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Table of Contents
explainer
The Mile High Club
explainer
ad report card
Madoff's "Information"
The Secretary Under the Desk
explainer
Advanced Search
Elf Detection 101
books
explainer
The Hidden Heart of Cheever Country
Break a Leg!
books
family
Scribblers of America, Unite!
When Men Lose Their Jobs
change-o-meter
fighting words
Empty Halls at Treasury
Swat? Not!
change-o-meter
food
Bush's Leftovers
Dietary Fibber
change-o-meter
gabfest
Obama: More School, Less Power
The Right To Bare Arms Gabfest
change-o-meter
gaming
A Good Day To Be a Doctor
And You Thought Grand Theft Auto Was Bad
chatterbox
grieving
Why the GOP Should Shut Up
The Long Goodbye
chatterbox
how to pronounce it
Obama: Soft on Health Insurance? Part 2
No Douthat About It
corrections
human nature
Corrections
Drill Babies, Drill
culture gabfest
human nature
The Culture Gabfest, Commodified Girl Power Edition
Winning Smugly
culturebox
low concept
Great Shots of Tough Times
Investigate the Investigators!
culturebox
medical examiner
Tag, You're It!
Drug Dealing
culturebox
moneybox
Boy Toy
Park Avenue Marauding Through SoHo!
day to day
movies
The Pessimistic Warren Buffett
Z
dear prudence
movies
A Face Not Even a Mother Could Love
Sunshine Cleaning
dispatches
music box
Backlash to the Kingmaker
Monk's Art
explainer
my goodness
Global Motherf*ckers
You Can't Take Them With You
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
1/105
other magazines
the green lantern
After Capitalism
Do Green Kitchen Cleaners Work?
poem
the has-been
"Bad Infinity"
Yes He Is
politics
the has-been
Biden Finds a Role
Rescind the Beast
politics
today's business press
Dr. No, But …
Short $11 Trillion
politics
today's papers
The New Czar in Town
The Great American Wealth Vanish
politics
today's papers
Sage Advice
Geithner to Europe: Let the Money Flow
politics
today's papers
Uncivil Union
The First Major Stock Rally of 2009
politics
today's papers
The Art of the Float
Obama Faces Opposition From Democrats
press box
today's papers
Bill Moyers' Memory
We All Fall Down
slate v
today's papers
iPhone vs. Kindle
Taking Down the Taliban
slate v
today's papers
Tim Geithner on Charlie Rose
Hard Sell on Stem Cells
slate v
tv club
Hopping Mad at AIG
Friday Night Lights, Season 3
slate v
war stories
History of the Barbie TV Ad
Intelligence Failure
slate v
Dear Prudence: Monstrous Mother-in-Law
sports nut
The Year of Magical Shooting
ad report card
technology
Is 6 Hour Power running the most sexually explicit ad ever?
Bono Has a BlackBerry?
By Seth Stevenson
Monday, March 9, 2009, at 3:19 PM ET
The Secretary Under the Desk
technology
Cash for Speed
television
Cramer vs. Stewart
the big idea
It Can't Happen Here
the browser
Speak, Atari
The Spot: A sexy secretary answers her intercom. "It's time,"
says her boss, calling her into his office. We next see the boss
experiencing violent spasms of ecstasy. He's seated at his desk,
and the secretary is notably not visible. "It's working! I can feel
it!" he shouts, his face contorting. We cut to a shot of the
product: 6 Hour Power, a concentrated energy drink. "Feel it
fast. Energy that lasts. No crash," says the announcer. "Now I'm
ready," says the boss, standing up from his desk, sweaty and
disheveled.
2/105
Ad Report Card reader Lindsey K. e-mails the following request:
Please do a write-up on the awful 6 Hour
Power ads that are running on Comedy Central
and Adult Swim right now. I have talked to
several people and they all hate the ads, but are
also confused by them. What exactly is going
on? Is he having a seizure? Is he jacking off at
his desk?
I watch a lot of late-night TV, and I've seen this ad several times
now. I still can't quite believe my eyes when it comes on. First,
let's get the big question out of the way. What's happening
behind that desk?
In my view, the ad very clearly implies (right up until the reveal
of its final shots) that the secretary is back there, hidden from
view, fellating her boss to orgasm. Allow me to present the
evidence:
The overt sexuality of the secretary character
is out of control. You rarely see skirts this
short or cleavage this prominent outside the
confines of soft-core porn. She even waves her
pen suggestively near her slightly parted,
glistening red lips.
At the height of his excitement, leaning back
in his chair, the boss flips his necktie over his
shoulder. Leaving us to wonder: Just what was
the tie in the way of?
There's a framed photo on the man's desk. It's
of a blond woman, presumably his wife. In the
midst of all those desk-rattling spasms, this
photo gets knocked over and smashed on the
floor, suggesting that some sort of insult has
been inflicted on the innocent woman pictured.
Barring Lindsey K.'s interesting theory that the
man is seizing—a notion I'm sure the energy
stimulant's manufacturer would prefer not
come into play—it's hard to imagine what else
might cause the man's ratcheting physical
tension and explosive release.
We know the secretary has been called into the
office, but we can't see her, which suggests a
classic trope of male office lechery: the hot-totrot secretary kneeling behind the executive's
desk.
Seems cut and dried to me. But when I called up Karen
Finocchio, vice president of marketing for NVE
Pharmaceuticals—the makers of 6 Hour Power—she rather
coyly argued that my prurient interpretation exists solely in my
head. "It's the theater of the mind," she insisted. "That framed
picture could be of his mother, for all you know. And the
secretary isn't scantily dressed. It's not beyond what a woman
might wear at the office. There's nothing showing!"
Fair enough. Though there's a whole lot of Cleveland visible
thanks to her unbuttoned blouse. And I swear that skirt is a
repurposed wristband.
Finocchio assured me that the ad has been approved by all
relevant authorities. It airs only after 10 p.m. and only on cable
channels that already broadcast edgy programming at that hour:
Comedy Central, Spike, the Cartoon Network, etc. The spot
targets groups Finocchio refers to as "corporate young America"
and "the CollegeHumor crowd."
Other ads in the 6 Hour Power campaign target slightly different
demographics. An ad for the G4 network shows a video gamer
first-person-shooting for hours on end, his focus sharpened by
the energy drink. Another ad shows a harried mother chasing a
toddler and airs on stations like E! and ABC Family. "There's no
one type of person we're trying to reach," Finocchio explains.
"Everyone needs energy."
I don't have a problem with the lewdness of the secretary ad. (I
do have a problem with its horrific portrayal of workplace
gender dynamics. But I'm just going to ignore that here.) The ad
is obnoxious, but I'm not much bothered by the thought that, say,
kids up late watching TV might see it. If those tykes don't get the
"joke," no harm done. If they do, well … that horse was out of
the barn. I'd be far more concerned about kids getting hopped up
on the actual product.
I do have to wonder, though: Is this the most sexually explicit
advertisement ever to air on American television? I'm scanning
my memory and can't recall a single ad quite this graphic. Even
phone-sex ads—which often show busty women lounging on
couches, making bedroom eyes—never dare depict, however
elliptically, an ongoing sex act. Ads for the Girls Gone Wild
DVDs may show a woman flashing pixilated breasts. But there's
a whole lot of distance between the suggestion of nudity and the
suggestion of a mind-blowing billy joel.
Perhaps the strangest thing about the ad is that it doesn't make
much sense. Presumably the kinetic, desk-shaking segment is a
metaphor for the energy boost taking hold. But by the time the
guy at last stands up and says he's "ready," he looks completely
spent. Drained. Post-coital, if you will. To me, the arc of arousal
and then satisfaction suggests the sluggish stupor that might
arrive when the energy shot's effects have worn off. Didn't the
announcer specifically tell us there's "no crash"? Seems like a
confused message.
3/105
Still, the ad works. It grabs our attention and raises awareness
about the brand. The next time you see a little vial of 6 Hour
Power on the shelf of your local Rite Aid, I guarantee you'll
recognize the product and link it to the commercial.
In fact, the two elements that make this ad so memorable are: 1)
the lasciviousness and 2) the slightly nonsensical weirdness. The
ad was conceived and written in house at NVE, not by an ad
agency, and it has a certain unpolished, handcrafted quality to it.
Given the success of other unforgettably bizarre in-house ads
(such as the ones for Head On headache gel and
Overstock.com), I wonder if other marketers will begin to follow
suit. Who needs slick agency work when you're more likely to
attract attention with the advertising equivalent of outsider art?
Grade: B. Cheesy. Raunchy. Effective. By the way, I'm currently
writing this under the influence of 6 Hour Power. Finocchio
mailed me a sample after we spoke. It's essentially an 8-ounce
Red Bull that's been compressed into a 2-ounce bottle. Yes, it
has taurine, whatever that is, but really, what you're getting is the
caffeine contained in a cup of coffee—delivered in a compact,
easily portable, shelf-stable package that, as Finnochio suggests,
"you can throw in your purse or tuck in your pocket." I can
report to you that the stuff tastes just awful. Also, while I'm
wide-awake, and a bit jittery, I do not feel as though I'm
receiving a brody jenner.
Is there an ad you love, hate, or can't for the life of you
understand? E-mail your suggestions to
adreportcard@gmail.com.
Advanced Search
Friday, October 19, 2001, at 6:39 PM ET
books
The Hidden Heart of Cheever Country
What John Cheever, a spy in suburbia, uncovered at last.
By Nathan Heller
Wednesday, March 11, 2009, at 12:03 PM ET
John Cheever is today known as a master of short fiction, the
writer who mapped a suburban landscape of privileged, wistful
souls. But this mantle was not entirely what he hoped for. "I
want to write short stories like I want to fuck a chicken," he
declared in the late 1940s, shortly before churning out the run of
short-form masterpieces now synonymous with his name—
stories like "Goodbye, My Brother," "The Five-Forty-Eight,"
and "The Country Husband." The frustration stayed with him as
he moved his family from Manhattan to Westchester, the
commuter haven now sometimes called "Cheever Country."
Cheever himself called the place "a cesspool of conformity." He
lived there till his death, writing against the ache of loneliness
and self-concealment. His best work is the prose of an outsider,
of a man in exile.
This exile is the subject of Blake Bailey's masterful Cheever: A
Life, published in tandem with the Library of America's new
collection of Cheever's work and two decades after the first
biography. Until now, Cheever's life came in two flavors: sweet
and sour. The sweet version (originating largely with Cheever
himself) describes the zestful "squire of Westchester," a Brooks
Bros.-clad paterfamilias who peppered his New Yorker stories
with jaunty banter, gentle melancholy, and what one reader
supposedly called a "childlike sense of wonder." The sour
version appeared later, thanks to posthumous publication of
Cheever's journal and letters. It lays bare a broken man—a selfcentered depressive and secret bisexual who struggled, drunk
and lonely, though adulthood. Both versions are true. Bailey's
challenge is to show how they fit together in someone who also
wrote some of the era's most layered and surprising fiction.
Cheever was born in 1912 into a once-respectable New England
family fallen on hard times, and the feeling of being banished
from the garden never left him. By the time he began high
school, his father's shoe business had crashed, forcing his mother
to open a "Gift Shoppe" in their suburb of Quincy, Mass.—an
added humiliation to Cheever, who was by then reading Proust
and Hemingway and dreaming of sophistication. He earned nearfailing grades in two high schools, left, and wrote a story,
"Expelled," based on his ignominy. He mailed it to a young New
Republic editor, Malcolm Crowley, whose poems he'd enjoyed.
Crowley liked the piece and published it in the fall of 1930.
Cheever was 18, and the story's unkind caricatures burned his
bridges in the Boston suburbs. Both the rupture and the literary
jump-start were just what he needed.
Still, with magazines scaling back during the Depression, it was
not the most auspicious time to start out as a writer. Cheever
spent a few years as an urban scrounger—working odd jobs,
publishing occasionally in tiny journals—until, in 1936, he sold
his first story to The New Yorker, then a solidly middlebrow
glossy with a high word rate and an appetite for slice-of-life
vignettes. It was the start of a "marriage," as he once called it,
that was fecund but never wholly blissful. By his mid-30s,
halfway through a two-decade struggle to write his debut novel,
Cheever worried he had typecast himself as sort of a journeyman
of fiction rather than an artist. He started pushing back against
the vignette form—his goal, he said, was to write "the noise of
the wind up the chimney."
In time, that noise grew into music. Cheever decamped in 1951
for Westchester and launched the first golden lap of his career.
His early stories had tended to trace a traditional shape,
4/105
culminating in an open epiphany or tidy revelation. (The
snubbed teacher wasn't drowning herself, just going for a swim!)
These first mature pieces, though, take wider and more
understated paths. Cheever's 1954 "The Country Husband"
introduces us to Frances Weed, a dutiful husband and father who
survives an airplane emergency only to fall in love with his
children's "frowning and beautiful" baby-sitter. Weed suffers his
desire in the endless obbligato of domestic life until a local
shrink tells him to channel his anguish into woodworking.
Harmony returns to the town. The story concludes with a
wandering dog and one of the most tightly virtuosic and often
quoted passages in postwar fiction:
The last to come is Jupiter. He prances through
the tomato vines, holding in his generous
mouth the remains of an evening slipper. Then
it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden
suits ride elephants over the mountains.
This is a Dionysian wail hidden in the order of the night.
Cheever brings us down on all fours with the dog and the
slipper—down even to the vines hugging the ground—before
flinging us up toward the stylized, aspiring image of Hannibal on
his beast. We rocket out of the suburban evening, aiming for the
light of grandeur, only to stall halfway and founder. It's a verbal
arc that makes us feel the tragic constriction of Francis Weed's
Westchester life.
Cheever, at his best, has this uncanny control, this ability to
make the English language fire on every cylinder into the odd,
ecstatic regions of the nervous system. His life followed an
equally avid course. Everything was Eros: Sex, visceral pleasure,
and spiritual transcendence blurred together in Cheever's eyes to
shape what his editor called his "joyful knowledge." He had a
lifelong penchant for diving naked into ponds and other people's
swimming pools. He threw himself similarly into trysts with
men and women, carrying the former encounters as a painful
secret while boasting wildly of the latter. The flip side of this
cosmic randiness was a profound sense of deprivation when the
world didn't respond in kind. It rarely did. "I am sad," he wrote;
"I am weary; I am weary of being a boy of fifty; I am weary of
my capricious dick, but it seems unmanly of me to say so."
This preoccupation with "seeming" was typical. For all his
hunger and caprice, Cheever controlled his image in the world as
tightly as he honed his fiction. ("Cheever was at once among the
most reticent and candid of men," as Bailey puts it.) Most
anecdotes he told were either overblown or totally apocryphal.
He hid his bisexuality with careful displays of manliness; he
obscured his background with a tony accent. Bailey thinks he
bowdlerized parts of his journal before submitting them to
Brandeis' archives. The goal of this duplicity wasn't always
clear, even to Cheever. "[I]t was my decision, early in life, to
insinuate myself into the middle class, like a spy, so that I would
have an advantageous position of attack," he wrote as early as
the '40s, "but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission
and to have taken my disguises too seriously."
Did Cheever ultimately see through the Francis Weeds of the
world, or did he speak for them? As Bailey leads us through the
'60s and early '70s, the line between Cheever's "disguises" and
his middle-class anxieties blurs almost to the point of
dissipation. Soon the writer who'd once thought himself a
downtown bohemian was taking stodgy, paternalistic pride in his
"faithful and pedigreed dogs," his "sporty roadster." He loved
being a family man, at least in theory. He lived in neurotic fear
of exposure as "an impostor … an imitation gentleman." The
wages of this insecurity were gin. By the mid-'60s, Cheever was
mixing his first stiff drink long before lunch. Ten years later, he
was gulping wine on the street with bums.
As Cheever embarked on his epic bender, he pressed more
desperately than ever at the boundaries of his art. The awkward
tension between Cheever's private self and public life had turned
into the essence of his work. (That Ralph Ellison was one of
Cheever's greatest proponents is not the irony it might seem.) On
one hand, his striving let him speak from deep within the
culture—self-reinvention in the suburbs, after all, was hardly out
of step with the postwar zeitgeist. At the same time, his
insecurity lured him away from realism and toward formal
innovation. The shifty narrator of his 1960 short story "The
Death of Justina" opens with oracular pronouncements about the
role of fiction—a boxes-within-boxes conceit worthy of
Nabokov. By the early '70s, lonely and dissipated, Cheever was
toying with using footnotes to fracture his fiction and reflect "a
loss of self-confidence"—just as David Foster Wallace would 20
years later.
Bailey's story crests in 1975, when, squalid and close to death,
Cheever went into rehab, never drank again, and proceeded to
publish his most successful books, the No. 1 best-selling novel
Falconer and The Stories of John Cheever. Yet the biography's
nuance lies not so much in its description of this personal
resurrection as in its account of Cheever's artistic discoveries in
these final years. Just as he actively pursued homosexual
companionship for the first time, in his fiction he finally delved
into his role as an outsider. Instead of living in exile as a "spy,"
he turned the lens around to spy on his own exile.
"What I come on is that I am writing the annals of my time and
my life and that any deceit or evasiveness is, by my lights,
criminal," he wrote. In other words, the way to reach the reader
was to let disguises fall. Bisexuality appears explicitly in his last
two novels. So does the naked loneliness of an aging man.
Cheever's introduction to the 1978 collected stories contains this
exquisite gloss on his enterprise—an ur-Cheever sentence that
soars from wry specifics into the numinous:
Here is the last of that generation of chain
smokers who woke the world in the morning
5/105
with their coughing, who used to get stoned at
cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance
steps like "the Cleveland Chicken," sail for
Europe on ships, who were truly nostalgic for
love and happiness, and whose gods were as
ancient as yours or mine, whoever you are.
Whoever you are: There couldn't be a more distant and aloof
phrase, and yet it's the most intimate and immediate moment in
the passage. This was Cheever's hard-won revelation: If he wrote
not merely as the outsider but about the outsider—wrote himself,
in other words, stripped of his costumes, a whoever from a
different world—he would find his readers right there with him.
books
Scribblers of America, Unite!
Are women writers undervalued because of what they write or how we read?
By Katha Pollitt
Monday, March 9, 2009, at 6:48 AM ET
Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own: British Women
Novelists From Bronte to Lessing (1977) changed the way we
read fiction by women by showing female writers in historical,
political, and literary relation to one another, and doing it in
prose that was energetic, enjoyable, and blessedly free of
academic jargon. At the time, this was a controversial project.
The previous year, Ellen Moers' brilliant (and, sadly, out of
print) Literary Women was attacked by Anne Tyler for arguing
that great women writers like Dickinson, Collette, and Woolf
shared something like a literary tradition with lesser writers like
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Fanny Fern. You can see why
Tyler bridled: After all, it was the misogynists who usually
grouped women writers together, the better to dismiss them all—
Nathaniel Hawthorne's "damned mob of scribbling women,"
churning out their hypersensitive derivative poems, their narrow,
pedestrian domestic fiction. Women writers, the good ones,
anyway, tended not to want to be put on the bookshelf next to
the other women writers.
Thirty years and many books later (to say nothing of a stint
writing at People and a distinguished Princeton teaching career),
Showalter has done for America what she did for Britain, and
the results are equally exhilarating, provocative, revelatory, and
even more magisterial. The 350-year span of A Jury of Her
Peers takes in more than 250 writers and covers sweeping tides
of history and social change. It's a long book, but it doesn't feel
long at all because it is so full of information, ideas, stories, and
characters. The celebrated get their due—Harriet Beecher Stowe,
Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Zora Neale
Hurston, Flannery O'Connor, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton,
Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison—and so do the forgotten: Mercy
Otis Warren, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Mary Austin, Mary
Wilkins Freeman, Emma Lazarus, Anzia Yezierska, Nella
Larsen, Meridel LeSueur, Ann Petry, and a host of others.
Who decides which subjects matter; what voice is appropriate
for what kind of story; what books get published, reviewed, read
and reread, and enshrined as Literature with a capital L?
Showalter takes her title from Susan Glaspell's 1917 story "A
Jury of Her Peers," in which a sheriff and an attorney, at a loss to
find a reason why a wife would murder her husband, overlook
clues to his brutality and her desperation that their wives,
rummaging around the farmhouse crime site, easily discover—
and, sympathizing with the accused, destroy. Women, of course,
could not sit on juries in 1917, or even vote; they were judged
and governed by laws and codes and procedures they had had no
hand in making or applying. In the same way, Showalter argues,
for most of our history women writers lacked "a critical jury of
their peers to discuss their work, to explicate its symbols and
meanings, and to demonstrate its continuing relevance to all
readers."
A woman could do very well in the popular marketplace, and
many have—women were, and are, the major readers of novels
and poetry, a source of much annoyance to male writers from
Hawthorne's day to our own—but men had a lock on prestige.
They ran the elite magazines and publishing houses and gave out
patronage. (If Emerson or Thomas Wentworth Higgins liked
your poetry, you were in.) They wrote the important, serious,
taste-making reviews. (Henry James, despite being Edith
Wharton's great friend, seems never to have missed a chance to
savage a woman writer in print.) Most important for the long
haul, they edited the histories and surveys of American literature
that shaped the canon, and they made no bones about their
preferences. In 1917, the four male editors of the Cambridge
History of American Literature set out to "enlarge the spirit of
American literary criticism and render it more energetic and
masculine." The Literary History of the United States, published
in 1948, was edited by 54 men and one woman.
Showalter organizes her history—the first of its kind, she tells
us—around the theme of women's relationship to the literary
marketplace. There is indeed a female tradition in American
writing, she argues, but biology and psychology do not explain
it: "[I]t comes from pressures on women to lead private rather
than public lives, and to conform to cultural norms and
expectations." Anne Bradstreet's first book of poems (1650) was
prefaced by testimonials to her humility and piety from no less
than 11 English men. Like many women writers to come,
Bradstreet was careful to disclaim high ambition, even as she
penned a 6,000-line epic about ancient history and produced at
least a few poems that speak to us today and that Showalter
forthrightly calls great. "Give thyme or Parsley wreath, I ask no
Bayes," she modestly asks—kitchen herbs, not the laurel of
poetic immortality.
6/105
The clash between literary ambition and family demands,
between truth-telling and propriety, between the longing to
express oneself and the inadequacy of the available commercial
forms in which to do so, made for a lot of careers that went off
the rails or never quite got on them. Abolitionist Julia Ward
Howe began as a daring and highly gifted poet, whose "frank,"
"disturbing," "intimate" first book, Passion-Flowers, shocked
and thrilled the eminent men of Boston when it appeared
anonymously in 1853; when word of its authorship got out, her
husband, an eminent Bostonian himself, threatened to divorce
her and take the children if she wrote more poetry. Although
Howe went on to produce reams of political prose (and the
"Battle Hymn of the Republic"), her literary development—
Showalter thinks she was potentially a great poet—was stopped
in its tracks. A hundred years later, women writers, whether
regionalists, Communists, members of the Harlem Renaissance,
or whatever, were still struggling against male norms that
defined female ambition as deeply unfeminine—shouldn't that
poet be baking a pie? getting married? having a baby?—and
female experience as trivial and/or embarrassing, and writing by
women as unlikely to be all that good.
Women's relation to the literary marketplace explains an
apparent paradox: A woman could be renowned in her own time,
and a fair number were—but almost always, her fame was
ephemeral. Lydia Maria Child (1802-80) was a celebrated and
prolific writer (47 books, including Hobomok, a path-breaking
novel about the relations between white settlers and Native
Americans) and a key figure in the abolitionist movement.
Today she's known as the author of the children's Thanksgiving
Day song "Over the River and Through the Woods." Margaret
Fuller? We remember she was the only female
Transcendentalist, but what did she actually say in her onceindispensable Woman in the Nineteenth Century? In 1923,
Sherwood Anderson wrote admiringly to Southwestern writer
Mary Austin, "[W]hat Twain and Harte missed you have
found"—but the literary West coalesced around the strong and
silent cowboys of Owen Wister, Jack London, and Zane Grey,
not the white and Native American women Austin wrote about.
Glaspell herself, "although she won a Pulitzer Prize for drama in
1931 and was ranked in her lifetime with Eugene O'Neill ...
quickly dropped out of the canon."
Showalter sees women's writing as a story of progress toward
self-definition: from feminine (imitation of prevailing modes) to
feminist (protest) to female (self-discovery), and, finally, free.
"American women writers in the twenty-first century can take on
any subject they want, in any form they choose." We have
indeed come a long way, but I'm not so sure we've reached
nirvana yet. The marketplace, with its many gendered strictures
and codes, has not disappeared. Thus, it matters that girls and
women will buy fiction by and about both sexes, but boys and
men—the relative few who buy fiction at all—stick to their own
gender. (There was a reason that J.K. Rowling used her initials
instead of her name, and that her student magician hero was not
Harriet Potter.) It matters that the Great American Novel for
which critics are always hunting is imagined as a modern MobyDick, not The House of Mirth. It means there's a certain kind of
critical receptivity, a hope of greatness for certain kinds of books
by men that hardly ever comes into play with books by women,
no matter how wonderful they are. Moreover, in literature as in
life, men have much more license to display their whole
unlovely selves and be admired for it, as the career of Norman
Mailer shows.
Many women writers have complained that fiction by women is
undervalued because we undervalue the domestic and the
personal as opposed to big manly subjects like war and whaling.
It's an important point, but I think there's something deeper
going on. In fact, there are men who write about intimate life
and women who take on big public subjects. More different than
the books themselves is the gendered framing of how we read
them. Nobody says Henry James is a less ambitious writer
because he wrote The Portrait of a Lady and not The Portrait of
a Sea Captain. If The Corrections had been written by Janet
Franzen, would it have been seen not as a bid for the Great
American Novel trophy, but as a very good domestic novel with
some futuristic flourishes that didn't quite come off? If the most
prolific serious American writer was John Carroll Oates, would
critics be so disturbed by the violence in his fiction? Perhaps we
emphasize different elements in similar books and only notice
the evidence that confirms our gender biases—and give men
more benefits of more doubts, too. Gertrude Stein is a difficult
and frustrating writer, but so is the Ezra Pound of The Cantos
and the James Joyce of Finnegans Wake, and nobody serious
calls them (as Showalter does Stein) basically frauds.
Try it yourself with the novels and poems on your bookshelf.
Jane Updike? John Smiley? And while you're at it, picture a
literary America in which women were not just the major
purchasers and readers of imaginative writing but also controlled
the world of reviewing, prizes, awards, fellowships, relevant
academic jobs, important panels, readings, international
festivals, and those infernal best-book-of-theyear/decade/century lists. That this would be a highly
speculative exercise suggests that Showalter is a bit
overoptimistic. Women writers have come a very long way since
Anne Bradstreet, Julia Ward Howe, and Mary Austin, but the
jury of their peers has yet to be empanelled.
change-o-meter
Empty Halls at Treasury
Another would-be Geithner deputy withdraws, but the stock market shows
signs of life.
By Chris Wilson
Thursday, March 12, 2009, at 5:23 PM ET
7/105
The Change-o-Meter is now a widget. You can add it to your
blog, Web site, or profile with just a few clicks. (Shortcut for
Facebook here.) Each time we publish a new column, the widget
will automatically update to reflect the latest score.
change-o-meter
Bush's Leftovers
Congress passed last year's budget, and the EPA acts on a Bush-era project.
By Karen Shih
President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden remind states to
spend their stimulus allowances wisely or have them revoked.
The Treasury Department still has a lot of empty corner offices,
but at least the Dow is up—even though Obama's stock is down
among blue-chip economists. Obama scores a 10 on the
Change-o-Meter.
The president dropped by a daylong personal finances 101 class
for states—except Idaho, which didn't show up—on how to
responsibly spend their share of the $787 billion stimulus
largesse. Biden, who's heading up the oversight effort, delivered
a parental warning to state officials about how to use the funds
responsibly and stimulatingly. The 'Meter awards 20 points for
this first step in oversight.
Two Bush-era leftovers are finally being taken care of: Congress
passed the $410 billion spending bill from last year, and the
Environmental Protection Agency plans to set up a greenhousegas reporting system that could help lead to emissions caps. In
the Middle East, Iran may not be the biggest threat after all, as
increasing violence in Iraq threatens to destabilize a government
bracing for a decreased American military presence. For
President Obama, it all adds up to a score of 12 on the Changeo-Meter.
Wall Street rallied for a third day, for which the 'Meter feels
obligated to award Obama 15 points, given that it tends to dock
him when the news is bad. But Obama and Treasury Secretary
Timothy Geithner got an F and an F-, respectively, from a
survey of 49 economists polled about their opinions of the
administration's economic policies. (Obama received a 59 out of
100 while Geithner got a 51.) It's probably safe to assume those
marks will not rise on news that yet another candidate for a top
Treasury post has withdrawn from the running, making three this
week. Obama loses 20 points for the combined blows to his
economic credibility.
As we noted yesterday, Obama tacked a signing statement onto
the earmark-laden spending bill he signed to fund the federal
government for the fiscal year that began last October. Further
inspection of his statement finds it particularly Bushian. Using
the same separation-of-powers arguments that defined George
W. Bush's attitude toward congressional oversight, Obama
warned that he may withhold some allocated funds that interfere
with his commander-in-chief authority. The 'Meter recalls from
11th-grade U.S. history class that withholding appropriated funds
didn't work out so well for Nixon. At the risk of taking Congress'
side on a mangled budgetary process, the 'Meter docks 5 points
for the unfortunate historical allusions.
There's a lot to cover, so we want to hear your thoughts on what
the Change-o-Meter should be taking into account. No detail is
too small or wonky. E-mail may be quoted by name unless the
writer stipulates otherwise.
The Senate finally passed the $410 billion spending bill for the
fiscal year that started more than five months ago, securing eight
Republican votes for the cloture motion that ended debate,
which three Democrats opposed. (The bill itself passed by a
voice vote.) The budget, which provides funding for all
government activities other than defense and homeland security,
has come under fire for its thousands of pet projects, a type of
spending Obama promised to curb. Obama signed the bill,
anyway, describing the heavily earmarked legislation as a
remnant of the previous administration. He loses 15 points for
addressing the earmark issue in a signing statement, a tactic that
just this week he promised he would not use as often as Bush
did. But we'll return 2 points for particularly a catty swipe at
Congress for "legislative aggrandizement"—no casual insult
here in Washington—for provisions that add extra congressional
control over granular spending decisions.
The EPA, meanwhile, is planning to establish a national system
for reporting greenhouse-gas emissions, a system that would
include up to 90 percent of the country's output. The program
was drafted during the Bush administration but blocked by the
White House budget office at the time—still, better late than
never. This move could be the first step in creating an emissions
cap to help curb global warming, for which the 'Meter awards 25
points.
In the Middle East, it looks like the threat of a nuclear Iran is
still several years off. (A brief history of Iran's nuclear
capability, according to the United States: Iran did have fissile
material on March 1, 2009; it just really wanted one on Feb. 12,
2009; it had given up on Dec. 3, 2007.) Intelligence officials
briefed Congress yesterday, saying that Iran had not produced
enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon. This
8/105
assessment, however, contrasts with the Israeli view, which
warns that Iran's nuclear ambitions remain grand. The 'Meter
awards 10 points for this week's assessment of a slightly less
volatile Mideast.
But then the 'Meter takes those points right back. In Iraq, two
highly sophisticated suicide bombings have killed more than 60
people since Sunday, creating worries that al-Qaida's
organization in Iraq has teamed up with Sunni insurgents,
mainly remaining Saddam Hussein and Baath Party supporters.
Though overall violence is down, Iraqi military officials are
worried this may be a sign of increasing attacks to destabilize the
government as Americans start planning for withdrawal.
change-o-meter
Obama: More School, Less Power
The president rolls out an education-reform proposal and forswears signing
statements—mostly.
By Emily Lowe
Tuesday, March 10, 2009, at 4:53 PM ET
Obama scores points for a bold proposal for education reform
and a promise of a little self-restraint when it comes to executive
power. In the Senate, unruly Democrats stall a $410 billion
homework assignment that was due last October. Meanwhile,
the Chinese are taunting America in their underwear in the
middle of the ocean. (Seriously.) Coming down from yesterday's
all-time high, Obama scores a 37 on the Change-o-Meter.
Obama rolled out his plans for education reform Tuesday, which
include longer school days and merit-based pay for teachers. The
proposals will doubtless draw ire from teacher unions, a group
that traditionally has had a hand on the steering wheel of the
Democratic agenda. For continuing to challenge this powerful
interest group for the sake of an effective education system, the
'Meter gives Obama 30 points.
What's more, in a memo released by the White House Monday,
Obama pinky-swears that he will limit his use of signing
statements, a favorite trick George W. Bush used to negate or
weaken sections of legislation. While Obama said that he plans
to use the statements the way the Constitution prescribes, the
ACLU et al. are calling foul and insisting he end the practice
altogether. As for the 'Meter, it is awarding 15 cautious points
but reserves the right to yank them back the moment Obama
slaps a politically charged Post-it on a bill.
On Capitol Hill, senators on both sides of the aisle are
squabbling over the details of the $410 billion spending bill that
combines last year's leftover spending bills. Majority Leader
Harry Reid had egg on his face after failing by one vote to end
debate on the bill—a vote that belonged to New Jersey
Democrat Robert Menéndez, who takes issue with the bill's
softened stance on Cuba. Senate bickering is old hat, but in-party
fighting isn't something Obama factored into his change
equation. The Change-o-Meter deducts five points.
And on the high seas, a Chinese provocation of a U.S.
surveillance ship ended with Chinese crewmembers stripping
down to their skivvies as they were hosed down by their
American counterparts. Maybe this sounds like fun to you, but
the Pentagon is pissed—the Americans were spraying the
Chinese ship because it was cruising too close—and it has filed a
formal complaint to China's military attaché. The bizarre
incident reeks of déjà vu, suggesting that China has adopted a
permanent policy of testing the mettle of new U.S. presidents
using weird military maneuvers. Unlike some other countries,
China doesn't seem sold on the change Obama brings, so the
'Meter docks another three points.
change-o-meter
A Good Day To Be a Doctor
Obama delivers a major victory for researchers in lifting the ban on stem-cell
research.
By Molly Redden
Break out the sparkling C2H5OH, scientists: While signing his
order lifting the restrictions on federally funded embryonic stemcell research, President Obama remarked that he was rejecting
the Bush administration's "false choice between sound science
and moral values." Meanwhile, a new military strategy in
Afghanistan embodies the "not all Taliban are bad" mentality.
And with Obama preparing to bring Turkey back into the circle
of international friends, the president earns an all-time high of 65
on the Change-o-Meter.
9/105
Critics frequently considered the restrictions on taxpayer money
for stem cells to be the crux of the Bush administration's
sustained political assault on scientific research. Accompanying
the lift of the ban was a presidential memorandum in which
Obama promised (albeit in vague terms) to protect scientific
research from the caprice of politicians by ordering the Office of
Science and Technology Policy to follow a strict and
nonpolitical vetting process. The Washington Post reports that
this may affect policy areas as varied as global warming and
birth control. For making today both Christmas and a birthday
for the science community (and not shortchanging them like all
the other kids whose birthdays fall on Christmas), Obama racks
up 50 points on the Change-o-Meter. That number would be
higher if Obama had taken a stand on the controversial DickeyWicker amendment, which bans the use of federal funds for the
actual experiments on human embryos. Also if this morning's
good news didn't have us wondering, "What took you so long?"
This weekend, meanwhile, Obama told New York Times
reporters that he intends to try cooperating with moderate
Taliban members in Afghanistan in an attempt to repeat the
success of doing so with Sunni military leaders in Iraq. That
sounds good—the same strategy is often credited with turning
the tide of the war in Iraq—and we'll award 15 points for a fresh
approach to this entrenched war. But it didn't take Reuters more
than a day to find experts who insist that the strategy will not
work. One former Taliban official asked, "Who are the moderate
Taliban?" They're the experts. Dock five.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., wants you to
know that he voted against the $410 billion spending bill
President Obama signed into law on March 11. His fellow
Republicans "tried to cut the bill's cost. Our ideas would have
saved billions of taxpayer dollars. Unfortunately, every one was
turned aside." Well, not every one. According to this spreadsheet
prepared by Taxpayers for Common Sense, the spending bill
incorporates 53 ideas put forth by McConnell himself in the
form of legislative earmarks. Far from lowering the spending
bill's cost, they increased it by $76 million.
Compared with his fellow Republicans, McConnell is a relative
piker. Here is a list of the Senate's 10 biggest earmark hogs,
based on dollar amounts in the spending bill:
1. Thad Cochran, R-Miss.: $474 million
2. Roger Wicker, R-Miss.: $391 million
3. Mary Landrieu, D-La.: $332 million
4. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa: $292 million
5. David Vitter, R-La.: $249 million
6. Christopher Bond, R-Mo.: $248 million
7. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.: $235 million
8. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii: $225 million
9. Richard Shelby, R-Ala.: $219 million
10. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa: $199 million
Finally, Obama plans to take a reconciliation trip to Turkey, a
U.S. ally whose cooperation will be vital to the United States'
withdrawal from Iraq and sustained efforts against a nuclear
Iran. The Iraq war has made things tense between the United
States and its longtime friend, but Turkey has recently promised
to facilitate the U.S. exit strategy. Obama's visit to this Muslim
country may begin to help put America back on the ins with
Muslims around the region. Here's hoping—with five points
back for the 'Meter.
No fewer than six out of these 10 senators are Republicans,
including the two top earmark hogs, Cochran and Wicker.
Cochran, Wicker, Bond, and Shelby at least had the decency to
vote for the bill after they stuffed it with earmarks. Vitter and
Grassley followed McConnell's hypocritical lead, inserting
earmarks but then voting against the final bill, knowing it would
pass anyway. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), who because of a legal
dispute over election results doesn't even have a Senate seat and
isn't likely to recover it in court, nonetheless managed to rank in
the top third of earmark hogs with a haul of $109 million. His
Democratic opponent and the likely victor, Al Franken, got
none.
Remember this next time you hear Republicans piss and moan
about Democrats' spendthrift ways.
chatterbox
Why the GOP Should Shut Up
Six out of the top 10 Senate earmark hogs are Republicans.
By Timothy Noah
chatterbox
Obama: Soft on Health Insurance? Part
2
More on whether Obama's backing away from real health care reform.
By Timothy Noah
10/105
In an earlier column ("Obama: Soft on Health Insurance?"), I
expressed some worry that President Obama was backing away
from his campaign promise to create a government health
insurance program for the self-employed, employees of small
businesses, and people whose employers don't provide them with
health insurance. My worry arose from an exchange at a White
House health care forum between Obama and Sen. Charles
Grassley, who with four other Republican senators had signed a
letter stating that creation of such a program would be a dealbreaker for health care reform. Here it is:
Sen. Grassley: The only thing that I would
throw out for your consideration—and please
don't respond to this now, because I'm asking
you just to think about it—there's a lot of us
that feel that the public option that the
government is an unfair competitor and that
we're going to get an awful lot of crowd out,
and we have to keep what we have now strong,
and make it stronger.
me as an argument for "public plan choice" rather than against
it. But in his comments, Obama seemed to agree with Grassley
that it would be wrong to "overwhelm" the private insurance
market by making this new government health insurance
program too cost-effective, or too generous, or too wonderful in
some other, unspecified way. Maybe we shouldn't have a public
program at all!
Mainly, though, I didn't understand what Obama was saying.
Seeking enlightenment, I consulted a recent paper ("The Case
for Public Plan Choice in National Health Reform") by Jacob
Hacker, the University of California-Berkeley political scientist
who first conceived this particular scheme. In my earlier column,
I'd linked to Hacker's paper and cited its observation that
Medicare spending had during the previous decade grown less
rapidly, per capita, than spending for private health insurance.
This time I lingered over Hacker's discussion of why Medicare
was more cost-effective. Two reasons seem especially relevant
to this discussion:
President Obama: OK. Well, let me just—I'm
not going to respond definitively. The thinking
on the public option has been that it gives
consumers more choices, and it helps give—
keep the private sector honest, because there's
some competition out there. That's been the
thinking. I recognize, though, the fear that if a
public option is run through Washington, and
there are incentives to try to tamp down costs
and—or at least what shows up on the books,
and you've got the ability in Washington,
apparently, to print money—that private
insurance plans might end up feeling
overwhelmed. So I recognize that there's that
concern. I think it's a serious one and a real
one. And we'll make sure that it gets
addressed, partly because I assume it will be
very—be very hard to come out of committee
unless we're thinking about it a little bit. And
so we want to make sure that that's something
that we pay attention to.
1.
As I noted earlier, the Republicans aren't wrong to fear that
creation of a new public plan might put the private plans out of
business. Employer-based private health insurance has been
costing steadily more and delivering steadily less for some time.
Existing government health insurance programs like Medicare
and the State Children's Health Insurance Program have
consistently been shown to be more cost-effective than private
insurance. A recent report by the Commonwealth Fund, a
nonprofit dedicated to improving the health care system,
estimated that a public plan along the lines Obama proposed
during the campaign could set its premiums 20 percent to 30
percent lower than private health insurance plans. That strikes
2.
Because of its sheer size, Medicare enjoys greater
leverage than private insurers in negotiating what it will
pay doctors and hospitals. On average Medicare pays
81 percent of what private insurers pay to doctors and
about 75 percent of what private insurers pay to
hospitals. When Congress enacted Medicare's
prescription drug benefit in 2003, it prohibited the
government from negotiating volume discounts with
drug manufacturers—that would be socialism!—but
other federal health insurance programs not subject to
this absurd restriction typically pay for drugs about half
what private insurers do. Although physicians like to
complain that Medicare's penny-pinching is driving
doctors out of the program, Hacker found that the
number of doctors participating in Medicare is actually
growing faster than the number of Medicare patients.
Those old folks are hard to get away from. Medicare
represents about 20 percent of the U.S. health care
market. (Government health care programs in general
represent about 45 percent.) Private insurers worry that
a new public program would exploit similar economies
of scale, putting them at a competitive disadvantage.
Doctors and hospitals recoup some of their losses from
Medicare by shifting a greater portion of their operating
costs onto private insurers. According to one California
study, every $1 that Medicare eliminated in payments
to hospitals added 17 cents to the hospital bills of
private patients. The same study observed similar,
though less pronounced, cost-shifting with Medicaid.
Taken together, Medicare and Medicaid cost-shifting
accounted for 12 percent of the cost increase in private
health insurance during the previous decade. Private
insurers fret that a new public program would lead to
more cost-shifting.
11/105
These may be the factors Obama had in mind when he said,
"[P]rivate insurance plans might end up feeling overwhelmed."
But it's hard to feel too sorry for private health insurance
companies. Through mergers, they've been expanding market
share at a pretty smart clip themselves. According to a 2007
study by the American Medical Association, in 96 percent of the
country's metropolitan statistical areas, there exists at least one
private insurer with at least a 30 percent share of the commercial
market. Medicare and Medicaid cost-shifting may account for 12
percent of the cost increase in private health insurance, but what
accounts for the other 88 percent? While Medicare has put the
squeeze on doctors and hospitals, insurers have put the squeeze
on policyholders.
system spins quickly out of control, forcing a government
takeover—a plausible scenario, in my view. Better to skip any
interim step where we make things worse before we make things
better. Here's hoping Obama's seeming willingness to
compromise on the public plan, as expressed at the White House
forum, was insincere. Politeness on this point would be
acceptable. Flexibility would not.
Hacker has lately been wrestling with the question of how to
create a level playing field for private and public health
insurance plans, and he graciously showed me a draft paper
touching on this problem. I am not convinced, after reading it,
that he cares much more about it than I do. "Everyone says they
are for a level playing field," he writes, "but what most critics of
the public plan idea really mean is that they do not want a new
public health insurance plan to have any inherent advantages."
True competition, Hacker writes, "does not require competitors
be equal" but rather "that they have an equal chance to succeed if
they are equally good at doing what consumers want." Exactly.
First, some people are going to want to be in a
private plan, period just as some people
continue to buy cars that Consumer Reports
says are less reliable than the norm because
they like how they look or drive or value the
decal on the front. Second, and more seriously,
the private plans will be able to do things like
selectively contract with small numbers of
providers that a stable, inclusive public plan
simply cannot do, and some people will value
these innovations. Third, we don't know how
the private plans will react to real competition,
since they've worked so hard to avoid it till
now. Perhaps they will discover inner
wellsprings of cost-consciousness that we
didn't know they had.
Under the Obama plan, private health insurance companies
would compete with the public plan to cover people whose
employers didn't give them health coverage. These private
insurance companies would receive a government subsidy in
exchange for abiding by certain restrictions regarding premium
increases, deductibles, etc. Hacker proposes that the subsidies be
the same for the public and private plans, that rules governing
premium rates and marketing be the same, that minimum benefit
levels be set, and that public and private plans both be required
to take all comers. "Relative disparities in plan costs" should be
reflected in "the relative prices that potential enrollees see." If
the Commonwealth Fund is correct, that would still make the
public plan 20 percent to 30 percent cheaper than the private.
Perhaps these are the sort of concessions Obama has in mind. If
so, I doubt they'll mollify conservative critics like Grassley.
What will Obama do? I don't have a lot of faith that any plan to
step up regulation of private health insurance will make much
difference. Most such proposals, Obama's included, amount
mainly to price controls, a regulatory approach that in the past
hasn't worked very well. Health insurers should know this better
than almost anyone. Employer-based health insurance owes its
very existence to wage controls put in place during World War
II. Barred from negotiating over wages, employers offered
employees health insurance instead.
Jettison the public plan and you've pretty much given up on
health care reform. If we try to regulate our way out of this mess,
the best true reformers can hope for is that the private health care
[Update, 2:40: Shortly after I filed this Hacker forwarded me an
interview from Feb. 2009 in which he outlined three reasons to
believe the public plan wouldn't kill off the private health
insurance policies they would compete against under the Obama
campaign plan:
I don't think Grassley and other opponents of a public plan
would find these arguments reassuring. If the first two are
correct then I would expect the health insurance business to
shrink down into a boutique "niche" industry. I don't think
Grassley's willing to settle for that. The third argument sounds to
me more like a taunt. I remain convinced that this conflict is
irreconcilable, and that the Grassleys will just have to give way.]
corrections
Corrections
Friday, March 13, 2009, at 6:49 AM ET
In the March 11 "My Goodness," Sandy Stonesifer originally
wrote that new guidelines allow withdrawal of life support after
total brain death. The new guidelines allow withdrawal of life
support after total cardiac death.
In the March 10 "Music Box," Fred Kaplan misspelled the title
of Thelonious Monk's "Crepuscule With Nellie."
12/105
In a March 10 "Politics," Christopher Beam incorrectly stated
that employers can ask workers how they plan to vote in union
elections. Interrogating employees about their votes is illegal.
In the March 9 "Gaming," Leigh Alexander originally
mischaracterized the 2007 Japanese movie I Just Didn't Do It.
While it's based on a true story, the film is not a documentary.
In the March 6 "Chatterbox," Timothy Noah stated, erroneously,
"On the health care page of the White House Web site, there is
no mention—none—of the public component to Obama's health
care reform." A clause does mention "a new public plan based
on benefits available to members of Congress."
In the March 6 "Technology," Farhad Manjoo incorrectly
referred to an "attack" on US Airways Flight 1549. The plane
was forced to make a water landing when it struck a flock of
geese.
In the Feb. 23 "Explainer," Brian Palmer incorrectly stated that
the main rotor of a helicopter in "autorotation" turns slowly,
allowing for a controlled vertical descent. The controlled descent
would not be vertical, and the rotor must maintain its speed.
If you believe you have found an inaccuracy in a Slate story,
please send an e-mail to corrections@slate.com, and we will
investigate. General comments should be posted in "The Fray,"
our reader discussion forum.
In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss the new movie
version of the classic graphic novel Watchmen; Elaine
Showalter's new book on the canon of female American writers,
A Jury of Her Peers; and a 'tween-style makeover for kiddie
cartoon hero Dora the Explorer.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
Dana Stevens' Watchmen review.
"What if Woody Allen Had Directed Watchmen?"—a slide show
on Slate.
Katha Pollitt's Slate review of A Jury of Her Peers.
Laura Miller's Salon review of A Jury of Her Peers.
Katie Roiphe's New York Times review of A Jury of Her Peers.
A Washingtonpost.com piece about Dora the Explorer's
makeover.
Brendan I. Koerner's Slate column about Dora's rise to power.
The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:
Dana's pick: Alison Bechdel's graphic novel Fun Home.
Julia's pick: David Segal's segment of the "My Big Break"
episode of This American Life.
Stephen's picks: For Emma, Forever Ago by Bon Iver (however
you pronounce it) and The Queen Is Dead by the Smiths.
You can e-mail us at culturefest@slate.com.
Posted on March 11 by Jacob Ganz at 12:39 p.m.
culture gabfest
The Culture Gabfest, Commodified Girl
Power Edition
Listen to Slate's show about the week in culture.
By Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner
Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 29 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana
Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio
player below:
Feb. 25, 2009
Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 28 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana
Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio
player below:
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe
to the Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
Get your 14-day free trial from our sponsor Audible.com, which
includes a credit for one free audio book, here. (Audio book of
the week: Steve Martin's Born Standing Up.)
to the weekly Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by
clicking here.
In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss the Oscars, the
rant of CNBC commentator Rick Santelli, the adventures of
Octomom, and the Tropicana juice carton revolt.
Get your 14-day free trial from our sponsor Audible.com,
which includes a credit for one free audio book, here.
(Audiobook of the week: Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys.)
in the show:
13/105
Dana Stevens and Slate TV critic Troy Patterson's discussion of
the Oscars.
Julia Turner and Amanda Fortini's discussion of Oscar fashions.
Ron Rosenbaum's Slate piece on The Reader.
Rick Santelli's CNBC rant.
John Dickerson's Slate piece on Santelli's rant and the White
House response to it.
A New York Times piece on the Tropicana packaging retraction.
The (possibly fake) Pepsi Co. branding memo unearthed by
Gawker.
executives' salaries.
The New York Times Style section details how bankers would
struggle to survive on a mere $500,000 a year.
Martin Wolf of the Financial Times sides with Stephen on
Obama's bank bailout plan.
Time magazine's Claire Suddath writes about Facebook's "25
Things" craze.
Slate's Chris Wilson attempts to locate the originator of "25
Things."
Dana's pick: Ricky Gervais' podcast.
Julia's pick: A tolerable romantic comedy: Definitely, Maybe.
Stephen's pick: The Danny Boyle film Shallow Grave.
Dana's pick: Blossom Dearie (RIP) singing "Rhode Island Is
Famous for You."
Julia's pick: Twilight's unjustly overlooked teenage vampire
costume design.
Jody's pick: Australian TV comedy series Summer Heights High.
Stephen's pick: Frank Kermode's essay on Milton (and the 400th
anniversary of his birth) in the New York Review of Books.
Posted on Feb. 25 at 1:28 p.m. by Julia Turner.
Feb. 11, 2009
Posted on Feb. 11 by Jacob Ganz at 12:39 p.m.
Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 27 with Stephen Metcalf, Jody
Rosen, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on
the audio player below:
to the Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
culturebox
Great Shots of Tough Times
Slate readers share their photographs of the economic crisis.
Get your 14-day free trial from our sponsor Audible.com, which
includes a credit for one free audio book, here. (Audio book of
the week: John Updike's Rabbit, Run.)
In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss A-Rod's
steroid use, Obama's proposed $500,000 salary cap for
executives of banks that take public funds, the "25 Random
Things About Me" frenzy on Facebook, and the Grammys.
in the show:
Alex Rodriguez admits to ESPN's Peter Gammons that he used
steroids in the 2001-03 baseball seasons.
William Saletan's Slate piece on Alex Rodriguez and the
prevalence of steroid use in MLB.
Tim Marchman's argument, also in Slate, that nobody liked Alex
Rodriguez even before they found out about the steroids.
The official site of Jim Bouton, author of the tell-all baseball
memoir Ball Four: The Final Pitch.
The 2007 Katie Couric interview in which Alex Rodriguez
denied using steroids.
The New York Times reports Obama's plan to cap bank
Thursday, March 12, 2009, at 6:47 AM ET
Click here to view a slide show of recession photographs taken
by Slate readers. Click here to submit your own.
Last week, Slate launched "Shoot the Recession," a project in
which we asked our readers what the economic crisis looks like
to them. The response on the photo-sharing site Flickr, where we
set up a group page to collect your contributions, has been
bullish. As of this writing, our Flickr pool is home to more than
160 pictures.
The photos represent a range of approaches to documenting the
recession. Some readers turned their cameras on the downturn's
retail victims, like this Linens 'n Things in South Portland,
Maine, or this Woolworths in Brighton, England. Others focused
on the housing crisis—on a cluster of unsold homes in
Washington, D.C.; one up for auction in Lyndhurst, Ohio; or an
unfinished one in Merced, Calif. Others captured the plight of
Detroit—the city and its auto industry.
14/105
But it's not all doom and gloom—several readers responded to
our call for photos with good humor. The consoling power of
beer—specifically cheap, domestic beer—has been a theme.
Then there's this shot of a Concord, N.H., pottery store with a
clever name its proprietor probably now regrets. Restaurants
across the United States appear to be embracing the "recession
special," and thrifty Slate readers have found some steals: free
biscotti with any latte in Chicago, a 99-cent lunch in New
Orleans.
Click the launch module above to view a slide show of the most
arresting images Slate readers have submitted thus far. Click
here to see all the shots in Slate's "Shoot the Recession" photo
group on Flickr. And most important: Keep the photos coming.
As we receive more images, we'll put together more galleries
like this one and publish them on Slate.
Questions about the project? E-mail slate.flickr@gmail.com.
culturebox
Tag, You're It!
What to do when old photos of you appear on Facebook.
By Brian Braiker
I am not a digital native. I was born in 1975 and didn't send my
first e-mail until I was a sophomore in college. I spent my junior
year abroad, where e-mail came in handy and Internet porn
would have, if only I had known about it. Don't get me wrong,
I'm no Luddite. These days I love the Web like Joanie loves
Chachi. (That's a pre-digital cultural reference for all you
youngsters.) But I came of age at a time when most photographs
ended up in a shoe box or a photo album. I never spent hours
snapping self-portraits with a digital camera trying to get that
perfect profile pic. And I always assumed that any pictures taken
of me before I had graduated from college were forever safe
from Google's tentacles.
That was until Caroline, a high-school friend's little sister, joined
Facebook. She scanned a batch of her pics from the late '80s and
early '90s, posted them to her page, and tagged them—
identifying the people in pictures and, if they were on Facebook,
announcing to their entire networks that these photos had been
uploaded. I signed on one day to find that she had posted a
picture of our friend Dan in all of his 1990 glory: blousy white
shirt, jeans that may or may not have been acid-washed,
righteous mullet. He is standing beside Kim, who is wearing a
floral print dress and a scrunchie around her wrist. Of course I
left a comment, something to the effect of
"HAHAHAHAHAHA!" Caroline commented back, ominously,
"ur next braiker."
I went through a bit of a hippie phase in high school: long greasy
hair, Dead shows. I was a few pounds heavier then and hadn't
yet blossomed into the well-groomed specimen of smoldering
manhood who is typing this today. So when I received an e-mail
alert that Caroline had tagged me in a photo, I was horrified.
Rightfully so. The picture she posted is terrible. It's homecoming
1991, though it could easily be mistaken for the parking lot at a
Phish concert. I appear to be dancing or jumping; my unwashed
mane is flying all over the place; I look like a hobo who has
spent the night in a patchouli patch. My first impulse was to
detag the photo. I mean, how dare she? Who goes through the
trouble of unearthing mortifying 18-year-old snapshots, scanning
them, and then putting them in a public space? Yet, somehow
removing the tag, which is my prerogative, seems weaselly—
especially since I had gleefully commented on Dan's photo.
Instead, I typed a lame comment ("who is that handsome
devil?") and hoped that nobody would see the picture.
But the whole experience nagged at me. I felt violated. So I
made some calls. "There is a generational element to this," says
John Palfrey, co-author of Born Digital. "A picture of someone
taken today at a party is thought to be fair game for uploading by
young people, whereas pictures taken in the pre-digital age are
not." Palfrey, a Harvard Law School professor, conducted
interviews with so-called "digital natives," members of the first
generation to have grown up online. He found that these people
place information, say a photograph of themselves, into one of
three separate categories. That photo can be either 1) something
they've put up on the Web themselves, 2) something a friend put
up online and then tagged, or, more worryingly, 3) something a
third party uploaded without them knowing—and was
subsequently identified, without any human intervention, by
some facial recognition software.
Palfrey, who is three years older than me and much smarter,
admits to having detagged photos of himself on Facebook for
privacy reasons. But whereas he and I might bristle a bit at that
second category, we all know that the digital native is more
accustomed to letting it all hang out online. The third category,
however, freaks everyone out, says Palfrey. And it's not purely
science fiction, either. Already there's Riya, a search engine that
can recognize images of people and things, with mixed success.
Affine Systems promises to do the same for videos. "Say you're
the copyright holder of Hannah Montana and you want to find
any time Miley Cyrus appears on Youtube, a service like
Affine's could be very useful" says Palfrey. "You could also
think of it being more pernicious if it's used in a social setting."
One can only imagine the horror of learning that some bot has
tagged you in footage of a high school musical, or some other
compromising situation, that somehow ended up online. As far
as Palfrey knows this hasn't happened yet, but it feels like only a
matter of time. "That seems to be the new frontier," he says.
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As with any new frontier, the rules of engagement can be vague.
Fortunately, there is Debrett's, which is publishing the A to Z of
Modern Manners, the first of their etiquette guides to tackle
social networking, in the United States next month. Its author is
Jo Bryant, a chipper Brit who thinks that "people are confused
about what's right and wrong and how far you can go" on sites
like Facebook. "It is a whole new code of behavior that we need
to get to grips with." Even digital natives have been known to
struggle: Last month Chelsy Davy changed her relationship
status on Facebook, inadvertently triggering a tabloid feeding
frenzy because she was no longer seeing her boyfriend of five
years, Prince Harry. More recently, the now infamous Chris
Brown confirmed his split from Rihanna by changing his
relationship status to "single," according to the New York Post.
Bryant, who has herself been tagged on Facebook "but nothing
bad, thankfully," agreed that I would probably be overreacting if
I were to detag the offending photo. She did offer advice to
would-be taggers. "Just because you're online you shouldn't
forget how your actions might make someone else feel," she
says. "That's really what manners and etiquette are all about." So
finally I called Caroline and asked her, as politely as possible,
just what the hell her deal was. Turns out she had just gotten a
scanner and, she says, has "a ton of free time right now," so she
went on a bit of a scanning and tagging binge.
Caroline told me that she's had her own unfortunate pre-digital
photo scanned and tagged, and therefore claims to be "very
sensitive" on the topic. "I got my tag cherry popped because this
girl from my boarding school put up all these photos and they
were amazing and I was so happy to see them," she says. "Then
she tagged me in one and I was embarrassed and self-conscious
that all my cool new friends were going to see that I was fat in
high school. I was going to remove the tag but I didn't want her
to feel insulted. I wasn't sure what to think of it."
What she ended up concluding is probably the best—and
hardest—lesson Facebook has to offer. Once you start
reconnecting with people from your distant past, even if
fleetingly online, your life goes from feeling like a patchwork of
acquaintances and experiences to something more fluid and
cohesive. This can be humbling. Or, as Caroline said when I
whined to her about posting that photo: "You can never be too
cool for your past."
culturebox
Boy Toy
Ken's sad and lonely life in Barbie's shadow.
By Troy Patterson
The golden jubilee of a diamond-bright icon is upon us as the
Barbie doll, introduced at the American International Toy Fair of
1959, passes a milestone on March 9. This presents an occasion
to praise her timeless charms, to damn her anti-feminism, and,
for those wired for negative capability, to hold both ideas in
mind. Of the season's two books on the subject, Barbie and
Ruth: The Story of the World's Most Famous Doll and the
Woman Who Created Her is the more sensible affair. Author
Robin Gerber details the career of Mattel co-founder Ruth
Handler—who named her celebrated toy after her only
daughter—with the precision of a business-school case study.
Rather less judicious, Toy Monster: The Big, Bad World of
Mattel, eructed by renowned sleaze broker Jerry Oppenheimer,
holds that Barbie's true creator was Mattel research-and-design
executive Jack Ryan, who had a thing for dames of a Barbieesque silhouette, one of whom appears, in the book's first
sentence, as his accomplice in "yet another evening of
compulsive sex."
Indeed, beyond matters of basic fact, the only quality that the
two new Barbiographies share is the short shrift each gives the
doll's love interest. Such is the eternal lot of unfortunate Ken
Carson, Barbie's long-term beau and ever-ready escort. If history
is any guide, Ken—an accessory, an ornament, a cold planet
orbiting a hyper-giant star—will not quite be a VIP at this 50thbirthday gala. But his role, however minor, will be critical:
Barbie wouldn't be Barbie if she didn't have a steady date.
Watch a Slate V history of the Barbie television commercial:
In the late 1950s, Handler observed her daughter using paper
dolls to imagine adult lives and saw an opportunity to "threedimensionalize" the play pattern. Though Mattel modeled
Barbie's physique on that of a German doll with a gold-digger
Weltanschauung, she herself entered life as an independent
woman. As noted in the definitive critical text on the subject,
M.G. Lord's Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a
Real Doll, Mattel's ad agency introduced the plastic figurine as a
flesh-and-blood mannequin: "She was a teenage fashion model,
and the world was her runway." Barbie never demanded a
boyfriend, but the fantasies of the little girls consumed with her
did. Ken made the scene in 1961, his namesake being Handler's
son.
"It all started at the dance," according to the myth marketed by
the TV commercial announcing Ken's debut. Here was ballgowned Barbie swiveling her head toward a young man in a
shawl-collar evening suit. The ad continues, "Somehow she
knew that she and Ken would be going together." Perhaps what
tipped her off was the expression on his blandly handsome face,
which splits the difference between eager attentiveness and
submissive captivation. After the new couple models some
outfits for genteel picnics, polite frat parties, and afternoons of
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beach-blanket bingo, the commercial climaxes with Ken back in
his tux and Barbie in a bridal gown. It's left to your imagination
whether they've just turned to face the officiant or have just now
tied the knot, but for sure they don't get a honeymoon. Is there
any corner of the Barbie universe—among all the board games
and sticker books and authorized novels—where the two live as
man and wife? Though anything is possible at playtime, the
point of Barbie's having Ken around is not for her to marry him
but for her to have the option. It is enough for him to be
marriageable. Today, the most popular Ken model—one of the
few sold in stores by its lonesome—is the Wedding Day Sparkle
Groom Ken. Impossibly patient and unfailingly loyal, he's
always waiting for her at the altar and always will be until his
plastic decomposes.
Those synthetics—the body is currently acrylonitrile butadiene
styrene—have taken on many shapes over the years. Ken started
out as lean and elegant and upper-class swell, befitting the "Ivy
stripes" and "Ivy colors" mentioned in ad copy for his early
outfits. According to the amazacrazily comprehensive collector's
site Keeping Ken—which is not safe to click on if you don't
want to have your mind blown—Mattel overhauled his body
mold in the late '60s so that he could "reflect the rugged
masculinity" of the times. These days, he is pretty cut. When my
friend Marion, who is 3½, heard I was working on this piece, she
voiced concern that I take notice of "his mighty arms." In the
clothes he has worn upon that body, Ken has emerged as the
foremost fashion victim of the postwar era, taking turns as a
mod, a rocker, a jazzbo, a disco king, etc., ad nauseum, all in the
name of expressing his devotion to Barbie by coordinating with
her. She is a slave to fashion, and he is a slave to her. Therefore,
when she appeared in the early '90s as Earring Magic Barbie, he
became the gay-iconic Earring Magic Ken.
There have been black Kens and Latin Kens, Kens with
mustaches and Kens with voice boxes who said things like "I'll
get the food for the party!" and "What are you doing next
weekend?" The only part of his anatomy that hasn't changed is
the one that's never been there. Handler and the other women at
Mattel were less sheepish than their male colleagues about
giving Ken a pronounced "bump" at the crotch, but none of them
ever considered endowing him correctly. Attending to a beauty
beyond Cleopatra, he is beyond a eunuch. To compensate for his
absent package, his outfits have been packaged with all manner
of deputized phalli—a drum major's baton here, a long-barreled
rifle there. "The cruelest comment on his genital deficiency …
came in 1964," writes Lord, "with 'Cheerful Chef,' a backyard
barbecue costume that included a long fork skewering a pink
plastic weenie."
But even with his manhood, Ken wouldn't quite be a man. When
I took my Beach Party Ken over to Marion's place for a play
date, I discovered that she has six Barbies—none of them bought
by ambivalent Mommy—attending to the needs of her one
hapless Ken. Marion and her mother evolved a game in which
two evil sisters (represented by Cruella de Vil and the witch
from Sleeping Beauty) repeatedly abducted the two Kens and
tied them up in their lair, where they waited powerlessly for a
Barbie to come to the rescue. Anecdotal evidence suggests that
such narratives are common in the nursery, the demigoddess
controlling the drone. One of Mattel's original slogans for Ken
was, "He's a doll!" But really, he's just Barbie's plaything.
day to day
The Pessimistic Warren Buffett
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Politics: Interpreting Buffett's Gloom and Doom
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett recently weighed in on the
state of the U.S. economy. He wasn't optimistic. John Dickerson
and Madeleine Brand review what Buffett had to say about
President Obama's policies. Listen to the segment.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Blogging the Bible: Good Book Explores the Bible's "Every
Word"
The Bible has been described in many ways, and now David
Plotz has a few more adjectives to add to the list. Plotz talks with
Madeleine Brand about his new book, Good Book: The Bizarre,
Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I
Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible. Listen to
the segment.
.
dear prudence
A Face Not Even a Mother Could Love
How do I tell my boyfriend I think we'd have ugly babies?
Get "Dear Prudence" delivered to your inbox each week; click
here to sign up. Please send your questions for publication to
prudence@slate.com. (Questions may be edited.)
Got a burning question for Prudie? She'll be online at
Washingtonpost.com to chat with readers each Monday at 1 p.m.
starting on March 16. Submit your questions and comments here
before or during the live discussion.
17/105
Dear Prudence,
My boyfriend and I are in a healthy and loving relationship, and
we are beginning to talk about marriage. We both want the same
number of kids at the same point in our lives. It is presumed that
these will be our biological children. The issue is, I'm not sure
that I would want to bear my boyfriend's children. While he is
incredibly intelligent and has a great personality, he is markedly
less physically attractive than I am. We get occasional
lighthearted comments from friends and family about the
discrepancy. Having biological children has never been
important to me, and I think adoption is great. I believe that he
will be an amazing father and that our children, biological or
adopted, would be bright and well-behaved as a result of good
parenting. Should I bring these thoughts up with him? I think he
would be open to the idea of adoption but would also be hurt by
my rationale. At what point should we discuss this more
seriously, and how should I tell him how I feel?
—Skinny Bitch
Dear Skinny,
You're wise to avoid the potential tragedy of reproducing with
your boyfriend: Your children could get his looks and your
personality. Perhaps your boyfriend's already got an inkling of
how you feel because of the Leonardo DiCaprio mask you ask
him to wear when you make love. And although Brad and
Angelina are both fecund and support adoption, I'm not sure
they're going to agree to place any of their future progeny with
you just to help you avoid the embarrassment of having a child
who looks like your boyfriend. I'm trying to imagine how you
initiate this discussion with him. Something like: "I look forward
to spending the rest of my life with you. But when it comes to
having kids, I'm sure that if we adopt we'll have a better shot of
having decent-looking ones than if I let you impregnate me with
your hideous sperm." That should go over well! What's supposed
to happen when you are in love with someone (who also happens
to be intelligent and have a great personality) is that you
discover, despite objective measures, that person is beautiful to
you. Your boyfriend sounds like a catch, so maybe you should
toss him back so that he has a chance to find someone who's not
permanently stuck in the shallow end.
—Prudie
Monstrous Mother-in-Law
Dear Prudence,
I'm in my late 30s, just finished a graduate degree, and recently
started a temporary job that I like. I share duties with a younger
woman also serves as a personal assistant to our boss. Over the
past few months, she's gradually revealed that the boss (a man in
his 40s) has been using her as an emotional outlet, sharing his
insecurities, fears, and early traumatic experiences with her. This
situation has been so taxing for her that she found a new job. I've
accepted her job since it means a permanent position.
Professionally, it's a treat to work alongside my boss, who is
very knowledgeable and puts a lot of effort into his work.
However, I started noticing that he expects me to substitute for
my former colleague as his new "handkerchief" to weep into. Of
course, I am capable of occasional sympathy, but I'm not
prepared to become my boss's psychoanalyst. I would prefer to
maintain a professional distance and save my emotional support
for my husband and child. How do I tactfully spell this all out
for my boss so that I preserve a good working relationship and
don't offend him?
—A Cold Shoulder
Dear A Cold,
You are in a delicate situation since you like and want to keep
your job, but the person who decides how much you like it and
whether you keep it is a psychological wreck. Maintaining your
professional distance is obviously the right and necessary thing
to do. But when you work for someone unbalanced, not feeding
his emotional needs does potentially put you at risk of him
turning on you. Your difficulty is compounded by the fact that
he's good at his job and therefore valued by the company. You
need to have a series of stock phrases that convey your concern
but close off further confession: "It's only human to doubt
yourself sometimes." "In this economy, everyone can't help but
second-guess themselves." "Your childhood sounds difficult and
painful." Then, when you've delivered one, immediately change
the topic back to the work matter at hand. If he tries to persist
with the psychoanalysis, you have to politely turn away such
further conversation: "If you really are that worried about this
decision, maybe you should discuss it with someone else in the
company." "I'm afraid I'm not the right person to talk to about
such personal matters." It might even help to role play this with
your husband, so that when your boss starts moaning, you have
practice maintaining a neutral, unflustered tone. If you're good at
your duties and don't allow yourself to be drawn into his drama,
let's hope he will turn to more suitable sources of solace.
—Prudie
Dear Prudie,
Since graduating from college several years ago, my younger
sister has adopted what you might call an alternative lifestyle.
She lives in our parents' basement, works part time at a fastfood restaurant, and spends the majority of her time protesting
for various causes. I have been sympathetic until recently, when
she adopted the freegan lifestyle. Freegan means that she goes
out in the middle of the night to dig through dumpsters behind
grocery stores and food production plants. Her stance is that
perfectly good food is being thrown out for cosmetic or other
bogus reasons. This weekend, I visited my family, only to find
the freezer full of expired health drinks and bagels and the
cupboards stuffed with other expired or damaged items—
including health-food bars that were recalled because of
potential salmonella poisoning. I was so grossed out, I wouldn't
18/105
eat anything without first inquiring about its origins. My sister
pays no rent and has no expenses, and my parents would happily
buy her any food from the store. I have tried to encourage my
parents to put their foot down about her bringing garbage into
the house to no avail. Their opinion is that I am the one being
unreasonable. Please help!
—Gag Me
Dear Gag,
Since I recently spent the wee hours driving the porcelain bus
because of some toxic stuffed peppers (which I paid for!), I am
sympathetic to the roiling in your stomach at the thought of
eating food rescued from the dumpster. As long as your family's
cuisine of choice is not Italian or Chinese but "Recalled by the
FDA," when you're visiting and mealtime comes around you
should make a pitch for supporting the beleaguered restaurant
industry. I think your distress is about more than your digestive
system, though. It's driving you crazy that your parents, instead
of encouraging your sister toward self-sufficiency, are indulging
her to the point that they are potentially endangering their own
health. But take note that the harder you push on this, the more
they rush to her defense. So don't give yourself a stomach ache
over your family dynamics. Instead, just be glad you're not
living in the basement, too, and consider brown-bagging it the
next time you visit.
—Prudie
Dear Prudence
I am a 14-year-old girl who's a freshman in high school. In
eighth grade, I was in all the same classes with an odd kid
named "Larry." He often said off-topic things in the middle of
class and made inappropriate comments. I was nice to him, so
teachers paired me with him for every group project. He
developed a huge crush on me and gave me a card on Valentine's
Day. I told him I liked him only as a friend, and everything
seemed fine. Then this year he asked me out. I told him no, but
he is totally oblivious and won't take no for an answer. He asks
me to go out with him in embarrassing places, like in class, and
hugs me in the hallway, which makes me feel uncomfortable.
My friends say he's harassing me. I don't want to embarrass him
by making him go to the guidance counselor or talking to his
parents, so what should I do? My parents know all the details,
but I don't want them to get involved because I want to learn
how to deal with an uncomfortable situation on my own. How
do I make Larry stay away from me? I'm not even interested in a
friendship with him anymore.
—Uncomfortable
Dear Uncomfortable,
It is great that you were kind to Larry—he has problems that
keep him from understanding normal social interactions, and he
probably hasn't had much compassion from his classmates. Also
admirable is your desire to handle this yourself. But how to deal
with unwanted advances from someone who doesn't understand
"no" is a difficult problem even for adults to solve. You're only
14, so for your sake, and for Larry's, you need adult intervention.
Tell your parents you can't handle this anymore, and you would
like them to go with you to talk about this with the guidance
counselor. This is not about getting Larry in trouble; he needs to
learn now how to restrain himself so he doesn't get into bigger
trouble later on. The school should take action immediately to
help Larry understand that he must stop asking you out and
touching you. If this doesn't get better right away, keep speaking
up to the adults who should be making sure you feel comfortable
at school.
—Prudie
dispatches
Backlash to the Kingmaker
What the rise of Avigdor Lieberman means for Russians in Israel.
By Sarah A. Topol
TEL AVIV, Israel—In Israel, calling an immigrant from the
former Soviet Union "Russian" is an insult; the preferred term is
repatriate, someone who has returned home. Russian refers to
ethnic Russians, and in Russia, Jews were constantly reminded
that they were not Russian. Having experienced institutionalized
anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, the 1.2 million Soviet
immigrants who flooded Israel in the 1990s were shocked when
they were accused of not being Jewish enough by the local
population. Whenever I am in Israel, I am constantly corrected
by the repatriates themselves when I use the term "Russian
immigrant."
Over the last 20 years, the repatriates have integrated into Israeli
society; their children serve in the army, speak fluent Hebrew,
and watch Big Brother VIP. Repatriates assure me that society
has begun to accept the quirks of Russian immigrant culture—
drinking vodka on a cold day, eating Russian food, tuning in to
Russian-language television and radio—but repatriate Avigdor
Lieberman's recent emergence as the kingmaker of Israeli
politics comes with a cost. Although it signifies Russian political
empowerment in mainstream Israeli politics, it has resurfaced
some old Russian stereotypes.
Peter Mastovoy, an internationally acclaimed documentary
director, will be honored with the Yuri Shtern Medal by the
Ministry of Absorption for his contribution to Israeli culture and
society on March 29. Over a lunch of borsht, seloydka (pickled
herring), Russian beet and potato salads, hummus, and pita, he
19/105
tried to explain the initial attitude toward the enormous wave of
Russian immigrants.
"In Russia, Jews had to work twice as hard as Russians; we had
to be smarter and faster, otherwise the Soviet masters would not
let us do anything. So, we arrived more educated, a head above
native-born Israelis. Still, for some reason there was a stigma,"
he observed. "When I first came to Israel, they asked me, 'Do
you know what a refrigerator is?' They thought we all lived in
Siberia with wild bears!"
Peter's wife, Marina, a journalist with Channel 9, Israel's first
24-hour-Russian-language TV channel, shared his laughter.
Marina and Peter wanted to vote for Lieberman, but instead they
chose to cast their ballots for Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud
because they worried that supporting Lieberman would harm
Bibi's chance of becoming prime minister.
Lieberman's rise made international headlines because of his
growing appeal among "mainstream"—that is, non-Russian—
voters; however, his main support base has been overlooked.
Mark Kotliarsky, the press secretary and spokesman for
Lieberman's party, Israel Beitenu (Israel Is Our Home),
attributes only four of the party's 15 Knesset seats to nonRussian voters. Still, Kotliarsky maintains that Israel Beitenu is
not a Russian party but "an Israeli party with Russian-repatriateinterest priorities."
When we met, the party office was buzzing with activity.
Kotliarsky's data suggest that Lieberman received more than 50
percent of the Russian-speaking vote; most of the rest voted for
Netanyahu because he had a better chance of becoming prime
minister. What would happen if those Russians voted for
Lieberman? I wonder. Kotliarsky answered my question in a
flash. In the previous election, each mandate was worth about
28,000 votes. If all eligible Russian-speaking voters cast a ballot
for Lieberman, their support alone would give him about 20
Knesset seats. If his popularity in the mainstream continues at
the expense of other parties, it is possible Lieberman could gain
enough mandates to become prime minister. (This chart shows
how relatively small shifts in support can affect party standings.)
Lieberman appeals to Russians because he is perceived as an
anti-democrat, someone who stands apart from other Israeli
politicians who engage in endless, inconclusive dialogue. They
see him as a decisive man of action. "Lieberman is the first
person to raise his voice against the sacred cow of democracy,"
Genadiy Nizhnik explains. Nizhnik moved to Israel at 18 and
immediately joined the army; he is now in his late 30s. Wrapped
in a woolen scarf to keep out the Jerusalem chill, Nizhnik is a
giant of a man who looks more like a lumberjack than the tour
guide of Jerusalem's holy sites that he is.
During our 30-minute conversation, Nizhnik knocked back four
shots of Jameson whiskey without batting an eye, as if to flaunt
the stereotype of the hard-drinking Russian. "[Repatriates] have
been immunized against liberal democracy. … We heard all the
leftist fairy tales and lullabies, and we can't be bought with them.
Maybe the locals can, but not us. Don't get me wrong," he adds,
"I'm not against democracy, just the kind of democracy we have
in Israel. Life is too hard here. Life, God, death, and war are
always right beside us."
Nizhnik also takes pride in Israel Beitenu's success with
mainstream voters. He tells me times are changing for
Russians—their culture and their political opinions are becoming
more accepted by the mainstream. "Russians have stopped being
on the periphery here. Our violin joined the symphony and
began to play. Now we are part of the Israeli orchestra, because
it wasn't just Russians who voted for Lieberman."
For all the Russian repatriates' attempts to convince me they are
accepted here, behind closed doors, sabras tell another story. To
them, Russians remain outsiders. Young and old alike turn sour
when discussing Lieberman's rise.
I met Danny on a bus in Jerusalem. His views echoed what many
other Israeli-born Jews told me. "The Russians? Lieberman?
This is an embarrassment. They come here, they eat pork, most
of them are not even Jewish!" he exclaimed. "And now they've
elected him, they will ruin our country."
It is not only older Russian immigrants who felt alienated upon
arriving in Israel. Twenty-one-year-old Yana moved to
Be'ersheva from Russia when she was 7. Four years ago, when
she moved to Tel Aviv, she changed her name to Lee. "I didn't
want people to know I was Russian," she explained. "I was tired
of being mocked and called a prostitute. I thought life would be
easier." Lee doesn't "look" Russian—she looks like all the other
beautiful girls with hazel eyes and flowing brown hair who roam
the city's streets. Dressed in the latest fashions, she attracted
admiring glances from other tables in the coffee shop where we
met. "But I'm Russian, no matter how hard I try, I'm Russian
here." She sighed. "I guess things are changing."
Two years ago, I met Sveta in Nicaragua. She was backpacking
after her army service, an Israeli rite of passage. Sveta looks
Russian, with long blond hair and bright blue eyes. She moved
from Odessa at 13 and considers herself Israeli.
As we chattered away in Russian at a bar in Jerusalem, I glanced
around to see if people were looking at us. I detected a faint air
of distaste from the next table. Was I just being paranoid? After
serving in the army, speaking Hebrew fluently, living and
working here, how would it feel still to be labeled Russian?
"Doesn't it bother you?" I asked Sveta.
"Of course," she replied, dragging heavily on her cigarette, "But
that's reality. The only thing I can do is prove them wrong. I just
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have to show them Russians aren't like all the stereotypes." But
with her parents and her friends voting for Lieberman,
empowering themselves at the expense of reviving old
stereotypes, I wonder if she can.
explainer
Global Motherf*ckers
Does every culture use the suggestion of maternal incest as an insult?
By Nina Shen Rastogi
A mythical beast known as the "grass-mud horse" has become an
Internet phenomenon in China. The New York Times reported
Thursday that the alpacalike creature's Mandarin name just
happens to be a very, very dirty pun. Times style rules prevent
the paper from clarifying the joke, but other, less-dignified
outlets explain that the phrase Cao ni ma is a homonym for
"fuck your mother" in Chinese. Is some variant of motherfucker
used all over the world?
venerate motherhood use variations of the phrase as well.
Mexicans like to hurl the invective chinga tu madre at their
rivals. During the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese exclamation du
me—literally, "fuck mother"—morphed into the popular
American military slang term doo-mommie.
African cultures yield some colorful entries in the motherfucking
canon. Anthropologist Philip Mayer, in a 1951 article on joketelling among the Gusii people of Kenya, noted that close friends
were likely to rib one another with the directive, "Go eat your
mother's anus!" The Igbo people of Nigeria use the phrase O-ra
nna ye!, or "fucker of his mother!"
The first known print appearance of the English phrase—as the
adjectival intensifier motherfucking—dates to a legal document
from 1889. In a case before the Texas Court of Appeals, it was
reported that the defendant had been referred to by another man
as "that God damned mother-f—cking, bastardly son-of-a-bitch!"
The phrase was considered so vile in late 19th-century America
that, in another Texas court case, it was argued that a man who
had been called a "mother-fucking son-of-a-bitch" by a person
he later shot "could not be found guilty of a higher offense than
manslaughter," so grave was the offense.
Pretty much. While it's not quite a universal insult, variations on
the command to commit incest with one's mother appear in
every region of the globe. Anthropologists note that, across
cultures, the most severe insults tend to involve a few basic
themes: your opponent's family, your opponent's religion, sex,
and scatology. Because motherfucker covers two of these
topics—plus incest, a nearly global taboo—it's a popular choice
just about everywhere. In Mandarin Chinese alone, riffs on the
basic phrase include Cao ni ma ge bi, meaning "fuck your
mother's cunt," and Cao ni da ye, "fuck your elder uncle." Given
the Chinese culture of ancestor worship, Cao ni zu shong shi ba
dai, or "fuck your ancestors of 18 generations," may be the worst
incest instruction of all.
Going back even further, medieval Arabic literature is a font of
motherfucking, mostly in the form of ritualized insult-dueling.
For example, Al-Nu`man ibn al-Mundhir, a sixth-century king of
Al-Hirah, was lampooned in a poem as "a king who fondles his
mother and his slave(s),/ His joints are flaccid, his penis the size
of a kohl-needle." An eighth-century Persian poet named
Bashshar ibn Burd dissed another poet, Hammad Ajrad, by
writing, "Ajrad jumps on his mother: a sow giving suck to a
sucker." To which Hammad responded: "You are called Burd's
son, but you are another's. But even if you were Burd's son (may
you fuck your mother!), who is Burd?"
Incest-related invectives are only one class of mother insults,
which may impugn a mother's sexual integrity—as in the Italian
phrase "If the streets were paved with pricks, your mother would
walk on her ass"—or suggest that the speaker is about to rape or
violate the listener's mother himself. (For example, the great
Turco-Mongolian curse, "I urinate on your father's head and
have intercourse with your mother!")
Explainer thanks Reinhold Aman of the journal Maledicta,
Timothy Jay of the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, Jesse
Sheidlower of the Oxford English Dictionary, and Robert
Vanderplank of the Oxford University Language Center.
In Mediterranean cultures, where the relationship between
mother and son is particularly sacred, insults about incest carry
special potency. The nastiest Greek curses, for example, are
gamo ti mana sou, gamo tin Panagia sou, and gamo to Khristo
sou—"fuck your mother," "fuck your madonna," and "fuck your
Christ," respectively. According to G. Legman's classic
Rationale of the Dirty Joke, "Go fuck your mother" (Idy v kibini
matri) is the "Russian ultimate-insult." Other cultures that
explainer
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
The Mile High Club
How aerial refueling works.
By Christopher Beam
The Pentagon may have to delay the purchase of aerial refueling
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tankers as a cost-cutting measure, CQ Daily reported on
Monday. Military leaders have been waiting years to replace its
aging fleet of tankers, a process that could cost up to $100
billion over the next two decades. How does aerial refueling
work, anyway?
It's like siphoning gas from a car traveling at 350 mph. The
purpose of air refueling is to extend the natural range of an
aircraft. Instead of wasting time by landing to refuel on the
ground, a military pilot can arrange to rendezvous with a tanker
plane along the way. The receiver aircraft—the one that needs
gas—approaches the tanker from behind and, once it's within
100 feet or so, slows down so that both planes are flying at the
same speed. (For fighter planes, that's usually around 300 knots;
for larger planes, it's slower.)
At that point, there are two main refueling techniques: "flying
boom" or "probe and drogue." In the former method, a boom
operator sitting in the back of a tanker navigates a giant
telescoping tube into a receptacle located near the front of the
receiver plane. After the boom latches in, it sends a signal to the
tanker to start pumping gas. In the latter system, tanker
engineers unspool a long hose from either below the fuselage or
a wing tip. At the end of the hose is a basket, or drogue, that
looks like a giant windsock. Once the hose is fully extended, the
receiver pilot maneuvers a retractable probe mounted on the
plane's nose into the drogue. If the pilot maneuvers too gently,
the probe won't latch into the basket. If he pushes too hard, he'll
stab the drogue, which can cause the hose to bunch up and fly
away. (Here's the right way to do it. Here's the wrong way.) The
tanker starts pumping only when the probe fits snugly into the
basket, forming a seal.
Why didn't the Ponzi schemer get indicted instead?
By Harlan J. Protass
Wednesday, March 11, 2009, at 10:23 AM ET
Bernie Madoff is expected to plead guilty Thursday in response
to an 11-count information (PDF) alleging crimes ranging from
securities fraud to money laundering to perjury. How does an
"information" differ from an indictment?
It doesn't come from a grand jury. Criminal cases formally begin
with either an indictment or an information, both of which set
forth accusations of wrongdoing. A prosecutor can obtain an
indictment only by convincing a grand jury that there is enough
evidence to warrant the filing of formal charges. A defendant,
however, can voluntarily give up his right to have a grand jury
consider the evidence against him. If that happens, a prosecutor
can skip the indictment and bring charges by way of an
information—a simple court filing that details the charges. In
practical terms, there is no difference between an indictment and
an information, once the document has been filed with the court.
So why would you ever waive your right to a grand jury?
Typically, defendants do this because they've entered into plea
agreements spelling out, among other things, a sentencing
calculation under federal guidelines. That's not the case with
Madoff, though. The government said yesterday that it "has not
entered into any agreement with Mr. Madoff about his plea or
sentencing." It may be that Madoff consented to the list of
charges but disputed the government's guidelines calculation. In
that case, he'd still be better off passing on the grand jury for the
certainty of an agreed-upon information.
Each method has its advantages. Booms can pump gas faster, at
around 6,000 pounds per minute, while a probe and drogue
pumps at less than half that rate. (The most common American
tanker, the KC-135, can hold up to 200,000 pounds of gas, or
29,000 gallons.) But tankers equipped with probe-and-drogue
systems can refuel as many as three planes at once (although two
is usually the maximum). In general, the Air Force uses flying
booms, while the Navy and Marines use probe and drogue—a
situation that caused compatibility issues during the Gulf War
and which the two military branches are still trying to resolve.
On Tuesday, Madoff's lawyers also received a letter (PDF) from
the government explaining that the charges in the information
would likely result in a sentence of life imprisonment under
federal guidelines. That's called a "Pimentel letter," and one just
like it is generally sent whenever a defendant agrees to plead
guilty without the benefit of a plea agreement. The practice dates
to 1991, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
suggested that defendants should be protected from the "unfair
surprise" of entering their guilty pleas before knowing what
range of sentences their admissions will authorize.
Of course, the judge to whom Madoff's case was assigned does
not have to follow the federal guidelines. Under the Supreme
Court's landmark decision in United States v. Booker, he has
substantial discretion to fashion a fair, just, and reasonable
sentence short of what the guidelines endorse. Indeed, some
judges have done just that in similar circumstances. For
example, in 2006 a judge sentenced Richard Adelson, the former
president of Impath, to 42 months in prison for securities fraud
and filing false documents, even though the guidelines
recommended life. Likewise, the former CEO of reinsurer
General Re, Ronald Ferguson, faced life imprisonment for his
Explainer thanks John B. Sams Jr. of the Aerial Refueling
Systems Advisory Group and Dave Sloan of Boeing.
explainer
Madoff's "Information"
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role in a rotten deal to artificially inflate the balance sheet of
insurance giant AIG, but he received a sentence of two years in
prison last year.
Given the magnitude of Madoff's crimes, the amount of money
that investors lost, and the level of public outrage, though,
anything short of an effective life sentence in this case seems
unlikely.
explainer
Elf Detection 101
How to find the hidden folk of Iceland.
By Juliet Lapidos
An article on Iceland's de facto bankruptcy in the April issue of
Vanity Fair notes that a "large number of Icelanders" believe in
elves or "hidden people." This widespread folklore occasionally
disrupts business in the sparsely populated North Atlantic
country. Before the aluminum company Alcoa could erect a
smelting factory, "it had to defer to a government expert to scour
the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under
it." How do you find an elf?
With psychic powers. According to a poll conducted in 2007, 54
percent of Icelanders don't deny the existence of elves and 8
percent believe in them outright, although only 3 percent claim
to have encountered one personally. The ability to see the
huldufólk, or hidden folk, can't be learned; you're just born with
it. To find elves, seers don't really need to do anything—they'll
just sense an elfin presence. The Vanity Fair article says that elf
detection can take six months, but it's usually a quick process
that can last under an hour. And although the magazine claims
that a "government expert" had to certify the nonexistence of
elves, the Icelandic Embassy insists that these consults are
performed by freelancers, not government contractors.
Indeed, it's thought that many who are born clairvoyant lose the
ability after the age of 8 or so. Furthermore, it's not just
Icelanders who have this capacity—theoretically, anyone, from
any country, can have the power to communicate with elves.
Clairvoyants see elves year-round, sometimes in their own
backyards, but Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve are
considered especially good occasions for elf-spotting. That's
because according to some legends, these holidays are traditional
moving days for the huldufólk. Elves often dress in old-timey,
19th-century outfits like homemade-looking ankle-length skirts,
and they come in all sizes. There are thought to be at least 13
types of elves, some of whom are as tall as humans. Others, like
the Blómálfar, or flower elves, are just a few inches tall.
When Icelanders try to build roads or settlements through elf
dwellings, the elves are said to go bonkers—causing equipment
failures and other problems. In the early 1970s, for example,
contractors trying to move a large rock to make way for a
highway near Reykjavík hired a clairvoyant, Zophanías
Pétursson, after experiencing several minor mishaps. Pétursson
detected the presence of elves and claimed to obtain a waiver
from the supernatural creatures so that work could progress. But
the elves weren't finished: A bulldozer operator who had helped
move the stone fractured a water pipe that fed into a fish farm,
killing thousands of trout hatchlings.
Although Pétursson apparently failed to mollify the highwayhating elves, huldufólk experts believe negotiation is possible. If
a construction supervisor suspects he might be heading into an
elfin zone or just wants to rule out the possibility, he can hire a
medium (by asking for a reference from the Icelandic Elf
School, for example). Elves sometimes agree either to move or
to let a construction project go forth unimpeded as long as the
workers don't blow up their nearby dwelling.
A minority of construction projects face elf-related delays. But if
a clairvoyant reports seeing elves hanging about a particular
rock, an Icelander will probably think twice before blowing it up
to make way for a swimming pool. And as the New York Times
reported in 2005, planning councils in towns with sizeable elf
populations, like Hafnarfjördur, try to keep elfin-interests in
mind.
The huldufólk are thought to live in another dimension, invisible
to most. They build their homes inside rocks and on craggy
hillsides, and they seem to favor lava formations. The port town
of Hafnarfjördur, near Reykjavík, is thought to have a
particularly large settlement of elves—as well as other mystical
beings like dwarves (who also fit under the broad category of
huldufólk). According to local clairvoyants, the huldufólk royal
family lives at the base of a cliff in that town.
Elf-spotting is an intergenerational phenomenon in Iceland,
although more children than adults report seeing huldufólk.
Explainer thanks Magnús Skarphéðinsson of the Icelandic Elf
School.
explainer
Break a Leg!
What's the best way to fracture your own tibia?
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By Brian Palmer
Spanish authorities arrested a man wearing a cast of compressed
cocaine at the Barcelona airport last Wednesday. The would-be
trafficker had a genuine fracture of two bones below the knee;
police are now investigating whether the injury was selfinflicted. What's the safest way to break your own leg?
Immobilize your ankle and knee and use a heavy instrument
with minimal surface area. It takes a surprising amount of
pressure to break your shin. (In fact, the weight of an average
American man would not be sufficient to fracture a leg, even if
the mass were concentrated on a spot the size of a quarter.) To
do the trick, you'll first want to strap the leg to a fixed object—a
cinderblock, maybe—below the knee and above the ankle. That
will prevent your joints from buckling before the tibia breaks.
Then you'll want to choose the heaviest, smallest weapon with
which you can reliably hit your target—a hammer would be
more effective than a mallet, for example. The wound is likely to
be quite unpleasant, so you might consider drugs to alleviate the
pain. (Cocaine wouldn't be a good choice, though—its analgesic
effects are highly localized.)
According to news reports, the Chilean smuggler had an open
fracture of the shin, meaning that the tibial shaft had cracked and
broken through the skin. Open fractures in this area tend to be
either spiral-shaped—caused by torsional forces such as twisting
after falling from a great height—or transverse. The amount of
force required to produce these injuries depends on a number of
factors, including the location of the impact, the thickness of the
soft tissue around the tibia, the condition of the bone, and the
area across which the force is spread. As a rough estimate, it
would take 218 pounds of pressure to produce a tibial fracture in
a healthy adult using a hammer. You could decrease the force
requirement by choosing a tool with less surface area, such as a
hatchet—then again, you'd be increasing the risk of soft tissue
damage and significant blood loss. In any case, it might be hard
to generate that amount of force with your knee and ankle
strapped down, so you may need the help of a friend.
There have been some reports of people breaking their own
tibias without help. In 2008, an Australian kayaker who had
become trapped in his boat by a fallen log leveraged his body
weight (supported by the tremendous force of the current) to
snap his tibia against the rim of the boat's cockpit. The break
enabled his trapped leg to collapse so he could escape the boat.
You may have heard stories about surgeons having to "re-break"
bones that healed improperly after an initial fracture.
Orthopedists don't use blunt force to this end. Instead, they move
the soft tissue aside and cut the bone using a very narrow power
saw. In cases where complicated nerves or extensive vasculature
border the cutting area, they will finish the cut with an
osteotome, a kind of surgical chisel used to penetrate only a
couple of millimeters. They would also use general anesthesia or
a regional pain blocker with heavy sedation to dull the
considerable pain.
Bonus Explainer: How do you compress cocaine into a cast?
Dissolve it in liquid and pour the solution into a cast-shaped
mold. The cocaine can then be recovered by chemical extraction
with about 80 percent efficiency, depending on the process.
Some news reports describe the cast as being "made entirely of
compressed cocaine." It would be possible to create a cast from
relatively pure (greater than 90 percent) cocaine, but that would
require the use of both a cast-shaped mold and a cast-shaped
press.
Explainer thanks Robert Campbell of Mercy Medical Center and
Stephen M. Pribut of George Washington University Medical
School.
family
When Men Lose Their Jobs
Could they be doing more around the house?
By Emily Bazelon
If you've been laid out and laid off by the downturn and your
spouse is still working, how much do you rearrange your family
life? Do you assume the hit you've taken is temporary and leave
all the old roles in place? Or do you concede semipermanence
and take on more household duties, never mind what went
before or what it all means?
That's a question more couples are facing because the layoffs, so
far, are largely affecting men. I put out a call a couple of weeks
ago asking for their stories. I wanted to know, specifically, how
couples handling a husband or wife's unemployment are also
handling what's called the second shift—the work we do at
either end of the day to keep our kids and our homes running.
The responses suggest that, possibly, the interplay between this
recession and "who does what" in the house may be more
complex than past data about the behavior of unemployed men
suggest.
This is all anecdotal, so it's way too early to know for sure. But
what I've heard matches the instincts of Stephanie Coontz, a
professor of history and family studies at Evergreen State
College and author of books on marriage and relationships. She
is one of my favorite family experts, because she likes to
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question the premises that everyone else takes for granted. This
time, it's the assumption—based, in all fairness, on time-use
studies from the 1990s—that men who lose their jobs do no
more and often less housework and child care than they did
before, while women in that position do significantly more.
Coontz is skeptical that the old numbers apply to the new
downturn because they're old and because they don't distinguish
between men who are chronically unemployed and those who
lose their jobs for a spell. She is sifting through the data to look
for overlooked patterns that might relate more directly to our
current collective state. I'll report back on what she finds. In the
meantime, she says that her hunch is that a "sizable minority" of
laid-off men are pitching in at home far more than they did
before.
That's the kind of story I heard from Penny, a registered nurse
who lives in Seattle. She says that she and her husband both used
to have "flexible jobs—mine part-time, his full-time—and split
the child care/house duties accordingly." Sometimes Penny felt
as if she was doing more than her share, and she said so, "mostly
because I HATE HATE housework," she writes. Her husband
lost his job in October. Penny was pregnant with their second
child. They had a "reality check talk," she says, about how
"there's no chance for him to get another job in his field."
Instead, she would go to work full-time, and her husband would
be a stay-at-home dad. In other words, they decided to treat his
layoff as semipermanent and plan accordingly. They could
weather the change financially because Penny is the higher
earner.
And at home? Penny was worried about her husband's state of
mind. But so far, so good. "I've spent some sleepless mornings (I
work night shift) thinking, what if he's not happy? What if he
misses his job (which he loved)? When I've asked how he feels
about it, he says that it's been a paradigm shift and taken some
getting used to, but so far he likes it." Penny says her husband
hasn't quite picked up the cooking and housework. "But he's
figuring it out, and I'm sitting back and letting him."
Parity, flexibility—who says the unemployed man of 2009 can't
put the old couch-bum rap to rest? Robert, who lives in North
Dallas, says recession-era partnership is all about planning. He
and his wife saw a layoff for him coming last fall, and though
she had been home since their kids were born (they are 3 and 1,
with another on the way), she went to work in November. In the
end, Robert didn't lose his job. For a few months, he and his wife
both worked full-time. But "I was looking forward to spending
more time with my kids anyway," he says, and so he scaled back
to part-time. When I caught him by phone, he'd just picked the
kids up from school. He juggled giving them a snack with
talking to me. And, yes, they got fed.
Robert says he and his wife are now dividing the chores "pretty
evenly." He does the day-to-day "maintenance around the house,
like dishes and picking up. She still does all the grocery
shopping, and she usually does the laundry." They still have a
twice-a-week housekeeper—a boon to domestic peace if you can
afford it. Robert's wife still cooks. But he's learning. And, he
says, "starting next month my primary project will be potty
training my oldest." I like the "primary project" phrasing, which
treats toilet training as the serious mission that it is.
Lest you think that all the responses I got were about men who
are better adjusted than the ones you know, a woman named
Jesse wrote in despair about her boyfriend. They've been
together four years. He calls her "The Stuff-Doer," and when
they were both working, she says, "most of the second shift
naturally fell to me." It still does. Just more so. Jesse's boyfriend
lost his job at the end of September, and now "he wakes up at 1
or 2 p.m., plays computer games, generally doesn't eat anything
until I come home, [then] he resumes playing his game, I work
out, go to bed, and he finally comes to bed around 4 or 5 a.m."
She does the shopping, the cooking, the laundry, and all the bills,
"even those in his name." She thinks that even if he finds another
job, her boyfriend isn't going to kick in more help. And because
he's had past episodes of depression, "I'm very hesitant about
asking him to do his share fearing it will just add to the burden
and push him back into the terrible state where he doesn't even
make eye contact with me for days." But she's getting resentful.
"I suppose I need to frame it as me asking for his support and
being careful not to shame him, but even that makes me angry."
That sounds like settling into a new reality—but miserably.
Other women similarly report not wanting to further undermine
their men's shaky out-of-work identity. The phrase "fragile male
ego" comes up a lot in these conversations. One woman wrote in
from Minneapolis, where her husband lost his job as a
conservative rabbi. (Who knew clergy were on the recession
chopping block?) She hadn't worked full-time in 10 years—she
was writing a novel and taking care of their kids, ages 13, 8, and
5. Now she and her husband have switched. She's at work, and
he's mostly at home. And she is still the grocery shopper, the
haircut-getter, and the maestro conducting the household
orchestra. When it came time to re-enroll the kids in school, her
husband filled out the forms, but only after she told him to. They
are both deliberately holding onto their past roles. "You're right,
we don't want to shift things completely," she said when I
probed a bit over the phone. "When he first lost his job, he was
so uncomfortable about being home in the middle of the day,
and my friend said to me, 'Don't make him into a house husband.
Don't reinforce his upset that he's not working.' So I'm not."
That strategy is about having faith that this, too, shall pass. It
means treating the unwelcome entry of employment as
temporary—momentary, even. You'll go back to work soon; in
the meantime, I'll stay in charge of the grocery list. You can see
through the surface tasks to the deep reason behind this method
of coping: One identity-shattering shift at a time, please. But it
also made me think about an insight from a reader named Dave,
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who sees stay-at-home fatherhood in his future because his wife
has more education and higher earning potential. "Men pay a
high price for tying their identity too closely to work," he says.
To be closely identified with one's career ambitions used to be a
good thing. It meant commitment, follow through, work ethic.
Women used to look for all of that in a mate. Some men did, too.
Now, it seems dangerously rigid.
***
My next question for readers: If you're in your 20s, how is the
downturn affecting you? Is it making you think differently about
work, relationships, maybe your parents? If you're just
graduating from college or graduate school, what's next? And
has the frozen job market reframed your choices? Send me your
stories, at doublex.slate@gmail.com. E-mail may be quoted in
Slate unless the writer stipulates otherwise. If you want to be
quoted anonymously, please let me know.
fighting words
Swat? Not!
Handing the Swat Valley to the Taliban was shameful and wrong.
By Christopher Hitchens
A whole new fashion is suddenly upon us. If only, in the
confrontation with reactionary Islamism, we could separate the
moderate extremists from the really extreme extremists. In the
last few days, we have heard President Barack Obama musing
about a distinction between good and bad Taliban, the British
government insisting on a difference between Hezbollah the
political party and Hezbollah the militia, and Fareed Zakaria
saying that the best way of stopping the militants may be to
allow them to run things in their own way, since an appetite for
the imposition of sharia does not equate to a thirst for global
jihad and may even partially slake that thirst.
It would be foolish to doubt that there is some case to be made
for this: The Karzai government in Afghanistan has been making
a distinction between the "Mullah Omar" madmen and the
merely localized Taliban for some time. In Lebanon, anyway,
Hezbollah takes part in elections and so far abides by the results
(also serving as a proxy for possible future talks with Iran). In
Iraq, the initial success of the counter-al-Qaida insurgency
depended on the suborning and recruitment of other Sunni
insurgents who were hostile to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and
Osama Bin Laden. One of the many reasons that I have always
opposed the use of torture and other extralegal methods is that
such conduct destroys the possibility of "turning" certain kinds
of Islamic militants and making potential allies of them.
However, one should be careful of the seductions of this
compromise. In a wishful attempt to bring peace with the
Taliban in Pakistan itself, the government has recently ceded a
fertile and prosperous and modernized valley province—the
former princedom of Swat—to the ultraviolent votaries of the
one party and the one God. This is not some desolate tribal area
where government and frontier have been poorly delineated for
decades, as in Waziristan. It is a short commute from the capital
city of Islamabad. The Taliban have never won an election in the
area; indeed, the last vote went exactly the other way. And
refugees are pouring out of Swat as the fundamentalists take
hold and begin their campaign of cultural and economic
obliteration: no music, no schooling for females, no recognition
of the writ of the central government. (See the excellent report
by Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah in the March 5 New York
Times.)
According to this and other reports, the surrender of authority by
the already crumbling Pakistani authorities has had an
emboldening effect on the extremists rather than an appeasing
one. The nominal interlocutor, Maulana Sufi Muhammad, with
whom the deal was signed, is related by clan and ideology to
much fiercer and younger figures, including those suspected in
the murder of Benazir Bhutto, in the burning of hundreds of
girls' schools, in the killing of Pakistani soldiers, and in the
slaughter of local tribal leaders who have resisted Taliban rule.
Numberless witnesses attest that the militants show not the
smallest intention of abiding by the terms of the so-called
"truce." Instead of purchasing peace, the Pakistani government
has surrendered part of its heartland without a fight to those who
can and will convert it into a base for further and more
exorbitant demands. This is not even a postponement of the
coming nightmare, which is the utter disintegration of Pakistan
as a state. It is a stage in that disintegration.
In Afghanistan and Iraq, where many very hard-line Muslims
take the side of the elected governments against the nihilists,
there is also a determined NATO or coalition presence that can
bring firepower to bear as part of the argument. This was the
necessary if not sufficient condition for the "awakening"
movements on which Gen. David Petraeus relied and still relies.
But even in default of that factor, the handing over of large
swaths of sovereign and strategic territory to the enemy was
never a part of any such plan, and it would have been calamitous
if it had been.
Fareed Zakaria makes the perfectly good observation in his
Newsweek essay that no Afghans have been found among the
transnational terrorist groups that apparently most concern us.
(He's righter than he knows: It's more likely now that a wanted
would-be hijacker would be a British citizen than an Afghan
one.) However, this can easily decay into being a distinction
without a difference. What the Afghan fundamentalists did do
when they were in power was offer their country as a safe haven
to al-Qaida and give it a hinterland that included the ability to
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issue passports, make use of an airport, and so forth. Comparable
facilities will now become available, much nearer to the center
of things, in a formerly civilized province of our ally Pakistan.
This is incredible.
There is another symbiosis between state failure of that kind and
the spread of deadly violence. A state or region taken over by
jihadists will not last long before declining into extreme poverty
and backwardness and savagery. There are no exceptions to this
rule. We do not need to demonstrate again what happens to
countries where vicious fantasists try to govern illiterates with
the help of only one book. And who will be blamed for the
failure? There will not, let me assure you, be a self-criticism
session mounted by the responsible mullahs. Instead, all ills will
be blamed on the Crusader-Zionist conspiracy, and young men
with deficiency diseases and learning disabilities will be taught
how to export their frustrations to happier lands. Thus does the
failed state become the rogue state. This is why we have a duty
of solidarity with all the secular forces, women's groups, and
other constituencies who don't want this to happen to their
societies or to ours.
By all means, let field commanders make tactical agreements
with discrepant groups, play them off against one another,
employ the methods of divide and rule, and pit the bad against
the worst. C'est la guerre. But under no circumstances should a
monopoly of violence be ceded to totalitarian or theocratic
forces. For this and for other reasons, we shall long have cause
to regret the shameful decision to deliver the good people of the
Swat Valley bound and gagged into the hands of the Taliban,
and—worst of all—without even a struggle.
food
Dietary Fibber
Don't be fooled by polydextrose and other fiber additives.
By Jacob Gershman
I was eating Cocoa Pebbles recently for dinner (yes, I'm a
bachelor) when I noticed something strange on the nutrition
label. Cocoa Pebbles, according to the box, is a "good source of
fiber." Who knew that I could get as many grams of fiber from
Cocoa Pebbles as I could from a bowl of Cheerios or a slice of
whole wheat bread? After a little research, I learned that higher
doses of fiber are showing up in all sorts of bizarre places, like
yogurts, cookies, brownies, ice creams, and diet drinks. Fiber,
perhaps the only nutrient to be mocked in a Saturday Night Live
parody commercial, is getting a makeover. And although we're
eating more of it, it's not the same nutrient we've always known.
The fiber in Cocoa Pebbles comes from a little-known ingredient
called polydextrose, which is synthesized from glucose and
sorbitol, a low-calorie carbohydrate. Polydextrose is one of
several newfangled fiber additives (including inulin and
maltodextrin) showing up in dairy and baked-goods products
that previously had little to no fiber. Recent FDA approvals have
given manufacturers a green light to add polydextrose to a much
broader range of products than previously permitted, allowing
food companies to entice health-conscious consumers who
normally crinkle their noses at high-fiber products due to the
coarse and bitter taste of the old-fashioned roughage. These fiber
additives serve dual purposes—they can serve as bulking agents
to make reduced-calorie products taste better, such as the case
with Breyers fat-free ice cream, and carry an added appeal to
consumers by showing up as dietary fiber on food labels.
The problem with this is that nobody knows if these fiber
additives possess the same health benefits as natural fiber found
in whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. Fiber, which consists of
nondigestible carbohydrates, was already one of the least
understood nutrients even before the introduction of ingredients
like polydextrose. Nutritionists and scientists have wrestled for
years with how to define fiber and measure its health impact. It's
a tricky thing to conduct a fiber study. (Consider for a moment
the logistics of organizing a placebo-controlled, randomized,
double-blind, fecal-mass study.) Even when it comes to the
natural, wholesome stuff, like oats and kidney beans,
nutritionists don't know for sure whether the health benefits
derive from the fiber itself or from the collective impact of highfiber foods.
The most recently accepted grouping by the Institute of
Medicine divides fiber into two categories: dietary and
functional. Dietary is the kind found naturally and intact in oat
bran, whole wheat, beans, prunes, peas, and almonds, and other
plants. Functional refers to both the synthetic variety like
polydextrose as well as naturally occurring inulin, which is
extracted and purified from chicory roots.
Polydextrose shares with dietary fiber one fundamental property:
It seems to rev up your GI tract. It does so, however, at a fraction
of the level of wheat bran. And while diets heavy in oat bran
have been shown to lower cholesterol levels and whole grains
have been linked to lower risks of heart disease, there's no
evidence that polydextrose protects cardiovascular health. A
spokeswoman for Danisco, a leading producer of polydextrose,
says it promotes digestive health but added: "Of course, it is
harder to prove without doubt the health benefits of adding a
single ingredient to the diet, than it is to prove the benefits of
consuming natural fibers in fruits." Studies on animals have
shown that inulin has a pre-biotic effect by altering intestinal
microflora, but the "potential beneficial effects in humans are
not well understood," according to a 2005 report by the IOM.
27/105
But you wouldn't know that from the FDA-approved food labels,
which don't distinguish between dietary and functional fiber. The
FDA allows polydextrose to be labeled as a dietary fiber, just the
same as whole oats. The same polydextrose products in Canada,
which has tighter classification regulations, wouldn't show the
fiber content because Health Canada doesn't consider
polydextrose to be a dietary fiber. Naturally, food manufacturers
in America are taking advantage of this loophole—to the distress
of nutrition watchdog groups. "Companies are putting fiber into
foods like cookies and ice cream and making people think these
are healthy foods, when in fact they should be eating fruits,
vegetables, and whole grains. It's dressing up junk food as health
food," says Bonnie Liebman, director of nutrition at the Center
for Science in the Public Interest in Washington, D.C. "We have
no idea if polydextrose has the same benefits as bran. It's
deceptive."
For example, Campbell's V8 High Fiber, which Liebman calls
"high fibber," claims on its label to offer "20 percent of the
recommended daily value" of fiber per 8-ounce glass. As
Liebman pointed out in a recent report, the fiber that Campbell's
is talking about is maltodextrin, which she says has not been
shown to have "any impact on regularity, or any aspect of
digestive health." You may have seen the goofy Fiber One
Yogurt commercial in which a supermarket employee watches
an older woman wolf down yogurt after yogurt. "That's her
fourth free sample. ... She's almost had a whole day's worth
already," he says, flabbergasted. "And I still can't taste the fiber,"
the woman replies incredulously. There's a reason for that. The
makers of Fiber One Yogurt haven't invented some magically
creamy and delicious version of wheat bran. They simply stuffed
the yogurt with inulin. A spokeswoman for General Mills, the
makers of the yogurt, defends the advertising by pointing to
studies showing that inulin suppresses appetite and promotes
regularity. Inulin has not been shown to reduce cholesterol levels
or lower blood pressure and has a much smaller laxative effect
than wheat bran, says Liebman.
Ironically, the rise of these faux-fibers is driven by the greater
attention that consumers are paying to nutrition labels. The food
companies, in other words, are teaching to the test. Whether it's
reducing fat and calories or adding fiber and vitamins, the
industry is getting ever more clever at manipulating ingredients
of snacks and other treats so that the stats mimic the nutritional
data of fruits and vegetables. To be sure, the fortification of
foods can facilitate healthier eating. There's not much difference
between getting your calcium from milk or from fortified orange
juice. (Sometimes, the added nutrients may be beneficial on their
own but not when they're inserted into certain foods. The omega3 fatty acids pumped into eggs, for example, don't cancel out the
cholesterol.)
The fiber trend is different and more worrisome. The benefits of
"fiber" nutrients like polydextrose are questionable. The makers
of Cocoa Pebbles admitted as much when asked about the use
and promotion of polydextrose as a dietary fiber. "We are
removing the polydextrose ingredient from Pebbles. That is
actually happening now," says Scott Monette, a spokesman for
Ralcorp, which owns Post cereal brands. He says the company is
instead fortifying the cereal with higher doses of vitamin D,
which he describes as a "more timely and relevant" nutrient. Just
last month, it was reported that vitamin D may protect against
common colds and dementia. That should ease my mind next
time I rip open a box of Pebbles.
gabfest
The Right To Bare Arms Gabfest
Listen to Slate's review of the week in politics.
By Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, David Plotz, and Hanna
Rosin
Friday, March 13, 2009, at 12:08 PM ET
Listen to the Gabfest for March 13 by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
Get your free 14-day trial of Gabfest sponsor Audible.com,
which includes a credit for one free audiobook, here. This
week's suggestion for an Audible book comes from a reader,
who recommended Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card.
John Dickerson, David Plotz, and Hanna Rosin talk politics.
This week, they discuss President Obama's workload, a renewed
fight over stem cells, and Michelle Obama's arms.
President Barack Obama is being accused of doing too much.
Prominent businessmen, including investor Warren Buffett and
Andrew S. Grove of Intel, say the president should focus on the
economy right now and suggest he is losing focus by also doing
other things. Hanna says she has lost patience with this
argument. She says Obama's plan is working out just fine so far.
John thinks the administration must accept some blame; he says
it could be talking up the economy more, but it's saying little so
it cannot be blamed later on if problems occur.
President Obama said this week that the nation's top teachers
should receive merit pay. John says an announcement like this
from a Democratic president would usually receive a great deal
of attention, but all the focus on the economy has overshadowed
other issues.
28/105
Charles Freeman, Obama's pick for chairman of the National
Intelligence Council, has withdrawn his nomination after key
senators questioned his views on Israel and his ties to Saudi and
Chinese interests.
Bush administration restrictions on federal funding for
embryonic stem cell research were reversed this week. The move
quickly drew protests. Hanna said she agrees with the change but
thinks the way the move was announced was smug and crude.
John points out that a 1995 law has forbidden the use of federal
funds for research linked to destroyed human embryos.
First lady Michelle Obama is being criticized for wearing outfits
that leave her arms bare. Hanna says she looks great. She is also
reminded of the Rosie the Riveter posters from World War II.
Some groups find the bare arms to be a good thing.
David chatters about Kings, a TV show premiering on NBC this
Sunday night. It's a modern-day retelling of the story of David
and Goliath.
Hanna talks about the novel Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay
Asher. The book is made up of transcripts from audio tapes
recorded by a 16-year-old girl before she commits suicide.
John chatters about found items—objects lost for a long time
that are suddenly rediscovered. This week, a portrait was
uncovered that appears to be the only painting of William
Shakespeare made while he was still alive. Another discovery
involved a watch owned by Abraham Lincoln and the message
hidden inside. This week, that message was revealed.
The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is
gabfest@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the
writer stipulates otherwise.)
is David Case, good on biographies of P.G. Woodhouse and
Winston Churchill.
Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz talk politics.
This week: President Barack Obama's approval ratings, Rush
Limbaugh as Republican leader, and newly released Justice
Department memos.
Public opinion polls released this week show that President
Obama is receiving the highest ratings yet, even as support for
his policies is more mixed.
Controversy surrounds Rush Limbaugh. Michael Steele, head of
the Republican National Committee, called Limbaugh an
"entertainer" and said that what the radio host does is
"incendiary" and ugly. Steele added that he is the de facto leader
of the Republican Party, "not Rush." Limbaugh fired back,
saying he would not want to be in charge of the party, given the
"sad-sack state that it's in."
David talks about President Obama taking in a basketball game
between the Chicago Bulls and the Washington Wizards. He
says this shows how brilliant Obama can be at handling the
public portion of being president. Obama even did some trashtalking and got in a little trouble for drinking a beer.
The trio discusses recently released Justice Department memos
that former President George W. Bush used as the basis for
many of his more controversial actions as president. At least
some of the memos were released in response to a lawsuit filed
against former Justice Department official John Yoo.
David chatters about the newfound recognition for Taiwanese
performance artist Tehching Hsieh. A book about his work is
coming soon from the M.I.T. Press, and there are two showings
of his work under way in New York.
Posted on March 13 by Dale Willman at 12:12 p.m.
March 5, 2009
Listen to the Gabfest for March 5 by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
Get your 14-day free trial of Gabfest sponsor Audible.com,
which includes a credit for one free audiobook, here. This week's
suggestions for an Audible book come from a listener named
Jennifer who loves narrators. The first recommendation is
Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child, narrated by
Nadia May and written by Noel Riley Fitch. The second narrator
Emily talks about the Supreme Court. The court heard
arguments in a case from West Virginia, where a state Supreme
Court justice is accused of bias. The court also ruled that patients
can sue drug companies for not providing adequate safety
warnings, even if the drug in question has received approval
from the Food and Drug Administration.
John chatters about a report that outlines the effect of the
economic crisis on the nonprofit sector. The report indicates that
nonprofits employ as much as 11 percent of the population—
more than the auto industry.
Posted on March 5 by Dale Willman at 11:23 a.m.
29/105
Feb. 27, 2009
Listen to the Gabfest for Feb. 27 by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
Robert Gates said this week that he will allow the caskets to be
photographed as long as family members agree to it.
Posted on Feb. 27 by Dale Willman at 11:11 a.m.
Feb. 20, 2009
suggestion for an Audible book comes from listener David
Englander. It's A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill
Bryson. David also recommends Slate writer Daniel Gross' new
book, Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds
Bankrupted the Nation.
This week: President Obama releases his top-line budget, the
first family chooses a dog breed, and the Supreme Court rules on
free speech.
President Obama gave his first address to Congress this week,
and by most accounts, including John's, it was a success.
John talks about an animation that does a great job of explaining
the current economic mess.
David bemoans the huge deficit that was announced this week.
The three also discuss a column by Slate contributor Daniel
Gross about whether Citibank should be nationalized.
The Obamas have selected a dog, or at least a breed. They want
to find a Portuguese water dog to join the first family.
The Supreme Court ruled this week on a free speech issue
involving an attempt by Summum, a religious group, to place a
monument in a public park.
David chatters about his new book, out next Tuesday: Good
Book. The book stemmed from a Slate series called "Blogging
the Bible."
Emily talks about a new study on early reading. Researchers
from Columbia University's Teacher's College looked at the
effect of the tidiness of your household on the reading skills of
your children. Emily says their findings are somewhat
surprising.
John chatters about the changing policy on photographing
caskets returning from the fighting in Iraq. Defense Secretary
Listen to the Gabfest for Feb. 20 by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
suggestion comes from David. It's David Grann's The Lost City
of Z, which will be released soon.
This week: President Obama announces his home-foreclosure
plan, Eric Holder talks about race, and the Uighurs get their day
in court.
President Barack Obama presented his $75 billion housingrescue plan. With thousands of Americans losing their homes
each week, the group debates whether the plan will help ease the
crisis. Some people are angry that the Obama plan would help
some homeowners who should never have received a mortgage
in the first place. Bailing them out of a bad debt creates moral
hazard—rash behavior by people sheltered from the negative
effects of their actions. Another challenge is keeping people out
of financial difficulty once their home loans have been modified.
According to the comptroller of the currency, more than half of
the loans modified by 14 of the nation's largest banks last year
were delinquent again after just six months.
Without fanfare, President Obama quietly announced that he is
sending 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. The
announcement came as Pakistan revealed a deal with Taliban
leaders in the Swat Valley. Under the deal, a form of Sharia law
will be enforced there.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder sparked a controversy this
week when he called Americans "cowards" when it comes to
race. Holder said Americans should have more conversations
about race relations. Emily says those discussions should be
expanded to include class as well.
30/105
Attorneys for 17 Chinese Uighurs have lost another round in
their effort to have the men released from Guantanamo Bay.
David chatters about Slate contributor Christopher Hitchens,
who was beaten up in Lebanon this week after defacing a poster
put up by a neo-Nazi group.
Emily talks about A-Rod, otherwise known as Alex Rodriguez,
who apologized this week for having used steroids in the past.
At least some observers said the apology was not a sincere one.
John chatters about www.recovery.gov, a Web site promoted by
President Obama as an effort to bring transparency to
government efforts to aid the ailing economy. John says the site
is rather lame, but he hopes it will improve as the recovery
program begins to take effect.
gabfest@slate.com . (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the
Posted on Feb. 20 by Dale Willman at 12:26 p.m.
gaming
And You Thought Grand Theft Auto Was
Bad
Should the United States ban a Japanese "rape simulator" game?
By Leigh Alexander
For a brief window in the mid-2000s, video games became
politicians' favorite piñata. Joe Lieberman and Ted Kennedy
spoke out against 2004's JFK Reloaded, a game that let you reenact the Kennedy assassination. The "Hot Coffee" modification
to Grand Theft Auto—which allowed players to (poorly)
simulate intercourse with in-game girlfriends—left Lieberman
and Hillary Clinton in a huff in 2005. That same year, the
Illinois Legislature (among many others) banned the sale of
violent games to minors, with then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich
sending a message to "the parents of Illinois" pointing out that
"98 percent of the games considered suitable by the industry for
teenagers contain graphic violence."
The last couple of years haven't been as fruitful for video game
scolds. Jack Thompson, the longtime face of the anti-gameviolence movement, was recently banned from practicing law in
Florida. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals just ruled that a
California law banning the sale of violent video games to minors
was unconstitutional. There is a Wii in the White House. With
America's pro-gaming forces gathering strength, crusading
politicians must now journey beyond our shores to find games to
rail against. Enter New York City Council Speaker Christine
Quinn, who has joined with the New York City Alliance Against
Sexual Assault in calling for a stateside ban of a Japanese "rape
simulator" game called RapeLay.
Quinn is half-right about RapeLay. While the council speaker is
right to say that the Japanese title is deeply disturbing, talk of a
ban is just grandstanding—the game has already been barred
from Amazon and eBay, and it isn't available in any brick-andmortar stores in the United States. Like every other illicit entity
in the universe, though, RapeLay is available online. Thanks to
an elaborate network of software pirates, persistent copyprotection hackers, and devoted fan translators, a free, fully
functioning English-language version of the game turns up after
30 seconds of Googling. In fan forums, the feedback on
RapeLay is as creepy as the game's premise—"hours of fun,"
one user posted.
After downloading and playing the game myself, I would have
to disagree with that review—a more accurate assessment might
be "hours of getting depressed about the fate of humankind."
The game begins with a man standing on a subway platform,
stalking a girl in a blue sundress. On the platform, you can click
"prayer" to summon a wind that lifts her skirt. She blushes. Once
she's on the train, the assault begins. Inside the subway car, you
can use the mouse to grope your victim as you stand in a crowd
of mute, translucent commuters. From here, your character
corners his victim—in a station bathroom, or in a park with the
help of male friends—and a series of interactive rape scenes
begins.
Early on, RapeLay operates like a visual novel—the exposition
comes via text that scrolls over a series of static images,
explaining your character's plan to enslave three women one by
one, and his eerie delight in the premeditation. Although the
interactive assaults are difficult to endure if you have a
conscience, the game's text actually provides the most unsettling
material. RapeLay relies on the horrendous, wildly sexist fantasy
that rape victims enjoy being attacked. After the exposition, the
game essentially becomes a simulator of consensual intercourse.
There's kissing. The women orgasm.
It's an old cliché that the more repressed a society, the more
extreme its pornography—but more upsetting than RapeLay is
the social environment that birthed it. The premise here is that a
wealthy man is out for revenge against the schoolgirl who had
him jailed as a chikan, or subway pervert. The epidemic of
chikan is an enormous problem in Japan, particularly in major
cities, where trains are so crowded that it's easy for predators to
conceal their crimes. In Declan Hayes' 2005 book, The Japanese
Disease, the author describes a community of salarymen who
organize online "groping associations" and subscribe to
31/105
publications that suggest ideal train lines and timetables for
attacks.
In an oft-cited 2004 survey, 64 percent of Tokyo women
reported that they'd been groped on a train. While Japanese
women are frequently too ashamed to report attackers, the
country's legal system does boast a high conviction rate, so the
chikan who are charged generally do jail time. Male commuters
fear being accused by mistake; a 2007 movie called I Just Didn't
Do It, based on a true story, follows the legal battle of an
innocent man accused of groping.* Though there's no question
of the groper's guilt in the game, this social conflict is RapeLay's
backdrop.
Although many violent Japanese sex games feature happy
endings in which formerly victimized women end up as fulfilled,
adoring wives, RapeLay allows only for dark outcomes. The first
possible conclusion has the original subway victim stabbing you
to death during sex. There's also the possibility that you can
impregnate one of the victims. If the player doesn't force her to
have an abortion, the game's protagonist, fittingly, throws
himself under a train.
While the moral outrage from the New York City Council and
Web sites like Jezebel and Shakesville is obviously well-placed,
there's little hope that legislation or activism can stem the
perversion. Not only is RapeLay rooted in a social illness that's
embedded in Japanese society, it's just one game in a niche
industry that's more closely related to the porn business than to
the video game world.
Considering the impossibility of policing the Internet, as well as
the availability of English RapeLay translations and forums for
years before any politician caught wind of the game, it's
unrealistic to think that the game could be banished from
America. Very few Japanese developers make an effort to sell
eroge to the West, and those that do, like Peach Princess and GCollections, make content modifications to suit foreign norms
and laws. (For example, all underage characters' ages get
rounded up to 18, no matter how young the character looks.)
These Westernized versions are sold in the United States via
import sites like J-List and Play-Asia. Neither company sells
RapeLay, but they do offer the popular eroge Yume Miru
Kusuri. That game, while more edgy than it is violent, does
focus on sex-crazed, underage-looking high schoolers with drug
problems and suicide fetishes. RapeLay is appalling, but titles
like Yume Miru Kusuri—sold in America after being
unconvincingly modified so the protagonists are "18," making it
tough to peg the games as outright illegal—would make far
more constructive targets for political outrage.
Correction, March 12, 2009: This article originally
mischaracterized the 2007 Japanese movie I Just Didn't Do It.
While it's based on a true story, the film is not a documentary.
(Return to the corrected sentence.)
grieving
The Long Goodbye
Hamlet's not depressed. He's grieving.
Risquè PC games, or eroge, are big business in Japan, and
legions of Japanese software-development houses are devoted to
churning them out. They're usually sold alongside glossy
comics, figurines, and animated smut in shops that cater to a
common fetish for animated women; they don't share shelf space
with Super Mario and Halo. Eroge enjoys a broad, if
underground, following in Japan, and titles with violent subtexts
are actually in the minority. More common are gauzy highschool dating stories, standard soap-opera melodrama that
prioritizes narrative, and plenty of oddball pap starring cat girls
and alien maids.
The Japanese government has never placed restrictions on eroge
themes, though they are subject to censorship laws. The absurd
result: games in which violent sex scenes feature genitalia that's
tastefully obscured. When resourceful software pirates funnel
eroge to Western audiences, they can implement hacks that
remove the mosaics—which means the version of RapeLay that
I saw is actually more graphic than the Japanese intended.
Nevertheless, RapeLay can actually be called tame compared
with its more extreme peers. It's almost insultingly nonviolent
for a game ostensibly about a brutal act. The idea of a "rape
simulator" is repellent—what's worse is that the game trivializes
the reality of rape.
By Meghan O'Rourke
From: Meghan O'Rourke
Subject: The Long Goodbye
Posted Monday, February 16, 2009, at 6:02 PM ET
The other morning I looked at my BlackBerry and saw an e-mail
from my mother. At last! I thought. I've missed her so much.
Then I caught myself. The e-mail couldn't be from my mother.
My mother died a month ago.
The e-mail was from a publicist with the same first name:
Barbara. The name was all that had showed up on the screen.
My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer sometime before
3 p.m. on Christmas Day. I can't say the exact time, because
none of us thought to look at a clock for some time after she
stopped breathing. She was in a hospital bed in the living room
of my parents' house (now my father's house) in Connecticut
with my father, my two younger brothers, and me. She had been
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unconscious for five days. She opened her eyes only when we
moved her, which caused her extreme pain, and so we began to
move her less and less, despite cautions from the hospice nurses
about bedsores.
For several weeks before her death, my mother had been
experiencing some confusion due to ammonia building up in her
brain as her liver began to fail. And yet, irrationally, I am
confident my mother knew what day it was when she died. I
believe she knew we were around her. And I believe she chose
to die when she did. Christmas was her favorite day of the year;
she loved the morning ritual of walking the dogs, making coffee
as we all waited impatiently for her to be ready, then slowly
opening presents, drawing the gift-giving out for hours. This
year, she couldn't walk the dogs or make coffee, but her bed was
in the room where our tree was, and as we opened presents that
morning, she made a madrigal of quiet sounds, as if to indicate
that she was with us.
Since my mother's death, I have been in grief. I walk down the
street; I answer my phone; I brush my hair; I manage, at times,
to look like a normal person, but I don't feel normal. I am not
surprised to find that it is a lonely life: After all, the person who
brought me into the world is gone. But it is more than that. I feel
not just that I am but that the world around me is deeply
unprepared to deal with grief. Nearly every day I get e-mails
from people who write: "I hope you're doing well." It's a kind
sentiment, and yet sometimes it angers me. I am not OK. Nor do
I find much relief in the well-meant refrain that at least my
mother is "no longer suffering." Mainly, I feel one thing: My
mother is dead, and I want her back. I really want her back—
sometimes so intensely that I don't even want to heal. At least,
not yet.
Nothing about the past losses I have experienced prepared me
for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did
not prepare me in the least. A mother, after all, is your entry into
the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a
life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a
world without sky: unimaginable. What makes it worse is that
my mother was young: 55. The loss I feel stems partly from
feeling robbed of 20 more years with her I'd always imagined
having.
I say this knowing it sounds melodramatic. This is part of the
complexity of grief: A piece of you recognizes it is an extreme
state, an altered state, yet a large part of you is entirely subject to
its demands. I am aware that I am one of the lucky ones. I am an
adult. My mother had a good life. We had insurance that allowed
us to treat her cancer and to keep her as comfortable as possible
before she died. And in the past year, I got to know my mother
as never before. I went with her to the hospital and bought her
lunch while she had chemotherapy, searching for juices that
wouldn't sting the sores in her mouth. We went to a spiritual
doctor who made her sing and passed crystals over her body. We
shopped for new clothes together, standing frankly in our
underwear in the changing room after years of being shyly polite
with our bodies. I crawled into bed with her and stroked her hair
when she cried in frustration that she couldn't go to work. I grew
to love my mother in ways I never had. Some of the new
intimacy came from finding myself in a caretaking role where,
before, I had been the one taken care of. But much of it came
from being forced into openness by our sense that time was
passing. Every time we had a cup of coffee together (when she
was well enough to drink coffee), I thought, against my will:
This could be the last time I have coffee with my mother.
Grief is common, as Hamlet's mother Gertrude brusquely
reminds him. We know it exists in our midst. But I am suddenly
aware of how difficult it is for us to confront it. And to the
degree that we do want to confront it, we do so in the form of
self-help: We want to heal our grief. We want to achieve an
emotional recovery. We want our grief to be teleological, and
we've assigned it five tidy stages: denial, anger, bargaining,
depression, and acceptance. Yet as we've come to frame grief as
a psychological process, we've also made it more private. Many
Americans don't mourn in public anymore—we don't wear
black, we don't beat our chests and wail. We may—I have done
it—weep and rail privately, in the middle of the night. But we
don't have the rituals of public mourning around which the
individual experience of grief were once constellated.
And in the weeks since my mother died, I have felt acutely the
lack of these rituals. I was not prepared for how hard I would
find it to re-enter the slipstream of contemporary life, our world
of constant connectivity and immediacy, so ill-suited to
reflection. I envy my Jewish friends the ritual of saying
kaddish—a ritual that seems perfectly conceived, with its builtin support group and its ceremonious designation of time each
day devoted to remembering the lost person. So I began
wondering: What does it mean to grieve in a culture that—for
many of us, at least—has few ceremonies for observing it? What
is it actually like to grieve? In a series of pieces over the next
few weeks, I'll delve into these questions and also look at the
literature of grieving, from memoirs to medical texts. I'll be
doing so from an intellectual perspective, but also from a
personal one: I want to write about grief from the inside out. I
will be writing about my grief, of course, and I don't pretend that
it is universal. But I hope these pieces will reflect something
about the paradox of loss, with its monumental sublimity and
microscopic intimacy.
If you have a story or thought about grieving you'd like to share,
please e-mail me at morourkexx@gmail.com.
Subject: Finding a Metaphor for Your Loss
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Posted Tuesday, February 24, 2009, at 7:11 AM ET
I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which
is to say: I am not religious. And until my mother grew ill, I
might not have described myself as deeply spiritual. I used to
find it infuriating when people offered up the—to me—empty
consolation that whatever happened, she "will always be there
with you."
But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she
was gone. She took one slow, rattling breath; then, 30 seconds
later, another; then she opened her eyes and looked at us, and
took a last. As she exhaled, her face settled into repose. Her
body grew utterly still, and yet she seemed present. I felt she had
simply been transferred into another substance; what substance,
where it might be located, I wasn't quite sure.
I went outside onto my parents' porch without putting my coat
on. The limp winter sun sparkled off the frozen snow on the
lawn. "Please take good care of my mother," I said to the air. I
addressed the fir tree she loved and the wind moving in it.
"Please keep her safe for me."
This is what a friend of mine—let's call her Rose—calls "finding
a metaphor." I was visiting her a few weeks ago in California;
we stayed up late, drinking lemon-ginger tea and talking about
the difficulty of grieving, its odd jags of ecstasy and pain. Her
father died several years ago, and it was easy to speak with her:
She was in what more than one acquaintance who's lost a parent
has now referred to as "the club." It's not a club any of us wished
to join, but I, for one, am glad it exists. It makes mourning less
lonely. I told Rose how I envied my Jewish friends the
reassuring ritual of saying kaddish. She talked about the hodgepodge of traditions she had embraced in the midst of her grief.
And then she asked me, "Have you found a metaphor?"
three or four long minutes; as soon as he stopped, his body
seemed to be only flesh. (When I got home the next week, I
found out that my mother had learned that same day that her
cancer had returned. It spooked me.)
But I never felt my mother leave the world.
At times I simply feel she's just on a long trip—and am jolted to
realize it's one she's not coming back from. I'm reminded of an
untitled poem I love by Franz Wright, a contemporary American
poet, which has new meaning. It reads, in full:
I basked in you;
I loved you, helplessly, with a boundless
tongue-tied love.
And death doesn't prevent me from loving you.
Besides,
in my opinion you aren't dead.
(I know dead people, and you are not dead.)
Sometimes I recite this to myself as I walk around.
At lunch yesterday, as velvety snow coated the narrow Brooklyn
street, I attempted to talk about this haunted feeling with a friend
whose son died a few years ago. She told me that she, too, feels
that her son is with her. They have conversations. She's an
intellectually exacting person, and she told me that she had
sometimes wondered about how to conceptualize her—well, let's
call it a persistent intuition. A psychiatrist reframed it for her: He
reminded her that the sensation isn't merely an empty notion.
The people we most love do become a physical part of us,
ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are
created.
I knew immediately what Rose meant. I had. It was the sky—the
wind. (The cynic in me cringes on rereading this. But, in fact, it's
how I feel.) When I got home to Brooklyn, I asked one of my
mother's friends whether she had a metaphor for where my
mother was. She unhesitatingly answered: "The water. The
ocean."
That's a kind of comfort. But I confess I felt a sudden resistance
of the therapist's view. The truth is, I need to experience my
mother's presence in the world around me and not just in my
head. Every now and then, I see a tree shift in the wind and its
bend has, to my eye, a distinctly maternal cast. For me, my
metaphor is—as all good metaphors ought to be—a persuasive
transformation. In these moments, I do not say to myself that my
mother is like the wind; I think she is the wind. I feel her: there,
and there. One sad day, I actually sat up in shock when I felt my
mother come shake me out of a pervasive fearfulness that was
making it hard for me to read or get on subways. Whether it was
the ghostly flicker of my synapses, or an actual ghostly flicker of
her spirit, I don't know. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't hoping it
was the latter.
The idea that my mother might be somewhere rather than
nowhere is one that's hard for the skeptical empiricist in me to
swallow. When my grandfather died last September, he seemed
to me merely—gone. On a safari in South Africa a few weeks
later, I saw two female lions kill a zebra. The zebra struggled for
Subject: "Normal" vs. "Complicated" Grief
"A metaphor?"
"Have you found your metaphor for where your mother is?"
34/105
Posted Thursday, March 5, 2009, at 11:24 AM ET
A death from a long illness is very different from a sudden
death. It gives you time to say goodbye and time to adjust to the
idea that the beloved will not be with you anymore. Some
researchers have found that it is "easier" to experience a death if
you know for at least six months that your loved one is
terminally ill. But this fact is like orders of infinity: there in
theory, hard to detect in practice. On my birthday, a month after
my mother passed away, a friend mused out loud that my mom's
death was surely easier to bear because I knew it was coming. I
almost bit her head off: Easier to bear compared to what—the
time she died of a heart attack? Instead, I bit my tongue.
What studies actually say is that I'll begin to "accept" my
mother's death more quickly than I would have in the case of a
sudden loss—possibly because I experienced what researchers
call "anticipatory grief" while she was still alive. In the
meantime, it sucks as much as any other death. You still feel like
you're pacing in the chilly dark outside a house with lit-up
windows, wishing you could go inside. You feel clueless about
the rules of shelter and solace in this new environment you've
been exiled to.
And that is why one afternoon, about three weeks after my
mother died, I Googled "grief."
I was having a bad day. It was 2 p.m., and I was supposed to be
doing something. Instead, I was sitting on my bed (which I had
actually made, in compensation for everything else undone)
wondering: Was it normal to feel everything was pointless?
Would I always feel this way? I wanted to know more. I wanted
to get a picture of this strange experience from the outside,
instead of the melted inside. So I Googled—feeling a little like
Lindsay in Freaks and Geeks, in the episode where she smokes a
joint, gets way too high, and digs out an encyclopedia to learn
more about "marijuana." Only information can prevent her from
feeling that she's floating away.
The clinical literature on grief is extensive. Much of it reinforces
what even the newish mourner has already begun to realize:
Grief isn't rational; it isn't linear; it is experienced in waves. Joan
Didion talks about this in The Year of Magical Thinking, her
remarkable memoir about losing her husband while her daughter
was ill: "[V]irtually everyone who has ever experienced grief
mentions this phenomenon of waves," she writes. She quotes a
1944 description by Michael Lindemann, then chief of
psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. He defines grief
as:
sensations of somatic distress occurring in
waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour
at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat,
choking with shortness of breath, need for
sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen,
lack of muscular power, and an intensive
subjective distress described as tension or
mental pain.
Intensive subjective distress. Yes, exactly: That was the
objective description I was looking for. The experience is, as
Lindemann notes, brutally physiological: It literally takes your
breath away. This is also what makes grief so hard to
communicate to anyone who hasn't experienced it.
One thing I learned is that researchers believe there are two
kinds of grief: "normal grief" and "complicated grief" (which is
also called "prolonged grief"). Normal grief is a term for the
feeling most bereaved people experience, which peaks within the
first six months and then begins to dissipate. ("Complicated
grief" does not—and evidence suggests that many parents who
lose children are experiencing something more like complicated
grief.) Calling grief "normal" makes it sound mundane, but, as
one researcher underscored to me, its symptoms are extreme.
They include insomnia or other sleep disorders, difficulty
breathing, auditory or visual hallucinations, appetite problems,
and dryness of mouth.
I have had all of these symptoms, including one (quite banal)
hallucination at dinner with a friend. (I saw a waitress bring him
ice cream. I could even see the flecks in the ice cream. Vanilla
bean, I thought. But there was no ice cream.) In addition to these
symptoms, I have one more: I can't spell. Like my mother before
me, I have always been a good speller. Now I have to rely on
dictionaries to ascertain whether tranquility has one L or two.
My Googling helped explain this new trouble with orthography:
Some studies have suggested that mourning takes a toll on
cognitive function. And I am still in a stage of fairly profound
grief. I can say this with confidence because I have affirmation
from a tool called "The Texas Revised Inventory of Grief"—one
of the tests psychiatrists use to measure psychological distress
among the bereaved. Designed for use after time has gone by,
this test suggested that, yes, I was very, very sad. (To its list of
statements like "I still get upset when I think about the person
who died," I answered, "Completely True"—the most extreme
answer on a scale of one to five, with five being "Completely
False.")
Mainly, I realized, I wanted to know if there was any empirical
evidence supporting the infamous "five stages of grief." Mention
that you had a death in the family, and a stranger will perk up his
ears and start chattering about the five stages. But I was not
feeling the stages. Not the way I was supposed to. The notion
was popularized by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her famous 1969
study On Death and Dying. At the time, Kübler-Ross felt—
accurately—that there was a problem with how the medical
establishment dealt with death. During the 1960s, American
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doctors often concealed from patients the fact that they were
terminally ill, and many died without knowing how sick they
were. Kübler-Ross asked several theology students to help her
interview patients in hospitals and then reported on what she
discovered.
By writing openly about how the dying felt, Kübler-Ross helped
demystify the experience of death and made the case that the
dying deserved to know—in fact, often wanted to know—that
they were terminal. She also exposed the anger and avoidance
that patients, family members, and doctors often felt in the face
of death. And she posited that, according to what she had seen,
for both the dying and their families, grieving took the form of
five emotional stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and
acceptance.
Of course, like so many other ideas popularized in the 1970s, the
five stages turned out to be more complex than initially thought.
There is little empirical evidence suggesting that we actually
experience capital-letter Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression,
and Acceptance in simple sequence. In On Grief and Grieving,
published years later, Kübler-Ross insists she never meant to
suggest the stages were sequential. But if you read On Death
and Dying—as I just did—you'll find that this is slightly
disingenuous. In it, she does imply, for example, that anger must
be experienced before bargaining. (I tried, then, to tackle On
Grief and Grieving but threw it across the room in a fit of
frustration at its feel-good emphasis on "healing.") Researchers
at Yale recently conducted an extensive study of bereavement
and found that Kübler-Ross' stages were more like states. While
people did experience those emotions, the dominant feeling they
experienced after a death was yearning or pining.
Yearning is definitely what I feel. I keep thinking of a night, 13
years ago, when I took a late flight to Dublin, where I was going
to live for six months. This would be the longest time I had ever
been away from home. I woke up disoriented in my seat at 1
a.m. to see a spectacular display of the aurora borealis. I had
never seen anything like it. The twisting lights in the sky seemed
to evoke a presence, a living force. I felt a sudden, acute desire
to turn around and go back—not just to my worried parents back
in Brooklyn, but deep into my childhood, into my mother's arms
holding me on those late nights when we would drive home from
dinner at a neighbor's house in Maine, and she would sing a
lullaby and tell me to put my head on her soft, warm shoulder.
And I would sleep.
Subject: Hamlet's Not Depressed. He's Grieving.
Posted Thursday, March 12, 2009, at 11:29 AM ET
I had a hard time sleeping right after my mother died. The nights
were long and had their share of what C.S. Lewis, in his memoir
A Grief Observed, calls "mad, midnight … entreaties spoken into
the empty air." One of the things I did was read. I read lots of
books about death and loss. But one said more to me about
grieving than any other: Hamlet. I'm not alone in this. A
colleague recently told me that after his mother died he listened
over and over to a tape recording he'd made of the Kenneth
Branagh film version.
I had always thought of Hamlet's melancholy as existential. I
saw his sense that "the world is out of joint" as vague and
philosophical. He's a depressive, self-obsessed young man who
can't stop chewing at big metaphysical questions. But reading
the play after my mother's death, I felt differently. Hamlet's
moodiness and irascibility suddenly seemed deeply connected to
the fact that his father has just died, and he doesn't know how to
handle it. He is radically dislocated, stumbling through the
world, trying to figure out where the walls are while the rest of
the world acts as if nothing important has changed. I can relate.
When Hamlet comes onstage he is greeted by his uncle with the
worst question you can ask a grieving person: "How is it that the
clouds still hang on you?" It reminded me of the friend who said,
14 days after my mother died, "Hope you're doing well." No
wonder Hamlet is angry and cagey.
Hamlet is the best description of grief I've read because it
dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it. Grief,
Shakespeare understands, is a social experience. It's not just that
Hamlet is sad; it's that everyone around him is unnerved by his
grief. And Shakespeare doesn't flinch from that truth. He
captures the way that people act as if sadness is bizarre when it
is all too explainable. Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, tries to get him
to see that his loss is "common." His uncle Claudius chides him
to put aside his "unmanly grief." It's not just guilty people who
act this way. Some are eager to get past the obvious rawness in
your eyes or voice; why should they step into the flat shadows of
your "sterile promontory"? Even if they wanted to, how could
they? And this tension between your private sadness and the
busy old world is a huge part of what I feel as I grieve—and felt
most intensely in the first weeks of loss. Even if, as a friend
helpfully pointed out, my mother wasn't murdered.
I am also moved by how much in Hamlet is about slippage—the
difference between being and seeming, the uncertainty about
how the inner translates into the outer. To mourn is to wonder at
the strangeness that grief is not written all over your face in
bruised hieroglyphics. And it's also to feel, quite powerfully, that
you're not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your
grief—that to do so would be taboo somehow. Hamlet is a play
about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.
Strangely, Hamlet somehow made me feel it was OK that I, too,
had "lost all my mirth." My colleague put it better: "Hamlet is
36/105
the grief-slacker's Bible, a knowing book that understands what
you're going through and doesn't ask for much in return," he
wrote to me. Maybe that's because the entire play is as drenched
in grief as it is in blood. There is Ophelia's grief at Hamlet's
angry withdrawal from her. There is Laertes' grief that Polonius
and Ophelia die. There is Gertrude and Claudius' grief, which is
as fake as the flowers in a funeral home. Everyone is sad and
messed up. If only the court had just let Hamlet feel bad about
his dad, you start to feel, things in Denmark might not have
disintegrated so quickly!
Hamlet also captures one of the aspects of grief I find it most
difficult to speak about—the profound sense of ennui, the
moments of angrily feeling it is not worth continuing to live.
After my mother died, I felt that abruptly, amid the chaos that is
daily life, I had arrived at a terrible, insistent truth about the
impermanence of the everyday. Everything seemed exhausting.
Nothing seemed important. C.S. Lewis has a great passage about
the laziness of grief, how it made him not want to shave or
answer letters. At one point during that first month, I did not
wash my hair for 10 days. Hamlet's soliloquy captures that numb
exhaustion, and now I read it as a true expression of grief:
O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter. O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Those adjectives felt apt. And so, even, does the pained wish—
in my case, thankfully fleeting—that one might melt away.
Researchers have found that the bereaved are at a higher risk for
suicideality (or suicidal thinking and behaviors) than the
depressed. For many, that risk is quite acute. For others of us,
this passage captures how passive a form those thoughts can
take. Hamlet is less searching for death actively than he is
wishing powerfully for the pain just to go away. And it is, to be
honest, strangely comforting to see my own worst thoughts
mirrored back at me—perhaps because I do not feel likely to go
as far into them as Hamlet does. (So far, I have not accidentally
killed anyone with a dagger, for example.)
The way Hamlet speaks conveys his grief as much as what he
says. He talks in run-on sentences to Ophelia. He slips between
like things without distinguishing fully between them—"to die,
to sleep" and "to sleep, perchance to dream." He resorts to puns
because puns free him from the terrible logic of normalcy, which
has nothing to do with grief and cannot fully admit its darkness.
And Hamlet's madness, too, makes new sense. He goes mad
because madness is the only method that makes sense in a world
tyrannized by false logic. If no one can tell whether he is mad, it
is because he cannot tell either. Grief is a bad moon, a sleeper
wave. It's like having an inner combatant, a saboteur who, at the
slightest change in the sunlight, or at the first notes of a jingle
for a dog food commercial, will flick the memory switch,
bringing tears to your eyes. No wonder Hamlet said, "… for
there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
Grief can also make you feel, like Hamlet, strangely flat. Nor is
it ennobling, as Hamlet drives home. It makes you at once
vulnerable and self-absorbed, needy and standoffish, knotted up
inside, even punitive.
Like Hamlet, I, too, find it difficult to remember that my own
"change in disposition" is connected to a distinct event. Most of
the time, I just feel that I see the world more accurately than I
used to. ("There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.") Pessimists, after all,
are said to have a more realistic view of themselves in the world
than optimists.
The other piece of writing I have been drawn to is a poem by
George Herbert called "The Flower." It opens:
How Fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returns! ev'n as the flowers in spring;
To which, besides their own demean,
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.
Grief melts away
Like snow in May,
As if there were no such cold thing.
Who would have thought my shrivel'd heart
Could have recover'd greennesse? It was gone
Quite under ground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have
blown;
Where they together
All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.
Quite underground, I keep house unknown: It does seem the
right image of wintry grief. I look forward to the moment when I
can say the first sentence of the second stanza and feel its
wonder as my own.
how to pronounce it
No Douthat About It
How to pronounce the new New York Times columnist's name.
The New York Times has tapped 29-year-old conservative Ross
Douthat to succeed Bill Kristol as an op-ed columnist. Douthat,
the co-author of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win
37/105
the Working Class and Save the American Dream, blogs and
writes for the Atlantic and is an occasional Slate contributor.
Douthat has offered some guidance on his blog on how to
pronounce his name. In case the phonetic spelling still leaves
you confused, Slate asked Douthat to settle the score on tape.
Name: Ross Douthat
Title: Soon-to-be New York Times columnist
Last Name Pronounced: "DOW-thut"
Tape: Click the arrow on the player below to hear Ross Douthat
pronounce his own name.
Both arguments are now being applied to fetuses. The Daily
Mail notes:
Almost 7,000 of the 8,000 Britons waiting for
a transplant need a kidney. More than 300 are
hoping for a liver, 222 need lungs and almost
100 have requested a heart. Kidney donors
have a less than one-in-three chance of
receiving an organ in any given year, and
hundreds on the transplant list will die before a
donor becomes available.
Furthermore:
human nature
Drill Babies, Drill
If harvesting embryos is OK, how about fetuses?
By William Saletan
Earlier this week, when President Obama lifted the ban on
federal funding of stem-cell research using destroyed human
embryos, I said the moral dilemmas in this field would become
increasingly difficult.
Buckle up. We're on our way. Last week, the Oxford
International Biomedical Centre held a symposium on "New
Body Parts for Old: Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine." At
the symposium, Oxford professor Richard Gardner delivered a
talk titled "Stem Cells: What They Are and Why They Are
Important." According to London's Daily Mail, Gardner told the
audience that kidney and liver tissue from aborted fetuses offer
"at least a temporary solution" to the shortage of available
organs for people in need of transplants.
Calling for studies into the feasibility of
transplanting foetal organs, Sir Richard, an
advisor to Britain's fertility watchdog and the
Royal Society, said he was surprised the
possibility had not been considered, and that
experiments in mice have shown that foetal
kidneys grow extremely quickly when
transplanted to adult animals. Sir Richard said:
"It is probably a more realistic technique in
dealing with the shortage of kidney donors
than others."
Two arguments have persuaded the United States to fund stemcell research using destroyed embryos. One is that the research
will save lives. The other is that the embryos, left over from
fertility treatments, will otherwise be wasted.
Professor Stuart Campbell, who has argued for
the abortion time limit to be lowered, had no
ethical objections to the proposal. He said
many babies were aborted quite late, "and if
they are going to be terminated, it is a shame
to waste their organs."
The argument against fetal tissue is that because it's less
fundamental and less pliable than embryonic stem cells, it's less
useful for research. But in some ways, its advanced development
makes it more logical as a source of transplants. As Gardner
pointed out, our prospects for engineering completely functional
organs from stem cells are "remote." And if stem cells do prove
useful in this endeavor, fetuses may still be crucial. Four days
ago, Art Caplan, a leading bioethicist who supports Obama's
stem-cell policy, observed:
No one … knows what the best source of stem
cells will be for treating diabetes, spinal cord
injuries or cardiac damage from heart attacks.
No actual scientist can say with any degree of
certainty whether it will be embryonic, fetal,
adult, cloned or induced stem cells—those
made by modifying adult stem cells so that
they act like embryos—that will prove most
effective. It will take a lot of money and at
least five to 10 years to find out.
From this uncertainty, Caplan concluded that "embryonic stem
cell research ought to be generously funded and aggressively
pursued."
Why isn't the same true of research on fetuses?
(Now playing at the Human Nature blog: 1. In praise of female
condoms. 2. More on Obama and stem cells. 3. Bad news about
smokeless tobacco.)
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human nature
Winning Smugly
remove these limitations on scientific inquiry." Harold Varmus,
the co-chairman of Obama's scientific advisory council, told
reporters:
You just won the stem-cell war. Don't lose your soul.
By William Saletan
On Monday, President Obama lifted the ban on federal funding
of stem-cell research using destroyed human embryos. If you
support this research, congratulations: You won. Now for your
next challenge: Don't lose your soul.
Obama announces the end of the ban on stem-cell research
The best way to understand this peril is to look at an issue that
has become the mirror image of the stem-cell fight. That issue is
torture. On Jan. 22, Obama signed an executive order prohibiting
interrogation methods used by the Bush administration to extract
information from accused terrorists. "We can abide by a rule that
says we don't torture, but that we can still effectively obtain the
intelligence that we need," the president declared. "We are
willing to observe core standards of conduct not just when it's
easy, but also when it's hard."
The next day, former Bush aide Karl Rove accused Obama of
endangering the country by impeding interrogations of the
enemy. "They don't recognize we're in a war," said Rove. "In a
war, you do not take tools that are working and stop using them
and say we'll get back to you in four months, six months, eight
months, a year, and tell you what we're going to do to replace
this valuable tool which has helped keep America safe."'
To most of us, Rove's attack is familiar and infuriating. We
believe, as Obama does, that it's possible to save lives without
crossing a moral line that might corrupt us. We reject the Bush
administration's insistence on using all available methods rather
than waiting for scrupulous alternatives. We see how Rove
twists Obama's position to hide the moral question and make
Obama look obtuse and irresponsible.
The same Bush-Rove tactics are being used today in the stemcell fight. But they're not coming from the right. They're coming
from the left. Proponents of embryo research are insisting that
because we're in a life-and-death struggle—in this case, a
scientific struggle—anyone who impedes that struggle by
renouncing effective tools is irrational and irresponsible. The
war on disease is like the war on terror: Either you're with
science, or you're against it.
Obama announced his executive order on stem cells in tandem
with a memo authorizing the removal of "politics" and
"ideology" from science. The ban on funding of embryodestructive research "has no basis in science," according to a
White House fact sheet, and the president was lifting it "to
We view what happened with stem cell
research in the last administration as one
manifestation of failure to think carefully
about how federal support of science and the
use of scientific advice occurs. This is
consistent with the president's determination to
use sound scientific practice, responsible
practice of science and evidence, instead of
dogma in developing federal policy.
Research proponents everywhere are parroting this spin.
Obama's stem-cell order shows "his commitment to evidence
and biomedical hope over his predecessor's ideological distortion
of science," says the Center for American Progress. The order
will "remove politics from science," says the president of the
Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation. It will "keep politics out
of science," says the vice president of the Juvenile Diabetes
Research Foundation. It signals that policy will no longer be
"driven more by ideology than by facts," says the director of the
University of Michigan Center for Stem Cell Biology.
Think about what's being dismissed here as "politics" and
"ideology." You don't have to equate embryos with full-grown
human beings—I don't—to appreciate the danger of exploiting
them. Embryos are the beginnings of people. They're not parts of
people. They're the whole thing, in very early form. Harvesting
them, whether for research or medicine, is different from
harvesting other kinds of cells. It's the difference between using
an object and using a subject. How long can we grow this
subject before dismembering it to get useful cells? How far
should we strip-mine humanity in order to save it?
If you have trouble taking this question seriously—if you think
it's just the hypersensitivity of fetus-lovers—try shifting the
context from stem cells to torture. There, the question is: How
much ruthless violence should we use to defeat ruthless
violence? The paradox and the dilemma are easy to recognize.
Creating and destroying embryos to save lives presents a similar,
though not equal, dilemma.
At their best, proponents of stem-cell research have turned the
question on its head. They have asked pro-lifers: How precious
is that little embryo? Precious enough to forswear research that
might save the life of a 50-year-old man? Precious enough to
give up on a 6-year-old girl? How many people, in the name of
life, are you willing to surrender to death?
To most of us, the dilemma is more compelling from this angle.
It seems worse to let the girl die for the embryo's sake than to
kill the embryo for the girl's sake, particularly since embryos left
over from fertility treatments will be discarded or left to die,
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anyway. But it's still a dilemma. And as technology advances,
the dilemmas will become more difficult. Already, researchers
are clamoring to extend Obama's policy so they can use federal
money to create and destroy customized embryos, not just use
the ones left over from fertility treatments.
The danger of seeing the stem-cell war as a contest between
science and ideology is that you bury these dilemmas. You
forget the moral problem. You start lying to yourself and others
about what you're doing. You invent euphemisms like preembryo, pre-conception, and clonote. Your ethical lines begin to
slide. A few years ago, I went to a forum sponsored by
proponents of stem-cell research. One of the speakers, a rabbi,
told the audience that under Jewish law, embryos were
insignificant until 40 days. I pointed out that if we grew embryos
to 40 days, we could get transplantable tissue from them. I asked
the rabbi: Would that be OK? He answered: Yes.
If you don't want to end up this way—dead to ethics and drifting
wherever science takes you—you have to keep the dilemmas
alive. You have to remember that conflicting values are at stake.
On this point, Obama has been wiser than his supporters. "Many
thoughtful and decent people are conflicted about, or strongly
oppose, this research," the president acknowledged on Monday.
"We will never undertake this research lightly. We will support
it only when it is both scientifically worthy and responsibly
conducted."
Several months ago, opponents of embryo-destructive research
gathered in Washington to celebrate Eric Cohen's book In the
Shadow of Progress, which explores the moral costs of
biotechnology. They asked me what I thought of the book. I told
them that the book was beautiful and important because it
represented the losing side of history. It spoke for values
threatened with extinction by the coming triumph of
utilitarianism.
They didn't like hearing that. Nobody wants to be a loser. Losing
is hard.
But winning is hard, too. In politics, to be a good winner, you
have to pick up the banner of your fallen enemy. You have to
recognize what he stood for, absorb his truths, and carry them
forward. Otherwise, those truths will be lost, and so will you.
The stem-cell fight wasn't a fight between ideology and science.
It was a fight between 5-day-olds and 50-year-olds. The 50-yearolds won. The question now is what to do with our 5-day-olds,
our 5-week-olds, and our increasingly useful parts.
(Now playing at the Human Nature blog: 1. The political
battlefield over IVF. 2. The myth of Obama's gray hair. 3)
Economic stress, creativity, and selling body parts. )
low concept
Investigate the Investigators!
Let's look into these unpatriotic Americans who want to prosecute patriotic
Americans.
By Dahlia Lithwick
It's all gone completely out of hand. First we had the Obama
administration last week releasing a pile of super-top-secret
memos in which it was suggested that the president could ignore
any of the odd-numbered amendments (like the First) and also
ignore the even-numbered ones (like the Fourth) if the Bill of
Rights ever got in the way of his war on terror. The legal
analysis therein was so bad, the memos actually came with an
official apology for their own badness. Days later, there was
John Yoo, formerly of the Office of Legal Counsel and principal
author of these memos, arguing forcefully in the pages of the
Wall Street Journal that if President Barack Obama adheres to
the rule of law in the war against terror, he'll be caught blinking
stupidly into the middle distance as terror plots unfold. Indeed,
Yoo went so far as to warn the new president that "risk aversion"
should probably not guide his anti-terror strategy, as though
Obama perhaps plans to fight al-Qaida by hiding under various
antique coffee tables.
But there's more! Because it seems the Obama administration
has dispatched its own lawyers to San Francisco to represent
John Yoo in a civil lawsuit by a prisoner, Jose Padilla, who
claims his treatment in detention was the direct result of Yoo's
shoddy legal work. Then the Senate judiciary committee
convened a hearing on whether there should be a truth and
reconciliation commission to look into high-level lawbreaking in
the Bush administration—except Republicans on the committee
took the paradoxical position that all this proposed truth and
reconciliation would get in the way of prosecuting Bush
administration lawbreakers.
America is meant to be getting over government-authorized
torture and eavesdropping and warrantless searches. In the
parlance of President Obama, we are supposed to be turning the
page. But a growing number of malcontents and backwardlookers (evidently more than two-thirds of you!) are somehow
not quite ready to put the lawbreaking of the last eight years
behind them. Some of you want prosecutions. Some want truth
commissions. Some want special prosecutors. Some want war
crimes tribunals. But the emerging consensus appears to be that
when the government secretly breaks the law for eight years, the
people may want some sort of public accounting.
This will never do.
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As we have heard innumerable times, we in this country are just
too busy to be obsessing about past wrongs. We need to refocus
our minds on repairing the broken economy, healing partisan
strife, and restoring our good name abroad. And we need to do
that by obliterating our short-term memories and short-circuiting
our sense of right and wrong.
And that can mean only one thing: We need to investigate those
calling for investigations. We need to prosecute them to the
fullest extent of the law. We should leave no stone unturned in
bringing to justice those lawless thugs seeking justice for past
wrongdoing.
We should start with Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the Senate
judiciary chairman, who appears to become more and more
fixated on creating a truth commission with every passing week.
We need to investigate that guy. What is he hiding? There must
be something sinister animating his bloodthirsty desire to see
Bush-era lawbreakers brought to justice. Let's assign a special
prosecutor and get to the bottom of this.
Ditto re: John Conyers, who chairs the House judiciary
committee. Conyers has also introduced a bill that would create
a bipartisan commission of inquiry into unlawful actions
authorized by the Bush administration. And as Sen. Arlen
Specter argued so powerfully last week, why do we need all this
truth and inquiry? Isn't it ultimately just going to get in the way
of the truth and inquiry?
Then there are all those liberal groups agitating for
investigations and prosecutions into war crimes. They all just
keep banging on about the need for a public accounting. Um,
why shouldn't they be held to account for that? I say the time is
now to find out what they're hiding and set some "perjury traps"
for them. Let's see how much time they have to demand war
crimes prosecutions when they are drowning in a complex
inquiry into their own lawless behavior.
Now I know what you're thinking: Where can we find people to
spearhead an investigation into those seeking investigations?
Doesn't this sort of partisan witch hunt against the partisan witch
hunters require a rather specialized set of skills, including a
relentless disregard for existing laws and an unwavering
certainty that the end justifies the means? Luckily there are a few
good men out there who are up to the task. It's been widely
reported that Alberto Gonzales, former White House counsel and
former attorney general, is looking for work. And it was reported
this week that former Vice President Dick Cheney's legal adviser
and chief of staff David Addington is also unable to find
employment. Doubtless they would be willing to lead an
investigation into the lawless cadre of American leaders who
seek to investigate the lawless cadre of former American leaders.
In his various memoranda to the president in the weeks after
9/11, professor Yoo proposed the suspension of the Fourth
Amendment if the military were to be deployed against
suspected terrorists in the United States, as well as the
president's right to suspend free speech and a free press if it
would make America safer. Yoo continues to urge that if we
don't stop pandering to the "anti-war base" and "the chattering
classes," America is staring right down the barrel of another
imminent terror attack. The time has come to bring this brief era
of American openness and transparency to a close. It's time to
hold those folks seeking government accountability to account.
Let's go after that chattering class once and for all. To do
anything less is to practically invite the terrorist menace to attack
us once more.
medical examiner
Drug Dealing
Who should decide when a medication is safe?
By Darshak Sanghavi
The medical events that culminated in last week's dramatic U.S.
Supreme Court decision Wyeth v. Levine began in 2000, when
Vermont musician Diana Levine came down with a migraine
and visited a small medical clinic. Her treatment led to a
horrifying complication, and her right forearm—which she used
to strum her guitar—had to be amputated. After she sued and
received a settlement from her treating medical providers,
Levine successfully hunted bigger game: the drug giant Wyeth,
which makes the anti-nausea drug responsible for her injury. The
story of Levine's victory has narrative gusto: A one-armed
children's musician takes down a heartless multinational
corporation. But that's the wrong drama to highlight.
Wyeth's failed case hinged on a legal doctrine called "implied
pre-emption," which would have allowed companies that comply
with FDA regulations—as Wyeth did—to avoid later state
lawsuits about the content of their drugs' labels. A win for
Wyeth would not (as is popularly believed) have immunized big
drug companies from all litigation. A company that intentionally
omits important safety data from FDA review (as some allege,
for example, about Merck's nondisclosure of the cardiovascular
risks associated with Vioxx) would still not be protected. The
company could still be sued under product-liability and fraud
laws. Furthermore, Wyeth's loss in court may not help avoid
future catastrophes, and the ruling has the potential to undermine
the centralized authority of the Food and Drug Administration—
which, though far from perfect, is arguably the most effective
public-health agency in the nation's history.
So, what was the case really about? Let's review what happened
to Diana Levine: To treat her migraine, a health provider first
injected a combination of Demerol (a narcotic pain reliever) and
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Phenergan (an antihistamine to reduce nausea) into her muscle.
When Levine's pain persisted, the provider concluded the
medicine was being absorbed too slowly from the muscle to
offer speedy relief, placed an intravenous line in Levine's right
arm, and quickly injected another dose directly into Levine's
bloodstream. The provider made a serious error by accidentally
and unknowingly putting the IV into an artery (a high-pressure,
pulsatile vessel going out to the arm) instead of a vein (a lowpressure vessel returning blood to the heart). Dispersed at high
pressure throughout the distal forearm, Phenergan caused
irreversible blood vessel damage resulting in gangrene and,
ultimately, amputation.
There's no question the provider fouled up and was deservedly
sued. But how is that Wyeth's fault? The package insert for
Phenergan—which is worth reading—clearly warned about the
risk of gangrene, explained the danger of accidentally putting the
IV in an artery, recommending stopping injections if patients felt
any pain, and prescribed a specific infusion rate and dose.
According to court documents, the risk of gangrene is only 1 per
10 million doses. Even fool medical students graduating at the
bottom of their classes know you're never supposed to inject
drugs into arteries.
Aaron Kesselheim, a Harvard researcher and intellectualproperty lawyer, admitted to me that any reasonable physician
knows not to inject drugs into arteries. But in his opinion, Wyeth
still should have put a "black box" warning about push injections
on the package insert decades ago, when the first reports of
gangrene surfaced.
By that loose standard, however, every drug given intravenously
probably needs one. (Stronger warnings might also be needed
for over-the-counter drugs like infant Tylenol, which each year
causes thousands of emergency-room visits and a handful of
deaths in young children because parents regularly mess up the
dosing despite the label's instructions.) The Phenergan insert
already has a "black box" warning not to give the drug to young
children, an admonition not to give anti-nausea drugs of any
kind to kids with "uncomplicated vomiting," and, as a bonus,
numerous dire warnings about glaucoma, peptic ulcers,
prolonged exposure to the sun, permanent nerve damage, and
dozens of other precautions.
The simple fact is that package inserts aren't terribly useful
because they're too damn complicated, much like the laundry list
of side effects at the end of television commercials for drugs.
How can anybody make sense of labels that list dozens of
horrible outcomes, even for the most commonly used drugs? In
ruling against Wyeth—and concluding the FDA-approved labels
may be insufficient—the Supreme Court has invited
manufacturers to lard medications with even more useless
warnings to head off lawsuits. It's hard to see how this will
prevent future harms to innocent patients, since adding yet
another warning to the dozens already listed for Phenergan
probably wouldn't have saved Diana Levine's arm.
Remarkably, some of the nation's most respected physicians,
such as a collection of editors of the New England Journal of
Medicine (one of whom wrote a book assailing the ridiculously
unscientific breast-implant litigation that bankrupted the Dow
Corning Co.), supported Levine: They think personal injury
attorneys can do a better job than the FDA in protecting
Americans from complicated and sometimes dangerous
medications on the market. In an editorial in last summer's New
England Journal of Medicine arguing against Wyeth's position,
several editors pointed out that Avandia, Vioxx, and Redux were
all approved by the FDA and were later found to have important
safety risks. They suggest that ruling in favor of Wyeth would
"erase" a harmed patient's "right to seek legal redress," even
though the truth is that outright lying wouldn't be protected. And
they also overlook their own contribution to our nation's drug
problems.
Consider the example of Vioxx, Merck's pain medication that
caused heart attacks. Merck likely was truthful in submitting its
clinical trial data to the FDA during approval, including those
suggesting an increased risk of heart attack. As nicely
documented by physician John Abramson in Overdosed
America, these data were easily accessible to the public and also
emphasized by warning letters issued to Merck by the FDA. It
wasn't exactly a secret. In 2001, the Journal of the American
Medical Association published a clear warning about the excess
risks. Yet the New England Journal of Medicine published a
review article at the same time minimizing the extent of the
problem, uncritical health insurers added the drug to their
formularies and paid for them, and many doctors happily wrote
prescriptions without reviewing any data. If the drug companies
should pay for resulting harm, shouldn't the New England
Journal of Medicine also be sued? How about health insurers?
Or the pharmacists who fill the prescriptions?
Now, there's no question Merck deserves punishment if the
company blatantly lied about risks. But here's the thing: The data
are really, really complicated. Major medical journals published
vastly different takes on it. And in the end, further studies on
Vioxx within a brief period of time confirmed the preliminary
risks, and the drug was withdrawn from the market—arguably a
regulatory success story.
Ultimately, there is no such thing as a "safe" medication. Drugs
each have a balance of risks and benefits best evaluated by
highly qualified sources. And the truth is that sometimes drugs
have unforeseen side effects. Complex nuances of medical
practice rarely survive courtroom battles—which, unfortunately,
is where many drug debates may continue to occur.
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moneybox
Park Avenue Marauding Through SoHo!
There is a war against the rich, but it's being waged by other rich people.
By Daniel Gross
Last week, I wrote that the Republican claim that Obama is
fighting a war against the rich was bogus. Over the weekend, I
thought better of it. It turns out there is a war on the rich. Only
it's not being waged by vicious overlords in Washington intent
on depriving honest, hardworking stiffs of their livelihoods.
Rather, it's a civil war, a war between the rich. It's Park Avenue
marauding through SoHo, Buckhead rampaging through Hilton
Head, Palm Beach shelling Bal Harbour with the big cannons.
Call it the War Between the Estates.
In the past two years, since the market peaked, investors have
suffered some $11 trillion in stock losses. Of course, stock
ownership is more widely spread today than it has been in the
past. But wealth is also much more concentrated than it has been
at any point since the 1920s. And so while all ships are swamped
by a rising tidal wave, some of the yachts have suffered the most
damage. The worst of the losses haven't been in mutual funds
and college-savings programs that cater to the middle class. No,
when it comes to lighting piles of money on fire, blowing up
assets, and generally causing financial carnage, the rich have
been going at one another ferociously.
The downfalls of Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros., AIG, Citigroup,
and Merrill Lynch all provide examples of rich people causing
immense financial damage to other rich—though not quite as
rich—people. Employees at these firms, even those who had
nothing to do with the activities of the minority who destroyed
the joints, were paid in stock over the years. At Lehman and
Bear, in particular, employee stock ownership was an important
component of the culture. In the last year, tens of thousands of
people, many of whom earned six-figure incomes and were
millionaires several times over, saw their wealth utterly
destroyed because of mismanagement by their peers and
superiors. Think of all the money managers and stock brokers—
Merrill Lynch's thundering herd—who took seriously the
mandate to preserve the wealth of their clients. Many of them
put their own assets, and those of their clients and relatives, into
ultrasafe investments like AAA-rated Lehman Bros. bonds or
Bear Stearns preferred stock. After all, analysts, top executives,
and credit rating agencies—aka the rich—told them it was
perfectly safe.
The hedge-fund industry, which by definition is open only to
rich individuals and to large institutions, has similarly been
engaged in a war on the rich. In 2008, according to Hedge Fund
Research, the industry—of the wealthy, by the wealthy, for the
wealthy—turned in its "worst performance year in history." The
HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Index fell by 18.3 percent for
all of 2008, with six straight down months between June and
November. To add insult to injury, many funds prohibited their
wealthy investors from pulling out money by erecting gates,
literally locking in the losses. In Vanity Fair, Bethany McLean
examines the fate of the hedge-fund company Fortress
Investment Group, which went public in 2007. Its top partners
cashed out. But the founders, as well as many top employees,
have their money tied in up Fortress' funds and in its stock,
which has lost about 90 percent of its value in the past two years.
So while they've lost the cash that everyday investors entrusted
to them, they've also lost their own fortunes.
The private-equity industry is supposed to be the sober older
brother of the hedge-fund industry. And yet its performance in
the past year provides another example of the rich gutting the
rich. In the past year, companies like the Blackstone Group and
the Carlyle Group have taken big write-downs in their funds.
They've also caused large losses to banks that extended them
credit and to sophisticated investors (i.e., rich people) who
bought bonds issued by their portfolio companies. As is the case
with hedge funds, the partners and many employees of privateequity firms have their own savings in the funds.
And while a lot of (small) bad loans were made to poor people
by the subprime-lending industry, a bunch of (really big) bad
loans were made by wealthy institutions—Wall Street
investment banks, opportunity funds, hedge funds—to other
really rich people. Broadway Partners, a high-flying real estate
investor, recently defaulted on a loan it took from other highflying financial institutions, which it used to buy the John
Hancock tower in Boston for $1.3 billion in December 2006.
(The Boston Globe estimated the building is now worth between
$700 million and $900 million.) And the most toxic of the toxic
assets—collateralized debt obligations, commercial mortgagebacked securities, credit-default swaps—were explicitly offlimits to middle-class investors. They were manufactured by rich
investment bankers and sold to hedge funds and proprietary
trading desks.
Finally, let's not forget the scams. Plenty of poor and workingclass people got fleeced in housing-related scams. But you could
add them all up, and they'd still be dwarfed by the biggest one of
them all, Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme, which
disproportionately targeted the already wealthy.
The Dumb Money debacle required the active work (or passive
nonwork) of hordes of really well-compensated professionals:
executives at financial-services companies, hedge-fund
managers, corporate board members, credit ratings agency
officials, private-equity investors, CEOs. These were people
who had every incentive to preserve the system and the wealth it
had produced for them, their friends, and their neighbors. So if
you want to find the real culprits in the war on wealth, don't look
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to Washington. Walk down Fifth Avenue, get on a chairlift at
Aspen, turn on CNBC, or charter a jet to St. Bart's.
movies
Z
When "political" movies were both political and hip.
By Dana Stevens
Constantin Costa-Gavras' 1969 classic Z (Rialto Pictures), just
rereleased in a snappy new 35 mm print for its 40th anniversary,
is as bold, jagged, and modern as its one-letter title. No one,
including its director, has ever made another film like it. A
treatise on politics that's also a tightly woven pulp thriller, with
nimble camerawork by Raoul Coutard (the great
cinematographer of the French New Wave) and a propulsive,
percussive score by Mikis Theodorakis (who composed the
theme music for Zorba the Greek), Z makes political intelligence
seem chicer than skinny neckties.
In an unnamed country—the relentless sunshine and zitherdriven score suggest Greece, but everyone speaks French—the
power is in the hands of a military dictatorship. An activist
leader, Zei (Yves Montand), arrives from abroad to lead a peace
rally, provoking a riot and an assassination. In the aftermath of
this unrest, a young judge is appointed by the state to hear the
assassins' case, with the assumption that he'll buckle under
pressure from the regime to make Zei's death look like an
accident. Instead, the judge (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant,
French '60s everyman par excellence) proves unexpectedly
obstinate about finding out the truth. Meanwhile, the activist's
widow (the incomparable Irene Papas) arrives from abroad to
collect her husband's effects.
These days, movies earn the title of "political" simply by virtue
of their subject matter. Z, which is based on real events that
occurred in Greece in 1963, is political in the deeper sense: It
attempts to think about politics, from the sick logic of fascism
(in the opening scene, a junta leader compares the squelching of
ideological "-isms" to the removal of mildew) to the awful
ineluctability of mob violence. After the assassination, a debate
among the activists about how to respond turns into a showdown
between the radicals and the more law-abiding centrist faction.
"Why don't you just call the Red Cross or the Human Rights
Commission?" sneers one of the hard-liners, and the sarcasm in
his voice tells us more about the realities of revolutionary
politics than a semester's worth of poli-sci lectures.
The movie's last half-hour is a neat trick of narrative
construction: As the judge interrogates witnesses to the
assassination (or, in government-enforced parlance, "the day of
the events"), we return in a series of subjective flashbacks to the
event itself, pausing in the present for a killer car chase. Z
combines the intellectual heft of revolution-themed films like
The Battle of Algiers with the drop-dead cool of mod
touchstones like Blow Out or Le Samouraï. (Overthrowing a
dictatorship is so much hipper when you do it in black-framed
glasses and narrow-lapel suits or, for the women, sleek pageboys
and Jackie O shifts.) But Cold War setting notwithstanding, the
movie's vision of paranoia, corruption, and moral compromise
remains blisteringly relevant, seeming to foresee both Watergate
and the Patriot Act. The penultimate scene, in which typewriters
in close-up tap out the indictments of top junta officials, would
go on to be quoted by the last shot of All the President's Men.
But unlike that film, Z doesn't end on a triumphant note. In a
coda, a narrator describes the military's brutal response to the
indictments: a crackdown banning everything from miniskirts to
free speech to the plays of Sophocles. The fascist strongmen of Z
have at least one thing in common with Costa-Gavras: They
know how frighteningly powerful political art can be.
movies
Sunshine Cleaning
Even though you've seen this movie already, you should see it again.
By Dana Stevens
Sunshine Cleaning (Overture Films) is a movie that the viewer
is willing to forgive a lot for four very appealing reasons: Amy
Adams' perfectly round, Delft-blue eyes and Emily Blunt's
almond-shaped ones, which seem to oscillate in color between
aquamarine and teal. Though they look nothing alike, Adams
and Blunt are believable siblings. They share an ability to make
the audience want to pick them up and cuddle them like
plaintively mewing lost kittens. Hell, Sunshine Cleaning
contains an actual plaintively mewing lost kitten—rescued from
a fire, no less, by Blunt's character—and you still find yourself
cutting the movie a break. Under the combined force of the lead
actresses' ocular weaponry, it's hard to remember that you've
seen this movie before, in versions from Little Miss Sunshine to
The Daytrippers (or any love-me-love-my-dysfunctional-family
indie of the past 15 years).
Adams' character, Rose Lorkowski (the very name, with its
combination of poetic lyricism and white working-class
ethnicity, screams "Sundance"), is a single mother barely
scraping by as a housecleaner in Albuquerque, N.M., while she
studies for her real estate license. Though her life is a fragile
tissue of bad decisions—among them a long-term affair with her
high-school boyfriend, Mac (Steve Zahn), now a married cop—
Rose is the highest-functioning member of the Lorkowski
family. Her younger sister, the hard-partying Norah (Blunt), has
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just been fired from a fast-food job and gets by baby-sitting
Rose's son, Oscar (Jason Spevack), for extra cash. Norah still
lives with the Lorkowski girls' perpetually broke father (Alan
Arkin), a wheeler-dealer who sells dubiously obtained goods
from the trunk of his rusty sedan.
During one of Rose and Mac's sordid motel assignations, he
encourages her to get into the business of crime-scene cleanup.
Though he seems a remarkably clueless oaf, Mac proves
prescient on this point. To her surprise and ours, Rose finds
professional fulfillment in scrubbing blood from shower grout
and dragging maggot-infested mattresses to dumpsters.
Conscripting the reluctant Norah as her partner, she opens her
own business, Sunshine Cleaning, and, without benefit of
certification, insurance, or the least idea what she's doing, begins
to corner the local market on "biohazard removal."
This sounds like the setup for a murder mystery: Surely the girls
will find clues at a crime scene that lead them afoul of the
police's official story? But no, Sunshine Cleaning, directed by
Christine Jeffs (Rain, Sylvia) and written by the first-time
screenwriter Megan Holley, is a straightforward comic drama
about family, loss, and economic survival, in which acts of
violence (often self-inflicted; many of the cleanup jobs are
suicides) serve more as metaphors than plot points. Sometimes
the going gets a little maudlin, especially in flashbacks involving
the long-ago death of the Lorkowski girls' mother. But Adams
and Blunt are just as determined to make this movie work as the
Lorkowskis are to better their lot in life. Their luminescence and
pluck, not to mention those two hypnotizing sets of eyeballs,
carry the day.
Alan Arkin virtually reprises his Oscar-winning role from Little
Miss Sunshine, right down to the cranky ranting about his misfit
grandchild's underappreciated gifts. It was more charming the
first time—and I say this as a viewer with a huge store of
affection for Alan Arkin. 24's Mary Lynn Rajskub surfaces in a
brief, underwritten role as a phlebotomist with whom Norah
pursues a semiromantic friendship. And Clifton Collins Jr., who
played Perry Smith in Capote, is quietly, wildly sexy as the onearmed proprietor of a janitorial supply store who initiates a slowburn flirtation with Rose. Casting directors, get this guy on
speed dial: In the right role, he could have women shimmying
out of their clothes right there in the movie theater.
music box
Monk's Art
How do you pay homage to the inimitable Thelonious Monk?
By Fred Kaplan
Tuesday, March 10, 2009, at 6:59 AM ET
Two of the most exciting jazz concerts I've seen in a long time
were the recent Thelonious Monk tributes at Town Hall in New
York, and one reason for the thrill—beyond the treat of hearing
great music played live by great musicians—was the sheer
surprise that they were great, for tribute concerts tend to be,
almost by nature, lame.
Certainly, there's a place for jazz repertory—recitals of the
classics—but, with some of those classics, the projects are
fraught with doom from the get-go. For instance, Charlie Parker
not only invented a new way of playing jazz; he also perfected it.
A generation of alto saxophonists latched on to his style, but the
best of them knew better than to play his tunes very often, for
fear of inviting comparison, inevitably to their detriment.
Covering Duke Ellington poses a different sort of risk: He
composed much of his music with specific band members in
mind; other big bands fall short when tackling Ellington's scores,
in part because their musicians, while they might be very good,
aren't Johnny Hodges or Paul Gonsalves or Cootie Williams.
And so, when you go to a Parker or Ellington tribute concert,
you usually wind up wishing you'd stayed home and listened to
your Parker or Ellington albums instead.
Musicians who dare devote an entire album or concert to
Thelonious Monk are toying with still more dangerous fire.
Monk was a completely distinctive pianist. His jabbing
dynamics, his jarring cadences, his oddball intervals that seem at
once slapdash and preternaturally precise—he was to the
keyboard what Picasso was to the canvas, and nobody can play
or paint the same way, to the point where it's a bit crazy to try.
Most of those who make the attempt either round off the edges
or sharpen them to the point of parody.
A few intrepid souls have leapt into the ring with Monk and held
their own. In the mid-1990s, Panamanian pianist Danilo Perez
put out an album called Panamonk, which, by highlighting
(though not overdoing) the suggestive Latin lilt in Monk's music,
made us hear Monk in a new, intriguing way. Around the same
time, Fred Hersch recorded an all-Monk solo-piano album,
called Thelonious, in which he managed to put his own stamp on
the music while imbibing a full dose of Monk's spirit. " 'Round
Midnight," as Monk first played it in the 1940s, was a haunting,
eerie tune.
Hersch's take, though very different, nailed that spectral quality.
The Monk tributes at Town Hall last month—the first led by
Charles Tolliver, the second by Jason Moran—faced a further
challenge. Both were commemorating the 50th anniversary of a
single concert—Monk's first stab at leading a big band through
his music, performed at the same Town Hall in February 1959.
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The concert was recorded live and released as an album that
came to be hailed as a modern masterpiece. How do you
duplicate—or otherwise capture "the spirit"—of that? Try to
sound too much like Monk and you risk coming off as a pale
imitation; try for something too different and you risk being
dismissed as insufficiently Monkish.
The first of the two tribute concerts took the former course to an
extreme degree. Charles Tolliver, an accomplished trumpeter
and arranger who attended the 1959 concert as a teenager, was
commissioned to transcribe all the parts (listening over and over
to the LP, since the original sheet music was lost long ago), put
together a 10-piece band, and lead them through a straight recreation of the event The musicians were allowed to improvise
their solos—this is jazz, after all—but the pianist, Stanley
Cowell, was instructed to match Monk's solos as closely as
possible.
Miraculously, Tolliver pulled it off. The concert, which could
have been an "academic" exercise, was anything but. The
musicians had no doubt listened to the album countless times,
but they owned these arrangements, playing them as if for the
first time—not too perfectly, not at all stiffly, leaving some
space to sway in—and blowing solos that, in some cases, rivaled
the originals. I would single out Howard Johnson on baritone
sax, Aaron Johnston on tuba, Marcus Strickland on tenor sax,
and—above all—Stanley Cowell. A longtime band-mate of
Tolliver's—and, like him, a connoisseur of the melodic avantgarde—Cowell embodied Monk like no other pianist I've heard,
grasping not only the material, which is tricky enough, but
Monk's off-center rhythms and distinctive touch without
sounding at all mannered. Listen to the first track of the 1959
concert, with Monk zigzagging through the opening bars of
"Thelonious":
Now listen to Cowell doing the same, here (jump ahead and
listen from 27:52).
Did the concert stand up to Monk's original? Not quite—how
could it? But it came closer, in substance and, more to the point,
in spirit, than anyone had any reason to expect. It was an
astonishing feat. (A podcast of the entire concert, recorded by
WNYC, can be heard here.)
The next night's tribute concert—by Jason Moran and his Big
Bandwagon, an octet extension of his Bandwagon trio—took the
more adventurous path, seeking not to replicate the original but,
rather, to use it as a leaping-off point.
Moran is attracted to conceptual art, meaning that he's fascinated
with process as part of the art. This fascination is what's on
display here—a sort of audio-video collage that explores the
roots of Monk's concert, of Monk himself, and of the ties that
bind his music to Moran's own path to jazz.
In most hands, this would be a formula for twee disaster. But
Moran, at 34 (meaning he was born 16 years after Monk's 1959
concert), is one of the most versatile and imaginative jazz
pianists of our time. On his 2002 CD Modernistic—which may
be the best solo jazz album of the past two decades—he
navigates James P. Johnson's stride-piano style, standard ballads
(putting an original spin on "Body and Soul"), hip-hop (Afrika
Bambaataa's "Planet Rock"), knotty numbers by Andrew Hill
and Muhal Richard Abrams, a piece by Schumann done straightup … In short, Moran can play everything and play it brilliantly,
preserving the integrity of the source while making it his own.
And he does it again in this unlikely postmodern adventure with
Monk. When Monk started planning his big-band concert 50
years ago, he and his arranger, Hall Overton, met frequently in
the loft apartment of W. Eugene Smith, one of the 20th century's
great photographers, who was friends with several jazz
musicians. (Overton lived in the same building.) In the late '50s
and early '60s, many of them used his loft as a space to hang out
and rehearse—and Smith tape-recorded everything they said and
played.
An obsessive historian named Sam Stephenson has spent the last
several years sorting through these tapes, which are archived at
the Center of Creative Photography and now also at Duke
University—focusing in particular on the ones with Monk and
Overton. During a Monk festival at Duke, Stephenson told
Moran about these tapes, guided him through some of the
highlights, and thus were planted the seeds for this concert,
which Moran titled "In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall 1959."
In the middle of Moran's concert, we hear about five minutes'
worth of these tapes (with subtitles shown on a screen, as
Monk's speech was hard to understand). Monk rarely spoke
about his music, yet it's clear from these tapes that he knew
precisely what he wanted: Certainly, for these big-band
arrangements, the ideas were Monk's; Overton served mainly as
a facilitator. For instance, there's a moment when the two are
listening to Monk's 1952 trio recording of "Little Rootie Tootie,"
one of the songs he planned to use, when Monk suddenly
suggests that they simply transcribe his piano solo for the entire
band—not in call-and-response riffs, or in lush harmonies, but,
rather, in unison, letting the tonal colors emerge from the natural
timbres of the horns (which included a French horn and tuba as
well as the standard saxophones, trumpet, and trombone). Here's
the song as played by Monk's trio:
And now as played by his big band.
During his chat with Overton, Monk paces the wood floor; you
can hear his footsteps. At one point, he breaks into a brief tap
dance. Moran took this bit of sound and repeated it over and
over on a tape loop. Then, at the concert, he played "Little
Rootie Tootie" on the piano to the rhythm of Monk's dancing.
Suddenly it became clear that Monk had been dancing to the
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song's rhythm. These songs, it seems, were constantly in Monk's
head, growing out of the other tangled ideas churning in there.
(Monk was deeply eccentric, possibly bipolar, but also a
mathematical genius; everything he wrote and played had
precise patterns, albeit unconventional ones, like some secret
language that only he comprehended.)
At another point in the concert, Moran and his band played
"Thelonious" at a very slow and melancholic tempo, while the
screen displayed video footage of the fields and forests in
Newton Grove, N.C., where Monk's great-grandfather toiled as a
slave. The juxtaposition may sound corny on paper, but at Town
Hall it was a heart-clutcher. As Moran told me a few days earlier
in an interview, "We think of Monk as a contemporary musician,
but this history is part of who he is, and what he plays, too."
Toward the end of the evening, Moran played Monk's sweet
ballad to his wife, "Crepuscule With Nellie."* He alternated the
opening bars with a reverie of his own composition. When the
rest of the band came in, the two themes weaved in and out of
each other; Moran launched into an improvisation; the horn
players devised their own variations on top of that. Meanwhile,
the screen displayed some of W. Eugene Smith's photos of Monk
in his loft, mixed in with video footage taken recently inside the
loft, which is now empty, the camera roaming across the bare
wood boards. The sights and sounds swirled together like a
kaleidoscope; it had the effect of a dream, a furtive glimpse of a
life voyage.
And did I mention that it cooked like crazy?
Correction, March 10, 2009: The article originally misspelled
the title of "Crepuscule With Nellie." (Return to the corrected
sentence.)
sidebar
my goodness
You Can't Take Them With You
The damaging myth that doctors hasten the deaths of organ donors.
By Patty Stonesifer and Sandy Stonesifer
Do you have a real-life do-gooding dilemma? Please send it to
ask.my.goodness@gmail.com, and Patty and Sandy will try to
answer it.
Dear Patty and Sandy,
For years I've been debating becoming an organ donor.
However, I resist because I keep hearing the rumor that people
who have this designation on their driver's licenses receive less
than full treatment by EMTs so that their organs can be
harvested. Is this true? I would love to get this rumor dispelled if
it is false.
Bob
Patty:
Bob, your question made me pull out my new driver's license
and make sure I reregistered on my last license renewal! (I did.)
I'm happy to have a chance to encourage our readers to become
organ donors and dispel this myth, because being an organ donor
is a wonderful way to have your last act be one that improves or
even saves the life of another. The rumor is false: Emergencyroom and trauma doctors are there to support you, the patient,
and they are entirely focused on saving your life until they know
it's not possible. This myth, and another nine organ donation
myths outlined by the Mayo Clinic, is contributing to the gap
between the more than 100,000 desperate folks on the waiting
list and the 25,630 actual donations in the past year.
What will it take for donations to reach the level of need? We
certainly don't need more deaths—there were more than 2.4
million deaths in the United States in 2005. We need more organ
donors.
Return to article
The best Ellington and Parker tribute albums also tend to be
those that spin the music in a shrewdly skewed direction:
Anthony Braxton's Charlie Parker Project 1993 imagines where
Bird might have flown had he lived through the era of Ornette
Coleman; and The World Saxophone Quartet Plays Ellington
and James Newton's The African Flower explore the outward
possibilities of Duke's compositions while staying true to his
lyricism.
Three simple steps can help us get there. Every reader should
follow them today. They will take you less than an hour: First,
read the best information you can find for people considering
organ donation. We recommend this brief fact sheet from the
Journal of the American Medical Association. Second, complete
or update your donor registration through an easy online registry
like this one from the National Transplant Society (or via your
driver's license renewal process). Third—this may be most
important—share your decision with your loved ones, and ask
for their cooperation in ensuring that your wishes are followed.
While the law is different from state to state, your family may
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end up being asked to make the final decision regardless of
whether you are a designated donor. No matter what local law
dictates, it will certainly make it an easier decision for your
loved ones to support if they are notified of your intentions now
rather than later. Sharing your decision might inspire them to
register, too. Most of the online registries we looked at have the
option to send an e-mail notice to your family. (I sent two myself
this morning: I think my family already knew of my intentions,
but now they definitely do.) If you'd rather have a little bit more
time to discuss, an after-dinner conversation tonight is a great
idea, too.
It is estimated that fewer than 50 percent of registered donors'
organs are harvested because their family members are
concerned or uncooperative and ultimately decide not to consent
to the donation. If that were to happen to you, it would mean
your last great gift would go unfulfilled. You can prevent that—
and perhaps even encourage other gifts to be made—by making
sure your family understands and agrees to support your
intentions.
Sandy:
I wish I could say this myth comes out of thin air, but
unfortunately it doesn't. While my mom is right that both EMTs
and doctors are bound by ethics and law to act in your best
interest, recent changes in organ donation guidelines fueled
concerns that a new practice known as donation after cardiac
death may disturb the donor's family and increase uncertainty in
the organ donation process. The new guidelines allow for the
donor's surrogate to consent to withdrawal of life support if total
cardiac* death has been confirmed by multiple doctors, thus
increasing the chance that the organs can be harvested in a short
enough time to be successfully transplanted into a needy
recipient.
The few highly publicized instances in which a patient's donor
status appeared to negatively influence the medical team's
treatment have surely served to kindle Bob's fears. In one recent
case, a San Francisco transplant surgeon was charged with a
felony for allegedly hastening a potential donor's death. (The
patient was in a coma after suffering a serious heart attack.) The
doctor was acquitted, but only after intense media scrutiny that
may have caused potential donors to hold off on registering.
Both individual physicians and organ transplant organizations
realize that this fear is one of the main reasons that Americans
don't sign up to be donors. They are adamant that doctors and
nurses always place the welfare of the patient first. Donation
guidelines specifically address ways to ensure that a patient's
donor status doesn't affect his or her care and require multiple
checks to ensure that the donor is actually dead before the
process is initiated. While this is clearly a decision you have to
make for yourself, please don't let what could be your biggest
gift get buried with you.
Do you have a real-life do-gooding dilemma? Please send it to
ask.my.goodness@gmail.com and Patty and Sandy will try to
answer it. In our ongoing effort to do better ourselves, we're
donating 25 percent of the proceeds from this column to
ONE.org—an organization committed to raising public
awareness about the issues of global poverty, hunger, and
disease and the efforts to fight such problems in the world's
poorest countries.
Correction, March 12, 2009: The article originally said that
new guidelines allow withdrawal of life support after total brain
death. In fact, the new guidelines allow withdrawal life support
after total cardiac death. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
other magazines
After Capitalism
The Nation rethinks socialism for the 21st century.
By Kara Hadge
The Nation, March 23
In the cover package, Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher Jr.
rethink socialism. While both are staunch socialists, they did not
expect capitalism to fail in the way that it seemingly has: "There
was supposed to be a revolution," not the nationalization that has
occurred. Meanwhile, capitalism has left us and our environment
"with less than it found on this planet, about 400 years ago." To
move forward, "we have to build organizations, including
explicitly socialist ones, that can mobilize … talent, develop
leadership and advance local struggles." … One of several
pieces in response to the cover story argues, "[T]here was and is
a revolution, just not one that looks the way socialists and a lot
of '60s radicals imagined it." To wit, "[o]rganic, urban,
community-assisted and guerrilla agriculture" puts up a small
but significant fight against giant food corporations.
Newsweek, March 16
David Frum laments in the cover story that ultraconservative
pundit Rush Limbaugh has become "the public face" of the
Republican Party. "Rush is a walking stereotype of selfindulgence—exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants
to affix to our philosophy and our party," to contrast with the
president's calm demeanor and keen sense of responsibility.
Limbaugh wants to maintain the Republican Party's status quo,
when what it needs, Frum argues, is to "deliver economic
improvement," win over voters, and "take governing seriously
again." … An article considers the fate of former members of an
all-female suicide-bomber group in Iraq. Some of the women of
Al Khansaa, part of al-Qaida in Iraq, "joined because their
fathers, husbands or brothers suggested it" or even forced them
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to. After one woman blew herself up, the group began to fall
apart. Now its former members remain ostracized within their
community, where "fear trumps forgiveness."
Weekly Standard, March 16
The author of the cover story vows to "never, ever join
Facebook, the omnipresent online social-networking site that
like so many things that have menaced our country (the
Unabomber, Love Story, David Gergen) came to us from
Harvard but has now worked its insidious hooks into every
crevice of society." Usually a late-adopter of trends, he's
forsaking this one completely, in part, he notes, because of
Farhad Manjoo's assertion on Slate that everyone else has
joined. "[C]ollecting Facebook friends is the equivalent of being
a cat lady, collecting numerous Himalayans, which you have
neither the time nor the inclination to feed," he argues. … An
article criticizes President Obama for being too complacent
about fighting climate change. Despite Obama's call for cap-andtrade legislation to be passed this year, his administration would
not levy taxes on emissions until 2012. While Obama quickly
pushed through his economic agenda, he "seems in no particular
rush to cut down on greenhouse emissions."
The New Yorker, March 16
In the "Style Issue," a profile of Bill Cunningham lauds his New
York Times column "On the Street" for its "elegiac respect for
the anonymous promenade of life in a big city, and a deadserious desire to get it all down." For the past three decades,
Cunningham has photographed a variety of fashion statements,
from Greta Garbo's classic coats to "the snowman sweatshirts
and reindeer turtlenecks of tourists." But Cunningham himself is
something of a fashion "oblate—a layperson who has dedicated
his life to the tribe without becoming a part of it." … Critic
David Denby examines the relatively new "mumblecore" genre
of low-budget, independent films so nicknamed because they are
"a kind of lyrical documentary of American stasis and
inarticulateness." In these understated movies, such as Funny Ha
Ha (2002) and Alexander the Last (2009), ambition is of little
concern to characters content to "remain stuck in a limbo of
semi-genteel, moderately hip poverty."
Smithsonian, March 2009
A feature considers "the difficulties of adjusting to life in a
quiescent Northern Ireland." During "the Troubles," "Catholic
Irish nationalists, favoring unification with the Irish Republic to
the south, began a violent campaign against Britain and the
Loyalist Protestant paramilitaries who supported continued
British rule." Ten years after a historic peace agreement,
Northern Ireland still grapples with old tensions. In some Belfast
neighborhoods, brightly painted murals of IRA hunger strikes or
Protestant military victories recall past conflicts. Although a
once-unlikely coalition government has been formed between
two former rivals, "[s]ome IRA splinter groups are still planting
explosives and, rarely, executing enemies." … Another article
analyzes a Cindy Sherman photograph that will appear this
spring in an exhibition on the American West at New York's
Museum of Modern Art. Sherman, known for her staged, "film
still" self-portraits, "resists any reference to cowboys or Indians"
in the photo and instead "offers an alternative mythology" of the
Western frontier.
poem
"Bad Infinity"
By T.R. Hummer
Click the arrow on the audio player to hear T.R. Hummer read
this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to
Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.
.
During the colonoscopy, orbiting through twilight sleep,
***she felt, light-years distant in the interior darkness, a thump
And a dull but definite pain—as if someone were dragging,
***at the end of a rusty chain, a transistor radio through her
body,
A small beige box with a gold grill, assembled by a child in
southeast Asia
***in 1964—and she woke in groggy panic till the nurse made
soothing noises
For her to sleep by, like a song in an alien language heard
through static
***beamed from the far side of Arcturus: The Dave Clark Five's
"Glad All Over," maybe, tuned in by a boy in Thailand. Such a
drug,
***the doctor said. Everything you feel you will forget.
Amen to that. Amen to plastic and silicon, amen to a living
wage,
***amen to our tinny music, to the shrapnel in the IV drip,
Amen to the template of genes that keeps the body twitching
***and the wormhole in the gut of Orion I will slip through
When the chain breaks and the corroded battery bursts, its acids
eating
***all the delicate circuitry that binds the speaker to the song.
.
49/105
politics
Biden Finds a Role
Joe and Barack are still figuring out how to make their relationship work.
By John Dickerson
Joe Biden used to joke about whether the vice president was less
powerful than the chairman of the Senate foreign relations
committee. Biden is naturally self-deprecating, but the joke
contained a germ of truth: Biden had genuine ambivalence about
what the job would be like. When Obama picked Biden, he told
him he would have a key role, but the six-term senator wasn't
sure what that would mean in practice. During the campaign, the
two didn't have much time to talk about it. They were rarely
together, campaigning in separate states most of the time, and
Biden was necessarily in the background. Strategy for the
campaign was handled by Obama and his long-serving team, and
Biden was often kept out of the limelight.
Now that the Obama administration is (mostly) in place, the two
men are enjoying an intense courtship after the marriage. Some
days, Biden is with Obama for five hours in security and
economic briefings and meeting foreign heads of state. As a
result, Biden isn't making jokes about his role anymore. He's
plenty busy, which he relishes. This week, he took his third
substantive foreign trip to meet with NATO officials about the
hot spot of Afghanistan, and Thursday he chaired a daylong
meeting with state budget officials on the implementation of the
stimulus bill.
When Obama announced that Biden was the top enforcer for
how the stimulus bill would be spent and accounted for, it wasn't
exactly confidence-inducing. "Nobody messes with Joe," Obama
said in his congressional address. When you are the kind of
person nobody messes with, it should be self-evident. Bush
never had to say, "Nobody messes with Cheney" because, as one
of Cheney's aides once put it, everyone saw Cheney as "the guy
in the loin cloth with the knife in his teeth." (I'll let you pause for
a moment to recover from this image.) By contrast, Bush did
have to testify to Harriet Miers' toughness, which diminished
her.
It may be paradoxical that the administration's most expansive
personality is being put in charge of restraint. But Biden's role as
the top stimulus cop is serious. It has to be. Before Dick Cheney,
it was common for a vice president to have a pet issue that was
sort of off to the side. Al Gore's job was to reinvent government.
Biden's role as stimulus cop could be seen in that tradition—
except that the bill and its success are crucial to the success of
the Obama administration.
president they like, will spend money wisely, and Republicans
are attacking Obama for being a spendthrift. Biden's role—
making sure the money spent is accounted for and spent
wisely—is crucial to improving trust and beating back those
critics. It also is necessary because Obama is going to be asking
for more. As Biden told the state officials Thursday, "If we don't
get this right, folks, this is the end of the opportunity to convince
the Congress that anything should go to the states."
That Biden has been given this portfolio could mean the
president has just signed him up to be the chief grief catcher:
When the inevitable waste is discovered, Biden will take the rap
for it. This was the dynamic during the early Bush days when
White House officials tried to blame Cheney's staff for the poor
rollout of the administration's energy plan.
But it can also be seen from another perspective. One state
official, struck by how much pressure Biden is putting on
everyone receiving federal money, told me that maybe the
administration would be only too happy to find an example of
wrongdoing—because it would then be able to show that it's
being fiscally responsible. As the president said Thursday at the
meeting of state officials, "I know Joe emphasized this to you—
if we see money being misspent, we're going to put a stop to it,
and we will call it out, and we will publicize it."
As a personal matter, Biden is still learning, after more than 30
years in the Senate, how to work for someone else, which often
means watching what he says aloud. He is, as one administration
adviser put it, at once the administration's biggest adult and
biggest child. He was called on to deliver the administration's
first major foreign-policy speech at a security conference in
Munich, Germany, in February, but he also caused a message
detour when he told congressional leaders that Obama could do
everything right—and there was still a 30 percent chance of
failure. When Obama addressed the comment in a press
conference, he appeared to diminish Biden, which didn't help
either man. And then there are Bidenisms that are simply
incomprehensible, as when he didn't know the number of the
government's Web site for the task force he leads.
Most of Biden's gaffes, however, tend to illustrate Kinsley's law
of politics: He says things that are true but that politicians are
not supposed to say. Administration aides say the president
admires this candor, and its public downside will perhaps ease
once Biden gets comfortable with his place in the relationship,
something Biden also likes to joke about. As he entered the
swearing-in ceremony for Gil Kerlikowske, the new drug czar,
Biden told the standing audience, "Please sit down, I'm only the
vice president."
Politically, Obama is being attacked for spending too much.
Voters don't trust that government, even the government of a
50/105
Republican governors are sure they don't want to spend stimulus
money. They just can't agree which parts to reject. Or whether
they're allowed to. Or why.
Yet Perry just rejected a chunk of change that has nothing to do
with stabilization funds. Moreover, the federal legislation states
that the governor has first dibs on all the money: "If funds
provided to any State in any division of this Act are not accepted
for use by the Governor, then acceptance by the State legislature,
by means of the adoption of a concurrent resolution, shall be
sufficient to provide funding to such State [emphasis mine]."
(Read it here.) Sanford's spokesman, Joel Sawyer, insisted this
passage refers only to stabilization money, i.e., the $700 million
Sanford has asked to be redirected.
Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina announced this week that
he wants to redirect $700 million that would be going toward
education and health care and use it to pay down the state's debt.
"In our opinion," he said, "that will do more to ensure our longterm economic strength, and to avoid our state's structural
budget shortcomings, than would other contemplated uses of the
funds."
But the words "in any division of this Act" suggest that he has
discretion over every dollar. Or, at the very least, he can instruct
his appointees at Health and Human Services or Social Services
to reject the money. Not so, says Sawyer. "If you go through the
rest of the bill, it speaks to a very specific certification process,"
he told me. "We spent three weeks looking at it, and we're pretty
sure we're correct."
Meanwhile, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas announced Thursday that
he will be rejecting the $555 million of Texas' stimulus funds
directed to unemployment insurance. Perry's rationale: He
doesn't want to increase the burden on businesses to fill the hole
once federal funds dry up. Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana
voiced similar concerns a few weeks ago but hasn't formally
rejected any money yet. Same with Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska,
who plans to make a stimulus-related announcement next week.
Whatever the truth, this puts Sanford in a convenient position.
He not only gets to dramatically redirect a portion of the
money—which has been reported all over as "rejecting" the
money and which either the White House or the South Carolina
state legislature will likely override—but he can also claim that
he would reject the entire monstrosity, if only he could. This
pretense that he opposes every dollar in the stimulus package—
much of which comes in the form of tax cuts—allows him to
engage in some clever reductio ad Zimbabweum. "What you're
doing is buying into the notion that if we just print some more
money that we don't have, send it to different states, we'll create
jobs," he said Wednesday. "If that's the case, why isn't
Zimbabwe a rich place?"
politics
Dr. No, But …
Mark Sanford's bizarre rationale for redirecting South Carolina's stimulus
money.
By Christopher Beam
Each governor's stance raises its own set of questions. But the
one question that applies to every Republican governor is this:
Why not reject the whole thing? What makes these particular
packets of money so much worse than the rest?
For Perry, the answer is simple: I reserve the right to reject more
money later. But this money for unemployment insurance is so
bad, I had to act fast. The governor is currently going through
the remaining allocations "line by line," says spokeswoman
Katherine Cesinger. "I would stay tuned," she adds.
For Sanford, it's a little more complicated. Seven hundred
million dollars is only 10 percent of the stimulus money
allocated to South Carolina, and a small fraction of the state's
likely budget shortfall. It's also not qualitatively different from
the rest of the state's money. The $700 million isn't a blank
check—it goes toward K-12 education, higher ed, and Medicaid
as part of the state's "stabilization funds." How does that hurt
taxpayers any more than fixing roads or distributing food stamps
or any of the other services South Carolina desperately needs?
Sanford says he would reject or redirect the rest of the money
but can't. His "hands are tied," he wrote in a letter to state
legislators. When asked to explain, his communications director
said that the governor has discretion over only the stabilization
funds, not the rest of the $8 billion allocated to South Carolina.
That said, Sanford is in good company. When it comes to the
stimulus, no one has been willing to jump in or out with both
feet. In the original draft of the American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act, Obama included just enough tax cuts so that
he wouldn't get painted as a lefty. In the Senate version, the
Snowe-Collins-Specter axis negotiated just enough cuts so that
they would get pegged as responsible moderates, but not in any
ideologically consistent way. Now Sanford requests that just
enough funds get redirected so that he can claim conservative
bona fides—but not so much that he'll be stiffing his own
constituents.
Other governors may follow his lead. But if they do, like Perry,
they could put Sanford in an awkward position: They would
agree with what he's doing in general, but not in particular. And
that would force him to defend his rationale for redirecting this
specific portion of the money. All politics is local, and
apparently so is all stimulus.
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politics
The New Czar in Town
during the annual HempFest, while thousands of civil
disobedients smoked pot in the streets.
Obama chooses a drug czar who recognizes the war on drugs hasn't worked.
By Andrew Marantz
Vice President Joe Biden sponsored the legislation that created
the job 21 years ago, so it was fitting that on Wednesday he
announced the Obama administration's choice for drug czar:
Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske. The announcement
thrilled neither progressive anti-prohibition groups, which
dislike the idea of a career cop in charge of drug policy, nor
conservative anti-drug groups, which distrust Kerlikowske's
record on enforcement.
So, which is it? In nominating a cop, is Obama snubbing the
left? Or is Kerlikowske the kind of squishy cop even liberals can
love? Or is he another in a string of compromises, a bid for
bipartisan support that will satisfy no one? Trick questions. Like
Obama, Kerlikowske is, first and foremost, a pragmatist. His
nomination is a victory not for any political faction but for
common sense.
Both as a candidate and as president, Obama has repeatedly
pledged allegiance to "what works." And most analysts agree
that, since its inception in the 1970s, the drug war has not
worked. Research suggests that programs like DARE yield
almost no benefits, while the medicinal use of marijuana yields
many. Anti-drug propaganda has done little or nothing to curb
domestic drug abuse, while the international drug trade
continues to wreak havoc in key U.S. allies like Afghanistan and
Mexico. Meanwhile, the Office of National Drug Control Policy
soldiers on, as expensive and ineffective as ever.
If Kerlikowske's record is any indication, he is just the man to
clean up this mess. From a personal standpoint, he has
experience with the issue: A son from a pervious marriage has a
history of arrests, some of them drug-related. (This could lead to
some awkward questions at his confirmation hearing.)
Professionally, his record of lowering crime rates gives him
instant credibility. Speaking approvingly of Kerlikowske, Barry
McCaffrey, drug czar under Bill Clinton and a retired general,
told Fox News: "If you really want to understand the drug issue,
go talk to any police officer with more than five years on the
force."
Yet Kerlikowske is no get-tough-on-drugs zealot. When asked to
help design a new police station as police chief in Port St. Lucie,
Fla., Kerlikowske recommended making room for a library
instead of a jail. He has long been a proponent of community
policing, which he defines as "problem solving, decision making
… and the utilizing and leveraging of the community." And as
police chief in Seattle, he instructed his officers to stand by
With this résumé, Kerlikowske might look like Bill O'Reilly's
worst nightmare (or Keith Olbermann's secret crush). But
Kerlikowske's decisions were based on prudence and case-bycase analysis, not political ideology. In the case of the Port St.
Lucie police station, Kerlikowske did not refuse to build a jail
because of any anti-incarceration views but because "we
[already] have a nice jail." Though some dogmatists continued to
decry community policing as "soft on crime," Kerlikowske
supported it—because community policing works.
In 2003, Seattle voters approved Initiative 75, making personal
marijuana arrests "the city's lowest law enforcement priority."
Kerlikowske, a consistent opponent of drug legalization, did not
support the initiative. Once it became law, however, he honored
it. As he explained at the time, "Arresting people for possessing
marijuana for personal use is not a priority now." (Only time will
tell, but if marijuana arrests were "not a priority" in 2003, it is
hard to see how they could be today.)
Enforcing old drug laws against the will of the voters would
have been costly and distracting—not to mention illegal. But this
has not stopped many other leaders, both local and federal, from
doing just that. Over the past two decades, several states,
including Washington, legalized marijuana for medical use.
Licensed marijuana growers, meanwhile, have found their
ostensibly legal farms raided by the Drug Enforcement Agency,
a constitutionally questionable habit that was endorsed by the
Bush White House.
Attorney General Eric Holder, when asked about the DEA raids,
implied that they would not continue. Given Kerlikowske's
record as a nonobstructionist—he also honored his state's
medical-marijuana laws and needle-exchange programs—some
onlookers see hopeful outlines of a message from the Obama
administration: If states want to amend their drug laws, the
federal government will not stand in their way.
Norm Stamper preceded Kerlikowske as Seattle police chief and
is now a member of the drug-reform group Law Enforcement
Against Prohibition. According to Stamper, the appointment of a
drug czar with nonobstructionist tendencies is of great
significance. "I'm hopeful that if the voters in a given state said,
'We want to decriminalize marijuana, or even legalize
marijuana,' that there's at least the possibility that the new
administration will respect that."
No doubt, Kerlikowske has his work cut out for him. But at least
there is reason to hope that he will bring a restrained,
dispassionate, nondogmatic approach to the ONDCP. Contrast
his approach with that of the outgoing drug czar, who considered
marijuana growers "violent criminal terrorists," and it's easy to
see why Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Drug Policy Alliance,
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is "cautiously optimistic." Kerlikowske is "likely to be the best
drug czar we've seen," he said. "But that's not saying much."
politics
Sage Advice
Barack Obama needs Warren Buffett more than Buffett needs Barack Obama.
By John Dickerson
During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama regularly
name-checked the world's richest man. "I've got a friend, Warren
Buffett," he would say before talking about how the two of them
agreed on tax policy. Buffett was perhaps Obama's most
powerful "validator," an unfortunate political term for a
supporter whose unassailable credentials in a particular area
make people feel good about a candidate's slim credentials in
that area.
Obama could use a little Buffett validation right now as he seeks
to bolster investor and consumer confidence about the plans he
has enacted and the plans he has yet to unveil. He didn't really
get it Monday as Buffett gave his views on the economic crisis
during a lengthy interview on CNBC. Buffett made a broad
critique of the politicians in Washington. And while he called
out Republicans for being obstructionist, his most specific
remarks were aimed at congressional Democrats and the
president. "I think that the Democrats—and I voted for Obama
and I strongly support him, and I think he's the right guy—but I
think they should not use this—when they're calling for unity on
a question this important, they should not use it to roll the
Republicans." He also said it was unproductive to blame the
Bush administration and use the crisis to get funding for "pet
projects."
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs could not dismiss
Buffett as quickly as he has other administration critics. Nor
could he point out, as other Democratic strategists did to me on
the phone, that Buffett isn't what he used to be. Buffett made a
lot of bad calls in the recent economic crisis, as Buffett himself
admitted, both in the interview and in his annual letter to
shareholders. (Sample: "During 2008 I did some dumb things in
investments.")
In prudent fashion, Gibbs embraced only part of Buffett's
critique, saying Obama agreed with his frustration with the
political process in Washington and his call for bipartisan
cooperation. (Tuesday, he didn't take the opportunity to note that
despite Buffett's remarks, the Dow went up almost 400 points.)
A lack of communication, says Buffett, is at the heart of the
economic problem. "We've had muddled messages," he said,
"and the American public does not know. They feel they don't
know what's going on, and their reaction is to absolutely pull
back. … How fast we get [to better economic times] depends
enormously on not only the wisdom of government policy but
the degree in which it's communicated properly." (Buffett's own
attempts at communication included repeatedly referring to the
current economic crisis as a war and drawing elaborate analogies
to the attack on Pearl Harbor.)
It's not as if Obama hasn't been trying to educate the country. He
does it often in speeches and on the road. He did it at the start of
his prime-time press conference and in his address to Congress.
His economic advisers have also been speaking to think tanks
and television news shows. Polls suggest Buffett is wrong:
People feel good about what they're hearing. Some 41 percent of
those polled say the country is on the right track, the highest that
number has been in five years. In a recent Wall Street
Journal/NBC poll, 56 percent said they approve of the job
Obama is doing in handling the economy, while 59 percent gave
their approval in a Quinnipiac poll. They approve of his
economic policies, including his budget. In a CNN poll, 80
percent said they believed Obama's policies would improve the
economy. When he spoke to Congress two weeks ago, people
told Gallup they felt more confident. Even Obama's plan for
housing gets support: While people think it unfairly benefits
those who behaved badly during the housing bubble, a plurality
nevertheless believes it will work.
But, Buffett would probably say (he wasn't available for an
interview), those polls are misleading. To see whether Obama
has really changed the economic climate, watch how people
behave. People are nervous, and they're not spending. Since the
stimulus bill passed, the consumer mood has not improved.
Obama obviously worries about what Buffett is talking about,
too, because he's been repeatedly making efforts to boost the
market in public confidence. He suggested it might be time to
get into the stock market, and in an interview with the New York
Times last week, he urged Americans not to "stuff money in their
mattresses," and tried to bolster confidence: "I don't think that
people should be fearful about our future," he said. "I don't think
that people should suddenly mistrust all of our financial
institutions."
Whether Buffett is right and Obama needs to communicate more
effectively to unlock the economy, the president also has other
reasons to improve his pitch. He's got to convince people that his
stimulus bill is working, and he may have more big spending
requests to make—for another bank bailout or maybe for a
second stimulus bill. He's got to make the case for his budget,
which the chairman of the Senate budget committee says doesn't
have the votes at the moment.
Buffett wasn't trying to assign blame. He was calling for focus,
most of all from President Obama as the communicator-in-chief.
53/105
If Obama still puts as much stock in his friend Warren as he did
during the campaign, he'll work even harder to educate the
country and show he's doing everything he can to improve the
economy. In the CNBC interview, Buffett repeatedly referred to
FDR and the spirit of fellow-feeling in the nation during his
presidency. So perhaps we'll soon see President Obama at the
fireside, talking about his solutions to the country's economic
woes. Maybe the president can even mention in these fireside
chats how often he talks and listens to his good friend Warren
Buffett.
politics
Uncivil Union
Does card check kill the secret ballot or not?
By Christopher Beam
As Congress prepares for battle over the Employee Free Choice
Act, the business and labor lobbies are launching multimilliondollar campaigns. But if the debate is about the sanctity of the
(workplace) ballot box—and that's how it's shaping up—then
organized labor may as well save its money.
Union elections are more complicated than either side admits.
Maybe that's why debate over the EFCA hangs on a single,
simple question: Does the measure eliminate the "secret ballot"
in union elections? Business groups like the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce say yes. (Warren Buffett has voiced his concern as
well.) Labor groups like the SEIU and AFL-CIO say no. Which
is it? Would the bill eliminate the secret ballot?
In theory, no. In practice, yes. That is, if you believe the secret
ballot even exists now.
Here's how it works currently: Say you work at a factory and
you want to form a union. First, you approach your favorite
union and request a bunch of blank cards. (Here's what they look
like.) Then you go around to your colleagues and ask them
whether they want to sign up. If they do, they sign their name to
the cards. Once you get 30 percent of the total work force to sign
cards, you're eligible to hold an election on whether to form a
union. (Workers usually wait till they get at least 50 percent or
60 percent, just to make sure they will win the election.) You
then present the cards to the National Labor Relations Board and
the employer. The employer can then either recognize the union
right away or request a secret-ballot election, which must happen
within 60 days. If more than 50 percent of employees vote for a
union, they've got a union. If not, they don't.
Even though employers are free to recognize a union without an
election, in practice they almost always request an election: Why
recognize a union before they have to? Requesting an election
also gives them more time to lobby against unionization.
The essential change of the EFCA would be to allow the
employees—rather than the employer—to decide whether to
hold a secret-ballot election. If at least half of the work force
signed cards saying it wanted a union, there would be a union—
without the rigmarole of a full-blown election.
Workers still have the option of holding a secret ballot election,
of course. But, again, as a practical matter, it's hard to imagine
why a group of workers, having just won a union, would then
also decide to hold an election. Sure, a smaller group of
workers—it'd have to be at least 30 percent—could still petition
for a secret ballot. But the legislation clearly states that "[i]f the
Board finds that a majority of the employees in a unit
appropriate for bargaining has signed valid authorizations … the
Board shall not direct an election but shall certify the individual
or labor organization as the representative."
To be sure, there are cases in which union supporters would
want a secret-ballot election. Maybe the company has workers
spread across the country, in which case it may be logistically
difficult to get 50 percent of workers to sign a card. Easier would
be holding an election back at headquarters. Pro-union workers
might also want to hold a secret ballot for strategic reasons:
Under card check, a majority of all employees is needed for
unionization. With an election, only a majority of voters is
necessary.
Naturally, this apparent abandonment of democratic principles
ticks some people off. Why throw out the secret ballot with the
bath water?
The problem is, the secret ballot isn't so secret. In reality, labor
leaders argue, it's hardly the democratic process suggested by its
name. During unionization campaigns, companies routinely hire
consultants to explain to workers, during work hours, why
starting a union is such a bad idea. These consultants can also
hold one-on-one meetings with workers.*
Businesses defend this practice as "free speech." But unions see
it as intimidation or, at the very least, an imbalance in influence.
Union officials can lobby workers, too, but only outside the
workplace. Hence the stories about goons showing up at your
door during dinner. (Reported cases of intimidation by
employers vastly outnumber those by unions.)
The upshot for a worker is: By the day of the election, both sides
know how you're going to vote.
54/105
Still, the question persists: Why is card check organized labor's
preferred way for workers to decide whether to unionize?
Presumably, it would be possible to speed up the election
process, crack down on worker intimidation, and allow unions to
make their case at the workplace—all without eliminating the
secret ballot.
That misses the point, say labor advocates. For one thing, the
grievance process for unjustly fired workers can take several
years—and that's unlikely to change. Moreover, it's often
cheaper for a company to fire a worker and pay a fine rather than
to allow workers to unionize. As for speeding up elections,
companies will always have time to pressure workers.
The core point, they say, is that it's simply too hard to unionize.
"It's about power," said SEIU director Andy Stern at a
roundtable in Washington last fall. As such, organized labor has
decided that it's more important to put employers and unions on
a level playing field than it is to preserve the oft-romanticized
notion of the secret ballot. Besides, they say, who said secret
ballots were so great in the first place? In Oregon, Stern pointed
out, millions of people fill out early election ballots with their
names attached. Democracy has not yet collapsed there. Same
with the Iowa caucuses—you don't see presidential contenders
boycotting that state.
Still, framing matters. And the fact that the debate is about the
secret ballot—rather than intimidation or low wages or the right
to unionize—doesn't bode well for labor groups. (Some
Democrats are already inching away from the bill.) In PR as in
politics, it's best not to get caught campaigning against a
fundamental democratic value.
Correction, March 12, 2009: This article incorrectly stated that
employers can ask workers how they plan to vote in union
elections. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
politics
The Art of the Float
How Obama flatters people he never intends to hire.
By Christopher Beam
Howard Dean is not being considered for surgeon general. But,
the White House would have you know, he's not not being
considered, either—even though he has said he's not interested.
"I would not dismiss it," one anonymous White House staffer
told CNN last week after Dr. Sanjay Gupta removed himself
from the running.
Dean allies, however, suggest it's an empty offer—that the
administration just wants to placate Dean after booting him from
the DNC chairmanship and denying him the job he really
wanted, secretary of health and human services. The fact that
Dean's consideration was news to him suggests they're right.
Dean is the latest example of the "flattery float"—the deliberate
leaking of someone's name as a potential appointee for purely
political purposes with no intention of actually hiring them. It's
the consolation prize for people who don't get the consolation
prize of being appointed.
Take Caroline Kennedy, whose name "surfaced" as a potential
U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James's. "It struck me then
that this was a 'We're thinking of you' Hallmark card to Caroline
after her embarrassing Senate foray," says University of Virginia
professor Larry Sabato in an e-mail. John Kerry's momentary
candidacy for secretary of state was a similar case of puffery. "I
don't think that was ever serious," says Sabato. "But they wanted
to say thanks for his early endorsement."
"Administrations often will 'surface' a name for a variety of
reasons," says Chris Lehane, a Democratic political consultant.
Here are some of the most common, with examples of each:
The trial balloon: By far the most common type of leak, its
purpose is to gauge public reaction. When Bill Richardson's
name appeared during the Democratic vice-presidential
deliberations, it was shot down—but not so strongly that he
didn't come up again as a potential secretary of commerce. Evan
Bayh, too, was aired and rejected. Tim Kaine—why not? Joe
Biden's trial balloon took some damage but stayed aloft.
The constituency soother: A name is floated not because of the
candidate's actual chances but because of his or her demographic
appeal. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told Obama in
mid-November that he wasn't interested in an administration job.
His name was mysteriously floated as a possible secretary of
housing and urban development, anyway. No constituency is too
small. Lloyd Dean, who heads up Catholic Health Care West
and helped usher in the California health care plan that served as
Obama's model, was mentioned as a possible HHS director, most
likely as a nod to California Democrats who were pushing him
for the job.
The obligatory nod: The nomination process is like an Oscar
awards speech: The worst insult is to leave someone out. That's
why it's hard to think of names that were not floated last year as
potential Democratic veep nominees. It didn't matter whether
Evan Bayh, Chris Dodd, or Hillary Clinton were actually in the
running. They had to be mentioned.
Political puffery: The president floats a name to increase the
person's stature or profile. Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel
55/105
was cited as a potential secretary of defense and secretary of
state, but neither post seemed realistic. Many people hadn't heard
of Evan Bayh until his name was floated for veep. Same with
Bobby Jindal on the Republican side. By airing the person's
name, you're giving him the biggest gift an incoming president
can give: a few hours, maybe even in prime time, of the 24-hour
news cycle.
Cool factor: Sometimes it's fun to toss out a name just to see
what happens. Obama flustered some Democrats—but delighted
others—when Jim Webb's name started circulating as a possible
veep. Likewise, "Colin Powell for secretary of education"
sounds cool, even if has no basis in reality.
Shock factor: Stubborn politicians sometimes float names or
make picks to flout expectations—especially expectations of
partisanship. Obama's campaign at one point floated Ann
Veneman, the head of UNICEF who had served as President
George W. Bush's secretary of agriculture, as a potential veep.
Less bizarre but still surprising was his selection of Sen. Judd
Gregg of New Hampshire as commerce secretary. (Gregg
eventually dropped out.) Other presidents just want to mess with
journalists' heads. In one story that qualifies as "too good to
check," Lyndon Johnson once responded to a Newsweek piece
by Ben Bradlee, in which Bradlee speculated about FBI Director
J. Edgar Hoover's replacement, by appointing Hoover director
for life. Johnson then gave his top aide a message: "Call Ben
Bradlee and tell him fuck you."
Not every name that "emerges" or "surfaces" is a deliberate leak.
Lots of it is pure speculation by uninformed bloggers,
journalists, and campaign staff. Nor is the float always welcome.
Candidates will often remove themselves from consideration,
either because they don't want the job—Webb seemed genuinely
uninterested in being vice president—or because they don't think
they'll get it. In those cases, removing oneself is the political
equivalent of saying, "You're not dumping me—I'm dumping
you!"
But for the most part, these guys want a job in the
administration. Even if it means getting manipulated a dozen
times before they finally get it.
press box
Bill Moyers' Memory
Why you can't trust it.
By Jack Shafer
Last month in a letter to Slate, former Johnson administration
official Bill Moyers dismissed my recent column that criticized
him for—among other things—instructing the FBI to investigate
Barry Goldwater's staff. The Goldwater stuff was "very old
news," he wrote, pointing to a Newsweek column he wrote about
it in 1975.
Dodging criticism by citing his March 10, 1975, Newsweek
column ("LBJ and the FBI") is a standard Moyers move. When a
1991 New Republic feature dinged him about Goldwater,
Moyers pointed to the Newsweek piece. He referenced it again
that year when a Washington Post Q&A touched on Goldwater.
A recent letter to the Wall Street Journal also relies on his beenthere, dealt-with-it-in-Newsweek defense. When a Washington
Post investigation exposed Moyers' role in investigating the
sexual orientation of Johnson staffers last month, he once again
blamed Hoover, although he now confessed an unclear memory
of the era.
What does Moyers say in the Newsweek column? The context in
which the column appeared bears mentioning: Congressional
hearings were revealing abuses of power at the FBI. According
to the New York Times news story (Feb. 28, 1975, paid), Justice
Department officials confirmed that Moyers had "asked the
bureau to gather data on campaign aides to Senator Barry
Goldwater, the Republican Presidential candidate … on behalf
of President Johnson a few weeks before Election Day. …"
The 1975 column blames the Goldwater probe on FBI Director
J. Edgar Hoover; Moyers writes that Johnson burst into his
office one day proclaiming, "Hoover was just here. And he says
some of Goldwater's people may have trapped Walter—set him
up."
Walter was Walter Jenkins, Johnson's long-serving and most
trusted aide. News of Jenkins' arrest for having sex with another
man had just broken, and with the 1964 presidential election just
a few weeks off, the Johnson administration was panicking at the
thought that the scandal might cost them the White House.
Moyers' Newsweek column continues:
J. Edgar Hoover had come to see [Johnson]
and, according to the President's account,
brought the news that one or more employees
of the Republican National Committee,
formerly associated with Senator Goldwater,
might have engineered the entrapment of
Walter Jenkins. The tip, Hoover suggested,
had come from the district police.
As Moyers tells the story, Johnson said he had instructed Hoover
to find the Jenkins-framing Goldwaterites. Johnson then ordered
Moyers to tell Cartha D. "Deke" DeLoach—FBI liaison to the
White House—to get busy on the same assignment. Moyers
56/105
supplies no dates for this action-filled conversation with
Johnson.
The problem with Moyers' assertion—that Hoover told Johnson
that Goldwater and the Republicans may have set Jenkins up—is
that, outside of Moyers' telling, I can't locate it anywhere in the
historical record. Nor can KC Johnson, a professor of history at
Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Johnson,
author of the forthcoming All the Way With LBJ: The 1964
Presidential Election, has spent hundreds and hundreds of hours
scouring archives, listening to and transcribing Johnson's secret
White House tapes, and studying other sources for his book.
Could FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover have told Johnson such a
thing off-microphone? Hoover collected and leaked so much
damning information on political foes over his long career and
victimized so many innocent people that it isn't a stretch to
imagine such words coming out of his mouth or to imagine
Johnson and Moyers his victims. But even the darkest villain is
guiltless once in a while. This, I believe, is one of those times.
If you go to the transcripts of the secret tape operation President
Johnson established in the White House, you find him positing a
"frame" from the get-go. Here Johnson is on the afternoon of
Oct. 14, 1964, speaking to "Kitchen Cabinet" member Abe
Fortas, just after learning of the Jenkins arrest. (All
transcriptions unless otherwise noted are from Reaching for
Glory: Lyndon Johnson's Secret White House Tapes, 1964-1965,
by Michael Beschloss.)
"Do you reckon this was a frame deal?" says Johnson.
Fortas says no, that Jenkins had been arrested on a similar
charge in 1959. According to the later FBI report, the 1959 arrest
and the 1964 arrest were made in the same men's room at the
YMCA near the White House.
Throughout the evening and into the early morning, Johnson
explores his setup theory with anyone who will listen. He asks
DeLoach from the FBI if Jenkins could have been framed. "It's
entirely possible," DeLoach says. Advisers Edwin Weisl Sr. and
Tommy "The Cork" Corcoran intuit a conspiracy, too, but
adviser Clark Clifford dashes the idea. Clifford explains to
Johnson the difficulty of setting up somebody who is paying an
impromptu visit to a public restroom.
In a phone conversation that started at 1:13 a.m. on Oct. 15,
Johnson asks Fortas about Jenkins' sex partner, Andy Choka: "…
Any possibility this guy might be an agent of anybody?" Fortas
responds, "… You mean, of a foreign agent? … Oh, no."
Johnson again urges Fortas, who has interviewed Jenkins, to
consider the possibility that Jenkins had been framed. The two
continue:
LBJ: Yeah, but I thought maybe you might be
talking to him and you might find out [if it]
looks like there is any claim of any frame-up.
Fortas: When I talked to [Jenkins], what he's
told me indicates that … he just … started out
for a walk and then ended up over there, which
would negative—really negative—the idea of
a plant.
LBJ: … Nobody suggested to him to go over
there [to the YMCA]?
Fortas: That's right. He went all alone.
LBJ: Where from?
Fortas: From the Newsweek cocktail party.
According to Beschloss' book, Johnson told DeLoach of his
setup theories on Oct. 20, saying that Republican operatives
might have persuaded the waiters at the Newsweek party to get
Jenkins drunk—presumably to frame him. (Beschloss footnotes
this account to a memo from DeLoach to Hoover in FBI files.)
That same day, LBJ bent the ears of newspaper publisher John S.
Knight and labor leader Joseph D. Keenan with his GOP
conspiracy theory. (Audio clips courtesy KC Johnson.)
The FBI interviewed more than 500 people for its Oct. 22
findings, known as the "Jenkins Report." The report uncovered
no evidence of entrapment. (See the FBI summary behind the
New York Times paid wall and the contemporaneous Time
magazine story.)
Hoover and Johnson talk about the report in a recorded Oct. 23
conversation. One would think that if Hoover actually took the
lead in informing Johnson about the Goldwater rumors, the topic
would have come up here. But it doesn't. Instead, Johnson
commends Hoover for doing a good job.
Even though the FBI report ruled out entrapment and he had
praised the report, Johnson refused to surrender. In an Oct. 27
conversation, he badgers DeLoach about Choka.
LBJ: I never was convinced that you-all
completed what you ought to complete on this
Choka. … Is there nothing else we ought to
do?
DeLoach: No, sir. … I don't think [Choka]
was part of any frame-up. … I think frankly
that this man was just hanging around in the
same place, hoping to pick up someone.
57/105
Johnson then suggests that the FBI run the names of top
Republicans—such as John Grenier and Dean Burch—past
Choka to see if he recognizes them, presumably to demonstrate
that Choka was part of a Republican frame job. DeLoach neither
accepts nor rejects the assignment. But minutes later he
volunteers that the FBI had gotten a rumor that another member
of the Johnson staff was homosexual, saying, "Bill Moyers knew
about it and asked me to check it out."
had been owned by Phil Graham, my good
friend, who had told Kennedy to make me
Vice President. I couldn't go, so I asked Walter
to go in my place. Now the waiters at the party
were from the Republican National Committee
and I know Walter had one drink and started
on another and doesn't remember anything
after that. So that must be the explanation.
In an Oct. 31 recording, Hoover and Johnson do discuss an
alleged GOP plot against Jenkins. After talking about a rumor
that a high official—perhaps a Cabinet member—might be
exposed as homosexual before the election, Hoover and Johnson
turn to a second topic: Hoover has investigated a rumor passed
along by syndicated newspaper columnist Drew Pearson that the
Republican National Committee participated in the framing of
Jenkins.
Note that in this retelling, Johnson doesn't say the director of the
FBI informed him of the GOP "plot." Goodwin continues,
"Whether Johnson actually believed his own statement here is
questionable, but his overreaction to the question of
homosexuality and his fantasy of conspiracy testify to the
disturbance he must have felt."
Hoover couldn't be more dismissive of the Pearson tip. "We got
an affidavit from that [Pearson] source saying it was absolutely
untrue; it was just said as a gag. Got that yesterday," Hoover
says (transcript by KC Johnson).
Note that this isn't the alleged GOP plot Moyers writes about in
Newsweek. In that rendition, district police are cited as Hoover's
source.
Who was Drew Pearson? In Drew Pearson: An Unauthorized
Biography, Oliver Pilat writes, "His columns almost invariably
showed Johnson in a favorable light, being opposed or thwarted
by stupid advisers or adverse events. The public flattery
employed to influence the President was often glaring. Johnson,
in turn, could not resist trying to mange the news" in Pearson's
column. In a Sept. 5 conversation preserved in the White House
tapes, Johnson promises Pearson that his aides will leak him
damaging information about the Goldwater-Miller ticket.
Pearson's Sept. 13 column, written by associate Jack Anderson,
contains the leak.
Johnson took his Jenkins-was-framed theory with him into
retirement. Doris Kearns Goodwin, who assisted Johnson in the
writing of his memoirs, quotes Johnson on the subject of the
scandal in her 1976 book Lyndon Johnson and the American
Dream. Johnson says:
I couldn't have been more shocked about
Walter Jenkins if I'd heard that Lady Bird had
killed the Pope. It just wasn't possible. And
then I started piecing things together. The
Republicans believed that the question of
morality was their trump card. This was their
only chance at winning; anyone who got in the
way wound up as corpses. Well, the night of
October 7, the night of the arrest, I had been
invited to a party given by Newsweek which
Johnson's staff understood his problems with the truth. "You
know, one of the things about Lyndon Johnson that you always
have to be careful about—whatever Johnson tells you at any
given moment he thinks is the truth," said George E. Reedy,
Moyers' predecessor as Johnson press secretary, in an interview
with the oral history project at the Lyndon Baines Johnson
Library. "In his own mind I don't think the man ever told a
whopper in his whole life," Reedy says.
If Johnson really said what Moyers claims he said about a GOP
plot, didn't Moyers ever slow down for a minute and wonder if
this was just more Johnson blarney?
To be charitable to Moyers, it's conceivable that Hoover told
Johnson about a Republican plot and that Johnson told Moyers
to start the investigation. It's conceivable that Moyers and
Johnson were the only ones to know that Hoover (via district
police) was the origin of the hypothesis and that Johnson, a
legendary motormouth, never mentioned Hoover's role to
anybody else. It also conceivable that Johnson lied to Moyers
about the Hoover "tip" and that Moyers has been spreading
Johnson's lie for decades. Or it could be that Moyers has
consistently misremembered the story since 1975.
Whatever the case, we have additional reasons not to rely on
Moyers' memory. In his letters to Slate and the Wall Street
Journal, Moyers shares an anecdote to convey how destructive
homosexuality rumors were in the old Washington. He writes:
The mere accusation [of homosexuality back
then] was sufficient to end a career. Several
years earlier, as I worked one afternoon at the
Senate office building, I heard the crack of a
gunshot one floor above as a U.S. senator
committed suicide over his son's outing. I have
never forgotten that sound.
58/105
The suicide was Sen. Lester C. Hunt, D-Wyo., but Moyers
botches the story. Hunt arrived on the third floor of what is now
the Russell Senate Office Building at 8:30 on the morning of
June 19, 1954, not the afternoon. Hunt's staff discovered him in
his office at about 8:55 a.m., shot in the temple by the .22 caliber
rifle he had brought to work that morning. Hunt died three and a
half hours later, and his death was ruled a suicide.
According to the Washington Post account published the next
day, "[t]he building was virtually deserted at that early hour and
no one heard the shot which pierced Hunt's right temple and
smashed through his brain." The New York Times (paid), the
Washington Star, and the Associated Press news stories about
the suicide do not contradict the Post on this point.
If Moyers' vivid memory of the suicide is correct, he heard
something that the Capitol Police did not hear and that no other
ear-witness reported to the Capitol Police, according to the June
20 Star story. It states:
Apparently an effort was made to conceal the
shooting. Capt. Broderick [of the Capitol
Police] said when the Senator's office called
for an ambulance, police were told that
Senator Hunt had suffered a heart attack. Capt.
Broderick said he learned from a newsman
that it was a shooting.
Historian Rick Ewig's 1983 article "McCarthy Era Politics: The
Ordeal of Senator Lester Hunt" remains the most complete
account of the senator's story. In it, Ewig collects and assesses
the considerable evidence that senator friends of Sen. Joseph
McCarthy, R-Wis., drove Hunt to withdraw from his re-election
campaign and kill himself 11 days later. Hunt's foes allegedly
threatened that if he did not quit the race, news of his son's case
would appear in every Wyoming mailbox.
Moyers contends that Hunt killed himself over the "outing" of
his son, but that's not exactly true. Hunt's son was arrested on a
charge of soliciting prostitution on June 9, 1953, and was
convicted on Oct. 6, 1953, paying a $100 fine. The eightparagraph Oct. 7 Washington Post story about the case
effectively outed Hunt's son in Washington. News wire stories
printed in several Wyoming papers and elsewhere did the same.
Yet Hunt did not kill himself for another eight months.
Hunt left several notes behind, "but none of these gives any
explanation which sheds light on the real reason or reasons" for
his suicide, Ewig writes. "While no one can ultimately be certain
of the precise reasons for Hunt's suicide, clearly he was under
personal and political pressure."
Moyers criticized my first piece on him because I did not contact
him for his side of the story. This time, I asked Moyers if any
citations from the public record exist to show Hoover's role in
initiating the Goldwater investigations. And I also asked him to
explain his faulty recollection of the Hunt suicide.
Yesterday afternoon, his assistant sent this response:
[Bill Moyers] is not able to assist in your
research as he has his hands full with his own
work, including going through his extensive
files from those days which he has only
recently begun to examine. He doesn't intend
to finish his book until he has checked
memories of events half a century ago against
his notes and documents, but he'll see that you
get a copy when it's done.
A half-day later, presumably when Moyers' hands were less full
with the book he's writing about the Johnson years, he composed
an e-mail addressing only the Hunt suicide, which his assistant
forwarded. I present it in its entirety:
Diane gave me your message late yesterday
and I thought about it overnight. I hear you've
declared war on me—I'd call it more of an
obsession—so nothing I say is going to
influence you. But you should know that in
that summer of 1954 in Washington I went to
the office every Saturday and Sunday at 7:30
a.m. to work on LBJ's correspondence.
Sometimes Booth Mooney, an old hand from
Texas, came in, but most days I was alone.
That particular day I heard what I heard,
including the scurrying feet on the marble
stairs, and I listened to the chatter among the
officers who arrived on the scene. That next
day LBJ had the scuttlebutt on what was
rumored to be behind the death—where he got
it, I don't know, but he and a clique of Senators
huddled over it. I rented a room that summer
from an old hand in Washington—a senior
legislative assistant to LBJ's predecessor as
majority leader—and he confided in me what
he was hearing around the Hill. None of that
speculation was made public for a long time,
and even more time passed before the real
story came out. But within days of the tragedy,
I wrote a long letter about the events to my
brother in New Orleans, which was returned to
me after his own death. In it there's no
reference to the time of day all this happened
but the impression on me was indelible—and
still is today, 55 years later. I've forgotten
some things in the meantime and learned
more. But what happened then was a defining
59/105
experience for me and played over and again
in my mind. Make of it what you will.
That Moyers is hard at work on a book about the Johnson years
is great news. He hasn't always wanted to revisit the era. In
1982, he told People magazine he had spurned lucrative offers
from publishers to write an LBJ book out of deference to his old
boss. "That would make me a thief of his confidence," Moyers
said. "Johnson spent hours and hours with me in unguarded
moments. He could not have done so had he ever thought I
would write what he was saying."
Will Moyers find evidence for his long-held belief that he and
Johnson were J. Edgar Hoover's victims? I hope he understands
that correcting the record will require references to the record.
There's something peculiar going on here. Why would Hunt
have given in to his purported blackmailers by agreeing to leave
the Senate—but also kill himself? Why would Pearson, who was
sympathetic to Hunt and his son, deliberately give greater
publicity to the son's case—essentially fulfilling the dark side of
the blackmailer's threat? Does anybody have an alternate take on
this? The Hunt suicide has been written up in Lewis J. Gould's
The Most Exclusive Club: A History of the Modern United States
Senate, David K. Johnson's The Lavender Scare: The Cold War
Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government,
and in Thomas Mallon's novel Fellow Travelers. Send e-mail to
slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name in
"The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or
elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent
disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)
Look, Ma, I'm Twittering!
****
Drew Pearson wrote a column (PDF) the day after Hunt's death
alleging a blackmail scheme against the senator. Claiming the
now-dead Hunt as his source, Pearson wrote that Sen. Herman
Welker, R-Idaho, working through intermediaries, had told Hunt
that his son would not be prosecuted if Hunt would abandon reelection. Hunt refused, the column states, and his son was
convicted. Hunt announced for re-election in April 1954 but
withdrew from the race in June, citing illness, but then he killed
himself.
Track my errors: This hand-built RSS feed will ring every time
Slate runs a "Press Box" correction. For e-mail notification of
errors in this specific column, type the word memory in the
subject head of an e-mail message, and send it to
slate.pressbox@gmail.com.
In his column, Pearson writes:
sidebar
It was no secret that he had been having
kidney trouble for some time. But I am sure
that on top of this, Lester Hunt, a much more
sensitive soul than his colleagues realized, just
could not bear the thought of having his son's
misfortunes become the subject of whispers in
his re-election campaign.
Return to article
Newsweek, March 10, 1975
LBJ and the FBI
By Bill Moyers
Columnist Marquis Childs wrote a similar piece, but Welker
denied Pearson's charges in a syndicated column by Holmes
Alexander.
Here's what Pearson wrote in his diaries the day Hunt killed
himself:
The door to my office burst open and all 6 feet 4 inches of the
President of the United States roared through it. "Good Lord," I
thought, "he thinks I leaked that story to Joe Alsop this
morning." That is exactly what I thought.
But no.
Senator Hunt of Wyoming committed suicide
early this morning. I am not sure whether it
had to do with the threat Senator McCarthy
made yesterday that he was going to
investigate a Democratic Senator who had
fixed a case, or whether it was Hunt's concern
over his son's homosexual problems.
"Hoover was just here. And he says some of Goldwater's people
may have trapped Walter—set him up."
Walter. Walter Jenkins—for 25 years the man closest to Lyndon
Johnson. When they come to canonize political aides, he will be
the first summoned, for no man ever negotiated the sharkinfested waters of the Potomac with more decency and charity or
came out on the other side with his integrity less shaken. If
60/105
Lyndon Johnson owed everything to one human being other than
Lady Bird, he owed it to Walter Jenkins. When others of us
wandered back and forth, flirting with one career, then another,
fickle Doubting Thomases of a sort, Jenkins stayed and kept it
all together. And Johnson loved him.
Then, one evening during the campaign of 1964, exhausted from
the unending rhythm of twenty-four hours days, overwork,
overburdened and probably overwrought from all the demands
LBJ and the rest of us kept making on him, Walter Jenkins left
the party at Newsweek's news offices a few blocks from the
White House and started walking back to his office. He was
delayed getting there. Police arrested him at a nearby YMCA
and charged him with "disorderly conduct." When the news
broke, Jenkins resigned, left Washington and acted courageously
as a man ever did. He went back to his hometown, in the face of
all the publicity, and made a place for himself and his family.
"When I leave here," Lyndon Johnson used to say at the White
House, "the first man I'll run to is Walter Jenkins, and I'll tell
him he's still the greatest."
ENTRAPMENT TIP
But today the President was thinking other thoughts. J. Edgar
Hoover had come to see him and, according to the President's
account, brought the news that one or more employees of the
Republican National Committee, formerly associated with
Senator Goldwater, might have engineered the entrapment of
Walter Jenkins. The tip, Hoover suggested, had come from the
district police.
The President said: "I told Hoover to find the [expletive deleted].
I told him I want to know every one of Goldwater's people who
could have done this thing. And I told him that when I know, I
intend…" (this portion also rated X).
He stalked to the door, turned abruptly, pointed his long finger
back at me, and said: "You call DeLoach and tell him if he wants
to keep that nice house in Virginia, and that soft job he's got
here, his boys better find those bastards." And out he stormed.
I did call DeLoach—Deke DeLoach, the FBI liaison to the
White House—and told him the President would very much like
to have as soon as possible that report on the information the
director had just brought to his attention. Then, in the whirlwind
wind-up of the campaign, I forgot about the matter until one day
DeLoach stopped by the office on other business and casually
mentioned that Hoover had told the President that the suspicions
could not be substantiated. I wasn't surprised; I had never
thought that what happened to Walter Jenkins was a conspiracy
of anything more than bone-crushing work and too little rest.
Goldwater himself had refused to make a serious issue of it in
the campaign. Shortly thereafter, I asked the President to relieve
me of liaison with the FBI, which I had inherited upon Walter's
departure, and he never again raised the affair with me.
FBI ABUSES
The incident came to mind again last week when Attorney
General Edward H. Levi told Congress that abuses of the FBI
had spanned three different Administrations, and listed some
specific examples he said occurred in the Johnson years.
There have been rumors for a long time: of the bugging of
Martin Luther King, of dossiers on congressmen, of prurient
souls chuckling over juicy tidbits that had nothing to do with
national security. The files on politicians I never knew about,
although I did know that the former Majority Leader of the
United States Senate hardly needed the FBI to tell him who on
Capital Hill was sleeping with whom. The King stories were
another thing. The President had been scared by reports that
King was getting financial support from Communist sources of
which even the civil-rights leader was unaware. Attorney
General Robert Kennedy had brought the possibility to his
attention, and I remember Johnson became quite agitated.
"There's not a God-darn thing you and I can do to help this civilrights thing," he told Kennedy. "If we put our arms around King
and Jim Eastland (the chairman of the Senate Internal Security
subcommittee) suddenly calls a press conference to announce
that the good doctor-preacher is a Communist front. And don't
think Hoover wouldn't tell him."
King was not a Communist front. The investigations not only
established that fact but they turned up some totally irrelevant
information which Hoover sent over to the White House. This
always puzzled me—why that kind of refuse was ever typed
up—until I realized, in the quickly fading days of my innocence,
that this was the flypaper. J. Edgar Hoover had cornered the
market on flypaper.
GOING PUBLIC
We may never know the whole truth about abuses of the FBI,
although a few more independent and unintimidatable Attorneys
General like Edward Levi may help us to know and prevent their
recurrence by going public with the information. I still cannot
sort out completely my own understanding of LBJ and the FBI.
In my files is a copy of a covering memorandum from the
Justice Department for a wiretapping program across which
Lyndon Johnson sprawled, in large black letters with a felt pen,
"NO!!!!" He could be enormously apprehensive about "turning
the gumshoes loose," as he once said, and there were times when
he personally feared J. Edgar Hoover.
But I also know that he learned to use Hoover even as Hoover
was using him; that he was given to fits of uncontrollable
suspicion, once lashing two of his aids for being as "naïve as
newborn calves" about the Kennedys, Communists and The New
York Times; that he sometimes found gossip about other men's
weaknesses a delicious hiatus from work. And that from these
grew some of our worst excesses. It is only a short step from
61/105
outrageous indignation over a possible injustice to a close aide
and friend to outrageous indignation over leaks of official secrets
to the press, and each can lead to constitutional violations. The
problem is in the legitimacy an exalted office with access to
unaccountable power and secrecy can bestow upon the darker
intimations of human character. It is a problem and a danger, and
the best safeguards against it are strict laws rigidly observed and
constant public scrutiny.
(© 1975 Newsweek magazine. Reprinted by permission.)
A daily video from Slate V.
TK
slate v
Dear Prudence: Monstrous Mother-inLaw
sidebar
TK
Return to article
Moyers is referring to this blog post by the Miami Herald's
Glenn Garvin.
sports nut
The Year of Magical Shooting
How Stephen Curry became a basketball folk hero.
By Tommy Craggs
slate v
iPhone vs. Kindle
slate v
Tim Geithner on Charlie Rose
An excerpt from the interview.
On Charlie Rose's show Tuesday, Tim Geithner explained why
so many people failed to see the financial crash coming.
slate v
Hopping Mad at AIG
slate v
History of the Barbie TV Ad
Barring a miracle, the annual Elks Lodge meeting known as
Selection Sunday will gavel to a close with Stephen Curry and
little Davidson College left out of the NCAA Tournament
brackets. This is a pity, not just for Curry and Davidson but for
those of us who prefer our basketball blithe and unconstipated—
which is to say, those of us who are not Billy Packer. It also
means that Curry, the NCAA's leading scorer and the man who
turned last year's tournament into his own personal Vegas act,
will likely close out his amateur career on college basketball's
undercard, the NIT. He will get his 30 a game, book it, and could
conceivably shoot an otherwise hopeless Davidson bunch into
the Madison Square Garden portion of the proceedings—and it
all will be about as sad as watching Olivier do dinner theater.
"I don't think we've seen anything like him in college basketball
for decades,'' West Virginia coach Bob Huggins told Dan
Patrick, and Huggins would know, having spent the previous
two decades acting as a bail bondsman for some of the finest
players in the land. This was back in December, a day after
Curry dropped in two dead-eye 3-pointers in the game's final
1:15 to beat the Mountaineers at the Garden, the last on a
shimmying little flick of a crossover that about juked his
defender into the beer stand. Huggins, in the interview, likened
Curry to the gold standard of hoops showmen, Pete Maravich.
These kinds of players appear on rare occasion, and invariably
they become a phenomenon. I don't mean the otherwordly
62/105
specimens, like LeBron James and Michael Jordan and Elgin
Baylor, who crack open basketball's possibilities and push the
game to new dimensions. I mean the scorers who excel within
the game's given parameters, who master its angles rather than
invent new ones, whom even the otherworldly specimens feel
compelled to see for themselves. LeBron James watched Curry
play in last year's tournament and rose to his feet twice to
applaud. This year, James again bore witness. Curry scored 44.
Curry is less athlete than folk hero, a star who shares a strand of
DNA with the knife throwers, crack shots, and pool-hall massé
artists of the world. Happy cults have always sprung up around
players like this, and a faint air of religion seems to hang over
their celebrity. A very brief and random survey: There was Rick
Mount, whose jump shot lit up Indiana basketball in the 1960s.
As a boy in Lebanon, Ind., he would shoot tennis balls into a
Planters peanut can with the bottom cut out, and then later into a
hoop contrived out of coat hanger and fishing net. At Purdue, he
once scored 61 points on 47 shots—"You know how much skill
it takes to get 47 shots up in 40 minutes?" he jokes to this day—
and video review later determined that, had the 3-point line
existed in 1970, he would've had 74. As a high-schooler, I once
attended a basketball camp at which Mount gave a brief shooting
clinic. Over and over, he'd pop in a jumper, and the ball would
hit the floor with so much English that it'd return obediently to
his hand. He called it "walking the dog back."
"God was looking after me, you know?" he once said. "The jump
shot he gave me, that was my special gift."
There was Maravich, of course, who for too long after his death
in a church pickup game was thought of as a parable about the
wages of obsession and dizzy celebrity—like a floppy-socked
Jim Morrison, only talented. And in the late 1980s and early
1990s, we had Chris Jackson—he later converted to Islam and
changed his name to Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf—of whom his
coach at LSU, Dale Brown, once declared: ''I believe there are
certain people God touches, and I believe He put His hand on
Chris' shoulder and said, 'You're special.' " (Curry's game bears
more than a superficial likeness to Jackson's. You'll recognize
the former in Brown's description of the LSU star's ability to get
out of traps: "They locked up Houdini, and he got out, didn't he?
Chris dances. He skates. Gee, he evaporates. It's like Shazam!")
It's said that one year, an 8-year-old girl called a New Orleans
hotline to say she was running away from home. She planned to
visit Jackson because, she explained, "he makes me so happy."
As Curry Kirkpatrick recounted in Sports Illustrated: "The
counselor who took the call told the girl that if she returned
home, CJ would win a game for her. The next game Jackson did
just that, beating Vanderbilt with a last-second rainbow from 18
feet." That this story is no doubt a heaping pot of beans is
immaterial. The point is that Jackson was the sort of player
about whom people wanted to concoct such wonderful, Bunyanesque lies.
The Curry phenomenon has unfolded in similar fashion. His
story has been worn mostly smooth by now. Everyone knows
about his father, former NBA gunner Dell Curry; about his
mother, Sonya, the woman often captured by cameras during
games doing the last scene from Madame Butterfly; about last
year's NCAA Tournament, when he poured in almost 32 points a
game in four contests, three of them upsets and the last a twopoint loss to eventual champ Kansas; about the 1,200 percent
increase in transfer inquiries to the Davidson admissions office
after the team's Elite Eight run and about his "recession-proof"
stardom; about the inscription on his shoe that is taken from
Philippians 4:13: "I can do all things through Him who
strengthens me," only it seems Curry ran out of sneaker and
wrote instead, with more balls than piety, "I can do all things ..."
Despite the wide proliferation of these details, the legend of
Stephen has been helped along by the fact that it was built
largely behind our backs, at a tiny school in an out-of-the-way
conference that gets only occasional notice from ESPN. Curry
wasn't ruined by premature ubiquity. He is the closest thing we
have today to a species that has become extinct in the age of
sports television: the star who came from nowhere. It's worth
considering how we'd feel about, say, J.J. Redick had he, too,
been found deep in the bulrushes.
Which is why, to my mind, the defining Curry moment came
this season, in a game no one watched against Loyola of
Maryland. It wasn't just the fact that Loyola's coach, Jimmy
Patsos, elected to double-team Curry whether or not he had the
ball, or that Curry decamped to the corner on every possession,
taking all of three shots and going contentedly scoreless, or even
that Davidson, effectively playing 4-on-3, won by 30. It was also
the fact that the game took place in a land beyond ESPN, which
made it seem all the more unbelievable, like something from
another era. A few days later, in response to the pasting he took
in the media and the praise lavished on Curry's unselfishness,
Patsos wrote a letter that should be filed away in the epistolary
pantheon somewhere between St. Paul and Jack the Ripper. "As
an American," he snarked, "I wish we had leaders like [Davidson
coach Bob] McKillop and Curry, who could have gotten the CIA
and FBI to talk so we could have prevented the 9-11 tragedy, or
saw that Fannie Mae was creating a mortgage crisis coming
which could cripple a country."
Since then, Davidson has been exposed against decent
competition as a solo act, though it's a wonder anyone who
watched the Wildcats ever felt otherwise. (Curry aside, they look
for all the world like a team of coaches' kids.) Still, there was
palpable sadness in the hoops world when Davidson effectively
eliminated itself from tournament consideration, dropping a
listless, heavy-legged game to the College of Charleston in the
Southern Conference semifinals this past weekend. In the
aftermath, Deadspin fought down the lump in its throat and
asked gravely, as if the kid had a busted fetlock and laminitis, "Is
This the End of Stephen Curry?" Mother of mercy!
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But it is indeed a sad state of affairs when college basketball's
most exciting player is forced to spend his March in the
decidedly off-Broadway NIT, relegated to the outer provinces of
basic cable. He will be worth watching, even there. In fact, if
geography permits, I'd urge you to see him live, which is always
the best way to see folk heroes. I watched him against West
Virginia, in the midst of a massive and boisterous walk-up
crowd on a night when Madison Square Garden for once earned
the right to call itself a basketball mecca. Fans yelled "Shoot!"
every time he touched the ball, and more often than not he would
do so, sometimes from roughly the Palisades, sometimes with
the West Virginia defense draped around his shoulders like a
shawl, and everyone cheered the minor miracle of his even
squeezing off an attempt. Then came his shimmying little flick
of a crossover, and his defender was on his heels, and the fans
were on their toes. We all said "Shoot!" and he did, and for a
moment it was like a great big magic act everyone was in on.
technology
Bono Has a BlackBerry?
The weird marriage between rock's biggest band and the world's dorkiest
phone.
By Farhad Manjoo
A question inspired by this week's news that Research in
Motion, the company that makes the BlackBerry, has become
the chief sponsor for U2's next bombastic world tour: Who
exactly is profiting from this deal? U2, like most big rock acts,
has never been shy about taking corporate lucre, but it usually
allies with companies that it claims share its change-the-world
vision—the prime example being RIM's rival Apple. In 2004,
Steve Jobs dedicated the first special-edition iPod in U2's honor;
the 20 GB black-and-red model sold for $349, and U2 agreed to
make some of its music available exclusively on iTunes. In
2005, Bono defended the deal with Apple by saying that the
company shared the band's creative spirit. "Selling out is doing
something you don't really want to do for money. That's what
selling out is. We asked to be in the ad," he told the Chicago
Tribune. He added that Apple is "more creative than a lot of
people in rock bands. These men have helped design the most
beautiful object art in music culture since the electric guitar.
That's the iPod. The job of art is to chase ugliness away."
If that justification sounds a little much, just imagine what kind
of knots Bono will have to twist himself into to explain the
band's new corporate partnership. Is the BlackBerry belt clip the
most beautiful object in apparel since suspenders? Does
checking your e-mail every five seconds also chase ugliness
away? Alas, all we've heard so far is a comment from the band's
manager, Paul McGuinness, that the partnership with RIM was
indeed born of a "shared vision."
Still, at least U2 gets a concert tour out of the deal. The reward
for RIM is much less clear. For one thing, celebrity
endorsements are a terrible way to sell technology. Every tech
company has tried it: Kevin Costner once shilled for Apple,
Jerry Seinfeld and the Rolling Stones have pitched Microsoft.
None of those efforts really moved the needle. In 2006, Slate's
Seth Stevenson reviewed an HP campaign that marshaled Jay-Z,
snowboarder Shaun White, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark
Cuban, and later Serena Williams to add some personality to the
company's staid line of notebooks. Stevenson liked the ads' tone
and visuals, but he worried that people wouldn't remember the
brand that the celebs were pitching. He was right. Ask your
friends which notebook Jay-Z would use to lay down some
tracks. I'll bet most of them would say he'd reach for a
MacBook.
The U2 deal isn't the first time that the BlackBerry maker has
sought celebrity approval. In 2007, RIM sponsored John Mayer's
North American tour, and Verizon Wireless' ads for the
BlackBerry Storm were voiced by John Krasinski, The Office's
Jim Halpert. And, of course, Barack Obama lent RIM perhaps
the most valuable celebrity endorsement of all time when he
refused to let go of his BlackBerry upon entering the White
House. All these pitches seemed in line with BlackBerry's
image. Mayer and Krasinski are known for their lack of flash,
and the Obama plug fit perfectly with the brand's identity as the
world's best productivity device. The U2 sponsorship pushes
RIM into a grander arena, a place where it doesn't quite fit—the
BlackBerry doesn't exactly scream arena rock. For RIM, the
move smacks of desperation, suggesting an ambition to be
regarded as generically "cool." This is a surefire way to tell the
world that you're actually lame.
And that gets to the deeper problem with the deal: The
BlackBerry doesn't need to be cool. It has done well enough for
itself—and could continue to do well—by eschewing celebdriven sheen. Every time I write about Apple or the iPhone, I
hear from BlackBerry fans who consider Steve Jobs and his
minions to be nothing more than image-conscious showoffs.
Whether or not you agree with this view, you can't deny that
there's a huge customer base of people who hate unnecessary
showiness—that's why we've got car companies like Subaru and
Volvo (and even Toyota and VW), computer companies like
IBM, and, until recently, mobile-phone companies like Research
in Motion.
The mobile-phone business is the most fashion-conscious corner
of technology—which is precisely why RIM's longtime
dowdiness gave it such a great niche. The BlackBerry appealed
to a famously schlubby set: the IT guys who outfit the world's
office workers with PDAs. These people don't choose cell
phones based on concert sponsorships, TV commercials, or
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fancy screen-pinching, multitouch user interfaces. If they did,
every workaholic lawyer, marketer, lobbyist, journalist, and
middle manager in America would have been given a Motorola
RAZR five years ago and an iPhone in 2007. The BlackBerry
stood apart by appealing to folks who cared more for function
than form: It had a great keyboard, a user interface that got you
straight to your e-mail, and an OS that never quit. And for that, it
was beloved.
I say that the BlackBerry had all this because lately the company
has disowned its most loyal fans. Last year, RIM put out the
Storm, which it heralded as the world's first touch-screen
BlackBerry—a bit like celebrating the world's slowest Ferrari or
the first Roomba to require human intervention. The company
had traded in the one thing that set the BlackBerry apart, the
thing that its customers loved most about the device, for a
technology most of its fans regarded as pure sizzle. To make
matters worse, RIM's foray into touch screens was a bust.
Executives later confessed that the rush to get the Storm out
before the holiday shopping season led to a lot of bugs in the
device, which accounted for many of its terrible reviews.
It's understandable that RIM wants to expand its market beyond
workaholics by emphasizing that its phones can play music, too.
But a self-conscious grab for style isn't the way to do it. Instead,
I'd urge the company to revel in its buttoned-down image. Here's
my idea for a TV ad: Collect every picture of Obama fiddling
with his BlackBerry, especially those in which the president
looks lost in his work. Assemble the shots into a 30-second slide
show and run them against some subtle but futuristic-sounding
instrumental track. Then, at the at end of all those shots of the
leader of the free world getting stuff done on his BlackBerry,
have Jim Halpert say something like "BlackBerry. For when
you've got work to do."
OK, maybe they could never do this for fear of arousing
Obama's ire, or even a lawsuit. But surely there are ways to
subtly hint at Obama's love for the device and to pivot that
image into a larger case for the BlackBerry as the one down-toearth mobile phone—a phone that doesn't need the world's
biggest rock band to prove how well it works.
Slate V: Farhad Manjoo on the iPhone vs. the Kindle:
technology
Cash for Speed
Programs that offer to boost your computer's performance are mostly bogus.
By Farhad Manjoo
The guy in the ad for My Faster PC clearly doesn't know much
about computers. For starters, his go-to search engine is called
Boggle, displayed in oddly familiar red, yellow, blue, and green
letters. Plus, he's searching for a URL—"MY FASTER
PC.COM"—which he should have entered (sans spaces) in his
Web browser's address bar, not Boggle. On top of his ineptitude,
his "darn computer" is slow as mud and constantly crashing.
And to make matters worse, he's got an annoyingly inquisitive
wife who keeps pestering him for updates about what he's doing.
No wonder the guy's willing to shell out $30 for an instant fix.
Our man is in luck. As soon as he runs My Faster PC, everything
changes. The software transforms his computer so thoroughly
that he and his desk suddenly begin to hurtle through some kind
of space warp. "Did it work?" the wife wants to know. The guy
is bowled over: "Oh yeah."
We've all been in Mr. My Faster PC's place before: After a few
years, your PC has ground to a halt, loading programs and Web
pages slothfully and freezing at the slightest provocation. My
Faster PC is one of dozens of programs that promise to fix all
that by cleaning your computer of all the junk that's collected
over the years. It's a particularly cunning metaphor. We're used
to other types of machines getting dirty and needing a tune-up
from time to time; you wouldn't throw away your car, oven, or
vacuum cleaner just because it collected a little dirt. Are
computers any different?
Don't fall for it. Among Windows experts, there's a lot of
controversy over whether computers need to be regularly
"cleaned" in order to keep them running well. (As far as I can
tell, there aren't many such discussions among Mac or Linux
enthusiasts, though that doesn't mean those systems always stay
pristine.) But if cleaning your PC feels like something you
should do, buying expensive programs that are advertised
infomercial-style isn't the best way to go about it. Learn it from
me: The other day I bit the bullet and bought a copy of My
Faster PC. It was a particularly scammy process. In addition to
the $29.95 program, the site's checkout menu had pre-enrolled
me into paying for "extended download service," a $6.95 option
that allowed me to download the software again if I ever lose
it—something most software I've bought online offers for free so
long as you hang on to your e-mail confirmation. Plus, it turned
out that I was not actually buying the software but leasing it. My
$30 covered a year's use of My Faster PC, and unless I canceled
it, my credit card would automatically be charged annually to
extend the service.
What a con. In its ad copy, My Faster PC promises several
different services, including tools to defragment your hard drive,
clean up unwanted files, review which programs are set to start
with your computer, and check your machine for updates. All of
these services come baked into Windows already. Of course,
there may be better defragmentation and scanning tools than
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those made by Microsoft, but My Faster PC doesn't ship with
these; instead, it seems to load up Windows' own native tools.
That $30 saved just a few clicks on the start menu.
The main new thing you're buying with My Faster PC, then, is
something called a "registry cleaner." This refers to the
Windows registry, the database at the center of Microsoft's
operating systems that tracks settings for hardware and software
on your computer. (Microsoft used to offer its own registry
cleaner but no longer supports it.) As programs like My Faster
PC describe it, the Windows registry is kind of like your car's air
filter—after installing and removing programs over months and
years, the registry becomes stuffed with digital grime. "This junk
can cause crashes, errors, and general slowness," says the Web
site of Registry Defender, the cleaning program that ships with
My Faster PC. It adds this dreamy promise: "Remember when
your computer was new? You didn't have to worry about errors
and crashes. Registry Defender can help you bring back that new
computer feel."
When I scanned my few-years-old Windows XP machine, My
Faster PC found that I had more than 530 registry errors that
needed fixing and handily offered to fix them. Here I hesitated. I
had read a few scary-sounding warnings online about registry
cleaners. These apps search the registry for settings that look like
they can be deleted without any trouble—duplicate entries or
settings that apply to programs that you've uninstalled, for
example. To understand the danger in this approach, imagine
that you hire a maid to clean up your antique closet. How would
the maid tell the difference between a genuine keepsake and a
piece of junk? Registry cleaners face the same dilemma. They
may decide that some line of your registry is garbage when in
fact it's keeping vital parts of your system alive. (Be sure to back
up your Windows registry before running a registry cleaner.)
Just to see what would happen, I let My Faster PC fix the errors
and then I restarted my computer. The good news is that
everything seems to work fine; the program doesn't seem to have
deleted anything important. The bad news is that it offered no
improvement whatsoever. My computer didn't launch into space.
It acted pretty much as it had before. What's the deal? Are
registry cleaners a scam?
Well, they're controversial. The root debate is over a
phenomenon known as "software rot," the idea that programs—
the Windows OS, in this case—deteriorate over time, getting
slower and buggier simply as a consequence of age. If you think
about it, there's no real reason why this should happen: There are
few moving parts in a PC, so if you kept doing the same thing
with your computer day after day, nothing in it should slow
down. One school of thought argues, then, that software rot is in
our heads: The computer's registry isn't getting "clogged" and
slowing everything down. Instead, we just think our computers
are getting slower, but what's really happening is that we're
getting used to the speed, or we're running more demanding
programs that run more slowly than apps we ran when we first
bought the machine.
But few people believe this. Many of us have had personal
experience with a Windows machine that seems literally to have
aged—one year it's running like a dream, and the next it takes
ages to open up the Web browser. Your software hasn't actually
rotted. Instead, you've screwed it up. Even when you're being
careful with your machine—you avoid free or beta software, you
check your system for viruses, you keep a firewall—your
machine suffers what an auto mechanic might call "everyday
wear and tear." This happens when you install a lot of programs
on your machine, or when you uninstall programs that don't fully
remove themselves, or when hardware on your system is
working off drivers that are old or buggy—or when any number
of other problems befall your computer. Windows is a
complicated, many-headed beast, and few of us know the
intricacies of how to care for it, so it's understandable that it
would fade over time.
How can you fix a slow computer? You're not going to get much
help from registry cleaners. Even though dusting out your
registry sounds like a sensible, eat-your-spinach kind of thing to
do, there's no empirical research showing that removing stray
entries from the database does anything for the system's
performance. But if you want to ignore my advice—say you're a
neat freak and the idea of having hundreds of "errors" on your
registry drives you crazy—try CCleaner, which does what My
Faster PC claims to do but is free.
But you'll probably see better results from a few other simple
procedures. First, get an app like Spybot Search & Destroy to
search for and remove spyware and adware from your computer.
(Ironically, Spybot flagged My Faster PC as a harmful app.) If
your computer takes ages to load up, check out this guide for
removing unnecessary start-up apps. I've also heard from a few
Slate colleagues that backing up your data then reformatting
your hard drive and reinstalling Windows works wonders for
your machine's speed. If none of that works, consider that your
computer may genuinely be too slow for what you're asking it to
do—if your machine is four years old, it may not have the
necessary pep to play that trailer for I Love You, Man in HD.
Oh, and here's another thing: Be patient. So it takes 30 seconds
to load up Firefox? Take a few deep breaths and think about the
weekend. It's just 30 seconds. You'll be fine.
television
Cramer vs. Stewart
The Daily Show showdown was mesmerizing but not quite satisfying.
66/105
By Troy Patterson
Cramer went on Stewart's show yesterday. I refer, of course, to
Jim Cramer, who opens his trap five nights a week on CNBC to
screech stock tips, and to Martha Stewart, whose K-Mart
dishtowels are terrifically absorbent. You see, Cramer embarked
this week on the oddest media tour since—well, since late
January, when Rod Blagojevich left hair-spray stains in every
green room in Midtown. Like Blago, Cramer sought to repel bad
buzz with a charm offensive. Unlike Blago, Cramer possesses at
least trace amounts of charm, but given the present national
mood, these amount only to a modest asset.
Cramer stands accused of being a performance artist who, in
playing a financial expert on TV, has amounted to a con artist.
That the man is a clown has long been obvious to every thinking
person with a cable box, but The Daily Show (Comedy Central)
has been riding him and his colleagues hard over the last week
and a half, with Jon Stewart channeling recessionary rage by
performing media criticism in language that has ranged from the
professorially sardonic to the truck-driverishly profane. To
explain the whole beef to a man from Mars, you'd need to
unpack both Habermas' theory of advanced capitalism and
Behan's First Law of PR, but here it might suffice to say that Jon
Stewart's been prosecuting a case against Cramer and his masters
as accessories to the theft of the life savings of every little old
lady in the country.
(especially during the yearslong run-up to the mortgage crisis)
less like watchdogs than jackals. The notion was that the
networks, being aware of a gap between image and reality that
they had steadfastly refused to address in their coverage, had
abdicated their journalistic responsibilities faster than you can
say "Judith Miller." Can you file for Chapter 7 spiritual
bankruptcy?
Stewart's self-awareness allowed him to pull this off without
descending into self-piety. The mock-stentorian intro made
much of this "weeklong feud of the century" as a blockbuster
pseudo-event: "People on TV have talked about how much
people have talked about it." As students of Stewart's famed
Crossfire fusillade of 2004 will remember, there's a special
corner of the comedian's spleen devoted to the Jim Cramers and
Tucker Carlsons of the infotainment world, frat-house bullies
exploiting emotion for ratings. One hand raises a heavy-metal
salute and encourages Stewart to rock on. The other is filled with
small questions: How much of his indignation is moral and how
much is simply aesthetic? Why is this satirist aroused to his most
serious anger by loudmouthed hacks? And does a small-D
democrat in the mass media guard against demagoguery?
the big idea
It Can't Happen Here
Why Obama won't bring European social democracy to America.
Cramer, his mood swinging almost as wildly as his antic arms,
has generally battled back, mooing on Today that he should be
exempt from the taunts of a comedian, failing to achieve
catharsis with Martha in abusing pie dough with a rolling pin.
He also accepted an invitation to Thursday's Daily Show. The
idea was to stage a debate of sorts, and warming up for the
appearance that day on his own show, Mad Money, Cramer
turned to a March Madness simile and likened himself to a 16th
seed matched against a Big East powerhouse. It seemed clear
that Stewart would "win" this tussle, whatever that might mean,
so the only real question was whether we might see Cramer
enjoy a good cry or a nice attack of conscience.
Alas, we got neither. Instead, Cramer, speaking truthiness to
power, performed an arcane combination of self-promotion, selfdefense, and self-flagellation. On the set, a glowing quintet of
NBC peacocks lurked behind Cramer's hunched form. Out of his
mouth came regular pleas that he has worked hard to drive
corporate snakes off our financial island. From his soul came
some semisincere groveling of the type you use when making
excuses in the office of your assistant principal or general
practitioner. He refused to get the fundamental point, and you
can't blame him for that: To do so would have invited an
existential crisis. Stewart, expressing chagrin that Cramer had
become the single face of a multiheaded monster, made a
persuasive argument that the financial-news networks behaved
By Jacob Weisberg
Saturday, March 7, 2009, at 6:33 AM ET
Conservatives have finally figured out their critique of President
Obama's agenda, and it's a familiar one: He wants to make us
French. The columnist Charles Krauthammer recently called the
president's address to a joint session of Congress last month "the
boldest social democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S.
president." Newt Gingrich claims that Obama wants to bring us
"European socialism."
Socialism is a scare word in our political culture and a poor
description both of Sweden these days and of whatever it is that
Obama has in mind. But the case that the United States is
moving away from market capitalism and toward a Europeanstyle social compact in which the state has a much broader role
in the economy and the lives of its citizens is not absurd. The
Obama administration is responding to the financial crisis by
nationalizing financial institutions, subsidizing failing sectors of
the economy, and, while it's at it, regulating industry to fight
climate change. It views greater social equality as an explicit
goal. If Obama succeeds in turning health insurance and funding
for college into universal entitlements, he will have expanded
Washington's obligations on the scale of an LBJ or an FDR. This
year, government spending at all levels will jump to 40 percent
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of GDP. Obama's proposals could bring that figure even closer
to the EU average of 47 percent.
A first question to ask about this expansion is: What, exactly, is
so awful about European social-style democracy? France,
Germany, Holland, Belgium, Norway, and Denmark are among
the planet's more enlightened places, with excellent public
services and benefits—not to mention really fast trains. What
part of free universal preschool do we not understand? Studies
suggest that higher levels of social equality in these countries
correlate with longer, happier lives for their citizens. The young
democracies of Eastern Europe, by and large, want the deal
Western and Northern Europeans have, not the deal we
Americans do.
The familiar downside to the trans-Atlantic model is less
economic flexibility and social dynamism. Western European
countries have higher taxes, lower growth rates, more
unemployment, and less class mobility. Powerful trade unions,
rigid bureaucracies, and heavy regulation make them less
conducive to entrepreneurship and slower to embrace
technological change. The cradle-to-grave welfare state
diminishes individual initiative and can breed a pervasive
sclerosis. In places, it seems capable of breeding an Americanstyle underclass.
In other words, our respective social contracts each have their
advantages but are too ingrained in culture and tradition to
imagine trading places. Americans are defined by a history of
immigration in pursuit of freedom and opportunity. We are more
individualistic, enterprising, and protective of liberties that most
Europeans do not expect, such as owning guns, working 70-hour
weeks, or appreciating nature as it goes by at 60 mph on a
snowmobile. Founded in rebellion against colonial tyranny, our
country is naturally suspicious of government intrusion,
interference, and snooping. European systems, by comparison,
grow out of a tradition of the state providing social benefits for
workers that stretches back to Bismarck and Germany in the
1880s. To overgeneralize, Europeans have less suspicion of
officialdom, don't view the right to get rich as sacrosanct, and
demand stronger social safety nets. Their more homogenous and
static societies place a higher premium on equality, security, and
stability.
Such historically grounded differences explain why the
European model of social democracy would be unlikely to find
root here, even if the president favored it. But Obama shows
every sign of instinctively resisting paternalistic and overarching
public sector authority as much as most Americans do. Though
the president's overall vision of government's role remains
somewhat foggy, his approach to problem-solving reflects the
national urge to rein in government even while one is busy
expanding it.
This aversion to state control characterizes Obama's response so
far to the financial crisis. When asked in an ABC interview why
he didn't nationalize the damn banks already, Obama's telling
response was to talk about how our "traditions" are different
from European ones. "Obviously, Sweden has a different set of
cultures in terms of how the government relates to markets and
America's different," he said. "And we want to retain a strong
sense of that private capital fulfilling the core investment needs
of this country." Note that Obama's global-warming plan is a
market-based cap-and-trade system rather than a more
straightforward carbon tax or regulatory scheme.
Even in areas where Obama seems to be moving in a more statist
direction, there are crucial distinctions. Like most Americans, he
believes government should guarantee health insurance. And
like most Americans, he believes the system should be privately
run. He, and we, may be kidding ourselves in thinking that it's
possible to have universal access and cost control without
stifling innovation or limiting individual choice. But Obama is
going to try to thread the needle. His college plan is for universal
access to loans, not the essentially free ride that most students
get in the European Union. And he looks poised to pare back
Social Security benefits and Medicare spending, in addition to
raising taxes, to constrain the overall cost of government. One
way to describe Obama's program is a move toward cradle-tograve opportunity, as opposed to the European model of cradleto-grave security.
The indictment that Obama wants to foist foreign ways upon us
echoes the claim by Roosevelt's critics that he wanted to usher in
socialism under cover of the New Deal. It similarly misreads an
ideologically moderate president's substantive views, his
political sophistication, and what's within the realm of the
possible in our country. Obama gets that Americans want
government to fix the free market, not take its place.
A version of this article appears in this week's issue of
Newsweek.
the browser
Speak, Atari
How the 2600 forged the home video game future.
By Michael Agger
Born in the early 1970s, I've experienced only a few worldchanging events along the lines of the automobile, the telephone,
and the television. Sure, I was around the campus computer
cluster when NCSA Mosaic was installed in 1994, but the
Internet didn't make a grand entrance. (The UC Museum of
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Paleontology, a prominent early Web site, was only so
interesting.) The World Wide Web doesn't compare with 1981,
when my brother and I got an Atari 2600 for Christmas. Before
Atari, no video games at home. After Atari, video games all the
time. Males of a certain age will regale you with tales of long
mornings roping cattle in Stampede and the distinctive thumb
cramp that the joystick delivered. But enough nostalgia for now.
Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, two professors of media studies,
have written a book, Racing the Beam, that approaches the
beloved machine from a new angle: What was it like to program
for the Atari 2600?
Examining the Atari 2600 as a device built of microprocessors,
ROM, and I/O ports lets us glean a new lesson from its rise and
fall: Simple, flexible machines make great gaming platforms
because they inspire unexpected uses of the hardware. The
potential downside of flexibility is the loss of quality control.
The "North American video game crash of 1983" is partly
attributed to the glut of cartridges for the 2600—consumers at
the mall couldn't tell what was good or bad. Yet, as Montfort and
Bogost write, the quirks and rudimentary nature of the 2600's
hardware offered unanticipated ways to innovate on the platform
and allowed for games as enjoyable as River Raid, as mockable
as E.T., and as execrable as the "adult" Custer's Revenge.
Atari founder Nolan Bushnell had an ideal background to start a
video game company. He was an electrical engineer who had
worked as a barker for carnival games like the one in which you
throw the ball in the basket to win an enormous stuffed animal,
except you never do, unless you are a little girl whom the
operator lets win in order to attract new marks. In the early '70s,
Bushnell struggled to make a "tavern-grade" adaptation of
Spacewar!, a game that ran on a minicomputer at his university
and displayed graphics on an oscilloscope. In the early '70s, the
tavern (otherwise known as the bar) was the place for video
games, which were seen as offshoots of darts and pool and
served the same purpose of keeping people around to eat and
drink. Bushnell's game, named Computer Space, never took off,
but it did have a brush with history: When the first Pong unit
was installed in a Sunnyvale, Calif., tavern, Computer Space was
in the place already.
Pong went on to worldwide fame and success, and Bushnell saw
an opening by targeting kids and families. Atari developed a
device called Home Pong that was sold exclusively through
Sears. It did well, but how many Home Pongs did a home need?
The next idea was to develop a machine that could play many
games. Atari could sell the device almost at cost and make
money on the cartridges. With these goals, Atari began work on
the Atari Video Computer System. (The VCS would be renamed
the 2600 when the Atari 5200 debuted in 1982.) The machine
had a cheap processor and a shockingly small amount of
RAM—128 bytes—even for the time. But the result was low
price. In 1977, an Apple II cost $1,298, while Atari sold the
VCS for $199.
Bushnell left Atari in 1978 and went on to realize his vision of
combining the carnival and the arcade by founding Chuck E.
Cheese's Pizza Time Theatres. (A must-read for the curious:
Anna Prior's Wall Street Journal article on what might account
for the weird amount of violence at the chain.) Meanwhile, Atari
changed living-room history. The VCS hardware was tailored to
bring two popular coin-op games into the home: Tank and Pong.
On the Atari, Tank was rejiggered as Combat, the cartridge that
came with Atari units. Even back in the day, Combat was a
letdown, only slightly less boring than Basic Math.
Montfort and Bogost, though, explain why Combat doesn't
deserve my scorn. It was the testing ground for many
fundamental Atari programming techniques, and the VCS's
hardware led to the peculiarities of the game. The horizontal
symmetry of the mazes or "playfields" were encouraged by the
processor, for example, and once you had programmed the basic
"tank vs. tank" scenario, the Atari's configuration made it easy to
add variations such as "tank Pong," in which you could bounce
shots off the walls, and the surreal "invisible tank," in which the
tanks appeared only when firing or when hit. It's these kinds of
insights that form the basis of what the authors call platform
studies, analyzing how a computing platforms "constrain, shape,
and support the creative work that is done on them."
The bigger, more headache-inducing Atari programming
challenge was dealing with the TV. The cathode ray tube screens
of the late '70s and early '80s used an electron gun that drew
individual scan lines on the screen. To create something as
simple as a tank or a pong paddle, Atari programmers had to
choreograph an intricate timing dance between their code and
the electron beam. The most basic accomplishments on the 2600
could take months of solo work. The famous programmer of
Adventure, Warren Robinett, describes the process of
developing a cartridge as essentially a form of folk art:
In those old far-off days, each game for the
2600 was done entirely by one person, the
programmer, who conceived the game
concept, wrote the program, did the graphics—
drawn first on graph paper and converted by
hand to hexadecimal—and did the sounds.
Robinett was inspired to create Adventure by an earlier text
adventure game also called Adventure, which was in turn
inspired by a love of cave exploring. Robinett's Adventure
popularized the now-common convention of screen-to-screen
movement through a virtual space. It also made early strides in
avatars and collision-detection (determining when one object
hits another), basic aspects of video gaming. Most famously,
Robinett programmed one of the first Easter eggs—a hidden dot
gave access to a secret room which displayed the words "Created
by Warren Robinett."
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The Easter egg, says Robinett, "was a signature, like at the
bottom of a painting." Atari discovered his handiwork
discovered after a 15-year-old player wrote the company a letter,
but the egg remained because it was too expensive for Atari to
make a new ROM mask. (Will that then-15-year-old player
please identify him or herself and take a bow? Various sources
suggest "a gamer in Utah.")
Montfort and Bogost go on to devote chapters to four other key
titles in Atari history: Pac-Man, Yars' Revenge, Pitfall!, and Star
Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. The most significant of these is
Pitfall!, produced by Activision in 1982. That company was
started by a group of star Atari programmers who realized that
the games they had anonymously programmed on their $20K
salaries were responsible for 60 percent of the company's $100
million in cartridge sales for one year. Activision prided itself on
decent-sounding sounds and aesthetic detail, such as the tree
limbs in the Pitfall! jungle canopy—a pride that strained the
limits of the Atari's native capabilities. They also started to work
in teams, while giving the lead programmer prominent credit.
That explains the tag line of this vintage TV ad for Pitfall!,
which informs us that the game was "designed by David Crane."
The end came in 1983. A lot of us started playing games on
home computers. A bunch of big-time cartridges, like the
infamous E.T., were huge busts, and retailers became gun-shy
about ordering more titles and sent the ones they had on the
shelves back. The returns bankrupted third-party game
developers and fueled an industry consensus that video games
were a fad—a toy whose time had passed. In two years,
Nintendo would prove everyone very wrong. The arrival of the
Nintendo Entertainment System would embed Nintendo games
in the memories of a new generation, just as Atari's had already
done. Using Montfort and Bogost's intellectual model, an
enlightening book could be written about how the design of the
NES hardware affected game development on that machine.
What still amazes me, in spite of my scholarly concerns here, is
the nostalgic punch of early video games—how transporting the
blocky sounds and sights can be. Thanks to the hard work of my
fellow travelers, all of these memories are a click away. Firing
up a game of Frogger, I can almost smell the mildew on my
basement floor. A game like Raiders of the Lost Ark really did
immerse you in the manner of a good Encyclopedia Brown
story. Getting caught in the balloons of Circus Atari was like a
nitrous hit. And I defy you to find a more haunting sound than
the collapse of a doomed city in Missile Command.
*********
If you discovered the secret room in Adventure by yourself, not
when it was published in a gaming magazine, send me an e-mail
and stake your claim to a place in history. (Update, March 11,
2008: Although I haven't heard from the "gamer in Utah," who
first wrote a letter to Atari about the Easter egg in Adventure,
I've heard from several people who found the dot and the secret
room on their own. There were rumors of a "bonus" or
"endgame" for Adventure, and the dot was discoverable because
of a quirk in the game that caused a room to flash when there
were more than two objects in it. For the complete scenario,
watch the unveiling of the Easter egg here. Thanks to all to who
pointed this out.) If you have questions about what it was like to
work at Atari as a kid, e-mail Slate's John Dickerson.
the green lantern
Do Green Kitchen Cleaners Work?
Getting rid of infectious bacteria without using too many toxic chemicals.
By Nina Shen Rastogi
I've replaced most of my cleaning supplies with eco-friendly
versions, but I'm not sure that Dr. Bronner's Sal Suds are
strong enough to kill all of the nasty bugs in my kitchen. Do
green cleaning products work as disinfectants?
Kitchen cleaning pits two modern bogeymen against each other:
infectious bacteria and toxic chemicals. Luckily, you don't need
to assuage one worry by ignoring the other—just read labels
carefully and exercise some common sense.
There are a number of substances that kill germs, from tea tree
oil to the sodium hypochlorite found in household bleach. But
not all microbicides are created equal, and their relative
effectiveness will depend on a few factors—namely, the kind of
organism you're trying to kill, the nature of the surface you're
trying to disinfect, the duration of the application, and how much
of the stuff you put on.
The EPA conducts rigorous efficiency tests on many of the
kitchen cleaners that are sold in the United States. Only those
that receive a passing grade can be marketed as a "disinfectant"
or a "sanitizer." (For more on the difference between these
labeling terms, see this PDF.) If you want to be sure that you're
waging an effective campaign against common food-borne bugs,
look for an EPA-registered product that attacks all of them—
products are required to list the various microorganisms that they
kill—and use it exactly as directed. Use any other kind of
cleaner as a germ-killer and you'll be taking a gamble—since
there are no good, published data on how well it might work.
(Products designed for human contact, like alcohol-based hand
sanitizers and antibacterial soaps, are subject to a different set of
regulations, so don't assume that a product that claims to kill
germs on your hands will be effective on your cutting boards.)
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At the moment, none of the big green cleaning companies—
Seventh Generation, Method, Ecover, or Clorox's new Green
Works line—offers an EPA-registered disinfectant or sanitizer.
However, some smaller companies already offer products that
meet EPA standards without resorting to ingredients some
environmentalists find troubling, such as sodium hypochlorite,
phenols, and quaternary amines, or "quats." PureGreen24, for
example, uses an active ingredient composed of silver ions and
citric acid, and the company claims the manufacturing process
produces no waste or byproducts. The botanical disinfectant
Benefect kills germs with thyme oil.
But as with beauty and personal-care products, figuring out
exactly how eco-friendly a cleaning product is can be a dicey
proposition. Not all environmentalists are convinced that silver
is greener, for example—a number of consumer groups are
pushing the EPA to stop the sale of products with silver
nanoparticles because of their potential toxicity to both humans
and aquatic wildlife. Verifying the green cred of a disinfectant or
sanitizer is especially difficult because the EPA prohibits these
products from being marketed with third-party environmental
logos, for fear that such labels make misleading suggestions as
to the relative safety or effectiveness of the product. The EPA is
currently revisiting the issue. But even if they can't show the
logo on the bottle, some disinfectants have been certified by
third-party programs like Canada's EcoLogo or the United
States' Green Seal—you can check these organizations' Web
sites before you go to the drugstore to find an environmentally
preferable product.
What about natural, homemade options? The Internet is full of
recipes for DIY "disinfectants" using ingredients like vinegar,
baking soda, or borax. These mixtures will probably reduce the
number of bugs in your kitchen, but, again, there's no reason to
believe claims that these mixtures are "just as effective as
conventional" (i.e., EPA-regulated) disinfectants. According to a
1997 study on homemade alternative disinfectants, undiluted
vinegar and undiluted ammonia did have some antimicrobial
effect on E. coli and salmonella, but solutions of ammonia,
baking soda, and borax—mixed in concentrations commonly
recommended by "natural cleaning" handbooks—were not
effective against staph, salmonella, or E. coli. A similar study
conducted in 2000 found that vinegar can be as effective as some
commercial disinfectants on salmonella and Pseudomonas
aeruginosa (a bacterium found in produce) but not very effective
at all on staph or E. coli. Baking soda showed "inadequate
activity" on all tested pathogens.
The big question, of course, is what level of certainty you
require when it comes to cleanliness. Most public health experts
stress the importance of basic hygiene practices like proper hand
washing, keeping separate cutting boards for raw meat and
poultry, and storing and cooking food at the proper
temperature—none of which require a special cleaning product.
If you do choose to use a disinfectant, though, there's no need to
go overboard and douse every surface in your home. Cutting
boards and utensils can be decontaminated with hot water and
soap; sponges can be boiled. (See this PDF for fuller guidelines.)
Keep the strong stuff for those few items that come into contact
with raw meat and can't fit into your sink—countertops, fridge
handles, taps, etc. As always, the greenest course of action here
is to cut back and use less.
Is there an environmental quandary that's been keeping you up at
night? Send it to ask.the.lantern@gmail.com, and check this
space every Tuesday.
the has-been
Yes He Is
Obama calls himself a New Democrat and shows what it means.
By Bruce Reed
For conservatives still trying to fit Barack Obama into their old
tax-and-spend-liberal box, Tuesday was a very bad day. In the
morning, the president gave a tough-minded education reform
speech demanding more accountability from schools, teachers,
students, and parents. The same afternoon, he brought members
of the House New Democrat Coalition to the White House and
told them, "I am a New Democrat." According to Politico,
Obama went on to describe himself as a fiscally responsible,
pro-growth Democrat who supports free and fair trade and
opposes protectionism.
So much for the ridiculous talk-radio bid to dub Obama a
socialist. As Ruth Marcus points out in today's Washington Post,
"The notion that President Obama has lurched to the left since
his inauguration and is governing as an unreconstructed liberal is
bunk." From his education reform agenda to his team of
pragmatists to his heavy emphasis on responsibility, Obama is
leading the country the way he promised he would: neither to
the left nor right but on a path that's new and different.
Full disclosure: I've always loved the term New Democrat and in
the early '90s launched a magazine by that name for the
Democratic Leadership Council, the organization I now head.
The label and the philosophy behind it were an attempt to think
anew and move past the ideological logjams of that era.
But that was then, and this is now. The job of my group and
other progressive, reform-minded organizations isn't to label
Barack Obama or to hold him to some old standard—it's to help
him enact his reform agenda and succeed at the standard he has
set for himself. The challenges of 2009 are different from the
challenges of 1992, and what it means to be a New Democrat
now cannot be the same as what it meant back then.
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Obama has always steered clear of labels, with good reason. One
of the great hopes of his campaign and his presidency is the
prospect of a new, post-partisan politics that leaves behind old
debates and moves beyond old boundaries. That approach has
become all the more necessary in the midst of an economic crisis
that demands new answers and eschews rigid ideology in favor
of doing what works.
The president is right that old labels don't mean anything, but
new labels do—and in Obama's capable hands, the term New
Democrat can take on new meaning. As Obama and others have
observed, the traditional terms of the ideological debate—liberal
and progressive, moderate and centrist, conservative and rightwing—are stale and imprecise. Obama has the opportunity to
define a governing philosophy for our time on his own terms.
In his campaign and as president, Obama has put forth the core
of his new philosophy for a new time. In January, he described it
as "a grand bargain." "Our challenge is going to be identifying
what works and putting more money into that, eliminating things
that don't work, and making things that we have more efficient,"
he said. "Everybody's going to have to give. Everybody's going
to have to have some skin in the game."
Obama's inaugural address, his joint address to Congress, and his
budget all have reinforced that philosophy. On Sunday, the
Washington Post dedicated 1,600 words to the president's use of
the word responsibility—another sign that the "new era of
responsibility" Obama promised is here to stay.
Obama's impressive education speech yesterday provided further
proof of his bold agenda for reform. The president explained
why transforming education is central to America's economic
future and outlined several smart steps to make it happen. In the
economic recovery bill, he secured $100 billion to invest in
education. On Tuesday, he committed once again to making sure
that investment brings real change. As Rahm Emanuel told the
Post, "The resources come with a bow tied around them that
says 'Reform.' "
Obama called for rewarding good teachers and making it easier
to remove bad ones, challenged states to stop capping the
number of charter schools, urged states to adopt rigorous
common standards, and repeated his pledge to cut the dropout
rate in high schools and college. He also reminded the nation
that more resources and more accountability from schools,
teachers, and students won't change our education system unless
Americans take more responsibility as parents.
On education, Obama showed a path out of gridlock that could
work as well in solving other entrenched problems. "For
decades, Washington has been trapped in the same stale debates
that have paralyzed progress and perpetuated our educational
decline," he said Tuesday. "Too many supporters of my party
have resisted the idea of rewarding excellence in teaching with
extra pay, even though it can make a difference in the classroom.
Too many in the Republican Party have opposed new
investments in early education, despite compelling evidence of
its importance."
The tectonic plates on which the 20th century was built are
shifting in the 21st. In the 1930s, New Dealers like FDR had to
save capitalism from itself. In the 1990s, New Democrats like
Bill Clinton had to modernize progressive government. Over the
next few years, Barack Obama has to do both at the same time.
For that, as Obama made clear again yesterday, a new president
with a new approach is exactly what we need.
the has-been
Rescind the Beast
The progressive case for the line-item veto.
By Bruce Reed
For the second time in as many months, Republicans in
Congress have managed to slow down a major appropriations
bill with horror stories about tangential spending. During the
stimulus debate, when Republicans on the talk shows started
scoring points against provisions to spruce up the Mall and fund
contraceptives, the White House forced House leaders to drop
anything that wasn't cable-ready. Now Senate leaders are
scrambling to pass last year's omnibus bill, which contains
thousands of bipartisan earmarks that sound awfully silly.
In the end, Democrats will probably find the votes to break a
filibuster on the omnibus. Most senators favor the bill, many of
the earmarks were added by Republican members, and
appropriation knows no party. But the longer these floor fights
drag on, the clearer it becomes that Republicans will succeed in
one objective: making a disproportionate amount of
congressional spending sound silly. Honeybee factories,
Mormon cricket control, beaver management—not much dignity
remains after both Dana Milbank and Maureen Dowd devote
their columns to the pork on John McCain's Twitter. While some
pet projects may be every bit as reasonable as their defenders
maintain, arguments are not won on defense.
So far, these attacks don't seem to have done the GOP much
good, apart from lifting conservative spirits and uniting
congressional ranks. But Democrats ignore them at our peril—
which is why the White House moved so quickly to excise
distractions from the stimulus. To turn the economy around, the
federal government needs to make some significant investments,
and President Obama can't let public confidence be rattled by
insignificant ones.
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For all the speculation that hard times have suddenly changed
American attitudes toward government, the nation's views are as
conflicted as ever. A new Newsweek poll asked people whether
they favor a larger government with more services or a smaller
government with fewer services. Americans split right down the
middle, with 44 percent in each camp—virtually the same results
as in 1988, Ronald Reagan's last year in office. A nation so
closely divided on the role and size of government needs
constant reassurance that any major government initiative will
be worth the cost.
Ross Douthat and Mickey Kaus may be right that some
Democrats want to "stuff the beast" now to protect against cuts
later, but Barack Obama isn't one of them. Obama wants to
prove that government can work, and for him, pork and the
congressional food fights it inspires are a counterproductive
sideshow. Rescinding the beast might make it easier for
Americans to see its beauty.
If Democrats want to shut down the Republican anecdote
machine, at least three options come to mind. The ideal route, of
course, would be to avoid junk spending in the first place. A ban
on earmarks would help, because narrowly tailored line items
tend to sound ridiculous even when they're worthy. But
abstinence-only is itself a risky approach. As House Democrats
discovered during the stimulus battle, items that might seem
sensible in one context can be made to sound ridiculous in
another.
today's business press
Short $11 Trillion
By Bernhard Warner
today's papers
The Great American Wealth Vanish
A second option is to throw the first punch. Many Democrats
have adopted that strategy for the omnibus bill, emphasizing that
earmarks and other forms of junk spending are neither a
Democratic habit nor a Republican habit but a failing common
to both sides. The so's-your-member defense is cathartic and
cable-ready. Yet while it may parry any partisan damage, this
approach does nothing to restore confidence in government over
the long haul.
The third option is to recognize junk spending as the greatest
threat to consequential spending and pass a constitutional
amendment to give the president a line-item veto to prevent it.
While the line-item veto is often seen as a conservative idea,
many Democrats—from Mike Dukakis to Bill Clinton—have
endorsed it over the years, and most governors in both parties
already have it.
In the past, some congressional leaders have resisted shifting
that much power to the executive branch. But both parties and
both houses might have something to gain from giving the
president a line-item veto. Advocates of fiscal discipline would
pick up a powerful new tool. Advocates of increased
government investment would benefit from fixing spending
blunders with a precision scalpel instead of a blunt instrument.
A constitutional amendment is necessary because, a decade ago,
the Supreme Court struck down a statutory line-item veto when
President Clinton tried to use it. But if President Obama doesn't
want to wait for states to amend the Constitution, he can achieve
virtually the same effect through existing rescission authority,
which allows him to rescind certain items and pressure Congress
to vote on whether to keep them. If Congress can't or won't get
rid of the most egregious earmarks in the omnibus bill, Obama
could break the impasse by rescinding them.
By Daniel Politi
The New York Times and Washington Post lead with another
good day on Wall Street as investors seemed desperate to turn
anything that could be interpreted as good news into an excuse
to buy. "The news, by and large, was bad—just not quite as bad
as feared," notes the NYT. In what was the second major rally of
the week, the Dow Jones industrial average surged 3.5 percent.
The Dow has gained 9.5 percent since Monday, while the
broader S&P 500 increased 11 percent. Despite these impressive
numbers, no one is ready to declare an end to the bear market,
and new data from the Federal Reserve illustrated just how much
the markets would have to gain in order to restore all the wealth
that American families lost in the last year.
The Wall Street Journal banners, and the Los Angeles Times
devotes its top nonlocal spot to, inmate No. 61727-054, aka
Bernard Madoff. The disgraced financier pleaded guilty to 11
felony charges and publicly discussed for the first time how he
carried out the biggest fraud in Wall Street's history before the
judge revoked Madoff's bail and sent him to jail to wait for the
June 16 sentencing. "I am painfully aware that I have deeply hurt
many, many people," Madoff said. "I cannot adequately express
how sorry I am for what I have done." Everyone talks to some of
Madoff's victims who attended the hearing. While many said
they were glad to see him in handcuffs, they emphasized that
there are still many unanswered questions they want to see
resolved. USA Today leads with a new report by the Government
Accountability Office that says fraud and abuse were partly to
blame for the 44 percent increase in Medicare spending on home
health services over five years. From 2002 to 2006, people using
the home health services increased 17 percent, and the price tag
reached $13 billion. The spending increase has continued, and
73/105
last year Medicare devoted around $16.5 billion to in-home
services.
The Fed reported yesterday that American households saw their
net worth decline by $11 trillion, or 18 percent, in 2008, "a
decline in a single year that equals the combined annual output
of Germany, Japan and the U.K.," details the WSJ. Almost half
of that, or $5.1 trillion, was lost in the last three months of 2008.
These numbers make previous downturns seem like a walk in
the park. In 2002, the next biggest annual decline, household net
worth dropped a comparatively tiny 3 percent. "The new data
underlined just how quickly wealth created during the biggest
credit bubble in history has vanished," says the Post, "leaving
Americans without the college funds, nest eggs and other
reserves they had set aside."
Still, investors seemed ready to feel a bit optimistic yesterday
even if the developments that led to this surge of hope "would
have been regarded as alarming" only a few months ago, notes
the NYT. Shares of General Electric increased 13 percent even
though its credit rating fell by one notch for the first time since
1956. Turns out, analysts were expecting it to be worse. General
Motors said it wouldn't immediately need the $2 billion in
government assistance for March it had requested, and its shares
surged 17 percent. Financial stocks continued on their upward
trend after Bank of America reported that it managed to make
some money in the first two months of the year. The retail sector
also received a much-needed boost after the Commerce
Department noted that sales were down 0.1 percent from
January, which was better than many had expected.
Despite the recent upward trend, experts warned that investors
shouldn't be feeling too bullish, particularly since this week's
rally looks an awful lot like the increases that began in
November and led the S&P 500 to surge 24 percent before
plunging again this year. "There is nothing new here, every
serious bear market has rallies like this," an analyst tells the
NYT. The WP points out that the encouraging news from the
retail sector doesn't change the fact that companies are still
having trouble getting rid of excess inventory, which means
most won't be expanding anytime soon. "It's too early to uncork
the champagne," an economist tells the Post.
When Madoff acknowledged his guilt publicly for the first time,
he gave some details of his Ponzi scheme that conflicted with
what prosecutors have said. Madoff said his scheme began in the
early 1990s—prosecutors say it started in the 1980s—when he
felt pressured to give investors good returns despite the weak
stock market, and Madoff emphasized that it all quickly spiraled
out of control. "When I began the Ponzi scheme I believed it
would end shortly and I would be able to extricate myself and
my clients from the scheme," he told the court. "However, this
proved difficult and ultimately impossible." As time went on and
the scheme got bigger, "I realized this day, and my arrest, would
inevitably come," Madoff added. Madoff insisted none of his
family members helped him pull off the fraud and didn't reveal
any information that shed light into where all the money has
gone.
The prosecutor handling the case said the government will
continue to investigate the case to try to shed light on how the
scheme was carried out, but the LAT says some "are skeptical
that prosecutors will be able to piece together a fraud of such
magnitude." For now, Madoff will spend his time in the
Metropolitan Correctional Center. The WSJ describes the living
conditions Madoff will have to endure, noting that "typical cells
at the corrections center house two inmates and are 7 feet by 8
feet with a bunk bed, sink, desk and toilet."
When journalists from the mainstream media crowded outside
the Manhattan courtroom to catch a glimpse of Madoff, they
weren't just joined by his victims but also by members of the
tabloid media. The NYT fronts a look at how the tabloid media
that are normally focused on the daily travails of celebrities have
now taken a great interest in corporate America's excesses.
Motivated by the deep populist anger that Americans are feeling
toward Wall Street, these media outlets are devoting lots of
effort to documenting what many would consider to be improper
use of taxpayer money. And tabloids aren't the only ones getting
into the act. Network news organizations are also devoting lots
of effort to catching examples of excessive spending by
corporate titans.
The NYT points out that Obama "is being forced" to figure out
whether he supports awarding health insurance benefits to the
same-sex partners of federal employees. Two federal appeals
judges in California have said their employees were entitled to
the benefit, but the Office of Personnel Management has said
that's not possible because of the Defense of Marriage Act.
Obama has always said he doesn't support marriage for same-sex
couples but during the campaign vowed to "fight hard" for gay
rights and sponsored legislation as a senator to award health
benefits to the same-sex spouses of federal employees. But it's
unclear whether Obama will want to get involved in such a
politically and socially contentious issue so early in his
presidency.
Everyone reports that the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at
President George Bush during a news conference in December
was convicted of assaulting a foreign leader and sentenced to
three years in prison.
In the LAT's op-ed page, Frederic Morton writes that in all the
talk about what can be done to restore the American dream, "an
issue underlying all others" is being ignored: "the need to reform
the American dream itself." The American dream is part of the
country's "unwritten constitution" that "mandates a steely
ambition, a heroic greed braving all consequences." That creates
huge highs but also devastating lows, such as what we're living
through in this economic crisis. Many see this constant striving
74/105
for the impossible as the very foundation of the country, but it
hasn't necessarily made people happier. We even have a
president who seems to embody the very definition of the
American dream. "Therefore, I put the question to you and me,"
writes Morton. "Do we have the courage to free ourselves from
the fixation on the exceptional? Shall we try to dream a dream
less extreme? Can we give up the mania that must crash into
depression?"
today's papers
Geithner to Europe: Let the Money Flow
By Daniel Politi
The New York Times leads with a look at how fraud prosecutions
will be coming soon to a courtroom near you. Attorneys general
across the country have started to get the ball rolling, and the
federal government is expected to get in on the action soon. The
Washington Post leads with the Obama administration's call to
boost the International Monetary Fund's war chest, which also
came with a push to get other countries, particularly in Europe,
to boost their stimulus spending. Treasury Secretary Timothy
Geithner said Congress will be asked to approve $100 billion
more to the IMF's fund to help struggling nations.
The Wall Street Journal leads its world-wide newsbox with
President Obama's signing of what he described as an
"imperfect" $410 billion omnibus spending bill that will fund
most government agencies for the rest of the fiscal year. He
criticized the bill for containing more than 8,500 pet projects
inserted by lawmakers worth around $7.7 billion. The president
said the bill should "mark an end to the old way of doing
business" and outlined a set of proposals to curb earmarks in the
future. The Los Angeles Times devotes its top nonlocal spot to a
look at how the gunmen who killed three British security
personnel over the last week in Northern Ireland may have
reinforced how much the area's residents yearn to move on from
their troubled past. Thousands took to the streets yesterday to
condemn the shooting and even hard-liners have spoken up
against retaliation. "These attacks not only represent a setback,
but they can represent an opportunity in further entrenching the
peace process," an expert on Northern Ireland said. USA Today
leads with word that federal, state, and local law-enforcement
agencies are being swamped by job applicants, many of whom
are highly experienced. The FBI has received 227,000
applications for 3,000 openings, "the largest such response in
history."
The Obama administration still hasn't said much about its plans
to file federal civil or criminal charges against financial
wrongdoers, but the president's proposed budget suggests there
will be a stronger focus on the issue in the coming months.
Apparently Attorney General Eric Holder is working on devising
a course of action and might set up a task force to deal with all
the cases. Even though it now seems common to see Wall Street
executives doing a perp walk, the NYT points out that "any
concerted legal attack on the financial sector would have little
precedent." In order to be successful in its prosecutions, the
government would have to prove that the crisis was a direct
result of law-breaking, rather than just dumb mistakes made by
supposed financial wizards. Defense attorneys who specialize in
white-collar clients say that it would be relatively easy for most
executives to claim they were just following the industry and
didn't realize the risks involved. "We'll all sing the stupidity
song," one lawyer said.
In a sign that the decrease in global demand is getting worse,
new data from China show that exports decreased a whopping
25.7 percent in February. Geithner said it's imperative for
leading economies to work together in order to bring an end to
the global crisis. The question of how the world's leading
economies should be acting to try to arrest the growing crisis is
likely to produce much heated debate when the G-20 finance
ministers meet outside London this weekend.
So far, European governments have been reluctant to increase
their stimulus packages, leading many analysts to say that the
continent's leaders aren't doing enough to deal with the
downturn. "They are in denial, and hoping that something from
the U.S. will come along to help them out," a European
economist tells the NYT. And while European governments seem
open to the idea of increasing IMF funding, they disagree with
the United States over how much they should give. The
additional money from the United States is far from a done deal,
either. It's unclear whether Congress would support a boost in
IMF funding at a time when everyone expects the administration
to ask for billions more to help ailing financial institutions as
well as a possible second stimulus package.
Even though earmarks account for less than 2 percent of the
discretionary budget, they have become "a lightning rod for
critics," as the WP puts it, who say they illustrate how the
government wastes taxpayer money. In order to curb their use,
Obama said he wants lawmakers to post any earmark requests in
advance on their Web sites, and agencies would be able to
review them and classify proposals as inappropriate. Obama also
wants all earmarks directed at a private company to be subject to
competitive bidding. Republicans and Democrats alike said
Obama's efforts would have little effect unless he also promises
to veto bills that carry lots of earmarks.
Besides approving the spending bill, Obama also issued his first
signing statement, which declared several provisions in the bill
could be ignored because they're unconstitutional. This came a
few days after Obama ordered a review of his predecessor's
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signing statements and vowed to issue them only "with caution
and restraint."
The NYT and WP front a look at the events that led up to Charles
Freeman Jr. removing his name from consideration to chair the
National Intelligence Council. The NYT notes that the White
House was surprised when it learned that Freeman, a former
U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, would be appointed to such a
high-level position, and administration officials worried the
selection would lead to an unnecessary controversy. When he
withdrew, Freeman didn't mince words and characterized
himself as a victim of "the Israel Lobby." As soon as his name
was floated, many bloggers attacked the selection due to his past
criticism of Israel as well as some statements about China that
Freeman insists were taken out of context. Although only a few
Jewish organizations publicly came out against Freeman, the WP
notes that "a handful of pro-Israeli bloggers and employees of
other organizations worked behind the scenes" to raise
complaints about the appointments with key lawmakers, who
then pressured the White House to resolve the issue. Freeman
said he withdrew out of fear that he would "be used as an excuse
… to disparage the quality and credibility of the intelligence."
The WP points out that U.S. media weren't alone in paying little
attention to Tuesday's attack in Iraq that killed 33 people. "In
2003, when America began its occupation, bombings with half
the casualties of Tuesday's suggested the United States might not
prevail," writes the WP's Anthony Shadid. Yesterday, the
government newspaper didn't even put the news on its front
page. "No one values the victims anymore," a relative of one of
the victims said. It's all part of the odd way of life in Iraq, where
"hundreds of people still die every month, even as a sense of the
ordinary returns," notes the Post.
The NYT takes a look at how the grass-mud horse has become
the latest Internet sensation in China. The mythical creature,
which was created as a little protest against government
censorship, is what "passes as subversive behavior" in China. A
music video that tells the story of the grass-mud horse's victory
over invading "river crabs" may sound and read like an innocentenough fable, but "their spoken names were double entendres
with inarguably dirty second meanings." The "grass-mud horse"
sounds like an insult in Chinese, as does the desert where these
alpacalike animals live. Meanwhile, the "river crab" that invades
the desert sounds a lot like "harmony," which has become a code
word for Internet censorship. As is usually the case with these
types of stories, it's a little confusing to understand what on earth
the NYT is talking about since it doesn't want to offend readers'
sensibilities by publishing the "inarguably dirty second
meanings." But this time TP can't really criticize since even he is
uncomfortable typing the double-meaning of Ma Lee Desert.
Luckily, the China Digital Times has published an uncensored
guide to the song.
In the NYT's op-ed page, William Cohan writes that it's about
time "to debunk the myths" that many Wall Street executives
want the public to believe about how the financial crisis
occurred. These "tall tales" usually imply the Wall Street firms
were "victims" of a "once-in-a-lifetime tsunami," when in reality
many top bankers "made decision after decision, year after year,
that turned their firms into houses of cards." Confidence in the
country's banking system won't return "until Wall Street comes
clean," writes Cohan. "If the executives responsible for what
happened won't step forward on their own, perhaps a subpoenawielding panel along the lines of the 9/11 commission can be
created to administer a little truth serum."
today's papers
The First Major Stock Rally of 2009
By Daniel Politi
The Wall Street Journal banners and the New York Times leads
with news that Bernard Madoff is expected to plead guilty
tomorrow to 11 felony charges and will likely spend the rest of
his life in prison. Prosecutors say Madoff began operating what
may be the largest fraud in Wall Street's history as early as the
1980s. Ten days before he was arrested, Madoff sent statements
to clients claiming to have a total of $64.8 billion, far more than
the $50 billion the disgraced financier originally confessed to
losing. The Washington Post leads with the first major stock
market rally of 2009 that came after Citigroup reported some
surprising good news and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben
Bernanke called for reforms in the financial system. Citigroup
announced it was profitable in the first two months of the year,
and its shares surged 38 percent. The Dow Jones industrial
average increased 5.8 percent, the biggest gain since Nov. 21.
The Los Angeles Times leads with President Obama's strong
criticism of the state of public schools. In a speech yesterday,
Obama called for more charter schools as well as higher salaries
for good teachers and a system to quickly fire bad ones,
outlining a set of priorities that put the president on a collision
course with teachers' unions. He had mentioned many of these
plans during the campaign but he always "treaded carefully on
the politics of education reform, siding with critics of public
education at some points but carefully preserving his
relationship with powerful education unions," notes the paper.
"His speech appeared to position him closer to the critics." USA
Today leads with a look at how the first two months of 2009
have marked the driest start of any year since the government
began to keep track in 1895. The dry conditions have led to a
severe drought in Texas and farmers are increasingly worried it
will be a bad year for crops while firefighters say it could lead to
a longer fire season.
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Assuming Madoff pleads guilty to all 11 charges against him, he
could face a maximum prison sentence of 150 years. Everyone
expects the actual sentence to be significantly lower, though still
effectively a life sentence for the 70-year-old. In documents that
were unsealed yesterday, federal prosecutors revealed new
details about Madoff's scheme but still left many unanswered
questions. Prosecutors say Madoff hired inexperienced
employees and directed them to "generate false and fraudulent
documents." He also carried out huge bank transfers to make it
seem as though he was trading in European securities. But it's
still unclear whether anyone knowingly helped Madoff with the
scheme, and whether his brother, wife, and sons who worked for
the firm knew what was going on. It's also still unclear how
much money investors lost and how much money Madoff
managed to take for himself. Assuming he did manage to pocket
a significant amount of the money, where is it? So far, only
about $1 billion in assets have been recovered. The government
said it plans to seek at least $170 billion in assets from Madoff.
No one actually believes Madoff has that kind of money, but
"prosecutors want to be able to grab everything he does have," as
the WSJ puts it.
In addition to the good news from Citigroup, investors were also
upbeat about suggestions from federal regulators that they may
reinstitute rules that put certain limits on short selling when
markets are on a downward spiral. In a speech yesterday,
Bernanke said the rules of the financial system need to be
reformed in order to prevent another financial crisis and
suggested that it might be necessary to review accounting rules
that determine how companies value their assets. Everyone
warns that yesterday's rally might not mean much because
during the crisis there have been several upswings that later led
to more losses. And while Citigroup's news was encouraging to
investors, many were skeptical that the banking giant will be
able to hold on to any profits if the global economy continues to
deteriorate.
The WSJ points out that yesterday also marked the end of the
first 50 calendar days since President Obama was inaugurated, a
period in which the Dow industrials fell 16.36 percent. That is
"the second-worst mark for the period in more than a century,"
reports the paper. The only one who was faced with worse
numbers was President Gerald Ford, who saw industrials fall
20.76 percent during his first 50 days.
USAT reports that the government's terrorist watch list now has 1
million entries, a 32 percent increase since 2007. The million
records currently on the list represent around 400,000
individuals since there are often multiple entries for one person
to reflect aliases or different spellings of a name. In the past two
years, 51,000 people have asked to be taken off the list but the
vast majority of cases that have been reviewed found these
people weren't on the list at all. There have been 830 requests
since 2005 from people who were, in fact, on the list and
approximately 150 of them were removed.
Nobody fronts yesterday's suicide bombing in western Baghdad
that killed more than 30 people and raised fears that insurgent
violence could increase as Obama begins to implement his 18month withdrawal plan. More than 60 people have been killed in
Iraq since Sunday. U.S. officials insist the attacks are acts of
desperation from a fading insurgency. But the NYT points out
that both attacks this week targeted Iraqi soldiers that have high
levels of security, "suggesting much planning and coordination."
Indeed, the WP points out that the attacks took place in areas that
"are fortified even by the standards of the capital," and perhaps
more significantly, the "Iraqi security forces seemed
undisciplined in the immediate aftermath."
The NYT reports on its front page that a group of leading
lawmakers led by Sen. Russ Feingold want to change the
Constitution in order to require any Senate vacancies to be filled
through an election. There are currently four appointed
lawmakers serving in the Senate, and while that is hardly a
record, it is higher than average. "I really became troubled when
I realized that such a significant percentage of the U.S. Senate
was about to be appointed rather than elected by the people,"
Feingold said. It's unclear whether the initiative will get very far,
particularly considering that it's far from easy to enact a
constitutional amendment, but the idea has gained some highprofile backers, including Sen. John McCain.
The papers note the Smithsonian confirmed a long-standing
rumor that a pocket watch that belonged to Abraham Lincoln
contains a secret message that was engraved by a watchmaker
who repaired it in 1861. The watchmaker, Jonathan Dillon, told
his family he was repairing the watch when he heard news that
Fort Sumter in South Carolina had been attacked. Turns out, the
engraving was there, and reads, in part: "Jonathan Dillon April
13-1861. Fort Sumpter [sic] was attacked by the rebels on the
above date thank God we have a government." Dillon misspelled
Sumter and apparently didn't know the opening shot of the Civil
War had been fired a day earlier. And it wasn't quite how Dillon
remembered it when he told the NYT in 1906 that the engraving
read: "The first gun is fired. Slavery is dead. Thank God we have
a President who at least will try." The NYT publishes a
correction today and points out the 1906 article noted the 84year-old had a "remarkable memory."
In the WP's op-ed page, Andrew Grove writes that in order to
institute change "an organization must travel through two
phases." First, there has to be "a period of chaotic
experimentation" where options are discussed. Then there comes
a time "for the leadership to end the chaos and commit to a
path." We have now lived through the chaos to try to figure out
the best way to stabilize the financial system, but the
administration still hasn't made a decision. Until that happens, it
needs to hold off on trying to fix other parts of the economy.
"First things first. Strive to achieve stability in our financial
system," he writes. "When the momentum is clear enough to
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allow trust in the system to return, then tackle the next megaproblem."
The NYT's Thomas Friedman writes that he's worried
Washington still doesn't quite grasp the severity of the ongoing
crisis. "Economically, this is the big one," he writes. "Yet, in too
many ways, we seem to be playing politics as usual."
Republicans seem to be lost in the woods. "Rather than help the
president make the hard calls, the G.O.P. has opted for cat calls."
Meanwhile, Obama sometimes gives the impression that he'd
rather stay a bit removed from the crisis and push forward with
other initiatives. "I understand that he doesn't want his
presidency to be held hostage to the ups and downs of bank
stocks, but a hostage he is," writes Friedman. "We all are."
today's papers
Obama Faces Opposition From
Democrats
By Daniel Politi
The Washington Post leads with a look at how the Obama
administration is seeking to put more restrictions on free trade
even as world commerce takes a plunge this year because of the
global economic crisis. The administration plans to take a harder
line on domestic and social issues not only when signing new
trade deals but also in determining whether existing agreements
will be honored. The New York Times leads with Democratic
congressional leaders opposing some of the priorities that
President Obama set forth in his budget. Key Democrats are
questioning Obama's plan to reduce tax deductions for the
wealthiest Americans, cut agriculture subsidies, and reduce
spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, among
other issues.
The Los Angeles Times leads locally and goes high with
Obama's expansion of federal funding for stem-cell research that
was accompanied by an order to federal agencies to strengthen
the role of science in the policymaking process. The paper says
it was the "most forceful break yet from his predecessor's
controversial scientific agenda." The Wall Street Journal leads
its world-wide newsbox with the Supreme Court's narrowing of
the protections of the Voting Rights Act. In a 5-4 decision, the
justices ruled that a measure designed to help minorities elect
their preferred candidate should be applied only to districts
where minorities make up more than half the population. In
other words, officials don't have to consider race when
redrawing voting districts unless minorities make up a majority
in an area. The decision could make it more difficult for
minorities to challenge redistricting efforts on the basis that they
would dilute their votes. USA Today devotes its top slot to
Heather McNamara, a 7-year-old who successfully underwent "a
daring, high-risk operation" last month. In a 23-hour surgery,
doctors removed six vital organs to take out a tumor. It was the
first time this kind of operation was performed on a child.
It seems the United States will soon be joining other countries
that are embracing trade restrictions amid the economic
downturn. Like many other governments around the world, the
Obama administration is under increased pressure to protect
domestic industries as cheap imports are frequently blamed for
job losses. So far, Obama "appears to be toeing a line," as the
WP puts it, and is carefully "avoiding words and deeds that
directly smack of protectionism." Still, the White House has
vowed to impose tougher labor and environmental standards on
trade deals and emphasized it would seek new concessions from
South Korea and Colombia before continuing with the trade
agreements that were signed by the Bush administration.
The NYT declares that Obama "is taking a gamble" by allowing
so many of his budget details to be fought over by lawmakers,
"each with his own political and parochial calculations." But the
White Hosue has made it clear it is ready to fight for its
priorities, as those who are against the increased limits on tax
deductions quickly found out. Meanwhile, Democratic leaders
emphasized that just because issues are coming up doesn't mean
that lawmakers are getting ready to gut Obama's proposal. "Not
every problem is a deal breaker," Rep. John Spratt, chairman of
the House budget committee, said. "We will try and make
corrections and accommodations."
The WP declares that objections from Democratic lawmakers on
the omnibus spending bill are "signaling that the solidarity of the
stimulus debate is fading." While Democrats mostly support the
ideas behind Obama's major initiatives, objections are increasing
as more details are being put on the table. There are many
controversial issues that have been glossed over because of the
economic crisis, but they are "waiting in the wings," as Rep.
Chris Van Hollen puts it, and will undoubtedly come out once
Obama's priorities go from abstract goals to specific legislation.
In a front-page piece, the WP says that Obama's order to lift the
limits on stem-cell research was so broad that federal funds
could end up going to a "much more controversial array of
studies" than many had expected. The general feeling was that
Obama would limit federally funded scientists to work only on
cell lines from embryos that would be discarded by fertility
clinics anyway. But Obama didn't give guidance on that issue,
and now the National Institutes of Health must decide what kind
of research will be supported with taxpayer funds. "He left it
wide open," said the director of a bioethics think tank. "Now we
are going to have to face a host of morally complicated,
politically charged questions." Obama suggested his decision to
leave the issue open was part of his pledge to allow scientists,
and not politicians, to make these types of determinations.
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In a strange piece, the NYT declares that Obama's order "will not
divorce science from politics, or strip ideology from presidential
decisions." That sounds interesting enough, but it turns out that
what the NYT means by that explosive statement is that scientists
won't be making policy decisions. This no-duh revelation
appears to be fully recognized by scientists, who almost
unanimously cheered Obama's move. "We're not dumb," said the
chief executive of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, "we know that policy is made on the
basis of facts and values."
In another move to get away from controversial actions by the
previous administration, Obama ordered executive branch
officials to consult the Justice Department before assuming that
the signing statements issued by former President Bush are still
valid. Bush had faced criticism throughout his administration for
attaching statements to laws that directed federal officials to
ignore parts of a law that he thought were invalid or restricted
the president's constitutional powers. Obama vowed to limit his
use of signing statements and said he would raise any
constitutional objections with Congress before a bill is passed in
order to increase transparency. Some criticized Obama for not
going far enough and said he should have brought an end to the
practice. While signing statements are typically used to guide
government officials on how a law should be implemented,
critics say there's still the risk that Obama would make efforts to
invalidate the will of elected representatives.
The LAT fronts a look at the security crackdown in Tibet as
China appears to be going to extreme lengths to prevent protests
to mark the anniversary of the failed uprising that began 50 years
ago today and led to the Dalai Lama's exile. A year ago, the
region experienced the worst rioting in decades, and with the
significant anniversary this year China hopes to avoid a repeat.
Foreigners aren't allowed to travel to Tibetan areas, but residents
say tens of thousands of paramilitary troops have moved in,
phones have been tapped, the Internet has been blocked, and
cellular communications have been disrupted so people can't
send out text messages. The NYT notes this is just the beginning
of what "is shaping up as a very stressful year for the nation's
rulers." April marks the 10th anniversary of the major protests by
the Falun Gong; the 90th anniversary of the May 4 movement is
this year; the 20th anniversary of the crackdown at Tiananmen
Square is in June; and in October comes the 60th anniversary of
the creation of the People's Republic of China.
In the WP's op-ed page, David Smick writes that since there are
no solutions to the banking crisis that don't involve huge
political and financial risks, Obama's economic advisers "have
adopted a three-pronged approach, delay, delay, delay." While
many have been advocating for nationalization, there's a simple
reason that officials are terrified to go down the road. Yes, it's
the good old credit-default swaps again. "These paper
derivatives have become our financial system's new master,"
declares Smick. The truth is no one knows what will happen, and
it seems the Obama administration is paralyzed by fear. It's time
for Obama to come clean to the American people, recognize the
magnitude of the problem, and appoint a well-known figure who
is not from Wall Street to deal with the mess. "The longer we
delay fixing the banks, the faster the economy deleverages, the
more credit dries up, the further the stock market falls, the higher
the ultimate bank bailout price tag for the American taxpayer,
and the more we risk falling into a financial black hole from
which escape could take decades."
today's papers
We All Fall Down
By Daniel Politi
The Washington Post leads with a new World Bank report that
warned the global economy will fall into a recession for the first
time since World War II as world trade suffers its steepest
plunge in 80 years. The crisis will put a dent in poverty-fighting
efforts, and multilateral lenders don't have enough money to help
developing nations get through the downturn. The World Bank
called on developed nations to dedicate 0.7 percent of whatever
they spend on stimulus programs toward a Vulnerability Fund to
help developing countries. The New York Times leads with a
look at how the dollar is increasing in value, a good thing for the
United States that appears to be making the crisis worse in other
countries. The dollar has risen 13 percent against major
currencies in the last year and "has once again been affirmed as
the global reserve currency," declares the paper. The Wall Street
Journal leads its world-wide newsbox with word that the White
House will push world leaders to increase government spending
to deal with the global downturn. The move could cause tensions
with European governments that think overhauling financial
regulation should be the first priority.
The Los Angeles Times leads with the U.S. military's
announcement that 12,000 American troops will leave Iraq
within the next six months. It marks the first step in President
Obama's plan to withdraw combat forces from Iraq by August
2010. Hours before the announcement, a suicide bomber killed
at least 33 people and provided a "grim reminder of the lingering
danger" in Iraq, even as U.S. officials prepare the troop
drawdown. USA Today leads with a look at how governmentfunded service programs are seeing a sharp increase in
applicants this year. AmeriCorps has seen its online applications
come in three times faster this year, and the number of people
applying to the Peace Corps has increased 16 percent. Obama
wants to boost funding for these organizations so more people
can participate in the coming years.
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In its report, the World Bank said 94 out of 116 developing
countries are suffering through an economic slowdown and
estimated that approximately 46 million people will be pushed
into poverty this year. The report called attention to what has
been called a "crisis within a crisis" as troubles that started in the
developed world are beginning to spiral into developing nations.
The IMF has been giving out billions of dollars to nations in
need, but there's a growing concern about what will happen in
nations that are thought to be relatively well-off and not
traditional recipients of IMF funds but that don't have enough
money to pursue their own bailouts. "I'm worried about what
happens when you see that a Greece or an Ireland that might
need bailouts," said a former IMF chief economist. "Where is the
money going to come from?"
and leave it to Congress to decide whether government funds
should be used to finance experiments on human embryos.
Unless Congress decides not to renew the Dickey-Wicker
amendment, which first became law in 1996, researchers won't
be able to create their own stem cell lines. Obama doesn't plan to
take a position on the issue.
Along with the executive order dealing with stem cell research,
Obama will also issue a presidential memorandum that will seek
to "restore scientific integrity" to public policy decisions. The
goal would be to protect scientific decisions from political
influence across the federal bureaucracy.
As more American investors are staying away from foreign
markets and U.S. debt continues to be an attractive place to sink
money for foreigners, the dollar is increasing in value and
providing much-needed financing for the United States. But as
more money goes into the United States, there's less of it to flow
into developing countries. Although developing countries would
normally be able to benefit from a devalued currency, since it
makes their exports cheaper in the world market, that might not
work so well this time around, considering that the global
recession is decreasing demand for their products.
The LAT fronts word that Pakistan has thwarted efforts by U.S.
counter-terrorism officials to find would-be terrorists currently
living in the United States. After the Mumbai attacks, U.S.
officials sought to learn more about the Pakistani group thought
to be responsible and to figure out whether any additional
plotters might be living in the United States or might be citizens
of a country that doesn't require a visa to enter the United States,
such as Britain. Some think that extremists with ties to Lashkare-Taiba now pose the biggest threat to the United States.
Evidence collected from militants suggests that there are
Lashkar representatives in several cities in the United States.
Pakistani officials say the government wants to cooperate but
can't turn over all its information in one sitting.
At the Group of 20 summit in London, Obama plans to push
leaders to increase government spending, but many European
nations want the meeting on April 2 to focus on tightening
regulations on financial markets. U.S. officials insist the world
will be looking at the summit to figure out whether the most
economically powerful nations can come up with a coordinated
response to stem the global downturn. A White House official
tells the WSJ that coming up with a coordinated course of action
to deal with the crisis is the "first and most important" goal of
the summit.
As the Obama administration announces the first step in the
withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq, USAT reports on new
figures from Afghanistan that illustrate how the country is
deteriorating. Improvised explosive devices killed 32 coalition
troops in the first two months of the year, compared with 10
during the same period last year. The increase in attacks
"foreshadow a violent spring and summer," notes USAT.
The WSJ fronts a look at how credit markets are freezing up
again after some signs earlier this year that they were thawing.
Fear appears to be increasing among investors as they wait for
more details from the government about its plans to boost ailing
banks. Bond investors are particularly worried that the
government rescue packages "are undermining the very
foundations of bond investing: the right of creditors to claim
their assets first if a borrower defaults," explains the Journal.
Analysts worry that the credit markets will continue to
deteriorate until the government clearly outlines its plans for the
financial sector. So far, investors seem only to trust securities
that are explicitly backed by the government, since nobody
knows the true value of bonds that aren't affected by the bailout.
While much attention has been paid to Obama's plans to sign an
executive order that will lift the limits on funding for human
embryonic-stem-cell research today, the NYT points out that the
president plans to sidestep "the thorniest question in the debate"
In the WP's op-ed page, Robert Samuelson calls Obama "a great
pretender." The president claims his budget makes hard choices
and will usher in a new era of responsibility when it does
nothing of the sort. And it's not just the budget. Obama
"repeatedly says he is doing things that he isn't, trusting his
powerful rhetoric to obscure the difference." A responsible
president would make the "tough choice" of concentrating on the
economy, and leave "his more contentious agenda" for another
day.
The WP's E.J. Dionne Jr. says "it's balderdash to call Obama's
policies 'radical.' " In fact, in trying to deal with the ailing banks,
it seems Obama is really interested in pursuing a moderate
course, but this is a case where "moderation may be exactly the
wrong recipe." So far, all the money that has been injected into
banks appears to have had no effect, and no one is sure how the
administration's actions will eventually lead to a recovery.
"Obama's calm and deliberative style is one of his greatest
strengths. … But sometimes excessive caution can be as
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dangerous as impetuousness. The president has no choice but to
be bold. If there is one thing he should fear, it is fear itself."
today's papers
Taking Down the Taliban
By Kara Hadge
Sunday, March 8, 2009, at 6:05 AM ET
Drawing moderate members away from the Taliban may be the
key to making progress in what President Obama considers to be
a losing war in Afghanistan. The New York Times leads with an
interview with the president in which he suggests that the
strategies of stripping insurgents away from Sunni militias in
Iraq may also allow the United States to make inroads against
the Afghan insurgency. The Washington Post leads with news
that the number of people defaulting on Federal Housing
Administration loans before making a single mortgage payment
has tripled in the last year. Following the crash of the subprime
mortgage market, the FHA is the only option for homeowners
with shaky credit histories, but quick defaults suggest improper
lending. Furthermore, the FHA's once-reliable reserves are
dwindling, which could eventually force Congress to bail out
borrowers. The Los Angeles Times reports that arrests of illegal
immigrants trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border have dropped
to numbers last seen in the 1970s. Poor economic prospects and
increased law enforcement in the United States both seem to be
dissuading Mexicans from attempting covert border crossings.
Despite his addition of 17,000 American troops to Afghanistan
last month, President Obama said that the United States is not
winning the war in Afghanistan. Because Afghanistan is filled
with various factions at odds with one another, identifying
elements of the Taliban who might be open to reconciliation
would pose a challenge to the United States. The president also
said that there might be scenarios in which the United States will
have to capture suspected terrorists abroad in countries with
which the government does not have an extradition agreement.
In the same interview with the NYT, the president said that he
does not expect the economy to rebound this year but that
Americans should not lose faith in United States financial
institutions and hoard their money.
As Obama tries to fight multiple fires in the early days of his
presidency, the Democratic Party faces internal challenges of its
own. The WP fronts news that Democrats are behind the many
defense earmarks that have increased the Pentagon's budget in
recent years, but President Obama declared last week that he
would come down hard on profligate defense spending.
Companies with defense contracts are worthy adversaries against
Obama's efforts, though: With workers spread across many
states or in key districts, they try to curry influence with an array
of congressmen. Conversely, key Democrats are also
questioning the president's spending plans. Whether the issue at
hand is tax cuts or the Iraq war, not all Democratic leaders are
behind Obama's plans to move forward, according to a broad
front-page analysis in the LAT. Meanwhile, Page One of the NYT
points to dissension among Republican ranks. A profile of
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele points
to his willingness to attack his own party's weaknesses.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has agreed to hold the next
presidential election in August, at the suggestion of election
officials who did not believe the country would be prepared to
organize a fair, democratic vote this spring, as Karzai had
previously advocated. The president's term expires in May, but it
is unclear who will rule between then and the August election,
which could lead to a messy transfer of power in an already
"fragile" nation. The Afghan constitution calls for voting to take
place before the end of a leader's term. Also in Middle Eastern
politics, all the papers all report that Palestinian Prime Minister
Salam Fayyad will resign from his post to facilitate "an interim
power-sharing arrangement" between the rival Hamas and Fatah
parties. The NYT and the WP express mild doubts that
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas could refuse the
resignation.
The WP fronts a trend story suggesting that growing immigrant
populations in the United States are having an effect on
interracial marriages. While the number of interracial marriages
overall has increased during what some have dubbed a "postracial" generation, U.S. census data actually show a decrease in
these statistics in Hispanic and Asian-American populations.
Among children of Asian and Hispanic immigrants, family
expectations and their own desires to connect to their cultures
are driving some to look for mates with comparable
backgrounds.
Two similar stories—one on the front page of the NYT, another
inside the LAT—illustrate the anxiety college admissions
counselors are facing about fall enrollment numbers. In
California, public schools are being forced to cut enrollments
just as more students are turning toward the less-expensive
opportunities they offer. Private schools across the country, on
the other hand, might have to both admit and wait-list more
students than usual in order to meet enrollment targets despite
families' tight purse strings and low consumer confidence.
A WP opinion piece worries that college students are regressing
towards novel intended for tweens at the expense of taking an
interest in more experimental literature. Stephanie Myers'
Twilight series of vampire stories, books about Barack Obama,
and a comedy compilation from the Onion have been the most
popular among this year's co-eds. Apathy toward revolutionary
literature, the author argues, corresponds with the lack of
campus activism and a general tendency among today's parents
to keep their children young as long as possible.
81/105
But there's at least one precocious kid looking beyond the
young-adult section in the bookstore. The NYT Style section
profiles Jonathan Krohn, an eighth-grader from Atlanta who has
become a conservative media darling overnight. The 14-year-old
nabbed himself a spot on a panel at the Conservative Political
Action Conference in Washington last week and impressed the
audience with his articulate and fervent three-minute speech,
which quickly surfaced on YouTube. After writing and selfpublishing a short book on conservatism last year, the pint-size
pundit foresees a career for himself as a political commentator.
But first, he has to finish middle school.
Given that the economic stimulus bill was billed at saving or
creating 3.5 million jobs, and the total number of jobs lost since
December 2007 is 4.4 million and rising, some economists
quoted in the Post story suggest we may need another stimulus
package before long. "It's not going to be enough, folks," one
said, and the International Monetary Fund told governments
around the world to get more involved in boosting their
economies. However, the paper doesn't quote any stimulus
skeptics.
In other economy news, even people with jobs are spending less,
further dragging the economy down, the Journal reports. The
Post fronts a feature on job fairs, and the NYT has a feature on
how annual winter flower shows across the country are being
canceled for financial reasons.
today's papers
Hard Sell on Stem Cells
Joshua Kucera
Saturday, March 7, 2009, at 5:57 AM ET
The unemployment rate rose to 8.1 percent last month as the
economy lost 651,000 jobs (and estimates for previous months
were revised significantly upward) with no prospect for
improvement in sight. The story leads all the papers. The
Washington Post takes a government angle: The stimulus efforts
are looking increasingly feeble, and the scope of the problem
gets larger and larger. The New York Times takes a bigger view
of the economy, proposing that we are in the midst of a
"wrenching restructuring of the American economy," in which
jobs that are disappearing won't come back. The Los Angeles
Times looks at the psychological impact the downturn is having
on younger workers: "This is something that will redefine a
generation," one economist told the paper.
It's so bad, this is the Wall Street Journal's attempt at a positive
spin: Because the revised figures for December are worse than
February's, "Some economists said the pace of job losses may be
stabilizing, albeit at a high level."
Jobs being lost now may be lost forever, especially in
manufacturing, retail, and financial services, the NYT writes.
"Firms are making strategic decisions that they don't want to be
in their businesses," one economist tells the paper. This means
the government needs to be working to retrain workers for other
industries—the stimulus spending bill signed last month contains
$4.5 billion in job training money, but that is only a start,
another economist said. "We have to seriously look at
fundamentally rebuilding the economy," he said. "You've got to
use this moment to retrain for jobs." The paper, unfortunately,
doesn't identify what the future growth industries might be,
except to note that the health care sector was one of the few that
actually gained jobs in February.
Everyone notes, and the NYT, Post, and LAT front, news that
President Obama will reverse the restrictions on federal funding
for stem cell research that former President Bush had instituted.
All the papers pay a little lip service to opponents of the research
(Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council is quoted in the
Post, NYT, and Journal) but focus on the potential benefits. The
LAT has the best reporting on what the move will mean for
scientists studying stem cells and the headaches that the Bushera restrictions caused.
Politically, the end of the restrictions was one of Obama's
campaign pledges and so was expected. The formal
announcement on Monday will be confident, the Post says: "In
contrast to the low-key way in which Obama has reversed other
Bush legacies related to culture-war issues, the White House has
invited scientists, advocates and members of Congress to a
public ceremony for the signing. Obama will also announce 'a
broader effort to restore scientific integrity,' " an administration
official told the paper.
Both the Post and LAT happen to have front-page features on
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. The Post story focuses on
his work in the Senate and how much more comfortable he is
working under a Democratic president than being the public face
of the opposition, as he was under Bush. The LAT piece is
datelined from Nevada and highlights the efforts Republicans
nationwide are taking to get him out of office when he comes up
for election in 2010, a campaign comparable to the one that got
his predecessor Tom Daschle voted out in South Dakota in 2004.
Also in the papers: South Koreans who were unlucky enough to
be shipped by their Japanese occupiers in World War II to, of all
places, Hiroshima have sued Japan for reparations, the LAT
writes. Hollywood and Bollywood are cooperating more and
more, the Post reports. The LAT has a good profile of the
Iranian-American freelance journalist who has been in prison in
Iran for more than a month; she was apparently arrested after
buying a bottle of wine. (She is scheduled to be released soon.)
And two police officers convicted of being "assassins and spies"
82/105
for the Mafia are still getting their police pensions, the NYT
reports.
Metaphor overload: Everyone stuffs news of the meeting
between Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and her Russian
counterpart Sergey Lavrov, and Clinton's botched gag gift of a
"reset button" that, because of two missing letters, instead said
"overcharge" in Russian. Says the NYT: "State Department
officials professed not to know who was responsible for the
error. But Mrs. Clinton was accompanied by several diplomats
and White House officials who had lived in Russia and speak
Russian—any of whom conceivably could have caught it."
tv club
Friday Night Lights, Season 3
Week 8: Tim Riggins would make a great wife.
By Emily Bazelon, Meghan O'Rourke, David Plotz, and Hanna
Rosin
From: Hanna Rosin
To: Emily Bazelon and Meghan O'Rourke
Subject: Week 1: Mass Amnesia Strikes Dillon, Texas
Posted Saturday, January 17, 2009, at 7:01 AM ET
As anyone who has talked or e-mailed with me in the last couple
of months knows, my obsession with Friday Night Lights has
become sort of embarrassing. My husband, David, and I came to
the show late, by way of Netflix, but were hooked after Episode
1. We started watching two, three, four in one sitting. It began to
seem to me as if these characters were alive and moving around
in my world.
David was happy with the football. I was into the drama. I
worried about Smash, the sometimes-unstable star running back.
I dreamed about Tyra, who was being stalked. When I talked to
my own daughter, I flipped my hair back, just as Coach's wife,
Tami Taylor, does and paused before delivering nuggets of
wisdom. Once or twice, I even called David "Coach."
I was all set to watch Season 3 in real time when I heard, to my
horror, that it might not get made. But then NBC cut a weird
cost-sharing kind of deal with DirecTV, and the Dillon Panthers
are back in business. The episodes have already aired on
satellite, but I don't have a dish. So I'm just now settling in for
the new season.
But did I miss something? The field lights are on again in Dillon,
Texas, but the whole town seems to be suffering from a massive
bout of … amnesia. The previous season ended abruptly, after
seven episodes got swallowed by the writer's strike. For Season
3, the writers just wipe the slate clean and start again. Murder?
What murder? Landry is back to being the high-school sidekick,
and we can just forget that whole unfortunate body-dragged-outof-the-river detour. Tyra got a perm and is running for school
president. Lyla Garrity's preacher boyfriend, rival to Tim
Riggins, has disappeared.
Over the last season, the show was struggling for an identity. It
veered from The ABC Afterschool Special to CSI and then
finally found its footing in the last couple of episodes, especially
the one where Peter Berg—who directed the movie adaptation of
Buzz Bissinger's book Friday Night Lights and adapted it for
TV—walked on as Tami Taylor's hyper ex-boyfriend. In Season
3, the show is trying on yet another identity. Mrs. Taylor has
suddenly turned into Principal Taylor. With her tight suits and
her fabulous hair, she is Dillon's own Michelle Rhee, holding
meetings, discussing education policy, and generally working
too hard. Meanwhile, Coach keeps up the domestic front,
making breakfast for Julie with one hand while feeding baby
Grace with the other.
This strikes me as a little too close to home, and not in a way I
appreciate. The beauty of Friday Night Lights is that it managed
to make us care about the tiny town of Dillon. It drew us in with
football but then sunk us into town life. The show took lots of
stock types not usually made for prime time—a car dealer, an
arrogant black kid, an ex-star in a wheelchair, a grandma with
dementia, a soldier, lots of evangelical Christians—and brought
them to life. It was neither sentimental nor mocking, which is a
hard thing to pull off.
Now I feel as if I'm looking in a mirror. Tami is a mom juggling
work and kids and not doing such a good job. Coach is trying his
best at home but screwing up. The only town folk we see in the
first episode are Tim's brother and Tyra's sister, drunkenly
falling all over each other in a bar—the sorriest, white-trashiest
bar you can imagine. Our heart is with Tyra, who, just like the
children of the show's upscale fans, is trying to go to college.
The final, inspirational scene of the episode takes place in a
racquetball court. At least Smash has the good sense to note that
it's the whitest sport in America.
That said, Friday Night Lights would have to do a lot to lose my
loyalty. Just the fact that there was a high-drama plotline
centered on the Jumbotron is enough to keep me happy. It's one
of the show's great gifts, humor in unexpected places. Like when
Tim's brother, looking half drunk as always, tells him Lyla will
never respect him because he's a "rebound from Jesus." I'll give
this season a chance.
Click here to read the next entry.
83/105
portraying women—and they are—they're leaving out a key part
of our lives.
From: Emily Bazelon
To: Hanna Rosin and Meghan O'Rourke
Subject: Week 1: Why Doesn't Tami Taylor Have Any Girlfriends?
Posted Monday, January 19, 2009, at 6:58 AM ET
A question for both of you: What do you think of the surly
version of Matt Saracen? I'm starting to feel about him as I felt at
the end of the fifth Harry Potter book: past ready for the nice boy
I thought I knew to come back.
Emily
Hey there, Hanna and Meghan,
Click here to read the next entry.
While we're complaining, isn't this the third year that some of
these characters—Tim, Lyla, Tyra—have been seniors? The
producers seemed to be dealing with this small lapse in planning
by bringing on the soft lighting and lipstick. Tim looks ever
more like Matt Dillon in The Outsiders (not to sound like that
thirtysomething mom who was shagging him in the first season).
But I'm letting these objections go. I fell for this opener once
Coach and Mrs. Coach had one of those moments that make
their marriage a flawed gem.
To: Emily Bazelon and Hanna Rosin
Subject: Week 1: Why Matt Saracen Got Surly
Posted Monday, January 19, 2009, at 12:33 PM ET
Hanna, Emily,
You're right, Hanna, that the Taylors seem more like a typical
two-career family as we watch Eric tending the baby while Tami
comes home at 9:45 at night, tired from her new job as principal.
Also, her sermon about how broke the school is descended into
liberal pablum (real though it surely could be). But it's all a setup
for a sequence that makes this show a not-idealized, and thus
actually useful, marriage primer. He tries to sweet-talk her. She
says, with tired affection, "Honey, you're just trying to get laid."
Then she realizes that he's signed off on a bad English teacher
for their daughter Julie and starts hollering at both of them. Oh,
how I do love Tami for losing her temper, snapping at her
teenager, and yelling loudly enough to wake her baby. And I
love the writers for bringing it back around with a follow-up
scene in which Mrs. Coach tells her husband she's sorry, and he
says, "I could never be mad at my wife. It's that damn principal."
Way to compartmentalize.
Much as I appreciate Tami, I'm puzzled by a weird gap in her
life: She doesn't have girlfriends. I know that her sister showed
up last season, but that doesn't really explain the absence of
female friends. In fact, it's a pattern on the show: Julie's friend
Lois is more a prop than a character, Lyla never hangs out with
other girls, and although Tyra occasionally acts like a big sister
to Julie, she doesn't seem to have a close girlfriend, either. Does
this seem as strange to you as it does to me? In Lyla's case, I can
see it—she often acts like the kind of girl other girls love to hate
(and I look forward to dissecting why that's so). But Tami is the
kind of largehearted person whom other women would want to
befriend. The lack of female friendships on the show has become
like a missing tooth for me, especially when you consider the
vivid and interesting male friendships (Matt and Landry, Tim
and Jason, even Coach and Buddy Garrity). It's revealing in its
absence: No matter how good the show's writers are at
For me, the genius of Friday Night Lights is the way it captures
the texture of everyday life by completely aestheticizing it. The
handheld camera, the quick jump-cuts, the moody Explosions in
the Sky soundtrack laid over tracking shots of the flat, arid West
Texas landscape all add up to a feeling no other TV show gives
me. And very few movies, for that matter. Then there's the fact
that FNL, more than any other show on network TV, tries hard
to be about a real place and real people in America. This is no
Hollywood stage set; it's not a generic American city or suburb;
the characters aren't dealing with their problems against a
backdrop of wealth, security, and Marc Jacobs ads. Most are
struggling to get by, and at any moment the floor might drop out
from under them. In this sense, the show is about a community,
not about individuals. Football is an expression of that
community.
That's why, Emily, I don't find surly Matt Saracen annoying; I
find him heartbreaking. After all, his surliness stems from
predicaments that he has no control over: a father in Iraq (how
many TV shows bring that up?) and an ailing grandmother he
doesn't want to relegate to a nursing home. Like many
Americans, he finds himself acting as a caretaker way too
young. And because he's not wealthy, when his personal life gets
complicated—like when his romance with his grandmother's
sexy at-home nurse, Carlotta, goes belly up—he loses it. (OK, I
thought that story line was kinda lame; but I was moved by the
anger that followed.) But your point about the lack of female
friendships on the show is a great one. It's particularly true of
Tami. (We do get to see a reasonable amount of Julie and Tyra
together, I feel.) Like Julie, I had a principal for a mother, and
84/105
one thing I always liked was watching all her friendships at the
school develop and evolve.
It's also true, Hanna, that the first episode of this season
hammers homes its themes—Tami's an overworked principal
with a funding problem; Lyla and Riggins are gonna have
trouble taking their romance public; and star freshman
quarterback J.D. is a threat to good old Matt Saracen. But for
now I didn't mind, because there were plenty of moments of fine
dialogue, which keep the show feeling alive. Like the scene in
which the amiable, manipulative Buddy hands Tami a check and
says in his twangy drawl, "Ah've got two words for you: Jumbo
… Tron!" (Tami, of course, has just been trying to meet a budget
so tight that even chalk is at issue.) Later, at a party, Buddy
greets Tami in front of some of the Dillon Panther boosters—
who are oohing and aahing over an architectural rendering of the
JumboTron—by exclaiming, "Tami Taylor is the brain child
behind all this!" Ah, Buddy. You gotta love him. He's almost a
caricature—but not.
What keeps a lot of these characters from being caricatures,
despite plenty of conventional TV plot points, is that ultimately
the show portrays them in the round. Coach Taylor, who has a
way with young men that can seem too good to be true, is also
often angry and frustrated; caring and sensitive, Lyla is also
sometimes an entitled priss; Tim is a fuckup with a heart of gold
(at least, at times); and the raw and exposed Julie can be a whiny
brat. In this sense, ultimately, I think the story FNL is trying to
tell is fundamentally responsible, unlike so many stories on TV.
When the characters make mistakes, they suffer real
consequences. Think of Smash losing his football scholarship. I
sometimes think the weakest feature of our entertainment culture
is a kind of sentimentality about pain, if that makes sense—an
avoidance of the messiness of life that manifests itself in tidy
morals and overdramatized melodramas.
But what could make FNL better? I'm hoping for more football
and atmosphere and fewer overwrought plotlines. Will the
J.D./Matt Saracen face-off help this story, do you think? And,
finally: Can the writers of the show figure out how to dramatize
games without making them seem totally fake? It feels like so
often in the last five minutes of an episode we cut to a gamethat's-in-its-final-minutes-and-oh-my-God-everyone-isbiting-their-nails …
Subject: Week 1: The Perfect Chaos of Tim Riggins' Living Room
That's it, Meghan. What the Sopranos accomplished with tight
thematic scripts and the Wire accomplished with a
Shakespearean plot, FNL pulls off with moody music and some
interesting camera work. It's not that these shows transform
brutal realities into beauty. They just make them bearable by
packaging them in some coherent aesthetic way that calls
attention to itself. And the result is very moving.
The inside of Tim Riggins' house, for example, is a place that
should never be shown on television. It's a total mess, and not in
an artsy Urban Outfitter's catalogue kind of way. There's that
bent-up picture of a bikini beer girl by the television and
yesterday's dishes and napkins on every surface and nothing in
the refrigerator except beer. This is a very depressing state of
affairs for a high school kid if you stop to think about it. But
whenever we're in there, the camera jerks around from couch to
stool to kitchen, in perfect harmony with the chaos around it. So
it all feels comfortable and we experience it just the way Riggins
would—another day in a moody life.
I think part of the reason Peter Berg doesn't see these characters
from such a distance is that he seems deeply sympathetic to their
outlook on life, particularly their ideas about the traditional roles
of men and women. The men are always being put through tests
of their own manhood and decency. The boys have Coach, but
hardly any of them has an actual father, so they are pushed into
manhood on their own. Almost all of them have to be head of a
household before their time, with interesting results. Matt is
decent but can't fill the shoes. Riggins is noble but erratic. Smash
is dutiful but explosive.
Emily, that insight you had about Tami is so interesting, and it
made me see the whole show differently. At first I thought Peter
Berg must love women, because they drive all the action and
make all the good decisions. Then, after what you said, I realized
that for the most part, the women exist only to support the men.
They are wives or girlfriends or mothers but don't have many
independent relationships outside their own families. Judd
Apatow's women are a little like this, too. It's a male-centric
view, and helps explain why a Hollywood director would be so
in tune with the mores of a small conservative town.
Meghan
Click here for the next entry.
It's also why this season could get interesting. As the principal,
Tami is stretching the show in all kinds of ways. Buddy has shed
his vulnerability and is back to being the town bully. Coach is
stuck in the middle. All kinds of potential for drama.
From: Hanna Rosin
85/105
From: Emily Bazelon
To: Meghan O'Rourke and Hanna Rosin
Subject: Week 2: Would You Let Your Kids Play for Coach Taylor?
Meghan, thank you for reminding me of all the good reasons
why Matt Saracen is a heartbreaking nice boy rather than a feelgood one. And now Episode 2 reminds us as well. Matt's
grandmother doesn't want to take her medication, and the only
way he can make her is to become an emancipated minor so that
he can be her legal guardian, instead of the other way around.
And then what exactly happens when it's time for him to go to
college? No good answer. As, indeed, there wouldn't be.
One of the luxuries of adolescence is that you don't have to
assume responsibility for the people in your family. Matt knows
what it means to take this on. In the first season, he let Julie see
him pretend to be his grandfather so he could sing his
grandmother to sleep. Now when she asks whether emancipation
means that he gets to "vote and drink and smoke," he brings her
down to earth: "No, it means I get to take care of old people."
This is one of the moments that, for me, capture the strength of
this show: In Dillon, kids with hard lives and kids with easier
ones get a good look at each other, which doesn't happen all that
much in our nation's class-segregated high schools. Lyla, Tim,
and Tyra had one of those across-the-class-divide moments in
this episode, when Lyla tried to get Tim to help himself with his
college prospects at a fancy dinner and failed. Tim then came
home and sat down in boxers to TV and a beer with Tyra while
his brother and her sister snuck in a quickie (off-camera in the
bedroom).
I was glad to see that the writers are back to making Tyra and
Tim and their weary, beery sense of their own limitations the
center of our sympathy. Maybe Tyra will make it out of Dillon,
but not by acting like the Zeta girls in The House Bunny. And it
seems entirely in keeping with Tim's fragile nature that Buddy
Garrity could destroy his confidence with a few slashing
sentences. Speaking of, one of the honest and realistic
assumptions of this show is that when teenagers date, they have
sex. So I gave Buddy points when he warned his daughter away
from Tim in a speech that ended with "Lyla, are you using
protection?"
But enough about character development. Let's talk about some
football. I entirely agree, Meghan, that FNL generally gives us
too little gridiron, not too much. But in this episode, there is a
lovely sequence on the field. Coach Taylor is testing Smash
before a college tryout, and the former Panther star is cutting and
weaving just like old times—until Tim levels him. We hear the
crack and thud of the hit, and, for a moment, Smash lies heavy
and still on the ground. In this show, when a player goes down,
the dots connect to the paralyzing hit that put Jason Street in a
wheelchair. But Smash gets up, his rehabilitated knee sound, and
it's a moment of blessed relief, because now we can go on
rooting for him to regain his chance to … play in college and
turn pro? To write the sentence is to remember how long the
odds are for such an outcome and to rue the role that the dangled
dream of professional sports ends up playing for a lot of kids.
Given Jason's broken spine, you can't accuse Friday Night Lights
of pretending otherwise. But what do we think about the way its
best characters revel in the game and make us love it, too? I ask
myself the same question when I watch football with my sons
knowing that I'd never let them play it. In the nonfiction book on
which the show is based, author Buzz Bissinger writes of a
player who wasn't examined thoroughly after a groin injury: "He
lost the testicle but he did make All-State." There are also kids
who play through broken arms, broken ankles, and broken hands
and who pop painkillers or Valium. Across the country, highschool football is also associated with a frightening rate of
concussions. Would you let Coach Taylor anywhere near your
boys?
From: Hanna Rosin
Subject: Week 2: The Indelible Image of Buddy Garrity Doing Yoga
Posted Monday, January 26, 2009, at 6:31 AM ET
Indeed, Emily. It's a hallelujah moment when we're back to Tim,
Tyra, Matt, the lovable, evil Buddy, and all the other things I
treasure about FNL. This episode made me very hopeful about
the rest of the season. I especially liked the Smash subplot and
how it ties together what happens on the field with what happens
off. Smash, who graduated but lost his college scholarship, is
having a hard time remembering how to be Smash. Without the
Dillon Panthers, he's just a kid in an Alamo Freeze hat who goes
home every night to his mom. And that just about summarizes
the driving theme of the show. On the field, class, race, and all
the soul-draining realities of life in a small Texas town get
benched. But off the field, you can have clear eyes and a full
heart and still lose.
Despite their best efforts, Matt, Tyra, and Tim just can't seem to
transcend. Instead of gender differences, what's emerging
strongly this season is, as Emily points out, class differences. All
the couples in the show are divided along class lines, setting up
lots of potential for good drama. There's Tyra and Landry, Lyla
and Tim, and possibly Julie and Matt again. Emily, you pointed
out that great moment in the car where Julie and Matt have such
different ideas about what the future holds. Buddy gives us
another such moment, when he lectures Lyla about dating Tim:
86/105
"Tim Riggins going to college is like me teaching yoga classes."
(I'm having trouble getting that image out of my mind, of Buddy
Garrity teaching yoga classes. Buddy in downward facing dog.
Buddy ohm-ing. Buddy saying "namaste" to his ex-wife in a
spirit of love and peace.)
Then, of course, there's the absolutely awful moment when Tim
orders squab, rare, at the dinner with the new freshman
quarterback J.D.'s posh Texas socialite family. This was
reminiscent of one of my favorite scenes in The Wire, when
Bunny Colvin takes Namond and the other kids out to a fancy
restaurant, after which they feel ever more alienated from their
better selves.
an assisted-living home, Matt is shaken when she suddenly tells
him how great he was in his last game. She spirals into loving
reminiscence:
"You've always loved football, Matty. I
remember when you were two years old you
were trying to throw a football, and it was
bigger than you were. And you were such a
sweet baby, such a sweet, sweet baby. But
here you are all grown up and taking care of
everything. I don't know what I'd do without
you. I don't know. Matthew, I love you."
"I know. I love you too, Grandma."
I have high hopes for J.D. in this regard. He turns the Dillon
Panthers formula on its head. His father is hellbent on mucking
up the field with privilege and influence. He's a serious test for
Coach and for Matt. Can't wait to see what happens.
One question, though: Does it seem right to you that Tim
Riggins would use the word schmooze? Seemed out of place to
me. (Ditto their conversations about Google.) It's not that I think
he's "retarded," as he puts it. It's just that until now, the show has
been intentionally claustrophobic, locking us in the town, never
letting us see what's on Tim's TV (unlike, say, Tony Soprano,
whose TV is always facing us). So we've been led to believe that
Dillon reception doesn't pick up the CW or VH1 or any other
channel that might infect teenage lingo.
To: Hanna Rosin and Emily Bazelon
Subject: Week 2: Is the Show Becoming Too Sentimental?
Hanna, Emily,
One thing I've been thinking about is Friday Night Lights'
distinctive brand of male sentimentality. This show seems
singularly designed to make men cry. Its lodestars are
comradeship on and off the field ("God, football, and Texas
forever," I recall Riggins toasting with Jason Street in the very
first episode); a modern blend of paradoxically stoic
emotionalism (epitomized by Coach Taylor); and a recurrent,
choked-up love of the tough women who make these men's
attachment to football possible. This may be the West, but in
Dillon, Texas, John Ford's American masculinity has been
diluted with a cup of New Man sensitivity.
Take this episode's key scene between Matt Saracen and his
grandmother: Debating whether to take his ailing grandmother to
"You're such a good boy."
"If I am, it's only because you raised me."
The scene is very well-played—we haven't talked much about
the show's acting yet, it suddenly occurs to me—replete with
pauses and tears and a final hug between the two. But the
emotion derives from a move in the script that occurs again and
again in this series: A man is having a difficult time when his
mother, his grandmother, or his wife describes how much it
means to her that he is taking care of her, or accomplishing
brilliant things on the field, or just plain persevering. Smash has
had moments like this with his mom. Coach has moments like
this with Tami. And here Matt is reminded of his duty—to take
care of his grandma, even though he's 17—when she speaks
about his masculine prowess, first as a tough little boy throwing
a ball "bigger than you were" and now as a tough teenager trying
to navigate another task much bigger than he is.
Friday Night Lights has gotten more sentimental over the years,
I think, not less, and it has also embraced its women characters
more than ever. (I'm not sure I think they really play second
fiddle to the men, Hanna—though they once did.) The show is
about relationships now; its investigation of male honor has
made a quarter-turn to focus largely on male honor as it pertains
to women. (Even wayward Tim Riggins has been domesticated.)
In this regard, the show is far more incantatory than realistic (to
borrow Susan Sontag's labels for the two main types of art). That
is, it trades on magic and ritual more than on gritty realism, even
while it often pretends to be grittily realistic. And so while it
does talk about class, unlike many network TV shows, and while
it does portray a place that's geographically specific, as I
mentioned in my last entry, it's also offering up a highly stylized
story that is intended, I think, to serve as an emotional catharsis
for men, while winning women over by showing that men really
do have feelings, and it's going to translate them into a grammar
we can begin to understand.
87/105
I like this episode, but it strikes me that we've come a long way
from season one, when there was a bit more edge on things.
(Remember how it almost seemed that Riggins was racist?)
And we're definitely a long way from Buzz Bissinger's book
Friday Night Lights, on which the series and the movie are
based. That book—so far, at least; I'm only 150 pages in—has
plenty of sentimentality about the power of athletic glory to
alleviate the mundanity of life off the field. But it also stresses
the meanness and nastiness that fuels the talent of so many of the
actual Panthers Bissinger met. Not to mention the racism that
pervaded the town. On this show, we rarely see that meanness;
Riggins used to embody it, but now he's a pussycat, trying on
blazers to keep Lyla happy. On the field, it's the team's purehearted sportsmanship that makes it so lovable, not any player's
manly violence. After all, their locker-room mantra is "Clear
eyes, full hearts can't lose." And in Matt Saracen they had a
scrappy quarterback underdog who really wanted to be an artist.
Even J.D. is small and—can't you see it in those wide eyes?—
supersensitive.
In the meantime, a complaint from me that I see a reader in "the
Fray" shares: Why does this show keep flunking TV Drama 101
by tossing characters without explanation? First Waverly,
Smash's bipolar girlfriend, disappears. Now Jason Street, whom
we last saw begging an appealing waitress to have his baby after
a one-night stand, is AWOL. What gives? Will Jason show up
later this season, child in hand?
One more thing for this week: Another Frayster who says he (I
think he) wrote for the show in the first season reports that Tami
initially did have a girlfriend, played by Maggie Wheeler. But
she got cut. More here. And more from us next week.
To: Hanna Rosin and Emily Bazelon
Subject: Week 3: The Small Muscles Around Kyle Chandler's Eyes and Mouth
I love FNL, but sometimes I wonder: Is the show becoming
simply too sentimental about its characters?
Meghan
From: Emily Bazelon
Subject: Week 2: Where in Tarnation Is Jason Street?
You're right, Meghan, to call FNL on its spreading dollop of
sentimentality. Doesn't this often happen with TV shows in later
seasons? I'm thinking of The Wire (at least Season 5), and
probably The Sopranos, too. You can see why the writers would
be pulled in this direction. The friction of the initial plot line has
been played out. As the writers—and the audience—get to know
the characters better, do we inevitably want them to become
better people? Even if that comes at the price of narrative tension
and edge?
The best way out of the mush pit, I suppose, is to introduce new
characters, who in turn introduce new friction. That's what J.D.
is all about this season. If you're right that there's a puppy dog
lurking behind his wide eyes, then the show is in trouble. On the
other hand, if he's merely a two-dimensional touchdownthrowing automaton, that's going to be awfully pat—the Matt vs.
J.D. contest will be good, humble working-class vs. evil, proud,
and rich. I hope we get something more interesting than that.
I'm glad that you pulled out that comment from the "Fray,"
Emily. I've wondered the same thing about why the show so
baldly ditches characters. Another one to add to the list: Landry's
nerd-cool girlfriend. Whatever happened to her? Meanwhile, we
know from entertainment news that the actors who play Street
(Scott Porter) and Smash (played by Gaius Charles Williams)
are going to leave the show, but I presume the writers will stage
their exits with more grace.
At last, though, the season is swinging into gear. There's
conflict. Tami and Eric's strong bond is fraying under the
pressure of balancing work and home. He: "You know who I
miss? The coach's wife." She: "You know who I'd like to meet?
The principal's husband." There's love. How sweet are Matt
Saracen and Julie? Somehow their romance got more real this
time around. I find her much less annoying and more credible in
her big-eyed, pouting awkwardness. E.g., that moment where
she timidly says "We don't have to talk about football… or not."
There's football. Again with the game being decided in a close
call in the last 20 seconds?
Plus, Tami finally has a friend. Or does she? At the butcher
counter of the supermarket, she's befriended by Katie McCoy,
J.D.'s mother, wife of Joe—the man I love to hate. (I think I'd
watch this season just for the catharsis of watching Coach Taylor
stick it to Joe. Kyle Chandler is brilliant in these scenes—check
out the way the small muscles around his eyes and mouth move.)
It's not clear whether Katie is working Tami just as Joe has been
trying to work Eric, plying him with scotch and cigars to no
avail. Eric takes the cynical view; he thinks Tami's being
"played." Tami protests. Hanna, Emily, I wonder what you two
88/105
think—is this a friendship in the bud, or a cynical play for
power?
trailing after them. It captured exactly how women are made
girlish by mutual crushes.
In either case, what's interesting to me is that it does seem more
plausible for Tami and Katie to develop a friendship than for Joe
and Eric to. As unalike as they are, Tami and Katie have
something to offer each other. The women may be divided by
class, but they connect subtly and intuitively, it seems, over
understanding just how the other has to negotiate delicately
around her husband to get what she wants for herself and her
kids. As different as these marriages are, this, at least, seems
alike. Even Tami, who has so much authority with Eric, has to
push back in all sorts of ways. Take their argument about the
football team's barbecue. It reminded me how new Tami's life as
a working mom is: She complains to Eric about the team coming
into the house and "messing up my floors" and "clogging up my
toilet." That my is so telling. The long shadow of domesticated
female identity falls over it. … Or am I reading too much into it?
Tami's falling for Katie would be harmless enough if it weren't
clashing with her husband's interests. It's that willingness to
clash that's new, isn't it? And captured so well by that great
exchange you quoted. The Taylors haven't just become a twocareer couple. They're a couple with jobs that are at loggerheads.
Finally, I was struck by how many scenes in this episode take
place between two people. The party scene, the football game,
and the fabulous, cringe-inducing scene when Lyla laughs at
Mindy for using Finding Nemo as a bridal vow are exceptions,
of course. But otherwise the show takes place in dyads, as if
homing in on relationships rather than community as a whole. I
wonder if this will extend through the show.
Curious to hear your thoughts.
Meghan
From: Emily Bazelon
Subject: Week 3: Deciphering the Bronzed Diaper
The Tami-Katie spark was connected, for me, with the LylaMindy debacle, in part because both of these dyads cut across
class, a theme we've been discussing. Tami and Katie are
flirtingly using each other; Lyla and Mindy miss each other
completely, in a way that causes real pain. How could Lyla have
laughed at those poor, sweet Finding Nemo wedding vows? I
mean, really. Then again, Lyla is completely out of her element,
sitting there with two sisters and a mother who present a fiercely
united front, at least to other people. Maybe she was nervous and
blew it. Or maybe she wanted to hurt them because she envies
their sisterhood.
And now a few questions, for you and for our readers. What
happened at the end of that football game? Did Matt really
fumble, or did he get a bad call—after all, it looked to me like he
was in the end zone with control of the ball before he was hit.
And was the pounding Matt took during the game just the show's
latest realist depiction of the perils of football, or were we
supposed to suspect that J.D.'s father had somehow induced the
other team to take out QB 1? (I'm probably being paranoid, but
the camera work had a sinister element to it.) Last thing: When
J.D. catches Matt and Julie making fun of his trophies and comes
back with that too-perfect zinger about how his parents also
bronzed his diapers, is he just trying to make them feel small and
stupid? Or is he also distancing himself from his parents and
their pushy football worship? I couldn't quite decide how to read
him in that moment.
Posted Monday, February 2, 2009, at 7:18 AM ET
Yes, Meghan, Tami is being played by Katie McCoy. In part
because she wants to be. I found their pairing off all too
recognizable: They have that spark two women get when they
see something in each other that they want and don't have. Their
friendship, or maybe it will prove an infatuation, is a trying-on
of identity. So, yes, Katie is using Tami to entrench her son's
status on the team and to show off her wealth. And Tami refuses
to notice, because it suits her purposes not to. A party at Katie's
house means no clogged toilets at Tami's (and, oh yes, that my
rang in my ears, too). I particularly loved the moment when
Tami enters Katie's glittering, ostentatious house and her new
friend and hostess puts an arm around her waist and they sail off
together into the living room in their evening dresses, husbands
From: Hanna Rosin
Subject: Week 3: Malcolm Gladwell Comes to Dillon
I read the relationship between Tami and Katie differently. Katie
is obviously awful, with her blather about the Atkins diet and
being a "connector." She is obviously playing Tami, as much for
her husband's sake as for her own. And the fact that Tami doesn't
see this is a sign that her judgment is off. Until this season, Tami
has been the moral compass for her family and for the show. But
now she's distracted. She's cutting corners, ducking out of her
domestic responsibilities. She's worried about those clogged
toilets, because her cup is full, and she can't handle one more
89/105
thing.
I empathize. When I'm in that too-much-work-too-many-kidsmode, I, too, lose it over minor housekeeping infractions. But it
does not bode well for Dillon. When Tami is off, so is
everything else. I read this episode as not so much about
friendship, expedient or otherwise, as about missed connections.
Tami is not picking up on Katie's cues. Lyla can't connect with
Mindy and Billy. Tim Riggins does not make it on time to meet
his date. And Saracen doesn't quite get that touchdown. The
center is not holding in Dillon.
In David Simon's scripts for The Wire, money always crushes
love, loyalty, family, neighborhood, and everything in its path.
Something like that is going on here. Money is wreaking havoc
in Dillon: the boosters' money for the JumboTron, the McCoy
money, those copper wires that are hypnotizing Billy and
making him corrupt poor Tim. (In The Wire, Bubs was always
hunting down copper.) The result is the closing scene, which
shows the very un-neighborly Dillon ritual of planting "for sale"
signs on the coach's lawn after he loses the game.
I don't know what will triumph in the end: money or love.
Emily, I couldn't tell either whether J.D. was pissed or chagrined
or ironic in that last scene, so I can't tell if he's our villain or just
a victim of his overbearing father. I'll bet on one thing though:
Things do not end well for Billy Riggins.
Subject: Week 3: Helicopter Parenting
say). Tami and Eric are attentive parents. So is Smash's mom.
But you couldn't call them helicopter parents, that breed of
nervously hovering perfectionists who busily cram their
children's schedules with activities and lessons. In this case, that
finicky sense of entitlement projected by Joe is associated, we're
meant to feel, with his wealth, to get back to what you brought
up, Hanna, about money and love. Katie, too. I'm curious to
know how far the sports parenting issues will go. Is J.D. going to
crack up? Or is Joe creating a sports equivalent of Mozart with
all his proud pushing? I suspect the first, mainly because Joe is
portrayed as such a jerk. (This dilemma might be more
interesting if the writers had let Joe be a more complex figure—
but maybe the whole point is these types are caricatures, almost.)
Meghan
From: Hanna Rosin
Subject: Week 4: Eric Taylor, Molder of Men
Posted Saturday, February 7, 2009, at 7:11 AM ET
This opening comment is aimed more at the producers of Friday
Night Lights than at both of you: Tami is a stabilizing force in
this crazy world, and there is only so much more of her fumbling
and humiliation I can take. This episode ruminates on the ancient
male art of mentoring, and particularly being a "molder of men,"
as Tami puts it to her husband. Tami tries to access this secret
world with disastrous results. She knows that Buddy Garrity just
played golf with the superintendent of schools, who is making
the final decision on what to do with the JumboTron money. So
on the advice of the wily Katie McCoy, she finds out where the
superintendent has breakfast and pays a visit. "Wear your hair
down," Katie tells her. "Wear it down."
Hanna, Emily,
I thought J.D. was trying to make a joke that didn't come off. It's
my guess, too, that we're not supposed to be able to read his
reaction, because he's not sure himself. He's angry, but he also
sees the ridiculousness of his parents' shrine to him. One thing
we haven't discussed: With the McCoys comes the FNL's first
depiction of that modern affliction known as helicopter
parenting. I suppose, to be accurate, that Joe is actually a more
specific type: a form of stage parent, the obsessed parent-coach.
Here is a parent who is helping drive his son into developing his
talents but who also just might drive him crazy by pushing too
hard.
This introduces a new theme for FNL, right? Until now, overinvolvement wasn't a problem for any of the parents on the
show. In fact, the parenting problems all had to do with moms
and dads who were notably absent (in the case of Matt and Tim,
Tami shows up in a fetching sunset-colored tank with her
fabulous hair down. The superintendent is friendly enough but
not overly so, and Tami pushes her luck. She scooches into his
booth and immediately starts hammering him about having all
the "information" and being "understaffed" and drill, drill, drill.
This is not the giggly seduction scene Katie was hinting at. The
whole exchange goes south quickly, and a few scenes later, the
new JumboTron is announced. My husband and I had a very
Venus/Mars moment over this scene. David says the
superintendent was against her from the start. I say he was just
friendly enough that she could have turned him if she'd played it
exactly right. But I can't be annoyed at her, because playing it
right—Katie McCoy's way—would have meant smiling coyly
and batting her eyelashes in a very un-Tami fashion.
David, meanwhile, choked up at a scene that played out exactly
the opposite way. Eric brings Smash to a big Texas university
90/105
for a walk-on, but then the coach there says he doesn't have time
to see him that day. Eric plays it perfectly. He finds just the right
words to win over the coach and just the right words to send
Smash soaring onto the field. David was so moved by the speech
aimed at Smash that he watched it two more times.
In a show that so highly values male honor, being a "molder of
men" is a serious compliment. Actual fatherhood in this show is
secondary to the art of shaping a fine young man. We get a
glimpse into the fragile nature of male bonding when Eric asks
J.D. to say something about himself, and J.D. comes up with
résumé boilerplate—"I set goals and I achieve them"—making it
hard for Eric to connect.
It's a delicate process, and also one that traditionally excludes
women. When, last season, Julie tried to make her young
smarmy English teacher into a mentor, Tami almost accused him
of statutory rape. You are right, Meghan, that the women are
quickly domesticating the men on this show. But that dynamic is
not buying them any more freedom. As principal, Tami can't
find her bearings. She still seems herself only in that moment
when she's in the bar with Eric, telling him he's a molder of men
and how sexy she finds that. To which he responds: "I'll tell you
what. I'll have to ruminate on that a bit longer, because you find
it so damned sexy."
I want more for Tami, but in that moment I can't help but feel
that some kind of order is restored.
A question for both of you: Are you buying Matt Saracen's mom
as a character? She seems so improbable to me.
From: Emily Bazelon
Subject: Week 4: What's the Deal With Saracen's Mom?
I'm on Mars with David: I think the superintendent was dead set
against Tami, too. The battle over the JumboTron is a fight she
shouldn't have picked—not as a new principal who clearly has
no political capital, because it's a fight she couldn't win. There's
a practical reason for this that in my mind blurs her moral claim
here: The donors gave earmarked funds, whatever Tami's
technical authority to ignore their wishes. And there's also, of
course, the larger metaphorical meaning of the JumboTron:
Dillon is about football first. In Friday Night Lights the book,
this primacy makes itself similarly felt. The real school that's a
model for Dillon High spends more on medical supplies for
football players than on teaching supplies for English teachers.
And the head of the English department makes two-thirds the
salary of the football coach, who also gets the free use of a new
car.
Hopeless as Tami's plea is, Katie coaxes her to try by instructing
that "nobody likes an angry woman." It's Tami's anger that's
making her fumble and bumble. That's hard for us to watch, I
think, because it brings up a lot of baggage about women in
authority being seen as bitches. Tami remembers Katie's words
and tells the superintendent, "I'm not angry," but her voice is full
of righteous indignation, so he can't hear her.
Before my inner feminist erupted, however, I reminded myself
that Tami was to blame, too, for playing the politics wrong. She
blew her honeymoon on a lost cause. (Here's hoping Obama
doesn't make the same rookie mistake.) That's why it rings false
when Eric tells her that she was right, unconvincingly
contradicting himself from a couple of episodes ago.
I don't share your despair, though, because Tami is already
bouncing back. She used the JumboTron announcement to do
what she should have done from the get go: co-opt Buddy
Garrity into raising the kind of money she needs by making him
host a silent auction for the school at his car dealership. You
can't beat Dillon's football fat cats if you're Tami. You have to
join them.
Meanwhile, even as Eric is being valorized in this episode—that
lingering shot of the "Coach Eric Taylor" sign on his door was
for anyone who missed the theme—he doesn't entirely live up to
his billing. Yes, he gets big points for getting Smash to college.
(Since I am still caught up in the glory of last Sunday's Super
Bowl—how about that game!—I'm feeling kindlier toward the
idea of Smash playing college ball, though I reserve the right to
come to my senses and start worrying about his brain getting
battered.) But what is Eric thinking by dividing quarterback
duties between Matt and J.D., and running a different offense for
each? It's baby-splitting, and it bodes badly. I'm betting against
the Panthers in the next game. Related point of ongoing
frustration: The writers seem to have settled back into portraying
J.D. as robotic and empty-headed, the boy with Xbox between
his ears.
Matt, by too-obvious contrast, is ever the thoughtful, winsome
struggler. You're right, Hanna, that his mother is a
disappointment. I was happy to meet Shelby because she's
played by one of my favorite actresses from Deadwood. But I
don't believe in her character, either. Where's the sordid
underbelly—the lack of caring, or mental illness, or selfishness
that would help us understand why she left her child? Knowing
that Matt's dad is a jerk only makes her act of abandonment less
explicable. And so I'm waiting for the bitter reality check: I was
ready for Shelby to start to disappoint by not showing up as
promised to take Matt's grandmother to the doctor. But there she
was, right on time. I don't buy the pat self-redemption, and I
hope the show goes deeper and darker.
91/105
Subject: Week 4: Can a Boy Who Doesn't Eat Chicken-Fried Steak Really Be
QB1?
After reading your entries, Hanna and Emily, I am left with a
big, unanswerable question many others have asked before: Why
is this show not more popular? It's smart and sharp. Yet it's also
extremely watchable. (In contrast, say, to The Wire, another
critical darling that never quite made it to the big time. That
show required a lot more of the viewer than Friday Night Lights
does.) Over the past two seasons in particular, FNL has made an
effort to reach out to both male and female viewers: It may
address male honor and epitomize modern male sentimentality,
as you and I have both mentioned, Hanna. But it also offers up a
buffet of romantic conflict that ought to sate the appetite of the
most stereotypically girly viewer. A good chunk of the show is
about teenage amour, bad cafeteria food, and cute boys, for
God's sake! Just see the Tyra-Cash-Landry love triangle this
week.
Does the mere mention of football turn viewers away? Is the
show trying to be all things to all people—and failing in the
process? Or has NBC just flubbed it by scheduling it on Friday
nights? I have another theory, but there's absolutely no evidence
for it. Sometimes I think FNL hasn't reached a huge audience
because it doesn't appeal to the ironic hipster sensibility that
turns shows like Summer Heights High or Flight of the
Conchords into word-of-mouth hits—it's too earnest to ignite
that YouTube viral transmission. Anyway, I'm curious to know
what you (and our readers) think, because in general it seems to
me that good TV has a way of making itself known and getting
watched.
love-me attitude. Cash doesn't wear his heart on his Western
shirt sleeve as Landry does; he wears his charm, whirling into
town with the rodeo and impressing the audience with his
staying power in the prestigious bronc event. (Rodeo neophytes:
Check out the wonderful chapter about it in Gretel Ehrlich's The
Solace of Open Spaces, a stunning meditation on the West.)
Tyra falls hard for Cash's routine. "Billy never mentioned that
Mindy's little sister turned into a goddess," he whispers to her at
the bar. Cash is an archetype, but the writers sketch him well,
refusing to let him seem too obviously dangerous. Even I fell
victim to his spell, wondering fruitlessly whether—this time!—
the bad boy might be tamed. If we need a warning that he won't,
I think, it comes in the barbecue scene at Tyra's house. Billy
Riggins—an old friend of Cash's—is recalling what a good
baseball player Cash was in high school. Cash laughs it off, turns
to Tyra, and, with a devil-may-care drawl, says, "Baseball's too
slow and boring … right now I like to ride broncs in the rodeo.
Yee-haw!" Like any good come-on line, the charge is all in the
delivery, and it works on Tyra. But (just like Tami) she's
misreading the politics of the situation—in this case, the sexual
politics. Right?
Meanwhile, Emily, I don't think I agree that Taylor's embracing
the spread offense is a form of baby-splitting. It seems
pragmatic, if perhaps a little softhearted. But how can Eric not
be softhearted about Matt? He is so winsome, and he's worked
his ass off. The other thing is that J.D. is such a wuss, still. Part
of being a quarterback, on this show, is being a leader—and how
can J.D. be a leader when he's still a follower? He's not even
rebellious enough to eat fried food, for Christ's sake. ("My dad
won't let me," he says.) How's being Daddy's Little Boy going to
inspire his teammates? J.D. may have the skills but is going to
have to get some gumption before he takes this team as far as it
can go.
Though, yeah, it'll probably go wrong. For the sake of drama, at
least.
Curious to hear your thoughts …
Back to our regularly scheduled programming: Yes, Hanna, I
find Matt's mom too good to be true. And the writers seem to
know it, because they are hardly even trying to give her
interesting lines. She's like a relentless optimist's idea of a
deadbeat mom. And, Emily, I agree with you about Tami: She
flubbed the JumboTron wars by choosing to wage the wrong
skirmish in the larger battle. Those were earmarked funds. She's
got to figure out a way to guilt the boosters into giving her
money; she can't just demand it.
Meanwhile, I find myself in agreement with Mindy for once:
That Cash sure is a fine lookin' cowboy. In this episode, Tyra's a
kind of parallel to Tami: Both are struggling and making some
bad decisions. In Tyra's case, it's ditching geeky sweetheart
Landry—who clearly adores her—after his dental surgery in
order to make out with Cash, a bad boy with big blue eyes and a
Meghan
From: Hanna Rosin
Subject: Week 4: I'll Take the Brooding Drunk Over the Sweet-Talking PillPopper
Meghan, I agree with your wild-card theory. I've always thought
the show doesn't touch a nerve because it's too straightforwardly
92/105
sentimental. Or, at least, it's a strange hybrid of sentimental and
sophisticated. The themes are not so different from middlebrow
dreck like, say, Touched by an Angel—honor, heart, the power
of inspiration, staying optimistic in the face of bad odds. The
show is hardly ever knowing. Hannah Montana is also a TV
teenager, but she would be an alien dropped into this version of
America. And when the show goes dark, it's on Oprah's
themes—missing fathers, serious illness, divorce. Yet, there is
something about the show that transmits "art" and makes it
inaccessible. It's not tidy, for example, either in its camerawork
or the way it closes its themes. It insists on complicating its
heroes and villains, as we've discussed, which is why we like it.
I demurely disagree about Cash, however. He's an archetype, but
one that Brokeback Mountain has ruined for me forever. To me,
Cash just screams male stripper—the name alone conjures up
visions of dollars tucked in briefs. I did not fail to notice that the
episode pretty much ditched Tim Riggins, as if there were only
room for one male hottie at a time. And I'll take the brooding
drunk over the sweet-talking pill-popper any day.
On an unrelated note, anyone notice how much actual cash is
floating around Dillon? Lets start a running list of the items the
good citizens of a real Dillon could probably never afford. I'll
start:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Lyla's wardrobe
Julie's wardrobe
Tami's fabulous hair
The McCoy house, located in Dillon's fashionable
McMansion district
Landry's 15" Mac laptop (with wifi hookup)
Landry's electric guitar and amp
Subject: Week 4: Dillon's McMansion District Located!
Posted Tuesday, February 10, 2009, at 10:30 AM ET
Hanna,
Well, if I had to choose between Tim Riggins and Cash, I'd go
for the brooding drunk, too. In any case, your Brokeback
Mountain reference has shamed me out of my crush. I always
fall too easily for the glib talkers.
Meanwhile, though, it looks like Dillon's real-life counterpart
does have a McMansion district. Welcome to the McCoy home.
It even has a hobby room for his trophies.
Meghan
From: Emily Bazelon
Subject: Week 5: It's Official—Matt Saracen Has Broken My Heart
Smart mail from a reader named Josh about FNL's popularity, or
lack thereof: He points out that the show got not a single ad spot
during the Super Bowl, when NBC had a captive audience of
many millions of football fans. If you're right, Meghan and
Hanna, that on-screen complexity and the taking of hard lumps
explain why FNL hasn't found a mass audience, then the
character who is most to blame is Matt Saracen. Watching him
in this last episode nearly broke my heart. The QB baby-splitting
went poorly, as threatened. Dillon won the game, but barely, and
when Matt walks off the field and the world around him goes
silent, as if he were underwater, we know that he's done.
Coach Taylor drives to Matt's house (plenty of peeling paint
here, to contrast with the McCoy mansion) on the painful errand
of demoting him. Coach doesn't say much, and nothing at all of
comfort: For all the ways this show adores Eric, he regularly
comes up short on words and compassion at crucial moments.
(Another bitter, not-for-everyone layer of complexity.) Matt
doesn't say much, either. He just looks stricken. When his
grandma and Shelby ask Matt whether he's OK, he tells them
yes. Then we watch him stand by the door outside, 17, alone,
lonely, and cut up inside. It's a scene that makes me want to wall
off my own smaller boys from adolescence.
As I muttered curses at Coach Taylor, my husband reminded me
that players don't have a right to their spots. J.D. has the magic
arm. Matt just has heart and a work ethic. State championship or
not, he's been revealed as the kid who only made QB 1 because
of Jason Street's accident. Matt sees it this way himself: He tells
Shelby as much in a later scene. What kills me about this
narrative is that it's too harsh. Matt has been a smart, clutch
quarterback. And yet his self-doubt is inevitable. By stripping
Matt of his leadership role in the middle of his senior year,
Coach has called into question the whole arc of Matt's rise.
(Even as Coach knows as well as we do that this is a kid who's
got no one to help see him through the disappointment.) Ann, I
love your points about Eric and Tami over on XX Factor, but
though Eric is prepared to lose the JumboTron fight, he sure isn't
prepared to risk his season. Or, more accurately perhaps, the
Wrath of the Boosters that would come with benching J.D., win
or lose.
The big question now is whether Matt has lost his job for good
or whether there's a cinematic comeback in his future. The
realistic plot line would be for J.D. to succeed at QB 1—or
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succeed well enough to keep the job. That would make Matt's
story that much more painful but also pretty singular. I am trying
to think of a sports icon from movie or TV who falls and stays
fallen so that the drama isn't about redemption on the field but
the quotidian small moments of going on with life. The Wrestler
might be such a movie, though I doubt a grown up Matt Saracen
will have much in common with Randy "The Ram" Robinson.
At least I hope not. A parlor game: Who are these FNL teenagers
going to be when they grow up, if the show's ratings were ever
to let them? Does Tim stop drinking long enough to open his
own construction company? (He's got Buddy's sales line down,
anyway.) Does Lyla leave Dillon for college and become a radio
host? And what about Matt, whom I mostly picture as a gentle
father throwing a football to his own boys?
If I'm being sentimental—and I realize I'm so absorbed by Matt's
troubles that I've ignored Julie's tattoo and the four stooges'
house-buying—the show this time isn't. After Eric's visit, we see
Matt and Landry pulling up to school in the morning, just as they
did when they were sophomore losers in the beginning of the
first season. Matt looks out his window and sees J.D. Landry
looks out and sees Tyra with Cash. They're back where they
started two years ago.
Subject: Week 5: Jason Street Is Back—and He Needs To Make Some Money,
Quick
I agree, Emily: This episode is pretty unsentimental. In fact, it's
probably the best of the season so far. Partly that's because it
begins with football rather than ending with it, loosening up
what had come to seem like a predictable structure. One key
result is that the episode can follow out plot points having to do
with the team: In this case, it follows Matt's sense of failure and
disappointment and Coach Taylor's need to address the fact that,
as the game announcer put it, J.D. McCoy has turned out to be
"the real deal." I'm always happiest when the show has more
football and less necking on it.
I liked how the writers intertwined Matt's disappointment with
the reappearance of Jason Street. Street is suffering from a
disappointment, too, reminding us that even great quarterbacks
go on to suffer. Street, of course, was paralyzed from the waist
down in an accident that the first season revolved around; now
he's had another accident: He got a girl pregnant in a one-night
stand. He has a son. It's turning out to be the central joy of his
life. And unlike so many guys his age—who'd be in college—
he's facing the concrete pressures of needing to make money.
You called Street and his pals the "Four Stooges," Emily, and I
get why, because this episode treats them as goofballs: Riggins,
Street, and Herc sit around trying to figure out how to make
some bucks quick. I love the scene in which Jason is trying to
think of something simple that everyone needs. ("A sharp
pencil," Herc says unhelpfully.)
It's almost shticky, but what keeps it from being too much so is
the quite poignant reality underlying the slacker riffing. They
don't just want money; they need money. And it's not all that
clear that they can get it. The scene at the bank when Street and
Herc are trying to get a loan and Tim and Billy fail to show up—
because they don't have the cash they promised they have—is
brutal. Street uses the word dumbass to describe Billy and Tim,
but that's putting it gently. You see how people with good
intentions easily cross to the wrong side of the law.
Meanwhile, Matt's mom is driving me crazy, but I guess the poor
guy needs something good in his life. She's eerily thoughtful just
as Tami starts to flip out and become oddly uptight—coming
down hard on Tyra in ways that alienate her and flipping out at
her daughter, Julie, for getting a tattoo on her ankle. The writing
here is excellent: I flashed back to when I got a second ear
piercing without telling my mom and she flipped out. I think she
said exactly what Tami did: that I'd ruined and disfigured my
body. Twenty years later, I can see the scene from both mom
and daughter's perspective: to Julie, who's desperately seeking
autonomy, her mom's nervousness looks square and
hypocritical—from her perspective, it's just a tattoo and "it
doesn't mean anything." But for Tami, Julie's mini-rebellion
seems as if it's part of a larger slide to … she doesn't know what,
and that's precisely what's terrifying. She has to assume it does
mean something. Or does she? This was a moment when I
wished we could see Tami with a friend, because you kind of
think the friend might give Tami a hug and say, "Your daughter's
going to be OK." Because Julie is: She isn't giving off all the
other signs of unhappiness that would seem to trigger real
concern. She just wants to feel that she's got some control over
her own life—even if she doesn't fully.
From: Hanna Rosin
Subject: Week 5: As Dark as the Bloodiest Sopranos Episode
I also loved this episode, but boy, was it dark. I continue to
marvel at how subtly the show ties what's happening on the field
to what's happening off it. Emily, I too was struck by how Eric,
for maybe the first time, consistently came up short in this
episode. Usually he can pull out just the right words to smooth
over a painful situation. But with Matt, as you point out, it's not
working. He tries to comfort Matt, but first Mom interrupts, then
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Grandma interrupts. Later, in the locker room, Matt himself
makes it clear he isn't having it. "Good talk, coach," he says
sardonically.
In fact, the "good talk" in this episode is the one Riggins keeps
delivering in a cynical salesman mode. Like a character from a
George Saunders story, Riggins spews some weird sales line he
picked up from Buddy, about how when the rats leave a sinking
market, "the true visionaries come in." Riggins seems surprised
to hear the words coming out of his mouth and even more
surprised that they work. "I'm a true visionary!" Billy says and
then hands over the money for the house that the Four Stooges
want to flip. And, of course, we all know, although they don't,
that this will lead to disaster. The boys just fight over the money
and the house, and the mother of Street's child is horrified, not
comforted. Plus, they'll never sell that house. It's as if when Eric
chose money and success (J.D.) over heart (Matt), the
consequences of that decision rippled all over town.
The whole episode had a very Paul Auster feel. One fleeting
thing—an unearned pile of money, a one-night stand, a tattoo, a
suddenly paralyzed teammate—can change your entire life.
Accident and coincidence are more powerful than any Goddriven holistic narrative. My favorite moment is when they cut
from the meth dealer shooting at the Riggins truck straight to
Jason babbling to his new little boy. There is no happy script.
Life can be a little random and scary, and it can all turn on a
dime. This is why those ominous radio announcers—"If they
lose this one, they can kiss this season goodbye"—really get
under your skin. One missed pass by one 17-year-old should
never mean so much, but in Dillon, it does.
The episode almost felt as dark to me as the bloodiest Sopranos
episode. Except for the Touched by a Mom subtheme we've all
complained about. Thank God for Herc, who's man enough to
handle anything. I love when he calls everyone "ladies." Also:
"Babies love vaginas. It's like looking at a postcard." Who writes
those great lines?
shrift to the power of the random and to the frayed threads that
make up so much of lived experience.
But I don't really buy your idea that on FNL the central conflict
between good and evil is also between heart vs. money. That
seems too simple. J.D. isn't a potentially brilliant quarterback
because he's rich. Yes, his parents paid for extra coaching, but
mostly, J.D. has God-given talent. Smash's similar talent comes
with working-class roots, and it looks like he's on his way to
success, and we're meant to celebrate that. Money is a source of
corruption—Tim and Billy's copper wire theft—but it's also the
vehicle for redemption—Jason's attempt to channel those illgotten gains into his house-buying scheme. If he fails, I don't
think it will be because the show treats money as inherently
corrupt. It'll be because money is painfully out of reach. And
money vs. heart leaves out other deep currents on FNL—like
athletic prowess and also the religious belief represented by all
those pregame prayer circles.
A couple of observations from readers before I sign off. My
friend Ruben Castaneda points out that for all its subtle
treatment of black-white race relations, FNL has had only a few,
not wholly developed, Hispanic characters. That's especially too
bad for a show about Texas. From reader Greg Mays, one more
thought about why Tami has no girlfriends. He writes, "As the
husband of a coach's wife, I have a theory: It's tough to have any
real friends in the school-student circle as the coach's wife
because you have to be watchful of their intentions to influence
your husband. … Also, if my wife is representative, there is a
population of coaches' wives who are coaches' wives because
they are more likely to have male friends than female." I'm not
sure that last part describes Tami, but I could imagine it does
other Mrs. Coaches.
And hey, Meghan, I have the same double pierce story, from
seventh grade. My parents drew a straight line: earring to
mohawk to drugs to jail. They didn't come to their senses as
quickly as Tami, either.
From: Emily Bazelon
Subject: Week 5: A Coach's Theory of Coaches' Wives
From: Hanna Rosin
Subject: Week 6: The Best Awkward TV Teenage Kiss I've Ever Seen
Hanna, that's such a good point about the power of random and
fleeting moments to wreak havoc on this show. I think that's a
theme common to many of the best HBO dramas as well. Maybe
it's a life truth that a TV show is particularly well-suited to
reveal. There's much more pressure on movies, with their twohour arcs, to depict larger-than-life incidents and tell a story as if
it's complete and whole. And often that constraint gives short
FNL has always operated on the opposite principle of most
teenage shows. It's about teenagers, but it isn't actually written
for them, which might explain why it's not more popular, as
fellow fan and writer Ruth Samuelson pointed out to me. Take
the role of parents, for example. In most American shows about
teenagers, the parents are not really relevant. They might leave a
ham sandwich on the table or some milk in the fridge, but
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basically, their role is to let the kids wallow in their own
histrionics. But in FNL, the parents drive all the action. When
they are absent, they are really absent, as in gone off to war, or
deadbeat, turning their kids into old souls who have to endure
alone.
From: Emily Bazelon
Subject: Week 6: A Defense of the Most Overbearing Dad Ever
Finally, in Episode 6, we get a break from all that. This one is all
about teenagers letting go, which results in some fine OC-style
interludes. Riggins cruises around town in a Dazed and
Confused mode, showing J.D. all the hot spots in Dillon where
he can get laid. J.D. gets drunk, and Julie and Matt go to the
lake—all the way to the lake, if you know what I mean. "This is
the first Saturday I can wake up not having to think about
everything I did wrong," he says. Then, after some splashing and
rolling around, Julie gets home after the newspaper boy has
already made his rounds and sneaks in the door. We're bracing
for Tami to march out of her bedroom screaming and yelling and
waving a jilbab in her daughter's face, but nothing like that
happens. Tami does not even stir in her bed, for all we know.
The tattoo caused an uproar, but the virginity left in peace.
Let's just linger here some more since Emily, you particularly
have worried so much about Matt Saracen. Matty shows up at
Julie's house in Landry's car. He and Julie share the best
awkward TV teenage kiss I've ever seen, followed by a most
convincing stretch of post-coital bliss, which carries through to
Sunday morning church. And Matt's improbable mother is
nowhere to be seen. For one dreamy weekend, being orphaned
and benched has its benefits.
The ur-parent of the show, meanwhile, goes off the deep end.
First, J.D.'s dad whisks his son out of the locker room after a
victory to go celebrate with mom at Applebee's instead of letting
him celebrate with the team. Then, after J.D. gets drunk, his dad
forces him to apologize to Coach Taylor in church for
disappointing the coach and the team. He is proving himself to
be the stage parent from hell and making the option of having no
dad at all look better and better.
The show has always been thoughtful on the subject of
parenting, contrasting the coach's tight family with the lost
orphans of Dillon. The addition of the McCoys complicates
things, since they make concerned parents look like nightmares.
And here, we get the final twist, where the Dillon orphans get to
shine.
Actually, the final twist comes with the very sweet scene where
Jason Street sings "Hole in My Bucket" over the phone to his
son, who is at that very moment driving away from him. This is
imperfect, patch-it-together parenting (like the song says). And
it's not really working, but it might someday. (Pay attention,
Bristol Palin.)
So, speaking of imperfect, is that kid Cash's son or not?
Yes, the kids took over the show this week, and what did we
get? Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll.
Sex. I also loved the Julie and Matt kiss and actually the whole
thing: the unceremonious, post-hotdogs roll by the campfire and
the blissful aftermath. For one thing, Matt deserves a weekend of
sweetness. For another, I'm happy to see teenage sex as neither
airbrushed and eroticized nor an emotional crack-up. Sometimes,
16- and 17- year-olds just lovingly sleep together. Maybe Tami
didn't wake up and freak out because she doesn't have to.
Though she did pick up on the shy, pleased Sunday-morning
glances that Julie and Matt exchanged in church, which signaled
to me what you suggested, too: Dream weekends don't last.
Drugs. Can I stick up for J.D.'s dad for a minute without sending
myself to Dillon detention? He is indeed the smarmy,
overbearing stage dad, so caricatured I can barely watch him.
But if Tim Riggins wanted to take my ninth-grader out to get
drunk and who knows what else, I might cart him home, too. It's
all well and good for Coach Taylor to encourage Riggins to
mentor J.D. To loosen this kid up, Eric is willing to keep quiet
about J.D.'s naked mile sprint and whatever hijinks Riggins
comes up with, it seems. I'm not sure I can blame Annoying
Applebee's McCoy for resisting. If acceptance on the football
team means getting shitfaced at age 14, then maybe that's a
reason unto itself that a freshman shouldn't be quarterback. Best
part of the J.D. party scene, however: Lyla as Tim's longsuffering sidekick, shouldering J.D.'s weight so she can help
drag him out of harm's way.
Rock 'n' roll: Landry and his band light up the garage. Or
rather, they fail to light it up, in spite of their acned-splendor,
until Devin, the cute freshman, comes along. She's got the guitar
skills, the green cardigan, the sneakers, and the pink lip gloss.
And she's got Landry's number. She tells him all his songs are
about the same thing, the same girl. It's time to get over that
Tyra, for the sake of the music. Hanna, what do you make of it
that in this teen-driven episode, the character keenly passing
judgment is the ninth-grade upstart?
You asked, meanwhile, about Cash and his baby mama and their
sad toddler. Yep, that's his kid (don't you think?), and Tyra is
demonstrating a willful detachment from reality by believing
otherwise. I'm sorry Meghan is out this week (don't worry,
readers; she'll be back next week), because you are both more
96/105
interested in Cash than I am. I just can't get past how much he
looks like Jon Voigt in Midnight Cowboy. And besides, don't we
know how this story comes out? Won't Tyra fall out of this
relationship bruised, callused, and less likely to make it to
college? The only glimmer of brain activity I saw in this plotline
was the moment in which Julie made fun of her, and Tyra
remembered that was the kind of joke that Landry used to make.
Ditch the lying cowboy already.
The contrast to Cash comes when Jason sings to his baby, in that
scene you've already mentioned. I loved the cuts to Herc and
Billy and Tim while Jason cooed. It reminded me of a point
Meghan made a few weeks ago about FNL's distinctive brand of
male sentimentality. There's Jason, putting himself on the line
for his kid even as that child moves farther from him, mile after
mile. Jason is the show's tragedy. Can he also somehow pull off
its redemption? Or would that be unworthy of this show?
From: Hanna Rosin
Subject: Week 6: I Would Rather Raise a Kid Like Riggins Than One Like J.D.
This is an argument we have in my household all the time and
which will come to full boil when our children are teenagers. I
would rather raise a kid like Riggins than one like J.D. In my
book, parental oppression is a crime, not quite on order with
negligence—but still. (My mother calls me like five times a day,
just to give you the source.) As I was relishing the awkward
teenage sex scene between Matt and Julie, which we've
discussed, David (my husband) was having a very overprotective
paternal reaction: His view is that Matt slept with Julie to get
back at Coach. Coach took away what mattered most to Matt, so
Matt got his revenge by doing the same. I think this is crazy dad
talk—teens in love don't need any extra motive to have sex,
especially not on a sunny day by the lake—but it gives you a
window into our differences.
As for Devin, what an excellent point. I hadn't quite noticed that
Devin had become Tami in miniature, dispensing wise looks
from behind her hipster glasses. Like any city girl, I have a soft
spot for these cute misfit girls with a heart of gold (we just
watched Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist last night—Norah is
one, too). But I do have one complaint. Every few episodes, the
show introduces a character who looks like she strolled straight
out of a walk-up in Park Slope, Brooklyn (the Riggins' old
neighbor, Landry's last girlfriend). I know, I know, Texas is
cooler than I think. But can't we aim for a little authenticity?
From: Emily Bazelon
Subject: Week 6: Sad, Lonely Tim Riggins
But, Hanna, you're defending Riggins' leading of J.D. down the
drinking path by talking about Matt and Julie sleeping together.
With the emphasis on together, because it all looked completely
mutual to me. (If David really thinks otherwise, then I hear you
about your upcoming battles; maybe my husband didn't have that
crazy dad moment because we don't have girls.) But my main
point is that sex and drugs are different. For teenagers as well as
for adults. I mean, I love Riggins, and I'd pick him over J.D.,
too. But then I'd work on his six-pack habit, which looks like a
symptom of loneliness and depression most of the time. Whereas
Matt and Julie—that looks like a good thing in need only of the
intervention of a condom.
One more point: Last week, I wrote about a reader's frustration
with the show's lack of Hispanic characters. Reader Sean Mabey
points out another lapse: "During the first season, Smash's
friends were exclusively black and he was at odds (to put it
nicely) with Riggins. Fast forward two years, and you don't see
Smash in the company of another black guy for the entire third
season and who's in the car with him on the way to A&M?
Riggins." Hmm.
From: Hanna Rosin
Subject: Week 6: All the Boys on This Show Have Gone Soft
You're right to distinguish between Julie and Matt's roll in the
hay and Riggins' drinking. But let's forget about his bad habit for
a moment and concentrate on what he was trying to accomplish
that night with J.D. The way J.D. and his dad are operating, J.D.
is a menace to the team. His dad is in it only for his son and does
not want him to be contaminated by the rest of them. This is
ugly, mercenary behavior and the worst of football. It's the
opposite of what Coach Taylor wants for the team. So Riggins
was subverting Mr. McCoy's influence in the only way he knows
how. And there's precedent in Riggins' humanitarian party
missions—remember the time he saved Julie from that skeazy
guy at a party? Once again, Riggins is sacrificing himself for
someone else's sake and getting no credit.
As for Smash and Riggins—you are absolutely right. This is
more proof of the point Meghan has made. Riggins used to have
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a dangerous, almost racist edge. Now he's gone soft, as have all
the boys on the show. Matty kicking those boxes is the most
male aggression we've gotten this season.
From: David Plotz
To: Emily Bazelon, Meghan O'Rourke, and Hanna Rosin
Subject: Week 6: The "Matt Slept With Julie To Get Back at Coach" Theory—a
Rebuttal
Allow me a brief rebuttal to my beloved wife's post about Matt
and Julie's trip to the lake. Hanna wrote of me: "His view is that
Matt slept with Julie to get back at Coach."
Uh, no. A few nights ago when we were discussing the episode,
I said, in the spirit of marital helpfulness: "Hey, Hanna, don't
you think that one possible interpretation of that scene is that
subconsciously, Matt sleeps with Julie in order to take the thing
most precious to Coach Taylor, his daughter's virginity, because
Coach Taylor has taken a thing precious to him, the job as
QB1?"
Note: I did not say that that was what I believed, because I don't
believe it. I happen to think the lake tryst was lovely. It didn't set
any of my paternal protectiveness neurons ablaze. That revenge
scenario was merely speculative and playful. I thought Hanna
might throw it out there to enliven the dialogue. Instead, she
exploited it to slander me, her innocent husband.
And while I'm fixating on that paragraph, Hanna, please tell me
you were kidding when you wrote: "I would rather raise a kid
like Riggins than one like J.D."
Subject: Week 7: Is Joe McCoy Making His Son Into the Next Todd
Marinovich?
I have tons to say about this rich and textured episode—how
could you not be moved by Landry baring his soul to Tami after
Devin tells him his kiss just proved to her she's a lesbian? ("I
seem to have some kind of repellent," he stutters.) Or by the
Four Stooges' ongoing adventures—and misadventures—in
house flipping?
But first I want to pose a question one of my friends asked about
J.D.: Is FNL setting him up to be a future Todd Marinovich?
Marinovich, as football fans will remember, was a vaunted
quarterback who was micromanaged by his dad from birth. Like
Joe McCoy, Marv Marinovich scheduled his son's every minute
and meal. "I had a captive audience. … I told him when to eat,
what to eat, when to go to bed, when to get up, when to work
out, how to work out," Marv told Sports Illustrated. Here's a
passage from an earlier SI piece about Todd:
He has never eaten a Big Mac or an Oreo or a
Ding Dong. When he went to birthday parties
as a kid, he would take his own cake and ice
cream to avoid sugar and refined white flour.
He would eat homemade catsup, prepared with
honey. He did consume beef but not the kind
injected with hormones. He ate only
unprocessed dairy products. He teethed on
frozen kidney. When Todd was one month old,
Marv was already working on his son's
physical conditioning. He stretched his
hamstrings. Pushups were next. Marv invented
a game in which Todd would try to lift a
medicine ball onto a kitchen counter. Marv
also put him on a balance beam. Both
activities grew easier when Todd learned to
walk. There was a football in Todd's crib from
day one. "Not a real NFL ball," says Marv.
"That would be sick; it was a stuffed ball."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Marinovich started to fall apart when he
got to college—and out of reach of his father. His performance
was inconsistent. Eventually he was arrested for cocaine
possession. He left USC for the NFL but didn't make good there,
either. He ended up in all sorts of legal trouble. In one detail that
strikes me as particularly sad, he was arrested for suspected
possession of drug paraphernalia, after trying to make his escape
on a kid's bike, and told the police that his occupation was
"anarchist."
And who wouldn't be one, if your dad had been flexing your
hamstrings in the cradle? (Being called five times a day
suddenly may not look so bad, Hanna.) Is this where we're
supposed to think J.D. is headed?
Because, certainly, he's being squashed under his father's
thumb—or fist. If Joe began to lose it in the last episode—and I
can't agree, Emily, that hauling his son out the way he did is
good parenting; kids fuck up, especially kids under as much
pressure as J.D.—then he really lost it in this episode. Early on,
Joe pulls J.D. off the practice field to yell at him, causing Coach
Taylor to intercede and ask him to leave J.D. alone. And then
during that week's game, Joe gets worked up as J.D. throws
some incompletes and at halftime flips out at his son. Taylor
intercedes again, telling Joe, "You yelling at him is not going to
98/105
help. … Give him some breathing room." Then Taylor tries to
perk J.D. up with some well-meaning exposition about how his
own dad used to expect a lot from him on the field. It doesn't
work. J.D. has Stockholm syndrome. He looks blankly at Taylor
and says: "My dad—he just wants me to do my best. He just
wants me to succeed is all."
This is another way football can hurt—not through concussions
but through repercussions: the repercussions that come when a
parent can't see how his ambitions are warping his child's own
sense of adventure and risk. I feel for J.D. And I feel for Taylor,
who hasn't figured how to handle this situation—and whose
professional life may be threatened if he speaks honestly. Joe has
the power of money and influence behind him.
Meanwhile, I wanted to talk about Buddy and his brood; their
aborted road trip was perfectly pitched. Buddy is annoying in all
the recognizable ways an affectionate but clueless dad can be
("You look like a hippie!" he says to Tabitha in the airport), and
the kids are annoying in all the ways that clueless kids can be,
whining and kvetching at all moments. And: Street is heading to
New York; Riggins is applying to college—what do you make
of all this change in Dillon?
(P.S.: I totally cried when Riggins was watching Coach Taylor
and Billy describe his toughness and fortitude. Talk about male
sentimentality.)
From: Hanna Rosin
Subject: Week 7: "She Uses V-a-a-a-a-seline …"
Posted Monday, March 2, 2009, at 6:43 AM ET
Teethed on frozen kidney? Wow, that is stunning, and it makes
my hair stand on end. In my friend Margaret Talbot's great story
about prodigy athletes, she concludes it's mostly cold corporate
sponsors piling on the pressure. And one imagines the old Soviet
Olympic mill (and now the Chinese one) would eat kids alive.
But there's a particular pathos when it's the parents doing the
pushing. The stories about those young Chinese gymnasts who
didn't make the cut were heartbreaking. But at least they had
parents to go home to. In J.D.'s case, the parental love is entirely
contingent on his performance, or at least he perceives it that
way. "He's not mad at me?" J.D. anxiously asks his mother,
because her smiling face is no comfort if he can't answer that
question.
One reader suggested that Riggins may be jealous of J.D.'s
relationship with his dad. And there may be a hint of that in his
disdain. But it's hard for me to imagine. In answer to my
husband's question of last week: Yes, I would absolutely rather
raise a son like Riggins than one like J.D. It's just too painful to
watch that empty performance machine of a boy, one who's
afraid of his own shadow. And as Meghan points out, those boys
with no center spin out of control eventually. David, remember
who else in our life used to endlessly ask a version of that
question: "Are you mad at me?" (Answer: Stephen Glass.)
So, yes, football can destroy men. But this episode also ran in
the opposite direction, reminding us of the many ways in which
football can make heroes of losers. Fullback Jamarcus never told
his parents he plays football, because he knows they won't let
him. Then he gets into trouble at school and, in speaking to his
parents, Tami lets it slip. Until this point Tami has been telling
Coach to butt out, this is the principal's prerogative. But finally
she realizes how her husband can impose the discipline better in
this case. She explains to Jamarcus' parents how she's seen her
husband "empower" and "inspire" boys through football. And
also how her husband will make Jamarcus "regret the day" he
ever set another kid's hair on fire or misbehaved in school. The
parents had been thinking of football as a frivolous distraction,
and Tami successfully reframes it as Jamarcus' salvation.
Then there's the moving scene with Riggins that you mentioned,
Meghan. Riggins' life, which always seems so chaotic, turns into
one of those Olympic athlete fables on screen. Billy is so
articulate in praising his brother, and Coach uses that word I
love hearing him say—"fortitude." We are reminded that
football can make these boys into their best selves. In Riggins'
case, it's his ticket out, but not in a crass way. He's using it
reluctantly, so he won't get burned the way Smash did. Football
even works magic on those bratty Garrity kids, who finally get
into the game and stop torturing Buddy.
As for everyone leaving Dillon: They make it seem so far away
and impossible. Street is going to New York? Why not stop in
Austin first, just to acclimate? And then Landry, who's going to
that mythical college where all the hottest co-eds fall for nerds.
It's so dreamy, it just perpetuates the sense that life after the
Dillon Panthers is a fantasy.
Except for Devin. Boy, do I love that girl. "She uses V-a-a-a-aseline." That's a great song she steals, and it's nice to hear a girl
sing it. And I love the way she delivers those platitudes—
"Tomorrow's a brand new day"— in that flat nasal voice of hers.
I'd follow her out of Dillon.
From: Emily Bazelon
Subject: Week 7: Why Is Lyla All Blush and No Bite This Season?
Posted Monday, March 2, 2009, at 12:57 PM ET
99/105
Well, you have together so thoroughly thumped J.D.'s dad that
there's not much left for me to lay into. He is written to be
indefensible, and you're right that there are real sports dads who
spin completely out of control and damage their kids. (They
don't restrict themselves to sons who play football, either: In
women's tennis, there's the unforgettable father of Jennifer
Capriati.) Nobody sympathizes with these people because they
are parental wrecking balls.
I will say, though, that I think child prodigies pose a real
dilemma for families, one that I'm glad to be spared. When kids
have outsize, amazing talent, parents can nurture it and deprive
them of being normal, or they can shrug it off and leave their
children's potential untapped. Mr. McCoy is clearly mixing up
nurture with self-deluded suffocation. Still, I read J.D.'s line
about how his dad just wants him to do his best a little
differently than you did, Meghan. On some level, J.D. is right—
his father does want him to succeed. It's just that he wants it in a
way that's utterly self-serving. I wish the character had some hint
of subtlety so we could do more than just whack him. And J.D.
still just seems like a blank.
Meghan, I'm glad you brought up Buddy and that sad little
divorced-dad road trip. Here's a dad who over three seasons has
gone from buffoon to repentant loser to make-amends struggler.
The moment in which he lashes out at his kids and then flees
weeping down the road should melt the heart of even a bitterly
divorced mom, I would think.
But I had mixed feelings about the scene between Buddy and
Lyla that follows. It was written to be touching. She says, "Dad,
you've still got me," and he tells her that means a lot. But what's
up with how Lyla is all blush and no bite this season? She
patiently helps Riggins with the once-and-nevermore drunken
J.D. She nobly stands by her father while her siblings refuse to
forgive his previous sins. And then at the end of this episode,
there's that close-up, wide-eyed scene between her and Jason, in
which she selflessly tells him how great he'll do as a sports agent
in New York as their knees touch and they sway together in the
night.
I was taken with that shot for what it says about the capacity of
post-breakup friendship. In fact, one by one, I went for each of
these scenes of stalwart, good-girl Lyla. But rolled together, they
made me miss her sharp, smart, and smug side. I wonder, too,
about turning this strong and flawed female character into the
beloved helpmate of every man in her life. When was the last
time we heard about Lyla's college plans? Is the turn her role has
taken part of the rose-colored softening Meghan has legitimately
complained of—FNL maybe anticipating its own sunset by
rubbing out its mean streak? I dunno. But I sure am grateful for
Devin and her not-melodic Vaseline lyrics. (Though I have a
reality-check quibble like the one you raised, Hanna: Would a
14-year-old in small-town Texas really come out as a lesbian
without missing a garage-band beat?)
Subject: Week 7: Was That Scene Between Lyla and Street Maudlin or
Touching?
Updated Monday, March 2, 2009, at 2:55 PM ET
Emily, you're totally right that Joe McCoy wants "the best" for
his boy in a ham-fisted way. Check. The problem is that he is
convinced he knows best—and we all know what happens when
father knows best: Children rebel.
Meanwhile, Lyla. I haven't until now minded Lyla's good-girl
shtick—in part because she and Tim have had their flare-ups.
She seems to be in one of those calm phases teenagers do
sometimes go through. She's got a boyfriend. She's waiting to
find out about college. (Or is she in? I can't remember. I guess
that's a bad sign.) She does seem to have no real female
friends—which reminds me of the apt point you made about the
relative friendlessness of her adult counterpart, Tami. And it
reminds me, too, of how much sharper the bite of this show was
early on: Remember when all the girls in school were mean to
Lyla because she was sleeping with Riggins after Street's injury?
But when you think about it, back then, Lyla was striving even
harder to be a helpmeet. She was saccharine in her desire for
things to be "all right" after Street's injury; I think back to all
those heartbreaking scenes in the hospital where she was
coaxing him to be chipper about the future, and his surly face
showed us that he knew the future she imagined would never
come.
But that's exactly why the scene between her and Street, sitting
together in the twilight, touched me. It did have that postbreakup sense of loss—the loss that accompanies getting used to
things, accommodation, and plain old growing up. Just a few
short years ago, they couldn't even look at each other: Street was
so mad at her, and Lyla was so disappointed that her fantasy of
their life together had fallen apart.
It would be kind of funny if now she ditched Riggins to sleep
with J.D. Somehow, I doubt that's going to happen.
And, yes, Emily, I did wonder if Devin would feel comfortable
coming out to Landry. Then again, she referred to it as her
"secret." So I assume it was Landry's goofy, sincere openness
that made her feel safe.
From: Emily Bazelon
100/105
Subject: Week 8: Jason Street Makes a Brand-New Start of It—in Old New
York!
Posted Saturday, March 7, 2009, at 6:30 AM ET
The can't-miss theme this week is the journey. Jason and Tim hit
Manhattan. Tyra takes off for the rodeo circuit with Cash. Tami
journeys to a new house, at least in her imagination. The
bundling works, I think. The contrast between Tim as loving
sidekick and Cash as casual no-goodnik points up the worth of
each relationship. The line that captures the bond between Jason
and Tim: "Texas forever." I knew it was coming, and I wanted to
hear it, anyway. Less welcome is "He's a cowboy," which Tyra's
mom says to send her off with Cash, when really it's the reason
she shouldn't leave her college interviews behind. What kind of
boyfriend talks you into going away with him by saying he'll try
to be faithful?
A second, underlying theme this week is about making the big
pitch. Tami (egged on, of course, by Katie McCoy) tries to sell a
new, grand house to Eric. Matt tries to convince Coach to let
him play wide receiver, with Julie's help making the case. These
bids build to Jason, who pulls off the sale of his young lifetime.
Actually, it's Tim's idea to persuade Jason's former teammate to
sign with the sports agent Jason hopes to work for. Since the guy
has just summarily dismissed the boys from his office, Tim's
plan is a display of the fortitude Eric praised on the football
field, translated to the world of business. Maybe this kid will
make it in college.
When Jason wins the job and then shows up at Erin's door and
asks, before anything else, to hold his baby—well, it sounds
soapy as I write it out, but in the moment, it felt to me wholly
earned. We've seen Jason as savvy salesman before, on Buddy's
car lot and in the house-flipping deal. Now he's performing in a
bigger venue with the same blend of naivete and determination. I
appreciated the acting—the set of Jason's chin, the veins in his
forehead and neck. I also liked the way the script deals with his
paralysis. We've grown accustomed to the shots of Jason sitting
when everyone around him is standing. In this episode, we see a
shot of Tim helping Jason out of the car into his wheelchair, and
the camera lingers on his dangling legs, just long enough. It
drives home Jason's own analysis, in a bad moment on the New
York sidewalk, of the pity his wheelchair evokes. What did you
guys make of the New York visit? Is it one of the more
ingenious moves of the season, or am I falling for melodrama?
I was also taken with Tami and Eric and their house-buying
tempest. It seemed prescient, even, as recession fear deepens
around us. Tami wants a nicer, bigger house for all the natural
reasons. She keeps pointing to the backyard that Gracie Bell
would have to play in. Since yards have factored heavily into
every home-buying or rental decision my husband and I have
made since our kids were toddlers, I sympathized.
But I sympathized more with Eric when he told his wife that
much as he would love to give her and their kids and himself this
house, they can't have it. Maybe the mortgage is straight-up too
high—it's not entirely clear. Instead, what's unmistakable is the
anxiety Eric knows he would feel by making a purchase that
would give his family no financial wiggle room. We see his
internal conflict, and it's laced with gender politics. Eric frames
the decision in terms of what he can and can't give Tami, even
though she's working now, too. He clearly wants to be a husband
who can fulfill his wife's material desires. At the same time, he
calls her back to what really matters to their family. They are
together, whether they live in a three-bedroom split-level or have
a kitchen with granite countertops and a stone fireplace. "I don't
need this house," Tami tells him, like a woman sprung from a
trance. They take each other's hands and dance away from the
real estate agents, like escapees. I see the father-knows-best
aspect of their marriage. But as ever, I care so much more about
the spark (after all those years!) and their evanescent, playful
spirit. They're a walking rejoinder to the excesses of feminist
dogma.
Cash and Tyra, on the other hand, are a reminder of the
continuing relevance of that old story: the girl who is reaching
higher, only to be yanked back to earth by her cowboy man.
From: Hanna Rosin
Subject: Week 8: The Mother of All Crying Scenes
Posted Monday, March 9, 2009, at 6:52 AM ET
Emily, the current I saw running though all the plot twists you
describe is the different ways men and women make decisions.
In this episode, the two key women—Tami and Tyra—are
focused on relationships, pursuing conversation and connection
above all else. Meanwhile, the men—Jason, Matt, Eric—go for
hard results. In the end, the women don't exactly get what they
want, while the men do.
Tami keeps pestering Eric to have a "conversation" with her
about the house. "We are having a conversation!" Eric answers.
By which he means she asked and he told her "No!" But she
keeps it up, waking him in the middle of the night. "OK, can I
turn the light off?" My favorite moment is when they are all
sitting around the dinner table with Matt. Julie is haranguing
Eric about making Matt wide receiver. Tami is haranguing him
about the house. Finally, he gets sick of it. "All right, let's go,"
he says to Matt, who has just proposed they run 10 plays outside
to test him. If he gets them all, Eric has to think about making
him wide receiver. The boys skip out of all the talk and solve
their problems with cold, hard stats and football.
101/105
Now, you can reasonably argue that Eric was right about that
house. Maybe they couldn't afford it. But the point is how
quickly Tami caved during the second visit. She blinked once
then said, "I don't need this house" and declared her life full
enough with Jules and Gracie Bell and her husband. It's as if all
along, all she wanted was for Eric to hear her out and walk
through the process with her, and that was all.
Meghan, you've outlined this dynamic before: A man is having a
hard time, and then one of the show's tough women describes
how much it means that he is taking care of her. The result is
that she creates a safe space for his emotions—the "show's
distinctive brand of male sentimentality," you called it. A
version of that happens here. Tami is suddenly called back to her
responsibility as wife and mother, and that soothes her, and him.
In Tami's case, she doesn't sacrifice much. She still does have a
great family and a pretty decent house. But Tyra is doing the
same thing, no? She, too, is opting to take care of Cash, who has
convinced her what a tough time he has alone on the road. But in
her case it's fatal. Maybe Tami was telling Tyra one lesson but
showing her another. This is why the validating of the wifely
duties on FNL always grates on me.
Now as for male sentimentality, this episode wins the prize.
Here we have the mother of all crying scenes. Tim Riggins'
lovable mug, usually adored by the camera, is in this episode
contorted into a blotchy mess as he watches his friend finally get
his lady. He is sad and happy all at once, but mostly he is mush.
Yet his male sentimentality is acceptable because he has,
throughout the episode, acted in a manly, honorable way. Tim is
what you want in a wife. He doesn't wake up Jason in the middle
of the night. He doesn't want conversation; in fact, he mostly
speaks in three-word sentences. But what he does do is deliver
concrete solutions: Go to Paul Stuart. Leave Paul Stuart. Buy
two suits, two shirts, two ties. Get Wendell to sign with the
agent. Now go get your girl. And, unlike Tyra, Jason doesn't
have to choose between the girl and his future; he gets them
both.
As for whether I liked the New York diversion: It's always good
when characters get pushed into a new location. The famous
Sopranos Pine Barren episode, when Christopher and Paulie go
to the woods to kill the Russian, set the bar really high on this
kind of plot twist. The New York diversion wasn't that good, but
it did take on the question of Life after Dillon. And at least they
didn't just drop Street.
Subject: Week 8: Will Tyra End Up Dancing at the Landing Strip?
It's funny, I'm less bothered by the "father knows best" (as Emily
aptly put it) aspect of Eric and Tami's marriage than either of
you. Hanna, you say that the quickness with which Tami caved
to Eric grated on you. You connected it to Tyra's wishywashiness. And I take the point, but I read this scene differently:
The episode, I thought, was trying to draw a distinction between
Tami's compromise and Tyra's. After all, a feminist
marriage/partnership isn't one in which the woman gets her own
way all the time or even digs in her heels to make a point. It's
one where you learn to hear when your partner is giving you
good advice—acting as a counterweight. And Tami was getting
overexcited about something impractical. This is what's so hard
about relationships: learning when a "we" is more important than
an "I."
In this case, there was no way Eric could feel like part of the
"we" if they bought the house, because, as he sees it, he has
almost no job security. At the same time, though, he doesn't
handle it well at first, going rigid instead of just trying to talk to
Tami. I actually like this scene, because Tami got what she
really wanted: Eric's attention, his willingness to enter the
fantasy with her for a second, his ability to make her feel it is a
partnership even when he can't give her what she really wants. If
she says she doesn't "need" the house to make him feel better—
well, that's part of what keeps their spark alive, isn't it? And he
does it too, at least a bit.
Meanwhile, on the N.Y.-Texas front—the Riggins/Street trip to
the Big Apple has a gimmicky feel, but the show pulls it off. The
sequence about trying to buy a suit at Paul Stuart illustrates so
much about how easy it is to feel like a pie-eyed outsider in
moneyed New York. I remember feeling similarly as a teenager
sometimes, even though I grew up in Brooklyn. My parents were
teachers, and I went to few fancy stores until I was an adult;
sometimes I still get nervous in them, and I love how the show
brought that feeling to the fore.
"Why would you want to leave Texas?" Riggins asks Street in
disbelief after Jason reveals his grand plan to head to the Big
Apple. It's a measure of the show's success that the statement can
be taken at face value (who would want to leave this place with
its deep comradeship and warm football-filled nights?) and
heard from an ironic distance (who wouldn't want to leave this
place, with its flat landscape and its sense of being isolated from
larger opportunities?).
Tyra is in danger of falling subject to that isolation. I think the
writers are going to save her in the end, but it would be Wirelike of them to sacrifice her to apathy and lassitude; if this were
The Wire, we'd see her three seasons from now dancing at the
Landing Strip, unable to excavate herself from the world where
she grew up, despite her smarts and her desires.
102/105
Ugh, how annoying Joe McCoy is! He defines smarmy and
pushy. Most Joes come in a less obvious form, but from now on
I'm going to be playing a parlor game with my acquaintances
and colleagues. Which ones are Erics, and which ones are Joes?
Eric, after all, is the model of cooperation underneath all that
brusqueness. Joe, by contrast, epitomizes self-serving deafness
to the needs of others.
war stories
Meanwhile, anyone notice how tall all the women on this show
are?
Discomfiting as it is to say so, President Barack Obama was
right to cut Charles Freeman loose—but not for the reasons that
Freeman's foes might think.
From: Emily Bazelon
Subject: Week 8: Tim Riggins Would Make a Great Wife
Hanna, yes, Tim is like a wife, but of the rare sort who knows
when it's time to be an ex-wife. Like Lyla in the previous
episode, he is helping Jason by letting him go. His mush face is
what it feels like to watch an old, irreplaceable friend walk away
from you. For the first time, the show is recognizing that these
teenagers have to grow up. Meghan, I can totally see Tyra gone
bad at 20, swinging around a Landing Strip pole. When I was
ruing her decision to ditch school, my husband pointed out that
what the show got right was why. In her FNL world, it's a choice
that makes sense. Tyra's mom is the ultimate underminer: She is
constantly upping the man-pressure and tearing down college.
Tami is there for Tyra, but in this episode, she was a realist
about the results of that college interview at a moment when
Tyra needed a cheerleader. Then there was the interview itself.
Am I being an adult scold here, or did Tyra blow it the minute
she kept the college counselor waiting by saying she had to take
a call on her cell phone (from Cash, natch)? Big forces, little
choices—they add up to more than Tyra can push up the hill.
Meanwhile, Julie. A friend of mine has been ranting that she's a
"whiny self-indulgent twit." Hanna, you make her part of your
girl-talky-talk trope for telling Eric to let Matt try wide receiver.
But I like Julie this season. In that dinner-table scene, I thought
she pulled off assertive rather than whiny or petulant. Plus, she's
right. Eric's brusqueness was too brusque. He needed his women
to reel him back from the brink of unreasonable. OK, maybe the
male-female power dynamic wasn't quite even-steven this
episode. But if you take Tyra out of the picture for a sec, it's
close.
Intelligence Failure
Winners and losers in the knock-down fight over Charles Freeman's aborted
appointment.
By Fred Kaplan
It's always discomfiting when nominees to high office are done
in by mendacious pressure campaigns—and that's clearly what
happened to Freeman, who was about to be named chairman of
the National Intelligence Council, the interagency group that
produces the official National Intelligence Estimates.
But in this case, while the campaigners are no doubt celebrating
their victory now, they may find that in the long run they've
committed a strategic blunder.
When news of Freeman's impending appointment leaked last
month, two sets of opposition groups leapt into action. Pro-Israel
lobbyists, bloggers, and legislators protested that Freeman was
hostile to Israel and in the pay of the Saudis. Some human rights
groups, especially those sympathetic to Tibetans, complained
that he was an apologist for China's ruling dictators, even for
their crackdown on dissidents at Tiananmen Square.
The position of NIC chairman does not require Senate
confirmation, but several senators—Democrats and
Republicans—expressed their deep misgivings, publicly and
privately, and they were heard at the highest levels. On Tuesday,
Adm. Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence,
defended Freeman at a Senate hearing. If President Obama had
intended to put up a fight, he or one of his spokesmen would
have backed up Blair's defense. But the White House stayed
mum—and Freeman's doom was thus sealed.
Freeman's friends and former colleagues—many of whom had
worked with him during his many years as a foreign service
officer and a senior Pentagon official—decried the whole
scummy process. During the struggle for his nomination, which
was carried out almost entirely in the blogosphere, they
mustered evidence showing that Freeman's critics were
distorting his statements, taking them out of context, in some
cases wildly so.
For the most part, his defenders were right. For instance, the
critics claimed that Freeman once said that Chinese officials had
acted with restraint at Tiananmen Square and that they should
have plowed down the dissidents more quickly—when, in fact,
he said that they were more restrained and slower to act than
103/105
Mao Zedong would have been. He certainly did not condone the
crackdown. And though his speeches on the Middle East have
been more critical of Israel than of the Palestinians—here his
critics had a point—his critiques have been more unbalanced
than wrong; his main sin has been to hold Israel even partially at
fault. (For more on the things he has and hasn't said, click here.)
But a debate on the merits is beside the point. Once Freeman
became a lightning rod—once his impending job became about
him and some of the things he's said since leaving government
for the world of think tanks—President Obama had no choice
but to abort the appointment. Otherwise, he would have faced
not only a struggle over personnel but a never-ending series of
struggles over policy.
In the coming months, if he can be taken at his word, President
Obama will open talks with Syria and invite Iran to join a
regional conference on Afghanistan and Pakistan. China will
have to play some part in this conference, too, as it will with
forums on North Korea. And if any progress is made toward
Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, he will have to pressure the
Israelis to make compromises on policy toward Gaza and the
settlements.
All of these things will be difficult enough. They will be harder
still if domestic critics can scream that Obama's policy is being
manipulated by "that Saudi agent" or "that Chinese apologist"
who's running the intelligence community.
Or let's look at the present, not the future. On Tuesday, Adm.
Blair testified that the Iranians have neither enriched their
uranium to the point where it can be used as a weapon nor
decided whether to enrich it any further—that is, whether to
build nuclear weapons at all. Blair is respected in all quarters.
Some senators may not have liked this assessment—it implies
that the Iranian threat isn't so clear, much less urgent—but they
had to treat it seriously, given the source. However, if Freeman
were NIC director, Blair's words would have been received with
cocked eyebrows and howls of protest over "the politicization of
intelligence."
The accusations, now or in the future, would have been absurd.
The chairman of the National Intelligence Council is not
involved in making policy. Nor does he even have much impact
on the contents of National Intelligence Estimates. Wayne
White, a former State Department intelligence analyst who spent
26 years working in NIC sessions, told me in an e-mail today
that the agency specialists—the National Intelligence Officers on
specific regions or subjects—hammer out a consensus and write
the resulting reports. The NIC chairmen coordinate these
meetings, set the parameters of the discussion, pose questions
about assumptions, and sometimes push the participants for
more evidence—all of which can certainly affect an estimate—
but rarely do they influence its conclusion. White and several
other former officials who have known Freeman for many years
say that he would have been an excellent chairman and that,
though he certainly holds views, he would never have let them
get in the way of hard analysis.
But, again, this is irrelevant. Intelligence has to be credible as
well as correct, and it's credible only if it appears to be objective.
Its politicization during the Bush-Cheney era only sharpens this
point—and heightens President Obama's sensitivity to its
dictates.
If Obama wants to change foreign policy in controversial ways,
intelligence will play a supporting role—and that means it will
have to be, and appear to be, purer than usual. Can anyone name
the last two or three NIC chairmen? (I can't.) They aren't highprofile figures, and there's a reason for that.
Chas Freeman is a high-profile figure. He became one by his
own design, through public speeches, some of them deliberately
provocative. Making him NIC chairman would—unjustly but
unavoidably—hurl all intelligence, and all policy based on
intelligence, into the fray of fractious politics.
However, this is where Freeman's foes misplayed their hand.
Had they let Freeman step into the job, they could have used him
as the whipping boy for all foreign-policy measures they don't
like—especially those involving the Middle East and China—
and it might have been easier for them to rally opposition. But
now it will be indisputably clear that the president is the one
making policy. They're left with Barack Obama as their target—
and one thing that's clear, so far, is that those who sling mud at
Obama wind up hitting themselves.
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Among the bloggers untangling the Freeman saga, Time's Joe
Klein and the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan have been the most
balanced and probing. Their links lay out the cases made by the
critics and the defenders—and point to Freeman's actual
remarks, which you should definitely read if you want to draw
your own conclusion. It's certainly possible to come out on either
side, no matter which way you lean going into the debate.
Freeman has been self-consciously contentious on the Middle
East. Critics have most frequently cited this remark, which he
made during one of his speeches:
Demonstrably, Israel excels at war; sadly, it
has shown no talent for peace. For almost forty
years, Israel has had land beyond its
104/105
previously established borders to trade for
peace. It has been unable to make this
exchange except when a deal was crafted for it
by the United States, imposed on it by
American pressure, and sustained at American
taxpayer expense. For the past half decade
Israel has enjoyed carte blanche from the
United States to experiment with any policy it
favored to stabilize its relations with the
Palestinians and its other Arab neighbors,
including most recently its efforts to bomb
Lebanon into peaceful coexistence with it and
to smother Palestinian democracy in its cradle.
Certainly there's much truth here, though it's the sort of truth that
can't safely be argued in American politics (even if it's quite
common in Israeli politics). Still, someone could file similar
charges against the Palestinians and some of their Arab allies—
especially that first eye-catching sentence—but Freeman doesn't.
On Tuesday, when Freeman withdrew his name from
consideration, he issued a withering statement—which was
published on Foreign Policy's Web site—condemning the
"tactics of the Israel Lobby," which "plumb the depths of
dishonor and indecency and include character assassination,
selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the
fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth."
Has any other officeholder, aspiring or otherwise, ever released
such an outburst? Upon reading it, President Obama must have
heaved a sigh of relief that he'd sidestepped a serious shit storm.
105/105
105/105

Slate.com

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