THE NEWS TODAY

The news today is scarier than it was Sept. 12, 2001, when at least the enemy wasn’t us. Today my eyes dart around the front of The New York Times looking for relief, finally finding a relatively harmless story about a new medical technology.

The rest is terrifying:

“The Americans raced Tuesday to contain a spreading insurgency” in Iraq, which we attacked because of faulty intelligence and a lack of proper debate. In fact, when the information we were getting didn’t build a strong enough case for attacking, the Bush administration set up its own office to correct the problem.

Yet in a nearby story the new, Bush-appointed chief of the Central Intelligence Agency is clearing out senior staff and advising his employees via memo that they are to “support the administration and its policies in our work ... As agency employees we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies.”

And, back at the top of the page, “New Bush Cabinet Seen as Move For More Harmony and Control,” meaning the president doesn’t want an attorney general that goes too far or a secretary of state that doesn’t go far enough. He wants only support, consistent with his pride in not reading the news, insistence on keeping protesters so far away he cannot see or hear the protest and assumption of a mandate based on a bare majority of the country’s voters.

At the bottom is a story from Spring, Texas, where a school district that has never had a kidnapping has put in place an electronic watchdog system intended to keep its students from getting kidnapped. The kids carry electronic radio frequency identification tags that keep track of where they are. It doesn’t work very well yet, but that doesn’t keep “advocates of the technology [from seeing] broader possibilities, such as implanting RFID tags under the skin of children to avoid problems with lost or forgotten tags.” Right.

This is where we’re headed: War no matter what. Dissent isn’t welcome. And we’re watching you.

EPILOGUE, PROLOGUE

I.

I was one of many anyone-but-Bush people in this past election, not a John Kerry fan, but that’s not Kerry’s fault. It would have been the same, or has been, for Edwards, Gore, a Clinton or two, Dukakis, Bentsen, Mondale and Ferraro. Were I to be a Republican, the names would change, but not the attitude.

That’s because I’ve believed, just like third-party voters, that Democratic and Republican politicians are essentially the same. After all, they’re politicians, not statesmen or activists, and our political system increasingly demands a certain sameness — “electability” — that has candidates avowing faith, quashing uniqueness, flaunting families, dressing alike and serving special interests.

All that set the politicians apart were that their parties paid lip service to different constituencies. But every four years or so, to get re-elected, they had to prove to those constituencies that they did a little more, so there was always minimal action in the direction of gun control, or deregulation, or environmentalism, or prayer in schools.

A vote for Republicans was a baby step toward corporate freedom. A vote for Democrats nudged us back toward protecting workers. And so on.

Republicans have been raising the stakes. Instead of incremental movement toward reshaping America, they’ve been promising greater and greater leaps, setting themselves up to have to deliver them. Those great leaps will take us into a scary future by way of a demonstrably dangerous present, justified by unhealthy paranoia, religious faith and juvenile fear. And they make it impossible to continue the cynicism that keeps me voting for lazy, minimal steps in the right direction.

In fact, the elephants’ thunderous, earthshaking leaps make it vital to vote and okay to vote against rather than for. It should have been obvious this year that a vote against Bush was the most important vote that could be cast, and, just as in 2000, the only practical way to do that was to vote for the electable opposing candidate. Four years ago that was Al Gore, before more than a thousand U.S. soldiers and perhaps 100,000 Iraqi civilians paid the price, before thousands of U.S. citizens lost health care, jobs or hope.

This year it was Kerry. A vote for anyone else was a vote for Bush — and more death, fewer jobs, a greater divide between rich and poor, the stage set for a dramatically worsening environment and possibly the end of Roe vs. Wade and any number of our civil liberties — despite the 2.4 million votes separating the candidates even if every independent voter had gone for Kerry instead.

The independent voters all have extraordinarily high-minded reasons for voting for their candidates. My co-worker Andrew J. Manuse writes, for instance:

I believe my decision to vote for [Libertarian candidate Michael] Badnarik was thoughtful, educated, moral, principled and purposeful. He had the best ideas for protecting and restoring our Constitutional and individual freedoms at home, restoring our economic well being, fighting terrorists, winning the war in Iraq and bringing our troops home. He supported giving individuals more power over their own destiny, primarily by stripping away government constraints on individuals' financial and social freedoms and responsibility. He believed that corporations should not be granted legal status as persons. I think that if we did away with the precedent that makes corporations “legal persons,” there would be less corruption and greed, and overall the world would be a much better place.

Principled and moral the vote may have been. Thoughtful, educated and purposeful it was not, any more than deciding to forgo voting against Bush’s ongoing evil in exchange for the expectation of finding a genie in a bottle — to wish for it to put Bush out of office.

As an example of how thoughtful the decision was, one reason the co-worker didn’t vote for Kerry is that he has “disdain [for] his support for the United Nations and I fear he would surrender U.S. sovereignty to the organization, which I believe is anti-American and mostly made up of nations that support terrorists.”

For the record, there are 191 countries in the United Nations. That’s every country on Earth, except for the Vatican and Taiwan. And not everyone accepts that Taiwan is still a sovereign nation.

II.

The suggestions for reforming our political system are similarly questionable.

1) We can stop allowing the government to steal our money to fund political parties. How? We can lobby Congress for a Constitutional Amendment that would make it illegal for the government to fund political parties and mandatory to allow all parties equal protection under the law. Let candidates get their own funding. They will be able to collect all the money they need if their ideas are strong enough.

This is a peculiar suggestion coming after a campaign in which Bush raised about $286 million and Kerry about $243.2 million on their own, getting only $74.6 million each from the government. The private fund-raising went so well that the candidates apparently flirted with the idea of rejecting public funding because it limited them, since only the public funding could be used after the candidates accepted their parties’ nomination.

2) We can stop buying newspapers, watching television news and listening to radio news programs that are biased toward one candidate and don't give alternative-party candidates the time of day. We can start our own news services online or work toward changing one of them and making it serve the people the way a news organization is supposed to: openly, without bias and with balance.

Better, but who funds the new media? It’s not so easy to get money for start-up news organizations, especially considering that the main font of interest in the idea would be from independent voters, who gave the top four third-party candidates all of $5.6 million through the election. Also, what money goes to this new media would shrink the money available for actual candidates, while people committed to more mainstream candidates would be relucant to leave more mainstream media behind without an established alternative, resulting in little financial incentive for existing media to change. Encouraging change there is the far better idea, but I foresee skepticism that more space would be warranted for “fringe” candidates.

3) We can force the organization that runs the debates (www.debates.org) to include all the candidates that have made their way onto the ballots in some of the states.

Even better, but the skepticism of the media would extend to the debate commission.

4) We can create organizations that would work toward making our election more fair and become powerful ourselves by working together.

A bit vague, but in fact the only suggestion that deals with the reality that, in this dangerous, delicate time, voting for a third-party candidate only makes sense if it is possible for one to win. A foundation for such a win must be built. It is only by laying the groundwork for a strong showing by a third-party candidate, which implies the possibility of a win, that such organizations can break through widespread skepticism to convince the media and debate planners to include more candidates. This inclusion, in turn, legitimizes the candidates and brings them more publicity, making more funding possible.

But something must start the cycle and make all this possible.

The first step of the organizations, then, would be to convince more communities, and then states, to move to instant runoff voting. This system lets people rank their candidate choices, meaning every person using it could vote for the third-party candidate they wanted as their No. 1 choice, with their safety candidate — a Democrat such as Kerry, for instance — somewhere down the list. Candidates are successively discarded by determining who got the least votes, then the second-least number of votes, the third-least number, and so on until one candidate has enough votes to win. It means there’s no such thing as a spoiler candidate and no such thing as vote splitting. It means a decline in “electability” as the defining factor in campaigns and an increase in the power of ideas.

In addition to encouraging coalitions and positive campaigning, as candidates vie to be a No. 2 choice for voters with whom they’re not No. 1, it encourages people to vote as they truly feel they should, including for third-party candidates, without throwing a vote away.

Forms of this are already in use in Cambridge and San Francisco.

It’s the only concrete step that improves U.S. politics without risking our culture. All else follows. It has to come from the grass roots up, though, and the grass roots seem focused on party instead of process.

ABHORRING A VACUUM

I begin to suspect there’s more than noise behind cats’ loathing of vacuum cleaners.

This occurred to me Saturday, when the niece was over and Roger Mexico, as usual, was hiding. It’s inexplicable. Sophia’s never done anything to the cat. She’s never had the opportunity, if only because he’s always hiding. And it’s hard to imagine Mexico reacting to some long-ago memory of being tortured by tots in some other house, since he’s been here since he was a baby.

When I went to the basement to do laundry, he emerged from his hiding place, thinking my presence was meant to give him the all-clear. “She’s still up there,” I warned him, repeatedly, but when I left, so did he. Saw Sophia. Froze.

Shaking my head, I went upstairs, seizing the opportunity to get some stuff done even though I knew it meant missing the outcome of the standoff. (She pets him, he tenses and walks quickly from the room. High drama.) My light-gray carpet was a horror — speckled with pebbles of cloth from new dark socks, littered with microscopic bits of paper and other rubble, clotted with hair off Mexico’s lush charcoal coat. This was my chance to vacuum, finally.

So I did, but ruefully, recognizing what a nightmare this was for the poor cat. First, confrontation with his most dread nemesis, a four-and-three-quarters-year-old girl in a purple princess dress. Then, overhead, the awful announcement of the only other thing that sends him running, that screaming, brutally gleaming, hard plastic eliminator of evidence, the vacuum.

I assumed Mexico would get over it. He gets over everything, returning quickly to his comic solemnity as whatever he suffers fades into foggy long-term memory or unimportance compared with more immediate possibilities: a pet, a nap or a feed.

But that must be it, I thought, running the vacuum repeatedly over the roughage of my room, watching it reluctantly suck up Mexico’s cottony patches of hair. Cats don’t have possessions. The only way they can claim ownership is by rubbing against something, marking it with their scent, leaving a little of themselves behind after a cleaning. Having so decorated, they can return to a room and look around approvingly, smelling themselves on the bookshelf and bedspread, seeing themselves on the carpet and closet floor.

Then here comes the vacuum, to destroy all their hard work, to eliminate all signs of occupation. It’s as though every week we come in with new books, magazines, wallpaper, furniture, dishware and Hummel figurines and regularly return to find it wiped away, just the raw architecture of our house remaining, for us to once again make into a home.

It’s not an easy thing to deal with. But I don’t vacuum that frequently.

You know, for the cat.

ARAFAT WHO?

CBS has fired a producer for interrupting “CSI: N.Y.” with breaking news.

Wow.

IDIOTORIAL

I’m fascinated by the absorption of rules without critical thought. In some cases, it’s rewarded because the opposite is punished: If there’s no walk signal, but no cars coming, either, it’s still jaywalking to cross the street. (Crossing the street with a walk signal and intense, speeding traffic is legal, if fatal, so far as I know.)

Why it happens in journalism, I have no idea, but examples abound. Here are two:

Newspapers try to avoid starting a story on one page and finishing it on another, because readers don’t like making the jump. Usually jumps are done solely from the front page of a section. At a tabloid newspaper, though, like a magazine there’s only one section, meaning one front page. The business section might start on page 39, for instance, with three stories jumping to later pages.

Sometimes the section will start on an even-numbered page, though, and readers will get two facing pages of news at once — pages 38 and 39, for a second instance.

Suddenly the question of jumps becomes far more complicated. Can you jump all six or so stories from those two pages? Do you stick to jumping only the stories on what is still technically the first page of the section, 38? Do you jump only from the second page, 39, because it’s the traditional right-hand page, where readers’ eyes go first? Do you jump no stories? Can you jump from 38 to 39?

The right answer is: No one cares! About 0.01 percent of newspaper readers think about these rules or even know of them, so clenching up, sweating and grappling over the choices with aggrieved desperation is a waste of time. One editors engage in all too frequently. Here’s my call: Jump stories from your front, even if it’s a two-page front. Also, consider getting a life.

There is also a long-standing rule that photographs in a newspaper aren’t supposed to be “posed.” It’s to ensure that the pictures are, in essence, factual, not fake: To reassure readers that, just as reporters aren’t making things up, photographers also aren’t faking action or results, and that newspapers represent reality and tell the truth.

But not every photograph shows breaking news of an actual event. Some are, in fact, posed, because that’s the risk you run in assigning a photo for any story from restaurant-hires-chef to chef-donates-kidney. Photographers aren’t always allowed in the kitchen, or the operating room. Sometimes they only have time to shake hands, explain who they are and shoot a few frames.

Editors come across pictures of people looking directly at the camera or holding things up for display and complain that they look posed. Yes. Because if a news photographer asks a subject to act as though they’re doing something they normally wouldn’t be, and to ignore the camera, that’s more fake than a picture that is obviously posed. Which is called, not to put too fine a point on it, a portrait.

Idiots.

JOURNALISN’TS

There are idiots in all professions. Having long ago chosen journalism, I liked to think it was the exception, but in fact the field is crawling with vermin, halfwits, bottom feeders and mad dogs, as well as your garden-variety hacks, lifers and conference dwellers.

A conference dweller is the sort that goes to peer gatherings, or merely scans the resulting literature, and comes away with a mistaken impression they’ve learned something. The problem with conference dwellers absorbing the lessons of accomplishments elsewhere is that they forget to think critically about what they’ve learned, much less to adapt what they’ve learned to where ever they return when their expense account runs out.

After USA Today hit the streets in 1982, for instance, a panicked clot of editors and publishers raced to produce the briefest, most colorful news report possible; in the U.S.A. today, most of those editors and publishers would blush furiously if shown their own product. It’s like unveiling long-lost home movies of them trying to moonwalk wearing one sequined glove.

Another bastard offspring of this was market research showing people didn’t like jumps, meaning they didn’t want to have to turn a page to finish an article.

This is reasonable. People don’t like to get up to answer the doorbell, either, even if it’s Ed McMahon and a giant check on the other side of the door, and they don’t even always like having to meet or exchange names with people with whom they want to have sex. But, darn it, sometimes you have to work a little. In the case of traditional newspapers, readers are asked to turn to a certain page if, and only if, they are adequately interested in a given topic. Whew.

The insight that this was a burden was taken very seriously by the executive editor of the midsize daily newspaper I worked at in the mid-1990s. For a brief, embarrassing period, we had no jumps from our front page. Because the front page is where newspapers keep the most exciting, interesting and urgent news, this meant that our newspaper’s most exciting, interesting and urgent news was also its shortest. The hotter the news, the less readers got to know about it.

Soon, some of the front-page articles were as long as ever, but we still couldn’t jump. Instead, our front page was just very, very ugly.

Eventually, the paper moved on to new concerns. If I remember correctly, one of them was journalism.

Tomorrow: More true, chilling tales of misguided newspaper policy! Not for the weak of heart!

CULTURAL EXCHANGE

Today I talked to Boston Herald columnist Joe Fitzgerald about my fears for the direction of the country, the nature of his column and its exaltation of the people voting for Bush and against gay marriage. Fitzgerald moralizes; nearly every column is about how liberal values are leading the United States straight to hell.

He writes that it was John Kerry and the Democrats who ran a sleazy campaign for president, not George Bush and the Republicans; and when I note, for example, that not a single charge of the bilious Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was substantiated, he admits he never really looked into the issue. He writes that it’s the 62 percent of voters blocking gay marriage that are standing up for American values; and when I note that freedom, equality and minding your own damn business are great American values, he replies that first-graders are being indoctrinated in the gay lifestyle and taught abortion is okay.

If one of his children said they were in a homosexual relationship, or getting an abortion, he’d love them no less, he said. But he clearly doesn’t want either to be legal.

The conversation got a bit heated. It never overheated. I’m old enough to realize that there’s little to be gained from getting crazy, and possibly something to gain from staying calm — even today, even after the dirty tricks of Bush Cheney ’04. Some of my anger dissipated as Fitzgerald told me of the personal attacks he suffers for his conservative views, even from people he works with daily in the Herald newsroom, and how even his 20-something daughter and wife of 30-plus years are upset by some of his opinions. Mainly it diminished when he shook my hand and expressed how impressed he was by the way I spoke with him: directly and reasonably.

Usually he gets anonymous rage.

Amazingly, Fitzgerald came over to me later and told me again how impressed he was. He patted me on the back. He shook my hand. Again.

Neither of our viewpoints budged an inch, so far as I can tell. Neither of us changed the other. But it was something, right? It was civility amid civil war. Culture amid a culture war. It’s the way things should be.

But the conservatives are still sticking their noses in other people’s business, taking away freedoms, rejecting equality.

Fitzgerald is courtly. A stand-up guy. And still quite probably the most pleasant face of a terrifying reality.

HAIL DEMOCRACY

Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi’s 60-day state of emergency, which sounds suspiciously like martial law, comes replete with material so sad it’s funny, or vice versa. Referring to the state of emergency, Allawi said:

We declared it today, and we are going to implement it whenever and wherever it is necessary. This will send a very powerful message that we are serious.

Actually, it sends an even more powerful message that we’re desperate.

President Bush declared the major fighting in Iraq over on May 1, 2003, beginning a U.S. occupation that sort of ended June 28 of this year with a ceremonial handoff of power to Allawi’s interim government. Four months later, that government — in a somewhat iffy lead-up to free, democratic elections planned for January — decides to use its “broad” powers to, as The New York Times says today, “impose curfews, order house-to-house searches and detain suspected criminals and insurgents.”

It’s obvious that the ongoing attack on the insurgent stronghold Fallujah, combined with the state of emergency, is a last-ditch effort to get the country under control. It’s also obvious that this is hopeless. The occupation forces just went through this in Samarra last month, and that city is already back in the hands of the insurgents (meaning, in an unfortunate and impossible to ignore irony, the Iraqi people).

Allawi and the United States are desperate because it’s already acknowledged that the January elections will be held only in some of Iraq, not in parts Allawi’s government and the United States can’t control. But you can’t establish a legitimate government from only the pacified part of a country. That makes it, to those elsewhere, an illegitimate government. Hell, many in the United States considered George Bush an illegitimate president, and we really did vote in the 2004 election.

What is now a battle between two countries will become a civil war over a government that much of the country didn’t elect. To keep that from happening, the interim government’s best solution is: martial law.

Hail democracy.

CIVIL SERVICES

The Postal Service, the band, ran afoul of the Postal Service, the postal service, but there was a happy ending, which The New York Times reports today.

I’m a fan of both services, although the band’s sweet music and gently biting lyrics come out a little ahead of the U.S. Postal Service’s growing restrictions (no more free mailing tape, for instance) and productivity enhancers (fewer employees, more mail-it-yourself machines along the lines of automated tellers and supermarket checkout kiosks).

Mainly I think the story, printed below for those without a Times password, is a great example of how problems should be worked out. The services found a civil solution, so to speak.

Postal Service Tale: Indie Rock, Snail Mail and Trademark Law
By BEN SISARIO

About two and a half years ago, Jimmy Tamborello and Ben Gibbard began to make music together despite the distance between them. Mr. Tamborello, who makes electronica with a group called Dntel, lived in Los Angeles, while Mr. Gibbard, who sings in the emo band Death Cab for Cutie, lived in Seattle. They sent each other music through the mail, completing songs bit by bit, and after about five months, they had finished an album.

In honor of their working method they called themselves the Postal Service. Their album, “Give Up,” was released by the Seattle-based Sub Pop Records in early 2003 and became an indie-rock hit, eventually selling almost 400,000 copies, the label’s second biggest seller ever, after Nirvana’s “Bleach.”

Then they heard from the real Postal Service, in the form of a cease-and-desist letter.

“It was really polite,” said Tony Kiewel, an artist and repertory representative at Sub Pop who works with the band. “It said that the Postal Service is a registered trademark of the United States Postal Service, and that though they were very, very flattered that we were using the name, they need to enforce their copyright.”

The letter arrived in August 2003, and for months the label and the band fretted over the consequences: Would the band have to change its name? Would Sub Pop have to destroy its stock of the album?

The outcome was as unusual as the band itself: this week the United States Postal Service - the real one, as in stamps and letters - signed an agreement with Sub Pop granting a free license to use the name in exchange for working to promote using the mail. Future copies of the album and the group’s follow-up work will have a notice about the trademark, while the federal Postal Service will sell the band’s CD’s on its Web site, potentially earning a profit. The band may do some television commercials for the post office.

The group also agreed to perform at the postmaster general’s annual National Executive Conference in Washington on Nov. 17. The attendees might not realize what a rare treat they are in for since the Postal Service does not play many gigs. Mr. Tamborello and Mr. Gibbard are busy with their regular bands: Dntel, with its atmospheric electronic dance music, and Death Cab for Cutie, which has become a college rock favorite for its heartfelt, jangly punk rock known as emo.

Gary Thuro, a manager of communications for the United States Postal Service who handles licensing and promotion, said the publicity would be valuable.

“We’re always looking for ways to extend our brand and reach into areas we don’t typically reach,” he said, “like teens and people in their 20’s, who are typically doing business online and are not familiar with the Postal Service.”

Not familiar with the Postal Service?

“I have three kids, and they do most of their correspondence online,” Mr. Thuro said.

He said the post office had been looking to promote its brand through popular culture tie-ins and cited the campaign for the 2003 film “Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat.” The post office is ending its sponsorship of Lance Armstrong’s cycling team at the end of this year.

The agency’s only concern, Mr. Thuro said, was that a rock band might prove an inappropriate mascot for a federal agency. But when executives met with Mr. Tamborello and Mr. Gibbard in Los Angeles earlier this year, they were set at ease. Soft-spoken, well groomed and unusually polite, they are two of the least offensive rock stars imaginable, and their music — bubbly yet pensive electronic pop with earnest vocals by Mr. Gibbard — is unlikely to dissuade anyone from buying stamps.

Mr. Tamborello, 29, said the band was happy to comply with the agreement.

“Doing promos for the post office seems a little bit weird,” he said. “But it’s a funny story for them to have — it’s a good story of how you can still use normal snail mail.”

He noted that the regular mail is inexpensive and easy to use, and that packages containing their working discs arrived in a couple of days, a comfortable margin for their unhurried schedule — although when finishing the album, they did use Federal Express a couple of times.

“Just to get it back and forth as quick as possible,” he said. “It saved a day.”

PURPLE STATES

It is depressing to look at an electoral college map, with its stark red-blue division — mostly red, making a passage from Massachusetts to California seem much like a trip from the Shire to Rivendell by way of Mordor.

It gets a little better if you look at a county-by-county breakdown, such as The Boston Globe did, where you can see patches of blue, counties huddled together for strength, even amid the blood red of Texas, Alabama and Mississippi.

Now that the election’s over, though, it may help us noble losers to blur the lines even further. Never mind the binary division of the electoral vote, the brittle lines of the county-by-county chart. Forget razor-wired red and blue entirely and instead blend the colors by percentage, making much of the country a somewhat pleasant purple, albeit one with, state by state, more of a red hue.

In this election, there were many states divided by presidential vote by around 20 percentage points, but less than a fifth of the country was more divided, about nine states ranging from Kansas (a 26 percentage point difference) to Utah (a 44 percentage point difference). (Oh, and the District of Columbia, whose three electoral college votes went Democratic in a striking 81 percentage point split.)

We are more alike, or at least more evenly divided, than a look at the electoral college map suggests. While it’s valuable to acknowledge the divisions, especially county by county, it’s vital that we remember too that we share the same space. The borders aren’t quite so solid.

Yet.

CAUGHT IN A LOOP

My hopes were that the next four years would bring more civility to our political process. With George Bush’s acceptance speech, those hopes are all but gone.

When appointed president four years ago, Bush’s lack of mandate and hints of bipartisanship as governor of Texas — added to his own claims to be humble in foreign policy, “a uniter, not a divider” and “a compassionate conservative” — had the nation thinking the bruising politics of the Clinton years would be put behind us. Bush spat on that.

Democratic anger was already high after the irresponsible Republican cruelties of those years, from rumors about Vince Foster being murdered to a $50 million-plus real estate investigation that wound up impeaching Clinton for having an affair. Had the Bush-Gore fight been decided in a nonpartisan way, possibly producing a President Gore, that anger would have dissipated, but Republicans have long since given up being fair fighters, reasonable losers or gracious winners. They will do anything to win a race, while Democrats are steeped in plurality; it’s against their nature, in general, to launch an attack like that of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

And Republicans are the ones claiming the moral high ground, and getting away with it, because Americans are strange. A slim majority perceive themselves simultaneously as underdogs and as the paragons of humankind. They are angered by others being angered by U.S. anger. They are scared by others being scared of them. They think they’re smart for rejecting intelligence. They mistake entertainment for facts, facts for lies and lies for entertainment.

And for another four years, in the eyes of the world, Democrats are lumped in with them, for reasons venal and mystifying, distressing and appalling.

As I say, I’ve all but given up on healing. It’s unclear why a Republican sweep would create it, when the tenuousness of 2000 didn’t.

What I was going to say instead is that for the race four years from now, all I’m looking for is a fairer fight.

For instance, let’s hold real debates. The candidates should speak to each other; moderators should be allowed to correct candidates’ inaccuracies and note their lies; when citizens ask questions, they should feel empowered to remind the candidates they haven’t answered.

But after that, I come up empty. The fight isn’t going to be fair, because — again — the Republicans know what they have to do to win, and they do it without compunction. Democrats can’t do it because they’d become as bad as the Republicans. All they can do is hope that something happens in the next four years to convince people that the Republican way is wrong, but that would mean horror and misery, and what good person can hope for that? Not to mention the danger inherent in that gamble: that things don’t become so bad that we can’t find our way back. Democratic anger is impotent.

That brings me back to hoping, including for more civility in our public process. Back to the beginning.

Back to hopelessness.

GOOD

The Kerry-Edwards campaign isn’t conceding.

Good.

It’s been a horrible night, in the truest sense of the word. I’ve felt horror. Despair.

And now I feel a moment of gratitude, almost a moment of grace, and I wish I could shake the hands of my candidates and simply tell them, “Thank you for not giving up. Thank you for fighting.”

America deserves it — certainly the half that voted Democratic this year, and the half that did so in 2000, surrendering too easily and finding only a betrayal of bipartisanship, an assumption of an absent mandate. Because of that betrayal, our half knows it has nothing at all to gain by conceding. And everything to lose.

So I would add to my thanks to the Democratic candidates, “Thank you for fighting honorably.”

And I would tell them, “Good night,” and hope for a better morning.

EXIT LAUGHING

Graffiti is usually sadly preadolescent, with even attempted wit tending to stink of tired shtick, whether it’s suspiciously earnest homophobia or intellectualism. That’s the saddest: people sitting on a toilet proclaiming their heterosexuality when no one’s challenged it, somehow not recognizing how desperate it seems; and someone correcting their spelling, even though the chances are infinitesimal the first writer will see the corrections.

But at the Charlton rest stop on the way back from New York, I emerged from a toilet stall, I confess, charmed and amused, chuckling and eager to share the thoughts I’d found scrawled within. It could have been punchiness after so long on the road, or maybe just low expectations. But it worked.

On the door of my stall, in red: BOSTON RED SUCKS
Underneath, in smaller black writing: Yeah, they suck so much they won the World Series!

And by the toilet paper assembly, etched into areas freed by the scraping away of toothpaste-blue paint, in cramped and mild writing made funnier by its subversive modesty: Lesbians are awesome! And up and to the right: Gays suck dick! And, finally, lower and to the right again, the completion of an arc, the arch of an eyebrow, the culmination of a wide-open wink, the end of the rainbow: Fags are gay!

Interstate 90 eastbound. Farthest stall from the men’s room entrance. Visit quickly. It’s a transitory medium.

OH, SEE

Unbelievably, a promo is running on Fox Television reassuring us that:

“The series that redefined a generation is back.”

It’s unbelievable because the promo is for “The O.C.,” which is returning for a second season of what is essentially a transplanted “Dawson’s Creek” with faux class consciousness. Somehow, this show, all one season of it so far, meaning all 27 episodes, has redefined a generation?

Probably only because this has become the generation that, until a year ago, had to watch something else Thursdays at 8 p.m. The promo’s claim falls into that numbing gap of things that seem like hyperbole but aren’t, like the claim that something will “change life as we know it,” when things are actually doing that constantly: “The O.C.” has changed life as we know it, for those who’ve heard of it, but so has the salad spinner, bubble tea and the fact that you can get stamps from an automated teller.

The line is even vague on which generation has been redefined. It’s possible, although unlikely, that it refers to the greatest generation, meaning those old enough to fight World War II. Its members may be shutting off televisions in disgust, for instance, earning redefinition from “the greatest generation” to “the generation that can’t stand the crap they have on television now.”

Of course it’s most likely the tagline refers to the youth of America, those watching and enjoying “The O.C.,” buying the first season on DVD, posting to or creating “O.C.” Web sites and listening to all three “O.C.” soundtrack albums, which implies that the show really has redefined a generation — as the generation that will O.D. on “The O.C.” and, in a year or so, move on to another redefinition.

PEOPLE WHO SHOULDN’T USE SIMILE

1. Michael Ovitz. The Hollywood power broker, explaining how he was ignored and mistreated when he became a Disney executive, says he was “cut out like a cancer.”

Here’s the complete quote:

I guess you could say I got pushed out the sixth-floor window. I was being left out of meetings. Nobody was talking to me. I was cut out like cancer. All of a sudden I found myself with no information. I didn't know what was going on.

The simile is wrong on so many levels that it’s difficult to address them all. It’s so wrong that I can only conclude that, when Ovitz arrived at Disney, company leader Michael Eisner suddenly realized the extent of Ovitz’ failure at language and immediately ordered everyone to be rude to him.

Anyway, there’s no one else on the list.

BECAUSE WE’LL KILL YOU

The headlines on the Boston Herald today are astoundingly ominous, and it’s not apparent the tone is intended by either the police or newspaper.

Now, keep in mind that a 21-year-old college student was killed last week when police fired a pepper spray cartridge into a (literally) riotously happy crowd of Red Sox fans.

“Hooligans on notice,” the Herald front says. “COPS: DON’T MESS WITH US.”

Right. Because we’ll kill you.

The immense headline refers to a story inside, which itself bears the headline:

“Cops: Don’t even think about rioting.”

Right.

Because we’ll kill you.

Lest readers think I’m being insensitive to Boston’s finest, who must be all torn up inside over the death of a pretty young thing with her whole life ahead of her, check out what “one source” said for quoting in the Herald:

“We’re not going to stand back this time. Once they start acting up, we’re going to go in and take them out ... our response is going to be swift and sudden. Any bad behavior will simply not be tolerated.”

What kind of police force does Boston have that policy such as this is given at all — and then given anonymously instead of addressed directly by a named official? Yet other anonymous sources claim the officers responsible for Victoria Snelgrove’s death truly are distraught, even “devastated.” To any other police department, this could be the time to speak responsibly on the dangers of letting good cheer over a winning team get out of hand, or about the wisdom of dispersing when warned by police, because the consequences can be fatal.

But not in Boston. Here anonymous threats stand in for responsible policy-making. A woman is dead. And the youth have been warned.

TORA BORING

The world is moving on from the Tora Bora miniscandal, if it even qualifies as one. I’m going to post these links to and from Talking Points Memo anyway, just to be a completist — and to reinforce the notion that I’m right sometimes, which is always a relief.

I said retired Gen. Tommy Franks’ defense of our failed attempts to grab Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora — echoed by others, such as Vice President Cheney — was nonsense. Talking Points memo, with its superior although unpaid staff of reader/researchers, revives for the record:

A December 2001 article from The Christian Science Monitor in which an Afghan alliance commander says they had evidence bin Laden was in Tora Bora but now “don’t know where he is.” What Kerry said in mid-2004 has been the accepted narrative for far more than two years.

A March 2002 Monitor article noting that bin Laden broadcast his plans to stick to Tora Bora and “teach [the Americans] a lesson, the same one we taught the Russians.”

A Washington Post story from April 2002 saying that the Bush administration itself ...

... has concluded that Osama bin Laden was present during the battle for Tora Bora late last year and that failure to commit U.S. ground troops to hunt him was its gravest error in the war against al Qaeda, according to civilian and military officials with first-hand knowledge.

Here, here, here and here is some TPM analysis.

So there! Take that!

COUNTERPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

The effort by hard-line Catholics to get John Kerry excommunicated are very likely counterproductive; I know anecdotally many Catholics fall short of strict Vatican rulings on, for example, birth control. And the rationally religious must recognize it’s a short distance from excommunication for merely supporting the civil right of abortion to excommunication for, say, using a condom.

A no-excuses policy of excommunication of sinners for birth control alone would probably result in a catastrophic drop-off in adherents in Italy, let alone New Jersey. Even the churches in Vatican City might empty out. You needn’t look too far to notice that Italy’s birth rate is among the lowest in the European Union and the world — a little odd for a nation of Catholics, no?

On the other hand, self-righteousness is a powerful and tempting emotion, and it’s not unusual for people to make themselves feel superior or safe by damning others for their own sins. For all the self-righteous excommunicators among Catholic voters, it might be good to consider what you get by rejecting a sinner: George Bush the heretic!

MAG BUYS RAG

The company that owns Boston magazine is buying the Weekly Dig, a story about which the dailies will have more tomorrow.

The Herald, for instance, is told by Metrocorp Holdings Inc. — a name you can trust! — that buying the Dig can help the company reach readers age 21 to 35, called by its president, David H. Lipson, “a totally new space for us.”

That says a lot about Boston magazine. There’s nothing about a city magazine inherently scary to people age 21 to 35, especially in one of the smartest cities in the United States, so no real reason Boston shouldn’t be read by them. Buying a slightly obnoxious weekly paper to answer a need that shouldn’t exist sounds the wrong note, or at least suggests a degree of cluelessness.

That may make the two publications a good match, in a completely incompatible way. When Dig publisher and founder Jeff Lawrence complains about the “Lexus left” because “They live in Melrose and Concord now, and are liberal and drive a Lexus,” he sure as hell isn’t looking for the same audience as Boston magazine. But portraying the Dig as an “alternative to alternative weeklies,” bipartisan and fresh, goes a little far.

In truth, it’s more nasty than fresh, mistaking puerility for independence, and its content is a little thin to go bragging about its superiority to alternative weeklies — let’s just say the Phoenix, okay? — that have been around since 1966 and retain a circulation of about 100,000. (The Dig has 30,000.) The problem with this is that simply rhetorically downgrading the classic limousine liberals to driving their own Japanese import doesn’t really qualify as fresh thinking. There’s never been anything wrong with liberals being rich, and anyone who thinks there is should contemplate life today without the Kennedy family’s work. Or tell us what percentage of young liberals intend never to drive a nice car.

It’s just lazy thinking.

Lazy thinking seemingly endorsed by a purchase made by equally lazy thinkers who pander to the demographic loathed by the purchase.

This should be interesting.

BANK ON IT

I have been made redundant by those whippersnappers at the Harvard Crimson! Viewing with alarm the coming incursion of Sovereign Bank into Harvard Square, already thick with the stench of bank branches, I intended to alert the world, be hailed as a hero and get my blog responsibilities over with for the day.

But all I can do is link to the Crimson’s story. With gratitude, actually, for its efforts, comprehensiveness and overall competence.

I can also note some amusing minutiae about the Citizens branch, though, that the Crimson doesn’t.

Not only will the branch have “a staff of 11 bankers who are able to speak seven different languages,” a community room with a 40-person capacity and a wall advertising city facts and events, but — and I hope you’re sitting down for this — “plasma screens broadcasting Citizens’ special offers for customers”!

Let’s all bank there!

Or not. Banks, especially big ones such as Bank of America, are crazy for the business of businesses and tend to do their best for them on fees, while smaller accounts such as ours take the hit for increased expenditures. Leasing expensive space (with plasma screens) in Harvard Square hardly bodes well for small-customer bargains. Cambridge Savings Bank, which owns, is more or less exempt from this. (In fact, it’s a landlord in the square. To repeat one thing from the Crimson: The Citizens branch squats in some of the 100,000 square feet owned by Cambridge Savings Bank, because Abercrombie & Fitch passed the lease on without warning.)

UPDATIN BIN LADEN

China, according to United Press International, is denying it let Osama bin Laden in but plans to betray him and give him to the United States.

And a spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry wouldn’t lie, would she?

For the conspiracy theorists out there, though, Dan Mahoney — whoever that is — has a Web site looking at the China-bin Laden connection in depth.

Here’s the original Misanthropicity link on the topic.

FRANKS TALK

Retired Gen. Tommy Franks can’t think his way through an op-ed piece any better than he can bring Osama bin Laden to justice, although in this case those are the same things.

He writes today in The New York Times in an attempt to give a devastating reply to what U.S. Sen. John Kerry keeps saying: President Bush made “a colossal error of judgment” in focusing on Iraq instead of bin Laden. The accusation tars Franks also, since he was in charge of the military operation considered to have been our best shot at getting bin Laden since 9/11.

“He escaped in the mountains of Tora Bora. We had him surrounded. But we didn’t use American forces, the best-trained in the world, to go kill him. The president relied on Afghan warlords,” Kerry said in the first debate, and that reliance led to bin Laden’s escape. “He outsourced that job, too.”

Franks makes three main points to dispute Kerry’s “distortions of history” and prove Bush hasn’t taken his eye off the ball — the ball being terrorism. He distinguishes these three main points by labeling them “first,” “second” and, yes, “third.”

Look at points two and three and see if there’s anything odd:

Second, we did not “outsource” military action. We did rely heavily on Afghans because they knew Tora Bora, a mountainous, geographically difficult region on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is where Afghan mujahedeen holed up for years, keeping alive their resistance to the Soviet Union. Killing and capturing Taliban and Qaeda fighters was best done by the Afghan fighters who already knew the caves and tunnels.

Third, the Afghans weren’t left to do the job alone. Special forces from the United States and several other countries were there, providing tactical leadership and calling in air strikes. Pakistani troops also provided significant help — as many as 100,000 sealed the border and rounded up hundreds of Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

Did everyone spot the clunker? Right: These are the same points. Franks says “We did rely heavily on Afghans” but that “Afghans weren’t left to do the job alone.”

This is like telling someone, “First, I don’t want you to go alone. Second, I want someone to go with you.”

Nice trick. But it pales in comparison with Franks’ first point in defense of Bush and the reliance on Afghans in trying to capture bin Laden. Read carefully.

We don’t know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001. Some intelligence sources said he was; others indicated he was in Pakistan at the time; still others suggested he was in Kashmir. Tora Bora was teeming with Taliban and Qaeda operatives, many of whom were killed or captured, but Mr. bin Laden was never within our grasp.

Oh, retired Gen. Franks, if “we don’t know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora,” how do we know he “was never within our grasp”?

Franks also fails to reply to Kerry’s assertion that the Afghans we “were there” with in Tora Bora had only weeks earlier been supporters of bin Laden and the Taliban, making them poor choices as allies — in fact, as guides on which we relied — in this crucial effort. Presumably this is because Franks can’t refute it, since he certainly shouldn’t be ignoring it: Kerry has made this charge as frequently as he’s made the one about our military outsourcing. Franks wraps up his defense on the Afghan front by insisting we had enough troops there to call it “a center of focus.” (This is wonderful language, something along the lines of Bush noting in his January State of the Union speech that “the Kay Report identified dozens of weapons-of-mass-destruction-related program activities” in Iraq.)

But enough troops, one wonders, for what? To let bin Laden go? To hand great portions of the country back to the warlords? To let Afghanistan again become the world’s top producer of opium?

Well done, Franks. It’s clear why we have the terrorists on the run ... and terrorist attacks on the rise.

A NEW CHAPTER

Between the small art galleries attached to CVS, a couple of far-flung bookstores and a smattering of restaurants and interesting shops, Porter Square had some minimal tourist attraction. The opening of Porter Square Books, by virtue of its presence in the square itself, is a significant improvement.

It’s exciting to have it there, although it isn’t quite all there: The coffee, pastries and periodicals are to come, and many shelves are bare or barely inhabited. There are curiosities and counterintuitions in the stocking, as well, which could have various explanations. There are two of the four Thursday Next books by Jasper Fforde, but not the introductory “Eyre Affair.” Five of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels are here, but not “The Great Gatsby.” Michael Chabon’s “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” is here, accompanied by his McSweeney’s anthology but not “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay.”

But the store falls into cliches, as well. Among all of Joseph Heller’s works, the only one warranting shelf space is “Catch-22.” The only work by Richard Adams is “Watership Down,” but there are two copies — different editions, both softcover.

On the positive side, I found the books I wanted, Oliver Sacks’ “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” and the latest Elizabeth George softcover. The just-released National Geographic World Atlas is in stock already. This store’s buying philosophy may be the equivalent of Newbury Comics’, with a carefully thought-out (but more spare) assortment of works relying on rapid replacement instead of redundancy.

Or it may be more or less random.

If only the Nuggets used-music shop (once found across the bookstore’s parking lot) had lasted, the square would really have something. As it is, with the rug shop that replaced it shutting down, that space is open again and has the potential of becoming something fun, like a small billiards parlor — or something appallingly dull, like a real estate office.

No matter. It’s nice enough to have Porter Square Books in the neighborhood. And so cleverly named, too.

OCTOBER SURPRISE

Osama bin Laden is in China and about to be captured and handed over to the Bush administration, according to last Sunday’s El Mundo, the daily tabloid based in Spain’s capital.

Reader beware, as a bombshell such as this, if true, would likely be getting more attention worldwide. Still, El Mundo isn’t some rabid rag, but a respected newspaper with 287,000 readers that BBC News calls “arguably the most independent-minded of the big Madrid dailies.” It’s only been around since 1989 and is already second in circulation in the country.

But finding El Mundo’s scoop took some good detective work; what a friend has passed on to me here has not become big news outside its pages, as is obvious from this Google news search.

El Mundo’s article is in Spanish, of course. Here’s the translation provided me:

Bin Laden Is In China

So confirms Gordon Thomas, a journalist with contacts in major intelligence services. The terrorist might have reached an agreement with China, which is now negotiating his return with President Bush. It’s his great electoral trick.

By GORDON THOMAS

During the final stretch of the U.S. elections, Osama bin Laden could become the ace up President Bush’s sleeve. At this very moment, Washington is negotiating, in utmost secrecy, a deal with Beijing, the Chinese capital, to extract bin Laden from his sanctuary in the turbulent Muslim provinces of China, to the northwest of the country of the Great wall.

More than 5 million people, many of them fanatical followers of Osama, live in what is considered one of the most volatile regions on Earth. Thousands of them work for the crime syndicates that traffic in human beings or drugs to the west. Last summer, bin Laden finalized a treaty with the government in Beijing, in which the latter would guarantee safety for bin Laden, while he would guarantee the cessation of the guerilla war by Chinese Muslims against the Chinese government.

Over the years, tens of thousands of troops of the People’s Liberation Army have been sent to the region to crush the insurgents.

Ever since the arrival of the Saudi Arabian bin Laden, the region has been relatively tranquil, and the Muslims living there have been permitted to traffic in human beings and drugs.

But now bin Laden could find himself trapped in his hole if an extraordinary agreement between Beijing and Washington bears fruit. It would mean China would extradite to the U.S. the most sought-after terrorist in the world.

The capture of Osama bin Laden would virtually guarantee the re-election of George Bush Jr., and would confirm to the millions of undecided voters in the U.S. that the war on terrorism was justified after bin Laden authorized the attacks of Sept. 11 against New York and Washington.

“A new Bush administration would laud Beijing as its great new ally in the war on terrorism. China would benefit from status of most favored nation in all possible regards. Contracts worth billions of dollars would be approved on the fast track. The history of human rights violations in
China would be ignored,” confirmed a high-level Pentagon official. He added that only a handful of “very high-ranking members” of the Bush administration know of the plan to “catch bin Laden in exchange for special relations with China.” With almost total certainty, these would include the vice president, Dick Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld.

Agreeing to speak of condition of anonymity, the official gave details of the plan to capture bin Laden as a means to keep Bush in the White House. He explained that this is not the first time an American administration has resorted to similar maneuvers during an election year.

Toward the end of the Jimmy Carter administration, an agreement was finalized between the then-future president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, and Iran whereby the American diplomats held in Tehran, the Iranian capital, would be freed the same day that Reagan took office.

According to Ari Ben-Menashe, former national security advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, “they paid enormous sums of money to the Iranian ayatollahs.” Ben-Menashe confirms that he himself was a key player in the negotiations that would later be known as Reagan’s October Surprise.

THERESA, ON THE TRAIL

Theresa, the wife of senator and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, has dedicated herself to finding out if another October Surprise is forthcoming. Two weeks ago, she surprised her husband’s political advisors by declaring in public, “I wouldn't be surprised if, before the elections, Bush captures bin Laden.” Since then, Mrs. Kerry has refused to comment on her explosive statement. But within the intelligence community rumors circulate that she and her husband were advised that any statements about an agreement that includes the capture of bin Laden would compromise the national security of the U.S.

And Washington analyst Al Santoli, national security adviser to California Republican [Congressman] Dana Rohrabacher, and editor of the respected bulletin The China Monitor, confirmed that an October Surprise, “would not surprise me in the least.”

In what has been his first confirmed sighting in many months, the refuge of bin Laden has been found by an NSA satellite, one of many the super-secret U.S. agency uses to search for him. His hiding place is found near a lake close to the border between China and Pakistan.

On the other side of the Zaskar Mountains, where the snowy peaks dominate the surroundings of bin Laden’s sanctuary, one finds a detachment of Pakistani and American special forces awaiting the order to capture bin Laden in his hideout and take him out on a flight to Pakistan.

ESCORT OF 50 WARRIORS

During the last six months there have been repeated sightings of bin Laden in the mountains and wastelands of the northwest border. American intelligence agencies in the region believe that the Saudi millionaire, accompanied by an escort of 50 mujahedeen, traveled east towards
Kashmir and thence crossed into China.

The agents think that, previously, bin Laden met various times with high-level officials from Beijing. He convinced them that he was capable of obtaining peace in China’s Muslim provinces. “We are aware of these meetings,” I was assured by Mansur Ahmed, chief of police in Bandipor, in the northern part of Kashmir, “but they took place in Chinese territory.”

Accompanying bin Laden was Ayan al-Zawahiri, his principle adviser and personal doctor (bin Laden suffers from a serious kidney problem). Al-Zawahiri is a surgeon trained in Cairo, accused of terrorism in Egypt and sentenced to death. After bin Laden, he is the next most sought-after
man on Earth.

White House sources have refused to comment. “If the negotiations fail, that’s not the best time for the president to be publicly implicated in taking part in the negotiations,” said one source.

It’s thought that the possibility of an agreement came up at the beginning of this year after Donald Rumsfeld met with high-level members of the Chinese government during a visit to the Far East. Later, George Tenet, then director of the CIA, ordered a study on the viability of an operation to capture bin Laden. Tenet was informed that the only way it could work was with Chinese assistance.

“How far this collaboration will go in the weeks remaining until the election will depend in large part on how much Bush can win China’s trust that he will maintain his promises to them,” said the Pentagon official.

Writer Gordon Thomas is an expert in intelligence and the author of books about the CIA and the Mossad.

MATH PROBLEM

Not a customer of Citizens Bank? Just have a question you want to ask a public relations officer? Then don’t call them.

No, really. Although there must be some kind of science to the modern voice mail system, Citizens Bank seems to be employing evil scientists in the pursuit of evil science. To confirm this hypothesis, try this experiment:

Call the bank at (800) 922-9999.

“Thank you for calling Citizens Bank. Not your typical bank. For existing account information, press one. To transfer funds, press two. For added services, press three. To speak with a customer service specialist at any time, press zero.”

A customer service specialist, that sounds keen!

“To speak with the most appropriate specialist, press one for checking or money market accounts, press two for savings, press three for check orders.”

Well, no, that’s not right. Because we’re not customers yet. Call back.

“Thank you for calling Citizens Bank. Not your typical bank. For existing account information, press one. To transfer funds, press two. For added services, press three. To speak with a customer service specialist at any time, press zero.”

Uh ... added services, I guess.

“To activate or replace a Citizens ATM or debit card, press one. To apply for a new account or loan, press two. For current rates, press three. To end this call, press eight. To speak with a customer service specialist at any time, press zero.”

A customer service specialist? No. Don’t fall for that again.

The closest you can get to a correct answer is “two.” It wins you a conversation with a clueless long-distance teller who doesn’t even know what a public relations officer is.

Sigh.

LET’S ALL GO THE DECORDOVA!

I must brag: On The Boston Globe’s arts section front yesterday, albeit at the bottom of the page, was excellent play for the artwork of my cousin, Nina Levy, now at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln.

Here’s the text of the article, which ran with two photos, one of each piece Nina has showing. The Globe didn’t post the photos that ran with the story, though, so I will. One is called “Big Baby,” the other “Headlong.”

REPLAY

I’ve limped to another conclusion on what was to be my explosive, boffo wrap-up to my previous post. Yes, scads of high school students chose to write in that they want an “iPod” in place of the generic “digital music player,” quite possibly indicating not just any digital music player will do, and that people really want specifically and only iPods.

But it may also have been used in the same way people reach for a Kleenex that is really a CVS facial tissue, Xerox something on a Canon copy machine and throw a dead body in a Dumpster that was really made by ... um, some competitor of Dumpster.

If this is true, the confusion could still work to Apple’s advantage. For all we know, it may already be, prompting comments such as, “But I wanted the kind of iPod made by Sony!”

DIGITAL PLAYERS? THEY WISH

Anyone starting a business inevitably has to define the niche of a new product, or at least explain why it will succeed where others failed, or where others are already succeeding. Don’t tell this to makers of digital music players, who keep finding the money to roll out generic products in feeble competition with Apple’s market-leading iPod and iPod Mini.

This week sees the rollout of the Virgin Player. Its main distinction is that it has the Virgin name on it. So do music stores, an airline and a cola, though, and none of these are anything more than interesting also-rans.

Nike and Philips announced a player this week, too, but it at least has a “performance monitor” for athletes that sets it apart. And a strobe light!

Last week it was the Rocbox, which is being marketed as sleek and shiny in black chrome, getting attention mainly because of the street cred of the man behind it: Damon Dash, the Roc-A-Fella empire builder, who plans to make it a vital hip-hop fashion accessory.

There are already a couple dozen of these music players available to what mp3.com calls “an increasingly confused public,” and every one released since the iPods took over has been touted as the device that’ll send Apple's players the way of the Mac G4 Cube. There’s nothing wrong with taking a gamble and defying the conventional wisdom, but it defies logic, too, to think that adding three players to a crowded market is going to thin it out somehow. While the names Nike, Virgin and Roc command some attention, and corporate synergies work in their favor, here are some reality checks:

Virgin already has four players for sale, including a stylish round “wearable” unveiled in July. When’s the last time you saw one? Has this Virgin Pulse become synonymous with mp3 players? Sure — just as Virgin’s cola has replaced Coke and Pepsi.

Sony thought its brand would rule the market, too, and it tried to stay in control by specifying which music formats its players would accept. In September, the company went crawling to the mp3 well, expanding its acceptable formats and, essentially, admitting defeat. Apple limits the formats it takes but is bending the world to its will, adding Windows users to its iPod, iTunes, iTunes Music Store world.

The iPod has 82 percent of the U.S. market for digital music players, despite all the competition. The news today is that Apple’s fourth-quarter profit nearly doubled from last year, with iPods accounting for nearly a quarter of the company’s revenue. Apple’s sales rose 37 percent, with iPod sales jumping by a factor of five.

The iPod name has also, unlike the Virgin Pulse, become synonymous with its product. In a survey of high school students, the financial adviser Piper Jaffray found that 16 percent already had an iPod, 24 percent planned to get one in the next year and that the players were the fourth-most-desired holiday gift. What’s important here is that “iPod” wasn’t an answer that could be chosen; the students all took the initiative to write in “iPod.”

It’s a fragmented, confusing music-player market out there, requiring a lot of research, unless consumers jump immediately to the “iPod” category. Consumers don’t want to be confused, and they don’t want to do research. They want an iPod.

GET REAL

This is an odd country, so it’s very possible, if not likely, President Bush will keep the White House for another four years. This is largely because this is a faith-based presidency, and people of faith have a keen interest in proving their mettle by keeping faith despite any and all evidence to the contrary.

So do your worst! Torture Bush voters, show them hard data, show them irrefutable evidence, remind them of the record, ask them pertinent questions! They won’t back down!

Perhaps current events as filtered through the cartoons of Pat Oliphant and Tom Toles can help, but don’t count on it.

WINK, WINK. DON’T BUDGE, BUDGE.

I’ve a friend who’s convinced that President Bush brought up the Dred Scott decision in the most recent presidential debate with U.S. Sen. John Kerry as a wink to antiabortion conservatives. I’m not so sure.

Dred Scott vs. Sanford was the 1857 U.S. Supreme Court case in which Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, writing for a 7-2 majority, said blacks “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic.” While it was true all were created equal, Taney found it “too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration.”

I don’t see a wink. I can’t draw a devious connection to abortion. Bush brought up Dred Scott to explain what kind of Supreme Court justice he wouldn’t appoint:

I wouldn’t pick a judge who said that the Pledge of Allegiance couldn’t be said in a school because it had the words “under God” in it. I think that’s an example of a judge allowing personal opinion to enter into the decision-making process as opposed to a strict interpretation of the Constitution. Another example would be the Dred Scott case, which is where judges, years ago, said that the Constitution allowed slavery because of personal property rights. That’s a personal opinion. That’s not what the Constitution says.

I also think he meant it as straight-on pandering to black voters. If there’s a wink, it’s to opponents of gay marriage, who feel court decisions in favor have been made by “activist judges.”

Another friend rewards Bush’s Dred Scott comment with a slow, sarcastic clap of scorn. The president boasting that he wouldn’t appoint a Taney to the high court is akin to bragging that he wouldn’t make Earl Butz head of Housing and Urban Development.

The reference may have been clumsy, but, judging from the deer-in-the-headlights look he’s adopted for his face-offs with Kerry, we should credit President Bush for even remembering to hit his talking points. What’s more likely to be mistaken for panicked presidential babbling is Bush’s gratuitous references to the International Criminal Court.

He’s made one in each debate, and it was strangest the first time around. It came in response to Kerry saying:

You don’t help yourself with other nations when you turn away from the global warming treaty, for instance, or when you refuse to deal at length with the United Nations. You have to earn that respect. And I think we have a lot of earning back to do.

To which Bush replied:

My opponent talks about me not signing certain treaties. Let me tell you one thing I didn’t sign, and I think it shows the difference of our opinion — the difference of opinions. And that is, I wouldn’t join the International Criminal Court. It’s a body based in the Hague where unaccountable judges and prosecutors can pull our troops or diplomats up for trial. And I wouldn’t join it. And I understand that in certain capitals around the world that that wasn’t a popular move. But it’s the right move not to join a foreign court that could — where our people could be prosecuted. My opponent is for joining the International Criminal Court. I just think trying to be popular, kind of, in the global sense, if it’s not in our best interest makes no sense. I’m interested in working with our nations and do a lot of it. But I’m not going to make decisions that I think are wrong for America.

In the second debate, the reference made a bit more sense, since it came in response to a question about easing tension with our longtime allies. He used it in the context that “sometimes in this world you make unpopular decisions because you think they’re right.” He’s sorry for nothing. He’s not budging.

The references are less weird if taken as an easy way for Bush to dodge questions about global warming and the Kyoto Protocol, take a poke at Kerry over his supposed willingness to bow to international pressure and show that a Republican-led United States will continue to stand up to one-world government.

It’s for all the isolated weirdos who actually fear that the United Nations — despite all evidence it’s an incompetent, all-talk body standing by despite death and misery in (a short list) Sudan, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia — controls the entire world, overseeing innocent Americans with high-tech surveillance and black helicopters.

It’s easy to quip that black-helicopter fanatics aren’t the ones watching debates on television, but that’s hard to argue when they’ve such a healthy presence on the Internet. Bush brings up the ICC as a wink to them and their soft-core undecided equivalents, just as politicians slip in biblical phrases to slyly reassure the religious.

But Dred Scott and abortion? I don’t see it.

THE CHRONICLE’S AFFLECKTATION

Amazingly, The Cambridge Chronicle has picked up Paul McMorrow’s piece from the Weekly Dig bashing Ben Affleck. There is no connection between the two papers that I know of, which means the editor of the Chronicle was either desperate for material, sympathetic to the content or coming to the end of the fiscal year and must spend, spend, spend.

The article, “This man must be stopped,” appears on the front page of the Chronicle, labeled as commentary. This is odd. Commentary rarely appears on the front page of newspapers, including the Chronicle. But that’s just the start.

It is also odd, for instance, to see the Dig’s hipper-than-thouness, which blasts Affleck for talking as though he’s from Cambridge even though he’s been gone a while (and, oh yes, wasn’t born here), transplanted into the Chronicle, which ... well, let me put it this way: Taking up the entire top half of its “Cantabrigia” section this week is a picture of friendly, smiling nerds, three-sevenths of them in purple shirts, smiling and holding musical instruments such as French horns and violins. This is the Radius Ensemble. They play chamber music. They provided this picture. Go see them.

So snarky Affleck-sucks-because-he-used-the-word-“enervate”-wrong-and-he’s-popular pieces seems a little odd here, especially for publication in an issue being distributed around town free. Presumably the Chronicle expects this bold, antiestablishment statement against a city booster to endear it to the cool kids who read stuff such as the Dig instead of stuff such as the Chronicle. And this would work, presumably, because they like Cambridge and don’t want someone as uncool as Affleck to like it, too.

I wish the Chronicle luck on its mission to win hearts by rabidly attacking someone who loves its city. Unfortunately, about those cool people who don’t read the Chronicle? They’re almost certain to not be from Cambridge. So it’s a little alienating to see the Chronicle crucifying Affleck for his love of the place by banishing him with: “Affleck is not a Cantabrigian. He is an ex-Cantabrigian ... Bankruptcy only stays with an individual for eight years; why, 13 years after he mercifully left Cambridge, must this stain remain on our record?” I love Cambridge, and I’m not from here. Is something wrong with me? Must I stop loving Cambridge if I leave to move back to California?

I know a lot of people think it’s cool to bash celebrities, even or especially if they seem like normal, pleasant down-to-earth people. But I don’t. As someone who loves Cambridge as Affleck does, thanks for the free issue, Cambridge Chronicle. I guess I’ll be seeing you the next time you send a free issue.

Although if I want to see what you’re publishing next month, I guess I can always pick up the current copy of the Weekly Dig.

NOTE: When I called the Radius Ensemble “nerds,” it was an observation, not criticism. They generally look like people I would enjoy knowing. I would sleep with at least three of them. But smiling, talented people in bright shirts toting musical instruments should be used to being assessed as nerds.

PUT SIMPLY, SO EVEN BUSH UNDERSTANDS ...

President Bush is back at it, reselling the Iraq war to eager, uninformed Americans, and with this latest iteration of his arguments, again ridiculing the “flip-flops” of Democratic presidential John Kerry on the matter, it’s really getting obnoxious.

Here’s Bush’s latest, post-debate, line of thinking on Kerry, courtesy of today’s The New York Times:

Last week in our debate, he once again came down firmly on every side of the Iraq war. He stated that Saddam Hussein was a threat and that America had no business removing that threat. Senator Kerry said our soldiers and marines are not fighting for a mistake — but also called the liberation of Iraq a “colossal error.” He said we need to do more to train Iraqis, but he also said we shouldn’t be sending so much money over there. He said he wants to hold a summit meeting, so he can invite other countries to join what he calls “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

To answer, Kerry should be explaining his reasoning and votes, and the consistency behind them, in a way Bush’s red states understand. He should be saying:

I voted to authorize force in Iraq if necessary, not for war. This is similar to, when you think there’s a deadly threat, handing your son a gun so he can defend himself. Anyone who responsibly handles a gun knows that doesn’t mean you go out shooting unless there’s a real threat. Using force responsibly means you use it only if you have to. As we have learned yet again, from a report today from our own arms inspector in Iraq, our sanctions there were working and Saddam Hussein was not a deadly threat — just what Iraqi defectors were telling us, and just what the United Nations weapons inspectors were telling us.

Now that we’re there, we cannot leave, though. We must succeed there for the sake of world peace. And the rest of the world knows that, which is why we can reasonably invite them to join us there, helping us with people and funding. In addition to the profit motive that can draw nations to help in Iraq, this is something peace-loving and freedom-loving nations of the world do all the time, all over the world, because they consider it their responsibility and something they must do for the greater good. With more nations of the world contributing, the training of Iraqis to keep peace should be much faster and less expensive for us, leaving more money for us to spend here at home. Many nations would already be in Iraq, had we not rejected their bids because they did not support us before, when we shot first and asked questions later.

UNCONSTRUCTIVE

Husam “Sam” Azzam must surely be Cambridge’s most loathed developer.

For a one-time building inspector, he has a remarkable amount of trouble on zoning issues. Having just settled a dispute in East Cambridge, he’s facing new regulatory hassles in Porter Square, both involving an insistence on putting a lot in a little space that could be commendable, but just winds up being questionable: If it’s not legal, this is one guy who should know better.

He was spared tear-down of his six units in East Cambridge by the city, which decreed that for creating too much square footage of housing, he must fill in some basement space.

Neighbors are reasonably upset, since the sanction doesn’t really speak to the problem. The punishment for foisting illegal construction on a neighborhood forever seems to be less closet space.

The 15 units of office space and condominiums Azzam is building in Porter — including a minitower with bold two-story strips of window facing Massachusetts Avenue, carefully overlaid on the remains of the Long Funeral Service — could be destroyed, but somehow, considering his last experience with City Hall, that seems unlikely. The project is at a virtual standstill, frozen not just in anticipation of a zoning board hearing a week from today, but by angry carpenters, who picketed yesterday to protest what they call inadequate wages and benefits by the construction company.

And here comes the cold, rain and snow that makes progress impossible.

Unfortunately, an abandoned construction site decaying under attack by the elements is not the ideal accompaniment for the St. James Episcopal Church across the street, a Richardson Romanesque built in 1888 that is one of the square’s rare attractive sights.

It should be nice that housing is going up in Cambridge. Azzam has a magic touch for making the nice seem awful.

SIDESHOW

The Twinemen’s second album, “Sideshow,” is out. Don’t hesitate to pick it up, or to see them live, although Massachusetts has a while to wait until the band comes around again; the Cantab Lounge’s CD release party last Saturday was it until at least November, according to the schedule on the band’s revamped Web site.

Part of the pleasure of Twinemen is its lingering Morphine undertone. The band members may reasonably resent that, but Morphine was such an exciting part of living here — the knowledge that something so good, so original, so cool was born in Cambridge and having such impact — that the persistence can hardly be faulted. And Twinemen members hardly play it down, even continuing to play a song or two from its predecessor band at each show and describing their “Twilight” as a track that “recalls the softer side of Morphine.”

“Sideshow,” befitting its name as a collection of oddballs and flukes, also breaks down a bit toward the end, just as Morphine albums could.

Where Morphine’s beat sensibility led to experiments such as “Slow Numbers,” “The Jury” or “Free Love,” creating an intense, wandering feel that usually came home, settled down and snuggled in by the final track, the Twinemen album leaves tunefulness behind at the blaring “Saturday” and never quite makes it back. Four tracks later it ends with the slight, and slightly dissonant, “The Circle,” which at least serves the purpose of sending listeners back to the earlier, sublimely tuneful, portion of the album. See for yourself online, if you have Real Player with the proper audio components.

This is not to say that the album isn’t wonderful, but its wonders are more straightforward through the first seven tracks. And such things go over even better live, where even the oddest of Mark Sandman’s Morphine explorations seemed intriguing and avant-garde instead of irritating, as they could on CD. When Twinemen perform live, people get up and dance, as they did Saturday, or at least groove appreciatively and energetically. The band gets love and gives it back.

Saturday it also gave back Ses Carny, a “Human Freakshow” who hammered a nail, screwdriver and ice pick into his nose, pushed needles through his resistant flesh, picked up weights and swung them with his nipple rings and, surprisingly unimpressively, slipped hooks under his eyeballs and pulled on the connected chains. Hard.

This was obviously in keeping with the “Sideshow” nature of the album, but it also contributed to the night’s sense of surprise and experimentation — cool for a band that can be as sweet as the Twinemen, whose weirdness used to lurk in lyrics camouflaged by compelling but more innocent-sounding music.

Ses Carny won’t necessarily be back, but Twinemen will. See them. Until you can, the “Sideshow” CD is the next-best, weird but wonderful, thing.

UNDEBATABLE

In time for the vice presidential debate tonight, some thoughts about last week’s lopsided confrontation between President Bush and U.S. Sen. John Kerry.

I.

Bush’s campaign is doing some weak and unconvincing spinning, including continued attempts to paint Kerry as inconsistent that mainly address, as The New York Times puts it,

his promise that he would never “give a veto” to other countries when it comes to national security but also saying that major actions should not be conducted unless they pass “a global test.” [Nicole] Devenish, the campaign communications director, said: “John Kerry last night said he would subject national security decisions to a world standard, a world test. Nobody in America wants their president to subject America’s national security decisions to a world test.”

This is yet another Republican insult to the intelligence and fairness of the American people, and of course they’re more or less getting away with it. Unfortunately, sometimes insults are deserved.

Ignore that the word “veto” implies letting one vote kill action even if many other votes are in favor. What Kerry said in the Sept. 30 debate, which Republicans and Democrats are welcome to confirm from this Commission on Presidential Debates transcript, was:

I’ll never give a veto to any country over our security ... No president, though all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America. But if and when you do it ... you have to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you’re doing what you’re doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.

If that qualified past-tense justification sounds anything like what the Republicans are trying to spin, well, go ahead and vote for George Bush on Nov. 2.

II.

It’s not just campaign workers that engage in this. The Times’ less blatantly deceptive of its conservative columnists, David Brooks, wrote Saturday that Kerry “is unable to blend his specific proposals into guiding principles,” and “That’s why he’s been fuzzy about the big things over the entire course of his career. That’s why he has changed his mind on big issues with such astonishing rapidity. That’s why he gets twisted into pretzels, like vowing to continue fighting the Iraq war, which he says was a mistake to begin.”

Brooks passes himself off as a great thinker, but on the matter of Kerry being “fuzzy,” he is intellectually lazy or complicit in intellectual bullying. His key example of Kerry being twisted into pretzels is merely a key example of Kerry being a realist — disagreeing with a war but agreeing to see it through to the best possible conclusion because, in the words of Bush himself, “The best way to defeat [terrorism] is to never waver, to be strong, to use every asset at our disposal, is to constantly stay on the offensive and, at the same time, spread liberty.”

Or, in Kerry’s own mature words from the debate, “I believe that when you know something’s going wrong, you make it right.”

Or, once again, from the debate, “Secretary of State Colin Powell told this president the Pottery Barn rule: If you break it, you fix it. Now, if you break it, you made a mistake. It’s the wrong thing to do. But you own it. And then you’ve got to fix it and do something with it.”

If that sounds like a pretzel, well go ahead and ... wait a minute. Didn’t Bush almost die choking on a pretzel?

III.

Ah, President Bush. He is a shining example of style over substance (which makes his weak performance last week so odd), and one of the worst possible role models this nation could imagine for young people who pay attention. His demeanor at the debate, veering repeatedly into the tone of a man justifying his pay to a downsizing consultant or a little boy desperately needing a toilet, did surprisingly little damage to his poll numbers. This is why insulting the American public is sometimes deserved.

But did no one find it odd that in his several earnest and slightly cheap admonitions to Kerry not to insult the “brave,” Bush glossed over attacks made by his own friends and family on Kerry, who volunteered to command swift boats for four months in Vietnam knowing the service had a suicidally high rate of casualties? Bush doesn’t “appreciate it when a candidate for president denigrates the contributions of these brave soldiers,” although Kerry didn’t. And the Iraqi prime minister, “a brave, brave man,” shouldn’t have his credibility questioned, because “You can’t change the dynamics on the ground if you’ve criticized the brave leader of Iraq ... That’s no way to treat somebody who’s courageous and brave, that is trying to lead his country forward.”

Unlike Kerry, a decorated veteran who’s trying to lead his country where, exactly?

There has also been no criticism, let alone a cocked eyebrow, over Bush’s unseemly squirming over North Korea, where Kerry’s suggestion to talk directly about nuclear proliferation would, according to the president, “cause the six-party talks to evaporate.”

What happened to tough-guy Bush? The man who’s not going to give any nation a veto over American interests, the preemptive cowboy, the leader of the free world, the rejector of the International Criminal Court, the unsigner of the Kyoto Treaty, the steel tariff magnate, the flight suit mission-accomplisher, the guy who’s not going to sit around and let the United Nations slap another sanction on Saddam Hussein? He quails and runs for cover when real nuclear weapons are involved.

Here’s what Bush has to say on the matter, and if it sounds like the same man who talked so tough on Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, well, go find that man and vote for him:

We began a new dialogue with North Korea, one that included not only the United States, but now China. And China’s got a lot of influence over North Korea, some ways more than we do. As well, we included South Korea, Japan and Russia. So now there are five voices speaking to Kim Jong Il, not just one.

And so if Kim Jong Il decides again to not honor an agreement, he’s not only doing injustice to America, he'd be doing injustice to China, as well. And I think this will work. It’s not going to work if we open up a dialogue with Kim Jong Il. He wants to unravel the six-party talks, or the five-nation coalition that’s sending him a clear message.  The minute we have bilateral talks, the six-party talks will unwind ... It will mean that China no longer is involved in convincing, along with us, for Kim Jong Il to get rid of his weapons. It's a big mistake to do that.

We must have China's leverage on Kim Jong Il, besides ourselves. And if you enter bilateral talks, they'll be happy to walk away from the table. I don't think that'll work.

LUNCH NO BREAK

Another bizarre irritation at Au Bon Pain: Although the soups are acceptable, there is no way to carry them. They are blistering hot, demanding cover as well as bowl if you take them any farther than a few feet, and this bowl would have to make it from Tufts-New England Medical Center to the Boston Herald. But this peculiarly poorly managed franchise had only small bowls ... and only large covers.

Soup is a significant part of Au Bon Pain’s business, so it is odd, to say the least, that there would be such a problem. It seems basic to order necessary things when they are about to go lacking, but in this case two necessary things have gone lacking in an entirely complementary way, creating not twice the mystery, but a mystery squared.

I recall how in Middletown, Conn., once in the mid-1990s, locals were incredulous to find the Main Street ice cream shop lacking ice cream and the means to make it. The reason was revealed quickly when the place quickly shut down, bankrupt.

The lack of something vital, not to sound too obvious, was a sign of trouble.

What’s Au Bon Pain’s excuse? As a wholly owned subsidiary of Compass Group Plc., which has 412,574 employees in 90 countries and owns such chains as Burger King and TGI Friday, can it possibly be so troubled? In fact, it can be; its stock price fell 25 percent in a single day in early September and has struggled since. Bloomberg News said the company expects “costs and pressure on prices” to hold back its stock over the next two years.

So the bowl problem is merely a clever way to enhance revenue. I usually get a large soup and a bagel, for $4.91, but I happened to go for lunch during the site’s 4 to 6 p.m. half-price sale on baked good such as bagels, and I expected to pay about $4.50. Instead, faced with the impossibility of transporting soup, I bought a Fields & Feta Wrap for $5.24.

Spend it wisely, Compass Group Plc. Large bowls, I’d say. If there’s money left over, small covers.

LINK LIFE

I’m slow in getting to this, I guess, when I thought I was ahead of the curve. But bless the jobless, for they are prolific bloggers, and it looks as though Eric LeMay, at least for a while, will be among the most prolific. Visit his site and you’ll see what I mean.

My fear for Eric’s blog is that, as a record of a transitional period in his life — a phrase I got from a human resources manual, I think — it will devolve from cogent thoughts on a presidential debate to critiques of “Drew Carey” reruns and then, ultimately, to such insights as “Socks ... wearing out. Polyester content? What/why? Toe.”

While he’s still on the debates, though, it’s worth checking him out:

... Kerry didn’t have to say much because Bush was imploding on his own. Heavy shoulders leaning on the podium. Tapping the podium every time for emphasis. Teeth grinding like they worked for Mr. Flint in Bedrock. Thirsty. Thirsty again. Need another drink of water, he’s thirsty again. He was stressed out and frustrated.

There’s other good stuff as well, including a bit on the lives we live on our laptops while straddling work and home life. Check it out, and meet me back here Monday.