I get all the news I need on the weather report
I gather all the news I need on the weather report
Hey, I've got nothing to do today but smile
Here I am, the
only living boy in New York.
-Simon and Garfunkle

I took the train to Manhattan today, to work out of my company's
28th Street office office. It was a gray, misty day, so it was
hard to tell from the train that something was missing from the
skyline.
But as I left Penn Station, any illusion of normalcy was quickly
banished. The air was different. And everywhere, there were the
pictures of the missing.

And to the southwest, there was a gap in the sky.

The pictures are taped to bus shelters, to light poles, to mailboxes
and newspaper boxes. They are snapshots, family portraits, wedding
pictures, xeroxed or printed on color inkjets, handwritten and
electronically typeset. People,especially women, stop
to read the pleas enscribed on them carefully.
.
Near the 28th Street office, the Empire State Building hides in
the low clouds, as if reluctant to reclaim the sky as its own
under these terms.

.

I get a number of trade magazines every week, particularly business information technology mags. This week, nearly all of them led with some photo of the World Trade Center wreckage on the cover as they rushed to get some tech angle on the disaster into their pages. CRN was but one of the offenders.
Look, I know this is probably the most important event of the last 10 years. But somehow, the struggle by media outlets of all types to own some piece of this story has sickened me, especially when it comes to professional publications sinking to sensationalism to get attention. Sure, there are important stories to be told that are connected to the tragedy. But the trade pubs using the imagery of death and ruin on their cover clearly have some lazy, sick bastards running their editorial operations.

Fox News=Satan's Radio

I made the mistake of catching a few moments of Steve
and E.D., the bubbleheads fronting Fox News Channel's "Fox
& Friends" morning show (not to be confused with Steve
and Eydie )during their uninterrupted coverage
of "America United." Here's an actual piece of dialogue
from them:

Steve: President Bush says this isn't a war on Muslims,
it's a war on terrorism.

E.D.: But the Muslim clerics are calling for a holy war,
so, really, it is a war on Muslims.

With razor-sharp reasoning like that broadcasting out to America,
I'm sure we'll all have a handle on this in no time (sarcasm level=10,
on a scale of 10).

Where do they get these people? Do they raise them on some
Aryan Youth Ranch in Idaho?

From the New York Times:
Comedy Central has kept “The Daily Show,'' a satirical show that runs four times weekly at 11 p.m. Eastern, on reruns since the attack. The network decided Monday not to bring the show back live this week, spokesman Tony Fox said.

“When you're talking about a show that is a news parody and the news is so consumed about this tragedy, what's funny about what's unfolding here? Nothing,'' he said. “As someone at the show said succinctly, irony is dead for the moment.''

What now? (the last dot-communist entry)

A couple of things have become pretty clear to me over the past month (with a little bit of an assist from last week's carnage):

(1) The revolution is over, the Internet is now part of daily life, but the revolutionaries' ranks have been drastically thinned ; those who remain have become shadows of their former hype-inflated selves. Their business plans were a tautology built from MBA phrasebooks and Gen Y / Boomer pop culture leftovers. Old line business execs are now picking up the pieces and incorporating them into their proven business models. You shall be assimillated.

(2) It is no longer contrarian to be pessimistic about how the Internet economy is going to Change The World For Ever For the Good. Being a naysayer and then being proven right just takes all the fun out of being a naysayer. There is no victory in watching lemmings plummet into the sea.

(3) Irony may not be dead, but it sure is on the ropes. The fallout from last week put it into a coma. When New Yorkers lose their edge, where is there room left in the world for edge?

(4) Politics is dead, for the moment. It looks like the attacks on the US killed the political debate, too–it's a dangerous time to be a dissenter. Jingoism is descending upon us; in times like these all cynics take deep cover.

There's been a definite chilling effect as a fallout from the attack. For example, I can't talk politics with my wife anymore, for example, because my civil libertarian views no longer match with the current climate–and when I say things like “Reichstag Fire” she gets upset and scared and stops talking to me. So I don't talk about those things anymore with her. In fact, I don't dare say them to anyone, lest I be labelled as some extremist anti-patriotic freak that should be beaten down and hauled off to jail, because Baltimore could turn that way pretty quickly.

(5) As a result of all these, the format of this blog has become, well, obsolete. “Dot-communist” is as archaic as the phrases “irrational exhuberance” and “peace dividend.” It's time for reinvention.

So, this will be the final entry in this format of the blog. I'm going to reinvent the damn thing, and relaunch, just like countless dotcommers have done in the last few months.

The Pentagon – Image from SpaceImaging, posted on Janes

Before and
after.