Of course it was. Woods seethed that the media opted to stalk his family, “fabricate” elements of story out of whole cloth, speculate and decide his marital status for him, advise him to seek Jesus’s forgiveness, and generally ask and answer questions that are, in fact, nobody’s business excepts the Woods’.

He’s right. The media shouldn’t have even been in the proverbial room. It’s not as if he’s a governor spending tax dollars on prostitutes, or any such thing. He’s a billionaire athlete. Why anyone should assume he doesn’t have affairs, and would therefore be shocked, shocked when his wife takes out a car window with a golf club over a discovered infidelity, is a stupefying mystery. Athletes don’t serve the public, or, God knows, have an unwritten code of ethics they have to live by. They’ve sold dope, killed dogs, beat up wives, gunned down enemies, become politicians. Mostly, they throw or hit balls of varying shapes and sizes.

Whether or not Woods was some trollop’s backdoor man is not only none of our business, we shouldn’t want it to be. We, the public, and the media that reflects our concerns and informational needs, should have more substantial things to worry about. We do, in fact, have a teeming pile of more substantial things to worry about. We shouldn’t care about an athlete’s marital skirmishes. Even if we were a little curious, certainly the media, if it defines itself as anything but a pandering plague of bed lice, should’ve saved its page and air space for stories that actually matter.

But, this week, the media, from Murdoch’s Isengard to NPR, ignored Woods’ unambiguously furious press conference but covered it anyway, as the latest chapter in the pointless story they’d just been scolded for telling. The cognitive dissonce is practically comedy, an old SCTV or SNL skit. Woods should’ve added something to the effect, “Isn’t there real news for you guys to write about? Why are you wasting time following my kid to school, when your editorial budgets are crumbling like sand castles in a typhoon? Isn’t it a little pathetic?”

Or, a la William Shatner on SNL, “Get a life!”

Of course, he would’ve been talking to us all.

(Or, look again at SCTV’s timeless premier episode of “The Sammy Maudlin Show,” and consider that Catherine O’Hara is Woods.)

Please. It’s pretty apparent to everyone from the marketing stampede alone that Avatar is a some kind of substantial uptick in digital F/X. If you care about that sort of thing. Which is to say, if you’re young enough to still have trouble buying beer in New York, or if you’re still masturbating three times a day. If I was 15, I’d see Avatar. But I’m not. And neither, chances are, you.

But even if Cameron got that much right — if he somehow managed to get digital characters to act, and didn’t make the women look cross-eyed, and the 3-D was, like, dude, so very cool — so what? Not only is the story recycled garbage and the script (reportedly, even by fans) idiotic, but the very essence of the film — its visual cataract of fantasy — is infantile. What, am I a forest animal, unthinkingly hypnotized by shiny objects? Oooo, I’m building a nest, I need something bright and pretty. Am I a toddler in the cereal aisle, blindly drawn to the box of Froot Loops because of the bright colors?

Since when is a flush of rainbow hues and sparkly art supposed to engage the adult mind? You read David Denby’s review of the film in The New Yorker (a month or more after Dana Goodyear’s Cameron rimjob), and you hear a grown man — who’s written books — try to explain that the film is stupid but he just loved the shimmering Crayola colors anyway. Maybe he’d like a mobile above his bed.

I’ve seen Avatar already, frankly, because I spent my youth looking at Roger Dean album covers and sci-fi/fantasy paperback covers and the art of Frank Frazetta, Chris Foss, the Brothers Hildebrandt, etc. — and that was a good 30 years ago. But since then, something happened: I grew short hairs and read Hemingway and had sex. There’s no going back.

• I resolve to spend more time with neo-conservatives. Not because I think it’d be fair to do so or anything, but because I know very few and I have no one to win arguments over.
• I resolve to never see another movie or TV show with zombies or vampires in them, just as last year I resolved silently to swear off superheroes. My life’s getting short, after all. I’d swear off giant robots if I ever bothered to see those movies in the first place.
• I resolve to get on Twitter, now that I’ve read a string of tweets responding to Rush Limbaugh’s recent ER visit; one of them hoped “he gets a black doctor,” while another wondered if he “exaggerated his symptoms, like Michael J. Fox did.” Many simply asked God to kill him.
• I resolve to get better at the dry one-line humor that’s becoming the sine qua non of Facebook, Twitter, et al. I don’t know how, exactly. I may have to steal.
• I resolve to allow my children to play in traffic.
• I resolve to find some way to get Neko Case to sing my outgoing answering-machine message.
• I resolve to try absinthe, mahua, Nepalese raksi, peyote and kratom. Just experimenting, understand.
• I resolve to stop envying David Niven for having had sex with Merle Oberon. And then for being modest about it.
• I resolve to solve the newspaper/magazine problem of “monetizing” journalism online. Don’t have any ideas yet, but when I do, you’ll hear about it.
• I resolve to find some way to write about the very strange and disturbing things that are going on in Internet porn, which no one can really do without shamefacedly admitting that they’ve looked at it. I haven’t yet. But ferChrissake, someone should say something.
• I resolve to lay off bourbon. I never drink it now, so it shouldn’t be difficult.
• And sure, I resolve to lose that midlife 20 by May. And when I resolve, that shit gets done.

It’s easy to play what-if, but before my scariest speculation drops here with a gruesome splat like a pterodactyl’s egg, a speculation I haven’t yet heard elsewhere, let’s quote the report:

“[T]he Al Qaeda leader would live to fight another day. Fewer than 100 American commandos were on the scene with their Afghan allies and calls for reinforcements to launch an assault were rejected. Requests were also turned down for U.S. troops to block the mountain paths leading to sanctuary a few miles away in Pakistan. The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines. Instead, the U.S. command chose to rely on airstrikes and untrained Afghan militias to attack bin Laden and on Pakistan’s loosely organized Frontier Corps to seal his escape routes. On or around December 16, two days after writing his will, bin Laden and an entourage of bodyguards walked unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan’s unregulated tribal area. Most analysts say he is still there today.

“The decision not to deploy American forces to go after bin Laden or block his escape was made by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, the architects of the unconventional Afghan battle plan known as Operation Enduring Freedom. Rumsfeld said at the time that he was concerned that too many U.S. troops in Afghanistan would create an anti-American backlash and fuel a widespread insurgency. Reversing the recent American military orthodoxy known as the Powell doctrine, the Afghan model emphasized minimizing the U.S. presence by relying on small, highly mobile teams of special operations troops and CIA paramilitary operatives working with the Afghan opposition. Even when his own commanders and senior intelligence officials in Afghanistan and Washington argued for dispatching more U.S. troops, Franks refused to deviate from the plan.”

There’re reams of communication that even Congress didn’t get to peruse, of course, and plenty of gaps in the available record. So here’s my thought, my naturally low-boiling paranoia bubbling over thanks to the fuel provided by the Bush Administration’s countless duplicities, evil machinations and mercenary secrets: if the battle following 9/11 would have effectively ended with the capture of bin Laden and the collapse of a semi-organized Al Qaeda, then what reason would Bush & Co. have had to invade Iraq? They had no real, or sensible, reason, we know that for sure. Just a series of scaremongering flashcards. But they used the ongoing climate of dread and rage to put us there, erecting one temporary justification after another, at a cost of a still untold number of lives. We know the Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, etc. team were interested in an Iraq invasion before 9/11, and Richard Clarke has told us it was virtually the first thing out of their mouths that morning eight years ago when the towers fell. But they would have lost their opportunity if bin Laden were caught or killed.

What if they didn’t want that to happen? What if they wanted to keep bin Laden alive, to give them a working justification for their already detailed invasion plan?

What if they deliberately pulled back at Tora Bora, to allow the “endless war” to commence?

I’m speculating. We’ll probably never know. But would you put it past them?

What is the legend of the Great Pumpkin if not an answer to the preadolescent rule of might is right, a cry in the wilderness against “hypocrisy,” for “sincerity,” and in the name of all things unlikely and visionary and hopeful. Linus Van Pelt is the John the Baptist here, a square peg kid in a round-headed world, poignantly compelled to follow his private star, howling against the mundane greeds of America (candy!) and holding out, alone in the night, for something better, something grander and more winged, a pagan god of his own invention. Charlie Brown’s tribulations are standard-issue social nightmares, lost as he is in a world where though his contemporaries insult him to his face, unglimpsed grown-ups actually throw rocks in his trick-or-treat bag instead of candy. But Linus’s defiant stand has the markings of a grade-school Galileo, an apostate for whom the weedy lots of Middle American suburbia is the desert of the Old Testament, whipped by winds and glowering under a black-eyed sky.

It’s not a parable of faith-vs.-greed so much as a paradigm of unorthodoxy; Linus is the hero Arthur Rimbaud and Johnny Rotten wanted to be. And, in the end, he is unrepentant. Heroic.

Still, the cartoon’s greatest single passage, and arguably the most mysterious and magical sequence ever animated for TV, is Snoopy’s vivid journey through the night battlefields and barbed-wire trenches of WWI, a flight of brain energy making concrete for us finally what we knew as children, and what the single-minded Linus is too rebellious to realize: play is realer than real, and can set us free.

The Internet is destroying everything. It must be stopped. We love it, we use it, we mainline it like smack, and in the meantime it’s laying waste to civilization as we know it, meaning, every common form of culture and communication.

Consider how many times weekly we hear about how the Internet, in all of its varied manifestations and equally in all of its costlessness, is destroying the newspaper industry.

And the book publishing industry.

And the music industry.

And the film industry. And broadcast television. And magazines. And theater and dance and live performance of every kind.

Not to mention everyday human contact, social intercourse, conversation, old-fashioned porch-sitting socialization, club meetings, hoedowns, card nights, cocktail parties, letter-writing, ad infinitum.

Even porn is being devastated. And, like the lice gone hungry on a dead man’s head, the advertising industry, utterly dependent upon all of these old forms, is close to simply eating itself. Only video gaming is thriving, overlapping as it does with the Internet and surviving in any case as part of the same paradigm, the sit-in-front-of-a-monitor-and-stare posture that is coming to dominate human activity. You’re doing it now.

We hear and understand that these industries and art forms are dying, and yet I have yet to hear anyone blame the Internet with any vitriol. If it is blamed, it is done indulgently, almost happily, as you might blame the evolution of a new sense organ for rendering smell obsolete. We may bemoan our losses, but no one is deeply considering the source, or what we should do about it, if anything.

There isn’t much we can do, of course, because The Internet has booming business advantages across the spectrum, and represents our newest instrument of “progress,” which is considered a self-defining social good. Anyone who proclaims otherwise is dismissed as a Luddite – without having their arguments answered or countered.

But the primary reason The Internet will rule, and the reason it has gained such colossal cultural dominance, is that it is essentially free. Whereas we’ve had to pay for other forms of culture – either with cash or with the attention-time extracted from us by advertisers – now we get everything we want for free, and everything of cultural value created and acquired by us over, say, the last five centuries, is gradually fading into obsolescence. Right now we read fiction and consume news and watch movie-stuff and listen to music online, enjoying humanity’s best-ever consumerable delivery stream. But we demand to get it for free, and art and culture cannot and will not be generated for free. “New paradigms” about how to earn on the Web, and therefore sustain cultural enterprises, are bandied about every day, but there is only one: we have to pay for what we read and watch and hear. Just like before. If we like YouTube and Facebook, which hemmorhage millions every year, we will have to eventually pony up. Otherwise, they will disappear.

This brings up a raft of tetchy questions, not the least of which is why we should pay for, say, a Kindle book or an online magazine when in fact we get only the experience of reading and not a physical object for our money. Or, of course, why we should pay for it at all if some teenage hacker in Stockholm has figured out a way for us to get it without giving up a dime.

It comes down to money, money we will all decide to happily pay. Or else there will be, eventually, nothing to pay for, and nothing to “do” in our office chairs and at our keyboards and with our palm devices except read each others’ blogs and hunt for illegally uploaded reruns. A world in which everything is free is literally a fairy-tale idea, a Heaven that sleeps in the dozy Sunday-school brainpan of our inner preteen selves.

Here’s the best-case scenario if this rolling boulder is not abated: new novels and new movies and new music, of at least the caliber we expect coming from their paying industries, will no longer appear. Our popular culture will freeze, and we’ll have only the past to pick over. Maybe it won’t be that bad, come to think of it: instead of the bastard nonsense produced freshly every year in our mass media, the CSIs and Dan Browns and Lady Gagas, kids will grow up reading Hemingway, listening to The Beatles, and watching Humphery Bogart movies.

America “used to be united!” he cries. And of course, he’s right — the nation used to be relatively untroubled by minority rights, women’s rights, immigrant rights, extreme economic disparity (for a time, anyway), and the other vast myriad of things that challenge the hegemony of plump, wealthy white men like Beck. So he’s absolutely correct, and you can’t even tell him he shouldn’t be upset by the fact. But we can save our sympathy, I think, for bigoted, retrogressive demogogues, and perhaps dedicate it instead to the vast majority of citizens everywhere who never had so much to lose.

But the fact that Beck points to nothing so much as a pair of corporate TV ads as his deathless illustration of how “life used to be” is truly amazing — perhaps, because he lives in a warped, weepy, nutbag-covering TV world all his own, Beck doesn’t quite understand that those commercials were commercials. For products. Comprised of adman hucksterism and cheap-shill sentimentality. They aren’t real, Glenn. And they weren’t real when you were a boob-tube geek kid, either.

Take Jean Baudrillard – please. One of America’s most-watched pundits posits a few moments of old contrived TV advertising as our great nation’s lost idealism? This is TV cheese earnestly crying about the state of perceived “reality” by comparing it unfavorably to a Coke commercial. A Coke commercial. We’re down the rabbit hole a little, it seems. And how many millions nodded with him, perhaps shed a tear or two as well? Wait, I’m faklempt. Talk amongst yourselves. 

Perhaps Beck is correct again — his constituency may have wholly lost the capacity to discern TV fantasy from what’s real. They vote and shop and recreate and even remember the way TV tells them to. And these aren’t kids raised on the Web, but old timers, those old enough to remember the 70s and pine for the days of segregation and all-white Presidents and restaurant smoking and women who knew how to bake. Or, more to the point, the days of Archie Bunker, the Wide World of Sports, and beer ads with honest-to-God jingles. Those were the good old days.

Let loose the dogs of neocon tantrum-throwing.

Very soon, someone will decide that Swedish meatballs should be renamed “freedom meatballs.” (Don’t presume Glenn Beck will make a distinction between the Swedes, who dish out most of the Nobels, and the Norwegians, who delivered the Peace Prize.) “Freedom massage” will follow, then “freedom fish,” “freedom erotica,” and “freedom yellow pea soup.” Maybe “Norwegian Wood” will get boycotted off the new Beatles Rock Band.

No reason to stop there: forming a boycott against Nobel winners’ books could follow (as if the people capable of being convinced of these sorts of things ever read), but I expect it’d peter out before Nobel laureates’ medical innovations are called out. My guess is no one will even mention the economists, because no one understands what their contributions are anyway, and why they all contradict each other year to year.

Wait a minute – Woodrow Wilson? For The League of Nations, which was dubious, and in spite of yanking the U.S. into WWI? Hey, didn’t Henry Kissinger get one of these?

We shouldn’t take the Peace Prize too seriously, of course, but the Rightist tribes have good reason to be miffed – coming so early in Obama’s public career, it’s obviously an international backhanded slap at the Bush Adminstration, who were as liable to win a Nobel as Phillip Garrido. It couldn’t be any louder or clearer, as righteous messages go, though it could’ve, one way or another, been a good deal earlier.

But I’ve finally decided where I fall on the issue: I don’t care.

I don’t care because Polanski’s victim doesn’t care, and because it’s old news, and because it’s an ambiguous case with a smattering of judicial chicanery involved, and because the more fiery point being snookered around in the press now, by brickbrows who believe in the destruction of a mythical Hollywood Babylon, is the petitions that have been rather thoughtlessly signed in Polanski’s favor.

But if Polanski goes free or goes to prison, it doesn’t matter to me anymore than does Mackenzie Phillips’s lurid assertions about her father. This isn’t public policy, or even a scandal about people that matter. It’s just a fart in the wind. It’s a semi-abstracted moral question that’s fun to argue about over cocktails. Until it’s not fun anymore. I don’t believe Polanski should “get off” because he’s a celebrity, but neither am I convinced that there’s much “getting off” that should be necessary, given the situation and the years and the rest. Frankly, my gut reaction is that if I’d suffered what Polanski suffered – seen his wife cut to ribbons and the baby cut from her stomach, not to mention escaping the Holocaust – then I can imagine feeling as if I had carte blanche, come what may. But then I might very well have gone to prison, and I wouldn’t expect there to be much debate about it.

Certainly Polanski’s was loathesome behavior, but is it deathlessly criminal decades after the fact? Does the passage of time alter or semi-neutralize the importance of what happened? If I brain you with a tire iron (obviously a less venal scenario), that is assault. 30 years later, what is it? Something even the victim should care very much about? It seems uncertain. Every state, including California, has a statute of limitations for straight-on rape, usually ranging from between three and ten years. Is that reasonable? They’re not applicable to Polanski because he had already pled guilty in a plea bargain deal that the judge was apparently not going to honor. Is that reasonable? It’s a legal boondoggle now, not a case about preadult sex, which is something I could’ve guessed would’ve happened if I’d noticed a young teenager stripping in Jack Nicholson’s jacuzzi while drinking champagne late at night and having world-famous men photograph her.

It’s 2009, and nothing, literally, is at stake. I know statutory rape is bad, but I’ve also known teenagers that screw and do dope, sometimes in tandem. The world still turned.

I do think it’s a good thing the authorities waited, or else we might not have The Pianist, which is a very good movie. Then again, I could’ve done without The Ninth Gate.

I don’t care. Lock him up, set him free.

Nobody will stake the movie for an American run, despite the fact that it has been already sold to distributors in virtually every other corner of the globe. The South Koreans and Australians and Japanese and Italians will see it. But not us. It wouldn’t be a blockbuster here, but it would’ve earned.

Michelle Malkin’s books may be bestsellers thanks to a right-wing bulk-buy, and simian radio shows might gain audience share via the rubbernecking curious and amusement-starved, but here’s cold evidence of the market responding for real to the neocon forces in this country, a country in which evolution is taught in every school. Distributors have decided en masse that the uproar by the anti-evolutionist faction in our society would be too much of a hurricane to handle.  “Darwin Day” — November 22 — is fast approaching, after all, and the efforts of Kirk Cameron to alter On the Origin of Species and distribute 50K copies to college students may just not be enough to stem the tide of common sense.

Creation may not be a good movie, but nothing about it can be remotely as terrifying as the simple fact that a distinctly American brand of proud ignorance has won this tiny fight over any consideration of reason, educated culture, fact, or even capitalist greed. Think about that for a minute, and tell me you don’t smell medieval brimstone in the air: a major industry has decided not to invest in a project that might earn them profits because too large a section of the American public and the froth-lipped media that stokes them are giving their ignorance primacy over the truth, and do not want that ignorance defied. (By “truth” I mean the truth of evolutionary science and Darwin’s work, not of the movie’s portrait thereof, which is probably romantic nonsense.)

In the middle ages, peasants believed in Genesis because they didn’t have any recourse to do otherwise. Today, with no excuses, the U.S. stands as, in this way, the world’s most willfully stupid country, the one industrialized nation where people like to hear the elected politicians claim to have conversations with God, and where scientific pedagogy, even in the form of a pop movie, is something to be dreaded and loathed. I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but I still am.

Postscript: As of midday today, Newmarket Films has deigned to theatrically release Creation. Somebody sucked it up and picked up the bat. Now, let’s watch the firefight — the best-case scenario is, of course, the possibility that no one will protest at all.