Week of May 13, 2002
[Note: Some now-dead links have been removed from archived items.]

ATTACK OF THE CLONES: We saw the movie Friday night. It's not quite as good as the remake of Planet of the Apes, which should not be considered an endorsement of Planet. The dialogue is worse, the characters less interesting. Attack looks good, but not as great as Planet. Without the Star Wars brand to make it a must-see cultural experience, this movie would flop. If you want fun reminiscent of the old series, see Spider-Man.

Worst scene: the horribly written, stiffly acted, no-chemistry "love scene" by the fire. Truly painful. Best scene: Yoda's light saber duel with Count Dooku. I've never been a big Yoda fan, but his character was the best part of this movie, the only character except little Boba Fett (Daniel Logan) who seemed worth caring about. Actually, both Fetts were good. You felt their emotional bond, a contrast to the supposed relation between Anakin and his mother or Anakin and Amidala.

I feel sorry for people who never got to see Star Wars when it was fresh and new. Ken Layne has a great post on his youthful view of the original movie. My reactions at the time were different, since I wasn't a little boy living in a swamp, but the magic was the same.

Oh yeah: I don't think Attack has any implications for the debate over whether to ban cell cloning, except for supplying brand new headline cliches. It's not powerful enough to add anything to the myths already informing that debate. [Posted 5/19.]

BOOKS REPRIEVE: I forgot the Post Office closes early on Saturdays, so if you missed the Friday deadline for ordering an autographed copy of TFAIE, it's not too late. Books will be shipped Monday morning, and new orders accepted until Sunday night. Thanks to everyone who has ordered the book. Including both sales batches, I've sold 180 copies. [Posted 5/18.]

RECOMMENDED: Thanks to an email exchange over how to inscribe the blogger's copy of TFAIE, I found out about Science Fair. Check it out. [Posted 5/17.]

ERIC CONSPIRACY: Citing my recent post about who the real "Eric THE Blogger" is, Jeff Wolfe refers me to Eric "A Blogger" Raymond's "Eric Conspiracy", in which we learn of the disturbing proliferation of mustachioed, Unix-mangling Erics. (Warning: lots of photos.) [Posted 5/17.]

WHO KNEW? John Ellis gets it exactly right on the current flap over whether the White House reacted adequately to pre-9/11 warnings of possible hijackings. If the Dems were serious about improving intelligence, they'd call for an independent commission—Ellis suggests the Challenger Commission as a model and James Schlesinger as the head—to "review every facet of how we gather, sort and collate information regarding our national security." We could use more scrutiny of how intelligence gets passed along, but we don't need show trials, which is all congressional hearings (by either party) are these days. Dems who care about national security surely realize that. Why haven't we heard from any of them? Do they exist?

Ellis also correctly notes, as far too few journalists have, that there's a significant signal-to-noise problem in deciphering these vague warnings. Why doesn't every news report contain information on how common such warnings were pre-9/11? That's called context, and you need it to make sense of the story. If the White House or law enforcement won't say, journalists still need to ask the question and report the response. [Posted 5/17.]

BOOK ORDERS: In response to my posting below, last-chance orders for autographed copies of TFAIE are pouring in. But people aren't telling me to whom they'd like their books inscribed. If you order a book, please use the PayPal comments form to let me know whether there's a particular name to whom you'd like the book inscribed. (If you've already ordered a book and didn't specify a name, send me an email.) If you don't tell me, you get a generic inscription. Thanks. [Posted 5/17.]

SHOWDOWN POSTPONED: The Franklin Society petition against criminalizing therapeutic cloning has been delivered to relevant senators. On post-anthrax Capitol Hill, "delivered" means "faxed." For a 30-page list of about 1,000 names, plus a three-page personalized letter, that's a big and—in the case of particularly popular senatorial fax machines—a late-night job.

You can see the full list of signatures, and read the letter, here. Thanks to Jeff Wolfe for programming, Sean Dougherty for p.r. help, Richard Tracey for proofreading (he's not responsible for goofs in signatures that arrived in the past week), Neil Inala for database analysis, and Evan Kirchhoff for our spiffy new website design. (Please let me know if you find any bad links, or links to old-style pages.)

After its busy week wrecking hopes for further trade liberalization, the Senate has delayed its vote on the cell-cloning ban until after Memorial Day. If you haven't done so already, please contact your senator and ask him or her to vote NO on the Brownback-Landrieu bill, S. 1899. For background information, see this page. And if you'd like to volunteer to help round up blogosphere discussions of the issue, please drop me an email. [Posted 5/17.]

STAR WARS AND CLONE POLITICS: Matthew Nisbet in The American Prospect Online and Todd Seavey in The American Enterprise's "Hot Flash" examine what Attack of the Clones might mean to the political environment. Nisbet, a lit professor, worries. Todd, who writes comic books when he isn't writing wonky stuff, is less concerned. Audiences have a tendency to turn sci-fi messages on their heads, he notes:

Luckily, cautionary sci-fi tales have a long, proud history of backfiring. Hardly anyone could follow what the trade dispute at the heart of Phantom Menace was, so that film's only lasting message was "Audiences hate Jar Jar." A few months before that, audiences left The Matrix, a movie about humans trying to escape a sinister virtual reality program, thinking, "I wish I had a virtual reality program like that!" A few years earlier, despite Spielberg and Crichton going to great lengths to create an anti-biotech fable with Jurassic Park, kids across America were left hoping the day will come when they can trade in computer-generated dinosaurs for genetically-engineered dinosaurs, and the wait is sometimes frustrating. Sci-fi, much as I love it, keeps peddling scare stories...and sci-fi fans, not easily frightened, keep hoping the world will soon resemble those stories.

Todd's probably right about the general culture, but the world of policy is different. Many of the people who drive policy loathe sci-fi fans and all they represent, even when those fans are in high places.

Back in Newt Gingrich's heyday, a New Yorker article called "Lost in Space" quoted a "leading conservative ideologue," who said, "For my taste, Gingrich is too futuristic, too psychobabble, too technobabble—he's a weird mishmash of all kinds of things. There is an ongoing attempt to try to keep Newt from going off the deep end. There is a certain grandiosity to his self-understanding which comes from Toffler, an end-of-an-era, the whole-world-is-changing feeling he projects. The Republican Presidential candidates are really more conventional than Newt."

Newt was nothing if not grandiose in those days, but his unconventional optimism, curiosity, and interest in the future were among his most appealing characteristics. Without them, he was reduced to a nasty partisan warrior. Was Bob "Bridge to the Past" Dole really preferable? I'd be willing to bet money that the New Yorker's "leading conservative ideologue" was the guy now teaming up with Jeremy Rifkin to outlaw cell cloning. [Posted 5/16.]

BOOK SALES: As part of my effort to concentrate on the deadline for my new book, after tomorrow, I'm shutting down TFAIE sales for the summer. If you want an autographed copy, order it by the end of Friday. I'll be doing the last shipment of the summer on Saturday. Thanks to everyone who's bought books. And, to answer a FAQ, yes, I do ship to other countries. For simplicity's sake, the price is the same, but I appreciate a voluntary addition to the tip jar to cover the extra postage. (Thank you, Bjoern Staerk.) [Posted 5/16.]

IF BLOGGERS HAD LOBBYISTS: Tres Producers imagines what we could accomplish. It's not pretty, but it is funny.

For the record, Eric Olsen of Tres Producers is Eric THE Blogger. Eric Raymond is merely Eric A Blogger. [Posted 5/16.]

ERIC THE BLOGGER: Eric Raymond of Open Source Initiative has joined the blogging craze with Armed 'n' Dangerous (minus the apostrophes and spaces). Asparagirl claims responsibility. [Posted 5/14.]

TRADE DESTRUCTION AUTHORITY: The Bush administration has sacrificed free trade principles on steel and textiles for the promise of greater good—"free trade promotion" authority (a.k.a. fast track) to negotiate big new market opening agreements. Today, reports Brink Lindsey, the Senate passed a poison pill amendment to TPA. "I'm not being melodramatic when I say that today marks the lowest point for U.S. trade policy in the dozen years I've been writing about it," writes Brink. [Posted 5/14.]

DAVID RIESMAN: Obituaries for David Riesman understandably emphasized his famous 1950 book, The Lonely Crowd (NYT, <Boston Globe), which Robert Fulford almost accurately described in The National Post as "the first of many books raising questions about conformity and individuality in post-war America." (Unless you insist on the "post-war" label, the list actually begins with The Fountainhead in 1943.)

I knew David Riesman in a different context in the early 1980s. As a just-out-of-college WSJ reporter, I often wrote articles about higher education. Riesman, who had turned his scholarly attention to that subject, was the best imaginable expert source. He seemed to know the nuances of every campus in America, however small, obscure, or regional. (I tested him on some campuses I knew but wasn't writing about.) Although he had what I considered foolish notions about foreign policy, he nonetheless struck me as not just a journalist's "wise man" source of quotes but as a genuinely wise person. And he was kind and generous with his time, far beyond any desire to be quoted in The Wall Street Journal—publicity he was long beyond needing. He deserves to be remembered for The Lonely Crowd, but not for that alone. [Posted 5/14.]