Read memos, not Macdonald

• Bruce Reed dubs Gov. Dubyah "The Bookworm" at Slate.

Make of this what you will:

Instead of spending the sixth year of his presidency globe-trotting to solve the mess in Iraq or poring over options memos on how to address middle-class families' economic concerns, Bush seems to have dedicated every waking, nontreadmill moment to one cause: reading books.

Two months ago, Ken Walsh of U.S. News reported that Bush had already read a staggering 60 books in 2006. Quick reads like Albert Camus's The Stranger and three plays by Shakespeare drew most of the scorn, but plenty of weighty doorstoppers made the list as well.

Admittedly, the list itself is suspect. The same U.S. News article suggesting that Bush was on a two-book-a-week pace marveled that "the commander in chief delved into three volumes in August alone."

But if the list is for real, it's evidence of presidential dereliction of duty and perhaps an outright threat to national security. Two books a week is an uphill battle for a graduate student whose responsibilities don't even include showering. For a president, who lives at work, reading and comprehending two serious books a month takes a Herculean effort.

60 books so far this year? George W. Bush?

B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T.

All governments lie -- at this point I take this for granted -- and yet every so often, I'm stunned afresh at the things they ask us to believe...

Library police (the good kind)

• Joseph Huff-Hannon details the recent uphill battles waged by librarians in The Nation.

The day-to-day challenges librarians face are inherent in the job description: defending access to controversial or banned books, staving off budget cuts, and creating and expanding programs to draw more citizens into one of the few remaining genuinely public commons in American life. While the ethic of secrecy often prevails in the gathering and dissemination of corporate and governmental information, the work of a librarian is imbued with just the opposite. Be it in the capacity of archivist, reference librarian or information technology professional, a common thread is the profession's dogged commitment to safeguarding books, research and information to make knowledge more widespread, not less.

In the past few years this dedication has become more important than ever. With the federal government ever more intent on spying on its own citizens, and on classifying, concealing and manipulating larger swaths of information and intelligence, librarians and library custodians are on the front lines protecting freedom of inquiry and our right to privacy. And where right-wing groups, both local and national, have campaigned for censorship, librarians have also stepped up to the plate to defend minority points of view in their collections.

Can Dubyah even spell "existentialist"?

• Gov. Bush recently read Camus' The Stranger on his summer vacation.

First thought: Good. It's a better choice than My Pet Goat.

Second thought: Did he understand it?

Third thought: Oh, sure, he did. He's the ostensible leader of the free world.

Fourth thought: Then again, he did talk about conducting "crusades" right after 9/11, and he's reading a book about the senseless murder of an Arab while Lebanon is bombing the holy shit out of Israel.

Unhappy tales of East meets West are found in the papers every day, so presumably the president was looking for more, but his aides will not tell us what he made of the story of a remorseless killer of Arabs. White House spokesman Tony Snow said Bush "found it an interesting book and a quick read" and talked about it with aides. "I don't want to go too deep into it, but we discussed the origins of existentialism," said Snow.

Fifth thought: Dubyah's literary aptitude is a big fat easy target (on par with jokes about airline food and Paris Hilton), but still... whatta bozo.

Slate says it best:

This may be the first time that national security demands an official version of literary criticism. We want a book report!

Don't worry. Salon has it:

Anyways, I'm glad I read it because next time Monsieur Prime Minister of Frogland Whoever says, What you reading? I can say, Hey, how about that "Stranger" book, huh? Isn't that a piece of work? We shouldn't fear a world that is more interacted, even if it's by books.

And maybe next time, Mrs. First Lady of Smartsville, you'll believe me when I say I think I'll read me a good book tonight. 'Cause "The Stranger" was cool, and even though it was in French, it read just like English. I mean, every word was in English, which makes me wonder why folks even bother learning other languages. Meantime, I can't wait to meet the author, so I can tell him how much his book rocked. Except maybe he'll want to kiss me on the cheek or something, which would make Joe Lieberman all jealous. Never mind, I'll send a note. "Heck of a job, Ca-Moose-and-Squirrel!" You'll check the spelling, won't you? If Condi's not around?

From finding the news to having it given to you

• News reporters have a fraction of the access to today's front lines as they did in Vietnam, says the AP.

Obligatory smartass rejoinder: No shit, Sherlock.

The journalists recalled that soldiers in the field welcomed reporters, would transport them around the country and respected them for facing the hardships and dangers in battle zones.

"In Vietnam, if you had the courage and the stamina, you could go anywhere," said [George] Esper, who spent 10 years in Southeast Asia and wrote more words on the war than any other reporter. He retired from the AP in 2000.

But the media's freedom to cover the war had some lasting harm, including journalists killed on the battlefield. There also was resentment from the military establishment, which didn't always appreciate what was written, the journalists said.

A troubling topic, this one. It's certainly true that the government has clamped down on the media since the end of Vietnam, which has had the ripple effect of creating a press corps that is either unable or unwilling to ask the questions that need to be asked. Every administration since has used a cloak of Byzantine legalese to keep from having to answer anything resembling a direct question. At one point it was thought that the old blogosphere was going to be the solution to this, but, of course, the prevailing attitude has evolved into "bloggers don't do their research and they're not accountable to anyone except themselves, so they're even less reliable than the mainstream media." The Dubyah Administration has been exceptionally obsessed with secrecy (even going so far as to reclassify previously-declassified documents en masse), but it's just continuing a trend that began once those last choppers left the Saigon embassy in 1975.

I can almost understand the government wanting to limit access to war zones, but at the same time, journalists today ought not to be so easily intimidated. It's not that they're not doing their job -- look no further than reports deunking the claims of Saddam Hussein's WMDs, or Iraq's so-called involvement in the 9/11 attacks, and so on and so forth -- but they're being beat at their own game by getting led around by the nose by a government that's figured out how to wrap the media around its grimy fingers. It has nothing to do with partisan bickering between parties; it has everything to do with the government's skill at manipulation and the media's distressing blind faith in seemingly everything they're told.

Good point

• A USA Today article focuses on a "wave" of antiwar books:
  

At Rainy Days Books in Kansas City, Kan., bookseller Geoffrey Jennings says publishers' tilt against the war isn't surprising: "Those who are not in power tend to be more critical of those who are in power. Conversely, the people in power are using their power; they're not writing books."

Hearts and minds; Garrison Keillor jumps the shark

• Over at Slate, Fred Kaplan discusses a blogger's plan to get key American works translated for Arabic readers.

A fascinating idea, but not without holes. A professor at the University of Michigan, Juan Cole, according to the story, is raising money to hire translators to translate key works of American political philosophy into Arabic for the Middle-Eastern market:

He has in mind the essays and speeches of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Tom Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Martin Luther King Jr., and Susan B. Anthony; a solid history of American Jews and other minority groups; maybe a few good books, written by American historians, about Iraq. Cole also wants to subsidize Middle Eastern publishers to print these books in large numbers and at low prices, and he wants to pay fees to book dealers throughout the region—just as publishers pay Borders and Barnes & Noble here—to display the books prominently.

Thankfully, this doesn't smack of a PR or business scam (at least not overtly so), but Kaplan does address its major pitfall:

Will Juan Cole's Library of Americana project do that? By itself, no. At best it's the kind of effort that takes years to germinate. It's aimed more at students and intellectuals than at "the street." Whatever impact it has will be trickle-down, not head-on.

Regardless of your political or religious persuasion, it will still take generations of backbreaking effort to undo the damage that has been wrought in the Middle East by shortsighted American foreign policy. That's just the way people are; it's much harder to change a mind, particularly in an elder generation whose ideals are fixed and solidified. Persistence in getting the meat of the American democratic ideal in front of our adversaries is what could eventually make it work, but it seems that it's difficult, if not impossible, to get the current administration to think beyond the narrow sphere of its own interests:

Long ago, the federal government did on its own just what Cole proposes to do. The United States Information Agency—then an independent agency—maintained libraries in Amman, Istanbul, and elsewhere, filled with translations of American political and literary classics. The Franklin Book Program, a nonprofit company with funding from the State Department and private foundations, published hundreds of titles and stocked them in libraries and bookstores all over the world. The Franklin Book Program shut down in 1977, its international board having determined—prematurely, it turned out—that its mission was accomplished. In the 1990s, under pressure from the Republican-run Senate (especially Jesse Helms, then chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee), the USIA was absorbed into the State Department; its budget was whacked and its agenda politicized; its libraries were shut down, their books remaindered.

Fear of new ideas isn't limited to a Republican or even a conservative mentality; it's hardwired into the human brain. Horror stories, for example, revolve exclusively around that principle -- that which is unknown is most terrifying. We've got to get these people to lose their fear of the dark.

• At Salon, Garrison Keillor spews a screed against whiny writers.

Keillor does make some points. There's nothing more insufferable than a writer-type who broods and bitches and never actually does anything. I've done it myself, as many of my roommates and regular readers will happily attest.

But.

Setting aside the question of taste, for which there is no accounting, Keillor shoots himself the foot by filling up the article with mindless, ill-thought-out generalizations, and baldly reveals his own middlebrow sensibilities by proclaiming that:

Young people are pessimistic enough these days without their elders complaining about things. Shut up. Life is pretty good when you grow up. You own your own car, you go where you like, and you sing along with the radio or talk to yourself or chat on your cellphone. You pull into the drive-up window and order the Oreo Blizzard. What's not to like?

What?!?

I'm very glad that writing comes so easily for Keillor, and that he's not forced to work a demeaning, soul-draining nine-to-five day job that leaves scant little time for writing solely for oneself, which is what most writers in the world have to do. There are precious few who can put words to paper every day and not have to do anything else to put food on the table. But it's awfully easy, and foolish, for him to lob stones from his high perch. It's easy to write, sure, especially when you're a millionaire with a handful of published novels and a radio show and a regular gig writing columns for Salon. Yeah, it's a breeze.

Nothing that is worth doing is ever easy. Many good comments on the article can be found at Salon's site, with many of them sounding hosannas in agreement, but many more make other and better points about writing. Some point out that attaining the discipline to actually sit down and do the writing is harder than the writing itself. Others make the point that writing might be easy, but rewriting, finding an agent, finding a publisher, getting books on the shelves and simply reaching readers is where the real hard part lies. Keillor's shockingly myopic essay, then, may be the best writing he's ever done; for the very first time, he may indeed have hit a nerve.

These things write themselves

• Sunday-Sunday-Sunday, it's Laura Bush versus global illiteracy!

Laura Bush announced an initiative Monday to combat global illiteracy, saying that more than 800 million people around the world can't read. The first lady said a conference on global literacy will be held in New York in September during the opening of the 61st session of the U.N. General Assembly.

She can start with her husband.

You are free to do as we tell you

• The Secret Service has cracked down on a 7th-grade essayist.

These things are reliably hilarious:

The boy's homework assignment for English class was to write what he would do on a perfect day. In addition to the president and Winfrey, the boy wrote that violence should be directed at executives of Coca-Cola and Wal-Mart, police and school officials said. "His perfect day would be to see the destruction of these people," Schools Superintendent David Raiche said.

I can hear some bureaucratic twit reading the words “violence should be directed at” with just the right amount of nasal officiousness. Maybe the kid’s screwed up, and maybe he was simply joking, but calling in the Secret Service seems a teeny, tiny bit extreme. I think he might have a point... does that mean the G-men are going to kick in my door, too?