An American Ex-Pat in... America.

‘Twas nine years after  the September 11th attack,
But the faultlines revealed by that trauma are back.
Where once, we were a nation that mourned for its heroes,
We’re now mired in debate about a mosque at Ground Zero.

The arguments are broken down broadly in three:
The first, Let them build it! It’s called “liberty!”
Next, Why put a mosque here? Muslims only want strife!
The past simply proves they hate our way of life!
Third’s, We respect Muslims, but in this neighborhood,
 (Like the Catholic church at Auschwitz,)
“Can” doesn’t mean “should.”

The issue was local to New York’s downtown
Now, politicians are batting it  here, there and around.
(It’s not even a mosque, its supporters have cried –
But a community center, a 92nd Street Y!)
For many, it seems a mere ploy for attention  -
A problem to exploit for the November election.

On Bloomberg! On Gingrich! On blogosphere, too!
On Obama, who flip-flopped – so disappointingly new!
On Fox News, on Stewart and the guys who work late!
Sarah Palin on Twitter:  You must  “refudiate!”

We’re still at a loss of what we should do
To distinguish the many from the terrible few.
The question is, Muslims – what role do they play?
A position familiar to Jews, Blacks and gays.

Most gleefully watching it get out of hand
Is Osama Bin Laden, in – my guess – Pakistan.
Nearly a decade has gone and we’re still prey to his vices
His hatred -  plus fear  - shape our identity crisis. 
 (Life’s no better for Muslims – but  that was never his plan.
‘Twas just megalomania by a very warped man.)

But it’s not just Osama - the world’s watching us fight.
They have to. We’re the superpower(!)  - which uses its might
For leadership, that’s frankly both brilliant  - and dumb.
And they’re looking for signs of the US to come,
With our glorious paradox of rule by majority -
Who’d fight to the death for the rights of minorities!

So let’s take a moment to consider the cost
Of all this tense vitriol on the Ground Zero mosque.
I’m not casting a verdict on who’s right and who’s wrong,
But I mean this sincerely: Can’t we all just get along?

The media pages have been alive in recent months with prognostications about the impending death of CNN, and multiple diagnoses about what’s causing its demise.

Most recently, Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff critiqued the leadership, or lack thereof, by the head of CNN/US, Jon Klein - and his efforts to shake-up CNN’s primetime line-up as both symptom and treatment of the illness.

Others, including Politico and the New York Times’ Ross Douthat, have insisted that because of its impartial editorial line, CNN is losing viewers to the left leaning MSNBC or the right leaning Fox. In Politico’s words, CNN needs to “get more personality.”

Douthat insists that CNN should bring back Crossfire, the debate program which allegedly fell at the hands of Jon Stewart, because viewers like to watch on-air slugfests.

The real diagnosis, however, may be deceptively simple. The sad truth is, CNN no longer reports the news. It merely does “lives” — an endless stream of anchors or talking-heads, blathering on about the subject du jour.

A 24-hour news channel, you see, is a good thing. Live news, more often than not, just blows.

When I first started looking at the CNN death knells, in April, I spent a day watching coverage of the coal mining disaster in Montcoal, West Virginia, in which there was an on-going search for four trapped miners after a blast killed 25 of their colleagues. (Sadly, all four were eventually found dead.)

CNN’s coverage consisted of live feeds from press conferences; lots of satellite interviews with talking-heads related to the mining industry; the occasional live question-and-answer with a correspondent, standing in a field in West Virginia.

I counted exactly one news package. (And it was a very low-rent one with wallpaper images cobbled together from feeds from local broadcasters, with no reporter on the scene.)

Where was the reporting?

In days of yore, say, the mid 00’s and the 90’s, CNN would send one of its correspondents — let’s say Christiane Amanpour — with a cameraman and perhaps a producer into a situation, to film events, do interviews and develop visual sequences with people informed about the situation at hand. She would write a script and shoot a piece to camera - placing herself on the scene and elucidating more about the situation. The team would feed an edited “news package” — a story — home, to be broadcast.

But where were CNN’s news packages on how coal mining communities are coping in a world that’s meant to be evolving toward alternative energy? Where’s the news package from another mine that shows what a day in the life of a miner is like? Where is the news package about the community pulling together to support one another, or help coming in from other towns?

I’m sorry, but talking heads, Google Earth and computer graphics of mining techniques just don’t do it for me. And that’s pretty much what CNN’s live coverage consisted of.

“Live” can also be blamed for the wholesale decline in the caliber of the discussion.

Most of us remember when Captain “Sully” Sullenberger landed the US Airways jet on the Hudson — for a certain amount of time, that was extraordinary live news — something CNN does well.

Then it devolved. As the coverage dragged on, Wolf Blitzer was saying things like, “Of course in an plane crash, you shouldn’t stop to get your things from the overheard compartment…. Let’s turn now to Person-at-the-Scene.”

Person-at-the-Scene: “What’s important to remember in an emergency is not to get your things from the overhead compartment… Now let’s turn to Air-Disaster Analyst So-and-So” - who repeats the same line about overhead compar — enough already!

It seems pretty obvious that when you have to spend hour after hour filling up live air, then the quality of the information and analysis you’re going to impart is going to become ever more trivial.

And — paging Jon Klein and Michael Wolff — when CNN’s regular news-programming consists, at times, of anchors reading Twitter out loud, should network execs really be so surprised that no one is tuning in to primetime?

The problem is that the news package I mentioned earlier — the one from the mine, reported, perhaps, by Christiane Amanpour? That would take all day to shoot and edit, and it’d come to a total of about 2-3 minutes of material. Tops. It’s expensive — far more expensive than having a talking-head babble on camera for the same amount of time.

With her defection from CNN to the Sunday morning circuit for ABC, Christiane Amanpour, I would wager, saw the writing on the wall. The veteran of Bosnia, Somalia, Israel/Palestine, Iran, Rwanda (among other places) would have been able to clearly see that CNN is no longer a place for a correspondent who wants to report news. (And now, rumors abound that Anderson Cooper also has one foot out the door.)

Yes, CNN appears to be dying. But the cure is not to be found in bringing back Crossfire, nor in developing an editorial bias, nor in finding someone provocative enough to drag viewers back to primetime.

The cure lies in blowing off live news coverage — in order to report the news.

(An earlier version of this piece appeared on TrueSlant. )

The stars must be aligned strangely in the heavens this week, because it’s the stars who are dominating foreign policy news. Stars - or at least some celebrities and a super-model.

But it’s not a pretty sight.

Naomi Campbell has been compelled to testify at the Special Court for Sierra Leone at the Hague. Prosecutors hope to link alleged war-criminal and former Liberian President Charles Taylor with the illegal diamond trade - by literally tracing the path of illicit gems from his commanders’ hands into those of a manicured model.

While Campbell testified that she didn’t know the “dirty” and unimpressive un-cut diamonds she received in the dead of night after a 1997 dinner party hosted by Nelson Mandela were from Charles Taylor - others disagree.

This includes her former agent, Carole White and fellow dinner-party guest Mia Farrow, who testified that Campbell was “mildly flirtatious” with Charles Taylor - and spent the night text-messaging about, and giddily awaiting, delivery of the stones from his underlings - whom prosecutors allege were rebel commanders.

Campbell says she “planned” to give the diamonds to the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, which the dinner was intended to benefit.

But how can we be sure?

Subpoena the housekeeper, I say! In 2006, Campbell was arrested for throwing a “jewel encrusted” cellphone at her housekeeper. Only the housekeeper can confirm if the gash on her head requiring stitches was caused by diamonds. And if they weren’t blood diamonds before, they sure as hell were after!

And while we’re at it, what was up with that guest list, Nelson Mandela? You invited former Liberian President Charles Taylor - war criminal - to a dinner, intended to benefit your Children’s Fund? What was that about?

As a rebel leader, Charles Taylor was renowned for the recruitment of child soldiers and the wholesale slaughter of civilians in Liberia’s civil war, which had spilled into neighboring Sierra Leone - for control of the diamond trade - in 1991.

So really, the dinner was about selling out Sierra Leonean kids for South African ones?

You, sir, got out of jail in early 1990. I know you had a country to fix - but virtually the entire time since you were released from prison - up to and beyond that 1997 dinner party - Charles Taylor was a murderous thug. No excuse for not knowing!

As for Mia Farrow? Well, we’ll let that one slide.

On the other side of the world, pop-star Wyclef Jean from “The Fugees” has announced his candidacy for the presidency of Haiti - for which his only qualifications appear to be that he’s written a song called “If I Was President” - in which he predicts his own assassination.

If I was President, I’d get elected on Friday, Assassinated on Saturday, Buried on Sunday, Then go back to work on Monday.

At least that’s a more lyrical refrain than, “If I was president, I’d compel donors to follow through on pledges of $5.3 billion in funds following the January earthquake, not only to rebuild shattered physical infrastructure, but to revitalize a government that was so riven by factional fighting that it required the presence of UN peacekeepers for the last 16 years in an effort to stop gang-warfare, glutinous corruption, and the wholesale destruction of the environment; while enacting a series of effective policy initiatives to alleviate poverty, stimulate the economy and push for the lifting of restrictions with trading partners like the US - saving Haiti from continued existence as a failed state and the poorest in the Western hemisphere.”

(Or how about: If I was president, I’d learn the subjunctive.)

Now, that’s a tall order for anyone - even Bill Clinton, the UN’s special envoy. And another self-appointed savior of Haiti, actor Sean Penn, and fellow “Fugee” Prakazrel Michel, don’t think Wyclef’s got it in him.

Psssst! They’re not alone.

Bizarrely enough, “If I Was President” includes a warning that “it’s not all that’s bling that’s diamond/ Most of y’all wear cubic zirconia.”

Maybe that’s a hidden lesson for Naomi Campbell. As those “dirty stones” suggest, it’s not all that’s diamond that’s bling. And she probably should have stuck to cubic zirconia - it doesn’t land you in the Hague.

A trove of more than 90 thousand documents released by the self-proclaimed whistle-blower WikiLeaks offers a grim picture of the latest US foray into the Middle East – one that senior White House officials knew would likely end in failure:  Sex and the City 2.

The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from June 1998 through May 2010 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the successful 2004 completion of the popular television series, producers refused to give up on the Sex and the City franchise even while opposition to it increased exponentially with the 2008 release of the first Sex and the City movie.

Sex and the City 2, released in May 2010, brings to the screen the now familiar gal-pals, Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda, who are flown on an all-expenses paid trip to Abu Dhabi by an Arab sheikh.  Culture clashes ensue.

“Frankly, since the movie was already a critical failure back in May, we thought we dodged a bullet,” said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the subject. “The fact that WikiLeaks released these documents means someone simply wants to embarrass Warner Brothers, HBO, and the White House.”

The reports — some spare summaries and others more detailed narratives — shed light on some elements of the Sex and the  City 2 production that pointed toward almost certain failure:

• Grossly oversimplified stereotypes would be inflicted upon civilians not just in US movie theaters, but around the world.

“The bitch, the slut, the princess, and the everywoman – forming a circle of friendship unlikely to sustain itself in real life -– these are stereotypes that might have had some traction in the late 90’s, but are long since past their sell-by date,” said one report.

• Those stereotypes would only be amplified in a Middle Eastern setting.

“Of course they have to ride camels,” said one classified document.  “Of course most Muslim men are portrayed as thugs, while Muslim women are all simply closeted Manhattanites.”

• Obscene displays of conspicuous consumption far outweighed concerns related to narrative flow, plot development and character growth.

“This is what happens when power is taken out of the hands of the American movie-goer and put into the hands of those who benefit from product placement,” said another secret document.   “It’s the rise of the fashion-industrial complex.”

The hugely popular Sex and the City television series starred Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis and Kim Cattrall -  all hailed for their portrayals of modern women in a post-feminist landscape.

The series, which ran from 1998 until 2004, was nominated for 50 Emmy awards, winning seven times.   The Sex and the City movie, released in 2008 – and focusing on the married lives of the characters -  faced lackluster reviews.

While not directly involved in the production of Sex and the City 2, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says President Obama “is owning up to the responsibility” of what the US “foisted” upon its allies, the emirate of Abu Dhabi (UAE), where major segments of the film are set, and Morocco – where the movie was actually shot.

“These documents simply highlight what the President has been saying since the campaign,” Mr. Gibbs said in a White House briefing. “Not every superhero, not every theme park ride, and not every tv series needs to be made into a film  – or a sequel.”