I’m figuring somebody in the know was reading my blog yesterday and yanked the new Jeremiah Wright ad campaign. It was that or something else, because it’s gone. Oh well. I have faith that another public service announcement just as inspiring will be hauled out to take its place. Exactly what it will inspire, we’ll have to wait and see.

Hadn’t really intended this to become a political blog, but it is an election year. And there’s not much else in the news today but the discovery of 4,700 new asteroids in the vicinity of Earth, and somebody smuggling cocaine in their fat folds, and an ancient Loch Ness Monster with arthritis. The biggest political news story of the day is that Obama’s top counter-terrorism adviser apparently let slip during a press conference that there was a double agent involved in the arrest of the latest underwear bomber. Walter Brennan, I think his name is, said that there was an inside guy in Al Qaeda that tipped off the plot. You would almost have to assume that Al Qaeda would have figured that out when the plot came up empty. Anyway, now the neo-cons are saying this is further proof that the Obama team is amateurish, and we need a change in November.

Does retrogression count as change? Mitt Romney has reassembled almost the entire foreign policy team of George W Bush to be his foreign policy advisers. Apart from Donald Rumsfeld, almost every name is there. The people who brought you the Iraq War are waiting in the wings for their big Act Two in a Romney administration.

I’ll spare you the obligatory lines about Osama bin Laden disagreeing about how amateurish the Obama people are in foreign policy, because according to conservatives, “anybody could have executed that mission.” There was nothing to it. And maybe there was nothing to bin Laden himself. George W Bush essentially said so, on videotape that    I have seen. He said bin Laden “didn’t matter anymore.” This was around the time of the Iraq invasion. According to Bush, bin Laden no longer mattered.

So, the current president deserves no special credit for getting the mastermind of 9-11. Anybody could have done it. I’ll just close for today with this question. Can you imagine, in your wildest dreams, the volcano of outrage that would still be blowing up, that would be permanently blowing up, at Barack Obama if that mission against Osama bin Laden had failed?

Pretty surprising to open up my glaring screen this morning and read about the leaked plans of some right-wing “Super PAC” against Obama this year. They’re hauling out the old videos from 2008 of Jeremiah Wright, ranting his furious screeds from the pulpit. Not sure if they have any fresh content. It would appear they are just going to run the familiar old ones on TV over and over, like they did in 2008. Granted, the McCain campaign didn’t use them, but if anybody in America or on the surrounding planet missed out on seeing these,  I can’t imagine how.

This is the Big Idea for 2012?

The advertising outfit that produced this ad campaign has a heart-warming name. “Strategic Perception.” Did they have to pay the Orwell estate anything for that? Why not just call it Mind Control Incorporated?

Here’s the reality on this whole issue/non-issue. Jeremiah Wright did not spew inflammatory sermons for 20 years. Look at those videos. There’s a grand total of maybe three carefully edited sermons on that reel. Out of a twenty year career of mostly video-taped sermons, how come they don’t have any more to show us than that? It’s because the good reverend got crankier as he got older. The average Wright sermon didn’t sound like that. And the small matter of the editing of those videos is not exactly unimportant. All you saw was the furious culmination of long sermons, which had outlined all kinds of injustice and unfairness that have gone on in this country over the years. The guy losing his cool at the end was all you got to see.

If you talk to a right-wing activist you would think that each and every sermon Wright ever delivered was a frothing freak-out, beginning to end. That’s not the case, (also known as bearing false witness.)

While Obama’s policies have not delighted the conservatives, he has also NOT governed as someone who hates this country. If so, why do American veterans favor him over Romney by 7% in the latest poll? If this worn-out Reverend Wright story is the major mover for 2012, then I’m guessing the Grand Old Plutocracy is running low on ideas.

Yahoo “News” took a throw-away story about a fossil and turned it into a major mover this week. The incident reveals plenty about human nature.

The story involved a fossil of a large marine dinosaur, a Pliosaur, and the specimen in question showed signs of an arthritic condition that may have led to its death. Yahoo took the mildly interesting tidbit, and gave it this headline -

“Ancient Loch Ness Monster had Arthritis.”

Two or three times in the article the term Loch Ness Monster was used. The Pliosaur had flippers, you see. The article was soon “Trending Now” on Yahoo.

All you have to do is work something paranormal-sounding into the headline, and the soft sound of computers clicking will be heard across the countryside. UFOs, Bigfoot, psychics, or that 19th century favorite, ghosts. That’s all you need! The traffic pours in like mighty Niagara. Americans have to be the most obsessively superstitious people on the face of the earth, outside of Haiti. We rank 25th in the world in math proficiency, but we know the anatomical features of the Loch Ness Monster.

Or maybe we don’t, since the Loch Ness Monster does not have anatomical features, or existence of any kind, and never has. Next year is the 80th anniversary of Nessie. The whole thing was concocted in 1933, and no other year has had more reported sightings than that one. (The famous “ancient sightings” are untraceable.) The loch was a major tourist attraction in the 19th century, but not one word about a monster appears anywhere in the newspapers of that time. We have tissue samples and close-up video of narwhals in the Arctic Sea, but somehow after eighty years not one carcass, not one legit photo, not one scintilla of true evidence exists for Nessie. A real animal would not be that elusive.

If it was real it would be seen more often. This rule can be applied to all kinds of phenomena. One thing that’s not in question is the insatiable hunger of the public for nonsense. We see plenty of hard evidence for that, every day. They cannot get enough, and it’s important to occasionally ask why. Are we so bored and alienated and frustrated with this world that we long for the “otherworldly?” There are plenty of legitimate wonders and mysteries in science, but these never attract as much attention as the patent hooey.

When it becomes widespread enough, uncritical thinking has consequences for society. It’s a real problem, and there is no answer. Only talk about it now and then.

I often use the word fuck when that’s what I’m doing. Otherwise, not so much. People who’ve read my fiction are sometimes stunned, staggered, and maybe a little heartbroken by my rare use of profanity. I stick to the rule that writing should be lean (not so much clean as lean), efficient, and not cluttered up with a lot of unnecessary words. And despite the mileage George Carlin got from The Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV, these are still words that are generally meaningless, in the way they are typically used.

Take an old time classic novel or movie that you liked as a kid and go in and add profanity. The meaning of the piece won’t be improved, and it might even come off sounding completely absurd.

But maybe I’ll have to revise my thinking on this, because in the hardcore culture we live in, profanity is apparently not only necessary, it is a veritable list of magic words. Profanity is capable of transforming a work of solid fiction into a best-selling colossus. A run-of-the-mill comedian can ascend to headliner status. A generic disc-jockey can become the new Howard Stern.

George Carlin’s routine remains hilarious, but The Seven Words came out almost exactly forty years ago. The words aren’t nearly as restricted anymore as they were then, and no one need be denied their magic today.

But it’s possible that we are being denied something else – a lighter, more imaginative, and more memorable experience of living, which just can’t thrive in an environment of unfocused hostility, rude cynicism, and nearly universal threat displays.

All over the internet howls and yowls of protest are streaming in about the evil MSM digging up fifty-year-old dirt on Mitt Romney. (That’s Main Stream Media, folks. I always thought mainstream was one word. And anyway, what do you want? Fringe Media?)  Let’s cut to the chase. What is relevant here is not what happened in the 1960s. What matters is the response of Mitt Romney to the story now.

Mitt Romney seriously stands before you and I and all the world and says he does not remember whether or not as a teenager he led a roaring mob to track down another student, pin him to the floor, and cut off his hair with scissors. It may have happened. It may not have happened. Mitt just doesn’t remember. But – if it happened – he apologizes.

Now we have entered the realm of relevance.

If you are going to say to me that you don’t remember taking a certain math quiz in your junior year of high school, fine. If you are telling me that you don’t remember whether or not such an emotionally-charged incident as this one happened, I am calling you a bald-faced liar. And that’s not about fifty years ago. That is about today.

Mitt Romney’s response to this story almost could not be any more weaselly, duplicitous, two-faced, and repellant. The story itself was bad enough. The response is the issue going forward. It goes to character and honesty, or lack thereof. And it fits perfectly into the pattern of the flip-flopping, etch-a-sketch personality of Mitt Romney, a pattern that is about as well-established as any in American politics. He apologizes – if it happened.

A right wing writer has a column out saying this story has “imploded” because the family of the alleged victim claims to be unaware of the incident. (The victim is deceased.) Maybe they are unaware of it. They weren’t there. Five people who were there said it happened. Again, the relevance is not so much in the incident itself, it’s in the Romney response to it. He “doesn’t remember” whether he presided over such an incident, but if he did, he apologizes. An honest man would have said it this way  -

“I don’t remember any such incident, so it never happened. Period.”

The atmosphere was electric in Boston’s Park Plaza Hotel today. Nikola Tesla would have been right at home. Grub Street writing center held its Muse and the Marketplace writers’ conference, drawing thousands of authors and industry pros from across the country. It was a very encouraging time for a guy who spends too much time bemoaning the state of American literary society. Time and again, from so many different speakers, we heard that digital devices and social media are bringing about a new Golden Age for writers and the literary arts. Indie publishing, or self publishing, is the new way, never to go away, and the stigma against it has been exploded, utterly.

E-books have arrived, and they’re no fad. But they are also no threat to the existence of regular printed books. New technologies typically don’t supplant the old in a precipitous chop. Both will remain, maybe for generations. Newspapers, too, will continue to exist. The number of book titles produced annually is a mind-bending 2.8 million. That will only increase over time.

The great Richard Nash of Red Lemonade Press spoke at the end of the day, and reminded everyone of the humanistic potential of literature. We read and write to be loved, and to love others, he said. That’s how I see it.

More coming up tomorrow.

Fortunately I am a better writer than computer programmer. In fact, I’m probably more talented at whaling (which I have never tried) than setting up a simple WordPress web site, and the proof is here before you.

A fancier web site is on the way (built by somebody else!) For now this one will suffice     to deliver samples of my literary work, and my personal regards, to all visitors of the 2012   Muse and the Marketplace Conference, held this weekend at Grub Street, in Boston. You’ll get nightly reports from the conference at this blog, depending on how late I nightly get in.

I’m excited to be back at my writing, after too long of an involuntary absence. I’ll keep this post short, and invite you to read the other pages of this web site, which took almost as long to produce as the fiction it contains.

Cheers,  (which is just up the street from the conference)

~  BART  STEWART