Slate.com

Transcription

Slate.com

Slate.com
Table of Contents
grieving
The Long Goodbye
human nature
Advanced Search
Fetal Foreclosure
books
idolatry
The Call of the Wild
Judge Dread
books
jurisprudence
The Educational Experiment We Really Need
Homesteaders in the Hood
change-o-meter
moneybox
Return of the Obamamaniacs
I Want To Buy Troubled Assets
change-o-meter
moneybox
Balancing Act
Man Up, Capitalists!
change-o-meter
moneybox
Hot-Air Emissions
House of Cards
change-o-meter
movies
Love the Banks, Hate the Bankers
Driving Mr. Crazy
chatterbox
movies
Jihad Lite
Monsters vs. Aliens
corrections
my goodness
Corrections
Deserving Kids, Undeserving Mom
culture gabfest
other magazines
The Culture Gabfest "Why Do I Know This Word?" Edition
Rage Against the Machine
dear prudence
poem
Reunited, and It Feels So Bad
"The Age"
explainer
politics
Murder, She Wrote
The President Will See You Now
explainer
politics
Jailhouse Doc
Universal Confusion
explainer
politics
States' Rights
Hard Times
explainer
politics
Have Prostate Exams Been Discredited?
The First Family's First Vegetables
family
politics
The Real World Threw Up All Over Us
The "E" Word
fighting words
press box
An Army of Extremists
The Pharm-Party Meme
food
Science
The Locavore's Dilemma
My Own Private B.O.
foreigners
slate fare
Ctrl-Alt-Diplomacy
What Is Good Design Now?
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
1/95
slate v
tv club
Gringo Guns
Friday Night Lights, Season 3
slate v
war stories
A Guy Walks Into a Bar ...
CT or COIN?
slate v
Mary Gaitskill: "Don't Cry"
slate v
Dear Prudence: Insulting Wedding Gift
Advanced Search
Friday, October 19, 2001, at 6:39 PM ET
sports nut
Wake Me When It's Over
supreme court dispatches
The Supreme Court Reviews Hillary: The Movie
technology
Stop Whining About Facebook's Redesign
books
The Call of the Wild
Wells Tower's debut collection is strong stuff.
By Juliet Lapidos
Tuesday, March 24, 2009, at 7:14 AM ET
television
Just Look Away
the best policy
The Real AIG Scandal, Continued!
the big idea
Book End
the chat room
Dial It Down
the green lantern
Are Microwave Ovens Good for the Environment?
today's business press
In Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis—that classic essay
on the origins of American republicanism—the historian pauses
over a description of what happens to the pioneer when
civilization catches up to him. It comes from an 1830s guide to
the West. "He builds his cabin, gathers around him a few other
families of similar tastes and habits … till the neighbors crowd
around, roads, bridges, and fields annoy him, and he lacks elbow
room. The preemption law enables him to dispose of his cabin
and cornfield to the next class of emigrants; and, to employ his
own figures, he 'breaks for the high timber,' 'clears out for the
New Purchase,' or migrates to Arkansas or Texas, to work the
same process over."
Obamanomics? President To Tackle Tax Reform Next
today's papers
Pressing the Reset Button on Afghanistan
today's papers
Extreme Makeover: Financial Edition
today's papers
This anti-social frontiersman with his elbows out is the guiding
spirit of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, a short-story
collection by Wells Tower. Though not exactly new to the
literary scene—his stories have appeared in The New Yorker, the
Paris Review, and Harper's—he has now published his first
book, and suitably enough, it forges into the wilder regions of
the American character in lucid, vernacular prose.
Obama: Just a Little Patience
today's papers
Investors Cheer Geithner (For Once)
today's papers
White House Courts Investors
today's papers
Obama Hurries Toward Solutions
today's papers
Where Does It Come From, Where Does It Go?
The title story, set during the Viking era, is simultaneously
unlike anything else in the collection and the best example of
what Tower is up to. The characters are, yes, marauding Vikings
who attack a neighboring island without provocation. Although
Harald, the narrator, feels he has outgrown the whole rape-andpillage game, and although his wife urges him to stay home, he
hops on the longboat and then watches as his compatriots go "on
a real binge," hanging monks from trees.
The pathos in this story comes not from the brutality itself, but
from Harald's curious detachment, which he conveys in riveting
2/95
sentences. Here's his description of a grotesque ritual called the
"blood eagle":
[Djarf] placed the point of his sword to one
side of Naddod's spine. He leaned into it and
worked the steel in gingerly, delicately
crunching through one rib at a time until he'd
made an incision about a foot long. …Then he
knelt and put his hands into the cuts. He
fumbled around in there a second, and then
drew Naddod's lungs out through the slits. As
Naddod huffed and gasped, the lungs flapped,
looking sort of like a pair of wings. I had to
turn away myself.
Tower's precise rendition of this grisly surgery—the crunch of
the ribs, the image of Djarf fumbling around Naddod's innards,
the lungs flapping like wings—builds to Harald's understated
response, as if to a paper cut. He's the pillager-as-spectator,
caught in the limbo between true callousness and true feeling,
trapped—despite his longboat—in his passivity.
Marauding is a practical necessity ("Once you back down from
one job, you're lucky if they'll even let you put in for a flat-fee
trade escort"), and, besides, it's less "crazy-making" than
domestic life, because the latter is so precarious. As Harald notes
in the melancholy last paragraph, "You wish you hated those
people, your wife and children, because you know the things the
world will do to them, because you have done some of those
things yourself. … [S]till you wake up late at night and lie there
listening for the creak and splash of oars, the clank of steel, the
sounds of men rowing toward your home." Hearth and home,
wife and children are simply not as durable as oars and steel.
The Vikings, of course, are really Americans—invading a tiny
country for no apparent reason. And all the American characters
in the collection are Vikings—randomly violent, tough, and
dangerous to know—just on a smaller scale. They are real-estate
developers, carpenters, and entrepreneur inventors, bumbling
through life, alienating their spouses, relatives, and friends.
Tower isn't the first writer to document the anti-social American
spirit, but he's a keen observer of how the drive to break out of
confinement rarely leads to true release. Like Harald, Tower's
other characters—for the most part—do love their families, but
they constantly find themselves striking out alone. And their
missions have a way of backfiring.
Take Matthew, the narrator in "Retreat," a thrice-married realestate developer who has "lived and profited in nine American
cities" and just recently bought a small mountain in Maine. Since
childhood, he's had a tense relationship with his brother,
Stephen, but after six strong drinks, "our knotty history unkinks
itself into a sad and simple thing. I go wet at the eyes for my
brother and swell with regret at the thirty-nine years we've spent
lost to each other." He invites Stephen up for a weekend hunting
trip with the best intentions but antagonizes him compulsively:
He's late for the airport pickup, and their reunion starts off with a
fight. Back at his cabin, he pressures Stephen to spend his life
savings on a real-estate venture, then storms off to bed. When
Stephen tries to communicate his sense of loneliness, Matthew
lets out "a long, low fart."
These cruelties are uniformly petty: just so many paper cuts. Yet
the cumulative effect is excruciating for Stephen, as well as for
the reader watching Matthew ruin the weekend. Not least, they
are excruciating for Matthew himself, who succeeds only in
walling himself off. In the final scenes, Matthew shoots a moose
and feels momentarily elated. But the meat is spoiled: "[T]here
was a slight pungency to it, a dark diarrheal scent gathering in
the air." While Stephen laughs it off, vowing to hunt again the
next day, Matthew stubbornly eats his putrid steak—a bizarre
bid to deny the fruitlessness of their trip, which becomes yet
another point of separation between the two brothers.
Many of Tower's protagonists are so hypermasculine they're
Hemingway-esque. Yet one of his best-drawn characters is
Jacey, the teenage girl in "Wild America." The title is lightly
comic, setting the reader up for another story like "Retreat."
What's "wild" here is not a geographic area—although much of
the action takes place in a state forest. It's the catty competition
between Jacey, "with a shiny chin and forehead and a figure like
a pickle jar," and her cousin, Maya, "a five-foot-ten-inch mantis
of legendary poise and ballet repute." Their casus belli is
Leander, an unhygienic boy with no trace of his namesake's
seductive warmth, whom Jacey kissed recently at the local
planetarium. When the three set off together for a walk, Maya
first plays the part of wingwoman, talking up Jacey's
accomplishments, but soon tires of that role and starts to flirt
with Leander.
Tower's portrayal of Jacey's reaction is pitch-perfect: Unable to
compete with Maya, she lashes out in an agonizingly childish
but still hurtful way. "[W]hy don't you just go off somewhere
and fuck? I mean, there's all kinds of bushes and stuff around
here for you all to fuck in. … She'll totally do it. She's a pretty
big slut." All Jacey can do after her outburst is run off alone:
Tension leads quickly to ferocity, then to the fantasy of isolation.
Adventure thwarted, Jacey wants to "go back to the afternoon
dark of her mother's house and watch TV and eat Triscuit
crackers topped with cheddar cheese and a pickle coin." But she
feels "Maya and Leander's eyes on her, watching her loiter on
the bank like a fool" and doesn't have the guts to "let them see
her heading home." She's the classic adolescent and the classic
Tower character—deeply ambivalent about human bonding, she
tries to break away and finds herself trapped.
Turner's pioneer is aggressive by necessity: To succeed, he
acquired, in Turner's phrasing, "that coarseness and strength …
that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism,
working for good and for evil." Tower's characters have
3/95
inherited the frontier mentality, but the wilderness they're taking
on is no longer a physical space: It's other people and
themselves. Their aggression is not so much willed as impelled,
and while the pioneer at least creates something—a cabin, then a
town—before leaving it all behind, Matthew, Jacey, and the rest
only tear things down. Nor does Tower give them the solacing
illusion that in this destructive process, they are claiming their
freedom. It's a bleak state of affairs, alleviated for the reader—
though not for pillagers themselves—by the sharp, brutal clarity
of the author's prose.
books
The Educational Experiment We Really
Need
What the Knowledge Is Power Program has yet to prove.
By Sara Mosle
Monday, March 23, 2009, at 6:58 AM ET
In his new book, Work Hard. Be Nice., Jay Mathews claims that
the Knowledge Is Power Program is the "best" program serving
severely disadvantaged, minority-group students in America
today. Let me begin—before I'm denounced as a traitor to the
cause of educational reform—by saying that I'm inclined to
agree. The improbable story of how KIPP was founded in 1994
by David Levin and Michael Feinberg, two young Teach for
America alumni in Houston, is thrilling and worthy reading.
KIPP's mission has been akin to putting the first man on the
moon: an all-out education race, requiring extraordinary, roundthe-clock dedication from parents, students, and teachers alike.
But the program is not the proven, replicable model for
eliminating the achievement gap in the inner city that Mathews
imagines, and this distinction is crucial. KIPP may be something
more important: a unique chance to test, once and for all, the
alluring but suspect notion that there actually is an educational
panacea for social inequality. As of yet, the evidence for such a
thing doesn't exist.
There have always been model school programs that work.
There have even been some that have been successfully
replicated in different parts of the country. But no program has
shown it can work for all, or even most, disadvantaged children
within a single city or neighborhood. Instead, as critics point out,
such model programs tend to skim off those kids who are
already better positioned (thanks to better home environments,
greater natural gifts, savvier or better-educated parents, etc.) to
escape the ghetto. Meanwhile, regular public schools are left
with a more distilled population of struggling students.
Similarly, model programs tend to attract young, talented, and
adventurous teachers, who are willing or able to work long hours
for low pay. (Model schools also tend to attract the most
philanthropic dollars, which effectively boost per-pupil
expenditures, even as such programs can still brag they use no
more tax dollars than traditional public schools.) Indeed,
Mathews likens KIPP to a cult "without the dues or the weird
robes." But by definition, a cult is a fringe movement. To date,
no one—including such mighty players as the Gates
Foundation—has figured out how to take an educational cult and
make it the predominant religion within any urban system.
Mathews insists that KIPP has solved this riddle. It's true that
perhaps no other model program has risen so far so fast, with
such consistently strong test scores. KIPP now has 66 academies
in 19 states. Still, 66 academies amount to just three schools, on
average, per state. Houston has far and away the highest
concentration with, currently, seven middle schools, three
elementary schools, and one high school. But this is in a school
system with 200,000 students, nearly 80 percent of whom
qualify for reduced or free lunches. At the moment, like every
other model program before it, KIPP serves only a tiny fraction
of disadvantaged students within any given district. And as
education researcher Richard Rothstein has rightly noted,
comparing students from different schools, even within the same
disadvantaged neighborhoods, is very difficult to do in a
rigorous, scientific way. Just because KIPP uses a lottery for
admissions, for example, does not tell us anything about the selfselecting nature of the pool from which this lottery is drawn.
(Rothstein's own research—here and here—has shown that KIPP
students come from families that are better off, or better
educated, than their regular public school or special-education
counterparts.)
What is more, KIPP's approach is implicitly, but obviously, not
designed to suit all students—or, for that matter, all parents or
teachers. For decades, educators argued that disadvantaged
children could succeed if only they received the same education
as more advantaged, middle-class students. Many, if not most, of
the nation's best public and private schools are decidedly
progressive, with less emphasis on test scores and more on
critical thinking skills, with rich arts, music, sports, and other
extracurricular programs. Why shouldn't poorer children enjoy
the same?
But KIPP is not the same. The program has usefully changed the
debate by acknowledging the obvious: Kids who grow up poor,
with no books or with functionally illiterate parents, in crimeridden neighborhoods, with destructive peer influences and
without access to basic medical care (such as glasses to help
them read), need something significantly more than—and
different from—kids who grow up with every economic and
educational advantage on which to build. For one, the academic
program at KIPP is relentless in its back-to-basics focus: a boot
camp that runs nearly 10 hours a day, from 7:30 a.m. until 5
p.m., not including transportation and homework, and half a day
every other Saturday.
4/95
There is a lot of rote learning and test prep, born of the
program's emphasis on demonstrable results. Enrichment
programs exist (one Bronx school has a remarkable orchestra)
but are necessarily limited, because precious time must also be
devoted to teaching social skills that middle-class students take
for granted—for example, how to follow a speaker with one's
eyes and nod as one takes in information. In addition, KIPP
includes an extended summer school. (Research has shown that
middle-class students consolidate and even improve on their
educational gains during the summer months, while
underprivileged students slip backward, negating their progress
during the academic year.)
As a result, KIPP teachers typically work 65-hour weeks and a
longer school year. Recognizing that students need more out-ofschool aid to supplement their educations, the program also
requires its staff to be available to students by phone after hours
for homework help and moral support. For this overtime (which
represents 60 percent more time in the classroom alone, on
average, than in regular public schools), teachers receive just 20
percent more pay. Unsurprisingly, turnover is high. The program
has relied heavily on the ever-renewing supply of very young
(and thus less expensive) Teach for America alums, whose
numbers, while growing, are decidedly finite. Indeed, it's unclear
whether KIPP would exist were it not for TFA (and its own
philanthropic investment in recruitment and training, which has
not come cheap).
For example, many of KIPP's now-lauded approaches were first
developed not by Levin and Feinberg but by a career publicschool teacher in Houston whose methods they admired back
when they were TFAers. Levin and Feinberg tried to recruit their
mentor to help launch KIPP, but as a middle-aged single mother,
she felt she couldn't afford to join their revolution. If KIPP's
success is ever to become widespread, it's going to have to find
more room for such everyday heroes, who are not less talented
than eager, young TFAers but who do have lives, families, and
financial needs outside their jobs.
Parents or guardians, too, must be hardy souls at KIPP. They
have to sign a contract saying they agree to KIPP's exacting
schedule, which serves, intentionally or not, to eliminate kids
from less involved or determined families. While KIPP does
have outreach efforts to broaden its applicant pool, only the most
determined parents are likely to respond to such overtures and
sign KIPP's demanding contract. This dedication suggests a
higher value on education within these families, and thus kids
better able or willing to learn. And the weakest students, not
surprisingly, get disproportionately winnowed. In KIPP's schools
in the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, the worstperforming kids have dropped out (or been expelled) in greater
numbers in the higher grades; the result has been to inflate the
schools' grade-to-grade improvement.
Such a regimen isn't for everyone, but KIPP has shown that with
the right underprivileged population, it can make a significant,
consistent difference—which is a lot more than most charter
programs can say. (A 2006 report by the Education
Department—i.e., under a Republican administration—revealed
that traditional public schools significantly outperform charter
programs in reading and math.) Far from finding the boot-camp
atmosphere dispiriting, kids—at least, those who stay—clearly
adore KIPP. This may be the program's singular
accomplishment: It's made "back to basics" fun. However, even
Mathews, the KIPP champion, describes an approach to
discipline that sometimes seems unduly harsh; in less expert
hands, such an approach could easily deteriorate into something
more disturbing, and if implemented on a wide scale, might well
turn off as many students and parents as it helps. Finally, even
with such gargantuan efforts, KIPP helps to close, but does not
remotely eliminate, the achievement gap in the inner city. It is
not the answer to urban ills that Mathews proposes.
But because KIPP has done so much better than so many other
charter programs, it has earned the right to shoot not only for the
moon but beyond. Given this, what mystifies me about KIPP is
that it has scattered its resources across the country—opening
just a few schools in any one state—instead of trying to
concentrate its resources more fully in one community.
No doubt the strategy partly reflects practical hurdles. States
may limit the number of charter programs (although this may
change if President Obama gets his way with his new education
plan). In addition, there may be union or administrative
opposition, although until recently, KIPP and the teachers unions
had peacefully coexisted. (Now, a dispute between one KIPP
school in Brooklyn and New York's United Federation of
Teachers threatens this détente.)
But since the biggest debate about KIPP, on both the ideological
left and right, is whether or not its methods can work for all
disadvantaged children (instead of just a handful of selfselecting families), why wouldn't it—and its financial,
ideological, and media backers—have a strong interest in
answering this question once and for all by taking on an entire
urban area or even, for that matter, a single neighborhood as,
say, Geoffrey Canada has tried to do in Harlem with his
Harlem's Children's Zone?
There's something perversely evasive about KIPP's opening up
just one school in Dallas, one school in Albany, N.Y., one
school in Oakland, Calif., one school in Charlotte, N.C., one
school in Nashville, Tenn., and so on—as if the program
recognizes that its best chance at success is to be the exception
rather than the rule in any city where it operates. Perhaps this
approach made sense in the program's early years, when it
needed to build credibility and attract financing. But now it has
done both. Until KIPP tries to succeed within an entire, single
community, it is, for all its remarkable rise and deserved praise,
5/95
just another model program that has yet to prove it can succeed
with all—or even most—disadvantaged children.
change-o-meter
Return of the Obamamaniacs
Thirteen million campaign supporters are being recalled to duty in defense of
the president's budget.
campaign, for now the 'Meter is heartened to learn that 13
million people are aware that there's a budget bill in the first
place and awards five points—which it will retract the moment
an overeager Obama volunteer calls its cell phone.
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.
By Chris Wilson
Thursday, March 26, 2009, at 4:32 PM ET
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.
It's big picture day in Washington as the administration prepares
plans to overhaul both the financial regulation system and the
war in Afghanistan. A campaign juggernaut fires up its engines
to defend President Obama's budget as he shifts his attention to
two crucial summits next week. Obama scores a 45 on the
Change-o-Meter.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced today that
Obama will press for increased regulation of the global financial
system when he travels to London next week for the G20
summit. Setting a good example at home, the administration
announced an ambitious proposal to ratchet up oversight of
domestic financial institutions, including hedge funds and
insurers like AIG, in hopes of erecting better levees against
future economic maelstroms. The 'Meter approves, if only out of
self-interest in not making stratospheric bailouts a once-a-decade
thing: 25 points.
Speaking of huge, intractable problems, a plan for
Afghanistan—details of which will emerge soon—would have
the United States take "unabashed ownership" of the war effort
there, as the Washington Post put it today. The plan includes a
major increase in American civilian officials and shifting
responsibilities for American allies, many of whom are drawing
down their commitment of combat troops in the region. The
'Meter is mostly just pleased that there's a coherent plan for the
eight-year-old war effort and awards 15 points for that fact as
details continue to emerge. Expect to hear much more as Obama
heads to a NATO summit after the G20 meeting.
Meanwhile, the gargantuan organization of supporters—and,
more important, their 13 million e-mail addresses—that the
Obama organization compiled during the campaign is being
reconjured on behalf of Obama's budget proposal. While there is
some fear that this Obamamaniac hydra could end up bullying
through his agenda with a massive write-your-congressman
change-o-meter
Balancing Act
Foreign leaders criticize U.S economic plans, but the economy continues to
show glimmers of hope.
By Karen Shih
Wednesday, March 25, 2009, at 3:06 PM ET
President Obama faced tough questions on his new budget and
economic-recovery plans during a nationally televised press
conference last night and woke up today to criticism from the
European Union and Mexico. But the public still loves him, and
Wall Street's sustained rally is alleviating a little of the doom and
gloom. The good and the bad almost cancel each other out,
giving Obama a paltry 5 points on the Change-o-meter today.
During Obama's second major prime-time news conference,
reporters pressed the president about his first budget plan and his
solutions to economic woes plaguing the country. Reporters
asked no questions about Iraq or Afghanistan, focusing almost
exclusively on the economy. The event felt particularly somber
compared with Obama's spate of more lighthearted appearances
over the last week, presenting his NCAA bracket on ESPN and
chatting with Jay Leno on The Tonight Show. Some have
accused Obama of wasting his time with trivial matters to appeal
to the American public (which still views him favorably and
seems to like his many appearances), overexposing himself, and
not focusing on the problems at hand. Either way, Obama's
media (over)exposure represents a change from the last couple
of administrations—he's already had half as many prime-time
press conferences as both Bush and Clinton did in their entire
eight-year tenures—even if he isn't saying anything surprising.
The 'Meter awards 10 points for style and immediately subtracts
five for lack of substance, for a total of five points.
6/95
Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek, the current president of
the European Union, called Obama's plan to stimulate spending
as a way out of the recession a "road to hell." The harsh rhetoric
is the toughest so far from a European leader, many of whom
have reservations about the U.S. plan for economic recovery.
The 'Meter doesn't lose too much sleep fretting over the approval
of all 27 EU nations but still deducts five points for this
distraction.
Spirits are up, however, on Wall Street, with stocks continuing
to rally after news that home sales rose in February, the first
increase in seven months. Orders for major manufactured goods
were up last month as well. While it's obscenely early to declare
a ratification of Obama's policies, hope in the markets
unquestionably boosts his political capital. The 'Meter awards 10
points.
To the south, Mexico's economic problems, plus rampant drug
violence fueled by American weapons and America's drug
appetite, are straining its relations with the United States. Obama
said earlier this month that he would consider deploying the
National Guard to parts of the border to contain drug-related
violence on the U.S. side and promised a plan "within a few
months." Now it looks as if the decision can't wait. Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton is in Mexico today, and Obama plans to
visit in April, but the 'Meter docks the administration five points
for not taking more aggressive measures to shore up relations
with Mexico. As if the administration needed another problem to
deal with.
change-o-meter
Hot-Air Emissions
Insults are flying in Washington while markets show a heartbeat.
By Emily Lowe
Tuesday, March 24, 2009, at 4:05 PM ET
It's another day of only-in-Washington trash talking. Rep.
Barney Frank calls Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia a
homophobe. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez calls President
Obama ignorant. And a couple of Republicans are calling for
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's ouster. But all the
bullying aside, it's a good day for the White House. In light of
some major AIG execs giving back their bonuses, the markets
surging, and a promising move on climate-change policy,
Obama and his cohorts earn a 40 on the Change-o-Meter today.
New York state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced
last night that he has already cajoled 18 of the top 25 AIG
executives into giving back their bonuses, a not-so-random act
of kindness adding up to $50 million so far. Cuomo presented
the execs with a simple choice: return the bonus checks or have
their names released to the angry mob with pitchforks on the
sidewalk outside. The news is good for everyone: Congress is
putting a hold on the highly reactionary bonus-busting
legislation drafted last week, and the public will keep the money
it meant to spend on tar and feathers. From the 'Meter's
standpoint, Obama wins points for managing to keep his hands
clean. It awards 15 points for a reasonably tidy solution to the
AIG mess—for today, anyway.
Despite early rumblings from the peanut gallery, markets rallied
yesterday at the announcement of the Treasury Department's
plan to buy up banks' toxic assets, with the Dow soaring 6.8
percent to its highest level in months. At a time when whispered
words like resignation are whistling through Geithner's office,
this marked show of confidence on the trading floor should
cheer Obama, who was asked on Sunday whether he might
consider getting himself a new treasury secretary. Fifteen points
for signs of renewed confidence after a solid week of dubious
glances toward the Treasury.
Finally, the new leadership at the Environmental Protection
Agency is pressing the White House to decide how to regulate
greenhouse gases, a decision that the Bush administration
craftily avoided when the Supreme Court asked for it in 2007.
Obama has stated pretty explicitly that he hopes to cap
greenhouse-gas emissions, despite warnings from critics that the
effect of such regulation could be politically treacherous. The
proposal from the EPA is just the first of many steps in the
process to limit emissions, but the 'Meter awards 10 points for
the long-overdue action.
change-o-meter
Love the Banks, Hate the Bankers
The latest bailout effort strikes a dissonant chord against last week's furor.
7/95
By Molly Redden
Monday, March 23, 2009, at 4:44 PM ET
President Obama announces a plan to rescue toxic bank assets,
but not in a way that will get America's mind off all that AIG
business. His sense of responsibility for the war in Afghanistan
rescues him for a 15 on the Change-o-Meter.
This morning, embattled Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner
announced the details of the Obama administration's bank-asset
rescue plan. Bloggers and politicos haven't quite caught up with
criticism yet (hey, it's Monday), but that doesn't mean the
administration is home-free. New York Times columnist Paul
Krugman has already gone for the jugular, likening the plan to
the "cash for trash" policy that the Bush administration gave up
on six months ago. Krugman blasts the Obama administration
for taking the easy way out and artificially driving up the price
of toxic bank assets with "financial hocus-pocus" instead of
merely guaranteeing bank debts. Ouch. Others are sure to
follow. It's never a good sign for your multibillion-dollar bankrescue plan when the economist-prince of the Times op-ed page
is at the front of the pundit pack. Add 10 for trying, but subtract
five for ensuing poor reviews.
What's more (speaking of public opinion), the timing of the
plan's announcement was far from optimal: It comes after a
week during which, as E.J. Dionne notes, the Obama team
refused to stay on message about the AIG bonuses. Chief
economic adviser Larry Summers had said the administration
can't govern out of anger, but then Obama said in so many words
that it very well could, giving Geithner marching orders to "use
that leverage and pursue every single legal avenue to block these
bonuses." Today, Obama and his aides are wary of Congress'
proposal to tax the AIG bonuses to Timbuktu.
Obama risks political capital with every further step to salvage
banks that made poor choices as the housing bubble grew. This
is no time to feed the "rewarding Wall Street" narrative that
ruffled so many feathers last week, especially when the
president's got big plans for health care and education. (See the
Times' Sheryl Gay Stolberg on the psychology of ignoring the
important stuff.) Still, the 'Meter docks five; with confidence so
vital to economic recovery, a clear message from the White
House is essential.
Does this mean the 'Meter is a big goose egg? Hardly. Yesterday
on 60 Minutes, Obama spoke two words that have spent the last
eight years exiled from the president's vocabulary: "exit
strategy." Just more than a month after announcing a buildup of
17,000 troops in Afghanistan, Obama said that the United States
and NATO must look for a way out of the war in Afghanistan
because "there's got to be a sense that this is not perpetual drift."
For remembering that troops can come out of battle as well as go
in, Obama gets 15 points.
chatterbox
Jihad Lite
Al-Qaida's dumbed-down recruitment manual.
By Timothy Noah
The Latin Mass is long gone, the Metropolitan Opera beams
subtitles from seat backs, and Wikipedia is depopulating library
stacks. Now even al-Qaida is cutting corners and dumbing down.
The evidence is A Course in the Art of Recruitment, a document
that started appearing on jihadi Web sites this past summer. Its
provenance is uncertain, but The Art of Recruitment is making its
way through al-Qaida's distribution network, and its author's
nom de guerre is Abu-Amr al-Qaidi. (Al-Qaidi means "of alQaida.") Writing in the CTC Sentinel, a publication of the
Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, Brian Fishman and
Abdullah Warius describe the 51-page manual as a tool
"designed to provide less-skilled jihadist recruiters operating
independently of any cohesive terrorist organization the tools to
effectively recruit secular and moderate Muslims into the global
jihadist movement." It's Terrorism for Dummies.
The Art of Recruitment is hardly the first al-Qaida training
manual to surface, but it represents something of a breakthrough
in the terror group's ability to provide simple and practical
advice to its far-flung franchisees. As such, it's a useful window
on the considerable (and, to some extent, reassuring) difficulties
involved in persuading somebody to become a terrorist. "The
book is so basic," observed NPR's Dina Temple-Raston in a
March 23 report, that "it seems to suggest al-Qaida is getting
desperate for new members." Less reassuringly, The Art of
Recruitment provides what may prove handy tips for lessexperienced terror groups to steer around these difficulties.
These include:

Nobody Likes a Pushy Terrorist! Reaffirming a strategy
long familiar to weirdo cults, Abu-Amr recommends
8/95




the soft sell. "Be careful not to discuss the concerns of
Muslims with the recruit at the beginning," he advises,
"so you do not seem as if you are attempting to recruit
him." Don't get into religious arguments with your
prospect or criticize his actions. As matters progress,
you can talk about mujahedeen and insurgents in a
general sort of way, but avoid mentioning al-Qaida
because your recruit may be "negatively affected by the
calumnies of the media" toward this much-maligned
organization.
Brush Up on Your Quran. You don't have to be a
scholar, but "seek knowledge, even if it is very little,"
so you can be prepared when your recruit experiences
religious doubt. "One suspicion only is enough to move
people off the road, particularly in the beginning."
Doubt is a part of life. Be ready for it!
Isolate, Isolate, Isolate! Although recruiters are advised
to take care at first not to separate a recruit from his
"family, society, and reality," eventually it becomes
necessary to "create a favorable environment." This is
achieved by "removing him from the bad environment
in which he lives" and putting him into "a good
environment designed to improve his faith." Until that
happens, keep the recruit busy listening to lectures and
reading religious pamphlets, especially "those that
discuss Heaven and Hell, eternal paradise or eternal
damnation," etc. The manual contains a long list of
recommended texts ("The jihadist library is large and
full of books that were written with martyrs' blood"),
audiotapes, and video clips downloadable from the
Web.
Be Nice. Your recruit will always appreciate a
thoughtful gift. Take him to lunch. Take him "for a boat
ride on the Nile or some other retreat." Go to prayers
together; ask him to supplicate on your behalf and vice
versa. "Send him a nice da'wah [i.e., proselytizing]
message on his mobile phone."
Choose Your Moment. When you're finally ready show
your recruit jihadi propaganda, choose a time when he
is "tranquil and in the best religious mindset possible."
Don't lay it on him when he's "upset or worried or sad."
Break the ice by talking about Palestine, "an issue on
which there is no disagreement." (It's assumed your
recruit will not hold a membership in B'nai B'rith.)
Work your way up to explaining why "democracy and
parliamentary activities" are incompatible with Islam.
Let him know he is "fighting the greatest power that
modern history has known." Once you get going in
earnest, it's OK to mention al-Qaida.
What sort of person is al-Qaida looking for?
the sort of fanatical reputation that attracts anxious attention
from the police. Religious newbies are also good because their
views are unformed and their acquaintanceships probably in
flux. Those long committed to religion are OK, so long as they
aren't hotheads, cowards, gossips, misers ("money is the
backbone of jihad"), or introverts (because—I have no idea
where Abu-Amr gets this from—they're wishy-washy and
uncomfortable with nonconformity). Converts from alternative
forms of radicalism tend to be malcontents and therefore far
more trouble than they're worth. "Youth in remote areas" are
likely to be "naturally religious"—avoid them if they aren't—and
"easy to shape and convince," because they're hicks. Colleges
offer fabulous recruitment opportunities, but for that reason
they're crawling with spies. People with "deviant ideas"
(example: "human rights activists") can work out provided that
they "listen to other opinions and show a readiness for dialogue
and persuasion." The group Abu-Amr seems most wary of,
oddly, is Sunni fundamentalists, partly because they think they
know everything and partly because they might be spies. For the
same reasons, Abu-Amr tends not to trust potential recruits who
know the Quran by heart.
Even in its dumbed-down form, I'm pleased to report, becoming
a terrorist would appear to require an extremely daunting
quantity of reading. Dozens of vitally important texts are
mentioned in the manual, and though The Art of Recruitment
streamlines the reading list by identifying in many instances the
most crucial passages, it nonetheless seems to me that you don't
get to strap on an explosive device and enter paradise until
you've completed the equivalent of a graduate seminar in jihadi
studies. (None of the readings identified as most crucial is from
the Quran.) Terrorism is not, nor ever will be, suitable work for
dilettantes.
Note: I do not speak Arabic. Thanks to Brian Fishman of West
Point's Combating Terrorism Center for providing an English
translation.
corrections
Corrections
Friday, March 27, 2009, at 6:59 AM ET
In the March 24 "Green Lantern" about microwaves and ovens,
Nina Shen Rastogi did not provide a clear explanation of why
gas ovens might be preferable to electric ovens from an
efficiency standpoint. There are significant energy losses
associated with generating electricity and transmitting it to your
home.
Abu-Amr declares his "favorite group" to be the nonreligious, in
part because they lack a vocabulary to answer religious
arguments ("It is you who is right") and in part because they lack
9/95
In the March 24 "Today's Papers," Daniel Politi attributed a
quote from a spokeswoman for the American Nurses
Association to the head of that organization.
In the March 23 "Technology," Farhad Manjoo stated that
Facebook's new activity stream forces people to listen to
conversations from everyone in their network. You can filter
your stream according to groups of friends.
If you believe you have found an inaccuracy in a Slate story,
please send an e-mail to [email protected], and we will
investigate. General comments should be posted in "The Fray,"
our reader discussion forum.
culture gabfest
The Culture Gabfest "Why Do I Know
This Word?" Edition
Listen to Slate's show about the week in culture.
By Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner
Wednesday, March 25, 2009, at 11:26 AM ET
Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 30 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.
(Audiobook of the week: Poetry on Record.)
Mark Bittman's NYT article about the false belief that organic
equals healthy.
Michael Calderone's article about JournoList on Politico.com.
Reihan Salam's response to the Politico article on the Atlantic's
Web site.
Slate's Mickey Kaus blog entries about the JournoList dust-up.
The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:
Dana's pick: the remarkable work of YouTube Bollywood
translation artist Buffalax.
Julia's pick: David Byrne and Brian Eno's album Everything
That Happens Will Happen Today.
Stephen's pick: Henri-alban Alain-Fournier's Le Grande
Meaulnes.
You can e-mail us, and send us your thoughts on how to
pronounce the name of Alain-Fournier's book, at
[email protected].
Posted on March 25 by Jacob Ganz at 11:26 a.m.
player below:
to the weekly 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. (Audiobook of
the week: Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys.)
In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss Paul Rudd and
Jason Segel's bromance in the new movie I Love You, Man; the
implications of the Obamas' vegetable garden; and the off-therecord media listserv JournoList. And as a bonus, Stephen
Metcalf interviews David Grann, the author of The Lost City of
Z, after the show.
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:
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
The official Web site for the movie I Love You, Man.
Dana Stevens' Slate review of I Love You, Man (where you can
also find the Spoiler Special podcast on the movie).
Leslie Fiedler's classic Love and Death in the American Novel,
which examines male friendship in American literature.
The New York Times piece on the Obamas' vegetable garden (see
map).
Andrew Martin's NYT article about the state of the sustainable
food movement.
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.
10/95
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 [email protected].
dear prudence
Reunited, and It Feels So Bad
My long-lost daughter is a terror, and I want nothing to do with her.
Thursday, March 26, 2009, at 6:44 AM ET
Get "Dear Prudence" delivered to your inbox each week; click
here to sign up. Please send your questions for publication to
[email protected]. (Questions may be edited.)
Posted on March 11 by Jacob Ganz at 12:39 p.m.
Feb. 25, 2009
player below:
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.)
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.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
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.
Dana's pick: Ricky Gervais' podcast.
Julia's pick: A tolerable romantic comedy: Definitely, Maybe.
Stephen's pick: The Danny Boyle film Shallow Grave.
You can e-mail us at [email protected].
Posted on Feb. 25 at 1:28 p.m. by Julia Turner.
Dear Prudie,
When I was 17, I got pregnant. My family was not supportive,
and I did not want to raise a child on my own. I placed her for
adoption but never forgot about her. Twenty-three years later, I
got in touch with the lawyer who assisted with the adoption and
shortly after got a phone call from my long-lost daughter. We
talked for a while, then e-mailed a lot. The more contact we had,
the more I didn't like her. She seemed very immature and
bratty—she still lives with her parents and had a child last year,
whom her parents are raising. Several months later, we met.
Also at the meeting were her mom, her baby, my mom, and my
daughter, who is five years younger then she. This girl is rude
and disrespectful to her mom, yells at her baby, dresses like a
slob, and was a brat the whole weekend. My mom said this is the
way she was raised, and we should be tolerant. I am all for
tolerance, but this kid is awful. Still, for her birthday I sent her a
great gift. I called and asked if she received it, and her response
was, "Yeah, it was nice." I had put a lot of thought, time, and
money into this gift, and that's all I get. I feel nothing for this
girl, even though I know she is my daughter. This makes me feel
guilty. How could a mother not love her own child, even if she
didn't raise her? She is in school to join my chosen profession,
which I think she will suck at.
—What Should I Do About the Daughter I Never Wanted?
Dear What,
It's sometimes easy when smacked in the face with issues such
as abandonment, disappointment, loss, love, obligation, and guilt
to focus on something more manageable. Something like, OK, so
23 years ago, I did decide I couldn't raise you. But now I've gone
to the trouble of getting you a really nice birthday gift, and
you're not thanking me properly, you little brat! I accept that this
girl is obnoxious and immature—but maybe this isn't just a
matter of nurture, but also of nature, because you are exhibiting
those same qualities yourself. You must know that in regard to
you, she has some big issues of her own. Surely she can detect
how much you dislike her, which might set her to thinking, Hey,
"Mom," the more time I spend with you, the happier I am that I
was adopted. And how nice that five years after I was born, you
decided to keep your next daughter—I guess you think she
turned out better than me. Yes, she is your biological offspring,
but her mother is the person who raised her—perhaps not very
11/95
well—and who is there for her and for her child now. How
disruptive of you to appear in this young woman's life and be so
judgmental about how she isn't meeting your needs and
expectations. For the future, a marginal relationship between the
two of you is probably for the best. Or possibly you could learn
to put aside your disdain and become a supportive, if peripheral,
presence—someone who can give her guidance as she tries to
make her way into your profession and help her so she doesn't
"suck" at it.
—Prudie
Dear Prudence Video: Insulting Wedding Gift
Dear Prudence,
Two years ago, my husband died in an accident. I was 27 years
old and moved in with my mother and stepfather so I wouldn't
have to be alone. (My father died years ago from lung cancer.)
Then, six months ago, I got another shock when my mother was
diagnosed with lung cancer that had metastasized to her brain.
We've been told she has three to six months to live. Mom is
totally incapacitated. It takes a lot of time and muscle to provide
for her care, even though we have hospice assistance. My
stepdad is the primary caretaker during the weekdays while I am
at work. When I get home, I take over this role. My sister and
her husband come over and relieve us on Saturdays. The
problem is that my brother refuses to help with our mom. My
sister and I have asked him to come over on Sunday morning
and stay until Monday morning, but all he does is give us
excuses. When he does come over to the house, he does not help
with lifting, cleaning, or feeding her, but just visits and chats
with Mom. I'm so stressed about this that when I confront him, I
either cry or blow up. How do I demand that he help out with
Mom and share some of this responsibility?
—Who's Going To Die on Me Next?
Dear Who's,
Your brother may not be doing enough, but you may be doing
too much. You will always be glad you were there to ease her
last days, but you need to reach out and see if all of you can get
more relief from the physical necessities of caring for your
mother. Talk to the hospice caseworker about the possibility of
more nursing help. You're overwhelmed and grief-stricken, but
you may be taking out on your brother some of the pain you're
feeling about all you've been through. It's understandable that
you resent that your brother seems to be floating through your
mother's illness, not even doing any of the literal heavy lifting.
But consider that your brother is also suffering because of your
mother's coming death from the same terrible disease that took
your father. Not everyone can bring themselves to bathe or feed
a dying parent. His simply sitting and visiting with her is surely
a balm for both of them. Instead of being angry at what your
brother's not doing, ask him for help with things he easily can
do: pick up prescriptions, shop, handle paperwork. Your
mother's life is closing painfully and too soon. But she must
have lived a wonderful one to have her family be so devoted to
her. Keep in mind how it would hurt her to know her death
drove a wedge between the people she loves the most.
—Prudie
Dear Prudie,
I am the flip-side of your letter last week from Bliss in Exile.
Many years ago, when I was in high school, I did something
very cruel to a friend of mine: I took her boyfriend. Now we are
both married to other men. I found her on Facebook and
attempted to contact her to apologize for the cruel thing I had
done. She took your advice and hit "ignore." I feel terrible that I
was not even given the opportunity to admit to her that what I
did was wrong and try to make amends. I also feel a little angry
because I think it is immature to hold a grudge or resentment for
so long over something that a teenager once did to you. Now that
I have been ignored by the person I would like to apologize to,
should I just let it go? Or should I take another avenue to try to
contact her to tell her how sorry I am?
—Blocked
Dear Blocked,
In response to Bliss in Exile, I have heard from several people
who were the miscreants in high school and have successfully
used Facebook to contact their victims and make amends. But
the problem with simply making a friend request to someone
you've hurt is that the person on the other end has no idea about
your intentions. In cases such as yours, it's a better idea to use
your Facebook network to get an address for your former
classmate and write a letter explaining that what you did has
weighed on you all these years, you are asking for forgiveness,
and that you want to reconnect. Give your phone number and email address and add you'd also be happy to be contacted
through Facebook. If you don't hear anything, just be glad you
did the right thing now, and accept that there are some people for
whom high-school graduation was one of the happiest days of
their lives.
—Prudie
Dear Prudence,
Over the years, I have been asked to contribute funds to some
rather dodgy "causes" at work. Usually, I have been able to say
no in a nice way. Last night, my husband came home with a flier
produced by a co-worker in which he asks for donations so he
can go climb Mount Everest! This man and my husband do not
see each other outside work and have no special bond; they don't
even eat lunch together. The flier closed with the request to
"keep this between us." I consider asking folks at work to buy
Girl Scout cookies as the absolute maximum level of acceptable
hitting-up. My outrage was compounded when my husband
declared his intention to give the climber $100 because, "He's a
12/95
good guy, and I have to work with him and feel obligated." After
my fit, he agreed to reduce the amount to $50 but got mad at me
for being mad. There is still tension in the air. Am I cruel and
selfish, or is my husband losing it?
—Still Steaming
Dear Still,
Your husband's colleague must have set up a PayPal account for
contributions toward his honeymoon, and he found he liked
having other people pick up the tab for his adventures. His
request is ridiculous, and your husband should simply ignore it.
If the co-worker asks directly, your husband should say, "Have a
great trip, but it's not something I'm in a position to help you
with." But your problem now is not your husband's relationship
with the would-be Sir Edmund Hillary; it's his relationship with
you. You're mad because you think he's letting himself be
manipulated. By your own admission, you lost it while trying to
force him to agree with you—causing your husband to feel
doubly manipulated. So if he wants to cough up $50 to keep the
peace with a colleague, consider that a small price to pay for
your own lesson in the detriment of overreacting and the benefit
of letting things go.
—Prudie
explainer
The first step in a handwriting examination is to collect "known"
documents—that is, writing samples definitively penned by the
person in question. Next, the examiner determines how suitable
that material is as a base-line specimen. Is there enough of it?
Does it show a natural range of variability? Was the writer
disguising her handwriting at any point or trying to simulate
someone else's? (A naturally written line will show wide
variation in thickness because people tend to change speed as
they write. A person trying to alter her handwriting, on the other
hand, will tend to write more slowly, resulting in a more even
line.) These characteristics are all taken into consideration
during the following step, when the examiner compares the
"known" documents with the disputed one, element by
element—sometimes with the help of a software program.
There's no standard level of correspondence that must be reached
for a document to be declared a match or nonmatch—each
individual examiner makes the call, using his best judgment.
According to the handful of studies on the subject, a trained
examiner will be correct more often than a layman. One 1997
study asked both professionals and amateurs to examine 144
pairs of documents and determine whether the documents in
each pair were written by the same person. Both groups were as
likely to answer correctly when the documents were, in fact, a
match; however, amateurs were six times more likely to declare
a positive match when none existed. Nevertheless, forensic
handwriting analysis is not always accepted in the American
judicial system. Individual judges have the authority to decide
whether the conclusions of a handwriting examination are
admissible as expert opinion testimony and whether the legal
team's chosen examiner is a credible expert witness.
Murder, She Wrote
How forensic handwriting identification works.
By Nina Shen Rastogi
The Los Angeles District Attorney's office has convened a grand
jury to probe the 1985 disappearance of John and Linda Sohus,
who once rented property to Clark Rockefeller. Two handwriting
experts said on Wednesday that they'd been subpoenaed to
weigh in on the authenticity of a postcard, purportedly mailed
from France by Linda Sohus after she vanished. What do
forensic handwriting experts look at when trying to match a
disputed document?
Twenty-one distinguishing characteristics. According to one
standard textbook, that's the number of handwriting elements
that may reliably help distinguish a person's writing. These
include the dimensions and proportions of the letters, the spacing
both between and within words, and the way in which words and
letters are connected. (In the cursive word cat, for example, does
the pen line go all the way around the circular part of the a
before doubling back to complete the loop?)
Bonus explainer: How do you become a forensic handwriting
expert? Most document examiners learn their craft through twoto four-year apprenticeships, either with government
organizations such as the FBI or CIA or with private
practitioners. Those apprenticeships usually involve reading the
classic texts of the field, writing essays, and courtroom training,
in addition to practical lab experience. Oklahoma State
University offers a stand-alone program in document
examination, and many forensics programs offer individual
courses.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Robert Baier, Ron Morris of Ronald N. Morris
and Associates Inc., and Gerald B. Richards of Oklahoma State
University.
explainer
Jailhouse Doc
13/95
What's the health care system like in prison?
By Christopher Beam
explainer
A federal judge denied Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's request to
take over California's prison health care system, which has been
out of the state government's hands since 2006. What's the health
care like in prison, anyway?
It depends on the state. At best, it's about as good as a lowincome health plan. At worst, it's almost nonexistent. In general,
when a prisoner gets sick, he tells the on-duty guard. If it's not
urgent—a sore throat, say, or an ear infection—the guard will
put his name on a list, and an appointment with the prison's inhouse doctor may be set up for as soon as the next day. To
handle emergencies, most prisons have a nurse on duty 24 hours
a day. The majority of ailments are treated on-site, but inmates
who are gravely ill can be taken to the nearest hospital. Sick
prisoners must make a nominal co-payment for each visit to the
jailhouse doctor—usually $5 or so, taken from an hourly wage
that typically runs between 19 cents and 40 cents an hour. Costs
above that are covered by the state.
Prisoners get checkups, too, but probably not as often as most
people. Incoming inmates always get a physical, blood test and
all, to check for diseases or drugs. (There are horror stories about
new arrivals dying from withdrawal.) After that, the period
between checkups varies. In Pennsylvania, men under 40 are
supposed to get physicals every three years, complete with rectal
exam, vision screening, and a risk assessment for chronic
diseases. Women get pap and pelvic exams every year. Inmates
of both genders older than 60 get a yearly electrocardiogram.
At least that's the theory. In practice, many prison systems are so
overcrowded that prisoners have to wait days to see a doctor,
even in emergency situations. The California penal system, for
example, has 170,000 inmates in 33 jails. To make things worse,
insurance companies sometimes fail to provide medication and
treatment to needy prisoners, and inmate medical records get
misplaced regularly. (Read the New York Times' investigative
series on insurance giant Prison Health Systems here.) The
quality of care also depends on the kind of prison facility. In
maximum security prisons, an inmate may be taken to see the
doctor in arm and leg chains, and left to wait in a cage. Those
who are elderly or chronically ill might qualify for a special
treatment facility—like Pennsylvania's Laurel Highlands, where
inmates receive constant care.
Explainer thanks Susan Bensinger of Pennsylvania Department
of Corrections and William DiMascio of the Pennsylvania
Prison Society.
States' Rights
Why can't governors spend stimulus money however they want?
By Christopher Beam
The Office of Management and Budget last week rejected Gov.
Mark Sanford's request to pay down South Carolina's debt using
$700 million of stimulus funds. But can't Sanford just ignore the
OMB? What's really stopping governors from spending stimulus
money however they see fit?
Politics and the law. The vast majority of the $800 billion doled
out in the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act has strings
attached. Some of it must be spent on one-time expenses like
extending unemployment insurance, and some must be siphoned
into pre-existing government programs like Medicaid or food
stamps or highway projects. Each of these programs is
supervised by a federal agency. For example, the Department of
Transportation manages spending for light-rail projects, and the
OMB makes sure that money is being spent as intended. If a
governor were to take money earmarked for, say, school lunches
and use it to pay down the state debt, the USDA, which oversees
the National School Lunch Program, would send the governor a
warning or, if necessary, take legal action.
More likely, interest groups would shout loud enough to keep
the governor in check. For just about every government
program, there's an outside group that monitors spending and
performance. For example, the National Education Association
would complain if secondary education were getting short shrift,
while the American Society of Highway Engineers would
protest if the governor chopped promised freeway projects. In
other words, it would be hard for a governor to redirect money
without interested observers making lots of noise—and
campaigning against him in the next election.
Governors may still be able to use accounting tricks to redirect
funds. Say a state usually spends $100 million on highway
construction. The governor could always use the stimulus money
to cover that cost and then send the state revenue intended for
highways elsewhere. The effect is the same as siphoning off
government funds. To prevent this, most provisions in the
stimulus bill have a "maintenance of effort" requirement that
says states have to keep up their usual spending to qualify for
additional federal funds. In other cases, stimulus money has
matching requirements. For example, to receive money to create
electronic health records, a state needs to contribute "an amount
equal to not less than $1 for each $5 of Federal funds provided
under the grant." (Read the whole bill here.)
14/95
There's some wiggle room with "fiscal stabilization" funds, set
aside to help states make up for budget shortfalls. (Forty-nine
states are constitutionally required to balance their budgets.)
Because every state's budget is different, the money isn't
specifically earmarked. Yet the OMB still needs to approve how
the funds are spent. The agency plans to keep tabs, too: Cash
from the stimulus bill will be tracked separately from other
government funds.
Explainer thanks Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute, Michael
Ettlinger of the Center for American Progress, and Robert
Lynch of Washington College.
explainer
Have Prostate Exams Been Discredited?
Not quite yet.
By Brian Palmer
Regular screening for prostate cancer may have little effect on
cancer mortality, according to a pair of clinical studies published
last week. The studies have reignited a years-old controversy
over whether screening is worthwhile. If a simple blood test can
reduce your risk of dying from prostate cancer, why wouldn't
you take it?
Because prostate cancer probably won't kill you, and the
treatment is risky and unpleasant. Prostate cancer is
extraordinarily common, even among men who never realize
they have the disease. Autopsy studies find evidence of the
condition in 27 percent of men over 50 and 63 percent of men
over 80, yet the great majority of those people die from some
other cause. Among men diagnosed with prostate cancer—a
small number compared with the undiagnosed cases—the fiveyear survival rate is almost 99 percent. Many of these patients
live for 30 years or more before dying of some other cause.
That's not to say that prostate cancer is completely benign. It
kills about three men out of 10,000 per year, and aggressive
forms spread to the bone, often leading to a very painful death.
The problem is that there's no way to distinguish the unlucky
patients from the many who would never even notice their
prostate cancer, meaning that the vast majority of treatment is
unnecessary.
Treatment for the condition can be quite dangerous in its own
right. The least invasive option uses a drug to block the activity
of testosterone, which might otherwise accelerate the growth of
the cancer. Side effects include testicular shrinkage, feminization
(hot flashes and enlarged breasts), and osteoporosis. Radiation
therapy or brachytherapy can cause damage to adjacent tissue,
such as the colon and rectum, which sometimes doesn't manifest
until years after treatment ends. Surgery to remove the prostate
can sever the nerve that enables men to have erections or can
lead to urinary incontinence. Because of these risks, and the low
mortality rate associated with prostate cancer, many have argued
that it isn't worth it to test for the disease, even though the
screening process involves little more than a low-risk blood test
and the eminently safe (but anxiety-inducing) digital rectal
exam. Physicians note that most patients, frightened by the idea
of cancer, will elect for extreme and often ill-advised treatment.
The data reported last week are unlikely to quell the debate. The
U.S. study, which showed no reduction in mortality as a result of
screening, did not analyze a large number of prostate-cancer
deaths, and there were some potential flaws in its design. For
example, 52 percent of the people in the "control group" ended
up being screened for cancer. The European study involved
several different testing centers with divergent protocols.
Moreover, because neither study exceeded 10 years in duration,
the full benefits of the screening may not yet have materialized.
Meanwhile, screening advocates note that deaths from prostate
cancer in the general population have been declining by 4
percent per year since 1994, which coincides rather neatly with
the FDA approval of the blood screening test.
Explainer thanks Robert Faust of the University of Maryland
Medical Center, Patricia Hoge of the American Cancer Society,
and Jyoti Mathad and W.T. Oberle of Mercy Medical Center.
family
The Real World Threw Up All Over Us
How twentysomethings are coping with the recession.
By Emily Bazelon
Apprehension, with an enduring edge to it. That's the general
mood among the twentysomethings I've heard from during the
last several weeks in response to a question I asked about how
the recession is making them feel. The fear isn't just about the
present but about the long-term future. Octopuslike, it has many
tentacles. But the most strangling aspect, I think, is the
perception of my Gen Y e-mailers that they dutifully set up their
lives based on assumptions that suddenly no longer apply.
They're anxious because they can't tell what the new rules of the
15/95
game will be—or because they think they can tell, and they don't
like what they see coming at them.
"Forgive the inelegant analogy, but it's like I got on the train I
was supposed to and dozed off for a bit and now that I've come
to I have no idea where the hades we are and I do not recognize
any of these stops," writes a woman, who didn't want to give her
name (let's call her Shala), who is from Michigan and lives in
Brooklyn. She's actually employed—she graduated from college
in 2007 and got a low-paying job for a nonprofit that does digital
services for libraries and museums. She says:
It's looking ahead that is the grim part. I was
prepared to worry about choosing a home in a
subdivision or the city, how I would invest for
retirement and travel, how my siblings and I
would split our parents' properties when they
retire or pass away. But now I do not know if I
will have much choice about where I live,
retirement seems as far away and unreal as my
own mortality, and I don't even know how
solvent my parents are—I just hope they can
live out their days without going into (much)
debt.
Debt rings like a series of deadening thuds through the e-mails I
received and the follow-up conversations I've had. "For my
generation … it seems like the 'real world' threw up all over us,"
writes Jennifer, who is 22 and graduated from Boston University
in May. She's living in Washington, D.C., splitting a bedroom
with another recent graduate she found on Craigslist.org, and
sleeping on an air mattress. Her college tuition was $44,000 a
year, and even with a lot of financial aid, she graduated with
$22,000 in debt.
If I were a touch more paranoid, I would think
there has been a conspiracy to systematically
entrap me and my fellow graduates into an
endless cycle of debt. Student loans, buying
necessities on credit because the student loan
payments bludgeoned my bank account,
racking up greater credit card debt than student
loan debt, credit scores, having children,
taking out another round of loans to pay for
their education, wondering if retirement is
possible when Social Security is a joke.
After seven months of looking for work, plus an internship,
Jennifer found a job with a campaign in Northern Virginia, for
$2,250 a month. It's not enough to cover her debt, but thanks in
part to a hardship deferment, she's up to date on her loans for
now, and her parents are helping with health insurance.
Debt is choking twentysomethings higher up the career ladder,
too. I heard from another Jennifer, who is 29. Four years ago,
she bought a small two-bedroom condo. Now she and her
husband—they got married last year—want to move and plan to
have kids. "It's not what I want at this point in my life," she
writes of her condo. "Having spent the past 10 years living in
suburban multifamily housing, I'm sick of hearing my neighbor's
alarm clocks, schlepping 350 feet between my car and my front
door, and putting up with the guy downstairs who entertains on
his patio until 2 a.m."
But if Jennifer and her husband sold, they would take a loss and
have nothing left for a down payment on a new place. Nor do
they feel like they can look ahead and see a higher income.
Jennifer makes more than her husband, but she thinks she has
"hit the ceiling" at her job. "I work in local government and
there's definitely a boys vs. girls mentality." Her husband spends
half his paycheck on student loan debt—together, they pay off
$1,800 a month. If one of them gets laid off, they would have no
cushion to land on. "Sure, other people have it worse, and I am
thankful that my husband and I are both employed," Jennifer
says. "Still, this is the time in our lives when we're supposed to
be making a future for ourselves, yet our seemingly good
salaries don't get us anywhere. In 10 years, when I'm 39 and my
husband is 40, we'll be in exactly the same place we are today—
living in a starter condo … with no children of our own."
Jennifer is beating herself up for one decision she now regrets—
spending $10,000 on her wedding and honeymoon last year.
Getting married has also meant a higher tax bill. (Are you
listening, Congress?) And, as a couple, Jennifer and her husband
aren't eligible for a first-time homebuyer tax credit since she
already owns.
I got another e-mail highlighting a love-and-relationship regret,
from Heidi, who graduated from college in 2005 and landed a
job with an architecture firm. "My employer was fantastic and I
thought things were going to be smooth sailing while I worked
to become a licensed architect," she writes. But last August, she
moved to another city to be near her fiance. She found a not-asgood job. And then she got laid off. That was in November. In
the months since, she's wrangled only two job interviews and no
offers. Her fiance's company is going through a second round of
reorganization, and while he survived the first round, it doesn't
look good this time. He has no savings. Her unemployment
insurance is running out. Going out with friends makes her feel
resentful about the money she no longer has. "I have become
more of a hermit and don't like to leave the apartment anymore,"
she says.
One step down from there, emotionally speaking: Last week I
talked to a 26-year-old named Candice who lives in North
Carolina. She'd written to say that she can't pay for therapy for
her depression anymore because she has no job and absolutely
no money. ("I have some spare change that I keep in a change
purse in my dresser," she writes.) In August, Candice graduated
from James Madison University with a master's degree in
16/95
English. She is the first person in her immediate family to go to
college. She wants to get a Ph.D. in literature and women's
studies, to study the works of Margaret Atwood. But she can't
afford to. Her parents, meanwhile, are having trouble
understanding why she can't find work after months of
searching. They're both ill and have to spend heavily for
prescription medications. It is all an enormous, hopeless-feeling
strain.
Since twentysomethings are often accused of whining, let me
say that the e-mails in my inbox don't do that. They are about
scrambling to make sense of changed, and reduced, expectations
and are not filled with self-pity, or at least not of the maudlin,
unjustified sort. Generation Y has a pretty good argument for
being the worst off right now. They may not have kids and
significant family responsibilities and bills yet. But along with
their school debt, they havea lot of loss to contend with as they
peer forward into the uncertainty ahead.
Some of them, also, are adjusting to not expecting much from
work or ambition. There's a bad side to this: Shala talked about a
long wait for a promised promotion, thinking of herself as
someone who would "demand fair pay and fairly value my own
worth." Now she doesn't want to insist on the title change
because she's afraid the company would then have to pay her
more—and she'd be more vulnerable to a layoff. Yet there's
some good to be fished out of reduced expectations, too.
Shannon, who works for AmeriCorps in New York City, wrote
about how getting used to a basic lifestyle makes her less, rather
than more, worried about what comes next. (It surely helps that
she has no college debt.)
Shannon wrote earnestly about her hope that the recession would
get us all back on track by encouraging Americans "to better
understand or at least admit the interconnectedness of our
society." I'm not so sure. But I'm glad there's still a bit of
youthful optimism out there.
***
I got so many great e-mails from Gen Y-ers—you are a hugely
articulate bunch of readers!—that I'm going to write another
column discussing their decisions about school: whether to go to
grad school or stay there, etc. More thoughts and stories about
that are welcome. Send them to me at [email protected].
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
An Army of Extremists
How some military rabbis are trying to radicalize Israeli soldiers.
By Christopher Hitchens
Recent reports of atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers in the
course of the intervention in Gaza have described the incitement
of conscripts and reservists by military rabbis who characterized
the battle as a holy war for the expulsion of non-Jews from
Jewish land. The secular Israeli academic Dany Zamir, who first
brought the testimony of shocked Israeli soldiers to light, has
been quoted as if the influence of such extremist clerical
teachings was something new. This is not the case.
I remember being in Israel in 1986 when the chief army
"chaplain" in the occupied territories, Rabbi Shmuel Derlich,
issued his troops a 1,000-word pastoral letter enjoining them to
apply the biblical commandment to exterminate the Amalekites
as "the enemies of Israel." Nobody has recently encountered any
Amalekites, so the chief educational officer of the Israeli
Defense Forces asked Rabbi Derlich whether he would care to
define his terms and say whom he meant. Rather evasively—if
rather alarmingly—the man of God replied, "Germans." There
are no Germans in Judaea and Samaria or, indeed, in the Old
Testament, so the rabbi's exhortation to slay all Germans as well
as quite probably all Palestinians was referred to the Judge
Advocate General's Office. Forty military rabbis publicly came
to Derlich's support, and the rather spineless conclusion of the
JAG was that he had committed no legal offense but should
perhaps refrain in the future from making political statements on
the army's behalf.
The problem here is precisely that the rabbi was not making a
"political" statement. Rather, he was doing his religious duty in
reminding his readers what the Torah actually says. It's not at all
uncommon in Israel to read discussions, featuring military
rabbis, of quite how to interpret the following holy order from
Moses, in the Book of Numbers, Chapter 31, Verses 13-18, as
quoted from my 1985 translation by the Jewish Publication
Society. The Israelites have just done a fairly pitiless job on the
Midianites, slaughtering all of the adult males. But, says their
stern commander-in-chief, they have still failed him:
Moses, Eleazer the priest, and all the chieftains
of the community came out to meet them
outside the camp. Moses became angry with
the commanders of the army, the officers of
thousands and the officers of hundreds, who
had come back from the military campaign.
Moses said to them, "You have spared every
female! Yet they are the very ones who, at the
bidding of Balaam, induced the Israelites to
trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor,
so that the Lord's community was struck by the
plague. Now, therefore, slay every male
17/95
among the children, and slay also every young
woman who has known a man carnally; but
spare every young woman who has not had
carnal relations with a man."
Moses and Eleazar the priest go on to issue some complex
instructions about the ritual cleansings that must be practiced
after this exhausting massacre has been completed.
Now, it's common to hear people say, when this infamous
passage and others like it come up, that it's not intended to be
"taken literally." One also often hears the excuse that some
wicked things are done "in the name of" religion, as if the
wicked things were somehow the result of a misinterpretation.
But the nationalist rabbis who prepare Israeli soldiers for their
mission seem to think that this book might be the word of God,
in which case the only misinterpretation would be the failure to
take it literally. (I hate to break it to you, but the people who
think that God's will is revealed in scripture are known as
"religious." Those who do not think so must try to find another
name for themselves.)
Possibly you remember Dr. Baruch Goldstein, the man who in
February 1994 unslung his weapon and killed more than two
dozen worshippers at the mosque in Hebron. He had been a
physician in the Israeli army and had first attracted attention by
saying that he would refuse to treat non-Jews on the Sabbath.
Now read Ethan Bronner's report in the March 22 New York
Times about the preachments of the Israeli army's latest chief
rabbi, a West Bank settler named Avichai Rontzski who also
holds the rank of brigadier general. He has "said that the main
reason for a Jewish doctor to treat a non-Jew on the Sabbath …
is to avoid exposing Diaspora Jews to hatred." Those of us who
follow these things recognize that statement as one of the
leading indicators of a truly determined racist and
fundamentalist. Yet it comes not this time in the garb of a
homicidal lone-wolf nut bag but in the full uniform and
accoutrement of a general and a high priest: Moses and Eleazar
combined. The latest news, according to Bronner, is that the
Israeli Defense Ministry has felt compelled to reprimand
Rontzski for "a rabbinal edict against showing the enemy mercy"
that was distributed in booklet form to men and women in
uniform (see Numbers 31:13-18, above).
Peering over the horrible pile of Palestinian civilian casualties
that has immediately resulted, it's fairly easy to see where this is
going in the medium-to-longer term. The zealot settlers and their
clerical accomplices are establishing an army within the army so
that one day, if it is ever decided to disband or evacuate the
colonial settlements, there will be enough officers and soldiers,
stiffened by enough rabbis and enough extremist sermons, to
refuse to obey the order. Torah verses will also be found that
make it permissible to murder secular Jews as well as Arabs.
The dress rehearsals for this have already taken place, with the
religious excuses given for Baruch Goldstein's rampage and the
Talmudic evasions concerning the assassination of Yitzhak
Rabin. Once considered highly extreme, such biblical exegeses
are moving ever closer to the mainstream. It's high time the
United States cut off any financial support for Israel that can be
used even indirectly for settler activity, not just because such
colonization constitutes a theft of another people's land but also
because our Constitution absolutely forbids us to spend public
money on the establishment of any religion.
food
The Locavore's Dilemma
What to do with the kale, turnips, and parsley that overwhelm your CSA bin.
By Catherine Price
It was what I did to the macaroni and cheese that made me seek
professional help.
My husband and I were looking for new ways to use the
vegetables from our CSA—a program, short for "community
supported agriculture," in which you pay in advance for a
weekly box of fresh produce delivered from a local organic
farm. We've been members of this particular CSA for about
three years, and for the most part, we love it. In August, we
receive endless tomatoes. In June, we're invited to a farm event
called "strawberry day." Every time we resubscribe, they send us
a lavender sachet. But each year, toward the end of winter, I run
into the Turnip Problem.
Ordinarily, I would never eat turnips. I managed to go 30 years
without buying one. But now every winter I'm faced with a twomonth supply, not to mention the kale, collards, and flat-leaf
Italian parsley that sit in my refrigerator, slowly wilting, filling
me with guilt every time I reach past them for the milk. After
three years of practice, I've figured out simple ways to deal with
most of these problem vegetables: I braise the turnips in butter
and white wine; I sauté the kale and collards with olive oil and
sea salt; I wait until the parsley shrivels and then throw it out.
The abundance of roughage is overwhelming.
It's a problem that affects anyone who tries to eat seasonally or
consume a wider variety of vegetables, as an increasing number
of Michael Pollan-ated Americans are trying to do. But it
becomes especially acute when you're faced with a new delivery
each week, whether you're ready for it or not. One friend
confessed "utter panic" at the sight of tomatillos. When I asked
another what he did with his mustard greens, he responded,
straight-faced, "I take them home, put them in my refrigerator,
and wait until they rot." Cabbage, kohlrabi, collards, bok choy—
everyone, it seems, has their problem vegetables. And, like me,
18/95
many feel guilty about it. When our farm's CSA manager, an
enthusiastic woman who has been known to use the words tasty
and rutabaga in the same sentence, revealed that her problem
vegetable was the radish, she immediately asked for forgiveness:
"I know I should embrace it more and am getting better."
But along with their confessions, friends shared success stories,
too: recipes for winter ravioli, vegetable stock, curried
cauliflower, even chimichurri sauce. Their creativity made me
remember how my box used to make me feel—the thrill of my
first vegetable custard, the rush of a successful butternut squash
soup. Somewhere along the way, I had lost the faith. I wanted it
back.
Which brings me to the macaroni. When my husband came
home excited about a recipe for Martha Stewart's "perfect
macaroni and cheese," I refused to make it unless we could
incorporate one of our vegetables. With six and a half cups of
cheese and an entire stick of butter, it had enough fat to
camouflage anything. Surely, I insisted, we could swap the
macaroni with turnips.
I was wrong. Our goal was a rich, creamy interior topped by a
crispy, cheesy crust. But far from absorbing excess liquid, the
vegetables released it. Our white sauce became a watery soup;
our kitchen filled with turnips' telltale scent.
It was time to call in the experts. So I phoned Mark Bittman,
author of the ubiquitous classic How To Cook Everything, to see
what suggestions he had for overcoming vegetable fatigue.
Bittman, who used to belong to a CSA in New Haven, Conn.,
pointed out that complaining about a surplus of vegetables in the
dead of winter made me sound like a spoiled Californian.
Feeling defensive—sure, he was right, but he hadn't answered
the question of what he would do with winter produce if he were
lucky enough to have it—I challenged him to a game of
vegetable free association. I would throw out a problematic
vegetable; he would tell me the first preparation that came to
mind.
"I love that," he said. "Go."
"Daikon radish," I began, skipping any pretense at a warm-up.
He didn't miss a beat. "Raw, grated, with soy sauce and sesame
oil."
"Cabbage."
"Sauté it with garlic, brown it, shrivel it, maybe turn it into fried
rice."
"Parsley."
"Parsley is a staple. You should be using it by the handful daily
anyway. It can go on top of anything. Just use it."
A bag full of parsley was currently rotting in my green bin, but I
refused to be chastened. "Butternut squash."
"I like to grate butternut squash, cook it with olive oil and garlic,
and toss it with pasta."
"Kiwi," I said, trying to catch him off guard. We'd been getting
them by the bagful for almost a month, and my counter was
covered in furry brown balls. "Is there any way to eat them other
than just as a fruit?"
He thought for a moment. "Not that I know of. And I don't even
think they're that good."
I came away from our conversation convinced that my kitchen
was suffering from a lack of sesame oil and buoyed by a
newfound zest for collards. But helpful as our conversation had
been, there was still one person I needed to reach.
For CSA devotees, talking to Deborah Madison—founder of San
Francisco's iconic vegetarian restaurant Greens and author of
nine cookbooks—is the equivalent of getting a personal phone
call from Barack Obama. "I do find that kale sits in my
refrigerator longer than other things," she confessed when I
called her. "And I sometimes forget what to do with turnips."
But Madison's love of fresh produce could not be suppressed.
Kale, she said, goes well with the "softness and neutrality" of
black-eyed peas. Radish greens' peppery bite is reminiscent of
arugula, and they can be braised along with their roots or
mashed into butter. She praised butternut squash as being "very
utilitarian" but then paused. "I hate to say so," she said, as if she
had admitted to having a favorite child. "There are so many
other great squashes out there."
I realized my problem was not that I had lost my creativity but,
rather, that I was trying too hard, as evidenced by my attraction
to any recipe containing the word gratin. Rather than covering
my vegetables in béchamel sauce, I should be making recipes
that complemented and highlighted their natural flavors.
Several hours later, I received a new box, containing kale,
lettuce, butternut squash, and still more turnips. Previously, this
would have filled me with dread, but I felt a sense of renewed
optimism. Perhaps I would turn those turnips into soup. Maybe
the squash could find its way into ravioli. The green garlic
radiated possibility; the stir-fry mix exuded hope. And for those
vegetables whose natural flavors still required an additional
punch, I could fall back on a piece of advice from Mark Bittman:
"A little bacon can go a long way."
19/95
weapons—an Obama administration suggestion—his lead
comment was that "there is no proof that Iran even has decided
to make a nuclear bomb."
foreigners
Ctrl-Alt-Diplomacy
A "reset button" won't suffice to transform U.S. foreign relations.
By Anne Applebaum
Press the reset button. Is there any phrase more enticing in the
modern lexicon? We all know what it means: Press the reset
button, watch your computer reboot, and presto! A nice, clean
screen appears, and you start again from scratch.
Yes, it's a wonderful feeling, pressing that reset button.
Unfortunately, it is also a deeply misleading, even vapid,
metaphor for diplomatic relations. Recently invoked by the vice
president—Joe Biden told a security conference in February it
was time to "press the reset button" on U.S. relations with
Russia—the expression was reiterated by the president, who
spoke of the need to "reset or reboot" the relationship. Earlier
this month, Hillary Clinton even presented her Russian
counterpart, Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov, with a
red "reset button." Despite an unfortunate mistranslation (the
Russian word printed on the gift actually meant "overload," not
"reset"), they smiled and pressed the button together for the
cameras.
It would be nice, of course, if U.S.-Russia relations really had
been frozen because of irrelevant technical complications and
could now begin again afresh. Unfortunately, while America
may have a new president, Russia does not. And while America
may want to make the past vanish—as a nation, we've never
been all that keen on foreign history—alas, the past cannot be
changed. The profound differences in psychology, philosophy,
and policy that have been the main source of friction between
the American and Russian governments for the past decade
remain in place. Sooner or later, the Obama administration will
have to grapple with them.
Anyone who doubts the truth of this forecast needs only to have
a look at remarks Lavrov made last weekend in Brussels, where
he presented a vision of the world utterly unchanged by the
events of Jan. 20. Speaking to past and present policymakers—
several of whom helped to dismember the Warsaw Pact and
expand NATO in the 1990s—he offered his own version of
those events as well as of some more current ones. Among other
things, he said, or implied, that the West lied to Russia; that
NATO remains a threat to Russia; that the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe should replace NATO as the
primary Western security organization; and that, by the way,
Russia has plenty of potential clients for its gas in the Far East
should its Western clients ever become problematic. As for
Russia helping to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear
The transcript of his remarks, and those of other Russians
attending the same conference, does not capture their snide tone
or the scorn with which they dismissed suggestions that Russia's
neighbors might have wanted to join NATO because they were
afraid of Russia. To return to the metaphor: If that is how the
Russia government sounds after pressing the reset button, I'm
not sure that the technical complications that caused the screen
to freeze have gone away.
Nor is this true of Russia alone. Any president can legitimately
call for a fresh start in his relations with the world, and none
more so than the current American president, who replaces an
unpopular predecessor. Sooner or later, however, Obama will
also have to make difficult decisions about regimes that oppose
U.S. policy for reasons deeper than dislike of George W. Bush.
If Russia persists in its occupation of Georgia, do we accept that
situation? If Russia uses its energy policy to blackmail Europe,
do we go along with that, too?
The rest of the world is no different. It's a fine thing to open
diplomatic relations with Iran or Syria—I've always thought it
extremely stupid that we have no embassy, and thus no resident
intelligence officer, in Tehran—as long as we remember that
talking is not a solution: Sometimes more "dialogue" reveals
deeper differences. It's also a fine thing for the president to issue
greetings on the occasion of the Persian new year, but that might
not dampen the popularity of Iran's nuclear program among both
adherents and opponents of its current government. What then?
I do realize that these are early days. The traditional, deadly
struggle for influence between the State Department and the
National Security Council is only just getting under way, and the
president has other things on his mind. But the gift of a "reset
button," however translated, was not a good beginning. If this
administration thinks it can transform America's relationships
with Russia or anyone else with the flick of a switch and a
change of rhetoric, then it is living in a virtual reality, not a real
one.
grieving
The Long Goodbye
Can nature help assuage your grief?
By Meghan O'Rourke
From: Meghan O'Rourke
20/95
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
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
21/95
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 [email protected].
Subject: Finding a Metaphor for Your Loss
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 hodge-
podge of traditions she had embraced in the midst of her grief.
And then she asked me, "Have you found a metaphor?"
"A metaphor?"
"Have you found your metaphor for where your mother is?"
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."
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
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.
22/95
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.
Subject: "Normal" vs. "Complicated" Grief
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
23/95
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
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
24/95
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
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
25/95
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.
Subject: Dreaming of the Dead
Posted Tuesday, March 17, 2009, at 11:36 AM ET
After my mother died, one of my brothers told me he had been
dreaming about her. He was comforted by this. I was envious. I
was not dreaming about her, and my main fear, in those first
days, was that I would forget what her face looked like. I told an
old friend this. He just looked at me and said, "That's not going
to happen." I didn't know how he could know this, but I was
comforted by his certainty.
Then, about a month later, I began to dream about her. The
dreams are not frequent, but they are powerful. Unlike dreams I
had about my mother when she was alive, these dreams seem to
capture her as she truly was. They seem, in some sense, beyond
my own invention, as if, in the nether-realm of sleep, we truly
are visiting each other. These visits, though, are always full of
boundaries—boundaries, that, judging from other mourners'
accounts, seem almost universal.
the dream, she was playing me and I was playing her. The dream
had a quality so intense I can still feel it: I am as sad as I have
ever been, as if ice is being poured down my windpipe, and I
keep trying to turn so I can see my mother, but I have to keep
my eyes on the road.
In the next dream, I am at my parents' house in Connecticut with
my father and one of my brothers, when, to our surprise, my
mother walks into the kitchen. Somehow, we all know she will
die in six days. She seems healthy, although her fate hangs
around her and separates her from us. Even so, her eyes are
bright and dark, darker than I remember them being. We ask her
what she is doing that day. She tells us, with a sly smile, that she
is going to something called Suicide Park. I become upset. She
reassures me. "I'm not going to there to commit suicide, Meg,"
she says. "It's a place where people who know they're dying go
to do risky things they might not do otherwise—like jump out of
a plane." She's excited, like a bride on the precipice of a lifechanging ritual. I am happy to see her face, and I never want her
to leave.
(Two days later, I tell her friend Eleanor about my dream, and
she goes silent on the phone. Then she asks, "Did you know that
your mother told me she wanted to jump out of a plane?" No, I
say. "One Friday this fall, when she had to stay home from
school, I was at the house with her, and she said: 'I really want to
jump out a plane before I die.' I said, 'B, you can't—you'll hurt
your knee.' But she got upset. So we tried to figure out how she
might really jump out a plane. She also wanted to learn Italian.
This was when we thought she had more time.")
The first dream was set in both the past and the present. And it
captured an identity confusion that is, apparently, not uncommon
right after a loved one dies. In the dream, it was summertime,
and my mother and I were standing outside a house like one we
used to go to on Cape Cod. There was a sandy driveway and a
long dirt road. We were going to get ice cream, and we were
saying goodbye to my youngest brother, who is 12 years
younger than I am; in the dream, he was just a little boy. When I
looked at him, I felt an oceanic sadness, but I didn't know why.
He smiled and waved from the porch as my mother and I pulled
out; I was driving, which struck me as odd in the dream. (My
mother loved to drive, and I learned to drive only last year; she
taught me.)
The third dream had the quality of a visitation. Again, I am at
my parents' house in Connecticut, feeling anxious about work. In
the den, I tell my father, who is watching football, that I need to
go back to New York, and he gets up to look at the train
schedule. As he rises, I become aware in my peripheral vision
that there are holiday ornaments on the kitchen table, and that
people are sitting there. "Stay another night," I hear my mother's
voice say, and I look up to see that she is the person at the table.
She looks at me, but her hands are busy—either knitting or
kneading dough for apple pie. "Stay another night," she says
again, with longing in her voice. "Of course," I say, happy I can
grant this wish, so simple yet so fundamental. When I woke that
morning, I felt calm and peaceful. The voice was my mother's
voice, and for the first time, her face was my mother's face. I felt
that she had been saying something important to me; I wasn't
quite sure what it was, but it had to do with how she loved me; I
was still her daughter.
As we headed down the long road, my mother talked about my
brother, telling me I didn't need to be anxious about him. It
became clear she was going somewhere, though I couldn't figure
out where. The conversation replicated one we had while she
was in the hospital, when I reassured her that my brother (now in
college) would be OK, and that I'd help look after him. Only in
My middle brother has told me about some of his dreams, too.
And I am struck by the continuities among all of them. Our
dreams almost seem to follow certain rules of genre. In all, I
know my mother is gone and that she will never be back as
before. But I am given a moment to be with her, to say
something, or to share a look or a feeling. In most, the important
26/95
conversation comes when we are alone together, although
another family member may be present on the outskirts. I am
never fully able to grasp her; in the first, the car was a barrier
between us; in a recent dream, I held her hand over the barrier of
a hospital bed. My brother's dreams are similar. (His, I find, are
even more beautiful and evocative than mine.) We both
experience a quality of being visited, of being comforted, though
we also feel a sense of a distance that cannot be traversed. Many
readers who have written to me have reported a similar sense of
feeling visited from a great distance.
Every time I wake from these dreams, I am reminded of
passages from epics like The Aeneid in which the heroes go to
the Underworld to see their fathers and cannot embrace them,
though they can see them. Or of the beautiful sonnet by Milton
about his wife, who died in childbirth. Recounting a dream about
her, he writes, "Me thought I saw my late espoused saint," and
then invokes her disappearance at precisely the moment they try
to touch : "But oh! As to embrace me she inclin'd,/ I wak'd, she
fled, and day brought back my night." What surprises me is how
comforted I feel when I wake. I am sad that the dream has
ended, but it's not the depleted sadness I've felt in the past when
I've woken up from a wishful dream. I feel, instead, replete,
reassured, like a child who has kicked the covers off her in her
sleep on a chilly night and dimly senses as her mother steals into
the dark room, pulls them up over her, strokes her hair, and gives
her a kiss before leaving.
Subject: Can Nature Help Assuage Your Grief?
Posted Wednesday, March 25, 2009, at 12:36 PM ET
The other night, I was talking to my father on the phone,
remembering my mother, when he happened to mention a "loss
of confidence" that "we" (that is, our family) had all
experienced. I asked him what he meant. I had been noticing that
I feel shy and insecure ever since my mother died, but I had
assumed my insecurity was particular to me; I've always been a
nervous person, especially compared with my sociable brothers.
But here was my father talking about something he saw all of us
suffering from. He explained. "Your mother is not there," he
said. "And we are dealing with her absence. It makes us feel, I
think, a loss of confidence—a general loss, an uncertainty about
what we can rely on."
Perhaps that's why I've gone to the desert twice since my mother
died. Not only does the physical desert reflect back at me my
spiritual desert, it doesn't have a lot of people in it—allowing me
to enjoy solitude without feeling cut off, as I would if I were
hunkered down in my Brooklyn apartment. In January, three
weeks after my mom's death, I flew to L.A. and then drove to the
Mojave Desert, where I spent a few days wandering around
Joshua Tree National Park. Being alone under the warm blue sky
made me feel closer to my mother, as it often has. I felt I could
detect her in the haze at the horizons. I offered a little prayer up
to her, and, for the first time since she died, I talked out loud to
her. I was walking along past the cacti, when I looked out into
the rocky distance. "Hello mother," I whispered. "I miss you so
much." Then I started crying, and, ridiculously, apologized. "I'm
sorry. I don't want you to feel bad. I know you had to leave."
Even now, whenever I talk to my mother—I do it every few
weeks, and always when I'm outdoors—I cry and then apologize
because I don't want her to feel guilt or sorrow that she can't be
here with me as she used to be. A part of me believes this
concern is foolish. But it is intrinsic to the magical thinking at
the heart of the ritual. I am powerless over it.
Just last week, I went to Marfa, Texas, a town in the Chinati
Desert in far west Texas, near Mexico. One afternoon, I drove
south through the desert to Terlingua, an old ghost town, where I
sat in the fresh spring sun. Perhaps because it is almost spring in
New York, the warmth of the air registered as the augur of a new
stage of mourning. It was as if I had been coaxed out of a dark
room after a long illness. I watched a band play songs to a
haphazard group of people who, for one reason or another, had
been drawn down to this borderland and its arid emptiness. A
group of girls lazily Hula-hooped in the sun while a drunk older
man from New Jersey, with the bluest, clearest eyes I have ever
seen, razzed the musicians: "Yer not stopping yet, are ya, ye
worthless sons of bitches? It's just gettin' goin'." Later he pulled
up a chair next to me. He told me he was about to turn 74. This
lent his desire for things not to end a new poignancy. Dogs
wandered among the tables, and tourists paused to watch before
walking to the general store, where they could buy souvenirs and
spring water. Listening to the band sing about loss and love, I
felt sad and wrung out, but this, too, was good, like the sun on
my skin. A vital nutrient that had seeped away during the winter
was being replenished.
Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny. And this,
too, I think, is why I am drawn to landscapes that juxtapose the
minute and the splendor; the very contrast is expressive of what I
felt. After the concert, I drove down along the Rio Grande,
noting all the green that had sprouted up along the dry riverbed.
Then I turned and went into Big Bend National Park—a majestic
preserve. Here, as in Joshua Tree, you drive along roads and can
see rolling, rocky desert for many, many miles. The sky is as
open as can be. On the horizon, mountains loom like old gods.
On a clear day, you can see so far you can actually detect the
curvature of the earth, according to the National Park's literature.
I wasn't sure I saw any curves, but it hardly mattered. Having my
sense of smallness reflected back at me—having the geography
mimic the puzzlement I carry within—made me feel more at
home in a majesty outside of my comprehension. It also led me
to wonder: How could my loss matter in the midst of all this?
27/95
Yet it does matter, to me, and in this setting that felt natural, the
way the needle on the cactus in the huge desert is natural. The
sheer sublimity of the landscape created room for the magnitude
of my grief, while at the same time it helped me feel like a
part—a small part—of a much larger creation. It was inclusive.
businessmen leaping over puddles can make it hard to let that
eerie, weird knowledge in.
Being in the vast spaces while mourning made me think about
religion. On New Year's Eve, I'd had dinner with a friend who
had been through his share of ups and downs. I was telling him
that I hadn't felt my mother leave the world, and he asked me if I
believed in God. I told him that I did not know. "I can say
existence is a mystery I don't understand or presume to pretend I
do," I said. And I mentioned that over the past year, I had prayed
in several moments of need, and had always felt better—as if
something were coming back at me. He was quiet and then said,
"I don't know if I believe in God. But I do believe in prayer." If
you are a secular agnostic in America today, chances are you
subscribe to a psychological framework for seeing the world.
This framework places stress on individuality, on the unique
psyche and its formation. I believe in the importance of
individuality, but in the midst of grief I also find myself wanting
connection—wanting to be reminded that the sadness I feel is
not just mine but ours.
human nature
I also want to find a way not to resent my suffering (though I
do). It is hard to know what that way is, outside of the ethical
framework of religion. Last fall, I copied out a passage from an
interview with author Marilynne Robinson in an issue of the
Paris Review. She is one of my favorite novelists; she is also
Christian. The interviewer recalled Robinson once observing
that Americans tend to avoid contemplating "larger issues."
(Many mourners would agree.) Here is what Robinson said in
response:
The ancients are right: the dear old human
experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed,
brilliant experience that does not resolve into
being comfortable in the world. The valley of
the shadow is part of that, and you are
depriving yourself if you do not experience
what humankind has experienced, including
doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and
difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will
pass through this, everyone I have ever
admired has passed through this, music has
come out of it, literature has come out of it.
We should think of our humanity as a
privilege.
To that, I can say: Amen. And it underscores why I have been
drawn to the remote outdoors, to places largely untouched by
telephone wires and TGI Fridays. I want to be reminded of how
the numinous impinges on ordinary life. It's a feeling I have even
in New York, but traffic lights and honking cars and
Fetal Foreclosure
If you stop paying a surrogate mother, what happens to the fetus?
By William Saletan
If you're angry about the AIG scandal or Bernie Madoff's Ponzi
scheme, check out what's happening to the infertile couples and
surrogate mothers involved in a California womb brokerage. It's
a familiar tale of vanishing funds and defaulted obligations. But
this time, the potential loss is bigger than property. It's
pregnancy.
Whose pregnancies are at stake? That's a tricky question.
Through in vitro fertilization, a fetus can have two mothers: a
genetic one and a gestational one. Last week, for example, we
looked at a Japanese case in which a doctor mistakenly put one
woman's embryo in another woman's uterus. Weeks later, the
second woman was told of the error and aborted the pregnancy.
The first woman wasn't told about anything for two and a half
months.
That's what can happen when you separate pregnancy into two
stages. One woman can abort another's offspring.
And that's not the only way it can happen. Thousands of women
have hired themselves out as gestational surrogates. If you're the
child's genetic mother, you can put a clause in the contract
stipulating under what circumstances the surrogate can abort the
pregnancy. But no court will enforce that clause, because you
aren't the one who's pregnant. The surrogate is. She can choose
abortion unilaterally. All you can do is stop paying her for
carrying the child.
But what if it's the other way around? What if you stop paying
her first? If you had hired her to sew booties for your kid, she
could respond to your nonpayment by halting work on the
booties. But her job wasn't to deliver booties. It was to deliver
the kid. If she responds by halting work on the thing you've
stopped paying for, that thing is your child.
Presumably, if you care enough about the baby to have hired a
surrogate, you'll pay what you promised. But what if you don't
control the payments? What if you delivered the money to a
broker, and the broker lost, stole, or squandered it? You did your
part, but the surrogate is no longer being paid. And she has every
legal right to end the pregnancy.
28/95
That's the scenario unfolding in California. The victims are
couples and surrogates who met through SurroGenesis, a
company "dedicated to assisting infertile couples to have a baby
through third-party assisted reproduction." Hiring a surrogate
through the company is expensive, as you'll see from its long list
of fees. But don't worry: The company offers to "arrange for
opening of [a] trust account" that will cover your expenses.
Specifically, according to the Los Angeles Times, its clients say
"SurroGenesis recommended that prospective parents set up trust
funds administered by the Michael Charles group," its partner
company.
The parents handed over the money. From this, the companies
were supposed to pay the surrogates. Now, the Times reports,
payments have stopped. In fact, the New York Times adds,
"SurroGenesis told clients on March 13 via e-mail that their
money was gone. Lawyers say that as much as $2 million may
be missing, with some couples losing as much as $90,000."
On one level, this looks like any other financial scandal. But the
pregnancies add a whole new dimension. Around 70 people are
affected. At least one pregnancy plan was reportedly suspended
just before extracting the eggs that were to be used. In two other
reported cases, the surrogates are in their third trimester. But
what about the pregnancies in the middle—too late to call off the
fertilization or implantation but not too late for abortion?
Some couples have managed to pay, out of their own funds, the
monthly installments that the companies had promised to the
surrogates. But others can't. Andrew Vorzimer, a lawyer
involved in the case, says, "We've got couples in the midst of
pregnancies with no ability to pay the surrogate."
Surrogates aren't mercenaries. But they do need to be paid for
their sacrifices. With every week that passes, they endure more
of pregnancy's burdens. They submit to exams, tests, and other
procedures. They take on serious medical risks. They forgo
activities that might harm the fetus. They lose the ability to
commute to and work at other jobs. They have bills to pay. At
least one abandoned surrogate says she has received an eviction
notice.
If you stop paying your surrogate, she needs to quit and find
another job, just like any other worker. But surrogacy isn't like
any other job. The only way to quit a pregnancy is to abort it.
Vorzimer says none of the surrogates are quitting. Many "will
not be reimbursed for their out-of-pocket expenses lost wages or
even have their medical bills paid," he reports, but "every single
one of them has committed to moving forward." That's a
different attitude from the one at AIG, where undelivered
bonuses are regarded as grounds for walking out. But when
you're carrying a baby instead of a briefcase, the stakes are that
much higher.
Update, March 24: I originally invited readers to contact
Vorzimer if they wanted to help the surrogates complete their
pregnancies rather than abort them. In an email this evening,
Vorzimer clarified that "there are no situations in which a
surrogate has elected to abort because of this financial scandal."
(Now playing at the Human Nature blog: 1. Are drones for
sissies? 2. Turning cell phones into universal remotes. 3. Cell
phones that let you see through walls.)
idolatry
Judge Dread
Will American Idol's new rules ruin the show—or save it?
By Katherine Meizel
Two weeks ago, I fell asleep during the Idol results show, and
when I woke up, everything was different. While I was
snoozing, Anoop Desai had become the first 13th finalist and the
judges had claimed the right to rescue a contestant from
elimination. It's a twist whose significance has since been hotly
debated online: Is it unfair? Is it un-American? Is it May 19 yet?
What it is, in any case, is a very big deal, because the entire
premise of American Idol has centered on the feeling of power
(real or imagined) in the viewers' hands. The new order shifts the
balance more obviously toward the judges, whose ranks have
swelled this season to include a second and less weepy female
presence in Kara DioGuardi, and toward the producers, who are,
literally, running the show. It's a jarring reminder that Idol's
version of democracy, as I've noted here before, camouflages
consumer choice as democratic voice. No matter how furiously
you vote on your phone, your other phone, and your boyfriend's
phone (what? I only have two phones!), the industry is
ultimately a marketplace, not a polling place.
It's Idol's adaptability in the changing market that keeps it at the
top of the Nielsen ratings in its eighth season (though President
Obama's Tuesday address beat last week's Idol numbers). The
show owes much of its success to the institutions that came
before, including, of course, the inspiration for this week's
theme: Motown. Motown's been my favorite Idol theme since
the Funk Brothers (RIP Uriel Jones) jammed with the finalists
back in Season 3. It's not just because I like the music, though.
The structure of Idol eerily parallels Berry Gordy's Motor Town
"assembly line," as Ryan called it last night, in some important
ways. Just as Gordy thoroughly managed his artists, so cocreators Simon Fuller and Simon Cowell manage theirs, with
Fuller calling their franchise "one-stop shopping" for singers—
they only need to deal with one company, whereas under typical
contracts, different aspects of an artist's career might be handled
by a record label and 10 different agents and managers, all paid
29/95
separately. And Motown and the Fox-hosted American Idol also
share a concern with family values, and the equal-parts idealist
and capitalist goal of racially integrated music that everyone can
buy. (And that everyone can sing, too, as Adam Lambert,
looking very spookily like Elvis, so brilliantly demonstrated on
Wednesday.) Motown couldn't have become what it did without
Gordy's iron hold on the reins, so maybe the Idol producers'
recent rule changes are a way to hang onto that kind of strict and
profitable management.
There's a new dynamic between the viewers and the judges now,
too. That relationship has always been contentious ("… could
Simon sway the vote?"; "But America showed Simon they were
in control"), and when at some point America makes a decision
only to have it revoked, the snit is going to hit the fans. We
know from past experience that we do not like our voting results
overruled. When will the Fantastic Four use their newfound deus
ex machina device? Not yet. It isn't that Alexis Grace, who got
kicked off last week, was not good enough to stay; it's just that
you don't want to use up your judging ammo before the battle's
begun, and, besides, the two-tone and/or pink-haired are among
the first to go every season. (The hair of adorable Allison
Iraheta, who is still with us, is definitely red! It's red!) No, the
show will always go for the drama. I'm betting the veto will
come into play around the Top 4 or 5, when fans and contestants
are at their most anxious, when the sudden reversal of Idol
fortune often happens, and when Lil Rounds will inevitably but
somehow shockingly be sent home instead of wobbly Megan
Joy.
Speaking of gods and machines, I've been thinking that, in the
end, American Idol is every bit as much about religion and
politics as the late, celebrated Battlestar Galactica series. We
tend to forget Idol's metaphorical power because of its genre, but
then again, isn't "reality TV" just another name for "science
fiction?" At any rate, I've heard the phrase "the judges' save" so
often in the past two weeks that I'm about ready to stand up and
shout "Amen!" By the end of Season 8, someone will be saved
(and that's very different from Ryan's intoning weekly "sit down,
you're safe"). I don't need to hear Kara attribute Allison Iraheta's
considerable talent to God, or Michael Sarver declare his
intention to "take it to church," to remember that the Idol
competition—like any American election—has to do with faith
on many levels. The producers have to believe in the salability
of their casting choices, the singers have to believe in their
American Dreams, and the viewers have to believe their votes
matter. (Plus, we are expected to suspend disbelief during the
lip-synced group numbers.) Bringing God into the equation just
adds a new dimension to the idea of television's "Powers that
Be."
But, seriously, the judges are already drunk with power (at least,
I think that's power). Do they really need the extra shot? Then
again, when the group number tonight is almost certainly "Ain't
No Mountain High Enough" for the 8,000th time, I know I will.
jurisprudence
Homesteaders in the Hood
Squatters are multiplying in the recession—what should cities do?
By Eduardo M. Peñalver
To survive, everyone needs to have a place to be and to sleep,
eat, and, let's face it, go to the bathroom. For most of us, that
place is the home. As rising unemployment pushes more people
out of their houses and apartments, however, and growing
numbers of Americans cannot find a place to perform these
essential functions legally, they will have little choice but to
break the law. And so some of them are turning to a strategy that
has cropped up repeatedly in American history—squatting.
Governments are sometimes tempted to respond to a spike in
this form of outlaw residency by simply forcing squatters out.
The better strategy, however is to treat squatting as a symptom
of a simultaneous failure of both the market and the government.
Viewed in this light, an outbreak of squatting is a sign that
governments should change their housing policies to make it
easier for poor people to find the housing they need—as lawabiders instead of renegades.
Squatting, or unlawfully occupying and making use of land that
belongs to someone else, tends to emerge when poverty and
homelessness intersect with absentee ownership. It was
widespread on the frontier of the 19th-century West, where
settlers who couldn't afford to purchase land at market prices
often simply occupied land owned by Eastern speculators (as
well as land owned by the federal government and by Native
American tribes).
From the point of view of local officials, this was a win-win, of a
sort. Far-away owners were more interested in free-riding on
rising property values, and flipping their land, than in developing
it productively. So they resisted paying property taxes or
investing in infrastructure. As a result, governments in the West
were happy to lend squatters a hand in their efforts to get
property out of the speculators' hands. Local governments
frequently made it easier for squatters to obtain title through the
legal doctrine of adverse possession (sometimes colloquially
called "squatters rights")—for example, by shortening the time
period required for squatting to mature into ownership.
Ultimately, even the federal government joined in. After years of
using the Army to chase squatters off its lands, Congress decided
to create a legal avenue for settlers without money to become
landowners: the 1862 Homestead Act.
A century later, in the 1970s, squatting went urban. In city after
city, the market for urban housing collapsed amid a toxic (and
self-reinforcing) brew of riots, redlining, and the flight of the
30/95
white middle class to the suburbs. City governments acquired
thousands of vacant units from owners who had fallen behind on
their property taxes. Rather than turning these properties over to
remaining low-income residents searching for affordable
housing, many cities sought to auction them off to speculators,
who in turn frequently fell behind on their own tax payments. In
the meantime, the vacant buildings became magnets for crime
and illegal dumping. In response, groups of squatters—backed
by community organizations like ACORN—began to take over
city-owned, vacant housing. Many city governments cracked
down on the squatters, but others took a more measured
approach, coming up with programs whereby urban
"homesteaders" could acquire vacant housing through "sweat
equity."
As the current recession picks up speed, we are again confronted
with the ingredients for a squatting boom. Unemployment is
closing in on double digits nationally, and homelessness is on
the rise. Between late 2007 and late 2008, the number of families
presenting themselves at homeless shelters in New York City
increased by 40 percent. In Massachusetts during the same
period, the statewide increase was more than 30 percent. At the
same time, housing vacancy rates are at all-time highs.
According to the Census Bureau, about 15 percent of housing
units in the United States were vacant during the last quarter of
2008. That's 19 million homes sitting idle, largely in the hands of
banks. The difference between the 1970s and today is that the
crisis last time was focused on the urban centers, while this time
around the suburbs are the site of the greatest mismatch between
people without homes and homes without occupants.
And so, the squatters are squatting. In Sacramento, Calif., a tent
city has begun to sprawl out on land owned by a utility company
on the banks of the Sacramento River. The cluster used to be a
small homeless camp but has grown in recent months to several
hundred residents, an increasing number of whom the Los
Angeles Times calls "recession victims." In Miami, where the
foreclosure crisis has hit particularly hard, a group of families
recently moved into foreclosed properties with the help of the
advocacy group Take Back the Land. In Minneapolis, another
group, the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign,
recently moved a dozen families into foreclosed housing.
So far, local governments have split over how to handle the
influx. The Atlantic recently documented the efforts of officials
in San Bernadino, Calif., to keep squatters out: One officer had
removed an unemployed nurse and her family five times from
different homes in the community. In other cities, meanwhile,
officials have decided to look the other way. Rep. Marcy Kaptur,
D-Ohio, has even advised constituents who have been foreclosed
to squat in their own homes by refusing to leave. Until he
backtracked after negative publicity, Sacramento Mayor Kevin
Johnson had considered making that city's tent encampment
permanent and providing its residents with utility services.
But these ad-hoc reactions aren't really the answer. Squatting can
be dangerous for squatters and can, depending on the
circumstances, harm neighboring property owners by driving
down property values, as neighbors of the Sacramento tent city
have complained. At the same time, some of the danger and
harm of squatting results from ill-advised efforts to keep them
out, and squatters who take over boarded-up housing might
actually improve neighborhood conditions and increase property
values. Cities should therefore resist the temptation to respond to
an increase in squatting by simply ratcheting up enforcement.
Instead, governments should attack the problem on both the
supply and the demand side.
On the supply side, local governments should penalize owners
who stockpile vacant housing, perhaps by imposing increased
property tax rates on properties left vacant, and by moving
aggressively to seize vacant properties when the owners fall
behind on paying those taxes. On the demand side, governments
should expand homesteading programs that permit and help lowincome people to take over vacant housing—but only after it
finds its way into city hands.
To be sure, these programs were only marginally successful in
the 1970s, in part because of lack of funding, but also because of
the difficulty of restoring abandoned urban properties to
habitable condition. The housing that is becoming vacant during
the current downturn, by contrast, is relatively new and should
be easier for homesteaders to repair. The federal government
should also move quickly to protect those in financial trouble
from foreclosure and eviction by requiring foreclosing banks
(many of which are themselves receiving taxpayer bailouts) to
rent out foreclosed homes to their former owners at fair market
value. In fact, as this letter to the editor in the New York Times
Magazine on Sunday correctly observed, allowing owners to
remain as renters in their foreclosed homes helps safeguard the
value of the houses—which is good for the occupants, good for
the banks, and good for the housing market as a whole.
The sudden increase in squatting shows that the housing market
that is out of kilter. The solution is not to chase squatters off, but
to bring the market back into balance by helping them find a
place to call home.
moneybox
I Want To Buy Troubled Assets
Why can't individual investors get the sweetheart deal Geithner's plan is
offering to hedge funds?
By Daniel Gross
Tim Geithner's plan to remove toxic assets from the books of
31/95
crippled financial institutions is receiving mixed reviews. Nobel
Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said the plan "amounts
to robbery of the American people. I don't think it's going to
work because I think there'll be a lot of anger about putting the
losses so much on the shoulder of the American taxpayer."
(Wouldn't you like to see the cage match between outside
Democratic genius economist skeptics such as Stiglitz and Paul
Krugman and inside Democratic genius economist promoters
such as Larry Summers?)
The Geithner plan is designed to benefit professional investors:
It provides them with lots of easy credit, limits their losses, and
allows them to reap a disproportionate chunk of the benefits if
the investments pan out. This will be a boon to outfits such as
the Blackstone Group and big hedge funds. But it will not be
much of a boon to you, and I don't mean that in the sense that
taxpayers are assuming too much liability. I mean that you, and
I, and other small-account holders have no easy way to
participate in the plan, and that's a shame.
The design of the Geithner plan reinforces the notion that there
are two sets of rules in the market, one for the really big players
(matching investments, generous loans) and another for small
investors and homeowners (expensive bailouts and foreclosure).
If we taxpayers are going to be financing something close to
guaranteed returns for hedge funds and private-equity firms, why
can't we get in on the sweet deal that's being offered to Wall
Street? Why can't we buy the distressed assets the same way
hedge funds will? If we think creatively, we can find a way to
enable this.
But it wouldn't be hard to arrange for small-fry investors to
participate in the bailout. The government could partner with
investment-management firms—especially well-regarded
investment-management firms such as Vanguard and TIAACREF—to create mutual-fundlike vehicles in which individuals
could invest as little as a few hundred dollars in the effort to
stabilize the banking system. The feds could even offer such an
investment as a check-off on tax returns. Or we could present it
as an allocation choice for federal employees' retirement
accounts. Legacy loans and legacy assets could be offered as an
option for state-sponsored 529 college savings programs, in
which investors typically commit to lengthy holding periods. Or
they could be made part of the universal savings accounts that
Obama supports.
And if the private-equity or hedge-fund industry had an ounce of
PR savvy—a really big if—it would help individuals make
similar investments while waiving the management and
incentive fees.
Yes, there's risk involved. And there is something circular about
this arrangement. We'd be lending money to ourselves to buy
stuff that the government would probably end up owning
anyway if we didn't buy it. But I'd rather lend my tax dollars to
help you, dear reader, profit from the financial disaster than lend
them to Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwartzman to help
him profit from it.
moneybox
As Matt Yglesias points out, at least part of the Geithner plan
envisions the participation of mom-and-pop investors. The fact
sheet says that for the "legacy loan" program, the less-leveraged
component aimed at encouraging investors to buy loans from
banks, "the participation of individual investors, pension plans,
insurance companies and other long-term investors is
particularly encouraged." But the "legacy securities" program,
the more-leveraged version aimed at encouraging investors to
buy mortgage-backed securities and other instruments from
banks, does not mention allowing individual investors to
participate.
Given the size of the assets involved and the structure of the
investment-management industry, it's likely that only wealthy
institutions and institutions that serve only wealthy individuals—
hedge funds, private-equity firms, etc.—will be bidding on these
distressed assets. Individual investors generally don't have the
tools to analyze the securities and assets for sale. Banks such as
Citi will be eager to sell off their junky assets in chunks of $50
million, not in chunks of $5,000. Bailouts and the unwinding of
bubbles are necessarily wholesale operations, not retail ones.
Man Up, Capitalists!
Why does the treasury secretary have to bribe investors to take risks?
By Daniel Gross
What to think of the latest plan to get crummy mortgage-related
assets off the books of large financial institutions? Two of the
economists whose views I most respect differ widely on it. Paul
Krugman hates it. Brad DeLong is more optimistic. The stock
market, which is a poor barometer of public policy, totally loves
it. In its wisdom, Wall Street could easily decide tomorrow, or
next month, that it hates the plan. That's been the pattern for the
last six months of bailouts—excitement and exuberance that the
cavalry is about to arrive followed by disappointment that it's
armed with pop guns.
We should sympathize with the dilemma the Treasury
Department faces in trying to clean up this mess. As Treasury
Secretary Timothy Geithner said last week: "Many banks in this
country took too much risk, but the risk now to the economy as a
whole is that you take too little risk." (Moneybox made a similar
32/95
point.) But who is taking the risk? And who stands to reap the
rewards? The Treasury acknowledges that private investors will
be subsidized to take on the ownership of what it's calling
"legacy loans" and "legacy securities." (If these horrific
securities are legacy loans, then the funeral industry should
reclassify corpses as "legacy bodies.") The Treasury cites as an
example a loan valued by a bank at $100 that is sold for $84. In
that instance, the private investor and the government would
each put in $6, and the investor would borrow the other $72
from the government. If you're keeping score at home, it means
the private investor would put in 7 percent of the cash but would
receive a much higher percentage of the profits.
The plan raises the disturbing question: Where the hell are the
capitalists? Where are all the people who are willing to put their
own money, and that of people willing to lend them cash, at risk
in pursuit of profit? Why are Wall Street's tough guys such a
bunch of girly men? The Geithner plan assumes that Wall
Street's bravest investors won't spend a penny or borrow unless
the government is willing to cover losses, make loans, and give
away extra profits. It assumes, in short, that these great
businesspeople are afraid to do business.
Dislocations create opportunities for investors with the courage
to jump in and the vision to extend their investment horizon
beyond a year or two. Many fortunes were made by purchasing
assets from the Resolution Trust Corp., the agency formed to
handle the leftovers from the savings-and-loans debacle. After
the junk-bond market crashed in the early 1990s, investors
deploying new pools of capital jumped in, purchased the bonds,
and used them to acquire control of companies—a bet that paid
off handsomely. Earlier this decade, Warren Buffett and others
pounced on telecommunications and energy-trading companies
that had become impaired.
The current environment should be a great moment for vulture
investors. We've just gone through the mother of all dislocations
when it comes to debt. In fact, the New York Times reports,
several name-brand firms are plunging into distressed debt. But
while these firms have plenty of cash, and (limited) access to
other people's money, they won't wade into the mortgage
morass—without something like a guaranteed return.
Yes, the market for these assets isn't functioning properly. But
improperly functioning markets are a feature of life. Just as
there's always a bull market somewhere, there's always a market
in which something is significantly underpriced because of
macroeconomic, geopolitical, or industry-specific issues.
There may be good reasons why capitalists aren't yet lining up to
buy discounted junk from banks. It could be that potential buyers
have lost their nerve (although you can never lose money going
long on the nerve of Wall Street operators). It could be that the
prices at which sellers are willing to part with lousy "legacy
securities" still aren't sufficiently low to make these trades
worthwhile without major leverage. It could be that investors
today can't fathom waiting a couple of years to get paid. It could
be, as economist Mark Thoma suggests, that the combination of
complex instruments and a totally FUBAR market makes these
legacy assets simply uninvestable at any price.
Or it could be that Wall Street has lost its nerve. In this past
decade, the controlling assumption of the financial-services
industry was that you could have "wealth without risk." Now it
seems to be that you can have "capitalism without capitalists."
moneybox
House of Cards
A podcast with William D. Cohan.
By Daniel Gross and Win Rosenfeld
The Big Money presents "Every Day I Read the Book,"
featuring Daniel Gross. Dan's guest today is William D. Cohan,
author of the new book House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and
Wretched Excess on Wall Street.
Listen using our audio player below, or download the MP3.
Subscribe to the "Every Day I Read the Book Podcast" on
iTunes.
movies
Driving Mr. Crazy
A great movie about a Senegalese cab driver and a suicidal old man.
By Dana Stevens
There's hope yet for world cinema if an Iranian-American
director can take the premise of an Iranian film, set it in North
Carolina, cast the lead roles with an African fashion model and
Elvis Presley's former bodyguard, and produce something utterly
new and beautiful. Goodbye Solo (Roadside Attractions), the
third film written and directed by Ramin Bahrani (Man Push
Cart, Chop Shop) owes its basic story line to the 1997 Abbas
Kiarostami film Taste of Cherry, but it's neither a straight-up
remake, a parody, nor an homage. A film of great intelligence
and quiet assurance, Goodbye Solo exhilarates without ever
trafficking in easy uplift.
33/95
The wildly charismatic Souléymane Sy Savané plays Solo, a
Senegalese cab driver in Winston-Salem, N.C., who's studying
to become a flight attendant. One night he picks up William
(Red West), a gruff, 70-year-old loner who's immune to Solo's
good-natured banter. William wants only to be dropped off at a
local cinema and picked up two hours later. On the way there, he
offers Solo a curious deal: In a week's time, he wants to be
driven to Blowing Rock, a peak overlooking a sheer drop-off,
and left there. After all but admitting that he plans to leap to his
death from the rock, William offers Solo $1,000 to set the date,
no questions asked. Instead, Solo sets about insinuating himself
into the old man's life and creating a friendship by fiat. He
introduces William to his wife, Quiera (Carmen Leyva), and her
9-year-old daughter, Alex (Diane Franco Galindo); takes him out
to shoot pool; and, when the pregnant Quiera throws him out
after an argument, moves into William's motel room.
All the while, Solo is conducting a benevolent espionage
mission: In an attempt to fathom the source of William's
depression, he searches the old man's bags for family pictures
and has his pills checked at a pharmacy to see if he's suffering
from a terminal illness. Solo simply can't accept the notion of
giving up on life; he's convinced that, once William realizes that
at least one person truly cares about him, he'll reverse his plans.
William, for his part, remains a mystery. He seems to be
warming to Solo's generous overtures, but when he senses that
his privacy is being invaded, he lashes out with unexpected
savagery.
The relationship between these two men—one who's given up on
life, another who's endlessly and miraculously resilient—could
easily recall one of those "magical Negro" films, in which an
isolated and grieving Caucasian is rescued from himself or
herself by a spiritually grounded emissary from the Third World.
(The Visitor and In America come to mind.) But Bahrani is too
smart, and too compassionate, for that; his script, co-written with
Bahareh Azmi, allows both characters their complexity, their
contradictions, and ultimately, their privacy. We never learn just
what in William's past has brought him to this point, nor why
Solo's usually smiling face occasionally slackens into an
expression of the purest sadness.
Goodbye Solo is as far as you can get from a tale of humanist
redemption, but it's kept buoyant by Savané's embodiment of
that rarest of things, a good (but not simple) man. Solo leads his
immigrant working-class life with style and grace. This is a man
who, as he, William, and young Alex are about to tuck into
bologna sandwiches in their dump of a motel room, makes sure
to wish them all, "Bon appétit." That graciousness extends to
Bahrani's sense of place: The one-story brick houses and tobacco
warehouses of Winston-Salem, where the director grew up, are
filmed (by cinematographer Michael Simmonds) with dignity,
never condescendingly milked for "local color."
The film's narrative suspense—will Solo drive William to that
fateful appointment at Blowing Rock?—relies on a clunky visual
device in which Solo repeatedly consults his calendar as the
preset date approaches. ("Who runs their finger along a blank
calendar page like that?" complained my viewing companion,
who likes to obsess about these details.) Yet, if the will-he-orwon't-he setup has a whiff of contrivance to it, the climactic
scene, set against a backdrop of natural grandeur worthy of King
Lear, upends your every expectation.
movies
Monsters vs. Aliens
Has Dreamworks finally made its Pixar movie?
By Jessica Winter
Not to let any unnecessary ideology creep into a review of a fun
animated movie, but let's get this out of the way up front:
Monsters vs. Aliens (DreamWorks Animation) is a film for
children with a female lead. She is not the love interest, or the
helpmate, or the mom. Nor is she a princess, or princesslike. She
does not marry a prince or a prince-manqué. She does not marry
at all. She tries to get married, but she is struck by a meteor on
her wedding day (typical!), which transforms her into an
unmarriageable, world-saving, 49-foot-11-inch superfreak and—
thank you, O bountiful movie gods—a Strong Female
Protagonist. (Or, as my more skeptical viewing companion put
it, "a strong female protagonist who just happens to be ultraskinny with big boobs and a pneumatic butt, and who sometimes
wears a catsuit." Touché.)
We can also think of saucer-eyed Susan (voiced by Reese
Witherspoon), aka Ginormica, as the majestic figure on the prow
of the DreamWorks Animation galleon as it heads into uncharted
waters: Starting with MvA, the studio will be making all of its
films in 3-D, which means higher-priced tickets, added security
against bootlegging, and—oh yeah—a more absorbing visual
experience. (In this gamble, DreamWorks has good company:
James Cameron's first post-Titanic narrative feature, December's
outer-space quest Avatar, is in 3-D, and Pixar's forthcoming Up
will open this year's Cannes festival in three dimensions.)
Though it begins with a flinch-inducing game of paddleball and
frequently arranges for characters to reach a hand into the
audience, MvA for the most part stays out of your personal
space; instead, the multilayered picture tends to have a gently
immersive effect, akin to a stroll through the world's most
expensive diorama.
The 3-D format also enhances the movie's retro-futurist spirit:
Starting with its pulp-tastic title and the Soylent Green accents of
its early scenes, MvA is a loving parody-homage to 1950s
34/95
creature features like Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman, The Fly, and
The Blob. The newly gargantuan Susan—soon to be dumped by
her insipid fiance (Paul Rudd) on grounds of excessive
tallness—wakes up in a top-secret government facility, where
she shares what looks like an airplane hangar with fellow
"monsters" Dr. Cockroach (Hugh Laurie), a bug/man; the
Missing Link (Will Arnett), a 20,000-year-old ape/fish; the
botched snack-food experiment B.O.B. (Seth Rogen), a
transparent, voracious blob the color of Vanish Drop-Ins; and
the mute/scary/adorable 350-foot Insectosaurus. The
incarcerated menagerie is under the supervision of General W.R.
Monger (Kiefer Sutherland), but not long after Susan arrives,
they're all furloughed to fight the evil alien Gallaxhar (Rainn
Wilson), who wants to conquer Earth with clones of himself.
(More homage: The deranged war-room encounters between the
crusty general and the idiot president, played by Stephen
Colbert, are a nod to Dr. Strangelove.)
much of Monsters vs. Aliens, it feels almost as good as getting
hit by a meteor.
my goodness
Deserving Kids, Undeserving Mom
Is this self-destructive, negligent mother taking advantage of my generosity?
By Patty Stonesifer and Sandy Stonesifer
Do you have a real-life do-gooding dilemma? Please send it to
[email protected], and Patty and Sandy will try to
answer it.
Dear Patty and Sandy,
What has often eluded DreamWorks ever since its first
computer-animated film, Antz, back in 1998, is how to ensure
the taller members of the audience are entertained without
resorting to coarse double-entendre and pointless pop-culture
referencing (the Shrek franchise was often guilty of both). That
is to say that one suspects DreamWorks has long ached to make
its very own Pixar movie, and with Monsters vs. Aliens, the
studio finally succeeds. The characterizations are unusually rich
for the DW brand: Arnett's Missing Link suggests a wellmeaning lothario puzzling through a midlife crisis, and Rogen's
literally brainless B.O.B. makes an endearing testament to
impenetrable innocence and cheerful cooperation worthy of Ray
Bolger or Anna Faris. MvA nails Pixar's gift for the glorious non
sequitur (for example, the president's olive branch to Gallaxhar,
which involves a certain deathless cornerstone of '80s synthpop). But it also captures the offbeat sweetness, the
unsentimental prizing of teamwork and loyalty, the wistful grace
notes (viz., a depressed Susan plunking down dolefully on the
awning of a gas station like it's a park bench). Even the
inevitable let's-smash-stuff-up! interludes are weirdly
heartwarming, as when Susan's monster buddies, due to a
momentary miscommunication, start pulverizing a white picket
fence at their ladyship's behest.
Right at its center, MvA contains the equivalent of a victory lap
for the 3-D bandwagon, and an early front-runner for Action
Sequence of the Year: Susan straps on two cars as ad-hoc roller
skates and glides into a showdown—monstrous friends in tow—
against Gallaxhar on the Golden Gate Bridge, as hundreds of
terrified, tiny commuters run screaming from their cars. This
epic set piece contains everything popcorn-movie-goers of all
ages have ever asked for: a heretofore aimless character
surprised and transformed by her own strength and bravery, a
screen that swallows you up with gorgeous photorealist detail
and comic bits of business, and above all else, the primal and
eternal satisfactions of Crash-Wreck-Explode-Destroy. Like
My church class was given the name of an 8-year-old girl who
needed gifts for Christmas. When I delivered them, I was struck
by the desperate need for more to be done than just dropping off
a few gifts and leaving. A couple of us organized a group to go
over and seal her windows. A plumber was paid to make repairs.
Treatment was set up for a bug infestation. We have not given
the mother money, but we have offered to pay for phone service
and other specific items to help out. Being the realist that I am, I
know that this woman may allow us to repair things and keep
going on the self-destructive path she's on. I'm not interested in
enabling poor behavior, but I also know that her children are
innocent victims of their family circumstances. Have we done as
much as we should, or is there something more we could do to
help the kids without being taken advantage of by the mom?
Abby in South Carolina
Patty:
I believe that the primary way to help a needy family is by
supporting the best social-service agencies in your area.
However, I also agree that sometimes it can be great for a group
to come together to provide direct service to an individual or
family in need as you are doing with your friends. It can connect
you to your shared values, make you aware of the needs in your
own community, and lead to a deeper understanding of the
issues and the people you wish to serve.
At first review, nothing you are doing sounds like you are
enabling the mom's problems, and you are certainly creating a
safer environment for these kids. I think what you are doing is
sound and compassionate. If the rest of your class doesn't agree,
why not sit down together and write out a few giving guidelines
you want to follow on any further projects and, as long as you
35/95
can find ways to help this family within those guidelines,
continue on?
I realize you and your classmates have standards for the way you
believe people should live—but I caution you about imposing
those standards as a requirement for your giving. A poster next
to my desk as I type this that has a quote from an Aboriginal
activist group: "If you have come to help me, you are wasting
your time. But if you have come because your liberation is
bound up with mine, then let us work together." I have returned
to that quote hundreds of times in the past decade as I examined
my own giving practices.
long run it will be more sustainable to have her working within
the system than receiving handouts from a benefactor, no matter
how well-intentioned.
Do you have a real-life do-gooding dilemma? Please send it to
[email protected] 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.
I encourage you to keep pursuing your own service plan, but
check your approach occasionally against this quote to ensure
you're on the right track.
Sandy:
It sounds like you have the very best intentions, Abby, but I
disagree with my mom on this one. With your current setup
(identifying, coordinating, and paying for the fixes), I think you
may be enabling the mom's problems without providing much
long-term benefit. I say keep helping only if you can take the
time to work with her to help identify and meet her basic needs.
If you don't feel that you have the time or the skills,
acknowledge that and try to put her in touch with someone who
can.
If you want to help this family and you have the time to do it
right, I would start by sitting down with her and making a list of
the issues that she thinks need to be addressed and help her to
match those needs to service efforts in your own community.
You don't discuss her work situation, but if she's currently out of
work and wants to change that, help her identify skills that she
could strengthen through job training courses. If child care is an
obstacle, help her get set up for subsidized child care so that she
can take those courses. Find out whether she is eligible for the
South Carolina Family Independence Program or low-income
phone assistance to help her pay her phone bill on her own. The
Family Service Center of South Carolina looks like a great
resource. Even if they don't have a center in your town, they may
be able to point you in the right direction for statewide services.
If she's been working with community agencies, she may already
have these resources, and if she isn't choosing to use them, you
certainly can't make her. At that point, you have to decide what
you're willing to do for the children. Maybe it's buying their
back-to-school necessities, maybe it's bringing a box of groceries
to their house once a week, but I don't think you should commit
yourself to paying for her phone service or any other long-term
aid. There are government and community resources to cover
exactly these needs, and while they aren't always perfect, in the
other magazines
Rage Against the Machine
The glossies tackle populist anger.
By David Sessions
Newsweek, March 30
The cover package is a series of takes on the benefits and
dangers of "populist rage." The introduction takes a historical
tour of populism, which began in the late 19th century as citizens
from small towns and mining centers targeted "economic
tycoons who betrayed the public." Robert J. Samuelson praises
the adaptability of American capitalism but warns that populist
outrage could "veer into a vindictive retribution." Joel Kotkin
argues that populism can raise powerful support for reform and
that the Obama administration hasn't used it enough against Wall
Street. Slate columnist and former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer
says we should accept basic market realities and restore "logic,
not anger" to the debate in Washington. … An article profiles
Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo, who argues that Western
aid to Africa keeps the continent poor and oppressed. She urges
celebrities to give up photo-op advocacy and focus on more
constructive ways to help.
New York, March 30
The cover story scans President Obama's economic brain and
reports that "it's not pretty at this moment." Treasury Secretary
Timothy Geithner botched his first presentation, "speaking
slowly, swaying side to side," and the rest of the economic team
mistakenly believes businesses are excited about their "turning
the country into a socialist state." They also appear to be
capitalizing on the crisis instead of solving it, using their array of
rescue plans to advance Obama's policy agenda, when this
"should be an all-hands-on-deck moment." … An article profiles
Cara Muhlhahn, a New York midwife and home-birth activist
36/95
who believes childbirth should be "more poetic than clinical."
She operates without required licenses and avoids partnerships
with hospitals to escape their restrictions. "I don't enjoy being an
outlaw," she says, but she insists no one else respects the body's
natural processes enough. Most of her happy customers agree.
The New Yorker, March 30
An article explores the torturous effects of solitary
confinement—a slow psychological deterioration that happens to
prisoners of war and common American criminals alike. The
widespread use of isolation in U.S. prisons is a phenomenon of
the past 20 years. "Supermax" prisons, designed for mass
solitary confinement, now contain at least 25,000 inmates.
Advocates say solitary confinement is the only way to contain
violent prisoners, but studies show no drop in violence when the
worst offenders are isolated. … An article examines the
"environmental benefits of an economic decline" and wonders
how to reignite the economy without burning up the time the
recession has "put back on the carbon clock." Once the economy
is "no longer teetering," our environmental success will come
from policies that seem to take us back to our leaner times. … In
a piece of fiction, Woody Allen imagines a Bernie Madoff
seafood dinner through the eyes of two lobsters.
Weekly Standard, March 30
The cover story predicts that the financial crisis could destroy
the EU, the union's "soft authoritarianism" having "left it
peculiarly ill suited to weather the storm." EU voter turnout is
low and displeasure is high, meaning any direction it takes will
push its alienated electorate toward extremist politics on either
side. Populist movements are gaining ground across Europe, and
as the EU's members hang together against their own interest,
the "wild men of the fringes" will see their numbers swell. It
seems "disturbingly likely" that the union will realize, "too late,
that there was something to be said for democracy after all." …
An article sees in this year's New Jersey gubernatorial race the
beginnings of a GOP comeback. Democrat incumbent John
Corzine trails both likely Republican challengers, including
Chris Christie, the state's former U.S. attorney. Christie is
winning statewide appeal with his engaging style and message of
reform.
Rolling Stone, April 2
The cover story follows the cast of Gossip Girl around New
York, where they live in a bubble of glamour that sometimes
resembles the lives of their privileged Upper East Side
characters. The young stars take the opportunity to reiterate that
the rumors brought up "in every interview"—that the girls hate
one another, that the boys are gay—have no more weight than
the hearsay on the show's titular gossip blog. The story wonders
if the fabulous five might be the last few living the high life in
Manhattan. … Matt Taibbi reviews the financial crisis and rails
against megabanks for creating an "idiotic language" too
convoluted for regulators to understand. The people trying to fix
the mess are graduates of that same class, making the entire
crisis a charade of ass-covering that the American people should
be way angrier about than they are.
poem
"The Age"
By Gail Mazur
Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Gail Mazur read
this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to
Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.
.
For what seemed an infinite time there were nights
that were too long. We knew a little science, not enough,
some cosmology. We'd heard of dark matter, we'd been assured
although it's everywhere, it doesn't collide, it will never slam
into our planet, it somehow obeys a gentler law of gravity,
its particles move through each other. We'd begun to understand
it shouldn't frighten us that we were the universe's debris,
or that when we look up at the stars, we're really looking back.
It was hard to like what we knew. We wanted to live
in the present, but it was dark. Ignorance
was one of our consolations. The universe was expanding
at an accelerating rate, we'd been told we were not at its center,
that it had no center. And how look forward with hope,
if not by looking up? I told the others we ought to study
history again, history teaches us more than erasures,
more than diminutions, there'd be something for us there.
I also dared to say we could begin to work at things again,
to make things, that I thought the hours of light would lengthen,
that nature still works that way. We would have a future.
Up to then we'd been observing anniversaries only
37/95
of mistakes and catastrophes, the darkness seemed to
blanket, to contain our terrible shame. I don't know
these anodyne serendipity-free town halls when selling his plan
for Social Security, and they failed to galvanize public opinion.
if anyone listened to me, it doesn't matter. Gradually,
afternoons began seeping back. As I'd promised, the children
Another way for a president to go around the traditional news
filter is by putting his weekly address on YouTube. But the
White House knows that after the second week, when the
gimmick wears off, people tune out. It's not special enough.
could walk home from school in the freshening light,
they seemed more playful, singing nonsensical songs
so marvelous catbirds wanted to mimic them. Why say anything,
why tell them the endless nights would return? Listen to them,
the name of a new leader they trust on their lips, O O O they
chant,
and I hear like one struggling to wake from a mournful dream.
.
So Obama's "online town hall" was a combination of these two
strategies—and it actually works. It's just gimmicky enough for
people to watch it online, if for no other reason than the quasipopulism of the question-and-answer session allows people to
join in the fun of going around the news filter that many of them
think is obsessed with trivialities. And yet the news filter can't
let go: The cable channels carried the town hall live and reported
on it extensively (expanding the audience). It was also very
safe—the questions were picked by community vote, but
anything out of the mainstream can be finessed out of the
conversation. A lot of people asked about legalizing marijuana,
for example, and Obama brushed the issue off with a joke. The
online town hall also now sits on the White House Web site,
where people can access it at any time.
politics
The President Will See You Now
Obama's gimmicky online chat session actually worked.
By John Dickerson
Barack Obama doesn't care much for cable news, but that doesn't
mean his administration won't borrow one of its ideas. On
Thursday Obama held the first-ever "online town hall," with
questions—104,074 of them!—submitted by "real Americans"—
92,933 of them!—and streamed live over the Internet. In form, it
echoed CNN's YouTube debates from the presidential campaign.
In concept, it mirrored the cable network's penchant for using
marginal technological innovations—it was community
moderated!—to make news out of reporting the news.
Fortunately for America, no one showed up by hologram.
The production values of the hourlong event were high. The East
Room, where Obama had held his press conference earlier in the
week, was transformed into the fanciest high school gym in
America. Just as they did in the campaign, some sat on bleachers
behind Obama, and the rest of the crowd sat in a circle with the
president in the middle. The president was relaxed and at ease,
pacing the carpet while he held a microphone in his hand. He
took six questions from the Internet—including two video
questions. He also took six questions from the live audience. The
crowd was screened, so it was not a surprise when a nurse from
the SEIU stood to ask a question.
It was an effective expansion of the presidential bully pulpit and
the latest in a wide-ranging White House effort to talk directly to
people. It may be Obama's best gimmick yet—entertaining
enough to get people to watch but also a risk-free platform for
him to give a presentation of his policies.
Not all chance was ironed out of the event, though. The
president got a little jokey with a teacher from Philadelphia,
saying that he knew she knew some teachers who weren't very
good at their jobs. He was talking about merit pay, but the
woman he spoke to was not playing along. Whether she was
tacitly agreeing with him and just trying not to show it, or
genuinely uncomfortable, wasn't clear as he tried to get her to
acknowledge that what he was saying was true. "You're not
saying anything," said the president to laughter. "You're taking
the Fifth."
Presidents are always trying to get around the traditional news
filter. But it's not easy. Part of the difficulty is built-in: One of
the goals of going around the media is to get coverage in the
media. Holding town hall meetings is a popular trick, but if
they're full of softball questions, they aren't newsworthy. Local
news stations may cover them, which can be important during a
campaign, but national attention is preferred when you're trying
to sell the nation on your programs. George Bush held a flood of
Despite that brief rough patch, Obama was at his earnest best,
giving long, explanatory answers without sounding pedantic.
He's been getting ribbed for using a teleprompter recently, but
there wasn't one in sight for the hour-plus show he put on. He
answered questions with enough detail that it was clear he'd been
read his briefing books. He talked about everything from the
federal procurement procedures that bundle contracts to the
advantages and disadvantages of single-payer health care plans.
38/95
Though Obama has been expanding his ways of "meeting people
where they live," as one senior aide put it, he's hardly forgotten
about the traditional media. He may not have called on members
of the Washington Post or the New York Times at his last news
conference, but he visited the Post's newsroom on the eve of his
inauguration, and he gave the Times a lengthy interview aboard
Air Force One. White House aides have a healthy appreciation
for the reach of the three big television networks, which is why
Obama sat down for an hour and a half with 60 Minutes last
weekend and why he'll appear on Face the Nation this weekend.
Obama may be going around the filter, but he's also using the
filter as much as he can. One day, he might even go on a cable
news channel.
politics
Universal Confusion
have universal access without a mandate, said: "Yes, by making
health care universally affordable and leveling the tax code to
give all taxpayers incentives to purchase it."
To review: GOP officials aren't exactly helpful. The document
itself is scant on details (although, to be fair, more may emerge
next week when the bill is voted on). And the spokeswoman
simply rearranges the text of the document. So what, exactly,
does the phrase "universal access to affordable health care"
mean?
Let's give it a shot. The difference between the Republican
"universal" and the Democratic "universal" is clearly in the word
access. Under a Democratic universal health care plan, everyone
is covered whether they like it or not. That can be enforced with
an individual mandate—forcing people to buy insurance—or a
tax levied on people who don't. Under a Republican plan,
"universal access" means anyone can buy insurance if they want
it, but they don't have to.
Since when is Republican health care "universal"?
By Christopher Beam
The Republican alternative "budget" unveiled Thursday is
getting ridiculed for what it lacks: numbers of any kind. But
there's plenty to mock that's actually in the budget, too. Take the
phrase "universal access to affordable health care," which the
document uses no fewer than seven times.
Since when do Republicans use the word universal to describe
their health care policies? And what—if not governmentsponsored, single-payer, socialist health coverage—do they
mean by it?
The formulation is not especially new—for either party. In 1992,
then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton promised "guaranteed
universal access" to health care. Gov. Bobby Jindal used the
phrase in his response to President Obama's speech to Congress
in February: "We stand for universal access to affordable health
care coverage. What we oppose is universal government-run
health care." Republican Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah likewise tried
to tease apart the "universal" from the "single-payer" at a policy
breakfast in early March: "Republicans are coming to the
understanding that their opposition to universal coverage is
misplaced. ... Let's understand that when we say we cover
everybody ... that is not a step toward a single-payer
government-run system."
Still unclear? The budget itself supports "leveling the playing
field" through "tax incentives." It proposes letting individuals
shop for health plans across state lines and praises state-based
solutions rather than national ones. And a spokeswoman for the
House Republican Conference, asked whether it's possible to
The problem is, "access" is a slippery concept. George W. Bush
famously said that "people have access to health care in
America. After all, you just go to an emergency room." By that
definition, "universal access" already exists. (Unfortunately, that
doesn't solve the "affordable" part. Emergency room visits cost a
lot more for uninsured patients than for their would-be insurers.)
In other cases, access means being able to visit a doctor who will
accept your insurance policy. For example, 7 million people in
California are enrolled in the state's Medi-Cal program, but more
than half of the doctors don't accept the card. So even if you're
technically covered, it doesn't mean you have access. Other
times, there simply aren't enough doctors to go around.
But even that is not necessarily what Republicans mean by
"access." More likely, they're suggesting that anyone who can't
afford health care will be eligible for a tax credit—say, $5,000 a
year—that will enable them to buy into an individualized plan.
(That's not unlike John McCain's plan, except McCain would
have eliminated tax incentives for employer-based health care.)
You don't have to take advantage of the tax credit. In fact, many
wouldn't. According to modeling by the RAND Corp., only 15
million of the 45 million uninsured Americans would become
insured under such a plan. (That assumes that everyone who
makes less than $100,000 is eligible.) So it probably wouldn't
result in universal coverage, but it would allow them to claim
that the plan offers universal access.
Even if the tax credit were high enough that everyone could
afford coverage, access would still not be "universal." Insurers
could continue to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions.
(Currently, five states require insurers to cover people no matter
what.) Some patients would still struggle to find doctors who
accept their coverage. Nor would it shrink the long waiting lists
for those denied coverage to enter high-risk pools.
39/95
Policy aside, shoehorning the word universal into the GOP's
health care pitch has the whiff of rebranding. Polls show that
most Americans favor health care for all. Sixty-five percent of
Americans think the government should "guarantee" health care.
In 2003, a Washington Post poll found that 62 percent of
Americans preferred universal health care to the current system.
Even more than half of Republicans say that universal health
coverage should be the right of every American, according to
one poll.
Emphasizing "universal access" also lets the GOP sound equally
ambitious while quietly reframing the debate. "By setting the bar
at access, they're trying to define the problem in a way that the
solution is something minor rather than something major," says
Anthony Wright of Health Access California.
politics
Hard Times
Obama tries to balance his calls for patience and urgency.
By John Dickerson
How does Barack Obama persuade people to be patient about
their outrage over the ongoing bailout of Wall Street—while also
persuading them to get impatient about long-term fiscal reforms
that may not affect them for years?
This was the task of the president's second press conference, and
it wasn't easy. Nothing is, as he reiterated. "By the time an issue
reaches my desk, it's a hard issue," he said, echoing a sentiment
his predecessor often voiced. "This is hard," Obama said of
reducing the deficit, a point he returned to later: "I'm not going
to lie to you. It's tough."
The president's other job at the press conference was to manage
anger, so he continued his role as national therapist. He
sympathized with people who wanted to vent their outrage at
Wall Street excesses but also asked Americans not to "demonize
every investor or entrepreneur who seeks to make a profit." (You
imagine that he'd like to hand out one of these to everyone in
America, since he is essentially asking Americans to bail out
some people who behaved badly in order to avoid an even
greater catastrophe.)
The president needs the nation to be on an even keel, because
addressing the economic collapse is going to take time. The
nation must get through the stress test of cleaning up the current
economic mess with enough emotional energy left to embrace
his argument for an ambitious budget. To help everyone calm
down, Obama argued that slow and steady progress was being
made. "That whole philosophy of persistence, by the way, is one
that I'm going to be emphasizing again and again in the months
and years to come, as long as I am in this office," he said. "I'm a
big believer in persistence."
Obama returned to the theme of togetherness to buy time. We
will "travel that road as one people," he said in his opening
remarks. "We are all in this together." Lovely sentiment, but the
times seem to call for a stronger pitch. Why should people join
together when bailouts are rewarding people who didn't act in
the common interest? Among those being rescued are Wall
Street bankers, AIG financial engineers, and even homeowners
who didn't behave responsibly—and now the responsible
citizens are bailing them out.
Obama may be popular enough to make the case. But to bring
about collective action in this environment, Obama may have to
return to a lesson he wrote about in Dreams From My Father:
the power of self-interest in helping to create community. People
often join together because it is obvious there is something in it
for them. Rather than the "we're all in this together" pitch he
gave at the press conference, he wrote that an appeal to selfinterest "bespoke a certain hardheadedness, a worldly lack of
sentiment."
On Tuesday, Obama didn't try to appeal to people's self-interest
in supporting his budget policies, except to create a general
sense of emergency. "This budget is inseparable from the
recovery," he said before reiterating his argument that only
through long-term investments in education, clean energy, and
health care could the country build the foundation for a
sustainable future.
Earlier in the day, it was obvious that Obama wouldn't get his
full wish list: Kent Conrad, the chairman of the Senate budget
committee, laid out the pared-back version of Obama's budget—
the working document Congress will have to agree on. It was
$600 billion smaller than Obama's budget over five years, and
Conrad made it harder for Obama to achieve his goals on
everything from health care reform to cutting taxes for the
middle class to increasing funding for Pell Grants. Anticipating
the difficulty he'll have with the White House and his colleagues,
Conrad started his briefing with reporters by showing a blownup picture of a dog he's adopting Saturday. "If you want a friend
in Washington, get a dog," said Conrad.
There was little mention of foreign affairs, and there were no
questions about the bank bailout plan announced the day before,
which suggests the plan was either a success or that reporters
found it too complicated. There were also no questions about
Obama's "embattled" treasury secretary, which would seem to
affirm the White House's posture that the Geithner squall will
blow over.
40/95
The president tires of people who want quick and easy answers,
a point that became abundantly clear when he snapped ever so
slightly at CNN's Ed Henry, who pressed him on why he hadn't
shown outrage about the AIG bonuses more quickly. "Because I
like to know what I'm talking about before I speak," he said
before calling on the next reporter. It was a flash of the kind of
immediate outrage Henry had said was missing.
politics
The First Family's First Vegetables
Of all the reasons to plant a garden, free food may be the worst.
By Jennifer Reese
The much-discussed Obama kitchen garden seems very noble
and well-intentioned (despite Michelle Obama's controversial
outfit), and as an avid gardener, I was loving the whole project
until I came across the following quote from an ecstatic Alice
Waters:
"To have this sort of 'victory' garden, this message goes out that
everyone can grow a garden and have free food." (Italics mine.)
Can someone please fire Alice Waters as the spokeswoman for
vegetable gardens? What a load of chicken manure.
Gardens and the food they produce are anything but free, and to
suggest otherwise is romantic pastoral nonsense. Anyone can
grow herbs cheaply in a pot on the windowsill. But to produce a
meaningful amount of food, you need land, a fence, beds, soil,
tools, organic material, mulch, and the plants themselves. Those
plants get thirsty, and even the nicest neighbors can't be counted
on to irrigate the pumpkins conscientiously during your twoweek vacation, and when they don't and everything withers, all
you can do is say thanks and give them that bottle of Scotch
anyway. I recently priced the installation of a timed irrigation
system to address this very problem and the estimates ranged
from $1,000 to $3,000. Fortunately, we may not need one,
because we're not sure we can afford a vacation this summer.
It takes many, many hours of toil before you harvest enough
"free" eggplant and bell peppers to make a bowl of ratatouille.
Though I doubt the Obamas will experience much of this,
gardening is incredibly messy, ruins your hands, wears holes in
the knees of your jeans, ends up costing 40 times more than you
think it will, sucks up whole weekends in a single gulp, takes
over your dreams, and frequently breaks your heart.
So why garden? Because gardening is one of the joys of life.
Peaceful and meditative, it's work that involves nurturing lovely,
colorful creatures that never talk back or defile the rug. You
proceed at your own pace in your own space while listening to
the birds or your iPod or your kids, and, if you're lucky and keep
after the weeds, you'll end up with a stir fry. When gardening
ceases to be a labor of love, you might as well stop, because
there are people who do this for a living and would appreciate
your patronage in these dark days. They are called farmers.
That said, there are two homegrown vegetables that really do
pay off and that are mysteriously absent from the Obamas'
published garden plan. Where are the tomatoes (OK, it's a fruit;
whatever) and fava beans? There's no vegetable more gratifying
to cultivate than the fava. Throw a handful of seeds onto a gravel
heap and five minutes later, you're harvesting giant green
legumes. I'm guessing that the Obamas have steered clear
because of the Hannibal Lecter jokes. But tomatoes? It's too
soon yet to be setting out tomatoes, so maybe they'll be rotated
in. A kitchen garden without juicy summer tomatoes is no
kitchen garden at all.
But, of course, this isn't really a kitchen garden. No one in the
Obama family is going to be standing on the South Lawn every
humid July afternoon holding a hose. By Mrs. Obama's own
admission, the White House vegetable patch will be tended
mostly by the White House staff—which, in my view, makes it
an organic demonstration farm that just happens to be located in
the Obamas' backyard.
That's wonderful. It really is. If the Obamas' example inspires
one little kid to eat a pea, or one tightly wound adult to discover
the therapeutic pleasures of hoeing, or one urban school to find
space for a little garden, it will have been worth it. But "free"
food? This admirable, enviable vegetable garden doesn't point
the way to a future of free, or even affordable, organic produce
for all. It's not going to fix our national obesity epidemic.
(Someone needs to tell Mrs. Obama to stop talking about her
daughters' weight.) And it's about as attainable for the average
American as the first lady's biceps.
politics
The "E" Word
Once people start calling you "embattled," is there any way to keep your job?
By Christopher Beam
Regardless of whether he stays, resigns, or is fired, there is
universal agreement that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is
"embattled." "Embattled Treasury Secretary Timothy F.
Geithner's job is safe," the Washington Post reported after
President Obama said he would not accept Geithner's
41/95
resignation. Days earlier, the Huffington Post wrote that John
McCain was defending "embattled Treasury Secretary Tim
Geithner." News site Raw Story reported that both New York
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and California Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger "stand by the embattled cabinet official." "The
Treasury Secretary is now tagged constantly with that hard-won
adjective," declared the Atlantic.
But what does it mean to be embattled, really? And does being
embattled necessarily mean you'll lose your job?
Embattled is one of those words that creeps into news reports
when a figure reaches a certain threshold of controversy. Neither
meaningless nor particularly meaningful, it's a subjective term
that, once used, seems to spread on its own until one of three
things happens: The person resigns, is cleared of wrongdoing, or
simply waits it out.
Normally, the catalyst that gains a person "embattled" status is a
call for their resignation. The first time a news report called
former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales "embattled" was on
March 15, 2007, when then-Sen. John Sununu demanded that
Gonzales step down. Sen. Larry Craig first got pegged with the
"E" word on Aug. 30, 2007, when Sen. Norm Coleman, Sen.
John McCain, and Rep. Pete Hoekstra called for his resignation.
Embattlement can also evolve over time. Illinois Gov. Rod
Blagojevich was "politically embattled" as early as September
2007, according to the Chicago Tribune, but that instance
referred to a legislative fight, not selling seats. By May 2008, he
was "increasingly embattled," per the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
thanks to his involvement in the Tony Rezko trial. By Dec. 11,
when the FBI actually charged him with conspiracy to commit
mail and wire fraud and solicitation of bribery, he was embattled
enough that Obama himself called for Blagojevich to quit.
Nor is being embattled specific to politicians. Larry Summers
was "embattled" as president of Harvard for months before he
announced that he would step down. University of Alabama
basketball coach Mark Gottfried resigned in January after his
team's shoddy record qualified him as "embattled." According to
London-based site the Inquirer, the entire nation of Britain is
embattled.
Yet sometimes waiting does work. Usually, it's because some
structural or constitutional obstacle gets in the way. Sen. Roland
Burris' detractors, for example, eventually realized that if he
wouldn't leave on his own, they were legally unable to remove
him. Other times, the official simply lets the mood pass. Sen.
David Vitter went into hiding after his name was found on the
phone list of a D.C. prostitution ring. He soon emerged,
apologized, and returned to work. (He's up for re-election in
2010.) In these cases, "embattled" soon gives way to
"controversial" or, in the best of all worlds, "iconoclastic." When
embattled basketball coach Bobby Knight was fired from
Indiana University, he took a job at Texas Tech, were he was
merely controversial. Now, in retirement, he is almost
iconoclastic.
Then there's the rare case where the embattled official does
something so popular—or so distracting—that memories of
battles past are washed away. President Bill Clinton chose the
day of Monica Lewinsky's grand-jury testimony to bomb
terrorist facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan. When he left office,
his 65 percent approval rating was the highest of any outgoing
president since World War II. Likewise, some have argued that
John McCain's crusade for ethics reform has been atonement for
past mistakes.
It's unclear which category Geithner falls into. He has a strong
defender in Obama, who has popularity to spare. He has not
violated any laws. And his resignation would have a high cost,
which is to his advantage: If Geithner stepped down under a
cloud, that could send investor confidence—and thus the
markets—into the ground.
But Geithner may already be recovering, as the announcement of
Treasury's "toxic assets" plan on Monday sent the Dow soaring
500 points. (The Krugman, meanwhile, plummeted.) According
to the New York Times, "Wall Street gave the government what
amounted to a do-over for the administration and Treasury
Secretary Timothy F. Geithner." It left out a word.
press box
The Pharm-Party Meme
In the vast majority of cases—we haven't run the numbers, but
we're confident about it—being dubbed "embattled" means
you're on the way out. It can be fast: Rep. Mark Foley quit on
the day his explicit IMs to underage teens emerged. Or it can be
slow: Larry Craig sat out his term instead of resigning. Alberto
Gonzales waited so long to resign that even Slate's Gonzometer
gave up tracking his fall. But however long they hold out, the
trajectory of the embattled is almost invariably downward.
It refuses to die.
By Jack Shafer
Although I've written four pieces since 2006 debunking the
existence of "pharm parties," the press continues to assert that
they're everywhere.
42/95
If you're arriving late to the dispute, a pharm (or "pharming")
party is a drug bacchanalia in which teenagers meet up to dump
the pills they've pilfered from their parents' medicine cabinets
into a collective bowl. Next, they dig into the heap, gulping the
drugs at random. (See my June 15, 2006; June 19, 2006; March
25, 2008; and March 26, 2008, columns for more.)
Although the pharm-party premise is ridiculous—no kid will
toss a Vicodin into the bowl on the chance that he'll get a
Tylenol in return—such august outlets as the Wall Street Journal
and ABC News have given credence to them. Other publications
have bestowed a tamer definition on pharm parties, describing
them as barter sessions in which drug enthusiasts gather to swap
pills.
None of my earlier pieces maintained that young people don't
take pharmaceuticals for kicks. Nor have I ever asserted that
today's kids don't trade pills. As long as there have been illicit
drugs, young people have shared and traded them. It's my
position—until I see proof running the other direction—that it's
an urban myth that young people across the country are playing
Russian roulette with stolen pills, a myth that can be traced back
to the late 1960s, when the drug-bowl bashes were written up by
a credulous press as "fruit salad parties."
To the best of my knowledge, only one reporter—Time
magazine's Carolyn Banta—has written from inside a
contemporary pharm party. In a July 24, 2005, piece, she hung
with the kids who had gathered at a suburban New Jersey home
to swap pharmaceuticals. There was no communal bowl, but
Banta said that "two or three" of the 15 young people in
attendance spontaneously described the event as a "pharming
party" without any prompting. Where did the kids get the term?
"My assumption is that they probably heard it from a popular
culture reference," Banta told me.
Indeed, the meme has become so pervasive that Hollywood has
latched onto it, producing pharm-party episodes of CSI: NY
(2005), Boston Legal (May 2006), Law & Order: Special
Victims Unit (2007), and Saving Grace (2009). Yet except for
Banta's piece, none of the scores of pharm-party articles I've read
over the last three years puts the phrase in the mouth of an
attendee. It's always a law-enforcement officer or drug counselor
or teacher or journalist peddling a wobbly pharm-party anecdote.
In recent months the Petoskey News-Review, the Las Vegas Sun,
the Herald Bulletin (Anderson, Ind.), the Rapid City Journal
(S.D.), the Oklahoman, the Salisbury Post (N.C.), the Long
Island Press, the Caspar Journal, the Times & Transcript (New
Brunswick, Canada), the Columbian (Vancouver, Wash.), the
Reading Eagle (which also calls the drug mix a "fruit salad"), the
Paducah Sun, the Salt Lake Tribune, the Charlotte Observer,
and other newspapers have given publicity to pharm parties
without visiting one.
The Oklahoman gets the closest to real drug action with its piece
about a bust of a "pharm party." About 25 teenagers with an
"assortment of muscle relaxers, tranquilizers and the painkillers
morphine and OxyContin" were trading and taking the drugs. As
the kids weren't making random withdrawals from a big bowl,
was this a pharm party or just a well-supplied drug party? The
Rapid City Journal comes in second with a story about a Sturgis,
S.D., mother who got five years in prison for hosting a pharm
party, but it wasn't an illicit potluck, so central to the pharmparty myth. Mom merely gave her 17-year-old son alcohol,
cough medicine, and oxycodone, which he then shared with his
friends.
Obviously, parents should worry about their kids taking drugs,
but those worries should be proportional to their children's
behavior and evidence, and not press hysteria and TV
melodrama. As the highly regarded Monitoring the Future
survey (PDF) shows, illicit drug use is down among highschoolers.
The worst thing about the pharm-party meme is the way that
newspapers have placed into wide circulation the idea that a
rare-to-nonexistent practice is actually quite common. Every
time a newspaper lectures its readers about the pharm-party
menace, it presents a deadly challenge to that kid out there who
is looking to test himself against something dangerous. If and
when pharm parties really start happening, I'll know whom to
blame.
******
I read all e-mails and respond to most. That said, don't think
you're special because you've lost a friend or a family member to
drugs. Many of us have. Send e-mail—especially sightings of
pharm-party coverage—to [email protected]. Hither, I
Twitter. 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 meme in the
subject head of an e-mail message, and send it to
[email protected].
Science
My Own Private B.O.
Forensic chemists examined my odorprint. Here's what they smelled.
By Dave Johns
This month the Department of Homeland Security announced
plans to study the potential of body odor as a means of
identifying criminals and figuring out when they're lying. The
43/95
work will expand on basic research into the chemistry of the socalled human "odorprint," which scientists say is as distinct as
DNA. At first whiff, the notion that individual B.O. is as special
as a snowflake sounds like a rotten joke. But body odor has
proved its value as a biometric for seven centuries, ever since
man first started hunting bad guys with the original B.O.
detector: the bloodhound.
While dogs certainly deserve a long scratch behind the ears for
clueing us in to the odorprint, their days as our elite odor
gumshoes may be numbered. (Canines are not as reliable as we
once thought: Although the best can match scents with 85
percent accuracy, poorly trained or feeble-nosed dogs may do no
better than chance.) Now scientists are figuring out their own,
more accurate ways to scrutinize an odorprint. Research on
electronic noses may also reveal secrets about how humans
recognize each other by B.O. We know, for example, that
mothers can pick out their babies by smell, and babies their
mothers. Scientists call this the "armpit effect" and suspect that
many other animals recognize kin by comparing body odors.
This got me wondering: Could the techniques of modern B.O.
analysis be used like DNA testing to reconstruct family
relationships from drops of sweat? Could this analysis work on
my own family? I asked one of the top researchers in the field of
criminal odorprinting to help me find out.
Florida International University chemist Kenneth Furton studies
the smells that might be of greatest use in a crime investigation.
These, he says, are the ones that come from the hands.
(Murderers rarely wield weapons in their underarms.) For the
last five years, Furton has been cataloging the many chemicals
that compose hand scent, including odoriferous acids, alcohols,
aldehydes, hydrocarbons, esters, ketones, and nitrogencontaining compounds.
It's a rich brew, but hardly the rankest in the human odor-sphere.
Hands don't contain apocrine glands, the funky B.O. factories
that reside in the armpit and groin and broadcast sexual status
updates. But they do have tons of eccrine sweat glands, used for
thermoregulation, and oil-producing sebaceous glands, which
generate their own odor signatures. These aromas mix with
volatiles from our dead skin cells and exhaled breath before
wafting in a plume of body heat.
I challenged Furton to construct my family tree based only on
data from our sweaty hands. He had never attempted such an
analysis before and made no claim that it would be possible. Yet
he agreed to give it a shot. I dragooned my mother, father, Uncle
Merritt, and identical-twin first cousins Ricky and Johnny into
the experiment.
Odor collection proceeded according to protocol in a pair of
secure, television-equipped locations. In Virginia, my mother,
father, and I meticulously washed our hands without soap and
then waved them around until dry. Next, we rubbed our hands to
lather them up with sweat and then clasped them around a piece
of gauze. For 10 minutes, we held our hands before us, as if in
prayer, while our B.O. impregnated the cloth and we watched
Rachel Maddow. I am told that during odor collection in
California, my uncle and cousins took in a crappy Golden State
Warriors game. Three scent samples were obtained from each
person and then shipped to Furton's grad student Davia Hudson
in Florida, who ran them through a gas chromatograph and mass
spectrometer. (Click here for a dendrogram of the data.)
The results were intriguing, though hardly Nobel-worthy.
Hudson said our odor profiles were "very similar" but that there
was "low reproducibility" among the samples collected from
each individual, likely due to contamination. So she discarded
one outlier from each subject. Even still, one of the "good"
samples collected from my mother came up 94 percent similar to
one from her nephew Johnny, which didn't make much sense.
The two of them were closer in scent than Johnny and his
identical-twin brother Ricky. (Twins should smell alike.)
Still, to my eyes the family odor tree that emerged smelled like
home. According to the data, I shared my dad's aroma, with
similar ratios of citrus and tallow that surely reflected our shared
heritage chomping pork-rib sandwiches. The clones, Ricky and
Johnny, were quite alike but for a burnt note that lingered around
Ricky, perhaps a side effect of his weakness for Caramel
Frappuccinos. In general, the males had similar odor profiles,
with the exception of my uncle, who seemed to come from
another B.O. planet. He excreted the rudest bouquet—subtly
oily, pungent, and sweet—which jibed with behavioral data from
the dinner table. The only person who showed a hint of
similarity with him—in one sample—was his sister, my mother,
who is, after all, more like him than she'd like to admit. (Click
here for a chemical breakdown.)
The B.O. Wheel. Click here for details.
They say you are what you eat, and when it comes to B.O., it's
true. Body odor can be heavily colored by diet and also by the
fragrant beauty products that we use. For this reason, one of the
biggest challenges faced by odorprint researchers is to ferret out
which chemicals constitute the "primary odor"—the root B.O.
bouillon that can't be altered by diet and perfume. When I ran the
results of my family experiment past George Preti, a smell
researcher whose odorprint work has been funded by the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, his main criticism
was that several of the odorants used to build my family tree
were probably environmental. For example, my cousin Ricky
and my uncle both had linalool on their hands, a ubiquitous
fragrance compound used in soaps, shampoos, and detergents.
But Preti conceded that the notion that I might smell more like
44/95
my dad than my mom was not outlandish. Unlike genetics, he
said, odor inheritance is "not a 50-50 mix."
It may not be surprising to learn that B.O. does indeed vary by
gender—a recent study claimed that men smell like cheese while
women smell of grapefruit or onions. It also reflects age: Preti's
lab has found several odorants that increase with advancing
years, such as the aldehyde nonanal. (This is not the molecule
others have implicated in "old person smell.") There may even
be racial differences in primary odors: Asians, for example, have
fewer apocrine sweat glands than blacks or whites. In a new
book about scent called Headspace, Amber Marks reports that in
the 1990s a British electronic-nose company was approached by
South African police and asked for the "odor signature" of black
people. The company refused, but an employee told Marks that
they could have derived such an ethnic odor-type if they'd tried.
If the prospect of a racial B.O. taxonomy gives you the willies,
the history of smell discrimination offers no comfort. In the 19th
century, Finns, Eskimos, Jews, and others were judged by
vigilant European doctors to possess a characteristic unpleasant
smell. (Asian docs thought Europeans were the foul ones.)
Blacks were thought to be at greater risk of shark attack due to
their "ammoniacal" odor. Blondes were said to smell "musky."
The old, like "dry leaves." Lunatics, "fetid and penetrating." In
1829, a French scientist proposed a new smell-based forensic
identification method but ran into problems discriminating darkhaired women from fair-haired men. Today we know these odor
classes are absurd; humans can't even smell the difference
between their own B.O. and that of a chimpanzee. But there are
some broad patterns to B.O. flavor—for a visual representation,
see this chart.
In any event, a new era of odor profiling may soon be upon us.
Furton foresees a day when crime scene odor evidence might
help cops establish a dossier: fiftysomething Irish-American
male, wears Axe body spray, loves garlic. If cops had a suspect,
they could trail him and covertly collect an odor sample using a
scent capture contraption without touching him or asking
permission.
While for centuries our B.O. obsession has focused on
preventing its unwelcome trespass, today's worry may be in
protecting our right to "odor privacy." For one thing, a body
smell may convey private medical information: Both Preti and
Furton are seeking the smell signatures of cancer and diabetes,
and Furton is studying the odor differences between depressed
and nondepressed individuals. Unlike DNA-rich blood or saliva,
scent cannot be withheld from authorities because—alas—there
is no "off button" for B.O. And, indeed, scent surveillance is
already in use. In 2007, Der Spiegel reported that German
authorities had collected scent samples from activists in advance
of the G8 summit.
Privacy hurdles aside, the odor chemists' greatest challenge may
be in overcoming our mistrust of smell. Odors can linger,
sometimes for days, and they are invisible, so it can be hard to
pin down their origins. An old grade-school maxim—"he who
smelt it dealt it"—illustrates the risks in making accusations
based on olfactory evidence. At this point, it's not clear that odor
science has the tools to move past this folk wisdom.
slate fare
What Is Good Design Now?
New York readers, you are invited to a Slate panel.
New York readers: This one's for you. On Thursday evening,
March 26, Slate is hosting a panel discussion about the future of
good design, moderated by Adam Gopnik. The panelists will be
potter and designer Jonathan Adler, architect and landscape
architect Ahmad Sardar-Afkhami, and graphic designer and
Pentagram partner Paula Scher. The subjects this distinguished
bunch will discuss include how the economy is changing design,
how the Internet is changing design, and how design is changing
everything else. The first 25 Slate readers to respond to this
posting will get two free tickets to the discussion.
If you'd like to attend, e-mail [email protected]. If you're
selected to get tickets, we'll send you further details on the
whereabouts and time of this event. (Ticketholders are
responsible for their own transportation to and from the event.)
We hope to see you there.
slate v
Gringo Guns
A daily video from Slate V.
slate v
A Guy Walks Into a Bar ...
slate v
Mary Gaitskill: "Don't Cry"
45/95
slate v
within two of top-seeded Pitt on Friday, resulting in fistpumping players drunk on the idea of an upset. Then Kevin
Tiggs overeagerly drove the lane into three defenders and turned
it over. Pitt responded coolly, feeding star big man DeJuan Blair
for a 3-point play, and Pitt was able to avoid becoming the first
No. 1 ever to fall to a No. 16.
Dear Prudence: Insulting Wedding Gift
sports nut
Wake Me When It's Over
Is this the most boring NCAA Tournament ever?
By Robert Weintraub
There are two NCAA Tournaments every year. One takes place
over the opening weekend, the two-round, 48-game feast. This is
the one usually rife with upsets and dramatic buzzer-beaters, and
when it isn't it gets labeled "boring" by the media and the fans.
The other tournament, starting with Thursday's Sweet 16, is a
playground for the big boys, with matchups between power
programs stocked with NBA-ready prospects. History has shown
that, despite the occasional exception like George Mason in
2006 or Davidson last year, the underdog from the first
tournament doesn't fare well in the second.
Still, fans like to see a Cinderella or two show up at the ball, and
this year's tournament has disappointed in that regard. For the
first time ever, the top three seeds in each region advanced, and
only one double-digit seed—No. 12 Arizona—made it through.
How come this year has produced such seemingly dull results?
One answer is that actually, it hasn't been that dull. There were
some excellent games the first weekend, although the best ones
took place late at night, after a wearying day chock full of TV
timeouts, reminders that President Obama would be interviewed
on 60 Minutes, and Bill Raftery screaming "Onions!" after every
big shot. The Siena-Ohio State and UCLA-VCU contests were
particularly thrilling, but both ended close to midnight ET, well
after the casual bracket-filler-outer had called it a day. Ronald
Moore of Siena probably wanted to call it a day against the
Buckeyes after missing nine of the 11 shots he had taken,
including all four 3-pointers. But Moore then drilled a gametying 3 at the end of overtime, and another with 3.9 seconds left
to win the game in double OT. How's that not exciting?
It is true, though, that several low-seeded teams came
tantalizingly close to knocking off a big guy then fell
frustratingly short after letting late leads slip away. No. 16 seed
East Tennessee State scored five points in eight seconds to close
Siena, a team good enough to qualify as this season's Davidson
or George Mason, followed its dramatic win over Ohio State
with a 12-0 run late in the second half Sunday to take a shocking
lead over No. 1 Louisville. Rick Pitino called timeout, the
Dayton crowd was going bananas—the scene had all the
makings of a historic upset. But over the next couple of minutes,
Edwin Ubiles and Clarence Jackson of Siena missed hasty 3pointers (Jackson's miss was particularly painful, coming on a
fast break seconds after a steal), Friday's hero Moore missed a
couple of tough jump shots, and battle-tested Big East power
Louisville reeled off nine straight points and won the game.
So was it just bad luck that the little guys fell shy of knocking
off Goliath this year? Or is there something different about this
year's tournament that made an upset less likely? Watching the
Siena and East Tennessee games, it was hard not to wonder
whether the endlessly hyped mythology of the Cinderella has
started to affect the players as well as the fans. Today's players
know that draining a 3-pointer to drop a top seed, a la Bryce
Drew, will be better remembered than nearly anything in college
basketball except winning it all—a goal realistic for only a
handful of teams each year. So perhaps it isn't surprising that
when faced with a moment that has the potential for repeated
replays every March, some kids ditch the disciplined play that
brought them to the brink of upset. Had one or two of the teams
just kept their focus late in the game, no one would be labeling
this tournament "boring."
Of course, what was a gutsy, conscience-free shot by Ronald
Moore on Friday was a hasty, forced shot on Sunday—the
difference being that one went in and the other didn't. It's
impossible to quantify the effect of previous upsets on this year's
close calls. We can assess the NCAA's growing talent gap with
more certainty. When the rule stating that players were not draft
eligible until their high school graduating class had been out of
school for a year took effect in 2006, it appeared to level the
NCAA playing field. Experienced teams would seemingly have
an edge over squads that are continually replacing "one and
done" studs. But as 2008 finalists and '09 Sweet 16 teams
Kansas and Memphis demonstrate, the powerhouse programs
have thus far had no trouble reloading with premium athletes
and have offset any lack of team chemistry with raw talent.
The mid-majors are also getting squeezed by the selection
committee. This year, only four of the 34 at-large berths were
given to schools outside the power conferences. Those slots are
vitally important for the little guys, as they have an outsize effect
on recruiting better players—witness Gonzaga's transition from
46/95
cuddly mid-major to annual high seed. The big-conference
stranglehold on the tournament further stratifies the haves and
have-nots for the future. Things might only get even boringer.
What's more, season-long bracketology has resulted in a
selection committee that may be too accurate for its own good.
Yesterday's upset-laden tourneys may have been more about toohighly seeded clubs regressing to the mean or unfairly lowseeded teams performing to their actual ability. This year's
avalanche of high seeds in the Sweet 16 is further evidence that
Mike Slive and his committee might need to shake things up
next time or risk putting fans to sleep. Perhaps the time allotted
to choose the brackets should be reduced from several days to 45
minutes. Lightning round!
Another radical thought—with the Madness draining from
March, perhaps it's time to contract the tourney. Until the mid1970s, only the conference tournament winners made the "Big
Dance," which then consisted of no more than 25 teams. What if
tournament berths went to the regular-season champions of each
conference? That would eliminate the mediocre teams that get
hot for a weekend at the conference tournament and then gum up
the works in the big show. There are 31 conferences, so the
selection committee could halve their annual duty and pick only
17 more, for a total of 48. They could also bring back the firstround bye for the top 16 seeds—not that big a deal when you
consider the top four seeds have lost only five games in the first
round since 2006.
This way, the various Middle Valley State Techs that make the
first rounds so compelling will have more of a fighting chance at
upsets, as the lowest seed would face the fifth-best team in the
region, rather than the best, in the first rounds. They then would
have a game under their belts when it came time to play the
elites, who took the first round off. Tightening the field would
also eliminate many of the average teams who make the dance
from the power conferences. That would help level the monetary
playing field among the conferences, spreading out the payoffs
for winning tourney games around the country. So maybe the
same dozen schools wouldn't comprise the Final Four year in
and year out. There's nothing as boring as that.
supreme court dispatches
The Supreme Court Reviews Hillary: The
Movie
Prediction: 10 thumbs-ups, 8 thumbs-downs.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Hillary: The Movie: The critics rave.
"This film, which I saw—it is not a musical comedy."
—Justice Stephen Breyer
"As Justice Breyer said, it's not a musical comedy."
—Justice David Souter
In 2008, a conservative group called Citizens United produced
Hillary: The Movie, a 90-minute documentary in which Hillary
Clinton, then seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, is
variously described as "deceitful," "ruthless," and "cunning," as
well as "dishonest," "reckless," a "congenital liar," and "not
qualified as commander in chief." For ideological balance, Dick
Morris says that "Hillary is the closest thing we have in America
to a European socialist." The movie did not expressly urge voters
to vote against her. It simply implied that friends don't let friends
vote for evil people.
Citizens United released the film in six theaters and on DVD,
actions not subject to federal regulation. But when they sought to
distribute the film by paying $1.2 million to sell it through a
video-on-demand service, the Federal Election Commission
contended that the film was no different from the kind of
"electioneering communication" regulated under the McCainFeingold campaign finance law. That was the 2002 statute that
tried to limit the influence of big money on elections. If subject
to the constraints of McCain-Feingold, the film could not be
financed by corporate treasuries or broadcast within 30 days of a
primary or 60 days of a general election. The federal court of
appeals agreed with the FEC, finding that the movie could be
interpreted as nothing but an effort to "inform the electorate that
Senator Clinton is unfit for office." Citizens United appealed.
The question for the high court in Citizens United v. Federal
Election Commission is whether the film is more like a 90minute version of one of those swift-boat ads or more like The
Federalist—core political speech that warrants the highest level
of constitutional protection. At oral argument this morning, the
government—seemingly unafraid of the latter comparison—
takes the position that in the right circumstances, even books can
be banned under campaign finance laws. And that's when the
justices start hyperventilating.
Former Bush administration Solicitor General Ted Olson
represents Citizens United, and because the justices had just
screened the virulently anti-Clinton film, his claims that the
movie simply "informs and educates" the public about important
issues are generally met by stony silence. Nobody really thinks it
is an episode of 60 Minutes. Olson does get the bunch hopping
when he characterizes McCain-Feingold as "one of the most
complicated, expensive, and incomprehensible regulatory
regimes ever invented by the administrative state." Olson notes
that the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (which
he accidentally calls "the Reporters Committee for the Right to
Life") filed a brief on his side of the case urging that the Hillary
47/95
movie "is indistinguishable from other news-media
commentary." (Disclosure: I am on the steering committee of the
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press; I am still waitlisted for Reporters Committee for the Right to Life.)
Several of the justices seem bothered by Olson's claim that
Hillary did not represent electioneering. "This sounds to me like
campaign advocacy," insists Justice David Souter. Justice Ruth
Bader Ginsburg adds, "If that isn't an appeal to voters, I can't
imagine what is." To which Olson replies that the film is merely
"a long discussion of the record, qualifications, history, and
conduct of someone who is in the political arena, a person who
already holds public office, who now holds a different public
office, who, yes, at that point, Justice Souter, was running for
office." But Justice Anthony Kennedy observes that a 90-minute
attack ad is pretty much by definition more potent than a 30second one: "[I]f we take this as a beginning point—that a short,
30-second campaign ad can be regulated—you want me to write
an opinion and say, well, if it's 90 minutes, then that's different.
It seems to me that you can make the argument that 90 minutes
is much more powerful in support or in opposition to a
candidate."
Olson seems to be of the view that a good way to peel off five
votes at the court is by berating the justices about the general
twirliness of the campaign finance laws, as evidenced by the fact
that "since 2003, this court has issued something close to 500
pages of opinions … and 22 separate opinions from the Justices
of this Court attempting to figure out what this statute means." A
defensive Chief Justice John Roberts observes that the statute
gives the court "mandatory appellate jurisdiction"—it has to hear
these cases. A tetchy John Paul Stevens snaps: "And maybe
those cases presented more difficult issues than this one!"
Note to Olson: Don't tell the justices they are too stupid to
understand McCain-Feingold.
Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart rises to argue the
case for the FEC. His job is to persuade the court that they can
and should ban 90-minute attack ads. But when Justice Samuel
Alito asks whether the government—if it can regulate
documentaries—might also regulate a book containing "express
advocacy" prior to an election, Stewart agrees that it might.
"That's pretty incredible," splutters Alito. "You think that if—if a
book was published, a campaign biography that was the
functional equivalent of express advocacy, that could be
banned?" Not banned, clarifies Stewart. Congress could just
"prohibit the use of corporate treasury funds" to publish it. Oh,
Malcolm Stewart. Malcolm Stewart. With your Macbeth-y first
name and your Macbeth-ier last name. You did not just say the
government might engage in a teensy little bit of judicious,
narrowly tailored book-banning, did you?
At this point, a horrified Anthony Kennedy gets even paler than
his usual pale self: "Is it the Kindle where you can read a book? I
take it that's from a satellite. So the existing statute would
probably prohibit that under your view? … If this Kindle device
where you can read a book which is campaign advocacy, within
the 60- to 30-day period, if it comes from a satellite, it can be
prohibited under the Constitution and perhaps under this
statute?" Again Stewart clarifies that it wouldn't be banned, but a
corporation could be barred from using its general treasury funds
to publish such a book and would be required to publish it
through a PAC. The chief justice seeks to clarify that this would
be so even in a 500-page book with only one sentence that
contained express advocacy. Stewart cheerfully agrees. The
chief justice wonders whether this would apply even "to a sign
held up in Lafayette Park saying vote for so-and-so." Stewart
doesn't quite say no.
Justice Breyer keeps trying to shake Stewart over his head—like
an Etch A Sketch—to erase the noxious image of governmentsponsored book banning and get him to stop chatting about
issues that are not before the court. But it's too late. Now Souter
looks even paler than Kennedy.
For the past few years, the Roberts court has been slowing
chipping away at McCain-Feingold, with Justices Roberts and
Alito tapping on the brakes as Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas
revved the motor. But it seems to me that all this talk of book
banning and government regulation of signs in Lafayette Park is
a pretty good way to get all five of them in the mood to run
down yet more restrictions on political advertising. And maybe
even back up and do it again.
technology
Stop Whining About Facebook's
Redesign
So you hate the site's new look. Simmer down—you'll like it soon enough.
By Farhad Manjoo
Do you hate Facebook's new design? Do you find the home page
too noisy, with important updates from your friends getting
buried under a stream of banal comments from high-school
classmates and other people you pity-friended? I bet you think
the site's confusing, too. It used to be easy to get to people's
photos and notes, but now you've got to click around to find
anything. Are you at your wit's end?
I've got news for you: You'll get over it soon enough.
48/95
Though Facebook will probably tweak its new layout over the
next few weeks—sites always tweak new designs—the giant
social network is unlikely to revert to its former self. That's
because it's banking on a tried-and-true axiom of the Web:
People always hate when their favorite site is suddenly
completely different. A lot of them threaten to quit. They're
bluffing.
For readers who aren't among the angry horde, here's the back
story: Over the last couple of weeks, Facebook revamped
members' home pages in an effort to let people "share more
information about what is happening with them," as founder
Mark Zuckerberg put it. In the past, Facebook used a complex
algorithm to round up your friends' recently added photos, notes,
and status updates and compile them into a neat summary on
your front page. But Facebook execs have lately become
enamored of the microblogging service Twitter, where people
share stuff with each other in real time. Earlier this month, I
argued that, like many in Silicon Valley, Facebook was
overestimating the importance of immediacy to its members; not
everyone wants to see what their friends are doing as it's
happening. The company didn't listen to me, and its new home
page is essentially a Twitterized Facebook. Now, instead of a
summary of what your friends have been up to in the last few
hours, you get what Zuckerberg calls a "stream"—a
continuously updated timeline that shows every little thing that
someone in your network does.
Every time you refresh the front page, there's new stuff for you
to read. Much of it isn't very interesting, and because the stream
moves so quickly, the little that is interesting gets drowned out
by items that aren't. Facebook allows you to block certain
people's updates from appearing on your home page or to filter
the stream according to your friends lists, but these options are
too crude. You can't simply choose to hear a bit less from some
people, or to say, I'd like to see Farhad's notes and photos, but
not his incessant status updates. The effect is like being at a
party of oversharers; every interesting conversation is
interrupted by 10 people who'd love to tell you what they ate for
breakfast.*
In a poll on the site, more than 1 million members—94 percent
of respondents—say they can't stand the design. I voted against
it, too. I don't necessarily want the old version back, but I think
Facebook should look for a better balance between showing you
what's immediate and showing you what's interesting. The bulk
of the page should be reserved for what's happened over the last
day, with only a small section displaying what's happening right
now.
Still, I'm not very confident that my feelings are genuine. When
a site as popular as Facebook makes a change as big as this, it's
hard to know whether your immediate negative response really
does reflect substantive concerns. As we flit about the Web
every day, we get used to our favorite sites being laid out in a
certain way. We develop habits for interacting with them, ways
of moving the mouse or the keyboard that become so familiar
they're etched in our muscle memory. Redesigns discombobulate
us.
But eventually we adjust. Over the next few weeks, you'll
probably grow increasingly comfortable with the new Facebook.
You'll discover the path of least resistance to get to the stuff you
like best, and you'll learn ways to tame the noise coming from
everyone in your network. (Over time, you can expect Facebook
to add more refined ways to filter what shows up.) Soon you'll
also forget much of what you loved about the old site. In a
month or two, the new Facebook will come to seem like home.
Don't believe me? Mark your calendar for some time in June. If
you still hate the new design then—and if you can still
remember what the old Facebook looked like—shoot me an email.
How can I be so sure that you'll learn to like the redesign?
Because you did the last two times Facebook did it. In 2006,
Facebook added the original news feed to its site. (This was the
slowly updated stream of what's happening with your friends
that new redesign is replacing.) People hated it. They said the
feed cluttered their home pages and violated their privacy.
Zuckerberg responded with a blog post titled, "Calm down.
Breathe. We hear you." Facebook tweaked the feed a bit, but the
redesign stuck. Zuckerberg's instinct was right on. In time, the
news feed became Facebook's signature feature, the part of the
site that everyone checked first. Last summer, Facebook
redesigned its front page to give more weight to the news feed.
Again, millions protested. But once more, people learned to love
the new site—stats show members started using Facebook more
often. On Friday, Gawker, citing an unnamed source, reported
that Zuckerberg sent a memo to his staff telling them to ignore
the latest cries because "the most disruptive companies don't
listen to their customers." That's not very politic, but if
Zuckerberg did really say it, he was only describing recent
history.
Indeed, learning to ignore readers is a necessary skill among
people who design for the Web. In January, Jason Kottke
redesigned his popular blog about "liberal arts 2.0." A few days
after the new version launched, Kottke, who is careful and
thoughtful about design, wrote a post describing people's
reactions. Most of the readers he'd heard from didn't like it;
many wanted him to bring back the old site. "This is exactly the
reaction I expected, and it's heartening to learn that the old
design struck such a chord with people," he wrote. He pointed
out that people hated the old design when it was new, too. "All
I'm asking is that you give it a little time."
Kottke's few hundred thousand readers might be inclined to give
him the benefit of the doubt. Facebook is in a different spot. It
has nearly 200 million users, and each of them thinks of their
49/95
page as something they should control. This suggests that
Facebook should approach redesigns much more carefully.
About a week before the new site went into effect, Facebook put
up a short note preparing users for coming changes. That was
insufficient notice. A better approach would have allowed
people to choose between the new site and the old one for a
while; this would have let the company get feedback on the new
site and fix what people hated about it before it rolled it out to
everyone. It would also have given users a chance to get used to
the new design before it became the default view. (In fact,
Facebook did this for its last redesign; it's baffling why it didn't
do the same this time.)
Other big Web companies have taken this go-slow approach in
their design shops. More than 300 million people around the
world check in to Yahoo's front page every day. The company
has spent months redesigning it. Yahoo relies heavily on "bucket
testing," in which it randomly serves up potential new designs
and monitors feedback. That process has given designers deep
insight into what people want from a new site and how best to
ease people into a new design. Google takes bucket testing to
almost absurd lengths. The New York Times reported recently
that in choosing the color of a single toolbar on one of its sites,
Google served up pages with 41 different shades of blue to see
which one people were most likely to click on. (One of Google's
top designers recently quit in part over his displeasure with this
strategy.)
When Slate redesigned its home page last fall, many readers
wrote in to complain. Last week I e-mailed a handful of them to
see if they still hated Slate's design. A couple of them said they
still weren't big fans; most admitted they'd grown used to it and
couldn't really recall the old site very well. But several said
something I found interesting—that what had bothered them
about the redesign wasn't exactly the change but the fact that the
changes hadn't seemed necessary. Slate, like a lot of sites, hadn't
explained well enough why it was making such sweeping
changes.
"I'm a big believer in 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it,' " a reader
named Barry Geisler told me. "The seemingly constant
redesigning of Web sites needlessly frustrates the user for what
appears to be very little gain. Yes, users adapt fairly quickly—so
what? Is the new Facebook a richer, better experience this week
over last week? Doubtful."
That's the main problem with Facebook's sudden redesign. The
real reason Facebook implemented it is to compete with Twitter.
So far, there's nothing in it for us.
Correction, March 25, 2009: This article originally stated that
Facebook's new activity stream forces people to listen to
conversations from everyone in their network; in fact, you can
filter your stream according to groups of friends. (Return to the
corrected sentence.)
television
Just Look Away
HBO's adaptation of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.
By Troy Patterson
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (Sundays at 8 p.m. ET)—a
beautifully shot, marvelously soporific, sporadically irksome
miniseries that reads mostly as a pretense for a glamorous
working vacation—airs, as they say, not on TV but on HBO.
Unlike The Wire or The Sopranos or even a befuddled effort like
the short-lived John From Cincinnati, this show has no vivid
artistic ambitions, only transparent status-seeking aspirations. A
prestige project, it's one of the network's excursions in hounding
after industry esteem and dinner-party kudos at the expense of
all else.
The director is Anthony Minghella, who previously helmed the
wonderful Truly Madly Deeply, the riveting Talented Mr. Ripley,
the inexcusable Cold Mountain, and—second only to
Shakespeare in Love as the ultimate artsy-fartsy cachet-catcher
of our time—The English Patient. The executive producers are
Harvey Weinstein, Sydney Pollack, and Richard Curtis, famous
as the screenwriter who inflected on an innocent public such
crumpets as Love Actually and HBO's The Girl in the Café
(seven Emmy nominations, one Humanitas Prize). Because both
Pollack and Minghella died last year, it feels boorish to
disparage Detective Agency, but let's give it a shot.
We shall begin with the matter of the source material, a dull
series of middlebrow novels churned out by one Alexander
McCall Smith. The most glaring of the many problems with the
Detective Agency novels—or at least with the first of them,
which is all I had the stamina to take—is that they are not
detective novels. Because they concern the workings of a private
investigator's office in Gaborone, Botswana, you might open the
book with the idea that the heroine, Precious Ramotswe, will
solve some proper mysteries, like Miss Marple with a headtie
instead of a cloche.
Silly you. Ramotswe never takes a case that would tax
Encyclopedia Brown. Hacking through the highly prosaic prose
of the eponymous first installment, you find her accepting
perhaps half a dozen major cases and developing a mildly clever
way of resolving each. It's not about who done it but about how
to catch 'em—exposing an adulterous husband by enticing him
home, stealing a stolen car on behalf of its rightful owner—and
the protagonist's expertise is not in deduction but in perception.
She's The Mentalist with a different accent. The tag line for the
show is, "Never underestimate a woman's intuition." Meanwhile,
the rear cover of the tie-in edition boasts that more than 7
50/95
million readers have discovered the book. Can 7 million readers
be wrong? Aren't they usually?
The novel features a lot of business about Ramotswe—a size 22,
a natural nurturer, a mechanical earth-mother archetype—
attending to her pot of redbush tea. The show picks up on this
and, like the book, functions itself as a kind of tea cozy. Onscreen, R&B singer Jill Scott reports for brewing duty in her first
starring role. Considering that her lines include, "I want to do
good with the time God has given me," she's perfectly fine.
There exists a perennial complaint about the dearth of good parts
for black actors in mainstream entertainment, and Detective
Agency, to its credit, gets halfway toward remedying this
imbalance; the casting agents offered a cornucopia of bad parts
to black actors. Witness Anika Noni Rose, unsung for her
excellence as the third of Bill Condon's Dreamgirls, doing what
she can in the role of Ramotswe's secretary, a caricature of an
uptight prig. I bailed on the show after its fourth hour and thus
will never catch the inevitable scene where she pulls off her
glasses and takes down her hair.
What does the show have to say about blackness? Nothing you
need to hear. Where the book, consistently tepid, forgoes
outright exoticism, the show dives headlong into a thoughtless
brand of Africanism, presenting Ramotswe as not just an earth
mother but a global mammy, just slightly. Though the book is
primarily set in a city, a montage near the beginning of the
miniseries gives us a lot of rhinos and giraffes and elephants, as
if this were The Jungle Book's India or Busch Gardens' Dark
Continent. This doesn't feel mindless, just unmindful, and the
best way to honor its late creators is to look away from it.
the best policy
The Real AIG Scandal, Continued!
The transfer of $12.9 billion from AIG to Goldman looks fishier and fishier.
By Eliot Spitzer
Sunday, March 22, 2009, at 9:42 AM ET
risk—systemic or otherwise—was being covered? If Goldman
wasn't going to suffer severe losses, why are taxpayers paying
them off at 100 cents on the dollar? As I wrote earlier in the
week, the real AIG scandal is that the company's trading partners
are getting fully paid rather than taking a haircut.
Goldman's answer is that it was merely taking a commercial
position—trying to avoid any losses at all on its AIG positions. I
suppose we can hardly expect Goldman to reject government
assistance in the form of pure cash that seems to have had no
strings attached.
But what were the government officials possibly thinking? The
only rationale for what we should call the "hidden conduit
bailout" to AIG's trading partners is that the cascading effect of
AIG's inability to pay would have been devastating. But
Goldman has now said very clearly there would have been no
cascade. Not even a ripple.
Is the same true of AIG's other counterparties, including several
foreign banks? What examination of the impact of an AIG
failure did federal officials undertake before deciding to spend
countless billions bailing out AIG and its trading partners?
The government decision to bail out AIG was made after the
private parties, supposedly at risk, had declined to structure a
private series of investments that might have avoided the need
for use of public money. Perhaps they knew the impact of an
AIG default would be small, or perhaps they knew that the
federal officials in the room would blink and ante up. In a postLehman moment when panic, not reason, was dominating the
discussion, perhaps they figured they could walk away with
extra billions—and, indeed, they did.
This issue cries out for immediate government inquiry. Maybe
one or two of the more than two dozen government entities now
beating their chests about bonuses can redirect their energies to
this much larger issue confronting us: Who signed off on this
$80 billion bailout—now approaching $200 billion—and why?
The AIG scandal is getting ever-more disturbing. Goldman
Sachs' public conference call explaining its trading relationship
and exposure with AIG established, once again, that Goldman
knows how to protect itself. According to Goldman, even if AIG
had failed, Goldman's losses would have been minimal.
The second question, of course, is why Goldman was wise to
AIG's declining position two years ago but nobody else appears
to have known. There is always the operating premise that
Goldman is better than the rest in the field, but where were the
federal agencies that should have been taking a look at AIG's
leverage situation and general financial health?
How did Goldman protect itself? Sensing AIG's weakening
capital position through 2006 and 2007, Goldman demanded
more collateral from AIG and covered outstanding risk with
instruments from other firms.
And were AIG's public statements accurate in revealing a
decline? Or did Goldman, with its multiple trading relationships
with AIG, get an early warning? This series of questions also
demands immediate inquiry and resolution.
But this raises two critical questions. The first is why $12.9
billion of taxpayer money went from AIG to Goldman. What
What continues to be fundamentally disappointing is that the
"too big to fail" institutions continue to absorb enormous sums
51/95
of taxpayer support without either demonstrating the genuine
need for such support or altering their behavior after receiving it.
After getting $12.9 billion in what now seems to be a mere gift,
has Goldman begun to lend in a way that will restore the credit
markets? Were they asked to do so?
It is time the government realizes it has two simple options:
tightly regulate entities that are too big to fail or break them up
so they aren't.
the big idea
Book End
How the Kindle will change the world.
By Jacob Weisberg
Saturday, March 21, 2009, at 9:27 AM ET
I'm doing my best not to become a Kindle bore. When I catch
myself evangelizing to someone who couldn't care less about the
marvels of the 2.0 version of Amazon's reading machine—I can
take a whole library on vacation! Adjust the type size! Peruse the
morning paper without getting out of bed!—I pause and
remember my boyhood friend Scott H., who loved showing off
the capabilities of his state of-the-art stereo but had only four
records because he wasn't really that into music.
So apologies in advance if I'm irksomely enthusiastic about my
cool new literature delivery system. Like the early PCs, the
Kindle 2 is a primitive tool. Like the Rocket e-book of 1999
(524 titles available!), it will surely draw chuckles a decade
hence for its black-and-white display, its lack of built-in lighting,
and the robotic intonation of the text-to-voice feature. But
however the technology and marketplace evolve, Jeff Bezos has
built a machine that marks a cultural revolution. The Kindle 2
signals that after a happy, 550-year union, reading and printing
are getting separated. It tells us that printed books, the most
important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join
newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence.
Though the PC and the Internet taught us all to read on screens,
they have not actually improved the experience of reading. I
remember Bill Gates, in Slate's Microsoft years, mentioning in
an interview that he read our webzine printed out—a tribute that
underscored an inherent flaw. For all their advantages in creating
and distributing texts, screens have compromised, rather than
enhanced, the feeling of being transported into a writer's
imaginative universe. You can't curl up with a laptop. Until now,
Gutenberg's invention had yet to be surpassed as the best
available technology for reading at length or for pleasure.
The Kindle is not better than a printed book in all situations. You
wouldn't want to read an art book, or a picture book to your
children on one, or take one into the tub (please). But for the past
few weeks, I've done most of my recreational reading on the
Kindle—David Grann's adventure yarn The Lost City of Z,
Marilynne Robinson's novel Home, Slate, The New Yorker, the
Atlantic, the Washington Post, and the New York Times—and
can honestly say I prefer it to inked paper. It provides a
fundamentally better experience—and will surely produce a
radically better one with coming iterations.
The notion that physical books are ending their lifecycle is
upsetting to people who hold them to be synonymous with
literature and terrifying to those who make their living within the
existing structures of publishing. As an editor and a lover of
books, I sympathize. But why should a civilization that reads
electronically be any less literate than one that harvests trees to
do so? And why should a transition away from the printed page
lessen our appreciation and love for printed books? Hardbacks
these days are disposable vessels, printed on ever crappier paper
with bindings that skew and crack. In a world where we do most
of our serious reading on screens, books may again thrive as
expressions of craft and design. Their decline as useful objects
may allow them to flourish as design objects.
As to the fate of book publishers, there's less reason to be
optimistic. Amazon, which is selling most new books at a loss to
get everyone hooked on the Kindle, will eventually want to
make money on them. The publishers will be squeezed at best
and disintermediated at worst. Amazon is already publishing
Stephen King. In the future, it could become the only publisher a
best-selling author needs. In a world without the high fixed costs
of printing and distribution, as the distance between writers and
their audiences shrinks, what essential service will Random
House and Simon & Schuster provide? If the answer is primarily
cultural arbitration and editing, the publishing behemoths might
dwindle while a much lighter weight model of publishing—
clever kids working from coffee shops in Brooklyn—emerges.
What we should worry about is that the system supports the
creation of literature, if grudgingly. There's a risk that what
replaces it won't allow as many writers to make as good a living.
But there's also a chance it could allow more writers to make a
better living. For newspaper journalism, the future looks bleak at
the moment. As the economic model for daily reporting
collapses, we're losing the support structure for large-scale
newsgathering. At the same time, the Internet has radically
expanded the potential audience of every journalist while
bringing a new freedom to experiment and innovate. When it
comes to literature, I'm optimistic that electronic reading will
bring more good than harm. New modes of communication will
spur new forms while breathing life into old ones. Reading
without paper might make literature more urgent and accessible
than it was before the technological revolution, just like
Gutenberg did.
52/95
A version of this article appears in this week's issue of
Newsweek.
hilarious lengths her mother will go to make sure she's all right.
But why do you even take your aunt's calls? The woman clearly
needs treatment for whatever ails her, but you need her to stop
ailing you. Tell her that you two are going cold turkey and you're
not going to answer her calls anymore. Surely she'll find
someone else to worry about.
the chat room
Dial It Down
Dear Prudence on family members who call way too often, and other readers'
quandaries.
Emily Yoffe, aka Dear Prudence, is on Washingtonpost.com
every Monday at 1 p.m. to chat with readers about their
romantic, family, financial, and workplace problems. She's
taking next week off but will be back live on April 6. (Read her
Slate columns here.) An unedited transcript of this week's chat
follows.
Emily Yoffe: Good afternoon. Let's get started!
_______________________
Washington, D.C.: I'm in my early 30s, and at the age where
people always ask if you have kids, want kids, or plan to have
kids. This is not something I want to launch into with people I
don't know well (and even people I do), so how can I deflect
comments/questions such as these without seeming rude?
Emily Yoffe: People often recommend, "Why do you ask?" as a
good conversation stopper. But that really doesn't end the
conversation, it just leaves the other person sputtering for a
response. I like, "You'll be the first to know."
_______________________
Alexandria, Va.: My aunt panics if she can't get in touch with
me. If I don't answer my phones (home and cell), she
immediately assumes that I'm in some kind of trouble and calls
my mother to find out if she knows where I am and if I'm OK.
For example: one time, I TOLD her I was going to a happy hour
with some coworkers, and probably wouldn't be able to hear my
phone. In the 90 minutes I was there, she called six times, left
two messages, and called my mother (who also left two
messages). I could give you many more examples. Oh, and I'm
in my late 20s and married.
I get that she does this because she cares, but it's driving me
mad. Is there any polite way to tell her that sometimes people
can't answer their phones and that "inaccessible for a few hours"
does not mean "dead in a ditch somewhere"?
Emily Yoffe: It's one thing to have a mother who's batty about
your safety. Comedian Amy Borkowsky has built a career on the
_______________________
Washington, D.C.: I thought my mother raised a gentleman. I
hold doors, let others off elevators first, and always remember
my p's and q's. And because I think 21st century gentlemen are
more enlightened than 19th and early 20th century gentlemen, I
perform social niceties without gender in mind. Unfortunately, I
recently went out on a date with a woman that became irritated
because I apparently did not walk on the proper side of her on
the sidewalk (Admittedly, walking too fast is a bad habit of
mine, but this concerned positioning). She said it was basic
etiquette for a man to walk on the outside of his date, on the side
closest to the street. I have never heard of this convention. I
assume the convention relates to the days of unpaved streets
when passing horses and wagons might splash water and muck
(and worse!) on pedestrians. I did a bit of research and could
only find one etiquette book that mentions this sidewalk rule.
Am I just another clueless pseudo-gentleman or is she hopelessly
old fashioned?
-Thinks he may have mucked it up
Emily Yoffe: It's good you didn't point out to her that it's equally
impolite to get irritated and unpleasant on a date over an issue
that only a tiny number of people would even be aware is a faux
pas. Yes, your research is correct about the origin of that
convention, but your date is being a stickler over something that
no one pays any attention to anymore. I hope she had some other
redeeming qualities.
_______________________
Rotterdam, Netherlands: I have a very good friend that I met
in college 10 years ago. He has always been obese. At one point,
he seemed to be losing weight successfully, but now that he
works an office job, his weight has ballooned by at least a
hundred pounds. I have also known his wife for 10 years. When
I first met her, she was a size 6. She has gained at least 10 dress
sizes in that time. They are both in complete denial about this,
saying they would rather be fat and happy than skinny and
miserable, but at the rate they're going, he especially is not going
to be around much longer. He is already suffering from
hypertension and sleep apnea and he's barely 30! I only see them
a few times a year, when I visit my hometown, but when I do,
they always want to go to a restaurant, where they order things
like 16-ounce steaks with fries and 4-cheese dip with fried pita
bread. From what they tell me, this is how they eat every day.
They don't even have bread or milk at home! I can't really invite
53/95
them for a home-cooked meal since I'm only visiting when I'm
there. Do you have any suggestions on how to behave around
these two people who seem determined to eat themselves to
death?
Emily Yoffe: Since they've told you they want to be fat and
happy, you obviously have already had a conversation with them
about your alarm over their weight. If the numbers on the scale
doesn't concern them, your semi-annual lectures are going to
have no effect. If you enjoy their company, just have a good
time when you're out with them. And no one wants to share a
meal with someone who is pointing out that the steak is going to
kill them.
However, I have one friend who has, over the past year, asked
me to edit more than 250 pages of his dissertation. I've helped
much more than I feel inclined to, giving up more than 50 hours
($2,500 if I freelanced it) of my time. I'm bored of the topic of
the dissertation and not interested in spending my free time
editing his work any longer.
I need help formulating a clear and polite response next time he
asks for assistance. I've occasionally said that I'm too busy to
help, but I need to be more clear that I don't welcome future
requests related to the dissertation. This man is a friend whom I
otherwise really like and don't want to offend; at the same time,
he is clearly willing to exploit this connection and I need to set
boundaries.
_______________________
Thanks so much.
Washington, D.C.: Hi Prudence,
I'm not sure how to deal with an awkward situation. A good
college friend got engaged this fall. She sent me an email asking
to confirm my address for the invitation, to which I promptly
replied. Now I see (via Facebook), and hear from friends that she
sent out "Save the Dates" more than a month ago. I never
received one.
Now, I respect her right to invite whoever the heck she wants,
and we're admittedly not as close as we once were (different
coasts, electronic communication). But based on some others
who she invited who were in our group of friends but not as
close, I think there may have been a mistake.
How do I handle this? I don't want to put her on the spot, but
don't want to miss out on celebrating her big day if she wanted
me there... Help!
Emily Yoffe: Didn't I just read that someone has just written a
book on Facebook etiquette? We need one. This is a case in
which you could deputize someone to ask for you. Have a friend
you know has been invited say to the bride, "I was talking to
'Kate' the other day and she said she got an email from you
asking for her address, but she never got an invitation. She didn't
seem upset, but she's wondering if she's still invited." That at
least should solve this mystery.
_______________________
Professional Services for Free: Dear Prudie,
I'm a professional editor. My family, friends, and colleagues
frequently ask me to edit their documents—resumes, papers,
important emails, etc.—in my spare time. Ordinarily, I don't
mind helping out, especially if the document is short.
Emily Yoffe: All professionals should be able to enjoy their
relationships with people without being exploited. That means
doctors shouldn't be expected to give free appendectomies, and
computer experts shouldn't be expected to come and get the porn
spam out of your computer, etc. To friends and family just say
that you edit for a living and don't want to do it for free in your
free time—unless you are in the mood to help with something
short. As for your "friend", you can tell him that while he may
not be done with his dissertation, you are.
_______________________
Kookooville: So my mom calls me a lot. Like, 3-4 times a day
on the weekends. She picks the most inconvenient times to
call—when I'm feeding the kids or giving them baths or taking a
nap. So we've started not answering calls when it's not
convenient for us. (Her calls aren't the only ones we don't
answer—anyone who calls at those times don't get picked up.)
So after she called 9 (!) times yesterday, and asked why we
didn't pick up—were we out shopping, were we outside enjoying
the weather—I told her that we don't pick up unless we're in a
position to talk. So now she says "well, I guess I won't call you
anymore" AND she called my dad & step-mom, brother, two
sisters, aunt, and cousin to say "oh, she doesn't want me to call
her anymore." Seriously, how do I deal with this? I'm fine
talking to her once or twice over the weekend, but 6 one-minutelong conversations ("What are you up to today?" "Laundry")
don't really get me excited.
Emily Yoffe: She said, "Well, I won't call you anymore"—what
a victory! That was easy, wasn't it? (Not that I believe her.)
Now, when you have the time to call her and talk, do so, and
when you've run out of time say, "Mom, great talking to you,
I've got to go." If she throws a snit or won't talk to you, then you
can do something else with your time.
_______________________
54/95
Denver, Col.: Hello! My husband has a really annoying habit
that is about to send me over the edge. Let's call it an
'adjustment' problem. He 'adjusts' himself at least 20 times an
hour (it feels like) and it drives me insane and grosses me out.
I've mentioned it, fussed about it, tried to ignore it, etc. Any
suggestions on how to handle it? Thanks!
Emily Yoffe: He couldn't have been doing this while you were
dating or else surely you wouldn't be married. Does he do this at
work? (If so, how is he still employed?) This has become a
compulsion and there is something more wrong in his head than
his pants. Perhaps he would agree to see a doctor with you to
discuss what is going on and how to stop it—surely he's
motivated enough to get you to stop mentioning it to him.
Explain your concerned because this habit could have severely
unpleasant consequences.
_______________________
Washington, D.C.: I am a woman in my mid-twenties, and was
raised to take care of myself and not rely on a man to do it. As
such, when on a date, I don't expect doors to be held for me, or
chairs pulled out, or car doors opened (I actually find those last
two kind of obnoxious). I also find it really insulting if a man
refuses to walk through a door that I am holding open for him.
The problem is, my stepfather does expect that my boyfriends do
these things, and consequently, he dislikes most of my
boyfriends. How do I convince him that I am not helpless, I don't
want my chair pulled out for me, and I would really just prefer
that whoever gets to the door first hold it open?
Emily Yoffe: If you are happy with the guys you date and
neither one of you are interested in car door or chair etiquette,
just ignore your stepfather's criticism.
_______________________
Baltimore, Md.: I am a 50+ year old woman, and many of my
friends are of similar age. Many of us regularly have to pluck
long wiry hairs growing from our chins. There is one woman in
our circle of friends who just lets them grow. Is there any polite
way to suggest she should do something about this?
Emily Yoffe: Equality in facial hair is one of the unsung
benefits of aging. Maybe this is why nature designed our eyes to
start going at the same time—so we won't stand in front of the
bathroom mirror and scream at the realization we've become
bearded ladies. Say to your friend, "I need to have an awkward
discussion with you. Marge, you may not be aware of it, but
you've got some facial hairs you need to take care of because
they are really marring your good looks."
Incessant calls from parents: I used to think that my mom was
calling me all the time, and that she always called at a bad time.
Now, I try to make sure that I call her at least once a week, and
if I can't get to the phone when she calls, I don't fret.
It makes her not feel like she's the only one calling, and it made
me realise that she just wants to talk. To me. Gee, how bad can
that be?
I know, it was just a change in my behavior. But the truth is, it
isn't that hard to just pick up the phone and call her once a week
or so. And now, I don't feel guilty if I don't pick up the phone
sometimes.
Emily Yoffe: Excellent advice, both on what to do and on
attitude.
_______________________
Santa Cruz, Calif.: Hi. Re which side of a date do you walk on,
I'm pretty sure the current etiquette is for the man always to walk
on the woman's left. This is because in these times the "danger"
is much more likely to come from an approaching human (e.g., a
purse snatcher) than from a rearing horse. Since most foot traffic
walks on the right side of the sidewalk in each direction (like car
traffic) this approach puts the man between the woman and
strangers.
Emily Yoffe: This is an argument for dropping the whole idea
that sex chromosomes should dictate position on the sidewalk.
_______________________
Washington, D.C.: Dear Prudence, I have a friend who bails out
of plans at the last minute. In her mind, all plans are tentative
until she shows up (which makes dinner reservations and being
seated at restaurants slightly problematic). Is there a polite way
to say "stop canceling at the last minute, or I am going to stop
inviting you?"
Emily Yoffe: It's nice of you to restrain the impulse to call her a
self-centered, inconsiderate flake. You can say something like,"I
love spending time with you, and I know we're all busy, but it's
frustrating to make plans with you and then have you not show
up. If I can't rely on you to follow through, I'm not going to keep
asking you." And surely you have found you don't actually love
spending time with her because that usually means sitting at a
restaurant by yourself staring at your watch.
_______________________
_______________________
55/95
College Point, N.Y.: How do I get my girlfriend to get back
with me? It was all my fault because I was seeing someone else
and she left me when she found out, but now I want her back.
She is the one for me. What can I do to get her back
Emily Yoffe: You can tell her you realize how much you hurt
her over your foolishness and that you would like another
chance. If she doesn't want to give you one, leave her alone. And
absorb this painful lesson about cheating.
_______________________
Washington, D.C.: I have visited the infertility clinic 3x/month
for the last four months. During each appointment, I have to
interact with 3-4 people who each always ask me how I am.
Truthfully, I am not handling the crushing disappointment of not
being able to get pregnant very well. I realize their questions are
their way of being polite and my normal answer, outside of the
doctor's office, is a simple 'fine'. However, inside the doctor's
office, I just refuse to say that I am fine. I am nowhere near fine.
And frankly, considering why people come to their office, they
should suspect that a large majority of their patients are not
going to have a very nice answer to this question.
Is there an answer I can give that is generic enough that I'm not
pouring my heart out to a stranger's throwaway question, yet
isn't positive?
Emily Yoffe: This is truly a case where they are just being
polite. You would probably be equally annoyed if you regularly
went to a clinic and the people you interacted with never even
bothered to ask how you are. "As well as can be expected,
thanks," should do it.
_______________________
Herndon, Va.: Do you have a polite, yet snarky answer to the
question, "Can I borrow some money?"
My coworkers constantly ask me for large sums of money
($600+). How do I get them to stop asking?
Emily Yoffe: What kind of office is this—a loan shark? No need
to be snarky. A simple, "Sorry, I can't help you," should do.
_______________________
Washington, D.C.: I'm getting married in October and I think
my mom wants nothing to do with it. I'm been with my fiance
for over seven years so the idea of us getting married was not a
complete shock to her. She has never said she doesn't want to be
involved, but every time I mention something about it she
changes the subject. I'm even planning a spa day for the girls the
morning of the wedding and she said she just wants to "show up"
to the wedding and not be a part of the activities we have
planned for guests. It's a small group and a destination wedding.
My question is... how do I handle her? I never thought in a
million years my mother would be the one to bring the stress at
my wedding. Do I keep her out or try and get her involved? We
are paying for the entire wedding too and haven't asked my
parents for anything.
Emily Yoffe: Since you are not financially entangled with your
mother over your wedding (Good for you!) this really is an issue
about your relationship with her. Just be honest and say you've
been hurt that she seems so disinterested in your wedding. Ask
her what's wrong. Maybe she resents that she hasn't been asked
to be part of the planning. Maybe she can't afford the trip to the
destination. Maybe she's never liked your fiance. Be direct but
non-confrontational and tell her it will mean a lot to have her
there and happy for you.
_______________________
Anonymous: Emily, I wrote last week about my estranged
father wanting to be at the birth of my next child. I ended up
responding to him, telling him my feelings about the situation,
etc, and he responded to me with a very scathing email. Because
of it, and the patterns he's displayed in the past, I've decided to
cut off all communication. Someone asked me what positives he
brought to my life and I couldn't think of any. I guess I just need
reassurance that cutting out a poisonous person, even if they
appear at times to be not so poisonous, is an ok thing to do.
Emily Yoffe: It is a very difficult decision to end contact with a
close family member. But sometimes that is simply the only way
not to be drawn back into endless dramatics with someone who
only causes pain. That was a very good question you were
asked; and if someone brings nothing positive to your life, then
you need that person out of your life. You don't have decide now
that you will never, ever have contact again. Just see what it
feels like to stop it for now.
_______________________
Fairfax, Va.: Hi Prudence,
I am a very fair-skinned, dark-haired woman in my 30's who
suffers an ongoing bout with Rosacea. I know it is unsightly to
be as red as a shrieking fishwife, and I do take medications on
my skin and orally. How do I respond to "your face is red" or
"sunburn?" without going into gory detail about it not being
contagious, etc.?
Thank you
56/95
Emily Yoffe: It depends on whether you want to get into this
with people. More important than the information you convey is
the way you convey it. If you're comfortable explaining you
have rosacea you can just say in a relaxed way, "No, not a
sunburn. I have rosacea, it's an inherited condition and
fortunately, I'm getting treatment for it."
Your foodie friends may cringe at the thought, but cash-strapped
grad students and single urbanites have had it right all along: As
a general rule, microwaves are more eco-friendly than
conventional ovens. However, that doesn't mean you should
consign yourself to a life of gummy casseroles and dry chicken
just to save the planet.
_______________________
Nashville, Tenn.: I wish I had a mother to call and who could
call me. How I miss that!!!
Emily Yoffe: Good point. Yet that doesn't mean that we should
accept behavior from people we love we are happy to have here
with us that is driving us batty.
_______________________
Alexandria: How about a comment for those people who keep
wanting to know why I don't have a boyfriend? It's been 3 years
and while I've dated and I am often busy every weekend with
volunteering, clubs, activities and the like, no one has been
serious. I'm beyond exhausted from the "when you least expect it
he will come" (I stopped expecting each date to be THE ONE a
long time ago), "well why don't you have a boyfriend" (if I knew
the answer, I might not be single), "maybe if you dyed hair
blond/got a tattoo/went to bars for one night stands" (do these
people know me?)....
Emily Yoffe: If your friends are suggesting you dye your hair,
get a tattoo, and have one night stands as a way of meeting guys,
then you may not need a boyfriend, but you do need new
friends!
_______________________
Emily Yoffe: Thanks everyone. I'll be back in two weeks.
the green lantern
Are Microwave Ovens Good for the
Environment?
Nuking your food to save the planet.
By Nina Shen Rastogi
I've been taking the Lantern's advice and eating at home
more often than going out. Now I'm wondering how I should
be preparing that home cooking. What's the greener choice
for heating up my meals—the microwave or the oven?
First off, a little perspective. According to the Department of
Energy, cooking accounts for a little less than 3 percent of an
average home's energy use (PDF). So any changes you make
aren't going to add up to much—you'll have a much bigger
impact by looking to your light fixtures or your thermostat. On
the other hand, it is fairly easy to cut energy consumption in the
kitchen, so why wouldn't you?
As a general rule, any oven powered by electricity—whether or
not it's a microwave—is going to cook food more efficiently
than a gas-powered appliance. About 12 percent to 14 percent of
the energy drawn by a standard electric oven goes toward
cooking your food. With a gas-powered oven, that number drops
to a little less than 6 percent. (Microwaves handily beat both,
directing about 60 percent of their energy toward cooking.) Still,
when compared with conventional electric ovens, gas-powered
ovens are usually considered more efficient overall, since there
are significant energy losses associated with generating
electricity and then transmitting it to your home. So if you have
a gas oven, use it with the Lantern's blessing.*
That's not an option for the majority of American households,
though. About 60 percent of our conventional ovens are powered
by electricity, not gas—and they're less efficient than standard
microwaves. In the first place, conventional ovens operate at a
higher wattage—about 3,000, compared with something
between 600 and 1,650 for a microwave. They also cost us
energy by cooking food more slowly. One University of Bristol
study found that a chicken cooked in a convection microwave
resulted in energy savings of 30 percent over a conventional
electric oven.
You'll see the greatest energy savings when cooking up small
portions. One Swedish study, for example, found that cooking a
single portion of baked potatoes in an oven took 9.5 times as
much energy as it did in a microwave. When that was increased
to four portions, however, the oven used only 2.5 times as much
energy per serving (PDF). When the meals get big enough—a
pot roast plus vegetables, for example—you're better off
skipping the microwave altogether.
Microwaves do have a few other environmental advantages. For
one thing, they produce a lot less indoor air pollution than other
cooking methods. Plus, they don't heat up your house the way an
oven can, which means lower energy costs associated with both
your A/C and your refrigerator. Heating up a meal on the plate
you intend to eat off of also means fewer dishes to wash—
57/95
although regular use of your microwave might encourage higher
consumption of ready-to-eat convenience meals and all their
extra packaging.
Whichever cooking method you choose, there are plenty of little
things you can do to save energy. With a conventional oven,
avoid preheating and turn the heat off a few minutes before your
food is done. If you switch from metal pans to heat-retaining
glass or ceramic ones, you'll be able to turn your oven down by
25 degrees. Microwave ovens can be made more efficient by
keeping them clean—the appliance can't tell the difference
between your dinner and old cheese splatters, so it'll expend
energy heating up both. Also remember to keep the appliance
unplugged when you're not using it. (Over its lifetime, the
average microwave will use as much energy in standby mode as
it will in actually cooking your food.)
In the end, though, the greenest way to cook your food is the one
that produces the tastiest meal. As we've discussed here before,
food waste is an important environmental consideration: Not
only does it mean more garbage, it also means squandering all
the resources that went into growing, storing, and preparing that
food. Let's say you roasted your Sunday-night chicken dinners in
the microwave rather than the oven for a whole year. Over 52
weeks you'd save 15.6 kilowatt-hours—or about 0.14 percent of
your home's annual energy use. If saving that teeny bit of energy
means you'd be more likely to toss your soggy leftovers, then by
all means, fire up the big boy and cook that chicken right.
Is there an environmental quandary that's been keeping you up at
night? Send it to [email protected], and check this
space every Tuesday.
Correction, March 27, 2009: The original version provided the
wrong context for understanding why gas ovens might be
greener than electric ovens. It failed to mention that the delivery
of electricity to the home is relatively inefficient. (Return to the
corrected paragraph.)
today's business press
Obamanomics? President To Tackle Tax
Reform Next
By Sara Behunek
today's papers
Pressing the Reset Button on
Afghanistan
By Daniel Politi
Afghanistan is the main topic of the day as all the papers
preview the announcement President Obama will make today
about changes to the American strategy to decrease violence in
the war-torn country that will place lots of emphasis on Pakistan.
Obama will announce plans to send 4,000 military trainers to
Afghanistan in the fall, which will be on top of the additional
17,000 combat troops the president authorized last month and
"hundreds" of U.S. civilian officials. USA Today points out that
sending additional aid workers "follows Obama's previous
statements that Afghanistan can't be tamed by military force
alone." For the first time, the U.S. government will explicitly tie
future aid to certain benchmarks that will measure how much the
Afghan and Pakistani governments are doing to fight al-Qaida
and the Taliban. In demanding concrete results from the two
countries, Obama "is replicating a strategy used in Iraq two years
ago," notes the New York Times. The Los Angeles Times
highlights that the new strategy comes at a time when
Afghanistan's former Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar,
"is pursuing a determined effort to reclaim power." The Wall
Street Journal notes that the Pentagon is considering setting up
"a new U.S. military command in southern Afghanistan," which
would "signal increasing American control over the war effort."
The Washington Post highlights that the new strategy will
involve a significant increase in the financial commitment to
both Afghanistan and Pakistan and increase U.S. military
expenses in Afghanistan by around 60 percent this year.
The NYT places Obama's plan as one piece in its two-story lead.
The paper's main story reveals that Taliban leaders in Pakistan
and Afghanistan have decided to set aside their differences and
work together in a new offensive in Afghanistan to greet the
buildup of American troops. In an impressive feat of reporting,
the NYT talked to several Taliban fighters along the border
region who say a group of younger commanders has recently
been promoted to carry out a stepped-up campaign of attacks
against U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
The NYT says Mullah Omar sent emissaries to his counterparts
in Pakistan to convince them to focus on Afghanistan so the
Taliban can greet American troops with a renewed display of
force. The Pakistani Taliban have been divided into three
branches that haven't always seen eye-to-eye, but Mullah Omar
apparently urged them to set aside their differences so they can
all work together against the Americans. This renewed
cooperation has raised fears among NATO commanders that the
violence in Afghanistan will soon get much worse. Taliban
fighters say they have reason to worry and predict that it would
be a "very bloody" year.
Obama's new plan for the Afghanistan-Pakistan region comes
after a two-month review that began pretty much as soon as he
moved into the White House. The president "will describe it as a
58/95
sharp break with what officials called a directionless and underresourced conflict inherited from the Bush administration," notes
the Post. Essentially, the White House hopes to bring an end to
the growing insurgency, by focusing on "building local
governments, wooing the civilian population with aid and
providing more help to the Afghan army," USAT summarizes.
The administration is convinced that a significant proportion of
insurgents can be induced to support their local governments.
The WSJ points out that the Obama administration is explicitly
moving away from the Bush administration's broad goal of
building a healthy democracy in Afghanistan to focus more
specifically on defeating al-Qaida and the Taliban. The efforts
will also place a specific focus on fighting the narcotics trade in
Afghanistan.
The NYT notes that the goals Obama will outline "may be
elusive and, according to some critics, even naive." The
administration wants to get several countries, including China,
Russia, and India, involved by specifying that the Afghan war is
a regional issue in which everyone has a stake. Still, Obama
seems to have accepted the fact that other NATO members aren't
likely to contribute more combat troops to the effort and instead
will ask European countries to send more trainers and economic
aid to the region.
Officials say the benchmarks for Afghanistan and Pakistan are
still being developed, but they emphasized that the demands will
be strict. Placing conditions on aid for Pakistan might prove
particularly difficult since similar, less ambitious efforts have
been resisted in the past. But the administration is determined to
move away from the old way of doing things. "We're going to
move from a policy of throwing money at Pakistan and then
ignoring it to a policy of consistency and constancy," a senior
administration official said.
In other news, the WP reveals that Freddie Mac and its regulator
recently got into a big tiff over what information the mortgage
giant should reveal to private investors. The federal government
seized Freddie Mac in September, but this latest drama shows
how it's still not clear what role the government should play in
the company's day-to-day operations. A few weeks ago,
executives decided they should disclose to private investors that
the government's management was costing it billions of dollars
and would hurt its bottom line. The regulator didn't like the
sound of that and urged Freddie executives to press the delete
button. The regulator backed down only after executives
threatened to take the issue up with the Securities and Exchange
Commission. This is just the latest example of how the
company's employees "are struggling to determine whether their
highest priority should be to fulfill the mandates of the Obama
administration or find a way back to profitability," notes the
Post.
and conditions," it isn't answering a seemingly simple question:
How much money is left from the $700 billion bailout package?
Assuming the Treasury spends $100 billion of the TARP funds
to help buy toxic assets, private calculations put the amount of
money remaining at $52.6 billion. But the Treasury isn't saying.
Even when asked directly, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner
has evaded giving a specific answer.
The WSJ fronts a look at how stocks continued to rally yesterday
and the Dow Jones industrial average finished up 174.75 points.
The Dow has now increased 21 percent from its recent bottom,
"a new bull market by a common Wall Street definition." It
marks the first time the market has gained 20 percent since
October 2007, and it was all achieved in 13 trading days,
"making it the fastest 20% rebound from a bear-market low
since 1938," notes the paper. Many think this is just temporary,
because short-term investors are responsible for much of the
increase but they will jump out of the market at the first sign of
trouble. Experts say that it seems like many investors are trying
to "time the market," which makes the market more volatile.
"Anecdotally, many hedge funds have become more like day
traders," an analyst said. Even if it's just a temporary rally, many
think it could last several weeks, and some are even declaring
that the bear market might be ending. Of course, many have
thought that before only to be bitterly disappointed.
The papers go inside with a Sudanese government official
claiming that convoy trucks carrying weapons and African
migrants were bombed by foreign warplanes. The convoys were
believed to be carrying weapons destined for Gaza, and the NYT
talks to American officials who confirm that the airstrikes were
carried out by Israeli warplanes. Israel refused to confirm the
attack, but if it was involved, it "would underscore the Jewish
state's determination to strike far beyond its borders to protect its
security," notes the LAT. It's unclear how many people died in
the attacks. The LAT quotes a spokesman for Sudan's Transport
Ministry who said as many as 800 people died, but the NYT talks
to another government spokesman who put the number at "more
than 100."
The NYT points out that while many stars have recently turned to
Twitter to give fans a close-up look into their daily lives, it turns
out that—shockingly!—the rich and famous may not be the ones
doing all that typing. In "many cases" stars have turned to what
the paper dubs "ghost Twitterers" to maintain a constant stream
of updates. Most aren't willing to admit it, but celebrities are
hardly alone in this practice as many politicians also assign staff
members to keep up with their social networks. Basketball star
Shaquille O'Neal insists he writes all his own stuff. "It's 140
characters," he said. "If you need a ghostwriter for that, I feel
sorry for you."
The WSJ points out that even as the Treasury Department
promised to usher in "a new era of accountability, transparency,
59/95
today's papers
Extreme Makeover: Financial Edition
By Daniel Politi
The New York Times leads with word that operatives from a
secretive wing of Pakistan's military intelligence agency are
providing direct support—including money, supplies, and
strategic planning—to the Taliban as well as other militant
groups in Afghanistan. The Washington Post leads with, and the
NYT fronts, a preview of the Obama administration's plan to
expand federal regulation over the financial system, which
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will begin to outline for
lawmakers today. The plan would expand federal regulations to
all financial derivative products and companies that have
previously been free of such oversight, including insurance
companies, hedge funds, and private-equity firms. The
administration sees these new regulations as essential to restore
faith in the financial system.
The Wall Street Journal leads its world-wide newsbox with
President Obama lobbying Democratic lawmakers to maintain
his priorities in the budget and stay united throughout the
negotiations. But divisions are already emerging, and some
centrist Democrats are pushing for a budget with less spending
and fewer tax cuts in order to lower the deficit. The Los Angeles
Times leads with Congress approving "the largest expansion of
the wilderness system in 15 years," extending federal protection
to 2 million acres in nine states. In what will be President
Obama's first signing of an important conservation bill, almost
as much land will be designated as wilderness as was done so
throughout his predecessor's entire tenure. The measure would
also initiate one of the largest river restoration projects and step
up protection of scenic rivers. USA Today leads with federal
accident investigators suggesting that the pilot was to blame for
the crash that killed 50 people outside Buffalo last month.
Weather was initially suspected to have been the culprit, but
investigators said the crash was likely due to the pilot's decision
to take the plane into a sudden steep climb that led to a loss of
control over the aircraft.
The fact that Pakistan's spies help out the Taliban is hardly news,
but the details revealed by the NYT today show "that the spy
agency is aiding a broader array of militant networks with more
diverse types of support than was previously known." No one
thinks that Pakistan's top leaders have a hand in what's going on
in the S Wing of Pakistan's spy service, but they also seem
unwilling or unable to stop it. Pakistani officials say that
Americans make too much of these ties, insisting they're just part
of a strategy to maintain influence in Afghanistan after the U.S.
troops have left.
The WSJ also hears word of this connection and adds that U.S.
and Pakistani officials are drawing up a new list of targets for
Predator drone strikes along the Afghan border, which is part of
an American review of the program. Pakistani officials want to
expand the program so it also targets extremists who have
attacked Pakistanis, in the hope that it would help the
government win some support domestically. Although the
program is largely considered successful, so it's unlikely to
change significantly, the WSJ notes that the review wants to set
out clear guidelines on under what circumstances the strikes
should be carried out, and it "could change the pace and size of
the program."
The NYT points out that Obama's plan to overhaul the federal
regulations of the financial system "goes further than expected."
And the WSJ highlights that Geithner's presentation to
lawmakers today merely "represents an early salvo in what will
likely be a long debate." The WP notes that it makes sense that
these changes are coming now since the "nation's financial
regulations are largely an accumulation of responses to financial
crises," but it's still important to note that the administration's
proposals amount to the "most significant regulatory expansion"
since the Great Depression era. "In essence, the plan is a rebuke
of raw capitalism and a reassertion that regulation is critical to
the healthy function of financial markets," says the Post.
Most of what the Obama administration wants to put in place
would require approval from Congress. What the WP describes
as the White House's "signature proposal" involves giving one
federal agency (probably the Federal Reserve) oversight
responsibility across the financial system with the power to
regulate the largest financial firms, including nonbank entities.
Congress would have to pass legislation in order to determine
which firms are considered so large that their failure would be a
shock to the entire financial system, and then these companies
would be required to meet much more stringent capital
requirements to prevent them from running out of cash when the
economy tumbles.
Unregulated investment firms, such as hedge funds and privateequity funds, would have to register for the first time with the
Securities and Exchange Commission. The administration also
wants the SEC to have more power over money-market mutual
funds to ensure they don't take on too much risk. The NYT
predicts that the biggest fight will be over the administration's
plan to regulate trading "in more exotic derivatives that trade
privately," such as credit-default swaps. Geithner isn't expected
to give much detail in how all this would work, but it's just the
beginning.
The WP notes that over the next few months, the administration
will present proposals to protect consumers, revise existing
regulations to remove any flaws, and increase coordination with
the international community. It is hardly a coincidence that the
administration is launching the first stage in its plan mere days
before Geithner and Obama are scheduled to meet with world
leaders in London to discuss the crisis, as many European
60/95
countries have said that reforming the financial regulatory
structure is one of their top priorities.
When Obama went to lobby Senate Democrats on the budget
yesterday, he kept the focus on the issues where there's much
agreement between party members. "It was vintage Obama,"
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said. "He made us all feel
content and inspired by where we need to go." Still, there are
real divisions between the Democrats, but it seems Obama's
most ambitious initiatives that he has identified as his
priorities—education, health, energy, and deficit reduction—will
remain in the budget. The NYT notes that these divisions among
Democrats "bring to life a paradox of political success." As a
party expands its base, it means that it's harder to keep all of its
members united.
The WSJ fronts word that Obama's auto industry task force will
begin announcing decisions within the next few days, and it
seems like the government is ready to lend General Motors and
Chrysler some more money. The government doesn't want to see
the companies go bankrupt, and, in fact, the task force is likely
to say that both companies can have "viable futures ... but only if
there are sacrifices from their managements, unions and GM's
bondholders," reports the WSJ. The automakers have requested
$22 billion more, but the "task force may not disburse new aid
immediately, choosing instead to preserve that as leverage,"
notes the paper.
The WP is alone in fronting news that John Hope Franklin, one
of the nation's most prominent scholars of African-American
history, died of congestive heart failure yesterday. He was 94.
The Post highlights that Franklin's reputation wasn't just due to
his scholarly work but also because he "had seen racial horrors
up close and thus was able to give his academic work a stinging
ballast." Franklin was among the first black scholars to earn top
spots in some of the nation's leading universities. His book From
Slavery to Freedom has sold more than 3 million copies and is
still in many college reading lists.
In the WP's op-ed page, Walter Dellinger writes a tribute to
Franklin and calls him "one of the most remarkable Americans
of the 20th century." Dellinger taught a class with Franklin for
seven years and "never ceased to marvel at how he managed
both to embody this history and yet recount it with an
extraordinarily candid honesty." Franklin "was the master of the
great American story of that century, the story of race." After
Obama won the Democratic nomination, Franklin acknowledged
he never thought he would live long enough to see a black man
win a major party's nomination. "That he did live into this year
seems a special gift from God."
today's papers
Obama: Just a Little Patience
By Daniel Politi
The Washington Post, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal's
world-wide newsbox lead with, and everyone else fronts,
President Obama's second prime-time news conference, where
he defended his proposed $3.6 trillion budget plan, which is
beginning to make its way through Congress. "The budget I
submitted to Congress will build our economic recovery on a
stronger foundation so that we don't face another crisis like this
10 or 20 years from now," he said. Obama focused much of his
attention on the economy, adding that there are already signs of
improvement but emphasizing numerous times that the
American people need to be patient. "We will recover from this
recession, but it will take time," Obama said.
The Los Angeles Times leads with the Obama administration
announcing a plan to send hundreds of federal agents and
intelligence analysts to the country's southern border to help
combat Mexican drug-related violence and prevent it from
seeping into the United States. It marks "the most determined
U.S. effort in years to counter the powerful and dangerous
cartels" that are enmeshed in a deadly battle with the Mexican
government that has already killed more than 7,000 people over
the last 15 months. The New York Times leads with the White
House's proposal to allow the government to take control of any
financial institution that is in trouble and is considered big
enough to create trouble in the broader financial system. The
government already has that power with banks and other
deposit-taking institutions, but the proposal would extend that
authority to other financial institutions, such as insurance
companies and hedge funds. House Democrats say they hope to
act on legislation soon. If the measure is approved, "it would
represent one of the biggest permanent expansions of federal
regulatory power in decades," notes the NYT.
The NYT states that Americans who tuned in last night to
Obama's news conference didn't see a "fiery and inspirational
speaker" or a "conversational president" but rather "Barack
Obama the lecturer." Barely moving from a flat tone of voice,
"he was the professor in chief, offering familiar arguments in
long paragraphs … sounding like the teacher speaking in the
stillness of a classroom where students are restlessly waiting for
the ring of the bell." The LAT points out that the night was
devoid of any "particularly memorable moments" as it seemed
the president was determined to "present himself as a steady
hand at the helm."
There was only one point when Obama seemed to lose his calm
demeanor, which came after a reporter asked why it had taken
him so long to express anger over the AIG bonuses. "Well, it
61/95
took us a couple of days because I like to know what I'm talking
about before I speak," he tartly replied.
On the subject of the bonuses, his voice may not have sounded
angry, but he assured Americans that he was, although he also
emphasized that the country "can't afford to demonize every
investor or entrepreneur who seeks to make a profit." He also
defended efforts to seek authority to take over nonbank financial
institutions, stating that it is "precisely because of the lack of this
authority that the AIG situation has gotten worse."
In his one overtly partisan tone of the evening, Obama said
Republican critics of his budget have "a short memory, because
as I recall, I'm inheriting a $1.3 trillion deficit, annual deficit,
from them." Obama will meet with Democratic senators today to
discuss the budget, and insisted yesterday he is open to
compromise on some issues but highlighted that he wants
Congress to move on his four top priorities. "The bottom line is
that I want to see health care, energy, education and serious
efforts to reduce our budget deficit," he said.
The WSJ points out that Obama "hit on a new theme for his
administration: Persistence," which he emphasized will be his
way of handling the numerous problems facing the country.
"That whole philosophy of persistence … is one that I'm going
to be emphasizing again and again in the months and years to
come," he said. "I'm a big believer in persistence."
In a front-page piece, the LAT's Mary McNamara writes that
Obama is "a child of television" and "it is television he trusts."
He snubbed the Washington press corps and didn't attend the
annual Gridiron Club dinner, but he made an appearance on
ESPN, late-night television, 60 Minutes, and then his second
prime-time news conference. Obama's "on-screen persona at its
best plays to the American desire for a real-guy president a la
Michael Douglas in An American President." Obama seems
determined to build a personal relationship with the American
public, and "[s]hort of his own Facebook page, television is as
close as it gets." When watching the president from the comfort
of your own home, Obama is "just a regular guy—someone you
might know, the parent of one of your daughter's friends," writes
McNamara. "Except that, oh yeah, he's also the president."
In addition to the resources that will be deployed to the Mexican
border, the administration also highlighted that it will step up
efforts to reduce the demand for drugs in the United States as
well as weapons smuggling from the United States. In total, the
administration said it will spend $700 million this year in a
variety of efforts, and probably more in the future. Still, many in
Mexico, as well as several government officials from border
states, say this isn't enough to counter the growing drug-related
violence. Indeed, many of the moves that were announced
yesterday involved expansions of programs that were started by
former President Bush. The WP highlights that the plan was
"notable for what it omitted" because it didn't ask for any new
troops or funding from Congress. But one Mexican official says
he got assurances from the White House that "more is coming up
in the near future."
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will travel to Mexico today, in
the first of several top-level visits from U.S. officials, which will
include Obama next month. "They will find a country mired in a
deepening slump, miffed by signs of protectionism in its largest
trading partner, and torn apart by a drug war for which many in
Mexico blame customers in the United States," notes the NYT in
a front-page piece. The troubles in Mexico mean that the Obama
administration will have to make changes to its policies toward
the country's southern neighbor "earlier than it might have
wished."
The WSJ is alone in fronting news that Israel's Labor Party voted
to join the coalition government of Prime Minister-designate
Benjamin Netanyahu. The move immediately added diversity to
Netanyahu's right-wing coalition to include at least one part that
is a strong advocate for peace with Palestinians. And, in fact, the
written agreement between the two sides included a pledge to
pursue peace. The vote to join the coalition created a huge rift in
the Labor Party, but it technically gave Netanyahu a bloc of at
least 66 votes in the 120-member parliament. Ehud Barak, the
party's leader, would remain as defense minister.
The NYT's op-ed page publishes a resignation letter that Jake
DeSantis, an executive vice president at AIG's financial products
unit, sent to the company's CEO on Tuesday. DeSantis says he
wasn't in any way involved in the credit-default swaps that led to
AIG's downfall, and highlights that "[m]ost of those responsible
have left the company and have conspicuously escaped the
public outrage." DeSantis agreed to work for an annual salary of
$1 and was repeatedly reassured that his 12 months of "hard
work dismantling the company" would be rewarded. Many
employees "are now angry about having been misled by AIG's
promises and are not inclined to return the money as a favor to
you." DeSantis says he will donate all of the $742,006.40, after
taxes, to "organizations that are helping people who are suffering
from the global downturn" and promises to send receipts as
proof. "I'm not sure how you will greet my resignation, but at
least [Connecticut] Attorney General [Richard] Blumenthal
should be relieved that I'll leave under my own power and will
not need to be 'shoved out the door.' "
today's papers
Investors Cheer Geithner (For Once)
By Daniel Politi
62/95
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner formally unveiled the
White House plan to clean out toxic assets from banks' balance
sheets on Monday, and investors gave it the equivalent of a
standing ovation. Contrary to what happened in early February
when Geithner first outlined the plan in such general terms that
everyone was disappointed, stocks surged around the world
yesterday. The Dow Jones industrial average jumped 6.8
percent, its biggest gain since October, suggesting that "investors
bet that the government may have finally found a way to fix the
nagging problem at the core of the financial crisis," notes the Los
Angeles Times. The Wall Street Journal says "the reaction
seemed more a sigh of relief at seeing some details of the
program, after weeks of waiting, than an overwhelming
endorsement," particularly since "much fine print is still to be
spelled out." The New York Times takes the broadest look at the
three-part plan that could end up purchasing "up to $2 trillion in
real estate assets" and points out that it was "bigger and more
generous to private investors than expected." The Washington
Post hears word that administration officials "made changes to
the plan in recent days in a way that makes it more favorable to
private investors."
USA Today goes big with Geithner's announcement but devotes
its lead spot to a look at how certain industries and states have
been able to continue hiring employees throughout the recession.
The health care sector continues to grow and there's demand for
almost every job in the industry. "There are no nurses looking
for work," a spokeswoman for the American Nurses Association
said.* The government and the energy sector have also been
hiring. And while every state is suffering during the recession,
some don't have significant unemployment rates: Wyoming,
Nebraska, Utah, South Dakota, and North Dakota.
Under the complex plan outlined by Geithner yesterday, the
government would join forces with the private sector to purchase
individual home loans as well as mortgage-backed securities.
The Treasury will use up to $100 billion from the financial
rescue funds already approved by Congress to match
contributions made by private investors. The public-private
ventures would get further help from the government through
loans from the Federal Reserve and loan guarantees from the
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. These programs could buy as
much as $1 trillion in public assets. In addition, the government
could put $1 trillion more into the toxic assets by using the Term
Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, known as TALF, which
will be expanded to finance existing troubled securities.
Investors were largely enthusiastic, or at least some were.
Almost all the papers quote Bill Gross, the co-chief investment
officer of Pimco, the nation's largest bond investor, calling the
program "perhaps the first win-win-win policy to be put on the
table." Investors do have plenty to be optimistic about since "the
Treasury was offering to lend up to $6 for every $1 of investors'
own money," as the NYT explains, which means taxpayers would
lose the most if the investments turn sour. The WP, which is the
most openly skeptical about the plan, says some analysts think
the government may be handing out too much of the potential
upside to investors when it should be going to the taxpayers. The
program also involves a major risk considering that if the
Treasury uses all of the $100 billion from the $700 billion
bailout plan, there will only be $12 billion remaining, which
means Geithner will have fewer options if another financial
institution desperately needs cash to survive.
The WP and LAT highlight that the program simply might not
work, considering that it's unclear how the government would
persuade banks to sell assets if they see the prices as too low.
USAT points out that in "prior situations in both the USA and
abroad, governments have forced banks to sell their bad assets."
The paper also says that the typical buyers of securities, such as
hedge funds, don't have much cash lying around so it's likely that
the biggest buyers would be so-called vulture investors, who
would only be interested in the securities if they're real cheap,
something banks may not be interested in since it'd mean they'd
have to record big losses in their books.
The WSJ says there's currently "a chess match of sorts" that is
playing out between banks and investors. Banking executives are
reluctant to sell assets at a deep discount since that could force
them to raise more capital. Experts say banks that have already
taken write-downs on their assets could be more willing to
accept a cheap price for their assets. The LAT quotes the lobbyist
of a financial trade group who says that even if many banks
refuse to participate, the program should at the very least
determine a market price for toxic assets. A shortage of
information on how much these assets might be worth is part of
the reason why the credit markets have seized up over the last
few months.
In a separate front-page piece the NYT says the positive reaction
to the White House announcement gave the "embattled" treasury
secretary "a critically needed boost." Even though Obama has
been insisting that he has full faith in Geithner, he has suffered
several missteps throughout his brief tenure, so it must have
been more than a bit of a relief to see things go his way for once.
Of course, there's no guarantee that the good feelings toward
Geithner will continue, but it at least shows that the
administration learned from the disastrous unveiling of the plan
last month. This time around, the administration devoted lots of
efforts to carefully releasing the plan over several days to key
Wall Street insiders and obtaining endorsements from two
leading global investment firms, BlackRock and Pimco. It's
hardly a surprise then that these companies were ready with
statements of support as soon as the plan was unveiled, which
the media gobbled up.
In a piece inside, the LAT points out that one key difference
between yesterday's announcement and the one in early February
is that this time around, Geithner didn't make the announcement
in front of TV cameras, and the administration "effectively
63/95
reduced the secretary from point man to staff briefer." That fact
may seem like a bit of inside baseball. After all, if investors
liked what Geithner had to say, who cares how he said it? But it
points to what the LAT calls the "worrisome fact" that besides
Obama, the administration "has yet to find a commanding figure
who can carry economic policy messages and inspire confidence
in White House prescriptions."
The lack of a clear communicator on economic issues may be
partly to blame for the dearth of explanations coming from the
White House about what's going on and why certain plans were
chosen over others. Inside, the WP points out that even as Wall
Street celebrated, other experts were holding back and were
expressing skepticism about the plan, noting there are several
other ways to fix the system that could ultimately be more
effective. But most also agreed they might be more open to the
White House plan if the administration took a time out to explain
things more carefully rather than presenting their decisions as
the only viable choices. "I think they would inspire much more
confidence if they explained their rationale," one expert said.
The WP fronts word that the White House is "considering asking
Congress" to allow the treasury secretary to seize a whole slew
of financial companies, including hedge funds and insurers, if
their collapse would threaten the economy as a whole. Currently,
the government only has the authority to seize banks. This would
"mark a significant shift from the existing model of financial
regulation" because someone in the president's Cabinet would
have authority over companies that are currently overseen by a
number of independent agencies. Geithner is set to talk about the
issue today at hearing on Capitol Hill that will focus on the
American International Group bonuses. Some think that if the
government had been able to seize AIG when it was clear that
the insurance giant was in trouble, the whole process of winding
down its operations could have been cheaper for taxpayers. If the
treasury secretary had this power, it could take a number of steps
to prevent a firm's collapse, including, significantly, breaking
contracts.
The NYT fronts, and everyone covers, news that New York
Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said that nine of the top 10
recipients of retention bonuses from American International
Group agreed to give the money back. Cuomo said he's still
working on convincing bonus recipients but so far has managed
to get commitments to return $50 million of the $165 million
that went to the insurer's Financial Products unit. Meanwhile, the
Senate has put on hold the legislation that would have placed a
large tax on bonuses. It seems lawmakers are willing to put the
legislation aside for now, particularly since Obama expressed
skepticism about the proposals.
In an op-ed piece in the LAT, President Obama writes that the
"leaders of the G-20 have a responsibility to take bold,
comprehensive and coordinated action that not only jump-starts
recovery but launches a new era of economic engagement to
prevent a crisis like this from ever happening again." No country
can hope to bring an end to the crisis in isolation, and that's why
coming up with a coordinated strategy at next month's summit in
London is so important. Countries must resist their protectionist
impulses, and take this opportunity to "advance comprehensive
reforms of our regulatory and supervisory framework."
The bad economy is sending people to the candy shop, reports
the NYT. So-called "nostalgic candies" like Necco Wafers and
Mallo Cups are particularly popular, and customers seem to
prefer "cheaper, old-fashioned" sweets, which is a significant
reversal from last year when mass-market candies were losing
ground to luxury brands. Many candy makers are reporting
surprisingly healthy profits and stores say they're struggling to
keep up with demand. The owner of a candy store in San
Francisco said it best: "All is well in candy land."
Correction, March 25, 2009: This article originally attributed a
quote from a spokeswoman for the American Nurses Association
to the head of that organization. (Return to the corrected
sentence.)
today's papers
White House Courts Investors
By Daniel Politi
The New York Times leads with the Obama administration's busy
Sunday, when officials went on a charm offensive to try to
convince private investors to participate in the government's
long-awaited effort to remove troubled assets from banks'
balance sheets. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will
officially unveil the plan's details today, but officials were
already out in full force yesterday to motivate private investors
to take the handsome government subsidies and buy up the
troubled assets. The Washington Post leads with key
administration officials making it pretty clear that the White
House isn't too happy about the idea of recovering bonuses
through taxes. Although some of the administration's top
economic officials were careful to emphasize that the public has
a right to feel angry about the bonuses, they said it's not a good
idea to use the tax code to target a small group of people.
The Wall Street Journal leads its world-wide newsbox with
Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the White House Council
of Economic Advisers, saying that she's "extremely confident"
the U.S. economy will rebound within the next year.
Republicans strongly disagree with this rosy diagnosis. The Los
Angeles Times leads with a look at how Mexican drug cartels
have become important players in the lucrative business of
smuggling illegal immigrants into the United States. By taking
64/95
over a business that had previously been operated largely by
independent coyotes, drug cartels have made it more violent and
dangerous. So far, Washington has largely ignored this side of
their operations, preferring to focus on drug trafficking. USA
Today leads with an Army inspector general's report that found
the rules to determine whether a soldier is fit for combat are so
confusing that they increase the likelihood that "soldiers who do
not meet medical deployability requirements may be deployed in
violation of one or more policies." The Army insists it's working
on improving the process to ensure that everyone who gets sent
to a combat zone meets all of the medical requirements.
Some investors are optimistic about joining forces with the
government to buy up troubled assets, but others have been
quick to tell administration officials that they're reluctant to
participate due to recent controversy over the bonus payments at
American International Group. The NYT talks to three heads of
investment firms, who say the terms sound appealing (hardly
surprising, considering that the government plans to "lend nearly
95 percent of the money for any investment"), but they're not
jumping on the opportunity to participate out of fear of future
regulation. Investors are asking the White House to guarantee
that it won't be imposing compensation restrictions for
participating firms. Administration officials went on the Sunday
talk shows to try to convince Americans that there's a difference
between companies that receive bailout money and investors
who are participating in broad government programs. "What
we're talking about now are private firms that are kind of doing
us a favor," the White House's chief economist said.
Although Wall Street has been anxiously waiting for Geithner's
plan, "the rollout comes at an inopportune time," notes the WSJ,
pointing out that last week's outrage over the bonuses is making
administration officials wary of appearing to pursue a plan that
ultimately rewards Wall Street.
Despite all the sweet talking with investors, it's still unclear
exactly how these troubled assets will be valued. Investors said
the government still hasn't quite answered the question of how
the prices will be reconciled, given what banks want for their
toxic assets and what investors are willing to pay. The Treasury
clearly believes these assets are now undervalued and the
government plan will help create a market for them. "Over time,
by providing a market for these assets that does not now exist,
this program will help improve asset values, increase lending
capacity by banks, and reduce uncertainty about the scale of
losses on bank balance sheets," Geithner writes in an op-ed piece
in the WSJ. Even as the administration works to fight off the
current crisis, it's important to "also start the process of ensuring
a crisis like this never happens again," notes Geithner, who adds
that the "lack of an appropriate and modern regulatory regime
and resolution authority helped cause this crisis."
As members of the world's leading economies prepare for the
Group of 20 meeting on April 2, the WSJ fronts an interview
with the president of the European Central Bank, who says
European countries don't need to boost their spending in order to
fight the downturn. The United States has been trying to
convince European leaders to boost spending, but comments by
Jean-Claude Trichet are sure to make that task even more
difficult. Trichet said that instead of trying to get new spending,
governments should be focusing on quickly implementing the
policies they already have. "Decisions have been taken; they are
very important," he said. "Let's do it! Quick implementation,
quick disbursement is what is needed."
The WP fronts a look at how "flex time," which seemed to be all
the rage just a little while ago, is slowly disappearing. When the
economy was good, employees were eager to snap up options to
telecommute or work different hours to balance their work and
family obligations. The anecdotal piece says workers are now
giving up these types of perks out of fear that they could give
employers a good excuse to lay them off, and many are scared to
even bring up the topic during such hard economic times. One
expert says there's a "silent fright" among workers that is
reminiscent of how women used to feel like they had to hide
their family from employers. "That's what it feels like we're
returning to. Work as many hours as you possibly can. Make
yourself indispensable. Don't ever complain. Don't ever ask for
anything," she said.
The LAT fronts the results of a study that found that teenagers
who go to a school with a fast-food restaurant within walking
distance have a higher probability of being obese. Researchers
studied data from ninth-graders in California and discovered that
if a school has a fast-food outlet within 530 feet, there is a 5.2
percent increase in the incidence of obesity. Older people don't
seem to be as affected by a nearby temptation. "School kids are a
captive audience. They can't go very far from school during
lunch, but adults can get in their car and have more choices," one
of the study's co-authors said.
The LAT fronts, and everyone covers, news that a small, singleengine plane that departed from California to Montana crashed
and killed as many as 17 people. A mechanic at a California
airport said there were about a dozen children onboard, ranging
in age from 6 to 10. They appear to have been on a ski trip.
After reading the leaked details of Obama's bank rescue plan
over the weekend, the NYT's Paul Krugman isn't happy with
what he calls a recycling of the Bush administration's "cash for
trash" plan. It almost seems as if the president wants "to confirm
the growing perception that he and his economic team are out of
touch." The Obama administration continues to insist that its
plan will allow the market to set a fair price for the toxic assets,
but the truth is that it's simply "an indirect, disguised way to
subsidize purchases of bad assets." The bottom line is that the
plan simply won't work because "no amount of financial hocuspocus" will change the fact that "financial executives literally bet
their banks on the belief that there was no housing bubble."
65/95
Meanwhile, Obama is risking his credibility. "If this plan fails,"
writes Krugman, "it's unlikely that he'll be able to persuade
Congress to come up with more funds to do what he should have
done in the first place."
that militants have begun turning violently on one another out of
confusion and distrust." The Bush administration decided in
August 2008 to stop asking the Pakistani government for
permission before launching missile strikes, leading to a nearly
400 percent increase in strikes from the previous two years
combined. The Obama administration plans to continue the
intensified offensive despite civilian casualities and protests
from the Pakistani government.
today's papers
Obama Hurries Toward Solutions
By David Sessions
Sunday, March 22, 2009, at 5:02 AM ET
Today's front pages herald the Obama administration's sweeping
new measures to contain the financial crisis. The Washington
Post leads with the Treasury Department's formation of a
government body called the "Public Investment Corp." that will
purchase approximately $1 trillion in so-called toxic assets. The
New York Times leads with a call for increased oversight likely
to come this week as part of a "sweeping plan to overhaul
financial regulation." That plan will seek a broad new role for
the Federal Reserve in overseeing large companies. The Los
Angeles Times leads with "one of the deadliest police shootings
in California history," a routine traffic stop that eventually led to
three officers being shot and killed yesterday in Oakland, Calif.
The suspect, previously convicted for assault with a deadly
weapon, was gunned down by SWAT officers two hours after
the initial shootings.
The Treasury is pressing ahead with plans to buy up the $1
trillion worth of toxic assets still burdening the economy, the WP
reports, though details of the new corporation that will do the
purchasing are not finalized. The body will include private
investors and the Federal Reserve, but the government will be
sticking its neck out farthest, committing $75 billion to $100
billion from the original $700 billion rescue package. The
administration says its goal is to "pursue compensation reform
that addresses public outrage while maintaining stability in the
financial system."
Prodded by this week's wave of outrage over bonuses paid to
AIG executives, the Obama administration is also hurrying along
its long-discussed plans to increase oversight of executive pay.
Details are still under debate, the NYT reports, but the planned
regulation might be presented in place of further legislation and
will apply even to companies currently not receiving federal
bailout money. The administration hopes to have the plan
written up before an April G20 meeting, where improving
corporate oversight is expected to be a hot topic.
Officials say the CIA's most expensive targeted killing program
since Vietnam has been a success, according to a front-page LAT
story. Predator missile strikes in Pakistan, dramatically increased
since August of last year, have "taken such a toll on Al Qaeda
Closer to home, the Obama administration is dispatching federal
agents and equipment to the U.S.-Mexico border, the WP offlead reports. The materials will assist Mexican president Felipe
Calderón in his war against the vicious drug cartels benefiting
from a steady stream of weapons and cash flowing across the
border from the United States. License-plate readers, scales to
weigh vehicles, and surveillance equipment will be headed to the
border, and government officials are discussing ways to increase
intelligence-sharing and military cooperation with Mexico.
The LAT fronts a less bloody war between self-promoting
Hollywood events planner Brian Quintana and his celebrity
patrons, many of whom he accuses of shocking—sometimes
criminal—behavior. "If he is to be believed, actress Stefanie
Powers sexually assaulted him, socialite Paris Hilton tried to
wreck him professionally and movie producer Jon Peters
solicited him to commit murder." Quintana, who claims
connections to dozens of A-list celebrities, has been in and out
of court with almost as many. The stars all scornfully dismiss
him as another one of the parasitic Hollywood opportunists who
make their lives miserable.
Sideways, a 2004 movie about two buddies on a wine-tasting
road trip through California, will be uncorked in Japan, the NYT
reports. It's the latest in a series of films being remade by
American production companies eager to expand their reach into
foreign markets. Sideways is an unlikely choice for a Japanese
audience, but producers are rerouting the road trip to more
recognizable California locations and plugging local wines with
up-close shots of signs and labels. Alexander Payne, who
directed the Oscar-nominated original, has given the new version
his blessing.
A NYT essay attempts to unpack "political distractions," those
bits of news, "seemingly side issues," that whip up national
anger in matter of hours. The AIG bonuses are "small change"
compared with hundreds of billions of dollars already spent on
misbehaving financial institutions, but the outrage that exploded
virtually overnight could end up derailing parts of Obama's
agenda. Political distractions are often manufactured by the
opposition, but "the ones that pose the greatest political danger
are those that seem to erupt spontaneously, crossing political
boundaries by putting a president at odds with his own party."
An essay in the WP warns against the European social model,
which the author says removes the human spirit from the stuff of
66/95
life. Jobs are protected, wealth distributed, and recreation
assured, but "human beings are a collection of chemicals that
activate and, after a period of time, deactivate. The purpose of
life is to while away the intervening time as pleasantly as
possible." Social policy based on that premise makes for an
environment "inimical to human flourishing."
auction, and more money is funneled through the Federal
Reserve-managed Term Asset-Backed Secure Lending Facility.
All that is supposed to then free up banks to resume normal
lending, but the Journal takes a skeptical investor's-eye view,
noting that banker types are smarting from the AIG bonus
backlash and leery of the administration's demonstrated tendency
to change the rules on bailout deals. The paper also lands heavily
on Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, saying this plan may be his
last, best chance to make an impact on the crisis.
today's papers
Meanwhile, Congress is starting to get blowback for the massive
taxes on corporate compensation proposed in the House on
Thursday. Chief executives are mobilizing to head off the move,
reassuring remaining employees that they won't let the
government ax bonuses completely, which the banks say would
result in a loss of talented workers to smaller companies.
According to the LAT, the outrage-fueled, everything-but-thekitchen-sink tax plans have scared the bejesus out of not just the
likes of Merrill and AIG but also comparatively healthy firms up
and down Wall Street, who fear they might be tarred with the
same brush. Back on the NYT business page, Joe Nocera calls for
sanity, contending that the rhetorical windstorm over AIG
malfeasance is distorting the political response to the financial
crisis, which he fears may pose a bigger risk to recovery than
economic problems on their own.
Where Does It Come From, Where Does
It Go?
By Lydia DePillis
Saturday, March 21, 2009, at 6:02 AM ET
The New York Times and Wall Street Journal lead with details of
the administration's anticipated plan (sketched out by the Los
Angeles Times on Monday) for a $1 trillion public-private
partnership designed to coax investors to rescue troubled assets
from banks. Complicating that picture, the Washington Post
leads with the Congressional Budget Office's new projection
that, under the current economic rescue plan, annual deficits will
force the federal government to borrow fully a third more than
the administration had earlier forecast. The Los Angeles Times
brings it home with a lead story on African-American
unemployment in California and nationally, where 13.4 percent
of blacks don't have jobs—disproportionately in low-skill
sectors—compared with the 8.1 percent average.
In rotten timing for the administration (which only the LAT had
in yesterday's print edition), the CBO came out with a staggering
analysis of how far in hoc the United States is expected to be in
10 years under President Obama's budget proposal: After
borrowing $9.3 trillion, the national debt would amount to a
whopping 82 percent of the size of the economy. That prognosis
is gloomier by $2.3 trillion than the administration had let on,
which White House budget director and former CBO chief Peter
Orszag chalked up to a different calculus for how far the
economy has yet to fall. Regardless of who's right, the new
numbers have sent pro-administration legislators scrambling to
hold together alliances already tied together with a shoestring in
order to keep the stimulus on track. One controversial strategy:
In order to pass a health care bill, House Democrats may be able
to utilize a rule that would get the legislation through on a
simple majority vote, whereas before it would need 60 votes to
cut off debate.
The administration's toxic asset disposal plan, officially debuting
next week, has three main elements (unavoidable jargon alert!):
The Treasury brings a handful of investment firms onboard to
raise private capital on a dollar-for-dollar matching basis with
federal money, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation sets
up and largely funds investment partnerships to buy the assets at
President Obama himself is seeking to reassure the American
people that all that stimulus money won't be wasted; requests for
funding must be made in writing. One of those seeking cash is
World Trade Center developer Larry Silverstein, with the
cooperation of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey,
which just wants to see planned towers get built after the
developer hit a rough patch in financing his highly symbolic
mega-project. And further down the ladder still, the NYT fronts a
heartbreaker from the economic front lines—this time, Fort
Lauderdale, Fla.—illustrating that the young are in a battle with
the elderly workers whose deflated 401(k)s have forestalled
retirement.
To kick off the day's noneconomic news! The Post fronts a look
at how Obama's three-minute video message to Iran played in
the foreign policy community yesterday: While recognizing the
break from Bush's axis-of-evil rhetoric, Iranian officials didn't
appreciate the decision to speak over their heads in such a public
way. "Statesmen address each other, instead of talking to the
people," said one military figure. The message came in advance
of a probable face-to-face meeting between Iranian leaders and
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the NYT reports, and may
force hard-liners to—in the Gray Lady's own sainted words—
"put up or shut up."
The Post features a pair of newly minted bureaucrats—relatively
uncontroversial nominations nevertheless held up by Senate
politicking—poised to have an impact on policy via their
respective roles on climate change. Jane Lubchenco, the first
67/95
woman ever to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, plans to wield her significantly boosted budget
in the service of comprehensive climate monitoring. And the
new guy at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Jon
Wellinghoff, is getting cracking on one of Obama's job-creation
devices, a new "smart grid" to help integrate decentralized
renewable energy sources.
Yes, it's still going on: A judge is expected to render a decision
soon in the five-month recount dogfight between Norm Coleman
and Al Franken in Minnesota. Within days, the Senate could be
complete, and the worst post-election overtime since Bush v.
Gore finally at an end. In other news of representation, it sounds
like the citizens of D.C. are facing a strangely incongruous
Sophie's choice: Legislation currently before Congress would
grant the District a representative in the House (offset by another
in comfortably Republican Utah) while weakening its gun
control laws.
Six years after the American invasion, Iraq is now (almost) safe
for tourism again, with the first civilian recreational tour group
out to see the sights. Not so much in Afghanistan, where an
American commander says he's fresh out of troops needed to
secure the area, and folks should just expect more things to go
wrong in the region.
So it's a rough world out there, and as the LAT tells us, college
students are preparing themselves with that great leveler of a
decision-making exercise: rock, paper, scissors.
tv club
Friday Night Lights, Season 3
Week 10: The joy and melancholy of being a high-school senior.
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
68/95
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.
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
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
portraying women—and they are—they're leaving out a key part
of our lives.
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.
Hey there, Hanna and Meghan,
Emily
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).
Click here to read the next entry.
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.
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
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,
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
69/95
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
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 …
Meghan
Click here for the next entry.
From: Hanna Rosin
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.
70/95
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.
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: 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
71/95
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:
"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.
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.
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
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."
"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.
To: Hanna Rosin and Emily Bazelon
Subject: Week 2: Is the Show Becoming Too Sentimental?
72/95
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.
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.
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.
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.
Subject: Week 3: The Small Muscles Around Kyle Chandler's Eyes and Mouth
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?
73/95
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
think—is this a friendship in the bud, or a cynical play for
power?
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?
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
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
trailing after them. It captured exactly how women are made
girlish by mutual crushes.
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.
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.
74/95
Hanna, Emily,
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
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
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,
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."
75/95
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
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
76/95
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.
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.
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
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
77/95
least.
Curious to hear your thoughts …
Subject: Week 4: Dillon's McMansion District Located!
Posted Tuesday, February 10, 2009, at 10:30 AM ET
Meghan
Hanna,
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
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
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.
78/95
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
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
79/95
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.
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?
From: Hanna Rosin
Subject: Week 5: As Dark as the Bloodiest Sopranos Episode
From: Emily Bazelon
Subject: Week 5: A Coach's Theory of Coaches' Wives
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
Grandma interrupts. Later, in the locker room, Matt himself
makes it clear he isn't having it. "Good talk, coach," he says
sardonically.
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
shrift to the power of the random and to the frayed threads that
make up so much of lived experience.
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
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.
80/95
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: Hanna Rosin
Subject: Week 6: The Best Awkward TV Teenage Kiss I've Ever Seen
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
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.
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?
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
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
81/95
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
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.
82/95
From: Hanna Rosin
Subject: Week 6: All the Boys on This Show Have Gone Soft
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."
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
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.
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
83/95
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
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.
84/95
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
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
85/95
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
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
86/95
Subject: Week 8: The Mother of All Crying Scenes
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.
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?
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.
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.
87/95
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.
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.
"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?).
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.
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.
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.
Meanwhile, anyone notice how tall all the women on this show
are?
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
From: Hanna Rosin
Subject: Week 9: Is Matt Saracen's Grandma Like Tony Soprano's Mom?
There is rock bottom, and then there is drunk and half-naked on
the couch with only the cardboard beer fraulein as his
companion. Yes, Mindy dumped him, so Billy was forced to fold
beer lady in half and seat her at the coffee table, no doubt having
poured out his heart to her before he fell asleep. This episode
features a few such postcards from the underside. The saddest is
Tyra as Lolita, trapped in the Tropicana Motel in Dallas, sitting
poolside in the rain, trying not to cry on the phone with Landry.
Back at Dillon High, Buddy has announced some good news: a
national TV network (NBC—ha!) has chosen to broadcast the
game on Friday night. The development allows for some nice
comparisons between life on TV and life lived in Dillon. The TV
type who shows up at Dillon High has slicked-back hair and
speaks in a sportscaster patter, even when the cameras are turned
off. Meanwhile, Lorraine Saracen's house is looking especially
like the set of a Horton Foote play. Matt falls asleep on the
couch watching a cooking show that could not possibly be aired
in the year 2009. The screen shot shows some flat dull brownies
baked in the kind of dented pan I sometimes borrow from my
mother-in-law. The camera lingers on the tinfoil holding
together the antennae on Lorraine's wood-paneled TV.
88/95
We've discussed before how the show intentionally locks Dillon
out of pop culture or any TV references. This episode plays that
up. Coach is annoyed the network is showing up, because he
knows it will make the fans act like baboons and his players lose
focus. Of course, they pull through in the end, only because of
the commitment and fortitude of the honorable Matt Saracen.
The life in Dillon/life on TV contrast reminded me of a point
Susan Faludi makes in Stiffed, her 1999 book about American
manhood. The men of the World War II generation were raised
in what she calls the "Ernie Pyle ideal of heroically selfless
manhood." They were taught to be brave and heroic and take one
for the team. But for various reasons, they failed to pass these
lessons on to their baby boomer sons. Instead they got their
models from "ornamental culture"—TV, movies, and celebrity
culture, which peddle a primping cartoon of manhood,
unmoored from the old patriarchy.
In this episode, the Dillon Panthers and especially Matt represent
the prelapsarian age, when men knew how to be men. Matt, who
knows how to sacrifice, takes hit after hit, and it pays off. Those
TV trucks parked outside the school and the slick newscaster
represent the world outside, where everyone just wants to be
famous. Eric sees them, and he rolls his eyes.
Overall, this episode was a little soap operatic and heavy on
relationship drama (Tyra and Cash, Billy and Mindy, Lyla and
Tim). But what saves it, as always, are the small moments—
Tyra walking out the back door of that saloon, Mindy teaching
Lyla how to dance. In an interview with the AV Club, Taylor
Kitsch, who plays Riggins, talks about how much the actors
improvise. This gives a certain spontaneity to the show, so that
even when the soap plot veers into its happy ending, the show
can breathe.
Buddy hears the knock at the door: "Let's see. It's not your
mother, and I don't have any friends," he says to a hidden Lyla.
"I bet I know." Then Riggins apologizes to Lyla, sweetly,
wholeheartedly, four times (most women would have buckled
after three). Whether or not these particular lines were
improvised I have no idea. But they pass in such a funny,
lighthearted way that we let Tim's dubious redemption slide.
The one character I'm having increasing trouble with is Lorraine.
What are we supposed to make of her? Is she selfish?
Manipulative like Tony Soprano's mom? Really losing it?
From: Emily Bazelon
Subject: Week 9: Loser Boyfriends, Now in Three Convenient Sizes: Small,
Medium, and Large
Hanna and Meghan,
The problem with Lorraine Saracen is that she moves in and out
of her dementia expertly. Alzheimer's does cloud the brain at
some times and not others, but not on a schedule that dovetails
with a TV show plot. I believe Lorraine's anger and discomfort
with Shelby. Paranoia and fear of a particular person—in my
experience, especially an unfamiliar caregiver—often
accompany the disease.
But I didn't believe in Grandma's utter lack of sympathy this
week with Matt's bid to go to college. That's a trump card when
played against any grandparent who is in her right mind and
most who are not. A grandmother might manipulate her way into
persuading her grandchild to stick around, but Lorraine goes
right at him. I guess the show gets points, in an after-schoolspecial sort of way, for dramatizing the plight of a teenager
whose future is constrained by his family responsibilities. But
Lorraine is being written too as selfish and Shelby too virtuous. I
had the same thought about Mickey Rourke's character when I
saw The Wrestler. When deadbeat parents are portrayed as only
kind and decent, if bumbling, one wonders about how they
managed to walk away from their kids in the past. I know, I
know, people change. But do they really go from abandonment
to being entirely upstanding and reliable? Rourke, at least, fails
his daughter once in the movie; Shelby, so far, is all saccharine
concern for Matt.
Meanwhile, this episode is a meditation on the loser boyfriend,
in sizes small, medium, and large. Riggins, of course, is the
minor, forgivable version. His transgressions are really only
against himself, and then he still offers Lyla his Apology in Four
Movements. Riggins' trajectory on this show can be measured in
the distance he has traveled since the last time Lyla kicked him
out of her car. (Remember, first-season loyalists? Hint: His
devotion to Jason wasn't foremost in his mind.)
The midsize loser boyfriend is Billy. He peels himself off the
couch, blotchy and blurry-eyed, and raps on Mindy's window to
tell her that she can go back to work at the Landing Strip, no
questions asked. Is her fight for the right to pole dance a victory
for womanhood? Well, yes, maybe it is. Mindy won't be one of
those wives who takes the off-ramp out of her career and into
dependency on a man who can't stay employed. She'll get to
dance into her dotage. Hmm, now I am back to The Wrestler,
and Marisa Tomei trying to sell a lap dance to a bunch of barely
of-age boys. Clearly, I need to see more movies.
Cash, of course, is the rotten louse of the episode. This all felt a
little staged to me, and, Meghan, you were right that FNL is too
89/95
soft-hearted to rub Tyra out like The Wire would have. A couple
of moments mollified me, though. The first was Landry's face
when he hears that Tyra's excuse for skipping school is that her
aunt is sick: He's heard that one before—the night he got his
wisdom teeth out and Tyra was a no-show—and it underscores
the degree to which he is her forever crushed-out keeper. Also
satisfying: Eric's deft handling of Cash at the crucial moment,
standing between him and Tami as she helped Tyra into the car.
My husband thought Cash would have taken a swing, but I
disagreed, because of the way Eric fills the screen. He's one bull
that Cash won't ride.
Hanna, your analogy between Tyra and Lolita threw me at first,
because our Tropicana Motel girl is 17 and looks 20. Pre-rescue,
as she sat alone in the bar where Cash left her surrounded by
skanky men, I flashed unwillingly to Jodie Foster in The
Accused. But Tyra does shrink into a younger girl in the back of
the Taylors' car, with her teary "yes, ma'am" in response to
Tami's questions. It's all very sobering, I know, but I couldn't let
go of Tami and Eric's lost night away together. Those fluffy
white hotel robes! No wonder good principals are hard to find.
Subject: Week 9: Don't You Miss Smash?
Yes, Dillon, Texas, has succumbed to the spell of a bad moon.
Things get screwy and sad in this episode for pretty much
everyone, from Eric and Tami to the kids—Tyra and Lyla and
Mindy and the hapless "men" in their lives. In this episode, men
fail and women turn their backs, one way or another. Even Matt
is "failing" his grandmother, who suddenly wants assurances
he'll be around to take care of her. (Emily, I agree: This new
selfishness seemed a stretch; though I don't know much about
dementia, and perhaps it could take this form.)
From a certain perspective, you could read this as an inverted
object lesson in the danger of attachment. The object of your
affection will never conform to the mood lighting of your inner
fantasies. Of course, then there's "Sunny," as I now call Matt's
earnest mom. Blond, elfin, soft-spoken, she's like the dreammom lonely kids conjure up before they go to sleep, hoping
she'll come rescue them from the dreariness that is life.
Which makes me wish we could see or hear from Matt's dad
again. The show was brave to introduce Iraq as a topic in an
earlier season (when we met Matt's dad in between tours
overseas). And it's too bad the show won't make good on that
introduction by letting us really get to know Matt's enlisted
father. According to Faludi's theories of masculinity, he's the
real deal, not an example of "ornamental bravery." Someone
who looked male but turned out to be ornamental is Cash, that
pill-popping, smile-flashing fraud. There's a lot of latent oldfashioned chivalry in the writing of this episode: Cash's big
crime is letting other guys leer at his gal while he goes after
money. (I wonder if this, too, is not an object lesson—a
subliminal message to all the male breadwinners who privilege
work and forget to spend any time taking care of the little lady.
OK, probably not, but we could read it that way.)
This episode is certainly soap operatic—it's positively sudsy, in
fact. But I did like the depiction of that awkward car ride home
with Tyra, silence settling over everyone like a toxic cloud, all
the shifting and twitching of being in a speeding vehicle eager to
get home. You can see Tyra is shaken and will still grimace
years later when, crossing a street, she happens to think back to
this moment.
It's this moment, though, that also led me to suspect teenagers
may hate this show. I have an enduring belief that I would have
loved it back when I was 14. But I'm beginning to suspect I
would've just thought it was "dumb." Not that I actually would
have had any opinions, because my parents were busy making
sure I was a permanent nerd: We had no TV at home. And this,
it occurs to me some nights, must really be why I love Friday
Night Lights. The show puts me in touch with an imagined
teenage self I can relate to better than I now can to my real
teenage self. In other words: Does this show capture something
about being a teenager that a real live teenage girl can relate to?
(Yes, and its name is Tim Riggins, says a little voice in my head.)
Or does it cater to nostalgic adults like me, who want, for a
moment, to feel that old sense of yearning entwined with the
promise of old ideas like honor and grace?
Hanna, Emily, what do you think?
I confess: For me, the show lost something—a levity, a
playfulness, a social depth—when it lost Smash.
From: Hanna Rosin
Subject: Week 9: Pole Dancing as Feminist Liberation
Definitely nostalgic adults, I would say. With its teenagers
burdened by heavy responsibilities, the show conforms to a line
Slate's founding editor, Michael Kinsley, once used to describe
Al Gore: "an old person's idea of a young person." One fan, Ruth
Samuelson, wrote to say she interviewed football players from
90/95
the school where the show was originally shot. They were all
pretty lukewarm about the show and preferred MTV's Two-ADays. Also, FNL is apparently one of the most popular among
"affluent viewers," which can't be teenagers.
That said, I love your point, Meghan, about Shelby/Sunny—that
she is an orphan's fantasy of a mother. This would explain her
flatness, her angelic nature, and Matt's near-muteness. It would
also attribute to the show a genuine child's-eye view.
One thought I had reading your descriptions of Mindy and Tyra:
For the first time, Tyra fails where Mindy succeeds. Tyra is a
victim in that skeevy dive of a bar, the terrified object of
threatening male attention. Mindy, meanwhile, is using the
skeevy bar as the source of her feminist liberation.
Now, all you die-hard fans, check out these rumors of two more
seasons, and begin to ask yourselves the relevant questions: Can
Tyra, Riggins, and Lyla all flunk senior year? Can they really
shoot half of the next season in San Antonio, where Riggins
apparently will be? Is J.D. man enough to inherit the drama?
Subject: Week 10: The Best Conversation About Teen Sex I've Ever Seen on
TV
This episode is all about daddy's little girls: Julie, Lyla, and J.D.
"I just feel like it's different now … like I'm not daddy's little girl
anymore," Julie says to Lyla after she's had sex with Matt. And,
worse, been caught lying in bed afterward by her own father,
complete with telltale crooning singer-songwriter on in the
background. "Yeah," Lyla says, knowingly, though she doesn't
spell out just what she knows. She's further down the path than
her younger schoolmate. Unlike Julie, she's a daddy's little girl
who really no longer has her daddy; she had to pick Buddy up
from jail after he beat an associate to a pulp at the Landing Strip
and caused an alleged $30,000 worth of damage. ("It's not even
worth that much," Buddy complains.) Now Lyla's not just
having sex with Riggins. She's shacked up with him, playing
house in a home that has a poster of a bikini-clad girl bearing
beer tacked to the wall. (By the way, I love that the scene
between Lyla and Julie takes place as the two girls brush their
teeth together in the Taylors' bathroom: soulful confession,
scrunch-scrunch-scrunch. That brought me back.)
Then, of course, there's J.D., a girl in boy's clothing. (According
to the show's gender lexicon, at least.) He goes to a party, where
a perfectly coiffed redhead—more Gossip Girl than rally girl, I
thought—asks him whether he wants an "appletini." "I don't
drink," he stutters in response; she flirtatiously responds, "Well
how about some milk? That could be your thing. A young …
wholesome … milk-drinking … quarterback." Never has milk
sounded so dirty. Madison (that's her name) is a sure thing, or so
we're meant to think. All too soon, though, J.D. is breaking
things off with her because—surprise, surprise—his father told
him to. But he makes the crucial mistake of breaking up with her
outside the team bus with the whole team watching. Riggins
collars him. And, finally, the show explicitly deals with
something I mentioned a while back, something that Joe McCoy
just doesn't seem to get: As quarterback, J.D. is supposed to
inspire and motivate his teammates. And there's no way he's
going to seem like a leader to them when he's being dadwhipped. As Riggins puts it, "You know what's good before a
game? Gettin' laid. A lot." J.D. says that's not going to be
happening. And Riggins goes for the jugular: "How do you
expect any of these guys to man up for you if you can't do that
on your own? … You know you're a leader right? Start acting
like one."
The sexual politics aren't very progressive, I guess, but on the
other hand you could say that the idea of finding your own path,
away from your parents and into your life, is the leitmotif of the
episode and the girls actually do a better job of it. Both Lyla and
Julie face a similar dilemma to J.D.'s: They have to choose
whether to bow to their parents' wishes or be themselves. And
they "man up" more than J.D. does: Lyla gets in Buddy's face
when he calls her a "spoiled little brat" for running away from
him to Riggins. Julie prickles when her mom says, "Your dad
told me what happened at Matt's," but then she figures out how
to get what she really needs. The truth is, she wants to talk to her
mom about sex; she just doesn't want to be talked to like a child
while the conversation takes place.
I thought this episode really captured that treacherous ground
where parents and adolescents get stuck in a quagmire neither
really wants to be in. Tami's face when she's asking Julie about
birth control is a mess of supportive sympathy and heartbreak.
She finally tells Julie what she really feels, not judgmentally, but
humanly: "I wanted you to wait … because I wanted to protect
you." And Julie says, "I didn't want to disappoint you." This was
the best conversation about teen sex I've ever seen on TV, for
sure. (And I think we wouldn't have seen one like this on the
first season of the show, which was more male-oriented.) Do
you two agree? Or did you have different feelings about this
episode?
There's so much more to touch on—Matt and Coach Taylor,
Landry and Tyra (and the wonderful Giving Tree sermon). But
let me end with a question. Don't the writers kinda lay it on thick
when Eric gets ejected from the game and Wade has to take
over? Within about 30 seconds, the announcer is praising Wade's
"inspired play calling" and then, after one touchdown, lauding
him as "a bright and shining star on the Dylan football horizon."
Tension between Wade and Eric (and, more to the point, Joe
91/95
McCoy and Eric) has only been rising. Is this thick impasto of
writerly praise foreshadowing of things to come? We're almost
at the season's close, after all.
From: Hanna Rosin
Subject: Week 10: Tyra Is Totally the Kid From The Giving Tree
I agree, this episode is really interesting on the subject of female
sexuality. The show bravely pairs two variations on the theme:
daughters having sex and strippers. Julie has sex; Lyla shacks up
with Riggins and is horrified by her dad's behavior at the
Landing Strip, although just last episode, she was drinking and
dancing with one of its performers. It's not all that progressive to
group drifting daughters and pole dancers, as you say, Meghan,
but mostly it's sex as seen from a father's point of view. That
scene where Eric walks in on Julie and Matt in bed was so
perfectly played and shot. "Ahh! Dad! Get out!" we hear as he's
walking out the door. Also the later scene at the Taylor house
where Eric wants to kill Matt but instead takes out all of his
aggression on his grill.
The scene between Buddy and Lyla, meanwhile, unfolds almost
like a lover's quarrel:
"Don't touch me," she says and runs into her
room to start packing so she can move in with
Riggins.
feeling." I think that's the Everymom feeling—the difficulty of
letting go. Her true feeling is in her smiles. She can't help but be
happy for Julie. I also love that speech she gave afterward, about
not having to do it every time.
One thing we haven't talked enough about: This show is so good
at conveying meaning through silence and gesture. There's Eric's
twitch, of course, but this episode was a veritable ballet of
twinned gestures: McCoy drinking milk cuts to Buddy drinking
whisky. Julie and Lyla brush their teeth, then Tami and Eric
brush. Julie can't look at her dad during that car ride; Matt can't
look at him in the locker room. Then when J.D.'s dad wants to
make a point to his son on the basketball court, he yells, "Look
at me!" three times. McCoy is not subtle enough for gestures, as
opposed to Eric, who has a beautiful one when he walks out of
Matt's house and tensely flips his hat.
I liked Eric losing his temper in the end. It had a very "we are all
sinners" feel. The episode began with Buddy losing his temper
and Eric restraining himself, just as he had in the previous
episode when he didn't hit Cash. Badgering the ref was a proxy,
I think, for throttling Matt, or Julie, or Buddy; better to lose your
temper in the game than in your house. As for Wade's rising—
that did seem abrupt, and a setup for McCoy feuds to come.
I do need to mention The Giving Tree. I have always found that
the oddest, most depressing children's book. It is such a raw take
on the selfless nature of parenting (much like the first few pages
of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping). It also has the same
problem as FNL: It seems to be written much more for adults
than children. I hate reading it and can almost never get through
it without choking up, for the sake of my future, bitter, emptynest self. I'm glad Landry threw it at Tyra. She deserved it.
"Please don't leave me!" he yells to her.
I imagine it must be near impossible for a father to come to
terms with his daughter having sex. A mom of a teenage boy
once told me that after her son had sex, their relationship
changed forever; to her, it was more of a parting than him
leaving for college. But it was all sadness, with none of the
muffled rage and disgust the men seem to feel. This might be
stretching it, but I felt like Devin, the cute lesbian oracle, was
voicing the subconscious of the dads in this episode when she
said to Landry, "You're like a prostitute. But you don't get paid."
This is so different from how Tami handled Julie. I absolutely
loved their talk, so much that I want to tape it and play it back to
my daughter when the time comes, because surely I won't handle
it so deftly. "Do you love Matt?" she asks. That is so absolutely
the right thing to ask first, both because it's the important
question and because it proves she respects how Julie made her
decision. Then she smiles, twice, despite herself. I don't think,
Meghan, that the last part about wanting her to wait is her "true
From: Emily Bazelon
Subject: Week 10: Don't Forget the Great Sex Talk From Season 1
This was my favorite episode of the season. I kept admiring the
craft: the short, tight scenes between different pairs of characters
and the deft segues you mentioned, Hanna. (One more: the
opening cut from Tyra in her car to the football players in
theirs.) You can feel the care the writers are taking, and it's
especially appreciated because they have only a few more hours
to wind up the season.
I think Tami's true feelings about Julie are two contradictory
things at once: She wanted her daughter to wait, and she's
shakily relieved that Julie had sex in a way that won't damage
92/95
her. Along with all the reasons you've both given for mounting
this scene on a pedestal for its honesty and feeling, we get to see
Tami's evolution about this subject, and for all the right reasons.
In the first season, Tami was all fiery mama bear after she
spotted Matt buying condoms in the supermarket. (Watch it here
at the nine-minute mark.) She confronted Julie, who tried to
shrug off sex as "just putting one body part into another body
part." Tami told her that thinking like that was evidence that
Julie wasn't ready. She said that at 15, Julie wasn't allowed to
have sex. And she warned her daughter that if she went ahead
anyway, she could be hurt, and she could become hard. Now it's
two years later. Julie is 17. She's not an adult, but she's a lot
closer. We can see from their scenes together that she and Matt
do love each other. She's not fooling herself. And she's not
cavalier and pretend-sophisticated with her mom: She's shy and
embarrassed but also sober. They talk about condoms—
hallelujah, the parent-child birth-control conversation that went
inexplicably missing in Juno.
Meghan, I've been mulling your great question last week, about
whether we'd like FNL if we were Tyra and Julie and Lyla's age,
by trying to commune with my 17-year-old self. Who really
knows, of course, but my best guess is that I would have
cherished Julie and Matt's relationship (along with, yes, all
things Tim Riggins). I've been wondering, though, how I would
have felt about Tami. She is wise, strong, sexual—a model of a
mom, in a lot of ways. Even her lapses and freakouts mostly
serve to make her more human.
As a fellow mom, I can't get enough of Tami. But as a teenage
daughter? I dunno. I might have found Tami too good to take. If
that's what your mom was really like, what would you find to
despise in her, and don't teenage girls need to do that to their
moms in some contained but significant way? When Julie tries
to rebel or complain, a la her tattoo a few weeks ago, the scenes
often don't really come off. But in this episode, my Tami doubts
melted away because she put every ounce of her goodness and
mettle to such excellent use.
Meanwhile, Katie McCoy showed some mettle, too. For the first
time, she's standing up to her husband for turning J.D. into a
daddy's boy. Meghan, you talked about Lyla and Julie manning
up by finding a way to do what they want and go their own way.
"Man up, Matt" is what Julie said when her guy suggested
meeting her at the movies instead of coming to pick her up and
face her dad. Here I think we're seeing Katie man up—a
welcome break in the McCoy facade.
What about Tim Riggins, though? He's in guy's guy mode when
he tells J.D. to man up, but his own manliness is increasingly
bathed in soft light and dulcet tones. That parting shot of Tim
and Lyla on the couch, after Tim quietly tells Buddy to please
leave (note the "please") is a teenage fantasy that's both
compelling and self-serious. The girl with the fallen father turns
to the boyfriend whom she has reformed, and lo, he comes
through for her. The children throw over the fathers and shack
up, and they get to do it more in sorrow than in anger. Even Eric
has lost it. What does this mean for how the season wraps up, I
wonder?
Subject: Week 10: The Joy and Melancholy of Being a High-School Senior
Posted Tuesday, March 24, 2009, at 7:07 AM ET
This might have been my favorite episode, too. I may read the
Eric scene differently—he loses his temper and gets ejected. But
that seemed morally and ethically appropriate. The refs were
being shady and dishonest. And in Texas, after all, there's a long
history of men losing their tempers and taking justice into their
own hands when the circumstances (usually corruption) call for
it. The problem is that we're not in the ethic system of the Old
West anymore; we're in the new West, where new money rules
the day. And Eric's moral righteousness opened a window up for
Wade to show his stuff. And Wade, of course, is the property of
Joe McCoy, rich guy. And I worry that the show is opening up a
space here. A very purposeful one: The old codes of male honor
aren't enough to get you by anymore. You need to pander to the
power structure, too. We'll see what happens, but that's clearly
not the last we'll hear about Wade.
Meanwhile, everyone is growing up and preparing to move on.
Somehow, this episode really caught the flavor of senior-year
joy and melancholy: the way that suddenly you feel adult,
replete in the new sensations of independence, and at the same
time feel the pangs of change. A new life is just around the
corner for a lot of these people—even if it's just the new life of
being post-high school in Dillon, without a job. I spent this past
week in West Texas, a couple of hundred miles from the real
place that Buzz Bissinger wrote about in Friday Night Lights;
the seniors in town had been getting their acceptance letters, and
you could feel that same sense of nervy excitement around them.
Things were going to change. I remember that feeling, and I was
wondering if every Dairy Queen blizzard must suddenly seem a
little sweeter.
Emily, I totally agree about Tami and my teenage self. You hit
the nail on the head. That's precisely the part of the show that
would have been hard for me to watch. She is so easy to relate
to, so powerful and real, and I am not sure I would have wanted
to all the time. When you're 17, you need to carve out a little
cave to be in, separate from parents. And seeing parents be that
involved—seeing yourself through their eyes—would have
made me squirm. You don't want to see yourself through your
93/95
parents' eyes at that age (or at least I didn't) because you have
conflicting desires: You want to grow up and be your own agent
in the world, but you also still want to be their little girl. Just like
Julie says.
for the government—or whether we should devote most of our
resources to going after al-Qaida terrorists directly. Obviously,
any plan will wind up doing at least a bit of both; the debate is
over priorities and emphasis.
I think this season has made her a more sympathetic and
interesting character. Which is important, because if the show
does get picked up again, she'll have to play a larger part in it, I
figure. Meanwhile—I guess Tyra redeemed herself for a bit, but
I, too, was glad that Landry gave it to her with that Giving Tree
speech. The show, though, indulged in one of its cheesiest
moments this episode: the shot of Tyra watching Landry and his
band play, where the lights of the bar cross her face, and she
smiles. One of the few moments where it was too much, too
obvious.
The advocates for a more purely counterterrorist (or CT)
approach—led forcefully by Vice President Joe Biden—point
out that, after all, we're in Afghanistan only because of al-Qaida
and therefore we should focus on that threat and leave the rest to
the Afghans. Yes, we should offer them aid and assistance, but
neither their economic development nor the survival of Afghan
President Hamid Karzai's regime should be what our troops are
fighting and dying for.
war stories
CT or COIN?
Obama must choose this week between two radically different Afghanistan
policies.
By Fred Kaplan
With just a week until President Barack Obama flies to
Strasbourg, France, for his first NATO conference, his top
advisers are still divided over what U.S. policy should be on the
summit's No. 1 issue: how to fight the war in Afghanistan.
It's a debate that the Bush administration never seriously had in
the seven years following the post-9/11 invasion. Now, by
contrast, in the wake of three major strategic reviews, Obama is
extending and deepening the discussion of Afghanistan, because
the outcome of this debate may set the course of American
foreign policy for the remainder of his presidency.
In the first days of his term, Obama placed strict limits on the
war's objectives, shedding Bush's utopian rhetoric about turning
Afghanistan into a Western-style democracy and focusing
instead on merely keeping the place from reverting to a haven
for global terrorists. But though he may initially have thought
otherwise, this didn't settle questions of military strategy: how
many troops should be deployed, what they should do when they
get there, and how victory or defeat will be measured and
appraised. This is what the debate inside the White House is
about.
According to close observers, the key debate in the White House
is whether the United States and NATO should wage a
counterinsurgency campaign—securing the Afghan population,
helping to provide basic services, and thus strengthening support
The counterinsurgency (or COIN) advocates argue that only
through their approach can al-Qaida and the Taliban be defeated.
Hunting and killing terrorists has its place, but in the long run it
only gives the enemy the initiative, lets them melt away into the
landscape, and does little to stop new recruits from taking their
place. The best way to keep al-Qaida at bay is to dry up its
support by earning the trust of the civilian population, building
roads, creating jobs, and striking power-sharing deals with tribal
elders.
Some in the CT camp realize that the COIN-dinistas (as critics
call them) have a point. Their real gripe with counterinsurgency
is that it costs too much and promises too little. Even most COIN
strategists acknowledge that a successful campaign, especially in
Afghanistan, would require lots of troops (way more than
President Obama has committed so far), lots of time (a decade or
so), and lots of money (wiping out most or all of the savings
achieved by the withdrawal from Iraq)—and even then the
insurgents might still win.
A "targeted" CT campaign, its advocates say, would at least
demonstrate the West's resolve in the war on terrorism and keep
al-Qaida jihadists contained. It's a type of fighting that we know
how to do, and its effects are measurable. One might also argue
(I don't know if anyone on the inside is doing so) that it could
serve as a holding action—a way of keeping Afghanistan from
plunging deeper into chaos—while we focus more intently on
diplomatic measures to stabilize neighboring Pakistan. If
Pakistan blows up, curing Afghanistan of its problems will be
irrelevant and, in any case, impossible.
Some in the COIN camp have sympathy for this argument—
especially for the part about the high cost and the uncertainty of
success—but they would argue back that a purely CT approach
is sure to fail in the long run.
In short, it's a messy plate that President Obama's been handed,
and his advisers' debate only highlights the dearth of good
choices and the real chance that things might get still worse, no
matter what he does. He scaled back the war's objectives, but the
task is daunting all the same.
94/95
Obama has to choose one approach or the other this week, if he
hasn't done so already. Afghanistan will fill the agenda at next
week's NATO conference. He has said that he'll ask the allies to
step up their involvement. But he can't expect them to accede
unless he requests specific measures and explains how they fit
into a clear strategic context, and he can't do that unless he
decides what the strategy is.
sidebar
Return to article
For the best summaries of COIN doctrine and strategy, spelled
out by officers, consultants, and private scholars, see the Web
site Abu Muqawama, the Small Wars Journal, Gen. David
Petraeus' Army and Marine Corps field manual on
counterinsurgency (or my summary of it), David Kilcullen's The
Accidental Guerrilla, and John Nagl's Learning To Eat Soup
With a Knife.
95/95
95/95

Slate.com

Transcription

Similar documents

2009-2010 Facts

Metrorail Costs and Benefits - washingtonpost.com

Greta Van Susteren reveals

Slate.com

Obama`s Last Day 01.20.17™ Order Form

Elegant Spring Wedding in the South

IT`S TIME TO UNITE

BLACK HOLIDAY GIFTS GUIDE BLACK HOLIDAY

Slate.com

The Penguin Class December 19, 2015 This week, we gave Bruce