Sept. 24, 02006 New York Times

Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat

By MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

More than a dozen United States government officials and outside experts were interviewed for this article, and all spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a classified intelligence document. The officials included employees of several government agencies, and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration. All of those interviewed had either seen the final version of the document or participated in the creation of earlier drafts. These officials discussed some of the document’s general conclusions but not details, which remain highly classified.

Officials with knowledge of the intelligence estimate said it avoided specific judgments about the likelihood that terrorists would once again strike on United States soil. The relationship between the Iraq war and terrorism, and the question of whether the United States is safer, have been subjects of persistent debate since the war began in 2003.

National Intelligence Estimates are the most authoritative documents that the intelligence community produces on a specific national security issue, and are approved by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence. Their conclusions are based on analysis of raw intelligence collected by all of the spy agencies.

Analysts began working on the estimate in 2004, but it was not finalized until this year. Part of the reason was that some government officials were unhappy with the structure and focus of earlier versions of the document, according to officials involved in the discussion.

Previous drafts described actions by the United States government that were determined to have stoked the jihad movement, like the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, and some policy makers argued that the intelligence estimate should be more focused on specific steps to mitigate the terror threat. It is unclear whether the final draft of the intelligence estimate criticizes individual policies of the United States, but intelligence officials involved in preparing the document said that its conclusions were not softened or massaged for political purposes.

Frederick Jones, a White House spokesman, said that the White House “played no role in drafting or reviewing the judgments expressed in the National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism.” The estimate’s judgments confirm some predictions of a National Intelligence Council report completed in January 2003, two months before the Iraq invasion. That report stated that the approaching war had the potential to increase support for political Islam worldwide and could increase support for some terrorist objectives.

Documents released by the White House timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks emphasized the successes that the United States had made in dismantling the top tier of Al Qaeda.

“Since the Sept. 11 attacks, America and its allies are safer, but we are not yet safe,” concludes one, a report titled “9/11 Five Years Later: Success and Challenges.” “We have done much to degrade Al Qaeda and its affiliates and to undercut the perceived legitimacy of terrorism.”

That document makes only passing mention of the impact the Iraq war has had on the global jihad movement. “The ongoing fight for freedom in Iraq has been twisted by terrorist propaganda as a rallying cry,” it states.

The report mentions the possibility that Islamic militants who fought in Iraq could return to their home countries, “exacerbating domestic conflicts or fomenting radical ideologies.”

On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee released a more ominous report about the terrorist threat. That assessment, based entirely on unclassified documents, details a growing jihad movement and says that “Al Qaeda leaders wait patiently for the right opportunity to attack.”

The new National Intelligence Estimate was overseen by David B. Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats, who commissioned it in 2004 after he took up his post at the National Intelligence Council. Mr. Low declined to be interviewed for this article.

The estimate concludes that the radical Islamic movement has expanded from a core of Qaeda operatives and affiliated groups to include a new class of “self-generating” cells inspired by Al Qaeda’s leadership but without any direct connection to Osama bin Laden or his top lieutenants.

It also examines how the Internet has helped spread jihadist ideology, and how cyberspace has become a haven for terrorist operatives who no longer have geographical refuges in countries like Afghanistan.

In early 2005, the National Intelligence Council released a study concluding that Iraq had become the primary training ground for the next generation of terrorists, and that veterans of the Iraq war might ultimately overtake Al Qaeda’s current leadership in the constellation of the global jihad leadership.

But the new intelligence estimate is the first report since the war began to present a comprehensive picture about the trends in global terrorism.

In recent months, some senior American intelligence officials have offered glimpses into the estimate’s conclusions in public speeches.

“New jihadist networks and cells, sometimes united by little more than their anti-Western agendas, are increasingly likely to emerge,” said Gen. Michael V. Hayden, during a speech in San Antonio in April, the month that the new estimate was completed. “If this trend continues, threats to the U.S. at home and abroad will become more diverse and that could lead to increasing attacks worldwide,” said the general, who was then Mr. Negroponte’s top deputy and is now director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

For more than two years, there has been tension between the Bush administration and American spy agencies over the violence in Iraq and the prospects for a stable democracy in the country. Some intelligence officials have said that the White House has consistently presented a more optimistic picture of the situation in Iraq than justified by intelligence reports from the field.

The broad judgments of the new intelligence estimate are consistent with assessments of global terrorist threats by American allies and independent terrorism experts.

The panel investigating the London terrorist bombings of July 2005 reported in May that the leaders of Britain’s domestic and international intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, “emphasized to the committee the growing scale of the Islamist terrorist threat.”

More recently, the Council on Global Terrorism, an independent research group of respected terrorism experts, assigned a grade of “D+” to United States efforts over the past five years to combat Islamic extremism. The council concluded that “there is every sign that radicalization in the Muslim world is spreading rather than shrinking.”

“The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation Northeast Regional Laboratory (Tahlequah) recently received a 135 exhibit submission that included 37 liquor bottles with green plant material suspended in the solutions, suspected marijuana (see photo). The exhibits were seized by the Cherokee Nation Drug Task Force pursuant to a search of a residence in Cherokee County (details sensitive). There were many different varieties of liquor in the seizure. Intelligence indicated that the suspects would take the bottles to various events in the area and sell shots of the liquor; these were referred to as “Pot Shots.”* Analysis of the plant material by microscopy confirmed marijuana, while analysis of the solutions (total net volume 29.75 liters) by GC and GC/MS confirmed delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC; quantitations not performed). Not surprisingly, liquors with higher alcohol concentrations also had higher THC concentrations. This was the first submission of this type to the laboratory.
 
[* “Microgram Bulletin” Editor’s Note: These solutions are also known as “Green Dragon.”]”

COURTESY HENRY KISSINJAH

Audit Finds Education Department Missteps

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: September 22, 2006
Filed at 2:18 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) — A scorching internal review of the Bush administration’s reading program says the Education Department ignored the law and ethical standards to steer money how it wanted.

The government audit is unsparing in its review of how Reading First, a billion-dollar program each year, that it says has been beset by conflicts of interest and willful mismanagement. It suggests the department broke the law by trying to dictate which curriculum schools must use.

It also depicts a program in which review panels were stacked with people who shared the director’s views and in which only favored publishers of reading curricula could get money.

In one e-mail, the director told a staff member to come down hard on a company he didn’t support, according to the report released Friday by the department’s inspector general.

”They are trying to crash our party and we need to beat the (expletive deleted) out of them in front of all the other would-be party crashers who are standing on the front lawn waiting to see how we welcome these dirtbags,” the Reading First director wrote, according to the report.

That official, Chris Doherty, is resigning in the coming days, department spokeswoman Katherine McLane said Friday. Asked if his quitting was in response to the report, she said only that Doherty is returning to the private sector after five years at the agency.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, in a statement, pledged to swiftly adopt all of the audit’s recommendations. She also pledged a review of every Reading First grant.

”I am concerned about these actions and committed to addressing and resolving them,” she said.

Reading First aims to help young children read through scientifically-proven programs, and the department considers it a jewel of No Child Left Behind, Bush’s education law. Just this week, a separate review found that the effort is helping schools raise achievement.

But from the start, the program has also been dogged by accusations of impropriety, leading to several ongoing audits. The new report from the Office of Inspector General — an independent arm of the Education Department — calls into question basic matters of credibility.

When the department fails to follow the law and its own guidance, the report says, ”it can only serve to undermine the public’s confidence in the department.”

The ranking Democrat on the House education committee was furious.

”They should fire everyone who was involved in this,” said Rep. George Miller, D-Calif. ”This was not an accident, this was not an oversight. This was an intentional effort to corrupt the process.”

About 1,500 school districts have received $4.8 billion in Reading First grants.

PRESIDENT CHAVEZ DELIVERS REMARKS AT THE U.N. GENERAL ASSEMBLY
SEPTEMBER 20, 2006
TRANSCRIPT

“Representatives of the governments of the world, good morning to all of you. First of all, I would like to invite you, very respectfully, to those who have not read this book, to read it. Noam Chomsky, one of the most prestigious American and world intellectuals, Noam Chomsky, and this is one of his most recent books, ‘Hegemony or Survival: The Imperialist Strategy of the United States.'” [Holds up book, waves it in front of General Assembly.]

“It’s an excellent book to help us understand what has been happening in the world throughout the 20th century, and what’s happening now, and the greatest threat looming over our planet. The hegemonic pretensions of the American empire are placing at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue to warn you about this danger and we appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our heads. I had considered reading from this book, but, for the sake of time,” [flips through the pages, which are numerous] “I will just leave it as a recommendation.

It reads easily, it is a very good book, I’m sure Madame [President] you are familiar with it. It appears in English, in Russian, in Arabic, in German. I think that the first people who should read this book are our brothers and sisters in the United States, because their threat is right in their own house. The devil is right at home. The devil, the devil himself, is right in the house.

“And the devil came here yesterday. Yesterday the devil came here. Right here.” [crosses himself]

“And it smells of sulfur still today.”

Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world.

I think we could call a psychiatrist to analyze yesterday’s statement made by the president of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world.

An Alfred Hitchcock movie could use it as a scenario. I would even propose a title: “The Devil’s Recipe.”

As Chomsky says here, clearly and in depth, the American empire is doing all it can to consolidate its system of domination. And we cannot allow them to do that. We cannot allow world dictatorship to be consolidated.

The world parent’s statement — cynical, hypocritical, full of this imperial hypocrisy from the need they have to control everything.

They say they want to impose a democratic model. But that’s their democratic model. It’s the false democracy of elites, and, I would say, a very original democracy that’s imposed by weapons and bombs and firing weapons.

What a strange democracy. Aristotle might not recognize it or others who are at the root of democracy.

What type of democracy do you impose with marines and bombs?

The president of the United States, yesterday, said to us, right here, in this room, and I’m quoting, “Anywhere you look, you hear extremists telling you can escape from poverty and recover your dignity through violence, terror and martyrdom.”

Wherever he looks, he sees extremists. And you, my brother — he looks at your color, and he says, oh, there’s an extremist. Evo Morales, the worthy president of Bolivia, looks like an extremist to him.

The imperialists see extremists everywhere. It’s not that we are extremists. It’s that the world is waking up. It’s waking up all over. And people are standing up.

I have the feeling, dear world dictator, that you are going to live the rest of your days as a nightmare because the rest of us are standing up, all those who are rising up against American imperialism, who are shouting for equality, for respect, for the sovereignty of nations.

Yes, you can call us extremists, but we are rising up against the empire, against the model of domination.

The president then — and this he said himself, he said: “I have come to speak directly to the populations in the Middle East, to tell them that my country wants peace.”

That’s true. If we walk in the streets of the Bronx, if we walk around New York, Washington, San Diego, in any city, San Antonio, San Francisco, and we ask individuals, the citizens of the United States, what does this country want? Does it want peace? They’ll say yes.

But the government doesn’t want peace. The government of the United States doesn’t want peace. It wants to exploit its system of exploitation, of pillage, of hegemony through war.

It wants peace. But what’s happening in Iraq? What happened in Lebanon? In Palestine? What’s happening? What’s happened over the last 100 years in Latin America and in the world? And now threatening Venezuela — new threats against Venezuela, against Iran?

He spoke to the people of Lebanon. Many of you, he said, have seen how your homes and communities were caught in the crossfire. How cynical can you get? What a capacity to lie shamefacedly. The bombs in Beirut with millimetric precision?

This is crossfire? He’s thinking of a western, when people would shoot from the hip and somebody would be caught in the crossfire.

This is imperialist, fascist, assassin, genocidal, the empire and Israel firing on the people of Palestine and Lebanon. That is what happened. And now we hear, “We’re suffering because we see homes destroyed.’

The president of the United States came to talk to the peoples — to the peoples of the world. He came to say — I brought some documents with me, because this morning I was reading some statements, and I see that he talked to the people of Afghanistan, the people of Lebanon, the people of Iran. And he addressed all these peoples directly.

And you can wonder, just as the president of the United States addresses those peoples of the world, what would those peoples of the world tell him if they were given the floor? What would they have to say?

And I think I have some inkling of what the peoples of the south, the oppressed people think. They would say, “Yankee imperialist, go home.” I think that is what those people would say if they were given the microphone and if they could speak with one voice to the American imperialists.

And that is why, Madam President, my colleagues, my friends, last year we came here to this same hall as we have been doing for the past eight years, and we said something that has now been confirmed — fully, fully confirmed.

I don’t think anybody in this room could defend the system. Let’s accept — let’s be honest. The U.N. system, born after the Second World War, collapsed. It’s worthless.

Oh, yes, it’s good to bring us together once a year, see each other, make statements and prepare all kinds of long documents, and listen to good speeches, like Abel’s (ph) yesterday, or President Mullah’s (ph). Yes, it’s good for that.

And there are a lot of speeches, and we’ve heard lots from the president of Sri Lanka, for instance, and the president of Chile.

But we, the assembly, have been turned into a merely deliberative organ. We have no power, no power to make any impact on the terrible situation in the world. And that is why Venezuela once again proposes, here, today, 20 September, that we re-establish the United Nations.

Last year, Madam, we made four modest proposals that we felt to be crucially important. We have to assume the responsibility our heads of state, our ambassadors, our representatives, and we have to discuss it.

The first is expansion, and Mullah (ph) talked about this yesterday right here. The Security Council, both as it has permanent and non-permanent categories, (inaudible) developing countries and LDCs must be given access as new permanent members. That’s step one.

Second, effective methods to address and resolve world conflicts, transparent decisions.

Point three, the immediate suppression — and that is something everyone’s calling for — of the anti-democratic mechanism known as the veto, the veto on decisions of the Security Council.

Let me give you a recent example. The immoral veto of the United States allowed the Israelis, with impunity, to destroy Lebanon. Right in front of all of us as we stood there watching, a resolution in the council was prevented.

Fourthly, we have to strengthen, as we’ve always said, the role and the powers of the secretary general of the United Nations.

Yesterday, the secretary general practically gave us his speech of farewell. And he recognized that over the last 10 years, things have just gotten more complicated; hunger, poverty, violence, human rights violations have just worsened. That is the tremendous consequence of the collapse of the United Nations system and American hegemonistic pretensions.

Madam, Venezuela a few years ago decided to wage this battle within the United Nations by recognizing the United Nations, as members of it that we are, and lending it our voice, our thinking.

Our voice is an independent voice to represent the dignity and the search for peace and the reformulation of the international system; to denounce persecution and aggression of hegemonistic forces on the planet.

This is how Venezuela has presented itself. Bolivar’s home has sought a nonpermanent seat on the Security Council.

Let’s see. Well, there’s been an open attack by the U.S. government, an immoral attack, to try and prevent Venezuela from being freely elected to a post in the Security Council.

The imperium is afraid of truth, is afraid of independent voices. It calls us extremists, but they are the extremists.

And I would like to thank all the countries that have kindly announced their support for Venezuela, even though the ballot is a secret one and there’s no need to announce things.

But since the imperium has attacked, openly, they strengthened the convictions of many countries. And their support strengthens us.

Mercosur, as a bloc, has expressed its support, our brothers in Mercosur. Venezuela, with Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, is a full member of Mercosur.

And many other Latin American countries, CARICOM, Bolivia have expressed their support for Venezuela. The Arab League, the full Arab League has voiced its support. And I am immensely grateful to the Arab world, to our Arab brothers, our Caribbean brothers, the African Union. Almost all of Africa has expressed its support for Venezuela and countries such as Russia or China and many others.

I thank you all warmly on behalf of Venezuela, on behalf of our people, and on behalf of the truth, because Venezuela, with a seat on the Security Council, will be expressing not only Venezuela’s thoughts, but it will also be the voice of all the peoples of the world, and we will defend dignity and truth.

Over and above all of this, Madam President, I think there are reasons to be optimistic. A poet would have said “helplessly optimistic,” because over and above the wars and the bombs and the aggressive and the preventive war and the destruction of entire peoples, one can see that a new era is dawning.

As Sylvia Rodriguez (ph) says, the era is giving birth to a heart. There are alternative ways of thinking. There are young people who think differently. And this has already been seen within the space of a mere decade. It was shown that the end of history was a totally false assumption, and the same was shown about Pax Americana and the establishment of the capitalist neo-liberal world. It has been shown, this system, to generate mere poverty. Who believes in it now?

What we now have to do is define the future of the world. Dawn is breaking out all over. You can see it in Africa and Europe and Latin America and Oceanea. I want to emphasize that optimistic vision.

We have to strengthen ourselves, our will to do battle, our awareness. We have to build a new and better world.

Venezuela joins that struggle, and that’s why we are threatened. The U.S. has already planned, financed and set in motion a coup in Venezuela, and it continues to support coup attempts in Venezuela and elsewhere.

President Michelle Bachelet reminded us just a moment ago of the horrendous assassination of the former foreign minister, Orlando Letelier.

And I would just add one thing: Those who perpetrated this crime are free. And that other event where an American citizen also died were American themselves. They were CIA killers, terrorists.

And we must recall in this room that in just a few days there will be another anniversary. Thirty years will have passed from this other horrendous terrorist attack on the Cuban plane, where 73 innocents died, a Cubana de Aviacion airliner.

And where is the biggest terrorist of this continent who took the responsibility for blowing up the plane? He spent a few years in jail in Venezuela. Thanks to CIA and then government officials, he was allowed to escape, and he lives here in this country, protected by the government.

And he was convicted. He has confessed to his crime. But the U.S. government has double standards. It protects terrorism when it wants to.

And this is to say that Venezuela is fully committed to combating terrorism and violence. And we are one of the people who are fighting for peace.

Luis Posada Carriles is the name of that terrorist who is protected here. And other tremendously corrupt people who escaped from Venezuela are also living here under protection: a group that bombed various embassies, that assassinated people during the coup. They kidnapped me and they were going to kill me, but I think God reached down and our people came out into the streets and the army was too, and so I’m here today.

But these people who led that coup are here today in this country protected by the American government. And I accuse the American government of protecting terrorists and of having a completely cynical discourse.

We mentioned Cuba. Yes, we were just there a few days ago. We just came from there happily.

And there you see another era born. The Summit of the 15, the Summit of the Nonaligned, adopted a historic resolution. This is the outcome document. Don’t worry, I’m not going to read it.

But you have a whole set of resolutions here that were adopted after open debate in a transparent matter — more than 50 heads of state. Havana was the capital of the south for a few weeks, and we have now launched, once again, the group of the nonaligned with new momentum.

And if there is anything I could ask all of you here, my companions, my brothers and sisters, it is to please lend your good will to lend momentum to the Nonaligned Movement for the birth of the new era, to prevent hegemony and prevent further advances of imperialism.

And as you know, Fidel Castro is the president of the nonaligned for the next three years, and we can trust him to lead the charge very efficiently.

Unfortunately they thought, “Oh, Fidel was going to die.” But they’re going to be disappointed because he didn’t. And he’s not only alive, he’s back in his green fatigues, and he’s now presiding the nonaligned.

So, my dear colleagues, Madam President, a new, strong movement has been born, a movement of the south. We are men and women of the south.

With this document, with these ideas, with these criticisms, I’m now closing my file. I’m taking the book with me. And, don’t forget, I’m recommending it very warmly and very humbly to all of you.

We want ideas to save our planet, to save the planet from the imperialist threat. And hopefully in this very century, in not too long a time, we will see this, we will see this new era, and for our children and our grandchildren a world of peace based on the fundamental principles of the United Nations, but a renewed United Nations.

And maybe we have to change location. Maybe we have to put the United Nations somewhere else; maybe a city of the south. We’ve proposed Venezuela.

You know that my personal doctor had to stay in the plane. The chief of security had to be left in a locked plane. Neither of these gentlemen was allowed to arrive and attend the U.N. meeting. This is another abuse and another abuse of power on the part of the Devil. It smells of sulfur here, but God is with us and I embrace you all.

May God bless us all. Good day to you.

(APPLAUSE)

Time Magazine on “Idiocracy”

Sunday, Sep. 10, 2006

Dude, Where’s My Film?

This man gave the world King of the Hill and Office Space. So why is Fox squashing his new movie?
By JOEL STEIN

Movies aren’t banished straight to video because they’re bad. A reasonably smart marketing exec with a splicing machine and a decent song can make a huge profit out of bad. If some guy at home could cut together that YouTube trailer where The Shining is a touching father-son comedy, then the Fox marketing division can make Date Movie look good in a 30-sec. TV spot. That’s why studio marketers are better at hoodwinking the customer than those two guys Huck and Jim picked up on the river. The biggest sin a director can commit isn’t making a bad movie, it’s making one that doesn’t make a good ad.

That helps explain the strange fate of Idiocracy, a sci-fi comedy starring Luke Wilson and directed and co-written by Mike Judge, the guy whose spotless track record includes Beavis and Butt-head, King of the Hill and Office Space. Idiocracy may not be a bad movie, but every ad and trailer the studio put together for it tested atrociously. After sitting around finished for almost a year, the movie opened two weeks ago–sort of. Fox released it in a few theaters in seven cities (not including New York City), with no trailers, no ads, no official poster and no screenings for critics.

The problem is, Idiocracy is so aesthetically displeasing–its vision of the future so purposely, gaudily, corporately ugly–that even showing a second of it made people refuse to see it. Judge’s unslick look might work for hand-drawn cartoons of hicks or a movie that takes place in poorly lit cubicles, but it’s not so great for a sci-fi action comedy. It just doesn’t look or feel like Talladega Nights or Dodgeball. Even though Fox probably made a million dollars’ worth of trailers and ads, they empirically knew from testing that every dollar they spent on ad time for Idiocracy would be wasted.

So they dumped it, which happens more often than you think. Last year Fox took The Onion’s sketch movie, which has been in development for several years, out behind the studio barn and put it to sleep. They also dumped the $50 million film Stay, starring Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts, in a few theaters with almost no marketing. Ever wonder where all those old, bad movies suddenly come from when a guy like Ashton Kutcher becomes famous?

Still, abandoning Idiocracy seems particularly unjust, since Judge has made a lot of money for Fox. Plus, Idiocracy isn’t a bad movie: a lot of the reviews are actually positive. The idea is an extension of Judge’s previous work mocking the dumbing down of society: perfectly average Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph are frozen until 2505 and awaken to a world so degraded by mass consumerism that they are now the smartest people in the world. Crops are dying because they’re being irrigated with an electrolyte-filled sports drink that has “the taste plants crave.” Costco takes up miles of space and has greeters emotionlessly repeat, “Welcome to Costco. I love you.” The movie is packed with top-shelf versions of the dumb-guy jokes that have sustained sitcoms for years, which you’d think would be great stuff for a trailer.

A desperate Fox last fall even considered shooting Idiocracy ads that wouldn’t show any of the movie at all. But the big studio marketing departments don’t work well with high-concept campaigns and grass-roots marketing. They’re designed to blast radio and TV into the mass consciousness. Stranger still, they seem not to care that marketing a movie’s theatrical distribution can boost its eventual DVD sales, which Idiocracy is very likely to score on. (After a modest theatrical run, Office Space went on to sell 6 million DVDs and videotapes.) That may be because DVD marketing comes out of the DVD division’s budget, and why help those guys? They’re over in a different building.

Not that anybody will talk about any of that–you’ll notice there are no quotes in this story. That’s because Fox doesn’t want to bad-mouth Judge, not even off the record, and Judge doesn’t want to complain about Fox. Judge knows he works in an Office Space world with dumb bosses who can’t market an offbeat movie and an Idiocracy world where audiences react mainly to CGI bells and whistles. The best he can hope to do is quietly keep making fun of those facts, and hope it plays a lot on cable.

CRITICAL MASS: Jerome Weeks’ farewell column

LAST WEEK, Jerome Weeks accepted a buyout offer from The Dallas Morning News beginning Sept 15, rather than work in a severely reduced arts section. Staff employees were told they could write a farewell column but it would have to be OK’d by management first. At any rate, Jerome’s farewell column was refused, and thus far just one farewell column from the 111 people leaving the paper has appeared. Here is what he wrote.

It’s a little thing, but I’m looking forward to reading for idle pleasure again.

Readers have often told me that being a full-time book critic must be a dream job. And I agree. It’s practically a leisure-time activity. Let me take a moment here to put my feet up on my desk. Ahh.

Still, as Mark Twain observed, anything you’re not obliged to do is play. Anything else is work. And as a book journalist, one is obliged to race after the Media Now-Now-Now – what critic David Denby once called “information without knowledge, opinions without principles, instincts without beliefs.”

What’s more, book culture may seem a dwindling, quaint endeavor to advertisers in mad pursuit of illiterate teens and at a time when arts coverage in general is getting dumped or fragmented into a million Web sites. But there are hundreds of thousands more new books released per year than TV shows, sports programs, movies or CDs. For all the talk of the death of print, more people have access to more books now than at any time in history.

That’s amazing but it means keeping up is a full-time sprint. A book columnist must read in gross tonnage, read hastily in trains, planes and lunch lines and read books no one should bother with. One can endure a film or a concert for two hours; reading a pointless book can take days. Recall those dreaded high school assignments: A bad book can seem like a prison sentence.

I know, I know. You spend your time heroically putting out fires and saving lives in the ER. All of this reading doesn’t really sound like work to you. But it is. Otherwise, we wouldn’t pay researchers, law clerks, teachers or librarians.

OK, so we don’t pay them much. Which just shows how little we actually value reading. Critic Walter Kirn has observed that the novelist is “culturally invisible” today because his job offers few rewards to the big-dog male ego. The same is true of reading. Nowhere in films or TV do characters read — other than the “bookish girl” or the action hero, but only when he must desperately decipher the Sacred Inca Brain Codex for clues to foil the arch-fiend’s dastardly plot — a plot the “bookish girl” could have figured out long ago.

Still, for reviewers, one of the accidental delights of the job comes precisely from reading many of those books we’d normally use for attic insulation. It’s a central pleasure of art: discovery. Finding that what we couldn’t imagine happening in a book can not only happen but succeed, endure, excite.

Then there’s the joy of relaying this to readers. To re-live the thrill. And, of course, there’s the pleasure of irking some people, notably bloggers. Mustn’t forget that.

All of which keeps the neurons firing. Helps stave off Alzheimer’s, as the doctors advise. So for all of this and a paycheck, if little else, I’m grateful. I’ve been doing it, on and off, in academia and the media, since I wrote my first published newspaper review at 20.

On the third hand, turning such pleasures into a chore can warp a person. No, not warp them into the cliche of the curmudgeon-critic but give them a pained relationship to what they love. I read books the way I breathe, but lately, when another three-pound monster has landed on my desk, I’ve flinched.

So it’ll be a relief to read for pleasure again. One reason it’s particularly appealing these days is that it’s so counter-culture — so counter to our prevailing techno-bully-rapid-response-profit-margin mindset. It’s seditious fun being idle, being un-productive.

Let’s not fool ourselves. Publishing is an industry like any other, and a book is a commodity like any other. But reading is slow, it’s private, it’s non-electronic. Reading fiction is particularly suspect in our Get Ahead Nation. Traditionally, it has been a “woman’s pastime.” It’s not necessarily self-improving. For that matter, it’s often not necessary at all.

So yes, being a book columnist is one of the last, great gigs in the grumpy, panicked world of newspaperdom. But although print journalism and books are far from gone, this little corner of them is. Just now, there was room for my big feet on my desk because it’s been cleared off. The books have been boxed up, shipped out.

I’ve left one novel unpacked, though. I plan to read it on the train home, maybe share it with my daughter, Suzanna, because it looks like one she might enjoy. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll turn off this computer now.

You will no longer be able to:
E-mail jweeks@dallasnews.com

From Sept. 9, 2006 New York Times:

Shying Away From Degeneracy
By DAN MITCHELL

THE new film “Idiocracy” sounds like a sure winner. It was directed by Mike Judge, creator of the animated TV series “Beavis and Butt-head” and “King of the Hill,” and director of the sleeper movie hit “Office Space.” It stars Luke Wilson. It has received good reviews from the few critics who, despite the efforts of 20th Century Fox, have been able to see it.

So why did Fox, after sitting on the movie for two years before releasing it Sept. 1, decide not to market the film, opting instead to open it quietly in only 130 theaters and then quickly send it to video? Judging by the online reaction, there are at least two possible reasons.

The first is that the film is simply too stark a critique of American culture, or even that it is a cautionary tale about low-intelligence dysgenics (essentially, overbreeding among the stupid). The movie depicts a future in which everyone has become so dense and culturally lowbrow that Mr. Wilson’s character — an average guy from the present day who travels by accident hundreds of years forward in time — is a relative genius. Why, asks David Weigel on Reason magazine’s Hit and Run blog (reason.com), do “movies that exploit dumbed-down American culture get wide releases while a comedy making light of that, by the creator of ‘Beavis and Butt-head,’ is getting canned?”

He points to another blogger, Ilkka Kokkarinen, who writes that the implications of the movie’s theme — flatulence jokes aside — “are so immensely serious that it is simply unimaginable that any studio boss would take the slightest chance of becoming the next Mel Gibson over the idea that society of stupid people is worse than a society of smart people.” (sixteenvolts.blogspot.com) Populists — defenders of the little guy — would not stand for it, Mr. Kokkarinen says.

Others theorize that Fox disowned the film because it makes fun not only of Fox News — the studio’s sister division — but also of Starbucks, Fuddruckers and other companies that may advertise with one or more media outlets of Fox’s owner, the News Corporation.

The blog FishBowlLA quotes Luke Thompson, a movie reviewer for E! Online, as saying, “some of the sponsors may well have been unhappy with the way their products are placed, and made some phone calls to higher-ups” (mediabistro.com).

from FishBowlLA:

Luke Thompson wrote:

It was obvious the studio killed it — usually, movies that don’t screen for the press are promoted up the wazoo with misleading trailers, posters, etc., but this wasn’t promoted at all.

It’s possible Mike Judge or somebody else pissed somebody important off.

Having seen the movie, though, the best theory I have is that some of the sponsors may well have been unhappy with the way their products are placed, and made some phone calls to higher-ups. Carls Jr. is prominently mentioned, featuring their new slogan “Fuck you! I’m eating!”, their “super big-ass fries,” and when one woman is unable to pay for her fries, the Carls Jr. automatic dispenser calls the cops and tells her her children are now the property of Carl’s Jr.

Perhaps closer to home, Fox News features nearly nude anchors and is affiliated with “The Violence Channel.” Though this seems fairly mild compared with the usual critiques of Fox News, sexual content does seem to be considered more of a stigma nowadays.

It may have been a simpler decision than that, like someone just figured they wouldn’t make money from it theatrically — but tonally and in content it’s absolutely in keeping with everything Judge has ever done, most of which has made the money men very happy in the long run.

Friday, September 15, 2006 7:30 PM at Skylight Books

Arthur Magazine and the Nightjar Review Present…

“They’re Coming To Take You Away: The Poetry of of Alex Mitchell, John Tottenham, and Peter Relic”

Three Los Angeles poets bring their work to Skylight for a evening of laughter, languor, and imagistic transgressions.

Alex Mitchell has been called both “a rock’n’roll addicted sweetly emotional fellow traveler” and “a bruiser with a bruised heart” in the pages of Arthur Magazine. Mitchell is the author of Life Is A Phantom K-Mart Horse Starting Up In The Middle Of The Night (Yahara Design Press), a book of prose-poems about both his misspent Florida boyhood and his hard-knock years in Hollywood. He is not afraid to show off his Miami Dolphins tattoo.

John Tottenham is the author of The Inertia Variations (Kerosene Bomb Publishing), a masterful poetic tome on the art of getting nothing done. In his eight-line poems, Tottenham succeeds in “discharging himself of will, while subtly sublimating his own state of stagnation” (Arthur Magazine). The Inertia Variations are currently being adapted into song form by Matt Johnson of The The.

Peter Relic is the recipient of the 2006 Da Capo Best American Music Writing Award. He he has written for publications including Rolling Stone, MOJO, and the Los Angeles Times. His poems (as published in the Nightjar Review) prompted betablog to write: “Utilizing the Malaysian stanza form known as the pantoum (Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, and John Ashberry all used it), Relic toggles between being trenchant and ludicrous, all rendered with a definite sense of craft.”

THE EVENT IS FREE AND ALL AGES ARE WELCOME.

Skylight Books
1818 N. Vermont Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90027
Tel: (323) 660-1175
Click here for more info.