Bursting BS Balloons

Just when the effusive outpouring of claptrap over the death of TV news celebrity Tim Russert threatened to choke us in a cloud of sentimental exhaust, a breath of fresh air arrived on June 23 in a column by Chris Hedges at truthdig.com titled "The Hedonists of Power."

"We were instructed by the high priests on television over the past few days to mourn a Sunday morning talk show host, who made $5 million a year and who gave a platform to the powerful and the famous so they could spin, equivocate and lie to the nation," Hedges writes. "We were repeatedly told by these television courtiers, people like Tom Brokaw and Wolf Blitzer, that this talk show host was one of our nation’s greatest journalists, as if sitting in a studio, putting on makeup and chatting with Dick Cheney or George W. Bush have much to do with journalism."

Quoting the great muckraker I.F. Stone, Hedges reminds us that all governments lie, and it is "the job of the journalist to do the hard, tedious reporting to shine a light on these lies." It is the job of TV courtiers, by contrast, to "feed off the scraps tossed to them by the powerful and never question the system."

These courtiers, Hedges continues, "including the late Tim Russert, never gave a voice to credible critics in the buildup to the war against Iraq. They were too busy playing their roles as red-blooded American patriots. They never fought back in their public forums against the steady erosion of our civil liberties and the trashing of our Constitution."

Letting Go

Nick Gallo, one of the best friends I've ever had, died in October at the age of 57. He had fallen ill on a flight to Athens, Greece, where he was headed to write an article for a magazine. He died a few days later in an Athens public hospital. Pericarditis and pneumonia were given as the cause of death.

I'm having a hard time letting him go. It's only now that I can write this entry, which already seems hopelessly inadequate. In recent years, we talked several times a week and usually got together at least once a week. Before that, we had offices across the hall from each other for 10 years.

I keep coming across things that Nick would be interested in and I think, "Oh, I've got to tell Nick about ..." or "I'll get this book for Nick."

Time, they say, is the great healer. But I'm not so sure. My life's a little darker now.

Goodbye, Old Friend

Walt Crowley died Friday evening, September 21. He was 60 years old, three years younger than I am, and he was a friend of mine. The best article about his life appears on the website historylink.org, which he co-founded in 1997. The warmest personal remembrance of Walt was written by Seattle City Council member Jean Godden, a former newspaper reporter and columnist.

I met Walt when he and I worked at the Weekly (now called Seattle Weekly) in the mid-1980s. We had neighboring desks in the open newsroom and soon became friends. I enjoyed his keen intelligence, playful sense of humor, personal integrity, and compassion. He knew a lot of people, some of them movers and shakers, and had a lot of friends.

Walt believed in engagement. He was not one to withdraw into cynical detachment in the face of appalling official injustice and cruelty. He sought to do something about it.

"As we know from any reading of the morning papers, liberty is never at a loss for ambitious enemies," said Lewis Lapham, former and longtime editor of Harper's magazine, in a salute to Molly Ivins last year. "But the survival of the American democracy depends less on the magnificence of its Air Force or the wonder of its fleets than on the willingness of its citizens to stand on the ground of their own thought."

Walt Crowley was more than willing to stand on the ground of his own thought. I'll miss him as a friend, and I'll miss him as a model of what a citizen should be.

Unsafe and Insecure

With the 2008 presidential race already rolling along, we're hearing a lot of noise from the candidates, Democratic and Republican alike, about "keeping America safe" and "securing our borders." It's all nonsense, of course.

No one can keep you safe from anything. Here are the facts: You are not safe, you are not secure. Life is uncertain. But you do have a choice. You can accept the reality of uncertainty, or you can deny it and convince yourself that this or that presidential candidate will do a better job of making you "safe" and "secure."

In the wake of 9/11, Bush and Cheney established a cabinet-level mega-department, Homeland Security, to protect us from terrorists and evildoers. Now we all know that B & C are tough guys, eager to dispatch the Air Force bombers and Devil Dog Marines. Shock and awe, baby!

Endless and ill-defined "war on terrorism," colossally inept Homeland Security department, disastrous invasion of Iraq ... you tell me, do you feel safe and secure? Well, do you?

The Plane Truth

An item in the August 4 New York Times titled "Passengers Scowl as Airlines Smile" finally confirms what anyone who's flown in the past few years already knows; namely, that the airlines have been consistently downgrading service to passengers. You know the drill: We get nothing to eat, inadequate seating space, dirty cabins and lavatories, broken equipment (e.g., seat-tilting controls), and, of course, regularly delayed or canceled flights.

Here's the bad news:

"For the first five months of this year, the on-time arrival rate of the big airlines was 73.5 percent, the lowest in seven years. Complaints about service were up 49 percent from May 2006. This summer, flights are booked at average levels of about 90 percent, a historic high. That means that if a flight is delayed, it is much more difficult for a passenger to get a seat on a later flight.

"Airlines make a simple calculation, comparing the loss from flying with an empty seat against the risk of bumping passengers, to whom airlines have to pay $200 or $400, depending on how quickly they can be rebooked."

The Times quotes Serguei Netessine, a professor at Wharton School of Business: "Previously, airlines worried about dissatisfied customers. Now I don't think they worry about it, because the customer service at all airlines is so horrible." [italics mine]

Blowing Smoke

Despite the proven health risks associated with smoking--e.g., lung cancer, emphysema, congestive heart failure, colorectal cancer, hypertension--many Americans continue to smoke. Here are the latest figures, reported in Time magazine's July 16 issue:

• 71.5 million Americans use tobacco products.
• 23.4 percent of men are cigarette smokers.
• 18.5 percent of women are cigarette smokers.
• 44.3 percent of young adults 18 to 25 years old use tobacco, the highest of any group.
  

The article also mentioned that tobacco use is lowest in the West and highest in the Midwest.

Stuff Happens

Last night, we went to see a production of Stuff Happens, a play written by David Hare, at A Contemporary Theatre (ACT) in Seattle. The play, whose title refers to a comment made by then-US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in response to a reporter's question about looting and pillage in Baghdad, is concerned with the run-up to war in Iraq, and the actors portray the members of the Bush administration who were centrally involved in making the case for war: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and George W. Bush, along with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain. It's a powerful play, and the ACT production was superb, with strong, convincing performances from the entire cast.

Late in Act II, Bush summons his war council to a critical meeting in the Oval Office regarding the Tony Blair problem. Powell, fed up with the vice president's frequent sarcastic asides about Blair, breaks in on Cheney:

Powell: Come on, this is ridiculous. This isn't worthy of you, Dick.
Cheney: Not worthy? You want me to be serious?
Powell: I do.
Cheney: You want me to tell you what I really think?
Powell: Yes.
Cheney: All right. I'll tell you. Tony Blair? I've read his stuff. I've heard him talk. This is a man on a mission. This is a man with a history.
Powell: Sure.
Cheney: He knows what he wants: He wants to build some new world order out of the ruins of the World Trade Center. He wants the right to go into any country anywhere and bring relief from suffering and pain wherever he finds it. And I don't. What I want is to follow this country's legitimate security concerns. And, for me, those come above everything.
Rumsfeld: Me, too.
Cheney: Now: If those interests happen to coincide with some Englishman's fantasy of how he's one day going to introduce some universal penalty system -- three strikes and the UN says you can overthrow any regime you like -- then that's fine. If not, not, and we won't miss him.
Powell: That isn't fair. Blair's loyal. He's been loyal from the start.
Cheney: OK, I admit it, if we want him, Blair's good at the high moral tone. If you want to go into battle with a preacher sitting on top of the tank, that's fine by me. But bear in mind, the preacher's one more to carry. Needs rations, needs a latrine, just like everyone else.
Powell: I like Blair.
Cheney: Maybe you do. But we don't need him. And as of this moment, he's bringing us nothing but trouble. It's a good rule: When the cat shit gets bigger than the cat, get rid of the cat.
Rumsfeld: Nice.
Cheney: This guy is putting himself halfway between American power and international diplomacy. And sorry -- but that's a place where people get mashed.

If you have a chance to see the play, by all means go. It's provocative, it's enraging, it's discouraging, but you won't soon forget it.

Inside Passage

For many years, I've thought that meditation, the practice of sitting quietly alone in a room with nothing but your breath and your thoughts for company, may be a key to understanding the fundamental mysteries of life. Who am I? Why am I here? What (if anything) is real? True, philosophers have grappled with such questions for centuries, publishing enough scholarly papers and books to fill entire libraries. But what about the rest of us? Is there a chance we might learn something important by going inside ourselves instead of opening a book?

Thinking about the value of meditation is one thing. Creating a practice is another. These things were going through my mind this morning as I was waiting at the chiropractor's office for my appointment. To pass the time, I started paging through the May-June Utne magazine and spotted an article by filmmaker David Lynch titled "Deep Thoughts." Admitting that he originally thought meditation was a waste of time, Lynch eventually decided to try it when anxiety and anger began to subvert his creative powers (and his marriage). As he writes, "Anger and depression and sorrow are beautiful things in a story, but they're like poison to the filmmaker or artist." After he'd been meditating for a couple of weeks, Lynch's wife asked him: "This anger, where did it go?" He hadn't even noticed it had lifted.

Now, Lynch tells us, he hasn't missed a meditation in 33 years. Reading about the lasting benefits of his practice, you can see why.

I meditate once in the morning and again in the afternoon, for about 20 minutes each time. Then I go about the business of my day. And I find that the joy of doing increases. Intuition increases.The pleasure of life grows. And negativity recedes.

Popular Demand

Yes, friends, Spiraglio has yielded to unrelenting pressure from his readers--all six of you--and reopened for business after a lengthy hiatus. Now, let's see ... where was I?

Oh yes, the Cheney-Bush administration. What are they up to? Well, for one thing, they're busily firing all the competent US Attorneys, and replacing them with legal hacks loyal to themselves. By doing this, they hope to avoid inconvenient federal criminal investigations into such practices as illegal eavesdropping against American citizens. James Bamford wrote about the NSA's four-year unauthorized monitoring of our phone calls and e-mails in a New York Times op-ed piece today, "Bush Is Not Above the Law":

Last August, a federal judge found that the president of the United States broke the law, committed a serious felony and violated the Constitution. Had the president been an ordinary citizen — someone charged with bank robbery or income tax evasion — the wheels of justice would have immediately begun to turn. The F.B.I. would have conducted an investigation, a United States attorney’s office would have impaneled a grand jury and charges would have been brought. But under the Bush Justice Department, no F.B.I. agents were ever dispatched to padlock White House files or knock on doors and no federal prosecutors ever opened a case.

The ruling was the result of a suit, in which I am one of the plaintiffs, brought against the National Security Agency by the American Civil Liberties Union. It was a response to revelations by this newspaper in December 2005 that the agency had been monitoring the phone calls and e-mail messages of Americans for more than four years without first obtaining warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Keep Your Ribbons

In his recent comprehensive post on TruthDig, Stan Goff, a retired veteran of the US Army Special Forces, discusses the evolution of the Rumsfeld Doctrine and its application in Iraq. Here's one passage that caught my eye:

Every time I see one of those insipid yellow-ribbon magnets now, I think of Charlie Anderson, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. “I just want to ask those people,” says Anderson, referring to those who display the yellow-ribbon magnets, “when is the last time you wrote one of those soldiers? How many of them do you actually know? How many have really asked us, what did you do there? I wanna tell them, we don’t need your fucking ribbons. We need help and jobs.”

The whole essay is well worth reading, and you can do that right here.

Salad Days

Are you getting tired of waiters coming to your table with a 3-foot-high pepper grinder asking if you'd like "fresh ground pepper" on your salad? Well, so is Nora Ephron, who unloaded last month on the New York Times Op-Ed page, God bless her. Ephron's a much better writer than I am, so I'll let her do the talking:

Many years ago, they used to put salt and pepper on the table in a restaurant, and here's how they did it: there was a salt shaker and there was a pepper shaker. The pepper shaker contained ground black pepper, which was outlawed in the 1960s and replaced by the Permanent Floating Pepper Mill and the Permanent Floating Pepper Mill refrain: "Would you like some fresh ground black pepper on your salad?" I've noticed that almost no one wants some fresh ground black pepper on his salad. Why they even bother asking is a mystery to me.

Ephron tackles some other restaurant annoyances in the column, which you can read here.

Air World

I hate flying. This wasn't always true, however. Thirty years ago, the airlines weren't going out of their way to insult "economy" travelers. You could get a meal then. Sure it wasn't very good, but still--it was a meal, not just a (small) bag of peanuts. You got a decent amount of room around your seat, not the stingy, impossibly crowded space imposed on air travelers today. You know what I'm talking about: The guy in front of you leans back, jamming your tray table into your rib cage. Your elbows spread out slightly while you're reading and they encroach on your rowmate's space. The carry-on bag you're permitted to bring onboard doesn't really fit under the seat in front of you and leave you room for your feet. I could go on (and may, later).

Why not upgrade, you ask. Well, consider this: A roundtrip economy-class ticket on British Air between Seattle and London costs about $1,000. The "business-class" seat for the same RT ticket costs about $8,000. I don't know about you, but the $7,000 difference is HUGE for me. So, what's a nonwealthy traveler to do? Seriously, what is such a traveler to do?

America the Fat

Now that obesity has become a major health concern in the United States, some of you may wonder how that happened. Well, we eat too much and we sit on our asses most of the time staring at screens: computers at work, TVs at home. Moreover, what we eat is often unhealthy, high-fat food with limited--if any--nutrients: chips, cookies, soda pop, French fries, ice cream, processed cheese, etc.

Then there's the ballooning portion size of almost everything in our diet. Jane Brody, who writes the weekly "Personal Health" column in the New York Times, weighs in on the subject in the paper's July 11 edition. Her comments make for button-popping reading. Brody reports that an average serving of pasta is now "480 percent greater than the one-cup recommended serving size" and some cookies are 700 percent larger. She goes on: "A New York bagel, now sold nationwide, weighs five or six ounces. That is five or six bread portions, supplying about 500 calories, not counting cream cheese or butter." Soft drinks come in 24-ounce containers or larger, "often with free refills."

What's a country to do? Fad diets have spawned shelves of best-selling books, but they rarely work for the long haul. But there is one tried-and-true method for weight loss: eat less and exercise more. Do both and you will lose weight. Continue to do both and you'll keep the weight off.

So, next time you're tempted by a chocolate chip cookie the size of a salad plate, take a walk instead. Simple as that, piece of cake.

Just Like That

I found out today that two friends of mine, a young woman and her mother, were involved in a car crash a couple of days ago. Both were hospitalized for injuries, the mother's more serious than her daughter's. The driver of an oncoming vehicle apparently lost control of the wheel, and her car swerved into the opposing traffic's lane, colliding with my friends' car.

There's no moral to this story. It's a reminder that terrible things can happen at any time.

You never know.

Numb and Number

"6 Weeks to 7 Figures," promises a Men'sHealth article. Seattle Metropolitan magazine heralds its inaugural issue with "65 BEST WAYS TO LOVE OUR CITY" on the cover. "10 MORE REASONS TO LOVE ORLANDO BLOOM," gushes CosmoGIRL! Why all these numbered lists? you may wonder. Because research shows that numbers sell magazines--women's magazines, historically, but, increasingly, men's magazines as well. "It all adds up to an arms race at the newsstand," says Katharine Q. Seelye in her playfully informative article "Lurid Numbers on Glossy Pages! (Magazines Exploit What Sells)," published in the February 10, 2006, New York Times. As Seelye explains, "Numbers jump out from the clutter of type on the newsstand. They draw the eye and quickly convey value and utility, helping monthlies in particular stay afloat in the rising tide of celebrity obsession."

Yes, we can't get enough of celebrities, it seems. US Weekly and People, the best-known star-crazed weeklies, feed us a steady stream of Britney, Gwyneth, and Paris sightings, with the occasional glimpse of George Clooney aboard his boat on Lago di Como. "Today, the biggest force everyone is dealing with is celebrity magazines," Kate White, editor of Cosmopolitan, the best-selling monthly in America, tells Seelye. "You're not competing with other people's numbers, you're competing with Brad and Angelina and babies."

For those of us who'd like to eighty-six the numbers mania, there's zero relief in sight.

On the Ground

Every so often, something shows up in The New York Times that makes me feel the expensive subscription is worth it. Sure, the "paper of record" has good reporters and very good columnists, especially Bob Herbert, Frank Rich, and Paul Krugman. But I'm not talking about writers who report and comment, however skillfully. I'm talking about someone who is not a professional writer on assignment, but rather a person engaged in activity on the front lines who gives us a glimpse of what life is like in the hot zone. The March 12, 2006, issue of The New York Times Magazine carries just such a firsthand report on the back page. Titled "The Waiting," it's written by Brian Mockenhaupt, who served two tours in Iraq as an infantryman with the 10th Mountain Division. Mockenhaupt's account is not long--about 1,000 words--but he conveys, with clear, powerful language, what it's like to confront death all the time, day in, day out, 24/7. After pointing out that the bomb, the improvised explosive device (IED), is "the main way to die in this war," he tells us why:

Everywhere you look, there's a possibility. The bombs are hidden in dead dogs, dead donkeys, trash piles and fruit stands, parked cars and moving cars. They're stuffed in sewer pipes, hung from overpasses and tucked behind street signs. Any place is a good place to slip, strap or bury a bomb.

A couple of paragraphs later, Mockenhaupt sums up the danger: "This is the problem with looking for bombs: They're hidden well, so you have to be close to find them. And if you do find one, you're probably too close."

A writer's bio at the end of the piece informs us that Mockenhaupt is working on a book about the military. I don't know about you, but I'm buying a copy as soon as it hits the shelves.

One Thing at a Time

We've heard a lot in recent years about the glories of multitasking, usually from self-described multitaskers. But the time has come to peel off the congratulatory gold star these dynamos have affixed to themselves and see the practice for what it really is. By definition, multitasking means never doing one thing with full attention. To cite one alarmingly widespread--not to mention dangerous, even lethal--example: driving a car while talking on a cell phone. If you're talking on the phone, you're not paying full attention to driving. If you're driving, you're not giving your full attention to the phone conversation. It's that simple. And if you're on the road and not paying full attention to your driving, you're a danger to me. If you're a danger to me, I want you off the road.

Page 123

Browsing at the Chekhov's Mistress blog, I came across an interesting item headed "Page 123." It's about a meme the blogger had spotted elsewhere and decided to spread at CM. Here's how it works:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around for an impressive title. Just use the book that's actually next to you.

This sounds like fun, so now I'm playing. Here's my sentence:

He was indeed a rogue, and a scoundrel to boot (when he died of acute alcoholic toxemia, in 1966, at the age of forty-four, he was under indictment for just about every variety of prohibited corruption recognized by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts); he was also a decorated veteran of World War II, commissioned on the battlefield in Normandy as a lieutenant, and when I met him for the first and only time, in 1963, he still carried with him shards of shrapnel in his legs that he could cause to grind audibly, to impress a young reporter.

The rules call for not revealing the book or author. But guesses are welcome.

Driving 101

All right, class, listen up: In light of the epidemic of unbelievably bad driving all around us, we're going to review the basics of safe driving. First, PAY ATTENTION. That means, when you're driving: Don't talk on cellphones; don't eat muffins, sandwiches, roast beef, sushi, or anything else; don't drink coffee, beer, soft drinks, or vodka tonics; don't change music CDs; don't reload your handgun, shotgun, rifle, or AK-47; don't have sex of any kind; don't cut (or paint) your toenails; and, for heaven's sake, don't take a nap.

This Stinks!

What's with all these scented ads jammed into magazines of all kinds? And not just magazines, either. I once got a bill from Nordstrom with a scented insert. I wrote them that if they did that again, I'd stop shopping at Nordstrom. They stopped sending scented inserts. But would such a direct approach work with, say, Vanity Fair?

Dear Graydon: I enjoy (mostly) your magazine, even though it's almost impossible to find the Table of Contents in the sea of full-page ads. But these disgusting scented ads have got to stop. I didn't ask for them, and I don't want them. If you keep inserting them in VF, I'll be forced to terminate my subscription.

There must be some magazines out there that are still unscented--maybe this one.