture program has made America "less safe." It seems politically unwise: Obama is the only thing standing between the vice-president and prosecution. It also seems to kick up another unforseen consequence: if he re-arms the issue and pushes anough people to wonder whether Obama has indeed made them less safe, Obama will be forced to prove him wrong. That will mean an investigation into what intelligence, exactly, the torture program gave us. How is Cheney served by this? The last thing he wants is an investigation of any sort. It's very puzzling. Is it rage?

Trailer of the year

Duplicity: I was had

It's official: I'm not as smart as I thought I was. I didn't love Duplicity, you see. I really tried to pay attention, too. Sat there with my head in my hand, eyes narrowed, brow furrowing, determined to get the most out of it. "This is as good as it gets," said Variety. "However you describe it, Duplicity is superior entertainment, the most elegantly pleasurable movie of its kind to come around in a very long time," said A O Scott. " If what thrills you is the swift-moving, unrelenting contest between equal and opposing forces, then the movies you seek out are surely the great romantic comedies of the studio era, verbal boxing matches that draw blood and end in kisses."

Count me in. Except that for a large chunk of time — almost (but not quite) the whole movie — I had no idea what was going on with Clive Owen and Julia Roberts. Were they gaming the company? Each other? Both? Neither? Are we supposed not to know? Maybe some people like the confusion — a sure sign that something superior is going on. I'll put up with this sort of thing for a bit, but eventually the suspicion begins to dawn that the movie is being complicated, rather than complex, that it is patterned, rather than plotted, and then I check out.

I had the same deal with LA Confidential — another complicated movie that everyone loved and left me cold. Duplicity didn't leave me cold. The script is lean and economical, and its satire is beautifully done. Tonally, it finds the same sweet spot as The Right Stuff — sending up this world while never failing to make it matter. I never tired of seeing Paul Giametti ranting about his opponent's new creams and lotions. But over the long haul I found myself adopting the same defensive crouch David Mamet induces in me — a twist overload. The assumption that nothing is at it seems has its own predictability, after a while. You sit there going "that's not going to turn out to be true" or "I bet she tricks him". And you're always right.

I read somewhere that butterfly wingspan only reach a span of two feet (or something like that) before they collapse. In other words, there's a inbuilt evolutionary limit to the size butterflies can be. I feel the same way about movie plots: there's a certain level of complexity you shouldn't go beyond. What's going to happen now, of course, is that Duplicity is not going to do as well as some people expect and then the critics are going to start blaming the multiplex or the average Joe or the dumbing-down of America or Jaws. It's nothing to do with any of those things.

The troublesome twos

Obama's bowling gaffe just goes to prove a theory of mine: mistakes comes in twos. Trying to correct gaffe number one (the public's perception of his bowling skills) he commits another (he compares it to the special olympics). It's always the way. Its just when you've successfully avoided stepping in a puddle that you walk into a lamp-post. I don't think it has to do with karma, or an ironic God or anything like that. I think there is a direct causal relationship behind Sod's law. It is precisely because you have negotiated threat A that you relax your guard sufficiently to succumb to threat B. Joking about his bowling score, Obama probably felt exhilaration (finally, that alabatross put to bed) and the exhilaration opened him up.

Pet peeve #34: ladders in the street

Confronted with a ladder across the sidewalk, you have two choices. Either you walk under it, or you walk around it. But it's not as simple as that is it? If you walk around it, you are announcing to the world "I am a superstitious sort and prefer not to talk under ladders in the street." If you walk under it, you are defiantly thumbing your nose at such nonsense. But what if you have no position on the matter and simply want to walk along the street, uninterrupted by demands to declare your position on the matter?

I'm not superstitious but have found that if I walk under the ladder, I spend the remainder of my walk wondering if there is something to it after all, and worrying that my defiance will not go unnoticed. On the other hand, walking around it, I feel stupid and superstitious. It's lose-lose. All I want to do is get from one end of the street to the other.

Who killed the horror movie?

From my column for The Daily Beast.

EXT. Night. A campfire burns in the middle of the forest. Around it are Michael Myers, darning his mask in preparation for the forthcoming Halloween 2. Next to him, lying down, is Jason Voorhees—wearing a neck brace, his arm in a splint, injuries he sustained from the last Friday the 13th. Tending to the fire, Freddy Krueger, now an old man, his blades rusty and broken. He is using them to open a can of beans.

The camera draws near.

MICHAEL (comforting): Don’t take it too personally.

JASON: It's hard not to. I mean I can’t believe I fell for that. A wood chipper. Jesus. That is worse than anything I ever did.

MICHAEL: Way worse.

JASON: It’s these new kids. They’re not playing the game the way it should be played. It’s all cellphones and pagers one minute and then they’re coming at you with baseball bats and knives and God knows what else. Whatever happened to taking a shower? Running in high heels? Losing the car keys?

MICHAEL (wistfully): Taking a walk in the forest.

JASON: Yeah right. ”Is anybody there?”

MICHAEL (girlishly): “I won’t be long.....”

Jason mimes bringing a machete down through the air, but cricks his neck and winces. Carefully, he massages his shoulder.

MICHAEL: It’s Scream. That film screwed everything up for us. Now everyone knows our shit.”

JASON: Bunch of artsy-fartsys Scooby-Doo crap is what it was. Putting ideas in their heads. They would never have thought of a wood chipper before. No way.

MICHAEL: If anyone’s feeding someone into a wood chipper it's you, Jay.

JASON: It’s fucked up.

MICHAEL: It's disrespectful is what it is.

They both shake their heads....

My favorite news story of 2009 so far

EASTON, Pa. - A man accused of driving drunk said Pennsylvania courts have no jurisdiction over him because he's his own country. Scott Alan Witmer, who represented himself, said he believes police lack jurisdiction to pull him over. "I live inside myself, not in Pennsylvania," he claimed Tuesday, prompting Northampton County Judge Leonard Zito to reset Witmer's bail. Witmer said he was challenging the traffic stop that led to his arrest and said he believes in certain laws, not all of them. "Don't all our souls live within ourselves?" he asked, pointing to his body. "Isn't this where you really live?"

Indiana Jones And The Missing Camel Chase

In the summer of 1978, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Lawrence Kasdan met to hash out their ideas for Raiders of the Last Ark. They met on 5 consecutive 9-hour days at the L.A. home of Lucas's assistant Jane Bay. "We had a tape recorder going and George essentially guided the story process," said Spielberg. "And that's where the fantasy of all our pent-up, wet-movie dreams coalesced. Most of the time we were on our feet, trying to out-shout each other with ideas." For the first time, those conversations have been published. They make for fascinating reading.

SPIELBERG: I like the idea that she's a heavy drinker and our hero doesn't drink at all. She gets drunk a lot. She's beautiful and she gets really sexy when she's drunk, and silly. And he doesn't touch the stuff.

LUCAS: I don't want to soften her. I like the fact that it's greed. I like all the hard stuff, but you're going to love here... I was thinking that this old guy could have been his mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.

KASDAN: And he was forty-two.

L: He hasn't seen her in twelve years. Now she's twenty-two. It's a real strange relationship.

S: She had better be older than twenty-two.

L: He's thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she was only twelve. It would be amusing to make her slightly young at the time.

S: And promiscuous. She came onto him.

L: Fifteen is right on the edge. I know it's an outrageous idea, but it is interesting. Once she's sixteen or seventeen it's not interesting anymore. But if she was fifteen and he was twenty-five and they actually had an affair the last time they met. And she was madly in love with him and he...

S: She has pictures of him.

L: It would be nice if they left in a huff, they fought or something. He left rather pissed. I don't think he would leave without the pendant. That's the only thing that bothers me about that.

S: So he goes upstairs and stays up, plotting how he's going to take it off her.

L: That makes him into a real rat.

K: That's all right. He never does it. What he does is just the opposite, save her life.

L: No matter how you do it, the fact that he thought about it is the rat part.

S: Rhett Butler was a rat.

L: He wasn't a real rat --

S: He proved himself by raising her family. Before that he was a gambler, dealt with cheap ladies.

L: There's a difference between being a rat and somebody who's having fun. He never hurt anybody.

K: I'm a little confused about Indiana at this point. I thought he'd do anything for this pendant.

L: But he still has to have some moral scruples. He has to be a person we can look up to. We're doing a role model for little kids, so we have to be careful. We need someone who's honest, trusting and true. But at the same time he's confronted with this difficult problem. We have a great thing when she won't give it to him. She doesn't like him...

+++++++++

L: What can he chase them with? What if he jumps on a camel?

S: I love it. It's a great idea. There's never been a camel chase before.

L: Is this camel going to chase a car?

S: You know how fast a camel can run? Not only that, he can jump over vegetable carts and things. It could be a funny chase that ends in tragedy. You're laughing your head off and suddenly. "My God, she's dead."

L: We've added another million dollars.

S: Not really. How much trouble can a camel be?

The thought that counts

The London press are outraged over Obama's recent gift to Gordon Brown — 25 DVDs including Star Wars, The Godfather and Citizen Kane. “Barack Obama, the leader of the world's richest country,” huffed the Daily Mail, “gave the Prime Minister a box set of 25 classic American films - a gift about as exciting as a pair of socks.” Brown on the other hand gave Brown a pen holder carved from the timbers of the sister ship of the one the White House desk is made from and a first edition of a seven-volume biography of Winston Churchill. I have to say that of those two gifts, I know which one I'd prefer. Surely there's one movie in those 25 that he hasn't watched?

I think this has probably less to do with Obama and more to do with the Fleet Street's desire to cast Brown as an unloved grovelling wretch. We dislike our premiers, on the whole. Any perceived slight to them only confirms their wretchedness. The British press are not complaining, they are going: look, see?

Quote of the day

"The main objections to the truth commission Sen. Leahy has been trying to organize are that it will be... nothing more than a witch hunt. Of course, the use of the phrase “witch hunt” today implies a hunt in pursuit of something that does not exist, while we are fairly certain that there were criminals in the outgoing administration who have thus far escaped the appropriate sanctions of the law." — Daniel Larison, The American Conservative

Mad as hell and not going to take it anymore

Every now and again Jon Stewart, whose shows are never less than smart, entertaining, morally grounded, etc, hits an ace. Last night's segment on CNBC had something extra — anger.

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I wish they'd told me

John Cole has some good graphs about the "socialism" ruckus, from which he deduces the following:—

The 2010 proposed rate of 39.60% = socialism.
The 2002-2008 rates of 35.00% = capitalist nirvana.
The 39.6% rate of the 1990’s = socialism.
Everything else = down the memory hole.

I don't remember America being a particularly communist country back in the nineties. Of course I only moved here in 1999, so what do I know. but I visited many times and I didn't really get that vibe off the place. You'd think news would have leaked out somehow. They have newspapers here, and TV. Wouldn't some brave American have got the news out that his country, so implacably opposed to socialism a few years earlier — they had a cold war for crissakes! for several decades! — had, in fact, succumbed to the cold clutches of Marxist-Leninism? Evidently not. The government crackdown on such dissidents must indeed have been savage and intense.

Manna from heaven

The latest hour-long Rush Limbaugh extravaganza is pure bliss. Not since Sarah Palin popped her head into our airspace has political theatre acquired such bouyancy — as light as farce. As with all the best farces, the engine of this one is powered along by a neat conundrum: someone who believes himself to be the solution to the problem is in fact its source.

For non-American readers, a quick update: four days before the inuageration, radio host Rush Limbaugh said, of Obama, “I hope he fails." The DNC used the statement to raise cash. Then, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, clad in a slinky black satin shirt, Rush re-stated his view. "What is wrong with saying I hope he fails?"

This time, things kicked up a gear. On Face the Nation Rahm Emanuel bigged up the conservative talk show host, calling him the “the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party,” in turn angering Republican National Chairman Michael Steele who dismissed Limbaugh as a mere “entertainer,” whose rhetoric was “ugly” and “incendiary.” Steele was then forced into calling Limbaugh to apologize Monday. Rep. Phil Gingrey took a shot at Limbaugh only to appear on his program the next day and plead “foot-in-mouth disease.”

The whole thing is genius: Democrats have barely had to lift a finger and suddenly the new face of the GOP is a corpulent, hateful white male in slinky black satin whom the Republicans cannot be seen to either endorse or reject. "The administration is enabling me,” Limbaugh wrote in an e-mail to Politico. “They are expanding my profile, expanding my audience and expanding my influence. An ever larger number of people are now being exposed to the antidote to Obamaism: conservatism, as articulated by me.”

The language of addiction is revealing. Limbaugh's opinions are cocaine to the GOP. He has no idea how toxic he is to them, or rather he does but he just doesn't care. He is indifferent to their fate. He is not an elected official. He does not have their interests at heart. Everyone gains from this — Rush Limbaugh, Talk Radio, Obama, the Democrats — everyone but the poor Republicans.

A stopped clock

From my review of Watchmen, which loosed a tidal wave of fanboy snark in Slate a few years back:

Whether you take this self-reflexivity as evidence of a newfound sophistication on behalf of the comic book, or as self-consciousness tricked out as superiority—that old adolescent standby—is up to you. Watchmen was unquestionably a landmark work, a masterpiece, even. Before Moore came along, comic books were not generally in the habit of quoting Nietzsche, or scrambling their time schemes, or berating their heroes for their crypto-fascist politics, or their readers for reading them. It was Moore's slightly self-negating triumph to have allowed it to do so... The last time I looked, the only ones reading Ulysses and quoting Nietzsche were teenagers. No adult has time for aesthetic "difficulty" or "self-consciousness." Life is too short. Frankly, we'd much rather be watching The Incredibles.

Thinking about it further, I'd hone my objections a little further: too much backstory and not enough story. Moore is a dead-end for movie-makers. The same thing happened with V For Vendetta, which spent its entire time taking us on a guided tour of the fascistic future it inhabited, and left approximately five minutes for an actual plot to get underway. Moore is way too fond of the world he envisions — or to be accurate, the political points scored by that vision — to ever let his plots run away with him. The clock ticks backward.

Crazy chimp attack

I had the following conversation with a homeless person the other afternoon, as I forked over a dollar. 

"Hey slim," he goes, "What do you think about the lady and the chimp?"  

"I think she crossed the line." 

"It's crossing the line, sleeping with a chimp. It's like sleeping with a dog." 

"I think she might have had problems." 

"Well, she's paying for it now...." 

This was a new one: instead of chit-chat about the weather, or the price of a big mac, he engaged me on the topics of the day, like a radio talk show host elliciting opinions from his listeners. It was very welcome: I've run out of people I can talk to about the crazy-chimp-attack story without seeming ghoulish. 

2010 movie preview

In no order, here are the films that I'm most looking forward to this year.

Public Enemies — Johnny Depp plays John Dillinger in Michael Mann's epic about 1930s gangsters. Script by Ronan Bennett and Michael Mann from Bryan Burroughs book. Described by one script review as "Heat meets The Untouchables." Mann on home turf, in period.

An Education — A Nick Hornby script, from Lynn Barber's memoir about her teenage romance with a feckless older man in 1950s Paris, with a reportedly stand-out performance from 22-year-old Carey Mulligan. Variety called it "bursting with life." Audiences at Berlin and Sundance were smitten.

The Lovely Bones — Peter Jackson's adaptation of Alice Sebold's novel starring Mark Wahlberg. This seems so unlikely, and the book was so bad, that something interesting may be brewing. (Look at what happened to The Bridges of Madison county). Fingers crossed.

Avatar — James Cameron's first film since Titanic, a sci-fi epic set on another planet which scientists are trying to colonise after Earth gets too polluted. Early script reviews suggest some Abyss-style preachiness — "Aliens meets Lord of the Rings if it were written by Al Gore." A stunning dud? 

Cheri — Michelle Pfieffer reteams with Stephen Frears in this Collette adaptation about a belle epoque brothel madam who falls in love; with a score by Alexandre Desplat.

Also looking forward to Funny People, the latest from Judd Apatow; Eddie Murphy playing Richard Pryor in James Whale's biopic, Up & Toy Story 3 (Pixar). I'm a little more circumspect about Martin Scorsese's Ashecliffe (too much through-the-looking-glass psychosis), Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds. I will be giving a wide body serve to Hillary Swank as Amelia Earhert in Amelia and Meryl Streep as Julia Childs in Julia & Julia.

Escape from the flea circus

"In 1919, Charlie Chaplin had an idea for some fleas. Wouldn't it be good, he thought, if a man accidentally opened his matchbox of performing fleas in a dosshouse? But he could find no place for the scene in the film he was shooting. He tinkered with the idea for almost a decade - wouldn't it be good if he inspected one of the fleas from a hobo's beard, only to throw it away because it wasn't one of his? - and almost got it into The Circus in 1928, and then The Great Dictator in 1940, but still it wouldn't fit. Finally, in 1952, with the communist witch-hunt closing in on him, the press baying for his blood, Chaplin made his last film on American soil, Limelight, about a washed-up clown called Calvero plying himself with greasepaint for one final hurrah. In a flashback sequence, we see Calvero finally lose those performing fleas, but not the whole box: just two of them now, hopping invisibly from fist to fist."

— From my review of Chaplin: The Tramp's Odyssey in tomorrow's Sunday Times