Ongoing saga of the United States of Wal-Mart

I'm fairly gratified that Maryland's Senate voted to override a veto and enact a law requiring large employers to provide health care benefits for workers. Wal-Mart, the world's largest corporation, is a wonderful example of how the blind pursuit of profits, or of cheap consumer goods, works. You can't make goods cheap enoough to undercut all competitors without underpaying someone somewhere, and Wal-Mart is a well-known offender, costing states billions of bucks every year in public-funded medical coverarge. It gives me a bit of satisfaction that a handful of elected representative assemblies are actually representing the interests of their constituents and not paving the way for a bigger, more powerful Wal-Mart. (Turlock has been fighting Wal-Mart's plan to close its current store and open a gigantic one a half-mile away.)

I have not made a purchase from a Wal-Mart in more than 18 months - probably much closer to 2 1/2 years. My reasons do include my objections to Wal-Mart's business practices, but that, as I've mentioned elsewhere here, doesn't mean I'm somehow a moral paragon. Moral paragons don't shop at Target. No, I have to say, I'm driven more by a visceral disgust of Wal-Mart that overtakes me any time I enter any Wal-Mart. I want, immediately upon entering, to leave. In fact, I've more than once turned right around and walked out again, even in situations where there was something I really needed, and knew that the Wal-Mart in question was going to be the easiest place to get it. I hypothesized for a while that Wal-Mart must have a brain-eating machine installed somewhere in each store. That explained my disgust, and also the way people in a Wal-Mart become zombies. Later I realized that a simpler explanation would be that people turned themselves into zombies in order to numb themselves to the Wal-Mart experience. Possibly they're all on drugs, which seems like a viable strategy as well.

Members of the Maryland Senate said they intended to make large corporations behave themselves (an odd thought for anyone who's seen The Corporation), and denied any deliberate attack on Wal-Mart. Personally, I have unfathomable ill will for Wal-Mart, and would really like a legislative body or court someplace to kill it.

T'ain't all work and no play

As rumor has had it, I've been working intensively on the food paper, and teaching class. But if all I did was work on papers and so on, I'd make myself crazy. I know this, because I've done it. It may actually make me busier, but sticking time into my day to do other stuff has become vital to my well-being.

I decided, for instance, to make a few recordings of songs I've written in the past year. To that end, a few weeks ago I got a pre-amp gizmo that patches into a USB port, and came with this weird German software package for recording. I've been fooling with it a very very little, just enough to get it to make decent, though rather crude, recordings (or, really, if we're being precise about it, digital samplings). I've only begun to play with the various effects, including some truly freakish pre-sets for the reverb effect that can make an ordinary 12-string guitar sound like circular saw blades cutting through steel.

Anyway, this one is a tortured thing called Very Much Like Three-Tenths of Torqeumada's Blues, and this other number, meant to be much sweeter, is called A Piece of Pie. With any luck, the links'll work.

Not actually funny, in fact (well, maybe it is)

This morning's Yahoo news feed included the headline "Turkey battles to weaken grip of deadly bird flu."

An as yet unnamed lasagne

Some time ago I wrote an entry about a lasagne I made and named Steve. I'm making another lasagne tonight, this time with greater reflection, because of the food paper I'm writing, but this lasagne is nameless.

It's a fairly sexy lasagne, I must say. The sauce is béchamel, which is basic white sauce, except I always stuff if with nutmeg and white pepper. The noodles are between layers of cottage, goronzola, mozzarella, and parmesan cheese blended together, and mushrooms, artichoke hearts, a little onion and garlic that I sautéed, to which I added a couple spoonfuls of chopped black olives.

I had the revelation I needed to make the next step in the food paper this morning as I rose. If you consider the sense of taste, you'll notice that it tells us a lot about sensation in general. For one thing, it shows us the synaesthesia of our sensoria - we live in whole sensory worlds, not individuated sense data that we compose into a whole. It's just about impossible to ignore this regarding taste, but we (and by "we" I mean primarily Modern philosophers) have done a great job ignoring it regarding vision, the sense they took as the model of all senses.

Right now I can only express the idea in phenomenological jargon, so pardon that. The basic notion I've hit on is that taste is the exemplary sense because tasting is the most intimate - what we taste becomes us, quite literally. This demonstrates that the alleged subject-object division, that bugaboo of Modern western philosophy, can't hold. We can't taste unless what we taste and our tasting become intimately conjoined.

That led me to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whom I spent three hours reading this afternoon, to pull together a few more ideas about what I've ended up calling the "founding intimacies" of perception. And with no undue modesty, I gotta say, I think "founding intimacies" is a damned nifty expression for it.

The dilemma of consuming

I took my new Jetta to the VW dealer today, to have them correct a couple chips of paint and a ding in the trunk lid. I half expected them to tell me to get lost, but perhaps part of the reward of being a conspicuous consumer (or at least the purchaser of a new car) is that you get good treatment.

I've been preparing for my second class session in Professional Ethics this evening, contemplating Anthony Weston's A Practical Compantion to Ethics and considering his take on what it means to value, and how little we tend to consider this in its depth. For instance:

I'm opposed to the current US military involvement in Iraq. I have suspected from before the beginning that it was for the sake of advancing a capitalist economic agenda, specifically the petroleum economy, and that the various pretexts presented by the Bush administration for invading Iraq (all of which have now been abandoned) were always nothing more than that - pretexts. My general reaction to news stories related to Iraq and the Bush administration's policies and statements about Iraq rests on the assumption that the war is really for nothing more noble than oil.

But of course, I'm implicated. I drive a car; I use electricity; I throw away plastic bags. I buy stuff - lately, in fact, I've bought a lot of stuff. My pretext for this behavior is that it improves my life in ways that are practical and worthwhile. The new car replaces a probably dangerous and probably (monetarily) worthless vehicle. The new laptop replaces a generally unreliable and frustrating machine - although I retain the old one, because it contains files I will likely need, and a PC hockey game I still may play from time to time. It all seems reasonable, and not at all objectionable, from the narrow standpoint of my own individual life and system of needs and desires.

Nonetheless, by choosing to consume, I'm choosing to contribute in my own way to the petroleum economy and the US and global capitalist policies that this entails. Now, my dropping out wouldn't make a noticeable difference, but my remaining within the worldwide economic hoohah means I don't have the legitimate right to pass moral judgments on IT. I am part of it. And I didn't buy the hybrid.

Is it a hand-wringing bit of hairshirt self-flagellation to say that there's no such thing as a conscientious consumer? Am I using guilt as an excuse for continuing to live the way I please? (Well, on that point, let me be frank: I gave up guilt about 18 months ago, by deciding that, right or wrong, I would make moral and life decisions of my own, stand by them, and deal with their repercussions.)

In a very practical sense, there are few options for a person in this society to act on the basis of objections to the way corporate capitalism dominates the world (regardless of whether such a person is a socialist, Marxist, anarchist, or just finds CEOs kinda stinky). In this society, YOU are GOING TO CONSUME. I think it doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of difference how you consume. Go ahead, buy nothing but organic fruits, veggies, and cotton fibers. But don't buy your own bullshit: they still use trucks to bring in the food, and they still use oil to make the plastic or the wax-covered cardboard cartons for your soy milk. Unless you're growing your own, or are running naked and eating nothing, you're part of IT too.

I don't mean that consuming is bad. Consuming is necessary and human. What I mean is that because we consume in the way we unavoidably do consume, in the current economic and social-political context, all of us are implicated. None of us has moral high ground on this. And that's very interesting, because it may be the one area of life where we can't stand on creed or culture like a soapbox and make pronouncements against one another.

Except against SUV drivers. We still get to loathe them, never fear.

Il pleut comme vaches qui pissent

It has been raining for the better part of the last three days, including strong wind all day yesterday. This usually has meant flooding here in Speedbumpville, but so far there hasn't been any.

After a fairly thorough search of sources available to me through the university library and the Internet, I can safely say hardly anyone has pursued a Husserlian phenomenological account of taste. There have been mentions of taste in plenty of discussions of Husserl's discussions of perceptual experience, but I have found nothing that extensively considers taste. I spent several hours working on it yesterday, developing a bit from Husserl's analysis of "sense-bestowing" intentionality in Ideas I. It's been long enough since I last slogged through Ideas I that I hadn't quite remembered what a slog it is. Next up is a similar slog through Ideas II.

Then I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening under this apocalyptic weather. By bedtime I was wondering about the future, specifically, whether it makes much sense to go on under the assumption that life in 20 years will be much like it is now. The trends seem to be toward (a) extremely limited and fantastically expensive energy resources, (b) rapidly changing, more volatile, more destructive weather patters, (c) more expensive, poorer quality food, (d) more expensive, less reliable, possibly dangerous water, and (e) a more dangerous, warlike world. I started to feel like a dope for buying a car whose gasoline I may not be able to afford in 6 or 7 years. I started to feel like a dope for buying a laptop whose usefulness is contingent on something like the status quo of available resources. Heck, I started to feel like a dope for drinking coffee every morning. In sum, this is some nasty weather to feel oneself to be under.

Then I had nightmares through the night (which I've forgotten). I woke around 7, absolutely freaked out. I tossed, turned, hid my head, and fell asleep again, to dream of visiting Pittsburgh and driving around the city streets and parkways on scooters - which is at best a foolhardy proposition. But at least we got to Duquesne in one piece (or, if you're thinking about this clearly, two pieces), to look down off the Bluff at the river and watch people stroll along the (nonexistent) white sand beach in the rain.

What exactly is a new year, anyway?

In just over fifteen minutes, and in fact less by the time I'll have completed this entry, it'll be "the new year," 2006. I suppose we need these arbitrary measures of the passage of time, and as far as that goes, calling a year by any particular number would be as good as any other, as long as enough of us use the same number to make it a convenient common measure. But really, how is January 1st in any way a rational time, seasonally speaking, or in any other way, to declare it the new year? It's not the beginning of Winter, nor the end of Winter. It's not the beginning of any season. It's not the beginning of anything, except the so-called new year. Call me contrarian, but I frankly just don't get it.

Lauren's folks call New Year's Eve "Amateur Night," which I think needs no explanation. I had a phone call from my friend Annie around 10 (she's back East, so for her it was already 2006 and 1/8,760th). During our hour-long conversation, I saw three cars careen through the parking lot here in Speedbumpville, one of them turning sharply and too quickly into a parking spot and not stopping until it hit the curb. I'm glad we opted for an evening of game-playing, music, George Carlin, and of course the traditional New Year's Eve chicken tacos.

Slowly, the food paper progresses

Today I finished reading Carlo Petrini's Slow Food, which gives a history and account of the principles of the Slow Food movement. It has an unearned reputation of being conservative, in part because it emphasizes restoring cultural traditions. But the originators of the movement were far-lefties, and their program might best be described as anarcho-hedonic consumer protection. It's an odd mix, but tied extremely well to the centrality of taste and of the pleasures of the table.

Here's Petrini's account of the supermarket:

Whether it is the season for them or not, there you will find strawberries in winter, pears in the springtime, apples at midsummer, and currants in the autumn. Somewhere in the world, less than twenty-four hours away by air, it is always the right season. Along with these eternal first fruits, we find cheeses and cured meats that seem to come from every corner of the earth (whether they really do or not) on the shelves of small stores and supermarkets. (p. 55)

Our eating habits are both reflected and shaped by grocery stores. What they present to us is an "El Dorado" (Petrini again) of what seems like the greatest possible variety of foods, of consistent quality, healthfulness, color, etc. Shopping in a grocery store trains us to think of food as nothing but a commodity, and its place of origin as nowhere other than the store. A reasonable and expected answer to a question like "where did you get these apples?" is something like "Safeway." Not Washington, or Oregon, or Alberta, or New Zealand, or Timbuktu. The availability of these commodities safely hides their place of origin (which, I suppose in response to some legal requirement, grocery chains now do print on labels in the produce aisle, often in tiny print). We're given little chance, and no reason, to question their origin. Nor their actual quality, healthfulness, nutritive value, or anything else. And we also accept, through the implicit acquiescence of our purchases, the bald-faced lies told to us in the grocery store - for instance, that the wax coating every goddamn piece of fruit or vegetable is to "protect freshness."

We frequent farmer's markets and fruit stands, but we also live in the Central Valley. There's simply no way to compare the fruits and veggies from the stands to what comes from the grocery store, even the "organic" stuff.

In my mind, there's a clear political and moral issue here. We're a society that feeds ourselves crap, to the great benefit of large and multinational corporations. We've become tricked somehow into accepting this as normal, and many of us are stuck with no other options. When I realize I have to consider myself lucky to be able to get good produce, locally grown, in season (at all, let alone for seven months of the year), and when I realize how few Americans eat fresh fruit and vegetables in the first place, I'm disgusted by what Big Food has done to us, and I'm saddened that the lovely tastes I routinely enjoy are out of reach for so many, especially when that's by choice or habit.

Somebody (maybe John Rawls?) once said that a good way to measure the justice of a society is to look at how it treats its poorest and most wanting members. Perhaps a better way is to look at how it feeds itself.

"Your car is from the future!"

I bought a Jetta!

It's silver, which is one of the colors I had forsworn. However, I got it around $1500 under the asking price. I got the car I wanted, for the price I wanted, just in a color I didn't want (I wanted the "blue graphite"). I'm financing it through VW at 4.5%, which seems decent.

I've never owned a new car before. I've also never owed this much on a car before. The first of these facts thrills me; the second disconcerts.

So after I take the car to a few live music shows, everything should be fine.

(Oh dear, I seem to have caused grievous injury to my loveliest Lauren with that last pun. However, the quotation that serves as this entry's title was her joke, seeing as the Jetta is a 2006. See, it's December 27, 2005? It's not 2006 yet? So the car, a 2006 Jetta, is a car whose official date is not this year but the next year, being the one proximately following this? To wit: 2006, being not 2005, but in point of fact a year further ahead than 2005, is in fact, from the point of view of those living in 2005, a date in the future, being that time which has not yet transpired. Hence, the 2006 Jetta, dated 2006, not 2005, is not a 2005. It is, if you follow, thus a car whose model year is 2006, not 2005, ergo a date in the future.)

(I could clarify this further upon request. But I should warn that there's all kinds of astronomical facts and theories involved. It's really quite complicated. A background in Einstein's General and Special Theories of Relativity would be advisable.)

What she said, to be technical, was "Your car is a 2006. But it's not 2006 yet...! Your car is from the future!" (She said it in italics.)

More later, possibly the beast's name, if that occurs to me, and maybe including pictures, although you've seen a silver Jetta before if you're not living under a rock. And if you're living under a rock, what the hell are you doing with Internet access?

Report from Mickey D's

I survived, but only barely. I did in fact become ill after consuming a Quarter Pounder Meal (TM). I've written up some of our observations, to begin the phenomenological account of taste. A couple characteristics really struck us.

First, the Quarter Pounder, and indeed the fries, dissolved more than needed to be chewed. As Lauren put it, the füd can't be masticated. Plus, it dissolves into little fine particles, of more or less identical size and shape, which, while not dry, aren't exactly textured the way whole food or cooked meat is. When you really pay attention to that, it's rather disconcerting.

Second, every bite, and every element of every bite, has the same, even, uniform flavor. It's as though every part of the sandwich, including the bun and the chopped onion, has taken on the overall flavor of the whole thing. Of course, you learn, as a cook, to "marry" flavors, for instance in beouf bourguignonne, where the mushrooms, the beef, the little onions, all take on the flavors of one another and of the wine and stock. But this is something different - the burger doesn't taste like a burger, onions, pickle, etc., married together, but like a McDonald's burger, which is a taste all its own, and not one clearly related to the constituent part of which the thing is supposedly made. (It doesn't taste like beef, for example. Nor does it smell like beef.)

These experiences probably hit me harder than they would most observers, because I so rarely eat any pre-made food of any kind, other than bread. Some would say it makes me a snob, but I don't really see it that way. I don't like pre-made food, and regard it as in general less healthy (and the 1440 mg of salt in the Quarter Pounder meal, to say nothing of the cholesterol and trans fats, back me up on that). But it truly is a matter of my sense of a good life and good health. I feel healthier when I eat food cooked at home; I like to cook my own food; I think it's cheaper, even when I get fine ingredients; I don't use much salt; I produce food that I like, to my own tastes.

After reading most of another chapter of Henri Lefevbre's Everyday Life in the Modern World, it's tempting to go into the notions of "satisfaction" and "pleasure," and perhaps in the paper I'll do that, to discuss Slow Food. I don't know to what extent I'd accept any of this as grounds of serious claims of superior enjoyableness for one kind of food or another. I'm not meaning to say anyone who enjoys a Quarter Pounder is a barbarian and incapable of gastronomic judgment. After all, my pal Imj ("The Most Optimistic Man in a McDonald's, Ever") Williams does Mickey D's, with gusto, and is also, among my friends and acquaintances, the one whose capacities for taste pleasure, discernment, distinction, and all the other arts of gourmandism most closely rivals mine. (See, now that's a snobbish thing to say.)

I realize that in part it's a matter of what you put into the experience. But that's the real point I think I want to get at: not that McDonald's füd is bad, or that my food is necessarily better (according to my tastes, it is, I'll cop to that), but that McDonald's füd attenuates experience. Don't call it bad or good, call it standarized. That has fairly important implications for developing aesthetic and gastronomic judgments, or for being able to take pleasure in food.

We're going to McDonald's today - ugh.

A couple years ago I committed to putting together an anthology on food and philosophy with my Finnish pal Matti Itkonen. That time has arrived. Unfortunately, my plan for a paper involves a comparative phenomenological account of two meals - one fast food, another slow food. I'll get to the slow food stuff another day. As for today, the plan is to go to a McDonald's, maybe around 2, and order and eat some manner of food (or, as we call such fare, "food with an umlaut," or "füd"). The things I do for art.

Maybe, instead, we'll go to a VW dealer so I can test drive a Jetta, the car I've just recently become obsessed with buying. I can't actually buy anything at the moment, but the 1999 Neon which doesn't make that high-pitched whining sound (dealers and repair shops have steadfastly sworn to this) now consists of nothing but high-pitched whining sounds. Now, I'm as weird as the next guy, but even I have a limit of tolerance. Plus, frankly, I suspect that high-pitched whining sounds have rotten side-impact collision ratings.

Dinner report

It turned out to be six courses. I didn't take any pictures, but I'll describe a coupla things.

The first courses were two hors-d'oeuvres: a grilled tomato with mozzarella browned on top of it, and little tartlets with fennel, raddichio, feta, green onions, and a savory custard. There then followed the soup course, a light consomme made with lamb and beef stock (the beef stock, I confess, was store-bought; when I make beef stock, it's with the intention of making demi-glace, so it doesn't stay beef stock for long).

Then the entree - sauteed shrimp with beurre blanc. The beurre blanc came out wonderfully, and the shrimp loved it. Lauren had had the idea, and didn't quite insist on it at the grocery store. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do otherwise, so we bought 9 big shrimp and I went for the beurre blanc. (Beurre blanc is what happens when you take shallots, simmer them in vinegar and wine until there's just a couple tablespoons of liquid left, then whisk in about a stick of butter. That probably sounds like a heart attack in convenient sauce form to lots of people, but if you only spoon out a dram of it onto shrimp, the cardiac effects aren't that great a consideration compared to what you get to eat. Life is always full of compromises like this. Get used to it.) I had also tossed a little saffron onto the shrimp, but I'm not sure what impact that had other than to be cute red threads.

Then the salad course, a simple one: romaine and arugula, a little more raddichio, and pine nuts, dressed with balsamic vinegar and olive oil. When you're eating six courses, simple salads and soups seem like a great idea. I mean, I'm not trying to kill anybody.

Finally, the main course, roast leg of lamb, mashed blue potatoes (they come out periwinkle colored, very amusing), and roasted vegetables. The lamb was overdone, by which I mean it was cooked through, which we tend not to like around here.

Lauren ground some decaf coffee with a bunch of spices, which is delicious even to someone like me who prefers coffee black and spoon-dissolving. We drank that, I played a couple songs fairly badly, we talked of the traumas of the semester past and our hopes for semesters yet to come (or, in Lauren's case, possibly not to come, at least, not at Cow State Santa Claus).

I think the shrimp was the best thing.

Now, we're going to Lopez Imports. I'm not sure how you can make money importing Lopezes, but I don't have much of a head for business anyway.

That strange feeling

I'm not enitrely sure I'm well. You know the feeling - I don't exactly fit together properly, I'm drifting through the day, etc. Personally, I blame grading.

And yes, I'm grading. I'm grading like there's no tomorrow. But there is a tomorrow, and tomorrow is the absolute end of it. We're leaving when Lauren's final is over, to acquire foodstuffs to cook up a whiz-bang supper for Valerie, with all of the potential food-porn ramifications that entails. Gonna try to do something frou-frou.

That's about as in-depth as my consciousness can get at the moment. Just a few more tonight, please, brain?

My new laptop

I got a new laptop. I'll give a brief account of it in convenient, E-Z-2-read Q&A format:

Q: What kind of laptop did you get?
A: I gots me a G4 iBook.

Q: What?? A friggin' Mac?
A: Yep. Call me weird, -

Q: You're weird!
A: Stop that. I say, call me weird, but my three-year-old laptop running Windows XP and freezing up every hour, especially when I'm trying to do something especially taxing to it, like print a document, was getting pretty damn boring.

Q: Why not one of them super-cool titanium PowerBooks?
A: Because they're $600 more, and the extra power is probably not something I need.

Q: Oh, you think so?
A: Yes, I do. Isn't that obvious?

Q: Who's asking the questions here?
A: That wasn't a question, it was more of a rhetorical threat.

Q: Oh yeah?
A: Look, I've had it with you. I have papers to grade.

Q: Are you going to continue using the E-Z-2-Read Q&A format in your blog?
A: Heck no. You've cured me of that particular impulse. Jerk.

Q: Neener-neener-neener!
A: Grow up, man.

Q: PLPLPLPLBBH!

Q: Hey! Come back here!

Q: Wuss! Come on and fight me, if you don't like it!

Q: HEY!

Q: Huh. He really left. Oh well. Dum-de-dum-de-dum-dum... Crap, no more orange juice! He left the empty carton in the fridge!

United States of Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart is objecting to a campaign, apparently funded by unions, which raises the theological question of whether Jesus would approve of Wal-Mart's policies.

I do enjoy the effort of some to suggest that profiteering isn't exactly Christian, but I think it never goes far enough. I know I heard and read dozens of times that a rich person has as much chance of reaching heaven as a camel has of passing through the eye of a needle. Whatever it means in terms of commerce as a fundamental means of organizing production and consumption, it's a fascinating notion for thinking about the nature of happiness and salvation (even for someone like me who doesn't believe in salvation).

So, while I chuckle whenever anyone makes fun of Wal-Mart, it seems to me the real message is to ask the reflective question of my own complicity. I didn't spend Thursday picketing in front of retail outlets; I spent Thursday roaming around inside them, buying goodies for Christmas. I'm involved.

Still, in all, hee-hee.

A brief note on December 7

I realize this is a couple days late, but I didn't get around to posting it on December 7th.

That afternoon I spent some time in my office, hitting the "next blog" button on the top of Blogger pages, to get an unscientific survey of what's out there. I kept coming across references to Pearl Harbor, since, of course, it was December 7th, the anniversary of the attack in 1941. But I didn't come across any references to December 7, 1975, which is the date of the invasion of East Timor by Indonesia, and the start of a campaign that killed, conservatively, over a hundred thousand East Timorese. The invasion is subject of media criticism controversy, since the story was barely covered in US news media, while the Khmer Rouge killings in Cambodia were covered extensively. The key difference in the two stories, according to many media critics, was that Indonesia was a client nation of the US, and incidentally a major trading partner, and Cambodia was a communist bloc nation.

Anyway, here's a piece from Democracy Now about December 7.

Mainly relief

Yesterday I got divorced. It was messy; it was ugly; it was all a divorce should be, I suppose. So I'm relieved it's over, and I can get on with my life. There's plenty to say about how this is going to be perceived, who will say what about it or about me. The fact of the matter is that I walked away with a chunk less share of community property than was my legal right.

And what did I go and do, the very next morning, completely unable to restrain myself? I went and bought a new car! And here it is:

I've been wanting to make a joke like that for a looooong time.

Now we're getting somewhere!

Here's an interesting story on the government's lack of real measures of success in the so-called war on terrorism. Raphael Perl makes two vital points in the report discussed in the story.

First, any raw number presented as a measure of success doesn't have the context to explain its meaning. The number indicates something is being done, but that gives a potentially misleading picture, since "we measure progress retrospectively against what we've done. And of course since we've done some stuff, we've made progress."

That reminds me of a great Max Frisch story I read in an elementary German class in college, where a bureaucrat's day is detailed. The maxim of the man's action is "etwas muss geschehen" - something must be done. If that's your motto, then anything you do is an achievement, regardless of its effect.

But Perl makes another, more subtle point: what counts as a measure of success to the US government may count as a measure of failure to someone else - for instance, to an adversary. Is increasing defense spending a success? Is removing Saddam Hussein from power and reducing Iraq from tyranny to chaos a success?

What this points out, on a deeper level, is the unexamined, unquestioned perspective of US media presentations of the events called "the war on terrorism" (or, in Bushspeak, "the war on terror"). Reporting on "insurgency" in Iraq, for instance, as part of the ongoing "war on terrorism," only makes coherent sense under the assumption of the same set of beliefs about US motivations and interests that are presented by officials. The Iraq-terrorism connection is presumed, not demonstrated, and the constellation of these notions, repeated in media, cloaks them in "objectivity" and all the other virtues of contemporary journalism. It's a currency without credit.

**

Another item: Rep. Cunningham (R-Calif.) resigned after pleading guilty to accepting bribes. Cunningham said he was sorry, and that he was resigning because he "compromised the trust of [his] constituents." I hate to be picky, but since he had proclaimed his innnocence as recently as July, what Cunningham really means here is that he's resigning because he got caught compromising the trust of his constituents.

How can I tell whether the President is lying?

As George Carlin put it in one of his HBO specials, some people need practical advice. So, here's some practical advice concerning when to believe what President Bush says about Iraq: never. This will save you time and energy you might otherwise spend in vain, attempting to sort out what tiny germ of truth there might be in some dimly-lit subparagraph of a subsection of one of his statements; or trying to work out what, if anything, the President actually believes.

The current case: Not two days after raising doubts about John Murtha's honor and credibility, President Bush made protestations of his respect for Murtha. It turns out that calling Democratic critics of the Iraq war names didn't help calm anyone down. Go figure. But of course, this is the same President Bush who kept coming up with different rationales for attacking Iraq before finally just bulling his way forward, the same President Bush who declared that "you're either with us or against us" as a way of casting aspersions on the patriotism of anyone who criticized the Iraq war, the same President Bush who announced in May of 2003 that we'd won in Iraq. If there's anyone with less credibility in the US government, I think it might be Dick Cheney.

In fact, even in lying about his respect for Murtha, the President couldn't stop himself from lying about what he was lying about. Murtha called last week for a 6-month schedule to withdraw from Iraq. Republicans in Congress pushed for a vote on an immediate troop withdrawal, basically as a political stunt to force Democrats to vote against withdrawing troops, since an immediate withdrawal would be rather chaotic. In saying he respects Murtha on Sunday, President Bush imputed to Murtha the proposal for immediate troop withdrawal, as though Murtha supported it.

There's a principle of scientific reasoning called parsimony, which says that the simplest explanations of phenomena are the best. Its ancient precedent is called Occam's razor, named after the philosopher who gave us the idea that explanations of phenomena that posit the fewest causes or origins are the best. Applying this to the President's statements about Iraq, one would assume everything the President says is untrue, because it's simplest to explain his statements this way. And not only is it the simplest explanation, it's also most prudent: If what the President says (consistent with his pattern of five years) is a lie, then we are not tricked by it. If it is the truth, then there will be evidence that demonstrates its truth, and we are not harmed by disbelieving it. If we were faced with the still more logically vexing problem of what we might call "modal lies" (not direct lies, but lies concerning what the President actually believes to be true -- that is, lies about his state of belief rather than lies about the world or the facts), our vexation would be dispelled by our simply regarding everything that the President says to be untrue.

An utterly unrelated news item of note: Iran says it will not accept nuclear checks. Yes, but will Iran continue to accept nuclear Visa or nuclear MasterCard?

Revelations

Two stories in the last couple days related to the ways the Bush administration has inserted a heavily partisan political agenda into federal agencies. This isn't news: it was clear from the very beginning of Bush's first term that he intended to use federal agencies as political pressure groups. After all, he made Gale Norton head of the Environmental Protection Agency - a clear sign that EPA would be protected the environment for extracting industries - oil, natural gas, and mining. (She had been sued by the EPA when she was head of Colorado's bureaucracy overseeing mining there, because she had simply refused to apply pollution control laws on mining companies. Putting her in charge of EPA is like hiring a methhead to keep watch on the Sudafed.)

First, there's the story of the FDA having decided to prohibit over-the counter sales of the "morning after" pill before hearing scientific evidence. This isn't news. The administration's position on scientific questions is consistently the same: don't confuse them with the facts, they've made up their minds. The world is flat.

Then, there's this morning's news that Bush's appointee to be head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting used the post to attempt to interfere politically in the way public radio and television operated. Again, this isn't news: remember the GOP operative inserted into the White House media corps to ask softball questions? This is part of a long-standing pattern.

I suppose what bugs me about this is the notion that suddenly this pattern is worth paying attention to, now that Bush is a lame duck, and we're stuck with him for another three years and two months.