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.

• The world is a vile and dangerous place.
• America is blindly and irrationally hated by just about everybody outside of our borders.
• If we left our security up to the peaceniks, bureaucrats, and Boy Scouts we elect to national office, the United States would be a smoldering ruin in a matter of months.
• Therefore it’s necessary that we fund a zillion intelligence agencies and black ops teams who routinely conduct secret assassinations in the name of defending our country.
• Nevertheless, despite our massive economic and military power, the United States is drastically outnumbered and constantly on the verge of apocalypse.

At least, these are the assumptions behind just about every spy thriller ever made. Now I find myself wondering: When the hell did these assumptions become so ingrained in our psyche? When did we blithely start accepting this worldview? Who says the United States should behave this way — and, for that matter, when did we all decide that the United States actually does behave this way? What the fuck happened to my country?

These assumptions are also the ones that underline 2002′s The Bourne Identity. It’s a nice little popcorn flick with a plot so familiar you can slip into it like an old bathrobe. Matt Damon plays Matt Damon, playing a CIA-funded black ops assassin who has a change of heart because the agency has Gone Too Far. Now after a bout of amnesia, he finds himself on the run from the very organization that funded him. Car chases and dead bodies ensue. Spoiler alert: the heroic Matt Damon gets the girl, and the villainous Chris Cooper gets shot in the head. (Oh, and FYI, there are more spoilers below.)

And then someone had the inspired idea of hiring Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, United 93) to take over the franchise. To call The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum better films than their predecessor is kind of like calling a fine aged pinot grigio better than a Zima. They’re among the most intelligent, well-crafted, thoughtful thrillers about American paranoia that I’ve ever seen. (And holy crap, did you realize Matt Damon could act?)

Suddenly our protagonist is no longer just a youthful maverick spy fleeing across Europe with a spunky German chick in tow. Jason Bourne is not so much a character in Supremacy and Ultimatum as he is a manifestation of the American subconscious. He’s an unstoppable force who never tires, who never gives up, who can never be killed. Imagine a cross between Batman and Patrick Henry who knows how to kill people with a plastic pen.

Richard Corliss clearly noticed the transformation in his Time magazine review of The Bourne Ultimatum:

That’s the secret of this character, and Bond and John McClane and all the other action-movie studs. They are a projection of American power — or a memory of it, and the poignant wish it could somehow return. In real life, as a nation these days, we can achieve next to nothing. But in the Bourne movies just one of us, grim, muscular and photogenic, can take on all villains, all at once, and leave them outwitted, dead, disgraced. That’s a macho fantasy of the highest, purest, most lunatic order.

Corliss is on to something here, but I think he’s got it exactly backwards. Jason Bourne isn’t just an action stud in the James Bond mold; Bourne is, in fact, a calculated response to James Bond, or more than that, he’s the anti-James Bond. James Bond on the Bizarro planet. Is it an accident that Jason Bourne and James Bond have the same initials? (Well, actually it probably is. But you’d have to ask Robert Ludlum, who created the character, and he’s dead. But apparently Greengrass didn’t read the Ludlum novels anyway.)

James Bond uses an assortment of high-tech gadgets helpfully provided to him by the British government. Sleek guns, high-tech cars, gizmos that are notable mainly for the way they’re camouflaged inside ordinary objects. Over the years, Bond has used:

• A remote-controlled BMW with rocket launcher
• A tricked-out surfboard with a hidden compartment for guns and explosives
• A ballpoint pen grenade
• A wristwatch with a built-in laser cutter
• An escape pod concealed in a ski jacket

Jason Bourne, by contrast, uses such glamorous weapons as:

• A cheap rotating fan
• A rolled-up newspaper
• Laundry pulled from a clothesline
• A beat-up Cooper Mini
• A plastic pen
• A hardback book

But even more interesting than the contrast of weapons is the contrast of attitudes towards government. James Bond is, in many ways, a manifestation of how the British would like to see themselves: debonair and worldly; as technologically adept as the Americans, without sacrificing class and gentility; dangerous when crossed. In the world of James Bond, the British government might be stodgy, but its heart is in the right place.

Jason Bourne, on the other hand, is a maverick who was once broken by his own government and is now on the run from it. In the world of Jason Bourne, the United States government is composed of equal parts corrupt slimeball and impotent douchebag, with a small contingent of do-gooders skulking around the fringes.

We can discuss Great Britain and James Bond another day. As for America: how did we get to this point? When did we get to the point that the assumptions outlined at the top of this article became commonplace?

I imagine it began in the aftermath of World War II as we ramped up to fight the Communists in their quest for world domination. It was fertilized by the suspicious assassination of John F. Kennedy, watered by Nixon’s dirty tricks in Watergate, nurtured by Reagan’s Iran/Contra hijinks, and ripened by George W. Bush’s global war on terror. And no, it wasn’t just the province of Republican administrations; Johnson was as manipulative a son-of-a-bitch as they come, Clinton did very little to stop or reverse the trend, and Carter played right into the paranoids’ hands by letting a bunch of religious maniacs hold Americans hostage in Iran without consequence.

The end result is that we the people don’t believe in the United States anymore.

Oh, sure, we believe in the people of the United States. We believe that our neighbors here in this country are largely honest, decent, hard-working citizens. But all the things the United States is supposed to stand for — the idea that free and open societies work better than closed ones, the idea that we can work out our differences through courts and legislation, the idea that we should live by principles of law and reason rather than mere tribalism — we don’t have faith in those things anymore. The courts are rigged against us, the government is laced with corruption and undue lobbying influence, the police are either too hampered by bureaucracy or too brutal and bloodthirsty to trust.

No, we need maverick heroes like Jason Bourne (and John McClane, and James Bond, and Indiana Jones, and Batman, and Jack Bauer, and every character that Arnold Schwarzeneggar ever played) who can skirt the law, who can actually break the law when they deem fit and not be held accountable for their actions because we know they’re really good, just, honorable people acting in our best interests. And every situation we face is a 24 situation. Al Qaeda has agents infiltrating your living room, they’re going to blow up the Sears Tower at any minute, there’s a ticking bomb about to go off! What, you want to trust the police at a time like this? You want to follow stupid laws hammered out by some ignorant yahoos in Washington who spend all their time in bed with lobbyists? Are you crazy? We’ve got to do anything we can to prevent this! Law and order be damned, we’ve got to act now now now!

It would be one thing if this was just the exaggerated attitude of the movies. But it’s not.

When a handful of jihadist fanatics murdered three thousand people in 2001, we didn’t trust that we could resolve this through the international cooperation of law enforcement agencies. No, we needed to lash out, we needed to send a disproportionate response, we needed to punish those states who were sympathetic to our enemies. Osama bin Laden isn’t just some robed lunatic with a gun in a cave; he’s evil incarnate. He’s Adolf Hitler! And when you’re facing Adolf Hitler, you can’t resort to ordinary tactics. Extremism in the defense of liberty tain’t no vice.

When Barack Obama recently suggested that even bin Laden should be given due process and his day in court, the nation scoffed. Due process? Man, due process doesn’t work! If we capture that son-of-a-bitch, we need to string him up but good. If you put him in a courtroom with F. Lee Bailey as his attorney, he’ll argue his way out of a conviction and be walking by sundown! Nope, only a secret military trial and execution will do.

(It’s the same mentality that’s at work with the Bush Administration’s runaround of the FISA limits on wiretapping. This just astounds me. FISA allows secret, anonymous, unaccountable intelligence agents to stretch the bounds of the Constitution by conducting wiretaps on U.S. citizens simply by getting rubber-stamp permission from a secret, anonymous, unaccountable judge — and the Bush Administration doesn’t think that’s enough?)

I just don’t believe this paranoid worldview is sustainable. And director Paul Greengrass doesn’t either. Like Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart or Irving’s Headless Horseman, these things come back to haunt us. And for Greengrass, in The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, that Headless Horseman is Jason Bourne.

Notice the look of fear in the eyes of the various intelligence impresarios that Bourne runs across (played ably by Brian Cox, Chris Cooper, Joan Allen, and David Straitharn). Bourne isn’t just a renegade spy; he’s the twitch of conscience that you feel in the middle of the night, he’s the thing that haunts you after you’ve just violated international law in the name of the United States of America. Soil the Constitution, and Jason Bourne will get you.

Interestingly enough, the manifestation of the American subconscious isn’t a bloodthirsty killer. Time and again in these films, we’re subjected to the image of Bourne approaching a target with gun in hand, only to turn away at the last moment and not shoot. Bruce Willis’s John McClane gives a cheerful “Yippeekayay, motherfucker” before he kills; James Bond’s whole signature move is to turn towards the camera, strike a pose, and fire a gun until cartoony blood flows over the lens. I haven’t seen all of the Bond films, but from what I remember every single villain meets some kind of nasty demise in the end. I can think of at least six distinct scenes in the Bourne films where the hero has the villain in his sights, unarmed, gun in hand, and he fails to pull the trigger.

But if Damon’s character isn’t a killer at heart, he isn’t a do-gooder either. He’s not on a righteous crusade to bring America back to lily-white purity. In fact, he’s almost completely self-absorbed; he doesn’t particularly seem to care about America or the government or international law. Sure, he cares for the various mousy white women who get into trouble because of him, but only insomuch as they intersect his path and get in trouble on his behalf.

All of this culminates in what is, to me, one of the most stunning, jaw-dropping, unforgettable scenes in the past decade of film. At the end of Supremacy, Jason Bourne drops in on the teenaged daughter of two of his early assassination targets. And he apologizes.

There’s something incredibly primal about the scene. Bourne is exhausted, gruff, half in shadow; he seems immense alongside the poor girl, who mistakes him at first for a burglar. But Bourne quickly calms her down. He tells her that, contrary to what she’s been told, her parents didn’t die in a murder/suicide. They were gunned down by him, on assignment from the CIA. “It changes things, that knowledge, doesn’t it?” says Bourne. The terrified girl nods. And then Bourne gets up, mumbles “I’m sorry,” and walks out of the room.

It reminded me of that grass-roots campaign that went around the web in the wake of John Kerry’s defeat in the 2004 presidential elections. Remember that? It featured thousands of Americans taking pictures of themselves holding up signs for the world to read expressing how sorry we are that we couldn’t stop George W. Bush from taking office for another four years. (Update 10/4/07: The name of the campaign was “Sorry Everybody,” and you can see the photos at www.sorryeverybody.com.)

When does the American paranoia end? And who will stand up and apologize once it’s over?

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.

The cause of this all, of course, was Senator David Vitter’s confession that he had once partaken of the services of a D.C. prostitution service, helpfully provided to us by Grand Inquisitor Larry Flynt. You know, Larry Flynt, the canny investigative journalist behind Hustler who forced that rabid mass murderer Bob Livingston to resign from leadership of the House in 1998 because he strayed from his marriage.

I really get hopping mad at revelations like this. Why? Because I firmly believe that it’s none of our fucking business what our politicians do with their personal lives.

Guess what? I don’t care that Senator David Vitter is hanging around with prostitutes on his spare time. I really don’t. Also:

• I don’t care if he’s cheating on his wife
• I don’t care if he’s gay or bisexual
• I don’t care if he litters
• I don’t care if he’s getting audited on his taxes
• I don’t care if he cheats at cards or golf
• I don’t care if he got bad grades in college
• I don’t care if he’s got a gambling problem
• I don’t care if he smoked marijuana in college
• I don’t care if he still smokes marijuana on his own time
• I don’t care if he uses the “f” word or tells someone to “go f— yourself”
• I don’t care if he did cocaine or heroin a long time ago
• I don’t care if he uses the “n” word from time to time in private conversation
• I don’t care if he calls somebody by an obscure French ethnic slur in the heat of a campaign event
• I don’t care if he drives an SUV or a Prius
• I don’t care how big his house is or how much electricity it uses
• I don’t care how much he spends on haircuts he pays for out of his own pocket
• I don’t care what his wife does for a living
• I don’t care what religion he is
• I don’t care if he’s friends with lobbyists
• I don’t care if he’s a hypocrite
• I don’t care if he flirts with the wrong people
• I don’t care if he watches or downloads pornography
• I don’t care if he owns a Confederate flag
• I don’t care if he’s a closet racist
• I don’t care if he’s a closet sexist
• I don’t care if he’s a closet homophobe
• I don’t care if he smokes
• I don’t care if he has a drinking problem
• I don’t care if he makes an egregious statement or two, as long as he promptly apologizes

Now here are the things I do care about as regards Senator David Vitter:

• I care about the policies he advocates
• I care about the votes he casts in the U.S. Senate
• I care if he’s charged with a crime that’s not a misdemeanor

Let’s make up a new rule. When our politicians step out of the office at the end of the day, they’re private citizens. Which means that just like you won’t splash it all over the newspaper that your next-door neighbor is having an affair, you won’t do the same about a politician. You shouldn’t follow a politician around or snoop on his personal life or try to dig up dirt on him. Now if he kills someone or actively cheats on his taxes or stashes bribe money in his freezer, then I want to hear about it. Until then, shut the fuck up.

Larry Flynt tries to cover his exposés of public officials with the paltry fig leaf of claiming that it’s all about hypocrisy. Well, guess what? I don’t care if politicians are hypocrites. Public discourse is cheapened by making it a clash of personalities. All that should matter is the content of the bills Senator Vitter proposes and the speeches he makes and the articles he writes, not the quality of the messenger. Even if the bills he champions specifically clash with his own personal behavior, I don’t care. In all but the rarest of cases, it doesn’t matter if a politician secretly disagrees with a policy he’s promoting. Larry Flynt’s lame excuse that David Vitter should be exposed because he campaigned on the sanctity of marriage (i.e. anti-gay marriage) is just that — lame.

This means that we desperately need to stop this idiotic parade of third-rate Freudian analyses of our politicians’ every utterance. I find it disgraceful that Trent Lott was forced to resign his leadership position in the Senate because of a single slip of the tongue. I find it disgraceful that Bill Clinton was dragged before the Congress for evasively answering a personal question he should have never been asked in the first place. I find it disgraceful that John Ashcroft was branded a racist because of his tenuous association with someone who favored segregation. I find it disgraceful that every time Ted Kennedy opens his mouth, right-wing talk radio has to call him a drunkard.

Why isn’t it possible to respectfully disagree with someone and not start piling on about their perceived personal flaws? Why do we have to morally judge these people’s activities at all? Why can’t we just concentrate on the policy?

Apparently, it is acceptable for Depp to make movies in Hollywood while at the same time publicly disrespecting the country where he was born and from which he reaps enormous financial benefits. Until Depp retracts his foolish statements, I will not pay a dime to see any of his films, no matter how wonderful an actor Newsweek thinks he is.

We can discuss the merits of Mr. Depp’s remarks — and Mr. Tarrasch’s criticism — some other time. The point is, Johnny Depp did issue a public apology. In fact, within 48 hours of the article’s publication, he claimed that his words had been misquoted and taken out of context:

There was no anti-American sentiment… My deepest apologies to those who were offended, affected, or hurt by this insanely twisted deformation of my words and intent.

(Let’s also put aside the question of whether Depp’s apology was sincere, or whether he was just engaging in some frenzied damage control after seeing the negative reaction his comments received in the press. Johnny Depp doesn’t strike me as the type of guy who would apologize for a political statement unless he sincerely meant to apologize. Do you think an actor who once jumped at the chance to star in a black-and-white film about an unknown cross-dressing homosexual B-movie director really cares if his political views affect his box office draw?)

So the news of Johnny Depp’s retraction did not reach the editors of Newsweek, and they printed Mr. Tarrasch’s letter. One can only wonder how many of Newsweek‘s circulation of 4 million heard about the whole flap for the first time through this letter and decided to boycott Depp’s film Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest this past weekend. A few hundred? A few thousand? Could Mr. Tarrasch’s letter have been one of the flakes in a snowball of conservative resentment that led to Pirates‘ disappointing second-weekend box office?

There’s a technological point to be made from all this, and here it is: information only flows one way. It goes forward, not backward.

Like the stuff that flew out of Pandora’s box, information is almost impossible to control once it’s released. Attempting to retract information that’s already out there is doubly difficult, and I’m willing to bet that Depp will be hearing conservative tirades about his supposed anti-American statements for decades to come.

It’s a problem that’s been a part of the human experience since the very beginning. And now the problem is ingrained in the very structure of the web, our greatest informational tool. Hyperlinks only point in one direction. From a technical standpoint, every page on the web is completely ignorant of the pages that link to it. As soon as you click on a hyperlink, the only connection back to that original page is through your browser’s history stored on your local machine. Move a page on the web or change its content, and watch the hundreds of linked pages dumbly continue to insist that the data is still there.

But here’s the really fascinating thing. For the first time in human history, we may be on the verge of finding ways to allow data to flow in the opposite direction. And this could very well be one of the small technologies that changes the world.

Many websites are smart enough these days to contain database-driven content that allows for easily generated “related articles” boxes (like the one pictured below, from Entertainment Weekly‘s website). This is a fairly crude solution that only offers a partial solution to the problem. It’s generally dependent on a human editor scanning the article and picking out the keywords to search for. And even then, you’re not linking back anywhere, you’re just linking forward. But at least it’s a partial solution.

Blogging software has really pioneered the closest thing we’ve got to bi-directional information with the concept of the Trackback. When you send a Trackback to a blog page, you’re essentially notifying the receiving blog that you have made a comment about it. From there, it’s up to the originating blog to decide what to do with this information. Generally, in the blog world, that either means adding a note in the Comments section with a short excerpt of what you’ve said, or listing that page in a “Pages That Link Here” sidebar.

We could get the Trackback to move up to the next level, however, if we had two things:

1. A way for Trackbacks to respond to smaller targets. Ideally, you should be able to respond to every individual character on a page, not just the whole page itself. This would require you to have an individual ID for every character on every page of the web, but this is probably not nearly as big of a challenge as you might think.
2. More detailed information contained within the Trackback. You should be able to send a wider set of information along with a Trackback. Perhaps a category (“addendum,” “correction,” “objection,” etc.), a rating, contact information, and a very detailed URL (like #1 above) that provides the exact location of the response.

Think of all the things we’ve done with regular ol’ hyperlinks and imagine how much cooler it would be if hyperlinks were a two-way street. Once you’ve got two-way communication between web pages, you could:

• Inform a page that one of its hyperlinks has changed, and automatically make the adjustment
• Have discussions that really move back and forth all across the Internet
• Track the flow of these discussions from site to site and person to person
• Rate web pages or individual paragraphs within web pages, and have the web page itself be aware of these ratings
• Issue corrections to your web pages that would automatically propagate down to the pages that link to it
• Make corrections on someone else‘s web page that the author would have the choice to accept or reject

Best yet, you could:

• Read a letter about Johnny Depp’s supposed anti-American sentiments, and instantly be able to not only read the source material, but Mr. Depp’s reaction as well (and the reactions of the unwashed masses to Mr. Depp’s reaction)

How much time do we waste on redundancy, unattributed hearsay, and irrefutable rumor? Impossible to say. But we may one day reach the point where information will flow both forward and backward, where we will take for granted the ability to follow a rumor back to its source.

Won’t that be cool?

I’m irritated as hell that anybody gives a flying fuck. Not because I have a special love or reverence for Rush Limbaugh, but because… Well, here’s what I posted on Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s Making Light blog about the whole thing, and I think it’s worth repeating and reiterating:

Am I the only one who is profoundly annoyed when stories like this suck up media attention? So Limbaugh was embarrassed to carry around a bottle of happy pills. So he’s a hypocrite. Big frickin’ deal. Make note of it at the bottom of page 12, and move on.

I felt the same way about the whole Clinton impeachment. So he messed around with some intern. So he fibbed a little. Big frickin’ deal. Make note of it in the official record, slap his wrist, and move on.

The problem with these stories is that they turn everything into a big schmaltzy drama of our politicians’ and pundits’ personal lives. The issues get buried. Ted Kennedy can’t open his mouth with the Right snickering about his predilection for alcoholic beverages. If George Bush misconjumagates a verb, the Left falls into a laughing fit. The argument devolves. Discourse breaks down.

I’m trying to remember the last time the MSM reported seriously on anything Limbaugh actually said on his show. All anyone seems to care about is his supposed drug habit.

You say Rush is a blowhard? Great, fine, I don’t agree with much that he says either. But argue it intelligently by refuting the statements he makes on his show. Don’t make little petty stabs at his personal conduct. I don’t care.

Oh, and yes, I know that Limbaugh makes plenty of petty stabs at others’ personal conduct. Fine. Doesn’t change the point.

(No intended slander against Teresa for bringing this up in the first place.)

If you read further down the comments thread, you’ll notice people asking the burning question of whether Limbaugh was using his ill-begotten happy pills to enjoy a bit of underage nookie in the Dominican Republic. I honestly don’t care. Let the police decide, or the DEA, or the World Court, or whatever law enforcement agency looks into these kinds of things.

We, as a society, need to stop prying into our public figures’ personal lives. Whether it’s George Bush or Rush Limbaugh or Bill Bennett on the right… Bill Clinton or Patrick Kennedy or Al Franken on the left… leave them the fuck alone. Let the politicians do their job making policy, let the pundits do their job discussing policy. Let the actors act, the singers sing, and yes, let the writers write.

If you want to criticize a public figure, criticize their works and their public acts. Otherwise, don’t waste my time by polluting the public discourse with this inane blather.