You may not have noticed, but judging from the news coverage the presidential race is over.

I know, you thought there was going to be an election of some sort in 2008. And, barring some reason to cancel it trumped up by Dick Cheney, there will be. But as someone who reads the way the mainstream media is covering this, I’m not sure why we’re going to go through all that. Because apparently Hillary Clinton has already won. She’s pulled ahead in the Iowa poll, and that has put an end to it all. And the other day, Newsweak’s Howard Fineman started picking her running mate, three months before the first primary and a full 11 months before the general election.

Hillary has won not only the primary, but also the general election. That’s because the GOP can’t find a good candidate, the bubble speak goes, because the leading candidate (Giuliani) can’t win.

All of this is disgusting.

It’s disgusting to believe what they would have you believe: that a handful of people in Iowa are truly going to select the next president. If I were in Iowa, at this point I would seek out the candidate furthest from the top of the polls and do everything I could to get that person a higher perch — just to knock the conventional wisdom and give some more time to the process. Front-runner Mike Gravel, anyone? God knows I’ve enjoyed his videos.

More than that, it’s disgusting to watch what has happened to political coverage in the past 30 years. Note to the media: It isn’t a horse race, and it isn’t The World Series of Poker, which ESPN is allowed to cover in this way. It’s about the next four to eight years of this country — and a lot of other countries. It’s about things like effective response to terrorism, and balancing a budget, and protecting resources, and leaving a better world than you found.

Why is it being covered like a horse race? Because announcers need sporting events to make their living.

I’m not especially predisposed against Hillary Clinton, although I don’t think she has a depth of qualification for this position. (The current inhabit did, to some degree, as governor of a large state — and look how that turned out.) But I don’t think the 2008 election is settled, no matter what seemingly every single bit of news would have me think. And I think it’s a more serious matter than their coverage reflects.

Anyone who has seen the Beckett play “Act Without Words” (“Actes sans saroles”) will find this battle between an animation and its “off-stage” animator and his tools thematically similar. There are no new ideas, only new mediums for expression.

(If the embed doesn’t work for you, click on the link at the bottom.)

Animator vs. Animation by *alanbecker on deviantART

Fair warning, this event that I’m emceeing is approaching sold-out status.

It’s your choice to hang out with not just a witty syndicated radio comedienne who happens to be running for vice-president, but also a major scribe for “Superman” who’s running for Congress. True Renaissance people, both of them!

You have been invited. And warned.

One of the recurring, albeit underlying, themes in my plays is the examination of human behavior: Can people change? Because we are animals, must we at root behave like animals? Are we to some degree naturally moralistic, or are these  morals constructs created by us to civilize behavior? I don’t usually set out to write about these things. Usually I set out to write about people in conflict in some way, or sometimes (rarely) I have a beginning notion or perhaps some latest outrage in the news gets my juices flowing, but often this central question of “what does it mean at core to be human” comes up.

I was reminded of this again the other day when I got an email from a friend who had seen my play “Next Time” in Fullerton on an evening I happened to be there. (And, if she’s reading this, I apologize for not responding yet to the email. But I will.) Among other things, she said she was glad to see another one of my plays that deals with ethics. I hadn’t realized this was another of my plays that deals with ethics, so to speak, but upon reflection I’ve realized she’s right; at one point the protagonist’s inner self (and, therefore, himself) questions all the behavioral systems he’s set up, pointing out that there’s no proof that anyone or anything else exists. (That point of view, it occurs to me as I’m writing this, is the perspective of a sociopath; I’ve written a few of them, too.) In my play “Animals,” a character named Social Realist gives us a tour of mankind’s base brutality through the prism of four interconnected lives (a man, a woman, a “Bad Friend” who may have had an affair with the man, and a contract killer), as well as his own experience when young of seeing a dog eat all her own pups.

Given my subconscious interest in this topic, this news story jumped off the web at me. In essence, according to this research as reported in the current issue of Science, humankind is more ethical and less self-interested than its closest cousin, the chimpanzee.

Key finding #1:

Economists used to say that people are self-interested and rational, maximizing whatever payday is within reach. But recent studies have blown that idea to smithereens. When people are given the choice of accepting or rejecting the split of some spoils that a partner offers—say, how to divide the $10 that researchers have given them in an experiment—they reject offers perceived as unfair. So if you offer me $2 and propose to keep $8 for yourself, I’ll walk away and leave us each with nothing—stupid, considering that I’m rejecting $2 in free money, but consistent with the emerging idea that humans have a strong, evolved sense of fairness that trumps immediate self-interest. Something like this probably underlies people’s tendency to punish cheaters, free-riders and noncooperators. The game has been played uncounted times in labs, and the basic finding is that proposers typically offer 40 to 50 percent of the pot, and responders walk away from any offer less than 20 percent.

I find this true in my own life, as I’m sure you do. Today we had some work done at our office by a professional firm and, before leaving, their workers subtly shared with my business partner that if we ever needed more work of the same sort done these guys would gladly come without telling their employers and charge us less. When I heard this, I was outraged. Not only are they moonlighting as direct competitors to the people who employ them, they’re doing it within their employers’ customer base. That’s doubly, or triply, cheating. Is it in my self-interest to be outraged? No, because the value proposition they offered would save us money. Nevertheless, I would never call these guys privately to come work for me, and I’m thinking about how to anonymously alert their employers.

Evidently, chimps see this sort of thing differently:

In a study being reported today in Science, researchers had 11 chimpanzees at the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center in Germany play this “ultimatum” game. One chimp, the “proposer,” sat beside the “responder.” The proposer pulled out a tray as far as he could. The tray held two dishes with raisins, separated by a see-through divider: one for the proposer and the other for the responder. The proposers first chose which tray to pull out; if the responder liked what he saw—and he could see how many raisins he and the proposer would each get, by seeing how many raisins were on each side of the divider—he accepted the offer by pulling the tray the rest of the way out. Both chimps would then chow down. If the responder did not like the offer, he refused to pull the tray the rest of the way out, and neither chimp got a snack.

If the dishes held the same number of raisins, the responder chimp almost always accepted a 50-50 offer and rejected a 100-0 offer. Unlike people, though, they rarely rejected 80-20 offers—only 5 to 14 percent of the time. And unlike people, who fume when confronted with unfair offers, the chimps almost never took umbrage, throwing a tantrum at an unfair offer a mere 2 percent of the time.

There has long been a debate over whether chimps are able to sense fairness, much less tolerate unfairness. These results suggest that chimps behave “according to traditional economic models of self-interest, unlike humans, and that this species does not share the human sensitivity to fairness,” the scientists write. As scientists find fewer and fewer fundamental human traits to be unique (see the previous post on tool-using animals), at least we can keep hold of this one.

There are two lessons for me in all this:

1. I guess there’s more hope for humankind after all, because chimp wars are truly vicious and the issue of fairness never intrudes.
2. Economists think people act like chimps (but we don’t). Now I better understand the origin of Reaganomics and its present-day ilk.

Ricky Gervais shows us the poverty in Africa and how to truly help some people.

A profile of an American falsely accused of terrorism who has been fighting the system and the Patriot Act the past three years — and winning.

Maybe our Constitution is retrievable after all.

If you haven’t had a barking exchange with a ticket agent and can get to Minneapolis airport, it’s safe to use the men’s room again. Authorities are putting in full-length dividers. But now that even Larry Craig knows not to go there for anonymous sex, isn’t that like closing the barn door after the horses have escaped?

According to this story, you’d better bow and scrape if you don’t want to get screwed by an airline ticket agent and sent to Siberia while your luggage heads to a lost-and-found auction. Some of us thought just buying a ticket entitled you to decent service. Guess not.

You may recall my failed attempts last week at convincing my kids to see “Mr. Bean’s Holiday.” Sixteen-year-old Lex was always up for it, but his two younger siblings were adamantly opposed because, quote, “Mr. Bean is stupid.” (This led me to a theory that Mr. Bean is uncool, and my kids want to be cool, at least until they become teenagers when, evidently, it’s okay to self-identify as a nerd even when one has actually become cool.) Over the course of the week my nine-year-old daughter weakened and this morning for some reason my five-year-old son relented, and we were off to see “Mr. Bean’s Holiday.”

It was terrific fun.

Surely no one reading this needs any further discourse on Rowan Atkinson’s comedic skills. But what became evident throughout the movie was the joy in it — the simple, childlike pleasure in being foolish. One of the subplots concerns a boy of 10 or 12 whom Mr. Bean is trying to reunite with his parents in Cannes. Later, Bean and the boy wind up separated as well, and when we discover what the boy was up to sans Bean it turns out he was adopted by an Afro Cuban jazz band traveling between gigs, where the kid had the time of his life. And isn’t that really what so much of 10- or 12-year-old boyhood is about — adventure? Hijinx? I’m sure other movies, especially the American comedies, would have shown him in increasing peril; here, he’s off on a lark. Every bit of “Mr. Bean’s Holiday” was like that: silly, upbeat, and sunny. When the movie ended the audience applauded, and when we stepped out all three kids proclaimed their love for “Mr. Bean.” Outside, the world seemed brighter.

Not for most Americans, though, as The New York Times reports here. Perhaps there’s something wrong with you if like Mr. Bean or, well, goofy fun. Last week in one of my classes I shared my appreciation for Mr. Bean and one or two students snorted. “There goes your credibility,” one said. But I’m not seeking credibility from anyone else; I know what I like and I know why I like it and I’m capable of expressing it — and that makes me cool.

In the 1970’s, comics artist Neal Adams did a heroic thing: He personally committed himself to a campaign to cajole and embarrass DC Comics into doing something to help Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of “Superman.” While DC had made untold hundreds of millions of dollars with this character — in publishing, in lunch boxes and Halloween costumes and action figures, on TV and radio and seemingly everywhere else all around the globe — Siegel was eking out a living as a typist at $7,000 a year and Shuster was going blind and unable to work. While the “work for hire” agreement the two had signed in the 1940’s may have been the letter of the law, it sure didn’t feel like Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Adams’ very public campaign culminated shortly before the release of the first Christopher Reeve “Superman” movie, and thus succeeded in embarrassing DC into giving the two creators an annual “salary” of $35,000, and amount that has grown over the years and is now paid to their heirs.

Most of us probably thought that was the end of it.

But now, according to Portfolio magazine, Siegel’s widow (who was the inspiration for Lois Lane) has contracted Hollywood’s most hated lawyer to represent her in a battle to recover all rights to Superman — and evidently he’s had success with similar cases.

Here’s the story.