A year ago, I got a call from MADD, asking for money. I don’t give money in response to an unsolicited phone calls–even to groups I support–and was not about to make an exception here. But as I spoke with the MADD telemarketer, I realized I have deeper problems with that organization.

What seems to be lost in the MADD frame of mind is that it is the combination of driving and alcohol that is the problem. And while MADD has been fighting the drinking side of this for 24 years, they haven’t done a damn thing about the driving. I am not, in this article, going to argue the merits of contemporary drunk driving laws–which are largely the result of MADD lobbying–except to say that the critics of the existing laws do raise a number of salient points. I am arguing that both MADD and the laws’ critics are working from a flawed set of ideas concerning the roles of cars and driving in our lives.

To begin with, I want to consider the predominant form of growth that has taken place in the last 40 years: suburban sprawl. The two defining characteristics of suburban sprawl are that it is designed for cars, not people, and that there is strict segregation between uses. Housing, shopping, and working places are all separated from one another by vast moats of asphalt, in the form of parking lots and multi-lane thoroughfares. Even where sidewalks are present, they are directly adjacent to the roadway with no buffer in the form of on-street parking. Suburban sidewalks are likely to end, suddenly, in nonsensical places. In order to get past all the parking lots, the distances between destinations are quite large and the intermediate landscape is so disagreeable that only the most determined or desperate would walk.

In sprawl, then, one has three choices: drive, be driven, or don’t participate in society. The result is a tremendous pressure on folks to drive, even those who shouldn’t be driving, like drunks, or those who shouldn’t be driving much, like new drivers and elderly drivers.

So consider the suburban bar, in some nameless strip mall. In front of it is a vast parking lot. The parking lot is bounded on two sides by large roads, the third side by the strip mall itself, and the fourth side by a row of juniper shrubs. On the other side of the juniper shurbs is a muffler shop. Across one street is another strip mall, behind its own parking lot. Across the other street is the backside of an “office park”, to which the real entrance to which is off some other road; all one can see from our vista are the rear emergency-exit doors and some “landscaping”. Kitty-corner from our bar is a big-box electronics superstore, surrounded on all sides by parking lots sized to handle crowds on the Saturday before Christmas. There are no apartments or houses in sight. The question is: how the hell else are you going to get to our bar besides to drive? And, once you’re there, how do you plan to get back home?

And its not just the bars; everything else is similarly situated. Drive, be driven, or don’t participate. Drunks are not the only ones who are left in a difficult situation: also affected are those who are too young to drive, those that have medical conditions that prevent them from driving, those that can’t afford a car, those that don’t want to drive–by some estimates, a third of the population.

The MADD solution, for the suburban bar, is to have a designated dork: someone who pretends to enjoy a Sprite while his friends do their drinking, and then drives them all home. This still has drunks getting into cars, they’re just not behind the wheel. I say: what the hell is a bar doing in a suburban strip mall surrounded by asphalt in the first place? MADD attacks only the alcohol, without asking why drunks need to be in cars in the first place.

A far better arrangement is found in traditional cities, where there is no strict segregation between living, working, and drinking spaces, and where a continuous network of sidewalks and crosswalks connects them all. Commercial streets have retail on the ground floor, often with apartments above. Apartment houses are clustered near the larger streets, and as one moves to the side streets, the housing density decreases. Single folks live in the higher density areas, families in the lower density areas. All of them can walk to the store or to a bar, and many can even walk to work. A car can be handy, but it is not essential, and certainly not required for everyday matters like going to the bar. So everyone in the bar can drink, and then stagger home. There is no need for drunks to be in cars, and no need for a designated dork.

The standard story from MADD is that, before Candy Lightner and the other mothers started speaking up, drunk driving was not treated as a serious offense, and they’re right about this. Through their efforts, drunk driving is taken seriously, and we are better for it. What I would point out, however, is that the emergence of drunk driving as a widespread problem is relatively recent. Before the accelerated buildup of the suburbs, most drunks did stagger home, and most bars weren’t surrounded by unhospitable asphalt. The emergence of drunk driving as a more widespread problem than other needless tragedies is a particular consequence of the suburban experiment of forcing everyone–drunk and sober alike–into their cars.

But in the MADD frame of mind, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this arrangement. Go search their website for anything related to traditional town design, public transit, new urbanism, walkable communities, smart growth, or any other alternative to drive-everywhere sprawl. It isn’t on their radar screen. And MADD hardly predates urbanism: Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities nearly twenty years before MADD.

Instead of looking for ways to reduce the need for drunks to be in cars, MADD attacks alcohol in every form and in every situation. We’re left with a situation where, despite widespread enjoyment of alcohol, there is a very real social stigma connected with it, much the same as the way in which our society deals with sex. When epidemiologic research shows a non-monotonic relationship between life expectancy, or overall health, and alcohol consumption, researchers backpedal and say that any benefits to alcohol “do not outweigh the risks.” But in the MADD-driven climate, how can anyone make such a weighing, when anyone who points out a benefit of alcohol is deemed “irresponsible”?

MADD welcomes the driving and demonizes the drinking. Instead, I propose we demonize the driving and welcome the drinking. We should envision a living arrangement where drinking is commonplace and driving is rare. Beer and wine have been a part of civilization for thousands of years, but cars have only been around for only about a hundred. Let us promote livable and walkable communities in which everyone can stagger home.

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It turns out that not only do we expect our government (and its officials) sometimes to say things that have no basis in fact, so also do we sometimes go to great lengths to prevent ourselves from seeing, believing in our hearts, or heaven forbid articulating out loud things that are inconvenient, uncomfortable, and unacceptable. Let me give you an example:

I teach in the South. And the students I teach, being Southern, tend to be of the Republican persuasion. So when I tell them things like “segregation exists, and it benefits White people, and it materially screws over Black people. And it is not a result of the fact that Black people like living with Black people, but is rather the result of the fact that White people are, on balance, kinda racist and don’t really like living next door to Black people no matter how nice and god-fearing and well-behaved and tax-paying they are. Moreover, segregation stems from the fact that Black people are, on balance, a whole lot poorer than White people, and can’t actually afford to live in a lot of White neighborhoods even though White people can usually afford to buy themselves a lily-white fantasyland called suburbia.” Well, when I tell them inconvenient, uncomfortable things like that, they surely do not want to hear it. It is an unacceptable truth to say out loud that we live in a racist world and that we White people are benefiting from that racism whether we will or no. It is unacceptable, and my students go to great lengths not to listen, to misunderstand, to ignore, and to forget such unacceptable truths.

Let me give you another example: Why are we in Iraq?

Someone asked me that the other day, and I confess I honestly don’t know. Do you know? I’d like to hear it. Or maybe I don’t. I’m not sure. Is this an unacceptable truth I’m not ready to hear?

It surely isn’t because of those much-fabled Weapons of Mass Destruction. Even Colin Powell has managed to pull together what’s left of his tattered dignity and much-shredded integrity and finally admit that, yes, Virginia, maybe we were wrong about the scope, volume, and even existence of Saddam’s fabulous WMD.

It surely isn’t because of Saddam’s supposed links to Al-Qaeda. Are we clear on that, at least, people? Saddam was a goddamned secularist, for crying out loud. He hated the Islamists almost as much as he hated George I and George II, and for precisely the same reason: they threatened his hold on power. And the Islamists surely hated him; the Baathists were warmed-over socialists, and those fundamentalists over there hate socialism just as much as our fundamentalists over here do.

What is left after those two acceptable lies are gone? Do we even want to go there?

Is it that our fearless leader is driven by corporate greed and is simply a shill for Bechtel, KBR, and all the other cronies who funded his campaign?

Is the world really about the run out of oil, and we needed, for reasons of national security and national economy to “secure” (read pillage) supplies?

Is it that our fearless leader is driven by some kind of wacko Freudian projection scheme to avenge his father’s would-be assassin? For this we drive foreign policy and kill 700-someodd of our best and brightest and who knows how many thousands of Iraqis?

Is it that our fearless leader watched that film we all watched in middle school about the prophecies of Nostradamus (you know the one!), and sees Saddam as the man in the blue turban, Magog the veritable AntiChrist, and himself as the watcher in the night, sounding the alarum for the coming of the Lord, leading the vanguard of the army of our risen Savior in preparation for the Rapture?

Where are we when we have to entertain such options? Because all of the acceptable lies are gone, and unless you are willing to entertain the idea that our government is simply incompetent (though see a recent AP article, “IAEA: Iraq nuke plants apparently unguarded” Friday, April 16, 2004), I don’t know where to go for an answer.

Can you handle the truth, to quote my man Jack?

Next up on the weekly ration: when did being “decisive” become more important than being competent?

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When does an acceptable lie cross the line to being unacceptable? I suppose this is one of the fundamental things that divides Republicans from Democrats. In general, Democrats appear to be more forgiving in matters of personal morality: not just Clinton – consider Willie Brown, the legendary speaker of the California State Assembly. The man openly took money from the tobacco companies, always appointed a bodaciously-endowed blonde as his press secretary, and even went so far as to father a child by one of those press secretaries, but the good people of San Francisco (God bless them, every one!) kept electing him to the Assembly, year after year. The good people of Burleson, Texas, on the other hand, just this past Tuesday found it completely unacceptable that Mr. Sam (aka, Samantha) Walls sometimes dressed up in ladies clothes, and so they refused to nominate him for the Republican ticket to run for state representative this fall. And let the record show the poor man is ugly as a man, but quite attractive as a woman. Let the record also show that at least one of the pictures of Mr. Walls in drag showed him in the company of his wife – so evidently she either forgave him his sumptuary indiscretions, or didn’t find it a problem. But apparently cross-dressing is incompatible with serving in Austin (though not with being head of the FBI, lest anyone forget the memory of our dear departed friend J. Edgar).

I think, though I’m somewhat less sure, that where Republicans (or at least some portion of them) care deeply about lies regarding personal morality, Democrats are less tolerant of lies when it comes to matters pertaining to the public good. I am somewhat less sure on this simply because it is something I happen to care about, but I cannot speak for all Democrats (that would be Terry McAuliffe’s job). So, for instance, when Texas Governor Rick Perry says that he is calling a special session to “reform” a broken Robin Hood system of school finance, we on the other side of the aisle get hopping mad over the fact that the man wouldn’t cross the street to help poor children (lets see, Ricky dear, how many kids did you dump from CHIPs this year?), and to pretend otherwise is not only a patent lie, but borders on the ridiculous. He is calling a special session to (a) stop the transfer of monies from rich districts to poor (omigod, how unfair!), and (b) to ram through a voucher system. WHY LIE ABOUT IT? (do you hear the tone of moral indignation? Good.) To be fair, by the way, Perry is apparently also proposing to split the property tax rolls, which might be good thing. Though of course it totally pisses off the business community. How unthinkable that businesses might be asked to contribute to the education of their future workers. How dare anyone suggest such a patent infringement on entrepreneurial freedom. He is also suggesting that we tax sin [which is to say, video poker] to pay for education. This has the Baptists hopping made. Poor Ricky just can’t satisfy anyone, it seems.

Similarly with Republican claims that we have to “reform” Social Security and Medicare in order to “save” them. LIES, ALL LIES! The Republican establishment hates what are essentially the government’s biggest income transfer programs, and wants to privatize them both for reasons of ideology (if it is government, it must be bad, and if it is private, it must be good) and for simple reasons of greed (who were George II’s biggest donors besides Enron and Bass Brothers Enterprises? Folks like the good people at MBNA, Merrill Lynch, UBS, Credit Suisse First Boston, Goldman Sachs, etc. Who will be managing those pretty little privatized pension funds on behalf of our poor benighted and inefficient government?) To pretend otherwise obscures the facts, scares the geezers, and threatens the integrity of our democracy.

But you know what? I’m tired of re-hashing old debates. We could argue all day as to whether people are spinning this issue, or misrepresenting that issue. It is in fact what occurs every day on shows like “CrossFire” and “AirAmerica” or the “Rush Limbaugh Show.” That Republicans and Democrats fight over what is an acceptable or an unacceptable lie should be obvious to anyone.

I want to talk instead about the last box in the four-by-four grid. Which is to say, it is time to talk about unacceptable truths (next week’s column)

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Dear Diary,

My minions are a bunch of total dickheads. They drive me up the wall. They give me no respect - and I’m the evil genius leading them onto world domination. Domination! Why can’t they get into this?

Like just the other day, a group of top-notch Japanese scientists fell into hands as the result of an elaborate abduction type deal. Well, maybe not that elaborate. Mostly I just had Chad pretend to be a fourteen year old Japanese school girl on some chat room or something and set up a meeting time. But no, diary, I’ve got to stop selling myself short: it was elaborate and full of abduction. I mean, the guys were IMing Chad in Japanese and he had to run everything they both said through Babelfish.com to get a translation, and then he had to IM their response back. Luckily they just figures it was like some sort of cute teen Japanese subculture thing or something. Anyways, a few days of IMing and sending them some really fake-o photos of japanese schoolgirls we got off the internet they were more then ready to meet up with them. Then - I STRUCK! Those guys never knew what hit them. They were caught in the net - I try to use a net to entangle my victims, sorta a hallmark thing you know - and the very first thing I said to them was: “What is it with the plaid skirts and stuff? That stuff is so TYPICAL. You ought to be ashamed!” Every negative thing I’ve ever heard about Japanese guys was more or less confirmed. Not that they could tell what I was saying, since they could only like, speak Japanese.

Anyway, I got them back to my secret undersea base and revealed to them my evil plans which they WOULD further OR ELSE. It was simple: a truly abbhorent mixture of man and animal - a superlethal killing machine with the cunning of man and the rapacious fury of a beast. But it proved absolutely impossible - it was like I was talking to a fucking Shonen Knife album or something. Anyway finally I explained to them exactly what I wanted them to do, and even donated some of my own body, my OWN FLESH AND BLOOD so that they might have only the finest and more fiercesome genetic sequences on the planet.

That was when the trouble started. I was walking out of the submarine bay back to My Throne Room (hells yes! I’m still SO psyched I’ve got a throne room)when I heard two of my minions talking about me.

“Did you see Overlord Pulliam with those pervy Japanese scientists today?” says one

and the other is like “Yeah. Dude what is his problem? I’ve been a minion to evil super genius types since back when Sean Connery was Bond and I’ve never seen anything so dorky before.”

“Fuck,” says the other one, “How much respect can you take in your work when your evil overlord is SWABBING HIS CHEEK OUT right in front of you. That was so corny. He makes this big speech and he’s pumping his fists up and down and has this maniacal light in his eyes and then he GETS a fucking cotton swab and sticks it in his mouth? He should cut off his finger right there in front of us, just to show us how tough he was.”

“Yeah, or at least like drawn a knife across his palm real slow like and let the blood drip onto the floor while he stared fixedly at them with a sort of obsessive evil look. Maybe even lick it too.”

“Eeew - that is SO gross. Yeah. That would have freaked the fuck out of me.”

“As it was, he just handed it to the guy. Gross. Like, I work for you, you know, but I don’t really want to share bodily fluids with you. It would be like him handing me a used kleenex or something.”

Anyway I was so pissed I just about killed them right then and there. But instead I bottled up my rage, diary. I didn’t unleash the evil super villain that I know lies within me. Instead I crumpled. Why? Why? Why can’t I unleash my inner super villain?

So I go back to my throne room and play some Tetris and just, you know, try to just let it go, you know? And then I decide that I have to face my fears, so I go back to the lab where the captured Japanese scientists are working and I’m saying to myself “I swear to god if anyone looks at me funny I’m gonna cut my hand and suck on it just to shut them up.” But then I walk in the door and I clearly iterrupt the conversation of two minions guarding the scientists.

“…I mean what kind of supervillain names his Personal Bodyguard and #2 ‘Chad’…. oh! er! Good Evening, Overlord Pulliam, my life is yours to command.”

It was heart breaking.

But finally the day arrived - the day I had waited for, longed for. The Japanese had grown the bioenhanceed limbs that I had demanded. With a final stern admonition to Chad to shoot on sight any who sought to desert while I was under anesthetic, I put myself on the table and ordered that the transplant begin.

I spent two days recovering from the operation, and even while dozing in my Inner Sanctum and watching The Apprentice I could still tell the troops outside were getting a little ancy. Was THIS the one? Had Pulliam finally done it? I chortled satanically and nursed the scars from the surgery and coutned the days until The Great Unveilling.

And finally the day came - I assembled my minions in my throne room and stood before them, enshrouded in a great scarlet cloak. I gave them the slow wind-up, the growing intensity, the final ranting peroration, just like I was supposed to:

“And now, with my powers enhanced beyond imagining, I will lead you, my loyal followers, to Total. World. DOMINATION!”

At that I flung my cloak aside to reveal my wickedly modified right arm. At the end of my pinky sprouted a three inch long nail sharpened to a razor point dripping with the ultratoxic poison of the fugu - a sinister, elegant weapon of assasination.

“DOMINATION!” I repeated, shaking my pinky in the air above my head.

I expected the room to erupt in a frenzied blood lust as my minions rejoiced in the completion of my vile plan, but there was nothing. Nada. Zip. I think one of them stifled a giggle. I ordered Chad to throw him into the volcano and then reteated to my Inner Sanctum.

I STILL think it was a good idea. Sure it makes typing a pain and my mouth goes numb if I hold cigarettes in my hand when I smoke them. But c’mon: sinister, elegant weapon of assasination! I’ll show those ungrateful loosers who the REAL supervillain is around here if it’s the last thing I do. I refuse to accept their peer pressure. I AM the greatest supervillain to walk the earth. I KNOW I am. And it’s just a matter of time before THEY realize it too. And if they don’t - I’ll give them the Pinky of Death. I mean, I think that’s super frightening. Don’t you, dear diary?

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On April First Google announced that it was testing a new email service called Gmail. I’m sure most have heard of this by now. I’ve been watching it for a while now, and listening to the fears about what it means, and I’ve come to a conclusion. In many cases, people having too much privacy is not really in their best interest.

Firstly, for those who don’t know, Gmail is Google’s new web-based email service. It is set to offer one gigabyte of storage space, compared to other popular services offering around five megabytes. For the average user this may accommodate around a decade’s worth of emails. The service is to be offered for free. The way the emails are sorted is a little different that a regular account might be, with the emails indexed by keyword, and searchable with Google search technology. So far that all sounds pretty nice, but there is a catch.

To pay for the service, Google will place text ads in email messages as they are viewed. These ads will be similar in appearance to the ones that show up when one does a Google search. They will be off to the side of the text of the message, and won’t break the flow of the message itself. Still, this sounds fine. Email messages frequently contain ads from the service providing the email, and they are easy enough to ignore. Now comes the part that some people are worried about.

In much the same way as it places ads with its affiliates, Google will scan the incoming email looking for keywords so it can deliver ads matched to the content of the email.

This has people up in arms. They don’t want Google reading their incoming email. They have a point, in a way, but I think that they are a little off target in their views. Firstly, no human at Google will be reading the emails. It will naturally be scanned by computer. Seriously. Why would anyone waste time reading all those emails? Secondly, Google won’t be the first to do this. Anti-spam programs do this all the time. Why do you think people are trying to sell you Viagara except to beat the filter? Thirdly, do I really care if some computer reads an email about the top ten first date mistakes someone sent me? Hardly.

I get about 500 or so emails a day. Of those, about 420 are junk, and filter to a junk mail folder. Of the remaining 80, I would say that there are an average of zero that I would care about somebody else reading, much less if they were scanned for keywords. I would say that in an average year, I get about four emails that I would consider so private that I would even care about another human reading them.

It is possible that I am a very dull person, with far fewer secrets than average, but even if this is true, I would still guess that around ninety-eight percent of the total email, aside from just spam (which is all junk), is stuff like the following:

Bob,

Hey man. Haven’t seen you in a while. Work’s just been murder recently. Maybe we can get together for a drink or something this weekend? Give me a call.

cu,
–Jack–

Even in this totally meaningless message the actual private part is passed to another kind of communication.

I’m sure that there are those that say that they don’t want anyone to read their stuff, even if it is a robot, and that their stuff really is personal. Right off, I doubt it. Who could really give a shit about your emails? Certainly there are those that are cheating on their spouse, or buying email porn, or working on super secret military, or other secret business stuff, and to those I say don’t use Gmail. Duh. If you are doing something illegal or unethical or sensitive in nature and you are using email at all to talk about it, you may be a moron. If you have things to keep private, then do so, but avoiding Gmail altogether is just silly.

Even now many of us keep aspects of our life separate. If I had a wife I was cheating on, and still decided to use email, it isn’t like I’d use the same account that I used for everything else. The same is true for other aspects of my life, and will be for Gmail. Right now I actively use about six addresses, though I have a few more. I have one for each of my two jobs, one for my weblog, one for website related mail, one for personal mail, and one for signing up for stuff on the internet. I’m sure many have a set up similar to this. Let us just accept the scanning of stuff, and move on.

As to them looking for keywords and matching the ads. Firstly, the indexing by keywords is vital to their search mechanism, and would be done even without the ads. Second, would you rather have ads suggesting breast enhancement than and ad actually relating to something you are in a conversation about? Really? Most of the ads will be totally ignored, but I think it may be handy to have an ad for Orbitz if I happened to be talking about a planned trip I was going to take. I may ignore it anyway, but it is still better than an ad for MSN. It may be creepy at first, but I think it will be so commonplace so quickly, that it will fade from notice.

There have been all sorts of privacy groups calling for Google to change the service to be more private, and even some proposed legislation in California to stop it. To this I say, WTF? If you are worried about it, don’t sign up. If someone else is using it, and you don’t want your meaningless email scanned, let them know that you would rather have an alternate email for correspondence. I’m sure the resistors will find themselves rapidly in the minority. But they will still be able to stay out if they want to. Why wreck it for those of us that are not all paranoid conspiracy theorists? Trust me, if the government wants to know what you are writing emails about, they don’t need to go through Google. If you work on something that your boss wants to be more sure of, you are probably required already to use the company email service to talk about it, and Gmail wouldn’t even be in the picture.

Now we get near the point (it has to be around here somewhere). Some people worry, though Google says it won’t, that they will take the info collected from your Gmail account (name, and all that), and match it to the searches you do by pairing the IP address. I thought about this and at first I was weirded out a little, but as I thought about it more I figured, why not? There are some things I’m searching for that I only want to find the spelling or one quick fact about, but, chances are, if I search for Gorilla hair styles more than a few times, I may have a genuine interest in this topic. Maybe the next time Google indexes a page that has a lot to do with Gorilla hair styles, it could alert me that there is a page I might be interested in, but have not yet seen. It could match my admiration of things Gorilla with my location from my Gmail account, and tell me that the Monkey Bar in Sacramento, California is having Gorilla night with proceeds to support the local zoo. Something like that might be of use to me over and over. This has its scary side too. Lets say you had a tendency to search for, say, boom boom yum yum cambodia and you didn’t want people to know that you did it. If you shared a computer, others may be alerted to your desire for knowledge about cambodian child prostitution. That may not be so good for you, but you can just stop being such a dirty pervert, can’t you? I think that there are situations where you might not want everything that you search for to be matched up with you, but there very well may be many time when it is very useful. It could even match you with what is hot that day for people of your age group, sex, income, and locality. Sure it sounds a little like fascism, but it doesn’t have to be the bad kind.

Let’s go a step further, as if fascism isn’t far enough. Let us look at all of Google as a new kind of unit, as others have proposed. There is some speculation that Google could become so multifunctional that it become a new operating system by itself. It is like we will all go back to having a mainframe computer and all the personal computers would just have to be terminals that access it. I could see that. All of our workspaces would be melded together, and any shared information could be gotten to. Let’s face it, Google is practically already the internet. It has read and stored most of the pages worth reading already, and is the hub that the rest of the pages circle around, waiting till google sends someone to read our information. Many users already only really use their computers for word processing, email, and internet, so I don’t think it would be all that hard to sell little terminal computers for cheap, at least as a backup computer for the living-room, or something. A desktop as big as the web. As I type a report, search results appear to help me collect the information I will need. Gmail has all of the messages I have ever sent or received, and locating the ones I want is as simple as typing “barbed-wire order” in the search bar. The search takes less than a second and all of the emails related to this order are sorted into their appropriate conversations. I search from the task bar in any application I am using. I can highlight a word and search. The news items I am interested in are waiting for me when I wake up in the morning. When I read or write, the referenced items are available to me with just a click.

Sure they would know practically everything about me, but is that worse that having to pay ten dollars a month to be free of the scanning? I think not.

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Imagine a 2X2 box (because all great theories, at least the social sciences, can be summarized in a two-by-two box). On one axis (the rows) you have truth vs. lies, and on the other axis (the columns) you have acceptable vs. unacceptable. Now, the first box (acceptable truths) isn’t very interesting, right? That’s the kind of thing that I suppose we all hope we all tell all of the time. Or something along those lines, anyway.

So what about acceptable lies? I suppose there are the simple things like the “little white lies” we all tell each other to lubricate social interaction: “No, honey, I never look at other men. No, honey, those pants don’t make your ass look fat. No boss, I never look at The Onion when I’m at work. Why yes, friend, it was such a pleasure to meet your new boyfriend – what a catch he is! Of course, friend, I meant to go to your party – I’m so sorry I missed it, but my mother was having a mid-life crisis and I had to bodily restrain her from purchasing a Hummer that evening,” etc. Those are understandable, and I’m sure we can all agree that yes, maybe sometimes, it’s okay to stretch the truth a little to preserve face, sustain a relationship, cover up a minor mistake, and in general make life bearable.

What about lies told by the government and elected officials? Me, I expect my government to lie to me once in awhile. Hey, I even expect them to lie regularly. I mean, really – who needs to know things like which cities will get sacrificed first in the event of a land invasion, or just how much of my tax money precisely is going to pay thugs and drug dealers to sit on stools and sing for the CIA? Not only do I not want to know, I affirmatively think that there exist some things I should not know if our government is to go about its business. In other words, there are acceptable lies when it comes to government, its business, and our elected officials. The government is not in the truth-telling business – we do not have a Cabinet-level “Secretary of Prophecy” no matter what delusions of grandeur Mr. Ashcroft may entertain about himself – it is in the governing business. And governing well does not always require telling the truth, and sometimes requires telling a whopping fat lie.

What’s interesting about acceptable lies is that it turns out there’s a lot of disagreement about what counts as an acceptable lie for the government or an elected official. Personally, I did not give a two hoots about how Clinton – a man my father’s age – lied about getting a blowjob from a woman – who happened to be my age – who worked for him (sort of). It was tawdry, it was unethical, it was perhaps even scandalous, but I personally thought it basically acceptable for Clinton to lie about it. After all, the person whose business it really was wasn’t Joe Public, but rather Hillary Clinton. And evidently she forgave him. So if she forgave him, and if getting his pole smoked by some buxom brunette didn’t interfere with the people’s business, what do I care if he got up before God and Congress and lied about it? But apparently a lot of people found it unacceptable for Clinton to lie about that. Why, I cannot begin to imagine, but evidently truth-telling in matters of personal morality are vital, and critical, and worth stopping the business of government for at least some portion of the American public. So yes, there are acceptable lies, but not everyone agrees on which lies are acceptable and which are not.

Which brings us to the next column – when does an acceptable lie become unacceptable?

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A college friend of mine occasionally referred to me as “The Metcaffeinator,” combining my name with my obsession, at the time, with coffee. I still drink a fair amount of coffee, and collect books about coffee, but I will not try to write about coffee here in my corner of This Blog. The web already has a good writer on the subject, and I don’t think it needs another.

Rather, I will contemplate urban life and the relationship between cities and the pursuit of the worthwhile. My interests sprang in cities sprang from longstanding environmental leanings, and a concern that the natural landscape was disappearing, and with it, wildlife. Why are numbers of so many species declining? Loss of habitat, says conventional environmental widsom.

I was wrestling with questions like: What is it about suburbia, and the overprotective SUV-driving soccer moms that inhabit it that I dislike so much? The link between these questions, and the disappearance of natural space, started to become clear to me when I read James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere. This book struck me the way Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring struck a generation of environmentalists. You won’t get anywhere trying to defend the natural environment unless you do something about the human environment. We are consuming vast quantities of land, for big box landscrapers and ticky-tack “housing starts”, because we’ve forgotten how to use land efficiently. And it’s not the fault of an expanding population: there are plenty of rust-belt cities that have seen decades of population decline yet have continued to increase their “urbanized”, paved-over and built-up area.

The canonical illustration at this point is the contrast between a decaying downtown and new suburban strip malls that spring up like weeds. More big boxes, more megastores, more futureless minimum-wage jobs, more habitat torn up, as if the not-nearly-as-mega stores we ripped up land for five years ago can no longer satisfy the shopping “needs” of a dwindiling rust-belt city’s population.

Well, we won’t return to downtown, and we won’t be able to stop the march of the big boxes, unless we fix the downtown. This is easier said than done, and there have been any number of attempts to fix downtowns that remind one that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

It was with this that I could start to answer my questions: I don’t like suburbia because it is ugly. I dislike the overprotective SUV-driving soccer moms because they whine about the problems–obesity and drunk driving and the harried non-stop overscheduled life they’ve created for themselves–that suburbia creates and simultaneously deny any connection between their living conditions and the problems they create. After work and sleep, quantity of suburban time devoted to driving, television watching, and discount shopping is so large that it adds up to a lifestyle that is hardly worthwhile.

I do not intend, in my corner of This Blog, to repeat the ideas that have inspired me. In addition to Kunstler’s book, the interested reader is referred to Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and Andres Duany’s Suburban Nation. Rather, in this space I hope to work through the questions and ideas I have contemplated as I have thought and read about cities, suburbs, and a worthwhile life. Welcome aboard.

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Dear Diary,

This weekend sucked. I was totally humiliated - and with the entire UN on conference call no less.

“Do you know what my favorite thing is?” I asked, leaning back in my overstuffed, leopard skin throne with the orbital laser controls in the arm rests.

“Excuse me?” asked my personal body guard.

“Do you know what my favorite thing is?” I asked, trying to keep a leisurely sense of tensed, deadly power in my voice.

“The smell of napalm in the morning?”

“No.”

“Uh… when a plan comes together…?”

I shifted, a bit uneasily.

“No.”

“To defeat your enemies, scatter them before you, and hear the lamentations of the women?”

“Urg….”

It was totally humiliating. I mean, it the idea of holding the moon hostage is already pretty crazy - I had to get past like twenty secretaries before I finally got to a for real UN official - but how impressive are you going to sound if you can’t even do a little sinister improv - and with your own personal bodyguard for christs sake! He kept on telling me I was ‘denying’ and to play off the cues he gave me. I was like: ‘whose secret undersea base is this, pal?!’

Being a supervillain is a lot harder than they taught me at Community College - like a hundred bintillion times harder. Fiendishly clever plans, a mastery of physics and biolchemistry necessary to whip up doomsday scenario after doomsday scenario - it doesn’t amount to anything if you don’t have that look, that feel, that certain je ne sais quois that separates the true-blue world-threatening lunatic from your average pension-raiding chief financial officer.

Dear diary, there is so much I have to learn! I feel so frightened and alone sometimes. I had a couple of the other members of the World Federation for Evil over for the laser launch last week - just to let them know there was a new gun in town, know what I’m saying? I spent weeks on the unveilling - getting it so that the enormous mile-high red satin curtains would fall away and reveal the orbital lasers and the music started roaring through my Master Control Center right when I get to the word ‘domination’ in my speech. And then on The Big Day, I pump my first into the air, wind up my speech - “…total. World. DOMINATION!” - and the curtains drop and the music goes nuts and what do you know but Dr. Doom starts laughing so hard champagne comes out of his nose. “Carmina Burana, Pulliam?” he laughs, “Is this the unveiling of a plan for global hegemony or a bloody Nissan commercial?” and Chang The Destroyer mutters something about “should have been John Adams” and I’m like: Who the fuck is John Adams?

So that’s why I’m starting this diary - to keep track of all of the stuff that they don’t teach you about in supervillain school. Like all the shit about wine and music and costumes and the difference between an embassy and a mission and the proper way to pull out your opponents hearts’ form their chest to whip up the bloodthirsty crowds of death-dealing fanatics under your command into a berserker rage. Today they laugh at me but soon, soon I shall rise up, and when my plan for Total World Domination is complete we’ll see how funny they think I am! MWAAAHAHAHAHA!

(see - that was a pretty evil ending, right? I’m feeling more optimistic already)

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To me, Disney represents all things about American Business as much as any single company can. It is the good and the bad. People love it and hate it. Since the beginning of this year the company has gone through some especially turbulent times. There has been some good news, but the bulk has been on a down note.

Over the last few years things have looked a little shaky at the entertainment giant. The theme park division is still trying to bounce back from the recession and the travel fallout caused in part by the terrorist attacks on 9/11. The ABC network, and the associated advertising revenue, is struggling, having fallen to fourth place behind even the Fox network. The retail division showed signs that it had expanded too quickly, resulting in the closing of many locations of the Disney store. Even the feature film division had some problems, with some big misses (Treasure Planet, Atlantis) along with the hits.

These issues already had Disney management on its heels, and then 2004 started, and the shit started to hit the fan. Roy Disney, nephew to Walt, began to voice his displeasure with the management techniques of Michael Eisner, claiming that Eisner and his cronies were responsible for the issues with Disney growth. This came to be an even greater issue when talks between Disney and Pixar broke down. Pixar wanted a better contract for the computer animated films it as producing for Disney, and Eisner was apparently unwilling to give in to the demands. While the Pixar demands may have been a little too high, it was largely seen as a personal failure by Eisner that he was unable to come to an agreement with Pixar. Roy Disney latched on to this, and began to exploit it, saying that Eisner’s pig-headedness would cause a reliable stream of cash from Pixar to Disney to dry up. Roy Disney began to contact large shareholders, urging them to withhold their votes from Eisner and his buddies in the upcoming board election. At this same time Comcast decided that Disney was ripe, and issued a takeover bid. I don’t think that any advisors took the bid too seriously in its initial state, and were looking for Comcast to up the bid. Roy Disney continued to attack Eisner (and still does) through this process. Disney released higher than expected earnings, and the stock price went up (based on the earnings report and the bid by Comcast). The new price made the bid silly, and it was rejected by the Board. Comcast has not raised its bid as yet. Roy Disney did accomplish part of what he set out to do though. Eisner received a pretty big vote of no confidence when a large minority of votes was withheld for him. Large investors were asking to meet with the board for some explanations, and Eisner was removed as chairman of the board, though he did retain the CEO position.

Not all of the tings that happened to Disney during this period were bad. In addition to the strong earnings report, they also announced that they will be producing the Chronicles of Narnia series, that should be very profitable, though probably not on par with something like the Lord of the Rings. Most analysts see a resurgence in travel for the theme parks. A key battle was won in the licensing for Winnie the Pooh, saving Disney several hundred million dollars.

Analysis:
First off, Roy Disney is handling his business all wrong. For some reason he hates Eisner. That’s fine, if it’s what he wants, but he should really look closely at what he wants. Would he prefer to suffer with Eisner a little longer, or would he like to have Comcast take over the company? To me the answer should be clear. Comcast primarily wants to get Disney’s networks and library. With this they could provide a massive amount of programming to their cable customers without having to pay for it. What interest does Comcast have in film production or retail sales or theme park operation? I think that it would be likely that under Comcast command those areas would either flounder under mismanagement or be sold off piecemeal. Roy should first defend against the outside threat, then take care of the inside one. Instead he takes action that could potentially lower the stock price, making it easier for the bid to succeed. That is a bad move.

Is Eisner all washed up? Possibly. He doesn’t seem quite as with it as he was when he started with the company. He is not a dumb man, but he is an ego-maniac. I imagine that most people in his position are, and that you have to be, but when this behavior starts to take over the ability to manage effectively, it is time to go. Personally, I like the guy. I think that he did a good job overseeing a great push for the company over the last twenty years. Still, twenty years is a pretty good run, and in a creatively driven business like Disney, it might be better to inject a little fresh perspective. The hope is that with the shifting of jobs he will be better able to focus on growing the business. This seems improbable to me though because even though he looks like he is out, he really controls the board even now. I don’t know who should be in charge if he goes, only that it shouldn’t be Roy Disney. He has proven himself a bad manager for something so large. I’ve heard of some talk about Steve Jobs (Apple, Pixar), but I don’t know if that will really work. It seems like he has a lot on his plate, and I’m doubtful he would be willing to give up the other positions. I think that if Roy wants Eisner out so badly, he should first come up with a reasonable choice for replacement.

What I’d like to see, and my predictions for the future:
I think that the theme park business will continue to recover, and earnings from that division will be strong. The only thing that needs to change, and management might be the key here, is the attention to detail. New high-quality attractions need to go in. The people react to innovation, so stop make a million variations on the same thing. Keep maintenance and customer service at the highest level. No customer should ever return and say that the grounds were messier than they expected, or that some of the staff were rude to them. That is far worse than not putting in a new ride or adding a million to the bottom line for that year. These things have a cumulative effect.

The retail situation is shocking. Why are these stores losing money and closing? They carry products that the whole world wants. Part of this is bad marketing and high prices, I imagine, but the real problem is that they limit their focus too much. Disney is for Kids, but it is the Adults who love Disney that spend the money on it. How about this. Reimagine the stores. How about Disney-Gap (why not they got gap kids and babies already)? In the store (or a store of this style if Gap is not available) have more clothes geared toward adults. Mannequins with khaki slacks and a white Disney button down shirt. That sort of thing. Use the store to drive more business to the parks. It is more than a point of sale, it is a marketing opportunity.

As far as movies go, I think that Disney will have a fine, though not stellar year. They are starting off a little rough with the sad opening for the Alamo. Probably they will find some success through the year. They usually do. The Pixar situation is tricky for the future. Disney didn’t want to give up the control it had over Pixar, and Pixar, naturally, wasn’t real happy about that. I think that it is nice for the company to have that regular stream of revenue, but I see the break from Pixar as a possible opportunity. If they are aggressive about it, the next two movies that Pixar owes them will give them the time to get their own computer animation up and running at full speed. They will test this with the upcoming Chicken Little. There is some talk that traditional animation is pretty much over, even at Disney. There is some truth in this at least, they have shuttered several of their studios recently. Thing is, I remember when people were saying this when during the seventies and eighties there was nothing worth a damn in animated movies. Then The Little Mermaid came along and they were back. I think there may be less for a while, but I wouldn’t bet on them going away for all that long.

Overall I’d like to see the company worry a little less about the bottom line, and reinvest more money into itself. This investment will result in a higher quality product, and that will bring in more dollars than ever. Trust less in focus groups and more in smart people. The other way is like the smart following the dumb, just because there are more of them. Seize the opportunity to tell the dumb what to think, and stop asking them what they think.

Over the next year I would buy this stock as long as it was under about thirty-three or four, but it is a buy and hold type of thing. This is going to be good, but it is going to be a few years, at least, before it really all comes together. If you are a fund manager that needs to show results in the shorter term, don’t bother. I doubt that there will be all that much volatility in the next year.

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Let me be among the many to congratulate Dr. Rice on her fine performance testifying today (April 8th) before the Sept. 11th Commission. She has demonstrated once again her deep knowledge of the strategic issues that face our nation, her personal loyalty and commitment to George Bush, and (not least) her unflappable poise.

Much of the commentary that will be no doubt be written about Dr. Rice’s testimony will presumably take the form of “does what she said square with what X said” – X being former counter-terrorism coordinator Richard Clarke, or former Treasury Secretary Snow, or Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, or whoever. There are various versions of this question, from the “is she dissing Clarke” to “what did she mean when she said that?” to “is her under-oath testimony different from what she said on the talk shows” etc. And I am sure that such discussion, debate, critique, comparison, and parsing of phraseology and intent will be endlessly fascinating to someone, although not, I confess, to me.

At this point in the whole Sept. 11th thang/process/whateverthehellyouwanttocallit
I would like us all to step back, take a deep breath – which is difficult and perhaps even dangerous, I know, in the miasma surrounding politics – and ask two very simple questions of the current administration. To twist on old query placed before a former sitting president:

What did they do, and when did they do it?

Because I fear that in the rush to parse, we forget that, especially in matters of life and death (how many of our fighting men and women died yesterday?), economy (who actually got the tax cuts?), law and justice (how many companies are evading taxes?), and especially in matters presidential, that while words may matter, deeds always, always matter more. Confession of faith may be important — but faith without deeds is worth nothing (as any Methodist should know).

To ask this question – what did they do, and when did they do it – does two things: it takes Dr. Rice on her own stated terms today, and shifts the focus of the debate to action, deeds, and just where this ship of state is heading under Bush’s hand. Not, you will note, how “steady” his hand is on the tiller (Dr. Rice’s metaphor), but into what waters (and onto what shoals) this captain has steered this country. It also shifts the terms of the debate back to the only things that matters in assessing a candidate for office in an election year: what has this person done in the past, and what do they propose to do in the future.

To answer that question depends to some extent on where each of us places our own interests. You may have your own answer, and I would not presume to tell you what to think. But I am happy to tell you what I think.

To answer this question as regards the so-called “war on terror” I personally need know only the following: after Sept. 11th we went to Afghanistan, and we smashed the Taliban (a bunch of bloody, vicious hoodlums if ever there were), and then we left. We left and fought a bad war, under false pretences, 1400 miles away.

I do not care who said what to whom. I do not care if Richard Clarke did or did not ask for an audience with Bush. I do not care if Bush “understood the threat posed by Al Qaeda.” I do not even care, at this point, to debate the point as to whether or not Iraq was an “imminent threat” or an “immediate threat” or a “looming threat” or whatever phrase Secretary Rumsfeld did or did not use at the various times in which he attempted to justify this war to the American people and to the world. What I care about is that the big bad boogeyman Osama is not now in custody, that we aren’t even for heaven’s sake pretending to look for the anthrax mailer, that who we do have in custody is a crippled old man with pathetic delusions of grandeur and a sorry history of massacring his own people (hello, people, why has this not gone to the Hague?), and that fundamentally, we are not now safer than we were four years ago, and we are not safer specifically because of the actions taken by this administration.

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