Missing persons

Before I went to sleep, I remembered what I forgot.

With all this worry about terrorist attacks, the French language and Super Bowl ads, I forgot that tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians will be killed or displaced when the war begins.

As you can imagine, it’ll be a humanitarian disaster. However, I found a couple groups that look like they will be there to try to ease the pain. If you have a couple extra bucks, consider passing it their way.

*UNICEF

*World Food Program

The grass is always greener…

There’s a bit of a brouhaha going on right now in the ol’ Letters to the Editor department. If you haven’t heard of “Astrotrufing” you soon will. Apparently, some GOP voters have banded together to start writing letters to newspapers supporting Bush’s policies. They use the same key phrases in each letter, trying to drive a point home, and they blanket newspapers all over the country with the same type of letter, whether it be on the economy or Iraq or Bush’s leadership.

Democrats out on the Web are pissed, viewing the move as an dirty little campaign, a low-scale PsyOp trick to get pro-Bush letters into the Letters to the Editor section of the paper.

You can get a Democrat-centric rundown of all the action up to now here. I picked this site because it represents a good example of the Democratic hue and cry over the astroturfing that's been cropping up lately.

With that, I have just one question for the anti-astroturf squad out there.

Aside the political partisanship, what's the difference between what I do through Amnesty International and what someone does when they get a template to write on behalf of something they believe in?

Amnesty International, the Nobel Prize-winning human-rights group, asks members to write letters to foreign leaders to release prisoners of conscience (opposition group leaders, writers, ordinary folks in the wrong place at the wrong time). To help you out, Amnesty gives you a name, an address, some general background on the prisoner, and tips how to address the letter. If you need more help, Amnesty even gives you a guide. There you go.

A template. A group effort. An organization with an agenda. Sound familiar?

How is astroturfing different from letter campaigns to save doomed TV shows? Or the whales? How is this different from MoveOn.org sending me an e-mail to contact my Senators on something related to the coming Iraq war?

Okay, one more practical reason to give the anti-astroturfers the hairy eyeball: When you get to the heart of it, it’s pretty rude for them to ride in on their high horse, telling opinion page editors how to run their letters section, especially when a lot of anti-war letters are starting to appear. You can’t have it both ways. What they want to have happen, stopping astroturf, smacks a bit of vigilante censorship covered with a dollop of self-righteousness.

That thinking offends me because I used to be an opinion page editor, and let me tell you, you start flushing letters based on certain political affiliations and I recommend buying a good umbrella for all the shit that's about to come your way. The astroturfed letters you are getting may be canned like cat food, but if it’s coming from your local readership, you better run it. As for the out-of-town stuff, decent editors can weed it out until they are desperate to fill space. Editors are also clever with balancing acts, running a couple pro-Bush letters with anti-Bush ones. Opinion page editors are usually tapped into the community…give them a break, or the benefit of the doubt.

Plus when you think about it, the whole thing reeks of a trap. Run the letters and you get crap from Democrat readers. Don’t, and the public finds out, and you get hammered with the “liberal media” tag. Oh, well. That’s democracy in action, people.

So, I don’t care. Write your letter, pick your side, work in teams to create those memes (hey, I like that). Again, it’s termite activism, trying to find a new way around an old medium. In the meantime, let the editors do their job.

Today’s Word: Butterfly.

From One Word, again…dodgy grammar. *Sigh*

Wow. Okay. I see that woman who sat in a tree for a couple years to make sure the tree wouldn’t be removed by loggers. I see an insect at the pinnacle of its life cycle, radiant with color and chaotic agility. It’s a metaphor for that lies beneath, what you can become. So there’s your amateur psychology for today, kids.