Critical Exponent

Read Clinton on Fox News.

Yesterday morning, I got up early to go vote, hoping I could still catch one of the early trains to work. There were a few people waiting at the doors to the school gymnasium. At seven, cellphone time, the nearby church bells tolled the hour, and before their peals ended we were inside.

The results are here. It looks like it will be a Patrick-Murray ticket on the Democratic side.

Ahh, there’s nothing like exercising your right to vote to make you feel virtuous. (Unless your voice doesn’t count, in which case you must feel like a chump.)

Mother Jones has some interesting stuff this month:

• A list of the eleven worst places to vote
• A timeline of the lies that led to the war in Iraq

I’m normally a cheery guy, but I have to admit I’m pessimistic about the future of the planet. Just today I woke up to read about polar bears dying. We humans have just been exploiting the planet willy-nilly for our short-term gains without thinking about the global picture or our responsibility as stewards.

Maybe it’s just an accident of Western-led industrialization, but I’m more inclined to think it’s part and parcel of human nature. Perhaps in any context, a pocket of humans who exploit nature are at an advantage in terms of technology and material comforts, and their numbers grow by both reproduction and affiliation. Moreover, it’s the ultimate tragedy of the commons: we all share the planet, hence we all bear the negative externalities. Thus, a pocket of eco-friendly sustainable-living humans will not reap immediate rewards and its numbers will not grow in the same (almost viral!) fashion—and numbers are what it needs to make a dent by crowding out the polluters.

It’s too bad, because I expect that, within my lifetime, the environmental crisis will grow to proportions we cannot ignore. Not even our affluence will shield us.

Today, my friend Arnav gave me a ride to to the Newton police station so we could pick up the remains of my bike. I thought it would be a tangled mess, but it doesn’t look too bad from afar. Get closer, though, and it’s obvious that it is completely totaled. The frame is bent and broken in several places. The spokes are bent. Even the rear rack does not line up with the (rear part of the) frame.

Sigh.

Here are the grim stats of that fateful ride:

My bike served me well. My bike computer reports 2980 miles on the saddle, and I’ve only had it a little over a year.

Eventually, I’ll get a new bike so I can start riding as soon as I’m healed. My more immediate task, however, is daunting: I need to remove the month-old protein shake that’s been sitting in my pannier and stinking up the police station and, now, my apartment.

Speaking of healing, I have the hand splint for two more weeks and then I start rehab—I couldn’t even make a fist yesterday at my follow-up appointment. I am getting a bit of exercise by walking every chance I get; that’s pretty comfortable, even if it does not feel completely normal yet. My left knee is very sensitive, so I am trying to be particularly good to it.

Interesting factoid: My doctor told me that bone is piezoelectric, and that property might help it regenerate. I didn’t know that.

Adolph Reed Jr.’s piece talks about this doctrine in the context of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation in New Orleans.

How does one deal with trauma? It’s been five years since the terrorist attacks that marked my generation, and one month since the bicycle accident that left me with permanent scars. Construction at Ground Zero has begun; my fractures have been healing

Memories of both events are, in their own ways, painful. The collective tragedy woke us to the fact that being the lone superpower would not bring us safety, that our brawn would not guarantee us peace, not even at home. My personal accident brought an emotional immediacy to the realization that my youth counts for nothing, that no matter how hard I train and how many products I buy, how many Men’s Health tips I follow and how many supplements I take, I am an all-too-vulnerable piece of flesh affected by what others do.

There’s a fear that comes after your foundations have been cleft by trauma. You yearn for things to be as they once were: innocent, unsullied. You strive to turn back the clock. But, of course, you can’t. The event becomes an indelible part of who you are, and the best you can do is hope that the sediments of later experiences that form your life will grow strong and stable. With time, perhaps, it ceases to be an an ominous every-day presence: the rift becomes less noticeable, the scars fade somewhat.

What of our choices in the aftermath? Our nation chose to lash out, at a credible party at first, at a red herring later. Caught up in a defensive reaction, our maladaptive response has only made us more hated and less safe, even as we lose touch with the values that define us.

As for me—well, it’s too early to tell. I like to think my choices remain reasoned and deliberate, but I’d be lying if I said there’s no emotional fallout from the accident. I am feeling cautious and vulnerable; when I get on a bike again, it will be with some trepidation. Nonetheless, cycling and taking calculated risks are part and parcel of what it means to be Victor.

And so, acknowledging the pain, we strive to move forward constructively, with grace and optimism. The future remains an open book.

A Senate report concludes there was no pre-war link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. The response by the administration that likes to talk about “personal responsibility”?

White House spokesman Tony Snow dismissed the report, saying, “We’ll let people quibble over three years ago.”

A shrug of the shoulders is all Americans get as thanks for sending their children off to be killed for the profit of plutocrats.

You’ve probably heard about the ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11, which has been criticized by the people portrayed there as inaccurate and biased. ABC has distributed advance copies to conservative pundits and bloggers, but not to liberals.

Take action to demand accurate and fair reporting by clicking here and here!

UPDATE: Several FBI agents declined to be associated with the making of the movie after producers refused to fix the inaccuracies.

UPDATE: Appletreeblog points out that advance copies were not in fact distributed to right-wing bloggers.

An article in The Nation’s recent “White Heat” issue reports how Lou Dobbs, one of CNN’s stars, has turned his nightly broadcast into a soapbox to air and misinform the public on the alleged threat posed by illegal immigrants:

Many Americans take him seriously. “Outside of elected officials he’s undoubtedly the most influential spokesman for the anti-immigration movement,” says Wayne Cornelius, a political science professor and director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego. “I think he’s actually putting real pressure on elected officials by riling up a significant portion of their base.”

[...]

Former senior staffers at Dobbs’s show told me the anchor specifically searches for local stories to support his positions. “He approaches stories with a partisan ax to grind,” one former employee told me, asking not to be named out of fear of reprisal. “He runs the place as a tin-horn dictator. He’s assembled correspondents who feel beholden to him. They are given the line on the story and told how to assemble it in his partisan manner before they’re sent out to do the story.” (A second former senior Dobbs staffer, who also declined to speak on the record, confirmed the accuracy of this description.)

That’s led to blatant distortions of key facts. Dobbs searches high and low for statistics showing the negative impact of immigration on the US economy, and he conveniently leaves out contradictory information.

I don’t watch TV, so I’d be interested to know (a) whether Dobb’s show is billed as an editorial rather than a news program, and (b) whether there is a corresponding liberal-biased counterpoint to this show. Regardless, reporting only one side of the story and completely ignoring contrary facts fails the journalistic integrity test, even for an opinion forum.

Dobb’s response (the video is available here; scroll down to find it) is telling. Rather than refuting the claims in The Nation’s article and editorial, he engages in ad hominem attacks. These include not only name-calling, but also red-baiting (he claims The Nation is repeating socialist arguments, the assumption being that such arguments are automatically wrong) and, paradoxically, class warfare (The Nation’s editor is “vacationing…in the Hamptons”).

It bodes bad for our future that political discourse has descended to the playground level.