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Add one part satire to two parts sincerity. Sprinkle on a couple of rants. Stir liberally.
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Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
If it's called Daily Blah, how come you don't ... hey, wait, you're writing every day!
See? Told you I'd try harder.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
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Daily Blah for... Thursday, March 20, 2003
A Three-Letter Word
Driving down Polk to report on the opening of the Asian Art museum this morning, with traffic backed up by the protest, I had ample time to study an odd, old-style newspaper booth on the corner of Polk and Washington. It looked like it had just emerged out of a timewarp from 1941: a wooden booth not much larger than the tiny man in the flat cap inside, with a single American flag and a faded, yellowing copy of the Chronicle stuck to the inside wall like a souvenir. In a font so large you could read it halfway across the city, the headline on the newspaper read simply: "WAR". I had to remind myself that this was, of course, today's paper.
How cliched, how ineffectual those three large letters seem. In the newspaper business in Britain, they were what the art department used to test out its largest possible font size. I did it myself once, when I was editing Oxford's own Cherwell. Every editor gets a little thrill at the idea of using them for real one day, but never believe he actually will. The Onion, as ever, offered a superb parody of this in the book "Our Dumb Century." The front page announcing World War II declared, in the most humungous 144-point type, "WA-" while a tiny addendum read "headline continued on page 2."
So the Chronicle's headline today probably fulfilled editor Phil Bronstein's wildest, most secret dreams. Technically, however, it's not factual. No country in the world has officially declared war since Russia joined battle against Japan in 1945. It just isn't done any more. For one thing, it's a lot more expensive under the laws of most nations for the government to support war veterans and war widows than those who are simply the victim of a "conflict" or "battle" or "police action." In the U.S., war has only been declared three times in history; the Constitution states that Congress alone has the power to declare it, which in this case it hasn't. It simply passed a resolution giving the President authority (which he didn't need) to use "all necessary force" -- in other words, passing the buck.
Suggesting that what is happening right now in Iraq is a "war" confers a kind of legitimacy on it that doesn't exist. No one declared war. No one authorized war. And it certainly isn't as even-sided as that word suggests. Nor is the peaceful-sounding word that Bush used, "disarmament," at all appropriate -- there are men out there who are going to lose a little more than their arms. So what's really going on? Lobbing million-dollar cruise missiles at senior army figures? That's assassination. Tracer fire in the night sky? C'est magnifique, at least for television, mais ce n'est pas le guerre. 200,000 troops crossing a national border? That's an invasion.
Let's be clear about what we're doing here: we are invading Iraq. Ten years after we went into bat for Kuwait, ostensibly because its sovereign territory was violated with the world's disapproval, we are ourselves blithely violating sovereign territory, again with the world's disapproval. You want to know what really terrifies me? That quote from an unnamed administration official in this week's New Yorker: "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran." Remember that. This White House is being run by people who want to prove themselves "real men," and believe invasion to be the ultimate testosterone test. There's something horribly, apocalyptically Freudian about all of this.
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