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Yep, another gap of a couple of weeks between updates. But am I going to apologise for having a social life? No, I’m not…

Monday 1st July

Rushing in where angels fear to tread? Well, OK, comedians aren’t angels exactly, but “fool” does same fairly applicable to the Shrub. I’ve said before that politicians are dire at joke-telling so the fact that Bush is telling a deeply unfunny joke is not surprising, although the subject matter is:

Professional stand-up comedians know that Sept. 11 jokes are radioactive. Not even the bravest have tried to turn the deaths of some 3,000 people into a laughing matter. But President Bush has forged ahead anyway. Bush has now been telling the same, spectacularly tasteless joke to a variety of mostly Republican audiences as part of his stock stump speech for the better part of four months now.

What is this comedic gem?

“You know, when I was running for president, in Chicago, somebody said, would you ever have deficit spending? I said, only if we were at war, or only if we had a recession, or only if we had a national emergency. Never did I dream we’d get the trifecta.”

If you’re wondering what the hell a trifecta is, you’re not alone. This is, it seems, an Australian word describing a form of betting in which the punter selects the first three place-winners in the correct order (the derivation is from tri + perfecta, an American system of betting about which I know the square root of bugger all). Trifecta doesn’t seem precisely applicable to this case, unless Bush is trying to hint that he was betting on getting these three things. No, that can’t be right, even for him.

But then, not much is right about this story.

Bush never told any audience, or any reporter, in Chicago that he could foresee three conditions under which deficit spending might be necessary. In fact, throughout the entire campaign, Bush had been insistent that budget surpluses would continue, and only once does he appear to have told any public audience at any time that deficit spending might become necessary — a Sept. 22, 2000, interview with Paula Zahn, in which he defended his tax cuts even in the face of a “short-term deficit.” The only other times that Bush ever seems to have brought up the subject of deficit spending were those when he accused Al Gore of planning to resume the practice.

When pursued by reporters, the White House press office has been unable to come up with any evidence that Bush ever made the original remarks that he claims. Jonathan Chait first pointed this out in the New Republic, and a number of other journalists have gone looking.

Well, politicians playing fast and loose with the truth is hardly news, but there is point to be made here:

And that gets to the heart of the “trifecta” joke, whose entire purpose clearly is to blame the deficit on Sept. 11 and its aftermath. It lets Bush escape any serious questions about either his failure to balance the budget or, particularly, his campaign pledge to use the Social Security Trust Fund to pay down the national debt. The national tragedy gave him unparalleled political cover for his administration’s failures — and Bush has displayed no hesitation whatsoever about using it. Indeed, it has become his favorite joke.

Unparalleled cover is right: towards the end of the article is a list of ways in which the Bush administration has used the events of September 11th to browbeat any political opposition. I’m so glad I live in a democracy rather than the USA…

There are signs, though, that Bush’s post-September 11th easy ride is coming to an end.

In San Francisco, during a taping of PBS’s “Washington Week,” a member of the studio audience asked the panel why we had said that support for the war remained strong, “because I don’t know anyone here who favors it.” The next night, at a social gathering, Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown asked skeptically, “How do you wage war on a technique?” And, he added, “How do you ever know when you have won?”

At every stop in Iowa, Dean heard similar questions. Many involved not just the war itself but also its effects on personal liberty and political dissent. Attorney General John Ashcroft was a frequent target.

At one session, Kathy Herman approached a reporter and said, “I am very worried about our foreign policy.” Why? “I think we are acting like the Ugly American,” she said. “We’re number one. Our president is from Texas. Here’s what we expect you to do. Now, do it.”

I’ve never been happy with the Left-Right description of politics. It’s not that it’s completely wrong, it’s that it’s too simplistic. Fascism and Communism are placed at opposing ends of the spectrum yet they have some similarities as well as some differences. I came across a suggestion once which rearranged the spectrum with totalitarian dictatorships on the Far Left and absolute monarchies on the Far Right — this did not seem to me to be a perfect solution either as the main difference between these two systems is the way in which the person with absolute power gets absolute power. Perhaps a system whereby absolute rule (by one person or an oligarchy) is at one end and full democracy is at the other end — but there are problems there, too. The real difficulty, of course, is trying to cram different parameters into a one-dimensional spectrum: differences in approach to economic questions, the traditional basis of the Left-Right split, do not necessarily correlate directly with approaches to other areas of social policy.

Here’s a site which tries to position you politically using a two-dimensional approach. There are six pages of questions but it doesn’t take long to complete. I found it irritating in places, but in the end the result was pretty much where I would have placed myself given the indices in use. Give it a go and see where you stand politically.

Salon is in danger of going out of business. With only $1,500,000 left it has enough cash to stagger on for three, maybe four, months. It has lost $76,600,000 since it was founded in 1995. Recently it started a subscription service, moving a lot of its more interesting articles to the subscription-only section, in an attempt to get more money. Subscribers apparently get more articles and no advertising.

That was always a dumb solution. I know people keep talking about the necessity for Internet companies to make money — fine, I can’t see a problem with that. I know people keep saying that that means subscriptions — here I think reality is dwindling in the rear-view mirror.

If you want people to pay for something, you need to offer them something worth paying for. In magazine terms, and Salon is a magazine, that means articles they want to read. With a hard copy magazine you can easily tell if there are articles you want to read because you can pick it up and flick through it. That is something you cannot do with an e-zine using a subscription system. Go to a Salon subscribers’ article and you get the heading and the first paragraph or two; this gives you very little idea of whether or not you would want to read the rest of the article (we have all seen articles with very enticing opening paragraphs which turn out to be a complete waste of time). Unless you already know Salon and know you like it and its articles, you are not going to pay up on the basis of a paragraph or two. (I know this sounds familiar to those of you who have visited this page before.)

But suppose you did, would that get Salon out of the red? Hardly. If there’s a magazine on the planet which makes its money — assuming it does make money — out of the cover price I haven’t heard of it. Advertising is what brings the money in. Internet magazines have a problem because surfers loathe ads at least as much as TV viewers do. Advertising works in many hard copy magazines for three reasons: the ads are relevant to the subject matter of the magazine (you get ads for software and hardware in computer mags, for cosmetics and clothes in women’s mags, not vice versa); they are not obtrusive — you can flick past them; and they are accessible, that is you can find an ad you want to look at by leafing through the magazine. None of these apply to online ads, which are almost never relevant, are infuriatingly and increasingly obtrusive, and, should you ever happen to glimpse an ad which does interest you, you cannot actively seek it out later.

If online magazines are going to make money, they need to crack the problem of providing advertising which is useful to the surfer and doesn’t get in the way of reading the articles — when are advertisers going to realise that an ad which irritates the hell out of the end user is not going to sell anything?

Relieved to be back in civilisation — that’s how Steven Berkoff describes his feelings on returning to Britain after being deported from the USA. Why was he deported? Because five years ago he overstayed the period of his visa by 24 hours.

Berkoff, who has played nemesis to stars ranging from Eddie Murphy to Sylvester Stallone, met his match in the form of an immigration clerk. “An overzealous immigration officer, desperate to make his mark on the world, discovered that I had overstayed the period of my visa in 1997 by 24 hours,” he said.…

“Unbelievable as this may seem to humans who are half-civilised,” he said, “this trivial infringement was enough in the post September 11 hysteria to give this lowly clerk with a gun holster the right to play God. I was kept back, shadowed like a criminal and put straight on a plane back to the UK.”

No idea why he overstayed in ‘97 — it could easily have been because of problems getting a flight — but unless they had film of him planting a bomb somewhere wouldn’t a warning not to do it again have been enough? Whatever, the thought of Berkoff declaiming, “I’m not a terrorist, I’m an actor!” is strangely appealing.

There are times when I think that cracks like that one of Berkoff’s about civilisation and America have a point. Such as now, when the USA is vetoing renewal of the UN peacekeeping operation in Bosnia because it wants to insist its soldiers be guaranteed immunity from prosecution in the International Criminal Court. Of course, Americans never commit war crimes, do they?

Another time I wonder about the application of the word civilisation to America is when I hear about the propensity of US states to censor books. I could be talking about the restrictions placed on access to the Harry Potter books — which are delightful, fun, full of positive lessons on the values of friendship and integrity, and just about guaranteed to be a vast help to any child struggling to learn to read — by a school library, but I’m not. I’m talking about the Texas Board of Education rejecting a textbook because it contains two paragraphs (in almost a thousand pages) they don’t like:

“It makes it sound that every woman west of the Mississippi was a prostitute,” said Grace Shore, the Republican chairwoman of the Texas State Board of Education. “The book says that there were 50,000 prostitutes west of the Mississippi. I doubt it, but even if there were, is that something that should be emphasized? Is that an important historical fact?”

I suppose the answer to that depends on what you are studying. If it’s history, well, yes, it is an important historical fact, assuming it’s accurate. And, oddly enough, I’d be inclined to trust historians over politicians on whether or not it is accurate. Sanitised history — in whatever way it’s cleaned up — is worse than no knowledge of history at all. Some of our ancestors did things we don’t think very highly of now. Of course they did; apart from anything else, the world was a different place. Grasping that is one of the points of studying history.