A Concise History Of MTV (1989-Present)

Thoughts On Synth Britannia

It isn't often that I come across a documentary that hits so close to home for me by zeroing in on a subject I was once truly passionate about, whether we're talking space exploration, oceanography, paleontology, cartography, or, in this particular case, the electronic pop music of the early 1980s.

BBCFour's fascinating documentary Synth Britannia was, for me, a lot like watching a documentary about my own "musical awakening" in 1981 and 1982. Like pretty much every other kid in seventh and eighth grade, I listened to the local Top 40 station and let them relentlessly pound the hits of the era into my skull, but it was that exotic, impossibly perfect, alien-sounding electronic pop music that I could only find on MTV that held me completely rapt back then.


A year later, for a few incredible months, that same wonderful, mesmerizing music actually threatened to become the Top 40 in this country; a time that I will always remember as one of those mini "golden ages" when it seemed like mainstream radio could do no wrong (sadly, I don't think another one of these eras came along until 1990 or so). Synth Britannia covers that magical time period and the years that led up to it, tracking the rise of electronic music as a form of pop music from roughly 1977 to the middle of 1983.

Ever since watching that program, I've been stuck in a bit of a time warp as far as my home play list is concerned. The last two weeks in this office have been soundtracked by the best of the golden age of wireless; revisiting the early glories of Ultravox!, discovering the rich solo career of their forgotten original leader John Foxx, marveling anew at the recently remastered Kraftwerk catalog, taking another stab at Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire (two challenging proto-electronic acts that I last sampled during my early 90s industrial phase) and playing through the entire Depeche Mode catalog while poring over the incredible Beatles Anthology-styled mini-movies packaged with their "collector's edition" releases that cumulatively chronicle their entire existence from 1991-2002 in incredibly revealing detail.

There were many joys and highlights to Synth Britannia, but perhaps the most striking part of the program was seeing these once unremittingly dour pop culture figures opening up a bit and showing that they didn't take themselves as completely seriously as, say, Sting does. OMD bassist and lead singer Andy McCluskey in particular was hilarious, while Human League singer Phil Oakey spins a good tale as well. Both figures offered plenty of pointed (and funny) insights into the electonic scene and their respective roles in it (with McCluskey getting a delicious parting shot at 90s Britpop at the very end). It was also interesting to hear deposed League synthesist Martyn Ware admit his jealousy at Gary Numan's "Cars" and discuss his motivations to challenge the his former band's chart supremacy with Heaven 17.

Now for the inevitable whining blogger complaints ...

The biggest problem with Synth Britannia is that, even at 90 minutes in length, you come away from the program a bit let down in the end since it seems to run full-tilt into a brick wall about 88 minutes in. I can understand and maybe even agree with Mr. Critic's point that the genre turned overtly commercial somewhere during 1983 (and the quick cut from that statement to poor Howard Jones dancing about with Jed The Dancing Mime was admittedly a hoot), yet it felt like a cop-out to end the program by saying "... and then things got really lame. The end." Regardless of what the producers may think of the Thompson Twins, I wanted more, and being told in effect that every synth-based act to come down the pike after the middle of 1983 was another load of bandwagoning crap struck me as irritatingly purist, especially when following the lionizing of Soft Cell, for crissakes.

I was also a wee bit irked that the Walter/Wendy Carlos' soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange seemed to be the lone early progenitor to synthpop, with no mention whatsoever given to David Bowie's Low (an album that, to me, is a far more obviously influential work). This omission becomes a bit more glaring when significant face time is slotted to Numan, whose twin genre classics Replicas and The Pleasure Principle owed an undeniable stylistic debt to Bowie's 1977 masterpiece.

Lastly, there is that inevitable list of bands that failed to make the cut. I'm sure this had much to do with time and budget constraints, but you also wonder if there was some unspoken lumping in of these missing artists with the post-1983 acts disparaged above. Was Thomas Dolby too commercial to count as true synthpop? Talk Talk? Visage? Pete Shelley? Blancmange?

My own geeky grumbings aside, Synth Britannia is definitely worth your time if you're into this kind of music. Here's hoping there will be some more in-depth examinations of this era in the future.

The videos linked throughout this post (and a lot more in the same spirit, including some very cool live BBC performances) can be found here.

E's List Of "People Who Have Been Kicked Out Of Marilyn Manson"

This list is not from E! the cable network, but E the singer/songwriter and leader of Eels. The following was cribbed out of the liner notes for his Useless Trinkets rarities compilation:

1. Fiona Hinckley
2. Ladybird Bundy
3. Baby Jessica Speck
4. Alanis Mussolini
5. Hilary Rodham Berkowitz
6. JonBenet Hitler
7. Lady Diana Dahmer
8. UnaBarbara Bush
9. Mother Theresa McVeigh
10. Son Of Sally Jessy Raphael
11. Anita Hillside Strangler

(Youtube): Synth Brittania Preview

Oh. Oh my ...

The following Youtube clips are all excerpts (or previews) of the forthcoming BBCFour production of Synth Brittania, airing October 16.







Phil Oakey (reminding me weirdly of Christian Bale) illustrates how ex-Human League synthesist Ian Craig Marsh came up with the drum sound of "Being Boiled."



Vince Clarke (Depeche Mode, Yaz, Erasure) shows off a very primitive sampling drum machine.



Andy McCluskey self-effacingly breaks down the sound of the Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark classic "Enola Gay."



Ex-Ultravox leader John Foxx (eventually replaced by Midge Ure) plays around with an ARP synthesizer.

I. Must. See. This.

RIVERBOTTOM NIGHTMARE BAND!

While this has never been a family blog per se, I still almost feel the need to apologize for the truly vulgar and tastelessly named band in the Youtube link below. If you can somehow get around their name, dig on this hilariously faithful (if you squint your ears) grindcore cover of an old chestnut from that gentle 1977 Christmas special Emmett Otter's Jugband Christmas.

For the sake of comparison, I first offer you the original version:



And now the same filmed performance, with the, uh, revised version dubbed in:



For those who wish to be even more offended/titillated, some additional info and a complete discography (including song samples!) on the band who covered this song can be found here.

Proof positive of some remaining immaturity still rattling around inside this grumpy old man's heart: I giggled myself completely sore while watching this.

People Of Wal-Mart

Here's a new photo blog that should appeal to those of you seeking more visual proof of just how doomed we are as a species.

Lords and saints preserve us.

WORST. SUMMER. EVER.

Expected local weather over next few days, courtesy of our friends at Weather Underground:

	Overnight Mostly cloudy. Scattered showers and a chance of thunderstorms. Lows in the upper 50s. West winds 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 50 percent.
	Sunday Showers and thunderstorms likely in the morning. Partly cloudy in the afternoon with a chance of a lingering shower. Cooler with highs in the mid 60s. West winds 15 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 60 percent. » ZIP Code Detail
	Sunday Night Mostly cloudy. A chance of a shower. Cooler with lows in the upper 40s. Northwest winds 10 to 15 mph... becoming north after midnight. Chance of rain 30 percent.
	Monday Partly cloudy. Highs in the upper 60s. Northeast winds 5 to 10 mph. » ZIP Code Detail
	Monday Night Mostly clear. Cool with lows in the mid 40s. Northeast winds around 5 mph.

GAH. ENOUGH. What the hell is up with the weather this year? I'm not demanding 100 degrees of blast furnace Arizona-style heat every day, but how about more than a mere handful of days in the 80s? Sure, I do appreciate the relative ease in which Sarah and I can take care of our power bills these days, but it seems like I spent all of June and July waiting for the real summer heat that finally arrived partway into August and hung around for, oh, two weeks.

If I sound unreasonable, hear me out for a minute: summer is the one season all year where I can sleep at night with the windows open and wake up in the morning without spending five minutes sneezing my head off or feeling like my sinus cavities have been packed full of rubber cement. Even more importantly, summer is supposed to be the one season all year when I can take a walk, drive or bike ride at 1 A.M. and feel completely comfortable in shorts and a t-shirt. Even if all of the days this past summer had topped out at 85 degrees with no humidity and not a cloud in sight, the near-total lack of evenings with the conditions as I described above leads me with no other choice but to proclaim the summer of 2009 to be the Lamest Summer In History (my history, anyway).

If I have to deal with six months of godawful weather starting in November, the least I can ask in return is an actual summer and not three months of what felt like early autumn instead. Here's to the warmest September/October ever.

(Youtube): Why Everything Sucks

(guardian.co.uk): My Moon-Landing Jam Session

With the 40th anniversary of the first manned moon landing approaching this Monday, there are going to be many interesting reminiscences and re-visitations of this historic occasion all over the airwaves. Perhaps fortunately for you, reader, I can offer no historical or sociological input of my own as I was just about to turn a month old as this event unfolded. I'm sure I was duly impressed. Really.



Anyway, in lieu of my own infantile observations and reflections on this momentous day ("waaaaaahhh bottle waaaah"), I offer you the recollections of a certain Mr. David Gilmour (click post header to access link), who spent the occasion in a BBC studio with the rest of Pink Floyd, providing an one-off improvised soundtrack to the proceedings, the performance of which can be viewed below (goat bless Youtube).

In Defence Of Compact Discs

The bed-headed 15-year-old slaps down a battle-scarred copy of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon rescued from the 99-cent bin. I prepare to engage in the oft-repeated litany about the “warmth” of vinyl and how it's closer to how the ear hears than anything digital, etc. etc. etc.

But then he follows up with, “I really like all the ticks and pops.”

A blog post (linked in the post title) I can certainly identify with from a fellow record store lifer in the midst of the early twenty-first century vinyl resurgence who is perfectly happy with his CD collection, thankyouverymuch.

The Wubbulous World Of Dr. Seuss

I think everyone knows by now that Google is always putting up different stylized logos on its homepage to commemorate holidays and special events. This morning, the following logo went up to mark the 105th birthday of Dr. Seuss:

Dunno about you guys, but I think this one is a keeper. :)

Some extra links, should you have the time:

Dr. Seuss's Seussville

Dr. Seuss Went To War: A Catalog Of Political Cartoons

American Art Archives display

Some videos available for streaming:

Green Eggs And Ham

The Lorax

The Zax

The Sneetches (Part 1 and Part 2)

Catching Up With Rex

Last night, 60 Minutes did a follow-up report on a blind, disabled kid named Rex Lewis-Clack, who has an absolutely incredible gift for music. I watched this report with the sound off while we were at Outback Steakhouse with my brother and my niece and, my curiosity piqued, decided to hunt it down online this afternoon.

If you haven't seen this segment (and have fifteen minutes to kill), you might it very worth your while. On one level, it's a fascinating (and moving) human story, while on another it raises all kinds of interesting questions regarding the apparent connection between blindness, mental disability, and prodigious musical talent.

I think what I find most fascinating about cases like Rex and Rachel Flowers is that we all have the same minds, more or less, and yet it seems that when "higher" functions are lost (or never gained) in a small group of people, an amazing, brilliant part of the brain that the rest of us never access is magically unlocked. Watching Rex and Rachel play, it's impossible not to feel the awesome, still untapped potential of the human mind.

Chinese Democracy Is Finally At Hand

Billboard's Jonathan Cohen is reporting the release of the fifteen-years-in-the-making Guns N' Roses album Chinese Democracy, which will (of course) only be available through everyone's favorite neighborhood record store, Best Buy. Oh goody.

The set ... will be available Sunday, November 23, rather than the usual Tuesday.

Gosh, how clever and daring, Axl. Nice to have you back. I hope your shitty new record tanks.

This spring, soft drink manufacturer Dr Pepper offered to send a free can of the beverage to "everyone in America" (excluding ex-GNR members Slash and Buckethead) if "Chinese Democracy" were to arrive anytime during the calendar year 2008. A Dr Pepper spokesperson was not immediately available for comment.

Crap. Dr. Pepper? Ewww. Can I ask for a Pepsi or Mountain Dew instead?

Ten Cent Beer Night

With this year's baseball season refusing to head outright into the tank (instead, it feels like the next 100 games will be a death march of mediocrity cruelly punctuated with maddening flashes of hope and inspiration), let's take a break from the current malaise and look back at a time when the Cleveland Indians were expected to suck, and ownership was frantically trying to keep people coming to the park anyway.

A friend pointed me at this article that ran on ESPN to mark the 34th anniversary of one of the more notorious moments in Cleveland's history: Ten Cent Beer Night.

Definitely a recommended read for baseball fans and native Clevelanders (though not necessarily in that order).

Wal-Mart stirs CD pricing pot with multi-tiered plan

By Ed Christman Sat Mar 1, 9:14 PM ET

NEW YORK (Billboard) - The major music companies have been resistant to lowering their price on CDs, but now they may be dragged to that point: Wal-Mart, the largest retailer of music with an estimated 22 percent market share, has proposed a five-tiered pricing scheme that would allow the discounter to sell albums at even lower prices and require the labels to bear more of the costs.

According to sources, the Wal-Mart proposal would allow for a promotional program that could comprise the top 15 to 20 hottest titles, each at $10. The rest of the pricing structure, according to several music executives who spoke with Billboard, would have hits and current titles retailing for $12, top catalog at $9, midline catalog at $7 and budget product at $5. The move would also shift the store's pricing from its $9.88 and $13.88 model to rounder sales prices.

Executives at the Bentonville, Arkansas-based discounting giant wouldn't comment on the specifics of their promotion, but Wal-Mart divisional merchandise manager for home entertainment Jeff Maas acknowledged the proposal. "When you look at sales declines with physical product, and you have a category declining like it is, you have to make decisions about what the future looks like," he said. "If you have a business that is declining and you want to turn it around, it really takes looking at it from all angles."

Maas referenced the DVD business as a model for tiered pricing. "(It) has been around for years and has worked very well," he said.

While Wal-Mart's negotiations with the labels have yet to take place, the proposal is already causing agita at the majors. Some consider the proposal a non-starter, others say further negotiations might eventually yield a workable solution, and a few see it as appropriate, given the big picture.

"I don't think this is a Wal-Mart discussion," one top executive at a major label said. "I think this is a future-of-the-business discussion. Right now everyone is paralyzed."

Some executives raised the question of whether the Federal Trade Commission would take issue with such a program were it rolled out only to Wal-Mart. But one executive said, "Making it legal is not the difficult part. The difficult part is coming to terms with it."

Another top executive said, "The decision might come down to: Do we give up 20 percent of our business (i.e., Wal-Mart) in order to not lose the entire business?"

That question assumes that Wal-Mart would either penalize or stop doing business with a major that decides not to participate in the pricing program. Moreover, if all majors take a pass, some speculate that Wal-Mart could pull music entirely from the store.

This type of speculation abounds, although the Wal-Mart proposal was presented only as a starting point. One label executive said, "This sounds like the Hail Mary pass, and if it doesn't work, they could be out of the music business; or maybe they reduce music down to a couple of racks" from the 4,000 titles carried by Wal-Marts with larger selections.

Maas declined to rule out those possibilities, but said he'd rather look at how Wal-Mart can help a declining category. "The customer votes every single day in our stores, and based on what they want is how we merchandise our stores."

Reuters/Billboard

Ruh roh, Raggy ...

Dear Music Industry,

Don't you just love it when the 800 pound gorillas you helped create start throwing their weight around and now have you bent over the proverbial barrel? Looks like your biggest customer is gonna start a whole new game of hardball and dictate terms to you, the very people whom they pay to supply them with their music stock. Funny old world, isn't it.

I can see you all sitting in the meeting rooms, throwing up your hands and crying poverty and maintaining to anyone who will listen that Wal-Mart is asking for the moon and stars, yet at the same time I can hear the wheels turning upstairs as you try to think of how this idea might .... just might ... bail your asses out of the frying pan, at least for the short term. We all know how seductive short term thinking is for you guys, but before you pick up the pen in desperation and sign on to this agreement, try just for once to think beyond the next quarter and walk this thing through. I'm not saying "NO! DON'T DO EET! EET'S TOO SEXY!!", but asking in effect how you're going to handle the rest of your business if you give in to your rampaging pet monster once again. What next? Will an almost certainly enraged Best Buy get the same pricing consideration when they angrily demand it? How about Target? One-stops? Independent accounts?

I guess we'll just have to wait and see how all of this falls into place. Depending on how serious Wal-Mart is with this idea (and whether they use it as a "either you are with us or against us" tactic to get their way), I get the impression this deal will not get off the table in its present form, but I can't rule out the idea of a compromise reached by all parties, especially as Sony/BMG and Universal are already experimenting with deep-discounting their lower-priced catalog tiers in a pricing fashion similar to what is in this article. If these new promotions are tied into the proposal reported above, it's not very difficult to imagine WEA and The Company That Was Once Respectfully Referred To As EMI falling into line.

I'd be delighted to see an across-the-board re-figuring of pricing strategies from the label, but I want to see these new prices offered to everyone, not just the one or two companies who can scream louder than all the others combined. That said, remembering how Universal caved in to these guys in the wake of the JumpStart kickoff, I'm also bracing for bad news.

I guess this is where Matt Drudge would say "developing ..."

Experts Predict Man Who Plays Once Every Five Days Probably Won't Save Team

While we're in a humorous mood, here's a goodie from the Onion...

Experts Predict Man Who Plays Once Every Five Days Probably Won't Save Team

May 24, 2006 Onion Sports

NEW YORK—Several leading baseball experts sent shockwaves throughout the sport Monday, making the bold—and some say outlandish—prediction that Roger Clemens, a 44-year-old man who will appear in a maximum of 130 of the 1,100 innings remaining in the Yankees' season, may not in fact be able to single-handedly vault his sub-.500 team into first place. "I am going to go out on a limb and say that this player who will perform in approximately 20 games for the rest of the year will, at the absolute most, have a positive impact on roughly 20 games," said ESPN's Rob Neyer, turning the sports world on its head. "Of course, there is always the possibility that several other Yankee pitchers and position players may begin improving in a manner coinciding with Roger Clemens' return, allowing the team to perform at a higher caliber on a daily basis and give the illusion that a man who plays once a week has saved the team. This would simply be happenstance." Some experts, however, disagree with Neyer's analysis, as New York Post columnist Joel Sherman recently claimed that Clemens will "win 30 games, mold [rookie starter] Tyler Clippard into a young Roger Clemens within a week, bat over .300 with 20-plus home runs, and make everything all better."

Spinning Into Oblivion

The following article was shamefully ripped off wholesale from the New York Times.

Op-Ed Contributors
Spinning Into Oblivion

By TONY SACHS and SAL NUNZIATO
Published: April 5, 2007

DESPITE the major record labels’ best efforts to kill it, the single, according to recent reports, is back. Sort of.

You’ll still have a hard time finding vinyl 45s or their modern counterpart, CD singles, in record stores. For that matter, you’ll have a tough time finding record stores. Today’s single is an individual track downloaded online from legal sites like iTunes or eMusic, or the multiple illegal sites that cater to less scrupulous music lovers. The album, or collection of songs — the de facto way to buy pop music for the last 40 years — is suddenly looking old-fashioned. And the record store itself is going the way of the shoehorn.

This is a far cry from the musical landscape that existed when we opened an independent CD shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 1993. At the time, we figured that as far as business ventures went, ours was relatively safe. People would always go to stores to buy music. Right? Of course, back then there were also only two ringtones to choose from — “riiiiinnng” and “ring-ring.”

Our intention was to offer a haven for all kinds of music lovers and obsessives, a shop that catered not only to the casual record buyer (“Do you have the new Sarah McLachlan and ... uh ... is there a Beatles greatest hits CD?”) but to the fan and oft-maligned serious collector (“Can you get the Japanese pressing of Kinda Kinks? I believe they used the rare mono mixes”). Fourteen years later, it’s clear just how wrong our assumptions were. Our little shop closed its doors at the end of 2005.

The sad thing is that CDs and downloads could have coexisted peacefully and profitably. The current state of affairs is largely the result of shortsightedness and boneheadedness by the major record labels and the Recording Industry Association of America, who managed to achieve the opposite of everything they wanted in trying to keep the music business prospering. The association is like a gardener who tried to rid his lawn of weeds and wound up killing the trees instead.

In the late ’90s, our business, and the music retail business in general, was booming. Enter Napster, the granddaddy of illegal download sites. How did the major record labels react? By continuing their campaign to eliminate the comparatively unprofitable CD single, raising list prices on album-length CDs to $18 or $19 and promoting artists like the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears — whose strength was single songs, not albums. The result was a lot of unhappy customers, who blamed retailers like us for the dearth of singles and the high prices.

The recording industry association saw the threat that illegal downloads would pose to CD sales. But rather than working with Napster, it tried to sue the company out of existence — which was like thinking you’ve killed all the roaches in your apartment because you squashed the one you saw in the kitchen. More illegal download sites cropped up faster than the association’s lawyers could say “cease and desist.”

By 2002, it was clear that downloading was affecting music retail stores like ours. Our regulars weren’t coming in as often, and when they did, they weren’t buying as much. Our impulse-buy weekend customers were staying away altogether. And it wasn’t just the independent stores; even big chains like Tower and Musicland were struggling.

Something had to be done to save the record store, a place where hard-core music fans worked, shopped and kibitzed — and, not incidentally, kept the music business’s engine chugging in good times and in lean. Who but these loyalists was going to buy the umpteenth Elton John hits compilation that the major labels were foisting upon them?

But instead, those labels delivered the death blow to the record store as we know it by getting in bed with soulless chain stores like Best Buy and Wal-Mart. These “big boxes” were given exclusive tracks to put on new CDs and, to add insult to injury, they could sell them for less than our wholesale cost. They didn’t care if they didn’t make any money on CD sales. Because, ideally, the person who came in to get the new Eagles release with exclusive bonus material would also decide to pick up a high-speed blender that frappéed.

The jig was up. It didn’t matter that even a store as small as ours carried hundreds of titles you’d never see at Best Buy and was staffed by people who actually knew who Van Morrison was, or that Tower Records had the entire history of recorded music under one roof while Costco didn’t carry much more than the current hits. A year after our shop closed, Tower went out of business — something that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier. The customers who had grudgingly come to trust our opinions made the move to online shopping or lost interest in buying music altogether. Some of the most loyal fans had been soured into denying themselves the music they loved.

Meanwhile, the recording industry association continues to give the impression that it’s doing something by occasionally threatening to sue college students who share their record collections online. But apart from scaring the dickens out of a few dozen kids, that’s just an amusing sideshow. They’re not fighting a war any more than the folks who put on Civil War regalia and re-enact the Battle of Gettysburg are.

The major labels wanted to kill the single. Instead they killed the album. The association wanted to kill Napster. Instead it killed the compact disc. And today it’s not just record stores that are in trouble, but the labels themselves, now belatedly embracing the Internet revolution without having quite figured out how to make it pay.

At this point, it may be too late to win back disgruntled music lovers no matter what they do. As one music industry lawyer, Ken Hertz, said recently, “The consumer’s conscience, which is all we had left, that’s gone, too.”

It’s tempting for us to gloat. By worrying more about quarterly profits than the bigger picture, by protecting their short-term interests without thinking about how to survive and prosper in the long run, record-industry bigwigs have got what was coming to them. It’s a disaster they brought upon themselves.

We would be gloating, but for the fact that the occupation we planned on spending our working lives at is rapidly becoming obsolete. And that loss hits us hard — not just as music retailers, but as music fans.

Tony Sachs and Sal Nunziato own an online music retail business.


NP: The Best Of D.A.F.

What $1.2 Trillon Can Buy

(The following article was shamelessly swiped from the online edition of The New York Times.)

What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy

By David Leonhardt
Published: January 17, 2007

The human mind isn’t very well equipped to make sense of a figure like $1.2 trillion. We don’t deal with a trillion of anything in our daily lives, and so when we come across such a big number, it is hard to distinguish it from any other big number. Millions, billions, a trillion — they all start to sound the same.

The way to come to grips with $1.2 trillion is to forget about the number itself and think instead about what you could buy with the money. When you do that, a trillion stops sounding anything like millions or billions.

For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign — a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.

Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn’t use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds.

The final big chunk of the money could go to national security. The recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that have not been put in place — better baggage and cargo screening, stronger measures against nuclear proliferation — could be enacted. Financing for the war in Afghanistan could be increased to beat back the Taliban’s recent gains, and a peacekeeping force could put a stop to the genocide in Darfur.

All that would be one way to spend $1.2 trillion. Here would be another:

The war in Iraq.

In the days before the war almost five years ago, the Pentagon estimated that it would cost about $50 billion. Democratic staff members in Congress largely agreed. Lawrence Lindsey, a White House economic adviser, was a bit more realistic, predicting that the cost could go as high as $200 billion, but President Bush fired him in part for saying so.

These estimates probably would have turned out to be too optimistic even if the war had gone well. Throughout history, people have typically underestimated the cost of war, as William Nordhaus, a Yale economist, has pointed out.

But the deteriorating situation in Iraq has caused the initial predictions to be off the mark by a scale that is difficult to fathom. The operation itself — the helicopters, the tanks, the fuel needed to run them, the combat pay for enlisted troops, the salaries of reservists and contractors, the rebuilding of Iraq — is costing more than $300 million a day, estimates Scott Wallsten, an economist in Washington.

That translates into a couple of billion dollars a week and, over the full course of the war, an eventual total of $700 billion in direct spending.

The two best-known analyses of the war’s costs agree on this figure, but they diverge from there. Linda Bilmes, at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and former Clinton administration adviser, put a total price tag of more than $2 trillion on the war. They include a number of indirect costs, like the economic stimulus that the war funds would have provided if they had been spent in this country.

Mr. Wallsten, who worked with Katrina Kosec, another economist, argues for a figure closer to $1 trillion in today’s dollars. My own estimate falls on the conservative side, largely because it focuses on the actual money that Americans would have been able to spend in the absence of a war. I didn’t even attempt to put a monetary value on the more than 3,000 American deaths in the war.

Besides the direct military spending, I’m including the gas tax that the war has effectively imposed on American families (to the benefit of oil-producing countries like Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia). At the start of 2003, a barrel of oil was selling for $30. Since then, the average price has been about $50. Attributing even $5 of this difference to the conflict adds another $150 billion to the war’s price tag, Ms. Bilmes and Mr. Stiglitz say.

The war has also guaranteed some big future expenses. Replacing the hardware used in Iraq and otherwise getting the United States military back into its prewar fighting shape could cost $100 billion. And if this war’s veterans receive disability payments and medical care at the same rate as veterans of the first gulf war, their health costs will add up to $250 billion. If the disability rate matches Vietnam’s, the number climbs higher. Either way, Ms. Bilmes says, “It’s like a miniature Medicare.”

In economic terms, you can think of these medical costs as the difference between how productive the soldiers would have been as, say, computer programmers or firefighters and how productive they will be as wounded veterans. In human terms, you can think of soldiers like Jason Poole, a young corporal profiled in The New York Times last year. Before the war, he had planned to be a teacher. After being hit by a roadside bomb in 2004, he spent hundreds of hours learning to walk and talk again, and he now splits his time between a community college and a hospital in Northern California.

Whatever number you use for the war’s total cost, it will tower over costs that normally seem prohibitive. Right now, including everything, the war is costing about $200 billion a year.
Treating heart disease and diabetes, by contrast, would probably cost about $50 billion a year. The remaining 9/11 Commission recommendations — held up in Congress partly because of their cost — might cost somewhat less. Universal preschool would be $35 billion. In Afghanistan, $10 billion could make a real difference. At the National Cancer Institute, annual budget is about $6 billion.

“This war has skewed our thinking about resources,” said Mr. Wallsten, a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a conservative-leaning research group. “In the context of the war, $20 billion is nothing.”

As it happens, $20 billion is not a bad ballpark estimate for the added cost of Mr. Bush’s planned surge in troops. By itself, of course, that price tag doesn’t mean the surge is a bad idea. If it offers the best chance to stabilize Iraq, then it may well be the right option.

But the standard shouldn’t simply be whether a surge is better than the most popular alternative — a far-less-expensive political strategy that includes getting tough with the Iraqi government. The standard should be whether the surge would be better than the political strategy plus whatever else might be accomplished with the $20 billion.

This time, it would be nice to have that discussion before the troops reach Iraq.

The Hole In The Ground

Following another day of the same sanctimonious and empty gestures from our Fearless Leader, Keith Olbermann did it again. He's been on fire lately this season as the anti-Democrat/pro-fear rhetoric has ratcheted up yet again, and this is quite possibly the best special commentary he has done since his classic post-Katrina piece excoriating the government's clueless response to that epic disaster.

The full transcript of his words follows this paragraph, but I highly reccommend watching the video of this seething commentary (posted here) to get the full effect.

Half a lifetime ago, I worked in this now-empty space. And for 40 days after the attacks, I worked here again, trying to make sense of what happened, and was yet to happen, as a reporter.

All the time, I knew that the very air I breathed contained the remains of thousands of people, including four of my friends, two in the planes and -- as I discovered from those "missing posters" seared still into my soul -- two more in the Towers.

And I knew too, that this was the pyre for hundreds of New York policemen and firemen, of whom my family can claim half a dozen or more, as our ancestors.

I belabor this to emphasize that, for me this was, and is, and always shall be, personal.

And anyone who claims that I and others like me are "soft,"or have "forgotten" the lessons of what happened here is at best a grasping, opportunistic, dilettante and at worst, an idiot whether he is a commentator, or a Vice President, or a President.

However, of all the things those of us who were here five years ago could have forecast -- of all the nightmares that unfolded before our eyes, and the others that unfolded only in our minds -- none of us could have predicted this.

Five years later this space is still empty.

Five years later there is no memorial to the dead.

Five years later there is no building rising to show with proud defiance that we would not have our America wrung from us, by cowards and criminals.

Five years later this country's wound is still open.

Five years later this country's mass grave is still unmarked.

Five years later this is still just a background for a photo-op.

It is beyond shameful.

At the dedication of the Gettysburg Memorial -- barely four months after the last soldier staggered from another Pennsylvania field -- Mr. Lincoln said, "we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract."

Lincoln used those words to immortalize their sacrifice.

Today our leaders could use those same words to rationalize their reprehensible inaction. "We cannot dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground." So we won't.

Instead they bicker and buck pass. They thwart private efforts, and jostle to claim credit for initiatives that go nowhere. They spend the money on irrelevant wars, and elaborate self-congratulations, and buying off columnists to write how good a job they're doing instead of doing any job at all.

Five years later, Mr. Bush, we are still fighting the terrorists on these streets. And look carefully, sir, on these 16 empty acres. The terrorists are clearly, still winning.

And, in a crime against every victim here and every patriotic sentiment you mouthed but did not enact, you have done nothing about it.

And there is something worse still than this vast gaping hole in this city, and in the fabric of our nation. There is its symbolism of the promise unfulfilled, the urgent oath, reduced to lazy execution.

The only positive on 9/11 and the days and weeks that so slowly and painfully followed it was the unanimous humanity, here, and throughout the country. The government, the President in particular, was given every possible measure of support.

Those who did not belong to his party -- tabled that.

Those who doubted the mechanics of his election -- ignored that.

Those who wondered of his qualifications -- forgot that.

History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot be taken away from that government by its critics. It can only be squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation's wounds, but to take political advantage.

Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.

The President -- and those around him -- did that.

They promised bi-partisanship, and then showed that to them, "bi-partisanship" meant that their party would rule and the rest would have to follow, or be branded, with ever-escalating hysteria, as morally or intellectually confused, as appeasers, as those who, in the Vice President's words yesterday, "validate the strategy of the terrorists."

They promised protection, and then showed that to them "protection" meant going to war against a despot whose hand they had once shaken, a despot who we now learn from our own Senate Intelligence Committee, hated al-Qaida as much as we did.

The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped into supporting a war, on the false premise that it had 'something to do' with 9/11 is "lying by implication."

The impolite phrase is "impeachable offense."

Not once in now five years has this President ever offered to assume responsibility for the failures that led to this empty space, and to this, the current, curdled, version of our beloved country.

Still, there is a last snapping flame from a final candle of respect and fairness: even his most virulent critics have never suggested he alone bears the full brunt of the blame for 9/11.

Half the time, in fact, this President has been so gently treated, that he has seemed not even to be the man most responsible for anything in his own administration.

Yet what is happening this very night?

A mini-series, created, influenced -- possibly financed by -- the most radical and cold of domestic political Machiavellis, continues to be televised into our homes.

The documented truths of the last fifteen years are replaced by bald-faced lies; the talking points of the current regime parroted; the whole sorry story blurred, by spin, to make the party out of office seem vacillating and impotent, and the party in office, seem like the only option.

How dare you, Mr. President, after taking cynical advantage of the unanimity and love, and transmuting it into fraudulent war and needless death, after monstrously transforming it into fear and suspicion and turning that fear into the campaign slogan of three elections? How dare you -- or those around you -- ever "spin" 9/11?

Just as the terrorists have succeeded -- are still succeeding -- as long as there is no memorial and no construction here at Ground Zero.

So, too, have they succeeded, and are still succeeding as long as this government uses 9/11 as a wedge to pit Americans against Americans.

This is an odd point to cite a television program, especially one from March of 1960. But as Disney's continuing sell-out of the truth (and this country) suggests, even television programs can be powerful things.

And long ago, a series called "The Twilight Zone" broadcast a riveting episode entitled "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street."

In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion by extra-terrestrials disguised as humans. The electricity goes out. A neighbor pleads for calm. Suddenly his car -- and only his car -- starts. Someone suggests he must be the alien. Then another man's lights go on. As charges and suspicion and panic overtake the street, guns are inevitably produced. An "alien" is shot -- but he turns out to be just another neighbor, returning from going for help. The camera pulls back to a near-by hill, where two extra-terrestrials are seen manipulating a small device that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there's no need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human machines and then, "they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it's themselves."

And then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves tonight: "The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.

"For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own -- for the children, and the children yet unborn."

When those who dissent are told time and time again -- as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus -- that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehow un-American...When we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have "forgotten the lessons of 9/11"... look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me:

Who has left this hole in the ground?

We have not forgotten, Mr. President.

You have.

May this country forgive you.

Moving Ahead, Guardedly

(the following is reprinted sans permission from latimes.com)

MOVING AHEAD, GUARDEDLY
9/11 Has Changed Few Lives
Surprisingly, the mind-sets of most Americans haven't been greatly altered.
By Stephanie Simon, Times Staff Writer
September 11, 2006

Airport trash cans overflow with toothpaste and deodorant.

Thousands of college students bend their heads over Arabic texts.

In Minneapolis, networks of sensors continually sample air for anthrax, smallpox and bubonic plague. In Nebraska, Gov. Dave Heineman is alerted when cars with out-of-state license plates are spotted cruising cattle feedlots.

On a gravel road in rural Indiana, the Amish Country Popcorn factory makes the federal list of potential terrorist targets — a list of 77,069.

Five years after Sept. 11, this is the new normal.

Nearly 3,000 Americans died when terrorists hijacked four planes, crashing two into the World Trade Center's twin towers, one into the Pentagon and another into a field in Pennsylvania.

Documentary filmmaker Ric Burns calls the attack "as seismic as an event can be …. Rarely does the future announce itself so vividly and horrifyingly."

Residents of New York and Washington remain edgy. And those who lost loved ones, or have relatives or friends serving in the military abroad, can't help but be reminded all too often of Sept. 11.

Remarkably, though, the day-to-day lives of most Americans have changed very little. We have found it easy, perhaps startlingly easy, to stick to routines and habits and mind-sets forged before we could have conceived of planes as missiles. Last month, the Pew Research Center polled about 1,500 adults across the country. More than 40% said the terrorist attacks had not changed their personal lives at all. And 36% said their lives had been altered "only a little bit."

Sept. 11 is often compared to another day of infamy, Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Historians, however, see no comparison. World War II demanded personal sacrifice from every American family. The global war on terrorism has touched only a few directly, even as the threat level bounces from orange to yellow to orange to red.

"Many of the predictions made five years ago by cultural pundits about positive long-term changes on our behavior, on our attitudes, even on the art we make, have proved largely untrue," says novelist Julia Glass, who won a National Book Award for Three Junes.

She finds the lack of transformation depressing, a moment missed. "You could say it's because human beings are so good at adapting," Glass suggests. "Or because we tend toward a certain set point of selfishness and complacency."

That capacity for moving on, for getting back to normal, infuriated Army Staff Sgt. Jay White when he was home last summer between tours of duty in Iraq. "It used to drive him nuts when we were standing in line and somebody was complaining about their Frappuccino," recalls his wife, Jessica.

Jessica feels that same frustration at the high school in Cromwell, Conn., where she teaches history.

"It's a feeling of isolation and loneliness and confusion," she says. Her husband left on his most recent deployment less than three weeks after their wedding. "You hear about the dramas of the 16-year-old girls all the time, and I want to go: 'You don't even know what people are going through. What your own teacher's going through,' " she says.

Though most Americans have seen little change in their lives, many do recognize the effect Sept. 11 had on their neighbors and on society as a whole. In the Pew poll, 51% said their country had changed "in a major way."

Those changes are not exactly what the pundits predicted in the days after Sept. 11.

Back then, President Bush publicly wrapped the top Democrat in the Senate, Tom Daschle, in a bear hug; unity in the face of adversity seemed the only possible course. But fighting terrorism proved a sharply partisan issue — and all too susceptible to fear-mongering.

"National security has become just another political weapon to beat each other up with," says Leon E. Panetta, White House chief of staff under President Clinton.

It has also become a top priority for many voters, a noted change from decades past.

"Generally speaking, you could almost [always] gauge the outcome of elections by the economy," says Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a likely candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. "Now that issue has been trumped by the war on terror … and understandably. We received a national shock on 9/11."

Immediately after the terrorist strikes, 64% of Americans said they trusted their government to do the right thing all or most of the time. By the summer of 2002, the figure had dropped to 39%.

These days, the paradigm has shifted so dramatically that 36% of Americans say it's at least somewhat likely the federal government was complicit in the attacks, according to a recent Scripps-Howard poll.

Tens of thousands of people have viewed an online film that asserts the government plotted to bring down the twin towers and blow up the Pentagon — and then pin the blame on Arab hijackers as a pretext to invade the Middle East. In the weeks after the attacks, when American flags seemed to fly from nearly every home, when nearly every marquee proclaimed "God Bless America," it would have been impossible to imagine such a dark conspiracy theory gaining such traction.

In those days, many pundits predicted Americans would turn to God in their moment of stress, and, for a time, church attendance shot up. Polls showed Americans grappling with big questions about God and salvation.

The revival lasted three months.

By January, church attendance was back to normal. The Barna Group, a polling firm for religious groups, found no movement in standard measures of faith, such as Bible reading. "Spiritually speaking, it's as if nothing significant ever happened," says David Kinnaman, a Barna vice president.

So what, then, has changed since Sept. 11?

The American Civil Liberties Union has devoted vast amounts to fighting Bush administration policies such as eavesdropping without a warrant on certain phone calls and imprisoning American citizens indefinitely without charges or access to a lawyer. Those efforts have clearly resonated: ACLU membership has grown more than 80%, revenue has jumped 34%, and the group has nearly doubled the size of its national staff.

Other civil liberties groups have been equally charged. At New York's Center for Constitutional Rights, Legal Director Bill Goodman has handled cases brought by terrorist suspects imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay and by U.S. soldiers forced to serve beyond their terms of enlistment. He has sued on behalf of immigrants detained after Sept. 11 and foreigners who allege they were tortured by American agents.

The center's caseload has "been taken over by post-9/11 litigation," Goodman says.

The government, too, has been consumed by its new focus on terrorism. The FBI's budget has doubled. Federal spending on air security has quadrupled. The Department of Homeland Security has checked 2.7 million truckers against a terrorist watch list.

In Los Angeles, Edina Lekovic, a Muslim, senses Sept. 11 fallout when she leaves the house in her head scarf. Strangers stop her in the supermarket to ask if her father forces her to cover her hair. They wonder aloud if she's oppressed. Then they grill her about jihad.

"Life has gotten a lot more complicated," says Lekovic, communications director for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, a national policy group. "To be a Muslim in this day and age is to be in a pressure cooker, 24/7. You have to constantly explain your faith…. [We] went from private citizens to public ambassadors."

For Chris Simcox, the new normal means a new vigilance — and long nights pacing the Mexican border with a gun. Long disturbed by illegal immigration, Simcox says he had an epiphany after Sept. 11: "The next terrorists are not going to come in on visas." So he moved to Phoenix and founded the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps to help guard his country.

Simcox says he has signed up 8,000 volunteer Minutemen. His themes are also seeping into election-year politics. Randy Graf, an Arizona Republican running for a U.S. House seat, explains his call for a crackdown on illegal immigration this way: "We all remember what happened on Sept. 11."

"I tell you," Simcox says, triumphant, "the sleeping giant has awakened."

The fallout from Sept. 11 has affected the world of culture as well.

Musicians have channeled sorrow, rage and fear into anthems to that indelible day. Classical composer John Adams gave us a haunting elegy with "On the Transmigration of Souls." Country singer Toby Keith served up a lusty cry for vengeance with "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)." And Bruce Springsteen poured out his empathy for terrorism's victims — and its perpetrators — in his 2002 album, The Rising.

With his novel A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, Ken Kalfus brought black comedy to the age of terror. He sets his satire about a divorcing couple in Manhattan in 2001; at one point, husband and wife each think the other has died in the World Trade Center — and each is secretly delighted. It's a deliberate effort, Kalfus says, to disprove what "we were told after 9/11, that irony was dead."

For her part, New York writer Martha McPhee, a former National Book Award finalist, had one of the main characters in her cross-cultural love story, L'America, die in the collapse of the north tower.

"It's not surprising that novelists want to try" to take on Sept. 11, McPhee says, "because what a novel tries to do is make sense out of something that makes no sense."

That's what Americans have tried to do as well these last five years: make sense of the senseless. Shock waves from Sept. 11 reverberate still, but carrying on with the familiar humdrum of our lives lets us feel stable, even as radiation detectors are installed at the Super Bowl and security guards at the airport order us to toss our bottled water.

"Probably no American life is totally unaffected by 9/11, but very few people are immobilized or totally preoccupied with it," says Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School.

Lifton studies the psychology of survival, and he says we as a nation have not fully come to terms with the fear, the anger — or the humiliation — 9/11 evoked. We have learned to live with the new normal, yes. But that doesn't mean we've moved past that bright September day of unthinkable horror.

"It's a powerful event which has not been fully absorbed," Lifton says, "and in many ways floats in and out of our psyches."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
stephanie.simon@latimes.com

Times staff writers Richard Fausset, Janet Hook, Jenny Jarvie, Lynn Marshall, Scott Martelle, Charles McNulty, Ann Powers, Maria Russo, Mark Swed, David L. Ulin, Henry Weinstein and Robert W. Welkos contributed to this report.