Beware of Wang Online

My good friend Thomas Pearson has hit up just the story I was going to write about myself, that being the announcement that the People's Republic of China is going to attempt to ban all access to online pornography. While trying to keep 1.2 billion people from engaging the wonderful world of electronic filth stikes me as likely to succeed as Canute's strategy for Atlantic tide diversion, one has to give the communists credit for being willing to take on massive projects with complete confidence, no matter how clearly they are doomed to failure. Whether its collectivizing agriculture, rooting out counterrevolutionary tendencies or imprisoning those who take a virtual ride on the Bang Bus, they know how to break some eggs.

And of course, note well the name of the official in charge of this ambitious undertaking.

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Operation Offended Pride

The Kerry campaign is finally moving to publicly counter allegations made by fellow Vietnam swift boat crew members that the candidate's war record is exaggerated and promising that this week was to be "the start of the mother of all backlashes." I had thought the phrase "the mother of all..." had been made permanently ridiculous after Saddam Hussein promised The Mother of All Battles in the days before Gulf War I, but I don't suppose that would stop the campaign from using it. In any case, the response so far seems to be a combination of outraged indignation and irrelevant counter-attacks. Take the supposedly dire charge that the men behind the book Unfit for Command (Amazon.com sales rank: 1) are coordinating with the Bush campaign. They've denied it repeatedly and vehemently, but even if they were, so what? What does that have to do with whether or not the accusations are valid? The authors were there, they saw what they saw, and they're either telling the truth or they aren't. Of course the opposing campaign is going to want this to gain wider attention. Whether they're working with authors directly or not has nothing to do with what really happened in Vietnam thirty-some years ago.

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What the Avant Garde Offers Us Today
Or, What Brown Can Do For You

It's easy to criticize some of the contemporary art world's more flamboyant and provocative trends, and that's because for the most part, they're crap. The intentionally obscure and insular world of modern visual arts has made a fetish of alienating all but a select few initiates, reveling at the incomprehension of otherwise enthusiastic gallery and museum goers. Naturally, self-indulgent crap art has reached its literal reduction to absurdity with Belgian artist Wim Delvoye's installation "Cloaca." It's actually been around for a year or two, so it's doubtless been upstaged by something even more simultaneously banal and grotesque, but it serves as a fine example of type. For a detailed description you can read Belgian critic Els Fiers' fawning review, but it will suffice to explain that it is a mechanical shitting machine. Attendants insert food into one end and something very like the human final result emerges on the other side after a reasonable interval. According to Fiers' keen critical eye, the product is "something close to genuine, human shit."

He could fairly expand his assessment to include much of contemporary artisitic endeavor, at least insofar as it's celebrated in "elite" environments. Unfortunately the average person is too intellectually intimidated to say so. The lesson here is that just because you're not scandalized by Chris Ofili's combination of Marist iconography and animal dung doesn't mean that "Sensations" was an artisitic triumph. The next time you look at a preserved slice of farm animal suspended in a preservation tank with a confused grimace and someone from the black-turtleneck mafia stifles a condescending snicker, smack them with your program and keep walking until you see something worth looking at. Don't let the postmodernist toffs define what's worth being called art.

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Going Local: Pedophiles, Gang Slashings, and Occasional Religious Intolerance

I’ve never been much for the Metro sections of the big daily newspapers, much less exclusively local print outlets. Over the last few months, however, I’ve come to appreciate the innocent charms of my local morning tabloid, the Northern Virginia Journal. This morning’s front page headlines included the arrest of a 62-year old sex offender caught sneaking into a private club’s swim meet, the confession to malicious wounding of a 17-year old "machete-toting" gang member, and news that a local school for the children of Saudi Arabian diplomats were being taught that all religions other than Islam are "false religions."

The global-clash-of-civilizations implications of the last item is very much an exception to an otherwise precise focus on the close to home. Oddly enough though, because most of its readers are suburbanites who commute to jobs in the District of Columbia, even the short bits of national and international news often seem like hometown stories. News of the increased terror alerts in D.C., New York, and Newark? As it turns out, the paper box from which I picked up my copy of today’s Journal was being looked over by a submachine gun wielding police officer just this morning. The aftermath of Abu Ghraib and its influence on the future of Pentagon policy? Half the people reading the story this morning probably passed through the Pentagon subway (Metro) stop on their way to work.

Even with the scanty, 300-word national and international wire stories, though, the Journal never disappoints in giving heart-warmingly tedious, violently alarming, and inexplicably detailed block by block reportage. For example, 78 local bus drivers were recently honored for having each driven more than 1 million miles while maintaining safe driving records; there’s no mention of a reception with cake and fruit punch, but the image doesn’t take much imagnation. Next is the story of Alejandro Coroy, 36, charged with forcibly entering his sister-in-law’s home, standing over her bed, and stabbing her repeatedly as she slept next to her husband. The motive is described as "family-related." And don’t forget to honor the fifteen years Sharon E. Pandak spent as Prince Willaim County attorney. She’s a member of the Virginia, District of Columbia, and U.S. Supreme Court bars, and no doubt spent many a long day over the past decade and a half observing the court progress of the parade of unfit mothers, attempted rapists, and gang members that the Journal reports on daily.

One last note on the local crime scene from today’s paper. Everyone love tales of stupid crooks and their boneheaded capers, and as always, the Journal does not falter. Page three carries the story of two sixteen-year old boys, arrested after throwing (or, in staff writer Andrea Pricer’s much hipper word,"hucking") rocks at not one but two police cars on succeeding nights. These kids stayed up all night to hurl rocks at easily identifiable police cruisers. May the long, sultry nights of summer vacation in Northern Virginia never end.

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Unpriced Legal Theory

Intellectual property radicals and p2p observers have fine champion in Lawrence Lessig and his new book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. The book's content is available online in many different formats and "remixes" - several hosted/formatted by free culture activists themselves.

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Where There’s Smoke, There’s Corporate Rent Seeking

Alarmed at the success of small tobacco companies in recent years, Big Tobacco is trying to persuade their good friends, the state attorneys general, to smack down their underpriced competitors. These smaller firms weren’t part of the industry’s multi-state cartel agreement which gave them immunity from legal health claims and gave state legislators billions of dollars revenue, therefor many are able to significantly undercut the major national brands in price. Philip Morris and friends want the little guys to abide by the terms of the agreement – even though they never agreed to it. Their logic makes sense, however, when you realize that it was never meant to be a voluntary legal agreement. It was a new form of industry-wide national regulation dressed up as something else. Now the AGs and Big Tobacco are crying when their hypocrisy gets exposed.

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Hear Ye, Hear Ye: Bad Stuff is Wrong

In a move that will doubtless cause the oppressed citizens of the Western Hemisphere to breath a pleased sigh of relief, the White House today issued a proclamation denouncing corruption of government officials. Bush and the other 33 nations represented at this week's summit of the Americas have agreed that corruption is bad, and leads to bad consequences. It's a big step, but I think we, as a hemisphere, are ready for it. No word yet on when the rampant corruption in Latin America will actually stop. But we have a proclamation.

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The Shi'ite Hits the Fan

Iran’s theocrats may have finally created the spark for the democratic revolution that many in the West have been waiting for. In preperation for parliamentary elections, The Islamic Republic’s Guardian Council disqualified hundreds of pro-reform candidates from running for election – including many current MPs. This has led to protests by members in parliament, including both a walkout and a sit-in. The nation’s regional governors have also threatened to resign en masse.

This high-handed rigging of national elections seems destined to create a dangerous split in Iran’s political establishment, given the historic inflexibility of clerics regarding their public pronouncements. Especially alarming is the knowledge that the Guardian Council is composed of “six clerics and six Islamic lawyers.” Could there be a more fearsome enemy of democracy that a cadre of fundamentalist Islamic lawyers?

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Next Up: The National Museum of German-Irish (Kraut-Mick) Heritage

The House has just passed a bill that would authorize spending $200 million to fund a new Smithsonian museum dedicated to black history. After 15 years of trying to get such legislation passed, Rep. John Lewis seems optimistic that it'll finally make it this year. The only thing odd about this story, of course, is that there already is a Smithsonian museum dedictaed to black history. It's called the Anacostia Museum & Center for African American History and Culture, and is located at 1901 Fort Place, SE. And for civil rights advocates who think prejudice also shortchanges the art and culture of Africa itself, the Smithsonian has a museum for that, too. So why the need for $200 million in taxpayer funds for yet another museum? Still wondering that myself.

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The Guaranteed Recession Act of 2005

Howard Dean is revving up the anti-corporate faithful with a plan for 're-regulation' of, it seems, pretty much every industry he can think of. What better way to inspire consumer confidence than to have every major company micro-managed by a slow moving bureaucracy with no direct stake in the outcome of their actions? And with more government control over corporate practices, I don't suppose that would inspire even more rent-seeking lobbying to get Congress to write the rules in a way that disadvantages competitors or erects greater barriers to entry in the market. I would have thought it would be a tough contest, but Dean has easily captured the Most Idiotic Policy Announcement of the Democratic primary so far. It makes Kucinich's Department of Peace look like the flat tax.

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