Month of October , 2004

[[image:onenationsm.jpg:Republican Flyer -- small:center:0]]

It's Swing State time here in Nevada, which means every day my mailbox is chock-a-block full of flyers from both Republicans and Democrats. Today, I got a flyer exhorting me to "Vote Republican" next Tuesday, from the party whose presidential candidate seemed very upset, during the debates, about the idea that "under God" might be dropped from the "Pledge of Allegiance". What's interesting is that the slogan on the flyer, the little catchphrase that's sposed to fire up my patriotic sensibility and get me to vote for the party that aims to protect my right to impose on atheists and other non-Christian folks a particular conceptualization of a supernatural being watching over this nation and its interests, this slogan printed in big, glowy letters, says: ONE NATION...With liberty and justice for all. Where's the Bearded One? There's an ellipsis there to show me that words were removed, and I'm well-educated enough to know what words those are, too -- those Republicans don't know who they're dealing with! (Though, to be fair, after what they've done to education, I spose they figgered they could count on people not going in for reading and all that.)

Via BoingBoing comes this more-than-slightly-creepy story about a toystore that was visited by Homeland Security. The complaint: Pufferbelly Toys was stocking a Rubik's Cube knock-off called "Magic Cube". Citing protection of the Rubik's Cube patent, the agents ordered the owner to remove the toys from her shelves, which she did while the agents observed. After they left, she called the manufacturer, who informed her that the patent on Rubik's Cube was long-expired.

Apparently HS made a mistake (No, really? Not Homeland Security?! But, but, but... they're faultless!) in determining whether the toy violated patent laws. What's creepy is that they went after a single toy store, instead of the manufacturer (who could, ostensibly, issue a recall if such was called for) -- what about the thousands of other stores that stock the toy? What's even creepier is the statement by Virginia Kice, of Immigration and Customs Enforcement:

One of the things that our agency's responsible for doing is protecting the integrity of the economy and our nation's financial systems and obviously trademark infringement does have significant economic implications.

"Protecting the integrity of the economy"?!?!?! That's Homeland Security's mandate? Yes, trademark infringement does have significant economic implications, and while I can see HS dealing with that as a sort of side-benefit of customs work, I would think that legal issues like trademark and patent infringement would be Dept. of Justice issues -- how are store owners (or the agents who harass them) supposed to know the intricacies of intellectual property issues? But even so, the idea that something as vast and intricate as "the integrity of the economy" should be considered part of our national security... Well, that just creeps me out.

AFTERTHOUGHT: You can order a Magic Cube from Pufferbelly Toys here.

There's an interview with Walter Mosley in this week's Las Vegas Mercury. Mosley was in town last week for the Vegas Valley Book Fest (yeah, people read here -- sheesh!), and gave a great talk on "the literary life". During the signing, my girlfriend asked him to put some "words of wisdom" for a young writer in my copy of Futureland; after responding with "I have no wisdom" (which I thought was a great response), he wrote simply "Write every day".

In any case, the interview covers a lot of the same ground as the Q&A session after his talk, and is interesting in its own right, but what really struck me is his last statement. One of Mosley's least-known works is Working on the Chain Gang: Shaking Off the Dead Hand of History, an essay on race and politics on the cusp of the 21st century. Readers of Mosley's books shouldn't be surprised to find that Mosley has a complex and nuanced take on modern politics; what might surprise them is how very Marxist his understandings are. This is the book that made me from a mere reader into a devoted fan -- and is the book I chose to ask him to sign when I met him last week.

In the Mercury interview, Mosley discusses our obligations, as Americans, to the Iraqi people, and our responsibilities in this ongoing war against them:

The thing I don't get is this: There's a guy who has a wife and two kids living in Baghdad, and one day bombs start falling. Every sixth or seventh week a bomb kills a member of the family. Then someone tells him, "Oh, no. There were no weapons of mass destruction." Not only have you killed his whole family because of a guy he didn't even vote for, but the excuse [Bush] gave for killing his family was false. I am an American, and whatever America does, it's my responsibility. I as an American am not right to have killed that man's family. America needs to understand that we are committing a crime by murdering a man's family.

I know it's not proper, in these days of Burly-Man politicking and punditry, to think in terms of morality and ethics (unless, of course, God is your bitch), but in this short statement, Mosley does far more to sum up the problems involved in America's bid for Empire than all the Friedman's, Kaplan's, Hitchen's, and other Burly-Men combined.

Does anyone else find it odd that, in this election where so much has been made of John Kerry's lack of committment to a fixed position and Bush's almost blasphemous certainty in the rightness of his actions, both parties are madly scrambling to enlist the support of undecided voters who are still, with all the facts more or less in from of them(maybe I should say "facts deemed appropriate for public consumption by the administration"?), wavering and uncertain?

"I don't disbelieve in universal truth; I just disbelieve anyone who tells me that he or she knows what the universal truth is."

I can't even begin to express what a balm that simple, to-the-point statement is for the heart of an unrepentant postmodernist sympathizer like myself.

Physical therapist did the deep tissue massage yesterday. O the Pain. I weep.

According to BoingBoing, Snap.com, a new search engine, has a ridiculous linking policy (Section 15 C):

Unless a User has a written agreement in effect with us which states otherwise, User may only provide a hyperlink to the Site on another Web site, if you comply with all of the following: (a) the link must be a text-only link clearly marked "snap.com" or "www.snap.com"; (b) the link must "point" to the URL "http://www.snap.com" and not to other pages within the Site; (c) the link, when activated by a User, must display the Site full-screen and not within a "frame" on the linking Web site; and (d) the appearance, position and other aspects of the link must not be such as to damage or dilute the goodwill associated with our name and trademarks or create the false appearance we are associated with or sponsor the linking Web site.

What I wonder is if Snap actually sees this linking policy as reasonable enough to follow themselves? Especially the parts about labelling sites only withtheir URL and not linking ot pages within a site? If it's not good enough for them, why on earth would they think it would be good enough for anyone else?

I know, I know -- Borders is Evil. Support local independents, by all means. I moved last month, and am pleased to find that a local used bookstore, Dead Poets Books, moved too, and right up the street! But sometimes there's a book that just hasn't made it into the stock of your local used bookstore, and Vegas is really not hip to the whole "independent bookseller" thing, so it's Borders and B&N for me, or no bookstores at all.

And normally it's no new bookstores -- I can be pretty happy with just used bookstores and the Web for new books, when I absolutely positively *must* have some new release (Walter Mosley comes to mind). But this weekend it's Education Day at Borders, so educators -- among whose exalted ranks I count myself -- get a whopping 25% off their (our) purchases. Given that the bulk of our society, for all the lip service it gives to "Leaving No Child Behind" and all that, sees actual educators as only a step away from prostitutes moonlighting as terrorists, it's refreshing to know that there is at least one place where, for a couple days out of the year anyway, we can get a little respect. Before, you know, going back to bilking taxpayers out of their hard-earned money, training their children to hate America, and securing entirely unreasonable stashes of WMDs to use against the government.

I haven't done much blogsurfing lately, due to my back and a busy schedule, so maybe this has been commented on ad nauseum, but did anyone else think it somewhat refreshing and even surprising to see The Man Who Would Be President admit on national TV during the first debate that he'd made a mistake? ("I made a mistake in how I talked about the war...") I know that the Bush campaign would have me believe that any display of less-than-fanatic certainty is a sign of lack of leadership capability, but I actually appreciated it. Although I'm never going to be a Kerry booster -- I want Bush out, but Kerry is far from who I'd have chosen to replace him -- I wouldn't mind having a president who can recognize his (or her -- when's that gonna happen?!) mistakes and publically admit that s/he's made them. It takes a certain kind of courage to realize and admit that you're wrong, and Bush has demonstrated time and again that courage is not something he's particularly familiar with.