The British government has investigated the killing of Benazir Bhutto and concluded that she was killed in just the way Musharraf’s government has said: agitators attacked her motorcade, fired shots , and in the melee that followed, Bhutto smashed her head against something.

I see that various groups in Pakistan refuse to accept this account of the assassination. Bhutto’s followers and other anti-Musharraf protestors are calling for a United Nations investigation into the matter. They’re hoping that a truly unbiased and disinterested investigation will find that… is going to show that… is going to prove…

Prove what? That Musharraf strangled Bhutto with his own hands? That Pakistan spy agency ISI replaced one of her guards with one of their agents who, at a crucial moment, fired the actual bullet that killed her?

Why would Musharraf or ISI get their own hands dirty?

I sympathize with the people who won’t accept the official account, who feel that somehow Musharraf and ISI were responsible for this death. No one will ever find a smoking gun, however, because there isn’t one. Musharraf didn’t need to arrange or even order Bhutto’s assassination–that’s the scary thing. He knew, as everyone knew, that countless rabidly violent individuals and ruthless little Jihadist groups were gunning for Bhutto. All Musharaff had to do was a little less than everything possible to keep her alive. That would be enough to ensure that one of those killers would get her. No conspiracy was needed, no secret planning, no cloak-and-dagger assassination schemes. Yes, Musharraf and his cohorts executed Bhutto just as surely as if they’d fired the bullet themselves, but there’s nothing to discover about the killing except what’s in the papers.

I’m willing to bet that Musharraf himself never said the words “Bhutto must die.”  He didn’t have to. Some matters are just understood. Most of the really problematic conspiracies are conspiracies of common interest. As for Bhutto’s assassination, you can learn everything there is to learn about it, I think,  by simply reading the papers.

Worst movie of the year? For me: no competition: it’s that so-called “Bob Dylan” movie, I’m Not There. It might be the worst of the decade or even…ever. Half an hour into it, I for one was wishing it had lived up to its title.Why was I there? Because some idiot writing for the New York Times gave it high praise.  He couldn’t get over the brilliance of casting seven different people to play Dylan. If you’ve heard about the movie at all, you’ve probably heard about that device becuase that’s all it’s got. And I’m sure someone will be writing to me now to protest that I’ve got the number wrong, that it was eight different people or six or whatever: I’ll have a word to say to those people further along.

For now, lets just look at the device. What could moviemaker Tod Haynes possibly have been getting at, casting many different people to play that one role? Gee, could he have been saying there are many different Dylans, no single one of them the real Dylan? Gosh, once you think of it that way, can you think of a more bull-ahead, ham-handed, no-nuance way of saying it?

What’s more, once you’ve said that Dylan is many different people, what else can you do with this device? In Haynes’s clumsy fists—nothing. The other night, I was listening to a group of people talking about the late Heath Ledger, and someone noted that he played “one of the Dylans.” “Oh?” said someone else. “Which one?”

A silence ensued: no one could think of any way to identify any of the Dylans except by the different actors that played them. Heath Ledger played the one that was, you know… played by Heath Ledger. Now isn’t that an indictment of what Tod Haynes has done?

Ah, but it gets worse. Dylan, as all fans know, has an extremely distinctive voice and diction. It’s pretty hard for anyone to play Dylan without doing a Bob Dylan impression. Not unavoidable, perhaps, but in this movie, not avoided. As an audience, therefore, what we’re doing here is watching a parade of actors doing Dylan impressions. Mostly bad Dylan impressions, I would say.  We can’t really focus on what these characters are saying because we’re too busy noticing how good (or bad) their impressions are, how close they’re coming to the real thing. I’ll lay odds that if you’ve talked to anyone who likes this movie, you’ve heard him or her going on and on about how Gwyneth Paltrow really looks and sounds like Dylan. That’s what the movie pushes into your face. Let me not, one doesn’t have this problem when listening to th real Dylan, because one is not comparing him to anything else, one is not marveling at how much he sounds like Dylan.

Then again, in this movie, anything that distracts attention from people’s actual words may be a blessing in disguise, becuae it ameliorates another flaw, the worst one, the really inexcusable flaw, the fact that every single line not written by Dylan is astoundingly, epically, unfathomably clichéd. This much cliché jammed into one movie is an achievement of sorts in itself. It’s inherantly impossible for every word to be a cliché but this movie flirts with impossible. I said “every single line not written by Dylan” because Dylan’s own words are very much present here: his songs constitute the soundtrack. But the words spoken by the various actor-Dylans—these all come from Haynes and his associates.  

And what words they are! I’m remembering one scene at some gallery in which the actor playing Dylan has behaved badly to a woman and sent her running off in a huff. The Dylan impersonator then leans over a banister. The camera catches him from below, framing him in the stairwell and against the stark white of the gallery walls, a visual framing that tells you to get ready,  quotable quote coming up, a Dylanesque moment.

And then it comes: “Love and sex, man… are two things….” (wait for it) that really … (here it comes) hang people up.” Oh! Ouch! Help! Too brilliant! It hurts! Please! No more—ah, but there is more. Shut up and drink in the wisdom: “And how they’re related…I’ll never fully comprehend.”  Want it again? Here it is:

Love and sex are two things that really hang people up
and how they’re related I’ll never fully comprehend.

I’m Not There gives you two hours of this crap, right alongside the actual Dylan singing things like:

I wake up in the morning
Hold my hands and pray for rain.
I got a headful of ideas
that are driving me insane…
It’s a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor!
I ain’t gonna’ work on Maggie’s farm no more!

Someone said to me, “Well, at least the movie has lots of Dylan music. That alone has to make it worth seeing. Doesn’t it?”

Look: I’m a big fan of Dylan’s work. I’m also a big fan of lemon meringue pie, but if I get a slice of that pie served to me on a plate dirty with somebody else’s leftovers , I’d just rather not, thank you.

Jon Stewart is back on the air but without his writers. I watched him a couple of times last week, and man, if I were him, I would stay home until the writer’s strike is over. He delivers all the familiar John Stewart mannerisms and timing, he sounds like he ought to be funny, I even feel my laugh reflex tingling because I’m conditioned to chuckle at his quips, marvel at his insights, and gasp at his dead-on skewerings of public figures; and his mannerisms tell me when he’s delivering one of those. His bottled audience certainly laughs on cue. But my own impulse to laugh never develops, because he’s delivering only the mannerisms, not the insights, quips, or skewerings.

In fact, again and again, in the course of last week’s shows, his jokes strayed just enough off-target to make me wince.

In one bit, he reported on the interaction between an American naval ship and several Iranian speedboats in the gulf. With his usual wry, understated manner, Stewart showed us how the Bush administration reported the event—shaky videos taken from the deck of the naval ship showing the Iranian speedboats buzzing around in the open sea, with voice of American officers issuing warnings and discussing the Iranians’ possible intentions …

Then Stewart said, “Ah, but Iranian reports of the same event were a little bit different.” And then he shows us shaky videos taken from the deck of one of those speedboats, with the American naval ship in the distance, voice-over of Iranians saying something in Farsi. After which we come back to Stewart who has that familiar impish gleam in his eye and who, with that familiar I’m-not-going-to-comment-the-video-speaks-for-itself air, says, “What really happened? We’ll never know.”

What has he shown us? That if you’re on the American ship, you see the speedboats; if you’re on one of the speedboats, you see that American naval ship. The Americans speak English, the Iranians speak Farsi. So what? This makes no point, and it’s not funny.

Stewart is taking a big risk, going on the air without his writers. He gets exposed, and that can’t be good for his career. Of course I always knew that someone wrote his lines for him, but in the past, I simply experienced the package, and that’s a necessary illusion. I feel like from now on, however, when I watch him, I’ll always experience him as a face and a voice mouthing someone else’s words. The illusion has been broken. That’s why I say, Stewart go out on strike in sympathy with the writers.

In fact, everyone in the entertainment industry ought to do that anyway, because what the producers are trying to deny to writers is unconscionable. How can corporate interests dream of deny writers any profit from their works published in new media. Do they think they’ll be able to get writers to work for them without paying them? Or is it that they think they won’t need writers?

That question ought to interest the rest of us, because corporate entertainment producers have in fact found a way to dispense with writers. It’s called Reality TV. All those grinning fools lining up to pose as bachelors competing for sluts or capering for Tara Banks in hoping of becoming America’s next top model are being paid, as I understand it, rat droppings for compensation. They’re capering in hopes of getting to suck up some of America’s top drug out of this: celebrity-status. In fact,, of course, most of them will go out with yesterday’s garbage when the show is over, just so much more chum fed to the animals. Entertainment producers find Reality TV a viable substitute for art because so many of us are gobbling up the product: why wouldn’t they keep shoveling it into the trough for us if we’re eating it?

That’s what the writer’s strike is about, ultimately. Corporate interests feel secure in denying writers any share of the profits in their own work because they’re confidant that in the long run, they won’t need writers at all. They will be able to make money by marketing consumers to themselves: that is, by plucking out random consumers, putting them in front of the camera, and debasing them, for the amusement of the remaining consumers. That’s what Reality TV is all about, and if the writers lose this strike, a day will soon come when there won’t be anything but Reality TV.

So Obama won the Iowa caucuses in large part because a lot of under-30 voters turned out and they went for him overwhelmingly. The moment I heard this I thought about my visit to the University of Arizona a couple of months ago to do some lectures and workshops. I spoke to a freshman honors class, 30 or so fresh-faced 18-year-olds,  and later to an assembly of several hundred of the same, some of whom milled around me after the lecture to chatt about this and that. In the class that morning, we got to talking about terrorism and where the kids thought world events were going, and it suddenly occurred to me to ask those 18-year-olds, “What do you think about 9/11? How did it affect you?”

An awkward silence ensued. Finally one of them said, “Well, you know: I was eleven when it happened.” Some of the others strained to find a connection to the event, some remotely plausible way to say that Yes, it affected them. One girl said she knew someone who knew someone who had a relative in the twin towers, so yes, she allowed, in a way it affected her personally. “I thought about it, you know. All those people…” She shook her head and her voice trailed off. Clearly the connection she cited wasn’t really all that personal. The thoughts and feelings she reported didn’t sound very urgent.

I said, “Do you guys worry about terrorism? Is it on your mind at all?”

Another even more awkward silence, an embarrassed clearing of throats, a few hesitant, “Well, sort of” and “well, I guess maybes…”

But then the responses started coming, and it turned out that, no, these young folks didn’t really think about terrorism much. Terrorism was something that happened once, maybe it still happened in some places, and yes, they supposed it might possibly conceivably happen here where they were. Anything is possible. But I could tell that my question struck them as the fuddy duddy sort of thing an out-of-touch older person would say, someone who couldn’t move with the times, some who was still harping on the past. One of these kids finally broke through to saying, “What I worry about more, if you want to know, is global warming. You want to know what worries me? That’s what really worries me, what I care about? That’s it.”

It cast me back to the 1960s, when old people I knew droned on and on about the Communist menace, and how it had to be stopped because it was just like with Hitler, no one took him seriously at first either and look what happened. It all sounded just so world War II era to me, as a teenager. And World War II was some extremely bygone thing. It wasn’t till many years later, reading David Halberstam’s The Fifties that a thing I understood emotionally what I already knew intellectually of course, that in 1960, World War II was only 15 years in the past. People who had fought in that war and come home from horror at the age of 21 were then only 36. People who had been 40 when the big war ended, fully middle-aged mid-career, mom-and-pop type folks, were younger in 1960 than I am now. Of course their world was still framed by the concerns and ways of thinking that held true in World War II and just after. But to me, because World War II ended before I was born, when the old folks tried to frame a political discussion in World War II terms, they might as well have been talking about the Peloponnesian War.

What all this said to me that day in Arizona—and again when I heard about Obama winning the youth vote in Iowa (plus the fact that there even was a youth vote in Iowa)—was that the mainstream politicians of our times are already out of touch and don’t know it. Imagine how Rudolf Giuliani must sound to this layer of emerging 18 year olds: interrupting a speech to answer a cell phone call from his wife and explaining that ever since 9/11 he always answers calls from his wife. Understand that every year from now on there will be a new group of 18 years olds, emerging into political consciousness. If 9/11 is so Back-Then to the 18 year olds of today, think what it’s going to be each emerging plane of 18-year-olds in two years, three, four?

One of the candidates now running for president said that even though he was personally opposed to abortion, he didn’t believe in making it illegal. Then I heard a pundit named David Lazarus attacking this position. He called it wishy washy . “Have the courage of your conviction,” said Lazarus. “If you think it’s wrong, how can you be against making it illegal? You can’t have it both ways.”

As it happens, I’ve been reading about the 1930s recently and thinking about the relationship between the state and the individual. Stalin and Hitler had many disagreements but on one issue they agreed: the state, whether embodied in a party or a personality, ought to determine all matters for all individuals.

This theory led both Nazism and Stalinism to commit catastrophic deeds. Hitler’s theories would have been evil, even if he had succeeded. Stalin’s vision would have been a boon to all mankind if it had succeeded. But the actual outcome of both madmen’s schemes was horror and heartache. Why? In part because they abrogated all power to the state.

Once you get a firm grip on this notion, you can see that the anti-abortion movement is really the same as a movement that would force women to have abortions. The fundamental point here is the assertion that the government—the law of the land, the state—has the right to decide whether a woman should have an abortion or a baby.

Today’s “pro-life” movement happens to believe the government should prevent abortions, but once the government has the power and authority to make this decision, the actual decision it makes will depend on who controls the levers of state power and what the circumstances of the moment happen to be. Those of us who are pro-choice are saying: “This decision is not the proper province of the government. It belongs to the individual woman.”

Well, if a decision like this doesn’t belong to the government, what does? I would say, on any matter that concerns “all of us,” we want to act with unity. We can find this unity more safely through an organic process than through charisma, submission to a personality, or reference to a manual. That’s what democracy is about.

We’re saying that on matters such as the roads we travel on, and whether to have a army, navy and air force to protect the whole nation, and what measures to take to allow or prevent a proliferation of homelessness, and whether to let all our wilderness be destroyed, and whether to build massive, universally needed facilities such as hospitals, we are all affected, so we must operate through a process, through a government, to solve these problems as a community. And if an issue only concerns a town, it should be the town government that decides; and if it only concerns a state, it should be the state government that decides, and if it concerns everyone within the national borders, it should be the national government that decides.

And if it only concerns an individual and his or her family and friends, then it should be the individual who makes the decision, in civilized conversation with his or her family and friends. Everyone else should butt out.

What’s the difference between literary fiction and commercial fiction? This is the sort of questions we writers obsess about. In fact, a bunch of us were obsessing about just this question the other night, over sandwiches and beer. One of us suggested that commercial fiction fits into a genre, literary fiction doesn’t.

By this definition, a book about somebody’s attempt to unravel a mysterious murder isn’t literature because it can be classified as a murder mystery. We’ve just eliminated Snow Falling on Cedars. Give me your best description of the genre known as romance fiction and I’ll show you how it proves that Pride and Prejudice isn’t literature. Read more

Last week I saw the future of flying in America, and I didn’t like it. See if you don’t find this experience disturbingly familiar. Read more

A few weeks ago, I killed my cat. I know: that’s a brutal way to put it. Not the accepted way. I felt this keenly when I called up the vet to ask for the “service.” I didn’t know quite how to phrase my request. I said, “I have this cat, um. This 18 year old cat?” Read more

Well, the Republicans have finally sunk far enough in the polls that they might actually lose the next presidential election.   

I said “might.”

Democrats are crowing and strutting, but in my opinion they should tone it down and do some deep thinking.  Read more

This year, in addition to all the usual New Years resolutions–lose weight, use less crack, etc.–I decided to add “Be nice.”   
Well, on paper I’ve been losing weight, if you turn the paper upside down. And using less crack has been hard ‘cuz I didn’t use any to begin with (but it’s such terrible stuff, zero doesn’t seem like enough: less than zero would be better.) But the hardest resolution to keep has been “Be nice.” (Or to put it in the long form “Don’t take it out on anyone whose fault it isn’t.”)

When I told my daughter Elina I was going to write a little something about the difficulties of being nice, she said, Read more