The Kiwi Is Surprisingly Stylish, Itself

Before I get started I want to make an announcement from the News You Can Refuse Department. On January 20th at 11pm RCTV is scheduled to have its first airing on community access television. That's RC as in Real Change, but it will be created, produced and hosted independently of Real Change by Steve Schrock.

Now, a couple of days ago Steve came by the office and taped interviews with yours truly and fellow editor Anitra "On Whose Kitchen Floor I Have Sometimes Slept" Freeman. I'm afraid those interviews may form the basis of the first show, even though I might have let slip some things about my sordid love affair[s] or what I may have initially thought of Timothy "Our Glorious Founder" Harris, and even though Anitra may have discussed whether I have ever been infested with invisible insects.

So what I'm saying is, this is News You Can Refuse. If you get the community access channel, you don't HAVE to watch RCTV that night. No, you can watch the Daily Show on Comedy Central instead, in spite of the fact that they rerun it the next day at 7 and it wouldn't hurt you to watch Jon Stewart a day late for once. Or you could watch, say, News at Eleven on Eleven 'cause you were too busy watching Whose Line reruns to see News at Ten on Thirteen, but you still have to get your news fix. Hey, nobody's holding a gun to your head, you know? Sheesh.

Speaking of me getting started, in our last column I ranted a bit. I know that ranting isn't pretty, so I thought I'd get ahead of the game and warn people what sorts of things start me up. In other words, let's talk about MY pet peeves!

1. People who just discovered Mars. "Mars is sooo interesting! Did you know that Mars was closer last year than it ever was in 60,000 years? Isn't that AWESOME? Don't you want to go look at it right now?" No, I want to chew beef jerky in front of a space heater. Go away for another 60,000 years.

2. Repetition. For example, her/his very clever joke at my expense was hilarious the first time I heard it and mildly amusing the next 20 times but after the 100th time she/he could be replaced with a neurotic self-abusive parrot and the world would be a far better place.

3. DSHS caseworkers. What are these people paid for? They don't know anything. They don't have any evident education into the challenges that their clients face. They don't even know how DSHS works. If you want to know a rule and ask three different caseworkers about it, you'll get three different answers. Paris Hilton knows more about poverty than these people.

4. Overused rhetorical devices. "Can you tell me what a rhetorical question is?" Well, I know that choking can prevent them.

5. Script speakers. These are people we have all known that compose and rehearse the conversations they will have with us, expecting us to follow their scripts even though we haven't seen them and don't care anyway. No matter what people like this say, I like to turn the subject to flightless birds or traditional oceanic art, or both. "I had a great time this weekend." "Maori depictions of Kiwi were rather stylized." "Don't you want to know what I did this weekend?" "The small repeated triangle is seen most often in Micronesia." "Aren't you listening to me? I thought you would ask about my weekend." "Emus?"

6. Pedestrian tailgaters. You get on a bus and someone gets on right behind you. Not only do they follow too close, but apparently they think your plan is to walk all the way to the end of the bus and walk out the imaginary back door at the very end, because when you stop to sit in a vacant seat it comes as a total shock to them and they run into you.

7. Weapons of mass destruction and the people who create and use them. Regarding weapons of limited destruction, many earnest people have told me that those have military uses, and that's a qualified Good in the Face of Evil. But weapons of mass destruction target civilians, including innocent children, an unqualified Bad. So people shouldn’t have them. Hello? That means us.

Opinions Shouldn't Come Easy

So I was thinking about my minor faults, and I thought of another one. I'm useless. I'm useless in so many ways, but one of my favorite ways of being useless is as an opinionated columnist.

An opinionated columnist is supposed to, above all, have opinions. But, oops, I hardly have any. In fact half the work of writing these things every two weeks is spending the nine or ten hours it takes each time to force myself to have one.

I've just called it a fault, but actually I'm so un-opinionated in my un-opinionated-ness that I can't really decide whether it's a fault or not. Maybe it's a cute quirk. Or maybe it means I could be the world's greatest jury member. "Mr. Browning, I'm sure you've read the hundreds of stories in the newspapers describing my client as a blood-thirsty murderer. What do you think of that?" "Duh, I don't know." "I have no objections to this juror, your honor."

I was reminded of all this Wednesday a week ago as I was reading the Seattle Times. I kept repeatedly running across stories that I felt I should have strong opinions about but I couldn't decide what they should be, just because I am so lame.

There was the story about 200 people from all over the world who have volunteered themselves to Iraq to serve as "human shields" in the event of a war. Now I have no problem figuring out what I think about Iraq's use of involuntary human shields. That's totally wrong. Iraq did that last time, they will probably do it this time, and it's wrong. But if people do it willingly, what can I say?

Sure, these people superficially resemble the suicidal bombers that we all hate for, uh, suicide bombing. They've got the suicide half down, and there's bomb-action involved. But WE'RE the ones about to be doing the bombing. How is that their fault?

Then, at the bottom of the same page, I got the privilege of reading for the first time about our military's latest computer-military advance, the new computer program called "Bugsplat."

Did I mention that I was preparing to see a psychiatrist as I was reading this? Here I found out that our military has a computer program that analyzes the potential for "collateral damage" that any given bombing might have, so that our commanders in the field can judge what size and kind of bombs to use in an attack. The program displays the potential collateral damage graphically as images of bugsplats on a computer screen, they say. So, I thought, why was I the one seeing the psychiatrist?

OK, the real name of the program is FAST-CD (Fast Assessment Strike Tool – Collateral Damage.) OK, if they're going to have a war and bomb people, I can see the benefit of having a computer program warn when a lot of civilians would be killed. I can see it on a practical, or what do you call it, logistical level. But it sickens me to think that the program has a built-in tolerance for a degree of civilian death and suffering. The idea isn't to avoid all "bugsplats" but to "minimize" them. We are building a definition of what that "minimizing" should be into a piece of software, so that our military commanders don't have to use their own consciences to make those sorts of decisions. Isn't that evil?

So then I moved on to the local news, thinking that I would be safe there. Nothing but familiar issues, issues I had long decided upon. Did I mention that I was seeing that psychiatrist to talk about child abuse that happened to me 40 years ago? So what do I read, but that there is now a move in DSHS and the state legislature to open up child abuse hearings to the public.

Ouch. I want people to know what goes on in these hearings. I want the extent of child abuse to be known. But I want the children to be protected from exposure. They need to be protected from the public.

Why can't the decision to have a hearing open or closed be made the hard way, in each individual case, by a judge or jury faced with the specific circumstances of that case? Do we have to have an opinion about everything in advance, no matter who could be hurt by it?