A Maverick Undaunted

After attracting intense criticism from the Left for delivering a speech in the black heart of theocratic America - Jerry Falwell University - Senator John McCain (R-AZ) went to the The New School graduation ceremony in New York City - a bastion of urbane East-coast quasi-socialism - and delivered the exact same speech. Before we examine the reaction, let's look at a small sampling of his remarks (although I strongly urge you read the whole thing):

Americans should argue about this war. It has cost the lives of nearly 2500 of the best of us. It has taken innocent life. It has imposed an enormous financial burden on our economy. At a minimum, it has complicated our ability to respond to other looming threats. Should we lose this war, our defeat will further destabilize an already volatile and dangerous region, strengthen the threat of terrorism, and unleash furies that will assail us for a very long time. I believe the benefits of success will justify the costs and risks we have incurred. But if an American feels the decision was unwise, then they should state their opposition, and argue for another course. It is your right and your obligation. I respect you for it. I would not respect you if you chose to ignore such an important responsibility. But I ask that you consider the possibility that I, too, am trying to meet my responsibilities, to follow my conscience, to do my duty as best as I can, as God has given me light to see that duty.

...

All lives are a struggle against selfishness. All my life I’ve stood a little apart from institutions I willingly joined. It just felt natural to me. But if my life had shared no common purpose, it would not have amounted to much more than eccentricity. There is no honor or happiness in just being strong enough to be left alone. I have spent nearly fifty years in the service of this country and its ideals. I have made many mistakes, and I have many regrets. But I have never lived a day, in good times or bad, that I wasn’t grateful for the privilege. That’s the benefit of service to a country that is an idea and a cause, a righteous idea and cause. America and her ideals helped spare me from the weaknesses in my own character. And I cannot forget it.

Now we can certainly debate McCain's allegiances. To some liberals - who mysteriously expect something different, given his party affiliation - he is yet another dastardly conservative eager to "impose America" on people who, I guess, seek to pursue their vendetta against the West. To others he is a lily-livered Republican-in-name-only who maddeningly defies party solidarity because he either A) Actually has his own principles, or B) Is a pandering opportunist with a media-driven ego complex. But all parties should agree, especially in light of the Falwell/New School double suckerpunch - the man is a shrewd, shrewd politician.

But I would be remiss if I didn't highlight the crowd reaction from the students at Madison Square Garden today. According to a correspondent for NRO's rightie blog The Corner:

“I supported the war in Iraq.” Boos. Explains the war was not for cheap oil. A little heckling: “You're full of it!” Says he thought the “country's interest and values demanded” the war. Someone shouts: “Wrongly!” Someone else: “More poetry!” (A reference to lines from Yeats McCain had quoted earlier.)

He says “whether [the war] was necessary or not...we all should shed a tear” for those who have sacrificed in it. Some hissing. Shouting.

He eventually enters into a Bushian rift: “All people share the desire to be free”; “human rights are above the state and beyond history”; we are “insisting that all people have the right to be free.” Someone shouts: “We're graduating, not voting!” Lots of derisive shouts and laughter and applause.

As McCain continues with a personal story, a student shouts: “It's about my life, not yours.” McCain: “When I was a young man, I thought glory was the highest value...” Groans from the students. “It's not about you!” “Sit down!”

The shocking juxtaposition behind McCain's call for civility (and civil service) and the response of the graduating student body might go down in history as one of the most exquisite plays in rhetoric and politics. Another post at NRO suggests that to win the Right "one of his challenges is to get hated by the right people" - and he certainly did that today in the heart of Blue America. But he did it not because of anything he said explicitly, but for the simple reason that he smelled faintly like fundamentalism from his recent travels.

As a convenience to readers Spacetropic usually steers clear of partisanship, but as we edge closer to 2008 this policy may shift. Unless something radically changes I'm afraid to say that I expect to be working, in any capacity they will have me, on the McCain campaign for president.

“It's about my life, not yours.”

Priceless.

The Eclectic Playlist

Some music that has been on my mind, in the CD tray, or spinning on my iPod lately. (Note the iTunes links below will launch that software application if it's installed on your computer.)

The New Pornographers, "Twin Cinema" - iTunes, Amazon - Music that sticks in your craw like a shred of popcorn kernel. Good luck listening to a track like "Spanish Techno" - it will park itself on your mental soundtrack. These Canadians are sometimes fey and obtuse, but they know songcraft.

Aaron Copland, Our Town - iTunes, Amazon - My mother played this for me a couple of weeks ago. But I do recall the stately melody was used in the film pastiche that Hollywood prepared immediately following 9/11. It probably worked so well because every swelling, maudlin soundtrack, every John Williams score you've ever heard is a shameless knock-off of Copland.

Stevie Wonder - iTunes, Amazon - Because Stevie knocks everybody cold. Because songs like 'Higher Ground' and 'For Once In My Life' are some of the most relentlessly positive expressions of joy in modern music. Because we're talking about Stevie his-godamn-name-says-it-all Wonder.

New Order, Every Little Counts - iTunes, Amazon - New Order functioned as the default background music for my youth - sulking around northwest Washington DC wearing a Joy Division T-shirt, trying to buy beer, trying with little success to impress girls. In college I decided very quickly this music was crap and never listened to it again. But now I don't know ... maybe it's only a matter of nostalgia.

Television, "Marquee Moon" - iTunes, Amazon - Let the rock nerds wax rhapsodic about Richard Hell, Verlaine and the punk New York proto-scene in the 1970s. You only need to acquaint yourself with this blazingly cerebral, technically astonishing rock music. Nothing quite sounded like this before or afterwards. The nasal, disaffected singing style won't appeal to everyone.

Keith Jarrett, "Radiance" - iTunes, Amazon - For me jazz music has always been a pleasure reserved for later in life, like presidential biographies. In my 50s I might amble around in my slippers with a cup of tea, Miles Davis on the stereo, and a dense tome about Truman. But I may have advanced the timeline when I came across this album. It's impressive - but so structurally different from the familiar forms and repetition of rock, blues, or pop. Jarrett chases a wide variety of melodies around the piano in ways that reward close listening. This music almost seems to grow brain cells with it's thoughtful phrases and explorations.

America's Bandwidth Problem

Justin Jeffre, musician, onetime political candidate, and occasional contributor to the Cincinnati Beacon - emailed recently with some concerns over "Net Neutrality". A campaign has begun under the auspices of saving the Internet from telecom companies that would seek to regulate access to various sites and online resources.

[Potions of this post appeared in an email to Jeffre and other bloggers.]

After some time looking into the issue I've decided that, with some exceptions (notably the AOL blocking case), this appears to be much ado about nothing. This is not about selectively limiting access. It's about bandwidth. We're sucking down massive, massive amounts of bandwidth these days - from YouTube to Google Video to all of the songs getting downloaded from iTunes. The trend is phenomenal - all of the charts on usage look like "hockey sticks".

Like many things, there is a hidden cost. We can't ask the same network that supports phone calls to handle videoclips downloaded to a Blackberry. In terms of data volume it's not apples and oranges - it's apples and 800-pound gorillas. Sprint and Verizon and the others simply cannot manage all of these expensive media-clogged pipes if they are forced to use the exact same pricing model that worked in the days when "Mmmmbop" was on the radio. In 2006 we have wireless broadband connectivity added to the mix - cool stuff, laptop cards that guarantee access anywhere. But these new networks don't pay for themselves.

It's a facile, familiar conclusion - it's all just greedy corporations fattening up profitability. But ultimately the best way to guarantee we don't get innovative products and services is to force companies to act according to increasingly outdated business models while their markets and customer habits are evolving rapidly in another direction.

(Another great conversation to have would be how increased bandwidth usage directly relates to server-side electricity consumption - another hidden cost. Google, Microsoft, all of them - they're frantically building out massive, massive data centers worldwide - but one of the dirty little secret of the IT world is that the lifetime operating cost of a server costs more than the hardware itself - and most of that operating cost is Mr. Electricity - which comes from the grid, which mostly comes from coal and natural gas, not oil. Our alternatives are going to narrow down quickly over time: Build nuke plants, build refineries for natural gas, scrub sulphur emissions, or, if you like things Green, turn a plot of land slightly larger than Canada into a wind farm and hope it's always really, really windy. But I digress.)

We should always be vigilant about preserving a system that provides fair access to the Internet. But this particular issue seems somewhat over-inflated.

Beats and Circulation

Local newspapers are seeing a decline in print circulation and an increase in web traffic towards their online offerings – this according to a study conducted by an industry group.

It’s hardly surprising that print media is experiencing a decline when 70% of the United States is online and 40% have speedy, broadband connections. And it’s likely that this trend will accelerate as the instant-messaging generation matures. These kids are strictly accustomed to online sources of information. This will gradually prompt advertisers who target this wealthy demographic to migrate away from legacy media.

And our national discussion is now linked and electronic. Opinion columns and stories about civic issues seem static and outdated without the commentary and supporting detail that comes along with ancillary web information. We want to share news and commentary items, forward a link in email, or clip quotes to a blog. These capabilities are becoming deeply ingrained in our daily behavior.

But the other side of the coin is the rise in traffic towards newspaper websites. From a business standpoint this still looks dire - a 10% increase in web eyeballs won't replace, with advertising income, the revenue lost by a 6% drop in paper sales. But over the long haul newspapers have a small advantage in being the natural aggregators of location specific information. Movie times, restaurants, school closings during inclement weather – where else can this be found in one convenient website?

But the list is getting thinner. Cheap data points like the five-day forecast or the National League standings are almost public domain. Craigslist and Ebay are both broken out by location – and powerful, game-changing technology like Google Maps promise to radically alter the landscape of information with geo-tagging, a technology that can tie Internet data back to physical space using global positioning devices. The combined impact of these changes may eventually make the traffic increase in local newspaper websites a temporary phenomenon.

But for now, nobody can package together local content any better than the papers. Local alternatives (the Beacon here in Cincinnati) are mostly alternative editorial pages and news stories that are selectively determined to be under-reported. The thought of “alternative” sports and weather isn’t very appealing - although I’m sure, on the web, there is someone somewhere who wants to debate the chance of rain and write ‘open letters’ to person who complied the box scores.

Zacharais Buried

Our conscience should always be troubled by the thought of purposely allowing society to kill people. The bible, in the event you are of the Judeo-Christian persuasion, is fairly unambiguous on this point. And we know human institutions like the courts, no matter how hard they aspire to perfection, have the potential to deliver flawed verdicts.

Nevertheless, when we consider the fate of our loved ones (especially children, if we have them) at the hands of predators, terrorists, or others who might willfully inflict violence upon the innocent, many people would come unhinged with a Louisville Slugger in the event we found ourselves in a secure room with a restrained individual who we had confidence perpetrated such a crime. There are certainly pacifists who have lost a loved one to violence and still cannot endorse the death penalty - but many will confess to at least entertaining the thought of vengeance.

It's still too easy, for me anyway, to meditate on the victims of 9/11, so many of whom were average schmoes at the office until the moment they were murdered. It's not hard to imagine the mothers and fathers who never came home that day, the immigrants working at Windows On the World, or the old-school style militia that formed on Flight 93. It's easy for me to consider that legacy and relish the thought of some civic servant, somewhere, strapping Zacharias Moussaoui into a chair. Anybody who has the weakest shred of sympathy for this individual should read about the trial. Moussaoui taunted the victims repeatedly, showed contempt for the lawyers assigned to his defense, and gleefully demanded the death penalty. Whatever bailiffs were assigned to court duty deserve congratulations for not unholstering on the spot and obliging him.

But he wasn't the guy flying the planes. And it looks like he was at least a second-banana, possibly a third in the ranks of Al-Qaeda - the kind of guy who ate lunch alone in the terrorist cafeteria. And, of course, his peculiar set of religious beliefs holds martyrdom in the highest esteem. If we killed him I expect his ugly mug would be added to the collage of heroes on the signs of Hamas and Hezbollah protesters, and the street throngs of Karatchi would be elated. We'll have to satisfy ourselves with the thought of Moussaoui in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day for the next forty years. And I probably speak for a plurality of Americans when I say I hope occasionally he spends that 24th hour enjoying some quality, unsupervised time with old-fashioned, patriotic American criminals.

And no, we're not sending him to France either.

A Modest Props

Allow me to echo the sentiments of local luminary Nate Livingston, one of the most coolheaded analysts of the Cincinnati blogosphere, when he opines thusly:

What you know about that? What you know about that? TI's learning all about that violence in Cincinnati.

Indeed! For the benefit of those of you who may not closely track events from the Queen City, we had a bit of a froo-ha in the early morning hours yesterday. Some gentlemen were taking in a concert at a reputable local venue when certain events began to unfold that were beyond the immediate scope of music appreciation. According to journalists at MTV (HT Nick):

Witnesses told the Cincinnati Enquirer that the problems began when a large group of men at the Ritz got offended when money was thrown from the stage by a member of T.I.'s posse. "It was supposed to be for the ladies," a witness told the paper. "But [the money] was hitting the guys in the face and they were like, 'We got money, so why are you throwing money at us?' "

The gentlemen from Cincinnati quite rightly took umbrage! What upstanding men of decency could stand down from such an obvious affront to their position in the community as responsible breadwinners? Needless to say an altercation ensued whereby the musicians and concert-goers took to their vehicles and brought out sidearms. The spectacular pursuit that took place down a major interstate artery in the faint hours of Wednesday morning left one dead, three severely injured, two vans riddled with bullet holes - and a traffic snarl-up that disrupted commerce for most of the morning.

Is this too high of a price to see the virtue of our fair city defended? Mayhaps these obstreperous upstarts from Atlanta will think twice before declaiming their eminence in the ways of honor. And kudos again to our fine local gentlemen, so highly attuned to any miniscule form of disrespect that they are boldly willing to engage any charlatans or Johnny-come-latelys. This staunch civic-mindedness has served Cincinnati well!

What, I dare say, do you know about that?

Gilder and the Chess Club

George Gilder was the pied piper of the new economy day traders in the 1990s. His strategy boiled down to this: Identify the enabling technologies behind the Internet boom, seek out the companies that are poised to deliver in that market space, and invest your pants off.

His book Telecosm was the sacred text of the telecommunications boom. Inspired by his prognostications everybody and their grandmother bet money on the companies laying down mammoth fiber optics trunk lines for high-bandwidth communication worldwide. Things went along swimmingly until the bubble burst. Former giants like Global Crossing (who endeavored to bridge the seas with fiber bandwidth) found their assets being sold at fire sale prices.

Now Gilder's reputation might be slowly rehabilitated, thanks to the steady advance of internet-based video and VoIP telephony. From iTunes to Google Video to YouTube (which accumulates an astonishing 35,000 videos a day) - everybody's using more and more bandwidth - and increasingly for user-created content.

Looking at it from a purely sociological perspective, offerings like Google Video prove that lip synching, pratfalls, dancing around like an idiot, and flatulence are the common features of world culture. From Bangladesh to Bay City Michigan this stuff is apparently universally funny - at least to the average somewhat-geeky teen, the bookish honors students and international chess club dorks who seem to create these videos. (I won't provide links, but you can rummage around for yourself.)

Copyright fear has caused Hollywood to miss many chances to take advantage of bandwidth to deliver content online according to an updated profit model. There are some late exceptions – and ABC deserves some accolades for their current effort. But a generation is growing up entirely comfortable with creating and distributing their own media, and they are inadvertently taking advantage of the bandwidth glut from the first wave of Internet deployment. When any entrenched powers grow fearful and slack we shouldn’t be surprised when younger upstarts make something new and repurpose unused resources. Right now Internet video might only consist of juvenilia, but I’d bet good 1990s-style money this trend will eventually prove more disruptive to media and culture than we can currently fathom.