It's hard to imagine that anyone actually believes that a generic "Happy Holiday" email, sent with assembly-line intimacy to all those resident in an address book, can be seen as anything with the smallest degree of meaning or emotional content.

Yet, I get them. I get them by the dozens, allegedly cheery slices of well-wishing that stack up in my inbox like planes over Newark, bearing passengers with encumbered minds but, most recently, unencumbered laps.

They arrive uninvited and resented from people I know I know, and otherwise; from companies I have done business with, often on such a transitory basis that I have no recollection of the transactional intercourse that provoked such warm feelings; from bail-out benefitting financial institutions that no doubt constructed elaborate PowerPoint presentations dedicated to the role of digital acknowledgements as a mechanism for generating customer loyalty; from restaurants and dry cleaners and art galleries and car companies and virtually anyone else who coaxed an email address out of me, and who is now using it as a strategic weapon in a charm offensive designed to convince me that an army of seasons-greeters is thinking of me and my family this time of the year.

Of course, they aren't thinking of me or my family at all. They are thinking of themselves and how this fundamentally thoughtless and meaningless gesture, this "send-all" carpet-bombing of cheap retail clichés will make me think better of them. Some want more business, or new business, or to keep what they've already got; others simply desire to be viewed as un-shallow sharers of the holiday spirit who exhale this sacred time of the year and think deeply of others. All with the swift depression of a single key; how jingily efficient.

This isn't a Luddite railing against the dehumanizing effects of technology. On the contrary, a charming descant of an email is far preferable to mantle-defacing, primary-color whack-in the-face Hallmark card that was inscribed with the same level of factory attention that the movie stars of the studio system gave to their autographed photographs.

So my holiday message (and math) is this: The more people who get the same message, the less it means to any of one them.

Before President Obama left for his Hawaii vacation, he recorded a video message offering his best wishes for the New Year. Transcript and video below.

Good evening. Tonight, as Americans across the country gather with family and friends, I want to wish everyone a happy and healthy New Year.

This is always a hopeful time, as we celebrate the end of one year and the beginning of another. And while 2009 was difficult for many Americans, we must also look back on this year with the knowledge that brighter days are ahead of us - that although our challenges are great, each of us has the courage and determination to rise up and meet them.

It is that spirit that has kept the American Dream alive for generations, and it is that spirit that will keep it alive for generations to come. Happy New Year, everyone.

More on Barack Obama

He reportedly killed his ex-wife in a nearby apartment before the attack on shoppers. A body believed to be the attacker is found later.

A lone gunman dressed in black killed five people, four in a crowded shopping mall, before returning home and taking his own life on Thursday. It was the third such massacre in Finland in about two years, and once again raised questions about gun control in a Nordic country where hunting is popular.

Running the small press section at Powell's in Portland and running my own little press has put me in a position to see a lot of cool stuff from authors before anyone else has even heard of them. 2009 was no exception. Here are the highlights from my own personal reading list...

"Some Things That Meant the World To Me" by Joshua Mohr (novel, Two Dollar Radio)

Mohr takes the loser-guy down-on-his-luck story and turns it on its head. This bizarre story of a guy named Rhonda is like a weird Kafka-Murakami-Bukowski smoothie with a lot of chunky bits.

"A Jello Horse" by Matthew Simmons (novella, Publishing Genius)

An odd little road story, complete with surreal roadside attractions and a melancholy tone that will pleasantly haunt you when it's all over.

Gagaku Meat: The Steve Richmond Story by Mike Daily (biography zine)

This is an engaging and meticulously researched biography (in oversized chapbook form) about the enigmatic California poet (who died a few months after it came out). A wonderfully illustrated and revealing look at one mad dude.

"Everything Was Fine Until Whatever" by Chelsea Martin (stories, art, Future Tense Books)

Ok--so I actually published this one on my press, but it's such a weird little stew of stories, lists, meta-poems, and art that I can't keep my mind off of how brilliant and fresh it all is.

"The Collected Fanzines" by Harmony Korine (Drag City)

Published by the fine folks at Drag City record label, this thick tome includes all of Harmony's pre-famous filmmaker zines. And they're just as weird as his movies.

"Big World" by Mary Miller (short stories, Hobart)

Mary Miller writes likes a fine combo of Ray Carver and A.M. Homes. This is one of those books where you just think: Where the hell did this lady come from?!

"Ever" by Blake Butler (novella, Calamari Press)

Blake Butler published two books on great small presses this year and they're both saturated in their own lunatic worlds. Ever, if my brain translated it correctly, is about a woman trapped inside a house that won't let her out. A tormented and highly stylized wonder of a book.

"Scary No Scary" by Zachary Schomburg (poems, Black Ocean)

Schomburg is possibly the man who will save poetry for all of those readers who are about to give up on the genre. Scary No Scary is both funny and ridiculously original. A playful, mournful, and sometimes sweet collection full of fantastic images and odd dialogue.

"Capacity" by Theo Ellsworth (graphic novel, Secret Acres)

Ellsworth's weird little tales sometimes read like acid trips of the future, complete with lonely robots and unknown creatures. But there's also a nice personal story threading through this. I have no idea why this guy isn't considered a comics God yet. Maybe someday he rightfully will be.

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As the first journalists to enter Kabul in 1981 for CBS News following the expulsion of the Western media the previous year, we continue to be amazed at how the American disinformation campaign between Hollywood, Washington and Wall Street built around the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan lives on. We've seen this pattern from the media again and again. It was disturbing to read Ken Herman's December 18 interview, "Charlie Wilson pessimistic about future of Afghanistan" in the AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN (www.statesman.com/opinion/charlie-wilson-pessimistic-about-future-of-afghanistan-132546.html?printArticle=y) once again filled with CIA disinformation. The secret propaganda campaign was activated before the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan to sell the American people on financing the coming Muslim holy war against the Soviet Union.

Let's separate the child-like fantasy world behind the U.S. support for the Mujihadeen's 1980's campaign from the true effect of Charlie Wilson's War.

FROM THE WILSON INTERVIEW: "the former East Texas congressman -- immortalized in a book and a movie about his exploits that helped the Afghans drive out the Soviet Union."

FACT: Covert funding for the mujahideen began long before the Soviet invasion. This covert aid was intended to lure the Soviets into the Afghan trap and hold them there, not drive them out, as claimed by Charlie Wilson. Both Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Zbigniew Brzezinski - President Carter's national security adviser, have admitted in print (Gates, in his 1997 book, From the Shadows; Brzezinski, 1998 interview in Le Nouvel Observateur, that the U.S. had been secretly undermining its own diplomatic efforts in order to give the Soviets their own Vietnam in Afghanistan. The American press failed to report these revelations from high-ranking government officials as significant news, back then. More recently, Brzezinski's remarks were addressed in an interview with Samira Goetschel for her film, Our Own Private Bin Laden. She asked: "In your 1998 interview with the French Magazine Le Nouvel Observateur you said that you knowingly increased the probability of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan." Brzezinski responded: "The point very simply was this. We knew the Soviets were already conducting operations in Afghanistan. We knew there was opposition in Afghanistan to the progressive effort which had been made by the Soviets to take over. And we felt therefore it made a lot of sense to support those that were resisting. And we decided to do that. Of course this probably convinced the Soviets even more to do what they were planning to do..."

FACT: As we document in our book, "Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story," the record contradicts Brzezinski's assumption that the Soviets would have invaded had it not been for his intentional provocation to lure the Soviet's into the "Afghan trap."

FACT: In 1983, under contract to ABC Nightline, we invited Roger Fisher, director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, to return with us to assess the chances of getting the Soviets to leave Afghanistan. The Kremlin's chief Afghan specialist told Roger, "Give us six months to save face and we'll leave the Afghans to solve their own problems." The Afghan government told us in 1981 that the Soviets would leave when the insurgency attacking from Pakistan and financed by the US and Saudis stopped. Our story was rejected as news by ABC World News Tonight. Then the Soviet request - as explained by Roger on Nightline - was framed in such a way by host Ted Koppel, that it dispelled any notion that there was a chance of a Soviet withdrawal. Neither congress nor the mainstream media followed up on the possibility.

FACT: Charlie Wilson prolonged Afghanistan's agony for another six years by getting congress to substantially increase funding to the insurgency attacking from Pakistan. Wilson's efforts provided a secure multibillion-dollar technological training base for Islamic terrorism, and set the stage for a privatized heroin industry of historic proportions. It's bad enough that a Hollywood film continues to project the propaganda campaign that kept Americans in the dark about America's role in helping terrorism grow in Afghanistan. It is unconscionable for any media to perpetuate the fantasy that Charlie Wilson or the congress wanted the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

FACT: America's mistake in Afghanistan was not "the endgame" problem depicted by "Charlie Wilson's War." The problem was in the conceptual framework created by America's Cold War policy makers in the first place that made Afghanistan the bleeding ground it remains to this day.

FACT: Charlie Wilson's War became the rallying cry for an arms buildup that would end public debate about American foreign policy on Afghanistan. The world was remade with the Soviet folly in Afghanistan, a Communist empire destroyed and the West's pre-eminence assured. But the price in human suffering in Afghanistan and the impact on our democratic freedoms has yet to be understood.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are authors of "Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story," published by City Lights. They can be reached at www.invisiblehistory.com
© Copyright 2009 Gould & Fitzgerald. All rights reserved

Just weeks after canceling Adam Lambert's daytime performances, ABC made history on Wednesday by airing the first-ever gay sex scene on daytime television.

'One Life to Live''s Oliver and Kyle (Scott Evans and Brett Claywell) finally had their onscreen love scene, followed by a tender spooning moment. Evans, who is the younger brother of 'Fantastic Four' actor Chris Evans, is openly gay.

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Just weeks after canceling Adam Lambert's daytime performances, ABC made history on Wednesday by airing the first-ever gay sex scene on daytime television.

'One Life to Live''s Oliver and Kyle (Scott Evans and Brett Claywell) finally had their onscreen love scene, followed by a tender spooning moment. Evans, who is the younger brother of 'Fantastic Four' actor Chris Evans, is openly gay.

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People like to perpetuate the idea of creativity as a result of divine inspiration followed by a burst of manic, late-night work, completed in a garret during a thunderstorm.

In reality, though, it's less about poetics and more about treating the process like any other job -- except that you're both your boss and your employee! A normal "creative workday" follows to give you an idea of just how much self-discipline and regular old elbow-grease your average "artistic" type employs each and every day.

9AM Wake up, feeling proud for not having overslept the alarm again, though, really, there's no real reason to wake up at this time than any other, as there's nowhere I have to be.

9:10 AM Open computer, ready to get down to really creatin'.

9:15 AM Realize the juices of inspiration just aren't going to flow without coffee.

9:25 AM Without breakfast, the caffeine jitters attack my frail, artist's temperament. I decide that making some oatmeal might reverse the effects, but it doesn't work.

9:26-10:15 AM Check celebrity gossip sites while waiting for the caffeine to settle down. This gets filed under the "research" heading, since they may produce handy "pop-culture" references later.

10:15 AM Caffeine has worn off, and now I'm ready to get down to really creatin.'

10:16 AM ...just as soon as these e-mails are dealt with. It's impossible to be focused when thinking about all that e-mail piling up; better to just tackle it now.

11:02 AM Now that I've dispatched those e-mails, and read up about the sale Pier 1 is having on various seasonal lighting, and browsed the suggestions eBay has for me, I'm ready to really get down to some creatin'.

11:03 AM Inspiration fails to strike, lightning-like, from above. In times like this, it's important not to give up, but instead turn to various online news sources for "inspiration."

11:14 AM The photo-slideshow of presidential pets past and present reminds me that it's really time to set up a vet appointment

11:17 AM Come to think of it, the food and litter supplies are running low. Better deal with that now, otherwise the cats are going to start peeing on the furniture again, and after a long day of work my energy and my sense of the urgency of the situation might disappear.

11:25 AM Head out the door to Target, calling the vet on the way there - this is what is known as effective multi-tasking

11:27 AM Without access to my calendar, I am unable to set up an appointment. Will have to call back later today or maybe tomorrow.

11:42 AM Arrive back home, litter and cat food in hand.

11:47 AM God, that litter box really did need changing. The smell is so distracting it's impossible to focus on anything else.

11:53 AM After that bout with the litter box, I really need a shower. Touching my computer would be like begging for delayed diarrhea, or some other debilitating illness, and everyone knows the mind can't function well when the body's in pain.

12:25 PM Cleaned, dressed, and ready to get down to really creatin'!

12:32 PM No wonder nothing's flowing - it's lunch time. Can't work on an empty stomach!

12:36-1:30 PM Though cooking and eating the garden-burger that is a staple of my midday diet only takes me until 12:48, I use the rest of the time to finish the Tivoed episode of Real Housewives that serves as lunchtime fare - building in little breaks like this for oneself is important, and helps maintain motivation!

1:32 PM I should probably tweet something. If you want to stay relevant these days, you have to build up a following on twitter, and keep it.

1:42 PM Why is it so hard to think of something witty and under 140 characters in length?

1:47 PM Resort to tweeting about poop - poop's always comic gold - now I'm ready to really get down to creatin'.

1:49 PM Actually, I should probably deal with the e-mails that have piled up since this morning.

2:16 PM Now that those are cleared up, it's time to really get down to creatin'!

2:23 PM Jot down a few one-line ideas for possible pieces, things like "Germanic fitness instructor as director of historic bus tour of Philly for the elderly?" and "Kathie Lee Gifford + the large hadron collider?"

2:25 PM Strenuous work like this deserves a little reward. Head out for a coffee and a little window-shopping.

3:26 PM Arrive back home. Attempt to work previous ideas into a coherent piece.

3:32 PM It would be much easier to concentrate on things if this room weren't so messy.

3:48 PM Having tidied up the living room, realize that the kitchen sink really needs scrubbing.

4:02 PM Finally, with a clean work area I can focus on really doing some creatin'.

4:36 PM Come up with brilliant bit of dialogue between two LHC scientists, who want to shoot Kathie Lee Gifford into a wall and see if dark matter erupts.

4:48 PM Fiddle around wikipedia, fan sites, and gossip sites, because before I proceed any further, I want to make sure that I can really get Kathie Lee right.

5 PM Save and close all work - after all, the most important thing to remember is to make sure you still separate out some time for yourself. And of course tomorrow, what with all that I managed to get done over the course of the day, I'll be ready to get right down to more creatin'.

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Vengeance - experienced vicariously via movies or TV - is one of the purest kinds of emotional satisfaction. And the revenge flick has had something of a renaissance recently, as Stanley Fish notes in this blog post, citing Liam Neeson's memorably-delivered statement from "Taken" as a road map for the entire genre: "If you're looking for ransom, I don't have any money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career, skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that will be the end of it I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you. I will find you. And I will kill you."

If you saw the movie, or even if you didn't, you know that's exactly what he does. And the quest to save the daughter and get the bad guy's scalp unfolds with a number of plot flourishes - torture, Arab sheikhs collecting American virgins, corrupt French bureaucrats - that make it appear that Dick Cheney was hired on as an uncredited script-doctor.

Revenge fantasies are durable, reliable entertainments because they allow us to experience actions that aren't allowed in real life, and that most of us wouldn't truly want to experience even if given the chance. That would be fine if we were just talking about pop culture. But during the 2000s, the revenge fantasy escaped the realm of fiction. It came to dominate our politics and - for a while - overturned centuries of established U.S. policy and tradition toward prisoners.

Call it the Jack Bauer Decade: a strange, hopefully anomalous phase of American history, and one that America has yet to grapple with fully.

When Cheney declared that it would be necessary to go to the "dark side" following 9/11, I doubt many people disagreed with him in the abstract. I didn't. And it remained conveniently abstract for long time, thanks to the veil of secrecy around it. We found out much later that the "dark side" meant torture, secret prisons, the suspension of due process, and a notion of judicially unassailable presidential power. I don't want to rehash the question about whether "torture works" - whether it produces more useful intelligence or stops terrorist attacks more effectively than traditional methods. Suffice it to say that the efficacy of the dark side is at best debatable, the debate about it is almost never substantive, and its downside is considerable.

What gave the "dark side" political force has nothing to do with its function as government policy. The allure of taking the gloves off is in setting aside and repudiating government policy - as well as broader ethical and moral constraints. Jack Bauer operates outside the rules because the rules themselves are a point of vulnerability that put us in danger. There is a kind of nihilism about government and democracy itself lurking just beneath the political discussion of these issues.

We heard versions of this again and again during the Aughts. Terrorists deserved what they got. Anything could be justified if it kept us safe. Jack Bauer became a hero to the Right, and (as detailed in books by Philippe Sands and Jane Mayer) to people actually devising detention and interrogation policy within the Bush administration. Now, 24 is an excellent TV suspense/action drama and Jack Bauer is one of the all-time great TV characters. The show's plotlines, however preposterous, capture something about our collective state of mind. But the emotional satisfactions of the four-act teleplay are not a substitute for serious thinking about complex problems. And TV suspense/action dramas - especially those whose principal plot device is government-as-useless-hindrance - are not good foundations for effective government action in any arena. Least of all national security.

Let your agents go all Jack Bauer and they might kill a few terrorists. But there's going to be excesses, collateral damage, disastrous mistakes. And no accountability. In the movies or TV, such inconvenient fallout is airbrushed out. Not in real life. Conservatives take note: that's how bureaucracies work.

If you watch 24 with any regularity, you'll see it's not all black-and-white, that Jack Bauer inhabits a semi-complex moral universe. Systems of justice and ethical conduct remain in place. Jack is the one guy who is capable of transgressing any legal, moral or ethical rule to save America from terrorists, mysterious plutocrats, or whomever. But he pays a terrible personal price for it. Moreover, he is willing to face the consequences - trial, prison, torture at the hands of the Chinese, interrogation by pompous liberal senators - for his actions. From the torture memos to the "ticking time bomb" scenario, the political debate about torture and other "dark side" practices has been about eliminating those consequences, making the dark side not the exception but the norm.

Even with a new president who says he wants to follow tradition and the rule of law, the Jack Bauer Decade won't end with the Aughts. (Who knows - maybe we're looking at the Jack Bauer Century.) There are too many unresolved legal and political issues. And as long as terrorists are trying to blow up planes with their underpants, the American political debate will skew towards the emotional popcorn of 24, ticking time bombs and Liam Neeson's "particular set of skills."

This post appeared originally on my True/Slant blog.

More on Terrorism

He reportedly killed his ex-wife in a nearby apartment before the attack on shoppers. A body believed to be the attacker is found later.

A gunman clad in black went on a shooting rampage today at a suburban shopping mall near the Finnish capital of Helsinki, killing four people, police and witnesses said.