-> SMOKE & MIRRORS
 KATRINA & THE LOST CITY OF NEW ORLEANS by Rod Amis
New Orleans is the Lost City of America.A portion of the proceeds of this book will go to the New Orleans Hospitality Workers Fund. The cooks, servers and restaurant workers of New Orleans have provided fabulous times and memories for millions. Now we must remember them in their time of need.
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SMOKE
"Where there's smoke, there's fire ..." Popular Adage.
INTRODUCTION: By retiring "My Glass House" in the last edition of the magazine, I suggested that we needed a new way to look at bloggistic journals, citizen journalism and what the Web would do next.
It should figure that I'd open this new column with the headline, "Blog 2.0." Audacity has always been my stock and trade. My intention is that I continue to live up to a bit of this audaciousness by way of the level of material you find here. This initial outing will only feature subtle tweaks to the familiar formula. The heavy lifting begins with the next update of the full magazine.
For example, unlike the "Comments" sections of most Blogs, you'll find that commentary here remains mediated and un-immediate. This is still a "magazine," after all. Spam and ads are not part of our vision of this equation. Comments for each section will be posted in regular updates of the experiment.
12 October, 2005: The purpose of this section of the column will be to focus on those issues, both editorial and journalistic, I wish to share. I'll comment about and link to other journalists in this medium, including bloggers, with whom your World Magazine either agrees or disagrees. This latter is an innovation. I have rarely, during the "Glass House" years, commented to or about those with whom I disagree. It's time to change that orientation of this journal.
I shall have little or nothing to say on this side of the dialogue about items or projects fo r your World's Magazine and very much to say about the "outside world."
This side of the dialogue will be unabashedly political. While I continue to believe that the personal is political, much of what those who choose to only follow this side of the column will find will be more in my "voice from Mt. Olympus" mode than that one would address to a personal friend.
Your comments on this experiment are most certainly welcomed.
COMMENT on 'Smoke' Intro
From Robin "roblimo" Miller, Bradenton, FL, USA :
13 October, 2005
I don't like "Blog 2.0" in the title. "Smoke and Mirrors" is enough.
- R
13 October, 2005
I love you, alcoholic teenager that you are!!!
I miss My Glass House.
Political blogging you can get anywhere. Your earnest insights are no better or worse than dozens of others I get on a daily basis thru any number of listserves.
You, however, are best at being the misunderstood teenager 40 years on. Really. I find it both exasperatingly aggravating & terminally endearing.
Being Rod is what you do best.
That is My Glass House.
I'd rather watch The Daily Show for politics.
Understand?
14 October, 2005
Rod ...
First off, from reading Smoke & Mirrors I see that you received the book box. I thought you'd enjoy the On Bullshit book. ?lol
Love the Smoke & Mirrors idea ...
15 October, 2005
Rod,
You've done it again! You love playing with people's heads don't you, mate?
Running the first of your new "Smoke & Mirrors" juxtaposed against you last "My Glass House"? You are a madman! I love it!
I'll be curious to see how your readers respond to this little game.
Put my comment under any section you like.
Regards,
Tim
16 October, 2005
I may be a stickler for consistency and a few months down the line, your "Smoke ... " column may become very familiar but the "I" voice in your writing was what kept me coming back. To sound terribly sentimental, it feels like losing a friend.
I would suggest that you keep twisting between the world and the personal in your writing ... even if you have taken a greater political and outer world stance ... that after all is what made me (and many others I am sure) identify with your plight, that of the struggling American and the increased understanding that even the term "American" holds its stereotypes which are rarely true.
And also, having the I voice could mean another "you" novel in the future.
NEWS TO ROD
I've been among those, Cicero style, who have tried to disabuse my fellow citizens of the effects of Empire and the virtues of the Republic, though like my predescessor, I'm probably fighting an uphill battle -- or a futile one.ITEM ONE: William Rivers Pitt, over at Truthout.org, often speaks in the same vein. Something he had to say last week rang a chime with The Old Philosopher. Listen:
Americans, by and large, have a fundamental need to feel like they are part of something great, above the fray and beyond the rest of the world. They are fed American exceptionalism with mother's milk, and will fight like rabid wolverines to avoid being forced to believe otherwise. Anyone mystified by the public support Bush has enjoyed until very recently, despite the endless litany of disasters that have befallen us, can look to this bone-deep need as the main reason for that support. It isn't just about 9/11. Americans need to feel good about America in the same way fish need water. Americans need to believe, and will thrash around like boated marlin if that belief is undercut. That belief serves as a kind of ideological Prozac, shoving bad thoughts to the background.Powerful stuff and nicely said.Iraq. Afghanistan. The continued freedom enjoyed by Osama bin Laden. Katrina. Abu Ghraib. Frist and insider stock trading. DeLay and a handful of indictments. Rove and Libby staring down the barrel of more indictments. Bush's approval ratings are plummeting, and the entire country is beginning to wilt under the depressing reality that we are, in fact, getting screwed with our pants on. Any conceits of moral authority being put forth by the White House and the Republican Party have been washed away in a flood of graft, death, lies and corruption.
Our supply of Prozac is running short. The belief in American excellence so desperately necessary to the mental balance of the populace is being eroded by the hour, and there will be hell to pay because of it.
ITEM TWO: Thanks to our friends at the Center for Media and Democracy, we were rushed over to this devastating article on Bush Administration Public Relations Czar Karen Hughes ("A Failed Public Diplomat" by John Brown, October 06, 2005,) featured on the TomPaine.com Web site. Here's just a tidbit to whet your whistle:Bush confidante Karen Hughes , the newly appointed, "relentlessly upbeat" Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, has returned from her recent five-day mission to Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Marketed as a "listening tour," Hurricane Karen's foray into the volatile region turned into a near feeding frenzy directed at her by the western media, despite the State Department's best efforts to win over the press ãwhich included providing seats to 16 reporters aboard the Under Secretary's Air Force jet.Hughes's PR failure with her home media would be of little importance if it did not lead to a simple but troubling question: If the administration's Under Secretary in a key foreign policy post can't demonstrate to western reporters that she's a serious professional, how will she ever be able to convince the rest of the world, so doubtful about the Bush administration's intentions and actions, that her official assignment --- winning hearts and minds abroad --- is worth any attention or respect?
ITEM THREE: You might be thinking, since I haven't written about any subjects North Carolina since moving here a few months back, that I'm not paying attention to the state where I now reside.If you're a wiseacre, you might even be prompted to ask, "Hey, Rod! What's going on with your former state Senator, former Presidential candidate and former Vice-Presidential candidate (a.k.a "Two-Time Loser") John Edwards?"
Well, here's the deal. After reading in my local newspaper, the (Raleigh, NC) News and Observer that Smiling John had begun aligning himself with the likes of Poverty Pimp organization ACORN (Alliance of Community Organizations for Reform Now,) I sort of wrote him off.
Shame on me. I shouldn't do such things.
So here's the latest on Smiling John that I know about: BusinessWeek Online reported on 13 October, 2005 that "Edwards has signed up to work for the New York-based private in vestment concern Fortress Investment Group as a part-time senior advisor. As such, he will be 'providing support in developing investment opportunities worldwide and strategic advice on global economic issues,' says Edwards spokesperson Kim Rubey."
How convenient.
While talking about his concern for the "other America" of those of us among the working poor, he ALSO manages to further feather is own millionaire pockets. Hmmn ...
COMMENT on "News to Rod" 13 October.
The Dialogue on Democracy
13 October, 2005: I watched Raoul Peck's HBO film, "Sometimes in April" this week. It is about the genocide in Rwanda a decade ago. It is a very disturbing and very exquisite film, in terms of bringing both the plight of average people in such a horrorific situation and the indifference of Western nations to Black deaths into focus, and to life. It certainly was unstinting in its indictment of United Nations' ineffectualness.Considering the number of times that I have deferred to the notion of using the United Nations as a force for justice and non-violent conflict resolution, the film serves as an indictment of that kind of appeal, as well.
When I look at what happened to the sacred places, for Serbs, in Kosovo while United Nations forces stood by and watched, and how Serbs were victimized and driven from a province which is central to their heritage, often beaten, driven from their homes, homes burned to the ground only a year and a half ago ... It's difficult to believe that United Nations forces will ever show the backbone needed to resolve conflicts.
Is it that they are not allowed to do so by national strictures from the very countries to which we send them? Are they essentially hamstrung? That could be part of the answer.
But I can't put the situation better than the Global Policy Forum (first citation to follow) did in 1999 or Human Rights Watch did in July of last year. From the Global Policy Forum we read this:
The United Nations launched its peacekeeping mission for Rwanda in October 1993 to monitor a cease-fire agreement between the Rwandan Hutu government and the rebel Rwandese Patriotic Front. The mission, which was not allowed to use military force to achieve its aims, was limited to investigating breaches in the cease-fire, helping humanitarian aid deliveries and contributing to the security of the capital, Kigali. The mission proved insufficient after the government launched the slaughter of an estimated 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus following the downing of the Rwandan president's plane on April 6, 1994.The report faulted the United Nations in several key areas leading up to that date, including its failure to act on a now-famous cable sent by the force commander, Canadian Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire on Jan. 11, 1994 warning of the risk of genocide. The cable was received by Annan and wasn't shared with the Security Council and didn't receive the follow-up such an important piece of evidence deserved, the report said. In addition, the United Nations and Security Council virtually ignored a groundbreaking assessment by the UN human rights investigator for Rwanda who raised the possibility in August 1993 that a genocide might occur.
But the report points most of its criticism at how the United Nations -- and in particular its Security Council members -- reacted to the killings once they started. There was little political will within the council, particularly from the United States, to authorize a robust peacekeeping force in the months after the failed Somalia mission, that left 18 Americans dead. After rampaging killers in Rwanda killed 10 Belgian peacekeepers at the beginning of the genocide, there was little will to keep the peacekeepers in place, much less strengthen their mandate.
The departure of peacekeepers from a school where thousands of civilians had massed hoping for protection was cited by the report as one of the main reasons for the enduring bitterness Rwandans feel Thursday toward the United Nations because of the ensuing massacre there. "The manner in which the troops left, including attempts to pretend to the refugees that they were not in fact leaving, was disgraceful," the report said.
Human Rights Watch said this:
(Brussels, July 26, 2004)ãThe NATO-led Kosovo Force and U.N. international police failed catastrophically to protect minorities during the widespread rioting in Kosovo in March, Human Rights Watch said today in the first detailed report on the attacks. Protection of minority communities will be a key challenge for the new U.N. administrator for Kosovo, Soren Jessen-Petersen, who is scheduled to take office on August 3.[FYI: "Roma" is the correct name for the people you might have been taught to call "Gypsies."-- RA]The 66-page report, "Failure to Protect: Anti-Minority Violence in Kosovo, March 2004," documents the widespread attacks against Serbs, Roma, Ashkali (Albanian-speaking Roma) and other minorities that took place in Kosovo on March 17-18. Human Rights Watch details the near-complete collapse during the crisis of Kosovo's security institutionsãthe NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR), international civilian police from the U.N. Interim Administration Mission to Kosovo (UNMIK), and the locally-recruited Kosovo Police Service (KPS). Based on numerous interviews with minority victims and security officials, the report provides a detailedãand previously unavailableãaccount of what happened in dozens of communities during the riots.
"This was the biggest security test for NATO and the United Nations in Kosovo since 1999, when minorities were forced from their homes as the international community looked on," said Rachel Denber, acting executive director of Human Rights Watch's Europe and Central Asia Division. "But they failed the test. In too many cases, NATO peacekeepers locked the gates to their bases, and watched as Serb homes burned."
Even someone as willing to dream about the United Nations being the kind of institution that people who want a more united, peaceful world, one with an ACTUAL Rule of Law believe in, the record of failure and so-called "peace-keepers" turning their backs on human suffering, leave me chilled -- if not yet hopeless.
In one of the most powerful scenes, for me, in Raoul Peck's film, "Sometimes in April," a group of Tutsis, men and women, old and young, are taken out of a church in which they expected sanctuary. They are made to kneel in front of a pit where their bodies will be buried. The camera pans across the two rows of people, pausing ever so slightly at each of their faces. One young woman looks directly into the camera, into our eyes.
For some reason, I could not but also think then of the scenes of the people in front of the Superdome in New Orleans ...
COMMENT on 'Dialogue on Democracy' for 13 October
MIRRORS
For those who liked the more personal side of the old "Glass House" column, they'll find more of what they were looking for here. This shall be more akin to a memoir, as well as a space to float project ideas I have for GENERATOR 21.
You'll get many more Web links on the other side of the journal, "SMOKE," than you'll find over here. Most of the links here will be self-referential, I'm afraid.
Unlike the "Comments" sections of most Blogs, you'll find that commentary here remains mediated and un-immediate. This is still a "magazine," after all. Spam and ads are not part of our vision of this equation. Comments for each section will be posted in regular updates of the experiment.
As the first entry below demonstrates, I mean to consider different avenues of diversifying this venture, including more of a presence in the "dead tree" arena.
Your comments on this experiment are most certainly welcomed.
COMMENT on 'Mirrors' Intro
14 October, 2005
Dear Amis,
There is every reason for optimism. I expect those incisive treatises.
You seem to have the uncanny ability to bend your reader in any configuration. We can all laugh, cry or shout all in a jiffy.
Cheers
Clarius
MORE OF A PUBLISHER
A back-burner idea that I have determined it was time to move to the front, now that I've gained some breathing room, is publishing books by and about the writers and contributors here at generator21.net. Most specifically, I've long considered the lament of many of the African writers we've featured here and the unique, personal quality of their reporting important to the type of writing that I've personally tried to support as an editor and publisher and the international dialogue that I've always felt was crucial to the very survival of humanity.The idea is that I should grow my publishing efforts and the Print On Demand technology, exemplified by Lulu.com, makes that vision both affordable and speedy. Web years, as opposed to dog years, are central to the type of publishing that an old Web hand like me would favor and embrace.
So I've entered into discussions with the G21 AFRICA department's contributors and Lulu.com to look at starting a book imprint dedicated to what I consider the best of new African writers. It's a chance to see if the "new voices from Africa" approach I've tried to take here over the last decade can be transformed into a viable commercial enterprise.
Too many of the African writers I've worked with over the years have complained about the need for an outlet for their work that they could trust and that would offer them a level playing field vis-?-vis consideration and nurturing. I believe I can provide that kind of environment for these great emerging voices because of our established relationship(s) and my own willingness to take risks.
This project provides the opportunity for your World's Magazine to test the business adage, "Find a need and fill it."
COMMENT on the G21 AFRICA Book Imprint Project
14 October, 2005
Dear Amis,
This is a very welcome and imaginative project. I will like to be part of it as you unfold the modalities.
Clarius
Basic Rules of Life
13 October, 2005: I have recently been contemplating the situation of a friend of mine that perplexes me. The individual in question has a Significant Other who seems to operate using three distinguishing characteristics:I shared this observation with an acquaintance and my perplexity that these two people had a relationship of long-standing.
- Most other people are either miscreants or dumb-asses.
- Being argumentative is more important than being factually correct, because of the corrrollary that the first principle applies to everyone else.
- Consideration for others is an indulgence to be applied randomly because most other people are not deserving of it because --- Well, see the first principle.
"Well, Rod," he said, "shouldn't the Basic Rule of Life 'Birds of a feather ...' be applied here?"
My jaw dropped. "'Zounds, Watson," I responded. "Your powers of deduction are astounding!"
This conversation brought to mind something else I had deposited back into my memory banks about these two people, the Food Museum concept.
I first learned about this concept when I moved to Phoenix (well, actually, Scottsdale at the time,) Arizona, at the invitation of Douglas McDaniel. He invited me out there during one of my more intense starving periods without letting me know that he was in the process of going through one of his more intense getting-fired-from-another-job and being-dumped-by-another-girlfriend periods.
He had gone to the local Dollar Store and stocked his apartment up on canned food before my arrival. After my arrival, he deposited me in the apartment that his landlord was preparing to kick him out of with the canned food BUT without a can opener and decamped to spend his time at his next girlfriend's place for days on end.
When he returned to the apartment, I mentioned that I had been unable to eat anything because of the lack of can opener and he commented, "Darn! You must have felt that I left you in a Food Museum."
I did, among other things.
Well, the couple I reference above ALWAYS maintained a Food Museum of their own. My friend always talked about wanting to go out to various places we knew in New Orleans for food, despite the fact that there was a cupboard in his own home full of food, jam packed. The problem was, it was food this individual was not actually allowed to eat.
The main purpose of all of this food they had stored, it seemed, was so that this person's S.O. could see it there. It had not been purchased to eat, you see, but only to look at. And it was the S.O.'s property, not to be shared with my friend or anyone else. A Food Museum.
I always thought there was something perverse about this arrangement. But, another of the Basic Rules of Life is not to involve yourself in other people's relationships. So I said nothing.
There is a third Basic Rule of Life that I'll share with you in this debut of "Mirrors." It is taken from a wonderful little monograph sent to me by my dear friend, DC Stultz, who lives in Florida. The monograph is by an academic named Harry G. Frankfurt and is entitled, On Bullshit (Princeton University Press, 2005.) It's a wonderful little book that I highly recommend. Quick reading.
The opening line of this book reads: "One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit."
I shall share two observations from the text from which I took great joy:
When we characterize talk as hot air, we mean that what comes out of the speaker's mouth is only that. It is mere vapor. His speech is empty, without substance or content. His use of language, accordingly, does not contribute to the purpose it purports to serve. No more information is communicated than if the speaker had merely exhaled. There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which makes hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed. Excrement may be regarded as the corpse of nourishment, what remains when the vital elements in food have been exhausted ...And later on there is this lovely bit:Why is there so much bullshit? Of course it is impossible to be sure that there is relatively more of it nowadays than at other times. There is more communication of all kinds in our time than ever before, but the proportion that is bullshit may not have increased. Without assuming that the incidence of bullshit is actually greater now, I will mention a few considerations that help to account for the fact that it is currently so great.Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person's obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled -- whether by their own propensities or the demands of others -- to speak entensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant ..."
Thanks for coming back this week. Keep me in your prayers as I keep you in my own.
Rod was a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he wrote over two hundred articles on web design and development issues. He was principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviewed technology issues weekly, producing 383 editorials. He became the Managing Editor for Electronic Mail/Newsletter Publications at Andover.net at the end of February, 2000, and left in September of the same year. He was a contributing writer for ACCESS Internet magazine, which appeared both on- and offline for 10 million readers in 100 newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Boston Herald, Austin American-Statesman, Denver Post and Orlando Sentinel, among others. Rod was the US reporter for Silicon.com, a division of Network Multimedia Television in London, UK, reaching 3.5 million European readers, until May, 2001.
In 2002, he worked as Assistant to the General Manager of a Big Easy company that does restaurants and nightclubs. He did stints as the Resident Philosopher at three separate gin mills in that city in the French Quarter and the Marigny, earning his stripes during two successive Mardi Gras seasons. Oh yeah, Rod's had Day Jobs working construction. Mostly renovations of old New Orleans structures, houses and a bar. Sometimes he designs Web sites for other people so that he can get his creative juices flowing the way he can't at a staid publication like this one. And he's been the instructor in Editing for Internet Publications at the Novi Sad School of Journalism in Yugoslavia.
Our Resident Philosopher has exchanged his legend mobility for a means of keeping your World's Magazine. Now he must become earnest about gaining a financial underpinning for this enterprise. (Read: Buy back his freedom and then go home.}.
In his spare time, he chases women in the manner that a fly pursues a spider. 
He continues to be committed to integrity, chastity and a dose of humility.
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