This article originally appeared at TomDispatch. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

The Kindle Reader, after Renoir by Mike Licht

A decade ago, I wrote a novel, The Last Days of Publishing, about the world I had worked in for a quarter-century. I already had at least some sense, then, of what was bearing down on the book. Keep in mind that this was a couple of years before Facebook was launched and years before the Kindle, the Nook, or the iPad saw the light of day. Still, back then, for my novel’s characters — mostly authors and book editors like me — I imagined an electronic book-in-the-making, which I dubbed the “Q.” It was the “Q-print,” officially, with that initial standing for “quasar”– for, that is, a primordial force in the universe.

When one of my younger characters, an editorial assistant, unveils it — still in prototype form — it’s described as “a sleek, steno-pad sized object… a flickering jewel of light and color.” And he imagines its future this way: “Someday it’ll hold a universal library and you’ll be able to talk with an author, catch scenes from the movie, access any newspaper on earth, plan your trip to Tibet, or check out a friend on screen, and that probably won’t be the half of it.”

An older publishing type, on the other hand, describes its possibilities in this fashion: “In a future Middlemarch, the church will offer public service ads when Casaubon appears, the drug companies will support Lydgate, and architectural firms can pitch their wares while Dorothea reorganizes the housing of the poor.” A decade later, that may still be a little ahead of the game, but not by so much. The inexpensive version of the Kindle is awash in ads by now and, books and all, the iPad, of course, is a riot of activity.

Don’t think of me, though, as the Nostradamus of online publishing. It was evident even then that the coming machines of our electronic lives, no matter the tasks they might be dedicated to, including reading The Book, would have little choice but to “generalize’ into all-purpose entities. The urge for email, a video camera, ads, apps, you name it, has indeed proved overwhelming.

Read the rest of this entry →

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Just to let those of you in New York City know, I’ll be appearing with the remarkable journalist Jeremy Scahill, just back from the frontlines in the Global War on Terror and author of the bestselling book Blackwater, on Friday, February 10th, 6 to 8pm, at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University -- 7th Floor Commons, 20 Cooper Square (Bowery at 5th Street).  For directions, click here.

The event is a launch for my new book, The United States of Fear.  I’ll read a piece or two and then Jeremy and I will have a conversation about our work and our world.  It’s free and open to the public.  Hope to see you there! Tom]

Are you on tenterhooks? Will Mitt make it out of the Cayman Islands and into the White House?  Will Newt take the full “wild and woolly” ride on the primary roller coaster to the Republican convention?  Will the two of them and their PACs eat each other alive by next week?  Will Rick and his single Wyoming funder hang in there until his “man on dog” sex comment finally fades from Google?  And Ron Paul — yes, we’re on first-name terms with the other three, but not Paul, the guy who insisted he’d be home reading an “economics textbook” while other Republican candidates piously opted for watching a football game — will he continue to make statements about U.S. global policy that would normally send a Republican to hell?  And honestly, did you really imagine that Elizabeth Warren wasn’t going to have something strong and supportive to say about the Pats in the Super Bowl, after the previous Democratic senatorial candidate blew her chances with a dismissive comment about Fenway Park?

You thought I was talking about American electoral politics?  Not at all.  I’m discussing the latest version of The Amazing Race.  And if you’re like me, don’t you miss the contestants who have already been eliminated: Herman (“Ubeki-beki-beki-stan-stanrdquo;) Cain, Michele (who mistook a serial killer for a movie star) Bachman, and the other Rick, whatever-his-name-was, the Texan who just couldn’t count to three?

I mean, aren’t you having a blast watching this bread-and-circuses spectacle, which in January captured a staggering 41% of the combined media newshole, 64% of cable TV’s?  There’s a headline a second, a new poll a minute, an angry set-to an hour.  With only three primaries and one caucus out of the way, the Republicans have already had 19 (count ‘em 19!) televised “debates,” and my hometown paper is running daily front-page stories about the race with double- or triple-page inside coverage.  In a season when spectacle and Super Bowl normally go together, the entertainment extravaganza of the moment remains the race for the White House — and in football terms, we’re still in the wild-card round of the playoffs.

I mean truly, did you ever dream that a moribund Democratic presidential race and a Republican one led by Mr. Mitt, the plastic quarter-billionaire, would be competition for that single holiest night on the sports calendar when everyone but the Giants, Patriots, and Madonna is expected to couch out?  Fortunately, we have TomDispatch Jock Culture correspondent Robert Lipsyte, author most recently of An Accidental Sportswriter, to remind us that, whether you’re watching a Republican debate or the Super Bowl, it’s wild and woolly America all the way to the end zone. Tom

Four Reasons to Watch the Super Bowl
Joe Hill, Joe Pa, Tebow, Wee Brains
By Robert Lipsyte

Most Americans won’t need a justification to watch Sunday’s game, but if you’re a TomDispatch.com reader you might think, even in passing, that celebrating the holiest day of violence, consumerism, and class warfare on your couch is a betrayal of your values or a waste of your time. You might even imagine that it would be better to take a hike, read a book, or meditate.

Not this Sunday, buster. It’s an election season. You need to watch this game to fully understand how jobs, religion, leadership, and healthcare dominate every American contest.

1. Joe Hill will be playing: Where else will be you be able to watch more than 100 young men, most of them African-American, working for high wages in a totally unionized shop? True, their jobs are dangerous (more on that later) and relatively short-term (typically three or four years), but they are also high profile. They can lead to TV gigs, even political office. Buffalo Bills quarterback Jack Kemp became a Republican congressman and vice-presidential candidate. The former New England Patriots running back and ESPN analyst Craig James is currently running for the Republican nomination for Senator from Texas, although to less than universal acclaim.

Fans tend to fixate on the money and glamour of the football job, so that when this past season was threatened by labor-management strife, it was easy for National Football League lackeys to frame the confrontation as “millionaires versus billionaires” so the rest of us thousandaires wouldn’t stand with the workers against the bosses.

Even with a progressive attitude, watching the Super Bowl, which seems to float on rivers of oil — think car ads — and beer, is not exactly like holding a OWS-style general assembly in the red zone. Nevertheless, it’s a terrific visual of the American class divide. In their skyboxes, usually in jacket and tie, eating, drinking, and high-fiving — or scowling — are the one-percenters who own the team, which is usually not their only source of income.

Below them, on the field, are their employees (many of them temporary one-percenters, given the median league salary of at least $560,000), using up the capital of their bodies. If you want to root for the Patriots or the Giants, fine. I’ll be rooting for the working class.

2. Tim Tebow will not be playing: Thank God. The season’s most hyped player — the NFL published its first magazine last month with Tebow on the cover — has the looks, personality, and backstory of the clean-living, principled, athletic role model we’ve been told we need to help raise our children. Born in the Philippines to Baptist missionaries who refused to abort him despite his mother’s illness, Tebow led the University of Florida to two national championships and became the first sophomore to win the Heisman Trophy, college football’s top individual prize. He also refused to be considered for Playboy’s annual all-American team because the magazine’s values conflicted with his Christian beliefs.

Tebow was a star attraction of the 2010 Super Bowl — in which he didn’t play.  (He was still in college.)  He appeared in a commercial for Focus on the Family in which he tackled his mother.  The ad generated intense controversy because of the group’s stand against abortion and same sex marriage. Neither issue was explicitly mentioned in the commercial, which marked the first time CBS had broken its rule against ads from advocacy groups.

This past season, as a Denver Bronco rookie quarterback, Tebow carried his team to the division playoffs despite his shortcomings as a passer and field tactician. As the saying goes, all he could do was win. He was tough, determined, inspirational, and a fine runner. Although he was careful to note that God did not care who won, he prayed publicly so incessantly it was celebrated and mocked as Tebowing.

While his aggressive evangelism turned off some people, no one could deny his confidence and fierce competitiveness on the field, and his humility and niceness off it. Also, he was white (as are most fans, coaches, and team executives) in a predominately black sport, a declared virgin in a world where the macho, and sometimes felonious, “playas” get an inordinate amount of attention and criticism. So why was there so much gasbagging about his evangelical faith?  Why was he called “polarizing”?

Tebow is too true to be good. His religious principles may eventually even get in the way of money-making. Playing for a higher team, he is a threat to owners who can’t buy him off (although he has plenty of commercial endorsements, thank you — and Republican presidential contenders are lining up).

He may also disrupt the fantasies of fans.

Dan Levy, writing in Bleacherrport.com, put it well: “Because his faith is so prevalent and because his beliefs have become so much of who he is on and off the field, it’s nearly impossible to separate the two. Can you blindly root for Tim Tebow on the football field without, in turn, tacitly rooting for him in life? And does rooting for him in life — even if that simply means rooting for the underdog to succeed — include implicit approval of his beliefs? Are Broncos fans able to parse the player from the man, the quarterback from the evangelist?”

If he were playing Sunday, it undoubtedly wouldn’t be the Super Bowl, but the Tebowl.

3. JoePa will be there: Once held up as the gold standard of college football coaching, now as the hero of a classical tragedy, the late Joe Paterno will be represented on Sunday by three players and his successor as head coach at Penn State. They will be reminders of what Paterno really represented beneath the iconic image.

The three players, almost a thousand pounds worth of them, are Jimmy Kennedy, a 302-pound defensive tackle, and Kareem McKenzie, a 330-pound tackle — both Giants — and Rich Ohrenberger, a 300-pound guard for the Patriots, who is on injured reserve. Boston College with six players in the Super Bowl and Rutgers with five lead this year’s honors list of colleges that serve as NFL minor league feeder teams, but Penn State has been a perennial supplier of meat on the hoof. No wonder the school has been dubbed Linebacker U.

Paterno became head coach in 1966, the year before the first Super Bowl. At least one player he coached has been in every one of the 46 Super Bowls.  He produced several hundred pro players. At the start of this past season, there were 36 Nittany Lions on NFL rosters.

In other words, Penn State was a football factory as well as a research university, which made Paterno the Geppetto of those over-sized puppets, even while he was touted as a classics scholar (he identified with Aeneas) and a philanthropist — he donated $4 million to Penn State. (How does a coach get that kind of dough?)

His successor will be Bill O’Brien, the current Patriots offensive coordinator. Though he graduated from Brown, as did Paterno, O’Brien has no connection to the Penn State program, which has angered some people, reassured others. A number of former players have threatened to sever their ties with the university because the school went “outside the family” for a new coach, an act seen as a total repudiation of the Paterno era. Others felt that a rigorous cleansing was necessary. After all, Paterno had apparently known for almost 10 years that Jerry Sandusky, once his main assistant and presumed heir, was an alleged child molester. Paterno tossed the matter upstairs and continued to devote his attention to Aeneas and linebackers, while Sandusky allegedly raped more little boys.

Paterno’s powers of concentration or expedience or denial were extraordinary enough, it seems, to qualify for presidential nomination. In his last interview, he implied that he probably couldn’t fully process the tale he was told about Sandusky sexually assaulting a young boy in the football team’s shower-room because he knew nothing about male-on-male rape.

4. You can occupy the Super Bowl: One of the Penn State trustees who voted to fire Paterno, Kenneth C. Frazier, said this:  “[E]very adult has a responsibility for every other child in our community. We have a responsibility for ensuring that we can take every effort that’s within our power not only to prevent further harm to that child but to every other child.”

Frazier, of course, was referring to the lack of leadership — the lack of humanity — at Penn State that allowed fealty to an institution and the power it offers to trump individual responsibility. It was an it-takes-a-village-to-raise-a-child sort of statement.  It’s worth keeping in mind as you watch the Super Bowl, because the subject Frazier raised goes far beyond the charges against Sandusky or the lack of leadership Paterno and others exhibited in the case. It includes our neglect, denial, and often encouragement of all the blows to the head that every football player — from peewee to pro — routinely suffers.

Watching those hits, hearing them lauded, feeling them vicariously is the guilty pleasure of football, as marketed by the NFL. Players who can deliver such hits and those who can absorb them, shake them off, and play on are extolled as true warriors, as gladiators, as real men. More and more of those “real men” are now being diagnosed with dementia and other conditions caused by the traumas first suffered by Peewee brains.

The “concussion discussion” started with retired NFL players pleading with the league and the players’ union for financial help with their medical bills. It has since trickled down to college, high school, and youth football as it becomes ever clearer that all those little insults to the brain that begin so early add up to catastrophe in middle age.

So if you believe in taking responsibility for “every other kid,” go organize in your community against helmet-wearing tackle football — at the very least until high-school age. (If you let your own kid play peewee football, you should be charged with child abuse.) It’s hard to go up against Jock Culture, which you’ll be watching in its full power and glory on Sunday.  Then again, it’s hard to go up against the banks and the war machine, too.  It’s time, in other words, to occupy football.

And if you need a pep talk before you get started, here’s one from Tim Tebow, who marked his eye-black with the numbers of biblical quotations until it was banned by the NCAA last year. (The NFL also bans unapproved logos.) I approve one of Tebow’s – Hebrews 12:1-2. “Let us run with patience the race that is set before us.”

Robert Lipsyte, the Jock Culture correspondent for Tomdispatch, is the author of a recent memoir, An Accidental Sportswriter.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on Facebook.

Copyright 2012 Robert Lipsyte

This story originally appeared at TomDispatch.com

Lowering America’s War Ceiling?
Imperial Psychosis on Display
By Tom Engelhardt

By now, it seems as if everybody and his brother has joined the debt-ceiling imbroglio in Washington, perhaps the strangest homespun drama of our time.  It’s as if Washington’s leading political players, aided and abetted by the media’s love of the horserace, had eaten LSD-laced brownies, then gone on stage before an audience of millions to enact a psychotic spectacle of American decline.

And yet, among the dramatis personae we’ve been watching, there are clearly missing actors.  They happen to be out of town, part of a traveling roadshow.  When it comes to their production, however, there has, of late, been little publicity, few reviewers, and only the most modest media attention.  Moreover, unlike the scenery-chewing divas in Washington, these actors have simply been going about their business as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening.

On July 25th, for instance, while John Boehner raced around the Capitol desperately pressing Republican House members for votes on a debt-ceiling bill that Harry Reid was calling dead-on-arrival in the Senate, America’s new ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, took his oath of office in distant Kabul.  According to the New York Times, he then gave a short speech “warning” that “Western powers needed to ‘proceed carefully’” and emphasized that when it came to the war, there would “be no rush for the exits.”

If, in Washington, people were rushing for those exits, no chance of that in Kabul almost a decade into America’s second Afghan War.  There, the air strikes, night raids, assassinations, roadside bombs, and soldier and civilian deaths, we are assured, will continue to 2014 and beyond.  In a war in which every gallon of gas used by a fuel-guzzling U.S. military costs $400 to $800 to import, time is no object and — despite the panic in Washington over debt payments — neither evidently is cost.

In Iraq, meanwhile, in year eight of America’s armed involvement, U.S. officials are still wangling to keep significant numbers of American troops stationed there beyond an agreed end-of-2011 withdrawal date.  And the State Department is preparing to hire a small army of 5,000-odd armed mercenaries (with their own mini-air force) to keep the American “mission” in that country humming along to the tune of billions of dollars.

In Libya, the American/NATO war effort, once imagined as a brief spasm of shock-‘n’-awe firepower that would oust autocrat Muammar Gaddafi in a nanosecond, is now in its fifth month with neither an end nor a serious reassessment in sight, and no mention of costs there either.  In Yemen and Somalia, the drones, CIA and military, are being sent in, and special operations forces built up, while in the region a new base is being constructed and older ones expanded in the never-ending war against al-Qaeda, its affiliates, wannabes, and any other nasties around. (At the same time, the Obama administration is leaking information that the original al-Qaeda teeters at the edge of defeat, even as it intensifies the CIA’s drone war in the Pakistani tribal borderlands.)  And further expansion of the war on terror — watch out, al-Qaeda in North Africa! — seems to be a given.

Meanwhile back in Washington — not, mind you, the Washington of the debt-ceiling crisis, but the war capital on the banks of the Potomac — national security spending still seems to be on an upward trajectory.  At $526 billion (without the costs of the Afghan and Iraq wars added in), the 2011 Pentagon budget is, as Lawrence Korb, former assistant secretary of defense under President Ronald Reagan, has written, “in real or inflation adjusted dollars… higher than at any time since World War II, including the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the height of the Reagan buildup.”  The 2012 Pentagon budget is presently slated to go even higher.

Senator John McCain recently raised the question of Pentagon spending in tight times with General Martin Dempsey, the newly nominated chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  He asked about a plan proposed by President Obama to cut $400 billion in Pentagon funds over twelve years, as well as proposals kicking around Congress for cutting up to $800 billion over the same period.

General Dempsey replied, “I haven’t been asked to look at that number. But I have looked and we are looking at $400 billion.  Based on the difficulty of achieving the $400 billion cut, I believe achieving $800 billion would be extraordinarily difficult and very high risk.”

In little of the reporting on this was it apparent that Obama’s $400 billion in Pentagon “cuts” are not cuts at all — not unless you consider an obese person, who continues eating at the same level but reduces his dreams of ever grander future repasts, to be on a diet.  The “cuts” in the White House proposal, that is, will only be from projected future Pentagon growth rates.  Nor were the “savings” of up to one trillion dollars over a decade being projected by Senator Harry Reid as part of his deficit-reduction plan cuts either, not in the usual sense anyway.  They are expected savings based largely on the prospective winding down of America’s wars and, like so much funny money, could evaporate with the morning dew. (In his last minute deal with John Boehner, President Obama’s Pentagon “savings” have, in fact, been reduced to a provisional $350 billion over 10 years.)

So here’s a question at a moment when financial mania has Washington by the throat: How would you define the state of mind of our war-makers, who are carrying on as if trillion-dollar wars were an American birthright, as if the only sensible role for the United States was to eternally police the planet, and as if garrisoning U.S. troops, corporate mercenaries, and special operations forces in scores and scores of countries was the essence of life as it should be lived on this planet?

When I was kid, I used to be fascinated by a series of ads filled with visual absurdities, in which, for instance, five-legged cows floated through clouds.  Each ad’s tagline went something like: What’s wrong with this picture? 

So imagine two worlds, both centered in Washington.  In one, they’re heading for the exits, America’s credit rating is in danger of being downgraded, jobs are disappearing, infrastructure is eroding, homeownership levels are falling rapidly, foreclosures are sky-high, times are bad, and even the president admits that the political system designated to make things better is “dysfunctional”; in the other, the exits are there, but there’s no rush to use them, not with those global ramparts to be guarded, those wars to be fought, and a massive national security complex — larger than anything ever imagined when the U.S. still faced a nuclear-armed superpower enemy — to feed and cultivate.

Now tell me: What’s wrong with this picture?

Two worlds, two productions, one over-the-top and raising fears of bankruptcy, the other steady as she goes — and (so it seems) never the twain shall meet.  And yet look again and those two worlds will fuse before your eyes, those two Washingtons will meld into a single capital city.  Then it will be clearer that the actors at center stage and those traveling in the provinces are putting on linked parts of a single performance. The financial problems of one will turn out to be inextricably linked to the other; the lack of an effective stimulus package in the first connected to the endless series of stimulus packages — all that failed “nation-building” in the imperium — in the second.

Like some Roman god, it turns out that schizophrenic Washington has two faces, each reflecting a different aspect of American decline.  In one, everybody can spot the madness.  In the other, it’s less evident, even though untold American treasure — literally trillions of dollars communities here desperately need — has been poured into a series of wars, conflicts, and war preparations without a victory, or even a significant success on the horizon.  (Greeted as if World War II had been won, the killing of Osama bin Laden should have been a reminder of the success of the Global War on Terror for a man with few “troops” and relatively modest amounts of money who somehow managed to land Washington in a financial and military quagmire.)

One American world, one Washington, is devouring the other.  Think of this as the half-hidden psychodrama of this American moment.

Put another way, for months Americans have been focused on raising that debt ceiling, as onscreen countdown clocks ticked away to disaster.  In the process, few have asked the obvious question: Isn’t it time to lower America’s war ceiling?

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books).

Copyright 2011 Tom Engelhardt