Day: May 22, 2003

I just received some mail that says, “If you can point and click with a mouse, you can make $100,000 a year or more as a desktop graphic designer.”

You hear that, graphic designers? I can do what you do, and I “don’t even have to be able to draw a straight line — the computer does everything for you.” I can do this part-time, from the comfort of my own home, while simultaneously raising three children, and I don’t even have to take one piddling little design class. I don’t need a degree, experience, connections, or even talent. I just need to take one little $430 course and —

Oh crap. You don’t suppose this is a scam, do you?

Well, I tried my best to convince the show’s producer that Touch My Monkey was a funny sketch, but he’s decided to pass. He thought the Jesus-phone was a potentially funny concept, but he was worried the audience would be too confused by what was going on. He’s quite fond of Remarkable Innovations, however. Go figure. My thanks to everyone who gave me feedback.

In response to my mix CD request below, Jon Kilgannon suggests: “I wonder if people would be more amenable to putting a set of 8 – 10 MP3s online rather than creating a CD.”

This is an interesting idea — although I think it’s something I’d like to explore in addition to swapping CDs. After all, part of what I’m hoping to gain from this is, as Kilgannon puts it, “the fun of receiving a package in the mail rife with possibilities”. But his idea has sparked my interest, and I’m curious to know if any (all, what? four?) of you would be interested in the following:

Once a week (or once a month) everyone would upload 5-10 mp3s to share with the group. Themes (e.g. favorite songs, songs that make you cry, etc.) could be suggested. We could either upload them to our individual websites and share the links or create a central location (sending the mp3s to me and having me upload them here is also a possibility, but that might play havoc with my e-mail account). I wouldn’t want this to become just an mp3 swap or dump — I have pretty mixed feeling about online music as a whole — but does this sound like an interesting idea to anyone but me?

“Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay; but no man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.” — Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay

In this month’s New Yorker, there’s a quote from Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge: “I am fifty-seven years old, and the time I’ve been alive has probably been the best time ever to be an American citizen. There was Vietnam — that blip on the scene that caused some social unrest — but there was prosperity, and we didn’t have to worry about international terrorism.”

I am suspicious of anyone who claims a belief in a golden age, much less anyone who considers the war in Viet Nam nothing more than a “blip”. It seems like an excuse to ignore the real causes of today’s problems, while simultaneously glossing over the very real problems of the past. Maybe he’s taking his cues from George W. Bush, who went AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard and still hasn’t accounted for it — and for whom Viet Nam was just a blip.

But, then, there’s convincing evidence that terrorism is actually at a 30-year low. As State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism J. Cofer Black writes, “the last time the annual total fell below 200 [terrorist] attacks was back in 1969, shortly after the advent of modern terrorism.”

This isn’t, of course, to say that terrorism has gone away. As Arianna Huffington makes clear, we still face very real threats, which the Bush administration has repeatedly made worse, while at the same time claiming the opposite:

[Bush] was similarly unperturbed by that troubling new report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, an influential and nonpartisan British think tank — released a day after the Riyadh bombings and three days before the president proclaimed us “more secure” — which found that al-Qaida was “just as dangerous” and “even harder to identify and neutralize” than it was prior to 9/11.

But the idea that we live in a time when constant fear of attack is justified, or that there was once some golden age of American life, is terribly flawed at its heart.

Although, maybe Ridge was referring to the 1950s. Heaven knows, the nation had no problems then.