Caesar's Bath

The day before he began blogging here, Neil tagged me with the Caesar's Bath meme. Fun. This one makes you name five things everyone else thinks are great but you just think are kinda, well, nice enough. Plus, I've got a nice, controversial last one that you'll all flay me alive for. Off we go:

The New Yorker: Really, what's the fuss? I recognize that the writing is often inspired, but the topic choice rarely is, meaning I'm only occasionally interested in whatever the magazine has decided to spend that week's 40,000 words on. The latest issue wastes half its time reestablishing John McCain's credentials as a lovable, cuddly outsider whose tough as nails when the situation warrants and has the genetic makeup to live until 170 and the rest inveighing against the scientific bankruptcy of Intelligent Design. Fine articles both, I guess, but I could have absorbed the same information in less time elsewhere, and indeed, I did so years ago. I guess that's my problem with the New Yorker, other magazines feel they need to break stories, or find new angles on them, The New Yorker instead believes in legitimating them. At great length. When I no longer care.

Everybody Loves Raymond: This show been winning critical acclaim and a variety of awards for years now. How? I can't, offhand, think of anything quite as forgettable as this vanilla sitcom. The characters are stereotypes, the jokes are throwaways, and the plots aren't, well, there. Don't get me wrong -- I like my sitcoms, I thought Friends was terrific end-of-the-day entertainment, and even Will & Grace throws out the occasional worthwhile one-liner. But Everybody Loves Raymond? It's the quintessential Caesar's Bath show: nothing really wrong with it, just undeserving of its success.

Blogs: Look, they've been very good to me, I quite like reading them and lord knows I enjoy writing mine, but someone turn off the hype. We don't break stories, we don't fact check ourselves, we rarely challenge our reader's biases, we don't encourage bipartisan conversation, only a few among us write well, only a few among them think well, and, if all that's not enough, I've managed to ascend to a high tier. Shouldn't that prove the medium's at least a little overhyped? Maybe as TPM Cafe comes online, Democracy Arsenal continues to mature, and a few politicians get the hang of them, they'll mature into a much-needed, unfiltered channel of communication between those on the inside and those on the outs. Until then? We're just marginally awake folks with keyboards and time on our hands.

Google Library: As a project, this seems merely cool, not revolutionary. After all, does anyone really want to read Dostoevsky on their computer screen? How about Proust? And I can't imagine we're going to start printing out 400-page books -- at this point, it's cheaper (in ink and paper) to buy the Penguin edition. Moreover, my streamline stapler is just not an adequate replacement for binding. In the future, I could see digitized text becoming useful through, say, in-bookstore kiosks that allow you to choose most any book written, download the text, print it, bind it, make a nice cover, and, for 10 bucks, take it home, thus making bookstores repositories for most every book ever written, both obscure and popular. Indeed, maybe home versions of these machines will eventually come online, making Amazon transactions instant. But until then, the digitization of millions of texts strike me as a highly effective timesaver for college students who forgot where a particular quote was, but little else.

The Downing Street Memo: I promised controversy, right? This has been blowing a few minds on the left and creating some pretty ambitious calls to action (notably Shakespeare's Sister's Brass Blog Alliance, dedicated to supporting the efforts of Conyers and After Downing Street to find impeachable offenses in it and begin proceedings). The memo itself is essentially the minutes from a meeting of Blair and his principals from 2002, wherein they talk about Bush's desire to go to war, about how to sell it to the public, and basically prove that the whole run-up with the UN and the rhetoric around the inspectors and all the rest were crap -- war had already been decided on.

This is nasty stuff. And when historians review the War in Iraq, it'll attain Gulf of Tonkin significance, no doubt about it. But it's just not that significant now. First off, most everyone watching knew that the rationale for war was trumped up. The Bush administration wanted to knock off the Iraqi regime for ideological reasons, not because they were deathly afraid Saddam would launch warships on Florida or pass his nonexistent nuclear weapons off to his longtime enemy Osama bin-Laden, who'd recently declared that good Muslims should undermine Hussein's apostate regime. Both then and now, the question was whether or not you thought Bush's central purpose -- deposing Saddam -- was desirable. Even if every American was told that Bush withheld information as he led us to war and protested that our path was uncertain when it wasn't, you'd change few minds. Either folks believe the war was worth it or they don't, but few think Bush only came to his conclusion after deep soul-searching and Iraqi intransigence.

More to the point, what do Democrats or liberals gain from pushing this story? The last thing they should want is to refocus the debate on whether American should have gone to war and return to the safer -- for Republicans! -- ground of gassed Kurds and regional aggression. Our incompetence once we got there and the poor way the Administration has handled the conflict are much more effective and, indeed, important. Beyond that, we're there now. Recriminations can be handled once the war is over, but few in this country are going to stand for an extended debate on the righteousness of the conflict's beginnings until we're done securing Kirkirk. For evidence of that, take Britain, where the populace is broadly antiwar and wholly irritated at Blair, and yet the Downing Street Memo, which enjoyed extremely wide play, did nothing but shave a few more seats off his winning margin. It's a shame, but I fear folks just don't want to hear about it, and the left will pay a political price if we force it to the fore.