When we talk about pop cosmopolitanism, we are most often talking
about American teens doing cosplay or listening to K‑Pop albums, not
church ladies gathering to pray for the success of a British reality
television contestant, but it is all part of the same process. We are
reaching across borders in search of content, zones which were used to
organize the distribution of content in the Broadcast era, but which
are much more fluid in an age of participatory culture and social
networks.

We live in a world where content can be accessed quickly from any
part of the world assuming it somehow reaches our radar and where the
collective intelligence of the participatory culture can identify
content and spread the word rapidly when needed. Susan Boyle in that
sense is a sign of bigger things to come — content which wasn’t
designed for our market, content which wasn’t timed for such rapid
global circulation, gaining much greater visibility than ever before
and networks and production companies having trouble keeping up with
the rapidly escalating demand.

Susan Boyle’s video was produced for a U.K.-only show but social media has allowed us to share it across that border. In the Convergent Friends movement, we’re discovering “content which wasn’t designed for our market”–Friends of all different stripes having direct access to the work and thoughts of other types of Friends, which we are able to sort through and spread almost immediately. In this context, the “networks and productions companies” would be our yearly meetings and larger Friends bodies.

Memo to Bush: Hussein did let them in (they were there when U.S. troop buildup started in the Mideast). Over the last few weeks the Bush Administration has had a lot of trouble keeping its alibis straight but now the President himself is just being out of touch with reality. (This is starting to feel like the glory days of the Reagan Administration.) He continues to bully reality out of the way, despite the exposure of forgeries and the non-discovery of weapons of mass destruction:

“I think the intelligence I get is darn good intelligence. And the speeches I have given were backed by good intelligence. And I am absolutely convinced today, like I was convinced when I gave the speeches, that Saddam Hussein developed a program of weapons of mass destruction, and that our country made the right decision.”

But wait. The President also defends CIA director Tenet who gave him bad information. So Tenet covered Bush’s bottom and now Bush is covering Tenet’s so now we can move on. How convenient.

In a TV studio a few blocks away Donald Rumsfeld has the balls to continue defending the inclusion of the obvious forgery in the State of the Union address. On a political talk show, he said the Niger uranium claim was “technically correct” since the President just said British Intelligence thought it was true. Of course, the Brits have said they said it because American intelligence had told them it was true. Again, how convenient. I almost expect someone to say the inclusion of the forgery was okay because the President had his fingers crossed behind his back as he read that part of the speech.

I think we could go too far in the who-said-what department with this speech. It was one speech, granted the most important of the year, but still the big issue is that Bush repeatedly fed the American people dubious claims about Iraq’s programs to build weapons of mass destruction. Whenever a reporter asked a hard question about these claims, the Bush Administration essentially told us there was more intelligence that they couldn’t share and that we should all trust them. Well it’s turned out the Administration was wrong. This is a colossal failure and this is the big scandal of the Bush Administration and the biggest source of shame for the American and British peoples.