Entry 18:

Ginger,

You really started a Frayster firestorm yesterday with your comments on Timothy McVeigh. Looks like they were roaring on well after midnight. Lots of passionate opinion out there. Never let it be said that Americans don't have an opinion. Me too. First in line.

Maybe today you'd like to offer a few judicious or lubricious comments on, let's see, O.J., Monica, J. Lo, P. Diddy, Clinton, Bush, what's his name's suicide, Ruby Ridge, abortion, evolution, the miracle at Lourdes, and the death of God? Is that what they mean by "right-wing talk shows"? Is it possible to overload the Slate servers? Wouldn't that be fun?

How about that Maryland women's lacrosse team! The Terrapins have won six national championships and are going for seven.

I think it's a shame Osaka got cut out of the 2008 (or is it 2004?) Olympics bidding. If Americans experienced the Japanese train system, especially the Shinkansen, maybe we'd start restoring the wonderful system we used to have and the highways would unclog a little. I can remember when there were more than a hundred passenger trains a day in and out of Union Station in Kansas City. Now it's a science museum. Not that I'm opposed to science museums. But since it's Kansas City, I wonder if they have any displays demonstrating evolution?

Cheney and the Kid issued their new energy policy yesterday. The Demos tried to trump them by issuing their energy policy the day before. One especially wicked little twist to the Bush proposals was one that would tie funds for developing wind and solar to royalties from Alaskan oil. I can just see the backroom boys grinning to each other as they slapped that one up. "That'll show those @#$%&* tree-huggers!" On the other hand, our lack of a coherent, long-term energy policy is a mystery to the rest of the world. When I met with the chairman of the Japanese Atomic Energy Commission in Aomori City a couple of weeks ago, it was one of his questions. He couldn't understand how the most advanced and powerful industrial democracy in the world could limp along jerry-rigging its energy policy from decade to decade. Engineers in the energy business were telling me back in 1990 that in about 10 years the U.S. would start seeing brownouts and blackouts, and here we are. The economics of building big new baseload power plants in the midst of deregulation have been discouraging--the only thing anyone's built anywhere in the last 10 years has been small combined-cycle gas plants--and the perpetual-motion-machine theory that conservation and efficiency alone could solve all our problems while we were adding the equivalent of a new California to our population every 10 years led everyone (especially California!) astray. For the latter I blame Amory Lovins, whose snake-oil theories were beautifully dissected by William Tucker in the Weekly Standard. (Not a periodical I would normally recommend, but what the hey, energy policy makes strange bedfellows.)

Speaking of Americans with opinions, have you noticed that every American down to toddler age and even below knows how to do television? Perfect sound bites! Watch for the little red light! Face the camera! Maybe that explains the creeping celebridom that is consuming the media the way termites consume wooden houses in Africa. Speaking of which, we had a perfect example of creeping celebridom when we went on safari in Tanzania for millennium week 2000-2001: 100 kilometers out of Dar es Salaam on our way to Ngorongoro Crater, nothing around for miles, a kid by the side of the road selling fake elephant-hair bracelets, he comes up the Land Rover, I roll down the window, he sees I'm American and says, "You know Michael Jordan?"

You have to leave after lunch to treat clients, I know. I'd better get the dialogue rolling. Last night was fun once we got the house warmed up ... 

red xox,
Rhodeman