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ereotypes, isn’t a problem: you can never have enough books about how corrupt America is. And boy, is he witty:

Despite the fact that he is an outspoken Democrat, Hiaasen’s fans span the political spectrum. Bill Clinton regularly requests early copies of his novels and George Bush Sr recently wrote asking for some signed bookplates for his wife. Bush Jr has yet to ask for an autograph but “I’d be thrilled if he did because it would suggest he has a sense of humour – which would suggest that he has intelligence… But I’d bet the only fiction that boy reads is memos from Cheney.”

He’s also very humble:

Hiaasen’s vivid sense of right and wrong still informs his journalism today, particularly with regard to the war in Iraq (“Vietnam without the mosquitoes”), of which he has been a vociferous critic in the Miami Herald. “People say sometimes, gosh, that was brave of you to write such-and-such last week. ‘Brave?’ What do they mean ‘brave?’ It’s right! How could you not write it? Sure, it would be easier to write a funny story about something the dog dug up in the garden, and there are those columnists who do that. But I told my editor, the day I do that, put a bullet in my brain because it’s over.”

Thank goodness there are still those, like Hiaasen, who have the courage to stand up, against all the odds, and tell it like it is. He suffers for it, of course:

He rarely leaves the island these days – the thought of traffic is a sufficient deterrent – making only the rare exception for his sons and the occasional rock concert. Instead, he spends his days in his white house with his young family, taking the boat out on the Bay.

As the Canadian doomster releases another album at the age of 70, Robert Sandall in the Telegraph lists his Lennie top twelve. I don’t have any particular argument with his choices, but was amused by his take on the lyrics of “Famous Blue Raincoat”:

“And what can I tell you? My brother would kill you, what can I possibly say?/I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you, I’m glad that you stood in my way.”

My brother would kill you?? This throws a whole new light on the song: the Cohen brothers at the centre of the Montreal Mafia… (It should be, “my brother, my killer..”)

And “First We Take Manhattan” – Sandall sees this as some kind of political allegory:

Although we don’t tend to think of Cohen as a political songwriter, he likes to keep a wandering eye on world events and at times he has made noises which in retrospect can sound sort of prophetic. The year before the Berlin Wall came down, he recorded this, a synth-heavy, ostensibly anti-New York anthem with a dramatic pay-off about the putative overthrow of the capital of old East Germany. Not the sort of message you could ever put on a T-shirt, obviously, but a real tease, given Cohen’s middle-European ancestry.

I always saw it as above all a piss-take of the whole rock-star-as-messiah thing, particularly David Bowie. But I suppose there’s room for different interpretations.

There are aspects of this affair which I hadn’t previously considered:

[T]he tape contained no demands from her captors, and offered few clues to their identity. There were no masked gunmen or Islamic banners such as those in the videos of Mr Bigley and the two American colleagues taken with him.

Mrs Hassan appeared in close-up, against a plain white wall, wearing a white open-necked blouse, not an orange jumpsuit like other hostages.

She is also unveiled, suggesting that she may be held by secular Muslims rather than extremists such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian leader of Tawhid wal Jihad, who executed Mr Bigley. They would regard it as un-Islamic for a woman to be bareheaded in the presence of men who are not close relatives.

For a moment there, I read it as un-Islamic for a woman to be beheaded in the presence of men who are not close relatives.

Meanwhile, the helpful Paul Bigley role (“Mr Blair has blood on his hands”) has been taken:

[A] close friend of Mrs Hassan, the film-maker Felicity Arbuthnot, said that if a woman as tough as Mrs Hassan was weeping “that is really bad, because this is a woman who is frightened of nothing”.

She accused Mr Blair of “signing her death warrant” this week when he publicly “slagged off” her kidnappers.

Arbuthnot “worked as senior researcher on the film Paying the Price—Killing the Children of Iraq, which investigated the devastating effect of United Nations sanctions on [the] people of Iraq.” So, a woman with a profound understanding of the situation. Here she is in March 2003:

I personally am convinced that this will be a nuclear war. […]

The country has been held together, not perfectly, but more cohesively than at any other time in its history. Had we allowed normality to return by lifting the embargo, it would progress and sort itself out. Saddam is a flicker in the eye of history. […]

Israel will use the opportunity to clear out Gaza and the West Bank—in other words ethnic cleansing. According to many people, they have chosen a place in the eastern quarter of Jordan near Iraq—a completely empty quarter—called Ashraq. I was initially quite dismissive but I have heard so many well informed Jordanians, including newspaper people, saying there is a lot of American activity up there. I know that a whole 1,200 kilometre stretch between Jordan and Baghdad and suddenly there is this huge new army camp that has been built slap on the Jordanian side of the border. I asked my driver whom I always use what it was. He said that is the new American base for when they ship the Palestinians out.

The toilet that changed the world:

Archaeologists in Germany say they may have found a lavatory where Martin Luther launched the Reformation of the Christian church in the 16th Century.

The stone room is in a newly-unearthed annex to Luther’s house in Wittenberg.

Luther is quoted as saying he was “in cloaca”, or in the sewer, when he was inspired to argue that salvation is granted because of faith, not deeds.

The scholar suffered from constipation and spent many hours in contemplation on the toilet seat.

edatory lope, even when they are engaged on an entirely peaceful errand.

They believe that civility is weakness, or — more importantly — will be taken by their peers as weakness. As for their appearance, the more brutal the better; they want to make it look as if there is no savagery they would not commit.

They are shaven-headed (not just to disguise incipient baldness) and tattooed, and if they have a dog it is a rottweiler or a pitbull. Even harmless and law-abiding young men want to look as though they might attack at any moment. I asked one such man why he wanted to look like this and he replied that it was the only way he could walk the streets where he lived unmolested.

You do not see so many brutal-looking young men anywhere else in the world as in Britain. I have scoured the globe in search of a society that produces so many vicious faces set in hatred against their own existence, but so far have not found one.

Well who knew?…violent young men with short hair cuts and tattoos, rottweilers or pitbulls at their sides, roaming the streets of our cities. And just as we’ve got over the shock of teddy boys. Really, this sort of crap must just write itself for Dalrymple.

For the better side of the man, here’s his alter ego Anthony Daniels on Che Guevara (via ALDaily).

that we are barbarians. There is some racism in that. They despise Islam and think it cannot reform itself or lead to reform. They think we are so ignorant we need a dictator. But look at what happened in Najaf when the US chased out al Sadr. The media said the people were angry, but they were only angry with al Sadr. They demonstrated against al Sadr and for the [interim] government. There was very little news on that.”

Despite the high tempo of terrorist bombings, Ali sees public satisfaction over the growing role of the Iraqi police and national guard, and he thinks it was right in 2003 to disband the old Iraqi army. Even now there is concern about infiltration by old Baathist elements who, for example, alert terrorists when recruits are lined up outside police stations and thereby vulnerable to attack. Ali also believes that some former Baathists work as interpreters for U.S. media and help to color their stories.

Ali wants to answer those who, like Warren Rodgers on CNN, refer to terrorists merely as “fighters” or “militants”. “That helps the terrorists,” he says.

One of the failures of the coalition after the direct warfare, Ali says, was not setting up a suitable replacement for Saddam’s state television right away. He admits that more Iraqis watch Al-Jazeera than any other TV channel, but he cites as reasons the technological edge and stylistic professionalism of the channel, plus its suspicious access to terrorists. He points hopefully to a new television channel, Al Fayha’a, which comes from the United Arab Emirates. The US-sponsored Al Hurra is “good, but not as attractively presented as Al Jazeera.”

The fight-back begins: a device for turning off any TV in the vicinity (via ArtsJournal):

The idea for TV-B-Gone was born at a restaurant in the early 1990s, when Altman and his friends kept paying attention to a TV in the corner, not to one another. They chatted about how to turn off all televisions, and he wondered if it would be possible to string together a series of “power” commands.

After that, the project would have disappeared, but Altman’s friends wanted the tools. He said about 50 people volunteered to help design, package and even name the TV-B-Gone. […]

The European model, which uses different codes from the American-Asian one, was field-tested at EuroDisney, where anti-TV activist and computer programmer David Burke was waiting with his 6-year-old daughter to get on a ride called Honey I Shrunk the Kids. A wall of TVs in the waiting room showed a loop of constant Kodak ads. Burke had prototypes in his bag and made a bank of screens go off with one click. […]

Altman said people who hear about TV-B-Gone start thinking about other nuisances. Friends have asked for ways to jam cell phones, shut down vehicle subwoofers and kill car alarms.

Iraq. Their problem is that if America abandons its commitment to helping Iraqis fight for a democratic outcome, through the end of 2005 and into 2006, this betrayal will transform the occupation’s many failures into an unforgivable crime.

Over at NKZone, a grim tale of escape from North Korea by a young boy. [The comments to the post, for some reason, are in reverse order.]

he Gap: The New Class Divide in Britain”.

Our Downers – to use Mount’s preferred term for the losers in the British class system – are, by world standards, culturally impoverished. It is difficult to be precise and non-subjective about this, but there seems to be a genre of working-class life in England which has no equivalent in the rest of the developed world. The deprivation in question is not material: we’re not talking about child labour, or anything which by global standards – the standards of the four billion people who live on less than $4 a day – is considered absolute poverty. It is difficult to quantify this deprivation, though Mount does have one or two good examples, such as the fact that 42 per cent of all burglaries happen to 1 per cent of all homes, principally those belonging to the poor and/or single parents: so the less you have, the more likely you are to have it stolen.

It is difficult also to discuss this without sounding snobbish; but there is, clearly, a crisis of value among the poor in Britain – the bottom decile, or 10 per cent, and perhaps the decile above it. The crisis is related to the fact that our culture now values only two things, money and celebrity, and the poor by definition don’t have either.

I think this is offensive bollocks. A crisis of value among the poor in Britain? From where I’m standing the most obvious crisis of value is in the LRB and Guardian-reading classes.

Once class simplification was set up [by Marx], however, something very close to class war did take place. Mount sees this process as being driven by middle-class dislike of the proles. He draws extensively on John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses to evince a widespread contempt for the working classes on the part of their betters: Huxley, Shaw, Wells, Lawrence, Woolf, the usual suspects – ‘the extraordinary thing remains that so many of the finest talents of their generation should have found the mere existence of millions of their fellow countrymen loathsome to the point of being intolerable.’

They still do.