PR VICTORIES: So I'm reading a piece in The New York Times about the growing influence of The Weekly Standard, a well-known neocon rag. And there I see that Bill Kristol has written a book called The War Over Iraq "with Lawrence F. Kaplan, a senior editor at The New Republic. The collaboration with a writer from a magazine identified with the Democratic Party is one more symptom of The Weekly Standard's transformation from outré journal of the right to the Boswell of the new global agenda."
Coming after the Observer's article about The New Republic's alleged new "daringness" -- represented by stances that break with neither conventional wisdom nor the mag's long-stated positions of the last decade -- this is too much to bear. I've been reading Kaplan's articles for several years now, and on foreign policy at least -- that is, on the one topic he ever seems to write about -- his views are completely indistinguishable from Kristol's and those of Kristol ally Robert Kagan. Indeed, I've sometimes slipped and said Kagan's name when I meant Kaplan's, and vice versa. The fact that he would write a book on Iraq with Bill Kristol represents no political realignment whatsoever. The New Republic and The Weekly Standard may disagree on taxes, but on foreign policy they are as one, and were so even when the Standard was allegedly an "outré journal of the right."
Why do I get the impression that some reporters assigned to cover magazines never read the publications they're writing about? The real story here isn't the increasing influence of the Standard or The New Republic's willingness to say purportedly daring things. It's the ability of magazines' PR people to sell other journals' writers on stories that are obviously untrue.
My friend Bill Kauffman has written that this "is not only the finest movie ever made about the Civil War, it is also the best American historical film. Period." I usually concur with Bill's judgments about American film, but my favorite Civil War picture is still Buster Keaton's The General.
LONGHORN SLAP SHOT VERITE: My brother, cited in this space yesterday for having spotted an Elvis impersonator at an Arkansas hockey game, today sends me this suggestion for filmmakers: "There is a possibility for a great documentary about hockey in Texas....Nobody in Texas knows the rules to hockey, but there are more professional hockey teams in the state than any other. Make a documentary following these bush league Canadians, Russians, and Yankees through long road trips from El Paso to Austin to Corpus Christi to Waco to Laredo to Fort Worth to Shreveport to Albuquerque. Meet the 'hockey chick' groupies. Watch the beer flow in small arenas. Meet the rednecks who come to see the fights. Interview the church groups and the Cub Scout packs. Cover the hundreds of loyal Laredo Bucks fans who cross over from Mexico for the games. (They even have a Spanish edition of their webpage. Do a keyword search on 'Hockey esta Noche'!) Show promotions far better than any minor league baseball team or stock car race has ever known, Elvis impersonators included. Make it surreal. Create the Texan response to Bull Durham."
TRAVEL TIPS: While my girlfriend's dodging bombs in Israel, my parents are in Italy and my brother is Somewhere In America. He gave me a call the other day to say he was at a hockey game in Arkansas -- I think he said Arkansas -- and that an Elvis impersonator was out on the rink singing "Suspicious Minds."
I always loved that song.
Now a friend writes to tell me that he's thinking of taking a three-week cross-country trip, and do I have any suggestions for places to see? (Sure: ask the Walker who isn't traveling.) I told him to let Roadside America be his Bible. And then I told him this:
If you go through Utah -- and really, there's no point to doing a trip like this and not seeing Utah -- then you should check out Bryce Canyon. It kicks the Grand Canyon's ass.
One of the casinos in Vegas has a big statue of Elmer Fudd in it.
Meridian, Mississippi, is filled with lovable run-down old buildings, and it's got the Jimmie Rodgers Museum too.
If you go to California, you should take Route 1 up the coast. If you go to Seattle, check out Gasworks Park. And for God's sake, don't skimp on the Rust Belt. Everyone knows about the crazy west and the gothic south, but there's a lot of hidden weirdness in Ohio and Michigan, too. And Pittsburgh is one strangely beautiful city.
Interstates are good for making relatively rapid jumps. They are not good for actually seeing the country. Use them, but use them wisely.
Keep your radio on. If a station sounds cool, drop by for a visit.
Utah and Nevada contain the country's weirdest people and the country's weirdest landscapes. Explore both.
Phoenix is ugly. Tucson is not.
There's some great burritos in Blythe, California. And there's some great felafels in Dearborn.
Most of my best cross-country driving experiences have had less to do with places than with the people I find there. Crashing on a stack of dirty mattresses by a pirate radio transmitter in San Marcos. Hanging out with militia and Panther types in Chattanooga, while it rains outside and they tell me wild stories and I feel like I'm underground. Hiking with an Australian hippie girl I met at a hostel in Boulder, then finding out she's related to Allen Ginsburg. (When she was little, the old guy taught her how to meditate.) There's lots of great sights to see out there, but the most important thing is to interact with all the interesting people you can.
And bring lots of country music, for those stretches where the radio's playing nothing but static or Clear Channel. You can't see America without listening to Haggard and Jones.
SELF-PROMOTION: I write yet more about reality TV today, this time in a column for Reason Online. I also have four articles in the new print edition of Reason: two short pieces in the Citings section, a lengthy interview with Howard Rheingold, and a shorter interview with Mickey Mouse. (An earlier version of the Mickey piece has already been published on the Web.)
Meanwhile, of course, I continue to post comments to Reason's weblog, Hit & Run. Indeed, I daresay most of my blogging energy goes into Hit & Run these days, with very little left over for this space. If any of you actually miss the era when I posted here virtually every day, you can go over to the other blog and live those memories all over again. Yesterday you would have seen me get into a tangle with Big Glenn Reynolds, which may or may not be an entertaining spectacle to behold.
Oh, and I was on KPCC-FM's Airtalk earlier today, along with a television producer and FCC Commissioner Michael Copps. A recording of the program will eventually be available on the station's website.
BACK TO KANSAS: The last episode of Oz aired earlier this week, and part of me is sad that my favorite TV drama is disappearing. Another part is happy that the show survived six years with its artistic integrity intact, and that it's ending things now rather than entering a long decline a la The X-Files or Ally McBeal. (Did I just compare Oz to Ally McBeal?) The final episode did its job well, drawing the series' themes and conflicts to a satisfactory conclusion. It did leave some narrative threads unresolved, but that was clearly intentional. Life's story arcs do not simultaneously resolve themselves in an hour, or even in a specially expanded installment of 110 minutes. Neither did the arcs of Oz.
They nearly did, though, in the program's first season -- eight episodes that, taken together, may constitute the best serial narrative in the history of television. It took a while, in the first couple of hours, even to see that a larger tale was being told. We simply seemed to be watching fragments of prison life, as characters took turns interacting with each other; the episodes were united by themes, not stories. Then key characters started to die, while others were transformed radically by changing circumstances. Power shifted constantly among the players and the tribes; the social web never stopped evolving. In a perfect climax, that web exploded into a riot, inverting, distorting, and dashing the prison's many hierarchies.
It would have been impossible for the subsequent seasons to match the quality of that first year, but they came close. Seasons two, three, and four were consistently excellent, marred only occasionally by an unbelievable plot twist or a too-loosely constructed episode. The final two years were more uneven, but still sometimes reached incredible heights.
Oz mixed gritty realism with giddy surrealism, storytelling with broadsides, soap opera with high art. It had more interesting things to say about power, liberty, responsibility, and tragedy than most of the films and novels of the last 30 years. I'll miss it. But I'm glad to see it end so gracefully.
TV NOTES: Sara Rimensnyder has outed me: I watched the final episode of Joe Millionaire, and I enjoyed it, too. Or, at least, I enjoyed the self-deconstructing first hour -- the second half was much duller, and eventually dissolved into tedious talk about miracles and fairy tales. As those of you who read my last Reasoncolumn will recognize, this means I watched America's favorite "reality" show back to back with Michael Jackson Unmasked. Some highbrow I turned out to be, eh? (I mean, I thought it was a Tarkovsky movie, but...)
The fact is, I think reality shows are the best thing to happen to network television since animation came back to prime time. Whatever else you might say about them, they're almost always more enjoyable than the sitcoms and dramas they're competing against. (Do any Joe Millionaire-bashers really think the show is more "toxic" than Friends or Providence?) The genre depends on constant novelty, a welcome contrast to scripted shows that depend on the constant reiteration of formulas. Of course there are reality formulas too, but it's fun to watch one species mutate into another so rapidly -- much more rapidly than TV's fiction genres do. (Joe Millionaire obviously began because Fox was trying to think of a way to imitate The Bachelor when somebody suddenly thunk, "Hey! Remember how the rich guy in Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire? turned out to be a fraud? I bet we can turn that bug into a feature!")
The best thing about the shows: You don't actually have to watch them. The simple news that a program like This Surreal Life exists is enjoyable enough; actually viewing more than one episode is going an extra mile. Our time is spared, and the network suits are forced to devise yet more novelty for our amusement.
As some strikers once said, "Give us bread -- and circuses, too." Or something like that.
SNOW UPDATE: Jim Henley informs me that I should not wait to dig out my car. "If you let the snow half melt," he warns, "what's left will be heavy, wet, and crusty. What we got was powder -- you'll be a lot happier shoveling powder than half as much sludge."
Unfortunately, this makes sense. On the other hand, I don't want to shovel anything until the plow's gone by -- I'm half-convinced that if I dig out the car now, I'll have to do the work all over again once the snow from the road's been deposited atop everything adjacent to it.
On yet another hand, I'm starting to suspect that the plow simply isn't going to come.
The next problem: Actually figuring out which two car-lumps on the side of the road belong to my girlfriend and me. I have a feeling I'm going to spend my lunch hour digging out all the neighbors' remaining automobiles before I finally stumbled onto ours.
The same storm hit nearby Washington as well. I'm told that their plows haven't been very prompt either. "Some years back," writes my D.C.-based friend Sam Smith of The Progressive Review, "I was asked by the paper to write an Outlook section piece about a recent storm. I decided to compare Washington's snow removal with that of another town I knew well, Freeport, Maine. As it turned out, Freeport had one percent of Washington's population but ten percent of its road mileage. If memory serves, Freeport did the job with five trucks while it took 150 in DC -- or three times as many per mile. In the most recent storm the figure for DC was up to 300 trucks with plows although the city's geography hasn't expanded in the interval."
The problem, Smith suggests, is D.C.'s native confidence in the bureaucratic approach to problem-solving. "There are certain jobs that do not lend themselves to the bureaucratic pyramid -- they are jobs in which employees carry most of the capacity for good or evil in their own skill, judgment and ethical standards. Jobs like teaching school, patrolling a beat, or plowing a street. Training makes them better; bureaucratic systems rarely do."
Fortunately, it's a holiday, and most of my neighbors don't seem intent on getting anywhere. Not that that's stopped anyone from devoting an hour or so to digging out a snowbound car. "It's better than doing it tomorrow morning," one woman told me. Depends on your point of view: Me, I work at home, and I'm gonna let my car sit until the white stuff's half melted.