I recognize that I’m the million-and-oneth blogger to link to this, but for all our sakes, if you haven’t yet read it, go read Ron Suskind’s New York Times Sunday Magazine profile of Dubya. It’s astonishing, to say the least.

This past week we experienced three major developments in the land of condo construction. First, of course, the officially sanctioned walk-through with the construction manager; I’d expected all to be pretty much as I’d left it three days before, but things were, instead, terrifically spiffed-up. The wallboard job had been completed, and they’d begun finishing off the corners, which made things look less like a construction site and more like a room in the making:

The real beauty of this trip was that, instead of the overcast skies that covered our tracks during our earlier covert penetration, it was gloriously sunny out, and so I got a little bit of a sense of the light streaming through all those windows.

Because I’m a little slow, it took me a few minutes to realize that one of the reasons the place looked so great was that it had been cleaned up a bit in advance of my arrival. Witness the kitchen, which was pretty much cleaner than the kitchen of the place I now live in:

So where do you hide the dirt when there are no rugs to sweep it under and no closet doors behind which it can be concealed? On the balcony:

Over the pile of crap on the balcony, though, one could begin to get a sense of the view; directly across the street from me is the City Yard (that’s what everybody calls it; if it’s got a more particular name, nobody’s letting on), which is going to be cleared out in the next couple of months in order to make way for Phase 2 of Village Walk, which will include a few more buildings’ worth of townhouses and some single-family homes. Nothing going in across the street should be taller than two stories, though, so my view of the mountains should, with any luck, remain at least partially intact.

Oddly, the best view of the mountains currently available is from the window of the master bedroom closet:

Anyhow, it was a lovely and worthwhile walk-through; I got to make sure that all the electrical outlets were where I expected them to be, and finally got a sense of the rooms as rooms.

That same day, R. and I drove down to Anaheim to visit the granite yard. Now, I had entirely the wrong idea about what this trip to the granite yard would entail. I imagined trudging through the hot, dusty afternoon, surrounded by big piles of stone from which I would carefully select.

Instead, the place was much, much cleaner, and far more inside than I expected it to be. The young woman who helped us—imagine a younger, shorter Tina Fey—asked us to wait a few minutes while she went to get a forklift, and then disappeared into the warehouse. I now crave an excuse to say that to someone—“Wait here while I get a forklift.”

Anyhow, Tina pulled out three slabs of granite, from which I was assuming I would select. Instead, these were my three slabs, from which, pending my approval, the three sections of my countertop will be cut.

The granite we’ve selected was, in the sample, mostly black with some lighter green and gold flecking; in actuality, it’s a fair bit lighter than that, but in a good way. As Tina told us, “it’s coming out of the mountain pretty green.” And that just seems a bit hard to argue with; anything that comes out of the mountain ought, be definition, to be good.

The color, incidentally, is called Ubatuba. Which I half selected just because I like saying it.

Oh, yes, and the third development? Earlier that day, while on the walkthrough with the construction manager, I found out that there’s not a chance the place is going to be ready before February. Which leads me to suspect that the weekly condo-blogging may have to become bi-weekly, or even monthly, if the pictures are going to reveal any progress whatsoever.

The Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, yesterday published a lovely editorial about the role of Michael Moore in contemporary political discourse.  And I’m thrilled that they did, particularly for their closing paragraph:

Nothing would horrify Moore’s critics more than the suggestion that he might well be the best upholder of the revolutionary spirit in the current day—and thus the greatest patriot. But, then, Moore’s critics tend to confuse patriotism with blind obedience. And if Jefferson and Madison teach us anything, it is that the true patriot must always stand against King George.

As I’ve said before, in this forum, on the radio, and in class, I don’t think Moore is above criticism; his films are clearly manipulative and often hit below the belt.  But that’s okay with me:  he’s a polemicist; it’s his job.

What I can’t bear is the hypocrisy that gives nutbars like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter unlimited license to say whatever they want while holding Moore to higher ethical standards.  Yes, I understand that we on the left aspire to be “better than them,” that we seek the moral high ground, but when the battles are actually taking place down in the trenches, I’m glad we’ve got somebody in there fighting for our side.

What’s prompted this post today is the announcement over the weekend that Moore’s election-eve cable special has been dropped by iN DEMAND (a New York-based company jointly owned by Time-Warner, Cox, and Comcast cable companies), who cited “legitimate business and legal concerns” in making the decision.  Now, lest it be suggested that this case is just like that of Sinclair Broadcasting, and thus that I’m being hypocritical in suggesting that Sinclair is wrong to air the anti-Kerry propaganda but iN DEMAND is wrong not to air the anti-Bush propaganda, let me point out the one key difference:  Sinclair is forcing its affiliates to air “Stolen Honor”; Moore’s special is pay-per-view, meaning that it won’t even appear on your television set unless you specifically request it. 

Moore is, needless to say, threatening a breach-of-contract lawsuit.  But iN DEMAND doesn’t seem worried.  So what are the “legitmate business and legal concerns” that iN DEMAND obliquely refers to?  And why is this story getting so much more play outside the U.S. than inside?

The key argument is in the subtitle:  He used Mary Cheney to shame Bush for gay-baiting.  On Slate, by Timothy Noah.  (Via Unfogged.)

Now, for the love of Jon Stewart, can we get back to something that at least pretends to be actual political discourse?  Please?

In the event you’re the last person on the planet who hasn’t seen this clip (and don’t worry—I’m quite sure I was second-to-last), go watch this:  Jon Stewart on Crossfire.  A brief warning—the clip is 18.2 MB, so make sure you’ve got a fast connection or a lot of time to wait.  But it’s ever so worth it, just to see the look on Tucker Carlson’s face when Stewart says that he’s “as big a dick on [Crossfire] as on any show.”

My favorite line from the whole thing, though, hasn’t gotten much attention as of yet:  after accusing Carlson and Begala of “partisan hackery,” and having that accusation turned back on him by Carlson, who insisted that Stewart brownnosed John Kerry during his August appearance on the Daily Show, Stewart responded with an incredulous “You’re on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls.”

[UPDATED, 10.16.04, 10.41 am:  Forgot to include a link to the transcript on CNN, in the event your connection is too poky for the file.  If you can, though, try to watch it; there’s something really remarkable about the actual performance of the script, in which, as ogged points out, the mere act of calling everyone’s attention to the empty theatricality of the event threatens to crash the entire system.]

Worth checking out if you haven’t yet. Not un-Strokes-like.

So I was poking around a bit on the FCC website today, trying to come up with some more information about their regulation of calls to action.  The closest I was able to come up with was the 1986 Commission Policy Concerning the Noncommercial Nature of Educational Broadcasting, in which announcements by and about underwriters and donors are covered:

B. Announcements containing a call to action are not permissible. Examples of such announcements are:
   – “Stop by our showroom to see a model”;
   – “Try product X next time you buy oil.”

There’s also some information about the regulation of political speech in the 1999 The Public and Broadcasting policy:

Personal Attacks. Personal attacks occur when, during the presentation of views on a controversial issue of public importance, someone attacks the honesty, character, integrity, or like personal qualities of an identified person or group. No more than a week after a personal attack, the station must transmit the following three things to the person or group attacked: (1) notification of the date, time, and identification of the broadcast; (2) a tape, script or accurate summary of the attack; and (3) an offer of a reasonable opportunity to respond on the air.

Political Editorials. A political editorial is when a station endorses or opposes a legally qualified candidate(s) during a broadcast of its own opinion. (The opinions of other people broadcast over the station are referred to as “comments” or “commentary”). Whether a statement of opinion is an editorial or a commentary will usually be made clear at the beginning of the statement. Within 24 hours after the editorial, the station must transmit the following three things to the other qualified candidate(s) for the same office, or to the candidate(s) that were opposed: (1) notification of the date and time of the editorial; (2) a script or tape of the editorial; and (3) an offer of a reasonable opportunity for the candidate or a spokesperson for the candidate to respond on the air.

Perhaps coincidentally, just as I was doing this poking around, I received an email message from the MoveOn folks, discussing the Sinclair Broadcasting Group’s recent decision to force its affiliates to air a piece of anti-Kerry propaganda in the days leading up to the election.  This is of course not Sinclair’s first offense against the airwaves; in April, the conglomerate demanded that its affiliates pre-empt Nightline’s tribute to the U.S. troops who lost their lives in Iraq.  What’s different in this case is that the broadcast of this explicitly partisan film appears to be in direct violation of federal election laws—and worse, Sinclair simply doesn’t care.

So, what can be done?  Some are talking about boycotts, both of Sinclair stations and of their advertisers.  But the FCC gives us a more direct mode of protest—the complaint.

Sinclairwatch.org, a project of Free Press, makes it possible for you, in four easy steps, to find out if one of your local stations is a Sinclair affiliate, to gather information about how that affiliate is or is not serving the public interest, and to file an informal objection with the FCC, if you see fit.  Such complaints become part of the public record, and must be considered when Sinclair’s broadcast licenses come up for renewal.

When my local college radio station has to avoid all calls to action for fear of losing their license, but a large media conglomerate is free to violate federal law simply because it can afford any potential fine, something has gone radically wrong with our regulatory system.  We must require the FCC to serve its function—to ensure the fair use of the public’s airwaves.

One of my students had been asking me for a few weeks if I’d appear on his Monday-night call-in show at the college’s radio station, and I have to admit that I was dragging my feet a bit about the whole thing, partly because of the hour (he actually wanted me to DO something at 10 pm.  At night.  He clearly has no idea how old I am) but partly, if I’m going to be completely honest, just because I was nervous.  Given the deep levels on which I really and truly believe that I’m a fraud, and that any day now the smart, sensible people around me are going to Figure It Out,* I was pretty convinced that I’d freeze up on-air, have nothing whatsoever to say, and certainly nothing of any interest.

As it turns out, I think I talked a blue streak.  The good news is that, while the station has a live web-stream, that stream is not archived, so there’s no record of the blueness of my streak available to you guys.  The bad news is, of course, that it was recorded on something they used to call “tape,” so the possibility that such an online archive might one day appear remains.  But I discovered, definitively, that I had Plenty To Say, and some of it might even have made a little sense.

The thing that was most interesting to me about the night, though, was the briefing the show’s two student hosts and alumnus engineer gave me before the broadcast.  There were only two points to this briefing:  “keep it clean” and “no calls to action.”

No calls to action?

For instance, you can mention that something is happening—hey, there’s a great screening of a documentary called “The Corporation” on October 25—but you can’t tell people to go to it.  You can talk about the election, but you can’t tell people to go vote.  And you certainly can’t advocate for any particular candidate.

I find this fascinating, particularly given that the kinds of activism that the FCC is working so hard to prevent—and seriously, these students told me, they might ignore us because we’re small, but there’s a web page on which anyone can file a complaint with the FCC, and one fine would put the station out of business—seem to focus on the left, on those attempting to organize to drive the current administration out.

FCC, I said.  Interesting.  And who is it that’s in charge of the FCC, who has advocated for these new, more stringent policies? 

Michael Powell.

Michael Powell, I said.  Interesting.  And he’s related to… who is it again?

Colin Powell.

Interesting.

—–

*[UPDATED, 10.12.04, 9.09 pm:  Forgot to add the footnote, which intended to say something about how such hidden internal conviction of one’s basic fraudulence seems to me the only thing that unites all academics.  All of us lie in wait for That Moment, when the dissertation committee calls to say that a terrible mistake has been made, or the tenure review committee passes on the word of the outside reviewers who, not knowing and liking you, have no vested interest in concealing the truth, and who thus say plainly what you’ve known all along, that you are at heart a Moron, that you have merely been faking otherwise, and that all good thinking people should cut ties with you at once.  That such a Moment never arrives does nothing to soothe away the inner conviction of its imminence; if anything, it comes to seem more certain, the more time goes by.]

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It was a big weekend for condo picture-taking. R. and I wandered over Sunday morning after breakfast, camera at the ready, and found that the building next to ours has not only been fully stuccoed but is also mostly painted. Our building’s tar-paper-and-chicken-wire underskin is still showing, however:

And I’m really not kidding about the tar-paper-and-chicken-wire thing, though it’s a bit hard to see in the photos.

I took a billion—or maybe a dozen—more pictures of the exterior of the building, but I think you’ve got the basic sense of it. The important stuff came after these images, though, when R. and I executed a small covert maneuver called Operation Wallboard, a quick and dirty penetration of the condo’s heretofore unphotographed interior. I bring you word of the condo’s imminent liberation from the forces of chaos! The structures of democracy (or, at least, walls) are being erected everywhere!

I tire of this thoroughly silly metaphor. To the pictures: first, the second-floor landing. The entrance to the condo is on the ground floor, but the condo itself is on the third, so I’ve got two flights of stairs with a lovely landing inbetween, a landing large enough for a small workspace, or, alternately, a litter box:

Upon turning the corner from the stairs into the condo proper, the kitchen is on your left. The mysterious arm and shoulder at far right belong to R.:

Directly ahead is the living area:

And to the right is the dining area:

Between the kitchen and the living area is the entrance to the hallway, and dead ahead on that hallway is the master bedroom, which has perhaps the best walk-in closet ever:

The master bedroom itself isn’t too shabby, either:

The hallway takes a left turn at the master bedroom –

– and continues on to the spare bedroom –

– and the hall bath.

And that’s pretty much it. Except for the garage, which is enormous and lovely:

All that preparation for covert action turns out to have been unnecessary, however, as I got a call from the contractor this morning asking me to come in and do a walk-through to make sure they’ve got all the options right. I like to think, however, that our undercover operations laid the groundwork that has made such a turn to openness possible.

Reading Fanon for tomorrow’s class, and finding it all a bit alarmingly familiar, this year:

The settler makes his history; his life is an epoch, an Odyssey.  He is the absolute beginning:  “This land was created by us”; he is the unceasing cause:  “If we leave, all is lost, and the country will go back to the Middle Ages.” Over against him torpid creatures, wasted by fevers, obsessed by ancestral customs, form an almost inorganic background for the innovating dynamism of colonial mercantilism.

The settler makes history and is conscious of making it.  And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother country.  Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves.

Not to mention, of course, Sartre’s preface:

With us, to be a man is to be an accomplice of colonialism, since all of us without exception have profited by colonial exploitation.  This fat, pale continent ends by falling into what Fanon rightly calls narcissism.  Cocteau became irritated with Paris—“that city which talks about itself the whole time.” Is Europe any different?  And that super-European monstrosity, North America?  Chatter, chatter:  liberty, equality, fraternity, love, honor, patriotism, and what have you.  All this did not prevent us from making anti-racial speeches about dirty niggers, dirty Jews, and dirty Arabs.  High-minded people, liberal or just softhearted, protest that they were shocked by such inconsistency; but they were either mistaken or dishonest, for with us there is nothing more consistent than a racist humanism since the European has only been able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters.

All of which is leading me to suspect that W.’s weirdly correct when he rattles on about how “they hate us for our freedom”; that freedom has always been created on the backs of those we enslave.  Why wouldn’t they hate us for it?  The problem is W.’s solution:  dragging them kicking and screaming into the light of democracy, writing our history on their backs one more time.