NY1 is reporting the anti-war demonstration that I photographed and blogged earlier today:

Thousands Of Anti-War Protesters Rally In Union Square
Organizers say tens of thousands of people marched from Union Square to Foley Square in Manhattan this afternoon to demand an end to the war in Iraq, and to call on the Bush administration to bring the troops safely home.

I’m no expert at estimating crowds, but it was a sizable number of people, especially for a gloomy, rainy Saturday.

Condi Rice is consulting with all the wisemen and -women she can muster for the miraculous Middle East peace she plans to bring about:

Rice, who hopes the international conference in November will set the basis for negotiations on the creation of a Palestinian state, met with former president Jimmy Carter on Wednesday and spoke by telephone with Bill Clinton weeks earlier, said spokesman Sean McCormack. …

The chief US diplomat also regularly meets with her predecessors, Madeleine Albright, Henry Kissinger and James Baker, said a senior US official who requested anonymity.

On another topic, the Flack writes [e.a.]:

As PR people, we’re often asked, “what makes a story most?” We typically answer with “the biggest,” “most expensive,” “first” or whatever superlative we can reasonably conjure up. But the biggest stories tend to be those that defy conventional wisdom, e.g., the child prodigy, the cancer-survivor who went on to notch seven consecutive Tour de France victories, the waif model whose career rose to new heights after her front page cocaine bust, the Asian-African-American pro golf superstar, and the list goes on and on.

Indeed it does, even—or especially—in politics and geopolitics.

Abracadabra! I see another “Mission Accomplished” banner in the Bush administration’s future.

In Britain, a man has admitted to “sexual breach of the peace” for getting it on with a bicycle:

“[Hostel workers] used a master key to unlock the door and they then observed the accused wearing only a white T-shirt, naked from the waist down.

“The accused was holding the bike and moving his hips back and forth as if to simulate sex.”

One does rather wonder where exactly, um, the man and the bicycle were, um, conjoined.

naked man:

bicycle:

Can someone draw me a picture?

Happening now (as Wolf Blitzer would say):

New York City, October 27, 2007

… your fictional daughter killed you and thought of putting your body in the freezer but couldn’t manage it and NYTBR reviewer Lee Siegel (among others) allegedly misunderstood a plot point in your book and now he’s supposed to feel bad?

I think not.

Let me take readers back four and a half decades to see how unbearably priggish and tragically humor-challenged and literal-minded—not to mention morally correct—Americans have become [e.a.]:

Arthur Kopit wrote Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad while he was studying European theater [in 1961] on a postgraduate travel scholarship earned at Harvard. … As its subtitle indicated, he wrote the play as a parody— ‘‘a pseudo-classical tragifarce in a bastard French tradition‘‘—in the new, avant garde French theater of Arthur Adamov, Eugene Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett. It was this subgenre of the theater that, in 1961, Martin Esslin labeled the Theatre of the Absurd. …

The offbeat, dysfunctional characters—especially Madame Rosepettle and her son, Jonathan— caused some critics to complain about a lack of serious purpose in the play as well as its derivative elements, but the farcical and fanciful treatment of an overly-protective, domineering mother and her neurotic son gave New York and European audiences little pause. Most commentators could not argue with success and found the play [an] engaging spoof of everything from Tennessee Williams’s Rose Tattoo to Freudian psychology.

I haven’t read Sebold’s novel, but judging from the words of her Little, Brown publicist, Heather Fain, Siegel hit Sebold’s Achilles’ heel.

Fain (quoted in GalleyCat):

The main concern that Fain voiced when we spoke about the review yesterday was that the “mom’s in the freezer” spin might be “making light of the macabre nature of the subject matter, …”

Siegel:

Helen is, you know, cool with murdering her mother. She isn’t being arch, in case you were wondering. … Sebold may not be as dreadfully earnest as Sophocles and Dostoyevsky, but she is sincere.

Very much so. After suffocating her mother, which also involves breaking her nose, Helen tells us she “thought of the uncared-for bodies that lay strewn in the streets and fields of Rwanda or Afghanistan. I thought of the thousands of sons and daughters who would like to be in the position I was in. To have known exactly when their mothers died, and then to be alone with their bodies before the world rushed in.” Though she has just killed her mother, Helen is a generous person. She never forgets that other people are suffering and dying too.

Surely the moral conundrum is the murder itself and not what the fictional daughter does with her fictional mother’s body after the murder. But  publicist Fain is doing what she’s supposed to do: she deflects criticism away from her trying-to-have-it-both-ways author and tries to place blame on the shoulders of that author’s righteous critics.

However, Siegel is calling bullshit precisely on Sebold’s attempt to be both deliciously transgressive and morally serious:

Sebold is mining a popular and lucrative vein in contemporary fiction: peg your book to some heartrending tragedy or act of violence and you’re almost sure to be greeted with moral seriousness, soft reviews and brisk sales.

Moral seriousness is not about your subject matter. It’s about how you handle your subject matter.

Robert Reich writes:

Considering the magnitude of challenges ahead for America, it seems only reasonable that taxes should rise on the wealthy.

Can someone explain to me why this seems reasonable, or fair?

Let me explain what I mean. The other day I was talking to a friend, a very hardworking professional who makes a healthy amount of money, much, much more than her younger sister, who chose the uncomplicated life of an artist in a rural idyll, in which she has been supported for more than 25 years by their financially comfortable parents.

Now younger sister wants a Viking stove for her birthday. Says mom: No problem!

My friend, who could, without blinking, afford to renovate her entire (huge) kitchen and put in two Viking stoves, is annoyed. She hasn’t asked for a penny from her parents since graduating from college, after which she attended professional school, married another hardworking professional, and raised a larger-than-average family. Now that their kids are out of school (she and her husband paid full freight for their children’s education at top-ranked and top-priced universities), she is preoccupied with socking away enough money for retirement so as not to be a burden on those children.

I have known my friend for several decades. In all that time, it would never have occurred to her to buy something that was beyond her means–or indeed even to allow herself to wish for such things. Instead, she focused on her gratifying and socially responsible work and on her personal responsibilities. She earned her wealth, such as it is, through intense labor.

Robert Reich wants the rich to pay their “fair” share.

What’s fair? I’d say a 50 percent marginal tax rate on the very rich, meaning those earning over $500,000 per year. I’d also suggest an annual wealth tax of one-half of 1 percent on the net worth of people holding more than $5 million in total assets.

In Reich’s dream world, my friend and her husband, in addition to being treated inequitably by her parents, would also be treated unfairly by the government—all because they are hardworking people who also made a wise investment in real estate many years ago and are thus probably “worth” more than $5 million.

Now, my friend and her family are hard-core progressive Democrats. In fact, if Reich’s Rules were to come into play in a campaign, my friend would not pay without complaining. She’d be out there on the front lines volunteering for the candidate who proposed those rules. That’s just the kind of person she is.

However, I say it’s not fair to ask others in her position (which, by the way, I am not—so this isn’t a hidden plea for understanding) to do the same. Her cheerful willingness to go many extra miles to support those anonymous Americans who are not as financially comfortable as she is requires a selflessness that most people can’t—and should not be asked to—muster.

If my friend would only extrapolate from her own family situation—about which she is increasingly resentful, because her decades-long selflessness is being entirely disregarded and taken for granted—she might get a glimmer of understanding about why “liberal” or “progressive” ideas about soaking the “rich” are anathema to other Americans (including both those less well-off and those who are even better-off than she).

We don’t want to pay for little sister’s Viking stove. Furthermore, we are sick of little sister’s attitude.

Of course Reich only asks for the “rich” and “super-rich” to pay for reasonable-sounding items:

national defense and homeland security, good schools and a crumbling infrastructure, the upcoming costs of boomers’ Social Security … and, hopefully, affordable national health insurance.

But his attitude—they can afford it, so they should pay—sucks.