Sometimes, the Quail Gets You (and Geek Wednesday)

...And Cheney wept. Ah well, them's the breaks, Dick: every once in a while in this crazy culture of ours, justice is indeed done. Sometimes you get the quail, sometimes...you blast your friend's face off. Umm, never mind. Anyway, your boy Scooter now faces 25 years of relatively soft time, and if he actually does any more than 5, I'll be shocked. Scooter will have plenty of time while he's in stir to work on his book and go over the six or seven figure offers from the various publishing giants that he's likely to receive (depending on how much he's ready to tell). All the rest of us, however, who are honest citizens and dream of becoming published authors, will have to try other means, to which end we here offer...

Geek Wednesday

Before we get to our feature piece on web-based book publishing, some followup to our previous posts is in order.

Word imPerfect: I looked into the WordPerfect Lightning beta that I mentioned last week. This is the new arrival in online document processing and office productivity, along the lines of GoogleDocs. Unfortunately, it doesn't really measure up to the Google product.

First of all, Lightning is really a sales tool for the WordPerfect suite. It comes with a 30-day trial of the suite, which is tied in with the online document sharing component. Now I happen to think that they have a great product; I've liked it since the 90's when Corel bought WP, Quattro Pro, and Paradox, and bundled them as an office suite (which now also includes presentation software and a mail client). WP itself is very fast for a GUI word processor, offers the option to run and save in MS Word mode, and thus includes all the essential functionality of Word; and QP has always been a great spreadsheet app, since the days it was first developed by Borland. But if you're not interested in adopting a new document management platform, then you're probably not going to be interested in this.

Second, this is not a web-based application suite like the Google product is. It requires a download, and the online part of it happens from the base of the local installation.

Finally, like Corel's other flagship products (with the exception of Painter), it's Windows-only: you can't run this thing on a Mac (except on XP installed on an Intel Mac). The last working version of WordPerfect for Mac was discontinued back in the late '90's, and it only ran on OS9, so if you're looking for another option in web-based document processing and you have a Mac, this isn't your path.

OS X vs. Vista: I found this article from InfoWeek, by a geek who has plenty of background with Vista, comparing Mac OS X with the shiny new MS offering. He points out much of what we've talked about here re. the usability and interface designs of OS X and Windows:

For Mac OS X, it's the classic English butler. This OS is designed to make the times you have to interact with it as quick and efficient as possible. It expects that things will work correctly and therefore sees no reason to bother you with correct operation confirmations. If you plug in a mouse, there aren't going to be any messages to tell you "that mouse you plugged in is now working." It's assumed you'll know that because you'll be able to instantly use the mouse. Plug in a USB or FireWire hard drive and the disk showing up on your desktop is all the information you need to see that the drive has correctly mounted. It is normally only when things are not working right that you see messages from Mac OS X.
Windows is ... well, Windows is very eager to tell you what's going on. Constantly. Plug something in and you get a message. Unplug something and you get a message. If you're on a network that's having problems staying up, you'll get tons of messages telling you this. It's rather like dealing with an overexcited Boy Scout ... who has a lifetime supply of chocolate-covered espresso beans. This gets particularly bad when you factor in things like the user-level implementation of Microsoft's new security features.

We've noticed this too: Windows makes noises and signals at you when you least need noises and signals. Take the OS audio greeting itself: you turn on a Mac and you instantly hear a chime. That chime tells you something: the machine has powered on, connected to the processor, BIOS, and firmware. The chime means, "OK so far, I'm loading the OS now—if you get a problem from here, check your hard disk." Windows gives you nothing until everything is already up and running, the kernel to the OS has long since been found and loaded, and even the GUI is there: then you finally get that annoying shave-and-a-haircut greeting sound.

Meanwhile, MS is just plain lying about what their operating systems can and can't do. Last week, we saw that the XP-64 download "complete with Service Pack 2" wasn't. I've also got it in writing from the Vista Upgrade Advisor that my old Gateway 1.3GHz P4 with 640MB of RAM is "Vista-ready." Yeah, right: kind of the way Bush was "President-ready."

Hard Disk Failures: Finally a followup to our mention of the Google study on hard disk failures. Slashdot reports on a Carnegie Mellon analysis of the Google data which appear to indicate that hard drives fail a lot more often (and sooner) than the industry would like us to believe. Granted, as the CMU experts add, these data need to be repeated and verified through further study—it is somewhat possible that people are replacing hard drives before they are truly corrupt or ruined, just as folks have been throwing out perfectly good PCs after getting a malware infection in Windows. But let's face it: what's the one hardware component of a computer—any computer, PC or Mac—that you tend to worry about the most? Is there an entire industry devoted to backup processors, backup video cards, or backup displays? Nope, just backup hard drives (both external and web-based) and backup software. Someday in the 80-core future, you may be able to keep essential data right on your processors, so that your processing hub becomes a storage facility. Until then, we all have to wring our hands and gnash our teeth over those hard drives.
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Go beyond Vista. Skip the hassles and choose the ultimate PC ugrade 
at the Apple Store.

Creating a "Lulu"

Since the arrival of iUniverse.com, the arena of on-demand publishing has been taking off, and has now developed into a Web 2.0 niche all its own, with Wikis, discussion forums, blogs, and a dedicated online following.

The core concept is, like many ingenious ideas, simple: I write a book on my word processor; upload the document to a web server, where it is converted to a pdf document. In another part of the website where this happens, there's an applet for designing and uploading the cover. The service then takes all that, prints cover and content, applies glue and binding, and voila—you have a trade paperback publication ready to be sold to the public eager to read your wit and wisdom. For the service provider, there's little overhead: no need to store books, because the publishing only happens when people order the book. Otherwise, everything is kept on servers.

There is a growing crowd of players in this field: I recently found out about a new one, Blurb.com, which has a downloadable application with an amazing array of design options for authors, in either a PC or Mac interface. I've got their app on the MacBook here, so perhaps I'll try doing my next book there, so we can feature this approach on GW sometime in the future.

The original player in the field, of course, is iUniverse, which charges fees for printing and distribution. These guys are more like a traditional publisher, because they combine print-on-demand with standard publishing and marketing practices. If you have hundreds of dollars to spend, then this option is definitely worth looking closely at.

But the product I've used for my four books to date is Lulu.com, which is a free service that lets you upload your content and publish—technically without shelling out a dime. There are costs down the line, of course, after you've published: you pay for copies of your own book, and Lulu also offers a marketing service that gets your book an ISBN number (the bar code thing on the back of any book you see at the bookstore, without which you cannot sell on amazon, B&N, or practically anywhere else), lists it with BOCA (the standard trade organization whose listings are used by most booksellers), amazon.com, and B&N. That costs you $100, and is probably worth it if you've got a truly marketable product.

Lulu comes complete with publishing wizards, FAQs, a user forum, author storefronts and blogs, and online documentation to help you through the process of getting from manuscript to print. They now feature a very cool, amazon-style content preview that I really like. The quality of their end product, the published book, can be very impressive, depending on what the author puts into it.

So there is vast potential for writers at Lulu; it's a beautifully designed site that does a lot of things very well. It's also a lot to wade through for someone new to this experience, so what follows is a quick guide for writers who have something to publish but are unclear about where to start with the geek side of things. As you will see, most of the work of publishing a book this way is in getting it ready at your end.


Step One: Prepare Thy Manuscript: This is the most important part of it all. Let's say you have a Word document (they also take WordPerfect .wpd, Rich Text .rtf, and pdf file types), and you've edited it as much as you can. Perhaps you've even published it online or gotten feedback from friends who have read it, and you're encouraged enough by the response that you're now ready to publish. You've decided on self-publishing because you know you don't stand a chance in a monopolistic publishing industry that is basically the property of Rupert Murdoch and Friends. So you need to get your ms. ready to print. Here are some considerations to take into account re. document prep:

Book size: If you have a 300 page ms., you'll want to consider a hardcover or softcover book in 6X9 size with standard glue-and-binding finish. A smaller book (of, say, 100 ms. pages or less) can be ordered saddle-stitched; and a pamphlet-sized book of 30-50 pages or less can be stapled. What you decide here will influence what follows in terms of ms. prep.

Book type and page size: If you've got a novel, full length non-fiction book, or reference tome, then a standard page size for trade hardcover or paperback will do. If you have a manual, academic paper, or training document, then maybe a coil binding for an 8.5 X 11 format will be right. You pick your page size according to the way the book is to be used by readers. If I'm buying a how-to manual on building a PC, for instance, I want that thing to be easily readable (i.e., big pages), and I want it to lie flat when I open it (because my hands will presumably be busy making a screamer PC or a massive door stop).

So let's say you've written a fair-sized book in MS Word—around 200 ms. pages—that calls for perfect binding on a trade paperback. This is the kind of book we see and use practically every day. It's held together with glue and stitching, with a soft, glossy paper cover. Here are some essentials about getting such a book ready to become a Lulu, based on my experience with my previous four:

Set your paper size the way Lulu will print it. For our example, this means going into page setup in Word and changing to a custom paper size (File / Page Setup in Windows; same in Mac or use Format / Document / Page setup). Select "custom size" in the Paper Size drop-down and enter 6" for the width and 9" for the height. Click OK, and before you do another thing, select File / Save As, then give your document a new name (mybook6x9.doc), so you don't accidentally screw up your existing document.

Step Two: Now comes the hard part. You have to slog through that document, page by page, resetting margins (they should be set at .6" to 1" all around, or else you'll have a cramped-looking text layout in your book); rearranging text, tables, text boxes, graphics, and anything else you have in there; and refining your styles to accommodate the new paper size. You'll also want to change fonts, font sizes, and line spacing to give the look-and-feel of a professional-quality book. Here are some setting changes I made to my books toward this goal:

I've found that Georgia and Palatino are nice, readable fonts for paperback books. Times New Roman isn't awful, mind you, but it tends to come out too small. You'll want to experiment with this to suit your own taste. If you're working on a Mac, it's a lot easier, because you can convert any Word document to a pdf (which is what Lulu will do anyway), through the print menu (Print / Save as PDF). So create two or more versions of your document using different fonts for your Normal or Body Text style, convert them to pdf, and look them over side by side to see which font will look best in a finished book.

By the way, speaking of styles: if you're not using them now, start. What's the point of having a word processor if you're not using one of its primary labor-saving features? Using styles makes a huge difference in preparing a ms. for a book, because you can make large, global changes to text simply by modifying a style. An average ms. will have roughly half a dozen styles (for example, Normal or Body Text for the major content; Footnote or Endnote text for those; Block Text for quoted passages; Title; Heading 1; Heading 2; and so on).

Line spacing: I have found that, when it comes to line spacing, the standard options (single, 1.5, and double) don't really work best for book preparation. I like setting this through the Modify Style dialog: select Format / Style (or use the sidebar/palette feature in Word 2003 or Word 2004 for Mac), then select the style you're in and click Modify. There, you click the Format button and select Paragraph from the drop-down. In the next dialog, you can set the Line spacing to "Exactly" from the drop-down there, and specify a point setting (I often go with 14 pt. for Normal and 12 pt. for Block Text). Again, experiment and find out what you like best.

Graphics: Lulu offers full color books, but they are prohibitively expensive for your potential customers (I found that one of my smaller books alone would cost readers something like $30 if I had it formatted with full color throughout). It's much better to offer your readers a book they can easily afford, so you'll probably want to go with Lulu's option for full color cover with black and white interior, unless you have a really good reason for insisting on full color throughout (maybe you've got an art book or a manual that requires color graphics). For preparing a ms. that will be converted to a pdf, the rule here is, the fewer graphics you have to put in there, the better. Use placeholders and experiment with your picture settings in Word to give you the best chance of having something that will stay in place and look professional once it gets into your book.

Tables, charts, and text boxes: generally, the same rules apply as to graphics. Avoid color if possible, keep it simple, and adapt your other settings (font, line spacing, etc.) to help your boxes and tables fit into your book format. I have used single-row/column tables as text boxes in my books, and set the background (Format / Colors and Shading) at 5% gray, with reasonably good results.

Widow and orphan control: these are those leftover words and dangling lines that flip between pages. They can be distracting to readers and positively maddening to authors trying to format a Word document. Modern versions of Word have widow and orphan control turned on by default; you can check this by looking in Format / Paragraph / Line and page breaks (tab) / Widow/orphan control (checkbox). All your document styles should have this feature enabled. Whatever else you have to do in this vein is purely manual: go through your document (at least twice) and check for dangling lines, words, or ends of text boxes or tables, and then resize, change margins, or use the options in paragraph formatting ("keep lines together"; "keep with next") to control them.

Table of Contents: you'll need one of these for a good-sized book with several sections, chapters, or parts. Use Word's Table of Contents feature (Insert / Indexes and Tables / Table of Contents) to set up a working TOC in your document, and experiment with different styles and formats. As for an index, if you and your readers can live without it, so much the better. Because if you need it, that's a somewhat more complex thing to configure in Word than TOC. It can be done, but it takes time and patience. In any event, the last thing you should do before you save your document for the last time and get ready to upload it to Lulu is to update your TOC (select anywhere in the text for TOC, right-click, and select "Update entire table"). You want to be sure that your finished book doesn't direct a reader to the wrong page from your TOC.

Content essentials: speaking of contents, your book should have a title page, TOC, chapter or section headings, and (if applicable) footnotes or endnotes. My own preference on the last is for endnotes, because they are easier to manage. Incidentally, Lulu has an odd way of converting Arabic (standard) numbered notes to Roman numerals, which is annoying; and I haven't figured out the solution to this one.

Content items you don't want to overlook: a two or three page Preface is generally helpful, and you can include a dedication page, acknowledgments, or an epigraph (a poem or quote, for example). You'll also want to make your own copyright page: this is usually found on the flip side of the title page, inside the front cover. It has information on the author, title, publication date, ISBN, genre, LOC classification (if applicable), and rights being claimed for the author. It will also contain any disclaimer that you may wish to put in there. For instance, in my Tao of Hogwarts book, I used the copyright page to let any passing attorneys know that my book is a work of literary criticism, and thus makes no claim to affiliation with or endorsement from any copyright holders (such as J.K. Rowling, her publishers, or Warner Bros.). You can also use the copyright page to include any personal or contact information about yourself that can't be fit anywhere else (email address, website URL, that sort of thing).

Step Three: Upload, Design, Publish. Once you're comfortable with the styling, look-and-feel, and formatting of your ms., it's time to go to Lulu and do the relatively easy part. You just log in (or register for an ID), click Publish, select your book type and size, enter all the details into their form, and upload your Word document. Once Lulu has converted it to a pdf, use the "View print-ready pdf" feature before proceeding, and go over that pdf in detail. It's best to save the pdf page that opens in your browser as a pdf and then open it on your machine locally in Adobe Reader, where you can full-screen it and adjust the view options to your liking (you can view one, two, or four pages at a time, depending on your display real estate). Once you're through with that and satisfied, go ahead and approve the conversion. Then you'll be taken to a cover design applet, which is nicely designed with separate sections for front, back, and spine. You can use Lulu's library of designs and background colors, or upload your own graphic files. Preview everything you do there before proceeding, and get others to look at it if possible before you go ahead and publish. They also have an option for uploading your own one-piece cover design, but this takes more graphical design skill and patience than I have. If you have a knack for that, though, it's a great option to look into.

Step Four: Pricing and Marketing. After that, you're taken to a pricing page, where you'll select how you want your book to be available (public or private; pdf download and/or printed form only), and how much you want to charge for it. Lulu will take a slice off the top and pay you a royalty on each copy sold. For example, my Life Lessons in a Time of War carries a price of $9.00, and I get a royalty of about three bucks for each copy sold. But believe me, you're not going to make a killing on this publishing route, take my word for it. I've sold about two dozen books since I've been doing this, and I market them here and at my other website, which together get about thirty or forty thousand page views a month. But then again, I may simply lack the talent or the message to be popular; your book might take off like gangbusters. But it's been my experience that success is less a matter of expecting a particular outcome than of welcoming whatever human benefit is generated by your work.

Once you're through, you'll want to start letting the world know you've got a book out there. And, of course, you shouldn't. Order an author's copy (make sure you're getting the reduced price) and wait the week or two that it takes Lulu to format the electronic copy at their end, print a copy, and send it off to you. Then, read it carefully, cover to cover, scribbling notes in it as you go. Make whatever changes you feel are necessary (there will be some, at least), and go back to Lulu with a revised Word document and click the "Revise" button next to your book's title at your author page; and then go back through all the steps above until you have a new edition that can be in turn reviewed and hopefully approved for sale.

From that point, you're on your own. You can spend the $100 it takes to have Lulu get you an ISBN number for your book, a listing in BOCA, amazon, and B&N; but the marketing of your product is, in the end, up to you. I've concentrated on web-based advertising, mostly at my own sites, for my books; and I've also posted them to Google Books. Beyond that, I'm eager to hear from anyone who has good marketing ideas for this kind of material—post your thoughts to the comments.

Uncle Dick's Dickensian Declaration

When it comes to following Uncle Dick around the world, nobody does it like Stewart and his roving reporter, John Oliver. Click the graphic and watch.

Meanwhile, the once-compliant lapdog mass media are suddenly starting to bark a little (or at least yip) over the White House's insistence on the "anonymity" of an "unnamed official" in Cheney's traveling party who referred to himself in the first person. Check out this quote:

"I've seen some reporting that says, `Cheney went in to beat up on them, threaten them.' That's not the way I work," the "senior administration official" said. "I don't know who writes that, or maybe somebody gets it from some source who doesn't know what I'm doing or isn't involved in it. But the idea that I'd go in and threaten someone is an invalid reading of the way I do business."

The media, of course, are up in arms over the fact that Dick clearly identified himself as the source by talking about himself. Fine, that's very insightful of you, reporters. But what you missed while your panties were in a twist over the obvious is that the man also revealed plenty about himself and this administration's operations in Iraq and elsewhere these past six years.

Note, for example, the last sentence from that quote: "...an invalid reading of the way I do business." Replace "I" with "Halliburton" and you've pretty much got the idea of how Dick and his assistant from Crawford, TX have been operating throughout the dark dawn of the 21st century. It's all about business. Not government, not democracy, and certainly not diplomacy: it's about business. That is, mergers, takeovers, corporate occupations, and above all, profit at any human or environmental cost. That's been the story of this Halliburton administration. The "unnamed official's" comment is a Dickensian declaration: "I am a man of business..."

But to every Scrooge there comes a Jacob Marley. Once again, this is the dawn of the 21st century; and every dawning begins with darkness. Tomorrow, we'll come back to the discussion of the burgeoning light, and from what direction it is coming. Fear not, however: the light is there.

Give Them Hell (and Geek Wednesday)

Before I let the cat out of the bag for Geek Wednesday, here's a question that many of us should be asking Congress as it continues to walllow...that is, I mean, conduct, its debate on the Iraq War: the biggest four-star cheese in the U.S. military says that there's no evidence of Iranian involvement in attacks on US troops. Now Gen. Pace is presumably an expert on military affairs, and might know a little more about what's really going on than a dyslexic political figurehead or his criminally psychotic VP. So...who ya gonna believe, Congress?

And let's say that the General is misinformed: after all, he does lack the advantage of having a golden earpiece exclusively tuned to the Voice of Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior, Inc. What about it? Don't you end wars by negotiating with the enemy? Or is it remotely possible, would you say, that Gen. Pace's bosses don't really have an interest in ending the war? Could it be that Gen. Pace, being a soldier, sees all too clearly what the result would be of ramping this war up into a large-scale regional affair, with the possibility of nukes becoming involved? Could this be the General's motive for effectively spitting in the eye of his clueless Commanders-in-Chief?

Meanwhile, 75% of Americans (and 72% of Republicans!) openly support negotiation with Iran and Syria. Once again, we are at one of those turning point moments where we will have to enforce our common will, our common wisdom, on these ignorant tyrants who are ruling us. We will have to especially be all over Congress on this one, because like them or not, they represent our main chance at the restoration of democratic process here. We are in the midst of an escalation; we could be on the doorstep of an explosion whose devastation will threaten the lives of generations to come, including those of our kids now. Here's an idea; use Progress Report's tracking form to keep tabs on how your local Reps and Sens are leaning or voting on both issues, and give them hell. Call them, write them, stop them on the street next week when they're back home for their winter break. Just give them hell.

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Geek Wednesday

Hey you nutty people, it's pawprints time at Geek Wednesday. My human is busy trying to find a job, and you know how people can get whenever there's an economic crunch—first thing that gets downsized is the poor kitty's food, and I'm not interested in getting scaled down to 9-Lives anytime soon.

So what's going on in geekdom these days? Yeah, I know, the web is more cluttered than a 3-cat litter box with talk of DRM, now that both Steve and Bill are competing to sound the grassroots-iest note on DRM.

Not bad, but let's get real for a minute: is it possible that Norway put the fear of heavenly retribution into Steve's heart? Or that Uncle Bill is ready to take the DRM locks out of his brand new OS (see below)? Yeah, and the Japanese are going to slap some sanity into Dick Cheney's head. Oh, and I'm going on an all-vegan program starting tomorrow...

But, given some time and more of Uncle Bill's stumble-over-my-shoelaces act, Linux might just take command in the enterprise and a solid bite in the consumer area. In this series, e-Week columnist and uber-geek Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols puts a variant of Ubuntu Linux side-by-side on the same hardware with Vista, and comes to some interesting, though hardly surprising, conclusions. One of these, by the way, is, "an operating system -- any operating system -- is not the place for DRM." Guess which OS he's referring to?

Vaughan-Nichols reaches many of the same conclusions that we've already arrived at in our prior posts here—namely, that dedicated audio and video hardware equipped with plenty of its own juice (no borrowing system RAM allowed) is required to run Vista in either its midrange or advanced flavors; that most of us will have to lay out at least a grand to get the gear necessary to run Vista without going the upgrade route (which in Vista's case is instant heartburn); and in short, that for the expense now involved in going with Windows, you can actually save money on new hardware (and certainly on software) by taking Vaughan-Nichols' last recommendation:

I have to say that my last thought on both Vista and Linux is that if you really, really want the best possible graphics... get a Mac.

Now that laptop you see me peeking around above is the Intel-equipped MacBook, which costs around $1300 with a 2.0 GHz Core Duo 2 processor, 80GB hard drive, and 1GB of RAM. We reviewed it here, and after six weeks, we're still happy with it. The only thing we'd add is something that won't impact most people: if you're a longtime Mac user who still has a toe or two in OS9, you don't want an Intel machine yet, because the Intel Macs don't play at all with OS9 apps.

In fact, some veteran Mac users among you may want to keep a PPC machine around even after you've migrated to an Intel box. If you want to get a sweet deal on an old PPC machine but still get a robust warranty, try the TechRestore link at the top of the sidebar—they come highly recommended, and if you buy a machine through that link, you'll be helping us out, too. You could actually get a new Intel Mac AND a 1GHz PPC iBook for the price of a loaded Vista box that has everything it needs to get going and give you some hope of keeping going.

Incidentally, why is it that Vista can't reliably support an upgrade path? We hadn't even thought of that when we did our upgrade from Jaguar to Panther and then to Tiger on the Mac: it just worked. You stick the cd (or dvd, in the case of Tiger) into the drive, take a nap while it's installing, and then get back to your Mac geekery without a hiccup. But every discussion board and geek pundit we've read has warned against an XP to Vista upgrade, and recommended a "clean install" (that is, wipe the HD clean or install a new one, and then do your Vista installation). Hell, if you humans want to throw away your money, I've got one unemployed human and a distinct hatred of cheap cat food: you can toss away your bucks right here:

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And a final word about our stats: as you can see, 45% of our traffic still comes from IE (W3C released their most recent global usage stats today, here). Now I understand that a lot of you don't have any choice: you're at work or on somebody else's machine that only uses IE or sets it as the default browser. But for the rest of you, you'll need to make an effort to get yourself out of that IE dog pound. Firefox and Opera are still the best cross-platform alternatives (that is, you can run current versions of them in Mac, Linux, or Windows); and Safari is still the best choice on the Mac by itself.

And I don't want to hear anything out of you about you not being geeky enough or not having enough time to pick, install, and use a decent browser. How do you think lousy stuff gets to dominate the consumer marketplace everywhere? I'm betting you have time to compare brands when you're at Home Depot or the supermarket, and you carefully choose what is best, not necessarily what's right at hand or cheapest or that carries the most prominent advertising. Same with browsers and software: think of how  much you use it (I wish corporations did!), and how important it is to use what's safe, reliable, fast, and fun.

Firefox and Opera win easily on all those fronts over IE, so what do they lack? How about a few billion to spend on marketing? That's the only thing that distinguishes MS: massive amounts of $$$ to spend on advertising. Fools enough people to make them the monster in their industry. But it all comes back to the people who don't have enough time (or think they don't) to make sound purchasing or usage decisions. Bottom line is, it has nothing to do with geekdom, but with smart shopping, even if the products are "free" (IE is no more free than Vista is--you pay for it with the OS). You don't have to be a geek to make the right choice, you just need the information and the will to use it.

But advertisers today count on a lazy marketplace populated by consumers who imagine there's no time to decide freely, so why not just take what they're shouting about on TV the most and what's in the first aisle or in the window display (which is there by virtue of marketing $$$ as well). 

Back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, Betamax was clearly the better product for clarity of display and playability over its competitor in the home multimedia market; VHS won because corporations put marketing $$$ behind it. Back in the mid 90's, IBM's OS/2 Warp was obviously a better, more reliable, faster, more user-friendly OS. But NT and Win 95 won out because of...you got it, Gates's marketing $$$ (and IBM's laziness and stupidity--they had the cash but not the marketing acumen). Gates had already bought or beaten the rest of his competition, so he hired Mick Jagger, staged Windows-mania in the media and at the storefronts, and won on the back of money and manufactured hype. That's how monopolies are made: you buy out competitors and potential competitors, and then you let the marketing and hype machines drive the rest of them into the grave.

That, fortunately, won't happen to Firefox, nor to Linux, because people are waking up to the fact that they have choices; and that they can choose a better OS, a better browser, a better government, if they care to ignore the advertising and find the one that really works for them.

So let me finally get serious with you people for a minute, because many of you are good to us animals—that is, you treat us as equals. Here's some advice, from a cat who's been around the block and seen your good and bad sides:

Strip off the masks. Tear down the facade that the collective built over your heart. Dissolve the scales of conditioning that are covering your eyes. Feel freely the light that has glowed within you since before you were born, and let your heart and your brain work as one, with no image or inhibition to disguise or enshroud them. Let your true and total self be felt by all and touched by some; and you will dance on the skull of evil, transcend the ghost of death, and continually expose and dispel the shades of deceit.

And always remember: meditate every day with your favorite animal beside you. Good luck, people.

Friday Reflection: On the Delusion of Evil

We have a quote of the week (well, I think it's funny)—from the head of the World Wildlife Fund, a Super Bowl prediction:

"Bears would likely win any encounter in the wild, but that's only if they could catch the colts," said WWF's president and CEO Carter Roberts. "And there's always a chance that a bear wouldn't come out of hibernation, which would cause them to forfeit any match."

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Friday Reflection: Evil, Spelled Backward

The other day, in what I thought at the time was a very cleverly written piece, I declared that Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld are "black-hearted, soul-dead, bloodsucking evil." This, I now feel, was a woeful error on my part.

Well, are they? If we asked their children or their wives, what answer would we get? And when we say they are evil, what power does that give them that they do not by nature have? What is the effect of such a statement?

When I turn within and answer these questions honestly, I realize how foolish I am. For to impute evil on another is not merely inaccurate, it is impractical. It gives him power that, superadded to the power he imagines that he has, forces him completely outside the realm of humanity; it makes him into a symbol rather than a man. Presidents can be impeached; their cronies can also be forced out of office; but a symbol, an idea, can only be brought down within the individual self. When we call another evil, we descend to the same image-making that makes a tyranny work. George Bush turned Osama and al Qaeda into symbols of Evil Incarnate, and thus justified one of the more hideous and misbegotten wars of our generation.

But it seems such a relentlessly inevitable conclusion, that these old and weak white men who are responsible for the needless death and disfigurement of hundreds of thousands of innocents, should be called Evil. Can there be any other reasonable conclusion? Yes: that they are sick—desperately ill, drained of feeling and of simple animal awareness. They are not living Satans, but merely failures, a few small and regressive steps in the evolutionary sphere. Great as their crimes may be, they are themselves just a few diseased men who need to be released from the bonds of power and given psychological treatment.

Thus, it is time for me to clearly admit my mistake, while it is still small. Yet there is another lesson in this, I feel, which may reach beyond my own personal weakness. As this year progresses and the election season heats up, we may wish to recall this lesson.

Be very careful how you choose your leaders: just one bad choice can be disastrous. One walking dead can open many graves. Leave the door to darkness ajar, and the light will waver. One diseased mind can spread much contagion, if it is allowed power or privilege. Anyone who tells you—no matter his party affiliation or national allegiance—that to lead is to hold power is not a leader, but an infestation.

What must we demand of a true leader? Above all, humility. Not humility before wealth or power or an external God of vengeance; but humility before Nature and before the people.

Another thing to seek in your leaders is clarity. This is the sense for truth that feels past the apparent and sees beyond the present. This is not the myopic vision of a corporate CEO and his five-year plan. No: clarity is the perspective that draws upon the insight of each part within the whole, and allows that synergy to become the lantern that guides the nation or the organization, rather than the distorted glare from a book of doctrine or a boardroom obsession.

This message will, of course, go unheeded in the mass media and the various institutions that aggrandize the superficial. But today it's just us, a few individuals meeting over an online connection in a remote corner of the blogosphere. We can scratch the surface, we can gaze past the spin.

To that end, it is my own personal practice to rely on the old Chinese oracle, the I Ching, to see what insight it may have for the moment. Here is the message I received on this very point of evil, leadership, and power:

PREPONDERANCE OF THE SMALL. Success.
Perseverance furthers.
Small things may be done; great things should not be done.
The flying bird brings the message:
It is not well to strive upward,
It is well to remain below.
Great good fortune.

Line 2: Six in the second place means:
She passes by her ancestor
And meets her ancestress.
He does not reach his prince
And meets the official.
No blame.

Line 4: Nine in the fourth place means:
No blame. He meets him without passing by.
Going brings danger. One must be on guard.
Do not act. Be constantly persevering.

"To strive upward" is to fall into the trap of power and the obsession with its symbols. The second line shows us how, when we run from belief to belief, from one figurehead to the next, we always fall short of what is truly a leader ("the prince") and are stuck again and again with "the official," the vapid institutional figurehead of power. Going thus, as the fourth line states, "brings danger."

The oracle's message on this point concludes with a ringing reminder to the voter, the citizen, to each unique individual whose inner leader is alive and intact: be on your guard; do not act with the crowd; persevere within yourself to reach a broader understanding that surpasses what you are told by a group pundit or an institutional lackey.

The true leader, both within the self and among the people, recognizes that it "is not well to strive upward, but to remain below." This is the same message that Lao Tzu offered leaders of his time, two and a half millennia past:

Like water is the Cosmic Consciousness:
It nourishes the depths of everything that lives.
It flows, it settles, it abides in low places.

Keep your home close to the earth,
Keep your thoughts direct and simple,
Keep judgment fair, and fluid in conflict,
Keep your government free of power,
And your personal affairs in harmony
With the life of Nature.

Drop the struggle, silence the demons,
And your natural self will be free.

___________________________________

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Mending the Dick Cheney Heart

In my transient passages through corporate America and my distant observations of corporate government, I am occasionally reminded of the oft-spoken lament of Commissioner Gordon of the Batman TV series (the old one with Adam West, one of the funniest shows ever on the tube). Contemplating the criminal genius of the Penguin, Riddler, or Joker, the Commissioner would mutter, "if only that mind could be used for good, and not evil..."

Take a look at some of the dramatis personae of our post-9/11 world, and you get the same impression. Dick Cheney: very smart guy. Saddam Hussein: also intellectually gifted. Don Rumsfeld: sharp as broken glass. I'm betting even Osama's pretty smart, though I don't know that much about him. Every one of them is, of course, black-hearted, soul-dead, bloodsucking evil.

These psychotic and murderous tyrants have one common trait: a tumor-like sense of supremacy that is based exclusively on their intellectual grasp of people and events. So when Time Magazine proclaimed earlier this month:

SCIENTISTS HAVE EXORCISED THE GHOST FROM THE MACHINE NOT because they are mechanistic killjoys but because they have amassed evidence that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain.

I had to wonder what kind of a devil's bargain had been made, especially considering that there is another stream of research that tends toward a different, more holistic conclusion. If we are going to conceive of our brains as "machines," as Time Magazine would have it, or of our hearts as mechanical pumps, then cynical tyrants like Cheney and Hussein will continue to dominate us.

Now the brain is no more at fault in this than is my cat: the problem is a matter of perspective, or how we use (and abuse) the physico-psychological tools we are born with. To declare brain the King of Konsciousness is to misuse it, because then it is no longer an organic part of a living whole, but a separate and distant tyrant of the body. This is how every tyranny is started and perpetuated: through a declaration of supremacy—the same kind of supremacy-speak that says, "my country, right or wrong," and "dissent is treason."

So if we're going to rid the world of tyranny, we will have to clear it out wherever we find its ideological substrate. At the same time, we will have to affirm a more truly modern and quantum view of ourselves and the universe: that feeling is as valid as thought; that a poet can see reality as clearly as a physicist; and that the organic unity of being is a more practical metaphor on ourselves and the universe than some anatomical hierarchy. If we can reach for such an understanding, and teach it to our children, then science will be deepened; thought itself will be given the freedom that comes with equality; diplomacy will more frequently be considered over war; and tyrants, when they appear, will be easier to recognize and dispel.

Dick Cheney's heart is physically rotting not because of age, poor diet, or inadequate medical care: it is rotting from neglect, from a deeply cynical subjection. Demons are not born; they are made through the deviant belief in supremacy: one species' supremacy over Nature; one country's supremacy over the world; one man's supremacy over his nation; or one organ's supremacy over the bodily whole. If enough of us can overcome that belief, and keep those who are poisoned with it away from positions of leadership, then we may reach the day when Commissioner Gordon will never have to wonder again.

Impeaching Helplessness

For a supposedly liberal newspaper, The New York Times is traditionally respectful to institutions and their leaders. So when you see a quote like this in one of their editorials (this is not the op-ed page, mind you, but an editorial), it gets your attention:

Nor is there likely to be an explanation of why the White House could not have sought the court’s approval in the first place. The White House’s claim that the process is too cumbersome doesn’t ring true. The law already allows the government to wiretap first and then ask for a warrant within three days. The real reason is almost certainly that the imperial presidency had no desire to share power even with the most secret part of the judiciary.

We've been talking here about the imperial presidency for over two years now, but this is the blogosphere, not the Paper of Record. For the Times to be switching to language like this in a Sunday editorial is a sign of how clearly decadent our government has become.

Also in Sunday's Times was a more familiar voice of cut-the-crap sanity: Frank Rich, who has been calling them clear and straight for years now.

In reality we’re learning piece by piece that it is the White House that has no plan. Ms. Rice has now downsized the surge/escalation into an “augmentation,” inadvertently divulging how the Pentagon is improvising, juggling small deployments in fits and starts. No one can plausibly explain how a parallel chain of command sending American and Iraqi troops into urban street combat side by side will work with Iraqis in the lead (it will report to a “committee” led by Mr. Maliki!). Or how $1 billion in new American reconstruction spending will accomplish what the $30 billion thrown down the drain in previous reconstruction spending did not.

A program of lies rarely accomplishes anything beyond a narrow and limited agenda: this is the reality of the modern corporation in a nutshell. The problem we're living with today is that our government has studiously modeled itself after the corporate, adopting all of its delusions and fabrications; pursuing the five-year plan of destruction, perpetual downsizing and firing, and short-term profiteering as if it were the golden fabric of a new social order, the outline of a new constitutional model.

That, too, is, of course, a lie. Indeed, an entire tapestry of lies—what I have elsewhere referred to as a monument made of shadows.

But for a fellow like me, the question really is this: "can it all be about mere greed?" Or is there something else feeding the greed, filling the hungry demon with the vapid sustenance that only increases its desire?

I had cause to work on these quesions a little over the past week. The circumstances are quite unremarkable for our time: I was fired again by another corporate entity (this time the credit card monolith, American Express). On the morning after I'd received my notice (I'm to be officially discharged this Friday), I woke up with the sensation that a sea of time had drained between the night before and the morning after. It was as if a vast gulf had suddenly opened in the space between that then and this now. On the way into work, the sensation only intensified, all the way to the point where I became fearful—that I was going crazy, that I was sick, or even that I was about to die.

So I said an inner No to that fear, and to the self-consciousness that created it, that made me think in terms of an image or a perception rather than about what was really happening within me. It was at that point that a certain realization came about, and it came in the form of a fresh meaning to Hexagram 1 of the I Ching.

This is the hexagram that has been traditionally referred to as "The Creative". The understanding that arose to me on the subway ride to work that day was "The Awakening". Here is the rest of it, as it came through me:

The Awakening:
The sun of the self arises,
Fearless and free.
Where could the darkness have gone?

It occurred to me then that it is fear that feeds all destruction, all delusion. Fear fuels every dogma of fundamentalism. What Bush and his co-conspirators, for example, have done in Iraq is only superficially driven by greed. For the hidden agent of greed is fear.

Greed is itself commanded by fear. Why else would someone grab and accumulate, spiraling down all the while through layer after depraved layer of murder, corruption, and falsehood, so far beyond the point of satiety? What makes greed run so far out of control as to defeat its own purpose?

It must be fear—a terror of such conditioned, corporate intensity that it makes a slave out of the tyrant. What other kind of fear could make a person die within, to his very core of being, rather than face his inner torment and call for the help needed to overcome it?

The psychologist Joan Borysenko offers one description for such a fear in her book, Fire in the Soul:

The most basic fear of every human being is rooted in the helplessness of childhood, the time before we are capable of surviving on our own and must depend on the protection of powerful others. It is the fear of rejection and abandonment. This instinctual terror arises from the part of the mind that thinks not in words but in feelings and images. The common nightmares that children have about being chased and devoured by monsters—nightmares that occur even in children who have never been exposed to the idea of a monster—are the expression of a primitive fear that has its roots at the dawn of human history when abandoned children were, indeed, chased and devoured by wild animals.

Borysenko goes on to point out that the destructive effects of emotional abandonment are every bit as devastating and life-threatening as physical abandonment: isolation sickens and eventually kills its host. Lonely children fail to grow naturally; adults trapped in isolation have significantly greater incidence of heart disease, depression, and immunological illness. Borysenko is referring directly to the fear of abandonment within the family or human society, but her description also implies a related and equally primal fear—that of the abandonment, through repression or denial, of one’s true self, one’s unique individual connection to Tao, or the Cosmic Whole. This, too, is isolation—the loneliness that comes of separation from the Source of our being and the unified totality of our personality. This is the isolation that befalls us when, under the influence of a group ideology, we project an inextinguishable stain or intrinsic fault onto Nature, and thus onto ourselves.

This fear, this isolation, is what I saw in Bush's face during his last speech; it is what I heard in his voice. The demons have trapped him; the nightmare is real; and he can't move in any direction except to let them drag him further into death. When it is all over, he will need treatment, a lot of help. But now it is his very illness, his utter rootlessness, that will make him and his cronies all the more dangerous if they are allowed to remain in their positions one moment longer than is absolutely necessary by the time required for the process of the consolidation of the evidence and the procedural necessities of impeachment.

Now is the time.

The Corporate Cold Shoulder

Maybe if you work for a company in corporate America, you'll understand what I'm talking about here: so often, workers will peel the skins off their backs to keep the company treadmill moving and productivity at least apparitionally positive. In return, they will be browbeaten, burdened with threats and suspicion, shafted at payday, bonus time, and the annual review, but most of all simply ignored.

If this sounds familiar to you, then you'll not be shocked to find that you are being treated exactly the same as a citizen of the United States of Corporate America. Tony Snow says that you and the remaining two-thirds of the American electorate are "out of touch" with the reality in Iraq. So it's time for a troop surge, some ten weeks after the American people had told this government, in the clearest possible terms, that they've had enough of this war and its endless escalation; and less than two weeks after our own nation's death toll had reached 3,000.

Next week will mark another milestone, the fifth anniversary of the opening of Camp Gitmo, Dick Cheney's personal torture laboratory, where all the other aberrations of justice and humanity that have marked this administration took root. The FBI has now released a horrifying report of what has gone on at Gitmo; and it resounds fairly exactly with what AI, HRW, the IRC, and other international NGOs have been telling us for years. Here's part of what our government did there, and repeated at Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and uncounted other places around the world:

Captives at Guantánamo Bay were chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor for 18 hours or more, urinating and defecating on themselves, an FBI report has revealed...Besides being shackled to the floor, detainees were subjected to extremes of temperature. One witness said he saw a barefoot detainee shaking with cold because the air conditioning had bought the temperature close to freezing.

This is what our government has been doing, even as it sent young men and women of our own to the most violent and horrible deaths and disfigurements imaginable; and as it prepares to continue to do tomorrow and next week, until we stop it. This is why I rise to disagree with all the Democrats who are saying that impeachment is the wrong direction to go. In fact, I don't see any other direction that will preserve this nation before its bespattered dignity is thoroughly corrupted and lost before the entire world.

In fact, our corporate analogy weakens only in the matter of the degree of the depravity involved. We corporate citizens have been treated worse than the lowest schlub in the company mailroom. We have been lied to, sneered at, taken for granted, economically stripped, driven, and most of all, ignored.

Will the new Congress change all that? Not unless we are all over them on it. Here are some options for making that happen:

Amnesty International's human rights pledge

Gold Star Families for Peace and the Walk for Change (today)

Code Pink's letter to Congress: Impeach Now

UFPJ's March (January 27)

If you know of anything else that's happening in your part of the world, by all means add it to the comments and I'll post it prominently here. The time to tear away the veil of corporate ignorance must be now.

Friday Reflection: Stripping the Image, Revealing the Truth

The neurotic...though godlike in his imagination, still lacks the earthy self-confidence of a simple shepherd. The great positions to which he may rise, the fame he may acquire, will render him arrogant but will not bring him inner security. He still feels at bottom unwanted, is easily hurt, and needs incessant confirmation of his value. He may feel strong and significant as long as he wields power and influence and is supported by praise and deference. But all of these feelings of elation collapse easily when, in a strange environment, this support is lacking; when he incurs failure; or when he is by himself. The kingdom of heaven does not come through external gestures. —from "Neurotic Pride," in Neurosis and Human Growth

The author of our banner quote for the week and of the text quoted above was not writing about Bush in the Huffington Post yesterday; she was writing one of the seminal works of psychological literature, about 56 years ago.

Karen Horney (it's pronounced horn-eye, so any wise guys out there can just get over it) is, to my mind, the most lucid voice of the entire European psychoanalytical tradition—more so than Freud, Rank, Adler, or even Jung. Neurosis and Human Growth is her classic work, and aside from containing eerily accurate psychological profiles of the characters currently ruling us from Washington, the book presents a beautifully balanced perspective on the human psyche, its conflicts and their various paths of resolution—both the adaptive kind and...certain other approaches. In her description of what she calls "the expansive solution", Horney paints another profile of the Bushies:

When looking at the expansive types we get a picture of people who, in a streamlined way, are bent on self-glorification, on ambitious pursuits, on vindictive triumph, with the mastery of life through intelligence and will power as the means to actualize their idealized self.

She goes on to demonstrate how such people use their image to disguise their own weakness and depravity:

The first picture we get is the one-sided aspect of themselves which they pretend is their whole being in order to create a subjective feeling of unity. The rigidity with which they hang on to the expansive trends is not only owing to the compulsive character of these trends but also to the necessity to eliminate from awareness all traces of self-accusations, self-doubts, self-contempt. Only in this way can they maintain the subjective conviction of superiority and mastery.

It is this pride-fed image, this delusion of mastery, this monument made of shadows, that drives the despot, the tyrant, and the warlord. It is the job of a free people and a free press to tear away the image and reveal the rank core behind the glittering facade. This is what we try to do every day here at Daily rEvolution; it is what we ask our readers to do in the public square, the voting booth, and in every available venue of free expression and dissent.

It is also something that we all must do within ourselves. Now I am not imagining that we have despotic and tyrannical readers coming here; but I know from my own experience that the sales pitches and subliminal images of such predators as are currently ruling in Washington can penetrate the individual consciousness. It is, after all, a game played upon us every day by corporations, media companies, advertisers, and, of course, our government. These entities have the benefit of the utmost sophistication in their methods and means; they spend billions of dollars per year on this manipulation of the image within the human mind.

But there are ways to resist this insidious corporate game, and it begins with a turning within, a regular examination of the self for the residue of the corporate fraud. You don't have to delve deep into your subconscious mind, either: just pay attention to your normal daily life and the thoughts that are pointed at you from without, and those that arise from within.

Also, pay attention to habits of speech and action. For example, do you tend to describe yourself as a "we" in talking about work? I can recall interviewing an applicant for a claims job at an insurance company once. I was relating one of the company's core processes in handling claims, and the applicant said, "oh, we don't do it that way, we always did it..."

I allowed him to finish his point, but then asked (with a smile), "and just who do you mean by 'we'?" Of course, he meant his prior employer (which had laid him off weeks before). The point is, people fall into this trap continually: talking about their present and past employers, about a favorite baseball team, or about their church as if the group and its image defined all or part of themselves.

It happens, of course, in the nationalistic strain of political and media discourse, to a level of near-ubiquity. You hear the pundits saying, "We went into Iraq..." "We had a network of secret prisons in Europe..." "We are threatening to turn Teheran into a nuclear cinder..."

Well, the fact is that we did none of these things. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest of the criminals inhabitating 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue did them. We are not the American (or any other) government. As we saw in Tuesday's post, there's a new Senator from Virginia who can clearly see that we are not represented by the thieves and plunderers of the Bush administration. Let's join Senator Webb in that firm resolution.

I'm sure you can find other examples of this kind of insidious psychological image-peddling in your own personal experience. It has been my experience as a counseling psychotherapist that the mere recognition of such habits and back-of-the-mind ideas or impulses is roughly 80% of the process of freedom from them. Give it a try, and you may find yourself feeling lighter and more energized from the disburdenment of these long-held and rarely-questioned habits of mind and thought. This is the activity of what Horney calls "the real self" whenever it is allowed to escape the prison of the image.

The alternative is not very encouraging; for a life filled with falsehood also poisons the body cells of the person living the delusion. For our final excerpt from Horney's marvelous book, I would ask you to think of Dick Cheney:

His plans are often too expansive. He does not reckon with limitations. He over-rates his capacities. His pursuits may be too diversified, and therefore failures occur easily. Up to a point his resilience gives him a capacity to bounce, but on the other hand repeated failures...may also crush him altogether. The self-hate and self-contempt, successfully held in abeyance otherwise, may then operate in full force. He may go into depressions, psychotic episodes..., or through self-destructive urges, incur an accident or succumb to an illness.

I chose to close my own book on the metaphor of the Harry Potter stories with a simple, brief meditation on separating from the cult of the image:

Think of yourself again as energy: the ceaseless movement whose order and disposition define the seeming matter of your body, and indeed of all form. You breathe out your excess into the Whole from which you came and to which you will return; you gently inhale the nourishment of renewed life-force—what the Chinese refer to as "chi". You can feel waves of movement, as of water or wind, passing through you with each breath—gently dissolving what is manifest but only derivative, while the energetic core of your personal inner truth is gradually revealed and strengthened. You are not, after all, your race, your gender, your occupation, your material possessions, your marital or family status, your sexual orientation, your socio-economic class, your political, national, or religious affiliation; nor are you what the voice from a television says you are. All these ingrained self-images dissolve with every breath, as the life-force enters and moves through you—dispelling the false, peeling away the appearance, revealing the core and center of your being, whose inimitable perfection dances in joyful separation from the realms of pride, guilt, and opposition.

________________________

Finally, one sorrowful note in followup to Wednesday's post on the disappearance of C-Net editor James Kim. As you may know by now, he died. It's a loss for technology, for journalism, and most of all for his family, whose lives he helped to save and whose safety he was trying to ensure when he went off into those woods. If you knew and admired Kim's work, as we did here, and would like to leave a note for his family, you can do it here.

Image is Nothing

"Image is everything", or so we have heard since that tennis star spouted the slogan for a camera company. If it is, then substance is nothing, and there is no room left for reality.

When it comes to this obsession with the image, is it better to be merely hollow within, or corrupt? This is image's only choice. Bush is largely hollow; Cheney is all corruption inside. The image for both is projected by the Rove machine, which sets everything from lighting to camera angles to sound bites so as to relay the appropriate image that has been carefully calculated to inspire fear, awe, camaraderie, or folksy good humor. Cheney's ubiquitous snarl, for example, inspires a feeling of menace. As one neocon fellow I know said of him, "yeah, he's a bastard...but he's our bastard!" I suppose that makes him acceptable to the neocon mind.

Corporations do the same thing: presenting everything from CEOs to animal mascots and cartoon characters in a calculated light of image. They also do it with their corporate palaces, the home offices where all the profit is taken and the images are created and nurtured.

I was reminded of this on starting my new consulting gig at the World Financial Center here in New York. It is a heavily guarded fortress of opulence, right behind the site of ground zero. To go upstairs to meet my new employer, I had to go through metal detectors and identity checks. Later, when I was sent to get my official company badge, I had not just my picture but my fingerprints taken by a scanner. To get into the building, I have to swipe the picture card at a guarded turnstile and then place a finger on top of the thing. At lunch on my first day, I was walking around the lobby and saw a guy with a dog come up the escalator. The dog walked calmly around the lobby, sniffing at big pots of pointsetta plants, Xmas trees set in a row along one wall, and a number of other planters and holiday decorations. Then he went off toward the shops downstairs, probably to sniff around there as well. Just doing his job.

But that didn't bother me much: the dog was both amusing and reassuring to watch, and the fingerprint thing was a little annoying, but you get used to it. What troubled me was the sheer, excessive, unbroken opulence of the place. Marble, granite, glass, chrome, and light—brilliance everywhere, not an inch of room given over to shadow. No place for a quiet moment, a private, separate space in which to reflect or turn inward.

I am old enough to recall having some of my most private moments in one of the more public space on earth, Grand Central Terminal. There used to be real phone booths, with doors, and benches in shadowed alcoves where you could feel more secluded than in a monastery. A lot has changed in thirty years or so. Here, now, in the World Financial Center, everything—every surface, every corner, every object—is bathed in glittering opulence. It is an orgy of light; a brutally relentless domination by the artificial; an oppression, via muzak, of silence.

I think it would be a mistake to blame it all on 9/11, as if the modern world started on a particular day five years ago. This obsession with glare and noise has been with us a long time; 9/11 merely provided a certain urgency to the note that the voices of the image-makers had already sounded.

Amid the piped tunes, the gleaming surfaces, and the omnipresent light, people walked around, most of them techno-fitted in some fashion. The Blackberry shuffle was in evidence: people walking sternly over the white marble, staring down at their devices as they spun the wheel of productivity. Phones, iPods, laptops, PDAs, and headgear were also apparent everywhere I looked. Image, defined by gear: this is how the stuff is sold.

The problem with image is that it is so easily mistaken for identity. It is a noxious problem, since at a time when it has never been more critical for us to be absolutely clear about who we are, we instead wrap ourselves in a microwave cloud or a bitstreamed cloak—a gleaming miniature of color, light, and the appearance of success.

Believe me, I am a friend of technology: gear is fun and sometimes even useful. I write about tech every Wednesday because I like it. But it does not define me, not even a little bit; and we can't allow it to if we are to have any hope of leaving behind a few drops of sanity in the life-cup of the next generation. We have to give our children more than cell towers and a working Internet, as helpful as those things may occasionally be. We have to give them an opportunity to understand themselves and their planet; a chance to self-create a future that is guided by truth, health, and love.

Our political and corporate leaders, by and large, are not doing this; they aren't even trying. They instil an orthodoxy of conformity, a yearning for the same vapid symbols of success; the ambition to climb the ladder or save (and buy) big on Black Friday. Or showing our support for the troops with bright ribbons and artificial flowers, which can be placed on their graves when they come home.

Psychologists tell us that image—body image, self-image, projected image—is important. I am suggesting that the emphasis upon image is itself driven by the solipsistic preoccupation of the culture and its advertising and media machinery. Image, in reality, is nothing; it is a Roveian illusion perpetrated by a cynical school of human psychology. If you can nurture the light that Nature gave you, that will be more than enough for your image. Whenever we give primacy to substance, to the palpable truth of our individual uniqueness, appearances will take care of themselves. Tomorrow, we'll consider a few alternatives to the societal cult of image-making and its pursuit.

Monday with McKenna: Call Out the Squirrels, the Nuts Are All Around Us

For a long time now, we've been discussing the psychopathology of the foul tyrants who have governed us these past six years and driven hundreds of thousands of people to death or to a living hell. The only thing we've occasionally been confused about is the precise diagnosis: we have offered psychosis, psychopathy, dependent personality disorder, and my own diagnostic entity, neuropia. On Sunday, Frank Rich offered his theory, which in turn echoes Terry McKenna's offering for today (Terry always sends me his Monday piece on Saturday morning, before the Sunday papers are out).

The main point is that these people—Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and quite of few of the supporting characters—don't need to be debated: they need to be studied. Preferably in a high-security facility with padded cells inside and electric fences outside. If you think I'm kidding, check out Kucinich's piece at HuffPost today, which includes some of the brutal details about where the destruction delusion has led us.

So now on to Mr. McKenna. Terry, as he often does, draws on history to reinforce his own comparative diagnosis. Here it is.

Despite what Republican sources argue, the Iraq debacle is very much like the affair in Viet Nam. They may not be identical, but the political fallout is very much the same. The war is George Bush’s albatross. Isn’t it embarrassing to watch the president on the nightly news (or in media outlets such as the Daily Show). He mixes an air of arrogance with the look of a deer caught in the headlights.

Things seem to be moving fast now. Iraq’s so called unity government is neither a government nor an agent of unity. Prime Minister Maliki is a fraud – according to insiders, either part of the Shiite power grab, or an incompetent, or perhaps a fool. Yet the US president goes forward with statements like the following regarding his recent meeting with Iraq Prime Minister, Maliki (this was issued November 30th):

"My consultations with the Prime Minister and the unity government are a key part of the assessment process. And that's why I appreciate him coming over from Iraq so that we could have a face-to-face visit. The Prime Minister and I agree that the outcome in Iraq will affect the entire region. To stop the extremists from dominating the Middle East, we must stop the extremists from achieving their goal of dominating Iraq. If the extremists succeed in Iraq, they will be emboldened in their efforts to undermine other young democracies in the region, or to overthrow moderate governments, establish new safe havens, and impose their hateful ideology on millions. If the Iraqis succeed in establishing a free nation in the heart of the Middle East, the forces of freedom and moderation across the region will be emboldened, and the cause of peace will have new energy and new allies."

You just can’t take George Bush seriously anymore.

The extremists are already emboldened. Our presence has given them 3 ½ years to work out the best way to use home made bombs to destroy American armor. Now they know. City warfare has always been tough and resident fighters ALWAYS have a tactical advantage - that’s why armies almost never attack cities by direct force. In WW2, the Germans opted for siege tactics against Leningrad. Stalingrad on the other hand was attacked directly and the early result made it a vast graveyard. When cities are entered, if fighting continues, it ends in desperate house to house warfare. The US is not prepared to either starve (siege warfare) or to fight house to house in Baghdad, so there is nothing left for our army to do. We can’t ask for a do-over.

We are in the current mess because of an over-optimistic sense of what success in war can achieve. And it’s odd how war continues to have a hold over the hearts and minds of men – for history demonstrates that even when you win, the aftermath is rarely what you hoped for.

Let’s take a brief look at our own history. I’ll start with the Civil War – our prior wars are all more or less special cases. The Mexican War was a war over territory that Mexico only lightly held – so when Americans began to develop a new society out west, the chance for an insurgency was just about nil.

On to the Civil War. Yes, the North won, and the slaves were freed. But in the South, the aftermath was an insurgency that destroyed the new freedmen’s governments. After reconstruction was ended in 1876, a succession of laws were passed in each state that re-enslaved blacks with a second class citizenship that provided no civil rights at all. It took another 100 years for descendants of the freed slaves to receive justice.

Ok, one down.

Then we have the splendid little war against Spain in 1898. We won in a matter of a few months. Spain was humiliated and never again participated in world affairs. But the liberated territories – Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines have fared little better since. Cuba was ostensibly freed in 1902, but with US intervention and a series of tin horn dictators, Cuba remains to this day a poorly managed economy full of people who fortunately still don’t hate Americans. The Philippines on the other hand is even worse off. It was not freed until after the Second World War, then it was led with a heavy hand by its own succession of dictators. Its current government may be less a dictatorship, but life in the Philippines is not easy. Ethnic tension abound, so too tensions between Muslims and Christians. White visitors today are subject to the threat of kidnapping.

Puerto Rico is at least a more benign commonwealth. Not quite a US state, but definitely part of the US. For most of the last century, its citizens were poor. In recent decades, the economy has modernized and gained benefit from the presence of US businesses operating from Puerto Rico because of unique tax advantages.

The First World War needs only a few sentences. A horrible affair that the US had no reason to join. The aftermath was a communist Russia, an unstable central Europe, and eventually the Nazi era and a Second World War.

So what about the Second World War. Wasn’t that a just war? Perhaps. But the notion of war being just is always problematical. My retort is: so what!

Let’s discuss the operation in Japan separately from that in Germany. Since Japan attacked our Pacific fleet, the war was as justified as any. But the years following Japan’s defeat are the story of a prosperous Japan surrounded by an Asia ruled mostly by dictators. Liberated China fared no better under communist rule than it did under the Japanese military – millions died anyway. We fought two “hot” wars - in Viet Nam and Korea. Only in the ‘90s did Asia wake up to her potential. So, however justified our effort, the following 60 years suggests that the war in Asia was a waste of lives and treasure.

The War against Germany was also a victory. And if we consider Nazi brutality, who can argue against the fight. Western Europe did prosper in the aftermath, but Eastern Europe suffered under Soviet era communism. And to this day, the former Yugoslavia has never stabilized. And if we think of the victims of Nazi brutality, sadly, most were dead by the time of liberation. I am not arguing against our having gone to war, but if a successful aftermath receives a rating of 4 stars, the results of our WW2 victory gets only 1 ½.

Of course, we already know that we should never have invaded Iraq. But even going forward, we must not forget that a so called victory (in a decade?) may be as troubling as the chaos of retreat. Much better to wall off the Kurds, make some deals to protect any other peaceful communities and then get out.

By the way, the story of the Southern insurgency is rarely told – so try this new book. Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War by Nicholas Lemann. It's also available as a CD (spoken book).

—T. McKenna