Not one book blog I visited today on my daily tour mentioned this explosive article in the New York Times Magazine, which I wrote about yesterday.

I’m still digesting all the astonishing stuff I read in there about search and linking, and the depth and breadth of human wisdom (and foolishness!) that will be available at the touch of a finger…

This is another one of those posts about the selling of ideas—PR-plus, if you will—so the squeamish may skip ahead to the next post…if there is a next post tonight.

Boyd Blundell at TPM Cafe has some astute insights into how to appeal to people’s emotions in order to bring them on board your political campaign.

when it comes to managing outrage, Katrina is the ripest of low hanging fruit. As I argued here, Katrina coverage naturally elicited massive outrage because it cut at the roots of the nation’s self image. So, while Americans have sophisticated mental defenses when it comes to avoiding outrage, Katrina has the notable advantage of having already penetrated them.

This is where the narrative management comes in. If this story, which has already left people outraged — at FEMA, for example — can be consistently tied in to the broader narrative that incompetent and negligent government causes real live suffering, then the ball will start to roll on its own. But if it just pops up in fits and spurts in articles like Grunwald’s, then a massive tool for shaping the political discourse in a way that advances progressive goals will have been lost. But the narrative has to be nurtured and prodded as deliberately as the administration exploited 9/11.

I don’t agree with his bottom line (I don’t think it’s a good idea to appeal to people’s fears and anxieties about the incompetence of their government. Indeed, I think it’s a very bad idea. It makes them feel insecure but doesn’t necessarily send them running to their polling places; it may cause even more of them just to turn off and apathy is already a huge problem…along with inertia).

I also don’t think the administration had to do much massaging of 9/11, and I don’t think they over-exploited it. (But I may not be objective about that—9/11 was a watershed for me. It happened in my backyard, for one thing.)

So that’s what I don’t agree with. What I do agree with is that managing the narrative is a critical element in any public endeavor in the 21st century. If you do not get your message out effectively, you may as well not have a message.

More about this another time too.

This issue is as least as important, as a matter of freedom of speech and support of Enlightenment values, as the Mohammed cartoons, and people aren’t paying enough attention to it. Some people are paying attention, though.

Juan Cole has asked his academic readers to sign the petition in support of Israeli scholars:

Yet another attempt is being made to institute an academic boycott in Europe of Israeli professors. Academics, please sign this petition and stand up. Israeli academics as a class have not done anything wrong and it is not right to subject them to a blanket ban.

Bravo to Cole.

Jeff Weintraub is also urging his readers to sign the petition.

Al Quds University president Sari Nusseibeh is urging his Palestinian colleagues to oppose the blacklist on Israeli scholars.

And there is an extraordinary cri de coeur by David Hirsch, of the University of London, against the blacklist.

Jews would be challenged to demonstrate their political cleanliness. An academic boycott would mean that UK based academic journals would refuse to publish papers from Israelis researching or teaching in Israel. Israelis would be excluded from academic conferences. Israelis would be disbarred from taking part in joint projects with UK academics. Israeli Jews that refused to identify themselves as anti-Zionists would be punished for the actions of their government in a way that no other academic on the planet is punished - at least by people claiming to be antiracists and on the left….
Not only is our union damagingly split by this moralistic and posturing gesture politics, so is the Palestine Solidarity movement in general. There ought to be a strong and united movement around the world to campaign for a free and democratic Palestine. Most decent people are alienated from the movement that exists by the feeling that it hates Israel more than it loves Palestine. We need to build on the basis of a new kind of language - we need to argue for peace and mutual recognition, not for war against the “oppressors”. The boycott campaign gives up on building a Middle East peace movement and replaces it with a lame and symbolic politics of despair and anger.

Hirsch touches on a point that indicts not just the usual suspects (the left) but the elites of the West—for their narcissism and condescension:

There is a significant stream of contemporary ‘anti-imperialism’ that routinely adopts this imperialist double-standard: liberty, womens’ emancipation and human rights are ‘western’ inventions, good enough for ‘us’, but not important for ‘the other’. …

And, eerily, he echoes something I wrote about here (the moral bankruptcy of “not in our name” arguments):

As well as punishing Israelis, the boycott has the added bonus of exonerating ‘us’. It is a ‘not in my name’ policy. It appeals to people who have an impossible need to feel themselves to be morally pure even though they live in a dirty world of complexity, conflict and injustice. They want to be able to feel that the corruption of the existing world is not their responsibility. Choosing to punish Israeli academics does not commit them to doing the hard work of changing the world, of building bridges, of making links; it does not take up any time or effort; it saves them from a feeling of complicity in the bad things that go on in the world. The fact that it does worse than nothing for Palestine is neither here nor there. [emphases added]

There is a deranged detachment from reality in some quarters in America, and it’s not only the far left and the Democrats and the liberals who show signs of denial. I’ll write more about this another time.

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

—Emma Lazarus

Andrew Sullivan’s readers seem to like the idea of Al Gore.

Okay, maybe that was a little gratuitous.

I have a bunch of beefs with Al Gore—primary among them is his conversion into a fire-breather. (I will spare you the photograph…for now. But you can find it on Google Images.). The timing is suspicious (he converted only after he lost the presidency) and it is way too late. When it mattered—during the recount in Florida, when the battle was for his own presidency—he didn’t have the balls to fight aggressively for what he wanted. That gives me deep reservations about his ability to lead a nation at war. There are other reasons, but that’s a pretty big one.

Read a bit about him for yourself, from Jeffrey Toobin’s Too Close to Call. (Which was published around 9/11 and got lost in the shuffle—it’s a good, if agonizing, read.)

Al Gore had lived in Washington for most of his life, and had absorbed, as if by osmosis, many of the attitudes of the establishment. He agonized about the views of the columnists, newspaper editorialists, and other elite opinion makers among who he had lived for so long. Gored cared as much about their approval as he did about winning, and he ran his recount effort accordingly. Ironically, and poignanntly, Gore’s solicitude toward the Washington establishment was never reciprocated. To a great extent, the vice president lacked passionate supporters among journalists and politicians, and even ordinary citizens. In the intense conditions of the Florida recount, this absence was notable. The recount required sacrifice, devotion, even a measure of fanaticism from those on the ground. At best, Gore inspired only a distant admiration from his supporters, and he paid the price in Florida. (p. 7)

When the first hints of this Republican attack on “selective” recounts began leaking out, [the Gore team was] flabbergasted. They had thought they were being statesmanlike by asking for recounts in only four counties….Instead, they were castigated for cherry-picking only the areas that would help their candidate the most….Gore and his lieutenants were so worried about appearing too aggressive that they were always heding, compromising, and, in effect, undercutting their own work…

James Baker suffered no such agonies. He believed that his candidate had won on Election Day, and his job was to preserve that victory—by any means necessary. If he had to repudiate decades of Republican thought about judicial activism and state sovereignty, Baker would—and did—do it in a flash. (pp.51-52)

The vice president thought that once the result was certified, the press and public would decide that the election really was over and begin to view him as a sore loser. If they filed a contest after certification, Gore’s team feared it might lead to the loss of…”credibility.”…Gore feared that a contest would alienate the editorialists and pundits whose approval he so craved and whose views, as it turned out, mattered so little. (p. 103)

It gets even worse. Gore didn’t even understand the stakes, or how to win:

Clinton’s philosophy about how to win posed a dramatic contrast to Gore’s….Whereas Gore regarded the [Florida] battle as primarily legal, Clinton saw it as political—and fierce. Gore wanted no demonstrators in the streets; Clinton wanted lots of them. Gore worried about pressing his case in court; Clinton thought the vice president should have sued everybody over everything. Gore believed in muting racial animosities about the election; Clinton thought that Democrats should have been screaming about the treatment of black voters. Gore believed in offering concessions, making gestures of good faith; Clinton thought the Republicans should be given nothing at all but should rather be fought for every single vote. “He’s being screwed,” Clinton would say of Gore….

Where was labor? Why was Gore so worried about stretching out the fight? There was plenty of time—just get the right result. Why hadn’t Gore asked for a recount of the whole state? Why such a timid public-relations message? Count all the votes—not good enough What about We won and they’re stealing the election? (pp. 193-94)

Al Gore seems like a good guy. He has ideals, and he wants to do the right thing. He’s careful and thoughtful. He’s logical and calculating. (Think Jimmy Carter, and shudder.) He may even have the right ideas about American and how we should behave at home and abroad. (I wouldn’t know, because his positions seem to have changed.)

Republicans will attack a Gore 2008 campaign as Democrats looking to turn back the clock to simpler (pre-9/11) times. That is a fatal image problem for a party that already looks weak on national security.

And one more thing: where the hell is Tipper? why is Al roaming around all over the place all alone? Would she even support his candidacy?

In her review of a book called The Attack, the New York Times’s representative of the New York intelligensia outdoes herself by presuming to understand the perpetrator of a suicide bombing better than the husband of the bomber.

Sihem [the bomber] turns out to have boarded a bus for Nazareth, then gotten off and stepped into somebody’s car. How exactly did she wind up back in Tel Aviv, wired with explosives? And who helped her? Most bewilderingly to Jaafari [the bomber's husband, who is the author], what brought her to this point? As far as he knew, he and his wife were both nonpracticing Muslims and thoroughly assimilated into Israeli society.

This willful obliviousness is repeatedly challenged by those he meets in the course of his investigation. Did he not recognize himself, he is asked, as “the serviceable Arab par excellence who’s honored wherever he goes, who gets invited to fancy parties by people who want to show how tolerant and considerate they are?” Or, as the questioner puts it more angrily, “What planet do you live on, sir?” Whatever the planet, it has forever been jolted out of its usual orbit…

The doctor’s sense of futility eventually gives in to outrage, once he visits places like Jenin, the battle-scorched site of a large Palestinian refugee camp…

And in Jenin, he finds an answer to his question about Sihem. “Your wife chose her side,” he is told. “The happiness you offered her smelled of decay. It repulsed her, you get it? She didn’t want your happiness. She couldn’t work on her suntan while her people were bent under the Zionist yoke.”

Oh yes. Now Sihem’s murderous act makes total sense. Her husband was “willfully oblivious” to the connection between Jenin (site of the non-massacre that has become The Massacre) and his wife’s political act. Right?

Suicide terrorism is understandable under the circumstances.

Great alienation always leads directly to suicide and murder.

Right?