Author: jp

For a few weeks now, we’ve quietly had God working for us as an unpaid intern, and He has for the most part been occupying Himself with support-related tasks around the office, such as dusting Jean-Paul’s various Edward Said and Ryan McGinness books, and helping Matt categorize his Us Weekly collection into the Bonnie Fuller and Janice Min eras (there is, in fact, a striking difference between the two reigns, He insists).
But events which have occurred over the past few days seem to have angered Him, such that He has been glowering around the workplace and approaching his assigned task of downloading Tracy Morgan MPGs with much less zeal than we have become accustomed to seeing in His endeavors. So, as a gesture of appreciation for all His hard work (not to mention creating us in His image!), we asked if He would care to voice his thoughts to the low culture readership. In a booming and thunderous voice that very likely disturbed our upstairs neighbors at Nerve.com, He subsequently presented us with what he called His “Smite List”, which we have chosen to run in an edited form, despite His protests.
Thee Who Shalt be Smitten
by God, aka Yahweh, aka Allah, aka Buddha, et cetera
1. CBS President Les Moonves, for not having the compunction to resist those who would claim to speak on My behalf, but who were in reality a small minority of vocal, churchgoing conservative right-wingers who threatened to boycott watching rewarding family programs such as “Survivor: Pearl Islands”.
2. Iraqi Coalition Provisional Authority head, L. Paul Bremer, for imposing a ruthlessly unjust flat-tax system on his new American colony. I have been monitoring “conservative wet dreams” such as this for some time now, Paul, and don’t think I don’t know about that copy of Forbes magazine and the box of Kleenex situated next to your king-sized bed in Saddam Hussein’s former palace in Baghdad.
3. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, for not yet adequately supporting the ascension of My very first openly gay bishop. While I am unsure whether I am technically on record as being for or against homosexuality, I would like to think that as a fair and just God, I shall come down on the side of tolerance for gays, just this once.

Here at low culture, we have already speculated how agonizing it must be for members of the White House press corps to be subjected to President Bush’s repetitive jokes and audaciously inane pet nicknames for his friends and peers.
Having taken a closer look at the full transcript of Tuesday’s press conference, however, it became vividly clear: the president must be taking leadership cues from David Brent of BBC America’s second-season hit television series, “The Office”). David (brilliantly played by actor Ricky Gervais) is the bumbling and deluded Regional Manager at a paper-supply company in an office park in the middle of nowhere.
Fans of the show can check out the uncanny similarities by looking at the lesson plan:

Despite reports that jocularity was in the air during yesterday’s 48-minute White House press conference, some quip-weary reporters seem to have tired of President Bush’s notorious wit and affectionate name-calling:
“When the president called on Mark Smith, the Associated Press radio reporter thanked him for ‘including radio folks’ in the give-and-take.
‘A face for radio,’ Bush rejoined, invoking a line he has applied to other radio reporters.
To that, a slightly chagrined Smith replied: ‘I wish I could say that was the first time you told me that, sir.’ Amid the short bursts of laughter, the smiling president retorted: ‘The first time I did it to a national audience, though.'”
This single moment in the press conference ought to inspire genuine pity for the poor “filtering” members of the press. I’d imagine that touring with Bush day in and day out would be comparable to being married to an exasperatingly bad stand-up comic who practices his or her routine on you each night, and then having to furthermore sit in and watch his or her stage shows every three months.
And I guess this explains why we haven’t seen many outtakes from “Journeys with George”.

Christine Hauser of the New York Times must have had to refrain from smiling to herself as she penned her account of Palestinian officials agreeing to form a new, permanent government in the wake of the impending November 4 dissolution of the current, temporary cabinet.
“The Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat asked the prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, to form the cabinet, Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath said today, according to news agency reports from Ramallah in the West Bank.
‘President Arafat and the Fatah Central Committee have unanimously asked Abu Ala to form a new Cabinet based on the current one,’ Mr. Shaath said, using Mr. Qurei’s nom de guerre.”
Hauser’s right, of course. Though she’s ostensibly discussing the creation of a Palestinian government, using the more conventional notions of “pseudonym” or “fictitious name” lacks the ever-so-clever double entendre of the French nom de guerre, which is also used in a pseudonymous capacity, but literally means “a war name, or a name used in the course of fighting.”
So, when does this government-creating end and the fighting resume? I was so busy quibbling over semantics that I forgot, whose turn is it?

Presumably, those of you living in New York have by now been bombarded with these public-service ads from the American Legacy Foundation, founded in the wake of the tobacco industry’s settlement with 46 states in 1999 and “dedicated to building a world where young people reject tobacco and anyone can quit.”
That’s a fine and noble mission, and certainly warrants some form of applause. But they’re making it so hard for me to get behind their message. First, they unveiled the truth® campaign, which utilized an uber-didactic narrative and “cutting-edge” filmmaking methodology to try to persuade the MTV generation that smoking is bad for you (natch) and the tobacco industry is run by a bunch of greedy, calloused motherfuckers who never saw a Michael Mann film they could really embrace.
Within the past year or so, the relatively austere tone of the original truth® campaign morphed into the “Crazyworld” campaign, which seemed to channel HBO’s absurdist “Carnivale” television series, but populating the cast with hipsters rather than circus freaks (those terms are in fact mutually exclusive).
Now comes our very own New York-tailored campaign, “A Smoke-Free New York Works”, which was ostensibly created in the wake of a vocal protest campaign by those who decried Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki’s recent ban on smoking in bars and nightclubs. Again, a fine and noble mission. Anyone living in Los Angeles or California in general knows this can work just fine, despite many TimeOut New York cover stories whining to the contrary.
The problem, however, is that this new American Legacy campaign seems to throw out (alongside the didacticism, thankfully) the avant-garde pretense of its predecessors in lieu of pure and simpleminded idiocy. Here’s the gist: whether sitting on a subway car, or waiting at a bus stop, or leafing through the Village Voice, a bold white ad with hand-scrawled red text leaps out at you, often bearing the most hilariously asinine phrases imaginable. Here are some real, actual samples, unlike our “absurd” headline:
“If they ban smoking in college classrooms, it will destroy higher education!”
“If they ban smoking in office buildings, no one will ever work again!”
“If they ban smoking in churches, it will wipe out all religion!”
“If they ban smoking at JFK, nobody will ever fly again!”
“If they ban smoking in stores, everyone will quit buying stuff!”
Bear in mind these are all actual ads you may have encountered. But I have to ask, who the hell would ever utter such stupid, contemptibly moronic assertions? And if these people really exist, are they really worth listening to, much less quoting?
So, once again, the lofty goals of the anti-smoking industry — despite my being otherwise inclined to endorse any and all of their efforts — have left me to consider supporting efforts and initiatives that would remove their funding. Well, not really, but…something needs to be done, because if I ever step into a bathroom and see this hanging on the doorway or near the stalls, I’ll snap and ask someone for a light. Again, this is a real and actual ad:
“If they ban smoking in bathrooms, it will kill the urinal cake industry!”
Do I even care about the urinal cake industry? It’s the tobacco industry that needs to be reined in, chumps, and ads like this are completely counter-effective.

Buried within the larger reports of Al Gore’s efforts to spearhead a campaign to introduce a “liberal” alternative to mainstream and conservative cable news outlets is this overlooked aspect of the current plan:
“Gore is keeping quiet about it, but he heads a group that plans to pay a reported $70 million to buy Newsworld International (NWI), a cable news network that’s currently in fewer than 20 million homes.”
I don’t claim to be well-versed in the mechanics of establishing new cable networks and contractually arranging for their effective distribution, but replacing a network like NWI with this “liberal alternative” to other networks seems a bit narrowminded and foolhardy, to say the least.
I can geekily admit to really, sincerely loving NWI — its motley assortment of news from Canada, Germany, the U.K., and Russia consistently proves to be a truly useful alternative to the nationalist (and often naive) perspective of much of the U.S.-based newsmedia. Where else can one see televised footage of U.S.-built Israeli Caterpillar D-9 bulldozers plowing through Palestinian homes, or uncensored broadcasts of the latest Osama bin Laden audio or videotapes? Where else can one see President Bush speak in all his soundbite-devoid, flub-worthy glory? And where else can television viewers get “man on the street” perspectives on international policy from citizens in Ottawa and Berlin?
As such, it would seem to be a less-than-ideal solution to remove this network from the airwaves merely to replace it with an “entertaining” platform for Al Franken or Bill Maher to put forth nightly punchlines about Bush’s numerous lies.
Can’t we have them both? And maybe we can give up the style network or even, if necessary, C-SPAN 3 (I’m not kidding, there are in fact three C-SPANs).

After yesterday’s latest attack on American forces in Iraq, where a rocket was fired upon the al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad and killed one U.S. occupier (I mean, officer), defense department officials were expressing frustration on Sunday at the increased bravado demonstrated by the strike. The hotel, where U.S. Deputy Defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz was residing during his current visit to Iraq, had been serving as a makeshift American base of operations and was believed to be safe from such provocation by virtue of being ensconced in protective concrete barricades. By striking at such a seemingly secure building, the insurgents have more or less shattered any myth of security for Americans trying to restore order to the embattled nation.
Also of note was the well-nigh un-ironic adoption of last week’s phrase du jour by sympathetic military analysts.
“Placed in the context of insurgent attacks on U.S. forces that are increasing in frequency and effectiveness, this particular operation — notable both for its daring and for what it says about the enemy’s intelligence capabilities — that, yes, it really does promise to be a long, hard slog,” said retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, a Persian Gulf War tank commander who is a professor of international relations at Boston University.