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Thursday, Jan 09, 2003

follow through

"I found myself onstage at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco unable to finish reading the passage, unable to speak at all for what must have been thirty seconds. All I can say about the rest of that evening, and about the two weeks that followed, is that they turned out to be nothing I had expected, nothing I had ever before experienced, an extraordinarily open kind of traveling dialogue, an encounter with an America apparently immune to conventional wisdom. The book I was making the trip to talk about was Political Fictions, a series of pieces I had written for The New York Review about the American political process from the 1988 through the 2000 presidential elections. These people to whom I was listening�in San Francisco and Los Angeles and Portland and Seattle�were making connections I had not yet in my numbed condition thought to make: connections between that political process and what had happened on September 11, connections between our political life and the shape our reaction would take and was in fact already taking."

clicque clack

"Iraq's totalitarian system has been a menace to its own people, the region, and the world at large. Leaving the monster in its place is an invitation to future catastrophe. This may sound like an endorsement of the war camp. Not at all. Warmongering is as shortsighted as philanthropic pacifism. The former deliberately neglects the possibilities of a political solution to the problem; the latter does not recognize the existence of the problem. Both are locked in an ideological cage."

machine heads

"Why have conservatives have to dominate the punditocracy? That�s a larger discussion that I�ll devote several upcoming columns to. But let�s start with this one lesson: Political discussion on television operates within very narrow parameters. Partisanship is fine. Attacking the very nature of capitalist America, as far-left social critics are wont to do, is not. And that gives the conservatives an advantage before anyone�s even opened their mouths."

cold cuts

"Genoa Police Admit Framing Global Justice Protesters"

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