In this issue:

Government communications:
It's still 1984, 20 years later
President Bush's response to the report of the 9/11 Commission illustrates something that George Orwell wrote about in 1984.

Movie review
The Stepford Wives chickens out
It could have been a great satire, if the studio weren't so concerned about being politically correct.

Communication delivery
Mail weirdness
Sure, the mail is a topic that fits under "communication." When you rely on the post office, you're sensitive to its mistakes. This one really makes you wonder.

Latest samples:
The color management chain
Color management gets automated.
Electronic Publishing, June, 2004

Out-of-the-box software fits
Microsoft's customer relationship management software works for this global electronics supplier.
MSI, July, 2004

Government communications

It's still 1984, 20 years later

The "9/11 Commission" in the U.S. released its final report on July 22, saying that the American Administration was unprepared for the attacks, blaming leaders for a "failure of imagination" to believe the terrorist threat was real.

The commission recommended setting up an "intelligence czar" and a single intelligence centre to oversee more than 12 different U.S. intelligence-gathering bodies.

According to MSNBC, the U.S. government has spent more than $12 million and produced nearly 2,000 pages in reports into what went wrong that allowed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 to happen.

Even before the official release of the report, President Dubya Bush was ready with his response: "There is still a threat and we in government have an obligation to do everything in our power to safeguard the American people," Bush said.

Back in April, before another, Congressional committee looking into September 11, the President's National Security Advisor, Dr. Condoleeza Rice, said "since [September 11, 2001], America has been at war and under President Bush's leadership, we will remain at war until the terrorist threat to our nation has ended..."

Last spring, this newsletter cited the Orwellian aspects of the Bush Administration's behaviour, as seen in the pursuit of the war in Iraq and its manufacturing of "fake news." Now we see another Big Brother tactic: the need to always be at war, to always have a major, very dangerous enemy, in order to stay in power.

Let's add this up: the U.S. was unprepared for terrorist attacks, and its response is to go to a permanent war footing until all enemies are eliminated, as well as to set up yet another intelligence bureaucracy.

How 1984 is that?

9/11 commission Chairman Thomas Kean (left) and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton (right) present their report to President Bush in the White House Rose Garden: "It must be five hundred pages thick."

(picture courtesy MSNBC/Reuters)

Stepford Wives chickens out

The Stepford Wives
Released 2004 by Paramount Pictures
Directed by Frank Oz
Starring Nicole Kidman and Matthew Broderick
With Glenn Close, uber-weirdo Christopher Walken, Bette Midler, Jon Lovitt and Faith Hill 

It started with a promise of a gleeful skewering of the middle-class suburban values and myths that our society inherited from the 1950s of middle-America.

The opening credits rolled alongside colourized advertisements from the manufacturers of new electrical household appliances made during what seems to be the 1950s: women in postwar hairdos, dancing around increasingly preposterous-looking electrical ovens, ranges, washing machines and entire roll-away kitchens. I couldn't stop thinking of a t-shirt friends of mine wore in high school in the 70s: "Live better…electrically!"

Given that the premise of the movie was already well-known through the previous version and the novel, I expected a complete and hilarious satire on what those values and ideas represented, both in postwar era and today.

I was disappointed: the movie started with such promise and chickened out, providing a completely predictable (in thematic terms), Hollywood happy ending.

The story is itself a bit of a cliché: men in an idealized suburb (idealized from a very narrow perspective) replace their human wives with human-form robots who obey their every command. The men pursue lives of boyish fantasies, playing with toy cars - in this version, no one seems to have to go to work. The robot-wives are deliriously happy with cleaning their houses and cooking.

This is the point where the movie could have gotten into some brilliant satire. It starts with a hilarious send-up of current reality TV, a show called I Can Do Better, in which a homely middle-American couple tries to resist seduction by prostitutes.

But it quickly shows its limitations. The film doesn't have the guts to carry through this kind of satire. It's too politically correct, first: women are powerful, successful careerists, gays are fashionably accepted into all parts of society - everything that America would like to believe about itself is presented as true.

And everyone is just too rich. Hollywood has always over-estimated the wealth and earning power of the average American family. Ever since the invention of television (and probably before that, too), Hollywood's stories have presented the upper edge of the professional middle class as the typical household: Dad drives his expensive car to the train station parking lot on his way to his job at a big corporation; Mom looks after the two or three kids, plus dog, in their four-bedroom colonial mansion. It’s a cliché that's so much a part of TV fare that we scarcely notice anymore how absurd it is, and how far from reality. (The fact that so many of us believe it is reality for most people, and beat ourselves up for not achieving it, is a real problem, but the topic for another newsletter.)

Stepford Wives' director Frank Oz takes this trend to a whole new dimension. The main characters aren't just upper-middle class: the Eberharts are very, very rich. Joanna, played by Hollywood's reigning anorexia queen, Nicole Kidman, isn't just a superwoman of the 90s, combining glamourous career and parenthood - she's the president of a television network. And their house isn't just enough to make us all jealous, it's a palace so much greater than 99.99 percent of the North American population will ever even see firsthand, that it lies completely beyond the range of our envy and leaves us completely cold.

The movie has some funny moments. There is some pure slapstick, such as when one of the robots malfunctions and we see Faith Hill spinning at hyperspeed with sparks flying out of her head, or walking, robot-like, backwards up a flight of stairs. But it goes too far when she spits out cash like a walking ATM.

But after that, the movie's message gets watered down. It could have been great: it starts out satirizing the suburban ideals of the 1950s, and it could have taken a few more stabs at current ideals of women who have it all - careers, partners, families, homes. There is a tepid attempt at comparing the Eisenhower-era sun dress uniforms of the robot-women with the urban careerists' insistence on wearing black. Both are social uniforms, but the movie shies away from that point. At another point, Bette Midler's character (a two-dimensional, funny Jewish writer) wonders why there are no African-Americans or Native Americans in Stepford. But apparently director Frank Oz felt that with a token Jewish family and token gay couple, the town was diverse enough.
Want to make it really satirical, or really scary? Have at least one of the Stepford wives say that she prefers her mindless state. That would reflect the thinking of a portion of North American society, the people who idealize the one income-earner family, the submissive female, the Leave it to Beaver mentality. They're out there -they're the ones who are continually crying that current family reality is destroying the family.

After all, what makes evil so dangerous is that it can appear so attractive.

Christopher Walken plays the uber-weirdo, as usual.

Nicole Kidman proves yet again that yes, she can get thinner. And what kind of work has she had done around her eyes?

(Movie photos courtesy and © copyright Paramount Pictures)

Delivery of communications

The mystery of the wide-wandering letter

Here’s a weird one for you: If you rely on the post office for anything, you will identify with this tale.

One long-time client based in New Hampshire occasionally makes a mistake with my postal code. Last January, I was awaiting a cheque; after 6 weeks or so, I asked the accounting people if they had sent it. They assured me they had, and read off the address, and I saw what had gone wrong: they had used “D2M” instead of “K2M” in the postal code. No big deal, I thought; they cancelled that cheque, corrected my address in their database and sent another cheque, which arrived in a reasonable time.

Then on July 2 - six months later - the original cheque arrived in my mailbox. The problem was bigger than I had imagined: not only was the postal code incorrect, but the last line of the address read “Congo, Democratic Republic of.” There was also a rubber stamp-mark from the Netherlands post office.

Somehow, the accounting office (yes, it was them, don't blame the mail room) typed "Congo" as the address, instead of "Canada." How much more wrong can you get?

I wonder if there's a Kanata in Congo?

How wrong can you make an address?

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