iWorld

With his customary fanfare and flair for the theatrical, Apple Computer Chief Executive Steve Jobs on Thursday announced the release of the video-enabled iPod, the latest tweak on the music recall device everyone seems to have today. With Jobs' latest bold move, the entertainment industry is again on notice that the relationship between producer and consumer is changing more quickly than ever; and that, regardless of market share and gross capitalization relative to other corporations in the space, Apple continues to enjoy an almost mythic high ground among devotees of the cutting edge.

As with other Apple products, the introduction of the video iPod will likely terrify the business world of personal entertainment technology. The rollout ads and at least some of Jobs' presentation were impressive. One ad for the new iPod showcases a video starring U2 (fast becoming Apple's house band); the camera pulls back slightly to frame up the video not in the spatial context of an actual performance but as an image on the screen of the New Device. And justhatfast, entertainment changes.

Microsoft, Apple's eternal bete noire, was late to the party, having introduced mobile video in 2004, about two years after the introduction of the iPod. In a story in yesterday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer, analysts told reporter Todd Bishop that sales of Microsoft's Portable Media Center "have been sluggish and consumer awareness is low."

Bishop asked a tech-savvy lawyer what he thought of the Microsoft product. "Never heard of them," the lawyer said. But he was hot to maybe buy the new iPod.

This begins to explain the differences one encounters when comparing Microsoft and Apple; both are visionary companies with enviable track records and reliable products; both are immediately recognized around the world; both are adapting technology to the human experience in compelling ways. But in the look & feel world of marketing, in the way the public experiences the product, Apple comes out on top.

Why? Let's call it the JNSQ Factor. Those four letters are fom the words in the French phrase "je ne sais quoi," which more or less literally translates to "I know not what," an expression used to describe the ineffable, ephemeral, something quality that makes a person, an idea, a performance, a device stand apart from, and usually above, the competition.

Apple has always held down that lofty perch. From the beginning, when the Macintosh was introduced, Apple set the pace for weaving art and computer technology in a way Microsoft couldn't hope to achieve. One reason for this is very much rooted in what each company is and what each company sells.

Apple's stock in trade is the development of the computer and tangible devices -- objects that, like all objects, summon a personal identification with the owner, a sense of individuality, a personality. Apple's core products reinforce our proprietary instincts, our embrace of things -- things we can hold and touch and manipulate and feel. Microsoft's business is software, arrays of code and markup language, ones and zeroes designed to improve efficiency, enhance productivity, streamline operations -- all utterly necessary in the modern world, but in the end not seen being as personal, as individual, as downright cuddly as that work of art sitting on your desktop, blinking every so often to remind you just how cool it looks.

JNSQ for sho. It's that extra element in an Apple product rollout that a Microsoft rollout doesn't seem to have. That edge. That mystery. That cool, elegant visual vocabulary that appears to owe as much to Zen-monastery simplicity as to the technology that embodies that simplicity. Want proof? Walk through an Apple retail store, like the one hard by the campus of the University of Washington. Watch people handling the new products. They play with them like at any consumer electronics store, of course. But there's often an extra lingering glance, the sweep of a hand across the monitor that's less the act of a consumer than it is the act of a suitor, one truly desirous of the object of his or her affections.

Sorry -- you don't feel that way about software, no matter how enabling it is. It's hard to fall in love with tags and code.

Not that Microsoft isn't subject to people's emotional reactions. One problem for MSFT is the still-lingering perception of the company as technological bully, that perception arising from the landmark civil trial in which the U.S. government sued the company for stifling competition, and despite a settlement in the case in 2004. With baggage like that trailing and preceding you, as well as a longstanding reputation for playing hardball with everyone from competitors to your own contract workers, it's hard for the public to embrace you, even if your product is in every facet of their daily lives. It all comes down to perception.

Apple has always played up its reputation as the mouse that roared; Microsoft has always positioned itself as an unstoppable force. Little guy vs. big guy. David vs. Goliath. And the public has voted, about 30 million times at last count, for the iPod from the little guy, while the big guy's Portable Media Center goes wanting. Reason? It's partly, or even mostly, human nature: People respect Goliath but their hearts, and regions south of their hearts, are with the underdog.

Apple's made missteps too -- can you say "Lisa"? Ironically enough, the video iPod Jobs rolled out this week was the result of a change of mind; as recently as last year, Bishop reported Friday, Jobs had come to the conclusion "that video may be the wrong direction to go." Jobs presumably got religion when he saw the market-share bite that Sony's PlayStation enjoys, and considered the prospect of a groundbreaking distribution deal with Disney (and by extension the best programming on ABC).

And Apple innovates more frequently (almost too frequently). That's great for running rings around the competition, but it can be pleasantly maddening if you're a Macintosh devotee. Apple zealously tweaks and upgrades hardware and operating systems so often it can be hard to keep up. Case in point: I bought a new iMac computer with 75GB, Bluetooth wireless mouse and 17-inch all-in-one display for about $1,900 in February. By July, if memory serves, Apple had dropped the price: had I waited, I could have bought a 20-inch iMac for the same as my 17-inch five months earlier. Then they did it again: When Jobs announced the video iPod, he also took wraps off the new iMac, which features a remote control for access to music and images from across the room, and a built-in web camera -- all for about what I paid, months earlier, for less.

That's the cost of keeping up. And the 30 million who ponied up for the iPod understand that, and they're willing to pay even more. They can't get enough. They're in the gym and at the coffee shops and in their cars and on the street, listening to whatever they want whenever they want, every one caught up in their own little world.

But not really. It's Steve Jobs' world, actually. We just boot it up.

White House of Pain

The escalating cost of war in lives and dollars comes home on the eve of the next stab at democracy in Iraq. With the Oct. 15 constitutional referendum dead ahead, the Pentagon announced Oct. 7 that the number of U.S. troops in Iraq has mushroomed to 152,000. A Pentagon official told the AP that troop strength probably will hold near that level at least through the election.

At almost the same time we get the money hit: A paper by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service determined that the average monthly costs of waging war in Iraq has gone from below $5 billion to $6 billion. The confllict in Afghanistan costs another $1 billion a month. The research service concluded that war costs could total $570 billion by the end of 2010, assuming those 152,000 troops are gradually, eventually brought home.

This begins to explain the haggard, beaten look lately on the face of George Bush. The cocksure certainties of the Ivy League jokester who changed into a governor who morphed into a president in a flight suit have given way to the insecurities of a man under siege. The political capital he announced with a smirk after the election is gone, like the billions already poured into Iraq, like the global capital of goodwill expended at a white-hot burn rate over the last three years.

The last three years. You want proof of how the presidency, this presidency has aged George Bush? Compare pictures from Bush's Cocksure Period -- the State of the Union 2002; even from the summer of 2003, before the grim slide began -- to shots taken today. His hair was dramatically darker then, his face less drawn, more animated, the gait of his walk sturdier, more aggressive, like the stride of a good ol' boy spoiling for a parking-lot fight. In that first year in office, and even after the horrors of Sept. 11, George Bush nearly bounded off of Air Force One and Marine One, walking with a jauntiness that underscored a joy of those marvelous perks of the presidency, pointed to an embrace of the levers of the most formidable power on earth.

Fast forward to the Blue Period: Nowadays when Bush alights from Marine One, he looks like a man painfully going through the motions, returning the salute from the Marine at the foot of the chopper's staircase like he'd rather be doing anything else. There's an aspect of sourness to some of his more recent public appearances, what looks like a foundational disappointment ... or maybe it's the look of a man who realizes that, as bad as it's been so far, he's staring down the barrel of another three years of the same.

It's tempting to write this off as the obligatory second-year jinx common to second-term presidents: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton. Presidential historian Michael Beschloss, talking to Don Imus on MSNBC this morning, called it "almost an eternal part of the modern presidency." But there are factors in play that are specific, things particular to this administration that give the president's current straits a singular status in the annals of second-term debacle.

A new poll brought that home today. A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that Bush’s approval rating has fallen to below 40 percent, a new low, while the percentage of Americans thinking the country is moving in the right direction has dropped below 30 percent. A plurality of poll respondents would prefer a Democratic-controlled Congress, and fewer than one in three -- just 29 percent -- think White House counsel Harriet Miers is qualified to serve on the Supreme Court.

What makes it especially damning for the Bushies is the fact that the poll was taken after a period of small triumphs. Bush delivered a prime-time speech from New Orleans, promising to rebuild the Gulf Coast after the damage caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. He made no fewer than eight visits to the region, pressing the flesh, wielding the odd hammer, doing his best to build goodwill among the locals. And earlier he witnessed the Senate confirm walking Caucasian archetype John Roberts to the Supreme Court with relatively little fanfare or controversy.

It'd be easier to commiserate with a president going through a bad patch if so much of this agony weren't self-inflicted. The president and his crew have stubbornly resisted a rising tide of popular opposition to the war in Iraq. They've resisted learning the lessons of our peculiar American history and the grim Santayanaesque course of events that is playing itself out in Iraq: that ultimately, democracy cannot be imposed, even by proxy, and still be called democracy. They've turned deaf ears to the thousands of American families who have suffered losses in the Iraq engagement, and called on the United States to leave a place we should never have entered in the first place.

They have even disregarded the admissions of the generals charged with prosecuting that war, generals and officials who have said the primary objectives of the war are unattainable [see post "Great(ly lowered) expectations"]. And they will no doubt be ready to disregard or ignore the gravity of the report from the Congressional Research Service, continuing to exhaust our childrens' childrens' treasure in the name of a chimera.

John Lee Hooker got it right: "Serve you right to suffer ... "

With all due respect to whatever football stadium that first acquired the nickname -- Lambeau Field? Applied Materials/Amgen/Unilever Park? -- there's a new house of pain in America, and its address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Its current occupants will be there until the lease runs out in January 2009, unless the current occupants decide to sublet the place in the meantime -- most likely to a vice president with a bad ticker, an implanted pacemaker and orders to stay away from microwaves.

We don't really want to go there.

Three more years! Three more years!

Bennett's Folly, defended

We knew William Bennett would inevitably surface again, after his recent talk-radio appearance in which he effectively imputed original sin to black children born and unborn [see the post "Bennett's Folly"]. And we frankly expected at least a smidgen of mea culpa from the oversize ego of the author of "The Book of Virtues."

But no! Today, in a classic example of blaming the messenger, and preaching before His Kind of Crowd in Bakersfield, Calif., the former education secretary -- a champion of social and political conservatism -- blamed the news media for having distorted his remarks about the societal benefit of aborting black babies as a pre-emptive approach to short-circuiting crime.

Bennett, making his first public fulminations since the comment was broadcast on his "Morning in America" radio show last month, told a crowd of 4,500 like-minded mushwits at the Bakersfield Business Conference that he purposely made "a bad argument in order to put it down."

"I was putting forward a bad argument in order to put it down," he said, drawing sustained applause, according to The Associated Press. "They reported and emphasized only the abhorrent argument, not my shooting it down."

We might have expected this. As we remember from how he handled public reaction to his little ... preoccupation with the gaming table -- one that reportedly cost him $8 million over a decade -- William Bennett is loathe to admit ever having done wrong. It's natural, of course, to get your back up when someone catches you committing a transgression. But contrition is anathema to Bennett; perhaps it's to be expected from a man who long ago appointed himself the Values Czar of America, king of the finger-waggers, a moralistic Aesop for our time.

Bennett dug in his heels even during a meeting with some black community leaders, who naturally expressed their outrage. It was all the press' fault. He was taken out of context, he was presumed to be saying what he believed when he was just deliberately positing an over-the-top argument for the sake of argument.

All of which would be easier to swallow if this darling of the GOP hadn't started his little exercise in anti-social roleplay with the words "I do know that it's true." [Again, see "Bennett's Folly" for the full flatulent remark.]

Where this mess goes from here is anyone's guess; there's never been any love lost between Bennett and African Americans anyway, and this will only make things worse. But black folks have long memories (even sometimes when we shouldn't), and Bennett's commentary -- coming so soon on the heels of the disastrous federal response to Katrina, and as part and parcel of blacks' old suspicions of the GOP's racial initiatives -- is the kind of thing that tends to be remembered at election time.

We do know that's true.

A 'pit bull' revealed?

Well ... maybe she's not so rasa a tabula after all. The Associated Press -- no doubt feeling the same kind of gauntlet throwdown as with Gary Hart all those years ago -- began sifting through the public life of Harriet Miers; they're reporting now that Miers has had a documentedly vibrant public life, with enough deviations from anyone's political script to make her, perhaps, the kind of jurist whose life experiences and passion for evolution the Supreme Court couldn't do without.

The AP's Donna Cassata and Calvin Woodward report that "Miers’ footprints on contentious social issues suggest a moderate position on gay rights, an interest in advancing women and minorities, and sympathy for anti-abortion efforts." She used to pack a piece too, they reported. Miers apparently didn't use the Smith & Wesson .45-cal pistol her brother gave her for protection very often or very long. But throwing that fact in with other aspects of her public persona, what may be shaping up is the public's discovery of the most interesting nominee to the Supreme Court since William Rehnquist. If living an at least marginally fascinating life -- one more average, one slightly out of step with the usual judicial career path -- counts for anything, Miers may be more qualified than we know.

What makes her somewhat more than mildly interesting is what makes her dangerous to the Republican right: She's unpredictable within the context of the predictable. The right wing knows she's a conservative, they can bank on that. But it's those doggone little spasms of philosophical and political originality that have Republicans terrified right now.

Just when everyone got comfortable with her philosophical throughline, something breaks ranks with the okey-doke. Consider her past championing of individual rights, something the GOP publicly endorses but doesn't want to go too far. In 1991, a decade before the Sept. 11 2001, attacks, Miers defended constitutional freedoms in a time of peril, AP reported.

“The same liberties that ensure a free society make the innocent vulnerable to those who prevent rights and privileges and commit senseless and cruel acts,” she wrote in Texas Lawyer as the president of the state bar association. “Those precious liberties include free speech, freedom to assemble ... access to public places, the right to bear arms and freedom from constant surveillance. We are not willing to sacrifice these rights because of the acts of maniacs.”

Cassata and Woodward reported that, "[i]n one of the few head-on expositions of her views on public policy, a short gay-rights survey she filled out during her city council campaign in 1989, Miers backed equal civil rights for homosexuals and spending on AIDS education while defending a Texas law — since overturned by the Supreme Court — that made gay sex a crime."

She contradicts herself? Very well, she contradicts herself. Guess what? It's human and it reflects the fallibility of just about everything we know, and absolutely everything we are.

And anyway, it's just interesting for Chrizake! The judiciary hearings for John Glover Roberts, the blandest, most frighteningly generic white man in the United States, were basically a love feast, a mildly abrasive coronation of a man whose name was probably being painted in gold leaf on his Supreme Court office door before the hearings even started. Drama is rarely found in a slam dunk -- outside the realm of basketball, anyway.

That's why the Roberts hearings weren't terribly interesting; there was much stonewalling and obligatorily refusing to speak about one topic or another that could come before him on the bench -- but through it all, Roberts presented the image of the Company Man from central casting, fulfilling a role that years of experience on the bench had made perfectly clear. It had all the drama of watching grass grow.

John Roberts was, to a greater or lesser extent, a known quantity and predictable as mashed potatoes, and sooner or later predictable is boring. Harriet Miers is all over the lot in many compelling ways, and that's unpredictable, and that has the GOP strategem machinery nervously ordering takeout from the West Wing on weekends -- wondering, like all of us, what's next.

Can't wait for the hearings.

'A pit bull in size 6 shoes'

That's someone's characterization of Harriet Miers, White House counsel and, as of a few hours ago, the second Bush administration nominee for the Supreme Court. Bush formally named her today, listing (as has been his habit with other appointees) her "heart" and her "character" as qualifying characteristics for the highest court in the land. It's fair to say those qualities count (how did Scalia get that job?), but there's an absence of other factors that have already made Miers' nomination a lightning rod -- not for controversy, but for curiosity.

Miers would be one of the 39 previous justices who came to the bench with no previous judicial experience, and the first since William Rehnquist not to be a judge. Miers, a longtime friend of the Bushies, a native Texan and previously the director of the Texas State Lottery, would bring to the court someone without the baggage of past judicial decisions.

Harriet Miers is also a mystery for exactly that reason. Because she's never been a judge, there's precious little of the paper trail for journalists, court-watchers in general and the Senate Judiciary Committee in particular to sift through hoping to divine the way she'd rule on Case X or Appeal Y. For now, at least, Harriet Miers is as close to a tabula rasa as they come in Washington.

But there have been glimpses of an at least historical willingness to think outside the lines. In younger years a Democrat, Miers made contributions to the 1988 campaigns of Democrats Al Gore and Lloyd Bentsen. By 1999 all that had changed; she contributed to campaigns of Republican candidates. Somewhere in that eleven years she switched, but that past inclination toward Democratic philosophy suggests there may be a centrist in the works -- someone with the kind of "first-rate intelligence" that F. Scott Fitzgerald described as a person with "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

Maybe it's that prospect that's got the knickers of some of the GOP punditocracy in a serious twist. Bill Kristol, conservative columnist, is reportedly "disappointed, depressed and demoralized" by Bush's selection of Miers. "Surely, this is a pick from weakness," he said on the Weekly Standard. In a statement, Manuel Miranda, a conservative strategist and former aide to Senate Majority Leader & Stock Trading Enthusiast Bill Frist, called Miers "possibly the most unqualified choice since Abe Fortas," referring to the personal attorney of President Lyndon Johnson.

Pat Buchanan is equally dismayed: "Bush recoils from greatness," he screams on the MSNBC.com Hardblogger. "Bush may have tossed away his and our last chance to roll back the social revolution imposed on us by our judicial dictatorship since the days of Earl Warren. ... He blew it."

Maybe it's this reaction from conservatives that has the Democrats cautiously optimistic, and given to thinking how a negative may really be a positive, how "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." Sen. Charles Schumer, part of the judiciary committee, was upbeat. "It could have been a lot worse," he said today, invoking a sentiment more often used after a root canal that wasn't as painful as you feared it would be. And Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said that Miers' status as a non-judge "is a plus, not a minus," presumably underscoring his sense of how refreshing it would be not to cross swords with an ideologue.

Schumer's admission that Miers "has the potential to be a consensus nominee" suggest that the Democrats on the committee may be inclined to move quickly on her nomination -- early thinking is that the Miers hearings will be done & done by Thanksgiving.

We expect those hearings will be somewhere between a pitched battle and a love feast, but it's anyone's guess as to which party will do what. It's encouraging that Miers' own party feels left out, outsiders with scant knowledge of the nominee's position on weighty matters. All to the good: That indicates something positive about Miers, despite a lack of traditional qualifications.

Harriet E. Miers may be from outside the mainstream, and it is true, someone needs to gently take her by the hand and tell her the Tammy Faye Bakker eyeliner treatment isn't really working. But she's right where she needs to be right: She's apparently as willing to keep her private beliefs private outside the judicial chambers as she would be constitutionally expected to keep them private as the next associate justice of the Supreme Court.

So far, what's not to like?
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Image credit: Miers: Public domain

A century in blacks and blues

When August Wilson’s play “Fences” opened on Broadway in March 1987, in a New York City in the throes of racial conflicts that seemed to permeate every aspect of daily life, the play was hailed as a revelation in American theater. Simply put, the play reached people.

Though its characters were African American, the play’s central clash — the chafing between a father and son on differing but parallel courses in search of themselves — brought multiracial audiences to tears night after night.

Wilson, who died today at age 60 of inoperable liver cancer, thus enjoyed a wide renown as a playwright unrivaled in the 20th century he documented. And that’s not just as a black playwright; assessments of his talent so narrowly defined miss the point of what made his plays work, what made them so eagerly anticipated by theatergoers of every persuasion.



In creating his sweeping 10-play cycle of black American life, Wilson worked in the idiom of black America, but his genius lay both in universalizing that experience for theatergoers largely unaccustomed to black America on stage, and in investing those plays with a deft weave of reality and myth.

Until “Fences,” mainstream American theater received black plays with painful infrequency, in indifferently-regarded works that either isolated the black American experience from everything else, or celebrated black life in the trappings of the musical, a theatrical form that fixes narrative and context in a frothier, more dramatically insubstantial framework.

Not that music was alien to Wilson: One of his triumphs of invention was how he used the blues. A music mostly relegated to the national past forms the emotional underpinning for many of his plays. Wilson explained for this reporter in a 1991 interview its importance as soundtrack and spiritual touchstone.

“The music is a specific cultural response of black America to the world, the circumstances and the situation in which they’ve found themselves,” said Wilson, charming and generous of spirit, a man of constant energy whose chain smoking formed a counterpoint to his comments.

“If you didn’t know anything about African people and nothing about black people in America, and someone gave you blues records, you could listen and find out what kind of people these were … their symmetry, this grace … you’d be able to construct their daily lives.”

That he as a playwright found and articulated universal truths is a given; that’s the mission of all playwrights. But Wilson’s gift was to find the universal within the largely overlooked backdrop of African American life, and to lift that expression of America — subtleties and nuances intact — into view for a wider playgoing audience, one that recognized his name more readily than many other playwrights, black or white.

Wilson crossed over in a way no African American playwright did before or since. Lorraine Hansberry died too young and too soon for her work to have articulated the full dimensions of the civil rights movement, or the role of black Americans in charting their destiny as a result of that movement.

The work of Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) was too often received by theatergoers as angry examples of racial propaganda, mythic exercises long on political education and short on emotional texture. Playwright Ed Bullins began his own naturalistic “Twentieth-Century Cycle” of black life in 1968, years before Wilson’s work saw light of day.

But it was Wilson’s plays that exploded into wider recognition through his blend of naturalism and poetics, the music of his language, the social forces of his heyday, and that utterly ephemeral aspect of good luck — being in the right place at the right time with the right play.

And in leapfrogging around the black American twentieth century, Wilson made his plays timely for modern audiences with stories that ran counter to the glitzy, mega-scale productions that characterized Broadway for much of the 1980s and early 1990s. Wilson worked in the small scale, found the drama within a smaller circle of intimates: family, friends and acquaintances.

In “Fences,” which won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for drama, the story of conflicts between a bitter, overprotective father and a son intent on accepting a football scholarship assumes wider dimension as the wrenching story of a battle between generations, and the power of sports in American culture.

“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” examines one woman’s struggle to nurture her music in the first throes of the mass marketing of communication. “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” looks at black Americans battling to achieve a sense of self-worth in the period of the first generations after the upheaval of the Civil War.

“The Piano Lesson,” which won the 1990 Pulitzer for drama, studies the conflicts that arise when a family faces a choice of whether to part with a treasured family heirloom in order to acquire a patch of land in the South.

In “Radio Golf,” a wealthy realtor poised to be Pittsburgh's first black mayor dreams of developing a decaying inner city — a dream that confronts the reality of people unwilling to demolish the past.

In these and other plays, the overriding theme of Wilson’s work comes through: the African American search for identity and connection, for self-awareness in a world and a country at odds with such discoveries.

In that 1991 interview, Wilson was asked “Is there life after the cycle?” The answer from this charitable, passionate, driven lion of the theater, the most-celebrated American playwright of the past quarter-century, revealed the breadth of his vision as a writer, and the scope of his aspirations for his people and his nation.

“Maybe I’ll start over,” he said. “I intend to write as least 15 more plays about black folks in America. My biggest problem is to find the time to sit down and do the work. But what is there to do except to write another play?”

As published Oct. 2 on msnbc.com. Photographer unknown