Shadow Of A Dowd

THE NEWS BIZ IS ABUZZ with a good old-fashioned brouhaha: plagiarism allegations against Maureen Dowd. Her Sunday New York Times column contained a key paragraph that happened to have originated in another writer's piece -- and now the Internet version of a wet dream is in full spasm.

Perhaps equally alarming as the original charge of plagiarizing was the strangely nonchalant dog-ate-my-notes excuse Dowd offered Monday by way of an explanation. Let's just say that after her weak defense, journalism schools won't be teaching Dowd's Frankenstein approach to assembling her columns -- unless it's an introductory course in How Not To -- despite her Pulitzer pedigree.

Coincidentally, just a few scant posts ago I was offering something close to unvarnished praise for Dowd's recent work, which in retrospect looks like yet another Warden's World jinx:

...On the positive side of the street, Maureen Dowd has written one good column after another for a long stretch now. Moving away from Hillary Clinton as a subject has freed her from overdoing the oversimplified gender politics which she delighted reveling in during the long and bitter Clinton-Obama campaign. Sometimes she reverts to bad form, as in a recent overwrought Michelle Obama piece, but Dowd's twice-weekly column is once again a safe place to turn for an incisive if sometimes catty take on the culture of national politics...

Well, it was part of an April Fool's Day post...

Glenn Greenwald used the Dowd kerfuffle Monday to remind everyone that this kind of "exchange" goes on all the time, despite the one-sided portrayal of bloggers as parasites cannibalizing established mainstream news sources. In The myth of the parasitical bloggers, Greenwald documents how a writer from The Economist recently nipped large parts of his recent post on the prison-industrial complex. Dowd's wholesale swipe of Josh Marshall's paragraph is only the latest, most concrete case of a more widespread practice:

Often, the parasitical feeding happens in the opposite direction, though while bloggers routinely credit (and link to) the source of the material on which they're commenting, there is an unwritten code among many establishment journalists that while they credit each other's work, they're free to claim as their own whatever they find online without any need for credit or attribution (see here for a typical example of how many of these news organizations operate in this regard).

Typically, the uncredited use of online commentary doesn't rise to the level of blatant copying -- plagiarism -- that Maureen Dowd engaged in. It's often not even an ethical breach at all. Instead, traditional media outlets simply take stories, ideas and research they find online and pass it off as their own. In other words -- to use their phraseology -- they act parasitically on blogs by taking content and exploiting it for their benefit.

Ironically, I really liked Dowd's column last Sunday and had bookmarked it with the intention of mentioning of it in Monday's Give 'Em Enough Rope, but then decided my post would be too Times-heavy after quoting Frank Rich so extensively.

Also smacking of irony, or maybe its lesser-cited cousin mere happenstance, Greenwald commended Dowd's column in his own Sunday post (Distorting public opinion on torture investigations) -- quoting the exact section I had planned to highlight -- calling her piece "uncharacteristically cogent and substantive." I too found myself in agreement with her unequivocal call for a truth commission that would get to the bottom of the Bush administration's willful disregard of the Geneva Convention and its flaunting of international law in the wake of the Nancy Pelosi-CIA standoff:

I used to agree with President Obama, that it was better to keep moving and focus on our myriad problems than wallow in the darkness of the past. But now I want a full accounting. I want to know every awful act committed in the name of self-defense and patriotism. Even if it only makes one ambitious congresswoman pay more attention in some future briefing about some future secret technique that is “uniquely” designed to protect us, it will be worth it.

But it was the section directly proceeding the above closing one -- the penultimate paragraph of her Sunday column -- that got MoDo into HoWa (hot water). Here's (1) the original Josh Marshall reference from the Talking Points Memo of 5/14; (2) the paragraph in Dowd's Cheney, Master of Pain from the 5/17 op-ed page; (3) what it looks like now on the Times website; and finally (4) Dowd's Monday email to Huffington Post explaining how the offending graph slipped in without due attribution:

(1)
"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."

(2)
"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."

(3)
Josh Marshall said in his blog: “More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”

(4)
josh is right. I didn't read his blog last week, and didn't have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now. i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent -- and I assumed spontaneous -- way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column. but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me. we're fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.

Given how they've backed themselves into a corner with that explanation, you can appreciate how Dowd -- at the Times since 1983 and an op-ed columnist since '95 -- and Executive Editor Bill Keller now have to stay away from the third rail of journalism, the dreaded P word. Sure, the Dowd imbroglio is unlikely to blacken her name and reputation as emphatically as Jayson Blair or Judith Miller -- but it's potentially scandalous nonetheless.

Yesterday, a U.S. News & World Report writer seemed willing to give his colleague the benefit of the Dowd; despite not wholly endorsing her version of how the mistake occurred, John Aloysius Farrell wants everybody to move along, nothing to see here. Strange...

This isn't the first time Dowd's methodology has been called into question. During the 2008 primary season, she filed a piece from out of the country that made it seem she was reporting from Hillary Clinton's New Hampshire campaign headquarters. Perhaps it's now fair game to raise the specter that "friends" may have had a ghostly hand in previous columns.

I'm running out of synonyms for irony, but consider that it was Maureen Dowd who caught Joe Biden plagiarizing part of another pol's speech in a 1987 column -- a textbook case of What Goes Around Comes Around:

But Mr. Biden's borrowing raises questions about how much a candidate can adapt someone else's language and thoughts, whether he remembers to give credit or not.

On Jeopardy Monday, an entire category was devoted to New York Times columnists, using video clues where each writer awkwardly looked into the camera and said things like, "I wrote back in 2003 that the Bush administration should close this place where thousands of prisoners have been held without charges." These cameos were cringe-inducing moments of the highest order. I believe Richard Cohen mouthed the above words, and then Gail Collins, Nick Kristof, Charles Blow and Frank Rich took their turns.

What made it even worse was Alex pompously stopping the proceedings when the category ended to offer his solemn gratitude to the important columnists who took precious time out of their day to participate. It came off as overly deferential, even reverential, and therefore pompous to the nth degree. The Times management never imagined these Jeopardy appearances would be overshadowed so soon by another charge of wrong-doing by arguably its best-known personality.

Perhaps MoDo had better things to do than literally become the answer to a trivia question. But I was surprised she passed on an opportunity for self-promotion, because Dowd's obviously no shrinking violet. I once saw her promoting a book on Letterman and, while not quite at ease in front of the camera, she seemed to relish the attention. So I remember being surprised that she wasn't featured on the Jeopardy slot, but it makes sense now: she was probably busy stripping the blogosphere of parts for her next column.

News To You?

IF YOU'RE READING THIS, chances are like me you're part of the problem.

In case you hadn't heard, the U.S. Senate has been holding hearings into the dismal state of the newspaper industry. No pun intended, but there hasn't been any good news to report on the industry this entire decade, with the latest publications either extinct or on the brink including the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Rocky Mountain News, the Baltimore Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle. The industry continues to bleed readers and jobs, with a record 6,000 newsroom jobs lost in 2008 alone.

Can't argue too much with John Kerry when he says: "America's newspapers are struggling to survive and while there will be serious consequences in terms of the lives and financial security of the employees involved, including hundreds at the Globe, there will also be serious consequences for our democracy where diversity of opinion and strong debate are paramount." Which is Kerry's typically long-winded way of saying what Joe Pulitzer said much more succinctly: “Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together.” That's probably why Joe was Joe and John never became president.

Andrew Malcolm of the L.A. Times' Top of the Ticket blog finds something hypocritical and at the same time humorous about Kerry blaming print media's demise on the advent of online journalism:

"First, 70 million is way too many bloggers. It's chaos out here. Everybody posting at once. So much to read. Who's got time to scroll Favorites lists with 70 million urls? If the feds can cull banks and car companies, Kerry should whack the politics blogs way back to maybe eight. Ten max. We've got a list.

Second, because everyone knows they're becoming increasingly important as the true lifeblood of democracy, political bloggers should be paid a whole lot more money, at least as much as a senator. Actually, more maybe. It would help stimulate the economy.

T-shirts, jeans and diet Coke should be legitimized as blogging business expenses."

But seriously. A report on the opening day of hearings yesterday on NPR featured some clips of testimony, and a few things caught my ear, or at least made it from the radio to my auditory canal and the relevant parts of my cerebral cortex:

One witness said the decline of newspapers was a simple matter of the parasite (digital media) killing the host (print media). Another speaker predicted a weakened press would make it a "great time to be a corrupt politician" with no one left to report the corruption. Who knows what becomes of the Watergate style of in-depth political coverage?

By the way, Kerry's hometown paper, the Boston Globe, owned by the New York Times, got a reprieve late last week from its parent company to stave off its imminent demise, but for how long is anyone's guess.

The struggling Times itself is raising prices again: the daily paper will now be $2.00, and a copy of the hefty Sunday Times will now cost you the sizable sum of $5.00. Ironically, I bought the Times today for the first time in a long, long while, maybe a year; I had a bunch of extra quarters left over from the laundry and used 6 of them to cover the $1.50, but once the price climbs to 2 dollars, there's no way I'm plunking down that much for a daily newspaper, I don't care if I'm written about in its pages or my face is splashed across the cover. Well, maybe then...

Anyway, while scanning some old clips last week, I remembered how at one point in my young life I wanted nothing more than to be the next Jimmy Breslin. Yet even when I was majoring in print journalism over 20 years ago, it seemed to be a dying world. For instance, my intro to news writing class at Hunter College had exactly 4 students in it, but we soldiered on while the broadcast classes were packed, writing for the student newspaper The Envoy and hoping to intern somewhere decent. I ended up with a one-year internship at the Queens Tribune, a local weekly based in Flushing, where I got about 40 bylines.

Next I toiled joylessly, Bartleby-like, for an incredibly obscure science/future studies magazine, lasting just over a year in the cramped, disheveled office on Madison Avenue. My title sounded better than it was, Managing Editor; in reality it was a two-man operation, with me writing almost every word of each 32-page monthly issue and then, together with the Publisher, this being the 1980s, doing the layout with an X-Acto knife, a ruler and a jar of rubber cement.

I began applying to publications ranging from the Washington Post NY Bureau to the Irish Echo, getting interviews but not job offers. Then, two days after quitting the singularly inconsequential Futurific magazine, I landed a job at the Wall Street Transcript, a weekly financial paper. As fate would have it, I would remain there for over 15 years despite having absolutely zero interest in the stock market. Just your average Horatio Alger story, slowly working his way from an 8-dollar-an-hour transcription job up to copy editor and finally production manager.

For purposes of this blog post if not for a future time capsule, I wish I had saved at least one copy of an old Transcript issue from back when it published in a tabloid size even bigger than the old New York Times unfolded used to be. At last check the Transcript was still going, mostly as an online product, and by the time I was unceremoniously downsized off the island in 2005, we were down to fewer than 500 copies published a week unless it was a special conference issue.

When I started there in '87, our editorial department had about 5 or 6 copy editors working in a tiny office at 99 Wall, while in a room down the hall a row of proofreaders dutifully squinted at copy across their ancient wooden table -- the true galley slaves of the publishing world. Not sure if it qualifies as a lagging or leading indicator, but by the time I left the Wall Street Transcript over 15 years later, we were down to 3 copy editors and 1 proofreader.

At the Tribune office, tucked inside a shopping center off Kissena Blvd., the reporters would sit around in the morning reading the dailies -- Times, News, Post, Newsday -- and bouncing story ideas off each other. I picked a good time to work there: the astonishing Donald Manes corruption case was unfolding that year -- from the bizarre January night when the Queens borough president first attempted suicide to the March morning when he was found dead on his kitchen floor from self-inflicted knife wounds.

Every afternoon an elderly guy dressed in a suit would arrive at the office. Arthur, who had long retired from one of the big papers, lived in the area and volunteered to write the Police Blotter column for the Tribune. He was much older than us, had to be in his late 70s, and he kept to himself, working his phone and jotting notes in a yellow legal pad as we all worked around him.

It was obviously a case of old Arthur having newspaper ink in his blood, and he just had to be around the click and clatter of a newsroom, even a small community weekly like the Tribune.

When the last American newspaper publishes its final edition -- one writer cites 2043 as the year the printing press comes to a stop -- the culture will have irreversibly changed in more than a few big ways and in all kinds of small ones...

I remember in the '70s, much to my father's consternation, my brother the Dallas Cowboys fanatic just had to get the Dallas Times-Herald delivered 7 days a week to our apartment in Queens so he could keep up with the latest news about his favorite team. The Times-Herald is long gone, having merged years ago into the Morning News, which itself is reported to be on the brink.

Up until about 10 years ago, though it somehow seems much longer now, you could purchase almost any newspaper from any major city around the world at Hotaling's, a Times Square newsstand where in the late '80s I would buy the San Francisco Examiner to read Hunter Thompson's columns as well as Zippy the Pinhead. I even bought an English language version of Pravda there at the height of Perestroika to see for myself what this crazy Glasnost was all about! Hotaling's managed to stay afloat until 1999, when it became one of the earliest victims to succumb to the onrushing online news consumption tidal wave.

What kind of world will it be when small towns and big cities alike no longer offer kids the economic rite of passage that the paper route represented -- for literally millions of Americans their first foray into the working world.

I can recall turning 13 years old and applying for my working papers just so I could get a Long Island Press route. As it turned out, I wasn't cut out for a paper route, at least not the one I shared with my friend Chrys Nicholas.

Our route included The Mets, a block-long apartment complex where we had a bunch of customers. We would climb the stairs delivering papers floor to floor at one building, then walk across the roof and work our way down the next one, and so on until we had finished the block. Well, every afternoon found us fighting on the rooftop, coming to blows over who would get which apartment and who would collect from which subscriber -- all the usual business decisions that lead to arguments and, in our case, punches and fisticuffs.

Me and Chrys usually got along everywhere else, so we gave up the paper route shortly after we got it. It's not like we were ever gonna get rich anyway -- not the way old Mr. Kaye, a notorious cheapskate, ran the Press operation out of a dingy storefront on Steinway Street, gypping us and every other kid with a paper route out of a penny or two every time seemingly we turned around. Even then, I knew there was something not quite kosher about the newspaper business.

Bygone Bylines

JUST SCANNED some old articles of mine at the local Internet cafe.

Two pieces from the Sunday Daily News Arts & Leisure section, two from the Queens Tribune. I think I got $75.00 from the News for each one, and had another one published a few years later; the Tribune items date back to my internship there while attending Hunter College.

We had a real good group of reporters at the Trib back in '86, including Marty Lipp, John Rofe and Tom Zambito. They treated me great, assigning me stories ranging from local community and political coverage to the pop culture stuff they knew I always wanted to do.

The New York Daily News used to have a feature called Counterpunch: Talking Back to the Critics, which was essentially a forum for freelancers. Counterpunch is long gone, and I doubt the News even utilizes freelancers anymore as newspapers continue going the way of pinball games, 8-track players, and private phone booths.



























































(Robert Gordon photo by John Starace)







See also:
News To You
In The News

Scourge Of The Seas

"I am a free prince, and have as much authority to make war on the whole world as he who has a hundred sail of ships and an army of a hundred thousand men in the field." --Captain Edward Low

Under the Black Flag: The Romance and Reality of Life Among the Pirates (1997, David Cordingly)

The History of Pirates
(1999, Angus Konstam)

The Pirates' Pact: The Secret Alliances Between History's Most Notorious Pirates and Colonial America
(2009, Douglas R. Burgess Jr.)
________________________________________________________________

SO THERE I WAS, planning this review of the above three pirate histories for a few days now-- mulling it over, making notes, trying to find a good lead-in -- when the top story coming out of my radio this morning is that Somali pirates have struck again, this time blatantly seizing a U.S.-flagged ship in the Indian Ocean. The latest update reports the crew of the Dutch ship, which includes 20 Americans, had retaken control of the vessel, with one Somali pirate in custody, but the American captain apparently has been taken hostage by the pirates in a lifeboat. The Maersk Alabama, a 17,000-ton cargo ship carrying emergency relief supplies to Kenya, was the sixth ship seized by Somali pirates in the last week alone -- indicating a new strategy that targets merchant vessels sailing hundreds of miles away from the now-heavily-guarded waters off the African coast, a presence which now includes patrols by five American warships.

Just as a fractured nation like Afghanistan proved a breeding ground for terrorism in the 1990s, history also teaches that failed states like Somali are exponentially more likely to contribute to illicit activity. The result is that such large-scale disenchantment with the status quo provides a willing supply of candidates with little or nothing to do, with a willingness to take up arms a common thread shared by pirates and terrorists alike.

When Angus Konstam writes about piracy being "an attractive alternative to dying of starvation, becoming a beggar or thief on land, or serving in appalling conditions on a ship with no chance of substantial financial reward," it's clear that for the economically hopeless the lure of striking it rich is not confined to the Golden Age of Piracy (1650-1725) but has implications which reverberate today. With life "nasty, brutish and short," it's little wonder that "for many desperate poor, or simply greedy people, piracy provided a slim chance to beat the system."
The plague of piracy goes back almost 4,000 years, with wall paintings depicting raids of ancient Egyptian cities by neighboring seafaring peoples. The Romans went so far as to call pirates hostis humani generi: "enemies of the human race." Julius Caesar was among prominent Romans kidnapped by Cilician corsairs operating out of southern Turkey. True to his word, after his ransom was paid and he was released, Caesar returned with a military force and destroyed the pirate lair where he was captured. These and other attacks on merchant shipping led to the great general Roman Pompey being given a mandate to stamp out the pirate menace once and for all, and with a force of 500 ships, 120,000 men, an almost unlimited budget, and the right to tax neighboring cities and raise additional militia, he did just that. In less than four months, he had cleared the Mediterranean of the threat, killing up to 10,000 pirates and pardoning or granting clemency to thousands more.

The recent hijackings by the Somalis -- not far from where pirates famously made their base on Madagascar during the so-called Golden Age of Piracy -- may yet result in such a large-scale effort to eradicate them once and for all. Back in the 17th century, pirates preyed on the shipping lanes used by the East India Company, where great treasure fleets carried gold, silk and other riches from India and China to the Middle East and Europe. Pirates of this era also engaged in the slave trade, ferrying their captured human cargo from Africa to the West Indies and the American colonies.

In the late 16th century, English privateers not only routinely plundered Spanish fleets carrying gold and silver coins back to Europe, but men like Henry Morgan conducted daring raids of Spanish colonial strongholds like Panama City. These often-brutal attacks enriched the English treasury to the extent where it was captured Spanish treasure that directly built the navy that ushered in the British Empire a century later. That's the thing about piracy, no matter what the age it takes place in: it all depends upon which side of the cutlass you find yourself on, with one man's sea scum another's benighted hero. The Somali pirates undoubtedly are hailed in their home ports as fearless warriors with the hearts of lions, just as four centuries earlier during the Elizabethan Era, the British reading public literally could not get enough of the exploits of a Sir Francis Drake.

Ironically, the Navigation Acts of 1651, enacted to protect British trade from Dutch competition, made it a criminal act for the American colonies to accept goods from anyone other than British merchants, opening the door for smugglers and pirates being accepted and even encouraged in places like New York and Rhode Island. According to Burgess,

"In England the acts seemed draconian; in the colonies they were ruinous. Merchants watched helplessly as their trade dwindled to nothing, and imports -- which were the lifeblood of every colony -- slowed to a trickle. Ships sat idle in their ports, and more and more disgruntled seamen were discharged onto the streets... At the other side of the equation lay the now-insatiable demand among the colonies for imported goods. Nearly everything that could be brought in -- spices, cloth, indigo, foodstuffs, enamelware, and, of course, specie [coined money] -- brought high prices at dockside auctions ... Piracy became -- and would remain, a staple of colonial commerce long after the acts themselves were revoked."

The following entertaining exchange quoted in The Pirates' Pact occurs around 1696 between Captain Josiah Daniell, a customs agent who has seized a suspected pirate ship, and Governor William Markham of Pennsylvania, an official known for liberally granting questionable privateering commissions and handsomely profiting from the plunder:

Daniell began by demanding that Markham "give (himself) a little trouble on his Majesty's account and cause strict inquiry to be made" and he went on to insult his recipient at great length: "The worst sailors know how ready you are to entertain and protect all deserters ... It is ruin for any ships to lade here so long as they have such encouragement to run in your parts, whence they are allowed to go 'trampuseing' [pirating] where they please. I read in last July's Gazette a proclamation to apprehend Captain Every and his crew, and hear that some of them are in your province ... I wonder that you prefer to gratify them rather than have regard for the King's service ... If you fall my way, I will endeavor to treat you as well as I am capable." Markham, in the face of these threats and imprecations, chose to see the humor in them. "Yours of the 9th inst. is so indecent that it seems rather penned in the cook-room than the Great Cabin ... I know not what you mean by 'trampuseing,' unless you aimed to show your breeding, which you have ill set forth in your mother tongue ... I hope I shall not fall in your way, lest my treatment be such as I find in your letter. I wish you a good voyage and a better temper."

Each of these three pirate histories approaches the subject in a slightly different way. Under the Black Flag's stated mission is contrasting how pirates have been portrayed in popular culture -- movies, plays, novels and paintings -- with what the record left behind tells us about how pirates conducted themselves. Not surprisingly, for instance, there are few instances of captives being forced to walk the plank; it was far more common for pirates to unceremoniously toss anyone offering resistance overboard.

Cordingly also traces the development of pirate flags like the Jolly Roger, where images of skulls, swords and hourglasses ("Time is running out on you") were meant as tangible reminders of their notorious reputation. The sight of a pirate ship hoisting their red or black banners usually inspired such fear in a targeted merchant ship that the crew would surrender immediately rather than risk incurring the wrath of these "hungry, stout and resolute" men hellbent on destruction.



















The Pirates' Pact focuses on primary sources in trying to piece together the historical record, mostly relying on correspondence between colonial administrators and the official governmental bodies charged with implementing crown policy. Burgess makes great use of letters going back and forth between America and England, with governors on the one hand protesting charges of countenancing known pirates and the Board of Trade demanding illegal trade and smuggling be stamped out.

In a chapter titled "The Most Hated Man in America," we learn that toward that end, a surveyor named Edward Randolph was sent by the Crown to the colonies to report on the state of piracy. Described by Burgress as "crusty and tenacious, morally above both politics and bribery, a sixty-four-year-old zealot whose cause is the English state," Randolph's surviving letters confirmed the worst suspicions of the Board, with Randolph bluntly detailing the worst transgressions:

"William Markham the Governor (of Pennsylvania) entertains several pirates who carry on an illicit trade with Curacao and other places ... Rhode Island (is) a free port to pirates and illegal traders from all places; the people are enriched by them ... It cannot therefore be expected that the frauds and other abuses complained of in the Colonies can be prevented unless duly qualified men, of good estates and reputation, be approved by the King as Governors."

The History of Pirates, compared to the relatively narrow missions of the other two books, is a straightforward chronological narrative hitting all the major figures and events. What sets Konstam's book apart is the sheer number of illustrations and maps. In a story so richly visual, it's almost indispensable to have in front of you the renderings of the famous pirates through the ages, along with the kinds of ships used, as well as clear indications of the territory in question.

Let's leave it there for now, because for better or worse, if today's extraordinary events are any indication, obviously the "final" chapter on piracy is still being written.

Fool Court Press

AFTER MY RECENT MICHAEL GOODWIN DIATRIBE, it felt good to see a like-minded letter in last Sunday's Daily News from M.W. Fischer of East Brunswick, N.J., under the heading Going negative:

Another day, another anti-Obama column by Michael Goodwin. I thought the Daily News Op-Ed pages got enough ignorance and right-wing spin from the odious Iraq War cheerleader Charles Krauthammer. If Obama's campaign slogan was "Yes, we can," then Michael Goodwin's slogan apparently is "No, we can't."

Fischer's spot-on sentiment pretty much mirrors my own problem with the very idea of an out-of-touch elitist like Goodwin being the Daily News' most prominent op-ed contributor. I wrote my own haranguing letter directly to the columnist right after I finished my original post:

Mr. Goodwin: Funny how you're so quick to write off the Obama administration less than 1/24th into its tenure, yet if memory serves you towed the Bush line for years and years' worth of columns with nary a disparaging word to say about the Bush/Cheney/DeLay agenda that got us into this mess in the first place. You repeatedly carry water for the rich man's burden, at a time when the recession is destroying the very fabric of middle class life, as if a slight increase in the taxation of the very well off represents a threat to the fabric of our capitalist system itself. How would you explain the discrepancy between the increasingly critical tone of your writing toward the new administration and the virtual free ride you gave the neoconservative agenda of the previous one?

In an older, more unabashedly chivalrous time, perhaps I would have challenged a scoundrel like Goodwin to a duel, but as it was the new president's honor, not mine, being offended, I quickly withdrew the notion. Instead, I will continue to monitor this malignant stain on the body politic. For the record, Goodwin's column of March 25, President Obama Failed to Sell His Budget Plan to American People, played to form, amounting to little more than a thumbs-down review of Obama's Tuesday night press conference ("His silver tongue seemed tied in knots...").

Goodwin's 3/29 Sunday column focused on AIG spending billions in taxpayer bailout money to settle accounts with its bankers, claiming "Washington's outrage over the millions paid for bonuses counts as a trivial pursuit" compared to where the rest of the money went. It's a legitimate claim here by Goodwin, but by column's end he can't resist returning to his latest relentless meme: "And as the bonus flap proved, the White House and Congress are not competent to make day-to-day or strategic company decisions. Washington can't even manage its own books." But enough Michael Goodwin already...

...My brother caught this next one and pointed it out to me. On the Village Voice's Tracking Shots page, which features 5 or 6 short movie reviews every issue, there occurred a most unusual coincidence/confluence in the March 25-31 issue. In reviews for the films American Swing and Guest of Cindy Sherman, two separate critics used almost the exact same phrase -- "genial, schlubby" and "genially schlubby". Apparently the two colleagues -- Melissa Anderson and Ella Taylor -- share a very thin thesaurus, or else these critics think in uncannily, almost eerily similar terms. What other conclusion can one draw when Anderson writes, "Levenson, a genial, schlubby horndog from Long Island..." and Taylor, in the very next review, writes of "A reclusive avant-garde artiste paired with the genially schlubby co-host of a public access television show..." ? Either the Voice employs the world's worst copy editor or, more likely, none at all in this age of downsizing...

...How long do you think the Daily News sports editor was saving this one for? Figuring he may never get a better chance, on Sunday we got the following headline above a story on the Rangers' 4-3 loss to Pittsburgh the night before:

Refs & Sid vicious
Calls help Crosby, Pens sink Rangers

Now that's killer...

...My favorite craigslist job ad of the young year is the one I came across for Fictional Writer Wanted. Part of me wanted to reply: "Hey, I'm your man. Or woman. Heck, as long as I'm fictional, I'll be whatever gender or age or height you need me to be. Now let's talk money. Since we're being fictional here, how about $50 an hour. Good, then it's settled. Have your imaginary people call my make-believe representatives." I bookmarked the ad, but now it just says "This posting has expired." Craig should've kept that one up a while longer...

...Someone needs to explain to me why on god's once-green earth The New York Times sees fit to waste everyone's time with a front-page profile of Glenn Beck, the right-wing nutjob who hosts a cable talk show on Fox? I knew about Beck for years, but the last time I caught his sorry act was almost exactly a year ago, where my Cancun hotel room had just 3 channels in English, one being CNN, and I watched Beck and wanted to throw up all over the TV, then I remembered that sort of thing is frowned upon in Mexican culture. But an hour-long show with Beck and guests like pathetic Ben Stein spouting patriotic platitudes should have come with a stern parental guidance warning from the FCC and the Mental Health Association.
Instead of dismantling this clown's disturbing brand of American chauvinism, the Times 3/29 portrait through the looking glass instead is not only almost critique-free, but writers Brian Stelter and Bill Carter indeed come offering something very close to unadulterated praise of the latest conservative media icon. For a less curiouser, more fact-based approach to covering an anti-progressive nemesis like Beck, the website Media Matters helpfully has a page with video links to this cretin's latest rants, where you can see for yourself the scope of the man's lunacy; last night Beck suggested that "the government is a heroin pusher using smiley-faced fascism to grow the nanny state." This from a man who saw nothing wrong with being invited to the Bush White House on numerous occasions to receive the latest talking points direct from the Horse's Mouth and the Horse's Mouthpiece (Rove and Bush, respectively). Beck, in all fairness, is best represented by another part of exterior equine anatomy.

The Beck feature was itself all too reminiscent of the infamous puff piece of the unctuous Rush Limbaugh that ran in the Times' Sunday magazine last year. The only thing worth noting in this latest sordid affair is the intensity and volume of feedback on the Beck story (lamely titled Fox News's Mad, Apocalyptic, Tearful Rising Star).

Among the 362 comments following the Times' singularly crapluster take on Beck is a passionate response from dkatie of portland, oregon:

"I can't believe that the NYTimes actually gave this man front page coverage. I can't believe it! YOU guys wrote about him as if he is a real newscaster, as if he has the pulse of the USA? I can't believe this! The man is an idiot who appeals to small but loyal part of the USA public, and not a very bright one at that. This man is a nutcase! Millions of Americans watch Montell Williams and the dramatic on-tele court drams and the rest of us do not take them seriously either -- Millions of people buy the National Inquirer and believe that Elvis is still alive and that doesn't make it NEWS. Gads, NYTimes, what is wrong with you people? The man is a dangerous sick individual -- Rush Limbaugh is not as bad as this guy. I can't believe you covered him in this manner. You all have lost your minds and good judgement."

...I guess that's just the kind of world we live in, a world where a Glenn Beck has 2.3 million nightly listeners. Now, my guess is that his audience is the same 2.3 million that first listens to Rush Limbaugh in the morning, then Sean Hannity and Michael Savage in the afternoon, then tunes into Beck and finally Bill O'Reilly in the evening, before falling asleep at around 10:00 smugly satiated with their daily fix of righteous anger...

...It's the kind of world where you hear sports radio host Max Kellerman has been fired from ESPN Radio, and you say to yourself: Finally, someone has seen through this obnoxious drone! Only to read a few weeks later in Bob Raissman's Daily News column that Kellerman will be joining WFAN as Mike Francesa's partner in the afternoon. Just the idea of such a self-centered loudmouth landing on his feet is a small blow to the very idea of How Things Should Work. Like a Glenn Beck being canned from CNN and then winding up on Fox News and getting good ratings. That's the kind of world we're gonna pass on to the kids...

...On the positive side of the street, Maureen Dowd has written one good column after another for a long stretch now. Moving away from Hillary Clinton as a subject has freed her from overdoing the oversimplified gender politics which she delighted reveling in during the long and bitter Clinton-Obama campaign. Sometimes she reverts to bad form, as in a recent overwrought Michelle Obama piece, but Dowd's twice-weekly column is once again a safe place to turn for an incisive if sometimes catty take on the culture of national politics...

...Independent journalism took another hit last week with the announcement that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. purchased The Brooklyn Paper, an award-winning local paper. First Murdoch bought their competitors a short time ago, adding to a collection that includes small papers in Queens and the Bronx. The Times article raises the issue of how coverage of the controversial Atlantic Yards real estate development would be affected. Given the precedent of News Corp.'s takeover of The Wall Street Journal, I wouldn't be inclined to give Rupert Murdoch the benefit of even one column inch of doubt.

History Lo Mein

"But, now that we have embarked on this topic, we have had second thoughts about setting it down in writing; for after all it is very well known to many people. So let us drop the subject and start on another one."

Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu (2007, Laurence Bergreen)
Marco Polo: The Travels (Penguin, 1958 translation R.E. Latham)

Genghis Khan & the Mongol Conquests, 1190-1400 (Stephen Turnbull);
The Mongol Empire (Mary Hull)
Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan (2007 DVD, Sergie Bodrov)

1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance (2008, Gavin Menzies)

Chronicle of the Chinese Emperors
(2009, Ann Paludan)
________________________________________________________________
Some good history books to recommend, and one DVD, although as a caveat I will admit that my movie pick was given a big Thumbs Down by the two friends I mentioned it to. Anyway, perhaps my enthusiasm will prove contagious. Remember, even Marco Polo's journey started with but a single step.

According to the Laurence Bergreen bio, most of what Polo claims to have seen, he really saw. Scholars through the centuries have contested how much of what Polo set down in his book was based on first-hand experience versus what he had heard second- or third-hand. Bergreen seems willing to cut Polo a lot of slack, casting dispersion gently over some of the more spurious bits of Polo braggadocio, such as the role he purports to play helping the Mongols with their siege of a key southern Chinese city that was providing fierce resistance. Polo claims he then helped design a series of catapults based on the latest Persian models, which sounds like so much Venetian bologna to Bergreen.

In another intriguing passage, Bergreen offers a novel explanation for why Polo seemed to linger so long near the mountains of Afghanistan: perhaps he was kicking a nasty opium habit he picked up along the way. And you thought history had to be boring.

As you probably already know, Polo didn't actually set quill to parchment and write The Travels all by his lonesome; rather, while languishing in a Genoese jail as a prisoner of war around 1298, he dictated his fantastic tale to a fellow prisoner, a writer from Pisa by the name of Rustichello. Therefore, it's anyone's guess as to which adventures belong to the well-traveled but down-to-earth merchant and which to the writer of picaresque romances populated by chivalric knights. Kind of like in our day determining where manager Joe Torre ends and author Tom Verducci begins in The Yankee Years, nominally Torre's memoir but most of the time rendered in third person.

Whatever the case, the combination has stood the test of time. Polo left home in 1271 as a 17-year-old, and by the time he returned a quarter-century later, his claim to have seen more of the world than any single man ever had was wholly justified.

But it's the little details that make Polo's Travels such a fascinating read. Even when dismissing foreign customs and cultures in the sweep of a short paragraph, the style proves ingratiating. There are subtle variations on passages like "Since I have told you about these Tartars of the Levant, let us now leave them and turn to Turkestan, so that you may hear all about it. But as a matter of fact we have already told you about Turkestan and how it is ruled by Kaidu, so we have no more to tell." Then the master of the smooth segue is on to another exotic city, where invariably the natives are savages who worship idols, the amenities of life are good and plentiful, and the women are beautiful.

It's funny, I didn't start out on such a Sino-centric path, but one topic seemed to lead naturally to another. This good streak began with the Marco Polo biography, and that led to wanting to not only read Polo's Travels itself, but wanting to find out more about these raging, rampaging, fearless Mongols, who in the 13th century altered the course of history. Led by Genghis Khan -- who by sheer force of will and personal magnetism organized thousands of scattered, nomadic, often warring tribes into arguably the most cohesive military force in world history starting in 1206 -- their empire ultimately surpassed the Roman Empire and even Alexander's conquests, ranking second only to the British Empire in land mass. At its peak, the empire included not only China but as far south as Cambodia, as far east as Baghdad (a city the Mongols burned to the ground in 1258, after slaughtering the entire population), with control over Russia and the Ukraine (the Golden Horde) as well as part of Poland (Battle of Liegnitz in 1241) and Hungary.

In addition to their vast superiority in numbers (males up to age 60 were still draft-eligible), there was strict discipline and nuanced strategy in Mongolian warfare. Commanders of 10 reported to commanders of 100, who reported to commanders of 1,000 and so on up to 10,000 and 100,000, with constant promotion and demotion designed to reward soldiers based on merit, regardless of status. This resulted in a fierce loyalty not to one's tribe, but to the military chain of command.

Yet as innovative as Mongolian warfare proved to be, it was their ability to adapt their style of governing to the conquered lands that proved revolutionary, with policies that not only tolerated religious diversity but made a point of incorporating Christians, Muslims and Buddhists into positions of leadership.
But like all superpowers, the Mongols got a little too cocky and foolishly embarked on costly invasions of Korea and Japan. In the two unsuccessful Mongol invasions of Japan (1274, 1281), bad weather played as big a role in fending off the Mongol force as the fierce resistance offered by Japanese samurais, with kamikazes ("divine winds") and tsunamis conspiring to alter the the course of history, as thousands of ships in the Mongol fleet were lost at sea. This seeming intervention by the gods cast a pall over the once-infallible sheen of Mongol might back home, and just as suddenly as their meteoric rise on the world stage came their downfall. Following the death of Kublai Khan, the empire began to crumble.

I just happened to stumble on the Mongol DVD while I was checking out another movie at the library. I watched, loved it, and would have loved another hour. But after Genghis Khan's death the movie ends kind of abruptly. My thought was, as long as the director had his cast of thousands of native Mongols, dressed up in period costume with no place to go, why not spin the sucker out to 3- or 4-hour epic length? Well, turns out that Mongol was just the "first entry in a proposed trilogy." So for those of us who didn't get quite enough Mongol throat singing the first time around, we may have two more movies to look forward to. You go, Mr. Bodrov.

I found 1434 to be a terrific read, but I made the mistake of checking out the Wikipedia page halfway through the book. Turns out other historians are up in arms over some of the more controversial conclusions. The consensus is that not only are the author's credentials questionable, but his claims are often outlandish and his research shoddy. It's like writer Gavin Menzies was the James Frey of the historical world, with 1434 evidently the Million Little Pieces of the genre. Yet 1434 and its predecessor 1421: The Year China Discovered America were bestsellers. Maybe it's a good story even if it wasn't true.

The author claims that not only were the Chinese sailing around the world centuries before Europeans, but on one specific expedition they reached Italy and bestowed gifts on the Vatican, including the latest maps of the world, astronomical tables, and a comprehensive encyclopedia containing the latest Chinese innovations in agriculture, city planning, engineering and weaponry. Later on, Da Vinci and other "geniuses" like him, according to Menzies, were merely offering variations on what the Chinese had known for centuries. European civilization really emerged from the Dark Ages and took off as a direct result of the 1434 contact between Chinese and the West. And it was Chinese science and map-making that made possible the voyages of discovery, specifically an astronomical chart that was based on knowledge of the earth orbiting the sun hundreds of years before Copernicus and Galileo. There's probably an element of truth to the Chinese influence, but perhaps attributing the entire Renaissance to this one 1434 event is going too far.
Before reading Chronicle of the Chinese Emperors, I had no idea how much emphasis the culture placed on the afterlife. For the same reason ancient Egyptians built their great pyramids above ground, the Chinese built whole cities underground for the deceased nobility in unbelievably ostentatious displays of wealth and industry. They believed that they would need all their everyday belongings, utensils and even toiletries in the next life, and so houses were replicated down to the smallest detail.

The emperors themselves went to even greater lengths to ensure their afterlives would not only be lavishly comfortable but safe. Why else would the First Emperor, in the 2nd Century BC, have himself buried with thousands of life-size, life-like terra cotta soldiers and horses? This proved to be the rule rather than the exception, as the bigger the gravesite, the more notable and powerful the ruler. The Chinese were kind of funny like that. But aren't we all?

See also:

Highly recommended
Falling Man
Pirate Histories
Poe Eye
Finding Wiki

Mean Time

THE FIRST THING you should know is that he lives with fear now. It has a hand in every public act. It is the unspoken assumption between himself and everyone else. In his mind the next violent act had already occurred and was only waiting, lurking, before it took a temporal and spatial form and became real, more real.

He starts with 100 and is huffing and red-faced but not yet sweating, all the body water sealed inside and boiling. He faces the mirror and hates what he sees, softness and confusion, fear in the eyes while he pumps the dumbbell. With two hands he grasps the bar outside the weight and pumps, curling the metal and beating it against his chest on the way up, leaving red marks on his chest, until his arms cramp up and stop midway. He smiles and feels his body through the pain for the first time in years. It becomes the morning ritual. He feels it gives him some small edge he didn't have before, a measure of readiness to confront violence, the violence that is out there, that is sure to be out there.

He sees it in the faces, in faces everywhere, in the eyes mostly. A brazen stupidity, a look that reveals the despair of lives not worth living. In the bodies of the people on the train every day, in the streets and in stores, he studies them for signs of weakness, disgusted by their misshapen forms, the bodies of those who quit fighting back.

He studies the bodies of the strong and appreciates these, and in contrast hates the great herd of bodies even more, sees the softness in their neglected bodies, like out of shape slaves. He sees the self-hate it took to quit on themselves.

Most of all he knows they too are victims, and he hates sharing this status with them. He is in no way like them. They were victims and would be victims again. It was logical. In a city of victims, a city filled with victimizers.

The detective motions for him to sit down. He is at the precinct to look at mug shots. The detective goes to a green metal cabinet and comes back with three huge black looseleaf binders. He sets them down on the desk.
"Take your time," he says, "maybe you'll get lucky. All I ask is that you're sure. We can't pick him up unless you're certain."
He opens the first book, containing white males picked up for assault. A small radio is set to an oldies station, playing Doctor My Eyes: I have done all that I could, to see the evil and the good...

The faces in the pictures frighten him to a surprising degree. The color is startling in the photos taken at flashpoint, the expressions frozen yet animated. He forgets which face he came to look for. He takes his time with each photo, searching for some kind of meaning behind the faces. About half of the men are bleeding or scratched. Street fights, he figures; two people get into a scrape and the loser charges the other with assault when the cops come.

The faces are sneering, simpering, class clown types. They are petrified, stricken, blinded by the light of the camera and the graveness of being arrested. Eyes are bloodshot, shirts are ripped, hair is matted down with sweat or crusted with blood.

Halfway into the first book he sees a face he knows. It's an old schoolmate--no, a former teammate from little league baseball, waiting here to be discovered, to complete some shared circle. The image looks back at him, pleads its case, its reason for being here among the nameless faces, and that is enough for him to flip the page and continue.

Sometimes he goes back to spend more time with faces that haunt him, that demand another look.

He wants to find the face he came here for, but the faces are terrifying. They frighten him individually, they frighten him en masse. There are hundreds and hundreds, four pairs on each page, and page after page, book after book. Containing those who have been arrested, it hits him; not the ones who were never caught, lurking here in this borough, animals who prey on the weak and defenseless, these white males arrested for assault. Assaulters.

They are all guilty, he feels it. All of them. It's on their faces and he reads it, tuned into their meanness, their savagery, and he is overwhelmed. He pushes the book away from him and his head is in his hands, overcome by this world within a world his life his opened into.

He feels worse a day later. It has been a weak since the Incident, and the more he plays it out in his mind, the more he is sure he acted cowardly. The more he wishes he had thrown at least one punch back.

When he relives the moment, the whole image in his mind brings tears to his eyes, the senseless viciousness of it.

He is hit and screams and falls to the ground. He never sees the punch coming. He is stunned and yells at them.

It eats at him.

If he had to do it all over again, he's pretty sure he would have gone after one of them. If it had been two, or even three, but it was four of them...

He visualizes it often, the punches he would throw, the first good one and then a flurry to finish him off. He sees the naked fear in their eyes but doesn't stop, can't stop. His hands are hurting and his knuckles sore, and everywhere there's blood, but still they haven't stopped smirking, and until they do he can't stop winding up and driving his fist into the face of the one who hit him.

All he remembers is the scream, then falling, his red blood everywhere, their smiling faces as they walk on, looking back and laughing. He punches now to drown out the scream, to stamp out the smirk forever.

If the Incident goes unpunished, he reasons, then the crime is compounded.

On Sundays, he waits in front of his house with a baseball bat, hoping they will come by again, completing the circle.

Daily life, he discovers, swims on all around him, not realizing that everything has changed.

He took it with him from the precinct, this feeling he was surrounded by blissful meanness, outnumbered statistically and allegorically by wolves in men's masks. He is down and withdrawn and sunken, but the next day he keeps his appointment anyway, a blind date with a friend of a friend.

He knows he will be disappointed as he sits at the bar of a place near work, full of suits and cutout faces dancing in fake delight above them, barking out orders for drinks and smiling eerily in the dark glow.

He sees his friend come in and she is there with him, walking stiffly. She is short and dark and he doesn't like her right away. He sees the night stretch out before him and he can't imagine how it will be saved.

They go and sit and it is crowded and the music too loud for their voices to carry even the short distance across the table, and so they are saying everything twice. Names, where they work, where they live and how they know each other, what time they get out of work and what time they have to be at work. The drinks arrive and cigarettes are lit.

Her mouth is way too big for her face and it is a dumb mouth, cruel even, and her words are thankfully lost in the music as she sits across from him. They are asking him, who does this song? and though he knows he just sits there out of spite. He looks around the bar and studies the faces, squinting to make out the features better, spotting the victim types. Pink, doughy faces perched ludicrously on thin necks.

He wants to tell them of his pain but they are smiling at him when he turns back. Cruel thoughts of his own are forming in his mind as he watches her, imagining her mouth as it might scream in terror, her face contorted, her eyes frozen in a flashpoint of fear.

It is a long time since he spoke last, and they are watching him more intently now, expecting something from him he just can't give.
"He's real quiet," his friend tells her.
"I knooooow!" she says. "Are you all right?"
He picks his drink up and looks into it for just a moment before throwing it at her face. She shrieks as he expected and throws her hands up, rising halfway from her seat and stopping, statue-like.
"You're a real asshole!" she shouts, and his friend is standing across the table, pushing him.
"What'd you do that for, schmuck?"
He is the only one smiling now as he grabs for his friend's shirt, ripping the buttons open. The music continues but the bar is still now as the punch comes, square on the chin, spilling him onto the floor. He looks up into the face of his friend and then to where she is sitting, her face shaking with laughter as she hides her mouth with her hands.

-- BW