Hard work of transcription posted on Mike's Link Blog, and stolen by me...

HILARITY ENSUES AS ASHCROFT DOES JUSTICE
Vanity Fair
February 2004

[The revolution inside John Ashcroft's Justice Department — an array of new crime-prevention powers embodied in the Patriot Act — has been fueled by the attorney general's ambition intelligence and unusually extreme beliefs about everything from the similarities between himself and Jesus to the post-9/11 role of law enforcement, to the purported demonic properties of calico cats. But as nervous sources share stories of his Missouri governorship, and former stagers and Senate allies speak out, JUDY BACHRACH discovers that Ashcroft has also sparked a growing backlash one with surprisingly bipartisan power.]

JOHN ASHCROFT'S PATRIOT GAMES
by Judy Bacharach

In the summer of 2001, John Ashcroft, George W. Bush's new attorney general, was holding one of his early-morning prayer meetings in his office. It was a gathering of 12 — many of them Justice Department employees who had asked to attend, many carefully vetted as to their upbringing and religious affiliation. On the appointed day, they were ushered into a room containing a collection of baseball bats, a photograph of the Pope, and, most intriguingly, new beige-and-red furniture. "So much better than Janet Reno's," declared a participant, eager to curry favor with the boss.

Ashcroft beamed. At 61, he is a devout member of the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination that disapproves of drinking, dancing, and pre-marital sex. As a boy, he never went to the movies, because, he has said, his parents told him, "If you pay 15 cents to get into a movie, 7 cents of that will go to support a Hollywood lifestyle we disagree with." But he is not indifferent to power and its trappings — indeed, he harbored strong presidential hopes as late as 1998 — and it is in his nature to combine piety with ambition. In 1995, for example, when he became the junior senator from Missouri, he was anointed by friends (in the style of "the ancient kings of Israel," he has noted) with Crisco oil from the kitchen.

Within the Justice Department, the devotional gatherings, in what had always been a determinedly secular branch, were the subject of mystery and anxious murmurs — so much so that their very existence, I am told, was at first denied by the press office. What would happen to the careers of employees who shunned such meetings? To those who protested the melding of church and state? "People were afraid of expressing their views about it," recalls a lawyer who left the department. "The major concern was: If the boss of the entire agency is doing it, to whom do you appeal?"

Besides, it was immediately apparent to praying participants that the Deity's relationship to Ashcroft was of a special and particularly intimate order. His wife, Janet, he explained to the small group, had recently been bumped by an airline but was rewarded with extra frequent-flier miles and a free ticket, leading a delighted Ashcroft to conclude, "God is working for her."

Then, according to Carrie Griffin, a young Justice Department intern who was at the prayer meeting, the attorney general turned to another matter. He wanted to make clear that forgiveness, while perfectly fine in religion, had no place in the Justice Department. "The law is not about forgiveness," he said. "It is oftentimes about vengeance, oftentimes about revenge."

That was before 9/11.

Two months later, in the wake of the attacks, a similar message was conveyed to 18 of Ashcroft's top people, gathered at 9:00 pm around a long wooden table at the Justice Department's command center. It is a secure facility, heavily insulated against electronic eavesdropping, and nearby is a vault-like room with classified material. "Things are different now," Ashcroft told the group. The role of the Justice Department had been altered, its goal now not simply to investigate crimes but to prevent them before they occur. "And if you are not ready or up for this, you should leave now," said Ashcroft. No one left, Adam Ciongoli, who was Ashcroft's counselor, tells me.

Indeed, over a period of 48 hours, Ciongoli adds, FBI agents, criminal-division chiefs, privacy-review people, even tax lawyers, eagerly trooped before the attorney general. "These are the areas where historically we've been held back" by statute, they told him. Thus was born a major congressional act — as well as other, more ambitious administrative actions desired by Ashcroft and his men. Now government was permitted to listen in on attorney-client conversations without a court order, sanction secret searches in the name of national security, impose a gag on those who were searched, jail Americans indefinitely without counsel, and detain immigrants on secret charges, while withholding their names and even their numbers from the public. Government agents have been dispatched to houses of worship. With minimal oversight, they are now allowed to monitor e-mail traffic, discover which Web sites are being visited, track some online purchases, and more easily access medical histories, credit files, and even library selections. Hundreds of surveillance and bugging operations have been launched since 9/11; 113 emergency authorizations for secret warrants were issued in the first year alone — more than twice the number granted in the previous 23 years, the most extensive investigation in the history of the United States, as the Justice Department has noted.

Some of these powers are vested in what Congress ultimately called the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, better known as the USA Patriot Act. "I remember thinking that it was rather Orwellian as a name," Vet Dinh, until recently Ashcroft's assistant attorney general for legal policy and chief author of the act, muses these days. His tone is wry, but disapproving. Dinh, a Vietnamese-born refugee of 35, thinks "the subject matter was dramatic enough" without that little touch.

Many of these new enhancements in terrorism control were more than dramatic — they were revolutionary in the rigor and sweep of their scope. Just like Ashcroft himself. Six years ago he declared, "There are only two things you find in the middle of the road, a moderate and a dead skunk." He believes that "you can legislate morality," and that any senator who suggests otherwise will simply be legislating "immorality, and we've done too much of that already." The attorney general invested his fight for the Patriot Act with a Crusader's fervor, "questioning his opponents' patriotism," as Bill Clinton's former deputy attorney general Eric Holder puts it. Holder happens to believe in much of the act (unlike subsequent Ashcroft measures), but such ill-considered attacks on critics, he adds, "have had a negative impact on necessary public support for anti-terrorism efforts."

Wisconsin Democrat Russell D. Feingold, the Senate's lone opponent of the act, was appalled when Ashcroft described critics as giving "ammunition to America's enemies and pause to America's friends." Within a mere 45 days after the World Trade Center attacks it was pushed through. (By contrast, Bill Clinton's 1996 anti-terrorism measure took almost a full year to gain passage.) Hesitant congressmen heard Ashcroft's thunder: "Your tactics aid terrorists."

"Which is sort of a low blow," Bob Barr tells me firmly. A Republican right winger from Georgia who once vigorously fought for the impeachment of Bill Clinton from the House Judiciary Committee and is now a consultant to the ACLU, Barr these days is extremely troubled. "Congress should never be intimidated into passing something that affects our constitutional rights, but in the climate of the day, those responses were, I'm afraid, likely." He was, as it happens, one of those who voted for the act — just 66 representatives declined to do so. "The most troubling vote I ever cast in eight years," he says now.

But the waning of 2001 was, as Barr suggests, not a propitious time for reflection. The country was just recovering from brutal assaults on its security and self-esteem. Some things were known even then about Ashcroft. He possesses a formidable intelligence which, when trained on those he encounters, can be perceived, depending on circumstances, as pleasant or very cold. "He stares at people like they're at the other end of a microscope," says Eleanor Dean Acheson, a top official at the Justice Department under Reno, and the granddaughter of Dean Acheson, Harry Truman's secretary of state.

Ashcroft has the broad shoulders of a football player, a sport in which he excelled in high school. Not long ago he was the enthusiastic baritone of the Singing Senators, a group that included former majority leader Trent Lott and Vermont's Jim Jeffords, who sang Ashcroft's own musical composition "Let the Eagle Soar" (" ... with healing in her wings"). The attorney general's humor is spiked with a gift for mimicking nearly anybody, most notably characters from "The Simpsons."

In the Senate, interestingly, Ashcroft won praise from civil libertarians in 1997 for supporting a bill that would have made it more difficult for the FBI and other agencies to spy on citizens as well as the respect of Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont. "I worked with John on encryption and privacy issues," Leahy tells me. His tone is puzzled. "The positions he takes as Attorney General Ashcroft are different from the ones he took as Senator Ashcroft."

But Ashcroft was also known as an archconservative, a foe of abortion even in instances of rape and incest. He has supported an additional 10 amendments to the Constitution (including one to make it easier to amend). A lifetime member of the National Rifle Association, he opposed any ban on the sale of assault weapons.

The senators were aware as well of withering attacks on Ashcroft by, among others, the philanthropist James Hormel, who is homosexual, a circumstance that for along time delayed his appointment as Clinton's ambassador to Luxembourg. Hormel feels that the opposition to his nomination was led by Ashcroft (who steadfastly refused to meet with him) solely because of his sexual orientation. "That's the only conclusion I could come to," he tells me. "It was very disappointing and hard not to take personally. But, of course, it was not personal. It has to do with ideology and posturing."

It was also known at the time of Ashcroft's nomination that he had just been beaten, most humiliatingly, in his bid for re-election as senator, by a dead man — Mel Carnahan, the popular Missouri governor, whose plane had crashed weeks before Election Day.

But perhaps none of this was enough. True, in his fierce four-day confirmation battle in the Senate, he received 42 negative votes, the most ever cast against a nominee for attorney general. However, it would have helped, for example, if more people had realized that Ashcroft routinely compares himself to Christ in his 1998 memoir, Lessons from a Father to His Son, in which he refers to his campaign victories as "resurrections." Conversely, his political defeats are compared to "crucifixions." Ashcroft's determination to liken his political career to the life and death of Christ is a sign of "narcissism — without question," says Washington, D.C., therapist William Demeo. Despite reams of information dispensed by his opponents at the time of his Senate confirmation, no one seemed to know the complete Ashcroft. No one outside his home state of Missouri, anyway.

Ashcroft was the second of three sons of J. Robert Ashcroft, a Pentecostal preacher and president of Evangel College (now Evangel University) in Springfield, 220 miles south of St. Louis. J. Robert led the institution to accreditation. "A great speaker who used a lot of good, flowery words to paint pictures" is how Bud Greve, who teaches education at Evangel, remembers him. But John Ashcroft, although equally admiring, gives a different side of J. Robert, an amateur pilot, in his memoir. It opens with the words "John, I'd like you to fly this plane for a while," a command issued when John, all of eight, found himself placed at the controls of a flimsy 1940s Piper Cub in midair.

The impact of this experience was indelible. The plane went into a swoon over a Springfield farm while the boy gaped, helpless, frozen with terror: "My stomach came up to my throat and I lost all sense of time or place as fear gripped my insides." His father, John recalls, "had a good chuckle."

"And I had a good lesson: actions have consequences," he continues. Even the two-month absences of J. Robert during summers, when he went preaching around the state, yielded salutary consequences, his son believes. Young John became "stronger" and self-reliant. Besides, "Jesus Himself faced family dislocation. Remember when He cried out to His heavenly Father, 'My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?'"

Ashcroft was an exceptional student and "very ambitious," even in junior high school, recalls his childhood friend Robert Adams, who visited the family in their modest ranch-style home, on the rural outskirts of Springfield. The town, then surrounded by cattle farms, has expanded more than twofold since the 60s, when it had only 60,000 residents. The Assemblies of God has its headquarters there, and as Jerry Boyer, another childhood friend of Ashcroft's, points out, "They were strong politically, with a lot of people on school boards within Springfield.

"You heard the term the 'Shiny Buckle of the Bible Belt'? Well, that's us," Boyer continues. "Just about every third corner has a church on it. And the Assemblies of God weren't by themselves. It's a Baptist stronghold. I guess we're just behind the times in a way. We still have pickup trucks and gun racks, and deer season is coming up, and the plumbers just quit for a week."

In many ways Ashcroft stood out from his more conventional peers: from 1963 to 1969 he received seven military deferments (including one for the apparently essential job of teaching business law at Southwest Missouri State University). He went to Yale University, then took his law degree at the University of Chicago, where, coincidentally, his future antagonist the gay millionaire James Hormel was dean of students. At Ashcroft's 2001 confirmation hearing, the nominee would suggest that Hormel had handpicked him to go to his law school. "He had the audacity to say that!" fumes Hormel. In fact, although Hormel believes he may have gone to Yale to interview prospective students when Ashcroft was enrolled there, "I do not recall an instance when I met with him." This, he adds, "means to me he was not distinguished in either a positive or negative way."

It was at law school that Ashcroft met Janet Roede, his future wife (and the mother of his three children, Martha Patterson, 34, John, 30, and Andy, 26). She caught his eye because of her "wholesome, attractive, midwestern look" and the "inherent modesty" of her dress. At the time of his marriage, as Ashcroft mentions in his memoir, he was a virgin. ("A prostitute has a sex life," he writes. "But a married person has a love life.")

For her part, Janet had a disastrous time during their courtship. While in law school she was attacked by a rapist, an experience she would discuss publicly only years later. Her revelation came on ABC's Good Morning America at the precise time of her husband's confirmation hearings — an effort, evidently, to prove his compassion for women. At the time of her rape, she declared, "John's response was absolutely perfect, which amazed me."

"Why was Janet amazed?" wonders Roy Temple, a Missouri Democratic operative who ran Carnahan's race in 1996. "Who wouldn't be sympathetic toward a girlfriend at a time like that? The Ashcrofts thought they were speaking to mainstream America, but they were really speaking to fundamentalist America!"

The religious intensity of their beliefs as well as the intolerant properties of such certitude are subjects that come up over and over again in Missouri, a state in which Ashcroft experienced a number of crucifixions and resurrections. He lost a 1972 congressional primary, was then appointed state auditor, lost the post in an election, then won the job of state attorney general in 1976 (a period during which he opposed desegregation in the St. Louis school district so adamantly that a federal judge threatened him and his state with contempt). He was elected governor in 1984 and senator 10 years later. In 1998 the ultra conservative John Birch Society awarded him second place on its legislative scorecard. (Ashcroft tied with North Carolina's Jesse Helms; New Hampshire senator Robert Smith was first.) Then Ashcroft lost that seat too. And in all that time a cloud of turmoil seemed to surround him, some hint of bad weather. In Missouri, at every step his was a polarizing career.

From Ashcroft, I receive no interview. The press is not high on his list of comfort zones. His former counselor Ciongoli explains this suspicion of the media with considerable sympathy: "If you were to realize every time you said something your critics were going to try to turn it into another caricature, you would be very careful."

But, in the mail, I receive a large pile of anonymously sent old press clippings on Ashcroft, and then, bit by bit, startling stories from sources back home, some of them very nervous.

Some 15 years ago, Missouri state senator Harry Wiggins, a Democrat and the spokesman for a bipartisan group trying to get funding restored for a Kansas City home for AIDS patients, met with Ashcroft in the governor's mansion. The Good Samaritan home, as it was then called, had received a $900,000 state grant, but, says Wiggins, "Governor Ashcroft vetoed it. I think twice."

Wiggins tried to explain the home's purpose. "This is a place they go, Governor, but they don't come back," he began. "Many of them, their families have rejected them."

"I understand. You got my attention," Ashcroft said with interest. "This is the place where it is cheapest for me to send them to die."

"Governor, these are human beings who have to have a place to live," protested Wiggins, "or they'll live in boxes under bridges."

Wiggins remembers Ashcroft's reply: "Well, they're there because of their own misconduct, and it wasn't very reputable misconduct, either."

Wiggins was puzzled. "When does misconduct become reputable? When disreputable?"

"That's beside the point," snapped Ashcroft.

Ashcroft had, it was swiftly discovered, a thin skin for a politician, and an almost bottomless capacity to nurse grudges. In 1992 an African-American Missouri legislator named Ronnie White outwitted a furious Governor Ashcroft, killing a measure that would have imposed a ban on most state abortions. Several years later, Senator Ashcroft managed practically single handedly to keep White off the federal bench.

An AP reporter who needled Ashcroft during a press conference was told, with keen menace, "Just come back sometime when we have a little private time together ... " After a mildly critical article on Ashcroft's political ads, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Deirdre Shesgreen was kicked off his campaign bus.

Missourians were amazed by the governor's tendency to assume the worst about more liberal colleagues. "He was very paranoid politically," recalls former lieutenant governor Harriett Woods. She is a feminist Democrat, but because the Missouri state constitution allows split tickets she served in 1986 under Governor Ashcroft, her main responsibility being to take his place in the event he was absent or ill.

"You have to promise you won't serve as governor in my absence," Ashcroft warned her straightaway. In return, he added, he might just give her something more substantive to do in office. Woods, astonished, explained that such a promise would violate Missouri law. "He blinked," she recalls. "On the other hand, he wasn't telling me or anybody when he left the state." Four years later, Lieutenant Governor Mel Carnahan — ultimately Ashcroft's nemesis — got the same treatment.

And Ashcroft's obsessions: these too were a puzzle. When, in 1985, a young man named Paul Offner applied for the job of head of Missouri's social services, Offner tells me, Ashcroft said, without preamble, "Mr. Offner, let me start by asking you if you have the same sexual preference as most men." Offner considered replying, "I haven't done a survey," before settling on a restrained affirmative. Still, he didn't get the job. (Through a spokeswoman Ashcroft claimed he couldn't remember the meeting.) Some years later Missouri state troopers were deployed to prevent Pete Busalacchi from ending the life of his comatose daughter, who had no hope for recovery. "It was a matter of one person in a high position inflicting his religious beliefs onto a family," Busalacchi said. "Is John Ashcroft's religion better than mine?"

Janet Ashcroft somehow acquired the same high-handed reputation. "It was Mother's Day, a Sunday, 1990, when I was called by my staff; who told me Mrs. Ashcroft wanted the Missouri State Library opened," recalls Monteria Hightower, who was then state librarian. Assuming the governor's wife wanted to show visitors around ("and that I could make a pitch for new computers," she adds, chuckling), Hightower left her family at home and hurried to unlock the darkened library. She found Janet, outside in a car with a driver, accompanied only by a boy of 12. With astonishment, she heard Janet's reason for her Sunday appearance at the library: "I want to find something on the Elizabethan era for my son's homework assignment."

Visitors to the governor's mansion often found themselves expected to join in prayer, and on one such occasion — it was a dinner gathering of lawyers, waited on (as is customary in the Missouri governor's mansion) by local prisoners who had earned the privilege — Ashcroft gave a family values speech. "In the course of this he said, 'Women in the workforce have become so prevalent that a man's role has been reduced to a sperm donor,'" reports one of the guests.

No one could believe it, says this lawyer. Everyone knew Janet Ashcroft had written a textbook on business law with her husband indeed, she would later teach law at Washington, D.C.'s traditionally black Howard University. Even their daughter, Martha, was attending law school. And yet, says the dinner guest, "he was serious. He didn't mean to be amusing."

Only the governor's wife appeared unfazed. Perhaps she was used to such opinions. (Last year, she declared in Missouri, "I have to behave myself, and I have to spoil him rotten, and that makes my life unbelievably stressful.") The night of the dinner, she was dressed girlishly, in a floral summer dress, with matching flowery sandals. Her earrings were roses modeled out of pink clay. The young lawyer complimented her on a particularly decorative artifact. "It's bolted down," Janet Ashcroft said meaningfully.

"Bolted down — I'm sure you know who the waiters are," echoed the governor, giving a swift glance at the prisoners, all within earshot, who served them. "You know how they are."

And the waiters? I wonder. What was their reaction?

"Stone-blank," replies the lawyer. "Stone, stone, stone. The waiters, who were all African-American, had to have heard. I love to pray, but what business did we have praying in the governor's mansion? That night I thought, We started this out with a prayer to God, and this is the way you end the evening? It makes me sick to think I prayed with him."

It was a mistake to underestimate Ashcroft as Clinton appointees swiftly discovered when he was elected to the Senate, in 1994. "He is one smart guy, a very intelligent, thoughtful person, no one to fool around with intellectually," says Eleanor Dean Acheson, whose job at the Justice Department included promoting the fortunes of federal judicial nominees in the Senate.

Ashcroft's interrogations of the nominees invariably began with variations on: "Do you believe the Constitution holds out the right of privacy" — a question that when answered affirmatively signaled the nominee supported abortion rights. Any squirming or obfuscation, Senator Leahy recalls, and some prospective judges were "held up for months and months, waiting. Senator Ashcroft would make them do it over again."

Then Ashcroft would deftly probe further: "What about the rights of the fetus? What in the Constitution guarantees rights to homosexuals?" Ronnie White, who had thwarted Ashcroft years earlier on abortion, was a dead duck. He had become the first African-American on the Missouri Supreme Court and had been nominated by Clinton to the federal bench. But Ashcroft spread the word that the judge not only was "pro-criminal" but had "a tremendous bent toward criminal activity," since he was "soft" on the death penalty (which was untrue: from the bench, White had voted 70 percent of the time to affirm the death penalty).

In fact, the depth of Ashcroft's antagonism to the nominee is inexplicable to this day to old acquaintances — so much so that Ashcroft had to deny any racial motivation for his vendetta. "Ronnie White is a wonderful judge. Ronnie would have been a wonderful federal judge," Harry Wiggins says simply.

Republican senators, including Kit Bond, the senior senator from Missouri, who had earlier promised to support White, were petitioned to stand fast behind Ashcroft, who was about to run for re-election, after all, against a powerful and popular Missouri governor. "He knew he was going to have one helluva race against Mel Carnahan, and he didn't want to be alone in fighting White," says Acheson. "He knew he would be nailed by black groups — he wanted a united front."

Although Carnahan was a devout Baptist, he was also, by Missouri standards, pretty liberal, its first openly pro choice governor. However, Roy Temple adds, "The only thing more offensive than a nonbeliever to Ashcroft is a believer who is nonfundamentalist."

In any event, the feelings between Ashcroft and Carnahan went far beyond political rivalry, to some dark core of bitterness stretching back to the days when Carnahan was lieutenant governor, left out in the cold. Once, two sources inform me, Ashcroft had confided to him about an irresponsible gubernatorial-campaign ad he had run against a 1984 adversary, Lieutenant Governor Ken Rothman. "I guess those ads I ran against Kenny weren't really fair or accurate, but that's politics," Ashcroft said. "Mel was horrified," Temple tells me.

On both sides during the Ashcroft-Carnahan Senate race there was constant sniping. The Democrats made much of the fact that Ashcroft had given the 1999 commencement address at Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist and racist institution. America's "character" was not secular, Ashcroft told the students, since "we have no King but Jesus." The G.O.P. volleyed with a 39-year-old photograph of Carnahan in blackface at a Kiwanis Club fund raiser. Carnahan apologized. As election time drew near, it appeared he might win, narrowly, but on October 16 he died in the crash of a twin engine Cessna, along with his 44-year-old son, Randy, and an aide.

Campaign workers initially felt "it was over and we should pack up and go home," says Marc Farinella, who was Carnahan's campaign manager. But "Ashcroft's conduct over the next several days of the campaign was an important factor in my not going home when Mel died." Carefully, the Carnahan family let it be known to Ashcroft that he was welcome to come pay his respects at their home — they understood his political desire to show sympathy during a tough campaign; in fact, a statement would be put out thanking him. However, they added, they didn't want him at the funeral services, where his presence might prove distracting. Ashcroft never responded to their request. He came to the services anyway. And his picture was in the papers.

"For Ashcroft to come to Carnahan's services over the family's objections — we felt that was despicable," says Farinella. "And then the icing on the cake! Ashcroft says he has to work through his grief over Mel by working at soup kitchens. He does this for exactly 12 minutes at one kitchen, showing up with cameras in tow. It was a photo op.

"At this point we said, The hell with it! So for the first time in the history of the United States, a dead man was elected to the Senate." Farinella struggles for speech, swallowing hard. "I can hardly talk about it."

Thomas Fowler, a Springfield attorney, who was once chairman of the Missouri Republican Party and an aide to Ashcroft's Senate campaign, reports that the defeated candidate was simply "very disappointed. I don't think I've ever seen him heartbroken about anything." Jean Carnahan, the widow, became the new senator from Missouri, in which capacity she voted against Ashcroft's nomination for attorney general.

After his lukewarm confirmation victory, Ashcroft was assured by his old Senate colleagues that they would not hold his previous history against him. He had a clean slate." So if it's the Senate or the Savior that wipes my slate clean, it's fine with me," Ashcroft told a group of 12 in his conference room. One listener was troubled. "It was just an unusual reference at a government meeting." At Ashcroft's inauguration ceremony, responsive reading required his audience to quote the prophet Micah, "to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God."

Within weeks of Ashcroft's arrival, the revolution began, although initially only his subordinates realized it, as it came in the form of a scolding memo. According to a former Justice Department lawyer, the phrases "We are proud of the Justice Department" and "There is no higher calling than public service," both of which had been pro forma in certain letters sent out to citizens and congressmen above the attorney general's signature, were to be excised. A call to Ashcroft's office provided an explanation of sorts: "Pride is one of the seven deadly sins; therefore we could not have a letter going out that would have the word 'pride' or 'proud.'" Moreover, "there is a higher calling than public service, which is service to God."

The oddest details seemed to carry grave theological implications, even in the Netherlands, where Ashcroft attended an international anti-corruption conference in May 2001. There, a trio of Siamese cats scampering about the residence of Cynthia Schneider, the U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands, produced alarm in the Justice advance team, according to a highly placed source. "Are there any calico cats at the residence?" they inquired of embassy staff. Ashcroft, who would be dining with Schneider, considered such creatures "instruments of the Devil," his people explained. (Ashcroft has denied any antipathy toward calico cats.)

Equally startling was the new composition of top staff. "To go from a Justice Department that was diverse, led by a woman," recalls one ex employee, "to that first wave of primarily white guys, that was a major change." Even after that first wave subsided (there was a flood of departures, including, after two years, Viet Dinh, the chief architect of the Patriot Act), the results were similar. Qualified female attorneys, complaining that Ashcroft "can't look a woman in the eye," found promotions to the highest levels almost nonexistent. Black men would be replaced by white men. In honor of Women's History Month, Janet Ashcroft, once an outspoken opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment, was asked by her husband to make a speech to women staffers. "Which is kind of a novel thing," one listener says dryly. "And he introduces her by saying she's the woman who taught him how to put dishes away. Yes, that's what he said to the women lawyers. He said she taught him you should rotate your china, put your new plates on the bottom of the stack, so you don't wear them out."

In those early days, the attorney general himself seemed already worn out at least he made it clear that the long briefing papers that had been Janet Reno's reading matter had to be reduced to what one former staffer describes as "a paragraph of background and a paragraph of talking points" per issue. But such abridgments were found onerous as well. "Do I get extra credit for reading all this?" mused Ashcroft, looking at 12 pages.

After 9/11, however, the pace stepped up. "There were a series of teams that came in to talk about changes in immigration law, FBI-related changes," recalls Adam Ciongoli, and Ashcroft spent hours probing their desires for the legal revolution in fighting terrorism with his usual analytic skill. "Why do we need this? What does it do? Are there any constitutional concerns?" he would ask. And then, most significant: "Are we allowed to do this in other areas of law enforcement?"

And that was just the problem, say his critics. It was amazing, in retrospect, the range of options that had been permissible all along in other areas of the law. Government, for example, has long been able to pierce attorney client privilege in certain cases by listening in on such conversations when the attorney himself may be facilitating a crime. "We did it under Clinton," says former deputy attorney general Eric Holder, "but we went to a judge to do it." Under Ashcroft, two years ago, this need for judicial approval was erased, providing both attorney and client were informed. Now it's up to Ashcroft to decide if there is "reasonable suspicion" to believe a conversation between a detainee and his lawyer "may" further "acts of terrorism."

Traditionally, the government has also been able to "sneak and peak," gaining access to the contents of homes, offices, and even library selections without immediately informing a suspect. Within the context of the Patriot Act, however, such measures have produced a heightened degree of alarm — and for good reason. Since 9/11 more than 18,000 anti terrorism subpoenas and search warrants have been issued. Last May, Ashcroft's people acknowledged that they had sought 248 times to delay notifying a target of an investigation. Moreover, now, as Vet Dinh tells me, you don't really have to be a suspected foreign agent to have your fife examined by law enforcement officials, just perhaps the possessor, he says, of some "evidence relating to an investigation" on terrorism. The government may seize business records and other information by seeking an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a body that sits in secret and where the standards of proof are lower than in criminal court. Probable cause does not apply. And as for the search itself, Dinh adds, "There is a provision to make it confidential."

Meaning a gag order, I say.

"Exactly," says Dinh.

Meaning if you've been searched, you can't even call your local congressman to complain?

"Exactly."

This is the kind of legal expansionism that causes Bob Barr to worry about the latitude that gave rise to it, long before 9/11. "Maybe we ought to look at those old criminal applications of the law and see if they are constitutional," he says. What about the Fourth Amendment?, he wonders. "If we are really entering an era when government can pre-emptively gather evidence on individuals to prevent future crimes, if that is what the administration wants to do, then they should propose rescinding the Fourth Amendment, or dramatically amend it. If they want to do it, do it honestly."

Barr warms to his subject. "That's the argument I use with the gun control folks." Repeal the Second Amendment, he tells them, if that's your real aim.

More alarming to civil libertarians than the Patriot Act ("In truth, the Patriot Act is simply a metaphor for all these civil liberties violations," Laura W Murphy, the ACLU's chief lobbyist, tells me) are subsequent government decisions. Americans on American soil learned that they could be jailed indefinitely as "enemy combatants," a status that has its origins in World War II. Foreigners guilty of mild infractions of immigration law (including Pakistani editor Ejaz Haider, who had been invited to the United States by the State Department but who was detained after failing to check in with immigration authorities within 40 days of his arrival) can be picked up on the streets by armed men. Or detained and deported, often without benefit of counsel. Or worse.

The Justice Department's own inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, reported last year that in Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center some guards slammed inmates against walls, dragged them by their arms, stepped on the chains between their ankle cuffs, and promised prisoners, "You're going to die here."

In fact, of the estimated thousands of detainees rounded up and subjected to preventive detention ("We don't know how many," Senator Leahy acknowledges), few were prosecuted and only two found guilty. Not a real fine haul, I suggest to Ciongoli, who is very tall, with piercing dark eyes. Ciongoli is one of many who recently left the Justice Department. (He now works at Time Warner.) He is an Ashcroft friend, a former Senate staffer who lobbied hard to prevent Ronnie White from becoming a federal judge. These days he doesn't understand the fuss made about the anonymity of detainees, whose names and numbers, were they known, might help al Qaeda, he says. Besides, "no one was stopping them from identifying themselves," he points out solemnly.

As for the minuscule number of convictions, the question is, says Ciongoli, "Are we making the country safer?" The answer? "Categorically yes! I mean, if you look at 9/11 hijackers, most of them we couldn't have charged with anything .... So it's entirely possible that the people we rounded up, based on suspicion that they were linked to others, were trying to do the same thing! They looked a lot like the 9/11 hijackers. They appeared to be otherwise largely law-abiding. They were in violation of their immigration status, and we had varying levels of information about their affiliations with groups that caused us concern."

How does that satisfy the Constitution? I wonder.

The dark brows lower. "We are entitled to arrest, detain, and deport them! You're characterizing it as a tiny haul!" He is distinctly annoyed. "Uh, I'm finding some of your questions interesting in their characterization in what appears to be, candidly, sort of a hostile bias."

There is an uncomfortable moment here, during which I am reminded of a conversation I had days earlier with David Keene, the head of the American Conservative Union. "Where I fault Justice and the attorney general," said Keene, "is in the disingenuous way they defended the Patriot Act and then tried to imply that anyone who faults the act is either in league with terrorism or not sensitive to terrorism."

Then Keene said, "I don't believe I have to give up my conscience to be a good conservative." If there's another attack, he adds, "you can bet" there will be worse to come.

In late 2003, it was learned, the government began using the Patriot Act against suspects who had little or no connection to terrorism. "We thought that was going to happen, and it did happen," says Keene. "Remember when RICO [the anti-racketeering act] was used against organized crime and now it's used against any four people who get together? Now Justice is sending out memos saying, 'Hey, you can use this against other criminals.' Because of a real threat, we have allowed the bar to be lowered."

Thus, the owner of a strip club, accused of paying off officials to allow contact between topless dancers and customers, discovered that the Patriot Act was used to get subpoenas for his financial documents. ("Clearly within the legal parameters of the statute," declared FBI special agent Jim Stern.) A lovesick 20-year-old California woman who wrote threats on board a cruise ship in order to return home swiftly to her boyfriend received two years in a federal prison again thanks to the Patriot Act, which mandates stiff penalties for making false threats on mass transportation. With the help of government's ever-expanding powers, suspected blackmailers, child pornographers, drug traffickers, and a computer hacker who stole trade secrets have been pursued. Hundreds of cases in all, say grateful Justice Department officials. "Prosecutors already have the tools they need," says Holder, clearly puzzled. But evidently, they want more.

Last February, a proposal known as the Domestic Security Enhancement Act (nicknamed Patriot II) leaked from the Justice Department, causing instant consternation — at which point Ashcroft assured everyone that it was simply a draft, that's all. It gave a fair idea, however, of options being considered. "I don't think it's dead by any stretch of the imagination," says Barr. The ACLU's executive director, Anthony Romero, observes, "It was clear Ashcroft was caught with his hand in the cookie jar. But what you're finding now is that they're taking pieces of Patriot II and sprinkling it across pieces of legislation."

Among its provisions: the creation of a DNA database of terrorism suspects and their associates. The power to wiretap Americans for 15 days without a court order after terrorist attacks. The ability to block bail for terrorism suspects, make secret arrests, and expand the federal death penalty to convicted terrorists. In addition, as Patriot II revealed, the government would like to revoke the American citizenship of anyone who helps an organization the attorney general deems terrorist.

Your idea, to revoke U.S. citizenship? I ask Viet Dinh.

Dinh wrinkles his nose, his expression suffused with disgust. "Nor do I think that that policy, vetted, would satisfy legal, constitutional strictures," he says. In fact, he is troubled about more than this — about Jose Padilla, for instance, who was suspected of planning to detonate a "dirty bomb." American-born-and-raised, he was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare airport, was designated an "enemy combatant," and has been consigned to a military prison since June 2002. "I do not necessarily agree with the position the president and the U.S. government is adopting with respect to military detention," Dinh says. Four weeks later, the second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with him.

"Hysteria" is how Ashcroft describes citizens' concerns. "Castles in the air. Based on misrepresentation. Supported by unfounded fear. Held aloft by hysteria." Significantly, he said this in a speech in Memphis, and not to his old colleagues in Congress, whom he now largely ignores.

"As attorney general, he is extremely reluctant to testify and appear," Leahy complains. "Jim Sensenbrenner of the House Judiciary Committee had to threaten to subpoena his answers. Senator Arlen Specter said to Ashcroft, 'How do we communicate with you?' It's a big mistake." There are issues Leahy would love to discuss with his old colleague: Ashcroft's demand that judges who impose more lenient sentences than those prescribed by federal guidelines be monitored by prosecutors, who must then report back to him. The roundup of detainees. The fate of those deported to countries famous for human rights violations. But the attorney general isn't available for consultation. As far as Ashcroft is concerned, says Leahy, "Congress is irrelevant."

Much more significant, however, is the second revolution Ashcroft has fomented, this one entirely inadvertent and not as well known to the general public. How could Ashcroft have possibly imagined the unlikely alliances his measures would promulgate? Or that the very patriots on whom he had counted would be trampling down party lines, massing in their zeal and fervor — against him? These days Chief Justice William Rehnquist is as one with the American Bar Association and Victoria Toensing, former deputy assistant attorney general of the criminal division at Justice, in his denouncing Ashcroft's incursions into judicial independence. ("I helped get those sentencing guidelines passed in 1984, God help me," says the staunch Republican Toensing, "and that's what they were: guidelines.") Within the courts there seems to be a significant mutiny taking place. "They can have their blacklist," Michael B. Mukasey, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, said recently. "But we have life tenure."

With special pride, Ralph Neas, president of Norman Lear's liberal advocacy group, People for the American Way, informs me that the chief speakers at his last conference were the conservative Keene and Grover Norquist of the right-wing Americans for Tax Reform, along with the liberal actor Alec Baldwin. With undisguised glee, Anthony Romero, the openly gay 38-year-old head of the ACLU, discusses former congressman Bob Barr.

You and Barr, such strange bedfellows, I tell Romero.

"Yes, Bob Barr and I are a great couple, really we are equals," Romero replies with a laugh. He appears to be giving consideration to the strange new legal world in which we find ourselves, for better, for worse. "Maybe if they give us the right to marry one day, I can propose to him."

I'M WITH LANDHAM TOO

DRIVING MR. LANDHAM

FMA

Obviously the root force driving this is bigotry, no matter how the proponents dissemble. The most intriquing side issue to me is the complaint against "activist judges." If that's really the problem, why doesn't someone introduce an amendment eliminating judicial review? That would eliminate a whole lot of conservative bugaboos in one fell swoop. Not easy to market, but it'd at least make sense.

I have another question which is shared by Andrew Sullivan: Jesus himself is not quoted against homosexuality anywhere in the New Testament (in fact, he has no problem lounging aroung with the Beloved Disciple's head on his chest, which sounds pretty gay to me), while he does speak strongly against divorce. So why the religious-based attack against homosexuality?

In December I ordered champaign flutes for my sister and her husband from Hecht's. They were backordered, so my little sister tracked some down at a store, and I cancelled the mail order. Six weeks later, I noticed a withdrawal from my checking account from Hecht's. I called, and despite this being a clear and obvious fuck up, the mumbling ESL shitbrain in customer service insisted that whatever happened, it was my fault. It took my about five minutes to demand a supervisor (and you would have thought that was a personal insult to the monkey I'd previously spoken to), and I managed to work out that the shipment could be refused, and then I'd get my money back.

Hecht's called me demanding to know why the shipment had been refused. I told the moron because it had been cancelled and never should have been shipped, and to credit my card. She then looked at whatever file they had, and agreed with me.

Today I called those colossal fuck-ups to get an idea of when my card would be credited. Apparently they were waiting for a call from me to confirm -- really, really confirm this time -- that I wanted a refund.

This is all to my debit card, btw, so it's right out of my checking account.

So, they call me back a couple time today, having finally noticed that maybe this had been going on a little too long. The latest call is to let me know that they were unable to credit shipping. But that's okay, they said, because the next time I'm in fucking Fairfax, VA, I can drop by the Hecht's there and presumeably spend a couple hours trying to crowbar $7 cash from customer service in-store. I said that wouldn't work, since I do not live anywhere near Fairfax, so they made a vague promise to get me the money somehow.

I suppose they are counting on such a small amount being worth dropping, but I am going to pursue this final $7, and make Hecht's the focal point of all the rage and frustration in my life.

Anyway, boycott Hechts.

Quote of the day

Well, there's this girl I know. And don't the worst things that ever happened to you in your life all start with those words?
-- Warren Ellis

Maybe I'm insane, but I CANNOT WAIT.

Michael Kinsley, of all people, swings a lead pipe: "You're not going to find John Kerry inspiring unless you're married to him or he literally saved your life."

"Literally."

Jesus.

I just lost a huge amount of respect for The Onion. It's book review archives are sorted two ways, alphabetized by title, and alphetized by author first name. You have got to be fucking kidding me. Who fucking looks for a book based on that. "I'm looking for a book by Patrick. I know it's Patrick. P-a-t-r-i-c-k. Huh. Not finding it."

YES!

Former Actor Challenging Bush in Primary

CAMARILLO, Calif. - Tom Laughlin, best known for helping bring martial arts into American pop culture with his 1970s "Billy Jack" films, is now throwing his punches in the political arena.

The 72-year-old actor, who lives in Camarillo, is one of 13 candidates running against President Bush (news - web sites) in the Republican primary.

Laughlin, who first ran for president as a Democrat in 1992, said he's campaigning to draw attention to a two-party system he deemed "so corrupt it can't function anymore."

He described himself as a "messenger" candidate and said he wasn't disappointed by the New Hampshire primary, in which he earned 154 votes to Bush's nearly 34,000.

"I've never run for president with any kind of thought of winning except to make a statement that we need change desperately," Laughlin told The Associated Press on Sunday.

The issues he's most concerned about: Bush's claims that Iraq (news - web sites) possessed weapons of mass destruction and Congress' recent approval of a Medicare bill that prohibits the purchase of cheaper health care drugs from Canada.

Political themes have long been of interest to Laughlin, whose low-budget martial arts films pitted Billy Jack, a part Indian outlaw and Vietnam veteran, against racist, corrupt politicians and greedy businessmen.

"Billy Jack was always about the little guy going against the power brokers who are out to exploit and ruin," Laughlin said. "And that's why I'm running."

I just realized: we live in a time when if you DON"T think there's a bomb on ain airplane, you are considered a cynic and a pessimist.

Now I feel good.

J-Dawg makes an observation in her blog which I have shared before. I agree, smokers have a bad habit of littering. Years ago, during which I was briefly friends with Christ Cornell's sister -- brushing with fame yet again -- she was pushing a ballot initiative to ban smoking in bars. I disagreed on her with that. I think private establishements should be allowed to set their own policies, while acknowleging the healthy feeling of no black lung, and fresh-smelling clothes. That is why I suggested that local governments should try an experiment, by making cigarette littering a high enforcement priority. Washington State can fine you as much as $1,000 for throwing a smoke out the window, which I think is fair, considering that smokers probably throw thousands of such butts in their lifetimes. No, but I think a campaign of terror against cigarette littering would at the very least result in slightly cleaner streets, and might nudge people towards clean lungs, sanity and freedom.

I read a terrible pop science book on body language a long time ago. It taught me a few thngs, honestly. Like, if a girl keeps touching you, she may well like you. I thought of it again today. The book, and forgive me, I'm going from memory here, the book has an anecdotal experiment, where the author describes systemattcally moving objects on a dinner table slightly closer to his companion, until all the items on the table head crept a couple inches towars the companion. The companion, unconciously, began replacing the objext, objecting to the crowding.

Well, my neighbor keeps parking his car ever closer and closer to mine. I feel crowded. I feel insane for caring.

A lesson was learned this week by a young man in Seattle. It wasn't me, but I was a facilitator of this lesson. I won't go into details, which anyone who knows the context will sypathise with, but the lesson is this: if you run into a friend of yours while he's on a date, ALWAYS assume the girl doesn't know anything about the career in porn. It's the safe bet.

Today I was interviewed by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and I received an email virus from Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels. I have truly arrived.

From today's TVGuide.com:

Fox has wrapped production on a new dating show that revolves around a 4-foot-5 single guy looking for love from a pool of 12 little women. Titled The Littlest Groom, the two-episode series will feature all of the typical reality trappings, including group dates, hot tub parties and — of course — a twist. At one point, the pint-sized bachelor will have to choose between dating women his own size or women of average height.

Lately I've become engrossed in the obsessive pleasure that is computer solitaire. The other day, while playing, something happened I'll admit I've waited a long time for: I couldn't do anything. The cards were dealt, and I scrolled through the entire deck, and there was not a single card I could play. I always wondered if ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������

And by the way, I've always wanted me make a crack about Fermat's Last Theorum. Another check off the list.

This isn't news or anything, but I often find myself reflecting on it. As bad as movies are, one can only imagine how much worse they would be if some studio executive were browsing on the internet, read something like

I know this is a fanboy's wet dream, but Ocean's Eleven is a heist picture and... how freaking cool would it be if Soderbergh let Luke and Owen Wilson play their characters from Bottle Rocket?! Can you imagine? Dignan robs Las Vegas!! Sigh... one can always dream...

and decided that yes, that would indeed be what the fans want. God help us if the internet starts influencing filmmaking. The horror...

WHY NEW YEAR'S EVE IS WORST NIGHT OF YEAR Dec 31 2003

By Christopher Hitchens

LORD Chesterfield once wrote to his son and said that he had himself broken entirely with New-Year custom and practice and "retired to bed early, sober and alone".

It's not the sort of thing that a chap likes to admit.

At the Hitchens household, as a general rule, or anywhere that household or its members may be travelling, guests and companions are beseeched or even enjoined to ply the corkscrew to that next bottle, pluck another Havana from the humidor, throw down one last careless truffle, postpone that dull "working breakfast" and in general to call back the cab firm and cancel.

The night is young and the newspapers haven't been delivered yet.

But tonight the phone will be off the hook and the evening air will be rent by nothing more than a well-mannered snore. The bottles will be ranged in strict military order as usual, but the corkscrew will lie blamelessly in its drawer.

The cleaning lady will not be greeting the dawn of the New Year with her customary squeal of shock, even of disapproval. Why should this be? I was walking home one fine recent evening with my own first-born and suggested to him that we might break the journey in a favoured bar of mine.

But what was I thinking? Even before we got to the door, I could see through the window that every stool bore a grisly burden: a festive customer with a wobbly smile and a pack of colleagues around him. Paper money was being waved to attract the attention of the over-worked staff.

Young women were ordering things with cream and umbrellas in them.

There could be no doubt of it, some annual office party or after-work spree was in progress. We trudged home wordlessly and threw some thick and bloody steaks on the grill. Once there, I could exert manly control over the pace and choice of drinks, viands, guests and ashtrays without being jostled or slammed on the back in false bonhomie.

Had we stayed out and made it to closing time, we would have endured the zoo only to find puke-flecked pavements, morose and lachrymose customers wondering why they hadn't had such a good time.

You can get this combination of boredom and horror practically every night between pre-Christmas week and New Year's Eve, but the Eve itself is the worst, not to say the limit.

The Christmas decorations are usually still up, so whether in a place of public resort or at a private home you are confronted with kitsch: reindeer horns and maudlin cards and scratchy, tinselly trees getting in the way.

The atmosphere of false gaiety is enough in itself to get the revolver rattling against your teeth, but then the most over-rated ritual of the year kicks in and you may be seized by a stranger and asked to count backwards en masse. Big deal.

They even make it hard to stick at home and vegetate in front of the box. Having already endured things like the sovereign's Xmas message to the Commonwealth, we are given by our media masters things like the Pope's New Year address or a round-up of preparations for equally silly celebrations across 15 time zones.

It's one of those occasions, like a World Cup or a royal wedding, when it is assumed on all sides that you, too, want to be part of the fun. At any rate, you are counted in whether you fancy it or not. You may even be accosted and asked to tell people what your resolutions for the coming year may be.

My answer is the same as usual. I resolve to lie low, de-carbonise the liver, recharge the batteries, save the money, catch up on the slumber and begin 2004 with a head start on the sorry figures who didn't have as good a time as they had expected on the night before.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair

TONIGHT'S TALE OF WOE...

380,000 people will be homeless with around 500 sleeping rough.

33 % of clubbers will take a dangerous cocktail of booze and drugs18,000 people will ring the Samaritans ..a rise of 10 %£128.90 spent by the average Brit who goes out.

66 % of revellers will reach hazardous booze levels.

300% more domestic violence calls to police70%more people will call an ambulance.

100% more people drink and drive.

Well, mankind has finally managed to land a probe on Mars, and it's a boring, sucky place. Now that's been cleared up, why don't we go someplace cool like Venus, which has volcanos and a corrosive atmosphere?

I received my comission from Gary Panter the other day. It is awesome.



"Use Once & Destroy"

"You provide one-to-three words and the artist will free associate thereupon." Go to his shop for more.

When, oh when, Oh Lord, when will the waiting end? When will Al Quada stop teasing and attack Seattle, as they are so obviously planning to do?

I'd wish everyone a happy new year, but since half of America is going to be exterminated by Al Queda at midnight on the dot Eastern time, there isn't much point. I should clarify, not the better half.

I saw Return of the King again last week. To my undying shame, I actually understood a couple words spoken in Elvish.

ORANGE CHRISTMAS REFLECTIONS

It's sort of hard to ignore the war on terror when you're at ground zero. I've been wondering one thing, though. If this raise in alet was caused by intelligence chatter, the likes of which we haven't seen since before the September 11, 2001 attacks, doesn't that mean the government is in fact acknowledging those attacks were predictable, anticipated, and could have been prevented? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Some last-minute shopping to do? Not getting jack shot from your so-called loved ones? Well, if you're into fine art, Gary Panter has a deal for you. His originals go for thousands in galleries, but right now he's selling 6" by 8" originals, "You provide one-to-three words and the artist will free associate thereupon." Go to his shop for more. I'm getting one. "Use Once & Destroy," of course.

I'M DREAMING OF AN ORANGE CHRISTMAS
I landed at Dulles airport yesterday. Apparently while I was in the air, the feds raised the terror alert level to Orange. Coincidence? I think not. But I made getaway before the so-called security even knew I was there. So long, suckers!

AND SO, A NUMBER OF HALF-ASSED THOUGHTS ON LORD OF THE RINGS...

Getting progressivly more half-assed, as it slowly dawns on me that I'm on vacation.

I AM A COLOSSAL GEEK

Okay, so I went and saw Return of the King on the nerd shift. Midnight, last Friday night. It finished four days later, and by the end, only 28 of a 400-plus member audience survived, the rest having succumbed to dehydration, toxic shock, despair and the cannabalistic depradations of stronger and more determined survivors, such as myself.

This movie has been praised all over as the movie of the year. My thoughts, more or less at random:

Of the more than 130 films about killer spiders, I believe this is the first that was actually any good at all, let only contained a believable -- and to be honest, fucking horrifying -- giant spider. Holy fuck. What an unbelievably tense scene. And it had a bigger than fuck spider. The one thing missing was the personality with which Tolkien imbued Shelob. I would have loved to see some subtitles as the thing menaced the midgets.



I couldn't believe the wholesale slaughter of elephants. Ivory must be at a premium in Middle Earth. Even my friend, a refined and compassionate woman, cheered when the pretty elf downed Babar. Was I the only one who felt any sympathy for those poor beautifuls beasts?

It was nice to see the Nazgul actually do something for a change. I guess that it was true to the books that their big show was to make the characters talk about how much other people feared them, but it was nice to actually see them cut loose and do rad shit like pick people up and throw them, and bash the fuck out of the Enemy. Um, I mean, the heroes. To be fair, their rides did all the work, and the minute one actually got down and started mixing it up, a girl shoved a sword through his face. But after two movies where all the the Ringwraiths did was scream like women and stab midgets. Fuck, if Sauron had me working for him, you can bet I would have done more than dress like a Dickensian stereotype and shreik nonsensically against the vertically challenged.



I thought it was pretty badass when Eowyn wasted the Witch King, even though the drama and momentum was damaged when the movie cut away to something I don't remember. That was disappointing.



Also disappointing was Aragon's public display of affection with Arwen. I could see him going for the Arwen of the books. God help me, I even realized that in my time, I've subconciously praised luminous brunettes by comparing them to her. I'm not sure that last sentence is going to survive into the next draft. But in these films, we're expected to believe anyone would choose a chubby, pontificating Liv Tyler over the welcoming and vivacious Miranda Otto? Fuck that. Sure, Arwen is an older woman, one who has presumeably laerned more in her thousand years of life than how to speak like priss. But she's also his fucking cousin, and now that I think of it, she never actually kills somebody, and her big action set piece involved running away from the Ringwraiths and then luring the morons into a river, which accomplishes the amazing feat of them coming back in the next movie, on even cooler rides than before. Yeah, Arwen, she's a real fucking catch.

I hope in the extended version, we get to see Faramir acheiving what is to my mind, the greatest triumph of the trilogy, which is to say he gets to marry Eowyn, the woman who is by far the best of the three women who live in Middle Earth, actually, does get to marry one of those three women (does extinction awaits man?), and best of all, gets to retain his top-ranking hereditary title with a thousand years of history and lineage behind it, while being only slightly demoted, presumeably to grow fat on the fruits of a life funded by the public while doing nothing for the rest of his days.

Can a man die with dignity when he is running around, encased in flamed, screaming insanely?

I was really rooting for Gollum, whose evil plan to sow discord among the Hobbits was straight out of Beverly Hills 90210.

One of the eighteen endings of Return of the King was awesome, as in what has to be the prettiest homoerotic reunion in all of fantasy, Frodo is joined on his bed by each survivor of the Fellowship in turn, each looking more beatiful, and hair breezing in slower motion than the last. It has to be seen to believed. Gimli opens his arms expectedly, like a mother welcoming his bitch back to maximum. And then fucking Legolas walks in wearing a headband. And finally Aragorn walks in wearing a white towel.

Gandalf whirling around with a stick and a sword was pretty cool, too, although I must have skipped the twenty pages that must have been devoted to it in the books. Perhaps they were in song. But it was badass on screen, making me wonder, how come we don't see that sword and staff two-handed combo more often?

Sloth from Goonies was the leader of the evil troops for the first battle. For a while, I dismissed this bloodless bureaucrat of an orc, but then, when he casually stepped out of the way of a house-sized boulder catapulted to his position, I gained a bit of respect for him. The he promptly went back to spitting over-disciplinary, even astrategic orders, and I again concluded that I was a better villain than him.

It's interesting how the institutionalized extended editions have shaped, and damaged Jackson's work on this series. Those seem like the real movies, and the theatrical versions come off like an edit of its eventual extended cut. Jackson was screwed by his reliance on these extended editions, completely dropping Sauruman from the final film, leaving a what the fuck happened to the heavy of the last two films vibe hanging over the third. Much of Return of the King comes off like the third act of David Lynch's Dune, where the story just started being summarized rather than completely told.

Speaking of Lynch, I thought of him when Gandalf rides up the sevel levels of Minas Tirith. And he was dramatically shown riding up one level, then a second, then a third, I realized, Christ, they were going to show him ride all the way up. Man.

Okay, I give up.

In conclusion: Miranda Otto!

As much as the Lord of the Rings, both films and books, deserve serious public mockery, I'm still such a geek for the shit I can feel my virginity growing back when I re-watch the trailers. Peter Jackson got these films right. The imagery in the films was exactly as I imagined when I read the books, and when it wasn't, it was better.

I disliked the constant denobling of the characters and their motivations. The books contain a sense of destiny, of great times coming to pass, and the characters accept their role in these times and seek to claim the destiny as their own. I liked how Aragorn determidy did his duty. I liked how debate was futile, how the choices were between action and destruction. I liked how Faramir and the Ents had convictions, and stayed true to them. I liked how the Hobbits accepted their quest, and entered it full-knowing the dangers and consequences. That was lost in these films, I'm afraid, as most of the characters joined the quest by accident.

Because Jackson has created a billion dollar blockbuster series, his real acheivement has been obscured. An independent, talented filmmaker, one even whose zombie movies betray a PBS or Merchant-Ivory tone of character, a man whose first two films had puppets, managed to create a massive, principled epic on his own terms. Though computers paid a large role, they were used to complement a filmmaking style that coould have been utilized a hundred years ago, where foreshortening and trick photography create a solidity the pixel villains in other films lack. And Jackson has created an epic of imagination. I realized half-way through Return of the King that I was craning my neck, trying to see what was lurking just off screen. What Jackson has acheived in these films is good for all the little guys, not in the least low-budget filmmakers.

I think Jackson's saving grace is because, as William Blake said of John Milton, he is of the Devil's party. His fascination with the grotesque and his warped sense of humor helped create a dedication to detail on the enemies less twisted filmmakers would have shorted. There's a clear line from the zombie baby in Dead Alive to the orcs in Lord of the Rings.

Sometimes it seemed like his attention worked against him. Listening to the commentaries on the dvds, it's clear he didn't want to introduce any characters he couldn't develop the way he felt they deserved, so there aren't any obvious red shirts marched out for cannon fodder. A lot of peripheral characters were eliminated from the trilogy. But the side characters add a sense of depth, of a word spilling off the borders of the screen, even if they just showed up, got a name check, and were run through.

And props for casting Christopher Lee. I think it's cool that as Lee is pushing 90, he's played the heavy in two epic trilogies, if one wants to include Star Wars. Man, that fucker is cool.

People are going to miss these films. Before the movie started, in the line for the bathroom a couple morons were sadly reading the poster, saying, "I can't believe the journey is ending."

I've disliked the propoganda misuse of the Lord of the Rings films in the War on Terror. I've been so corrupted by opinions and editorials that I honestly cannot discerne if Peter Jackson has intentially layered the films with this subtext, or if I only see it because others claim to.

Andrew Sullivan, for example, has made a number of outlandish comparisons, from comparing Bush to Frodo when the first movie came out, to the "Men of the West" cheer that goes up at the final battle on Return of the King being an appropriate rallying cry for the war. I don't undertsand the self-pity emenating from the most powerful nation in the world identifying itself with ludicrously outnumbered film characters.

Do neocons really look at the impoverished terrorists in the middle east and see an overpowering, outnumbering superior enemy force? I suppose only a country as massive, strong and reckless as ours can feel like such a self-pitying underdog.

One argument I've had with friends is about the current state of American freedom. I've heard sensible people argue that America is no better than the Taliban. No, I would say, a country that only cirumcises men is at least that much better than the Taliban. We're not living under a fascist regime.

But the Iraqis are. We've established a bona fide military dictatorship on the far side of the world.

Vacation. Fuck yeah.

Regarding www.justinsimmons.com...

I have some stories about the guy, back when I knew him as a dangerous psychopath using the name "Reverend Victor Rehcana." I'll get to those at some point, when I have the time and the stomach to wade through that sewar again. In the meantime, it is entertaining to fantasize about the careers that will be damaged or ended for those foolish enough to have been photographed with the man.

Your Michael Jackson Snideness of the Day

Well, no suprise that the King of Pop has been charged with drugging and molesting children. It is only my appreciation for his fine album Off the Wall and my sypathy for his childhood friendship with a rat that prompts me to give him this free advice: Keep your fucking family away from the media.

In this story, Jackie and Jermaine Jackson leap to their eccentric brother's defense, with approbation like, "My mom told him this a long time ago … said, 'One day they're going to pin something on Michael. Something that he loved the most is children. They're going to use that against him.' "

Thanks, guys. I predict that soon, very soon, LaToya will come forward and sell Michael out.

My friend Jaydawg recently discovered some disturbing information about her boyfriend trolling in some young and Hasidic waters. How does a modern girl respond? Profiteering.

A beautiful dose of reality from David Frum at National Review: Dean’s combination of weakness in foreign policy, ultra-permissiveness in social policy, and stinginess in fiscal policy isn’t “centrism”: It’s the politics of the dinner parties of Brentwood and East Hampton, of people who read Vanity Fair and don't need an SUV because their grocer delivers.

I couldn't give a fuck about Dean, but I'm amused by the concept that someone who owns a $40,000 car is part of the suffering poor. Is this class warfare, pitting the top two and three percent againt the top percentage of income earners?

It's 12:46 am, Pacific Standard Time, and I'm at work. I wish death on everyone.

Right after the end of Arrested Development on Fox, there was a PSA encouraging abused women to escape from their situation. I didn't catch the name of the production organization. It occured to me. I assume advertising isn't cheap, so advertisers are going to choose their time carefully, to make sure it reaches its target audience, right? So, was I watching a show that statically appealed to, and thus had a reachable target audience of abused women? God, I wonder if some of the other advertisers pursue that demographic as well.

I missed the big story earlier this week. My Monday at 12:16 pm entry, featuring a mongoloid embracing a cocoon, was taken from the website of Creative Growth Arts Center, who provide creative art programs, educational and independent living training, counseling and vocational opportunities for adults who are physically, mentally and emotionally disabled.

I was browsing through the web site, and found these paintings by Terri Bowden:





I'm a little nervous about Michael Jackson popping up in scarifying artwork by mentally disabled artists. I wonder if it's a cultural phenomena, or is the King of Pop meeting these outsider artists? BTW, these painting are titled, "The Bad Thing That Happened Part 1," "The Bad Thing That Happened Part 2" and "The Bad Thing That Happened Part 3."

I think this needs to be investigated.

My Rissman was delivered today. I completely underestimated its 46" by 61" dimensions, thinking it displayed wide, rather than tall. It is tall. Very tall. I don't know where I'm going to put it. Luckily, December is a good month for re-arranging my apartment. I should throw a party in January to show off the new floor plan and artwork.

Once again:


Spiraling Galaxy

By the way, Dorothy's husband Benton Peugh is also a talented artist, and art installer.

Department of the inconsequential

Today I caught the tail end of Moonraker on the absurdly named Spike TV.

I assume Moonraker is considered one of the worst James Bond movies, clearly attempting to milk the success of Star Wars (which was released two years before) with a science fiction story.

While not as unworkable a concept as it sounds (I only say this because of a great sequence in the Secret Agent Corrigan comic strip by Al Williamson and Archie Goodwin, which saw the titular spy traveling to outer space), but Moonraker fucks it up grandy, combining then state of the art space shuttles with laser beams, and a truly preposterous insane plan by the villain.

Anyway, it's a very bizzare film. I was moved to write this because of one scene I caught, in which Walter Gotell, playing a recurring semi-villian, Soviet General Anatol Gogol, presumeably a bigwig in Russian intelligence, is being briefed on the situation by either the Americans or the British. After he rants about holding the West responsible for whatever consequences result from the evil plan, the Western representative apologises for waking the General up. The general says it's okay, he was having trouble sleeping anyway.

It struck me as strange.

Today would have been Charles Schulz' 81st birthday. In commemoration, and in the spirit of self-promotion, here are two pieces I wrote on Peanuts, in the years bookending the end of Peanuts, and Schulz’ death.

I wrote this piece for my column in Iconoclast. I wrote it, and Schulz died the day after I submitted it. The editor asked me if I wanted to revise it in light of schulz' demise, and I declined. I did write an intro, which basically acknowledged Schulz' passing, and noted that Peanuts was my first exposure to the words "sarcasm" and "theology," but that wasn't included in the publication.

++++

After fifty years a lot of people I know just wanted Peanuts to go away, and this year they got their wish. It’s impossible to read Peanuts: A Golden Celebration without mournfully reflecting on Schulz’ recent retirement. A problem with syndication and cultural ubiquity is being taken for granted, which is certainly what happened to Peanuts. That’s why it’s good to have a book like this, to remind how good and how special Schulz’ achievements have been. The tone for the strip is captured in the Sunday strip on the book’s last page, where Snoopy goes to windows barking, only to be rebuffed each time. He retires to the roof of his doghouse, reflecting, “You try to warn them that the world has gone mad, but they won’t listen…” A punch line that’s rueful, and sad, and funny and unfunny all at once.

This strange, sad, melancholy strip is at its heart about facing failure, with the emphasis on facing, not the failure, and that’s why the strangely adult characters are not losers. Sure, Lucy continually violated Charlie Brown’s trust by yanking out the football, but his rationalizations, year after year, are a powerful testament to the vagaries of faith. Or the choice of baseball, as the neighborhood team lost games by insane margins. Baseball in itself is a brilliant choice, as no other team sport offers the opportunity for most of the on-field players to watch in impotent despair as their opponents repeatedly hit the ball out of the park, or straight through Charlie Brown, knocking off all his clothes. But there’s an integrity in continually stepping up to face futility, and Schulz is aware of that. “A real loser,” Schulz writes in one of the many illuminating sidebars, “would stop trying.” I know I’m getting sappy here.

The strips in this book are well chosen, with even the crappy strips becoming worthwhile in the context of the whole. After Schulz hit his stride in the Sixties, the strip lapsed into a two-decade decline featuring innumerable repeated punch lines, Snoopy relatives, and witless encounters with the cat next door. But there was good even in the worst of times, and sub-standard Peanuts was, on the whole, better than just about everything on the comics page.. Luckily, that led to the Nineties. One fan has suggested facing mortality has pushed Schulz to his best work in years. For such an honest, melancholy strip, that’s a natural.

In its last years, we get to see the strip slip out of its formula. Sure, Charlie Brown never did kick his football, but he did kiss a girl, and he won a baseball game. Even Lucy, a Jungian Bitch archetype if there ever was one, developed an almost maternal attitude toward her youngest brother Rerun. Insights like that, as long as Schulz’ surprisingly insightful and self-deprecating commentary, make this A Golden Celebration well worth enjoying. If you think you hate Peanuts, think again.

I wrote this for The Comics Journal's year-end issue in 2001. It never ran, presumeably due to an editorial shake-up. But I did get a kill fee, so maybe the piece isn't totally worthless. There are a few errors, but I'm not going to bother correcting them.

It was originally about Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz, but the outgoing editor asked me to expand it considerably to include Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits, as well as two other books, which, considering what happened to the piece, I'm glad I was never able to track down. ">The Art of Charles M. Schulz was just released in paperback, with 32 new pages.

++++

Pantheon’s new book Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz, is absolutely beautiful and needs to be purchased by every student of comic art in general and every fan of Peanuts in particular. This book is amazing in many, many ways. Some wags on the Internet have been predicting an inevitable Chip Kidd backlash after the recent Jack Cole opus, but it won’t come from this book, which manages an almost perfect meeting of both the material and the aesthetic.

The inside cover sports a sketch and autograph by Schultz that almost looks hand-inscribed. From there, we see marvels including a photo of Schulz’s drawing tools (although preserved exactly as he left them when he stopped drawing, which is sort of creepy), a high school yearbook page starring a ridiculously young-looking Charles Schulz (underneath a girl named Schroeder) and sketchbook pages dating from his stint in the army (which reveal a surprisingly white and crisp style). From there, we move on to the true meat of the book: reproduction of the strips from original art and ancient newspaper clippings, astonishing for their fidelity.

Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz elegantly conveys the experiences of looking at different presentations of the strip. Because the newspaper strips, the original art and the sketchbook drawings were photographed in situ rather than digitally scanned and restored, the reader experiences the works represented on the page as similarly as possible to the experience of seeing them in the original.

The amount of care and fidelity that went into the reproductions is amazing, bringing to mind the disclaimer that appears on compact discs, which warns, “… high resolution also reveals limitations in the master… including noise and other distortions.”

Those distortions, which in this case include dirt, smudges, creases, fingerprints and coffee stains, are part of what makes this book so poignant and so real. It would be a real pleasure and privileges to have the opportunity to page through Sparky’s sketchbooks, to touch his original art and sit in his workspace and eavesdrop as he created. Chip Kidd practically has had that, and has given us the next best thing: a book that replicates the experience.

The strips are not reprinted from the original art are reproduced from vintage strips clipped, mounted and preserved, and photographed as is for this book. It’s just like looking that original collection!

Not having seen any of Schulz’s original art, I’ll have to take it on faith that seeing the strips printed from the originals is JUST LIKE SEEING THE ORIGINALS THEMSELVES. Even if that isn’t the case, there’s a nice tactile pleasure to being able to see the edges from the paste-overs, or the brushstrokes in the blacks.

There’s more to the book than the propeller-head thrill of design and faithful reproduction, though. More than half of the strips date from the Fifties, many being reprinted for the first time. Much of what made Peanuts great in there in embryo. That should itself be a hell of an encouragement, to see these seminal pieces, in which Snoopy walked on four legs, Lucy was a baby and Charlie Brown was a spunky wise-ass. Even then, however, there is still a strip from 1951 about how no one likes him, which isn’t even remotely funny. Shades of the future. And it’s refreshing to see that even a genius like Schulz plagiarized himself within the first few years of the strip. Once Schulz hit his stride, take him decades to swipe wholesale from his best ideas again.

Hopefully, this book’s success will give the keepers of the flame reason to believe the public might indeed be ready and appreciative of the early Peanuts, and give some impetus to an orderly, complete reprinting of the greatest comic strip of the second half of the twentieth century.

To step down for a moment from foaming-at-the-mouth praise, Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz certainly has its flaws. Chip Kidd’s commentary has the air of an informed if hardly expert writer composing from memory, and so, mistakes are made. The biggest error I noticed (I suppose it was the biggest precisely because I did notice) was Kidd’s statement that Schulz wanted Peanuts to be titled Good Ol’ Charlie Brown. In fact, Schulz always preferred the title Li’l Folks. The mistake is particularly nonsensical when one considers the prominence other characters have always had in Peanuts. Also, if I know that, Kidd certainly should have.

More disturbing is much of what Kidd includes as "art" in addition to the strips. Admittedly, it is difficult to evaluate Peanuts overall without acknowledging the massive amount of merchandizing, shilling and selling out that have been part of the Peanuts experience from almost the beginning. But to title a book The Art of Charles M. Schulz is to call attention to the art, first and foremost, and it is hard to see tacky figurines of the more popular characters with spring-set bobbing heads as being "art" in even the broadest, most philistine sense.

The selection and ordering of strips itself has its ups and down. Kidd has arranged the strips in his own idiosyncratic order, roughly chronological in the sense that the early ones are near the beginning and the later ones are near the end, and focusing on the strips as art rather than continuity, which suits the purpose of the book. I suppose leaving this reader wanting more isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it still left this reader wanting more. But with something like 15,000 strips to choose from, it was unavoidable.

That said, I was driven nuts by Kidd’s habit of quoting from strips not reproduced. Anyone who has tried to describe a comic to someone inevitably fails to it justice, and Kidd shouldn’t have tried to do it here. Even that is understandable: there are few strips more quotable than Peanuts. And the strips he quoted might not have been what he was looking for visually. But still, annoying.

That’s just gripes, though.

It is understandable and forgivable in that this is not a work of scholarship. Much like Viking Press’ recent Jorge Luis Borges series, this is a work of appreciation and discovery. The aim is taking joy in exploring long out of print strips, and reveling in the gorgeous reproduction. There are no claims of definiteness or comprehensiveness.

I refer the reader to the foaming-at-the-mouth praise in the first two-thirds of this review, or better yet, to the book itself. The pleasure outweighs the pain by far. The reproduction. The sense of both discovery, and re-discovery. And the strips themselves. There is even a sketch of the little red haired girl.

In an unimaginative segue, this brings us more or less to Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits.

Many of the annoyances in the Peanuts book are present in Jack Cole and Plastic Man. So are many of its strengths, but in this case, they come close to sinking the whole thing.

The book contains multiple pleasures. Art Spiegelman’s New Yorker essay on Cole from 1999 is reprinted, five complete comic book reprints, including four Plastic Man stories, one featuring a solo Woozie Winks, his famous “injury to the eye” story “Murder, Morphine and Me,” and selection of his panel cartooning in Playboy. Strangely, even though Spiegelman points to Betsy and Me as the skeleton key to Cole’s suicide, only a few strips are reprinted. The rest of the book is filled with clippings, collaged and expanded and enlarged.

While this approach worked for Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz, it fails here. One reason for its success in the Schulz book is by virtue of the source material: a clipping of a four panel daily strip can easily contain the whole strip; a clipping of a comic book page will be necessity separate the panels from the others with which it was juxtaposed.

As a result, the focus here is much more on Kidd’s design. Which is too bad. The best way to enjoy comic art is in its context, and we have so little of that here. Continuity and page design are sacrificed in order to call attention to the caricature, grotesques and distortions Cole often committed to the comic book page, as if he were Basil Wolverton.

The story reprints are presented on browned and yellowed paper, the better, apparently, to capture that old feeling of reading the musty originals. There has never been any virtue to the crappy paper, off-register color and shrill melodrama, and Kidd does a disservice to the art form by trying to claim that is so. It is ridiculous to present the cheap ten-cent comics of a half-century ago as art objects, and if the stories themselves are to be viewed as art, they need to hold up on their own. If Cole’s stories, or anyone’s, of interest only as nostalgia, then they are of no interest at all.

The difference, at least between the Cole book and Schulz book, may be the difference between art in general and comic books in general. The overall effect of Kidd’s design of the Peanuts book is personalization. For something as personal and sentimental as Peanuts, a strip that is and has always been a part of the lives of just about everyone on the planet, this is an important thing, and feels like a gift. Peanuts justifies itself though its own depth and quality.

For better or for worse, Jack Cole’s lesser-known work is better served by being evaluated on its own terms, uncluttered by another’s visual verbiage. And it isn’t here. As a result, Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits is not so much a book on or about Jack Cole as it is a book inspired by Jack Cole. Luckily, Cole’s work is strong enough to lend itself to such translation, although the originals are better.

One element in Kidd’s design sense that has been flawless has been his endings. The closing pages of Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz brings a tear to the eye, and at a crucial point, Forms Stretched to Their Limits provokes a similar reaction.

The reprinted Spiegelman essay is excellent, one of the best prose pieces he has ever written. The piece is informative and engaging, telling the story of Cole’s life, explaining the importance of his work, and illuminating the historical context in which it first appeared. At the end of his essay, near the end of the book, Spiegelman notes, “As he climbed his ladder of success, up from the primal mulch of the comic books, he finally arrived at air that was too thin to breather: Jack Cole, a comics genius, died of growing up,” which Kidd follows with eighteen pages of blown up images clipped from Silver Streak Comics, Plastic Man, CRIME Does Not Pay and other comics, as well as Playboy, and Cole’s own obituary. Spiegelman’s word’s provide, in the end, touching lyrics bridging to an imagistic coda derived from the many themes discernable in Cole’s work. It’s heartbreaking.

For a moment, I briefly considered announcing a permanent moratorium on Michael Jackson comments. But then I realized, I got nothing else. So, at least until I see Bad Santa, it'll most likely be the King of Pop, or nothing. I'm warning you.

According to Jim Treacher, this article about Michael Jackson has "broken the record for Most Prison-Rape References Per Paragraph of anything published under the Microsoft banner."

There just doesn't seem to be anywhere to go beyond Michael Jackson.

I know I implied I didn't want to comment on the subject, but I heard a theory about Michael Jackson that bears repeating: when he commits suicide, or dies, or whatever, his face will tranform back into the handsome black man he used to be.

Okay, you've all heard about that Jessica Lynch sex tap making the rounds. Well, you can download it here.

I'm really sick. All this weak. Bleh.

So, I recently competed another art purchase. From my former assistant, Dorothy Rissman, who was clearly destined for greater things than having me throw hot coffee at her. She's really good.



Spiraling Galaxy

Saving me the trouble of both writing about this particular subject, and writing period while I'm sick and dying, here is a guest blog, from my old enemy Jason Probst:



JACKO THE PRIEST

Who knows if Michael Jackson will be exonerated after the police raided his ranch this week and announced they will press child molestation charges against him. Given the money and civil settlement that allowed him to buy off his last complainant in 1993, it’s hard to see him going to jail in this country. He has everything going for him. It’s not like he’s some street junkie getting a public defender. He’s not poor. And he hasn’t been black for several years. If anything, the sympathy factor in favor could be critical.

But the fact that he continued to welcome kids into his bed during regular sleepovers, after that same practice got him into such hot water a decade earlier, you wonder if the guy shouldn’t have just gone into the priesthood.

He loves being alone with kids, garish outfits, and imaginary worlds (dig the “Neverland” references where the alleged incidences occurred). Ditto for priests. They could’ve just transferred him to another parish in that case instead of letting the police get involved.

This shouldn’t be interpreted as some hateful screed about Jackson – he’s probably not going to go to jail, despite the fact that laws have changed since 1993 and the DA’s office, and not alleged victims of child molests, decide whether or not to press charges. High priced lawyers are like high jumpers – they look at how high the bar is, and know immediately if they can get over it or fail in doing so. Jackson will get the best, the kind of people who could get John Wilkes Booth off for shooting Lincoln with a jury of freed slaves.

But just imagine, for a second, that he DID go to prison. What strange things will unfold!

First off, he’s going to be fucked up in the ass, and he’ll be turned into the kind of cock gobbler that would make Rocco Siffredi blush. Sure, he’s got money, but tell that to a guy doing a life sentence seeing that sweet ass sashaying into the shower. It’s almost like fucking a white chick. You can’t buy your way out of that.

Status is accorded in prison to those who take the best-looking inmates into their possession as their bitches. Therefore, the battle over ownership of the world’s most “Dangerous” tush is likely to be fought between very tough people vying for a prize that’s unlike any they’ll ever see again.

In prison, turning Jacko into your bitch is as meaningful as scoring the winning touchdown in the homecoming game, and then running amok down Main Street with a pair of panties aloft after you break the head cheerleader’s cherry.

Prison culture is pretty basic and unvarying, and in Jackson’s case, he fails the first two tests. He’s not very physically intimidating, so he’s likely to get confronted, or “pushed up on” (more on that later), and two, his jail rep as a convicted child molester is the absolute lowest on the social scale for inmates. Confidence men, swindlers, and scam artists are generally regarded as the professional class of criminals, followed by typical violence practicioners like murders, along with common stick up artists. But being a child molester in prison is not cool. It’s like bringing ham to a friend’s briss.

Prisoners 1, Jackson 0.

Secondly, inmates are generally “pushed up on” by inmates of their own race first, as a sort of self-governing dynamic. Black newcomers being solicited for sex or targeted for bullying are generally approached for these by fellow black inmates – the same goes for Hispanic inmates, and to a lesser degree, white ones. The problem lies in classifying Jackson’s racial status.

Black prisoners are generally allowed much more leeway in violating white prisoners than vice-versa, so they might, under prison rules, be allowed to classify him as “white” for terms of leasing him out. It is generally considered bad form to allow white inmates to screw black ones, as it’s a regrettable metaphor for life on the outside – but Jackson’s disappearing pigment and Caucasoid transformation in recent years may result in black inmates shunning him, and therefore increasing the amount of people who will be leased out to. Typically this means a carton of cigarettes, or possibly two considering Jackson’s unique collector’s value. There could, in fact, be a menu of options available for additional price increases, such as making him sing during coitus, or don his famous Glove en route to giving a whimpering handjob in a darkened, roof-a-dripping maintenance shack.

Prisoner 2, Jackson 0.

All said and done, Jackson is facing a tough situation – his unwillingness to even molest children of his own race shows his self-hatred, too. These things won’t be good for him should justice, in its curious forms, decree him a guest of the state. It will be rough justice for man who has alternately billed himself as a “Thriller,” “Bad,” “Dangerous,” and “Invincible,” but will belatedly find out who the real bad guys are.

So, what does everybody want for Christmas?

They're actually encouraging single straight couples to live together and form long-term relationships, with the benefits and social acceptance of marriage? Isn't that even weirder than gay relationships? It's like permananent roommate-hood. People like me who like living alone will be the ones discriminated against.

www.andrewsullivan.com

THEY'RE CHANGING THE AMENDMENT: For some reason, Ramesh Ponnuru's full account of the morass of the proposed "Federal Marriage Amendment" isn't online yet. It's in the coming issue of National Review. I've read it several times now and even someone like me who has studied this in some depth finds it hard going at times. (That's not Ramesh's fault. It's the amendment's.) The bottom line is that my and others' criticisms of the proposed amendment - that it would go further than banning gay marriage and would deny gay citizens any benefits whatever - seem to have struck home. The far right knows that its attempt to disenfranchise gay citizens for ever and to trample states' rights in the process is an extremist non-starter. So this is what they have apparently done. They've added a third clause to the FMA. Here's how Ramesh describes the new far right consensus:

It fell to Chuck Colson, the leader of Prison Fellowship and perhaps the most unifying figure among social conservatives today, to find a solution. On October 15, he succeeded in getting more than 20 groups to come up with a common position. They agreed that the amendment would prohibit gay marriage. It would also prohibit the states and the federal government, including both the courts and the legislatures, from providing any benefits to people that were contingent on their being involved in a sexual relationship outside of marriage. The amendment would, however, allow state legislators to extend the particular privileges of marriage to gay couples -- just not as gay couples. People not in gay relationships would also have to be eligible.

Re-read the penultimate sentence: "The amendment would, however, allow state legislators to extend the particular privileges of marriage to gay couples -- just not as gay couples." Huh? I think this means that the social right is now offering semi-marital benefits to anyone - gay or straight - so long as they're celibate in the relationship or pretend they're straight or act as if they're as intimate as most law partners. I don't know how any sane person could conclude that this isn't ridiculous. How could the government tell who's celibate and who's not, or who's gay and who's straight, or who's doing unmentionable things in their own bedrooms? Is a gay couple supposed to put on some act like they're bachelor buddies in some 1950s movie and the minute they're "presumed" gay, all their rights disappear? Or are we going to have federal videocams in the bedroom?Beats me. And this exquisite piece of precious social maneuvring belongs in the Constitution! So once you've trashed states' rights, deconstructed marriage and alienated gays and their families, what else does the religious right want to accomplish? Except give everyone else in the country a long, hard burst of the giggles?

THE RIGHT VERSUS MARRIAGE: Ramesh elaborates:
Whether the amendment agreed upon by the groups at Colson's meeting would ban "civil unions," then, is not a yes-no question. It would allow civil unions so long as eligibility for them is not based, even in part, on the fact, supposition, or presumption that the people involved are having sex. The amendment would thus make it theoretically possible for gay couples -- and cohabiting straight couples -- to have any of the benefits of marriage, except for governmental recognition of their relationships as equivalent to those of married people.

Huh? This is dizzyingly confusing. And the way in which it empowers government to arbiter the minutiae of people's sex lives should be abhorrent to anyone to the left of the Taliban. What's more, it's a far more direct attack on marriage than anything that has yet been invented by the social right's opponents. The real problem with civil unions or domestic partnerships is that they provide an easy way-station for straight couples other than marriage. They don't demand the same kind of responsibility and commitment that marriage entails, and thus they weaken the important role of marriage in contributing to social stability. That's why I've long proposed cutting through the entire domestic partnership racket (I'd happily abolish all of it) and including gays in marriage, period - as the most conservative measure available. It still is. But the far right's loathing of gay people has forced them to adopt the most radical of the left's proposals - the deconstruction of marriage altogether into a meaningless French-style array of benefits for anyone and anything. Except they've added a new unenforceable twist - that these new benefits are conditioned on celibacy! And that celibacy applies to straights as well as gays. So this amendment will actually now threaten any straight couple in a domestic partnership or civil union - and demand that they stop having sex or have their benefits removed! If I had to come up with an Onion-style parody of the religious right, I couldn't do better than this. I'll leave you with the new improved amendment as it now stands. It is more eloquent than anything I could say about it:

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups. Neither the federal government nor any state shall predicate benefits, privileges, rights, or immunities on the existence, recognition, or presumption of sexual conduct or relationships.

This is graffiti on a sacred document. The founders of this country would be horrified.

A note to all wanna-be populist demagogues: insisting you can't get a fair trial makes you sound like an uncredible nut.

Alabama chief justice faces ethics charges

MONTGOMERY, Alabama (CNN) -- Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who opposed federal and state orders to remove a Ten Commandments monument from a public building, faces a judicial panel Wednesday morning in a showdown between the state's top judge and top prosecutor.

More than two months after the 5,300-pound granite monument was removed from the rotunda of Alabama's Judicial Building, Moore will face charges filed by Attorney General Bill Pryor that Moore violated judicial ethics when he refused a federal order to remove the monument.

The Alabama Court of the Judiciary, which will hear the case, could remove Moore from office, suspend him, reprimand him or exonerate him. The hearing may last only one day.

Pryor filed the ethics charges against Moore after the chief justice refused U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson's order to remove the monument.

Thompson ruled the monument was an unconstitutional promotion of religion by government in violation of the First Amendment.

In August, after a protracted legal fight, the Alabama Supreme Court's eight associate justices had the monument moved out of sight. (Full story)

The U.S. Supreme Court on November 3 refused to hear Moore's appeal in the case. (Full story)

The Associated Press reported Monday that Pryor was seeking Moore's removal from the elected office.

In a pretrial brief, Pryor said Moore should be removed because he "intentionally and publicly engaged in misconduct, and because he remains unrepentant for his behavior," the AP reported.

Moore's lawyers said in a brief filed Monday that the chief justice was not guilty of any ethical charges and that the allegations against him were without merit, partly because the federal judge never charged Moore with contempt, the AP reported.

Moore, who was suspended with pay when charged, has expressed doubt that he could receive a fair trial. He said he is concerned that cameras will not be allowed inside the courtroom for most of the trial.

Republicans drop support

Moore's case became a magnet for religious conservatives around the country.

He and his supporters say the Ten Commandments are the foundation of the U.S. legal system and that forbidding the acknowledgment of the Judeo-Christian God violates the First Amendment's guarantee of free exercise of religion. (Moore interview with CNN)

But a lawsuit filed after the monument's installation argued the massive stone marker constituted a government endorsement of Christianity.

The First Amendment reads: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ... ."

With Thompson threatening to fine the state $5,000 a day for defying his order, Pryor and Gov. Bob Riley refused to support Moore.

Both men are Republicans and self-professed conservative Christians who supported the monument's installation, but they said Moore was bound to obey Thompson's order.

Pryor has been nominated to a seat on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by President Bush, who has been silent on the issue.

Moore was a circuit judge in Etowah County, northeast of Birmingham, in the late 1990s when he fought a lawsuit seeking to remove a wooden plaque depicting the commandments from his courtroom.

The legal battle propelled him to statewide office in 2000, when the Republican jurist was elected chief justice after campaigning as the "Ten Commandments Judge."

In suspending Moore, the Judicial Inquiry Commission charged Moore with six ethics violations.

For whatever reason, I'm all about laughing at message boards. The Comicon gutters represent culture in its lowest form, suggesting that if language is a virus, it can sometimes, and may be evolutionarilty destined to, manifest in violent or even flesh eating forms. These are the thread titles on the front page at 8:08 Pacific Standard Time on Monday October 20, 2003 (and forgive my shoddy HTML cut and paste):

Red Skull's cigarette holder is just not that impressive

***The OFFICIAL 2003-2004 NFL Thread***

REALLY fucked up Gutters/comics related dream I had

Never try to whip a donut in a parking lot in four-wheel drive

Have you ever noticed

Hey Black people on Comicon...

CAPTION CONTEST

I Miss Y'All

chris & danny quarantine thread

Lamest sockpuppet EVER!!

Everyone says I draw like Dan DeCarlo anyway

Speaker's Corner

Freedom

We've never seen danny and Otto together, have we?

The Cubs aren't in the World Series

It's been a year.

what kind of music does ronan like?

How can you NOT love it?

Cub Fans sucks today

The Haiku of ScooterDoom

I fell into a burning ring of fire

Peter MacDonald!

UP TOP!

anyone else notice how complicated jim treacher lore has gotten lately?

cahleeforrnians


What's up with Half-Penis Anyway?

English paper on Ruth Hall

O danny boy, this is not a pipe calling

He looks just like his father

Hey ScootiePie

Survivor: Comicon

Why won't ScooterDoom tell us where he works?

Battlefield 1942 - Anyone here play?

The final fate of Danny Hellman and Ted Rall.

9-11, We had it coming

move over, serapion

Thread sent to Gutters and I want it closed.

Sam Catalino is "The Big C" at the ORCA Boards.

Ummm.....Frank?

AESTUS, DEFEND YOURSELF

GOD and Religion suck Hitler was righteous

How To Make The Perfect Cup Of Coffee

someone should show this to groth

Why i hate people who hate_ Bush, Harrison, Clinton, and Taft.

Hello

Horoscope and puzzles

Arnold orders off the menu

SEASONAL
ANNOUNCEMENT

Why I hate Danny Hellman

What the hell happened?

If a teenager was caught spraypainting any one of these slogans on the side of a school, he'd probably be suspected of plotting a shooting, and rightfully so. On the internet, its just part of communication. Any one is a short poem of loneliness, misery, despair; adrifting and lost, they mournfully prefigure an epitaph for our entire times and culture.

Wonderful comedy is afoot at the John Byrne message board. It opens with Byrne, a veteran superhero comic creator, devoting a statement to the use of a comic book characters' full name: "What's with the cutesy abbreviations of the character names, people? "Supes"? "Bats"? Do you really feel right using those? Does it really resonate correctly for you when you refer to a super powerful mass murderer as "Mags"? Or a homicidal maniac who would gut you as soon as look at you as "Wolvie"?"

There's plenty more ("Seriously -- would you call Batman "Bats" to his face? Even Superman, who is a much more "approachable" kind of guy -- if he were real, would you actually feel comfortable addressing him as "Supes"?"), the gist of which is that Byrne is absolutely not kidding, documenting a persolality that is chillingly unsettling even by the standards of posters to a comic book message board. If I were an FBI agent interviewing a serial killer for a profile case, and he delivered a monlogue like that, I would leave the meeting sweating and pale, and spend the rest of the week in bed, doubting God and contemplating a career change. Would you trust this man a gun?

Alomst as unsettling is the ensuing debate, with partisans taking the argument seriously on every side imaginable. From "I would consider it the highest compliment if I created a character and the fans started refering to him with a nickname, as long as it was intended as affection and not done with malice" to "That you think calling Batman "Bats" is a term of affection means not one whit to the conversation. I, personally, don't think it's an affectionate term at all. Nor do I think that it's a "fun" term either. Am I taking it too seriously? No. If you think so, more's the poorer for you."

I wonder if social debate was like this before the middle ages, or is speculating that the Earth has two sides and acceptable heresy?

If you're in the Seattle area, I highly recommend heading to Consolidated Works to check out Dazzle Camouflage, a new installation by Jason Puccinelli. He received funding for it from Artist Trust, which is how I first heard of. And Jason is joining us for a fundraising reception at the site, so I've gotten to talk to him a bit while setting that up.

The basic idea is that he's constructed museum dioramas, like you would see representing Stone Age culture or something like that, and combined them with a fashion shoot. In this case, the dioramas are representations of some questionable things, such as in the image up top. Other scenes are a slaughterhouse, a missile silo and a stock exchange. Opening night, he had fashion models pose and cavort in the scenes, covered in blodd, stabbing pig carcasses, and also audience members were selected to pose as well. I thought the fashion models weakened the effect, actually, because the exhibit works better as audience participation, the better to implicate the audience as they interact in the settings. The performed fashion shoots distanced the audience. It wasn't them.

There won't be the full on fashion shoot spectacle in the regular exibit, but a photographer will be on duty Thursdays thru Sundays 7:00pm – 8:00pm to take pictures of visitors to the installation. Which means you get a photo as a souvenier. It's supposed to be fun, and kind of disturbing that it is fun.

It's also the cover of last week's Stranger:

I have returned from vacation. I was considering retirement, but I found something out today that demanded my attention -- and the world's.

Jimmie Walker writes a column for Jewish World Review.



Today he writes about Rush Limbaugh.

That is all.

Um, I'm on vacation.

In a world gone mad with grief and ecstacy, there is at least some good news. In April 2004 Fantagraphics Books will publish the first of 25 volumes of the Complete Peanuts. All fifty years. All fifty years.

Riefenstahl dies at 101; tainted by link to Hitler

September 10, 2003

BY ROGER EBERT Sun-Times Movie Critic

Leni Riefenstahl, who did more than any other artist to shape the image of the Third Reich, died in her sleep Monday night in Berlin. She was 101. Although her 1934 documentary "Triumph of the Will" was the most dramatic and influential visual treatment of Nazism and the cult of Adolf Hitler, she maintained until the end that she was not a Nazi.

Not everyone agreed. She was declared to be a Nazi sympathizer by an Allied tribunal after World War II and essentially disappeared from public view for 20 years. Then she attempted to rehabilitate her image through interviews, film festival appearances, a 1973 book of photographs about a threatened African tribe, a 1992 autobiography, and her appearance in an extraordinary 1993 documentary by Ray Muller named "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl."

I wrote in my review of that film: "If Leni Riefenstahl had done nothing notable before the age of 60, what a wonderful life we would say she had lived since then." At that time in her early 90s, she was the world's oldest active scuba diver, and in the documentary, at the end of a day of diving, we see her walk down a pier with two men -- the captain, and Horst, her younger companion and cinematographer -- and "the body language says everything. The two men walk ahead, carrying gear, engaged in conversation. She walks behind them, alone, carrying her own gear and oxygen tank. They don't lend her a hand, or offer to carry the tank for her, and what this says is that, at 91, they do not think she needs special consideration. She's one of the guys."

But being in great shape at a very old age, while admirable, does not erase the stain of her association with the Nazi movement. As Hitler began his rise to power, Miss Riefenstahl was already a famous German actress, best known for a group of "mountain films" in which idealized Nordic characters posed heroically against the sky. In "The Blue Light" (1932), which I once saw at the Telluride Film Festival, she is accused of being a witch, but finds truth and deliverance in the secret of a blue light which shines from a cave high on a mountainside.

By 1934, she was a favorite of the Nazis, and was chosen by Goebbels, the propaganda minister, to film the party's rally at Nuremberg. Given many cameras and unlimited film, she also benefitted because much of the rally was deliberately staged with the film in mind. The result, "Triumph of the Will," is one of the most important documentaries ever made, and by general consent one of the best: important at the time for the way it painted Hitler and his followers as idealized supermen, important now because it helps explain how Nazism was not only a political movement but an exercise in mass hypnotism drawing on fetishistic imagery.

Miss Riefenstahl's other important documentary was "Olympia" (1938), a record of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which took place on the eve of Hitler's war.

Again she had unlimited resources at her disposal to create heroic images of muscular athletes conquering space and time. The buried message praised the cult of the body, particularly the Nordic body, and it was a considerable embarrassment for Hitler that the African-American runner Jesse Owens won four gold medals and set three Olympic records at the Berlin Games.

There was one other important film directed by Miss Riefenstahl, the little-known "Lowlands," partly filmed in Spain in 1944 and using gypsies in a parable that she said was intended as a criticism of Nazism. Post-production was interrupted by the end of the war, and the movie was not finished until 1954. Only last year Miss Riefenstahl was sued by gypsy death camp survivors who said she used them as slave labor; they objected to her statement that none of her gypsy extras died, since some did, in Auschwitz.

After her public reappearance in the 1960s, Miss Riefenstahl often defended herself against charges that she was a Nazi. She was an artist, she said, interested in film, not politics. In the 1993 documentary, she is questioned strenuously about her association with the party, and we see that she has rehearsed over the years an elaborate explanation and justification for her behavior. There is no anti-Semitism in her films, she points out. She did not know until after the war about the Holocaust. She was naive, unsophisticated, detached from Nazi party officials with the exception of Hitler, her friend -- but not a close friend, she insists.

But the very absence of anti-Semitism in "Triumph of the Will" looks like a calculation; excluding a central motif of Hitler's speeches must have been deliberate, to make the film go down more easily as propaganda. Nor could a film professional working in Berlin have been unaware of the disappearance of all of the Jews in the movie industry.

In the 1993 film, Miss Riefenstahl is seen visiting the site of the 1936 Olympiad with the surviving members of her film crew. They talk about some of their famous shots -- from aerial techniques to the idea of digging a hole for the camera, so that athletes could loom over the audience. We sense Miss Riefenstahl's true passion for filmmaking. But there are candid moments, when she is not aware of the camera, when she shares quiet little asides with her old comrades, which, while not damning, subtly suggest a dimension she is not willing to have seen.

The impression remains that if Hitler had won, Leni Riefenstahl would not have been so quick to distance herself from him. Her postwar moral defense is based on technicalities. Understandably, she was not eager to face conviction or punishment as a war criminal. But ironically, if she had confessed and renounced her earlier ideas, she might have had a more active career. It was her unconvincing, elusive self-defense that continued to damn her.

Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

Leni Riefenstahl was an amazing woman. I'm amazed she died. I figured she would outlive me. Her autobiography is an amazing document. In it, she describes Josef Goebbels crawling on his hands and knees in her living room, begging her to sleep with him. Amazing stuff.

German Film Director, Leni Riefenstahl, Dies at 101

By Bart Barnes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 9, 2003; 1:40 PM

Leni Riefenstahl, 101, the German film director and protege of Adolph Hitler whose historic documentaries about the 1934 Nazi party congress at Nuremberg and the Berlin Olympics of 1936 set benchmark standards for cinematic imagery and political propaganda that endured through the 20th century, died Sept. 8 at her home in Pöcking, near Munich. No cause of death was reported.

Ms. Riefenstahl was a personal favorite of Hitler's, and one of the few remaining friends of the Nazi dictator still alive. Under his sponsorship, she had wide authority and unlimited access in her work, and her career flourished. But it collapsed with the fall of the Third Reich and the carnage of World War II, and Ms. Riefenstahl never rid herself of the Nazi stigma.

As a filmmaker and artist, she had an eye for detail and a talent for editing that evoked the hypnotic spectacle of the massed Nazi legions, the raw charisma of the German fuhrer and the mesmerizing drama and majesty of Olympic competition with a force and power not seen before in the film medium.

During the 1930s, Ms. Riefenstahl was widely rumored at the highest levels of the Nazi party and throughout Germany to have been Hitler's mistress. In the United States, the Saturday Evening Post described her as a "Nazi pinup girl," and the Detroit News, in a 1937 story, called her "the woman behind Hitler."

Ms. Riefenstahl always insisted the rumors were baseless, and investigators for the Allied Powers after the war found no evidence to suggest she may have had a romantic or sexual liaison with the fuhrer.

Taken into custody by military authorities following the Nazi surrender in 1945, Ms. Riefenstahl was eventually released without charges. But it was years later before she obtained a work permit, and the films she made under Hitler would become a permanent reminder that she had served a regime that produced concentration camps, gas chambers, the Gestapo and genocide of European Jews. She never regained her pre-war professional standing as a director and actress.

Late in her life, Ms. Riefenstahl would downplay her relationship with the fuhrer. "Hitler did not play such an important role in my life," she said.

But she did admit being "dazzled" by him. "I had never met anyone with such power of persuasion," she said, "able to influence other minds so effectively."

Ms. Riefenstahl had been a glamorous actress and film director who starred in her own adventure movies before Hitler selected her to make the film of the 1934 Nazi congress. As one of Germany's leading movie stars, she caught the fuhrer's eye with her performance in "Blue Light" (1932), which she co-directed, about a courageous village girl who scales a treacherous mountain.

"Your 'Blue Light' proved that you can do it," Hitler told her when she voiced doubts over her ability to produce the documentary he wanted about the Nazi congress. He would later describe the finished product, which came to be known as "Triumph of the Will," as "a totally unique and incomparable glorification of the power and beauty of our Movement."

For the filming of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Ms. Riefenstahl was officially working for the International Olympic Committee, but her efforts were surreptitiously financed and later exploited by the Nazi regime. She would produce an epic three-hour documentary entitled "Olympia," that became a prototype for much of sports television decades later.

In that picture she pioneered such techniques as aerial photography, underwater pictures of swimming and diving events and the placing of cameras on tracks to move with runners in a race.

She perfected the technique of dramatizing athletic contests by personalizing the athletes. With such details as a close up of the vein throbbing in American sprinter Jesse Owens' forehead and the glint of confidence on his face as he prepared for the final in the 100-meter dash, Ms. Riefenstahl made the Games come alive.

It took her 18 months to edit the 250 miles of film footage into a single documentary, which had its premiere showing in Berlin on April 20, 1938, Hitler's birthday. To no one's surprise, "Olympia" won Germany's State Prize as the best film of 1938, but it also won prestigious awards in France, Sweden and at the Venice Film Festival. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin sent a congratulatory note praising the film.

In its May 1938 issue, the German Film magazine declared "Olympia," to be "one of the greatest works of art that the German film has produced up to now -- filled with the spirit that we sense not only as the spirit of the Games but also the spirit of the German reality of today. . . . It is a result of National Socialism, which is penetrating the total life of the nation. Only in the ideological structure of National Socialism could this great documentary film have come into being as an artistic achievement."

Helene Berta Amalie Riefenstahl was born in Berlin, where her father was a prosperous manufacturer of plumbing and heating equipment. As a child she aspired to be a dancer, but a knee injury cut this career short and she turned to acting.

Dark haired, brown eyed, and athletic, she radiated confidence and a cool Teutonic sensuality. In seven films during the 1920s and early 1930s, she displayed a lively and spirited alpine glamour as she climbed mountains barefoot, survived avalanches and traversed treacherous crevasses on the flimsiest of ladders, often in films by her protege, director Arnold Fanck.

In May 1932, after having attended a Nazi party rally where Hitler spoke at the Berlin Sports Palace, Ms. Riefenstahl sent the fuhrer a letter. "I was so impressed by you and the enthusiasm of the spectators that I would like to meet you personally," she wrote.

A few days later she received a telephone call from one of Hitler's aides inviting her to meet the Nazi leader at Horumersiel, a small fishing village on Germany's North Sea coast. She accepted, and the following day she spent several hours with Hitler, walking along the seashore and conversing on subjects ranging from art and architecture to Hitler's politics. "I feel that I have been called to save Germany -- I cannot and must not refuse this calling," she recalled him as saying.

At one point, she recalled in her 1987 autobiography, "Leni Riefenstahl: a Memoir," Hitler "halted, looked at me, slowly put his arms around me and drew me to him, . . . but when he noticed my lack of response he instantly let me go and turned away. Then I saw him raise his hands beseechingly: 'How can I love a woman until I have completed my task?' "

They met periodically over the next several years. At one point Hitler offered to place her in charge of all German cinema, which she declined. But she agreed to his request to film the 1934 Nazi congress. Preparations for filming this spectacle began months before the rally itself, which took place from Sept. 4 to 10, 1934, and they involved elaborate, stage-managed coordination between party organizers and the 36-member film crew.

The result of these efforts was an amalgam of exquisitely interwoven and highly emotional images building up to a crescendo of frenzied German nationalism and mass hero worship for the fuhrer. Time magazine later called it "newsreel raised to romantic myth."

Especially powerful was a sequence in which Hitler walked down an enormous corridor of massed party members to lay a commemorative wreath at the grave of a Nazi martyr.

The American film director Frank Capra found the fanaticism of "Triumph of the Will," so compelling that he used copious footage from the documentary to illustrate the nature of the enemy in "Why We Fight," the inspirational films he made for the U.S. armed forces.

To film the Berlin Games, Ms. Riefenstahl directed dozens of camera crews -- 60 were assigned to the opening ceremonies alone -- and pictures were taken from helium balloons and the saddles of horseback riders.

In editing the films, she perfected such artistic techniques -- copied later by U.S. film directors -- as superimposing the image of the Olympic Stadium getting nearer over the running feet of a marathon racer and the cinematic silhouettes of the Olympic divers soaring and tumbling as if in defiance of the laws of gravity.

Late in 1938, Ms. Riefenstahl toured the United States with the film, which drew grudging admiration. She herself received a cold shoulder from the media and the Hollywood film industry. At the outset of World War II, she followed the Wehrmacht into Poland, but she soon decided against making war films.

She did some desultory work during the war on a film version of the Eugen d'Albert opera "Tiefland," but the picture was not finished until the early 1950s and it was withdrawn from circulation after unsuccessful openings in Germany and Austria. Several other film projects during the 1950s never materialized. For the Munich Olympics of 1972 she was a photographic adviser.

For most of the half century since the end of the war, she attracted little notice from the media, although she did return to the public spotlight with the publication of her memoirs and the U.S. release of a documentary film about her, Ray Muller's "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl" (1993).

She also learned to scuba dive at age 71 to take photographs for her book "Coral Gardens," which was hailed for its stunning beauty.

She continued diving well into her 90s. In 2002, she released in conjunction with her 100th birthday a 45-minute documentary, "Underwater Impressions," about her 30 years of exploring the coast of Indonesia.

Hilmar Hofmann, director of the Goethe Institute, was quoted as saying, "It exceeds even the talents of the veteran French underwater film-maker Jacques-Yves Cousteau."

She was married once, in 1944 to Peter Jacob, an officer in the Wehrmacht. They were divorced in 1946.