The evening of November 7, 2000. It’s three or four in the morning. Bush and Gore deadlocked, a passel of Florida voters separating them. Most of the regulars are starting to rotate out for the night, realizing that there will be no grand finale to the evening. But Tim Russert’s there. He’s got a long-sleeved shirt with the long sleeves sloppily rolled up. There’s sweat stains on his armpits. His five o’clock shadow is shortly to become a five o’clock a.m. shadow. It’s clear the man’s been hustling up and down the news floor all night. He’s been on the phone for hours.

In his hands? A microphone, a laptop computer, a remote control, a fancy prop? No. A dry-erase board that looks like it was probably swiped off someone’s desk in passing. This hasn’t been blocked, it hasn’t been scripted, the lighting guy is probably fussing at the glare coming off the board, thinking Couldn’t you have frickin’ told me you were going to grab a dry-erase board before you sat down, Tim?

And Tim’s writing. He’s writing furiously. Explaining to whomever is sitting in that other chair (Tom Brokaw?) the mathematics of the electoral college. It comes down to Ohio and Florida. No, just Florida. If Gore wins Florida, he wins. If Bush wins Florida, he wins. Too close to call. Look! The columns of numbers are slanted almost to the point of toppling over.

And I’m thinking of Secretariat, the Triple Crown-winning horse who pulled away from the pack at the end of the Belmont Stakes. The Belmont, longest of the three big races, one and a half miles, the big test of endurance. Secretariat is leagues ahead of the rest, he’s practically at the finish line — and he’s still accelerating. He’s 31 lengths ahead of the second-place horse. He’s not tired. He looks like he could tear around the track for a whole other lap if they’d let him. But finally the jockey’s got to ease him up, he’s got to let the horse know, hey, slow down, you’ve won.

Tim Russert has not only covered the epic struggle between Bush and Gore through the night — at that moment, he looks like he’s ready to sit through a whole other election. His eyes are slightly bulging. His muscles seem to be tense. The dude is on. And I imagine at some point, after the cameras were shut off, somebody had to walk in and tap him on the shoulder to let him know, hey Tim, slow down, you already nailed it. Save some for tomorrow, huh?

Those of you outside the Washington, DC area may not know who Anthony Williams is, and you might be confused by the fact that he doesn’t appear on the ballot in any of the 50 states. Anthony Williams was the mayor of Washington, DC from 1999 to 2007, and he did a heckuva job cleaning up after a heckuva mess.

How? After the disastrous administration of the grandstanding (and coke-snorting) Marion Barry, Tony Williams came into the mayor’s office with his nasally voice and his dorky little bow tie. He didn’t spew forth a lot of bullshit about the audacity of hope and the firmness of character. Williams simply rolled up his sleeves, set the dial for Maximum Wonkiness, and turned out budget surplus after budget surplus. You could see him on TV in press conferences for years, discussing the minutiae of fiscal policy with the authority of someone who stayed up half the night digging through stacks of government reports. Nobody was inspired to write a song about how they had a crush on Tony Williams.

Before Williams, the city was in such dire shape that Congress had to step in and effectively wrest control out of Mayor Barry’s hands, setting up a control board to manage the city’s affairs. Before Williams, a good chunk of DC’s parking meters were permanently busted, because a bunch of punks discovered that you could easily decapitate them with a baseball bat. Seriously. The city was full of smashed-up parking meters that the city didn’t bother to fix, losing out on millions of dollars of revenue.

In my view, Anthony Williams is the model of what a president should be. A sober, staid manager who keeps his head, who knows the facts better than anyone else, who arbitrates disputes by getting people to sit down at a table and discuss things calmly like grown-ups. Presidents do not need to be soaring masters of inspirational rhetoric. They don’t need to promise you the moon. You can have your presidents who promise you get-rich-quick schemes; I want a president who consistently delivers prime plus two.

It’s obvious who I’m taking aim at here. Hint: his name begins with a “B” and ends with “arack Obama.” I’ve been watching the hype surrounding this guy for months now and shaking my head in amazement. It’s amazing how many people fall for this stuff every two years. We’re going to restore civility to Washington, DC! We’re going to cut through the partisan gridlock! We’re going to change the tone! Right, sure. President Howard Dean said that too, as did President Wesley Clarke, President Ross Perot, President Colin Powell, President Gary Hart, and President Jerry Brown. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she was going to end the partisan bickering in Congress, right before she started threatening other Democrats with retaliation if they didn’t support the fiercely partisan Jack Murtha for House Majority Leader.

Every time I hear the rhetoric about courage and audacity of hope, I roll my eyes. What the hell does that even mean? Courage and audacity to hope for what? It’s meaningless blather. It doesn’t tell you anything. It’s kind of like those people who tell you that they don’t follow any particular religion, but they’re “spiritual.” To quote the late Chris Farley — well, la-dee-frickin’-da!

Memo to Senator Barack Obama: It wasn’t particularly noteworthy that Martin Luther King had a dream, it was noteworthy what he was dreaming about. I mean, Osama bin Laden has a dream too. He’s inspired radical Muslims with the courage and audacity to hope and dream better than any sorry-ass American politician is likely to do in our lifetimes. The problem is that bin Laden’s dream is about a new caliphate slicing off the heads of infidels.

We don’t need new dreams. George Washington, Patrick Henry, Ben Franklin, et al had a pretty damn good dream (though they could have done better in terms of extending that dream beyond the walls of white male landowners). What we need are good administrators and competent executors of that old dream.

Which is kind of what makes me shake my head at all this disparaging talk of the “Clinton machine.” What’s wrong with machines? I don’t know about you, but I drive a machine to work every day, and I use a machine to wash my clothes. Despite the audacity of hope that using a ballpoint pen and notebook paper to write this blog post would inspire, I think I’m better off typing it on a machine. Machines are efficient. They work. And by definition they have no moral agency of their own; they’re just tools to help achieve the ambitions of human beings.

It’s not that I don’t like Obama. (And I’m not trying to write this in a backhanded attempt to boost Hillary Clinton.) I suspect Obama’d be a pretty good president, and he’d do a decent job of restoring respectability to the United States on the global Whuffie exchange. His rhetoric is good, but his ideas are hardly revolutionary. I think he’s got as good a plan as any candidate for dealing with the Iraq mess. He couldn’t possibly do much worse of a job than our current president — but then again, he shares that distinction with everyone from Al Roker to Bobcat Goldthwaite to, hell, maybe even Marion Barry. I’m sure if Obama wins the Democratic nomination, I’ll vote for him over whichever nut job wins the GOP nod. (Although I’m prepared to listen to John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, if either of them get the bid.)

But this “inspiration to change the world” stuff is just a shtick. That’s all it is. It’s a good shtick, and to some extent a president needs to be able to do a good shtick. But in the end, it’s not the capacity to love and heal and embrace change that is going to help this country. It’s the ability to be a boring policy wonk who stays up half the night burying one’s nose in stacks of government reports.

Like Tony Williams.

What do I mean by moral challenges? Well, defining morality is a sticky business even if you’re a full-time philosopher, which I’m not, or a believer in God, which I’m also not. The definition I’m favoring these days goes something like this: morality means making decisions that benefit the most number of people in the long run, and by extension the human race as a whole.

So what, in my opinion, are the greatest moral quandaries currently facing the species? Thinking from the long view, and trying not to get bogged down in short-term issues (e.g. the Iraq War), I’d argue that they are these five:

1. We need a sustainable way to live on the planet. As I’ve written before on my post about Global Warming Skepticism, I don’t particularly care about the Earth, except inasmuch as we can’t live without it. Right now, letting the Earth die means letting us die. So it’s imperative for the species’ survival that we either a) learn to conserve the planet’s natural resources, b) figure out how to keep the species going using renewable resources, or c) invest heavily in survivalism science that will let us live without them. (Or, more likely, a combination of a, b, and c.) Personally, I’d be happy living in a funky sci-fi dome city, but making something like that sustainable is much harder than it looks. Ergo: investing heavily in alternative energy is a moral imperative.

2. We need to divorce morality from religion. I don’t think anything good comes from the belief that we should refrain from murder, theft, and rape because someone wrote it down in a book five thousand years ago. Those of us who don’t believe in an all-powerful Being In The Clouds are just as capable of defining principles of morality and sticking to them — in fact, I’d argue that we’re more capable. If you want to continue to believe in God, great; but we can agree on moral principles regardless without the intervention of priests, pastors, rabbis, popes, ayatollahs, imams, or prophets. What I’m saying is that the species needs to be able to think moralistically in a way that’s inclusive of both religious and non-religious people.

3. We need to figure out how to balance personal freedom with equitable division of wealth. Westerners are inclined to see the political landscape as a spectrum between hard-core loony socialism (all the world’s wealth should be divided equally among its population, regardless of merit) and equally loony hard-core capitalism (everyone go grab your share of the pie, and if that results in radically uneven distribution of wealth, so be it). In Infoquake and MultiReal, I called these two poles governmentalism and libertarianism. Somewhere in the middle, theoretically, is a society where nobody’s starving and everyone can afford basic medical care, yet we still have ample freedom to make our own individual choices without governments taxing us to death. We’ve got to find that place, and figure out how to sustain it long-term.

4. We need to take the nuclear option out of the picture. Once upon a time, two countries were idiotic enough to play a high-stakes game of chess where the stakes were the survival of the human race. You don’t like my way of governing? Fine, then let’s blow the whole place to hell and you can’t govern any of it. Figuring out how to get rid of these weapons so that nobody has the power to scour the planet clean is one heck of a challenge. There’s no Cold War anymore, but the odds of a nuclear war breaking out in either the Middle East or the Indian subcontinent are still much too high for us to ignore. (Personally, I don’t think the threat is going anywhere until some theoretical point in the future when we’re living so much of our lives virtually that physical threats just don’t make sense anymore.)

5. We need to get serious about global human rights. The United States pays a lot of lip service to the idea of global human rights — and compared to much of the rest of the world, we’re willing to do something about it more of the time — but too often we back down from the ideals of democracy when it suits us. The way we’ve helped Israel shunt aside the results of free, democratic elections in Palestine is shameful, and the way we turn a blind eye to similar human rights abuses in our allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia is equally ludicrous. But compared to much of the rest of the world, we’re light-years ahead. We’ve ditched slavery, worked hard to put all races on an equal footing, and we’re in the long, slow process of recognizing alternative sexual orientations. Until the whole planet works the same way, we’re going to have a hard time moving forward as a species.

Okay, so these are my five long-term moral challenges for the species. What did I miss?

Update 1/16/08: Some interesting commentary on this article by S. M. Duke here, here, and here.

The highlights:

• Scott Edelman and I bumped into each other several times and shared a plane flight home. As you can see by the photo on the right, the meeting didn’t go so well. (You can see more of Scott’s photos from WFC 2007 on his Flickr photo set.)
• I had a long, rambling conversation with the inimitable Hal Duncan, beginning as a summary of his next work, continuing on to a discussion about the subtext of the Epic of Gilgamesh, moving on to Joseph Campbell and primitive mythology, and concluding with the psychology of the animal kingdom. Fookin’ great guy, that Hal Duncan.
• Matt Jarpe and I came up with the brilliant idea of Photoshopping authentic photos so they look like they’ve been badly Photoshopped. He’s going to try to track down a photo of him and George R.R. Martin taken the other night, and make it look like he’s Photoshopped himself into it. Personally, I think we may have started a whole new art form, and I can’t wait to get started myself. (Who knows — perhaps Robert Stanek got there ahead of us?)
• I finally met Patrick Nielsen Hayden, one of the editors at Tor! Patrick said that he didn’t recognize me without my hat, and that he reads my LiveJournal, and that he’s amused about how I boldface the important phrases in my blog posts, just like a Spider-Man comic book. (Eat yer heart out, PNH. ‘Nuff said!)
• My reading of chapter 2 from MultiReal went off swimmingly, despite my horribly sore throat and need to sip water every four seconds. Nick Sagan praised my “excellent word choices,” and Paul Cornell continued to call me his “favorite current SF writer” (which hopefully he also repeats when I’m not in the room).
• At the very classy party put on by UK publishers Orbit, I got a chance to meet the fabulous Scott Lynch (he of The Lies of Locke Lamora). I also had plenty of opportunity to act like a big shot and pretend like I know how to promote books online in conversations with Jon Armstrong (whose Grey came out from Night Shade this year), soon-to-be-published author Daryl Gregory, and also soon-to-be-published author David J. Williams.
• Guest of Honor Kim Newman, Paul Cornell, and I had a great time poring over the SFWriter.com newsletter and catching up on all the Robert Sawyer news fit for Robert Sawyer to print.

• Speaking of whom, damn it, Robert Sawyer does appear to be a genuinely nice guy, as I discovered chatting with him at the Tor party. Not only is he very friendly, but he was very generous with his time and advice as well.
• Hung out here and there with my copy editor Deanna Hoak and F&SF Slush God John Joseph Adams (see pic to the right).
• Award winning artist John Picacio gave me lots of sage career advice, and related the story of how he brought Graham Joyce home with him from a World Fantasy Con. (Not for those reasons, you sickos.)
• I had dinner with “the Brits,” including Solaris honchos George Mann and Marc Gascoigne, novelist and telly writer Paul Cornell, and Waterstone’s buyer Michael Rowley. As the only American at the table, they obliged me by talking only about cricket, the BBC, fish ‘n chips, and various types of cloudy and rainy weather. (Michael Rowley also set the record straight by telling me that socialized medicine works just great in the UK, thank you very much, although dentistry is a separate issue and quite problematic. So fuck you, Sean Hannity.)
• Jay Lake signed my copy of his Night Shade novel Trial of Flowers, though exactly what he signed I have no clue.
• I had a good time attending the Shimmer Pirate Issue group reading. Stand-out reading honors went to Marissa Lingen for her story “Pirates, by Adeline Thromb Age 8,” which had everyone in the room spitting out their pirate grog in laughter.
• Have I mentioned Jess Nevins and the 1939 British pulp story about the six-gun gorilla? Okay, I have now. Jess, it turns out, is a terrific guy and one of the coolest people I met all weekend. He also knows more about the old pulps than just about any person alive.

Someone asked me the other day why exactly I write these detailed posts of my con experiences where I name-drop everybody I met. It’s simple. I write them mostly for me, so that I can remember later the names of people I met. Of course, I also hope that they’re entertaining for you, whoever you are reading my blog.

You realize, of course, that this is the end of Ann Coulter’s career. She is probably realizing that right about now too. There’s no mea culpa that covers something like this. Even Sean Hannity will be wrapping his defense of Ann Coulter in statements like, “Now, of course what she said about the Jewish people is shameful and anti-Semitic and horrible and wrong, but [insert hapless attempt to change the subject to a criticism of Hillary Clinton].”

I’m going to admit something that you will find shocking: I kinda like Ann Coulter. I agree with very little that she says, but she generally is funny. Left-wingers (and centrists) don’t get that she’s a humorist, just like right-wingers take everything that Al Franken and Bill Maher say as straight-faced screeds of liberal intolerance. Dude, they’re jokes. Sure, Coulter goes too far — sometimes quite a bit too far — but she’s entertaining and she provokes political debate. I thought her calling John Edwards a “faggot” was priceless, even if it’s a somewhat peculiar slur considering the fact that he’s one of the nation’s preeminent devoted husbands (and opposed to gay marriage too). As for using a nasty slur against homosexuals, I’ve made my feelings about such epithets known before.

Coulter’s biggest crime with the thing about “perfecting Jews into Christians” is that it wasn’t funny. There were a couple of amusing quips — asking Donny Deutsch if he wanted to go to church with her made me chuckle — but she quickly fell into the trap of trying to say these things with a straight face.

The funniest thing of all? She’s absolutely right.

Not about Jews needing to be perfected into Christians, of course. That’s silly and absurd. But she’s right that this is what Christians believe essentially what the New Testament says. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John didn’t agree about everything that Jesus did while he was alive, but I think they were all pretty clear about a few key points. There’s nothing that I’m aware of in the New Testament that says Jesus is your Lord and Savior, unless you choose to ignore everything he had to say and continue practicing the Old Testament the way you’re used to practicing it, in which case no problem! No, according to the book, God sent his kid down here to tell the whole world that humanity has messed up pretty seriously and we need a reboot, so pay attention. (Of course, Jesus also had a lot to say about being tolerant of others — something about casting stones, I think? — but never mind that.)

(There’s also a lot of modern debate about whether Jesus actually said anything about being the son of God. If I’m correct about this — and someone will need to point me to the right place to back this up — there are only one or two passages in the New Testament where Jesus directly claims he’s the One True Savior, and some scholars believe those passages were misinterpreted or inserted later. Take out a couple of sentences, and the things Jesus was saying become quite different.)

I find it amusing to see public religious figures in the media soft-pedaling the differences between their faiths. As if none of those differences matter as long as we all believe in one all-powerful, omnipotent God. Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Mormons, we’re all essentially heading in the same direction, aren’t we? So let’s all get along! What’s that? What about the Hindus, Buddhists, Native Americans, Confucians, Wiccans, and whomever else that don’t believe in one God and aren’t headed in the same direction? No problem! Just agree with our basic precepts of morality, and everything’s hunky-dorey. Wait, some people out there don’t respect those either? Fine, then just don’t hurt anybody. Please.

Someone’s got to explain this to me. Does everybody go to Heaven, provided that they’re following their deeply held faith? Who goes to Hell then? Just the vicious, unrepentant murderers? That’s a pretty low bar to set.

The pundits and scholars on TV dance circles and try to convince us (and themselves) that all the bad, hateful, spiteful, ridiculous things in the holy books were put there by ignorant monks or biased priests back in the Dark Ages. When the Bible says that homosexuality is an “abomination” (Leviticus 18:22), God didn’t really mean it. Either that, or we’re misinterpreting his words. He never actually said those words. He said them to a primitive audience, and so he had to phrase things differently. It’s an artifact of the translation.

But the Ann Coulters of the world blow this lovey-dovey mushiness right out of the (holy) water. They tell us in strident words that the Jews are going to Hell (Jerry Falwell) or that Muslims are justified in taking the lives of innocent infidels (Osama bin Laden) or that the Palestinians should be forcibly ejected from the land of Israel (Meir Kehane). They tell us that these books pretty much say what we think they say, and that there’s no rationalizing your way around it.

Fundamentalists have a right to be worried about the secularization of their traditions and institutions. Once you stop believing in the infallible truth of your holy documents, once you start applying reason to the whole process, you come to realize that there are big incompatibilities between the things we believe to be true today and the things our religions tell us. Once you start questioning the fundamental precepts of a religion, you come to realize that it’s only a matter of faith. And once you start wondering why it is you believe in this particular faith rather than some other completely incompatible faith, you start wondering if there’s any truth to any of them.

I’ve heard Bill Clinton say that whenever you can get people to focus on serious issues, the Democrats win. I’m not sure I agree with that statement, but I think it works when applied to religion. Whenever Ann Coulter shoots her mouth off, she forces people to confront the logical contradictions in their religious beliefs; and whenever you can get the people to focus on logic and reason, those of us who believe in secular morality without religion win.

That’s what I believe, anyway.

Perhaps we can add to that what I’m going to call Edelman’s Corollary: “If you ever forget Bernard Malamud’s statement, a Jew will remind you.”

Way back in January, I posted on this blog a little contest called The Jewish Marxist Werewolves in Bolivia Infoquake Giveaway. The aim of the contest was to write the introductory paragraph to a bad fictitious novel about Jewish Marxist werewolves in Bolivia. I received a number of very amusing entries, topped by a hilariously bad entry by Josh Vogt. (Read the winning entries here.) As a fun little teaser for the entry, I spent fifteen minutes one Friday night Photoshopping a fake werewolf mask onto a picture of a rabbi and then adding in a white knit yarmulke. You can see the image here on the right.

I happen to think the photo is hilarious, but a few commenters on my blog don’t agree with me. Check out the comment thread for this post. Here’s one:

SHAME ON YOU! jew’s are HUMANS just like everybody else

THE ONLY WOLF AROUND HERE IS YOU

And another one:

you fucker bech i am a Jewish and i prove theth you can onli to suck my dick and your mom to fucker my dream is to kech peple like you ..bech

And a third:

We lost more then 6,000,000 people for nothing they said we are beast ,they said we are ugly , they said we are stupid they said every thing to people start hate and murder us i dont know if you realy jew or not but present us (in the picutre) like evil people that their holy book is evil himself and that fucking not funny….

Now finally the latest:

Listen to me carefully you little cock sucker, you will take this picture down I don’t even care if its a joke or not. This is very offensive and you speaking high language saying “I’m sorry if you’re offended by this, and I’m sorry for fucking my grandmother and getting her pregnant” we just don’t give a fuck….This is very disrespectful and I am not asking, I’m demanding you to take this off! Got it, bitch? don’t make me take actions I prefer not to.

I’m unclear whether this is all coming from the same person or not, but I assume it is. I wish this guy would have the courage to put down a consistent name and/or e-mail.

My first reaction to this was, come on, dude. It’s clearly a joke, and not even a particularly cutting edge one at that. The whole thing has a whiff of that Mel Brooks/Borscht Belt comedy that’s pretty much culturally dead in the water at this point. The photo’s been up on the web for nine months, thousands of people have seen it (including, presumably, many Jews), and nobody’s thought to complain about it being offensive up to this point. In fact, I discovered this morning that someone appropriated the image for this entry on the 92nd Street Y blog — presumably a Jewish organization. Their caption: “Stay the Night for Tikkun Leil Shavuot: All fun, no werewolves!” See screen cap on the left.

But then it occurred to me: There are people around the world who believe that Jews are monsters. There’s a small but very vocal minority who believe that Jews are evil tools of Satan, or vampires out to suck the blood of your children, or — well, I don’t know what exactly they believe, but you know what I’m talking about. And it’s not outside the realm of possibility that some asshole searching the web for “Jewish werewolf” will appropriate this photo without permission for his anti-Semitic propaganda rag. (If you search Google Images for “jewish werewolf,” my image is the top result.)

It would be quite galling, to say the least, if this image ended up propagating around the web to anti-Semitic groups like the cartoon of Calvin pissing has ended up on the back of pickup trucks everywhere. (Incidentally, in case you’re not aware, possession of that Calvin pissing image is grounds for having the windows of your car smashed in by a heavy brick, as far as I’m concerned.)

So the big question is: what kind of responsibility do I have to the Jewish community?

One thing that us Jews are painfully aware of is that not believing in Judaism doesn’t exempt you from the hatred of anti-Semites. This was Bernard Malamud’s point. I don’t believe a word of the Torah, just like I don’t believe that some dude turned water into wine two thousand years ago, just like I don’t believe that there’s a God who wants us to pray towards Mecca five times a day. But the Nazis (just to name one group) didn’t care. They dutifully stuffed the secular Jews and the atheist Jews into their ovens right alongside the orthodox Jews. I’m sure Osama bin Laden wouldn’t bother giving me a Talmudic quiz either before taking my head.

In fact, I think some groups hate Jewish skeptics like me even more. According to their logic, people like me are either sniveling pussies who don’t have the strength to maintain their convictions, or just undercover Zionist agents who are faking their skepticism in order to integrate into society.

My feeling on offensive iconography is that it should be embraced. Why? Because embracing it is the easiest way to deprive it of its sting.

Look at the homosexual community. These people have done a terrific job of advancing their civil liberties over the past thirty years, and to my mind it’s because they haven’t shied away from the so-called offensive stereotypes and slurs. Can you think of an insult you can throw at a gay person that he or she can’t easily shrug off?

BIGOT: You pansy-ass, cocksucking, queer, fairy faggot.

GAY PERSON: Yay! I’m a pansy-ass, cocksucking, queer, fairy faggot!

The words are no longer so shocking and offensive in and of themselves. The problem, of course, is that the words are sometimes backed by a gang of rednecks carrying baseball bats and broken bottles.

Spend five minutes reading Dan Savage’s column, and you’ll see him gleefully refer to people of his sexual orientation with those kinds of terms all the time. Shows like “Will & Grace” embraced the stereotypes of the effeminate, Barbra Streisand-loving, fairy queen rather than avoid them. The result? Well, gays still can’t get married yet in most states and still endure plenty of persecution. The 80% of gay men who are not flirty, effeminate, limp-wristed designer clothing fanatics feel like they’re misunderstood. But in thirty years, they’ve gone from a completely closeted community to a public community of great diversity, strength, and clout. Thirty years ago, TV stars risked ending their careers if they came out of the closet; today, TV stars risk ending their careers if they insult homosexuals. The gay movement has a long way to go — but they’ve already come so far.

(For this same reason, I think the elder statesmen of the black community are making a grave mistake by trying to repress the use of the word “nigger.” I say, embrace it! Personally, I’m looking forward to the day when I can call a black friend a nigger and he can call me a kike, and nobody gets upset. I’ll toss him a piece of fried chicken, he’ll drop a penny on the ground to see if I pick it up, and then we’ll both laugh our asses off and go back to whatever we were doing.)

But back to the Jewish werewolf picture.

I’m not inclined to take the photo down. If another Jewish organization in New York found it amusing and inoffensive enough to repost, why shouldn’t I keep it up? One exception I would make is if the rabbi himself in the photo — a Rabbi Aaron Goldscheider of the Mount Kisco Hebrew Congregation in Mount Kisco, New York — took objection to the photo. I could understand this particular rabbi or congregation having trouble with this photo. There’s no need to throw someone else into the middle of a censorship spat if he doesn’t want to be there. But understand that if this particular rabbi doesn’t want to be involved in this, I’m just going to go find another rabbi photo to doctor up; or hell, I’ll pose for one myself.

Your thoughts?

Stories of missing pretty young white women are such a regular occurrence on Fox that it’s become a joke, which is exactly what these women’s families don’t want. It sounds cruel to call the disappearance of a young woman a joke. But after the umpteenth missing-pretty-little-white-girl news story, shouldn’t we really question whether these stories are worth extended attention from a national news organization?

I’m sure the people in Salt Lake City, Utah are very concerned about this young woman Camille Cleverley, and I have no doubt it’s worthy of close attention in the Salt Lake Tribune. But why would the national Fox news team focus on the disappearances of young, white women? Sure, it’s tragic. But the story about the 48-year-old guy who was killed crossing traffic in Des Moines is equally tragic. So is the story about the 13-year-old boy who contracted leukemia in Savannah, and the story about the 52-year-old woman who OD’d in Anaheim.

I decided to do a search on the Fox website for stories about missing women. I searched for “missing woman,” “missing girl,” “girl missing,” and a number of related searches. What I found shocked the hell out of me. I counted 28 separate stories on Fox about missing women — and that’s just from this summer alone, from June 2007 to today. And let’s not forget that each one of these disappearances generated multiple articles on FoxNews.com; Jessie Davis’s story alone accounted for 59 unique news stories, if the Fox search engine is to be believed.

For the record, here are all the women whose disappearances were deemed newsworthy enough to have an entire story devoted to them by the Fox organization in the past three months:

1. Paige Birgfeld, a 34-year-old white woman from Colorado
2. Camille Cleverley, a 22-year-old white senior at Brigham Young University
3. Danielle Cramer, a 15-year-old white girl from Connecticut (found alive in her abductor’s house)
4. Jessie Davis, a 27-year-old white woman from Ohio (found dead)
5. Susan Fast, a 60-year-old white woman from Florida
6. Cynthia Hankins, a 36-year-old black woman from Colorado
7. Lorraine Hatzakorian, a 41-year-old white woman from New York (found dead)
8. Stepha Henry, a 22-year-old black woman from Florida
9. Amber LeAnn Hess, a 17-year-old white girl from Arizona
10. Natalee Holloway, an 18-year-old white woman from Atlanta
11. Marilou Johnson, a 50-year-old Asian woman from Detriot (found dead)
12. Cheryl Jones, a 43-year-old white woman from Arizona (found dead)
13. Donna Jou, a 19-year-old white girl from California
14. Jennifer Kesse, a 24-year-old white woman from Florida
15. Hannah Klamecki, a 5-year-old white girl from Illinois (found alive)
16. Kara Kopetsky, a 17-year-old white girl from Missouri
17. Madeleine McCann, a 4-year-old white girl from London
18. Alyssa Heberton Morimoto, a 24-year-old white woman from Colorado (found dead)
19. Liza Murphy, a 42-year-old white woman from New Jersey
20. Kelly Nolan, a 22-year-old white woman from Wisconsin (found dead)
21. Theresa Parker, a 41-year-old white woman from Georgia
22. Jon-Benet Ramsey, a 6-year-old white girl from Colorado (found dead)
23. Elizabeth Smart, a 14-year-old white girl from Utah (found alive)
24. Kelsey Smith, an 18-year-old white woman from Kansas
25. Lisa Stebic, a 38-year-old white woman from Illinois
26. Francine Tate, a 50-year-old white woman from Wisconsin
27. Haleigh Whitton, a 11-year-old white girl in Alabama
28. Kimberly Whitton, a 36-year-old white woman in Alabama (mother of Haleigh)
29. Mahalia Xiong, a 21-year-old Asian woman from Wisconsin (found dead)
30. an unnamed 2-year-old girl from Florida (found dead, race not identified)

Note that some of these deaths and disappearances happened quite a while ago, and yet they’re still making headlines. Do you realize that Jon-Benet Ramsey might very well be in her first week of college if she were alive right now?

For those keeping score, here’s the tally. You don’t have to be a statistical wizard to see the pattern here.

• 26 missing white women (20 of them under the age of 40)
• 2 missing Asian women
• 2 missing black women

Man, what are these namby-pamby liberal yahoos always complaining about? Looking at the statistics, black women are doing just fine in this country! It’s the white girls who are disappearing left and right, isn’t it? It’s practically an epidemic! We need to convene a governmental task force to get to the bottom of this!

The knee-jerk liberal response — that the folks who determine what’s news at Fox are racists — is equally unsupported by the facts. Many of these stories were simply picked up by Fox from the AP.

But it’s no accident that Fox is choosing to emphasize these particular missing-white-girl stories. Visit FoxNews.com on any particular day, and you’d be under the impression that white women are vanishing off our streets every minute in the United States. Just like if you visit Slashdot, you’d probably conclude that the whole of Western civilization is up in arms over Microsoft’s perceived manipulation of open standards votes at ISO. Watch the CBS Evening News, and you’ll be convinced that the AARP is the world’s most powerful lobbying organization.

So what’s happening here with the Fox missing white women stories?

It seems pretty obvious to me that Fox is simply pushing stories that will appeal to a large segment of its base. I don’t have the Nielsen statistics in front of me to back this up, but we all know that Fox viewers skew towards conservative white families in middle America. And what’s more gripping to a white families in middle America than the disappearance of an innocent-looking white child?

Of course, many of us long ago decided that Fox News doesn’t have the most, er, fair and balanced record when it comes to choosing which stories to highlight. The same is true of the Washington Post and the New York Times and just about any news organization you care to highlight.

So what’s my point? Well, I’m not sure I have a nice, tidy conclusion to all this. Perhaps I’ll just end this little rant by stating that what we call “the news” is rapidly devolving into crass emotional ploys for attracting eyeballs in order to grab a bigger piece of advertising revenue.

But then again, I’m sure you already knew that. You already knew that instances of missing white women are overreported in the media. I’m not sure why I’m even bothering to publish this. Barrel of fish, meet my friends Smith and Wesson.

***

A few interesting sites I found while Googling this topic:

• A blog called Black and Missing But Not Forgotten
• An article from Essence magazine, Have You Seen Her?
• Wikipedia’s article on Missing white woman syndrome

First off, the dude was railroaded into confessing his impropriety by the police to avoid embarrassment, and that bothers me. As unseemly as it may be that Senator Craig (supposedly) felt compelled to alert the plainclothesman in the next stall that he wanted to get his knob polished, it’s not a crime. Really, it isn’t. Just the same way that talking to a prostitute about her/his services isn’t a crime until you hand over the cash. Theoretically it might be construed as harassment if he just walked up to a stranger in the restroom to solicit sex in plain English — but it seems to me that the case is pretty thin when you have to be familiar with the whole procedure to even know you’re being solicited in the first place.

Now, actually having sex in a public restroom is a crime, and if the senator was paying a stranger to have sex it’s also a crime. But what if the man in the next stall had responded to Craig’s solicitation by slipping him a note saying “I’ve got a condo two blocks away, why don’t we pop over there instead”? That’s not a crime. That’s called a pickup. Sleazy, yes. But not illegal, and I’m not even sure it’s immoral.

And let’s say he did actually get a BJ in a public restroom. Have we really lost all sense of perspective here? Have we become that prude of a society? Breaking news, North America: men love blowjobs. If there’s any man who claims he doesn’t, please stick your name in the comments below so the rest of us can snicker at you. And while quietly having sex in a semi-public place while nobody can see you is crude and crass and unbecoming of a public official, on the scale of moral turpitude it ranks pretty damn low. I’d say it’s somewhere around shoplifting in the grand scheme of things, but I can’t decide if it’s north or south of that line. Lots of people do dumb things like this when they’re young. Hell, I did stuff like that when I was in college almost twenty years ago.

Of course, nobody wants to walk in on two people having sex in a public restroom. Eww. And you don’t want unattended minors stumbling across something like this either. Which is why you haul these offenders down to the police station, slap them with a fine and community service, and put something in the file that your future employers can dig up if they want to.

But Dave, you sick pervert, I hear you thinking, Larry Craig’s a U.S. Senator! We have to hold him to a higher standard!

Well, sure we do. That higher standard is called “elections.” If this joker decides to run for re-election next year after all, his arrest record, guilty plea, and lame-ass excuses are fair game for his opponent(s). Of course, it’s never going to get to that point. The Idaho Republican Party will wisely decide that supporting Craig is too costly for them, and the national GOP will conclude the same thing. Right now, there are undoubtedly GOP bigwigs calling Senator Craig telling him that stepping down now and allowing a Republican replacement to gain momentum in office for the next 18 months will be a big boon to the party’s chances in 2008.

I’m convinced that 60% of this whole scandal has to do with public disgust at male homosexuality. It’s a quick opportunity to score some political points because most Americans are really queasy about gay male sex. Gut check time: if you walked in on Carmen Electra and Angelina Jolie engaging in hanky-panky in a public bathroom stall, would you storm out of there looking for a cop and demand that they be publicly humiliated and dragged through the mud?

In case you’ve forgotten, this is Carmen Electra:

And this is Angelina Jolie:

No, if you saw these two (or two women who look just like them) going at it in a public place and you’re like most people in this country, you’d probably back out of there very slowly, make lots of conspicuous coughing noises, and state in a loud voice that you hope nobody in this restroom is doing anything that the approaching police officers might take offense at.

If 60% of this scandal is motivated by public disgust with male homosexuality, then what’s the other 40%? I’ll allow that 20% of the impetus for pushing this story is purely morality. The remaining 20%? Why, a witch hunt against conservative Republicans who have supported the war and President Bush’s über-conservative policies. And I say this as someone who opposed the war from the start and who has vocally opposed Bush’s agenda for years now. I’ve still got a John Kerry 2004 sticker on my car, fer Chrissake.

Here’s an idea: let’s vote Republicans like Larry Craig out of office because they support the war and because they support discrimination against gays. Are the Democrats really proud of the fact that they’re holding a majority in both houses of Congress because of silly sex scandals, because George Allen once said the word “macaca,” and because Joe Lieberman refuses to officially join the GOP?

What makes me think this is partisan? If we’re so concerned with official corruption, we’d be seeing a daily drumbeat of Congressional leaders standing up and demanding the resignation of Democratic Representative William Jefferson, he of the $90,000 worth of bribe money stashed in his freezer. If it wasn’t partisan, then it wouldn’t be mostly the Republicans who are bum-rushing the airwaves to denounce Senator Craig’s moral unfitness. (Don’t you just love how Republicans always rush to loudly denounce anti-family values talk, while Democrats always rush to loudly denounce perceived weakness on national defense? This is how you get Barack Obama pushing for a big increase in military size and Hillary Clinton cozying up to the idea of threatening other countries with nuclear weaponry.)

Putting aside the sexual aspect of this case, what do we have? Not much. We have the potential intimidation factor of Craig throwing his Senatorial business card on the table and saying “What do you think of that?” Okay, this bothers me. But one statement is a pretty thin reed to hang an entire ethics case on, and you know that no sane jury would convict someone based on that evidence alone.

We have the hypocrisy factor. Definitely worthy of consideration that a senator who’s supported so many anti-gay policies over the years is himself gay. But again, I don’t think hypocrisy is all that great of a sin.

We have the supposed other instances of homosexual behavior. If you read the accusations, they’re all pretty flimsy. Craig followed some dude around in a store for half an hour? Some random guy claims he had sex with someone that looked like Larry Craig, but didn’t even get his name? Involvement in the page scandal would be a big deal if there was any evidence out there to support it. But all these things added up to so little that the Idaho Statesman wisely decided to kill the story until the guilty plea for disorderly conduct came up.

None of these accusations hold a candle to the fact that, you know, Senator Larry Craig supported anti-gay policies in the first place. Whether he’s straight, gay, bi, dom, sub, switch, decaffeinated, or unleaded is pretty irrelevant as far as I’m concerned. I’d just as soon not know.

I’m not suggesting we nominate Larry Craig for Senator of the Year or give him the Congressional Medal of Honor. I’m just saying, please America, stop it with the silly sex scandals. Larry Craig’s guilty plea for disorderly conduct should be a page 3 story at best, and the guy should be allowed to quietly step down from his committee leadership posts and then just not run for re-election.

• I read Cho Seung-Hui’s play Richard McBeef. Yes, it sucks, but it’s not as sucky as I had been led to believe. It’s also quite disturbing, but honestly, the play in itself isn’t the stinking, fetid hatebomb of a warning sign that the media thinks it is. I wrote some disturbing shit myself in college — there was one story I wrote in the form of an elaborate suicide note, wherein the protagonist vows to kill himself with a Rube Goldberg device he’s rigged up in his apartment to save everyone the trouble of dealing with his remains. Lots of young men vent their frustrations on the printed page, I don’t see why a fucked-up murderer should be any different.
• The shooting has reinforced the right’s belief that guns should be more readily available, and that in a more gun-tolerant society some citizen do-gooder would have taken this kid down. The left, meanwhile, believes that this is an excuse to enact stricter gun control legislation. To me, the irony is that either much stricter gun control or much looser gun control could have helped prevent this tragedy. Waffling in the middle helps no one.
• Another ironic thing about the brewing gun control debate is that the killer did not use weapons that would have been prohibited by the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. He used a Glock 19 and a Walther P22, and I believe both of these would have been legal had the Assault Weapons Ban been extended. (Someone please let me know if I’m wrong about this.) The extended gun clips Cho is believed to have used are another issue, but not having those wouldn’t have stopped his rampage.
• Blaming the Virginia Tech administration for failing to send timely warning e-mails to the students is absolutely, totally, completely, offensively ridiculous. If we tried to lock down the 2,600 acres surrounding each one of the 30,000 gun deaths in the U.S. every year, society would come to a screeching halt. Two hours is a perfectly reasonable period of time for the police to respond and get a mass e-mail communication out to the campus, and the e-mail they did send struck exactly the right tone under the circumstances. Besides which, even if everyone had hunkered down inside their dorms at 7:30 A.M. and not gone to class, Cho Seung-Hui was in one of those dorm rooms. He would have just gone on his massacre in a different building.
• The frightening thing is that, ultimately there’s nothing you can do to prevent this sort of thing from happening 100% of the time. There are a thousand different ways to kill large groups of people. Probably the best solution we have is counseling — which makes it so ironic that college counseling centers are so understaffed and underfunded throughout the country. The Scientologists better not try to ram any more of their anti-psychiatry crap down our throats after this.
• This dude was from Centreville, Virginia. I live about 10 minutes away from Centreville. I may very well have driven by this guy or passed him in the mall half a dozen times.
• One of the victims of Cho Seung-Hui’s massacre was Jamie Bishop, son of the science fiction writer Michael Bishop. This sucks on too many levels to even recount here.

——

I’m going to be cutting back on the blogging for the next couple weeks so I can concentrate on getting MultiReal finished and polished by May 1. There are a few pivotal scenes that have to be done just right, and they’re not quite there yet.

Meanwhile, I’ll be attending this weekend’s Penguicon science fiction/open source software convention in Troy, Michigan. What will I be doing there? I really don’t know, because I couldn’t keep up with the con-related e-mail traffic and so I stopped reading it entirely. But if you’re looking to find me, the bar’s always a good place to check.

The Smoking Gun recently published the autopsy report for the former starlet, which reveals that she died from some lethal mixture of prescription drugs. But that’s not all! You can now see definitive proof of her weight (178 pounds), the size of her breast implants (“each containing 700 ml of clear fluid”), and the character of her tattoos (a pair of red lips, a Playboy bunny, Christ’s head, Marilyn Monroe, etc.). Furthermore, the report informs us that “the genitalia are those of a normally developed adult woman,” “the left and right buttocks have foci of recent, hemorrhagic tracts” and “the anus is unremarkable.” Hubba hubba!

The whole Anna Nicole Smith saga is so monumentally depressing that it’s hard to know where to begin. Here’s a woman who’s famous for, well, for buying a large pair of fake tits and wearing them well. One could admire her for her modeling career, except she pretty much slept her way into that too. She was enamored with Marilyn Monroe, another woman famous for nice tits — though at least Marilyn did have an actual acting career, as lousy as she may have been at it. Why anyone would want to hold Marilyn Monroe’s sad, sad life up as an inspiration, I don’t know, unless her goal was to make Marilyn look less pathetic in comparison.

(And in case you missed it, a recently released FBI memo from 1964 throws new evidence into the suspicion that Robert F. Kennedy conspired to get Marilyn Monroe to commit suicide. See this article on Celebitchy. Seems like a bit of a stretch, but it’s instructive of how long the media is willing to follow its obsessions. She died 45 years ago.)

We all knew that Anna Nicole was a high school dropout without much in the way of an education, but now her private diaries are being auctioned off and we can see just how uneducated she really was. (See real sample above right.) Don’t worry, Anne Frank, your claim to fame as the world’s best posthumously published diarist is secure. The AP article quotes insightful passages from Vickie Lynn’s diaries like this one:

I’ve been really stressed out lately and depressed and I can’t quit eating. I feel like a pig. Howard has been buying me som jewelry but he call me 15 or 20 times a day it drives me crazy. I love him but he aggravates me somtimes. I don’t no what to do about Paul hes strange guy. I hate for men to want sex all the time. Chow!!

And this one, about first husband J. Howard Marshall:

Hes so very weak and fragile When I touch him Im afraid he might break. If Jesus desides to take him I dont no what I’ll do. I love him so much it hurts me to site and watch him when hes hurting I just want to hold him touch him let him no how much I care.

An anonymous German businessman bought these diaries off eBay recently for $500,000, says the AP. But don’t think of it as too bad an investment, considering he can sell them off to ABC for use in the scripts of their Geico cavemen sitcom.

If you think I’m being mean to this poor girl who really wanted nothing more than to be rich and famous, you’re right. But this is nothing compared to the shame and humiliation the former Vickie Lynn Smith invited year after year by putting herself in the public spotlight. She invited television cameras into her home to film her life 24/7. She starred in soft-core porn that was obviously shot while she was coked up to the gills. She pressed her inheritance case all the way to the Supreme Court, and made an obscene spectacle out of the whole thing.

And the public licked it all up. The media obliged her quest for fame by acting as both stick and carrot. The gossip rags kept track of her rapid weight fluctuations. Comedians fed the fire by making snide commentary about how much of a train wreck her life had become. Who wants to bet that this blog entry gets more traffic than just about anything else I’ve written here?

And it’s just getting started! We’ve had the death coverage, and the autopsy coverage. Watch soon for the paternity test coverage and the dispensation of the estate coverage!

It’s all just so ridiculously shameful. I feel dirty, dirty, dirty just having to live in a country where this kind of thing happens over and over again. I can’t believe that our culture seems to throw these talentless starlets onto center stage year after year for our amusement. I’m angry that the news media outlets and the blogosphere feed on this kind of thing. I feel like such a dupe for writing one of these predictable angry blog pieces about the futility of it all and the wretched state of our culture. Writing this, I feel like the poor schlub actor playing Emmanuel Goldstein in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, making sour faces for the camera so that the public can jeer at him during the Two Minutes Hate.

Rinse and repeat. Thanks for reading. Guess I’ll see you back here in the same place when Paris Hilton OD’s.