It’s inevitable that I’ll be steeped in children’s literature over the next several years, so I’m taking it slow and resisting the urge to read ahead. There’s stuff on the shelf that I’m eager to look at, like Frog Went A’Courtin’ and The Story of Frog Belly Rat Bone, but I figure Ella will want that stuff read to her plenty when she reaches the right age, so no sense in getting my fill of it now.

This means that my current exposure is limited to board books. Ella doesn’t exactly take a literary approach to them yet, but neither does she view them solely as chew toys. Heck, I don’t know if she’s even paying attention to the pictures, but she does enjoy the ritual of page turning accompanied by the cadence of my voice. The thing is, even if she’s not particularly picky yet, I am—I have to read the dang stuff. Our self-selected board books (like Seuss and Boynton—more on her later) are fine, but amid the gifts and other random acquisitions are many, many duds. The following is not an exhaustive list of problematic material, merely some examples that illustrate the most common problems:

Rub-a-dub, Pooh—This square, squat little book features the Disneyfied versions of the characters playing in a puddle and engaging in related hilarity. I prefer Ernest Shepard’s drawings, but that’s not the issue here. Turn on your poetry ear and read the following lines:

Rooh and Pooh
just love to play!
Jumping in
puddles is fun . . .

When Roo asks Pooh
to spend the night,
there’s washing-up
to be done!

Apparently, when it comes to kids, meter only matters in the first half of each stanza. It’s not like I’m looking for the supple iambs of a good sonnet, here, just adherence to a basic pattern of stresses. But apparently the author can’t be bothered to muster the effort.

Curious George’s “Are You Curious?”—I pulled this one off the shelf one day full of hope, because hey, Curious George rocks. But this little board book is little more than a lame attempt to spin some more money off the property. It features illustrations from the classic books, each one accompanied (without even an attempt at verse) by questions: Are you curious? Are you hungry? Are you dizzy? No coherence, no story. The last thing I want to do is spoil Ella’s first exposure to those fine illustrations by presenting them out of any meaningful context.

Classic Nursery Rhymes—This little monstrosity is a box containing six square board books and a CD. Apparently, “If You’re Happy and You Know It” now counts as a classic nursery rhyme, but that’s a minor offense. Their version of “Humpty Dumpty” features some competent drawings, but right when you get to the failure of all the king’s horses and men, the tale goes on! The next pages contain (I am not making this up):

Along came the children
with brushes and glue
And stuck him together
as good as new

Well, it scans until the fourth line, let’s give it that. But it also demolishes all the bite of the original. I will never understand this persistent desire to eradicate tragedy and sorrow from nursery rhymes, folk tales, and children’s literature in general. What do people think they’re shielding them from? Kids get the fact that bad things happen in the world easily enough, and the most morbid folk tale has nothing on what they’re able to imagine lurking under the bed all by themselves.

Humpty Dumpty has an illustrious history. Here’s a plausible-sounding explanation for its origin:

Humpty Dumpty was a powerful cannon during the English Civil War (1642-49).
It was mounted on top of the St Mary’s at the Wall Church in Colchester defending the city against siege in the summer of 1648. (Although Colchester was a Parliamentarian stronghold, it had been captured by the Royalists and they held it for 11 weeks.) The church tower was hit by the enemy and the top of the tower was blown off, sending “Humpty” tumbling to the ground. Naturally the King’s men tried to mend him but in vain. NB: The “men” would have been infantry, and “horses” the cavalry troops.

Our image of the jauntily clad egg-man, though, we owe to Lewis Carroll.

`What a beautiful belt you’ve got on!’ Alice suddenly remarked … `At least,’ she corrected herself on second thoughts, `a beautiful cravat, I should have said—no, a belt, I mean—I beg your pardon!’ she added in dismay, for Humpty Dumpty looked thoroughly offended, and she began to wish she hadn’t chosen that subject. `If only I knew,’ she thought to herself, `which was neck and which was waist!’

Evidently Humpty Dumpty was very angry, though he said nothing for a minute or two. When he did speak again, it was in a deep growl.

`It is a—most—provoking—thing,’ he said at last, `when a person doesn’t know a cravat from a belt!’

Such a gloss on the original is expected and even welcome, but the senseless addition of the kiddie repair brigade only does damage to the evolution of the Humpty legend. And anyway—what exactly are they supposed to accomplish with brushes?

The box’s take on “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush” is another travesty. Everyone knows the basic stanza of the real version, but for fun, here’s the whole thing:

All around the mulberry bush
The monkey chased the weasel.
The monkey thought ‘twas all in fun.
Pop! goes the weasel.

A penny for a spool of thread,
A penny for a needle.
That’s the way the money goes.
Pop! goes the weasel.

Up and down the City Road,
In and out of the Eagle,
That’s the way the money goes.
Pop! goes the weasel.

Half a pound of tuppenney rice,
Half a pound of treacle,
Mix it up and make it nice,
Pop! goes the weasel.

Like Humpty Dumpty, this nursery rhyme has an interesting history. But here are the first couple stanzas of the version in the box set:

Here we go round the mulberry bush
The mulberry bush, the mulberry bush
Here we go round the mulberry bush
On a cold and frosty morning

This is the way we jump about
Jump about, jump about
This is the way we jump about
On a cold and frosty morning

UPDATE: The following rant loses some of its punch given that, as I have been reliably informed by a couple different people, we’re talking about two completely different songs here, with two different tunes, that happen to share a reference to a mulberry bush. My bad. I still think the weasel version is a much better nursery rhyme. It’s awfully weird that I’ve never heard of the other one, though.

UPDATE CONTINUED: Special thanks to alert reader TM, who not only pointed out the error of my ways but also emailed some links to the background of the “Here We Go Round” mulberry song: here and here.

Now, judging from a quick Google search, this version is commonly found elsewhere as well. But that doesn’t make it OK! The annoying repetition is a poor substitute for the original content. I guess the idea is to make a nursery rhyme that kids can participate in, but there are plenty such verses out there already. I can see some well-meaning but deluded parent exclaiming, “But ‘pop goes the weasel’ doesn’t even mean anything!” To which I say: Phooey! Not only is there a long tradition of glorious nonsense in children’s verse, but kids are no doubt taking plenty of the sensible stuff as nonsense too, and are perfectly happy to do so.

There are rays of hope out there, though. Hippos Go Berserk, by Sandra Boynton, is a modern classic, and But Not the Hippopotamus is excellent as well. These books get it all right: fine illlustration, deft verse, a happy world tinged with sadness, and, c’mon, hippos! They’re also Ella’s favorites—probably not because of her discerning taste just yet, but because she picks up on the irrepressible glee I take in reading them. Maintaining that glee as she gets older is possible, but it won’t be easy—it will require constant vigilance against books that suck. There are worse jobs.

Michael Hall is “getting rid of stuff”:http://www.puddingbowl.org/archive/2004/08/clutter_apocaly.php (scroll down to the “Stuff” section). I’m getting more and more ready for a major stuff purge myself, thanks in part to the fact that we’re going to need to childproof the apartment sometime soon. Anyway, I perked up upon reading this bit:

Those technical books have all been interesting in their time, but I don’t use them anymore. Having them helps me feel anchored in my identity as someone who is comfortable and fluent with technology. But they don’t make me any more or less that way. They just fill up space. Hundreds of pounds of books I won’t read, for the sake of anchoring a piece of identity on them.

This put me in mind of all the talk of “shelfworthiness”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000411.html a few months ago. How many of the books on my shelf do I actually value, want to keep, and plan (at least theoretically) to read again someday, and how many are only there to anchor a piece of my identity (for example, “literature guy”)? I’ve done a pretty good job of weeding stuff out periodically, but there’s definitely more that can go, keeping in mind Michael’s words of sublime wisdom:

The thing I’ve come to realize, though, is that the real walking memory of all those things is me. I am the sum of my experiences and cares and passions. No thing can be that. No collection of things can be that. And in the process of gathering up so much stuff, I’ve become less mindful of the things that really do mean something, that resonate with me now.

Of course, in taking this route when it comes to _books_, I’m consciously choosing to be a certain kind of person. I was at the house of one of Suanna’s boss recently, and her husband had thousands of books — a whole library in the basement, and separate cabinets for first editions elsewhere to boot. It was supremely cool to poke around in there with him, sipping scotch, yanking stuff out that struck our fancy, testing each other’s knowledge. By commiting to a low-stuff life I’m ruling out the library basement for myself in the future. Besides, I’ll need to save room for all the “games”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000412.html.

It’s been out for a little while, but I finally got around to reading “Inside Al Qaeda’s Hard Drive”:http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200409/cullison, by Alan Cullison, in September’s issue of _The Atlantic_.

(Atlantic has recently limited most of its online content to subscribers; I’m not sure whether this article is open to everyone or not. When they did it took me all of two seconds to decide to shell out for a subscription, and I did so happily. Ironically I haven’t been keeping very close tabs on Atlantic content lately, but now that I’m paying for it, I probably will again.)

Anyway, it’s one of those read-it-if-at-all-possible sorts of things. Cullison got his hands on a couple Al Qaeda laptops in the aftermath of major fighting in Afghanistan, and managed to copy the contents of one of the hard drives before he had to turn them over to the CIA. The best parts of the article are excerpts from a variety of translated and decoded email messages and other documents that provide a glimpse into the iner workings of the organization.

No _huge_ surprises in the material — they’re still a bunch of psycho bastards. But I was surprised by their degree of infighting, bureaucratic finagling, and sheer naivete about Western culture. One thing that comes clear is how hard it was to attract followers to Bin Laden’s extremist vision. The group was seeking for imams to justify their attacks on innocent women and children. Al-Zawahiri had trouble keeping his old compatriots in Islamic Jihad in line, because they wanted to stay focused in Egypt and saw Bin Laden as a publicity hound. It’s not hard to see how a concerted attack on Al Qaeda’s assets, combined with a “well thought out response”:http://www.slate.com/id/2070210/entry/2070211/ to the larger issue of terrorism, might have successfully squashed these guys like the bugs they are. Instead, we got the Iraq War.

Woohoo! I got “her”:http://www.wonkette.com/ autograph! I was even all nervous and everything, which I didn’t expect, but it hit me as I was walking up and prevented me from saying anything particularly clever. Ella broke the ice, as is her wont.

She’s much less snarky in person.

There’s less time for watching DVDs at Polytropos HQ with Ella in the mix, but we occasionally manage to squeeze an episode of something in after she goes to bed. Lately we’ve been trading off the second-season discs of _Smallville_ and _Six Feet Under_, respectively.

I gushed a little about _Smallville_ when we were just a few episodes into it, but at the end of the first season I was on the fence about whether to keep going. The show is one part comic book, one part X-Files, one part Buffy — but then there’s that one part Dawson’s Creek that gets oh-so irritating very quickly. But we tested the waters of Season Two, and have found it better than the first, so we’ve been pressing on. Lex Luthor remains my favorite character, Clark’s parents still annoy the hell out of me, but all in all the show has taken a slightly darker turn that suits it.

For some reason, it is terrifically important to me whether or not the show actually _ends_ — by which I mean that, instead of fizzling off into cancellation, the storyline actually takes us to the point where Clark Kent makes the decision to become a superhero and leaves Smallville. If we get there, then all of the clever bits of foreshadowing, the buildup of his powers, the little visual references (like how he’s always wearing red and blue) will all have served a _purpose_ — to show us how the hero came to be. But if we don’t get there, then it’s just a bunch of throwaway pop culture references in another teenybopper show. It seems odd that how it ends should matter so much, but in retrospect, I think it will. Of course, being a couple seasons behind, I deliberately avoid chatter about the show, so I have no idea what direction its creators see it going, or where they see it ending. But for now, anyway, I’ll go along for the ride.

The second season of _Six Feet Under_ was long-awaited and long-overdue. Why oh why don’t all the networks take lessons from HBO? This show, _The Sopranos_, _Sex in the City_: their subject matter and tone are all over the map, but what they have in common is that each episode is a finely crafted gem. The writing is sharp, and the performances are in a completely different class than that of other TV. HBO’s just the network, they’re all made by different production companies, so what’s the common denominator? Pick good people. Give them creative control. It’s easy; would that it were more common.

I shouldn’t like _Six Feet Under_ as much as I do. Sure, it’s the brainchild of Alan Ball, the very able screenwriter of _American Beauty_. But it’s just a show about normal people living normal lives. Well, it’s a family that lives in and operates a funeral home, and their lives are pretty screwed up in a variety of ways, but I mean that they’re not mobsters or superheroes and they don’t fight demons, shoot lasers, or infiltrate embassies. And I’m generally a sucker for fantastic adventure, especially when it comes to TV and movies — a family drama has a higher threshold to clear before it hooks me.

Suffice it to say, _Six Feet Under_ has hooked me. If you’re one of the people who didn’t care for _American Beauty_, it may not be your cup of tea — the same guy does the music, it revolves around the same sort of existential suburban dilemmas, and it’s even _more_ obsessed with death. The whole premise of the show seems impossible to sustain: meditations on Life, Death, and the Meanings of Things every single episode? Start every show with a death? They pull it off by underplaying those existential moments and never being preachy, and by keeping the focus on the everyday elements of the characters’ lives. A measured touch of magical realism in the form of dreams, daydreams, and visions of the recently (or not so recently) passed helps, too. There isn’t a weak link in the whole ensemble cast, though my clear favorite is Lauren Ambrose, who plays Claire, the teenage daughter. While her brothers share the uncanny ability to hide everything behind their faces, Claire hides nothing — her incredibly expressive eyes will always tell you exactly what she is thinking. But the point is not so much her eyes but that something as small and subtle as her eyes can be consistently impressive, again and again.

All this, and _Alias_ season three is coming out in September. Good times…

I’m really glad that Douglas Farah made a comment on my “last entry about Charles Taylor and Al Qaeda”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000492.html, because if he hadn’t I never would have realized that “he has a blog”:http://www.douglasfarah.com/blog/. (Farah, not Taylor, that is.)

Check it out for the West African diamond trade, Al Qaeda, Victor Bout, and more, all from an investigative journalist who’s been following this stuff for years.

UPDATE: I finally got caught up on all his last several posts myself. This bit regarding the Special Forces team that didn’t go after Ghailani in Liberia in November 2001 is particularly interesting, and clears up the questions I had about the matter:

In November 2001, the Defense Intelligence Agency had multiple source, reliable intelligence reports that it could score a major blow against the al Qaeda network that had just carried out 9-11. Their reports said Khalfan Ghailani, the senior al Qaeda operative arrested last week in Pakistan, was hiding out in Gbatala, Liberia, under the protection of Charles Taylor. This was just two weeks after my initial story on al Qaeda’s ties to the blood diamond trade. Gbatala was the ultra-secure base of Taylor’s ill-named Anti-Terrorist Unit (ATU), housed right next door to Taylor’ s sprawling private farm.

With virtually no forces in the area, the Pentagon ordered a small U.S. Special Forces team carrying out a training operation in neighboring Guinea, to prepare a snatch operation. With Ghailani were three other suspected al Qaeda terrorists, including Fazul Abdullah Mohamed, Ghailani’s partner in the West Africa diamond buying operation. The two had also worked together in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in East Africa. The other two were not identified.

The team prepared its mission and was placed on high alert. But, with no other assets on the ground and no one in the area who spoke Krio or was not obviously a foreigner, final reconnaissance and recognition of the target was not able to be achieved. After about a week, the group stood down, and were rotated to a different location. (For more details, see pp. 82-83 of Blood From Stones). It would have been a different al Qaeda today if the operation had been able to proceed and had nabbed the two. Fazul went on to participate in the Mombasa bombings and other attacks. Ghailani returned to Afghanistan after West Africa, then resurfaced in the al Qaeda cell in Pakistan that was planning multiple attacks on the United States.

On with the gamer hat. The one with the “roleplaying game theory” feather in it.

Still with me? OK. The following thoughts were sparked after reading Ron Edwards’ essay Narrativism: Story Now over at The Forge. I am not fluent in Forgespeak, nor am I a regular Forge reader, otherwise I’d have joined the conversation there. As it is what I have to say has probably been said by somebody there, so I’ll gear this for a non-Forge audience and (hopefully) use Edwards’ essay only as a starting point.

That essay is one of a series that describe the three modes of roleplaying, as they have evolved in theoretical talk about the hobby: Gamism, Simulationism, and Narrativism. According to Edwards, Narrativist play is roleplaying that explicitly addresses what he calls Premise. Premise = Theme is an oversimplification—it’d be better to say that focusing on a clear Premise produces concrete and meaningful Themes. The point, in a Narrativist game, isn’t to level your character up, or even to play your character truly in a rich fantasy world, but, collectively, to address a Premise. He doesn’t say “collectively tell a story” because he notes, quite rightly, that all roleplaying games, even the most gonzo dungeon crawl, tell a story.

What sets Narrativism apart for Edwards is the conscious addressing of Premise. Along those lines, he quotes Robin Laws’ roleplaying essay “The Literary Edge,” which says, among other things:

Making the artistry conscious is a liberating act, making it easier to emulate the classic tales that inspire us.

It’s that first clause that trips me up, and that ultimately makes me disagree with Edwards’ whole premise about Premise. Here’s why: Consciously addressing Premise is an unrealistic goal for an improvisational, collective, social activity like an RPG. To put it in Laws’ terms, making the artistry “conscious” does not make it easier to emulte those classic tales at all.

Imagine, if you will, a novelist writing away in her garret. She’s working on a generation-spanning historical epic that struggles with issues of betrayal, forgiveness, and the loyalty due to one’s family.

I humbly submit that if our novelist starts every page, or even every chapter, by thinking to herself “How will what I’m about to write incorporate themes of betrayal, forgiveness, and the loyalty due to one’s family?” she will be dead in the water. It is theoretically possible for a novelist to work that way, but by far the most common approach of writers throughout history has been, for better or worse, to get lost in their work—to let the story flow out of them, come what may. Then what they do—almost always more than they admit—is to go back and revise it, again and again, to fix broken bits, but often to reinforce what they see as the themes of their work—whether those themes are ones they had in mind in the beginning, or ones they discovered through the process of writing.

Addressing Premise, then, when it comes to fiction, happens mostly after that first draft is written (and occasionally before it’s written, in the planning stages).

But in a roleplaying game, all you get is the first draft. There’s no revision. There’s just a bunch of improvised play-acting where the creators and the audience are one and the same. Everyone understands that a transcript of the proceedings isn’t going to win any awards, but that’s OK. It’s OK for the same reason that an audience will laugh uproariously at a joke at an Improv show that would fall flat if it were delivered by a standup comic: the audience’s expectations are different when everyone’s making things up off the top of their head.

Achieving elegant thematic cohesion in a roleplaying game is a happy accident. I’m all for setting up conditions (via rules, character creation, scenario development, etc.) to encourage it, but consciously trying to achieve it during play puts a burden on the players that even a single author in control of the whole story would do best to avoid. The lesson here is not that roleplaying games create stories that suck more than regular stories, but that roleplaying games are narrative games, and so what they do should be evaluated by whole different criteria than something you can check out of a library. A serious focus on narrative is the best thing that has happened to the hobby in the past fifteen years, but it’s only part of the picture. At least as important as the question “Is this event succeeding as a story?” are “Is it succeeding as a social activity?” and “Is it succeeding as a game?”

A couple related matters:

1. What about games that are just about storytelling, like Universalis? Even though they’re often grouped in with narrativist-oriented RPGs, to my mind they’re a whole other kettle of fish. Engaging in pure collaborative storytelling can be great fun, but it can be a demanding and even frustrating activity the same way that trying to write a story can be. Or taking part in (shiver) a writing peer group.

I suppose there’s a continuum of creative demand here, from just-you-and-a-pen-in-your-garret to collaborative storytelling to narratvisit roleplaying to come-on-dice-daddy-needs-a-critical-hit roleplaying. I’m currently involved in a superhero RPG (with Jim, among others) that has a strongly narrativist bent, constantly exploring the whole power-and-responsibility premise. And, on a given Wednesday night, the extent to which I’m up for playing at that level varies. Sometimes I’m right in there explorin’ the theme, but other times I’m very happy to fall back on the soft backdrop of “just playin’ my character.” “Here’s what you see: what do you?” is much, much easier to respond to than “Why don’t you frame the next scene” or “What themes do you want to address with your character?”

2. Over at the Forge glossary, there’s a term called “El Dorado,” which refers to ”… the unrealizable ideal of consistently addressing Premise through explicitly Simulationist play.” Sifting out the Forgespeak, what it means is basically “Your game narrative isn’t going to magically become thematically significant if all you’re doing is focusing on the details of character, setting, and genre, instead of the story itself.” Hopefully it’s evident from what I’ve written that I disagree. If roleplayers keep their focus on the nitty gritty and let the story come what may, they’ll be doing what writers have been doing for time out of mind.

UPDATE: Not surprisingly, this has become one of those entries where the material in the comments turns out to be more interesting than the actual essay. Don’t miss it.

There’s actually some sense to the fact that they’re making “another Dungeons and Dragons movie”:http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dnd/20040805news. Since the “first one”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0190374/ was, objectively speaking, the worst movie ever made in the history of the universe, were practically guaranteed that the sequel will be an improvement.

To tell the truth, though, the first one wasn’t that bad. Or, rather, it was bad enough that it was actually funny. Though I found it quite painful at the time, I’m looking forward to seeing it again sometime with others just so I can watch their faces and share the feeling of its utter awfulness. A bit of familiarity with D&D helps, because then some parts of the movie come off as not merely nonsensical but nonsensical _and_ hilariously dumb. At least, that’s how I remember it — as soon as I got home after seeing it I poured myself a good stiff drink in a concerted effort to wipe it from my mind.

Yah, so, anyway, you get the picture. They’re making another one. Just as the first one starred (and thus humiliated) talented actors like Jeremy Irons and Thora Birch, this one’s going to demolish the careers of Ian Holm and Lauren Ambrose, its two headliners

Joking! Actually there’s no cast information yet. But you can be sure that Polytropos will be your reliable source for updates on the film throughout its development. I find these sorts of debacles much more satisfying from a front-row seat.

The link between Charles Taylor and Al Qaeda has been getting more traction in the media, thanks to the ongoing hearings of the Sierra Leone special court and, apparently, a few new government sources. The Boston Globe article mentioned on NPR this morning goes over the basics that I’ve mentioned before: Taylor’s government provided a safe haven to a number of Al Qaeda members, and helped them launder money through the illegal diamond trade. But the article also brings to light a new piece of information:

The Defense Department approved a special forces raid to capture Al Qaeda leaders under Taylor’s protection in 2001, but called it off and never reactivated the plan, the US officials said in recent interviews, on condition of anonymity. Meanwhile, senior leaders of Al Qaeda continued to receive Taylor’s protection.

That was after September 11, by the way. So why is this information just coming out now? As noted in the Globe article, and in more detail in a Post opinion piece by Douglas Farah and Richard Shultz, the CIA has been reluctant to corroborate any evidence of a link because it reflects badly on them—Taylor was a CIA informant for years, and the U.S. backed his anti-Doe activities in the Eighties and his bid for power in the Nineties. (We sure know how to pick ‘em, don’t we?) But it wasn’t just the CIA. Also from the Globe:

“For some reason our intelligence people have been very anxious to disprove this as happening, something that can’t be disproven,” said Joseph Melrose, who was US ambassador to Sierra Leone until September 2001.

As recently as June 2003, the FBI reported to the US General Accounting Office that there was no Al Qaeda presence in West Africa, despite what intelligence and military officials say was a plan to capture Ghailani and Mohammed in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks using a US special forces team stationed in nearby Guinea. That mission was called off, although it is unclear why.

Yes, that Ghailani, the one who helped plan the embassy bombings and was recently captured (with remarkable timing) in Pakistan.

Let’s chalk up the failures here:

• Mine: I wish that I had been on the Taylor-AQ connection last year, during the runup to his ouster, but I didn’t mention it then. At the time I was aware of shady diamond dealings, but wouldn’t have necessarily guessed a terrorist link. And yet the information was out there, just not readily available. Which brings us to …
• The media’s: If I had access to Lexis-Nexis I’d go back to July of 2003 and see how many people interviewed Douglas Farah and at least put the notion of the CT-AQ link out there. But it’s certainly the case that the idea got no significant media attention. It’s their job to make connections like that. But most egregious, of course …
• The government’s: If Special Forces were ready to go in and nab these guys, then clearly someone was aware of Al Qaeda operatives in Liberia. This makes the CIA and FBI’s denials of that link a classic case of miscommunication at best and deceit at worst. There may yet be a reasonable explanation for why special forces didn’t act in September 2001, though I’m hard pressed to think of what it might be. But there are no good reasons why the government itself didn’t raise the issue of Taylor’s relationship to the war on Al Qaeda in July 2003. No good reasons, but obvious ones: the focus was on Iraq, and the Bushies didn’t want another matter—even one involving the people who actually attacked us—to get in the way. Fessing up to what they knew about Taylor would have required more direct action in Liberia. Instead they went along with a plan to put him in a box and hoped the world would forget.

  Thankfully, the world isn’t forgetting. It looks more and more likely that Taylor will get his day in court, though there are plenty of hurdles in the way. The U.S. elements who want him cooped up can just leave it to Obasanjo to oppose extradition, and will only need to get involved if that fails. As has always been the case, the easiest way for it to happen would be if the Liberian government called for it (though goodness knows what pressure is being placed on them behind the scenes not to do so). And, as has also always been the case, enough media coverage could force action. Here’s hopin’.

  UPDATE: One important thing I forgot to mention: because of FBI and CIA reluctance, the 9/11 Commission report doesn’t conclude that West African diamonds were a significant source of Al Qaeda funding. Douglas Farah responds to that, and answers a number of other questions, in this AllAfrica.com interview.

It happened today. I was already on edge after the whole well-timed Orange Alert thing. A Homeland Security lady was talking on NPR about how even though the information was years old the danger was still real, and I waited for the followup question about the _timing_ of the alert, in that case, but the question never came. Then I absorbed more campaign speechmaking than I cared to — Kerry pounding hard on the economy because he lost the right to pound hard on what he _should_ be talking about — the Iraq war — when he voted to authorize Bush’s use of force. And Bush’s speech was an irritating marvel of patriotic pablum thrown like a smokescreen over his failures. But it was the general lack of substance in either speech that irked me most, like it does every campaign season, and the troubling implications: that the nation’s campaign wizards put on this dog and pony show of style-without-substance every couple of years because they think that that’s what will most effectively sway the populace, and worse, that they may be right. As the final nail in the coffin, I caught a snippet about skyrocketing punitive tariffs on U.S. goods put up by the EU because Confress has yet to amend illegal trade laws from five years ago. Surprise surprise, the bill to set it right is currently wallowing because it’s weighed down with pork.

That’s when it happened. The weight of it all caused something inside me to snap, and I became, once again, terminally cynical about American politics. It’s happened before, and I’ll get over it, but from now until the election at least, I’m going to have to steer clear of campaign coverage, political commentary, and anything big media, lest my head explode with frustration. The political-junkie me who watches it all with ironic detachment will now take a back seat to the “nutbar conspiracy theorist”:http://www.cafeshops.com/nielsenhayden.10557224 me.

To weather this bout of terminal cynicism, I’ll be turning to “him”:http://www.comedycentral.com/tv_shows/thedailyshowwithjonstewart/, “her”:http://www.wonkette.com/, and of course “them”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/. All good for smiles, but I’m crying on the inside.